We strongly oppose the notion that a Directive must be agreed at any price – particularly not at the price of grave harm to our sector.
Translation: Our sector uber alles, and screw everyone else! We can harm you all you want, peasants, but don't you dare place even the slightest scratch on our paint job.
Multiple people, myself included, have challenged this guy on the subject, and his responses never address it. Why? Because he has no good answer to it!
Digital copyright enforcement, as it currently exists, already causes far too much collateral damage. What we need are changes to the law to reduce it. What we're being offered are changes to the law that will make it much worse, but he's incapable of seeing that.
I actually know a mega-successful creator. Howard Tayler, one of the biggest names in webcomics, lives just a couple blocks away from me, and we get together and talk about stuff on a pretty regular basis. He gives his primary work away for free online, to generate demand for print editions and other swag based on his comic, and he and his family live pretty well on that. I've never heard him complain about piracy, because he's come up with a business model that makes it irrelevant.
The fact that our resident troll has not managed to do so says more about him than it does about the Internet.
One other thing I forgot to mention. The talk about the effects of the Microsoft antitrust trial felt a bit weird, because I remember hearing on a podcast sometime in the last few months (and I'm pretty sure it was this one, because I don't listen to any other podcasts that cover this sort of subject matter!) when the guest talked about the effects of that trial, and one of the things he said was that Microsoft's first reaction to the then-nascent Google was "we should crush them," but they refrained from acting on that impulse specifically because of the painful lessons they had learned from the antitrust trial. It's not an exaggeration to say that without that, we would not have had the Web as we know it today.
Sometimes, every once in a while, a "chilling effect" turns out to actually be a good thing!
"Supposed to" is an incredibly subjective term here. That was the original intent of the ARPANet, for a very specific purpose: spreading valuable information around to ensure that it would survive a Russian nuclear strike because there was a Cold War going on. According to Wikipedia, "The first documented version of HTTP was HTTP V0.9 (1991)," which means that that purpose stopped being valid before the basic protocol of the Web was even created!
Decentralized, non-hierarchical social systems have never been stable over a long term, at least not much beyond the scale of a single-digit number of people. Throughout history, centralization has always won out in the end. (I'm not claiming that that's good or that's bad, only that it's true.) So it should come as no surprise that the Web went down that same route, almost from the very beginning.
The heavy dominance of Amazon, Google, and Facebook over the Web may be a fairly recent phenomenon, but centralization has been with us all along. Before the current crop of tech leaders we had others. Remember in the pre-Google era, when every other website was hosted on Geocities, Yahoo dominated search, and the majority of emails were handled by either Yahoo Mail or Hotmail? Not much has changed other than the names.
This article is no different than a company releasing a "new and improved" product, which is contradictory as it cannot be both new and improved.
Why not? It can be a new version of an older idea that improves upon it; I don't see anything contradictory there. (Not to defend AT&T or anything; just as a general principle, there's nothing inherently wrong with this claim.)
Wow, your reading comprehension is truly atrocious here. The shrug was about the state he was from.
Also, the choice of examples is particularly telling. I looked it up, and the photo in question was taken 35 years ago. When that's your go-to talking point for claiming that racism is alive and well today...
The first was fine and unmemorable, but the second was a show-stopper: "Allow Flywheel access to your contacts?" Saying no made the app exit with passive-aggressive flourish ("You have forcefully denied some of the required permissions.") but I could not for the life of me figure out why I should say yes. Why on Earth would a taxi summoning app require access to my contacts?
Argh! I hate apps that do that. My current phone will not open the Calendar app without access to my contacts, the telephony service, and my local storage. This is completely absurd! I can understand how having access to these permissions might enable valid features that make it more useful, but to display a calendar requires none of these things!
There are a number of reasons for this, but debating if this should be the case is not in the scope of your question.
I disagree; that's pretty much the entirety of my question. How does it make any sense to allow them to charge for something that they are already giving away for free because someone else already paid for it?!?
Saying "because spectrum sales set it up that way" merely moves the question back a step, and it's very frustrating to have that be immediately followed by "because reasons which we aren't going to discuss here." That is what I'm trying to discuss here: what justification can there possibly be for that?
This is technically correct. It's not blackmail, but it most definitely is extortion, which is a crime. Blackmail is one specific type of extortion, and it's common enough of an example that many people use the two terms interchangeably.
What you're describing is a civil suit. But you don't sue someone for extortion; it's a crime, which means you report it to the police and the government (not the victim) charges them with a crime, and may or may not call the victim to testify in court.
If someone sends me a message that says "I've put two strikes on your account, now you must send $150 to my PayPal account at VengefulFlame@BlackMail.com or I'll give you a third strike and destroy your account and your livelihood," I now have in my possession evidence of a crime (the message) and evidence of the criminal's identity (the PayPal account, which has to be linked to a personally-identifiable bank account in order to be of any use to the criminal). YouTube, if necessary, would be able to provide corroborating evidence in the form of confirmation that this person was responsible for the past copyright strikes.
This YouTuber--assuming for the purpose of this discussion that he's telling the truth about what happened to him--has everything he needs to sic the law on this guy and have a good chance of seeing him convicted.
At groups large enough for their behavior to best be understood statistically rather than individually, it really is. If you present the same stimulus to a large group of people, a certain number of them are going to react in very predictable ways. (This is the basic principle behind advertising, among other things.) Human nature doesn't change, and we've had a pretty solid grasp on the basic points thereof for a long time now.
For just one example, look up "The Book of Swindles" sometime. It was originally written in 1617 in China, as a comprehensive guide to swindling and fraud and how to protect oneself therefrom, but sooooo much of it, if you take out the culture-specific stuff and focus on the human behavior principles involved, remains perfectly applicable even now, in the USA in the Age of the Internet, half a world away and 4 centuries later.
On the post: Copyright Holders Still Don't Support EU's Already Awful Upload Filter Proposal; Demand It Be Made Worse
Translation: Our sector uber alles, and screw everyone else! We can harm you all you want, peasants, but don't you dare place even the slightest scratch on our paint job.
On the post: Italy Tells Rest Of EU To Drop Articles 11 And 13 From The Copyright Directive
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
This, exactly.
Multiple people, myself included, have challenged this guy on the subject, and his responses never address it. Why? Because he has no good answer to it!
Digital copyright enforcement, as it currently exists, already causes far too much collateral damage. What we need are changes to the law to reduce it. What we're being offered are changes to the law that will make it much worse, but he's incapable of seeing that.
On the post: Ex-NSA Personnel Spied On Americans And Journalists For The United Arab Emirates
Re: Re: Re:
I beg your pardon!
On the post: Apple Helps AT&T Mislead Consumers With Fake 5G
Re:
I'm not, simply because... when has the post-iPhone Apple ever needed someone to twist their arm as an excuse to be evil?
On the post: Italy Tells Rest Of EU To Drop Articles 11 And 13 From The Copyright Directive
Re: Re: Awesomeness
I know that was true at some point, but is it still true today? (Not saying you're wrong; I'm genuinely curious.)
On the post: The Revolving Door Spins Hard: FCC's Clyburn Now Lobbying For T-Mobile
Re:
How is that relevant when the merger hasn't happened yet?
On the post: A Deeper Look At Verizon's Early 5G 'Launch' Finds It's Barely Available
Technology that does not exist yet found to not be in wide use.
In other news, water is wet, the Pope is Catholic, and traffic in LA is horrible today.
On the post: Italy Tells Rest Of EU To Drop Articles 11 And 13 From The Copyright Directive
Re:
I actually know a mega-successful creator. Howard Tayler, one of the biggest names in webcomics, lives just a couple blocks away from me, and we get together and talk about stuff on a pretty regular basis. He gives his primary work away for free online, to generate demand for print editions and other swag based on his comic, and he and his family live pretty well on that. I've never heard him complain about piracy, because he's come up with a business model that makes it irrelevant.
The fact that our resident troll has not managed to do so says more about him than it does about the Internet.
On the post: Australian Government Agencies Already Flexing Their New Encryption-Breaking Powers
Crikey! This 'ere's a Snapchat message, the most dyngerous encryption in all the Web!
*manic grin*
I think I'll poke it with a mandatory-backdoor bill!
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 198: Life Without The Tech Giants
Re:
One other thing I forgot to mention. The talk about the effects of the Microsoft antitrust trial felt a bit weird, because I remember hearing on a podcast sometime in the last few months (and I'm pretty sure it was this one, because I don't listen to any other podcasts that cover this sort of subject matter!) when the guest talked about the effects of that trial, and one of the things he said was that Microsoft's first reaction to the then-nascent Google was "we should crush them," but they refrained from acting on that impulse specifically because of the painful lessons they had learned from the antitrust trial. It's not an exaggeration to say that without that, we would not have had the Web as we know it today.
Sometimes, every once in a while, a "chilling effect" turns out to actually be a good thing!
On the post: EU Copyright Directive Has Been Made Even More Stupid, And Some Are Still Trying To Make It Even Worse
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Supposed to" is an incredibly subjective term here. That was the original intent of the ARPANet, for a very specific purpose: spreading valuable information around to ensure that it would survive a Russian nuclear strike because there was a Cold War going on. According to Wikipedia, "The first documented version of HTTP was HTTP V0.9 (1991)," which means that that purpose stopped being valid before the basic protocol of the Web was even created!
Decentralized, non-hierarchical social systems have never been stable over a long term, at least not much beyond the scale of a single-digit number of people. Throughout history, centralization has always won out in the end. (I'm not claiming that that's good or that's bad, only that it's true.) So it should come as no surprise that the Web went down that same route, almost from the very beginning.
The heavy dominance of Amazon, Google, and Facebook over the Web may be a fairly recent phenomenon, but centralization has been with us all along. Before the current crop of tech leaders we had others. Remember in the pre-Google era, when every other website was hosted on Geocities, Yahoo dominated search, and the majority of emails were handled by either Yahoo Mail or Hotmail? Not much has changed other than the names.
On the post: Italy Tells Rest Of EU To Drop Articles 11 And 13 From The Copyright Directive
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
It's not the automobiles; it's the drivers, and only about 10% of them really. Take them off the road and 90% of problems would be gone overnight.
Figuring out which 10% specifically, though... that's the hard part!
On the post: Italy Tells Rest Of EU To Drop Articles 11 And 13 From The Copyright Directive
On the one hand, Italy gave us awesome things like pizza and spaghetti.
On the other hand, there's the Mafia and (to some degree) fascism.
It's good to see them contributing to the positive side on this one!
On the post: Apple Helps AT&T Mislead Consumers With Fake 5G
Re:
Why not? It can be a new version of an older idea that improves upon it; I don't see anything contradictory there. (Not to defend AT&T or anything; just as a general principle, there's nothing inherently wrong with this claim.)
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Wow, your reading comprehension is truly atrocious here. The shrug was about the state he was from.
Also, the choice of examples is particularly telling. I looked it up, and the photo in question was taken 35 years ago. When that's your go-to talking point for claiming that racism is alive and well today...
On the post: The 3rd Party Doctrine: Or Why Lawyers May Not Ethically Be Able To Use Whatsapp
Argh! I hate apps that do that. My current phone will not open the Calendar app without access to my contacts, the telephony service, and my local storage. This is completely absurd! I can understand how having access to these permissions might enable valid features that make it more useful, but to display a calendar requires none of these things!
On the post: Former FCC Official Attempts To Create An Aereo That The Supreme Court Won't Kill
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I disagree; that's pretty much the entirety of my question. How does it make any sense to allow them to charge for something that they are already giving away for free because someone else already paid for it?!?
Saying "because spectrum sales set it up that way" merely moves the question back a step, and it's very frustrating to have that be immediately followed by "because reasons which we aren't going to discuss here." That is what I'm trying to discuss here: what justification can there possibly be for that?
On the post: YouTube's ContentID System Is Being Repurposed By Blackmailers Due To Its Failings
Re: Not Actually Blackmail
This is technically correct. It's not blackmail, but it most definitely is extortion, which is a crime. Blackmail is one specific type of extortion, and it's common enough of an example that many people use the two terms interchangeably.
On the post: YouTube's ContentID System Is Being Repurposed By Blackmailers Due To Its Failings
Re: Re:
What you're describing is a civil suit. But you don't sue someone for extortion; it's a crime, which means you report it to the police and the government (not the victim) charges them with a crime, and may or may not call the victim to testify in court.
If someone sends me a message that says "I've put two strikes on your account, now you must send $150 to my PayPal account at VengefulFlame@BlackMail.com or I'll give you a third strike and destroy your account and your livelihood," I now have in my possession evidence of a crime (the message) and evidence of the criminal's identity (the PayPal account, which has to be linked to a personally-identifiable bank account in order to be of any use to the criminal). YouTube, if necessary, would be able to provide corroborating evidence in the form of confirmation that this person was responsible for the past copyright strikes.
This YouTuber--assuming for the purpose of this discussion that he's telling the truth about what happened to him--has everything he needs to sic the law on this guy and have a good chance of seeing him convicted.
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
At groups large enough for their behavior to best be understood statistically rather than individually, it really is. If you present the same stimulus to a large group of people, a certain number of them are going to react in very predictable ways. (This is the basic principle behind advertising, among other things.) Human nature doesn't change, and we've had a pretty solid grasp on the basic points thereof for a long time now.
For just one example, look up "The Book of Swindles" sometime. It was originally written in 1617 in China, as a comprehensive guide to swindling and fraud and how to protect oneself therefrom, but sooooo much of it, if you take out the culture-specific stuff and focus on the human behavior principles involved, remains perfectly applicable even now, in the USA in the Age of the Internet, half a world away and 4 centuries later.
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