Amusingly enough, there was an epidemic response team in the US that could have handled this better.
Problem is that was setup by the Obama administration and Trump was so busy erasing anything with the name "Obama" on it that he was left with nothing when the crisis hit the US. Plus he got himself too worked up trying to deny it even hit the US that he did nothing. His first reflex of banning travels from China would have been a good first step if 1. it was a complete blocus (instead, he only banned chinese people from traveling, which left plenty of other carriers), and 2. he did something else to restrain the spread inside the US.
Actually, he did less than nothing. Doing nothing would at least have left professionals able to deal with it. Instead, he politicized the issue so much that masks became a threat, and vaccines suddenly became the subject of multiple conspiracy theories each crazier than the previous one (from the "magnet" to the "tentacle monster"). Even worse, the less crazy republicans pretend that "it's a choice", but then ostracize vaccinated people or leave it to more local entities to ban them.
Not to mention the stocks of medical supplies that he sold off as soon as he got in office in the name of the almighty short-term dollar. (Which he then complained about, pretending that "Obama left the shelves empty.")
Wherever it originated, the US had such a bad response to it that it couldn't have been a factor in the plans of your hypothetical evil dictator. Unless Trump was your evil genius's plant to undermine the pandemic response. :D
If that's the case, bravo to the evil genius here.
If not, it would have been an evil retard who just got an incredible stroke of luck.
Finally, the virus is dangerous, but mostly in its contagion rates while it's actual death rate is not high enough to qualify as a "weapon". At best, as an evil scheme, I could see it as a corporate plan to sell vaccines and/or cures. In which case, your "evil genius" got kinda foiled by Trump's idiotic anti-vaccine rants getting in the way of their sales. Which would be funny enough given how easy it is to bribe Trump, all republicans and a good 80% of democrats. This really takes the "genius" out of "evil genius". :D
(Just a side note: please make your links consistent, ideally not using the enforced "threaded=false" links. They are quite bad when quoting reply-type comments in particular.)
This is more of a "contract" vs "copyright law at the time" issue.
And the fact that copyright can change retroactively after a work was created, regardless of the contract. Which is a huge stupid point of copyright law. And how there is no clear ownership tracing available to all.
But that's details compared to the larger problem at hand.
Copyright needs to be changed, both in duration and scope.
A duration based on the life of the author is bad enough as it is unpredictable. (An author could die the day after authorship, or live another 50 years...) Adding basically a full additional life-time is just crazy, and doesn't incentivize the author to create new works after his death. (Until we manage to make necromancy work in real life at least.)
As for the scope, there is a proper duality between "idea" and "expression" that is sadly too unclear to be reliable in copyright disputes. The law should be clearer about the fact that only a very particular "expression" is protected. You should be able to claim copyright on a particular story of Batman, not the idea of Batman's adventures entirely. (Sadly, it has been ruled the other way in court and you can copyright an entire character.)
How can you defend your work on Batman against people claiming to write Batman stories? Authorship. You're the original author and you can prove it, so you're free to tell people that someone else's works are not canon. That's all the power you should have.
(In this case, obviously, claiming that the original author acknowledges your work to build credibility is as much of a fraud as claiming to be the author of someone else's work.)
If the public prefers to stick to the canon material, all the best to you. If they consider that other authors did better work from your original idea, all the best to them. That's how you encourage competition and reward quality, how you incentivize good creation rather than the industrial production of trash.
Also, canon recognition could be monetized, if it comes to it. This way, anyone can create anything (by himself or by being asked to), then the original author (or his "estate") can make a (free or paid) announcement that this is canon. "Work for hire" becomes essentially obsolete. The clauses of the "canon" contract would rule, be it in a one-time payment or share of sales or anything else. No need to alter the whole copyright law to share money in creative ways.
Also, public domain needs to be actively defended for two reasons.
The first is that there are a lot of abuse of copyright on public domains that go unpunished because nobody is allowed to claim standing in such cases. The obvious fix here is to make clear that anybody can claim standing for public domain works.
The second is to fight the idea that everything has to be owned somehow, be it material items or abstract creations. As was the case of the monkey selfie. There was this assumption that it was owned, and that the only problem was to determine the owner. Which is simply missing the mark.
Re: Re: Re: Re: "99% of the time it's justifiable"
When you say hands up and they shove their hand in the pockets they’re a legitimate threat.
I'll give you this one, with one correction. "... they're a potential threat."
They might not be armed, they might not hear you to begin with (yes, that's a real case where police shot someone who had earphones and couldn't hear them: are you going to blame him for listening to music?).
But I agree that they might have a weapon and getting ready to shoot.
When you tell a suspect to stop and they keep running they’re a threat.
This one, certainly not. They might become a threat later on, or in some cases they might be a threat to people crossing his path, but if he's fleeing he's definitely not a threat to you. You can't pretend "you fear for your own life" when shooting down someone running away from you. Unless he's also shooting back at you, but I've yet to see such a case (outside of movies that is).
You see, the problem is that there are way too many cases where the use of force went above and beyond not only what was necessary, but also what was reasonable and justifiable.
You want to know what study proves that 50% of shootings where unjustified?
That was likely unfounded and probably just a figure of speech instead of actual statistics.
What about your claim that 99% are justified? I'm going to be way more suspicious about this number than the 50% above. There have been enough proof that cops can shoot someone with all the bad faith in the world and get away with it. (Just a little less now than a couple of years ago, but still.) And we also have definite proof in many cases that they will lie through their teeth (with full support from their hierarchy in most instances) about anything to make a shooting "justified", so their reports are difficult to believe.
"Disobeying a lawful order", though their orders are not always lawful.
"Running away", does present an immediate danger to the cop.
"Being stupid", which is not illegal. (Fortunately for some politicians since they give proof of this "crime" on TV.)
And in some cases (I won't estimate the percentage), we know that cops lie about the circumstances of the shooting. The most common lie being the "resisting arrest", when we can see cops one-sidedly beating someone to a coma or even to death while repeating "stop resisting" to cover their bases.
Re: Re: Re: 'Honestly the dog is usually much more well trained.
Actually, that's a pretty bad argument against the drug war.
Let's shift it a little: even by arresting a ton of murderers, we never managed to stop murders. So should we stop arresting them?
Better arguments can be about the foundation of the relevant laws. (Which were mostly made to target black people through the drug that were mostly used by them, or at least so was the perception of it at the time).
Or the unequal enforcement of said laws. (black people being arrested way more and convicted more successfully than white people even when statistics show that they are, in proportion, equally guilty.)
Or the excessive means used to enforce them, both legal and illegal ones. (abuse of force, fabrication of evidence, reversing the burden of proof, entrapment...)
Just stating that catching dealers doesn't help isn't a good point in my opinion.
I don't know if forensics expert like this one are subjected to the Brady decision. After all, they aren't the ones bringing evidence to court. That's the prosecutor's job.
Falsifying evidence is definitely an out though, regardless of Brady. You can't make a report saying "no", then scratch that based on nothing but a "pretty please" from the prosecutor and write a new one saying "yes". That's malpractice, and it could (and should) be a foundation for re-examining every single case he worked on. Every case the prosecutor ever worked on too.
Qualified immunity is not meant to cover deliberate violation of the laws and procedures, it was intended to shield law enforcement from mistakes in good faith, made while following procedure. (i.e. you got the wrong guy because available evidence actually pointed to him, not because you're convinced he is so you made up the evidence.) Extending it to a full immunity for any deliberate misconduct would mean law enforcement is totally above the law. Which is sadly the current state of affairs in way too many cases.
That's not a contradiction for some people. They read the First Amendment as "free speech I don't disagree with", "freedom of my religion" and "right to assemble with people who look like me".
This strongly reminds of some copyright advocate a long time ago. He said that "copyright is not a tool for censorship". (Paraphrased)
That was a lie then, and this case just adds to the pile of evidence.
It doesn't matter what the original purpose was (hint: yes, censorship), the current implementation has tons of incentive to use it for censorship. If not directly against someone's speech, it can definitely freeze speech broadcasting by targeting the tools available to the public at large. (In particular thanks to automatic takedowns and presumption of guilt.)
People have rights.
Objects don't.
So we sue the cash, not the people. Cash is guilty until proven innocent. If you want your money back, sue us. At a heavy cost. And be ready to prove that you never committed crime. Good luck with that.
Seriously, one would think there is a high-level legal document that prevents, for example, unjustified seizure of property by the government. But apparently one would be wrong.
Suing someone one a vague software patent. (With a few overly specific claims just to avoid existing patents.)
Suing the user of a product/service instead of the provider.
Suing over a patented "product" that they don't even commercialize themselves. Or failed to commercialize because "I can't compete with free". (Not sure if they really tried or if they claim it just for 4.)
FBI trying to find the source of a specific leak is like someone trying to find a specific drop of water in the ocean.
It's amusing how they did find tons of leakers, but just didn't care because most of them were leaking "positive" leaks, and they don't want to discourage that. :D
First, we don't need a high-level of detail, even a generic category of rule violation is fine. Something like "sexual content", "incitement to violence", etc.
Preferably quoting or linking to the exact content at fault.
Second, sports have precise rules. Communities have precise laws. Why wouldn't social platforms be able to do the same? Bad people will try to get around them. Of course they will. But that shouldn't and - in other cases - doesn't stop the rules from being as precise as possible.
If you give up on this, you might as well not pretend to have rules at all. Secret rules and secret reasons amount to the same as pure arbitrary ones.
I don't like this kind of resolution.
You don't know why it happened in the first place. ("A mistake" doesn't explain anything.)
You don't know how it was solved in the end. (You don't have any more reason for the account being restored than you got for the account getting suspended.)
I'm a software developer and there is one thing I hate above even obnoxious customers: a bug that appears in one of my products, then disappears by itself before we can find its source.
And the reason I hate both of these things is the same: they can and probably will happen again, and we would still not know why.
Then again, with bugs, I would at least have another chance at investigating the issue. With opaque moderation choices, you still get no more chance to learn anything on the second, third or subsequent occurrences. The moderators will keep you in the dark every single time. Unless, maybe, enough people get impacted and quit in disgust.
My personal policy is: if someone doesn't want your money, just use someone else's products.
If a game/movie/music studio doesn't let me "consume" their entertainment for some reason (geographic or service restrictions, basically), I will not go through hoops and loops to do so. I won't bother pirating, I'll just play/watch/listen to something else. There is a ton of entertainment out there, after all, so I don't need any one production in particular.
Doesn't matter. Your phone, your messages, to yourself.
Illegal seizure means they can't use it. Because it's all "you".
(At least, it seems this concept still holds, despite the increasingly narrowing scope of "illegal seizure".)
Now, change any of these to "someone else" and it seems they can use it. Against either yourself or the other person, depending on who owns the phone, I suppose.
The problem here is not because "it's a message", it's because "it's someone else's message".
That's a follow up question mentioned by the article. Guess we'll have to see what happens next in this case.
But this would be a terrible interpretation of the law. That would mean cops can break anyone's rights, for example by illegally seizing phones at random, collect information on people other than the owner, then do an "oopsie" and give the phones back to their owners, while keeping the collected data.
That's not too far from they do in other cases (e.g. Stingray, collecting data from service providers), but a dangerous behavior to legitimize for sure.
Losing a hand in an unjustified arrest. That's pretty harsh, doesn't happen often and severely penalizes the victim... for not being immediately and completely subservient to a cop.
If only there was a law against... I don't know... cruel and unusual punishments. We could even write that in the Constitution. As an amendment. Right between the 7th and the 9th.
Our rights are being assaulted in relation to copyrights.
The copyright system is badly in need of a reform.
We just don't agree on the direction of the ongoing assault and needed reforms.
Also, she seems to think that their little schemes to get money for life + 70 years are more important than the innumerable assaults on several of our rights using copyright as a foundation. (Free speech, right to repair our own property, right to actually own property... and many more.)
The constitution defines copyright as a (optional) mean to incentivize the progress of science and culture. Giving money to someone (and his heirs) for longer than your own life is not an incentive. It's bad enough that it brings everything to money, even when an "infringement" isn't for commercial use. Worse yet when it can actually be used to prevent the spread of your work. Worst yet when it can be used to prevent the spread of completely unrelated work on the flimsy pretext of some vague "similarity", or misidentification by a bot.
All this while keeping in mind that, in many cases, the author is not even the one benefiting from the system.
So, she plays victim, like many republicans, bigots, racists, and other serial rights assaulters... or regular assaulters... in order to push politicians in the direction of more authoritarianism when she has no reasonable foundation for her demands. She has no fact to back her up, so she just whines publicly as loudly as she can. The bad news is... this shamelessness works often enough.
On the post: Massachusetts College Decides Criticizing The Chinese Government Is Hate Speech, Suspends Conservative Student Group
Re: Re:
Amusingly enough, there was an epidemic response team in the US that could have handled this better.
Problem is that was setup by the Obama administration and Trump was so busy erasing anything with the name "Obama" on it that he was left with nothing when the crisis hit the US. Plus he got himself too worked up trying to deny it even hit the US that he did nothing. His first reflex of banning travels from China would have been a good first step if 1. it was a complete blocus (instead, he only banned chinese people from traveling, which left plenty of other carriers), and 2. he did something else to restrain the spread inside the US.
Actually, he did less than nothing. Doing nothing would at least have left professionals able to deal with it. Instead, he politicized the issue so much that masks became a threat, and vaccines suddenly became the subject of multiple conspiracy theories each crazier than the previous one (from the "magnet" to the "tentacle monster"). Even worse, the less crazy republicans pretend that "it's a choice", but then ostracize vaccinated people or leave it to more local entities to ban them.
Not to mention the stocks of medical supplies that he sold off as soon as he got in office in the name of the almighty short-term dollar. (Which he then complained about, pretending that "Obama left the shelves empty.")
Wherever it originated, the US had such a bad response to it that it couldn't have been a factor in the plans of your hypothetical evil dictator. Unless Trump was your evil genius's plant to undermine the pandemic response. :D
If that's the case, bravo to the evil genius here.
If not, it would have been an evil retard who just got an incredible stroke of luck.
Finally, the virus is dangerous, but mostly in its contagion rates while it's actual death rate is not high enough to qualify as a "weapon". At best, as an evil scheme, I could see it as a corporate plan to sell vaccines and/or cures. In which case, your "evil genius" got kinda foiled by Trump's idiotic anti-vaccine rants getting in the way of their sales. Which would be funny enough given how easy it is to bribe Trump, all republicans and a good 80% of democrats. This really takes the "genius" out of "evil genius". :D
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
(Just a side note: please make your links consistent, ideally not using the enforced "threaded=false" links. They are quite bad when quoting reply-type comments in particular.)
On the post: Marvel Hit Once Again By Estate For Some Spider-Man, Doctor Strange Copyright Terminations
This is more of a "contract" vs "copyright law at the time" issue.
And the fact that copyright can change retroactively after a work was created, regardless of the contract. Which is a huge stupid point of copyright law. And how there is no clear ownership tracing available to all.
But that's details compared to the larger problem at hand.
Copyright needs to be changed, both in duration and scope.
A duration based on the life of the author is bad enough as it is unpredictable. (An author could die the day after authorship, or live another 50 years...) Adding basically a full additional life-time is just crazy, and doesn't incentivize the author to create new works after his death. (Until we manage to make necromancy work in real life at least.)
As for the scope, there is a proper duality between "idea" and "expression" that is sadly too unclear to be reliable in copyright disputes. The law should be clearer about the fact that only a very particular "expression" is protected. You should be able to claim copyright on a particular story of Batman, not the idea of Batman's adventures entirely. (Sadly, it has been ruled the other way in court and you can copyright an entire character.)
How can you defend your work on Batman against people claiming to write Batman stories? Authorship. You're the original author and you can prove it, so you're free to tell people that someone else's works are not canon. That's all the power you should have.
(In this case, obviously, claiming that the original author acknowledges your work to build credibility is as much of a fraud as claiming to be the author of someone else's work.)
If the public prefers to stick to the canon material, all the best to you. If they consider that other authors did better work from your original idea, all the best to them. That's how you encourage competition and reward quality, how you incentivize good creation rather than the industrial production of trash.
Also, canon recognition could be monetized, if it comes to it. This way, anyone can create anything (by himself or by being asked to), then the original author (or his "estate") can make a (free or paid) announcement that this is canon. "Work for hire" becomes essentially obsolete. The clauses of the "canon" contract would rule, be it in a one-time payment or share of sales or anything else. No need to alter the whole copyright law to share money in creative ways.
Also, public domain needs to be actively defended for two reasons.
(Not sorry for the rant here. :D)
On the post: Body Cam Video Shows Cop Killing A Harmless Dog Within 15 Seconds Of Arriving At The Scene
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "99% of the time it's justifiable"
Sorry: "Running away", does not present an immediate danger to the cop.
Hopefully, people read that right.
On the post: Body Cam Video Shows Cop Killing A Harmless Dog Within 15 Seconds Of Arriving At The Scene
Re: Re: Re: Re: "99% of the time it's justifiable"
I'll give you this one, with one correction. "... they're a potential threat."
They might not be armed, they might not hear you to begin with (yes, that's a real case where police shot someone who had earphones and couldn't hear them: are you going to blame him for listening to music?).
But I agree that they might have a weapon and getting ready to shoot.
This one, certainly not. They might become a threat later on, or in some cases they might be a threat to people crossing his path, but if he's fleeing he's definitely not a threat to you. You can't pretend "you fear for your own life" when shooting down someone running away from you. Unless he's also shooting back at you, but I've yet to see such a case (outside of movies that is).
You see, the problem is that there are way too many cases where the use of force went above and beyond not only what was necessary, but also what was reasonable and justifiable.
You want to know what study proves that 50% of shootings where unjustified?
That was likely unfounded and probably just a figure of speech instead of actual statistics.
What about your claim that 99% are justified? I'm going to be way more suspicious about this number than the 50% above. There have been enough proof that cops can shoot someone with all the bad faith in the world and get away with it. (Just a little less now than a couple of years ago, but still.) And we also have definite proof in many cases that they will lie through their teeth (with full support from their hierarchy in most instances) about anything to make a shooting "justified", so their reports are difficult to believe.
And in some cases (I won't estimate the percentage), we know that cops lie about the circumstances of the shooting. The most common lie being the "resisting arrest", when we can see cops one-sidedly beating someone to a coma or even to death while repeating "stop resisting" to cover their bases.
On the post: Forfeiture Case Shows Cops Don't Even Need Drug Dogs To Alert To Engage In A Warrantless Search
Re: Re: Re: 'Honestly the dog is usually much more well trained.
Actually, that's a pretty bad argument against the drug war.
Let's shift it a little: even by arresting a ton of murderers, we never managed to stop murders. So should we stop arresting them?
Better arguments can be about the foundation of the relevant laws. (Which were mostly made to target black people through the drug that were mostly used by them, or at least so was the perception of it at the time).
Or the unequal enforcement of said laws. (black people being arrested way more and convicted more successfully than white people even when statistics show that they are, in proportion, equally guilty.)
Or the excessive means used to enforce them, both legal and illegal ones. (abuse of force, fabrication of evidence, reversing the burden of proof, entrapment...)
Just stating that catching dealers doesn't help isn't a good point in my opinion.
On the post: Forfeiture Case Shows Cops Don't Even Need Drug Dogs To Alert To Engage In A Warrantless Search
Can't help but love when they so much want a good acronym that their name actually suggests the opposite of they're supposed to do.
So, this team enforces smuggling?
On the post: Appeals Court Says Police Ballistics Expert Can Be Sued Helping Wrongfully Imprison Two Men For More Than 17 Years
I don't know if forensics expert like this one are subjected to the Brady decision. After all, they aren't the ones bringing evidence to court. That's the prosecutor's job.
Falsifying evidence is definitely an out though, regardless of Brady. You can't make a report saying "no", then scratch that based on nothing but a "pretty please" from the prosecutor and write a new one saying "yes". That's malpractice, and it could (and should) be a foundation for re-examining every single case he worked on. Every case the prosecutor ever worked on too.
Qualified immunity is not meant to cover deliberate violation of the laws and procedures, it was intended to shield law enforcement from mistakes in good faith, made while following procedure. (i.e. you got the wrong guy because available evidence actually pointed to him, not because you're convinced he is so you made up the evidence.) Extending it to a full immunity for any deliberate misconduct would mean law enforcement is totally above the law. Which is sadly the current state of affairs in way too many cases.
On the post: Satire Site Gets Ridiculous Threat Letter From Baseball Team; cc's Barbra Streisand In Its Response
That's not a contradiction for some people. They read the First Amendment as "free speech I don't disagree with", "freedom of my religion" and "right to assemble with people who look like me".
On the post: Officer Claims Sheriff's Office Told Him To Play Copyrighted Music To Shut Down Citizens' Recordings
This strongly reminds of some copyright advocate a long time ago. He said that "copyright is not a tool for censorship". (Paraphrased)
That was a lie then, and this case just adds to the pile of evidence.
It doesn't matter what the original purpose was (hint: yes, censorship), the current implementation has tons of incentive to use it for censorship. If not directly against someone's speech, it can definitely freeze speech broadcasting by targeting the tools available to the public at large. (In particular thanks to automatic takedowns and presumption of guilt.)
On the post: Judge Orders FBI To Return $57,000 Seized From A US Private Vaults' Customer Since It Apparently Can't Justify Keeping It
The scam of asset forfeiture
People have rights.
Objects don't.
So we sue the cash, not the people. Cash is guilty until proven innocent. If you want your money back, sue us. At a heavy cost. And be ready to prove that you never committed crime. Good luck with that.
Seriously, one would think there is a high-level legal document that prevents, for example, unjustified seizure of property by the government. But apparently one would be wrong.
On the post: Stupid Patent Of The Month: This Captcha Patent Is An All-American Nightmare
Let's play patent-troll bingo.
On the post: Oversight Unable To Discover Which FBI Agents Leaked Clinton Investigation Info Because Goddamn Everyone Was Leaking Stuff
FBI trying to find the source of a specific leak is like someone trying to find a specific drop of water in the ocean.
It's amusing how they did find tons of leakers, but just didn't care because most of them were leaking "positive" leaks, and they don't want to discourage that. :D
On the post: Content Moderation Case Study: Instagram Takes Down Instagram Account Of Book About Instagram (2020)
Re: Re: Re: Wrym
That might be, but it's a poor excuse.
First, we don't need a high-level of detail, even a generic category of rule violation is fine. Something like "sexual content", "incitement to violence", etc.
Preferably quoting or linking to the exact content at fault.
Second, sports have precise rules. Communities have precise laws. Why wouldn't social platforms be able to do the same? Bad people will try to get around them. Of course they will. But that shouldn't and - in other cases - doesn't stop the rules from being as precise as possible.
If you give up on this, you might as well not pretend to have rules at all. Secret rules and secret reasons amount to the same as pure arbitrary ones.
On the post: Content Moderation Case Study: Instagram Takes Down Instagram Account Of Book About Instagram (2020)
I don't like this kind of resolution.
You don't know why it happened in the first place. ("A mistake" doesn't explain anything.)
You don't know how it was solved in the end. (You don't have any more reason for the account being restored than you got for the account getting suspended.)
I'm a software developer and there is one thing I hate above even obnoxious customers: a bug that appears in one of my products, then disappears by itself before we can find its source.
And the reason I hate both of these things is the same: they can and probably will happen again, and we would still not know why.
Then again, with bugs, I would at least have another chance at investigating the issue. With opaque moderation choices, you still get no more chance to learn anything on the second, third or subsequent occurrences. The moderators will keep you in the dark every single time. Unless, maybe, enough people get impacted and quit in disgust.
On the post: Nintendo Hates You And The Company Most Certainly Does Not Want You To Co-Stream 'Nintendo Direct'
Re: Re: unNintendoed consequences
And I always disagreed.
My personal policy is: if someone doesn't want your money, just use someone else's products.
If a game/movie/music studio doesn't let me "consume" their entertainment for some reason (geographic or service restrictions, basically), I will not go through hoops and loops to do so. I won't bother pirating, I'll just play/watch/listen to something else. There is a ton of entertainment out there, after all, so I don't need any one production in particular.
On the post: State Court Confirms The Obvious: There's No Expectation Of Privacy In Text Messages Sent To Other People
Re: Assumptions
Doesn't matter. Your phone, your messages, to yourself.
Illegal seizure means they can't use it. Because it's all "you".
(At least, it seems this concept still holds, despite the increasingly narrowing scope of "illegal seizure".)
Now, change any of these to "someone else" and it seems they can use it. Against either yourself or the other person, depending on who owns the phone, I suppose.
The problem here is not because "it's a message", it's because "it's someone else's message".
On the post: State Court Confirms The Obvious: There's No Expectation Of Privacy In Text Messages Sent To Other People
That's a follow up question mentioned by the article. Guess we'll have to see what happens next in this case.
But this would be a terrible interpretation of the law. That would mean cops can break anyone's rights, for example by illegally seizing phones at random, collect information on people other than the owner, then do an "oopsie" and give the phones back to their owners, while keeping the collected data.
That's not too far from they do in other cases (e.g. Stingray, collecting data from service providers), but a dangerous behavior to legitimize for sure.
On the post: Alabama Deputy Sued After Cuffing An Arrestee So Tightly His Hand Had To Be Amputated
Losing a hand in an unjustified arrest. That's pretty harsh, doesn't happen often and severely penalizes the victim... for not being immediately and completely subservient to a cop.
If only there was a law against... I don't know... cruel and unusual punishments. We could even write that in the Constitution. As an amendment. Right between the 7th and the 9th.
On the post: Chief Publishing Lobbyist Maria Pallante Claims Copyright Is 'Under Assault' At Annual Meeting
Funny how she and us agree on two points.
We just don't agree on the direction of the ongoing assault and needed reforms.
Also, she seems to think that their little schemes to get money for life + 70 years are more important than the innumerable assaults on several of our rights using copyright as a foundation. (Free speech, right to repair our own property, right to actually own property... and many more.)
The constitution defines copyright as a (optional) mean to incentivize the progress of science and culture. Giving money to someone (and his heirs) for longer than your own life is not an incentive. It's bad enough that it brings everything to money, even when an "infringement" isn't for commercial use. Worse yet when it can actually be used to prevent the spread of your work. Worst yet when it can be used to prevent the spread of completely unrelated work on the flimsy pretext of some vague "similarity", or misidentification by a bot.
All this while keeping in mind that, in many cases, the author is not even the one benefiting from the system.
So, she plays victim, like many republicans, bigots, racists, and other serial rights assaulters... or regular assaulters... in order to push politicians in the direction of more authoritarianism when she has no reasonable foundation for her demands. She has no fact to back her up, so she just whines publicly as loudly as she can. The bad news is... this shamelessness works often enough.
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