The cops claiming there was no way into the phones was because they wanted a court to issue ruling granting them official access. That's all.
They already had and probably had used those commercial tools to gain access BUT that evidence is problematic to use without a court saying it's OK. And the best way to get a court to do that, and ensure that it always works, is to get them to force Apple to do what they want. It's not that they really need Apple to cooperate. They don't want cooperating. They want to force them so they don't have to do more than ask and it's done.
But the song and dance about not having a way in is just PR BS designed to make Joe Q. Public feel like the gubmint is not already fully capable of getting into the stupid private phones full of lunch photos and porn fanfics. If the public relaxes and takes their eyes off the fight, then it's that much easier to get it done. Meanwhile, Apple knows the game is already over and doesn't want the court pushing them around. So they fight it to make themselves look good, to keep up the illusion of privacy which makes the fans rabid and drooling, and a third thing I forgot. It's been a long day.
Whoa, the reasons WHY the artists are starving are relevant too. A lot of the artists are stupid and sign away the rights to their songs for cash upfronts from the record labels and publishers. Those big companies end up owning the song and often charge a fee TO the artist if the artist wants to perform their own song at concerts or the like. It gets worse when the labels send them a bill for all the other stuff they do, like manufacturing CDs. Bands sometimes ONLY make money off the T-shirt table at the back of the concert. Everything else goes to somebody else.
At the same time, because many artists don't actually own their songs, they get no revenue from radio plays or usage in advertising. You sometimes hear about bands upset that their songs got used in political venues. But often the band doesn't OWN the song any more and has no actual say in it.
And because they often don't own the song, they get no revenue from streaming plays. Which leads the artists to get on YT and Twitter and complain that nobody is paying them for Spotify or pirate downloads, and they have no money for food.
Yeah. It's not your song any more. The money collected goes to the record labels and publishers.
There ARE artists who own their own songs. They are a very small minority but a lucky few of them actually do make a ton of money by owning all the things the labels and publishers usually own. Jay-Z is one. Regardless of liking him or his music at all, he is a shrewd businessman who has made a fortune and done exactly what most artists never achieve.
The justice system in the US, at all levels, operates on a principle that you have done something illegal. You have been bad. You broke a law. And it's the job of justice to find out what you did, charge, punish and convict. Once they get as far as those steps, they don't and can't admit they were wrong.
This whole thing about "innocent until proven guilty" is basically BS. All they do is lower the bar of proof so low, you are guilty by default.
We just had a case where a football player was stopped for speeding. A white substance was found on the hood of his car. The driver said it was bird poop. The cops tested it anyway, using one of these "field test kits" which are notorious for coming up with false positives for things like the sugar off donuts, aspirin, food crumbs, vitamins, powdered artificial sweeteners, etc. The tests are worthless. And yet these cops, dead set on busting this kid, ran that "bird poop" and wow it came back as a controlled substance. Kid went to jail. His football career ended.
The police chemist came back with a lab test that revealed it was, in fact, bird poop. Just as the driver claimed. But the cops are not happy with this. Their job is to arrest people and fill the jails.
Thanks to the intense media coverage and police body cam footage of the bird poop on the car, looking like bird poop, and the cops being absolute idiots, the kid has gotten his football career back.
Home Depot markets a vacuum cleaner called Buckethead. It's literally a vacuum head that fits over a plastic 5-gallon bucket and turns said bucket into a utility vacuum. I'd call it a shop vac but that's also a trademark.
The point is, HD has sold this Buckethead product for years without challenge. IANAL but that would seem to dilute the trademark of the movie character.
The claims mentioned in the article are not DMCA claims.
They are internal YouTube claims following a process and procedure and penalties that YouTube decided and determined and executed entirely on their own. There's no law behind what they are doing. It's just how YouTube chooses to act.
And the uploaders consent to this when they post videos. They accept that there may be claims and that YT will reserve the right to act on them without regard to DMCA.
WVs problems are far beyond population density. The terrain is really harsh, with mountains everywhere. This means roads and powerless have a really tough time. Even cellular coverage is spotty because the terrain often blocks signals.
Another issue is employment: there are very few jobs in WV which means wages are low, if you can even find a job. A lot of smaller towns -which is most of the state- just manage to survive. They don't have the disposable income to pay for wildly expensive broadband even if they could get it.
My ex and her mom lived in a tiny WV town and had Frontier DSL. Well. They hadn't paid the bill in a year but it still worked, somehow. 2 megabits of wonderful service. Getting them to pay the bill was out of the question and not my problem anyway.
Frontier eventually locked them out by doing a DNS redirect or something. But I was able to work around that by telling their router to use Google DNS. Yeah. Frontier was that incompetent. Stupid easy to maintain service.
My ex eventually used the internet I fixed and the laptop I let her use to find a new guy to replace me. So I really should have let their rotten Frontier DSL stay broken. Shrug
Israel's version redefines the entire song, and remakes it into something far more beautiful than anything before. Not many songs have ever made me gasp the first time I heard them. His version did. And the the tears because it IS so perfect. The human race would do well to be remembered for songs like that one. RIP Israel.
There is an old joke about any sort of "act" in DC, such as this one called "Protecting Against Child Exploitation Act of 2017" almost always actually mean the opposite of, or cause consequences equivalent to the opposite of whatever the act is called.
And it's criminilizing something rather than controlling for it. Kids are going to use their phones and other things to sext. So NOW we're just going to lock up a LOT of them. Great. With so many convicted sex offenders and felons, we're going to cure the future unemployment numbers by making sure a whole ton of people can't get work of any kind anyway, so they won't count as unemployed and also will be denied benefits. Awesome.
Glad I don't have kids and I'll probably be dead before what's left of the USA burns down. Y'all can have the ashes. You win.
it's not just gamers but people in general who dutifully line up to see remake movie after remake movie and watch the same tired sitcom themes that have been on TV for years, and they do this and fork over lots of money especially in movie ticket sales for absolute crap.
And then they ask why Hollywood isn't making good movies.
Because you lined up and bought into the last Spiderman remake, so they KNOW you will fall for it again. Why make new when you can remake and pocket the same cash?
The public has to stand up and refuse to play along. But they won't. They think being used like this is fine.
Gamers do the same thing, paying again and again for games that are basically the same as the previous version. But damnit the will line up on release day to drop $60 on it so why would any game maker tell them to stop?
These field tests are also used in multiple other countries with exactly the same bogus results. So this is actually a GLOBAL problem where innocent people are being locked up for food crumbs and other things, and the resulting skewed arrest records make crime rates look worse than they actually are.
Which is good if you are a law enforcement agency who can point to increasing crime rates as you ask for more and more tax dollars. You don't want things to get better or else people might say they don't need so spend so much on policing.
An old joke in advertising is the ad exec who says "I KNOW half of my advertising dollars are wasted. But I don't know WHICH half!"
And so it goes.
The fact is, TV and radio have been sponsored by advertisers since the very beginning, and they always will be. The very reason we HAVE TV seasons at all is because those were the times of the year car makers had new models in stores, so they wanted hot, new TV shows to run at the same time and provide a place to run ads for the new cars.
TV is not nearly as tied to new cars but we still have TV seasons married to the car seasons and car ads are still the biggest advertisers on TV.
TV itself is married to this broken and obsolete model of having affiliates. Middlemen in cities and towns hired to distribute their shows and ads. These days, you COULD get your shows directly from the production companies. The idea of local stations isn't needed at all, in that case. Yet it persists.
The point lost in all of this is that the NSA does not care at all if American companies are damaged by this or American citizen's data is compromised.
The NSA's mission is to preserve and defend the nation. If companies or even citizens have to go down as part of the NSA's job, so be it.
Not one company or person is more important than their mission, probably not even the President.
The ONLY agency with an even higher mission than the NSA is the MJ-12 group, if they even exist at all. Those people put the nation second after whatever is their prime mission.
Before or after 1972 depends on exactly when the actual recording they used was originally recorded, and by whom.
If it was after 1972, OR if a cover band did the performance, then the license applies and it's game over for the band.
It also depends on WHO actually owns the performance. If the band, like most bands, signed away those rights, then that may have absolutely no say in anything because they don't own it any more.
Every time a band complains they aren't getting paid for performances or use on streaming services or digital music stores or Youtube, ask them who OWNS the song. That is who gets paid. So many bands don't understand any of this stuff. If they want to get paid, sell shirts at the back of the concerts like everyone else. OR don't sign away your rights. It's simple.
Yes it is NICE if controversial events ASK permission but they don't have to and it would establish a bad precedent if events suddenly had to begin asking every single artist or rights holder before using their songs. Crap like that is what ASCAP/BMI/SESAC licenses are supposed to effing prevent. The licensing agencies promised to streamline this and make it easy to cut a check to ONE party and know you are covered and and be done with the hassle.
If THAT is not the case and we are heading into a world where you really do have to chase down millions of individual rights holders, then ASCAP and BMI and SESAC and the other agencies call all go to hell. Thanks for NOTHING! Thanks for promising this would never happen and letting it happen anyway.
The Summer Olympics were held in my city 20 years ago this summer. I saw how the thing worked from the inside and the Olympics were already an irrelevant marketing machine long before then. Anything that could be sold was sold, often with big promises to sponsors that their marketing would be allowed and protected from competing companies -if only they forked over more money. MONEY is all the USOC cares about, not representing the country or even supporting the atheletes beyond whatever minimal work it takes to make sure they show up for the games. Hell they make the athletes pay for a lot of stuff too.
And ATHLETES are the other issue: most people probably think the games are all about amateurs but in fact professional atheletes are brought in for some sports and quietly downplayed. So the people you see are not necessarily starving and struggling amateurs. They might be completely pro with millions of dollars in income. It's a big fraud.
So once again I will go out of my way (it's not very hard) to not watch any of the games or pay even the slightest attention to it. Screw them. The IOC cares so little about the athletes, they're going to make the rowing crews perform in lakes of sewage where they will have to be taken to hospital and decontaminated if they fall in the water. WHAT THE HELL!? They're so bold, they are toying with lives this year.
8 years is a long time. In Internet years, that's about a million years. I would not be at all surprised if Google no longer even had the records of who controls that blog, as it is beyond any reasonable length of time to retain such data.
And if an IP was recorded, the provider behind that IP themselves probably no longer have records back that far.
And even if they did, courts have held that IP is not the same as proving it was a particular person.
So they're asking for information that probably does not exist and can't be used even if it did.
Well OF COURSE their lawyers are going to chase this. They're getting paid by the hour and all they have to do is file motions on this one and they might even win if somebody defaults.
Ironically, if the owner of the blog came forward and revealed themselves, I think they'd have a great grounds for a 1A defense anyway. Which means the case is hoping they DON'T come forward and that Google just cuts a check.
Audiosocket took on the responsibility to sue and defend the copyright because they were the ones who sold the songs that were misused. The artist, or copyright holder, entrusted them to maintain the copyright for songs licensed via that site. So Audiosocket has to bear the brunt of suing regardless if they keep the money or have to pass it on.
IANAL and I have not read the suit, but I suspect Audiosocket would get to keep the $25K for breech and most or all of any damages would go to the copyright holder. Which may also be Audiosocket. Looking at the song on the website, it does not actually show who owns it.
FWIW, the Cruz campaign claim that the copyright had not been filed is laughable. Copyright applies the moment the work is created, whether it is filed or not. Copyright is not like a patent.
Those "warranty void if broken or removed" stickers are illegal?
WTF?
I'm guessing they're not actually "illegal", but rather "unenforceable", otherwise there'd be a rash of class action lawsuits against companies that put them on their products.
Actually yes, they are illegal. The law -and there REALLY is one- says you can open your stuff. It is illegal to deny support or services because you broke the seal. They may give you a hard time but that's why they have lawyers sitting around and so should you. Their legal reps will darn well know they can't forbid this -but not before billing their client for a few hundred hours. Meanwhile your lawyer won't have to do much beyond writing a letter. Good stuff.
You have it all wrong
The cops claiming there was no way into the phones was because they wanted a court to issue ruling granting them official access. That's all.
They already had and probably had used those commercial tools to gain access BUT that evidence is problematic to use without a court saying it's OK. And the best way to get a court to do that, and ensure that it always works, is to get them to force Apple to do what they want. It's not that they really need Apple to cooperate. They don't want cooperating. They want to force them so they don't have to do more than ask and it's done.
But the song and dance about not having a way in is just PR BS designed to make Joe Q. Public feel like the gubmint is not already fully capable of getting into the stupid private phones full of lunch photos and porn fanfics. If the public relaxes and takes their eyes off the fight, then it's that much easier to get it done. Meanwhile, Apple knows the game is already over and doesn't want the court pushing them around. So they fight it to make themselves look good, to keep up the illusion of privacy which makes the fans rabid and drooling, and a third thing I forgot. It's been a long day.
Re:
Whoa, the reasons WHY the artists are starving are relevant too. A lot of the artists are stupid and sign away the rights to their songs for cash upfronts from the record labels and publishers. Those big companies end up owning the song and often charge a fee TO the artist if the artist wants to perform their own song at concerts or the like. It gets worse when the labels send them a bill for all the other stuff they do, like manufacturing CDs. Bands sometimes ONLY make money off the T-shirt table at the back of the concert. Everything else goes to somebody else.
At the same time, because many artists don't actually own their songs, they get no revenue from radio plays or usage in advertising. You sometimes hear about bands upset that their songs got used in political venues. But often the band doesn't OWN the song any more and has no actual say in it.
And because they often don't own the song, they get no revenue from streaming plays. Which leads the artists to get on YT and Twitter and complain that nobody is paying them for Spotify or pirate downloads, and they have no money for food.
Yeah. It's not your song any more. The money collected goes to the record labels and publishers.
There ARE artists who own their own songs. They are a very small minority but a lucky few of them actually do make a ton of money by owning all the things the labels and publishers usually own. Jay-Z is one. Regardless of liking him or his music at all, he is a shrewd businessman who has made a fortune and done exactly what most artists never achieve.
Re:
The justice system in the US, at all levels, operates on a principle that you have done something illegal. You have been bad. You broke a law. And it's the job of justice to find out what you did, charge, punish and convict. Once they get as far as those steps, they don't and can't admit they were wrong.
This whole thing about "innocent until proven guilty" is basically BS. All they do is lower the bar of proof so low, you are guilty by default.
We just had a case where a football player was stopped for speeding. A white substance was found on the hood of his car. The driver said it was bird poop. The cops tested it anyway, using one of these "field test kits" which are notorious for coming up with false positives for things like the sugar off donuts, aspirin, food crumbs, vitamins, powdered artificial sweeteners, etc. The tests are worthless. And yet these cops, dead set on busting this kid, ran that "bird poop" and wow it came back as a controlled substance. Kid went to jail. His football career ended.
The police chemist came back with a lab test that revealed it was, in fact, bird poop. Just as the driver claimed. But the cops are not happy with this. Their job is to arrest people and fill the jails.
Thanks to the intense media coverage and police body cam footage of the bird poop on the car, looking like bird poop, and the cops being absolute idiots, the kid has gotten his football career back.
That sucks. Really
Home Depot markets a vacuum cleaner called Buckethead. It's literally a vacuum head that fits over a plastic 5-gallon bucket and turns said bucket into a utility vacuum. I'd call it a shop vac but that's also a trademark.
The point is, HD has sold this Buckethead product for years without challenge. IANAL but that would seem to dilute the trademark of the movie character.
Re: Re: Re: This is SOLELY a Youtube problem, NOT copyright.
They are internal YouTube claims following a process and procedure and penalties that YouTube decided and determined and executed entirely on their own. There's no law behind what they are doing. It's just how YouTube chooses to act.
And the uploaders consent to this when they post videos. They accept that there may be claims and that YT will reserve the right to act on them without regard to DMCA.
Re:
Another issue is employment: there are very few jobs in WV which means wages are low, if you can even find a job. A lot of smaller towns -which is most of the state- just manage to survive. They don't have the disposable income to pay for wildly expensive broadband even if they could get it.
(untitled comment)
Frontier eventually locked them out by doing a DNS redirect or something. But I was able to work around that by telling their router to use Google DNS. Yeah. Frontier was that incompetent. Stupid easy to maintain service.
My ex eventually used the internet I fixed and the laptop I let her use to find a new guy to replace me. So I really should have let their rotten Frontier DSL stay broken. Shrug
Re: Re: Re:
The old joke about "acts" in DC
And it's criminilizing something rather than controlling for it. Kids are going to use their phones and other things to sext. So NOW we're just going to lock up a LOT of them. Great. With so many convicted sex offenders and felons, we're going to cure the future unemployment numbers by making sure a whole ton of people can't get work of any kind anyway, so they won't count as unemployed and also will be denied benefits. Awesome.
Glad I don't have kids and I'll probably be dead before what's left of the USA burns down. Y'all can have the ashes. You win.
Re: If gamers weren't so stupid, this would already be over
And then they ask why Hollywood isn't making good movies.
Because you lined up and bought into the last Spiderman remake, so they KNOW you will fall for it again. Why make new when you can remake and pocket the same cash?
The public has to stand up and refuse to play along. But they won't. They think being used like this is fine.
Gamers do the same thing, paying again and again for games that are basically the same as the previous version. But damnit the will line up on release day to drop $60 on it so why would any game maker tell them to stop?
Also used in other countries
Which is good if you are a law enforcement agency who can point to increasing crime rates as you ask for more and more tax dollars. You don't want things to get better or else people might say they don't need so spend so much on policing.
Old joke
And so it goes.
The fact is, TV and radio have been sponsored by advertisers since the very beginning, and they always will be. The very reason we HAVE TV seasons at all is because those were the times of the year car makers had new models in stores, so they wanted hot, new TV shows to run at the same time and provide a place to run ads for the new cars.
TV is not nearly as tied to new cars but we still have TV seasons married to the car seasons and car ads are still the biggest advertisers on TV.
TV itself is married to this broken and obsolete model of having affiliates. Middlemen in cities and towns hired to distribute their shows and ads. These days, you COULD get your shows directly from the production companies. The idea of local stations isn't needed at all, in that case. Yet it persists.
There will be casualties
The NSA's mission is to preserve and defend the nation. If companies or even citizens have to go down as part of the NSA's job, so be it.
Not one company or person is more important than their mission, probably not even the President.
The ONLY agency with an even higher mission than the NSA is the MJ-12 group, if they even exist at all. Those people put the nation second after whatever is their prime mission.
(untitled comment)
SHOCKING!
This NEVER happens!
Oh wait, that's in the Bizarro Universe. Failing to honor their promises ALWAYS happens in the normal universe.
(untitled comment)
So yes Sony has sued itself. This isn't even shocking know how Sony operates.
(untitled comment)
If it was after 1972, OR if a cover band did the performance, then the license applies and it's game over for the band.
It also depends on WHO actually owns the performance. If the band, like most bands, signed away those rights, then that may have absolutely no say in anything because they don't own it any more.
Every time a band complains they aren't getting paid for performances or use on streaming services or digital music stores or Youtube, ask them who OWNS the song. That is who gets paid. So many bands don't understand any of this stuff. If they want to get paid, sell shirts at the back of the concerts like everyone else. OR don't sign away your rights. It's simple.
Yes it is NICE if controversial events ASK permission but they don't have to and it would establish a bad precedent if events suddenly had to begin asking every single artist or rights holder before using their songs. Crap like that is what ASCAP/BMI/SESAC licenses are supposed to effing prevent. The licensing agencies promised to streamline this and make it easy to cut a check to ONE party and know you are covered and and be done with the hassle.
If THAT is not the case and we are heading into a world where you really do have to chase down millions of individual rights holders, then ASCAP and BMI and SESAC and the other agencies call all go to hell. Thanks for NOTHING! Thanks for promising this would never happen and letting it happen anyway.
(untitled comment)
And ATHLETES are the other issue: most people probably think the games are all about amateurs but in fact professional atheletes are brought in for some sports and quietly downplayed. So the people you see are not necessarily starving and struggling amateurs. They might be completely pro with millions of dollars in income. It's a big fraud.
So once again I will go out of my way (it's not very hard) to not watch any of the games or pay even the slightest attention to it. Screw them. The IOC cares so little about the athletes, they're going to make the rowing crews perform in lakes of sewage where they will have to be taken to hospital and decontaminated if they fall in the water. WHAT THE HELL!? They're so bold, they are toying with lives this year.
(untitled comment)
And if an IP was recorded, the provider behind that IP themselves probably no longer have records back that far.
And even if they did, courts have held that IP is not the same as proving it was a particular person.
So they're asking for information that probably does not exist and can't be used even if it did.
Well OF COURSE their lawyers are going to chase this. They're getting paid by the hour and all they have to do is file motions on this one and they might even win if somebody defaults.
Ironically, if the owner of the blog came forward and revealed themselves, I think they'd have a great grounds for a 1A defense anyway. Which means the case is hoping they DON'T come forward and that Google just cuts a check.
Re:
IANAL and I have not read the suit, but I suspect Audiosocket would get to keep the $25K for breech and most or all of any damages would go to the copyright holder. Which may also be Audiosocket. Looking at the song on the website, it does not actually show who owns it.
FWIW, the Cruz campaign claim that the copyright had not been filed is laughable. Copyright applies the moment the work is created, whether it is filed or not. Copyright is not like a patent.
Re: Wait a sec...
Actually yes, they are illegal. The law -and there REALLY is one- says you can open your stuff. It is illegal to deny support or services because you broke the seal. They may give you a hard time but that's why they have lawyers sitting around and so should you. Their legal reps will darn well know they can't forbid this -but not before billing their client for a few hundred hours. Meanwhile your lawyer won't have to do much beyond writing a letter. Good stuff.
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