Originally posted by Four0Six Copyright law states 10% alteration is all you need. Which isn't all that much.
That's completely wrong, as others have said.
I think it makes copyright laws clearer if you stop to consider their purpose.
The only purpose copyright laws serve is to legally allow people/business to monopolize things they create. IMHO, I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but historically anything that allows one person/business complete control is generally seen as bad, since it erodes competition.
While copyright laws do create a monopoly of sorts, it's on something too narrow to really be a problem. If you create a product, copyright laws do not prevent me from creating from scratch a product intuitively similar to yours and competing with you that way. A company may have a monopoly on the rights to sell one particular game, but that hardly constitutes a monopoly over the entire game industry. The latter situation, where no one else can create a similar product to compete, is when monopolies become problematic. Patent laws can sometimes grant such monopolies, but that's an entirely different discussion from copyright.
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While copyright laws do create a monopoly of sorts, it's on something too narrow to really be a problem. If you create a product, copyright laws do not prevent me from creating from scratch a product intuitively similar to yours and competing with you that way. A company may have a monopoly on the rights to sell one particular game, but that hardly constitutes a monopoly over the entire game industry. The latter situation, where no one else can create a similar product to compete, is when monopolies become problematic. Patent laws can sometimes grant such monopolies, but that's an entirely different discussion from copyright.