[catsman]

The legalities of this are very clear-cut.

1) Intellectual property laws state that the TOX project is not infringing on any copyright unless it directly takes assets from your logo. As you can plainly see, the TOX logo was created from scratch. 2) Even if intellectual property laws did work that way (again, they don't) it's also incredibly obvious that the TOX logo concept was arrived upon totally independently of your logo.

You have no legal ground to stand on in this regard, and a shaky ethical ground considering that you somehow think you're entitled to exclusive rights to this really quite generic idea. ESPECIALLY considering you've been sitting on this idea for well over a year - as far as I know, there's no risk of this project being confused with an existing brand or idea, and there are no actual pieces of software that use this logo.

I'm sorry that you feel like this TOX logo has violated your 'generally accepted rules'. Perhaps they aren't as general as you assume?

[eps]

> As you can plainly see, the TOX logo was created from scratch ... the TOX logo concept was arrived upon totally independently of your logo

It is far from obvious. Linked posts show how they were stomping around a simpler logo for a long time busy with minor adjustments until someone posted a much improved logo, which just happened to be almost identical to the OP's. That was not an evolution.

But even that aside, you are viewing this situation all wrong. "Legalities", "legal ground to stand on", etc. The way Tox handled this is nothing short of peeing in a community pool. How do you envision Tox replacing Skype if the project leadership can't handle a simple dispute over a logo in a civilized manner? Look at latitude's creds, they should be wanting him on their side, but, no, let's mix him with a barrel of shit, because he dared to suggest that /gd/ might've ripped his work. Right on.

[catsman]

Dared to suggest? The words 'oh, I see you helped yourselves to my logo' are the unhelpful ones in my opinion. Also, the fact that this post was here, in a public forum, rather than directly attempting to contact the TOX authors on their IRC channel.

Even so, demanding that a FOSS project (with extremely limited resources) scraps a perfectly fine logo and starts from scratch just because a similar logo exists is simply not a reasonable demand.

[eps]

Suggest you can, but I disagree on both points. The more I look at both logos the clearer it becomes that it's a blatant rip.

Given the 4chan "culture" both you and I know what the answer would've been if he'd go via the private channels.