Pffft, weak attempt at trying to sidestep the matter.
I asked you to prove a positive. You claim that I am those things. I ask for the evidence that your claim is true. The requires a single example of something that already exists; at least, it already exists if your claim is based on actual evidence, and not merely pulled out of thin air with no factual basis at all.
Similarly, my argument against you is based on something which already exists and has been demonstrated, and not a negative.
My, my. Such hostility and insults. Very unbecoming.
We have been debating one thing and one thing only: whether you trust the government to any degree. You said you do not to any degree, and I said that the fact that you voluntarily permit the government to have secrets by definition means that you trust the government to act in your best interest a sufficient amount to justify that trust.
Please point out where I have said even once that secrecy is 100% unnecessary, that I have 0 trust the government, that government is unnecessary, or anything else that expresses "anti-establishment", not living in "the real world", etc. Of course, you can't. I merely pointed out the irony that you argued that the government must be trusted using as evidence examples of secrets that harm those they are kept a secret from, and you've been raging ever since, for reasons that are unclear. Whenever you made an argument, I responded to it, and nothing more. Perhaps you could show the same courtesy, or is courtesy only for people who need to "grow the hell up"?
So it's not that you trust the government, it's that you know the government is going to screw you and you voluntarily let them? That's actually more insane than just trusting the government to act in your best interest in the first place.
While there are different degrees of trust, permitting a party to have secrets at all is by definition placing an amount of trust in that party. You are arguing that it is necessary that governments have some secrets; this is by definition trusting the government. Those who do not trust do not tolerate secrets.
I can't help but find it highly amusing that you are saying trust is necessary because if people didn't trust they'd become aware that the people they aren't trusting are not trustworthy at all, and plotting against them in secret.
Remember that this is the government carrying out official business. If the seizure was unlawful, can think of a couple Constitutional rights the action would violate. Consequently, there's a good chance "sorry guys, we fucked up" would get them sued.
I have a medical suggestion for you: stop reading TechDirt. It's very obvious that it makes your blood pressure go through the roof, and that's unhealthy and generally life-shortening.
Or, alternately, you could leave it to your significant other or children to file a class-action lawsuit against him after you die. You could use the cases against cigarette manufacturers to build your case.
I guess which of those is preferable is a matter of taste.
Well admittedly the worst case scenario would be the courts accepting some completely absurd method such as summing all reputable reported downloads (e.g. numbers reported by trackers who are considered reliable) and assigning MSRP to each. That would rape both these sites/services and reality all in one shot.
Though I suppose pirates themselves would get off pretty easy if they used that method. MSRP is 2-3 orders of magnitude less than they're getting sued for currently. Guess it's a better outcome for some than others.
"Perhaps I missed it, but I looked over the linked article and did not find a link to the source material it was quoting."
What exactly are you referring to here? I ask because the most obvious interpretation of your post is that you're factual wrong in the most trivially-proven way. That is, that the CS4IF post contains a quote from the HailingBlog, and the title of the quote - Making Patents Incontestable - links to the source post on HailingBlog by the same title.
So, to clarify: what is the "linked article" and "source material" you refer to?
I can't help but think that calling them his children is a terrible analogy. You want everybody to love your children, and taking the effort to scan and post repositories of comics definitely shows love. Similarly, only the most incredibly overbearing of parents demands total and absolute control over their children's lives, completely devoid of outside influence.
What elevates the above from nitpicking to actual useful contribution is that the above exactly describes how I view my own creations, and I can't help but find Larson overbearing in copyright and (based on his analogy) parenting.
Re: Re: Good idea, if you cant dispute it in 5 years, you should be told to go away.. you are never going to dispute it.
My suspicion is that he's anti-TD, and if that makes him pro-IP-abuse, that's a small price to pay.
Actually, the mindset of people like him seems to be that there is no such thing as IP abuse (at least not by IP holders), therefore there's no need to worry about preventing it. Similar to how there's no such thing as an illegal download that doesn't monetarily hurt IP holders.
I suspect it'll be argued as a matter of intent. Almost everyone uses banks for lawful purposes, and as such giving out a map to a bank is no indication of ill intent. On the other hand, an unauthorized copy of a file posted in a public, easily-discoverable area (e.g. a public forum) is highly likely to be used for copyright infringement, therefore linking could be construed as intent to encourage infringement.
Of course the edge case would be giving out a map to somebody you know is planning to rob the bank, but the frequency of that is negligibly small.
To an extent this has already been done. Materials unearthed in discovery in the Viacom vs. YouTube case showed that the promotion arm of Viacom was sending promotional materials to YouTube, which then got DMCAed by the legal arm of Viacom. Internal e-mails revealed people on the promotion side referring to YouTube as "assholes" etc. for taking down and ultimately banning Viacom's YouTube account due to repeated copyright violations reported by Viacom's legal arm.
"The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines."
That is one of the most excessively (and irrationally) romantic things I've ever heard. Trust is a tool: something which exists only to serve a purpose. You trust because you need to, not because trusting is good in itself. If there is no need for it, trust, like any other tool that is no longer useful, will disappear. This is perfectly normal, and working exactly as intended.
If I have the option of trusting that someone is my friend vs. knowing that they're my friend, I want the latter, 100.% (that period is not a typo) of the time. Between trusting that someone is acting the way they're supposed to and knowing, again I will choose the latter 100.% of the time. Between trusting that my government is acting in my best interest and knowing that it is, the very same. Are we noticing a pattern yet?
Once again, trust is a tool, it is not a virtue. It is neither morally right nor wrong, it is merely useful or it is not. Only the truly hopeless romantic cries when a tool becomes obsolete.
That said, the lack of secrets in no way implies the obsolescence of trust, so the argument is absurd to begin with. There are at least two uses for trust (the tool), and only one disappears with secrets.
"Wiretapping? Secret investigations? Propaganda? Net neutrality>? Corrupt politicians? All par for the course... as long as it's the US. Just one idiot here seems to justify a massive sense of outrage, and that was my point: one idiot who can be stopped without effort, but you're outraged."
I just have one question: are you insane? The majority of posts on Techdirt are slamming the US for those very things you list. If anything, Techdirt is US-centric, and subjects the US to greater scrutiny and in more detail than other countries, mentioning only the worst offenses from other countries. I might hypothesize a reason for this would be the greater knowledge of the US and its political and legal system than the systems of other countries, leading to more thorough exposition for US stories.
Indeed. Which brings us to the only real question here: is it permissible to torture somebody as punishment? This is in contrast to the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by the US in recent years which, defenders claim, are a means of extracting vital, life-saving information.
The last two sentences are rather unnecessary and irrelevant to the rest of your post. It is indeed just business. But it doesn't matter that Wikileaks isn't a business, it matters that Wikileaks doesn't have the economic and political power that the Times has to directly take retribution on any businesses to take action against it.
On the post: RapidShare Ruled Legal... Yet Again
Obviously
On the post: US Gov't Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: BETTER IDEA
I asked you to prove a positive. You claim that I am those things. I ask for the evidence that your claim is true. The requires a single example of something that already exists; at least, it already exists if your claim is based on actual evidence, and not merely pulled out of thin air with no factual basis at all.
Similarly, my argument against you is based on something which already exists and has been demonstrated, and not a negative.
How are you going to wriggle now, I wonder?
On the post: US Gov't Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: BETTER IDEA
We have been debating one thing and one thing only: whether you trust the government to any degree. You said you do not to any degree, and I said that the fact that you voluntarily permit the government to have secrets by definition means that you trust the government to act in your best interest a sufficient amount to justify that trust.
Please point out where I have said even once that secrecy is 100% unnecessary, that I have 0 trust the government, that government is unnecessary, or anything else that expresses "anti-establishment", not living in "the real world", etc. Of course, you can't. I merely pointed out the irony that you argued that the government must be trusted using as evidence examples of secrets that harm those they are kept a secret from, and you've been raging ever since, for reasons that are unclear. Whenever you made an argument, I responded to it, and nothing more. Perhaps you could show the same courtesy, or is courtesy only for people who need to "grow the hell up"?
On the post: US Gov't Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: BETTER IDEA
On the post: US Gov't Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: BETTER IDEA
On the post: US Gov't Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked
Re: Re: Re: Re: BETTER IDEA
On the post: Previously Chatty Homeland Security Clams Up After Errors In Domain Seizures Pop Up
Re: C'mon.
On the post: Why Is A Charity For Abused Kids Suing A Bunch Of Tech Companies For Patent Infringement?
Re: Masnick on Charity's Case
Or, alternately, you could leave it to your significant other or children to file a class-action lawsuit against him after you die. You could use the cases against cigarette manufacturers to build your case.
I guess which of those is preferable is a matter of taste.
On the post: Limewire Seeking All The Recording Industry's Secrets
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Though I suppose pirates themselves would get off pretty easy if they used that method. MSRP is 2-3 orders of magnitude less than they're getting sued for currently. Guess it's a better outcome for some than others.
On the post: How To Make The Patent System Even Worse: Make Patent Validity Incontestable
Re: Re: Re:
What exactly are you referring to here? I ask because the most obvious interpretation of your post is that you're factual wrong in the most trivially-proven way. That is, that the CS4IF post contains a quote from the HailingBlog, and the title of the quote - Making Patents Incontestable - links to the source post on HailingBlog by the same title.
So, to clarify: what is the "linked article" and "source material" you refer to?
On the post: Dear Gary Larson: Your Kids Go Out At Night; Let Them Be
Bad Analogy?
What elevates the above from nitpicking to actual useful contribution is that the above exactly describes how I view my own creations, and I can't help but find Larson overbearing in copyright and (based on his analogy) parenting.
On the post: How To Make The Patent System Even Worse: Make Patent Validity Incontestable
Re: Re: Good idea, if you cant dispute it in 5 years, you should be told to go away.. you are never going to dispute it.
Actually, the mindset of people like him seems to be that there is no such thing as IP abuse (at least not by IP holders), therefore there's no need to worry about preventing it. Similar to how there's no such thing as an illegal download that doesn't monetarily hurt IP holders.
On the post: New Congressional Leadership Prioritizes Wikileaks Investigation
Re:
On the post: Would Twitter Be Liable For Links To Infringing Material?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Sadly Enough
Of course the edge case would be giving out a map to somebody you know is planning to rob the bank, but the frequency of that is negligibly small.
On the post: Would Twitter Be Liable For Links To Infringing Material?
Re: Re: Re: Logically speaking.
On the post: Jaron Lanier's Virtual Reality: Secrecy Is Good Because Secrecy Is Necessary
That is one of the most excessively (and irrationally) romantic things I've ever heard. Trust is a tool: something which exists only to serve a purpose. You trust because you need to, not because trusting is good in itself. If there is no need for it, trust, like any other tool that is no longer useful, will disappear. This is perfectly normal, and working exactly as intended.
If I have the option of trusting that someone is my friend vs. knowing that they're my friend, I want the latter, 100.% (that period is not a typo) of the time. Between trusting that someone is acting the way they're supposed to and knowing, again I will choose the latter 100.% of the time. Between trusting that my government is acting in my best interest and knowing that it is, the very same. Are we noticing a pattern yet?
Once again, trust is a tool, it is not a virtue. It is neither morally right nor wrong, it is merely useful or it is not. Only the truly hopeless romantic cries when a tool becomes obsolete.
That said, the lack of secrets in no way implies the obsolescence of trust, so the argument is absurd to begin with. There are at least two uses for trust (the tool), and only one disappears with secrets.
On the post: EU's Main ACTA Supporter Caught Lying About ACTA
Re: Re: Selection bias
I just have one question: are you insane? The majority of posts on Techdirt are slamming the US for those very things you list. If anything, Techdirt is US-centric, and subjects the US to greater scrutiny and in more detail than other countries, mentioning only the worst offenses from other countries. I might hypothesize a reason for this would be the greater knowledge of the US and its political and legal system than the systems of other countries, leading to more thorough exposition for US stories.
On the post: UN Investigating Whether Or Not US Is Torturing Bradley Manning
Re:
On the post: Will Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, BofA & Apple Terminate Relationships With The NYTimes For Revealing Military Secrets?
Re: It's business
On the post: Will Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, BofA & Apple Terminate Relationships With The NYTimes For Revealing Military Secrets?
Re: Re: cc came closest
Straightforward enough distinction. But what does it matter?
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