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“For years, it was assumed that stimulants had paradoxical calming effects in ADHD patients, [while] stimulating ‘normal’ individuals … It is now known that low doses of stimulants focus attention and improve executive function in both normal and ADHD subjects.” https://www.nature.com/articles/1301164

Companies exist to limit the liability of shareholders / investors, not principals. The idea is that you can buy equity and receive dividends if the company goes well, without standing to lose more than you put in if the company harms others through mismanagement. The company doesn't shield the directors from personal liability for that mismanagement as a matter of law, it just pays for high quality legal representation if the allegation is made.

VBA macros aren't supported. Last time I checked even conditional formatting wasn't supported, although I see now it was added in January 2022 [1]. Even so, as with many other features, the web UI is different and more limited. Links to documents stored locally or on an SMB share don't work. Scrolling through thousands of rows is laggy. Generally, Excel Online is useless for the complex spreadsheets used in large enterprises, which themselves are often workarounds for the limitations of the web apps the enterprise is supposed to run on.

[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-condit...

The effects of education on democratic participation, workforce participation and public health are all explicitly assessed in Caplan’s book, particularly chapter 6. This comment tends to prove the point he makes in the article: “Quantitative social science is barely relevant in the real world … If you’re lucky, researchers default to common sense. Otherwise, they go with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the latest prestigious papers as fig leaves.”

Outline numbering, cross-references and tables are all common features of contracts which are difficult to capture in plain text.

> “It is inconceivable,” said Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce, at the first national radio conference in 1922, “that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.” Hoover’s remarks reflected the accepted wisdom of the times: that advertising on radio was unacceptable … According to a report of the first conference, all agreed that “direct advertising in radio broadcasting service [should] be absolutely prohibited.”

Tim Wu, The Master Switch (2011), chapter 5

Most other countries solved the issue a century ago with Torrens title.

The article is talking about subpoenas – court orders for disclosure of relevant records, which override ethical and contractual confidentiality obligations, unless the person holding the confidential documents persuades the court to quash or limit the scope of the order. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/07-08/ce-corner

> Meta is alleged only to have superimposed a fact-check label on the Fire Video, describing Climate Feedback’s conclusion that the video was “missing context.” Stossel does not claim that label is actionably false—presumably because it is protected opinion. The conclusion that the video was “missing context” is necessarily a judgment call, one that is “not capable of verification or refutation by means of objective proof.”

Seems like a reasonable claim to me. https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Faceb...

You can accept that the brain is governed by physical laws, without conceding that the brain can be simulated. Emulation on the atomic level may not be computationally feasible. The emergence of human behaviour from a less detailed simulation is not guaranteed. These possibilities are discussed under the heading “Scale separation” in the roadmap to whole brain emulation published by the Future of Humanity Institute [1].

> At first it may appear unlikely that a complex system with many degrees of freedom like the brain could be modelled with the right causal dynamics, but without taking into account the smallest parts … However, state variables of complex systems can be quantitatively predicted when there is ‘scale separation’: when different aspects of the system exist on sufficiently (orders of magnitude) different scales (of size, energy, time etc), they can become uncoupled … [an] example is the scale separation between electric currents and logic operations in a computer …

> When there is no scale separation (such as in fluid turbulence) macroscale predictions become impossible without simulating the entire microscale. An important issue to be determined is whether such a cut‐off exists in the case of the human brain … if it could be demonstrated that there is no such scale, it would demonstrate the infeasibility of whole brain emulation.

The FHI is assuming scale invariance in order to test it experimentally. We shouldn’t assume it for the purpose of analysing the roles played by humans and AI under IP legislation.

[1]: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf

Stephen Thaler is filing junk patents in his own name, naming his software as the “inventor,” and challenging the various patent offices when they reject his defective application form without examining its merits. As the dissenting judge said in the Court of Appeal, “if only Dr Thaler was not such an obsessive and, instead of calling DABUS the inventor, he named himself … none of these problems would arise” [1].

Thaler recently won the same argument in Australia [2], although an appeal is pending. His lapsed patent application (2019363177) can be found in IP Australia’s online database [3]. Putting the legal question aside – whether Thaler’s insistence on naming DABUS the inventor was fatally defective to the application – the patent application is pseudoscientific nonsense, not a sound basis for deep questions about the nature of ownership and invention.

The patent claims two apparently unrelated inventions. It does not explain how they were identified by DABUS or identify any other connection between them. The first invention is a “food or beverage container” with the cross-section of a Koch snowflake, which supposedly allows for containers to stick to each other. The material used for this flexible, fractal surface is unspecified, but plastic, metal or “an elastomeric material” are suggested, along with “potentially flexible food product (for example pasta, dough, liquorice and so on.” It is plausible that the text of this claim was generated by GPT-3.

The second invention is a “neural-flame device for attracting enhanced attention,” that is, an LED that blinks “at a frequency corresponding to approximately 4 Hz and a fractal dimension near ½.” There is extensive citation of Thaler’s own publications, none of which are in reputable peer-reviewed journals. What can be found online [4] fails to show that flickering LEDs have some useful neurological function, or explain what the patent application has to do with DABUS.

[1]: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2021/1374.pdf

[2]: https://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fc...

[3]: http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/applicationDet...

[4]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091...

That’s a necessary condition for any bill to pass, but as explained in [2] and [3], this one followed an exceptional procedure which reduced the opportunity for parliamentarians outside the two major parties to consider, propose and persuade others to endorse amendments to the bill. The opposition was also “concerned” about aspects of it, but voted yes because of the “tension between how quickly criminals can adapt their trade craft and how long it takes to properly scrutinise and introduce the legislation required to counteract and disrupt criminal activity” [4].

[4] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....

You’re quite right, but it is exceptional that the bill passed the House of Representatives on the same day as its second reading speech, and passed the Senate on the following day [1]. This means that there was little time for debate and amendment within Parliament itself, including by minor parties [2] and independents [3] not represented on the committee that reviewed the first draft of the bill.

[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...

[2] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....

[3] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....

The AAT is basically what’s known as an administrative court in other countries [1], or a consolidation of the numerous tribunals presided over by administrative law judges in the U.S. [2]. The average person in Australia is most likely to interact with the AAT by appealing a decision of the federal government in relation to child support, workers’ compensation, social security, immigration or tax [3]. Although the distinction between an AAT member and a judge is constitutionally important, it is not that obvious or practically significant. Both conduct public hearings and provide written reasons for deciding the legal disputes within their jurisdiction, which can be further appealed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_court

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_law_judge

[3] https://www.aat.gov.au/about-the-aat

Katz v. United States held the opposite: “The Government’s activities in electronically listening to and recording the petitioner’s words violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and thus constituted a ‘search and seizure’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”

More recent decisions suggest that the third party doctrine, according to which there is no legitimate expectation of privacy in information voluntarily turned over to third parties, is unlikely to apply to private messages on Facebook:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Warshak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

Afterpay bears the credit risk, not the merchants. Search for the keyword "net transaction loss": https://afterpay-corporate.yourcreative.com.au/wp-content/up...

A confidential settlement does not mean that a licence has been “tested in court” or “litigated and upheld.” It means the parties thought the risk of losing was high enough to justify a settlement. The state of the law remains uncertain because cases are getting settled rather than litigated.

The unprecedented number is 11. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-mps-call-...

The notion of fairness is contestable, but that does not mean we cannot progress past Perry’s second stage of development [1] (“it’s all subjective”). Fairness can be equated with due process or natural justice, which in a workplace relations context, commonly includes the right to be heard, have your personal circumstances taken into account and be given reasons for decision, and the right of appeal. Automated decision-making threatens these rights.

[1] https://www.jmu.edu/geology/_files/willperry21.pdf

Using copyright works to train an AI may qualify as fair use, meaning the terms of any copyright licence can be ignored, as argued in this blog post by reference to the Google Books litigation: https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin...

Perhaps it’s not so different from a search engine like Google. The article cites Google’s successful defence, under US copyright law, of its practice of displaying ‘snippets’ from copyrighted books in search results. There is a clear difference between this and the distribution of complete copies on LimeWire.

> If he's committed a crime, charge him with it and give him his day in court.

Isn’t this exactly what the government has done? https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1289641/downl...

There are lots of unusual things about the Assange case, but the fact that the government tried to strengthen it by offering leniency to an informant isn’t one of them.

If the model is a derivative work, why wouldn’t works generated using the model also be derivative works?

Put some keywords into Google Scholar and you will find heaps of research on this topic. Here’s the first one I found. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/eej.2014.22

> We estimate several models with an extensive list of control variables and high school fixed effects. Results consistently show that high school GPA is a positive and statistically significant predictor of educational attainment and earnings in adulthood. Moreover, the coefficient estimates are large and economically important for each gender.

That’s what Apple says, but isn’t it a bit early to conclude that Epic’s arguments (relevantly, that Apple is illegally monopolising the market for iOS app distribution) are doomed to fail?

That’s the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution came 11 years later (and did not, even then, include the Bill of Rights).

The article quotes the part of the Signal blog that said “a real exploit payload would likely seek to undetectably alter previous reports, compromise the integrity of future reports (perhaps at random!), or exfiltrate data from the Cellebrite machine.” A complex exploit like that would say much more about the author’s intent than a driver that shuts down the computer when a “wiggler” is detected.

The DOJ publishes legal guidance on prosecuting computer crimes [1], which includes this relevant passage:

> An attacker need not directly send the required transmission to the victim computer in order to violate this statute. In one case, a defendant inserted malicious code into a software program he wrote to run on his employer's computer network. United States v. Sullivan, 40 Fed. Appx. 740 (4th Cir. 2002) (unpublished) [2]. After lying dormant for four months, the malicious code activated and downloaded certain other malicious code to several hundred employee handheld computers, making them unusable. Id. at 741. The court held that the defendant knowingly caused transmission of code in violation of the statute. Id. at 743.

The CFAA is notoriously broad, which is probably why Pfefferkorn didn’t feel the need to undertake a detailed analysis of exactly how it prohibits the deployment of a targeted exploit which would “undetectably alter previous reports, compromise the integrity of future reports (perhaps at random!), or exfiltrate data from the Cellebrite machine.”

[1] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-ccips/l...

[2] https://www.anylaw.com/case/united-states-v-sullivan/fourth-...

The parts of the article quoted above suggest that the principle is a CFAA violation – someone who distributes an exploit tailored to destroy evidence captured by Cellebrite probably “knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer.”

Difficult philosophical questions arise with the phrases “knowingly causes” and “intentionally causes damage,” but a jury can use common sense to resolve them on the evidence in a particular case. The same issues arise when trying to determine intent and causation when someone fires a gun or carries a bag full of white powder. The details matter.