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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people like to include things in a larger work without crediting the sources for their designs. If a given design was under an MIT license, it would still have to be attributed somewhere since the copyright still resides with the original designer/copyright-holder. The license states: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." So, it should be in there somewhere. Including when you utilize MIT-licensed images and deliver a greater work including them to a client.

I think you're thinking more of public domain, which has no copyright attached and can be used however you'd like.

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I'm not a lawyer, so my reading of the licenses may be wrong. If so, please do correct me.

As far as I understand, MIT-style license requirements can be satisfied by comments in the HTML or CSS whereas Creative Commons Attribution style licenses require the attribution to be visible to the end user.

It was my understanding (or interpretation) that Creative Commons Attribution could go in a different page. I normally add a Copyright or License link in the footer that leads to a page with a list of software and artwork used in the app. Otherwise, I just put a comment in the caption if it's a one off thing.

Either way, I don't see what the issue is with designers not wanting to attribute.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

"You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use."

Based on my earlier discussions with legal folks, a separate page is just fine. For websites, I link the Copyright 20XX wording in the footer to a page that includes mention of all the sources of designs, themes, etc, even when not required.

I don't know if an HTML comment would satisfy the requirement for an image. Then again, MIT is source code license and not designed for images anyway. CC licenses are designed for all kinds of things. The designers in this case wanted attribution, so the choice is to either use it and attribute or not use it.

It's worth nothing that CC-BY-SA is incompatible with the GPL and similar licenses, so you would not be able to compile the images from Material Design into a GPLed app. You can include them with a GPLed app and load them at runtime, though.

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