91–100 of 138 posts
Sure, copyright infringement, plagiarism, but not theft! Copying is not theft! We need to hear this more often. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ
Not this crap again. Counterfeiting money and causing massive inflation is theft of value, regardless of whether any money actually exchanged hands.
I tried looking on the linked mazes page for a license, the closest thing (in my opinon) was a statement to feel free to reproduce for personal, school, and church use. I figure if I couldn't find the copyright notice, it's probably hard for someone at Kraft to find it too (unless that statement IS the copyright notice). Does this necessarily exclude a for-profit use, or does that have to be explicitly declared? IANA…
Additionally, you don't have to provide a copyright notice or any licensing terms for your copyright to be valid an enforceable (with some very special exceptions blah blah).
I see literally thousands of mazes generated on the site, and (unless I"m mistaken) they are all simply generated output from a computer program. Its cool, but is it even possible to copyright something like this?
No, I don't believe so:
"The U.S. Copyright Office has taken the position that "in order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable."
I see literally thousands of mazes generated on the site, and (unless I"m mistaken) they are all simply generated output from a computer program. Its cool, but is it even possible to copyright something like this?
Given that he wrote the program, exercising creativity there, and (I presume) exercised additional creative activity manually selecting which outputs to post from the space of generated mazes, it seems likely that it's possible to copyright something like this. IANAL, though.
That is not the law. The actual work must demonstrate creativity, and a mechanically generated works of this sort do not.
"The U.S. Copyright Office has taken the position that "in order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable."
Please do unto them what they would have done unto you. Not only do you stand to make some money but you'll be helping correct a bad behavior.
I doubt he has the resources to fight it if they choose to fight. He would basically be hoping they would give him a settlement just to make him go away.
Filing a lawsuit just to get a settlement when you can't actually fight on the merits is not considered positive behavior (although it can be lucrative).
Notice how he pointed out that it is copied in clear violation of copyright law. Then he did NOT follow this up with a cease-and-desist letter, or a threat of legal action. Classy. Now I hope that Craft is classy in return, by contacting him and negotiating in good faith a reasonable fee for the use of the maze.
It was 1 designer tasked with putting a maze on it that did a google image search and came up with that result.
That by no means exonerates Kraft, but it can be helpful to put things in perspective sometimes. I would be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, that if someone in a position to actually do something about it was made aware that they had mass produced copyrighted materials, they would be willing to offer a reasonable fee. However actually getting in touch with that person may be challenging without legal action.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it not "theft" because that word is pejorative and another word should be used? Is it because it isn't taking something without permission? Is it because intellectual property isn't property in some sense? Is it because the original isn't really "owned"? Is it be because the owner still has the original? Given similar reasoning, "identify theft" isn't really theft. After all, if someone "stole" my identity I'd sti…
Honestly: I don't think the term "identity theft" is a good one. It's not clear at all what exactly that even means unless people have had it explained to them; and even then it's pretty vague and encompasses lots of things. Identify theft is a kind of fraud or perhaps libel, but it's certainly not conventional theft. Nevertheless, the term has taken on a life of its own, and that's just the way language works. The p…
there is some argument that it is conventional theft. It does, essentially, render the original unfit for use until considerable time is spent repairing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting because a similar thought experiment that immediately occurred to me would be to consider a program that calculates digits of pi, sqrt(2), or some other transcendental number, given some user input --- basically, a calculator. The program itself is almost certainly copyrightable, but what about its output? These mazes feel like a similar idea to me - he even mentioned that this particular one is g…
Remember, copyright is about "provenance", or how you arrive at the result. If you get the same maze but you didn't copy from the original, it can't be a copyright violation. It's the copying that creates the problem. That said, there is a "minimum of creativity" that limits what you can copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
I see literally thousands of mazes generated on the site, and (unless I"m mistaken) they are all simply generated output from a computer program. Its cool, but is it even possible to copyright something like this?
However, if the maze is entirely the product of a random process then the online compilation could be protected as a 'selective' creative work, but individual mazes would not.
Note that even if each individual maze is eligible for protection that the author doesn't end up with copyright over Fibonacci mazes, it's only the creative parts, whatever aesthetic tweaks (or manual selection in the case of a compilation) were made that is covered. So you could produce a very similar maze with your own program using your own creative decisions without infringing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that he wrote the program, exercising creativity there, and (I presume) exercised additional creative activity manually selecting which outputs to post from the space of generated mazes, it seems likely that it's possible to copyright something like this. IANAL, though.
> manually selecting which outputs to post That is not the law. The actual work must demonstrate creativity, and a mechanically generated works of this sort do not. "The U.S. Copyright Office has taken the position that "in order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human autho…
The law here lags behind the technology. By procedurally generating something like a landscape, a programmer can creatively define a whole set of possible landscapes. It's fallacious to say that this can't involve artistic awareness and creativity. Here, the law is trying to apply 19th century models to 21st century media.