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Comment by alasdair_ | Hacker News Reader

It's a "fact" that a book has specific words in a specific order, yet we're not allowed to share that fact with other people without legal repercussions.

I fully understand laws are not written by computer scientists and that nuance is involved, I'm just saying that the idea that PII could be copyrightable doesn't seem THAT crazy to me.

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> It's a "fact" that a book has specific words in a specific order, yet we're not allowed to share that fact with other people without legal repercussions.

Talking about the order of words in text X is not the same as a reproduction of text X.

Example:

Original: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

Reproduction: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

Talking about the order: In the sentence beginning with the following fair-use excerpt "The quick brown", the word "fox" precedes "dog".

> I'm just saying that the idea that PII could be copyrightable doesn't seem THAT crazy to me

It would be awesome, because then I could license out my address and collect royalties any time it is used or mentioned.

The first word of the sentence is "The". The second word of the sentence is "quick". The third word of the sentence is "brown". The fourth word of the sentence is "fox". The fifth word of the sentence is "jumped". The sixth word of the sentence is "over". The seventh word of the sentence is "lazy". The eighth word of the sentence is "dog".

Eight facts. Would replicating an entire book like this violate the copyright? The entire text is reproduced in order, there's just a bunch of junk added. I suspect courts would rule that it is a copyright violation.

Yea because your “fact” is literally a reproduction of the creative work with superfluous additions. Instead, if you publish a list of books and their unique word count it would be a collection of facts - and someone can copy your list (including mistakes) because your list isnt covered by copyright.

Producing a Mona Lisa with a mustache would therefore be a reproduction with superfluous additions then, eh?

That is a derivative work, unless parody.

Huh, one can obviously share snippets of paragraphs or pages for review and all for books. Same with address, it is snippet of information about a person and not the whole detail of everything in a house.

Yes, exceptions exist. But while you can use a small sample of a song in a review (say), you can't take the same sample and use it in your own song, even if it's just a few seconds.

Perhaps PII for commercial use could be treated differently than for private use?

You can measure the duration, key, BPM etc and publish that which are all facts.

A recording of a song (even if it falls under fair use) is not a “fact”, it’s information that took creativity to produce, multiple people working independently would not produce the same exact song - unlike going around and measuring the height of bridges where if multiple people did it they would arrive at the same measurement

Just as it's a fact that PI is 3.14 when approximated to 3 digits, it's also a fact that a particular recording can be represented by an MP3 file when approximated to about 3 MB.

One portion of our daily 10,000 steps will be to write out some copywritten works in the GPS path to make sure our data is doubly copywritten and should not be reproduced!

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