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Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks

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Re: Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks

#61

Harold Thomas is an artist who created something and is still fully alive. He has every dam right to do as he wishes with his own creation. He has always had copyright and everyone knows this. It's his creation, it came from him, it's used today exactly as he created, nothing derivative. If you don't want to respect this you can also shove your GPL or shove your copyright over books. You show respect what people crea…

Even if you accept that such a basic shape is copyrightable, it's laughable to have a national flag that is copyrighted and cannot be freely used. When the government declared it a national flag, they should have given him a few million dollars and bought the rights off him. They still can do this easily since they have eminent domain and it applies to IP as well.

> When the government declared it a national flag, they should have given him a few million dollars and bought the rights off him.

But they didn't, so the government can get stuffed.

I love the way you want the government to steal from an indigenous man here. Haven't they stolen enough yet?

Harold Thomas owns it. It's been recognised he owns it. He can do as he wishes with it.

If a bunch of people want to continue following something that's owned by someone else they can, but they follow the creators rules.

Lets just steal Linux off Linus and co because we feel like it shall we. Remove his stupid GPL v2 because we want to.

Re: Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks

#63
Fascinating, I had no idea that flag was copyrighted. I guess that's one of the reasons why there was a push for alternative flag designs a few years ago.

As far as searching for prior art, I would probably look at using a large data-set like the [1] 2.8 million art images released by the Smithsonian. So you can process it all locally rather than uses a SAAS api.

Then use something like tensorflow to do the image recognition. Here's a [2] fun tutorial.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smith...

[2] https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/tensorflow-f...

Re: Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks

#64
post #50

Interesting problem. What is the general class of "find this object in other pictures" called? I've noticed that most image search aims at a different goal: "find pictures like this picture" so tineye, Google Image Search, and friends are unlikely to be of use. By the way, it reminds me of the flag of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (a party from my home state in India), which coincidentally also uses a Sun amongst the…

Image stitching maybe?

There's probably a good name on one of the SIFT papers if you're also looking for some algorithms

Re: Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks

#65

Just to add more juice to the story. The company he gave the exclusive rights to was co-founded by his friend. Who got fined 2.4 million dollars the year prior for selling "authentic" Aboriginal art that was actually made in Indonesia. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/11/compa...

Wow, based on OP I thought Thomas was just a colossal idiot, but that tips the scales to malicious.

Re: Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks

#66
post #63

Fascinating, I had no idea that flag was copyrighted. I guess that's one of the reasons why there was a push for alternative flag designs a few years ago. As far as searching for prior art, I would probably look at using a large data-set like the [1] 2.8 million art images released by the Smithsonian. So you can process it all locally rather than uses a SAAS api. Then use something like tensorflow to do the image rec…

Ahhh great! Lots of good feedback here but I that dataset is exactly what I was looking for!

And yes it is a rather peculiar situation, I'm still trying to figure out if any other flag on the planet is copy righted by an invididual.

Re: Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks

#67
Abos are not Australians

Australians are WHITE

Australians came from UK and EUROPE

------------

If anything it shows the lack of culture that abos had before white man showed up

- No farming

- No sewage

- No government

- No animals domesticated

- No currency

- over 70 languages

--------------

They were conquer , just like Indians and other races

time to deal with it and move the fuck on

Re: Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be in the public domain until 70 years after his death. (Though it might be easier to override his heir's claim after he is deceased)

Probably longer. Each time Mickey gets close to the end of the countdown, it gets extended by the US government and their crack squad of Disney negotiators.

I know right! It almost like Disney is using some magic (Constant Authorized Side Help (CASH)) to convince the US Gov politicians to keep moving the goal posts.

Re: Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about the latter - using section 51 of the constitution to acquire the intellectual property (the Australian Government can make a law to compulsorily acquire property from citizens "for any purpose" but only "on just terms"). My reasoning is that they're a lot more likely to have another "The Castle" episode (great movie, by the way) while he's alive rather than when the copyright is assigned or inheri…

Thanks! Do you perhaps know any cases of acquired intellectual property? I don't see any mentions of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_51(xxxi)_of_the_Consti...

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