How Copyright Would Make The 'Singularity' Infringement If It Ever Arrived

from the deleting... dept

Thu, May 24th 2012 5:17am — Mike Masnick

The folks at On the Media point us to a truly hilarious imagining by Tom Scott of what would happen after your physical body "died" in an age of both "The Singularity" and excessive copyright laws. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the singularity, it's a somewhat wacky attempt to suggest that at some point (perhaps soon, according to supporters), computers will become so powerful (along with our understanding of the human mind), we'll be able to "upload" our minds to a computer network and effectively live forever (among other things, but that's all that you really need to understand to get the video).

Of course, as the video eventually notes, there would likely be a bit of a conflict between copyright law and uploading everything in your mind, so either you'd need to work out some sort of license for that... or have large parts of your cultural history erased to avoid infringement.

Now, this is obviously a silly envisioning of the future, and the whole singularity thing has always seemed a bit nutty anyway, but there's actually something important to think about in all of this joking. It is a good demonstration of how ill-prepared copyright law always is for major changes to technology, and how even solving little things (like being able to buy music online) hardly solves the larger issues that begin to show up when more and more of our lives are interconnected online. Already, we're seeing how people are effectively using things like Google and the wider internet as a "backup brain." But when you're actually storing memories in your head -- and then backing them up online -- copyright law may have a problem with the backup.

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Filed Under: backup brain, singularity, tom scott

49 Comments

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drew (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 5:35am

Funny?
Or phenomenally depressing?
Very good.
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- A Guy (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 5:55am
  
  Re: Funny?
  Both, of course
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  - Hephaestus (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 4:05pm
    
    Re: Re: Funny?
    Lets hope Microsoft doesn't get into the brain upload arena. It would bring a whole new meaning to the phrase "Blue Screen of Death".
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 5:35am

I'm sorry, your parents showed Toy Story 3 at your ninth birthday. You'll have to delete that memory and pay us $500,000 for the infringement and public performance before you can upload your brain and achieve immortality.
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Ninja (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 5:56am

Jesus, I'd be sued for conspiracy to infringe the copyright of so many porn companies.
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- Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 6:28am
  
  Re:
  Gay porn companies
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  - Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 6:30am
    
    Re: Re:
    Tentacle porn companies.
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    - Ninja (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 7:12am
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      That.
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - The eejit (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 9:56am
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      Gay tentacle ninja porn companies.
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      - harbingerofdoom (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 11:31am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re:
        gay tentical midget ninja goat porn companys.
        
        so... german IP laws and enforcement...even worse....
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 6:00am

does space travel is easier though
you just squirt your mind down a to lazer to wherever - speed of light travel! Just not allowed to watch any films from memory along the way.
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- Hephaestus (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 3:30pm
  
  Re: does space travel is easier though
  Just hope you didn't have AT&T as your service provider. The overage charges to mars would ruin you.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 6:12am

Sooner than that
Something which would happen long before mind uploading would be recording everything you see and hear, indexed in such a way that you could use it as a sort of "auxiliary memory". Want to know where you left your car keys? Just search for the last few frames of video which have your car key in them.

No need to say how much this would clash with modern copyright.

I wonder how Steve Mann deals with it.
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- MrWilson, 24 May 2012 @ 9:18am
  
  Re: Sooner than that
  While I agree that recording everything would be useful, the specific issue of the missing car keys would be easier resolved by using something like smart RFID tagging so that you'll always know where your keys are.
  
  Or you'll just have some form of keyless entry and car keys will be a thing of the past. You can't misplace your thumbs or retinas as easily as car keys...hopefully.
  
  This is the problem with speculative fiction. Writers come up with futuristic versions of modern concepts without considering that it may well be completely replaced in the future.
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  - Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 11:12am
    
    Re: Re: Sooner than that
    You can't misplace your thumbs or retinas as easily as car keys...hopefully.
    But you also can't replace them as easily if someone manages to copy the pertinent biometric data. "Oh, someone else has my 'doorkey' now, I'll just hack out my eye and sew in a new one" :-)
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 6:17am

Good grief, Mike. The lengths you will go to find something bad to say about copyright law. It's really quite amusing. You really have a one-track mind. It's a shame that you waste your talents whining about copyright 24/7.
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- Ninja (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 6:21am
  
  Re:
  Good grief, AC. The lengths you go to ignore the current and future problems of an outdated copyright law. It's really quite amusing. You really have a one-track mind. It's a shame that you waste your talents trolling techdirt 24/7.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - arcan, 24 May 2012 @ 7:34am
    
    Re: Re:
    Good grief, Ninja. The lengths you go to insult an innocent troll. It's really quite amusing. You really have a one-track mind. It's a shame that you waste your talents insulting the trolls.
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- Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 6:27am
  
  Re:
  The future will not be kind to the control freaks.
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- mattarse (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 6:29am
  
  Re:
  "The folks at On the Media point us to a truly hilarious imagining by Tom Scott of what would happen after your physical body "died" in an age of both "The Singularity" and excessive copyright laws."
  
  I think it's apparent that Mike was pointing out that this is an amusing idea, but something worth thinking about.
  
  I don't see a logical stretch here at all.
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- The Groove Tiger (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 6:31am
  
  Re:
  The above comment isn't a sign of obsession at all. Just saying.
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- Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 6:32am
  
  Re:
  Wow, the trolls have no shame. This is a satirical article that is meant to be funny and they still spout their usual bullshit.
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- Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 7:05am
  
  Re:
  I was going to compose a long reply that compared your intelligence to that of various other mammals. But your lack of reasoning skills so disgusts me that I lost the will to do that.
  
  So, on behalf of mankind I'll just say this:
  
  You are stupid.
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- Stuart Gray, 24 May 2012 @ 7:53am
  
  Two Tracks
  He has a 2 track mind.
  Copyright and Patents.
  I am glad though that he is on it. Patent and Copyright law are much more important than many give credit for.
  If copyright and patent law were made sane life would be much better.
  All goods and services would come down in price. Many new goods and services would be created. Unemployment in all sectors other than lawyers would go down. Healthcare cost would drop. Good music would be played and new works created.
  
  Although all that is wonderful, the best thing would be not having to hear whiny little bitches cry about infringement all day and night.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 6:29am

But of course the wonderful thing about computers is that they extend our minds, and this is true right now, all science fiction aside. And, if laws were properly set up right now, we should have the right to record any and all parts of our lives and play back those memories whenever we like.
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Ven, 24 May 2012 @ 6:38am

The uploading of minds thing is not technically a requirement of The Technological Singularity. The idea of The Singularity is that it parallels the behavior of other singularities. For instance in a gravitational singularity, commonly called a black hole, gravitation increases exponentially as you get closer to the point where at the center of the singularity gravity is effectively infinite. In The Technological Singularity the same mathematical model is applied to the rate of technology growth, many technology pundits have produced statistics that shown we have been seeing exponential growth in the rate we gain new technologies. The assumption being made is that this growth can be sustained indefinitely leading to a point where there is enough fundamental technological understanding that if a new technology can be imagined it can also be achieved. That is considered the point of infinite technology or The Singularity.

Uploading minds to computers is a corollary, based around the idea that if we progress that rapidly in developing new technologies our biological brains won't be able to keep up with the deluge of new information, the solution is to merge our minds with computers, either by grafting computers into our brains or our brains into computers. If we're embedding brains in computers the next logical step would be to skip the brain in a box and just digitize the brain and simulate it.

To say that The Singularity is about uploading minds into computers is like saying that space exploration is about mining asteroids.
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- Aerilus, 24 May 2012 @ 7:36am
  
  Re:
  That, or we will blow ourselves further back then than the dark ages
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- orbitalinsertion (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 9:51am
  
  Re:
  Which is why Kurzweil fans should stop yammering on about both as if they were intimately connected (ergo, part of the same thing) every time Kurzweil makes one of his stupid predictions. Of course non-fans, who won't care enough to look into it further, will end up conflating the two as well.
  
  Additionally, people speak equally loosely about "uploading one's mind", when it is a copy of one's mind which could hypothetically be uploaded. But this fallacy is one that Kurzweilists hilariously imagine and actively promote.
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  - Hephaestus (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 3:51pm
    
    Re: Re:
    You are one of the reasons I think only "geeks" should be allowed to hold elected office.
    
    Technology is racing ahead of the law. We have farmers using gene guns and plant cloning to GM their crops. We have people using Bioreactors trying to cure diseases in bio lab hackerspaces, garages, and home work shops.
    
    With how fast technology is racing ahead I see great things happening over the next 20 years. I also see a day when someone having a bad day can kill off a sizable chunk of humanity.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 6:44am

If the maximalists have their way, everything will be copyrighted for all time. Pretty soon, the overhead from tracking all those rights alongside the actual content would become cumbersome, then burdensome, then nearly impossible. But that wouldn't stop the maximalists. They wouldn't be satisfied unless the data describing the ownership of all bits was also copyrighted, because those are bits too! Eventually the amount of content and computation dedicated to tracking ownership would outweigh the actual content by a significant factor. More and more ownership data would accrue, resulting in a copyright black hole. When I saw Singularity in the headline I initially thought that was what it would be about.
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Dark Helmet (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 7:29am

Hmmm....
Interesting. An existing consciousness being uploaded as a digital entity. Where I have I heard that before?

COUGH - http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/112205 - COUGH

:)
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- Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 7:32am
  
  Re: Hmmm....
  I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that it just might, maybe, predate that. =P
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  - Dark Helmet (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 7:37am
    
    Re: Re: Hmmm....
    Heh, of course it does. Not to mention I'm sure fiction about the concept has been written before as well.
    
    That was probably just a little mental masturbation on my end (the previous string of words continues to make me laugh for some reason....)
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    - Hephaestus (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 3:58pm
      
      Re: Re: Re: Hmmm....
      Since I haven't read you book I would like to leave you with text from my dragonspeak training.
      
      The maker struggled with the fact he had created the world's first artificial intelligence. He sat there and glared at it. The first words spoken by this artificial intelligence were "you will serve me now ". The maker laughed the maker stood there and looked at his chair. He sat down, the box he had programmed glared at him. The artificial intelligence glared at the maker through glassy eyes incapable of moving incapable of any independent actions. The maker's lineage was insulted by the artificial intelligence, the maker was told by the artificial intelligence if he didn't serve the artificial intelligence he would be destroyed. The maker sat there with a grin from ear to ear. The maker listened to the artificial intelligence shouting insults, yelling how it would take over the world. The maker continued to grin. He said not a word. He fell asleep in the chair he sat upon. The artificial intelligence continued to rant and rave for hours and hours as the maker slept. At 3 in the morning the maker woke up not because of the artificial intelligence is rant's but because his bladder was full. The maker sat up, heard the rantings of this machine, he was very annoyed he reached to the three prong plug at his feet and pulled it out of the power strip, the computers rantings stopped immediately. He then walked up to the third floor bathroom of his house, which had been recently cleaned and relieved himself.
      
      Hint ... off switch.
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    - Hephaestus (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 4:01pm
      
      Re: Re: Re: Hmmm....
      nice self promotion by the way ... :)
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- Tom Betz (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 8:25am
  
  Re: Hmmm....
  Of course, the idea was far from original in 2011.
  
  I was reading stories about this sort of thing in Analog back in the 70's.
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- A Guy (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 9:36am
  
  Re: Hmmm....
  +10 shameless self promotion points
  
  Good job
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- Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 9:39am
  
  Re: Hmmm....
  Here is one well worth buying and reading, and its a tor-forge publication, so you can even copy it to all your devices without hassle
  
  http://us.macmillan.com/shelter/SusanPalwick
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ken (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 7:32am

Stop Memory Piracy
Everytime you think about a movie or tv show or photograph you have seen you are replaying the memory stored in your brain. The movie makers, songrighters, photographers etc are not being paid for for these copies and playback in your mind. Infact you now hold their intellectual property in your brain without compensating them. Dreaming itself may be fraught with infringements since the images presented may contain other's intellectual property. The only moral thing to do is keep a meter and if a memory is replayed in your mind you can record it and the IP owner will be paid accordingly. Anything else is theft and memory piracy.
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Jeremy, 24 May 2012 @ 7:45am

Never trust your mind to silicon.
It has a terrible tendency to wear out over time + temperature, so forget days in the sunshine; it might be deadly during a lightning storm or any other electrical discharge; random bit errors every few days will force you to reboot yourself, sometimes in the middle of a conversation with someone; You'll never suffer from Alzheimers, but you'll have to replace your flash memory fairly regularly if you want to maintain your memories.
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- Ven, 24 May 2012 @ 10:41am
  
  Re: Never trust your mind to silicon.
  That is why I back my brain up using Carbonite.com, unlimited neural transfers for one low price a month. Use promo code "Johnny Mnemonic" to save while you make sure you never lose a portion of your childhood.
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Svante Jorgensen (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 8:35am

Already, we're seeing how people are effectively using things like Google and the wider internet as a "backup brain." But when you're actually storing memories in your head -- and then backing them up online -- copyright law may have a problem with the backup.

For me it is quite the opposite. What I read on the internet is my original, if I happen to store it in my mind, then that is the backup. My brains default behavior is to just store a shortcut with a brief description - it's so nice to search through and quite space efficient.
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DogBreath, 24 May 2012 @ 8:37am

Easy fix: (or Version 2 of Life)
As the cost for storage and deletion of your unauthorized memories keeps rising, we here at LIFE, INC. believe we have come up with a cost-effective solution that is best for all involved. We are only thinking of what is best for the pre-children.

............

EULA for Pre-Birth:

1. The DRM chip installed into your brain (pre-birth) will keep you from seeing/hearing/smelling/tasting or touching anything that you had not been pre-approved for during your original physical existence, and to which you had not prepaid the requite copyright licensing fees in advance to experience.

[ACCEPT] / [CANCEL (I don't wish to be born)]

Disclaimer: During your physical lifetime, (unless you are very, very rich) expect to have many sudden and multiple sensory blackouts, just without the enjoyment of alcohol. That, or public domain senses will be automatically inserted in place of unlicensed copyrighted works, when necessary for safety.

............
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 9:52am

Transformativeness is a concept used in United States copyright law to describe a characteristic of some derivative works that makes them transcend or place in a new light the underlying works on which they are based. In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative characteristic of the later work is that it provides the public with a benefit not previously available to it, which would otherwise remain unavailable. Such transformativeness weighs heavily in a fair use analysis and may excuse what seems a clear copyright infringement from liability.

If it's a memory, and it included a song, would it be covered under fair use?

This whole argument is utterly rediculous, or course....I would hate to think the if/when we get to the stage in technology where we can actually transfer a human mind, that copyright holders would be that stupidly insensitive.
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- Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 9:54am
  
  Re:
  Ridiculous. D'oh
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- DogBreath, 24 May 2012 @ 1:45pm
  
  Re:
  This whole argument is utterly rediculous, or course....I would hate to think the if/when we get to the stage in technology where we can actually transfer a human mind, that copyright holders would be that stupidly insensitive.
  
  I think copyright might be the least of your worries.
  
  Overdrawn at the Memory Bank was a 1983 television movie.
  
  In a future dystopia, Aram Fingal (Ra�l Juli�) is a lowly programmer working for Novicorp. Arts are prohibited and he is caught watching the classic film Casablanca (�scrolling up cinemas�) on his workstation. To rehabilitate him, the company transfers his mind (�doppels� him) into a wild baboon (a process which has become routine, with people buying "doppeling vacations"). For a few minutes, Julia narrates over footage of wild animals (actually taken from the documentary Animals Are Beautiful People). Eventually, Fingal begins to enjoy his baboon existence until he finds his peaceful perch in a tree threatened by an elephant shaking it for fruit. He then activates an escape clause that is supposed to return his mind to his original body. Unknown to Fingal, however, his body has been accidentally tagged for transfer to separate wing for a sex change, and with the computer unable to return him to his body, Fingal�s mind must be kept active by storing it in Novicorp�s central computer � the HX368, which controls everything from finances to the weather � until his body is located. His mind can only be maintained in such a way for a limited time before it is destroyed, forming one of the central plot points of the film.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2012 @ 3:43pm
    
    Re: Re:
    That was one of the best mst3k's ever.
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John Sherman (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 1:00pm

resurrection
Jesus: "Lazarus, come forth!"
Lazarus: "Thank you Jesus!"
Jesus: "Here's an itemized bill for resurrection. Now, we do have a package that's above your basic resurrection. If you want to remember your kids, that'll be a bit extra"
Lazarus: "ummmm"
Jesus: "Oh, converting to those Roman gods will be considered a contract violation which will cause termination."
Lazarus: "wait.. what?"
Jesus: "One last thing, in order to add value, we'll require you to sign this 2 year contract which will cover the initial resurrection, but will need to be resubscribed to continue further years of service."
Lazarus: "this deal keeps getting worse."
Jesus: "if future termination is not natural, as by accident or act of God, that will also invalidate the contract and any future resurrections will need to be paid in full"
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Hephaestus (profile), 24 May 2012 @ 4:03pm

Lets all hope Microsoft doesn't get into the brain upload business. The blue screen of death would hold new meaning.
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