Wordle…
September 4th, 2009 by HenNoticed Ben Hyde linking to Wordle.
Stupid dumb licensing statement of the day from the Wordle site:
May I make money off of Wordle images?
Yes. The images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license
A tool. That I put input in to. Whose owner claims ownership of the output of the tool by determining the licensing. That’s evil.
Of course he does state before that:
May I use my Wordles for…
Yes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use in any way you choose. (snip…)
So they’re mine to use in any way I choose… but he defines the license. Of course… it sounds like what I have to do is provide attribution to myself (obviously not the intent… but if I own it and have to use that license…hmm).
I can only assume it’s the font. Which is an interesting question that I was pondering idly the other day; font licensing. If I print up a lorum ipsem etc in a particular font, do I own that piece of paper? Presumably it’s messy.
Effectively this is the Afferro permissive (aka badgeware) license that I pondered on a year back. Rather than existing properly, it’s surfacing in dubious application of existing licensing.
September 4th, 2009 at 8:12 am
IANAL, but I have been told this by lawyers:
In the United States, fonts are not copyrightable by law and legal precedent. However, the digital representation of a font is copyrightable. So if you send somebody a digital copy of something with embedded font data, you have to have a license for the font: but if you print it out or convert it to a bitmap, you don’t.
In other countries the legal landscape is very different: in France, fonts are copyrightable.
I happen to know this because the French Abbey of Solesmes claims copyright on the shapes of Gregorian neumes which they have invented over the years. Their books can be reprinted freely in the United States, but not in Europe!