So you accept that the tax rules are subject to change without notice regardless, and plan so you maximize long-term revenue overall and let the changes come as they will. You may not optimize for any particular set of rules, but long-term you'll come out ahead.
The evidence was adduced in the Post article itself. Phillips stated what he felt at that time, and it's not within the court's purview to say he didn't really feel that way. Whether his feelings were reasonable might be something the court could rule on, but for defamation that's irrelevant. If your feeling is completely irrational and unreasonable you're still entitled to say you felt that way and your statement of how you felt can't be defamatory to the other party.
Note that saying how you felt is something different from falsely saying the other party did some specific thing to make you feel that way, but Sandmann couldn't point to anything Phillips said he did that he didn't clearly do.
Third option: the judge has a heavy docket and decided that allowing the case to move forward is a safe option (at worst it's an issue to be decided at trial and the defendant suffers no injury because if their argument is valid they'll prevail at trial) while dismissing the case embroils him in an appeal by the plaintiff about him abusing his discretion. Unfortunately appeals courts have repeatedly been willing to ignore the injury resulting from having to go to trial over something that's an issue of law, not fact, and could have been decided without the costs involved in a trial. I don't think that'll end until defendants repeatedly and successfully argue after prevailing that their costs to defend themselves in court are in fact an injury that they're entitled to recover from the losing plaintiff. Or maybe when both attorneys for the plaintiff and judges start getting bar complaints filed about them willfully refusing to follow binding precedent handed down by the appeals courts about what the law says.
Why should any US company be forced to compete on an unlevel playing field against a competitor with immoral business practices that, were the company to attempt to duplicate over here, would make them into criminals?
US companies leveled the playing field by simply moving the activities "over there" where they're legal. Why else do you think so many of the components used to build gear are manufactured in China or other Asian countries? US companies can make things cheaper by outsourcing the actual work to countries without US labor laws, then import and badge the results and pretend they weren't made overseas.
Which is why the whole "industrial espionage" argument should be dropped. China didn't need to engage in industrial espionage to get the tech. US companies handed Chinese companies all the detailed technical and manufacturing information and taught the Chinese everything about the technology for the express purpose of enabling China to manufacture it. The outrage is over the fact that China is manufacturing it for their own use rather than solely for the benefit of US companies, no more and no less.
And what's wrong with on-spec work? Professional authors do it all the time, it's rare for an author to be guaranteed payment for a book even under contract. More often the author writes the book for nothing (and sometimes they're contractually obliged to write the book) and hopes the publisher buys it for publication, and if the publisher doesn't like the book the author gets zilch (and if under contract for a certain number of books has to keep writing books until the publisher likes enough to satisfy the contract). Same with bands, their contracts are usually for a certain number of albums with no guarantee the label will accept any given album and they just have to keep recording albums and not getting paid until they come up with ones the label likes and buys.
Of course anyone writing music for Ubisoft under this offer had better be doing it the same way professional authors and bands do it: the publisher has right of first refusal, but the rights remain with the author/band until the publisher actually buys the work. If the publisher doesn't want the book or the album, the author/band is then free to offer it to any other publisher and the original publisher has no more rights to the material. Labels may screw the artists more in the music industry, but no professional author submits their work these days without a signed agreement to a strict limit on how long the publisher can sit on the manuscript (too many authors got burned, I recall authors getting shirty about terms back in the late 80s).
It depends a lot on the speech. Even politicians aren't obliged to let people who don't agree with them yell over other people who're trying to talk, eat up time spewing personal insults at other speakers who don't agree with the bile-spewer, and generally disrupt other people's attempts to speak at meetings, open houses and such. It's harder to do that in an on-line forum, but I can see an argument being made for politicians being able to block people who spam comments to the point it makes it difficult for anyone to follow actual discussions, even if the spamming is completely one-sided, as long as the block is for the act of spamming and not the viewpoint being spammed. My experience is that such spam also inevitably falls under the heading of harassment and abuse as well, just because the people who engage in it have no real rational points to make and are resorting to simply bullying everyone else into shutting up.
The ISPs are the ones who've been trying to gouge money out of Google, Netflix et. al. and sell the idea that content providers should pay the ISPs for the privilege of sending data to ISP customers who're already paying the ISP to have the ISP transfer data for them. The ISPs won't raise the caps, they'll just double down on "Oh, if Google wants to use our wires to send data to our customers Google needs to pay us.". Any executive at Google (or any other content company) who doesn't realize that needs to be sat down and forced to read/watch the ISPs making their claims.
And the developers don't sue Steam why? If Steam doesn't want to bear the cost of the fraud, then simply reverse all of the fraudulent transaction and be done with it. But if they only want to reverse half the transaction, taking back the money they paid the dev while letting the player keep the fraudulently-obtained key, that's exactly like someone demanding a refund on a purchase and the store deducting the refund from their payments to the distributor but not recovering the item and returning it to the distributor. If any store was in the habit of doing that, you can be sure the distributor would have them in collections pretty quickly.
The flip side of that is that the people who are in the market for oscilloscopes probably don't register that way to the ad-targeting algorithms because they're only rarely in the market for them and the other 99.9% of their activity swamps any useful indications. If you're trying to sell oscilloscopes, you're better off not trying to figure out which users in your market are interested and putting the effort/resources into advertising aimed at anyone who's looking for oscilloscopes. That's actually fairly trivial, and Google did a land-office business doing just that in it's first decade or so: have your ads put on sites that would pop up high on the list of sites matching the keywords "oscilloscope" and "for sale"/"purchase"/"buy", or on the ad column of the search results page when the search keyword list contains "oscilloscope".
That's what'd kill them. Say that size limit happens. The next Christchurch shooting (and it will happen, that sort of nutcase is as inevitable as gravity), the uproar will happen again. This time though, it'll be easy to argue for removing CDA 230 protections because it can be done without impacting the large sites that most people use for everyday stuff thanks to the size division. Meanwhile YouTube and the like will be able to point to the viewpoint-neutrality parts of the law to say "We're doing everything we can, but the law says we can't cut off the people who're the source of the problem because that'd cut off that political movement from the platform.". With the uproar there'd be enough support for getting exceptions made for the problematic content on the big platforms while going after the small ones would make the politicians look like they were doing enough to satisfy the outraged groups.
It'd impact similar sites on the liberal/progressive side too, but there's a lot fewer of the really extreme ones there than on the conservative side.
Mostly it's probably because all the general-news outlets carry the same wire-service stories, identical text just with different formatting. Even if they did additional investigation and analysis beyond the basic story, I'd still only subscribe to a couple because I can't justify the expense of dozens of news sites any more than I could dozens of newspaper subscriptions. Specialist/niche sites, same deal just in a more limited scope.
I suspect the same holds for web sites as for newspapers: subscriptions pay for the paperboy to deliver the things, advertising pays the real bills. That's bad news for web-based news outlets because web sites have gone so far beyond the pale with advertising (originally with amount, size and intrusiveness, now extended to delivery of malware and stalking of viewers across the Web) that they're never going to convince people it's worth looking at the advertising. I think only inertia's kept the majority of news sites open, and inertia inevitably runs out.
One thing that'd likely kill support for this: point out to these bozos that this would either destroy conservative websites (by removing their CDA 230 protections) or force them to carry liberal content.
I'm not sure the server test is entirely appropriate. With both the browser fetches from the image's server, not the page's. The difference is in display which is what copyright is (or should be) aimed at. In the case of a link the browser displays the image on it's own page (probably an otherwise blank page), and it's obvious the image didn't come from the page that linked to it. An embedded image, though, has it's content (not merely it's location) displayed as part of the page that embeds it. To the user there appears to be no difference between an embedded image fetched from another server and one fetched from the page's server. In both cases it appears to be part of the original page. That's not a mere technicality, that's the heart of what it means to copy something from someone else and present it as part of your work when you distribute your work.
And it shouldn't work anyway, all email clients I know of (well, all non-Web-based ones anyway) default to not fetching remote content in email bodies at all and you have to deliberately enable it before it'll go fetch the embedded image. A reporter probably shouldn't be using a Webmail client simply because it doesn't let you disable things like remote content and scripts.
The big problem is that the Internet platform companies aren't offering products to users, they're offering eyeballs (users) to advertisers either directly or indirectly. As long as that's the case, their incentives will always favor working around any privacy regulations strongly enough to offset any incentives to behave otherwise.
If the carrot doesn't work, use the stick. Make it the law that personal information and data is owned by the user who generates it and the default is that no other entity has the right to collect or distribute it. Make statutory damages and legal costs and fees mandatory if a violation is proven. Then spike the guns of "privacy policies" and "terms of service" by setting a requirement that any collection or distribution of personal information requires the express consent of the user for that specific use, after having been clearly informed of the nature and extent of the data collected and it's use, and that any agreement that does not conform to this requirement is expressly contrary to public policy and not just void but flatly illegal.
I don't see the politicians going along with that though, there's too much money involved.
Problem: Facebook doesn't own the copyright to most of it's content, it's users do. Facebook merely has authorization from them to use their content. You'd have to come up with a legal justification for granting you authorization to copy my content because of something someone completely unrelated to me did, and I don't think you can.
It would be. I've spent some time working out what would be needed, and my conclusion was that it's all available as open standards and open implementations. The problem is that it's not legally possible to force Facebook to take part in the federated system. Without that, the federated system would become just another small platform that wasn't really relevant.
Facebook's position is just the network effect at work: everybody uses Facebook because everybody else they know uses Facebook. You can't "break up" Facebook in a way that neutralizes the network effect. The only thing I think could affect their data-collection practices is to bar them from conditioning access to their platform on acceptance of their privacy terms, and I can't see any way to legally do that. The best I can come up with would be a law vesting ownership of personal information explicitly in the person it was about and declaring any contract terms purporting to grant blanket authorization for collection/use of that data by any other party contrary to public policy and illegal (ie. Facebook would have to negotiate separate agreements with each user for each specific transfer of data to another party and for each change in what that data would be used for, with statutory liability for any failure to comply so that users wouldn't have to prove they were harmed, only that a violation occurred).
I think what Beat Saber should do is publish a letter from it's own lawyers stating that the content i question is owned by Beat Saber, not NBC Universal, it's use on the Jimmy Fallon show is an authorized use, the use by all the uploaders is also authorized by Beat Saber, and that NBC Universal has been informed that it's attempting to claim ownership of material copyrighted by Beat Saber. Then every single person who receives a notice files a DMCA 512(f) claim with that letter attached. Judges may be willing to toss individual 512(f) claims, but I'd bet that if every judge in say Los Angeles was suddenly faced with a couple of hundred 512(f) claims each with a letter from the actual copyright holder attached saying the defendant knew they didn't hold the copyright and weren't authorized to issue a takedown notice that those judges would be much more skeptical of the defendant's claims that it isn't liable for issuing false takedowns.
In which case everyone who has a credit card can be charged with the same charges. Cardholder => bank (paycheck) => credit card company (card payment via bank transfer) => cardholder (card available amount increased by amount of payment).
On the post: Potentially Big News: Top CEOs Realizing That 'Maximizing Shareholder Value' Isn't A Great Idea
Re:
So you accept that the tax rules are subject to change without notice regardless, and plan so you maximize long-term revenue overall and let the changes come as they will. You may not optimize for any particular set of rules, but long-term you'll come out ahead.
On the post: As Expected: Covington HS Teen's Lawsuit Against The Washington Post Is Dismissed
Re: Is this a premature decision?
The evidence was adduced in the Post article itself. Phillips stated what he felt at that time, and it's not within the court's purview to say he didn't really feel that way. Whether his feelings were reasonable might be something the court could rule on, but for defamation that's irrelevant. If your feeling is completely irrational and unreasonable you're still entitled to say you felt that way and your statement of how you felt can't be defamatory to the other party.
Note that saying how you felt is something different from falsely saying the other party did some specific thing to make you feel that way, but Sandmann couldn't point to anything Phillips said he did that he didn't clearly do.
On the post: Very Confused Judge Allows Bizarre Copyright Lawsuit Against Cloudflare To Continue
Re: Malicious or ignorant
Third option: the judge has a heavy docket and decided that allowing the case to move forward is a safe option (at worst it's an issue to be decided at trial and the defendant suffers no injury because if their argument is valid they'll prevail at trial) while dismissing the case embroils him in an appeal by the plaintiff about him abusing his discretion. Unfortunately appeals courts have repeatedly been willing to ignore the injury resulting from having to go to trial over something that's an issue of law, not fact, and could have been decided without the costs involved in a trial. I don't think that'll end until defendants repeatedly and successfully argue after prevailing that their costs to defend themselves in court are in fact an injury that they're entitled to recover from the losing plaintiff. Or maybe when both attorneys for the plaintiff and judges start getting bar complaints filed about them willfully refusing to follow binding precedent handed down by the appeals courts about what the law says.
On the post: Latest Huawei 'Smoking Gun' Still Doesn't Prove Global Blackball Effort's Primary Justification
Re:
Why should any US company be forced to compete on an unlevel playing field against a competitor with immoral business practices that, were the company to attempt to duplicate over here, would make them into criminals?
US companies leveled the playing field by simply moving the activities "over there" where they're legal. Why else do you think so many of the components used to build gear are manufactured in China or other Asian countries? US companies can make things cheaper by outsourcing the actual work to countries without US labor laws, then import and badge the results and pretend they weren't made overseas.
Which is why the whole "industrial espionage" argument should be dropped. China didn't need to engage in industrial espionage to get the tech. US companies handed Chinese companies all the detailed technical and manufacturing information and taught the Chinese everything about the technology for the express purpose of enabling China to manufacture it. The outrage is over the fact that China is manufacturing it for their own use rather than solely for the benefit of US companies, no more and no less.
On the post: Ubisoft Once Again Crowdsourcing Content For Video Game, Once Again Gets Unwarranted Backlash
And what's wrong with on-spec work? Professional authors do it all the time, it's rare for an author to be guaranteed payment for a book even under contract. More often the author writes the book for nothing (and sometimes they're contractually obliged to write the book) and hopes the publisher buys it for publication, and if the publisher doesn't like the book the author gets zilch (and if under contract for a certain number of books has to keep writing books until the publisher likes enough to satisfy the contract). Same with bands, their contracts are usually for a certain number of albums with no guarantee the label will accept any given album and they just have to keep recording albums and not getting paid until they come up with ones the label likes and buys.
Of course anyone writing music for Ubisoft under this offer had better be doing it the same way professional authors and bands do it: the publisher has right of first refusal, but the rights remain with the author/band until the publisher actually buys the work. If the publisher doesn't want the book or the album, the author/band is then free to offer it to any other publisher and the original publisher has no more rights to the material. Labels may screw the artists more in the music industry, but no professional author submits their work these days without a signed agreement to a strict limit on how long the publisher can sit on the manuscript (too many authors got burned, I recall authors getting shirty about terms back in the late 80s).
On the post: Following Trump Ruling Against Twitter Blockade, AOC Sued For Her Blocks On Twitter
Re: Re:
It depends a lot on the speech. Even politicians aren't obliged to let people who don't agree with them yell over other people who're trying to talk, eat up time spewing personal insults at other speakers who don't agree with the bile-spewer, and generally disrupt other people's attempts to speak at meetings, open houses and such. It's harder to do that in an on-line forum, but I can see an argument being made for politicians being able to block people who spam comments to the point it makes it difficult for anyone to follow actual discussions, even if the spamming is completely one-sided, as long as the block is for the act of spamming and not the viewpoint being spammed. My experience is that such spam also inevitably falls under the heading of harassment and abuse as well, just because the people who engage in it have no real rational points to make and are resorting to simply bullying everyone else into shutting up.
On the post: Google's Dead Wrong If It Thinks Broadband Caps Won't Hurt Game Streaming
The ISPs are the ones who've been trying to gouge money out of Google, Netflix et. al. and sell the idea that content providers should pay the ISPs for the privilege of sending data to ISP customers who're already paying the ISP to have the ISP transfer data for them. The ISPs won't raise the caps, they'll just double down on "Oh, if Google wants to use our wires to send data to our customers Google needs to pay us.". Any executive at Google (or any other content company) who doesn't realize that needs to be sat down and forced to read/watch the ISPs making their claims.
On the post: Indie Publishers Tell Gamers To Pirate Instead Of Buying Keys Through Reseller G2A
Re: Re:
And the developers don't sue Steam why? If Steam doesn't want to bear the cost of the fraud, then simply reverse all of the fraudulent transaction and be done with it. But if they only want to reverse half the transaction, taking back the money they paid the dev while letting the player keep the fraudulently-obtained key, that's exactly like someone demanding a refund on a purchase and the store deducting the refund from their payments to the distributor but not recovering the item and returning it to the distributor. If any store was in the habit of doing that, you can be sure the distributor would have them in collections pretty quickly.
On the post: Once Again: It's Not Clear The Internet Needs Creepy Targeted Ads
Re: General case vs niche
The flip side of that is that the people who are in the market for oscilloscopes probably don't register that way to the ad-targeting algorithms because they're only rarely in the market for them and the other 99.9% of their activity swamps any useful indications. If you're trying to sell oscilloscopes, you're better off not trying to figure out which users in your market are interested and putting the effort/resources into advertising aimed at anyone who's looking for oscilloscopes. That's actually fairly trivial, and Google did a land-office business doing just that in it's first decade or so: have your ads put on sites that would pop up high on the list of sites matching the keywords "oscilloscope" and "for sale"/"purchase"/"buy", or on the ad column of the search results page when the search keyword list contains "oscilloscope".
On the post: Guy Pushing Hawley's 'Viewpoint Neutrality' Concept In The Media Used To Write For White Supremacist Site
Re: Re:
That's what'd kill them. Say that size limit happens. The next Christchurch shooting (and it will happen, that sort of nutcase is as inevitable as gravity), the uproar will happen again. This time though, it'll be easy to argue for removing CDA 230 protections because it can be done without impacting the large sites that most people use for everyday stuff thanks to the size division. Meanwhile YouTube and the like will be able to point to the viewpoint-neutrality parts of the law to say "We're doing everything we can, but the law says we can't cut off the people who're the source of the problem because that'd cut off that political movement from the platform.". With the uproar there'd be enough support for getting exceptions made for the problematic content on the big platforms while going after the small ones would make the politicians look like they were doing enough to satisfy the outraged groups.
It'd impact similar sites on the liberal/progressive side too, but there's a lot fewer of the really extreme ones there than on the conservative side.
On the post: The Paywall Conundrum: Even Those Who Like Paying For News Don't Pay For Much News
Mostly it's probably because all the general-news outlets carry the same wire-service stories, identical text just with different formatting. Even if they did additional investigation and analysis beyond the basic story, I'd still only subscribe to a couple because I can't justify the expense of dozens of news sites any more than I could dozens of newspaper subscriptions. Specialist/niche sites, same deal just in a more limited scope.
I suspect the same holds for web sites as for newspapers: subscriptions pay for the paperboy to deliver the things, advertising pays the real bills. That's bad news for web-based news outlets because web sites have gone so far beyond the pale with advertising (originally with amount, size and intrusiveness, now extended to delivery of malware and stalking of viewers across the Web) that they're never going to convince people it's worth looking at the advertising. I think only inertia's kept the majority of news sites open, and inertia inevitably runs out.
On the post: Guy Pushing Hawley's 'Viewpoint Neutrality' Concept In The Media Used To Write For White Supremacist Site
One thing that'd likely kill support for this: point out to these bozos that this would either destroy conservative websites (by removing their CDA 230 protections) or force them to carry liberal content.
On the post: As Google Ponders Making Ad Blockers Less Useful, Mozilla Ramps Up Tracker Blocking
Re: Man, Google has fallen
"If your news outlet isn't one of the big three liberal outlets, you don't even trend on Google in the US."
Perhaps this is less an indication of the leanings of the outlets and more an indication of the leanings of the population they're serving.
On the post: Settlement In Tom Brady Photo Case Leaves Issue Of Copyright On Embedded Images Unsettled
I'm not sure the server test is entirely appropriate. With both the browser fetches from the image's server, not the page's. The difference is in display which is what copyright is (or should be) aimed at. In the case of a link the browser displays the image on it's own page (probably an otherwise blank page), and it's obvious the image didn't come from the page that linked to it. An embedded image, though, has it's content (not merely it's location) displayed as part of the page that embeds it. To the user there appears to be no difference between an embedded image fetched from another server and one fetched from the page's server. In both cases it appears to be part of the original page. That's not a mere technicality, that's the heart of what it means to copy something from someone else and present it as part of your work when you distribute your work.
On the post: Government Prosecutor Caught Sending Emails With Tracking Software To Reporters And Defense Attorneys
Re: Not entirely accurate
And it shouldn't work anyway, all email clients I know of (well, all non-Web-based ones anyway) default to not fetching remote content in email bodies at all and you have to deliberately enable it before it'll go fetch the embedded image. A reporter probably shouldn't be using a Webmail client simply because it doesn't let you disable things like remote content and scripts.
On the post: One Year Into The GDPR: Can We Declare It A Total Failure Yet?
Eyeballs, not products
The big problem is that the Internet platform companies aren't offering products to users, they're offering eyeballs (users) to advertisers either directly or indirectly. As long as that's the case, their incentives will always favor working around any privacy regulations strongly enough to offset any incentives to behave otherwise.
If the carrot doesn't work, use the stick. Make it the law that personal information and data is owned by the user who generates it and the default is that no other entity has the right to collect or distribute it. Make statutory damages and legal costs and fees mandatory if a violation is proven. Then spike the guns of "privacy policies" and "terms of service" by setting a requirement that any collection or distribution of personal information requires the express consent of the user for that specific use, after having been clearly informed of the nature and extent of the data collected and it's use, and that any agreement that does not conform to this requirement is expressly contrary to public policy and not just void but flatly illegal.
I don't see the politicians going along with that though, there's too much money involved.
On the post: Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Calls For Facebook's Breakup... But Seems Confused About All The Details
Re: Re: Re: Make it a federated service
Problem: Facebook doesn't own the copyright to most of it's content, it's users do. Facebook merely has authorization from them to use their content. You'd have to come up with a legal justification for granting you authorization to copy my content because of something someone completely unrelated to me did, and I don't think you can.
On the post: Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Calls For Facebook's Breakup... But Seems Confused About All The Details
Re: Make it a federated service
It would be. I've spent some time working out what would be needed, and my conclusion was that it's all available as open standards and open implementations. The problem is that it's not legally possible to force Facebook to take part in the federated system. Without that, the federated system would become just another small platform that wasn't really relevant.
Facebook's position is just the network effect at work: everybody uses Facebook because everybody else they know uses Facebook. You can't "break up" Facebook in a way that neutralizes the network effect. The only thing I think could affect their data-collection practices is to bar them from conditioning access to their platform on acceptance of their privacy terms, and I can't see any way to legally do that. The best I can come up with would be a law vesting ownership of personal information explicitly in the person it was about and declaring any contract terms purporting to grant blanket authorization for collection/use of that data by any other party contrary to public policy and illegal (ie. Facebook would have to negotiate separate agreements with each user for each specific transfer of data to another party and for each change in what that data would be used for, with statutory liability for any failure to comply so that users wouldn't have to prove they were harmed, only that a violation occurred).
On the post: YouTube Copyright Filters Suck: The 'Beat Saber' And 'Jimmy Fallon' Edition
I think what Beat Saber should do is publish a letter from it's own lawyers stating that the content i question is owned by Beat Saber, not NBC Universal, it's use on the Jimmy Fallon show is an authorized use, the use by all the uploaders is also authorized by Beat Saber, and that NBC Universal has been informed that it's attempting to claim ownership of material copyrighted by Beat Saber. Then every single person who receives a notice files a DMCA 512(f) claim with that letter attached. Judges may be willing to toss individual 512(f) claims, but I'd bet that if every judge in say Los Angeles was suddenly faced with a couple of hundred 512(f) claims each with a letter from the actual copyright holder attached saying the defendant knew they didn't hold the copyright and weren't authorized to issue a takedown notice that those judges would be much more skeptical of the defendant's claims that it isn't liable for issuing false takedowns.
On the post: FBI And Half The World Bust Operators Of A Site That Made The Dark Web Searchable
Re: Money laundering
In which case everyone who has a credit card can be charged with the same charges. Cardholder => bank (paycheck) => credit card company (card payment via bank transfer) => cardholder (card available amount increased by amount of payment).
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