I remember when we would throw this into our utilities.js scripts back in like 2007. We didn't have querySelector yet, though. We'd also walk to school with no shoes, in the snow, uphill, both ways.
Came here to say this. I thought "Now that it's not streaming, I've at least got a copy on Amazon Prime!" Nope. Not anymore. And definitely can't get Season 3 any longer. Complete bullshit.
You absolutely can copywrite works created via automation, you just still have to list a human as the author.
Which makes a lot of sense to me - Someone had to set up the automation with the intent to create a copy writable work, and copywrite often has built in expirations based on a window of time after the death of the author. Hard to make that sane if you're listing a computer program as the author - when does it die?
Even if you assign the copyright to a human and not a machine, you need a minimal amount of creativity to qualify for copyright, eg phone books can't be copyrighted. A "phone book" of every melody of a certain length is probably(?) not copyrightable either.
The linked TED talk on the article explains it nicely. A phone book is created with a finite set (numbers,letters, words in English), but that finite set can be used to produce an infinite set. You can always produce a new result by appending to previous result.
In contrast, a musical melody is created by a finite set, and is bracketed by a duration. You can't keep adding more notes to a composition without extending its duration. Doing so makes it non melodic. If you do it enough, it becomes noise (white noise, pink noise..)
No real disagreement from me - I'm just saying that there's absolutely nothing preventing you from using automation to create copywrite-able works.
People keep throwing that article around, and there seems to be a profound misunderstanding about what was determined there - automation is fine. Listing a machine as the author is not.
I certainly agree that the author of an automation deserves credit/copyright for its output.
But imagine I build something that spits out as many binary sequences as possible. Do I then have a copyright to all the "works" that can be interpreted from it in various data formats I may have accidentally met?
Good luck proving that these songs were not created via automation in court - or that the claimant did not create the melody via automation for that matter. Wouldn't most electronic music fall under that definition?