Wyrm’s Techdirt Profile

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  • Feb 23rd, 2022 @ 1:12pm

    Re:

    nb: quotes used multiple times because they have very unorthodox definitions for these words. Or alternate words with equally absurd definitions.

    "Platforms" or "common carriers" is... well... anyone they want to sue who is not the actual speaker of the speech they didn't like. This is more a matter of twisting things to get a law they want to apply to the case at hand.
    "Neutral" means to let them speak whatever they want, as hateful or dishonest as they want. If you ban them, even for the same reasons they would want a political opponent to be banned for, that's viewpoint discrimination.
    And "protected" doesn't mean anything because nobody should be safe from their righteous fury anyway.

  • Feb 23rd, 2022 @ 12:59pm

    (untitled comment)

    Once again, some people make you wish you could set up a special court where they would be judged by their own standards rather than actual laws.
    If they think 230 is bad, or that "platforms" must be "neutral" to be "protected"... when they are the farthest thing from "neutral" themselves... they wouldn't last a day in such a court before begging to be judged by actual legal standards. 45th wouldn't even last an hour given how whiny he is on a daily basis.

  • Feb 17th, 2022 @ 6:29pm

    Re: Re:

    And that's why I wrote about the idea of conditioning public funds to availability.
    If you're a private entity running without public funds, it's entirely up to you.
    If you're a public entity or you get public grants, then this can be contracted to include making digital representation of the art they are safekeeping more available.
    I just don't think that adding this to copyright law or somehow interpreting current law this way is the solution.

  • Feb 17th, 2022 @ 2:10am

    Re: This is NOT about copyright

    Moral rights can't be used to argue on financial grounds. Which is apparently what the museum tried to do anyway.

    So either they argue "droit patrimonial", which they can't because it expired.
    Or they argue "droit moral", which they can't because it's all about money.

    They lose either way.

  • Feb 17th, 2022 @ 2:07am

    (untitled comment)

    The Musée Rodin disagrees, presumably because it is concerned that its monopoly on “original” posthumous casts might be devalued.

    Poor excuse there. Of course the originals would be devalued.

    But that's because of artificial scarcity derived from the monopoly that became unenforceable as the copyright (or the french equivalent "droit patrimonial") expired. The "droit moral" never expires, but doesn't give any right to prevent manufacture and distribution of copies of a work on financial grounds. (It only covers the prevention of uses that the author doesn't or wouldn't have agreed on for moral reasons. e.g. using a song as a fascist anthem.)

    So, the Musee Rodin is completely out of legal arguments if that's what they try to argue. I don't think they should be compelled to produce the scans, but this argument carries no weight at all.

  • Feb 17th, 2022 @ 1:55am

    (untitled comment)

    Wenman believes that museums, art galleries and private collectors around the world should make 3D scans of important public domain works and release them freely

    I kind of disagree. This would be the right thing to do and there is no legal way to forbid these digital models from being created and broadcasted by anyone willing to do so, but that doesn't mean someone should be obligated to do it.

    Now, entities that receive public funds (public organisations or private individuals with public grants) could - and maybe should - get their funds (in part or in whole) conditioned to making public domain art available in digital format. But I would see that as a contractual obligation rather than a legal one.

    If that is Wenman's idea, I can agree with him. If he wants an outright law to enforce it, I think that's close to - if not actual - compelled speech, which I understand most of us here are against.

  • Feb 17th, 2022 @ 1:43am

    Overton window

    These are far from "hard-left" policies.

    By their standards, anything left of full-blown fascism is "hard-left".
    No use discussing left and right with them given that their overton window is centered on "January 6th was a peaceful tour of the Capitol".

  • Feb 15th, 2022 @ 2:12pm

    Re: Re: Re: Libel?

    (Note: I do agree with the point about "federal laws" though. That was a little off subject.)

  • Feb 15th, 2022 @ 2:10pm

    Re: Re: Libel?

    You're needlessly complicating the question that is being asked: should bots that can't understand context and are even bad at identifying content have the power to decide if something is infringing?

    Since you don't seem to want to answer it, you're deflecting by adding complexity that don't apply to either the case in the article nor the hypothetical from Rich.

    Because although they seem random to the end user, they're not.

    They're basically random in results even if the algorithm has its logic. If you can identify a cat purring as infringing (other examples include white noise, bird songs and more), your algorithm is wrong and should not be used as a basis for accusations that have pretty dire consequences. Also, siding with the accuser is the very reason this whole process is unfair. In any legal process, doubt benefits the defender, for good reasons. And these accusers in particular have long demonstrated that they are not trustworthy, which makes it doubly unfair.

    Then, it should be silly if that gets taken down, but the first thing to look at is why.

    Let's put that back in the context of this article: no background music. Just the content as described. "Why" in this case is obvious: false positive in looking for infringement. Let's stop pretending that we should contextualize more than needed.

    All they can do is withhold the part of ad income (...) and having videos taken down won't really affect your offline business

    For some people, this is their business. (They might have another job, or another side to the same job, but maybe this is also necessary for them to reach a living wage... Who are you to tell that their ad income is not important?) And just three wrong notifications like this and the whole business goes under. I agree that making your business dependent on shaky foundations like a platform that can write you off arbitrarily in a few minutes is not a great business model, but it is theirs. Adding a layer of unfair non-judicial process on top of already unfair laws shouldn't be tolerated.

    They can't affect the same video hosted elsewhere

    Great. Problem is the dominant position of Google on this market. No other platform will give the same degree of exposure. For those who want to make a business out of their videos without a heavy investment in time (which they might not have) and possibly money (which they might also not have), YT is the most obvious option. It's not perfect by any standard, but it's the best one for the general public at the moment.

  • Feb 11th, 2022 @ 11:19am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Maus

    If the picture of unclothed mice is grounds for ban or limited censorship, then Disney should be banned for their pictures of pant-less ducks.

  • Feb 7th, 2022 @ 11:13pm

    (untitled comment)

    Wouldn't Powell's logic also require that anyone who has ever worked in the telecom industry would need to recuse themselves from any telecom decisions made by the FCC?

    No, because bias only exists against me. Anything in my favor is objective truth.

    • every human ever.
  • Feb 5th, 2022 @ 2:02am

    Re: Re: light sensitive?

    Thanks. This anon was wrong on so many I wouldn't have known where to start.

    One detail though:

    As for her plea to have the instructor downrated by other students, ...

    The student didn't ask that. She implied it, I agree, but what she did was: tell her story then ask for "honest reviews". No call for negative reviews, despite how you probably think so by the story attached to the call. No call for flaming, no call for trolling... no call for disturbance. Just a call for review.

    If the teacher is so bad that the school knows that such a call would indeed lead to a flood of bad reviews that can break the teacher's career... then maybe it's time to reconsider the teacher's employment. One is not entitled to a job as a teacher, particularly when he has no consideration and respect for his students.
    Good teachers are generally liked and supported by their students. If he's a good teacher that is unfairly portrayed by this one students, he probably has no need to fear honest reviews.
    And given the system in place, it seems like the "goth girl" cannot ask random unrelated people to leave bad reviews. They have to be registered as actual and current students of this teacher.

  • Feb 3rd, 2022 @ 6:08pm

    (untitled comment)

    But it wasn't just limited to investigators trying to convince suspects to admit their guilt. One of these fake documents made its way into court, used as evidence (!!) during a bail hearing.

    Using fake evidence in interrogations is dubious enough. Probably legal, but ethically wrong on many levels.
    However, when they start using it in actual court proceedings, they cross the barrier from "legal" into outright "criminal". Was someone arrested for this? Or fired, at the very least?

  • Feb 3rd, 2022 @ 6:06pm

    (untitled comment)

    The Virginia Beach Police Department said in a statement that the technique, “though legal, was not in the spirit of what the community expects.”

    My favorite answer to this sort of stupid statement:
    In movies, when someone is asked "Why did you do it?" and he answers "Because I could", that's the villain. Why do you think that is?

  • Jan 31st, 2022 @ 10:46am

    (untitled comment)

    The encryption comparison to leaving a key under the doormat is quite funny.
    But for a more accurate comparison, I'd refer to TSA locks... that all TSA agents can open with a master key... that a TSA agent can post a picture of online...
    Not that it would ever happen, right?

  • Jan 30th, 2022 @ 1:12am

    When I use a word...

    They are clearly trying their best to write the most stupid law out there.
    Now, here comes a law that applies to all Common Carriers... except for all actual Common Carriers... and with the addition of some non Common Carriers.
    It's clear that politicians don't like words, so they redefine them as they like.
    I supposed the Humpty-Dumpty quote is due...

    “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
    ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
    ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

    And these politicians definitely think of themselves as the masters, not the public servants they are supposed to be.

  • Jan 28th, 2022 @ 9:24am

    (untitled comment)

    > This sucks, just like it always does, because unlike many other major international companies, Nintendo seems utterly unwilling—or even unable—to differentiate between commercial projects that infringe on their copyrights and fan-made playthings that are free and made for fun.

    That, of course, is nonsense. Nintendo absolutely can make this differentiation. It chooses not to.

    That's exactly what the source said: "unwilling" is their first choice or words.

  • Jan 26th, 2022 @ 1:26pm

    (untitled comment)

    Great, someone copyrighted the number 1.
    (Along with 173, 174, 186, 266, 285, 302, 336, 451, 500, and 833 apparently.)
    Next, I imagine math students during tests...
    "What is cos(0)?"
    "I can't answer this question for fear of violating someone's copyright."

    Seriously, bots can be useful, but - at least until they are somewhat reliable and able to understand context - they should never be used as anything more than an alerting tool. Currently, they are definitely not good enough for automated take-downs.
    Obviously, if they can mess up such obvious cases, you can only imagine that they will also strike less obvious but still perfectly legal files.

  • Jan 26th, 2022 @ 1:18pm

    (untitled comment)

    This has been said repeatedly: there is no satisfying the copyright maximalists, so don't even try. It only encourages them. Every inch you give them is another mile they will be asking next.

  • Jan 24th, 2022 @ 6:03pm

    Re: Re: third parties you've let in.

    That's actually consistent in a way.
    "They" (copyright holders... and a few others) want control and they want "customers" (because that's all we are to them) to have no control.
    So, everything the customer does must be validated by them.
    And they must be given free rein on everything.

    Obviously it's a completely one-sided view of the internet, which is more reminiscent of radio and TV than the multi-way communication channel that is the global network.

    These people still don't live in the 21st century. I'm not sure some of them have even caught up to the 20th. (Some newspaper publications for example still try to enforce business models from the paper-based era in the digital market.)

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