Surely once should be enough! The police don't wait until you have persistently commited a crime before arresting you. In order to establish that you were a persistent file sharer wouldn't they lose the right to claim they were acting as a 'mere conduit' in order to avoid civil liability themsleves?

On a secondary note - if they warned a customer ahead of time about their alleged persistent *illegal* file sharing (as distinct from sharing, say, open source software) would they be allowed to "promote" their new service at the same time (and would this amount to a "get out of jail not-so-free card" or alternatively "demanding money with manaces")?

Maybe where you come from. Here in the UK theft is theft and copyright infringment is copyright infringement - Theft is covered by criminal law and results in a prison sentence, copyright infringement is covered by civil law and results in damages being awarded.

Regardless - Here in the UK downloading music and movies is neither theft or copyright infringement - however uploading music and movies would be the latter....but its still not theft!

Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently best undertaken by humans.

Surely we have plenty of humans available to do tasks 'curently best undertaken by humans' :)

Seriously though... while it might be useful to develop AI systems in this area as timesaving devices, the examples given above aren't really in that category - IMO AI research could be better applied to tasks humans can't achieve so easily (and maybe provide an insight into why that is the case) - I guess I just don't buy into the whole 'we can make something just like a human - but that isn't one' view of AI.