Transformative is one of 4 conditions that the court uses to decide if something is fair use. This question is still in active litigation in the courts.
you're right it's a grey area, but in the field of music specifically, it's some of the most stringent requirements. the more creative it is, the more it replaces the market for the original, the less of a parody it is (not weird al), the more you will struggle to use fair use as a defense. suno generating music hits all the parts of "this is hard to defend" while also being in the the most litigious possible industry for fair use
Fair use encompasses a lot of possible scenarios involving copyrighted works which may or may not be commercially licensed: transformative derivative works, short excerpts for purposes of commentary, backups of copies obtained legally, playback for face-to-face instruction, etc.
Fair use has consideration for whether the derivative work disrupts the market for the original, it doesn't mean you can't use it for profit as we saw with the Google books case.
De-soldering an MCU and soldering on a new oneis typically far from trivial. We're typically not talking about dedicated big through-hole flash chips here. We're often talking about MCUs with integrated flash memory which are surface-mounted and often with pins on the underside.
In general, I find it easier to desolder and replace surface mounted parts. With those, you just have to hit it with some hot air, it melts all the solder at once, and lifts right away. The chips are small, so it's not too bad to heat the whole thing evenly with a small air gun.
Through hole parts need a lot more heat across a bigger area, or you have to go pin by pin. I've scorched many a through hole board trying to desolder something, cursing at those who didn't socket the chip in the first place.
Want to annoy a repair person? Pot the whole thing in epoxy.
The saving grace here is that ESPs have radios and require certification which is expensive. As a result it is common for vendors to use pre-certified modules that are provided on a modular PCB with castellated half-holes. These are relatively easy to desolder.
> Prior to 20th-century monetarist theory, the 19th-century economist and philosopher Frédéric Bastiat expressed the idea that trade deficits actually were a manifestation of profit, rather than a loss. He proposed as an example to suppose that he, a Frenchman, exported French wine and imported British coal, turning a profit.
> He supposed he was in France and sent a cask of wine which was worth 50 francs to England. The customhouse would record an export of 50 francs.
> If in England, the wine sold for 70 francs (or the pound equivalent), which he then used to buy coal, which he imported into France (the customhouse would record an import of 70 francs), and was found to be worth 90 francs in France, he would have made a profit of 40 francs.
> But the customhouse would say that the value of imports exceeded that of exports and was trade deficit of 20 against the ledger of France. This is not true for the current account[, which] would be in surplus.
A major fundamental flaw in the concept is the assumption that goods have a fixed value. In reality, their value changes according to where they are, which is the only reason it's possible to make a profit by moving them around.
Note that in the same example, if the French wine is bought by a wizard instead of a merchant, and he transmutes the wine into 50-francs-of-wine's worth of coal for export to England (the ways of wizards are mysterious), the customs house will record the value of the coal as 90 francs. It's only worth 50 francs when it's going the other way.
And if he does the same thing, transmuting the wine into coal within France, and then sells it in France, the econometric body will be happy that French GDP has increased by 90 francs, making the people of France richer.
Get this: China sends us all this great stuff, and the only thing they get is OUR FIAT CURRENCY, which is essentially worthless. And then, what do they do with that currency? They buy our treasury bonds, which pay them interest in our own fiat currency. Not only that, but every bond they buy is more encouragement to help us keep the US economy strong and stable. The trade deficit thing looks like a great deal for us when viewed from some angles.
My gut says the concern arose around the balance of gold, which would behave differently. But that really doesn't work with Bastiat's example, because there is no flow of gold (or other currency) in or out of either country.
But the fact that there is no flow of currency makes the problem look stupider. England is notionally benefiting because it has gained some wine "worth" 50 francs while losing some coal "worth" 70 francs. France is suffering because it's lost some wine worth 50 francs while gaining some coal worth 70 francs. With no francs traveling abroad, the matter is closed and France has ended up better off. What was the problem?
From this perspective, "trade deficit" appears to be synonymous with "gains from trade". (But note that the analogy falls apart immediately; England is also experiencing gains from trade, but it has a surplus instead of a deficit. The difference is driven by the artificial division of the trade into two legs, one of which happens first. If the import happens first, you get a surplus. If not, you get a deficit.)
With fiat, I think there is a concern floating around that if some foreign party absorbs a lot of our currency, and then we print more to replace the loss (so that we continue to have an appropriate amount domestically), the foreign party could suddenly crash the value of the currency by deciding to spend it. That's true. It can't be the origin of the fear of trade deficits, though, because nothing similar appears in Bastiat's example, where currency never moves. It's more analogous to the traditional fear of seeing your country's supply of gold drained away by trade.
That sounds like a forerunner to Ricardian comparative advantage which is a major (really the major) reason for thinking international trade makes everyone better off.
Forerunner? Bastiat would have been 15 when Ricardo published.
But note also that the example doesn't make any use of comparative advantage. It's sufficient that the value of the coal is different in different places. This is about how water is more valuable when you're dying of thirst, not about how water is easy to produce if you live on an island in a freshwater lake.
Apple has internal transfer pricing which is dictated by accounting regulations and tax law.
Companies try and set transfer prices to minimize local taxes, but need to follow regulations.
A phone made in China is “purchased” by say Apple Canada for some fraction the price it sells for - regulation usually require the Value to reflect the cost of inputs.
So Apple Canada might purchase a phone from Apple China for $600 CAD then turn around and sell it for $1200 CAD in Canada.
It’s the $600 that counts as a Chinese export to Canada.
Most of that $600 is BOM inputs where most of high end components worth $$$$$ is ultimately captured by US / western suppliers (i.e. chips, sensors, screens for iphones). The actual value of export from PRC in terms of material and labour is $, but still counted as $$$$$+$. Though iphone/high tech unique since US plays hand - sanction $$$$$ PRC components so Apple can't integrate them and raise PRC share of Apple BOM, which IIRC grew to ~20% and on way 40%+ (prc memory + screen) and now <20%. This is something PRC stats has started adjusting for.
No, I should have been more clear relative to original comment. I was pointing out even % Apple charge customs, i.e. imports from PRC, large % is still ultimately not value captured by PRC.
For full priced iphone, i.e. $1200, Apple captures or offshores another big slice of $800 in Ireland for intangibles like software related IP. But within the $400-600 BOM for physical device / import unit cost for customs, ~80% are western components, i.e. western value capture.
This is actually something that I think a lot about with tariffs. The price that you pay at the corner store for an item, even an imported item, is nowhere near the price that an importer pays at the border.
Not only China but let us assume iPhones are made in China only.
China gets a modest share of the profits, because Apple pockets the rest. Reinvesting a fraction in US and stashing most of the profits in banks across the world that use this money as leverage to buy US bonds, among other things.
The physical phone is a "good" that is exported from china. But the majority of the value for an iPhone is in the "services" rendered to that phone, which may be sold/exported from the US but can likely be shifted to other countries in order to avoided taxation/tariffs.
Unless I got it completely wrong, the beauty of this ambiguity is that one can make two radically different arguments based on it, depending on who we're trying to impress. Do you want to praise the USA? Here. Do you want to tax China? Also here.
VAT and all other relevant taxes are entirely handled by the person importing it, before the product is released from customs. I don't even think about it.
Perhaps SAAS people just should physically send a "activation code" in the mail? Then the person importing it can just handle it.
They’ll never make their money back. Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.
There’s not enough money paid to drivers in the world today to repay the investment in autonomous driving from direct revenues. It’ll be an expected feature of most cars, and priced at epsilon.
Autonomous driving and the attendant safety improvements will turn out to be a gift to the world paid for by Google ad revenue, startup investors, and later, auto companies.
I agree here, because the profit margin on taxi services is too low. Well, on an unrealistically long time horizon, like 50 years, they might make it back, but surely much worse returns that investing that same money into US Treasury bonds.
> Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.
I disagree here. To be clear, when we talk about AI/ML here, I separate it into a few parts: (1) the code that does training, (2) the training data, (3) the resulting model weights, (4) the code that does the inference. As I understand, self driving uses a lot of inference. (Not an expert, but please correct me if wrong.)
How can Waymo's software be "commoditized very shortly after it works well" if competitors don't have (2) and (3)? The training data that Waymo has incredibly valuable. (Tesla and some Chinese car companies also have mountains of it.)
You point out yourself that Waymo doesn’t have a monopoly on training data. And the trained model is software, of which the price-to-use trends towards epsilon, even when it’s very expensive to make. For example Google search, maps, docs, YouTube. An exception is Netflix, but there the value provided by a subscription is access to novelty, which is not intrinsic to driving software.
Regardless of how much money you save, there also needs to be enough people still working when you retire, so that your money can buy things for reasonable price.
Retirement really depends on a pyramid shape age distribution.
