I'll do ya one further: Copyright should have the same lifespan as a patent. 20 years max. No extensions, no exceptions. I'd even cosider less time than that.

If you retained the unilateral rights to copy your idea for 20 fucking years and you haven't made your healthy profit on it already in that time, tough. Your work will forcefully enter the public domain so people who were likely actually still alive when it was culturally relevant get a shake with it.

There is no reason why something created during my childhood ought to still be languishing locked up in trust of some dead man's corporation by the time I've withered away of old age and my grandkids have done the same. The severe generational lag of culture and accessible technology created by copyright in its current form is absurd.

If you want to chase your golden goose forever, keep making new iterations of it that have their own copyrights that fairly compete against everyone else's in the marketplace of ideas. Get off your laurels. Get on your toes. Keep making new, inspired things. Earn your goddamn right to continue being seen as the rightful creator to follow up what you've previously made in the past.

They are considering it making it open source, among other options to keep the robots alive

I'm assuming it runs on AI and the company has to provide the backend. So yeah, if you purchase something that requires a company's infrastructure, it can certainly be bricked.

To be fair, electronics break all the time, and living pets die eventually - both things everyone needs to learn how to cope with, including children. This is just the Venn Diagram of those two pieces of reality.

A parent with autism is probably seeing it as another "could've been" that they get to toss out now, likely paid for by insurance.

I wonder how big that pile of products is, failed crap marketed to insurance companies and parents for autistic kids.

Big business.

Daily slot check in, pull the arm and the eyes display the slots. Ez money make me a CEO.

you can't brick my cat

Is this a challenge

Careful with that one. Big pharma killed my cat once.

My cat came down with Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is a coronavirus that is lethal to cats when the virus mutates and becomes FIP. FIP is 100% fatal without treatment, and there is now a treatment (originally developed at UC Davis) that is now owned by a big pharma company. They shut down the feline clinical trials in 2020 because they also make Remdesivir, and there was a concern that if there were any problems with the feline drug trial, the FDA might not approve Remdesivir for COVID. You can buy the drug on the internet from China, but it's a 12 week course of twice daily injections, and you're gambling on whether you got a good batch every time you get a shipment.

By the time we found this out, it was too late to save our kitty, so he crossed the rainbow bridge.

I get the feeling, but tools come in many shapes and forms. If this was truly helpful for any kid, it's a fucking tragedy that's bricked.

I assume it relies on external servers for processing, so it was a matter of time though.

Pooped the onion? Honestly, I've only ever seen these kinds of stories as notTheOnion.

So does the startup.

It sounds like they literally can't refund people because the company completely ran out of money and is gonna be liquidated. Sucky situation for all parties involved.

A robot has infinite patience and will never get mad or bully a child for fun. Ideally, this should also be true of a parent, but it's not. From a less grim angle, a robot doesn't have other responsibilities like work.

For a kid who feels too shy to talk to people, a robot can be good for practice. But it requires a lot of attentiveness from parents to make sure the child doesn't become dependent and moves on to taking to people once they get their confidence.

Back when drag was a kid, we used imaginary friends instead of robots. But a lot of parents and children don't believe in imaginary friends, which is a shame, because robots are a lot more expensive.

It's also probably a developmental aid also. As someone with a child, you'd be surprised at how laser-focused parents can be with regards to developmental delays or issues and ensuring that their kids have every opportunity to meet specific milestones.

IMO while it's absolutely not a replacement for human interaction, something like this with the right backing could be very useful to a lot of kids that need additional help.