"Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous commenter with a bit of highly-contextual wordplay that I could try to explain but you should probably just read the original thread:"
Eh, not as contextual as you imply. There are two other pieces of wordplay in the thread but they aren't relevant to the joke. You probably could have said something like: "our first place winner comes from our article on the court decision against Strike 3. After a thread that brought up comparisons to three other copyright trolls, one with plenty of hilarious wordplay and humor to begin with, an anonymous commenter came in with the coup de grace:"
This post is kinda repetitive. It would have done better if Mike had just summarized all the points Chris makes about how problematic Facebook is that cleaving off Instagram and Whatsapp wouldn't solve, only break out those points where he can say something beyond that, and then go in-depth on Chris's vision on what a broken-up and regulated Facebook would look like.
Regarding the second insightful editor's choice: I've long felt there should be a rule in the US government that any bill should be public for a minimum amount of time based on its length before it's voted on. That would effectively prohibit the thousand-page bills that tend to be all too common in Congress where only lobbyists know what's in them. It wouldn't ensure the people putting their names to a bill would have actually read them, but it would ensure someone did, or at least had the chance to.
If you want a completely unmoderated free-for-all, check out 4chan. I think most people have good reasons not to want their discussion areas to be like that.
The problem is not necessarily the concept of the EU, but the structure where the democratic institutions serve no other purpose but to rubber-stamp the will of unelected bureaucrats in the pocket of big corporations. The people of the EU must demand: real democracy or break it all up.
Re: The EU ends The Open Internet, but for a Deeper Reason?
I knew when this comment adopted a solemn tone with regards to the increasing restrictions on the open internet and the "deeper reason" behind it, and when it twice used the grammatically incorrect phrase "millions of opposition", it was going to lead to some bonkers conspiracy theory. But even after mentioning the US military situation in Syria and North Korea, I wasn't prepared for it to jump all the way to "the world's governments are planning World War III and trying to shut down the Internet so we don't know about it until they actually launch the nukes and wipe out mankind". Presumably the reason why all these governments are planning World War III at the same time with no one knowing about it, despite the fact that they too would perish as part of "mankind", is because they're actually lizard people that would survive a nuclear war to become the new dominant species on Earth, and my questioning of this narrative is just because I've let their chemtrails infect my mind and prevent me from seeing The Truth(tm) because I don't wear a tinfoil hat like this one guy that has alone stumbled onto their plot to start World War III by locking down the Internet and wake up sheeple.
Known Google shill Mike Masnick continues to stick up for them with an article that (checks notes) questions their current business model and suggests that the aggressive, invasive targeting they've been engaged in doesn't actually work.
As I keep saying, Brexit may be a bad idea economically but that doesn't mean there aren't serious problems with the way the EU works. Britain should say they're willing to remain in the EU but if it won't give more freedom to the member countries, it must become truly democratic. No country should be willing to give up any of their sovereignty to an entity run of, by, and for the corporations by its very structure (not just because of corporations exploiting flaws in the structure).
Re: Re: It's only about two months until the next EU election...
Britain should tell the EU: We'll hold a new Brexit referendum and potentially stay in the EU after all, but only if you make yourselves actually democratic, not have all laws he proposed by an undemocratic commission in the pocket of big business and have them unable to be repealed, only overridden.
Oh, Voss perfectly understands copyright law, or at least what his masters want it to be. Basically everything published by big corporations with the money to bully everyone else is covered under copyright. Everything else is probably using images or concepts or words that appear in an actually copyrighted work and needs to be sued out of existence so that the major publishers can reclaim their rightful place as the only locuses of human creativity.
Interesting, but the rest of that sentence is important: building web pages completely independently from centralized platforms would realistically involve paying for a domain (relatively cheap but hardly free) and hosting (which often comes with the domain or vice-versa, but if you don't want to be entangled with particular companies you probably want it separate from the domain, and that's significantly more expensive). That effectively raises the barrier to entry and makes it the province of the relatively well-off. Is it possible to create something that people of all means can use to quickly and easily create an online presence using whatever protocols and standards they wish that gives the user complete control of their data and presence? More realistic is probably incorporating decentralized protocols in a number of blog platforms and free host sites, and making it as easy as possible to port from one to another.
Neither this article nor the linked one points to anything specific the Bundesliga is actually doing that they aren't already doing, other than recognizing that this is the way it is.
Reminds me of Steven Pemberton's vision of "Web 3.0" I encountered ten years ago: http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/01-15-steven-website/ In his eyes, the next evolution of the Web should have been built around individual web sites with machine-readable data that could be scooped up by individual apps. Realistically, it would have been near-impossible to get millions of people to start their own web pages from scratch that weren't themselves built on centralized platforms like Tumblr or Facebook (which is why to the extent his vision came to pass it was limited to aggregating large corporate sites like in the Google and Apple News apps), but the more general notion of decentralizing the web was and remains a valid one, and you're getting at what may be a more practical approach to it.
I do have a couple of concerns, however: first, since Usenet eventually dwindled away to irrelevance, how do you ensure the new "protocols" wouldn't similarly be abandoned in favor of new "platforms"? Second, and this may be something you've addressed in previous posts, some sites could be "protocol-ized" more easily than others. It's easy to see how, say, Twitter could be protocol-ized, harder with something like Amazon. But what about something like Google? I don't see room for a middle ground between everyone at least relying on Google's search algorithm and creating full-on competitors that have nothing to do with it.
I still believe one of these days copyright will be restored to sane terms that it would have without the excessive lobbying by the entrenched industries and, while we might not have everything enter the public domain at once, we should at least have a phased freeing of content so everything that should be in the public domain becomes so over the course of a handful of decades.
Instead, there’s just an incentive to start a clock for however many years it takes after the death of the creator for the copyright to expire. Once they’ve been dead for longer than Walt Disney, you’re in the clear!
Re: Yup. For all cases where Price > 0 and Ease < Impossible.
As trolly as this is, it does underscore that people that don’t want to accept the facts will always find ways to dismiss them, so you can’t just expect “moar facts” to somehow change their mind.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
"Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous commenter with a bit of highly-contextual wordplay that I could try to explain but you should probably just read the original thread:"
Eh, not as contextual as you imply. There are two other pieces of wordplay in the thread but they aren't relevant to the joke. You probably could have said something like: "our first place winner comes from our article on the court decision against Strike 3. After a thread that brought up comparisons to three other copyright trolls, one with plenty of hilarious wordplay and humor to begin with, an anonymous commenter came in with the coup de grace:"
On the post: And Scene: Suburban Express To Shut Down In Mere Months
Re: Re: Re:
Says the person without a username to the person with one.
On the post: Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Calls For Facebook's Breakup... But Seems Confused About All The Details
This post is kinda repetitive. It would have done better if Mike had just summarized all the points Chris makes about how problematic Facebook is that cleaving off Instagram and Whatsapp wouldn't solve, only break out those points where he can say something beyond that, and then go in-depth on Chris's vision on what a broken-up and regulated Facebook would look like.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Regarding the second insightful editor's choice: I've long felt there should be a rule in the US government that any bill should be public for a minimum amount of time based on its length before it's voted on. That would effectively prohibit the thousand-page bills that tend to be all too common in Congress where only lobbyists know what's in them. It wouldn't ensure the people putting their names to a bill would have actually read them, but it would ensure someone did, or at least had the chance to.
On the post: Here Comes The Splinternet: How The EU Is Helping Break Apart The Internet
Re: Re:
If you want a completely unmoderated free-for-all, check out 4chan. I think most people have good reasons not to want their discussion areas to be like that.
On the post: The EU's Catastrophic Copyright Directive Can Still Be Stopped, If Governments Of Sweden And Germany Do The Right Thing
Re: Re: Democracy is dead in the world.
The problem is not necessarily the concept of the EU, but the structure where the democratic institutions serve no other purpose but to rubber-stamp the will of unelected bureaucrats in the pocket of big corporations. The people of the EU must demand: real democracy or break it all up.
On the post: Free Software Foundation Europe Comes To Its Senses After Calling For EU To Fund Open Source Upload Filters
Re: The EU ends The Open Internet, but for a Deeper Reason?
I knew when this comment adopted a solemn tone with regards to the increasing restrictions on the open internet and the "deeper reason" behind it, and when it twice used the grammatically incorrect phrase "millions of opposition", it was going to lead to some bonkers conspiracy theory. But even after mentioning the US military situation in Syria and North Korea, I wasn't prepared for it to jump all the way to "the world's governments are planning World War III and trying to shut down the Internet so we don't know about it until they actually launch the nukes and wipe out mankind". Presumably the reason why all these governments are planning World War III at the same time with no one knowing about it, despite the fact that they too would perish as part of "mankind", is because they're actually lizard people that would survive a nuclear war to become the new dominant species on Earth, and my questioning of this narrative is just because I've let their chemtrails infect my mind and prevent me from seeing The Truth(tm) because I don't wear a tinfoil hat like this one guy that has alone stumbled onto their plot to start World War III by locking down the Internet and wake up sheeple.
On the post: What If Google And Facebook Admitted That All This Ad Targeting Really Doesn't Work That Well?
Known Google shill Mike Masnick continues to stick up for them with an article that (checks notes) questions their current business model and suggests that the aggressive, invasive targeting they've been engaged in doesn't actually work.
On the post: Enough MEPs Say They Mistakenly Voted For Articles 11 & 13 That The Vote Should Have Flipped; EU Parliament Says Too Bad
Re:
As I keep saying, Brexit may be a bad idea economically but that doesn't mean there aren't serious problems with the way the EU works. Britain should say they're willing to remain in the EU but if it won't give more freedom to the member countries, it must become truly democratic. No country should be willing to give up any of their sovereignty to an entity run of, by, and for the corporations by its very structure (not just because of corporations exploiting flaws in the structure).
On the post: A Century Ago We Killed The Radio Commons; Don't Let The EU Do That To The Internet
Re: Re: It's only about two months until the next EU election...
Britain should tell the EU: We'll hold a new Brexit referendum and potentially stay in the EU after all, but only if you make yourselves actually democratic, not have all laws he proposed by an undemocratic commission in the pocket of big business and have them unable to be repealed, only overridden.
On the post: EU Internet Companies Warn EU Parliament Not To Vote For Articles 11 & 13; Say They'll Hand The Internet To Google
Known Google shill Mike Masnick with an article about how checks notes a bill he vehemently opposes will entrench Google's supremacy.
Forget Axel Voss, I wonder what mental gymnastics a certain class of troll right here would use to write this off.
On the post: Axel Voss Says Maybe YouTube Shouldn't Exist
Oh, Voss perfectly understands copyright law, or at least what his masters want it to be. Basically everything published by big corporations with the money to bully everyone else is covered under copyright. Everything else is probably using images or concepts or words that appear in an actually copyrighted work and needs to be sued out of existence so that the major publishers can reclaim their rightful place as the only locuses of human creativity.
On the post: How To Actually Break Up Big Tech
Re: Re:
Interesting, but the rest of that sentence is important: building web pages completely independently from centralized platforms would realistically involve paying for a domain (relatively cheap but hardly free) and hosting (which often comes with the domain or vice-versa, but if you don't want to be entangled with particular companies you probably want it separate from the domain, and that's significantly more expensive). That effectively raises the barrier to entry and makes it the province of the relatively well-off. Is it possible to create something that people of all means can use to quickly and easily create an online presence using whatever protocols and standards they wish that gives the user complete control of their data and presence? More realistic is probably incorporating decentralized protocols in a number of blog platforms and free host sites, and making it as easy as possible to port from one to another.
On the post: German Football League To Try Novel Antipiracy Strategy Of Actually Having Legal Alternatives For Its Content
Neither this article nor the linked one points to anything specific the Bundesliga is actually doing that they aren't already doing, other than recognizing that this is the way it is.
On the post: How To Actually Break Up Big Tech
Reminds me of Steven Pemberton's vision of "Web 3.0" I encountered ten years ago: http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/01-15-steven-website/ In his eyes, the next evolution of the Web should have been built around individual web sites with machine-readable data that could be scooped up by individual apps. Realistically, it would have been near-impossible to get millions of people to start their own web pages from scratch that weren't themselves built on centralized platforms like Tumblr or Facebook (which is why to the extent his vision came to pass it was limited to aggregating large corporate sites like in the Google and Apple News apps), but the more general notion of decentralizing the web was and remains a valid one, and you're getting at what may be a more practical approach to it.
I do have a couple of concerns, however: first, since Usenet eventually dwindled away to irrelevance, how do you ensure the new "protocols" wouldn't similarly be abandoned in favor of new "platforms"? Second, and this may be something you've addressed in previous posts, some sites could be "protocol-ized" more easily than others. It's easy to see how, say, Twitter could be protocol-ized, harder with something like Amazon. But what about something like Google? I don't see room for a middle ground between everyone at least relying on Google's search algorithm and creating full-on competitors that have nothing to do with it.
On the post: AT&T Begins Trying To Screw Up HBO In Earnest
Re: Re: Re: Re:
“If she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood!”
On the post: A Big Copyright Mess: Miel Bredouw, Barstool Sports, Slob On My Carol Of The Bells And The DMCA
Re: Just an aside...
Always a relevant xkcd (or at least alt-text).
On the post: The Tyranny Of Copyright: How A Once-Humble Legal Issue Has Tormented A Generation Of Speech
Re: Consensus
I still believe one of these days copyright will be restored to sane terms that it would have without the excessive lobbying by the entrenched industries and, while we might not have everything enter the public domain at once, we should at least have a phased freeing of content so everything that should be in the public domain becomes so over the course of a handful of decades.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re:
Instead, there’s just an incentive to start a clock for however many years it takes after the death of the creator for the copyright to expire. Once they’ve been dead for longer than Walt Disney, you’re in the clear!
On the post: NZ Study Yet Again Concludes That Piracy Is A Function Of Price And Ease Of Access
Re: Yup. For all cases where Price > 0 and Ease < Impossible.
As trolly as this is, it does underscore that people that don’t want to accept the facts will always find ways to dismiss them, so you can’t just expect “moar facts” to somehow change their mind.
Next >>