Ok then, what's your analysis of the fair use tests that suggest that the use isn't covered? Ungoofy it for us, please.
Considering that satire/parody is normally considered to be covered by fair use, I don't think that hoping for controversy (even if that is the case here) forms any part of a ruling against fair use.
The mention of fair use is in passing, and certainly not central to the story - which is would be if the guy was suing content from NBC.
Really, the story should be "photographer doesn't understand Fair Use, unwisely sics lawyers on big media". Instead, it's pretty much a lame attempt to slam NBC (and support torrentfreak's biased coverage).
The mention of fair use isn't central to the story, because fair use doesn't really have any bearing on the story.
If NBC had attributed the photos correctly, and/or if they had mentioned their fair use claim when contacted by the photographer, rather than falsely claiming that they had obtained permission for use, then this might be a story about fair use.
"NBC and friends repeatedly claim that not only is piracy bad, but apparently piracy is easy to identify and easy to avoid by just doing the right thing... except oops."
NBC cannot stop someone from filing a lawsuit that may turn out to be frivolous. Fair use is the fine stripe of grey between the black and white of copyright, and journalism (especially big media journalism) is one of the clearer examples. It's an equally funny thing then that the lawyer claims to be well versed in copyright. You would think that he would have advised his client that he might not have a leg to stand on.
Emphasis mine... because you've almost hit on the point of the article here. Sure, NBC did the wrong thing by misattributing the photo and not responding when the photographer tried to contact them, but does this really justify a lawsuit? Remember that this is the normal that the likes of NBC are trying to promote, if not extend.
My feeling is with the tabled turned the other way, the story would read about the horrible copyright bully trying to stop some guy from tweeting images.
And I have a feeling that you'd be here telling us that there's no problem, that the guy will be able to defend his fair use claims in court, and if his use was really fair then no foul, right?
I stick with my point too, the guy would likely have gotten way more action with a DMCA notice to Twitter...
So the guy tries to contact the company directly to talk about the use of his photos, but you think that the thing he did wrong was going to the courts rather than taking down the Today Show? He didn't want the photos down, he just wants to be paid for their use.
Protip: When an article is talking about how broken the system is, it doesn't necessarily help to bring up another broken part of the system.
" But, almost without fail, we find examples of copyright maximalists being accused of infringement themselves."
Of course you do, because they are actually out there producing tons of new content every day and sometimes mistakes happen or misunderstandings occur. What is objectionable here isn't that someone clearly didn't understand what they were doing, but the lack of response by NBC on the subject.
NBC's actions in response to the accusation aren't really the point of the article. The point is that "Copyright maximalists like to assume that infringement is a black or white issue, that it's obvious and that it's obviously "bad." But, almost without fail, we find examples of copyright maximalists being accused of infringement themselves."
NBC and friends repeatedly claim that not only is piracy bad, but apparently piracy is easy to identify and easy to avoid by just doing the right thing... except oops. Rather than tightening up all of the rules that nobody but a copyright lawyer can follow anyway, or increasing the punishments that are already so far beyond reasonable that they are a joke... perhaps everybody would benefit from unwinding this knot a bit?
How much? I don't know. But it would be nice if it was even an option to discuss, rather than the non-stop ratcheting of stronger IP protections and damages. I mean, if "producing tons of new content every day" means that "sometimes mistakes happen or misunderstandings occur" then shouldn't the law take that into account?
It seems to skip over the concept of fair use in Journalism (you know, the fair use you guys trot out all the time for everyone else, but apparently NBC doesn't get any!).
You mean the bit that says "To be clear, NBC may have a reasonable fair use defense here, but that's not what it claimed when originally approached at all (though it likely will in the lawsuit)."?
In my comment I meant "building on the open results" as publishing research using the open results as a basis. I guess it could also mean developing a product or mechanism using the research and using it internally, but I guess I figured that such use would by definition be allowed by open science, so I wasn't commenting on that specifically.
Rephrasing, open science sounds more like a BSD license than a GPL license to me.
Somebody has a not too well hidden agenda?
I don't try to hide my agenda :-) I don't like GPL. I tolerate its existence, much as I tolerate the existence of evangelical Christianity, radical Islam and telemarketers - their prevalence makes me sad, but other than offering my own point of view I'm not going to do anything about them.
Go ahead and try to defend proprietary.
I'm not a huge fan of proprietary either, though it doesn't make me sad like GPL does. Nobody tries to pretend that proprietary is anything but selfish.
For myself, BSD/MIT is my preferred license, but even better would be for copyright to not apply to code at all. I recognise the creative aspects of programming, but trying to apply copyright to code really doesn't seem to solve any problem that treating the code as a trade secret doesn't solve better. That may sound like being pro-propietary, but I think the quantity of code that would benefit from being a secret more than by being shared is infinitesimal.
I guess you missed Linus' tirade about Nvidia. He was bending over backwards to tolerate their crap for years just to try to co-exist, but damn, sooner or later enough becomes enough!
I'm aware there was a weird situation with nvidia drivers in linux for quite a while, involving the drivers only being released under a proprietary license or something... but never delved much into the details.
I wonder how it would have worked out if the GPL never existed, and the Linux kernel had always been under a BSD-style license. There wouldn't have been any basis for a flare-up over a driver, but would we be in a better or a worse situation over it?
Put another way, have more companies embraced open source because of restrictive licenses such as GPL, or permissive licenses such as BSD/Apache/Mozilla/Eclipse? Curious thought exercise, I suspect that each person's first answer will swing towards their license of preference.
I'm really not a Stallman or GPL "fanboi", though I do strongly sympathize with his point of view.
I find his point of view far too extreme to sympathise with. Some of his ideals are good, as are some of his goals, but his methods and opinions are anathaema to me.
I actually prefer the BSD license. I want this stuff to get out there to everyone who can benefit from it, and if that allows a few greedy jerks to lock stuff up by creating a proprietary version of it, so what? We don't have to use it. We haven't been robbed of anything.
This is almost exactly my point of view, as well.
It also reminds me of a common misconception of the GPL - it's a share-alike license, not a share-back license. The originator of the GPL code is not promised anything back by anyone taking, modifying and redistributing their code; the license merely promises the source code to be available to anyone who receives binaries built from that code (oversimplified). You can still lock up modifications to GPL code by never releasing the derived product externally.
Way back when, I had no problem with MySQL being both free and proprietary at the same time depending on what the user wanted to do with it. Companies like to have a commercial operation behind the tools they use. They get a place to submit bug reports to. I didn't need that. I'm grateful they didn't force onto me features I neither wanted nor needed. The combination created better software in the end, for everybody.
Dual licensing is good, but not particularly relevant to the discussion - you still have to choose a particular license and abide by the rules of that license. The fact that an alternative license is available doesn't make the GPL license any better.
It may even be possible that the GPL is actually the best non-commercial license option in this specific case, although it technically does allow for commercial use as long as the source is provided as well.
With the GPL library, you're SOL.
Are you not aware that they have another license specifically for libraries, just to get around this "viral" stuff?
Sure, the LGPL may allow you to distribute in the same way as any other decent proprietary license, but you're still SOL with the GPL library.
I like how you consider that to be a "solution", let alone easy.
I also like how you consider the alternative to the GPL to be proprietary. At the risk of being stalkerish, and assuming these are the same Mason Wheelers, he seems to prefer the MPL: https://code.google.com/archive/p/turbu/
Obviously, if there was a proprietary library to perform the required function and it didn't offer a suitable license, then the problem would be exactly the same. However, if the library was offered under a permissive open source license then everybody wins - the program gets the feature it's after, users get the feature quicker and likely with fewer bugs, and the library maintainer is more likely to receive feedback and bug fixes because the library is being used.
To me, the GPL is just another form of proprietary license... Except it has even worse licensing terms that most other proprietary licenses, if you're in favour of permissive open source licensing - at least with commercial proprietary licenses, you can pay for a suitable license and ship it with your open software in binary form. With the GPL library, you're SOL.
Back to the article, it's great to see this kind of public announcement, I hope they can stick to it and deliver good results.
As for insisting that collaborators "also have to follow open-science principles for that project", that doesn't seem particularly viral to me. It's just the university saying that they are committing to open science, and they won't compromise even in projects requiring collaboration. It doesn't sound like they are pushing anyone else to follow open science, except in projects where they want to work with MNI.
Unlike GPL, anyone can build on the open results without requiring those derivative results to be open, though no doubt MNI would prefer openness.
Maybe that's some kind of infectious openness, but it seems to require constant close contact to maintain the "infection".
I tend to agree with you on all your points except this one:
"If only they hadn't gone with what's basically the worst possible way to implement their ideas, the world would probably be a noticeably better place today for it."
What-if can be a fun game to play... I'd suggest that the extreme views of the FSF and some of the debates it got into publicly helped to raise awareness of "open source" in general amongst developers. Without the extra noise, I suspect that open source would have seen slower growth.
Would we have a better result now though? While I personally would prefer for the FSF to see that the time for its zealotry* has passed and to start actually sharing nicely with the rest of the development community, it doesn't much harm me to either avoid all GPL projects, or treat anything I build with GPL links as purely personal projects that I'll never release.
I'm happy to offer patches and such to a GPL project, but darned if I'll release any of my work in a license not of my choice.
As for tools I use but don't look at the code, I don't care in the slightest what license they were developed under. In that sense, BSD and Linux are peas in a pod to me. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera... whatever works best is best for me.
* - IMO "zealous" is a better term than "evangelical"
I'm sorry, but a non-smart small tv hooked up to a computer isn't an alternative to a non-smart big tv. In fact, it kind of fails both requirements.
"way bigger than existed in the 80s or were common in the 90s"
You know that resolutions and picture quality have gone through the roof since then too? Don't presume that everyone has the same requirements or circumstances as you, and will be happy with the same compromise.
@Ninja, I'm sure you'll have already had advice, but for non-smart and big you could consider a projector. Quality, resolution, running costs have all improved over the last decade. I definitely feel your pain about near-complete lack of high quality large tvs without "smart" features.
Just had a thought while reading an article here about the MPAA... Hollywood seems to have a voice in the whitehouse, why not get them to help in the "war on encryption"?
Forget about insecure banking, nobody really understands that stuff anyway, or what the ramifications really mean. Way too vague. Try telling Hollywood that it's going to become illegal to use encryption to stop people from copying movies and TV shows, and we'll see how quickly the politicians get educated!
I wonder how many days it actually took to be cracked, vs how many days nobody was even trying.
I think the best form of "uncrackable" DRM is to release something unannounced that nobody is interested in. I bet I could get a longer "uncracked" streak than just 424 days ;-)
iirc Denuvo isn't really a DRM but more of a package around the DRM that blocks debugging and stuff like that. Like a reversed sandbox, it stops you from getting in instead of out. So the DRM itself still dies in a day or two but getting there is the problem.
Sounds to me like Denuvo is DRM by definition. There may be more layers of DRM inside, but what is DRM other than "it stops you from getting in"?
Re: Re: I'm sure they are just using the scrooge mcduck counting method
You missed the joke...
1 for me... I hand me 1, now I have 1 1 for you... I hand you 1, now you have 1 2 for me... I hand me 2, now I have 3 2 for you... I hand you 1, now you have 2 3 for me... I hand me 3, now I have 6 3 for you... I hand you 1, now you have 3 4 for me... I hand me 4, now I have 10 ... etc
On the post: Sony Music Issues Takedown On Copyright Lecture About Music Copyrights By Harvard Law Professor
Re: Re: Re:
Considering that satire/parody is normally considered to be covered by fair use, I don't think that hoping for controversy (even if that is the case here) forms any part of a ruling against fair use.
On the post: Our Response To Yet Another Bogus Legal Threat From Australia: Go Learn Some Law
Re: Re: Re: Popcorn [was Re: ]
Sue the legal system!
On the post: Our Response To Yet Another Bogus Legal Threat From Australia: Go Learn Some Law
Re: Plenty worse things than Gangster...
Also, please don't extrapolate from this lawyer to the rest of the country.
On the post: NBC, Filthy Pirates, Sued Over Use Of Photographer's Work Without Permission
Re: Re: Re:
The mention of fair use isn't central to the story, because fair use doesn't really have any bearing on the story.
If NBC had attributed the photos correctly, and/or if they had mentioned their fair use claim when contacted by the photographer, rather than falsely claiming that they had obtained permission for use, then this might be a story about fair use.
Emphasis mine... because you've almost hit on the point of the article here. Sure, NBC did the wrong thing by misattributing the photo and not responding when the photographer tried to contact them, but does this really justify a lawsuit? Remember that this is the normal that the likes of NBC are trying to promote, if not extend.
And I have a feeling that you'd be here telling us that there's no problem, that the guy will be able to defend his fair use claims in court, and if his use was really fair then no foul, right?
So the guy tries to contact the company directly to talk about the use of his photos, but you think that the thing he did wrong was going to the courts rather than taking down the Today Show? He didn't want the photos down, he just wants to be paid for their use.
Protip: When an article is talking about how broken the system is, it doesn't necessarily help to bring up another broken part of the system.
On the post: NBC, Filthy Pirates, Sued Over Use Of Photographer's Work Without Permission
Re:
NBC's actions in response to the accusation aren't really the point of the article. The point is that "Copyright maximalists like to assume that infringement is a black or white issue, that it's obvious and that it's obviously "bad." But, almost without fail, we find examples of copyright maximalists being accused of infringement themselves."
NBC and friends repeatedly claim that not only is piracy bad, but apparently piracy is easy to identify and easy to avoid by just doing the right thing... except oops. Rather than tightening up all of the rules that nobody but a copyright lawyer can follow anyway, or increasing the punishments that are already so far beyond reasonable that they are a joke... perhaps everybody would benefit from unwinding this knot a bit?
How much? I don't know. But it would be nice if it was even an option to discuss, rather than the non-stop ratcheting of stronger IP protections and damages. I mean, if "producing tons of new content every day" means that "sometimes mistakes happen or misunderstandings occur" then shouldn't the law take that into account?
You mean the bit that says "To be clear, NBC may have a reasonable fair use defense here, but that's not what it claimed when originally approached at all (though it likely will in the lawsuit)."?
On the post: Beyond Open Access And Open Data: Open Science -- And No Patents
Re: Re:
Rephrasing, open science sounds more like a BSD license than a GPL license to me.
I don't try to hide my agenda :-) I don't like GPL. I tolerate its existence, much as I tolerate the existence of evangelical Christianity, radical Islam and telemarketers - their prevalence makes me sad, but other than offering my own point of view I'm not going to do anything about them.
I'm not a huge fan of proprietary either, though it doesn't make me sad like GPL does. Nobody tries to pretend that proprietary is anything but selfish.
For myself, BSD/MIT is my preferred license, but even better would be for copyright to not apply to code at all. I recognise the creative aspects of programming, but trying to apply copyright to code really doesn't seem to solve any problem that treating the code as a trade secret doesn't solve better. That may sound like being pro-propietary, but I think the quantity of code that would benefit from being a secret more than by being shared is infinitesimal.
On the post: Beyond Open Access And Open Data: Open Science -- And No Patents
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm aware there was a weird situation with nvidia drivers in linux for quite a while, involving the drivers only being released under a proprietary license or something... but never delved much into the details.
I wonder how it would have worked out if the GPL never existed, and the Linux kernel had always been under a BSD-style license. There wouldn't have been any basis for a flare-up over a driver, but would we be in a better or a worse situation over it?
Put another way, have more companies embraced open source because of restrictive licenses such as GPL, or permissive licenses such as BSD/Apache/Mozilla/Eclipse? Curious thought exercise, I suspect that each person's first answer will swing towards their license of preference.
On the post: Beyond Open Access And Open Data: Open Science -- And No Patents
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I find his point of view far too extreme to sympathise with. Some of his ideals are good, as are some of his goals, but his methods and opinions are anathaema to me.
This is almost exactly my point of view, as well.
It also reminds me of a common misconception of the GPL - it's a share-alike license, not a share-back license. The originator of the GPL code is not promised anything back by anyone taking, modifying and redistributing their code; the license merely promises the source code to be available to anyone who receives binaries built from that code (oversimplified). You can still lock up modifications to GPL code by never releasing the derived product externally.
Dual licensing is good, but not particularly relevant to the discussion - you still have to choose a particular license and abide by the rules of that license. The fact that an alternative license is available doesn't make the GPL license any better.
It may even be possible that the GPL is actually the best non-commercial license option in this specific case, although it technically does allow for commercial use as long as the source is provided as well.
Sure, the LGPL may allow you to distribute in the same way as any other decent proprietary license, but you're still SOL with the GPL library.
On the post: Beyond Open Access And Open Data: Open Science -- And No Patents
Re: Re:
I also like how you consider the alternative to the GPL to be proprietary. At the risk of being stalkerish, and assuming these are the same Mason Wheelers, he seems to prefer the MPL: https://code.google.com/archive/p/turbu/
Obviously, if there was a proprietary library to perform the required function and it didn't offer a suitable license, then the problem would be exactly the same. However, if the library was offered under a permissive open source license then everybody wins - the program gets the feature it's after, users get the feature quicker and likely with fewer bugs, and the library maintainer is more likely to receive feedback and bug fixes because the library is being used.
To me, the GPL is just another form of proprietary license... Except it has even worse licensing terms that most other proprietary licenses, if you're in favour of permissive open source licensing - at least with commercial proprietary licenses, you can pay for a suitable license and ship it with your open software in binary form. With the GPL library, you're SOL.
On the post: Beyond Open Access And Open Data: Open Science -- And No Patents
As for insisting that collaborators "also have to follow open-science principles for that project", that doesn't seem particularly viral to me. It's just the university saying that they are committing to open science, and they won't compromise even in projects requiring collaboration. It doesn't sound like they are pushing anyone else to follow open science, except in projects where they want to work with MNI.
Unlike GPL, anyone can build on the open results without requiring those derivative results to be open, though no doubt MNI would prefer openness.
Maybe that's some kind of infectious openness, but it seems to require constant close contact to maintain the "infection".
On the post: Beyond Open Access And Open Data: Open Science -- And No Patents
Re:
"If only they hadn't gone with what's basically the worst possible way to implement their ideas, the world would probably be a noticeably better place today for it."
What-if can be a fun game to play... I'd suggest that the extreme views of the FSF and some of the debates it got into publicly helped to raise awareness of "open source" in general amongst developers. Without the extra noise, I suspect that open source would have seen slower growth.
Would we have a better result now though? While I personally would prefer for the FSF to see that the time for its zealotry* has passed and to start actually sharing nicely with the rest of the development community, it doesn't much harm me to either avoid all GPL projects, or treat anything I build with GPL links as purely personal projects that I'll never release.
I'm happy to offer patches and such to a GPL project, but darned if I'll release any of my work in a license not of my choice.
As for tools I use but don't look at the code, I don't care in the slightest what license they were developed under. In that sense, BSD and Linux are peas in a pod to me. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera... whatever works best is best for me.
* - IMO "zealous" is a better term than "evangelical"
On the post: Nest Thermostat Goes From 'Internet Of Things' Darling To Cautionary Tale
Re: Re:
"way bigger than existed in the 80s or were common in the 90s"
You know that resolutions and picture quality have gone through the roof since then too? Don't presume that everyone has the same requirements or circumstances as you, and will be happy with the same compromise.
@Ninja, I'm sure you'll have already had advice, but for non-smart and big you could consider a projector. Quality, resolution, running costs have all improved over the last decade. I definitely feel your pain about near-complete lack of high quality large tvs without "smart" features.
On the post: Senators Whine About FCC's 25 Mbps Broadband Standard, Insist Nobody Needs That Much Bandwidth
Re: This WAS Going To Be Avoided In Australia.....
The network of yesterday... tomorrow!
On the post: Hillary Clinton Continues To Say Ridiculous Things About Encryption... Without Ever Taking A Real Position
Forget about insecure banking, nobody really understands that stuff anyway, or what the ramifications really mean. Way too vague. Try telling Hollywood that it's going to become illegal to use encryption to stop people from copying movies and TV shows, and we'll see how quickly the politicians get educated!
On the post: Once Again, Piracy Is Destroying The Movie Industry... To Ever More Records At The Box Office
Re: Re:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130218/03033922013/bollywood-no-longer-worrying-about-pi racy-as-studios-keep-setting-new-records-box-office.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101222/ 04193712380/how-piracy-helped-establish-dominance-nigerian-films.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/artic les/20100406/1506438902.shtml
On the post: Once Again, Piracy Is Destroying The Movie Industry... To Ever More Records At The Box Office
Re: Real creators get angry at those who pirate their works
On the post: Game Cracking Group Predicts The End Of Cracking Because Of Better DRM
Re:
I think the best form of "uncrackable" DRM is to release something unannounced that nobody is interested in. I bet I could get a longer "uncracked" streak than just 424 days ;-)
On the post: Game Cracking Group Predicts The End Of Cracking Because Of Better DRM
Re: time...
Sounds to me like Denuvo is DRM by definition. There may be more layers of DRM inside, but what is DRM other than "it stops you from getting in"?
On the post: US Courts Administrative Office Sued Because PACER's Bad Math Is Overcharging Users
Re: Re: I'm sure they are just using the scrooge mcduck counting method
1 for me... I hand me 1, now I have 1
1 for you... I hand you 1, now you have 1
2 for me... I hand me 2, now I have 3
2 for you... I hand you 1, now you have 2
3 for me... I hand me 3, now I have 6
3 for you... I hand you 1, now you have 3
4 for me... I hand me 4, now I have 10
... etc
On the post: GQ And Forbes Go After Ad Blocker Users Rather Than Their Own Shitty Advertising Inventory
Re: Eh
Get over it.
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