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This maze looks familiar

krazydad.com

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Re: This maze looks familiar

#131

Post by emn13 »

chrisbennet wrote: post #81
mordocai wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate: If someone "steals" your identity, it isn't really theft sure. Really, you both have a pointer to that identity. The problem, which makes it a good idea for it to be illegal, is that you both have a pointer to the EXACT SAME identity. Thus, any destructive(or benevolent) changes they make affect your identity as well. Contrast this with most forms of "copyright theft", where the original own…

However, "copyright theft" does have an effect on the value of the original. Suppose you write a book report for school and another student copies yours and passes their copy in first. You still have your original but it is significantly devalued. Passing it in may actually have negative value as you maybe accused of cheating. It may not be theft but I think it hard to argue that it is not taking something of value w…

First if all: merely finding some instances of copyright violation that reduce a copyrights value does not validate calling it theft. By that line of reasoning half of the English language is approximately theft. This very answer is stealing your copyrighted answer by undermining its validity, thereby reducing its value, therefore it's equivalent the theft.

That's a preposterously loose requirement. Secondly, even in your example, the damage isn't primarily caused by the copying, it's primarily caused by the misrepresentation. If the copier had been truthful about the source, it's doubtful the original would have been much devalued.

In any case, clearly copyright violation can devalue the copyright. It's certainly not always the case (it may even increase the value of the copyright), but it's a serious risk. However, that still doesn't make it equivalent to theft, any more than vandalism, fraud, competition, criticism, libel, etc. are theft. Some of those are even considered virtuous - as a society we supposedly encourage criticism and competition (even if many sectors manage to pay only lip service to that notion).

Re: This maze looks familiar

#132

Post by tripzilch »

ZoF wrote: post #6

Heh,that poor miserable employee who probably thought nothing of copying a cool maze off the Internet.(Not to imply that makes it any less illegal) That's certainly got to be interesting/validating for the op though (albeit simultaneously violating/annoying). Definitely curious to hear how Kraft responds; if op is willing to share even more about something he shouldn't have had to deal with in the first place that is…

> Heh,that poor miserable employee who probably thought nothing of copying a cool maze off the Internet.(Not to imply that makes it any less illegal)

As a graphics designer you should have a basic grasp of these manners, and respect them.

Re: This maze looks familiar

#133

Post by tfinniga »

chton wrote: post #105
tfinniga wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the short answer is that the maze will look very different. It's very possible that the verts of the maze would be in exactly the same position, since that's a regular pattern. But the maze walls will be extremely random.

Maybe the best way to get a feel for it is to take a look at this page of maze generators: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorit...

Re: This maze looks familiar

#134

Post by chton »

tfinniga wrote: post #133
chton wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the short answer is that the maze will look very different. It's very possible that the verts of the maze would be in exactly the same position, since that's a regular pattern. But the maze walls will be extremely random. Maybe the best way to get a feel for it is to take a look at this page of maze generators: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorit...

That's a great page. I learned a lot, thanks!

Re: This maze looks familiar

#135

Post by thirdusername »

Without making a judgement on weather or not it is or should be legal, it's sadly common to plagiarize or outright copy without conscience amongst marketeers, especially the smaller firms.

I have conversations with (often the same) marketeers that they need to purchase the $9-99 font they've used in their design on almost every project. They send me copy often verbatim copied from the website they are "taking inspiration from". There is unsurprisingly little integrity in the industry. Bigger firms is sometimes slightly better since they have lawyers cracking down on this kind of behavior.

Source: I work for a software consultancy that primarily work with marketing firms.

Re: This maze looks familiar

#138

Post by mcherm »

nmjohn wrote: post #96
mcherm wrote: post #50

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.

If he didn't contact Kraft how would they ever be made aware of it? It's not like there was a giant company meeting where the CEO said "This guy. I want you to steal his maze design and put it on our mac and cheese." 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 somet…

Oh, I'm not knocking Kraft for being unaware of the problem before the blog post, I'm just hoping they'll be classy about how they handle it AFTER it has been discovered.
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