So let me get things straight. A "civilizational collapse" in an area of the world that never was civilized, leading to the resumption of business as usual--except for a few short decades in the 20th century when the winners of the world wars arbitrarily rearranged a bunch of borders because they could--puts us all at risk of being overrun by a tiny barbarian "army" whose only military conquests have come because the people opposing them are literally cowards afraid to stand against an enemy force even when they have a 30:1 advantage? And that has... what, again, to do with China?
It's stupid crap like this that makes me want to support the development of electric vehicles and the Hyperloop project. The sooner we can make oil irrelevant to the modern economy, the sooner we can do what we should have done a hundred years ago and quarantine that entire part of the world until they've finished working out their own problems and demonstrated that they're ready to finally join their grown up brothers and sisters in the civilized world.
If so, why did he spend the bulk of his career on the other side?
No, I think Karl's right; this looks like someone who no longer has to worry about making the bad guys happy out of basic self-interest and is now free to do the right thing.
Sports events are performances, just like live theatre. Thus copyright laws imply.
I've never heard of someone "performing" sports; I always hear about people playing them.
Theatre has a script. It's written and learned and rehearsed, and eventually performed. It (debatably, some works of theatre more than others) has artistic and literary value. But sports, while they obviously have entertainment value, possess none of these qualities. There is no "authorship" in playing sports, no creative work being performed.
...with one obvious exception. Wow, it's a bit disturbing to suddenly realize that professional wrestling is actually deserving of copyright protection! o_0
Yeah, how does that even make sense? Copyright is for works of creative authorship, which sports simply aren't. Under what legal doctrine is copyright a thing in the absence of creative authorship?
There is a reason I dislike, avoid and have no interest in organized sports, and that's the strong culture of thuggery that goes with them. Disproportionately large percentages of athletes in the professional sports system have been accused of serious, violent felonies--assault, sexual violence, domestic abuse, drug dealing, DUI, stuff like that--and in almost every case it gets covered up and papered over by the League's high-powered lawyers and well-trained handlers.
This pattern of evading responsibility and enabling violence goes all the way back through college sports and, in many cases, even to the high school level, and no one does anything about it. So I'm going to do the only thing I can, and not feed a cent of my money into that corrupt system.
It's not too surprising; breaking a channel like ESPN out of the core channel bundle immediately reduces ad impressions and overall marketing footprint, even if it's unfair for consumers to pay for incredibly-expensive content they have absolutely no interest in.
Wait, what? How do you lose ad impressions from customers who weren't watching your channel in the first place, simply because it's not not even an option for them to watch your channel that they weren't watching anyway? 0 - 100% = you haven't lost anything.
you are suggesting writing a major copyright bill with thousands of provisions
When did I suggest that? What I suggested above contains exactly one provision: the repeal of the entirety of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Although in the past I have advocated a second provision that logically should go with this: formally reclassifying the "access control devices" (aka DRM) formerly protected by the DMCA as what they truly are: illegal hacking tools.
I see no need for further provisions, at least not right away. Fixing these two things would allow a lot of the problems built upon these main problems to sort themselves out.
without having to completely rewrite digital copyright law.
You say that like it would be a bad thing.
It also gives rights owners a way to address concerns with infringement without A) creating a small claims court for copyright which would be a disaster, and B) requiring a rights holder to go through a bloated suit process for someone they likely cant serve.
A) Why? B) If all you were looking for was getting infringing content taken down, a simple small claims suit would be quite suitable, (no pun intended), and if the defendant never shows up, you get a default judgment. It's all very simple, neat and tidy. It's only if you try to make a big deal out of it (see: stupid stunts that the MAFIAA pull on a regular basis) that it requires a bigger, more expensive court proceeding.
Remember we do actually have to think about independent artists.
You mean the guys who benefit the most and (generally, at least) have the least objections to having their work shared around, generating free advertising for them? The current system doesn't protect them; it gets in their way at best, and that's when it's not actively helping the bad guys to rob them blind.
Take a look at what his campaign spent on the last two elections. (Here's a hint: the order of magnitude is written with a B, not an M.) Who do you think provided all that money? It sure wasn't We The People...
Except without the safe harbors YouTube would totally have LOST its suits. Its entire defense hinged on the fact that by adhering to the law it was protected against the lawsuit.
Begging the question. Yes, obviously without the DMCA, YouTube would not have had a "we were in compliance with the DMCA" defense, but it's a bit silly to jump from that to "they would have had no defense."
MegaUpload went out of business, yes, but because of the rogue actions of law enforcement. If allowed to remain a going concern, Or if its assets had not been seized, it very likely could have kept going, as it had the cash to fight (which is why he was never sued). It has yet to be decided if MegaUpload violated the safe harbors. Evidence provided to us suggests no, but we shall see.
Veoh yes got sued to death before being vidicated by the courts. But what took them down was court costs, not penalties for infringing on copyright. This has less to do with the safe harbors failing then the way the court system works failing.
Well, it's not much of a safe harbor if it doesn't even keep you from being sued to death over an obviously meritless charge, now is it?
You want to see a real safe harbor in action, look at CDA 230. Look at the way it routinely gets baseless cases thrown out long before they become expensive enough to destroy the innocent victims. The DMCA does not do that.
You recommend a regime where if I upload say The Avengers 2 in HD and then go off grid, the site hosting the content would never have to take it down. Because even with the court declaring me guilty of infringement, the host isn't liable if it remains up. So without me to take it down, it remains up indefinitely.
I recommended no such thing. This issue has come up before, and my recommendation has remained consistent: I believe in due process.
If you were to be found guilty in a court of law, at that point the copyright owner would have every right to present the hosting site with a takedown request, and that request should be honored. But punishing someone for breaking the law before they have been found guilty of breaking the law is an abomination, and that doesn't change if the law in question is copyright law.
Throwing out the safe harbor provisions doesn't solve anything.
It solves the true problem: "guilty until proven innocent." Everything else is just details.
Fix the issues in the courts, as with all copyright disputes make fee shifting the norm, institute penalties (on top of the fee shifting) for those who sue hosts who are adhering to the DMCA and make it so false DMCA claims are punishable, and you have fixed most of the problems with the safe harbors.
...or you could just throw it out and institute sane rules that preserve the sanctity of due process and the presumption of innocence.
If you're unfamiliar with it, copyright's safe harbors are designed to make sure that the internet thrives, by avoiding frivolous litigation that would stifle free expression and innovation. Honestly, the safe harbors are a pretty simple concept: put the liability for infringement on the parties that actually infringe the content, rather than the internet services that they use.
No, that's the way they're marketed, and anyone who uses the term "safe harbor" here is either pushing that line of propaganda or has been taken in by it. The way it actually works in practice is the exact opposite: the "safe harbors" provide the exact opposite of safety, and a tool of extortion by which the bad guys use the threat of frivolous lawsuits are to avoid having to do the hard work involved in putting the liability on the parties who actually infringed, and instead going after the service providers who are supposed to be immune under the safe harbor.
It did nothing to protect YouTube from coming within a hair's breadth of being sued out of existence. It did nothing to protect MegaUpload, Veoh, or Aereo. The bottom line is, it is a "safe harbor" that does not keep Internet companies safe!
In fact, it actively makes things worse for Internet companies. By establishing a set of rules that an Internet company has to follow in order to avoid secondary liability, it implicitly establishes a concept of secondary liability that would not exist otherwise. The notion of liability pertaining only to the actual infringer and not to the person who transmits it long predates the Wold Wide Web; it's known as Common Carrier doctrine, it doesn't have any extortionate conditions attached the way the DMCA takedown system does, and if it weren't for the DMCA it would have been offering real protection to Internet companies all these years.
So yes, the "safe harbors" have to go, along with the rest of the DMCA. Throw the entire law out, and maybe we can start making some real progress towards an Internet that's truly safe for user-generated content.
The first line is quite correct. Much of the Democratic party is vehemently against these deals... but not all of it, and more significantly, not the guy at the top.
If they make war too ugly, great! Maybe that would stop the next one from happening.
That's what Nobel thought about his invention of dynamite: this is something too horrible to ever use in combat, therefore it will never be used. Instead, military folks gleefully adopted it and invented the bland-sounding notion of "collateral damage" to gloss over the attendant horrors.
It's what a lot of people thought about World War I, with its insanely pointless trench warfare. They called it "the war to end all wars." We all know how that turned out.
It's what a lot of people thought about the atomic bomb. Here, finally, is something so horrible that no one will ever try to use it again. And no one did... right up until the next war broke out, and General McArthur advocated using The Bomb on North Korea so aggressively that President Truman had to fire him. We've just barely managed to dodge this one so far, but don't think for a second there aren't people out there who would love to get their hands on a nuke and then set it off in a major population center, if they could!
There's never been such a thing as a weapon so ugly that no one wants to use it, and I don't think there ever will be. Heck, just look at Star Wars. Build a weapon literally millions of times more destructive than a nuclear warhead, and someone will use it, and then rebuild it as a bigger and better 2.0 version when the first one gets destroyed! Those movies were so phenomenally successful because they had a ring of truth to them.
I once heard that a few years back, a certain political party in Britain managed to pick up a huge number of seats in an election by doing nothing more than publishing the official platform of their biggest rival and saying "this is what these guys stand for." Seems to me that a similar strategy is called for here. Take these statements, collect them, and say "this is sheer insanity on the face of it, and these people are trying to enshrine it in law."
It's also worth pointing out that it's called copy-right for a reason, and not access-right or usage-right.
On the post: Tom Friedman: If We Don't Sign The TPP Agreement, The World Will Be Overtaken By ISIS, Anarchy And China
It's stupid crap like this that makes me want to support the development of electric vehicles and the Hyperloop project. The sooner we can make oil irrelevant to the modern economy, the sooner we can do what we should have done a hundred years ago and quarantine that entire part of the world until they've finished working out their own problems and demonstrated that they're ready to finally join their grown up brothers and sisters in the civilized world.
Ugh.
On the post: Dear Tom Wheeler: I'm Sorry I Thought You Were A Mindless Cable Shill
Re: Kudos, but...
On the post: Dear Tom Wheeler: I'm Sorry I Thought You Were A Mindless Cable Shill
Re:
No, I think Karl's right; this looks like someone who no longer has to worry about making the bad guys happy out of basic self-interest and is now free to do the right thing.
On the post: Can You Sue For Copyright Infringement Before It's Actually Happened?
Re:
I've never heard of someone "performing" sports; I always hear about people playing them.
Theatre has a script. It's written and learned and rehearsed, and eventually performed. It (debatably, some works of theatre more than others) has artistic and literary value. But sports, while they obviously have entertainment value, possess none of these qualities. There is no "authorship" in playing sports, no creative work being performed.
...with one obvious exception. Wow, it's a bit disturbing to suddenly realize that professional wrestling is actually deserving of copyright protection! o_0
On the post: Can You Sue For Copyright Infringement Before It's Actually Happened?
Re:
On the post: The CIA Will Keep Killing Civilians With Drone Strikes Because The 'Rules' For Drone Strikes Aren't Actually Rules
Re:
...wait a sec...
On the post: ESPN Sues Verizon For Trying To Give Consumers What They Want
Re: Dear ESPN
This pattern of evading responsibility and enabling violence goes all the way back through college sports and, in many cases, even to the high school level, and no one does anything about it. So I'm going to do the only thing I can, and not feed a cent of my money into that corrupt system.
On the post: ESPN Sues Verizon For Trying To Give Consumers What They Want
Wait, what? How do you lose ad impressions from customers who weren't watching your channel in the first place, simply because it's not not even an option for them to watch your channel that they weren't watching anyway? 0 - 100% = you haven't lost anything.
On the post: Recording Industry's Latest Plan To Mess Up The Internet: Do Away With Safe Harbors
Re: Re: Re: Re:
When did I suggest that? What I suggested above contains exactly one provision: the repeal of the entirety of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Although in the past I have advocated a second provision that logically should go with this: formally reclassifying the "access control devices" (aka DRM) formerly protected by the DMCA as what they truly are: illegal hacking tools.
I see no need for further provisions, at least not right away. Fixing these two things would allow a lot of the problems built upon these main problems to sort themselves out.
On the post: Recording Industry's Latest Plan To Mess Up The Internet: Do Away With Safe Harbors
Re: Re: Re: Re:
You say that like it would be a bad thing.
A) Why?
B) If all you were looking for was getting infringing content taken down, a simple small claims suit would be quite suitable, (no pun intended), and if the defendant never shows up, you get a default judgment. It's all very simple, neat and tidy. It's only if you try to make a big deal out of it (see: stupid stunts that the MAFIAA pull on a regular basis) that it requires a bigger, more expensive court proceeding.
You mean the guys who benefit the most and (generally, at least) have the least objections to having their work shared around, generating free advertising for them? The current system doesn't protect them; it gets in their way at best, and that's when it's not actively helping the bad guys to rob them blind.
On the post: If You Really Think TPP Is About 'Trade' Then Your Analysis Is Already Wrong
Re: Re: Freedom of trade
On the post: Recording Industry's Latest Plan To Mess Up The Internet: Do Away With Safe Harbors
Re: Re:
Begging the question. Yes, obviously without the DMCA, YouTube would not have had a "we were in compliance with the DMCA" defense, but it's a bit silly to jump from that to "they would have had no defense."
Well, it's not much of a safe harbor if it doesn't even keep you from being sued to death over an obviously meritless charge, now is it?
You want to see a real safe harbor in action, look at CDA 230. Look at the way it routinely gets baseless cases thrown out long before they become expensive enough to destroy the innocent victims. The DMCA does not do that.
I recommended no such thing. This issue has come up before, and my recommendation has remained consistent: I believe in due process.
If you were to be found guilty in a court of law, at that point the copyright owner would have every right to present the hosting site with a takedown request, and that request should be honored. But punishing someone for breaking the law before they have been found guilty of breaking the law is an abomination, and that doesn't change if the law in question is copyright law.
It solves the true problem: "guilty until proven innocent." Everything else is just details.
...or you could just throw it out and institute sane rules that preserve the sanctity of due process and the presumption of innocence.
On the post: Recording Industry's Latest Plan To Mess Up The Internet: Do Away With Safe Harbors
Re: Re:
On the post: Recording Industry's Latest Plan To Mess Up The Internet: Do Away With Safe Harbors
No, that's the way they're marketed, and anyone who uses the term "safe harbor" here is either pushing that line of propaganda or has been taken in by it. The way it actually works in practice is the exact opposite: the "safe harbors" provide the exact opposite of safety, and a tool of extortion by which the bad guys use the threat of frivolous lawsuits are to avoid having to do the hard work involved in putting the liability on the parties who actually infringed, and instead going after the service providers who are supposed to be immune under the safe harbor.
It did nothing to protect YouTube from coming within a hair's breadth of being sued out of existence. It did nothing to protect MegaUpload, Veoh, or Aereo. The bottom line is, it is a "safe harbor" that does not keep Internet companies safe!
In fact, it actively makes things worse for Internet companies. By establishing a set of rules that an Internet company has to follow in order to avoid secondary liability, it implicitly establishes a concept of secondary liability that would not exist otherwise. The notion of liability pertaining only to the actual infringer and not to the person who transmits it long predates the Wold Wide Web; it's known as Common Carrier doctrine, it doesn't have any extortionate conditions attached the way the DMCA takedown system does, and if it weren't for the DMCA it would have been offering real protection to Internet companies all these years.
So yes, the "safe harbors" have to go, along with the rest of the DMCA. Throw the entire law out, and maybe we can start making some real progress towards an Internet that's truly safe for user-generated content.
On the post: If You Really Think TPP Is About 'Trade' Then Your Analysis Is Already Wrong
What does the author think that populism is, if not an ideology?
On the post: If You Really Think TPP Is About 'Trade' Then Your Analysis Is Already Wrong
Re: Re: Re: Revisionist history much?
On the post: Sony Execs Freaked Out That Its Marketing People Wanted To Use Torrents For Marketing
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The nuclear bomb card.
That's what Nobel thought about his invention of dynamite: this is something too horrible to ever use in combat, therefore it will never be used. Instead, military folks gleefully adopted it and invented the bland-sounding notion of "collateral damage" to gloss over the attendant horrors.
It's what a lot of people thought about World War I, with its insanely pointless trench warfare. They called it "the war to end all wars." We all know how that turned out.
It's what a lot of people thought about the atomic bomb. Here, finally, is something so horrible that no one will ever try to use it again. And no one did... right up until the next war broke out, and General McArthur advocated using The Bomb on North Korea so aggressively that President Truman had to fire him. We've just barely managed to dodge this one so far, but don't think for a second there aren't people out there who would love to get their hands on a nuke and then set it off in a major population center, if they could!
There's never been such a thing as a weapon so ugly that no one wants to use it, and I don't think there ever will be. Heck, just look at Star Wars. Build a weapon literally millions of times more destructive than a nuclear warhead, and someone will use it, and then rebuild it as a bigger and better 2.0 version when the first one gets destroyed! Those movies were so phenomenally successful because they had a ring of truth to them.
On the post: Sen. McConnell Undercuts USA Freedom Act By Dropping Bill To Reauthorize PATRIOT Act Until 2020 Directly On The Senate Floor
Re: Good cop / Bad Cop
On the post: DVD Makers Say That You Don't Really Own The DVDs You Bought... Thanks To Copyright
It's also worth pointing out that it's called copy-right for a reason, and not access-right or usage-right.
On the post: LA School District's iPad Farce Reaches Nadir As Officials Demand Refunds From Apple, Answer Questions From The SEC
Re: Re:
Wow, that's really screwed up. Where's "here"?
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