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Comment by williamcotton | Hacker News Reader

> > not the 1s and 0s that make up the image.

> Now this is plainly false. I cannot start selling a Mickey Mouse JPEG stripped straight from Disney's site.

You can absolutely go to the Disney website right now, download any JPEG, convert that image to a series of 1s and 0s, and then print that series of 1s and 0s on a t-shirt that you sell on your website.

Once those 1s and 0s are in a new non-digital medium they are no longer a copy of the image. Historically, the digital copy is a special case because practically there is no difference between the "expression" of a byte sequence in a digital medium and the "idea" of a byte sequence in a digital medium.

A t-shirt is not a digital medium so the rights holders don’t get to extend their monopolization of speech to a screen print of an unintelligible pattern of 1s and 0s.

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> A t-shirt is not a digital medium so the rights holders don’t get to extend their monopolization of speech to a screen print of an unintelligible pattern of 1s and 0s.

Can you point me to a ruling where this form of expression is successfully defended via fair use?

Seems unlikely that a judge would agree that a simple transformation between "digital" vs "non-digital" medium avoids copyright infringement (ex: if I produce a digital image, I definitely maintain copyright over digital and non-digital forms of that image; you can't just start printing and selling posters of my image).

You could try to argue that the change of medium is transformative, but that's not a generic argument for "digital" vs. "non-digital"; that's particular to the circumstances of the case.

I’m having a hard time figuring out what it is you’re missing here but I’m enjoying that I get to hone my rhetorical chops with this argument.

Finding the relevant case law is going to take me a little bit of time and it will probably require a bit of exposition so please be patient!

Briefly, more to come:

What are you missing about the fact that a t-shirt with Mickey Mouse on it and a t-shirt with a pattern of 1s and 0s are completely different. Is anyone buying and wearing the 1s and 0s shirt instead of buying and wearing a Mickey shirt?

You can’t say the same thing about digital copies! Is anyone buying the 1s and 0s of a JPEG in a digital medium and expecting to just have a bunch of 1s and 0s?

BTW, if anyone wants access to those 1s and 0s they only need to go to the Disney website to download the JPEG… they don’t need to buy my 1s and 0s shirt.

You’re just not thinking about this in legal terms: who has wronged who and how did they wrong them. These lawsuits are not criminal, not public wrongs, but rather private wrongs. People must show that there are concrete damages against their specific property!

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