24 ms·

This maze looks familiar

• woutersf 12y ago
  Did you contact them?
  • yawz 12y ago
    I'm sure his lawyer did.
• bshimmin 12y ago
  Reminds me of Roger Penrose and toilet paper plagiarism: http://web.archive.org/web/20050312084035/http://www.parascope.com/articles/slips/fs_151.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20050312084035/http://www.parasco...
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • JetSpiegel 12y ago
    This deserves a submission. > "So often we read of very large companies riding rough-shod over small businesses or individuals," said David Bradley, director of Pentaplex. "But when it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited by a multi-national to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a Knight of the Realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made."
    • krazydad 12y ago
      [This is Jim Bumgardner - author of the maze that Kraft copied]. Amusingly, this comes full circle. One of the puzzle varieties on my site is based on Penrose tilings. http://krazydad.com/slitherlink/sfiles/sl_penrose_b001.pdf http://krazydad.com/slitherlink/sfiles/sl_penrose_b001.pdf Years ago, I sought (and received) permission from Penrose to use his tiling on these puzzles.
      • GhotiFish 12y ago
        hey! That's loopy! From the Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. Play it here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/loopy.html http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/loopy... You can play penrose style puzzles by selecting the type in the furthest right drop down menu. (beware, select custom and choose easy mode, becuase hard mode is hard)
  • jmaygarden 12y ago
    How did that case end?
• innguest 12y ago
  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.
  • goatforce5 12y ago
    You can save yourself the trouble of finding out the address of their lawyers by simply putting a Kraft and/or Spongebob logo on your website... They'll come to you quick smart!
  • triangleman 12y ago
    Ah yes, the silver rule.
  • ars 12y ago
    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).
    • dllthomas 12y ago
      "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.
• ZoF 12y ago
  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.
  • dspillett 12y ago
    > who probably thought nothing of Working for a media related company or similar he will have been told not to do that sort of thing, officially at least (it'll be in the company handbook which he'll have signed a document stating he has read and understood) - so yes if he is still there he'll get some of the fallout. The company should have checks and balances on such things though, so they can't blame a sole individual and wash their hands of it without recall of the item and/or recompense to the creator they've copied.
    • jonnathanson 12y ago
      Yes. More than one person's hands at the company are almost assuredly dirty here. Maybe not directly, but indirectly. No consumer packaged goods company, least of all a giant like Kraft, puts anything onto a box without many layers of approval and rounds of creative review. In this case, the buck presumably stops with the brand manager for the Mac & Cheese product. I doubt he or she would have even thought to ask about the IP origins of the maze when conducting creative review. Nevertheless, he or she bears some responsibility as the owner of the review process. Most likely this maze was lifted and passed off as original by someone a bit lower down the food chain: an agency staffer, a freelance designer, or an artist at the company. But there is virtually no scenario in which that person's contribution wasn't reviewed a half-dozen times by people with managerial authority. At CPG companies, the package is an incredibly important and borderline sacred thing. Nothing gets onto the package by accident, and as such, it would be incredibly difficult for Kraft to argue its way out of responsibility. Another possibility is that Nickelodeon (the owner of Spongebob) provided the artwork, including the maze, to Kraft. This makes identifying the proximately responsible party a bit trickier, but Kraft still bears a burden. It would also mean that two companies, and possibly two brand managers, had eyes on this.
• chton 12y ago
  Hypothetical question: is it possible that they did not copy it? The author here indicates that the original maze was generated by software, maybe Kraft stumbled upon the same algorithm, or a close variation of it (considering the minor differences between the two)? Obviously, this is very out-of-left-field and I don't believe it either, but it's not impossible that Kraft didn't plagiarise anything.
  • joshstrange 12y ago
    Seeing how the author says he developed said algorithm and the maze is from Book #1 Maze #1 I don't think that's at all possible.
    • chton 12y ago
      That's a very good point, but maybe it was #1 because it was the default case, the simplest to generate?
  • hawleyal 12y ago
    It is impossible.
    • chton 12y ago
      Mind elaborating why? I'm not versed in maze generation, but I am a software dev, and reinventing an existing algorithm does happen. It might be very unlikely in this case, but I'd just like to know why.
      • tfinniga 12y ago
        With maze generation, you need some way of deciding which subset of the possible walls you're going to keep. Usually you rely on some random or pseudorandom numbers to feed into the algorithm or use internally. Having the maze verts in the same positions is possible and not too unlikely. Having the same walls is astronomically unlikely. Even if you had exactly the same algorithm (possible, but unlikely) and the implementations used the random values in exactly the same order, you'd also need exactly the same random seed. There are a lot of possibilities for that seed.
• ejr 12y ago
  We seem to have killed the site. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:krazydad.com/blog/2014/07/13/hmm-this-maze-looks-familiar/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:krazyd...
• dspillett 12y ago
  > If you’re gonna steal a maze, you might want to try stealing from maze book #47, and do a horizontal swap on it before you rotate it 90 degrees. That’ll slow me down some… And now the next maze to be copied by someone will be that one, and they'll argue that this statement is permission!
• DanBC 12y ago
  What's the offline DMCA workflow? Send an invoice for a reasonable amount, then sue if they don't pay?
  • logicallee 12y ago
    Pick up the phone and call around until you find out what their limits are before some approval is needed, you can probably even explain what happened, and that you just want to invoice in an amount that can be approved, then just submit an invoice for under that amount, with a note that upon payment you will give a one-time license for the already-printed kraft boxes.
• bby 12y ago
  I saw your post on /r/legaladvice. Good luck pursuing this further!
• jordigh 12y ago
  Sure, copyright infringement, plagiarism, but not theft! Copying is not theft! We need to hear this more often. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ
  • jfoutz 12y ago
    Luckily, neither the essay nor anyone else in this thread are talking about theft.
    • jordigh 12y ago
      From TFA: > If you’re gonna steal a maze, you might want to try stealing from maze book #47, and do a horizontal swap on it before you rotate it 90 degrees.
      • hyperpape 12y ago
        Jiminy cricket. Copyright violation isn't theft, but saying you "stole" a maze isn't a literal accusation of theft either. "Good artists copy; great artists steal." -- someone a long time ago "UMMMMM, IT'S NOT ACTUALLY THEFT!" --you.
        • jordigh 12y ago
          It is important to repeat "copying is not theft" because it's at the heart of the arguments that e.g. the MPAA make to the public in order to convince them of the evils of copyright infringement ("you wouldn't steal a car," etc). TFA seems to be trying to appeal to the evil of Kraft's deeds by suggesting that something has been stolen from him. It seems clear to me that nothing of the sort of theft has happened, and at least some people would instead be flattered to have their work reproduced large scale instead of slinging accusations of theft. If it were me, I would use this to promote the value of my own work. Maybe I would try to talk to someone at Kraft before firing the lawyer cannons, perhaps just work out a deal where they give me some sort of recognition. Even recognising the copyright infringement, it seems to be on such small scale (one maze out of hundreds?) that it might be difficult to argue for damages incurred. This person isn't flattered, but the language of "theft" indicates a graver damage than what actually has happened.
• phy6 12y ago
  At what point do a series of angled lines become copywritable? After two lines? Three? Can I copywrite two lines meeting at 67 degrees, and then claim angles 65-69 as like works? Can I then claim that your maze contains my intellectual property in several places? (And would you still feel your rights were violated had kraft taken two of your mazes and glued them together?)
  • Piskvorrr 12y ago
    It's a matter of arriving at the result. In other words, what matters is whether you used the original (and with what intent), not whether you arrived at the same result. Unfortunately, both of these are hard to prove. Not exactly intuitive, I'd agree; see e.g. this: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 (Oh, and it's "copyright")
  • icebraining 12y ago
    s/copywrite/copyright/ With regard to your question, it depends on whether it passes the Threshold of Originality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
• cloverich 12y ago
  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?
  • jordigh 12y ago
    A number of people have attempted to claim copyright on the output of programs. One of the most infamous examples is how Wolfram claims copyright over the output of Wolfram Alpha. http://yro-beta.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/2055221/how-wolfram-alphas-copyright-claims-could-change-software http://yro-beta.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/2055221/how-wolf...
    • userbinator 12y ago
      This is interesting because a similar thought experiment that immediately occurred to me would be to consider a program that calculates digits of pi, sqrt(2), or some other transcendental number, given some user input --- basically, a calculator. The program itself is almost certainly copyrightable, but what about its output? These mazes feel like a similar idea to me - he even mentioned that this particular one is generated by a "fibonacci spiral", so there is likely a compact mathematical description of its vertices, and a PRNG (further thought experiment: what if the "randomness" was generated by a true RNG?) along with its seed that was used to determine where the lines appeared. It's an artistic work, but the majority of the "work" was done by an algorithm - he didn't manually draw all the lines.
      • sp332 12y ago
        Remember, copyright is about "provenance", or how you arrive at the result. If you get the same maze but you didn't copy from the original, it can't be a copyright violation. It's the copying that creates the problem. That said, there is a "minimum of creativity" that limits what you can copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
• mcherm 12y ago
  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.
  • nmjohn 12y ago
    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 sometimes. I would be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, that if someone in a position to actually do something about it was made aware that they had mass produced copyrighted materials, they would be willing to offer a reasonable fee. However actually getting in touch with that person may be challenging without legal action.
    • mcherm 12y ago
      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.
• pyb 12y ago
  Notice how they removed a couple of walls and made it 5x easier than the original.
  • triangleman 12y ago
    I think they actually added a wall and made it harder.
    • pyb 12y ago
      Ah yes, you're right
  • decode 12y ago
    I'm not sure which you mean by "original", but in the KrazyDad version you can go in a nearly straight line from the start point to the end point, but in the Kraft version, you have to take a spiral path through more than 360 degrees around the circle. Even if they started with the KrazyDad version, that's a pretty interesting change.
• rrss1122 12y ago
  I tried looking on the linked mazes page for a license, the closest thing (in my opinon) was a statement to feel free to reproduce for personal, school, and church use. I figure if I couldn't find the copyright notice, it's probably hard for someone at Kraft to find it too (unless that statement IS the copyright notice). Does this necessarily exclude a for-profit use, or does that have to be explicitly declared? IANAL, so I'd like to know.
  • dllthomas 12y ago
    This seems a good example of the actual original meaning of "the exception proves the rule". The fact that he specifically states an intent for it to be free in those cases implies that he does not intend for it to be free more generally. Coupled with the fact that you automatically have copyright on copyrightable works, and that by default you need license to copy copyrighted works outside fair use and similar exceptions, I think it's clear that if these mazes are copyrightable and if the maze wasn't independently generated (both of which seem more probable than not), then Kraft owes him some money here.
  • PaulAJ 12y ago
    The maze becomes copyright once it is fixed in tangible form. The license does not include commercial use (which this clearly is), so it is unlicensed.
  • coldpie 12y ago
    The copyright notice is on every single page of the linked PDF, and every page at krazydad.com has a copyright notice at the bottom. What trouble are you having, exactly? Additionally, you don't have to provide a copyright notice or any licensing terms for your copyright to be valid an enforceable (with some very special exceptions blah blah).
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• thirdusername 12y ago
  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.
• Yimgo 12y ago
  How he dealt with the design agency is quite selfless and ended up with $4K in donations for local food banks. http://krazydad.com/blog/2014/07/18/about-that-mac-cheese-maze/ http://krazydad.com/blog/2014/07/18/about-that-mac-cheese-ma...