More stuff cropped up today that resonates with Accelerando. Linda from Ink and Paper tweeted about an article on Mashable about a pretty fascinating service. Or program. Or some combination thereof. It’s called WordPressDirect, and it’s essentially a blog automation service. You get the program, decide what sort of niche you want to blog about, and enter some keywords. The program then sets up a blog for you (though you get to choose how it looks), making categories for posts dependent on the keywords you’ve given it. So far so good, and no huge deal. The next bit is what put me in mind of Accelerando: the program will then monitor RSS feeds, other blogs, YouTube, and a host of other resources, and automatically post blog entries for you. More after the break. . . .
This is pretty important stuff; you’re basically talking about machines creating content. Linda mused about whether or not what the program does is plagiarism, and that’s a good question. Assuming that it didn’t grab entire articles, but rather just bits and pieces, I could see a fair use argument being put forward. That being said, I’m not sure that programs are sophisticated enough yet to tell which bits are relevant information, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the thing just grabbed entire articles, which would be violation of copyright.
I’m curious about a different angle, though: Assuming that the program managed to cobble together an original article, who would own the copyright to it? I’m sure there are laws on the books about this sort of thing, probably going back to machine-created art like that of Jean Tinguely, but I don’t know what it has decided. If machine-created works are copyrightable, who gets the copyright? The owner of the software, or the creator? Assuming it’s the owner, what are the ramifications of that when you consider that almost all commercial software these days is licensed rather than sold; that is, you don’t own the software you’ve bought. You’re just allowed to use it forever.
Accelerando uses these kinds of thoughts as a jumping-off point, and imagines a world where entire corporations are self-aware computer-guided systems, which clearly has the possibility of ending humans up in a pretty weird place. I don’t want to go too much more into the plot, as I’d hate to spoil it, but it’s certainly pretty fascinating. And the question of how much computer assistance it takes to render something computer-generated rather than person-generated, and how that impacts copyright, is only going to become more important as technology improves. If I tell a software agent to run off and collect some data for me and then to come back when it’s done, did I do the work, or did the agent? It’s an interesting question, and it will probably come up more and more in the next couple of decades.
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Excellent point and interesting blog. I think with anything automated that you have to worry about losing the human element.
Definitely the case, yes. The software being offered here isn’t going to understand the articles it’s collecting; it’s nothing but a news aggregator, really. Until programs get sophisticated enough to analyze English for meaning, we’re unlikely to see anything from them other than snippets of articles (or the entire thing) written elsewhere. Seems to me this is really nothing more than a way of generating splogs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splog) that appear to have some sort of relevance to a given topic.
This is an angle I hadn’t considered, Tom, so I’m doubly glad you explored it. It would be interesting to sit down with a copyright lawyer and chat about this. Keep me posted if you dig deeper into this issue.
wow. first there were robot bartenders and now this. pretty soon blogs will be just another stream of content that the machines will use to tell us what to believe and think. why am i so excited?