It's not better than that, but it IS better than having no such official acknowledgment, because said acknowledgment can be used as leverage to extract sex from merely adequately sexy American women.
The one that hurts me is that I wanted to create an internet search site with rankings based on how peer sites linked to pages. In 1995. I couldn't get investors to help fund the servers and bandwidth I needed.
The problem with unionizing programming vs plumbing is that the standard of trade for plumbing is well established. For programmers, you'd wind up paying fixed wage levels for people who are utterly incompetent.
Our non-unionization is exactly why a handful of grads 5 years out of school are earning 200K+ because they are really that good, while other work is going overseas at $8/hr.
Mod parent up. The number of different people who thought up a variation on pagerank is astounding, but there's only one company that executed it well, and had the funding to get through the development of that idea.
I specialized in C reduction for years (and was very successful at it), but I started making 6-figures after I gave that up and just started building business applications.
He is absolutely clearly using copyrighted materials. If you can look at his game and not see that, you either have a misunderstanding of what 'copyright materials' are, or you are blind.
You've misunderstood the parent. Try rereading it as:
The image of the pac-man. The image of the ghosts. The image of the dots and power dots.
All of those are clearly copyrightable, and what he did was an utterly clear case of violation. There is absolutely no chance of him winning in court, even if he wasn't up against a monstrously larger and well financed opponent.
The style of the maze is more interesting. That would probably fall under the special protections for gameplay mechanics.
Exactly. Anyone with half a brain would agree that he copied the artwork. Whether he did that with a xerox, cp, bittorrent or by hand in mspaint is irrelevant.
It's not in the description, but if you went and looked at the page it's clear that he's making a lookalike, and the copyright laws were heavily invested in by disney to prevent exactly that, and the law has come down clear and hard against Mickey Mouse lookalikes.
Doesn't help when the actual appearance of characters is so similar. Remember: a significant fraction of the copyright laws were written specifically to protect Mickey Mouse from lookalikes. You can't just make a pacman game with characters that look just like pacman characters, even with a clean-room design. It will still be a copyright violation.
Looking at your artwork, it seems obvious that you copied theirs. Probably not with a photcopier, or a binary file copy, but with a paint program of some sort I'd guess. It's still copying. Whatever you believe about the rightness/wrongness of copyright itself, I think you'd be hard pressed to find even a tiny fraction of the population that wouldn't say this fits the definition of copying.
A criminal is by definition someone who violates the law. And police have abused their powers since the beginning of there being police, that's relatively independent of the density of laws, it's more a measure of the corruptibility of human nature. Of course, it worsens the more power police have.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not better than that, but it IS better than having no such official acknowledgment, because said acknowledgment can be used as leverage to extract sex from merely adequately sexy American women.
The people who are worth 200K aren't worth it because the knowledge they have is fashionable, it's because they have a skill that is timeless.
The one that hurts me is that I wanted to create an internet search site with rankings based on how peer sites linked to pages. In 1995.
I couldn't get investors to help fund the servers and bandwidth I needed.
What really sucks is that it is the norm to do so. Those of us at better jobs are very lucky, and/or very talented.
The problem with unionizing programming vs plumbing is that the standard of trade for plumbing is well established. For programmers, you'd wind up paying fixed wage levels for people who are utterly incompetent.
Our non-unionization is exactly why a handful of grads 5 years out of school are earning 200K+ because they are really that good, while other work is going overseas at $8/hr.
I usually call the latter software engineers rather than programmers. It's a handy way to distinguish what the two do.
Mod parent up. The number of different people who thought up a variation on pagerank is astounding, but there's only one company that executed it well, and had the funding to get through the development of that idea.
I specialized in C reduction for years (and was very successful at it), but I started making 6-figures after I gave that up and just started building business applications.
Exactly the point of my post.
Yeah, I'm actually in general very anti-copyright. I don't think there SHOULD be copyright here, but there very clearly IS.
That only matters to the form of the distribution, not the form of the copy.
That was precisely the point of my post.
1 is true.
2 is incorrect. 2 happened.
3 is the incorrect label for what I did.
And besides all of that, you either whooshed the point of my post entirely, or trolled me very well.
Precisely what I'm claiming SHOULD NOT be the case.
Your understanding of copyright is incorrect. You should consider reading the faqs if not the actual laws provided by the copyright office.
You can get started here:
http://www.copyright.gov/
He is absolutely clearly using copyrighted materials. If you can look at his game and not see that, you either have a misunderstanding of what 'copyright materials' are, or you are blind.
What you've run into is that Slashdot is even more vigorously anti-stupidity than they are anti-copyright.
You've misunderstood the parent.
Try rereading it as:
The image of the pac-man.
The image of the ghosts.
The image of the dots and power dots.
All of those are clearly copyrightable, and what he did was an utterly clear case of violation. There is absolutely no chance of him winning in court, even if he wasn't up against a monstrously larger and well financed opponent.
The style of the maze is more interesting. That would probably fall under the special protections for gameplay mechanics.
It doesn't even have to be a pixel-for-pixel match for the original. Just close enough for the judge if it comes to that.
I'd say looking at the images that he pretty clearly DID take the graphics from Namco Bandai. I bet he drew up the copies in something like mspaint.
The method of copying does not have to be exact or binary to be a copyright violation.
Exactly. Anyone with half a brain would agree that he copied the artwork. Whether he did that with a xerox, cp, bittorrent or by hand in mspaint is irrelevant.
It's not in the description, but if you went and looked at the page it's clear that he's making a lookalike, and the copyright laws were heavily invested in by disney to prevent exactly that, and the law has come down clear and hard against Mickey Mouse lookalikes.
Doesn't help when the actual appearance of characters is so similar. Remember: a significant fraction of the copyright laws were written specifically to protect Mickey Mouse from lookalikes. You can't just make a pacman game with characters that look just like pacman characters, even with a clean-room design. It will still be a copyright violation.
Looking at your artwork, it seems obvious that you copied theirs. Probably not with a photcopier, or a binary file copy, but with a paint program of some sort I'd guess. It's still copying. Whatever you believe about the rightness/wrongness of copyright itself, I think you'd be hard pressed to find even a tiny fraction of the population that wouldn't say this fits the definition of copying.
A criminal is by definition someone who violates the law. And police have abused their powers since the beginning of there being police, that's relatively independent of the density of laws, it's more a measure of the corruptibility of human nature. Of course, it worsens the more power police have.