ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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2hr ago
ToaKraka
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3hr ago
The statement mostly cites court decisions in support.
In the Office's view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author”, which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans. The Office's registration policies and regulations reflect statutory and judicial guidance on this issue.
In its leading case on authorship, the Supreme Court used language excluding non-humans in interpreting Congress's constitutional power to provide “authors” the exclusive right to their “writings”. In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead created by a camera. The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author”. The Court defined an “author” as “he to whom anything owes its origin; originator; maker; one who completes a work of science or literature”. It repeatedly referred to such “authors” as human, describing authors as a class of “persons” and a copyright as “the exclusive right of a man to the production of his own genius or intellect”.
Federal appellate courts have reached a similar conclusion when interpreting the text of the Copyright Act, which provides copyright protection only for “works of authorship”. The Ninth Circuit has held that a book containing words “authored by non-human spiritual beings” can only qualify for copyright protection if there is “human selection and arrangement of the revelations”. In another case, it held that a monkey cannot register a copyright in photos it captures with a camera because the Copyright Act refers to an author's “children”, “widow”, “grandchildren”, and “widower”—terms that “all imply humanity and necessarily exclude animals”.
ToaKraka
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23hr ago
AI-generated works are public domain in most countries
This sounds suspicious to me. I have no idea about Indonesia, but the usual criterion for copyright is creativity, not the tool.
In its complaint, Spyder Games quotes a 2023 statement of policy from the US Copyright Office.
If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user.… When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright.
This statement remains in force, though the Copyright Office is continuing to investigate the topic.
You didn't specify why any of these actors are claiming they own this character.
Spyder Games alleges in its complaint that the characters are AI-generated, but Mementum Lab actually denies this allegation in its amended counterclaim.
[1] Defendant Mementum Lab describes itself as “the (Brainrot) Memes Agency”. [2] Even though the law provides that AI-generated content isn’t protectible by copyright, defendant claims that it owns or controls the copyrights to over a dozen brainrots in the Game that were generated by artificial intelligence tools (and more than 50% of the entire “brainrot universe”). [3] For example, defendant contends that it owns or controls the copyrights to the brainrots known as “Tung Tung Sahor” and “U Din Din Din Din Dun Ma Din Din Din Dun”.
Answering Paragraph 7: [1] Defendant admits the allegation in the first sentence of this paragraph. [2] While the allegation in the second sentence of this paragraph that the law provides that AI-generated content isn’t protectible by copyright calls for a legal conclusion, to the extent a response is required, Defendant denies this allegation on information and belief, admits the allegation in this sentence that it claims it holds copyrights relating to over a dozen brainrot characters in the Game, and otherwise denies the allegations in this sentence. [3] Defendant admits the allegation in the third sentence of this paragraph that it contends it holds the copyrights relating to the referenced brainrot characters.
On page 9 of the amended counterclaim begins a five-paragraph section with the title "Defendant’s Creators Use an Involved, Artistic Process to Create Some of the Most Iconic Brainrot Characters, including Tung Tung Sahur", in which AI is not mentioned at all.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
ToaKraka
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1d ago
Assuming that people are engaging in targeted stalking just because they respond to comments that are buried deep inside threads is unreasonable. Lots of users use the "firehose" page to scroll through all comments as soon as they are made, with no regard for how deep into a thread they are.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
You can't just assume that your interlocutor is the downvoter in such cases. Lots of users use the "firehose" page to scroll through all comments as soon as they are made, with no regard for how deep into a thread they are, and one of them just as easily could be the downvoter.
"DLC" and "expansion pack" are not synonyms. Rather, "DLC" encompasses all optional add-ons, while "expansion pack" is reserved specifically for major optional add-ons.
Victoria 2 and Victoria 3 are good examples.
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Victoria 2's DLCs are easily divided into two categories. The two expansions, A House Divided and Heart of Darkness, were major, linear upgrades to the game—you can play V2, V2 + AHD, or V2 + AHD + HoD. Additionally, there were several cosmetic, non-expansion-pack DLCs, mostly "sprite packs"—e. g., American Civil War Sprite Pack—plus a music pack.
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Victoria 3 currently has a smorgasbord of DLCs. They are marketed with several different names, from "music packs" and "art packs" at the minor, purely cosmetic end to "immersion packs", "mechanics packs", and "expansions" at the high end.
Likewise, for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, the infamous Horse Armor Pack was merely a minor DLC, while Shivering Isles was an actual expansion.
Also, you didn't ask a question.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
it's not "aristocracy" in any established meaning of the word
Polybius's "anacyclosis" idea (Wikipedia article short on citations, original text)
Monarchy (good) → tyranny (bad) → aristocracy (good) → oligarchy (bad) → democracy (good) → ochlocracy (bad) → monarchy
ToaKraka
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1d ago
670,500 Haitians expelled from the Dominican Republic in 20 months
For non-paywalled information, see also the UN Secretary-General's most recent report, which quotes numbers from the International Organization on Migration.
Internal displacement continued to rise. IOM reported that, as of February 2026, more than 1.45 million people, over half of them children, had been internally displaced, with the Artibonite Department recording the highest increase (23 percent). Over 741,000 children faced barriers to education due to disruptions caused by displacement, and many schools were being used as shelters.
In parallel, forced migration dynamics intensified, with 270,214 Haitian migrants forcibly returned in 2025 (of whom approximately 25 percent were women and 10 percent were children, many in highly vulnerable situations), a 36-percent increase compared with 2024. The vast majority of returnees originated from the Dominican Republic, and IOM data indicate that economic factors were the primary driver of migration for approximately 85 per cent of returnees. From January to mid-March 2026, 52,000 people had already been deported, placing additional pressure on already vulnerable border communities.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
I feel obligated to point out that this is the second finance thread in a row incorrectly labeled 2027 rather than 2026.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
that person should try meetup
Are you referring to Meetup.com in specific, or to the concept of "meetups" in general?
ToaKraka
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2d ago
California-based Castelion, which makes solid rocket motors and hypersonic weapons, turned to the auto industry for sophisticated electronic components used in advanced driver-assistance systems and electric vehicles to help steer its missiles to targets. These auto-industry processors, known as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, can be bought at a tenth of the cost and obtained six times faster than comparable versions used in the aerospace industry, Chief Operating Officer Sean Pitt said.
The oil and gas industry has been another important supply-chain resource for Castelion. Rather than sourcing high-pressure metal tubes from aerospace vendors with long lead times, the company is using high-temperature, stress-rated precision machined tubes used to help crack open rocks in the fracking process.
These tubes are built to handle heat and pressure levels comparable to what is required for a rocket motor, but are sold by far more vendors, at lower prices, than the aerospace-industry equivalent, Pitt said. Castelion, recently valued at nearly $3 billion, has won big Pentagon contracts to make over 500 hypersonic weapons.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
I will post a full summary of this case in the next Friday Fun Thread.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
Vinoverski v. Sullivan, in which the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that municipalities could regulate short-term rentals under the zoning code (I made that case up so don't go looking for it)
Link to a non-made-up Pennsylvania decision on the topic for people who want it
That's another thing I liked about the movie. There are parts where she's, like, creeping in the shadows and her face looks fucked up, but if you look at behind-the-scenes photos it's just, like, super simple makeup on her. It's just the way they've lit it, keeping her in shadow.
They play the footage backwards to give her a very unnatural movement at several points in the film.
There's one shot where she was clearly walking forwards and they played it backwards, but her voice was speaking forward—they didn't, like, reverse her voice or anything.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
The Motte automatically changes the link to Old Reddit
It does that only if you've enabled that setting in your personal account options (under the "Content" tab).
ToaKraka
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2d ago
Sorry, I got confused betwen the nutrition label (12 ounces or 355 milliliters per serving) and the bottle label (1.25 liters or 42.2 ounces).
An example supermarket webpage lists 1.25-liter (<del>12</del><ins>42.2</ins>-ounce) bottles of soda for sale.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
Direct quote from the Reuters Weekend Briefing newsletter for today:
I'm in your base and I'm taking your chips
Parts and labor: Defense startups are raiding the automotive and fracking industries for parts to accelerate weapons development. The US stopped Polestar, majority owned by China's Geely Holding, from selling new models domestically. Owners want to know who's going to service their cars.
AI: Argentina's president announced a congressional bill to create non-human corporations run by artificial intelligence. Look behind the curtain and you'll find they would need humans anyway, experts say.
The heading is a reference to a 20-year-old meme.
Large illustrations showing the entire character (1 2 3) are a lot more useful for judging this question than a small profile image showing only the face. Her face is drawn in an extremely weird style that has been satirized for decades, but the rest of her seems fairly adult.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
Unfortunately, I think Jean Raspail badly needed an editor willing to make severe cuts. I found the prose a bit stilted at times, which I can only partly ascribe to a loss in translation.
If you're reading the old pirated version, note that a new translation was published, based on a later edition of Raspail's original text. (It recently caused a stir when Amazon temporarily removed its print version from sale.) Here are the first and last paragraphs of its "Note on the Translation".
This translation is based on the final, 2011 edition of Le Camp des Saints and differs in important respects from its predecessor, Norman Shapiro's 1975 translation for Charles Scribner's and Sons. Between the first and third editions of the novel (1973 and 1985, respectively), Jean Raspail revised his text in ways both large and small. Many of these revisions were of an "editorial" nature: the elimination of passages of unnecessary or redundant characterization, a greater willingness to forgo lengthy development and leave matters already suggested to the imagination, the suppression of some asides particularly likely to draw the censor's ire, and so on.
Finally, the two translations differ in point of the temperament of their respective translators. Shapiro, who died in 2020, was a brilliant and accomplished translator of Belle Époque theater and poetry and a master of the inspired paraphrase. This latter trait, elsewhere a virtue, sometimes led him to improvise in ways that are not, in my view, authorized by the source. I [Ethan Rundell] have preferred a more sober approach, attempting as far as possible to render Raspail in English as he would have written in that language himself. It is his voice, I hope, that will prevail, not mine.
I keep my controller balanced on top of my uninterruptible power supply (under my desk) rather than on my desk.
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