It's treating it's own inability to clean up its own platform as a legal issue.
Far be it from me to defend Facebook on... well... just about anything, but in this particular case, isn't that exactly what it is?
If it were a physical premises rather than a virtual premises, they would have the right to tell someone to leave and not come back, and if the unwelcome person tried to come back after that, they would be trespassing, which is a legal issue. Why treat this differently?
There are occasionally people around here who say we need to do away with copyright altogether. I don't agree with them--when properly implemented, copyright serves a valuable purpose--but with stuff like this, I can understand. Because I think that trade secret protection needs to be done away with altogether.
Trade secrets were literally the problem that patents were invented to solve: as problematic as patents can be, at least they require publication so that something does not remain a secret that can be lost. So now that we have a patent system, why do we still also have trade secrets?
And when I've asked that question in the past, the only answers I've gotten that are even anywhere close to being valid is people saying that there are valid cases where things like a business's customer list should be protected as trade secrets. While I agree that there are valid cases for protecting such information, it would be better classified as a privacy issue than a trade secret issue. So again, what valid reason is there for trade secrets to be a thing?
Intuit SELLS tax software... I don't know why we should trust them to do anything other than that.
This is something I've maintained for a long time, ever since a job at a clinic got me a serious peek behind the curtain of the world of healthcare: if a conflict of interest is an inherent part of your business model, you should not be in that business.
He’s done a lot of growing up behind bars, shedding his child’s skin and the reckless decision-making that came with it. “I know I did wrong. I know I committed a crime. From the very beginning I’ve never disputed that. If they had brought me a burglary plea bargain I would have signed it, because I was guilty. I made a bad choice, and I gladly take responsibility for it,” he said.
But the one thing that he does not accept is that he is a murderer. “I’m not a killer,” he said.
No one is saying that he is; they're saying that it doesn't matter. By doing something that 1) he knew full well was illegal (mens rea) and 2) led directly to somebody getting killed, he is still responsible for the death even though he is clearly not directly the killer. In other words, it is indisuputable that, had he and his friends not decided to rob the house, his friend would not have been shot and killed by the house's owner defending himself against robbers.
There's precedent with things like the Felony Murder Rule: if you're committing a felony, and for whatever reason something goes wrong and somebody dies, even if that was never part of the plan, even if someone else was the person who actually killed somebody, you're still considered liable for murder as well as the felony you meant to commit, because it wouldn't have happened without your felonious actions.
If we can accept that (and I see no good reason not to) then why not also the idea that if you're holding an illegal demonstration and violence quite foreseeably breaks out, you can be held liable for the results of the violence which would not have happened without your actions, even if you weren't personally the one being violent?
That is of course that McKesson did in fact lead them onto the highway, according to the appeals court this is only alleged, not proven.
Which is why the lawsuit is allowed to go forward: to give an opportunity for a plausible allegation which, if true, would subject McKesson to criminal liability, to be properly proven or disproven in a court of law.
Trademarks are handed out by the US Patent and Trademark Office. They have a ex parte review system for challenging bad patents and getting them invalidated; do they have anything similar for bad trademarks?
John Deere ... stands by the general opposition to release software to the masses. Other companies also argue intellectual property should be protected.
There is something very wrong with any state of affairs in which a freaking tractor can be considered worthy of intellectual property protection, backed up by immoral DRM and unconstitutional laws defending the use of such DRM.
Repeal the DMCA. Take off and nuke the whole thing from orbit. At this point it's the only way to be sure.
Do you have a source for this? Because pretty much everything you just said flies directly in the face of what's happening right now. (Struggling to get the server running because it hasn't been built from source yet, not accepting donations to avoid legal issues, having a "i25" version that's incompatible with the source server because it's the product of reverse engineering, etc.)
from the things-i-never-thought-i-would-ever-say dept.
One thing that's interesting, is that Facebook does have a policy that they should gather as much information as possible before making a call -- because sometimes what you see at first may not tell the whole story
Which, surprisingly, makes Facebook significantly better in the handling of controversial videos than the Washington Post.
This story is a lot bigger than you're reporting. Somehow, while all this was happening, somebody raised the stakes exponentially by posted a leaked copy of NCSoft's full source code for the game--both client and server--online for anyone to download. Suddenly it's not just SCORE's reverse-engineered attempt at a CoH server anymore; there are teams working to try and get an authentic City of Heroes server up and running!
There are various technical hurdles to overcome: the server is very resource-intensive and requires a lot of hardware to run, and not all the source code matches the available data files it's supposed to be working with, but the community is working on making it work, and is actively in talks with NCSoft representatives about coming up with a legal resolution that will allow the server to run without lawsuits being filed. How optimistic the people involved are that this will be resolved peacefully tends to vary wildly from day to day, but it will definitely be interesting to keep an eye on...
Enforcement at this scale isn't possible without at least some automation. But the government's botched implementation shows it cared more about maximizing revenue than minimizing error. And when everything goes this wrong this quickly, it's the citizens who end up paying for both the end results of a broken system and the costs involved in fixing it.
Content moderation at this scale isn't possible without at least some automation. But the company's botched implementation shows it cared more about maximizing revenue than minimizing error. And when everything goes this wrong this quickly, it's the users who end up paying for both the end results of a broken system and the costs involved in fixing it.
Same problem, only thing different is the organization involved. The same principles should therefore be applied in confronting it... right?
What the heck?!? How did this get flagged? My joking complaint notwithstanding, this is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in TD comments.
Hey Mike, I think Thomas Goolnik himself must be actually lurking around here or something, as I don't see any reason anyone else would find it objectionable!
"At this point"? That's been the case ever since the 1970s, when they radically revamped the laws with a new, poisonous philosophy of ownership culture. For a significant percentage of Techdirt readers, including myself, copyright law has been actively working against the public interest for their entire lives!
Wasn't "censorship". According to you at other times when suits your slant, private persons / corporations by definition cannot "censor".
I don't believe I've ever seen Mike express such an idiotic sentiment. Can you provide a citation?
Yes, Nerd Harder. Just because "AI" or "filters" aren't perfect doesn't mean that can't be adequate. -- Humans will be required to fix only the few rare failures.
When you're dealing with something as, well, world-wide as the World Wide Web, no matter how tiny the failure rate is, failures are not "rare" in any objective sense.
They say Facebook has over a billion users. Let's just say, pulling a wild guess out of nowhere, that the average user makes one post per day. That means that, assuming an absolutely minuscule error rate of 0.1%, they're going to literally have over a million mistakes every single day.
When you get that big, it's really true: filters that aren't perfect are not adequate.
In contrast to your assertions, actually the system worked pretty well for the purpose of protecting apparently "copyrighted" work. The system noted the work as coming from a publisher, identified copies on own Scribd servers, and expeditiously removed.
Except the work should never have been in their "copyrighted works" system in the first place, as it's impossible to copyright. Once something breaks down at an earlier stage in the process, it doesn't matter how correctly the later stages work.
There's a principle in computer programming known as "fail fast." The idea is that the best thing you can do is detect errors as quickly as possible and then deal with them immediately--crashing the program if necessary--because the further you proceed with an error still active inside the system, the more damage it can do, and because the closer the visible failure is to the cause, the easier it is to see what needs to be fixed. This case is a perfect illustration of what happens when the fail-fast principles are not applied.
None of this is a surprise to anyone who actually understands the internet, but because some people falsely believe that the internet has been bad for artists, now we get to deal with the fact that automated filters are going to go censorship crazy.
We can start by "censoring" all of Europe until the come to their senses and repeal this mess. Make it nice and simple: "if you're capable of inflicting EU Copyright Directive liability upon us, you can't use our platform. Period." The faster the geofence gains widespread adoption, the quicker the nightmare will all be over, because they will end up with no choice but to acknowledge that they need us more than we need them.
On the post: Facebook Files Questionable Lawsuit Over Fake Followers And Likes
Far be it from me to defend Facebook on... well... just about anything, but in this particular case, isn't that exactly what it is?
If it were a physical premises rather than a virtual premises, they would have the right to tell someone to leave and not come back, and if the unwelcome person tried to come back after that, they would be trespassing, which is a legal issue. Why treat this differently?
On the post: Tired: Insane Patent Verdicts; Wired: Insane Trade Secret Verdicts
There are occasionally people around here who say we need to do away with copyright altogether. I don't agree with them--when properly implemented, copyright serves a valuable purpose--but with stuff like this, I can understand. Because I think that trade secret protection needs to be done away with altogether.
Trade secrets were literally the problem that patents were invented to solve: as problematic as patents can be, at least they require publication so that something does not remain a secret that can be lost. So now that we have a patent system, why do we still also have trade secrets?
And when I've asked that question in the past, the only answers I've gotten that are even anywhere close to being valid is people saying that there are valid cases where things like a business's customer list should be protected as trade secrets. While I agree that there are valid cases for protecting such information, it would be better classified as a privacy issue than a trade secret issue. So again, what valid reason is there for trade secrets to be a thing?
On the post: TurboTax Did Everything It Could To Hide The Free-Filing Its Supposed To Offer
Re: Making it hard is part of the 'sale'
This is something I've maintained for a long time, ever since a job at a clinic got me a serious peek behind the curtain of the world of healthcare: if a conflict of interest is an inherent part of your business model, you should not be in that business.
On the post: TurboTax Did Everything It Could To Hide The Free-Filing Its Supposed To Offer
So... how serious of an offense is false advertising considered these days?
On the post: Appeals Court: Idiot Cop Can Continue To Sue A Protester Over Actions Taken By Another Protester
Re: Re: Re: Re:
This article misses the point:
No one is saying that he is; they're saying that it doesn't matter. By doing something that 1) he knew full well was illegal (mens rea) and 2) led directly to somebody getting killed, he is still responsible for the death even though he is clearly not directly the killer. In other words, it is indisuputable that, had he and his friends not decided to rob the house, his friend would not have been shot and killed by the house's owner defending himself against robbers.
On the post: Appeals Court: Idiot Cop Can Continue To Sue A Protester Over Actions Taken By Another Protester
Re: Re:
There's precedent with things like the Felony Murder Rule: if you're committing a felony, and for whatever reason something goes wrong and somebody dies, even if that was never part of the plan, even if someone else was the person who actually killed somebody, you're still considered liable for murder as well as the felony you meant to commit, because it wouldn't have happened without your felonious actions.
If we can accept that (and I see no good reason not to) then why not also the idea that if you're holding an illegal demonstration and violence quite foreseeably breaks out, you can be held liable for the results of the violence which would not have happened without your actions, even if you weren't personally the one being violent?
On the post: Appeals Court: Idiot Cop Can Continue To Sue A Protester Over Actions Taken By Another Protester
Re: Re: The Appeals Court...
Which is why the lawsuit is allowed to go forward: to give an opportunity for a plausible allegation which, if true, would subject McKesson to criminal liability, to be properly proven or disproven in a court of law.
On the post: FanX, Previously Salt Lake Comic Con, Ordered To Pay $4 Million For San Diego's Con's Attorney's Fees, Barred From Calling Itself A Comic-Con
Trademarks are handed out by the US Patent and Trademark Office. They have a ex parte review system for challenging bad patents and getting them invalidated; do they have anything similar for bad trademarks?
On the post: Minnesota May Be First State To Pass A Right To Repair Law
There is something very wrong with any state of affairs in which a freaking tractor can be considered worthy of intellectual property protection, backed up by immoral DRM and unconstitutional laws defending the use of such DRM.
Repeal the DMCA. Take off and nuke the whole thing from orbit. At this point it's the only way to be sure.
On the post: NCSoft Has A Great Opportunity To Be Awesome And Human To 'City Of Heroes' Enthusiasts
Re: Re:
Do you have a source for this? Because pretty much everything you just said flies directly in the face of what's happening right now. (Struggling to get the server running because it hasn't been built from source yet, not accepting donations to avoid legal issues, having a "i25" version that's incompatible with the source server because it's the product of reverse engineering, etc.)
On the post: Behind The Scenes Look At How Facebook Dealt With Christchurch Shooting Demonstrates The Impossible Task Of Content Moderation
from the things-i-never-thought-i-would-ever-say dept.
Which, surprisingly, makes Facebook significantly better in the handling of controversial videos than the Washington Post.
On the post: NCSoft Has A Great Opportunity To Be Awesome And Human To 'City Of Heroes' Enthusiasts
This story is a lot bigger than you're reporting. Somehow, while all this was happening, somebody raised the stakes exponentially by posted a leaked copy of NCSoft's full source code for the game--both client and server--online for anyone to download. Suddenly it's not just SCORE's reverse-engineered attempt at a CoH server anymore; there are teams working to try and get an authentic City of Heroes server up and running!
There are various technical hurdles to overcome: the server is very resource-intensive and requires a lot of hardware to run, and not all the source code matches the available data files it's supposed to be working with, but the community is working on making it work, and is actively in talks with NCSoft representatives about coming up with a legal resolution that will allow the server to run without lawsuits being filed. How optimistic the people involved are that this will be resolved peacefully tends to vary wildly from day to day, but it will definitely be interesting to keep an eye on...
On the post: Emilio Estevez Uses Some Public Domain Footage In Film, So Universal Studios Forces Original Public Domain Footage Offline
Re:
Wait... pull a movie that hasn't even been released in theaters yet, and will never be legitimately posted on YouTube, off of YouTube?
Something tells me this plan hasn't been thought through all the way...
On the post: Watchdog Says Australia's Traffic Enforcement System Has Hits Hundreds Of Drivers With Bogus Fines
Content moderation at this scale isn't possible without at least some automation. But the company's botched implementation shows it cared more about maximizing revenue than minimizing error. And when everything goes this wrong this quickly, it's the users who end up paying for both the end results of a broken system and the costs involved in fixing it.
Same problem, only thing different is the organization involved. The same principles should therefore be applied in confronting it... right?
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re:
What the heck?!? How did this get flagged? My joking complaint notwithstanding, this is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in TD comments.
Hey Mike, I think Thomas Goolnik himself must be actually lurking around here or something, as I don't see any reason anyone else would find it objectionable!
On the post: Scribd's Takedown Of The Public Domain Mueller Report Is A Preview Of The EU's Future Under The Copyright Directive
Re:
"At this point"? That's been the case ever since the 1970s, when they radically revamped the laws with a new, poisonous philosophy of ownership culture. For a significant percentage of Techdirt readers, including myself, copyright law has been actively working against the public interest for their entire lives!
On the post: Scribd's Takedown Of The Public Domain Mueller Report Is A Preview Of The EU's Future Under The Copyright Directive
Re: Nerd Harder. -- Re-Write Harder.
I don't believe I've ever seen Mike express such an idiotic sentiment. Can you provide a citation?
When you're dealing with something as, well, world-wide as the World Wide Web, no matter how tiny the failure rate is, failures are not "rare" in any objective sense.
They say Facebook has over a billion users. Let's just say, pulling a wild guess out of nowhere, that the average user makes one post per day. That means that, assuming an absolutely minuscule error rate of 0.1%, they're going to literally have over a million mistakes every single day.
When you get that big, it's really true: filters that aren't perfect are not adequate.
Except the work should never have been in their "copyrighted works" system in the first place, as it's impossible to copyright. Once something breaks down at an earlier stage in the process, it doesn't matter how correctly the later stages work.
There's a principle in computer programming known as "fail fast." The idea is that the best thing you can do is detect errors as quickly as possible and then deal with them immediately--crashing the program if necessary--because the further you proceed with an error still active inside the system, the more damage it can do, and because the closer the visible failure is to the cause, the easier it is to see what needs to be fixed. This case is a perfect illustration of what happens when the fail-fast principles are not applied.
On the post: Scribd's Takedown Of The Public Domain Mueller Report Is A Preview Of The EU's Future Under The Copyright Directive
Re:
Have they been relevant before?
On the post: Scribd's Takedown Of The Public Domain Mueller Report Is A Preview Of The EU's Future Under The Copyright Directive
We can start by "censoring" all of Europe until the come to their senses and repeal this mess. Make it nice and simple: "if you're capable of inflicting EU Copyright Directive liability upon us, you can't use our platform. Period." The faster the geofence gains widespread adoption, the quicker the nightmare will all be over, because they will end up with no choice but to acknowledge that they need us more than we need them.
On the post: Another Attempt To Tie Twitter To Terrorist Acts And Another Dismissal With Prejudice
Re: Illustrious antonym
I'd go with "ignominious" myself...
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