On the left hand side of that image you see a little segment that conists of a hand, an eye and an ear. Those stand for interaction, video and audio. TrueTech hired Jonathan Kraij, a talented young designer to make that logo and it was featured in many places, magazines such as wave and many others besides in the late 90's.
Not three weeks after one prominent bout of exposure the logo appeared in an advertising campaign by Sony the Netherlands.
We talked it over with them and they traced it to a guy working for one of the agencies that designed the campaign. He'd most likely been subconsciously influenced by exposure from a magazine. Sony was pretty good about it, promised they wouldn't use the logo any further and paid us a fair bit of money to offset the use.
All in all it could have been a lot worse and I think that before you start using words like 'pirates' you have to dig a little deeper to be sure that it was intentional and that it wasn't some external party that caused this.
Sony is a damaged brand, they've done lots of terribly stupid stuff but at a minimum they should be given the benefit of the doubt until there is hard proof they did this on purpose. We all know Sony fucked up in the past but that is no reason to automatically assume they did so again without any proof.
Interesting. We should give the benefit of the doubt in cases regarding commercial use from copyright infringement. If its a 9 year old who is downloading a song, then she must be aware of copyright law and thus can't be given the same benefit of the doubt. That girl is a pirate.
Of course she should be given the benefit of the doubt too.
See, if you as an outsider want to make sure that all parties are held to the same standard then you should be willing to apply that standard to your worst enemy as well.
Note that I am not in any way defending Sony or their conduct, I just want the same standard that I'd like to apply to downloading music to apply to this instance of possible copyright violation.
Sony is a terrible company and they deserve to go down because of the way they've harassed private individuals, they've lobbied for ridiculous legislation and have done an enormous amount of wrong. And in spite of all that you should still be even handed in dealing with them.
I agree that we should hold all parties to the same standard no matter who the party is, but commercial usage should add additional expectations from the defending party. Commercial use is commonly perceived as "worse" than if it's done for private/non-profit use.
But my initial comment was mostly to acknowledge that we do not give the benefit of doubt to private persons, but we do to commercial entities. The law should be equal, but had this been a discussion about someone who downloaded songs, there wouldn’t have been a single comment questioning the validity of the accusation.
I work in advertising for multi-national clients the size of Sony, and believe me, acquiring the rights to images is a hugely important step in any marketing campaign. Most likely Sony hired an outside firm to create them a logo, and that firm copied it instead. I have no doubt Sony will apologize and pay a standard fee plus some for its use. If you think a huge corporation like Sony, with billions of dollars of sales a year, is purposely looking to rip off a single $1000 logo and hoping nobody would notice, you don't understand big business.
After they were told of their mistake, did they stop with the infringement or did they continue selling their devices?
Its one thing to do a mistake, but its an other to continue because its cheaper to ignore copyright law than to do a complete stop in the production and selling of a product. At that point they are doing willingly infringing copyright law.
What is the likely reaction going to be for the agency that was supposed to create this for Sony? Will they just be fired from doing work for Sony, or are there any clawback provisions for the firm submitting supposedly original work that wasn't?
Even the title say "pirate bay girl". Not a single comment ask if this was just a innocent mistake done by the girl. not a single comment address if either the father or the girl have read copyright law or was aware which sites are authorized sources and which aren't.
> See, if you as an outsider want to make sure that all parties are held to the same standard then you should be willing to apply that standard to your worst enemy as well.
That is a pretty difficult line to uphold when you can have no sway on said worst enemy and he's already been engaging in egregious behavior with no end in sight. Then isn't it just you being the sucker?
I don't think it's necessary to use the same standard in personal-use and commercial-use situations. The current law already makes such a distinction. That seems reasonable and consistent to me.
So, get back to us when the 9-year-old uses the pirated music to attract business to her lemonade stand.
It's not just you. That's an example of "high court" for the rich and well-connected persons, versus "low court" for the vast rabble. Less serious charges, with minor or no penalty in "high court". More serious charges, with large penalties, often with strict sentencing guidelines, for the "low court".
Really they should have handled this the same way as the other case. Sent a 600€ request (or 6000€) for a donation to KDE and a NDA and possibly a licensing agreement.
It's pretty clear Sony did not intend to do this and most likely just a placeholder image left in by mistake. Who at Sony would think saving 300$ on designing the image outweighs the risk of this.
How can you say this? If you've ever worked in a corporate environment, you know that layers and layers of reviews and supervision and requirements exist to prevent any mis-step. If this image flew through that process, then Sony knows what it did.
I think you're making an unwarranted assumption. My assumption about Sony's massive, multi-review process is far more likely to be upheld by fact.
I think you're making an unwarranted assumption. My assumption about Sony's massive, multi-review process is far more likely to be upheld by fact.
I sincerely doubt your assumption will be upheld. I've worked at large multi-nationals, I currently run an agency which does design services for large multinational companies. Not once have I heard nor seen anyone do something like run an icon set for a support page through something like TinEye or Google Image Search to search for possible copyright infringement.
Legal resources at a company tend to be scarce and expensive, and this would be a waste and there's too much gray area in design copyright to make this sort of thing feasible. Also its easier to have your internal teams just do their job and design icons from scratch, outside contractors are going to be bound by contracts to ensure the work they provide is adequately licensed and to indemnify the company against any losses if its not.
Not to mention Sony will spend a small bit of money to deal with this slip up as opposed to a great amount of money trying to police every design they use.
But Sony has a big policy (https://internet.sony.tv/customer/template/IPNotice.vm) of respecting "Intellectual Property" of others! And of defending its own "IP" quite zealously (http://www.itproportal.com/2011/06/28/sony-says-attacked-bec...) How can you write that?!? Do you mean to say that Sony would consider violating some person's Property Rights just because it's cheaper or even free of charge to steal "Intellectual Property" than it is to figure out if some person owns the "IP" and who that person might be, and then negotiate a contract for the legal, proper use of the "IP"? Shocking! Just Shocking that some person would impugn Sony's good "Intellectual Property" name over an icon!
| If this image flew through that process, then
| Sony knows what it did.
So there are people at Sony that can determine the source of a random icon presented to them with 100% accuracy? It's impossible that some lowly contractor somewhere copied it, and lied about it to management? It's impossible that there was human error along the way in the review process?
To be fair, a few seconds with Google will usually identify the source of a given image with reasonable accuracy if that image has been copied from another public project. So yes, there almost certainly are people at Sony who could do what you described.
I'm torn on this whole issue. On the one hand, I think the world would be a much better place if we didn't have silly draconian copyright laws, so I don't like to see those silly laws given any further legitimacy by using them (and I write that as a guy who makes his living creating stuff that is protected by copyright). On the other hand, those laws are laws because of companies like Sony, and hoping they won't be used doesn't stop them being laws.
I suspect if companies like Sony started paying obscenely disproportionate fines for careless minor infringements, this might be the fastest way to get the problem fixed, though regrettably with significant collateral damage resulting along the way. For example, if they have sponsored laws that call for criminal sanctions against individuals who infringe copyright for commercial gain, those laws should be hovering over any conceivably responsible individuals at Sony and anywhere they outsourced to as well in cases like this. If merely working for a company like Sony on any creative project is potentially enough to get you a criminal record, the true damage caused by draconian copyright laws will become apparent to them very quickly (and probably quite briefly, since it seems unlikely that a company that became so toxic to employees and agencies would last very long).
I really dislike that I've come to that conclusion, but looking at the world as it is rather than as I wish it to be, I have trouble seeing any more logical outcome.
I work in an environment similar to this (an outside agency working with a large multi-national) and believe me, I CAN believe that this is an unintentional mistake. Also, there's not "multiple layers and layers of reviews" for small "build your vaio" websites such as this. Sony may be large, but that doesn't mean it's CEO, legal team, or any senior person with a VP or C-level title ever saw this.
I work at an agency, and we have done things for Sony in the past. Even small campaign sites like this get caught in "legal review" for a week or two at the minimum.
That being said, I would imagine that someone in the agency that did this thought that "open source" means "free", and that the lawyers at Sony weren't informed where the icons came from (or didn't ask).
Ultimately, I do think KDE should fire a takedown notice and make a big stink about it, though. Sony certainly wouldn't be shy or understanding about it, so neither should they.
Designers overrate their influence. I can certainly get a usable settings icon for less than $300. We're talking about a website to help users use the hardware they already bought, not trying to win a design award.
The point that I take away from the current episode, though, is that Sony is profoundly hypocritical. They are a "damaged brand" because of their past actions. That shouldn't give them a free pass, but should instead cause increased scrutiny.
And yet again, it appears that increased scrutiny is warranted.
We all know Sony fucked up in the past but that is no reason to automatically assume they did so again without any proof.
Why not? When somebody or something repeatedly behaves in a certain way, I think it's perfectly valid to assume that they will probably continue behaving that way in the future (unless there is some evidence otherwise, which in Sony's case I personally haven't seen).
While you are right, a lot of the backlash is somewhat deserved: Sony was and is aggressive in pursuing their copyrights, which is part of the damage to their brand.
I don't think they did this on purpose. But they are part of a group of companies that don't care about those complexities when they sue others on copyright grounds, so they should tread very carefully there.
Most of the copyright cartels like Sony fight against giving people the benefit of the doubt in copyright. So they are not entitled to it any more.
*(They promote automatic systems that will kick people off the internet after 3 strikes, they promote things like YouTube copyright detection software, etc.)
a) Give prominent notice with each copy of the Combined Work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License.
Public domain and freely available artwork is commonly available on the internet. Free movies are not. One of those seems more likely to be valid than the other.
And in any case, Sony can use this artwork commercially. It's free software, for goodness sake. What they missed was the requirement for attribution. So they should provide that somewhere. End of story.
I don't understand this kind of logic. I mean, I can see the hypocrisy argument -- Sony is a Big Evil Corporation and constantly harping about IP rights, and here they got caught not-quite-following-the-letter-of-the-licesense.
But come on now: the KDE team drew and released those icons (and the rest of their software) with the clear intent that they would be useful to people in their own work. They even licensed it to allow that. This isn't a great crime, it's just a mistake.
I honestly think we should be pretty strict about following licenses to the letter. No-one who creates open-source software has the time to hand-hold all their users and make sure they are in compliance, so we should help them out.
Also, such a shame the article introduces Sony as "the company who created Audio CDs which installed a rootkit on Windows computer to try to stop people copying music", as if Sony needed introduction, especially for people that read the KDE blog.
Maybe it would have been more effective to point them out in a matter-of-fact way, tell them to stop or to comply with the licence, and move on. It would certainly come across as more mature, more about problem solving, and less about name bashing.
I appreciate though it is hard to keep a level headed tone if it were to happen to me..., but there's no harm in trying!
As a former Sony employee although in the consumer TV's business rather than either Vaio or Sony Music I'm pretty confident it is a mistake and that it is likely to be fixed. [The Sony TV's came with a paper license in the box for all the various open source licenses of the software included in the TV and I believe there is a website with all the relevant source.]
If it is used in a website is it really a breach of the terms of the LGPL? I thought that the whole point behind the Affero GPL was that the normal GPL/LGPL did not prevent you using software server side to present a service to users without the requirement to distribute the source. Given that I'm not sure what the status would be of an image under LGPL (dual license with Creative Commons Sharealike, attribution as mentioned by another commenter) being served as part of the website software. Now maybe it is reasonable to say that Javascript and images are actually distributed to every browser accessing the page and that therefore source code and license must be made available but it isn't completely clear to me.
Whatever the technical legal case it was bad form and most likely a mistake for Sony to use this icon in this way.
Edit to add: Sony is a massive sprawling multi-limbed business with actions from different parts sometimes not just contradictory but conflicting at times. It is all done under the Sony name so it is fair that bad in addition to good actions are reflected in the reputation but the reality is that there is very little shared between the Music arm putting out rootkits (about eight years ago - maybe it is time to move on) and the electronics side.
Sony should not have claimed copyright and should not have used it without attribution.
I'm however not sure of the legal status of components of LGPL software that are downloaded components of a hosted service. If they are not "distributed" the license brings no requirements does it?
LGPL is interesting when used in the server software itself. Then, it doesn't have to be distributed, as the server software itself is never provided to the client.
"Oxygen icon theme is dual licensed. You may copy it under the Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License or the GNU Library General Public License."
The KDE Developer that wrote this needs to take a deep breath...they asked: "Should KDE e.V. and Nuno's Oxygen friends start a new business model by sueing them for everything they're worth?"
Really? Sue them for all they are worth?
Go ahead and try, but you need money to sue and no Judge is going to award you "All they are worth" over an icon.
You haven't lost anything with Sony using this icon. You have gained because now there is an subconscious association between Sony and KDE.
Well, for those that even recognise that it is KDE artwork to begin with.
If you look at it under current copyright law, every time Sony has distributed this icon without the GPL (e.g., the page on which it resides has been viewed) can be considered an infringement of the original artist's copyright. Sony would be liable for between $750 and $150,000 per instance. Say this page has been viewed 100,000 times.
That's 100,000 violations of the original copyright. Statutory damages awarded could be upward of $75,000,000. We balk at these figures when applied to eight year olds and grandmothers, because these figures were oriented towards companies and individuals that violate copyright in order to profit from it.
RIAA can sue individuals for violating their copyright by distributing music files; artists should be able to sue Sony right back for violating their copyright by distributing their icon without following the stipulations set out by the original artist. That's how copyright law is supposed to work, anyways.
And no, they haven't "lost" anything. But Sony still broke the law.
> You have gained because now there is an subconscious association between Sony and KDE.
I can only speak for myself, but I don't think those of us at KDE would find it desirable to have that association in people's minds. I would actually say that would be a negative.
> Well, for those that even recognise that it is KDE artwork to begin with.
So only artwork which has saturated the public eye warrants protection?
Oh, no, I surely think that Sony did wrong and needs to admit the mistake but that picking and choosing one's battles might be more appropriate here.
I disagree with the author's blog post on making a big stink and "suing them for all they are worth". Yes, maybe just a saying that everyone understands the meaning to but it doesn't lent any credibility or help justify the issue at hand. Which is Sony used the artwork.
When people start tossing around hyperbole it doesn't help, it hinders.
I have less compassion for KDE over this because of the way the blog author worded this. Had the author approached this in a more profession manner than spouting off at the mouth I would be more onboard.
Is it hyperbole, really, when the same argument would be applied in the opposite direction?
I know that KDE somehow has a reputation for quiet professionalism [1], but I don't think that should extend to a developer's personal opinion, nor do I think that pointing out the hyperbole of someone else is itself an example of hyperbole. Especially when the hyperbole is so obviously hyperbolic!
The blog author is asking the community [KDE] a question, not acting as if his opinion represents the community. He's talking to me and my fellow developers, via an open letter.
KDE is a much looser community than you may be used to seeing within open source projects. You seem to be projecting to see an alpha dev who's looking back at his friends saying "What should we do with this one?" with a grin on his face and a plot in his mind. But that's not what's going on, and that's not what someone in KDE would see. What you see on the tin is all that's going on.
A KDE developer's opinion is implicitly his or her own and no one elses.
Coming from the KDE folks it's likely to be hyperbole, and maybe they might want you to notice the irony of that with respect to Sony's past reactions to misappropriation of Sony's own content.
This leads me to a legal question about GPL stuff.. Say the guys at KDE threw their full legal might behind this- what would happen to Sony?
Obviously they would be required to change it (or include the GPL licence), but is that all? What kind of 'damages' could be claimed in such a situation?.. ie what is the risk to Sony in doing this. NB i'm using this (somewhat trivial) example to talk about GPL violation more broadly.
Well, it is still copyright infringement. It doesn't matter if the copyright says you can do whatever you want as long as you mention our license, if you don't follow the terms you're still infringing on their copyright.
Lost sales is normally calculated as some hypothetical price tag in the case if Sony had bought a license from KDE. Its what music labels do when calculating damages in p2p cases, rather than looking at the unit cost.
It could come down to damges per sold unit if Sony is seen as intentional breaking copyright law, especially from this point on after Sony has become aware of the issue.
In more likeness, KDE can now prevent any future sale of VAIO if they want, but asking a judge for an injunction.
Of course, this assume that the copyright law is sanely being interpreted. If we use movie/music version of it, KDE can then dictate what a "license agreement" would cost for sony if they were to "buy" the image. They could then say "If we were to buy a similar image from apple, they would require this cart loads of money so that's what Sony should pay + damages and lawyer costs.
Working with the assumption that Sony righted-itself in a reasonable time-frame after legal action/threats began;
Could KDE prevent sales of VAIO machines if they were now complaint? I guess not?
Is there ANY precedent for damages of this kind of situation? (particularly where wilful infringement was not long-continued) If not, it would seem there is an almost non-existent risk.
If Sony took even the tiniest steps toward reasonable action to come in compliance I'd be 101% surprised if either the KDE e.V. or the artist tries to take any further legal action.
And given that the license in this case merely requires attribution it would seem it's very easy to come into compliance.
I don't know jriddell personally but I would be willing to bet his point is not the infringement, so much as the hypocrisy by the Big Giant Defender of IP, Sony.
I understand this, but i was asking a broader question; is there any real deterrent or risk for a company to use GPL code (in violation) first, and then fix it if/when they get found out and threatened legal action.
No one has brought up a case that got to the point of there being actual damages, which leads me to believe there isn't, really. The closest i (as by no means an expert) can think of in terms of commercial 'damage' is when Linksys released the source code for their routers found using linux. (And this release probably led to them making more money anyway).
> is there any real deterrent or risk for a company to use GPL code (in violation) first, and then fix it if/when they get found out and threatened legal action.
Well, there's a pretty wide gulf between "The Board of Directors and CEO decided that any legal consequences would be cheaper than not infringing" and "Oops, we didn't mean to mis-appropriate that IP".
The tricky area IMO is when a company or industry repeatedly "Oops"es and you have to start wondering whether they're even performing due diligence.
That's a serious case of Google-Image-Searchitis. My theory: somebody googled for "settings icon", swore to himself to get proper artwork later, forgot, and there we have it. (Yes, I'm guilty of that too, but I usually don't forget)
Which is why we need a consistent way to embed license data into media. Not as "enforceable" DRM but as metadata that is preserved by image editing software and can be checked automatically when you are about to send your creation to production. EXIF theoretically allows for this but it is hardly ever used.
It's both (which is to say, it's about HCI). People would be more eager to use whatever license embedding mechanism we agreed upon if it was as easy as right click -> "License as..." -> "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0". That is not the case right now.
> That solves the license input but doesn't make anyone more likely to check the license at go-live time.
My point is exactly that you shouldn't have to. If all your license information sat in the files themselves checking licensing would be accomplished by adding a few standard lines to your deployment script.
If your website used Creative Commons-licensed media your CMS would even be able to generate attribution data to be shown at the bottom of the pages that use that media on its own resulting in fully automated compliance.
An open source search might have found this image - LGPL isn't CC, but it's close enough to be practical. IANAL, but if it's LGPLed, they can probably just include it without issue - they just need to note that the _image_ is open source, not necessarily the rest of their stuff. The only real problem here is the lack of proper licensing (i.e. the default its-all-ours! license is too strict).
And totally unnecessary too, probably. I seriously doubt this kind of software is in any way an edge over their competitors - it's probably just big corp habit.
We care a lot about stating the license clearly since it's essential to our business. Also if there is anything copyright infringing on our site we'll remove it immediately.
As far as I can tell, this icon is created by the Oxygen team and the license information is correctly presented on our site.
Yep - I don't see any blame for you guys in this thread :-)
If you know you were used for this, you might be in a position where you could choose to help out. There may well not be any clear evidence you were used in this instance though.
Searching [settings] with the Size setting (found by clicking "Search Tools") set to "Icon" shows it on the 16th row for me, along with lots of other hammer & wrench icons.
I think unfortunately the best case of action would be for KDE to sue Sony pre-emptively. Otherwise, some lawyer on Sony's side would notice KDE using "their" icon and sue KDE.
I would expect for a name like KDE they wouldn't have to worry about it. If the FSF doesn't pick up the bill, if the EFF doesn't pick up the bill, if someone else doesn't pick up the bill they'd have a donation drive. There's no way KDE would have to worry about paying lawyer fees if Sony sues them for their own original artwork.
So wait, in order to avoid the risk of trial costs in a situation someone on the internet made up, KDE should ensure that they have to pay trial costs by suing?
What's funny is that is' happening both ways. Lots of people are confusing "copyright infringement" with "claiming another work as your own". There was an article here about mundane/average computer users trying to use copyrighted music tracks on YouTube, and it being banned. Users were confused how it was being taken down for 'copyright infringement' when the person wasn't claiming it was their music.
Attribution is a pretty standard component of the moral rights associated with copyright in many non-US countries. In the US, moral rights (versus economic rights) are hardly protected at all. For the most part they are limited to riding the coat-tails of economic rights.
Yet, as your example shows, the right of attribution is the kind of right that many people naturally perceive as a "fair" part of copyright, much more fair than the right to control distribution.
This isn't the first time Sony's ripped artwork off.
Back in early 2006 I left a webpage comment (haha, remember them?) with the admins at Digital Blasphemy (that CGI desktop wallpaper site everyone loved back in the day) because I was playing with a mate's Sony W800i mobile phone and noticed that they'd ripped off an image called 'Fluroescence' [1] to create an animated mobile background image - there's a whole series of that image in different colours with different transparencies and they'd just grabbed them all and made an anmiated GIF that faded between them. In doing so, they'd cropped the DigitalBlasphemy watermark in making it a portrait aspect ratio and as far as I could tell not credited DB anywhere.
I ended up getting a 'thanks I'll look in to it' reply, but don't know if anything ever came of it. I figured at the time it may have been the mistake of a lazy artwork designer but part of management of such a project surely must be to ensure that all of the content is legit. It's certainly interesting to see that this company has done this again. As previously, it may well have been the work of a lone employee but it is still the company's responbility to stop that behaviour.
I hope KDE can get a favourable resolution to this problem.
The Digital Blasphemy guy later worked with some developers to make some PS3 "Live Wallpapers" based on his artwork... perhaps that was in reaction to what you pointed out?
I like Sony, but some stuff they did in the past was highly questionable and may come back to haunt them, specially when some random artist at them use someone else artwork.
The best thing Sony can do is fix this, say sorry, and punish the guy that did this.
$14 billion market value, down 75% from 2007, and down 60% in just the last year. The company has nearly been demolished by the incompetent management.
Remains to be seen if they'll learn from their cultural problems or not (many of which no doubt contributed to their current mess).
Couldn't they just add LGPL3 to the website and acknowledge the work of those who helped [albeit in this case in a small way] create their website unpaid?
They most certainly will pay $1000 to license the image, or change it, AND punish the person who did that... What makes you think Sony won't work they way every large corporation works in this respect?
Come on kids, the rootkits on audio CDs are already history for quite a while. Yes, they shouldn't copy stuff from others, but why link it to past mistakes?
Don't you think it demonstrates, in at least a small way, how companies like Sony continue to preach the benefits of strong, long-lived copyright protection and still continue to play fast-and-loose with the equivalent rights of small companies, FOSS and individuals.
The link to past "misdemeanours" demonstrates a continued failure with respect to the rights of others.
Honest question: did Sony ever attempt to contact anyone before installing rootkits on their machines or suing them for copyright infringement through proxy? They didn't even contact me quickly when my PSN account with CC info and everything was compromised.
While it might be good style, contacting a copyright violator before making things public is not at all a must. Sony is not exactly known for communicating well, so it might not have been worth the effort.
Honest question: Who do you contact and what is the chance that it would be at all an effective approach? Are you basically asking the OP to bang their head against the wall dealing with "tier 1" customer support agents?
Sony being willing to install rootkits on people's PCs and being quite sue-happy over copyright infringement, then turning around and violating copyright and licensing terms matters in a social context. Sony needs to live up to their own standards (which I would prefer means they need to change their standards, but realistically means that they need to at least obey what they enforce).
Well, "pirated" is probably not the right word for anything less than armed robbery of a boat. But lately it's been used as a synonym of "copyright infringement", so maybe it applies.
In the context of software, "piracy" has come to mean downloading and distributing copyrighted material. And I think it's fine to use it for that, even though it doesn't happen on the high seas (usually?).
But this is more like plagiarism, although I'd be fine with calling it stealing or theft, which have a pretty broad meaning colloquially.
I mean, theft is theft, right, whether it's 9 songs, more than 3 sentences or an image. And using the image to make money, that compounds the theft, just like getting caught with lockpicks during a burglary.
We have many important, wealthy sources saying that, so you can believe it.
"Pirated" is commonly used as a simple synonym for "stolen" these days. Common usage has shorn "pirated" of any nuance or connotation. Saying "Theft is theft" means that asking for a more nuanced verb than "pirated" in this situation amounts to excusing theft.
Please excuse me for invoking a phrase that Sony itself (possibly through it's RIAA mouthpiece) uses in precisely the same context for its irony value. I should not have attempted the use of a subtle and low-energy communication modality like irony.
While this blows ... it's a bummer that companies keep getting blamed when things like this happen. Sure, at some point an employee is a reflection of a company but at the end of the day a person did this. It's easy to point the finger at a big company and use this as fud against them. But really... the correct title should be "Someone who works for Sony pirated KDE artwork."
When one copies a music track that was sung by someone who works for Sony, who sues you? Sony (with all their legal & financial resources)? Or the person who sung the track? The answer is Sony. Likewise, Sony is responsible for putting this out there.
Sony (or anyone) cannot have it both ways when it suits them.
I get what you're saying- this is almost certainly a case where one employee was either lazy or ignorant and just found a nice icon. Not a big deal. But, it was in the service of a company and the corporation is responsible for it. In a sane world, what that means is that someone from KDE would point it out to them, and Sony would say "Ooops. That was a mistake. We'll change it. Sorry.". Who knows what happens in the real world.
> it was in the service of a company and the corporation is responsible for it.
This a million times over. When I write code, or do a quick Google Image Search for a stupid icon to clean up a UI while I'm at work, I'm doing so in service of the company I work for. If my actions result in me and my company infringing upon someone else's copyrights, it is ultimately my company that is responsible for those actions. My company may retaliate against me (I'm pretty sure there's a "don't fuck up" clause in my work agreement), but my company cannot wash their hands and allow another company or individual to sue me directly for the violation anymore so than I can remove all the code I've written in their products on my last day of employment the same way I pack up the nic-nacs on my desk.
Unfortunately, I honestly think the best course of action is to sue Sony for every penny possible.
The case needs to get as much press and possible, and people need to see how completely ridiculous the whole thing is. More and more cases like this need to tie up the court system, wasting everyone's time and money.
A part of me would like to see such a torching strategy. Yet I feel a strong resistance from another part of myself -- a part of me that believes that OSS would do better by taking the high road, by continuing to be one of the few areas/markets/communities, commercial or otherwise, that lives the life it preaches for the world.
If OSS devolves to "one of the pack", then I feel like we'd lose something fundamental and core to the only viable players for the moral high ground strategy. Don't we already have enough companies showing the world how ugly litigation can be?
Oh no, I don't want them to win. At most, SONY will just add a "we use icons from KDE, licensed under LGPL" as a tiny text somewhere. The goal isn't to win a case against SONY and score massive profits from damages. The goal is to not be on the wrong end of a suit.
On the left hand side of that image you see a little segment that conists of a hand, an eye and an ear. Those stand for interaction, video and audio. TrueTech hired Jonathan Kraij, a talented young designer to make that logo and it was featured in many places, magazines such as wave and many others besides in the late 90's.
Not three weeks after one prominent bout of exposure the logo appeared in an advertising campaign by Sony the Netherlands.
We talked it over with them and they traced it to a guy working for one of the agencies that designed the campaign. He'd most likely been subconsciously influenced by exposure from a magazine. Sony was pretty good about it, promised they wouldn't use the logo any further and paid us a fair bit of money to offset the use.
All in all it could have been a lot worse and I think that before you start using words like 'pirates' you have to dig a little deeper to be sure that it was intentional and that it wasn't some external party that caused this.
Sony is a damaged brand, they've done lots of terribly stupid stuff but at a minimum they should be given the benefit of the doubt until there is hard proof they did this on purpose. We all know Sony fucked up in the past but that is no reason to automatically assume they did so again without any proof.