Chris Meadows 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Supreme Court Quotes Eminem As It Explores The Difference Between Free Speech And 'True Threats'

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 02 Dec, 2014 @ 10:20am

    We don't need to get into mindset

    The way that the current test for threatening speech works is that 12 jurors perform the "reasonable person" test. Would they, as reasonable people, find the lyrics threatening in that context? Furthermore, they have to find them so unanimously; if there's any doubt, they have to acquit. This doesn't get into the mindset of the perpetrator or the victim. It doesn't require the court or the jury to try to be mind-readers, and doesn't give a free pass to anyone who makes a statement that a reasonable person would assume to be a credible threat if they say afterward, "Oh, I didn't mean it."

    You can't tell me that Elonis wasn't trying to make a cute end-run around the law. "I want to throw a scare into this woman because she made me feel bad, but I want to leave myself an 'out' so I can claim I wasn't actually serious if I get arrested. I know, I'll make it look like a rap and claim I'm just 'expressing myself'!"

    We really don't need to put juries in the position of trying to read minds. What we've got now is a great balance between free speech and rule of law. There's nothing magical about Facebook that means anything people post there can't be considered credibly threatening, whether it rhymes or not.

  • On the post: EU Thinks It Has Jurisdiction Over The Global Internet: Says Right To Be Forgotten Should Be Global

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 01 Dec, 2014 @ 12:40pm

    Re: Re: Another way Europe thinks it can legislate the global Internet...

    It's specifically being removed as of the start of next year. That's the problem.

  • On the post: EU Thinks It Has Jurisdiction Over The Global Internet: Says Right To Be Forgotten Should Be Global

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 01 Dec, 2014 @ 06:06am

    Another way Europe thinks it can legislate the global Internet...

    Have you heard about the new VAT MOSS regs, which state that everyone who sells to an EU consumer, even if they're located outside the EU, is required to collect and remit the proper VAT from the consumers, as well as hold onto two non-contradictory sources of information concerning customer location for each order, for ten years? What's more, in order to do that and comply with EU privacy regs, their business servers have to be located in the EU.

    Ridiculous. And unenforceable, unless the operator of such a business should decide to visit the EU somewhere down the road.

  • On the post: DailyDirt: Uncommon Un-Colas

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2014 @ 09:55am

    Re: Moxie

    Yeah, and it's the source of the expression, "You got moxie" so often heard in hard-boiled detective and gangster dramas.

    Tastes kind of like a less-sweet Doctor Pepper.

  • On the post: Facebook To Ruin Our Good Time With 'Satire' Disclaimer; The Onion Responds With Satire

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 19 Aug, 2014 @ 01:22pm

    Re: Re: It's not ABOUT the Onion, people

    As many dogs and people as they've been killing lately? It looked all too plausible. Even I thought it was real until I clicked through to the editor's defense.

  • On the post: Facebook To Ruin Our Good Time With 'Satire' Disclaimer; The Onion Responds With Satire

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 19 Aug, 2014 @ 01:06pm

    It's not ABOUT the Onion, people

    Why does everyone fall into assuming that Facebook thinks most users are too stupid to discern that an Onion article is satire?

    That's not what it's about.

    In the last year or so, a new brand of "satire" site (I quotate "satire" because it's not clear to me that they really deserve to be in that category) has sprung up that specializes in writing outrageous stories that are just plausible enough to be believable.

    They give themselves names that aren't obviously satirical ("National Report," I'm looking at you), and do pretty much everything they can to hide the fact that they're satire. As nearly as anyone not intimately familiar with the site can tell, they're real news.

    Their whole purpose is trolling people to get outraged and send their real-looking fake news stories viral, so they can make a fortune on ad revenue. (Say what you will about "You won't believe what happened next!" clickbait sites like Buzzfeed, at least they aren't trying to con their readership.)

    Most recently, we saw this in a National Report fake story about a cop who got in an argument with a breastfeeding woman and ended up killing her baby. When people realized it was fake and got upset, the paper's editor was all, "Hey, don't hate on us, hate on the real cops who are nasty enough that you found this ridiculous story believable in the first place."

    It would be more convincing if it weren't that his site and others like it built their whole business model on tricking and outraging people.

    This kind of thing is why Facebook users actually asked Facebook to make it easier to distinguish satire articles. And why, thus, Facebook is doing it.

    And thank goodness they are, at last. If I don't ever have to deal with another manufactured-outrage fake news story in my friend feed, it will be too soon.

  • On the post: Accepting Amazon's DRM Makes It Impossible To Challenge Its Monopoly

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 29 May, 2014 @ 06:13am

    Don't blame Amazon for DRM

    By putting DRM on its digital products?ebooks and audio books?Amazon gets the legal backing of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention restrictions on its products. This isn't for the advancement of public policy goals, either; Amazon gets to create the private law it wants to be enforced. Thanks to DRM, Kindle users are no longer free to take their business elsewhere?if you want a Kindle book, you must purchase it from Amazon.

    Point of order here: Amazon does not require publishers to put DRM on their e-books. Tor hasn't for two years, Cory Doctorow and Baen never have, and plenty of self-publishers don't. It's a choice individual publishers make for themselves, and so far most of the Big Five have chose to use it.

    If the publishers are looking for someone to blame for Amazon's DRM platform lock-in, they need to look in a mirror.

  • On the post: Accepting Amazon's DRM Makes It Impossible To Challenge Its Monopoly

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 28 May, 2014 @ 06:18pm

    Under a bus?

    Curious how Amazon is throwing customers under a bus here. If they gave in to Hachette, it would probably end up resulting in higher prices as agency pricing went into effect again. I suspect most customers would prefer a little pain now for a lot less later.

    It's also worth noting that Amazon made its announcement last night not in the form of a press release, but on its forum. The subtext is that Amazon is speaking directly to its customers about what's going on, rather than speaking over their heads to the press. They even apologized for the inconvenience and suggested how people can order the books under dispute if they want them in a timely manner.

  • On the post: Blogger Offers To Pimp Restaurants If They Feed Her And Her Family Food And Drinks

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 17 Dec, 2013 @ 12:44am

    Not sure what the problem is

    I'm not really seeing the problem here. If any restaurant did take her up on this offer, she'd be pretty much required to state up front she was compensated for her plugging it. If she didn't, she'd be in big trouble with the FTC, who recently issued very specific rules that if you got comped in return for a plug on your blog, you have to say so.

    As far as I know, it's a pretty common practice for blogs to approach companies with products they want to review offering a review in return for a complimentary product. This blogger seems a bit audacious, but then her offer is couched in PR-speak, to which average consumers these days tend to have a poor response.

  • On the post: Illinois Prosecutors Planning To Appeal Ruling That Said Recording Police Is Protected By The First Amendment

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 29 Sep, 2011 @ 07:37am

    Perhaps if we're lucky this case will go all the way to SCOTUS and set a nationwide precedent that it's allowed.

    Of course, if we're unlucky it will go all the way to SCOTUS and set the wrong precedent.

  • On the post: DA Realizes That Gizmodo Didn't Break The Law In Writing About Found iPhone 4 Prototype

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 12 Aug, 2011 @ 08:29am

    The article I read suggested the DA's decision was a bit more pragmatic than realizing Gizmodo hadn't done anything illegal. The subtext I got, reading between the lines, was that they still thought Gizmodo had acted illegally in receiving stolen property, but Gizmodo was prepared to use a first-amendment freedom-of-the-press defense that could drag on into a lengthy, highly-publicized legal battle that would just end up Streisand-effecting them into greater publicity. Even if the DA's office eventually won, it would have been at too great a cost for any possible benefit.

  • On the post: Apple Trying To Run All Content Sales Through Its Own Sales System

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2011 @ 04:45pm

    Technically, it's not that they want all content to be sold through in-app purchases. It's just that they want in-app purchases to be available if out-of-app purchases are. And in-app purchases would pay 30% to them.

  • On the post: The Latest Generation Of 'Get Off My Lawn!' Books From People Who Don't Understand Technology

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 25 Jan, 2011 @ 07:35pm

    It matters how old you are

    "My friend Jim Griffin always says that anything invented before you?re 20 was there forever; anything invented before you?re 30 is the coolest thing ever; and anything invented after that should be illegal." ?Cory Doctorow

  • On the post: Righthaven Takes On Drudge Report

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 09 Dec, 2010 @ 10:59pm

    We may be looking at this all wrong

    Whatever you say about Righthaven, you have to admit that they're not pulling an RIAA, making threats to people they believe will readily cave and pay them more money than it cost to send the copyright notices.

    They're going after one of the most pugnacious bloggers in the whole blogosphere, the guy who stood up to an ex-Clinton aide and won. (What are they thinking? Are they thinking?)

  • On the post: Amazon Believes In Free Speech For Pedophiles, But Not For Wikileaks?

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 02 Dec, 2010 @ 11:47am

    It didn't apply to the pedophile book either

    Amazon pulled it only a couple of hours after making the announcement, leading to speculation that the announcement was a knee-jerk boilerplate Amazon sends out in the event of a complaint about any book (such as, say, a Tea Partier complaining about Amazon selling Obama's book, or a fundamentalist complaining about Amazon selling books about Satanism) whereas the decision to pull the pedophilia manual was made by someone high-ranking enough to be able to use his own judgment.

    When you get down to it, Amazon rolled right over on the pedophile book, too.

  • On the post: Would A Moron In A Hurry Confuse R2D2 With An Ad Platform? No? But George Lucas Would…

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2010 @ 11:37am

    Lucas is famously litigious as regards the word "Droid" (a word that they made up themselves, albeit by shortening an existing word, to note).

    And they have been all the way back to the '70s, when FASA came out with "BattleDroids" and Lucas made them change it to BattleTech.

  • On the post: Digitizing Your Own Books Becoming Popular In Japan

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 25 Aug, 2010 @ 02:04am

    Remember that high speed flip scanner that University of Tokyo researchers developed was done with the rationale of scanning manga for world-wide dissemination. (Manga publishers weren't too happy about the idea.) And they want to shrink it down and put it in cell phones!

    Remember also that "digital shoplifting" with camera phones (people snapping photos of magazine pages to read on their phones later) has been a problem in Japan since at least as far back as 2003.

    Seems like personal scanning is a big part of Japanese culture already.

  • On the post: Porn Company Embracing 'Pirates,' Planning To Monetize Experiences

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 19 Aug, 2010 @ 12:27am

    I seem to recall hearing that the porn industry has historically always been one of the earliest adopters of any new media technology. DVDs, for instance—and also, erotica titles are just about the hottest-selling model of e-books (and one of the first big e-book stores (so old that one of their delivery options was snailmailed floppy disk!), Hard Shell Word Factory, was a romance/erotica publisher).

    Perhaps they're among the earliest adopters of new business models, too.

  • On the post: National Youth Rights Association Looking For Examples Of Political Speech Via Video Games

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 13 Aug, 2010 @ 04:52pm

    Bioshock springs immediately to mind...so immediately that I imagine a dozen people have already suggested it by now.

  • On the post: Pillsbury Sends Cease & Desist To 'Dough Girl' Bakery

    Chris Meadows ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2010 @ 03:25am

    Hmm. According to Wikipedia, a "Pillsbury Doughgirl" character, "Poppie", appeared in some commercials and had a toy in the '70s.

    I don't know if legally that gives them a better case ("Doughboy" was a term in common use; "doughgirl" was not) but morally it shouldn't ought to.

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