Mason Wheeler 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Another Way In Which Patents Contributed To The Opioid Crisis: Hospitals Ordered Not To Use Better, Less Problematic Medicines

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 17 Jul, 2019 @ 09:13am

    Re: Re: Re:

    That won't actually work. Cognitive Dissonance Resistance is a class power that Ideologues pick up at level 3. It upgrades to immunity somewhere around level 7.

  • On the post: EU Looking To Regulate Everything Online, And To Make Sites Proactively Remove Material

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 17 Jul, 2019 @ 09:09am

    Re: Re:

    And the case against it continues to be that it would hurt innocent people and devastate the global economy
    And? You're incredibly naive if you honestly think that the status quo won't. To put it bluntly, collateral damage is going to happen either way; better to contain it to the place that's responsible for the problem than to let it devastate the rest of the world too.
    There's also the minor point that legal liability doesn't really work like a viral contagion at all.
    It works sufficiently like it for the purposes of this discussion: if a carrier comes into contact with your service, there's a non-zero chance of your service contracting a potentially crippling or lethal liability. The only real point where the analogy breaks down is that that liability doesn't, in turn, make you contagious and pass it on to other users, but that's irrelevant to what's being discussed here.

  • On the post: EU Looking To Regulate Everything Online, And To Make Sites Proactively Remove Material

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 17 Jul, 2019 @ 07:57am

    Re: Re: Nefarious Plan

    Unlikely; just look at history. Decentralization always sounds like a cool idea when proposed by some young, idealistic radical... and then it never actually works. Decentralization and consolidation both have certain benefits they bring, but when you compare the two against each other, the lesson that history teaches us again and again and again is that consolidation wins every time. It seems to be something inherent in human nature. A good rule of thumb is, if you've got a decentralized system that currently appears to be working well, just give it ten years.

  • On the post: Another Way In Which Patents Contributed To The Opioid Crisis: Hospitals Ordered Not To Use Better, Less Problematic Medicines

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 17 Jul, 2019 @ 07:53am

    It's not just patents; the monetary incentives are bad all the way around. If you do a bit of research, you'll find that drugs like Methadone which are used to treat opioid addiction are made by the very same companies that make opioid painkillers. In other words, they have very little incentive to do anything to help people not become addicted because addiction is good for business.

  • On the post: New Study Points Out What A Boon Sports Streaming Piracy Could Be To Leagues

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 17 Jul, 2019 @ 07:41am

    from the copy-editing department

    sports plays an outsized roll

    role

  • On the post: EU Looking To Regulate Everything Online, And To Make Sites Proactively Remove Material

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 17 Jul, 2019 @ 07:36am

    The case for geofencing Europe out of the broader Internet continues to mount. As I've said before,

    Under the conditions that currently exist in reality, Europe should be considered infested with a noxious and potentially deadly disease known as "liability," and there is no way to know if any specific European user is a carrier until they've infected your site, at which point it's too late.

    Until such time as they manage to eradicate this pestilence from among themselves, the only sane choice is to place the entire EU under quarantine.

  • On the post: The Sixth Circuit Also Makes A Mess Of Section 230 And Good Internet Policy

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Jul, 2019 @ 10:42am

    Plaintiff Megan Fox

    I'm assuming from the context that this is not the actress. I wonder what it's like, having the same name as someone famous...

  • On the post: ESA Steps In With Amicus Brief In Support Of Activision Versus Humvee

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Jul, 2019 @ 07:59am

    an historically accurate work of art

    Gah! Why do people do that? H is not a vowel!

  • On the post: Congress Moving Forward With Copyright-For-Censorship 'Small Claims' Act

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 12 Jul, 2019 @ 02:04pm

    As I've said before, when a weed grows in your garden, you have two ways to deal with it. The easy way is to cut it off above ground. Unfortunately, that doesn't work particularly well, because it will just grow back, over and over and over again. The right way is to uproot it. With the roots removed, there's nothing there for the weed to grow back from, and you're finally free of it.

    The root of digital copyright abuse is the DMCA. It enshrines the principles of DRM and extrajudicial takedowns, both of which are legal abominations that fly in the face of the entire tradition of Western jurisprudence, in law, and every bad copyright act we've seen since then has built upon the foundation established by the DMCA.

    Just look at this act. It takes the horrible doctrines of the DMCA and makes them even worse, making the already-bad process of DMCA takedowns even harder to defend against.

    We can fight against this act... or we can do it right. Pull it up by the roots and repeal the DMCA. You can't make the DMCA takedown process worse if there is no DMCA takedown process to make worse. Sooner or later, that's what we will have to do if we're ever going to have peace and security in our digital lives. And the sooner we get around to it, the better.

  • On the post: Why Is The Washington Post Publishing Blatantly False Propaganda About Section 230?

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 11 Jul, 2019 @ 01:52pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    No, that is not what I meant to say, and I'll thank you to not put words in my mouth. Particularly when those words are ugly ones. I meant to say exactly what I said.

  • On the post: Indonesian Court Convicts Woman Of Criminal Defamation For Recording Her Boss Trying To Harass Her Into An Affair With Him

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 11 Jul, 2019 @ 11:29am

    Re:

    Yup. Welcome to the mental disease that is Libertarian thought.

  • On the post: YouTube Finally Demands Specificity From Copyright Claimants

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 11 Jul, 2019 @ 11:11am

    Re: what am I not understanding?

    CDA 230 makes a specific exemption for intellectual property. It's one of its biggest flaws. So instead the applicable law is the extortion-based extralegal abomination that is DMCA Section 512.

  • On the post: Why Is The Washington Post Publishing Blatantly False Propaganda About Section 230?

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 11 Jul, 2019 @ 12:33pm

    No one's being kicked off of platforms for calling for lower taxes, less government, or other traditionally "conservative" ideas.

    It does you no credit when you disingenuously treat "traditionally conservative ideas" as meaning exactly the same thing as "economically conservative ideas," when it's well-understood that what's actually being discussed is "morally conservative ideas."

    People are getting kicked off platforms for voicing opposition to abortion, affirming the sanctity of traditional marriage, and similar moral viewpoints which are still held even today by a majority of Americans.

  • On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 217: Public Interest Tech, With Bruce Schneier

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 11 Jul, 2019 @ 12:20pm

    The part I don't get: what exactly is awful and horrifying about a senator asking Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook makes its money?

    Seems to me that if your inquiry involves allegations of shady business practices, getting someone to explain their business model is not only useful but something that is necessary to establish on the record. What's the counter-argument here?
    Because I'm not seeing why that's a bad thing.

  • On the post: YouTube Finally Demands Specificity From Copyright Claimants

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 11 Jul, 2019 @ 11:22am

    This is not to say what's being implemented here is worthless or unwelcome. This is very much a step in the right direction.

    I disagree. At best, this is going to be about as useful as a band-aid on an amputation wound.

    We have a system to properly adjudicate claims in light of real evidence and minimize the harm of false claims. It's right there in the word "adjudicate": the judicial system. It's not perfect, but it's far better than any alternative that's been developed thus far, and DMCA 512 gives the bad guys an end run around it.

    The judicial system protects the rights of the accused. The Presumption of Innocence is one of the ground rules: you (and the video you put up) are innocent until proven guilty. Due Process is enforced: you can't be deemed guilty on an accusation alone; the accuser has to actually provide evidence to prove his case.

    DMCA 512 turns the entire thing on its head: the accusation is presumed to be valid without a shred of evidence required! Anyone could take one look at this negation of centuries of Western jurisprudence and say that it's going to be abused seven ways from Sunday, and many people did, from the very beginning! The DMCA was passed over the objections of people who knew what they were talking about, and now those people are looking like prophets today.

    "A step in the right direction" would be the repeal of the DMCA. A further step in the right direction would be replacing it with an act that clarifies and explicitly reinforces the correct principles of the Rule of Law here: no work accused of copyright infringement shall be taken down unless and until it has been ruled in a court of law that the work is infringing.

    Innocent until proven guilty is the only acceptable standard here.

  • On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: The Case Of YouTube And 'Hacking' Videos

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 08 Jul, 2019 @ 12:02pm

    Wow, out of all of the companies that could possibly fail to understand Kerckhoff's Principle, you really wouldn't think Google would be one of them!

    For those who aren't familiar with computer security, Kerckhoff's Principle is one of the most counterintuitive, yet most important fundamental principles of the entire field: "the enemy knows the system." It means that any discussion of information security is not valid if it doesn't begin with the ground-level assumption that the bad guys already know every detail of how your system works, and therefore if you aren't secure even with that knowledge being out there, you aren't secure period.

    So what does that mean in this context? It means the bad guys already know about hacking--and probably not from YouTube. Taking hacking information off of YouTube isn't going to shut down any attacks. What it will do, as Professor Halderman pointed out, is exactly the same thing that people using secrecy and obscurity in defiance of Kerckhoff's Principle always accomplish: it makes it more difficult for the good guys to level the playing field.

    Cliff Stoll made the same basic point in his classic book The Cuckoo's Egg, which described in detail the techniques that a hacker used to break into his computer network and several others: he didn't feel any qualms about publishing this information because the "people in the black hats" already know this stuff, and teaching everyone else about it allows them to be better informed and better able to defend against such attacks.

    Frankly, in the light of Kerckhoff's Principle alone this decision doesn't add up, but it just looks worse when you consider research that suggests that approximately 89% of people are basically honest. Any intelligent admin who knows that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 good guys for every bad guy would want to do everything possible to recruit and empower them, rather than keep them in the dark!

  • On the post: Senator Lindsey Graham To Host Special 'But Think Of The Children Online!' Moral Panic Hearing

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 03 Jul, 2019 @ 01:46pm

    Re:

    Actually, violence, drugs (including smoking), and sexual activity are all down significantly among teens over the last decade or so. We do seem to be a pretty good job at creating a "shortage" of kids engaging in such dangerous behaviors.

  • On the post: Senator Lindsey Graham To Host Special 'But Think Of The Children Online!' Moral Panic Hearing

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 03 Jul, 2019 @ 11:39am

    Re:

    " Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke It is unfortunate, not to mention disturbing, the number of people for whom the common computer still rates as "sufficiently advanced."
    I am a computer programmer. I spend my days creating complex written formulae which, when invoked, cause changes in reality. These formulae are developed in an arcane language, ordered according to strange and arbitrary rules that reflect deeper realities of an unseen world, a system which most ordinary mortals freely admit is beyond their comprehension. The language itself was created by several of the greatest masters of my craft, to provide a way to give definition to the powers of the unseen world and tame the chaotic and dangerous effects that can all too easily arise from manipulating them. Is it truly that surprising that people see what I do as sorcery?

  • On the post: The End Of The Open Internet: Cory Doctorow's Op-Ed From The Future

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 28 Jun, 2019 @ 08:11am

    Re: Re: The End Of The Open Internet For Most People

    Don't feed the trolls; just flag and move on.

  • On the post: Crazy Copyright Suit Over Gigi Hadid Posting A Photo Of Herself To Instagram Shows Absurdity Inherent In Photo Copyrights

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 28 Jun, 2019 @ 08:31am

    You can't get a copyright on factual information and -- some might argue -- what is a photograph but a capturing of factual information. That photograph is a factual representation of what the lens captured.

    I'm all for reining in copyright abuse, but that's a facially silly argument. If you can say that, you can just as easily say "a book is nothing but the factual representation of the words the author wrote," etc.

    [massive list of procedural problems and irregularities]

    Now that is a good reason to throw out this suit. Challenging the very concept of copyrightability of photos... not so much.

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