Re: Copyright of console illustrations

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Sat, 30 Aug 2025 10:46:32 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<1817054.d7IHhHJzqS@soren-desktop>
On Saturday, August 30, 2025 9:47:39 AM Mountain Standard Time Andrea 
Pappacoda wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm currently packaging the melonDS console emulator (ITP bug #1050348),
> but I'm stuck. The emulator ships with two minimalist illustartions of
> a Nintendo DS Lite game console; these illustrations are derived from
> <https://www.dimensions.com/element/nintendo-ds-lite>, which have
> a non-free (non-commercial uses) license.
> 
> The derived illustrations, shipped with the emulator, are here:
> <https://salsa.debian.org/tachi/melonds/-/blob/
793427e203df56edaa7f3046f92d763
> 4998e091f/src/frontend/qt_sdl/InputConfig/resources/ds_open.svg>
> 
> My question is: are these illustrations copyrightable? To me, it seems
> that they do not meet the threshold of originality of copyright law, as
> they just report in SVG format a physical object. There's no
> originality.
> 
> I was thinking, in the debian/copyright file, of writing something like
> this:
> 
>     Files:     src/frontend/qt_sdl/InputConfig/resources/ds_back.svg
>                src/frontend/qt_sdl/InputConfig/resources/ds_open.svg
>     Copyright: 2021 melonDS team
>     License:   public-domain
>                The two illustrations are in the public domain as they do not
>                meet the threshold of originality required for copyright to
>                apply.
>                .
>                The images are based on a Dimensions.com illustration,
>                modified to add color, remove real-life dimensions text, and
>                smoothen edges.
> 
> Does this make sense to you? Let me know!

The problem is that you are making an assertion here that might or might not 
be true.  Generally, to be safe, Debian doesn’t want to be the organization 
asserting that something is in the public domain when the author says 
otherwise.  We would either prefer that legal bodies had reviewed the matter 
and determined these were in the public domain (that usually happens through 
court cases) or that there is general acceptance in the community that these 
are in the public domain.  Because the person who created these images stated 
they were not in the public domain (releasing them under a non-free license), 
you should not include them in Debian unless they are generally deemed in the 
public domain as described above.

My recommendation would be to simply remove these images from the Debian 
package and use something else in their place.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]
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