21 ms·

Copying is the way design works (2020)

743 points by innerzeal 2y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Beautifully written article. One of my first ideological shifts happened when Napster was released. Bits flowing freely without being bounded by rules of the physical world deeply changed me and while later I do understand artists need to get paid and make a living, piracy and the pirating community is still very close to my heart. The amount of innovation which comes out of that space, is tremendous. The fact that zuckerberg could create trillions of dollar on free projects such as php and apache is not cherished enough. I think we still haven't found a proper economy for the digital world. The fact that pirating game of thrones was a better option than waiting for it to be premiered in your region goes to show there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. If there wasn't piracy, free software, open source and american VC (the first few waves, not the last few), this industry wouldn't have grown at this pace.
- ppqqrr 2y ago
  The “artists need to make a living” narrative against piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want nothing more than for their messages to spread as widely as possible, as that is also the most naturally profitable path for them in the long term. It’s only when managerial types get involved the need to turn a quick buck by denying the natural flow of information becomes a primary concern. So pirate away, knowing that nothing of value is lost.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    I self-publish my books. The audience is decent, I publish shortened audiobook versions for free, but frankly, I like the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market with them at my expense. It would have been natural, but also depressing.
    - surfingdino 2y ago
      I stopped self-publishing my books, because as soon as I offered PDFs to those who purchased my paper books the sales of printed copies tanked. Then nobody wanted to pay for PDFs and Amazon screwed my KDP sales (banned my book). The readers felt entitled to free copies and free consultation on the subject of the book. It's really depressing how entitled people feel to other people's creative output or knowledge.
      - inglor_cz 2y ago
        That is why I publish freely the audio versions (which only consist of about half of the stories within each book), but not the PDFs.
      - __mharrison__ 2y ago
        Did you just stop publishing altogether?
        surfingdino 2y ago
        Yes. I do not need another book as a CV, which is currently the most viable business model for authors of non-fiction.
        meiraleal 2y ago
        We are probably better off without your marketing content tho
    - shagie 2y ago
      > I like the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market with them at my expense. Amazon has a book piracy problem ( 219 points by tosh on July 8, 2022 | 120 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026663 https://x.com/fchollet/status/1550930876183166976 https://x.com/fchollet/status/1550930876183166976 (and via Threadreader - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550930876183166976.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550930876183166976.html ) - also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210256 ( 665 points by jmillikin on July 24, 2022 | 193 comments ) Pirated books thrive on Amazon — and authors say web giant ignores fraud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761641 ( 87 points by vanilla-almond on April 30, 2023 | 79 comments ) https://nypost.com/2022/07/31/pirated-books-thrive-on-amazon-authors-say-web-giant-ignores-fraud/ https://nypost.com/2022/07/31/pirated-books-thrive-on-amazon... Amazon caught selling counterfeits of publisher’s computer books—again - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazon-caught-selling-counterfeits-of-publishers-computer-books-again/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazo... Having something that is paper doesn't mean that no one else can print them cheaply and flood the market. While it might not be at your expense - it certainly isn't something that is making you any money.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > The “artists need to make a living” narrative against piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want [...] I'd like to offer a more moderate option--or perhaps just radical in a different direction. Artists would like to make a living, and the "deception" comes from how that slogan is used to falsely present the powers-that-be as able, willing, and actively delivering on that goal.
    - ppqqrr 2y ago
      Thanks for the clarification - I do not claim that artists don’t want to make a living. My point is that, too often, the “artists need to make a living too” narrative is used by the system that exploits artists.
      - hluska 2y ago
        Can you rephrase that without a double negative? I don’t have a clue what you’re trying to say and your explanation makes it worse.
        Terr_ 2y ago
        Not parent poster, but I suspect the thesis can be rephrased like: "Artists do want to make a living, however there's a nuance when it comes to achieving that. Finding enough solid supporters requires such a wide dispersal of their content that any 'anti-piracy' measures are almost always counterproductive, at least when it comes to the interests of artists as opposed to middlemen."
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    It's important to note who is pushing the deception, here. Creative industry is composed of both labor (artists) and capital (publishers). I file artists under labor because their valuable economic resource is time. They make money when people pay them to make art. Unauthorized copying has harms, but the primary effect is that artists have to expect to be paid money up-front, since the only way they get profit participation on the sale of copies is if there's a strictly enforced set of laws to grant a monopoly on copying. That being said, money up-front is still a very common way for artists to get paid, so "artists need to make a living" is a half-truth. Paying per-copy and agreeing not to copy for some fixed period is more consumer friendly than, say, everyone pooling their money into a giant one-and-done Kickstarter and just trusting that the end result will be good. If your work can be published serially, then something like Patreon might work, but that's impractical for a lot of larger projects. The consumer unfriendliness manifests in the form of risk: who is out the money if something turns out to suck, or worse, doesn't even get made. The traditional "sell copies with a monopoly" model means that if I don't like a work, I just don't buy it. We have reviews to inform people if a thing is good or not, but you can't review a finished work based off the Kickstart campaign. This results in a market dominated by scams of varying degrees, customers who are hesitant to put money into campaigns that might not produce, and artists that can only really make the business model work if they have a lot of social capital and reputation to stake. I mentioned fancy capitalist words like "risk" and "market", so let's talk about the capitalist side of the business: the publishers. Or "managerial types", as it were. They do not make their money from selling the service of creating art, they make money from selling art that has already been made, which is capital. When Napster was telling people to stop paying for music and just steal it, the publishers shat their pants. An embarrassingly large part of the music business at the time was reissuing old acts on CD[0][1], and even new acts had to sell albums, which is why 90s listeners had to deal with a flood of albums with one good song and 10 terrible ones. It's specifically the capitalist side of the business that got screwed over the hardest by Napster. What screwed over artists was Spotify, which made music profitable again for the capitalists by turning it into a subscription. A music Boomer[2] accurately summed this up as a faucet pouring water straight into a drain. This is the best way to devalue artists, because it doesn't matter what songs the artists make - just that the publishers control the flow of the songs. The Spotify mentality has percolated into basically every other form of media over the last decade. It's why you will own nothing and be 'happy', and why every publisher CEO has a boner for generative AI, even as their artists are screaming their heads off about being scraped. Publishers have nominally been stolen from as well, but they don't care, because the theft is in their benefit[3]. It's the exact opposite of the Napster situation. What matters is not what will benefit the artists, nor what the law says. What matters is what will make them richer. [0] This is also why the SPARS code was a thing for a few years - to distinguish between new recordings made for CD and reissues riding the hype of digital music. [1] Metallica also found themselves caught on the back foot, mainly because they found out Napster users were trading pre-release soundtracks they'd made. Their reaction made them look like suits for a while, because Metallica had gotten popular through unlicensed copying, though I don't think this read was entirely fair. [2] https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo?t=485 https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo?t=485 [3] I don't think generative AI will replace real artists, but it doesn't matter so long as publishers believe it can.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
> "Functionally and aesthetically, the chairs are identical." Listen dude, go ahead and buy the $145 Modway chair. It's so bad, it is $118 nowadays. It will literally fall apart under your ass. Read the reviews.
- MatthiasPortzel 2y ago
  > the chairs are identical Followed by pictures of two different-looking chairs. IMO the Modway looks notably worse.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    They really aren't different at all though, they only look different because of the finish on the plywood.
breck 2y ago
Go further. If you model ideas mathematically, you will see that societies plagued with IPDD (https://breckyunits.com/ipdd.html https://breckyunits.com/ipdd.html) will become extinct, because they prolong the lifespan of bad ideas, and those with intellectual freedom, where bad ideas rapidly evolve into good ideas, will rise to the top of the food chain. The equation is simple: ETA! (https://breckyunits.com/eta.html https://breckyunits.com/eta.html) Question whether we should even have a concept of "licenses" (hint: we shouldn't). Look up "freedom licenses", which "freed" African Americans used to have to carry around in the 1800's. Think about how future generations will look at us for having a concept of "licenses on ideas". Think about the natural progression of automatic licenses on ideas (copyright act of 1976), to breathing: there is no reason not to require "licenses" to breathe, given that you exhale carbon dioxide molecules just as you exhale "copyrighted" information.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  I think you are conflating copyright with patents. Licenses and other forms of intellectual property protection exist so that those who control means of production and distribution pay those who have ideas, or produce creative output.
  - bediger4000 2y ago
    I agree they're different, and different still from trademarks, but the common thing is to conflate it all under "Intellectual Property", isn't it? I'm deeply suspicious of this conflation. I think it's done on purpose, in bad faith, for nefarious reasons.
- rileymat2 2y ago
  Is there any evidence that the equations in the blog post model the real world? I ask, because these intellectual property protections are intended to incentivize creation. If that incentive overwhelms these models of information sharing and testing frictions then the model is incomplete.
  - breck 2y ago
ljlolel 2y ago
I can make cheap, small-scale facsimiles, fangzhipin, to demonstrate some quality of the original. I can make exact replicas, pixel-perfect fuzhipin, to learn how the originals and their creators work. Or I can create shanzhai, unsolicited redesigns, commenting and riffing on the work of others. All these copies have an important role to play in the process of design. Whether you believe that it’s worthwhile or worthless to copy, whether you think that copies are a valuable part of the design community or a scourge, you are using software, hardware, websites and apps that all owe their existence to copying. As long as there is design, there will be copying.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  As long as there are new ideas, those without such ideas will copy them
  - CognitiveLens 2y ago
    But that take is too narrow - many of the 'great' painters had extensive training in the work of previous masters, frequently copying their works repeatedly in order to develop technique and more deeply engage with what came before. After developing that base skill and understanding, they had a better toolset to express their own originality.
  - burnished 2y ago
    I see that you've copied every word you used here, not very original of you
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    As long as there are ideas, there will be people who claim their "new ideas" have absolutely nothing in them derived from any previous ideas. Such people then scorn others who do not help them maintain the same fiction, and who instead dare to acknowledge that everything builds on what came before.
    - unraveller 2y ago
surfingdino 2y ago
The author got lost in his argumentation. He starts with design, but goes off into the lands of open source, patents, and art. It's not a well-written or researched article. Design is not software development is not art.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
karaterobot 2y ago
> As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, too. I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer. What a designer fundamentally does is communicate the best solution to a problem, given the requirements, goals, and constraints of that problem. Originality is subordinate to that at best.
- VirgilShelton 2y ago
  [flagged]
- burningChrome 2y ago
  This. I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do that, it seemed easy. The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them. Reality set in with my first client. Same thing, they didn't want cool shit, they just wanted their potential clients to find information about their work and contact them to hire them. After another 4-5 clients, I suddenly realized that web designers aren't some artist creating ultra cool, ultra rare stuff that your clients must absolutely have like a Banksy piece, they have more fundamental problems they're trying to solve and want you to solve them for them. I got my ego checked in a hurry, but it was a good lesson to learn. You're not selling art, you're selling a solution to their problems.
  - ozim 2y ago
    It is not only that. For example wannabe EDM DJs think they have to be creative and find tracks that no one ever heard to be edgy or whatever… most of people pay for having cookie cutter songs played so they can dance and have a good experience and they don’t want to be surprised on EDM event - well there are big names that can do whatever they want of course but that is different expectation. The same with software devs that they think, it must be “framework like code, extensible, reusable that will be there for 20 years” - well no if it is crud app most likely it will be trashed in 2 years stop overthinking and just do it :)
indiv0 2y ago
Reminds me of one of my favourite video essays -- "Everything is a Remix" [0]. The video and this article cover the same ideas albeit with different examples. Which is funny on a meta level -- the article could be called a remix of the video. The video (if I recall correctly) goes a bit further, attacking patents/IP law as anti-creative. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc
- amelius 2y ago
  Yes and that Disney copied old fairy tales and made them their own.
- scoot 2y ago
  There's a fine line though. Led Zeplin didn't remix, they flat out ripped off other artists lyrics and melody. Changing the musical genre doesn't wash IMHO.
js2 2y ago
For a visual form of the same argument, but more about music and film, see everything is a remix: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/ https://www.everythingisaremix.info/ It's been submitted to HN many times but has never spawned any discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=everything+is+a+remix https://hn.algolia.com/?q=everything+is+a+remix
- amadeuspagel 2y ago
  It's easier to discuss a text, to quote from it, to comment on it -- to remix it, you might say.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  > It's been submitted to HN many times but has never spawned any discussion: It could be because, at least for me personally, I found the first 15 minutes to be a little too boring. Perhaps people just gave up before then.
pembrook 2y ago
Copying isn’t just how design works, it’s how everything works. Humans are imitation machines. We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas outside of base impulses. Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all the breakthroughs are BS media narratives. Most if not all steps forward in any field have hundreds of people clawing at similar ideas concurrently.
- tracerbulletx 2y ago
  This is why not much changed for 10s of thousands of years until writing was invented, and accelerated when a valid method of iteration (science) was instituted.
- kivle 2y ago
  It's very Hackernews to throw LLMs in there, but I agree. LLMs don't have experience though. They have training data, and a probabilistic output. Designing things have two goals: - Make old things seem new - Make new things seem old and familiar Both need a lot of knowledge about how humans work and how we have made sense of the world up until now. Design can't be made in a vacuum and without input. Edit: To expand: An LLM would never have come up with touch input. It would have regurgitated the existing ideas of using a pen or a mouse to point at things on a screen. To come up with touch input was a huge feat of human engineering that was a combination of design (making touching a obvious for any human, old or young) and engineering (making that interaction actually work).
  - visarga 2y ago
    > LLMs don't have experience though. They might not have had experience 2 years ago, but in the meantime they assisted 100s of millions of people for many billion tasks. Many of them are experiences you can't find in a book. They contain on-topic feedback and even real world outcomes to LLM ideas. Deployed LLMs create experiences, they get exposed to things outside their training distribution, they search solution space and discover things. Like AlphaZero, I think search and real world interaction are the key ingredients. For AZ the world was a game board with an opponent, but rich enough to discover novel strategies.
infoseek12 2y ago
An interesting article about Asian perspectives on copying (https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just-as-good-as-an-original https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just...)
asdasdsddd 2y ago
Re: The copied terracottas Originality is overrated in art, painting restoration usually entails repainting large sections of the original. The image and the ideas far transcends the "original" which is usually reserved for bragging rights for uber rich collectors. The best art is the art you get to enjoy everyday.
m3kw9 2y ago
You sorta want to use affordance, when Apple creates a new type of UI, it’s usually because the introduced new tech. Like recent Samsung copy cat AirPods, they cannot invent a new UI because they are not the innovators, so they need to borrow affordances from Apple. On why they copy the shape and size, that is the part where you can be more artistic, and it seems they have no taste. (Affordance meaning using what people already is familiar with so they don’t have to relearn an interface)
- esalman 2y ago
  A lot of the UI features and associated tech that apple introduced in iPhone and iPad last few years lagged Android by a few iterations. What gives?
  - m3kw9 2y ago
    Yeah like the customizable home screen and widgets. They ain't perfect, but I think they really wanted it done right for Mobile. The widget itself isn't new in Apple's ecosystem as Macs always had it.
    - esalman 2y ago
      You can actually find lists of 100 or more things if you look it up, that were made available in Android first, and some have not even made to Apple yet, like 4k or 120hz display etc.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    That's sorta the history of Apple in a nutshell. For every actual innovation, there is a ton of commoditizing things that exist and repackaging them for locked-in Apple consumers that were previously unaware of them.
eddyzh 2y ago
Insightful perspective. Maybe interesting to point out from what year it is. It looks like 2020.
- SushiHippie 2y ago
  Yep, the opengraph published_time is (taken from the source code of the page): Wed Oct 28 2020 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) Article has been submitted twice, but never gained any traction (no comments, very few votes): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30093794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30093794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24925039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24925039
eduction 2y ago
Steve Jobs didn’t just waltz into Xerox PARC and steal a glimpse at the Alto. That visit was heavily lawyered and PARC got Apple shares as compensation. To summarize this as “stealing” is just incorrect. Lazy work.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  Except Apple recruited GUI engineers from PARC to work on the Lisa and Macintosh itself. I don't think you can steal any better than that.
rogerclark 2y ago
Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen, however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior. Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  The article didn't say it was better. No one thought it was better. It was just the first time anyone was able to smoothly side scroll on a PC. By copying something, he was able to push the boundaries of the perceived constraints of the technology which I believe is what the article is pointing out.
  - rogerclark 2y ago
    "Disappointed, but not defeated, they resolved to build a better version of Mario."
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      Resolved = tried, wished
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Millennial here - I played this as a teenager on our ancient-for-the-time family PC.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Disagree. Commander Keen 4-6 are better than Mario, imo.
  - thestepafter 2y ago
    To add to this Commander Keen was released on a very limited platform. More people were gaming on Nintendo systems than personal computers. If Commander Keen was released on Nintendo things may have gone differently.
zogrodea 2y ago
Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us being shocked. "Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing them. It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody should be shocked." I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it hard to take a single side.
jjcm 2y ago
One of the mistakes I made as a young designer was pushing back against trends and fads. My opinion at the time was that trends that weren't thought out from a position of UX principles were an anti-pattern to follow. As I matured more as a designer, I now think nearly the opposite - not following trends is an anti-pattern, since that's what your users will be used to. Pull down to refresh is a great example of this. Not visible or discoverable at all, but was all the hype when Tweetie first released it. On paper it's an anti-pattern, but now it's so ingrained as a trend and pattern that it became expected, and is now muscle memory for many users. The same goes with flat buttons - I used to be quite opposed to them since there was no visual elevation off the page designating it as a button. Now if you create a button with a bevel, users will think it's an ad, not part of the page itself. Copying leads to harmony in the wider ecosystem, and it creates a defined agreement on what things are are how they work. It's an important part of the user experience.
- lupire 2y ago
  That just your own bad taste. Pull to refresh is useful and optional. Flat buttons save precious space on tiny mobile devices.
  - hardwaresofton 2y ago
    I can only hope this was a joke/light hearted but anyway > That just your own bad taste. Please be civil [link to hn guidelines here]
  - jjcm 2y ago
    > Flat buttons save precious space on tiny mobile devices. You're probably mistaking a flat button for a link / undecorated button. Apple's HIG refers to these as plain buttons for iOS[1]. I'm referring to flat vs bevelled[2], which take up the same space. [1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/buttons#iOS-iPadOS https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... [2] https://image.non.io/428397dc-93ae-4158-8b71-323bd11182a0.webp https://image.non.io/428397dc-93ae-4158-8b71-323bd11182a0.we...
twobitshifter 2y ago
There’s been recent discussions on TV news about ’dupe’ specific sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However, the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan, but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler would look at a shoe and know how to make it for their customer. A tailor can change a collar or stitch to match what anyone wants.There was no demand that every worker have a unique design - everyone understood it was made to order. When it becomes possible to scale a design to worldwide sales, then the claims of uniqueness seem to us to become more important - but should they?
- vizzier 2y ago
  Counterpoint to that though, guilds existed as a different form of control for many hundreds or thousands of years. Instead of controlling what people can make, just control who can make it.
- chrstphrknwtn 2y ago
  Tom Ford commented on the issue of counterfeit and "knock off" products in the fashion industry, he said after some research (I assume by him/his company) they found that the people buying the cheap counterfeit products weren't their customers anyway, and so they weren't losing anything.
  - lupire 2y ago
    That's not the problem in fashion. The problem is if their non-customers tarnish the brand and drive customers away.
    - chrstphrknwtn 2y ago
      What industry do you think Tom Ford was talking about?
analog31 2y ago
"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -- Igor Stravinsky (Probably stolen)
trentnix 2y ago
Copying from one source is plagiarism. Copying from multiple sources is research.
nxobject 2y ago
“Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” – Yohji Yamamoto.
Gualdrapo 2y ago
Back at uni a teacher used to say everything (in design, at least) has already been made - so yes, "creativity" was an act to put things that already exist and nobody thought about putting together before.
seanwilson 2y ago
> In a 2005 forum post, John Carmack explained his thoughts on patents. While patents are framed as protecting inventors, he wrote, that’s seldom how they’re used. Smart programmers working on hard problems tend to come up with the same solutions. I find this happens in UI/UX design too. When you're trying to come with the best interface for a problem, there's only so many directions that make sense once you've explored the design space and understood all the constraints. With desktop and mobile interfaces for example, all operating systems and devices have converged on a lot of similar patterns and visuals. I don't think this is because people are unoriginal, but given the constraints, there's only so many decent options to pick from so many designers will inevitably converge on the same solution. > I’m a designer. As a designer, I feel the need to be original. I'll often come up with a solution on my own after immersing myself in a problem for a while, then after looking at existing work more later, find it's already been done. I'll then sometimes even consider changing my solution so it doesn't look like I copied, but usually there's no obvious other direction you can go in that is close to as good.
Osiris 2y ago
There is no such thing as completely original. No matter what, all of your ideas are influenced by your life experience and what you've seen.
xiaoape 2y ago
Reminded me a short article: https://signalvnoise.com/archives/000324 https://signalvnoise.com/archives/000324 > We’re not designers, or programmers, or information architects, or copywriters, or customer experience consultants, or whatever else people want to call themselves these days… Bottom line: We’re risk managers.
anna4151 2y ago
[flagged]
rramadass 2y ago
Even more strongly; Copying is the way we Learn.
__mharrison__ 2y ago
Data folks would do well to find some good visualizations (from the Economist or New York Times) and recreate them. They will learn a lot from doing so.
lemax 2y ago
As a designer, one eventually thinks not about what they liked in other people's work but why it worked. You can derive a design out a compendium of some things that you've seen that you like, but ultimately, to be successful you need to know why what you're copying made sense for its purpose. Perhaps you need to even encounter the same problem; it takes a bit of maturity to copy effectively.
1GZ0 2y ago
Good artists copy, great artists steal - Pablo Picasso
atoav 2y ago
As a former designer with a broad background (graphics, typography, print, web, product design) whenever I read something like this I get the feeling people generally have a misguided idea of what design is. Many (bad) designers confuse what I would call styling with design. Design is a lot about functionality and how information is organized visually. These two core design points can only be copied if the underlying project is exactly the same in terms of underlying information. But even for two blogs about different topics the question which information needs to be presented how would be different — even if both blogs were using the browser's default CSS. This is the core of design. Styling is finding colors, shapes proportions etc. All of this of course overlaps with the functional question and the question of organization of information — bigger buttons get more attention and all that — but ultimately you can slap more or less any style on any content. Whether it makes sense is a different question.
- andruby 2y ago
  I like your description, and it resonates with how I see things. A lot of people think of aesthetics when they hear "design". But design is about how things work. Everything we use was at some point designed by someone. In our SaaS company we changed the role of Designers to Product Designers to help people understand it a little better.
  - atoav 2y ago
    I mean in the end aesthetics are intricately intertwined with how things are perceived and thus how they work. There is only so much information a person can process at once, there are certain expectations where they would find things those can be met or sub erted, colors, font choice, all important for how information gets processed on the functional level. So in the end design cannot exist with some degree of aesthetical choice, and the better designers are the better they are at choosing aesthetics that serve the functional choices (if that is the goal of their designs). If you make it completely utilitarian it might become boring, and the function of a design in a SaaS company could also be to sell the product..
myworkinisgood 2y ago
Side note: This is why I feel Stallman is more of a visionary and would have much more lasting impact than Jobs had (character flaws of both people not withstanding). Jobs stole and kept market dominance to keep the loot for himself. In medieval time, Jobs would be a raider. Stallman empowered the people and let them have fruits of their own labor.
- andruby 2y ago
  The analogy doesn't work well. Sure Steve Jobs and Apple shareholders got rich, but everyone that bought a Mac, or iPhone, or iPad was able to benefit from the innovations they brought. As far as I know, a raider doesn't share or enable others.
sva_ 2y ago
(2020)
hackerskiss 2y ago
[flagged]
xtiansimon 2y ago
A manifesto, how retro.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >A manifesto, how retro. Somewhat unrelated, but it's a shame that manifestos have such a bad rap, most often associated with terrorists and such. There is something sorta nice about sitting down and clearly declaring your thoughts on a subject. It makes sense that people pushed to the edge want to let us know why they are behaving they way they are, but it's a shame that normal people aren't encouraged to reflect upon their thoughts and write them down. Being able to think about a topic and put on paper that these are my thoughts and feelings about $x brings a certain amount of clarity to your thinking and can help other people understand your thinking in a way that has a lot of power. Consider historical documents like the Declaration of Independence, the points are laid out in a way that even if you disagree with them, there is no denying what they are declaring.
okonomiyaki3000 2y ago
I've always said: Good artists borrow, great artists steal. You can quote me on that.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  OK, Pablo.
raptorpark 2y ago
Self taught artist, and I learned by copying my favorite comic books and painters. Went to art school and a significant part of my art history class dealt in remembering the name of art "movements" which is a veiled way of saying a period when everyone was copying each other. Then of course you learn about the influential artists who heavily borrowed from xyz. Another funny one is "revival" which just means "straight up copy" This is why I have limited sympathy for the uproar about AI art. It's just cutting through the boring part.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I think it is how every artist learns. Later an artist's "style" then comes to be the bits and pieces they preferred from various artists they copied as they were learning — a kind of Stone Soup style.
adolph 2y ago
> But at $145 (the equivalent of $12.78 in 1947) it’s more affordable than the LCW was when it was first manufactured and sold. The article isn’t explicitly dated (afaict). Using an inflation calculator leads me to believe it was written in 2019 [0]. The same calculator indicates a material deviation from the quoted number: “$145 in 2024 equals $10.16 in 1947.” Amazingly, the chair is listed on Amazon now at $118.53 [1] (at least for my login/cookies/tracking; price includes shipping estimated at 6 days), the equivalent of $8.31 in 1947, a 60% off sale. The cost probably has some externality tradeoffs however. Was the wood clear cut by children from thousand year old forests? Was the chair manufactured by prisoners using chemicals known by the state of California to cause cancer? 0. https://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=145&year=2018&toYear=1947 https://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=145&ye... 1. https://www.amazon.com/Modway-EEI-510-WEN-Fathom-Mid-Century-Plywood/dp/B004K8PLS4 https://www.amazon.com/Modway-EEI-510-WEN-Fathom-Mid-Century...
jmdots 2y ago
This all great but for small time programmers trying to get a company off the ground, acting defensively is justifiable. It’s not always a question of a guy like Carmack having a good time cloning the big corp thing. Sometimes, and even many times lately it’s big corp obliterating inventive small business by releasing their own copy, or they simply use their monopolistic power to drive them into an inequitable sale. If you’re small time and have a great idea, you’re better off going stealth and this is its own mitigation against destructive copying.
thomastjeffery 2y ago
The irony of copyright is that it demands copied design. Want an online menu for your restaurant? Well, you can't just go copying someone else's design; so you must create your own from scratch. Will yours look and behave practically identically to the other? Yes. Will both websites be overall worse quality than if everyone just collaborated on a standard design? Yes. Would it save the world an incredible amount of redundant work to just allow people to copy each others' work? Yes. Who wins in this arrangement? Only those who have already won. Keep looking at this pattern, and you will enter a deep cavernous rabbit-hole. At the bottom, you will find yourself at the very core of design itself: the goals, philosophies, and systemic failures of every design we use today can be traced back to this point: collaboration must be avoided at all costs. Compatibility is the cardinal sin, and it must be punished. So we go on, building silos upon silos. When will we ever learn? --- There is a lot of talk lately for change. They say, "AI will be the end of copyright. It's too important to hold back the potential of AI over a petty argument for intellectual property." I don't believe for a minute that LLMs will ever reach the lofty goal of "General Intelligence". I don't believe for a minute that megacorps like OpenAI, Google, and Meta deserve a free pass to siphon data for profit. So why is it that these words ring true? AI has nothing to do with it: it's design itself that has incredible potential, and we should absolutely stop holding it back. Intellectual Property is nothing more than a demand against progress.
fasteddie31003 2y ago
This is relevant for me today since we are designing a new house. To go with an architect is looking like between $50k - $100k for basic building schematics and not the build plans. This seems like a lot to me. The route I'm going down now is finding houses I like on Zillow and hiring a Designer on Fivrr to basically copy them and create a 3D model in Revit that can eventually become building plans. So far the Fivrr Designer costs $100 per Zillow house to model into pretty good Revit plans that I could take to a Draftsman in my area to turn into building plans. It feels a little like cheating, but I've been seeing good results so far.
mlism 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
karmakaze 2y ago
This is a great quote: > In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it.”
- manav 2y ago
  Copying from Xerox, some irony there.
  - lelandfe 2y ago
    Adds layers of irony to their “Redmond, start your photocopiers” dig https://www.padawan.info/en/images/photocopiers.html https://www.padawan.info/en/images/photocopiers.html
    - freetinker 2y ago
      I miss this flavor of advertising. It all feels too anodyne these days.
  - karmakaze 2y ago
    It's also a lesson that always seems to fail to be learned. Xerox had the capital to set up a research arm, then failed to convert on any ideas because they were too focused on their current cash-cow. They eventually transitioned to "document company" where a document wasn't only paper, but it was too little/late.
    - razakel 2y ago
      The same thing happened to Kodak - they were a tech company that thought they were a chemical company.
    - kragen 2y ago

743 points by innerzeal 2y ago

Beautifully written article. One of my first ideological shifts happened when Napster was released. Bits flowing freely without being bounded by rules of the physical world deeply changed me and while later I do understand artists need to get paid and make a living, piracy and the pirating community is still very close to my heart. The amount of innovation which comes out of that space, is tremendous. The fact that zuckerberg could create trillions of dollar on free projects such as php and apache is not cherished enough. I think we still haven't found a proper economy for the digital world. The fact that pirating game of thrones was a better option than waiting for it to be premiered in your region goes to show there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. If there wasn't piracy, free software, open source and american VC (the first few waves, not the last few), this industry wouldn't have grown at this pace.

ppqqrr 2y ago
The “artists need to make a living” narrative against piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want nothing more than for their messages to spread as widely as possible, as that is also the most naturally profitable path for them in the long term. It’s only when managerial types get involved the need to turn a quick buck by denying the natural flow of information becomes a primary concern. So pirate away, knowing that nothing of value is lost.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  I self-publish my books. The audience is decent, I publish shortened audiobook versions for free, but frankly, I like the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market with them at my expense. It would have been natural, but also depressing.
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    I stopped self-publishing my books, because as soon as I offered PDFs to those who purchased my paper books the sales of printed copies tanked. Then nobody wanted to pay for PDFs and Amazon screwed my KDP sales (banned my book). The readers felt entitled to free copies and free consultation on the subject of the book. It's really depressing how entitled people feel to other people's creative output or knowledge.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      That is why I publish freely the audio versions (which only consist of about half of the stories within each book), but not the PDFs.
    - __mharrison__ 2y ago
      Did you just stop publishing altogether?
      - surfingdino 2y ago
        Yes. I do not need another book as a CV, which is currently the most viable business model for authors of non-fiction.
        meiraleal 2y ago
        We are probably better off without your marketing content tho
  - shagie 2y ago
    > I like the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market with them at my expense. Amazon has a book piracy problem ( 219 points by tosh on July 8, 2022 | 120 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026663 https://x.com/fchollet/status/1550930876183166976 https://x.com/fchollet/status/1550930876183166976 (and via Threadreader - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550930876183166976.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550930876183166976.html ) - also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210256 ( 665 points by jmillikin on July 24, 2022 | 193 comments ) Pirated books thrive on Amazon — and authors say web giant ignores fraud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761641 ( 87 points by vanilla-almond on April 30, 2023 | 79 comments ) https://nypost.com/2022/07/31/pirated-books-thrive-on-amazon-authors-say-web-giant-ignores-fraud/ https://nypost.com/2022/07/31/pirated-books-thrive-on-amazon... Amazon caught selling counterfeits of publisher’s computer books—again - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazon-caught-selling-counterfeits-of-publishers-computer-books-again/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazo... Having something that is paper doesn't mean that no one else can print them cheaply and flood the market. While it might not be at your expense - it certainly isn't something that is making you any money.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > The “artists need to make a living” narrative against piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want [...] I'd like to offer a more moderate option--or perhaps just radical in a different direction. Artists would like to make a living, and the "deception" comes from how that slogan is used to falsely present the powers-that-be as able, willing, and actively delivering on that goal.
  - ppqqrr 2y ago
    Thanks for the clarification - I do not claim that artists don’t want to make a living. My point is that, too often, the “artists need to make a living too” narrative is used by the system that exploits artists.
    - hluska 2y ago
      Can you rephrase that without a double negative? I don’t have a clue what you’re trying to say and your explanation makes it worse.
      - Terr_ 2y ago
        Not parent poster, but I suspect the thesis can be rephrased like: "Artists do want to make a living, however there's a nuance when it comes to achieving that. Finding enough solid supporters requires such a wide dispersal of their content that any 'anti-piracy' measures are almost always counterproductive, at least when it comes to the interests of artists as opposed to middlemen."
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  It's important to note who is pushing the deception, here. Creative industry is composed of both labor (artists) and capital (publishers). I file artists under labor because their valuable economic resource is time. They make money when people pay them to make art. Unauthorized copying has harms, but the primary effect is that artists have to expect to be paid money up-front, since the only way they get profit participation on the sale of copies is if there's a strictly enforced set of laws to grant a monopoly on copying. That being said, money up-front is still a very common way for artists to get paid, so "artists need to make a living" is a half-truth. Paying per-copy and agreeing not to copy for some fixed period is more consumer friendly than, say, everyone pooling their money into a giant one-and-done Kickstarter and just trusting that the end result will be good. If your work can be published serially, then something like Patreon might work, but that's impractical for a lot of larger projects. The consumer unfriendliness manifests in the form of risk: who is out the money if something turns out to suck, or worse, doesn't even get made. The traditional "sell copies with a monopoly" model means that if I don't like a work, I just don't buy it. We have reviews to inform people if a thing is good or not, but you can't review a finished work based off the Kickstart campaign. This results in a market dominated by scams of varying degrees, customers who are hesitant to put money into campaigns that might not produce, and artists that can only really make the business model work if they have a lot of social capital and reputation to stake. I mentioned fancy capitalist words like "risk" and "market", so let's talk about the capitalist side of the business: the publishers. Or "managerial types", as it were. They do not make their money from selling the service of creating art, they make money from selling art that has already been made, which is capital. When Napster was telling people to stop paying for music and just steal it, the publishers shat their pants. An embarrassingly large part of the music business at the time was reissuing old acts on CD[0][1], and even new acts had to sell albums, which is why 90s listeners had to deal with a flood of albums with one good song and 10 terrible ones. It's specifically the capitalist side of the business that got screwed over the hardest by Napster. What screwed over artists was Spotify, which made music profitable again for the capitalists by turning it into a subscription. A music Boomer[2] accurately summed this up as a faucet pouring water straight into a drain. This is the best way to devalue artists, because it doesn't matter what songs the artists make - just that the publishers control the flow of the songs. The Spotify mentality has percolated into basically every other form of media over the last decade. It's why you will own nothing and be 'happy', and why every publisher CEO has a boner for generative AI, even as their artists are screaming their heads off about being scraped. Publishers have nominally been stolen from as well, but they don't care, because the theft is in their benefit[3]. It's the exact opposite of the Napster situation. What matters is not what will benefit the artists, nor what the law says. What matters is what will make them richer. [0] This is also why the SPARS code was a thing for a few years - to distinguish between new recordings made for CD and reissues riding the hype of digital music. [1] Metallica also found themselves caught on the back foot, mainly because they found out Napster users were trading pre-release soundtracks they'd made. Their reaction made them look like suits for a while, because Metallica had gotten popular through unlicensed copying, though I don't think this read was entirely fair. [2] https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo?t=485 https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo?t=485 [3] I don't think generative AI will replace real artists, but it doesn't matter so long as publishers believe it can.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

> "Functionally and aesthetically, the chairs are identical." Listen dude, go ahead and buy the $145 Modway chair. It's so bad, it is $118 nowadays. It will literally fall apart under your ass. Read the reviews.

MatthiasPortzel 2y ago
> the chairs are identical Followed by pictures of two different-looking chairs. IMO the Modway looks notably worse.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  They really aren't different at all though, they only look different because of the finish on the plywood.

breck 2y ago

Go further. If you model ideas mathematically, you will see that societies plagued with IPDD (https://breckyunits.com/ipdd.html https://breckyunits.com/ipdd.html) will become extinct, because they prolong the lifespan of bad ideas, and those with intellectual freedom, where bad ideas rapidly evolve into good ideas, will rise to the top of the food chain. The equation is simple: ETA! (https://breckyunits.com/eta.html https://breckyunits.com/eta.html) Question whether we should even have a concept of "licenses" (hint: we shouldn't). Look up "freedom licenses", which "freed" African Americans used to have to carry around in the 1800's. Think about how future generations will look at us for having a concept of "licenses on ideas". Think about the natural progression of automatic licenses on ideas (copyright act of 1976), to breathing: there is no reason not to require "licenses" to breathe, given that you exhale carbon dioxide molecules just as you exhale "copyrighted" information.

surfingdino 2y ago
I think you are conflating copyright with patents. Licenses and other forms of intellectual property protection exist so that those who control means of production and distribution pay those who have ideas, or produce creative output.
- bediger4000 2y ago
  I agree they're different, and different still from trademarks, but the common thing is to conflate it all under "Intellectual Property", isn't it? I'm deeply suspicious of this conflation. I think it's done on purpose, in bad faith, for nefarious reasons.
rileymat2 2y ago
Is there any evidence that the equations in the blog post model the real world? I ask, because these intellectual property protections are intended to incentivize creation. If that incentive overwhelms these models of information sharing and testing frictions then the model is incomplete.
- breck 2y ago

ljlolel 2y ago

I can make cheap, small-scale facsimiles, fangzhipin, to demonstrate some quality of the original. I can make exact replicas, pixel-perfect fuzhipin, to learn how the originals and their creators work. Or I can create shanzhai, unsolicited redesigns, commenting and riffing on the work of others. All these copies have an important role to play in the process of design. Whether you believe that it’s worthwhile or worthless to copy, whether you think that copies are a valuable part of the design community or a scourge, you are using software, hardware, websites and apps that all owe their existence to copying. As long as there is design, there will be copying.

fsckboy 2y ago
As long as there are new ideas, those without such ideas will copy them
- CognitiveLens 2y ago
  But that take is too narrow - many of the 'great' painters had extensive training in the work of previous masters, frequently copying their works repeatedly in order to develop technique and more deeply engage with what came before. After developing that base skill and understanding, they had a better toolset to express their own originality.
- burnished 2y ago
  I see that you've copied every word you used here, not very original of you
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  As long as there are ideas, there will be people who claim their "new ideas" have absolutely nothing in them derived from any previous ideas. Such people then scorn others who do not help them maintain the same fiction, and who instead dare to acknowledge that everything builds on what came before.
  - unraveller 2y ago

surfingdino 2y ago

The author got lost in his argumentation. He starts with design, but goes off into the lands of open source, patents, and art. It's not a well-written or researched article. Design is not software development is not art.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

karaterobot 2y ago

> As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, too. I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer. What a designer fundamentally does is communicate the best solution to a problem, given the requirements, goals, and constraints of that problem. Originality is subordinate to that at best.

VirgilShelton 2y ago
[flagged]
burningChrome 2y ago
This. I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do that, it seemed easy. The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them. Reality set in with my first client. Same thing, they didn't want cool shit, they just wanted their potential clients to find information about their work and contact them to hire them. After another 4-5 clients, I suddenly realized that web designers aren't some artist creating ultra cool, ultra rare stuff that your clients must absolutely have like a Banksy piece, they have more fundamental problems they're trying to solve and want you to solve them for them. I got my ego checked in a hurry, but it was a good lesson to learn. You're not selling art, you're selling a solution to their problems.
- ozim 2y ago
  It is not only that. For example wannabe EDM DJs think they have to be creative and find tracks that no one ever heard to be edgy or whatever… most of people pay for having cookie cutter songs played so they can dance and have a good experience and they don’t want to be surprised on EDM event - well there are big names that can do whatever they want of course but that is different expectation. The same with software devs that they think, it must be “framework like code, extensible, reusable that will be there for 20 years” - well no if it is crud app most likely it will be trashed in 2 years stop overthinking and just do it :)

indiv0 2y ago

Reminds me of one of my favourite video essays -- "Everything is a Remix" [0]. The video and this article cover the same ideas albeit with different examples. Which is funny on a meta level -- the article could be called a remix of the video. The video (if I recall correctly) goes a bit further, attacking patents/IP law as anti-creative. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc

amelius 2y ago
Yes and that Disney copied old fairy tales and made them their own.
scoot 2y ago
There's a fine line though. Led Zeplin didn't remix, they flat out ripped off other artists lyrics and melody. Changing the musical genre doesn't wash IMHO.

js2 2y ago

For a visual form of the same argument, but more about music and film, see everything is a remix: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/ https://www.everythingisaremix.info/ It's been submitted to HN many times but has never spawned any discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=everything+is+a+remix https://hn.algolia.com/?q=everything+is+a+remix

amadeuspagel 2y ago
It's easier to discuss a text, to quote from it, to comment on it -- to remix it, you might say.
ranger_danger 2y ago
> It's been submitted to HN many times but has never spawned any discussion: It could be because, at least for me personally, I found the first 15 minutes to be a little too boring. Perhaps people just gave up before then.

pembrook 2y ago

Copying isn’t just how design works, it’s how everything works. Humans are imitation machines. We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas outside of base impulses. Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all the breakthroughs are BS media narratives. Most if not all steps forward in any field have hundreds of people clawing at similar ideas concurrently.

tracerbulletx 2y ago
This is why not much changed for 10s of thousands of years until writing was invented, and accelerated when a valid method of iteration (science) was instituted.
kivle 2y ago
It's very Hackernews to throw LLMs in there, but I agree. LLMs don't have experience though. They have training data, and a probabilistic output. Designing things have two goals: - Make old things seem new - Make new things seem old and familiar Both need a lot of knowledge about how humans work and how we have made sense of the world up until now. Design can't be made in a vacuum and without input. Edit: To expand: An LLM would never have come up with touch input. It would have regurgitated the existing ideas of using a pen or a mouse to point at things on a screen. To come up with touch input was a huge feat of human engineering that was a combination of design (making touching a obvious for any human, old or young) and engineering (making that interaction actually work).
- visarga 2y ago
  > LLMs don't have experience though. They might not have had experience 2 years ago, but in the meantime they assisted 100s of millions of people for many billion tasks. Many of them are experiences you can't find in a book. They contain on-topic feedback and even real world outcomes to LLM ideas. Deployed LLMs create experiences, they get exposed to things outside their training distribution, they search solution space and discover things. Like AlphaZero, I think search and real world interaction are the key ingredients. For AZ the world was a game board with an opponent, but rich enough to discover novel strategies.

infoseek12 2y ago

An interesting article about Asian perspectives on copying (https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just-as-good-as-an-original https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just...)

asdasdsddd 2y ago

Re: The copied terracottas Originality is overrated in art, painting restoration usually entails repainting large sections of the original. The image and the ideas far transcends the "original" which is usually reserved for bragging rights for uber rich collectors. The best art is the art you get to enjoy everyday.

m3kw9 2y ago

You sorta want to use affordance, when Apple creates a new type of UI, it’s usually because the introduced new tech. Like recent Samsung copy cat AirPods, they cannot invent a new UI because they are not the innovators, so they need to borrow affordances from Apple. On why they copy the shape and size, that is the part where you can be more artistic, and it seems they have no taste. (Affordance meaning using what people already is familiar with so they don’t have to relearn an interface)

esalman 2y ago
A lot of the UI features and associated tech that apple introduced in iPhone and iPad last few years lagged Android by a few iterations. What gives?
- m3kw9 2y ago
  Yeah like the customizable home screen and widgets. They ain't perfect, but I think they really wanted it done right for Mobile. The widget itself isn't new in Apple's ecosystem as Macs always had it.
  - esalman 2y ago
    You can actually find lists of 100 or more things if you look it up, that were made available in Android first, and some have not even made to Apple yet, like 4k or 120hz display etc.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  That's sorta the history of Apple in a nutshell. For every actual innovation, there is a ton of commoditizing things that exist and repackaging them for locked-in Apple consumers that were previously unaware of them.

eddyzh 2y ago

Insightful perspective. Maybe interesting to point out from what year it is. It looks like 2020.

SushiHippie 2y ago
Yep, the opengraph published_time is (taken from the source code of the page): Wed Oct 28 2020 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) Article has been submitted twice, but never gained any traction (no comments, very few votes): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30093794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30093794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24925039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24925039

eduction 2y ago

Steve Jobs didn’t just waltz into Xerox PARC and steal a glimpse at the Alto. That visit was heavily lawyered and PARC got Apple shares as compensation. To summarize this as “stealing” is just incorrect. Lazy work.

ranger_danger 2y ago
Except Apple recruited GUI engineers from PARC to work on the Lisa and Macintosh itself. I don't think you can steal any better than that.

rogerclark 2y ago

Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen, however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior. Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.

bongodongobob 2y ago
The article didn't say it was better. No one thought it was better. It was just the first time anyone was able to smoothly side scroll on a PC. By copying something, he was able to push the boundaries of the perceived constraints of the technology which I believe is what the article is pointing out.
- rogerclark 2y ago
  "Disappointed, but not defeated, they resolved to build a better version of Mario."
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    Resolved = tried, wished
robertlagrant 2y ago
Millennial here - I played this as a teenager on our ancient-for-the-time family PC.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
Disagree. Commander Keen 4-6 are better than Mario, imo.
- thestepafter 2y ago
  To add to this Commander Keen was released on a very limited platform. More people were gaming on Nintendo systems than personal computers. If Commander Keen was released on Nintendo things may have gone differently.

zogrodea 2y ago

Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us being shocked. "Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing them. It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody should be shocked." I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it hard to take a single side.

jjcm 2y ago

One of the mistakes I made as a young designer was pushing back against trends and fads. My opinion at the time was that trends that weren't thought out from a position of UX principles were an anti-pattern to follow. As I matured more as a designer, I now think nearly the opposite - not following trends is an anti-pattern, since that's what your users will be used to. Pull down to refresh is a great example of this. Not visible or discoverable at all, but was all the hype when Tweetie first released it. On paper it's an anti-pattern, but now it's so ingrained as a trend and pattern that it became expected, and is now muscle memory for many users. The same goes with flat buttons - I used to be quite opposed to them since there was no visual elevation off the page designating it as a button. Now if you create a button with a bevel, users will think it's an ad, not part of the page itself. Copying leads to harmony in the wider ecosystem, and it creates a defined agreement on what things are are how they work. It's an important part of the user experience.

lupire 2y ago
That just your own bad taste. Pull to refresh is useful and optional. Flat buttons save precious space on tiny mobile devices.
- hardwaresofton 2y ago
  I can only hope this was a joke/light hearted but anyway > That just your own bad taste. Please be civil [link to hn guidelines here]
- jjcm 2y ago
  > Flat buttons save precious space on tiny mobile devices. You're probably mistaking a flat button for a link / undecorated button. Apple's HIG refers to these as plain buttons for iOS[1]. I'm referring to flat vs bevelled[2], which take up the same space. [1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/buttons#iOS-iPadOS https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... [2] https://image.non.io/428397dc-93ae-4158-8b71-323bd11182a0.webp https://image.non.io/428397dc-93ae-4158-8b71-323bd11182a0.we...

twobitshifter 2y ago

There’s been recent discussions on TV news about ’dupe’ specific sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However, the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan, but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler would look at a shoe and know how to make it for their customer. A tailor can change a collar or stitch to match what anyone wants.There was no demand that every worker have a unique design - everyone understood it was made to order. When it becomes possible to scale a design to worldwide sales, then the claims of uniqueness seem to us to become more important - but should they?

vizzier 2y ago
Counterpoint to that though, guilds existed as a different form of control for many hundreds or thousands of years. Instead of controlling what people can make, just control who can make it.
chrstphrknwtn 2y ago
Tom Ford commented on the issue of counterfeit and "knock off" products in the fashion industry, he said after some research (I assume by him/his company) they found that the people buying the cheap counterfeit products weren't their customers anyway, and so they weren't losing anything.
- lupire 2y ago
  That's not the problem in fashion. The problem is if their non-customers tarnish the brand and drive customers away.
  - chrstphrknwtn 2y ago
    What industry do you think Tom Ford was talking about?

analog31 2y ago

"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -- Igor Stravinsky (Probably stolen)

trentnix 2y ago

Copying from one source is plagiarism. Copying from multiple sources is research.

nxobject 2y ago

“Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” – Yohji Yamamoto.

Gualdrapo 2y ago

Back at uni a teacher used to say everything (in design, at least) has already been made - so yes, "creativity" was an act to put things that already exist and nobody thought about putting together before.

seanwilson 2y ago

> In a 2005 forum post, John Carmack explained his thoughts on patents. While patents are framed as protecting inventors, he wrote, that’s seldom how they’re used. Smart programmers working on hard problems tend to come up with the same solutions. I find this happens in UI/UX design too. When you're trying to come with the best interface for a problem, there's only so many directions that make sense once you've explored the design space and understood all the constraints. With desktop and mobile interfaces for example, all operating systems and devices have converged on a lot of similar patterns and visuals. I don't think this is because people are unoriginal, but given the constraints, there's only so many decent options to pick from so many designers will inevitably converge on the same solution. > I’m a designer. As a designer, I feel the need to be original. I'll often come up with a solution on my own after immersing myself in a problem for a while, then after looking at existing work more later, find it's already been done. I'll then sometimes even consider changing my solution so it doesn't look like I copied, but usually there's no obvious other direction you can go in that is close to as good.

Osiris 2y ago

There is no such thing as completely original. No matter what, all of your ideas are influenced by your life experience and what you've seen.

xiaoape 2y ago

Reminded me a short article: https://signalvnoise.com/archives/000324 https://signalvnoise.com/archives/000324 > We’re not designers, or programmers, or information architects, or copywriters, or customer experience consultants, or whatever else people want to call themselves these days… Bottom line: We’re risk managers.

anna4151 2y ago

[flagged]

rramadass 2y ago

Even more strongly; Copying is the way we Learn.

__mharrison__ 2y ago

Data folks would do well to find some good visualizations (from the Economist or New York Times) and recreate them. They will learn a lot from doing so.

lemax 2y ago

As a designer, one eventually thinks not about what they liked in other people's work but why it worked. You can derive a design out a compendium of some things that you've seen that you like, but ultimately, to be successful you need to know why what you're copying made sense for its purpose. Perhaps you need to even encounter the same problem; it takes a bit of maturity to copy effectively.

1GZ0 2y ago

Good artists copy, great artists steal - Pablo Picasso

atoav 2y ago

As a former designer with a broad background (graphics, typography, print, web, product design) whenever I read something like this I get the feeling people generally have a misguided idea of what design is. Many (bad) designers confuse what I would call styling with design. Design is a lot about functionality and how information is organized visually. These two core design points can only be copied if the underlying project is exactly the same in terms of underlying information. But even for two blogs about different topics the question which information needs to be presented how would be different — even if both blogs were using the browser's default CSS. This is the core of design. Styling is finding colors, shapes proportions etc. All of this of course overlaps with the functional question and the question of organization of information — bigger buttons get more attention and all that — but ultimately you can slap more or less any style on any content. Whether it makes sense is a different question.

andruby 2y ago
I like your description, and it resonates with how I see things. A lot of people think of aesthetics when they hear "design". But design is about how things work. Everything we use was at some point designed by someone. In our SaaS company we changed the role of Designers to Product Designers to help people understand it a little better.
- atoav 2y ago
  I mean in the end aesthetics are intricately intertwined with how things are perceived and thus how they work. There is only so much information a person can process at once, there are certain expectations where they would find things those can be met or sub erted, colors, font choice, all important for how information gets processed on the functional level. So in the end design cannot exist with some degree of aesthetical choice, and the better designers are the better they are at choosing aesthetics that serve the functional choices (if that is the goal of their designs). If you make it completely utilitarian it might become boring, and the function of a design in a SaaS company could also be to sell the product..

myworkinisgood 2y ago

Side note: This is why I feel Stallman is more of a visionary and would have much more lasting impact than Jobs had (character flaws of both people not withstanding). Jobs stole and kept market dominance to keep the loot for himself. In medieval time, Jobs would be a raider. Stallman empowered the people and let them have fruits of their own labor.

andruby 2y ago
The analogy doesn't work well. Sure Steve Jobs and Apple shareholders got rich, but everyone that bought a Mac, or iPhone, or iPad was able to benefit from the innovations they brought. As far as I know, a raider doesn't share or enable others.

sva_ 2y ago

(2020)

hackerskiss 2y ago

[flagged]

xtiansimon 2y ago

A manifesto, how retro.

Suppafly 2y ago
>A manifesto, how retro. Somewhat unrelated, but it's a shame that manifestos have such a bad rap, most often associated with terrorists and such. There is something sorta nice about sitting down and clearly declaring your thoughts on a subject. It makes sense that people pushed to the edge want to let us know why they are behaving they way they are, but it's a shame that normal people aren't encouraged to reflect upon their thoughts and write them down. Being able to think about a topic and put on paper that these are my thoughts and feelings about $x brings a certain amount of clarity to your thinking and can help other people understand your thinking in a way that has a lot of power. Consider historical documents like the Declaration of Independence, the points are laid out in a way that even if you disagree with them, there is no denying what they are declaring.

okonomiyaki3000 2y ago

I've always said: Good artists borrow, great artists steal. You can quote me on that.

CRConrad 2y ago
OK, Pablo.

raptorpark 2y ago

Self taught artist, and I learned by copying my favorite comic books and painters. Went to art school and a significant part of my art history class dealt in remembering the name of art "movements" which is a veiled way of saying a period when everyone was copying each other. Then of course you learn about the influential artists who heavily borrowed from xyz. Another funny one is "revival" which just means "straight up copy" This is why I have limited sympathy for the uproar about AI art. It's just cutting through the boring part.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
I think it is how every artist learns. Later an artist's "style" then comes to be the bits and pieces they preferred from various artists they copied as they were learning — a kind of Stone Soup style.

adolph 2y ago

> But at $145 (the equivalent of $12.78 in 1947) it’s more affordable than the LCW was when it was first manufactured and sold. The article isn’t explicitly dated (afaict). Using an inflation calculator leads me to believe it was written in 2019 [0]. The same calculator indicates a material deviation from the quoted number: “$145 in 2024 equals $10.16 in 1947.” Amazingly, the chair is listed on Amazon now at $118.53 [1] (at least for my login/cookies/tracking; price includes shipping estimated at 6 days), the equivalent of $8.31 in 1947, a 60% off sale. The cost probably has some externality tradeoffs however. Was the wood clear cut by children from thousand year old forests? Was the chair manufactured by prisoners using chemicals known by the state of California to cause cancer? 0. https://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=145&year=2018&toYear=1947 https://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=145&ye... 1. https://www.amazon.com/Modway-EEI-510-WEN-Fathom-Mid-Century-Plywood/dp/B004K8PLS4 https://www.amazon.com/Modway-EEI-510-WEN-Fathom-Mid-Century...

jmdots 2y ago

This all great but for small time programmers trying to get a company off the ground, acting defensively is justifiable. It’s not always a question of a guy like Carmack having a good time cloning the big corp thing. Sometimes, and even many times lately it’s big corp obliterating inventive small business by releasing their own copy, or they simply use their monopolistic power to drive them into an inequitable sale. If you’re small time and have a great idea, you’re better off going stealth and this is its own mitigation against destructive copying.

thomastjeffery 2y ago

The irony of copyright is that it demands copied design. Want an online menu for your restaurant? Well, you can't just go copying someone else's design; so you must create your own from scratch. Will yours look and behave practically identically to the other? Yes. Will both websites be overall worse quality than if everyone just collaborated on a standard design? Yes. Would it save the world an incredible amount of redundant work to just allow people to copy each others' work? Yes. Who wins in this arrangement? Only those who have already won. Keep looking at this pattern, and you will enter a deep cavernous rabbit-hole. At the bottom, you will find yourself at the very core of design itself: the goals, philosophies, and systemic failures of every design we use today can be traced back to this point: collaboration must be avoided at all costs. Compatibility is the cardinal sin, and it must be punished. So we go on, building silos upon silos. When will we ever learn? --- There is a lot of talk lately for change. They say, "AI will be the end of copyright. It's too important to hold back the potential of AI over a petty argument for intellectual property." I don't believe for a minute that LLMs will ever reach the lofty goal of "General Intelligence". I don't believe for a minute that megacorps like OpenAI, Google, and Meta deserve a free pass to siphon data for profit. So why is it that these words ring true? AI has nothing to do with it: it's design itself that has incredible potential, and we should absolutely stop holding it back. Intellectual Property is nothing more than a demand against progress.

fasteddie31003 2y ago

This is relevant for me today since we are designing a new house. To go with an architect is looking like between $50k - $100k for basic building schematics and not the build plans. This seems like a lot to me. The route I'm going down now is finding houses I like on Zillow and hiring a Designer on Fivrr to basically copy them and create a 3D model in Revit that can eventually become building plans. So far the Fivrr Designer costs $100 per Zillow house to model into pretty good Revit plans that I could take to a Draftsman in my area to turn into building plans. It feels a little like cheating, but I've been seeing good results so far.

mlism 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

karmakaze 2y ago

This is a great quote: > In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it.”

manav 2y ago
Copying from Xerox, some irony there.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  Adds layers of irony to their “Redmond, start your photocopiers” dig https://www.padawan.info/en/images/photocopiers.html https://www.padawan.info/en/images/photocopiers.html
  - freetinker 2y ago
    I miss this flavor of advertising. It all feels too anodyne these days.
- karmakaze 2y ago
  It's also a lesson that always seems to fail to be learned. Xerox had the capital to set up a research arm, then failed to convert on any ideas because they were too focused on their current cash-cow. They eventually transitioned to "document company" where a document wasn't only paper, but it was too little/late.
  - razakel 2y ago
    The same thing happened to Kodak - they were a tech company that thought they were a chemical company.
  - kragen 2y ago