Jeff Croft

I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.

Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.

I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.

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Items tagged copyright

  • Link // 01.22.2012 // 5:03 AM // 0 Comments

    SOPA and The New Gatekeepers

    I’m with Mike, here: what’s interesting about SOPA and PIPA to me is not so much the bills, but the fact that our governments are set up in a way that such bills could even ever get drafted. It’s patently absurd.

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  • Link // 05.27.2009 // 10:23 PM // 1 Comment

    Can You Copyright A Tweet?

    A thoughtful analysis. The conclusion? Well, it’s two-fold: First, It depends on the tweet. Second, almost no tweet would ever be protectable. A protectable tweet exists in theory, but actually finding one is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So, pretty much, your tweet is not copyrightable. In other words, get over yourself.

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  • Link // 05.12.2007 // 7:01 PM // 0 Comments

    DVD-decoder fiasco shows lawyers are behind the times

    John Dvorak, whom I generally consider to be a professional troll, puts together a nice piece on how lawyers are largely inept when it comes to dealing with the Internet and are doing their clients a grave disservice because of it. Clearly, the lawyers behind the threats to Digg over the HD-DVD code simply didn’t get it at all.

    And who looks stupid? Not the lawyers — no one knows who they are. Instead, it’s the companies that hire the lawyers that look like morons.

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  • Link // 03.31.2007 // 1:49 AM // 15 Comments

    Daring Fireball: Rip This Joint

    I mostly agree with what Gruber has to say in a response to criticism over his defense of Apple’s Hello TV spot. And, it’s well-written, as you’d expect from John.

    Tangentially, I think one of the points of confusion over all this rip-off-or-not business is that there’s a world of difference between the law and the morals of individual creative people.

    Creative people, and especially web designers, have gotten up in arms a lot lately over things the law would laugh at. What you call a rip-off often would not be seen as any kind of wrongdoing in copyright or trademark court. Copyright doesn’t protect ideas at all, and trademark is pretty lenient about logos and other marks that “look pretty similar.” So just because you’re upset that someone has a logo that looks like yours doesn’t give you any legal ground for focing them to cease and desist (you have the right to ask, of course, but they have the right to ignore you, too).

    So next time you’re upset because someone has appropriated your idea or design, maybe think twice before saying, “you’ve stolen my intellectual property.” Because, more often than not, you don’t know the law well enough to know if that’s really true (I certainly don’t!). Instead, say what you do know: “I think you got this idea from my original work and I feel cheated that you used it without my permission.”

    In the case of Apple’s Hello ad specifically: there’s absolutely no way it is copyright infringement in the legal sense. But is it a rip-off? Definitely. Is ripping something off without breaking the law morally wrong?

    Well, that’s for you to decide. Everyone’s morals are different.

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  • Link // 03.28.2007 // 8:55 PM // 4 Comments

    Christian Marclay says iPhone ad is a rip-off

    Someone needs to tell Christian Marclay that you can’t copyright an idea. Ideas are simply not protected under copyright law. While they’re at it, someone should tell a lot a web designers this, too. Even if something is a rip-off of an idea, that doesn’t make it illegal.

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