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humans caused the photograph to be created... authority is becoming confused. The notion of Intellectual Property is becoming obviously self-contradictory. Who

by olefoo 11y ago

humans caused the photograph to be created... authority is becoming confused. The notion of Intellectual Property is becoming obviously self-contradictory. Who owns the copyright to your soul? Is it Facebook? Is it Google? Did you accidentally assign all of your Intellectual Property to WR Hambrecht? Can you be required to perform on command like a dancing bear? Are the excrescences of your soul merely the feedstock of an industrial process that requires human fleshbrains for supervised learning processes the output of which will be the property of the state since they are formed without human agency? Bullshit. Intellectual Property is Ideal Theft. There are no original ideas. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. There is nothing to be afraid of; resume shopping and avoid panic buying.

icebraining 11y ago
Overstuffed wording aside, copyright is just a set of laws that can be interpreted with more or less ambiguity; it's not some sort of ineffable concept. And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory. Also, "original" in the law doesn't mean the same as in regular conversation; it merely means it's not an outright copy. That's why a work can be deemed to be derived from other(s), yet still have copyright protection for its own contribution.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  >And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory. No, they just become meaningless (and potentially dangerous). The problem is that people are trying to apply the law to actual mathematical concepts (like bits). Since the law does not model mathematical reality, the law necessarily fails. Many appear to be stuck in the fallacious belief that the law reflects reality, or at least that reality should reflect laws. Of course, this belief is incorrect, doomed to failure, and we see that failure play out all the time, including in this case.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    A bit is no different than a letter/grapheme of a text, which was what copyright originally was designed to protect. They are both digital (discrete) encodings of information - a computer file is just a text in a language that only has two letters. The law doesn't concern itself with the specifics of the components of the work, it concerns itself with higher-level concepts like "copy" and "derivative", which still make perfect sense for information encoded as bits. As for the failure, I disagree. This case merely represents ambiguity, which is inherent to law (it's why we have courts and judges and juries).

by olefoo 11y ago

icebraining 11y ago

Overstuffed wording aside, copyright is just a set of laws that can be interpreted with more or less ambiguity; it's not some sort of ineffable concept. And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory. Also, "original" in the law doesn't mean the same as in regular conversation; it merely means it's not an outright copy. That's why a work can be deemed to be derived from other(s), yet still have copyright protection for its own contribution.

jsprogrammer 11y ago
>And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory. No, they just become meaningless (and potentially dangerous). The problem is that people are trying to apply the law to actual mathematical concepts (like bits). Since the law does not model mathematical reality, the law necessarily fails. Many appear to be stuck in the fallacious belief that the law reflects reality, or at least that reality should reflect laws. Of course, this belief is incorrect, doomed to failure, and we see that failure play out all the time, including in this case.
- icebraining 11y ago
  A bit is no different than a letter/grapheme of a text, which was what copyright originally was designed to protect. They are both digital (discrete) encodings of information - a computer file is just a text in a language that only has two letters. The law doesn't concern itself with the specifics of the components of the work, it concerns itself with higher-level concepts like "copy" and "derivative", which still make perfect sense for information encoded as bits. As for the failure, I disagree. This case merely represents ambiguity, which is inherent to law (it's why we have courts and judges and juries).