Re: Copyright and Machine Learning IP
Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2018 9:25 pm
Football is not yet solved, but 11 players running behind a ball according to some strategy designed by their coach are playing to win and not to create a work protected by copyright. I'm not saying there is no creativity in designing a chess engine, but it's another type of creativity than what is needed for copyright.hgm wrote: ↑Mon Aug 13, 2018 8:49 amOf course, that was never an issue. Also, the decimal representation of the value of pi would be unprotected (list of facts).
IMO "to serve solely a technical effect" here would apply to the requirement that it plays legal Chess, not that it plays good chess. As Chess is yet unsolved, move selection takes place by heuristics, which require creativity to design.That functional features are not protected is also well established. See e.g. here:4.2 (...) De aldus door het hof toegepaste maatstaf is juist. Elementen van het werk die louter een technisch effect dienen of te zeer het resultaat zijn van een door technische uitgangspunten beperkte keuze, zijn van auteursrechtelijke bescherming uitgesloten (vgl. HR 22 februari 2013, ECLI:NL:HR:2013:BY1529, NJ 2013/501, rov. 3.4 onder (c), en de aldaar aangehaalde, door het onderdeel ingeroepen BSA-uitspraak van het HvJEU).
But the NN itself is not perceivable by the human senses.Playing style would merely be the output of the NN, though. I don't want to protect the style, but the NN that generated it.But even in the rare case where something creative in the end result can somewhat plausible be seen, I suspect there is no room for doubt: "playing style" probably does not legally qualify as something that can be protected. But here I am speculating.
There can be copyright on an mp3 file because there is copyright on the music it encodes, but there is no separate copyright on the numbers.
The algorithm for a PRNG is not copyrighted. The implementation in source code is copyrighted (because the EU Directive says so). Those aspects of the implementation that are determined by the algorithm will not be copyrighted.So it is more comparable to the case where I write a pseudo-random number generator. We agree that the output of such a PRNG is not copyrightable. But would the code for the PRNG be copyrightable? It might be far better than any existing PNRG, in terms of metrics used to judge PRNG (e.g. periodicity, long-range correlations).
"So that the resulting function always terminates and returns an integer" is a functional restriction.It is not at all inconceivable that I could obtain code for a PRNG by randomly generating C programs from the C syntax, with some restriction (claimed by me to be creatively designed) on the syntax (e.g. so that the resulting function always terminates and returns an integer).
So code yes, algorithm no.Would that disqualify me from getting copyrights on any PRNG code I carefully designed by hand, with the aid of deep mathematical theories?