copyright for crafters
question 18: I can call a work my “own” if I change 10% (or 30%, etc.) of somebody else’s work, right?
Wrong.
Or more correctly, not necessarily. In brief, there is no law that says you can avoid copyright infringement by changing a set amount of someone else’s work. There’s no 10%, 30%, 50%, or 70% law. There’s no law that says you’re safe calling something your original work if it was derived from somebody else’s work, but you changed three, five, seven, or ten features of that work.
When copyright infringement is assessed by comparing an infringing work to the original work, it’s not simply assessed on a mathematical or quantitative basis. The significance of the parts that weren’t changed has to be evaluated.
Besides, applying a percentage rule is rather nonsensical. If you translate a pattern from one language to another, in a sense you’ve changed 100% of the pattern. Does that make it original to you, or prevent the translation from being a copyright infringement? No. If you change the colours specified by a pattern or chart, but leave everything else the same, again you could argue that there is a 100% difference. But while the selection of colours might have been your own idea, the rest of the work remained unchanged, so that doesn’t mean you’re at liberty to distribute the pattern or chart yourself with your own colours.
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