Open Source
Out of context: Reply #22
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- mitsu0
Consider the following:
http://www33.brinkster.com/trans…
Artist A creates digital image (Fig.1) and places it on website.
Artist B saves image, and post the image (Fig.2) immediatley to his website.
Artist C saves image, changes the hue of image as well as bgcolor (Fig.3) and posts it to his website.
Artist D saves image, crops it and posts the image (Fig.4) to his website.
Artist E saves image, and changes the brightness by 1 unit. (Fig.5)
Artist B took the image and made no modifications to it and used it in his site
Artist C did the same but changed the hue and bgcolor to produce what you see in Fig.3. As a result of this change, while the image portrays what others would perceive to be an exact copy of the origianl, the image itself is no longer a digital duplicate of the original as each bit that makes up the image has been changed completley.
Artist D also made a modification to the origianl image by simply cropping it. At this point, in terms of binary comparisons, there are only few notable matches.
Artist E makes a clever change to the original image by changing the brighness by 1 unit. To the naked eye, the image is an exact duplicate, but to a program, these files are entirely different. What might be noticable is the pattern of the bits, However, as seen in Fig.4, this can be slightly detered by shifting bits, or removing them entirely.
Of course, for the purposes of illustrations, the exapmles used are for more simple than their real-life counterparts. But each of these scenarios contains subtle differences and begs the question: Are any of these forms of copying legal? What constitutues the illegal usage of an image. How do you copyright an image? The same question holds true, in my opinion for mp3's, and software. What is it about an image that allows it to retain it's own unique identity, one that cannot be copied?