this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
430 points (83.1% liked)
Technology
59390 readers
2560 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes and none of that matters in the slightest. By that logic the Library of Babel is also copyright infringement. By that logic my memory of the movie is copyright infringing even if I don't do anything with it.
You're taking a fictional work and trying to apply real world laws to it?
Copyright assumes that Library of Babel would take up so much space as it'd be impossible to create.
Which is true. Every possible combination of letters, spaces, and characters would never fit on anything in today's universe (be it a 24 TB Hard Drive, or even a collection of thousands of them).
Secondly: any computer-generated work is automatically non-copyrighted as per US Law.
Wut? I'm talking about this website here: https://libraryofbabel.info/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
That is just a website demonstrating the concept of a famous science fiction story. Everything I said above remains true.
No storage can hold that. Its likely a computer generated system.
Any computer generated set of text cannot be copyrighted.
Finding any particular book in that "library" would require an index that is the same length / entropy as a full length book in any case. So its a stupid thought experiment to any information theorist. (I'm a Comp. Engineer by trade and have been taught numerous theoretical comp. sci. problems from Nyquist Frequencies, theories on communication, entropy and other such concepts. So this is actually well within my wheelhouse, training an expertise).
Go search for a book in there that replicates Shakespeare's Hamlet in its entirety. The only way that website could possibly work is if the link you give me has the same entropy / information space as all of Hamlet to begin with.
In the case of copyright law, the Website's code (including its text generating engine and so forth) is subject to copyright. But the Quadrillion-pages of "text" (most of which is random-gibberish) is not copyrightable.