While I am glad this ruling went this way, why’d she have diss Data to make it?
To support her vision of some future technology, Millett pointed to the Star Trek: The Next Generation character Data, a sentient android who memorably wrote a poem to his cat, which is jokingly mocked by other characters in a 1992 episode called “Schisms.” StarTrek.com posted the full poem, but here’s a taste:
"Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, / An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature; / Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses / Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations, / A singular development of cat communications / That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection / For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection."
Data “might be worse than ChatGPT at writing poetry,” but his “intelligence is comparable to that of a human being,” Millet wrote. If AI ever reached Data levels of intelligence, Millett suggested that copyright laws could shift to grant copyrights to AI-authored works. But that time is apparently not now.
I think Data would be smart enough to realize that copyright is Ferengi BS and wouldn’t want to copyright his works
Although he’s apparently not smart enough to know what obviate means.
This one’s easily explained away in-universe though-- not enough people knew the original definition so it shifted meaning in 3 centuries.
Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to peacefully assemble. These are pretty important, foundational personal liberties, right? In the United States, these are found in the first amendment of the Constitution. The first afterthought.
The basis of copyright, patent and trademark isn’t found in the first amendment. Or the second, or the third. It is nowhere to be found in the Bill Of Rights. No, intellectual property is not an afterthought, it’s found in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
This is a very wise compromise.
It recognizes that innovation is iterative. No one invents a steam engine by himself from nothing, cave men spent millions of years proving that. Inventors build on the knowledge that has been passed down to them, and then they add their one contribution to it. Sometimes that little contribution makes a big difference, most of the time it doesn’t. So to progress, we need intellectual work to be public. If you allow creative people to claim exclusive rights to their work in perpetuity, society grows static because no one can invent anything new, everyone makes the same old crap.
It also recognizes that life is expensive. If you want people to rise above barely subsisting and invent something, you’ve got to make it worth it to them. Why bother doing the research, spend the time tinkering in the shed, if it’s just going to be taken from you? This is how you end up with Soviet Russia, a nation that generated excellent scientists and absolutely no technology of its own.
The solution is “for limited times.” It’s yours for awhile, then it’s everyone’s. It took Big They a couple hundred years to break it, too.
While I’m completely agreed, the amendments came after the rest, hence the name. :)
Yes, hence I referred to them as “afterthoughts.” James Madison and company drew up the articles (he didn’t create it alone but I think it’s in his handwriting), it wouldn’t pass as-is without ten amendments, it passed, more or less the current federal government was in place, and since 17 (very nearly 18) more have been added for a modern total of 27, two of them extremely stupid.
Life is only expensive under capitalism, humans are the only species who pay rent to live on Earth. The whole point of Star Trek is basically showing that people will explore the galaxy simply for a love of science and knowledge, and that personal sacrifice is worthwhile for advancing these.
Walk out into the wilderness and make it on your own out there, tell me how much manpower you have to spend keeping your core temperature above 90F. It takes a lot of effort keeping a human alive; by yourself you just can’t afford things like electricity, sewage treatment and antibiotics. We only have those things because of the economies of scale that society allows.
Yeah, capitalism is a bit out of control at the moment, but…let’s kill all the billionaires, kill their families, kill their heirs, kill the stockholders. Let me pull on my swastika and my toothbrush mustache for a minute and go full on Auschwitz on “greedy people.” That the Musks and Gateses and Buffets of the world must be genetically greedy, so we must genocide that out of the population. And we get it done. Every CEO, every heiress, every reality TV producer, every lobbyist, every inside trader in congress, every warden of a for-profit prison, dead to the last fetus.
Now what?
You want to live in a house? Okay. At some point someone built that house. Someone walked out into a forest and cut down the trees that made the boards. And/or dug the clay that made the bricks or whatever. Somebody mined the iron ore that someone else smelted into large gauge wire that someone else made into nails that someone else pounded into the boards to hold them together.
We’re still in the 21st century, there are people on this planet lighting their homes with kerosene lanterns. We still have coal miners, fishermen and loggers. Farming has always been a difficult, miserable thing to do, we’ve just mechanized it to the point that it’s difficult and miserable on a relatively small number of people. Those people probably aren’t going to keep farming at industrial scale for the fun of it.
Star Trek, especially in the TNG era, shows us a very optimistic idea of what life would be like if we had not only nuclear fission power, not only nuclear fusion power, but antimatter power. The technology to travel faster than the speed of light and an energy source capable of fueling it, plus such marvels as the food replicator and matter transporter. The United Federation of Planets is a post-scarcity society. We aren’t. Somewhere on this planet right now is a man hosing blended human shit off of an impeller in a stopped sewage treatment plant so he can replace the leaking shaft seal. We use a man with a hose for this because it’s the best technology we have for the job. We do the job at all because if we don’t, it’ll cause a few million cases of cholera. Who do you think should pay for the hose that guy is using?
We have those things because people do the required labour, economies of scale make it require less labour, but one can’t afford it because it’s privatized. Why wouldn’t people do this simply for the benefit of humanity?
What’s with the disgusting eugenics? Just expropriate their wealth.
Yeah people built a lot of houses, so let’s use them? And build more if needed?
Right, so let’s distribute the burden of this labour instead of having a small number of people do it for a lifetime.
Since the labour protects all of us, all of us collectively. Again, for the benefit of humanity and let’s distribute the burden.
Because the good of humanity doesn’t heat the house or put dinner on the table. Never has and never will. If you were a human, you’d have learned that from experience.
Some of that is exaggeration for comedic effect. “Okay, thanos snap every rich person everywhere is gone, we’ve solved greed. Now what?” But also…have we ever tried exterminating the rich? I think I’ve got a hypothesis here worth testing.
Who gets to make the decisions as to how?
Well now we’re getting into some Robert Heinlein. Service Guarantees Citizenship! Would you like to know more?
I believe he once backed down a little bit on the requirement for military service, in favor of civil service in general. And I can kinda get behind that. You want to have a say in how society is run? Go spend 6 years as a mailman or a middle school janitor. Go be an NTSB accident investigator or one of those folks working in the USDA’s kitchens testing canning recipes for safety. Those are the folks who should be running the show.
I don’t know man, money doesn’t heat my home or grow food. It’s the skilled maintenance worker who fixes the central heating, the farmers growing my food and the logistics personnel ensuring it ends up on the supermarket shelves. It’s just good people doing the work that needs doing, I don’t think it’s a given that anyone needs monetary compensation for that.
This is why we invented democracies.
Haha, hell yeah! Just imagine decision makers having actual experience doing useful labour, I imagine things would turn out better indeed! :)
Stop paying them and find out.
Star Trek also operates in a non-scarcity environment and eliminates the necessity of hard, pretty non-rewarding labor through either not showing it or writing (like putting holograms into mines instead of people, or using some sci-fi tech that makes mining comfy as long as said tech doesn’t kill you).
Even without capitalism the term “life is expensive” still stands not in regards to money, but effort that has to be put into stuff that doesn’t wield any emotional reward (you can feel emotionally rewarded in many ways, but some stuff is just shit for a long time). Every person who suffered through depression is gonna tell you that, to feel enticed to do something, there has to be some emotional reward connected to it (one of the things depression elimates), and it’s a mathematical fact that not everyone who’d start scrubbing tubes on a starship could eventually get into high positions since there simply aren’t that many of those. The emotional gains have to offset the cost you put into it.
Of course cutthroat capitalism is shit and I love Star Trek, but what it shows doesn’t make too much sense either economically or socially.
I was going to disagree on this, but I think it rather comes down to intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards. I ascribe my own depression largely to pursuing, sometimes unattainable, goals and wanting external reward or validation in return which I wasn’t getting. But that is based on an idea that attaining those rewards will bring happiness, which they often don’t. If happiness is always dependent on future reward you’ll never be happy in the present. Large part of overcoming depression, for me at least, is recognizing what you already have and finding contentment in that. Effort that’s not intrinsically rewarding isn’t worth doing, you just need to learn to enjoy the process and practices of self-care, learning and contributing to the well-being of the community. Does this sometimes involve hard labour? Of course, but when done in comradery I don’t think those things aren’t rewarding.
And of course these positions aren’t attainable for all, but it doesn’t need to be a problem that they aren’t. This is only true in a system where we’re all competing for them, because those in ‘low’ positions struggle to attain fulfillment. Doesn’t need to be that way if we share the burdens of hard labour equally and ensure good standards of living for all. The total amount of actually productive labour needed is surprisingly low, so many people do work which doesn’t need doing and don’t contribute to relieving the burden on the working class