When it comes to the Oracle case, I think Oracle better hope they lose their appeal. Remember that they published their own implementation of the AWS S3 APIs when they started offering their own S3-compatible service, so if they win against Google then Amazon can sue them on the same grounds and ask the judge to block any Oracle arguments that are contrary to the ruling against Google.
I think there's a difference between "counterfeit" and "infringing on trademark". Counterfeit strongly implies that the copy looks very similar to and is intended to be mistaken for the original. Counterfeit US dollar bills, for instance, wouldn't be very good counterfeit if they were printed in bright orange ink instead of green and grey. The same with knock-offs, they only serve their purpose when they look similar enough to the real thing to pass themselves off as it at least at first glance. It seems to me that even if the buyer knows it's a knock-off, it's still trading on the reputation of the product it looks like and that's the central problem trademarks are intended to help solve.
I'd argue that if it can't be confused with the original then it's not counterfeit or a knock-off by definition, and if it can be then the rest is just rules-lawyering.
There's additional constraints on "lewd" though. Otherwise there'd be no such thing as not-lewd material. Remember Rule 34, it exists for a reason. Describe any image, any at all, and you can find at least 2 people out there who view it as sexually arousing. No exceptions. To be considered "lewd" the material also has to meet objective criteria about how a (theoretical) reasonable person would view it, which takes context into account (an outfit that would be incredibly inappropriate in a high-school hallway wouldn't raise an eyebrow at the beach in summer).
Be interesting to pull together clips from "Toddlers and Tiaras" and start a campaign targeted at Texas asking "If we can prosecute the distributors of this stuff, why aren't we prosecuting the producers of the same thing who live right here in the US where we have jurisdiction?".
Have to wonder if China will in fact compromise. Seems like they've got no reason to do so, and lots of reasons not to (not least of which is giving Trump a big PR black eye). There's just too many easy ways around any US "ban" of the app.
Barr's issue with them isn't so much that those cities won't protect the citizenry, but that they've decided that the biggest threat the citizenry needs protected against is law enforcement.
One major fault here: most states do cross-check the address you have to give on your voter-registration form. They have to do that to determine what precinct you reside in. And what database do they usually use to validate addresses? The same database used by merchants and shipping companies to normalize and validate addresses for shipping. So, your fake person has to use a real, valid street address. It needs to be a residential address too, because one of the things those databases return is whether it's a residential or commercial address (different shipping rates to each) and voters aren't supposed to reside at a commercial address. It's not going to take too many fake people to generate a suspiciously high number of collisions with addresses of real registered voters. That leads to checking the SSN against the tax databases which have nationwide coverage to pick up on tax and wage fraud, and the whole scheme comes unraveled.
That and any project manager can tell you that your chances of keeping even a couple of dozen people in a single office on-task and following the plan for a confidential project without blabbing for even a month are pretty much nil. Tens of thousands of people across the entire country over the course of years... winning the lottery's a sure thing by comparison.
The problem is likely that this involves the OFAC lists. The government's rules about those are pretty strict and not very sensible. If the OFAC servers return a hit, PayPal likely doesn't have the option of second-guessing it. By the same token, though, PayPal shouldn't properly be running the name/description of merchandise items through the OFAC query process. The name of the purchaser, yes, possibly the name of the supplier or manufacturer if known, but not item names/descriptions.
I'd hope Amazon was applying this already, but Bayesian filtering worked pretty well (still works pretty well, in fact) for separating spam from non-spam email. The Kindle store should be able to provide good-quality large samples of both actual books (pull from known authors and books which have been published on dead trees) and generated content, I'd honestly start by taking those samples and using them to initialize bogofilter, then feed it a selection of test books and see how accurate it's classification was.
After classification, there's some heuristics that can be applied. If an author account is long-standing and doesn't have any scam-content flags, it's probably safe to just list any new books regardless of what the filter says. If they're uploading a lot of works over a short time-frame, check whether that author's got hardcopy-published works. If they do (or they don't and the filter says they're mostly or all scam content) it's probably safe to just go with the filter results, otherwise flag the lot for manual review because it's anomalous behavior.
Major difference between user-posted content and ads: the advertiser (or ad network) can't just go in and drop it's ads into the site's pages, the site has to enter into an agreement with the advertiser (or network) and modify it's pages to display the ads. In the process the site has to evaluate the kinds of ads that will be supplied and decide whether they want to carry them or not and, through the contract, has control over what is supposed to be displayed. If an ad network is known to distribute content the site doesn't want to be liable for, the site only has to decide not to use them and the content won't ever appear. This makes the difference.
The purpose of Section 230 isn't to permit sites to carry any kind of content without liability. It's to permit sites to allow user-posted content without requiring the kind of item-by-item review that would make carrying that content a practical impossibility. Advertising contract terms don't involve such difficulties in reviewing them.
How would the FCC go about reasserting it's authority? By doing the same thing Pai did: asserting it's authority (given to it by Congress) to decide which title to regulate broadband under. It'd mean going through the analysis and review process again, but given the state of broadband it should be easy enough to satisfy the administrative requirements to rule that broadband should return to Title II classification and regulation.
This is a major contributor to the decline of U.S. schools. Disruptive students bring down the quality of learning for everyone in the class.
Oddly the most disruptive students I knew when going through school were the ones the teachers and the administrators and the SROs vehemently refuse to do anything about. They'd much rather target the targets of those disruptive students. Getting rid of the SROs will at worst not change anything because the teachers and administrators still won't do anything about the disruptive students and will continue to harass the students being victimized by the disruptive ones.
The basic problem is that the administrators, the school board members, the rest of the adults involved are highly likely to have come from the same disruptive group of students: the highly social, popular, "in" crowd, the football and other sports teams, the Biffs of the world.
I look on his positions as this: the rest of the politicians are just as bad about it so choosing him isn't any worse, and at least he's an improvement in other areas and is more likely than a lot of them to be educable. I'll take what I can get.
No law or copyright concern, just a practical one: academic recognition requires that papers be published in well-established journals, and those journals will simply refuse to publish papers if the paper was previously published by this new publisher you suggest.
It's fallout from the abuses. So many entities abused cookies for so many bad things and refused to do anything about user anger or even admit they were doing it that the response turned from "Please stop the abuse." to "We find your terms acceptable." (in response to the abusers' position that allowing even benign cookies without restrictions means having to allow any and all cookies without restriction).
One wonders. The news organizations didn't create the material behind their stories. If they carry a story about how person A acted and what they said, it was person A who performed the actions and declaimed the statements. Without that, the news organization would have had nothing to write a story about. So if Google owes the news organization for linking to their story (profiting off what the news organization created, supposedly), then isn't person A owed compensation for the use of their performance by the news organization in the article? The news organization is, after all, profiting off what person A created.
Let's take it a bit further. When a news site carries it's own ads, it profits when I view a page and profits further when I click on an ad. But the news site didn't perform the actions that yielded the profit, I did. Since the news site is profiting off of someone else's performance of actions, don't they owe that someone else compensation for the use of their performance?
If the news organizations really want to make this the rule, are they willing to accept all the consequences of having that rule enforced?
The captain wasn't the one who put it in the public eye. His letter went only to his chain of command (albeit the part of his chain of command higher up than his immediate superior). It was someone in that chain of command who leaked the letter to the press. The captain's merely the scapegoat so SecNav can avoid having to discipline/fire someone with political connections.
On the post: An Update On The Pretty Crummy Supreme Court Term So Far On Issues We Care About
When it comes to the Oracle case, I think Oracle better hope they lose their appeal. Remember that they published their own implementation of the AWS S3 APIs when they started offering their own S3-compatible service, so if they win against Google then Amazon can sue them on the same grounds and ask the judge to block any Oracle arguments that are contrary to the ruling against Google.
On the post: If Something Is Advertised As A Knockoff Product... Is It No Longer Counterfeiting?
I think there's a difference between "counterfeit" and "infringing on trademark". Counterfeit strongly implies that the copy looks very similar to and is intended to be mistaken for the original. Counterfeit US dollar bills, for instance, wouldn't be very good counterfeit if they were printed in bright orange ink instead of green and grey. The same with knock-offs, they only serve their purpose when they look similar enough to the real thing to pass themselves off as it at least at first glance. It seems to me that even if the buyer knows it's a knock-off, it's still trading on the reputation of the product it looks like and that's the central problem trademarks are intended to help solve.
I'd argue that if it can't be confused with the original then it's not counterfeit or a knock-off by definition, and if it can be then the rest is just rules-lawyering.
On the post: Texas Grand Jury Indicts Netflix For 'Lewd Exhibition' Of Children In Its Movie 'Cuties'
Re: Re: It ain't lewd, you just misunderstood
There's additional constraints on "lewd" though. Otherwise there'd be no such thing as not-lewd material. Remember Rule 34, it exists for a reason. Describe any image, any at all, and you can find at least 2 people out there who view it as sexually arousing. No exceptions. To be considered "lewd" the material also has to meet objective criteria about how a (theoretical) reasonable person would view it, which takes context into account (an outfit that would be incredibly inappropriate in a high-school hallway wouldn't raise an eyebrow at the beach in summer).
On the post: Texas Grand Jury Indicts Netflix For 'Lewd Exhibition' Of Children In Its Movie 'Cuties'
Reality TV
Be interesting to pull together clips from "Toddlers and Tiaras" and start a campaign targeted at Texas asking "If we can prosecute the distributors of this stuff, why aren't we prosecuting the producers of the same thing who live right here in the US where we have jurisdiction?".
On the post: China Calls TikTok Deal 'Extortion'; Says It Will Not Approve
Have to wonder if China will in fact compromise. Seems like they've got no reason to do so, and lots of reasons not to (not least of which is giving Trump a big PR black eye). There's just too many easy ways around any US "ban" of the app.
On the post: DOJ Releases Its List Of 'Anarchy' Jurisdictions The President Thinks Should Be Blocked From Receiving Federal Funds
Barr's issue with them isn't so much that those cities won't protect the citizenry, but that they've decided that the biggest threat the citizenry needs protected against is law enforcement.
On the post: Trump's Campaign Is Engaged In Lawsuits All Over The Country To Try To Make Safe Voting More Difficult
Re: Re:
One major fault here: most states do cross-check the address you have to give on your voter-registration form. They have to do that to determine what precinct you reside in. And what database do they usually use to validate addresses? The same database used by merchants and shipping companies to normalize and validate addresses for shipping. So, your fake person has to use a real, valid street address. It needs to be a residential address too, because one of the things those databases return is whether it's a residential or commercial address (different shipping rates to each) and voters aren't supposed to reside at a commercial address. It's not going to take too many fake people to generate a suspiciously high number of collisions with addresses of real registered voters. That leads to checking the SSN against the tax databases which have nationwide coverage to pick up on tax and wage fraud, and the whole scheme comes unraveled.
That and any project manager can tell you that your chances of keeping even a couple of dozen people in a single office on-task and following the plan for a confidential project without blabbing for even a month are pretty much nil. Tens of thousands of people across the entire country over the course of years... winning the lottery's a sure thing by comparison.
On the post: PayPal Blocks Purchases Of Tardigrade Merchandise For Potentially Violating US Sanctions Laws
The problem is likely that this involves the OFAC lists. The government's rules about those are pretty strict and not very sensible. If the OFAC servers return a hit, PayPal likely doesn't have the option of second-guessing it. By the same token, though, PayPal shouldn't properly be running the name/description of merchandise items through the OFAC query process. The name of the purchaser, yes, possibly the name of the supplier or manufacturer if known, but not item names/descriptions.
On the post: Would You Believe That Infamous Copyright Troll Richard Liebowitz Is In Trouble Again?
In trouble again? Looks to me more like "in trouble still".
On the post: Content Moderation Case Study: Amazon Alters Publishing Rules To Deter Kindle Unlimited Scammers (April 2016)
Bayesian filtering
I'd hope Amazon was applying this already, but Bayesian filtering worked pretty well (still works pretty well, in fact) for separating spam from non-spam email. The Kindle store should be able to provide good-quality large samples of both actual books (pull from known authors and books which have been published on dead trees) and generated content, I'd honestly start by taking those samples and using them to initialize
bogofilter, then feed it a selection of test books and see how accurate it's classification was.After classification, there's some heuristics that can be applied. If an author account is long-standing and doesn't have any scam-content flags, it's probably safe to just list any new books regardless of what the filter says. If they're uploading a lot of works over a short time-frame, check whether that author's got hardcopy-published works. If they do (or they don't and the filter says they're mostly or all scam content) it's probably safe to just go with the filter results, otherwise flag the lot for manual review because it's anomalous behavior.
On the post: It Doesn't Make Sense To Treat Ads The Same As User Generated Content
Re: But... Wha... Why?
Major difference between user-posted content and ads: the advertiser (or ad network) can't just go in and drop it's ads into the site's pages, the site has to enter into an agreement with the advertiser (or network) and modify it's pages to display the ads. In the process the site has to evaluate the kinds of ads that will be supplied and decide whether they want to carry them or not and, through the contract, has control over what is supposed to be displayed. If an ad network is known to distribute content the site doesn't want to be liable for, the site only has to decide not to use them and the content won't ever appear. This makes the difference.
The purpose of Section 230 isn't to permit sites to carry any kind of content without liability. It's to permit sites to allow user-posted content without requiring the kind of item-by-item review that would make carrying that content a practical impossibility. Advertising contract terms don't involve such difficulties in reviewing them.
On the post: Trump, Big Telecom Continue Quest To Ban States From Protecting Broadband Consumers
Re: Curiosity
How would the FCC go about reasserting it's authority? By doing the same thing Pai did: asserting it's authority (given to it by Congress) to decide which title to regulate broadband under. It'd mean going through the analysis and review process again, but given the state of broadband it should be easy enough to satisfy the administrative requirements to rule that broadband should return to Title II classification and regulation.
On the post: DOJ Finally Uses FOSTA, Over Two Years Later... To Shut Down A Site Used By Sex Workers
https://newsone.com/3965112/milwaukee-missing-black-girls-found-report/
From how the police reacted I don't think they're actually interested in finding victims of sex trafficking.
On the post: Minneapolis City Council Votes Unanimously To Disband Its Police Department
Re: 'If you're not willing to compromise then neither are we.'
"Over our dead bodies."
"I find your terms... acceptable."
"... wait, what?"
On the post: More Schools Are Ending Contracts With Cops Following Protests Over The Killing Of George Floyd
Re: About Discipline
Oddly the most disruptive students I knew when going through school were the ones the teachers and the administrators and the SROs vehemently refuse to do anything about. They'd much rather target the targets of those disruptive students. Getting rid of the SROs will at worst not change anything because the teachers and administrators still won't do anything about the disruptive students and will continue to harass the students being victimized by the disruptive ones.
The basic problem is that the administrators, the school board members, the rest of the adults involved are highly likely to have come from the same disruptive group of students: the highly social, popular, "in" crowd, the football and other sports teams, the Biffs of the world.
On the post: Why Doesn't Joe Biden Have Any Tech Policy Advisors?
I look on his positions as this: the rest of the politicians are just as bad about it so choosing him isn't any worse, and at least he's an improvement in other areas and is more likely than a lot of them to be educable. I'll take what I can get.
On the post: After Taming Open Access, Academic Publishing Giants Now Seek To Assimilate The World Of Preprints
Re: Fuck Elsevier
No law or copyright concern, just a practical one: academic recognition requires that papers be published in well-established journals, and those journals will simply refuse to publish papers if the paper was previously published by this new publisher you suggest.
On the post: Yes, This Site Uses Cookies, Because Nearly All Sites Use Cookies, And We're Notifying You Because We're Told We Have To
It's fallout from the abuses. So many entities abused cookies for so many bad things and refused to do anything about user anger or even admit they were doing it that the response turned from "Please stop the abuse." to "We find your terms acceptable." (in response to the abusers' position that allowing even benign cookies without restrictions means having to allow any and all cookies without restriction).
On the post: Australia Gives Up Any Pretense: Pushes Straight Up Tax On Facebook & Google To Pay News Orgs
One wonders. The news organizations didn't create the material behind their stories. If they carry a story about how person A acted and what they said, it was person A who performed the actions and declaimed the statements. Without that, the news organization would have had nothing to write a story about. So if Google owes the news organization for linking to their story (profiting off what the news organization created, supposedly), then isn't person A owed compensation for the use of their performance by the news organization in the article? The news organization is, after all, profiting off what person A created.
Let's take it a bit further. When a news site carries it's own ads, it profits when I view a page and profits further when I click on an ad. But the news site didn't perform the actions that yielded the profit, I did. Since the news site is profiting off of someone else's performance of actions, don't they owe that someone else compensation for the use of their performance?
If the news organizations really want to make this the rule, are they willing to accept all the consequences of having that rule enforced?
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re:
The captain wasn't the one who put it in the public eye. His letter went only to his chain of command (albeit the part of his chain of command higher up than his immediate superior). It was someone in that chain of command who leaked the letter to the press. The captain's merely the scapegoat so SecNav can avoid having to discipline/fire someone with political connections.
I also suspect the leak was very deliberate.
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