The original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total. It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It's only a rare few works that end up becoming "classics" and spawning "franchises" that last beyond that point. We're sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows. There's a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.

In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.

So they'll do it without any plans, like all the other stuff the military's been doing.

It's kind of weird how Strange New Worlds is turning out to me more of a joke series than Lower Decks was. Lower Decks was hilarious but it always put being Star Trek as the top priority. It was clearly made with love for the history of the show.

Hell, the literal Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover episode felt more serious than this later SNW stuff.

That's what the copyright cartels want you to believe, sure.

It's not the case. Rooting for it to become the case is repellent.

I'm an opponent of the death penalty. If there's a convicted murderer on death row I would oppose executing him.

Does that mean I'm definitely a murderer?

Every law is, fundamentally, a restriction on someone's freedom. The key justification for why that's okay is that the law protects one or more people from harm in the process. So in this case the question is "who is being harmed when an AI generates this particular configuration of pixels? How are they being harmed?"

When you dig into that it's more complicated than the simple knee-jerk "that stuff is just plain bad!" Attitude that has been drummed into the general public.

This isn't a question of "walking it back", though. There was never anything in copyright law that prohibited analyzing a copyrighted work before. This is an attempt to extend it.

A while back I saw a thread in a piracy community that was cheering some other lawsuit against an AI company for similar reasons, so I wouldn't bet. The anti-AI sentiment is quite strong in these parts.

And now watch everyone cheer for Sony and Warner to succeed in their lawsuits to extend the grip of copyright. What a timeline.

It's certainly a great shibboleth for quickly detecting complete idiots.

I'm thinking that gender and sexuality aren't even a simple spectrum, they're a multi-dimensional space. There are some blobby fuzzy-bordered regions of that space that have traditionally been called "Man" and "Woman", but the more we look into it the more complicated it all gets and the more arbitrary that partitioning becomes. We're already starting to see that there may be portions of that space that likely don't belong to either category, or where the categories overlap, so I'm of the opinion that treating them as super important might be a bad idea that's bound to lead to heartbreak and confusion.