Re: Weather in London icon as email signature

Jonathan Chetwynd wrote:
> 
> Weather in London icon as email signature
> 
> Please find attached an icon displaying the daily forecast for the 
> weather in London.
> This icon can be copied and pasted into your own mail.

It won't work if you copy the icon, you need to copy the link to it.

> please report your success at copying and pasting into other applications.
> 

There is no link to the icon in the plain text of your email (and I 
didn't see it in your Australian example when using Outlook in the 
office.)  It's embedded in the HTML, not attached.

However, tracing the source and looking at it, is seems pretty clear to 
me that it is in breach of the BBC terms of use for the feed 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/feedfactory/terms.shtml>
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/bbcweather/features/RSS_termsandconditions.shtml> 
and, therefore, the Met Office copyright.

Also, given the intended general use, it would be advisable to include a 
copyright notice and licence grant; "public domain" is not possible here.

The BBC RSS terms of use only allow use on a personal web site.  Whilst 
using it on an email may be borderline, using it for the purposes of an 
organisation is clearly out.  More importantly, the terms of use require 
an acknowledgement of the origin of the information, in a prescribed 
form, on any site that uses it (and with the clear intention that it be 
visible to anyone using it).

Unfortunately there is no right under copyright law to mechanically 
derive accessible version of documents.

The problem with public domain is that you are in the UK, and the UK 
doesn't allow you to abandon copyright in that way.  Moreover, in this 
particular case, you don't own all the copyrights, some are owned by the 
Met Office.  (It is controversial as to whether or not the US allows 
abandoning copyright.)

Even if you could put it into the public domain, without a copyright 
provenance, it would be unsafe for people to use, as the default state 
of a published work without copyright notices is in copyright, by 
persons unknown.



-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Tuesday, 29 July 2008 21:12:11 UTC