No One Is in Charge at the US Copyright Office
wired.com
wired.com
AI is way better at mass oppression, however, and copyright is a threat to it, so it (copyright) will be dismantled.
[0]: Not just or fake videos or comments. Do you have someone on the internet you consider a friend but have never met in person? In the future, rich people or governments will be able to plant ideas in people and influence their thinking by generating fake friends.
5 paperclips:
• Iron in an adult: ~5 grams
• Weight of a steel paperclip: ~1 gram
I am not a lawyer but I thought it was pretty well established that (a) the library of congress is part of the legislature, not an executive branch office and (b) that the president can remove some people but can't install people in the other branches without confirmation (e.g. when a SCOTUS justice dies or retires, the president can't name a temporary justice).
https://www.govtrack.us/posts/503/2025-05-13_president-trump...
Since the George W. Bush administration, Congress has used pro forma sessions[1] to prevent recess appointments. Both the House and Senate would have to agree on a time to adjourn Congress per Article I, Section 5, Clause 4. If they disagree but one of them wants to adjourn, the President can adjourn them under Article II, Section 3. But no president has ever done this. President Trump talked about doing it to ram through his appointments both in 2020 and last year during the transition period. But so far it hasn't been deemed necessary because the Senate has, surprisingly to me, confirmed his cabinet in a timely manner and without significant pushback even on the less conventionally conservative choices like the DNI and the HHS Secretary. In all likelihood, the threat of adjourning Congress and of using his billion dollars plus of fundraising for 2026 to primary uncooperative Republican members of Congress has forced them to largely fall in line for now.
Recess appointments to the Supreme Court were common in the old days when the Court was less politically contentious. Justice William J. Brennan was recess appointed by Eisenhower and later confirmed by the Senate. A recess appointment who is not confirmed by the Senate would be null and void at the start of the next Congress on January 3rd of the next odd numbered year. I doubt any president would recess appoint a Supreme Court justice today both because it would be likely derail their nomination and also because a recess Justice might get to hear at most 1 term of cases depending on timing. Recess appointing somebody to run the FDA or the Justice Department or even to be a district court judge would be much more useful to a President's agenda.
[0]: "The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session."
[1]: These are sessions where they immediately adjourn by unanimous consent after doing the formalities to open the session. C-SPAN broadcasts them live and they only last a few minutes at most.
https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/05/09/carla-hayden-remo...
I'm still waiting for an update on the final removal timeline.
If you hide behind corporations and have millions of dollars, sure, but not for us normies it isn't.
And it's not like copyright outside the US is a wild west; most national and international copyright regimes in the developed world are based on the US's system (often because the US has strong-armed other countries to comply).
At this point it’s a bold assumption they’ll go after people violating anything. It’s become apparent the decade of accusations of “weaponizing government” was a projection and the only people they’ll go after are people they consider enemies, whether they’re breaking any laws or not.
That’s the beautiful part of a puppet Supreme Court, you don’t actually need to worry about the laws, you can just make it up as you go.
We see this at the patent office, where overworked patent examiners leads to more junk patents being granted. Which is utterly backwards, and stems from viewing patents as something the applicant has earned and needing a good justification to deny them the fruits of their labor, and not as what they are - an enormous restriction on everyone else.
You have this exactly backwards. That belief is in a quote. idle_zealot is attributing that bad opinion to __loam, as a kind of paraphrasing.
That can be understandable in other communities with diehard FOSS folk. But this place is a a startup incubator. Clearly appealing more to the entrepreneurial side of industry.
One is general purpose software used by significant numbers of people. This is the sort of software that could be, should be, and often already is open source. Enough people use it to sustain a community around maintaining it, and then you don't have to deal with the overhead and rent seeking incentives created by proprietary software. Obvious advantage: No more ads in the start menu.
The other is custom code. Here "IP protection" is pretty worthless, because the company employing you is the only one that wants or uses the thing, or they're a SaaS company not interested in publishing or licensing the code to anyone else anyway.
Neither of these has a strong need for IP laws and moreover either of them would do fine under a regime where copyright terms last 14 years, there is no extrajudicial DMCA takedown process or anti-circumvention law and software patents don't exist, but you can still sue a company that violates the GPL or fails to pay you for services rendered.
Both of the cases you mentioned have an important need for IP law.
Do they?
BSD licensed software exists even though it waives pretty much all of the IP rights. If that was so important then how does it exist without it?
There is a huge industry of people integrating various business systems together. It's a huge industry because of the combinatorial explosion of interactions between different systems, which means that every integration is different, which in turn means that the whole question of copying is moot because each one is only useful to that specific company. You can't copy it, you have to do another one because the next customer has different requirements. What does it matter whether the law prohibits copying something nobody was going to copy anyway?
Not as of late. The Executive office and inauguration were full of it on full display, when the year before they were influencing who gets to run for president. They are sucking as much from the nation as possible while eliminating as many jobs as possible (the main way they get defended).
They got away with a lot by being boring an overall boiling the frog. But the suffering is very explicit and immediate as of late.
May the best implementation win.
Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
Accelerate.
a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
or
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
How is advertising a book you've written and are selling different than advertising your writing or skills to potential patrons and clients with regard to being negative-sum?
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
Who said anything about the relative wealth or patrons and authors? People seem totally willing to subscribe to people whose creative output they value. Sometimes such patronage is barely enough to live, sometimes it's an impressive total sum.
re b) An employer ("user") is generally richer than the person they're employing ("using"). The reason they can employ people and people are willing to be employed is because they have access to tools such as trademarks, patents, other employees or advertising budgets the employee ("person used") does not. It's a relationship where power is fundamentally imbalanced.
If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is their work really creating much value to society?
A lot of the people bashing on copyright seem to have no concept of the second order effects abolishing copyright would have and no intention to game it out.
Copyright has issues. For example it protects corporations instead of individual creators and workers. But not having it means rich people who own brands and have access to massive advertising can just take someone's work and make money from it while contributing nothing of value by themselves.
Other than authors, the people I can think of that make money off novels are book printers and occasionally media studios? But those also depend on copyright, and other than copyright nothing makes them a monopoly.
I think we can look back on history and see what kind of class system dominated when creators had to rely on patronage to eat.
Also they're using the term "patronage" more loosely when they say to attract an audience. There's no horrible class inequality when a bunch of people are paying $1-100 a month.
Or they just have no mental model of how incentives work. All this talk about abolishing copyright coming from people whose job literally consists of creating intellectual property. I have never seen one of them try to think it through and come up with the new equilibrium a world without copyright would settle into.
Any copy-left code is basically free to be used in closed source software, as long as it's not a verbatim copy? Count me out.
LLMs are used to subvert the spirit of GPL, if not the letter.
That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not releasing anything again in the future.
My model used to be to build products and spin off components into generic open source libraries others could use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
Now they can just copyright-wash it through AI models.
The rich will still abuse it, but copyright gives smaller creators some channel to fight back with. It's another means to prevent the rich from getting richer without compensating those who helped get them there. It's basically what powers places like YCombinator; Why would someone pay for your pitch instead of hearing it and going to shop for the lowest bidder to implement it?
>Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
copyright isn't on ideas, it's on implementation. And experience also tells me there's dozens of ways to skin a sheep. Especially in an industry like tech. You try to rest on your laurels protecting your idea, and someone else will just improve on the idea with a new one.
There can be a few BS copyrighted ideas, but for the most part you are only copyrighting a very small part of how something works. Not the very idea of making a rounded square phone.
I thought that was the default?
Are there honestly _any_ examples of the best implementation winning against a solid advertising budget?
Copyright certainly needs improvement but in the direction of protecting individual creators from mass exploitation, not abolishing it to remove one more restriction from what the rich can monetize to get more rich.