2600 Accused of Using Unauthorized Ink Splotches (2015) | Hacker News Reader

2600 Accused of Using Unauthorized Ink Splotches (2015)

2600.com

114 pointshandedness36 comments

Followup apology from accuser: https://www.2600.com/node/27106

I was expecting this to be about Rorschach slides for some reason. Somehow this is even sillier.

Maybe there should be some kind of way to sue for damages for claiming damages from work you don't own. What a waste of time.

I expected it to be about some secret image-copy-prevention constellation like EURion.

Me too, well, I was expecting them to be even more sexually explicit than usual...

But it is about Rorschach slides.

- What do you see when you look at this picture?

- I see a copyright infringement.

- How do you feel about it?

- Rather litigious...

Should be illegal.

I'm sure countless people pay these kinds of fines, just assuming that the company threatening to sue them is legitimate.

What's to stop me from just making a cool company name and sending cease and desist letters asking for fines for all kinds of "IP"?

The company issuing the threat had identified what they thought was a copied bit of artwork. This isn't a company just randomly attacking anyone - they honestly thought (via automated system) that one of their images had been partially copied.

>they honestly thought (via automated system)

that sounds like passing the blame to someone else ("automated system")

I was responding to a claim that it was entirely spurious. It did show signs of being a copy of a portion of the image. It turned out that that portion was a copy of another image, which they (or their system) didn't realise. But none of this is (as the top post in this thread claims) just invented. Had 2600 copied that portion of that image, court action against them may well have succeeded.

All of this could easily have happened without an automated system involved.

If it wasn't an automated system, they would have the cost of someone going through everything.

Do you really doubt that this is constantly happening and people are paying? Just look at the people who get DMCA'd for content they made themselves. Same system, just instead of paying a fee they lose their youtube/Twitch.

I agree with you that people are unfairly impacted by such practices; the whole thing even discourages some people from producing things.

Again, I was arguing against the claim it was without merit. A large team of people could have made the same mistake.

This was spurious entirely. They claimed ownership of an asset that wasn't theirs based on a composite asset they didn't own. They literally did no checking on whether or not they owned the original resource. The fact of the matter is this was an automated shakedown in one of the most corrupt industries in America. Automated copyright and patent abuse claims are literally sucking money out of the productive engine of the country and the whole industry needs to be sued out of existence and people who do it need to end up in jail for long sentences as a warning to other jerks that might try it.

No, the trunk archive image was owned by them and appeared to them to be the source of the ink blots. This is covered in the article. They didn't claim ownership of anything else. They asked for licensing fees for the use of what they thought was their image.

I had a run-in a few years back where a company claimed rights on a screenshot of work I did and tried to shake down bloggers who reproduced the original image saying that it was a derivative work of the screenshot. It turned out to be a completely innocent mistake, but with no disincentive to making such a mistake it will no doubt keep happening.

I got a copyright ding on YouTube for children singing come all ye faithful. I challenged it and they never responded, but the claim remained on the video for 30 days.

It's especially frustrating because the companies involved in claims and even the content is rarely identifiable and of course has no consequence.

Their claims that such copying would have been fair use are spurious at best. If they had copied that portion of the other image directly, it would have been copyright infringement. The fair use provisions are for specific circumstances, not just randomly copying. But they didn't copy it and had instead used a freely licensed common source, so they're in the clear, anyway.

This is nothing more than taking IP law to its logical conclusion... ;)

When was this published? The letter from Trunk Archive is dated August 2015.

I believe this is from 2015

That's why there is a (2015) after the title.

Seems there wasn't when I made the comment.

this has got to be automated right ?

(2015)

Thanks! Updated.

They literally took a portion of someone's image and duplicated it wholesale. What's so ridiculous about the original copyright infringement claim?

The original artist had licensed it freely, both 2600 and the Trunk author had used that freely licensed work.

2600 didn't mention that in their original post. Did they know that at the time they chose to use the image?

The argument they originally used seemed to be that the original work isn't actually worthy of copyright protection because it's just ink splotches.

From the article:

> But it gets even better. You see, not only are they trying to get us to pay them for using a few ink splotches, but as it turns out, the ink splotches don't belong to them in the first place! Our cover artist happened to keep meticulous records (probably not something they anticipated) and traced the source of the ink splotches to a Finnish artist at this page. [3]

And as you can see below, the Loadus image (which is at least five years old) is a background to both our Spring 2012 cover and "Harry Potter in a Vest" or whatever Trunk Archive is calling their image (which also may not even be theirs).

Here they are still expressing their willingness to infringe copyrights. They're still unaware of the license of the work at this point. They're only lamenting that the wrong party has lodged a complaint.

> They're still unaware of the license of the work at this point

No, they actually link to the original work, which if you follow, it's licence is pretty clear. Not reading the article the first time is fine (and common), but repeatedly insisting that people who have are in the wrong is kind of inexcusable.

No, the page they link to clearly licenses it freely and they and their artist (who kept "meticulous records") were clearly aware of it.

Though, their tone elsewhere does indicate that they would have happily copied it, so you are partially right.

That "someone" took the same freely licensed splatter graphic as them (it's linked from the article) and put it in their photo. That's their right, but doesn't mean they now own that splatter.

You used the image without permit, you dint ask. I would do the same and go after you. Good image recognition software they have. Are they still able to read the watermark within the pic?

This falls within fair usage rules.

As another user says above:

piracykills 1 minute ago | unvote [-]

The original artist had licensed it freely, both 2600 and the Trunk author had used that freely licensed work.

They link to the freely licensed source splatter image they used in the article. Someone else used the same freely licensed splatter in their photo, and they then got a claim because of that.

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