[horsawlarway]

You absolutely can copywrite works created via automation, you just still have to list a human as the author.

Which makes a lot of sense to me - Someone had to set up the automation with the intent to create a copy writable work, and copywrite often has built in expirations based on a window of time after the death of the author. Hard to make that sane if you're listing a computer program as the author - when does it die?

[roywiggins]

Even if you assign the copyright to a human and not a machine, you need a minimal amount of creativity to qualify for copyright, eg phone books can't be copyrighted. A "phone book" of every melody of a certain length is probably(?) not copyrightable either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications%2C_Inc.%2C_....

[viccuad]

The linked TED talk on the article explains it nicely. A phone book is created with a finite set (numbers,letters, words in English), but that finite set can be used to produce an infinite set. You can always produce a new result by appending to previous result.

In contrast, a musical melody is created by a finite set, and is bracketed by a duration. You can't keep adding more notes to a composition without extending its duration. Doing so makes it non melodic. If you do it enough, it becomes noise (white noise, pink noise..)

[horsawlarway]

No real disagreement from me - I'm just saying that there's absolutely nothing preventing you from using automation to create copywrite-able works.

People keep throwing that article around, and there seems to be a profound misunderstanding about what was determined there - automation is fine. Listing a machine as the author is not.

[nwsm]

I certainly agree that the author of an automation deserves credit/copyright for its output.

But imagine I build something that spits out as many binary sequences as possible. Do I then have a copyright to all the "works" that can be interpreted from it in various data formats I may have accidentally met?

This question is about intention, not authorship.