Yes, it should be enough. IANAL but I know a thing or two about copyright. Shapes are not protected by copyright (how could you own the visual shape of diskette or trashcan or…?). What is protected is individual artistic expression. The rule of thumb is that if someone would create similar work without actually copying it, for example wrote the same programming function for the same purpose, would it be identical or not? If not, it’s artistic expression. If you take a photo of a monument you own the copyright for the photo because nobody could take exactly similar photo. It doesn’t actually need artistic quality or creativity. For fun, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute. If you draw an image by yourself, using software tools, but don’t copy image data and don’t follow the original, you don’t violate copyright.
It’s not clear where the boundaries are, but clearly icons, like smileys, are necessarily so similar in different sets that the general appearance and shapes can’t be copyrighted. You can compare different icon sets of for example linux desktops, or different smiley sets like the one in this editing screen, and tell how similar or dissimilar they can be.
@Seth_h, can you publish your research? The names of the icons which need to be replaced would be enough for volunteers, if you can add the needed information to the svg icon files which have paper trails. The old icons are in the git history anyways.
The advice we have been given by our lawyers (US only) is that this is insufficient if the icon is visually distinct. In other words, you can only copy icons that don’t need to be copied because they are generic.
We are avoiding this altogether by having new icons drawn that we own the copyright on.
Again, anyone who has specific suggestions for improvements of individual icons should post those suggestions to the Gitlab issues. Generic comments about large groups of icons are not helpful and cannot be implemented.
I am not sure what is meant by this. Surely the old version of a lot of the icons replaced were simply mimicking the visual appearance of Kidcad’s content itself. How could that be a copyright violation? For instance green wires with dot have been replaced by a blue wire with red dot that does not look anything like in the schematics. A net, global and hierarchal label looks like and have the same color as the label when it is placed on the schematics in the old version. The Eeschema icon looks like a very small schematic. Why can we not keep a visual appearance of the icons that actually look like and has the same colors as the visual elements used in the program itself?
I agree with otoien, I don’t understand what this means. About every desktop icon set has for example a trashcan. They are all visually distinct. They are similar but not identical. They are necessarily similar to each other, yet they are independent works, not copies or derivatives. If you take 5 trashcan icons, don’t copy bytes from any of them and create your own trashcan keeping those 5 icons as models but don’t follow any of them specifically, you haven’t infringed copyright. Otherwise all of those icons except the first one would be illegal.
With SVG it would be theoretically easier to create an identically looking icon without copying the source file, but we are not talking about exact copy of the appearance, either.
I think that this is that you cannot make an icon similar to copyrighted artwork or design, something like the Warhol soup cans painting or the Monroe grating photo
But in this case there seems to be an effort to make the icons different, just because we do not know if someone out there have created an icon that looks similar. That is a different case than if we confirmed that a specific icon was copied from a copyrighted non-open source. Again most of the old icons seem to have been inspired by the appearance of KiCad contents rather than someone else creation, and I would think that in itself would provide some protection if they were recreated in the same way. For instance if someone else had a copyrighted icon of green wires with a dot for a ecad application to describe their green wires and junctions, that should not barr anyone else to also use a green wire with a dot for their icon, when that is also the style of their application.
There has been a good effort to create new icons, but I feel that the background lead idea for how the replacement should be carried out has been misguided.
I think the premise of the icons is noun/verb i.e. For the add dot, the blue T junction is the context - 'a junction ’ and the red highlight is the action - ‘add a dot’. If you think of the icons in that way they make more sense. This conveys more information than a green junction on a green wire.
I agree that some of the icons are too small or too busy but I noticed that several have been reworked so clearly this is a first iteration.
To resume what are my thought about that icon pack, I think they are not rupturing enough with the old ones. Right now they boldly convey a new style while staying shy of new idioms. The things I didn’t liked about the old icons have stayed (libraries looking like a bookshelf for example (winrar anyone)). I think I would have preferred much more drastic changes, completely ditching the old idioms, and full monochrome very bold shapes.
But still, thanks a lot for the great work. It’s 480 already amazing streamlined icons.
A note to everyone checking this out: The “V6” icons (V6 is not out yet) are still changing daily, so this PDF is just a snapshot of what the icons looked like on one day.
I’m talking about creating a new icon set based on the old one.
Are we making this more difficult than what it actually is?
Yes, sure, but that’s not a problem here. If Seth could actually give us the list of problematic/non-problematic icons it would help tremendously. Then we could see which icons would need replacing. More probably the icons which have KiCad inspired content do have paper trails. The generic icons like trashcans, cut/copy/paste can be replaced easily by copying them unmodified or modified from 3rd party sources but this time embedding the copyright information and licence. Some KiCad specific icons can be copied from the new set, modified or unmodified, because they have the paper trail.
From reading the icon credits and the Gitlab issues, there appear to be two issues with licensing:
Not all the original attributions are known
There are a smattering of disparate licenses for the ones that are known
Therefore, it sounds like the Devs would like to get the entire icon set under a single common license moving forward. It also sounds like the leg work has been done to get a legal advise on what the bounds are. This seems like a reasonable ask, and would help Kicad moving forward. But it does means two things:
All new icons will have to be created
The community should give constructive feedback in #1
The icon work so far is looking promising, and many people have given great feedback. I’m looking forward to seeing the final product in V6. Thanks!
I might be in the minority here, but I like the new icons. Nice work!
I’m surprising by all the bike-shedding on here, but I shouldn’t be. 4 or 5 years ago when Solidworks changed their icons, the user base got so up in arms they had to issue a public statement and quickly implement a “classic mode”. Obviously a straightforward fix when you own the old icon copyrights and you are charging users a couple thousand dollars a year.
From https://blog.trimech.com/new-in-solidworks-2016-turn-back-time-with-classic-icon-colors:
I liked the newer SW interface and I think as others have pointed out, the new KiCad icons have followed industry trends.
While you may feel the need to blame people for bike-shedding, your contribution to a recurrent pattern of users being provoked by swapping around entire icon sets is duly noted. Autodesk did this with Eagle8, not having learned from Solidworks a year earlier, as it seems. I’ll give KiCad the benefit of the doubt that everybody was just too busy and buried in work to put some thought to communicating the changes, but it still remains a pretty boneheaded move and the backlash is just and well-deserved.
The current KiCad icon candidates seem to use colors and gray tones to hide contrast instead of accentuating details in a well-measured fashion.
Compared to the LibreOffice7 icons, it’s obvious what could have been achieved with more discipline, high contrast and fewer details:
UI/UX always hit close to home because this is what people interact with
I think the biggest issue is the heavily reliance on gray and blue. These are already quite close together on the colour map. Couple with thin lines AND the blue used to highlight a modal tool… there are some clarity issues when it comes to the icons
