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Linspire Accused Of Misusing Creative Commons Art

Posted by timothy on from the ask-and-receive dept.

SuperDuG writes "Seems that intellectual property and copyright laws are something that Linspire still doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of. Their flash intro has with it some popular Linux images made by a rather talented artist. An email to Klowner was the first notice he ever got about the images being hijacked, not once has Linspire requested permission to use these images in their ad campaign. They seem pretty similar to me, you be the judge."

6 of 534 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Another misleading title by Neon+Spiral+Injector · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, since there was not CC license when the Flash demo was made, and there was no mention of copyright, then the default copyright laws apply. That is no derived works are permitted, period.

    The CC license now allows non-commercial derived works.

  2. Re:The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend... by Daniel+Boisvert · · Score: 4, Informative

    Another fact about this story that leaves me wondering -- the Klown website very sneakily says (paraphrased) as of 24 April is licensed under ... Well, inquiring minds want to know: PREVIOUS to 24 April, under which (if any) license was it released under?

    It's not sneaky. He released his stuff under the CC effective April 24. Previous to that he granted permission on a case-by-case basis to folks who asked if they could use his work, and standard copyright protections applied.

    (FYI--I know him; I'm not just pulling this out of my ass..)

  3. Re:Marketing... by gathond · · Score: 4, Informative

    The article states:
    Prior to the addition of the CC license on Klowner's wallpaper site, there was no specific copyright, although standard international copyrights still hold.

    And since (link on the article) the default with regard to copyright on works (art, or whatever) is that if there is no mention of something else things are copyrighted. It would stand to reason that if Linspire "borrowed" the art before the artist changed to the CC license, they were still breaking copyright laws, and so would anyone else who without the authors explicit permission copied the work in question.

    --
    --- For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken
  4. Re:Linspire are Lassholes by throughthewire · · Score: 4, Informative
    What I find more ironic is that this is coming up in the context of Free Software advocacy. Shucks, people freely share code that they spent hundreds of hours of their time on.... how about some artists doing the same?

    Umm... the artist in question did exactly that. These images are free for non-commercial usage (Creative Commons License.) The artist requires permission for non-commercial useage - if you're using his work to make a buck, you should share part of that buck.

  5. Re:Questions by Klowner · · Score: 4, Informative

    I didn't give them permission, because they never asked for it.

  6. Re:Linspire are Lassholes by JimDabell · · Score: 4, Informative

    How is it that Linspired contributed WINE, KDE, and Mozilla?

    You mean contributed to WINE, KDE and Mozilla? It's all there on the page I linked to. If you are having trouble reading, I'll quote:

    Lindows.com is the founder, maintainer, and lead sponsor for Nvu, a complete, easy-to-use Web Authoring System for Linux (such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver).

    Lindows.com contributed nearly a half million dollars to CodeWeavers, other 3rd-party developers, and our own in-house engineers to help get Microsoft Office to run on Linux with WINE. 100% of all the code we developed, as well as any code we've paid to have developed and continue to develop, was contributed back to the open source WINE tree.

    Lindows.com is a proud sponsor of the KDE League at the highest Corporate Affiliate level. All changes made to KDE are open source and the code is made available to be put in the main tree.

    Lindows.com is the proud sponsor of KDE-look.org. KDE-look.org is the premier site on the web to obtain icons, wall papers, themes, etc. for KDE.

    Lindows.com is a proud supporter of Mozilla. All changes made to Mozilla are open source and the code is made available to be put in the main tree.

    Lindows.com paid for the development of a "kids" theme for KDE which was then contributed to all as open source.

    Lindows.com sponsored the first wineCONF (http://lindows.com/wineconf) conference for WINE. (Video from the last conference, held at our offices in San Diego.) Additionally, we paid for the costs to have dozens of WINE developers from all over the world travel to this event.

    Lindows.com contributes all changes to Mozilla, Nvu, KDE, WINE, Debian, etc. back to these projects as well as making the source code available. (http://lindows.com/licensing).

    That looks like pretty substantial contribution to me. Yeah, they must really be assholes to give us all that!