My brain contains loads of copyrighted info. And if I exactly reproduce it from memory, it's copyright infringement. But if I come up with my own work, even if using that copyrighted info to learn from, it isn't infringement.
I'm pretty sure if you reproduce a work from memory by accident, because you didn't notice your subconscious had just stored the entire article and is now reproducing it word for word, you'd still be guilty of copyright infringement.
If I read something, "learn" it, and reproduce it word for word (or with trivial edits) even without referencing the original work at all, it is still copyright infringement.
Yet my comparison of the human brain still stands, I believe.
Just because you learned about something in art class from looking at a copyrighted work doesn’t make everything you produce after that a derivative work.
Copyright has always made a distinction between the copies you make in a person's head and the copies you make into another work generated by a person.
That's like saying that you make a copy of a book when you read it, because the words are in your memory. Or at least that memorizing passages of text is copyright infringement.
Actually, people have been successfully sued for plagiarizing other works because they had internalized it and accidentally regurgitated it. So. The fact that content runs through a human brain doesn’t necessarily cleanse it from copyright concerns.
> Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity.
Yes, and humans are being found liable for copyright infringement for doing so. All that's needed to establish liability is access and substantial similarity; the bar for the latter can be very low indeed (see Williams et al. v. Bridgeport Music et al.).
A human is both capable of reciting things from memory in an infringing manner, and learning from experiences to create something new. Maybe we should tape people's mouth shut if they dare to violate copyright by reciting a copyrighted book word for word or put them in a straight jacket if they recreate a copyrighted painting from memory.
If you pirate a book, learn from it and then create something using the information you learned, would that creation constitute copyright infringement? If so how far does the tainting go? Once you put your eyes on something which you haven't purchased, all future works could potentially be inspired by that experience and should therefore be considered infringement, following your logic.
Authoring any work, no matter how closely copied, is not an infringement. The infringement is commercial distribution of copyrighted work. And yes, I do think you should be liable for whatever you distribute commercially, regardless of how you obtain it.
Seems like 'learning' and 'producing something with that learned information' are two different things. I can 'learn' all day long from copyrighted materials. I'm not violating anything, because I've not produced a copy that would be distributed or used. First/knee-jerk reaction to that above - no doubt there's more nuance buried someplace.
That's a straw man. Copyright doesn't prohibit someone from learning from your work. It prohibits (in the US) five specific acts: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution of copies, public performance, and display. You don't need to be able to define a work of purely unique expression. All you need to be able to do is define when a work is sufficiently original that it's not a derivative work or reproduction.
Synthesising material from various sources isn't copyright infringement, that's called writing.
It's only infringement if the portion copied is significant either absolutely or relatively. A line here or there of the millions in the Linux kernel is okay. A couple of lines of a haiku is not. Copyright is not leprosy.
Plagiarism and copyright infringement have some overlap but they're distinct. You can be guilty of plagiarism by taking something in the public domain and presenting it as your own work.
reply