Choosing appropriate copyright and licences for ICC profiles

[Richard Hughes]

In the shared-color-profiles project upstream we take some trivial
well-known data e.g.
"2.2 D65 0.6400 0.3300 0.297361 0.2100 0.7100 0.627355 0.1500 0.0600
0.075285" and then create a binary ICC profile with some added
metadata. The binary file can then be embedded into jpeg documents or
used standalone in programs like Krita and GIMP.

The added metadata are things like a profile description (which is
optionally translated) and what space it's supposed to represent e.g.
sRGB.

The colorspace co-ordinates are in the public domain, and so I'm
wondering what copyright and licence to choose for the resulting
binary blob.

The binary file is actually created on koji/brew and so I'm not sure
if Public Domain is the right thing to use as I'm aware that some
countries can't do this. Is CC0 a safer/saner choice?

Logically the profile copyright string should be "No copyright" and
the licence "Public Domain" to match the source but treating law
logically isn't always a good idea. :)

Can anyone advise what to put in the profile header. Thanks.

Richard Hughes.

[Tom Callaway]

On 11/23/2012 09:24 AM, Richard Hughes wrote:
>  In the shared-color-profiles project upstream we take some trivial
>  well-known data e.g.
>  "2.2 D65 0.6400 0.3300 0.297361 0.2100 0.7100 0.627355 0.1500 0.0600
>  0.075285" and then create a binary ICC profile with some added
>  metadata. The binary file can then be embedded into jpeg documents or
>  used standalone in programs like Krita and GIMP.
>  
>  The added metadata are things like a profile description (which is
>  optionally translated) and what space it's supposed to represent e.g.
>  sRGB.
>  
>  The colorspace co-ordinates are in the public domain, and so I'm
>  wondering what copyright and licence to choose for the resulting
>  binary blob.
>  
>  The binary file is actually created on koji/brew and so I'm not sure
>  if Public Domain is the right thing to use as I'm aware that some
>  countries can't do this. Is CC0 a safer/saner choice?
>  
>  Logically the profile copyright string should be "No copyright" and
>  the licence "Public Domain" to match the source but treating law
>  logically isn't always a good idea. :)
>  
>  Can anyone advise what to put in the profile header. Thanks. 
I think if you're worried about regions where Public Domain is not a
valid option (and thus, where parts (or all) of your copyright in the
work would still be applicable), going explicitly with CC-0 is a
reasonably good solution.

As always, I'm not a lawyer, so that isn't legal advice.

~tom

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