Is it just me who thinks this logic is wrong?
See, if you as an outsider want to make sure that all parties are held to the same standard then you should be willing to apply that standard to your worst enemy as well.
Note that I am not in any way defending Sony or their conduct, I just want the same standard that I'd like to apply to downloading music to apply to this instance of possible copyright violation.
Sony is a terrible company and they deserve to go down because of the way they've harassed private individuals, they've lobbied for ridiculous legislation and have done an enormous amount of wrong. And in spite of all that you should still be even handed in dealing with them.
But my initial comment was mostly to acknowledge that we do not give the benefit of doubt to private persons, but we do to commercial entities. The law should be equal, but had this been a discussion about someone who downloaded songs, there wouldn’t have been a single comment questioning the validity of the accusation.
Its one thing to do a mistake, but its an other to continue because its cheaper to ignore copyright law than to do a complete stop in the production and selling of a product. At that point they are doing willingly infringing copyright law.
That just isn't true.
Even the title say "pirate bay girl". Not a single comment ask if this was just a innocent mistake done by the girl. not a single comment address if either the father or the girl have read copyright law or was aware which sites are authorized sources and which aren't.
did you mean something else? You could not of meant that.
That is a pretty difficult line to uphold when you can have no sway on said worst enemy and he's already been engaging in egregious behavior with no end in sight. Then isn't it just you being the sucker?
So, get back to us when the 9-year-old uses the pirated music to attract business to her lemonade stand.
It's pretty clear Sony did not intend to do this and most likely just a placeholder image left in by mistake. Who at Sony would think saving 300$ on designing the image outweighs the risk of this.
How can you say this? If you've ever worked in a corporate environment, you know that layers and layers of reviews and supervision and requirements exist to prevent any mis-step. If this image flew through that process, then Sony knows what it did.
I think you're making an unwarranted assumption. My assumption about Sony's massive, multi-review process is far more likely to be upheld by fact.
I sincerely doubt your assumption will be upheld. I've worked at large multi-nationals, I currently run an agency which does design services for large multinational companies. Not once have I heard nor seen anyone do something like run an icon set for a support page through something like TinEye or Google Image Search to search for possible copyright infringement.
Legal resources at a company tend to be scarce and expensive, and this would be a waste and there's too much gray area in design copyright to make this sort of thing feasible. Also its easier to have your internal teams just do their job and design icons from scratch, outside contractors are going to be bound by contracts to ensure the work they provide is adequately licensed and to indemnify the company against any losses if its not.
Not to mention Sony will spend a small bit of money to deal with this slip up as opposed to a great amount of money trying to police every design they use.
| If this image flew through that process, then
| Sony knows what it did.
I'm torn on this whole issue. On the one hand, I think the world would be a much better place if we didn't have silly draconian copyright laws, so I don't like to see those silly laws given any further legitimacy by using them (and I write that as a guy who makes his living creating stuff that is protected by copyright). On the other hand, those laws are laws because of companies like Sony, and hoping they won't be used doesn't stop them being laws.
I suspect if companies like Sony started paying obscenely disproportionate fines for careless minor infringements, this might be the fastest way to get the problem fixed, though regrettably with significant collateral damage resulting along the way. For example, if they have sponsored laws that call for criminal sanctions against individuals who infringe copyright for commercial gain, those laws should be hovering over any conceivably responsible individuals at Sony and anywhere they outsourced to as well in cases like this. If merely working for a company like Sony on any creative project is potentially enough to get you a criminal record, the true damage caused by draconian copyright laws will become apparent to them very quickly (and probably quite briefly, since it seems unlikely that a company that became so toxic to employees and agencies would last very long).
I really dislike that I've come to that conclusion, but looking at the world as it is rather than as I wish it to be, I have trouble seeing any more logical outcome.
That being said, I would imagine that someone in the agency that did this thought that "open source" means "free", and that the lawyers at Sony weren't informed where the icons came from (or didn't ask).
Ultimately, I do think KDE should fire a takedown notice and make a big stink about it, though. Sony certainly wouldn't be shy or understanding about it, so neither should they.
You've never met a designer in your life, have you?