Baldaur Regis' Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
from the the-internet-is-actually-useful dept
What has 500 thumbs and sounds like a murder of crows? A Twitmob, of course, and this weeks' chatter of angry, angry birds featured a group of writers closing down a website...for helping promote their works. Oops. Don't be too hard on them - mobs of any sort are tricksy beasts, and most of these folks are self-publishing their ebooks. To all the struggling authors out there: good luck, keep writing, and thanks for the grammatically correct tweets.
If you're writing just for the money, you may want to look into a membership with The Author's Guild, yet another trade organization suing Google for copyright infringement. Google Books is an ambitious project that aims to scan and digitize every book in existence. The Guild is asking for a summary judgment of $750US per scanned book. As of March 2012, Google Books has scanned over 20 million books. Does $15 billion dollars sound like a reasonable penalty for helping ensure the continuation of all human knowledge, levied against an organization using the most conservative sense of "Fair Use"? See just how Google Books defines "fair use" and decide for yourselves.
And from the same The-Internet-is-actually-useful department comes news that The Internet Archive - home of the fabled Wayback Machine - has enabled more than 1 million torrents to its collection of copyright-free books, movies, music and more. What's the big deal here, you ask? This stuff can just be downloaded from the Archive. Consider the architecture of the Internet as it exists today: under the banner of cloud computing, more and more data is being concentrated in massive server farms owned and operated by corporations such as Google and Amazon (just for fun, ask your hosting service where your website is actually hosted). Server farms are physical choke-points, subject to weather, changing local regulations, and the whims of the hardware owners. If the farms go offline, bye bye data, nice knowing ya. With peer-to-peer distribution (aka P2P, BitTorrent, etc), bits and pieces of the data reside on multiple personal computers located anywhere in the world, and if one goes down, the data is still accessible to anyone connected in the swarm. Our data is ours, we'll share it with whom we please, and if corporations or governments try to throttle our ability to share via BitTorrent, they would do well to remember the world is full of clever people; new protocols will be developed. Some may scoff and say server farms have backups on their backups - what could possibly go wrong? Think about the recent Twitter outage or the MegaUpload takedown.
Finally, speaking of MegaUpload, what's the latest word on that fat fellow in New Zealand? By now, we've all seen the footage of the police raid; debates on this entire subject will doubtless rage on for some time. I leave you with an observation, and a thought: look, really look, at that footage. Listen to the commentary, watch the people's reactions in the courtroom; see their faces. I get the sense of a decent people caught up in something they know to be unsavory, something brought to their shores under the guise of friendship with America. How do you tell your friends their government is listening to bad council and has gone astray?
Re: Re: Let me get this straight.....
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure the old "TA-DA!" ploy would be countered by the "I hereby sentence you to five years in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison" maneuver. Of course, he could counter with the "But I'm crazier than a shithouse rat!" defense, to which the proper judicial response (if hazy memories of old Perry Mason TV shows serve me correctly) would be "We are not amused."
Re: Re: Let me get this straight.....
Agreed. What's telling, though, is his tacit admission he can't go the last mile toward positive identification without the court's intercession. From one of his Settlement Demand Letters:
For good or ill, anonymity has ever been a valuable component of free expression; it is and should remain the toughest of veils to pierce.Let me get this straight.....
From his press release, Mr. Monsarrat claims:
OK, groovy. He's got patented technology to identify anonymous posters online. And yet, in his actual Complaint it states:He owns a cyber-investigation service. Wouldn't he have already identified these Does? Is his means of discovery the same old 'harvest IP addresses then subpoena ISPs for the actual name' shuck and jive the copyright trolls have been trying? Or do you have to notify the court before using cyber-investigation kung fu?Re:
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Reputations are forged in the crucible of collective society. You don't own them. Reputations can own you, however, if you define yourself only through past achievements and spend your days zealously guarding what once was, at the cost of what is.
Re: Re: YOUR only interest in "the blind" is as wedge against copyright.
I never read his comments, just the subject line and scan the rest. He's ranting about the pope in this one, yeah? Or is he going off against the monarchy again?
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Also, I'm assuming Dutch law enforcement are just as technologically inept as American LE, so this work would be outsourced...to China.
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Three boxes of SABAM laundry soap, delivered to your door by gaijin ninjas.
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The ultimate goal of any for-profit org is to literally turn you upside-down and shake every penny out of your pockets. Taking just 3.4% must seem a teeth-grinding compromise for SABAM (and does anyone else think that name sounds like laundry detergent?). Companies may propose any damn thing they please; it's up to those affected by these proposals to tell them to go pound sand.
Re: That's FINE! But an entire recent movie isn't fair use.
"Whatcha doin this weekend?"
"Well, I thought I'd do some infringement, then later mebbe do a little advocating."
"Sweet."
*rolls eyes*
(this is what I'd say if replying to the REAL ass_in_the_hat)
It's as if...
...I'm actually sitting in a bar in Hollywood and hearing those tie-wearers muttering 'fucking hippies and their fucking manifestos'...
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Your discussion with Akiri re 'attribution' brings to mind a concept perhaps closer to what you may be thinking about - provenance - wherein
which if you think for a moment sounds like the idealized version of metadata. Technology has caused the current churn in how copyright is viewed; perhaps someday descendants of current search/match algorithms will provide an automated provenance for any work appearing online: "This is the work of so-and-so; the style is in the school of such-and-such; the classical themes of thus-and thus are mirrored in the work." and so on.Re: Re: He should
Sadly, the only response to the assertions of posturing lawyers is to drag in another layer of attorneys. Traditional - honorable - remediations such as pillow fights or drinking contests are unavailing once the nuclear legal option is deployed.
Re: Diet?
Mountain Dew was once colorfully described as 'hillbilly piss'. Just acknowledging you drink it gives you mad hacker cred.
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Yes. That is EXACTLY how I imagine Canadian government works, except with more beer and less big anime eyes.
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Anytime a politician "insists that the government did indeed understand how [something technological] operates", a puppy gets kicked.
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The gentleman from France perhaps forgets that the creation of town centers devastated the door-to-door trade. Who speaks for the peddlers? And at what point in searching history do we stop and say 'this fits my ideal of commerce; let's use this system from the Middle Ages'?
dig if you will the response
this is what it sounds like
when lawyers lawyer up.
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First, +10 for using 'skeevy'.
Second, I'll stick with the only publication that's reliably delivered smut (and toilet paper) for over one hundred years - the Sears catalog.
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In striving to become inoffensive to all, Google will evolve into some weird analog of gut bacteria: necessary for the smooth operation of the corpus internetum, but not something you'd want your sister to date.