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How different is different enough?

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fabricquestion

Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Washington

A designer 30 years ago made a fabric that was her interpretation of a fabric from the early 18th century. Recently I made my interpretation of the same fabric. Upon first glance, our interpretations could be mistaken for each other because they're interpretations of the same fabric. Now the other designer obviously has a copyright of her design because she made her interpretation of an old fabric.

Now my question is how different from hers does my own interpretation have to be to not be considered a violation of her copyright? I saw hers, and actually made some changes to make mine a bit more different. The colors are different, the exact placements of the floral bouquets, which themselves have differences, are different, I added some tiny bugs into the bouquets, and removed all the shading, replacing it with the solid black I used in the black and white bouquets.

The reason I'm asking is that I want to make my version available for sale. Her version has never been available for sale, and as far as I know, won't be. She's been dead for a decade, so it's not like I can just ask her her thoughts, and I don't know how to contact her descendants (who are probably in Europe, where she was born, lived, and died).
 


FlyingRon

Senior Member
If you are both making derivative works of a public domain item, neither infringes on the other. In fact, any copyrights in the derivative item is pretty suspect anyhow. Small tweaks aren't likely to be sufficient original work to mandate protections.

Copyright is not something that is determined by DIFFERENCE. It matters if you actually copied the protected work. There's no amount of "change" that makes it yours if the original was owned by someone else.
 

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