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His last name was spelled Swartz, for the record

Only in the modern day. Up through the SVGA days, cards supported true character-mapped text modes.

The signature can certainly be copyright protected, I would think?

There's a difference between reproducing a signature in an encyclopedia or in some way that makes it clear that you are recording the thing as it is.

Putting a signature on a work is forgery and in most jurisdictions charged as fraud.

If you produce an artwork in the style of someone and then clone the signature of someone who produces art in that style, there is a reasonable case for fraud.


Yeah, the references to copyright/trademark in this thread are confusing to me. I feel like there are much more straightforward legal arguments against falsely claiming artwork is by a famous artist.

When you are no-one, it’s fraud. “When you're famous they let you do it”

you have to sell it (or deceive for material gain) for it to be fraud.

You could argue that you did that to entertain your social media followers and gain more of them, which is somehow a material gain.

For starters people pay for ChatGPT accounts used to generate these things. Secondly people use ChatGPT to generate stuff they put up on social media slop accounts to earn money. You'd probably build a case by finding a collection of these to justify discovery for more and build your fraud case based on that kind of thing where people are generating and publishing work with your signature on it for money. That's both a criminal and civil case.

Wikipedia doesn't think so, citing the US copyright office

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_P...


This is true, it'd be a trademark issue if anything, not a copyright one. From this page:

> it may be reproduced, as long as the reproduction cannot be mistaken for an authentic signature.


>as long as the reproduction cannot be mistaken for an authentic signature.

Which seems applicable in this case, because the image is clearly generated by AI (at least to the guy who prompted it).


The guy who forges a signature isn't confused about who wrote that signature either.

The fine citizens of the Internet the forger posts on may be.

Visual artists have a right of attribution via the Visual Artists Rights Act (17 U.S.C. § 106A). This includes protection against misattribution.

>This includes protection against misattribution.

What does the case law say on what counts as "misattribution"? If a paste the "BLOPER" signature onto a jpeg, did I commit a crime right then and there? What if I put a notice next to it saying "btw it's not actually Brendan Loper"? What if I took that image (with the notice), uploaded it for the whole world to see, then some guy cropped out the "btw it's not actually Brendan Loper"?


This reminds me of the Helen Green David Bowie Gif image (https://dollychops.tumblr.com/post/107517113745/happy-birthd... ) that got changed, tweaked, cropped, distorted and distributed by humans without attribution in all sorts of places [0] over ten years ago. I recall Mediachain (which was later acqui-hired by Spotify to help address attribution and licensing) would talk about this problem and proposing blockchain ledger approaches to help validate a media files similarity to existing content and notification to the original artist of its use. Didn’t follow them closely, but Spotify saw some value in their attribution ideas.

[0]. https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/16/digital-images-photos-gi...


In this scenario it sounds like you're fine, and if there's confusion then the guy that cropped it out is the source of the problem.

CopyRight isn't the relevant legal concept here at all. It's more of impersonation through a specifically protected identification mechanism.

No but in the article he makes the explicit case that its the mark of his trade.

Windows 98 did introduce the gradient title bars. Maybe even IE4’s desktop update added it to 95, I can’t remember.

In fact, the PC Engine provided a very 16-bit type of experience with an 8-bit 6502-based CPU

Not letting you backup and restore saves from local media also deprives modders of potential attack surface

The “perfect” timing window in Festival is +/-5ms from gem position (10ms total afaik). Harmonix has always been exceptional with their beatmatching code. There are physical limits to the black magic of latency compensation, however. If your input has to travel over the wire before the game can see it, then it’s unavoidable without heavy compensation

IBM PC design philosophy was the furthest thing possible from “open architecture”.

The PC only became “open” when the industry basically strongarmed it open. Prior to clean-room BIOS cloning, IBM did pursue legal redress against early clones.

The PC pivoted to open architecture despite IBM.


> BM PC design philosophy was the furthest thing possible from “open architecture”.

I was talking about IBM PC and compatibles. Big things have small beginnings, and so on.


The Nintendo black boxes were still mock-ups to a significant degree. They often depicted situations nearly impossible (or actually impossible) to achieve in-game, the graphics often exceeded NES color limits, and often the pixel art itself was completely wrong (check out Mario on the Donkey Kong or Mario Bros boxes).

It’s worth noting that this is not actually explicit in the standard so much as it is just a natural consequence of not including the half-line. Since the raster is continually moving across and down, including during all retraces (until the actual blanking pulses reset them), the presence of the half-line means that the horizontal retrace doesn’t reset at the end of the half line, it just continues scanning horizontally while the vblank pulse resets the vertical deflection to the top of the screen. Similarly, all scan lines are actually very slightly tilted down on all CRTs unless there is compensation for it. The vertical deflection is consistently moving across the length of the horizontal trace.

Edit: if you have a set that is miscalibrated or worn out, you can end up actually seeing the retrace lines during what should be blanking


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