They’re not. Some buy a Verified Mark Certificate (e.g. ikea.{com, ca, fr, maybe others} do), but most won’t ever (e.g. the first one on https://bimi-explorer.svg.zone/bimi/list.html 026430010.co.il, and a slightly random other dailydot.com). Also the two Mark Verifying Authorities listed at https://bimigroup.org/implementation-guide/ currently talk about approximately $1,300 and $1,600 per year, less than the $2,000 you say though recurring.
I was just about to ask if it was. That's good, because honestly fuck every other spaghetti solution for icons. It's tiring, and iconify coupled with the related unplugin-icons library solves it.
I was curious what the biggest would be, and was disappointed when I looked at Glitch to find its 1017 bytes was so close to the limit only because of unnecessary usage of the XLink namespace. <use href> (as the preferred alternative to <use xlink:href>) has worked across the board¹ for more than five years now. Shortening that stuff trims off 55 bytes. I also managed to shave another 11 bytes off because that’s the sort of thing I do for fun:
¹ I’m only considering browsers; see https://caniuse.com/mdn-svg_elements_use_href for compatibility data. As for other tools that handle SVG, I expect approximately all actively-maintained things to support this by now, but some older tools certainly won’t. I’ll also remark that I’m getting mixed signals about how you’re supposed to use these things. If you’re supposed to inline them into HTML, the SVG namespace declaration is unnecessary (so you can save 35 bytes, and you could also then remove many of the quotation marks on attributes); but if you’re supposed to link them, the aria-label and role="img" attributes don’t do anything (so you can save 25 + name-length bytes).
Seems like a lot of trademark infringement suits about to come their way. Am I mistaken or is there no way this viable? In addition, nobody has any legal right to put others trademarks (use these) on anything without the trademark owners permission. So even if the site and distribution is somehow OK, nobody can really use them anyway. Right?
You're mostly fine unless you are confusing consumers. The purpose of these marks is exactly to avoid that, so you're going to get into a lot of trouble if you use the marks to mislead people in any way.
Take the Air China logo - if a not-so-bright reader might think you are Air China, you're using this all wrong. But if you use an Air China logo to signify the routes actually flown by Air China on a free world map of international flights on your web site, well, yeah, that's Air China, nobody is misled, even a moron knows the little logos on your map of the world aren't actually jet aeroplanes.
I'm not sure if simply offering a brand's logo would be trademark infringement.
Years ago someone contacted me at the company I worked for claiming in some sorta pseudo legal language that we couldn't have one of our competitor's logos on our website. We had it on a promotional page comparing features across similar products.
It's not trademark infringement to copy or display a logo. Trademark infringement happens when you confuse customers by using a logo or phrase and make them think that you're selling the actual product or that you're somehow endorsed by the original company.
These and others have been online for a while, so I doubt it. There's more here, under the Brands / Social category: https://icones.js.org/
Yes, there are ways someone could use them that would not only run afoul of the trademark, but have trademark holders come after them. However, that doesn't make this useless, because there are proper and gray-area uses of these as well.
I imagine avoiding IP legal issues with things like icons could be less about signing agreements with all involved companies and more about having a team that can respond professionally to an inquiry.
Businesses may often not really understand what’s going on and default to being worried about third-party use of their trademarks that they normally must defend. Perhaps they don’t need to worry in this case, where it may actually provide a bit of free advertisement, but if there’s no one on the other side then it wouldn’t help the case.
They probably each carry their own licensing and terms of use. I'd suspect there's a good number where reuse in some situations would be permitted, and in others would not. But every single one is going to be different, and just making assumptions is a quick way to blindly assume enormous legal liability.
That's why SimpleIcons contains metadata about that, so if you are worried about that, you can just exclude any icons that have explicit licensing information attached.
If I were going to use these in my product, I would only do it the other way around. If there's no explicit license, I'm not touching someone else's trademark.
It has existed for years and they actively remove icons when they get a takedown request. I'm sure most companies other than Oracle are happy to be there.
Isn't it also copyright infringement, and thus punishable by death in some enlightened jurisdictions [1], or at least by thousands in damages per infringement?
How many infringements do you generate by just loading the front page?
The guy who paid $70k to convert 14000 existing icons/logos to SVG for commercial use because he wanted to use these icons according to his product standards. All existing SVGs icons are for personal and study purposes, that's why he spent so much amount out of good faith, moral compliance and professional courtesy.
Moreover, this website has 3198 icons and what about the remaining icons as per his specifications?
One very important thing to note here is that these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License meaning you must allow users to download the source code no matter whether it's modified or not.
Another important point is that licenses like AGPL are (simplifying slightly) copyright instruments, and for a work to be eligible for copyright protection, there must be creative effort, which I expect not to be the case for at least the vast majority of the icons—they’ll be mechanical translations, more or less. The original creators will hold copyright over the designs, but I don’t believe there will be any further copyright on such an icon collection, just as photographs of public domain artwork don’t get copyright protection. I am conscientious about these details, and I’d be comfortable ignoring an AGPL claim on such a thing.
Also AGPL would not be a good license for a work like this. The GPL family of licenses are very specifically designed for code, and quite a bit of their terms are a little difficult to apply for such a collection as this. And their nature would largely prevent anyone from using the icons unless they wanted to license their stuff under (simplifying slightly) the same license.
Thank you for the correction. It doesn't come with the GNU Affero General Public License, and the GPL family of licenses are very specifically designed for code.
If you can help, where can I learn more about licensing in plain English?
> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.
For icons like this, it’s just that there is no object code, the source code is the only form there is.
But supposing you had your SVG document with high precision, meaningful object IDs, Inkscape PowerStroke data (variable stroke thickness, which gets materialised in SVG as a path that gets fill), editor metadata and the likes, and then fed it through svgo and stripped all that stuff out, leaving just the bare bones, the original would be the source code, and the svg output object code.
To put it in the frame of another format where the difference is more stark, if you design something in Photoshop and you export it as PNG but don’t distribute the PSD, that ain’t Open Source. You can modify it, but not properly.
Or another: C, and a compiled binary. You can patch the binary, but that doesn’t make everything open source.
What you mean is that it is plaintext, and can be introspected. Great for many practical purposes, yes, but in business context, you are obligated to honor the actual license.
It can get minified/optimized by a tool. The "source code" is what you immediately edit, but you might not distribute that version, only a "binary" derived from it.
I didn't want to tell you, but there is a thing called copyright. That said, if you copy SVG it is often easy to change the paths etc. and make it "yours".
I guess I'd rather pay a small bit though.
If you already starting from an existing set from publicly available sources, and you just need to standardize them amongst each other for consistency, then I can see how that would be kinda reasonable, though I'm no designer myself
perhaps things like giving them a consistent center or consistent brightness/contrast could be done programmatically as well, and maybe there are end user tools to do those things en masse
other tweaks such as selecting between subtle variations found in each icon, or adding some artistic modification, shadow mimicking, etc... can possibly be done, to align the set to a certain pre-defined theme now that I think about it more
seems like a pretty interesting kinda project actually
> Arts, crafts and sciences uplift the world of being and are conducive to its exaltation ~Baha'u'llah
the designer who chose to instead run with the money probably got insecure or bored, but they would probably be happier if they learned to appreciate the creative process more
Re-create existing icons, since a lot of these icon packs are not very standardized (e.g. some icons are full logos, some are actual icons, some have borders, some have backgrounds, etc).
I’ve done this. The internal brand center was focused mostly on sales and people interfacing with customers.
I was using it for internal tools though. I’m sure if I made customer facing sites I would need to go through more official channels and make sure all the branding guidelines are followed to the letter.
This is cool, but I wish I didn't have to get past "infinite" scrolling to check the license of the icons in the footer (it's CC0). "free" is a bit ambiguous.
Doesn't have pornhub or Brazzers, not even logo SVG archiving escapes the tentacles of the moral police (keep in mind pornhub it's one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world)
Except I actually looked for the other top 10 most popular websites before making my comment, they are all there (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al), as you may know Microsoft.com doesn't even make it to the top 100
Or just draw googly eyes on top and its a parody and totally legal art..
You can also have a NN turn it into a prompt and then recreate the SVG from prompt - shove it through the laundryAImat - nothing is sacred, the world they wanted they have now, let them suffer speared on there own swords.
That's what the intro would have you believe, but if you read past it you find these bombs:
> "Simple Icons is released under CC0 - though that doesn't mean to imply that all icons within the project are also CC0. Please see individual licenses where available."
> "the absence of licence data for a particular icon does not imply that the icon is not released under a license."
Majority of the icons uploaded on simple-icons are registered trademarks and IP as well. If you read carefully what you have highlighted, this is what exactly simple-icons is trying to say.
Thanks, TRiG; we're working on a fix for this and should have it implemented soon. As the token Irishman on the team, that icon was one of my creations, by the way.
It was added by one of our regular contributors to complement the WWE & NJPW icons already in our library.
It's far from the most niche one we have, though. My personal favourite is the Chupa Chups one, which I added on a whim a few years ago after learning it was designed by Salvador Dalí.
We don't aim to be a definitive collection of all the world's brands. Rather, we only add brands that are specifically requested or contributed by our community (and, occasionally, on a whim by our maintainers!) and, so far, nobody has requested this one.
If you would like to see the Grindr icon then please do feel free to open an issue or pull request. We would ask, though, that you attempt to contact them to seek permission first as their terms of service state: "The names and logos associated with the Grindr Services are the property of Grindr. No use of these marks is permitted except through the prior written authorization and permission of Grindr. All rights reserved."
Also, a good source of official SVG logos is BIMI, a standard that uses DNS to point to the URL of an SVG.
Spec: https://bimigroup.org/
I recently scraped them for the top N domains: https://bimi-explorer.svg.zone/bimi/