On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 7:43 PM, Bruce Perens bruce@perens.com wrote: [snip]
It is possible that Inkscape is not informing image authors that their stock textures have a license. Those authors then dedicate the entire image to the public domain on Wikimedia, and do not note the licensing of the contained texture.
Ugh. Are you following up with Inkscape on this or should we look into it?
Obviously we expect uploaders to do the right thing with respect to any works that they derive from. Since we do not allow raster portions in our SVGs that kills one easy way for third-party rights to sneak in and generally we'd hope users realize that they have obligations when they copy from another SVG. Textures are an obvious way problems might sneak in.
Recommended action: parse Wikimedia SVG files to detect <pattern> tags, see how many have this problem, fix information pages to indicate licensing of the textures, delete inappropriately licensed content if necessary.
In progress.