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I have found an MIT licensed SVG that I wish to use in print, for instance a business card.

The relevant part of the MIT license:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

My interpretation of this situation is that printing an SVG is not a "copy or substantial portions of the Software", as I am printing the output of rendering the SVG, not the code (XML) of the SVG itself. In fact, I think that even rendering the SVG to a PNG would constitute an output, and I would be the copyright holder of that PNG image under the concept of authorship and "independent creation". I could certainly see arguments against that though.

I am hoping someone has some prior art, or case law, or legal opinions or something for this situation.

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    This does not answer your question, but I would personally reach out or the author of the SVG for permission to simply omit the license text on your business card. Their selection of MIT suggests an intent to allow very permissive reuse of their work, and did not foresee that the simple requirement to include license text would be tremendously onerous on a business card.
    – apsillers ♦
    Commented 12 hours ago
  • I completely agree with my esteemed colleague. Anyone who picked the MIT license for an image is likely to be happy to go with, eg, CC BY instead, which would still give them credit but not be unusable on a business card.
    – MadHatter ♦
    Commented 5 hours ago

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In copyright law, the PNG is clearly a derivative work of the SVG so the original copyright applies; you don't get to own it by running it through a mechanical translation process, just like you don't get to own copyright in a book by taking a photo of it.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the MIT license applies because as you correctly note it explicitly references "software". Is the PNG software? Maybe. In general, this is why something like the Creative Commons family of licenses are preferred for non-software works.

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    This doesn't really answer the question of if it's legal or not to use in print. I can edit out my speculation about if a PNG would be derivative or not, if it distracts from the actual question.
    – Beefy_Swain
    Commented 15 hours ago

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