On the flip side, I have enjoyed the few Canadian shows that made it to the U.S. (especially during the writer's strike).

Hard to say, but rember that it was because of similar laws in Canada that we got The Great White North with Bob and Doug McKinzie.

On the other hand, If I have an ultralight and realize I need to move over 200 people at once, I know I'd better talk to a domain expert rather than trying to tie 250 ultralights together with kite string.

You’re packing three different bodies of law into one spooky word, “theft,” and that muddies the water more than it helps. If it was your intent to muddy the waters, congratulations -- now go troll some other thread.

Think about it this way: If “the ideas were on the open internet,” then you’ve already answered the patent part yourself. Anything publicly disclosed before the filing date is prior art. If an AI regurgitates something that’s already out there, it doesn’t create a new patent right for the AI user – it just means the application is dead on arrival as either not novel or obvious. That’s exactly what the patent system is designed to prevent: locking up what’s already in the public domain.

More to the point: “Theft” is the wrong label for what you are talking about. Patent law doesn’t care whether you “stole” an idea; it cares who first conceived it and whether it was already disclosed. If someone copies an existing invention and tries to patent it, it’s not a clever AI loophole – it’s just an invalid patent application. At worst it’s fraud, and after the PTO kills it, the applicant will certainly get a visit from a process server with a civil tort, and (depending on how politically connected the corporation they are attempting to defrauded is) the DOJ.

Finally, copyright and scraping training data are not Issues that the USPTO deals with. At all. It is a different fight altogether. Training an AI on public data doesn’t magically transfer someone’s patent rights to the model’s owner, and it doesn’t erase prior art. Even in the most brain-dead interpretation of the scraping wars, you don’t get to turn “LLM saw a paper” into “we now own a patent on what that paper taught.” If the model outputs something substantially identical to a copyrighted work, that’s a copyright issue, not a patent issue. Neither of those scenarios gives the AI user a valid patent.

In a bucket, the new USPTO guidance doesn’t bless any of this. It basically says: AI is lab equipment, only humans can be inventors, and prior art is still prior art, no matter whether a human or a GPU found it. If your worry is “big players will try to slip bad patents through on things that already existed,” you’re late to that party – they’ve been doing that with manual searches, interns, and buzzwordy specs for decades. AI doesn’t change the core legal filters; it just changes how fast you can search and how easy it is to generate garbage that those filters are supposed to catch.

You’re giving the hardware way too much credit here. Drop a random into a state-of-the-art drug discovery or materials pipeline and they’re not going to “lock up progress,” they’re going to drown in garbage candidates. The stuff that still matters – and that the law still cares about for inventorship – is choosing the problem, defining the constraints, designing or tuning the models, sanity-checking outputs, and turning one candidate into something that works in the real world. That’s domain expertise and judgment. The new USPTO guidance doesn’t say “push the big red GENERATE button and collect your patent”; it says “we still use the same old ‘did a human actually conceive this invention?’ test, even if AI was involved.”

That dystopia assumes two things that aren’t actually true even after this policy change: (1) that you can get a patent on anything your model spits out, and (2) that nobody has to worry about human inventorship or the usual patentability hurdles. Even under the new guidance, a human still has to be able to stand up in court and say “I had a definite and permanent idea of this claimed invention,” not “I filed whatever the GPU burped out.” If no human ever reaches that benchmark, the patent is defective on old-school inventorship grounds, regardless of how many racks of H100s were involved. On top of that, as AI tools become standard, a lot of AI-assisted output becomes easier to attack as “obvious” to a skilled person using ordinary tools. So raw compute gives you an advantage, sure, but it doesn’t magically let you patent “all of human progress.”

On that much, I’m with you: the constitutional rationale is “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” not “to funnel perpetual rents to whoever owns the biggest datacenter.” But this particular USPTO tweak isn’t a radical new scheme; it’s the bureaucracy ducking the hard philosophical questions and saying: “AI is lab equipment.” Same inventorship standard, same novelty / obviousness / enablement tests. That absolutely does tend to favor big, opaque, capital-intensive R&D shops – just like every expensive tool does – but it’s an extension of the system’s existing bias toward incumbents, not a brand-new AI loophole.

If your broader point is that IP law has drifted a long way from its original “limited-time bargain” into something closer to “long-term tollbooths for incumbents,” I think a lot of us would nod along. But that’s a critique of the entire modern IP regime – term length, scope, litigation costs, DMCA-style enforcement – not specifically of this AI-guidance change. This move doesn’t turn AI into a magical rent-extraction engine; it just tells applicants, “We’re going to pretend the 19th-century conception doctrine still works in an AI lab.” That’s a fair thing to criticize, but it’s a different argument than “no creativity required, game over.”

Unless the part of the penalty that doesn't compensate Indian consumers and businesses is the punitive damages to assure no repeats of the behavior.

Well, right in the summary it says ChatGPT gave the kid a "pep talk" encouraging him to actually carry out the suicide.

I can agree with you on this point, as long as you are not trying to defend piracy as some kind of noble "sharing". But I have to say, judging by the rest of your post, “Sharing of info” is doing a lot of work here. This story is not about someone handing a friend a USB stick with some MP3s. It’s about a guy running a commercial IPTV service, charging 50€ for 3 months or 100€ for 6 months, reselling pay-TV he never paid to license in the first place, and a bunch of hotels/cafés using that to undercut competitors who do pay for legal subscriptions. Calling that “sharing” is like calling a pirate cable company “your generous neighbor.” The tech that makes copying easy doesn’t magically turn commercial theft of service into a noble act of information freedom. A thief is a thief, and there is nothing more ignoble than a thief who commits his crimes in the name of a worthy cause.

Sure, we can and should argue about business models -- subscriptions vs. ads vs. public funding, Creative Commons, whatever. But this particular setup already is a compensation system: broadcasters pay for rights, hotels and bars pay for commercial subscriptions, and the revenue chain keeps the content being produced. The IPTV reseller in this story isn’t experimenting with a better system; he’s just inserting himself into the existing one as an unpaid middleman and pocketing the money. That’s not “rethinking compensation,” it’s “I keep the cash and somebody else eats the loss.”

Again, nobody outlawed “sharing.” I don't think that word means what you think it means --get a dictionary (your choice!) and look up sharing. Then look up "piracy" in the same dictionary. Not even close, right? Greece passed a law that explicitly targets pirate IPTV networks and end users who knowingly buy access to illegal pay-TV streams, with fines between 750€ and 5,000€ (higher for commercial users, doubled for repeat offenders). That’s not “grandma got sued for emailing a recipe,” it’s “hotels and cafés running their business on stolen feeds while their competitors pay full freight.” Calling enforcement there a “waste of lives” is melodramatic. If you decide to run your business on obviously dodgy 100€-for-6-months “all the premium channels you want” boxes, the legal mess is not an accident; it’s baked into the choice.

Yeesh. The source is TorrentFreak, not some mainstream media outlet. TorrentFreak has spent years criticizing heavy-handed anti-piracy campaigns and is hardly a house organ of the copyright maximalists. If even TorrentFreak describes this as an IPTV piracy reselling network and talk plainly about “illegal streams” and “commercial exploitation,” maybe the problem isn’t media bias against “sharing,” it’s that this really is just bog-standard commercial piracy.

Well, look around you. In this thread we literally have: Slashdot summarizing, TorrentFreak reporting (from a pretty pirate-sympathetic angle), and people in the comments arguing about priorities and proportionality. What more do you want? This is exactly what a functioning public debate looks like. You can absolutely criticize copyright law, argue for decriminalizing non-commercial copying, or push for new compensation models. But using “information wants to be free” as a blanket excuse for a commercial IPTV gray-market — especially one used by businesses to gain unfair competition over law-abiding rivals -- just erases the actual victims and pretends there’s no tradeoff at all.

IOW: "We've only got $3.5T in capital to work with, so this is just too hard for us to figure out. You'll have to switch to an OS made by unpaid volunteers."

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

Or actually invite reporters to secret chats.

We should call it "job incomplete".

Most common metals have a simple one or two syllable name: Iron, Copper, Tin, Zinc, Lead, Nickel, Silver, Gold, etc.

The USA recognized that to some extent and got started by chopping off one extraneous syllable, paring it down from five to four. However, once it was realized that Al would be a common everyday material like iron, we should have gone ahead and pruned it all the way down to two syllables, maybe something like "Alem".

A typical Briton will only see lower energy bills when wholesale prices stay low, grid congestion costs stop wiping out those gains, and OFGEM ensures those savings actually reach the meter. While these record wind outputs are absolutely real and frequently drive wholesale generation costs down to near zero, the price Brits pay is currently dominated by the archaic rules of the UK energy market and the physical cost of moving power from Dogger Bank to London.

The primary culprit is the sad fact that dead dinosaurs are still setting the marginal price. Under the current "pay-as-clear" market structure, the price of electricity is set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand at that specific moment. Even if wind is providing 55% of the power for pennies, if the grid needs a single gas peaker plant to turn on to meet the last megawatt of demand, every generator gets paid that high gas price. Until market reform decouples renewables from fossil fuels, gas prices will largely dictate a typical Brit's electric bill regardless of how hard the wind blows -- this is the only thing that keeps gas peakers economically viable. As soon as renewables are decoupled from dead dinosaurs in OFGEM's repricing algorithm, fossil fuel generation will stop being a guaranteed profit maker, and start becoming a guaranteed loss. The fossil fuel industry knows this, and will do everything in its power to keep that decoupling from happening.

This is compounded by a massive hidden tax caused by grid congestion. As the Times mentions, Britain has spent nearly £1.3 billion this year paying wind farms to turn off because the cabling network physically cannot carry that much power south. Brits then have to pay gas plants closer to London to fire up to replace them. Realistically, consumers won't feel the full financial benefit of Dogger Bank, Hornsea, and Beatrice until the transmission upgrades catch up to the generation capacity. Brits are likely looking at 2026 for the first bottlenecks to clear, but true structural price drops won't arrive until the late 2020s when new transmission lines come online and the "gas-setting-the-price" mechanic is finally reformed. Wind is doing its job; the grid and the regulators just haven't caught up yet.

Bad idea. We're just a few volcanic eruptions away from wanting all the sunshine we can get.