Re: Re: Re: 28 years plus reduced protection for second 28
My best idea in this vein thus far (which I think I may have posted in the comments here once, long ago) has been to tie the renewal fee to a certain percentage of the revenue from the work whose copyright is to be renewed, over e.g. the last year prior to the renewal, or a certain relatively-low minimum.
So if it's still making you lots of money, you have to pay relatively lots of money to renew the term of the copyright; if it's making you some income, you can renew for less; if it's making you little or nothing, you still have to pay the minimum fee.
That would still leave open the possibility of e.g. taking the work off the market for a year (or just over that) prior to the point of renewal, to drop the revenue for that final year down to zero. That could either be addressed by having the relevant year for determining the renewal fee be the last one in which income was generated (although that would probably just lead to people reducing availability so severely as to minimize income), or allowed to stand, on the grounds that the cost of forgoing that year of income is likely to be higher than the cost of the fee would have been.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Capacity costs vs. market constraint.
I think the difference is supposed to be that the floor price for bolts is fixed by the price the supplier pays for raw iron, and therefore the scale of the advantage available to an established giant has its limits - but the floor price for bandwidth has no such external constraint, and thus the scale of the advantage available to an established giant like YouTube is much larger, even potentially unlimited.
Bandwidth does have a floor price of its own, of course, but exactly what that price is and what the constraints on it are is less clear than in the case of e.g. bolts.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: can't we all just - just get along
I would consider that to be a different type of exclusivity, and not include it under the same heading for determining - er - common-ness.
There's a considerable difference between "We're going to release this for our own platform and nothing else, because we want to" and either / both of "If you release this for any platforms other than ours, we'll penalize you" or "If you release this for only our platform, we'll reward you".
I find the question of how the two major political factions in the modern era came to be referred to as "liberal" and "conservative" to be an interesting one.
The most satisfactory-seeming answer I've been able to come up with thus far is that it must have had to do with spending policies.
If you look at uses of the words outside of the political context, "conservative" can be found in a number of slightly differing usages, but "liberal" pretty much has only one: "freely, without stinting". For example, "he poured out the drinks with a liberal hand" means that he was generous with the amount that he poured out instead of limiting it to make sure he wouldn't run out of the beverage, and "he spread the butter liberally over the toast" means that he didn't hold back on how much butter he was spreading over the toast (and therefore he easily used enough to cover the entire thing).
Based on that sense of the word, it seems easy to me to envision it coming into use in politics: "let's be liberal with our resources, and use them without restraint where they will do the most good!".
And when placed in contrast to that policy attitude, it seems equally easy to envision "conservative" coming into use in opposition to it: "we should conserve our resources, not spend them recklessly!".
Looked at like that, both sides clearly have their arguments, and both sides can be respected for that view, depending on the details of the case at hand and how the view is argued - and it's even easy to switch between the two policies on a case-by-case basis, depending on the merits of the individual case.
Unfortunately, that sort of precise distinction between the positions to which those labels get applied has been long since lost...
The point of that argument as I understand it is that even if there are some people observing with whom he has not already destroyed any semblance of credibility, the practice described would tend to undermine his credibility with even those people.
I think he considers those to be an example of verbal shorthand, where he just makes the general statement rather than bothering to re-outline the exceptions every time, and thus not a valid example.
(And/or, in some cases from the early days, an example of an older viewpoint which he has been persuaded to modify - by, e.g., all the times people pointed out that anti-trust regulations are a form of regulation; it wasn't until after that had been happening for a while that I first saw him doing the "I'm for anti-trust and anti-monopoly regulations" thing. Though I don't recall his ever having admitted to having been persuaded to change his views, or to having been inititally wrong.)
Your mention of "seeing anti-regulation folk argue [such-and-such]" appears to imply that the person being responded to is such a person.
He considers the statement that someone is "anti-regulation" to imply that that person is against all regulation.
Therefore, he considers that mention to be an implied statement that he is against all regulation.
He is, or claims to be, not against all regulation but only against all but a(n apparently ill-defined, or at least ill-explained) subset of regulations.
Therefore, he considers claims that he is anti-regulation to be lies.
Therefore, he considers that implied statement to be a lie.
If you're asking for regulations to keep those who hold the natural monopolies from abusing those monopolies, you're asking for the FCC as originally intended, or for something functionally equivalent to it.
If you're asking for regulations to keep the natural monopolies from existing, you're asking for the by-definition impossible.
I think that's based on the idea that "the makers of the console pay, or otherwise induce, the makers of a particular game to release it as an exclusive for a single console" is monopolistic behavior, in that it's an artificial limitation on the breadth of the market availability of the game.
I don't know how common that type of exclusivity is nowadays, but at one point in my awareness of the gaming industry, the impression was that it was nearly standard.
I doubt anyone (here) has any more love for protectionist regulation than you do. Certainly I don't.
However, I have yet to see any indication of what protectionist regulations are supposed to exist in the Internet-service market at the federal level, except to the extent that the failure to impose "open up the last mile" types of regulation - which is a lack of regulation - may be considered protectionist.
All of the protectionist regulations I know of in the Internet-service market are at the state and local levels, and mostly at the state level. None of them were imposed by the FCC.
So what federal-level regulations is it that you consider protectionist and would like to see removed?
So, who are you saying *should* have the natural monopolies in Internet service?
Because "no one" is not an option; the only way to have no one hold those monopolies is to not have the service provided at all. Although we try to get rid of monopolies wherever possible, with natural monopolies that is not a viable possibility; that's (one way to express) the defining characteristic of a natural monopoly.
It was recognized long ago in this country that the least bad way to handle such natural monopolies is to regulate them, and those who hold them, such that they do not get abused. The entity which was established to do that regulating is the FCC.
If the FCC were not in place to do that regulating, someone else would have to be - or else no regulating would occur, and the monopolies would be subject to unconstrained abuse. (And what would cause that "someone else" to be any different from the FCC, in practice?)
Even that isn't theoretically 100% guaranteed to render the data unrecoverable. It's enough for the limits of modern technology and the resources of pretty much any organization that exists, but in theory, a sufficiently-powerful organization could collect the scraps and shuffle through them and reassemble them (or scan them and reassemble the scanned data objects) and read the result.
If you really want to guarantee that no one will ever be able to read what used to be on a given hard drive, you need to pull out the platters and melt them, then stir the result together till it's unrecognizable.
Any entity capable of recovering the data from that would be so far into "indistinguishable from magic" that it could just as readily recover the data without access to the hard drive in the first place.
The "deep state" consists of entrenched, career government officials, who remain in place across administrations, and by their presence and their actions impede new elected officials from enacting meaningful, significant change, thereby preventing the officials' campaign promises from being be fulfilled.
This concept is one of the several consequences which has arisen from the decades of right-wing politicians lying to their electorate - not about what they would do once elected (although in many cases they may have also been lying about that), but about the things they said they would do being good things to do.
Once elected, they look at the details of doing what they said they would do, realize what the consequences would be, and decide (reasonably) that those consequences are too much - so they don't do it. But they keep promising the same things to the voters, because those promises are what got them elected - or if they don't, then the people who do unseat them in a subsequent election.
That electorate looks at the fact that politician after politician, once elected, does not deliver on what was promised, and some of them conclude that there is some hidden force blocking these politicians from coming through on their promises - and hey, there are all these non-elected officials who tend to remain the same no matter who's in office; clearly they are in the best position to be blocking these changes, so they must be responsible!
(I also believe that this "deep state" is what was meant by the term "the swamp" during Trump's Presidential campaign; if you look at things from that perspective, his gutting of various departments takes on a new aspect, and it becomes clear that he's doing quite a good job at "draining the swamp" - i.e., clearing out the members of the "deep state" - by getting rid of the people with the established skills and institutional knowledge which actually keep the government functioning properly.)
Back when Jon Stewart and his ilk used it of their own (comedic) programs, and when various people (including, I think, The Onion itself) used it to describe The Onion, it certainly did not mean that.
I'm also reasonably sure it didn't have that meaning when Hillary Clinton used it in the post-election interview which seems to have given Donald Trump the idea to use the term, but I haven't reviewed that interview recently enough to be sure about that.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Who cares if rubber stamped? Real tests ALWAYS come later.
Reading the article isn't a prerequisite for being annoyed that the article was written; the only prerequisite for that is knowing that the article exists, and that is easily satisfied by seeing the headline in the front-page feed.
Also, I see no indication that he's annoyed about reading the article - only that it existed to be read. (Believe it or not, with the right mindset, those two perspectives are not contradictory.)
Re: Re: Re: Macron is an inherited 1-percenter and a globalist. -- And none too popular in France now he's been found out.
There are multiple possible answers, ranging from "because he expressed positive sentiments toward them and so they had reason to think he would improve relations and withdraw sanctions" through "because they had influence with/over him and thought they could control US policy towards them by that channel" to "they weren't trying to get him elected, they were just trying to weaken (the public image of and trust in) US democratic institutions, because the weaker those are the more easily Russia can claim that its own authoritarian and alternative models are just as good or better".
We don't have enough information to know for certain which (if any) of these is correct, but there are certainly enough possible reasons available that an implied argument of "they had no reason to want to do what they're accused of doing" doesn't fly.
I'm assuming you mean an analog TV, rather than a digital one? Because I haven't seen a digital (much less a "smart") TV display the classic "snow" image and associated audio static as far as I recall; they tend to fall back to a "signal not available" message, much like computer monitors.
In that case, I'm reasonably sure that the "snow" and static come from the ambient electromagnetic spectrum around wherever the TV's getting whatever signal it is managing to pick up, and have little to do with the design or construction of the TV itself. So, presumably no, the manufacturer would not have a copyright interest in those resulting patterns.
Re: Re: Re: Who cares if rubber stamped? Real tests ALWAYS come later.
Now, now, be fair.
What they're complaining about is not that they had to read the article, but that the article was written and posted in the first place.
Why that's something worthy of being complained about is another question; I can understand it intuitively, but translating that intuitive understanding into an explainable rationale - however faulty - is a trick I've not yet managed.
There is sometimes a considerable delay between when an article is written and when it actually gets posted for public visibility. (I'm given to understand that those with access to the Techdirt Crystal Ball can see such articles sooner, though how far in advance I don't know.)
As can be seen from the date in the URL, this article was written in 2017.
(Admittedly, one could argue that this wording detail should have been corrected in an editing pass before publication.)
The ranked-preference voting system which is most comonly meant by the shorthand of "IRV" actually is fairly bad as ranked-preference systems go; it does have the advantage that it's simpler and easier to explain than most of the better ones, but it only changes the structure of the strategic-voting gaming-the-system incentives, it doesn't eliminate them entirely.
To eliminate those incentives (and the "spoiler effect") entirely, you need the Condorcet method, or something else that satisfies the Condorcet criteria.
(Those methods do have the downside that they still leave open the possibility of a "true tie", in which every candidate beats at least one other but is beaten by at least one other. IMO, however, that sort of tie simply means that the electorate really is so evenly split that there really is no "candidate preferred by the majority" - in which case there's no reason not to break the tie by random draw.)
On the post: Copyright Maximalists Throw In The Towel On Term Extension; Admit That Maybe Copyright Is Too Long
Re: Re: Re: 28 years plus reduced protection for second 28
So if it's still making you lots of money, you have to pay relatively lots of money to renew the term of the copyright; if it's making you some income, you can renew for less; if it's making you little or nothing, you still have to pay the minimum fee.
That would still leave open the possibility of e.g. taking the work off the market for a year (or just over that) prior to the point of renewal, to drop the revenue for that final year down to zero. That could either be addressed by having the relevant year for determining the renewal fee be the last one in which income was generated (although that would probably just lead to people reducing availability so severely as to minimize income), or allowed to stand, on the grounds that the cost of forgoing that year of income is likely to be higher than the cost of the fee would have been.
On the post: Dennis Prager Seeks Injunction To Keep YouTube From Administering Its Own Site While YouTube Seeks Dismissal
Re: Re: Re: Re: Capacity costs vs. market constraint.
Bandwidth does have a floor price of its own, of course, but exactly what that price is and what the constraints on it are is less clear than in the case of e.g. bolts.
On the post: NSA Denies Prior Knowledge Of Meltdown, Spectre Exploits; Claims It Would 'Never' Harm Companies By Withholding Vulns
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: can't we all just - just get along
There's a considerable difference between "We're going to release this for our own platform and nothing else, because we want to" and either / both of "If you release this for any platforms other than ours, we'll penalize you" or "If you release this for only our platform, we'll reward you".
On the post: Dennis Prager Seeks Injunction To Keep YouTube From Administering Its Own Site While YouTube Seeks Dismissal
Re: Re:
The most satisfactory-seeming answer I've been able to come up with thus far is that it must have had to do with spending policies.
If you look at uses of the words outside of the political context, "conservative" can be found in a number of slightly differing usages, but "liberal" pretty much has only one: "freely, without stinting". For example, "he poured out the drinks with a liberal hand" means that he was generous with the amount that he poured out instead of limiting it to make sure he wouldn't run out of the beverage, and "he spread the butter liberally over the toast" means that he didn't hold back on how much butter he was spreading over the toast (and therefore he easily used enough to cover the entire thing).
Based on that sense of the word, it seems easy to me to envision it coming into use in politics: "let's be liberal with our resources, and use them without restraint where they will do the most good!".
And when placed in contrast to that policy attitude, it seems equally easy to envision "conservative" coming into use in opposition to it: "we should conserve our resources, not spend them recklessly!".
Looked at like that, both sides clearly have their arguments, and both sides can be respected for that view, depending on the details of the case at hand and how the view is argued - and it's even easy to switch between the two policies on a case-by-case basis, depending on the merits of the individual case.
Unfortunately, that sort of precise distinction between the positions to which those labels get applied has been long since lost...
On the post: Publisher Not At All Impressed By Trump's Defamation Threat Letter; Promises To Defend The First Amendment
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The point of that argument as I understand it is that even if there are some people observing with whom he has not already destroyed any semblance of credibility, the practice described would tend to undermine his credibility with even those people.
On the post: Uphill Effort To Reverse Net Neutrality Repeal Has The Early Votes
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
(And/or, in some cases from the early days, an example of an older viewpoint which he has been persuaded to modify - by, e.g., all the times people pointed out that anti-trust regulations are a form of regulation; it wasn't until after that had been happening for a while that I first saw him doing the "I'm for anti-trust and anti-monopoly regulations" thing. Though I don't recall his ever having admitted to having been persuaded to change his views, or to having been inititally wrong.)
On the post: Uphill Effort To Reverse Net Neutrality Repeal Has The Early Votes
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I think the chain of logic is:
Your mention of "seeing anti-regulation folk argue [such-and-such]" appears to imply that the person being responded to is such a person.
He considers the statement that someone is "anti-regulation" to imply that that person is against all regulation.
Therefore, he considers that mention to be an implied statement that he is against all regulation.
He is, or claims to be, not against all regulation but only against all but a(n apparently ill-defined, or at least ill-explained) subset of regulations.
Therefore, he considers claims that he is anti-regulation to be lies.
On the post: Uphill Effort To Reverse Net Neutrality Repeal Has The Early Votes
Re: Re: Re: Re:
If you're asking for regulations to keep those who hold the natural monopolies from abusing those monopolies, you're asking for the FCC as originally intended, or for something functionally equivalent to it.
If you're asking for regulations to keep the natural monopolies from existing, you're asking for the by-definition impossible.
On the post: NSA Denies Prior Knowledge Of Meltdown, Spectre Exploits; Claims It Would 'Never' Harm Companies By Withholding Vulns
Re: Re: Re: can't we all just - just get along
I don't know how common that type of exclusivity is nowadays, but at one point in my awareness of the gaming industry, the impression was that it was nearly standard.
On the post: Uphill Effort To Reverse Net Neutrality Repeal Has The Early Votes
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Here's the thing.
I doubt anyone (here) has any more love for protectionist regulation than you do. Certainly I don't.
However, I have yet to see any indication of what protectionist regulations are supposed to exist in the Internet-service market at the federal level, except to the extent that the failure to impose "open up the last mile" types of regulation - which is a lack of regulation - may be considered protectionist.
All of the protectionist regulations I know of in the Internet-service market are at the state and local levels, and mostly at the state level. None of them were imposed by the FCC.
So what federal-level regulations is it that you consider protectionist and would like to see removed?
On the post: Uphill Effort To Reverse Net Neutrality Repeal Has The Early Votes
Re: Re: Re:
Because "no one" is not an option; the only way to have no one hold those monopolies is to not have the service provided at all. Although we try to get rid of monopolies wherever possible, with natural monopolies that is not a viable possibility; that's (one way to express) the defining characteristic of a natural monopoly.
It was recognized long ago in this country that the least bad way to handle such natural monopolies is to regulate them, and those who hold them, such that they do not get abused. The entity which was established to do that regulating is the FCC.
If the FCC were not in place to do that regulating, someone else would have to be - or else no regulating would occur, and the monopolies would be subject to unconstrained abuse. (And what would cause that "someone else" to be any different from the FCC, in practice?)
On the post: The Stasi's Tiny Torn-Up Analog Files Defeat Modern Digital Technology's Attempts To Re-Assemble East Germany's Surveillance Records
Re: Re: Book scanning writ large
Even that isn't theoretically 100% guaranteed to render the data unrecoverable. It's enough for the limits of modern technology and the resources of pretty much any organization that exists, but in theory, a sufficiently-powerful organization could collect the scraps and shuffle through them and reassemble them (or scan them and reassemble the scanned data objects) and read the result.
If you really want to guarantee that no one will ever be able to read what used to be on a given hard drive, you need to pull out the platters and melt them, then stir the result together till it's unrecognizable.
Any entity capable of recovering the data from that would be so far into "indistinguishable from magic" that it could just as readily recover the data without access to the hard drive in the first place.
On the post: New York State Appellate Court Says Cell Site Location Records Have No Expectation Of Privacy
Re: Re:
This concept is one of the several consequences which has arisen from the decades of right-wing politicians lying to their electorate - not about what they would do once elected (although in many cases they may have also been lying about that), but about the things they said they would do being good things to do.
Once elected, they look at the details of doing what they said they would do, realize what the consequences would be, and decide (reasonably) that those consequences are too much - so they don't do it. But they keep promising the same things to the voters, because those promises are what got them elected - or if they don't, then the people who do unseat them in a subsequent election.
That electorate looks at the fact that politician after politician, once elected, does not deliver on what was promised, and some of them conclude that there is some hidden force blocking these politicians from coming through on their promises - and hey, there are all these non-elected officials who tend to remain the same no matter who's in office; clearly they are in the best position to be blocking these changes, so they must be responsible!
(I also believe that this "deep state" is what was meant by the term "the swamp" during Trump's Presidential campaign; if you look at things from that perspective, his gutting of various departments takes on a new aspect, and it becomes clear that he's doing quite a good job at "draining the swamp" - i.e., clearing out the members of the "deep state" - by getting rid of the people with the established skills and institutional knowledge which actually keep the government functioning properly.)
On the post: Really Bad Ideas: French President Macron Wants To Ban 'Fake News' During The Election
Re: Re: Re: Define Fake News?
I'm also reasonably sure it didn't have that meaning when Hillary Clinton used it in the post-election interview which seems to have given Donald Trump the idea to use the term, but I haven't reviewed that interview recently enough to be sure about that.
On the post: Shocked, Shocked To Learn The Patent Office Is Structurally Designed To Approve Shit Patents
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Who cares if rubber stamped? Real tests ALWAYS come later.
Also, I see no indication that he's annoyed about reading the article - only that it existed to be read. (Believe it or not, with the right mindset, those two perspectives are not contradictory.)
On the post: Really Bad Ideas: French President Macron Wants To Ban 'Fake News' During The Election
Re: Re: Re: Macron is an inherited 1-percenter and a globalist. -- And none too popular in France now he's been found out.
We don't have enough information to know for certain which (if any) of these is correct, but there are certainly enough possible reasons available that an implied argument of "they had no reason to want to do what they're accused of doing" doesn't fly.
On the post: White Noise On YouTube Gets FIVE Separate Copyright Claims From Other White Noise Providers
Re: Re:
In that case, I'm reasonably sure that the "snow" and static come from the ambient electromagnetic spectrum around wherever the TV's getting whatever signal it is managing to pick up, and have little to do with the design or construction of the TV itself. So, presumably no, the manufacturer would not have a copyright interest in those resulting patterns.
On the post: Shocked, Shocked To Learn The Patent Office Is Structurally Designed To Approve Shit Patents
Re: Re: Re: Who cares if rubber stamped? Real tests ALWAYS come later.
What they're complaining about is not that they had to read the article, but that the article was written and posted in the first place.
Why that's something worthy of being complained about is another question; I can understand it intuitively, but translating that intuitive understanding into an explainable rationale - however faulty - is a trick I've not yet managed.
On the post: Confused Judge Says Video Game Play Has No Copyright, Because The Work Is Not 'Fixed'
Re: From the article
As can be seen from the date in the URL, this article was written in 2017.
(Admittedly, one could argue that this wording detail should have been corrected in an editing pass before publication.)
On the post: Donald Trump Hires Charles Harder To Threaten Steve Bannon With A Lawsuit, Block Publication Of New Book
Re: Re:
To eliminate those incentives (and the "spoiler effect") entirely, you need the Condorcet method, or something else that satisfies the Condorcet criteria.
(Those methods do have the downside that they still leave open the possibility of a "true tie", in which every candidate beats at least one other but is beaten by at least one other. IMO, however, that sort of tie simply means that the electorate really is so evenly split that there really is no "candidate preferred by the majority" - in which case there's no reason not to break the tie by random draw.)
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