stephan.com
scattered thoughts

Last night, in a fit of nostalgia over my formative years programming the TI-99, I got a hankering for a t-shirt with some hexadecimal digits. See, we used to program sprites in hex, and that was my introduction to computer graphics, and I can pretty much do hex math in my head. It takes me back to my teen years, my first girlfriend, high school, all sorts of things. So, I used interactive Ruby to generate some:

stephan.com:~/Desktop/Mystery Number stephan$ irb
irb(main):001:0> hex = ("0".."9").to_a + ("A".."F").to_a
=> ["0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F"]
irb(main):002:0> 16.times do |i|
irb(main):003:1* print “-” unless i==0
irb(main):004:1> 2.times do
irb(main):005:2* print hex[rand(16)]
irb(main):006:2> end
irb(main):007:1> end
C0-88-56-63-C5-56-41-D8-5B-E3-74-9D-02-11-F9-09=> 16

Perfect! I copied that string into Illustrator, but the pairs got reversed from how I dragged the layers around, and it came out like this:

A great design for a t-shirt. I uploaded it to CafePress, and got several products all set up. When I was done, I thought I might share my design with other hexadecimaphiles at Digg, but when I got there, the site was down. There was some sort of hoo-ha going on about a number - coincidentally, almost the same number that came from my random number generator! What are the odds of that? (umm, 2¹²⁸:1, right?)

Well, I decided that all the hubbub about this other number would totally make people misconstrue the point of my number, and didn’t end up posting about the t-shirt, and it just sat in my CafePress account. Things died down. I figured no one would notice it. (Kudos to Alex, Kevin and all for handling this perfectly)

Oddly enough, CafePress did notice, and sent me the following notification:

Dear Shopkeeper,

Thank you for using CafePress.com!

As you may know, CafePress.com provides a service to a rich and vibrant community of international users. From time to time, we review the content in our shopkeepers accounts to confirm that the content being used in connection with the sale of products are in compliance with our policies, including our Content Usage Policy (CUP).

We recently learned that your CafePress.com account contains material which may not be in compliance with our policies. Specifically, designing, manufacturing, marketing and/or selling products that may infringe the rights of a third party, including, copyrights (e.g., an image of a television cartoon character), trademarks (e.g., the logo of a company), “rights in gross” (e.g., the exclusive right of the U.S. Olympic Committee to use the “Olympic Rings”), and rights of privacy and publicity (e.g., a photo of a celebrity) are prohibited.

Accordingly, we have set the content that we believe to be questionable to “pending status” which disables said content from being displayed in your shop or purchased by the public.

You may review the content set to pending status by logging into your CafePress.com account and clicking on the “Media Basket” link. The content set to pending status will be highlighted red.

Please visit our Content Usage Policy (CUP) for additional information regarding your use of the CafePress.com service. Once there, you may access our Copyright, Trademark & Intellectual Property Guidelines and FAQ’s for more detailed information regarding Intellectual Property Rights.

We apologize for any inconvenience that the removal of your content may have caused you. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

Content Usage Associate
CafePress.com
CUP@cafepress.com

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been known to have things to say about intellectual property law, and have been around IP for a while… So I responded thusly:

To Whom it May Concern

Thank you for your polite and amazingly prompt notification.

Interestingly, the content in question does not clearly fall into any of those categories. It is not covered by a copyright, nor a trademark, nor a “right in gross”. It is allegedly proprietary information related to violation of the DMCA, though that law presently stands on shaky ground. Intellectual property law has certain notable exceptions of unprotectable content, including the visual appearance of fonts (though their digital embodiment is covered) and recipes (though a specific written description of the recipe is covered, and innovative methods might be patentable). Were this to come to a court case, I think it would be difficult to prove that a particular string of hexadecimal digits should be afforded any intellectual property right whatsoever.

Perhaps there might be some sort of sui generis protection similar to the database rights allowed in the EU since 1996, though in the US this was covered in Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co (1991), which decided (if I might quote Wikipedia) “exclusive rights cannot cover the factual elements of any copyrighted work”.

Had I succeeded in designing my t-shirts and taking orders during yesterday’s firestorm, rather than completing the design when things were just about over, your decision might have resulted in some actual damages in the form of lost business - particularly if you had opted not to fulfill orders already placed. However, I was a bit late, decided last night not to pursue the t-shirt angle, and hence have no interest in seeking any potential damages from you. In your shoes, I would likely make the same decision.

I will however, post your email to my blog, as well as my response and any further responses from you, in the interest of furthering the debate about intellectual property and free speech.

yours,

- stephan

Well, gosh, I’d still like some sort of design. Back in the TI-99 days, we used to specify an 8×8 sprite with 8 hex pairs, so I guess this would be two sprites. Like this:

Thus, I present the world with my Mystery Number Product Sprite line of clothes. Operators are standing by to take your order.