4 ms·

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.
      • dllthomas 12y ago
        Copyright cares about provenance, though. If you put out a book called "Jimmy Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and your work was more or less identical to "Harry Potter" and you had never encountered Harry Potter, directly or indirectly, then you wouldn't be guilty of copyright infringement. Of course, proving that would be difficult, given the spectacularly low odds of just happening to write the same tens of thousands of words. In this case, if the algorithm is one of a narrow range of obvious algorithms, "just happened to..." might be more believable.
• Someone 12y ago
  Not the PowerPoint, but likely the copyright over parts of it. Presentations may be self-running, embed fonts, contain graphics, or simply use templates whose copyright Microsoft owns.