[Commons-l] Licensing for textures within SVG files

[Bruce Perens]

Forgive me if this is the wrong list.

Inkscape is an Open Source authoring program used by some Wikipedians to 
create SVG files. The author of 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:M1_Abrams-TUSK.svg placed one such 
image in the public domain. On examining the image, I found a 
non-public-domain texture called "Sand". Fortunately, the texture is 
under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 . It has an "inkscape:stockid" 
attribute, so I'm assuming it is a built-in stock image of Inkscape.

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.

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.

    Thanks

    Bruce