While I believe Rep. Lofgren to be one of the few fighting the good fight in the Congress, especially by bringing attention to these issues, it would be so much more effective if she didn't just ask questions on the basis of an article but actually contacted the affected parties so that she's strong on the facts, not on someone's interpretation of those facts. Her question lost its punch when she kept saying "I'm only reading from this article". Something real is happening here and she really should addressing its substance more thoroughly...IMHO.
Someone does need to sit w/Larry Downes however and do some media training. Tepp's intellectual dishonesty is steeped in definitive unwavering responses. Downes doesn't do enough to cool "bullshit" or simply state a clear position that the uninitiated could easily grasp on to. For Tepp's arrogance and clearly devious approach to outlining the problem, he does so clearly and with enough stats (even if those can be debunked later) that one can easily see the reasonableness of his position. In this sort of short interview format, it's more important to have a stronger position to combat the insanity that Tepp lays out. It can be rooted in truth rather than lies, as Tepp has taken to, but for example, one could paraphrase the breakout you've laid out (and in your other post, http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111122/04254316872/definitive-post-why-sopa-protect-ip-are-bad-ba d-ideas.shtml), here and come up with very direct speaking points that could offer an equally compelling but diamtrically opposed story that shows that gov't's and the entertainment industry's current approaches are the works of ignorant and some times disturbed and corrupt people.
Where this sort of tech is nice when applied to targeted advertising or what music you're likely to like, it's always disconcerting when it's applied to more serious endeavors. While most of these systems are never more than 70% accurate (if that), let's give them the benefit of the doubt and call it 90% accurate. That means that 10% of the time someone is being treated like a criminal that genuinely isn't. Note the number of false positives that arose from the "No Fly List". Too many to justify the system that's for sure. To those adversely affected, it's a nightmare that has a traumatic affect on their lives. Given that I've yet to see any of these systems live up to their hype, and the signals they use are often insufficient to meet their stated goals, I really wish people would put more energy into making sure the ads I get are really relevant ;)
It baffles the mind how they think themselves so above humanity as to believe that everyone should believe what they say despite the numerous breaches of trust we've seen from this and other gov't departments over just the past 10 yrs, and even worse over the past few since the Wikileaks document release. Crazy.
Assuming the monkeys did own the copyright, or simply that it wasn't owned by the photographer or news agency, who would sue for copyright violation? Assuming the monkeys owned the copyright, then how would they have consent to sue? Otherwise said, until these monkeys can talk and assert any right they may or may not have, the photographer doesn't have much to worry about ;)
Anti-justice? Hmm...one innocent person is inappropriately stopped and searched and another innocent person gets arrested on a trumped up charge. You my friend, have a strange sense of justice ;)
Seems like any defendants that previously settled with Rightshaven might have a case (if there's enough of them, perhaps even a class action) to bring up against Rightshaven for fraud or something of the sort. After all, if Rightshaven tried to sue them (or extort them ;) without having the rights necessary to do so, then doesn't that constitute a violation of some fraud statute? Just wondering outloud.
Guess it's taking ICE & co. some time to figure out how to come after Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! since by your broad definition here they are also inducing copyright infringement with search results to sites that may have content or may be pointing to sites that have content that may be violating copyright (since these assertions have not actually been proven).
It's clear you have a long future waiting for you at DHS or ICE since they clearly agree w/your less than persuasive interpretation of these laws.
Funny you would use the cops example. It used to be that they needed probable cause to get a warrant and enter someone's home, now standing outside and saying "I think I smell marijuana" is sufficient (whether or not it's actually true). It used to be that you needed a warrant tap a phone line, then it became a subpoena, now an NSL fm the FBI does the trick w/o judicial review. Yes, the slippery slope is indeed happening a little more every day. As for your thoughts that anyone walking down the street cannot be arrested, perhaps not arrested but certainly detained and good luck understanding that difference.
So back to the original point, asking for extradition on matters that have yet to be shown violate any criminal laws in the U.S. indeed opens up a Pandora's Box. It also leaves our "free speech" nation at greater risk given that we likely do more stuff to violate other countries' norms than they do to violate ours.
OK, back to your regularly scheduled dreaming about your dad's ol' Chevy and eating mom's apple pie :)
You do know that in our country (I'm presuming you live in the U.S.), our legal system works on precedents. Allowing this to happen would be setting one of those. Just sayin'.
Really? You can't see how doing this is normalized to all laws? It's this sort of shortsighted mindset that has gotten us to this place. I bet you'll be the first to be surprised when another country asks to have a U.S. citizen extradited for saying something against their god or something equally trivial to us. Sheesh!
Perhaps it's worth keeping in mind that what Facebook starts out with isn't always the end of their plans. While explaining that it was not being done, the video mentioned a very interesting use of this facial recognition, the ability to upload a picture and find out who it is. Wouldn't this be useful too, especially if you couldn't remember that person's name with whom you spent several hours chatting at a social event you attended? Wouldn't it be convenient to have such a capability and run all your photos through the facial recognition engine since you remember having seen them at other events you both attended? How about running all of your friends' photos through it? Why would this be such a big deal, after all you met this person in meatspace and want to see who you know in common or what events they might enjoy. My point being that saying a feature is helpful without considering its wider application and possible longer terms effects is exactly what got us into the privacy gotchas we are in today.
I can think of many privacy infringing uses of this new tech and the fact that it was deployed six months ago and didn't get a lot of attention doesn't make it OK. Note, there are also no stated limits on what they can do with it, so just because they're using it in one way now doesn't mean they won't use it in more privacy infringing ways later.
Our privacy is eroding a little bit at a time. At some point we either have to draw the line on what is acceptable or simply find other platforms that have shown themselves to be more respectful of users. To suggest that this new auto-tagging feature is really that useful is also somewhat ludicrous. It's just the lowest barrier to entry for Facebook to deploy it claiming some utility for users ;)
Noteworthy in this follow-up is the following comment:
"A U.S. government official confirmed for News10 Wednesday morning federal agents with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), not local S.W.A.T., served the search warrant. The official would not say specifically why the raid took place. He did say the search was not related to student loans in default."
This may be a case of there being more than meets the eye especially with the last sentence. We may want to wait a bit more before jumping to conclusions on this story.
I'm surprised it took this long for some publishers to start exploring Web-based access. Apple's App Store is Web 1.0 when it comes to searching for applications. The clear advantage to these HTML5 versions is that they could be more easily found using the standard search engines as well. As well, the app developer can also advertise their HTML5 across any Web site and drive the traffic to their site directly, instead of forcing the additional action of making the user download the app.
If I recall correctly, even Steve Jobs had at one time said that the apps would run natively on the Web rather than be downloads. For some reason no one was listening and every one continued to try to get featured in the App Store. Just messed around with that FT app and it's actually pretty nice. Certainly functional enough to serve its purpose.
The thing that strikes me from that sample comment is how unnecessary it really is. After all, part of Kickstarter's appeal is that as someone donating to the entrepreneur/artist's cause, you're helping someone with a good idea or a compelling project move ahead with it. If you don't like the product or are not compelled by the project then you simply pass and don't donate. What the heck does this have to do with his dad or his personal wealth. Sure, Colin may have gotten more attention for his project from his dad tweeting it, but that's no guarantee that people will donate if they don't like it. If anything, one might call this market research or testing user demand for the idea.
Also, I don't recall there being a box on Kickstarter stating the entrepreneur's personal net worth as a reviewable category or criteria for donating to the project.
This backlash feels like an example of small minds and is disappointing.
One of the BIG probs that Klout and others face with advertisers and marketers that consider these influence scores is that they're missing something important. Influence only matters to marketers to the extent that it moves some needle, whether that be sales of their products or brand awareness. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to measure if these influence scores correlate in any way to either of those metrics.
The way this is handled w/TV today, is also a bit of a black art, where every few month surveys are run to poll users on brand awareness shortly after a campaign has been run. This isn't a great way to measure but advertisers are accustomed to these surveying methods. This is why online advertising has seemed so attractive to advertisers. With online advertising, it's easier to measure whether people clicked on an ad and took other actions.
Until companies like Klout, Peerindex and Empire Avenue can substantiate the correlations between their scores and useful metrics for the advertisers, I don't see the level of activity they're seeing as anything more that marketers putting their experimental budgets to work. These don't last for ever, and if they don't find a way to measure results soon, they won't last much longer ;)
On the post: Congressional Investigations Into Dajaz1.com Censorship Begin
Politicians need to get the facts
On the post: A Step By Step Debunking Of US Chamber Of Commerce's Dishonest Stats About 'Rogue Sites'
On the post: Computers That Accurately Guess What Gangs Did What Crimes
The cost of being wrong
On the post: Winklevii Lose Again: Have To Pay Their Lawyers $13 Million
What reputation? If anything, it feels like it confirms their reputation, that of losers ;)
On the post: Homeland Security Says Homeland Security Hasn't Abused Airline Passenger Info
Amazing!
On the post: Monkey Business: Can A Monkey License Its Copyrights To A News Agency?
On the post: Woman Charged With 'Obstructing Governmental Administration' For Filming Police From Her Front Yard
Re:
Anti-justice? Hmm...one innocent person is inappropriately stopped and searched and another innocent person gets arrested on a trumped up charge. You my friend, have a strange sense of justice ;)
On the post: Guess Who Just Lost Another Lawsuit? If You Said Righthaven...
Defendants who settled
On the post: Why Is The Justice Department Pretending US Copyright Laws Apply In The UK?
Re: Re: Re:
It's clear you have a long future waiting for you at DHS or ICE since they clearly agree w/your less than persuasive interpretation of these laws.
On the post: Why Is The Justice Department Pretending US Copyright Laws Apply In The UK?
Re: Re: Re:
So back to the original point, asking for extradition on matters that have yet to be shown violate any criminal laws in the U.S. indeed opens up a Pandora's Box. It also leaves our "free speech" nation at greater risk given that we likely do more stuff to violate other countries' norms than they do to violate ours.
OK, back to your regularly scheduled dreaming about your dad's ol' Chevy and eating mom's apple pie :)
On the post: Why Is The Justice Department Pretending US Copyright Laws Apply In The UK?
Re: Re:
On the post: Why Is The Justice Department Pretending US Copyright Laws Apply In The UK?
Re:
On the post: There Really Are Privacy Issues Out There; Facebook Using Facial Recognition Is Not One Of Them
Features in that video
I can think of many privacy infringing uses of this new tech and the fact that it was deployed six months ago and didn't get a lot of attention doesn't make it OK. Note, there are also no stated limits on what they can do with it, so just because they're using it in one way now doesn't mean they won't use it in more privacy infringing ways later.
Our privacy is eroding a little bit at a time. At some point we either have to draw the line on what is acceptable or simply find other platforms that have shown themselves to be more respectful of users. To suggest that this new auto-tagging feature is really that useful is also somewhat ludicrous. It's just the lowest barrier to entry for Facebook to deploy it claiming some utility for users ;)
On the post: SWAT Team Raids Home To Recover Student Loan [Updated: Or Not]
Re: It may not be so simple
On the post: SWAT Team Raids Home To Recover Student Loan [Updated: Or Not]
It may not be so simple
Noteworthy in this follow-up is the following comment:
This may be a case of there being more than meets the eye especially with the last sentence. We may want to wait a bit more before jumping to conclusions on this story.
On the post: Newspapers Finally Realizing They Don't Have To Use Apple's High Priced Payment Offering, Or Locked Down App Store
Findability
If I recall correctly, even Steve Jobs had at one time said that the apps would run natively on the Web rather than be downloads. For some reason no one was listening and every one continued to try to get featured in the App Store. Just messed around with that FT app and it's actually pretty nice. Certainly functional enough to serve its purpose.
On the post: Is It Bad When The Rich & Famous Use Things Like Kickstarter?
Take it or leave it
Also, I don't recall there being a box on Kickstarter stating the entrepreneur's personal net worth as a reviewable category or criteria for donating to the project.
This backlash feels like an example of small minds and is disappointing.
On the post: Activity Is Not Influence
Closing the loop
The way this is handled w/TV today, is also a bit of a black art, where every few month surveys are run to poll users on brand awareness shortly after a campaign has been run. This isn't a great way to measure but advertisers are accustomed to these surveying methods. This is why online advertising has seemed so attractive to advertisers. With online advertising, it's easier to measure whether people clicked on an ad and took other actions.
Until companies like Klout, Peerindex and Empire Avenue can substantiate the correlations between their scores and useful metrics for the advertisers, I don't see the level of activity they're seeing as anything more that marketers putting their experimental budgets to work. These don't last for ever, and if they don't find a way to measure results soon, they won't last much longer ;)
On the post: NBC News Produces Propaganda Video Highlighting NBC's Views On Domain Seizures
Re: Prepare for retaliation?
On the post: Microsoft Blaming 'Piracy' Rather Than Basic Economics For Its Struggles In China
Embattled CEO