You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means
If you agree that the DMCA Takedown system is problematic and probably violates people's rights, why do you keep calling it a "safe harbor" when it clearly isn't one?
CDA 230 is a safe harbor. The DMCA Takedown system is not. The difference? There are two, both very significant. First, CDA 230 doesn't come with strings attached that turn it into a tool of extortion by giving the bad guys leverage. And second, there's a long history of people successfully using CDA 230 to have bad lawsuits thrown out. But name even one case in which the DMCA Takedown system's alleged "safe harbors" have protected a company that the bad guys wanted gone.
Wow. The Supreme Court is even dumber than I thought, if they can hold something like that to be enforceable, when the First Amendment guarantees the right of the people to petition the government (not private arbitrators) for redress of grievances.
This isn't the first time, either. I remember fixing up a computer that a friend's family had had trashed by a virus. They were using IE, and the first thing I did once I had the system up and running was download and install Firefox for them. And I remember telling them that IE was one big security hole, and that the US Government had recently issued a warning against using it, and that you know something is truly filthy when even the government doesn't want to get contaminated by touching it!
I don't remember exactly when this warning came out, but I do recall installing WinXP and downloading Service Pack 2, which was still pretty new, and Wikipedia says that came out in 2004. So... yeah.
Exactly. That's something I've been saying for a long time: before you advocate for doing away with patents and copyrights, take a long, hard look at the problems that they were meant to (and actually did, at least at first) fix! What we need is to restore these systems to their original purity and get them back on track, turn them back into tools of progress rather than the corrupted tools of oppression that they've turned into over the centuries.
Viruses are not evil. Bacteriophages actually keep us healthy by infecting and killing off disease-causing bacteria. Phage therapy could be a viable alternative to using antibiotics, but using viruses to fight off infections is not a widely used procedure in Western medicine (yet).
Ah, trade secrets. The bane of civilization and progress since ancient times.
Did you know that the oldest known steel samples date to the 14th Century? No, not the one with knights and steel swords and chainmail, actually; I mean the 14th Century BC!
Yeah. Something as essential to modern life as steel really is that old. It kept getting discovered, lost, and re-discovered over and over throughout history. Why? Two reasons.
First, figuring it out is hard. Iron is hard to work with, hard to refine from its ore, and hard to forge due to its melting point being significantly than that of most metals ancient smiths worked with. And to get steel, not only do you have to alloy it with something that tends to burn up well before you get it to temperatures hot enough to melt iron, you have to get the amount of the carbon just right, in a very narrow percentage range. Too little, and you get iron that's slightly harder than usual. Too much, and you get worthless "pig iron" that's too brittle to be useful. You need to hit the "Goldilocks zone" in terms of carbon percentages to get the shiny silver miracle metal, and that's not at all easy with primitive tools and techniques.
Second, because once you've figured it out, it's valuable. Today, we see steel as a structural material, and one of the most important ones around. It forms one of the pillars of modern civilization, right up there with electricity and running water. But in the old days, steel meant military power, swords and armor. Anyone who could produce it was likely to get rich selling their services to the king.
So they tended to not share the technique--it became a trade secret. And the problem with secrets that don't get shared is that they can be lost if the person who doesn't share them dies, or simply forgets. Sometimes the smith would share the secret with an apprentice or partner, other times he would take it to its grave and it would have to be rediscovered.
This state of affairs continued for approximately 3,000 years, right up until something fundamental changed. The British government realized something that we've since forgotten: that people keeping secrets was bad for innovation. So they came up with the patent system, that essentially said "if you want official recognition and protection for your discoveries, you can't keep it a secret." And then, almost as if by magic, two steelmaking techniques were created and published that helped kickstart the modern world by fueling the Industrial Revolution. Cheap, valueless steel turned out to be far more valuable than rare, valuable steel had ever been!
True, there were plenty of other factors influencing the development of the Industrial Revolution, but it's difficult to overstate just how huge of a role commodity steel played. So right there, in one single example, we can see trade secrets literally setting back the progress of human civilization by 3,000 years.
And now we're trying to protect them even more. You know what they say about those who do not learn from history...
Hear hear! I agree wholeheartedly, Mr. Comey! In fact, why don't you lead by example and do away with the Fourth-Amendment-Free Zones that exist up to 100 miles from our borders?
Exactly. That was a big part of the reason why Google Search was obviously a better product from the very beginning, even before CodeRank got polished enough to truly shine: the signal-to-noise ratio was high.
Obnoxious banner ads are not useful search results. Even non-obnoxious non-banner ads are not useful search results. (Seriously; how often do you get "featured ads" at the top of your Google searches? About 70% of the time, for me at least. And how often do you actually click on them because they're what you were looking for? I can't remember ever once having done so.) So even very early on, when the results being returned weren't all that much better than what you'd get elsewhere, the way in which they were presented made it a far better system than the competition.
My original point stands. Google Search was never "a toy," and it's a bit mystifying that someone as tech-savvy as Mike Masnick would present it that way.
It's long been understood that copyright infringement is not theft, because it doesn't involve taking anything away from the owner, and that it's silly to conflate the two.
but you know what actually is theft? This is! Forcibly taking away functionality that the console owner paid for. That is theft, pure and simple. Using the threat of loss of access to the console entirely as leverage to force the user to do something against their will qualifies as extortion. And since all of this security related stuff requires encryption, and (as a recent Techdirt article reminds us) encryption technology is officially classified as munitions, there may even be a case for calling it armed robbery.
...or maybe not, but the first two crimes are pretty solid. Nintendo and Sony have committed felonies against millions of customers. Where are the legal consequences?
Exactly. And we really need to stop talking about DMCA safe harbors, because they don't exist. It's not a safe harbor if there are strings attached.
CDA 230 is a safe harbor. It tells the bad guys "no, you can't harm this site." But a mechanism by which the bad guys can say "remove this thing we don't want and we won't sue you" IS NOT A SAFE HARBOR; it is a tool of extortion. Threatening a negative action against someone unless they comply with your wishes is extortion, plain and simple, and the DMCA Takedown system enables it. It needs to go; the entire DMCA needs to go.
The nature of truly great disruptive innovation is that it starts out looking like a toy. It's easy for people to dismiss. Google was a toy -- slightly better search in a world that already had a bunch of dominating search engines? Why bother?
Umm... what? Were you even there at the turn of the millennium? Google Search never looked like a toy; from the very beginning it looked like "these guys have taken the toy of web searching and finally gotten it right." What brought so many users to Google so quickly was the simple fact that it just worked, returning high-quality, high-relevance results, when Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc. gave you lots of garbage with a low signal-to-noise ratio.
Lots of people like to attack things like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar for disrupting the taxi industry, but have little vision for how those companies can evolve into ones that fundamentally change the way we travel.
While the text of the actual agreement sounds like it's just internationalizing the DMCA (already problematic),
I'm seriously having trouble understanding Techdirt's position here. It would be problematic to take the DMCA and export it to the rest of the world? I thought it was something we want to keep around, because of the so-called "safe harbors" it provides, that it just wouldn't do to get rid of.
Are the folks at Techdirt finally beginning to understand what I've been saying for years, that there is no such thing as DMCA safe harbors in the first place, that they are nothing but tools of extortion, and therefore exporting the DMCA to the rest of the world would be problematic?
Education is extremely important, all the more so nowadays, when so many employers require a college degree for jobs whose actual work doesn't require a college education, just to narrow down the first group of applicants to a manageable number.
Yeah, like I mentioned in my post above, this is known as eduflation, and it's caused by having too many degrees chasing too little demand. And just like the problems caused by monetary inflation (such as the cost of living being too high) can't be fixed, and indeed will only be made worse, by inflationary measures such as raising the minimum wage, you can't fix the structural problems of eduflation by handing out even more degrees to even more people. What's needed is to fix the actual underlying problems.
Not necessarily. As I pointed out, if all the minimum wage workers magically vanished, societal collapse would ensue very quickly. These are jobs that need to be done one way or another, and as we don't currently have the technology to replace most of them with robots or similar automation, they need to be done by human workers.
Attempting to alter the equation by giving the human workers in question more education would not change the basic underlying facts; it would most likely just further contribute to the eduflation problems we've been seeing for decades. It's already gotten to the point where, in some places, a college degree will get you a highly prestigious pizza delivery job; do we really want to make eduflation even worse?
Any company stupid enough to cut workers to compensate for an increase in minimum wage, would quickly find that if they wanted to maintain their previous levels of productivity, and therefor profit, they've be all but forced to hire people right back to fill in the holes they made with the previous firings.
...or they could simply make the remaining workers work harder. Again, this is not a hypothetical; it's what has actually happened in the past when the minimum wage has been raised.
You know, for the life of me I cannot understand why so many people seem to think raising the minimum wage is a good idea. Yes, I get the basic concept of "helping the poor" and "providing a living wage" and all that, and I'm all for it, really; I grew up in poverty and it's a horrendous thing that nobody deserves. But isn't it obvious, with just a tiny bit of thought, that raising the minimum wage will not achieve those goals, at least not for very long at all?
Consider this: Who makes minimum wage? Think about the types of jobs that offer it, and a common thread begins to emerge: most minimum-wage jobs are jobs that have to do with providing basic services, such as making food available. If all of the people doing minimum wage jobs magically disappeared tomorrow, we'd have societal collapse by the end of the week.
Now, take all the companies that are paying those people we all depend on, and tell them that their labor costs are about to go up significantly. In today's hyper-short-term-focused corporate world, where nothing matters more than the next quarterly report, that's going to eat into a lot of profit margins, and two things are inevitably going to happen to balance it out: prices will go up, and a lot of minimum wage workers (the people such an increase is supposed to help!) will lose their jobs. It's happened every time in the past that the minimum wage has been increased.
Meanwhile, all of us who aren't making the minimum wage don't get a raise, but because the prices on basic things we all need go up, it lowers everyone's standard of living. (Including minimum wage earners, who need all the same basic stuff too. So even the ones who don't get laid off don't actually see much of an increase in their standard of living, at least not for more than 3-6 months.)
The only way to avert such an outcome would be for the legislation that raises the minimum wage to explicitly forbid companies to respond in the obvious way, and getting something like that passed, and then trying to enforce it, would be the legislative and bureaucratic nightmare to end all legislative and bureaucratic nightmares!
So then what should be done to help raise minimum wage workers out of poverty? It's worth remembering that a wage is just a number, and it's meaningless without context. (For example, my car is worth a few million. Yen, that is... but since I don't live in Japan, that number is irrelevant.) So what's the context needed to make any discussion of "a living wage" relevant? The cost of living, of course. Current minimum wage levels weren't oppressively low when they were passed, but the cost of living has gone up since then.
If the minimum wage has stayed where they put it, enough to afford the cost of living, but the cost of living has moved, that is not the minimum wage's fault. So why is no one talking about fixing the actual problem, by pushing legislation that would drive the cost of living back down? Raising the minimum wage, in the end, would benefit nobody, and directly harm most wage earners, including (disproportionately!) the ones it's intended to help. Lowering the cost of living, on the other hand, making those few dollars go further, would benefit almost everybody. So why is no one talking about doing that?
Systems of justice should be transparent and accessible on an equal basis. The DMCA takedown system is anything but: Only copyright holders can use it and there are no requirements that affected users be allowed to participate or even have their view considered. In many cases, there often are not even requirements that hearings or decisions exist at all! Even in the case of clear legal error, it is almost impossible to reverse a decision.
On the post: GitHub Promises To Alert Users To DMCA Notices Before Taking Content Down
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means
CDA 230 is a safe harbor. The DMCA Takedown system is not. The difference? There are two, both very significant. First, CDA 230 doesn't come with strings attached that turn it into a tool of extortion by giving the bad guys leverage. And second, there's a long history of people successfully using CDA 230 to have bad lawsuits thrown out. But name even one case in which the DMCA Takedown system's alleged "safe harbors" have protected a company that the bad guys wanted gone.
Go on, I'm still waiting...
On the post: 5 Year Old Who Drew A Gun In Crayon Forced To Sign No-Suicide Contract With School
Re: Re: Re: Contract
On the post: Finnish Parliament Refuses To Consider Crowdsourced Copyright Law -- Or Any Other Bill Drafted By The Public
Re: Finnish Parliament is not obeying the law
CSI shades pull
Finnished?
On the post: Nintendo Bricks Wii U Consoles Unless Owners Agree To New EULA
Re: Re: Re: Where are the lawsuits?
On the post: Not Just Governments Hacking Your Computers Via YouTube Videos; Malicious Ads Found On Popular Videos
Re: Re:
I don't remember exactly when this warning came out, but I do recall installing WinXP and downloading Service Pack 2, which was still pretty new, and Wikipedia says that came out in 2004. So... yeah.
On the post: TPP Leak Confirms Measures To Criminalize Corporate Whistleblowing
Re: Re:
On the post: DailyDirt: Killing Those Tiny Germs
For some reason, the first thing I think of when I hear this is an old song, that sounds like a cautionary tale about just this kind of scenario...
On the post: TPP Leak Confirms Measures To Criminalize Corporate Whistleblowing
Did you know that the oldest known steel samples date to the 14th Century? No, not the one with knights and steel swords and chainmail, actually; I mean the 14th Century BC!
Yeah. Something as essential to modern life as steel really is that old. It kept getting discovered, lost, and re-discovered over and over throughout history. Why? Two reasons.
First, figuring it out is hard. Iron is hard to work with, hard to refine from its ore, and hard to forge due to its melting point being significantly than that of most metals ancient smiths worked with. And to get steel, not only do you have to alloy it with something that tends to burn up well before you get it to temperatures hot enough to melt iron, you have to get the amount of the carbon just right, in a very narrow percentage range. Too little, and you get iron that's slightly harder than usual. Too much, and you get worthless "pig iron" that's too brittle to be useful. You need to hit the "Goldilocks zone" in terms of carbon percentages to get the shiny silver miracle metal, and that's not at all easy with primitive tools and techniques.
Second, because once you've figured it out, it's valuable. Today, we see steel as a structural material, and one of the most important ones around. It forms one of the pillars of modern civilization, right up there with electricity and running water. But in the old days, steel meant military power, swords and armor. Anyone who could produce it was likely to get rich selling their services to the king.
So they tended to not share the technique--it became a trade secret. And the problem with secrets that don't get shared is that they can be lost if the person who doesn't share them dies, or simply forgets. Sometimes the smith would share the secret with an apprentice or partner, other times he would take it to its grave and it would have to be rediscovered.
This state of affairs continued for approximately 3,000 years, right up until something fundamental changed. The British government realized something that we've since forgotten: that people keeping secrets was bad for innovation. So they came up with the patent system, that essentially said "if you want official recognition and protection for your discoveries, you can't keep it a secret." And then, almost as if by magic, two steelmaking techniques were created and published that helped kickstart the modern world by fueling the Industrial Revolution. Cheap, valueless steel turned out to be far more valuable than rare, valuable steel had ever been!
True, there were plenty of other factors influencing the development of the Industrial Revolution, but it's difficult to overstate just how huge of a role commodity steel played. So right there, in one single example, we can see trade secrets literally setting back the progress of human civilization by 3,000 years.
And now we're trying to protect them even more. You know what they say about those who do not learn from history...
On the post: FBI Director Continues His Attack On Technology, Privacy And Encryption
Hear hear! I agree wholeheartedly, Mr. Comey! In fact, why don't you lead by example and do away with the Fourth-Amendment-Free Zones that exist up to 100 miles from our borders?
On the post: Neil deGrasse Tyson Attacks 'Startup Culture,' Demonstrates Lack Of Understanding About Innovation
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Obnoxious banner ads are not useful search results. Even non-obnoxious non-banner ads are not useful search results. (Seriously; how often do you get "featured ads" at the top of your Google searches? About 70% of the time, for me at least. And how often do you actually click on them because they're what you were looking for? I can't remember ever once having done so.) So even very early on, when the results being returned weren't all that much better than what you'd get elsewhere, the way in which they were presented made it a far better system than the competition.
My original point stands. Google Search was never "a toy," and it's a bit mystifying that someone as tech-savvy as Mike Masnick would present it that way.
On the post: Nintendo Bricks Wii U Consoles Unless Owners Agree To New EULA
Where are the lawsuits?
but you know what actually is theft? This is! Forcibly taking away functionality that the console owner paid for. That is theft, pure and simple. Using the threat of loss of access to the console entirely as leverage to force the user to do something against their will qualifies as extortion. And since all of this security related stuff requires encryption, and (as a recent Techdirt article reminds us) encryption technology is officially classified as munitions, there may even be a case for calling it armed robbery.
...or maybe not, but the first two crimes are pretty solid. Nintendo and Sony have committed felonies against millions of customers. Where are the legal consequences?
On the post: Leaked TPP IP Chapter Would Lead To Much Greater Online Surveillance... Because Hollywood Still Hates The Internet
Re: Re:
CDA 230 is a safe harbor. It tells the bad guys "no, you can't harm this site." But a mechanism by which the bad guys can say "remove this thing we don't want and we won't sue you" IS NOT A SAFE HARBOR; it is a tool of extortion. Threatening a negative action against someone unless they comply with your wishes is extortion, plain and simple, and the DMCA Takedown system enables it. It needs to go; the entire DMCA needs to go.
On the post: Neil deGrasse Tyson Attacks 'Startup Culture,' Demonstrates Lack Of Understanding About Innovation
Umm... what? Were you even there at the turn of the millennium? Google Search never looked like a toy; from the very beginning it looked like "these guys have taken the toy of web searching and finally gotten it right." What brought so many users to Google so quickly was the simple fact that it just worked, returning high-quality, high-relevance results, when Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc. gave you lots of garbage with a low signal-to-noise ratio.
No, lots of people like to attack Uber for being run by an evil, profiteering Objectivist who likes illegal price gouging during times of crisis. And even if these services are tremendously successful, they aren't going to fundamentally change the way anyone travels; they'll still be fundamentally traveling in taxis.
You know what would fundamentally change the way people travel? The Hyperloop, which Techdirt featured a while back. But "App Culture" is going to make it very difficult to get a project like Hyperloop off the ground. Tyson was right on the money with this one.
On the post: Leaked TPP IP Chapter Would Lead To Much Greater Online Surveillance... Because Hollywood Still Hates The Internet
I'm seriously having trouble understanding Techdirt's position here. It would be problematic to take the DMCA and export it to the rest of the world? I thought it was something we want to keep around, because of the so-called "safe harbors" it provides, that it just wouldn't do to get rid of.
Are the folks at Techdirt finally beginning to understand what I've been saying for years, that there is no such thing as DMCA safe harbors in the first place, that they are nothing but tools of extortion, and therefore exporting the DMCA to the rest of the world would be problematic?
We can only hope...
On the post: USTR Hoping To Keep Corporate Sovereignty Provisions If It Excludes Big Tobacco From The Deal
Re: Re: Re:
Yeah, like I mentioned in my post above, this is known as eduflation, and it's caused by having too many degrees chasing too little demand. And just like the problems caused by monetary inflation (such as the cost of living being too high) can't be fixed, and indeed will only be made worse, by inflationary measures such as raising the minimum wage, you can't fix the structural problems of eduflation by handing out even more degrees to even more people. What's needed is to fix the actual underlying problems.
On the post: USTR Hoping To Keep Corporate Sovereignty Provisions If It Excludes Big Tobacco From The Deal
Re: Re:
Attempting to alter the equation by giving the human workers in question more education would not change the basic underlying facts; it would most likely just further contribute to the eduflation problems we've been seeing for decades. It's already gotten to the point where, in some places, a college degree will get you a highly prestigious pizza delivery job; do we really want to make eduflation even worse?
On the post: USTR Hoping To Keep Corporate Sovereignty Provisions If It Excludes Big Tobacco From The Deal
Re: Re: Raising the minimum wage
...or they could simply make the remaining workers work harder. Again, this is not a hypothetical; it's what has actually happened in the past when the minimum wage has been raised.
On the post: USTR Hoping To Keep Corporate Sovereignty Provisions If It Excludes Big Tobacco From The Deal
Re: Re: Raising the minimum wage
On the post: USTR Hoping To Keep Corporate Sovereignty Provisions If It Excludes Big Tobacco From The Deal
Raising the minimum wage
Consider this: Who makes minimum wage? Think about the types of jobs that offer it, and a common thread begins to emerge: most minimum-wage jobs are jobs that have to do with providing basic services, such as making food available. If all of the people doing minimum wage jobs magically disappeared tomorrow, we'd have societal collapse by the end of the week.
Now, take all the companies that are paying those people we all depend on, and tell them that their labor costs are about to go up significantly. In today's hyper-short-term-focused corporate world, where nothing matters more than the next quarterly report, that's going to eat into a lot of profit margins, and two things are inevitably going to happen to balance it out: prices will go up, and a lot of minimum wage workers (the people such an increase is supposed to help!) will lose their jobs. It's happened every time in the past that the minimum wage has been increased.
Meanwhile, all of us who aren't making the minimum wage don't get a raise, but because the prices on basic things we all need go up, it lowers everyone's standard of living. (Including minimum wage earners, who need all the same basic stuff too. So even the ones who don't get laid off don't actually see much of an increase in their standard of living, at least not for more than 3-6 months.)
The only way to avert such an outcome would be for the legislation that raises the minimum wage to explicitly forbid companies to respond in the obvious way, and getting something like that passed, and then trying to enforce it, would be the legislative and bureaucratic nightmare to end all legislative and bureaucratic nightmares!
So then what should be done to help raise minimum wage workers out of poverty? It's worth remembering that a wage is just a number, and it's meaningless without context. (For example, my car is worth a few million. Yen, that is... but since I don't live in Japan, that number is irrelevant.) So what's the context needed to make any discussion of "a living wage" relevant? The cost of living, of course. Current minimum wage levels weren't oppressively low when they were passed, but the cost of living has gone up since then.
If the minimum wage has stayed where they put it, enough to afford the cost of living, but the cost of living has moved, that is not the minimum wage's fault. So why is no one talking about fixing the actual problem, by pushing legislation that would drive the cost of living back down? Raising the minimum wage, in the end, would benefit nobody, and directly harm most wage earners, including (disproportionately!) the ones it's intended to help. Lowering the cost of living, on the other hand, making those few dollars go further, would benefit almost everybody. So why is no one talking about doing that?
On the post: USTR Hoping To Keep Corporate Sovereignty Provisions If It Excludes Big Tobacco From The Deal
Wow, that sounds familiar.
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