No, that's a bad idea. A menu bar at the top of the screen is a much bigger target to hit, and easy to find by muscle memory. The file menu is always in the same place, regardless of what app you're using, and the buttons extend infinitely up above the screen. By contrast, a menu bar tied to the window moves around whenever the window moves, so you always have to visually find it again, and target size is just the size of the button and ends at the top of the window.

Because I've tried using LLMs to generate code and I've seen the results. They are not usable. They *resemble* valid code, but they typically throw exceptions and raise errors, they can't pass unit tests, and they don't correctly handle edge cases. AI-generated code is a mess that *superficially looks right* but isn't fit to purpose.

There is a meme going around about the fact that you can tackle a normal coding task by spending 3 hours to write code and 1 hour to debug and test it, or you can use CoPilot to spend 15 minutes to write the code and 8 hours to debug and test it. That matches my experience.

Yeah, that's the position of the copyright office.:

The guidance goes on to instruct applicants for copyright registration to "disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author's contributions to the work" and "AI-generated content that is more than de minimis should be explicitly excluded from the application."

It's a test case. Specifically, he tried to register the copyright in the work naming the AI system as the author, and himself as the owner of a work-for-hire. The copyright office refused registration, because AIs can't be authors, and therefore there was no human author. He may well own the output, but it's not subject to copyright.

No. From the decision:

Specifically, the employer (including corporate entity) of a employee who creates a work for hire is the legal owner of the copyright, but they are not the author. The employee is the author, and ownership passes to the employer by law.

Not sure which fees you're looking at. Here's the fee schedule. Filing a provisional application is $325 for a large entity vs. $130 and $65 for a small and micro, respectively. But that's just a provisional, which never gets examined or turns into a patent. For a nonprovisional application, there are filing fees, search fees, and examination fees, totaling $2k for a large entity, or $730 for a small entity and $400 for a micro entity.

Legally, no - anyone can file a patent application pro se.

But it's like doing your own appendectomy. Legally, you can do that, too. But it's a terrible idea, and you are likely to make mistakes that are permanent and unfixable.

Popeye's great, and they're still making the comic strip. Nancy's gotten pretty good again. Little Orphan Annie eventually got canceled, but man, it was just insane after around 2000 or so.

Patents keep getting longer too. They used to be 14 years long, and now they're 20.

My proposal has been requiring authors to take affirmative steps to get a copyright (it's not automatic or free, though the fee is nominal), so that we only have to worry about the works the author specifically wants to protect, and that the terms would be 1-year with renewals. The number of renewals would depend on the type of work, but in no event would be all that long.

There was a study some years ago that suggested that 15 years was optimal in general. I'd like to see more investigation of that.

Strong disagree. First, life terms are too unpredictable (and might be shorter than fixed or renewable terms of years). Second, part of the goal of copyright is to encourage the creation of unauthorized derivative works; that's why we have limited terms to begin with.

If an author writes a series of books over years in a common setting, with common characters, the first one entering the public domain only opens up the setting and characters as they were in the first book; third party authors can fork it -- instead of the character of John Smith remaining in Everytown USA on his farm, which was what the original author kept writing about, the new unauthorized one has him set out on magic spy adventures in space. The market can sort out whether this is popular or successful.

This sort of thing has worked out okay before. The Aeneid is just the pro-Trojan, pro-Roman fanfic sequel to the Iliad. (Virgil: "Turns out some of the Trojans survived the war and escaped and had crazy adventures! Let's follow them instead of continuing with Odysseus or Agamemnon.")

No, it's not. This is, no pun intended, patently obvious -- look at all of the unsuccessful artists out there, who will never be successful by virtue of their art even if the copyright lasted a billion years.

Copyright gives people a shot at success, but ensures nothing. Most works are, with regard to copyright-derived income, total flops. Most artists don't get reasonably paid from their copyrights.

It's a lot more like a lottery ticket; lots of people try their luck, and all but a handful lose. The tiny number of big winners, combined with the poor math skills of the average artist or gambler, result in people trying again and again and again, almost always fruitlessly.

But as a side effect, our culture gets enriched with all of this art. Maybe not much, if it's bad, but the only way to get more good art is to have more art created period.

I agree that it should vary, probably by medium. Different media have different viable commercial lifetimes, ranging from less than a full day, in the case of a daily newspaper, to usually no more than a couple of decades (and possibly less, now) in the case of TV and movies. On the other hand, I don't think we need guaranteed minimums at all. If an author wants a copyright, let them apply for it -- by as simple a means as possible, but still requiring an affirmative act and the payment of a token sum, such as $1, so that they have to put in at least a little thought. In many cases, the author won't bother, in which case, why should we be putting a copyright on it anyway?

So what if instead there is an auto mechanic who dies unexpectedly at a young age, and who left behind a young family with children that had depended on their income? Do they get a royalty on the cars he fixed, or do you say fuck his family, he should've been a successful artist.

No reason for there to be a special solution that only benefits young, dead, successful authors and their surviving families. Everyone dies, and plenty of people die young or otherwise leave their family in dire straits. And the vast majority of creators are never successful in the first place, whether during their lives or posthumously.

Better then to have a more generalized solution: encourage people to get life insurance policies, regulate the insurance market so that they actually pay out, and provide a social safety net just in case. This solution doesn't fuck up our copyright laws, helps more people, is more reliable (what if the work suddenly stops being popular?), and is just plain better in every imaginable respect.

Copyrights have their uses, but providing for one's widow and orphans is not one of them. That's just a red herring meant to play on people's sympathies.

No, that's fine. Remember, it's not just Hollywood that does that; everyone can and does. For example, the Wicked movie just came out, which is the film adaptation of a musical adaptation of a novel which came out in 1995, which in turn was a derivative work based on the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 which has been in the public domain since 1956. (Although Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, did put in a few elements from the still-copyrighted 1939 film, but little enough as to not matter -- mainly just the Witch's green skin)

This is all exactly the sort of thing we want to encourage: authors -- and songwriters, and performers, and filmmakers -- creating new works derived from older works just as much as we encourage them to create new original works. The main thing is to get more works created, of any kind -- sheer quantity is the only way to get more works of quality.