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About Ophelia Millais
Hello, and thanks for reading my profile. This is the only account I use on Techdirt.
I prefer to remain semi-anonymous, mainly out of paranoia. My posts under this name mainly appear in forums devoted to discussion of copyright issues, and I don't want potential employers and business associates, for example, to hold this fact against me or my friends. My posts are simply intended to be reasonable arguments and poignant observations, taken at face value and considered on the basis of their content only. My real-life credentials and reputation aren't relevant.
That said, I'll say a few things so that you know where I'm coming from. I'm a musician, DJ, and photographer. My own music has been released commercially on an indie label, and more recently was self-released with Creative Commons licenses. My photography is also CC-licensed, and this led to one piece being displayed in a museum in Berlin, where it has been seen by tens of thousands of visitors. (Impressed? gosh, I hope so.) Although I'm a "creative professional," my art has never come close to supporting me, save for a few DJ gigs in the '90s. Therefore, I work a day job I enjoy, and it doesn't impede my creativity at all. It never occurred to me to be resentful that I have to work a day job, or that some people don't consider my art worth paying for. I have no sympathy for artists who feel otherwise. I only ever feel gratitude toward those who enjoy my work.
Although I tend to be a skeptic of copyright maximalism, I actually have quite mixed feelings about copyright law, file-sharing, the commercialization of art, and the various kinds of entitlement felt by the various competing interests. Generally, though, I'm idealistic in that I hold the principles of freedom and privacy in high regard; if a choice must be made between the businessman's "freedom to profit" (or the artist's legal rights) and the individual liberty and privacy of consumers, the consumers should always come out ahead.
Here are a few of my favorite memes:
• It is a well-kept secret* that most artists have sources of income aside from the royalties they receive based on consumers purchasing new copies of their work. Very few enjoy sustained, lifelong success where they live entirely off of such royalties. Those who do achieve such success often don't maintain it for long. Yet so many artists, especially when debating file-sharing and copyright, continue to promulgate the myth that they are part of a class which solely subsists on such royalties, and that making art is and must be a full-time job, or else it will cease to exist. Certainly, for a privileged few, it is a profitable, full-time job, and certainly, some artists are only in it for the money. But that's the exception, not the rule. There is no reason that artists must earn a living wage exclusively from copyright exploitation, or that if they ever do reach that point, that they're entitled to remain in that fortunate state. Most are not in that category, and it's disingenuous to imply otherwise.
• Marketing creative works can be very lucrative, but artists and copyright owners are not entitled to earn a living from their works, nor are they entitled to sustain a particular level of earnings. They can try, of course, but there are no guarantees.
• A creative work's monetary value is not conferred by its price tag, nor by the labor and expense that went into it, nor by public interest in it. Monetary value is what each consumer is willing to pay.
• It's not the consumer's responsibility to choose to spend their money only in ways which are assured of sustaining the businesses of those they buy from.
• Shaming consumers for their spending choices is attacking them, and is a business strategy best left to televangelists and other con artists. Even if you are on the moral high ground, you undermine your cause when you resort to such tactics.
* [I was taken to task for characterizing artists' day jobs as "a well-kept secret". I stand by it, though. Copyright advocates repeatedly insist that artists won't create if they have to go get day jobs "to compete with free" when others are "stealing" their work or whatever, when in fact the reality is that most artists already have day jobs they just keep quiet about, lest anyone realize they aren't suffering and aren't entitled to copyright-based welfare.]
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Re: Re:
What does using video in education have to do with piracy?
Re: wait
Indeed, I don't see how Boundless Informant is identifying participants or even geolocating with any more precision than any other IP address-based lookup. It seems to be precise only to the country level.
So Emmel didn't lie, considering she qualified her denial of geolocation and identification as being something they can't do with certainty in regard to all parties to a given communication. That leaves quite a bit of wiggle room.
Re: Anyone who wants some of my DNA can have it.?? !!
...including the ones you didn't know you had until the DNA proof! :)
Re: How is status quo "clearly good news for fair use"?
I think most of us can't help but regard a failure to erode the public interest as a win.
The part I find interesting is that it's a case of using a complete work, not just an excerpt or two. It's usually pretty difficult to get a determination of fair use when more than a portion of a work is at issue. In this case, the portion didn't matter, due to the copies being made (a) without intent to compete (b) for their factual rather than expressive content.
(untitled comment)
The parents and administrators probably still give this security company the benefit of the doubt. It's assumed the scans would only be used for attendance and would only be useful when the child is in school.
They don't even think of things like what could go wrong, how secure is this data being kept, how long do they keep it, what else might be done with it, what if someone uses the data to identify and track the children in places & situations where they (and their parents) expected anonymity, what happens when the company goes out of business or is acquired by a big government/military/law-enforcement contractor, etc.?
Re: Assange
Agreed. It's in their interest to conceal the fact that they've declared him an "enemy", the ramifications of which are profound for Assange, Manning, anyone else who has any connection whatsoever with Wikileaks, and anyone who is in a position to leak any U.S. government/military information to anyone, ever.
Re: Re: Re: Mike NEVER deals with the morality of Napster.
Are you talking about Patronet, his buggy, overengineered, browser-based content subscription service? That seems to have died on its own, and is more comparable to crowdfunding than Napster. Rundgren was vocally anti-Napster and the like.
Re: Re:
Citation needed. I would grant you that unchallenged doesn't mean legitimate, but even so, come on.
Re: Just to play Devil's Advocate
If the only people with the ability to develop a test for a deadly virus are so ethically challenged that they need to be "motivated" by a fat monopoly payday, then it's going to take a massive die-off of humankind before people get their priorities straight and realize that just because you can charge for something doesn't mean you should.
Re: Re: Corrective Action.
That kind of stuff continued through the mid-'80s where I lived. All the students in our (small-ish) high school were on guard for it, too; they even protected, across social and class divides, the kids who were acting out. No one was trying to "terrorize" or "bully" anyone. Everyone eventually grew up and became successful in adulthood; no one had to be taught a lesson or locked up for decades to send a message.
Our yearbook staff conspired to sneak things past the faculty advisor (or so we thought, who knows what she really knew), writing risqué captions, creating fake students, swapping in embarrassing photos of kids doing things they weren't supposed to be doing ... it was all just silly fun. Now it would be "bullying" and someone have to pay with a felony record, I guess.
Re: Re:
As you said, they are in a public place. It would be improper to broadcast any footage disclosing the identities of the civilians, but I'm not sure the act of filming them can be said to be an invasion of privacy, even if they don't want cameras on them. And we've already established that cops don't have the right to privacy in these situations.
Re: Re: Re:
You're good at detecting sarcasm. :)
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Again, sheerly an anti-copyright WEDGE for Mike.
What I see is basically what I said in my previous comment: the post is merely a relayed report about an IP-maximalist organization spreading baseless FUD and employing faulty reasoning for upholding the status quo, to the detriment of the disabled. And that's not even Mike's assessment; KEI blogger Jamie Love is who ascertained these things. Mike's contribution, besides the secondary report, is really just the addition of his "see? yet more evidence of..." reaction.
I suppose his posting it here can be interpreted as an attempt to discredit someone, although "copyright holders" is a bit broad, since that's basically everyone who has ever authored anything. Rather, it's discrediting this particular business lobbying group, based on something they're actually doing. What more do you want?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Again, sheerly an anti-copyright WEDGE for Mike.
You want to have a conversation based on the merits of your post, yet your post is pure ad hominem.
Like any blog, this one attracts more than its share of readers whose opinions are aligned with those of its contributors. And like most popular blogs, the writers know their audience, and both consciously and subconsciously write for it.
Yet, for some reason, you envision Techdirt readers as an obedient, unthinking cult, hanging on Masnick's every word and regarding him as their "leader". You regard all the readers - except those agree with you, I bet - as unable to formulate positions and arguments on their own, unwilling to see that his posts are mainly griping and shit-stirring.
Like I said, he knows his audience - he can certainly whip us up into a pissed-off comment frenzy - but we know him, as well. You guys keep trying to point out to us what's really going on, not realizing that we already know, and it doesn't matter, because most of the time, he's not saying anything we don't already agree with.
Mike and his guest bloggers just relay reports of outrageous things that the IP industry is up to, and they often express their opinions about it, and we all chime in with ours. It's as simple as that. He doesn't have us under mind control. He's not our "leader". One misstep and we'll turn on him...for that one post, which is how it should be.
This "leader" fixation is a generational thing. Mike's generation, the Gen Xers, distrust power and leaders in general, starting with their parents. The younger Millennials laugh at would-be leaders and rarely conflate celebrity with authority. But the older generation, the Baby Boomers - good god, they revere and exalt as ideologues anyone who's got anyone's attention, and can't comprehend the idea that everyone must be following someone. Of course there are exceptions to these trends, but I'm guessing you're in this camp, born before the 1970s. Am I right?
(untitled comment)
I'm just commenting in order to be the first person to spell Silverglate correctly.
(untitled comment)
"Everyone wants stuff for free" is true and should be an integral part of these policy discussions. "Everyone just wants stuff for free" is not true and should not be the basis of policy.
The reality is that right now, many people choose to get gobs of convenient content for free, and most of those people also choose to pay for some content in various forms. This has been going on for a long time. Content still generates tons of cashflow. It's in different configurations than before, but the money is still all there, notwithstanding wages not keeping pace with inflation and debt.
What needs to be abandoned in these discussions is the notion that this longstanding reality - that not all content needs to be licensed and paid for ad infinitum - is an unsustainable situation which government needs to put an immediate and total stop to, or even curb to some degree. Likewise, pitting every proposal against the binary choice of strictly paying for every use and experience of content, versus no payment or enforcement for anything, is utter nonsense. And as we repeatedly point out here, it is counterproductive to regard as a hostile adversary every consumer who expects certain things - or anything - to be free.
Yet, the copyright maximalists have long dominated Congress's ear and have very well established these strict, absolute parameters for the conversation. It will require creative thinking to get lawmakers to understand that progress will come from realizing it is their duty to abandon this polarized framing of the issues.
A much more realistic starting point for policy is to acknowledge that the public fully expects that certain kinds of uses of content need not be licensed or subject to fees, and that most people draw some kind of distinction between the acceptability of unlicensed commercial and noncommercial uses. This has been manifesting in people's actual behavior for decades, and is supported by polls and the surge of democratized, creative output. Lawmakers and industry need to stop fighting these expectations and developments; these changes need to be enshrined and protected by law, not punished.
Re: Re: WHOA! Stop at: "everyone just wants stuff for free".
I look at it like the copyright industries have spent decades getting us to treat content as nothing but a commodity. They have drilled into our heads that nothing else matters but the money. It's not art, it's not work product, it's not culture, it's not ideas. So now that's exactly what we all do: treat it as a pure commodity. And that means that we sometimes get to determine the market value of the content to be less than what they want it to be. Oh well.
(untitled comment)
I hope I'm wrong, but it wouldn't surprise me if the authorities and/or coroner attribute the guy's death to "excited delirium". The baton cracks to the head and body will be deemed inconsequential.
Re: Sue Monsanto...
As the linked court opinion notes, the grain elevator sold the seed for the ordinary use of consumption, not the extraordinary use of planting. I think warranty of merchantability would only apply if the seed were unfit for the ordinary use of consumption.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Interesting fight, but...
s/see/sees/