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From: goldfain@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Who owns the output of an AI?
Message-ID: <8300013@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: Wed, 18-Nov-87 04:55:00 EST
Article-I.D.: osiris.8300013
Posted: Wed Nov 18 04:55:00 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Nov-87 15:22:38 EST
References: <1778@svax.cs.cornell.edu>
Lines: 43
Nf-ID: #R:svax.cs.cornell.edu:1778:osiris.cso.uiuc.edu:8300013:000:2693
Nf-From: osiris.cso.uiuc.edu!goldfain    Nov 18 03:55:00 1987


Just to fan  the  flames,  let me throw  in  1 totally  outlandish,  2  mildly
outlandish answers and a 4th that  is not so bad (but  I'm not sure  whether I
buy the analogy.)
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1) Newsflash.   Microsoft   today filed  lawsuit   against 250,000 authors  of
   various books  and papers  for violation of  copyright.   Said a  Microsoft
   spokesman,  "Yes, these people really wrote  the manuscripts, but then they
   gave them, in very raw form, to our program which then  took it upon itself
   to  edit, layout, and  publish them.  Our  program actually   owns the copy
   rights to these  items."  When  asked how   his company managed  to file  a
   quarter of a  million legal documents  in one day, the  spokesman  said "No
   trouble, we just used  Think Technology's  'legal councillor'  program."  A
   second later, the Microsoft representative ran  from the room muttering "Oh
   no ..."
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2) If the computer program is not intelligent enough to reply to the "raw"
   data with :
                  "I don't know, nothing looks interesting here ..."
   then to phone its author and say
              "Hey Jaime, this formula makes a wonderful superconductor.
               Do you want it, or should I tell Tom? "
   then I doubt it has enough intelligence to "deserve" the credit itself.
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3) In today's environment the  user can shut off  the machine and go  get  the
   patent  himself, claiming to  have made the  discovery without any computer
   assistance.  (Those who believe "an unenforceable  law should not be a law"
   may see some point in this.)
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4) The  user  can claim  "I   did not  ask the  machine    to find me   a good
   superconductor.  All  I  asked it was  whether this particular math problem
   had a solution.  The analogy leads us to the conclusion that we should give
   credit to the author for  a math theorem (and he  probably already has that
   credit in the literature), credit to the  program for applying  the theorem
   to solve a particular math problem (usually quite technically difficult but
   quite  uninteresting to humans) and   to the  user   for having applied the
   solution of a math problem to discovery of a new superconductor.
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              Mark Goldfain         arpa:     goldfain@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu
                                    US Mail:  Mark Goldfain
          (just a student in the) -->         Department of Computer Science
                                              1304 West Springfield Avenue
                                              Urbana, Illinois  61801