funny coincidence with splashscreen blender 2,62

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
61

Are you seriously suggesting that only users of Linux be qualified for the Splash screen?

Nobody is suggesting this.

The thing is, there is just so much work being produced at this point sooner or later you will come across something similar. Go to deviantart, wait a few seconds, and refresh your browser- there is a constant stream of images being uploaded every second. It’s the 10,000 monkeys thing. Speaking of which, this is pretty funny, from wikipedia:

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages[12] consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. Phillips said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys “are not random generators. They’re more complex than that. … They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there.”

This thread is getting close to poop throwing!

62

I am not trying to pick on anyone – Here is what Meta said:
“Maybe the Splash rules should state:
That only oss software be used.
That the artwork must be original in nature.”

I am a windows user, and am not about to switch to Linux – maybe you did not intend to mean operating system, and that’s fine, but your comment doesnt really clarify

and, as I said before, the definition of “original” is nebulous. I understand your intention, and I agree with it – There are obvious violations of originality, which can be dismissed immediately, but there is a HUGE level of grey – and sometimes even obvious violations aren’t so obvious (I mean, I can name several times I have come up with an idea, developed it, only to find something very similar had already been done)

This thread is diverging –
this splash screen could have been better vetted, oh well. Live and learn.

discussing originality and OSS is another thread…

Throwing poo:

http://www.motivationals.org/demotivational-posters/demotivational-poster-14640.jpg

63

That only oss software be used

To add, many Linux Users have copyrighted fonts, and of course the browser you use to find textures is another thing.

64

richard, daren, OL77, get a life.

65

^How does one plagiarize something which belongs to noone?

66

I think the discussion is going to very serious and is just a splash screen.
Such seriousness is placing in an uncomfortable place to the judges like jeepster and in my opinion is not fair.
The splashscreen is what it is and it is beautiful.
For next splash screens contact first the author and ask for a viewport capture that shows the art was made in blender and in my opinion it suffices. Asking for the blend when the author perhaps don’t wants give it is not fair.

And I really like the spirit of luxrender where the splash shows very directly new features that before were not present in the app. That is for me the spirit of a splash screen.

67

I think we can agree that the splash screen is not very original, but it does look good.

Based on the many versions of it out there, it seems very unlikely that anyone will face a lawsuit or even legal complaint about the image.

I think we all agree that judges should check .blend files before accepting a splash screen in the future.

Not much more to discuss about this, I guess.

Also, for the record, Apple sued Samsung (and others) over supposed patent violations, NOT copyright infringements. Very, very different, and not similar to this situation.

68

Neither Windows nor OSX are FOSS, thus users of it may not partake. Easy as pie.

Oh, and
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTCLZBMS3tdqxYMMid1qvcbyg1l4h3tR65K0NqwPZ59f31TL52BTdcP51rc

:wink:

69

I don’t think anyone said the splash screen was ugly, because it’s really good and very well done.

The main discussion was all about to know if the splash screen was inspired/copied/etc more or less by this (so it should have been mentionned somewhere) :
http://houroboros.deviantart.com/art/Fireflower-216938150
And if it was done in Blender or only in a photoshop-like program.

70

Sorry for being late, I never imagined splash would cause such a dispute here.

For those who are worried about legal aspects of this image being as a splash screen:
First of all, this is a completely authentic piece based on a well known concept of fire flower mentioned somewhere on the first page. Long time ago even before 2.5 was released I was trying to develop a technique to produce similar burning objects in 3d, so the general idea was taken from that image and reproduced in Blender using polygons, particles and compositing. Actually, I made several scenes testing this technique and only the flower scene has a close relation to the original concept image.
This might be considered as a derivative work, if it uses some major copyright-protected elements of the underlying work, but since concepts and ideas cannot be protected nor patented this is clearly not a derivative but rather original artwork just having several quite obvious similarities in mood, colors and composition.

For those who are striving to see a blend file, here you go: click here.zip
And this would be a node setup: click here.png
Just another picture just to show different scene produced with the same technique (included in the archive):

http://i.imgur.com/yag2H.png

71

Thanks for the blend file
the effect is so simple yet so beautiful

72

awesome.
thanks for clarifying.
sorry if this thread got a little heated.
always there are lessons to be learned.

73

Thanks for the info Agent_AL! And thanks for the mature response and sharing your technique.

74

wow i guess we all got something out of this thread, a lesson and a awesome blendfile so we can learn the technique, thanks Agent_AL

75

As a lawyer I can tell you at least in my country (Greece) this is not true, and I would be suprised if it is in your country. Ideas can be copyrighted, but you have to be able to prove that are addressable to you , that you think of it first and that you can prove it. IF Ideas cant be copyrighted then nothing can, since everything is ideas.

In any case, I dont think art is about originality in themes, its about originality in execution. Many amazing arts of the past did not use any form of originality in their work actually many of them created manifestos and schools of thought and limited themselves on the themes they were working on to such extend that they were copying each other.

Copying is an essential part of human learning and especially art. IF you dont copy you simple dont learn, it does not matter if you copy from memory, photo or other records , you copy all the time, cant escape it. So what people consider “original” its just shuffled copying of something even on a subconsious level.

I love what you did with the splash screen , my favorite splash was that chameleon thing it was not very original but yet I loved it. I think people blow “originality” out of proportion. This thread surprised me. But I used to think like that so I can relate but learning art completely changed my mindset.

76

As a lawyer I can tell you at least in my country (Greece) this is not true

I agree that laws may differ, but as far I know there’s an overall concept known as “fair use”, which states that by the nature of the subject just an idea is too abstract to be protected by any means like copyright or patent and doesn’t require author to be mentioned. If not so, Apple would be the only company producing home computers just because they produced a concept, and Audio Highway would be the only company producing MP3 players for the same reason.
Just imagine, if someone creates an idea which may completely revolutionize our world but protects it with a patent, which makes him and his successors the only monopolist in this area for ages.
I presume you have some misunderstanding about this concept, so a quotation from copyright act would be nice.

IF Ideas cant be copyrighted then nothing can, since everything is ideas.

This is wrong, read more about scope of copyright: click here

77

We enter here the realm of a long discussion of me as a legal practioner trying to explain the way law works , which definetly does not follow the reasoning of the internet people. Which I rather wont do. Usually when client ask as to justify something we reply “because its the law” , regular people cant understand the law any way a regular person can understand brain surgery, only basic concepts of it. That is why people pay for our advice, or else they would just open book and find the answer . Of course it depends from national law to national law, for me as a Greek for example, US law has no effect and I dont even care what an american lawyer consider as copyright as far as my copyright is concernd and of course vice versa.

In greek law if a home computer is an idea I came out with , first, with specific structure that is not too abstract, like " a home computer is a computer inside a home" ( so that anyone else could come up with the same idea ) but rather something specific based on specific principle , and I write an article about it and then Apple goes and makes it , yes under Greek law I can sue Apple and most likely win. It wont even invalidate my copyright if someone else came with similar concept as an idea later without reading my article. Whether it would be wise to do so its another story (expense wise).

No disrespect to wikipedia, its perfectly fine for general information, but there some Universities (at least the ones I have been in UK) that will scream in terror if legal stufents would use wikipedia as a source of legal essays or forming any legal advice :wink:

Saying that, I would rather not go into a long discussion about copyright, since alot of people in the net seems to have alot of difiirent ideas on what copyright law talks about and to make it even worse , Copyright laws all over the world dont seem to agree on alot of things.

Ps: What wikipedia says is true, but again being wikipedia is not true :smiley: it describes an abstract idea of an anthropomorphic mouse which of course everyone can come out with as an idea. Copyrightable ideas , are long, specific, well documented and hard to be mistaken with something else. Which of course wikipedia does not talk about. At least under Greek Law , the idea must be “adressable to you” . That means it wont be difficult to prove that you are the original author of that idea and none else. This criteria is not absolute but its rather strict. So yes any idea is not necessarily copyrightable, and especially abstract ideas like the one described by wikipedia , will not , since they completely fail to satisfy that criteria. Again I am not certain if that criteria applies to US law. But I find it strange and weird if me as a writer lets say I create of story by writing a novel, cant be protected from a guy that comes copies the general concept of my book which still is quite specific and change the dialogues here and there to make it look diffirent and viola, he perform a legal stealing of my work. Whats the point of copyrighting an idea that other people can come up with ?

If that applies then I would be surpised to find that US law is less progressed than Greek law and that , I find very very hard to believe being a guy that has to face Greek law in a daily basic :smiley:

78

Short version: U.S. copyright law is different. Ideas cannot be copyrighted; the idea must be fixed in a tangible medium, and that is what’s copyrightable. For example, if we have a conversation about a character with a ham sandwich for a foot, the idea of that character cannot be copyrighted. However, if you draw a picture of that character, then that picture can be (and actually is, from the second you complete it) copyrighted.

79

yeap that seems the case , I glanced through US law leg and seems to be alot more focused than Greek law. UK law seems to be in similar grounds to US. So I guess we are special case afterall :smiley:

80

And, as Antonio Meucci found more than a century ago, the supreme legal argument is how much money you can spend in legal fees.

You can be as wrong as you want, but if you have more money than your counterpart you can litigate him long enough to force him into a settlement.

Remember: law and justice are not synonims. Never been in any country, in any historical period.