How to get the colour name by RGB value?

Are any legal problems with distributing the sRGB IEC-61966-2.1 ICC profile even though it's been embedded into half the JPEGs on the planet?

• Specifically I am referring to this profile here: http://www.color.org/srgbprofiles.xalter ... you know, THE sRGB profile. The one. There are others[1], yes, but this is this the big one. Based on the sha1 of its binary data is present in almost half the JPEGs in the testing corpus I am using to write some color software -- while maybe it's debatable as to whether or not this is the #1 profile on earth, it's got to be up there. There are probably half a million copies of it on this laptop I'm using now; anyone who has a phone with Facebook on it probably has a couple thousand of 'em in their pocket; etc. But so: the raw data suggests otherwise. There's a copyright string inside the profile identifying its original owner as HP, from 1998: There are also vague attributions to the IEC[2] and other big stakeholder type entities. In the case of most consumer output profiles, these sort of proprietary shoutouts make sense at least; any profiles you get with your Epson 4900 are covered under the EULA you 'signed' when you unpacked it and are engineered in favor of $100 ink refills in some sinister fashion. As you know, for serious-business printing, the profiles for the giant Heidelberg -- or the assiduously-calibrated and job-managed studio Firey, or what have you -- are generally available from the printing company website at no charge. Maybe you click the EULA legalese button before you get them, but not always: the printing companies get your money when you print something, so they give you the profile so you'll print something; since they can't fleece you for name-brand ink, the supplies behave like actual commodities, and Joe Printer's calibration costs are treated as does the cost of the electricity to run the press[3]. So but the ubiquitous sRGB profile seems like it sorta needs to be ubiquitous to work. Amirite? This is why I ask. But the intellectual property lines in the profile are drawn just as they are in their proprietary peers. That's what the snapshot above suggests, as does that first http://color.org link I posted, which makes you click the I Have Read The Legal Document button before handing over a copy of the profile *sans* photograph. I just want to distribute it as part of the open-source web color stuff I am writing: https://github.com/fish2000/django-imagekit ... so like eventually, when it's polished, people can use my software easily and accurately, without having to get this one little 60k blob from http://color.org, or extract it from their own mounds of sRGB-IEC-61966-2.1-tagged JPEGs (which is unreliable enough to offend my nerd sensibilities) or raid Bruce Lindbloom's math and erroneously fudge my own transform matricies[4]... yeah. So yeah can I give out the file? [1] Despite what several members of the Luminous Landscape Colour Management forums -- http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?board=45.0 -- would prefer w/r/t the RGB gamut state-of-the-art. [2] See also http://www.iec.ch/ -- isn't it cool how the 'E' stands for 'electrotechnical'? That is an awesome word. They should have called all the late-90's bands like the Chemical Brothers 'electrotechnical' instead of 'electronica' and maybe that subgenre would have aged better, but I digress. [3] Or the exterminators, or the muzak you have to listen to while they shuffle around back there for like *ever* even when they know perfectly well how you paid extra for rush, or the writeoff costs for all the 'artistic' early-1980s naked-girl photos they have to print for 'testing' and then hang up in the back offices, etc. [4] I of course speak of this Bruce Lindbroom: http://brucelindbloom.com/ -- the patron saint of color math for me and many others.

• Answer:

  The sRGB profiles on the ICC have this disclaimer: To anyone who acknowledges that the file "sRGB_ICC_v4_appearance_beta.icc" is provided "AS IS" WITH NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY, permission to use, copy and distribute these file for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the files are not changed including the ICC copyright notice tag, and that the name of ICC shall not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission. ICC makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. So it looks like yes, you can distribute at least these versions of them.