One one hand, maybe it's good to have better searchable records, even if it's hard to quantify the benefit.
On the other hand, now all your meetings produce reams of computer searchable records subject to discovery in civil and criminal litigation, possibly leading to far worse liability than would have been possible in a mostly email based business.
I doubt that, but even if you're right it doesn't change my point: if you're not willing to stop doing that, you'll be less productive than the firms that are willing to operate legally and ethically.
And if in some industry it's really not possible to do business without committing crimes, then let's reform the criminal code to something reasonable.
Brings to mind the line about the behavior of most organizations being best explained by it being controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Just mass-violating the copyright of deep pocketed plaintiffs is like writing them checks that need to go through court first. The Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to make laws concerning copyright. Congress used that power. The statutes say what they say. There is no wriggling out of it; there are centuries of case law reconciling copyright with the 1A. If the IA is going to be provocative like this it should do so outside of the reach of the judgments of US courts.
No they're not. There are whole classes of professional that take on personal liability related to handling of private information. Journalists can be one of them but one reason you do not want a journalist handling private information is that they do not get the benefit of privilege in most jurisdictions. Anything in their possession that is private can be exposed by subpoena or other court order.
Again, depending on the country. I don't think what you're saying applies to my example of Sweden for example. Sweden probably has some of the strongest protections for journalists and their sources in the world, AFAIK.
In Sweden, journalistic source protection ("källskydd") is enshrined in the Swedish Constitution through the Freedom of the Press Act ("Tryckfrihetsförordningen").
Obviously, this doesn't matter much as the submission is about Meta and OpenAI, so journalists aren't as strongly protected as in other places of the world.
I wouldn't say a blanket "journalists are in the worst industry" like parent did, nonetheless.
No that is not an extreme interpretation of the fair use factors. This is a routinely emphasized factor in fair use analyses for both copyright and trademark. School fair use is different because that defense is written into the statute directly in 17 U.S.C. § 107. Also, § 108 provides extensive protections for libraries and archives that go beyond fair use doctrines.
The idea that the schools are encouraging the students to compete with the original authors of works taught in the classroom is fanciful by the meaning that courts usually apply to competition. Your example is different from this case in which Ross wanted to compete in the same market against West offering a similar service at a lower price. Another reason that the schools get a carveout is because it would make most education impractical without each school obtaining special licenses for public performance for every work referenced in the classroom.
But maybe that also provokes the question as to if schools really deserve that kind of sweetheart treatment (a massive indirect subsidy), or does it over-privileges formal schools relative to the commons at large?
> School fair use is different because that defense is written into the statute directly
It's written into the statute as an example of something that would be fair use.
> The idea that the schools are encouraging the students to compete with the original authors of works taught in the classroom is fanciful by the meaning that courts usually apply to competition.
People go to art school primarily because they want to create art. People study computer science primarily because they want to write code. It's their direct intention and purpose to compete with existing works.
> Your example is different from this case in which Ross wanted to compete in the same market against West offering a similar service at a lower price.
So if you use Windows and then want to create Linux...
> Another reason that the schools get a carveout is because it would make most education impractical without each school obtaining special licenses for public performance for every work referenced in the classroom.
How is that logic any different than for AI training?
> But maybe that also provokes the question as to if schools really deserve that kind of sweetheart treatment (a massive indirect subsidy), or does it over-privileges formal schools relative to the commons at large?
It not only doesn't have any explicit requirement for a formal school (it just says "teaching"), it also isn't limited to teaching, teaching is just one of the things specified in the statute as being the kind of thing Congress intended fair use to include.
>It's written into the statute as an example of something that would be fair use.
Statutory text controls what the courts can do, even and perhaps especially when it includes an example.
>People go to art school primarily because they want to create art. People study computer science primarily because they want to write code. It's their direct intention and purpose to compete with existing works.
Interesting perspective.
>So if you use Windows and then want to create Linux...
I don't understand your meaning.
>How is that logic any different than for AI training?
That is what Mark Lemley, law professor at Stanford, has argued in his many law review articles and amicus briefs: he believes that training is analogous to learning. The court here didn't agree with the Lemley view.
>It not only doesn't have any explicit requirement for a formal school (it just says "teaching"), it also isn't limited to teaching, teaching is just one of the things specified in the statute as being the kind of thing Congress intended fair use to include.
In practice courts tend to limit these exceptions to formal teaching arrangements.
Copyright covers expression, not ideas. The underlying problem here is that Ross Intelligence never went to the trouble of distilling the purely idea-based and factual element from their original sources; even their finalized search system still had a pervasive reliance on Westlaw's original and creative expression as embedded in their headnotes. Using Windows and then creating Linux is something entirely different because Linux goes to great effort in order not to use anything that's specific to Windows. Large-scale language models are probably somewhere in the middle, because their unique reliance on an incredibly wide variety of published texts makes it very unlikely that they'll ever preserve anything of substance about the expression in any single text.
What a world we’re in where a school using text to teach children, who will remember it, talk about it with others, likely buy it for their own children… can be framed as a “massive indirect subsidy” rather than “free advertising”.
This reflects on the individuals choosing to create and proliferate such misleading or hyperbolic framing more than it does on the world that we all live in. In meatspace we usually reject these ideas and ignore the people pushing them.
Part of the reason for this is also is that the underlying clothes and fabrics were also very very expensive relative to what they became in the post-industrial world. So you would want to show off what you had.
It will be "fixed" by just killing off old people in large numbers through some combination of high pressure euthanasia campaigns and denial of healthcare subsidies. Just no one wants to be honest about it.
Our political culture is not a high integrity, high honesty culture but one that relies on a lot of indirect communication and symbolism. In this the west has become a lot more like east Asian stereotype. So in my view this crisis will be solved, just not in a way that people want to acknowledge. A lot of the nonserious "attempts" to address the issues are just performances to make it look like the facially palatable policies have been tried before they inevitably fail.
It's not the most intuitive thing, but how long we live has no long term impact on population levels. Think about a fertility rate of one - this means each successive generation will be half the size of the one prior. This makes simplified population sims very simple because it's simply powers of 2.
If you start with a population of 1 then the generation before was 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. So when you remove the biggest group, the oldest, it will always be about 50% of the total population regardless of how many other generations happen to be alive. And a 'generation' is proportional not to our life expectancy, but to our practical fertility window - so about 20 years.
You would substantially mitigate many of the economic problems but your Logan's Run would also need to be a dictatorship (and a rather less than benevolent one) because the skewed age ratios mean with a collapsing fertility rate the elderly will exclusively control any democracy, even if 100% of people vote. And all of this just to make it more comfortable to sleep walk into extinction.
I'm fully on board with you about saying the unspoken parts out loud, but I don't see this idea as a solution.
It has. If you are born into work camp slave status, doomed to starve to keep the gerontocropolis warm, your motivation to put kids into that labour camp will be below zero.
This is very topical in the UK at the moment, as Parliament has just voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its second reading in the Commons. What that means is that it will probably soon be possible for individuals who are slowly dying to request their own euthanasia.
There has been a lot of debate in the press and online (and no doubt also in private across the whole country). The arguments range from the risks of potential cooercion to the morality of a 'coup de grâce'. Yet your point is also pertinent, as 'quality of life' often has as much to do with the quality of care as it does with the affliction itself, and quality of care is largely down to how much society pays for it.
There's also many old people that are so demented they're just sitting in a chair drooling, totally unaware of their surroundings. They receive as much care as they can get but it's not really improving their quality of life. They basically exist only as a reminder for the people that knew them.
I do think that euthanasia would make sense in these cases. The real person, their mind, has died a long time ago, it's just their body that lives on.
Of course the decision should be up to these people (while they're still capacitated) and their family. It shouldn't be imposed on them. But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that.
> But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that.
In such a situation I'd be inclined to agree. I think my question is rather how many of the candidates for humane euthanasia would be in that condition if preventative healthcare was better.
Clearly there will be some people whose conditions could not be prevented by any medical intervention, but cuts to healthcare funding would probably result in more people getting terminal illnesses in total. Witnessing the suffering of patients is a big part of reminding people why healthcare is important (which of course is why medical charities advertise in this way). Thus, personally, my chief concern is that compassionate euthanasia could end up hiding fixable problems in our healthcare system.
The big issue with aging is general cognitive decline. In some people it can happen faster, or slower, but it happens to all of us and is no more avoidable than muscular decline.
It makes it increasingly difficult for people to care for themselves, and highly vulnerable to exploitation, even when in 'perfect' health.
In practice, even later English kings were effectively elected and could have their terms ended early. Taking a few Plantagenet examples, the nobles imprisoned Edward II as retaliation for the plots of Hugh Despenser, and then the king died mysteriously (adverb used ironically). Edward III was far more popular with the nobles due to his many victories in Scotland and France. His successor, Richard II, tried to make a lasting peace with France, but that was much less popular with the most powerful burghers and nobles. So Richard II was deposed, imprisoned, and died mysteriously. No doubt if they had security cameras in those days, they would have mysteriously ceased functioning at some critical moment. So ended the Plantagenets and began the line of Lancastrian kings.
I would push back slightly and say that this trend is more even and there is less disruption to it than sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th century is often presented as a sharp break with tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like business as usual.
It probably didn't help Edward II that he had Robert the Bruce in Scotland to fight who was most certainly an actual stupendous badass but even he was employed on condition that:
"if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us as our King"
The difficulty here is that it has long been US policy to promote the exports of its intellectual property (such as its movies) and communications networks (such as the internet). Trade policy is almost always a two way street, particularly in the modern era in which arrangements like the "unequal treaties" that choked the Qing dynasty are highly unusual. So banning Tiktok necessarily results in reciprocal bans. Canada does not have similar concerns as the US does because it is our little gas station whose pretensions to independence we humor and they do not export IP or communications technologies at the same scale as we do.
American social networks are already banned in China and have been for a long time. Even TikTok doesn't operate in China because they have a different message they want for their own citizens. Douyin - the Chinese version of Tiktok - promotes learning about science and technology, shuts down at night, and limits how much children are allowed to use it.
Maybe there's child accounts that has those limits, but normal accounts don't match that description. I've watched my girlfriend use Douyin and the content was lower brow than what e.g. Instagram shows her. It was mostly dumb skits and people doing silly dances. Due to time zones, I have no clue if it shut down at night, but it never seemed to be an issue.
We get a lot of propaganda about Chinese social media apps that's just wrong. I was told Xiaohongshu is a propaganda app that sends quotes from Mao's little red book, and it's Chinese Instagram.
On the other hand, now all your meetings produce reams of computer searchable records subject to discovery in civil and criminal litigation, possibly leading to far worse liability than would have been possible in a mostly email based business.