4 ms·
> If you are writing a book about something that has an official animal or something, I am sure you can have some sway, but for the long tail of titles, you get
by gnulinux 4y ago
> If you are writing a book about something that has an official animal or something, I am sure you can have some sway, but for the long tail of titles, you get one assigned randomly at some point.
Wouldn't that potentially be a copyright violation? E.g. using elephant for PHP could be seen as trying to copy PHP's logo? [1] (Not a lawyer, this is just a question)
[1] This is likely a terrible example, as I don't think elephant is PHP's official logo, just an associated mascot like Java's Duke? Still... I don't know if this can be copyrighted.
- snapetom 4y agoThis would be a trademark, not copyright. And assuming PHP trademarked it's elephant, it has to be THE PHP elephant to be a violation, not an O'Reilly drawing elephant. Duke is a bad example, too because there's not real Duke to make a drawing of.
- macksd 4y agoIncidentally, an elephant was used in their first big Hadoop book (and I would find it hard to believe that was coincidence): https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hadoop-the-definitive/9780596521974/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hadoop-the-definitive/9.... There's a Hadoop-the-elephant logo that's trademarked by Apache, but elephant puns and even other drawings of yellow elephants abound in that community, and I'm not sure that's the kind of thing that trademark law could be enforced against even if the ASF wanted to.