I ran into a rather upset person dealing with the "Amarok Icon Created for Amarok 1.1 by Nenad Grujicic" icon.

they were claiming to be the owner and copyright holder for the icon, but according to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Amarok-icon.png, the creator of the icon set it GPL for anyone to use.

i would like to know the standing officially from the project, so if this comes up again i can deal with solid facts.

the amarok project has a great thing and i love pointing people to it however i can.

Hi, could you provide some more detailed information on who this company/person is, and maybe a link to their logo? It's hard to judge this issue without having some more facts.

psycovermin wrote:they were claiming to be the owner and copyright holder for the icon, but according to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Amarok-icon.png, the creator of the icon set it GPL for anyone to use.

You don't give up your position as the copyright holder when you release an icon or code under the GPL. So assuming the person your talking about is Nenad Gruijicic, these two positions aren't mutually incompatible. 

i do not know who the person is, they refused to give me their name. according to wiki Nenad Gruijicic set it as GPL, which i a believe any one can use the image for any purpose (yes, Nenad Gruijicic keeps his copyrights), but is licensed for ANY general use not just to amarok.

the situation is, on the gala-net game rappelz the guild i am part of uses that image iconized because it fits nicely with the guild's name. when people make comment to the image we use it as a point to advertise oss, and amarok.

this person made an account and character name "hawkwynd" and started harassing some members of the guild about the image saying he was the "owner" of the image and he was going to report inappropriate use of it to gala-net, when i told him we are using the GPL wiki version he said that the wiki had no rights to post the image nor state it was GPL (he said it was not GPLed) and he was going to have the wiki remove all posts/links for the image.

this person refused to provide any evidence that he was the copyright owner or had any link to the amarok project. he then deleted the character. i made screen shots of the ordeal.

he gave me "permission" to continue use of the image under certain terms, to which i still feel are unneeded since to my best knowledge the image was released by the owner (Nenad Gruijicic) under a GPL license. the other problem i have is that this person did not have the right (if it was violation of use and therefore not GPLed) to grant me permission to use it since the person gave me no proof as to being the owner of the image.

so the heart of the issue is; is this image truly released by Nenad Gruijicic as GPL license?
if yes, then i am in no wrong for using it and am also benefiting the amarok project with free advertising. if no then i need "official" permission to continue using the image (specifically a likeness of it since it has been slightly modified and iconized).

my understanding also that if i have made changes, it is a NEW image and the only issue would be trademark if i was using the image likeness for a similar product/industry as amarok.

thanks!

Well I'm sorry that someone has been harassing you. They aren't one of us. Other users who have found our icon used elsewhere came to us directly and we handled the situation ourselves. It's too bad this user did not do this.

However we would like to politely ask you to not use the image. We do not have a trademark, so there's no legal reason you can't (though it's fairly likely you aren't abiding by all the GPL requirements in regards to license distribution and copyright statement, but those are details). But we would like to discourage the use of our icon in a non-Amarok context, so that when we get our act together we could get a trademark. As you may know, Amarok is a free and open source program. We do this for fun and not for profit.

OTOH, you did say that your giving us free advertising, so if you really are the "Amarok Media Player" guild, then feel free, go ahead. But if your the "Blue Wolf Squadron" or something, then that is diluting the purpose of our logo.