Re: Selling ICC profile...is it legal or not?
Re: Selling ICC profile...is it legal or not?
- Subject: Re: Selling ICC profile...is it legal or not?
- From: Graeme Gill <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 14:16:05 +1000
CS05 wrote:
The person preparing the profile could be considered the creator and
hence the copyright owner of the material. Their work went into making
the profile.
Some of their work went into making the profile. You could
have long argument though, about where the creative elements
came from. An argument could be made for instance, that the
person making the profile is merely doing a mechanical
process, printing patches and measuring them, and that all
the real art is in transforming that raw data into
a finished profile. That input came from the author
of the software.
[In practice of course the person preparing the profile will
usually have done a great deal more than measuring patches,
but the point still remains that they had no detailed input
into how the numbers were actually transformed into a profile.]
I don't think though, that copyright law is setup to support
this sort of argument, because there is no notion of
authorship by proxy. There is a much more straightforward
case when elements of the profile were authored directly
by the software writer and were copied into the profile, or
where an agreement is made via the software license.
I don't think that would matter much. If somebody uses a leaf- shaped
brush in Photoshop to create an image, even though it is a tool created
by the software company that in itself has some creative component to
it, if a user uses it to create an image of their own, they fully own
the copyright to their own image. Adobe can't make any kind of
copyright claim, because regardless of the fact that their tools were
used, they didn't create the image.
They could if they could show that sub-sections of the image were in
fact copied elements from Photoshop (such as the a brush or texture pattern).
In this situation it is a composite work, with different creative elements
having different authors.
Hopefully something like Photoshop grants a license to use such
elements without condition to the user of the software.
Even if someone were to break someone else's copyright by, say, using
a copyrighted image to make a montage of copyrighted images, they may
have broken the law, but in turn, nobody, not even the copyright
holders of the original images could use the thief's montage because he
owns the copyright on that work, (even though it was made through
illegal uses of copyrighted images itself!) Copyrights belong to the
people making the work. (or in a work-for- hire situation, to the
company hiring the creative worker) Simple as that. A software company
trying to make a claim that they own your work because you used the
font or table their software generates sounds ridiculous to me. I would
be interested in seeing such a claim played out in court.
I think you're jumping to conclusion here. As I've explained several
times now, the likely basis for arguing control over profiles is
the copying of elements from the software into the profile, or
simply by agreement (contract) by the software licensing agreement.
The former does not imply a claim on the whole profile, just
elements of it.
Graeme Gill.
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