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This maze looks familiar

krazydad.com

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Re: This maze looks familiar

#101

Post by dllthomas »

ars wrote: post #94
dllthomas wrote: post #80

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…

Manual selection is some "contribution by a human author."

Re: This maze looks familiar

#102

Post by dllthomas »

ars wrote: post #95
innguest wrote: post #5

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.

It's not that simple. It's not clear that the maze is copyrightable in the first place. 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).

"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)."

If you can't actually fight it on its merits because the facts and law don't back you up, I whole heartedly agree. If you can't actually fight it on its merits only because you don't have the resources to do so, it's more questionable.

Re: This maze looks familiar

#103

Post by ars »

stcredzero wrote: post #100
ars wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 actual work must demonstrate creativity, and a mechanically generated works of this sort do not. 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 m…

The program used to generated the landscapes is copyrightable, the landscapes themself are not.

> 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.

A problem with copyrighting mechanically generated works is there is no end to them. What awareness and creativity is shown by letting a computer make 1 million slightly different images?

All the creativity is in the programming, not in the result.

Re: This maze looks familiar

#104

Post by ars »

dllthomas wrote: post #101
ars wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Manual selection is some "contribution by a human author."

There would be a compilation copyright to the whole work, but no copyright to the individual mazes.

Re: This maze looks familiar

#105

Post by chton »

tfinniga wrote: post #83
chton wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the explanation. what would the impact be if they had a different seed, would the maze be really drastically different? Or could it look more like the 2 mazes in the original post, with only a few walls different and mostly identical?

It depends on the pseudorandom number generator that you're using, but you'd be hard pressed to find a standard library prng where similar seeds produced similar random numbers. That would be pretty bad design. For example, here is some code I wrote to test my own prng: srand(1000000); for( int i = 0; i printf("====\n"); srand(1000001); for( int i = 0; i And here is the result: 21585 18586 29373 4301 3304 21158 23657…

I'm aware of how prngs work, and of how often they are misused. What I was mostly wondering was how big an effect that would give in the final product. Do typical maze generation algorithms use it extensively, or sparingly so the differences are minor? How different would the maze look if the seed was different, and is it likely that you could get very similar mazes from completely different seeds?

Re: This maze looks familiar

#106

Post by kbutler »

cloverich wrote: post #34

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?

In the US, copyright automatically applies to "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression". (There are some exceptions, like for US government works.)

"original" boils down to "more creative than alphabetical ordering", and "tangible media" includes pictorial/graphic displays.

So yes, the maze is likely subject to copyright.

However, there's very little "creative expression" in the individual maze, as an algorithmic result, the creative expression is in the inputs, resulting in a "thin" copyright - only applying to virtually identical copies.

In the specific case, Kraft's maze is a significantly better maze - also evidence of the lack of individual creative analysis in the original.

There's definite copying - the styling and layout are too close for there to be otherwise, but the creative expression in the original is so minimal that it likely balances the fair use criteria (nature of the work, effect on the negligible original market suggest it is fair use, commercial use counts against fair use.)

Not sure which way a judge would rule. Kraft is probably very unhappy with their illustrator for not just creating an original maze...

Re: This maze looks familiar

#107

Post by [deleted] »

ars wrote: post #93
cloverich wrote: post #34

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?

> 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."

[deleted]

Re: This maze looks familiar

#108

Post by stcredzero »

ars wrote: post #103
stcredzero wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual work must demonstrate creativity, and a mechanically generated works of this sort do not. 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 m…

The program used to generated the landscapes is copyrightable, the landscapes themself are not. > 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. A problem with copyrighting mechanically generated works is there is no end to them. What awareness and creativity is shown by letting a computer make 1 million sli…

The program used to generated the landscapes is copyrightable, the landscapes themself are not.

But this is problematic. Procedurally generated landscapes can still have a definite "feel" or "look." These attributes can be protected as "trade dress." But there is no way to preclude other attributes we haven't thought of yet.

A problem with copyrighting mechanically generated works is there is no end to them. What awareness and creativity is shown by letting a computer make 1 million slightly different images?

Yes, you're right, there are algorithms that actually don't show much creativity. But this is actually already covered in the "Threshold of creativity" laws -- if the declaration that the output of an algorithms cannot be protected is removed. If you apply most of the same "Threshold of creativity" laws to a notion of meta-creativity, you still arrive at a usable and coherent law.

All the creativity is in the programming, not in the result.

Clearly, the truth is that creativity can manifest in the result.

Also understand that modern technology makes the current formulation of the law problematic. What if I simply used cheap data storage to slurp the output of a program so that I could use the output of someone's copyrighted code without permission? I could imagine doing this to a procedurally generated MMO world. This would seem to make the practical effect of the law quite divergent from its intended effect. Introduce a notion of algorithmic meta-creativity, and the law would protect against that kind of infringement nicely.

That said, in many cases, it would be advisable for the copyright holder to not reserve copyrights for such media. But in that case, I think the providing the option is the wiser choice.

Re: This maze looks familiar

#109

Post by dllthomas »

ars wrote: post #104
dllthomas wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manual selection is some "contribution by a human author."

There would be a compilation copyright to the whole work, but no copyright to the individual mazes.

Photography is a creative work, mechanically produced by manual selection of particular views of something you did not necessarily create. This doesn't seem a tremendously far cry - in a sense, he is taking photographs of maze-space.

Re: This maze looks familiar

#110

Post by ars »

dllthomas wrote: post #109
ars wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would be a compilation copyright to the whole work, but no copyright to the individual mazes.

Photography is a creative work, mechanically produced by manual selection of particular views of something you did not necessarily create. This doesn't seem a tremendously far cry - in a sense, he is taking photographs of maze-space.

The result of a surveillance camera is not copyrightable. Only if a person controlled the camera. Even if the person carefully selected a site but then just left it there to record whatever would come, it's not clear that would be copyrightable.

If you fed in specific tuning parameters to the procedure and fine tuned them until you liked the output that might have a claim. But if you just let it work randomly and picked the ones you liked best that would not.

It's not enough to simply like the result, you have to actually do something to create that specific result.

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