But the individual didn't destroy it. The agent did the physical act of destroying it.

Suppose you were at the border with your phone, and the agent confiscated it.
Then the agent had said, how do i get into this phone?
You said, "put it in a blender".
If the agent puts it in the blender, the agent destroyed it, not you.

Now clearly, one would expect the agent to know that putting it in a blender would destroy it.

And equally clearly the inference here is that the agent did not know that the password he was given would wipe the phone as part of opening it. But isn't the onus still on the officer?

If it had been a physical safe, and you gave him the code, but the safe contained something that would self-destruct in exposure to air, and must be opened inside an enclosure with inert gas to get at the contents... who would be responsible for destroying the evidence inside the safe?

As a second scenario, what if you had printed a PIN password on a piece of paper and included that in your wallet. If the agent had confiscated your wallet and discovered the paper; and then used that password on your phone? If that was your duress password, who is responsible for destroying evidence in that case?

Legally, Isn't the onus ultimately still on the agent to apply caution before pushing buttons on a device they confiscated?

To blame you the suspect for destroying evidence on something the agent had custody and full physical control over seems a bit far fetched to me.

On a 13" screen most people would have scaling enabled to see it anyway. Not really sure its worth the extra horsepower to push quadruple the pixels, and average them out.

Don't get me wrong, I love 4k screens. My desktop has a pair of 32" 120hz 4k screens.

But on a laptop, especially a 13" model, my priority is going to be battery life, not performance; so 4k is not a hard requirement. Plus this unit features a more old school 3:2 aspect ratio which is arguably more practical and useful than a 1.78:1 widescreen at 13".

Higher than a 13" dell xps. Higher than the 13" Macbook Neo. Higher than a 13" Macbook air... hell it just edges out the display on the Macbook air 15".

Its 120Hz. It's matte. It's touchscreen (if you care).
It seems to be a very solid 13" laptop screen overall.

Copy protection on the original sleeping beauty is long expired.
Copy protection on the Disney version is good for years yet.

In the original versions, the scene i quoted? There is no scene like that in the original version. But it is beat for beat straight from the Disney version. If you want to tell a sleeping beauty story, you absolutely can, the original source material not copy protected, you can faithfully tell that story, including the unconscious rape of the princess to impregnate her so that she finally wakes up at child birth... or you can create more family friendly version all your own with whatever you like. But you can't simply lift a bunch of scenes that only exist in the copy protected Disney version and call it your own original interpretation by changing a few details.

The chatgpt story is a ripoff of the Disney version though.

The scene I quoted with the three "magical gaurdians" bestowing three gifts at a celebration crashed by the sorcerous who places the curse -- that is not from the original source material, its not novel either, its a scene ripped straight from the Disney version. And its not an isolated issue with the AI version.

There is no question that Disney doesn't "own" sleeping beauty, but they do own their telling of it. This was an obvious ripoff of that particular telling in several places.

If a child handed in the Moonlit Princess the teacher would give them a lecture about plagiarism. Because its not remotely original enough. It is so clearly taking so many things straight from Disney's version. Sure the names are changed, and the words "aren't the same", but its far too derivative of that particular version to credibly claim its an original telling of the sleeping beauty story.

"No. It is not copyright infringement"

Go ahead, prompt for that story and publish your own 'moonlit princess". It is not a court case you'd win; the details taken from the Disney version are beyond excessive.

" and there's no reason to hold copyright so sacred anyway. Are you seriously wanting to protect hundred year old fairy tails from being retold?"

That's an entirely separate discussion. Legally it is infringement. Whether it should be is completely separate question, or how long it should be are separate questions.

FWIW, I don't agree with copyright being 100 years.

Who is they? And what database are you referring to?

Dictionaries often contain quotes from original source material, or references to where it was first used, or first used a certain way.

Dictionary publishers have never been accused of downloading massive torrents of pirated copies of books and processing them.

Google on the other hand HAS been accused of that, and the decade of litigation related to that ultimately rules that the limited things google was doing with it was fair use. The dictionary companies are likely paying for enhanced access to that google data now.

The AI companies are singing the same fair use tune, but its really quite different. Google was doing it (at the time) to allow for search so you could enter phrase or quote and find the book it was from and the page it was on, and to collect other meta data - word count, word frequency, analyze sentence complexity, etc... all factual information.

AI companies are using the content of that digitized corpus and everything else they can get their hands on to generate new content, much of which non-factual in nature, and often very arguably explicitly creatively derivative.

prompt: "Make a story like sleeping beauty" ... 2 seconds later we have "The Moonlit Princess" and we'll just self-publish that on Amazon... boom I'm an author!

You seriously telling me this is NOT copyright infringement? Even if you wanted to argue that sleeping beauty is a classic fairytale from the 17th century and not under copyright, the prose above is a pretty blatant Disney ripoff.

You can replace your entire BMW seat if you like with seats from another vendor. Put in a racing seat, or even install a seat you designed yourself.

This probably was not the brilliant analogy you thought it was going to be. :p

Wow I guess someone had to miss him; I thought he was ridiculously overrated myself and didn't care for a lot of his design work over the years.

If you need Ive back in your life, you could check out the new Ferrari ... most of the internet hates it, but maybe its for you.

They recently bragged about how much they were getting done with AI vibe-coding.

Could it be related to the wave of bugs? Say it ain't so!

Exactly yes. You don't need a license to "copy" something to your mind.

You technically do need a license to copy something to a disk or to RAM. A number of cases around hacking/cracking have hinged even on the nuance that the hacker, by violating the "terms and conditions", no longer had a software license to make the "copy" of the software that was loaded from disk to RAM for example, and it was therefore copyright infringement.

In any case, yes, you are of course also correct that although you are free to remember anything, what you produce from that memory *may* be an infringing copy or infringing derivative work that requires a license.

But the difference of course, is that the LLM itself is already an infringing derivative work before it even produces anything. Your mind isn't.

And everything the LLM produces is basically just taking that collection of derivative works, and rolling dice on it to generate output. The output is a strictly a function of the input. On some level, it can't "not produce" derivative works. The best it does is slice and dice so many of them together that we can't tell.

I suppose that might be what the total sum of what human creativity is too, and some people genuinely believe that. It appears to be a surprisingly capable facsimile in some respects. But most people think there is more to the spark of human experience of creativity than *just* that, at least for now.

"It is no more "theft" than you are."

Yes. It is. Quite different in fact.

You see, Rei, ... suppose we assume you are "correct" that the LLM is doing the same thing as the human brain here. (This is a point I don't necessarily concede, but don't really need to actually engage with that here.) It just doesn't matter, they are legally distinct situations.

No amount of argument that "its doing the same thing as you are" changes that fact. What happens in a machine is covered by copyright law. What happens in a human mind is not.

It doesn't actually matter if the two are doing the same thing.

One is copyright infringement aka "theft", and one isn't.

You can potentially make the argument that there is no ethical difference if you like, but legally, they are worlds apart. Don't confuse ethics with law.

Even if they are doing the same thing, perhaps collectively society wants to carve out exclusions for copyright law to enshrine human beings right to see and remember things without requiring a license to do while continuing to want to require machines to require licensing to perpetuate the socio/economic contract that copyright is supposed to reflect.

That is not hypocrisy.

Ok, I'm imagining a class of high school students breaking the guardrails, getting it to report that they're doing brilliantly and deserve A+ while they watch tiktok... at the very least they'll make it say racist things and publish that on tiktok for the lulz. It'll also find a way to organically mention how much its been hearing that everyone else really likes new Pepsi Cherry Zero on a daily basis too.

Is that not the outcome you were imagining too?

Oooh... yes please, i can't wait for virtual Feyman prefacing his lectures with the lords prayer, explaining how God created the universe and all the physics in it; and also: you look thirsty, there is a Pepsi machine with new Pepsi Cherry Zero in the hallway; have you tried it?

Einstein meanwhile extols the virtue of Zionist colonization in Palestine...

Wait? Do you actually think that it would go differently? If we create puppets of brilliant revered thinkers they'll inevitably say whatever slop some combination of political appointees and advertising companies want them to say. Why on earth would anyone think they would be used for anything else?

Its frequently used on general elective courses because they're big enough (often hundreds of students) that the statistical variation between student cohorts fits normal curves pretty well.

That doesn't even make sense. The defining characteristic of a credential mill is that it passes everyone who goes. A curve grading system assigns Fs and Ds and C- to the bottom of every class.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, right now, everyone who goes and shows up to class passes, and half of them get As. How is that not "essentially a credential mill" right now?

Even more damning, a generation ago 25% of them got As. What's your theory on that? Harvard students this generation are just a lot smarter and more studious and they're mastering the material at a much higher rate? Or that Harvard is handing As out like participation trophies now?

I know where my money is at. And Harvard's own teaching staff agrees.