nnvvhh

The availability of the copyrighted works is not determinative. Fair use in the US takes (at minimum) four factors into account, listed in the federal copyright statute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107.

That quote from Stanford's library is not discussing fair use doctrine in general, but rather is stating what is permitted in those specific circumstances. There are plenty of instances of fair use where the underlying work used was available at a fair price. That's the whole point of fair use law: some use of a work that is facially infringement escapes liability because the particular use is considered fair.

Current US copyright law is not clearly in a place to view model training as infringement. Courts have a long history of permissiveness in the face of copyright challenges to new tech (e.g. the image search engine cases, Google v. Oracle and smartphones, Sony v. Universal and VCRs) and I predict it will happen again with AI. The cat is out of the bag and judges know that finding training to be infringement of each training example will have a negative impact on a new product category. If training was more obviously infringement then that permissiveness would be harder to sell, but in my opinion it's really difficult to argue that a "copy" of an example has been made during training (aside from the copy made to process the example).

Another aspect of this arrangement: you don't pay federal income tax on money you receive as a loan in the US. The money does not count as income because of the matching obligation to pay it back.

Nothing you mentioned has anything to do with communism AS AN IDEOLOGY, though. So why discuss it? It could have been any group based on the logic of your comment.

Thanks for engaging with the paper.

I'm too lazy to check the GPL comment (I'll assume I made a mistake). But as far as I can tell my only reference to Stack Overflow was not about liability based on copying from SO. I was making a comment about a common industry practice.

I wrote a law school paper discussing the potential liability stemming from Copilot: https://nickvh.com/blog/archive/2022/02/copilot/copilot.html

I think some countries use a different tradeoff than the US for their income tax. Instead of spending a ton of government and taxpayer time and effort to accurately assess what each taxpayer owes, the government simply generates an estimate based on what it knows about each taxpayer and uses that. They accept the reduced accuracy but it is offset by the reduced effort in determining everyone's bills. That is to say, you don't need to move away from an income tax to address the problem.

dang is Daniel Gackle; see https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th....

Sure, but where the burden lies still matters. The plaintiff needing to prove copying is a lot more defendant-friendly than the defendant needing to disprove copying.

Copyright exists upon creation, registration is required to sue. They don't need to register them all.

You're mistaken about who has the burden to prove actual copying. The person alleging infringement has to show that the defendant copied the work.

The simple answer is that the Supreme Court of the United States said as much. Lower courts are bound to follow SCOTUS' holdings. Of course, precedent can always be overturned (i.e. if SCOTUS changes its mind), but the N&P Clause's interpretation is unlikely to be changed.

Congress has a lot of room within a grant of power (e.g. "to promote the progress...") because of the necessary and proper clause. In short, the tight relationship you're demanding is not required.

How would this lead to an antitrust claim?

If you are going to paste what you claim to be a direct quote, please provide a source.

Nobody is advocating an N95 mask for the rest of your life.

Copyright infringement is always in civil court. What I was getting at is that you can view a license violation as a contract dispute or copyright violation. The latter may mean high statutory damages (i.e. a pre-set range of money values that can go as high as $150K per work infringed), whereas the former does not.

Not complying with an open source license can be enforced as copyright infringement rather than a contractual dispute.

Funny, I was thinking of a Logan Roy quote: “Life's not knights on horseback. It's a number on a piece of paper. It's a fight for a knife in the mud.”

My mistake, I didn't watch all the way through. Thank you.

My mistake, I didn't watch all the way through. Thank you.

The video is Biggie, not Kanye!

The people enforcing the laws change between administrations, so it is not unexpected that past actions look inconsistent. Biden's people were not in power then (in fact the current FTC chair was seventeen).

I'm not sure if you're saying that Intel and AMD existing means that competition is doing fine, but three actors is a highly concentrated market.

Take note that the FTC has not actually done anything, they have only initiated a lawsuit. A court may disagree with the FTC's assessment and permit the merger. The government loses antitrust suits. But antitrust suits are long and expensive, so a challenge like this may cause Nvidia and Arm to back off.

Your intuition is right in that vertical mergers are viewed less suspiciously than mergers between competitors. But courts still assess the impact to competition in vertical mergers. As you did, assume the worst case: if Arm is really crucial to Nvidia's competitors, and the merged firm keeps Arm's designs to themselves, competition in chip-supply is harmed. Yes, Nvidia was savvy etc. and is just doing what another actor could do, but compare this method of Nvidia beating their competitors versus the "ideal" way where Nvidia makes a better product, does it cheaper, and is generally more efficient. That's what antitrust law wants. It wants the merits of the product and the org to decide the winner in a market, not things like buying Arm and keeping them to yourself.

Either Sherman or Clayton Act.

One thing the TFA says: "Because Arm’s technology is a critical input that enables competition between Nvidia and its competitors in several markets, the complaint alleges that the proposed merger would give Nvidia the ability and incentive to use its control of this technology to undermine its competitors, reducing competition and ultimately resulting in reduced product quality, reduced innovation, higher prices, and less choice, harming the millions of Americans who benefit from Arm-based products, the complaint alleges."

When a downstream firm merges with an upstream supplier that is really important to the downstream firm and its competitors, the merged firm can competitively hobble the downstream competitors. They can refuse to sell the upstream good to competitors, or raise the cost for competitors. Plus it may force the competitors (or potential new entrants) to vertically integrate themselves and enter both the downstream and upstream markets, which chills competition in the downstream market. The government also credits business justifications for the merger, and in the end they balance those with the potential harms to competition.

The article (I can't find the complaint) also says, and this is a typical vertical merger concern, that this will give Nvidia (the downstream firm) access to sensitive information of Nvidia's rivals that they had previously shared with Arm.

EDIT: There is also a general antitrust push in the Biden administration, notably in the appointments of Lina Khan and Tim Wu. Interesting to see its fruits.

I think the superiority felt by some software engineers stems from the simple fact that they are paid a lot and are seen as smart and valuable in the culture. They have economic power, and work on something that seems incomprehensible to many everyday people. The subject matter may also have something to do with it. We're taught that lots of problems can have their details reduced and abstracted away, and I think engineers can ignore the normal human elements of life that have a real effect.

This is more armchair Freudish, but I also think that a feeling of intellectual superiority makes up for other areas that are lacking in similar feelings of value and power. Life as a computer science student is not cool or fun or sexy, so you fall back on what gives you power in wider society. Sort of like the idea that poor whites fall back onto their whiteness. People jockey for position using whatever they have.

"Ass-covering" is a really uncharitable synonym of "being prudent."

You are not being charitable with the arguments of those you disagree with. People are not reduced down to their race or gender, those aspects are one factor among multiple. No company is hiring random people matching their desired profiles off the street simply because of those characteristics.

I have a lot to say about your views on this. First of all, I am not concerned about company cultures. There are way bigger concerns in life than company culture. And if that really matters to you and you don't like your company culture, go to a company you like.

Your phrasing of "collective punishment" is really telling. You seem to really focus on the hardship incurred by the candidates discounted a bit because they are historically privileged. I find it very easy not to dwell on the temporary misfortunes of well-qualified software engineers. They will be fine. It's not a big deal. I care much more about fixing the "collective punishment" that has been inflicted on certain groups for hundreds of years.

And to your point claiming you know how to fix these problems: I like what you advocate. I disagree that it will be sufficient. Nothing has worked. We need to try everything, because the problem is so hard. To me, what the OP describes is part of the price society has to pay for the ill-gotten gains we've enjoyed for hundreds of years. It's not a punishment, but it's like tech debt. We backed ourselves into a corner where things are so bad that the only feasible ways to address inequality among groups is hacky solutions like affirmative action. Nobody WANTS to do that. But the problem is just so old and stuck.

You can't discuss the topic you raised without discussing social issues because it IS a social issue. Affirmative action in hiring software engineers is not a distinct topic, you simply raised the topic of affirmative action among the tech community.

And I will say, it is fine to broach these subjects. Your concerns are legitimate. I simply choose to take a much broader view of things and feel that until we get much closer to making the world more equal and righting past injustices, we should try and use as many tools we have to close the wealth gap between majority and minority groups.