File talk:Pidgin Logo.svg

Derivative Work Licensing

Hi Joel. My name is Mark and I'm a developer on the Pidgin project. There was a question about the license of this file on our mailing list and I thought it would be a good idea to add a comment here. To my knowledge all images from the Pidgin project are licensed as "GPLv2 or newer." I believe that according to the GPLv2, any image that is considered "a derivative work" must also be licensed as GPLv2 or newer.

Your image is listed as "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported." The image appears like it might have been recreated (and is not simply one of our png's saved as an svg). I honestly don't know whether this would be considered a derivative work. I don't think anything necessarily needs to change and I don't think we need to worry about this, because it's honestly not very important. But I did want to mention it. User:Markdoliner (talk) 07:06, 11 April 2013‎ (UTC)

I think it is probably an infringement. I think any image in Commons goes beyond fair use, and a scaleable image goes beyond fair use even when used to identify the original bitmapped one. The GPL would also require the full copyright ownership to be stated, and that should include the name of the copyright owenr for the original image. Fair use also requires the original source and copyright be acknowledged. David Woolley (talk) 00:01, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

I have changed the licensing to GPLv2 to conform with the work of the Pidgin project. Since this is a derivative work of a raster version on the commons (which is now properly sourced), I had used the same released this under the same licensing as the original image, which was "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported". Jtornado (talk) 19:59, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Educational Value

I'm also tempted to tag this as no educational value, as it is personal extrapolation of the logo to vector format, when the logo, itself, only exists in pixel format. It is what the logo might look like in non pixellated form, not a true representation of the logo within the limitations of the medium. David Woolley (talk) 10:42, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

The source image appears to a composite of two images which no longer are available on the Pidgin website - which may mean the image could fall into a legal grey area. This image was a personal project which I had, if my memory serves me right, done per request of Commons:Graphic_Lab_School/Images_to_improve. If this image is infringing, I have no issue with removing it from the commons. Jtornado (talk) 20:05, 13 April 2013 (UTC)