Hacker News Reader

Comment by slim | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised the site did not have an icon, so I searched for duck and found the duckduckgo icon. are you sure it's opensource ?

View on HN

The duckduckgo icons are labelled as such. Plenty of icon sets will have recognisable brand assets for the likes of social media platforms and so on, which will allow use according to certain guidelines.

Their inclusion probably isn't an issue in itself, but the blanket guidance in the copy above the result will be.

> The icons below can be used for Personal & Commercial purposes. They can be used on your website, branding and designs.

Obviously assets relating to existing brands will never be permitted for use in the branding of an unaffiliated party. onassar may want to update the guidelines to note such exclusions.

Thanks for the notes mrkwse. I try to show copy like the following when trademarks show up:

> Naturally, trademarks apply to any brand icons or logos above. That means that you can use them in practice (for example, linking to the respective service), but that the company likely has limitations on how else they can be used.

I need to do some work to communicate that better :)

Might be worth being very explicit which icons are trademarks. Facebook is obvious to basically anyone with an internet connection at this point, but there are plenty of brands that, despite (or because of) paying 7 figures to a big name design firm, ended up with super generic-looking symbols as their logos. "Ooh, that's a great apple/bird icon, I'll just use that."

Yep that's a good idea. I do some internal tagging when something is a brand logo, so I could use that data to put a little notice in the Preview modal that it's likely trademarked :)

Yep; those icons can be used freely, however Trademarks apply. Generally, that means you can use it (for example, link to Duck Duck Go), but you probably couldn't sell it on t-shirts

Reply on news.ycombinator.com