In my unprofessional legal view, it seems that what the copyright clique is really hoping to gain from this case is a precedent for making website owners responsible for ensuring that content uploaded to their site is copyright kosher.
Currently, the copyright holder has to crawl the internet to make sure their copyright isn't being violated somewhere and if so - file a takedown order. This is very whack-a-mole and when it comes to cyberlockers - intractable, since many external links can resolve to the same file. Locker admins have to only remove the offending link to comply with a takedown request, as it is impossible (without knowing the internal code structure) to prove whether two links resolve to the same file or different copies thereof. The linkers can simply check periodically to make sure their links are current and update as necessary, which can be easily automated.
The copyright holders cannot automate the discovery process (not without huge resources, anyway), while the copyright infringing parties can easily automate their side. This inherent unbalance creates a difficult policing problem that copyright holders (naturally) don't want to be responsible for.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If UGC site admins become legally compelled to monitor what they are hosting, the overhead will kill most ad-only revenue models. If not, copyright holders will have to hire some sort of copyright police (does it already exist? if not --> startup_idea_masterlist.add() ).
Opinion question: what is the "ok/not ok" line for encouraging your users to use your (online) service for illegal activities (esp. copyright infringement)? Paying them to do it seems to be clearly "over the line", as far as US gov. is concerned. What about publicly announcing that you are not going to police their data?
It could potentially kill all UGC. There is no foolproof way to determine the copyright status of a given piece of content, unless it happens to be a piece that you can demonstrate was published long enough ago that copyright must have expired.
E.g. if website owners are made liable for the copyright of uploaded content, a successful (illegal) attack on any site hosting copyrighted content would be for two parties secretly cooperating (secretly, because conspiring like this would almost certainly in itself be illegal):
One party operates an offline (to prevent it from showing up in Google searches or otherwise being easy for the copyright owners to identify as possibly infringing) newsletter that publishes assorted essays that might for example include responses suitable for the forum of a specific UGC site. They might be written specifically for that purpose...
The other party uploads a copy of said content to the site.
The first party sues the website.
You could do this without someone cooperating with you to write custom-written content, but it'd be easier to spot that something was off, and since you wouldn't hold the copyright on the content you wouldn't have standing to sue so you'd be dependent on making third parties pissed off. Since you'd be infringing on copyright in the first place, it might be easier to just use an accomplice.
All it takes is someone who dislikes you strongly enough, and you're potentially out of business if you depend on UGC in this kind of scenario...
What exactly is it about losethos's cognitive patterns that you find "insane"? (honest question)
I have spent quite some time reading miscellaneous forum threads by him and have found nothing that shocks me as profoundly "mentally ill". Sure, the guy sees some strange patterns in the noise, but don't we all? Most of us just have enough sense not to share them publicly, or enough existential fear to censor our own thinking.
If we take the lack of cognitive self-censorhip to be a criterion for establishing "insanity", then are we not guilty of the same intellectual laziness we point out when we discuss "thinking inside box"?
That is, if someone professes to one "insane" (== not generally accepted as "true", to the point of ridicule) idea, does that invalidate the rest of ideas they originated? What about two? How many "insane" ideas must one express to have the rest of one's ideas invalidated? Or must the ideas be considered independently of the source?
If you don't find the slip-sliding from strangely-worded technical discussion into invocations of the Godhead as explanations for why he only runs at certain monitor resolutions as clear indications of delusion I think you may be trying too hard to be accepting. In doing so you're fooling yourself.
I resent the accusation. But I do venture south of the "sanity" meridian quite often, so perhaps I have lost perspective. Perhaps I should watch more television.
Do engage the substance of my inquiry, please. If it is "delusional" to invoke the Godhead as an explanation for running only certain monitor resolutions, is it not delusional to invoke same Godhead as an explanation for holding $moral_value or making $public_policy_decision?
Rhetorical, obviously. My point is - if no objective metric is invoked in determination of "insanity", does it not then become a "house rule" of sorts?
A reliable and objective metric for insanity is whether you believe not only that the supreme deity of the universe is telling you how to program, but also that passages in the Bible are coded references to the same written directly to you.
I feel like censoring it would be unethical, while refusing to host it would simply be poor form.
Livecasting of own suicide: freedom of expression + freedom to make choices with regard to own life.
Edit: This is not to imply that Tumblr is not entitled to do whatever they damn please with their own website. But, should someone build a website specifically for livecasting suicides I would very much disagree with its censorship.
None, whatsoever. But what alternative do the "best and the brightest" have? After all, in order to keep being "the best and the brightest" they do need to pay rent (and have an occasional steak dinner).
What value is there in educating if one can simply purchase social capital when one needs it?
> "After all, in order to keep being "the best and the brightest" they do need to pay rent (and have an occasional steak dinner)."
Plenty of people pay rent and eat well and aren't complicit in scams and get-rich-quick schemes. Plenty of people have jobs that pay well and don't pander to the lowest common denominator and reinforce ignorance...
If you think I'm advocating pandering to the lowest common denominator and reinforcing ignorance, you are mistaken.
I am pointing out the fact that within a system of social organization which allows "material capital" to be easily convertible to "social capital" this type of behavior will always exist. Moreover, in most cases it will be a superior social/business strategy.
Consider a hypothetical example. Evil Company X can do a "socially harmful" thing Y and make Z dollars or a "socially beneficial" thing W and make V dollars. Well, if Z - [the cost of whitewashing] > V, why not do it?
Furthermore, should the CEO of ECX opt to do V and forego greater profits, investors of X would be well-justified to vote for his removal at the subsequent board meeting. After all, the CEO was not representing THEIR best interests...
Mostly everyone is a criminal, if you've gotten a city parking ticket you're a criminal.
If you've let your meter run out but didn't get caught it's still criminal. Didn't wear your seatbelt? Criminal.
Were you having a bad day but when you talked to the city clerk you told them it was going well? You're a criminal.
Altria sells a product that is harmful to people's health while providing other benefits, like most other products including car manufactures, coffee shops, etc.
Does Altria break a criminal statute? It's pretty much inevitable that they do.
Would I characterize them as a criminal enterprise? No.
Some people are far more concerned about living life than prolonging death. If you don't like cigarettes don't smoke.
OC does not misrepresent the point, he does not engage it, (those are distinct). In not engaging it, he provided tremendous value for everyone ITT.
[Thanks, Patrick]
However, if you want someone to bite - I will. Why bother engaging in moralizing if you don't care enough about your values to pay for them? Better yet, how much is your morality worth to you?
"I know that this engine is driven by the money, and the money is in luring people into Google's social thingamajiggy instead of trying to sell someone a book or a course or even a BBC/Discover/National Geographic edutainment special on dinosaurs or natural history.
But you know, the whole point of having values is that sometimes you don't do the most expedient thing or the most profitable thing or the easy thing. That’s what makes them values, you value them more then pecuniarum."
Well, if Raganwald wishes to educate children, why not create a service that serves educational ads instead of selling add slots to the highest bidder? Because it wouldn't be able to compete with Google outside of some tiny niche. Clearly, society as a whole is not willing to pay for this moral value, namely educating children.
It might be tempting to trivialize this by the way of "heartless businessmen" argument, but that would be misrepresenting the point. The point is - in a society where the only over-arching value is money, morality becomes a liability. One could argue that this is an inevitable state of human affairs due to $characteristic_of_human_nature. However, to me this seems to be more of an inevitable consequence of implementation of a universal means of exchange. Not everything boils down to money - true. But most things do. And most things will always be enough for some people. And the rest will ultimately have to follow. That, or find a clever way to monetize their "moral liabilities".
> However, to me this seems to be more of an inevitable consequence of implementation of a universal means of exchange.
Disagree.
Anytime humans get ahold of a metric, they fuck it up and make it mean something it never did intend to mean. But, hey, animals did it, so we don't need to rise above that.
What these same people also fail to realize is that just because you enjoy working on "exciting and challenging stuff!" doesn't mean you will find debugging their firm's spaghetti code exciting.
Yes, there are projects on which I would work 10-15 hours a day with minimal pay but, odds are - yours isn't one of them.
Attention deficit is a conduct disorder, which means that its diagnosis relies entirely on assessment of patient's behavioural patterns. Since it's next to impossible to keep a patient under 24/7 observation, secondary sources have to be used. In most cases, the diagnostic process reduces to an "intake session" interview with a patient and a few multiple-choice diagnostic questionnaires.
So an AD* diagnosis is trivial to hack. Moreover, it's impossible to design a diagnostic process that's not easily hackable because, ultimately, everything will boil down to a subjective assessment of patient's behaviour, i.e. a "doctor's call". Furthermore, the more you restrict prescriptions and tighten the diagnostic criteria, the more you increase the risk of denying medication to "legitimate" sufferers. Since the guiding philosophy of the medical community prioritizes "helping people" over "prescription security", the problem of how to keep people from getting "illegitimate" prescriptions is ultimately intractable.
There are NO technological solutions. It is mathematically impossible to restrict communication of certain kinds of information, while still allowing information exchanges to take place.
This is why there are no legal, political, or economic solutions to the general problem of copyright, either. The only solutions that are even theoretically possible rely almost entirely on ideology backed up by a massive coercive force.
Too true. Everything on a computer can be represented as a number. So if you try to say that someone owns a number, let's say 5, how do you enforce that technologically? If they're not allowed to transmit 5, they can transmit 2+3 or 4+1. And it shouldn't take much imagination to see that to ban people from transmitting one number requires banning them from transmitting any numbers, because you can use any other number to make 5.
But mere impossibility isn't enough to make people give up. They'll keep trying and trying and just think that they didn't try hard enough, never wondering why people always seem to be able to find countermeasures. Maybe they can just ban the + program, any other use of it be damned? Oh, but we have - too. Well, there aren't that many functions on a pocket calculator, are there? Maybe you can ban them all? Maybe we could get that Godel guy to help us figure this out....
War on General Purpose Computation == War on Consciousness. Why not just go straight to the root of the problem and outlaw certain kinds of cognitive patterns? Since "intellectual property" begins in the mind, so does "copyright infringement". Thought would be a whole lot easier to police, anyway.
Memory is theft. That's why I choose to stay ignorant - stupidity will never be outlawed.
I would love to see a lawyer in a courtroom ask the jury if people should be allowed to copyright or patent a number. Then show them a written numerical representation of the work in question (preferably compressed).
The question of intellectual property is moot. It is impossible to adequately police teh intertubes without outlawing encryption.
Why do the media companies insist on continuing to attempt the impossible, instead of cutting their losses and investing in distribution infrastructure? By pursuing the kind of ham-fisted, extra-legal "piracy fighting" that the article describes, they are doing themselves a huge disservice. Strong-arming internet users, interfering with judicial processes, and pushing unpopular bills doesn't do a whole lot to stop piracy, but it does promote the view of the media industry as a mafia.
"The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was." [Article]
Every time something like this happens, more people who in-principle support the idea of intellectual property become hostile towards media lobbies and companies they represent.
Instead of trying to win the "hearts and minds" of internet users, they are turning "convenience pirates" ideological and legitimizing the very fears that push internet rights-activists in the same camp as the "ideological pirates".
i may be out of the loop, but... none of the popular ways of piracy are generally encrypted are they? if all the unencrypted ones were to be shut down, would it be possible to replace them with safe ones?
i mean with public p2p filesharing, you can always "spy" on the sharers. i mean it has the be decryptable for you to download it, right? and youll know who sent it.
and with stuff that hosted somewhere, whether it's some usenet provider or megaupload, you can always shut down the hoster.
people could still pirate by directly sending each other encrypted files, but you'd always have to know someone personally who has what you want. which would make piracy much harder.
Just because it's not the dominant means of exchange today doesn't mean it couldn't be.
Ten years ago, the analogous reasoning would have been 'Well, we can just shut down the Napster server', or shortly after 'Well, we can just shutdown the Gnutella superpeers'.
you ignored the problem i saw with it. if there's no public component to it and people would only share with their friends, the availability of piracy would be severely limited.
and if there is, the content industry could still get their "spies" in.
Currently, the copyright holder has to crawl the internet to make sure their copyright isn't being violated somewhere and if so - file a takedown order. This is very whack-a-mole and when it comes to cyberlockers - intractable, since many external links can resolve to the same file. Locker admins have to only remove the offending link to comply with a takedown request, as it is impossible (without knowing the internal code structure) to prove whether two links resolve to the same file or different copies thereof. The linkers can simply check periodically to make sure their links are current and update as necessary, which can be easily automated.
The copyright holders cannot automate the discovery process (not without huge resources, anyway), while the copyright infringing parties can easily automate their side. This inherent unbalance creates a difficult policing problem that copyright holders (naturally) don't want to be responsible for.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If UGC site admins become legally compelled to monitor what they are hosting, the overhead will kill most ad-only revenue models. If not, copyright holders will have to hire some sort of copyright police (does it already exist? if not --> startup_idea_masterlist.add() ).
Opinion question: what is the "ok/not ok" line for encouraging your users to use your (online) service for illegal activities (esp. copyright infringement)? Paying them to do it seems to be clearly "over the line", as far as US gov. is concerned. What about publicly announcing that you are not going to police their data?