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Ask HN: Can you own copyright on everything if you publish it first?
This is just meant to be a bit of fun, I was going to attempt it as a joke website and give it all a Creative Commons license but after 1 quick sum it's obvious it's just not possible (doh!).
Anyway, assuming it was possible to iterate every possible combination of characters < 100 characters in length, store them and publish them to a website. You're looking at in the region of 10^135 terabytes of data so there's no way to store it at the moment, but imagine somehow you can.
Do you then own copyright on all that text? If Britney Spears released a new single, would it break your published copyright as her lyrics will certainly overlap with your published text?
- patio11 15y agoNo, for a variety of reasons. Copyright attaches to creative expression. Your work is not creative. Britney Spears' new single would not decrease the commercial value (hah) of your work. Any copying of your work would be de minimis in character. More broadly, the law is generally resistant to attacks that programmers dreamed up in two minutes and thought sounded clever. The canonical essay on this is The Color of Bits.
- jamesbritt 15y agoCopyright attaches to creative expression. Your work is not creative. And yet, Damien Hirst and "his" spin art created by his minions. There are assorted examples of works created through some process, with varying degrees of human intervention once the process is running. I have to believe that there is some path to creating a program that generates text such that the results would be considered art and as such protected by copyright. The key to this would be, sadly, in what way Colour was applied. You can't just run the the damn code. Perhaps if iterations of the program were driven by the random activities of people passing through Times Square and you attached some suitable art theoretic narrative to the whole thing. My complaint is not that people cannot get away with programs that allow them to copyright everything, but that the circumstances that allow for copyright at all allow for some pretty arbitrary things. (See, again, Damien Hirst, and his Crystal Skull, and an artist named Cartrain.)
- dctoedt 15y agoWhat Patrick said. In the U.S., there has to be at least minimal originality to be able to claim copyright. The White Pages don't count (sayeth the Supreme Court of the U.S.). Neither do exact photographic reproductions of paintings (sayeth another federal court). Even now, 25 years after Pam Samuelson's [1] seminal article [2], it's still unclear whether computer-generated works can be subject to copyright protection. [1] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/ http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/ [2] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/47UPittLRev1185.pdf http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/47UPittLRev11...
- rmc 15y agoRaw facts don't count as copyrightable, but a collection/database can count as copyrightable in some cases. This is how map data is copyrightable. Each individual road data ("The road is called main street", "Main St. is 200m long", "The top corner of main street is at X deg North, Y deg West", etc.) is just a little fact, and itself is not copyrightable. However if you collect all those uncopyrightable facts together into one database/collection, then that database/collection might be a copyrightable work. Tracing street/road positions from aerial imagery may or may not be making a derived work. It may or may not be similar to your 'photograph of a paining'. This sort of thing is important for OpenStreetMap and tracing from aerial imagery. However in that project, we avoid legal gray areas and just don't trace from aerial imagery without permission. But when it comes to copyrights, IANAL, lots of this is decided by case law in courts, it varies from country to country, and you should get a lawyer if you need better answers.
- dctoedt 15y ago> However if you collect all those uncopyrightable facts together into one database/collection, then that database/collection might be a copyrightable work. True, if there is at least a modicum of "originality" in the selection and/or arrangement of the uncopyrightable facts. In the U.S. Supreme Court's Feist case,[1] the Court held that an alphabetical arrangement of names, etc., in the white pages of a phone directory did not include the requisite originality. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
- ig1 15y agoThat's not globally true, some countries recognize "sweat of brow" copyrights and others some form of database copyright, which don't require creative expression.
- zoowar 15y agoPlease share: https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/
- wmf 15y agoWhat colour are your bits? http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- ig1 15y agoCopyrights aren't like patents, if two people come up with the same creation independently neither will infringe on the other's copyright.