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?