Today, I was showing a bunch of colleagues how to use YouTube’s auto-captioning feature, and letting people do some demo videos. My colleagues recorded videos of themselves reading poetry, or reciting song lyrics – and those videos are probably technically derivative works!
But the captions themselves are derivatives of the videos – so when your initial video is itself a derivative work, the captions are a derivative of a derivative… (Captionception!) Theoretically, the videos themselves could be infringing – in which case, creating the captions might itself be infringing! Horrors!!!*
Anyway, one of the transcripts is so -extremely incorrect-** that I’m wondering if it could really be called a derivative work at all. Technically, it is of course “derivative”, in that it is a poem re-rendered in text by transcription of a recorded recitation. But here’s the transcript – can you tell what the poem is???
called fast injuries forestry in style i
says a broken remembered that cannot buy
house passed a jury instrument reinstall
life as a parent
field trials in the snow
I will even add line breaks for you in the appropriate places:
called fast injuries
forestry in style
i says a broken remembered
that cannot buyhouse passed a jury
instrument reinstall
life as a parent field
trials in the snow
What do you think? Derivative work? Masterpiece of computer-generated absurdist original art?? (Can unintentional computer-generated anything truly be considered original???) Now I’m just making my own brain hurt.
*I do not think anything we did today was in fact even remotely plausibly infringing.
** The auto-caption feature is usually much better than this – it was recorded in a loud room with a lot of background noise.
