The articles point out the company went bankrupt and her doctors advised her to remove the implant. It says she was willing to pay to keep it, and suggests this could have been avoided if another company could have taken over device maintainance.
All of which suggests that the device was removed because it could no longer be maintained, despite her willingness to pay.
I think “forced” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People use it to refer to unpleasant decisions, like “I was forced to leave New York City after I lost my job”.
One of the articles suggests that the device was removed because the batteries were no longer available and nearing end of life.
Regardless, a surgeon is only going to maintain devices approved by the FDA or cleared for investigational use. If the company goes bankrupt then both are no longer the case.
This story was described more accurately by The New Yorker. No, they did not do anything without her consent.
For three years after her operation, Leggett lived happily with her device. But in 2013 her neurologist gave her some bad news. NeuroVista had run out of funding and ceased operations. Leggett’s neural device would have to come out.
Leggett felt grateful that everyone involved was sympathetic to her plight. They let her keep the implant as long as possible. But the demise of NeuroVista—after spending seventy million dollars to develop the technology and conduct the trial, it struggled to find further investors—made removal inevitable. If the battery ran out, or a lead broke, or the site of implantation became infected, the company would no longer be there to provide support. She remembered a solemn drive to Melbourne for the surgery, and then coming back home without the device. It felt as if she had left a part of herself behind.
These days, when she gets a funny, flip-floppy feeling inside, she takes anti-seizure medication. She’s not always sure. Sometimes she gets her husband to weigh in. He says, “Go with your first instinct,” and usually she takes a pill. She is now seizure-free.
The article also suggests that other patients had problems with the device, which may have contributed to the failure of the clinical trial and recommendation for removal.
There’s another article that explains that it wasn’t just the battery. After the company went under, there was nobody who could provide support for the product in the event of malfunction. Removal was recommended as the safest course.
This isn’t an “FDA problem”. The device was investigational, which means it did not have final FDA approval. Consequently, there is no guarantee that a surgeon would have the knowledge to maintain it. Surgeons are not expected to be familiar with every experimental device, in fact most surgeons will never touch any experimental device.
And no, surgeons aren’t just going to read a bunch of documentation to get up to speed. Typically, when a new product launches the manufacturer will send their technical representatives into the operating room to help troubleshoot any issues.
It doesn’t say that. It says she was willing to pay to keep it in, which means she was willing to pay for long-term maintenance. But there was nobody willing to provide maintenance, because the company dissolved. That is why she was advised to remove the device.
the company was forced to liquidate assets
Implants generally go in the garbage after removal.
Implants that failed to gain FDA approval definitely go in the garbage after removal. Nobody else wants them, in fact the company will end up having to pay for proper disposal of medical waste.
They aren’t reasonable possibilities, because Medicare covers everyone over 65 regardless of their medical history and ACA health insurance plans are required to enroll all applicants regardless of age or medical history.
The latter can raise your premium if you smoke tobacco. That’s literally the only power of “coercion” they have available. All your other choices are off-limits.
The whole point of a clinical trial is to enroll volunteers who are willing to undergo a treatment that might not work at all and might not be available in the future even if it does work. Not only that, but you might expect to get a potential cure and end up with only a sugar pill.
If you think any of that is unreasonable, then don’t enroll in a clinical trial.
Doctors remove unsafe implants and/or replace them with safer versions all the time, including devices like deep brain stimulators. I don’t see why you consider this to be a big problem.
Making something publicly available does not automatically give everyone unrestricted rights to it.
For example, you do not have permission to make copies of articles in the NYT even when they are available to the public. In fact, a main purpose of IP law is to define certain rights over a work even after it is seen by the public.
In the case of AI, if training requires making a local copy of a protected work then that may be copyright infringement even if the local copy is later deleted. It’s no different than torrenting a Disney movie and deleting your copy after you watched it.
Only very specific rights are needed, such as the right to learn concepts and styles from what you can see.
For AI training, you nearly always need a local copy of the data.
That’s the case for literally everything you view online. Putting it up on your screen requires copying it into your computer’s memory
Yes, and that copy is provided with restrictions. You can view your copy in a browser, but not necessarily use it for other purposes.
Every search engine ever has done this way more flagrantly than any AI trainer has. There have been plenty of lawsuits over this general concept already and it’s not a problem.
Those cases have delineated what Google is and is not allowed to do. It can only copy a short snippet of the page as a summary. This was ruled “fair use” largely because a short snippet does not compete against the original work. If anything it advertises the original work, just as movie reviews are allowed to copy short scenes from the movie they are reviewing.
On the other hand, AIs are designed to compete against the authors of the works they downloaded. If so, a fair use defense is unlikely to succeed.
Except that in this case it’s not torrenting a copy that Disney didn’t want to have online for you to see. It’s looking at stuff that you have deliberately put up online for people to see.
Disney does put its work online for people to see. So does the New York Times. That doesn’t mean you can make an unrestricted copy of what you see.
Besides, it’s actually not illegal to download a pirated movie.
Both are illegal in the US, although copyright holders generally prefer to go after uploaders.
It makes no difference what the AI model retains. The only question is whether you had permission to use your copy in the manner that you did.
So for instance suppose you made a copy of a Disney movie in any fashion (by torrent, by videotaping a screening, by screen-capturing Disney+, etc), then showed it to a classroom in its entirety, and then deleted it immediately thereafter. You infringed copyright, because you did not have permission to use it in that manner even once. It makes no difference how long you retained your copy.
Note that it would also make no difference if there were actually no students in the classroom. Or if the students were actually robots. Or just one robot, or a software AI. Or if you didn’t use a screen to show the material, you simply sent the file electronically to the AI. Or if the AI deleted the file shortly after receiving it. You still didn’t have permission to use your copy in the manner you did, even once. Which means it was illegal.
America’s laws are not global laws.
True. But the GDPR has shown us that a country can take measures to protect its data globally.
If they wish to ban AI training this will become starkly apparent.
In every other field, researchers have long been required to use opt-in databases for their work. They can’t just “scrape” your medical records without your consent in order to study a particular disease. That would be wildly unethical.
Yet research, including AI research, has thrived in the US even with such ethical requirements. I am confident future AI researchers in America can be both ethical and successful.
That’s a public performance, which is a form of redistribution. That’s not relevant to AI training.
Copyright law defines whether or not you can make a copy of a work. The person who owns the copyright can deny permission to make any copies, or grant you to make a permission to make a copy only under certain conditions. Those conditions are completely up to the copyright holder. They might prohibit public performance, but by no means is public performance the only thing that the copyright holder can prohibit. It’s simply a very common prohibition.
You are trying to trying to generalize from a specific right, viewing the content on a browser, to a general right to “look” at the content, to the right to train an AI. But legally those are not the same at all. You may be granted some, all, or none of those rights.
Suppose you are in a modern art gallery. You have been given the right to “look” at someone’s art. You can nevertheless be prohibited from making a photograph of the art, even if the camera is also “looking” at it. The owner of the art can attach whatever conditions they want to your photo, including how long you can keep it and exactly what you do with it.
For example you could be allowed to photograph the art for home use but not for wider distribution. You could be allowed to photograph the art for classroom use, but not for AI training. If you are not willing to follow all of the conditions, then you can’t make a photo of the art at all.
The same is true of text. Websites give permission to make a copy of their text for use on your browser. And they can set whatever rules they like for how else your copy may be used.
Except for being banned from using public data that non-American AIs are able to use.
Sure. Of course, America could also ban those non-American AIs from being used in the US. Just as America bans other products that infringe patents/IP.
Copyright holders can prohibit all use of their work. If they can prohibit all use, then they can prohibit any specific use.
And they rarely give a wide-ranging “permission for their posts to be viewed by the public.” That’s like saying “I can do whatever I want with this source code, the developer gave permission for the code to be viewed by the public.” The legal language is often far more specific. There may be prohibitions on commercial usage, requirement for attribution, or even requirements that future code be licensed in a similar manner. There is almost always fine print when content appears to be “free”.
Of course, it’s possible that you could find a creative way around the legalese. Pointing a camera at a browser may work, until the fine print changes to prohibit that too. But anyway, that’s not what AI developers have done in the past. So one way or another, they may be forced to change their ways.
Hollywood and other big businesses will still find a way to train AI as usual. They are already used to paying musicians when a song is used in a movie. They can easily pay copyright holders for a license to use content as training data. It’s far safer - and more efficient - to pay up than try to get around the rules with a camera pointed at a screen. As a bonus, content creators who contribute training data may benefit from royalties.
Nevertheless, I think it will become more difficult for people who think they can easily get “free” training data from the web, just like 20 years ago when people thought they could easily get “free” music from Napster.
There are situations where permission is not required to use copyrighted material, mainly “fair use”. But AI training often does not qualify as fair use.
Otherwise, intellectual property is treated similarly to other types of property. For example, the person who owns a car can give you permission to use it. That doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with it. The owner gets to set the rules. They aren’t “kings”, but as owners they do have near complete control over what you can do with their car.
When you upload something to social media, you (the content owner) give the host permission to display your content. That does not mean users who view your content have permission to do whatever they want with it.
There is plenty of open source code posted into repositories that are extensively mirrored, yet the code has lengthy conditions attached to it. If you use it in violation of the stated license, you could find yourself on the losing end of a lawsuit.
There are plenty of photographs posted onto Instagram, which is also designed to display them to anyone who asks. If a professional photographer finds that you’ve used one of their Instagram photos without permission, you could find yourself on the losing end of a lawsuit.
And the Fediverse may be a non-commercial decentralized platform, but copyright protection doesn’t magically disappear here. You give servers a license to display what you wrote, but you may reserve the same rights over your IP as software developers and photographers do over their own.
As I already said, fair use is generally not granted when it entails competition with the original work. See above regarding movie reviews vs copying an entire film.
It has nothing in common with it.
Legally, property is something that has an owner. IP has an owner, and like other types of property it can be transferred to another owner and become the subject of contracts.
IP cannot be “stolen”, and I never said it could be. Real estate cannot be “stolen” either, yet real estate is still property.
That’s all an AI needs in order to get trained on something. They just need to see it.
For someone who thinks other people are “weird” about legal language, you keep making the same mistakes.
When people “see” something, they do not need to create a copy of it in the legal sense. When I look at an old photograph, legally I do not create a copy of the photograph.
AI do not “just see” data. They need access to an electronic copy of the data. An AI cannot “see” an old photograph unless they first create a local copy of the photograph. There is a significant legal difference.
Here’s the kicker: based on these AI-assigned definitions in the updated terms, your access to certain content might be limited, or even cut off. You might not see certain tweets or hashtags. You might find it harder to get your own content seen by a broader audience. The idea isn’t entirely new; we’ve heard stories of...
Researchers were required to use opt-in databases long before they trained AIs. It may be less convenient than taking someone’s data without consent, but it’s also more ethical.
I certainly do not understand what concept of fucking justice that is related to.
This concept of justice:
higher scores will be given to projects that are likely to retain collective bargaining agreements and/or those that have an existing high-quality, high-wage hourly production workforce, such as applicants that currently pay top quartile wages in their industry.
The homeowner who fatally shot a 20-year-old University of South Carolina student who tried to enter the wrong home on the street he lived on Saturday morning will not face charges because the incident was deemed “a justifiable homicide” under state law, Columbia police announced Wednesday....
While the woman was on the phone with police, Donofrio broke a glass window on the front door "and reached inside to manipulate the doorknob," at which point the male resident fired the shot through the broken window
Regardless of what you think about gun laws, I think the resident had good reason to be concerned for his safety.
I’ve been drunk plenty of times, but I’ve never smashed through a window and reached through broken glass to try to open a locked door. Most drunk people know better than to literally break into a house.
A Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy who the government says “served as an instigator and leader” during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol could face decades in federal prison at his sentencing Thursday....
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani is liable for defaming two election workers in Georgia, a U.S. judge in Washington said on Wednesday....
What a weird study. They only asked participants what they ate in the past 24 hours.
So that means a small proportion of people eat half the beef consumed on a given day. For that matter, a small proportion of people probably eat most of the strawberries consumed on a given day.
The title implies that there is a small group of people eating most of the beef produced in the US. But people don’t usually eat the same thing every day. So the study only shows that most Americans are unlikely to eat beef today.
The study design was reasonable. The unreasonable part is implying that what the respondents did that day is what they do every other day. Because what respondents do on that day does not necessarily predict what they do on other days.
In other words, it is reasonable to assert “On a given day, 12% of the population consumes half of the beef produced that day”. It is not reasonable to imply “12% of the population consumes half of the beef produced in any given time period”.
Researchers from several institutes worldwide recently developed Quarks, a new, decentralized messaging network based on blockchain technology. Their proposed system could overcome the limitations of most commonly used messaging platforms, allowing users to retain control over their personal data and other information they share...
Unlike Bitcoin this ledger is not open to the public, it only exists on the nodes containing group members.
And everything in the ledger is encrypted except the timestamp. So without a decryption key, you could tell when messages were sent but not who sent them.
Even if it’s encrypted, it can be lost or destroyed if it’s stored client side.
I know what identity keys are, but they don’t solve the problem. If someone says they didn’t receive your message, the best way to prove you successfully sent it is to use a distributed ledger.
That doesn’t solve the problem. If you don’t get a read receipt, then you can’t prove you sent the message. And if the recipient doesn’t want you to be able to prove you sent a message, they can disable sending read receipts.
This sort of system is not meant for your use case. It is not meant for memes or other things nobody cares about. It is meant for people who need an auditable permanent copy of their communication.
For example, businesses sending orders, contracts, etc to each other. Or lawyers sending documents to each other. They need systems that are private, not susceptible to central server failure, yet nevertheless auditable in case of an untrustworthy recipient.
If a lawyer sends a time-sensitive letter to opposing counsel, the recipient must not be able to claim, “You did not send it to me on time”. Blockchain is a good solution for such needs.
I don’t want to leave my data publicly available with all the metadata
Did you read the paper? This isn’t Bitcoin. The metadata is not available to the public.
Any form of internet communication is potentially susceptible to traffic analysis, so that flaw isn’t specific to this particular design.
The goals here are to address some of the other weaknesses of communication protocols, ie lack of auditability and reliance on a central server. They do not claim it’s completely impervious to attack.
I just gave you one example of a use case. It’s hardly unique. There are plenty of time-sensitive messages sent in business settings, and plenty of people who don’t necessarily want to acknowledge receiving them.
More examples, off the top of my head:
Manager tells worker they need to cover an emergency on the weekend, worker claims they never received the message.
Business wants to cancel a work order, contractor shows up and says they weren’t properly notified of the cancellation.
Supervisor sends disciplinary note to employee before dismissal, employee says it was never sent and then claims wrongful termination.
And of course, this has nothing to do with email. So if you set up a “spam filter” that deletes your boss’s messages, that’s on you. They know they sent you the message, even if you delete it or otherwise pretend they didn’t.
This is about an independent audit trail, not “keeping logs”. Your personal email server doesn’t count, because you can alter the log to show whatever you want. Nobody is going to take your word for it.
Finally, it’s pretty clear you have no idea how this system is supposed to work, because you keep claiming that documents are “accessible by any third party”. You do understand that not every blockchain system is public, right?
You didn’t even know what a pgp key was before this convo or read receipts
Lol what? I knew what they were, I just thought it was stupid to bring them up because they solve nothing.
Falsifying evidence is a crime.
Oh, then there is no need to worry about it, I guess.
“why did you not respond”,
“Respond to what??”
they’re going to pull out their phone and say “see, I sent you this”.
Then the worker pulls out their phone and says, “see, it’s not on my phone”
That’s the contractors fault. Blockchain is irrelevant. If they didn’t check their email, they’re sure as hell not going to check a dumb ass blockchain.
Unless, of course, the sender/manager actually didn’t properly notify the contractor/employee, and now they are lying to cover their ass.
Like many disputes, it amounts to he-said-she-said. When it goes to court, the jury will flip a coin. There is a better way.
Ok, so the main purpose of a blockchain is to get a bunch of computers that don’t trust each other to agree on who did what when.
A blockchain gives everyone a “voice”, so they can share what they heard. But it can’t be the sort of voice we have in the real world, because one computer can easily impersonate a million computers. In the case of Bitcoin, your “voice” is your computing power. Your computer might be able to impersonate a million computers, but your CPU cannot do the work of a million CPUs. So it is nearly impossible for single malicious computer to “drown out” all the other computers and insert a false message into the blockchain.
Bitcoin has a limit to the number of transactions per second because it wants computers to pause and talk to each other before validating a transaction. The delay is a feature, not a bug. This arbitrary limit is designed to self-adjust, so adding more computers won’t make the process go faster and removing computers won’t slow it down.
That said, computing power uses a lot of energy. Too much energy. So now there are other ways to assign voices that don’t rely on raw computing power but still prevent impersonation. This particular messaging protocol uses one of them, it is not based on computing power. But there is still a blockchain that contains everyone’s messages, and a malicious computer in theory cannot overwhelm the common consensus. So you can be pretty sure that if a message appears in the blockchain, then it was sent by the person who claims to have sent it.
Note that unlike Bitcoin, this blockchain is not public. It is not like a secret agent placing a classified ad that all can read (but not understand). Even the encrypted form of the blockchain can only be accessed by servers whose users participate in the conversation. If your server has nothing to do with a group, then you cannot glean anything at all about the conversations within the group.
The Biden administration on Tuesday unveiled the first 10 prescription drugs that will be subject to price negotiations between manufacturers and Medicare, kicking off a controversial process that aims to make costly medications more affordable for older Americans....
The Greatest Generation consists of people who are over 96 years old. They lived through the Great Depression and fought the original Nazis, hence the name. And they are nearly all dead.
This is not for them, this is for their children who are now in their 60s and 70s, the Boomers.
Some people don’t pay attention to forecasts. Some people sell because they need money now. Some people sell because they need to move now. Those people won’t wait for prices to increase.
Nobody knows what will happen. It’s a forecast. If I forecast 2% inflation next year, my forecast does not automatically cause prices to immediately increase. Next year, everyone will see if the forecast was accurate.
The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal election interference case shut down a bid by the former president to set his trial more than two-and-a-half years away....
This trial is now scheduled to start on March 4, so the defense has about six months to prepare.
While you have your calendar open, the New York hush money trial is set for March 25 and the federal stolen documents trial is set for May 20. The Georgia election interference trial date is not yet set.
And while some governors can pardon convictions, the governor of Georgia cannot. There is a Georgia state board that can issue a pardon, but only after a sentence has been served.
Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will (futurism.com)
SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry (www.eurogamer.net)
Threads' New Terms & Conditions Affects the Fediverse (wedistribute.org)
OnePlus is working on an interesting way to use all that RAM on your phone (www.androidauthority.com)
X/Twitter has updated its Terms of Service to let it use Posts for AI training (stackdiary.com)
Here’s the kicker: based on these AI-assigned definitions in the updated terms, your access to certain content might be limited, or even cut off. You might not see certain tweets or hashtags. You might find it harder to get your own content seen by a broader audience. The idea isn’t entirely new; we’ve heard stories of...
Biden-Harris Administration Announces $15.5 Billion to Support a Strong and Just Transition to Electric Vehicles, Retooling Existing Plants, and Rehiring Existing Workers (www.energy.gov)
Fatal shooting of University of South Carolina student who tried to enter wrong home 'justifiable,' police say (www.nbcnews.com)
The homeowner who fatally shot a 20-year-old University of South Carolina student who tried to enter the wrong home on the street he lived on Saturday morning will not face charges because the incident was deemed “a justifiable homicide” under state law, Columbia police announced Wednesday....
Proud Boy Joe Biggs faces decades in prison in Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy case (www.nbcnews.com)
A Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy who the government says “served as an instigator and leader” during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol could face decades in federal prison at his sentencing Thursday....
Giuliani liable for defaming Georgia election workers, judge rules (www.reuters.com)
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani is liable for defaming two election workers in Georgia, a U.S. judge in Washington said on Wednesday....
deleted_by_author
A decentralized, blockchain-based messaging network for safer communications (techxplore.com)
Researchers from several institutes worldwide recently developed Quarks, a new, decentralized messaging network based on blockchain technology. Their proposed system could overcome the limitations of most commonly used messaging platforms, allowing users to retain control over their personal data and other information they share...
Biden administration unveils first 10 drugs subject to Medicare price negotiations (www.cnbc.com)
The Biden administration on Tuesday unveiled the first 10 prescription drugs that will be subject to price negotiations between manufacturers and Medicare, kicking off a controversial process that aims to make costly medications more affordable for older Americans....
Chipotle agrees to $300K settlement over child labor allegations in DC - ABC News (abcnews.go.com)
And yet again, basically nothing for violating child labor laws.
Home Values Will Rise 6.5% Over the Next Year: Zillow (money.com)
Judge rejects Trump bid to push federal election trial to 2026 (www.cnbc.com)
The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal election interference case shut down a bid by the former president to set his trial more than two-and-a-half years away....