Nick Dynice's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
This week’s favorites post comes from Nick Dynice, a long-term, insightful member of the Techdirt community.
This week Mike and fellow contributors have been on a rampage, taking NYT to task with 7 posts, as of Friday afternoon, about the ridiculousness of the pay-wall.
But, my favorite post of the week was on Paul Vixie’s explanation of why COICA is a dumb idea. Whenever the not-so-tech savvy entertainment industry and government get together to come up with a way to beat the emergent nature of the internet (which was designed as a worldwide copy machine that can survive a nuclear war), they just can’t win. In this case, Vixie suggested that if the US government mandates DNS blocking with COICA, there will be the unintended consequence of incentivising someone to create an alternate DNS, which will break the universal naming premise that made the internet a success, and will not stop infringement. When Vixie is developing his own tech solutions, he actually thinks through all of these scenarios since he has to live with results — unlike our Congress critters, who are out of office in a matter of years. Whenever I read about cases like this, I know there is some 80’s movie narrative that explains the point pretty well and shows how things can spiral out of control. There is always some sort of pompous villain who creates obstacles for our heros. One such narrative is in the film Ghostbsters. In the scene where the character Walter Peck from the EPA shuts down the Laser Containment Unit because it is “in violation.”
My other favorite post was about how The Newspaper Guild has a problem with Huffington Post using a different compensation model than legacy news organizations. Ironically (or not) plenty of anonymous critics came by to contribute their counter arguments to Techdirt for free in the comments.
The second most popular post was about the “infringement vs. inspiration” debate. If being inspired by or borrowing something is piracy, then let’s all be pirates. The flood of troll commenters missed the point, as they always do, by insisting that the same examples Mike used were indeed determined to be infringement by law. But laws are man-made construct that can be changed and, in fact, were more permissive in the past. Isn’t it time they change to reflect current realities?
The post with the most comments by far this week (a couple hundred so far) was regarding the tortured legal interpretations that many lawyer critics are using to defend the accidental seizure of a domain that took down 84,000 sites, with Mike debating many ACs with lots of “lols” and “insightfuls” being awarded. A truly religious debate.
new term?
I think this calls for a new term: The Streisand Paradox. Anyone naïve enough to incur the wrath of SE and is either unaware of SE or unable to conceptualize it without its history or name might take its expiation as a threat. So, do you explain it to would-be victims or just let the Effect play out to let them understand, first hand, its sheer power?
A more cynical headline might be:
Modern Day German Stasi Seek to Buy Exploits from French Black Hat Hackers to Reduce Trust in E-commerce Worlwide
I found another copy.
http://www.veooz.com/news/4HgGV~~.html
Re:
Thanks Steer.
To summarize, U.S. Copyright Law prohibits Mixcloud users from using more than 3 songs from an album or more than 4 songs by the same artist in a mix so that Mixcloud may benefit from a 114 statutory license that they pay to SoundExchange.
from http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/114
So, a few questions.
Re: Re:
I know of an independent artist in the UK who made a mix containing only a dozen his own songs, and it is blocked here in the US. Your mix will be blocked as well.
Re:
Great point, Keith. US PROs have been blocking content outside of the US for a while and now they are doing it inside the US in a case where they have no jurisdiction.
PaulT, my mix was specifically sighted by Mixcloud as having more then 3 songs by the same artist. The artists you mention that do have representation in the US only have either one or two tracks in my mix.
http://support.mixcloud.com/customer/portal/articles/1595566-us-licensing-sound-recording-complement-rule
I ran into this with one of my old mixes just a few weeks ago that has been up for a few years.
http://www.mixcloud.com/nsputnik/library-and-radiophonioc-influence-revealed/
My mix does have more than 3 songs by 2 artists each. However, neither of them are represented by SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. I looked them up in all for PRO site. I e-mailed Mixcloud about this and got their same boilerplate response.
Thank you for addressing this Tim.
Some alternate headlines running through my head when I read the original article a few days ago:
So the message this sends to the bullies: as long as this kid brings his My Little Pony backpack you can beat him up because you just can't control yourself.
This guy?
https://www.facebook.com/pompeoforcongress
So by trademarking military insignia the US government is admitting that war really is a business.
Re: And...
Yes, I remember Chris has admitted elsewhere got the idea from IRC. Back then ('07 I think) the idea was you could create an adhoc facsimile of and IRC room by tweeting and searching (on a 3rd party site, I can't remember the name now) for hashtags.
So I guess all of this drama could have been avoided if GoldieBlox had just paid their ASCAP/BMI feeds.
Here is my question: where does Adam Horovitz's uber-feminist wife Kathleen Hanna have to say about attempts to stifle a song about girl power in her husband'a name?
Vlambeer does what Nintendon't.
Video of the event:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/226505
Democracy Perverts
One man's insider threat is another man's whistle blower.
The last sentence of the post, rearranged a bit:
"GETPRSM: The social network the NSA doesn't want you to know about. And don't worry if you haven't received your invite. You've already joined."
Sounds like the tagline for a horror movie about government spys that terrorize their victims with the information they have on them.