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Comment by cpncrunch | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing wrong in theory with someone claiming copyright over white noise. If someone else blatantly copies their white noise, they are perfectly within their rights to file a copyright claim.

However in this case it does seem to be youtube's content matching algorithm that is finding the match (as far as I can tell, but it's hard to know for sure). My guess is that their matching algorithm just doesn't work well for white noise.

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Copyright, in USA, requires a creative component. Facts, randomness, and other stuff lacking any creative expression is not covered by copyright. The bar is ridiculously low as in you can claim copyright on particular formatting or page layout of say names and phone numbers.

I could imagine, it's a stretch, a specific "arrangement" of white noise being copyrightable. But in general it is wrong to think you can copyright white noise.

There is always going to be some kind of creative component in actually generating the white noise. And even if you argue that white noise is theoretically uncopyrightable, you have to remember that it is also theoretically impossible to prove that any particular piece of sound is actually truly random.

As you said, I could imagine that maybe, maybe a specific white noise file is copyrightable. This would be similar to how typeface copyrights work. The specific font file for Helvetica Neue is copyrightable, but printing out the letters, tracing them, and digitizing that to make your own font is legal (in America at least).

I'm pretty sure John Cage's works are under copyright, which is interesting since he made such a big show of erasing himself from the work and embracing the random. It never occured to me how obtuse that was. I'm thinking particularly of 4'33". So, I guess the 'him' part of that composition is the fact that someone sits at a piano in particular, rather than say... bagpipes or even pipe organ. I wonder if it would be considered satire or a derrivative work on ukelele choir...I wish he was alive to ask him his thoughts on this.

/offtopic

> I'm thinking particularly of 4'33".

I read that using Apple's Text to Speech (macOS High Sierra) like:

> I'm thinking particularly of 4 feet 33 inches.

LOL Apple. You haven't heard of Classical Music yet, have you?

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