Hilariously (and appropriately), the decision cites Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., also known as the "Betamax case."
> (a) “The Copyright Act does not expressly render anyone liable for infringement committed by another.” Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 434.
> In Sony, copyright owners sued the maker and the retailers of the Betamax video tape recorder. Id., at 422. The tape recorder could be used to record copyrighted television programs for later personal viewing, which would not constitute infringement. Id., at 449. On the other hand, it could also be used to reproduce and sell copyrighted television programming, which would constitute infringement. Ibid. The lower court found the Betamax maker liable because the tape recorder was “not suitable for any substantial noninfringing use” and infringement “was either the most conspicuous use or the major use of the Betamax product.” Id., at 428 (internal quotation marks omitted). This Court reversed, concluding that “[t]he Betamax is . . . capable of substantial noninfringing uses”—like personal use—so “sale of such equipment to the general public does not constitute contributory infringement.” Id., at 456.
> The lower court found the Betamax maker liable because the tape recorder was “not suitable for any substantial noninfringing use” and infringement “was either the most conspicuous use or the major use of the Betamax product.”
I don't know anyone who sold television recordings, it was always for personal use. How could the lower court get this so wrong? Was this just one uninformed judge? Or was this actually less certain at the time?
The Ninth Circuit court of appeals understood correctly what the primary use of Betamax would be, but they believed that personal home recording was not fair use, and was thus copyright infringement. They interpreted the law as only allowing libraries to record TV or radio broadcasts.
The Supreme Court ruling for this case found that time-shifting was fair use, but only by a narrow 5-4 margin. Fair use could have gone in a completely different direction over the last 40 years if just one judge had voted differently on Betamax.
We have to remember that at the time of the decision, there really wasn't any source of things to copy with a Betamax recording device besides commercial broadcast TV and other copyrighted materials.
Camcorders and such devices where you could make your own content were very rare, if available at all.
This speaks to first principles. I don't want judges making law - and any good judge doesn't want to make law. Laws are from elected legislatures. Of course this is all wishful thinking.
If a judge had ruled differently in the Betamax case, we'd still have the ability to vote in representatives who'd enact a law that explicitly gave us the right to record for personal use. Judges should only have power to decide what a law means in situations where it's not already clear how or if the law applies.
Isn't "judges making law" a key feature of common law systems? IANAL, obviously, I would know the answer to such a basic question if I were. But this is my understanding, and given that this case is in the US and the US is based on common law, I'm genuinely curious if you're advocating the US change to civil law?
Special interest groups throwing their money at suitable cases of random people to further their interests is not a key feature of common law, it's a very unfortunate side effect.
Judge's rulings set precedence. So as a judge you can point to another judge, usually up the chain, and say "this is what those laws mean". Legislators write laws that are very broad and ill defined. Almost on purpose. Then the judges have to figure it out. I don't like that. It is an ill defined spec and we dump the details onto a judge who may or may not have any idea of what is going on.
As it happens, natural language is "ill defined". This is an important piece of the argument for teleological justice, where the law is framed and interpreted according to the intent of the sovereign rather than some linguistic literalism.
By the involved professionals laws are commonly understood as norms, i.e. what is established through judgement in court when the instructions from the sovereign (and sometimes sources like common sense) are interpreted and applied to so called facts presented to the court during proceedings.
In this sense, what the politicians have their minions type down into some document isn't actually the law. Common law systems give judges more leeway in how to frame and interpret the sources of law than e.g. the swedish system, where politicians apply a process that produces a series of documents that explain and teleologically ground the text that parliament then votes on. This gives the sovereign a larger degree of influence over the instructions that judges use when creating law through their judgements.
As I understand it, this leeway in common law systems is thought to balance the latent tyranny of the sovereign, and function similar to constitutional courts in that judges can take the view of the people into account to a larger extent.
Not that I'd trust US jurisdictions in anything but certain business law settings, but some clever people thought and deliberated a lot when designing what they have over there.
So what is the difference between "setting precedence" and "making the law" in your view? Essentially there isn't one? I think legislators write vague laws not almost on purpose, but absolutely with purpose: to leave it up to the judge to interpret. But then, you don't like that judges exercise judgement, which is frankly really quite puzzling to me. That is explicitly their job, it's right there in the name. But why don't you like that? Oftentimes, someone has to figure it out. Why not someone who is used to exercising good judgement? You're absolutely right that it's an ill-defined spec, but we're not gathering requirements to develop some application, we're talking about law?
This feels unavoidable when you have a new circumstance turning up in court? There's no "decline to have an opinion" option, the ruling has to go one way or the other.
How does this work in Civil Law jurisdictions? Do you get the opposite of precedent, similar cases having different outcomes until the legislature resolves it?
(it is something of a problem for the US that most of its really big important freedoms come from courts against more repressive legislatures, though)
I had a relative who setup a kinda "blockbuster" type service recording things and offering them out for rental. It really took off for VHS when he got HBO and recorded movies and then rented those. It wasnt a very lucrative hustle but it was an instance of what they didnt want to have happen
Absolutely this happened, but would you say that was the primary use case of the recording capabilities?
I'm trying to understand how a judge would say that the only practical use of backups were copyright infringement, since that is completely contrary to both my experiences and what I believe to be common sense. If the answer to my confusion is that this actually was the major use case and my experiences were rare, then that's fine. Otherwise, I can't help believe this is yet another case in recent history where judges are completely backwards on technological understanding, or maybe even under influence from copyright holders.
This is the case that determined that recording TV broadcasts for your own personal use was not copyright infringement. They understood what the tech was used for, but they didn't know that this use was non-infringing until they made that decision.
> Absolutely this happened, but would you say that was the primary use case of the recording capabilities?
I don't think I can understate the amount that I hate this line of reasoning.
Suppose we apply this logic to writable CDs. Some drives could only read but not write CDs and those devices cost less than the ones that could write. Moreover, the early writable drives were stupid expensive and because of that most people in those days only had readers.
Then in those early days, the usage of the drives would skew more heavily towards piracy, because it would be more common to spend $1000+ more on a CD writer if you're operating a commercial piracy operation and keeping it busy than if you just want to write something to a single CD instead of an entire $20 box of floppy disks once or twice a year.
A few years later the price of the writable drives has come down to almost as low as the price of the read-only drives and everybody has them and is using them for all kinds of legitimate things. But that doesn't happen if pointing to a high initial rate of piracy can get them banned before they get widely adopted for other purposes.
There's a reason why they said "substantial non-infringing use" instead of asking what percent of existing use it is at some specific point in time.
In the late 80s and early 90s there was a great deal of blatantly pirated SF, Fantasy, and Anime videotapes for sale at conventions, typically recorded from OTA, satellite, or cable for Western stuff. Anime was typically better quality, copied from Japanese originals with fan dubs added. Some of it was "at cost" where you were paying other fans for the their time, equipment, and the tape. Others were more obviously for-profit, with higher prices and sometimes better quality.
To be clear, this was the only way to get most of the stuff being traded and sold. TV shows or films with no VHS release, or anime with no official dub or American format release.
Given that that judgement was made in 1981, it's possible that the judges (who were likely a bunch of depression era old dudes) had zero knowledge or exposure, and had never even thought much about, personal video recording before a bunch of lawyers tried to explain it to them during the case.
We have see this happen repeatedly with modern tech cases.
Judges asking things that are obvious to us make for great headlines and quotes, like "what is a website?" or "what is an API?" and "shows" how out of touch they are, but like a judge (trying to) define pornography, making sure the plaintiff, the defendant, and the judge are on the same page seems to me (I am not a lawyer) just good procedure. First everyone has to agree on what a website or an API is before passing judgment on legal matters concerning them that all parties will abide by.
I worked with a team of developers who were totally confused by my attempt to call the thing we were creating a library or SDK and not an API.
We built and released a JavaScript client library that talked to a proprietary server product. But if you were a customer, and you used it to build a JavaScript app, you would write code against the library’s API, right?
In the course of that discussion we definitely had some “what is an API” questions.
Yeah, that makes sense. For the purposes of this court case we’re trying today, is an FTP server a website because you can view it in a browser? An Nginx server pointing to an empty directory? One that only returns 404s? One that only accepts POST and not GET? And is a website an API, because an automated client could send a request and get back a machine-parsable result? Is a JSON response an API? An XML response? An XHTML response? An RSS feed? An RSS feed that’s dynamically generated in response to query parameters?
Lots of things seem facepalmingly obvious until you start exploring the edges.
I doubt that. Home video recording, while a new thing in 1981, was not substantially different from making personal mixtapes on tape from radio or vinyl records which had been popular for decades. My grandfather had dozens of 4 track mixtape reels he made in the 60s. You could even go further back and say it wasn't any different than taking a photo of artwork for personal use. You didn't have to be that young in 1981 to understand what home video recording is.
They had the ability to record video at home LONG before 1981. People had handheld "Super 8" film cameras ages before this, which they used to film their own home movies. Of course, this is a little different from videocassettes, just like LPs are different from audio cassettes, but it didn't take a genius to see that home video was going to move to videocassettes before long, they just needed cameras that could record directly to them instead of to film.
And in fact you had big video cameras attached to battery packs going back to at least the 70s. The tech existed. It was just clunky and barely suitable for consumers.
Even complete legal novices like me know about the Sony/Betamax case, FWIW. It would shock me if a judge ruling on copyright implications of a technology didn't know about it.
I suppose that selling is not necessary, distribution is. Record a movie off cable TV, share with your friends, and lo and behold, they're not going to buy the licensed VHS tape! And maybe even not going to subscribe to cable TV! Losses, losses everywhere.
Several years ago, I've read about a similar case somewhere in Europe (Germany?): a group of friends gathered together for a party, and it was either some show on the cable, or they blared some broadcasted music on the loudspeakers, or something, but somehow the police got involved, and the guy at whose house they've gathered was found guilty for illegal broadcasting/retransmission, because apparently, if more than 3 people (without familial bonds) watch the same TV or something like that, then yeah, it's broadcasting, and you need the license and the rights to the material.
I remember in 1980, when our school got a VCR and television (on a cart to allow it to be moved from one classroom to another). one of my teachers said that she wasn’t allowed to record something off the air at home and then show it in the classroom.
Time shifting for personal use is expressly legal (making a personal copy). It was also an early form of ad-blocking, because a VHS recorder could stop recording at a set time, thus skip a block of commercials, and then continue. There were suits about that, too.
The Betamax case that GP mentions is the same case that established that time-shifting is not copyright infringment. The law and courts were previously both mute on the subject.
... because if _use_ of a product creates a liability for the maker, you are very quickly headed toward liability for gun manufacturers. [ed: this is very much discussed in the decision, by the by]
Expect to see heavy lobbying from the music and video industry to create some kind of "Know your Customer" regime internet service providers in order to create such a liability.
I wouldn't call this a slam dunk for privacy or liberty, given what it is going to force the various actors to do in response.
It could create the right sort of incentives though. If I'm a junior and I suddenly have to take my work to a senior every time I use AI, I'm going to be much more selective about how I use it and much more careful when I do use it. AI is dangerous because it is so frictionless and this is a way to add friction.
Maybe I don't have the correct mental model for how the typical junior engineer thinks though. I never wanted to bug senior people and make demands on their time if I could help it.
What you're actually going to see is seniors inundated by slop and burning out and quitting because what used to be enjoyable solving of problems has become wading through slop that took 10 minutes to generate and submit but 30+ minutes to understand and write up a critique for it.
not even that. implementing this requirement could be a general work stoppage whenever the senior engineer is in all day meetings or on vacation
With a layout of 4 juniors, 5 intermediates, and 0-1 senior per team, putting all the changes through senior engineer review means you mostly wont be able to get CRs approved.
I guess it could result in forcing everyone who's sandbagging as intermediate instead of going to senior to have to get promoted?
30+ minutes is a gross underestimation IMHO. It is probably somewhere in the range 1:10, 10:100, especially if you include the cost of context switches a senior has to do. In my experience, the loss of flow, due to context switch is very prominent and sometimes painful.
In my experience, Claude and the juniors piloting it are usually receptive to quick feedback along the lines of "This is unreasonably hard to understand, please try refactoring it this way and let me know when it's cleaner".
Why not get it 1st time right before it's sent to the Sr. Devs?
Granted AI creates sloppy code, but there are ways to make it Sr. Dev grade, mainly by getting rid of what I call Builder's Debt:
- iterate the shit out of it to make it production grade OR
- extract ACs from Jira, requirements from docs, decisions and query resolutions from Slack, emails, meeting notes, stitch them together, design coding standards relevant to the requirements and context before coding
At first I thought the "unmanned tunnels" description was just a way to avoid broadcast regulator scrutiny, but it does look like it's genuinely designed to be used underground as part of an emergency alert system. That led me to "leaky feeders", a type of broadcast antenna used in mines and tunnels.
I did a more aggressive internet search. This seems not possible given physics, as well as not documented (at least in the US) in the CDC Mine Accidents Database [0], which has been recording mine accidents since before the discovery + invention of AM radio.
Edit: The physics
- (lambda) = c / 1,620,000 Hz = 185 m :: 1.62 MHz is what I derived as a near max possible accidental frequency able to be produced by AM equipment
- 185 m / 2 = 92.6 m :: this is half a wave length
In order to resonate (let alone have enough power to "cook", which I didn't even look at because the wave can't even resonate), a tunnel must be at 92.6 m (fundamental) or 185 m wide or tall (2nd harmonic). Most tunnels are ~5m/3m wide/tall at most.
Dusted off my physics from my minor in college so someone feel free to correct me.
Bollocks the wavelengths are on the order of hundreds of meters, there is no way you get microwave like heating out of that. Even at 30 MHz you're still looking at 10 meters wavelength, 3 meters at 100 MHz.
This system operates according to TFA up to the end of the AM band at roughly 1600 KHz, so 180 meters and change.
The danger is more likely there because someone might enter the tunnel and hit the feeder, which depending on the design can carry considerable power.
This is basically hilarious. Leaky Feeders are a few watts. and even a high powered multi-kW AM radio with 200m wavelength wouldn't resonate much in a rough walled tunnel multiple sq meters in cross section. It's both too large for there to be significant power density, and much less than a wavelength in diameter except in length where the tunnel passively attenuates the signal.
I must be missing something ... Why broadcast speech over AM in an 'unmanned' tunnel ?? who's gonna hear/receive it ?? I wish the repo had some sort of use case summary or something...
Edit: I'm also sorta puzzled by the choice of AM in any sort of 'alert' context...Do people still listen to/use AM radios?
Updated the README with a use case section - vehicles with AM radios transit during construction/maintenance. Leaky feeder distributes the signal. Thanks for the feedback :)
AM radios are extremely simple and utterly fool proof, they can be made with only a handful of simple parts. Even so, these systems are archaic and these days you can make much more complex radio systems using a SDR which effectively reduces the whole radio to a pre-amp an ADC, an embedded CPU and some software.
> their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, for example, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for accepting freight arriving from outside the city. At its height in 1929, the network had 150 locomotives pulling 10 to 15 cars per train.
This is neat but also seems like an insane solution to the problem of “I don’t like seeing service trucks”. How many such tunnels and elevators would it take to supply the buildings in a typical city’s downtown area?
> Eliminating cars doesn’t eliminate the need for infrastructure for moving goods.
Burying other last mile utilities that waste less land was not insane when real estate was a fraction as valuable as now and engineering technology was worse.
When I see bad faith arguments like this I earnestly worry that maybe sometimes I do the same and just don’t recognize it.
Did you read my comment about the cost of laying fiber being far different from the cost of digging truck-sized tunnels and make a conscious choice to pretend I was making a nonsense argument about diesel-powered fiber, or did you construct this strawman without realizing it?
I don't think you are trying to look at it rationally but simply in terms of priors where sprawl has cost an immense amount of resources. A tunnel where 2 pallets can cross is not much larger than a sewer, fits bellow a pedestrian/emergency vehicle system and is more valuable than a larger tunnel because it can never be DoT approved.
I wonder how many people such an automated freight system would kill per year, compared to cars in the same cities. Once we have some numbers, you would probably reconsider the use of "insane" there.
Sure. In 2022, 672 pedestrians were killed by large trucks. How many of those do you believe happened in say New York City? And how many of those do you think you could eliminate with this hypothetical tunnel system? And how much will this hypothetical tunnel system cost?
New York has about 300 pedestrian deaths total from all vehicles every year. So my guesstimate is that if you eliminated all of the trucks from New York City, you might save 50 lives a year, max. I would also guesstimate that it would probably cost well north of $50 billion to create this tunnel system to connect all of the major buildings in New York City. So we’re looking at about $1 billion per life saved. I bet you could save more than one life per billion if you put that money somewhere more useful.
> What do you think, ready to imagine such a comparison?
What are you intending to accomplish with your snarky and condescending tone?
it is not possible to eliminate the risk from the absolute requirement to move heavy bulk stuff, through and in citys.
roads need work, big things break and fail ,wherever they are, new stuff gets built, again, precisly, wherever, it gets built.
civil engineering is completly mature,and wildly boreing,and will dry your eyes out.
much of the cannon is millenia old, with fuck all room to "inovate"
and what works in one place, is a total fail somewhere else.
what is more is that the ancient world is littered with the ruins of civilisations and citys, that did fail, and in every case part or all of that failure was to overextend, undermaintain, there infrastructure, or worse, jump to some new flashy thing that then fails, spectacularly.
having walked through those ruins, and marvled at there engineering and planning of infrastructure, and also become a keen reader of all things civil or infrastructure engineerin, and also aircraft engineering, where the most important concept is up front, "failure mode", I have no respect for sudden ideas, and approve of what China has done to prohibit un educated comentary on infrastructure development and implimentation.
"influencer engineering" by way of "saftey"
Nitpick: it is one life per year for the billion invested. Which after the typical metro infrastructure lifespan of a century is actually viable because the cost for a working-age US life in medical and other contexts is probably around the $10mn ballpark.
(Assuming financing happens cheaply by the federal state rather than via PPP grift; and assuming that $50bn is the number, which in NYC is an underestimate by a factor of at least five…)
That’s a really good point. This is all very back-of-the-envelope, but if the total cost per life saved were 10 million it gets into the ballpark of sane.
But as you noted this 50 billion is likely a major underestimate (for comparison the recently built SR-99 tunnel in Seattle cost 1 billion per linear mile and connects to approximately zero buildings via elevators). NYC covers 300 square miles and estimates are that there are upwards of a million buildings across 120k city blocks.
How much will those robots cost? How many will we be able to make within the next 30 years?
How will they be autonomous considering bipedal operation in random environments is MUCH, MUCH harder that full self driving for cars on public roads? And that's just moving around, we're talking about actual judgement to do a human job that requires reasoning and practical skills.
Jetson type robots are a pipe dream at this point. I don't expect to have a robot maid within my lifetime.
Let's be realistic and not plan society today around scifi fantasies, please.
We're probably lacking 80% of the basic science needed for autonomous robot maids.
Right. My comment wasn't about maids from the Jetsons. General purpose robots are not soon. But for more specific tasks we've come very far in the last decade.
Warehouse automation is a reality today. Package delivery is also, just not broadly across the US. But it is very much happening right now.
Specifically my comment was about package delivery, which appears to be around the corner for most major cities, and already in place in several major cities around the world.
For indoor delivery, you don't really need Atlas. A 4 wheeled "full self drive" can fairly easily navigate cubicles and press elevator buttons. It's really not that crazy, and doesn't require any reasoning whatsoever. Basic preprogrammed pathfinding borrowed from any modern video game works fine for this. I don't think you need any advanced AI, let alone AGI.
Also perhaps worth mentioning in Chicago is Lower Wacker Drive.
It's a split-level street, more-or-less with local traffic on the surface and with through traffic at the subterranean level. It's a quick way to get through the area.
And beneath parts of that that is an road I've heard referred to as Lower Lower Wacker. This is almost entirely the realm of delivery and service vehicles (except for a time in fairly recent years when those darned kids were using it for drag racing at night).
It's all crazy-expensive to build anything like underground local delivery rail and underground roadways.
(But the stuff at the surface is crazy-expensive, too, and often can't be expanded horizontally without demolition of the very buildings that it seeks to benefit.
But expanding down? Sometimes, yeah -- that can happen.)
> Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it.
Recent anthropological and archaeological research is challenging the traditional view that ancient lives were "nasty, brutish, and short." Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day and frequently took time off for festivals or to travel long distances to visit friends and family. And unlike today, work usually had a more flexible rhythm where short periods of hard work were separated by long periods of light work and rest.
> Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day
This statement is technically correct if you let the word “many” do the heavy lifting and ignore the people doing the work (slaves, etc)
Claiming that average life in the past was easier is just false, though. If it was easier to shelter, feed, and clothe yourself in the past then those methods wouldn’t have disappeared. You’d be able to do them now if you wanted to. Easier than before, in fact, because you can walk to the store and buy some wood instead of chopping down trees by hand and letting them dry for a few seasons before building, and so on.
Average person took long time off work to travel to visit far away friends? Call me sceptical, because this is provably untrue for pretty much any period and place we have actual resources about.
I don’t know what research they saw, but the claim was mainstreamed by the popular book “Sapiens”. The author romanticized past life and made claims that life was leisurely until agriculture came along and made us all miserable as we toiled working the soil. Before that we supposedly relaxed all day as our food was easy to catch and we didn’t have to build anything because we were always on the move. There are some very obvious problems with that statement that will be easily spotted by anyone who has ever done any hunting or camping.
Since this is generating revenue for NYC, you can't consider whether this tax is good or bad in a vacuum though. The alternatives are a different tax with its own effects, or more debt, or less spending. (In this case, the revenue goes to the MTA.) Any opportunity costs due to less traffic are at least partially offset by opportunity costs you aren't having to pay somewhere else.
I walked away with that page open, glanced at the "Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?" post, and clicked to see the comments because I thought it was real :')
I heard one of the founders interviewed on the Hard Fork podcast[1] (which confusingly is primarily concerned with AI, rather than crypto.) I went in with very negative expectations, but came away with a positive impression and optimism that they might be onto something. As you say, AI is not core to the project. Instead, the focus is on using technology to facilitate individualized learning. It is true that teachers are 'replaced', but by humans whose job it is to keep the students focused and motivated, rather than to convey information.
>Instead, the focus is on using technology to facilitate individualized learning. It is true that teachers are 'replaced', but by humans whose job it is to keep the students focused and motivated, rather than to convey information.
I have good news for you. Tell your kids to get into a few fights, or get caught smoking weed in school too many times. They will be sent to an "alternative school" as punishment that uses this same insight - let the kids sit in front of a computer all day "learning" while a teacher nags them to quit falling asleep. In fact, they can do it for around 6 hours a day, three times better than this charter.
I've had the same opinion since I was a TA. Most of the stuff the students learned was from the textbook. The value the instructors provide should above all be the motivation , the enthusiasm and the instilment of meaning into what the students are learning.
> (a) “The Copyright Act does not expressly render anyone liable for infringement committed by another.” Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 434.
> In Sony, copyright owners sued the maker and the retailers of the Betamax video tape recorder. Id., at 422. The tape recorder could be used to record copyrighted television programs for later personal viewing, which would not constitute infringement. Id., at 449. On the other hand, it could also be used to reproduce and sell copyrighted television programming, which would constitute infringement. Ibid. The lower court found the Betamax maker liable because the tape recorder was “not suitable for any substantial noninfringing use” and infringement “was either the most conspicuous use or the major use of the Betamax product.” Id., at 428 (internal quotation marks omitted). This Court reversed, concluding that “[t]he Betamax is . . . capable of substantial noninfringing uses”—like personal use—so “sale of such equipment to the general public does not constitute contributory infringement.” Id., at 456.
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