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Comment by simiones

5 months ago

> "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law.

On the contrary. Except for discussions about punitive damages and so on, insider knowledge or lack thereof is completely irrelevant to patent law. If company A has a patent on something, they can assert said patent against company B regardless of whether any person in company B had ever seen or heard of company A and their patent. Company B could have a legal trail proving they invented their product that matches the patent from scratch with no outside knowledge, and that they had been doing this before company A had even filed their patent, and it wouldn't matter at all - company A, by virtue of filing and being granted a patent, has a legal monopoly on that invention.

In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work. Even more, you have your own copyright over your own work, and can assert it over anyone that tries to copy your work without permission, despite an identical work existing and being owned by someone else.

Now, purely in principle this would remain true even if you had seen the other work. But in reality, it's impossible to convince any jury that you happened to produce, entirely out of your own creativity, an original work that is identical to a work you had seen before.

> But you very much can rewrite a project under new license even if you have in depth knowledge. IFF you don't have the old project open/look at it while doing so.

No, this is very much false. You will never be able to win a court case on this, as any significant similarity between your work and the original will be considered a copyright violation, per the preponderance of the evidence.

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simiones

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aleph_minus_one  5 months ago

> In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work.

This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower:

> https://www.travelandleisure.com/photography/illegal-to-take...

> https://www.headout.com/blog/eiffel-tower-copyright/

  • simiones  5 months ago

    This has no relation to what I was saying. Taking a photo of a copyrighted work is a method for creating a copy of said work using a mechanical device, so it is of course covered by copyright (whether buildings or light shows fall under copyright is an irrelevant detail).

    What I'm saying is that if you, say, create an image of a red oval in MS Paint, you have copyright over said image. If 2 years later I create an identical image myself having never seen your image, I also have copyright over my image - despite it being identical to your image, I have every right to sell copies of my image, and even to sue someone who distributes copies of my image without my permission (but not if they're distributing copies of your image).

    But if I had seen your image of a red oval before I created mine, it's basically impossible for me to prove that I created my own image out of my own creativity, and I didn't just copy yours. So, if you were to sue me for copyright infringement, I would almost certainly lose in front of any reasonable jury.

  • chimeracoder  5 months ago

    > This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower:

    That example is not analogous to the topic at hand.

    But furthermore, it also is specific to French/European copyright law. In the US, the US Copyright Act would not permit restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces.