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Honest question. Did the author even attempted to contact Sony or anyone in the KDE organization to resolve this issue?
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.
[1]: http://digitalblasphemy.com/preview.shtml?i=fluorescence
So what now? Are we going to see Sony GPL'ing their UEFI implementation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question. Does Sony do the same when someone accidentally uses their licensed material?
In lieu of blogging about it? Yeah, yeah they do.
Not that I have a problem with this method, but it isn't usually done with the end goal of fixing the problem.
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)
[settings icon]["settings icon"][free settings icon] etc don't return it.
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."
Honest question. Did the author even attempted to contact Sony or anyone in the KDE organization to resolve this issue?
Does it matter (legally)?
Violating the GPL terms matters legally.
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.
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.