Licensing for Images Used in Badges

Archive Badges
#1

Daniel had a question about Badges that are on our platform badges.p2pu.org:

I would love to know if all the badges created by people are actually “legal” and you don’t run into any “legal issue”. Basically, my badge is using CC material from here: Open Clipart Library, Font-Awesome and Open Font Library so I would say that it is safe to publish it without problems (it would be great if I could have an option to acknowledge all the other authors), however several of the images look like they have been taking from other sites and it is not possible to know the licenses. Have you thought about providing a license field for the badges icon? It could help a lot to know if you can re-use a badge from another badger and be safe knowing that you can re-use it without ending up in a problem. What do you think?

I think he raises a good issue, what is our take on this?

#2

By default, content contributed to P2PU is CC BY SA. We should link to the terms of use from badges.p2pu.org if we don’t already. That would be the easiest solution for now.

I am not opposed to adding badge image licensing functionality, but that might add complexity across the site and in other places. At the moment we don’t have to worry about that, because ALL content is always CC BY SA. That’s less of a headache.

#3

I think Daniel’s point is about a place to note third party images that are used in the badge. Even if the default is CC BY-SA, that doesn’t mean that the third party materials used are governed by CC BY-SA, or even if they are governed by CC BY-SA, their creator should still be noted since creator retains rights. Maybe badge attribution info can be mentioned textually in an about or similar field? Not sure if there is such a field right now. And then when it comes metadata, we can work on that down the line since it is more complicated…

#4

Jane is right, my point of view is about the images of the badges, not the badge itself. For example, there is a badge right now for Github using the Github logo. Obviously, that logo has a copyright and cannot be treated as CC BY SA, and that’s why I was raising the issue.

My goal with the previous comment is about improving your site :wink: by adding more meta-data. A possible solution, to avoid cluttering the interface is to include only this information if the user clicks in a special button to show more details about it or something similar. Again, this is just an idea, so you can have it in mind and discuss about it :wink:

#5

I suggest we talk about it on the community call?

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#6

I think I misunderstood. Thanks for explaining again. I have not thought much about the implications of using third party images in P2PU issued badges, but would assume that it is not ok to use the copyright github logo as part of a badge.

There seem to be two issues:

  • Do we require a particular license for badges on badges.p2pu.org? Given that badges are user contributed content, at the moment they would be licensed as CC BY SA by default. If we don’t change that, we would require all images used to design the badges to be CC BY, public domain, or CC BY SA.

  • How do we attribute third-party images that were used to create the badge on badges.p2pu.org? Adding an optional field to attribute the author, and specify the image license seems like a good solution.

And yes, let’s talk about it in the community call (except I’m missing the call this week).