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Comment by michaelpb | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping this was a resuscitation of Open Clip Art. I used to use it so much with Inkscape -- rarely I'd use anything as is, but it was great to have a bunch of different shapes at my finger-tips for tracing, rapid prototyping of graphics, etc. Everything was public domain which made licensing a non-issue.

But on the front page: "Most icons and vectors useable for your commercial projects without any royalties" -- This worries me, as it makes it sound like some of these ARE NOT under free licenses, and I'll have to check each one. Is there a "PD only" view?

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We've had to tackled the provenance problem at my company (https://www.vecteezy.com) by getting all of our content directly from the original designers. It was a crap ton of work and took us several years, but that allowed us to also back it up with legal indemnification. We now have a team of 18 folks reviewing all our content for legal and copyright issues now and we back it up with up to $100k in legal indemnity. So far it seems to be helping.

Suggestion: Submit “We've tackled the (SVG?) provenance problem” to HN in the form of a blog post that expands on your reply.

Rigorous provenance is vital when it’s vital.

Many years ago (early 90s) I used some vector art from a CorelDraw cdrom on a buisness card for my company logo. somehow my card made its way to another company's lawer who served me with a cease and desist notice. Being a small company and not wanting to be sued, I complied and stopped using the logo. I can't recall if it was a copyright or trademark issue but I remember the letter caused me a great deal of stress at the time.

Looking back now it was sort of a blessing in disguise since because of that letter, the next time I started a company I took the time to learn the simple process of taking a digital photo and converting it into to an SVG and have done that for all of my companies I've started over the years.

Creating an SVG logo or clipart from a photograph isn't difficult to do, especially nowadays with Inkscape and actually provides a sort of CMA proof of work to defend against copyright trolls.

Creating your logo yourself will protect against copyright claims, but it won't protect against trademark violations.

Apple sued Prepear because Prepear's logo looked too much like the Apple logo [1]. Prepear spent lots of money to defend themselves and finally made a small change to the logo to make Apple happy.

I think the lesson is to be prepared to change icons and logos swiftly when another legal entity sues for copyright or trademark violation.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/09/apple-and-prepear-reach-an-ag...

https://openclipart.org is (somewhat) back. I think this was better browsable and searchable in the past. At least there is some contents available.

These pages are really valuable.

Did they ever detail what happened, they kept saying nothing has been lost and they were ready to return the site, any minute now, I gave up looking after a few months assuming they'd had some sort of deletion accident they weren't prepared to confess.

IMO contributors deserve to know what happened still. I think there was a lot of agreement that a torrent backup should be made available so the responsibility for the OCAL community's work didn't have to rest with one (?) person who seemingly didn't have time to manage things.

Yup. If they can't guarantee provenance and license for reuse, then it's worthless to me.

But that's just me. YMMV.

I don't know if there is a way to restrict search by license, but you can see the license of every item it looks like most are under cc0.

There are more than enough “clipart” sites that steal and put CC0. You never know without a clear statement from the original artists.

I really suggest you to try to personally contact svgrepo. They definitely don't look like the usual shady clipart site and are sponsored by icons8.

Provenance tracking is impractical with a site like this.

Provenance tracking is a necessity for non-toy projects.

So a site like this has limited utility.

I'd read that as the author thinks everything is in the Public Domain, but they don't want to be liable if some big work uses something from their page and some guy materializes out of the woodwoork with a billion dollar lawsuit.

Gotcha! Well, I might feel okay then using these for placeholder, but not for anything serious... while I wait for an Inkscape-integrated clipart revival :)

Click an svg, it display its license.

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