Millions Upon Millions Of 'Takedown' Notices To Google... For Links That Aren't Even In Google
from the meaningless-fodder dept
For years, the RIAA and MPAA have pointed to the millions upon millions of takedown notices sent to Google as "evidence" that the DMCA notice-and-takedown process doesn't work. You can find lots of examples of this, but here's an MPAA VP making this exact point:
“The large volume of removal requests cited in Google’s Transparency Report clearly illustrates the magnitude of the piracy problem and the ineffectiveness of the ‘notice and take down’ system,” said Chris Ortman, MPAA VP of corporate communications. “If this system were working, the numbers would be going down — not up.”
But here's the thing about that quote: it's almost entirely bullshit. First off, the numbers have started going down, but you don't suddenly hear Chris Ortman and the MPAA saying "look, the notice and takedown system is now working!" Because Ortman wasn't being honest when he made the original statement.
But, the larger point, is that takedown requests, by themselves, don't mean a damn thing about how much infringement there actually is. The requests may be bogus. Indeed, millions of the requests to Google turn out to... not even be in Google's index. Torrentfreak had a recent story pointing out that the top 3 copyright owners alone sent Google over a billion takedown requests. That article further shows just how top heavy the requests are, with the top 16 copyright owners reporting more than 50% of all the takedown requests to Google. In other words, a very small group of organizations very much have their fingers on the scales of how many takedown requests Google receives. So, for those very same organizations to whine that more takedown requests proves anything... is questionable, at best.
And back to that point about many requests not even being in Google's index. As Google's Transparency Report shows, many of those top removal requesters keep requesting links that Google doesn't even have. The 2nd largest requester, for example, is APDIF Mexico. It submitted over a quarter of a billion takedowns. But do those mean anything? Well, let's take a look at its most recent batch of requests:
So... look at that last column. A huge percentage of the URLs were not even in the index. Then look at the column to the left of that. Google removed none of the links requested. Obviously, it can't remove the non-indexed ones, but it appears that even when they were in Google's index, they were deemed non-infringing or, in some cases, duplicates to URLs that had already been received in earlier takedowns. In other words, counting up the number of requests is meaningless when organizations can and do submit URLs that aren't even in Google and when they simply repeat URLs that had already been requested. Anyone could simply re-request the same URL a billion times and it wouldn't say a damn thing about whether the notice-and-takedown system is working.
Or, if you think it's unfair to pick on APDIF Mexico -- an organization many of you have never heard of -- why not look at the RIAA? Of all of the latest requests from the RIAA, I noticed that, once again, it shows no removals by Google. Why? Because the RIAA is submitting duplicates of URLs already removed. This is literally the result of their latest request from earlier today according to Google:
If you can't see that, it shows that 99% of the URLs submitted are duplicates, and the other 1% is still "pending" meaning they might also be duplicates. When the RIAA is submitting links that have already been removed, it kinda makes you wonder if the RIAA and groups like it are simply padding their own numbers to later try to make a bullshit point about how many "takedown requests" Google receives. It certainly highlights the fact that the RIAA does not actually check to see if what they're submitting to Google is actually in Google.
Anyway, the next time you hear the likes of the RIAA or MPAA claiming that the DMCA notice-and-takedown safe harbors aren't working because of the number of takedowns, you can safely note that they are being dishonest.
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Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca 512, piracy, takedowns
Companies: apdif, apdif mexico, google, mpaa, riaa
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Yes, it was. And that turned out to be a mistake, like so many other aspects of the DMCA.
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And they're right. It doesn't work. It never has, and we ought to get rid of it and replace it with proper jurisprudence: innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
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And they're right. It doesn't work. It never has, and we ought to get rid of it and replace it with proper jurisprudence: innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
That's great in theory. The reality is that any opening up of the DMCA will create something much, much worse. Be careful what you wish for.
(Also, to be more pedantic about the legal situation: nothing in the DMCA says anyone is guilty before innocent, it just says that if a service provider wants any legal liability quickly dismissed it has to follow certain steps. And platforms have always had the option to remove whatever content they want for any reason -- including to avoid legal liability -- without it being any kind of admission of "guilt.")
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I don't want to "open up" the DMCA; I want to do away with it, and any other concept of extrajudicial takedown processes. I want to get rid of the insane notion we've got right now of copyright as a trump card that all other considerations must give way before.
Also, I don't believe that it would replace it with "something much, much worse." If publishing interests had to go to court to get things taken down, we would inevitably see three positive effects just from the nature of the judicial system:
That would be significantly better than the current regime.
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In this case only blockbuster studios have the resources to deal with takedown requirements. Everyone else quickly goes broke trying.
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Bot is looking for "Mary Poppins" on website Movies.com
Movies.com creates a URL for "Mary Poppins" because the bot requested the URL. The URL contains nothing but a stub.
Bot finds a response from movies.com that contains "Mary Poppins" and demands that it be taken down. Despite the fact that the bots search resulted in the URL in the first place.
This will only get worse as time goes on.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
When the fundamental rules change, those who aren't able to adapt do tend to go out of business. That's the way it's always been.
Copyright was originally intended to be a tool for authors to keep abusive publishers in line. It's been perverted, mostly over the last 50 years or so, into a weapon for abusive publishers to wield against everyone else. But in a time when it's not just publishers who can make high-quality copies of a work, but literally any Joe Random Citizen at all, it's time to ask if the fundamental idea still makes any sense anymore. Techdirt has run plenty of articles over the years highlighting various different people and companies that have managed to find financial success in their creative endeavors without needing to rely on copyright.
I'm well aware that my proposal makes copyright enforcement at scale ruinously expensive. That is, as they say, "a feature, not a bug."
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Those free servers have very limited storage and bandwidth. If you gain an audience, the bandwidth charges, and the need for a CDN solution start to add up to a fair chunk of change, and even more required if you you need mutiple servers, load balancers etc to meet demand.
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I can put a Website up that I control 100% via AWS in a few hours. I can use torrent links to save bandwidth. I can use S3 and get CDN and load balancing out of the box. Now this is a simple HTML site, but my point was quantity not quality.
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The current system at least allows one offs and small businesses to stem small scale infringement of their products.
This needs to be in place somehow otherwise you will see big players in the US market put up 10 various business fronts to sell your book, game or whatever and game you into paying all the fees to bankrupt yourself.
Systems need to be built with trolls in mind.
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Ladies and gentlemen this is copyrights best and brightest
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Ideas are 10 a penny, and execution is everything. Josef Prussa for one has built a successful business while keeping all his hardware designs and software open source. His innovations means his machines are in advance of all the Chinese copies.
Also, many kickstarters fail because the people involved have no clue about project management, manufacturing, quality control or how to run a retail business.
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"[Musicians] don't need to be paid for their art"
They're not. The publishers are, but they use a tuckfun of Hollywood accounting to assure that all but a tiny percentage of superstars are paid a pittance. Certainly not their fair share given they actually made the stuff.
These days musicians are better off putting their stuff up online, letting it get pirated and then living off the proceeds from tours and contracted work.
Come with me to Barbary
We'll ply there up and down
Not quite exactly
In the service of the Crown
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Where the rights holder can quickly go out of business trying to block all the copies of his product.
You... have been reading the same TD I have been, right? The one that has noted time and time and time again that there are much better ways to compete with infringing alternatives that don't involve playing takedown whack-a-link?
If 'something has to be demonstrated as a violation, rather than merely asserted, before it can be taken down' is enough to crash certain groups then they were doomed from the get-go.
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People will abuse any system you put in place. A pay to remove data system will be abused to put content creators out of business if they try to protect their original content. The example of trolling kickstarter is just that, someone puts up an idea and 10 firms copy it, the legal fights to shut down the copycats results in the original creator to go bankrupt.
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The best systems I've seen are more about future content creation. Where a number of existing works becomes your resume for people to hire you to build something new for them.
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(Also, to be more pedantic about the legal situation: nothing in the DMCA says anyone is guilty before innocent, it just says that if a service provider wants any legal liability quickly dismissed it has to follow certain steps.
It may not say it explicitly, but given how utterly one-sided the penalties are it might as well have done so. When you only get legal protections by removing content the result is pretty clearly that if the claim is made that the content is infringing then it shall be assumed to be, and treated as, infringing, with refusal to do so allowing the site to be dragged into the fight as well.
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Fuck musicians, they don’t need to be paid for their art
Can you point me to where I've ever said that? I've long supported musicians (and all sorts of content creators) getting paid for their art, which is why I've spent so much time highlighting business models and services that help them get paid. What I complain about is the abuse of copyright in ways that don't help anyone get paid, but which have significant negative consequences.
Why is it that you always show up here and lie about my position? What an odd infatuation you have with deliberately lying about me.
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Sure. Nothing's perfect. This set of problems is significantly less bad than the current set, though. I find it a worthwhile tradeoff.
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My understanding of the DMCA, which can be flawed, is that the notices are supposed to be sent to the sites hosting the offending material.
Google hosts none of this content, merely indexes it, and yet are expected to deal with editing their index.
This doesn't remove the offending content & does nothing to "protect" their copyrights. This allows them to claim Google is at fault for all of this, that they should nerd harder to protect them. The government suffers from the delusion that Google is the internet & is the proper point for all demands & attacks.
The simple truth is that Google never fought back, because the **AA's are willing to burn millions of dollars on legal fights they have no hope of winning but will keep going until the earth is scorched and salted even if they lose in the end.
Google has to spent untold amounts of money & build system to deal with a barrage of a firehose of flawed computer generated notices that have nothing to do with them. The **AA's are happily paying companies to send these notices even if they are flawed because they don't care, they want to gain the ultimate in control and get everyone else to jump when they say so. Congress cares more about the **AA's saying we sent 2.5 billion notices & they didn't do enough, than Google saying of those notices only .0000001 billion were actually hosted on Google & we removed them.
They law pretends to hold both sides to the same standards yet you can send 10K bad notices & keep going... but if Google doesn't jump fast enough they will be forced to pay up. Penalty of perjury isn't a penalty when there is no enforcement of it.
We have courts ruling that these notices are proof of infringement & customers should be cut off on mere accusations & if not the ISP needs to pay the **AA's billions in damages. To view this another way, this is a bank being able to sue Ford because the bankrobbers drove a Ford. We can't find the bankrobbers but Ford needs to do something!! Of course the evidence they are 'bankrobbers' is a single frame of a video showing the accused were near the bank but not that they robbed it or did anything other than we saw them in a Ford.
We need to demand that facts actually win in this, not just paid for reports supporting conclusions that aren't real. Hell make them pay Google $1 for every notice they get that isn't hosted on Google servers & notice how quickly the notices will get better & stop flooding 3rd parties who aren't hosting the material, who are the ones the notices are supposed to target.
We have a flawed system and trying to fix it, given the track record, would make this an even larger clusterfuck. The problem is pretending the system isn't flawed & allowing the idea that a notice sent by someone with a financial interest in the result is impartial and correct.
There is an entire legal framework they could use, but it is easier to steamroll everyone else and make them bear the costs. I didn't remember that being part of the copyright act, that they get these rights (for a limited time HA!) & society needs to pay the costs to proactively protect them for them.
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I suppose these are just “million in a billion” anomalies, then.
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Re: There's an interesting concept
Can't good start putting on service and fees to be paid? Can only be like a nickle and dime. But if its good enough for normal consumers, should be good enough for the people too, right? I mean, even courts do it to poor defendants, sooooooo......
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I never said it was smart to play whack-a-link. I am simply pointing out that the proposed alternative creates its own problems due to failing to accounting for trollish behavior.
If a company/individual wants to be stupid enough to kill off their own business by tilting at endless windmills, I say let 'em, no need to protect them from themselves. If the price for changing the system away from 'guilty unless the target wants to and can fight back' is that some people end up driving themselves into the dirt trying to accomplish the impossible that seems a more than fair trade-off.
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Re: Re: THERE ARE NO OTHER EFFECTIVE "MODELS" THAN DIRECTLY PAID
There, you just said it again! THERE ARE NO OTHER EFFECTIVE "MODELS" THAN DIRECTLY PAID. (Which can by "dinosaurs" or Spotify or Youtube collecting money indirectly through advertising: the key point is artists DIRECTLY paid.)
Promoting unrealistic unworkable academic notions is SAME as "Fuck musicians" -- that's why all the actual musicians have long since abandoned Techdirt.
Masnick, you have literally advocated that artists give away their product and sell T-shirts. Don't bother to claim you haven't or that can work too, as industry needs a NON-anomaly, NON-labor-intensive (not constantly "connecting with fans" to BEG) way of collecting and DIRECTLY paying artists.
There is NO other model that works than the ones that have been around since, oh, the 1930s: either advertising-supported radio or direct sales (of media in the past, files now).
What you've actually done for 20 years is assert that piracy is inevitable (tacitly, despite explicit denials, you've okayed it), and excuse yourself by repeating that "new business models" must be found, without ever showing any new. (I remind you that independents have existed for a hundred years and that Hank Williams "connected with fans" by selling records out of his Cadillac's trunk. That is therefore NOT a "new business model", just obvious.)
I'm sure you don't / won't see yourself as advocating piracy, but I think it's a fair charge when you've wrongly predicted court cases since Napster, explicitly said that there's no money in piracy, and supported, among others, Kim Dotcom's "business model" which relies on ILLEGALLY getting valuable products for free, and money directly for faster downloads besides indirectly from advertising.
SO, at this relective time of year, THINK on whether you might be misleading / evading / simply wrong / beating your head against reality / and far from reducing the grifting of middle-men, you're simply promoting a new herd of them in Kim Dotcom, Spotify, and Youtube!
[And just to show that I have thought on latter: the only non-violent way to deal with grifters getting too rich is steeply progressive income tax rates on all UNEARNED income.]
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Yet you continue to suggest that musicians aren’t paid this way- that the evil labels and publishers take all the money.
Which is, of course, a blatant and easily provable lie.
You also seem to enjoy ignoring how independent musicians are protected by copyright; gee, why is that?
You’re a monstrously silly person, and as long as you continue to attack artist’s rights, I will continue to mercilessly mock your bullshit.
Now, censor away, all you TD freeze peach advocates!
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Google's computers can check billions in a second.
Without any identifiable incremental costs.
Really. My computer could grind through a billion links and Google probably has literally a million servers by now, all much faster than mine.
Now, Google can come out ahead by checking the URL before indexing it. No processing time / no storage.
So the underlying premise that Google is burdened by this is false.
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Remember when you promised to leave forever?
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Re: Re: Re:Liars gonna lie?
Liar
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Re: it’s getting kinda sad
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One could easily flip this script and say tha tcopyright infringement is the "Kryptonite" that puts automated search engines out of business. These debates seem to be boiling down to the rights of search engines to automate piracy (or defamation or spam or sex trafficking or whatever) against the rights of copyright holders to protect their work.
We could have an internet run by human-edited portals and link farms which would avoid much of these problems. This would spread the wealth and eliminate antitrust concerns which would help the economy. If Google wants to let a bot hoover up billions in ad revenue, paying for the cost of the inevitable infringement should be part of that equation.
Companies who DMCA-blitz to the point of negligence should also be held accountable because they harm those who have legitimate concerns about piracy. Many adult entertainers complain about the free porn tube sites and how they have to play whack-a-mole. Many have had to turn to prostitution to update their "business model." One outfit which used to make well into six figures a year was all but put out of business because its catalog was uploaded. Their work was much higher production quality than what replaced it. Now instead of actual films you get webcam garbage that promotes stuff that can't be pirated (like escorting).
Copyright law does not pass judgment on the quality or profitability of a work. It allows for statutory damages for a reason.
Perhaps the search engines need to change THEIR business model instead. The idea behind the DMCCA was to avoid forcing rightsholders to go to court and sue individual infringers, who probably would prefer a DMCA notice to a $225,000 judgement like that woman who said "bring it on" wound up getting.
Another idea is to treat these violations as ASCAP violations and limit damages to an ASCAP license (for music), and to set something similar up for the films and other works. Nominal damages is a well-established legal concept. Just ask Trump, who won $1 against the NFL in the USFL antitrust lawsuit, with damages trebled to $3, or the $2 won by Food Lion against ABC for the network's sending undercover journalists in (fraud) to expose something or other.
It's one thing to complain about abuse of the system, quite another to complain about the concept of copyright protection.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: THERE ARE NO OTHER EFFECTIVE "MODELS&am
What's a lie there, snowflake?
YOU are lying by not admitting to being an account holder so that you spew some trivial ad hom.
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Re: THERE ARE NO OTHER EFFECTIVE "MODELS" THAN DIRECTLY PAID
No, AGAIN, I cleverly worded so that you FOOLS would take it that way. I just wrote that wouldn't darken the site. That does not imply leaving. And in fact, I enlighten the site -- at least in my view.
So, thanks again "AC" who's actually a regular if not re-writer / administrator, in any case, TOO CHICKEN to even put account name on this false attack for showing how STUPID you and site are -- on a point which no one but you insane regulars will even understand, let alone care.
Try stating some ON-TOPIC substance, "AC".
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Creative works are now a hobby under that scheme.
Many indies refuse to deal with big labels or publishers so they can control their work and while they don't make as much, others don't profit from their work.
The concern that is legitimately raised is that of the knockoff, made very easy online. A book's ideas as discussed until the entire book is out there anyway, then someone repackages it (knockoff). A musician hits it big with a new style and the copycats storm in almost immediately. That is more of a "too many chiefs not enough Indians" problem than a piracy problem.
Most famous musicians and particularly songwriters have become very wealthy from their works, their money obviously not stolen by those "evil" publishers.
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Any time, computing power, and other finite resources used in a fruitless search for links that are not in its search engine (or duplicate links that have already been taken down) is a burden. Granted, Google has enough money to shoulder that burden, so its overall effect is likely minimal.
Now imagine if a smaller search engine, without Google’s power and bank account, were to receive billions of takedown requests. That company would have a far rougher time doing what Google does with takedown requests. That would make competing with Google—which I think you would want—a far harder endeavour than you want to believe.
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Re: Re: Google's computers can check billions in a second.
Thanks for showing Techdirt's true level of intelligence.
You've said a thousand times more and worse about the site there than I have in several years.
And yet you and Masnick wonder why everyone reasonable left.
Cosmetic re-do of the site ain't gonna fix your stupid fanboys, Masnick!
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Visa processes payments for pirated pictures from Perfect 10 and is not liable even after being put on notice? The courts are not friendly to the rightsholders, that's for sure.
Artists will definitely have to adapt. Patronage and other alternatives (such as advertising and sponsorship_ are the main ones. A YouTube video is protected and marketed by Google, who takes 32 percent for doing so. It's not bad but it forces people to youTube. Instagram and other social media tend to work with people who have large followings and get corporate sponsorship for ongoing content that doesn't even have to be of high quality. We wind up with a cult of personality rather than a library of quality work, i.e., "cheap culture."
Whether or not this is bad or good is up for debate. There are those who will still put out quality work, loss of income be damned, and who won't be rewarded because of piracy. My personal view is that copyright holders should be the top consideration for any legal construct for dealing with piracy, which has no more of a right tobe treated as inevitable than say burglary or dining-and-dashing.
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Re: Re: Google's computers can check billions in a second.
First, you've not refuted that the incremental costs of checking all -- repeatedly -- are vanishingly low. Google is not complaining about the cost, is it? No.
You fanboys are only complaining that piracy may be reduced.
And a start-up that's going to compete with Google but can't handle the exampled vanishing small costs too is simply idiotic.
So, "now imagine if" you're reaching for least objection, trivially wrong, falsely here playing that you're reasonable, and that will correspond with reality.
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And it's irrelevant.
Google is voluntarily cooperating in a needed effort to reduce piracy. It's not Google which is complaining, but "vicarious or contributory" pirates / supporters TorrentFreak and Techdirt, worried that piracy will be reduced and trying to use computer checking a few extra links as the hook. There's no barb on this hook except what Pirate Mike imagines.
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You wouldn't know substance if it slapped you in the face.
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You idiots can't even keep your own narratives straight.
How's that Paul Hansmeier defense fund coming along, by the way?
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Yet organizations like the FCC and police departments can't even get their stories straight for usage records and criminal databases.
And before you'd like to argue that Google has significantly more computing power, the scope of data you regularly demand that Google trawls through far outnumbers what the FCC and police departments have to hand over. But whoops, the FCC accidentally corrupted their data!
You're pathetic even for a threadbare excuse.
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I remember the days when it was like that, and Gopher was the way of finding things. It took as long as library search to find anything, as one jumped from site to site in search of answers.
Also piracy is not the problem that you think it is, but rather an excuse used by those who fail as entrepreneurs. Having a good or idea, or a story told in a compelling way is not enough to make money, one also needs the business skill to sell, and to ignore distractions from the prime objective building a loyal fan/customer base. Complaining about pirates will not generate income.
Automated search engines, and large distribution services are the glue that make the Internet such a powerful human tool. Those who have figured out how to use the tools can make a living from their creativity, and many will tell you how they built their business, by putting in spare time over several years to build a support base that enabled them to go full time.
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Actually, even at the height of the recording industry, concerts and other live performances was how musicians made their money. Those who remain in the business for 40 or more years are and were those who performed for an audiences.
Also, successful YouTubers sell their ability to create new content, and do not rest on their laurels hoping that the work they produced last year will keep food on the table, Copyright is not needed to sell an ability to create new works, just attribution on prior, or embedded branding to identify them as the creator of a work creations.
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Sharing a business plan with the world is the problem there.
Many small businesses also don't know that their tax returns are repackaged by their CPA firms and sold as business consulting to their much wealthier clients.
Every system can and will be gamed.
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Re: Remember when you promised to leave forever?
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Piracy should never be acceptable, and it has put many producers of previously profitable products out of business.
Not "previously profitable" before the internet, but profitable until the pirates started redistributing their work.
By not protecting the indies from piracy you're protecting those supposedly evil corporations, while pretending to attack them. Very Kafkaesque.
What's baffling is how the legacy copyright industry couldn't control the courts in cases like Perfect 10 versus Visa.
One can prove a business model is flawed by simply avoiding the content. There is never any justification for stealing it, nor for allowing it to be stolen. Search engines should be liable for vicarious infringement.
Let's also not forget that the DMCA has a counter-notification provision that requires only that the accused state their legal name, give their contact info, and waive service in a lawsuit. If they're not doing anything wrong, they shouldn't have a problem with this.
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Turning producers of valuable work into laborers is not exactly consistent with copyright protection as it used to exist.
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The Beatles stopped playing live in 1966.
So where did all their wealth come from?
Copyright.
Seriously, just stop. You people look ridiculous spouting tropes that were blown up years ago. Maybe you think you’re helping Big Tech with all this nonsense? You’re not. Everybody hates Big Tech these days.
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And you wonder why nobody trusts you.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: THERE ARE NO OTHER EFFECTIVE "MODEL
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Money is not the only “cost” to consider, and Google can afford any such costs borne from dealing with all these takedown requests.
I said nothing of piracy, so maybe shove those words in someone else’s mouth.
No, what it would be is burdened with costs it may not be able to afford despite only trying to do the exact same base-level function as the Google search engine (indexing websites across the Internet). Start-ups generally have far fewer resources than Google has right now.
What does this pile of garbage you call a paragraph even mean?
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I love the fact that you're holding up Perfect 10 as your shining example, as though that's supposed to help your argument. A company that demanded that everyone else do it's work for it(or even better, simply pay them to go away), only to lose case after case after case, and then try to dodge a court order to pay the other side's legal fees through sleazy(and blatantly obvious) tactics.
When you use an example like that you're not scraping the bottom of the barrel, you've gone even deeper and you're hitting dirt.
Piracy should never be acceptable, and it has put many producers of previously profitable products out of business. Not "previously profitable" before the internet, but profitable until the pirates started redistributing their work.
[Citation Needed]. Be specific.
One can prove a business model is flawed by simply avoiding the content. There is never any justification for stealing it, nor for allowing it to be stolen.
Good thing nothing's being stolen then, merely infringed upon.
Search engines should be liable for vicarious infringement.
As a wise man once said/printed on a coin, 'Not my circus, not my monkeys'. Or put another way, 'Your stuff being infringed upon is not my problem.'
Ford is not responsible for what people do with their trucks.
Walmart is not responsible for what people do with what they buy from there.
Comcast is not responsible for what people do with the internet service they provide.
Unless you want to start holding all of those companies responsible for what people do with their products/services, it's not only absurd to hold search engines for infringement that may show up in their searches, it's grossly hypocritical.
Let's also not forget that the DMCA has a counter-notification provision that requires only that the accused state their legal name, give their contact info, and waive service in a lawsuit. If they're not doing anything wrong, they shouldn't have a problem with this.
... Said the person posting anonymously.
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And that should tell you something even you could understand: Google is not responsible for copyright infringement carried out by others just because its search engine indexes public web sites. Your hateboner for Google—and it’s a pretty hateful boner—has sucked enough blood out of your head that your brain seems more than willing to blame a tool instead of the person who uses it.
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Re: Re: Re: THERE ARE NO OTHER EFFECTIVE "MODELS" THAN DIRECTLY
There, you just said it again! THERE ARE NO OTHER EFFECTIVE "MODELS" THAN DIRECTLY PAID. (Which can by "dinosaurs" or Spotify or Youtube collecting money indirectly through advertising: the key point is artists DIRECTLY paid.)
The vast majority of the methods I advocate for is getting artists directly paid. Remember the whole "connect with fans/reason to buy" thing? That's about getting paid directly. It has nothing to do with copyright, of course.
Promoting unrealistic unworkable academic notions is SAME as "Fuck musicians" -- that's why all the actual musicians have long since abandoned Techdirt.
Unworkable? More musicians are making more money than ever before, much of it based on models I advocated for. I still talk to musicians all the time (had a long conversation with two super successful musicians just today). Not sure what you mean that they "abandoned" Techdirt. What does that even mean?
Masnick, you have literally advocated that artists give away their product and sell T-shirts. Don't bother to claim you haven't or that can work too, as industry needs a NON-anomaly, NON-labor-intensive (not constantly "connecting with fans" to BEG) way of collecting and DIRECTLY paying artists.
I have advocated for anything that works over the long run -- and that's by aligning interests, not attacking your biggest fans as pirates. ONE suggestion OF MANY was selling physical merchandise for some artists if (and only if) that made sense for that artist and that artist's fans. It is extraordinarily misleading to suggest I ever said that all artists should "just sell t-shirts." I specifically advocated for looking for multiple scarcities that artists can sell. T-shirts was merely one example -- and one that some artists have actually found to be quite successful (not to mention that t-shirt sales have been fairly profitable for us at Techdirt as well...).
There is NO other model that works than the ones that have been around since, oh, the 1930s: either advertising-supported radio or direct sales
Huh? I'm not even sure what you're saying here.
What you've actually done for 20 years is assert that piracy is inevitable (tacitly, despite explicit denials, you've okayed it), and excuse yourself by repeating that "new business models" must be found, without ever showing any new.
Yes, I have said that piracy is inevitable, because it is. No one has shown otherwise. My point is that if it's inevitable, why not find a business model that takes advantage of that inevitability. And many have done exactly that. And, it's bullshit to say I've never shown what that business model might be. I discussed crowdfunding before Kickstarter even existed. I discussed patronage before Patreon existed. I've talked about all sorts of other scarcities as well, many of which are now regularly used by artists -- including things like special live shows.
I remind you that independents have existed for a hundred years and that Hank Williams "connected with fans" by selling records out of his Cadillac's trunk. That is therefore NOT a "new business model", just obvious.)
Um. I'm not sure why you think this argument proves your side and not mine. Hank Williams connecting with fans is a great example. Again, your focus is on the wrong word. I never said that the business models themselves need to be wholly "new." I've said that they need to be different than what won't work in an age of widespread piracy. For some that's something "new" for others it's a reinvention of the old. But the key is connecting with fans. And tons of musicians now do that THANKS TO THE INTERNET.
I'm sure you don't / won't see yourself as advocating piracy, but I think it's a fair charge when you've wrongly predicted court cases since Napster, explicitly said that there's no money in piracy, and supported, among others, Kim Dotcom's "business model" which relies on ILLEGALLY getting valuable products for free, and money directly for faster downloads besides indirectly from advertising.
I've gotten many cases right and many cases wrong -- as have you. Copyright is a crapshoot in the courts -- which actually supports my position that copyright infringement is not nearly as "obvious" as some think it is. Including you. As for Kim Dotcom, remember that he actually had build a really great business model for musicians, in which he'd pay them to distribute their own works for free to users. But, you know, that got killed. Too bad. Could have been a real winner, which is why so many musicians were on his side and had signed up.
SO, at this relective time of year, THINK on whether you might be misleading / evading / simply wrong / beating your head against reality / and far from reducing the grifting of middle-men, you're simply promoting a new herd of them in Kim Dotcom, Spotify, and Youtube!
I'm always thinking about my views and carefully considering points in contrast. The problem is you are not arguing honestly here. You have spent many years on this site repeatedly lying about me and my positions and purposely misrepresenting them. If you hope that inspires me to rethink anything, you've got some self-exploration to do.
[And just to show that I have thought on latter: the only non-violent way to deal with grifters getting too rich is steeply progressive income tax rates on all UNEARNED income.]
And here's where we point out that your knowledge of economics is basically non-existent. But, hey, no surprise there.
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Which copyright holders, though? Small-name artists will never be able to enforce their copyrights on the same level as media conglomerates such as Disney or Warner Bros. Any “consideration” for copyright holders would land at the feet of those corporations first and foremost, for they are the copyright holders that have the resources necessary to defend/enforce their copyrights where it matters the most: in a court of law.
As for the whole “it has no right to be treated as inevitable” thing: Of course copyright infringement has no rights; it is an abstract concept. But copyright infringement is inevitable, especially in re: digital works. The only way to protect a work against infringement is to never publish it.
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I personally don't listen to the Beatles. Pirated or otherwise. Me sending money to Yoko On is not going to incentivize Lennon's corpse to start composing. Get over yourself.
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Strangely enough, you seem very keen on relying on "Big Tech" to infect everybody with Sony rootkits and surveillance malware so you can figure out who to sue over your new pornographic flick.
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I recall average_joe claiming that the lawsuits provided ammunition for copyright enforcement to use. Now not only is Perfect 10 half a shadow of its former self after its litigious abuses were discovered, courts now rightly regard righstholders with closer scrutiny. And average_joe has to resort to meager threats of shoving Masnick in a wood chipper to get his jollies off.
Karma works in strange ways, doesn't it?
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No, they are not. Unless someone works on commission, any creative work created with monetization in mind is a work created with the hope that someone will pay money for a copy of it. Movies, books, music, video games—all created with that hope regardless of who made them, and absolutely none of them entitled to generate income merely by existing. Toby Fox was no more entitled to make money from Undertale than Nintendo was to make money from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate; everyone could have refused to buy both games and left the creators with nothing to show for their efforts but the game itself.
So what? Ideas and concepts enjoy no protections of exclusivity or distribution. If an idea in a book can be repackaged or explained in a different way without infringing on the original author’s copyright, what makes that such a bad thing?
So what? All creative fields see trends take over at one point or another. Hollywood went through an entire decade where it produced a shitload of Westerns. Music in the ’80s trended towards hair metal and synthpop (amongst other genres). If only one artist could use a style at a given time, the entire field in which they work would dry up.
Two things.
“Indians” is a term given to the indigenous peoples of what we know as the United States by a colonizing asshole who kickstarted the long-term genocide of those peoples. Be a little more personally considerate in the future; use “Native Americans” instead.
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That you think your involvement in celebrity culture means that you're automatically owed a Beverly Hills lifestyle is pretty damn staggering.
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1) An idea
2) A product, sufficiently tested to be viable.
3) A product in production
4) A market
5) A way to communicate with that market
6) Production
7) Distribution
8) A recycling of the above as the originator listens to the marketplace and continually improves their product. (Wait, that doesn't apply to the extant comment).
When someone puts their 'idea' on a kickstarter they leave the rest of the chain (and whatever I am missing) to the other side. The question then becomes, is this idea mature enough to be on a kickstarter? The answer to that is yes if it can overcome the remainder of the list, and no if it cannot. If the idea is put on a kickstarter and the answer to the above questions are no, then they deserve what they get.
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And just to show that I have thought on latter: the only non-violent way to deal with grifters getting too rich is steeply progressive income tax rates on all UNEARNED income.
This would have made sense if not for the fact that Trump, your beloved President, has consistently advocated for reducing taxes on the rich. You know, the guy you keep vehemently defending in that overused Devin Nunes thread.
So close, but no cigar.
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That is more of a "too many chiefs not enough Indians" problem than a piracy problem.
Actually, the corporate buzzphrase you just listed is used in the context of too many bosses and not enough laborers/grunt workers to carry out their marching orders.
For goodness's sake, John Smith. You can't even analogy right.
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Can you explain that? What is different now?
Those are the powers condoned to Congress. There is nothing there to say that anyone should make any kind of income or profit. Congress has the right to create copyright legislation, or patent or trademark. Nothing in the Constitution says that any creator has to have profit. I don't think that anything Congress has done says otherwise, even if they have been co-opted to increase the length of copyright in ways that appear to be solely beneficial to copyright holders (aka MAAFIA) rather than any creators.
If you want creators to be the beneficiaries of copyright, then tell your Congresscritter to enact legislation that makes creators, either the writers or the performers or however you like, but only creators, the sole beneficiaries, rather than the copyright holders.
Oh, and good luck with that.
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You just said today that "no one is owed speculative money." What else are claims of "losses from piracy" but a company feeling owed speculative money?
Dammit, John. I actually thought you were learning.
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Re: Re:Hey blue balls what’s your REAL name?
As the good bard once said
“Me thinks you doth protest too much sir.”
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Re: It’s called projection
That’s pathetic even by your sorry assed standards.
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So what?
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I see it is your first time here good sir. Might I recommend reading the article and then the comments posted after said article, before commenting. It will in future stop you from again looking like an enormous jackass. Especially after blue has been at the computer all day proving the inverse of your point.
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Re: Re: Re: Yo panties are in a twist today bro
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"Yes, when the fundamental rules of taxi medallion ownership changed due to Lyft and Uber, cabdrivers who bought medallions began committing suicide due to their business model being made "obsolete" by what used to be called GYPSY CABS. People used to be aware of the dangers of gypsy cabs but not in the feel-good sharing economy."
Meanwhile other cab drivers ran around France setting cars on fire.
"One could easily flip this script and say tha tcopyright infringement is the "Kryptonite" that puts automated search engines out of business. These debates seem to be boiling down to the rights of search engines to automate piracy (or defamation or spam or sex trafficking or whatever) against the rights of copyright holders to protect their work."
What? Google telling me something is located somewhere does not add the file or folder to my computer. Try again.
"We could have an internet run by human-edited portals and link farms which would avoid much of these problems. This would spread the wealth and eliminate antitrust concerns which would help the economy. If Google wants to let a bot hoover up billions in ad revenue, paying for the cost of the inevitable infringement should be part of that equation."
Right, Jhonny. This utter brainwave of yours again. Have humans run the Internet when the copyright enforcers in your corner have been screaming about how it's so, so hard for humans to police copyright. What's next, have humans monitor world hunger and poverty?
"Companies who DMCA-blitz to the point of negligence should also be held accountable because they harm those who have legitimate concerns about piracy."
This would be a valid point you had if not for each and every time DMCA blitzes are pointed out, like in this case, you scream about how anomalous it is to the point where it should not only be permitted, but promoted. Because screw Google!
"Many adult entertainers complain about the free porn tube sites and how they have to play whack-a-mole. Many have had to turn to prostitution to update their "business model." One outfit which used to make well into six figures a year was all but put out of business because its catalog was uploaded. Their work was much higher production quality than what replaced it. Now instead of actual films you get webcam garbage that promotes stuff that can't be pirated (like escorting)."
Your reluctance for live performances is duly noted, although the usage of pornography as an analogy is amusing. You know, the thing that's so scandalous and taboo, your buddy out_of_the_blue gleefully celebrated its removal from tumblr? The thing that has earned Malibu Media the right to be not protected by copyright in Germany?
Pornography is increasingly difficult to police and protect. You can thank your copyright enforcement arm for that, namely Prenda Law for setting the precedents they never wanted.
"Copyright law does not pass judgment on the quality or profitability of a work. It allows for statutory damages for a reason."
You know what I like about this argument? It completely nullifies the arguments you have about art and quality. If quality or profitability doesn't matter then why piss and moan about the reduced quality of works over the years? Why use quality as a damning point in support of harsher penalties if the work produced gets your protection regardless? Sounds like someone is feeling a little threatened now that judges are looking out for business models that look suspiciously like "make a crappy movie and make millions from suing children".
"Perhaps the search engines need to change THEIR business model instead. The idea behind the DMCCA was to avoid forcing rightsholders to go to court and sue individual infringers, who probably would prefer a DMCA notice to a $225,000 judgement like that woman who said "bring it on" wound up getting."
The "going to court and following the law is too hard" excuse, really? You don't allow the grandparents you sue the benefit of doubt; what part of your snowflake is so special that you get a free pass?
"Another idea is to treat these violations as ASCAP violations and limit damages to an ASCAP license (for music), and to set something similar up for the films and other works. Nominal damages is a well-established legal concept. Just ask Trump, who won $1 against the NFL in the USFL antitrust lawsuit, with damages trebled to $3, or the $2 won by Food Lion against ABC for the network's sending undercover journalists in (fraud) to expose something or other."
Smaller penalties? Finally something we might agree on. It's just too bad so many of your buddies rely on threats and saber-rattling for their meal ticket so nobody is ever going to agree with this.
"It's one thing to complain about abuse of the system, quite another to complain about the concept of copyright protection."
You say that like a person can't do both. There are very few who would consider the concept of statutory damages to be reasonable. If it's "theft" as you say it is why not punish it like theft? Of course, we all know the answer - it's because this way your standards of evidence are lower and you get to squeeze more money out of the unsuspecting.
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What does this pile of garbage you call a paragraph even mean?
To hazard a guess, he probably thinks his "NO U" claim that people who disagree with him must be cherry-picking constitutes as a clever rebuttal.
Never mind that cherry-picking is a standard strategy of the RIAA playbook.
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No it isn’t.
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1) That was mainly before the Internet, when the labels limited the competition.
2)Those musicians usually relied on live performance for most of their income, as the labels took most of the income from sales of recordings.
Creative works have always been speculative for the majority of creators, and prior to the Internet most creators could not find an outlet for their works. The Internet has not created an explosion of creativity, but rather enabled self publication enabling that creativity to be offered to the world. The low overheads of self publishing, and not having to share income with a publisher, means that many more are making a living from their creativity.
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In the above example where someone uses an AWS server to host pirated content, even that wouldn't make them liable. The logic the courts use is that the infringers would simply find another site, another processor, so the enabler doesn't "control" the activity of the infringer. Very shaky logicif you ask me, but also very clearly NOT in favor of the rightsholders.
As a practical matter, producers and publishers do have to accept this new reality, for better or worse, but I wouldn't call it just. Life will go on no matter how these coyright wars play out.
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To take an example from the film industry; the invention of the talkies put most of the stars of the silent era out of work. Or more generally, as the world changes dues to new inventions, some jobs will disappear or change dramatically, and some people will have to look for a new career.
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There is a new breed of producers on the Internet, who sell their services as 'polishers' of raw content. They do so as service providers in the same way as accountants sell their services, and are paid for the actual work that they do.
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it takes down 1000,s of videos that it should not,
video,s that are fair use ,or claimed by trolls ,
eg userno7 makes a video,
Some random troll claims the revenue on it and youtube treats the troll as the creator of the video .
There shoud be a public record of all companys who claim videos or content ,music that they do not own ,after a certain amount of false claims your account is flagged as a user that needs to be checked in future by a youtube worker if they continue to file claims on videos .
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"Your alternative ends badly in the other direction. Its mostly "Free", as in Beer, to setup a server, a URL, and start streaming the current hot movies. If it costs someone $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 to take down a feed, the fees can quickly reach amounts that are slightly insane."
And the issue is...?
Sorry, but communications technology exists and the "setup" you envision has been part of factual reality since the invention of the internet. With DHT and PEX alone it is arguable that in practical effect anything that anyone wishes to put out there already is, and will so remain, all attempts at rendering it otherwise notwithstanding.
When actual reality demands that practical enforcement of a law requires you to roll back technological progress and waste tens of thousands of hours building increasingly complex legislative structure just in order not to risk accidentally eradicating civil and human rights as accidental byproduct...then it is time for said law to vanish.
Copyright was a crap law back when the guild of stationers first lobbied for it and it remains a crap law today.
What you can ask for and resonably retain of it would be attribution and strict commercial rights. Exercising the privilege of determining who makes a copy and where is just not feasible anymore.
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"People will abuse any system you put in place."
And this is why you simply shouldn't HAVE a system where avoiding the abuse becomes more costly to society as a whole than the lack of said system could ever be.
Even if we ignore the way you conflate real-world goods with the ability to press ctrl-c, ctrl-v on a computer, we're still stuck with the facts that;
a) Copyright today <b>is completely unenforceable and has been since the invention of the internet</b>.
b) Copyright can not be enforced without heavily circumscribing or abolishing large parts of actual ownership rights.
c) Copyright enforcement, despite being completely bloody ineffective, consumes public resources on a massive scale.
The issue we're looking at with the DMCA is that it has no practical effect on enforcing copyright but DOES put everyone providing core infrastructure services in a bad situation.
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"I can use torrent links to save bandwidth. I can use S3 and get CDN and load balancing out of the box."
Yes, yes, and yes.
...and in order for the law to catch you at it they need to spend more resources from the public purse than they would need to catch...any other form of malfeasance such as organized crime and murder.
Then again for a society as a whole t exist at all in any form of freedom, any attempt to shut someone up MUST require a court of law. So we're back to where copyright holders must be expected to put up the resources and risks associated with a court case for every takedown they require.
And if that's too expensive for them they still shouldn't expect anyone else to pick up the slack.
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*"So in order to get paid, one must create work for which they should have been paid and HOPE someone pays them in the future.
Creative works are now a hobby under that scheme."*
This has always been the case, is the case now, and always WILL be the case. Barring a rollback of every tech more modern than vacuum tubes we're not going to see that change in a hurry.
And yet some 95% of all we call culture today was created without even a trace of copyright protection.
"...Many indies refuse to deal with big labels or publishers so they can control their work."
And the problem is that "control" will always be beyond anyone this side of God or Hogwarts when what is supposed to be "controlled" is information.
At best you can control outright commercialization. Dissemination of copies? Nope.
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It is far better to allow some infringement to go uncontested than to allow IP holders to take down any perfectly legitimate content in the name of protecting a law that is not that important and should be intended to encourage the production of more content. The purpose of IP should not be to protect IP holders, it should be to encourage the production of new content and serve the public interest. If it serves to take down perfectly legitimate content then it is not serving the purpose it should serve.
The problem is that the law is one sided. The penalties for infringement are ridiculous. The penalties for false takedown requests are practically non-existent. The exact opposite should be true. You can send as many infringement requests as you wish for free provided every single infringement request is valid. But you should pay steep penalties for invalid ones to discourage you from making them. It should be your responsibility to police the validity of your own infringement requests, it shouldn't be everyone else's.
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"It's not Google which is complaining, but "vicarious or contributory" pirates / supporters TorrentFreak and Techdirt, worried that piracy will be reduced..."
Worried. Right. Because in the fevered mind of some copyright defenders "piracy" is a form of great conspiracy, no doubt helmed by moustache-twirling master villains.
People who are sane complain because Google is flooded by invalid and inaccurate takedown notices which, for some reason, you feel is contributory in your crusade against "Pirates".
Here's something which shouldn't be news to you. If you and your kind got EVERYTHING you wanted for in legislation pirates would still work unhindered. Legitimate users of the internet, however, not so much.
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You don't get to blow up a bridge just because you think a car of thieves might have used it.
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But yeah - irrelevant to the story.
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It also has nothing to do with copyright protection except that these people would be considered rightsholders.
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The actual evidence of infringement is that a registered work was distributed, unauthorized, over the internet.
Exactly why should the law be changed?
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These little pirates who upload apparently are causing major damage within the construct of well-settled copyright law. That would make what they do a major crime.
Why should rightsholders have to surrender their right to criminals?
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But after decades of more misses than hits, it's no surprise why judges are getting fed up with you failing to put out.
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The DMCA was designed to eliminate the need for endless litigation over infringement, and to balance everyone's rights. The internet literally imposed itself on the rights of creators who were operating under a framework of absolute protection for copyright.
If someone writes a book that sells 3,000 copies at $15.95 each that's not a lot of money to most but could be a year's income that vanishes because of torrent sites.
The best protection available now is the Amazon Kindle store but they steer most works towards pricing in the $3-10 range due to the 70 percent they pay for works which sell for that price.
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Google is not responsible for DIRECT copyright infringement. For vicarious and contributory infringement, it's not so clear, especially once they are put on notice. Do they profit from infringement? If so, no DMCA protection. The courts have been very kind to tech on these issues so the rightsholders certainly don't have a lock on the government as an ally.
Search engines amplify damage caused by malfeasors. If no one could find a pirated copy of something it wouldn't be as big of a deal.
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A better analogy is what's going on with taxis and Uber/Lyft, who have an edge of not having to comply with regulations. The value of a medallion in NYC has plummeted over 80 percent, driving some cabbies to suicide.
Uber and Lyft could have been built as apps that work within existing regulated taxis, but chose the gypsy-cab route instead. Gypsy cabs are dangerous but Uber and Lyft's customers don't seem to care. Some do.
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An indie who can sell books or records to a loyal audience should not have that revenue destroyed by internet piracy. Under the law, they have the right to sue anyone who infringes for direct infringement, and those who enable it for vicarious or contributory infringement.
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Making IPs bulletproof against infringement claims would make it impossible to enforce copyright law.
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If IP addresses were that infallible you wouldn't fuck up enforcement each and every time it makes the news.
Once again going to show that all you have for enforcement is smoke and mirrors.
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And libraries destroyed the market for printed books.
/Sarc (for the benefit of John Smith)
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An IP address is sufficient only to begin an investigation into whether the owner of that IP address made the threat. It is not proof of guilt.
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…fucking what
The Internet busted copyright law in ways that lawmakers and those who want to keep copyright law under de facto corporate control still have yet to address. That it did so was not an “imposition”, it was a natural evolution of the digital age and the emergence of the Internet into our daily lives. How could the Internet have ever been designed in a way that obstructs any and all unauthorized copying? How could it ever be done now?
By all means, prove that a single prohibited download of a work is the equivalent of a lost sale, or that a prohibited download takes actual money away from the author of a given work. No one else has ever been able to do so, but if you think you can do it, your opportunity is here.
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Then go after the “malfeasors”.
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That was a change in the market, not a refusal to enforce the law. Not exactly the same thing.
It's exactly the same, especially when "the law" is written literally by the industries looking to protect their old business models. I mean, just look at how much copyright law changed from 1870 until now... nearly all of which was driven by the industries who completely twisted the original purpose and intent of copyright to make it a special mercantilist form of protectionism against competition from innovation.
A better analogy is what's going on with taxis and Uber/Lyft, who have an edge of not having to comply with regulations. The value of a medallion in NYC has plummeted over 80 percent, driving some cabbies to suicide.
Market competition that has driven down prices for consumers and made transportation much easier, while actually reducing fraud and bad overall consumer experiences. So of course you would complain about that.
Uber and Lyft could have been built as apps that work within existing regulated taxis, but chose the gypsy-cab route instead. Gypsy cabs are dangerous but Uber and Lyft's customers don't seem to care. Some do.
This is nonsense. The revolution of Uber and Lyft was not that they recreated Gypsy cabs, but rather that they solved most of the problems of why Gypsy cabs were a problem: to wit, they made it easy to get transportation from anywhere to anywhere at any time for a reasonable price. And second, by instituting a rating system, they were able to incentivize good behavior and massively reduce frauds/scams/danger associated with Gypsy cabs.
That does not mean that every Uber/Lyft is safe -- and of course you can point to the few examples of bad behavior on those platforms, but there's a big difference: we all learn about those and those drivers no longer drive. With a Gypsy cab that didn't happen.
So, sorry, but your example is luddite ignorant bullshit.
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Which is laughably difficult to use and get content restored, and which does not shield against further notices. Even when content is restored, it's down long enough for actual damage to have been done to the person that posted the clearly non-infringing content - but there is no way for the person who was falsely DMCA'd to recover damages from the malfeasor.
It occurs that DMCA might need to be turned against the RIAA/MPAA, etc. DMCA all their content. Flood them with DMCA requests. After all, you clearly can't be punished for false DCMA's.
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Google DMCA Takedown Problem & The Misuse Of Copyrights
According to YouTube Support, SocialBlade aren’t misusing my Copyrighted Materials as they are using YouTube API to display Statistics about my YouTube Channel. Which kind of infringes my Rights because it displays my name (copyrighted to me), my thumbnails (copyrighted to me), my channel profile picture (copyrighted to me), my channel cover art (copyrighted to me) — so you can see my frustration. So I’ve sent an email request to SocialBlade who have stated that they aren’t misusing images, when clearly it can be observed at https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/warrenwoodhouse
Under legal law, my copyrighted materials are my images, videos, music, etc. that YouTube are hosting, they own their logos and stuff — I own my own contents.
SocialBlade is part of Curse Entertainment, the parent company of Twitch TV.
I filed a request for the SocialBlade pages of all my YouTube Channels to be taken down to which it hasn’t been dealt with. So I’ve created a list of websites misusing my contents as a result. https://warrenwoodhouse.wikia.com/wiki/Copyrights
I’ve even sent a new email recently a week ago to SocialBlade explaining that they may only showcase my Channel name and statistics, nothing else, otherwise it’s infringement which I’m entitled to sue for, aren’t I?
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Yes, it was. And that turned out to be a mistake, like so many other aspects of the DMCA.
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MT Bucket? Massive Turd Bucket? There you go, have your ad hom and eat it too...
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Re: Re: Re: Google's computers can check billions in a second.
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You don't know your definitions again. Vicarious or contributory infringement require a third party to directly facilitate the infringement.
That is:
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But you can? Search engines didn't even exist for a large portion of the Internet's life. People still knew how to follow links, look at page names, and run queries by hand. Have you never used your computer's search function?
You must be very young, or very tech-illiterate.
I'm not surprised though. You seem to think running a giant digital card catalog is the same as making a bot to distribute infringing files.
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Ask your local porn queen what happens to her videos once she releases them. They complain about the free tube sites a lot.
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Then your issue is with the law. Write to congress.
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Not everyone in music is making bank on digital music.
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This ignores the 130,000 extra cars which are clogging up traffic in Manhattan, as occurred during the Great Depression (which is what led to the Medallion system), or the risks and costs of unregulated taxis (gypsy cabs) versus a well-regulated system like what we had.
Crushing prices at the expense of traffic, passenger safety, and driver income are not necessarily a good thing, yet they are the reality today. I don't point out these realities because I am for or against them, instead I merely note that is what we are dealing with.
Both cabdrivers and rightsholders were certainly blindsided by the internet, though some of the cabdrivers dismissed the concerns of musicians who were in their cabs in 2005 warning that the internet would one day come for their jobs as well. Kind of like the cops who told people "it's just the internet" until someone started uploading viral videos of police and criticizing the cops.
Human nature is fascinating.
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The "Tanya Anderson" problem.
Many pirate sites have flooded the market with illegal copies of works which no longer need to be purchased, and which eliminated the need for people to buy competing works.
It's not about lost sales, but control over one's work. If the work is worthless, don't steal it. Pirates act entitled to free "samples." They aren't.
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Also, most is not all.
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Reducing the income of the industry will reduce the quality of work, since it will reduce the budget devoted to creation of that work. Relying on hobbyists creates a new reality.
Fortunately, Congress isn't buying this, and no matter how much people complain, they won't. If anything, a great case is being made for locking up pirates, as the law already allows.
If IP doesn't prove theft then someone can let their computer be used for mass piracy without fear of legal consequences. Don't think that will ever fly.
This site is a nice echo chamber for those who are sympathetic to pirates who want to think they are actually accomplishing something. There are other internet subcultures which serve the same function for their fringe members.
The Perfect 10 case was very pro-pirate, beyond anything Perfect 10 may have done. It immunized search engines, cloud hosts, and even payment processors from contributory or vicarious infringement liability, effectively destroying copyright protection for many. As I mentioned above, the "too many creators not enough fans" problem and internet dissemination leading to knockoffs are also issues.
I switched to a patronage model a while ago, and a large chunck of my income is the result of a single member of the audience who has money and power. The other revenue stream that works is YouTube, since they protect content, while Amazon Kindle does also to some extent but they are flooded with e-books.
"True artists" now have to rely on day jobs, patronage, or large corporations as distributors of their work (like Netflix, Apple, etc.) to get paid. I do not agree with this new reality but I acknowledge it. I think it would have greatly benefitted the masses to have it go the other way, but at least for now, it has not. I'd much rather sell those 3,000 books at $20 each then have to rely on one rich person paying me.
Who controls the media under a patronage model? Ask this site where its bread is buttered and you might get more insight. The site's real audience could be as small as a single entity. Without transparency we wouldn't know.
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Hi, MCU fan here. Marvel had to deal with illegal copies of Black Panther circulating around the Internet, and the movie still brought in a billion dollars at the box office alone (never mind DVD, Blu-ray, and digital video sales as well as merchandising). The existence of illegal copies does not, on its own, prevent people who wish to support the author(s) of a given work by buying a copy of that work. And to be fair, no one “needs” to buy any creative work at all; owning a copy of Black Panther on Blu-ray is not necessary for me to live.
Welcome to the digital age, where any creative work that can be easily converted into a digital file can also be just as easily distributed. Until someone creates a device that can prevent the creation, distribution, and downloading of prohibited copies of a work before any of those things happen, such copies will continue to be created, distributed, and downloaded despite the wishes of that work’s copyright holder. Digital copyright infringement is an inevitability; all it takes is one copy.
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If that damage could be consistently proven in court such that “well-settled” law requires updating to account for that reality, the law would have changed already. (Disney alone would have seen to that.) Until you can prove that non-commercial copyright infringement is causing “major damage” to copyright holders large and small—that one download represents actual money taken away from the copyright holder—this assertion of yours can best be described as “bullshit”.
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No, “begin an investigation” = using the discovery of evidence of a possible crime (in this case, an IP address) to follow a lead that may either point to the perpretator of said crime or refute the notion that a crime took place. “Investigation” is not shorthand for “arrest”, “conviction”, or “sentencing”—and an investigation does not eliminate the notions of due process or “innocent until proven guilty”.
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Show me how “practical” such “protection” can be in the digital age without turning computers into one-way output devices. Please.
Yes. And?
[citation needed]
For the record: The furry community is filled with the kinds of artists you would call “hobbyists”, and we get along just fine that way. While corporations can market to furries, it is nigh impossible for those organizations to “corporatize” the community. (No corporation worth a damn in the eyes of the public would ever dare try to “monetize” Zig-Zag, that much I can assure you.)
And how far would this “locking up” go, hmm? Would you lock up an infringer who made use of a copyrighted work under Fair Use principles? (That is still technically infringement.) Would you lock up an infringer who did not know they were infringing? To paraphrase a line from A Man for All Seasons: How far would you go to get after the Devil?
Three things.
Copyright infringement is not theft; even the Supreme Court recognized this as a fact of law.
An IP address alone does not prove the owner of that IP address infringed upon someone else’s copyright, let alone that a copyright was even infringed.
I sympathize with people who are accused of copyright infringement despite using a copyrighted work under the principles of Fair Use. I sympathize with people who are sued for copyright infringement despite the infringement being, say, a muffled thirty-second excerpt of a song playing in the background of a home video. I sympathize with people whose lives have been dragged into a living hell because an overzealous copyright holder wanted to “make an example” out of those people.
I do not, however, sympathize with infringers who download copyrighted works for the hell of it. I doubt you will find anyone here who does.
Someone already destroyed this argument, but to abridge their points for your benefit: Contributory infringement implies that infringement would not have occurred but for the activity of the accused contributory infringer (e.g., infringement would not have occured but for the activity of a Google employee), and vicarious infringement applies only to employers or people legally responsible for the direct infringer (and only then if the infringing activity benefits the organization).
I fail to see how either of those things, as you described them above, are “issues” on par with copyright infringement of any scale and type.
“True artists” have always had to rely on those things to put money in their bank account. So have “false artists”/“hobbyists”. Welcome to the world.
I bet you would. But you are not owed, nor are you entitled to, even one person buying your works simply because you published them. Do the work require to make your works turn a profit for you or start looking for another rich bastard to pay you.
Better question: For what reason does media need to be “controlled” by anyone beyond the authors of said media and their giving copies of their works to their patrons?
Given how often you stan for copyright in ways that would make an RIAA executive reach for their Fleshlight, I have to wonder if that executive butters your bread.
And if that baseless accusation does not feel good to you, I hope it makes you think twice about using similar baseless accusations against anyone else.
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And once again, you make all these grandiose artist claims and refuse to cite who you are or what you do? Self-help books? Pornography? What do you do, John Smith?
As for how much audience this site gets, everybody knows you trolls love painting it as small. 27 Bangladeshis or something, as blue is often wont to say. Too small to influence legal policy, as you gleefully cheer. What confuses and amuses me is how many bricks you shit by the fact that this little, insignificant site exists that you have to throw a daily temper tantrum on the platform you loathe so much.
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You're firing blanks.
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Fuck that noise.
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That still doesn't mean I owe cab drivers money. Which is what you've been begging for all this time.
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Right... I'm sure every chicken should just waltz into the foxhole because the fox says it's safe, trust me...
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If your book was worth that, you would sell that number and more, with the internet spreading that infomation, despite any piracy that occurs. If you book is a steaming pile of crap, well the Internet will spread that infomation as well, and you will sell very few..
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Fixed that for ya bro
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(because you know it is me, Anonymous Coward, who is doing the posting.)
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There are artists who send hundreds if not thousands of demos to record labels, only to be ignored, or in the best case, rejected mercilessly by these gatekeepers.
And in many cases it is not because the quality of their art is insufficient. If anything, their work is innovative or different, and labels don't want to have anything to do with it because, according only to their often skewed judgment, it is not marketable or profitable enough. In fact, labels even ask artists to modify their tracks to make them more "commercial".
Then, in the few cases when an artist gets signed, most labels do their shenanigans around payments, even with a signed contract with precisely stated royalty rate. So that the artist never gets what it's due.
I guess this is common not only in the music industry but also in all the others where publishers decide who gets published.
The Internet has enabled musicians to escape the stranglehold of the legacy gatekeeper publishing industry, and now with direct selling websites like Bandcamp etc. profiting from their works has become a reality, without any middleman. Sure, not all become multimillionaires through it, but it was always like this anyway and at least it's something, while historically this level of control of artists around their own art is unprecedented.
I wonder how this can be bad while shelving an artist's art with an exclusive contract and forgetting to pay their due royalties is better.
If anything, major corporations like Google are guilty of restricting all possible avenues of promotion to paid advertising, when in the past there were other ways that didn't cost a dime, but since Google probably couldn't profit out of it, and some people started abusing them, they were removed. For example, before Google acquired YouTube there was a full-fledged community in it and people could send personal messages, friend requests, and share videos with each other, and this was an effective way to promote something. But then Google came and abolished all those things to introduce their botched Google+ social network which has been an epic fail in all aspects.
In fact, the real challenge for artists today is to get noticed. But if getting noticed nowadays equals only to spending money on ads, then only those who have money for ads in the first place will get noticed. And it doesn't mean that their art is worthy.
There should be real, effective ways for artists to get noticed without spending money or hoping to go viral just by chance, which is in most cases a chimera.
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What an odd comment. Nothing in my comment refers to getting paid from digital streaming companies, and your response is to point to (misleading) royalty statements from a digital streaming platform. That has never been the focus of what I've talked about, so why bring it up other than to deflect from what I am actually talking about?
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Yes, clearly, because you would need to be totally clueless to think the impact has been negative.
This ignores the 130,000 extra cars which are clogging up traffic in Manhattan, as occurred during the Great Depression (which is what led to the Medallion system), or the risks and costs of unregulated taxis (gypsy cabs) versus a well-regulated system like what we had.
You ignore everything I wrote about the differences with gypsy cabs. Why? Because you cannot deal with reality.
Meanwhile, I am frequently in NYC, and I can't recall ever having a cab ride in which I felt (a) safe or (b) not likely to be ripped off. At the same time, I've never had a bad Uber/Lyft ride in Manhattan. They've been much more pleasant and enjoyable, and noticeably cheaper. The overall experience has been much better, with much greater convenience.
Crushing prices at the expense of traffic, passenger safety, and driver income are not necessarily a good thing, yet they are the reality today.
There are a bunch of claims in this sentence that are not reflected in reality. NYC traffic seems no worse than it has been in the past. There is no indication that passenger safety is worse (indeed, I've always felt much safer in Uber/Lyft).
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It's obvious that many think that creative works do not need practical protection, and that creators should monetize their fan bases in other ways.
Yes. That is correct.
Reducing the income of the industry will reduce the quality of work, since it will reduce the budget devoted to creation of that work. Relying on hobbyists creates a new reality.
There's a big assumption here, and this has been the prediction over the past two decades, and literally none of it has been borne out. There is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE creative output today than any time in the past, there is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE money being made by creators that at any time in the past. Some of it is more spread out, but that has created a much wider distribution of creators who can make money.
The amazing thing about the world we live in today is that it has enabled not just hobbiest to make some money doing what they love, but has also enabled many formerly "hobbyists" to more easily move up the chain to making a career out of being a creator -- often by building a strong relationship with their fanbases. That doesn't require copyright. Indeed, copyright can get in the way of such things.
Fortunately, Congress isn't buying this, and no matter how much people complain, they won't. If anything, a great case is being made for locking up pirates, as the law already allows.
Heh. If you believe that, more power to you. But okay...
If IP doesn't prove theft then someone can let their computer be used for mass piracy without fear of legal consequences. Don't think that will ever fly.
You haven't been paying much attention to the courts, apparently.
This site is a nice echo chamber for those who are sympathetic to pirates who want to think they are actually accomplishing something. There are other internet subcultures which serve the same function for their fringe members.
For someone who claims to support creators, why do you mock those of us who actually help creators and who are creators ourselves?
The Perfect 10 case was very pro-pirate, beyond anything Perfect 10 may have done. It immunized search engines, cloud hosts, and even payment processors from contributory or vicarious infringement liability, effectively destroying copyright protection for many.
Just to be clear: there have been multiple Perfect 10 cases, and Perfect 10 lost all of them. Easily. So the idea that it was some weird anomaly outside of the law is... kinda funny. Also, it did no such thing in immunizing such sites from either vicarious or contributory liability (Grokster is still considered the law of the land, after all). The Perfect 10 cases just noted that the law properly draws the line for who gets blamed for what, while the Grokster case drew the line for what really is contributory infringement. Guess what? Most of the sites you name don't meet it, because they are not inducing infringement.
"True artists" now have to rely on day jobs, patronage, or large corporations as distributors of their work (like Netflix, Apple, etc.) to get paid.
Huh? I mean, pre-internet, most "true artists" made no money at all. The very, very few who did, had to rely on large corporations to get paid... and the terms of those deals were terrible (the corporation got the copyright and paid a pittance in royalties). That's... not the case with new companies in this space. Plus there are more options for artists, so that they can find a variety of ways that work.
Who controls the media under a patronage model?
The fans of the creator. Which seems a lot better than a giant rent-seeking gatekeeper, no?
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This appeal to pornography really hurts you in the John Steele bone doesn't it?
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For the majority of creators, through the whole of human history, creativity has not been a particularly profitable activity. Before the Internet, most new works never got published, and since its takeoff, many more have been published, and more have led to some income for the creator, and fewer have managed make a living from their creativity. There are more creators than ever before making a living from their creativity, but it is still far from the majority.
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It wouldn’t help. First, because the linked-to site can change after a human has looked at it. Second, because humans might not be thorough enough in finding piracy on the site — partly because there might be so much on the site that it’s a needle in a haystack problem, partly because ordinary humans are not always going to recognize infringement when they see it. Third, copyright is a strict liability offense, so it’s even harsher than, say, negligence. Let’s say a commercial truck hits a car, and it’s determined that the brakes weren’t working. If the trucker/truck company can show that it was not reasonable for them to detect the problem through inspections, etc., they’re off the hook because they were responsible and not negligent in their duty to make sure the truck was safe for driving on the road. Copyright infringement occurs even in the lack of negligence, the law is so harsh. So even the most careful human review, if it is faulty and lets some infringement slip through, exposes the link directory to the same liability as if it had no standards at all. So there is no advantage to doing so.
Your idea is consequently lame, argued in bad faith, and indicative of hatred for the Internet and a desire to dismantle it. While I like the idea of copyright and would like to see copyright in some form or another continue to exist, if it came down to choosing copyright or the Internet, I would always prefer the latter.
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Why? This website is altered every time someone posts. Newspaper websites are altered whenever a new article comes up. Weather websites are altered almost constantly. What the hell good would flagging do?
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No, you’re wrong.
Copyright is like a funnel or a magnifying lens. It allows the copyright holder to concentrate revenues obtained for the work to themselves. But it does not cause the revenues to exist. If the day is overcast, the lens can’t concentrate enough light to make a spark because it just isn’t there. If there’s no water around at all, the funnel has nothing to direct into one spot.
They just came out with that Holmes and Watson movie that’s clearly a giant piece of crap. It’s not going to earn much money, and might even result in a loss for the studio (a real loss, not one manufactured through Hollywood Accounting). It’s not for lack of copyright, it’s because no one wants to see such a bad movie. Likewise, there will probably never be much copyright infringement for that movie, because even the pirates will not want to see it.
Profitability requires that the work is popular enough and inexpensive to have produced. Popularity and keeping costs down are problems for the author that Congress has no power over. The government can’t make a work profitable. All they can do is give authors a slim, slim chance. So slim, in fact, that even with copyright, the vast majority of authors usually don’t make much money from their works, even in the absence of piracy. There’s too many of them competing for too small a pie. Luckily, their unreasonable expectations allow the public at large to enjoy lots of works.
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So you’re saying that when the police break the law, or act in an unacceptable fashion, they should not be accountable for that? Do you perhaps not know what a law is or from where its legitimacy originates?
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Okey-doke. If that’s what’s sustainable, then I’m cool with that.
And that’s nothing new: Not every movie needs to be a DeMille epic. Not every group of musical performers needs to be an orchestra. Books probably won’t be affected at all. And there’s a whole philosophy of software development that encourages making small, focused tools rather than giant monolithic applications that can do it all.
Nothing new there. It’s worked that way since forever.
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However that means that That RIAA claim rate means that they wont be able to submit another claim till somewhere around 2061. Sounds fair to me
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'Just because I have to, doesn't mean I have to make it easy.'
Unfortunately the DMCA doesn't contain any real punishments for bogus claims, or even piles of bogus claims, so that wouldn't really work out as they'd lose the legal shield if they started just ignoring the notices.
However, there's nothing in there that says they have to make it easy to submit DMCA claims, so to the best of my knowledge it would be entirely legal for them to say start demanding written DMCA claims, personally signed, on a 1-to-1 claim/address basis in an attempt to provide 'incentive' for serial-abusers of the system to actually check their work before sending it off, and that would absolutely destroy the current 'shoot first, ask never, mass DMCA claim' method certain parties use.
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Please define "unearned income". Your examples of Kim Dotcom, Spotify, and Youtube all seem not to apply. Somebody had to spend time, money and energy to create those platforms. Programmers had to be paid, servers had to be bought and bandwidth must be paid for.
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