copyright

29 Articles

You Wouldn’t Steal A Font…

April 25, 2025 by 67 Comments

In the 2000s, the DVD industry was concerned about piracy, in particular the threat to their business model presented by counterfeit DVDs and downloadable movies. Their response was a campaign which could be found embedded into the intro sequences of many DVDs of the era, in which an edgy font on a black background began with “You wouldn’t steal a car.. “. It was enough of a part of the background noise of popular culture that it has become a meme in the 2020s, reaching many people with no idea of its origins. Now in a delicious twist of fate, it has been found that the font used in the campaign was itself pirated. Someone should report them.

The font in question is FF Confidential, designed by [Just van Rossum], whose brother [Guido] you may incidentally know as the originator of the Python programming language. The font in the campaign isn’t FF Confidential though, as it turns out it’s XBAND Rough, a pirated copy of the original. What a shame nobody noticed this two decades ago.

It’s a bit of fun to delight in an anti-piracy campaign being caught using a dodgy font, but if this story serves to tell us anything it’s that the web of modern intellectual property is so labyrinthine as to be almost impossible to navigate without coming a cropper somewhere. Sadly the people caught out in this case would be the last to call for reform of the intellectual property environment, but as any sane heads would surely agree, such reform is overdue.

If copyright gives you a headache, here’s our take on it.

The £25,000 Tom Evans Pre-Amp Repair And A Copyright Strike

December 7, 2024 by 103 Comments

We were recently notified by a reader that [Tom Evans] had filed a copyright claim against [Mark]’s repair video on his Mend it Mark YouTube channel, taking down said repair video as well as [Mark]’s delightful commentary. In a new video, [Mark] comments on this takedown and the implications. The biggest question is what exactly was copyrighted in the original video, which was tough because YouTube refused to pass on [Mark]’s questions or provide further details.

In this new video the entire repair is summarized once again using props instead of the actual pre-amp, which you can still catch a glimpse of in our earlier coverage of the repair. To summarize, there was one bad tantalum capacitor that caused issues for one channel, and the insides of this twenty-five thousand quid pre-amp looks like an artistic interpretation of a Jenga tower using PCBs. We hope that this new video does stay safe from further copyright strikes from an oddly vengeful manufacturer after said manufacturer event sent the defective unit to [Mark] for a repair challenge.

Since this purportedly ‘audiophile-level’ pre-amplifier uses no special circuits or filtering – just carefully matched opamps – this is one of those copyright strike cases that leave you scratching your head.

Continue reading “The £25,000 Tom Evans Pre-Amp Repair And A Copyright Strike” →

Mickey Shall Be Free!

December 18, 2023 by 24 Comments

The end of the year brings with it festive cheer, and a look forward into the new year to come. For those with an interest in intellectual property and the public domain it brings another treat, because every January 1st a fresh crop of works enter the public domain.

We’ll take a look at the wider crop around the day, but this year the big story is that Mickey Mouse, whose first outing was in 1928’s Steamboat Willie, is to get his turn to be released from copyright. [Jennifer Jenkins] from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, is using Mickey’s impending release to take a look at the law surrounding such a well-protected work.

Mickey has perhaps the greatest symbolism of all intellectual property when it comes to copyright terms, having been the reason for the Disney Corporation’s successive successful attempts to have copyright terms extended. Now even their reach is about to come to an end, but beware if you’re about to use him in your work, for the Mickey entering the public domain is an early outing, without gloves or the colours and eyes of his later incarnations. Added to that, Disney have a range of trademarks surrounding him. The piece makes for an interesting read as it navigates this maze, and makes some worthwhile points about copyright and the public domain.

Last year, we welcomed Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the public domain. Meanwhile if you’re reading this in 2023, we believe our use of a header image featuring the 1928 Mickey to be covered by the doctrine of fair use.

Falsified Photos: Fooling Adobe’s Cryptographically-Signed Metadata

November 30, 2023 by 34 Comments

Last week, we wrote about the Leica M11-P, the world’s first camera with Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) credentials baked into every shot. Essentially, each file is signed with Leica’s encryption key such that any changes to the image, whether edits to the photo itself or the metadata, are tracked. The goal is to not only prove ownership, but that photos are real — not tampered with or AI-generated. At least, that’s the main selling point.

Although the CAI has been around since 2019, it’s adoption is far from widespread. Only a handful of programs support it, although this list includes Photoshop, and its unlikely anybody outside the professional photography space was aware of it until recently. This isn’t too surprising, as it really isn’t relevant to the casual shooter — when I take a shot to upload to Instagram, I’m rarely thinking about whether or not I’ll need cryptographic proof that the photo wasn’t edited — usually adding #nofilter to the description is enough. Where the CAI is supposed to shine, however, is in the world of photojournalism. The idea is that a photographer can capture an image that is signed at the time of creation and maintains a tamper-proof log of any edits made. When the final image is sold to a news publisher or viewed by a reader online, they are able to view that data.

At this point, there are two thoughts you might have (or, at least, there are two thoughts I had upon learning about the CAI)

  1. Do I care that a photo is cryptographically signed?
  2. This sounds easy to break.

Well, after some messing around with the CAI tools, I have some answers for you.

  1. No, you don’t.
  2. Yes, it is.

Continue reading “Falsified Photos: Fooling Adobe’s Cryptographically-Signed Metadata” →

Will A.I. Steal All The Code And Take All The Jobs?

March 8, 2023 by 59 Comments

New technology often brings with it a bit of controversy. When considering stem cell therapies, self-driving cars, genetically modified organisms, or nuclear power plants, fears and concerns come to mind as much as, if not more than, excitement and hope for a brighter tomorrow. New technologies force us to evolve perspectives and establish new policies in hopes that we can maximize the benefits and minimize the risks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is certainly no exception. The stakes, including our very position as Earth’s apex intellect, seem exceedingly weighty. Mathematician Irving Good’s oft-quoted wisdom that the “first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need make” describes a sword that cuts both ways. It is not entirely unreasonable to fear that the last invention we need to make might just be the last invention that we get to make.

Artificial Intelligence and Learning

Artificial intelligence is currently the hottest topic in technology. AI systems are being tasked to write prose, make art, chat, and generate code. Setting aside the horrifying notion of an AI programming or reprogramming itself, what does it mean for an AI to generate code? It should be obvious that an AI is not just a normal program whose code was written to spit out any and all other programs. Such a program would need to have all programs inside itself. Instead, an AI learns from being trained. How it is trained is raising some interesting questions.

Humans learn by reading, studying, and practicing. We learn by training our minds with collected input from the world around us. Similarly, AI and machine learning (ML) models learn through training. They must be provided with examples from which to learn. The examples that we provide to an AI are referred to as the data corpus of the training process. The robot Johnny 5 from “Short Circuit”, like any curious-minded student, needs input, more input, and more input.

Continue reading “Will A.I. Steal All The Code And Take All The Jobs?” →

What’s New, From 1927

January 2, 2023 by 13 Comments

Here we are at the start of the new year, which for the Internet Archive means a note about what has just entered the public domain. 1927’s finest previously copyrighted materials are now up for grabs in the public domain, which means there’s a treasure trove of films, books, and music to freely copy and remix.

Their article highlights a few notable pieces of 1927’s popular culture , of which we suggest you should definitely take note of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis if you have any interest in sci-fi, but for Hackaday readers there’s not much else in the article itself relating to technology. Delving into the archive for 1927 is still a fascinating pastime though, because beyond the interest of seeing what’s now free it led onto what was the state of technology in the 1920s. And here we find ourselves as much navigating the English language as we do the library itself, because so much of what we do uses vocabulary from the decades since. Continue reading “What’s New, From 1927” →

Showing an Ortur lasercutter control module in front of a screen. There's a serial terminal open on the screen, showing the "Ortur Laser Master 3" banner, and then a Grbl prompt.

Watch Out For Lasercutter Manufacturers Violating GPL

July 15, 2022 by 84 Comments

For companies that build equipment like CNC machines or lasercutters, it’s tempting to use open-source software in a lot of areas. After all, it’s stable, featureful, and has typically passed the test of time. But using open-source software is not always without attendant responsibilities. The GPL license requires that all third-party changes shipped to users are themselves open-sourced, with possibility for legal repercussions. But for that, someone has to step up and hold them accountable.

Here, the manufacturer under fire is Ortur. They ship laser engravers that quite obviously use the Grbl firmware, or a modified version thereof, so [Norbert] asked them for the source code. They replied that it was a “business secret”. He even wrote them a second time, and they refused. Step three, then, is making a video about it.

Unfortunately [Norbert] doesn’t have the resources to start international legal enforcement, so instead he suggests we should start talking openly about the manufacturers involved. This makes sense, since such publicity makes it way easier for a lawsuit eventually happen, and we’ve seen real consequences come to Samsung, Creality and Skype, among others.

Many of us have fought with laser cutters burdened by proprietary firmware, and while throwing the original board out is tempting, you do need to invest quite a bit more energy and money working around something that shouldn’t have been a problem. Instead, the manufacturers could do the right, and legal, thing in the first place. We should let them know that we require that of them.

Continue reading “Watch Out For Lasercutter Manufacturers Violating GPL” →