"Well, the argument about fiat currency is spectacularly silly. I know what you're trying to say, but it's as idiotic to suggest that currency would be based on a file format as it would be to say that it should be based on pints of cream."
That's actually what copyright folk are trying to argue.
In regards to internet pirate traffic it comes up as a regular figure over the years despite what people claim about "easy convenient paid services" reducing it:
Cer tainly nowhere near as low as 3%. And that really should be "CitationS please" in the plural if we're really talking skepticism. I can provide more if needed, but that's the general picture found by most studies.
"So, you're saying that no employee in any other field gets screwed over, denied payment for services, forced to give free labour without direct compensation, etc.? Because whenever you decide to work in the real world, you're in for a shock."
Actually all I said was that creators would actually have a chance to get to know what they'll be paid before they do their work akin to an employment contract - no more, no less.
"You are ignoring the vast majority of creators who do it for fun, or altruistic reasons, and are often faced with a problem of fans demanding ways to pay them. The majority of works published on the Internet are published their for reasons other than directly raising money."
There is such a thing as anonymity, which is rather easy. Including that of aliases. Even further still, there is such a thing as anonymity with the ability to still prove you are that particular person on multiple platforms - my personal favourite is using the inverse of the RSA encryption algorithm to prove it's really you: clever use of very large prime numbers you see.
"The people who demand strong copyright protection, and or forced payment are dominantly the middlemen who have built a business that relied on them controlling what works were published, and so inflating the price they could demand for that work. Such people hate the openness of the Internet because it allows creators to go directly to their audience, bypassing their ability to manipulate the market to maximize their, (and not the creators), profits."
I like how you used the word "inflating"; it supports my copyright-as-dud-money metaphor. As Orwell liked to point out again and again, language is everything.
I don't believe the internet eliminates middlemen. It may reduce their numbers, but it is still nonetheless a bridge of some kind between the buyer and seller, and so middlemen are bound to be there. In the internet's case it would be the ISPs, the search engines, advertisers etc.
Even fans need to find a way to access the artist, which requires someone to help make the connection. That person is the one to remain vigilant towards, and even in my case of assurance contracts it would be the likes of Kickstarter and Patreon. For one thing they need to start refunding for failed projects, but the other big thing for the future is to watch that their % cuts are fair. Because we'll need to be ready for it.
"The facts are uncontested: Copyright owners cannot reach all channels where the product could be available."
Those facts most certainly are uncontested. And it is the very fact that copyright owners cannot possibly watch over every single inch of this planet that they will never be able to enforce copyright.
There is a reason why dollars, pounds, euros, all the fiat currencies of the world do not have "MP3" as a legal tender. To do so would collapse that currency spectacularly fast. Nobody would be dumb enough at that point to say "well the system just needs to be enforced better". Nor would they say "well the fact that 75% of people still use the system honestly proves the system deserves credit for being effective and so we need to keep it going".
Copyright is, like it or not, a privately owned fiat currency, without the luxury of on-hand police to watch over forgeries in quite the same way. You have a single party giving permission out to print something, excluding others, for the purpose of adding value to objects where there was none before. But there's a reason why the forgery rate of the pound is kept at about 3% - coins and notes are scarce enough naturally to make it work.
But when it comes to copyright, ANY medium is a legal tender, ANY material construct of it is fair game including digital, which is why 25% of all internet traffic is pirated: it's an undisputed failure. Not even Ron Paul with his absurd theory of scrapping state fiat currency and replacing it with privately competing currencies would support this if it were presented to him as such. Libertarians do not call for a return to the "JPEG" standard or the ".TXT" standard for a reason. Both fiat advocates and gold standard advocates would agree that money made out of digital files wouldn't work no matter how much wish-thinking we had otherwise.
Assurance contracts is how you protect the labour of artists. And is the only paywall which will work. Simultaneous payment from all customers set at a price the artist demands, and all the problems of property rights are solved with no copyright necessary. When millions pay their bills every month, they are participating in an assurance contract of simultaneous service. Same with tickets for gigs, same with pre-orders, same with reality-TV phone-voting, same with just about everything that involves a simultaneous pay-in or pay-out. It works, has been proven to work, and is the only way artists are going to have a say in their rights to be paid for work.
It also means the golden luxury of knowing what you're going to be paid for your work. You know, just like any other employee with basic contract rights.
Copyright is a currency. It involves a party, in this case the copyright holder, having the legal authority to make copies of something and exclude others from doing so, for the purpose of adding artificial value to that something making it a tradeable commodity.
That's what the dollar, pound and euro is. A fiat currency.
Now tell me. Why is the forgery rate for pounds something like 3%, while for copyrighted material it's something like 25%? The reason being that the printers of pounds (and the dollar and euro) are not insane enough to make "MP3" a legal tender. It's notes and coins, nothing more and nothing less.
And who's really going to say that "actually, the MP3 'tender' does get credit if 75% of them are still legit!", as if there's any real difficulty getting your hands on the forgery 25% without being caught in some way by lawyers or police? Whatever's causing people to act honestly and not make MP3 forgeries, it aint copyright law.
We all know what would happen to a currency if it went JPEG. Hint: a lot of stock market crash, and a whole lot of irrational anger towards Google instead of the system that provided Google the means to cheat in the first place.
And of course because you've now said it's okay they'll take that as proof that copyright works anyway because of "see, look, he's given permission and now his T-Shirts are selling!".
If Digital Rights Malware, sorry "Management", really will end up making a game uncopyable, then there's no excuse for copyright law for games anymore, is there? After all if the DRM does the job, that's all you need, right?
Though I might add, if journalism demanded payment through assurance contracted crowdfunding before being worked on and released, this kind of paywall WOULD get credit for funding the discovery of those facts.
Precisely because it's not being dependent on the utopia of "artificial scarcity". Crowdfunding paywalls are natural scarcity, and it gives the journalists the advantage to set a price they require to do their work and actually get it.
If you paid for journalism on a paywalled news site, when you could have easily gone to another site that didn't have a paywall to find those exact same non-copyrighted facts, it can only be concluded that the paywall doesn't deserve any credit for the factors that caused you to pay for the journalism.
Everything is an uproar here at the moment. Mr Johnson just got subjected to a monstrous put-down, therefore helping to ruin the country for nothing. Corbyn thought it'd be a good idea to mention Israel and ISIS in the same breath at a counter antisemitism rally whilst a Labour MP is accused of Zionist treachery right in front of him.
As a Scot up here who wants both unions to live I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN RIGHT NOW.
Saying this will infuriate copyright advocates but it is the truth: this ban is what you really need to do to stay consistent with copyright mentality.
Because what is the difference between sending a copy over the internet of a work, and making a copy of the work via the beams of light that bounce off a pre-owned paper? In both cases one physical good (whether that's paper or electricity) has ended up producing two copies with one copy in one mind each. If "pay-per-view" demands all the Digital "Rights" "Management" in the world, the logic must also extend to Physical "Rights" "Management".
And why shouldn't there be a big padlock that snaps shut your newspaper at unauthorised moments? You might make an infringing copy for all we know! If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear! Because the burden of proof is on you to prove innocence! Those beams of light that bounce from the paper and hit somebody else's eyes except yours are facilitating piracy!
HOW WILL PAPERS EVER MAKE MONEY AS LONG AS THIS BLATANT THEFT GOES ON? PHYSICAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT NOW! PRM! PRM!
Oh... what's that? Oh? People still pay for papers even though everyone can wait for everyone else to buy and then free-ride?!? Whereas our "game theory" analogy says this should be impossible?! People still pay despite 0% enforcement against second-hand readers?!
Well... uh... that's still because of copyright law ya know!!!
The whole point about journalism is that it doesn't require your respect. Or anyone else's.
I've also noticed "journalism" is now more and more becoming a synonym for anyone who has an opinion of any kind. Just replace the word "Gawker" in your comment with the word "Deepthroat" and you've got every single Nixon lover (yes, they still do exist) an excuse to crush every single paper's reporting of the corruption on the grounds they don't "respect" it. Further still, replace it with the word "Daily Mail", "Guardian", etc.
People here are not going to respect your comment. Should you shut up? No.
And though I think the jury were in the right to award Hogan damages, I can still say all of the above without hesitation.
Contrary to what a lot of folk have been saying on Twitter, Orwell did not in fact say "journalism is printing what someone else does not want to hear, everything else is PR". Though the sentiment is true enough (just don't follow it up with screams of "BIAS!" and then demand the sacking of X number of TV reporters from the BBC and ITV, as these fools from where I am in the UK were doing. The shit-for-brain fuckers had no idea how profane they were being when they were doing that).
It should be noted that when an injunction had been put on Gawker to take down the video, they did, but then merely linked to another video site hosting it instead.
If the logic stands, surely that video site must have been sued by Hogan too. But it wasn't. In other words Gawker have got the "leaker" role here and that is why they must bear the legal burden, not the folk echoing what was leaked e.g. the video site.
If Gawker had a source who provided them with the tape, they could have said they weren't the leaker but merely the echo. Though that would mean having to defend the identity of the source against a possible legal demand to reveal it. None of that happened. It could have also been possible that Gawker were actually the folk who got a hold of the tape without a middleman, considering how they didn't even attempt to pass the buck.
It needs reminding that the hackers of the iCloud celebrity photos were rightfully punished, though folk reposting them on Reddit were not. I don't think a free expression claim is warranted when hackers were trespassing onto property like that. Given the unexplained nature of how Gawker came into possession of that tape (they may have indeed trespassed Hogan's property to get it themselves for all we know), the judgement for damages was probably justified.
Though it sucks. Every instinct in me tells me that gutter press is the FIRST area to defend against censorship precisely because of the huge hate it generates. Hate is fine, gutter press gonna gutter. Censorship is not. If I can defend the rights of Holocaust deniers to speak their minds, and I do justly, I can certainly defend it for sharticles these tabloids put out.
A person who deeply, deeply offends everyone on the internet requires EXTRA protection for free expression, not less. Because it still benefits us. If it is true that knowledge is power, then knowledge of what is false is just as liberating as knowledge of what is true. Every time you hear disgusting, revolting opinions the more you know how low humanity can sink. It's important, otherwise you won't know what to do when confronted with lynch mobs of racist hate peddlers marching on the doors of a minority because you weren't given the space to get angry about the bile building up beforehand. Know thy enemy. You can't do that if you shut them up. Beautiful flowers cannot live without being dependent on pollen-carrying stinging pests.
Here, an anus-inverted tabloid has self-destructed in a manner similar to News of the World here in the U.K., preventing us the right to know about how nasty and cold-hearted an opinion can be. A man has also been the victim of revenge porn but walked away with, what he'd consider, not enough compensation. A billionaire Silicon Valley tycoon walks away with a smile on his face knowing that folk who are nowhere near as rich as him will never have the same kind of financially-backed justice if they ever end up as revenge-porn victims, who he probably couldn't care less about - he will continue to be rich and not stand by his supposed principles, on the basis that revenge can solve anything.
I should point out a correction, Mike. This isn't a superinjunction, it's an injunction. A superinjunction is when you can't even mention the injunction exists without being in contempt of court, which is illiberal because it essentially means secret courts. Though a regular injunction you can say that the injunction exists, which is why papers are allowed to talk about the injunction in England and Wales without actually mentioning the names, and they have done so. See the Daily Mail's "The Law Is An Ass!"
Here in Scotland I could probably name the names without legal trouble. However if I were to step across the border only a couple hundred miles away I probably could not. And I'm not sure if it counts if a copy of my message would be read in HTML in England despite me posting from Scotland to an American server.
I do have some sympathy with my opponents here. If some poor woman were photographed nude without her permission and that image went viral across multiple sites globally, she'd be pretty pissed, and she would be a bit disgusted at folk who try to mock her resisting it as creating a "Streisand Effect", as if she were to blame for everybody else's violation of her privacy, which is what "fighting it makes it stronger" can only mean in this case. The thing about the Streisand Effect is that it only gets you so far morally. It can lead to victim blaming.
And my opponents could also say that it is possible to beat the Streisand Effect by citing the example of the naming of the identities of the killers of James Bulger. This had gone a bit "viral", but then the names had indeed still been removed at every instance in the end.
Though I fear the above example was only due to luck and the example above that no doubt due to the ignorance of porn viewers when determining if each and every nude image is consensual or not. There was more interest here in the UK about the James Bulger killers' identities than say in the US because it was a UK story at its origin, and not as many were spreading the identities because many others objected to it, which may have made it easier for the police to stop.
It's a bit scary to think that law has lost its competency here, and that no amount of law can stop memetic information if it's up against millions willing to resist it. If the law does appear to succeed in putting it down, is that because the law's force was strong, or because the people simply chose not to make the content viral? That's a critical question, because if law is all in the mind anyway and authority is an illusion just like free will is, it would make sense that the latter bit of the answer would be right. We all, in the end, decide if laws should be followed or not, and papers called "laws" are inanimate objects that only mean something if we choose to act in favour of them. Law comes from Order, not the other way around.
That's pretty disturbing, so it is possible that memes can't be stopped by law online - and I really do mean meme in the Dawkins sense of the word: natural selection of expressions. So how do we deal with the nasty stuff?
I think we need to start considering focusing all the justice of civil compensation and prosecutions etc, if there is a case of course, on the "point of the leak", not on folk who simply echo the leak. So if Hulk Hogan wants compensation for an act of revenge porn (I don't know the full details but I assume it must have been revenge porn, I don't think he would have won if he himself published it), he'd have to take it to Gawker or even the person who sent it to Gawker, not everyone else reporting on the story. Otherwise you get farces where because of international servers anyone can find out the UK injunction names but cannot talk about it between them in certain regional parts of the Union. And I'm sure you can still find the Hulk Hogan sex tape somewhere. If you worked hard enough, the killers of James Bulger too.
One exception to this might be child rape images, where those who echo them must also be punished. Though I think that works because the "Is it consensual? How am I meant to know?" line of thinking doesn't hold up since a child cannot consent whatsoever. And the presumption must be made that those who possess such images must also have knowledge of and history with child rape criminal gangs who profit from the slavery, so it is easily justified to say why law must fight against it. And it succeeds very well because the majority will report and fight against child rapists, not spread evil images.
...so again, law only "works" because the masses follow it.
Therefore, in regards to the stuff where you've got to stop the point of the leaks, we may have to simply face the fact that we're in an age where you can't just walk up to printing-press bottlenecks anymore and put a hold on them. You're up against a massive ball of rubberbands the moment something leaks, and even if you get 99% of them that 1% still lingers waiting to instantly turn into the big ball again (I'm sure there's a better metaphor... probably the ProtoPets from Ratchet and Clank 2). So in this day and age, it makes more sense to focus all your justice on those who take something out of your private sphere initially into the public sphere without permission. Because chasing the echoes is only going to be horrible and ugly.
I know what'll stop piracy! The Stop All Piracy Act! And don't worry artists, this law will continue indefinitely, or in other words it'll never stop!
But seriously, we're not talking with rational people here. Just imagine debating against a crazy wing of libertarianism demanding a "JPEG standard" to replace our fiat currencies: there's a point where you just have to accept no amount of reason will do.
Even the gold standard enthusiasts would know it was time to give up if research into technology lead to discoveries where you could suddenly download gold at the click of a mouse.
On the post: Terrible Ruling: EU Decides That Mere Links Can Be Direct Infringement
Re: Re: Re: Copyright...
That's actually what copyright folk are trying to argue.
In regards to internet pirate traffic it comes up as a regular figure over the years despite what people claim about "easy convenient paid services" reducing it:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/41356625
http://www.dailydot.com/business/nbcuniversal-comcast-piracy-study /
https://gigaom.com/2011/01/31/419-piracy-nearly-a-quarter-of-global-internet-traffic-says-study/
Cer tainly nowhere near as low as 3%. And that really should be "CitationS please" in the plural if we're really talking skepticism. I can provide more if needed, but that's the general picture found by most studies.
This article shows distribution:
https://torrentfreak.com/europe-has-the-highest-online-piracy-rates-by-far-160801/
"So, you're saying that no employee in any other field gets screwed over, denied payment for services, forced to give free labour without direct compensation, etc.? Because whenever you decide to work in the real world, you're in for a shock."
Actually all I said was that creators would actually have a chance to get to know what they'll be paid before they do their work akin to an employment contract - no more, no less.
On the post: Terrible Ruling: EU Decides That Mere Links Can Be Direct Infringement
Re: Re: Re: Copyright...
There is such a thing as anonymity, which is rather easy. Including that of aliases. Even further still, there is such a thing as anonymity with the ability to still prove you are that particular person on multiple platforms - my personal favourite is using the inverse of the RSA encryption algorithm to prove it's really you: clever use of very large prime numbers you see.
"The people who demand strong copyright protection, and or forced payment are dominantly the middlemen who have built a business that relied on them controlling what works were published, and so inflating the price they could demand for that work. Such people hate the openness of the Internet because it allows creators to go directly to their audience, bypassing their ability to manipulate the market to maximize their, (and not the creators), profits."
I like how you used the word "inflating"; it supports my copyright-as-dud-money metaphor. As Orwell liked to point out again and again, language is everything.
I don't believe the internet eliminates middlemen. It may reduce their numbers, but it is still nonetheless a bridge of some kind between the buyer and seller, and so middlemen are bound to be there. In the internet's case it would be the ISPs, the search engines, advertisers etc.
Even fans need to find a way to access the artist, which requires someone to help make the connection. That person is the one to remain vigilant towards, and even in my case of assurance contracts it would be the likes of Kickstarter and Patreon. For one thing they need to start refunding for failed projects, but the other big thing for the future is to watch that their % cuts are fair. Because we'll need to be ready for it.
On the post: Terrible Ruling: EU Decides That Mere Links Can Be Direct Infringement
Re: Copyright...
Those facts most certainly are uncontested. And it is the very fact that copyright owners cannot possibly watch over every single inch of this planet that they will never be able to enforce copyright.
There is a reason why dollars, pounds, euros, all the fiat currencies of the world do not have "MP3" as a legal tender. To do so would collapse that currency spectacularly fast. Nobody would be dumb enough at that point to say "well the system just needs to be enforced better". Nor would they say "well the fact that 75% of people still use the system honestly proves the system deserves credit for being effective and so we need to keep it going".
Copyright is, like it or not, a privately owned fiat currency, without the luxury of on-hand police to watch over forgeries in quite the same way. You have a single party giving permission out to print something, excluding others, for the purpose of adding value to objects where there was none before. But there's a reason why the forgery rate of the pound is kept at about 3% - coins and notes are scarce enough naturally to make it work.
But when it comes to copyright, ANY medium is a legal tender, ANY material construct of it is fair game including digital, which is why 25% of all internet traffic is pirated: it's an undisputed failure. Not even Ron Paul with his absurd theory of scrapping state fiat currency and replacing it with privately competing currencies would support this if it were presented to him as such. Libertarians do not call for a return to the "JPEG" standard or the ".TXT" standard for a reason. Both fiat advocates and gold standard advocates would agree that money made out of digital files wouldn't work no matter how much wish-thinking we had otherwise.
Assurance contracts is how you protect the labour of artists. And is the only paywall which will work. Simultaneous payment from all customers set at a price the artist demands, and all the problems of property rights are solved with no copyright necessary. When millions pay their bills every month, they are participating in an assurance contract of simultaneous service. Same with tickets for gigs, same with pre-orders, same with reality-TV phone-voting, same with just about everything that involves a simultaneous pay-in or pay-out. It works, has been proven to work, and is the only way artists are going to have a say in their rights to be paid for work.
It also means the golden luxury of knowing what you're going to be paid for your work. You know, just like any other employee with basic contract rights.
On the post: Our 'Copying Is Not Theft' T-Shirt Seems To REALLY Upset Some People
Re: I want to point out
That's what the dollar, pound and euro is. A fiat currency.
Now tell me. Why is the forgery rate for pounds something like 3%, while for copyrighted material it's something like 25%? The reason being that the printers of pounds (and the dollar and euro) are not insane enough to make "MP3" a legal tender. It's notes and coins, nothing more and nothing less.
And who's really going to say that "actually, the MP3 'tender' does get credit if 75% of them are still legit!", as if there's any real difficulty getting your hands on the forgery 25% without being caught in some way by lawyers or police? Whatever's causing people to act honestly and not make MP3 forgeries, it aint copyright law.
We all know what would happen to a currency if it went JPEG. Hint: a lot of stock market crash, and a whole lot of irrational anger towards Google instead of the system that provided Google the means to cheat in the first place.
On the post: Head Of Anti-Counterfeiting Lobbying Group Says He's Going To Make Counterfeit Techdirt T-Shirts
Unfalsifiable arguments are usually the weakest.
On the post: Remember When Cracking Groups Said Denuvo Would End Game Piracy? Yeah, Didn't Happen
On the post: Lots Of Newspapers Discovering That Paywalls Don't Work
Re:
Precisely because it's not being dependent on the utopia of "artificial scarcity". Crowdfunding paywalls are natural scarcity, and it gives the journalists the advantage to set a price they require to do their work and actually get it.
On the post: Lots Of Newspapers Discovering That Paywalls Don't Work
On the post: But Wait: Copyright Law Is So Screwed Up, Perhaps The Rolling Stones Are Right That Donald Trump Needed Their Permission
On the post: As Erdogan Faces Turkish Coup, The Guy Who Once Banned Social Media Sites, Forced To Address Nation Via Facetime & Twitter
On the post: Google Issues Its Latest 'Stop Blaming Us For Piracy' Report
Because now I don't know where to send my DMCA notices to!
On the post: With The Brexit In The Bag, 'Vote Leave' Starts Vanishing Away Its Promises And Faulty Math
As a Scot up here who wants both unions to live I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN RIGHT NOW.
On the post: Europe Is About To Create A Link Tax: Time To Speak Out Against It
On the post: Not The Onion: Morocco Bans Sharing Newspapers To Protect Publisher Business Models
Because what is the difference between sending a copy over the internet of a work, and making a copy of the work via the beams of light that bounce off a pre-owned paper? In both cases one physical good (whether that's paper or electricity) has ended up producing two copies with one copy in one mind each. If "pay-per-view" demands all the Digital "Rights" "Management" in the world, the logic must also extend to Physical "Rights" "Management".
And why shouldn't there be a big padlock that snaps shut your newspaper at unauthorised moments? You might make an infringing copy for all we know! If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear! Because the burden of proof is on you to prove innocence! Those beams of light that bounce from the paper and hit somebody else's eyes except yours are facilitating piracy!
HOW WILL PAPERS EVER MAKE MONEY AS LONG AS THIS BLATANT THEFT GOES ON? PHYSICAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT NOW! PRM! PRM!
Oh... what's that? Oh? People still pay for papers even though everyone can wait for everyone else to buy and then free-ride?!? Whereas our "game theory" analogy says this should be impossible?! People still pay despite 0% enforcement against second-hand readers?!
Well... uh... that's still because of copyright law ya know!!!
On the post: Gawker Files For Bankruptcy, Begins Process Of Auctioning Itself Off
Re: Re:
On the post: Gawker Files For Bankruptcy, Begins Process Of Auctioning Itself Off
Re:
I've also noticed "journalism" is now more and more becoming a synonym for anyone who has an opinion of any kind. Just replace the word "Gawker" in your comment with the word "Deepthroat" and you've got every single Nixon lover (yes, they still do exist) an excuse to crush every single paper's reporting of the corruption on the grounds they don't "respect" it. Further still, replace it with the word "Daily Mail", "Guardian", etc.
People here are not going to respect your comment. Should you shut up? No.
And though I think the jury were in the right to award Hogan damages, I can still say all of the above without hesitation.
Contrary to what a lot of folk have been saying on Twitter, Orwell did not in fact say "journalism is printing what someone else does not want to hear, everything else is PR". Though the sentiment is true enough (just don't follow it up with screams of "BIAS!" and then demand the sacking of X number of TV reporters from the BBC and ITV, as these fools from where I am in the UK were doing. The shit-for-brain fuckers had no idea how profane they were being when they were doing that).
On the post: Gawker Files For Bankruptcy, Begins Process Of Auctioning Itself Off
Re:
If the logic stands, surely that video site must have been sued by Hogan too. But it wasn't. In other words Gawker have got the "leaker" role here and that is why they must bear the legal burden, not the folk echoing what was leaked e.g. the video site.
If Gawker had a source who provided them with the tape, they could have said they weren't the leaker but merely the echo. Though that would mean having to defend the identity of the source against a possible legal demand to reveal it. None of that happened. It could have also been possible that Gawker were actually the folk who got a hold of the tape without a middleman, considering how they didn't even attempt to pass the buck.
It needs reminding that the hackers of the iCloud celebrity photos were rightfully punished, though folk reposting them on Reddit were not. I don't think a free expression claim is warranted when hackers were trespassing onto property like that. Given the unexplained nature of how Gawker came into possession of that tape (they may have indeed trespassed Hogan's property to get it themselves for all we know), the judgement for damages was probably justified.
Though it sucks. Every instinct in me tells me that gutter press is the FIRST area to defend against censorship precisely because of the huge hate it generates. Hate is fine, gutter press gonna gutter. Censorship is not. If I can defend the rights of Holocaust deniers to speak their minds, and I do justly, I can certainly defend it for sharticles these tabloids put out.
A person who deeply, deeply offends everyone on the internet requires EXTRA protection for free expression, not less. Because it still benefits us. If it is true that knowledge is power, then knowledge of what is false is just as liberating as knowledge of what is true. Every time you hear disgusting, revolting opinions the more you know how low humanity can sink. It's important, otherwise you won't know what to do when confronted with lynch mobs of racist hate peddlers marching on the doors of a minority because you weren't given the space to get angry about the bile building up beforehand. Know thy enemy. You can't do that if you shut them up. Beautiful flowers cannot live without being dependent on pollen-carrying stinging pests.
Here, an anus-inverted tabloid has self-destructed in a manner similar to News of the World here in the U.K., preventing us the right to know about how nasty and cold-hearted an opinion can be. A man has also been the victim of revenge porn but walked away with, what he'd consider, not enough compensation. A billionaire Silicon Valley tycoon walks away with a smile on his face knowing that folk who are nowhere near as rich as him will never have the same kind of financially-backed justice if they ever end up as revenge-porn victims, who he probably couldn't care less about - he will continue to be rich and not stand by his supposed principles, on the basis that revenge can solve anything.
Nobody wins, to be honest.
On the post: New York Times Says Fair Use Of 300 Words Will Run You About $1800
However, quote 100 sentences and you don't have 100 fair uses, you have an infringement.
On the post: Why Is Twitter Sending Legal Letters Warning People About Tweeting About The Gagged Topic Of A 'Celebrity Threesome'
Here in Scotland I could probably name the names without legal trouble. However if I were to step across the border only a couple hundred miles away I probably could not. And I'm not sure if it counts if a copy of my message would be read in HTML in England despite me posting from Scotland to an American server.
I do have some sympathy with my opponents here. If some poor woman were photographed nude without her permission and that image went viral across multiple sites globally, she'd be pretty pissed, and she would be a bit disgusted at folk who try to mock her resisting it as creating a "Streisand Effect", as if she were to blame for everybody else's violation of her privacy, which is what "fighting it makes it stronger" can only mean in this case. The thing about the Streisand Effect is that it only gets you so far morally. It can lead to victim blaming.
And my opponents could also say that it is possible to beat the Streisand Effect by citing the example of the naming of the identities of the killers of James Bulger. This had gone a bit "viral", but then the names had indeed still been removed at every instance in the end.
Though I fear the above example was only due to luck and the example above that no doubt due to the ignorance of porn viewers when determining if each and every nude image is consensual or not. There was more interest here in the UK about the James Bulger killers' identities than say in the US because it was a UK story at its origin, and not as many were spreading the identities because many others objected to it, which may have made it easier for the police to stop.
It's a bit scary to think that law has lost its competency here, and that no amount of law can stop memetic information if it's up against millions willing to resist it. If the law does appear to succeed in putting it down, is that because the law's force was strong, or because the people simply chose not to make the content viral? That's a critical question, because if law is all in the mind anyway and authority is an illusion just like free will is, it would make sense that the latter bit of the answer would be right. We all, in the end, decide if laws should be followed or not, and papers called "laws" are inanimate objects that only mean something if we choose to act in favour of them. Law comes from Order, not the other way around.
That's pretty disturbing, so it is possible that memes can't be stopped by law online - and I really do mean meme in the Dawkins sense of the word: natural selection of expressions. So how do we deal with the nasty stuff?
I think we need to start considering focusing all the justice of civil compensation and prosecutions etc, if there is a case of course, on the "point of the leak", not on folk who simply echo the leak. So if Hulk Hogan wants compensation for an act of revenge porn (I don't know the full details but I assume it must have been revenge porn, I don't think he would have won if he himself published it), he'd have to take it to Gawker or even the person who sent it to Gawker, not everyone else reporting on the story. Otherwise you get farces where because of international servers anyone can find out the UK injunction names but cannot talk about it between them in certain regional parts of the Union. And I'm sure you can still find the Hulk Hogan sex tape somewhere. If you worked hard enough, the killers of James Bulger too.
One exception to this might be child rape images, where those who echo them must also be punished. Though I think that works because the "Is it consensual? How am I meant to know?" line of thinking doesn't hold up since a child cannot consent whatsoever. And the presumption must be made that those who possess such images must also have knowledge of and history with child rape criminal gangs who profit from the slavery, so it is easily justified to say why law must fight against it. And it succeeds very well because the majority will report and fight against child rapists, not spread evil images.
...so again, law only "works" because the masses follow it.
Therefore, in regards to the stuff where you've got to stop the point of the leaks, we may have to simply face the fact that we're in an age where you can't just walk up to printing-press bottlenecks anymore and put a hold on them. You're up against a massive ball of rubberbands the moment something leaks, and even if you get 99% of them that 1% still lingers waiting to instantly turn into the big ball again (I'm sure there's a better metaphor... probably the ProtoPets from Ratchet and Clank 2). So in this day and age, it makes more sense to focus all your justice on those who take something out of your private sphere initially into the public sphere without permission. Because chasing the echoes is only going to be horrible and ugly.
On the post: A Dozen Bad Ideas That Were Raised At The Copyright Office's DMCA Roundtables
Re: Re:
But seriously, we're not talking with rational people here. Just imagine debating against a crazy wing of libertarianism demanding a "JPEG standard" to replace our fiat currencies: there's a point where you just have to accept no amount of reason will do.
Even the gold standard enthusiasts would know it was time to give up if research into technology lead to discoveries where you could suddenly download gold at the click of a mouse.
Next >>