Nick Dynice's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
from the favorites dept
This week's favorites post comes from Nick Dynice, a long-term, insightful member of the Techdirt community.
This week Mike and fellow contributors have been on a rampage, taking NYT to task with 7 posts, as of Friday afternoon, about the ridiculousness of the pay-wall.
But, my favorite post of the week was on Paul Vixie's explanation of why COICA is a dumb idea. Whenever the not-so-tech savvy entertainment industry and government get together to come up with a way to beat the emergent nature of the internet (which was designed as a worldwide copy machine that can survive a nuclear war), they just can't win. In this case, Vixie suggested that if the US government mandates DNS blocking with COICA, there will be the unintended consequence of incentivising someone to create an alternate DNS, which will break the universal naming premise that made the internet a success, and will not stop infringement. When Vixie is developing his own tech solutions, he actually thinks through all of these scenarios since he has to live with results -- unlike our Congress critters, who are out of office in a matter of years. Whenever I read about cases like this, I know there is some 80's movie narrative that explains the point pretty well and shows how things can spiral out of control. There is always some sort of pompous villain who creates obstacles for our heros. One such narrative is in the film Ghostbsters. In the scene where the character Walter Peck from the EPA shuts down the Laser Containment Unit because it is "in violation."
My other favorite post was about how The Newspaper Guild has a problem with Huffington Post using a different compensation model than legacy news organizations. Ironically (or not) plenty of anonymous critics came by to contribute their counter arguments to Techdirt for free in the comments.
The second most popular post was about the "infringement vs. inspiration" debate. If being inspired by or borrowing something is piracy, then let's all be pirates. The flood of troll commenters missed the point, as they always do, by insisting that the same examples Mike used were indeed determined to be infringement by law. But laws are man-made construct that can be changed and, in fact, were more permissive in the past. Isn't it time they change to reflect current realities?
The post with the most comments by far this week (a couple hundred so far) was regarding the tortured legal interpretations that many lawyer critics are using to defend the accidental seizure of a domain that took down 84,000 sites, with Mike debating many ACs with lots of "lols" and "insightfuls" being awarded. A truly religious debate.
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The IRS targeting groups critical of government taxation is really no different than DHS targeting protesters who are critical of the police state. Both are immoral acts by the government.
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I think it is time we built a "Statue of Privacy" somewhere.
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The only thing a real free market economy needs to restrict is the creation of an artificial monopoly.
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I have created a petition at WhiteHouse.gov: http://wh.gov/Hbjv
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This post inspires a few more practical project ideas:
A Firefox or Chrome plug in that will can for names of Congresscritters and Senators and add javascript to them so that when you hover over the text it will show a bubble with the representatives’ data from OpenSecrets API, possibly along with logos for donors.
A website that plays CSPAN embeds that has a way of detecting the name of the representatives on camera. To one site it can super-impose the headshot of the representatives on a body image and display corporate donor logos on their clothing, using the OpenSecrets API.
A website that is a directory of representatives that uses the OpenSecrets API to simply display the image of the headshot, body, and logos, along with a scoreboard or maybe some sort of Wall Street-style display of dollar totals.
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Enter: a proliferation of satirical LAC employee gripe blogs. Those should be fun reads.
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OPML is a thing, people. Look it up!
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It is important to note that Swartz wanted to fight the charges because he wanted to work in politics and be able to vote, as was noted in Quinn Norton's harrowing and heartbreaking account of the entire saga. Read that and tell me Heymann used discretion, Holder. As Norton revealed, this man would go to unethical extremes to get a guilty plea.
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You can take action here, but don't stop there. http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/aaron_justice/
Call you Representative also, once a week, and ask your friends to do the same.
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http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-founders-forum-2013-innovation-forum-comes-to-los-angele s-187085411.html
Also in attendance will be a VP from YouTube, the founders of Spotify, Soundcloud and Songkick, some UK bureaucrats, a chairperson from Maker Studios, and Jimmy Wales.
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I always thought beer was the cause of young people.
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In the maximalist world, your opinion doesn't matter if you don't have a history of profiting off of the IP system. That makes you an expert.
Those darn abolitionists who smuggled slaves to freedom just before the American Civil War. They were not economists.
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Hopefully he is too old. Let's hope he retires and does not try to get any other jobs.
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Well, Google has wasted no time and fired the first shot. The battle is on! https://www.google.com/takeaction/
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This is why he can't have nice things.
Re: "The explosion of litigation we are seeing is a reflection of how the patent system wires us for innovation" (as Nick Dynice)
Said the weapons manufacturer on sales: "The explosion in wars you are seeing throughout the world shows us that weapons wires us for war."
Or, more accurately: "The explosion of litigation we are seeing is a reflection of how lawyers are wired to find suits to make money from. It's natural and reasonable that innovative attorneys would seek to enrich their bank accounts using the patent system."
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I can't wait for these slides to be remixed into a new meme.
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If I had made some Star Wars fan fiction I would say to Disney: Come at me, bro. If the ire of Star Wars geeks can't help drive awareness about the need for copyright reform and the evental reform itself I don't know what can.
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I agree. Is it profit or propaganda? They can't have it both ways. I guess if you think of Fox News as farcical entertainment then you could think of the film the same way. Either way, all just an opportunity for the filmmakers to get more attention to the film.
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So much for "Don't be evil."