Relevant Onion article here: https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-18195...

Relevant real Microsoft patent on the IS NOT OPERATOR:

https://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2...

Why is satire so much better at predicting our dumb reality than sci-fi? This is definitely the darkest timeline.

Because rational people like to think people are rational. Rational people then go on and write their great sci fi works.

People writing satire know people are irrational. Otherwise they wouldn't be writing satire, would they?

To quote George Carlin: Take an average idiot on the street, then realize half of people are dumber than them.

GPT-3 says: In mathematics, there is a search for a satire-to-satire mapping function with the longest cycle length. These are called N-quines.

Haha wow. In another testament to the times, the length of yesterday’s satire seems as long as todays “long form”, and much more developed than todays two line satire “articles”. /end soapbox

I mean, it's not A Modest Proposal, but Onion articles are still actually article length. I know most people just read and share the headline, but they're still taking the time to do full write-ups.

Relevant SMBC comic: "Mister President! India is suing for half of our data!" https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-08-29

Perhaps this issue came about because Google's AI read this article.

From 1998 no less!

Careful there. My law firm in east Texas happens to own the patent rights to a system and method of concatenating a plurality of 1s and 0s for the purpose of generating an encoding of a creative work, and as such you are in peril of infringing on one of my claims with your concatenation of 1s and 0s!

General Mills owns the copyright on 0s, sir. (Cheerios)

But do they own an NFT of an 0?

I believe 0 and 1 belong in the public domain, at least under US copyright law - there appears to be a significant amount of prior art.

FYI while Drive and YouTube's Content ID systems operate based on copyright, they are not entirely bound to it since they only actually have to comply with DMCA requests (barring any lawsuits that claim Google has the resources to create automated copyright detection systems[0]). Even when claiming copyright, they can remove and block access to content for any reason they want legally.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/business/media/viacom-and...

They theoretically are based on copyright, but in practice the way it works is a few trusted entities are allowed to submit content and claim it as their own. If you have access to a Content Owner dashboard, you can claim literally any content you want from there- you'll just be putting your access to that dashboard at risk if you claim content that isn't actually yours to claim and Google gets wind of it.

This is how movies and music are added to the system for copyright enforcement purposes- they are effectively uploaded to YouTube and never published (this is called an "asset" in Content Owner parlance)

People have posted recordings of typing on keyboards so they can file claims and steal ad revenue from anyone whose video has the sound of typing. People are exploiting the bugs in the system.

Youtube's Content ID system is an artificial substitute for actions based on copyright law like DMCA takedowns, because actions based on copyright law have forms and procedures and you need to pay a lawyer to review them. Youtube's system is designed to be so generous to established content owners that they prefer to use it over legal filings, and to have very little recourse for appeal when a video gets taken down.

Not sure if prior art is relevant, per se (usually quoted in the context of patent law but IANAL), but, certainly, any copyright has expired by this point.

It might be that the 1s and 0s are derivative works, such as being derivatives of sin(x) and cos(x) for x->0.

Seeing as the default font used by google's file reader is Roboto and that typeface has only been around since 2014, so my expression of 0 using Roboto is copyrighted 2014.

I do not know how any of you _hackers_ stole my original work, and I certainly do not authorize it's use. Immediately send me your full name and address so that I can have my lawyers contact you.

I hope you did that from a burner account!

Exactly my thoughts. I'd not want to risk angering the Google gods with this experiment, considering your account can be disabled by yet another automated system with no way to contact a human.

Better do it from a burner device on a burner internet connection, to prevent Google from detecting any link between your burner account and your real account.

Remember, "there is no review for this restriction"

Well that MP3 the RIAA flagged was FULL of ones and zeros, so it only makes sense they would get flagged ;-)

Silence copyrighted too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3

Does this mean every binary file is now a derivative work?

That’s it, kids, the internet is now illegal — until we switch to a quaternary system using only 2’s and 3’s <taps forehead smartly>

Suspicious -- just when Google is announcing success with qbits and quantum computing.

Wouldn't that still be binary, just using different symbols?

Does that mean someone copyrighted binary? :p I guess that mean that this comment and everything digital is copyrighted.

Technically any creative work you author is copyrighted, so your comment was copyrighted anyway.

Whether or not large tech companies will punish people for infringing upon your copyright is yet to be determined.

I don't know about US lawy but in German law there is a requirement on some originality. ("Schöpfungshöhe") The barrier is low, but a 1 certainly doesn't receive the protection.

Yep. A HN comment a couple of sentences long, OTOH, is probably just on the threshold where whether it counts as a protected work depends on just how “unique” the comment is.

As we are on HN, not reddit, thus comments are more than "yes" or "lolz" they are most likely protected.

However one implicitly gives a license to YCombinator - at least to publish it. And what other rights can be upheld would be interesting.

Maybe it's because you have "one" in the file name: "zeronewline".