This whole issue about fractals being art and the right to copyright parameters seems to be calming down and the administration is taking a new, better informed stance on the subject. Please read Update on Fractals published earlier today, where $moonbeam13 and $lolly talk about new measures and policies.

Though most things have been said already, and in a quite vehement way, I would like to add my own reflections on the subject.

I think the question of parameters is clearer now and, thanks to the new chatroom #FantasticallyFractal created as a forum for fractal artists, further explanations and elucidations will come forth.

But there are more things involved in artistic creation than tools, and they are as important as the tools themselves. What happens when we open our fractal program to start working? We need to work in a certain direction, that may not be clear from the beginning but must necessarily become clear to us along the way. What marks this direction is our intention. As vague as this may sound, artistic creation is the result of a deliberate process. We mean to go somewhere, "say" something, express ourselves through the fractal image, as painters express themselves through painting and photographers through their photographs. (By the way, photography had to face the same problems of incomprehension and lack of recognition for decades before it was aknowledged as an art in its own right.)

What I want to stress here is that the process of fractal creation is personal. It is not random, it is not mechanical, it is not easy. Even if two fractalists worked with the same formulas, gradients and colouring algorithms, the results of their efforts would be very different, not only because the mathematical combinations are infinite and exclude random coincidence but also because they are two different artists, with different points of view on things, who will express themselves in entirely different ways.

I would invite everyone interested in the subject to read Kerry Mitchel's Fractal Art Manifesto. A clear, eminently informed and precise presentation of why fractals are art.

Artistic creation is the result of hard work, compositional skills, deep thought, self-examination, analysis of the tools at hand and awareness of our intention. If the work, the analysis and the intention belong to someone else, the work of art is theirs, not ours. That's why simply rendering someone else's parameters does not make the result ours.

It is not by chance that we use bright colours instead of dark ones, spirals instead of linear shapes, textures instead of flat colours, transforms and a long etcetera. It is because these elements mean something to us, and this something is personal and nontransferable. It comes from within and belongs only to us. Art is not a random process, it has its history and its rules. It requires study, knowledge and practice. Fractal art lacks none of the above.