Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark-r | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there's anything gray about it. I'd hate to be on the bad side of a bunch of Microsoft's lawyers.

Even if there's no perceivable harm from having the collection available, the lawyers will be forced to take it down just to protect their rights in other cases.

View on HN

> he lawyers will be forced to take it down just to protect their rights in other cases.

Isn't this just a thing for trademarks? I was under the impression that regular copyright could be selectively applied since you can do things like grant private licenses to your work.

yes, it's only for trademark and even then it is rare. Frisbee still has their trademark somehow, even though everyone calls all brands of novelty flying discs frisbees

ianal, but im pretty sure im right.

“Frisbee” probably is “genericized.” The problem is that it takes a court ruling on it to know for sure, and no one wants to be the one to take that risk. It costs money to deal with the inevitable lawsuit, and if you lose, you need to fix it (and that costs a lot of money as well). OTOH, it costs (relatively) nothing do just choose a different name in the first place.

Pretty much all of the archetypal examples of trademarks becoming "genericized" are actually examples where the trademarks are still fully enforced. I'm not going to be able to get away with selling Bob's Kleenex or Happy Sheep Q-Tips anytime in the foreseeable future.

That entire lecture that everybody gets seems to me to be for the purpose of rationalizing sometimes extremely aggressive trademark enforcement to prevent something that has never happened.

There are some quite familiar terms that used to be trademarks, though: cellophane, dry ice, trampoline, escalator. As usual, Wikipedia has a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

As far as I can tell even that is not quite accurate:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...

tl;dr: The bar for trademark abandonment seems to be quite high.

So IANAL but could you use this if you owned MS Office? Presumably there is some kind of license for clip art specifically since it's for reuse.

So, I looked it up, and this seems to be the important part:[a][0]

> 3. You may use clip art for personal, noncommercial uses.

So, that’s that. A personal website or blog is ok, but not a commercial website.[b]

[a]: Couldn’t find it in a quick skim on the EULA

[b]: So it seems years ago, a lot of mom and pop shops violated that part...

[0]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vi...

Wow, that feels like BS. They sell a product called "Office" to businesses, then say parts of it weren't licensed for commercial use. Then you have to ask how the bundled fonts were licensed, because it'd be weird to license those for commercial use, but not the clipart.

AFAIK fonts are not copyrightable in most countries, what is copyrightable is the font file itself (of course) as well as the code (if any) for vector fonts that produces them. However using the font isn't copyrightable. The design might be under design patent and the name trademarked, but not the font itself and these really cover the entire font designs, not their applications. Someone printing a paper with the font isn't infringing on any copyright.

At least that is my understanding of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

As for the part that is copyrighted, it’s not just the code that makes the fonts (like what metafont would be), but also the bytecode embedded in the font file (for kerning and other things).

Yes that is what i meant. The curves aren't copyrightable since those aren't code, but the bytecode is copyrightable.

> I'd hate to be on the bad side of a bunch of Microsoft's lawyers.

Or worse: They might send Clippy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com