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

Samuel Gaist samuel.gaist at edeltech.ch
Sun Nov 3 20:58:10 CET 2013


On 3 nov. 2013, at 18:28, John Layt <jlayt at kde.org> wrote:

> 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.

The backport is available at
https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,70187

Cheers !

Samuel


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