While doing research on free icons I came across one archaic yet popular website. The legalease was so strange that I had to write this short blurb and share. Read on to understand how one ‘free icon’ site makes sure that their icons aren’t free, or even usable. This site in question: IconBazaar.

Step 1 with any free icons site, read the licensure. At Iconbazaar you’ll need to read the fine print:

1. Do not directly link to any image on our web site
2. Do not copy or distribute downloaded images
3. Do not rename or otherwise modify downloaded images
4. Do not collect and publicly display downloaded images
5. Please make a small shareware donation to support our web site if possible
6. Please acknowledge IconBAZAAR as the source for any images you use for free: [not shown]

Lets examine these conditions: 1 and 2 seem reasonable. Hotlinking is evil and hotlinkers can often get punished easily. Also, if IconBazaar wants to control the distribution of their icons they have every right to do so. At condition #3 things start to get bazaar. Let me explain by first reviewing condition 4 which, in a nutshell, makes all the free icons offered useless for anything other than personal use on your desktop / PC. If you can’t show icons publicly, then that means you may only use them privately — yes? So if I may only use them privately, who cares what the name is (see condition #3)? Is the name “3cl02c.gif” really that important? If one were to search for ‘3cl02c.gif’ one would find about 89 results of its use around the net. Shady factor is meduim.

Also, returning to the use of icons for only private purposes, why the heck would you have a spinning mailbox that says ‘CLICK HERE’ on your desktop. To be fair, you might be developing some kind of intranet and need gaudy icons that spin in which case you could use these icons (as long as you don’t rename them).

On another page, their FAQ, this is posted:

Can I use as many images from the IconBAZAAR as I want?
NO. Please limit your free use of images from these archives to 20 images and refer to the Conditions of Use posted at this site. Use of more than twenty (20) images requires a license.

Regardless, I understand what IconBazaar was trying to do. However, what they have ended up with is crazy — the licensure of images available at IconBazaar makes their use in a legal context dubious at best. Having already done the research, this site is abnormal in its search engine placement given their licensing scheme. Perhaps this is because most people don’t read the fine print and use the graphics anyway.