RE: Fw: [-empyre-] a-life poetic moments

["C. Mendoza" <c@matadata.com>]

a-life...

i propose to you that much like a genome (hey mr. craig venter, nice
try, but i'm sure that you are right... under the current political
climate), any piece of code, or anything that you can actually think of
nowadays, it is just a piece of property. thus, the fact is that any
sort of automated, and even self-aware (impossible at this point)
software, will always be subjected to ownership rules. if you can patent
"one click"
http://www-cse.stanford.edu/classes/cs201/projects-99-00/software-patent
s/amazon.html you can pretty much patent god if you cook Him in a lab,
or at least if you register Him with the US Patent Office. therefore, i
think it is interesting that this conversation happens outside of this
realm.

regardless of what any sort of a-life device is, it will always be
"protected" under copyright; in fact, this is explicit in the (U.S.)
law. therefore, a-life starts its so-called life as a slave to someone
else, either its creator or its owner, which can enforce any number of
copyright measures against the a-life "creature" or the creations of the
creature. or, obviously, the creations of the users of the creature.

therefore, a-life is no more flexible in its originality potential as
any other human creation; it is always enforceable in terms of the law,
as long as the creator decides to enforce. in fact, even more so if the
source code isn't available, since even the most random a-life
algorithms'output will be able to be recreated, given the exact
conditions of its execution (unless you are using some really crafty
random number generator*). thus, a-life may be nothing more than a
fountain of youth of enforceable patents.

so that is just a thought, which i suppose ties with the previous
"ownership" thread, to keep people busy :)

c.

*which reminds me of a really cafty random number generator used by a
cryptology company i read about: keep the lid on a video camera, but
turn it on... the noise produced by imaging black is almost completely
random.