[Development] Nokia/Digia copyright in PDF produced by QPrinter

[John Layt]

On Monday 07 Oct 2013 10:35:26 David Boddie wrote:
> On Sun Oct 6 20:51:40 CEST 2013, Lars Knoll wrote:

> > I think this is fully correct, and doesn't assert any copyright over the
> > generated PDF. It states that the PDF got produced by the PDF generator of
> > Qt 5.1.1, which is (C) Digia.
> 
> While this interpretation may be valid, it is unusual to put the copyright
> of the creation tool in the Producer string. I can find documents with the
> following Producer strings on my disk:
> 
> (AFPL Ghostscript 8.54)
> (Acrobat 5.0 Image Conversion Plug-in for Macintosh)
> (Adobe PDF library 4.800)
> (Aladdin Ghostscript 6.01)
> (GNU Ghostscript 7.07)
> (GPL Ghostscript 9.05)
> (ImageMagick 6.3.8 01
> (Inkscape inkscape 0.44.1)
> (LaTeX with hyperref)
> (Mac OS X 10.5.8 Quartz PDFContext)
> (MiKTeX pdfTeX-1.40.9)
> (Microsoft� Publisher 2010)
> (cairo 1.9.5 (http:
> (pdfTeX-2.00.0)
> (pdfeTeX-1.403)
> (xdvipdfmx \(0.7.5\))
> 
> The only two that I found that included a copyright symbol were Qt and
> Microsoft Word. The above Microsoft Publisher string presumably includes a
> registered trademark symbol, which is more common.
> 
> I suggest removing the Producer copyright string to avoid confusion since it
> is clear that Digia doesn't seek to claim copyright on user-generated
> content. Along the same lines, it might be useful to add a setProducer()
> function to QPrinter for applications that create PDFs as a key part of
> their functionality.

Good analysis David, makes it clear this is not normal practice.  I've raised 
change https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,70182 to remove the copyright 
statement for 5.2 (which will need to be back-ported to 4.8).  I'll leave the 
Producer api for 5.3.

Cheers!

John.