Nick Dynice's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
from the favorites dept
This week's favorites post comes from Nick Dynice, a long-term, insightful member of the Techdirt community.
This week Mike and fellow contributors have been on a rampage, taking NYT to task with 7 posts, as of Friday afternoon, about the ridiculousness of the pay-wall.
But, my favorite post of the week was on Paul Vixie's explanation of why COICA is a dumb idea. Whenever the not-so-tech savvy entertainment industry and government get together to come up with a way to beat the emergent nature of the internet (which was designed as a worldwide copy machine that can survive a nuclear war), they just can't win. In this case, Vixie suggested that if the US government mandates DNS blocking with COICA, there will be the unintended consequence of incentivising someone to create an alternate DNS, which will break the universal naming premise that made the internet a success, and will not stop infringement. When Vixie is developing his own tech solutions, he actually thinks through all of these scenarios since he has to live with results -- unlike our Congress critters, who are out of office in a matter of years. Whenever I read about cases like this, I know there is some 80's movie narrative that explains the point pretty well and shows how things can spiral out of control. There is always some sort of pompous villain who creates obstacles for our heros. One such narrative is in the film Ghostbsters. In the scene where the character Walter Peck from the EPA shuts down the Laser Containment Unit because it is "in violation."
My other favorite post was about how The Newspaper Guild has a problem with Huffington Post using a different compensation model than legacy news organizations. Ironically (or not) plenty of anonymous critics came by to contribute their counter arguments to Techdirt for free in the comments.
The second most popular post was about the "infringement vs. inspiration" debate. If being inspired by or borrowing something is piracy, then let's all be pirates. The flood of troll commenters missed the point, as they always do, by insisting that the same examples Mike used were indeed determined to be infringement by law. But laws are man-made construct that can be changed and, in fact, were more permissive in the past. Isn't it time they change to reflect current realities?
The post with the most comments by far this week (a couple hundred so far) was regarding the tortured legal interpretations that many lawyer critics are using to defend the accidental seizure of a domain that took down 84,000 sites, with Mike debating many ACs with lots of "lols" and "insightfuls" being awarded. A truly religious debate.
new term?
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Modern Day German Stasi Seek to Buy Exploits from French Black Hat Hackers to Reduce Trust in E-commerce Worlwide/div>
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http://www.veooz.com/news/4HgGV~~.html/div>
Re:
To summarize, U.S. Copyright Law prohibits Mixcloud users from using more than 3 songs from an album or more than 4 songs by the same artist in a mix so that Mixcloud may benefit from a 114 statutory license that they pay to SoundExchange.
from http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/114
So, a few questions.
- Does Mixloud pay a statutory license to PROs outside of the U.S.?
- How does U.S. copyright law apply to the performance inside the U.S of artists who are not party to SoundExchange?
- If an independent artist does not "lawfully distributed for public performance or sale in the United States" then this restriction should be exempted, correct?
- If you wanted to produce a show which featured a different live performances by an artist in each show, which will most likely exceed 4 songs you must buy a licence from one or more U.S. PROs and you could not use Mixcloud to host it, is that correct? Or could you buy a licence and then us Mixcloud?
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Re:
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http://support.mixcloud.com/customer/portal/articles/1595566-us-licensing-sound-recording-comple ment-rule/div>
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http://www.mixcloud.com/nsputnik/library-and-radiophonioc-influence-revealed/
My mix does have more than 3 songs by 2 artists each. However, neither of them are represented by SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. I looked them up in all for PRO site. I e-mailed Mixcloud about this and got their same boilerplate response.
Thank you for addressing this Tim./div>
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- USPS to the General Public: You Are Not the Customer, You are the Product
- How USPS is Selling You out to Spammers
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https://www.facebook.com/pompeoforcongress/div>
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Re: And...
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http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/226505/div>
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"GETPRSM: The social network the NSA doesn't want you to know about. And don't worry if you haven't received your invite. You've already joined."
Sounds like the tagline for a horror movie about government spys that terrorize their victims with the information they have on them./div>
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