I only made it about half way through your post when
it struck me that you are analyzing the law with
mathmatical logic. They are not very related. This is
why engineers and other scientist who do very well on
the LSAT do not do as well in law school.
"If/then" statements are almost never applicable in
the legal context without a caveat, and the caveat is
ussually the important part. The old joke for
answering a law school question when you have no idea
what the law is seems the best example:
1)make up a rule
2)apply the rule to the facts
3)make up an exception
4)apply the exception the facts
Keith
- David Dailey <david.dailey[_at_]sru.edu> wrote:
> Last week in a class on programming, I scribbled the
> following sentence
> into a web form I was demonstrating:
>
> (1)“This sentence is uncopyrightable.”
>
> It made me wonder if the sentence I typed was true
> or if I now owned yet
> one more copyright, or worse, if I had infringed on
> someone else. A search
> of that literal string on various search engines
> revealed no prior
> occurrences on the web, though it seems like the
> sort of thing that if
> Bertrand Russell didn’t write it then Douglass
> Hofstadter would have. It
> was just a matter of time.
>
> It gives rise to my main question:
>
> [A] What is the shortest expression (in bits) for
> which a court has upheld
> a copyright?
>
> Other questions, of course, emerge.
>
> [B] Let alpha refer to a copyrighted expression. May
> I publish an algorithm
> A and a string beta, for which A applied to beta
> yields alpha? Would I be
> guilty of contributory infringement or even primary
> infringment?
>
> We might be tempted to answer ‘yes’ since we might
> assume that I copied
> alpha in creating beta. But, on the other hand, I
> may produce beta through
> mental arithmetic:
> uif tnbmmftu dpqzsjhiubcmf fyqsfttjpo <= the
> smallest copyrightable
> expression
>
> The string at left was derived by adding 1 (mod 26)
> to each letter in the
> expression at right, and there is no reason that a
> physical copy of the
> original would have been created.
>
> Here’s an argument that I should not be guilty in
> the scenario raised in
> question [B]:
>
> (2)“the smallest copyrighted phrase”
>
> Statement (2) presumably defines a referent: a
> phrase that the legal system
> has defined or, in theory, can define. While there
> might be two or more
> such expressions (which have the same number of bits
> of information), this
> seems unlikely since the phrase would have to be
> fairly lengthy it has to
> be more than 24 bits, else individual colors in RGB
> space are copyrighted.
> The definition in (2), however, when combined with
> the proper process of
> legal scholarship (historical and hypothetical) will
> yield precisely that
> phrase. Since sentence (2) is a string of 31 ASCII
> characters (counting
> blanks), then the smallest copyrighted phrase must
> have fewer than 31
> characters, else we could replace it by (2) yielding
> a smaller copyrighted
> expression.
>
> (3) “the smallest copyrightable phrase”
>
> If the referent of sentence (3) can be found, then
> that phrase either
> already exists, or by the axiom of choice, it comes
> into existence at the
> moment it is found. In either case, the referent of
> (3) is copyrighted and
> hence (3) is equivalent to (2) which is all very
> pleasant since (2) has
> fewer characters than (3).
>
> (4) The 3044-th through 3047-th sentences in James
> Joyce’s Ulysses.
>
> Here I have alluded to a process or algorithm by
> which that particular
> (copyrighted?) expression might be excerpted: namely
> enumerate the
> sentences in the book and find those referred to.
>
> In both of these examples (2) and (4) however, we
> assume that the reader of
> my description has ready access to the body of
> literature upon which the
> algorithm operates. Therefore, though (4) defines
> those sentences of Joyce,
> it does not infringe upon them since no actual copy
> is made.
>
> A better statement of question [B] is therefore:
>
> [C] Let alpha refer to a copyrighted expression.
> Assume there is an
> algorithm A and a string beta for which A(beta) =
> alpha. Assume that
> A-inverse (the process of constructing beta)
> requires access to alpha. Also
> assume that the process of applying A does not
> require access to any string
> zeta of which alpha is a substring? Would one then
> be guilty of
> infringement (contributory or primary) for
> publishing beta and A?
>
> Question [C] surmounts the above complaints about
> the phrasing of question
> [B] that required the would-be illegitimate reader
> of alpha to have access
> to the original work alpha or a container thereof.
>
> In order to declare the phrase “the smallest
> copyrighted phrase” illegal
> then, one would need to show, first, that the
> expression it refers to can
> be reconstructed without legal reference to a body
> of literature that
> contains the phrase; and, second, that the encoder
> who wrote this cryptic
> way of alluding to it did.
>
> [D] Is this the way the law works? It seems as
> though the provisions within
> DMCA on removing copyright protection assume that
> the author of alpha has
> used A-inverse to produce beta from alpha, thence
> protecting beta, rather
> than the reverse: using A and beta to decrypt the
> unenciphered-but-copyrighted alpha.
>
> Copyrights are “inheritable” in the following sense.
> If alpha is
> copyrighted then any string which contains it as a
> substring is also
> copyrighted. Thus strings inherit the copyright of
> substrings. Hence, there
> is no limit to the length of a copyrighted work
> since one may simply append
> k copies of the letter ‘a’ to the work and produce a
> longer, copyrighted work.
>
> [E] Are there inheritably uncopyrightable strings?
> Namely is there any
> utterance the occurrence of which in a document
> renders the entire document
> uncopyrightable?
>
> While there might be a smallest copyrightable
> expression, there is no
> largest uncopyrightable expression.
>
> S(4)1 “This sentence is uncopyrightable.” is in the
> public domain.
>
> We may then define S(4)n recursively as follows:
>
> S(4)n = “S(4)n-1” is in the public domain.
>
> We have thusly enriched the public domain with
> infinitely many new
> utterances much to the pleasure of Eldred and
> supporters, provided only,
> that we may find infinitely many ways to nest
> quotation marks:
>
> S(4)2 “ ‘This sentence is uncopyrightable.’ is in
> the public domain.” is
> in the public domain.
>
>
> [F] Are there short phrases rendered illegal by
> copyright law?
>
> (5) This sentence is c*********d.
>
> I have blanked out the letters ‘opyrighte’ in
> sentence (5), since the
> sentence, if typed, makes a claim about its own
> copyright status. This
> claim is likely false since it is probably too short
> to qualify. Section
> 506 specifies that making a false claim of copyright
> is illegal. Hence, I
> must avoid the temptation to fill in the blanks.
>
>
=== message truncated ===
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Received on Thu Oct 24 2002 - 12:52:29 GMT