Oh boy, guess what? Even have an LL.M in IP.

There's really no such thing as an obvious fair use. It's always fact-intensive, always case-by-case. And there's always the risk of times changing. Format shifting comes to us from the RIAA v. Diamond case, and it's terrifying to think of how differently that gone had it been litigated just a few years later when the iTunes Music Store was open. I'll agree though that the use of pirated books for training was a bad idea, in that it does not help how a court will perceive the AI developers. Never a good idea to piss off a judge, and it's clear these guys were not thinking.

Still, there's no market for AI analysis of books as far as I know, and the use was transformative in nature given that no one appeared to be reading them, they were just grist for the mill. This is actually more favorable to fair use than Google Books, which is intended for some human to ultimately use to get to read snippets of text in search results. Imagine how strong Google's case would've been if they'd said that searching for a string of text points you to a book with no snippet or anything else to tell you what's inside. Maybe a page or chapter number, for all the good that does.

Once you get over the training hurdle though, it looks like pretty smooth sailing. The model is demonstrably lossy. It's too abstract to mesh with the concept of an abridgement or condensation. You might be able to get snippets here and there out of it, but I would imagine that given a few examples to dive deep into analyizing, OpenAI can show that they appear because they're built out of common chains of text from multiple works, or are overrepresented due to multiple copies of the work. (Kind of like how the image-generating AIs are said to like to make fake Getty Images watermarks because it saw so many of them in training data, so it must be important)

Personally, I like their chances. Either way, it'll be interesting to see.

Users are allowed more freedom with regard to non-fiction, since the facts therein are uncopyrightable, and the general organization may be as well. Fiction, being more creative, enjoys a bit more protection from potential fair users.

I'm a lawyer. I would suggest you take a look at the court opinions concerning Google Book Search. You may be surprised. Try Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., 954 F. Supp. 2d 282 (S.D.N.Y. 2013) which was at the trial level, and then Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., 804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015), when it went up on appeal.

If an infringing use is also a fair use, it is rendered non-infringing, and that's the end of the analysis. There are no additional steps after fair use.

Gotcha covered:

So there's your answer.

A quote is not a derivative work because it's not based on a preexisting work. Instead, that's a reproduction of part of the work (a separate exclusive right under 106, however). A literary analysis is not a derivative work, but if you dug too deep and merely produced an annotated work or adaptation, then it would be. It's not too hard to stay on the correct side of that line.

Ideas can always be used. Facts -- or things claimed to be a real-life fact -- can always be used. But be cautious again of digging in too deeply. Castle Rock Entertainment Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group, 150 F.3d 132 (2d Cir. 1998) was a case where someone wrote a book of Seinfeld trivia questions. The questions weren't about the show, per se, but about the contents of the show. (That is, they did not ask on what soundstage it was filmed, but things like what is the number of the apartment, or what tagline did character X say repeatedly in a particular episode, that sort of thing) This was held to be copying many little fragments of the show itself, and thus infringing. And it wasn't held to be fair use.

Memorizing a book is not infringing. Reciting to a large group of people -- by any means, whether from memory or not -- would be, if the book is copyrighted.

I remember this being a big area of interest about 15 years ago, but there doesn't seem to have been much about it lately. So long as it's done in real time and just for the reader, and not an audience, I would be inclined to say that it's not infringing the reproduction right, derivative right, or most significantly, the public performance right.

You've never had to buy a license to read a book. Perhaps if you're doing other things in association with your book reading, you might need a license for that but not for just reading.

We've yet to invent a general-purpose AI. These things aren't reading books the way we do. My understanding is that they're basically compiling statistical models, and figuring out how each word or part of word relates to others. Kind of a more complicated version of playing the autocomplete game on your phone, where you input one word in a text chat and then just choose whatever the next suggested word is. The sentences you get make sense for a little while, but become run-ons and start to loop.

Analyzing a work isn't a copyright infringement. Predicate work needed to reach the point of conducting an analysis might, though. And the output of the software might as well.

That and also not wanting machines to be able to write things that sound like something she might write. Licensing isn't all that relevant, as in many cases a license would simply not be granted.

Like I said, if a disk needs to be ejected at boot, you hold down the mouse button during boot and it should be ejected by the drive. This is even mentioned in the 128k's manual. The paperclip thing is only if nothing else works.

If the machine is already up, ejecting the disk normally should work fine as long as it isn't in use. If it is, you can close out whatever's using it or if it's already the boot disk, well, too late given that your issue was not wanting it to boot off that disk.

And yes, there were two originally hidden, but later sometimes subtle but immediately available "programmer's keys" for reset and interrupt. Given the flaky OS of the day, though, dropping into MACSbug was usually pretty pointless.

On older machines, you needed to order a small plastic clip that fit on the side and would poke the buttons hidden behind some of the vents. Eventually they were provided as small buttons on the case. Or you could just use the right sort of many-button keyboard shortcut.

The Xerox Alto was the internally used research project. The Xerox Star was marketed commercially but had way too steep a price to assemble a useful system -- since it basically required a small LAN of multiple machines and a laser printer -- for hardly anyone to buy.

Yeah, but it also was designed around 128kB of RAM (itself an increase over the original plan to go with 64kB as I recall) so it's not like it could have run multiple apps if they wanted it to.

They were just trying to build one computer back then -- not a platform that would be in use in the future.

In fairness there was no consistency then as to what other buttons did, if anything, and it was confusing to people who already had to be taught what a mouse even was and how to use it. Also, Apple's mice ship for some years now have multiple 'buttons' (technically trackpad areas -- the mice have no physical buttons at all), and the platform has supported contextual menus since the late 90s.

Also, this isn't really a Steve thing. The NeXT machines all had two button mice.

Totally untrue. The original Mac had a power switch on the back left side. A big rocker switch near the compartment for changing the clock battery.

Power switches on the keyboard didn't appear until ADB came along for peripherals, which on the Mac was '87. Annoyingly not all of the machines could be powered on from the keyboard even as late as the mid-90s. And none of them would just shut down from the keyboard -- there was always a dialog box that could be canceled. The button was more related to the Apple II keyboard mounted reset switch.

Auto-inject was even sweeter. I never heard of auto eject failing in except in truly ancient drives (20-30 years old) that need to be lubricated and fixed up anyway. And if the machine crashed the disk would either eject on reboot, could be forced by holding the mouse button down during boot, or in the absolute worst case, ejected using a straightened paperclip in a subtle but conspicuous hole even with power off.

I don't think that was a Steve thing either -- hell, it took some effort just to get him to agree to the Sony 3.5" disk, which was a new thing and no standard at the time. Auto eject isn't a bad idea though, especially on removable media, so long as it can be overridden.

Authors are not inherently entitled to copyrights. They can carry any number of conditions, and in the past, have done. There's even still a few on the books.

There's no reason Congress cannot decide to say that if a work is allowed to go out of print for, say, a year, with some definition as to what constitutes being in print (so that authors don't just have to whip up a single copy) and what sorts of works the statute would apply to, then it enters the public domain. This would tend to encourage authors to keep works in print at all costs until it's no longer economical to do so, at which point they'd enter the public domain.

On a related note, you may wish to look at 17 USC 303(a), which encouraged authors to publish certain works before a deadline in order to lock in a certain duration of protection. The EU did something similar resulting in certain rare sound recordings getting very limited pressings in order to meet the minimum threshold.

Yes! We know this for a fact because: 1) Authorial copyright as we know now it did not exist anywhere until England in 1710, and did not become widespread until well into the 19th century. And 2) Even then, there were many limits, and it was not uncommon for a given author to not get copyright protection due to some failing on their part (such as publication without notice or registration, in the US).

Yet many works were published, many of which are among the finest works humanity has ever created.

Protecting authors is a means to an end, but it is not the goal of copyright. Basically, the goal of copyright is to promote the progress of science (i.e. knowledge). This is accomplished by A) encouraging authors to create and publish works that they otherwise would not have created and published. This is also accomplished by B) having the works be in the public domain so that they can be freely disseminated as widely as possible, used to the fullest possible extent, and serve as the basis for derivative creative works, which are treated with equal respect by copyright policy.

The mechanism we use to encourage authors for prong A is to give them a monopoly concerning a work. This is directly at odds with prong B. To address this, the monopoly is limited in time and scope -- not all uses of a work fall within copyright and it won't last forever. Nevertheless the system is largely controlled by the various publishing interests (movie studios, book publishers, record labels) with little concern for the public interest which should control. But if in actual practice the public interest was actually looked after, there would surely be other conditions that would limit copyrights so that authors got the minimum copyright necessary -- in duration and in the scope of rights protected -- that got them to create and publish their work, since, after all, giving them any more than that would be wasteful.

Depends on how inventive it is, I suppose.

The part of the copyright and patent clause that concerns copyrights and creative works is the promotion of science, which in the late 18th century when it was written, basically just meant 'knowledge.' The useful arts falls under patents and inventions, and means something like applied technology. There are still traces of this in English -- Patents deal with state of the art technology but the invention must be disclosed in a way understandable to a person having ordinary skill in the art, and must not be anticipated by previous examples, i.e. prior art.

Whatever else you think about Apple, they are one of the few companies willing and able to spend the resources it takes to do something like this.

Agreed. The vision to take an existing technology, make it proprietary, and then crush those who actually developed the technology is something that few companies have the resources to do. Therefore, I for one appreciate that there are companies willing to do it. Otherwise, there would be an almost endless, dizzying array of choices. It would be chaos. Anarchy even!

Also, once you get too many choices, self-esteem becomes fragmented. Like, I want to buy a product which clearly says "look at me, I'm not poor like you". I usually count on my refined snark and conformity talents to convey this, but an emblem, a "brand" if you will, really expedites this process and helps make me feel like I want to feel.

Once Apple gets into the market place, smaller companies like PiMax and Vario can finally go fuck themselves, as we sit back and enjoy REAL innovation that will only come from the seriously creative minds of a magalocorp!

Not sure that is true this time, from what I've heard at least three years to the next model.

Bullshit, rumor is already out that they're going to release a blue one this summer. Then, around the holidays, "A Black Hole" one, which is not just "black" like regular stuff, but rather which is so black that it physically cannot reflect light.

So that's three updates right there in less than a year. Not even counting the headset holder which is on deck for this spring, which will cost less than one-third of the headset itself.