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ascii-boxes / boxes

Command line ASCII boxes unlimited!
https://boxes.thomasjensen.com/
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Contact info for artist Joan Stark #126

Closed mdebusk closed 6 months ago

mdebusk commented 6 months ago

I was looking through usr/share/boxes just now and noticed several references to a GeoCities page by ascii artist Joan Stark. As GeoCities no longer exists, I went looking for her and found she has (at the least) reclaimed her privacy.

Her site is archived, however, at :joan stark's ASCII Art Gallery:. There are reasonable arguments both for and against updating the references. I just wanted to suggest doing so.

tsjensen commented 6 months ago

Great find! And in her "guidelines on using my ASCII art", it says:

Q #1: Can I use this ASCII Art?

Yes, but I do have a few conditions. They are pretty simple to follow.

  1. please leave my initials (jgs) on the pictures
  2. for personal use only (commercial readers keep reading)
  3. optional conditions : a. link to this website (http://www.ascii-art.com) b. tell a friend about this site! c. send a postcard via snail mail to me and my family d. consider making a donation

So, as we are an open-source, non-commercial project, we are good by having the jgs initials on her box designs.

tsjensen commented 6 months ago

The links are "optional". We still reference the website in multiple places, but the links have gone cold:

I notice that Joan Stark did not specify a license for the website, only for the artwork. Copyright law says that this means we may use the artwork, but not the website itself. Purely from a legal point of view, the "unofficial copy" site is violating copyright ...

IANAL, but this would kind of keep me from linking to it as a means of improvement. I would lean towards not changing anything right now. The link was fine at the time of creation. Websites do not live forever. And anyway, we are using the link only as decoration in the samples. If it somehow became a problem, we could just remove it entirely.

mdebusk commented 6 months ago

Looks like this issue is worth closing, then. :)