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Sort of off topic, but I wonder if you can copyright or otherwise do something legalish with specific word frequency distributions. It's not nearly enough information to, say, reconstruct a corpus, but it's often sufficient information to identify someone with precision (so I've heard, anyway).


I studied these issues a lot (copyright, right of publicity, etc), and I think this particular use is fine. You are right that sometimes it is easy to figure out the text from the cloud, just like you can make out a famous photo from a very small 10x10 thumbnail, or draw Mona Lisa in 50 polygons http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolut... or as a single tweet http://www.flickr.com/photos/quasimondo/3518306770/


It may or may not be fine, but my guess is that calling your Zazzle shop y-combinator is a bit much. Yes it's a generic term, but out of courtesy you should probably rename it to something like pgfan or something that indicates that you're not somehow "official"...


This is actually the "Tagxedo" shop in Zazzle, and the category is called "Y Combinator".

The link goes to http://www.tagxedo.com/shop/y-combinator so this is also Tagxedo shop Y Combinator category. It's clearly stated that this is a tribute. I don't think I used language that is misleading, but I'll triple check.


Oh I didn't mean that at all, it just brought up a question I thought was interesting.




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