While grocery shopping this evening, I happened to notice a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese that was turned around, with a familiar looking maze on the back.

While this maze may look generic to you, it looks quite recognizable to me, because I spent quite a bit of time writing software that produces mazes in this style. If you look closely, you may notice the vertices form a fibonacci spiral. It’s a pretty unique design, but, just to be sure, I bought a box, took it home, and started looking through the collection of mazes on my website. These mazes are free for you to download, but definitely not free for you to reuse, unless I grant you permission.

Looking at my website, I found the original pretty quickly. The artist took Maze #1 from Book #1 (published in 2010) of my Intermediate Mazes, and turned it 90 degrees clockwise, and altered it in a handful of spots. Despite the addition and removal of about 7 line segments, the majority of the puzzle is identical to the original. Alas, he or she forgot to ask permission to use my design! They also failed to notice my copyright notice. I can only assume that they figured I wasn’t a consumer of Kraft Macaroni & cheese, or that I would never touch the SpongeBob variety that this maze appeared on (true – I prefer the classic elbow variety, which is getting increasingly hard to find for some reason). I admit I’m not terribly proud of my biannual craving for classic Kraft Mac, but sometimes, I like to pretend I’m 8 years old again.

Here’s the two mazes side by side, just in case there was any doubt:

A helpful note to the good folks at Kraft Foods, or any other multinational conglomerates that wish to use my content without my permission: If you’re gonna steal a maze, you might want to try stealing from maze book #47, and do a horizontal swap on it before you rotate it 90 degrees. That’ll slow me down some…

UPDATE: I’ve worked things out. The story continues…