How Copyright Would Make The 'Singularity' Infringement If It Ever Arrived
from the deleting... dept
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.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.
Filed Under: backup brain, singularity, tom scott