Get the SEC to stop thinking of cryptocurrency as just a financial tool and to recognize it's something entirely different. Sure, you need them to deal with the out-and-out scams, but as it stands right now, the SEC is talking about crazy ideas like how any crypto system should need to go through "clinical trials" like drugs. Ideas like that would simply snuff out any possibility of the above ever happening. People don't realize how much of this future may be held back by a myopic SEC who is viewing all of this through a single lens.
Sorry, but this is completely wrong.
I've heard all the hype about how blockchain will supposedly revolutionize all sorts of different industries, but there's nothing to any of it. Blockchain technology was developed specifically for Bitcoin, and for various technical reasons, that's the only thing it really works for at all. For any other application other than a virtual currency, anything you can do with a blockchain you can also do (and do orders of magnitude faster and more efficiently) with a database.
That's what a blockchain fundamentally is: a very slow database. It has to be slow because that's necessary to establish a "proof of work" system that's not easily susceptible to fraud, and it has to have a proof of work system in order to make its tokens valuable as a virtual currency. That currency application is the keystone of the whole thing; remove it and the rest of the architecture comes crumbling down and all you have left is a database that's very slow for no good reason. So it really is "just a financial tool."
As for "crazy ideas" like putting cryptocurrency through rigorous "clinical trials," just have a look around the world of crypto! Not a week goes by without news of something going horribly wrong and costing people millions. Outright scams, hacks that steal massive amounts of coins, exchanges becoming insolvent because the founder died and took the master password to his grave, we've seen it all, and we keep on seeing it over and over and over again. It's getting to the point where it's not that big an exaggeration to say that the idea of cryptocurrency itself ought to be regarded as a scam and nothing more. So right now, the idea of a SEC program that "would simply snuff out any possibility of [new crypto developments] ever happening" is starting to look like a pretty good idea, and not a myopic one at all.
No, actually. You're perfectly free to put a competing app store on an Android device, or to load apps without one. It's not locked down in any way even remotely comparable to what Apple has done.
This exactly. We as a society have lost track of this simple truth: that copyright is a means to an end, and not an end unto itself. We've expanded and expanded and expanded copyright to the point where we now have a 200-pound tail wagging a 5-pound dog!
Their App Store is one in a very meaningful sense: it's the only way to get third-party apps onto an iOS device. No competitor is allowed to run a competing service, and no developer is allowed to simply put their app up for download on the Web and let people download and install it for themselves. There is no way to get your work into the iOS ecosystem without Apple taking their cut, and if that's not monopolistic I don't know what is.
And before anyone says it, yes, a very, very narrow sideloading exception exists, but that's for first-party apps (stuff you, or more likely the organization you work for, created yourself) rather than third-party programs. It's irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion.
Doctorow's work is good, but I'd also recommend the book Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman to anyone interested in the history of how we got into the mess we find ourselves in today. She does a very good job explaining the details and making such an arcane subject approachable and understandable to ordinary readers.
Not if people like you keep telling them they can't use efficient ways of running a modern business they won't.
Point of order: how much does efficiency really matter when it fundamentally doesn't work?
There's an old joke in the programming community: "[insert new CPU model here] will run an infinite loop twice as fast!" If what you're doing isn't working, doing the wrong thing more efficiently isn't actually a benefit.
I'm all for the proper applications of Hanlon's Razor, but there's simply no explanation other than "spreading malicious falsehoods" for anyone to say that on here. What you're claiming flies in the face of the entire history of similar laws and the way they have always been abused for as long as they've existed, and anyone who's spent any length of time on this site knows it because Mike has covered it extensively.
Please go away and don't come back until you grow some basic honesty.
Second, I know some may disagree, but I find it difficult to believe that the government's antitrust case against Microsoft truly "helped clear a path" for Google and Facebook. After all, that antitrust case fizzled with the DOJ, despite "winning" the case, eventually getting basically no real concessions from Microsoft at all. The argument that some will make was that merely being involved in the antitrust case helped clear the path by (a) distracting Microsoft and forcing it to spend a bunch of resources on fighting the DOJ and (b) by making the company more hesitant to continue its historical practices, but I'm not sure there's much evidence to support either of those claims.
You had a guest on your podcast a while back who made this exact argument, and explained it pretty well. The experience of having been through the antitrust trial caused a chilling effect, so to speak, on Microsoft's predatory behavior going forward. (Proof that they are not always a bad thing.) He mentioned how they had the opportunity at one point to try to either buy out a little Internet startup by the name of Google, or use their usual tactics to destroy them before they grew big enough to be a real threat, but they chose not to for fear of drawing regulatory attention.
Microsoft fell behind Google and Facebook because the company was structurally oblivious to the power of the internet,
Google: See above.
Facebook: Not sure why they're being mentioned here, as they didn't appear until well after
when [Microsoft] finally realized the internet was important
So this line of reasoning comes across as a bit incoherent, to be honest.
Code is a direct assault on the libertarian perspective that informs much Internet policy debate these days.
I'm liking it already.
Elsewhere, however, he writes that code is something qualitatively different from law in that it does not derive from legislative or juridical action or community norms, yet may affect us more than laws or norms do, while providing us less opportunity for amendment or democratic feedback. It does not help matters when he refers to things like bicycle locks as "real-world code."
Hmm? This is not a particularly difficult metaphor to follow. I haven't even read the book, but just from this description--purportedly of something that doesn't make much sense--it makes perfect sense what Lessig is trying to say.
The key to the creation of such an architecture, Lessig writes, is not that a government will require people to hold and use certified IDs. Instead, he writes, "The key is incentives: systems that build the incentives for individuals voluntarily to hold IDs." Lessig adds, "When architectures accommodate users who come with an ID installed and make life difficult for users who refuse to bear an ID, certification will spread quickly."
But even if you don't believe that e-commerce alone will establish an architecture of identification, he writes, there are reasons to believe that government will want to help such an architecture along. After all, a technology that enables e-commerce merchants to identify you and authorize your transactions may also have an important secondary usefulness to a government that wants to know where you've been and what you've been up to on the Internet.
Interesting concept, but it didn't really ever come to pass. I'm "identified" to websites today in essentially the same way I was identified 20 years ago: by my email address and a password, with no cryptographic certificate or similar technology involved.
So can the open-source movement, which Lessig refers to as "open code."
I'm glad that term never caught on. The term "open source software" dates to 1998, and I was already familiar with it before this book was published. Having multiple terms for the same thing just creates confusion at best and hair-splitting contention at worst.
With intellectual property, and with copyright in particular, technological changes raise new problems that the nuanced established legal balances built into the law do not address. Lessig challenges the long-standing assertion, in Internet circles, at least, that the very edifice of copyright law is likely to crumble in the era of the Internet, which enables millions of perfect copies of a creative work to be duplicated and disseminated for free, regardless of whether the copyright holder has granted anyone a license. In response to that perceived threat, Lessig observes, the copyright holders have moved to force changes in technology and changes in the law.
As a result, technologically implemented copyright—protection and copyright—management schemes are coming online, and the government has already taken steps to prohibit the circumvention of such schemes. This has created a landscape in which the traditional exercise of one's rights to "fair use" of another's work under the Copyright Act may become meaningless. The fact that one technically has a right to engage in fair use is of no help when one cannot engage in any unauthorized copying.
He was spot-on with this one. That's still one of the biggest problems we're struggling with today. But...
Complicating this development, Lessig believes, is the oncoming implementation of an ID infrastructure on the Internet, which may make it impossible for individuals to engage in anonymous reading.
Thankfully, this part never happened.
A similar argument can be made about how the Internet alters our privacy rights and expectations. Because the Internet both makes our backgrounds more "searchable" and our current behavior more monitorable, Lessig reasons, the privacy protections in our Bill of Rights may become meaningless. Once again, when the searching and monitoring is done by someone other than the government, it means that the "state action" trigger for invoking the Bill of Rights is wholly absent.
This line of reasoning sounds familiar...
Lessig's analysis of the problem here is convincing, even though his proposed solution, a "property regime" for personal data that would replace today's "liability regime," is deeply problematic. This is partly because it would transmute invasions of privacy into property crimes
With the benefit of hindsight, is that really such a bad thing? Who wouldn't like seeing execs at Verizon, Comcast, Facebook, AT&T, and other abusive companies that trample on your privacy get sent to prison for it?
But even if one disagrees with Lessig's analysis of certain particular issues, this does not detract from his main argument, which is that private decision making, enhanced by new technologies and implemented as part of the "architecture" of the Internet, may undercut the democratic values—freedom of speech, privacy, autonomy, access to information—at the core of our society. Implicit in his argument is that the traditional focus of civil libertarians, which is to challenge government interventions in speech and privacy arenas, may be counterproductive in this new context. If I read him right, Lessig is calling for a new constitutional philosophy, one rooted perhaps in Mill's essay On Liberty in which government can function as a positive public tool to preserve from private encroachments of the liberty values we articulated in the Constitution. Such a philosophy would require, however, a very imaginative "translation" of constitutional values indeed to get past the objection that the Bill of Rights is only about limiting "state action."
It doesn't have to be particularly "imaginative." It only requires recognizing a simple truth: the rights that are meant to be protected in the Bill of Rights are rights that we believe in protecting. They were originally only applied to the government because originally only the government had the sort of wide-reaching power that was required to do real, widespread harm to them, but what they are, at the core, are things that We The People find so fundamentally important that we don't even trust ourselves, in the person of our elected representatives, to tamper with them. Now that the government is not the only ones with that kind of power anymore, our defenses of our values have to evolve to acknowledge this truth or those values risk becoming meaningless.
What he would like to see, perhaps, is a constitutional structure in which something like the Bill of Rights could be invoked against challenges to personal liberty or autonomy, regardless of whether the challenges come from public or private sources.
And why shouldn't he? Private oppression is, if anything, even more harmful because in a democratic system, at least the government is accountable to the people, while private entities are not.
The ideology of libertarianism, he believes, will interpret the changes wrought by e-commerce and other private action as a given, like the weather. "We will watch as important aspects of privacy and free speech are erased by the emerging architecture of the panopticon, and we will speak, like modern Jeffersons, about nature making it so—forgetting that here, we are nature," he writes in a somewhat forlorn final chapter.
This one is right on the money! When you try to talk to a libertarian about some sort of societal problem that their twisted ideology sees as beneficial, about half the time (at least!) they'll launch into some super-condescending lecture about how that's just the way things naturally are and trying to change it would 1) be futile, 2) be more trouble than it's worth, 3) just make things worse even if you succeeded, or 4) all of the above. It's one of the many things that makes libertarianism so disgusting and evil.
Lessig may be right in his gloomy predictions, but let us suppose that his worst fears are not realized and a new debate does begin about the proper role of government in cyberspace and about appropriate limitations on private crafting of the online architecture. If that happens, it may be that at least some of the thanks for that development will have to go to Lessig's Code.
Unfortunately, it hasn't yet. But many of the problems Lessig pointed out have become more and more prominent as time goes by, so maybe now's a good time to start?
First of all, as we've pointed out in the past, spreading disinformation is more of a human problem, rather than a technology problem, and it's a bit bizarre to blame the technology for the disinformation.
Not necessarily. While you're technically correct here, the part you're not addressing is technology's role as a force multiplier: it takes human problems and makes them much, much bigger. So it's definitely reasonable to look into what can be done to mitigate that side of the problem.
No you don't. You end up with exactly the same laws you had when you started, plus a precedent that an attempt to make that kind of change to the law ends in failure. It's not as big an improvement as actually rolling back bad laws, but it's not nothing either.
Heck of a mouth you got there for an internet coward.
The tantrums about Article 13 suggest that the pirates know it will put them out of business
I'm not a pirate. I don't steal content. I'm posting this under my real, legal name. And you're a moron.
I don't want Article 13 for two basic reasons, one philosophical, one practical.
Philosophically, because it will expand the regime of extrajudicial law enforcement, which is an abomination that needs to be reduced (ideally to zero) rather than increased.
Practically, because it will cause harm to all manner of legitimate uses of the Internet by making it a de facto necessity to filter too much. (The collateral damage mentioned above.)
To make an analogy, did you know about the universal disease cure? We've had one for a long time now. You can take a patient with cancer, HIV, ebola, the common cold, or whatever else, and destroy the disease entirely. 100%. All you need to do is throw the patient in an incinerator, and the disease will be wiped out. But there's a good reason why we don't do that! If you can imagine what it might be, you can also understand why Article 13 is a bad idea.
A man in the middle of a HTTPS connection would theoretically be able to decrypt HTTPS traffic, spy on it, possibly change things, and re-encrypt it with its own certificates before sending it on to you, but your browser would notice that the certificate is not valid.
If they can manage to get your computer to install a rogue root certificate, then they can get away with this and your browser won't complain. But that's a pretty involved process and (probably!) not something that can happen without you noticing simply by you visiting a malicious website or using a compromised TOR node.
It makes sense (as a joke, actually a rather amusing one) if you happen to be a programmer familiar with the one of the ALGOL family of languages. If not, I don't know of any other context where that statement makes sense.
That's not just meter; that's an example of the Barney TV show reusing a tune with different words.
What Bamboo Harvester is referring to is that the Gilligan's Island theme song was written in ballad meter. Well, mostly. In "proper" ballad meter, the note pairs "and you'll" and "a fate-" from the first verse should only be a single syllable each, rather than two. Keeping these minor scansion hiccups in mind, you can use its tune interchangeably with any number of other songs, including Amazing Grace and America the Beautiful. (Try it. Sing the Gilligan's Island theme to one of those tunes and see how well it works!)
To a certain extent, yes. But if it's not registered, you don't have much in the way of legal protections. If someone infringes on your work and it's not registered, (and there are a few nuances to this but nothing that would make this statement untrue in general,) you won't be able to successfully sue them in court for their infringing actions.
If you can put in place a CDA 230 style system, that would certainly be better.
Which is what I've been advocating for all along. Why should copyright be a special exemption to the liability rules that govern literally everything else?
But it's a non-starter politically.
Are you sure? Don't take this the wrong way, but... you don't exactly have the best track record at this kind of prediction. You were surprised by SOPA/ACTA being defeated, and again with the TPP getting shut down in Congress. Each time, you thought that they were sure things politically, and each time, we ended up with laws that protected the Internet and made things better. Might I respectfully submit that the pendulum is finally swinging back in the right direction and right now is a very good time politically for something like this?
I will note that... there seems to be considerable misplaced anger directed at Twitter for all of this. Mashable says this story "reveals Twitter's copyright issues" while the Verge's weird take is that this "shows how Twitter's copyright system can hurt creators."
And they're completely right, about everything except for the name "Twitter." This story reveals the DMCA's copyright issues, and shows how the DMCA's copyright system can hurt creators. All Twitter did here is to comply with the de facto (if not necessarily de jure) obligation to implement a DMCA takedown system.
If we want to fix this sort of problem, repeal the DMCA and do away with its takedown system. Twitter (and pretty much everyone else!) would most likely be more than happy to revert to a saner policy if they were legally able to do so.
On the post: How To Actually Break Up Big Tech
Sorry, but this is completely wrong.
I've heard all the hype about how blockchain will supposedly revolutionize all sorts of different industries, but there's nothing to any of it. Blockchain technology was developed specifically for Bitcoin, and for various technical reasons, that's the only thing it really works for at all. For any other application other than a virtual currency, anything you can do with a blockchain you can also do (and do orders of magnitude faster and more efficiently) with a database.
That's what a blockchain fundamentally is: a very slow database. It has to be slow because that's necessary to establish a "proof of work" system that's not easily susceptible to fraud, and it has to have a proof of work system in order to make its tokens valuable as a virtual currency. That currency application is the keystone of the whole thing; remove it and the rest of the architecture comes crumbling down and all you have left is a database that's very slow for no good reason. So it really is "just a financial tool."
As for "crazy ideas" like putting cryptocurrency through rigorous "clinical trials," just have a look around the world of crypto! Not a week goes by without news of something going horribly wrong and costing people millions. Outright scams, hacks that steal massive amounts of coins, exchanges becoming insolvent because the founder died and took the master password to his grave, we've seen it all, and we keep on seeing it over and over and over again. It's getting to the point where it's not that big an exaggeration to say that the idea of cryptocurrency itself ought to be regarded as a scam and nothing more. So right now, the idea of a SEC program that "would simply snuff out any possibility of [new crypto developments] ever happening" is starting to look like a pretty good idea, and not a myopic one at all.
On the post: It Sure Sounds Like Elizabeth Warren Wants To Bring The EU Copyright Directive Stateside
Re: Re: Re: Re:
No, actually. You're perfectly free to put a competing app store on an Android device, or to load apps without one. It's not locked down in any way even remotely comparable to what Apple has done.
On the post: More Copyright Policy Should Be As Boring As This Supreme Court Decision
Re: Re: Re:
This exactly. We as a society have lost track of this simple truth: that copyright is a means to an end, and not an end unto itself. We've expanded and expanded and expanded copyright to the point where we now have a 200-pound tail wagging a 5-pound dog!
On the post: It Sure Sounds Like Elizabeth Warren Wants To Bring The EU Copyright Directive Stateside
Re: Re:
Their App Store is one in a very meaningful sense: it's the only way to get third-party apps onto an iOS device. No competitor is allowed to run a competing service, and no developer is allowed to simply put their app up for download on the Web and let people download and install it for themselves. There is no way to get your work into the iOS ecosystem without Apple taking their cut, and if that's not monopolistic I don't know what is.
And before anyone says it, yes, a very, very narrow sideloading exception exists, but that's for first-party apps (stuff you, or more likely the organization you work for, created yourself) rather than third-party programs. It's irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion.
On the post: More Copyright Policy Should Be As Boring As This Supreme Court Decision
Doctorow's work is good, but I'd also recommend the book Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman to anyone interested in the history of how we got into the mess we find ourselves in today. She does a very good job explaining the details and making such an arcane subject approachable and understandable to ordinary readers.
On the post: Disaster In The Making: Article 13 Puts User Rights At A Disadvantage To Corporate Greed
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Point of order: how much does efficiency really matter when it fundamentally doesn't work?
There's an old joke in the programming community: "[insert new CPU model here] will run an infinite loop twice as fast!" If what you're doing isn't working, doing the wrong thing more efficiently isn't actually a benefit.
On the post: Disaster In The Making: Article 13 Puts User Rights At A Disadvantage To Corporate Greed
Re:
I'm all for the proper applications of Hanlon's Razor, but there's simply no explanation other than "spreading malicious falsehoods" for anyone to say that on here. What you're claiming flies in the face of the entire history of similar laws and the way they have always been abused for as long as they've existed, and anyone who's spent any length of time on this site knows it because Mike has covered it extensively.
Please go away and don't come back until you grow some basic honesty.
On the post: Elizabeth Warren Wants To Break Up Amazon, Google And Facebook; But Does Her Plan Make Any Sense?
You had a guest on your podcast a while back who made this exact argument, and explained it pretty well. The experience of having been through the antitrust trial caused a chilling effect, so to speak, on Microsoft's predatory behavior going forward. (Proof that they are not always a bad thing.) He mentioned how they had the opportunity at one point to try to either buy out a little Internet startup by the name of Google, or use their usual tactics to destroy them before they grew big enough to be a real threat, but they chose not to for fear of drawing regulatory attention.
Google: See above.
Facebook: Not sure why they're being mentioned here, as they didn't appear until well after
So this line of reasoning comes across as a bit incoherent, to be honest.
On the post: A Book Review Of Code And Other Laws Of Cyberspace
Hmm... let's see.
I'm liking it already.
Hmm? This is not a particularly difficult metaphor to follow. I haven't even read the book, but just from this description--purportedly of something that doesn't make much sense--it makes perfect sense what Lessig is trying to say.
Interesting concept, but it didn't really ever come to pass. I'm "identified" to websites today in essentially the same way I was identified 20 years ago: by my email address and a password, with no cryptographic certificate or similar technology involved.
I'm glad that term never caught on. The term "open source software" dates to 1998, and I was already familiar with it before this book was published. Having multiple terms for the same thing just creates confusion at best and hair-splitting contention at worst.
He was spot-on with this one. That's still one of the biggest problems we're struggling with today. But...
Thankfully, this part never happened.
This line of reasoning sounds familiar...
With the benefit of hindsight, is that really such a bad thing? Who wouldn't like seeing execs at Verizon, Comcast, Facebook, AT&T, and other abusive companies that trample on your privacy get sent to prison for it?
It doesn't have to be particularly "imaginative." It only requires recognizing a simple truth: the rights that are meant to be protected in the Bill of Rights are rights that we believe in protecting. They were originally only applied to the government because originally only the government had the sort of wide-reaching power that was required to do real, widespread harm to them, but what they are, at the core, are things that We The People find so fundamentally important that we don't even trust ourselves, in the person of our elected representatives, to tamper with them. Now that the government is not the only ones with that kind of power anymore, our defenses of our values have to evolve to acknowledge this truth or those values risk becoming meaningless.
And why shouldn't he? Private oppression is, if anything, even more harmful because in a democratic system, at least the government is accountable to the people, while private entities are not.
This one is right on the money! When you try to talk to a libertarian about some sort of societal problem that their twisted ideology sees as beneficial, about half the time (at least!) they'll launch into some super-condescending lecture about how that's just the way things naturally are and trying to change it would 1) be futile, 2) be more trouble than it's worth, 3) just make things worse even if you succeeded, or 4) all of the above. It's one of the many things that makes libertarianism so disgusting and evil.
Unfortunately, it hasn't yet. But many of the problems Lessig pointed out have become more and more prominent as time goes by, so maybe now's a good time to start?
On the post: Yes, Actually, There Is A Lot Of Good News In Zuckerberg's New Plans For Facebook
Not necessarily. While you're technically correct here, the part you're not addressing is technology's role as a force multiplier: it takes human problems and makes them much, much bigger. So it's definitely reasonable to look into what can be done to mitigate that side of the problem.
On the post: A Big Copyright Mess: Miel Bredouw, Barstool Sports, Slob On My Carol Of The Bells And The DMCA
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
No you don't. You end up with exactly the same laws you had when you started, plus a precedent that an attempt to make that kind of change to the law ends in failure. It's not as big an improvement as actually rolling back bad laws, but it's not nothing either.
On the post: Clash Of EU's Poorly Thought Out Laws: German Data Protection Commissioner Warns That Article 13 Might Violate GDPR
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Does that really matter, on an open discussion board?
On the post: Clash Of EU's Poorly Thought Out Laws: German Data Protection Commissioner Warns That Article 13 Might Violate GDPR
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm not a pirate. I don't steal content. I'm posting this under my real, legal name. And you're a moron.
I don't want Article 13 for two basic reasons, one philosophical, one practical.
To make an analogy, did you know about the universal disease cure? We've had one for a long time now. You can take a patient with cancer, HIV, ebola, the common cold, or whatever else, and destroy the disease entirely. 100%. All you need to do is throw the patient in an incinerator, and the disease will be wiped out. But there's a good reason why we don't do that! If you can imagine what it might be, you can also understand why Article 13 is a bad idea.
On the post: VPNs Are No Privacy Panacea, And Finding An Ethical Operator Is A Comical Shitshow
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: tunneling home
A man in the middle of a HTTPS connection would theoretically be able to decrypt HTTPS traffic, spy on it, possibly change things, and re-encrypt it with its own certificates before sending it on to you, but your browser would notice that the certificate is not valid.
If they can manage to get your computer to install a rogue root certificate, then they can get away with this and your browser won't complain. But that's a pretty involved process and (probably!) not something that can happen without you noticing simply by you visiting a malicious website or using a compromised TOR node.
On the post: A Big Copyright Mess: Miel Bredouw, Barstool Sports, Slob On My Carol Of The Bells And The DMCA
Re:
It makes sense (as a joke, actually a rather amusing one) if you happen to be a programmer familiar with the one of the ALGOL family of languages. If not, I don't know of any other context where that statement makes sense.
On the post: A Big Copyright Mess: Miel Bredouw, Barstool Sports, Slob On My Carol Of The Bells And The DMCA
Re: Re: Just an aside...
That's not just meter; that's an example of the Barney TV show reusing a tune with different words.
What Bamboo Harvester is referring to is that the Gilligan's Island theme song was written in ballad meter. Well, mostly. In "proper" ballad meter, the note pairs "and you'll" and "a fate-" from the first verse should only be a single syllable each, rather than two. Keeping these minor scansion hiccups in mind, you can use its tune interchangeably with any number of other songs, including Amazing Grace and America the Beautiful. (Try it. Sing the Gilligan's Island theme to one of those tunes and see how well it works!)
On the post: A Big Copyright Mess: Miel Bredouw, Barstool Sports, Slob On My Carol Of The Bells And The DMCA
from the argh-why-do-we-*still*-not-have-an-edit-option dept.
This should say "with a legal situation," as each time it resulted from bad laws or treaties not actually getting passed.
On the post: A Big Copyright Mess: Miel Bredouw, Barstool Sports, Slob On My Carol Of The Bells And The DMCA
Re: Re: twitter & copyright
To a certain extent, yes. But if it's not registered, you don't have much in the way of legal protections. If someone infringes on your work and it's not registered, (and there are a few nuances to this but nothing that would make this statement untrue in general,) you won't be able to successfully sue them in court for their infringing actions.
On the post: A Big Copyright Mess: Miel Bredouw, Barstool Sports, Slob On My Carol Of The Bells And The DMCA
Re: Re:
Which is what I've been advocating for all along. Why should copyright be a special exemption to the liability rules that govern literally everything else?
Are you sure? Don't take this the wrong way, but... you don't exactly have the best track record at this kind of prediction. You were surprised by SOPA/ACTA being defeated, and again with the TPP getting shut down in Congress. Each time, you thought that they were sure things politically, and each time, we ended up with laws that protected the Internet and made things better. Might I respectfully submit that the pendulum is finally swinging back in the right direction and right now is a very good time politically for something like this?
On the post: A Big Copyright Mess: Miel Bredouw, Barstool Sports, Slob On My Carol Of The Bells And The DMCA
And they're completely right, about everything except for the name "Twitter." This story reveals the DMCA's copyright issues, and shows how the DMCA's copyright system can hurt creators. All Twitter did here is to comply with the de facto (if not necessarily de jure) obligation to implement a DMCA takedown system.
If we want to fix this sort of problem, repeal the DMCA and do away with its takedown system. Twitter (and pretty much everyone else!) would most likely be more than happy to revert to a saner policy if they were legally able to do so.
Next >>