Hacker News Reader

Comment by nck4222 | Hacker News Reader

By that logic, the library of Babel owns the copyright on every piece of literature that could be written, which would be a terrible idea.

https://libraryofbabel.info/

View on HN

They don't pre-generate all the "books", right? So they can't claim the copyright (it's not "affixed to a physical medium")

So what is the difference between a program that views some text by reading it from a huge file and a program that views the same text by generating it on the fly? Especially if the file is generated by the very same process that happens on the fly in the second case? Why would you even have to actually build one of the two programs, enumerating all possible character sequences of some given length is a somewhat obvious idea and actually implementing that idea, especially if the text is only generated on the fly, does not bring the text into existence substantially more than just pondering the idea.

I guess for matters of copyright you have to produce a specific artifact, just blindly enumerating all possible artifacts is not good enough. Which would also mean that the existence of all those MIDI files will not make a difference.

There is something missing here.

If I were to write a "random book generator" that just regurgitate infinite text then I can copyright a pair starting index and length, but not simply all possible finite sequences of letters.

I would argue writing a book, composing a song, or inventing a device should be viewed as a search process. You are wandering around in the space of all possible books, songs, or devices looking for one that is interesting to read, pleasant to listen to, or useful to use. Your work is mainly identifying special items in the vast space of possible items, making it physical once identified is only secondary, at least for the purpose of this discussion. So writing a computer program to generate all possible songs is finding a specific and - at least somewhat - useful program among all possible programs and - ignoring its triviality and the general questions about copyright - seems copyrightable to me. On the other hand using this program to turn the space of all possible songs from something in your head into a huge pile of MIDI files on a disk seems not copyrightable to me because you do not single out interesting songs. Finding a good song did not get significantly easier, searching through and listening to a sea of MIDI files instead of playing all possible combinations of notes on a piano and judging the sound of it.

By that logic, you wouldn't be able to claim copyright on works that are distributed compressed or encrypted.

Nice link; thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com