I'm no big fan of ads, though auto-play videos of any kind do tend to cross my threshold. The trigger that pushed me to ad blocking is security - I'll be happy to remove my ad blocker once I can be sure that there's no way to inject malicious code via ads.
"If you see copyright as primarily an incentive to monetize your work"
I don't. You are missing the point entirely. Copyright defines ownership.
Actually, I think you're missing the point.
Copyright is primarily an incentive to produce copyrightable works in the absence of any other motivation.
If copyright didn't exist, of course we would still have new music, and paintings, and photography, and books - we had all of those (except photography) long before we had copyright. The apparent goal of copyright is to encourage the creation of more works, in an exchange that allows those works to eventually be used by anyone - there's not much difference to the people who were creating before copyright (and would create now without copyright), so it's only those others who are only creating because of copyright that see copyright as primarily an incentive to monetize their work. Everyone else sees copyright as primarily an incentive for more works to be available to the public.
Ownership of physical property is no different.
And yet it's nearly trivial to prevent you from relieving me of ownership of my physical property, and nearly impossible to prevent you from relieving me of ownership of my intangible property.
A book is physical property and can be limited to single ownership. A story is intangible, and there is no way to limit its ownership - once someone knows the story, it cannot voluntarily be forgotten. Digital goods make things tricky because you want to treat it like a physical object in the days when copying that object were hard...
Now we can share a book or a song as easily as a joke, and models based on the physical(-only) world just don't fit. Trying to make them fit regardless leads to the situation today - where people infringe on copyright as easily as they share a joke, and think as little of it. They maybe read about massive lawsuits against random people for something to do with copyright, but what does that have to do with them?
And an aside... When someone can be owned... I know this was a typo, but I found it a pretty funny one.
As for Google Books, the question remains - is digitizing the works transformative, or derivative?
Google Books is expanding the market for old books by making them discoverable. It does not substitute for the original product because there's no way to get the entire content of the scanned book. It directs the user to places to purchase the book, if it's available anywhere for sale.
The comparison to web indexing above is apt; why does anyone not want people to discover their work?
Put another way: If your craftsman sold a table for $1000, but got only $100 today and the rest due next month, and then he died, would his heirs be allowed to collect the other $900? Of course they would. The value of his work didn't disappear because he died, it still has to be paid for.
Sure, but that's contract law rather than copyright. I agree with you that copyright shouldn't end at the creator's death - something like 14 years on registration + 14 years on optional renewal makes more sense to me, and I very much doubt we'd lose much in the way of culture from people deciding they don't want to create any more because they are only offered 28 years of exclusivity... after which they can continue selling exactly as they did before but will simply have to compete with other copies (which may or may not appear).
Business models that are predicated on the notice system would fail rapidly if they could no longer hide behind this safe harbor system, and most of this problem would disappear pretty quickly.
Business models like remixing, parody and news?
What about all the cases where two parties create something building off the same public domain (or otherwise legitimate/licensed) source, and one party kicks the other party's content off the internet because they think it's infringing?
What you're suggesting may be possible if every creative work was spun from whole cloth, and never incorporated any element from any other creative work ever. In the world we live in? You're spitting into the wind.
For example, how many thousands of times does an artist have to tell YouTube that she didn't authorize anyone to post her indie film? If YouTube takes that first notice and uses it to prevent others from violating that artist's rights, how does that hurt the artist?
Your specific scenario does not hurt the artist. That very same technology that you are describing that YouTube has deployed? It will hurt many artists in exactly the same way that the DMCA already does, but even more.
Just search this site for examples of creators who have been locked out of their own content because of bogus DMCA claims. Here is one story to start you off.
Notwithstanding, what happens if the artist subsequently allows someone to post a portion of her film to YouTube? Or if someone posts a portion of her film in a manner covered by fair use? Should YouTube take the content down in this case? Do they need enough copyright judges* on staff to review the hours of footage published each second to ensure that each video is non-infringing?
*- at first I wrote lawyers here... but copyright lawyers are qualified only to argue whether a use is infringing of not. It takes a judge to determine the case.
I've always seen that term used to describe slowing down the transfer rate of the connection. So I would agree that technically, they aren't throttling.
And yet, if you read the article...
That's because T-Mobile appears to downgrade the data flow from ~12 Mbps down to something like 1.4 or 1.5 Mbps.
and from the EFF...
They confirmed that they don’t do any actual optimization of video streams other than reducing the bandwidth allocated to them (and relying on the provider to notice, and adapt the bitrate accordingly).
So technically, yeah, they are throttling. And then taking the credit for any upstream optimisation, to boot!
Re: Re: Re: “Criminals use cars and computers and guns”
Sorry, you said "will primarily impact bad people" while I responded "will only hurt bad actors"... I do think that any kind of ban will primarily impact good people rather than bad, even guns.
Unless you have a magic wand that will remove all guns from a (city? country? world?), as well as the knowledge of how to make new guns, anyway. If that's the case, then we can have a completely different conversation.
Re: Re: “Criminals use cars and computers and guns”
Ah. Now that's just wrong, and I say that as someone who thinks the second amendment is a stupid idea.
Trying to clamp down on guns at this point will be about as effective as trying to clamp down on encryption, for many of the same reasons. And the idea that clamping down on guns will only hurt bad actors is about as accurate as the idea that clamping down on encryption will only hurt bad actors.
Just because you don't see any constructive uses for guns doesn't mean that they don't exist. Would you ban archery, martial arts, knives, explosives, loud noises, strong acids, ...?
Not to dispute the rest of your comment, but your statement "By now pretty much everyone with any audience to speak of is on Patreon trying to make a buck" doesn't seem to hold water.
And there's the rub. Those people paid to be left alone, and unnamed. Finding out who they are to give them their money back may be the opposite of what they want, even if it may be to the greater good...
You mean you missed the bit in the middle where an angel dealt karmic vengeance on an EHS-denier by driving him crazy until he shot his own father? Pure gold, I tell you.
The bit where Wikipedia (and the entire internet) is a government agency was also quite informative. My mind reels at the conspiracy theories that come to light, looking back at the SOPA protests in that light.
I'm a little disappointed that the poster didn't offer any help to locate any of the thousands of studies that positively demonstrate EHS, but that the article is ignoring.
Maybe the simplest tl;dr takeaway from the whole comment is "EHS is like sensitive teeth". I really do recommend reading the angel bit, though. If it doesn't convince you that EHS exists, then you have no soul!
Generally, use of another’s trademark is permissible
Note that HBO was opposing waggawagga.tv's registration of their own trademark, not opposing waggawagga.tv's use of "It's not tv".
Seems to me like they could have avoided this whole brou-ha-ha by not trying to register the trademark themselves. I mean, now they potentially become the trademark trolls, needing to police (or license) anyone else using the phrase in Australia. Win for the little guy perhaps, but this doesn't seem like a win for the public. Not a loss, perhaps, but that's a low bar.
On the post: UK Government Spends Three Years And Large Sums Of Money To Avoid Revealing The Number '13'
Re: Re: Re: From the Government
On the post: GQ And Forbes Go After Ad Blocker Users Rather Than Their Own Shitty Advertising Inventory
Re:
I'm no big fan of ads, though auto-play videos of any kind do tend to cross my threshold. The trigger that pushed me to ad blocking is security - I'll be happy to remove my ad blocker once I can be sure that there's no way to inject malicious code via ads.
On the post: And Of Course: Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court To Overturn Fair Use Ruling On Google Books
Re: Re:
I don't. You are missing the point entirely. Copyright defines ownership.
Actually, I think you're missing the point.
Copyright is primarily an incentive to produce copyrightable works in the absence of any other motivation.
If copyright didn't exist, of course we would still have new music, and paintings, and photography, and books - we had all of those (except photography) long before we had copyright. The apparent goal of copyright is to encourage the creation of more works, in an exchange that allows those works to eventually be used by anyone - there's not much difference to the people who were creating before copyright (and would create now without copyright), so it's only those others who are only creating because of copyright that see copyright as primarily an incentive to monetize their work. Everyone else sees copyright as primarily an incentive for more works to be available to the public.
Ownership of physical property is no different.
And yet it's nearly trivial to prevent you from relieving me of ownership of my physical property, and nearly impossible to prevent you from relieving me of ownership of my intangible property.
A book is physical property and can be limited to single ownership. A story is intangible, and there is no way to limit its ownership - once someone knows the story, it cannot voluntarily be forgotten. Digital goods make things tricky because you want to treat it like a physical object in the days when copying that object were hard...
Now we can share a book or a song as easily as a joke, and models based on the physical(-only) world just don't fit. Trying to make them fit regardless leads to the situation today - where people infringe on copyright as easily as they share a joke, and think as little of it. They maybe read about massive lawsuits against random people for something to do with copyright, but what does that have to do with them?
And an aside...
When someone can be owned...
I know this was a typo, but I found it a pretty funny one.
On the post: And Of Course: Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court To Overturn Fair Use Ruling On Google Books
Re: Re: Re: Death and Values
Google Books is expanding the market for old books by making them discoverable. It does not substitute for the original product because there's no way to get the entire content of the scanned book. It directs the user to places to purchase the book, if it's available anywhere for sale.
The comparison to web indexing above is apt; why does anyone not want people to discover their work?
Put another way: If your craftsman sold a table for $1000, but got only $100 today and the rest due next month, and then he died, would his heirs be allowed to collect the other $900? Of course they would. The value of his work didn't disappear because he died, it still has to be paid for.
Sure, but that's contract law rather than copyright. I agree with you that copyright shouldn't end at the creator's death - something like 14 years on registration + 14 years on optional renewal makes more sense to me, and I very much doubt we'd lose much in the way of culture from people deciding they don't want to create any more because they are only offered 28 years of exclusivity... after which they can continue selling exactly as they did before but will simply have to compete with other copies (which may or may not appear).
On the post: US Copyright Office Asks For Public Comments On DMCA's Notice And Takedown
Re: The numbers add up
Business models like remixing, parody and news?
What about all the cases where two parties create something building off the same public domain (or otherwise legitimate/licensed) source, and one party kicks the other party's content off the internet because they think it's infringing?
What you're suggesting may be possible if every creative work was spun from whole cloth, and never incorporated any element from any other creative work ever. In the world we live in? You're spitting into the wind.
On the post: US Copyright Office Asks For Public Comments On DMCA's Notice And Takedown
Re:
Your specific scenario does not hurt the artist. That very same technology that you are describing that YouTube has deployed? It will hurt many artists in exactly the same way that the DMCA already does, but even more.
Just search this site for examples of creators who have been locked out of their own content because of bogus DMCA claims. Here is one story to start you off.
Notwithstanding, what happens if the artist subsequently allows someone to post a portion of her film to YouTube? Or if someone posts a portion of her film in a manner covered by fair use? Should YouTube take the content down in this case? Do they need enough copyright judges* on staff to review the hours of footage published each second to ensure that each video is non-infringing?
*- at first I wrote lawyers here... but copyright lawyers are qualified only to argue whether a use is infringing of not. It takes a judge to determine the case.
On the post: T-Mobile Is Flat Out Lying: It's Throttling Video Even Though It Says It's Not
Re: To be fair...
And yet, if you read the article...
and from the EFF...
So technically, yeah, they are throttling. And then taking the credit for any upstream optimisation, to boot!
On the post: T-Mobile Is Flat Out Lying: It's Throttling Video Even Though It Says It's Not
Re: Re: Re: It was never
On the post: Stupid Patent Of The Month: Microsoft's Design Patent On A Slider
Re:
On the post: Senator Richard Burr: Confused And Wrong On Encryption
Re: Re:
On the post: Senator Richard Burr: Confused And Wrong On Encryption
Re: Re: Depends on how you define constructive and destructive.
As I said above, lack of imagination is no substitute for correctness.
On the post: Senator Richard Burr: Confused And Wrong On Encryption
Re: Re: Re: “Criminals use cars and computers and guns”
Unless you have a magic wand that will remove all guns from a (city? country? world?), as well as the knowledge of how to make new guns, anyway. If that's the case, then we can have a completely different conversation.
On the post: Senator Richard Burr: Confused And Wrong On Encryption
Re: Re: “Criminals use cars and computers and guns”
Trying to clamp down on guns at this point will be about as effective as trying to clamp down on encryption, for many of the same reasons. And the idea that clamping down on guns will only hurt bad actors is about as accurate as the idea that clamping down on encryption will only hurt bad actors.
Just because you don't see any constructive uses for guns doesn't mean that they don't exist. Would you ban archery, martial arts, knives, explosives, loud noises, strong acids, ...?
On the post: Senator Richard Burr: Confused And Wrong On Encryption
Re: “Criminals use cars and computers and guns”
On the post: Video Game Industry Embraces Internet And New Business Models: Others Should Pay Attention
Re:
http://mortalityplays.tumblr.com/post/77937806438/webcomic-patreon-megalist
Non-syndicated comics I don't see on that list (non-exhaustive):
* Penny Arcade
* Sluggy Freelance
* xkcd
There also doesn't seem to be much overlap with this list of comics or this one.
On the post: Next Shoe Drops For Prenda's Paul Hansmeier: Minnesota Law Board Seeks To Disbar Him
Re: Re:
On the post: Parents Sue School, Claim Wi-Fi Made Son Sick
Re: Re: Re: Re:
The bit where Wikipedia (and the entire internet) is a government agency was also quite informative. My mind reels at the conspiracy theories that come to light, looking back at the SOPA protests in that light.
I'm a little disappointed that the poster didn't offer any help to locate any of the thousands of studies that positively demonstrate EHS, but that the article is ignoring.
Maybe the simplest tl;dr takeaway from the whole comment is "EHS is like sensitive teeth". I really do recommend reading the angel bit, though. If it doesn't convince you that EHS exists, then you have no soul!
-MrTroy, new true believer
On the post: It's Not HBO, It's Wagga Wagga, Yo!
Re: Descriptive
Note that HBO was opposing waggawagga.tv's registration of their own trademark, not opposing waggawagga.tv's use of "It's not tv".
Seems to me like they could have avoided this whole brou-ha-ha by not trying to register the trademark themselves. I mean, now they potentially become the trademark trolls, needing to police (or license) anyone else using the phrase in Australia. Win for the little guy perhaps, but this doesn't seem like a win for the public. Not a loss, perhaps, but that's a low bar.
On the post: Revamped Comment Buttons + New Ways To Buy Techdirt Credits
Re: Formatting and editing comments
WYSIWYG formatting or in-place preview (so you don't lose the context of the comment being replied to) would certainly be nice.
Just avoid that WYSIHYD thing.
On the post: Awesome Stuff: The Light Non-Switch
Re: Response to: Rekrul on Oct 17th, 2015 @ 3:13pm
Then again, a bowl full of nice stones, an empty milo tin, and a plastic bottle with some dried pasta in it also make for fun toys for our toddler...
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