Weather Image Scandal and its aftermath!
Friday, January 9, 2004 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
Without even knowing it, dozens of skinners were using ripped images.
The weather images that you have seen in various docks, DesktopX objects, DesktopX themes, Samurize, and other programs that have made it far and wide are rips. Those images were taken from a Macintosh program called Konfabulator and made by Arlo Rose. They are (I think) based on images from Weather.com but only in terms of inspiration, they are wholly his works.
But they seemed to have made their way to the freeware world on Windows in the form of weather plugins, Samurize scripts, etc. and eventually then made their way to DesktopX objects which there are now many that make use of those images.
Inadvertent or not, those images do belong to someone and they took effort to create. But we don't want all these skinners and such to be out of luck. So Stardock has gone and created high quality weather images to replace them.
Authors on WinCustomize who have used Arlo's images without his permission (i.e. all of them) will be contacted and can use the Stardock created images as well. Insize the two ZIP files (one a set of PNGs the other icons) is a permission.txt file. Essentially Stardock is providing permission for skin authors and themers everywhere to use these icons as long as they include the permission.txt in some way (in DX, you can attach it in the summary page). That means even Samurize scriptors and yZ Dock plugins and Sysmetrix skins and such that use weather images that they shouldn't have permission to use these new weather images.
Here are the two images side by side. We have worked to ensure that the new Stardock images (created by Paul Boyer at Stardock) have the same dimsensions and the same general style to them (still based on the weather.com images). The image names are also the same so a DesktopX object maker can just rename their .dxpack to .zip, open it up, copy the images in there, and then rename it to .dxpack and voila, it's updated and ready to be re-submitted.
No one has to use these images but we will be removing images that use Arlo's images without his permission shortly. We are providing these as a way to make it easier for authors to use images they do have permission to use.
The Files are located at:
https://www.stardock.com/files/weather/weather_icons.zip
https://www.stardock.com/files/weather/weather_PNG.zip
You can download DesktopX at http://www.desktopx.net
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Reply #22 Saturday, January 10, 2004 12:17 PM
Arlo contacted me about the images. I don't know the exact pathway they took.
On DesktopX, I know that that authors asked permission to port from Samurize or yZ dock or whatever which was using them. And I don't know where they got theirs. But it's one of those things where somewhere down the chain they entered into a quasi-public domain. But they aren't public domain.
Arlo's a pretty good guy and I hang out on the Konfabulator forums (I have a Mac too and am a registered user of Konfabulator). Though embarassingly enough, I didn't recognize the images as being from Konfabulator until after talking to Arlo about them.
Reply #23 Saturday, January 10, 2004 1:50 PM
Reply #24 Saturday, January 10, 2004 2:20 PM
Reply #25 Saturday, January 10, 2004 2:56 PM
Reply #26 Saturday, January 10, 2004 9:29 PM
Reply #27 Saturday, January 10, 2004 10:06 PM
Reply #28 Monday, January 12, 2004 9:30 PM
Reply #29 Monday, February 23, 2004 4:47 PM
Reply #31 Friday, April 23, 2004 5:45 AM
For the icons: -9.4k
For the PNGs: -178k
There *are* folks out there who still have dialup, you know.
Reply #32 Tuesday, April 27, 2004 1:55 PM
Reply #33 Tuesday, April 27, 2004 1:56 PM
Reply #34 Tuesday, April 27, 2004 8:55 PM
Reply #35 Tuesday, April 27, 2004 9:01 PM
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Reply #21 Saturday, January 10, 2004 11:50 AM