Copyright In The Modern Era: Fortnite Lets Players Mute Emote To Avoid Auto-Copyright Claims Against YouTubers
from the no-mote dept
If you had told me a few years ago that we would have multiple stories at Techdirt over copyright issues surrounding video game emotes, I would have said you were a crazy person. Unfortunately, it seems that it's the world that is crazy instead. Fortnite in particular has been a focus of many of these stories, as a popular feature in the game is the ability to perform emotes, some of which are or are accused of being based on pop culture occurrences from other media. It is all, I can assure you, very stupid.
But people claiming likeness to Fortnite emotes isn't the only copyright issue that surrounds their use in the game. Even when Epic has tried to do right by creators of copyrighted content, it still has managed to find itself in trouble. For example, it seems that Epic, which properly licensed Rick Astley's meme-famous Never Gonna Give You Up audio for an emote inspired by his song, has been forced to patch the game so that players can mute the musical content of that emote. Apparently, YouTubers are finding themselves receiving copyright strikes over the song.
Fortnite introduced its Rick Astley-inspired emote just one week ago, and the company has already rolled out an update to let PC players mute the music in response to complaints: creators said they were getting copyright claims over the licensed track that plays when the emote is used.
While it’s clear that Epic licensed Astley’s song, which defined early memes for an entire generation of people, the company didn’t think of how this would affect its creator base. Giving players the ability to mute might take away from the fun of the emote, but it’s a good middle ground for now. It also allows Epic to pursue other popular tracks for its game while ensuring the creator community isn’t hurt.
This shows yet another flaw in copyright law in terms of it functioning well within the modern era of technology. Epic licensed the song properly, except that nobody planned for the obvious eventuality of that licensed emote being used by YouTubers, where the label then issued copyright strikes against those video uploads. What's the argument by the label? Every YouTuber doing let's plays has to license the song as well, even though they're only playing the game? Is Epic supposed to work out a separate license for YouTube videos? Is it a public performance?
Or is this all terribly dumb and a barrier to the original purpose of copyright law? That, probably. After all, it's not as though a snippet of a song that was otherwise licensed appearing on YouTube is somehow a replacement for that song. It's also not as if rick-rolling weren't an incredibly common trollish trope, for which Astley is principially famous among the present youth. Epic having to patch the audio of the emote out of its game for this reason is silly.
But that's modern era copyright for you.
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Filed Under: copyright, emote, fortnite, muting, never gonna give you up, public performance, rick astley, rickroll, videos
Companies: epic, youtube
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Seems to me that instead of muting emotes, Epic should have a Creators mode, where it is expected that the content will be shared on public forums. Regular mode would include a small watermark reminding players that the game includes assets licensed for personal use only, and Creators mode would replace those with really bad parodies of the originals.
If any of the rightsholders complain, they can then get their content added to Creators mode with the understanding that THEY are responsible for any fallout.
Interestingly:
https://www.uselessdaily.com/news/how-much-money-did-rick-astley-make-from-rickrolling/
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its creator base.
Creators? Really?
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Re:
Yes, creators. YouTubers do create content, y’know.
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They _say_ it was for YouTube creators ...
... but really they're just caving to the gamers who want to play the game and not encounter the song in the middle of their game. ;)
/sarc (I think...)
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Re: They _say_ it was for YouTube creators ...
You know those gamers...
They're always gonna give you up
Always gonna put you down
Always gonna run around and desert you
Always gonna make you cry
Always gonna say goodbye
Always gonna post a meme and hate you
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Re:
Would you rather they be called artists?
I think there's no dispute that they're creating something....
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Re: Re:
Well, the bar for being called an artist is quite low. Heck, you could probably just a tape a banana to the wall and call yourself an artist...oh..wait...
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The time has come to just accept that most people are stupid, and that the only solution is to make me the dictator of the nation. Vote herre.
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Private vs Public
I just read how YouTube is still considered private in a 1st amendment suit... Instances like this should be fair use and it gives free advertising to the right holders. Media companies = Sticking sticks in our own spokes since Napster.
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From The Pits
Copywrong came from the pits of hell. What the heaven did you expect?!
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The problem isn't just copyright law
But also YouTube law. I wonder at what point does YouTube become a platform so ubiquitously used that users are entitled to public accommodations and protections from mistreatment (much like gays kissing on the Church-of-Jesus-Christ-of-Latter-Day-Saints-owned promenades in Salt Lake City).
Or does it never happen until someone creates a public option?
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Re: The problem isn't just copyright law
And we have Viacom and RIAA (among others) to blame for 'youtube law'. So given the latter's influence, for now such protections are a far off dream at best.
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Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
If you're publishing anything, like what people do in youtube, the authors should check all content beforehand against copyright infringements. This includes process like the following:
1) divide the content to individual parts
2) decide owner of every part
3) get licenses for every part
4) combine the cost of licensing every part and calculate the total cost so that you can consider if it's possible to publish the material
5) then reject or accept the publish -operation
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Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
[Asserts facts not in evidence]
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A court ruled yesterday (it’s past midnight where I am) that the use of YouTube by the general public doesn’t make it a “public forum” subject to First Amendment law. (Citation provided.) YouTube could ban videos of gay people kissing in Salt Lake City and said gay people could do nothing about it besides complain.
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Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
This is a recipe for killing culture, not making it.
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Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
"the authors should check all content beforehand against copyright infringements"
Sigh, our local idiot returns with his dystopian fantasy..
The fact is, everyone involved did their prior checking, from Epic confirming they licensed the song, to YouTubers having permission to stream it. But, it got flagged anyway, and it would NOT be possible to prevent this, as the content that was flagged was live.
"then reject or accept the publish -operation
Explain how you do this with a live stream, numbnuts.
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Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
"1) divide the content to individual parts
2) decide owner of every part
3) get licenses for every part
4) combine the cost of licensing every part and calculate the total cost so that you can consider if it's possible to publish the material
5) then reject or accept the publish -operation"
I had a look at meshpage and can confirm you didn't do any of the above. Provide the proof that you did or surrender yourself to the police.
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"What's the argument by the label? Every YouTuber doing let's plays has to license the song as well, even though they're only playing the game?"
Even that might not work. One podcast I listen to regularly has recently had an experience where despite them paying multiple licencing agencies for permission, YouTube doesn't necessarily obey this as they have to err on the side of the labels' claims. Even if they did, the podcast often gets direct contact from artists and labels asking them to play their song, so they wouldn't always be part of those licences. So, this podcast has had to fight against a number of strikes that temporarily shut down their YouTube channel, despite having gone out of their way to obey the rules.
"It's also not as if rick-rolling weren't an incredibly common trollish trope, for which Astley is principially famous among the present youth"
That's one of the fun things here. If it weren't for unlicenced usage, most people playing Fortnite wouldn't have a clue who the singer was or what the song was, and it would be worth nothing to that audience. Now, they know it well enough to share it among themselves as a joke, and the reaction to that is to restrict the song and any value it may have gained.
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Allow me to break this down for you so you can see how bad of an idea this truly is. To do that, I’mma use a recent YouTube video: “How to Do a Fight Scene” from a channel called The Closer Look.
The video runs 22 minutes and 32 seconds with no clear delineations in subject matter, so for the sake of discussion, we’ll cut it into ten even pieces that run about 2 minutes and 23 seconds each.
Now we’ll look at the first piece (the first 2 minutes and 23 seconds of the video). The video shows footage from Kingsman: The Secret Service, Mad Max: Fury Road, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, John Wick, and Avengers: Infinity War. The audio belongs to the videomaker themselves, as it is their original commentary.
If we assume the distributor of each film holds the ultimate copyright (and we will for the sake of discussion), that means 20th Century Studios, Warner Bros. Pictures, Lionsgate Films, and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures hold the copyrights for the film footage and the videomaker holds the copyright for their commentary. Got it? Good, because I’m lumping the next three “steps” together.
Herein lies the problem with your proposal: The video that we’re discussing literally could not exist without a lack of proper licensing.
The purpose of the video is educational (critique of popular media). It uses a small proportion of each featured film. And nobody will ever watch the video as a replacement for the films themselves. If ever a video qualified for Fair Use protection, this is it. But under your proposal, this video would never see the light of day because it would literally be too expensive to properly publish.
I can’t imagine how much a single movie studio would charge for the use of even a fraction of a film’s footage in a video like this. Multiply that amount by the total number of studios represented in the video and the cost becomes even more unimaginable. No lay person could ever afford to license out that much footage for usage such as that video. (Before you go saying “well he could just release the audio”: The commentary would be far less effective without the video footage to accompany it.)
Fair Use exists precisely to protect videos such as these from being censored by copyright. And I can’t think of any reason why this video should be censored other than unadulterated capitalist “fuck you got mine” greed.
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Re:
You have to remember who you're talking to - this guy hates fair use, FOSS and the public domain because they give people a choice other than his own shoddily created work. The idea that freely created content should be made impossible is par for the course in his mind. The idea that someone would watch the freely created video, and then go on to spend more money on the referenced properties is completely alien.
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Re: Re:
"Would you rather they be called artists?"
Basically if they chose to call themselves artists, that is what they are. You could argue - successfully - that farting could be considered art (wikipedia; Flatulist). Rocky brings the "banana taped to a wall" as a successful art example from real life, below. Etc.
...and this brings to mind yet another reason why copyright is such a toxic mess - because there is no form of human behavior or action which can not be successfully described as "art". That being the case there is also in reality very little you can't copyright.
And that brings us to youtube whose users are increasingly discovering that the "burden of proof" required for a successful DMCA claim to be made against them appears to be that they've made anything to be streamed in the first place.
Yes, youtubers create. And when they show others what they've made it's called "art".
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Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
"If you're publishing anything, like what people do in youtube, the authors should check all content beforehand against copyright infringements. This includes process like the following:"
You realize, I hope, that your little list would have prevented ALL of human culture from existing, since well before the days of Cicero and Horace?
Hell, according to your little list, the bible is an unlawful work.
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Consistent delusion
Sigh, our local idiot returns with his dystopian fantasy..
I find it both funny and fitting that in their constant attacks against basically all form of creation and creativity they themselves never seem to come up with anything new, and are instead so predictable that even without unflagging the comment I knew who was commenting the second I saw people calling out the mystery poster for attacking culture and creativity with insane ideas.
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Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
Make a video, and come back and tell whether it is clear of any infringement after you have checked it against every video published on YouTube. Trying to do so should keep you from annoying us ever again'
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Re: Re: Re:
Actually, they don’t even need that. It could simply be the promise to make something to stream.
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Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
Yeah, in addition to your suggestion being unfeasible in general and going against the concepts of fair use, public domain, and the purpose of copyright, need I remind you that Epic licensed the song in question for use in Fortnite and not only expressly permits but actively encourages YouTubers like these to stream Fortnite and all of its content? Strictly speaking, Epic would be essentially offering a sublicense to Fortnite players for the snippet of the song, and that’s not even getting into the bits about the First-Sale doctrine and “Fair Use”.
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Re:
I would have put quotes around the word “proper” as I would argue that licensing the footage for a critique of those film would actually be improper.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Actually, they don’t even need that. It could simply be the promise to make something to stream."
True enough, looking at a few real world examples of "pre-emptive" DMCA threats we've all seen.
Just when you think copyright couldn't get more insane, reality serves you a new low.
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Yeah, but that’s our legal system for ya.
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Which is what those who understand copyright have been saying ever since the DMCA passed. The entire thing is insane from beginning to end.
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Banning videos of gay kissing
The question is, at one point does a common publicly accessible video-sharing forum become an accepted right like email (or if we want to go back further, a postal address)?
What must happen between now and then?
I mean granted, one generally needs a bank account, which is a rather archaic idea, and plenty of people don't have one, and we have a whole check-cashing industry to exploit the underserved. In that regard, just because we as a society would be served by such a public forum existing I get that it may not for a while.
But so long as we depend on corporate providers who insert their own rules, it puts in sharp relief the failure of our society to enforce human rights.
The same question can be asked about other ubiquitous yet monopolized web services like Twitter and Facebook. The iTunes store provides a smaller example, where iPhone users are limited by the opinions of a hand full of executive committee members what kind of content they can access from their phone.
But we have in the past decided that our society is better when everyone has access to certain services. And I think YouTube and social media are going to fall into these categories eventually (provided the changing climate doesn't kill us).
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Re: Banning videos of gay kissing
When will a Muslim be allowed to preach in a baptist chapel?
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Divide content into part,s ,get permission from owners, this is wrong,BS.
under fair use law , one does not need to ask permission for reviews, ,commentary, parody one just makes a video in a free society.
All the news programs uses clips and parts of other networks programs
for political commentary under the fair use law.
THE Problem is millions of video,s are uploaded to youtube every day,
youtube prefers to give big corporations money or revenue share in video,s
then go to court to fight for fair use
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Muslims preaching in a Baptist chapel
Religions are given obscene numbers of special rules. As far as I know Baptist chapels won't marry gays.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints only would marry blacks within the last fifty years.
And I think some chapels still will not marry couples of mixed race, whether or not it is legal for them to discriminate, it is not enforced.
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Nobody in the United States has the absolute protected right to have a roof over their heads. What in the blue hell makes you think using YouTube would ever become a guaranteed human right before that?
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Re:
The steps that I'm proposing are easy to include to your video development process. I.e. every time you include any section of the work to your end result, you should check licensing. It's just one necessary step in the process of choosing which clips can be used. Given that you anyway need to choose the clip from millions of different videos, which is known to take plenty of time, one small additional license check step to the process isn't too burdensome or annoying. And it avoids costly legal wranglings when copyright owners find out about your video.
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Re:
No lay person can hijack space-x space shuttle and travel to the international space station, because it just costs too much. This is why going to the international space station is illegal without proper permission. Your video footage has the same problem. Those clips might have costed millions to develop originally, and you expect to be able to use those expensive clips in your published videos without compensation to the original authors. It's like stealing a space shuttle and fuel.
Basically such illegal practices are twisting competition, where legal videos are in huge disadvantage because they cannot use expensive video footage, but then illegal players in the market are doing copyright infringement to get more clicks by including high quality and expensive movie clips to their videos to attract audiences. Soon legal video production becomes impossible because everyone needs to compete against illegal players. Once that happens, there will be wild west for RIAA and MPAA to sue anyone who wants to create. These illegal practices are killing video production completely, because legal vendors need to quit producing videos because there is too large legal risk in publishing the end result.
This is why we decided to not include software that plays video files or streams to our 3d graphics software. The legal risk to us for end users playing hollywood movies with our software just becomes too high. We do not expect to receive licenses to hollywood's content without significant money investment, but instead it just kills the whole technology. We do not expect video files or video streams to provide any other content than pirated hollywood's movies.
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right to a roof over their heads
Considering the housing and homelessness crises in the States, I expect that's going to be addressed in the near future, either by finding a way to provide homes, or by purging all the poor.
Our numbers living in continual precarity is not a circumstance that can be sustained for long before they start packing the cattle cars with Trade Unionists.
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Re: Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
This kind of pairing (v1,v2) isn't necessary in my process. You just need to know the author of the material. If you don't trust your video clip vendors to not lie to the origins of the material, then the legal risk obviously grows larger.
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Re: Re:
"I.e. every time you include any section of the work to your end result, you should check licensing"
Again, can our resident dunce please explain how this is done with a live stream?
"Given that you anyway need to choose the clip from millions of different videos"
Or live stream a videogame. Are you incapable of addressing the actual issue under discussion?
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Re: Re:
"This is why we decided to not include software that plays video files or streams to our 3d graphics software."
Is that also why more people mock your software on this site than actually use it? Maybe it's why you spend so much time creating fantasies here and whining about Pixar, since you don't have paying customers to need to work full time?
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Re: Re: Re:
If the software has 600 features implemented, why would missing 1 feature be so significant that users would start to mock the software?
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
Because it's a feature people need?
Or, perhaps it's a good indicator of your mindset. Nobody holds a client video player responsible for the content played on it, not even the wet dreams of the MPAA have ventured that far (distribution and online play are different issues). Yet, people absolutely need such software to verify that the end product ofd what your software creates is what is claimed.
So, what you've done is insist that people use 3rd party software, some of it provided by competitors, in order to perform the final basic function of the software you provide. The reason for you doing that is some wild interpretation of the law that's shared by nobody. That's mockable.
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Re: Re: Re:
livestreaming a videogame -issue was already decided when nintendo decided to oppose the gamer's youtube videos about nintendo games being played in youtube gaming channels. Basically the conclusion is that publishing game videos on youtube would be illegal and needs a permission from the authors of the games.
Obviously we need to use the strictest interpretation that we can find from the blogosphere. RIAA/MPAA or Nintendo's position is as good as anyone elses.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
We consider this to be mistake. The whole reason why napster and kazaa was illegal was because their users were able to listen/watch pirated content while using the service. In user interface area, even single pirated item visible in the user interface makes the whole software's user interface illegal. napster and kazaa both had tons of pirated content visible in the user interface and thus the authors of the client software were liable for user's copyright infringement as the tech enabled that use case. Users were also responsible because when the user interface displays pirated content, users should detect that fact and reject the whole service. The end users were sued for copyrights and they lost because they didn't reject obviously illegal service.
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Re: Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
well, before using your streaming service, you need to check if the service itself is legal to use. And one important criteria for service legality is how they handle/remove/filter obviously copyrighted and pirated content. Ability to remove such content when dcma notices are received is essential in this evaluation. flagging systems are obviously helping.
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Re: Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
I'm the author of the content so owner is clearly determined. The publish, perform and distribute bits are author's exclusive operations, so a license is not needed for anything where you're author yourself. Then cost is obviously my work amounts spent to create the work. Publish operation can be accepted until some errors in this process can be identified.
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A church with no desire to marry interracial couples can refuse to host a wedding for an interracial couple. So long as this refusal is only for the religious ceremony, and so long as the refusal is for the use of a purely religious building instead of a secular public accomodation (i.e., for the use of a church instead of a “we serve everyone” wedding chapel), the United States government can’t do dick about it — which is the correct outcome for the principles of religious freedom.
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Principles of religious freedom
Ah, so principles of religious freedom serve religious institutions, not the public nor the parishioners to that religion.
What's the purpose of the religious institution then, and why are they given immunity to taxation by the state? Are they a state unto themselves like the Vatican?
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
"issue was already decided when nintendo decided to oppose"
So, it's "decided" because Nintendo demanded something you agree with, and this somehow overrides Epic's demands that you don't agree with?
"needs a permission from the authors of the games"
They had that you blithering idiot, the thing in question was not even the game but rather music (for which that had permissions as well, btw).
Address the reality of the facts, not the cherry picked misdirections you wish weren't challenged.
"RIAA/MPAA or Nintendo's position is as good as anyone elses."
Not as good as their competitors who think differently to your ridiculous position, apparently.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"We consider this to be mistake."
Who is "we"?
"The whole reason why napster and kazaa was illegal was because their users were able to listen/watch pirated content while using the service."
Sigh.. no it wasn't. Nobody watched videos through those services, that feature was not available, they used other programs. Those services were illegal because they allowed unauthorised duplication of the files.
Again, why do you waste so much energy inventing an idiotic parallel universe when you could address the real one? Is it because you're a failure in the real one?
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Re: Re: Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
"well, before using your streaming service, you need to check if the service itself is legal to use."
It is. Are you trying to say Twitch is illegal now?
"Ability to remove such content when dcma notices are received"
By which time the stream is over the blithering fool! How do you deal with the above in a live stream, where all parties already have implicit permission to use the content? What is your solution that addresses the facts in front of you, not the random distortion you wish they were?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
So,
1) song writers authored the music
2) Epic has a permission to include the music to fortnight
3) players obtained license to the games in question
4) BUT players had no license to publish any of the game's content
5) youtube and epic recommended/encouraged creation of the videos, this only gives implicit license
6) BUT without doing copyright checks against all authors of the material
7) songwriters sent dcma notices to videos containing their music, claiming that epic's implicit license doesnt cover the music in question
8) techdirt tries to spin this pattern as somehow these people should be freely publish all the material available in the games, i.e. reversing copyright law's explicit purpose and rules.
9) copyright laws explicitly state that all those publish operations are illegal until proper license negotiations have taken place
10) courts have not endorsed implicit licenses, but instead their status remains unclear
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"4) BUT players had no license to publish any of the game's content"
This is where your argument turns to complete bullshit. See if you can work out why.
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This is right up against the line of otherwording.
The principles of religious freedom serve everybody, even if that makes some religious people/groups look like douchecanoes. Them’s the risks.
The ostensible purpose of a religious institution is to help people find spiritual inspiration for living better lives and bringing together believers as a community to enrich each other’s lives. Whether you agree with that, to any degree, is your business.
The ostensible reason for that immunity is “keeping up the wall of separation between church and state”. If a church can be taxed, it can be punished for tax code violations.
The Johnson Amendment presents an interesting wrinkle to this idea: Should a church be punished with a loss of its tax-exempt status because a preacher said something that the government didn’t like (e.g., endorsing a certain political candidate)? And if so, how do you square that away with the idea that the government shouldn’t interfere with the speech of religious people/groups?
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You’re missing the point. I almost think you’re doing that on purpose as a troll, but I’m willing to give you the benefit of a doubt.
If the maker of the video to which I linked needed to legally license every single clip they used in the video, that videomaker likely couldn’t afford to do that, in which case the video as a whole wouldn’t exist. And what’s fucked up about that is that the video has every right to exist, especially as a creation reliant on Fair Use principles. Your plan would have absolutely prevented the video from ever being release, never mind being made to begin with — a net loss for culture, regardless of whether you think that loss is meaningless.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Your fair use argument fails for the following reason:
1) it's not transformative to do format shifting of the content
2) there is negative impact to the potential market of the game
-> users just watch the videos and fail to buy the games
3) its not parody or critisism to replicate game's whole gameplay logic
4) attaching some idiot's face to the screen only decreases the quality of the material
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Re:
How copyright handles this is that it recommends that authors create the content in their videos themselves, instead of cloning someone elses work. It is signiicantly more burdensome to create the content from scratch, but the end result is so much better that copyright laws call it "to promote the progress and useful arts".
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Re: Re:
Funny thing. Apple, Microsoft, Linux all include various video players in their systems, and do not get licenses from content creators, and have not been sued for including those players. Indeed the basics of copyright are that the making of copies, not the playing of copies, is what creates legal liability. This enables torrent users to be sued, as they also make and distribute copies while downloading a copy.
Under your legal theory, you could liable held liable if someone used you software to create an animation that intentionally triggered an epileptic fit in somebody else, so you had better take it down before that happens.
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Two very, very important points.
Copyright infringement is not theft, which kills your analogy.
Any video, whether “legal” or “illegal”, can use the same clips because of the principles of Fair Use.
Nobody — I repeat, nobody — is going to watch that “How to Do a Fight Scene” video as a replacement for all the movies featured in the video. The clips are used for educational purposes, for presenting a reasoned critique of popular media in a proper context. If I want to watch John Wick, I’m going to watch John Wick, not a YouTube video with clips from the movie.
…at which point they will expose copyright for the censorious corporate welfare system it truly is and turn anyone who isn’t a corporate bootlicker against the MAFIAA for good. So yeah, that’s not fucking happening.
Reality says otherwise. Start listening to it.
…the fuck does a media player have to do with whether copyright allows someone to create a media critique video under the principles of Fair Use? That whole paragraph has no relevance to the discussion and makes no sense besides.
Nobody is going to get sued because they used a preview window in a video editor to watch a movie. Nobody is going to do that in the first place because there are already dedicated media player applications. Do you really believe anyone will be sued if I watch Avengers: Endgame using XMedia Recode’s preview window instead of VLC Media Player?
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That isn’t a guarantee that your material isn’t infringing upon someone else’s — or that someone will say your material infringes. If anything, all your proposition does is make easier the task of tracking down a possible infringer.
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(I’m gonna go through this one more time. If you respond in a way where you come off as intentionally obtuse, I will regard you as a troll and your further contributions will be read accordingly.)
The video to which I linked uses clips from existing movies to present a critique of modern media. The video literally could not exist without those clips. Someone can’t “create” that content from scratch.
Copyright ostensibly exists “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”. I’d consider critique of modern media to be a “useful art”. But under your plan, your interpretation of how copyright should work and what videomakers should have to do before they present such critique, those critiques wouldn’t exist. Or, at least, they wouldn’t exist in the form of videos, which offer a far better experience for consuming such critique than reading a shitload of text.
And you continue to ignore the principles of Fair Use, which are wholly relevant to this discussion. Your argument needs a hell of a lot of fixing if you truly believe Fair Use isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a thing.
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Hey, fuck you. Maximilian makes watching any game a better experience.
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Re: Principles of religious freedom
"What's the purpose of the religious institution then, and why are they given immunity to taxation by the state? Are they a state unto themselves like the Vatican?"
Sort of.
Most tax exemption on religion is based on the concept that the state should not be able to discourage religious observation through fiscal leverage. And that was probably fine in a time when being an atheist was a decided rarity.
Today that exemption is regularly tested and the politicians stuck with the precedent that a group of people can come together in the Fraternity Of The Sacred Pink Dildo and have the same argument for tax exemption as the local methodist church has.
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"What in the blue hell makes you think using YouTube would ever become a guaranteed human right before that?"
The one example requires fundamentally complex juggling of logistics and finance against a background of political controversy.
The other example requires the effort of some congressman writing the suggestion down on an A4 page and tossing it into the ring in an open session.
You might as well ask what in the blue hell makes anyone think banning webpages would be preferred legislation over actually going out and fighting sex trafficking. Oh, hey, FOSTA.
Politicians LIKE rubberstamped legislation which requires no budget and little more effort than holding a few speeches and getting an "Aye".
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Re: Re: Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
"I'm the author of the content so owner is clearly determined."
Prove it.
Your own argument requires you to include, in any mention of meshpage, the required paperwork demonstrating that you are, in fact, the owner.
Failure to do so means, again according to your argument, that you really shouldn't be bringing it online.
The fastest way to have copyright and patent law abolished would be, I believe, to let you people have everything you're asking for.
It would rob every legitimate stakeholder of the ability to publish and distribute, while not actually affecting the pirates.
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"Those services were illegal because they allowed unauthorised duplication of the files."
In fact, going further, they were only deemed illegal because they published dual-use software with the outright advertising that said software was meant for copyright infringement purposes.
Which is why Kazaa is now unlawful whereas bittorrent clients are most definitely not.
Of course, TP regularly mistakes what the law says for what he personally thinks it should say. And uses that as the logical basis for his arguments.
That broken logic is why he can't design even a halfway functional application - he fully believes that since HE himself is happy with how that application works, it's somehow the responsibility of everyone else to think the way he does.
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You have to understand that there is value-adding layer diagram like this:
1) cloning someone elses work
2) creating the product from scratch
3) creating exactly correct product from scratch
4) creating exactly correct product from scratch and keeping it updated via copyright's progress bits
5) creating a global family of products from the same source material
The work being done in each layer gets more and more burdensome. If you stay in layer (1) for your whole life, you never reach level 4 or 5.
So my recommendation is to come away from layer 1 and try to implement layer 2 for your critique. It is significantly more powerful critique if you can display how you would implement the same feature in such way that it is better than the original.
Of course that means doing few years of work, and your critique will be late to the theatrical release, but the end result will be better when you don't simply clone someone elses work, but instead try to implement something better.
The real problem is that your "product" becomes finished too early if you clone someone elses work. Then you have nothing to do for the rest of your life when you have already implemented all your ideas, but did them in shoddy way with shortcuts designed to save time.
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Yes, this is what I mean...
Everything you said is true IF you ignore the fact that the gamers had permission from Epic (well, except point 2 which is demonstrable bullshit). Since they did, and Epic had to disable a game feature in order for them to not be caught up with problems from people outside of Epic - the entire point of the article you're commenting on - then you are ignoring objective reality to suit your own fantasies.
You are lying and/or in a fantasy world to suggest that a sane person's version of permission had not been granted.
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Your comment is intentionally obtuse because it ignores, sidesteps, or otherwise dismisses the arguments at hand, including the discussion of Fair Use. I now regard you as a troll; your further contributions will be read accordingly.
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You tube take down victories
I have had endless copyright notices from YouTube for using all sorts of licensed music and sounds that are bought as stock video and sound/music with commercial use rights. I contest each one by putting the terms of my license in the you tube form..and win Everytime..but it's a pain in the ass. "We are sorry, but we had to take down/mute/withhold ad money because the National Association of Fart Sounds Composers had filed a claim against your video titled 'Compressed Air Valve Repair in Space' so please refrain from theft of intellectual property...blah blah". Fuck you.
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Re:
Every claim tp makes about copyright is a complete lie. It's kind of his thing.
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To be fair, in this comment thread, they’re not lying per se. They’re ignoring statements of fact, sidestepping the discussion of Fair Use, and generally being obtuse on purpose because…apparently they enjoy looking like a troll, I guess? But none of that is necessarily the same as lying.
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"The principles of religious freedom serve everybody"
Maybe I'm missing something. The principles of religious freedom seem to manifest only when a religious business doesn't want to cover women's reproductive healthcare, or when a religious institution doesn't want to serve or employ gays. I'm pretty sure they bump up against laws when they don't want non-white persons to appear in their congregations, or, as I mentioned before, marry them.
In all other parts of our culture we seem to be of the understanding we are a pluralist society and have to tolerate the weirdos, and that giving action to resentment of them is hateful and wrong. But religious institutions are exempt.
And religious institutions go untaxed, where every other institution is taxed. Granted, we have non-profit organizations, but they have to do a whole lot more filing, pay a bunch of fees and follow a bunch of rules that religions do not... specifically Abrahamic churches, actually. It's up to an official on a case-by-case basis which churches are considered churches and which are considered NPOs, and they like to exclude anything that isn't a church or synagogue. Some mosques get the benefit of doubt, but Hindu and Buddhist temples are right out. (The Church of Scientology sued its way into being recognized as a church. It had money.)
Maybe you can cite some examples of religious freedom that weren't about discriminating against women, gays, blacks or some other minority group. Yes? I guess we have the controversies of whether it's okay to hit kids or deny them medical care.
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I think "religious freedom" should cut both ways.
Separation of church and state is breached when churches are privileged over other churches or secular institutions, as well as when they are penalized over other churches or secular institutions. So when non-churches have to follow certain rules to not be taxed, churches should as well. When some churches are fast-tracked to tax exemption but others aren't, that's complicity between Church and state. When pastors don't have to pay taxes on account they're pastors, it raises the question why secular persons (or other pastors of unregistered churches) do have to pay taxes.
This is an example of stratification in our society, and a special relationship between (some) churches and the state. So either we have a wall of separation, or we don't. Maybe we have a sieve?
And when some for-profit corporations don't have to follow state regulations because they're religious but others (which are not religious or other-religious) do, that's definitely in the realm of but some animals are more equal than others. Again that sieve of separation.
This is before we get into things like prayer breakfasts, Red Mass and the pronounced influence of the Protestant Evangelical lobbyists on the Bush administration and Trump👑 regime.
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Re:
I think you need to withraw the 'troll' designation and use the more correct 'master troll' instead.
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Those are instances where religious people claim their right to discriminate should be part of their “religious freedom”. But in both cases, they’re not just right, they should be right — the government shouldn’t be interfering with the day-to-day activities of private religious organizations. Exceptions exist, of course (e.g., if the discrimination involves a public-facing business rather than a private institution), but much like free speech principles, the general rule still applies.
I don’t believe in discrimination based on immutable traits (or religious beliefs, for that matter). But my beliefs shouldn’t get to override those of a local church that believes otherwise. And I can’t think of any good reason why they should.
And we do that for a reason: Whenever a government involves itself with matters of religion, it never ends well for anybody. For proof, take a look at how China treats Muslims.
And that is a point of contention with secular nonprofit groups. They have routinely argued that churches receive privileges (e.g., ministerial tax exemptions) that the secular groups don’t, and that clearly favors religion over non-religion. The argument goes that removing such exemptions, or providing similar ones to secular groups, would negate that favoritism and replace it with neutrality. For the record: I happen to agree, but I accept the law as it is because it won’t be changed for a long damn time.
To be fair, it also had operatives within the U.S. government who stymied investigations into the group (among other things). Money wasn’t the only factor involved.
“Religious freedom” means I can be an agnostic atheist (which I am) without worrying about the government tossing me into a religious reëducation camp or otherwise punishing me for my beliefs. Am I a good enough example?
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You are no “master” and I will not bow before you, verbally or physically. You want me to do otherwise? Put a gun to my head.
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When your video is full of copyrighted material without obtaining the licenses, it would be illegal for the media player app to play it. If this happens alot with the application, some copyright owner is going to call the bullshit and sue the authors of the software. Users can also be sued for this, they should reject the player if it encourages piracy.
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Re: "The principles of religious freedom serve everybody"
Well, there’s discrimination against or in favor of some religions (as well as agnosticism or atheism). For example, you can’t be fired for being Muslim. There’s also the fact that public schools cannot force you to pray or keep you from praying, and you can’t be forced to swear on the Bible (or any religious text) when making an oath or affirmation. There’s the exemption from alcohol age limits for wine in communion. You can’t be prosecuted for having or expressing discriminatory beliefs (as opposed to exercising them) or for praying in a certain way. I also recall some cases where Seventh-Day Adventists couldn’t be forced to work on Sundays (or fired for refusing to do so), Sikhs can wear turbans (even for ID photos), Muslim women can wear their hijabs, Jehovah’s Witnesses can’t be forced to recite a pledge or anything like that (though this also gets into free speech), Hindus can’t be forced to eat beef, Jews can’t be forced to eat pork, etc.
There are a lot of examples of religious freedom that don’t involve allowing someone to discriminate against someone else, nor do they involve domestic or child abuse or medical care.
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it's a common business trick to tie users to some technology and then demand payment for the usage of the tech. Basically when your company is going to have large user base, there will be companies which will offer their technology in exchange of a permission to gouge the large user base for additional license revenue. This can happen for example by commercial tool that is absolutely necessary to do some operation that the users want to do.
I'm pretty sure Epic and the "people outside of epic" had a contract ongoing which allowed them to ask compensation for the copyrighted works from epic's customer base.
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Re: Re: Re: Anyone publishing should check _all_ the content
I am unaware of any known streaming service that is illegal to use.
Filtering isn’t a legal requirement (and is also entirely impossible for a live stream), but this gets handled through DMCA notices and takedowns, and, again, I am not familiar with any streaming services that don’t comply with that, so I don’t see why this is an issue.
Again, this is already done by all the ones I’m aware of.
Now, with all that said, there is one slight issue to keep in mind: there is no way for anyone to know about infringement in a live stream before it airs and the infringing content is “broadcast”. That said, I don’t really consider that a problem, and at any rate, there’s at least one known case of a live stream being taken down by a DMCA notice before it aired (even though it did not infringe).
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Actually, the YouTubers, live-streamers, Let’s Players, etc. did have permission from Epic (the makers of Fortnite) to publish footage of the game’s content in the manner that they did. That’s why, after learning that these streams and videos were being DMCA’d and/or ContentID’d because of a snippet of a licensed music track, Epic quickly patched the game to allow that song to be silenced; they wanted these gamers to publish these videos of their game. “Fair Use” isn’t even relevant here (though I’d argue that using such a short snippet of the track in such long videos should be either “Fair Use” or “de minimus” and so would still not be infringing anyways); these streamers and YouTubers had permission to use the game’s content like this, so we don’t even have to get into evaluating exceptions that apply to unauthorized use like “fair use”.
Seriously, did you read the article? It clearly states that Epic did, in fact, authorize all this.
And by the way, an implicit license does, in fact, cover all of the content within, and it’s just as valid as an explicit license. And once a license is established, it’s up to the licensor to prove the use is unauthorized. And courts have endorsed implicit licenses; that’s why when someone puts their content up on Pirate Bay (in order to trap potential infringers), copying that content is not infringement but authorized by an implicit license.
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When the market is at early state, the companies who build video player software can easily control that the only files available in the system are legally licensed content. When the market matures, and there might be millions of items available using .mp4 format for example, it might turn out that 20% of the files are pirated. Building a new video player application that plays .mp4 files in such market is very risky business, because in principle you need to filter out all the pirated files before your player succeeds playing the files.
How the vendors normally handle it is that they reject existing .mp4 file market and invent their own video format. Then they try to control the conversion process from .mp4 files to the new video format, i.e. keep only legal files available in their video format. This will ensure that the video player application (at least in the beginning) is legal. Again when market matures, pirates have found ways to get their piracy collections available in the new more efficient format, and the cycle repeats. Next person who creates video player app, again cannot use the existing file formats..
Now the standardisation organisation at some point notices that there is always coming new file formats and compability between different applications was poor. All kinds of conversion processes were utilized and the same files were used in many different file formats. Trying to get the situation sorted, they wanted to standardize the file formats.
But the legal issues around this area were never sorted. The reason for new file formats was companies need to control their legal liability in situation where existing files available in the market have been poisoned by pirated files.
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1) is debatable, and 2) is unproven and unlikely (also irrelevant where, as here, the makers of the game have encouraged and given permission for the use).
3) is not a requirement if the use is authorized (like here), is transformative for other reasons (like with Google Search or Google Books), doesn’t make substantial use of a substantial portion of the copyrighted material and the use makes up an insignificant portion of the allegedly infringing material (which is the case here for the music, the only part where infringement has even been alleged), the portion of the underlying material being used isn’t copyrightable, or the market for the underlying material is not being replaced (which is clearly the case for the song and arguably for the game as well). Also, I’m not seeing where the game’s entire gameplay logic is being copied here (or much of it at all, really), anyway, nor would that preclude a determination that the use is for parody, criticism, or commentary.
A lot of people would argue that 4) is completely false as well, and it has absolutely nothing to do with determining whether or not the use is infringing or whether or not the use is authorized whatsoever. It’s not only highly debatable and incredibly subjective, but it’s also completely immaterial to any argument as to whether or not the use is copying, licensed, commercial, fair, de minimus, or infringing, and so it’s completely and utterly irrelevant.
Finally, as I recall, the arguments have fallen under the first of the following and at least one of the remaining two:
Epic encouraged and granted an implied license for this use of their game, and they aren’t claiming the use is infringing anyways.
The aforementioned license would also mean that, since Epic also licensed Rick Astley’s song, the use of Rick Astley’s song is also permitted.
No one seems to be arguing that, in this case, the use of the game footage as a whole is not infringing because it’s fair use. At most, they’ve argued that the use of the song is Fair Use.
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Re: Re:
The users cannot be successfully sued merely for using the player, and the author of the software cannot be successfully sued if they did not actively encourage piracy, did not themself engage in piracy directly, and the software is capable of noninfringing use. We’ve gone over this.
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Re: Re: Re:
Check this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thomas-Rasset
They can be successfully sued for using the player.
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This comes from nintendo's statements.
Also I think you're missing much of how the game footage gets into youtube:
1) player buys the game and normally plays it
2) there's screen grabbing software that creates video file
3) youtube supports the same video file format than the screen grabbing software
So basically you forgot to include the authors of screen grabbing software to your lawsuit. The whole path from the original authors to the pirated video file needs to be considere.
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Huh? I’m only talking about this particular case. Whether or not game footage being used in YouTube videos or live-streams in general is fair use is immaterial in this case because—like I said—the makers of this particular game (Epic) have authorized the use. We don’t need to consider fair use at all if the use is already authorized. Since Epic isn’t disputing that the use of their copyrighted works for this case has been authorized, it doesn’t matter whether or not some other case where the use is not authorized would be fair use.
And what does Nintendo have to do with this? They did not submit any DMCA claims over any of the footage we’re discussing, they were not involved in any way with authoring, developing, or publishing Fortnite, and none of their copyrighted material is used in Fortnite at all. They have no relevance to this story whatsoever.
And as for the screen-grabbing software, the authors of screengrabbing software have no more copyright interests in anything created using that software than Apple does in any video recordings I make using an iPhone, or the makers of a camera do in any photos taken using that camera, or Adobe does in any photos manipulated using Photoshop. They also have no responsibility whatsoever for how the software ends up being used. The authors of whatever software or other tools used to capture the footage used have no reason to be included at all in analyzing the copyright issues regarding the discussed footage. I didn’t “forget” to include them; they are completely irrelevant to this discussion.
I’m also not “missing” how much game footage gets onto YouTube. That, too, has no relevance to this discussion. First of all, it doesn’t matter how much game footage gets onto YouTube; recorded or streamed footage of gameplay doesn’t involve much (if any) copying of gameplay logic, which was what I was disputing when discussing point 3 of your earlier comment. More importantly, if the use of the gameplay footage has been authorized by the owners of the copyright of the game (as it has been here), the amount of footage uploaded doesn’t matter. It’s also irrelevant to discuss the uploading of footage of other games in other videos/streams, since that has no bearing on the lawfulness of these particular videos/streams.
And as for YouTube using the same file format as the screen-grabbing software, that’s just because the file format has been standardized; it gets lawfully used by a lot of recording software and video players. It’s not really material to this discussion at all.
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If you're admitting to deliberate trolling, I'll use "pathetic waste of skin" instead. Is your failure so complete that this is the only way you get validation?
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"This comes from nintendo's statements."
Again, why do you insist that Nintendo's demands are the absolute law, but Epic's wishes are to be ignored?
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Yeah, they were liable for downloading and distributing songs that they themselves did. This wasn’t a case where program X was used by person A for infringement, person B uses X for noninfringing purposes, and then B is found liable for infringement because they used a software capable of being used for infringement. In fact, the use of a music player had nothing to do with this lawsuit at all. That case has absolutely nothing to do with what was being discussed.
Seriously, did you read the article?
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Actually, none of that is true. The .mp4 format was never rejected, and the other formats were really more to restrict the videos to specific platforms and software, not for preventing copyright infringement per se. There were never any legal issues in this area, either. Creating .mp4 players has never been risky (in this regard, anyway), and no .mp4 player has ever been required to filter out copyright infringing files at all. You don’t have the slightest idea about anything you’re talking about and are just rambling on about some alternate reality that bears no resemblance to this one.
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While that may be a common business trick, there’s no evidence at all that that’s the case here. Epic isn’t charging for any technology here; the aforementioned update was completely free to all users (as is Fortnite itself), and Epic had nothing to do with the copyright claims. They haven’t asked for any revenue from YouTubers or streamers that use footage of Fortnite, either.
Finally, there has never been a license where the licensor agrees to provide revenue obtained from the licensed material to the licensee. That doesn’t happen, and you have no evidence to even suggest that your scenario is even plausible. And even if that was the case, that would not explain why Epic quickly patched the game to prevent footage of Fortnite from getting these copyright claims put on them and gave it to all player for free. Seriously, your argument is both invalid and has no basis in reality whatsoever.
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Nintendo doesn’t represent the entire videogame industry. Stop acting like its word is the Word of God on anything other than Nintendo’s business.
There’s a reason for that: Nobody — except maybe for a handful of assholes at the MAFIAA, no doubt — believes the authors of any screen grabbing software created said software to promote copyright infringement. It’d be like me saying Notepad++ developers should be sued because the copy-paste function in that app can be used to put copyrighted content into a text file — I might be technically correct, but seriously running with the idea that those devs should be sued for copyright infringement would make me an extremist dumbass with a (possibly willful) ignorance of the law.
Hmm. Sounds familiar. 🤔
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Amazing. Every word of what you said there is wrong.
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How do you plan to stop me from listening to my MP3 collection, then — you gonna sue the developers of Foobar2000 for copyright infringement?
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you're thinking this wrong way. The authors of screengrabbing software are a party in the lawsuit, but you' need to move them from plaintiff to the defense side. They should be sued, because they created software that was used by pirates. They are directy enabling the path that pirates used, and the end result of their software is now subject to a dcma notice. If that dcma notice ever gets decided in court, authors of screengrabbing software needs to be blamed jointly from the pirates actions.
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This comes from the copyright maximalist view. It needs to always use the most draconian interpretation of the law that can be found from the internet. In this situation, nintendo just holds (the questionable) trophy in that direction.
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So, you're saying that the interests of creators don't matter if they disagree with Nintendo. Good luck screwing over a majority of the industry, but at least you admit you don't give a shit about creators.
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You have to understand that creators reap the benefit from the copyright laws, so creators also need to bear most of the copyright law's burden too. The rules that creators need to follow to create software or other products are significantly more draconian that you expect. End users are already complaining that copyright laws are too strict when it imposes 300k damage awards to end users. But creators in similar situation are in 2 billion damage award range.
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Only in your head, champ.
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Take it away, Bender.
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So, yes, you're saying that creators can screw themselves if they don't accept your dystopian nightmare that makes them less income overall.
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I think you underestimate the horror.
How much spy equipment companies will buy to track people when the alternatives are either buy 100k spy equipment for the workplace, or pay 2 billion bucks for copyright infringement damages when the spy equipment didn't catch all piracy attempts by the workforce?
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I think you overestimate the horror to push an extremist view of copyright, but you do you, champ.
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And if someone used Meshmixer to create an animation to trigger an epileptic fit you should be sued because you wrote the software that allowed that. You had better take you site down because the software has potential illegal uses.
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yes, but thats why the software has important features implemented like proper frame rates, flicker prevention, and detection of colour switching.
some of those features that prevent accidental epileptic problems took years to develop, but they're still essential for the safety of the product
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Someone will find a way around those “locks”, if they try hard enough. And even if they do, you won’t be sued for what they do because nobody sues Craftsman if a murderer uses a Craftsman tool to kill a person.
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these are not exactly locks. They are basic features that users are demanding, and if you listened end user problems with such software at all, you'd have fixes for this type of problems already available in your software.
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Does anyone else see the irony here, or is it just me?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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our position is that the lawsuit had all the elements of piracy operation:
1) kazaa software automatically published the downloaded material
2) it's user interface displayed thousands of pirated files
3) users ignored the pirated nature of the files and used the software even
after it was perfectly clear that the material was illegal
But the main culprit is obviously the author of the client that does all these illegal operations. But users need to filter out illegal software vendors and use only legal services.
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How does a video player like VCL Media Player do the same thing that KaZaa did, to the point where anyone involved in VCL’s development could be sued for copyright infringement if I were to watch an illicit copy of Knives Out using VCL, like you seem to think would/could happen?
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You've been complaining all day about youtube's content id flagging videos which you consider to be legal, but still you can't see the legal issues in the area? The history of these legal issues is deeper than you think, started from swapping floppies, all the way to mp3 music files and further to mp4 video files and youtube's content id system...
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Is that end user yourself, because you have complained loud and long on this forum that nobody seems to be interested in your software.
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1) enables watching pirated files
2) user interface allows selecting pirated files via file dialog
3) market has thousands or millions of pirated files and the software allows playing them
4) user's usage pattern suggests that the software wouldn't be used at all without availability of large libraries of pirated files
5) standardized file formats bring millions of individual pirated files available to the movie catalog to the software
The only difference between VLC video playing software and kazaa is that vlc activates copyright's DISPLAY bit, but kazaa also activates DISTRIBUTE bit. Both of them are exclusive operations of the authors and thus illegal to use without a license.
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True, but the fact is that lacking those features doesn’t trigger liability. Trust me, many games lack proper frame rates, flicker protection, etc., but they don’t lose lawsuits over it.
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It’s not just you. He does tend to ignore feedback.
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Also, none of that really refutes the points that others have been making.
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We're surprised that google's banner adverticement operation havent got sued for flickering and blinking banner adverticements.These are important features that must be implemented if you distribute your product to large enough user population that there is chance of being affected humans in the group.
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Here’s the thing you’re missing: VLC doesn’t download illicit files for you. It isn’t a filesharing program. Even if it were capable of doing that, VLC doesn’t promote itself as a filesharing program or a method of watching illicit video files. It’s a fucking media player. It’s no different than a hammer made by Craftsman: Sure, it can be used to do destructive things like breaking someone else’s windows or smashing in someone’s skull, but nobody thinks to hold Craftsman liable when someone does one of those things because that’s not how the world fucking works.
The MPAA can’t sue VLC devs when I play an illicit video. The RIAA can’t sue Foobar2000 devs when I play an illicit MP3. What in the cobalt bluest of hells makes you think the devs for a video editor application could ever be sued over someone using it to make, say, an anime music video?
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The issue isn’t with the file formats, you admitted troll, it’s with copyright infringement. The existence of a given file format doesn’t equal copyright infringement; if that were true, digital files wouldn’t exist outside of proprietary applications.
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I don’t think you understand what I said: in the specifics of this case, the authors of the video-capturing software do not have any relevance to the question of whether or not copyright infringement has occurred at all. I wasn’t discussing who would be liable for copyright infringement if it occurred; I was only talking about the analysis of whether the footage in question is infringing on anyone’s copyright at all and, if so, whose. Whether or not the makers of the tools used to produce the footage would be liable for any copyright infringement that occurred in the footage is completely immaterial to the argument I was making. That’s why I was saying I didn’t “forget” to include them: including them would have no effect whatsoever on my analysis, my claims, or my arguments.
But since you’ve mentioned it, I suppose I might as well address that argument for the record. As I have told you countless times before, the makers of some software or interactive service are not liable for infringement that occurs using their software/service as long as 1) the software has substantial noninfringing uses, 2) the makers do not actively and explicitly encourage infringement using their software/service, 3) the makers have no direct involvement in any infringement (that is, they are not actually doing the directly infringing activity themselves), and either 4a) they lack specific knowledge of the specific instance(s) of infringement (general knowledge is insufficient) or 4b) they fundamentally lack the capability of stopping infringement after the fact and the infringing content is not located on devices under their control (which would be the case for most video-capture software). DMCA notices also only apply to interactive service providers online; they don’t really apply in this sort of situation. It’s also not the case that the makers of video-capture software must have a license for anything that gets used in footage obtained through that software by an end user. Makers of video-capture software have no more liability for infringing activity performed using their software by others than makers of a video camera are responsible for infringing activity performed using their device. If I used my iPhone to record a film in a theater and post that footage (unedited) on YouTube, I would be infringing and YouTube would have to comply with a DMCA notice and take down the video, but Apple would not be liable for copyright infringement.
With all that said, that doesn’t even matter in this situation because the footage isn’t even infringing on anyone’s copyright in the first place. As such, there is no infringement in this case for the makers of the software to be liable for to begin with.
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I’m not. Lots of people have adblockers, so it’s not like everyone is going to see them, and the flickering/blinking affects a small part of the remaining population that does, such that it isn’t a gigantic issue. (It is an issue, to be clear, but it’s not like Google intends to cause epileptic seizures.)
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While I often complain about YouTube’s Content ID system, I haven’t really been doing so here or for the past week at least; I think I might’ve mentioned it once or twice, but it wasn’t in a positive or negative manner. Additionally, that Content ID isn’t illegal or unlawful says absolutely nothing whatsoever about anything we’ve been discussing, nor is it indicative of “any legal issue in the area”. It also has absolutely nothing at all to do with file formats whatsoever.
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downloading isn't required to activate DISPLAY bit.
It's enough that pirates use the software as part of their piracy operation.
The requirement for software vendors is to prevent misuses of the technology, and users watching pirated movies with the tech is clearly one such misuse.
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??? What a quaint way to say he always ignores and diverts to avoid admitting that he may be wrong.
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I’m not surprised at all. There’s no reason Google should be liable for that to begin with.
Also, seriously, who is this “we” you keep referring to? Who else besides you thinks this?
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Youtube's system relies on availability of .mp4 or other standard video formats. Their upload video feature accepts standardized file formats, and content id tries to ffiter out illegal videos from the large market of pirated videos.
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Well, first of all, that’s extreme even for copyright maximalism. I don’t think anyone thinks that Nintendo can decide this sort of thing for Epic. Second, the copyright maximalist view is not reflective of what the law actually is.
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That has nothing to do with determining whether Nintendo has any say in how Epic chooses to enforce its copyrights or grants licenses. How Nintendo chooses to enforce its copyright or feels copyright law should work has no relevance whatsoever to this situation or what Epic chooses to do or how copyright law actually works in the real world.
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Since that’s not how the real world actually works, I honestly don’t care. If anything, you’re just proving how untenable and absurd the copyright maximalist view actually is, but you actually go even further than what copyright maximalists expect.
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…yes, and how does that make file formats liable for copyright infringement, again?
Jesus, even the MAFIAA isn’t as extreme about copyright as you, and they sued dead people over it!
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Okay, so when and how hard will you be pushing the developers of Notepad++ to prevent copyright infringement?
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I already explained that when the market (using the same file format) matures, the internet's file storage spaces are being poisoned by pirated files. Thus on mature market, building software that utilizes that large market of possibly pirated files -- i.e. any software that is able to display all the material -- gets liable for user's copyright infringement, whenever users choose pirated files from the large collection of video files in that file format.
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Counterpoint: Text editors. I mean, I dunno about you, but I don’t see anyone suing Microsoft over Notepad!
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It's more complicated than this. I will explain one direct application of the principle using my own software. My software is designed to do nice animations and demos/intros. But demos/intros has a dark side that their original use case has involved pirated games and a demo/intro attached to the pirated product before distributing the pirated files to the audience, so that users know where to get more of similar (illegal) stuff. This pattern was used by all the piracy groups in the 1980's and 1990's to allow file sharing of commercial games.
The authors of demos and intros tried to get their creative output separated from the piracy operations. Thus they focused on organizing (copy) parties and that activity evolved to demo parties (which tries to further distance themselves from the piracy origins), and further to e-sports party activity what is currently happening.
Given these facts, how could this kind of demo/intro products be legal at all? The authors simply need to build features necessary to prevent the original piracy use case. This means that it must be impossible to attach the end result to pirated products.
Note that this "attach" operation is still possible, using screen grabbing tool and video files. For this reason my software needs to find a way to prevent this use case where screen grabbing software and saving it as video files moves the animation to a pirated video files. Microsoft happily provides a way to disable usage of screen grabbing tools. For example, it's impossible to take screenshots and record video from web browser window, because operating system prevents that use case. Software vendors can disable screen grabbing feature using win32 api. But we have not chosen to disable screen grabbing yet, simply because the original pattern about attaching demos/intros to pirated files seem to have disappeared over time. Still this is dangerous area for my software, given that the history of the work is too near illegal area.
This kind of patterns are everywhere. Video files in this case are enabling again the illegal pattern my software needs to avoid. I've spent years building alternative to video files using opengl/3d technology, which doesn't have the same problems related to hollywood's movies or attaching the animations to pirated products.
Why we do this is because we still believe that demo/intro technology is significant enough development that it needs to be further improved and explored how far the technology can reach. But obviously the dangerous areas need to be avoided.
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What a dystopian world you want to create, one where to do anything you will need permission from one or more large corporations.
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If you create the product yourself, you need permission from noone.
You just need to do enough dependency management to ensure that your product is independent from anything happening outside of your own software.
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You’re really, really fucked up, you know that? You’re so concerned about the possibility that someone might use an application for a potentially infringing use, no matter how small, that you’re actively campaigning for applications to somehow prevent any possible instance of copyright infringing activity despite the inherent impossibility of any application being able to do that.
I could copy-paste the entirety of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from a Kindle ebook to a plain text file right now. How can you possibly stop Microsoft from bundling a text editor with Windows, or program that text editor to prevent that (or any other) infringement? And if you say “get rid of the copy-paste function”, keep in mind that I can always type the book into a text file without copy-pasting. Also keep in mind that I may be copy-pasting part of the book from a legitimate (i.e., legally bought) copy for my own personal use rather than to share the copy with others, and format shifting for personal use isn’t illegal (yet).
Your entire worldview is informed by fear — specifically, the fear that you might one day end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit because someone you don’t know downloaded an application you developed with substantial noninfringing uses in mind and created an illicit work with it, which you didn’t intend for your application to do and you had no idea that person was going to create. How does it feel to be so afraid of such an impossibility — so paranoid that you’ll be sued into oblivion for something that isn’t even your fault, directly or indirectly — that you’re intentionally making your application inferior to basically every other application like it and justifying that inferiority by claiming that the existence of non-proprietary digital file formats is the same thing as copyright infringement?
Get some help, man. In terms of paranoid delusions and the wrongness of your claims about copyright and technology, you’re almost as bad as Shiva Ayyadurai.
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What if the product I make — say, a video critique a cultural work — relies on my ability to use parts of that work (and any other works) under the auspices of Fair Use for the sake of contextualizing the critique? Should I really be sued into oblivion, left penniless and homeless and half-dead in a gutter by a film studio hellbent on eradicating all possible copyright infringement no matter what, because I made a fifteen minute video about how much the six Resident Evil films suck?
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I'm actually using copy-paste in my software in two places:
1) my software outputs some generated code and user is supposed to copy-paste
that script to my meshpage.org web site web form.
2) my software supports copy-paste of urls for any external content
The (1) one is easy to handle, because I'm the owner of the code that generates the script file being copied. So it's easy for me to give everyone permission to copy-paste the content.
the (2) is more difficult case, but it's basically solved by small amount of copied url contents. The url is a link to larger files, so that brings additional difficulty to it.
I can't say how microsoft or any other companies should handle their legal liability. Some companies have additional option to just pay the damages for anyone who has stamina to sue the company.
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You didn’t answer any of my questions. Here’s hoping you get the professional help that you so obviously need — be it from a therapist or an attorney who’s far more knowledgeable of copyright law than you will (and should) ever be.
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The way you want software to behave, you will need permission from the corporations that made the software to write a letter to your mum.
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There is significant problems with this mixing and matching pattern you refer.
Basically the problem is that you'll always choose higher quality products as your target where you use parts. This means that "use parts" are not done because the material is necessary for your critique. But the critique is being done simply to bloat the quality of the video.
Authors who do this have noticed that they cannot reach the quality of the other players in the market, and they need to mix higher quality products to their videos to raise the quality level enough for users to accept the video. And critique was chosen because copyright laws have exception in that area.
So basically we see "improvement in quality level" that isn't addressable to the quality of the of the development effort. This kind of artificial quality improvement shouldn't be happening under copyright laws.
To fix the mix&match pattern, you should only mix&match the lower quality products. I.e. use the same quality level than what you can yourself reach when developing videos. Always stuff that you cannot create yourself from scratch is dangerous copyright-wise.
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…fucking what
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Software vendors are not required to prevent misuses of technology. No law says that they have to, and failing to do so does not open them up to liability.
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While true, the file formats YouTube accepts and YouTube’s ContentID function have no relation. YouTube accepts common video formats because it’s convenient. They implemented ContentID in order to shut up groups like the MPAA (though there is no legal requirement for them to do so). There is no causal link here. Legally and practically speaking, the file format has absolutely no relevance at all to anything involving copyright on YouTube. If YouTube used a proprietary format instead, that wouldn’t change anything with regards to copyright or piracy.
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Look, using a file format for some software or interactive online service that just so happens to be used for a large number of pirated files does not increase liability. The format is completely and utterly irrelevant to liability for copyright infringement. The makers of the software/service do not become liable for users’ infringing activities just because the file format used is also used for a large number of pirated files. That’s not how liability or copyright law works.
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If it were how copyright liability works, the people behind the GIF, JPEG, PNG, MP3, FLAC, AVI, MOV, MPEG, MP4, MKV, TXT, DOC, and EPUB formats (among basically every other digital file format that isn’t proprietary and locked-in with its associated application) would have already been bankruped several million times over by now.
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Uhhh… what does that have to do with holding the makers of the tools used for infringement liable? Obviously, if someone uses software X to make some intro/demo Y that contains pirated material Z, the makers of Y are generally liable for infringement of the original authors of Z’s copyright barring some exceptions. However, if the makers of X satisfy the conditions I listed (which you cut off partway through, BTW), then the makers of X are not liable for infringement just because X was used to create the infringing work Y.
The factors for analysis I gave was for liability on the part of the makers of tools that may possibly be used to create infringing material (as well as hosting or streaming services that may possibly end up hosting some infringing material); it has nothing to do with the infringing nature of any particular content created using those tools. The makers of the software do not have any liability for copyright infringement by users as long as the conditions I gave are met. It really is that simple.
Additionally, it also doesn’t relate to whether some other user of the tools/services is liable for infringement; the sole factor there is whether or not that user directly infringed; even if the makers of the tools/services are found to be contributorily or vicariously liable, that does not necessarily mean that every user of those tools/services are also liable for infringement in any way.
Finally, I know for a fact that Microsoft does not offer that capability to disable screencaptures. Even if they did, there is no legal requirement for them to do so.
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WTF are you talking about? That word salad has no resemblance to reality.
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Uhhh, what? You can’t pirate a URL. A URL in itself cannot infringe on copyright, nor can it be protected by copyright. It may direct someone to a page that is infringing/copyrighted or that contains infringing/copyrighted material, but the URL itself is just an address. An address cannot be copyrighted, nor can an address infringe on copyright. The same goes for a URL.
If you’re trying to prevent linking to infringing content via URLs, making the URLs smaller or cut into chunks doesn’t do anything. Do you mean HTML or something? Because that may include copyrighted or pirated material. The URL, though, is unprotectable and cannot contain anything pirated because the URL only contains information on where on the internet to go to.
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I was referring to feedback on his software, but it does also apply to his arguments.
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Why artificial quality improvement is dangerous because it raises the overall quality level of the market. Then all the people who actually create stuff from scratch, will need to reach higher and higher quality until they're all burned out. Basically higher quality means more burnouts and that's dangerous.
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Or the makers of any software that accepts or creates files in any of those formats.
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I mean, that’s great and all, but it has absolutely nothing to do with anything in this discussion. And WTF is “artificial quality improvement”, anyway?
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Much like the inner workings of your brain, that doesn’t make any fucking sense.
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Maximalist view is required when you're creating new products that will be used by real customers.
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This might be incorrect in situations where the title of the page is encoded to the url / page title is visible in the url.
But this isn't the case in any of the cases I mentioned.
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It isn’t.
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Okay. Maximalist view.
Here’s a sentence I wrote off the top of my head:
Can I guarantee that this exact sentence, regardless of context, infringes upon anyone else’s copyrighted work that contains the same exact sentence? No! Should the people who made my laptop, my keyboard, my web browser, and Techdirt’s comment system all be sued alongside me if I happen to infringe upon someone’s copyright? You tell me, you MAFIAA bootlicker.
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how it normally happens is that the service is full of pirated content and the end users need to filter out the pirated material to find legal content. Then when they fail to do that, they will be liable for the copyright infringement.
This is the reason why it's dangerous to use piracy services -- you simply cannot be careful enough in the copyright filtering when 50% or more of the available material is pirated.
When copyright owners are suing the pirates, they always start with some end users and make them examples of the infringements, then when that succeeds, they sue the authors of the services. Once that succeeds, they can sue all users of the service, because successful lawsuit of the service itself will indicate that users should have known the illegality of the service.
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you still have a defense that you created it independently of the other work / didn't have access to the previous uses of that text.
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How, then, does that apply to applications like video editors and plain text editors and audio players?
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That doesn’t fucking matter to a copyright maximalist. If I infringe, even by accident, it’s still fucking infringement and I’m still a filthy fucking pirate. And according to you, everyone who provided the tools for my infringement should be sued alongside me.
Congratulations, maximalist. You’ve invented a new circle of Hell.
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text editors are relying on the keyboard events coming from a legal source, i.e. your keyboard. It is expected that your keyboard is connected to a real human (or your cat), but not to a book cloning service.
audio players are step more difficult, because the samples they are able to use are recorded by microfone. Ideally the data would come directly from microfone, but in practise, the data is first stored to files and then played from the storage space. But skype for example relies on direct connection to the microfone.
video editors are one step further. You need huge video files and some keyboard input. Basically only the keyboard input can be ensured to be legal content. But video editing relies on external video cameras and the video editing software would be optimized for supporting easy transfer path from video camera equipment, but difficult or non-existent path from hollywood's movie content.
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Doesn’t matter. According to you, if the application is capable of creating or displaying an infringing copy, it must be remade to ensure no infringement can take place. How can a text editor be made in a way that can ensure no infringement of anyone else’s work, anywhere in the world, from the past to the exact present moment?
Doesn’t matter. According to you, if the application is capable of playing an infringing copy, it must be remade to ensure no infringement can take place. How can an audio player be made that can ensure no infringement of anyone else’s work, anywhere in the world, from the past to the exact present moment?
Doesn’t matter. According to you, if the application is capable of creating or displaying an infringing copy, it must be remade to ensure no infringement can take place. How can a video editor be made in a way that can ensure no infringement of anyone else’s work, anywhere in the world, from the past to the exact present moment?
And in all three instances, how can you ensure that each application can both ensure no infringement and still allow for non-infringing uses? (ProTip: You can’t.)
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well, I haven't created that kind of application yet, so I can't know all the legal tricks they need to use to make their activity legal. Maybe ask some author who has text editors, audio players or video editors.
But in general, you just need to restrict the software enough that pirated use cases are not happening any longer. Every time you find people using your software for piracy, its time to redesign it until the usage becomes impossible. At some point you might need to stop releasing the software completely, when the market matures enough that legal usage is no longer possible.
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And how can you do that when the amount of created works in the world continues to increase? How can you ensure that a text editor cannot be used to infringe upon copyrights when new articles, books, poems, etc. are published on the Internet every day? How can you do the same for video editors, audio players, image editors/viewers, ebook readers, and any other application that could conceivably display a infringing copy of a cultural work? And how can you do that for every application under those categories without also preventing any non-infringing use of those applications?
(Answer: You can’t. You literally cannot do that under any circumstances.)
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There's nice trick to this. Copyright laws says that using all of these is illegal. The default is that all content available in internet is unusable.
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Not an answer to my question. How can you write an application that guarantees it can’t be used for copyright infringement while also allowing for non-infringing uses? How can you personally guarantee that anything made in your application doesn’t infringe on any copyrighted work anywhere in the world, from the past to the present moment in which someone is creating a work?
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0) Well, you start from empty computer program. You declare that empty program doesn't infringe.
1) Then you incrementally add some content to the program, and check that the added feature doesnt infringe content.
2) Then you combine (0) and (1) together and declare (again) that the whole program doesnt infringe.
3) you repeat the process until you cannot figure out new non-infringing features
4) then you stop improving the program.
This is known as "induction proof". Base case for induction is step (0), while the (1),(2) forms the "step" of the induction. And (3) is the result of the induction proof.
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Still doesn’t answer my question. Your application must guarantee that it will never infringe upon ANY COPYRIGHTED WORK EVER. How can you possibly do that and still allow any non-infringing uses? How can a text editor possibly ensure no infringement ever takes place and still allow me to write whatever I want, when even a single sentence could infringe upon someone’s — anyone’s — copyright, no matter where in the world it might happen and no matter the length of the work? How, I ask you, can you ONE HUNDRED PERCENT NO FUCKING BULLSHIT guarantee that a text editor won’t stop me from writing “Disney was never a small company - not in our lifetimes, anyway” even if I never read or saw the source of that sentence?
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nope. when you publish your work, its responsibility o every copyright owner to check that you are not infringing and send you dcma notices if they think your proof has serious problems. Once its been available in the market or 20 years without significant lawsuits, companies can trust your work.
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Except you’ve said, throughout this entire discussion, that liability for infringement also falls on the developers of any application that doesn’t guaran-fucking-tee it can’t be used for infringement. How can you now say “it’s the copyright holder’s responsibility” when you’ve spent all this time today saying “it’s the application developers’ responsibility to prevent infringement from even happening to begin with and they’re liable for infringement if they don’t”? How has the cognitive dissonance of holding those two propositions simultaneously not given you a brain anuerysm?
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1) liability for infringement also falls on the developers
2) it’s the copyright holder’s responsibility
Yes, both statements are true simultaniously. How copyright laws resolve this is that copyright holder can empty your wallet whenever they find copyright infringement of copyright holder's work. This gives developers enough incentive to actually follow the copyright (or lose all their money).
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Which wraps back around to my main question: How can you expect the developers of a text editor Notepad++ to guarantee that I can’t copy, say, any copyrighted work you have ever written or will ever write (in part or in whole) into a plain text file on my computer? And why should they be held legally liable for my infringement if I were to do that, considering they had no idea I was going to use their application in that way and didn’t encourage me (personally or otherwise) to use it that way?
And how, then, can you expect any application developer/development team to do the same thing for their application vis-á-vis copyrighted works in other formats — including new works that are published after, say, the publication of this very post?
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application developers know about all possible ways how the app can be used.
Some of those ways are more risky than others, and for example copy-paste feature was explicitly marked as dangerous relative to copyrights. End users managed to use the feature in ways that were not the right usage pattern. They did warn about the feature in 1990's already.
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How, then, can the developers of Notepad++ possibly prevent me (or anyone else, for that matter) from infringing upon anyone’s copyrights, now and in the future, like you say they absolutely without question should be doing right the hell now?
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they can always refuse to give you a copy of notepad++. then you need to go to some other app if you want to continue your infringing activities. Or they can disable your copy of notepad++, if illegal activity is detected.
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Notepad++ is an open source project. How can the devs stop me from getting a copy when I can literally download and compile the code?
And even if they could, how could all the other developers of all the other available text editors stop me from getting one of theirs and using it for infringement?
And if even if all of those devs could do that (they can’t), how could they stop everyone else from using those text editors for infringing purposes without basically turning the applications into useless propriety applications that can’t export text files, can’t let you type anything that might infringe on someone else’s copyright (now and in the future), and otherwise can’t let you use them for any purpose other than staring at a blank screen and wondering how the hell you can even type anything without the application shutting you down for daring to type even one sentence someone else has already typed somewhere in the world?
Because if you want a world where copyright maximalism is the norm, that’s the kind of application you’re going to get. Hell, why even stop at applications? Let’s go with physical tools, too! Text editors are the evolution of typewriters, so what can you do to prevent someone from using a typewriter to infringe upon copyright? How about printing presses — how can you stop them from being used by private persons for infringing purposes? Paper, ink, pencils, crayons, colored pencils, markers — all able to facilitate infringement, so how can you stop those from being used to infringe?
Your copyright maximalism will kill culture by making it impossible for anyone to create anything new. Everything builds upon everything else that came before it. Under your ideas of copyright maximalism, no one would be able to ever do that again. No tool could ever even remotely infringe upon anyone else’s copyright without the maker of that tool and the person who used it both being sued into poverty and eventual death in a gutter. No new culture could ever be created out of fear that someone could call it infringing and destroy it with a copyright lawsuit. Welcome to a living nightmare of your own making, you piece of shit. I hope you enjoy it. No one else will.
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Make the application so useless that nobody wants to use it, and then nobody will use it to infringe, which is what TP seems to have achieved.
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Here are some of the problems with that:
The makers of Notepad++ have no way to refuse to give anyone in particular a copy of their software.
They have no way of knowing beforehand who will or won’t use Notepad++ for infringing activities.
They have no way of tracking the activity of end users at all, let alone detecting any illegal or unlawful activity.
It’s generally impossible to know what software is used to modify pure-text files like those created with Notepad++ as opposed to essentially any other text editor.
Some of the reasons for those problems include:
Notepad++ is a free download and is open-source, so the makers have no way to control who downloads it.
Many sites that offer downloads for Notepad++ (and there is more than one thanks to reason 1) don’t keep records for who visits.
Notepad++ contains no tracking software at all.
Notepad++ doesn’t connect to the internet at all outside of looking for global updates or submitting bug reports if the software crashes, if that.
It should also be noted that there is no legal requirement or legal incentive for makers of text editors to include such features for the purpose of stopping or preventing copyright infringement. If someone gets assaulted with a baseball bat, they can’t successfully sue the makers of the baseball bat over making the tool used in the assault, and the same would go for criminal liability.
And even assuming it’s possible to implement those features in Notepad++ that you suggested, that would not change the fact: they currently don’t implement any of them, there is no law saying they should, and no one has ever successfully sued the makers of Notepad++ (or any other text editor, really) for contributory infringement. This is all despite the fact that the software can and has been used for copyright infringement and yet neither the software nor the makers do anything to reduce or mitigate that, and even assuming that it is possible for them to do so.
Additionally, you actually say something that supports the idea that what you’re suggesting is completely ridiculous:
Basically, no matter what the makers of Notepad++ do, there will always be some other app that infringers can turn to to continue their infringing activities. Trying to sue the makers of text editors (or pretty much any other software that can be used for infringement) for providing a software that can and probably has been used to commit some illegal or unlawful act (especially where the software is capable of lawful, legal acts, which is clearly the case with text editors) is like playing Whack-a-Mole: other options will pop up, and the amount of infringing content created will not go down. It’s a complete waste of time and money to even bother, and the people you’re suing didn’t actually do anything wrong.
Finally, you keep saying “illegal” activities/content as if infringing on copyright is a criminal act. However, outside of some rare circumstances, copyright infringement isn’t necessarily illegal; it’s unlawful, sure, but not illegal. (“Illegal” refers to criminal acts, whereas “unlawful” focuses more on civil liability. There is obviously a lot of overlap between the two, but copyright infringement is rarely a criminal act.) Also, both “illegal” and “unlawful” are extremely broad, whereas this discussion is narrowly focused on copyright, copyright infringement, liability for copyright infringement, and technology capable of being used for such purposes.
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Stephen wasn’t talking about the general knowledge that someone could use the software to infringe or the general knowledge that people have and continue to do so. He isn’t even talking about having specific knowledge of a particular instance of infringement that has already happened. He’s talking about having (or lacking) the specific knowledge that a particular (potential or current) user is or will at some point in the future commit an infringing act using the software before, during, or shortly after the act itself has already happened.
Whether the app can be used that way and whether the makers of the app are generally aware of that is immaterial. That doesn’t change the question of liability for copyright infringement, which requires having specific knowledge of the particular infringement/infringer and its infringing nature. And it’s worth noting that no court has ruled that simply having a copy/paste feature triggers liability if the makers don’t include any sort of countermeasures against infringers.
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So your killer feature that made everyone use your application was actually...
tadaa.... "copyright infringement"...
If this is true, then the whole app might be illegal and you should immediately stop making public releases of it.
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Assuming you mean developers of software that is capable of being used for copyright infringement (as opposed to developers of software that itself directly infringes on someone’s copyright), then no, liability for infringement generally does not fall on the developers. There are exceptions to that, where the devs clearly solicit or encourage infringement of others’ copyright, the software lacks any substantial capability for noninfringing use, or the developers had actual, specific knowledge of particular instances of infringement, already had the capability of doing something reasonable about it, and then did nothing at all, but those rarely happen nowadays and don’t really apply to software like Notepad++. So, as a general rule, developers of software capable of being used to commit or facilitate infringing activity are not liable for any infringement done using their software.
That doesn’t exactly “resolve” anything. Setting aside the fact that points 1 and 2 don’t have any apparent contradictions between them, that doesn’t really address or explain how point 1 gets resolved.
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Problem: software/a feature that by itself does not infringe can still be used to infringe. Additionally, many very basic and fundamental features are impossible to implement without creating the possibility of infringing uses, and those features are frequently used for perfectly reasonable, noninfringing, legal, lawful, ethical, and moral activities, even without getting into fair use, and are in very high demand.
Additionally, as any developer can tell you, the fact that two parts do not infringe/are not capable of being used to infringe by themselves doesn’t necessarily mean that combining the two will not create the ability to infringe. Sometimes, it’s not infringing to do one or the other, but doing both is. Other times, having both features may combine in such a way that may create unintended capabilities. Bugs do exist, and there’s a reason people have to not only test individual parts of a program for bugs but also entire program as a whole.
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Uhhh, no. The default is that all content available on the internet is both usable and legal. The plaintiff has to first identify and prove copying or possibly infringing use as well as the material allegedly infringed upon, then the defendant can respond by asserting (and proving as necessary) that no copying occurred, that the copying/use was authorized/licensed by someone authorized to grant such a thing, the plaintiff doesn’t have a valid copyright in the copied/used material, or the copying/use is not infringing, whether it’s because it is de minimus, a case of scénes a faire, “fair use”, or a case involving the First-Sale Doctrine. Alternatively, the defendant may be able to prove copyright misuse and thus invalidate the copyright. Then the plaintiff has to refute the defendant’s claims. Regardless of the end result, the fact is that until a copyright holder identifies something has potentially infringing, it is presumed that everything is not infringing until proven otherwise.
Copyright law doesn’t say that using any of those things is illegal or unlawful. No court has ever ruled that any of them are and not been overturned on appeal.
And if you were right, that would only show how unworkable copyright law actually is. Under your claims and reason, the entire internet is completely unusable until every copyright holder in the world has examined everything on it and agreed it’s not infringing. That’s not at all how it works, there is no reason to believe that’s how it should work, and trying to make it work that way would be completely unreasonable and unrealistic.
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You misunderstand both the question and the answer. If you want to make an application that guarantees prevention of copyright infringement, you have to make it so useless to anyone who uses the application to infringe copyright that it also becomes useless to literally everyone else. I’m not going to use a text editor for non-infringing purposes if the application is so intentionally hobbled to the point of functional worthlessness because of its developers’ unfounded fears of copyright infringement liability. I’m going to find a text editor that isn’t.
A similiar situation, I imagine, happens a lot with people who use your applications.
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Oo! Oo! I know! [inhales] None. They don’t use any legal tricks. Or, at least, most don’t. The vast majority of audio players, video editors/players, and text editors contain no restrictions to prevent, stop, or punish infringing uses, especially text editors. And even for the measures that do exist, they are really easy to circumvent, and it’s fundamentally impossible to prevent that.
The law doesn’t require them to do so, anyways, and failing to do so doesn’t open them up to liability. What measures do exist aren’t strictly necessary for the software itself to remain legal.
Copyright law does not require, encourage, suggest, or incentivize developers to do so. It’s also futile, unnecessary, and harmful to creativity in general, and it punishes lawful uses and users more than it does infringers (since infringers will often find a way around such obstacles very quickly). (See, for example, DRM.)
Well, then it’s a good thing that market maturity doesn’t change whether or not a particular piece of software is capable of being used legally and lawfully for legal, lawful purposes. No matter how many particular instances of infringing uses exist or are possible, that doesn’t change whether or not legal usage is possible. For example, every text editor can be used to create a new text file from scratch without copying anything you yourself did not create, every audio player can be used to listen to legally obtained sound/music files, every video player can be used to watch legally obtained video files, and every video editor can be used to legally edit video files you created yourself from scratch. There is no question that each and every one of those uses is legal, lawful, and noninfringing, and these are fundamental uses for those programs. Again, neither the number of pirated files available that can be accessed with the software nor the number of pirated files created using the software are relevant to whether or not legal usage is possible.
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You just need to figure out better software features.
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This is only because you categorically refuse to do anything to the misuses that you see in the marketplace. Your refusal is the main cause for this problem. It is not any fundamental issue that cannot be solved when you just do your market research properly and stop pirates from using your work.
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Well, with text editors, humans have these things called eyeballs, which they can use to read copyrighted text. Then, using their hands on the keyboard you mentioned, they can then copy, word-for-word, the entirety of the copyrighted text. Bam! They just used a text editor to create copy of a copyrighted book. And you can always print or upload any text file that you create, they can then publish that copy, thus clearly committing copyright infringement. There is no way to prevent this from happening, either.
With audio players, first of all, the idea is to play sound files which could potentially be purchased in the form of a CD or downloadable file. Of course, if user-created files can be created and played as well, one could simply record music from a CD or downloaded file and then play it. A music player can’t know the difference. (Also, Skype isn’t technically an audio player.) But let’s stick with the fundamental feature of an audio player (not a sound editor or recorder). Even so, unless the music file itself has some sort of DRM that the audio player looks for (which can be spoofed, BTW), audio players can’t tell the difference between an authentic, legally obtained file and a pirated copy. It also cannot tell how or where it’s being used, so I could just plug my computer to a speaker and play a legally obtained copy of a song for many to hear, which I’m pretty sure could be a public performance and thus infringing on copyright. Again, there is no way for the makers of the software to stop or prevent this from happening without removing every single feature from the audio player that makes it work at all.
Video editing falls in the same trap. There is nothing preventing me from using that camera to record a live performance or a prerecorded video and then editing or viewing it in the video editor. Video editors can’t tell whether I recorded something I made or something made in Hollywood. As for preventing Hollywood’s movie content from being transferred, in addition to the very easy workaround I mentioned earlier, that isn’t something the makers of the video editor can do. It would be incumbent on the makers of the movie to include some form of DRM to distinguish it from user-created video files. (Also, outside of keyboard shortcuts, typing things like file names, and macros, keyboards aren’t really used to edit videos, so that stuff about keyboard inputs makes no sense.)
Everything I’ve mentioned is easy to do, BTW.
Keyboard input can’t be ensured to be legal content. In addition to the aforementioned method for text editors, there are many programs that can be used to tell the computer that it has received input from a keyboard without actually tapping the corresponding key on the actual keyboard. It’s very trivial, and it can be used to automate typing. It wouldn’t be that difficult to create a script that triggers keyboard and mouse inputs in such a way that it uses some piece of software to create an infringing file. And there really isn’t a way to prevent this, either. Of course, the earlier example I gave works, too, and is completely impossible to detect, prevent, or stop.
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Pencils and paper can be used for infringing activities, as one makes the marks on the other, and neither can control what marks are made. Should they be outlawed?
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I can retype the entirety of a given book into a text editor without using the copy-paste function. How can you prevent that “misuse” and still offer me a functional text editor?
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first it was audio players, video editors and text editors and once your arguments fail in that area, you need to jump to pencils and paper. This kind of jumping from one issue to another is what causes most of the mistakes in your thinking.
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How can a text editor prevent me from retyping an entire book (without using the copy-paste function) and still be a useable application?
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We’re not “jumping from issue to issue”. We’re pointing out the obvious fact that you either can’t or willfully refuse to understand: A tool with multiple legal/lawful/non-infringing uses that could also be used for copyright infringement can’t be made in a way that prevents any and all copyright infringement, now and in the future, but also allows for all those legal/lawful/non-infringing uses. You can’t build a text editor that stops me from retyping literally any book in existence, in part or in whole, and still allows me to use that editor for lawful purposes. And you can’t do the same for pens(/pencils) and paper.
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There's always alternative to ask for license information, mark all your source material, use quote marks for borrowed content, use a list of contributors at the end of your paper. For example LaTeX explicitly supports these features. If lack of this information becomes significant problem, the tool can be modiified to require this information before it accepts it as valid text document. Compiler's like LaTeX has significant feature which allows them to reject misformatted text files, and that feature can be used to filter out infringing material.
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sure, but the current situation is that 20% of the files are copyright infringing. Surely you can do better than that.
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Not an excuse. The application must prevent all infringement, now and in the future, even if I have a Fair Use defense for that infringement. How can a text editor do that, and how can it do so while also allowing me to use it for non-infringing purposes?
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No, you really can’t. You can’t make a text editor that stops me from infringing on any copyright, now and in the future, and still allows me to use that application for non-infringing uses.
If I were to type out a sentence from a given book as part of a review of that book, that is infringement, regardless of whether I have a Fair Use defense for it. A text editor that prevents infringement has to stop me from typing out that sentence because it must stop all infringement, regardless of the size and context and timing of the infringement, or else — as you’ve claimed throughout this entire discussion — the developers of that text editor will be just as liable for copyright infringement as I am.
You can’t make an application that prevents all copyright infringement and still allows people to use the application for non-infringing purposes. It is literally impossible. If you can do it, you’re God — and you don’t strike me as the “omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent deity” type.
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That wasn’t what you said before. You said that by simply using a service deemed to be unlawful due to contributory/vicarious infringing, even if that specific use doesn’t involve doing anything that would infringe on copyright directly or using pirated material, the end user is still liable for copyright infringement. That is, since the service itself indirectly infringes, everyone who uses that service at all is also infringing.
Well, that is the nature of “piracy services” (i.e. services specifically designed for the specific purpose of committing and/or facilitating piracy, not ones that can incidentally be used to commit or facilitate piracy); since the whole point of the service is to pirate, you kinda have to expect that you will end up committing piracy. That said, that doesn’t actually address anything I said. I was talking about end users using a service without engaging in piracy themselves or encouraging others to do so.
I can tell you right now that that often is not the case. They will often sue authors of the services before or together with the end users. Additionally, the lawsuits against the authors of the services are rarely successful. For all of its faults, the DMCA does a pretty decent job of protecting intermediary services and the like from liability, as does the rest of copyright law.
First, again, such lawsuits of the service itself rarely succeed. Usually, the best case scenario for the plaintiffs of such lawsuits is a settlement (often without admitting any wrongdoing), and you generally can’t use a settlement as proof that the service is unlawful.
Second, that argument would only even remotely reasonably apply to users who continue or begin using the service after the success of the lawsuit against the service has been made public. It wouldn’t apply to users who only used the service before or during the lawsuit.
Third, I have never heard of anyone actually suing every user of a service under such a theory. Not only are successful copyright lawsuits against services pretty rare, but I don’t know of any lawsuit that argued that the user should have known that the service was unlawful.
Fourth, if the users weren’t themselves directly infringing, I cannot think of any existing liability that they would be exposed to for using that service. Neither contributory nor vicarious liability for infringement use such a standard. For one thing, those both would require particular knowledge of, clear encouragement of, or direct involvement with direct infringement. Liability for infringement doesn’t really exist for such a tenuous connection as one between two different users with no connection other than that they both used this one service, and a user cannot be found liable for anything that the developer did, either.
Fifth, for direct liability, you’d still have to prove that each of the individual users themselves actually committed direct infringement of copyright that you own. The previous lawsuit against the services may be evidence that the user was likely to have committed direct infringement of somebody’s copyright, or that any infringement was willful when calculating damages, but that’s not enough to prove that you, personally, (or the client you represent) have standing to sue each individual user for direct infringement, even if each one has committed direct infringement of someone’s copyright at some point. You have to prove that not only did they directly infringe on someone’s copyright, you also have to prove that you have standing to enforce the specific copyright that was allegedly infringed upon by these specific plaintiffs. Even if some other user was found to have directly infringed on your copyright, the service itself was found contributorily and/or vicariously liable for infringement, and the defendant did, in fact, use that particular service at some point after that lawsuit was resolved to infringe on a different person/entity’s copyright on some other material that you have no copyright ownership of or exclusive license for (or copyright of unknown ownership or an unknown/unidentified copyright on some unidentified material), that is not enough to find that this user has direct liability for infringement on your copyright. As noted in my fourth point, it’s not even enough to make them contributorily or vicariously liable for infringement on your copyright. That’s not how liability and standing work in any aspect of law.
Look, there has to be something that the defendent(s) personally did that specifically and adversely affected the plaintiff(s) personally and that was unlawful, or the defendant(s) must have materially contributed to someone else who personally did something that specifically and adversely affected the plaintiff(s) personally and that was unlawful. (There’re also cases involving a duty of care, but that doesn’t really make sense here; there is no duty of care owed by a user of a service to a copyright holder involving copyright at all.) None of that really applies in this scenario involving someone suing someone else solely because they used a service that was found liable (directly, contributorily, and/or vicariously) for infringement of the plaintiff’s copyright (even if they prove that the defendant used that service to infringe on yet another person’s copyright after the service was found liable). There needs to be more than that for the plaintiff to have a case against that defendant.
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The URL still wouldn’t be infringing on copyright. There have been cases about this.
But really, my point was that you keep talking about infringing URLs, and that makes no sense, particularly in any of the cases that have been mentioned.
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Next step in copyright enforcement after quote marks and compilers was obviously these "document templates". Html and ms word uses this approach. There some fixed elements have been inserted to the document to enforce that everyone uses "list of contributors" section in their document. The document just looks funny if you skip this important copyright enforcing section. And valid documents which actually follows copyrights can be easily detected from the otherwise pirated source material.
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Actually, those “killer features” were things like listening to a prerecorded or user-recorded sound file, recording and/or editing a home video, copy/pasting your own work, printing and/or uploading text or photos you created, and the very basic function of typing on a keyboard to record words, numbers, sentences, code, etc. into a text-based file. Y’know, pretty basic features that are in common use and are generally used for noninfringing purposes but that can be used for infringing purposes no matter what countermeasures are implemented. It’s unavoidable.
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As I’ve said several times, very fundamental features that are not infringing can still be used to infringe. Like typing text using a keyboard into a text editor and then printing or uploading the resulting file.
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I’m not talking about templates. I’m not talking about HTML and rich text formatting. I’m talking about editors for plain text (i.e., .TXT files). How can the developers of a plain-text editor like Notepad++ make their application prevent all possible copyright infringement, now and in the future, while still making the application usable for non-infringing purposes? How can they prevent me from re-typing the contents of any given copyrighted document — even if I’m looking at my own printed copy to do it — without hobbling the software into uselessness?
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Urls are kinda difficult technology relative to copyrights. Basically you can assign a boolean flag for every url to identify if the content behind the url is legal or illegal. The browser vendors are warning that it is illegal to place copyright infringing material to the web server's storage space, simply because that operation is breaking the URLs that point to that content, i.e. the boolean flag attached to urls gets decided to "illegal" status whenever that happens.
So when our software fetches data based on url content, we basically need to ensure that the urls coming to our software are legal. We have some tools related to that operation in our software, but the techniques are not perfect, and there will be improvements that need to be done, once we get our market research done.
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No, it’s because you cannot stop every instance of infringement using any computer service. You are expecting things that are fundamentally impossible on the basis that not doing so creates liability in some alternate reality where copyright laws exceed the wildest dreams of copyright maximalists and are divorced from any semblance of reality, reasonableness, fairness, equity, justice, or common sense, and where computers are magical devices capable of, among other things, reading minds, predicting the future, and making complex decisions that involve a tremendous amount of nuance and subjectivity that our real-world computers simply cannot do with anything approaching accuracy or consistency. I also don’t think that copyright law is infallible and free of abuse, nor is it strictly necessary for people to innovate or create new works (even if it can encourage it).
Basically, I’m just being realistic.
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You can also work from the other side
Make your content so useless and unentertaining that no-one would be bothered to infringe upon its copyright.
We get a lot of that lately.
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The arguments in that area didn’t fail. You just don’t seem to grasp that audio players, video editors, and text editors do not fit within the scheme you envision, so this AC decided to go with something more tangible and easier to understand. Also, if I can do it with pencil and paper, then I can also do it with a text editor or basic drawing software, so if you can’t refute the pencil-and-paper argument, then it can also apply to the text editors discussed previously.
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There is no way for a text editor to know whether or not a given piece of text needs a citation, licensing information, etc., as opposed to being created from scratch. Plus, a lot of text editors don’t support any sort of formatting or markup; this is plain text we’re dealing with, after all. And what LaTeX does cannot be extended to filtering out infringing material for the basic reason that it cannot know what material is infringing, created completely new, or in the public domain. There is also no way for any text editor or LaTeX compiler to know that any citations or licensing info or such are accurate or honest.
Also, LaTeX isn’t a plain-text editor like we’ve been discussing. It is a method of formatting text.
But seriously, you don’t seem to understand that not everything that can be used in a text editor needs to be cited or licensed, that people can lie, that text editors (and any other software or program) cannot tell content that needs to be cited or licensed from content that doesn’t, nor can it tell truth from lies, that copyright law has way more nuance than you seem to realize, or that no text editor has such features like you proscribe and yet none have been sued.
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I’d like to know where that 20% figure comes from, but it’s not even all that relevant. No matter what countermeasures you put in place, there will always be a way to circumvent it. Studies have shown that stronger anti-piracy measures don’t cause much—if any—significant reduction in the prevalence of piracy in all but the very short term. Often, anti-piracy measures will actually lead to an increase in piracy if the measures inconvenience legitimate users too much.
You have also not provided any reason based on US copyright laws that would necessitate these countermeasures.
I also wouldn’t consider 20% to be that useful a figure without more context. If the vast majority of the infringing files are only accessed and accessible to a very small portion of internet users, then not much damage is actually being done since only a few are even using the pirated version to begin with. I also have no idea if we are talking about distinct files or files period.
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Hey now, I resemble that remark!
…wait, nevermind, sorry. All my stuff is public domain.
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the 20% figure comes from the situation what will happen if you have no protection against copyright infringement in your software. When people just
refuse to fix the issues in the software and let pirates freely use the system for illegal purposes.
The software gets popular when the pirate's reason to spread the software is that they detect copyright infringement and want to screw your ass. Basically the situation in the marketplace isn't too nice, but that's what market research is for.
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Um, no. HTML and MS Word don’t require such things (I’ve never used either document templates or a “list of contributors” section in any documents I’ve created and never encountered problems because of it), it is not easy to distinguish noninfringing content from infringing content, and none of that applies to plain text editors, which don’t use any formatting or templates at all. MS Word is a word processor, not a text editor; it allows for formatting, templates, fonts, additional information, etc. HTML is a markup language used for formatting web pages; it is not a text editor or a word processor. You can certainly type using HTML in a text editor, but the text editor wouldn’t actually do any formatting or anything else with it; it gets treated like any other text and doesn’t get handled. (The same goes for LaTeX; all it does is tell some program how to format something; it isn’t a program itself at all, let alone a text editor, and text editors don’t treat it any differently from regular, unformatted text.) So in addition to the fact that those enforcement measures don’t actually exist, none of what you’re talking about actually involves text editors.
Also, compilers don’t check copyright info (I’ve checked) aside from licensing the compiler itself, so they have nothing to do with copyright enforcement. Quote marks predate copyright law by at least a few centuries, and even nowadays I’ve never encountered any program that checks them outside of making sure that I close every quote I open and formatting the quotation marks based on whether they open or close the quote, both of which can be ignored or even turned off entirely, so they clearly have nothing to do with enforcing copyright, either. In fact, quote marks have nothing to do with whether something is infringing or not, nor do citations or crediting authors/contributors (except for Creative Commons or similar copyleft licenses); that’s all regarding plagiarism, which is a completely separate topic.
And then there’s the fact that you once again ignore the possibilities of using original content and the ability to lie.
So you’ve discussed how non-text editors supposedly enforce against what you call copyright infringement but would actually be plagiarism, despite the fact that they don’t actually do what you claim, and also cited other measures (including one that also actually involves stopping plagiarism) that are actually not used to enforce or check copyright at all. Since we were talking about text editors and copyright enforcement or infringement in the real world, you’re getting pretty off-topic. As a reminder, a text editor would be a program like MS NotePad or Notepad++.
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Look, URLs are just addresses. That they may point to something illegal doesn’t make them illegal.
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I was asking what calculations and sources were used to arrive at the 20% figure, not what hypothetical situation would lead to it. I’m asking you to show your work and prove that claim.
Additionally, you seem to thing that 20% is a lot. It’s not. That’s still 80% that is not infringing, and that means the authors have no legal requirement to enforce copyright beyond DMCA notices for content that they host or link.
Furthermore, as I’ve said, there are some cases where it’s impossible to make a dent in the number of pirates without making software completely unusable, like text editors. Pirates aren’t that easily discouraged, and once one is successful, it becomes fairly trivial for everyone else.
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Proper authors are doing more than the bare minimum of what is legally required.
You wouldn't build a house which has leaking roof, even though laws do not require that level of quality.
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Many people will notice headquarters of CIA from it's commonly known address. Same way pirates know address of piratebay as a location where they can find illegal material. Of course url can be illegal, nothing in the laws is saying that all urls are free from legal problems.
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Actually, since I know nothing about building houses, any house I built probably would have a leaky roof. Additionally, I’m pretty sure that people who build houses do owe a duty of care to not leave leaky roofs, and there are an awful lot of building codes that probably have something to say on the matter, so actually, the laws probably do require that level of quality.
By contrast, authors of text editor software don’t have a duty of care to disallow as many possible methods of piracy as possible, and the laws governing software and copyright are nowhere near as complicated, jurisdiction-specific, or difficult to find and understand as building codes. They aren’t necessarily simple, but there’s no contest here.
At any rate, you asked why shouldn’t we try to lower the amount of piracy, and so I pointed out why some hypothetical developers wouldn’t: it’s not really feasible for them to do so, anything they try is likely to reduce piracy by much or for long, anything they try is likely to negatively impact legitimate, noninfringing users more than pirates, and there is no legal requirement to do so. Basically, it would be a lot of effort for little to no gain.
You’re making an argument from emotion; that developers should work harder on this simply because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of how effective or reasonable it may be. I’m just saying that there’s no logical reason for them to do so and plenty of reasons not to.
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The address isn’t illegal. At most, it may point to a location that is illegal or where illegal activities take place. Same with URLs.
(Also, you have it backwards; the laws would have to say something to make some URLs illegal.)
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Design a text editor that stops people from typing the contents of any book they have in front of them. The only way to do that is to not allow them to type words into the editor. On the other hand if you allow them to enter text, you have potentially enabled copyright infringement, and by your reasoning you are also guilty of copyright infringement.
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You just need to ensure that your own house is in order. There is no requirement to check other people's houses. But when you build software, your house is all the software's users, which means you need to control piracy of everyone using your software.
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It's not the builder's fault if the homeowner takes a drill to the roof and it starts leaking.
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Addresses of the CIA and Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay has developed methods to routinely rotate addies and keep DNSes updated, and active efforts to close TPB have only caused them to entrench.
The CIA has its own networks of VPNs, so the only time you're going to know its coming from the CIA is if they want you to know. (Or if someone is very stupid and soon to be reassigned.)
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Lawbooks does not have a list of technologies and their legal status written in them. Instead they just give general guidelines and expect all technologies to follow those rules to the letter.
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“The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.”
That is the opening sentence of Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Stephen King. Neither you nor anyone else can design a plain text editor that can stop me from typing out that sentence — an act of copyright infringement, even though I have a Fair Use defense for that infringement — without also stopping me from typing out any other sentence in that or any other book, poem, short story, magazine article, blog entry, etc. You can’t design an application that prevents even the slightest infringement upon any copyright anywhere in the world without also making the application effectively useless for legal/lawful/non-infringing content creation purposes. That goes for rich text editors, image editors/viewers, media editors/players, web browsers, and even entire operating systems.
No one who develops Notepad++ can — or even should — be held liable if I use that application to format an illicit .TXT version of The Gunslinger that I plan to somehow distribute. No one who develops Firefox can — or should — be held liable if I use that application to upload that illicit .TXT file to MEGA or some other filesharing site. And no one who develops Microsoft Windows can — or should — be held liable if I do all that while using Windows 10. You cannot, have not, will not, and should not ever have tried to provide any argument whatsoever to the contrary.
Your imaginings of how the law works are wrong. Your theories about the liability of developers of everything from Notepad++ to Audacity to Firefox are so ridiculously incorrect from a factual standpoint that laughing at your wholly complete wrongness on the matter would be a morally reprehensible act. You’re an ignorant fool — possibly wilfully so, since you’re also an admitted troll — and no one alive should take you seriously on any matter of actual fact ever again.
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Now fuck off.
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Proofs using computers work using two principles: type checking and manual testing.
Type checking provides automated way to check some properties from large text documents. What type checking cannot verify, needs to be done via manual testing.
Copyright checking can be done using the same principles. Anything that your "type checking" cannot verify, can then be done by manual testing. Type checking does 90% of the task, and then 10% needs to be done using more burdensome test cases.
This process results in 100% accuracy.
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Tero "Meshpage" Pulfuckheadinnen shitting up another thread based on nonsensical copyright-based arguments, who would have fucking thought?
Time to write up another weekly Under the Bridge report...
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How can you design a text editor application that can check whatever you type in your text editor against every copyrighted written work ever, understand the context of whatever you typed (i.e., whether it’s intentionally or accidentally infringing, because it will be infringing), and still allow you to type anything you want in the text editor?
I’ll save you the trouble and give you the only correct answer: You can’t.
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When you do, could you keep it under the bridge with you?
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Man's got a point, nobody wants to read about how Stephen owned an idiot by responding to everything tp has to say.
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Nah.
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Yeah, nobody wants to read about how I owned myself by responding to everything tp has to say.
…wait
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You don't even need to look at the text that was written to do the copyright check. You can detect it from the speed that they spend typing it. If your village idiot writes code 1200 pages a minute, it's pretty clear it wasn't their own work.
It just takes some market research on different programmers to find out exactly how fast programmers can output code, but too quick output is always indication of something bad happening.
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Your entire, ridiculous, possibly drug-fueled fantasy about programming and copyright hinges upon a computer application being able to do what even the most intelligent and knowledgable people alive cannot: detect and prevent copyright infringement of any kind without hobbling the legitimate uses of any tool used by the infringer. Programming genuises can’t stop an app like Photoshop from being used to create fake nudes of female celebrities. What makes you think any programmer in the world could ever be able to make a text editor app that stops people (including legitimately fast typists) from typing part of any copyrighted work in the world, even by accident, and still lets them type anything else they want?
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None of that addresses any of the cases we’ve pointed out (like reading something and typing it up by hand, or copying your own work from one place and pasting it somewhere else, or copying something in the public domain).
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You can’t do manual checking with a text editor because you don’t have the necessary access, and type checking doesn’t work for copyright at all.
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Hey! Are you calling me an idiot, or ignoring me entirely?
Kidding aside, I enjoy reading Stephen taking down idiots and trolls, but then I also enjoy engaging in such activities (though in a less confrontational manner, usually; otherwise I’d just be aping Stephen and others).
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Well, individual copyright check doesn't need to catch all pirates. The check that works in 100% cases might not exist, but if you can find 50% of pirates with one check and then you have 34 different checks available, you get good approximation of the 100% coverage.
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Your entire argument in this discussion is that if an application can’t prevent all copyright infringement in all contexts, now and in the future, the application’s developer(s) must be held liable for that infringement no matter what. You don’t get to move the goalposts now, son.
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Yes, that's good incentive to do the copyright checks properly.
Compare what happens when you don't even try to do copyright check, then you'd be liable for 100% of user's copyright infringements.
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Explain, then, how the developer of a plain text editor application can design their application to both prevent all present and future copyright infringement in all contexts (which you have said is the 100% no-compromise condition upon which the developer is free from liability for infringement) and allow a user to type anything they want into the application. The speed of typing is irrelevant. A Fair Use defense is irrelevant. The application absolutely must stop all infringement no matter what and still allow for all non-infringing uses, even if those uses accidentally infringe (which is still a context in which someone can infringe).
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No, the copyright check does not need to allow all non-infringing uses.
This requirement is coming from copyright minimalist view, which is clearly wrong.
We do not need to allow "your parrot to decide the material", even though
that usage might be non-infringing, given that animals cannot own copyrights.
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That must be why no popular programs carry out copyright checks, and their programmers have not been sued into bankruptcy.
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This has been proven wrong months ago. Proof: download operation in web browsers.
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Then the application becomes functionally useless, because you cannot have an application that both prevents all copyright infringment in any context and allows for any non-infringing uses, even ones that may infringe by accident. Feel free to show me the lie in what I said there, if you can. But if you can’t? Congratulations, you’ve discovered the utter ignorance of your repeatedly-stated position on app developers and copyright liability.
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Counterpoint: We still have web browsers. No web browser developer has ever been sued out of existence because their browser had a download function.
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There is no requiement in laws that require companies to provide their services for all purposes. If the product is suitable for just one purpose, that is already enough. All purposes are not required.
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As we’ve said several times before, that’s not how U.S. copyright law or liability work. Heck, in cases like text editors, I’m pretty sure that’s not even how European or Australian copyright law works. Not doing copyright checks at all does not lead to liability for copyright infringement by users. Do I need to go through the list yet again?
Look, none of the methods you’ve suggested are substantially more likely to catch actual infringement more than a coin toss. There are way too many false positives and way too many false negatives. Many also depend on both copyright holders and users being completely upfront and honest with the makers of the software, which is demonstrably false; this further decreases the accuracy of the checks.
Before we start holding them liable for infringement, we first have to know that they could take action to substantially reduce it without essentially nullifying the good their software provides. Otherwise, putting liability on them would only discourage them from providing any software at all, not to innovate potential new ways to solve a complex problem that we don’t even know can be solved to begin with and we don’t know has a substantially negative effect on anyone that can’t be remedied through lawsuits against the actual infringers and any potential solution for it we can come up with doesn’t work well at scale and the only solutions that might help solve it require a ton of resources that smaller businesses don’t have and it only gets more complicated all the time. Devs, especially smaller ones, aren’t going to accept liability for every pirate that slips through, even if we get a solution that captures 90% of pirates, and they certainly aren’t going to do so when nothing they do has any significant effect on piracy but does anger legitimate users. There’s a reason YouTube and large-scale copyright holders like AP, Nintendo, Sony, or Ubisoft (and some smaller ones) really try to go beyond what the law requires with respect to copyright enforcement.
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The copyright check wasn't "remove download operation completely", but instead
"restrict usage of download just enough that it only DISPLAY's the content" and "restrict usage of download just enough that you cannot download terabytes and thousands of files of data"...
Note that zip files are breaking the browser copyright check, so web browser download feature together with large zip files might be "circumvention of technical protection measures".
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There is no requirement in laws that require application developers to prevent all possible copyright infringement in all possible contexts, either.
The sole purpose of a text editor is to type out text. If I cannot type out text into that text editor because it will prevent me from doing so because (as you have asserted) it must prevent me from doing so or else the developer will be held liable for even the smallest, most accidental act of copyright infringement, that text edtior is incapable of carrying out its sole purpose. How can a text editor prevent all possible copyright infringement in all possible contexts, no matter what and still allow someone to type out something that might be even remotely infringing on any copyright anywhere in the world even by accident?
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How would the browser know, with the certainty of God, that I am allowed to download a file in any digital file format? For example: I download a public domain JPEG image from its original source and store it on my website’s server in a place only I can access. When I want to download the image again, I’ve forgotten the source, but I know I have it on my server. How, then, can my browser know beyond any shadow of any doubt that I have the legal right to download another copy of that image (which I do) when I’m not downloading it from the original source and the JPEG has no metadata identifying it as a public domain work?
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browsers doesn't need to support all use cases you can think of.
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And as I’ve pointed out before, multiple times: You can’t design an application that prevents all possible copyright infringement in all possible contexts (which you have repeatedly asserted must be done to keep app developers free from liability for infringement) and still retains even the tiniest functionality that could be useful for legal purposes were it not for the fact that said functionality could accidentally infringe upon someone else’s copyright in even the most insignificant way.
You have not yet offered any cogent rebuttal to my argument that is also based in this reality. If you can do so, feel free. If not? Fuck off.
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That’s not how it works. You assume that each check is independent, or that each check is 50% accurate after the previous one(s) have been applied, but we don’t have 34 or whatever distinct checks that work like that. You also ignore false positives, which—like false negatives—also need to be minimized. If each check not only fails to discover 50% of pirates on their own but also misidentifies 50% of non-pirates as pirates, then doing more and more checks will 1) be literally no different than flipping a coin over and over again to determine whether a person is a pirate and 2) lead to essentially 100% of all users of the software being declared a pirate and stopped. And it’s impossible to eliminate false positives entirely, at least not without leaving so many false negatives that the test is essentially worthless or only picks up the most obvious and indisputable cases (and not even all of them).
You also still haven’t addressed any of the problems Stephen and I pointed out, either; namely things like how no text editor could implement any sort of copyright checking that works more than a small fraction of the time, that the law doesn’t actually require such a thing, that no text editor actually implements such a thing, that any copyright checking implemented in a text editor would compromise the ability for it to perform legitimate, noninfringing uses significantly or even entirely, that implementing copyright checks will not actually reduce piracy by any significant amount and may actually increase it, that there is no way for a text editor to be able to detect someone copying—by hand in a text editor or drawing program or something—something they are reading or looking at (among other ways to pirate)—making the checks trivial to circumvent, that it is unfeasible for programs to be able to check against every copyrighted work (the only method with any chance of being more accurate than random chance), that people can and do lie, and other issues we’ve addressed. It also doesn’t really fit the problem you proposed: that makers of, say, a text editor should be liable if they don’t catch exactly 100% of pirates, and that’s impossible.
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browsers are your proof. they're still useful even though they are doing copyright checks.
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Except they don’t stop all infringement, therefore — according to your logic — everyone who develops Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc. are all liable for infringement unless they intentionally hobble any (read: all) functionality that could even accidentally infringe upon someone’s copyright. How can they hobble all that functionality and still offer people a functional web browser?
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This could be true. That's why those companies who create browser software have millions or billions of money in their bank account, so that they can pay damages for any copyright claims. The only reason why they don't get thousands of copyright claims is that people do not know about mistakes or errors in their technology. They have developed their technology well enough that finding those real problems is difficult. And you simply cannot sue them unless you know about the problems. But happily I'm here to explain how browsers are broken.
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You haven’t even shown a way to substantially reduce piracy using text editors that wouldn’t eliminate essentially all non-infringing uses. Basically, you haven’t proven that it’s possible to create a text editor program that would even eliminate a significant amount of piracy that would use the software without rendering the software effectively useless even for noninfringing uses and would be reasonably difficult to circumvent. And that isn’t even the bar you have to reach. In order to prevail, you’d have to prove that there is a way to prevent all piracy using the software without greatly impeding or preventing entirely most noninfringing uses. After all, if you can’t do that, the law mandating such things would run afoul of the First Amendment protection of free speech, as well as prevent essentially any content from being created at all, except by a select few, maybe, and it would also unreasonably subject people to liability for things they had no way of reasonably preventing.
Also, what makes the copyright minimalist view any more wrong than the copyright maximalist view?
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That's the joke.
The same people who downvote the troll reports will continue to engage in idiots like tp until everything they type has been crushed into columns a single letter wide.
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Uhhh, no. The download operation in web browsers does not carry out copyright checks. We went over this months ago.
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Copyright minimalists are doing copyright infringement when they fail to understand all details of copyright laws.
Copyright maximalist on the other hand are following stricter set of rules than copyright laws and thus minor misunderstandings about the rules do not bring them into illegal area.
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I haven' noticed any restriction in the latest Firefox, which I use on a daily basis to download various file types, and all quite legally. What is happening, on a few sites, it that they are using J.S. to download assets and so hide the files from the web browsers. That is not the web browser trying to prevent infringement, but rather a site using standard facilities to try and prevent downloads.
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According to your arguments, it is true. But seeing as how your arguments aren’t based in reality…
Can you cite a single legal case concerning copyright infringement ever successfully brought against Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. over their web browsers?
Doesn’t matter, according to your logic. The software must block all possible copyright infringement, no matter what. Any refusal to do so means the software is illegal and its developers are liable for copyright infringement. That’s what you’ve been saying. And, ironically enough, it would make the web browser you’re using to post comments here on Techdirt an unlawful application. Congratulations, champ: You’re a criminal.
No, it’s not difficult. According to your logic, a browser’s devs have to hobble any functionality, no matter how innocuous, if it could infringe upon someone’s copyright in any way and in any context. That means the devs have to make an application that can’t let you view or interact with any content that might be copyrighted. To put it bluntly, the devs have to make an application that can only access public domain material — which, according to your logic, means the near-entirety of the Internet would be inaccessible through the browser you’re using right now.
Except, according to your logic, they can be sued simply because the basic functionality of a web browser could be used to infringe, even accidentally, upon anyone else’s copyrights. Without hobbling that functionality to a point of practical uselesness, the devs are legally on the hook in your fantasy idea of how reality works.
…said the asshole using a “broken” browser for which they believe the devs should already be sued into their graves for making.
God, just fuck off already. Your arguments are shit, your application is shit, and you’re an even shittier person than I am for being an admitted troll who is intentionally refusing to get the point because you want to drag out an argument that you lost before you even made it. Kindly fall into a bonfire and stay there.
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Counterpoint: web browsers allow you to download as much as you want without checking anything. Restrictions on downloads exist, sure, but not through the web browser. Also, restrictions on quantity have absolutely nothing to do with copyright at all (nor does the way browsers handle displaying web pages), and zip files are absolutely not a violation of section 1201 as you imply. Again, we went over this months ago, and you failed then, too. These examples, to the extent they exist, are in place purely for efficiency and practicality; they don’t exist as copyright protection, and many aren’t actually a function of the web browser itself in most cases.
You don’t have anything resembling a point here, and you don’t seem to exist in this reality based on your claims.
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Without zip files, try to download 2 thousand files using your browser. While it is eventually possible, you just need to use so much time clicking the browser download bar that the operation isn't feasible. Definitely not easy enough operation than what your average pirate expects.
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…fucking what
Viacom sued YouTube for copyright infringement over content Viacom employees uploaded to YouTube. Your argument is bullshit.
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According to your logic, how long the downloading takes is irrelevant. That any downloading is possible at all is a violation of your imaginary principle that a software developer must stop all possible infringement in all contexts and at all costs or else they’re liable for the infringement. Hell, according to you, no browser should even let you see any work outside of the public domain because the copyrights on those works could be infringed in some way, even accidentally. Your entire argument is that you shouldn’t even be able to post your comments, let alone view this website, because it makes the developers liable for infringement.
Congratulations, you’re a party to copyright infringement by using an unlawful application in a way that could even potentially infringe upon someone’s copyright in some small, possibly even accidental way.
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This isn't true. RSA cryptosystem relies on that feature that opening the ciphertext without the necessary keys takes billions of years to execute on normal computer.
Similar manner, it's clearly enough if browser vendors can make the operation take so much time that no ordinary pirate will ever contemplate doing the operation using a browser.
Obviously cryptosystems have some issues too, like quantum computers, but the time used for the operation is clearly relevant aspect of the question.
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They can’t do that without hobbling the download operation in a similar manner for all users in all contexts, even when someone is downloading something they’re legally allowed to download. You can’t magically detect when someone is infringing upon a copyright; neither can an application. The only way to ensure nobody can infringe upon copyright using your application is to truly make sure nobody can infringe in any way, even accidentally — which makes your application functionally useless to everybody, even people who don’t and wouldn’t ever use it for infringement purposes.
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They magically detected this long before computers were invented, so you can't now claim that it's impossible. The automation -part of the operation just seems slightly challenging (it requires 34 if statements in your code as explained before), but given that these software developers are completely idiotic, even such small checks seem to be impossible for these people.
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Copyright maximalists engage in free speech suppression when they use the law without fully understanding copyright law, which is also a violation of the law. And as I’ve said before, generally, copyright infringement isn’t illegal; it’s unlawful. There’s a difference. Additionally, none of what you described as copyright minimalism involves the person in question engaging in copyright infringement themselves. Even if someone is liable for someone else’s copyright infringement, that does not necessarily mean that they themselves are “doing copyright infringement.”
Furthermore, your understanding of copyright law has no resemblance to reality at all, and it presumes technical and human capabilities that simply do not exist. You also express views that care nothing at all for reducing or minimizing collateral damage, encouraging innovation rather than locking in the current big players, or allowing free speech and also assert the use of certain measures in software that don’t exist or aren’t used by that particular software and claim that certain measures are used in software or hardware as copyright enforcement measures that actually have nothing to do with copyright and often don’t actually do anything to stop, prevent, or reduce infringement, anyway. Basically, if our point of view is too minimal to be useful, yours is so over-the-top that it is also useless as it is completely unrealistic and unreasonable.
And again, and I cannot stress this enough, it is far, far more difficult to be found contributorily or vicariously liable for copyright infringement than you think, and lawsuits for it are relatively infrequent (nonexistent for a number of cases that you insist should be sued).
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Here’s the thing:
You haven’t explained anything like that.
None of them have been found liable or even been sued for anything like that, really.
The idea that the copyright maximalists are unaware of these browsers being capable of being used for infringement is absolutely ridiculous. You may be the only person who thinks that’s even plausible.
An error in technology is insufficient to create liability for copyright infringement. Again, specific knowledge of particular instances of infringement is required or the technology must be designed specifically (and intentionally) to aid in piracy or have no substantial noninfringing uses.
People sue without understanding the technology all the time.
Mozilla doesn’t actually have that much money.
That you fail to see how much your idea of copyright would stifle innovation and creativity (the things copyright is supposed to be encouraging) is simply incredible.
Again, browsers don’t actually implement any measures that are designed to enforce copyright or reduce piracy.
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No. No, they don’t do copyright checks. The only examples you offered have nothing to do with copyright at all, and some aren’t even actual features used in web browsers. To the extent they may possibly offer some copyright protection, they are clearly completely ineffective. Exhibit A: people still use them a lot to pirate stuff easily without having to resort to any trickery at all. Exhibit B: online piracy still exists.
At any rate, you were asked to either provide an example of a text editor that performs copyright checks and is still useful or provide an example of a piece of software that successfully stops 100% of all copyright infringement that in any way involves or is facilitated by the use of said software while still being useful for at least some legal purpose(s). The former was because you seem to think text editors perform copyright checks (but they don’t), while the second is because, without such an example, your idea of liability for infringement is shown to be completely and utterly unreasonable, unrealistic, and unfair, as well as having no basis whatsoever in reality.
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Since what you’re asking for also isn’t required by law, that makes no difference to this argument.
Stephen wasn’t talking about every purpose. “Functionally useless” means “unsuitable for any purpose.”
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Lets look at these one by one:
Well, the text editors are quite old invention, and they were already available in c64 and amiga, when copyright issues weren't such a big deal. Their solution was to use quote marks to mark borrowed text.
Copyright laws have always required authors to mark their source material carefully, and use quote marks when the author borrows someone elses opinions.
Pretty much every text editor on the planet implements "quote marks" like this.
Quotes didn't prevent any significant non-infringing use cases. It required special position for quote marks in the fonts, and ability for keyboards to input them and then text editors could display them on computer screen.
None of the changes caused significant problems in non-infringing use cases.
These quote marks had nice property that they allowed easier detection of the copyright infringing material. When material had no quotes, but still everyone detected copied content in the material, they could request author to mark the borrowed material properly and if that succeeded, the author could fix the 2 pages which had borrowed material copied from other works.
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He was talking about detecting it 100% of the time, you idiot! Also, it isn’t just “challenging”; it is impossible to do well with decent accuracy. And as has been pointed out to you over and over and over again, every single case you’ve given doesn’t actually do a good job, anyways.
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That's why we have competition so that products can compete in the marketplace and provide features that have been optimized for important use cases. Copyright checking is one such area where product competition can produce significant improvements in people's lives.
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The biggest difference is that the amount of time to break cryptography rarely impedes the intended, legitimate purpose/user of the software; nor does the cryptography itself. By contrast, the time it takes to download something which may or may not be infringing impacts every user drastically, regardless of the intended purpose.
Additionally, there is no legal mandate for the cryptography (outside of a few cases mostly involving a duty of care, but that wouldn’t be a factor for copyright), while you have asserted that copyright enforcement by intermediaries/makers of tools is legally mandated to avoid liability. Copyright law doesn’t care how long it takes to complete piracy; only whether and when it occurred and who is responsible.
Finally, the time scales are completely different. With strong cryptography, it’s meant to take many, many years to break it through brute force, often longer than the projected life of the Earth. Downloads—even large and/or infringing downloads—are much, much quicker. I can download like 12 gigabytes of data on my computer within a few hours at most, so terabytes of data could be downloaded in significantly less than two years, possibly not much more than a year or maybe even less. And my internet and/or my computer are pretty slow at downloading things (it’s probably my computer, since my phone downloads things a lot faster). With a decent computer and decent internet, you could probably download a few terabytes in less than 6 months or something. But even on the slower end, these massive downloads are many, many magnitudes faster than bruteforcing decent cryptography. A few years at most vs. millions or billions of years… there’s just no comparison. Really, if a human can do it within their lifespan, time is not really a significant factor.
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this requirement gets stricter if your product is distributed to larger area in the world. Very successful and popular products have huge problems fulfilling the legal requirements related to copyright enforcement. Browsers are one of the most difficult areas. There's also the fact that general public doesn't like any built-in restrictions or limitations, so vendors need to "hide" those built-in limitations to their software, without telling end users that the software has those implemented.
On the other side of the scale, there are products with small number of users, products created by children or non-professionals, and products that are safe to use by end users.Copyright restrictions on those products don't need to be too accurate or innovative.
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You don’t really specify size, which is kind of a huge deal. I mean, eBooks, music, and images—without using zip files—are generally a few megabytes at most, frequently less. Let’s say that each one takes up 4 MB. Two thousand of those would be less than 8 GB, but let’s give you the best chance of success and round that up to 10 GB. My computer (which is slow, BTW) generally takes a few hours at most to download that much data, so I guess that’s how long it would take to download two thousand files. I suppose you could add some additional time for having to browse for it, but that should still only add like an hour or two overall, especially if I already know what I’m looking for.
Now, obviously, I’m not going to do that just to prove a point, but for the average pirate who wants to download two thousand different songs, books, or images, regardless of technical skill and even with below average download speed, based on my calculations, I can’t imagine that they’d have to wait more than six hours at the absolute most, and probably far less, especially if they go for smaller files and/or have faster computer or internet speeds.
If we’re talking files that take up gigabytes, that would take several thousand hours, which would be like a year or two.
…You have a pretty loose definition of “feasible”. For a couple thousand megabyte-files, it’d be done in a few hours. That’s not exactly a ridiculously long amount of time. People wait that long for downloads pretty frequently.
Heck, even with thousands of gigabyte-files, it’d only be a year or two. That may seem like a long time, but it’s really not in the grand scheme of things, especially since you can put all two thousand files on the queue in a few hours at most, then do other things as each one downloads. You can even start viewing the files as they finish downloading without interrupting later downloads. While it may be beyond what an average person would do, it’s not exactly unfeasible for someone to do that. I’ve seen much crazier things than that.
I’m not sure that the average pirate is likely to download thousands of files in one go, especially thousands of gigabyte-sized files. If the files are small enough, then it’d be a matter of hours, which isn’t really very long at all. If they want to download larger files, they’d probably just break the task up into smaller chunks. I doubt that they’d feel the need for thousands of the larger files in a short amount of time, anyway, unless it’s legal and for work or something.
Frankly, I don’t see your point. At these timescales, I wouldn’t say the task is that absurd. Plus, as I believe I’ve made clear, the size of the files makes a much larger difference than their quantity. To put this into perspective, when it comes to cybersecurity, if it takes less than like a century to crack by brute force, it’s not really considered secure.
In fact, I believe that you missed the point I was making entirely: no matter how many files downloaded or the size of each file to be downloaded, at no point does the browser do any copyright checks or do anything differently from asking it to download fewer and/or smaller files. Yes, it takes longer to download larger amounts (though no significant difference regarding the number of files), but that’s just because more data has to be downloaded, anyways, so of course it takes longer. It has nothing to do with the browser trying to throttle the download speed (like IAPs often do to squeeze more money out of customers), nor does it have anything to do with enforcing copyright or discouraging pirates at all. It’s purely about the limitations of the internet and the computers (and possibly the IAP deciding you need to pay up if you want to download so much using their lines).
It also has nothing to do with the file format. Whether it’s a .zip, .7z, .rar, .txt, .gz, .png, .jpg, .gif, .exe, .rtf, .doc, .docx, .xcl, .ppt, .pdf, .html, .css, .mp3, .mp4, .cs, .cpp, .java, .js, .php, .swift, .py, .bin, .bmp, or whatever, it doesn’t matter. Same goes with what, exactly, the contents are. The only aspect of the file(s) themselves that actually factors into the time it takes to download is the file size. And file compression itself (like used for zip files) predates internet piracy; it was designed to allow relatively large amounts of data to be stored on relatively small storage media, whether it was for backup, to physically transfer to another machine, or to be used later. It has a number of other useful features beyond speeding up downloads, such as allowing multiple files organized in a specific way to be downloaded as one file without making the downloader have to jump through hoops to get all the necessary files in the right places, though this is somewhat incidental. Again, nothing to do with copyright or piracy.
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First, whether or not one is liable for copyright infringement is not dependent on the prevalence of the infringement or the tool/intermediary.
Second, the “requirements” you’re referring to simply do not exist under US law, at least not in the form you’ve been discussing.
Third, for the umpteenth time, browsers don’t implement any copy protection at all. If they did, someone would have found out and publicized it no matter how well hidden those features would have been. You still have not provided any actual evidence or examples of any actual features actually implemented in actual web browsers that are actually intended to stop, track, prevent, or limit copyright infringement by users.
You have also never provided any evidence that the makers of web browsers even could face liability for copyright infringement by users if they fail to stop it or they don’t implement any copyright-protection measures into the browsers, or really under any circumstances at all. All you’ve done is claim they exist (without any evidence to support that), that web browsers include certain features meant to reduce piracy (despite the fact that each of those features either isn’t actually implemented in any existing browser or was included for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright protection or enforcement and don’t actually do anything to reduce copyright infringement, anyway), and that makers of web browsers would be liable for infringement if they didn’t (they don’t, and they aren’t).
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This is incorrect. Browser by default allows only downloading one file at the time.
This means the 10 second download bar clicking needs to be done 2000 times. This means 5.5 hours of doing nothing but clicking the mouse and accepting downloads. This operation is just too much for more pirates (who just want to wait like you mentioned, they don't actually want to do the actual work)
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As I’ve pointed out, other than people selling DRM to copyright holders directly to protect their copyrights, YouTube is the only one that has actually done anything beyond the minimum legal requirements to try to reduce infringement of others’ copyrighted materials. (Well, there are also a few video game clients, but they don’t really do much in that area, and a number of video game clients/storefronts offer no copyright enforcement beyond the minimum legally required.) To the extent anyone else enforces others’ copyrights, it’s more or less the same (taking down content claimed by a DMCA notice) with the only difference being the amount of deference given to the claimants. So really, there isn’t any actual competition in copyright checking by or for intermediaries.
Additionally, I don’t see how copyright checking provides any actual benefits for either the ones implementing it, advertisers (if applicable), or users; only for third-parties. As such, I don’t see any reason competition in this area would produce significant improvement to people’s lives.
In fact, as I’ve said multiple times, what you’re asking for is fundamentally impossible to achieve. I’ve already explained that by simply allowing someone to type, you’re enabling piracy, and it is absolutely impossible to stop that without completely removing the ability to type. And trying to automatically determine whether something does or doesn’t infringe on copyright is fundamentally impossible to do with any decent accuracy. Even the best would leave tons of false negatives and capture tons of false positives.
And then there’s the question of whether and to what extent piracy actually causes problems, but I won’t get into that.
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well, it's significant improvement for end users, if they don't need to always be afraid that they accidentally do copyright infringement. For example the user experience in web browsers is significantly better compared to the user experience in kazaa. The safety net that these copyright checks are providing shouldn't be underestimated. It's similar to what browsers are doing with security with browser sandbox, i.e. you can trust that browser-based web pages do not install viruses or malware to your computer. Copyright checks are doing similar job in the copyright-area.
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Nope. Quote marks have nothing to do with copyright. At most, they deal with plagiarism. Additionally, quote marks were included for the same reason quote marks have been used for centuries: to indicate someone speaking/thinking, to indicate a (sometimes near-)verbatim recitation of something said or written by someone (possibly including the author themself but may also be someone else), or to indicate titles of books, plays, films, etc. There are other ways quotes get used, but they weren’t why they have been included in text editors, per se. They never had anything to do with copyright at all.
Also, that doesn’t actually have anything to do with what I said, which was about effective methods of copyright protection in text editors. Quotes aren’t effective not only because they have nothing to do with copyright protection but also because they are completely voluntary and were never enforced.
I should probably also mention that piracy was an issue back in the days of the C64 and such, and copyright was a big deal then, too. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.
Once again, no. For one thing, again, that’s not copyright infringement but plagiarism. These two things are completely different. Outside of certain licenses conditioned on giving credit, failing to mark sources or quotes is not copyright infringement, period.
Second, there is actually no legal requirement to not plagiarize except under very specific conditions. As such, there actually isn’t a legal requirement to mark source material or use quote marks when using someone else’s words.
Third, you’re talking about authors. I was talking about those who provide the necessary tools to authors.
Again, quote marks provide no measure of copyright protection or copyright enforcement, but even if they did, no text editor treats quote marks differently from literally any other printable character, nor does any text editor ever require their use at all under any circumstances.
So what? They don’t cause any problems whatsoever in infringing use cases, either.
Again, that’s dealing with plagiarism, not infringement. You can quote something—using quote marks and citations and everything—and still infringe, and plagiarizing someone doesn’t—in itself—constitute copyright infringement. The quote marks do quite literally nothing with regards to copyright infringement. They don’t make infringement easier to detect or remedy, nor do they do anything to prevent or mark infringing content at all. And even if they did, the text editors themselves did nothing with them. Had text editors not included quote marks, piracy rates would not have changed one iota. Actually, failing to include quote marks would probably have had an even more negative impact on noninfringing use cases.
Look, quote marks are not copyright protection in any way, shape, or form. Text editors have never used them to reduce piracy at all. Neither their presence nor absence have any correlation with or effect on whether some material infringes or not. Their existence predates and has never had any connection whatsoever to copyright or copyright infringement. The inclusion of quote marks has no effect on pirates or infringing uses of text editors. The only legal, ethical, or moral issue related to quote marks is plagiarism, which is a completely separate issue from copyright infringement and usually has no direct legal ramifications at all. And even then, that has never been why quote marks have ever been included in any text editor. They were included because they have long been in common use for several purposes and were used on typewriters, which in turn was because they were used in printing presses, and before that they were used in writing by hand or in engravings. And there they were originally used to indicate speech, among a few other things, and that’s why we still use them. (They are also used in writing code for computers.)
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When people use web browsers or text editors, they don’t care about accidental infringement or being legally protected from copyright infringement. Also, you have also stated that web browsers hide this functionality to avoid angering users. Why would they do this if users got any value from such a thing?
We expect browsers and operating systems to protect us from viruses and malware (though we rely more on antivirus software); we don’t expect or want them to filter the web for us in any other way unless we explicitly tell them to.
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The downloads may only occur one at a time, but I can put as many as I want in a queue (which is built in to the browser, BTW). Each time an item finishes downloading, it gets removed from the queue (or marked as finished), and the browser checks the current queue to see if there are any other unfinished or unstarted downloads left. If there are, it starts/continues to download the next one in the queue. This continues until there are no more unfinished/unstarted downloads left in the queue.
As for the time spent clicking to add something to the queue, that’s an inherent aspect of downloading thousands of files in a single session, and it’s a pretty unusual thing to download thousands of files like this, anyways. (You really underestimate pirates’ abilities and tenacity while overestimating the number of files they expect to download in a single session.) If you’re saying, “But that’s fixed with zip files,” while I acknowledge that zip files definitely simplify things, if it’s all in one zip file, then it’s all on one page and it’s all meant to go together anyways, so it wouldn’t take hours to add into the queue to download. It also completely ignores the noninfringing uses of zip and similar files. Games and many other pieces of software use them all the time. Regardless, none of that has to do with any way in which browsers would try to reduce piracy, anyways. That’s an inherent aspect of the task you want to perform and not an intention design choice. With regards to the browser itself, there isn’t really any way to significantly reduce that process at all.
So the number of items is irrelevant with regards to both how the browser itself handles downloads and the length of time it takes to finish downloading, which is what I was talking about. It is also not in any way related to any features of or design choices in any web browser that would have been intended to in any way reduce or discourage piracy at all, which is the only other relevant question here. In fact, it is not due to any intentional design choices at all, really. It’s just the nature of the task.
Look, just because something may discourage some pirates from engaging in absurd levels of piracy in a single session doesn’t make it copyright protection or copyright enforcement at all.
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The downloads may only occur one at a time, but I can put as many as I want in a queue (which is built in to the browser, BTW). Each time an item finishes downloading, it gets removed from the queue (or marked as finished), and the browser checks the current queue to see if there are any other unfinished or unstarted downloads left. If there are, it starts/continues to download the next one in the queue. This continues until there are no more unfinished/unstarted downloads left in the queue.
As for the time spent clicking to add something to the queue, that’s an inherent aspect of downloading thousands of files in a single session, and it’s a pretty unusual thing to download thousands of files like this, anyways. (You really underestimate pirates’ abilities and tenacity while overestimating the number of files they expect to download in a single session.) If you’re saying, “But that’s fixed with zip files,” while I acknowledge that zip files definitely simplify things, if it’s all in one zip file, then it’s all on one page and it’s all meant to go together anyways, so it wouldn’t take hours to add into the queue to download. It also completely ignores the noninfringing uses of zip and similar files. Games and many other pieces of software use them all the time. Regardless, none of that has to do with any way in which browsers would try to reduce piracy, anyways. That’s an inherent aspect of the task you want to perform and not an intention design choice. With regards to the browser itself, there isn’t really any way to significantly reduce that process at all.
So the number of items is irrelevant with regards to both how the browser itself handles downloads and the length of time it takes to finish downloading, which is what I was talking about. It is also not in any way related to any features of or design choices in any web browser that would have been intended to in any way reduce or discourage piracy at all, which is the only other relevant question here. In fact, it is not due to any intentional design choices at all, really. It’s just the nature of the task.
Look, just because something may discourage some pirates from engaging in absurd levels of piracy in a single session doesn’t make it copyright protection or copyright enforcement at all.
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"This might be incorrect in situations where the title of the page is encoded to the url / page title is visible in the url."
I'm not sure where your legal advice comes from - but I suspect "strong medication" might be the answer.
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is not copyrightable in any way, shape or form. Not any more than any other pure reference can be.
Bluntly put, your argument now has become that every mapmaker, mathematician, and historian in the world is guilty of thousands of cases of clear-cut copyright infringement by default. And you doubling down on those assertions consistently only makes it that much worse.
Get help, tp, because at this stage your arguments - and I use that term loosely - have gone beyond merely "wrong" and entered the realm of "deranged".
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"Of course url can be illegal, nothing in the laws is saying that all urls are free from legal problems."
No, a URL can not be illegal. This has actually been tested in court multiple times, in multiple jurisdictions. End of story.
And the argument used by the courts has been unanimously the same - that attempting to render an address illegal or unlawful will, by default, render mathematics, programming and mapmaking illegal or unlawful in general.
TL;DR?
*Multiple judges have heard your arguments already and the reply has invariably been, summarized: "No, you're nuts. Addresses can not be illegal or copyrighted"
We'll just have to keep flagging your posts as irrelevant garbage since they keep relying on outright lies and proven fallacies.
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"Instead they just give general guidelines and expect all technologies to follow those rules to the letter."
...which is why URL's aren't illegal, no matter your opinion. Several rulings exist to that exact fact.
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"To be fair, in this comment thread, they’re not lying per se. They’re ignoring statements of fact, sidestepping the discussion of Fair Use, and generally being obtuse on purpose..."
Not quite true. TP is lying through his teeth in every assertion he makes because he always, invariably, uses manifest untruth as a basis for all his assertions.
Take his little gems about URL's where he keeps assuming, in his argument, that addresses are copyrightable and can be considered illegal in themselves. Bluntly put there are about a dozen judges who have tested that exact assertion and said "No Dice".
So the law says the opposite of what he claims, we have rulings to that exact effect, and yet his standard modus operandi is to simply ignore all the facts and then build an argument centered around his own revisionist history.
He's a troll and a liar. And I'm guessing that by now his entire game is centered around spamming the threads to pieces, to ensure no one else can read the tread from start to end.
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"Counterpoint: Text editors. I mean, I dunno about you, but I don’t see anyone suing Microsoft over Notepad!"
Dig deep enough in copyright history and we'll find someone trying exactly that, I'm thinking. To MS or to someone else creating a text editor. The rulings, of course, have always been the opposite of what TP asserts.
Pretty sure we simply need to realize that since he actually admitted to being a troll - and proud of it - we simply need to flag his posts and move on.
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If this assertion gets regularly tested in court means that there are other people than me that also thinks that the addresses can be illegal
Also there are significant chance that you've not properly understood whatever judge's decision that you refused to link to.
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The usual copyright minimalist pattern which leads to copyright infringement goes like this:
1) "We need to kill copyright completely"
2) ""To do so, we will refuse to follow copyright's rules"
3) "Scope of the allowed area needs to be expanded"
4) "We need to use all the content and mix&match them"
5) "We simply refuse to obtain permission because it would cost too much"
6) "People on the other side of the pond are saying we violate copyright's rules"
7) "oh, are you kidding, this stuff is copyright infringement? -- we do not care?"
8) "ha ha ha, copyright infringement gives us better product and they call us criminals"
Something like that happens every time with copyright minimalists.
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In that case, your definition of “copyright minimalism” does not describe any of what Stephen or I have been saying. We’ve been pointing out that cases where what you claim is copyright infringement is not infringement and that expanding copyright law to where you want it to be would be unreasonable.
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That some people think that they might be illegal is not evidence that they are illegal. Frivolous lawsuits get filed all the time.
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And I already made it, so quit yer yappin’, whippersnapper.
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Right, and since a physical address cannot be illegal, unlawful, or infringing, neither can a URL until or unless a law specifically says otherwise. That’s what I meant when I said you have it backwards.
All that an address is is a shorthand for where something can be found. You can do illegal or unlawful things at the location indicated by the address, and it’s possible for a building there to be in violation of some code, but the address itself is perfectly legal and can be used in essentially any way, shape, or form lawfully. The same goes for a URL: it just points to where some content can be found. It cannot itself be illegal, unlawful, infringing, or infringed upon no matter what can be found at the location indicated by the URL or what the URL looks like. (Well, in some cases it might infringe on trademark, but that doesn’t happen terribly often. It cannot infringe on copyright, though.)
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Yes, but this is slippery-slope. If you're wrong, you'll do copyright infringement accidentally. Going to that direction where you allow more is always dangerous operation and shouldn't be done too sloppily. Your practise of trying to find all allowed slots in the space is not acceptable.
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With copyrights, the situation is slightly different. Only copyright owner can sue, so even if the whole planet thinks its illegal, if copyright owner decides to ignore it, those illegal practises will continue.
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You have not demonstrated any danger. Also, you are aware that the slippery-slope argument is a fallacy, right? What danger is there in following the law as it is right now of going too far? Besides, by that logic, copyright maximalism would lead to nothing being allowed. How is that any better?
At any rate, noting that some cases are not infringing under the law as it is right now doesn’t lead to a slippery slope because it is still confined to the four corners of what the law currently is. I’m not talking about what the law should be, and the only things I’m saying about what the law shouldn’t be have been to reject what you want it to be, and those have not reflected what the law is, anyway.
Your practice of trying to hold anyone and everyone that could possibly have any connection to anything that could possibly infringe on someone’s copyright liable for copyright infringement—even if that connection is extremely tenuous and regardless of whether or not the law actually supports a finding of liability and even if finding liability is completely unreasonable—is far more unacceptable than my pointing out what uses are allowed under copyright law.
While I have been wrong about things in the past, with regards to copyright infringement, I’ve been right every time I was confident in the answer. Each time I’ve claimed that something is not infringing (as opposed to “should not be”, “probably isn’t”, “is not necessarily”, “might not be” or “arguably isn’t”), I was right. This is particularly the case when arguing with you, as these generally involve cases that are clearly not infringement. If something is in a legally grey area regarding copyright, I say so, and I’ve generally been accurate in noting that the law does not clearly indicate that the use is infringing. However, in most—if not all—of the specific cases I’ve argued with you about have been clear cases of noninfringement, and I have yet to be disproven on those.
Plus, pretty much every law has some grey areas. The only way to resolve those grey areas is to test them in court, and I fully support doing that. Some are able and willing to test the boundaries of the law.
It’s important for any developer to understand the full contours of what the law does and doesn’t allow and make their own personal judgements about what risks should be taken. It’s even more important to correct incorrect claims about copyright law. What you’ve been claiming about copyright is demonstrably false, and you offer no evidence that it’s true. There is no danger in pointing that out.
Also, “all allowed slots”? I believe that our current discussions have been either about allowing at least a substantial portion of clearly noninfringing uses or regarding allowing any noninfringing use at all. Well, also without substantially impeding most—if not all—allowed noninfringing uses. I’ve also noted that measures that ostensibly protect or enforce copyright but that have no significant effect of reducing piracy aren’t actually worth it—especially if it is not your own copyright being protected and isn’t legally required under the current law. Any law that places liability on makers of software for failing to take measures that wouldn’t be feasible (or even possible) to actually implement, significantly impede or ban essentially any noninfringing uses, don’t actually cause any substantial reduction in piracy, and/or do more harm to clearly noninfringing users than actual infringers would be unreasonable. Thankfully, for the most part, the current copyright law in the US—while heavily flawed and prone to abuse—doesn’t break those rules I mentioned. (Well, section 1201 of the DMCA is quite problematic, but that’s a completely different story and not relevant here.)
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"the current situation is that 20% of the files are copyright infringing"
Wait, so you're not only saying that you wish to destroy the usefulness of any utility and place huge amounts of overhead on to any creator because you're so scared of piracy, but you're willing to do this over something you only believe represents 20% of content? I'm sure the the, by your standards, 80% of people using the tools for their own legally provided content will be happy with that. FFS...
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"Next step in copyright enforcement after quote marks and compilers was obviously these "document templates". Html and ms word uses this approach."
So you wish to outlaw plain text, ASCII and other formats that don't allow those things? A strange attitude for a coder to have, but nothing you say makes logical sense.
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"“The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.”
That is the opening sentence of Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Stephen King."
A perfect example, btw. King has acknowledged that the line's meaning is taken directly from Robert Browning's poem "“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”". So, not only is tp insisting that nobody copy King, he's existing his Dark Tower epic never exists.
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" Proof: download operation in web browsers."
The operation that absolutely allows you to download infringing material?
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Note to self: apparently the “Use plain text” option also removes any breaks between lines/paragraphs. Let’s try this again.
That doesn’t actually disprove my claims or prove any of yours. It’s technically true,* but it’s not really material to this discussion. Also, the situation isn’t really that different for frivolous copyright suits other than the fact that copyright law includes a fee-shifting provision for frivolous cases (which cuts both ways, as I recall). There have still been a number of frivolous copyright lawsuits, just like under pretty much every civil law (as well as many criminal or municipal laws and regulations), and only an injured party can sue over the activity even if the whole world thinks it’s clearly unlawful or illegal, which is true for any violation of civil law. (Well, in some cases the state can do so, but that depends on which law was allegedly violated and is not the case for civil copyright infringement.) And, of course, if a lawsuit is not pursued over clearly unlawful conduct, one can reasonably expect the unlawful activity to continue, whether or not the unlawful conduct is copyright infringement or some other civil law.
None of what you said is peculiar to copyright law. Not just anyone can file a lawsuit over a civil claim—even if the claim is completely valid and there is no question that the underlying event involved the defendant(s) breaking the relevant law and the issue doesn’t fall under any exceptions: you must still have standing to sue, meaning that you, personally, were injured by the unlawful conduct/negligence or—in the case of a deceased person—represent the estate of a person injured by the unlawful conduct/negligence. It’s also true for contract law: only parties to the contract can sue (or be sued) for breaching the terms of that contract.
Of course, that hasn’t completely prevented people from trying to sue over infringement of someone else’s copyright. I can’t recall any of the clearest cases offhand (ones where the plaintiff(s) didn’t even allege ownership of or possession of a valid exclusive license in the copyright(s) allegedly being infringed), but I know that with Righthaven’s many lawsuits, whether or not Righthaven actually owned any copyrights they could sue over was a major issue that ultimately led to Righthaven losing essentially every case it filed (outside of a number of cases that settled early). And this isn’t peculiar to copyright, either, as many people try to sue over conduct that doesn’t actually affect or really involve them and as such lack standing, and there have also been times where a nonparty to a contract has attempted to enforce the terms of that contract. Many lawsuits—copyright-related or otherwise—get dismissed because the plaintiff(s) lack(s) standing to sue over the alleged conduct, negligence, or breach of contract/duty.
*In many cases, when a copyright owner decides to ignore clear cases of infringement, either they have arguably granted an implied license (in which case it’s not unlawful anymore), they’ve decided it’s not worth suing over, the statute of limitations has run, or they think they can actually benefit from the infringement in some way. The most common (possible) exception to this is bootleg stuff from China. I don’t fully understand why that gets a pass even after it’s been imported, but it does. Maybe it’s a jurisdictional issue, in which case that is another perfectly valid reason to not sue for infringement.
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Yeah, I don’t get it either. He said something about how long downloading a lot of data takes discouraging some pirates, but it doesn’t take that long and it was not a design choice or even an actual decision by the makers of the browser, isn’t even really something that is part of the web browser’s design or features (the limiting factors on download speed are generally the computer doing the download, its OS, the server being downloaded from, and the internet connection between the two; the only other real factors in how long it takes would be what other tasks are being run and the size of the file(s) to be downloaded), was not done with the purpose of enforcing or protecting copyright or in order to reduce, discourage, stop, or prevent piracy/copyright infringement, doesn’t actually have any effect on piracy or copyright infringement, and doesn’t affect pirates/infringing users/uses any more than it does legitimate, noninfringing users or uses. It also doesn’t involve detecting piracy, and neither the amount of data nor the number of files to be downloaded does much—if anything—to change the rate at which they get downloaded (in terms of bits per time unit or something similar) or flag the operation as suspicious or anything like that.
He also talked about downloading thousands of non-zip files in a single session, but 1) I don’t believe pirates who don’t use some sort of bot to automate the process anyway (and thus drastically reduce any time it takes to add thousands of distinct files to the download queue)are likely to do so in the first place; 2) the browser itself doesn’t treat downloading thousands of files any differently from downloading, say, twenty files in a single session (outside of the obvious); 3) depending on the sizes of the files, it could take as little as a few hours, possibly less, to download thousands of them even with a slow computer/internet speed; 4) browsers implement a download queue that allows you to tell the computer to download pretty much any number of files one after another without addition input from the user once all the desired files have been added to the queue; 5) no aspect of the downloading process depends on the type of file or the file format, just the size; 6) despite his claims that it takes like 10 seconds to tell the web browser to download something/add something new to the download queue, in my experience, it can take just a single click on a hyperlink or button on a web page to do so, which takes a lot less than 10 seconds; 7) this still isn’t a feature or design choice but just how things work, as there really isn’t any alternative that would eliminate or reduce any of the time spent searching and clicking in order to download each file (that is, it’s an inherent part of downloading thousands of files without using bots); 8) it doesn’t actually treat or affect piracy/infringement any differently from noninfringing uses; and 9) it doesn’t really have anything to do with copyright infringement, copyright protection, copyright enforcement, or legal liabilities.
Basically, he asserted some aspects of the download feature were examples of copyright protection, copyright enforcement, anti-piracy measures, or something like that, but each of those aspects had nothing to do with intentional design choices/features or deterring, stopping, preventing, or reducing piracy or copyright infringement; they were actually just inherent, unavoidable (at least from the web browsers’ perspective) limitations of the systems, software, hardware, and/or technology themselves, and they don’t actually do anything at all about copyright or single out pirates or likely-copyright-infringing acts at all.
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I’m not sure what’s most confusing about that comment: what you pointed out; what any of those things have to do with dealing with copyright infringement (as opposed to plagiarism); why he brought up HTML, MS Word, compilers, or (in a similar comment) LaTeX when asked for measures that would be used in a plain-text editor; or why he thinks quote marks actually do anything with regards to copyright at all.
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This is what you don't understand. The features designed to avoid liability does not need to deal with the piracy phenomenon as a whole. Instead it needs to prevent pirates from using your work for piracy. The misuses of the technology needs to be prevented. While you cannot change the overall murder rate in the country, at least you can try to make your product safe enough that it doesn't happen accidentally during normal use of your sharpener. Copyright area is no different from other ways of making products safe to use.
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How do you achieve that when legal use and misuse are impossible to distinguish. The same content, with the same object, with the same description from a marketing platform can be licensed or infringing dependent on who placed it on the platform for dale.
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You'd think then that profiling those "taking down" efforts and demonstrations of how Tero McFuckface is a douchebag would be a good thing.
Fuck it, it's happening anyway.
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Which is inherently impossible when you consider the humble plain text editor. Notepad++ developers can’t prevent every single last misuse of text editor technology — or even the biggest misuses of that technology — without also preventing people from using that technology for legal, non-infringing purposes. They can’t prevent me from typing “it was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” into Notepad++ without being able to prevent me from typing literally anything else. And before you say “of course they can do that”, you’ll have to explain how Notepad++ devs can design their application to magically detect whether what I’m inputting into Notepad++ violates any copyright anywhere in the world, up to the moment I input that text. (ProTip: You can’t.)
You seem to think copyright detection can magically discern context. It can’t. If I were to type “it was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” into a text editor with copyright protection features, how can those features know whether my doing so is direct, unabashed, meant-to-be-distributed infringement of the copyright of George Orwell’s 1984 or a Fair Use-protected infringement of that copyright for, say, a discussion of famous opening lines in literature or a critique of Orwell’s works in general? The answer you don’t want to hear is the only correct answer: Those features can’t do that. No copyright protection features can; it’s why YouTube media critics such as Bob “MovieBob” Chipman continually fight copyright notices even when their videos would have a clear-cut Fair Use defense in a court of law.
You can’t prevent all, or even just the biggest, misuses of a given technology without making said technology a functionally useless mess. To believe you can do that is to willfully (and ignorantly) believe in a blatant lie. To say that it can be done, even when you have been told literally dozens of times that you cannot, is to lie through your teeth out of spite and maybe masturbatory fantasies. What are you going to be: someone who lies for sexual pleasure (which I have to assume is your goal by now) or someone who acknowledges and accepts the truth?
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I think you use the word "impossible" too sloppily. If youtube's contentID can detect MPAA's content just fine from millions of videos, the operation simply
cannot be "impossible". And I'm not even talking about that advanced tech solutions. It's simple issues like asking for license.txt file from the user. Similar manner as how google search uses robots.txt, license.txt is one good alternative to ask. But these kind of "solutions" are just proving that the operation isn't impossible. Other solutions could be what "thingiverse" is using for licenses, i.e. their web page has fixed set of accepted licenses, and uploading content requires choosing one of the alternatives. When your web page asks such questions, it's legally required to provide correct answer. If you get tons of broken answers, you can ask two questions and check consistency of the answers. Ludumdare web page handles the situation so that it requires you to click few checkmarks and doesnt let you go forward until you have checked the right checkmarks required for the publishing platform's requirements.
there is always ways to do the operations.
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Content ID only recognizes content, and is infamous for taking down licensed content alongside the infringing content. For instance, it cannot distinguish between two separate recording of the same classical music piece, played on the same instruments at the same tempo, an an unlicensed copy of either or both recordings.
That is identifying content is not the same as identifying infringement.
Also, how does a license.txt file solve anything, as someone intent on infringing on content can fake such a file. A more secure version of the same runs into both cost and time issues, which would stifle self publishing.
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It can remove the liability from the platform. The platform can rely on the questions asked from the users to be accurate information, and thus when the user lies their teeth, your platform is still safe from liability.
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But it can’t detect context. It can’t detect whether this video featuring clips of multiple movies is using those clips under the auspices of Fair Use (which it is); it can only detect the usage, period. And while the video is technically infringing upon copyright, it has a clear-cut Fair Use defense. But ContentID doesn’t, and can’t know that.
That’s why trying to build copyright protections into applications such as text editors can never result in anything but those applications becoming functionally useless. How can they prevent copyright infringement without still allowing for non-infringing uses when both infringing and non-infringing uses will look functionally identical to a copyright protection scheme?
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They’re not, because you’d be doing the same thing: Engaging the douchebags and giving them attention. I don’t claim to be any better about that — I’d be a liar if I did — but I’m not trying to goad them into coming out of hiding by lighting up a neon sign that says “HEY LOOK, FREE ATTENTION, NO WAITING”. (My compulsion is a bit more…xkcd-ish.) You’re basically trying to get your rocks off by giving them the attention they need to get their rocks off. If you want to participate in a troll circlejerk, look into joining Gab.
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And that, which I doubt has gone beneath your notice, is one of the things you’ve been arguing that applications with copyright protections should be stopping. That is what would make a text editor application functionally useless: You can’t stop all infringement without dinging people for accidental infringement. Notepad++ can’t stop copyright infringement, even accidental infringement, without preventing people from inputting text into the application. A text editor that doesn’t allow people to input/edit text (or read/display text, since you’ve asserted that displaying copyrighted text is also infringement) isn’t a text editor — it’s a piece of code with no legitimate function. No one can use it for any purpose; it is functionally useless.
This is the nightmare you want to inflict upon all application developers. This is the endgame you want to play out for all users of a given application. And all because you live in irrational, unfounded, overly paranoid fear of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your applications that will never come to pass. How does it feel to be so frightened of developing an app that might be used for infringement that you’re willing to make sure it can’t be used for anything?
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Well, because I'm so great programmer (and I spent my whole life designing the system), I can solve the problem without making the software completely useless. It's only those who think software development can be done in a week that have problems implementing these trivial features.
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How, then, can you make an application that can (and absolutely must) detect all possible copyright infringement — intentional or accidental, in all possible contexts, and checked all copyrighted works in creation up to the exact moment of the infringement itself — while still retaining any sort of basic functionality that allows for non-infringing uses despite no prior application in the history of computer programming that allows for user input of any kind ever being able to detect the context of whether that input infringes upon someone else’s copyright?
Or, to put it simpler: How can a theoretically infringement-preventing version of Notepad++ allow me to type “the two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane” (the first line of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) in any context other than outright copyright infringement and still not ding me for copyright infringement?
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"If this assertion gets regularly tested in court means that there are other people than me that also thinks that the addresses can be illegal"
Yes, and those people, just like you, regularly get told that "No, that's not the law" and in some cases even "It's not possible to make that law, either"
"Also there are significant chance that you've not properly understood whatever judge's decision that you refused to link to."
No, there's absolutely no chance of that since URL's today are, by default, legal, no matter where they point to.
You're the one asserting that Russel's Teapot exists. With extraordinary claims it's now up to you to present evidence. Failing that, to gracefully accept that observable reality is, in fact, real.
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" Yeah, nobody wants to read about how I owned myself by responding to everything tp has to say.…wait"
Given that tp confessed to considering himself a "master troll"...yeah, I'm afraid that one's all on you, Stephen. :)
Don't beat yourself up over it though. I think everyone realizes that when someone insists on pulling down his pants and taking a dump in the middle of the town square it's damn hard to look the other way.
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"Well, because I'm so great programmer (and I spent my whole life designing the system), I can solve the problem without making the software completely useless"
Yet, you're making this claim on a site whose visitors largely know you as being someone regularly mocked for having messed up a simple website and decided to waste huge amounts of money advertising to people who would never use the thing in the first place.
Occam's Razor suggests your software will be even more useless than it already is, which is why you spend so much time here whining about successful competitors.
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"when the user lies their teeth, your platform is still safe from liability"
So, you want the same situation as already exists with section 230, et al, but force people to do more work in order for other people to get protections they already enjoy?
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"If youtube's contentID can detect MPAA's content just fine from millions of videos, the operation simply cannot be "impossible". "
You do realise that in our world, ContentID is roundly criticised for not doing the work "just fine", right?
I know your planet is different, but if you're using ContentID as the standard, you just admitted that accurate mass filtering at scale is indeed impossible.
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my software is a lot simpler than the competition, so shouldn't you be cutting them out -- according to your principles?
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The whole idea behind copyright laws is that the various players need to do more work. For example end user need to do more work to obtain the product from legal source instead of easier illegal source. Then authors need to do more work to create the copyrighted product. And publishers need to do more work to distribute the copyrighted work to customers.
This forcing of people doing more work is built-in feature of copyright laws.
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Simple isn’t always best — especially if the “simple” application is less useful, in practically every way, than the “complex” competition.
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Google has spent many years on ContentID, and it still isn’t perfect. In fact, absolutely no one has found a solution to that problem, including devs whose sole purpose is to prevent or detect copyright infringement and regardless of how much time, money, or resources spent on the proposed solution.
Even if a solution existed for this problem, it certainly wouldn’t be “trivial”. The problem has too many layers, subtleties, and has too much subjectivity for there to be a simple solution. No one would expect such a solution to be able to be implemented in a week.
You also have presented no evidence that a solution exists. You haven’t proven that there is any way to stop 100% of all actual and/or all potential copyright infringement—accidental or otherwise—while still allowing for even a substantial portion of noninfringing uses. Nor have you proven any actual benefit to protecting the copyright of third parties for the developers or the end users or any legal requirement for devs to do so. As such, you haven’t proven the existence or benefit of a solution, let alone how trivial such a solution would hypothetically be.
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The question is whether or not such features improve or complement the core functionality and the software’s usability. It’s more or less about whether the complexity is necessary or helpful to the end user and/or the devs. Adding complexity that is unrelated to the purpose of the software is generally worse, and the protection and/or enforcement of the copyrights of unrelated parties is unrelated to the purpose of this software.
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Um, no. No it is not. The idea behind copyright law is to encourage the promotion of the arts and sciences. Also, the point is to make the legal method more appealing than unlawful means. Copyright law is absolutely not intended to make lawful actions harder than unlawful actions or make anyone do more work, even if that may be the effect.
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Problem: there is no legal liability that would be stopped by a license.txt. And since—by your own admission—it does absolutely nothing to stop copyright infringement, what is the point?
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I believe it’s pretty clear that Content ID is actually pretty bad at distinguishing between misuse and legitimate use, which is what was being talked about. It also can’t tell the difference between material that is copyrighted or not. And robots.txt have nothing to do with preventing users from infringing on copyright.
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Here’s the thing: that’s not what I meant, it is also impossible to prevent 100% of accidental infringement, death is far, far worse than infringement, and there is no legal liability to be had, here.
There is no legal requirement for any software to implement any copyright checks or protection at all, nor does failure to include any open the developers to liability for copyright infringement by end users of the software. The only requirement is for ISPs which host and/or publish user-submitted content to comply with DMCA notices. That’s it. No legal liability for misuse of technology by end users or third parties exists.
And, again, it is fundamentally impossible to prevent all piracy/copyright infringement by users of your software/service without compromising its core, noninfringing uses to the point of uselessness, nonfunctionality, or nonexistence.
You have still not proven the existence, possibility, or necessity of what you’re asking for.
Also, in case you missed it, I meant that each of the so-called “features” you mentioned are nonexistent; are not intentional features of the specified software; do nothing to stop, detect, prevent, deter, or reduce copyright infringement done using the specified software; and/or were not implemented with copyright in mind at all, which contradicts what you were asserting. In other words, none of what you said actually addresses what I said as opposed to a strawman.
I didn’t say anything there about stopping or reducing all piracy everywhere, though I do believe that it is important to consider that when considering making changes to the existing law regarding liability for copyright infringement: if adding liability to more entities that weren’t previously liable won’t do anything to reduce piracy as a whole, why bother? It only adds additional burdens to entities that do not infringe and discourages noninfringing uses as well. But that is about making changes to the current policy to better conform to what you think copyright law should be; it doesn’t relate to that particular statement of mine that you quoted from, doesn’t change the fact that what you think makes someone potentially liable for copyright infringement is completely wrong under current US copyright law, and wasn’t really my main problem with your examples or proposals, anyway.
Furthermore, that specific statement was regarding web browsers and text editors. And you expect them to prevent any and all copyright infringement from being done using their software, which is impossible to do without compromising virtually all clearly noninfringing uses.
Finally, copyright law has nothing whatsoever to do with laws regarding product safety. That involves a user causing physical injury or death to themselves or others. It also involves the existence of some duty of care between the makers/sellers and the users, and no one owes anyone a duty of care involving copyright at all. As for a duty of care involving one’s legal liability for one’s own actions or for copyright infringement, that only exists between a lawyer and their client or for something like doing taxes or handling money; the kind of software we’ve been discussing doesn’t involve any similar relationships between the developers of the software and either end users or other copyright holders. For these reasons, there is no relevant duty of care owed here at all by the developers to the end user or other copyright holders, and since there are also no physical or health-based injuries or deaths stemming directly from use of the software either involving the copyright holders or involving both copyright and the end users, that means that there are no similarities between laws, regulations, and/or liabilities involving product safety and those involving copyright or piracy.
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Also, copyright law is not meant to prevent any sort of accidents at all from being allowed by anything or anyone at all.
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this isn't true. I have listed over 20 possible ways how this feature can be implemented, but you keep rejecting them. So right solution is or you to read the discussion again and collect the solutions together and then you'll have the proof you require.
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This is impossible. (note that I used the word impossible for the first time).
The reason why it's impossible is because original authors need to actually
produce the item in question from scratch. Illegal players skip the work and thus they can focus on making it appealing to customers instead of focusing on essential features of the product that make it useful. Thus illegal version is always more appealing than the legal version.
But using illegal versions is not "promoting the progress and useful arts", because authors need to get compensation or they cannot continue doing the useful activity. When illegal version fails to distribute the compensation from the customer to the people who did the actual work, the activity will stop as soon as authors cannot absorb the creation costs from their own savings.
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And there’s a reason for that: You can’t design an application with non-infringing uses that also prevents all copyright infringement, in all possible contexts (including accidental), now and in the future. Any such application would try so hard to prevent infringement that said efforts would make the main functionality of the application useless for any non-infringing uses — because there can’t be any non-infringing uses if those uses could somehow violate someone’s copyright somewhere in the world. You can’t make a text editor that can stop infringement and still allow people to input any text of their own; the application can’t know whether that text will be infringing, so it must stop all attempts to infringe, even by accident, which means the application is functionally useless.
I hesitate to use this word, but you’ve been acting so incredibly stupid in this entire discussion by believing in a fantasy right out of a Philip K. Dick story. No one can turn computer applications into Precogs for copyright, and that includes you.
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Thank you, Ted, that was the joke.
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First, by placing negative consequences for unlawful behavior, that inherently gives plenty of people reason to find lawful behavior more appealing. The problem comes from placing too many negative consequences on lawful actions so that the negative consequences for unlawful actions no longer outweigh the difficulties of following the law.
At any rate, you have provided no evidence for your claims. For one thing, I don’t think most pirates spend much time or resources on marketing at all, and most don’t receive compensation anyways. Furthermore, most pirates lack the amount of money that most companies spend on marketing, anyway.
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they do receive compensation, but its usually in form of illegal products.
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That a person who claims to be a programmer can say that is incredibly hypocritical, as programs of any size build on the works of others if formal, use of libraries and operating systems, and informal, programming practices and patterns. Some fields of programming, like 3d graphics, also have a heavy debt to mathematicians who devised the representation and algorithms needed for the field.
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That sounds like the mix&match pattern which was declared broken and leads to the copyright inringements.
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when the goons sue you and you have a database of license.txt files attached to all the content, you can actually prove that you have received permission to use the material. Then the only thing to prove would be that you didn't get the permission from criminal organisation.
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Talk about jumping the shark, you have made such a mighty leap that lack of oxygen is causing you brain damage.
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If you honestly believe the equivalent of “I have a note from my doctor, I.P. Freely” would hold up in court, you’re fucking ignorant to the point of unteachability.
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That is also how culture works. Everything builds on what came before. No one can create a wholly unique work that has no direct inspiration from other works unless that “unique” work was created by someone who has literally never experienced any other creative work in their lifetime, and you’re never going to see that happen in your lifetime.
Any book you’ve ever read in your lifetime was inspired by books and stories that came before. Any movie you’ve ever watched, every song you’ve ever heard, any videogame you’ve ever played — all of them were built by taking existing cultural influences and channeling them into something different. (Tabletop RPGs, for example, inspired the creation of the anime Record of Lodoss War.) You can’t build something new without taking from something old first. That’s a fact of life, and it’s one you should acquaint yourself with better than you have up to now.
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Let me rephrase that: the people who provide pirated games or other software online for others to download generally don’t receive compensation.
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The only one who has declared that broken is you, and you haven’t demonstrated that it leads to copyright infringement, either.
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Here’s the thing: they won’t be asking you for a license anyway because you aren’t responsible for the content provided by users! Seriously, we’ve said this over and over and over again in thread after thread after thread. Third parties are not responsible for infringing content outside of very specific circumstances that don’t apply here, and in those circumstances, having a license.txt won’t help at all.
Additionally, what criminal organizations are you talking about that give people license.txt files? And why is the burden of proof on the defendant to prove that they didn’t receive them from a criminal organization? Generally, the burden would be on the plaintiff in such a situation.
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This would be only true if you follow the draconian DCMA safe harbor limitations. Given that you have provided no proof that you are willing or able to follow those limitations, we have to assume that liability extends to content posted by users too.
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Liability extends only to the people who posted the content. We don’t hold Twitter liable if someone posts, say, a death threat aimed at the president unless Twitter employees somehow directly aided in the writing/posting of that threat. That’s why, if someone uses Notepad++ to retype an entire copyrighted book, we don’t hold the app’s developers responsible for that infringement. How willfully ignorant are you?
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...so, given that when pushed to be honest in other threads you admit to freely utilising libraries crated by others, you admit you're infringing copyright by your own ridiculous standards. Got it.
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we expect best products on the planet. There is no reason to accept substandard quality.
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Yes, which is why most coders - including yourself - utilise existing known high quality shared libraries rather than follow your idiotic suggestion that everyone needs to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time something is to be done.
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this is internet's broken position. I you ask them, every project should include 300 shared libs in it. But when they see such a project, they think its bloated and then refuse to use it. So internet is recommending practices which make the project completely useless.
The reasoning they have is this:
1) you shouldn't reinvent the wheel
2) there already exists a library for every purpose
3) projects should have at least 300 purposes
but they cannot explain how projects should avoid being bloated.
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Why are you recommending illegal practises? I have not accepted to their license terms, so any usage of those libraries would involve copyright infringement.
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I fail to see how that’s a broken position. L
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If you cannot accept the terms of the licensing agreement, that’s on you. Many shared libraries are available for free, royalty-free use, and many don’t have any exceptions for commercial use. Most don’t have any particularly onerous terms of use, either. If you’re willing to abide by the terms of the license, then there’s nothing illegal going on.
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Wait, you, of all people, are calling the DMCA safe harbor limitations “draconian”? I mean, you’re not completely wrong there, but compared to what you’ve been claiming and advocating with regards to copyright law, they’re incredibly permissive.
I’m sorry, but where the hell did you get that from? What proof do you have that any of us are unable or unwilling to follow the limitations of the DMCA? Seriously, the burden of proof is on you here in that regard.
Do I like every aspect of the DMCA? No. But I am able and willing to comply with it regardless of my personal opinions.
With regards to third-party liability for copyright infringement by software developers (as opposed to IAPs), the safe-harbor provisions’ limitations only apply to hosting or transmitting content submitted by end users, and they only require being able to receive DMCA notices and complying with them by taking down the content specified in the notice. Additionally, failure to comply with a DMCA notice can only ever create liabilities for the particular infringing content specified in the ignored notice, and only to the entity asserting copyright ownership; it does not create liability for any other content or to any other entities. And if your software does not involve a machine under the developer’s control hosting or transmitting the content or something (e.g. a text editor or software that doesn’t require an internet connection to use, then those limitations don’t even apply. DMCA notices make no differences. In those cases, then as long as the software (or hardware) is capable of substantial noninfringing uses and you don’t actively encourage users to commit copyright infringement, then there’s no liability for user-created copyright-infringing content. (This also applies to the other kind of software when the allegedly infringing content (nor a link to the content) is not actually being hosted by a machine under the developer’s control.)
Look, when it comes to cases where you lack specific knowledge of the existence of or allegedly infringing nature of some specific user-created or -submitted content that is allegedly infringing, you (the developer, publisher, or author of the software or physical device used to host, create, edit, send, receive, or submit the allegedly infringing content) are never liable for copyright infringement on the basis of that content except where the software/device in question is not capable of substantial noninfringing use, you actively encourage infringing use, specifically, or you actually created the content itself. General knowledge of the possibility, likelihood, or general existence of infringing content using your software/device is alone insufficient to make you liable for all of that content. Even if you have specific knowledge (such as through a DMCA notice or court order), you only are liable for that specific content that you have the necessary knowledge of, and only if you both ignore or refuse to abide by the notice/order or do anything about it and you are able to remove that specific content.
IAPs (but not software developers) also can become liable for infringing activity by users if and only if they have specific knowledge of one or more users who are alleged to have committed multiple instances of infringement and fail to kick them off their connection (though there is some question regarding specifics and whether that provision is necessarily constitutional).
At any rate, those are all the ways one can be held liable for copyright infringement over content created, submitted, or received by a user (rather than content they themselves created) and the extent of the limitations on the DMCA’s safe-harbor provisions and their applicability. I should also mention that you are never, ever liable for infringement based solely on content that can be viewed (but not created, submitted, hosted, edited, or anything else) using a specific software or device that you created. You would also have to—at a minimum and among other requirements already mentioned—be able to use the software/device to download, create, transmit between devices, modify, host, submit, or find the allegedly infringing content. And, again, failure to comply with the DMCA’s safe-harbor provisions doesn’t generally make you liable for copyright infringing users except for the specific cases you fail to comply regarding and are capable of doing so.
In fact, inability to comply with the provisions because you lack any means of controlling the content at all nor own any devices that contain the content is actually a pretty good defense against potential liability.
Finally, again, the license.txt file(s) would not change the question of either liability or safe harbor. At most, they could be used as evidence to defend yourself in a case where you fail to comply with a DMCA notice, but that’s it. In that case, you could simply ask the user for any licensing information upon receiving a DMCA notification. Regardless, there is no legal necessity for such measures, nor are the legally sufficient to remove liability in most cases.
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Also, weren’t we talking about the fact that you yourself do in fact use shared libraries?
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No, before we go to that area, we need to handle the issue about standard template library. The problem is that the wise man on internet decided that everyone who use c++ must absolutely use the library. i.e. they forced it to everyone's projects. Currently I would consider those forcing actions to be illegal pressurisation over internet. They didn't want to consider that some project leaders are against new dependencies, and they didn't want to consider license terms to be not acceptable and they didn't consider issues like compile times. But everyone needed to use their standard template library.
Basically internet keeps pushing certain libraries to all projects... Now if someone else decided that your project needs to absolutely have a library, who is responsible for the copyright infringements?
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If you really want to start from scratch, you need to start from a processor where you implement a switch and lights front panel, and write your own operating system and programming languages. If you start from a more advanced position than that you are dependent the work of others.
Hint most modern processors and microcontrollers are reliant on jtag or similar low level serial interface, and that requires anther working system, and the relevant software to use.
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"The problem is that the wise man on internet decided that everyone who use c++ must absolutely use the library. i.e. they forced it to everyone's projects"
I suspect this is bullshit, but even if correct - whoever mandates this must be people with power of the project, i.e. the licence holders. So, you're saying that you should not obey the wishes of the people who own the project.
"Currently I would consider those forcing actions to be illegal pressurisation over internet."
I suspect that it's not illegal, however.
"Now if someone else decided that your project needs to absolutely have a library, who is responsible for the copyright infringements?"
The person who refuses to obey the licences requirements, yet continues to use the library in violation of the required licence.
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" I have not accepted to their license terms, so any usage of those libraries would involve copyright infringement."
Yes. So, are you still using them in violation of the licence?
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"but they cannot explain how projects should avoid being bloated."
If you disagree, there are thousands of competing environments you can use instead. Anyone who has been working in software for decades as you claim to be, yet is unaware of the many forked and rewritten projects that exist to get around disagreements in architecture and licencing models applied to the original must be woefully ignorant of the entire industry.
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I never used them.
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I think you seriously misunderstand the issue.
When you start a software project, you need to strip away layers of the software stack that you consider to be not suitable for your project. This means you still have base system (like c++ language) which is based on work done by other people. But if you fail to do that strip-away-layers thing, then the space where you can contribute will be reduced to such small area that any significant contribution isn't possible. Existing software systems have just eaten out all flexibility and leave no room for improvement.
The base system is usually chosen so that it's composed of free software modules, where authors do not demand onerous license conditions (like GPL).
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This isnt true.
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Burden of proof for following DMCA is on your shoulders. The normal process in a copyright lawsuit is as follows:
1) defendant needs to explicitly mention that his platform follows DMCA's safe harbor -- this is because the defendant need to actively do some operations before they can claim DMCA protections, for example register their contact agent with the copyright office. If you failed to do this before lawsuit, no DMCA protections for you.
2) DMCA safe harbor is very easy to lose. Large companies have significant problems fulfilling all the required sections, even though they have dedicated persons assigned to this task alone
3) Smaller entities the safe harbor requirements might be impossible to fulfill, and those smaller entities would need to follow copyright laws instead of dmca.
4) It is still the default option that everyone in the market would need to follow copyright laws. Only larger companies can avoid that by relying on DMCA.
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So, who determines the licences terms if not the copyright/licences holders?
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"I never used them."
Then why are you complaining about the licence terms of something you never used? There are many options, the ones you don't use are irrelevant normally.
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"This isnt true."
So, who do you think dictates licence terms?
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this problem wasn't done via license terms.
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The libraries, like the template library, that come with C++ are covered by tour compiler license. Also, the GPL on the GNU compiler does not carry over into projects compiled with it. Any extra libraries may have license terms that carry over, but those can be avoided by writing your own version.
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Wait, when did anyone say anything about standard template libraries, and what does that have to do with what has been discussed? Weren’t we talking about the extra libraries that people have created beyond the standard libraries? Why do you keep changing the subject?
Assuming for the sake of argument that that is actually a problem, no one’s forcing you to use C++ (and, by extension, the standard library for that language). There are many programming languages out there for you to use, you know. Plus, you could create your own version of the standard library yourself if you really wanted and use that instead. Hell, you could even create your own programming language, associated libraries, and compiler/parser for that language from scratch if you really wanted. No one’s really forcing you to use anything.
Of course, that’s assuming that this is actually a problem that needs to be solved, which it isn’t, which I’ll explain in my responses to other things you said.
There’s nothing illegal about it. You aren’t entitled or required to use C++ or any other languages for any given project. Furthermore, they aren’t actually forcing you to use the specific standard libraries. C++, like many programming languages, involves a set of standard rules that anyone implementing it is expected to follow (similar to an API). You can always create your own compiler and standard libraries for it that follow those rules, and I believe there are some other versions available, including some FOSS implementations, that you could use instead. Not that you need to, but there is no reason you couldn’t do so. As such, I’m not seeing any unlawful or illegal “forcing” or anti-trust issues at all here; you have other options available.
This part kinda confuses me. I mean, I totally understand why you would want to minimize any dependencies, but I’m not sure how that applies here.
First of all, with regards to the specific implementations most people use for the standard library, you can, again, use other implementations or create your own if you really wanted to. There is no reason you couldn’t use some other implementation and thus control those dependencies. They also aren’t “new” dependencies because, if you started the project coding in C++ and weren’t using a custom version of the standard libraries, you already had those dependencies.
Then, regarding the API and standards that are implemented by the standard libraries, that’s kind of an integral part of how a programming language works. By using C++, you are coding based upon those rules. So, again, how are these “new” dependencies? If you don’t want to be confined to those rules, use another language. People decide which language to use based upon stuff like that.
So it’s less that they didn’t want to consider it and more of a thing where they would expect someone who doesn’t like those dependencies to use C++ or their implementations of the standard libraries to just choose some other option.
Question: what specific part of the licensing terms do you find unacceptable? As I understand it, for any implementation of C++ (which often include their version of the standard library), you license the use of the standard library along with the compiler/parser and/or the programming language itself with no additional terms, conditions, fees, or other costs beyond the original license you acquired in order to use (or compile or whatever) C++ in the first place. There are also FOSS implementations of C++ and its standard libraries that impose very few terms or conditions on even commercial use, so you don’t even need to agree to any particular licensing agreement just to use C++. And, of course, you are allowed to create your own implementation that would require no license agreement (at least not beyond one for the API for C++ itself, if even that) for you to have to agree to.
All of this applies equally well to any publicly available and standardized programming language (not just C++).
For these reasons, whether or not you or anyone else considers the licensing terms unacceptable, I don’t see how that is a problem at all. Also, you haven’t specified what specific terms you find egregious or unacceptable, anyways, so I’m not even sure why you or anyone else has a problem here to begin with. Regardless, I’m not seeing any legal or ethical issues here.
Well, I’m not quite sure what that has to do with standard libraries, exactly, but there are other compilers for C++ and implementations of the standard libraries that can reduce those compile times (or you could create your own), and anything else about the compile times are pretty much an inherent aspect of using a programming language you didn’t create. (In fact, the same can be said about any programming language.) If that’s your problem, why are you even using C++ to begin with?
Also, I’m pretty sure that the people who decide the rules for C++ do consider compile times to some extent.
No, they did not, nor would they really be an insurmountable problem.
I’m not sure how the internet is doing so, but to the extent it does anything that could be described that way, those libraries are generally for very common tasks used in many applications and are usually FOSS or come standard with the compiler; as such, there are generally no additional terms, costs, or conditions to follow. You are also free to disregard such advice if you want to. It also doesn’t really have anything to do with that whole “standard template libraries” are thing you were just talking about.
Unless that person is your boss or supervisor or something, they can’t really make that decision for you. They can certainly state their belief or opinion that that’s the case, but they can’t actually force you to do anything.
Huh? What copyright infringements? If we again exclude bosses or supervisors, unless they tell you to use those libraries or whatever that need separate licensing or payment and specifically to not properly license it or follow the terms of the licensing agreement or whatever (which, for many publicly available libraries, doesn’t really involve anything to onerous or restrictive), and it doesn’t fall under fair use (such as for personal or academic use that is noncommercial), nothing that they are saying involves copyright infringement that anyone but you. Further, under no circumstances are you (the developer) absolved of any responsibility for infringing use of any libraries in your software based solely on the fact that someone else outside of the project told you to do so, even if they too are liable.
But, again, many libraries—including standard libraries—that are made publicly available online don’t really require any additional costs or onerous terms; many either fall under a licensing agreement you already agreed to in order to use the specific programming language or compiler/parser or are free, royalty-free, and really only ask for credit to be given to the author(s) of the library (though some also require the use to be noncommercial, in which case don’t use it for commercial software unless you’re willing to pay a licensing fee or something). As such, it generally isn’t too hard to use a number of publicly available libraries without paying additional costs or agreeing to onerous or unacceptable licensing terms or conditions while not infringing on anyone’s copyright(s). As such, I’m not entirely certain what copyright infringement is involved here. Even if you take someone’s advice to use a certain, specific library, that person doesn’t specifically tell you to ignore any licensing issues or the use doesn’t fall under one of the exceptions to copyright (such as fair use) and the other person was given the relevant information that would make the use infringing, and you fail to agree to and follow the licensing agreement, then you are the only one responsible for the copyright infringement.
As long as either you don’t use the library, you agree to and follow the terms of the licensing agreement for that library, or the use and/or copied content (the library) fall under one of the exceptions to copyright law, there is no copyright infringement going on.
Basically, I have no idea what you’re so concerned about or what is unreasonable or unacceptable about anything mentioned (with the possible exception of some claims you made that are simply false). I also don’t understand what the first paragraph has to do with either the last paragraph or anything that was discussed previously.
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I seem to recall that either you said otherwise or someone else claimed to have seen the code and that you are using external libraries.
Then why in the world are you complaining about them?
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I’m sorry, but what specifically do you find onerous about GPL?
More importantly, you’re only proving the point that all new creative or useful works (including software) build off of existing works and knowledge. After all, you just said you use a base system created by someone else, which is the point that PaulT and that AC was making. It also disproves all the claims you made in your past few comments about not having any viable options for libraries, that you shouldn’t use others’ works in your own, or that you don’t use anyone else’s works in your own.
As for the “strip-away-layers thing”, as you call it, there are plenty of ways to still have significant flexibility, and it has nothing to do with copyright at all, nor does it disprove or really anything anyone else has said. And that’s assuming that that is actually necessary or preferable, which isn’t always the case.
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Yes, it is. No one else can force you to use a specific library or something like that. Do you have any substantive arguments to the contrary?
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First, this is a discussion, not a court of law, and we’re talking about software developers as a whole. Unless you have evidence that no one is able or willing to follow the DMCA, we assume that such people exist. You’re the one asserting that we’re violating the law, so prove it.
You skip a number of steps here. These include the fact that the complain must allege either that the defendant actively and explicitly encouraged or directly participated in some act of copyright infringement, the defendant created a piece of software/device is only capable of being used for copyright infringement, or the defendant developed software/a device that was used in one or more specific acts of direct copyright infringement and the defendant had or should have had particularized knowledge of the infringement and the defendant had the ability to remove the offending content. Otherwise, we don’t even need to get into the safe-harbor provisions of the DMCA because the defendant isn’t harboring any infringing content to begin with.
This implicitly assumes that the defendant’s product/service is even a platform at all. Again, for things like text editors, video editors, or audio players, there is no platform involved, hence we don’t even need to go into safe-harbor provisions at all.
Additionally, in order to survive a motion to dismiss, the complaint must plausibly plead certain facts that could plausibly lead a reasonable fact-finder to conclude that the defendant may have lost safe-harbor protections in this specific case. The defendant can then merely assert that the allegations aren’t sufficient to overcome the DMCA’s safe-harbor provision, so the claims against them must be dismissed. Even if the case does not get dismissed, it would then go into discovery, after which, should the evidence be legally insufficient to lead a reasonable fact-finder to plausibly conclude that the DMCA’s safe-harbor doesn’t protect the defendant in this case, then the defendant could move for summary judgement and would likely prevail. Should it get to a trial, both sides must present evidence that they are right, but the burden of proof is still on the plaintiff first, not the defendant. The only proof the defendant needs to provide regarding this issue is evidence that refutes the claims or evidence that the plaintiff provides that the defendant is not in compliance.
At each stage, it is actually on the plaintiff to prove that the safe-harbor provision don’t protect the defendant. (Well, they defendant would have to show that they provide a platform for users’ content, which woud mean the DMCA’s safe-harbor provisions would plausibly apply, but that’s it.) In these respects, the DMCA’s safe-harbor provision is rather similar to CDA §230. Once the defendant’s status as a platform for or publisher of user-created/-submitted content has been established as being the basis for the underlying cause(s)-of-action for the lawsuit’s claims against that defendant, it is entirely on the plaintiff to prove that the law doesn’t protect the defendant from liability in this suit.
Do you have any evidence for these claims?
With the possible exception of registering a DMCA agent for a platform (and even that may not be strictly necessary to comply with the DMCA’s safe-harbor provision), the only requirement for non-IAPs is to accept DMCA notices and take reasonable steps to remove the specific content specified in those notices from the platform. Even if the platform doesn’t reasonably comply with a given DMCA notice, the platform only loses protection from liability over the content specified in that specific notice, and only with respect to the specific copyright(s) alleged to have been infringed upon in that notice. They only lose all safe-harbor protections for all content on the platform if it has been demonstrated that the platform frequently ignores DMCA notices. It’s also worth noting that there is no set deadline for compliance, and “reasonable compliance” is rather broad. It’s really not that hard to comply with this, either.
(With IAPs, failure to enforce their own rules that require kicking off repeat-infringers after a certain number of strikes (which is not set in stone in the DMCA, either) will remove their safe-harbor protections, but that’s not really relevant when talking about software or developers.)
Additionally, I have seen no instances of larger platforms having significant issues with complying with this section of the DMCA at all (possibly excluding IAPs). Do you have any evidence to support this claim?
And, to reiterate, the DMCA’s safe-harbor provision is only regarding online ISPs (like YouTube, Facebook, or Steam) and IAPs (like Verizon Wireless or Spectrum Internet). For other software and devices (like a text editor, audio player, video player, or physical MP3 player), there is no liability at all so long as the product in question is capable of substantial noninfringing uses and the devs/publishers don’t actively encourage infringement in particular.
Ummm, the DMCA is part of US copyright law. If you follow the DMCA, you are following copyright law. And, as stated above, the safe-harbor requirements aren’t that hard to follow, and they aren’t even necessary for many of the specific cases we’ve discussed.
Look, all the safe-harbor provisions of the DMCA do is provide an exception to the rule that, if you have actual, lawful, legal control over devices that have the allegedly infringing content and/or are yourself publishing the allegedly infringing content (even if you don’t create it), then you become liable for that case of infringement. It doesn’t affect the fact that if you don’t publish that content and you don’t have any actual, lawful, legal control over any devices containing the infringing content, you are liable for copyright infringement if and only if you yourself were directly infringing on someone’s copyright, your software/device is not capable of substantial noninfringing uses and is capable of being used for copyright infringement, and/or you actively, directly, and explicitly encourage copyright infringement. (It also doesn’t affect the fact that, even for those who do publish the underlying content or have actual, lawful, legal control over any devices containing the allegedly infringing content, you are just as liable as the others if any of the aforementioned conditions are true.) There’s also usually a knowledge requirement, at least a general one, for liability. As such, copyright law—with or without the DMCA’s safe-harbor provisions—does not support your claims about who is or isn’t liable for copyright infringement at all.
Additionally, none of that changes the elements for direct copyright infringement, and you can’t hold anyone liable for any sort of copyright infringement by anyone (whether it’s direct, contributory, or vicarious liability) without first establishing that there is some underlying case of direct infringement for which some person(s) is/are directly liable and for which the defendant(s) have some plausible connection to in some way, shape, or form. Thus, the plaintiff still has to allege and prove that they possess valid ownership of the relevant right(s) associated with the allegedly infringed copyright, that that copyright was properly registered with the US Copyright Office, and that the allegedly infringing material does, in fact, copy from the copyrighted material. Without that, the plaintiff lacks standing to sue. Additionally, if the copied material is uncopyrightable (such as ideas, scenes a faire, or facts) or in the public domain (such as Shakespeare’s works) or the use falls under one of the exceptions to copyright infringement (such as de minimus use or fair use), then the allegedly infringing material is not, in fact, infringing, so there is no copyright infringement in that case for anyone to be held liable for at all. These elements can be determined at any stage of litigation (transfer of venue, dismissal, summary judgement, trial, reconsideration, or appeal), depending on the situation.
And, as I noted earlier, the DMCA isn’t that hard to comply with, anyways. You’re given a lot of leeway to comply. But let’s say that it is difficult to comply with. That’s only evidence that copyright law is too restrictive.
Counterpoint: this website is dependent on the DMCA’s safe-harbor provision, and I don’t believe anyone would argue that it is owned or run by any larger companies.
Also, again, the DMCA (including its safe-harbor provision) is a part of US copyright law, and US copyright law does not in any way match what you’ve been claiming about it (even without the DMCA or just excluding its safe-harbor provision). You are completely wrong about what either the rest or the entirety of US copyright law actually says and does, and regarding what is considered infringement and who is liable for it when it occurs.
Really, you seem confused about what copyright law is, and you also seem to confuse discussing/determining the boundaries of what is considered copyright infringement and/or the conditions for one to be held liable for someone else’s infringement with trying to find ways to infringe or not follow copyright law yourself and not be held liable for it. That’s not how it works at all. It’s not about finding ways to infringe and not be held liable; it’s about what is actually considered infringement and who is actually liable for it. If you follow the DMCA’s safe-harbor provision and are not otherwise liable for infringement, you are following copyright law and you are not committing copyright infringement.
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You’ve been complaining about how onerous some terms of some license agreements can be, and you posted a moderately long post that claimed that you (or some hypothetical dev) don’t want to agree to certain licenses because they aren’t acceptable, then later singled out GPL as an example of an onerous license. As if that wasn’t enough, a lot of what has been discussed has been regarding what licenses are necessary in what cases and similar topics.
How can you now assert that license terms were never part of the “problem” that you claim exists?
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So... you can avoid the licence terms you find distasteful by using competing libraries, and the tools you use don't magically change the licencing of the end product. Cool. What's the problem?
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"I’m sorry, but what specifically do you find onerous about GPL?"
From what I've seen - because he actually has to share what he's done with others, rather than just leech off the work of the community then whine when he has to compile the code for functional client use.
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Ah. I suppose compared to most of his arguments and claims, it’s not exactly the worst thing he’s said. Still, that wouldn’t be the fault of the people suggesting their use, and there is still no one forcing him to use those libraries anyways (by his own admission), so I’m still perplexed about why he mentioned this.
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This argument was just as terrible the last time you posted it, too.
For the two times tp got posted or mentioned in a roast, posts were mentioned where people responded to tp, en masse, on specific threads. tp does interact on smaller threads, posters simply don't respond to him there. You know what's causing these roast posts? People giving tp attention, the very same thing you seem to claim a monopoly on. Either stop giving tp attention by responding to him or get over your high horse of insisting that everyone who deals with tp in a way you don't like is a Nazi sympathizer.
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While I never used them, the internet still wants me to use them. The goons on the internet do not see why we'd reject such good technology. Supposedly everyone on the planet needs to use that tech, otherwise they can't claim they're popular.
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You’re always free to ignore them, you know.
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That's where the illegal pressusisation comes in. They claim the request wasn't optional, and they're prepared to do illegal operations to enforce their views.
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"They claim the request wasn't optional, and they're prepared to do illegal operations to enforce their views"
Citation needed.
Also, from the random word salad you're presented here, all that seems to be happening is that someone is demanding you abide by licence requirements in order to distribute your software in certain venues. What's illegal about that?
Also, I bet the request really was optional, you just don't want to do the work of going for the other options (such as rewriting code to avoid licence issues, or using other distribution platforms)
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Again, unless they are the licensors for something you’re actually using or your boss/supervisor, their threats are highly unlikely to have any teeth, so just ignore them. If they are claiming that something is required by a licensing agreement for something you’re using, either ask them to point out where in the license agreement that language is or check for yourself. Otherwise, they’re just empty threats.
Also, I highly doubt there’s anything illegal going on there, especially if it’s by uninvolved parties. Morally dubious at best, perhaps, but I don’t believe there is any law against anything that would fit what you’ve described.
Seriously, either ignore them or double-check to make sure they don’t have a point. Regardless, none of that explains why you’re complaining about it here. It seems pretty irrelevant to the arguments that have been made thus far.
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Here's why it's relevant:
1) there was a question about what dependencies/libraries I'm using and whether they're licensed
2) this story involves parties that are forcing people to use some libraries
3) thus the question is how these forced situations are handled?
4) this story explains some decisions that we have done for our current project
important position, where small amount of c++ standard library is allowed,
but using larger sections of the the technology is absolutely forbidden
illegally pressurised in the earlier project
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Nope, that wasn't the actual situation. It's morre like co-workers having different opinion which direction the project should go, and someone deciding to force their views to everyone else.
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That's the whole reason for DMCA*s existence, i.e. they didn't want to keep some platforms liable for copyright infringements of their users. I.e. it allows platforms to ignore copyright laws, i.e. not enforce copyright's draconian rules to platform's users. I.e. they let cat out of the bag and it'll be impossible to put the cat back to the bag.
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yes, this is true. The dependencies are carefully designed.
Forcing other people to use some crappy libraries is so evil operation that it just screams for a response.
Our response to such forcing actions is that we refuse to use those technologies. This has very big impact to all licensing activity happening in the project, because dependent projects are actually carefully considered and not accidentally imported to the project.
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it spreads to many projects because if any part is under GPL, then the whole system must be available under GPL
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First of all, 2 and 3 add nothing whatsoever to 1, as what libraries people want you to use and how they try to get you to do so does not answer the question about what libraries you actually use. It also doesn’t explain anything about the first part of 4, as you clearly chose not to use those libraries before any pressure was applied (that is, it was a cause for 2 and 3, not an effect). As such, the story is still immaterial and unnecessary.
Second, I still fail to see how what you alleged would be considered “forcing” anyone to do anything. Pressure, maybe, but not force. Seriously, the best thing is to ignore it if you feel so strongly about it.
Third, as noted, if you licensed a compiler, you also licensed the entirety of the standard library, so there is no legal issue with you using it.
Finally, there is nothing illegal about whoever-it-is pressuring you. At most, it is possible to conceive of a plausible situation where it might be unlawful, but that is not terribly likely, is definitely not illegal (unless they were using blackmail or ransom or something like that, but that’s highly unlikely), and you shouldn’t base any of your decisions on whether someone pressured you to do one thing.
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Wow, have you gotten things completely wrong. Get this through your head: the DMCA is a part of copyright law; complying with the DMCA is complying with copyright law; and ignoring copyright law would entail ignoring the DMCA.
Plus, there’s a lot more to the DMCA than just the safe-harbor provision, including parts like 1201, which also makes circumvention of DRM unlawful outside of certain exceptions that have to be reapproved every few years, thus expanding liability. In other words, the DMCA did a lot more than limit liability of platform holders for users’ infringement.
Furthermore, the DMCA does not allow platform holders to both ignore copyright law completely and avoid liability. That protection is conditioned on, among other things, receiving a DMCA claim for the specified content and acting appropriately. It’s also only an exception to the rule that, if you have actual, lawful control of a machine containing and/or displaying infringing content and have knowledge of infringement occurring, then you are liable for infringement by users, and even that exception is fairly limited in that it requires particular knowledge and failure to act. It doesn’t change anything regarding direct liability for actions by the accused (including platform holders) that are actively, directly infringing on someone else’s copyright, it doesn’t change anything regarding what is or isn’t direct infringement of copyright (aside from circumvention of DRM, but that does include things like fair use, which predates the DMCA), it has no impact on liability of makers of software/devices that have no substantial noninfringing uses, and it did not introduce the fact that cases where the developers/manufacturers of software/devices have no actual, lawful control of devices containing allegedly infringing content, the software/devices are capable of substantial noninfringing uses, they aren’t directly and actively encouraging infringement, and they are not actually, directly infringing on copyright themselves, the developers/manufacturers have no liability whatsoever for infringing activity by users (alleged or proven), and that determination is not conditioned on the same factors as the safe-harbor provision.
It also doesn’t change the fact that no one is liable for anyone’s allegedly infringing content if the content has not been legally proven to be infringing. The plaintiff(s) still has/have to prove that
1) they own a valid copyright in work X;
2) the copyright in X was validly registered with the US Copyright Office;
3) the authors/publishers of Y
a) had access to X and
b) either
i) copied content from X for use in Y or
ii) made Y probatively similar to X;
4) some elements of X used in Y are
a) protectable elements and
b) substantially similar (or unlawfully copied) in both X and Y;
5) if none of the defendants did not themselves author/publish Y, the use does not fall under fair use or other exceptions; and
6) the defendants either
a) are the authors/publishers of Y and either
i) are not holders of a platform that published or hosted Y or
ii) are not protected by the DMCA’s safe-harbor provisions,
b) actively and directly encouraged infringement of others’ copyright, including Y;
c) created a device/software that was used to create/publish Y and either
i) the defendants had both
A) knowledge of infringement using their device/software and
B) actual and lawful control over a machine that contains Y, or
ii) the device/software is incapable of substantial noninfringing uses.
(Although, if Y was found to be infringing in another court case, parts 1-5 can be demonstrated by merely bringing the ruling from that case. Also, in some cases of contributory or vicarious liability, more than one infringing case may be needed for liability to be demonstrated.)
Only if the plaintiff adequately alleges (on a motion to dismiss), can reasonably prove (in summary judgement for the defense), cannot be reasonably disproven on (in summary judgement for the plaintiff), has proven at trial according to a jury (jury trial) or federal judge (bench trial), or has plausibly proven at trial (on appeal) all 6 of these things would we need to get into affirmative defenses like the copyright has been invalidated somehow, de minimus use, or fair use. The only thing that the DMCA changes are with regards to 6ai and 6aii.
It should also be noted—once again, since you clearly missed this point as well—that even where someone is somehow liable for some or all infringing use(s) done by users of a software/service/device they created, that doesn’t change whether or not that person/entity actually infringed. Again, if someone uses your product to infringe, that doesn’t mean you yourself infringed as well, even if you are legally liable for that infringement. Additionally, any use that is fair use or use of uncopyrightable or public domain content is not infringing.
At any rate, the point is that the DMCA did a lot more than just the safe-harbor provision, the DMCA is a part of copyright law, and platforms (and IAPs) are generally required to do some ad hoc enforcement of copyright after receiving a proper notification of specific infringing content on their platform (and only with regards to that specific content and/or the specific user(s) responsible for that content), at least if they have actual and lawful means to do so, in order to be protected by the DMCA’s safe-harbor provision. No part of US copyright law requires or recommends any preventative measures be taken to prevent or reduce copyright infringement, nor does doing so actually affect one’s liability for infringement (outside of whether the infringement is willful or not, but even then, that only changes the degree of liability).
Also, none of what you just said actually addresses my point: the things we’ve been talking about haven’t involved avoiding liability for your own infringement but avoiding any direct infringement by yourself or not being liable for infringement done by a user(s) of your software, service, platform, or device somehow involving the use of your software, service, platform, or device. That’s what I was saying there. It’s not about avoiding liability for one’s own actions. It’s about either not being liable for someone else’s actions or whether certain actions/works are actually infringing or not.
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Sorry! This is actually me! It logged me out while I was typing for some reason, and I didn’t notice! Whoops!
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Okaaaay… I don’t think it’s that onerous, but fine. I still stand by everything else I said.
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That’s fair enough, I suppose. It doesn’t really address my point, but whatever.
Again, no one is forcing you to use anything. Additionally, nothing you described would be what I—or most people, for that matter—would consider even remotely “evil”.
Also, even if “it just screams for a response,” unless someone here was doing that, it most certainly doesn’t require a response to be given here, to us, regarding that. It doesn’t even really make sense to put such a response here to an unrelated comment by someone wholly involved in the alleged issue.
Finally, I was under the impression that you had a problem with the license for those libraries and/or the inherent dependencies including additionally external libraries would necessarily add to your project (at least according to you), not a problem with the libraries themselves. The quality of the libraries is rather immaterial to any point being made here by anyone. We’re discussing legal issues, semantics, and the quality/nature of your work. Whether or not a library made by someone else and recommended by someone not participating here in this discussion is beyond the scope of this discussion. Dissing libraries you don’t like or that are being “forced” on you adds nothing and makes you sound kinda petty.
Again, nothing you alleged actually involves “forcing actions” because you don’t allege any ability for them to actually force you to do anything or to meaningfully enforce their decisions in a way that would directly impact your work or your project. Please stop calling it “forcing”; it’s not. (Also, there isn’t anything illegal or evil about it.)
Next, regarding your response, I don’t quite get it. Are you saying that, solely because you don’t like them trying to “force” these libraries on you, you won’t use them, but had they not done so, you would have? If so, the only ones you might possibly be hurting would be yourself, your work, your business, and/or your customers/clients. It’s not going to affect some person online who tried to get you to use those libraries. (Well, I suppose it might also affect the makers of the libraries, at least if it requires additional payment for a separate license.) So that just seems petty and nonproductive.
If, on the other hand, you won’t use those libraries for one or more specific and completely unrelated (to the “forcing” actions) reasons—like the licensing, the added dependencies, the libraries’ relevance to the project, or the quality of the libraries themselves—then that isn’t really a case of you refusing to use technologies in response to any “forcing actions” but rather sticking to or digging in your heels on a decision you already made in spite or because of the “forcing actions”.
Either way, don’t let them make decisions for you. Use information they provide to help guide your decisions and/or decision-making process, perhaps, ultimately, make your own decisions. (Unless they’re your boss or supervisor or something or if it’s in the terms of a licensing agreement you already signed and that you must abide by in order to use something that you are using in your project, in which case you might not have any choice but to use them.) That includes making decisions to not use something that someone is “forcing” you to use. Make your decisions on the merits of each side (as well as legal/contractual obligations and your boss/supervisor’s mandates), not what some other person thinks, says, or does.
Like I said, you don’t actually need to respond to them, anyways, and it’s not actually helpful or productive to do so.
Come to think of it, the fact that you are able and willing to continue to refuse to use those libraries after the “forcing actions” suggests that no “forcing” actually occurred, which kinda undermines a large, substantial part of your whole argument. Either that, or you’re either willing to do something unlawful or that could potentially cost you your job or something, or you’re calling their bluff, suggesting that you don’t think that they can actually force you, either. This, too, would tend to undermine your argument, so you’re not really helping your case here.
Again, I’m a little confused here about what you’re saying. Are you saying that your response has a big impact? Because if it does, you really shouldn’t responding that way to random people on the internet.
Also, regarding the use of dependent projects, isn’t that why you refused before any “forcing actions”? Come to think of it, wasn’t the licensing also part of the original reasoning? If so, what does this statement have to do with your response to “forcing actions”?
I think at least one of us is really confused about cause-and-effect here, and I’m not entirely sure who.
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"Nope, that wasn't the actual situation"
Then, please explain the situation using specifics and words that allow others to understand it.
"It's morre like co-workers having different opinion which direction the project should go, and someone deciding to force their views to everyone else."
Wellcome to the real world, where this happens on every project, especially when they're some idiot suggesting completely unrealistic ideas.
However, none of this is "illegal" as you keep saying, it just means that others have agreed to go in a different direction to the one you want to go. Either man up and accept this as a cost of collaborative work, or use something else.
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"That's the whole reason for DMCA*s existence"
No, it's not. Please stop lying.
"i.e. they didn't want to keep some platforms liable for copyright infringements of their users"
Yes, innocent 3rd parties should not be held liable for something they didn't do just because something they made was used without their knowledge. This applies to your shitshow of a software just as much as it does to anyone else.
"i.e. not enforce copyright's draconian rules to platform's users"
Again, lying. They can apply it to the users but not the platform that users happened to be on at the time.
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"Forcing other people to use some crappy libraries is so evil operation that it just screams for a response."
Good thing nobody's forcing you then. Stop choosing libraries whose licences you disagree with and stop whining.
Again, you're full of shit and notably avoiding stating any specifics that would further allow the rest of us to demonstrate just how full of shit you are, but even by your own words you're choosing to use these libraries.
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"it spreads to many projects because if any part is under GPL, then the whole system must be available under GPL"
Then, choose something with a different licence, dickhead.
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This isn't true. I quit developing that project after this problem.
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I would consider it actual human rights violation when they keep sending enough emails which keep demanding certain outcome. It's similar to spamming operations currently. (this all happened before spam was a real problem), which were declared illegal at some point. But it's more like sending targeted spam to certain selected people.
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Man, you really don’t understand how laws work, do you? First of all, I’m pretty sure it’s not “spam” if it is only targeted at you and doesn’t involve solicitation/advertisement of business for either the person sending emails or the one who hired them. And even if it was spam, that wouldn’t be a human rights violation.
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The infringing and non-infringing uses are not looking identical:
1) infringing use can generally use a lot larger amount of content because they don't need to pay market rates for the content => you can immediately reject large amount of content
2) infringing use always picks the best content on the world. So if the content quality is better than expected from such a small team, then you can immediately reject the content. Non-infringing content cannot use the best content on the world because it would cost too much. You don't need to accept ripoff's of star wars.
3) infringing use always picks the most popular works. If the same work is already widely available on the internet, there's no reason to accept it for further publication
4) infringing use is coming from untrusted vendors and players who were not confirmed to be the original authors of the material
5) infringing and stolen goods are generally cheaper than genuine products
6) infringing and cloned goods are generally substantially similar to some well known brand
7) infringing and copied goods generally is exactly the same bits than some already existing product
etc, there's tons of different ways how infringing goods can be regognized.
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youtube's case proves you wrong. Hollywood's content owners actually sued youtube and demanded implementation of contentID.
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"This isn't true. I quit developing that project after this problem."
Ah, so here we get the real facts. For all your whining about "illegal" activity and copyright infringement, what you're actually saying is that the rest of the people working on a project decided something you didn't like, and you're annoyed that the existing code you already contributed didn't magically disappear as a result.
Very childish, but that makes sense from what we've know of you here. But, here's the thing - nothing's stopping you from working on a competing product that uses different licences. Hell, depending on the original licence you may be able to simply fork the project and use the entire code that existed before the licence change. But, you're rather stay here and whine incoherently, it seems.
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"The infringing and non-infringing uses are not looking identical"
Except, they do. A file can be infringing and non-infringing depending on who is using it. I know that most of your arguments depend on completely misrepresenting reality, but you cannot avoid the simple fact that when you start your explanations with an outright lie, the rest of your comment will always be worthless.
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"I would consider it actual human rights violation when they keep sending enough emails"
Yeah... we'lll get on to caring about that once we've dealt with things like sex trafficking and torture of political prisoners. Are you really insane enough that you think your reading email is on the same level?
"(this all happened before spam was a real problem)"
You're still this pissed off about something that happened in the early 90s?
"But it's more like sending targeted spam to certain selected people."
Which isn't really spam. But, what kind of shitty email client are you using that won't let you block a sender or filter straight to the spam folder?
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I obviously did two products after that.
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Then why are you still whining about the first one? Let me guess - the other two were failures in comparison (possibly due to you refusing to collaborate in ways other wish to work)?
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There are strict rules related to how deep dependencies you're allowed to use from the libraries. It shouldn't work so that once you allow usage of std::string and std::vector, that they'd go all-in and use the whole library. There simply isn't permission to do anything such stupid operations. So these people are working without a permission and thus in the illegal area. Their only illegal area wasn't some pressurisation, but also lack of permissions from the project owners.
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"There are strict rules related to how deep dependencies you're allowed to use from the libraries"
Yes, that's how it works. If you use a library, you abide by the licence conditions of that library, or you can use something else if you disagree. Are you arguing that you should be able to violate the conditions chosen by the author of the library?
"There simply isn't permission to do anything such stupid operations"
Yes, there is. Just because you dislike something doesn't mean that the authors of the work you're using should lose their rights to apply their preferred rules.
"Their only illegal area wasn't some pressurisation, but also lack of permissions from the project owners."
Do you have a concrete example of this happening, other than vague whining. I know you refuse to provide specifics because you know you'll be mocked for how wrong your interpretations of the facts are, but you're not winning an argument by deliberately keeping it vague.
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I think you're missing the whole point. This statement above is what is wrong. Your ideas of who is the author of each piece of code is completely broken, i.e. parties in your statements are badly assigned
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That's just another method of detecting infringing goods.
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"Your ideas of who is the author of each piece of code is completely broken, i.e. parties in your statements are badly assigned"
Prove it with real world examples. The fact is, if someone says "you have to use licence X to use my library", unless that licence violates a condition of the original libraries it uses, then you have to use that licence. To claim otherwise is to claim that the author of the library you are using does not have a choice of the licence they use.
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"That's just another method of detecting infringing goods."
No, it's not. If I say "John can use this file, but nobody else can" but Dave uses the same file, that's infringement, but John using the same file is not infringing when he does the same thing. The file itself does not change.
Another example of how your wishes do not change reality.
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No, that’s not what happened. Or, rather, any actual lawsuits on the matter either failed or would have failed because no part of copyright law requires (in any way) copyright filters like ContentID. What actually happened was threats of large numbers of frivolous lawsuits and threats to lobby for mandating copyright filters. The law itself doesn’t support your claims.
Also, that one can sue doesn’t mean that the lawsuit has any merit whatsoever, or that the lawsuit has any basis in law that would make it past a motion to dismiss. People file frivolous lawsuits all the time. That a lawsuit was filed is, by itself, fairly meaningless in this context. As such, even if what you said was accurate about past events, that does not change what the law actually is, nor does it disprove or even substantially dispute anything I said. Whether or not Hollywood actually filed lawsuits against YouTube (or, rather, Google) for not implementing any sort of copyright filter like ContentID, that doesn’t change the fact that YouTube was not actually liable at all for any infringing content posted by users (prior to receiving a DMCA notice on that content and deciding to ignore it, at least) even before they implemented ContentID. That decision was made for other reasons that don’t relate to what is actually required under U.S. Copyright Law.
Of course, if you’re talking about lawsuits filed outside the US, those are immaterial to this discussion.
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None of these factors actually make noninfringing use clearly distinguishable from infringing use, as there are many noninfringing cases that fall under many if not all of these factors. Furthermore, there isn’t really any good way to determine authorship prior to the actual author (if it is not the uploader) making a claim, copying isn’t always infringement (among other things, not everything is copyrightable, and parody and commentary are generally not infringement), most people and entities don’t have access to every product ever made to compare uploads to, less popular or low-quality works also get infringed on and are no less protected by copyright, noninfringing cases may also involve large quantities of content and/or be available for very low prices or even for free, and even popular works may be uploaded to new places (how many times have Skyrim, GTA V, Super Mario Bros., and Sonic the Hedgehog been rereleased?).
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Copyright checks only need to make the business case for piracy not worth it for the pirates. I.e. focus can easily be on the cases where pirates are getting most of their profit from.
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Going by the fact that the Pirate Bay still exists, the business case for piracy is, in fact, still very much worth it. You lose, Meshpage.
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