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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 doesn’t fall under any exceptions; you must first 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.
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, 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).
* 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 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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Copyright laws have always required authors to mark their source material carefully, and use quote marks when the author borrows someone elses opinions.
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.
Pretty much every text editor on the planet implements "quote marks" like this.
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.
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.
So what? They don’t cause any problems whatsoever in infringing use cases, either.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
Without zip files, try to download 2 thousand files using your browser.
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.
While it is eventually possible, you just need to use so much time clicking the browser download bar that the operation isn't feasible.
…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.
Definitely not easy enough operation than what your average pirate expects.
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.
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.
On the post: Copyright In The Modern Era: Fortnite Lets Players Mute Emote To Avoid Auto-Copyright Claims Against YouTubers
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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?
On the post: Copyright In The Modern Era: Fortnite Lets Players Mute Emote To Avoid Auto-Copyright Claims Against YouTubers
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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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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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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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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.
On the post: Copyright In The Modern Era: Fortnite Lets Players Mute Emote To Avoid Auto-Copyright Claims Against YouTubers
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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.
On the post: Copyright In The Modern Era: Fortnite Lets Players Mute Emote To Avoid Auto-Copyright Claims Against YouTubers
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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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On the post: Copyright In The Modern Era: Fortnite Lets Players Mute Emote To Avoid Auto-Copyright Claims Against YouTubers
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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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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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That some people think that they might be illegal is not evidence that they are illegal. Frivolous lawsuits get filed all the time.
On the post: Copyright In The Modern Era: Fortnite Lets Players Mute Emote To Avoid Auto-Copyright Claims Against YouTubers
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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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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.
On the post: Copyright In The Modern Era: Fortnite Lets Players Mute Emote To Avoid Auto-Copyright Claims Against YouTubers
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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