That should have been patents attract trollsâ¦

Lawyers get paid to take cases. The fact that they take a case doesnâ(TM)t mean it is a good one

Um, no. We really donâ(TM)t need to consider this.

There is an obvious reason why patents attack trolls - they are not always easy to work around if you have an infringing product. A picture - easily worked around. And much harder to claim infringement on a picture if it not an exact copy. You cannot claim infringement on the idea of a picture, and therefore you will need something approaching a bit for bit copy to win an infringement claim. And with the low stakes, not something anyone will be putting money to.

I think the monkey selfie case was very flawed. Unfortunately Slater did not have the resources to really take this further. The idea that a monkey took the photograph is absurd. The monkey pressed a button and didnâ(TM)t even know or realise it had created an image of itself.

The judgement didnâ(TM)t state that Slater couldnâ(TM)t copyright the image, but that the monkey could not own a copyright.

Regardless, if Disney had been the party litigating, they would have easily won this.

This is such an unlikely and very paranoid scenario that it is not worth seriously worrying about.

Very few people spend tonnes of money to create images just to sit on them and then sue for infringement.

At a cost of $65 per application, no one is spamming the copyright office with millions of AI generated works of art!

I donâ(TM)t think the Wikipedia article that you linked to says what you possibly think it does.

It is quite clear, for the USA at least, that provided that there is direction by a human, then a work can be considered to be copyrightable.

The copyright office is grappling with the issue of tools such as Midjourney making creation easier. However, in much the same way that photographs can be and are copyrighted, so will works created using AI.

I am not sure that being protected from the claim of copyright infringement is the same thing. The law still favours whoever did it first.

Just to put some maths on it, if we imagine the 624 prompts to be binary (they clearly arenâ(TM)t) then what we would have is 2^624 possibilities which is approximately 7*10^187 possibilities. To put that number in context - that is more possibilities than there are atoms in the known universe (up to approx 10^82), and represents a lower bound on the number of possibilities. This person has used Midjourney to produce exactly one image that cannot be reproduced by chance - it is impossible (almost surely). If that is not a product of creativity then I donâ(TM)t know what is.

The idea that he didnâ(TM)t know precisely what the outcome would look like is also a red herring. If I set out to photograph a sunset, I might have an idea what the image might look like but I have no control over the final outcome. If that was the only thing that mattered, then creativity would be meaningless as a concept.

The human expression is precisely the prompts given to the AI to produce the image. The AI did not just produce an image by itself that the copyright filer is then claiming. He directed it - very precisely too 624 text prompts in all. There is also almost no way to replicate what he has done without specific application of his prompts and other edits. This is a creative work - no question. It should be entitled to copyright protection in exactly the same way as a photograph.

Yes you absolutely can say the same about using a computer to do the work. The fact that someone else might have created the code and trained the AI does not change the fact that someone competent had to use the tool to create the art. He didnâ(TM)t just grab an image that the computer spat out. He composed it, using commands to Midjourney.

I think this is a very flawed finding that will be ultimately overturned (if challenged). What is the difference between taking a photograph of something completely natural (and therefore the photographer only observed) and a Midjourney produced image where the artist actually directs a computer to produce an image.

If photos are copyright-able, then so should Midjourney created images.

Nuclear is expensive primarily because we are not building them any more. However, the South Koreans did manage to build modern nuclear power plants with timescales of about 5 years.

If we want nuclear to be cost-effective, we need to build loads of them with the same design so that we can get economies of scale. The approach of building bespoke designs for each plant (coupled with varying and conflicting licensing requirements) is the thing we need to avoid.

Once a design is built, we should be building 100 of them to recover the design costs.

There are ways of offshore the work while keeping control of the outputs e.g. by ensuring that the workstations that your VFX workers use do not allow for removal of the material.

And Disney doesn't have to completely outsource - they could just establish a VFX team abroad.

However, they should be careful that a suddenly cost-conscious Disney (and Hollywood generally) doesn't just decide that they might as well outsource all VFX abroad. VFX artists are not selling their "personal" brands like most actors - they provide a very specific service that can very well be outsourced.