I was hoping this was a resuscitation of Open Clip Art. I used to use it so much with Inkscape -- rarely I'd use anything as is, but it was great to have a bunch of different shapes at my finger-tips for tracing, rapid prototyping of graphics, etc. Everything was public domain which made licensing a non-issue.
But on the front page: "Most icons and vectors useable for your commercial projects without any royalties" -- This worries me, as it makes it sound like some of these ARE NOT under free licenses, and I'll have to check each one. Is there a "PD only" view?
We've had to tackled the provenance problem at my company (https://www.vecteezy.com) by getting all of our content directly from the original designers. It was a crap ton of work and took us several years, but that allowed us to also back it up with legal indemnification. We now have a team of 18 folks reviewing all our content for legal and copyright issues now and we back it up with up to $100k in legal indemnity. So far it seems to be helping.
Many years ago (early 90s) I used some vector art from a CorelDraw cdrom on a buisness card for my company logo. somehow my card made its way to another company's lawer who served me with a cease and desist notice. Being a small company and not wanting to be sued, I complied and stopped using the logo. I can't recall if it was a copyright or trademark issue but I remember the letter caused me a great deal of stress at the time.
Looking back now it was sort of a blessing in disguise since because of that letter, the next time I started a company I took the time to learn the simple process of taking a digital photo and converting it into to an SVG and have done that for all of my companies I've started over the years.
Creating an SVG logo or clipart from a photograph isn't difficult to do, especially nowadays with Inkscape and actually provides a sort of CMA proof of work to defend against copyright trolls.
Creating your logo yourself will protect against copyright claims, but it won't protect against trademark violations.
Apple sued Prepear because Prepear's logo looked too much like the Apple logo [1]. Prepear spent lots of money to defend themselves and finally made a small change to the logo to make Apple happy.
I think the lesson is to be prepared to change icons and logos swiftly when another legal entity sues for copyright or trademark violation.
Did they ever detail what happened, they kept saying nothing has been lost and they were ready to return the site, any minute now, I gave up looking after a few months assuming they'd had some sort of deletion accident they weren't prepared to confess.
IMO contributors deserve to know what happened still. I think there was a lot of agreement that a torrent backup should be made available so the responsibility for the OCAL community's work didn't have to rest with one (?) person who seemingly didn't have time to manage things.
I'd read that as the author thinks everything is in the Public Domain, but they don't want to be liable if some big work uses something from their page and some guy materializes out of the woodwoork with a billion dollar lawsuit.
Gotcha! Well, I might feel okay then using these for placeholder, but not for anything serious... while I wait for an Inkscape-integrated clipart revival :)
Reading this first as "sv-grep-o" and then entering in a regex into the search and realizing "oh, svg repo" ... yet another way linux has warped my mind.
As much as I like the concept, am I the only one to find the current design aesthetic boring and infantile? Compared the the really detailed and beautiful vector art people were making with vector editors in the '90s, I find little here genuinely beautiful, just reductive and minimalistic, lacking in any sort of character and with zero detail. SVG is capable of so much more.
Very good ! Congrats on launching. If I could add anything, how about an option to view more than X icons per page. I searched and scan very quickly with my eyes. Would love a see 100 or 200 icons per result page.
But on the front page: "Most icons and vectors useable for your commercial projects without any royalties" -- This worries me, as it makes it sound like some of these ARE NOT under free licenses, and I'll have to check each one. Is there a "PD only" view?