Disney+ Titles Disappear Without Warning, Bringing Confusion To The Streaming Wars
from the here-today,-gone-tomorrow dept
While there’s little doubt that cheaper, more flexible streaming TV options are a definite step up from overpriced cable TV channel bundles, we’ve noted for a while how there’s a problem in the sector it hasn’t spent much time thinking about. As companies rush to lock down your favorite content via exclusives, users are increasingly being forced to hunt and peck among rotating catalogs to find the content they’re looking for. Want to watch Star Trek? You’ll need to subscribe to CBS All Access. Want to watch The Office? You’ll need to subscribe to Comcast’s streaming service. Friends? You’ll need AT&T.
The one two punch of ever shifting licensing deals and exclusives, shared among more than a dozen different services, risks over-complicating finding the content users are looking for. Push this particular idea too far in that direction, and consumers are going to simply pirate — an ironic outcome to a decade spent trying to migrate pirates to legit streaming alternatives.
So The Office is leaving Netflix in 2021 to go to an NBC streaming service…. pic.twitter.com/TdVgxfvsgk
— Jamie (@Jamie_2455) June 26, 2019
Case in point: Disney has done amazing work driving new users to its Disney+ streaming service with low(ish) price point and exclusive programs like The Mandalorian. But users this week began noticing that movies that were on the service just last month are already falling out of rotation, without users being notified that they were disappearing:
“…as 2020 began, some Disney Plus users noticed that a few films had gone missing from the streaming library.
Dr. Dolittle, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Home Alone and Home Alone 2, and The Sandlot are no longer streamable on Disney Plus. All these titles disappeared without warning, and so far, Disney has not commented on the titles.
Many fans are surprised by films dropping off the service, particularly since Disney hasn?t issued press releases about the changes. Where companies like HBO and Netflix put out monthly bulletins of everything coming to and leaving their streaming services each month, so viewers can plan their last-minute binges, Disney has only emphasized new arrivals, not departures.
To be clear this isn’t the end of the world, but it does create a level of consumer annoyance that, if driven at too large of a scale, could drive users back to pirating content. Eventually the industry needs to work in collaboration to make it easier to subscribe and unsubscribe from numerous services, track which services you’re subscribed to, clearly notify users when content licenses expire, and make it easier to search across multiple platforms to find particularly content.
Ignore the lessons of the past (that piracy is a competitor and a meaningful metric of potential customer dissatisfaction), and the sector is going to relive it. At which point you can easily see the industry blaming everything but its itself (“we gave you everything and you still pirated you ungrateful wretch”) for customers who drift back to piracy.
Filed Under: disney plus, exclusives, movies, silos, streaming
Companies: disney
Comments on “Disney+ Titles Disappear Without Warning, Bringing Confusion To The Streaming Wars”
Beast's Doghouse
Has anyone checked Beast’s Doghouse for the movies? I seem to remember that was a place where baseballs went to never be seen again.
Soon streaming will have the same little text ads telling you how your provider is not going to be carrying your fav shows anymore …..
This makes no sense for Disney
This doesn’t make a lick of sense. At least with say, the Office leaving Netflix or a movie such as the Firm leaving Hulu, Neither Hulu nor Netflix own those two particular pieces of content so it makes sense for them to leave seeing as their lease expired. With Disney+, it makes no sense whatsoever because Disney owns the property to begin with. What reason does Disney have to remove them when there are far more negatives associated with removing content they own than keeping it up? Could somebody please explain it to me?
Re: This makes no sense for Disney
It could be the case that Disney is using its "Vault" business model (i.e. purposefully holding back content and then releasing it later to high sales), but that made sense in the age of physical media and not when quick piracy is a competitor.
Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
"It could be the case that Disney is using its "Vault" business model (i.e. purposefully holding back content and then releasing it later to high sales), but that made sense in the age of physical media…"
Unfortunately the control freaks at Disney still think the Disney Vault makes sense. It never did, given how many it drove to piracy.
I’m thinking the good trolls at Disney have drunk the kool-aid and accepted the hype that "piracy is dead" because reasons and thus it is now possible to go right back to the good old days of physical media and movie theatres.
I used to say that there will come a time when the internet has become so screwed by greedy copyright cult corporations and legal snares the only ones to still have decent service will be the pirates. Disney’s certainly always put the extra hours in to make that vision a reality…
Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
The ‘Vault’ still makes some sense to Disney, in the sense that you want people to keep coming back, so rotate stuff out… except for all the people you lose by doing that.
Plus, there is probably way more Disney than anyone can realistically watch, so chances are they figure it won’t hurt to ‘retire’ some for a while. Then they can bring it back with a fanfare…
Re: This makes no sense for Disney
It’s the whole "Disney vault" thing but with streaming. It didn’t make very much sense then, either. Unless the whole plan is to annoy would-be-paying customers with artificial scarcity, anyway.
Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
As I said, the "Disney Vault" business model doesn’t make sense in the age of rampant piracy and, moreso, devalues their own product.
Re: Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
Completely agreed. Your post appeared while I was typing mine. 🙂
Re: Re: Re:2 This makes no sense for Disney
Ah. My apologies, then.
Re: Re: Re:3 This makes no sense for Disney
No worries.
I sometimes wish the discussions would automatically refresh, but it’s probably not worth the overhead.
Re: Re: Re:3 This makes no sense for Disney
Enter copyright lawyer –
You are hereby issued a cease and desist for sharing pirated content. You clearly stole Jason’s idea by coming up with the same idea a few minutes after he did.
Re: Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
Vault model: When distributing DVDs/blu-rays it kind of makes sense as long as the discs are ones that are actually popular with multiple generations. Other titles haven’t aged so well.
Disney seems to think demand for a small selection of older titles can be used to drive demand for the streaming service, but a subscription isn’t the same at all. Unless they expect people to subscribe for access to particular titles and then cancel their subscriptions. Which is bass-ackwards from the better profit model of a set it and forget it subscription.
Re: Re: Re:2 This makes no sense for Disney
Exactly. A friend of mine once said to me, "why do I need to buy CDs anymore when I can just subscribe to a music streaming service and listen to whatever I want whenever I want."
Well, you can’t if they rotate what’s available in their library.
Re: Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
"As I said, the "Disney Vault" business model doesn’t make sense in the age of rampant piracy and, moreso, devalues their own product."
It never really made sense. Disney has always been considered a veritable Iran of Copyright (remember when they went after every comic artist using anthropomorphic birds and mice?) and many of their marketing decisions reflect a desire of control rather than a desire to actually make money. Disney and Sony both stand out as the core members of this Church of Holy Copyright – just that disney’s window dressing is a lot fluffier than Sony’s.
Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
When you are producing content in batches, like DVDs, once you have sold out, it makes sense to wait for demand to build up before pressing a new batch, as there is a minimum number of sales for the pressing to be profitable. When you are dealing with digital copies, it costs so little to keep a copy available that it makes no sense to remove a film from a service even if they have been no views for several years.
Re: Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
Not only that, but in the case of Disney+, it’s a streaming service, so à la carte Digital Copies don’t even factor in the equation when one is paying for all of the content per month for a monthly fee…
Re: Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
The costs are minimal. A glass master costs a couple of thousand dollars, but that already exists and can be reused. Even a small run of 1000 discs with packaging won’t be much more than $2/unit (and the cost can be passed along). This excuse doesn’t work at Disney’s scale.
Re: Re: Re:2 This makes no sense for Disney
You are ignoring all the costs involved in getting those discs to the customer via a retail outlet. Also, unless you are doing direct sales, 1000 discs are no where near enough to send 1 to every possible outlet. A band selling DVDs at their gigs could find that level of production useful, but the possible profits would not pay for all the management and legal time involved inside a large bureaucracy, or the management and stocking time at a retail outlets.
Re: Re: Re:3 This makes no sense for Disney
The existence of dollar stores makes me think this could be done for less than a dollar per unit.
That’s the point. If some obscure band can get prices like that, Disney can get their costs even lower. With their well-known name they can get people to pay an extra $5 or $10 for "classic" re-releases, and they should have little trouble selling a box of discs to every Walmart. They just don’t want to; not because it would be unprofitable, but because they think the artificial scarcity will benefit them more.
If the old Disney movies went out of copyright, other companies would be racing to press the discs.
Re: Re: Re:4 This makes no sense for Disney
You keep looking at the wrong part of the costs. A band can decide to get a DVD made, whilst having a pint after a band practice, have one of them send a copy of the masters o the pressing plant the next day, and once the receive their box of DVDs, all they have to do is put some in the van when they set out for a gig, and have a roady sell them to fans.
They will have sold out their run of DVDs before Disney have managed to hold the meeting to decide whether the rerun is worthwhile, never mind run the bureaucratic processes involved in getting a copy of the master to the pressing plant, and organizing the distribution from the plant to the distribution warehouses, along with the advertising campaign to drive the sales.. Disney only think in terms large scale distribution, and that requires large volumes, and lots of management time, actual production costs are small part of their costs. Because of this Disney will have a high sales volume as a minimum for a repressing of a DVD.
If Disney films were out of copyright, there are companies that would be producing copies, but they would be companies with much smaller overheads than Disney, as in companies with a turnover that would not pay the salary of one Disney executive.
Re: Re: Re:5 This makes no sense for Disney
If Disney’s unable to compete, why should that be society’s problem? If beaurocracy prevents them from releasing the material, they shouldn’t be allowed to keep copyright on it. I guarantee you they’d solve all these beaurocratic and logistical hurdles really quickly if that were the deal.
Re: Re: Re:4 This makes no sense for Disney
"The existence of dollar stores makes me think this could be done for less than a dollar per unit."
The existence of this comment makes me think you don’t understand how that end of the market sources its stock.
"If some obscure band can get prices like that, Disney can get their costs even lower"
At the same quality, with the logistics and additional costs (storage, transport, breakages, etc) involved with wide distribution, along with the end of life costs of dealing with unsold stock? Unlikely.
I’d read a few things about scale distribution if I were you, things change somewhat with the kinds of numbers Disney deal with vs. your garage band.
Re: Re: Re:5 This makes no sense for Disney
That’s not the point. The point is that "minimum number of sales for the pressing to be profitable" can in no way justify the Disney vault strategy, and never could. If companies can profitably sell cheap plastics for $1 in large quantities, there’s certainly a higher but reasonable price at which Disney could sell any non-obscure vaulted title profitably.
Let’s say $60/disc, with a run of 10,000, exclusively sold online and shipped via USPS domestic mail. There’s no way that would be unprofitable, even if the amount of profit is a trifle by Disney’s standards.
Re: Re: Re:6 This makes no sense for Disney
"If companies can profitably sell cheap plastics for $1 in large quantities"
FFS, that’s my point. You’re missing the point where they often buy excess stock AT A LOSS to the original retailer/manufacturer. Of course they’re able to offer stock cheaply if they’re buying it for less than it cost to make and distribute it in the first place.
"Let’s say $60/disc"
Why would people suddenly start paying that much now? That’s over 3 times the current price of a new Disney disc.
"There’s no way that would be unprofitable"
There is if nobody wants to pay the idiotic markup you just demanded.
Re: Re: Re:7 This makes no sense for Disn
Bullshit. There are things my local dollar stores have been selling for decades at 50¢/unit. That’s not surplus, it’s manufactured specifically and repeatedly for them.
I’m demanding nothing. I marvel that people will drop hundreds of dollars a day to take their kids to Disney World, but they do—in large numbers. When something’s rare and desirable, there are always parents willing to buy it for their kids. Lots are willing to buy $60 presents, although you’re missing that this is an exageration—it will not literally take a doubling or tripling of sale price to bring a smaller-than-usual disc run out of the red.
Disney has never used actual costs to justify their vault strategy, because it’s not a valid justification—and, anyway, they’ve never felt a need to justify it at all.
Re: Re: Re:8 This makes no sense for
"That’s not surplus, it’s manufactured specifically and repeatedly for them."
Some things yes, some things no. Things like batches of DVDs of movies that used to sell full price in major retailers, almost certainly not.
"I marvel that people will drop hundreds of dollars a day to take their kids to Disney World, but they do—in large numbers"
Yes, including myself this year in fact, travelling halfway across the world to take my niece and nephew there as a once in a lifetime experience. Worth every penny since they’re unlikely to get that experience again before adulthood and not something that can be easily replicated at home.
That doesn’t mean you can sell them a $10 DVD at $60 just because you decided to ask for a ridiculous markup.
Re: Re: Re:7 This makes no sense for Disn
Really? The dollar stores near me mostly carry the same stock year-round. And there are seasonal products that I’ve only ever seen at that particular chain, but they’re been at multiple locations at least four years in a row. So are you telling me the same companies are making the same mistakes and selling the same overstock at a loss month after month, year after year? You’d think they’d eventually lower their production a bit if that was the case.
Re: Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
"When you are producing content in batches, like DVDs, once you have sold out, it makes sense to wait for demand to build up before pressing a new batch, as there is a minimum number of sales for the pressing to be profitable."
Except that was never Disney’s deal. There are a number of market calculations available on the cost-benefit of continually making and selling new content which pans uot solidly in favor of consistently churning out new movies…but for that to work they need a clean playing field where they don’t need to compete with their own olden goldies for the household budgets.
And it also allows them to simply remaster their old movies and re-sell them at new price. How many here have five different editions of "Snow White" by now?
Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
"Unless the whole plan is to annoy would-be-paying customers with artificial scarcity, anyway"
In the era of tape and shiny disc sales, that was exactly the plan. Tell everyone it’s going away, get a rush of sales, hold it back for a bit, release a new "special" edition, get another rush of sales.
But in the era of streaming this seems more like a variant on the underpant gnomes business model:
Re: Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
"But in the era of streaming this seems more like a variant on the underpant gnomes business model…"
Not just in the era of streaming. A lot of corporations operate with the underpant gnome business model, but it’s pretty telling that major media companies almost always place 99% of their efforts in that particular bracket. They always have.
It’s similarly pretty telling that the reason Netflix ate so much of the market is because they came onto the scene of media without putting ANY stock in the underpant gnome business model, always putting a clear focus on HOW to achieve their profits.
All too often Disney, Sony, and other major entertainment companies operate from what I can only term a religious belief in marketing schemes relying exclusively on keeping people from simply pressing "ctrl-C".
Re: Re: Re:2 This makes no sense for Disney
Above comment by me…got logged out, for some reason.
Re: Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney
Except that it appears to work. Disney has no shortage of profit, nor of subscribers to their streaming service. Even if everyone hates the vault model, it’s a stretch to say it reduces profit. Where’s the evidence?
Re: This makes no sense for Disney
"This doesn’t make a lick of sense"
Corporate licencing rarely does.
From what I understand, Disney had pre-existing agreements for other providers to have the titles that dated to before they planned to launch Disney+. Then, rather than leave money on the table for content such as Home Alone over the launch and Christmas period, they opted to stream them until they had to give up streaming rights and then remove them when they had to. The above may or may not be accurate, but it fits with the short term gain at the expense of the long term that’s typical of these things.
It’s utterly idiotic from a consumer point of view, but realistically what do Disney have to really lose here? Nobody’s subscribing to Disney+ solely for the titles that left, and when the crunch comes and the market collapses because people only want to subscribe to the same couple of services, Disney+ is likely to have a top spot on that list.
Re: This makes no sense for Disney
I know for at least some of these films it’s due to existing license deals, and the films will return when those deals expire. Disney already talked about it, so I’m surprised this article or the one it’s based on didn’t mention it.
‘A Disney+ spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that, "a small number of titles had left the platform over issues relating to legacy deals. However, all of those titles that have left will return to the service as soon as those licenses expire."’
https://comicbook.com/2020/01/02/disney-plus-home-alone-sandlot-removed-reveals-why-more-were/
Re: Re: The answer I was looking for
Thank you! This makes the most sense as to an explanation! God bless the Techdirt comments section!
Re: Re: Re: The answer I was looking for
I love how Disney acts like it’s some force of nature that’s out of their hands when actually what happened is they chose to sell the exclusive rights to stream these to someone else instead of putting it on their own service they knew was coming.
Re: Re: Re:2 The answer I was looking for
These agreements were in place long before Disney decided to roll out their own service. Some were also carried over from the purchase of Fox.
Re: Re: Re:3 The answer I was looking for
Fair enough. I don’t know who knew they were going to create their own streaming service when. I still feel like they are playing victim to their own actions whether they decided to do the service and then signed up to a bunch of long term agreements or signed up to a bunch of long term agreements and then decided to do a streaming service.
Re: Re: Re:4 The answer I was looking for
We’re talking about an organization that spent years and millions of dollars conflating copyright and trademark law to keep a cartoon from the 1920s out of everyone else’s hands.
Disney’s at the point where Katy Perry is – even when they’re in the right, I think I’d give myself spinal bifida trying to eke out a modicum of sympathy for them hoisting themselves on their own petard…
Re: Re: Re:2 The answer I was looking for
Well it’s out of their hands once they sign on the dotted line.
Disney should have made the jump to streaming years ago. It’s been obvious for years that Netflix would destroy cable and broadcast. But corporations find it hard to shed a business that is making money today just because they know that it’s going to crash and burn tomorrow and they need to put those resources towards planning for the future.
Disney jumped to streaming at pretty much the last possible moment but maybe they planned it that way. They’re like a fighter pilot who knows his plane has been hit and is doomed. But it’s still gliding along, looking from the outside like it could be salvaged. He’ll wait till the last possible moment to eject just so he doesn’t look like a panicky coward.
Disney has shareholders to answer to, and some of those shareholders even now are bitching about how Disney is undermining profitable businesses by plowing resources into this newfangled streaming jazz that cannibalizes cable and broadcast but isn’t as profitable per person (and never will be, the days are gone when everyone had to subsidize ESPN with their cable subscription despite half of them not watching sports.)
Re: This makes no sense for Disney
Welcome to the "Disney Digital Vault" where all your favorites go to die for a few years, until Disney can squeeze top dollar out of them again for the next generation…
It will happen, and they will claim it’s to ‘help’ consumers when we all know it’s just trying to create artificial scarcity to increase the marginal profit margin available. Forget that they already recovered their cost 100X over during the initial release and showings, they expect to be able to keep bleeding the customers until they have nothing left to give.
Don’t give these bloodsuckers anything, no matter how ‘entertaining’ you may think their creations (stolen copyright on most, since they can’t be bothered to pay for the things they appropriate, but expect everyone else to pay for their appropriated culture…)
Re: This makes no sense for Disney
In this case Disney made deals with Netflix a long time ago before they even were considering their own streaming service and they don’t want to buy out those contracts because it would be expensive they would rather just wait a year
One explanation for the missing movies:
Disney thought everyone liked Pirates of the Caribbean, so they decided to help everyone become a pirate.
Re: One explanation for the missing movies:
I like where this is going! Do you think they’ll also pay for me to live in the Caribbean?
Re: Re: One explanation for the missing movies:
I don’t see why not!
Re: Re: Re: One explanation for the missing movies:
Why is the rum gone?
Re: Re: Re:2 One explanation for the missing movies:
BURp…dont know
Re: Re: Re:2 One explanation for the missing movies:
Pirates deserve to walk the plank.
Re: Re: Re:2 One explanation for the missing movies:
Ask Captain Jack Sparrow.
Went to watch Stranger Tides last night actually, and found it missing. Googled, and I couldn’t find it on any streaming service that didn’t want you to also pay to rent the movie.
And we have Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix as well as Disney+.
Re: Re:
No, we don’t have Hulu. This is Canada.
not quite, but close
That’s more the actual complaint, I think.
Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming.
I had a thought the other day, about someone setting up a sort of TV guide type service where one could look up what they wanted to watch and find out how to get that service (maybe someone like IMBD could link to them). The article above shows how difficult it would be to maintain any kind of accurate listing (who would want THAT headache?). Hell, not even the sites providing the streams seem to be able to keep an accurate listing as without any kind of hint about why changes are made there is no predicting what the lists will be tomorrow.
Storage is so cheap these days, it doesn’t seem like technical difficulties would be the issue, even if some property only got one viewing per year, the fact that that property was available might get someone to subscribe to your service. Or many someones. There might be some convoluted scheme involving scarcity that these folks are playing with, but it appears they are going to piss viewers off (with the attendant revenue issues) more than reap benefits from artificial scarcity.
Re: Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming.
There’s an app, at least on the iPhone, I would assume Android also called "JustWatch". You can enter the name of whatever you’re looking for and it’ll show you where you can buy it, rent it, or Stream it. It seems to work pretty good for things I’m entering into it.
Re: Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming.
Would such an app even be legal under current laws?
Re: Re: Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming.
Considering that the app leads people to buy, stream or rent, I don’t think the copyright holders or licensees even have an incentive to litigate seeing as there’s no harm being shown.
Re: Re: Re: Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming.
Did they ever need an incentive to shoot themselves in the foot and sue someone else for the hospital bills and emotional distress?
Re: Re: Re: Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming.
"Considering that the app leads people to buy, stream or rent, I don’t think the copyright holders or licensees even have an incentive to litigate seeing as there’s no harm being shown."
You realize you’re talking about the industry which has repeatedly, in the past, spent hundreds of millions to fight phenomena which would have made them money?
At the end of the day the copyright cult is all about control.
The closest analogy I can think of is how the catholic church fought tooth and nail to keep bible interpretation in the hands of ordained priests because the core goal was control rather than how many people actually ended up believing in christianity.
Re: Re: Re:2 Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming
Great points. I forgot that the MPA and the RIAA are the same type of industries that want to strangle the formats that will then make them money. Me stupid.
Re: Re: Re:3 Using the Magic Eight Ball to select program
"Great points. I forgot that the MPA and the RIAA are the same type of industries that want to strangle the formats that will then make them money."
Not just them, unfortunately. We’ve all seen, over the years, numerous copyright cult corporations throwing millions of dollars down a black hole in litigation and lobbying to fight off massive opportunities for them. I keep having this vision of a confused redneck running down main street firing a shotgun at the guys running after him screaming "Stand still and take my money!!!" as if he was running from the zombie uprising.
" Me stupid."
For forgetting that these corporations – run by mature adults able to tie their own shoelaces – often act as if they were clinically insane or mentally disabled? No. That’s not "stupid". 🙂
Re: Using the Magic Eight Ball to select programming.
Try justwatch.com.
It doesn’t subscribe to services for you but it lets you see where everything is.
What people seem to want is some kind of meta-service, one place to subscribe to stuff. Amazon is building that. You can subscribe to HBO and some other services via Amazon. Of course you’ll pay full freight (after teaser deals expire).
What people really want are customized payment plans so they don’t pay full freight to all services at once. For starters, Amazon could set up auto-churn so you can schedule the beginning and end dates of services across all the ones they offer. Same thing any of us can do, but easier.
The problem is: Amazon has to do deals with Disney, Netflix, Apple etc to be able to offer their services; and has to convince them that automated starting and stopping is in their interest. Which it isn’t. The big services know they can get subscribers without offering such deals. They want the opposite, to keep subscribers coming back and not even looking at the competition.
I think "Amazing Work" is a bit of a stretch.. When it was released after months of beta testing it still couldn’t even resume your shows or tell you which episodes you had watched.. Didn’t work at all for tons of people, still doesn’t work on Linux and worst of all… No Muppet Show..
"and exclusive programs like The Mandalorian" is maybe less of a stretch but I would say instead "and the exclusive program: The Mandalorian"
I predicted Disney would screw this up because they overvalue their content and doing something like throwing the doors open so you can watch whatever you want just isn’t in their DNA but I did not predict that they would screw up the service itself so badly.. I mean they already had Hulu running for a long time, it’s pretty embarrassing I should think.
Disney also specifically made the claim that they were not going to do the rotating stock thing when promoting the service.
So anyway stop hoarding The Muppet Show and you will have my 7$
Re:
It works on Linux now and has for a month at this point.
Re: Re: Re:
Hey Nice! Apparently I’m behind the time since I cancelled my service.
Re: Re: Re:
To their credit they fixed all these issues very quickly after launch.
Re: Muppets
I bet there’s no Muppets because of all the music involved. I remember the first season on DVD: My favourite song was cut out of my favourite episode of that season. I wasn’t happy. Bunch of Muppets.
Re: Re: Muppets
Perhaps the same reason Muppet Babies isn’t on Disney+ either: there’s so much third-party video footage in every episode that it’s a licensing nightmare to deal with, so it makes more sense just to leave it off of Streaming Services (and home video entirely).
Re: Re: Muppets
If it’s cost prohibitive to allow people to see the Muppet show and other beloved shows I certainly wouldn’t blame music for it. Having music in shows is nice and creates no problem for releasing anything. If the horrible state of copyright law makes it cost prohibitive to release shows that have music in them it’s victim blaming to point the finger at the music.
Something something decades screaming about piracy, we think they finally got a glimmer of a hint seeing piracy drop as they made it easier for people to get the content legally….
They some dipshit said this whole vault thing worked well last time, some other dipshit decided that people would pay to add more streaming services (I mean really, its just like cable!!! They’ll pay more for HBO, ShowTime, etc etc WE’LL BE RICH!!!!!!)
Rather than offer 1 or 2 really good streaming platforms (iTunes?) each of them is going to build their own (UltraViolet now with 17 more websites you have to log into first to verify your access rights) and expect consumers to pay a premium price…
They aren’t very bright are they…
Hey, this golden egg is awesome.
But I bet if we cut the goose open, we could get a second golden egg, and we wouldn’t have to wait for tomorrow.
Frankly, I can’t see any downsides to this plan, and I suggest we implement it immediately.
Gentlemen, sharpen your axes.
The result of allowing a company to silo in their content.
Honestly this is bad for the consumer. Disney leads the charge with anticompetitive practices with their refusal to licence their content all while swallowing more companies.
Honestly Copyright protection is so powerful, cheap and broken that companies might end up getting away with recreating cable channel’s BS on the internet and resume their gouging. How long before we also get bombarded with ads on subscription services just like cable?
Re: The result of allowing a company to silo in their content.
I pretty much figured that once Netflix became successful and the way was paved for streaming services, everyone would start to mimic the gouging model cable was famous for…
Why make a reasonable income licensing affordable content when you can hoard everything including old crap and keep it all wing-wangs for yourself?
Give it a few years and streaming services will all be trashy reality shows and paranormal/Bigfoot/aliens/hunt for lost nazi gold shows and anything remotely worth watching will be locked into a deluxe package.
The beauty of history is if you miss it the first time, you can experience it all over again when it repeats itself.
Re: The result of allowing a company to silo in their content.
Hulu already does ads at the beginning of some shows, even for paying customers. Unless you pay even more money.
I don’t get the logic, If I’m streaming the content I am not suddenly going to start watching it on cable just because of their dumb unskipable ad.
just things settling into place
This is just part of the process of Disney wrangling back their licenses from their licensors.
http://www.darkhorizons.com/disney-rep-explains-rotating-film-slate/
Global streaming means no more licensors – why bother with middlemen when you go direct to the customer? But Disney isn’t global yet, and the process of getting there will be messy.
"Eventually the industry needs to work in collaboration to make it easier to subscribe and unsubscribe from numerous services, track which services you’re subscribed to, clearly notify users when content licenses expire, and make it easier to search across multiple platforms to find particularly content."
The industry will work on that collaboration through mergers & acquisitions. Independent corporations don’t cooperate with others; they are set up to continually try to kill and eat competitors. Fox and Hulu now cooperate nicely with Disney because Disney killed and ate them.
More mergers are on the way. Apple is probably going to buy MGM soon and somebody is going to buy ViacomCBS. This whole industry will probably crunch down to four or so global behemoths, so the confusing and annoying range of competitors will become more tolerable.
As for finding where content is, try this: justwatch.com
I’m not confused, when it’s not on Netflix I go without. Or pirate. I started pirating again last year after 4 years without downloading a single movie/series. Because of this kind of stupidity.
As for the usual copyright morons around here, I couldn’t care less about your rants of how much of a criminal I am when the big copyright holders engage in all sorts of fuckery like this.
Another example of if you can’t touch the media or device storing your data, the data isn’t yours and may vanish with no notice or recourse.
A decade spent successfully migrating pirates to legit streaming alternatives.
And they’re going to throw it all away because some mid-level execs need bullet points for their evaluations so they come up with these ‘great ideas’ for squeezing a tiny little bit more short-term income.
hrmm
………want to pirate it all get bittorrent
that ends the streaming wars
Disney regularly does this
They bury titles in a peat bog for 10 – 20 years to drum up "demand" for a "re-release". That should work even better in an age of digital streaming media, no?
Waitaminnit
Stop playing their damned games and go to putlocker.
I stopped pirating 4 years ago when I subscribed to NetFlix. I thought then that was all I ever needed
This week i noticed that a series I was (occasionally) watching was removed from site
As the cartoon accurately says . . . . "hello old friend"
Finding legal content is not the problem
It is responsibility of end users to find authorised vendor of copyrighted works, and paying the requested amount of money before consuming the work.
This basically means that end users need to do "more work" to find legal alternative to find the real author of the copyrighted work. Giving your money to scammers who have large pirate collections is not acceptable, instead you need to read the copyright notices, and find authorised vendor who can provide you with legal copy of the material.
Proper authors cannot reach all the users on the planet. There’s always pirate vendors available too, and author’s works can often be lost in the flood of pirate material. But this is why it’s every end user’s responsibility to find authorised vendor for all the consumed material and reject the scammers who provide pirate or counterfeit products.
Depending on the amount of scammers in the market, the end user’s job of finding needle in the heystack can be slightly more difficult.
Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
Since when has Disney paid the authors and actors their fair share of the profits, rather than using Hollywood accounting to keep the money themselves? In some respects, the legacy publishing industry is one of the oldest collection of scammers going.
Re: Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
obviously end users can evaluate themselves who is trustworthy entities in the market. If end user accidentally chooses a scammer to obtain the work from, the end user takes a risk of copyright infringement lawsuit. So the choices need to be made carefully to pass the money to the right vendor.
Re: Re: Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
How to miss the point totally. Buying from Disney is not Infringement, but neither does it do much to put money in the pockets of the actual creators.
Re: Re: Re:2 Finding legal content is not the problem
Well, if your author can reach that area of the world by distributing their permissions to the chosen vendors, then author is getting his fair share of the profits.
Re: Re: Re:3 Finding legal content is not the problem
"then author is getting his fair share of the profits"
The fantasy world you live in where studios ripping off artists isn’t famous enough to have its own popular nickname is interesting. However, can you keep the conversation to this reality?
Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
Our favourite moron has returned! Made any useless pieces of software nobody can work out how to use over the holidays? Any "perfect" pieces of software that have no reason for anybody to even consider paying for them?
"Giving your money to scammers who have large pirate collections is not acceptable"
Nobody’s doing that, numbnuts. If they can’t find a convenient way to pay for the products they’re trying to get hold of, they’ll get it for free.
"Proper authors cannot reach all the users on the planet"
I love the fact that this is your comment in a conversation about bloody Disney.
Re: Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
I know it’s harsh to compete against vendors like disney, when the competition has global distribution network worth billions of dollars to distribute their products, and I need to rely on random messages in techdirt.
It’s currently not possible to pay for them, given that I haven’t implemented monetising feature. I considered the actually useful product to be more important than trying to fetch money from end users. (well, if you find my itch.io page, it’s possible to send money)
Re: Re: Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
"I know it’s harsh to compete against vendors like disney"
They are not a competitor to your product, yet you still come in here to regularly complain about how you’ve failed.
"I need to rely on random messages in techdirt."
Well, you don’t but at least you’ve stopped spending huge amounts of money on a type of marketing that would never work in a million years.
"It’s currently not possible to pay for them"
Then you lose nothing if someone decided to pirate them.
Re: Re: Re:2 Finding legal content is not the problem
This probably isn’t true. And I have copy-protection provided by the web technologies/web servers available, so pirating might not be possibe anyway.
Re: Re: Re:3 Finding legal content is not the problem
Every single piece of content available is piratable due to The Analog Hole. There’s never been a pirate-proof DRM mechanism. Never has, never will be. DRM failing is as inevitable as death and taxes.
Re: Re: Re:4 Finding legal content is not the problem
My content is interactive, with user input required. Good luck with your analog hole and recording equipment. When interactive content is available, it provides more value than a mere recording.
Re: Re: Re:5 Finding legal content is not the pro
Only if it has an online component with multiplayer capabilities and servers from the developers themselves can you be kicked off if you break the DRM. Still, the DRM could be broken.
Re: Re: Re:6 Finding legal content is not the
He’s getting himself confused again. He’s rambling about his magic yet unmarketable software, not realising that everybody else is talking about the movies that the article is about.
Re: Re: Re:5 Finding legal content is not the pro
"When interactive content is available"
There are accompanying attack vectors.
Re: Re: Re:3 Finding legal content is not the problem
"This probably isn’t true"
State how you lose money from a product that is not for sale.
"I have copy-protection"
Which is not the magic rock you think it is.
Re: Re: Re:4 Finding legal content is not the problem
flood of pirated products replaces shelfspace from legal products. End users never bother to look at my product since they’re busy watching pirated hollywood movies, and thus I need to compete not only against local content, but also a flood of pirated high quality global content.
this happens also when someone elses product is pirated, even though you’re only allowed to sue for copyright infringement of your own product.
Basically there isn’t any way to stop the flood of someone elses pirated products, because the system doesnt let us sue if our own product isn’t the product being pirated.
Re: Re: Re:5 Finding legal content is not the pro
Why don’t you just admit your product is not competitive, and figure out why and fix it. Piracy is not the problem you think it is, and competition is the name of the game in a free market.
Re: Re: Re:6 Finding legal content is not the
See the failure list. How do you fix the problem that you don’t have 2 million content items available in your web page?
Re: Re: Re:7 Finding legal content is not
Last I checked Disney+ doesn’t have 2 million content items available. Hell, the article is about them having even fewer items available. Yet it’s touted as an answer to Netflix.
You figure the rest out, I’m not doing your Meshpage homework for you.
Re: Re: Re:8 Finding legal content is
They keep claiming disney is outdated for this exact reason. Other players in the market have "better" selection of home videos.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
Then name them. Netflix doesn’t have "2 million". Again, I’m not doing your damn homework for you.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
"Other players in the market have "better" selection of home videos."
Home videos?
Maybe the reason you’re so deluded is that you think that VHS is the current leading format? Hmmm…
Re: Re: Re:5 Finding legal content is not the pro
As we’ve told you on multiple occasions, that’s not how competition works. Competition is “like against like”. Yes, they all have to compete for your time, but any attempts to block an unlike “competitor” is unlikely—at best—to have any observable impact whatsoever on your success because there is unlikely to be any substantial overlap between those who pirate movies and those who would have any interest in your product or anything like your product.
Also, of course you can’t sue over copyright infringement of someone else’s work. That’s copyright 101. No legal system has ever allowed such a thing. The legal system is flawed, but only allowing people to sue over copyright infringement of works that they themselves own the copyright to is not one of them, and to allow otherwise goes against the most basic principles of copyright and legal standing and would be a perversion of justice and equity.
Finally, of course you’ll have to compete against high-quality global content, but not if it’s in a completely unrelated market. Disney movies—pirates or otherwise—do not compete with your product at all. Let’s pretend that the general copyright maximalist claim—that every pirated copy is a lost sale—is valid. That would necessarily mean that every copy that gets pirated would otherwise make money for the copyright-holder. So if you successfully end piracy in any manner, those people pirating Disney movies won’t go for your product; they’ll spend their time with the legitimate copies instead, almost certainly spending the same time on Disney movies whether they pirate them or get them legitimately. (Of course, this is not the case, but it’s still the case that someone who would otherwise pirate a Disney movie is more likely to legitimately purchase or stream that movie or pirate or legitimately watch some other movie instead if prevented rather than look up your software.)
Re: Re: Re:6 Finding legal content is not the
This isn’t true. When disney does awesome animations, it places some strict expectations of how good quality animation systems should implement. When children are watching nice animations, and when my tool that is designed for children to use, cannot fullfil the quality requirements they see in disney movies, the tool might be rejected by the children. In this way, disney movies are substituting the market for my animation tool.
If these are legal copies of disney movies, this all is valid competition. Then it just depends whether children consider good quality animation more important than the ability to create their own animated films.
Re: Re: Re:7 Finding legal content is not
You still aren’t competing with Disney movies. At most, you’re competing with Disney’s animation tools. And even then it’s not true competition because Disney doesn’t sell its animation tools, like, at all, and all animation is done using proprietary tools. So it’s still not the same market. Competition is not the only way different companies/products affect each other; it’s just the largest one.
Also, your success doesn’t depend on whether or not the competition is “valid” or not. If all the people who pirated Disney movies started buying them legitimately instead, that would have precisely 0 effect on your bottom line, even by your argument. As far as your product is concerned, whether the competition is pirated or not is irrelevant for you. You will see no actual changes to your success if every pirate stopped pirating Disney movies. There are legal and moral differences, to be sure, but none of that actually affects you from a practical perspective.
Re: Re: Re:8 Finding legal content is
This isnt true. Legal software distribution has overheads like money collection and shelf placement which isn’t an issue with pirated software. Also people consider more carefully whether they actually need the product, whenever they need to part with their money to obtain the product. Piracy messes up with this equation badly, because it fills the demand gaps without compensating the authors. It’s only those demand gaps in the marketplace which makes people buy the product with their own money.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
Works in the public domain exist without authors being compensated, yet modern works still perform very well. You can compete with free.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
"shelf placement"
Lol.
Re: Re: Re:7 Finding legal content is not
I have news for you, a child could not compete with Pixar when it come to animation, even with the same tools, as those animations are created by teams of people, as it can take months to model and animate a single character.
Re: Re: Re:8 Finding legal content is
That’s no reason to deny the opportunity to let the children create animations.
And we can provide good enough tooling that the children’s work will be as good as what pixar can do. It’s just a small challenge to genius that we are. Just need to keep costs down so that it is affordable to the children and their families.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
"That’s no reason to deny the opportunity to let the children create animations."
Nobody’s denying them any opportunity. It’s just that you’re uninformed enough to think that the only things standing between the average 8 year old and the teams of hundreds or thousands who work on the average Pixar movie is the age range of the interface.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
How to miss the point, it not the software that is the problem, but rather the number of person hours needed to create a 3d models, rigged ready for animation. About the only way of doing that is to provide a library of pre-rigged characters, ready for using in an animated movie. After that, there is the need for writing the script, working up a storyboard, plotting character movements etc.
The time investment for even a short animation is more than most children have the patience for, and for the few children that do, there is Blender along with lots of video tutorials, and a very supportive community to help the newcomer.
Re: Re: Re:10 Finding legal co
In other words: the only thing he’s even considering is the time rendering the end product. In order to make his point he has to both ignore the other 99% of work that goes into an animation and pretend that the work of the hundreds or thousands of people who work on a Pixar movie can easily be replaced by a small child so long as his software is written the right way.
Whatever he needs to tell himself, I suppose…
"there is Blender"
Oh, that’s come up before. He just whined about how he doesn’t like their user interface (while coming up with bad excuses as to why that product has such a long history and strong community compared to the nothing on his platform).
Re: Re: Re:8 Finding legal content is
This is mainly because pixar made mistakes when buiding their animation frameworks. For example, we solve those problems using the following techniques:
1) input data amount needs to be small enough that they can be inputted using computer keyboard
2) there must be feature called "composability", i.e. when you combine different features, all combinations need to work automatically, without any extra input data.
3) there must be short descriptive names for all features
4) there must be large number of features, but they all need to follow common pattern that allows their usage via simple controls
5) operations performed on the data must be fast enough that ordinary computer hardware can handle the operations with sufficient performance, so that render farms are not required
With these techniques, we expect that our system can outperform pixar’s tooling when children are using the system.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
"operations performed on the data must be fast enough that ordinary computer hardware can handle the operations"
Oh, it’s that simple? All you need to do is create software that manages to outperform the ability of the hardware it’s running on? Why didn’t anyone else think of that!
Re: Re: Re:10 Finding legal co
No need to do anything like that. You just drop all the heavy operations that take too long time to execute on standard ibm pc’s…
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
Why IBM PCs?
Re: Re: Re:12 Finding
These tablets or phones do not have necessary things for the tooling to work, i.e. mouse and keyboard.
Basically it’s a tradeoff because some children do not have access to pc’s, when their schools are using tablets. But availability of GPU’s, mouse, keyboard and other inputting devices are just superior in pc hardware.
Re: Re: Re:13 Find
…but not Macs?
Re: Re: Re:12 Finding
"Why IBM PCs?"
Because the last time he stepped out to try and understand the world around him, IBM were still the dominant home PC manufacturer?
Re: Re: Re:13 Find
That’s what I was thinking. Does anyone at home still use IBM PCs? He got hung up on the “PCs”, when I was questioning the use of “IBM”.
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
"You just drop all the heavy operations that take too long time to execute on standard ibm pc’s…"
I’m intrigued. How do you render an animation after you’ve dropped all the heavy rendering work?
Re: Re: Re:12 Finding
It uses opengl. Basically you first have url to .obj, .stl, .mtl, .glb files coming from external sources, and then it gets loaded to a mesh. Then mesh can be rendered using any number of materials. Then movement is handled using opengl matrix stack. Then window is added which handles the event loop with all the key bindings and mouse positions etc. Basically it uses the GPU to blit triangles to the screen. That operation is fast even on crappy laptops.
Re: Re: Re:13 Find
That’s an interesting collection of buzzwords, but it still doesn’t explain how you think you’re going to get the performance of a dedicated render farm in a crappy laptop, unless you’re just depending on magically outperforming the hardware. Which, I know is a wet dream of some software people, but at some point you do have to accept that the hardware is at least as important as your code when performing hardware-intensive processes.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
It looks like you have fallen into the trap that many software developers have fallen into, and that is a belief that an Interface can replace the learning of relevant skills and practices needed to achieve a creative goal. There is even a minimum level of knowledge needed to be able to understand what the items in an interface actually do, and how they are used to solve a problem.
For example, how many kids would know what composability means, and how do you make that accessible to them?
Re: Re: Re:10 Finding legal co
Exactly. The reasons why these interfaces might be too complex for a small child is frankly because adult professionals in the animation field will wish to make choices that a small child would not. He seems to think that all he needs to do is lay the crayons out in the right order, but hasn’t considered what happens when the budding artist wishes to use something other than crayons.
Re: Re: Re:10 Finding legal co
Composability is the same trick than what lego blocks are using. Tons of children know early in their lives how lego blocks can be combined to various different shapes.
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
So once again, you demonstrate that your software aimed at kids continues to be terrible at teaching them how to use it, or motivating them to even try, and you still want a mansion for being shit at your job.
Re: Re: Re:5 Finding legal content is not the pro
"flood of pirated products replaces shelfspace from legal products"
You’re online. Why is there "shelf space"
"End users never bother to look at my product since they’re busy watching pirated hollywood movies"
Sure. It’s not because your products in a completely different marketplace are shit and you can’t market worth a damn. It must be because people are pirating movies.
Your weak excuses for your failure are always amusing. I’ll be over here >> consuming my legally purchased content while I laugh at your delusions.
Re: Re: Re:2 Finding legal content is not the problem
He’s already admitted once (in a spirited defense of Malibu Media) that he’s a professional troll. It’s not hard to imagine that he legitimately thinks that pandering to a website, which antidirt regularly screams as having a dying reader base, is a legitimate marketing strategy that he thinks the government should reward him with effort points. Because if he tried this in actual programming forums he’d have his ass laughed all the way to the North Pole…
Re: Ass backwards...
I would have thought that if you have a product that people are interested in you would make it easy for them get it.
If a customers has to go out of their way to find something, they wont. It’s simple basic economics and human nature that people will go for the easier and cheaper route almost every time. Those who don’t understand this will blame everyone else for their poor business-decisions, and if they have enough power and money they will lobby for laws that forces customers to buy their products in one way or another.
I wouldn’t put a cent into a company that embraces your view of how customers should act.
Also, can you define proper author? And by that, I also think you need to define what an improper author is.
Re: Re: Ass backwards...
It might not be possible to create both excellent product that people want to consume and also awesome distribution network that reaches millions of users around the globe. Only very few vendors have resources to build something big like that. Everyone else needs to limit the scope of market that they can handle.
Thus if you want good product and good reachability, you might find that there doesnt exist vendors that can implement both of them.
Re: Re: Re: Ass backwards...
You do not get the power of the Internet for distribution, and just how fast word will spread about an awesome product.
Re: Re: Re: Ass backwards...
"It might not be possible to create both excellent product that people want to consume and also awesome distribution network that reaches millions of users around the globe."
Oh, stop. You realize that in factual reality we have websites which exploded from a single page showing silly cat pictures to a network with dozens of employees within a year all thanks to the internet being really great at marketing anything a sufficient amount of people find interesting?
If you’ve put your product online and it still isn’t popular enough to instantly grow you a fan base sufficient to carry you then your problem is that your product isn’t a competitive offer. End of story.
You are essentially putting the blame on invisible fairies cursing you for your lack of business success.
Re: Re: Re:2 Ass backwards...
We also have 2 billion other websites that didn’t succeed in making a dent to the user population.
Re: Re: Re:3 Ass backwards...
That the way it goes with any form of creative work, a few works gain traction and explode, somewhat more get enough of a fanbase to allow the creator to go full time with their creativity, and the rest will never be anything more than a hobby. That said, most authors who obtained a publishing contract had to keep the day job, and most musicians have made more from live performances that any record contract, while most actors are amateurs performing in local venues.
Working a day job to support ones creativity is the norm, and getting rich from it is a lottery win.
Re: Re: Re:3 Ass backwards...
"We also have 2 billion other websites that didn’t succeed in making a dent to the user population."
Yes, so you are not alone in your failure to reach an audience. So what?
Re: Re: Re:3 Ass backwards...
"We also have 2 billion other websites that didn’t succeed in making a dent to the user population."
Welcome to how the real world has always worked, in every area of the market.
You want to be an artist, successful brain surgeon, nobel prize winner, astronaut, etc? Your odds are pretty slim and it’s guaranteed you’ll have to work ten times as hard as anyone else with a high risk of still ending up doing a desk job in an office somewhere.
You want to be an office clerk? Congratulations, odds are very good you get to be one.
Many are Called. Few are Chosen. This is the way success has always worked.
The copyright cult has been trying to sell the view that mediocrity has market value. That the mediocre artist doesn’t have to take a desk job or flip burgers. That you don’t need a great deal of both luck and genius to make it big with a new invention.
But that’s not how the world works and it never did. The existence of "piracy" only serves to reveal that truth.
Re: Re: Re: Ass backwards...
I’ve pointed this out before, but itch.io is a vendor that has good reachability.
Also, Netflix, Amazon, and Steam all offer great products and great reachability.
Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
"It is responsibility of end users to find authorised vendor of copyrighted works, and paying the requested amount of money before consuming the work."
…and since the point of being an online consumer is to avoid doing the grunt work yourself to begin with, we’re right back at square one again. In case you’re wondering that would be a lot of years ago when the music industry started screaming in outrage over the lazy consumers making swaptapes rather than go out and buy a dozen albums because they liked a single song on each of them.
"This basically means that end users need to do "more work" to find legal alternative…"
…or save themselves a lot of hassle by firing up the VPN and torrent client and get everything they wanted instantly. See how that goes?
"There’s always pirate vendors available too, and author’s works can often be lost in the flood of pirate material."
In fact, whatever the end user desires can most often be found in one and the same convenient location without either having to pay or getting scammed. Which, incidentally, is why scammers trying to "sell" copies of licensed material have always been a fringe market – 99% of the pirates just go directly to their chosen torrent site instead.
"But this is why it’s every end user’s responsibility to find authorised vendor for all the consumed material and reject the scammers who provide pirate or counterfeit products."
According to the copyright cult, yes. Most pirates carefully consider the fact that copies of information aren’t scarcity items and then heartily reject the bullshit of Queen Anne’s Statutes. Copyright was a shit idea back in the 13th century when it was the catholic church using it to maintain narrative control and it is still a shit idea today.
In an era where it is possible to own a computer and have a mass communications network available, it is all up to the authors and gatekeepers to build platforms which attract the customer. That hasn’t changed since the days of the mom-and-pop store.
The end consumer, frankly, doesn’t have any responsibility to find the thousands of outlets which may or may not carry what he wants. All he has to do is to make the judgment whether he is sufficiently interested in <whatever> to waste hours and days looking for it…
…or whether it can all be solved within fifteen minutes of firing up the VPN and uTorrent client.
Re: Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
This is a major failure in your part. One location cannot provide large amount of content. Copyright laws require license negotiations before offering the product to the public, and any single location cannot do thousands of license negotiations and obtain necessary funds to properly license large amount of content. Creating content is expensive enough operation that the cost needs to be divided to large number of shopping locations. Thus single centralized location that contains all the content is not possible under copyright laws.
Only pirates that are not paying authors at all can do centralized location. The system is such that the authors can fetch their compensation in a single 300k cenralized money block simply by sueing the pirates.
Re: Re: Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
Tell that to the Libraries of the world, and see what response you get. Note also, with physical copies, shops do not negotiate licenses, they just order the content they think they can sell. Further a site may not be a copyright holder, and simply offer a distribution service, like YouTube does, and that also eliminates complex license negotiations.
Re: Re: Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
The existence of Google, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Steam, GOG, Hulu, Amazon Prime, DeviantArt, Google Books, etc., not to mention libraries (as in brick-and-mortar libraries or virtual libraries), proves you wrong. They can and do exist without piracy. You give no evidence to disprove that from copyright law itself. And companies like Google, Netflix, and Amazon do have more than enough funds to negotiate thousands of licenses.
Not if it’s a physical copy, fair use, in the public domain, the copyright is also owned by the distributor (like how Valve owns Portal and distributes it on its own platform), uses a nonnegotiable standard contract for distribution, or uses a license like Creative Commons. Also, libraries generally don’t have to negotiate any licenses at all. And again, that fact wouldn’t make it completely impossible to do, and it’s done all the time.
You’re misunderstanding something here. The creator may license their creation(s) to a large number of distributors, but that doesn’t prevent the existence of a single location that has a large number of copyrighted works from multiple creators available legitimately. Distribution rights are rarely licensed exclusively to a single licensee.
Re: Re: Re: Finding legal content is not the problem
"This is a major failure in your part. One location cannot provide large amount of content. Copyright laws require license negotiations before offering the product to the public, and any single location cannot do thousands of license negotiations and obtain necessary funds to properly license large amount of content."
Let me introduce you to any torrent index page. Like it or not the reality that you need to address is that the user convenience you must meet to remain competitive IS going to match up against the various pirate index pages and the increasingly popular DHT-driven alternatives.
If copyright law presents such a barrier that you can’t gather everything the consumer wants in one place, then piracy remains the answer.
"Thus single centralized location that contains all the content is not possible under copyright laws."
Then we are facing the current and past issue of copyright law still screwing the consumer, the copyright holders, and the authors alike because the result will be what the cartoon in the OP so clearly shows. We’ve known how this works for about 20 years and until humans stop being human that’s how it will continue to work.
"The system is such that the authors can fetch their compensation in a single 300k cenralized money block simply by sueing the pirates."
Something they more or less stopped trying to do in the last twenty years because they found that the costs of doing that were massive and resulted in no gain and at most a few embarrassing lawsuits aimed at senior citizens, dead people, and laser printers.
Now, in the real world where cause and effects apply rather than the intricacies of if-pigs-had-wings legislative theory you will, in reality, face the unassailable fact that unless corporations get their shit together to the point where they CAN get everything the consumer wants on one page, the main distributor of media will once again be the venerable pirate bay and it’s successors.
While we’re at it, I should point out that today you don’t even need the index page, since quite a lot of torrent clients can now establish the network and search function without any single point of failure involved at all.
So you can’t, in reality, sue the pirates. Even when back in the day the MPAA and RIAA burned money like mad on lawsuits it was still given that a pirate was less likely to get sued than being hit by lightning. It isn’t even a method of intimidation anymore. Just a loss leader and bad PR.
Nor can you sue the intermediates since, with clients like tribler, they aren’t in the position to know what has been transmitted, between which people, or be able to block what looks like an encrypted webpage request to an unknown addressee.
Re: Re: Re:2 Finding legal content is not the problem
It’s very simple to sue the people. You launch the client, watch these pirate product names appear to the screen, you store the screenshot of the pirate products for courts to examine, and once you have the evidence stored, you can start procedings against the authors of the client and maintainers of the support infrastructure that allows this.
Re: Re: Re:3 Finding legal content is not the problem
IP addresses aren’t people, and clients don’t track anything else for stuff like that. Pirate sites don’t usually sell pirated content or track users or anything. That’d be stupid.
Re: Re: Re:4 Finding legal content is not the problem
usually the name of the author of the client software is well known, even if they have taken steps to hide the person’s identity. ISP’s are also tracking people who setup servers etc.
Usually the users are not the right target for copyright infringement lawsuit. The lawsuit ought to be done to the technology providers that enable the infringing activity, and maintainers of piracy servers etc. While they will just move the servers to different country and hide their tracks, the whack a mole game can be played endlessly.
Re: Re: Re:5 Finding legal content is not the pro
The client is only liable if they know about specific cases of infringement and do nothing about them. The evidence you’re suggesting to collect wouldn’t be enough proof. They’d have to have specific knowledge of infringement and then fail to act.
Re: Re: Re:6 Finding legal content is not the
Whoever builds a client that is able to display pirated content in the software’s user interface is automatically liable for any copyright infringements. It is enough that the user interface has ability to display such content.
This doesnt require knowledge of any instances of infringement. Software authors need to build enough safety features to prevent copyright infringement happening using the software.
Re: Re: Re:7 Finding legal content is not
I’ve asked you this before, but show me the part of copyright law that mandates this. Intermediary liability has a “knowledge” requirement. (Unless the intermediary explicitly solicits or promotes infringement or it is incapable of any substantial noninfringing use, but neither of those are applicable to this situation.) No safety measures are mandated by copyright law. I’ve already explained this in another thread (with evidence) and you were unable to refute my claims. I’m not going to get into this again in this thread.
The fact is that your claims about liability for copyright infringement aren’t supported by the law.
Re: Re: Re:8 Finding legal content is
Copyright law explicitly has sections about DISPLAY, PERFORM, DISTIBUTE operations which are marked explicitly as copyright owner’s exclusive operations.
This "DISPLAY" part is what I’m talking about, i.e. when pirated products are being displayed in your product catalog etc, then you’re liable for copyright damages because of violation to the DISPLAY bit.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
And you’ve been explained to, time and time again, why that is a shit idea. It’d mean that television manufacturers were liable for lawsuits because someone played a pirate cassette tape.
Re: Re: Re:10 Finding legal co
How does this "someone" have access to pirated material if they all are law-abiding citizens? Obviously if you buy a television set and you can watch pirated movie-streams from the tv’s menus, obviously the tv manufacturer will be sued.
either way tv’s menus having pirated material is clear example of this DISPLAY bit being broken.
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
If you have a device and a compatible cord that lets the device connect to a TV, and you have a TV that can accept signals from that cord, then the TV will accept literally any signal the device sends to it over that cord. Furthermore, in most cases, neither the device nor the cord are manufactured or designed by the same people as the TV (especially since the ports that connect to the TV are pretty standardized but the other end isn’t). The TV doesn’t know the difference between pirated content and unpirated content. It can’t even tell the difference between an optical disc, a cable box, a satellite receiver, a laptop, a PC, and a video game console. TVs just display whatever images are sent to them.
And for the record, a pirated cassette copy can be made completely without the help of a TV.
This isn’t about the TV having pirated content built-in. It’s about a user using the TV to watch pirated content from an outside source, like a videocassette player.
Re: Re: Re:12 Finding
you can just sue one of the manufacturers of these devices, if those are sending pirated content to your tv.
step1: identify the source of pirated material
step2: sue the technology providers
step3: collect ransom money
step4: laugh all the way to the bank
Re: Re: Re:13 Find
Well, first of all, unless you own the copyright to the original, you don’t have standing.
Second, it’s not the technology’s fault that someone used it in an unlawful manner. So long as it has substantial lawful uses, the technology providers have no liability whatsoever unless they explicitly encourage or solicit copyright infringement.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
While you cannot sue for copyright infringement, pirate vendors can be sued for unfair competition. Using illegal practises (like copyright infringement) to compete in the marketplace and replace legal vendors is clear basis for unfair competition claim.
If we just frame this as product safety issue, companies cannot dismiss damage claims where product is so unsafe to use that it makes tv’s show pirated content (which is known to be illegal to dislpay on your tv)
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
Except that 1. that’s not a legal statute, and 2. Thanks to the efforts of copyright enforcers like Strike 3 Holdings, judges have now ruled that you actually need to own the copyright to something before you can sue for it. So nice job fucking up your own meal ticket, genius.
This might have worked… if copyright infringement had anything to do with product safety. Displaying possibly pirated material is not a safety violation, because if it did TV and computer screens would flat out not exist.
The malware angle is also funny as hell each time you guys try it because it suggests that all pirated software is out to malware your stuff, when it makes no fucking sense for a pirate distributor to bundle their less legitimate software with things that make it harder for users to use… On the other hand, plenty of games and software, purchased legitimately, often come bundled with antipiracy measures that fuck up the user’s system like the Sony rootkit, so the way things are now you’re more likely to get a product safety issue from the legal product instead of the pirated one. Again, nice going, genius.
Re: Re: Re:16 Re:
opening liability of hundreds of thousands of dollars isnt a product safety issue?
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
"If we just frame this as product safety issue, companies cannot dismiss damage claims where product is so unsafe to use that it makes tv’s show pirated content (which is known to be illegal to dislpay on your tv)"
You truly need to look up the reason WHY none of the thousands of lawyers employed by the copyright cult has suggested this in modern times.
The answer is that the supreme court has multiple times handed down extremely clear-cut precedents and rulings which allow both the TV and VCR to exist – and by direct analogy, any other technology capable of copying data.
So none of your suggestions work, in a legal case, which is just fine because trying to implement any of them would render it impossible to manufacture cars, power tools, and crowbars.
You’ve also delivered an argument which would make ANY gun manufacturer illegal. I do so hope the copyright cult eventually tries to follow your suggestion. The NRA isn’t as nice as us pirates.
Re: Re: Re:13 Find
"you can just sue one of the manufacturers of these devices, if those are sending pirated content to your tv."
It has been tried. SCOTUS said "HELL NO!".
Which is why the VCR is still perfectly legal, along with any other dual use technology intended to copy data.
This is the way your hypothesis looks, in reality;
step1: identify the source of pirated material
step2: sue the technology providers
step 3: have the lawyers quote multiple supreme court decisions and the judge toss your case out of court
step 4: end up with a solid loss and still having to pay your lawyers.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
The display part has a knowledge requirement. Again, we’ve been over this.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
"This "DISPLAY" part is what I’m talking about, i.e. when pirated products are being displayed in your product catalog etc, then you’re liable for copyright damages because of violation to the DISPLAY bit."
…which doesn’t even, by law, cover torrent index pages – especially not the ones restricting themselves to magnet links. Let alone clients.
It would cover an online retailer if they had pirated products in their showcase window and it sunk Kazaa since it expressly used piracy as advertising for it’s client.
Since no one is dumb enough to do the equivalent of putting up ads equivalent to "Screwdrivers and hammers for all your burglary needs" these days the statute you quote doesn’t apply.
Re: Re: Re:7 Finding legal content is not
Are you saying that every application that can display images, texts, movies and/or play sounds can be held liable for infringement, because distinguishing between licensed and infringing content on the basis of file type, content or source is not possible.
Re: Re: Re:8 Finding legal content is
In principle all applications should limit the content in such way that only licensed content can be displayed in the user interface. Usually the image content is like icons and thumbnails which are coming from inside application installation, and cannot be changed by users or 3rd parties. Thus such content is already implementing techniques against infringements because lack of content-change feature.
Web browsers obviously try to do something different. They allow web site designers to change the content items. But there is warnings in the web server side, i.e. pushing your content to web server is considered dangerous operation because licensing need to be checked before uploading content to web server.
But it’s clearly software developers who implement the client software that can control when each displayed item is possible to change by users, 3rd parties, network, databases etc, and thus it’s software developer’s responsibility that infringing content is not available in the software’s user interface.
Movies are difficult aspect. Its extreamly dangerous to build software that can display or manipulate movies. The reason is that the data amounts are huge, and thus its possible that the software handles data streams that took millions of dollars to create. Any manipulation of such content is dangerous copyright-wise, and authors of projects like ffmpeg or mplayer are taking huge copyright risks when they publish such software on the internet.
Basically images and texts are saved from difficult copyright analysis only because creation of them is relatively cheap and there exists millions of pieces available on the internet, so actual damages of copyright issues when handling images and text are relatively small.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
Uh, what? Absolutely none of that is true. No website or software does any of that, nor could they given the enormous upload traffic many of them receive. Manipulation of data or content-change does not affect copyright infringement to make it more dangerous; on the contrary, a full, exact copy is generally considered worse than a modified copy thanks to things like fair use. And images and text are absolutely not easier to do copyright analysis. I literally just finished taking a class about handling third-party content and copyright in software, and you have it completely wrong. You clearly know nothing about what you’re talking about.
Re: Re: Re:10 Finding legal co
This information is coming from Richard Stallman himself:
"software that allows changing which font file to use, will have to deal with all the possible licenses that exists in the font files that are being used with the software"
This deals directly with the content-change feature, in this instance font files that libfreetype library allows you to use in your software.
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
I’m just going to quote you here:
And point out that Meshpage lets you create movies, therefore your software is dangerous, therefore it must be destroyed. How many own goals is that now?
Re: Re: Re:12 Finding
Nope, we call them animations because we’re not using the standard mpeg technology, but instead we have our own tech that isn’t yet flexible enough to play movie clips.
Re: Re: Re:13 Find
Now you’re just arguing semantics.
Re: Re: Re:13 Find
So what you’re saying is that in the future, it could play pirated movie clips. Anticipate a lawsuit coming your way.
Re: Re: Re:13 Find
"Nope, we call them animations because we’re not using the standard mpeg technology, but instead we have our own tech that isn’t yet flexible enough to play movie clips."
Have you secured that program against the possibility that ANY user will be able to create a version of, say, "Steamboat Willie"? Or any other copyrighted character?
Because if not you just argued that your tool is illegal.
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
"This information is coming from Richard Stallman himself:
"software that allows changing which font file to use, will have to deal with all the possible licenses that exists in the font files that are being used with the software""
And in practice no magic exists which will allow enforcement of that. Stallman was stating a legal requirement, not accidentally revealing that copyright enforcement can work because tech experts are all in on a massive coverup conspiracy, which you seem to be implying.
So we’re once again back to you claiming you’re a software programmer who apparently hasn’t a single fucking clue how a computer works.
You guys still getting paid for astroturfing or are you just expected to show obedience to the faith, troll?
Re: Re: Re:7 Finding legal content is not
"Whoever builds a client that is able to display pirated content in the software’s user interface is automatically liable for any copyright infringements."
…right.
I’m starting to flag tp’s posts now because it’s obvious he’s just trolling.
He’s just insisted no technology beyond that of the 17th century is allowed to exist. According to law.
Last I checked no one has managed to successfully sue Microsoft, Oracle, or GM over this issue so "tp" is just babbling nonsense without thinking.
Re: Re: Re:8 Finding legal content is
But I can still create over 100 million devices using these principles. Are you claiming my devices are not technology?
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
"But I can still create over 100 million devices using these principles."
But, you wouldn’t be able to sell a single one as they would not allow people to do anything they wanted to do.
Re: Re: Re:10 Finding legal co
Well, I know the devices are soon going to trashcan, but we hope the users spent time using the software and devices enough that the activity becomes useful. Otherwise we’re just dealing with 100 million devices in dumps somewhere in europe.
Even my amiga gave several years of useful time for me when I was young. I hope our devices can do the same before they’re discarded.
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
"Otherwise we’re just dealing with 100 million devices in dumps somewhere in europe."
Well, coming from the guy that apparently threw away huge amounts of money on bus videos that anyone sensible knew would fail, I can believe that you’d also somehow manage to throw away millions on manufacturing devices nobody wants to use.
"Even my amiga gave several years of useful time for me when I was young"
Yes, they were made by competent people who identified a marketplace and successfully sold to it. That’s a long way from what you’re trying to push.
Fortunately, the real world contains lots of people who already own devices that do the things you’re selling with free software, and I doubt anyone rich enough to be able to bankroll your alternative will finance such waste from your unsellable trash.
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
"Even my amiga gave several years of useful time for me when I was young. I hope our devices can do the same before they’re discarded."
Your Amiga would be illegal according to your own previous arguments. There are no safeguards on it prohibiting the end user from using it for criminal purposes.
Hell, a screwdriver would be. You’ve basically argued that no tool, ever, is allowed to exist.
I’m going to start flagging your comments unless they demonstrably contain better logic than you’d expect from a brain-damaged lemming.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
"But I can still create over 100 million devices using these principles. Are you claiming my devices are not technology?"
No you can’t.
You’ve just spent twenty-odd comments trying to argue that it would be illegal for any technology to exist which could facilitate a crime.
That includes every manufactured tool known to man – including the one you’re tyring to advertise, because you can’t safeguard it from the end user recreating "Steamboat Willie" or "Daffy duck".
Re: Re: Re:5 Finding legal content is not the pro
"usually the name of the author of the client software is well known, even if they have taken steps to hide the person’s identity. ISP’s are also tracking people who setup servers etc."
Wait, so Microsoft is an accomplice to 9/11 if it turns out Bin Laden wrote his pamphlets down in "Word"?
Ford is an accomplice to bank robbery because they didn’t make their cars impossible to use for criminals?
What drugs do you take to even be able to formulate that nonsense without blinking?
And no, ISP’s usually don’t "track" the communications of their clients because, you know, that would be an actual federal crime. The relevant law allowing the ISP to do that would render it impossible for banks to operate within the nation where that legislation existed.
"The lawsuit ought to be done to the technology providers that enable the infringing activity…"
Which has been tried, has failed, and will continue to fail. Unless the law of the land suddenly has a precedent for making microsoft liable for terrorist plots written in Word, Ford liable for bank robberies, and gun manufacturers liable for murder.
I welcome a US attempt to get such legislation off the ground. Once the NRA and Big Banking is done with the MPAA/RIAA and BSA no one in the world will ever mention copyright again.
Re: Re: Re:6 Finding legal content is not the
Making a contract between user and isp for providing internet connections in exchange for some monthly money transfer is not (by definition) communication.
Re: Re: Re:7 Finding legal content is not
"Making a contract between user and isp for providing internet connections in exchange for some monthly money transfer is not (by definition) communication"
But providing the service they just paid for very much is.
Re: Re: Re:8 Finding legal content is
ISP’s do not need to "track the communication", instead they just examine the contracts they have entered with the user. Their customer files clearly state which ip addresses are used for which customers, so RIAA/MPAA can summon the isp’s contract files to catch the pirates. ISP is never involved in tracking the communications. Once the server ip address is known and determined to belong to certain isp, the isp has responsibility to dig through which customer provides that ip address. Then they can catch the pirates.
Obviously some isp’s are more diligent with the copyright enforcement than others. Some of them hide behind "bit pipe" boilerplate and are resisting copyright owner’s attempts to identify alleged infringers. But that position is losing battle, because laws are overwhelmingly on the side of the original authors instead of the alleged pirates.
Re: Re: Re:9 Finding legal conten
You evidently haven’t been looking at the actual lawsuits. Most of the RIAA vs ISP lawsuits are demands from the ISPs to show the tracked data on their consumers.
There are things called "dynamic IPs", you knucklehead. Even in the universe where IP addresses are, for whatever dumb reason, baked into the terms and conditions, IP addresses would still change to make this prior agreement meaningless.
Right, like all the times they did get this information and sued children, grandmothers, homeless people, computerless people, dead people, etc etc all the times they fucked up and arrested non-pirates. Your track record is so bad, if this planet was a nuclear reactor we’d have thousands of meltdowns by now because you idiots can’t be trusted with numbers.
Let’s see… Malibu Media, Prenda Law, Dallas Buyers Club, Elf-Man, Voltage Pictures… all getting their cases against ISPs kicked out by the courts because none of them could prove jack shit. Looks like the laws are overwhelmingly on the side of the average citizen and not money-grubbing assholes trying to cheat the justice system out of a free buck.
Re: Re: Re:10 Finding legal co
Lets do a calculation:
1) I spend $100,000 to develop some software
2) I try to license it to 10 companies, $10,000 each
3) now instead of taking the license, copyright infringement
will allow you to use the software without compensation
Now my $100,000 investment needs to be covered by the licensees, but why
would you get the software without compensation?
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
Well, assuming that there’s nothing important being left out, you could sue them for copyright infringement, maybe even some sort of business-related tort as well. That case seems pretty straightforward. It also has nothing to do with anything we’ve been discussing thus far.
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
"Now my $100,000 investment needs to be covered by the licensees, but why would you get the software without compensation?"
Because there is very little you can do to claim said compensation.
Microsoft has tried time and time again, until they gave it up as a bad (and very expensive) job.
Today what they are saying is that they’d rather the user pirates their products than switches to Linux or Mac. They no longer bother to even try going after pirates unless said pirate actually sells bulk installations.
Individual users will compensate for software licenses if they WANT to support the vendor and find the method of licensing convenient and well priced. Or they may choose any of the dozens of free open source alternatives instead.
Corporations will buy the licenses because verifying the license key is usually part of their internal audit processes. Or may opt for the free open source alternatives instead.
Today most software vendors focus on selling maintenance and adaptation services rather than just the licences, because they know the information control-based model doesn’t work anymore.
Re: Re: Re:12 Finding
"Today what they are saying is that they’d rather the user pirates their products than switches to Linux or Mac"
To the point where they’ve actually started including Linux components directly within their OS, a complete about face from where they were fighting tooth and nail a decade ago.
It’s amazing how a company like Microsoft can make the sane decision, but some pissant failure insists he’s due money.
Re: Re: Re:13 Find
"It’s amazing how a company like Microsoft can make the sane decision, but some pissant failure insists he’s due money."
As amazing as his idea that the one who build the technology is liable for every malicious use of it? That’s what gets to me.
That and his suggestions on how to "safeguard" his own tool from abuse which only serves to illustrate he doesn’t know how computers work.
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
"but why would you get the software without compensation?"
Because a developer that’s depending on selling to 10 users at $10k a pop has such a poor business model that they’ll have folded before you’ve requested your first support ticket?
Re: Re: Re:11 Finding lega
I’ll note that you’ve once again decided not to address any of the points brought up and instead continue to whine about scenarios where you flog off your crappy Meshpage at 3ds max-level prices.
At this point considering that you support people who sue grandmothers for money I wouldn’t be surprised if people refuse to get your license out of sheer spite.
Re: Re: Re:7 Finding legal content is not
"Making a contract between user and isp for providing internet connections in exchange for some monthly money transfer is not (by definition) communication."
According to every law on the tablets, yes it is.
At least learn what the law says before you try to argue about it.
Re: Re: Re:3 Finding legal content is not the problem
"It’s very simple to sue the people. You launch the client, watch these pirate product names appear to the screen, you store the screenshot of the pirate products for courts to examine, and once you have the evidence stored, you can start procedings against the authors of the client and maintainers of the support infrastructure that allows this."
As we’ve seen in the increasingly desperate attempts by the copyright cult to do exactly that every such attempt has failed or turned into a vast loss operation. Worldwide.
Case in point the biggest "success" for copyright enforcement in the last ten years or so – the Cox case – actually forces every US ISP to do one of two things – quit their business or stop giving the copyright enforcers anything while scrupulously enforcing the safeharbor provisions of the DMCA. Cox’s biggest issue was that they tried to meet copyright enforcers to the best of their ability, which just wasn’t enough when there’s a thousand copyright trolls eagerly looking for easy tort. And meeting them fully means the ISP couldn’t, in practice, operate at all.
Your last sentence – of holding actual internet technology responsible isn’t exactly a blinding insight either since, for that to work, we’d have to abolish mass communication completely or turn it into such a regulated and expensive structure to maintain only the supremely wealthy could afford it. I actually look forward to some harebrained legislation of this kind rendering it, in practice, as legally safe to operate a US ISP as it would be to operate a metamphetamine facility.
I doubt you’ve actually written a single line of code in your life or you’d know full well just how impossible your suggestion is, to anyone who knows the simplest basics around computers and networking.
Let me break it down to you in the simplest possible terms once again;
Once you’ve gotten to every ISP, every network provider, every backbone provider, the DNS namespace, and every computer OEM…
…piracy will STILL remain untouched.
Therefore i reiterate; "Like it or not the reality that you need to address is that the user convenience you must meet to remain competitive IS going to match up against the various pirate index pages and the increasingly popular DHT-driven alternatives."
End of story.
If that isn’t to your liking you can, of course, deny reality until increasing costs of futile enforcement run your business into the ground.
"It’s very simple to sue the people."
The same way it’s very "easy" to fly as long as you just flap your hands fast enough.
If your arguments are indicative of your normal reasoning then I can understand why no one wants to buy your product. You seem to substitute wishful thinking and hopeful assumptions instead of factual reality before constructing answers to issues.
Re: Re: Re:4 Finding legal content is not the problem
Copyright owners purpose for sueing the pirates is not to remove piracy from the world. They just want the money back what they invested to the product. If there are too small number of licensees that are actually paying for the product, the copyright owners have no other choice than sue the nearest pirates they can find and hope courts are making them win the lawsuit.
Re: Re: Re:5 Finding legal content is not the pro
"Copyright owners purpose for sueing the pirates is not to remove piracy from the world. They just want the money back what they invested to the product."
And precisely that is what they aren’t getting. Even the copyright troll enforcement companies aren’t breaking even, looking at the vast amount of bankruptcies and disbarments in that field.
"…the copyright owners have no other choice than sue the nearest pirates they can find and hope courts are making them win the lawsuit."
They have tried this for well over 30 years and it still doesn’t work. For good and valid reason. Any law which would enable that model has side effects which would make it hazardous to even own a computer.
You seem to know very little about copyright law, normal law, telecom regulations, computers and networks…and anything else you’ve seen fit to weigh in on.
I don’t think anyone here is interested in your arguments about how it’s possible to fly if you just flap your hands fast enough, or how owning and operating a crowbar must be considered illegal unless the hardware store owner has a camcorder attached to it to ensure you aren’t using it for criminal purposes.
And by now I’m pretty sure no one believes you have the ability to program your way out of a wet paper bag because the logic you employ proves you know jack shit about computers and networks. Or law, or recent copyright history, for that matter.
"It might not be possible to create both excellent product that people want to consume and also awesome distribution network that reaches millions of users around the globe."
Again, you’re spewing your nonsense on a story about how people are complaining that the movies they love are being removed from the service that they and millions of others are already paying for.
Your rambling idiocy is always misplaced, but the very story you’re commenting on is disproving all your supposed points before you even started typing.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
Obviously authors can decide what product they’re offering and when those products are available to customers. Deviating from those designated time frames are easy way to get sued by the entertainment industry. I.e. when they have movies leaking before publishing dates to the market, whoever receives those versions of the product outside their release windows are perfect candidates for copyright infringement lawsuit. Obviously if author decides that the product is not availabe in year 2020, and market still have people consuming it in 2020, it’s clear indication that the product is illegally available in the market.
The removal of the products often have license issues, i.e. original authors only licensed it for some time window, and displaying it on other times is not possible. Or they could be trying to catch pirates by controlling release times.
Re: Re: Re:
In a word where supplying on demand anywhere in the world is a trivial exercise, the use of release windows, removing from the market for a period to try and drive up demand, and other studio tricks are a recipe for encouraging piracy and/or losing customers to actual creators who care about their audience.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I never used any studio tricks or other evil stuff to market my wares, but I’m still not seeing huge amount of studio audiences queuing my product. Maybe they come after I implement monetizing features?
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
Maybe they will come if and when it does something that they find valuable.
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
It’s not that easy. Users simply don’t know your product exists, even if it provides the exact solution they’re looking for. It’s just hidden in a flood of 2 billion other web sites and noone will find out how great the product is.
You need both the product, and the distribution network.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
Social media can solve that problem easily. The trick, as I learned right here on TD, is to be social. That means talking to people about what’s going on from their perspective, then seeing if your product can address their issues. If it can, job done.
When I had my own web design service back in the day, I would chat to developers, bloggers, and all sorts of other people about issues tangential to the service I provided, e.g. hosting, types of web design, search engines and SEO, etc. When they needed a web designer, I was top of the list because they believed I knew what I was on about.
It takes a lot of effort to cultivate fans, but that’s how you do it.
Re: Re: Re:5 Re:
that’s the whole point about my nice goverment mansion story…
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
LOL!
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
"that’s the whole point about my nice goverment mansion story.."
Yes, we’ve been through your fantasy before. What a shame you still cling to that as a way to blame everyone else for your failures.
Re: Re: Re:7 Re:
Well, the failures are evolving:
1) at beginning there was no project, so noone would buy it
2) then you only have 1 3d object
3) then you only have 1 computer game
4) then you only now got frame rates working
5) then you only have a web page that allows storing your work
6) then you have 30 3d objects available in the web page
7) then you have 15 computer games available in itch.io
8) then you have 70 3d objects availalble in the web page
9) then you only get performance to acceptable level
But, you don’t have:
10) you don’t have 2 million content items like youtube has
11) you don’t have community of 5 million people
12) you cannot make 5 millioin dollars revenue
13) you use browser technology that doesnt allow the performance profile that we request
14) you don’t have monetizing system designed to annoy your million end users
15) you cannot reach all the people that pirate vendors can reach
16) you’re not using newest (vulkan) technology so your product is outdated
17) this product was already available in our social media channel, can’t you create something we haven’t seen yet?
18) your documentation isn’t as large as wikipedia
19) your end users are not willing to spend their money on that product
20) your videos are not available in disney+, netflix, youtube or wikipedia
Etc, the failures keep evolving…. When will the demands for better features end?
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
Why would videos on YouTube matter for 3D modeling/engine software? Half your "better features" aren’t even features. Meshpage is not even in the same market as Netflix or Wikipedia. Unless you’re flogging print copies of Encyclopedia Britannica from 1987 why would anyone look at 3D modeling software like Autodesk and refuse to buy it because Wikipedia exists? Who even uses Wikipedia as a video platform, for fuck’s sake?
Like, I swear half your rants are nothing more than detailing elaborate plans for people to make fun of you, and the other half is you bitching about people taking the bait…
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
People get used to the products of established players, and bringing new product that isn’t excelling in those same areas is doomed to failure.
You’ve all the time claimed that our web page is a failure, but when the reasons of the failure are revealed to you, you refuse to believe it?
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
Again, why would 3D modeling software need to compete with video hosting? Why is consumer decision-making based on you catering to completely unrelated markets? That’s like a vegetarian visiting a salad bar for lettuce, then setting the place on fire because they don’t offer beef filet mignon.
Your website isn’t a failure because you have a shit product. All you have is animated tech demos that look like Neopets flash games of the early 2000s. You didn’t think that having decent design and presentation is necessary? Is that why all you got was two buses in London to carry your "advert"?
To be fair, that’s not the only reason. It’s also completely uninformative as to what a user or consumer would even want Meshpage for, never mind pay for. Why would I pay millions of dollars for a desert plane animation that looks like a child put it together in Roblox?
And as usual, your whining about "boohoo, nobody wants to use Meshpage because they use Autodesk Maya and 3dsmax" is icing on the cake. Imagine that, people want more than birds shaped like Ws and desert hills that don’t look like kindergarten-level zigzag cutouts! Are you going to cry that Pixar should shut down because their movies make your product look terrible by comparison?
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
Maybe I’m going to attract children to the web page? The tool I’m offering is perfect for children who already knows everything about games and is wanting to explore how to create their own computer games.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
So don’t complain that adults look at a product aimed at children and don’t use the product not aimed at adults, genius.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
Pixar should make their tech so simple to use that even children can use it and get the same results as we see in tv. Are you going to destroy children’s dreams of being able to create awesome 3d graphics simply by making the tooling too complicated and burdensome to use?
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
Simple tools used by children are highly unlikely to be able to make the same quality products as more advanced tools. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but more complicated tools are likely to have advanced features that allow for better results.
Also, Pixar’s tech isn’t available to consumers last I checked, so its market would be experienced animators/designers, not children.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
Game design and animation tools already exist for kids, so no, those dreams aren’t broken.
And if you’re appealing to kids by the basis of the simplicity of your graphics, and yet they want to do what Pixar does, then what does that say about the demand for your tool since your tool can’t generate Pixar graphics? Nice own goal, would get baited again.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
These tools are not coming from pixar, even though they’re leading vendor of computer animations in the kids area.
Every vendor needs to find suitable niche area where they can do the best work on the planet. I’ve just decided to do computer animation tools suitable for children. That niche already have some competition like roblox, but there
still might be good market for the tool.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
I already said that Pixar’s animation tools aren’t available for anyone outside of Disney to use. They aren’t sold at all.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
"These tools are not coming from pixar, even though they’re leading vendor of computer animations in the kids area."
LEGO also don’t make their plastic moulding plants accessible to the average 8 year old. So? Does that somehow kill kids’ creativity when playing with LEGO or stop them moving to more advanced tools when they outgrow the ones they use as kids?
"Every vendor needs to find suitable niche area where they can do the best work on the planet"
Yes, and many fail miserably while finding a spot in the marketplace, as you have found.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
Market’s requirements for new products are often unrealistic. They expect your software to allow travelling to the moon, without nasa’s help. The market seems to push the requirements that are impossible to implement to the technology people’s requirement lists. Time machines, travelling to other galaxies, warp drives, teleporting and other impossible stuff keep appearing in the requirements, without any consideration if those are possible to implement. Then they complain loudly that tech people cannot implement their (broken) requirements.
Even when the requirement is possible to implement, it could be outright dangerous to humans if it is implemented. Guns, laser swords, pathogens, spy equipment are common in people’s wishes.
When we have to refuse their requirement requests, those refusals are not made lightly. There is always some underlying flaw in the argument which prevents the implementation or its simply not safe for humans. Copyright issues belong to the same category, they cause significant number of feature rejections.
Re: Re: Re:16 Re:
Thanks once again for confirming that your software shares similar features to existing software, such as putting 3D shapes onto screen, and by your copyright rules Meshpage must be deleted. Congratulations!
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
If that what you think, give up and stop complaining. otherwise go and learn how create interest in a product, rather than destroy it via web site that leaves most people clueless about what’s on offer, and continuous whining to which leads people to thing the project will soon fold and go away.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
There is no good reason to quit even if you don’t immediately find solution to all failures that exist in your product. You just need to lower the price to level where the benefits and cost o the product are in balance.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
There are products out there that you couldn’t pay me to buy. If there’s no demand for your product whatsoever—whether because of poor marketing, poor distribution methods, or a poor product—then the price is effectively irrelevant, especially if it’s nonzero.
I agree that failing to immediately find solutions to all the failures in your product is not a reason to quit. However, you’ve been complaining about this for a while, and the complaint has been inability to get anyone to try because of “competition” from other, unrelated markets, which is insoluble. Additionally, the price can only go so low.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
Usually the products created by large teams and which are globally distributed can do higher quality than what smaller teams can do.
But small teams can more quickly adjust to the changes in the marketplace.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
So why haven’t you?
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
True, but my point was that price-adjustment can only go so far.
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
Well, I googled for my web page name and found that one blog has written an article about the site. The reactions I get from the bloggers are nice example of what could be the real problem:
https://mediaisnothingtomebutistilllikeit.wordpress.com/
in that page, there’s short review of meshpage, which kinda explains the market position of my web site in 2017 when the bus ads were running….
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
You seriously think that a review from two years ago on a dead blog, written by some Instagram teenager who has even worse English than you do, is costing you all the sales of a program that isn’t even available for download on the animation pages?
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
i added a link to the tool download page.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
Still didn’t answer the question of you actually thinking some nobody on the Internet is costing you all your sales, but par for the course when trying to winkle a response out of you…
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
Naah, blogs like that are just ok. Every mention is positive, teenagers are using anyway some funny language that noone else in the world speaks.
And I can now claim that my webpage is endorsed by the blogs.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Every mention is positive?
Guess you won’t mind other readers saying "Meshpage sucks" then. Nice going…
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
"Every mention is positive"
Then why are you whining about how a single mention lost all the sales of your shitty product?
But, hey, at least you’re admitting that your horrendous bus ads were worth less than a single teenager’s free wordpress post. Progress…
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
"Etc, the failures keep evolving…. When will the demands for better features end?"
Funny.
Paulo Coelho put up his work on the pirate bay and got an extra 12 million copies sold.
Trent Reznor gave away an album for free…and Ghost I-IV made the billboard 200 within week One.
As you’ve noticed by now the primary point of competition isn’t piracy. That hardly even matters. When you launch any entertainment media your competition is everything else occupying consumer attention. From movies to mobile games.
Unless you are extremely outstanding or happen to look like a studio’s currently desired "six-week-wonder" odds are good you are simply shit outta luck and should consider a day job.
Many are called. Few chosen. It’s a fact that not everyone gets to make making art their choice of career.
Not everyone gets to be an astronaut or successful brain surgeon either but the wannabes there whine a lot less than the would-be rockstars and bestseller authors.
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
…addendum to the above; When it comes to software and tools this hurdle rises sharply since there are just so damn many skilled programmers who wrote their own version of a given app and launched it as FOSS.
You want to launch a new word processor? Well, it has to be better, more intuitive, and contain significant improvements over libreoffice and Word to stand a chance.
A new image processing app? Oh, dear…an even dozen and counting, all with excellent abilities.
Honestly, the way you do it today in software is to launch the app you built as open source then when the reviews come in, use it on your CV to get a good job.
Or, as a programmer, get yourself accredited to code on SAP systems and start raking in gagging bagfuls of cash for mediocre drudge work done mainly to fix the mistakes of grossly overpaying corporations.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
My product have been in open source for several years. The process doesnt seem to work like you think. for example this happened under open source:
1) github repo was not used for its original purpose of distributing source code,
instead the trolls spent time on critique of dead code
2) licensing was not considered a positive sign it was designed for, instead they
consider "free" to be sign that the software has no value whatsoever
3) the community’s only contribution has been attempts to bypass login systems and trying all kinds of illegal tricks
4) the source availability of open source has tendency to being misused by piracy groups, i.e. they modify offered software to be more suitable for piracy and bypassing provided copyright protection mechanisms
Basically the trolls on the internet are misusing the ideals by which free software community has been built from. The techniques are no longer working the way it worked still in 1990’s, and something new is required. I’ve long since moved to more modern approach/web platform’s rules, i.e. keeping my source code hidden inside my web server, and providing only working user interface to users, without providing source code.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
In other words, people recognized that your software is terrible, and you chose to make it as inaccessible as possible, and for some reason believe that this effort entitles you to a government-sponsored mansion.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
This indicates that you never managed to get any software done, even after your mom kepr feeding the best serials to you for last 18 years.
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
That sounds horrible. I hope he prepared properly to the task of packaging the content and collecting the money, or else he’ll have few years without sleep when customers keep pinging his email and calling his phone number in middle of night to obtain the content he published.
Large operations like that needs to be planned very carefully or else it’ll be huge catastrophy.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
Then congratulations, you’ve got a "huge catastrophy" on your hands!
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
"That sounds horrible. I hope he prepared properly to the task of packaging the content and collecting the money…"
What happened was that Coelho already had all books up for sale with a distributor. Then a copy of "The Alchemist" leaked on Pirate Bay. His physical sales swelled by 12 million copies.
To a great author, and a great work, piracy is not a problem, only beneficial.
We’ve grown used to the idea that mediocrity also deserves recognition, as if everyone who put pen to paper deserved fame and fortune. An idea peddled by the MPAA and the RIAA mainly.
The problem is that has never been true. There is no room in art for the mediocre and uninspiring. There never was. Unless you are an inspired genius, don’t quit your day job.
It’s a bit like science in that there is room in the Nobel prizes only for a very select few who were skilled, incredibly smart, and lucky.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
This sounds like marketing pitch from pirate bay central. Are they trying to position their web site as something actually useful, after naming the service as hub for pirated products?
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
"This sounds like marketing pitch from pirate bay central."
Do you have any evidence to counter it?
"Are they trying to position their web site as something actually useful"
They already have. It’s way more useful than anything you’ve ever done in your pitiful life already, in fact.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
"This sounds like marketing pitch from pirate bay central. Are they trying to position their web site as something actually useful, after naming the service as hub for pirated products?"
…you…aren’t for real, are you?
TPB hasn’t ever "marketed" themselves as anything other than "Feel free to place your torrent files/magnet links here".
As for "The Alchemist", the takeaway is that coelho gained, massively from the exposure, earning himself millions of physical sales.
When it comes to information you’ve succeeded if you can still sell it after everyone has it – like when a popular radio hit turns into a platinum album.
Because the information, if published, will become the property of everyone who wants it. This is guaranteed. It’s up to you to construct your business model around that market, not up to the market to cater to your whims.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
"That sounds horrible"
12 million extra sales sounds horrible? Hmmm, are you a deliberate failure?
"customers keep pinging his email and calling his phone number in middle of night to obtain the content he published"
Nah, I’m sure he has a competent publisher to avoid the idiocy that happens in your fantasy world.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
And when this happens to some 16 year old children who explored the piracy world and pushed his poems and contact information to the pirates? Do all these people also have a publisher that handles the customer calls?
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
I’m sorry, but what kind of customer calls would 16-year-old poets have to handle, anyways?
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
"And when this happens to some 16 year old children who explored the piracy world and pushed his poems and contact information to the pirates?"
You seem to be losing your tenuous grip on reality again.
"Do all these people also have a publisher that handles the customer calls?"
With your talk of customer calls, shelf space and video tapes, and your ads on buses populated exclusively by people who have no interest in your software’s platform, it’s clear you’ve no idea how the modern marketplace works.
I’m truly sorry that the modern world has left you behind, but it has nothing to do with piracy.
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
Of the “don’t have”s, only 13, 16, and 17 may actually be even close to actual problems you’re facing. No one demanded 10-12, 15, or 18-20, that’s for sure.
Actually, even in the “have”s, 7 isn’t all that relavent either.
By Tero Pulkinnen’s own admission if a kid used his Meshpage to animated a bootleg Mickey cartoon he’d be liable for copyright infringement lawsuits because his code doesn’t prevent it.
Game, set, match.
Re: Re:
This is true. There exists some protection against this situation from happening in meshpage. Currently there hasn’t been enough users to verify that the protections are working accurately enough, but at least some actions have been taken to prepare for this problem.
Basically it doesnt allow publishing the material (via meshpage) if the content isnt coming from user’s own web space. This is supposed to ensure that mickey mouse images are not being used.
Re: Re: Re:
So how do people collaborate on the same project?
All attempts to prevent infringement in a product meant to enable creativity result in a crippled product.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Well, you post your animation to the web page, which publishes it, and then your friends can see it. Then it’s possible to place your animations to your own homepage.
This isn’t true. Infringement isn’t necessary to enable creativity.
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
I didn’t say it was, but:-
Stops two or more people working on the same animation, which means you have crippled your product.
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
huh? they can just pass the keyboard and mouse to the next person who wants to make changes.
You’re assuming some crazy collaboration tool like google docs which is too difficult for children to setup.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
Not if they are on the web, and can see and use what the others put on their pages. One advantage of the Internet is that collaborators do not have to be on the same continent.
Re: Re: Re:5 Re:
I wouldn’t put children to go through that horror.
It’s better if they spend a month tweaking their animations alone, and once its finished after 30th iteration, they decide that it’s now good enough to publish, and then they put it to the web page for others to see.
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
Why should you decide what other peoples children can or cannot do? One kid may be a good character creator, and another a better story teller, and between them they can produce a better animation than either could alone. Besides online cooperation is fast becoming a necessary skill for any skills based job.
Re: Re: Re:7 Re:
It doesnt work like that. The animation technology has some limitations which kinda prevent this use case. First when they create animations, the maximum size of animations is like 300 nodes, after that the animation becomes unusable.
This limit would break if more than one person worked on an animation.
Then there’s GPU performance problems. Once you pile up more and more content to the same screen, at some point the gpu stops rendering it fast enough and their "collaboration" stops producing any useful output. For this reason the animations are divided to different web pages, with normal browser back-key to switch between animations.
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
So you’re expecting children, working on their own, to be able to create Pixar-quality animations using your software with such a restriction on the level of detail?
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
Well, I don’t yet know how far children can navigate my tool before using it becomes impossible because they cannot figure out what technique solves the problem. There are multiple places where it could fail:
1) learning to create/delete nodes
2) learning to connect nodes
3) learning to connect all slots in left side of the node
4) learning to display the end result from display menu
5) learning to combine meshes using or_elem
6) learning to render mesh using p_render or m_bind
7) learning to assign materials to meshes
8) learning to terminate material chains
9) learning to move meshes using move_ml
10) learning coordinate systems for positioning and movement
11) learning hex numbers for setting colours
12) learning to use web space
13) learning to load external files from web space
14) learning to connect the whole render graph
15) learning volume objects and voxels
At some point, depending on the age and skill level of the children, they simply cannot figure out how to go forward in the tool, and at that point the activity is likely to stop unless some more experienced people can help to go forward.
But older children can learn the whole tool and then they can create similar animations than what are available in the meshpage…
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
There are multiple places where it could fail
So what you’re saying is that your product, aimed at children as you quoted, might not actually be simple enough for them to use. Therefore, like you’ve argued about Pixar’s tools, they should be scrapped because children can’t use them.
Discourse with you is like kicking a retarded puppy I don’t feel sorry for.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
There are bigger problems than this. Videos adverticing my system are not popular enough that they would be displayed to potential users, so none of the children even knows the system exists.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
Well, first of all, what videos are you even talking about, and how do you plan to get kids to watch them?
Second, I think you should probably fix the more obvious roadblocks (like hex numbers for colors) before worrying about grabbing kids’ attention.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UF0zIMI2xA&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZxCE-RsBDc&feature=youtu.be
I just dumped the videos to youtube and expect the crowd to get interested…
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
I’ll watch the videos in a bit, but first, I’d just like to say that, while I’m far from an expert in YouTube algorithms or advertising, just dumping them on YouTube seems like a pretty weak strategy, but I suppose it’s better than the London buses.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
If you expect those videos to attract any attention to your product you are delusional. Some blocky animations that look like they come the 8 bit era , with no sound or demonstration of the actual program, or even hint they are advertising a program, are not going to attract any interest.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
You have to learn to walk before you can run.
Re: Re: Re:16 Re:
And you need to learn a lot about marketing, as your efforts have not yet reached the crawling stage.
Re: Re: Re:17 Re:
It’s no surprise that programmers get their code working, but then marketing is left for those who actually understand how to spam people’s email boxes without annoying people with cold contacts.
Re: Re: Re:18 Re:
Uhhh… that’s not a generally effective method of marketing, either. It’s usually stuff like word-of-mouth or ads on websites, YouTube videos, cable, etc. Mailing lists are a terrible way to advertise.
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
Still all the products and web sites seem to take your email address and spam you with their weekly newsletter to ensure that you don’t forget that the product exists.
I’m not yet popular enough to start doing such evil practises.
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
And yet here you are, asking for mansions.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
Well, the government is the most probable place where to get the money to cover the development costs of the system.
Re: Re: Re:22 Re:
And you are doing a terrible job convincing anyone to pay you for a mansion.
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
Original mansion story only expected government to provide plans of a mansion. I obviously have other plans for full scale mansion. But government is currently not even providing working plans, so full scale mansion is probably unrealistic to expect from them.
Re: Re: Re:24 Re:
I’m still perplexed as to why you think the government was going to provide plans for mansions for your software. I’ve heard the explanation, but it doesn’t make logical sense to me (or anyone else, apparently).
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
Because copyright is brain damage, that’s why.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
Here’s the thing: I do think there is a certain rationale for copyright that I can fully get behind if properly implemented. I also believe that, as a general rule, piracy is wrong and should be punished accordingly and proportionately.
The problem is that the most powerful entities and the most vocal people who speak in favor of copyright and against piracy tend to push things too far, are completely ignorant (willfully or not) of copyright law, economics, and/or reality, are just really bad at coming up with good arguments or examples to support their claims, or some combination of the above, and in some cases deliberately abuse copyright law just to earn a quick buck or silence critics. Because of this, I often have to be more critical of copyright and more defensive of piracy than I feel I ought to be. I don’t like having to criticize creative outlets or defend unlawful, immoral, and/or unethical activity, but people and entities like tp, the MPAA, the RIAA, Disney, Malibu Media, Rightshaven, Prenda Law, that guy who tried to sneak in IP stuff into the TPP, and those German, Spanish, and Belgian newspapers force my hand by pushing things way too far in the direction of overprotection or overextension of copyright and entitlement to success.
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
Obviously something happened where government/politicians promised the people who work hard to build software that the market for copyrighted works would exist and it would be possible for different sizes of teams to make a living while writing software. Basically the university education was government’s cunning plan to get large number of people study computer science in exchange of getting better life for everyone.
Now the government’s plan did work so that we actually learned to write software. Sadly the market never materialized, so there is danger that the work goes to waste when companies cannot utilize the work that was done. While market for physical products was strong, end users simply refuse to pay for the software, simply because everyone thinks "copying" is completely free operation, and they shouldn’t pay for receiving a copy.
So there is good plan to test if government is serious in trying to build a market for software products. Asking government to execute the initial steps for creating a mansion, i.e. getting plans done with the software I provided is good test if government is serious with their promises.
note that for government’s promise is fullfilled, if there exists one person who decides to try my tool and create plans for a mansion with it. But no, government doesn’t seem to be prepared for such complex operations, given that everyone I’ve seen has just refused to try the tool that is available.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
"Sadly the market never materialized"
Oh, but it did… You just want to blame the government for your failure in that marketplace.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
yeah, but I’m one of the best software developers on the planet, so if the market doesn’t work for me, noone has a chance in the market and in reality the market doesn’t exists at all.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
"I’m one of the best software developers on the planet"
The guy who just claimed that his software would use domain registrations to check the copyright status of work created 5 years before the first domain was registered?
I somehow doubt it.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
sadly I never claimed this.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
Then what were you claiming here?
Which URL are you expecting to be created 5 years before the first domain name was issued, and what does that have to do with copyright, as you claim?
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
How would you know? You never even tried my builder tool, even though it has been available in the page that you’ve been bashing all the time. If you decide software developer’s status using anything else than his finished software quality, then you’re doing it wrong. But no, you decided not to even look at it.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
I looked at it. Your website is shit and it not compatible with any OS I use. You marketing is also hilariously bad, and your claims of what your software supposedly does bears no relationship to reality. So, I have to conclude that you’re either a horrible developer or an incompetent designer of such.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
The YouTube videos are more of the same, showing animations that were state of the art back in the 1980s. Impressive back then, but nowhere what any computer user today expects.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
So you didnt get it working?
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
No, as I use Linux and MacOS and I’m not going to set up a Windows partition just to look at your software. But, I probably got further than most visitors to your site.
Your attempt to change the subject away from your silly claims above is noted, though.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
For the record, being doubtful of a claim is an opinion that can be based solely on the claim standing on its own. It’s not an assertion of knowledge at all. You don’t need to prove or disprove anything to have doubt. In the end, doubt is a personal feeling one might have about an assertion.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
Honestly, I’m doubtful of your claim because of how pretentious it is and the lack of any evidence supporting it, but let’s pretend that you are “one of the best software engineers on the planet.”
First off, even under those terms, there are still better software engineers who could potentially succeed where you failed.
Second, even the best software engineer on the planet may have absolutely no marketing skills whatsoever. If you can’t market your product, it really doesn’t matter how good a product it is; it almost certainly won’t sell.
Third, let’s look at what a software engineer does. Fundamentally, they are given a problem and some specifications, they analyze those requirements, and develop software accordingly. However, if the problem is judged improperly or there’s a problem with the specifications themselves, then even the best possible software that fits those parameters will fail in the real world due to bad information. In your case, it’s a pitfall or being self-employed since you may not be the best at judging what the market desires in your hypothetical product. Being a great software engineer doesn’t involve any skill in market research. And there’s some evidence to that given that you actually expect that schools will provide web space for kids to store content they make outside of school. As I personally know a number of teachers, I can tell you that that is utterly ridiculous, if only because schools place heavy restrictions on what can be done with school property, which includes this imagined web space. Plus, most schools—especially middle school or younger—don’t teach things like web design. Maybe they should, but even a little market research would disprove that handily.
Fourth, and this is related to the previous one, being one of the best software engineers doesn’t necessarily come with legal expertise. You have already demonstrated this with your ignorance of how copyright law works. This is relevant because it has led you to designing restrictions into your project in an effort to comply with legal requirements that simply don’t exist.
So yeah, you haven’t proved anything except possibly your own ineptitude or ignorance. I’d also suggest you look up the Dunning-Kruger effect for why people are skeptical of your claim to be one of the best. Suffice to say, most people who’d claim something like that are nowhere near as skilled as they believe.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
I did mention that I heard your explanation. I was stating that it is nonsensical even after you explained it. I wasn’t asking you to try again.
To reiterate what was said last time, none of what you referred to constitutes the government promising anything or anyone promising you anything that specific, predictions and speculations are not promises, and the government cannot control the market to that extent.
Also, it’s worth noting that with today’s technology, copying is effectively free. That doesn’t mean paid software cannot succeed, nor does it mean it’s impossible to make money off of free software without engaging in predatory practices. Your personal lack of success does not prove that the market is the problem. The fact that many players do succeed actually indicates that the market isn’t the problem. Therefore, the problem is likely on your end; whether it’s your product, your marketing, your website, or whatever. It could also just be bad luck. Not everyone succeeds on the market; that’s a fact you’re going to have to live with.
Re: Re: Re:24 Re:
And so your new plans are what, exactly? Expecting them to do more in exchange for the fuck all you provided? Two mansions with an army of terracotta gnomes?
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
I think you have an even bigger problem, most kids do not have the patience or attention span to undertake even simple animation projects spread over 1 or more months. Teenagers are more likely to undertake such projects, but they want a competent system, such as Blender or Art of Illusion.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
We spent our whole life studying how to build the system and now you claim its not competent system? Maybe you can do something better for the kids?
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Maybe you can do something better for the kids?
Why would I? To let you claim that it’s too much competition and should be shut down like you think Pixar should be? Fuck that noise.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
I only asked for pixar to make their tools suitable for children. I never said they need to be shut down.
Re: Re: Re:16 Re:
That is like asking Ferrari to make a formula 1 car that can be driven by children.
Re: Re: Re:17 Re:
I’m sure they already implemented this requirement and it’s very likely that such thing is available in local amusement park.
Re: Re: Re:18 Re:
If it’s that likely, then find one.
I won’t hold my breath waiting.
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
This url has a picture of theme park having cars designed for children:
https://www.linnanmaki.fi/fi/laitteet/
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
And can those cars go as fast, as off-road, the same way that Formula 1 cars can?
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
So… a completely different product that’s not used in the same way as the main one? That’s not what you’ve just been blathering on about.
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
It still lacks fundamental features, functions, and usability that you would find in a Formula-1 racecar. The two are not even close to the same market even if you exclude the fact that one is clearly meant for children and the other is very clearly not.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
There are bigger problems than this
Right, right… you think besides kids not knowing how to use a system that was designed for them to use is the smaller problem.
You think kids not using your system is a problem with your system you don’t need to worry about.
How has this amoeba’s original paramecium not won the Darwin awards yet?
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
You’re missing my main point. While I don’t know with absolute certainty, I would think that it would be impossible to fit a Pixar-quality animation into such a small size. That you expect children of any age to do it is just more absurd.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
This is why we spent our whole life studying this size vs quality problem in demoscene, and there are significant solutions available in the technology we built recarding this feature.
We all used to be children at some point, so we have (different kinds) of experience of how the process should work. And the system we’ve built would be useful to kids at beginning of high school etc…
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
Kids at that age, and with an interest in animation, will want an ability to produce more than kaleidoscope patterns and rotating cubes etc. Also, Art of Illusion is simple enough for them to use, and allows them to tell stories, rather than just produce pretty pattens, which becomes boring rather quickly.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
If you have 30 kids in school class, and 10 of them use blender, another 10 will use art of illusion, then there’s still 10 people left to use my system. Plenty of market for my system.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Better idea, let’s not use a system supposedly aimed at kids which the creator admits can’t be used by kids.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
You don’t trust kids ability to learn new technologies? The old farts are not able to learn new skills, but the kids can learn any kind of spaghetti you throw to them. We developed our system while trusting the kids to figure out the horror.
Re: Re: Re:16 Re:
To continue with this….
Compare my system to youtube — kids are using it even though google is not providing video editing tools, video cameras, microfones or animation technologies. I.e. they require kids to create all those themselves, before they can post finished videos to youtube.
My system at least provides the tools to do this, even if the tool is slightly difficult to use.
Re: Re: Re:17 Re:
YouTube is about video hosting, not video production. bhull242’s already explained this to death. Your insistence on conflating the two areas of focus doesn’t make you look smarter. It confirms suspicions that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Re: Re: Re:18 Re:
Why would a company as great as google leave video prouctionn to 3rd parties?
Are they not able to compete in that area?
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
"Why would a company as great as google leave video prouctionn to 3rd parties?"
Because Google’s business is not video production.
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
My bet is that they just couldn’t get the technology to work.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
My bet is you’re still addressing things that bear no relation to reality.
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
Google is already in a bunch of different markets: operating systems, web browsers, search engines, cloud hosting of a variety of files, word processors, music streaming, live video streaming, photo sharing, GPS mapping, video hosting, translation software, video game streaming, social media, smart home devices, smart phones, laptops, VR, spreadsheets, slideshows, software application storefronts, searchable texts, etc. They’ve also tried getting into the IAP market and are working on self-driving vehicles, among many other projects. However, there are many markets they don’t delve into—like online references (like Wikipedia), music or video production, or musical recording and editing. Maybe they’ll make video production software in the future, but there’s no pressing need at the moment.
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
Why would a company as great as Google leave agriculture to 3rd parties?
Are they not able to compete in the area?
Flying Spaghetti Monster, but you’re dumber than a sack of rocks.
Re: Re: Re:17 Re:
Wrong, they let all users of their hosting service select and use whatever tools they prefer, and the kids are doing just fine with the tools that are already available, and are intended for anybody with an interest to use.
Re: Re: Re:18 Re:
So the kids either need to buy $5000 camera equipment and pirate the software required to convert it to video streams that youtube requires?
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
"So the kids either need to buy $5000 camera equipment"
Why would they do that rather than using the equipment they already have (laptop, webcam, phones)?
"and pirate the software required to convert it to video streams that youtube requires?"
Why would they do that when there’s so many free programs available, some of which may be built into the OS and utility software supplied with their computer?
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
With children as customers, you need to assume that they still do not have all the gadgets that you’re used to. Are you assuming that every child on the planet decides to spend their weekly allowance to buy laptops, webcams and phones?
Again you’re talking about children, where parents forget to give the child any money to spend on "free" programs, so the only alternative is to explore the dark web.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
"With children as customers, you need to assume that they still do not have all the gadgets that you’re used to"
No, with the real world being what it is, I have to assume that the type of child who would want to create a YouTube video also has a device with a camera installed within their household.
"Are you assuming that every child on the planet decides to spend their weekly allowance to buy laptops, webcams and phones?"
No, I’m assuming that they don’t have to personally own a device in order to use it, and that the device in question is likely to be the one they already use to watch YouTube.
Even if not, it’s not exactly unrealistic. I personally saved for a year to buy my first computer as a child, a ZX Spectrum, which cost around £125 in 1985 money. A modern child will be able to get a device with a camera for far less money than they if they don’t already have one and their allowance is likely to be more than I got.
Even if you assume that the average child doesn’t already have access to a camera, it’s hardly a major hurdle for them to get one, even if they don’t have the sort of parent who will happily drop some money on a device to encourage their child’s creative output.
"parents forget to give the child any money to spend on "free" programs"
Again, your fantasy world where people have to spend money on free programs and where legal free programs do not exist, is nothing like the real world the rest of us inhabit.
Re: Re: Re:22 Re:
I spent my weekly allowance to get amiga 500. That was awesome computer, much better than zx spectrum. I even created a commercial game using that hardware and got my weekly allowance money back.
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
"I spent my weekly allowance to get amiga 500. That was awesome computer, much better than zx spectrum"
Nice story. However, your attempt at superiority involves ignoring me mentioning 1985, which is a full 2 years before the Amiga was released. You do have a problem dealing with real world facts when they don’t allow you to pretend to be better than you really are, don’t you?
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
I have a younger cousin who used his parents’ equipment to make a video and post it online like five years ago. The equipment was pretty decent, too. And since his dad works in software, his house has laptops, webcams, tablets, and smart phones.
Heck, pretty much every household has at least one smartphone with a camera, including many children (more than I think ought to), and most laptops I’ve seen include a webcam built-in. In fact, most cell phones, even if they aren’t smartphones and including prepaid phones, have a built-in camera. Kids having access to laptops, phones, and cameras is extremely common, and kids owning them isn’t all that rare, either.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
"huh? they can just pass the keyboard and mouse to the next person who wants to make changes."
Wow. No wonder your product sucks if your idea of online collaboration involved physically handing over control in order to work.
"You’re assuming some crazy collaboration tool like google docs which is too difficult for children to setup."
A 5 year old can set up a Google doc in seconds. Sharing features are easy and transparent even if a parent has to help for a few moments to set up the initial sharing. Why is your software so inferior that you can’t imagine of allowing the same?
Re: Re: Re:5 Re:
There just isn’t any demand for collaboration features. In the whole development time of the technology, noone has mentioned users to want collaboration, so I just assume the feature is not in demand.
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
"There just isn’t any demand for collaboration features"
Hmmm… who to believe about what people are demanding? You or Pixar?
https://renderman.pixar.com/product
When you, a failure, are saying that collaboration is not necessary and Pixar, a massive success, is using it as a main selling point of their product, it’s not hard to see what reality is.
"In the whole development time of the technology, noone has mentioned users to want collaboration"
I dare say that the tiny sample size of people who both use your software and are engaged enough to take part in future development is not going to give you a wide range of real world requirements.
Re: Re: Re:7 Re:
But you still have no idea how my development process works. Only thing you can do is guess it based on some funny metrics like number of developers in the project. But you have no idea how our requirements process works.
It’s significantly more complicated than what you think.
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
"But you still have no idea how my development process works"
This much is true.
"Only thing you can do is guess it based on some funny metrics like number of developers in the project"
Not true. I can also go on what you state here, the product you reveal for public consumption and various other tells. What that reveals to me is a substandard project led by someone who has a tenuous grasp on the reality of the marketplace.
I may be wrong about that, but given the data I have to go on, that’s what is suggested to me.
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
The requirements still hits the exact spot that google failed to implement and where they assumed that 3rd parties need to handle.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
So, the things that people have been doing in their millions since YouTube launched without the need for your product?
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
I already explained that I didn’t implement "video" technology what these millions of people are using. The reason is that anyone who does publish software handling video streams(like ffmpeg and mplayer) are taking huge copyright risks when publishing their software on the internet, given that those video software is going to be used for hollywood movie piracy.
Thus my software is using 3d/opengl technology. As far as I know, google still doesn’t have a solution to let youtube users to create 3d animations. (even though they might be using phone cameras to create video streams)
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
That is not an Area of software that Google is interested in. However there are plenty of paid for and free applications that allow users do just that.
And owning a pencil is to have an unauthorised device that allows copyright infringement.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
But you have to browse 2 billion web sites before you find one that provides such service.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
"But you have to browse 2 billion web sites before you find one that provides such service."
Only if you’re utterly clueless. The rest of us will find a decent selection of tools on our first Google search, along with articles that help choose the best one for your personal needs.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
You could let DuckDuctGo so that for you, and type in ‘free animation apps’ to find out what is available. The same search works with Google as well.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
You’re thinking of the famous space pens where the pencil development took millions of dollars and the blueprints of that pencil was kept huge secret so that soviets are not into the development. Still soviets solved the same problem using $2 pencil from nearest shop?
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Yes, and by your standards the pencil should have been banned because it made the space pens look costly and stupid.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
US laws that space pens are under, might not exist in soviet union.
Even if you managed to import cheap pencils from the soviet union, or use local pencils, the copyright issues are not solved by this.
After spending millions to develop space pens, nasa has clear ownership of the space pen designs and any cheap pencil manufacturers who want to use that design will need to get a (expensive) license from nasa.
Re: Re: Re:16 Re:
You seem to be labouring under the delusion that people will pay extortionate fees rather than just use the cheap pencils.
Re: Re: Re:17 Re:
He does not understand English either, as I said the pencil enabled copyright infringement, not that the design of the pencil itself could be an infringement.
Re: Re: Re:18 Re:
I’m always moving to the direction where there is biggest problems recarding the area which you identified. "enabling copyright infringement" by writing poems isn’t the biggest issue with the pen industry. But since you went to pen direction, I need to find where the real problem is located at, and nasa is obviously good direction to go. They were doing awesome software engineering already when moon landing was big, so they have tons of experience with complex software systems. While their rockets sometimes crash and burn, they still have the support of the american people and congress is providing them with taxpayers money regularly even with some failed products.
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
""enabling copyright infringement" by writing poems isn’t the biggest issue with the pen industry"
You’re confusing yourself again. He was not saying anything about the pen industry, he was saying that you can "pirate" poems with a pencil if you so wish and there’s nothing the maker of that pencil nor the author of the poem can do to stop you. Nothing you’ve said refutes this.
What you’re responding to had nothing to do with NASA until you brought it up, but it’s interesting that you’re obsessing over a decades-old project rather than deal with the current issues that are in the conversation everyone else is having.
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
You’re now claiming that the feature of "copyright checking" is impossible to implement? The reality where such thing is actually possible might be nearer than you think. They have already invented the following technologies:
1) 3d pens where computer tracks pen position and outputs correct plastic or content recarding where you move your pen
2) Artificial intelligence will be very likely to be used for copyright checking, i.e. regognizing plagiated text is already used by universities to check student output, and it’s only small step forward to do correct copyright checking
3) text editors are perfect place where copyright checking could be integrated
So all the technologies needed for such pen are already available. They simply haven’t yet integrated them to do the copyright checking operation, even though there is huge financial benefits from doing so.
There are some issues with copyright checking though:
1) free speech is prevented if systems start to filter out copyrighted works from people’s vocabulary
2) much of the text output in the world is never published, but only used for communication between small number of humans, so copyright checking might not make sense for such usage
3) business situations usually need to be considered with copyright issues. It’s completely different aspect to do hobby writing than what happens when you have millions of products in the marketplace.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
"You’re now claiming that the feature of "copyright checking" is impossible to implement?"
On a pencil? Erm, yes…
"They have already invented the following technologies"
None of which is on a pencil, and none of which can be implemented without greatly increasing the price of a pencil (meaning nobody will buy the ones it’s installed in). Even if you managed to somehow ban the sale of a standard pencil, people could make their own quite easily.
"even though there is huge financial benefits from doing so"
There really isn’t. As with your "millions of devices" idea, there’s no realistic benefit of doing any of these things instead of simply accepting that a non-zero rate of piracy always has and always will exist, and adjust your expectation and marketing accordingly.
"There are some issues with copyright checking though"
Yes, which is why most sane people aren’t trying to do it in the way you keep saying it should be.
Re: Re: Re:22 Re:
You simply accept failure than try to solve the problems?
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
Yes, when the alternative is to destroy human culture to enrich a few companies.
Re: Re: Re:24 Re:
I think after hundred years of copyright laws, there’s still no sign of human culture being destroyed. It’s "to promote progress" that copyright exists.
But I don’t think you yet understand how serious business copyright issues are. Companies that actually care about users are spending significant amount of resources to implement copyright’s limitations properly. You could consider it like a flock of chickens that runs around the house when damage awards of billions of dollars are being introduced to the system. One person’s rights to free speech are completely insignificant when money amounts nearing billions are being handled. There are significant human rights issues related to how those billions are handled, and its nothing to be proud of. Whenever you hear companies spending billions on something, there is significant amount of damage that has already happened, and that damage can never be properly recovered and world is much worse off when problems happen in this area.
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
There is this story about copyright maximalism, killing pop music, published on this site today. So yes copyright is killing culture slowly but surely.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
When large companies are building products for large areas of the world, the only guiding principles they can use for implementation is those which are implemented the same way on all those areas. Relying on local rules is a no-go, because it just causes more damage than what it fixes. Thus the companies can only use things like copyright which is supposedly implemented by all the areas in approximately the same way.
Once you break copyright, you lose the support of these larger companies which can provide significant support for large areas of the world. Are you going to study the laws of physics to find commonality between those areas of the world, or whether you rely on copyright?
There is significant adverse consiquences related to breaking copyright, i.e. the vendors who produce the products and services have no base they can rely on since every area implements their legal rules different way.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
Not nearly. Copyright doesn’t even last the same amount of time in all countries. Works like 1984 by George Orwell are already in the public domain in Australia.
You seem to be enamored with the idea that copyright is necessary to work with larger companies or that larger companies have a love affair with copyright. That’s a shit relationship. Larger companies are all too keen to abandon copyright the moment it inconveniences them. The cases where the RIAA used pictures for their materials without compensating the photographers would be a good start.
Why not? According to you people use YouTube even though it doesn’t provide them with 3D modeling software. If you’re going to logic leap off the edge of a cliff…
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
Question: How does Microsoft do anything to prevent its tools (Windows, Edge, Office Suite, Notepad, etc.) from being used to commit copyright infringement?
Also, free speech is actually considered pretty darn important compared to copyright. That’s why satire of a work is considered fair use and is not infringing. Are there some limitations on speech due to copyright? Sure, but there are as many if not more limitations on copyright due to free speech.
Additionally, I highly doubt that any company or person earned or lost billions of dollars due to any single copyrighted work and/or piracy of a single copyrighted work. That’s pretty absurd. Millions, sure, but billions?
I’m also unconvinced that the damage done by copyright infringement is, has been, will be, or could be so substantial as to make the world much worse off when there are problems with copyright enforcement. I certainly don’t think that copyright protection is a human right like privacy, free speech, nondiscrimination, voting, medical care, dignity, life, freedom of religion, freedom of association, etc.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
oracle vs google java lawsuit has billions damage awards in it, once it gets properly decided. These takes long time to resolve, but in the end they either get their billions, or they dont. At least oracle is trying to get some.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
Ah, right… Oracle. Your shining example of copyrightability… except that they were caught copying Amazon’s API, the same thing they’re suing Google for.
So Oracle owes Amazon money now, right?
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
And I am extremely doubtful about the merits of that lawsuit, so…
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
Question: How does Microsoft do anything to prevent its tools (Windows, Edge, Office Suite, Notepad, etc.) from being used to commit copyright infringement?
Also, free speech is actually considered pretty darn important compared to copyright. That’s why satire of a work is considered fair use and is not infringing. Are there some limitations on speech due to copyright? Sure, but there are as many if not more limitations on copyright due to free speech.
Additionally, I highly doubt that any company or person earned or lost billions of dollars due to any single copyrighted work and/or piracy of a single copyrighted work. That’s pretty absurd. Millions, sure, but billions?
I’m also unconvinced that the damage done by copyright infringement is, has been, will be, or could be so substantial as to make the world much worse off when there are problems with copyright enforcement. I certainly don’t think that copyright protection is a human right like privacy, free speech, nondiscrimination, voting, medical care, dignity, life, freedom of religion, freedom of association, etc. It may be important, but you’re exaggerating just how important it is.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
It’s easy, they invented their own file formats like .doc files which nothing else on the planet is using.Thus all word documents on the planet are created in ms word. keeping thing incompatible with rest of the world is easy way to ensure that users created the content themselves.
Then copy-pasting from word files can be prevented using some flags in the ms word. same with powerpoints.
Then word has some very evil trickery in it: word’s internal data structures are directly reflected to the file format. Thus any programs that can read ms word files must exactly replicate word’s internal data structures. However, this cloning of data structures is illegal by copyright laws, so writing software that can read ms word files is not allowed. This is why os/2 was killed basically, they couldn’t legally replicate microsoft’s word .doc files. Even currently, linux office software has significant problems with microsoft’s .doc files, because some operations they need to do are simply illegal. There was some law changes and government tried to unravel microsoft’s control over those file formats, but that never was too successful.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
Fine, I’ll bite. What’s stopping me from writing "this is where you can download a free copy of Photoshop, URL here" in Notepad, saving it as a .txt file and sending it to someone else who can open it? Pinkie swears? Imaginary ponies?
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
nothing stops you from doing it. But you’ll just take a risk that photoshop authors will find out about your pirated product catalog offer and sue you for copyright infringement. (obviously the "someone else" lied to you about being yout friend and instead sent your .txt file to photoshop lawyers for cannon fodder)
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
And there’s the point everyone here has been trying to hammer into that anvil you use for a brain: nothing inside Notepad itself, or the .txt file format, contributed to copyright protection here. You keep claiming that Microsoft made their file format and software so exclusive it magically protects the copyright of Photoshop. Here the only thing that’s stopping piracy of Photoshop going on is a human snitch. And what if the guy isn’t a snitch and spreads the word anonymously so people can download Photoshop? How’s Notepad’s file format exclusivity going to save you then, wise guy?
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
"You simply accept failure than try to solve the problems?"
Piracy is not necessarily a failure, and given that your suggested "solutions" cause way more problems and losses than just accepting reality, it’s best to just live with it.
Case in point: you suggested that the correct reaction to piracy is to stop people buying the legal version. My suggestion is to build the expected small percentage of actual losses into your revenue projections. It’s not hard to see who will get the best long term revenue.
Re: Re: Re:24 Re:
My suggestion is actually "build enough limitations to your product that piracy becomes impossible".
there is slight note here, "impossible can be implemented, but there is always some problems while doing it".
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
As detecting any and all infringement is impossible, so the only guaranteed way of preventing infringement is to prevent the user viewing or creating anything.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
Or you can create the content yourself from scratch?
Then expanding from the content you created is easy since you have actually legal content that you can use to build your user interface.
Who said all content needs to be authored by random trolls on the internet?
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
If I am creating content, how do you expect to prevent me infringing on someone copyright using software you developed.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
Well, my software has some concept of "operations that ordinary authors are doing". This includes for example:
1) creating jpg image using gimp
2) placing those jpg images to their web space
3) looking up url to that content
4) copy-pasting or typing the url to url field
5) letting my software to load the content.
With this conceptual model of what user activity is expected, I can do the following checks:
a) if user loads jpg image from newyorktimes.com and bostonherald.com, then user is not using their own "web space", and thus the access can be discarded. I.e. user is not following the conceptual model of how legimative authors of their own content should work
b) if user loads jpg image from some other domain than where their homepage is at, then user is again not using their own "web space", and access can be discarded. This allows discarding the content from first access, not after damage has already been done.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
If you allow them to bring their own photos into the system, they can bring infringing photos into the system, and according to you, your are then liable to pay $30k.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
The only way this can happen is by lying to my system and providing invalid homepage address. Then the checks I’m doing are not doing anything. But when my web form asks for homepage address, there is legal requirement to fill in exactly the correct information that is being asked, and thus people who can avoid my checks are already doing illegal operations.
My copyright checks are allowed to trust the information that user provides, assuming it has been correctly asked when publishing the information. If I ask homepage address, they need to provide their correct homepage.
Once I have necessary information to execute my checks, I can just design those conceptual models of how I expect users to work, and then reject all other use cases.
Possible improvements would be checking the photos and files for creation date…
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
"there is legal requirement to fill in exactly the correct information that is being asked"
So, your way to make sure someone isn’t wanting to break the law by pirating something is to hope they care about not breaking the law when signing up?
"Possible improvements would be checking the photos and files for creation date"
Which tells you what about the copyright status, exactly?
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
creation date check is useful when my software launches gimp or mspaint for creating the image, but user gives url to some earlier work….
if I expect user to create the content with the program i launched an the resulting url is created in 1980, then there might be copyright infringement used.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
That would be rather inaccurate. Sometimes people place newer images in older urls, or vice versa. And it’s often for nonshady reasons, too.
Though I’d be suspicious of a url from 1980, too, seeing as the internet wasn’t really a thing until the 90s. Or rather, I’d be suspicious of the metadata associated with that url.
Re: Re: Re:34 Re:
"Though I’d be suspicious of a url from 1980"
I’d be extremely suspicious, since the first domain name was registered in 1985.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280090622/The-first-ever-20-domain-names-registered
Not that it really matters, as before the invention of the web and the Mosaic browser, the internet was mostly text based and very few people would have been associating images with the domain names at that point even if they had existed.
As usual, he’s so obsessed with his "perfect" software , he forgets to make it applicable to documented reality.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
"creation date check is useful"
Not in terms of telling when the original work was created it’s not.
"but user gives url to some earlier work"
So, again you’re blindly depending on them telling the truth when your whole system is supposed to catch people who are infringing??
"an the resulting url is created in 1980"
You’re expecting URLs to be created 5 years before the first one in history was registered? You’re expecting people creating works 9 years before the web was invented to have relevant online presence at the time they created their work?
You really are delusional.
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
I’d like to note that Tero has on multiple occasions claimed that having insufficient protection and copyright enforcement should open you up to enough legal consequences to tear you a new asshole.
And here we have his system where his highest level of protection is a fucking pinkie swear.
Then again this is the same brilliant mind who claims that copyright exists because older works should be nuked off the face of the earth when the copyright expires, so it’s not like we’re dealing with particularly exceptional brainpower here.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
You’re missing the point. If that is the only thing needed to prevent piracy to your satisfaction (or the law’s satisfaction), then your measures are unnecessarily complicated and restrictive. You might as well just have the user sign a legal document that says, “I am not/will not commit copyright infringement using this software.” It will have the exact same effect except that your software wouldn’t be restricted to users who have a homepage or are willing to lie about that even if it adds to the legal problems they’d run into if they get caught. It’s like security theater but with copyright protection.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
"Well, my software has some concept of "operations that ordinary authors are doing"."
But, no concept of why.
"if user loads jpg image from some other domain than where their homepage"
So, you immediately reduce your customer base to people who already own a domain and hosting and/or are willing to set up such things for the express purpose of using your software? Also, preventing professionals from servicing clients whose domains they don’t own.
That will lose more potential sales than your overreaching crap could ever gain by doing so implementing it. Not to mention – just because I host an image on my domain, that does not necessarily mean I have the rights to do so. How do you check if the photo I uploaded was taken by me or by someone else who didn’t give me permission?
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
Yes, if they ever want to display this in a web page, content needs to acquire urls. I cannot change this feature, since web technologies decided it for me.
urls obviously work with file:// prefix, if you don’t need to put it to web page.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
I must be misunderstanding something here. It sounds like you require a url for the image in order to upload it to a website based on that url.
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
It’s not technically upload operation since meshpage never permanently stores the content behind the url. But it can be called fetch-publish or fetch-display operation.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
Let me see if I have this right.
Someone makes a 3d model or whatever using your software. They then upload it to their homepage (not using your software) and tell your software the URL of this file’s location. Using that URL, your software or website can then allow anyone to be able to view that file using a fetch request through your software or website. Essentially, the idea is to make it so that these files can be accessible using data from a single database while the files themselves are stored by the users on their own server or website or something that you have nothing to do with. Do I have the gist of it?
Re: Re: Re:34 Re:
yup, that’s exactly how it works.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
BTW, that’s not a URL, exactly. That’s a filepath.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
" I cannot change this feature, since web technologies decided it for me."
Nom, web technology has decided that things like 3rd party image hosting sites are perfectly acceptable. If you’re going to reject those and insist customers create bespoke sites at their own expense, that’s on you
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
Well, obviously these checks built into the software cannot check all instances of copyright infringement. Additionally you also need to manually check all the content that appears to your web page submitted by the users. While I still have low amount of users, the manual checks are feasible and while doing those, I will learn new techniques which can be enforced by the software. Thus when user base grows larger and I acquire more copyright checks which actually works properly, eventually I have system that cannot be broken by users.
Its slow incremental process of evaluating which checks are necessary to control your current user base.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
Therefore those checks are insufficient and, by your own rules, you’re liable for copyright infringement lawsuits.
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
thats why it still needs manual checking of all the content that gets posted to the web page.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
It’s adorable that you think this counts as a solid rebuttal.
Copyright enforcement often claims that manual checking of all content is insufficient. It’s slower than machines, which is why they enjoy algorithm-based DMCAs. Manual checking is also a great source of copyright enforcement mistakes, which on several counts you’ve defended their wrongful suing of children because the enforcement powers they have are insufficient, therefore they make mistakes.
So, once more with feeling. Meshpage has insufficient copyright protection. Tero Pulkinnen has claimed that anything with insufficient copyright protection must be destroyed, or the owner must pay millions of dollars. Therefore, Tero Pulkinnen must remove Meshpage or pay millions of dollars.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
So someone working with the NYT or Boston Herald or whatever other parts of the internet you classify as a legitimate author’s “own web space” (which normal people would call a web site or possibly domain) or licensing content from such a “web space” would be unable to use your software to work with content they created or have permission to use from the ones who created it.
It also means that a person would not be able to upload something that they originally uploaded to, say, DeviantArt using your software.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
No it doesnt work like that. It only checks if two separate sites are being used.
People who have two domains and want to use both at the same time might have problems with the check.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
Chalk that up to you once again having no fucking idea what you’re ranting about…
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
So it doesn’t check to see, “Is this domain likely to be used by the average user?”, just whether the homepage and file location and metadata are, in your view, consistent?
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
Actually, why do you expect children to have a homepage to begin with, but not a laptop, phone, webcam, or some other camera? I know a lot more children who own laptops, phones, webcams, and/or expensive cameras than ones who have their own domain and hosting for their own homepage, and most of those who do have a homepage are probably more likely to have their own phone or laptop with a camera, too. Even among adults, more people are going to have phones with cameras, laptops with webcams, or expensive cameras than those with their own website.
The more you explain about your software, the more confused I get about your intended market, what your software is intended to do, or both.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
Web technologies give 3 alternatives:
1) upload content to web server
2) don’t use external files at all
3) store urls and do fetch-display during web request
I’m using the alternative (3), because (1) requires me to store other people’s jpg files in my server, and (2) is too limited. So alternative (3) is suitable for my technology.
This requires users to have their own web storage space.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
Okay, but that doesn’t actually answer my question. I totally understand why, of those three options, that’s what you would choose… if you weren’t focused on marketing this to children. I was asking why you would expect children to have web storage space, especially when you also expected your child users would likely not have a laptop, webcam, or phone.
And that’s what’s confusing me about this whole thing (well, one of them anyways): you say you want to focus on making this accessible children, and you say the part of your software that makes it stand out from its competitors so people would want to use it and not some other piece of software is that you’re trying to make it highly accessible for average users, particularly children. However, you also impose all these restrictions that would definitely reduce accessibility, not to mention usability or usefulness. In most cases, you say it’s to implement copy-protection because you think it’s legally required, but a) it’s not, b) some of the measures you’ve chosen don’t seem like they’d actually reduce piracy by any substantial measure, especially when compared to the legitimate uses that would be reduced or prevented (though even excluding that they still seem extremely ineffective), and c) some measures are needlessly restrictive in that less-restrictive measures are available that would be equally effective both in preventing or reducing piracy and in preventing legal liability (even under your idea of legal liability for copyright infringement).
I’m also confused about why you would need to be accessing user content online at all if online collaboration isn’t an option and you aren’t hosting the files yourself.
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
creating web pages is probably something they teach at school nowadays.
I expect this to happen with school’s web space.
So the children has already experience how to use these isp’s systems.
Its another matter if the parent have provided web space for the children.
what measures would these be? I can always implement new techniques if they actually help with removing liability about 3rd party content
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
"I expect this to happen with school’s web space."
But, you just said that you’d reject images hosted on domains the customer does not own, hence by definition you’d be rejecting all of those kids’ pictures.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
This might surprise you, but education policies are generally not built upon the business expectations of some talentless hack nobody.
The new technique is nothing, because nothing will stop copyright fanatics like you from bitching about 3rd party content.
You can choose whether to spend nothing and have nobody notice Meshpage, or spend millions of dollars (which I might add could be spent on an actual mansion) and have nobody notice Meshpage. Guess which option is less expensive.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
There is no way to give a user tools to create something from scratch without also giving them tools to make a copy of something (even if indirectly) if the user has the ability to view that something and it would be possible to create that something using the same tools, and there is no way to prevent tools that allow one to make a copy of something while also preventing any and all—or even a majority—of copyright infringement that would otherwise be possible using your tools. Therefore, the only way to prevent your tools from being used to infringe on copyright completely (or nearly so) is to prevent or heavily restrict users from using your tools to view things or create things, even from scratch.
Similarly, there is no way to ensure that random internet trolls won’t have access to your tools without restricting legitimate users.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
The checks do not need to exactly follow the legal borders. It’s not illegal to build limitations that are stricter than the legal limits. It’s only copyright minimalist view that breaks the whole thing, when they want to "utilize" the full power of the technology space. Users just get confused if you give them full power of what programmers can do. Instead you need to find reasonable limitations which make the software easy to use while still preserving some of the powerful operations. Thus there’s no reason to allow copyright infringements to happen.
this might mean things like "not using movie files" or "not allowing all urls" or "uploading content only from your own computer" or some other such technique. Of course powerusers would like to rewrite their own protocol stack for your program, but propably those users are rare.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
Why should you impose any restriction on users, especially if they prevent them doing things that they are legally entitled to do?
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
I don’t need to support all use cases that users can think of.
copyright infringement is just one use case that I don’t want to support.
there are other such things
1) pouring cola to your keyboard and watching the software fail in smoke
2) movie files are not supported because I think they are too dangerous
3) I don’t support rendering .blend or .3ds files because they’re too proprietary
4) I don’t support uploading to facebook, twitter or instagram
5) I don’t create log files and post them to reddit regularly
6) I don’t spam people with marketing emails
7) I don’t use rss feeds to publish new software versions
etc, there are tons of things that I simply dont support, even though many users might want to use those features.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
Then don’t piss and moan when they don’t use your software, dumbass.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
" there are tons of things that I simply dont support"
Which is why nobody wants to use your feature=poor software and use your competitors instead.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
You’re missing the point.
First of all, did you know that people can, from a “blank canvas”, so to speak, create pretty darn accurate copies of still images? So long as they have a tool to view the original and a tool to create something, they can make an exact or near-exact copy of the original image. Not to mention the “screen capture” feature most modern devices with a screen and internet connection have. Text files can be copied in almost exactly the same way, only easier.
For movies or sound recordings, even under impossibly perfect copy-protection, we have these amazing inventions known as the camera and the microphone that can be used to record anything we can see and/or hear.
“But,” you say, “I only allow certain file formats to be used, and it’s for animations!” However, that’s not enough. People could painstakingly replicate the original animation manually. People do that all the time. After all, an animation or movie (excluding sound) is fundamentally just a bunch of still images displayed one after another in very quick succession, often with sound added. Hell, they could even just do a simple copy-and-paste or downloaded copy of an animation done by someone else in the required file format, maybe make a few minor, nontransformative changes or manipulate the metadata to get around your other checks, and done! One pirated copy that your software cannot detect.
Additionally, since everything that the computer does gets sent to certain memory banks at some point in a fairly predictable manner, it’s possible to reverse engineer any program run by your computer or any nonexecutable file displayed by your computer.
And nearly all of this is done using basic tools. Much of it can be done using only tools to create content from a blank file (not from an existing file and without the basic operations of cut, copy, and paste) and tools to view preexisting, copyrighted content (again without the typical operations of cut, copy, or paste). Others relax those rules slightly. Some involve the copy-protection you specify; others don’t.
My only point was to demonstrate how fundamentally impossible it is to restrict copyright infringement without restricting users’ ability to create and view content. Even under unrealistically restrictive scenarios using impossible copy-protection measures, it’s still able to be circumvented. And of course, the users will notice these restrictions, especially since other programs that do something similar do not have such restrictions.
Sure, there is no legal requirement to match the bounds of the law exactly, but the legal requirements on ISPs and makers of software regarding handling of copyright with regards to third-party content are much broader than the bounds of the law regarding direct copyright infringement, and the financial incentive generally pushes closer to the boundary of the law than you think. There is no financial or legal incentive (at least right now in the US) to impose any copyright-enforcement measures in any of their software that handle third-party content than Google does, and that’s nowhere near what you are demanding. For one thing, copyright-based upload filters are not used by the vast majority of ISPs, and the law absolutely doesn’t require them
at all.
But anyways, my point was that legitimate users will notice a negative impact from any copy-protection or copyright-enforcement measures implemented by software that handles third-party content if such measures have a strong impact on piracy. It’s unavoidable.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
Law doesnt require upload filters but it requires some kind of copyright check. It’s companies own issue how they want that copyright check to implement. Usually it has two elements:
1) software based limitations that make amount of manual checking smaller
2) manual checking that examines every work and finds out original authors
This is the same pattern that programming languages use for ensuring correctness of software:
1) type checking checks some of the rules automatically
2) manual testing will find rest of the problems
Every software developer knows this pattern and its easy to implement for
all known software, and it ensures perfect results both in software correctness and also in copyright area. Thus legal eagles can require software vendors to check the published products against copyright infringement and only the incompetent fools cannot make the system work perfectly.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
That lie didn’t fly when Article 17 was passed and it’s not going to fly now, bro.
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
I’m talking about US law. I’m not touching EU law.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
copyright is supposed to be the same all over the world. USA has made all countries accept all kinds of negotiation results, mostly because hollywood interests are also outside usa borders…
Re: Re: Re:34 Re:
And yet, it isn’t.
I know that tears a deep gash in the garbage dump you use for a heart, but it really isn’t.
Re: Re: Re:34 Re:
Regardless, copyright law is not the same across all borders, especially after the EU Copyright Directive was passed, so it really doesn’t matter what’s supposed to be the case. We’re dealing with real laws in the real world in this reality, not whatever reality you seem to have come from.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
Fair, not that it actually dissuades the point.
If the US copyright fuckbois tried to argue for an Article 17 system, you can bet your back teeth they’d insist upload filters were optional if they thought it’d win them support.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
We’ve already had this conversation, too. I pointed out that US copyright law does not require such things (and by the way, 1 involves upload filters and 2 is just impossible to do at scale and completely unreasonable). I showed you case law that made it clear that US law doesn’t require such things. I gave examples to show that these ideas aren’t actually used in practice by major companies. I’m not litigating this issue again unless you have something actually new to work with.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
Then I guess literally every ISP (like YouTube) that handles third-party content was developed by incompetent fools because absolutely none of them do that.
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
thats why they need to do upload filters and contentID systems to keep hollywoo lawyers happy. While hollywood has special access to youtube’s system and can reject other people’s videos via some content id hashes, ordinary youtube authors do not have that luxury. This means those authors gets ripped off by youtube when youtube’s community takes anything that can be displayed on computer screen and turns it to videos for youtube community’s enjoyment and authors have no way other than sending DCMA letters to youtube to take down the violators.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
And that’s not what you said several replies ago:
I mean, we already knew you were a lying sack of human and animal excrement, so it’s not like this was surprising, but I suppose another demonstration that copyright supporters are gorram fucking batshit insane is always nice even if it is preaching to the rational.
Re: Re: Re:34 Re:
These both can be true at the same time, if the following information is taken into account:
1) it’s site maintainer’s own decision how they want to implement the necessary copyright checks
2) some sites actually want to do copyright filter instead of manually going through submissions
3) there is no requirement for upload filters in the law, because other alternatives also exist
Re: Re: Re:35 Re:
to continue this, check this web site: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/frequently-asked-questions-copyright-reform
It has the following text:
Will the directive impose upload filters online?
No. The text of the political agreement does not impose any upload filters nor does it require user-uploaded platforms to apply any specific technology to recognise illegal content.
Under the new rules, certain online platforms will be required to conclude licensing agreements with rightholders – for example, music or film producers – for the use of music, videos or other copyright protected content. If licences are not concluded, these platforms will have to make their best efforts to ensure that content not authorised by the right holders is not available on their website. The “best effort” obligation does not prescribe any specific means or technology.
Also, it will only apply in cases where the online platforms covered by the Directive and the rightholders have not concluded licensing agreements for the use of copyright protected content and only for specific content identified by rightholders. The Directive explicitly prohibits Member States from imposing on online platforms a general monitoring obligation of the content uploaded by the users.
Re: Re: Re:36 Re:
Except that after enough questions the supporters of Article 13 did, in fact, admit that for copyright enforcement through Article 13/17 to be at the standards and effectiveness they want, they do want you to use upload filters.
You’re not fooling anyone.
Re: Re: Re:37 Re:
Actually, I think what they really want is licensing fees for every major publisher.
Re: Re: Re:36 Re:
Manual checking is completely impossible just based on the fact that it’s impossible to check against every single copyrighted work not in the public domain that has existed, so that isn’t actually an option when it comes to checking at the moment it’s uploaded but before it gets displayed. Just checking one piece of content manually would be an enormous undertaking.
Getting licenses for everything isn’t much better. For one thing, there’s no guarantee that every license will actually cover content that actually gets uploaded. Additionally, the sheer number of copyright holders makes this unfeasible, especially when you also factor in ghost authors, shared copyrights, transfers of ownership, and that copyright takes effect at the moment of publication (or earlier in some cases) regardless of whether the copyright gets registered or not (and I believe Europe has no registration requirement whatsoever for any part of the process). You also have to consider things like Creative Commons licensing, which may allow or disallow either noncommercial use or nonpersonal use, depending on a variety of factors like which license and which jurisdiction. Then there’s the fact that smaller businesses simply can’t afford to pay all those licensing fees.
Essentially, the most viable option to provide the service is to use upload filters. The other two “options” are simply impossible to do even remotely close to as well as upload filters (which have their own set of problems).
Just because a given law, statute, or regulation claims that it doesn’t do something if there is no other viable way to interpret it. It’s like when someone tries to make the Bible the official state book and tries to get around the establishment clause by saying that the Bible is a historical text rather than a religious one. It doesn’t actually change anything.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
Note that the ContentID system is exclusively used for YouTube and literally nothing else, is extremely problematic in that it creates a lot of false positives (and false negatives) and there is no effective way to appeal it, and goes far beyond what US law requires. It is also extremely expensive. Like I said, literally no software that handles third-party content can check for copyright infringement perfectly. And since you said this:
You are 1) completely and utterly wrong about copyright law and the limits of software and 2) saying that literally every software developer on the planet who has worked on software that handles third-party content is an “incompetent fool” because literally no one has been able to implement a system that checks for copyright infringement that works perfectly.
There are a number of problems. It ignores exceptions to copyright infringement like fair use (such as in parody or criticism) or de minimus use; things that aren’t protected by copyright at all like facts, pure ideas, scenes a faire, and stuff in the public domain; and licensed use (whether individual, general, noncommercial, commercial, personal use-only, copyleft, not copyleft, exclusive, nonexclusive, whatever). It ignores the fact that there are times where a noninfringing copy may appear more similar to the original than an infringing copy. It ignores the sheer volume of upload traffic that needs to be handled in a number of cases. It ignores the sheer number of copyrighted works and copyright owners (not to mention tracking transfers of rights/ownership as well as the deaths of authors) that would have to be checked against for just a single upload, and if you also wanted to factor in the fact that a copyrighted work may use public domain material, you’d also have to include vast amount of material in the public domain. It ignores the fact that copyright also covers the creation of derivative works, not just copies. It ignores the fact that edge cases in copyright law are extremely common, and that copyright law is very complex even for humans to figure out. It ignores the fact that, despite the best efforts of lobbyists from the likes of Hollywood, the RIAA, or the MPAA, copyright law differs between countries, whether it’s regarding the creator of an infringing copy/work, the end user, or intermediary liability, as well as the boundaries of what can or can’t be copyrighted, exceptions to copyright infringement, differences between how different kinds of works are treated, the onset of copyright, what rights are granted to copyright holders, and the duration of copyright. It ignores the fact that the entities best able to determine whether a particular work is infringing are the copyright holders/authors (together with their lawyers), the alleged infringers, and a court of law, not online intermediaries like Google. There are just far too many nuances, exceptions, subjectivity, and grey areas for software to handle, and too much data to work with for manual checks to be feasible.
I believe the most ideal solution would be for copyright holders to check for potential infringement (possibly using an automated tool to help) and send infringement notices to the intermediary, specifying the infringed work(s), the infringing work (including a URL), the parts of the work(s) infringed upon, the parts of the work that are infringing, the date of authorship of the infringed upon work, any available paperwork to prove copyright ownership (including copyright registration, transfer of rights, and/or exclusive licenses), and the requested remedy (modification, a portion of the revenue, all of the revenue, demonetization, or a takedown), but not any settlement offers; the intermediary checks if there is any plausible validity to the notice (that the notice isn’t clearly deficient on its face) and passes it on to the uploader; the uploader either doesn’t respond within a certain amount of time or concedes (in which case an appropriate remedy is administered, largely dependent on the requested remedy especially in the case of silence), submits a modified version for approval (which may lead to more back and forth until one side or the other either completely gives in, remains silent for too long, or the uploader decides additional modification is futile or too much and thus submits a counternotification), or submits a counternotification asserting fair use (with reasons given), the existence of a valid license for the use (which should include a copy of that licensing agreement), that the material isn’t copyrighted in the first place (again including reasons), that the actual copyright holder isn’t the one who submitted the notice (including a name of the actual copyright holder), that the allegedly infringing work doesn’t actually copy anything from the allegedly infringed work, that the notice is deficient or false in some way, the existence of a court decision explicitly ruling that the uploader content is not, in fact, infringing, or whatever; in the case of a counternotification, the copyright holder may submit a reply (which may be followed up by a surreply from the uploader), modify the notice to correct deficiencies (which will then be passed back to the infringed to determine accordingly, though the number of times a corrected notice may be submitted would be limited), remain silent (which, after a certain amount of time, will generally be considered a concession and so the notice will be resolved without taking action against the uploader or allegedly infringing content unless the counternotification is clearly deficient), or retract the infringement notice (which again means no further action will be taken); and finally, if the issue is not resolved by the parties coming to an agreement, the intermediary may either make its own decision or formally request that the parties resolve the issue in a courtroom. Incidentally, the intermediary may, of course, exercise its discretion to either rule in the favor of the copyright holder or decide to end the process early to formally request the parties work it out in a courtroom. Additionally, if the intermediary rules in favor of the uploader (except where the notice is merely deficient and the maximum allowed corrections has not been reached) or formally requests the parties take it to a courtroom, no additional notices against that particular allegedly infringing work from that particular copyright holder or from another copyright holder regarding the same allegedly infringed work(s) (except where the only deficiency was that the previous submitter was not actually the holder of the copyright but someone else was) will be considered without enclosing a court ruling deeming the allegedly infringing work to actually be infringing. And even if the alleged infringer is ruled against, that couldAdditionally, I’d say that there could be a six-strike system for repeat offenders (either in infringing or sending faulty notices) could be in place, preferably with some remedies available. This feels like the fairest way to handle things without requiring any particular side to handle too much. It’d be kinda like mediation. (In fact, I’d say that the intermediary could also have the option of delegating much of its responsibilities to an outside mediator, in which case it’s bound by whatever decision the mediator comes to.) Though, there’d be no discovery or subpoenas during the process by either side; only any copyright registrations for any allegedly infringed or infringing works, transfers of rights/ownership relevant to the allegedly infringed copyright(s), licensing agreements involving either the apparent holder of the allegedly infringed copyright receiving an exclusive license or the alleged infringer receiving a license to the allegedly infringed copyright(s), evidence of when the original author died, evidence regarding date of authorship of any of the relevant works, and copies of, URLs for, or exerpts from any of the allegedly infringing or infringed works may be submitted as evidence, and neither side can demand evidence from the other, at least not directly. It’s also largely informal, so lawyers aren’t entirely necessary, and the mere fighting against a notice can’t, in itself, be used as evidence of willful infringement. And no settlement offers can be passed from the accuser to the accused through this process.
Re: Re: Re:34 Re:
Software alone cannot do it. You need both software and manual checking. This is why the process is divided to two parts.
Copyright was originally built when computers didn’t even exist, and they still didn’t have any problems manualy checking for infringement. Now that you have much more powerful tools available, how can you claim that you have problems checking for infringements, when the original drafters of copyright laws had no such problems.
Re: Re: Re:35 Re:
Simple. Because copyright owners themselves claim that they can’t afford to verify whether every copyright claim they make is legitimate.
If the copyright owner themselves have problems when it comes to checking for infringements why can’t everyone else have the same problems? The technology is immaterial. Copyright holders have access to the exact same technology (MarkMonitor, Guardaley etc). What you idiots don’t seem to get is that neither technology nor manual labor, or a combination of the two, will result in the standards of copyright enforcement you expect.
Re: Re: Re:36 Re:
you just check the sotware’s user interface and mark every item the following information:
1) author name
2) license arrangements
3) whether the item is pirated or not
there is tools available to take screenshots of your software, printers allow moving the screenshot to a meeting room and its possible to hire proessional monkeys to find out the necessary inormation.
Re: Re: Re:37 Re:
And no author is going to do this, because checking hundreds of thousands of licences is too time-consuming for them to give a shit.
This is precisely why the RIAA insists on algorithm-run copyright enforcement, because they sure as hell aren’t going to put in the effort themselves.
Re: Re: Re:38 Re:
Well, if they fail to do this operation diligently, every instance of infringment only costs 300k. So if the author has rich parents or something, bill-gates style rich, then why not. But all ordinary authors who are not bathing in money, the best course of action is to check all published material against copyright infringements.
Re: Re: Re:39 Re:
And once again therein lies your problem.
To do that, you’d have to be bathing in money, because checking all published material requires time and labor-intensive work that few can afford.
Again, this is precisely why the RIAA is very invested in automatic flagging systems, even the ones that regularly make mistakes. Especially the ones that regularly make mistakes.
Re: Re: Re:40 Re:
It just sounds like you’re trying to publish more material than what your organisation is capable of handling properly. Of course if you have labor shortages, you might need to take shortcuts which can become expensive excersizes of stupidity.
Cut down the amount of published material is always a good alternative.
Re: Re: Re:41 Re:
Tell the RIAA that, then. Hell, tell Viacom that. They produced so much content they ended up suing YouTube for hosting legal content that Viacom put up themselves.
You’re the one supporting companies who produce and publish too much. Now you’re saying everyone else is wrong?
Re: Re: Re:42 Re:
RIAA and viacom might have thousands of employees who have no trouble handling copyright checking of few hundred products.
You’re the one with small enough organisation who have trouble fullfilling your legal oblications.
Re: Re: Re:43 Re:
Again you are missing the scale problem, it is not the number of works to check that matters, but rather the number of existing works that you think people should check against. Publishers often solve the checking problem by insisting that authors indemnify them against copyright infringement cases.
Re: Re: Re:44 Re:
You’re misunderstanding copyright checking completely. It’s not necessary to do pairing against all products on the planet.
It is enough to ask from the author where he got the material from. Every element available in the product needs to have a story of where the information and the ideas originate from. Maybe you learned some techniques when you were 10 years old watching mickey mouse animations and thinking about frame rate features and you noticed that the animations had too slow frame rate and you then figured out how animations are composed of individual images that are just changed.
All information in the product has such story available, if you just ask the author to explain the origins of the product. It does not require going through all products on the planet, just all the features that the product is actually using.
Re: Re: Re:45 Re:
"It’s not necessary to do pairing against all products on the planet."
Then, how do you know if something is infringing?
"It is enough to ask from the author where he got the material from"
…and if he lies?
"Maybe you learned some techniques when you were 10 years old"
So, every artist has to recount every possible influence since he was a child and be held liable if he misremembers something or remembers incorrectly?
"All information in the product has such story available, if you just ask the author to explain the origins of the product"
OK. Then, what happens once you ask that and you distributed pirated content anyway?
Re: Re: Re:45 Re:
I’m afraid you’re the one misunderstanding copyright checking completely. For example, what you’ve just described is a) so absurdly easy to circumvent that it is worthless, b) involves aspects of creation that don’t involve actual copying in the first place, and c) wouldn’t satisfy copyright holders anyway.
Seriously though, that “solution” has so many holes in it as to be completely and utterly useless. In case you’ve forgotten, people lie. No, the only way to be absolutely certain nothing has been infringed is to check against all published materials in the world.
Re: Re: Re:43 Re:
"You’re the one with small enough organisation who have trouble fullfilling your legal oblications."
So, you’re saying that only major multinational corporations should have the right to publish?
Re: Re: Re:41 Re:
"It just sounds like you’re trying to publish more material"
No, it sounds like you haven;’t a clue as to the subject at hand, yet again.
The time he’s referring to is not the material being published. It’s the requirement that you insist upon that they check against every existing product to make sure they’re not infringing. Which takes a long time.
"expensive excersizes of stupidity"
Is that your personal motto, by the way? It’s quite apt, if so.
Re: Re: Re:37 Re:
..and who provides that data? How do you check if it’s accurate? How do you keep it updated (as works that were not infringing can become so without changing the original work in any way)?
Re: Re: Re:35 Re:
"Copyright was originally built when computers didn’t even exist, and they still didn’t have any problems manualy checking for infringement."
Yes, and after the advent of computing and self-publishing on the internet the number of publisher works has gone up by a factor of million, if not billions. Hence the impossibility of accurate manual checking at scale. I know you don’t understand this, since the tiny customer base you’re used to dealing with comes nowhere near the scale successful companies work with. But, as ever, the real world does not work the way your world does.
What kind of "genius" software developer bases his methods on how things were done before the invention of the computer, anyway?
Re: Re: Re:34 Re:
Every author can encode all the copyright rules to his software that he is confortable using. If he knows million lines of legal bullshit and is also a software engineer, he can try to design software that checks for all the bullshit rules you listed. All the normal software developers will just abstract it into one or few main problem areas and check for those, and save million lines of business logic. But once every author on the planet does checking in his own way, the combined result can find/identify tons of pirates from the pirate groups, and then they appear at the court’s doorsteps.
Re: Re: Re:35 Re:
Even the best of the best, most accurate copyright enforcers can’t seem to step suing dead people. You think all authors on the planet are going to spend time and money doing individual checks?
Re: Re: Re:36 Re:
These "authors" have no other choice, because copyright law for the authors is much stricter than what ordinary end users need to deal with. Authors of copyrighted works can be sued if 5 words from his book have been copy-pasted from unlicensed source material. For more complicated copyrighted works the situation is much worse, since the damage awards are increasing exponentially based on the size of the copied source material. You have to understand that when an author copy-pastes 5 words, the courts are not concerned only about the 5 words in his original manuscript, but also all the copies that publishers made from the material. Thus copyright laws for authors are significantly more harsh than they’re for end users who consume the material.
This is why you hear copyright fights between authors can have millions or bililons as damage awards when ordinary pirates will only have to hand over 300k dollars.
Re: Re: Re:37 Re:
And once again demonstrating you have no clue about the law you want to be upheld so much…
Five words is not nearly the benchmark anyone has to claim copyright infringement. If not, anyone could write a book containing five words "I, you, the, and, or" and sue for, as you put it, millions or "bililions as damage".
And if you genuinely think authors have been generally punished harder than ordinary users, I have a bridge to sell you because I know you don’t have a case to cite.
Re: Re: Re:37 Re:
"These "authors" have no other choice"
They have many choices. The fact that you’re too stupid and delusional to understand them does not mean they do not exist.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
You are overlooking the big scale issue with manual checking, knowing every other work that has been created. It does not matter whether you are checking one work or ten works, when you have to compare them against hundreds of thousands of works.
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
original drafters of the copyight laws had the same problem, they still weren’t scared of the enormity of the task of finding all the pirates. They just passed it to author’s responsibility, so that authors themselves can find best ways to identify alleged pirates. They didn’t even have computers to help in the task.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
And now we pass the problem back to you. Put up software that doesn’t look like a kindergartener took a dump on it.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
"They just passed it to author’s responsibility"
No they didn’t. In the US, they passed it to Congress, under the condition that any rules promote the progress of the arts and useful sciences. That doesn’t happen if they place a huge overhead on authors to publish their work, so if it does work the way they imagine, they got it wrong. In other countries it varies, but the issue remains the same.
"They didn’t even have computers to help in the task."
Yes, and they also didn’t have computers to publish their work either, whereas people in today’s world can publish thousands of new works to every country in the world in less time that it takes you to glance at an existing work.
The world has changed. Copyright and your outdated view of the world need to keep up.
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
Two things:
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
This is similar thing than making credit cards have enough security that criminals cannot empty every account after stealing the card. This kind of limitation is clearly useful to have, and gives significant value to all legal uses of those cards. But of course criminals are slightly disgruntled because they need to obtain access to those funds some other way which might be more difficult to pull off without police finding about their operation immediately.
Same way copyright limitations are useful to everyone except the criminals.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
Credit card security is a far simpler problem that prevent piracy. It relies on knowledge shared by the user and the issuing bank, while preventing piracy requires knowing about every work still under copyright.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
There are massive differences between credit cards and copyrighted works. For one thing, in order to have access to someone’s credit card account or bank account, one must get every necessary piece of information exactly right (if there are substantial differences between the real and the fake, the fake won’t work or wouldn’t be illegal, and the converse is also true), and most people will not have access to others’ credit or debit cards or copies or images of them.
By contrast, something can infringe on copyright even if there are significant differences between a legitimate copy and the pirated copy, and two works that are not infringing on each other’s copyright may have significant similarities. That is, copyright infringement can be done without making an exact copy, and in fact an infringing work may actually have more similarities to the original than a noninfringing one. Furthermore, just about everyone has legitimate access to some copyright work(s) to which they own neither the copyright nor a license, so access to copyrighted works by others is far easier than access to credit card information.
And besides, even credit cards don’t have 100% perfect security. However, it is far, far easier to successfully keep credit cards information pretty darn secure while allowing the average person to use them properly and not substantially inconveniencing them than to prevent even any copyrighted work(s) from being copied a substantial number of times without permission and infringe on its/their copyright without preventing legitimate consumers/users from using them as is reasonable and/or greatly inconveniencing them in a number of ways. Plus, I think people are more concerned with keeping credit card information secure than they are about stopping copyright infringement. Not that they don’t care about the latter, but people have their priorities. It probably helps that a sizable majority of adults have some sort of credit card or debit card while only a relative few are dependent on income from the success of any given copyrighted work and would therefore be impacted by piracy at all.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
This is interesting case from the above message. I only know one way how this can happen. If two independent authors are exploring the same maze from different starting locations — once they have fully explored the whole maze, they have maps of the maze that looks the same. I.e. the maze layout determined the outcome, not the authors independent decisions.
This happens if you document how intel cpu asm instructions are working or if you explore opengl software dependencies.
This pattern basically explains why unity, unreal engine and my meshpage game engine has similar graph data structure avaiable, even though they were all independently developed.
But this pattern is very difficult to explain to the legal eagles. Copyright infringemt lawsuit on such maze layouts are very tricky business.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
And this is where we default to the basics of Tero "Meshpage" Pulkinnen-style argumentation.
If Pixar does something similar to what he does it’s infringement. If he copies what Pixar does, he’s owed a mansion.
You seriously can’t make this shit up. Someone in Scandinavia is genuinely this brain-damaged…
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
Well trying to have conversation with him is like trying to have a conversation with someone high on drugs.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
There’s 3rd alternative: both of them learned the magic sauce from ancient stone tablets
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
Well, you did anyway, because I think we can safely say you’re as high as a kite.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
Well, there are others, but yeah, that’s a big one. This sort of independent construction is actually more common than you’d think. It generally happens when reporting factual information, discussing legal documents, including laws, statutes, or court rulings, depicting something that actually exists/existed/happened, retelling/remaking something in the public domain, or when both works mostly use scenes a faire (basically things that are necessary to express the same fundamental idea, where the idea itself cannot be copyrighted as only expressions of ideas can). Now, while facts, legal documents, and scenes a faire are not copyrightable themselves, and material in the public domain isn’t copyrighted, some things like annotations and commentary are copyrightable. This is quite common. And mapmaking is particularly complicated with copyright.
Exactly. This is why enforcing copyright at scale, particularly through upload filters, and doing so well is impossible. There are simply too many edge cases, ones which even copyright experts cannot be certain of their lawfulness. Similarity is not the only factor in whether something is infringing or not. Copying isn’t necessarily infringing, and even similar works aren’t necessarily definitive proof of copying.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
The sad thing is he’s not going to take this agreement as a sign that copyright enforcement at scale, to the standards expected by the RIAA, is a dumb idea. He’s just going to double down on his insistence that Malibu Media should be allowed to sue dead grandmothers because he doesn’t have a mansion yet.
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
"My suggestion is actually "build enough limitations to your product that piracy becomes impossible"."
…and your suggestion is not only hopelessly/ naive, but cannot be achieved without killing more sales from existing customers than you could ever hope to generate by killing piracy.
"impossible can be implemented"
No it can’t, by definition.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
legal users do not even notice those checks, they’re completely invisible to users who don’t try to scam my program to accept copyright infringing work.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
If you want complete or near-complete prevention of piracy using your tools, legal users will notice because there is no way to even come close to doing the former without restricting what legal users can do with your tools and/or making legal users jump through a bunch of hoops.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
None of the users noticed when web browsers implemented their copy protection features. They simply didn’t tell anyone that browser technology is restricting users downloading activity to only displaying the downloaded content. Pretty much noone on earth knows that browsers have copyright limitations implemtented.
So that is proof that its possible and users dont necessarily learn it until its too late.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
Users don’t notice copy-protection in web browsers because browsers don’t have copy-protection or any other method of protecting or enforcing copyright. We’ve already had this discussion: browsers don’t have any features to prevent piracy. Any features they have that might reduce piracy are merely accidental side effects and were implemented for completely unrelated reason (i.e. storage and/or processor efficiency).
Also, assuming “downloaded content” includes the temporary copies made when viewing a web page or streaming a movie or sound recording, of course computers only display downloaded content. In order for anything to be displayed by a computer, in addition to having to receive a command to specifically display the content, data representing that content—which may include instructions for when, how, or where to display it—must first be loaded onto some sort of memory (registers, RAM banks, the cache, the hard drive, etc.) contained within the computer. When that data comes from the internet (or certain other sources), we call it “downloading” the content represented by the data. So, by definition, any content from the internet that your computer displays must have been downloaded. (See, downloading is technically the process where some central machine (a server, host, etc.) sends information (instructions or data) to your local machine (a PC, laptop, phone, tablet, etc.) Incidentally, uploading is where information is sent from your local machine to some central machine. In both cases, the “local machine” is generally the one to request access to the central machine or to upload or download.)
If you’re not using such a broad definition of downloaded, then you may be excluding streamed content, stuff that pops up due to malware, cached web pages, error messages, or something else that is accessed from the internet and displayed on your computer.
Also, of course the computer doesn’t copy all the data from the internet at once and erases data that hasn’t been saved more permanently by the user after a certain period of time, a certain amount of data is already in the cache, RAM, or whatever, or certain instructions are sent, and it has absolutely nothing to do with copy-protection. There isn’t a single computer in the world that can handle that much data at once. One of the two essential purposes of the internet existing is to allow access to information from around the world from multiple different machines without having to download the entire thing or having all that information in one machine, allowing individual machines access to far more information than any single machine could possibly contain on its own.. (The other is to facilitate communication between machines irrespective of physical distance.) So it only downloads information it needs/wants, then when that information no longer appears to be needed (or is refreshed), the downloaded copy gets erased to make room for more data.
If you were to take one person’s entire internet history (especially if you include pages visited more than once) from a single device, it’s unlikely you’d be able to fit the entire contents of each of those web pages into that same device at one time. The content doesn’t get erased periodically by the browser for copyright reasons; it’s one of the fundamental features of the internet, and trying to implement internet access without it quite simply wouldn’t work at all.
Besides, a lot of this erasure is done by the computer’s operating system, not just the browser.
Plus, compared to actual copy-protection, it is absurdly simple to circumvent this. Just tell the computer to download a copy and save it to the hard drive or some external memory bank like a flash drive, optical disc, or external hard drive. Pretty much every browser has this option easily visible and accessible, so much so that a child could do it with no problem. Some might be trickier than others, but there’s pretty much some sort of pretty easy way to create a long-term or permanent copy of an online copyrighted work via a web browser without the permission of the creator(s), copyright owner(s), or licensee(s). And on the upload side; there is nothing even remotely similar to copy-protection in any browser or computer, so once an infringing copy is made, the browser does absolutely nothing whatsoever to even attempt to complicate, delay, reduce, or prevent distribution of infringing works over the internet through the browser or do anything that might also happen to complicate, delay, reduce, or prevent distribution over the internet through the browser.
One reason it’s so simple to circumvent and use web browsers to commit copyright infringement (either via copying or distributing) is that those features in web browsers were never intended to even reduce copyright infringement in the first place. It’s purely a practical feature of how the internet, computers, and operating systems work. It is not, by any stretch, copy-protection or copyright-enforcement.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
If browsers didn’t do proper job at copy-protection, we would have several copies of the youtube web site, since half the planet wants their own copy of youtube.
Then bank’s web site would have 500 clones, since every criminal on the planet wants you to enter your access codes to some other web site than where your bank is at.
But while people are making poor clones of bank’s websites, there hasnt been significant amount of web page cloning. 2 billion web sites exists, but many of them are independently created, so the copyright enforcement actions that they’re taking are actually working.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
Cybersecurity is not copyright enforcement.
They’re not even within the same branch of law.
And nobody wants to own their own copy of YouTube. Few people have that sort of server storage space.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
No, because the sheer volume of data handled by YouTube is incredibly immense. It takes hundreds of thousands of servers just to handle 1 complete copy of YouTube. Few people or companies have those kind of resources.
First of all, you’re neglecting things like domain names, SEO, costs of hosting your own website, etc. It’s just not that easy to do, and any reasonably convincing clone would be pretty easy to catch (thanks in part to the domain name thing) and would be susceptible to trademark infringement lawsuits and copyright lawsuits, which are enforced a lot more often than spam email, robo-texts, or robo-calls. It’s not very cost-effective and unnecessarily risky. Spoofing companies in emails, texts, or robo-calls is a lot more effective while also requiring less active participation by the target and luck on the part of the scammer.
Also, this has happened. People have sent out mass spam email directing targets to fake-but-convincing copies of websites modified to send the access info to the scammer. It’s been a real problem. That said, it’s usually easier to use man-in-the-middle attacks to gain that stuff, and there aren’t that many more people who would be fooled by an exact copy (but using the wrong domain) that wouldn’t be fooled by a fake site that merely looks official, so copying the entire website doesn’t improve the marginal benefits to outweigh the marginal costs.
Additionally, you’re assuming that pirated or spoofed websites would outnumber legitimate sites without copy-protection, but there’s no reason to believe that’s true. For one thing, in most cases, there’s no real benefit for users or pirates to pirate an entire website. Content hosted on a website, sure, but copying the entire website isn’t much help. And most websites are free to begin with, so aside from archiving, there really isn’t any benefit to pirating an entire website. Plus, of the 2 billion+ websites, how many of them get significant traffic? A lot of them just don’t attract enough users to be worth cloning. Of the ones that do get a lot of traffic, they tend to take up a ton of digital storage space, so cloning them would simply be impractical. The websites that attract enough traffic to generate enough potential victims but aren’t too large to store on a personal machine are generally not worth it for other reasons, such as the smaller user base being the type to recognize a fake version of the website, not being the type that would allow the scammer to reap any real benefits, etc. Plus, some websites implement some sort of copy-protection to make it more difficult to copy the site itself.
Basically, it’s far easier, more practical, more efficient, and more effective/profitable to pirate things like books, comics, webcomics, manga, shows, movies, videos, poems, images, animations, software applications, or video games than websites.
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
it would need some kind of software that uses storage space from the user’s machines. Once you have enough users, you can easily absorb storage costs between the users.
But there is bigger issue with it — competing youtube might be technically possible, but it has possibility to kill off original youtube, since the same content would be available in the cloned copy. If they additionally implement some performance improvements or some other techniques like that, then a clone+optimization operation would be alot more attractive than the original.
And this leaves the issue, google invested millions or billions or develop youtube’s technology, and if cloning that work was easily possible, then they would never see their money back. While its not guaranteed in any investments anyway, freely cloning the technology would clearly prevent their return on investments.
Current copyright laws requires those competing youtube clones to develop their custom technology instead of using google’s tech. Society will benefit when we have multiple different technologies competing, instead of all the players using the same tech.
Sharing the work can still be done pretty easily by licensing the technology to companies who want to use it.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
Fam, if you found a way to kill off one of Google’s biggest moneymakers the RIAA would worship you as their deity.
The same could be said of the IP address harvesting systems used by copyright enforcement – expensive as hell and has the accuracy of a blind man trying to shoot a penguin at the North Pole. And somehow that hasn’t stopped idiots like you from singing its praises.
So that’s why the RIAA chose to use unlicensed copies of Microsoft Office, because of their respect for copyright law?
Re: Re: Re:34 Re:
Maybe their plan was to pay for the office once they receive the money from pirates?
Re: Re: Re:35 Re:
"Maybe their plan was to pay for the office once they receive the money from pirates?"
So, it’s OK for them to pirate from Microsoft, so long as they had some half-assed intention to pay at some unspecified date in future?
Yeah, run with that logic, it’ll get you far /s
Re: Re: Re:36 Re:
Well, that’s what I did when I created my amiga game. My friends had to contribute to the game project without compensation until the publisher managed to pass some money to the project. Once the money was available, obviously my friends who had contributed graphics and music to the game could receive their compensation. It wasn’t too large amount of money, but at least some compensation was properly handled.
If small children in high school can figure out this pattern, I don’t think RIAA would have too large problems figuring it out.
Re: Re: Re:37 Re:
"My friends had to contribute to the game project without compensation until the publisher managed to pass some money to the project. "
With their agreement, I presume. Where’s Microsoft’s agreement for the RIAA to pirate from them?
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
Honestly, by that point, you’d have changed the product so drastically that it might not even be pirated anymore. But at any rate, the amount of collaboration needed on a likely unlawful project with no particular guarantee of success (after all, YouTube has had competitors in the past) makes the whole thing unfeasible. Plus, YouTube doesn’t even make much money for Google, so I doubt it’d be that much more successful for anyone else.
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
Congratulations, you have just invented the torrent file sharing system. There is also the PeerTube system. Neither manage to substitute for YouTube as the lack the social networking features of YouTube.
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
There are some problems that aren’t important, simple, and/or inexpensive enough to be worth the trouble of fixing or fixing completely. Additionally, nonzero failure rates are impossible. As such, one must do some weighing of the costs and benefits of solving a given problem. One must also determine how high a rate of failure is acceptable and what things cannot be compromised further in the name of improving that, as well as finding ways to minimize the consequences of a failure without compromising those same core aspects. Finally, some problems are provably impossible to solve, at least completely and/or with the technology we have today and/or without creating worse problems.
So yes, sometimes it is reasonable, or even preferable at times, to accept failure as inevitable rather than try to solve the problem. C’est la vie.
Re: Re: Re:17 Re:
It’s of course pen manufacturer’s internal decision whether nasa’s space pen designs are offering enough value that licensing the techniques built into that product is giving value to manufacturer’s customers. Given that its nasa, the cost might be too expensive for many of the manufacturers, even when nasa is absorbing much of the costs with the taxpayers.
taxpayers are anyway keeping many businesses afloat, when government money is being distributed to the companies to help support the companie’s infrastructure. ISP’s are receiving government money to expand their networks, and many other industries are kept working because taxpayer’s money is being used to support the (outdated) business models.
Re: Re: Re:18 Re:
You have fallen for a myth, NASA did not develop the spaces pen, but rather it was an independent effort by Fischer.That Story About the Million Dollar US Space Pen and Russian Pencil is BS
Re: Re: Re:
There exists some protection against this situation from happening in meshpage. Currently there hasn’t been enough users
So what you’re saying is that the protections are insufficient, then.
Thanks for confirming your liability to a Disney-flavored lawsuit.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
There has been some messages claiming that any protections will cripple the product. Now this message seems completely opposite of that for demanding more protection. Can’t you make your mind if you want more or less protection?
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
You are complaining about two people having somewhat different opinions.
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
I expect techdirt rregulars to negotiate a consensus and only communicate stuff that is generally accepted by the whole community.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
In that case you will be sadly disappointed, as discussions without a difference of opinion the comments section would become rather bland.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
Why? Does honest debate scare you?
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
It’s the common view of copyright holders that if you don’t have sufficient protection it means your product is a piracy enabler that has to be removed.
Since you’ve provided no evidence that your tool has sufficient copyright protection it must therefore be taken down. That this result is unfavorable for you is frankly no skin off my nose.
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
This is why copyright maximalist view is better while developing copyrightable products like software.
I have provided the evidence, you just ignored the facts. That’s no good position to take when dealing with legal issues.
This is slightly wrong legal remedy. The consiquences for copyright infringement is $300k damage awards to the copyright owner. Each
violation costs up to 300k, if the violation is willful.
Taking down entire websites is only available when there’s significant proof of illegal activity, a mere speculation is not enough to cross the boundary.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
This is why copyright maximalist view is better while developing copyrightable products like software.
And that is why you wouldn’t have any issues with having Meshpage wiped off the face of the Internet, right?
I have provided the evidence, you just ignored the facts
No, your evidence is just terrible like the software it’s trying to defend.
That’s no good position to take when dealing with legal issues.
That’s the exact position every copyright enforcer takes, you numpty.
Taking down entire websites is only available when there’s significant proof of illegal activity, a mere speculation is not enough to cross the boundary.
This might have been a defense if not for the fact that the copyright holders that you respect so much have, for several years now, insist that "notice and staydown" is the standard that must be upheld. As in, "If someone asks you to take down your shit, you have to take it down".
Are you refusing to follow the standards of copyright law?
Are you a pirate?
Re: Re: Re:5 Re:
Authors of copyrighted works now have an alternative to protect themselves from copyright issues. When they detect a copyright issue in their book or product, they can stop the presses and take down the content. But this is always decision that publishers and authors negotiate together and it can change the compensation that the author receives from the publication.
Current web technologies make this operation quick and simple, and thus it is being offered as easy solution to copyright issues when author of the original copyrighted work do not want to fight the illegal publisher.
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
"When they detect a copyright issue in their book or product, they can stop the presses and take down the content."
So… your answer to copyright infringement is to prevent people from accessing a legal copy of the product?
Re: Re: Re:7 Re:
It’s up to the author and publisher to decide how to deal with the issues that are being found by the competing authors.
It might not be exactly legal product, if the book text contains copyright infringing material still when the printing presses are workng.
Temporary copies which are not published are not available to your competing authors, so the world cannot help authors with evaluation of the legality of those copies.
But once it’s published, the world has opportunity to find copyright issues with the work. If some treshold gets crossed and authors are angry because you cloned their story, preprate to receive letters from them demanding stop the presses.
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
"It’s up to the author and publisher to decide how to deal with the issues that are being found by the competing authors."
It is. However, making it impossible to buy your version of the product and forcing people to use the pirated version is not typically a good idea in terms of incoming revenue.
"Temporary copies which are not published are not available to your competing authors"
Yes, and as soon as you’ve released a single copy there’s a non-zero chance it may be pirated, after which time you cannot stop it from happening. Blocking legal purchases does not magically make the pirated version go away.
"preprate to receive letters from them demanding stop the presses"
You keep using terms relating to physical publishing which have no relationship to what we’;re talking about. Either you need to update your vocabulary, or you need to understand the reality of the marketplace you are trying to control.
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
So once again nothing that actually disputes what I said.
Thanks for confirming that you are a pirate and Disney is entitled to take down Meshpage for enabling piracy.
Re: Re: Re:7 Re:
I’m not here to dispute your ramblings. It’s more like "continuing" the story from the exact position what you introduced to the discussion.
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
Which is just as well. Your method of disputing is akin to claiming that decapitation is a good cure for headaches…
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
I can think of three ways to interpret that.
a) In an alternative to having the owners of an allegedly infringed copyright demanding that infringing content be taken down, the author/publisher of a potentially infringing work may detect possible infringement by their work on their own and decide, of their own volition, to remove their own content from publication. While true, there’s nothing new about that, it’s not really an option taken by the original copyright holder but by the potential infringer, it only addresses unintentional direct infringement, not willful infringement or contributory or vicarious liability for infringement, and it still ends in the content being taken down without a ruling on the facts. It also doesn’t address the meat of the comment you’re replying to: if copyright maximalists had their way, if someone merely alleges your content is infringing, it must be taken down and kept down forever somehow with no recourse.
b) Rather than contacting publishers, the holders of allegedly infringed copyright can contact the authors of allegedly infringing content directly and ask them to have their publishers remove it. Again, this is nothing new, doesn’t address the comment you’re responding to, and doesn’t actually change anything.
c) When potential infringement is detected, the author of the allegedly infringed work can contact the publisher, “stop the presses”, and convince the publisher to remove the allegedly infringing work from publication. Of course, that’s exactly what the AC was talking about, so…
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
Oh, I forgot a fourth interpretation:
d) When the author of a copyrighted work detects potential infringement of the work by third parties, they may choose to talk with their publishers in order to stop publishing their own works that are supposedly being infringed upon. How that would help anybody at all except pirates is completely beyond me.
Re: Re: Re:
"This is true. There exists some protection against this situation from happening in meshpage. Currently there hasn’t been enough users to verify that the protections are working accurately enough…"
You don’t need any. The "protections" are failures from the start and by your own arguments you are culpable for any 3rd-party malfeasance by the user. Good thing the law really doesn’t work that way, eh?
"Basically it doesnt allow publishing the material (via meshpage) if the content isnt coming from user’s own web space. This is supposed to ensure that mickey mouse images are not being used."
…how would you ensure that? Does your software stop working if the user switches host providers or proxy?
And what does the program do when the host uploads, for five minutes, the entirety of the disney cast to the url address you’ve unwisely allowed to link meshpage to and uses that?
I reiterate, you are VERY lucky your argument on intermediary responsibility doesn’t hold legal water or you’d be screwed (and by now, harrassed by a thousand copyright trolls all offering to settle for the low price of a few hundred bucks each).
Re: Re: Re: Re:
user obviously need to go through additional steps designed to warn users that their activity might be illegal.
well, if after all the checking, copyright infringement still gets posted to the web site, my trained monkeys always checking the legality of the service will just enter the product to a block list and it suddenly disappears from the website.
i.e. copyright filters are doing their work before posting, and trained monkeys will handle the rest of the problems afterwards. And our website
takes the liability during the time between before and afterward. This extra liability is needed to keep user experience of the posting new content reasonable for the users.
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
"user obviously need to go through additional steps designed to warn users that their activity might be illegal"
All activity might be illegal. Especially in the copyright maximalist hellscape you support where everything is infringing because even vague influences from childhood somehow count against you.
"my trained monkeys"
Well, that would make more sense than you having somehow fooled a human being into working for someone who has no concept of business or human nature.
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
Copyright maximalist view is also called "damage minimisation approach".
I just happen to be expert on implementing user interfaces, so the statement of yours might not be exactly accurate.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
"Copyright maximalist view is also called "damage minimisation approach"."
It’s also called "incompatible with the real world".
"I just happen to be expert on implementing user interfaces"
Really? Do you post your quality work somewhere outside of the shitshow on your website? Because that presents the opposite of what a good UX designer would create….
Re: Re: Re:5 Re:
I only claimed "implementing" user interfaces, not UX designer stuff.. Are you claiming that the user interface has not been implemented?
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
"Are you claiming that the user interface has not been implemented"
No, I’m saying that what has been implemented is not particularly good looking and incomprehensible to navigate. Which, actually means more than your code in the grand scheme of things. A pretty, intuitive but buggy interface is worth more in the real world than a perfectly coded mess.
But, that’s how things work. As a developer, you depend on things like stable servers, quality networking and good design in order for your code to mean something. If you don’t do those jobs yourself then you have to collaborate and, unfortunately, if you have a bad UX designer then you have a bad interface no matter how good our own code is.
Re: Re: Re:7 Re:
The problem with this approach is that UX design that is acceptable depends highly on other products on the marketplace. And those are being improved all the time, so the acceptable UX design is not a stable base to which you can build your software. This kind of changing mess which keeps trying to reach the moon is not stable enough for software that is being used for 20 years or more.
While it’s possible to update your software when it gets outdated, that approach only works for short amount of time. Thus better approaches are needed, and the solution is to rely on something else than UX design.
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
"UX design that is acceptable depends highly on other products on the marketplace"
Yes, competition and collaboration are very important to have a workable product in today’s market.
"not stable enough for software that is being used for 20 years or more"
Unless you’re working with embedded systems, which software are you expecting to last that long without redesign and rewrites along the way? For anything consumer focussed, the expectations and requirements of software for that market have fundamentally changed in that time, as have the tools and requirements for building them.
"Thus better approaches are needed"
Such as not building your code in such a way that an interface redesign breaks fundamental aspects of the backend?
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
Redesigning your interface on the whims of the random internet population is completely waste of time. It’s better to build actually useful features to the products than keeping redesigning the user interface every time products on the marketplace change from material design to fluent/metro or to ios design language. Basically trying to emulate what other people have implemented is a losing path. You need to choose your own path, and stick with it, even though half the planet wants to you commit copyright infringement by cloning the UX design from competing companies.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
"Redesigning your interface on the whims of the random internet population is completely waste of time"
It’s really not. Seriously, go back and look at sites from the late 90s and compare them to now. Most modern consumers would consider some of them unusable, even if they were fine at the time. Some have changed more than others to be sure, but there’s definite refinements for virtually every successful site out there. Some are unrecognisable from what they used to be.
Then again, a lot of those sites have also had major fundamental redesigns under the hood as well. Many major pieces of software have been rewritten from the ground up, and nobody likes being held up by legacy code just because it used to be great years ago. That what people successful in the marketplace do – they adapt to market conditions, and provide what their customers require.
"half the planet wants to you commit copyright infringement by cloning the UX design from competing companies"
Once again, we can all be thankful that the real world does not operate the way the strange alternate universe in your head operates. Although, it again explains your poor choices. If you refuse to learn from the choices others make, you’ll make a lot of bad ones.
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
There are core concepts of user interface design that have not changed since the GUI was invented at Palo Alto. Also how to structure applications so that the user interface can be changed without impact on the functionality has been known for a long time, along with using themes to separate the visual aspects of a user Interface from implementation. Therefore your complaints show a lack of skill, rather than identifying a significant problem.
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
But the complaints I hear are all based on "your design looks like 1980s 3d objects and current design is significantly more advanced", so this might not be exactly working approach either.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
Basically, the currently best approach goes something like this:
1) build awesome technology
2) build user interface based on the best that your own tech can do
3) stop cloning other people’s designs but instead find techniques that noone else is using but which makes it better for everyone
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
That is more like design that is different from what people are used to, and which introduces a learning curve that drive users away.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
learning curve is necessary. You simply cannot learn category theory without a suitable learning curve. At some point the curve goes deep enough to the abyss that there will be a wall that user cannot break. But until that wall, learning curve is necessary.
Given that these system are designed for children, the learning curve needs to be nice enough that every child manages to get something useful done before they bump into the wall.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
The learning curve of the Interface is separate from the leaning curve of the application.
Your refusal to address actual issues raised, but rather decide that some different issue needs to be addressed is probably the root of your failure to gain users of your software.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
"1) build awesome technology
2) build user interface"
Therein lies your problem. You prioritise what you think is important over what the end user thinks is important. You think of the customer after you’ve satisfied your own needs.
"3) stop cloning other people’s designs"
There’s a massive difference between "copy someone else’s complete design" and "understand why some things are done a particular way and incorporate that into your own design". It can be fun to be original, but if the end result is that nobody wants to use your interface, you’ve failed, no matter how clever you think you are.
"techniques that noone else is using"
A lot of the time, there’s a damn good reason why nobody else is doing it that way. Bravo if you stumble across a previously unknown improvement, but I’m not seeing evidence that have done any such thing.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
it’s not just one such improvement. Your whole system needs to be full of this kind of stuff that noone else is doing.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
"Your whole system needs to be full of this kind of stuff that noone else is doing."
…leading to your UI being unintuitive for the average user, who will then abandon your product for the competitor’s whose UI works in the way they expect.
I understand what you’re saying, but in the real world pure innovation does not work in a wider market. For example, one of the major things that has stopped people jumping from Photoshop to GIMP over the years has been the UI design. Some people actually prefer paying extortionate licensing fees to Adobe rather than use a free product that doesn’t work the way they expect.
Once again, it’s fine to be proud of your code and your originality, but if nobody wants to use the end result, your work is utterly meaningless,.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Well, in the UI there is a small core set of practises, and once user knows that small core, they can then use the whole software.
The innovative parts will only then become available, after they learn to use the UI.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
"Well, in the UI there is a small core set of practises,"
Yes, they’re called standards. The things you’ve been attacking people for adopting rather than reinvent the wheel?
"The innovative parts will only then become available, after they learn to use the UI."
Or… you use standard UI elements to make the UI intuitive then nobody has to learn an entire new interface just to get to the point where they can work out if your software has anything of worth to them…
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
The animations have nothing to do with interface design beyond having a window in which to display them, so stop twisting all arguments into something different.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
This isn’t true. the whole interface design is based on the fact that the animations have huge 20 second loading time, and thus the animation itself cannot be on the front page, and thus user needs to click a screenshot before they can see the actual work that I’ve done.
Thus the interface design cannot be done without dealing with the actual technology that is available.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
"thus user needs to click a screenshot before they can see the actual work that I’ve done"
a) Many visitors to your front page wouldn’t realise they are links to animations.
b) If they do click to look at the animation, there’s nothing to suggest it’s anything other than an upload of a demo on some floppies you found lying around from 1992.
c) There’s also nothing to suggest that they’re anything other than video files that you’ve chosen to load using an obscure plugin rather than HTML5.
It is a good decision to not try and get a page full of animations loading as your landing page, but that’s about the only good decision there.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
When you hover your mouse over a screenshot, it shows a red highlight which is supposed to indicate that you can click on the animation.
How should this be indicated in the user interface?
opengl/3d technology simply isn’t available anywhere else on the web.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Screenshots or screen recordings of an application in use are easy to create, and give the visitor a better idea of what you are offering than a page of thumbnails with no explanation of why they are there, and how they are created.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
"it shows a red highlight which is supposed to indicate that you can click on the animation"
I’ve highlighted the operative word. It might indicate that to you, but if the end user doesn’t understand that’s what it’s saying, then it doesn’t work. In this case, the red box indicates that something will happen, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate an animation. So, people either don’t bother clicking through, or they abandon the page when the first loading screen comes up. Waiting 10-20 seconds for a random plugin to load something might have worked in the dialup days, but modern audiences are less forgiving, especially when the thing they’re waiting for is a mystery.
"How should this be indicated in the user interface?"
Perhaps some kind of informative output to tell people that’s what they are, perhaps dedicating some of the real estate to something other than images? You have a single line of text and a lot of unimpressive still pictures on your front page. That’s not going to convert to a lot of active users.
I understand this stuff can be annoying, but there’s a reason why companies tend to have UX people nowadays, and it’s not because they’re wanting them to express their design individuality.
"opengl/3d technology simply isn’t available anywhere else on the web"
…and nothing on your front page indicates that such tech is in use. Again, most people will just assume you’re just playing prerecorded video.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
"But the complaints I hear are all based on "your design looks like 1980s 3d objects and current design is significantly more advanced""
No. The actual complaints are:
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
The front page has a text "animation technology making a small splash" designed to address this exact complaint.
You only need to understand copyright laws well enough to know that publishing 90 animations simply isn’t possible without either creating the work yourself, or licensing someone elses works, or committing copyright infringement. Only those 3 alternatives are avaiable, and the quality if my works indicates that I did implement it myself.
There exists a text like "Want to create animations like this? Click here" to address this complaint.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
Not really, but you’ve already demonstrated your understanding of copyright law is in the shitter. Copyright itself does not prevent something from being published even if something was infringed, and even then – so fucking what? You don’t actually have to commit copyright infringement to get a DMCA notice. But then clueless clods like you don’t think false copyright claims are a thing.
Or you could have got a kid to use your "designed for kids" software and make something? Or you could have scammed a kid to do your dirty work for you? Again… the fact that you host these videos doesn’t by itself prove who did it or the legality of its copyright, just that you’re brave enough to risk Paul Hansmeier sending you a subpoena. And frankly the idea that a kid made these using your software is still at least a bit more charitable because the alternative is a grown adult proudly declaring his kindergarten-level animation is worthy of the government sponsoring a mansion for him, and that is far less redeeming.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
All technology we create will be misused once it finds its way to people who spend 2 minutes evaluating the tech, and then try to use it for harassing their "friends".
I’ve given examples of how free software was being misused in the internet, so if that is possible, misusing copyright laws is also possible.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
"All technology we create will be misused once it finds its way to people who spend 2 minutes evaluating the tech"
Yet, you falsely claim you have implemented "perfect" DRM on your software. Hmmm…
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
"I just happen to be expert on implementing user interfaces, so the statement of yours might not be exactly accurate."
You’ve spent about a hundred posts demonstrating to everyone around here that you are a complete computer illiterate and you expect anyone to believe you are an expert in anything computer-related?
I’m pretty sure you can’t design a user interface in any other way than possibly drawing buttons on an etch-a-sketch because that’s the point your broken logic leaves you at.
Re: Re: Re:5 Re:
Tell me how does techdirt posts demonstrate anything about user interfaces. The site doesnt even allow you to design user interface, or even layout of the web page or user interaction…. basically reading techdirt you can only find out about scumbags who write stories about technology
You cannot place critique on my user interfaces
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
"Tell me how does techdirt posts demonstrate anything about user interfaces"
The fact that many more people use it successfully than your site?
"The site doesnt even allow you to design user interface"
Where does your piece of shit site allow you to design the interface?
…that’s what I thought.
"You cannot place critique on my user interfaces"
We have exactly the same right as the one you just exercised to criticise this one.
Well, as usual tp has polluted this thread to the point where trying to keep track of anything just turns half the comments into columns instead of sentences.
John Smith lives on…
Re: Re:
The best explanation I have is that Tero Fuckface Pulkinnen, like many around him, got suckered into a higher level of education than the job market could comfortably accommodate within its own status quo, hence his fixation with mansions and "government mandates". By itself, that would actually not have been terrible, because overinflation of qualifications is in my opinion a pretty big issue with developed economies.
Of course, Mr. Meshpage had to fuck it all up by buying into the celebrity lifestyle of a limited few in Hollywood, and thinks that copyright violations are the only possible reason he’s not as rich as he’d like to be, not because he designed a terrible product or that he has no idea how marketing or litigation actually works.
Re: Re: Re:
Not even that. Judging by his typical performance here, I’d be willing to bet he was sold something completely different and far more realistic, but he decided to insert his own fantasy version instead.
Re: Re: Re:
"The best explanation I have is that Tero Fuckface Pulkinnen, like many around him, got suckered into a higher level of education than the job market could comfortably accommodate within its own status quo, hence his fixation with mansions and "government mandates"."
"Higher level of education"?
The man has spent hundreds of posts demonstrating to everyone that he’s a complete imbecile. What is this alleged education supposed to be in, a PhD in Alternative Metaphysics? Because judging from the broken logic and false assumptions he keeps applying around here it sure wasn’t STEM, Business or Law.
Worst of all, his blind copyright ideology adherence and false assumptions on how law works aside, he actually insists he should be making money on a product which demonstrably no one wants and rather than try to make it into something people want or need he somehow links his lack of success to piracy – failing to realize that in his current position pot odds are a torrent of his product would remain untouched since it is, apparently, counterintuitive crap with functionality covered by about a dozen other freeware tools which are actually convenient to use…
Re: Re: Re: Re:
It is no surprise to anyone that the market has more than one player offering their products to the public. But this is exactly how it should work, because one entity cannot service the whole planet. The work amount needs to be split to multiple entities who all handle small part of the overall market. Thus software systems that are implementing the same features that some freeware tools are offering are still welcome to the market. If someone on the planet implements the same features, its no problem to offer similar features, as long as they’re not direct clones of the existing features.
To promote the progress, you need to have different implementations of the same features available. Just cloning someone elses freeware stuff isn’t enough to fullfill the purpose that copyright laws are after.
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
"To promote the progress, you need to have different implementations of the same features available"
Or… you combine standards with the new elements that differentiate you from everybody else. This is part of your problem – while your competitors are agreeing to standards and adding to them, you’re stuck trying to attempt problems that were solved years ago, often with solutions that have already been found not to work.
"Just cloning someone elses freeware stuff isn’t enough to fullfill the purpose that copyright laws are after."
Why, ffs? If they’re "freeware" (which I suspect you mean FOSS), the people writing the software has already given permission for them to be reused. Why would people need to implement something else?
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
Simply reusing the stuff isn’t enough. You actually need to spend years maintaining it. And if you just cloned someone elses work, then you have no incentive to remain with that technology and maintain it for several years when the market moves to newer tech. You’ll leave your clients with outdated tech that noone is willing to support, because you didn’t create it yourself and thus you have no reason to maintain it. Thus such project is completely dead-end and unsuitable for anyone.
Basically you’re ripping off the clients for easy cash.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
"Simply reusing the stuff isn’t enough. You actually need to spend years maintaining it"
…and?
"And if you just cloned someone elses work, then you have no incentive to remain with that technology and maintain it for several years"
Only if you’re a selfish idiot. In the real world, people on FOSS projects regularly collaborate and users will submit patches if they find the need to fix bugs or develop new features internally. If you decide to leech the project and then whine that what you want to be fixed isn’t done, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Meanwhile, look up "sunk cost fallacy’ if you think that the amount of work you personally did has any bearing on the long term value of software.
"Thus such project is completely dead-end and unsuitable for anyone."
Apart from all the FOSS that the majority of web browsers and server-side web tech is based on? You’re using at least 3 FOSS projects (and likely more) right now to say that they don’t work…
I’ll say yet again – I’m glad the real world doesn’t operate the way the thing in your head does.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
And when you create your own tech, what happens to your users if you end up under a bus? At least with most FOSS software there are independent maintainers, and the source code is available to do their own maintenance, or take on the mantle of keeping the project going.
Re: Re: Re:5 Re:
so everyone who dont have support of some global company should just quit and leave the responsibility of maintaining the world to "people who can build larger teams"?
So these one person teams are not allowed to exist at all?
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
I did not say that, I just pointed out that your objection to FOSS also applies to your own efforts. FOSS also has the advantage that the source code is available so that someone else can take over the maintenance of the code if they want to continue using it.
Re: Re: Re:7 Re:
When my code was under open source licenses, this pattern above isn’t what they used the source code for. Basically source availability is being misused on the internet for something completely different than what idealistic FOSS people are thinking.
Even without FOSS, source availability isn’t a bgi problem as they can just send email to ask for the source, in case I actually want to hear how people are using my code. FOSS allows them to stay completely hidden, which isn’t too good, since I can’t use hidden projects as cannon fodder in trolling…
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
"When my code was under open source licenses, this pattern above isn’t what they used the source code for"
Judging by your conduct here, I’m willing to bet you actively put people off contributing to your code.
"Even without FOSS, source availability isn’t a bgi problem as they can just send email to ask for the source"
So, you get all the downfalls of proprietary software with none of the benefits of open source. Fantastic.
"FOSS allows them to stay completely hidden"
The licences that force you to release source code for any modifications you make to the code allow you to stay hidden? What do you think open source is?
"I can’t use hidden projects as cannon fodder in trolling…"
Well, if that’s what you need projects for, it’s no wonder nobody wanted to collaborate with you.
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
Maybe they read your trolling which claimed even before seeing the project that it’s completely useless crap. You still havent seen how builder works, and critique of the project without bothering to look at the project is completely useless noise.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
"Maybe they read your trolling"
I never troll. I do offer my opinion that you’re a deluded little shit and your design skills are worthless, but I only offer them to you here. If people see them associated with your site, it’s only because you associate them with your comments here.
"You still havent seen how builder works"
I don’t need to. I’ve never criticised your app, just the hopelessly shit website and your horrendous video ad.
"without bothering to look at the project"
I tried, but you removed it from GitHub by the look of things. So, I only have the rubbish you present to the public to evaluate, and I gave you my honest opinion.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
Didn’t you say earlier that a teenager calling your ad dumb and software garbage in a blog post was good for you?
What makes us calling your software crap here any different?
I mean… At least have the decency to have consistency for your rubbish arguments…
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
I might trust the teenagers more, given that they even had a screenshot of my web page.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
"I might trust the teenagers more, given that they even had a screenshot of my web page."
We’ve described to you exactly where your site is failing and even given some suggestions as to how to improve it. If your response to that is to pretend that we didn’t really visit it, that’s on you. Just stop begging for free money because nobody wants to use your product or collaborate on your doomed project.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
You’d treat teenagers who call your software crap as a more reliable source of support for your software.
Uh huh. I suppose that must have made some logical synapse in the bullet hole-riddled mess of spaghetti bolognese you use as a brain.
But don’t take my word for it, I’ll provide a link to your page: right here, to "cite my sources".
I’d provide an imgur screenshot but trying to negotiate with you is draining on the levels of adding 2 + 2 and trying to get a chainsaw…
Re: Re: Re:6 Re:
so everyone who dont have support of some global company should just quit and leave the responsibility of maintaining the world to "people who can build larger teams"?
Congratulations! You’ve figured out one of the major rules of copyright enforcement: anything made by a smaller team is either inferior or pirated.
So thanks to the copyright law you support you just trashed your own work. Good job!
Re: Re: Re:7 Re:
This seems to be pretty accurate. I have nothing good to say about small teams.
What gave you the idea that it was built by a small team? While it’s almost correct, it might not be correct enough to make your argument survive.
Re: Re: Re:8 Re:
Try every single post where you said meshpage was worked on by you, therefore you deserve credit, mansions, etc rewards determined by no metric beyond your opinion.
The fact that the files aren’t visible on GitHub also indicate that currently you’re the only one working on it. So you admit that you have nothing good to say about yourself.
The only thing stopping these exchanges from never getting old is your constant butchering of law, code, and the English language.
Re: Re: Re:9 Re:
Copyright for the software attaches to the person who actually wrote the code. That would be me.
Well, private repos on github can have tons of people working on it.
That said, there seems to be only 1 main contributor.
But even if there is only one person writing the code, you still cannot claim the whole work is just me alone. My imaginary cat also contributed, as did everyone I talked with in last 40 years.
Re: Re: Re:10 Re:
"Copyright for the software attaches to the person who actually wrote the code"
Heh. The real laws are still a mystery to you, it seems, as well as employment contracts.
"Well, private repos on github can have tons of people working on it."
Wow, you actually said something that’s true! In fact, this is the case for the company I work for, all our repos are private for various reasons, except for the ones we have open sourced. But, i don’t know of a single coder, even the lead dev, who would think of taking sole credit for any of them.
"But even if there is only one person writing the code, you still cannot claim the whole work is just me alone. My imaginary cat also contributed, as did everyone I talked with in last 40 years."
I sense sarcasm, but I’ll bet the reason you make the repo private is that when you claimed to have written all the code, people were showing you all the dependencies your code had.
Re: Re: Re:11 Re:
I control dependencies very carefully and thus I only have like sdl2, sdl2_mixer, libfreetype, stb_image, stb_image_write, tiny_gltf, glew, libGL, libm, stdc++ as main dependencies, and then emscripten, g++, clang as tool dependencies
But repo went private for a good reason. The github repo was being abused by the internet. If the community decides to abuse the services provided, they’re going to lose the service completely.
Re: Re: Re:12 Re:
"I control dependencies very carefully"
So, you finally admit that your work is indeed dependant on collaborating with the work provided by others? Well done.
"The github repo was being abused by the internet"
Define "abused". Knowing you, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something perfectly reasonable that happened to interfere with your insane god complex over inferior design.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
He’s already confirmed in his own words that there’s only one person doing it. His imaginary cat is the horse apple cherry on the shit cake he’s constructed, mind you.
Re: Re: Re:13 Re:
It’s your imaginary world where programmers are in a silo with no communication to the outside world. Real world just works a little differently.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Thanks for confirming that your work is dependent on the work of others and you do owe other people money.
How many mansions (plans) do you owe now? Several lifetimes’ worth? Enough for a killer robot army to map out a subway system?
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Wow… You’ve spent weeks banging on about how your software is perfect because you don’t collaborate. How everyone else is being unfair to you because their collaboration creates nfair competition. Now, when cornered, you claim that I’m the one claiming that programmers don’t collaborate? Is this what you’re reduced to – desperately attempting to rewrite reality so that you’re right, rather than finally admit you’ve been lying and/or completely wrong the whole time?
I’ll give you this – at least you’re honest enough to have logged in to make all your stupid comments here, so that people can see the history of what was really said. Now, if you can just get to the point where you’re not bashing collaboration and sharing while doing the same thing yourself, that would be nice.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"What is this alleged education supposed to be in"
From my memory and interactions, I believe he spent most of his career coding embedded telecoms software solo, and seems to have been unable to adjust to things like public end users and collaboration with other developers after he left that space.
He might be genuinely great at what he used to do, but what he’s pushing now is a long way from what he’s good at.
Questions on copyright terms and authorship
So I have a few questions regarding the duration of copyright. As most of us know or have known, the current duration for copyright protection of a work under US law is from the date of first publication to (I think) 70 years after the death of the author, rounded up to January 1st (though some aspects, like the ability to bring suit or get statutory damages, are dependent on whether and when an official copyright registration is submitted to and approved by the Copyright Office). This calculus doesn’t change even when there is a transfer of some or all of the rights from a copyright from the author(s) to some other person or entity (even if the transfer occurs immediately upon publication or such like in a work-for-hire scenario) or if that or another person or entity transfers some or all of the copyright to yet another person or entity (including if it gets divided among several persons or entities). (There are some cases where the beginning of copyright protection is before the date of first publication (preregistration), and it’s true that the duration is very different for works published prior to a certain year, but that doesn’t really affect my questions.)
Now, my questions are regarding determining the “life of the author” in cases where defining authorship is not clear-cut:
What if absolutely no one knows the identity of author (abandoned works or works written anonymously)? How will we know when the copyright has expired?
When dealing with works created using a ghostwriter(s), do we use the life of the author who “officially” wrote it or the one(s) who actually wrote it?
With collaborative works, do we go by the first or the last to die? And do we include management?
In some cases, works are created by syndicates where no one reveals exactly who wrote what but effectively share credit even if actual authorship is limited to only a few members. Do we use the life of all of the people who were contributing members of the syndicate during that time or just the actual authors?
When a corporation or organization creates a work, in many cases people leave or are removed from the project before the final draft that ends up being published is completed. Do they still count as authors for the purposes of the duration of the copyright?
Let’s say we have a book that was written by person A and illustrated by person B. Do we determine the duration of the copyright on the whole book using the lives of A and B, or do we calculate the duration of the copyright of the written parts based on A’s life and the duration of the copyright of the illustrations based on B’s life? And what about in other areas where contributions are cleanly delineated, like coding a game vs. writing its story?
There was a time when video game publishers refused to recognize any of the people involved in the creation of the games at all, leading to their identities being a mystery in some cases. Like in question 1, how will we know when the copyright has expired?
If a work licenses content from another work, do we have to factor in the duration of the copyright of the licensed work as well as the new parts?
What aspects of the creation of a work constitute authorship? Naturally, anyone who writes code, draws illustrations, writes text, sculpts figures, designs animations, etc. are all considered authors (excepting anything excluded according to the answer to question 8), but do actors, voice actors, models, editors, publishers, bookbinders, or manufacturers count?
When it comes to translations and localizations, do the translators and localizers count as authors of the translated/localized work? If so, do we also still include the authors of the untranslated version even if they had no input in the translation/localization process? What about later ports, remakes, or remasters done by different people than the original?
Let’s say the sole author of a work dies within a few years of the first publication of that work but before anyone submitted a registration for the copyright in that work. Can someone still register that work for copyright protection even though the sole author is dead?
This one I really don’t expect an answer to and will hopefully be a complete nonissue, but say that it is decided that works created by an AI are eligible for copyright protection. Naturally, the AI’s life cannot be used to calculate the duration of the copyright because AIs don’t really have any clear limit (at least with humans, it appears highly unlikely any given author will live much more than 100 years at most, with many dying sooner; a potentially infinitely-long-lasting copyright would be unconstitutional), nor are they really “alive” in the first place. And while the ownership of the copyright would likely go to the author(s) of the AI (or their employer(s)/client(s)) or someone running the AI, do they really count as authors for the purposes of copyright? And if not, how long would the copyright last, then?
Here’s a really odd one. Let’s say, hypothetically, you have a work by a single author that dies before it ever gets published. In fact, let’s say that the work continues to go undiscovered and unpublished for a really long time after the author’s death. Eventually, someone discovers it and decides to publish it without any changes to the creative elements or any additional creative elements. How long does the copyright last? Can it even still be registered for copyright? If publication doesn’t occur until more than 70 years after the death of the author, can it even still be copyrighted anymore? It’s not like this is entirely far-fetched. All of Emily Dickinson’s poems (that we know of) were never published until after she died, and people are still looking for hidden lost works from long-dead authors like Gilbert & Sullivan, so it’s entirely feasible that someone would create something, die without ever publishing it, and then it gets discovered and someone finally decides to publish it. Sure, it’s pretty unlikely, but it’s not unheard of.
This is actually more related to the question of publication. As many of you know, a work cannot be protected by copyright unless it has been “fixed” in some sort of medium. This is particularly important when it comes to live performances like songs, dances, or plays. Now, “fixed” could mean a video or audio recording of the work, or it could be the “instructions” for the performance (sheet music, lyrics sheet, choreography steps on paper, a script, etc.) And in fact, the copyright office generally has even more specific requirements to register these things than is required to qualify for copyright (for example, a simple recording generally isn’t enough to register; you usually must also include scripts, instructions, lyrics, whatever to get a registration for such a thing). However, unlike things like a video game, film, TV show, book (including an ebook), magazine, comic book, animation, program, album cover, or YouTube video—where a public release simply cannot be done without “fixing” the work in a medium first—live performances can be made public well before it ever gets “fixed” in any sort of medium at all (recorded). In other words, while we generally think of copyrighted works being first recorded and then being released to the public, in some cases, the work doesn’t get “fixed” until after it’s already been released to the public, if ever. In the case where no part of the performance gets fixed in some sort of tangible medium until sometime after the first performance, does the copyright term start from the first performance or from the first time it gets “fixed” in a tangible medium.
As you can see, I believe there are a number of problems with the way the duration of copyright is determined. If both the beginning and end of the time for copyright protection, ability to be registered for copyright, and copyright registration were clearly and solely based on when the underlying work was “fixed” in a tangible medium and/or officially made available to the public via publication, essentially all of these issues would be gone. Using the life of the author, something often disconnected from publication or being “fixed” in a tangible medium, just unnecessarily complicates things. Another thing that would help is if copyright didn’t apply essentially the same for so many different kinds of works and assuming that the same order is always followed: the author creates a work, it gets “fixed” in a tangible medium, it gets publicly released, the author dies (where any two consecutive steps may be simultaneous but no later step occurs before an earlier step); plus, they also assume that registration can only possibly occur before the death of an author. I’m also annoyed that copyright is “opt-out”. Copyright is a privilege, not a fundamental right, and it places restraints on free speech, free expression, the free market, and creativity. As such, and given the great power it grants copyright holders, it should really be something that people have to actually ask for and do some basic legal work in order to gain those benefits. It shouldn’t be easier than getting the right to vote.
Re: Questions on copyright terms and authorship
Pretty much. Unfortunately, the people who set the foundation for the state of copyright today sucked too many cocks to give up the power they wield. Not only that, they got other idiots to suck cocks with them too, making said idiots invested in maintaining the status quo even at their own detriment.