Mason Wheeler 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: SoundCloud Troll Getting DMCA Takedowns Shows The Weakness Of Notice And Takedown Systems

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2018 @ 02:27pm

    Re: '... claims of it anyway.'

    Exactly! One of the most important aspects of copyright law (it's right there in the name, afterall,) is that it's law. Law has important principles attached to it, such as Due Process and the Presumption of Innocence. And the DMCA tramples all over these principles. We need to fix this. Instead of the DMCA, we need to establish a framework rooted in the rule of law, in which piracy is the copyright holder's problem, and they have no right to make it my problem until such time as they manage to prove in a court of law that I am part of the problem. Just like any other law.

  • On the post: But Her Emails: Ivanka Trump Also Used A Private Email Account For Official Government Business

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2018 @ 02:20pm

    Re: Election is over, deal with it.

    If people had ever wanted to hold any Trump to the same standard as other politicians, they'd have voted differently.
    Really? When the alternative was Hillary Clinton, of all people? Literally the only good reason to vote for either one of them was to keep the other one out of the White House. I know the term "the lesser of two evils" has been overused in politics to the point of cliche, but in this particular case that's exactly what the 2016 election was about, and as bad as it was, I do honestly believe we ended up with the (slightly!) lesser evil this time.

  • On the post: Apple, Amazon Team Up To 'Enhance Customer Experience' By Limiting Customers' Options

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2018 @ 12:26pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    I didn't say that it was. I said that both the chipping away at first-sale rights and the chipping away at protections from anticompetitive behavior are parts of a larger pattern that needs to be reversed.

  • On the post: Apple, Amazon Team Up To 'Enhance Customer Experience' By Limiting Customers' Options

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2018 @ 11:43am

    Re: Re:

    There's some important nuance here. It's not so much that they "should be legally required to allow users to sell refurbished Apple products on its platform," as that, once they have already allowed it, they should not be permitted to enter into an exclusive agreement with Apple that kicks these established users off. That's classical anticompetitive behavior, and Apple ought to get dragged into court over it if there was any sanity in this world.

  • On the post: But Her Emails: Ivanka Trump Also Used A Private Email Account For Official Government Business

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2018 @ 01:30pm

    Lock them both up. It would be a good start, if nothing else...

  • On the post: Court Again Rules That Cable Giants Can't Weaponize The First Amendment

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2018 @ 11:45am

    Over the last few years, telecom giants have increasingly been trying to claim that pretty much any effort to hold them accountable for their terrible service (or anything else) is a violation of their First Amendment rights. Historically that hasn't gone so well.

    Can you blame them for trying, though? It worked for the financial folks who gave us the 2008 crisis...

  • On the post: Apple, Amazon Team Up To 'Enhance Customer Experience' By Limiting Customers' Options

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2018 @ 09:46am

    This is just an extension of what's been going on for decades in software into the world of hardware.

    Fun fact: the right of first sale (or "First Sale Doctrine," as it's more commonly known as) originated in a 1908 case where a book publisher tried to put what we would today call a EULA on one of their books, placing additional restrictions on how it could be resold and stating that it would be considered a copyright violation to not comply with these restrictions.

    People thought that was ridiculous, and it eventually ended up in court, going all the way to the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court established that a publisher has no right to put a EULA on their published works; that copyright law granted exactly the specific protections that it says it grants and nothing else, and once you've sold the work to a third party, the property rights (ie. right to control how it is used) not specifically covered by copyright transfer to the new owner and they're free to use it as they wish.

    In 1976, this doctrine was upgraded from "case law" to "real law" when Congress passed a new Copyright Act that codified the concept. It ought to be pretty solid and unassailable at this point, but it wasn't too much longer after that when publishers of computer software, rather than books, started putting EULAs on their work. And unfortunately, so far they're winning after a truly horrible 9th Circuit ruling flew in the face of a century of precedent and established the validity of Autodesk's EULA, and then the Supreme Court declined to review the case.

    Now that the bad guys have their foot in the door, they're working on eroding the First Sale Doctrine elsewhere, such as by undermining the right to access and repair your own property. And after decades of systematically weakening laws against anticompetitive behavior, you end up in a situation where blatantly evil crap such as:

    [Amazon is] free to de-platform anyone for almost any reason. You can resell your Apple stuff. You just can't do it here.

    is actually legally valid!

    How much more is it going to take before we start pushing back and demanding en masse that Congress pass laws that uphold our rights to our own property?

  • On the post: In A Speech Any Autocrat Would Love, French President Macron Insists The Internet Must Be Regulated

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2018 @ 08:03am

    Thanks to the Internet, Macron said, we saw an upsurge in democracy (i.e. Tahrir Square).

    And this is the point where he loses all credibility.

    Enough time has passed now since the events of the Arab Spring that we can ask the question, are the general public in any of these countries better off today than they were before these events? Do they have more democracy? How about "the values of democracy"? Do people have more personal freedom? A higher standard of living? Are Christians and Jews and Sikhs and foreigners treated better today? Are women treated better today?

    The answer overwhelmingly tends to be no, all they accomplished was to trade one oppressive Islamist regime for another.

  • On the post: Blockchain Voting: Solves None Of The Actual Problems Of Online Voting; Leverages None Of The Benefits Of Blockchain

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 19 Nov, 2018 @ 08:41am

    Re: Re: Re: Well that's bloody disappointing.

    But "this could be happening and we would never even know" is a weak argument.
    Not really. That's kind of the whole meaning of "verifiability:" the ability to know that a plausible problem is not actually occurring.

  • On the post: Blockchain Voting: Solves None Of The Actual Problems Of Online Voting; Leverages None Of The Benefits Of Blockchain

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 19 Nov, 2018 @ 08:37am

    Re: Typo

    I think you mean:

    You have the quote from Ben Adida twice in the quoted section.

    You have the quote from Ben Adida twice in the quoted section.

  • On the post: Red Bull Fails To Block Trademark Registration In EU Over Logos That Aren't All That Similar

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 19 Nov, 2018 @ 01:40pm

    Red Bull based its opposition on the registration of the two bulls logo, i.e. without the word Red Bull.

    Umm... those are clearly rams in the Big Horn version. This makes me wonder if someone's been spiking the Red Bull folks' energy drinks with maybe something a bit stronger than caffeine...

  • On the post: Judge Blocks White House From Pulling Jim Acosta's Press Pass, But The Battle Continues

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 19 Nov, 2018 @ 11:43am

    trumped up claims

    I see what you did there...

  • On the post: Facebook's Use Of Smear Merchants Is The Norm, Not The Exception

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2018 @ 12:22pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: tl;dr

    Secondly, if every new incoming president is simply a referendum on the outgoing president, then the logical conclusion of that argument is that Bush and Gore, Obama and McCain, Clinton and Trump, were actually irrelevant in their own elections; that people did not vote based on who was actually running, they voted based on the outgoing president who wasn't running.
    It's not quite that simple, but to a large degree, yes.
    This is, of course, absurd.
    Why? I first pointed out this pattern on here a long time ago. I called the next election for whichever Republican candidate manages to most effectively portray himself as the anti-Obama, years before anyone even knew Trump was going to be a serious candidate, and that's exactly what ended up happening. Scientists will tell you that the most important test of a theory is whether it's able to make valid predictions, and on that all-important criterion, my "backlash model" theory doesn't look "absurd" at all.
    Third, as I already pointed out: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were popular presidents when they left office.
    ... ... ...seriously? What world are you living in? Do you even remember the eight years of unending scandals of the Clinton administration? The way Bush got elected as his replacement on a platform of "restoring dignity to the White House"? (Yeah, we all know how that turned out, but at the time, it was exactly what the people needed to hear, and it resonated with them, much like the equally-ridiculous-but-oh-so-timely "hope and change" and later "make America great again" did for the next few election cycles.) By the end of that mess, pretty much everyone was sick and tired of Clinton and ready for a break. I was there; I lived through it. Where were you? As for Obama's approval rating, it was below 40% at the end of 2014. It ended up rising to a bit above 50% (hardly "very popular"!) once election season got started and people saw how the absolute stinkers of choices they had available on all sides were even worse than him, but between that and the chilling effect of anyone disapproving of him for any reason, legitimate or not, getting loudly accused of racism, it's safe to say that the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.
    I do think it's quite clear that Bush's unpopularity dragged McCain down and it's unlikely that another Republican would have done any better.
    To be completely honest, I think Mitt Romney would have beaten Obama in 2008, had he not gotten washed out of the primaries by Mike Huckabee's blatant appeals to religious bigotry. Between the primaries and the general election, the financial crash happened, and suddenly the biggest issue on the nation's collective mind shifted from foreign policy--McCain's strongest area--to the economy, which was Romney's strongest area, and one in which he would have wiped the floor with Obama '08. (2012 was different for a number of reasons.) But that didn't end up happening, and we ended up stuck in the same pattern for another two cycles at least.
    But that's just one election. You're making it out as if this is some kind of rule that holds every eight years. It is not.
    And yet it has, ever since we got rid of Bush Sr. and replaced him with a charming, suave, younger President who oh-by-the-way turned out later to be thoroughly corrupt and also a sexual predator, setting up the cycle of backlash...

  • On the post: Facebook's Use Of Smear Merchants Is The Norm, Not The Exception

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2018 @ 11:55am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: tl;dr

    What I said was that "the collective national will" was to be rid of the current screwup, and that's been pretty constant for decades now. Heck, if you factor in voter turnout, it's been a long, long, long time since any presidential candidate actually won a majority of the popular vote, because so many voters were so disgusted by the choices available that they couldn't bring themselves to vote for either one.

  • On the post: Facebook's Use Of Smear Merchants Is The Norm, Not The Exception

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2018 @ 09:04am

    Re: Re: tl;dr

    It's not a non sequitur at all, and if it seems like one to you, that says more about you than it does about this conversation.

    The point being made is that that is deliberately not the way it works, so pointing to some alternative scoring mechanism and trying to arbitrarily redefine victory in terms of it rather than the real rules is silly and pointless.

  • On the post: Not Even Hiding It Any More: EU Council Explicitly Pushing For Mandatory Upload Filters

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2018 @ 09:02am

    Re:

    Copyright thieves deserve prison. They're parasites.
    Yes, I agree entirely. People who abuse copyright (and copyright-enforcement mechanisms) to steal people's ad revenue on YouTube, to steal people's rights to control over their own property with DRM, to steal their voice via the censorship of bogus takedowns, and so on, are thieves and parasites who deserve prison. ...that is what you meant, right?

  • On the post: Facebook's Use Of Smear Merchants Is The Norm, Not The Exception

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2018 @ 06:58am

    Re: Re:

    Or, as Dr. Horrible put it, "it's about destroying the status quo, because the status is not quo!"

  • On the post: Facebook's Use Of Smear Merchants Is The Norm, Not The Exception

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2018 @ 06:56am

    Re: Re: Re: What does corporations not having free speech rights actuall

    liability is basically the entire point of corporations
    No. Protection from liability is basically the entire point of corporations. And in some cases that makes a lot of sense--it would be a travesty of justice if you, as a shareholder, were to be held responsible for corporate crimes because the person managing your 401(k) thought there was a lot of upside potential in PuppyKickers Inc. stock, for example--but when it shields decision makers from responsibility for the consequences of the decisions they make, as is all too often the case in today's world, the system is broken.

  • On the post: Facebook's Use Of Smear Merchants Is The Norm, Not The Exception

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2018 @ 06:51am

    Re: Re: Sure, but we "threw out" *what they stood for*

    That argument makes exactly as much sense as claiming "my team is the real winner of the World Series because they scored more runs overall!"

  • On the post: Not Even Hiding It Any More: EU Council Explicitly Pushing For Mandatory Upload Filters

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2018 @ 07:03am

    The USA has the SHIELD law, which protects US citizens from foreign defamation suits over conduct that is not illegal under US law.

    What would it take to get an equivalent shield established for stuff like this and the GDPR?

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