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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

There is a real cognitive disconnect in our legal system with how businesses can go after something like youtube-dl for for potentially facilitating infringement while companies just straight copy features from their competitors. Why should Disney have this protection of their IP innovation but Snap doesn’t?

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Copyright protects the expression of an idea in a tangible medium. All of these story features are arguably expressions of the same idea, but they're not the same expression, so it's not a copyright issue.

There's an amazing variety of creative products that are based on the same idea; often the better ones aren't the first ones.

Copyright protects more than just the specific expression, they also protect collections of ideas. If I publish a novel about a magical wizard who can control things with his mind, flies around the galaxy in a spaceship shaped like an X, carries a laser sword, and battles his cyborg father who wears all black, I bet I would get a call from Disney's lawyers. That is because my work could be deemed substantially similar to Disney's IP even if it is a different expression.

> I bet I would get a call from Disney's lawyers.

Disney's lawyers are famously litigious. I'm not clear that they would win a case here. (Although they might have success with this HN comment as evidence)

The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: Livid Land (1987) has a similar high-level of comparison to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), and that case was thrown out.

Except that book didn't have "a similar high-level of comparison to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire". To quote the judge: "The contrast between the total concept and feel of the works is so stark that any serious comparison of the two strains credulity"[1]. There is a sort of "know it when I see it" nature that is hard to define, but copyright certainly protects works that are substantially similar even if not straight copies, at least in the US.

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-12134288

What I mean is:

"Both Willy [a wizard] and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures."

is very comparable to your completely hypothetical example above.

So, if a paragraph of cherry-picked, high-level description are the only identified similarities, there is no case in copyright law.

The only real similarity between those two stories that isn't easily attributed to a trope of the genre is the fact that scene took place in a bathroom. Everything else is unspecific and common. Also there is a difference when one scene shows similarity rather than the overall arc of the story.

Not defending the youtube-dl take down, but you can write a story about a boy living under a closet with an abusing adopted family who finds out he is a wizard and there is nothing anybody with the rights to Harry Potter can do about it. Copyright protects concrete versions, not abstract ideas (very much by design, and very much deliberate).

That isn't true. Copyright does not just protect "concrete versions". For example, here is a famous court case[1] in which one of the criteria was whether a "ordinary reasonable person" would find there was substantial similarity between the two works. Some of the similarities can be as vague as "McDonald's character Mayor McCheese and Sid and Marty Krofft's character H.R. Pufnstuf both are fictional mayors that possess disproportionately large round heads."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_%26_Marty_Krofft_Televisio....

Patents still exist. If Twitter has violated any Snap patents then they are free to sue.

A copyright happens automatically and is a much more powerful tool to stop infringement while a patent is a pain to acquire, involves public disclosure of a process you often want to keep secret, and is often defined very narrowly. The two aren't really comparable in the level of protection that they provide for your IP.

I would generally be on the side of weakening copyright over strengthen patents, but the disconnect between the two just seems strange when they theoretically are supposed to serve the exact same purpose.

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