Who owns old icons?

[Richmond Mathewson]

Rick Harrison wrote:

"Unless Apple, Inc. has put all of HyperCard into the public domain,
the HyperCard icons are still owned by Apple, Inc."

which seems pretty clear and unequivocal.

However, old icons are a bit like my face:

I own my face, and were somebody to mysteriously remove it and graft it on to another person they would have stolen it.

However, journalists and others photograph people's faces and publish them everywhere without so much as a backward glance; and they cannot be said to have "stolen people's faces", or even their likenesses.

Now, were I to post the HyperCard application, or, say, a ResEdit document containing Hypercard icons on a website and/or user group I would have stolen the icons.

However, were I to post (as, indeed I have done) photographs (i.e. screenshots) of HyperCard icons; this would be similar to an individual publishing a photograph of me s/he took. Of course if it were of me, say, in my bath with a plastic duck,I might feel fairly cheesed-off, and that it were an invasion of privacy.

Apple have never hid their HyperCard icons in the "bathroom" (they have flashed them around like nobody's business), and the 'photographs' of them published on my Yahoo Group

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/RsHYPERCARD

are not "with plastic ducks"; in fact no 'value judgements' are attached to them at all.

Not the same situations, at all!

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.
____________________________________________________________

A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
____________________________________________________________


      __________________________________________________________
Not happy with your email address?.
Get the one you really want - millions of new email addresses available now at Yahoo! http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/ymail/new.html