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Can you copyright generated things? You probably could copyright the way you're generating it, but I doubt you have a legal standing about the generated text or

Can you copyright generated things? You probably could copyright the way you're generating it, but I doubt you have a legal standing about the generated text or melody itself.

thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
I am not a lawyer, but I don't see why not. Have you ever used code generation as part of software you have built? Is there any reason why generated code could not be copyrighted as part of a larger system? For example, suppose I define a data model for a public-facing API and then generate SDKs in various popular programming languages to interact with the public-facing API. If I were a major corporation that owned such a public-facing API, then I would expect that the generated SDKs would carry the major corporation's copyright. edit: Another example of generated code would be the code generated by lexer analyzer generator and parser generator tools such as lex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)), flex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_(lexical_analyser_generator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_(lexical_analyser_generat...), YACC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Yacc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Yacc), and bison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Bison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Bison). If you create commercial software that includes YACC-generated code, wouldn't the generated code be copyrightable?
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  > I am not a lawyer, but I don't see why not. The involvement of actual human creativity is required for a work to be copyrightable.
  - thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
    In my code generated-SDK example, a human defined the data model and a human created the code generation algorithm, but an algorithm generated the SDK code itself. So human creativity is involved, but is not the direct creator of the SDKs. Does that count? I am not really sure. I bring up the generated SDK example because I have used just such a system when I worked at a major corporation: I created a data model in Web Services Description Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Langu...) and used a company-owned tool to generate SDKs in various programming languages. All of the generated SDKs had the company's copyright notice in the generated code.
    - eqvinox 6y ago
      IANAL, but: The code generated SDK is a derivative work of the human-defined data model - just like the binary for any piece of software is derivative of the source code. (Otherwise where'd the copyright for the binary come from?) The generator's copyright (or the compiler's) doesn't directly flow in. (But if the generator/compiler incorporates pieces of itself, like a support library, that does. Also, the generator/compiler might have terms of use...) If you write a generator that just generates random APIs, those are basically machine generated garbage and wouldn't be copyrightable. The human input to the generator is missing. [FWIW, I had to research this due to an "ill-behaved" community member on an open source project a few years back; I'm not completely making this up out of thin air. That still doesn't make me a lawyer though ;)]
      - ghaff 6y ago
        My understanding is that the copyrightability of binaries was something of a gray area for a time even after the copyrightability of source code was established. Apple v. Franklin is probably the most relevant court case.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    The generator has been run by someone.
- ghaff 6y ago
  A more obvious example is that, if you write a program that generates music based on some algorithm, that work is presumably copyrightable.
- hctaw 6y ago
  We already do this, binary is generated and copyrighted.
- pvorb 6y ago
  > as part of a larger system I think this is the key statement that will make a difference. If you want to copyright a larger system, generated code is not a problem. If you want to copyright an individual, generated piece of code, I doubt you'll get copyright for that. But IANAL either.
hetspookjee 6y ago
Sometimes I fantasize about generating methods for creating copyrights, such that you can copyright the process of creating the copyright - for the commmunity, obviously. However, they explicitly forbid that, unfortunately. If only it worked, you could file a claim for anyone that created a copyright to your disliking, given that you probably make strong stance. While I'm at it, in a similar vein though entirely unrelated, i sometimes think of ways to create jurisprudence in your favor: You try to emulate a situation to your disliking - e.g. aggresive data hoarding - and file suit to yourself, try to argue the arguments that your target would probably file, but just crappy enough that you actually lose. Do this often and stealthy enough and voila, you might have generated enough jurisprudence to actually file your final claim based on your previous "lost" lawsuits. I do think that this actually does happen at times, though.
- simonh 6y ago
  You can't copyright a procedure or process, but you can copyright the text of the instructions for the procedure. That doesn't stop someone writing an original text of instructions for doing the same thing though. That's how come there are clones of Monopoly. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20311/horse-opoly https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20311/horse-opoly
  - shagie 6y ago
    Board games are protected with patents. For example, with Khet ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16991/khet-laser-game https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16991/khet-laser-game ) there is https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 which was upheld - https://www.generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-million-patent-infringement-lawsuit-over-board-games.html https://www.generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-m... The patent for Monopoly is https://patents.google.com/patent/US2026082A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US2026082A/en which expired in '52 There is also issues of trademark on the '-opoly' games... which was settled in '83 with https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2014-15/march-april/not-playing-around-board-games-intellectual-property-law/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law... > Finally, in 1983, the Supreme Court let stand an appeals court ruling that the word “Monopoly” had become generic, because purchasers associated the name with the product rather than with the source.7 Specifically, evidence showed that purchasers of Monopoly were motivated by their knowledge of the game, and not by its association with Parker Brothers. Directly as a result of this case, Congress amended § 14(c) of the Lanham Act, which addresses cancellation of a registered mark, later that year. Congress added language clarifying that a mark becomes generic only if its “primary significance . . . to the relevant public” is as the generic description of the particular goods or services, and that purchaser motivation is not used as the test. --- There are clones of Monopoly because the patent expired long ago and the trademark was lost in 83. ... Which is also why McDonalds did its Monopoly game in '87.
jcranmer 6y ago
My understanding is no. Copyright requires human authorship (the case of the monkey selfie found it to be public domain because a monkey did it, e.g.), and code written by a machine is likely to follow similar precedent and be uncopyrightable.
- sriram_sun 6y ago
  Well if it's your monkey (or program) that generated it (music or art or whatever) and the monkey can't talk, what's to prevent you from copyrighting it?
  - analognoise 6y ago
    Yeah, have an AI do the work and just say nothing about it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    You can certainly try to copyright it, but if the person who slavishly copies the case can demonstrate that you didn't write it yourself, you lose the copyright protection because you're not the author. There are copyright cases which turn heavily on who the actual author of the work in question is--the Happy Birthday song being perhaps the most famous.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      This whole thread could be true wrt the Monkey Selfies, but I am someone else's paid monkey and they can definitely copyright the work I do at work. So does this case really boil down to the Monkey being free and not owned in that you can't take their copyright away, but you could if you owned the monkey? I feel like the structure of our civilization is not stable, the focus and balance of capital power, the law and the ecological direction we are headed. I saw this play once and I didn't understand a bit of it.
daniellarusso 6y ago
For video and photography, there has to be a human element involved. A fixed, CCTV feed of a beach with a daily sunset is not copyrightable, nor is a non-human using a photo camera.
- salawat 6y ago
  The human still made the decision to place the camera just so. You're not travelling through enough layers of intentionality.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    Which human? The installer or the owner of the equipment?
    - salawat 6y ago
      Look through the contract. Guarantee the installer assigns all IP rights to the client if theres anything else softwarewise going on with the feed, and if not, litigation would probably clear it up.
- myself248 6y ago
  But a photographer who travels to the beach and sets out a camera on a tripod to capture a timelapse of the sunset DOES have copyright over those photos. What's the difference if they leave the camera there for longer? They still chose the placement and the angle and the lens. In either case, the camera's electronics are deciding the minutiae of the image acquisition.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    Intent. It is non-permanent and done by the photographer, not a third party.
coldtea 6y ago
>Can you copyright generated things? You probably could copyright the way you're generating it, but I doubt you have a legal standing about the generated text or melody itself. What would be the difference between a "generated text or melody" you present to copyright, to one you've written yourself? What would be the mark of "automatic generation" that would be used to identify them as such and disqualify them?
- luckylion 6y ago
  > What would be the mark of "automatic generation" that would be used to identify them as such and disqualify them? None, but you wouldn't get copyright, much like you can present the works of others as your own but won't actually get the copyright if you're not the creator.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Huh? For one, nothing stops you from saying you are the creator, and nobody would have any way to say you're not. Second, even if you have used a generator tool, regardless of if you wrote it or just run it, you're the creator of the works it produced, and you can trivially get copyright for it, unless somebody else copyrighted the same work. Half of Brian Eno's output is generated works, where he sets some rules on a music synthesis system, and lets it create a work. Never had any issue copyrighting them...
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > Huh? For one, nothing stops you from saying you are the creator, and nobody would have any way to say you're not. Sure, just as nothing is stopping you from walking into a store, taking something, and walking out without paying. It's when you get caught doing so that the trouble beings. If you get caught, not only do you not get the copyright, but you've likely committed fraud. Proving that you're not the creator is another issue, which would probably make for an interesting case. > Half of Brian Eno's output is generated works, where he sets some rules on a music synthesis system, and lets it create a work. Never had any issue copyrighting them... That's somewhat different though. Setting rules makes it a predictable process, and you have a one-way system: you set the rules and you always get the same result. A generator that would generate all possible results isn't the same. If you sifted through all those randomly generated things, found one that you like, and published it, things get fuzzy, I guess. Maybe the curation would qualify as the creative input.

Can you copyright generated things? You probably could copyright the way you're generating it, but I doubt you have a legal standing about the generated text or melody itself.

thesuperbigfrog 6y ago

I am not a lawyer, but I don't see why not. Have you ever used code generation as part of software you have built? Is there any reason why generated code could not be copyrighted as part of a larger system? For example, suppose I define a data model for a public-facing API and then generate SDKs in various popular programming languages to interact with the public-facing API. If I were a major corporation that owned such a public-facing API, then I would expect that the generated SDKs would carry the major corporation's copyright. edit: Another example of generated code would be the code generated by lexer analyzer generator and parser generator tools such as lex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)), flex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_(lexical_analyser_generator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_(lexical_analyser_generat...), YACC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Yacc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Yacc), and bison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Bison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Bison). If you create commercial software that includes YACC-generated code, wouldn't the generated code be copyrightable?

CydeWeys 6y ago
> I am not a lawyer, but I don't see why not. The involvement of actual human creativity is required for a work to be copyrightable.
- thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
  In my code generated-SDK example, a human defined the data model and a human created the code generation algorithm, but an algorithm generated the SDK code itself. So human creativity is involved, but is not the direct creator of the SDKs. Does that count? I am not really sure. I bring up the generated SDK example because I have used just such a system when I worked at a major corporation: I created a data model in Web Services Description Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Langu...) and used a company-owned tool to generate SDKs in various programming languages. All of the generated SDKs had the company's copyright notice in the generated code.
  - eqvinox 6y ago
    IANAL, but: The code generated SDK is a derivative work of the human-defined data model - just like the binary for any piece of software is derivative of the source code. (Otherwise where'd the copyright for the binary come from?) The generator's copyright (or the compiler's) doesn't directly flow in. (But if the generator/compiler incorporates pieces of itself, like a support library, that does. Also, the generator/compiler might have terms of use...) If you write a generator that just generates random APIs, those are basically machine generated garbage and wouldn't be copyrightable. The human input to the generator is missing. [FWIW, I had to research this due to an "ill-behaved" community member on an open source project a few years back; I'm not completely making this up out of thin air. That still doesn't make me a lawyer though ;)]
    - ghaff 6y ago
      My understanding is that the copyrightability of binaries was something of a gray area for a time even after the copyrightability of source code was established. Apple v. Franklin is probably the most relevant court case.
- coldtea 6y ago
  The generator has been run by someone.
ghaff 6y ago
A more obvious example is that, if you write a program that generates music based on some algorithm, that work is presumably copyrightable.
hctaw 6y ago
We already do this, binary is generated and copyrighted.
pvorb 6y ago
> as part of a larger system I think this is the key statement that will make a difference. If you want to copyright a larger system, generated code is not a problem. If you want to copyright an individual, generated piece of code, I doubt you'll get copyright for that. But IANAL either.

hetspookjee 6y ago

Sometimes I fantasize about generating methods for creating copyrights, such that you can copyright the process of creating the copyright - for the commmunity, obviously. However, they explicitly forbid that, unfortunately. If only it worked, you could file a claim for anyone that created a copyright to your disliking, given that you probably make strong stance. While I'm at it, in a similar vein though entirely unrelated, i sometimes think of ways to create jurisprudence in your favor: You try to emulate a situation to your disliking - e.g. aggresive data hoarding - and file suit to yourself, try to argue the arguments that your target would probably file, but just crappy enough that you actually lose. Do this often and stealthy enough and voila, you might have generated enough jurisprudence to actually file your final claim based on your previous "lost" lawsuits. I do think that this actually does happen at times, though.

simonh 6y ago
You can't copyright a procedure or process, but you can copyright the text of the instructions for the procedure. That doesn't stop someone writing an original text of instructions for doing the same thing though. That's how come there are clones of Monopoly. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20311/horse-opoly https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20311/horse-opoly
- shagie 6y ago
  Board games are protected with patents. For example, with Khet ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16991/khet-laser-game https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16991/khet-laser-game ) there is https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 which was upheld - https://www.generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-million-patent-infringement-lawsuit-over-board-games.html https://www.generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-m... The patent for Monopoly is https://patents.google.com/patent/US2026082A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US2026082A/en which expired in '52 There is also issues of trademark on the '-opoly' games... which was settled in '83 with https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2014-15/march-april/not-playing-around-board-games-intellectual-property-law/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law... > Finally, in 1983, the Supreme Court let stand an appeals court ruling that the word “Monopoly” had become generic, because purchasers associated the name with the product rather than with the source.7 Specifically, evidence showed that purchasers of Monopoly were motivated by their knowledge of the game, and not by its association with Parker Brothers. Directly as a result of this case, Congress amended § 14(c) of the Lanham Act, which addresses cancellation of a registered mark, later that year. Congress added language clarifying that a mark becomes generic only if its “primary significance . . . to the relevant public” is as the generic description of the particular goods or services, and that purchaser motivation is not used as the test. --- There are clones of Monopoly because the patent expired long ago and the trademark was lost in 83. ... Which is also why McDonalds did its Monopoly game in '87.

jcranmer 6y ago

My understanding is no. Copyright requires human authorship (the case of the monkey selfie found it to be public domain because a monkey did it, e.g.), and code written by a machine is likely to follow similar precedent and be uncopyrightable.

sriram_sun 6y ago
Well if it's your monkey (or program) that generated it (music or art or whatever) and the monkey can't talk, what's to prevent you from copyrighting it?
- analognoise 6y ago
  Yeah, have an AI do the work and just say nothing about it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jcranmer 6y ago
  You can certainly try to copyright it, but if the person who slavishly copies the case can demonstrate that you didn't write it yourself, you lose the copyright protection because you're not the author. There are copyright cases which turn heavily on who the actual author of the work in question is--the Happy Birthday song being perhaps the most famous.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    This whole thread could be true wrt the Monkey Selfies, but I am someone else's paid monkey and they can definitely copyright the work I do at work. So does this case really boil down to the Monkey being free and not owned in that you can't take their copyright away, but you could if you owned the monkey? I feel like the structure of our civilization is not stable, the focus and balance of capital power, the law and the ecological direction we are headed. I saw this play once and I didn't understand a bit of it.

daniellarusso 6y ago

For video and photography, there has to be a human element involved. A fixed, CCTV feed of a beach with a daily sunset is not copyrightable, nor is a non-human using a photo camera.

salawat 6y ago
The human still made the decision to place the camera just so. You're not travelling through enough layers of intentionality.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  Which human? The installer or the owner of the equipment?
  - salawat 6y ago
    Look through the contract. Guarantee the installer assigns all IP rights to the client if theres anything else softwarewise going on with the feed, and if not, litigation would probably clear it up.
myself248 6y ago
But a photographer who travels to the beach and sets out a camera on a tripod to capture a timelapse of the sunset DOES have copyright over those photos. What's the difference if they leave the camera there for longer? They still chose the placement and the angle and the lens. In either case, the camera's electronics are deciding the minutiae of the image acquisition.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  Intent. It is non-permanent and done by the photographer, not a third party.

coldtea 6y ago

>Can you copyright generated things? You probably could copyright the way you're generating it, but I doubt you have a legal standing about the generated text or melody itself. What would be the difference between a "generated text or melody" you present to copyright, to one you've written yourself? What would be the mark of "automatic generation" that would be used to identify them as such and disqualify them?

luckylion 6y ago
> What would be the mark of "automatic generation" that would be used to identify them as such and disqualify them? None, but you wouldn't get copyright, much like you can present the works of others as your own but won't actually get the copyright if you're not the creator.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Huh? For one, nothing stops you from saying you are the creator, and nobody would have any way to say you're not. Second, even if you have used a generator tool, regardless of if you wrote it or just run it, you're the creator of the works it produced, and you can trivially get copyright for it, unless somebody else copyrighted the same work. Half of Brian Eno's output is generated works, where he sets some rules on a music synthesis system, and lets it create a work. Never had any issue copyrighting them...
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Huh? For one, nothing stops you from saying you are the creator, and nobody would have any way to say you're not. Sure, just as nothing is stopping you from walking into a store, taking something, and walking out without paying. It's when you get caught doing so that the trouble beings. If you get caught, not only do you not get the copyright, but you've likely committed fraud. Proving that you're not the creator is another issue, which would probably make for an interesting case. > Half of Brian Eno's output is generated works, where he sets some rules on a music synthesis system, and lets it create a work. Never had any issue copyrighting them... That's somewhat different though. Setting rules makes it a predictable process, and you have a one-way system: you set the rules and you always get the same result. A generator that would generate all possible results isn't the same. If you sifted through all those randomly generated things, found one that you like, and published it, things get fuzzy, I guess. Maybe the curation would qualify as the creative input.