It's hard not to lose a little respect fo the LayerVault guys, even if the icons in question were direct copies. I get you're protective of your art, but this doesn't really make sense from a business standpoint, and their response has been less than convincing. It's really disappointing.
Even then it's a good idea to put up a quick and easy comparison sheet.
But for things like "3 cogs" (cogs are different sizes, different colours, different numbers of teeth, different orientation) it's ridiculous to DMCA it. 3 Cogs is so generic that it's an annoyance to engineers. (Because the cogs are usually drawn in such a way that they cannot possibly turn).
HN is generally pretty good when people rip off a design. Even people like me (who have very little idea about design) respect the amount of work and expertise that goes on. But it's because I have so little clue about design that people need to explain the similarities. If you're the first people to curl a newspaper under then tell me that. Show me what people used to do, and how you innovated that.
Remember Svbtle?
Direct copies only work as an argument if the item is an Original, as in the idea of a thing wholly onto itself without an external influence of any sort.
you might argue that it's derived as in Originated from, borrowed from, a sourced to, an antecedent of, an allusion towards. I could continue. sort of like how Star Wars Episode II and Star Wars Episode I are derived from Star Wars Episode IV. :)
Not "like" them, not derivative of them, but actually them (e.g. Yoda).
So yeah, that would be a direct copy.
If that's indeed them who sent the notice, they are just shitting all over their reputation and alienating a lot of people. Talk about "starting off on the wrong foot"... and for what? A design that is border-line trivial. It would seem that their best option for getting the situation under control is to release their own version of the toolkit. A version that is sufficiently different from their original background-color, border-radius and icon @font-face. If not, they are bound to repeat the clone wars of Svbtle.
Edit | LayerVault actually appears to be a pretty useful product, clearly with a lot of thought sunk into it. Which makes it twice as unfortunate that they decided to pursue something like this. Google "LayerVault videos" if interested.
I thought I had a backup on my laptop, desktop, remote backup from my desktop and all the revisions on their server. But all revisions were corrupted and it synced those bad copies to all my machines, including the machine that performed it's own remote backup (so all those backups were broken).
Their support team acknowledged that it was a problem and that they were 'hoping' to fix in an upcoming version, but offered absolutely no solution to fix my data except their apologies.
Never going to trust that product ever again if they don't have data integrity as their number 1 priority.
Create a new topic guys!
Oh and did the developer of Flat UI file a counter takedown notice?
Edit: Sorry if I offended anyone, just posted what I thought.
Github search found 116 repositories: https://github.com/search?q=flat-ui&ref=commandbar
There are 48 forks alone of this single fork: https://github.com/iurevych/Flat-UI/network/members
The project itself shows 129 forks.
You really prepared to piss off hundreds of people by sending a DMCA takedown to each and every one? Really? Do you know when to stop digging? Is the hole deep enough yet? Found some suspicious odorous dark substance? I can tell you, it's not oil.
"Here's the eMail icon. This version was designed by Susan Kare".
Now imagine I file a takedown notice for every aspiring project posted here on HN that is hosted on github. They take a pretty good hit from it I'd assume, to be silenced on the launch. Of course I open myself to litigation with false takedown request... but what do I care? I'm not a citizen of United States and I don't really care what laws are there.
So what now? How can this work?
I'm not entirely sure whether you can submit a DMCA takedown request if you're not a citizen of the USA. For once, you need to provide US-based contact info.
However, I am not sure if the service provider needs to check whether this contact info is correct before takedown.
So it seems that any public-facing data on any US-based server can be made to disappear for at least 10-14 days. But just because a country has crappy laws doesn't mean you should use those laws against them! ;)
So you can't just have an agent do the request on your behalf?
It doesn't. Our most recent copyright overhaul (which this is a feature of) currently works close-enough to OK to be tolerable to those who would otherwise fix it.
Even without the DMCA, if the service provider interjects itself into the dispute they risk legal action against themselves. For example, they could evaluate the claims wrong, and get sued to allowing actually infringing material to stay up.
It goes like this:
1. DMCA is filed by a person/entity with the service-provider.
2. Service-provider takes down offending content.
3. The person/entity that submitted the offending content now has the option to file a counter-notice with their service provider claiming that they feel/know there is no infringement. If they do file a counter-notice, then we continue on. If they don't file a counter-notice, then the story ends here.
4. The service-provider notifies the person/entity that filed the DMCA notice that a counter-notice was filed. The service-provider can now restore the content, but there is some weird stipulation that they need to wait something like 10 ~ 14 days before doing so.
5. The person/entity that filed the original notice now has to take legal action against the person/entity that they feel has infringed their copyrights if they want anything more to happen.
The party that files the DMCA notice stipulates that they believe that their work has been infringed under penalty of perjury.
[1] For a long time, people on the Internet believed that 'Common Carrier' provisions applied to ISPs, but it really only applies to phone companies. The Safe Harbour provisions of the DMCA are meant to give something similar for ISPs, though there are different rules.
1) what happens with perjury? how severe is "penalty of perjury"?
If at point 5, LayerVault chooses not to take legal action (say, because they realized their mistake), did they just take some random piece of work offline for 10-14 days without any consequence?
What if they do take legal action and lose?
2) You say the provider has to act like a "dumb pipe" and just obey these notices. Does this also exclude basic sanity checks such as calling back the phone number on the notice to check whether the corporation in question actually filed this notice, or whether notice-filer actually exists, whether the phone number is actually connected to the corporation the notice claims to be from, etc? Because otherwise, it's just a matter of time until somebody is going to ... take down all the things.
I just checked Wikipedia on perjury and it says, "Statements which entail an interpretation of fact are not perjury because people often draw inaccurate conclusions unwittingly, or make honest mistakes without the intent to deceive. Individuals may have honest but mistaken beliefs about certain facts, or their recollection may be inaccurate, or may have a different perception of what is the accurate way to state the truth", I think this is pretty much the case for LayerVault. So they won't get penalty of perjury, because they did believe their work had been infringed ... even when it's based on a wrong idea of what constitutes an actual infringement instead of a "heavily inspired by" rip-off?
thanks for the explanation, I never realised it was like this.
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/
Why is this being upvoted a 2nd time in the same week to the top of the homepage...
Counter notice commit with comments: https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/6a33a213e04e7fc5e74ce3...
We in tech need to be good to each other because other corporate interests and patent trolls won't be. We should always give each other the benefit of the doubt and try to resolve issues without menacing legal language and the threat of lawyers. We need to show we can thrive without this garbage. Otherwise, it will only embolden our enemies and cause this type of confrontation to happen more frequently in the future - to everyone's detriment.
it's trés bothersome when designers behave like this when they're themselves just un/consciously influenced by previous artmovements and designers (florian freundt(2003), matias duarte spring to mind).
I never understood why people don't just embrace the idea of imitation being the biggest form of flattery.
So you are doing something right, great continue with that.
LayerVault lost me as a customer today.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/01/25/Imitated_Image_Copyr...
the other part deals strictly with derivatives (creative meaning, not legal) What I mean is that strictly speaking, the new art movement influenced the "flat ui" movement, a folded newspaper is clearly an influence for the nuon project, dribbble iconry, DM flat ui representation and the LV icon. In much the same way a set of gears are derivative of a set of.. gears, which has been represented in too many ways in art that it's lost the entire concept of originality.
and Originality, due to Barthe's work on the Death of authorship, is quite moot at this point.
LayerVault should have gotten a design patent. That works pretty well regarding trivial bullshit like corner radii, so it probably covers icon similarity also.
http://i.imgur.com/yFHlGVH.png
http://i.imgur.com/VX1h4Xj.png
http://i.imgur.com/oyAYDM8.png
http://i.imgur.com/ZUlf0hF.png
http://i.imgur.com/QMSTZ8k.png
Given that they don't show it off on their demo page, it's either incomplete or clunky.
"The Son of Man" was painted 1964. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_of_Man_(Magritte))
I stress respectfully. Try to be well spoken and sincere.
So go public. On a medium which the company doesn't control. And then they're not in control anymore.
It's exactly the same with SO: everytime someone comes up with a very valid criticism about SO there are SO officials (or high-rep users) saying "Put this on meta". But no, that's precisely the point: do certainly not put it on meta because once it's on meta it's the same little clique who's in control.
My opinion is that something like this reaching several times the front page of HN is the best way to make people aware of the problem (including the people at the company/ies concerned).
As unlikely as it may sound, there have been lawsuits somewhat like what you describe. Perhaps most notorious is a tattoo artist claiming IP on Mike Tyson’s face tat visibly shown on Ed Helm’s character’s face, being used without permission. The artist sued Warner Bros. (I believe) for damages and asking to be taken down. IIRC the judge was very close to issuing an injunction against /The Hangover 2/. Not sure what ended up happening; probably settled out of court.
http://cl.ly/image/2X2c1T1X043a
I was secretly hoping that it would act recursively when clicking the second "fork" button, creating a "fork bomb" of sorts, but no cigar :P
