New 'Company' Claims It Uses Algorithms To Create Content Faster Than Creators Can, Making All Future Creations 'Infringing'

from the [algorithmically-generated-trollface] dept

Mon, Sep 29th 2014 11:21am — Tim Cushing

Over the weekend, TorrentFreak covered the discovery of the latest thing in copyright enforcement: algorithmically-generated content created solely for the purpose of extracting infringement settlements and licensing fees.

That's the staggering notion being put forward by Qentis Corporation. The outfit, which claims a base in Russia, says that its business model is to use massive computing power to generate digital intellectual property on a never-seen-before scale and transfer the rights to its partners.

"Our clients are private high net-worth individuals (HNWI), investment funds and corporations that act as pure investors," Qentis explains.

What Qentis is proposing is the bulk algorithmic creation of content – music, text, images etc – on such a large scale that in a few years its clients will own the rights to just about anything people might care to create and upload.

The creator of Qentis, Michael Marcovici, told TorrentFreak that his "company" had the potential power to generate content before actual creators can, resulting in a world where every new work is already infringing.

"Qentis aims to produce all possible combinations of text (and later on images and sound) and to copyright them," Qentis' Michael Marcovici told TorrentFreak.

"Concerning text we try this in chunks of 400 word articles in English, German and Spanish. That would mean that we will hold the copyright to any text produced from now on and that it becomes impossible for anyone to circumvent Qentis when writing a text."

By 2020, supposedly every possible photograph will have been created and registered by Qentis. Text content generation is advancing at a faster rate.

Qentis -- as a concept -- is frightening. As an actual entity, it's an ultra-dry satirical device. Marcovici's website isn't the future of anything. The computing power needed to accomplish this is beyond the means of anyone. Brute force creation results in tons on unusable "content," something Marcovici readily admits.

"About the mathematics, this is mainly about working with n-grams, we don't work iteratively with misses because that would produce as you mention a LOT of misses, probably only 1 out of few million would be readable," the company's Michael Marcovici told us.

Qentis is a piss-take on utilitarian content creation and over-broad content protection. It seeks to embody the worst aspects of automatically-generated content and copyright trolling. And it pretty much nails both, presenting a respectable corporate front that almost masks the insanity leaking in around the edges. A quasi-proof of concept page claims Qentis' software "wrote" Lady Gaga's "Applause" four years before she did. On its About page, it notes that it has already generated "97.42%" of all 400-words-or-less text in several languages before dropping this bombastic (and misspelling-laden) statement.

If you are planning to publish any text in these languages we must inform you that the chances are almost 100% that they are already part of the copyrighted inventory of the Qentis Corporation and that you are about to violate these and you will be held responsible for this.

Qentis does not issue permission to individuals to publish any of its texts or images, please do not try to inquire. Qentis grants writes for reproduction only two is selected group of publishers.

Another page claims this company will free online content providers from the hassle of creating content. Instead, all content roads will lead to Qentis, from which rights to its algorithmic creations will be distributed to a variety of middlemen ("high networth individuals"), who will then license the content.

Whoa if true, but you'd have to ignore the computing power needed to brute force content creation that covers almost every conceivable combination of words -- especially given that the language keeps evolving and changing, adding massive new permutation and combinations. The claims Qentis/Marcovici make would be impossible in one language. Quentis claims to be doing this in several.

Then you'd have to ignore the fact that solely computer-generated content (i.e. content created without an actual creator) generally isn't copyrightable. From the USPTO:

Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.

While it wouldn't take much to skirt this in real life (the presence of an editor or someone who tweaks algorithms before generating content), in the Qentis world where millions of pieces of content are being "created" every year, it would be impossible.

Furthermore, even if Qentis could create all those works and even if they were found to be copyrightable, Qentis would still run into a different problem: under the law, if someone truly comes up with the identical works independently, there's no infringement which would kind of break Qentis' entire business model (were it real). Independent invention, while not allowed in patent lawsuits, is a defense against copyright infringement. As Judge Learned Hand once famously wrote: "if by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose anew Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, he would be an "author," and, if he copyrighted it, others might not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats's." In short, even if all the other impossible situations above were taken care of, others creating these works independently likely would not be infringing anyway.

But it's all a joke… or at least, yet another art project from Marcovici. At his personal website, it's listed along with other concepts like Bitcoin paper money, rats in a Skinner box entering trading orders, an underground package delivery system and advertising on paper money.

Marcovici's publicity bio that looks suspiciously like a Wikipedia page notes that he also owns the Domain Developers Fund, conveniently located out of reach of US regulators in the Cayman Islands. The website seems to be dead, but his personal site gives some details as to its purpose. The language used is decidedly more flowery than informative, but it appears to be (if it actually exists) a domain squatting business. While this is listed alongside other Marcovici projects (like Qentis), this one at least appears to have some basis in reality. Marcovici's email address (mike@qentis.com, according to the Qentis.com registry) is linked to at least 1,649 domain registries.

Interestingly, one of those is Fontsy.com (also listed on Marcovici's website), a site that gives away "free" fonts (many of which can only be licensed by their creators), providing the following warning to those who partake of its services.

The fonts which available on this website are their authors' property. If you want use any font from this website commercially, you should contact the author. Look at the redme-files for more informations. is there no readme-filme, open the font file. Under windows there are copyright informations.

So, Marcovici (or at least the administrators of this website) have a pretty slippery grasp on intellectual property rights, something Qentis.com definitely shares.

Qentis.com's history as a domain dates all the way back to 2003, when it linked surfers to Marcovici's ebay store. By 2006, it had gone dormant. From there it became a platform for pushing his book on his ebay experiences, only morphing to its current form sometime this year.

So, this is Marcovici's stunted, but expansive, satire. A copyright-trolling automaton that will cleanse the world of creativity using brute force computing power and a team of outsourced rights enforcers. But behind all the copyright monopoly bluster, there are small hints at the message Marcovici is trying to send.

The same page where "Howard LaFarge" states that Qentis will become the "universal source of all web content," thus "freeing" corporations from their dependence on "expensive" creators, this paragraph appears.

what is left now to creatives is not anymore the repetitive low quality text they currently produce mainly from machines for SEO but to engage in real creativity at the level where context becomes more important than words.

It's even more explicit on a page detailing an interview with a "Russian TV station" that likely never happened.

The first way is simply to create something new, something really new, not just the remix of parts that are already there, really creativity is when people grow out of the usual stuff, we have been written books for thousands of years, produced images for thousands of years, it’s time to make use of new technologies and the combination of technologies to create content in new ways. such new ways of content, combinations of acting, sound, text, smell and and more can never be reproduced in an automated way. Yes Qentis makes it useless to continue to write average texts because they already exist writing text has become an activity like harvesting potatoes, or washing the car, jobs we want to eliminate so that we can grow over this and focus on more intellectual activities.

That's the statement of intent. I don't agree with all of it, especially since creativity is informed by predecessors and influences, but if Marcovici's Qentis "project" is meant to mock SEO-friendly filler and bots that compile web detritus into ebooks, then I can get behind the concept. There's nothing here that's based in mathematical reality, but using hyperbolic bullshit to take an (admittedly blunted) swipe at "brute force" content generation (millions of web pages generated with all the care and creativity of "harvesting potatoes") is a worthy windmill tilt. Unfortunately, Marcovici -- with his domain-name squatting and casual use of the IP of others (at Fontsy, but likely elsewhere as well) -- isn't the best medium for the message.

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Filed Under: content, copyright, hoax, michael marcovici
Companies: qentis

88 Comments

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Trevor, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:28am

When everyone is infringing, no one is infringing.
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Carl "Bear" Bussjaeger (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:30am

Cost Effective?
I wonder if this model is cost effective in the long run, what with the expense of feeding a million monkeys and training to them to operate typewriters.
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Ninja (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:32am

Pi has it covered. It is said that it contains the numerical equivalent to every single song, photo or5 whatever one may conceive. Who should we start paying for?

On the other hand part of me would love to see this causing copyright to implode in the future as it starts causing economic issues. Because ordinary people already largely ignore it today.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:32am

The flip side
In 120 years or so, all of that would come into the public domain.
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mcinsand, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:37am

maybe we're seeing things differently
To me, this looks like a potential copyright melt-down. Where we are now, with MPAA, RIAA, and Disney, those souls working to generate original content are brave, to say the least. What if they create something that is similar to a work that they never saw or heard. Decades ago, the probability was minimal. Now, with the Internet, the number of creators with an outlet is rising exponentially, and automation will only increase the effect. In a scenario that I fear, the little guys will be at the mercy of the big guys with deep legal pockets. However, if Qentis' investors gain enough momentum, the big guys over here might start pushing their paid-for legislators to roll back some of the ridiculously over-reaching copyright extensions; backpeddling could become their best survival choice.
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DogBreath, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:38am

Unforeseen consequences
Or as some might say, "When keeping it real wrong, goes into outer space."

By 2020, supposedly every possible photograph will have been created and registered by Qentis.

So the Qentis Company, by it's own admission, will have created all the child porn that had or ever will exist.

Bye bye Qentis Company and co-conspirators. Off to prison you go. Prepare your 7th planet.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:39am

"By 2020, supposedly every possible photograph will have been created and registered by Qentis. Text content generation is advancing at a faster rate...Furthermore, even if Qentis could create all those works and even if they were found to be copyrightable, Qentis would still run into a different problem: under the law, if someone truly comes up with the identical works independently, there's no infringement which would kind of break Qentis' entire business model (were it real)."

Well, were a company to do this, and try to claim copyright infringement even lacking any actual copying then they'd run into a big problem, because their program, by their own argument, would have just **infringed** on every possible copyright. And they would know, mathematically, that would be true, so *willful infringement* at $150,000 per instance...
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:40am

I can map any alphabet character to a pair of numbers, and every finite sequence of numbers exists in pi. Using this method, every written work appears somewhere in pi. Therefore, every written work is a natural phenomenon and has no copyright. QED
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:40am

All joking aside, the number of possible variations of, say, a 256 color image 32 pixels wide by 32 pixels high would be:
1090748135619415929462984244733782862448264161996232692431832786189721331849119295216264234525201987 2239572917961570252731098708201771840636109797650775547990789062988421929895386098252280482051596968 5161359163819677188654260932456012129055390188630101790025253579991720001007960002653583680090529780 5880952350501630195475653911005312364560014847426035293551245843928918752768696279344088055617515694 3499454066778251408149006161059202564385045780133264935658360472424073824428122451315177575191648992 2636574372243227736807502762788304520650179276170094569916849725787968385173704999690096112051565505 0115561271491492515342105748966629547032786321505730828430221664970324396138635251626409516168005427 6234359963089216914461811874063953106654048857394348328774281674074953709935118687563599703901170218 2361674945862096985700626361208270671540815706657513728102702231092756491027675916052087830463241104 9364568754920967322982459184763427383790272448438018526977764941072715611580434690827459339991961414 2427414105991174260605564837637563145276113626586283833686211579936380208785376755453367899156942344 3395566631507008721353547025567031200413072549583450835743965382893607708097855057891296790735278005 4935621561090795845172954115972927479877527738560008204118558930004777748727761853813510493840581861 5986522116059603083564059418211897140378687262194814987276036536162988561748224130334854387853240247 5141941718301228107820972930353737280457437209522870362277636394529086980625842235514850757103961938 7449629866808188769662815778153079393179093143648340761738581819563002994422790754955061288818308430 0796486932321791587659180355652161571154029921202761556078731079374774668415283629877086994501520312 3186259420308569383894465706134623670423402682110295895495119708707654618662279629453645162075650935 1018906023773821539532776208676978589731966330308893304665169436185078350641568336944530051437491311 2988343672652385954049042734559287239495252271846174043678547546104743770197680255766058810380772707 0771794222197709038543858584409549211609985253890397465570394397308609093059696336076752996493841459 8185705963754561497355827813623833288906309004288017321424808663962671333528009232758350873059614118 7237814221014601986157473868550968960891891804413395585248228675411132126387936755676503403629700319 3002339782846531854723824423202801518968966041882297600081543761065225427016359565087543385114712321 4227266605403581781469090806576468950587661997186505665475715792896.
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Ralph, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:45am

Response to: Anonymous Coward on Sep 29th, 2014 @ 11:40am
Nice try, but fail. You've got a 7 where there should be a 3, and a swapped 8 and 9. No biscuit.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:46am

I don't know about you all but I find this absolutely hilarious. It's like they're trying to forcefully break Copyright by shoving as much crap into it as fast as they possibly can.
They're trying to force a crash by intentionally causing a stack overflow.
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Gracey (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:47am

[quote]What Qentis is proposing is the bulk algorithmic creation of content – music, text, images etc – on such a large scale that in a few years its clients will own the rights to just about anything people might care to create and upload.[/quote]

...bullsh**t
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:52am

Re:
I can just see Hollywood freaking out that they didn't think of this first.

All this Quentis needs to do now is get the City of London Police to start doing their gig on every piece of content on the internet.
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John Fenderson (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:52am

Re: The flip side
Not if Disney has anything to say about it.
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 11:57am

Re: Cost Effective?
Just do the hashes. That's all that matters, right?
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:00pm

Quentis has obviously never heard of 4chan
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:08pm

Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Sep 29th, 2014 @ 11:40am
And, he forgot the checksum. tsk.
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tomczerniawski, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:09pm

Odd, all the copyright executives on Earth just simultaneously ran from their offices. Who knows where they went... but I'm sure we can find out by tracing the snail-trails they left behind.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:24pm

Re: Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Sep 29th, 2014 @ 11:40am
numbnuts, that is just a number. The number of possible variations, not the crc, or checksum, or hash, or bits of the data itself.

But your reply's were funnie either way!
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:27pm

Re: Re:
Knowing those punks they would only be too happy to do it as well!
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:29pm

Re:
Wait... that is a double asterisk...

is it "bullsheet" or "bullshaat" or ?
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:49pm

If information stored on a computer can infringe copyrights, then copyright applies to numbers, since the sum total of information on a computer is essentially a very large number. In that sense, a program that iterated through every possible number would take on the role of the famous "infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters", eventually reproducing every possible work of every type of medium that can be stored as data. Moore's law means that even if it can't be done now, it will be doable eventually.

Of course, as you said, it wouldn't be a valid legal claim. However, if a valid legal claim were needed to make use of the law, Veoh wouldn't have gone bankrupt. Legal trolls only need a half-baked excuse to make a claim. An actual troll, able to employ the strategy referred to (or lampooned) by Qentis, would be able to come up with a half-baked excuse for absolutely any media whatsoever created after they started operating. In that sense, a program that purportedly generates every possible media file could be considered a "perpetual lawsuit machine". ("Perpetual legal motion machine"?)
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antidirt (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:51pm

Re:
Well, were a company to do this, and try to claim copyright infringement even lacking any actual copying then they'd run into a big problem, because their program, by their own argument, would have just **infringed** on every possible copyright. And they would know, mathematically, that would be true, so *willful infringement* at $150,000 per instance...

Ha! I was thinking the same thing. By their own logic, they're infringing lots of works that are already under copyright.
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Jack, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:51pm

Sorry Quentis, it's not Copyrightable
Yeah, that'll never work. For a work to be copyrightable, it has to be created by a human. Just a few weeks ago this was re-established with the monkey-selfie.

I applaud them for their villainous scheme, but they failed copyright 101.
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kP (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:52pm

Those resources would be better used generating Bitcoins...
... not that I place any value in them, but others do!
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:52pm

Copyright this: fuck Qentis Corporation!
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:53pm

It costs $300 to register each copyright with the US Copyright Office, does it not? I seem to remember something like this from the porn trolling lawsuits?

I'm pretty sure you have to pay $300 every time you want to register a copyright, to get the legal benefits.

Is this company paying the US Copyright Office $300 every single time they create a new work? I guarantee you they aren't.
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antidirt (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:54pm

Re:
...bullsh**t

Even Falkvinge said this is "bullshit." When something that purports to destroy the "copyright monopoly" is called "bullshit" by Falkvinge, you know it's dumb.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 12:56pm

No story like this is complete without mention of the melancholy elephants.
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antidirt (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:11pm

Re:
Registration is as low as $35. You're probably thinking of what it costs to file a lawsuit in federal court (which is more than $300).
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That One Guy (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:25pm

Re:
Nope. You can register a work, and that gives you additional benefits, but thanks to the moronic shift over to 'Everything is covered by copyright as soon as it's created', you no longer have to register a work for it to be covered.
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DannyB (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:32pm

Re: Cost Effective?
Monkeys at typewriters?

While they won't produce anything great right away, they will no doubt very quickly create every possible Perl program.
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Steven (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:37pm

That's not their business plan.
If they really think they are going to do this they don't understand just how many things there are, or how many ways they can be put together.

That said, I think they've found a way to sucker some quick cash from a few wealthy folks.
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DannyB (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:42pm

Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Sep 29th, 2014 @ 11:40am
I got exactly the same result he did...

=> (clojure.math.numeric-tower/expt 256 1024)
10907481356194159294629842447337828624482641619962 . . . rest omitted . . .
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Rich, 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:42pm

I thought copyright law allowed for two authors independently creating the same thing.
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DannyB (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:46pm

Re:
You only have to register a copyright in order to sue. Ideally you should register as soon as you discover someone is infringing on the output of your random number generators.
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John Fenderson (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:46pm

Re:
I don't think there is provision in the law for this. I also don't think it's needed.

Copyright covers the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. It would be monumentally unlikely for two authors to independently come up with the same idea and express it in the nearly identical way that would be needed to be a copyright violation.
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DannyB (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:51pm

A better use of Qentis technology
Dear Qentis:

I propose another important use of your valuable technology.

Generate every possible patent. A patent application doesn't have to make sense. It just needs to be in a particular form with obscure terminology, impenetrable language and very simple vector drawings.

Please don't generate patent applications faster than the USPTO can accept them. Just make sure that the USPTO is unable to process any other patent applications.

As a side effort you could form a betting pool on how many of your generated patent applications will be granted.

Good luck!
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McFortner (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 1:58pm

[Comment REDACTED because of a automatically generated copyrighted inventory by a 3rd party.]
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That One Guy (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:06pm

Copyright status irrelevant
Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.

Sounds like a slam-dunk right? Eh, not so much. Remember that in order for a DMCA claim to be legal it requires that the one filing it 'swear under penalty of perjury', something that as far as I know computers can't do, and yet computer generated DMCA claims are still treated as valid.

The current legal system is set up in such a way that even if you are sure that you're not infringing, it's still safer to fold, rather than be forced to spend ridiculous amounts defending yourself, so while this 'plan' may have other problems, the legal status of the 'copyrights' isn't really one of them.
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DannyB (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:13pm

Re: That's not their business plan.
I think they might have found a way to cut down on the space of outputs to create.

Obviously, every possible 256 x 256 pixel image is not interesting. But many of them are.

They might have a machine learning algorithm trained to recognize noise and non-noise. Non-noise images get further sub variations created.

From the non-noise, you could use trained recognizers to classify images. Images containing certain objects (say people, animals, plants, etc) could have more variations produced.

As another example, take a set of types of things (cars, dogs, etc) that might appear in a photograph, and create ways of generating simple representations of those. On a larger scale combine various combinations of types of elements into composite images.

For sounds, generate random chord sequences according to some basic rules. Over any given set of chords, generate every possible melody as any note from first chord, followed by any note from second chord, etc. Use rules to discard obvious junk. Use machine learning to identify things that are appealing based on the training set.

All they need is to 'create' something similar enough to an artist in order to shake them down.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:14pm

I think whats happening with software patents in america ,is similar
to this 1000,s of software patents that are vague and broad and pointless are granted ,
A Patent troll can buy them and use them to extract money from companys ,using the treat of high legal fees.
Most patents are granted ,
companys have a choice ,pay say 50k or go to court and pay legal fees,of a million dollars plus,
to fight and invalidate a patent .
Even microsoft has paid money on patents which were later
shown to be invalid .
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M. Alan Thomas II (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:15pm

Re: The flip side
Beat me to it. :) Of course, I'd argue for corporate authorship, which generally runs shorter.
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DannyB (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:17pm

The importance of publishing!
Qentis needs to make all of their 'creative' 'output' available via the web. It's not that anyone will read / view / hear it. It's just that anybody can read / view / hear it.

It needs to be plausible that any big content, big copyright maximalist people could have possibly seen / heard / read Qentis's 'valuable' work and then copied it.
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DannyB (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:18pm

Re: Copyright status irrelevant
Oh! That's a good catch!

If computers can SWEAR to an automated bogus DMCA takedown, then computers can also CREATE automated bogus content.
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Steven (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:20pm

Re: Re: That's not their business plan.
Sorry, but you are vastly underestimating the search space we're looking at. In addition you are skipping over areas of computer science that are still not solved as if they are trivial.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:28pm

Re: Re:
Actually, Rich is correct. Independent creation is an absolute defense against copyright infringement claims.

http://www.neustel.com/cinfringement.aspx
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:29pm

You wanna talk about the entertainment industry freaking out over copyright this is one fine way to set up a bogus method. No it won't float and if it did, the first time something got close to hitting them in the pocket they would have their lobbying wagon in full swing to see the law changed.

Damn shame it isn't a real threat. It would end a lot of the BS we see now dealing with copyright and the flagrant misuse of the court system. I would love to see this sort of scheme break copyright totally.
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Josh in CharlotteNC (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 2:35pm

Re: Cost Effective?
Assuming you used computers (cheaper and more efficient in every respect than monkeys), you're going to very quickly run out of particles in the entire observable universe to store your creations. In fact, you wouldn't even make a dent before you ran out of storage space.

A quick Google gives me a few sources that say there's over 1 million words in the English language.

Therefore, there are more than x possible 400 word combinations. 1 million to the 400th power.

x = 1,000,000^400
or
x = 1 * 10^400,000,000

There are 10^80 particles in the observable universe (which is already unimaginably huge). Well, 10^80 if you could convert everything to hydrogen atoms. So, if you could do that, and then use each atom to store a single 400 word creation, you would have gotten 0.0000002% of the way through the possibilities.

Yes, I know the claim is nonsense, or a joke. But maths is fun.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 3:11pm

Re: Re:
Wait... that is a double asterisk...

is it "bullsheet" or "bullshaat" or ?

The correct answer is "all of the above".
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Anon, 29 Sep 2014 @ 3:14pm

Re:
I absolutely agree? For example, they're already infringed on Lady Gaga's song, et.c
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Andrew (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 3:25pm

On the other hand...
What if this were approached with the aim of producing a large number of (say) 400 word fragments and releasing them into the public domain?

Wikipedia reckons a vocabulary size of 5000 covers 95% of word use. While the combinations of that set over 400 word articles is still prohibitive, the number of grammatically feasible sentences will be much, much lower. If a suitable set of subject-specific CFGs were created (cf. SCIGen), it may be feasible to come up with a non-trivial subset of all possible articles in a particular field.

If this were possible (and I really don't know how large the set would be) and the articles were all published online, what would the legal situation be?

Specifically, if someone (human) who subsequently (and independently) wrote an identical 400 word article, could we rely on the USCO's comments in the monkey selfie case to negate any copyright interest the author may have (at least in the autogenerated copy)?
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 3:27pm

This totally sounded like an Onion article. Then I got to the end and it apparently is the less organized equivalent.
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beltorak (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 3:28pm

Re: Re: Cost Effective?
your maths is off a bit.

1,000,000 == 10^6;

1,000,000^400 == (10^6)^400 == 10^(6*400) == 10^2400

Although still quite a bit smaller than 10^80, no where near 10^(4*10^8))
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Get off my cyber-lawn! (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 3:32pm

Have you created this picture yet?
....................../´¯/)
....................,/¯../
.................../..../
............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸
........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\
........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')
.........\.................'...../
..........''...\.......... _.·´
............\..............(
..............\.............\...
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John Fenderson (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 3:35pm

Re: Re: Re:
Ah, good to know! :)
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beltorak (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 3:36pm

Re: Sorry Quentis, it's not Copyrightable
which raises an interesting question; aren't they creating a vast body of effectively public domain works? If you create something, that happened to be exactly what some big corp created before you, which also happened to be exactly something that this algorithm spit out before that, by definition it's not copyrightable, so you are safe, right? all we need is an (incredibly) efficient indexing algorithm!

/s
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 3:52pm

Will talking be a breach of Copyright, we will all fall silent out of fear of any speech. Bring it on.
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Mike Masnick (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 4:06pm

Re:
I thought copyright law allowed for two authors independently creating the same thing.

Yes, as stated in the article... above.
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G Thompson (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 5:26pm

Re: Re: Cost Effective?
You're still measuring using atom sizes? Why?

Quantum Foam is so much better.. it's the stuff that dreams ARE made of

oh and if you think of a bit of data as the size of the Planck area (as Bekenstein proved with black holes et.al ) then all the info ever to be and ever was will definitely fit ;)
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That Anonymous Coward (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 5:27pm

I am willing to bet they have lots of investors.
One need only look at the returns currently available in the US for a 5 minute clip of people fucking.

Now that the Prenda financials are public record, it really is hard to pretend there isn't money in doing it. This seems little different than the statement made by Hans in the depo that caused me chills, I paraphrase, We take these worthless copyrights and put value into them. It is like what caused the housing bubble, using crap to get cash... the trick is to get out before the bubble bursts.

As we see more of these 'bright' ideas enter the market, there is a chance that finally there will have to be change to copyright... lets just hope that the people talk louder than the bribes.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 5:41pm

The sad thing is, all you'd need is a group of lawyers power-hungry and rich enough to fund this enterprise and a judge dumb enough to let it pass.
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Anonymous Anonymous Coward, 29 Sep 2014 @ 8:47pm

Monkeys
So, are these folks telling us they are the monkeys, or the typewriters?
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Togashi (profile), 29 Sep 2014 @ 9:15pm

Re:
Now let's have some fun with a 1920x1080 photograph in 24-bit color. That's actually a fraction of the resolution modern cameras can record, but let's go with it. At that resolution and color depth, the number of possible images (with 14981180 digits) is so large that it would be half again as long as the Guinness World Record holder for longest novel, at a mere 9.6 million characters spanning 3031 pages.
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me, 30 Sep 2014 @ 4:47am

Re:
I declare war on this idiot.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Sep 2014 @ 4:55am

Re: Re:
Even AJ said that this is "bullshit". When something that purports to destroy the "copyright monopoly" is called "bullshit" by AJ, you know it's dumb.

FTFY
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Shiva Ayyadurai, 30 Sep 2014 @ 5:33am

It's mine
All these copyrights are mine, because I invented the algorithm. You Techdirt people just can't handle that a black guy made this.
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DannyB (profile), 30 Sep 2014 @ 5:50am

Re: Re: Re: That's not their business plan.
Then I'm glad I'm not Qentis.
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jackn, 30 Sep 2014 @ 7:44am

"Our clients are private high net-worth individuals (HNWI), investment funds and corporations that act as pure investors," Qentis explains

A hilarious quote from quentis. WTF does this have to with anything? Do we need an acronym here (and should it not be PHNWI?) Does he think this statement makes everything OK?
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jackn, 30 Sep 2014 @ 7:47am

Re: Re:
wrong on all counts.
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jackn, 30 Sep 2014 @ 7:49am

Re: Re:
and you can cram a lot of art into your $35 fee. Think of how many images,songs, and/or text you can fit onto a cd or dvd.
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Trevor, 30 Sep 2014 @ 9:10am

Re: Re:
Et Tu, person on the internet who identifies him(her)self as "me?"
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any moose cow word, 30 Sep 2014 @ 11:08am

A quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits (quantum bits) could represent all works simultaneously. Once my future-self finishes the machine, I'll have him ship it back through time to my present-self on next Thursday, when I'll be serving Qentis a cease and desist order to halt the use of their copyright trolling machine and to destroy all infringing works.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 30 Sep 2014 @ 12:16pm

Re:
You could narrow it greatly by constraints, say images that have shapes of a significant size. I bet a neural network could cull out images that are "of something" in contrast to those that aren't.

Still, the number would be astronomically immense (e.g. more than the photons in the universe), just not as astronomically immense.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 30 Sep 2014 @ 12:20pm

Could such an idea be used in reverse?
By taking all these paragraphs and giving them a creative commons free-use, no-attribution-necessary license, you could systematically eliminate copyright since that means any given work is a quote of something that has been freed to the public.

Ergo, you wouldn't be quoting Disney but a segment of Quentis extensive library of open-access material.

Chak-Thoom!
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Uriel-238 (profile), 30 Sep 2014 @ 12:31pm

Is it possible to challenge a copyright...
On the basis that it could have been designed by a machine? I'm sure that some products of human innovation (e.g. lace trim reminiscent of a sin wave) were demonstrated to be less so once we developed the technology to compute it by algorithm. How simple does an algorithm have to be before we figure that it's obvious? How sophisticated does an algorithm have to be before it is regarded as human quality?
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Sep 2014 @ 7:03pm

Re: Re:
You could cull it further by eliminating visually indistinguishable images, since slightly changed colours and locations would be derivative works (in the fantasy world in which there would be any copyright in the images anyway).
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Sep 2014 @ 7:11pm

Re: Re:
It is important because of the massive expansion of the concept of derivative works, especially if your work and the other are both derivatives of the same source material.
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Coyoty (profile), 30 Sep 2014 @ 10:09pm

Re: Re:
Registering a copyright establishes a date that can be proven for the copyright, but legally copyrights are created at the same time as their works. If you have different way to prove when a work was created, registering is unnecessary.
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Coyoty (profile), 30 Sep 2014 @ 10:38pm

If a monkey, as a nonhuman, cannot legally own a copyright on a photo, then infinite monkeys in the form of a nonhuman supercomputer cannot legally own the works it generates. Likewise, the owner of the camera can't own the copyright on the photo because he had no creative input, so the owners of the monkey machine can't own copyrights on its intellectual-property-aping word search puzzles.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 1 Oct 2014 @ 3:16am

Brian Eno might disagree.
Last I checked, Brian Eno noted that if he used a songwriting algorithm to write a song, and all he did was set a few parameters and the computer happily churned it out for him, then he can still claom copyright on the piece.

Even if he just kept hitting "randomize" until something that sounded pleasant came out, Mr. Eno could still copywrite the song.

If you disagree, you'll have to be ready to determine how much input is required by the human element before automated content creation is copywritable.

Not that I necessarily agree with Brian. Rather, copyright is too powerful a legal device to apply to wprks that are completely human, let alone autpmated processes, but in a wprld where there were reasonable copywrite terms, such a distinction might have to be made.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 1 Oct 2014 @ 3:18am

Re: Brian Eno might disagree.
Copyright, not copywrite.

And sorry about my dropped Ps for Os.

Bleh.
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Sheogorath (profile), 1 Oct 2014 @ 6:05am

Re: Re:
Wrong. If your work is unregistered, then you can still sue alleged infringers, you just can't claim statutory damages.
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Anonymous Coward, 1 Oct 2014 @ 9:54am

Re: Re: Re:
You have to register before you can sue. You can register just before suing, but you still have to register.
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GEMont (profile), 1 Oct 2014 @ 4:32pm

Might be the best thing to happen to copyright.
My hopes are that this idea of computerized, algorithmic mass auto-manufacturing something to gain copyright control over all possible iterations of that thing, and thus being able to sue anyone who ever does anything similar in the future, will force the courts and judges of the world to finally realize that copyright law is being massively abused by non-creators and needs to immediately be returned to its original state for its originally stated purpose.

Before this incredible corporations-and-lawyers-get-rich scheme started and copyright was only for the protection of creators for a very limited time, there were very few legal proceedings - compared to today - dealing with copyright infringement.

Now it is as much a daily occurrence as weather and almost NEVER has anything to do with protecting creators or their works.

Yes I realize that lawyers will need to buy smaller yachts and that politicians world wide will receive smaller graft checks thereafter, but hey, I think we can all live with that.

---
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Sheogorath (profile), 1 Oct 2014 @ 6:35pm

Re: Re: Re: Re:
Okay, I guess that makes 17 U.S. Code § 412 a liar then. Thank you for informing me of that.
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Shrubery, 6 Oct 2014 @ 4:48am

Re: Re:
"Now let's have some fun with a 1920x1080 photograph in 24-bit color. That's actually a fraction of the resolution modern cameras can record, but let's go with it. At that resolution and color depth, the number of possible images (with 14981180 digits) is so large that it would be half again as long as the Guinness World Record holder for longest novel, at a mere 9.6 million characters spanning 3031 pages."

I got bored and worked it out as:

6.057878255625903915397895493134545504683543 × 10^14923080

Which I believe is slightly less than the claimed losses this fiscal year by the copyright industry.
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David, 17 Feb 2015 @ 3:20pm

Correction: you say "from the USPTO," but that's the US Patent and Trademark Office. What you mean is "from the US Copyright Office."
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