[Fedora-legal-list] Choosing appropriate copyright and licences for ICC profiles

[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

==
Fedora Project