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Comment by Salgat | Hacker News Reader

The human input makes sense, otherwise, couldn't you bruteforce generate billions of low resolution images that cover a vast range of situations and then use that to attack anything similar enough to fit the substantial similarity condition? You could even plug a news feed into the generator.

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Somebody did this with music - they brute forced all chord progressions or something like that. In theory all new music is infringing.

Unfortunate problem of copyright being an ever uphill battle and why it should be short timed.

Similarly with patents.

Even when used there should be a timeout, possibly per clause to avoid overly broad stuff.

But then a few IP trolls and lawyers would have to find another job.

Things like this often makes me wish we had more 'common sense' laws and left the discretion of interpreting that notion to judges, juries, and the various systems of appeals and other courts we have, entirely with the expectation that laws would 'evolve' over time. This might sound radical, but instead it's actually just going back to how things used to be. Here is the First Amendment in its entirety:

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"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

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The rest of the bill of rights looks similarly. Now a days it'd be thousands of pages long trying to elaborate endlessly upon every single scenario. But the more important thing is that this idea of trying to codify every scenario still doesn't work because you end up with a zillion loopholes in just about every single law with some clever clown going 'ah hah! you didn't cover this!' So all you really do is end up with laws that are not only excessively fragile and subject to exploitation, but also completely indecipherable by just about anybody, certainly including the people voting on their passage.

See, while I agree that loopholes will abound — basically your whole last paragraph I completely acknowledge — I also want to point out the deeply insincere and frequently malicious people who appoint and confirm judges now. From both of our cravenly corrupt parties. If anything, since common sense is not even uncommon, it’s nearly extinct, we need even more fine-grained explicit laws, if of course we had a useful Congress to pass laws with any degree of seriousness, which we also don’t.

Basically (speaking from a US perspective) we’re doomed either way.

Many states assign judges through nonpartisan elections. I mean I do, more or less, agree with you but at the same time there's quite a lot of checks and balances - judges, appelates, constitutional review, and the final judge - juries. The entire government was intentionally designed to be mostly nonfunctional to prevent a tyranny of the majority (or minority). It's hard to really do things, and have them stick, unless there's pretty wide consensus.

I'd also add that the more simple laws add transparency. If a e.g. judge does something not in the apparent spirit of a older law, it's apparent to anybody with a mind. But when instead an offender (or judge) relies on a nuanced, if esoteric, interpretation to a loophole in section 274, subsection 74 paragraph 13a, nobody has any clue what's happening.

And if we're screwed either way, it'd be nice if people could at least visibly and explicitly see that they're being screwed.

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