RE: [dvd-discuss] Public Domain Enhancement Bill

["Richard Hartman" <hartman(at)onetouch.com>]

I don't know if the "english chunks" approach would
hold up ... but the computer permutated ringtones 
CD would be hard to beat under current conditions.

Hmmm... for a = 1 to octave . . .


-- 
-Richard M. Hartman
hartman@onetouch.com

186,000 mi/sec: not just a good idea, it's the LAW!



> -----Original Message-----
> From: D. C. Sessions [mailto:dvd@lumbercartel.com]
> Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 7:21 PM
> To: dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
> Subject: Re: [dvd-discuss] Public Domain Enhancement Bill
> 
> 
> On Friday 27 June 2003 18:25, Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> # Disney might (speculatively) control 90% of the existing 
> copyrights on
> # novels, short stories and movies (or whatver), but that's 
> an insignificant
> # percentage of the novels, short stories, and movies that 
> can possibly be
> # copyrighted.  In other words, creative potential is always 
> deemed to be in
> # competition with previously creative work and hence there 
> can never be a
> # monopoly.
> 
> The total number of possible copyrightable works isn't important.
> All that's necessary is to make sure that the odds of any work
> infringing on one of your copyrights is near unity.
> 
> IIRC, the shortest copyrightable prose passage or musical
> work is Pretty Dang Short (ringtones, anyone?)  The trick is
> that the "shortest length" is long enough by 19th century
> standards to be immune to the monkey attack, but with
> 21st-century methods it's no longer much of a problem.
> 
> A single CD can now hold all of the possible musical phrases
> (allowing for "legal Hamming distance") so that one could, with
> modest effort, make it legally impossible to produce *any* music
> without infringing the copyright on one of those "works."
> 
> Likewise, IIRC it's now possible to brute-force copyright all
> enough chunks of English prose that it would be impossible
> to write much of anything without infringement.
> 
> The owner of these priceless copyrights would then be in
> position to hold all music and English writing hostage.
> 
> Remember, you read it here first.
> 
>