Based on what _I think_ you're trying to say, I think this is a terrible take and I hate everything about it. People aren't trees. Society, people, and children especially shouldn't be forced to be exposed to anxiety inducing, depressing, and stress inducing situations. (But that's what I'm guessing what you're saying, since you have not put a real conclusion or clear statement there.)

There is also copyright in the design and layout of the NES interface, which has obviously been copied (it's the whole point of the project!), there's likely another option there.

Copyright pales in comparison to the protection afforded by a patent.

Many players we license technology to are only interested in licensing a technology if it's protected by a patent. If there isn't any patent protection, then any third party willing to put enough in can simply read some journal articles published by the researchers (because they do publish everything they can for prestige and more government money) and implement the software themselves and the licensee has no way to stop them (other than through their own execution).

I haven't work at the tech transfer office for very long, but I think I have only seen software related inventions be licensed that had patent protection. When we do license a patent, the licensee most often receives worldwide exclusive rights to exploit the technology in their field. (well, I guess it's not quite worldwide monopoly, it's only a monopoly in the regions the patent is filed in, we do give them worldwide rights to use other stuff like copyright and trade secrets though).

Here's[1] a patent they have filed towards the system. Claims 1-18 and 20 are focused on the training of the neural network. Looks like Claims 1-18 are going to be granted soon largely in that form also from looking at PAIR[2].

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160292856A1/en?q=AI,ar... [2] https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair

If it's not a pointless blog/article header, then the ingredients and method are split up across "tabs". So that now, when it says "melt the butter and whisk in half the flour", you need to flick back and forward multiple times for each step to remember what to do and how much to add.

I make guitar pedals sometimes, I've never seen a volume knob not be a logarithmic potentiometer.

EDIT- checked the source:

It looks like imagemagick's 'threshold' [0] command is being used, so everything is max/min/black/white:

https://github.com/firstlookmedia/pdf-redact-tools/pull/23/c...

[0] https://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#...

There are other examples of shows that do fine without strong plots. One example from the top of my head is "The Chinese Restaurant" episode in Seinfeld. Little to no plot at all in that episode. Just a string of funny interactions between characters.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/no_dice

Personally, I've never seen such explicit graffiti. The worst might have been "Call XXX-YYYYYY for a good time" sort of messages.