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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

When I was in middle school, I had a short black and white photography class. For one assignment, we developed black and white images and then colored parts of them using kool-aid. I shot a stop sign and colored it red. The idea that http://davidsutherland.photoshelter.com/image/I0000jSgkaCbPa... would somehow infringe on my copyright because it's the same subject matter and coloring is absurd. It's not my picture.

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What if (as it appears to be in this case) the second photographer intentionally used your photograph as a template for his own, copying it to the extent that a casual observer would not notice that they are different, putting in the effort to make it as much as possible like yours? There's many more similarities in those pictures - e.g. it's the same location, the same iconic background buildings, the same shade of red and the detail of the sky has been removed in both.

I don't think the judge would have ruled this way if it had been a coincidence that the photos are alike.

And what if you both sit in a life drawing class drawing the same model? What if for some odd reason you decide to sit behind one of the participants and draw a portrait based off their drawing?

I certainly understand what you're getting at, but everything that we do today is based off of some idea that came before us. Is a certain level of indirection required for an expression to be considered appropriately unique?

From the article, "..there is a line between copying ideas and copying the original expression of ideas...", I would consider that opinion to be both myopic and absurd. We stand on the shoulders of giants - nothing created today can ever be considered to be truly "original".

> From the article, "..there is a line between copying ideas and copying the original expression of ideas...", I would consider that opinion to be both myopic and absurd.

Society needs to draw that line somewhere, to balance the free dissemination of culture and the possibility to make a living off creative works. As long as you are living in a democracy that needs to balance different opinions and make compromises, you'll never be able to get rid of this (unless you simply ignore the law, of course).

I understand it's popular at Yosemite to try to replicate Ansel Adams' famous photos. Can his estate claim ownership of all of those photos? It seems like a dangerous precedent to me.

> kool-aid

Do you know of a link? Googling is not working for me, mainly because of all the images of coloured kool-aid drink and all the DIY sites on dying yarn with kool-aid(!).

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