7 ms·

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

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
    - stcredzero 12y ago
      It's evident to me that the current notions of the "Threshold of originality" lag far behind the capabilities of today's media. Just because something is mechanically produced shouldn't mean that it can't be copyrightable. That said, it's pretty foolish to copyright something like that. I just don't think I can determine that it would always be foolish to copyright such information, so the conservative choice would be to leave the copyright in the hands of the meta-creator.
phy6 12y ago
Does Microsoft own my powerpoints?
- rtkwe 12y ago
  That'd be a fair comparison if Powerpoint generated powerpoint shows for you without any work on your part.
  - cmpb 12y ago
    Well now that's like saying the generator generated mazes without any work on his part.
  - randomdata 12y ago
    If you look closely, the path isn't exactly the same. There was some work involved. Perhaps they even attempted to re-implemented the algorithm? Are algorithms copyrightable?
    - elarkin 12y ago
      Cynically, I would say that it depends on whether or not you can get your case to the Supreme Court. Normally, though, algorithms are not copyrightable. Though Books about algorithms are. In this case, the guy published a book containing a maze, so reproduction of the maze should fall under copyright.
    - jonnathanson 12y ago
      My understanding of copyright law [1] is that the maze itself, not the maze-generation process, is the issue here. The author accrues a copyright over the maze by virtue of having published it. Kraft's republication of the maze is potential infringement of the copyright over the maze. The algorithm is almost irrelevant in that determination. The copyright is over the work itself, not the process of creating the work. [2] The test for determining infringement is, more or less, the classic smell test: does it look like a duck, walk like a duck, and quack like a duck? Would a reasonable individual conclude, from visual inspection, that Kraft's maze is strikingly similar to the original maze? Even if there are some small changes here and there, it could still be found to be sufficiently similar. For instance, if I tried to put out a version of a popular song that was ever so slightly different from that song, I'd be infringing if a reasonable listener found my version sufficiently close to identical. If I put out a book called "Jimmy Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," and my work was more or less identical to "Harry Potter," with some character names and minor sequences changed, I'd probably be found to be infringing upon the original work. [1] IANAL, but I've dealt with copyright issues, to a certain tangential extent, in a professional capacity. [2] Note that we're talking about copyrights here, not patents, which are different animals altogether.
Nursie 12y ago
Why would it not be? If I write a website and put thousands of mazes up, what difference does it make if I created them with a tool I wrote? Does the number of mazes created make a difference? Why? I can copyright a computer program that is the binary output of a compiler...
- jordigh 12y ago
  > Does the number of mazes created make a difference? Why? I understand that in some jurisdictions reproducing a small portion of a larger work, then it may constitute fair use. Bullet point 3: The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html Of course, this is but one bullet point out of four, and the law is fuzzy, as it should be.
  - Nursie 12y ago
    Hadn't thought of that angle. You're right, there may be something in that (though I imagine you could argue each maze is a 'work') I was more coming from the idea that just because there are lots of them generated surely doesn't mean they fall outsidd the law.
dllthomas 12y ago
Given that he wrote the program, exercising creativity there, and (I presume) exercised additional creative activity manually selecting which outputs to post from the space of generated mazes, it seems likely that it's possible to copyright something like this. IANAL, though.
- metacorrector 12y ago
  There was a project in the early days of the internet boom, a website was put up (in australia IIRC) with every possible melody combination (using discrete scales) along with a copyright notice for each one, so nobody would be able to write a song in the future without infringing. even if there was no creativity involved and thus the copyright would fail, it seems (IANAL) that it might put the melodies into the public domain, since how could somebody claim you had no right to use a melody that you had already published?
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    Copyright is not ownership of a particular composition, its ownership of the right to copy a particular work. While similar composition often is relevant evidence in a copyright case, the actual critical fact is, for ownership, the act of creation, and for infringement, whether the creation was copied/derived from a particular other work in which copyright ownership existed due to the act of creation. The project you describe seems to be based on a patent-like idea of copyright, where infringement is independent of whether or not the work is an actual derivative of the protected work.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      Moreover, it ignores that the creative act, when you are viewing things from a perspective of "there is a space of every possible ...", is locating interesting locations within that space, which an enumeration is not doing.
    - metacorrector 12y ago
      I don't think (as I said) the guy was intending to chase around the world protecting his copyrights, he was trying to show the absurdity of the definitions that copyright law depends on, and in that sense what he did refuted a priori your comment. You use the term "act of creation" as if he didn't engage in it. Not sure how you can claim that he didn't create the melodies, he did, doesn't matter that he didn't ever hear them, neither did Beethoven (you get my point). If he had any musical training he could credibly state that he was creating a Philip Glass style composition exploring the space of melodies blah blah blah. You don't think a skilled musician could characterize and categorize the different elements of this work? If he was serious about it, he could call it his ring cycle and start playing it, all the way through, a one hour performance a week. And then I pointed out, and you ignored, that even if he didn't go out and claim copyright infringement, there is still the point that he insulated himself in a certain way from infringement claims from others. I think he made an interesting philosophical point, I think you should chew on it in a more interesting way. In a case of an actual claim of infringement, he created lawyer fodder that could drag through courts for years, had he been a musician. No, I don't think he overturned copyright law. To a large extent, judges make decisions based on practicalities more than they do on the letter of the law. The letter of the law comes up when there are colliding practicalities, and ambiguity in the law. Still, I think it's a more interesting thought exercise than you are giving it credit for.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
It's where IP is a proxy for rewarding the original creator for the effort gone to. Clearly Kraft's designer just found the first maze that was circular-ish that came up in Google images and plonked it down and moved onto the next rush job. Kraft clearly nicked it, or where careless as to wither it was copyrighted, but we have now wondered into output of program territory instead of the much clearer area of did kraft just grab the first thing that they could find? You won't succeed in suing them - so this is probably the best option he has.
ars 12y ago
> is it even possible to copyright something like this No, I don't believe so: "The U.S. Copyright Office has taken the position that "in order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable."
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
jahewson 12y ago
Yes. While the computer program itself is a creative work, the important factor is that it is being used as a tool in an overall creative process. There are most likely aesthetic concerns which are contained in the program which are reflected in the output, meaning that it is not just a purely mathematical exercise. There may also have been some manual selection process in which the mazes were assessed for aesthetic quality - which counts as creative from a copyright standpoint, though this applies primarily to an overall work which is a compilation. However, if the maze is entirely the product of a random process then the online compilation could be protected as a 'selective' creative work, but individual mazes would not. Note that even if each individual maze is eligible for protection that the author doesn't end up with copyright over Fibonacci mazes, it's only the creative parts, whatever aesthetic tweaks (or manual selection in the case of a compilation) were made that is covered. So you could produce a very similar maze with your own program using your own creative decisions without infringing.
kbutler 12y ago
In the US, copyright automatically applies to "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression". (There are some exceptions, like for US government works.) "original" boils down to "more creative than alphabetical ordering", and "tangible media" includes pictorial/graphic displays. So yes, the maze is likely subject to copyright. However, there's very little "creative expression" in the individual maze, as an algorithmic result, the creative expression is in the inputs, resulting in a "thin" copyright - only applying to virtually identical copies. In the specific case, Kraft's maze is a significantly better maze - also evidence of the lack of individual creative analysis in the original. There's definite copying - the styling and layout are too close for there to be otherwise, but the creative expression in the original is so minimal that it likely balances the fair use criteria (nature of the work, effect on the negligible original market suggest it is fair use, commercial use counts against fair use.) Not sure which way a judge would rule. Kraft is probably very unhappy with their illustrator for not just creating an original maze...

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
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    It's evident to me that the current notions of the "Threshold of originality" lag far behind the capabilities of today's media. Just because something is mechanically produced shouldn't mean that it can't be copyrightable. That said, it's pretty foolish to copyright something like that. I just don't think I can determine that it would always be foolish to copyright such information, so the conservative choice would be to leave the copyright in the hands of the meta-creator.

phy6 12y ago

Does Microsoft own my powerpoints?

rtkwe 12y ago
That'd be a fair comparison if Powerpoint generated powerpoint shows for you without any work on your part.
- cmpb 12y ago
  Well now that's like saying the generator generated mazes without any work on his part.
- randomdata 12y ago
  If you look closely, the path isn't exactly the same. There was some work involved. Perhaps they even attempted to re-implemented the algorithm? Are algorithms copyrightable?
  - elarkin 12y ago
    Cynically, I would say that it depends on whether or not you can get your case to the Supreme Court. Normally, though, algorithms are not copyrightable. Though Books about algorithms are. In this case, the guy published a book containing a maze, so reproduction of the maze should fall under copyright.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    My understanding of copyright law [1] is that the maze itself, not the maze-generation process, is the issue here. The author accrues a copyright over the maze by virtue of having published it. Kraft's republication of the maze is potential infringement of the copyright over the maze. The algorithm is almost irrelevant in that determination. The copyright is over the work itself, not the process of creating the work. [2] The test for determining infringement is, more or less, the classic smell test: does it look like a duck, walk like a duck, and quack like a duck? Would a reasonable individual conclude, from visual inspection, that Kraft's maze is strikingly similar to the original maze? Even if there are some small changes here and there, it could still be found to be sufficiently similar. For instance, if I tried to put out a version of a popular song that was ever so slightly different from that song, I'd be infringing if a reasonable listener found my version sufficiently close to identical. If I put out a book called "Jimmy Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," and my work was more or less identical to "Harry Potter," with some character names and minor sequences changed, I'd probably be found to be infringing upon the original work. [1] IANAL, but I've dealt with copyright issues, to a certain tangential extent, in a professional capacity. [2] Note that we're talking about copyrights here, not patents, which are different animals altogether.

Nursie 12y ago

Why would it not be? If I write a website and put thousands of mazes up, what difference does it make if I created them with a tool I wrote? Does the number of mazes created make a difference? Why? I can copyright a computer program that is the binary output of a compiler...

jordigh 12y ago
> Does the number of mazes created make a difference? Why? I understand that in some jurisdictions reproducing a small portion of a larger work, then it may constitute fair use. Bullet point 3: The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html Of course, this is but one bullet point out of four, and the law is fuzzy, as it should be.
- Nursie 12y ago
  Hadn't thought of that angle. You're right, there may be something in that (though I imagine you could argue each maze is a 'work') I was more coming from the idea that just because there are lots of them generated surely doesn't mean they fall outsidd the law.

dllthomas 12y ago

Given that he wrote the program, exercising creativity there, and (I presume) exercised additional creative activity manually selecting which outputs to post from the space of generated mazes, it seems likely that it's possible to copyright something like this. IANAL, though.

metacorrector 12y ago
There was a project in the early days of the internet boom, a website was put up (in australia IIRC) with every possible melody combination (using discrete scales) along with a copyright notice for each one, so nobody would be able to write a song in the future without infringing. even if there was no creativity involved and thus the copyright would fail, it seems (IANAL) that it might put the melodies into the public domain, since how could somebody claim you had no right to use a melody that you had already published?
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Copyright is not ownership of a particular composition, its ownership of the right to copy a particular work. While similar composition often is relevant evidence in a copyright case, the actual critical fact is, for ownership, the act of creation, and for infringement, whether the creation was copied/derived from a particular other work in which copyright ownership existed due to the act of creation. The project you describe seems to be based on a patent-like idea of copyright, where infringement is independent of whether or not the work is an actual derivative of the protected work.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Moreover, it ignores that the creative act, when you are viewing things from a perspective of "there is a space of every possible ...", is locating interesting locations within that space, which an enumeration is not doing.
  - metacorrector 12y ago
    I don't think (as I said) the guy was intending to chase around the world protecting his copyrights, he was trying to show the absurdity of the definitions that copyright law depends on, and in that sense what he did refuted a priori your comment. You use the term "act of creation" as if he didn't engage in it. Not sure how you can claim that he didn't create the melodies, he did, doesn't matter that he didn't ever hear them, neither did Beethoven (you get my point). If he had any musical training he could credibly state that he was creating a Philip Glass style composition exploring the space of melodies blah blah blah. You don't think a skilled musician could characterize and categorize the different elements of this work? If he was serious about it, he could call it his ring cycle and start playing it, all the way through, a one hour performance a week. And then I pointed out, and you ignored, that even if he didn't go out and claim copyright infringement, there is still the point that he insulated himself in a certain way from infringement claims from others. I think he made an interesting philosophical point, I think you should chew on it in a more interesting way. In a case of an actual claim of infringement, he created lawyer fodder that could drag through courts for years, had he been a musician. No, I don't think he overturned copyright law. To a large extent, judges make decisions based on practicalities more than they do on the letter of the law. The letter of the law comes up when there are colliding practicalities, and ambiguity in the law. Still, I think it's a more interesting thought exercise than you are giving it credit for.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

It's where IP is a proxy for rewarding the original creator for the effort gone to. Clearly Kraft's designer just found the first maze that was circular-ish that came up in Google images and plonked it down and moved onto the next rush job. Kraft clearly nicked it, or where careless as to wither it was copyrighted, but we have now wondered into output of program territory instead of the much clearer area of did kraft just grab the first thing that they could find? You won't succeed in suing them - so this is probably the best option he has.

ars 12y ago

> is it even possible to copyright something like this No, I don't believe so: "The U.S. Copyright Office has taken the position that "in order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable."

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

jahewson 12y ago

Yes. While the computer program itself is a creative work, the important factor is that it is being used as a tool in an overall creative process. There are most likely aesthetic concerns which are contained in the program which are reflected in the output, meaning that it is not just a purely mathematical exercise. There may also have been some manual selection process in which the mazes were assessed for aesthetic quality - which counts as creative from a copyright standpoint, though this applies primarily to an overall work which is a compilation. However, if the maze is entirely the product of a random process then the online compilation could be protected as a 'selective' creative work, but individual mazes would not. Note that even if each individual maze is eligible for protection that the author doesn't end up with copyright over Fibonacci mazes, it's only the creative parts, whatever aesthetic tweaks (or manual selection in the case of a compilation) were made that is covered. So you could produce a very similar maze with your own program using your own creative decisions without infringing.

kbutler 12y ago

In the US, copyright automatically applies to "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression". (There are some exceptions, like for US government works.) "original" boils down to "more creative than alphabetical ordering", and "tangible media" includes pictorial/graphic displays. So yes, the maze is likely subject to copyright. However, there's very little "creative expression" in the individual maze, as an algorithmic result, the creative expression is in the inputs, resulting in a "thin" copyright - only applying to virtually identical copies. In the specific case, Kraft's maze is a significantly better maze - also evidence of the lack of individual creative analysis in the original. There's definite copying - the styling and layout are too close for there to be otherwise, but the creative expression in the original is so minimal that it likely balances the fair use criteria (nature of the work, effect on the negligible original market suggest it is fair use, commercial use counts against fair use.) Not sure which way a judge would rule. Kraft is probably very unhappy with their illustrator for not just creating an original maze...