Well that's stupid.

The entire history and purpose of "230" was to encourage sites to engage in moderation, alternatively favoring or suppressing different content, and to give them the freedom to do so without being treated anything like newspapers or other media.

I doubt that there's anything interesting that happened, and I certainly don't believe your take on it, but as a general rule there's nothing at all wrong with the government offering advice or asking people to do things and for people to agree or to voluntarily do those things.

For example: If the government puts out an Amber Alert, you don't have to read it, you don't have to watch for the child who has apparently been kidnapped, and you don't have to report sightings. You can ignore the whole thing and go about your day. You can even deliberately notice the kid and the kidnappers and not lift a finger. That's not illegal. You're committing no crime by letting kidnappings happen where you lack a duty to stop them.

But it's nice to help rescue children, so why not do what the government is asking you to volunteer to do?

Apparently the reason why is that you are opposed to anti-kidnapping, pro-saving-children government conspiracies of that sort.

They're almost always the same. If there are any that aren't, I'd be shocked. He occupies the same sort of 'designated target of hate' that the Rothschilds did. In fact, that's really where it all starts -- a couple of political consultants working for Victor Orban, the Hungarian dictator, decided that a useful political tactic would be to have an enemy to demonize, so they rather arbitrarily decided it would be Soros. Read all about it.

And so we wound up with Hungary being thoroughly fucked up, Hungary impairing the functioning of the EU and NATO, increases in anti-semitism and fascism, probably daily death threats against a guy who did nothing wrong, and all to score some cheap political points.

It's disgusting.

Still works fine, actually. And it's been closer to three decades now. 47 USC 230 is from 1996.

Good thing that wasn't the argument, then. In fact, your summary of it doesn't even make sense -- middlemen don't get in trouble for taking things down, they get in trouble for not taking things down.

What actually happened was that just before the Internet got big, two cases came down concerning different online services. CompuServe got sued for user-posted content, but was found not to be liable because they had not moderated anything and were just a middleman. Prodigy got sued for user-posted content and was found to be liable because they moderated their boards (for things like bad language; they wanted to be family friendly) but had failed to moderate every post perfectly. By letting one bad thing through, they were liable for it -- and by extension, anything else they had failed to catch.

Since Congress wanted sites to moderate user content -- they were really concerned about porn -- they passed a law that encouraged sites to do moderation but did not hold them responsible for failing to moderate every single little thing perfectly in every respect. Further, sites got to choose what they were moderating for -- could be porn, but could just as easily be off-topic posts, like talking about carrots when everyone else is talking about money.

In practice, sites don't like to moderate much -- it takes effort, it may lose engaged users, it costs money, it can't please everyone -- but they certainly can, and there's nothing wrong with it. Get rid of the protection of the CDA and sites won't be able to do mandatory moderation sufficiently, so they'll fall back on none. This is apparently okay with scum who get kicked off of boards left and right, but should not be okay with people who have standards and don't want to put up with that crap.

Absolutely no usage cases for where you don't want to share the contents of the screen with others, although a simple snap-on cover would solve that and give you at least the option of sharing the screen (and allow for an after-market in replacement/custom cover designs). As long as you don't include text on what you're sharing, because it's going to be mirror writing from one side or the other depending on how you draw the screen, you're good.

Here's a possible usage case though. Assuming a traditional clamshell design with a slim base and keyboard with illuminated key lettering, fold the screen flat against the keyboard, turn off the keyboard LEDs, and you've got a conventional, if slightly bulky, tablet without the need for a complicated and fragile hinge that lets you turn the screen through 180deg like current hybrids. If the screen is touch sensitive and it includes a stylus, I can see that might appeal to at least some graphic artists or people looking to do some light work or reading while they're commuting, yet still have a traditional laptop available once they arrive.

I have long advocated that somehow the companies that have built their businesses on the backs of open source developers find some way to reward them on the backs of the IPO, like redhat did, in 1999. This is not that. For a one time investment in stock, you too, can support development of our new AI overlords.

Or almost any publication reporting on finance, for that matter. Take a look at the "News" section on Google or Yahoo! finance pages for a few stocks, indexes, or (for a real laugh at the chutzpah of blatently biased reporting) crypto tokens; there's occassionally some interesting stories about the stock/index/whatever you're looking at, but mostly they're full of shitty articles that are almost always trying to push the same buttons as those TFS is accusing CNBC of, or are outright hyperbole that I suspect is almost certainly produced by some second rate GPT type tool given how similar the summaries read. Articles by Forbes on BitCoin are particularly laughable in that respect; the one-line strap you see on Google/Yahoo is almost always claiming some multi-trillion dollar "earthquake" that's several times larger than total market cap of all crypto tokens, let alone BTC. They're not targetting people with above average IQs or levels common sense here, that's for sure!

IMHO, it's all utter crap, produced either because they put some GPT to work and are not checking the output (or don't care that it sucks), and/or is deliberately designed to generate clicks and FOMO. In some cases, I suspect it may even be going one step further and trying to help pump the price and sucker rubes in so those pulling the strings can boost their profits when they sell to those rubes looking to get in on the action before they miss out.

I fully get your point - I am a bit of a privacy nerd - but let's see..

Joe D.(igitaly Illiterate) Random's router is infected. So an employee of a three letter government agency shows up and explains that his router has been used by teh Rusians to attack the DoD and DoJ, and that a software update needs to be installed in order to stop this. What are the chances of our dear Joe allowing this to happen? What are the chances that he'll accuse the government of trying to illegally invade his privacy, or even wanting to install a secret "5G" feature in an attempt to wirelessly control his brain via the microchip they implanted when he got vaccinated against smallpox as a child 40 years ago?

I assume that you're replying to the part about fair use turning prima facie infringements into non-infringing uses, but it's difficult to tell.

If so, well, that's the statute at work:

No factor is determinative in fair use, even though often enough the fourth factor is. Always do the full test, every time. And recognize that much comes down to which side of the bed the judge got up on. It's not as bad as the copyright utility doctrine and conceptual separability, but it's not great. Look at time shifting; people extoll it as a classic fair use but really it fails on three out of four factors and is middling at best on the fourth, and was originally going to go the other way. Prof. Litman has a nice write-up about it. And for every example of fair use, there's always a counter example where the same sort of thing came out differently due to a minor factual difference.

Anyway, got a cite where a court held that a prima facie infringing use was a lawful fair use and which was nevertheless still an unlawfully infringing use meriting damages and/or injunctive relief? I'd love to read it. Closest thing that comes to mind was some of the section 1201 stuff from ages ago, distinguishing fair use from circumvention.

Doesn't sound like a problem to me.

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.