For the past couple of months I have been working on developing the pipapic concept and the tools to generate pipapics - you can find out about it at my website www.pipapic.org.
Here is the idea: Take a color cube. Pull out an evenly spaced palette. Place it on a screen canvas just the right size. Re-arrange the pixels as desired. Into say, the Mona Lisa, or into irises. This is a pipapic. So a pipapic is pixel art with constraints: call it the haiku of color. All pipapics have a well balanced brightness and colorfulness. Any image can be converted to many many pipapics that retain some semblance of the original. Some existing images have the color balance close to being a pipapic without any editing. Examples include some images of parrots and flowers.
The concept is probably patentable. My attitude is...well I read this blog every day, so I don't believe I need say more. But what I would like is for all pipapics to be virally free. So if anyone creates a pipapic it is free, full stop. I would really like to impose a moral patent, and say: I have the legal right under the current system to gain monopoly rights over the entire concept. I do not want monopoly rights nor your stinking money. All I want is freedom for me, for my kids, for your kids, for Chinese kids and for Talibani kids to use this as they wish. If you don't actively support the no intellectual property concept leave pipapics alone. Go. Now. There is nothing for you here. And don't use the pipapic balance in your fashion, in your makeups, in your colorful foods or any other place.
I am concerned about the legality of the pipapic tools. These tools take existing images, images that will often be "owned" by other people, and manipulate them. This is in fact even against some Creative Commons licence conditions on derivative works. By releasing tools to enable people to create pipapics I am enabling them to break the covenants imposed by copyright. It can be viewed as being worse than Napster. And to be blunt, I am seditious, I consider IP laws to be garbage and I am most definitely encouraging people to treat these laws with the contempt that I believe they deserve.
Copyright law is a huge problem. There are examples of pipapics that I have derived from original images. The original images have been well and truly butchered - large portions have been discarded to provide an image with the pipapic balance, the remaining portion has been reshaped and resized to provide a pipapic canvas, and then every picture has had at least 100% of the pixels recolored. I also display the original for comparison purposes. I consider this to be fair use. In the context of my website they are demonstrative and educational.
I'm eager to get examples from the public, and want to display those examples as well. These may also be modified from existing images that are under copyright. Do I have to request the pedigree of every example? What if the examples are collated from many sources? They could be doctored in many ways before I get them, including being modified to look like another image. Is it me who must devise the questions to be asked of any submitters? If I ask the wrong questions will I later have to discard the images until they are re-certified as meeting the new compliance standards?
Look at all the legal opinion needed just to release and promote a artistic imaging scheme. All in order to comply with undemocratic laws devised in an undemocratic country and imposed undemocratically on the entire world through secretly negotiated treaties. The rule is: Before you can start to be creative you must pay for a legal opinion. This is supposed to stimulate creativity and enrich the public. Surely you jest!
