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EFF To Japan: Reject Website Blocking (eff.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: The latest country to consider a website blocking proposal is Japan, and EFF has responded to the call for comment by sharing all the reasons that cutting off websites is a terrible solution for copyright violations. In response to infringement of copyrighted material, specifically citing a concern for manga, the government of Japan began work on a proposal that would make certain websites inaccessible in Japan. In response to Japan's proposal, EFF explained that website blocking is not effective at the stated goal of protecting artists and their work. First, it can be easily circumvented. Second, it ends up capturing a lot of lawful expression. Blocking an entire website does not distinguish between legal and illegal content, punishing both equally. According to numerous studies, the best answer to the problem of online infringement is providing easy, lawful alternatives. Doing this also has the benefit of not penalizing legitimate expression the way blocking does. According to The Japan Times, the "emergency measure" would "encourage [ISPs] to restrict access to such 'malicious' websites 'on a voluntary basis' in order to protect the nation's famed manga and anime industries from free-riders."
The EFF seems to have spent way more time ensuring that we can get access to pirated materials over the last 20 years than it has constraining the behavior of the five big tech companies. If they hadn't been so interested in ensuring that I was able to download Game of Thrones, maybe they could have done something more about Google and Facebook's rampant siphoning of personal data. Of course lets face it, the EFF doesn't want to bite that the hand that feeds them and while we concentrate on the distracting issue of whether we can still pirate stuff, the EFF's sponsors can get away with ensuring that they have us by the nadgers
The internet genies is being put back in the bottle by big corporations, and it is computer nerd's fault.
We've had two decades to build a truly free, decentralized, uncorporatized, uncontrollable network. Instead we have spent the best part of two decades wasting time on technologies like CA backed encryption which have actually become tools of central control(see SciHub), and of course, apps, apps, apps, and more walled garden, restricted device apps, that are eroding the concept of a generally browsable web altogether. I have yet to see a phone app that can rival the functionality of an ordinary webpage or IRC client circa 2006.
The focus on "standards" and "interoperability" has simply led to the creation of consequence free "frameworks", which have bloated the average webpage to a scale beginning to rival OS kernels in both size and code complexity, all while tearing open users browser to a literal panopticon of private and government surveillance. Technologies like tor, DHT, freenode are in their infancy or niche or all but abandoned. It did not have to be like this.
Worst of all, such has been the shift to "cloud" based development, even basic computer programs like wordprocessers and spreadsheet are actually migrating online, taking user's freedom and agency with them. As bad a MSOffice ever was, I am shocked by how readily people are embracing the unresponsive, feature deprived excuses for "applications" that are being heralded as some kind of forward step.
Computer nerds, developers, geeks, the internet at large, forgot the idea of the Personal Computer. We've abdicated the digital revolution to the control of the same corrupt conglomerates who drove its creation in the first place. Bram Cohen bought the internet 20 years, and we have squandered it.
Who the hell are you.
Ask me that when I issue a press release about my recommended website blocking guidelines.
someone with more posts on slashdot than the EFF
Looks like a useless study in that it doesn't measure piracy, only traffic to websites that the study monitored. Of course blocking some of those websites should reduce the traffic to them, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to other websites that aren't being monitored or aren't getting their pirated media in other ways.
Of course if your study showed that blocking websites did fuck all in terms of preventing piracy it would be a lot harder to justify doing it.
Um... This is kind of the raison d'être of the organization. What exactly did you think they did?
Note: I disagree with them fairly often, but on balance, I think the world is better off with them around to tackle the digital issues that most lay-people don't understand or may not even hear about.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
1. The same rules apply to everyone. Media companies don't get a free passdon't get a free pass just because they own a lot of copyrighted content.
2. The company(ies) requesting the block have to financially compensate the blocked website if it's later discovered that their claim of copyright violation was in error. Unlike is currently done under the DMCA where media companies regularly claim copyright violation on YouTube videos and get them defended. And when the person who posts the video is finally able to prove that there was no copyright violation, the media companies only have to say "oopsies, sorry."
If you follow these common-sense guidelines, you'll quickly find that the problem with blocking websites for repeated copyright violations is that the websites which feature large amounts of media (e.g. news sites, art/photo sharing sites, etc) are the ones which get accused of copyright violation the most. And you'll conclude that an outright ban based on a handful of accusations ends up hurting some of the most useful sites disproportionately.
Since you [iggymanz] were joking in response to an AC I think you should have quoted the original to get the funny mods you deserved. Too bad Slashdot doesn't have a capacity to express "witty". Perhaps as a two- or three-dimension combination? (And of course moot to me, as one of the record-holders for no mod points to give.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Gee, I wish I could say something substantive on this topic without revealing my sources. It's not just the censorship, but the self-censorship related to the fear of being punished and the loathing of divergent opinion. Yeah, I'm averse to conflict, but I got nothing on the the Japanese at the systemic level. Or perhaps I should describe it as the level of the mob?
The evidence I wish I could tell you about involves the internal workings of certain Japanese universities as manifested in their computer-system usage guidelines and policies for their students. I think the result is fundamentally antagonistic to creative or innovative thinking, but I feel that I can't say anything just now. I'm not afraid of the Japanese police, but that's because my Japanese wife would kill me first. (Is that a joke?)
The only approach I can think of whereby I might be able to help advance the discussion is to offer to confirm your evidence or to agree with your hypotheses when they agree with mine... That way it isn't really my fault? However that approach is not viable in the context of Slashdot.
The original story? The EFF? They are SO clueless about Japan that it has to make me laugh. The EFF is an excellent example of how good intentions and charity mix poorly. Or maybe not, if you disagree with some of their intentions? I generally regard Libertarians as incredibly naive on their best days.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Malware links on slashdot. Now I've seen everything.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
you want a useful study ? https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-sup... SO useful they hid it , SO useful a MEP had to invoke their own laws on data disclosure and free information against them (yea ofcourse pirate party, who else would go against lobbyright these days?) thats how useful it was and it will very likely confirm mafiaa and breinbaf worst nightmares : the only ones losing money are the ones sponsoring the copyright trolls because it barely makes a dent compared to all the lawyer and troll money thrown at it, its not about sounds business, its about competitive psychopaths and their need to "win" even if its against all reason back when the world was young i had the silly idea if you do business you scrap that what costs you more than that what gets you, otherwise you're closer to an NGO (but i always had weird ideas) on top of that : https://torrentfreak.com/japan... https://www.japantimes.co.jp/n... while https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu... https://torrentfreak.com/inter... most people here think anime is cartoons is pokemon shall i rest my case, because its pointless, clearly, like the whole intellectual and expert world advising against internet filtering and then they vote PRO
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
http://www.newser.com/story/16... & http://www.newser.com/story/25... & http://www.newser.com/story/24...