this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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I wonder how far “ai is regurgitating existing articles” vs “infinite monkeys on a keyboard will go”. This isn’t at you personally, your comment just reminded me of this for some reason
Have you seen library of babel? Heres your comment in the library, which has existed well before you ever typed it (excluding punctuation)
https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?ygsk_iv_cyquqwruq342
If all text that can ever exist, already exists, how can any single person own a specific combination of letters?
I hate copyright too, and I agree you shouldn't own ideas, but the library of babel is a pretty weak refutation of it.
It's an algorithm that can generate all possible text, then search for where that text would appear, then show you that location. So you say that text existed long before they typed it, but was it ever accessed? The answer is no on a level of certainty beyond the strongest cryptography. That string has never been accessed, and thus never generated until you searched for it, so in a sense it never did exist before now.
The library of babel doesn't contain meaningful information because you have to independently think of the string you want it to generate before it will generate it for you. It must be curated, and all creation is ultimately the product of curation. What you have there is an extremely inefficient method of string storage and retrieval. It is no more capable of giving you meaningful output than a blank text file.
A better argument against copyright is just that it mostly gets used by large companies to hoard IP and keep most of the rewards and pay actual artists almost nothing. If the idea is to ensure art gets created and artists get paid, it has failed, because artists get shafted and the industry makes homogeneous, market driven slop, and Disney is monopolising all of it. Copyright is the mechanism by which that happened.
There is no mathematical definition of copyright, because it’s just based on feelings. That’s why every small problem has to be arbitrarily decided by a court.
They don't own it, they just own exclusive rights to make copies. If you reach the exact same output without making a copy then you're in the clear.
Fortunately copyright depends on publication, so the text simply pre-existing somewhere won't ruin everything.
Unless you don't like copyright, in which case it's "unfortunately."
That is not correct. Copyright subsists in all original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102
Legally, when you write your shopping list, you instantly have the rights to that work, no publication or registration necessary. You can choose to publish it later, or not at all, but you still own the rights. Someone can't break into your house, look at your unpublished works, copy them, and publish them like they're their originals.
No, a list of facts like a shopping list is not under copyright protection.
If you wrote the list as a poem, you could claim it, though.
Right, but it's not a pure list of facts. When you set it to paper, it's unique, and you could argue it's art. In fact, a quick Google search found one such example: https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Shopping-list-1/2146403/10186433/view
Granted, that one was presumably intended to be a work of art on creation and your weekly shopping list isn't, but the intent during creation isn't all that important for US copyright law. You create it, you get the rights.
Here's the ruling.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.^article^ ^|^ ^about^