

Ask HN: Can you own copyright on everything if you publish it first? - TomGullen

This is just meant to be a bit of fun, I was going to attempt it as a joke website and give it all a Creative Commons license but after 1 quick sum it's obvious it's just not possible (doh!).<p>Anyway, assuming it was possible to iterate every possible combination of characters &#60; 100 characters in length, store them and publish them to a website.  You're looking at in the region of 10^135 terabytes of data so there's no way to store it at the moment, but imagine somehow you can.<p>Do you then own copyright on all that text?  If Britney Spears released a new single, would it break your published copyright as her lyrics will certainly overlap with your published text?
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patio11
No, for a variety of reasons. Copyright attaches to creative expression. Your
work is not creative. Britney Spears' new single would not decrease the
commercial value (hah) of your work. Any copying of your work would be de
minimis in character.

More broadly, the law is generally resistant to attacks that programmers
dreamed up in two minutes and thought sounded clever. The canonical essay on
this is The Color of Bits.

~~~
dctoedt
What Patrick said. In the U.S., there has to be at least minimal originality
to be able to claim copyright. The White Pages don't count (sayeth the Supreme
Court of the U.S.). Neither do exact photographic reproductions of paintings
(sayeth another federal court).

Even now, 25 years after Pam Samuelson's [1] seminal article [2], it's still
unclear whether computer-generated works can be subject to copyright
protection.

[1] <http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/>

[2]
[http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/47UPittLRev11...](http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/47UPittLRev1185.pdf)

~~~
rmc
Raw facts don't count as copyrightable, but a collection/database can count as
copyrightable in some cases. This is how map data is copyrightable. Each
individual road data ("The road is called main street", "Main St. is 200m
long", "The top corner of main street is at X deg North, Y deg West", etc.) is
just a little fact, and itself is not copyrightable. However if you collect
all those uncopyrightable facts together into one database/collection, then
that database/collection might be a copyrightable work.

Tracing street/road positions from aerial imagery may or may not be making a
derived work. It may or may not be similar to your 'photograph of a paining'.
This sort of thing is important for OpenStreetMap and tracing from aerial
imagery. However in that project, we avoid legal gray areas and just don't
trace from aerial imagery without permission.

But when it comes to copyrights, IANAL, lots of this is decided by case law in
courts, it varies from country to country, and you should get a lawyer if you
need better answers.

~~~
dctoedt
> _However if you collect all those uncopyrightable facts together into one
> database/collection, then that database/collection might be a copyrightable
> work._

True, _if_ there is at least a modicum of "originality" in the selection
and/or arrangement of the uncopyrightable facts. In the U.S. Supreme Court's
_Feist_ case,[1] the Court held that an alphabetical arrangement of names,
etc., in the white pages of a phone directory did not include the requisite
originality.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural>

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wmf
What colour are your bits? <http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23>

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ig1
Copyrights aren't like patents, if two people come up with the same creation
independently neither will infringe on the other's copyright.

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zoowar
Please share: <https://creativecommons.org/>

