DB 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Don't Cheer For The Twitter Employee Who Deleted Donald Trump's Account

    DB ( profile ), 03 Nov, 2017 @ 11:17am

    Why would a rational person want to delete Trump's account?

    The only reason I could think of would be to stop him from embarrassing himself. And that's pointless, since the account would be certain to be quickly restored.

  • On the post: Reporter Arrested, Thrown To The Ground For Cursing

    DB ( profile ), 02 Nov, 2017 @ 03:41am

    Re: He wasn't charged with obstructing traffic

    If being in the street was the problem, the police would have added on a citation for that.

    It seems pretty clear what happened. The police officer was part of the security detail. He was told by someone working for the campaign to harass the reporter. He did. The officer thought that the profanity was a justification to roughly arrest the reporter. Before they filled out the arrest report the officer was told the law was unconstitutional, so they had to substitute 'disorderly conduct'.

    Without the video, the officer's narrative would stand. Before the age of ubiquitous video cameras I certainly would have believed it. But with the video it's clear that the police officer was arresting the reporter for a violation of section 511. They needed to substitute a different charge later to justify the arrest. Without a plausible charge -- one that wasn't obviously unconstitutional, the police couldn't justify the force used during the arrest.

  • On the post: Man Gets $37,500 Payout After Field Drug Test Says Donut Crumbs Are Methamphetamines

    DB ( profile ), 31 Oct, 2017 @ 10:58pm

    How much would you pay for...

    How much would a police department pay for a dice roll to do an otherwise-improper search?

    When viewed from that perspective, the ideal test kit would have a high false positive rate, with some attribute (such as lower cost) that justifies its use vs. a more accurate test.

  • On the post: Energy Group Labels Creators Of Video Game As 'Eco-Terrorists'

    DB ( profile ), 31 Oct, 2017 @ 09:19am

    Complete own-goal

    My previous perception was that 'eco-terrorist' referred to those extremists that were willing to destroy property and even kill in "raise awareness" for their 'cause'. They do evil things like spike trees, burn down buildings and release ill-adapted animals to the wild.

    Now when I hear that phrase I'll just expect regular people with moderate views wanting reasonable constraints on companies that would otherwise destroy the environment to make money.

  • On the post: BlackBerry CEO Promises To Try To Break Customers' Encryption If The US Gov't Asks Him To

    DB ( profile ), 30 Oct, 2017 @ 09:26am

    Is this just a competitive position?

    His comments might have no technical basis. They could be pure market positioning for a government-enforced windfall.

    Blackberry went from owning the smartphone market to having a vanishingly tiny share. That is a trillion dollar screw-up. It puts them near the top of the worst business misses of all time.

    With that perspective, it's understandable that the CEO would grasp at any straw that might cause a government to mandate them back into relevance.

  • On the post: Sorry, You Can't Abuse Copyright Law To Make A Negative Review Disappear

    DB ( profile ), 17 Oct, 2017 @ 03:25pm

    Hopefully this case will result in much more careful consideration with a default judgment. It was easy to foresee that transferring the copyright could only lead to the plaintiff stirring up trouble.

  • On the post: Australian Police Ran A Dark Web Child Porn Site For Eleven Months

    DB ( profile ), 13 Oct, 2017 @ 08:40am

    "One million accounts" is quoted. But it appears that fewer than 5000 of them were active, and there is no estimate of how many individuals that represents.

    Just looking at this website is illegal in many places. It's likely that the users regularly created and abandoned accounts to avoid leaving an obvious long-term record of their activities. Some may have have done it as frequently as every use. 5000 active accounts over a year might be only 100 active users.

    A similar thing is true for the image view counts. Most users are presumably going back to the site rather than downloading incriminating content. And viewing with their browser caching turned off, or even with browsers that retain no state. Each time the page is viewed the images are downloaded. In some cases just scrolling up and down will load an image multiple times, or re-load the page to render additional content.

    The count of individuals is important. Police are justifying their actions based on large counts. If the reality is there are few people creating and viewing child porn, it may be that the police are actually the largest purveyors and consumers.

  • On the post: Cop Cleans Out Wallet Of Unlicensed Hot Dog Vendor Just Because He Can

    DB ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2017 @ 11:35am

    Re:

    More to the point, how is having money and credit cards in a wallet evidence of the suspected crime? Before this was a seizure, it was a search -- why were they searching in the first place? What relevant evidence did they expect to find in his wallet?

  • On the post: Bill Introduced That Would Make Arrested Protesters Pay Police Overtime, Gov't Expenses

    DB ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2017 @ 01:24pm

    Re: Re:

    The equipment is free, but it can be extremely expensive to operate and maintain. A Bearcat spare tire is $5K. Helicopters cost at least a few hundred an hour, up to $1K.

    Once you can pass the cost to someone else, there is a strong incentive to move every expense in the operating cost column. For instance leasing the equipment instead of purchasing, and have the lease contract include training.

  • On the post: Spotify Finally Realizes That Streaming Isn't Reproduction Or Distribution

    DB ( profile ), 06 Sep, 2017 @ 10:46am

    I'm sure many companies would be happy to rip up the rules and start over.

    Not because they want clarity and fairness, but because they expect that they will be able to grab a bigger piece of the pie.

    Even if that happens, licensing of existing content will continue under the current rules, so deciding what those rules actually mean is important. And once the rules are clarified, there might be little reason to make new ones.

  • On the post: Spotify Finally Realizes That Streaming Isn't Reproduction Or Distribution

    DB ( profile ), 06 Sep, 2017 @ 10:40am

    Re:

    There used to be arguments over what constituted a "copy" sufficient to implicate copyright law, but that has long been decided. Ephemeral copies are not covered.

    There might be thousands of identifiable "copies" along the distribution chain, but legally that counts as Zero Copies. Not one of the copies from the master tapes, through storage, memory and registers of uncounted servers and routers counts. You don't need a separate license for DRAM chip, swap disk, flip-flop and transistor along the way.

  • On the post: Court Dumps Lawsuit Against Zillow Over Its Inaccurate 'Zestimates'

    DB ( profile ), 01 Sep, 2017 @ 02:54am

    Re: Re:

    Thanks for the link that reminded me of those comments.

    There was also the poster that (intentionally?) conflated disparaging property (a putative undervalue estimate) with disparaging property rights (falsely claiming some aspect of ownership), combined with stretching "injurious falsehood" to cover a value estimate.

  • On the post: State Supreme Court Says Digital Cameras Can't Be Searched Without A Warrant

    DB ( profile ), 24 Aug, 2017 @ 09:24am

    A good decision

    They have carefully avoid deciding an issue that might make them look archaic in a few years.

    Just as Linux devices (Trolltech Greenphone), PDAs and music players simultaneously developed into sophisticated smart phones in just a few years, digital cameras may suddenly become something more. Or perhaps not, as GoPro is demonstrating.

    Arguing that digital cameras should fall into the same category as wallet photos couldn't have helped their case. To most people it just solidifies how different the two situations are.

  • On the post: Aspiring Actor Forges Court Order To Delist Content, Gets Busted By Judge, Forges Court Order To Delist Article About Contempt Charges

    DB ( profile ), 17 Aug, 2017 @ 12:01pm

    Re: Tried and got burned?

    My guess is that thousands have tried this, and far fewer than 50 have been caught. And of those, have any really been punished?

  • On the post: The Snopes Fight Is Even Way More Complicated Than We Originally Explained

    DB ( profile ), 15 Aug, 2017 @ 01:53pm

    So many sketchy things, why are they bring it to the court's attention?

    It appears that the top two guys at Proper Media have done many, many questionable things. What type of personality would drag their own soiled laundry into court and not expect everyone to notice the stench?

    The opening question might be establishing that they are truly officers of Proper Media. An corporate officer is generally a statutory employee. Exceptions may be made for officers that have extremely limited, token, perfunctory or no duties.

    If they have claimed in corporate tax filings that they are not employees, then they aren't legitimate corporate officers.

    It wouldn't surprise me if the judge takes the easy way out and dismisses the case because Proper Media isn't a valid plaintiff.

  • On the post: The Snopes Fight Is Even Way More Complicated Than We Originally Explained

    DB ( profile ), 15 Aug, 2017 @ 11:16am

    I don't think that Green comes out looking too bad. He was a minority shareholder, and thus had very limited power. He was heavily pressured into signing a loan guarantee that disproportionately imposed liability on him, at the risk of losing even that small share of ownership.

    If that email is genuine, and there is no reason to suspect that it is not, Proper grossly misrepresented the employment situation in their complaint.

  • On the post: Psychiatrist Files Lawsuit Over Wordless One-Star Review

    DB ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2017 @ 12:13pm

    When I read this story I was thinking "in what mall storefront could you find an attorney to take such an obviously bogus case?"

    So I checked.

    Apparently this lawyer doesn't have an office, instead working out of his house. He is variously listed as a detective, computer forensic investigator and a litigation attorney. His website proclaims that he has a "law enforcement commission from the governor of South Carolina". Which sound serious, but seems to typically mean an auxiliary police officer, volunteer/reserve constable, or a park ranger.

  • On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 132: Is There Any Smartphone Innovation Left?

    DB ( profile ), 01 Aug, 2017 @ 05:46pm

    There are a huge number of potential innovations on the horizon. Many are based around spacial sensors and image processing -- stereoscopic vision, time-of-flight sensors, IR imagers, etc. Gesture recognition might become interesting, or entirely news ways of interacting with the device might become suddenly popular. Eye,and even focus tracking might become input methods.

    Who knows, after more than a century, typing might be gone in the blink of an eye.

  • On the post: Google Asks US Court To Block Terrible Canadian Supreme Court Ruling On Global Censorship

    DB ( profile ), 28 Jul, 2017 @ 04:56pm

    Re: Re:

    Yes, I do wish courts would bring that issue up.

    You shouldn't get to claim to be a U.S. company for the purposes of court protection if the bulk of your revenue is booked as occuring in Bermuda.

  • On the post: Giganews Sues Perfect 10 For $20 Million For Trying To Play 'Hide The Assets' After Jury Award

    DB ( profile ), 20 Jul, 2017 @ 04:21pm

    Looking at the filing, the cash transfers are pretty damning .

    There are lots of ways to transfer other assets for much less than market value when you have control of the company.

    The touchstone for those transfers might be the vehicle. To transfer ownership, the title needs to be transferred. Most states really, including California, really don't like losing out on the tax revenue from vehicle sales. Typically for vehicles less than ten years old the declared sale price must be close to the "blue book" value (the state has its own tables).

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