[theme-reviewers] Licensing of photos used in themes

[Kirk Wight]

I understand licenses for binary assets such as images, fonts and icons are
to be explicitly listed in the readme.txt.

There's also a tool called TinEye <http://www.tineye.com/> that can be used
to find other uses online of an image; it's not perfect, but it can be
useful for reviewers (it will show a lot of images that are registered in
online stock libraries, for example).


On 6 December 2011 23:35, Dion Hulse (dd32) <wordpress at dd32.id.au> wrote:

> On 7 December 2011 15:12, Angelo Bertolli <angelo.bertolli at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Ian Stewart wrote:
> >>
> >> I was traipsing through the theme directory theme by theme as I am
> >> sometimes wont to do and happened upon this theme with a beautiful
> header
> >> image.
> >>
> >> http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/silent-film
> >>
> >> It looked like a stock photo to me and made me wonder if the original
> >> license of the stock photo (if it is one) allowed it to be made free
> and if
> >> that's something being checked on in theme reviews (and in this theme in
> >> particular).
> >>
> >
> > It is my understanding that photos are not required to be put under the
> GPL,
> > as they are not themselves derivative works.
> >
> > This doesn't mean that such a photo is licensed to be distributed
> though...
>
> Correct, Some people will subscribe to the notion that only the Theme
> PHP code is required to be GPL - this is a accepted licensing opinion
> from what I'm aware of - Lets not go into this battle here however, as
> it's a moot point:
>
> Submission to the WordPress.org Themes repository however has a much
> stricter licensing arrangement, ALL of the theme - PHP, JS, CSS, Flash
> Objects, Fonts, Icons, and most importantly in this case Images, MUST
> be GPL licensed, or under a GPL-compatible license.
> This is covered under the Theme Review guidelines:
> http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Review#Licensing
>
> This allows for WordPress.org org to be a repository of Plugins and
> Themes which are 100% GPL'd, with Zero restrictions placed on usage.
> By all means, You should be able to take images from any theme on
> WordPress.org and use it in a GPL-compliant manner without license
> issues.
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