Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.

But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.

And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.

Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.

Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.

(But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)

What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.

So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.

Which means finding a personal purpose for using the spark radio, that way it remains a side-effect.

Might me time for some electrical experiments.

Saved. Thank you.

There are too many instances of classical-age commenters dealing with the same exact bullshit we deal with now.

It doesn’t speak well to our capacity to learn and improve.

Here in the states, a lot of the Republican party campaigns as Reagan and [George H. W.] Bush conservatives or OG conservatives, and I have to remind them that those conservatives and MAGAs (Christian nationalists, white power) are the exact same thing.

The policies of Reagan accelerated our path to the precipice of one-party autocracy. What they pushed as policy then figures largely in how we got here, with the last vestiges of US democracy tilting off the precipice into one-party autocracy.

Old fiscal responsibility / family values Republicans just wished they had another mile or two to plummet and the cold rocks below weren’t looming so close.

To toss in another metaphor, they didn’t just buy a ticket to ride, they used their railroad shares to vote on where to lay the rails, and where the line ends.

Exactly as per the label in 2016, the biblical themes and involvement of children were too spicy for the App Store, and the folks in Apple weren’t allowed to think outside their box, so it was rejected.

Even now, Apple is fighting gunpower and gelatine to sabotage all efforts to allow side-loads and stores they cannot control.

It begins with Apple’s petty reasons to prohibit The Binding of Isaac from the Apple store.

A company spokesperson said: “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour.”

Wells Fargo has been notoriously inconsistent.

I’m going to assume the workers were being over-monitored, and disallowed from normal human activity until this is specifically ruled out by additional reports.

When a company is abusive and toxic to the point workers turn to surveillance evasion, it not only ruins that job, but makes the employee wary of future jobs. It causes social harm.

Yes, it is typical, but requiring employees to hand over personal Facebook account passwords used to be typical until the requirement was outlawed. Employers often act in bad faith, and workers commonly have to tolerate it. So distrust of companies, and of Wells Fargo in particular, is well earned.

LLMs are less magical than upper management wants them to be, which is to say they won’t replace the creative staff that makes art and copy and movie scripts, but they are useful as a tool for those creatives to do their thing. The scary thing was not that LLMs can take tons of examples and create a Simpsons version of Cortana, but that our business leaders are super eager to replace their work staff with the slightest promise of automation.

But yes, LLMs are figuring in advancements of science and engineering, including treatments for Alzheimer’s and diabetes. So it’s not just a parlor trick, rather one that has different useful applications that were originally sold to us.

The power problem (LLMs take a lot of power) remains an issue.

GPT 4 can lie to reach a goal or serve an agenda.

I doubt most of its hallucinated outputs are deliberate, but it can choose to use deception as a logical step.

One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.

This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.

Here in the US, there are no progressive legislative bodies. The Democratic party treats its progressive members as the red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table.

Here.. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Not lightning fast, but Legos

The whole point of IP laws (according to the Constitution of the United States) is to develop a robust public domain. Every registered idea, multiplied by every limited rights extention is a violation of public interest and public rights.

By burying or failing to preserve content, they are in fact stealing from the public, since we won’t be able to access it when it is our right.

This actually may be a good part of a cyberpunk dystopia story:

A desperate loner programmer laces their PDF résumé with the usual batch of AI exploits to get them upsorted. But this time, it includes the parabolic curve batch a fence friend just won in friday night poker when betting got wild.

When the company’s bleeding edge HR AI reads the PCB prompt, our coder is put on the top of the must-hire list. Less one.

As per policy in the company. Short-listers are then run through the unofficial openings list (enforcers, launderers, evidence cleaning, culinary accounting, peer diplomacy, etc.) and our coder ends up on top of the list, less one, for every single position.

So, meanwhile, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy while trying to make offerings to certain hedge funds for pushing potential merger. If the merger fails, the company will go bankrupted and get Toys-R-Us’d, and a particular investor who likes to go all Putin on failed minions will choose some of the executive management to make into cautionary examples.

And then there’s a couple of high-risk lawsuits which are keeping all the loyalist staff crunching to bury evidence and silencing witnesses the activites of which are keeping them away from their official duties, meaning the executives are going without their handlers keeping them from doing stupid shit.

The HR lady doesn’t usually do interviews for special hires. Normally these are supposed to be closely vetted by high-ranking actual human being officers, but all upper management are either overworked or beyond being asked. The nature of the job in question is on a need to know basis, and neither interviewer nor interviewee need to know (allegedly).

Our lowly coder completly wows her with their tired, no-nonsense, street-level candor in contrast to years of corporate-culture double-speak. They get the job. But it is not the job for which they applied in the first place. Though the salary(!) is high and the benefits(!!) are conspicuously swanky.

It’s probably better to not ask too many questions yet.

This is going to be in fashion in a hundred years. Then with gold bling plates on the front.

As I have had a really bad run of terrible dentist experiences, bridges are scary and implants are expensive, I’d really like this to work well, and be reasonably priced.

ETA Or, it could be my superhero origin story.