rpenner1886 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (95)

• On the post: Does Elon Grok The Trademark Issues With ‘Grok’? AI Chip Company Groq Does

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 15 Nov, 2023 @ 05:14pm

  My editor says...

  I don't know what the Martin Brooks, you are talking about. — JJJ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/characters/nm0112138

• On the post: Eighth Circuit Says Cops Can Come With Probable Cause For An Arrest AFTER They’ve Already Arrested Someone

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 16 Sep, 2023 @ 02:51am

  Poe's Law, actually. Or I am saying that I am a time traveller, in violation of many regulations and accords.

• On the post: Eighth Circuit Says Cops Can Come With Probable Cause For An Arrest AFTER They’ve Already Arrested Someone

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2023 @ 08:44pm

  Everything changed now (statement of historical fact from future historians)

  The 8th circuit has just endorsed the practice of authorizing time travel expositions to run surveillance on crimes and their antecedents so that prosecutors may fully understand the persons and events leading up to any crime. This will also end Brady disclosures since you can't even argue the witnesses saw your evil twin commit the crime if the prosecutors have a video record of you from birth to committing the crime to arrest and arraignment. Sadly, this does not eliminate crime, but it does introduce new philosophical approaches to criminology. For example, is it possible to commit a crime which is so victimless that no one's life is touched by the event. Can you, for example, desecrate a mathematical theorem in the privacy of your head?

• On the post: Elon Starts Bribing His Biggest Fans As He Admits The Company Is Still Burning Cash (Despite His Earlier Claims To The Contrary)

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 17 Jul, 2023 @ 10:44am

  Parasocial Cronyism

  Tweet from July 14 Elon: (explaining payout amounts) It’s not exactly per impression. What matters is how many ads were shown to other verified users. Only verified users count, as it is otherwise trivial to game the system with bots. Montana Skeptic: As another poster here (whom I don't want to expose to shadow-banning points out, Twitter is not just a scam; it's a Multi-Level Marketing scheme. RP: MLM scams cling to the facade of legality because they work by formula. There is no formula here, just parasocial cronyism.

• On the post: Something Stupid This Way Comes: Twitter Threatens To Sue Meta Over Threads, Because Meta Hired Some Of The People Elon Fired

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2023 @ 08:53pm

  ni ma is "you mother" -- the pedantic literal translation of "your mother" is "ni de ma" where de is the possessive marker. But it may be that the possessive marker may be omitted without loss of meaning. 你的媽 / 妳的媽 (Taiwan, depending on whether "you" is male/female) 你的妈 (Mainland China)

• On the post: Twitter Reveals That ‘X Holdings Corp.’ Has 95 Shareholders… That It Would Like To Keep Secret

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 12 Jun, 2023 @ 04:09pm

  Akiva M. Cohen's affidavit 37.1

  1. I am a real lawyer with real facts.
  2. X Holdings has disrespected us and the court rules by failing to consult or even respond.
  3. 48 hours after filing the motion, they demanded of us to defend basic court procedure wrt motion practice. We have receipts.
  4. Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud of Saudi Arabia has already publicly acknowledged his status as owner. We have receipts.
  5. See also a copy of Best Odds Corp. v. iBus Media Ltd, to see it does not support X Holdings ideas about secrecy.

• On the post: Twitter Reveals That ‘X Holdings Corp.’ Has 95 Shareholders… That It Would Like To Keep Secret

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 12 Jun, 2023 @ 03:59pm

  Update²

  X Holdings has filed a reply to the response. Hilariously, they cite no law at all and want to get opposing counsel bound not to release names.

  • They do not address failure to consult.
  • They do not address public access to court records.
  • They do not address that some owners seem to be public already.

  Doc 38 on CourtListener.com

• On the post: Twitter Reveals That ‘X Holdings Corp.’ Has 95 Shareholders… That It Would Like To Keep Secret

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 12 Jun, 2023 @ 12:11pm

  Dhruv Batura's affidavit 36.1

  Dhruv Batura penned a very short affidavit (36.1) for the motion to seal. Here is a short paraphrase of each of the numbered paragraphs:

  1. Elon trusts me to know who owns it.
  2. Elon doesn't want people to know.
  3. The owners made us swear.
  4. If the public knew who owned it, they would turn on us.
  5. Only the judge can save us from torches and pitchforks.

  Original on Birdsite, with link to affidavit

• On the post: Perhaps GPT Is Not Ready For The Supreme Court

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 30 May, 2023 @ 10:56am

  Proposed Sanctions

  Levidow, Levidow & Oberman: Order to determine the earliest possible date in which Schwartz came into contact with generative AI and to contact every court and opposing counsel in which he was then or subsequently involved warning that some case quotes and citations may be bogus, and for such notices to apply to any new cases until further order of this court. Levidow, Levidow & Oberman: Order to provide mandatory training on doing legal research on a computer and the nature of generative AI to act like a confidence artist. LoDuca: 100 hours CLE on Ethics, Candor, Supervising a Law Office Schwartz: 100 hours CLE on Ethics, Candor, Supervising a Law Office Schwartz: 100 hours CLE on Use of a computer in a law office Schwartz: 100 hours CLE on Pitfalls of Generative AI LoDuca & Schwartz: Only in-person CLE with a notarized affidavit of instructor certifying dates and times of the instruction and a detailed curriculum will be satisfactory. Too much or not enough?

• On the post: The Mouse Strikes Back: Disney Sues DeSantis For 1st Amendment Violations

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 28 Apr, 2023 @ 10:23am

  Disney's complaint cites Ron DeSantis' memoir to show his intent to use government power to retaliate for their mild criticism on a matter of public policy.

• On the post: Stability AI And DeviantArt Ask Court To Dismiss Artists’ Silly Lawsuit Against Generative Art

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2023 @ 11:32am

  Well, also the 5th and 8th circuits have been heard from on this point.

• On the post: Stability AI And DeviantArt Ask Court To Dismiss Artists’ Silly Lawsuit Against Generative Art

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2023 @ 04:25am

  But mooooom, obeying the law is hard!

  To the contrary, the fact that there is no image to simply remove from a database of images in the model or identifiable parameter change which would reverse the effect of the image having been part of the training set speaks to the defendant's argument that no subset of the model is in any way substantially similar to the specific input image and thus by Ninth Circuit law, the model is not infringing the copyright of any particular image. Litchfield v. Spielberg, 736 F.2d 1352, 1357 (9th Cir. 1984)

  a work is not derivative unless it has been substantially copied from the prior work. We have stated that "[a] work will be considered a derivative work only if it would be considered an infringing work if the material which it has derived from a prior work had been taken without the consent of a copyright proprietor of such prior work." To prove infringement, one must show substantial similarity.

  Vault Corp v. Quaid Software Ltd., 847 F.2d 255, 267 (5th Cir. 1988)

  To constitute a derivative work, "the infringing work must incorporate in some form a portion of the copyrighted work." .... In addition, the infringing work must be substantially similar to the copyrighted work.

  Becton, Dickinson & Co. v. Cytek Biosciences Inc., 2020 WL 1877707 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 15, 2020)

  Where a complaint fails to identify "the facts and circumstances surrounding the alleged breach, . . . it fails to give fair notice to defendants of the actions of which they are accused, in direct contravention of Rule 8."

  Carlini v. Paramount Pictures Corp., No. 21-55213 (9th Cir. Mar. 2, 2022)

  To allege copyright infringement, Carlini must sufficiently allege unlawful appropriation and copying. .... Unlawful appropriation requires a plaintiff to allege that there are "substantial similarities" between the two works. .... The district court correctly concluded that Carlini failed to allege unlawful appropriation.

• On the post: Stability AI And DeviantArt Ask Court To Dismiss Artists’ Silly Lawsuit Against Generative Art

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 21 Apr, 2023 @ 02:28pm

  Why is it not a Collage?

  A collage is assembled from images or fragments of images. But the trained model has 890 million representations of floating point numbers (parameters). There is nothing to be "cut out" if you want to remove a specific image from the model because parameters are like more like sliders on a audio mixing console than image files. If you want to remove a particular image from the inputs used to train a model. You need to remove it from the training set and train the model completely from scratch. Because of the self-organizing nature of the model, it would not be possible to equate model parameters in the old and new models, so you wouldn't be able to meaningfully point to a difference from removing the image. Tellingly, the plaintiffs said that there were no instances of image duplication by the model, which is a function of there not being an image database and the use of the model is not analogous to e collage. (Also, collages generally don't seem to be infringing derivative works, so this is not a great line of legal reasoning aside from its divorce from facts.) ———— Stable Diffusion (as used by StabilityAI) has been trained on billions of images, each of which typically requires over a million bits (3×8×512×512 > 10⁶) to "store" in a way where you can recreate the image. So if Stable Diffusion were copying the images, it would need at least a quadrillion bits for reasonable quality. (10⁹×10⁶=10¹⁵) Instead, Stable Diffusion is conditioning less than one billion parameters, so the whole model needs less than 64 billion bits. (6.4×10¹⁰) That's a ratio of less than 0.000064 model bits stored per input bit. Is it likely that it is storing 0.0064% of every image? No. It is conditioning the model to distinguish between "art" and "noise" and to be able to make input noise look more like the concepts of art that it has been trained on. One can imagine all possible 512×512 images lying in a 786432-dimensional space with the "art" images clustered together in a hard-to-imagine shape. The 890 million parameters of the model are about this shape and how parts of it are associated with certain keywords, not about recreating any particular image. https://mathstodon.xyz/@Arpie4Math/110223907728786036 The plaintiffs' lawyers have arranged for a late January media blitz of misinformation about the technology with a companion website that boosts the plaintiffs' story: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/ But there is what reads to me as a more mathematically-informed view suggesting that plaintiffs are using only reasoning by analogy with little foundation in what the computer is doing: http://www.stablediffusionfrivolous.com/ There is no database of images. The rare toy example of overfitting ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188 ) does not mean an example of near-duplication proves that Stable Diffusion is some form of lossy image compression. https://mathstodon.xyz/@Arpie4Math/110157719487741300 To my mind, the act of web scraping itself seems harmless as it is literally necessary for the operation of libraries and search engines. Generating images in the style of artist X seems beyond the realm of copyright law. And the claim that generated images are collages created in violation of copyright seems to be deficient in the facts. Specifically, nothing that StabilityAI does seems to be akin to maintaining a library of art and creating collages from it. https://mathstodon.xyz/@Arpie4Math/110154844297782956

• On the post: Court Orders Twitter Reveal Anonymous Tweeter Over Sketchy Copyright Claim, Because That Tweeter Won't Show Up In Court

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 23 Jan, 2022 @ 12:37pm

  Re: The "Appeal"

  For its part, Bayside never articulated any harm it would suffer should the subpoena be quashed. It has offered no facts (evidenced or otherwise) about who Bayside is, what Bayside does, the impact of these alleged infringements on whatever business it is that Bayside conducts, or the importance of pursuing a copyright claim against an anonymous account on Twitter that, until this litigation, had only a few hundred followers. Twitter suggests that Bayside’s silence here is telling. As Twitter articulates above, this subpoena is not a mere steppingstone on the path to an infringement action. The subpoena is itself an end, sending a message to would-be critics that mocking Brian Sheth is a costly endeavor.

  From Docket 22.

• On the post: Court Orders Twitter Reveal Anonymous Tweeter Over Sketchy Copyright Claim, Because That Tweeter Won't Show Up In Court

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 23 Jan, 2022 @ 12:26pm

  Re: Re: Re: Who owns the copyright?

  Popcorn indeed, as Twitter asked for and got a rehearing under a new judge with a schedule inviting amici.

• On the post: Court Orders Twitter Reveal Anonymous Tweeter Over Sketchy Copyright Claim, Because That Tweeter Won't Show Up In Court

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 23 Jan, 2022 @ 12:24pm

  The "Appeal"

  On January 7, filed a motion for reconsideration of the order and asking for a new judge. They listed five main points of disagreement with the order by the Magistrate Judge:

  1. The Magistrate Judge erred in issuing an order on a dispositive matter instead of a Report and Recommendation.
  2. The Magistrate Judge erred in holding that the burden of establishing fair use in this context is on the anonymous user targeted by the subpoena at issue.
  3. The Magistrate Judge erred in failing to recognize that the anonymous user’s Tweets constituted fair use.
  4. The Magistrate Judge erred in holding that it could not engage in the balancing of harms required by the prevailing First Amendment standard without evidence submitted by @CallMeMoneyBags.
  5. The Magistrate Judge erred in its balancing of harms required by the prevailing First Amendment standard.

  In re DMCA § 512(h) Subpoena to Twitter, Inc. (4:20-mc-80214), Docket 22 On January 11, the same Magistrate Judge who signed the December 29 order agreed to the reassignment and rehearing.
  Docket 23 And now there is a call for additional amici briefs as the schedule for going forward is as follows: • February 18, 2022 – Amicus briefs in support of Twitter due;
  • March 11, 2022 – Bayside’s response / opposition due;
  • April 4, 2022 – Amicus briefs in support of Bayside or amicus briefs that do not support either party due;
  • April 25, 2022 – Twitter’s reply due;
  • May 12, 2022 – Hearing. Docket 26

• On the post: If MLB Thought Its Website Shenanigans Would Intimidate MLB Players, That Plan Has Backfired

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 04 Dec, 2021 @ 09:02am

  Re: Oh, no!

  Each team has about 26 major league players and 116 minor league players (of which 14 are subject to collective bargaining on the "40 man roster"), and a fourteen year contract. There is no job security or actions a player can take to ensure promotion. About 71.8% earn between $8k-12k a year (April-August).
  About 9.9% earn between $12k-$563k a year
  About 9.2% earn between $563.5k-1100k a year
  About 6.7% earn between $1100k-$10000k a year
  About 1.9% earn between $10000k-25000k a year
  About 0.5% earn over $25000k a year. https://en.as.com/en/2021/10/08/mlb/1633685987_178363.html
  https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/32172108/can-union-fix-minor-leaguers-say-poverty-level-pay-poor-housing-driving-mental-health-crisis

• On the post: Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, And A Bunch Of Other Trump-Loving Lawyers Hit With Sanctions In Michigan

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 23 Sep, 2021 @ 09:54am

  Re: 2nd,3rd OBJECTIONS: TOO MANY SANCTIONS

  Law and Crime covered this in a story entitled Sidney Powell and Others Want to Pay Less Than $44,000 in Sanctions After Trying to Overturn the 2020 Election It refers to all three objections. I like this part:

  Powell, et al. told Judge Linda V. Parker that the focus of monetary sanctions should be to compensate the government — not to punish them for filing the case. But they also admitted that the law allows punitive sanctions in certain situations:

• On the post: Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, And A Bunch Of Other Trump-Loving Lawyers Hit With Sanctions In Michigan

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 23 Sep, 2021 @ 09:50am

  2nd,3rd OBJECTIONS: TOO MANY SANCTIONS

  In Doc 176 Emily Newman also objects to the City of Detroit's lawyers billing for appellate costs. We also get the novel argument that the number of hours the City's lawyers bill for should not exceed the 57.8 hours which the Michigan state attorneys used. And then there's the novel argument that hours spent arguing for sanctions that were awarded were not hours spent toward defending a case.

  The sanctions proceedings were not necessary to or a part of the defense of this action. Therefore, time and fees incurred in the sanctions proceedings are not recoverable under the language of the August 25, 2021 Opinion.

  Further, Newman finds fault that the annotations and retractions carving up the billing record into three categories of asked-for reimbursement was made “done well after the activity occurred.” as will happen when a billing practice suitable for one purpose is repurposed to a court order which happened months laser. In Doc 177 L. Lin Wood's attorney also argues against paying for the appeal and the sanctions. Case law is cited that “only those fees which directly resulted from the sanctionable conduct’ should be awarded under Rule 11. But the court has other authority to levy fees. So when addressing the courts other authority, the requested reimbursement wrong under Rule 11 is twisted to be “punitive” and thus ill advised. ha ha! Lin Wood's attorney tries to argue against the rate, but adopts "median" or "average" as the only "reasonable" rate. Clearly, that is not a reasonable position informed by the experts in statistics. And so Lin Wood's demand is to limit payment to the City of Detroit to what the state lawyers billed as state employees despite the same economic survey clearly pointing out the private/public wage gap.

• On the post: 8th Circuit's Bizarre Ruling In Devin Nunes' SLAPP Suit Against Reporter Ryan Lizza

  

  rpenner1886 ( profile ), 22 Sep, 2021 @ 10:57pm

  Re: Re: Farm Case - Enter the Volokh

  Press converge on the case continues to ramp up and now there are requests for transcripts to be released. Status Conference tomorrow at 10 AM. Nunes v. Lizza (5:20-cv-04003) District Court, N.D. Iowa

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