Zabet Patterson > Quotes

“Noll tried to register Gaussian Quadratic with the US Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, another body perplexed by the works on display. His request was originally denied “since a machine had generated the work.”10 He explained that a human being had written the program that, through a mix of randomness and order, generated the work. The Library of Congress again declined: randomness was unacceptable. Noll finally argued that although the numbers produced by the program appeared random, “the algorithm generating them was perfectly mathematical and not random at all,” and the work was finally patented.”
― Zabet Patterson, Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art