Donors get policies, voters get apologies fined.

MMW the midterm results will enshrine DNC Incumbents as the fascist enablers they are.

Can’t wait for Dems to take both the House and Senate … and then always be just one vote short of being able to do anything meaningful. As usual.

“Poor americans have guns” bruh, guns cost 1/2 a month of rent just for the gun. No way I can put my money for that.

97?! I was that old already… I thought this was older

tbf, some fines in europe are based on income, not a set value. I remember someone getting a fine of a few hundred grand.

They used the duress PIN on their rare book library

“The training process [also] implicates the right of reproduction.” – Part 3, III, B, U.S. Copyright Office Guidelines on generative AI.

I’m not sure that’s been extensively tested in courts. The document you referenced below appears to be as-yet not officially published, so I don’t believe it actually qualifies as an official position yet, but the bigger issue is that it’s untested in court.

This thread is a response to an AI court case where the ruling was that training on copy written works is fair use.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-judge-approves-15-billion-anthropic-copyright-settlement-with-authors-2025-09-25/

Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a “central library” that would not necessarily be used for that purpose

Regardless, you do make good points and I think we agree that the end state is “they shouldn’t be able to do that”. I have concerns that using existing standards that take copying too literally results in some unintended ambiguity, and situations where AI training is incidentally blocked, but so is stuff like “opening a news article on a computer”, which does the same things the copyright office report highlights as infringement.
I think we’d be in a much more agreeable place if we just legally state that a commercial AI tools training isn’t fair use. That lets you have nuance like “search engine? It’s a statistical model, but not generative: allowed. AI agent? Statistical model that’s generating content as opposed to classification or ranking: not allowed”.

They hyphenated techno-logical both times in the second paragraph? Was it a line break both times, or was the moron who wrote it really that out of touch with the topic he was writing laws for?

Har har.

Different senses of the word digital. The dvd is digital as in “made discrete and not analog”.

I meant in the sense of “to move off of fixed use physical media and translate to a format more agnostic to storage medium or conducive to transfer and immediate processing”.

More succinctly: to copy something to a storage medium that’s harder to loose under the couch.

You can’t hold something in your hand if it’s digital.

Commercializing a work virtually guarantees it’s creation isn’t “fair use”.

But also, “fair use” is actually quite a bit more narrow than just non-commercial.

If you have a large number of DVDs, digitising them makes them easier to browse and decouples you from the physical medium (so you don’t have to bring them with you everywhere in order to watch them).

As for the conversion, maybe you’re confusing this with ripping vinyl or tape. Ripping a CD or a DVD is easy and reproducible and gives you a 1:1 digital copy of it.

It definitely does have the meaning of making an analog signal discrete, and DVDs are digital in that sense.
There’s also the sense of serializing or enumerating something into a format more flexible or amenable to computer manipulation. More briefly: to put it on a computer.

For some things it’s super obvious: a vinyl record has a groove you can see, and you digitize it by sampling the output of the wiggle: analog.
The contents of an SD card are invisible and the only way to observe them is via a computer, where they’re already presented in a flexible format: not analog.

Then you have fuzzy things: a printed picture that was taken with a digital camera. Grab a magnifying glass and you can see that it’s got blocks of quantized color, and isn’t continuous. You digitize the photo by shining light on it and capturing the bounce.
Optical media is a disc with a groove in it that you read by shining a light on it to capture the bounce. Instead of a horizontal wiggle though it’s pits creating an interference pattern with a laser.
It’s digital because it’s quantized information that it stores. It needs to be digitized to work with easily because the format is often read-only or write once. It’s analog because the pits themselves are continuous and the system spends surprising amount of nuance correcting errors from things like fingerprints and dust.

Books are plainly analog, even though they’re composed almost entirely of discrete, quantized units of structured information. Sometimes even with a lookup table and index for faster search!

Magnetic tape stores analog audio by varying the strength of a magnet with the audio signal. It stores digital information by only setting the magnet to specific strengths. Same for VHS or cable Internet.

To make a long ramble short: digitize also means to stick it on a computer, owing to efforts to digitize things often being focused on items that aren’t continuous, like text.

The traditional method would be to define the scope and intent of the law, and then defer the specifics of enforcement to an executive agency for nuanced application. That way the law conveys “no usage of information passed to a machine learning model for the purposes of generative content production, nor the output of any such system, should be considered fair use under copyright law unless the usage is non commercial and qualifies as fair use for academic or research purposes”. Then someone like the FCC would determine what qualifies as a machine learning model, and can flex to account for changes in technology.

You basically just say what you mean very specifically. I don’t think it’s a problem for Google to download webpages and track how they connect and their words, because that’s how search engines work. So I’m okay with that. I’m okay with individuals downloading chunks of the public web to do normal things. I’m okay with people needing huge swaths of the text for research, as well as the images, even for specific research into generative AI of the type we’re talking about. No one is being harmed by someone at MIT incidentally creating farside comics.

Harm or no harm, the disagreeable part to me is the commercial use of the model trained on inputs from people who didn’t want you to do that, sometimes without even having the most superficial justification to have the content in the first place.

i think also state socialism would be a problem, yes.

Am I misunderstanding something here??? Copyright needn’t exist under socialism because under socialism artists wouldn’t be dependent on the legal fiction of “intellectual property” to make a living.

It’s unclear that is inevitable, but it does seem to be a common result of State socialism.

In libertarian socialism, hoarding resources will be recognized as an attack on the commons that can be answered with an attack (by the people) on the hoarder.

The DMCA prevents breaking encryption but you can still create an ISO from the disk.

you forget we all practice bird law here