M. Alan Thomas II’s Techdirt Profile
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About M. Alan Thomas II
My addiction started when I began reading copyright law for fun in college, and it's all been downhill from there: library school, a "Guild of Radical Militant Librarians" t-shirt, an information policy Tumblr, and now Techdirt.
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Not a single advocate for the public? Is the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance so different from its U.S. counterpart?
(My answer: Not as far as I can tell.)
I'm less sure where The National Archives and the National Museum Directors' Council fall on that spectrum, but speaking as a librarian, I'd usually consider those allied professions and assume a similar pro-public-access-to-information ethic.
Re:
The Chamber of Commerce isn't going to be the target of any government budget cuts because it's not a government agency.
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Whereas Lieutenant General George Washington of Virginia commanded our armies throughout and to the successful termination of our Revolutionary War; Whereas Lieutenant General George Washington presided over the convention that formulated our Constitution; Whereas Lieutenant General George Washington twice served as President of the United States of America; and Whereas it is considered fitting and proper that no officer of the United States Army should outrank Lieutenant General George Washington on the Army list; Now, therefore, be it
Approved October 11, 1976.Public Law 94-479
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And by "don't like it very much" we mean "mostly (52%) like it, with a 5:3 favorable–unfavorable ratio." Which compares favorably with both the President and Congress.
These are only bad numbers by historical comparison, which I don't think justifies the more absolute headline.
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Three points:
(1) I'm not sure that there's any such thing as a "happiness drug"—even antidepressants don't really work that way—but I take your point.
(2) Your objections seem to assume that such an index would measure present-day happiness; they don't seem to respond to the question of what happens if a big-picture metric is chosen.
(3) The best argument for why we might choose a short-term metric is that we already effectively do so with snap polls, approval polls, "Do you think the country is headed in the right direction?" polls, and obvious short-term-profit-long-term-loss choices being made by government, but that simply invites the question of to what degree a designated metric would exacerbate a problem that arguably already exists in substantially similar form.
Not that I'm arguing in favor of such an index, mind you; I just think that this argument is perhaps missing some elements of the big picture itself.
Sleeping?
"A traditional targeted advertising system fails to account for what the user is doing (e.g., eating, interacting with another user, sleeping, etc.)."
Wait, sleeping? What ads do they think I should be watching when I'm asleep? Are they going for subliminal advertising or just jacking up the volume to make me wake up?
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Vint made a relatively absolute claim that I'm not sure is so absolute in the proposal. You're right that the proposal does seem to be designed to allow for the later back-door removal of M-Lab from the scheme (subject to replacement by another "research platform," which is not defined in the document but does seem to be inherently opposed to ISP ownership), but it doesn't require that. It does say that "The above approach will allow us to use 'on-net' results in the future as our primary data source for reports"; however, it also states fairly clearly that the off-net data (including research platforms) must keep being used in case the ISP's internal numbers are off, in which case the ISP's internal numbers can be discarded. I'm afraid that I have to side with Henning Schulzrinne in rejecting any reading of the proposal as absolutely replacing M-Lab.
Oh, and SamKnows wants sudo rights on every ISP-owned test server so they can check why the ISP's suddenly giving them bad data. I like that idea.
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Michael Burstein does seem to be saying that patents are a way of solving the problem, so it's not like they're useless. I imagine that, reformed, they will probably be the best solution for a certain class of cases, although I must admit to not being expert enough to identify specifically what that would be. (I think Burstein would like to see more research into that question.)
Re: Re: It's an airport.
It's not that I think that this is necessarily going to be usefully increased vigilance—I'm quite happy to accept increased risk of dying if I can do so with a clean conscience—but I also don't think that I have much expectation of privacy in this context to begin with. Useless boondoggles that only cost me taxes just aren't what I come to Techdirt to complain about.
It's an airport.
An airport is a public space where I could (presumably) legally record the people around me. While that in and of itself doesn't make it okay for the government to monitor it, it's also not what I would call a public forum; it's a transportation hub, not somewhere I go for a quick political rant. Indeed, for decades now airports have been high-security (i.e., monitored) areas where we know that certain talk (e.g., jokes about bombs) is forbidden.
To put it another way: This does not change my basic understanding of the world that airports are bad places to go when you want to talk about how much you hate the government and wish everyone would just die.
Plan B: Policy change
While it is true that to date the exemption to copyright for court opinions has been carefully kept unavailable to court filings, it is worth noting that this position might have occurred only as a result of there being no successful challenges to the de facto public domain status of the filings. As even state court opinions are normally uncopyrightable as matter of policy, the result of a successful suit might simply be a quick policy fix to restore the status quo ante.