Mason Wheeler 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (4010)

• On the post: If You Think Big Internet Companies Are Somehow To Blame For The New Zealand Massacre, You're Wrong

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 18 Mar, 2019 @ 02:25pm

  Re:

  Check the second link in the first paragraph. It explains how the "manifesto" is full of trollery and isn't particularly reliable as an indicator of the guy's actual beliefs or politics.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 18 Mar, 2019 @ 11:27am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: what a sad sad little man you are Jh

  If you saw a policeman in a fight with an obvious disgusting and dirty criminal, would you help the policeman?

  No, because unless the policeman and I were trained to fight together, I'd be more likely to get in his way than to actually be of help to him.

• On the post: Online 'Reputation Management' Company Brags About Abusing Copyright Law To Take Down Bad Reviews

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 15 Mar, 2019 @ 03:45pm

  Re: Re: Re:

  You can still sue, even without any valid grounds. It happens all the time, unfortunately.

• On the post: Axel Voss Says Maybe YouTube Shouldn't Exist

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 15 Mar, 2019 @ 07:55am

  Re: "think about whether this kind of business should exist"

  We should think about whether people like Axel Voss should exist.

  They're human. They have the same right to exist as you or I do. They probably shouldn't be MEPs, though. Used car salesman sounds like a better line of work for such folks...

• On the post: Security Researcher Discovers Flaws In Yelp-For-MAGAs App, Developer Threatens To Report Him To The Deep State

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 15 Mar, 2019 @ 07:11am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

  I didn't say Unix the specific product, I said Unix culture, which definitely includes Linux and other derivatives.

• On the post: Online 'Reputation Management' Company Brags About Abusing Copyright Law To Take Down Bad Reviews

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 15 Mar, 2019 @ 12:10pm

  I can't help but wonder if Ripoff Report has any reports on these guys and the way they rip you off in their futile attempt to get stuff removed from Ripoff Report.

• On the post: Appeals Court: Stored Communications Act Privacy Protections Cover Opened And Read Emails

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 15 Mar, 2019 @ 11:21am

  Wow, that two-paragraph quote sounds like something straight out of a soap opera. Man 1 and Woman 1 are together. Woman 1 informs Man 1 that she's having an affair with Man 2, (who is married to Woman 2,) and they break up. Woman 1 continues her affair with Man 2, who eventually decides to break up with Woman 2, and Woman 1 helpfully provides evidence to him that Man 1 has been having an affair with Woman 2!

  That's just a big mess all over...

• On the post: Security Researcher Discovers Flaws In Yelp-For-MAGAs App, Developer Threatens To Report Him To The Deep State

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 14 Mar, 2019 @ 02:51pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re:

  More recently it's used in pop culture to refer to people who break into secure systems for nefarious purposes.

  That's not recent at all. It's been the accepted meaning of the term in common parlance for at least 30 years now. The definition you got from Wikipedia is incredibly dated and no one uses it in that sense anymore outside of Unix culture, which has always had trouble accepting that we're no longer living in the 1970s.

• On the post: Axel Voss Says Maybe YouTube Shouldn't Exist

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 14 Mar, 2019 @ 02:11pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Every online forum, from Usenet to Techd

  No, even they weren't this insane.

• On the post: Bogus DMCA Takedown Targeting Indian Copyright Blog Demonstrates The Problems Of Notice And Takedown

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 14 Mar, 2019 @ 01:03pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Oh, my god. ONE more anomaly of mist

  Most guilty defendants would rather have their content taken down (bypassing the judicial system) than being sued.

  ...so what? If they're actually guilty of piracy, why are we taking their preferences into account? (And for those who aren't, a fee-shifting provision in the applicable law would go a long way towards eliminating false accusations.) If that's the societal price to pay to get rid of the massive collateral damage that the current system causes, we should all be happy to pay it!

• On the post: Security Researcher Discovers Flaws In Yelp-For-MAGAs App, Developer Threatens To Report Him To The Deep State

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 14 Mar, 2019 @ 12:49pm

  Re: Re: Re:

  If John Q. Appdeveloper develops an app, and I download it and put it on my computer, suddenly John is no longer the only stakeholder with an interest in whether or not the app is secure. My right to know whether John's software is introducing security holes to my computer, and make informed decisions based on that knowledge, trumps John's interest in hiding the truth in order to not be embarrassed by news getting out of his shoddy software development skills.

• On the post: Bogus DMCA Takedown Targeting Indian Copyright Blog Demonstrates The Problems Of Notice And Takedown

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 14 Mar, 2019 @ 12:08pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Oh, my god. ONE more anomaly of mistaken -- NOT

  to claim that the entire law goes away if you water down take down provisions is wrong

  I wasn't making that claim. I was saying that when you said "And if that is true, the law is about bypassing the judicial system, which then impacts the Due Process clause," that this is already true independent of any other predicate being true.

• On the post: Bogus DMCA Takedown Targeting Indian Copyright Blog Demonstrates The Problems Of Notice And Takedown

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 14 Mar, 2019 @ 11:51am

  Re: Re: Oh, my god. ONE more anomaly of mistaken -- NOT "bogus"

  I can't speak for the troll, but the rule I heard was "once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern."

• On the post: Bogus DMCA Takedown Targeting Indian Copyright Blog Demonstrates The Problems Of Notice And Takedown

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 14 Mar, 2019 @ 11:50am

  Re: Re: Oh, my god. ONE more anomaly of mistaken -- NOT "bogus"

  And if that is true, then the law is about bypassing the judicial system, which then impacts the Due Process clause

  No, that's what it's always been about, completely independent of the idea you're predicating it upon. That was the explicit intent of the law: publishing interests didn't want to have to prove to a court of law that content on the Internet was actually breaking the law before they could get it declared infringing and taken down, because they claimed it would be too big of a hassle. So they came up with an alternative that stomps all over sound jurisprudence and Due Process, tried to get Congress to pass it, got rejected by Congress because it's terrible jurisprudence, snuck off to Geneva to get it inserted into a trade treaty, then went back to Congress and said "you have to pass this now because trade obligations." And we've been dealing with the collateral damage ever since.

• On the post: Bogus DMCA Takedown Targeting Indian Copyright Blog Demonstrates The Problems Of Notice And Takedown

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 14 Mar, 2019 @ 11:35am

  Re: Oh, my god. ONE more anomaly of mistaken -- NOT "bogus" URL.

  And that's a few hundred anomalies out of the BILLIONS of links to stolen content, kids. Keep the scale, and then all that Techdirt has ever shown is STILL just insignificant decimal places with leading zeros.

  Nope. The truth is actually exactly the opposite of what you just said. According to Google, 99.95% of all DMCA notices are not only bogus, but one specific flavor of bogus. Everything else (including all of the other kinds of bogus DMCA notices!) is included in the last 0.05%. Notices targeting legitimate infringement are so rare as to be statistically almost nonexistent. Legitimate takedowns truly are the anomaly; the DMCA takedown program is used entirely (or close enough as makes no difference) for abuse, and therefore needs to be done away with.

• On the post: Do People Want A Better Facebook, Or A Dead Facebook?

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2019 @ 01:01pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re:

  Mike's point, in my mind, is that people have claimed that they dislike the business practices, and then go so far as to say the concept of Facebook making money is the problem.

  And as far as I can tell, Mike's point is objectively wrong. If you look at the linked article, it doesn't actually say that. Sure, the word "profit" is in the headline, but the objections people are raising in the article actually are most of the same stuff that people here are pointing out: that Facebook simply can't be trusted.

• On the post: German Government Confirms That Article 13 Does Mean Upload Filters, Destroying Claims To The Contrary Once And For All

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2019 @ 11:55am

  Re: Re: Alternate

  It's Henry Ford's choice: you can have your Model T painted any color you like, as long as it's black.

• On the post: Do People Want A Better Facebook, Or A Dead Facebook?

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2019 @ 11:35am

  Re:

  Mike, please take note. I'm agreeing with Thad here, and I never agree with Thad. That's how serious this is.

• On the post: Big Fair Use Win For Mashups: 'Oh, The Places You'll Boldly Go!' Deemed To Be Fair Use

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2019 @ 04:18pm

  Interesting. I hadn't heard of this book, but my wife recently picked up a similarly amusing storybook: The Call of Cthulhu in the style of Dr. Seuss. It's... well... exactly what it sounds like, and the author and illustrator clearly put some real effort into imitating both the poetic and the visual styles of Dr. Seuss. I'm a bit surprised it didn't end up in court, if the Seuss Estate is going to do stuff like this.

• On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 203: Crying Wolf Over Conservative Censorship

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2019 @ 09:15am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: sad

  Are you sure he's the one who originated the saying? Wikipedia calls it a traditional aphorism.

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