Thirty days until election day. Or, rather, the first election day for the presidency, thanks to an electoral college that today withstands just as much scrutiny as the original text of Article I § 2 cl. 3 — especially in light of their common flaw: Restricting full voice to "the right kind of people" beyond the mere facts of "citizenship" and "adulthood."
- OpenAI is possibly poised to become a profit-making corporation — that is, provide a measureable financial return to investors, in addition to any purported social benefits. The more-subtle change would be allowing outsiders direct influence on what benefits "the board" can establish as objectives (not to mention their operational priority)… because as a for-profit corporation, outsiders can buy enough voting control to "own" one or more seats on that board. (They can arguably do so for a benefit corporation, too, but it's harder.) Given the historical track record of too-early shifts from "basic science" to "economic exploitation of technology arising from basic science," like data brokers, that should scare you.
- In a remarkably-but-not-surprisingly myopic article, James Hibbert asks whether Disney is bad at Star Wars without engaging with the more-fundamental precondition: Is Star Wars badly conceived? I'm shocked — shocked, I say — to find a purported analysis of missteps in exploitation of an artistic property that does not consider missteps in creation of that artistic property. As a slight riff on the recently-deceased central character: I find your lack of questions… disturbing.
- Speaking of forgetting fundamental questions, a German court recently ruled that a specific large-model-inference dataset could rely on a German copyright-law defense to a claim of infringement. The fundamental question that was not asked concerns a confusion generally sidestepped in German copyright law but implicit in American copyright law: What kind of transformative process gives rise to a defense of transformative [fair] use, let alone when the concept of fair dealing (and not fair use) is at issue? That this failed of consideration in its US origin, too, doesn't help… especially given rejection of other defenses in the LAION decision at the lower-level court.
- One might also ask cui bono Big Music, but that's likely to be just as disturbing as the shadowing figures behind the previous two items. Not to mention just as difficult to discern — and just as subject to deception.
- Cui bono indeed when bankruptcy proceedings intervene! A Florida district court recently reached the (clearly) correct conclusion that termination rights are not extinguished by the creator's bankruptcy discharge (PDF at 18–27) without reaching the really, really hard question. It's pathetically easy on these facts to focus on the bankruptcy process, precisely due to the structures of the recorded-music industry. This enabled the court to evade the much harder question — whether, absent availability of the first clause of the § 101 definition of "work made for hire" (employee within the scope of duties), the claim in a contract that it concerns a "work made for hire" that is not eligible under the second clause in § 101 (the nine eligible categories for freelance works made for hire) makes it a work made for hire. That would have been a different question here because due to cui bono-flavored shenanigans followed by a technical correction, there's a clear textual-history determination that "a phonorecording" is not one of the eligible categories. (tl;dr The recorded-music industrial interests got phonorecordings included as a tenth category in an amendment to the 1976 Act, but that was rapidly reversed in another amendment.)
- As noted previously on this blawg, Braxton Bragg was a multidimensional loser (who was so inept that he "resigned" as army commander — under not-well-publicized pressure — after one of his many defeats) unworthy of having a military base named after him, regardless of (misplaced) "sons of the Confederacy" pride in the local community where the base is located. Why doesn't it surprise me that The Orange Menace proposes elevating that pride even further over reality by reinstating that traitor's name on a military base? Might "surprise" require inferring some knowledge of American history, even some knowledge of military principles, on the part of that individual, contrary to all other indications?