On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 03:40:16PM -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
The terrible truth about laywers, courtesy of the late Mark MacCormack,
is that they'll tell you what's *safe*, not what's *reasonable*.
I'm pretty sure Apple is very proud of its Aqua widgets, and equally
sure they'll be after you with a thousand lawyers if you try to claim
their graphical designs are owned by you because they happen to be
visible in a screenshot you made.
If Apple could find a lawyer who could successfully argue that, because
I was *exhibiting* a screenshot of an application that *happened* to be
running on a desktop managed with their icon set, that I was "trying to
claim their graphical designs are owned by me" -- such exhibition
simply *does* *not* make that claim.
If you
successfully fend them off, let
me know, I could use a bunch of textures, and clipping them from WoW
screenshots will save me a lot of time, not to mention Blizzard's
artists have better technique than I can muster.
And as an end-user, you can do with any of those things anything you
want to, as long as you don't try to distribute them, make money off
them, or explicitly claim them as your own.
Copyright and trademark law is what it *is*, not what inside counsel of
largr corporations *tell* you it is. They aren't *your* lawyer, you
shouldn't rely on them.
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274