Hello everyone, i have Open Source (GPL license) project, and i want use couple of icons from blender:
But license some weird, blender use GPL, but in icons license: “THIS CONTENT IS UNDER CC ATTRIBUTION-SHARE ALIKE LICENCE 2.5 AS LONG AS IT’S USED FOR BLENDER 3D GUI, OTHERWISE IT’S COPYRIGHTED. © ANDRZEJ AMBROZ”
what does this mean?
where did you find that? it is with a high chance way outdated information since the amazing icon designer
Andrzej Ambroz has changed the licence to ‘GPL 2 or later too’.
You can redistribute the Work and/or modify it - as well as bitmaps generated out of the Vector Source - under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This particular copyright information and the GPL-license.txt
must accompany all copies of the Work along with a list of changes You made.
If You did not recieve a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with the Work, write to the Free Software Foundation,
Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
The Original Work is Copyright (C) 2012, Andrzej Ambro¿
All rights reserved.
OTWARTA PRACOWNIA PROJEKTOWA architekt Andrzej Ambro¿
town of Wolsztyn
POLAND
more informations + download link to the full licence here;
and here some additional informations;
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2012-May/036877.html
No offense but I doubt copyrights (in whatever form) on a mouse icons a little bit.
Is it truly “amazing” and original art ?.
We’re sure there hasnt been something like it before, say prior art cases, on which it is based ?.
I’d say 20 years ago mouses where already a pretty common thing, the patent is 3 years ago.
Prior art relates to patents, not copyright. Those are two different parts of intellectual property law and one does not apply to the other.
You cannot copyright an idea, only the implementation of that idea in a fixed medium. So copyright absolutely exists on those icons, regardless of whether other similar icons exist in the world. The question from the OP asks about the usage license on those icons. I’d be curious to know where the referenced text is.
While there is no “prior art” clauses for copyright, there is such a thing as treshold of originality. Yet even if the icon contents wouldn’t pass the treshold, the source files might still pass.
Either way, the GPL as a license doesn’t really make sense for something that is not a program (unless you considered SVG files programs - which would be quite a stretch). “CC-BY as long as it’s Blender” made no sense either, because that contradicts CC-BY terms.
The closest CC license to the GPL is arguably CC-BY-SA. I would suggest requesting such a license from the author.
That certainly isn’t a valid Creative Commons license in any form or shape.
It does still say that in blender_icons.svg:
<cc:license
rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" />
<dc:description>This content is under CC Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike licence 3.0 as long as it's used for Blender 3D GUI. Any other uses are not allowed.</dc:description>
I also remember this being the original (self-contradictory) license. If you look at Andrzej’s blog, he has updated the relevant posts for the GPL license, but the files still contain the old license.
Ah… I was searching based on his name. Good catch.