Would there be any issues using this in a commercial project?

[JohnBain]

Thanks for all your hard work, Jam3. I was wondering if this is OK to use in commercial projects? I see the library itself is MIT license but I was just wondering if ColourLovers themselves would care if someone used this in a project.

[Martin-Pitt]

According to ColourLover's terms the default licence of content is:

To Users: By posting any User Content on the Service, You grant by default to each User of the Service an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Creative Commons license.

However, on each palette, you can customise each palette with a custom license, for example:
https://www.colourlovers.com/palette/4602631/Colors

Credit must be given to Helinen.
Commercial use is allowed.
Derivative works are allowed, but must be shared with this license.
CC-BY-SA

Whereas this one used the default:
https://www.colourlovers.com/palette/4602623/Confused

Credit must be given to katesbloodhour666.
Commercial use is not allowed.
Derivative works are allowed, but must be shared with this license.
CC-BY-NC-SA

I think we should update the scripts to be able to fetch licensing information from the original palette page via the "url" of the page in the JSON API.

Then we could filter out palettes for commercial use and such and be able to credit people correctly and transfer licensing around automatically.

[mattdesl]

Here's some info from ColourLovers.com:

https://www.colourlovers.com/faq/18/How_can_you_copyright_a_color_palette

We recently added a Rights Management System that allows members to select several different licenses for the content they share on COLOURlovers, including color palettes. There is often confusion about how somebody can copyright or protect the rights to a combination of colors. You can't really protect or copyright the usage of a combination of colors in new works. Ie, if you take a color palette and then draw an illustration using those colors. But, what is protected is the arrangement of those colors into the rectangular shape that they are on COLOURlovers displayed along with their names. This is treated like a picture or work of art and can be protected... ie, you can't just scrape a bunch of palettes and put them as they are displayed here in a book you sell.

The main point to keep in mind: You can't really protect or copyright the usage of a combination of colors in new works

Honestly, IANAL, but it does not seem at all realistic to try and claim copyright on a set of hex codes for general use. Even an image like this could be argued as a "derivative artwork" created from the palettes, rather than an infringement on each individual palette's copyright. I suspect most creators would not even be able to pick out their palette among 1000 others.

If your entire artwork is just rendering a few clearly discernible palette swatches exactly as is shown in ColourLovers.com, then, yes, perhaps you would be infringing on those creators' work.

—

Anyways... We could have a 100.meta.json and so on for each set, which is a parallel array but instead of just containing hex code arrays, it could contain all the palette details.

[Martin-Pitt]

Okay, yeah, I have always felt this was never enforceable anyway.

I'm not a lawyer either.

Colours on screens have always been like this. This is nothing new.

I mostly feel that it would be nice in the sense of the open source spirit.