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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This comment was by me, I thought I was signed in.
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I think the same can be said of the housing market. A buyer does not care how underwater the previous owner is on their mortgage. They may be sympathetic, but that is not going to effect the price the buyer is willing to pay.
Or a start-up pitching investors. The potential investor is not going to base their decision or amount invested based on the start-ups sunk costs or how much time they put into the business. The investor only cares about a potential return.
Re: Why does it always go this way...
I think new Security Industrial Complex created by post 9/11 security hype is behind this new glut of legislation.
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Every time someone successfully files and receives approval on a patent, they have created an unlimited amount of precision financial missiles that can be deployed by any number of owners, future innovation terrorist organizations or individuals, against real innovators shipping financially viable products in the marketplace. I wonder if Lee Nguyen is proud of this. We know people like Andy Baio and Stephan Brunner are not.
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Who is Marcus? This guy can't even get names right.
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EPIC fail! Sorry, I couldn't resist.
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When you are and organization that distributes propaganda you need to stay on message.
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So if they wanted to be consistent they would need to choose the following:
Digital sales is licencing:
Pay Eminem his 50% licencing fee and not allow digital reselling since it is just like licencing.
Digital sales is a sale:
Pay Eminem his 15% sales fee and allow digital reselling since 1st sale doctrine applies.
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We can hold a Constitutional Convention to get around this problem of Congress being unwilling to reform their own corruption. http://prospect.org/article/calling-convention
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What about Dodd's freedom of speech?
/sarcasm
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I know we know this, but they may not understand that "rouge websites" and Anonymous are no the same thing. They are both things on the internet that the government does not like, but that is where the similarities end.
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Here is my guess:
They are saying the bill does not target domestic TLDs by domestic owners because they can go after them with dubious, due processes-free ICE Operation In Our Sites-style takedowns.
They are saying it will not affect foreign TLD by domestic owners because they can go after their hosting if it is domestic or their money under some other law using tortured logic and hide it under national security.
Foreign TLD that is US-directed are not targeted so bit.ly is in the clear according the the US.
They are saying it will not affect domestic TLD or domestic payment processing, and domestic ad networks owned by foreign owners because the FBI can just take down their hosting under some other law using tortured logic and hide it under national security.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that US companies need to comply.
What all of this says to foreigners: investment in going after the US market, using US based payment processing, hosting, and ad networks is risky and at the whim of a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats using SOPA. Don't try to do business in the US unless you are a member of some international trade org. What a bunch of jingoist crap!
If you want your site to be bulletproof from all possible future US legislation, do everything: domain TLD, hosting, payment, ad network outside the US. Go USA!
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Hey Mike, I'll turn this one into a video response as well.
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Have you seen Lamar Smith's Facebook wall? Most of the hundreds of comments to his posts and photos are unrelated to his posts and are opposition to either SOPA or keeping cannabis illegal. It's really not a surprise that he does not get the internet. How soon will it be until some Redditors personally harass him?
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The idea is that if infringement is theft, then when relatives infringe on you they are stealing your good will. Not copyright infringement in particular, but just to show how silly it is when you call other kinds of infringement a theft.
But I guess the hotel analogy can work too.
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I am using Pro Tools 10, Mbox 2 Mini, SM58, dbx compressor. Overkill, I know, but I am also a musician and mix engineer in my spare time.
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None taken ;) Thanks for the critique.
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So you are saying I don't have a future in voice-overs? ;) Sorry, it was the only voice I had lying around. If anyone has a nice voice and a decent recording setup hit me up and next time I have an idea for one of these I'll let you know.
You can find links to the papers and posts by following the links in the previous posts.
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This topic could be a whole other post on the topic with a different angle!
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Here is a video made by HandsOff.org in 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlhSbJYxOnc