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> The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression.

The US Constitution grants Congress the power to grant copyrights "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts." Creative expression that is not useful therefore is not constitutionally copyrightable.

But that aside, I agree with the author that the Copyright Office refusing to further expand the already vastly over-expanded scope of copyrights is a rare positive ruling.

> rules for thee but not for me

Exactly, the same copyright rules should and do apply to both parties.

I'm glad copyright law didn't prevent the creation of LLMs. I'm also glad it doesn't prevent others from creating LLMs. I think that benefits us all.

Without government intervention, I think distillation will prevent these giant AI companies from recouping their investment. But that's not our problem.

Copying the exact weights? Yes.

But asking the trained model lots of questions, and creating a similar but different open weights model? No, that's fair use.

The current copyright rules cover both cases well and benefit everyone, I think. (I think copyrights are waaay too long, but that's another topic....) Whether trillion dollar companies can ever make a profit once open weights competitors distill them is, frankly, not our concern.

I agree on this point!

And also, training an open weights AI on the outputs of an AI trained using "fair use", is itself "fair use" that benefits everyone.

Like many I was a taker, almost never asking or answering questions, but simply finding answers that helped me.

Even so, at some point I made sure to answer a few questions, to get enough reputation to upvote and occasionally comment. I wanted at least to be able to reward / thank those who had posted answers that I found helpful. Even for 5 or 10 year-old answers, if an answer helped me I'd upvote it.

Now we're all "taking" via AI. We don't know who posted a helpful answer 10 years ago that the AI learned from in order to help us. That saddens me.

But in a way that's just the way of the world. We know to credit Pythagorus and Fourier and a few others whose names are attached to their methods. But for the most part we're all constantly standing on the shoulders of anonymous giants whose names are long lost.

> Software engineers who use LLMs should save a curated prose document describing the software, alongside the code that was generated from it.

That sounds great! Though software engineers are all about being lazy - typically in a good way. So I expect in practice they'll use LLMs to generate some code, iterate a few times until it works well enough for them, and then have the LLM generate "a curated prose document describing the software..."

Management surveys have shown that 90% of managers rate themselves as being in the top 10% of management.

I have no evidence but suspect most of the actual top 10% of managers are in the other 10%.

> Jevons paradox

Thanks! I've heard numerous examples of this. E.g. paint rollers, and later paint sprayers, made painting so much more efficient and cheaper that people wanted their houses and apartments painted more often, ultimately increasing house painter employment. But I didn't realize the phenomenon had a name.

> Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI?

My guess is that's the point - now you understand how San Francisco property developers feel.

Corollary: I would like the value of my house to rise, and I would like housing costs to fall to make housing more affordable.

> I was kinda shocked when he was let go, to be honest.

Uh, Mike Tomlin resigned / reitired from the Steelers after 18 seasons without ever having a losing season. He wasn't let go.

Yeah I've evidently been staying at the wrong hostels.

It's perfectly safe for YOU, the CUSTOMER.

It's just so powerful that, like, the WORLD can't handle it, man!

Downloading and redistributing companies' exact AI models would violate copyright. Querying multiple AI models to form your own model with a unique set of weights does not.

Exactly. AI companies distilled the whole internet into AI weights, now other AI companies are distilling their work to generate new AI weights. Nothing wrong with that, and the world gets open weights AI models.

Don't forget, the regulatory moat will also be complex enough that only existing trillion dollar companies can comply. That way they ban any new upstart domestic competition too.

Regulations to "slow down" AI are necessary so they can drop R&D expenses and finally make a profit. They can't keep these years of $100 billion of revenue on $200 billion in expenses going forever.

> physically disconnected the sandbox from internet ... used connections ... that they had allowed.

That's not "physically disconnected the internet", that's "disabled some connections but enabled others."

So the agent found and used the non-blocked connections.

> It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him

Closer analogy: The dumbest student in a class tells you 2 + 2 = 5 and you believe them.

Even more apt analogy: You're the dumbest student in the class, the second-dumbest student tells you 2 + 2 = 5, but you lack the critical thinking skills necessary to know whether that student is smart or not so you just believe them.

By stealing text from the Bible rather than using your own words, you've just committed labor theft!

Of course that accusation sounds outrageous as it should. All human knowledge and progress has come by building on the works of those who came before us, as it should. Turning this on its head and calling it "theft of labor" is insane, as is asking others not to build on today's knowledge.

Or to steal some more human labor: "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

The particular brainless lawmaker behind this act went on to become President. I think that shows Americans love and reward brainless lawmakers for creating these brainless laws.

Years ago people warned that we had to limit the population to save the planet.

Now we're naturally reducing population growth, and people warn of disaster.

Gradually decreasing populations means that overall, fewer workers have to support more non-workers. We've had decades of productivity growth, with more to come if we're not stupid, making that extremely feasible.

The extremely elderly are staying at home or a nursing home, and occasionally and delicately transported by car.

But lots of walking in their less elderly days may partially explain their longevity.

> What are Japan and France doing so much better?

I think the question misunderstands the data.

Or more specifically, a big part of the answer is "not having kids." Think about the denominator.

Yet Musk consistently opposes AI regulation - https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/elon-musk-criticizes-ai-re... - even though it might help him.

I too am skeptical of government-granted intellectual monopolies, as Richard Stallman correctly names them. Trademarks are the least offensive of them because they expire relatively quickly and are designed to prevent genuine consumer confusion. Trade dress rules help prevent consumers from unwittingly buying products from Company A while thinking it's Company B.

This video game creates zero risk that a consumer will buy furniture from the wrong store, so trade dress should be inapplicable. IKEA would likely even lose in court. But as the article points out: legal proceedings ... get really expensive.

This move was pure bullying by IKEA lawyers.

The legal short-hand saying that "corporations are people" is terrible PR. Non-legal-experts look at that and logically and correctly conclude "no, they're not", and think it's a ridiculous statement.

The underlying legal principle is that groups of individuals banding together don't lose their fundamental rights. That applies to unions, non-profits, clubs, churches, political parties, small businesses, and yes, corporations.

Courts do allow more government control over "commercial speech" than, say, political speech. But that discriminates based on the type of speech, not the type of speaker.

OpenAI and Anthropic are falling over themselves to claim these "incidents" show their products are both amazingly super-powerful and also "dangerous" so they need to be regulated. In addition to these stories, these companies are sponsoring "please regulate us" ads. ( https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/dueling-pacs-take-center-sta... ) Like Uber, companies that had no concern for the law as they innovated their way to the top, once there, push for laws to limit competition.

So it turns out destroying a record to obstruct an investigation is also a crime under 18 U.S. Code § 1519. For that they wouldn't need to prove that it was "evidence" or even that it was relevant.

So as much as I sympathize with the guy a d wabt to cheer him on, he's probably screwed.

> But this guy catching felony charges for giving federal border police a duress PIN to wipe his phone when they asked for an unlock PIN? Not actually overreach.

I think it's an interesting case that will get litigated in the courts. It seems they'll have to prove that the phone contained "evidence"; it could have just had embarrassing personal photos that he didn't want shared. When a house is raided and someone flushes a toilet, can courts assume they flushed drugs, or does that have to be proven?

I hope he's found not guilty, but either way this definitely is not the "sky is falling", "we're almost a police state" case that folks here are making it out to be. It's a very narrow and novel line.

Some general advice that probably works around the world is, if you're present in a country illegally, don't go out of your way to seek out immigration enforcement officials to record them for TikTok.

Nothing in the article refutes the assertion that Carlitos Ricardo Parias has been in the country illegally for 2+ decades, so it's not surprising that he's detained by ICE pending deportation. The Intercept refers to him as a "journalist" though all I can verify is that has a large TikTok following.

The Intercept's editorial comment calling ramming ICE SUVs "a meaningless move in a small car physically pinned by multiple large SUVs" is laughable and destroys any notion one might have that they have journalistic integrity. I think in any country, when surrounded by police, if you ram police vehicles rather than stopping and raising your hands, you'll be in trouble. While him getting shot in the elbow is a great example of police ineptitude, I guess we've just gotten used to that.

There are plenty of things to complain about regarding ICE behavior, but detaining someone who's in the country illegally isn't one of them.