Yes, the protection of the software and the images it creates are separate, but that’s missing the point. What protections the software does or doesn’t have are irrelevant to the question of whether or not the images are covered. By developing the software, he determines how it functions, which influences the final product that it outputs. That would still be the case even if the software weren’t covered by IP of any kind at all.

Howell wrote that copyright has never been granted to work that was “absent any guiding human hand,”

Plaintiff develops and owns computer programs he describes as having “artificial intelligence” (“AI”) capable of generating original pieces of visual art, akin to the output of a human artist.

If he developed the program, that sure sounds like a “guiding human hand” to me. I think his real mistake was trying to claim it as a work for hire with the AI as the author, rather than it just being a tool.

Both directories are in your path, and many distros have /usr/bin as a symlink to /bin or vice versa, so it almost certainly doesn’t matter. Also, the location of the shell has no bearing on which shell is used when you log in as root. That’s determined by the login shell field for the root user in /etc/passwd, which is most likely set to bash or /bin/sh (which is most likely a symlink to bash) by default.

The word you’re looking for is “copula”, and it’s actually 「です」(desu)

It’s actually 「は」, and… kind of. It marks the topic, which is sort of the thing the conversation is generally about, which typically is the subject of each sentence, but not necessarily. It’s kinda hard to explain it well since it doesn’t really map cleanly onto any grammatical feature in english.