I asked James Rose (the contact person for KanjiCafe) if it would be ok to use the animated kanji images in some toMOTko's glossaries. I thought that writing a reference link to the licence in the glossary's description field would be enough, but unfortunately, it's not. To comply with rule 2 of the license, I would need to show a note like "The animated kanji is taken from KanjiCafe.com according to the licence at http://kanjicafe.com/license.htm" each time I display an animated kanji. Considering the limited space of the Zaurus's screen, I find that too prohibitive and won't use these images in the public glossaries. Nonetheless, anyone is free to use them for its personal glossaries.
Just in case, I asked how much would it cost to use a commercial license of these animated images. I don't think I can afford it but who knows? I will report on that later. Even then, I'm not sure that a commercial license would remove this restriction.
It's confirmed. Even though a commercial license is affordable, rule 2 still applies and I would need to display the license note each time an animated kanji image is shown in toMOTko.
I suggested to modify toMOTko's glossary data format to add a license field so I could display it (using a confirmation dialog) when an end-user imports a glossary into the application but my proposition was judged not enough and was rejected. As I want to keep the design of toMOTko as generic as possible without introducing special cases for particular languages, I won't include the images from kanjicafe.com into my glossary files. もったいないけど人生です。
That being said, I think that nothing prevents an end-user to use the animated images for his personal glossaries. toMOTko has no way of knowing it anyway. For toMOTko, it's just an image like any other.
I even wonder if it would be ok to have a glossary file with hard links pointing to the animated images in some hard coded directory. If an end-user separately downloads and installs the images to the same location, the images would be displayed by toMOTko (as a side-effect). If the images are not found, obviously they would not be displayed. This way, I could distribute glossaries with links to kanjicafe's images without distributing the images themselves. Could this be acceptable and/or legal? Anyone has an opinion on this?
