I can’t believe it’s not battery!

No, the paper says it shares a receptor with sour, not that it tastes like sour.

Just as “orange” and “purple” have receptors in common but are not perceived as the same.

Umami is the fifth flavor. This paper is about the sixth, which doesn’t seem to have a name other than “ammonium chloride”.

Democrats didn’t vote to vacate because they like to watch chaos. They simply will not support McCarthy unless he offers something in return. Their vote is a bargaining chip and they aren’t throwing it away.

They are fine with their jobs because they have other jobs that pay them.

Your idea would mean the end of professional musicians. Music performance would be mainly for people with lots of leisure time, something rich people would do as a hobby. Like playing polo.

If your job stopped paying you, and told you to rely on donations from your clients/customers, then I’m pretty sure you’d find a different job.

In the movie industry, everyone usually signs a work for hire contract that specifies who will have the rights to the completed film.

However, in a recent case the director (Alex Merkin) did not sign a contract and then tried to claim copyright afterwards. The court said that directors have no inherent copyright over film:

We answer that question in the negative on the facts of the present case, finding that the Copyright Actʹs terms, structure, and history support the conclusion that Merkinʹs contributions to the film do not themselves constitute a ʺwork of authorshipʺ amenable to copyright protection. … As a general rule, the author is the party who actually creates the work, that is, the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression entitled to copyright protection. … But a directorʹs contribution to an integrated ʺwork of authorshipʺ such as a film is not itself a ʺwork of authorshipʺ subject to its own copyright protection.

If a musician doesn’t have the right to their own work, it’s because someone offered to pay them for the rights and they accepted.

Is that in their favor? I think so, considering the alternative is to not get paid and not have rights to their work.

And not to go too far off topic, but publicly funded research is generally not aimed at drug development, it is aimed at discovering the basic science behind how the body works (human body or otherwise).

If you want a clinical trial that proves a particular drug can actually help patients, you will need to find a company to pay for it. The government almost never pays for clinical trials (I think the COVID vaccine might have been an exception). Clinical trials are far more expensive than basic science, and patents are the carrot to get the private sector to pay for them.

After you’ve spun enough brushes or popped enough balloons, the results will be fairly predictable. And some elements, for example the color of paint in the brushes/balloons, would be under full control.

Even if the final result is not completely predictable, an artist only needs to establish that a significant part of it is a form of creative expression.

In a work for hire contract, the contract explicitly states that the employer gets the copyright.

You can think of the compensation as being partly from employment, and partly from the sale of any copyright.

It’s not actually called “theft” or “stealing”, it’s called “infringement” or “violation”. Infringement is to intellectual property as trespassing is to real estate. The owners are still able to use their property, but their rights to it have nevertheless been violated.

Also, corporations cannot create intellectual property. They can only offer to buy it from the natural persons who created it. Without IP protection, creators would lose the only protections they have against corporations and other entrenched interests.

Imagine seeing all your family photos plastered on a McDonald’s billboard, or in political ad for a candidate you despise. Imagine being told, “Sorry, you can’t stop them from using your photos however they want”. That’s a world without IP protection.

You need direct control over some elements of a work to claim copyright. Not necessarily all of them.

So even if the microtexture is out of your control, you still have complete control of the framing, color, etc. That’s sufficient to claim copyright.

If you lose control of every element by replacing them all with prompts and/or chance, then you lose the copyright. Which is what happened in the “monkey selfie” photo.

No, under copyright law it would be your work and your work alone.

Someone who is providing suggestions or prompts to you is not eligible to share the copyright, no matter how detailed they are. They must actually create part of the work themselves.

So for instance if you are in a recording studio then you will have the full copyright over music that you record. No matter how much advice or suggestions you get from other people in the studio with you. Your instruments/voice/lyrics, your copyright.

Otherwise copyright law would be a constant legal quagmire with those who gave you suggestions/prompts/feedback! Remember, an idea cannot be copyrighted, and prompts are ideas.

In the case of Stable Diffusion, the copyright would go to Stable Diffusion alone if it were a human. But Stable Diffusion is not a human, so there is no copyright at all.

You can’t copyright AI-generated art even if it was only trained with images in the public domain.

In fact, you can’t copyright AI-generated art even it was only trained with images that you made.

So if someone asks you to paint something and gives you detailed instructions about what they want to see in your painting, do you think they should have copyright over your work?

The copyright office has been pretty clear that if an artist is significantly involved in creating an image but then adjusts it with AI, or vice versa, then the work is still eligible for copyright.

In all of the cases where copyright was denied, the artist made no significant changes to AI output and/or provided the AI with nothing more than a prompt.

Photographers give commands to their camera just as a traditional artist gives commands in Photoshop. The results in both cases are completely predictable. This is where they diverge from AI-generated art.

It’s not a matter of intelligence or sentience. The key question is whether the output of a prompt is fully predictable by the person who gave the prompt.

The behavior of a paintbrush, mouse, camera, or robot arm is predictable. The output of a prompt is not (at least, not predictable by the person who gave the prompt).

But it does matter whether your input is a brush or a prompt.

If you physically paint something with a paintbrush, you have a copyright over your work.

If someone asks you to physically paint something by describing what they want, you still have copyright over the work. No matter how picky they are, no matter how many times they review your progress and tell you to start over. Their prompts do not allow them to claim copyright, because prompts in general are not sufficient to claim copyright.

The argument relies a lot on an analogy to photographers, which misunderstands the nature of photography. A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.

A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won’t have a copyright on the photo.

First of all, Chrome still has 3rd party cookies even after implementing their new tracking system.

Second of all, 3rd party cookies could be turned off and not replaced with any tracking system at all. Safari and Firefox have already done so.