Simon Dvorak.com

A look at the gallery page at Complexification.net is certainly a mind blowing experience.

One in particular is quite interesting. Entitled “Offspring”, this java applet graphs the life history of a theoritical colony of robots (*blue collar workers*). WOW!

Run, don’t walk, over to Wellstyled.com for some great articles on CSS and web standards.

For the above image I used a picture of the Mona Lisa. After heavily filtering, resizing and tweaking this is the result. Am I infringing on copyright? (The Mona Lisa probably isn’t copyrighted, but that is beside the point)

There’s a great discussion going on over at mezzloblue on this very subject. Dave’s post Design Theft: Crossing the Line is generating a variety of ideas concerning the nature of copyright.

Personally, I remembered Sherrie Levine and her work which involves direct challenges to copyright. Also, many artists incorporate copyrighted images into their work. Techniques such as painting photos or newspaper clippings into the canvas (Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) as well as some collage artists would probably be considered copyright infringement by some of the commenters here.

I think people might be overlooking some facts about image copyright. I’m not a lawyer, but from what I have read copyrighted images can be used without the author’s permission if the use falls under “fair use.” What “fair use” is is somewhat hazy, but aspects of it allow the image to be used/copied if the use does not affect the author’s ability to market their image.

Another aspect of “fair use” is how much of the orginal work is being copied. It the example at mezzoblue, the 150px image shown could have been a crop from a 3500px panorama. Sampling this small section would most likely come under “fair use.”

Finally, in the example case presented at mezzoblue we are also dealing with extreme data filtering. The original image data is mathmatically altered by the artist to a final form where the original no longer exists. This certainly is not copyright infringement any more than writing this comment is. (I didn’t come up with all this stuff myself. I researched copyright law, representative artists, etc.. I then used my mind to process the data available into this post)

The Microsoft convention is going on right now and thanks to some insider connections I’ve recieved a complete recording of a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 presentation. Should be some interesting info for those looking forward to this release. I will be posting it as soon as I can.

Update
The house has been rented. I repeat…the house is rented. Thank you.

Here are some pictures of the house that is currently available for rent at 108 Guaymas Pl. Davis, CA. If you are interested, give us a call at 530-220-2743 or download the rental application(2Mb PDF).
Front Yard
Living Room
Dining Room
Kitchen
Master Bedroom
Master Bath
Bedroom 2
Bedroom 3
Bathroom 2
Back Patio
Backyard 1
Backyard 2