Do you think that removing the dust spoils the appearance?

I don’t know what you expected the thread to be about when you gave an example of “wiping dust off a car” and treated it the same as “scraping the paint off with a box cutter”. You picked an example that just begs for quibbling over severity.

Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble. Thus, even though the words or phrases used in the headnotes might be found in the underlying opinions, Thompson Reuters’ selection of which words and phrases to use was entitled to copyright protection. Interestingly, the court stated that “even a headnote taken verbatim from an opinion is a carefully chosen fraction of the whole,” which “expresses the editor’s idea about what the important point of law from the opinion is.” According to the court, that is enough of a “creative spark” to be copyrightable. In other words, even if a work is selected entirely from the public domain, the simple act of selection is enough to give rise to copyright protection.

The court distinguished cases holding that intermediate copying of computer source code was fair use, reasoning that those courts held that the intermediate copying was necessary to “reverse engineer access to the unprotected functional elements within a program.” Here, copying Thompson Reuters’ protected expression was not needed to gain access to underlying ideas.

https://natlawreview.com/article/court-training-ai-model-based-copyrighted-data-not-fair-use-matter-law

It sounds like the case you mentioned had a government entity doing the annotation, which makes it public even though it’s not literally the law.
Reuters seems to have argued that while the law and cases are public, their tagging, summarization and keyword highlighting is editorial.
The judge agreed and highlighted that since westlaw isn’t required to view the documents that everyone is entitled to see, training using their copy, including the headers, isn’t justified.

It’s much like how a set of stories being in the public domain means you can copy each of them, but my collection of those stories has curation that makes it so you can’t copy my collection as a whole, assuming my work curating the collection was in some way creative and not just “alphabetical order”.

Another major point of the ruling seems to rely on the company aiming to directly compete with Reuters, which undermines the fair use argument.

I don’t think that’s the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn’t for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.

If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren’t making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don’t deserve any sympathy for altruism.

A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?

Dumb as fuck. I can also guarantee that if any organization is capable of hiding content it’s the NSA. Both via the tricky methods you think of when you think of the NSA hiding data, and the much more boring “having so much data that’s so sensitive that no one is allowed to just run a search over all of it, and if they were allowed to they wouldn’t be capable of actually doing so”.

It’s probably going to end up being pages from the HR wiki, random pages talking about historical stuff and things like that.
Dumb, wasteful and pointless, but also not going to actually impact NSA operations, which would really only be a problem if it deleted one of those tidbits of math the NSA figured out and has been sitting on.

More trivia rambling than anything: we do actually regularly send donkeys and mules into conflict. They’re better at handling rough terrain than the vast majority of vehicles, so if you can’t send a truck you send people with pack animals.

https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-05-213.pdf

The US army manual for the use and maintenance of pack animals.

The fun part of the idiocy is that the complaints are all public. A major complaint the financial industry had was that anyone could go and just say anything about an institution and it could be found by anyone.

So the only part they left behind is peoples ability to say bad things about financial institutions, and took away the agency’s ability to say “actually, quicken loans hasn’t been randomly adding $50 fees to mortgage payments”.

There’s a thread of truth to what they say. Humans are tribal, but that doesn’t mean that what we use as in group and out group signifiers is universal and lines up with western European racial boundaries.

In some cases, existing group divisions were altered to fit with other peoples notions about how it should work: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734.amp

In Africa, certain ethnic groups defined themselves based on language and a rough “wide or narrow” metric. Talk or short, skinny or stocky, wide nose or thin. Etc. it’s like a racial categorization from the west, but it uses features that we don’t usually use , and only became overt once it was used by colonial powers to classify people and assign social status.

Point being that “I don’t know you so I don’t trust you” is a human tendency, but race and racism as we would recognize the terms are not, they’re just a specific instance.

Sadly, because the tax forms are mostly to get money back. They don’t rely on you doing the paperwork right once a year to get what they want. That’s why the money is taken out of your paycheck, and most people need to ask for the excess they took to be returned to them.