[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] PDF icon: licensing concern & fix

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

> On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 08:22:49PM +0000, Lazar, Alexey Vladimirovich wrote:
>> Maybe I'm missing something, but neither GNOME nor KDE icons use that
>> symbol.

Dan Scott replied at 02:34 (EDT):
> Yes, I think you're missing that the design of KDE's PDF icon [1] and
> the Dropline Etiquette theme PDF icon [2] both appear to be derived
> from Adobe's PDF icon [3],

I don't think we actually have explicit reason to believe those icons
are copyright derivative works of the Adobe icons, but they *may* be and
it's clear we'd want to investigate that question more before using
them.

> Tony -- who is a lawyer, BTW -- said a few posts back: "I don't think
> this would qualify as fair use, because the value of this icon file is
> derived from its use of Adobe's trademark."

Indeed, the primary issue that Tony raised was that of whether use of
those icons might constitute trademark infringement.  Tony can speak
more to the issue of how a trademark infringement analysis works, but I
trust his opinion that we should err on the side of caution.


BTW, Dan, as a side note, you mentioned that the GNOME icon you showed us
wasn't the canonical GNOME one, but rather a community-developed
alternative to the GNOME defaults.

Have you looked at what the default icon is in GNOME 3 for PDFs?  I'd
guess that one doesn't infringe Adobe's trademark nor copyrights and we
could use that.

While I think your icon with just the letters PDF is probably fine (I'd
like Tony to confirm, of course), perhaps there is something out there
from another Free Software project that's prettier and doesn't have any
of these trademark issues. 
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy