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A high level of paranoia is present throughout the film with the visual manifestation of corporate power, omnipresent police, probing lights, and in the power over the individual represented particularly by genetic programming of the replicants. Control over the environment is seen on a large scale, hand in hand with the seeming absence of any natural life, with artificial animals being created as a substitute for the extinct originals.

Captain Beatty claims that society, in its search for happiness, brought about the suppression of literature through an act of self-censorship and that the totalitarian government merely took advantage of the situation.

Mechanical Hound The mechanical hound exists in the original book but not in the 1966 film. It is an emotionless, 8-legged killing machine that can be programmed to seek out and destroy free thinkers, hunting them down by scent. It can remember as many as 10,000 scents of others it is tracking down. The hound is blind to anything but the destruction for which it is programmed. It has a proboscis in a sheath on its snout, which injects lethal amounts of morphine or procaine.

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.[6]

Perfect 10 claimed that by assisting users in locating and obtaining access to third party sites that themselves contained infringing images, Google was guilty of contributory infringement.

Said the Ninth Circuit:  “Google’s failure to change it operations to avoid assisting websites to distribute their infringing content may constitute contributory liability …”.

The District Court was also directed to determine whether Google was immunized from liability for such contributory infringement claims by operation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”).  The DMCA immunizes Service Providers such as Google from liability “for infringement [including contributory infringement] of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity, by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer or hypertext link,” if the service provider meets certain specified criteria.  The parties disputed whether Google in fact met such criteria, and qualified for the protections of the DMCA.  This issue was left to the District Court on remand.

Google had no contractual or other right to cause such third party websites to stop displaying infringing content.  As such, the Ninth Circuit held, Perfect 10’s vicarious copyright infringement claims were likely to fail.

only delivered html instructions – to wit in-line links – to its users, and not the actual images themselves

a user’s act of “caching” copies of infringing images in his computer as part of his review of such infringing materials was a fair use protected from claims of copyright infringement.

It may, in fact, be dangerous to build conscious machines that are more intelligent than we are; just as intelligence may be an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems, so too may ambition and desire be emergent properties of sufficiently intelligent systems.

Although we used to consider the mastery of chess to be the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, we've had to concede that it is simply a mathematical problem, and even today's primitive computers can do it better than the most skilled human. But there are other realms — including art, philosophy, and scientific theorizing — that, because of their intuitive, nonlinear nature, we may always be better at than any machine. Our AI servants may free humanity at the dawn of the fourth millennium to concentrate on these areas.