Crade's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
This week’s favorites post comes from crade
Happy Saturday to the workers. I guess we have another week of dirty tech and it would be good to review, summarize, and have a look at the best posts of the week. We aren’t going to, though; we are going to have a look at the ones I happened to take a fancy to instead.
Now I am a great lover of irony and one of the things I have found the most ironic about this whole ever-encroaching copyright “cage of security” is that while the biggest pushers for a smaller cage claim it’s all for the protection of the artists, they are near legendary for their constant mistreatment of those artists. Not only that but copyright is one of the strongest tools they have used to do it. So it was in the heyday of vinyl and so it is today. So, here they are again, using copyright legislation to force the takedown of the work of an emerging artist. And using their stricter rules to censor people trying to speak against them and to keep people from trying to be artists all while Senator Leahy claims there is no First Amendment issue at all.
Ironic enough? Ha! It gets better. At the same time that the record labels use stricter laws to censor new music, they are also breaking the law themselves. The artists are lining up to sue the labels for infringment and the record labels could owe them up to $2 billion. Of course making sure artists get paid for their hard work is the labels’ greatest desire, their raison-d’?tre and certainly the reason they need to make the security cage so tight we can’t breathe.
I know I shouldn’t find this stuff funny, but I can’t help it.
Besides being a lover of irony, I am a somewhat lawfully minded individual. I believe in the law (to a decent extent). Laws are decided jointly, to a minimum extent (if they were not, there would be rebellion), and when the law is wrong, or bad, I believe it needs to be addressed, not reinterpreted to do “less” harm, nor ignored nor casually broken. Now laws that are wrong are not easy to fix, certainly my opinion is not going to do it, and I’m not entirely convinced even logical arguments from the Harvard Business Review, explaining how big content is strangling innovation, are going to get the job done. In order to get laws changed, we need outrage.
The completely unjustified secrecy around ACTA generated some nice controversy and got a few people asking questions, and now with the TPP, they may be doing the same thing. Splendid! Alzheimer’s Institute of America directly interfering with Alzheimer’s research by suing a bunch of other researchers has the potential to ruffle a few feathers. Although the ridiculous liability issues Google and Yahoo are facing (Google is being found liable for its Autocomplete Suggestions and Yahoo for its users being able to search for infringing movies) are over in Italy this week, perhaps it is a sign of things to come. Or maybe it will piss them off enough to start doing more about the issue in general.
We have seen that people are willing to get up in arms about the hyperbolic amount of cashola involved in copyright infringement lawsuits, so maybe it’s a good thing that the record companies aren’t letting up on that front, as well, and are still appealing to try to get Joel Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 for downloading a measly 30 songs. Sliding in at the last minute, Denmark’s recent decision to endorse retroactive copyright extensions sure seems outrageous to me, so here’s hoping it makes some waves.
So thats what I come to Techdirt for. A little humor, and hopefully some pot stirring and a bit of hope for the future!
Re:
Yeah I saw that.. But that part I don't entirely buy if you take it literally. Yes he could say that the images wouldn't have been top notch quality even if he could print them, but really they were never all that top notch quality to begin with anyway. This seems a bit like sour grapes, I fully admit I could be completely wrong and maybe the images not being printable at high quality would still be a deal breaker for them even without copyright, but I'm pretty skeptical.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm happy to be corrected, I'd rather be attacked and insulted and learn something than stay ignorant if I'm in the wrong but seriously, that stuff is completely beside the point. I just printed the image from the link that you sent me full size on letter and you can see the picture and read and understand the text and image context just fine with no manipulation whatsoever. The point wasn't that image manipulation for printout (which I need to do all the time for work, although it's beside the point entirely) is so easy or that it's so easy to get a perfect printout or a great printout or even a good printout.. The point is that you are comparing something to nothing here at least in terms of the images. The title on the thing is "Do Not Sue Edition", which I took as jokingly referring to them wanting to release the actual strip, but releasing this instead due to copyright concerns.. This edition is a compromise and the joke in the title is pointing out the compromise, they are completely up front about having to make the compromise. I should not have said they promised something and couldn't deliver though. I misunderstood this from the article
"Instead, backers will get the 8-Bit Theater 20th Anniversary Complete Script Book Do Not Sue Edition."
To mean that backers were getting this instead of what they signed up for which is completely not the case
Re: Re: Re:
When you are printing if your original image is lower res you can print it smaller to increase the DPI (but get a smaller print) or print it larger but get lower quality, but you are still going to have a comic. Without the copyright issues, it's hard to imagine they could have come up with something someone would consider worse than having the pictures stripped out entirely. I haven't seen the script version, but I read the comic and the pictures are kind of important
Re: Re: There was no right for them to even start using copyrigh
Also
Re:
The script book, is "for the best"? isn't it just a joke that only exists because they promised something and couldn't deliver? The quality of the originals is not an issue if what you are supposed to be putting out is a book of the originals.. You can just make them smaller or blow them up at poor quality or whatever, at least it's still some form of the comic people are looking for. You don't release an old TV show in audio only because you can't properly upgrade the picture to HD
Re: Re: Re:
Final Fantasy was completely abandoned.. They made some new game with the same name to replace it with, but there is no relation.
Re: Re: Re:
Yeah, you would be fine with the courts discriminating against supremacists, and white supremacists are fine with the courts discriminating against anyone who isn't white, at various points in history and future the majority of people in your country will be fine with discriminating against muslims, transgenders, you name it but you can't just set the system up to enable discrimination and hope the people doing the discriminating will always agree with you
Sure it lets people hear our podcasts, but it doesn't let us get much private information about the user without having to ask.. I mean we can't tell how they used the podcast, how much they listened to, what they had for breakfast or anything without asking the users.. And you know, when you ask the users don't want to tell us!
I was following until the part that explained what they did.. Sure the distinction between hacking and plain abuse of a system is valid and somewhat important but
no one "hacked" into Facebook,
They simply exploited a vulnerability in a facebook feature to gain access to information they were not supposed to have access to..
Even if you are splitting hairs.. Thats just the definition of hacking.
Re:
The more subjective the decisions by the courts are the more they are susceptible to discrimination and other corruption. We already have plenty of examples of this sort of "use your discretion in each particular case type laws", but it just ends up giving powerful people a way to manipulate the results. This is how the fair use laws "work".
Re: Re:
It's an expression.. It means "music and the world in general has become a mesmerizing mess" has nothing to do with Morrisey not being able to sue the simpsons for making fun of him.. By substituting in "the mess of copyright law" I'm also saying that is what he is describing with his statement. Oh it's no fun when I explain it
Re: Re: Re:
None of the really old games for would be playable anymore if we were relying on backwards compatibility. Companies go away for change priorities. Emulation is the way to go if hardware can handle it, or porting to a common platform so that backwards compatibility for everything can be maintained together
Re:
How is backwards compatibility is a permanent solution? You are making it backwards compatible with another temporary proprietary closed system. The new xbox being backwards compatible won't help you at all once it's gone Somewhat "permanent" solutions to release the work along with any dependencies after you are done with it so that volunteers can port it to run on general purpose system and keep it maintained, or for volunteers to make emulators to be able to run it on current general purpose hardware after you are gone. Even then, they are only solutions so long as those general purpose platforms stay around and/or someone somewhere cares enough to try to keep them maintained as the available platforms to run such things on change and break compatibility. Not to mention the server side dependencies will often take effort and money on their own just to be available in case someone wants to run the game someday
"[not all] are coming from the same intent"
Perhaps not all of them are paving the road to hell, but it's whether the result is actually fundamentally any different that matters
To be fair, Anyway, I can see how music - and the world in general, has become a mesmerizing mess.. and you could make an argument for free speech no longer existing being a cause.. But what does the mess of copyright law have to do with the price of tea in China? There you lose me
These platforms can't hinder speech.. It's more a matter of forced service than speech
You wouldn't have the moral high ground trying to force the government to include porn is because he government effort is a communal effort that we all have a stake in and more or less everyone else will disagree with you about spending the communal effort in that way. It's different from a private entity putting up entirely their own effort since now we are talking about forcing others into service for yourself. The result might be the same for a porn filter, but switch it to something most people would consider a legit function of the government in context and it will be legit to force it on the government and not on the private entity
The sort of privacy you are talking about is inextricably linked with trust and with discretion. You are always handing your "data" off to a third party any time you need to use it for anything or just mention it to someone. You are trusting them to act appropriately with it, and of course everyone's definition of appropriately is a little different. Selling it to spammers, etc is a breach of that trust
The problem isn't privacy, it's transparency. These problems all rise out of misunderstandings between what people think using facebook means in terms of their data and what it actually means. If people understood exactly what using facebook meant in terms of what would happen to their private data they added, there wouldn't be an issue, they would either accept that and continue to use facebook or they would rebel and go to the competition or whatever. That understanding isn't there, so there is no legitimate agreement and people feel like they are being betrayed when their data gets used to rig elections or sold to spammers or to steal their identity or whatever and facebook points to some fine print somewhere.
The "what the hell, thats not even close to right" reactions that people have when they understand what facebook will do with their data and that
the legalese fine print doesn't line up at all with people's expectations just need to be moved up front so they can be used to make the decision to stay away from that service, go to a competition they feel is better or accept the compromise with understanding instead of afterward when it's too late to be helpful.
Re:
Is that like the tree falling in the woods? When you put enough thought into them to make them not look like trollish spam.. Are they still trollish spam?
Re:
Trouble is no justice system that is independent of the police or has any way to prove them guilty without relying on them to help do it themselves. They are often caught making an unusually high number of "mistakes" when investigating their own and we have no reason to think the number of times they aren't caught isn't way higher.
Re: Re: Re: You Know It's Good When Maz Panicks
The democrats will put themselves out there to stand up for what they think is right, but only if whats more liberal happens to be whats right. The republicans will stand for whatever they think is easiest and helps them win, right or wrong, liberal or conservative, they don't give a shit but there is no one will put themselves out there to stand up for whats right on the conservative side.