Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I just checked them again, and I must say that I'm a bit disappointed in how they seem to have become more commercially oriented over the years.

View on HN

Yeh it's tricky. They have some pretty amazing icons and services, and probably one of the most reliable APIs I've worked with. And so, that costs $. It is a bummer, but there's always that trade off I suppose.

Hoping Iconduck can fill a bit of a void when it comes to open source contributions. I'll be very consistent with it, adding new icons every week, improving the searching, and the design.

Can't you (legally) pull all the Create Commons-licensed icons from their website? Have you tried contacting the original creators?

We (Flaticon) tried that years ago. Very quickly got a letter from their lawyer pointing out that a) that was a violation of their ToS (right) and b) they have a sui generis database copyright that applies to whatever we got (doubtful, that applies in Europe to "big" parts of a collection).

We deleted everything we got from them. We got a second letter when we reached independently to some authors with CC icons, got their explicit approval and got their icons from their site. The same icons were also available on the noun, and I guess they thought we had downloaded them there. This time we answered back and never heard from them again.

They seemed pretty protective to me, and I would not recommend touching their site if you want to get a CC collection of icons without troubles.

Btw, Iconduck looks dope :) congrats!

Thanks for the context. I assume the original question was meant theoretically. My response in based, in part, on the fact that I really love Noun Project. They're an amazing company, have a great product, and have some phenomenal support. We've (a different product) been a customer of their API for 5+ years now.

I remember reading a little while ago about scraping and what is/isn't allowed. I find the legal/theory of it pretty interesting, but also irrelevant for Iconduck: I like icons and want to spend time bringing together as many open source ones as I can, while practicing some of my design skills.

Appreciate you checking is out. Flaticon is a gr8 product.

Do you mean from Noun Project? I wouldn't do that (for a couple reasons). The main one, is that I want to always be able to link back directly to the creator's repo and license. It gets a bit meta when people start collecting icons from other 3rd party sites. As for whether it's allowed, I think it depends on the specific license. For example, some licenses may not allow for redistribution generally, but then may grant a special license to a provider (for example, like Noun Project). So then, you may find yourself violating a license that you didn't even know about.

So the rule is, I'll only include icons that have licenses that specifically allow redistribution and attribution, and I'll almost always link back to the repo. The exception is some sets aren't hosted through GitHub or GitLab, so I'll link back to their respective website.

(see below; didn't reply to the right message)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com