So the alarm industry is asking both the FCC and AT&T for a little more time, as well as some help migrating existing home security gear temporarily on to T-Mobile's 3G network so things don't fall apart when AT&T shuts down its 3G network (currently scheduled for February 22).
date of post: February 23
Man, Techdirt is such a great resource for staying on the cutting edge of tech policy news.
If Democrats wanted to raise suspicions among their own base that they're only interested in presenting the appearance of opposition to Republican policies, but are really working hand-in-hand with them to ensure the hegemony of the 1%, it'd be hard to come up with a course of action that'd be more effective...
perhaps we should be looking at moving copyright in the other direction, so that these "mistakes" can't happen any more. Perhaps copyright law shouldn't allow the shutting down of a website based on totally bogus accusations from an automated spammer hired by the largest publishers in the world, where no one cares about what they might actually be taking down?
Silly rabbit, that would help the little people and make things marginally less convenient for big companies, so it'll never happen in the United States.
There are two ways to go about using the DMCA as a content provider in order to keep copyright infringement at bay: the right and good way, or the bad and lazy way. The right and good way is to use DMCA takedown requests sparingly, to be very targeted in their use, and to do some minor legwork to ensure that the target is in fact an infringing actor.
So long as there are no penalties for using takedown requests willy-nilly, untargeted, and against innocent parties, the "right and good way" is in reality the wrong and dumb way that wastes effort for no good reason. Why go to the effort of actually finding out who the infringers are and sending specific takedown requests against specific infringers when you can just rev up an algorithm to find anything that might kinda sorta look like infringement if you look at a particular pixel or word and flood the zone with takedown requests?
Unfortunately, there are far too many areas where people have "rights" they can't afford to exercise. That tech companies have 230 dating from a time they were a lot smaller than now is a minor miracle.
Anyone want to bet that when Trump and his cultists spew lies that won't be considered "misleading other users" but when mainstream media sources post on there and left-wing trolls try to spread some actual truth to counteract the lies it will be?
What's especially funny is that the guy who spewed out that COVID nonsense prefaced his post with "here's your most insightful comment for next week". Well, it did come from the ensuing thread...
The legal system is broken. When the side with money prevails over the side that's right, the idea of rule of law becomes a joke.
The economic and regulatory structure of linear television is broken. Broadcast networks feel they need retransmission revenue to compete with the subscription fees cable networks charge for entertainment and sports programming, which has led them to neglect their own nominal medium. Linear television still has an important role to play in a streaming world, and that role is more important in the context of over-the-air broadcasting where there's a limited amount of spectrum to go around, but broadcasters have felt actively disincentivized from making that future possible, let alone preparing for it, allowing themselves to be portrayed as the villains in the cable bundle's problems. So long as broadcasting feels more like an annoying aggravation the networks have to put up with for historical reasons and that they can ditch once it becomes unacceptably crippling to their bottom line (as they threatened in the Aereo case), and less like something with value in its own right, this story will repeat itself.
There's a pathological refusal in elite circles to even consider the notion that a large enough chunk of the people of America to make an impact on politics are acting in bad faith. The government is supposed to represent all the people, and elites don't want to be seen as making certain people second-class citizens - especially since they have a lot of guns and a determination to make the government listen to them if they have to. Elites also deeply internalized the notion that elected officials genuinely represented the people who elected them, under the assumption that the people wouldn't have voted for them if they acted in bad faith, because even if it was always a fiction, it was a fiction necessary to keep the whole system running.
The problem with concerns about "free speech" is that they're impossible to refute without undermining the whole premise behind free speech, or even democracy, itself. Yes, "free speech" can be undermined by bad faith actors, but the whole premise of free speech is that the truth can be identified and agreed upon through reasoned debate and investigation, so shouldn't bad faith actors be identified and shamed and the truth identified anyway? I mean, if it were possible for bad faith actors to pollute the discourse without being filtered out, it would imply people are susceptible to demagoguery and aren't actually that good at finding truth from lies, which could be construed to mean they can't necessarily be trusted to determine their own destiny, and that's an especially toxic notion to consider when a common rallying cry of the bad-faith actors is that elites "think they know better than ordinary Americans" and want to enslave people to a totalitarian state.
I do think democracy is the best system and free speech worthwhile, but at some point we're going to have to seriously and publicly confront the flaws in the rationalist paradigm of human nature underlying our conception of it, and come up with a new vision of democracy that reckons with what human nature actually is.
I saw someone say that if you take porn out of it, Only Fans is basically Patreon except they take four times the cut. Kinda hard to get anyone or anything that isn't barred from Patreon to come to your site that way.
Maybe trailers that use replacement music should use music that mercilessly mocks permission culture and Amazon's complacency and complicity. Assuming developers have any interest in changing this state of affairs, of course.
I mean, there are certainly plenty of industries with blatantly anticompetitive mergers where the companies involved have pleaded to save the poor, dying company whose investors really just don't want to bother anymore that would leave you with the impression that maybe the burden of proof should be reversed, some of which have even been covered on Techdirt (Sprint-T-Mobile comes to mind). What's that? This bill only covers the newest, least politically connected, and therefore scariest of them, and doesn't do anything to crack down on anticompetitive mergers in telecom, broadband, media, or the like?
(Granted, this particular bill may in fact cover those fields but I'm not wading through the whole thing to find out when I'm on mobile and the PDF display on this page goes past the edge of the screen)
Will this make clear that Amazon, like Google, is not on the independent creator's side and is more concerned with keeping the legacy media industries happy?
(untitled comment)
date of post: February 23
Man, Techdirt is such a great resource for staying on the cutting edge of tech policy news.
(untitled comment)
If Democrats wanted to raise suspicions among their own base that they're only interested in presenting the appearance of opposition to Republican policies, but are really working hand-in-hand with them to ensure the hegemony of the 1%, it'd be hard to come up with a course of action that'd be more effective...
(untitled comment)
Why do I suspect it's the lawyers that are driving this and that will see most of the money...
(untitled comment)
Silly rabbit, that would help the little people and make things marginally less convenient for big companies, so it'll never happen in the United States.
(untitled comment)
So long as there are no penalties for using takedown requests willy-nilly, untargeted, and against innocent parties, the "right and good way" is in reality the wrong and dumb way that wastes effort for no good reason. Why go to the effort of actually finding out who the infringers are and sending specific takedown requests against specific infringers when you can just rev up an algorithm to find anything that might kinda sorta look like infringement if you look at a particular pixel or word and flood the zone with takedown requests?
Re: 'Sure you have that right, but can you afford to use it?'
Unfortunately, there are far too many areas where people have "rights" they can't afford to exercise. That tech companies have 230 dating from a time they were a lot smaller than now is a minor miracle.
Re:
I get the sense conservatives' answer to your second question might not be what you would think.
Re:
I think we know where this is headed.
(untitled comment)
Anyone want to bet that when Trump and his cultists spew lies that won't be considered "misleading other users" but when mainstream media sources post on there and left-wing trolls try to spread some actual truth to counteract the lies it will be?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
For one thing, they tend to hold up Citizens United as the problem with corporate personhood, when not only did that case not actually have anything to do with corporate personhood, taking it seriously might lead to less dumb Supreme Court decisions: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/03/corporations-are-people-and-thats-why-hobby-lobby-should -lose-at-the-supreme-court
(untitled comment)
What's especially funny is that the guy who spewed out that COVID nonsense prefaced his post with "here's your most insightful comment for next week". Well, it did come from the ensuing thread...
(untitled comment)
The legal system is broken. When the side with money prevails over the side that's right, the idea of rule of law becomes a joke.
The economic and regulatory structure of linear television is broken. Broadcast networks feel they need retransmission revenue to compete with the subscription fees cable networks charge for entertainment and sports programming, which has led them to neglect their own nominal medium. Linear television still has an important role to play in a streaming world, and that role is more important in the context of over-the-air broadcasting where there's a limited amount of spectrum to go around, but broadcasters have felt actively disincentivized from making that future possible, let alone preparing for it, allowing themselves to be portrayed as the villains in the cable bundle's problems. So long as broadcasting feels more like an annoying aggravation the networks have to put up with for historical reasons and that they can ditch once it becomes unacceptably crippling to their bottom line (as they threatened in the Aereo case), and less like something with value in its own right, this story will repeat itself.
(untitled comment)
There's a pathological refusal in elite circles to even consider the notion that a large enough chunk of the people of America to make an impact on politics are acting in bad faith. The government is supposed to represent all the people, and elites don't want to be seen as making certain people second-class citizens - especially since they have a lot of guns and a determination to make the government listen to them if they have to. Elites also deeply internalized the notion that elected officials genuinely represented the people who elected them, under the assumption that the people wouldn't have voted for them if they acted in bad faith, because even if it was always a fiction, it was a fiction necessary to keep the whole system running.
The problem with concerns about "free speech" is that they're impossible to refute without undermining the whole premise behind free speech, or even democracy, itself. Yes, "free speech" can be undermined by bad faith actors, but the whole premise of free speech is that the truth can be identified and agreed upon through reasoned debate and investigation, so shouldn't bad faith actors be identified and shamed and the truth identified anyway? I mean, if it were possible for bad faith actors to pollute the discourse without being filtered out, it would imply people are susceptible to demagoguery and aren't actually that good at finding truth from lies, which could be construed to mean they can't necessarily be trusted to determine their own destiny, and that's an especially toxic notion to consider when a common rallying cry of the bad-faith actors is that elites "think they know better than ordinary Americans" and want to enslave people to a totalitarian state.
I do think democracy is the best system and free speech worthwhile, but at some point we're going to have to seriously and publicly confront the flaws in the rationalist paradigm of human nature underlying our conception of it, and come up with a new vision of democracy that reckons with what human nature actually is.
Re: How long can a snail sleep?
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
Re: money money money
I saw someone say that if you take porn out of it, Only Fans is basically Patreon except they take four times the cut. Kinda hard to get anyone or anything that isn't barred from Patreon to come to your site that way.
Re: Something to note:
Maybe trailers that use replacement music should use music that mercilessly mocks permission culture and Amazon's complacency and complicity. Assuming developers have any interest in changing this state of affairs, of course.
(untitled comment)
The last editor's choice comment forgot to frame it as "something THEY don't want you to know".
(untitled comment)
I mean, there are certainly plenty of industries with blatantly anticompetitive mergers where the companies involved have pleaded to save the poor, dying company whose investors really just don't want to bother anymore that would leave you with the impression that maybe the burden of proof should be reversed, some of which have even been covered on Techdirt (Sprint-T-Mobile comes to mind). What's that? This bill only covers the newest, least politically connected, and therefore scariest of them, and doesn't do anything to crack down on anticompetitive mergers in telecom, broadband, media, or the like?
(Granted, this particular bill may in fact cover those fields but I'm not wading through the whole thing to find out when I'm on mobile and the PDF display on this page goes past the edge of the screen)
Re: Re: Re: The Dunning–Kruger effect
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2165/
(untitled comment)
Will this make clear that Amazon, like Google, is not on the independent creator's side and is more concerned with keeping the legacy media industries happy?
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