Well, the Library of Congress entry notes him as "Gugusse the clown" and the Wikipedia entry[2] has a few citations (to books, I can't verify) that support it, but more to the point, "Pierrot" is a classic[3] stock character in e.g. commedia dell'arte. It says clown but I think our modern meaning of that word is a bit removed, and perhaps "harlequin" (another character[4]) is more what we'd say these days.
*His character in contemporary popular culture—in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall—is that of the sad clown [...]*
> Why does NPR call Gugusse "a human clown" ? He is not wearing clown clothes.
Strange of you to criticize NPR for that bit seeing as they didn't come up with that description for Gugusse. From the LoC page for the video:
>> Gugusse the clown appears to control the actions of Pierrot Automate, a child-sized automaton standing on a pedestal. By turning a crank, Gugusse makes him march and wave a stick. As Gugusse turns the crank, the automaton gets bigger until it is the size of a grown man. Suddenly the automaton is controlling his own limbs. He hits Gugusse on the head with his stick. Gugusse pulls the automaton off the pedestal and picks up a large hammer. As Gugusse pounds the automaton on the head, he gets smaller and smaller. At the final stroke of the hammer, he disappears.
So they're using the supplied description of Gugusse. If you have an issue with it, take it up with the Library of Congress.
The jacket just looks like a variant of “morning dress”. It’s the equivalent of a tuxedo for the daytime (wearing either at the wrong time of day used to be considered incorrect; see the selectively-sartorially-fastidious Jack in 30 Rock reacting to Liz’s surprise at his wearing a dinner jacket without some special event planned with, “it’s after 6:00, Liz, what am I, a farmer?”)
You still occasionally see them at state functions (Trump wore an infamously poor-looking one when visiting Queen Elizabeth in his first term, iirc, and you can find photos of people like Reagan in it looking a bit less uncomfortable). I think they were standard/required clothing for arguing in front of the Supreme Court through the 1970s or something.
It’s the kind of jacket one might imagine a stereotypical cartoon mayor of a town wearing for a daytime ribbon cutting… because, not that long ago, that’s exactly what they would have worn.
It’s an almost, but not quite, dead piece of clothing, but it was still quite familiar when this was made.
Almost all works make all their money in the first five years after creation.
5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit, that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the first place, i.e. us.
Generative AI raises a lot of questions as to the value of copyright to society.
There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined.
Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal.
These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve?
What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?)
Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok.
A human's own likeness is not copyrightable. Hard to take posts about copyright doctrine seriously when they are premised on complete misunderstanding.
There is a legally protected right of publicity. You cannot take someone's likeness and use it for your advertising campaign/movie/endorsement without their permission.
> There is a legally protected right of publicity.
There is not a general right of publicity in federal law in the US; in certain states there is with different parameters, including as to who is even protected.
There is a false endorsement provision in the Lanham Act, 15 USC § 1125(a), that provides a very narrow protection around misleading commercial endorsement, though.
FWIW it's not just about money, it's about controlling creative work. E.g. Radiohead really does not want ICE to use their music for fascist propaganda, at any cost.
I really don't like how the discussion on HN always ignores the ways copyright protects individual expression as a fundamental right. Instead we're STEM dorks, focusing on how getting rid of copyright protection lets us increase content volume at the entertainment factory.
We GIVE creators copyright to serve us by encouraging CREATION.
Mondrian died decades ago.
He is not creating any more.
Copyright of his works is not serving us any more.
Copyright should have ended when the balance between encouraging his creation and encouraging others to create based on his works was reached.
i.e. About 5 years after he made the piece.
The US Constitution authorizes Congress to enact copyrights with limited scope:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
One could argue that a colored box promotes neither science nor useful arts, and therefore applying any copyright protection at all to this non-useful art is unconstitutional.
That creepy AI dog-tracking Superbowl ad is dystopian enough -- especially when even South Park is now mocking Homeland Security and Noem shooting puppies -- and it's likely a future episode will be about federal ICE agents using surveillance cams and AI to round up more dogs for her to shoot.
I hated religion. There is no god, and fooling yourself that there is seemed a stupid thing to do.
But nowadays we need a bulwark against the hateful woke, who have replaced christian kindness with a demented sort of kindness combined with a disregard for facts and a violent contempt for people who disagree about how to be kind and to whom.
And we need a bulwark against other less kind religions, whose adherents are, sadly, attacking democracy, equal rights, dogs and, yes, the Western civilisation ( which we built on tolerant christianity ).
I'm not admitting I was wrong about religions being a crazy thing to believe in, but we have replaced christianity with something much worse.
So far, all I see on OpenClaw is hype from AI fans promoting the use of OpenClaw to people but only AI fans posting about actually using it to do stuff, and the stuff it does seems to automate stuff I don't need automating.
It makes me think of Home Automation, fine if you are the sort of hobbyist who can be bothered to set it up and keep it running, but more trouble than it's worth for most people.
Salesmen have been doing this since at least 1981: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
Yes, the company selling the last program you would ever need in 1981 were called 'D.J. "AI" Systems.' !
Bullshit then, bullshit now.
AI is a software engineer's tool, and always will be.
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