Clef icons

[Markus]

Am Samstag 11 August 2012, 16:47:06 schrieb Friedrich W. H. Kossebau:

> > "MusiXTeX fonts may be freely copied, duplicated and used in conformance
> > to the GNU General Public License (Version 2, 1991,
> > see included file gpl.txt)."
> 
> GPL2 might be a no-go with Calligra, or? At least the music shape source
> code itself is LGPL.
> 
> Now the question is if these icons are derived works and thus need to have
> the same license, or are new creations created _with_ the font. At least
> the PNG icon to me would not need to have the same license, as this does
> not have any font data anymore, but is just a rendering of one "glyph" of
> the font.

The looks of clefs is public knowledge since ages. I don't know the English 
word for that but in German law the look is defined as "Geschmacksmuster" and 
the design of clefs is too old and its knowledge is too common to be  
protected by any law.

The source code used to generate the font (PostScript or whatever) can be 
copyrighted but not the visual output. An analogy would be a fractal 
generator, where the programming code can be copyrighted but not the image of 
eg. the Mandelbrot set.

I am not a lawyer but during my Wikipedia "career" I had to deal with 
licensing issues several times. If you want an expert opinion, I can ask a 
friend of mine who is about to get a PhD in law and specializes in copyrights, 
patents, and Geschmackmuster.