On 08/02/2012 07:44 AM, Mirek2 wrote:
Thanks for the replies.
The SVG was done from scratch, but it aims to copy the exact look of the
Ubuntu Ambiance theme, which I'm sure there's some copyright on.
Unfortunately, I don't know the license it's under nor the contributors.
Ideally, though, with Canonical's permission, I'd like to license it as
permissively as possible, to encourage the widest adoption.
Is there an e-mail address I could use to contact someone from Canonical's
design team directly?
I was very curious about this, so I ran it by a lawyer friend. It
depends on the country that you're in, but copyright may not apply here.
While you've attempted to create a work which closely matches the
appearance of elements of the Ambiance theme, you've done so in a new
medium and made use of a novel layout. Generally, just because something
looks like something else doesn't make it a derivative work. Intent
matters a lot too. This is why you can copyright Harry Potter, but not,
a wizard boy goes to school and has many adventures. Moreover, the
ability to copyright all elements of a design is highly contentious and
not recognized in a lot of countries and jurisdictions. (I know, you've
explicitly stated you wish to clone Ambiance, which makes this a
derivative work, but I'm trying to make a larger point.) In this case,
what you're looking at is trademark, which has a whole different set of
guidelines.
Canonical has pretty clear about how they wish to see Ambiance used (see
https://launchpad.net/light-themes and
http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/TrademarkPolicy). This was taken from their
website:
Ambiance is licensed under: Creative Commons - Attribution Share Alike,
Other/Open Source (Unless otherwise indicated, artwork is available
under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license v3.0 or any
later version.
To comply with this license, you need to:
1.) Acknowledge your UI kit is a derivative work of Ambiance and provide
appropriate attribution
2.) Be willing to share it with those who would like to further build on
your work, and allow them the right to do so as well. You could even
charge for it, if you wanted (again, not a factor, just a general point).
For further questions, see the urls I provided above.
If you wish to touch base with the design team (though it's not clear
that they are the responsible parties for Ambiance), you can reach
through the Canonical Design site: http://design.canonical.com/
If unable to help, they would probably be able to point you in the right
direction.
Best of luck and thank you for the kit. I'm sure it will be very helpful
to other designers. I've already been able to use it in mock-ups for a
project I'm working on now.
Cheers,
Rob Oakes
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