Hi,
the TV channel logo graphics collection installed on my vdr has about 650 logos, many of them out of date, some of them in bad shape.
So it might be a good idea to update the collection.
Asking my lawyer confirmed that distributing TV channel logo graphics for open source software is problematic: You shouldn't do this unless you have written permission by the logos' owners.
Much to my surprise, /if/ you ask them and explain the specific purpose, the logo owners /do/ grant permission to distribute their logo graphics for use in non-commercial open-source software.
So far, noone turned down the request and I have collected a critical mass of logos within a few days:
http://www.linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php/Logo_Collection
I will continue to ask those German TV and radio stations in my channel.conf, but help for other countries would be welcome.
Please contact me before you ask your local stations, so that they don't get asked twice. (Oh, and don't bother asking pay TV stations that do not permit pvr use such as German Premiere.)
The strategy is to ask for vector graphics logos and for permission to use them in OSD and EPG non-commercial open-source applications. This will make the collection versatile enough to be used beyond vdr, e.g for mythtv etc.
However, vector graphics files means Illustrator, Freehand or EPS. What I need is SVG. For many of the files of the collection, Inkscape or pstoedit fail to open them.
It'd be nice if a user of illustrator or freehand could help. It shouldn't be more work than simple conversion of files to .svg or to clean .eps every now and then, so that I can edit those files in Inkscape later.
(Yes, I know that there are SVG logo files on Wikipedia. However, those logos were drawn and contributed by users and some of them are not true to the original logo.)
Thanks,
Hanno