https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
In the case of the music project, it was for the protection of the community, but I can imagine such a system being used selfishly for software APIs.
It would have officially mean businesses and the US governments are locked by vendors and have no right to copy API in order to provide compatibility towards other systems.
Making « VendorLocking » legally valid in favor of the vendor.
Not gonna lie I was scared by the outcome of that judgement and the catastrophic defense of Google.
I’m now relieved !
However, that would indeed require a ton more work to prove that you did not copy any of the generated work and truly did create yours by yourself.
Have you ever used code generation as part of software you have built?
Is there any reason why generated code could not be copyrighted as part of a larger system?
For example, suppose I define a data model for a public-facing API and then generate SDKs in various popular programming languages to interact with the public-facing API.
If I were a major corporation that owned such a public-facing API, then I would expect that the generated SDKs would carry the major corporation's copyright.
edit: Another example of generated code would be the code generated by lexer analyzer generator and parser generator tools such as lex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)), flex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_(lexical_analyser_generat...), YACC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Yacc), and bison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Bison).
If you create commercial software that includes YACC-generated code, wouldn't the generated code be copyrightable?
The involvement of actual human creativity is required for a work to be copyrightable.
So human creativity is involved, but is not the direct creator of the SDKs. Does that count? I am not really sure.
I bring up the generated SDK example because I have used just such a system when I worked at a major corporation: I created a data model in Web Services Description Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Langu...) and used a company-owned tool to generate SDKs in various programming languages. All of the generated SDKs had the company's copyright notice in the generated code.
The code generated SDK is a derivative work of the human-defined data model - just like the binary for any piece of software is derivative of the source code. (Otherwise where'd the copyright for the binary come from?)
The generator's copyright (or the compiler's) doesn't directly flow in. (But if the generator/compiler incorporates pieces of itself, like a support library, that does. Also, the generator/compiler might have terms of use...)
If you write a generator that just generates random APIs, those are basically machine generated garbage and wouldn't be copyrightable. The human input to the generator is missing.
[FWIW, I had to research this due to an "ill-behaved" community member on an open source project a few years back; I'm not completely making this up out of thin air. That still doesn't make me a lawyer though ;)]
I think this is the key statement that will make a difference. If you want to copyright a larger system, generated code is not a problem. If you want to copyright an individual, generated piece of code, I doubt you'll get copyright for that. But IANAL either.
While I'm at it, in a similar vein though entirely unrelated, i sometimes think of ways to create jurisprudence in your favor: You try to emulate a situation to your disliking - e.g. aggresive data hoarding - and file suit to yourself, try to argue the arguments that your target would probably file, but just crappy enough that you actually lose. Do this often and stealthy enough and voila, you might have generated enough jurisprudence to actually file your final claim based on your previous "lost" lawsuits. I do think that this actually does happen at times, though.
The patent for Monopoly is https://patents.google.com/patent/US2026082A/en which expired in '52
There is also issues of trademark on the '-opoly' games... which was settled in '83 with https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law...
> Finally, in 1983, the Supreme Court let stand an appeals court ruling that the word “Monopoly” had become generic, because purchasers associated the name with the product rather than with the source.7 Specifically, evidence showed that purchasers of Monopoly were motivated by their knowledge of the game, and not by its association with Parker Brothers. Directly as a result of this case, Congress amended § 14(c) of the Lanham Act, which addresses cancellation of a registered mark, later that year. Congress added language clarifying that a mark becomes generic only if its “primary significance . . . to the relevant public” is as the generic description of the particular goods or services, and that purchaser motivation is not used as the test.
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There are clones of Monopoly because the patent expired long ago and the trademark was lost in 83. ... Which is also why McDonalds did its Monopoly game in '87.
Are you saying McDonald's needed to wait for the trademark to expire? Or that they had to wait for a new trademark to be established? Wasn't the promotion collaborative?
Looking at McDonald's Monopoly commercials from 87 [1] and 88 [2], there's a Parker Brothers TM in both years.
McD's probably waited until the trademark on Monopoly was sufficiently weakened for them to go out, license the other parts of it (as it was Parker Brothers(TM).
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4803%3A...
In particular - https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:qp... is likely the one that they're referring to which covers the trademark on the board and game pieces - which is different than the game name.
Also note that many of those (now dead) trademarks were all filed in '85 - '87... after they lost the trademark in '83.
And IANAL, but I think that strategy could fall under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frivolous_litigation.
So does this case really boil down to the Monkey being free and not owned in that you can't take their copyright away, but you could if you owned the monkey?
I feel like the structure of our civilization is not stable, the focus and balance of capital power, the law and the ecological direction we are headed. I saw this play once and I didn't understand a bit of it.
That is "work for hire." You are the creative author of the code, but since your creativity is being applied at the direction of another, it is that person who owns the copyright instead of you. The Copyright Office has a document to explain how to decide whether or not your work is a "work for hire."
As applied to monkey selfies, it's possible that the human photographer who set the situation up owns the copyright instead, but this wasn't argued in court.
(Appeals courts can still settle case law, even if SCOTUS doesn't hear the case. There are several precedents that are set by appeals courts and not SCOTUS itself.)
A fixed, CCTV feed of a beach with a daily sunset is not copyrightable, nor is a non-human using a photo camera.
The installer or the owner of the equipment?
What's the difference if they leave the camera there for longer? They still chose the placement and the angle and the lens. In either case, the camera's electronics are deciding the minutiae of the image acquisition.
What would be the difference between a "generated text or melody" you present to copyright, to one you've written yourself?
What would be the mark of "automatic generation" that would be used to identify them as such and disqualify them?
None, but you wouldn't get copyright, much like you can present the works of others as your own but won't actually get the copyright if you're not the creator.
Second, even if you have used a generator tool, regardless of if you wrote it or just run it, you're the creator of the works it produced, and you can trivially get copyright for it, unless somebody else copyrighted the same work.
Half of Brian Eno's output is generated works, where he sets some rules on a music synthesis system, and lets it create a work. Never had any issue copyrighting them...
Sure, just as nothing is stopping you from walking into a store, taking something, and walking out without paying. It's when you get caught doing so that the trouble beings. If you get caught, not only do you not get the copyright, but you've likely committed fraud.
Proving that you're not the creator is another issue, which would probably make for an interesting case.
> Half of Brian Eno's output is generated works, where he sets some rules on a music synthesis system, and lets it create a work. Never had any issue copyrighting them...
That's somewhat different though. Setting rules makes it a predictable process, and you have a one-way system: you set the rules and you always get the same result. A generator that would generate all possible results isn't the same.
If you sifted through all those randomly generated things, found one that you like, and published it, things get fuzzy, I guess. Maybe the curation would qualify as the creative input.
Well, there is. If you get caught you get to jail.
Whereas if you get "caught" saying this generated melody is your melody, nothing happens. It's a totally valid thing to copyright. (And even if it wasn't, unlike the store theft case, there's no way for anybody to tell and prove it's not yours anyway).
But in any case, you appear confused as to this.
Whatever tool you can use to create a melody, the melody is still yours to copyright (unless somebody else came with it first and copyrighted it). You don't have to "think" of the melody or write it on the piano, or something.
In fact tons of melodies nowadays are written partially or wholly by compositional tools.
People using those tools have the regular claim to the output melodies, regardless of whether the tool is some DAW utility or "random melody" button (all of which exist), a music synthesis algorithm with some params and seed, or even an exhaustive, minimally creative tool to iterate over all possible melodies.
(Actually some musicians/coders did exactly the latter: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic... )
There's no rule "you can't copyright a generated melody".
If that was so, then no more melodies can be copyrighted after that group that was also mentioned somewhere else in the threads generated (essentially) all melodies, claimed copyright and then released them into the public domain. Alas, there is, even with people claiming copyright on individual generated melodies!
Again, I think the curation is relevant. You can certainly copyright a book, even though "it's somewhere in Pi". If you endlessly calculate fractions of Pi and check them for something interesting, I'm sure you can copyright whatever poem you find.
Well, that's true.
But
(a) nobody is going to cross-check their melodies against a new copyright claim,
(b) they are not going to claim infrigement against anyone,
So there's that. And even if they did, they'd be thrown out as a joke-submission (the content being "all possible melodies" etc).
But you can submit hundreds of generated melodies, copyright them, and succesfully sue people for infringing of them. The fact that they were generated doesn't change anything.