Yes.
In any election in which a federal candidate is on the ballot, federal law prohibits any
individual or entity, including 501(c)(3) nonprofits, social welfare organizations, and unions,
from knowingly and willfully paying, offering to pay, or accepting payment either for
registering to vote or voting
> pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both
Even so, the IP is used to make things which require resources. Disney IP is used to make toys, movies, books, etc, that all require electricity, paper, computers, employees sitting and eating, commuting into the office. Or a vaccine patent will be used to make a vaccine which requires a factory to be built and operated, the product produced, stored, shipped, used, and disposed into a landfill.
That's true, but more and more products are moving away from dependence on the physical resources. Kids don't buy toys much anymore, they play digital video games. You can see a doctor on Zoom instead of driving to their office. I'm not saying that's better, but it's happening.
The real problem I see is when people use wealth generated from intangibles to put the squeeze on physical resources, such as buying up land as an investment to drive up the price when people need a place to live.
I'm in the energy sector and have been thinking of fine tuning a local llm on energy-specific legal documents, court cases, and other industry documents. Would this solve some of the problems you mention about producing specific answers? Have you tried something like that?
Law in general is interpretation. The most "lawyerese" answer you can expect is "It depends". Technically in the US everything is legal unless it is restricted and then there are interpretations about what those restrictions are.
If you ask a lawyer if you can do something novel, chances are they will give a risk assessment as opposed to a yes or no answer. Their answer typically depends on how well they think they can defend it in the court of law.
I have received answers from lawyers before that were essentially "Well, its a gray area. However if you get sued we have high confidence that we will prevail in court".
So outside of the more obvious cases, the actual function of law is less binary but more a function of a gradient of defensibility and the confidence of the individual lawyer.
Are the "ruling classes" actually trying to dictate morals? Some of them, sure, like the ones who historically were religious leaders, or these days politicians who push religion, but these days I don't see, for instance, business leaders making speeches about morality at all, except maybe that one nutcase who bought Twitter.
I wonder how the neanderthals felt when a new, superior(?) species appeared out of nowhere. Is this how we're feeling about technology and AI now? Give technology another thousand years and humans may well be facing the same fate as neanderthals did. Or perhaps like nea/humans, we will find a way to interbreed?
With their bigger brains larger lungs and stronger bodies too expensive in the ice and snow. We the budget model had an advantage but in this time of plenty some neanderthal clones would give us a run for our money.
Wildly speculative unfounded thought experiment plot twist based on no evidence:
Neanderthals were the superior species and hunted humans into hiding. A global cataclysm occurred, devastating the food supply available to Neanderthals who required more fuel. Humans survived, only barely, because the few who survived on the run had acclimated to living in underground caves.
Sometime in the next few centuries, another cataclysm will occur, wiping out the surface dwelling human species.
Dolphins inherit the earth, and one day look back at the “primitive human species” that clearly gave way to the “superior” dolphin.
Superior, is good enough adapted to circumstances. Evolution turns your blood into anti-freeze as a inherited sickness, and this bug is a feature near the arctic. For the rest of the planet you are a very sick fish.
Imagine a water-world, with one volcano caldera above water. In that volcano caldera there is a geysir, and th at geysir, keeps a giant diamond ball rolling, since the dawn of time.
Evolution is not a refree, rewarding smartness or excellence. It just a process rewarding even foolish adaptions, in my example, the ability to become flat and squeeze into rift and cracks. It also rewards cultural taboos, like sticking your flatworm head up and wonder at the sky.
So superior, the word, assumes the idea of progress, of going forth towards the end of history, that the process can not crash and get stuck in a million years looping till the sun goes out. And that "getting stuck" is a very real thing, a very real danger, a "reasonable" voice from the gut, to return to reliable roots and thrust your "gut-instincts."
In biology they use terms like "fitness" or "reproductive success" for this. "Superior" is a bit loaded since many people have more or less neanderthal dna.
Also "superior" implies some sort of objective measure of progress that evolution is moving towards. Whereas "reproductive success" better captures the idea that selected biological traits are situational. Always remember that lowly rodents were "superior" to the mighty dinosaurs during the Cretaceous extinction period.
I really enjoyed the read, thank you! Though... I get the feeling we're all obsessing over how to live instead of just... Living. About halfway through I got anxiety thinking about how to improve my life.
I agree. You can infer that falsely creating positive results leads to funding leads to prestige, fancy dinners and fancy homes, fancy educations and large inflated egos.
52 U.S.C. § 10307