HotHead 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (224)

• On the post: Devin Nunes Loses Yet Another Of His Frivolous SLAPP Suits Against CNN

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 02:28pm

  Sorry, I should've double checked David's comment. David said "elephant" and not "horse".

• On the post: Devin Nunes Loses Yet Another Of His Frivolous SLAPP Suits Against CNN

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 11:21am

  From your initial comment:

  presumably you hate him just cuz he’s a republican

  If you're making such a presumption before reading about the case then I don't know what to say.

  I haven’t been following the case at all and don’t even slightly trust Masnick’s characterization of it but CNN is shitty af and no, shouting “Imma journalism!” should not mean you get to lie without recourse.

  You would've learned from Mike's article that most of the statements Nunes chose as evidence were opinions. If lying opinions could be defamation then Fox News would get sued all day long. (Hey, I didn't say that Fox News would lose every time.) Anyway, I sincerely hope that you skimmed the court's opinion (which Mike provided as usual, but which you might be able to find on your own if your paranoia is that bad) and took a minute to evaluate how accurate Mike's article is to the court's decision. Also, please tell us which of CNN's non-opinion statements which Nunes brought in this case were lies, along with the evidence (i.e. sources and links). Meanwhile, David made a great point about putting the cart before the horse.

• On the post: So Much For The 4th: Ring Allows Cops To Acquire Recordings Of Non-Suspect’s Home And Business

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 10:39am

  Never. Judges have absolute immunity, so merely deciding cases incorrectly (which might not apply to this one) has no consequences for them. The Fourth Amendment, outdated and filled with Swiss cheese holes in the form of undermining common law exceptions (especially the Third Party Doctrine), is not fit for the information age. I think that the minimal long-term solution is to [vote in Congress members who would] pass a Constitutional amendment to strengthen the Fourth Amendment by establishing a right to privacy from government intrusion even when third parties are involved (which is almost always; what do you do in your daily life that doesn't involve providing a third party more information about you?). In particular, Congress has to eliminate the Third Party Doctrine.

• On the post: So Much For The 4th: Ring Allows Cops To Acquire Recordings Of Non-Suspect’s Home And Business

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 10:24am

  I hope that you are articulating how you think reality is rather than how you think reality should be. If it's the latter, then surely you'd have no objections if police were to read or listen to all of your bank statements, emails, phone calls, online drive files, and browsing activity without telling you about doing so, amd without asking for your permission either. Let's not conflate "publically accessible in unencrypted, raw form on the internet" with "stored by a private company or publically traded company".

• On the post: MSCHF One Ups The Onion In Filing Hilarious Supreme Court Amicus Briefs That Educate

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 10:02am

  Return addresses, is my guess

• On the post: Devin Nunes Loses Yet Another Of His Frivolous SLAPP Suits Against CNN

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 09:44am

  That's a great way to put it

  Devin Nunes, the SLAPP failblazer who pioneered the art of suing fictional cows and losing to them

• On the post: Another German Court Says The DNS Service Quad9 Is Implicated In Any Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 09:08am

  My analogy in the final paragraph was slightly incomplete

  My analogy should've made clear that youtube-dl wasn't in the wrong, but I also hope you didn't think that Github and Uberspace (the hoster of the youtube-dl website) were in the wrong. Additionally, Techdirt has a few articles about youtube-dl.

• On the post: Another German Court Says The DNS Service Quad9 Is Implicated In Any Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 08:58am

  The Perfect 10 decision is better, and the only one that's good at all between the two cases

  I'm not very familiar with the Perfect 10 case, but a quick skim of the Wikipedia article for Perfect 10, Inc. v. Visa International Service Ass'n tells me that you are heavily cropping and misrepresenting the court's reasoning. Regarding whhether Visa made a material contribution to the infringement (emphasis mine):

  The court decided that infringement rests on reproduction, alteration, display, and distribution of Perfect 10's images over the Internet. It argued that Visa and its payment processing services were not designed to reproduce or alter copyrighted images. Even if users could not pay for images with credit cards, infringement could still continue on a large scale because other viable funding mechanisms were available.

  Regarding whether Visa induced the infringement (emphasis mine):

  The court made the distinction that the software system in A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. and MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. were engineered and promoted explicitly for the purpose of facilitating infringement of copyrighted music, thereby reducing legitimate sales of such music. In contrast, the defendant's system did not facilitate access to infringing websites. Again, the defendants did not use its payment process system to copy, alter, distribute, or display infringing material. Consumers did not use Visa to locate, view, or download the infringing images.

  By your logic, any tool which allows people to download YouTube videos should entail third-party liability. Just as there are many non-infringing uses for downloading YouTube videos (time shifting, clipping for fair use, clipping for education, availing of the creator's express permission including from permissive copyright licenses, saving for journalism, working around unreliable internet access, etc.), non-infringing uses of Visa are a dollar a dime. I hope you didn't think that the developers of youtube-dl were in the wrong back when the RIAA targeted (not even youtube-dl, making the RIAA's actions even more damning!) Github for hosting the code and a hosting provider for hosting the youtube-dl website.

• On the post: Another German Court Says The DNS Service Quad9 Is Implicated In Any Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 08:34am

  Correcting a mistake

  My first sentence should be the converse: “to criminals” is more analogous than “of criminals”.

• On the post: Another German Court Says The DNS Service Quad9 Is Implicated In Any Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 08:32am

  Suing phone book registries for providing the phone numbers of criminals.

  "of criminals" is more analogous than "to criminals". My edit of your analogy: Banning me from giving the phone number of a pizza place to anyone for any reason because I told a friend the pizza place's phone number despite knowing that my friend has a history of prank calling pizza places.

• On the post: Details Of FTC’s Investigation Into Twitter And Elon Musk Emerge… And Of Course People Are Turning It Into A Nonsense Culture War

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 08:18am

  It does make sense if you read carefully. "Everyone" refers to all news organizations who have written repeatedly about Musk.

• On the post: Elon’s (Good?) New DMCA Policy Appears To Be The Result Of Lots Of Confusion & Misunderstanding

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2023 @ 09:56pm

  Abuse of dmca is when you try to use it against something that isnt your IP or is such a short snippet that its fair use.

  Instead of "such a short snippet that its fair use" say "likely to be fair use". Length is only one aspect of fair use, and tweets are so short that most copying of tweets, especially copying via retweets, could hardly be considered taking "short snippets". I'm guessing that Mike's fair use argument for Rainmaker's retweets relies on whether Rainmaker adds Rainmaker's own comments.

• On the post: Telecom Monopolies Win Again: Gigi Sohn Forced To Withdraw From FCC Nomination

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2023 @ 09:05pm

  If you don't mind, I'm curious about how you feel about the current state of internet access. Who is your ISP? Would you want the FCC to change the way it regulates ISPs? What change do you want to broadband regulations? What is your opinion of municipal broadband? What is your opinion of fiber optic cable? (If your ISP is a big one like Comcast or Frontier, the I would struggle to understand if you were perfectly satisfied with the current legal environment.)

• On the post: Copyright Fraud Deployed To Silence Journalists In Equatorial Guinea

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2023 @ 08:29pm

  Heaping more legal pressure on a provider is a personal band-aid which doesn't address the root problem: false DMCA claims and the lack of meaningful penalties for filing them. It also further undermines the "safe harbor", even though your recommendation is nowhere near as bad as filing false DMCA claims. Meanwhile, most people have neither the time nor the energy to get a lawyer and sue providers to reverse a DMCA takedown. As a different AC commented, the minimum change for improving the DMCA would be to make the penalties for false claims worth as much as (if not more than, imo) statutory damages for infringement.

• On the post: Elon Musk’s Vision Of Trust & Safety: Neither Safe Nor Trustworthy

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2023 @ 05:46pm

  The Babylon Bee has been banned from using someone else's website! This is censorship. It's not as if the Babylon Bee has an easy way, such as its own website, to get its opinions out without fear of being silenced.

• On the post: Netflix Fights Big Telecom Plan To Impose ‘Big Tech Tax’ In EU

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2023 @ 05:35pm

  Imagine if electric companies decided to complain that sellers of electric vehicles are "getting a free ride by hogging electricity and straining power grids" while completely ignoring that the owners of the EVs already pay for the electricity they use to charge their cars. Anyway, internet service should be regulated as a utility a la electricity and water. Internet service is necessary for most people in the US to attend school, attend work, check emails, search for schools, search for work, set clocks, move house, manage insurance and credit, and search for places/addresses to buy anything ranging from food to home necessities to medical treatments to legal assistance. There's no valid justification for a telecom giant to decide intentionally and repeatedly to neglect building internet infrastructure to the very populations who are the targets of "fix the digital divide" subsidies. Of course, when I say "digital divide", I'm referring to the state of incomplete service (exacerbated by intentionally fraudulent service availability maps) caused and perpetuated by telecom giants". Oh, fiduciary obligations to shareholders? Please. Even more justification to make internet service a utility.

• On the post: When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2023 @ 10:56am

  Two things.

  1. If you need to change copyright law, then why not have orphan works automatically fall into the public domain? Overhauling copyright to require "this work is not an orphan work as of 20XX" every few years or switching to a renewal system like I suggested would be more efficient than leaving preservationists to find and track potentially orphaned works.
  2. What do you mean by "that individual would need to agree to sacrifice his own freedom for that information"? Anyone can use something in the public domain. The public domain IS freedom. Copyrightable works are non-rival. Copyright intentionally but temporarily restricts intellectual/creative competition. Preservationists would be better off if copyrightable works would fall into the public domain before the works degrade or disappear. Movies from the 1900s are rotting because activists don't dare to touch them.

• On the post: When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2023 @ 10:40am

  When authors eat food, it leaves a gap of products to the market, and that gap needs to be filled with the work of the authors. But moving products from one person to another is illegal operation, unless you actually move money to the other direction. So now you have explanation of both activities.

  What's so different about eating food when authors instead of non-author workers are the ones eating it? Payment for the food fills the gap. That money goes toward making more food, buying machines, buying vehicles, buying tools, buying home necessities, paying for school, etc. A healthy economy needs circulating money. It also needs people to improve old things and make new ones. I'm no economist, and I think you aren't one either. As I mentioned in a different reply, economist Rufus Pollock found that the optimal length of the copyright term is around 15 years "with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years". Furthermore, you seem assuming that there will be insufficient economic activity around a work after its copyright term expires. You'd be wrong. The public domain underlies everything: scientific research, medical research, technological advancement, storytelling, government laws, education, and more. Disney's success depends on the public domain stories (think Aladdin, Snow White, and Mulan) that Disney modifies. Scientific research depends on sharing knowledge between scientists and harnessing past discoveries. Public domain math (math being not copyrightable in the first place) and fictional literature from hundreds of years ago (including Shakespeare's writing, in particular) form a large chunk of a public school K-12 education. Essential internet protocols, library software, and programming languages would stall if they didn't have copyright licenses with far fewer restrictions than usual (MIT license, Apache 2.0, Gnu GPL v2 and v3, etc. or no license). Online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia share information under permissive licenses such as CC BY-SA 3.0. Most computers in the world (especially phones, web servers, and supercomputers) run a Linux distribution, the Linux kernel being licensed under the Gnu GPL v2. The internet is as convenient and accessible as it is because it's built on open standards. The entire digital economy depends on permissive or waived copyright. Think HTML and HTTP. Meanwhile, fair use is just as important to the economy in general. Schools, libraries, archivists, and every person who uses a search engine depend on fair use for normal operation. And copyright infringement (most videos on YouTube, most fan art, most memes, Sci-Hub etc.) on the internet demonstrates that perfect enforcement of copyright would bottleneck creativity even further than the current status of copyright enforcement already does.

• On the post: When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 07 Mar, 2023 @ 11:32am

  so why didn’t they say so at the lengthening of terms? why didn’t they say something against the big companies?

  This is a good point to consider because it highlights how little evidence the article uses to support its conclusion. However, "artists didn't say anything" also doesn't support the alternative conclusion that copyright restrictions should be extended - at most in that direction, "artists didn't say anything" justifies preserving the status quo. However, the article's conclusion is relatively more legitimate because any artist who took the previous copyright term length (life plus 50 years) seriously in their financial calculations should've been aware of the term extension in comparison to more recent artists. On the other hand, I'm curious about whether the parties who lobbied for the 1998 term extension went out of their way to ensure that artists would be aware of it. I doubt it because I don't think media companies care enough about everyday people to run awareness/education campaigns, much less target such campaigns at artists.

  after all, those companies are the ones that want extension after extension, simply to stay alive

  This is not a convincing framing. I'm sure that the large media companies (The Walt Disney Company, Time Warner, sports leagues, etc.) who lobbied for the 1998 copyright extension would've stayed alive just fine. If they start dying anytime soon then it's because copyright has been too much of a crutch and they haven't been leveraging their popularity to adjust their business models to provide greater value to their audiences without relying as much on enforcing artificial scarcity. Selling physical media which people can actually own (recall vinyl's nostalgia mini-resurgence and the continued success of hardcopy books), selling physical merchandise, partnering with other companies for promotions/advertising, making commercial deals with fan content creators, hiring fan content creators, and generally winning the goodwill of the audiences are some strategies which don't need copyright to be as restrictive and long as it is.

• On the post: When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms

  

  HotHead ( profile ), 06 Mar, 2023 @ 11:41pm

  Say what you will about whether the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 represents whether artists really want a really long copyright term beyond death if they think about it. I will always associate that copyright term extension act with its nickname The Mickey Mouse Protection Act (protection from whom? us humans in a different dimension of being, of course!) and the "forever less one day" quote from then Congresswoman Mary Bono and widow of Sonny Bono:

  Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti’s proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

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