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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 7h

There isn't one I have been able to think of, and that's (hopefully) not from a lack of understanding of the problem. Or a lack of effort, although I'll concede that there's definitely a difference between full-time research and extracurricular research.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 7h

Twitter doesn't own the content of Tweets. That's not what they are selling.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 7h

Yeah. That's really hard. It's "fools rush in" hard. Because we don't need solutions to this problem, we need solutions to this problem that don't make everything worse for everyone in the long term.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 7h

Because until very recently, the public weren't really directly affected by copyright - weren't the subjects of the legislation - and creators interests sufficiently overlapped with publishers for most real world purposes. Thing is, fixing stuff while preserving the purpose of copyright?

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 7h

Specifically, it was in response to a dispute between London and Edinburgh publishers. All major copyright statutes since have generally been similar - they exist to fix issues within industries. And that's not innately bad! In fact, it worked well for nearly 300 years!

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 7h

Part of the problem - a big part - is that copyright has never really been anything other than a form of industrial regulation for the creative industries. That goes back to the Statute of Anne in 1710, which came about largely because of a need to deal with Act of Union consequences.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 7h

I was going to write an article about why the potential for AI to create market substitutes means that training isn't fair use. But I can't. The process of doing the research and working through the logic changed my mind.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 11h

Because there are things that many authors don't like, and would often refuse to license (like negative reviews), but have huge social value.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 11h

I strongly disagree. The license model that people have gotten used to is a dangerous abomination. Authors should be able to sell their works and make reasonable income. They should not have the right to dictate uses. In fact, that principle is central to fair use.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 12h

It can. But on an individual social media user post level, the realistic value, rounded to the nearest hundredth of a cent, is zero cents.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 12h

And the content only has value on bulk. The individual posts and accounts have minimal value, if any.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 12h

Not really. The deals with the social media companies aren't deals for licenses to the user content (for the most part). They typically can't be; platforms can't sell greater rights than they possess. The deals are for access to the content.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 12h

Yeah. The needle was threaded incredibly well in that ruling.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 12h

Only if you tried to sell it or widely distribute it. At least as a practical matter.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 12h

Correct. And stealing the originals you train on can be infringement even if the use you subsequently put them to is not infringing.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 12h

Thing is, that basically kills discovery, which is a different way of killing creatives.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 12h

They probably can't, at least for text. The argument that it's fair use to train on text is fairly strong, the best efforts of the AI bros notwithstanding. That's not to say that all training is fair use, but the market substitution argument gets weaker the less market there is for the original.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 12h

That's not accurate. The ND license itself has, in effect, a carve-out for fair use.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 13h

It's not really separable. All of it affects all of it.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 14h

Doing it that way makes both a finding of substantial similarity and a finding of infringement all but certain. And it ignores that the headnotes for a case are created together, as a set.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 14h

Atomizing it down to individual headnotes radically changes both the substantial similarity and fair use analysis. What Bibas did was, in effect, ignore the bits that either weren't taken or were too unoriginal for even him, and compared what was taken only against what was taken.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 15h

I can see an argument for viewing the set of headnotes that go with a case as a work. Individual headnotes, no.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 15h

That makes it worse, not better. It's endorsing, in effect, a microworks approach in which each headnote is a separate work. Judicial decisions along this path have been an increasing problem for decades. It's atrocious copyright policy, and entirely judicially imposed.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 15h

That's still a very limited set - the doctrine isn't supposed to be limited to cases where there are only one or two. It's also critical to keep in mind in this context that you can infringe without literally copying - and the variants will all be substantially similar to each other.

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Meredith Rose (from the grave) 👻 @mrose.ink · 15h

That’s posting, baby

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 15h

Even there, it can be iffy. If the original work is something like Trek or LotR, there's a good chance that even an OCwon't be enough - everything about the character will be so wrapped up in the universe that you can't pull out the character without also pulling out protected parts of the original.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 15h

More or less. Big caveat: a lot of fic is so thoroughly intertwined with the original that it's effectively inseparable. Probably that would leave nothing sufficiently original to receive independent protection.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 16h

there's basically no commercial value to these posts, which immediately pushes one of the two most important fair use factors strongly toward fair use.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 16h

This is where it gets really tricky. Virtually everything anyone writes is copyright protected - in theory. But a lot of it is more susceptible to fair use than commercial stuff. For example, training on these replies that I'm writing probably implicates my copyright. BUT...

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 18h

Pretty easily, actually. The law is generally much more pragmatic and much less formalistic than many people think.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 18h

Your brain does not make copies. Computer learning does. And, yes, I am aware that people claim otherwise. Those people are some combination of unaware how the tech works, unaware of how the law works, disingenuous, duplicitous, and/or dishonest.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Yes, but probably not in 27 - likely work conflict.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Absolute pleasure to meet you, too - we totally have to do this again.

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Cathexis Zero @cathexiszero.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

One of the best things about #Lvo2026 was getting to meet two luminaries of #Lawsky: @questauthority.bsky.social and @goobermunch.bsky.social!

Thomas Neville as his gorgeously painted T'au at LVO 2026: The Long War Doubles.

Mike "The Questionable Authority" before he pilots his Guard List at LVO 2026: The Long War Doubles.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Game 1: 42-24. The guard were not on the 42 side.

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Chance the Lawyer @chancethelawyer.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

do not be the person who fucks about this

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Raccoon Fink (aka Benjamin Reed) @rangerrick.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Sir that's a maxi

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Will "scifantasy" Frank @scifantasy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It always surprises and honors me when I get Tuckerized...thank you, @tkingfisher.com.

"Lazlo handed him his first law book--Introduction to Legal Procedures, Twelfth Edition, by Frankwilliam and Kiva--and"

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That's...sub-ideal, at least in his current apparent condition.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I'm curious to see how it performs over different primers. It may be - both for better and worse - that the primer color is largely irrelevant.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

...with the new GW Tone Pro paints yesterday. I'm not sure how I feel about them yet, but the coverage is genuinely amazing. It's not always truly one-coat in all circumstances, but I also watched someone get a very good yellow with 2 coats over black primer.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I'm taking a 2-hour class later today where the theme of the class is basically painting different brands and formulations of mini paint on a cube so that we can get a feel for how different brands differ in application. Separately, since I doubt it will be in the class - I had a brief hands-on...

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Andy Clark of the living dead @andycruns.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

One of the tasks on Taskmaster last night had the contestants trying to hide with big red arrows on top of their heads and now I can't unsee it.

Custodes minis in gold armour with big red plumes on top of their big gold helmets

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