The story is a joke. Literally. The version I herd decades ago was a guy keeps buying for everybody but the Jew at a table who ends up owning the bar.

For ntsc vhs players it wasnt a component in the vcr that was made for copy protection. They would add garbled color burst signals. This would desync the automatic color burst sync system on the vcr.

CRT TVs didn't need this component but some fancy tvs would also have the same problem with macrovission.

The color burst system was actually a pretty cool invention from the time broadcast started to add color. They needed to be able stay compatible with existing black and white tv.

The solution was to not change the black and white image being sent but add the color offset information on a higher frequency and color TVs would combine the signals.

This was easy for CRT as the electron beam would sweep across the screen changing intensity as it hit each black and white pixel.

To display color each black and white pixel was a RGB triangle of pixels. So you would add small offset to the beam up or down to make it more or less green and left or right to adjust the red and blue.

Those adjustment knobs on old tvs were in part you manually targeting the beam adjustment to hit the pixels just right.

VCRs didn't usually have these adjustments so they needed a auto system to keep the color synced in the recording.

I grew up near an area where a large number high net worth people. For example as a kid I thought Lamborghini was a common car because I saw them all the time.

In my experience lots of money brings out your true self and let's you act the way you want. So if you are inclined to be self centered and an asshole you can be a massive asshole. You can also be generous and kind.

Most rich people are pretty normal. However the normal ones do try to not make it known that they are rich. So you often don't notice the normal rich people.

It's also hard to tell the difference between a person who lives on a 200k a year income and a person with a double digit millions net worth.

I had a friend as a teen. I invited him to go diving with me as he had never been. He showed up with a 20k wetsuite.

If only he had some way of reducing the amount of bombing.

It comes down to how transformative the work is. They look at things like how much of the existing work you used and how much creative changes were made.

So grabbing your 9 favorite paintings and putting them in 3x3 grid is not going to give you fair use.

Cutting out sections of faces from different works and stitching them together into a franken face could give you enough for fair use if you made it different enough.

There were similar debates about photographs and copyright. It was decided photographs can be copyrighted even though the camera does most of the work.

Even when you have copyright on something you don't have protection from fair use. Creativity and being transformative are the two biggest things that give a work greater copyright protection from fair use. They at are also what can give you the greatest protection when claiming fair use.

See the Obama hope poster vs the photograph it was based on. It's to bad they came to an settlement on that one. I'd have loved to see the courts decision.

As far as training data that is clearly a question of fair use. There are a ton of lawsuits about this right now so we will start to see how the courts decide things in the coming years.

I think what is clear is some amount of training and the resulting models fall under fair use. There is also some level of training that probably exceeds fair use.

To determine fair use 4 things are considered. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

1 Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.

This is going to vary a lot from training model to training model.

Nature of the copyrighted work.

Creative works have more protection. So training on a data set of a broad set of photographs is more likely to be fair use than training on a collection of paintings. Factual information is completly protected.

-> Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

I think ai training is safe here. Once trained the ai data set usually doesn't contain the copyrighted works or reproduce them.

Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Here is where ai training presumably has the weakest fair use argument.

Courts have to look at all 4 factors and decide on the balance between them. It's going to take years for this to be decided.

Even without ai there are still lots of questions about what is and isn't fair use.

Low risk but inflation is above 3% so you are looking at less than 2% effective granted it's a fairly safe investment.

Money market or CD is going to have terrible return. You will be lucky to match inflation. Get a low overhead SP 500 index fund. By low overhead I'm taking .15% or less. You should be able to find .125% with a bit of poking around.

Years ago there was a commit to the Linux kernal that strangly had no author. This got some attention of several of the developers.

Looking into the code that had to deal with network transmission. there was a section that if you tried to get network access in a unusual way had a check that was written something like this.

If (usr_permission = ROOT) ... Instead of If (usr_permission == ROOT) ...

The first giving the user root if invoked and the second checking to see if the user was root.

It's widely thought this was the NSA or some other intelligence agency trying to backdoor lin Linux.

The company had always been run by engineers that came up from chip fab. Then they fired both the CEO and the head of fab for sexual harassment.

Then they make the CFO with a MBA the new CEO. A year or two latter and chip design is having problems and fab is falling behind.

Simple answer is they are careful about what they say and have good lawyers that review it.

A few examples.

Calling Tom Cruise a fudge packer in the context of him being in a bathhouse could eaisly open them up to liability for calling him gay. But doing it in a fudge factory while showing him putting fudge in a box gives them a clear defense that they meant it literally.

Simmaraly telling him to come out of the closet while he is actually in a closet provides cover.

Making things so absurd that a reasonable person wouldn't believe it and know it's a joke also works. So having Barbara Streisand aquire an artifact that makes her into a giant robot monster works but something plausible wouldn't.

Having Kanye open up and admit he is a gay fish is absurd enough to provide protection. However they probably couldn't get away with him simply coming out as gay.

Of course the genius of south park is they use these legal protections in ways that make the story funnier and not just for cover.

Not quite. Some is lost in magnetic flux and mechanical deformation. But that is a VERY small about.