Re: default colormap

[Carnë Draug]

On 4 November 2015 at 14:50, Michael D. Godfrey
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 04/11/2015 13:42, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>>
>> Intellectual property, legally speaking, does not exist.
>
> Jordi,
>
> While I tend to agree that IP claims are exaggerated and misused
> they do "exist." For instance the Olympic Committee has trademarked
> the 5 rings symbol. During the Olympics in London all objects that
> looked like some rings had to be removed if they were in the vicinity
> of the Olympic events. Also, the BBC, which did not have broadcast
> rights, was not allowed to show anything which included 5 rings,
> such as a pub with a symbol that "looked like" rings. Serious money
> was at stake in this case.
> [...]

That's not Intellectual Property.  That's trademark law.  And it doesn't
apply to a colormap.  The following may be helpful to clear the differences:

    https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

Roughly, the point of that document is that IP does not exist.  What does
exist is copyright, patents, and trademarks, and each of them gives very
different types of rights.  Laywers use the expression "Intellectual Property"
to confound the layman, so we associate rights that we take from granted
to things we shouldn't.  Slightly related, I found the following question
and answer, and even their comments on Law Stack Exchange extremely
interesting [1]:

    
http://law.stackexchange.com/questions/4559/why-are-lawyers-typically-excluded-from-juries

On this specific case, of the parula colormap, it doesn't fall under any of
three categories.  And they claiming of IP is meaningless because that
word has no legal meaning.

It should go without saying that I'm not a lawyer.

Carnë