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The United States Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal of a lower-court ruling that the U. S. Copyright Office's understanding that copyright only applies to works by human authors. The Court had also rejected another appeal, by the same plaintiff, of a ruling that affirmed a similar policy on the part the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office.

I'm not a intellectual property lawyer, but it appears to me that between these rulings, items created by generative automation, and genuine artificial intelligence, if/when it comes along, are not eligible for intellectual property protection. In the case of most audio/visual media, I'm not sure that this will really move the needle all that much, at least at the start. But in the case of inventions, it could have repercussions. If part of the promise of automation is that it could create new medically-useful drugs, or create other products, the inability to patent them may be a strike against broad adoption of the technology for such purposes. Given this, it seems that large companies will take this lying down. I doubt that they'll attempt to directly re-litigate these sorts of cases; it's highly unlikely that this, or a future Supreme Court would reverse itself on this, simply because it was Pfizer Inc. bringing the appeal, unless things had gotten to a point where the Court simply stopped caring if the public felt that it was openly in the pocket of Big Business.

And so that leaves Congress. If corporations are going to want to outsource their research and development to some datacenter somewhere, and still be able to claim a government-enforced monopoly on whatever it is said datacenter comes up with, intellectual property law will have to change. And, regardless of what individual Representatives and Senators might say, Congress tends to be very willing to openly ally itself with business interests, and then make the case that they're doing it all in the name of helping the general public.

Of course, it's unlikely that the overall business community will be aligned on this; there are likely to be some sectors who feel that computer creations having to be either closely-guarded trade secrets or effectively in the public domain works in their favor, and so I can see lobbyists working both sides of the issue here.

But (as there always is), there's a simpler way, perhaps to deal with such issues: lying. I wouldn't put it past anyone, especially not someone who feels that they've created an amazing new advance in some field or another, to simply claim that a person invented it. The same goes for artwork, for that matter; launder something through Photoshop enough times, and would it be possible to determine that the original had been created by a machine? In this way, I can see detection of automation-generated outputs becoming a big business, if for no other reason than the amount of money that could be on the line.

There's also another angle: If the Copyright and Patent/Trademark Offices won't grant protection to the outputs or autonomous automation, that's another obstacle to the idea of a one-person company with a billion-dollar valuation. Because if they can't copyright or patent the products or services that the agents produce; they'd have to be in business that's extremely difficult to copy.

Picking Sides

Over the weekend, there was an Ipsos/Reuters poll that covered the ongoing attacks on Iran and the Trump Administration's use of force in general. While the headline proclaimed "Just one in four Americans say they back US strikes on Iran, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds," for myself I wonder if that was what was actually being measured. Consider the results that drove the headline:

While the Democrats booed louder than the Republicans cheered, there's still a pretty clear partisan divide in the numbers, to the point where I wonder if this is really a poll about partisan identity. I'm pretty sure that Ipsos/Reuters weighted their results to better align with what they understand the current partisan percentages to be, so it's unlikely that the percentages given reflect the raw numbers. It is interesting, however, where the numbers for partisans do and do not align with the "Other" category at the bottom of the graph. It's also interesting that, in terms of the "No" choice, that the numbers for the "Other" category roughly align for those for all survey participants, given the broader variance in the other two options.

Overall, the Democratic-identified participants come across as the most reflexively partisan, in the sense that they are more likely to disapprove than Republicans are to approve, less likely to approve than Republicans disapprove and less likely to be undecided about the matter. This could give Republican office-seekers heartburn come this year's election season, as the Democratic coalition tends to have more high-propensity voters, as I understand it. If that holds, and the lower-propensity voters who would otherwise lean Republican stay home, the Democrats may find that they have enough new seats in Congress to actually change things, at least on some level.
 

Salesmanship

Part of me wants to ask: If generative automation is so great and wonderful, why are there so many messages that seem to attempt to threaten people into using it? Like the following example:

taste, domain experience and relationships are still incredibly valuable but refusing to use AI for the tactics and execution part of your job is a one way trip to being unemployed 

plan accordingly

But I suspect that I know the answer to that.

If I'm going to pitch generative automation to you as a positive thing in your life, something that can solve problems for you, I have to actually know you well enough to have an understanding of what your problems are. It doesn't do me any good to say that you'll be able to write 10x more code, if you don't write any code for a living.

But a claim that not using generative automation for tactics and execution will result in unemployment doesn't require me to really know much about the actual job someone is doing. There are a lot of jobs that have some tactical and executive functions attached to them. So the message of "use automation, or else!" can seem more broadly applicable.

This trade in anxiety doesn't serve anyone well, because its primary purpose comes across as setting people up to be blameworthy for any eventual misfortune: "Oh, you can't find another job that will support you and your family? Should have leaned into AI harder!" And what good does this do anyone?

In the end, it's an odd message: "This is critically important to you, but not so important that I feel any need to offer affirmative guidance on how to do it." And in this, it feels like American individualism talking, in that it doesn't care if anyone else succeeds. Which may be the point all along.

Another Go-Round

There was a protest today; big surprise. I didn't see it take place... I only caught some of the preparation for it, a long line of cars, formed up on the shoulder of Interstate 405 North, bedecked with flags. There were a number of Iranian flags, and a fairly good representation of the Stars and Stripes, too. What was somewhat surprising was the number of Israeli flags that the protestors had brought along. Traffic was flowing too quickly (as in, it wasn't stop-and-go) for me to risk taking a picture. I'd hoped to get a snapshot when I came back the other way, but by then, the protest had moved from its staging area to wherever it was actually planned for.

I'm starting to have the same thought whenever I see a large protest against the Administration around here: This place is too Blue for anyone to care. Neither the President nor Republicans in Congress are going to be moved by a protest in the Seattle suburbs. It's much more likely that they'll regard it as convenient fundraising fodder, casting the protestors as anti-American supporters of the government of Iran.

I understand why dialog with Red America isn't happening, but I'm still of the opinion that it's the most fruitful path forward. Which, perhaps, isn't saying much. It's possible that the United States is too far gone for a coming together to even be possible, let alone change anything. There's too much invested in the fighting, and each side sees backing away from that investment as a crippling loss.

News reports claim that the Supreme Leader of Iran has been killed in the strikes, and we'll see how things materialize in the wake of that. It's unlikely that the United States will be able to find someone high up in government who will agree to work with Washington, as happened in Venezuela. But it's just as unlikely that Iran would fare much better than Iraq did, in the event of an invasion. So the best case scenario may be an internal uprising within Iran. We'll see if it comes to pass.

Remembrance

A pair of firefighters cleaning up the remnants of a van fire, down in Kent last Sunday. I would say that it's unusual events like this that prompt me to carry a camera with me pretty much whenever I leave the house, but in looking at this picture to evaluate whether I was going to post it, I noticed the fact that the firefighter's names are on the bottoms of their coats, which had completely gotten by me when I was actually at the scene.

And that brings me to another of the reasons that I carry a camera; I'm not as observant as I would like to be. Perhaps, if I hadn't been viewing the world through the small screen on the back of the camera body, I would have noticed the names, but I wouldn't place any money on that. And I'd forgotten about the Starbucks across the street until I looked at the photographs again.

I wonder how much of the world around me has slipped through my fingers, due to inattention or a memory that, sometimes, seems barely worthy of the name. And in that sense, the camera is a net, that backstops my fallible senses.