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

[Dan Scott]

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 08:45:42AM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> > 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.

Really? I can't imagine where, other than the original Adobe PDF logo
itself, both the Dropline Etiquette and KDE Oxygen icon designers would
have found the inspiration to create a red loopy "A" to represent a PDF
document. But... my imagination is pretty limited.
 
> > 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.

Right. Realistically, Evergreen is unlikely to be a primary target of a
trademark infringement action, even if Adobe starts freaking out about
trademark dilution along the lines of Penguin [1], but the reward for
taking the risk of being such a target amounts to the use of an icon.
Even at a very low risk, that seems like a very low reward...

> 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.

Yes. GNOME 3.4.0 doesn't use a specific icon for PDFs; it uses a generic
"office document" icon [2] (text flowing around a graphic on a portrait
page). This matches what I see in Fedora 16, too.
 
> 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. 

I think I would dissolve into madness if putting Deja Vu Sans "PDF" on a
white background is still a problem for the project. But okay, I'm happy
to wait for word back from Tony. In the meantime, should we just remove
the PDF icon altogether and replace it with a text link?

1. http://www.27bslash6.com/covers.html - (I'm somewhat sympathetic to
   Penguin's position, but it's still outrageously funny)

2. http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-icon-theme/plain/gnome/48x48/mimetypes/x-office-document.png?id=3.4.0