July 15, 2014 at 12:34Copyright to the generated maze?
Programmer Jim Bumgardner in his spare time is keen on making mazes. The other day he visited a supermarket and saw a packet of pasta Kraft Mac & Cheese, which depicts "something very familiar . "
For a stranger, a picture may seem unremarkable, but Jim spent many years writing software to generate such mazes. If you look closely, you can see the vertices of the Fibonacci spiral. According to the author, this is a rather unique design.
For verification, Jim Bamgardner bought this pack, brought it home and compared it to a collection of labyrinths that were generated by his program and published on the Internet.. Pictures can be used "for personal purposes and in schools." For commercial use you need permission.
The author quickly found a coincidence: on the pasta packaging there is a labyrinth No. 1 from the first book of Intermediate Mazes , only rotated 90 ° and edited in several places.
An attempt to extend copyright to the result of a computer program is a rather dubious initiative, from a legal point of view.
Nevertheless, Jim Bamgardner is sure that he is right: “Useful advice to the guys from Kraft Foods, or any other multinational corporation who wants to use my work without permission: you better steal the labyrinth from book No. 47 and make a horizontal revolution before rotate it 90 °. This will slow me down a bit, ”he writes.
For a stranger, a picture may seem unremarkable, but Jim spent many years writing software to generate such mazes. If you look closely, you can see the vertices of the Fibonacci spiral. According to the author, this is a rather unique design.
For verification, Jim Bamgardner bought this pack, brought it home and compared it to a collection of labyrinths that were generated by his program and published on the Internet.. Pictures can be used "for personal purposes and in schools." For commercial use you need permission.
The author quickly found a coincidence: on the pasta packaging there is a labyrinth No. 1 from the first book of Intermediate Mazes , only rotated 90 ° and edited in several places.
An attempt to extend copyright to the result of a computer program is a rather dubious initiative, from a legal point of view.
Nevertheless, Jim Bamgardner is sure that he is right: “Useful advice to the guys from Kraft Foods, or any other multinational corporation who wants to use my work without permission: you better steal the labyrinth from book No. 47 and make a horizontal revolution before rotate it 90 °. This will slow me down a bit, ”he writes.