If the logic of copyright/trademark/IP law applied to everything, what's the most peculiar possible implication you can think of for it? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by CraigOhMyEggo@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Was thinking of this after a conversation I had on a thread about dreams. Someone joked “I was dreaming of the events of The Matrix, then I was woken up by someone worried my dream was infringing the Wachowski’s copyrights”, and it turned into a whole train of thought in my mind, like violating IP law because you stole fire from Zeus which was his intellectual property.

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[-] hornface@fedia.io 6 points 1 month ago

I think current copyright rules are already quite wild enough when applied to digital media, since digital media is literally just made of numbers. Anyone who makes IP automatically owns the number that represents it in a computer.

Plus it's not just that one number. What if you have different resolutions of an image or video? Different file formats or encodings? What if you compress or encrypt the media? Yeah, the copyright holder can enforce that nobody is allowed to use ANY of those numbers. What if you take media and divide it by 2? Probably still copyrighted. What if you divide it by 236832746589? Copyrighted? Probably, yeah, since it would be too easy to take a movie, divide it by that number, and give it to all your friends so they could reproduce the original. I don't even know how to estimate the extremely vast amount of numbers somebody implicitly owns every time they make any piece of IP.

So yeah, literally illegal to count high enough or perform certain forbidden math.

[-] pivot_root@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024

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