Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

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Your GF is not an artist whose reputation has been rock solid for decades and who doesn't have any commercial interests to protect.

I am not arguing a general case; I'm arguing specifically that Maisel should not have complained, let alone started a lawsuit, about this specific use of one of his works, in part because he is in the position to do so. He can let a thousand derivative suns, making a few handfuls of people happy each time, bloom without any negative effects for him.

But really, if this guy had used a picture by your girlfriend as the cover art, she would have been pissed? Why? Because a couple of dozen people now have a CD with some version of her art on the cover? Because some guy on the internet has that version on his website? I don't understand that at all. Even unknown artists are supremely unlikely to suffer any negative consequences as a result of this tiny project using one of their images. It isn't like this is a serious commercial effort: it was born out of love, not out of a quest for cash.

I don't know about photography but I do know how much effort a painter has to put into each of his painting, especially for those who's great at "attention to detail".

And the 8-bit derivative is but a thin layer on top of enormous work. Think of someone who add 10 lines of code on top of your 10,000 lines of code and publish it without asking for permission.

The artist definitely have the right to be pissed at least.

Your "thin-layer" analogy sucks. I propose one instead that I think is about 10000+10 times better.

How about instead we take your 10kloc of code, and replace every char with a randomly-chosen char with the same rough shape ("w" => "w" or "m", "l" => "1" or "l" or "I", etc). And we publish that.

The new product has some interesting properties. Information-theoretically, the new product has less entropy than your code, so it cannot be converted into your code. It doesn't do what your code did (like let you recognize Miles Davis if you didn't already know it was him). On the other hand, it's clearly derivative, because it uses _exactly_ the same whitespace, and the same line-lengths. If you hold printouts of both of them side-by-side, from far enough away, you can't tell which is which... but if you get up close enough the difference is obvious. One is obviously a technically-detailed work that had some specific requirements and took a lot of skill, the other is obviously and evidently less so (but still took a LITTLE skill, or at least effort). If someone already knows the original, the derivative will call it to mind, but if they don't, the derivative is uninteresting. The derivative clearly is a comment on the original, because otherwise it wouldn't exist.

Actually, I think I've got a pretty tight analogy here.

Why on earth would you be pissed off?

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