Comment by baroffoos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baroffoos | Hacker News Reader

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Years ago I remember there was an article of someone using brute force to generate every possible phrase of a certain length so that from that point on no one could ever claim ownership of one since they had all already been created.

Also I wonder what defines created. If I create a program that can generate every possible variation of x, do I get copyright when the program is run or do the results have to be saved. Or do I get copyright over the output of my program before it has even run since the result of the program is fixed we can know it would have resulted in the output even if it was never run. What if I just make a webserver with unlimited pages and given the correct url is entered it can output any result at all. That data was available on my website since it was created so do I have copyright over it?

If we allow the output of programs which were not extensions of the users input (photoshop, a text editor) than in theory my program that outputs random numbers now has copyright over every possible work that could ever be created.

That gave me an idea for an app which would permute all phrases of any length randomly and have forward and back pointers to the next and previous word in the series. At the end of an _n_ word phrase, the next link would give you an _n_+1 phrase.

If a crawler came along (like archive.org) it might index all permutations, giving you some evidence of when your site “coined” a phrase.

The app may want to consult a recent USPTO dump you avoid known trademarks and copyrights. Sounds like a fun exercise.

There is something similar to what you are describing.

This reminds of infinite monkey theorem.

[1]https://libraryofbabel.info/ [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Creating an intelligible work through a random process takes a really long time. It took Earth hundreds of millions of years.

A lot of things that seem to fall under copyright are not particularly difficult to brute force. Looking at music for example. Most music follows a set of fairly basic patterns where each part of the music (drum beat, chord progression) is just a short arrangement of only a few choices. And yet the copyright system seems to take even a tiny piece of a song as copyrightable. It would not be difficult or time consuming for a script to generate every possible 4-6 chord progression and every single kind of melody which is close enough for copyright (Often these cases use very general terms like "A descending melody starting at C")

I think the intellectual component to randomly generated content is distinguishing between the good and the bad. And there's a lot of bad.

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