You said it yourself. You’re drawing Micky mouse in a new pose, so you’re copying Mickey mouse.

Drawing a cartoon in the style of Mickey mouse isn’t the same thing.

You can’t have a copyright on “big oversized smile, exaggerated posture, large facial features, oversized feet and hands, rounded contours and a smooth style of motion”.

There’s nothing stopping someone from licensing their art in a fashion that prohibits their use in that fashion.
No one has created that license that I know of, but there are software licenses that do similar things, so it’s hardly an unprecedented notion.

The fact of the matter is that before people didn’t think it was necessary to have specific usage licenses attached to art because no one got funny feelings from people creating derivative works from them.

Copies that were freely shared for the purpose of letting anyone look at them.

Do you think it’s copyright infringement to go to a website?

Typically, ephemeral copies that aren’t kept for a substantial period of time aren’t considered copyright violations, otherwise viewing a website would be a copyright violation for every image appearing on that site.

Downloading a freely published image to run an algorithm on it and then deleting it without distribution is basically the canonical example of ephemeral.

Keep in mind that a lot of the “bad” of today is just people noticing the bad that’s been there all along.

People still make fun colorful content, and we make more of that now than we did in the 90s.
It’s just that the hateful angry people didn’t have Internet access then, and they do now.

It wasn’t considered okay to talk about a lot of problems at the time, and it is now.

The Internet of the 90s is incompatible with billions of people using it.
Once you make Internet access less something that only a small group of relatively privileged people have access to, and less are interested in, and something that a more representative sample of the world can use and want to use, you find out that people more often prioritize sex, cats, banal updates on their friends and family, gossip, and to get it in a easy to absorb package.

So, a lot of the replies are highlighting how this is “nightmare fuel”.
I’ll try to provide insight into the “not nightmare” parts.

The proposal is for how to share this information between parties, and they call out that they’re specifically envisioning it being between the operating system and the website. This makes it browser agnostic in principle.

Most security exploits happen either because the users computer is compromised, or a sensitive resource, like a bank, can’t tell if they’re actually talking to the user.
This provides a mechanism where the website can tell that the computer it’s talking to is actually the one running the website, and not just some intermediate, and it can also tell if the end computer is compromised without having access to the computer directly.

The people who are claiming that this provides a mechanism for user tracking or leaks your browsing history to arrestors are perhaps overreacting a bit.

I work in the software security sector, specifically with device management systems that are intended to ensure that websites are only accessed by machines managed by the company, and that they meet the configuration guidelines of the company for a computer accessing their secure resources.

This is basically a generalization of already existing functionality built into Mac, windows, Android and iPhones.

Could this be used for no good? Sure. Probably will be.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate uses for something like this and the authors are openly evil.
This is a draft of a proposal, under discussion before preliminary conversations happen with the browser community.

Again, it’s not a record keeping problem, it’s a problem with people being able to dispute the records, and transactions being able to be nullified.
The records are public today, and you can go check them. It’s usually even accessible via the Internet.
Part of buying a house is the mortgage company checking all those records, and other ways things can go sideways.

Issues usually aren’t because someone misread the records, but because a record was created that was invalid, or things you can’t record on the block chain, like “back taxes” or “grandma had two wills”.

The block chain doesn’t add anything that a public website doesn’t provide more simply, and it’s just as susceptible to the courts coming in and saying that a transaction was invalid because the estate executed the wrong will, or something like that.

I’m not sure I agree with your mortgage insurance example.

The problem isn’t record keeping, but answering the question “if you use an asset as collateral for a loan to purchase that asset, what happens to the loan if the purchase is invalidated”?

Block chain might make title searches easier, but it wont have any impact whatsoever on the existence of a legal system that can independently audit and invalidate contracts after the fact.

The asset isn’t digital, so ownership can’t be enforced digitally.
The current system is a pile of digital databases and paper records that need to be checked before sales can happen. Actual questions or disputes are handled by the courts. Block chain can’t change that, only change the underlying way we store the data.

I feel like how you’re describing it makes it sound more complicated than it is.

All employees are required to make minimum wage.
If your tips don’t take you over minimum wage, your employer has to pay the difference.

So tips given before you get to minimum wage just reduce how much your boss needs to spend to make up the difference. Once you get there, your boss has to pay you at least some very small quantity and the tips increase your take-home

It’s a stupid system and exploitative, but it’s not as “wink wink nudge nudge” as you made it sound.