Computers aren't people and acting like a computer doing something a human can do means it has all the same rights as a human is not established law anywhere in this solar system.
is not established law anywhere in this solar system
Fair Use is the main doctrine relevant in this situation, and does not inherently distinguish between manual and automated creation. Use of traditional algorithms, like the caching/thumbnailing/snippeting done by search engines, is already covered by it.
There are cases where "but it's not human" makes sense because the relevant law does make that distinction (e.g: registering a work for copyright in the US depends on human authorship), but I think it's a fairly weak point in this case. You could instead argue that it's not solely "doing something a human can do" and how that impacts on the Fair Use factors.
Computers "act" on behalf of the human(s) who own them. Are we gatekeeping how humans can learn? You can learn with your own brain and maybe a pencil and paper notebook, but your computer cannot help you learn?
There are services that are provided based on implicit assumption that their consumers are human and they are priced accordingly.
You can't go to theater and instruct your computer(a.k.a. camera) to consume & learn or summarize the movie/performance on your behalf. If that's possible and allowed, I'm sure the admission fee will be drastically different.
Google will not let you instruct your computer to consume all the search results for a keyword and filter out good results & summarize them (you can technically still do that but Google will try their best to make sure you don't). If you do, they'll throw you into a hell that is infinite captcha loop. Yes, they are hypocritical to do that but that is a different issue.
A human and a computer are not comparable either in capabilities or their lifetimes. Let's not mix them up.
Comments
Computers aren't people and acting like a computer doing something a human can do means it has all the same rights as a human is not established law anywhere in this solar system.
Fair Use is the main doctrine relevant in this situation, and does not inherently distinguish between manual and automated creation. Use of traditional algorithms, like the caching/thumbnailing/snippeting done by search engines, is already covered by it.
There are cases where "but it's not human" makes sense because the relevant law does make that distinction (e.g: registering a work for copyright in the US depends on human authorship), but I think it's a fairly weak point in this case. You could instead argue that it's not solely "doing something a human can do" and how that impacts on the Fair Use factors.
Computers "act" on behalf of the human(s) who own them. Are we gatekeeping how humans can learn? You can learn with your own brain and maybe a pencil and paper notebook, but your computer cannot help you learn?
There are services that are provided based on implicit assumption that their consumers are human and they are priced accordingly.
You can't go to theater and instruct your computer(a.k.a. camera) to consume & learn or summarize the movie/performance on your behalf. If that's possible and allowed, I'm sure the admission fee will be drastically different.
Google will not let you instruct your computer to consume all the search results for a keyword and filter out good results & summarize them (you can technically still do that but Google will try their best to make sure you don't). If you do, they'll throw you into a hell that is infinite captcha loop. Yes, they are hypocritical to do that but that is a different issue.
A human and a computer are not comparable either in capabilities or their lifetimes. Let's not mix them up.
Humans can learn, but you can not plagiarize other humans work.
I mean isn't the problem here that said computers reproduced material verbatim (plagiarism)?