Thought some people might be interested in this:
Stephen Findeisen, a.k.a. Coffeezilla, is a YouTuber best known for doing scam investigations, particularly around cryptocurrency. He has 3x as many subscribers as RecklessBen, and he's actually talked to a lawyer before. (Logan Paul sued him for defamation two years ago and he's still fighting it.)
Yesterday, he put out his own video looking into the situation, including new interviews with both sides and various photos, spreadsheets, etc. that they provided. His overall conclusion is that the overall value of the entire collection was $107K to begin with, and between layaways, side deals, and maybe some sloppy recordkeeping, only about $10K–$20K of that is truly unaccounted for at this point. That being said, Bryan hasn't been compensated for a lot of the sales that did take place. He believes that the smart move for BAM corporate would be to stop suing people, settle with Bryan and move on.
I wonder if these sites would agree to be archived on a time-delay. "Yes, you can make the copies now, but you can't put them up on the website until 1/5/10 years from now." It's better than getting nothing.
Yeah, this is dumb and unnecessary, but is it really going to drive up prices that much?
Presumably these companies only have to run these tests once per product, or maybe a few times if they really screw up the design. So we're talking about adding <=$10,000 to the total R&D cost, which is then going to get split across however many units they sell. I assume "units sold" would be a pretty large number. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
Now, I don't work in this industry, so maybe my understanding is wrong or my estimates are off. But since the article doesn't dig into those details, I have to fill in the gaps myself.
Of course Paxton's going to do whatever he feels like doing. The question is, what precedents will the higher courts be looking at when someone sues to stop him?
(And that cancer comment was uncalled for.)
As demonstrated by The Washington Post, “The water used by data centers caused a stir in Arizona’s drought-prone Maricopa County. But while they used about 905 million gallons there last year, that’s a small fraction of the 29 billion gallons devoted to the country’s golf courses.”
I get that, in some sense, this makes a platform liable for the content it hosts, but this is not suddenly a world where every single design decision will result in a lawsuit. That was not true for car design after Ford Pintos started blowing up, and it won’t be true here.
You have a point, but perhaps not as strong a point as you're making it out to be.
In the case of the Pinto, both the nature of the harm and the cause of the harm were well-defined. We knew that Pintos tended to explode when rear-ended, and it was pretty easy to figure out that that happened because of where the Pinto's gas tank was positioned, among other factors.
But when the harm is "I spend too many hours on this website and I feel terrible afterwards", everything is much more muddled.
How do you prove that the website caused the harm? Maybe the plaintiff would have felt just as bad without the website.
If the website did cause harm, was the harm due to the website's design, or to its content?
If the harm was due to design, which features of the design contributed to the harm, and to what degree?
What if design features that have negative effects for some users have positive effects for others? How should those be balanced?
None of those questions are easy to answer.
If these cases hold, I personally expect a lot of lawsuits. Anyone who uses a black-box algorithm to recommend or rank content, outside of traditional search engines, will be accused of being "addictive". We'll see "binge-watching" lawsuits against streaming services. It'll be nuts.
(As an aside: now that I'm reading the Wikipedia article, and this cited source from the article, even the case of the Pinto wasn't quite that clear-cut. Yes, it did have more of a problem with rear-end collision fires than other models. But the position of the gas tank was fairly standard for American cars of that era, and the Pinto's overall fatality rate was entirely unremarkable for a subcompact. Few people today think of the '70s VW Beetle as a "deathtrap", but when you look at the number of deaths per million cars on the road, it was worse than a Pinto.)
I think a really clever ad agency could spin some gold out of this straw. Picture the commercial:
John: Man, this cow's milk is really refreshing!
Mary: Oh, honey, that's not cow's milk, it's oat—
Little Timmy: Mum, shh! They'll hear you! [points out window]
[A trio of forbidding-looking law enforcement officials are standing outside the window. Behind them are protestors carrying picket signs with slogans like "DON'T SAY IT" and "OATS ARE NOT THE M-WORD".]
Mary: Er... oat...non-dairy...beverage product? [looks to the lead official for approval]
[Official gives a short, professional nod.]
[Brief awkward pause among the family.]
Oatley™: You know what it is.
The point of Section 230 is that it makes websites like bookstores. And that's a good thing.
We don't allow people to sue bookstores for what books they choose to stock or not stock. Even if a book is libelous, the bookstore selling it is safe. Why?
First, because the bookstore is a step removed from the process of making the book. They didn't write it, they didn't publish it, and they may not even have a way of knowing whether the book is true or false.
Second, because bookstores stock a lot of books. If every single book on a store's shelves potentially opened them up to a lawsuit, then such stores might not even exist at all. Or they might protect themselves by only stocking the blandest, most uncontroversial books possible.
We give bookstores these protections because we feel it's good for our society in the long run. Yes, there are authors and even bookstores that disgust us with their ideas and decisions, but we need some place for ideas that matter to get a foothold and find an audience. In other words, freedom of speech is good.
And there is no requirement for bookstores to be "neutral". You can have a gay bookstore or a Christian bookstore or a store for books about fish. That, too, is freedom of speech. If you don't like what's on offer at one bookstore, you can always go to another. And that's as it should be.
All Section 230 does is take the bookstore model and apply it to the online space. The websites are the "bookstores", the users are the "authors", and their comments and pictures and videos are the "books". If you are an "author" yourself—that is, if you've ever posted anything to any website you didn't personally own—Section 230 helped you get your book onto the shelf, so to speak. You may not be aware of that, in the same way that a fish isn't aware of water, but it's true.
And that"s why messing with Section 230 is a bad idea. Repealing or "reforming" Section 230 because you hate Facebook is like making it easier to sue bookstores because you hate Amazon. Will it hurt Amazon? Sure, probably. But it'll also hurt every other bookstore in existence, and the authors who depend on them.
^ Accidentally posted the above when I wasn't logged in, plus it looked like it didn't go through anyway. Which is why I reposted it under my own account. So, mods, please feel free to delete.
Does Don Lemon have a magical super-power that Mr. Schmoe doesn’t in this kind of a situation?
Broadly speaking, no. A journalist is simply a person wielding a mixture of freedom of speech (which everyone has), freedom of association (which everyone has), and freedom of the press (which everyone who has the means to publish has). Yes, there are a few laws on the books about technical details of the trade like protecting sources, but fundamentally journalists don't have extra rights. They're just taking full advantage of their rights.
So, to make a sound argument that Don Lemon shouldn't have been arrested, you must argue that the other people shouldn't have been arrested either, or you must argue that his behavior differed from the behavior of the other people in some key way (e.g. they shouted slogans and he didn't). You can't simply say "haha, journalist go brrrr". And to be clear, this post doesn't: its claim is that he was acting like a journalist, meaning his behavior differed from that of the protestors. (Though I imagine the author opposes the arrest of the protestors as well, on top of that.)
While I certainly wouldn't enjoy that, neither I nor, by my best understanding, the law would consider that an arrestable offense unless it became a repeated pattern. Though if it happened on publicly-accessible private property, the property owner or an employee would probably ask the yelling person to leave, which could bring in the trespassing charges I mentioned above.
Furthermore, when loud, forceful speech is used to criticize a public figure for his role in carrying out official government policy, the bar for proving or even prosecuting harassment should be even higher than it would be under other circumstances.
"I'm a journalist" isn't a get-out-of-crime-free card. In your example, the person acting as a journalist has clearly committed the crime of breaking and entering, even if he didn't personally break open the door. He can be prosecuted on that basis.
But as you said, context matters. Don Lemon wasn't accompanying a bunch of robbers breaking into a private house; he was accompanying a bunch of people walking into a church—which is a publicly-accessible space, like a store or restaurant—to shout some words that the pastor and congregation didn't want to hear. That may be rude, but I'm not convinced it's a criminal offense—and if it is, is shouldn't be. (I say this as a church-goer myself.)
Now, if these people didn't leave the property in a timely manner after being asked, they can fairly be charged with trespassing. And that includes Don Lemon. But they have to be asked first. It isn't a criminal conspiracy to plan to walk in somewhere and shout things, even if you're 99% sure that you'll be shown the door immediately.
I imagine the Republican response to this will come (or has already come) in two flavors:
"The only people ruining our country's reputation are the America-hating liberals in the mainstream media who can't stop telling lies about the Trump administration. That's why they spread this ridiculous story in the first place."
"and we'll do it again! sucks to suck foreign losers! lol"
In most cases these responses would come from different people, but I'd be interested to find the exceptions.
New coverage
Thought some people might be interested in this: Stephen Findeisen, a.k.a. Coffeezilla, is a YouTuber best known for doing scam investigations, particularly around cryptocurrency. He has 3x as many subscribers as RecklessBen, and he's actually talked to a lawyer before. (Logan Paul sued him for defamation two years ago and he's still fighting it.) Yesterday, he put out his own video looking into the situation, including new interviews with both sides and various photos, spreadsheets, etc. that they provided. His overall conclusion is that the overall value of the entire collection was $107K to begin with, and between layaways, side deals, and maybe some sloppy recordkeeping, only about $10K–$20K of that is truly unaccounted for at this point. That being said, Bryan hasn't been compensated for a lot of the sales that did take place. He believes that the smart move for BAM corporate would be to stop suing people, settle with Bryan and move on.
I wonder if these sites would agree to be archived on a time-delay. "Yes, you can make the copies now, but you can't put them up on the website until 1/5/10 years from now." It's better than getting nothing.
"Way more expensive"?
Yeah, this is dumb and unnecessary, but is it really going to drive up prices that much? Presumably these companies only have to run these tests once per product, or maybe a few times if they really screw up the design. So we're talking about adding <=$10,000 to the total R&D cost, which is then going to get split across however many units they sell. I assume "units sold" would be a pretty large number. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Now, I don't work in this industry, so maybe my understanding is wrong or my estimates are off. But since the article doesn't dig into those details, I have to fill in the gaps myself.
Of course Paxton's going to do whatever he feels like doing. The question is, what precedents will the higher courts be looking at when someone sues to stop him? (And that cancer comment was uncalled for.)
It says "county's" in the next sentence, but I just double-checked and it does still say "country's" where I marked it.
Typo
Unapproved = Approved
Yeah, that all makes sense to me.
- How do you prove that the website caused the harm? Maybe the plaintiff would have felt just as bad without the website.
- If the website did cause harm, was the harm due to the website's design, or to its content?
- If the harm was due to design, which features of the design contributed to the harm, and to what degree?
- What if design features that have negative effects for some users have positive effects for others? How should those be balanced?
None of those questions are easy to answer. If these cases hold, I personally expect a lot of lawsuits. Anyone who uses a black-box algorithm to recommend or rank content, outside of traditional search engines, will be accused of being "addictive". We'll see "binge-watching" lawsuits against streaming services. It'll be nuts. (As an aside: now that I'm reading the Wikipedia article, and this cited source from the article, even the case of the Pinto wasn't quite that clear-cut. Yes, it did have more of a problem with rear-end collision fires than other models. But the position of the gas tank was fairly standard for American cars of that era, and the Pinto's overall fatality rate was entirely unremarkable for a subcompact. Few people today think of the '70s VW Beetle as a "deathtrap", but when you look at the number of deaths per million cars on the road, it was worse than a Pinto.)Typo in post title?
Just noticed that the title says "almond milk", but the story is about oat milk.
I think a really clever ad agency could spin some gold out of this straw. Picture the commercial: John: Man, this cow's milk is really refreshing! Mary: Oh, honey, that's not cow's milk, it's oat— Little Timmy: Mum, shh! They'll hear you! [points out window] [A trio of forbidding-looking law enforcement officials are standing outside the window. Behind them are protestors carrying picket signs with slogans like "DON'T SAY IT" and "OATS ARE NOT THE M-WORD".] Mary: Er... oat...non-dairy...beverage product? [looks to the lead official for approval] [Official gives a short, professional nod.] [Brief awkward pause among the family.] Oatley™: You know what it is.
Ah, my bad. Thanks for the correction. Does my general point still stand? Section 230 doesn't give websites more protection than bookstores, does it?
A short pitch for Section 230
The point of Section 230 is that it makes websites like bookstores. And that's a good thing. We don't allow people to sue bookstores for what books they choose to stock or not stock. Even if a book is libelous, the bookstore selling it is safe. Why?
- First, because the bookstore is a step removed from the process of making the book. They didn't write it, they didn't publish it, and they may not even have a way of knowing whether the book is true or false.
- Second, because bookstores stock a lot of books. If every single book on a store's shelves potentially opened them up to a lawsuit, then such stores might not even exist at all. Or they might protect themselves by only stocking the blandest, most uncontroversial books possible.
We give bookstores these protections because we feel it's good for our society in the long run. Yes, there are authors and even bookstores that disgust us with their ideas and decisions, but we need some place for ideas that matter to get a foothold and find an audience. In other words, freedom of speech is good. And there is no requirement for bookstores to be "neutral". You can have a gay bookstore or a Christian bookstore or a store for books about fish. That, too, is freedom of speech. If you don't like what's on offer at one bookstore, you can always go to another. And that's as it should be. All Section 230 does is take the bookstore model and apply it to the online space. The websites are the "bookstores", the users are the "authors", and their comments and pictures and videos are the "books". If you are an "author" yourself—that is, if you've ever posted anything to any website you didn't personally own—Section 230 helped you get your book onto the shelf, so to speak. You may not be aware of that, in the same way that a fish isn't aware of water, but it's true. And that"s why messing with Section 230 is a bad idea. Repealing or "reforming" Section 230 because you hate Facebook is like making it easier to sue bookstores because you hate Amazon. Will it hurt Amazon? Sure, probably. But it'll also hurt every other bookstore in existence, and the authors who depend on them.^ Accidentally posted the above when I wasn't logged in, plus it looked like it didn't go through anyway. Which is why I reposted it under my own account. So, mods, please feel free to delete.
While I certainly wouldn't enjoy that, neither I nor, by my best understanding, the law would consider that an arrestable offense unless it became a repeated pattern. Though if it happened on publicly-accessible private property, the property owner or an employee would probably ask the yelling person to leave, which could bring in the trespassing charges I mentioned above. Furthermore, when loud, forceful speech is used to criticize a public figure for his role in carrying out official government policy, the bar for proving or even prosecuting harassment should be even higher than it would be under other circumstances.
"I'm a journalist" isn't a get-out-of-crime-free card. In your example, the person acting as a journalist has clearly committed the crime of breaking and entering, even if he didn't personally break open the door. He can be prosecuted on that basis. But as you said, context matters. Don Lemon wasn't accompanying a bunch of robbers breaking into a private house; he was accompanying a bunch of people walking into a church—which is a publicly-accessible space, like a store or restaurant—to shout some words that the pastor and congregation didn't want to hear. That may be rude, but I'm not convinced it's a criminal offense—and if it is, is shouldn't be. (I say this as a church-goer myself.) Now, if these people didn't leave the property in a timely manner after being asked, they can fairly be charged with trespassing. And that includes Don Lemon. But they have to be asked first. It isn't a criminal conspiracy to plan to walk in somewhere and shout things, even if you're 99% sure that you'll be shown the door immediately.
I imagine the Republican response to this will come (or has already come) in two flavors:
- "The only people ruining our country's reputation are the America-hating liberals in the mainstream media who can't stop telling lies about the Trump administration. That's why they spread this ridiculous story in the first place."
- "and we'll do it again! sucks to suck foreign losers! lol"
In most cases these responses would come from different people, but I'd be interested to find the exceptions.Attribution
(I finally created a Techdirt account. The comment I'm replying to is mine.)
Attribution
(I finally created a Techdirt account. The comment I'm replying to is mine.)