Thought for the Day
If an infinite number of monkeys working on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare, a sufficiently powerful computer could auto-generate random combinations of letters, numbers, punctuation, sounds, and pixel maps, until it owns the copyright on every work of art that could ever be created.
One application of this machine would be to generate income by suing popular artists. Another would be to render all future art illegal.
Since going about your everyday life would inadvertently create an unauthorized performance of a copyrighted work, it would be illegal to do anything, at least for 120 years, except act out old books and films that had already entered the public domain.
Happy New Year!
Comments
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Calaquin (#2434)
Location: United States
Posted: 5565 days ago
Emily (#609)
Location: New York
Quote: "When in doubt, fuck it. When not in doubt, get in doubt!"
Posted: 5565 days ago
Ben Moss (#109)
Location: New York, NY
Posted: 5565 days ago
david (#1793)
Location: San Diego
Posted: 5565 days ago
the laws of probability and chance indicate that if an infinate number of monkeys are given typewriters and allowed to peck away for an infinite time they will eventually produce all the world's great literature. but in the process we find monkeys, like humans, also turn out quite a bit of absolute junk.
Eric (#1896)
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Posted: 5565 days ago
Another nitpicky thing I've wondered about the monkeys and typewriters...given enough (infinite) time, don't you only need one monkey and one typewriter?
M. Kilbain Lazer (#1709)
Location: Holland
Quote: "I guess we're awesome"
Posted: 5565 days ago
towr (#1914)
Location: Netherlands
Posted: 5565 days ago
The problem with having just one monkey is that it doesn't live forever. You'd need at least two, so that they can reproduce. But the limited genepool would quickly produce freakish mutants (like hairless monkeys with brains over four times the normal size and an overinflated sense of importance). I think the safe limit is at a population of about 500 individuals.
@Max
I like the idea of creating a computer program that generates any possible future work of art (in digital form). However, the really big problem is that you need to exclude all current copyrighted works. Because you can hardly claim a right and at the same moment infringe upon it.
It is _very_ easy to write a program that can (potentially, given a universal Turing machine, and enough time) create all possible work of art; but it will inevitably be copyright infringing. The reason is that merely to be able to exclude reproducing every currently copyrighted work, you have to copy them (in a sense).
I suppose you could make a hash of every existent work, and then avoid generating works that produce the same hash. But 1) you still need to generate a work to compute the hash needed to realize that you shouldn't have generated it. 2) ignoring that, there are an infinite number of unique works with the same hash. (Although most are crap. But then, so are most of the artistic works people produce).
Max
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Quote: "I'm my number one fan!"
Posted: 5565 days ago
Let's see: the computer wouldn't need to distribute its works. In fact, that would probably be impossible, given it would possess an infinite number of them. So although it would inevitably create duplicate works, it wouldn't be distributing. It could get in trouble for falsely accusing other people of violating copyright it didn't really hold, which might happen if it used some kind of automated copyright-violation-notice-issuing system. But the penalty for this, and its own violations, would surely be far outweighed by the return from all the successful lawsuits.
(One reason I don't like this as a basis for a story is because if the situation arose, society would simply change copyright law to stop the abuse. If the computer was sufficiently powerful to prevent that happening, it wouldn't need to be generating novels to make money.)
Andrew White (#3558)
Posted: 5564 days ago
Regardless to the question of time, I think that money is the biggest limiting factor here. There is no where close to enough wealth on this planet for anyone to afford copyrighting or even recording all of the stuff that the computer would make.
dave (#3785)
Posted: 5564 days ago
imagine a lump of titanium the size of a galaxy, then imagine that every 100 trillion years a fly lands on the lump, eventually the fly will erode away all of the titanium, once this period of time has elapsed infinity has not yet even begun.
infinity is endless, so to set a computer to work to produce an infinite amount of artworks is impossible, as they could not all be created.
Dave (#3198)
Location: Pennsylvania, USA
Quote: "There is no great genius without some touch of madness."
Posted: 5564 days ago
Perhaps that's the answer: re-write the classics that are already public domain. Then find 120 year old garbage and re-work that.
I've been a fan since Syrup. I remember the joy when I saw Company for the first time in the bookstore (one of the all time great works of fiction). Please don't give up writing!
Toby O (#2900)
Location: Sydney
Quote: "vote with your wallet"
Posted: 5564 days ago
Hobbie (#1359)
Location: Cornwall, England
Quote: "There was a little man in his hair!"
Posted: 5564 days ago
I quite like what comedian Bill Bailey says about it. "If the monkey is that smart, why doesn't it write plays in a more modern idiom?"
Jeffrey (#2286)
Location: Right here
Quote: "Mathematics is a powerful language. Just look at how mathematicians destroyed the housing market."
Posted: 5564 days ago
Frédéric Meurin (#2820)
Location: France
Posted: 5564 days ago
Then it would be illegal to hold any legal action, and the judge and juries would not say anything that wouldn't be a copyright infrigment. If any prosecution was illegal from the very beginning, it wouldn't work : he paradox kills itself, or it needs so many changes to our actual world that it is not so big.
Happy new year anyway ! :)
towr (#1914)
Location: Netherlands
Posted: 5563 days ago
"infinity is endless, so to set a computer to work to produce an infinite amount of artworks is impossible, as they could not all be created."
It is quite easy to set a computer to work on an endless task; the fact it will not finish does not bother a computer at all. "while(true);" is sufficient to keep it busy. "while(fork());" is more fun, though.
Of course, the trick is to somehow create all works in potentia, and claim them as real. You can consider your algorithm as a compression technique, and each number 'decompresses' as a work of art. This is reversible, such that of any later work, you can say exactly what number it has in your program, and that therefore you were first. So all you need to do is claim every natural number. (Considering people are patenting large primes, this is apparently not much of a problem).
@Andrew White
"In fact whether or not the computer could even produce a human quality artwork is questionable with the existence of the halting problem and the theory of the big crunch."
The halting problem is no objection, because the program doesn't have to determine whether it gets a program as input that will halt. The only problem, as you say, is time and storage (if you want to actually create all works). Given those two, it should, inevitably, create human quality artwork though.
"Regardless to the question of time, I think that money is the biggest limiting factor here. There is no where close to enough wealth on this planet for anyone to afford copyrighting or even recording all of the stuff that the computer would make."
I think copyright is automatic; authorship is, in any case. If you make something new, it is your intellectual property, regardless of whether you registered it at any institution. However you'll need some way to prove your ownership if it comes to a trial.
Perhaps we don't need to go this far anyway. If I can claim the first page of every book, that should be enough to get a piece of the pie. And with a good grammar and dictionary, plus a bit of semantics, it is a much more tractable problem. There are an infinite number of possible sentences, sure; but only a finite number of them make sense. (Due to limits of human comprehension.)
Abgrund (#3357)
Location: Atlantis
Quote: ""Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority." - Ayn Rand"
Posted: 5563 days ago
Celeste (#2590)
Location: St.L. MO, USA
Quote: "You can't child-proof the world, so world-proof the child."
Posted: 5562 days ago
seems like it would be simple. when they run out of paint, just cut the canvas into appropriate size pieces. While Jackson Pollock had a specific way of working and specific visions, there is no consensus among the experts on how to tell a Jackson Pollock from something that looks like a Jackson Pollock. Even the occassionally discovered accidental fingerprint is of no help, there is no authenticated Pollock fingerprint in existence.
He took too much of the human element out of his work, which makes him much easier to "recreate" by computer, or monkey. Unlike the work of Shakespeare and Max Barry, which actually take effort to make saleable works, instead of gibberish. But with Pollock, who's to tell?
hmmm. I wouldnt even need to claim they're Pollocks. I could just publish them in a book called "Why Roomba's Paint" and I'd make a fortune!
(by me saying this in public, is my idea copywrited, and then I can sue anyone who actually does it before me?)
>wink<
towr (#1914)
Location: Netherlands
Posted: 5562 days ago
Unfortunately, people have already put their Roomba to painting. e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/towers/1812634956/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/vjtx/1680511105/
Although you might still be the first to make a book about it. (I don't think the idea is enough to make claims on though.)
Joe (#2270)
Location: Campbell, CA, USA
Quote: "I'm subverting the system from the inside. I think."
Posted: 5557 days ago
But it doesn't really work out because the numbers get so large so fast. If you try to store each story on a single atom, you run out of atoms in the visible universe long before you can save every possible 80-character combination.
Yenzo (#829)
Location: Secret underwater pyramid base in the Pacific
Quote: "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe (Carl Sagan)"
Posted: 5554 days ago
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