Even if it were, I'm not convinced that a secure network for this sort of thing is appropriate. Imagine a world in which the media do not arrive until an hour after the police because they can no longer use scanners to monitor the chatter. That significantly impacts the press's ability to serve as a guardian of freedom.
Imagine a world in which home burglars sneak into an occupied house at night. They don't hear the police call on the radio, so they don't know that the police are on their way. Instead of the burglars cutting their losses and running away at the first sign of trouble, the police arrive silently while they are still in the house. Now you have a hostage standoff in which there's a good chance that everybody dies.
In probably 99% of situations, it is better for the public to have access to police communications. Sure, there are occasionally situations where the use of secure communications is warranted and helpful. These situations are by far the exception, rather than the rule, however, and the potential for abuse of a secure system exceeds its utility by a sizable margin.
Suppose you set up a publishing run of a million copies of a work that is in the public domain and Congress pulls it back out of the pubic domain. You are no longer legally allowed to finish the printing, but you've already sunk the setup costs. It's also dubious whether you have the legal right to redistribute the books you have already printed.
(This post has been censored due to copyright claim.)
That's it. Now you've helped take the protest to Facebook.
Re:You want copyright to protect the content creat
on
A Copyright Nightmare
·
· Score: 1
Despite what CSI and The Mentalist would have you believe, people are not killed for their inheritance every day. A quick search showed 6.4% of murders were for "gain" (1994 in India, all I could find easily), so the other 94% were for something other than inheritance.
A quick bit of math: there are 45 murders per day in the U.S. Therefore, if 6.4% are over inheritance, then there are on average almost three murders over inheritance per day in the U.S. alone. So if your numbers are correct, then they almost certainly do happen every day.
It wouldn't. There wouldn't be wholesale slaughter of artists to get their copyright into the Public Domain. If you think every human will kill for $10, then think of it this way, if Disney killed an artist to get art in the public domain, how can they make money off it if everyone else can as well?
I'm not saying there would be wholesale slaughter of artists. I'm saying that it would add an incentive for killing content creators, which even if nobody acted on it, would still not be a good idea.:-)
Re:You want copyright to protect the content creat
on
A Copyright Nightmare
·
· Score: 1
It's not practical to kill someone just so that their works will be available for your company to exploit in 70 years. By contrast, people are killed for their inheritance every day, knowing that it will be distributed a few days later. Change copyright to end at death + zero days as was suggested previously, and you'll quickly find out how it would change.
no, it's irrelevant to my point. What is relevant is that he can put up original content and make money on it while competing with FREE (as in beer) copies of his show being downloaded at the same time.
That's irrelevant. You can always compete with free copies as long as most people see those copies as illegitimate. If that copy is being sold by Amazon, people see it as legitimate. That's the difference you're failing to acknowledge.
Worse, even if people realize that those big companies are cheating the original creator, it still won't encourage sales through channels that don't, because if a big company thinks it's okay, then it's okay. In effect, destruction of copyright legitimizes piracy—people taking things for free. But that's still not the worst part....
If people didn't want to pay Louis C.K. for his original work, why would they pay anybody else instead of him when they could just get a free copy?
It's not that people wouldn't want to pay him for his work. It's that there would be no realistic way for them to determine whether or not they were actually paying him for his work. A big part of copyright's primary purpose is keeping the middlemen honest. Without copyright, his ISP could redirect to a page of their choosing, sell his work in a way that fully appears to be a direct sale from him, and then pocket the money. So there's literally no good way to confirm that you're really paying him other than physically walking to this guy's house, checking a photo ID, and handing him cash.
This is an even bigger problem if you actually want anything with physical distribution, because you have no real choice but to have middlemen like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local bookstores, local music stores, or whatever simply because you cannot be everywhere at once.
I guess maybe you could come up with a clever way of using trademarks to badge the goods as being legitimate, but that can get a bit expensive ($400 per trademark every ten years), and even then, you're relying on one of those government-issued protections that you so despise. It's also a *lot* harder to enforce because the book printers, DVD manufacturing houses, etc. can't be held liable for abetting the violation of a trademark, which means they have no reason to watch for trademark violations as they do with copyrights.
For digital delivery, in theory, digital signing could solve some of the problems, but it would be nontrivial, and more importantly, would require the cooperation of the middlemen, who would have no real incentive to set up such a system in the first place.
As to kindness of strangers - ANY FUCKING NEW BUSINESS depends on "kindness of strangers".
Uh, no. New businesses depend on strangers, but nothing comes for free. They're expected to pay it back with interest.
Wake up. It's not funny how completely off-topic the rest of your post was.
Louis C.K. showed that he can make money by selling his original content without resorting to any of the government protection schemes.
You're wrong. He merely was selective about the degree to which he enforced it. The most crucial of those protections are automatic, and are entirely outside his control.
The primary purpose of copyright is not to prevent piracy. That's at best an externality, and at worst, a minor annoyance. The main purpose of copyright is to prevent people from selling your work without your permission. Without copyright, nothing would have prevented large companies (e.g. Amazon) from selling his video and keeping the royalties for themselves. Indeed, it would be almost inevitable that most such companies would do so. It's truly naïve to believe that any company would be so altruistic as to pay royalties if none were legally owed.
More to the point, with the possible exception of contracts to the contrary, nothing would have prevented even his own distributors from reporting only a few percent of the sales and pocketing the rest.
There are exactly two ways to make money by selling creative works: selling lots of copies of the work with copyright protection, and selling individual works for thousands of dollars apiece. Artists tend to do the latter, but that is only feasible for works whose scope (in terms of creation time) is measured in days, or at most, weeks. It is unlikely that anyone would pay a hundred grand for a well-written novel that took a few years to write, so this model doesn't really work for most other creative works. That pretty much leaves copyright as the only viable option. Anything else is hopelessly dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Re:You want copyright to protect the content creat
on
A Copyright Nightmare
·
· Score: 1
Not at all. The derivative works would still have copyright protection. The movie company assassinates the author, then takes the script, revises it a little, and makes it into a movie, which is protected by copyright for 30 years. The movie industry couldn't have it much better than that.
Similarly, the music company does the recording as a work for hire. The artist agrees to a small flat fee for the recording, knowing that he or she will get songwriter royalties. The artist dies in a mysterious boating accident. The royalties are never paid because they are no longer owed, but the music company owns all rights to the recording (because it is a derivative work).
The author's death should not play into it at all. Copyright should be for a certain number of years, period. That said, if you're going to make the author's death a factor, copyright should last until the author's death or n years, whichever is longer, where n is the same as the length of a corporate copyright.
Either way, individual copyrights should certainly not have a shorter period than corporate copyrights as is the case now. Corporations can afford to burn money to create new works. Individuals have to either squeeze it into the gaps in their work schedule or starve in order to create new works. Individuals suffer far greater hardship in order to achieve their creation, so the protection of individually copyrighted works should be commensurately greater.
And you are again raising as fact the assertion that California pays more to the feds than gets back. If you don't cherry-pick federal spending but take all federal outlays instead, you will find California is not a net donor.
Since that's contrary to every stat I've ever read, I'm going to just say [citation needed].
The wide difference in wealth is *not* the cause of the safety problems on the border. Rampant narco-wars in Mexico, and some blatantly boneheaded ideas from Congress on border security are the cause.
There were serious problems with rampant corruption and lawbreaking in Mexico (particularly along the border) long before the drug wars happened. That's just the latest aggravating factor.
I would think that if there is any situation in which E85 is an advantage, you should be able to design hybrid engines that burn exclusively E85 and use always run the engine in that optimal state, thus resulting in an overall improvement in efficiency. Unless, of course, wide open throttle at E85 is still less efficient than the best point in the torque curve on a gasoline engine, in which case, E85 is pointless.
What you're missing is that the people saying that Ethanol takes more energy to produce are not including the sun's energy that causes the corn to grow, nor are they including the sun's energy that caused the plants and animals to grow that eventually turned into oil. They're talking about the production process itself. If the production process itself takes more energy than it produces, then the system as a whole isn't just a net loss; it's a *huge* net loss.
It would be as though the amount of gasoline your chainsaw took to chop down the tree could produce more heat than burning the tree. That's what happens with ethanol. That just isn't true for gasoline, coal, or wood. I'm not certain about the lab assistants. They generally don't like it if you try to burn them for warmth.
Although I do agree that the Democrats are remarkably conservative by world standards, the traditional meaning of the terms refers to seating position, which is determined (in most legislative bodies) by political party affiliation. Therefore, the Democrats are, by definition, left, regardless of how conservative their position on a given issue might be.
1. Do you know for sure how much of California's state budget goes to the federal government? I do. It is $0. No state pays the federal government for anything (except for fines for various things). State governments haven't paid the federal government since the Articles of Confederation. This is a fact.
First, the GP said nothing about the state budget.
Second, that's a perfect example of the broken window fallacy. The citizens pay the Federal Government, and in so doing, give it money that cannot be spent for other things. The correct question is how much the citizens of California as a whole send to the federal government versus the amount that the federal government sends back. The answer to that is "a lot more", with the sole exception of the last couple of years (in which California has gotten more than it sent in, but so has every other state). In most years, California gets back somewhere in the ballpark of eighty cents for every dollar it sends to the feds.
2. Ah yes. Those dastardly Republicans! Why just yesterday I got my Form 1040 package in the mail, and the instructions clearly have me paying income tax at a higher rate because I live in a blue state.
Again, the amount is immaterial. What's important is the cost-benefit ratio. The blue states, on the average, get far less benefit for their federal tax dollars than the red states. This is fairly well established and can be trivially proven by examining the numbers.
Unless, of course, you consider the security benefits. Consider how the wide difference in wealth between the U.S. and Mexico has caused serious safety problems near our Southern border. Now consider what would happen if the Southern U.S. were similarly poor because California stopped propping them up. And that is why the argument of California getting less out than it puts in falls flat—not because it isn't true from a purely numbers point of view, but rather because there are unquantifiable externalities that the argument fails to take into account.
On the whole, California takes in far more in federal benefits than it pays in federal tax. Unlike your analysis, which excludes broad categories of welfare spending, I look at gross flows of funds.
And yet SOPA/PIPA were/are supported by both of California's Democrat senators and many of its Democrat representatives as well. Right wing bill, my ass.
No, this was very much an interdenominational bill. It was supported by most career politicians, regardless of whether they preferred fifties or hundreds.
Only to a point. It's hard to imagine any sort of societal structure in which no maximum ratio of criminals to law enforcement exists beyond which that society would cease to function. Indeed, we're already seeing a complete enforcement failure in the area of copyright infringement. At this point, it seems pretty unlikely that the U.S. government will ever be able to get piracy under control.
We're also seeing near-complete enforcement breakdown in other areas:
Immigration enforcement
Drug enforcement
Preventing bribery of and kickbacks to public officials
Patent law
Regulation of financial instruments
Maximum work hour laws
And so on. It looks, at least from my perspective, like the government is rapidly losing control over an awful lot of crime, and historically speaking, that is often a precursor to much more serious problems. I hope I'm wrong. I really hope I can earn enough money to be safely on my own private island before the U.S. comes apart at the seams....:-D
But seriously, the real problem is that our political leaders don't actually understand crime. Trying to stop crime through enforcement alone is like trying to stop mice by picking them up and carrying them outside. Ten minutes later, the mice are back, and they've brought their friends. It just doesn't work.
There's really only one way to really get crime under control, and that is to eliminate its causes. Eliminate the wide disparity in income between the richest and poorest people. Eliminate the barriers to the poorest people improving their positions in society. Eliminate black markets by creating legal, regulated markets in their place, where possible, and by creating better alternatives where regulated markets would be unacceptable (e.g. human trafficking). Eliminate the culture of acceptance towards violating the law at every turn—a culture that has its roots in the corruption at the highest levels—a culture in which those who should be role models lead us down the path towards destruction by setting poor examples.
Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. The status quo is probably the best that we can hope for, realistically... and that's just sad.
If they don't start again soon, they're liable to have a rude awakening. The fundamental social contract between the public and governments is built on mutual respect for the law. If the government ceases to respect the law, it's only a matter of time before the general public starts to imitate them. Down this path lies chaos.
So you think they're dumb enough to hand the EFF grounds for a permanent injunction against their entire operation on a silver platter? The last thing they want to do is actually deny a vocal opponent of the TSA access to a flight, as that would give that person clear standing to sue them for all they're worth.
Getting? It was ridiculous eight years ago. At this point, they've crossed the line into gross criminal negligence, reckless endangerment, and willful malfeasance. They should not merely be abolished. They, along with everyone who voted to create them, should be sent to prison with very, very long terms to set an example for anyone who might contemplate usurping the Constitution of this great nation in the future.
Throwing them out on the street with no jobs is way, way too good for these unAmerican traitors.
You'd think this would be detected rather quickly. Unfortunately, history disagrees with you. It took almost two years. And this one wasn't even deliberately obfuscated by anyone.
You can legally time shift a program from TV. So what's the difference between time shifting it using your own TiVo and time shifting it using a copy recorded by someone else's TiVo? I would argue that the only difference is the extent to which your hardware is tied up. And if your TiVo *was* recording it and failed for some reason, even that distinction goes away. Any argument against piracy at that point is purely pedantry; it's technically a copyright violation, but it is only "wrong" in the most purely bureaucratic sense.
See that's the problem with anti-piracy arguments. They don't ever take into account the "why". If you paint every pirate with a broad brush, rather than analyzing the range of reasons for piracy, you're completely missing your opportunity to combat it in any useful sense. At that point, as far as I'm concerned, the government no longer has any responsibility to give you a second chance to combat it....
Slashdot Mirror
Even if it were, I'm not convinced that a secure network for this sort of thing is appropriate. Imagine a world in which the media do not arrive until an hour after the police because they can no longer use scanners to monitor the chatter. That significantly impacts the press's ability to serve as a guardian of freedom.
Imagine a world in which home burglars sneak into an occupied house at night. They don't hear the police call on the radio, so they don't know that the police are on their way. Instead of the burglars cutting their losses and running away at the first sign of trouble, the police arrive silently while they are still in the house. Now you have a hostage standoff in which there's a good chance that everybody dies.
In probably 99% of situations, it is better for the public to have access to police communications. Sure, there are occasionally situations where the use of secure communications is warranted and helpful. These situations are by far the exception, rather than the rule, however, and the potential for abuse of a secure system exceeds its utility by a sizable margin.
Suppose you set up a publishing run of a million copies of a work that is in the public domain and Congress pulls it back out of the pubic domain. You are no longer legally allowed to finish the printing, but you've already sunk the setup costs. It's also dubious whether you have the legal right to redistribute the books you have already printed.
IMHO, that's a clear fourth amendment violation.
The nice thing is that Facebook allows you to rope them into the protest.
Just do the following:
In your favorite image editor, create an all-black JPEG image.
Change your Facebook profile picture to that image.
Upload the all-black photo to Facebook to post on your wall. In the description, type the following (or similar):
If SOPA/PIPA pass, the Internet will look like this. Write your congresspeople. https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/
(This post has been censored due to copyright claim.)
That's it. Now you've helped take the protest to Facebook. Spread the word.
The nice thing is that Facebook allows you to join in the protest. Steps required:
In your favorite image editor, create an all-black JPEG image.
Change your Facebook profile picture to that image.
Upload the all-black photo to Facebook to post on your wall. In the description, type the following (or similar):
If SOPA/PIPA pass, the Internet will look like this. Write your congresspeople. https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/
(This post has been censored due to copyright claim.)
That's it. Now you've helped take the protest to Facebook.
A quick bit of math: there are 45 murders per day in the U.S. Therefore, if 6.4% are over inheritance, then there are on average almost three murders over inheritance per day in the U.S. alone. So if your numbers are correct, then they almost certainly do happen every day.
I'm not saying there would be wholesale slaughter of artists. I'm saying that it would add an incentive for killing content creators, which even if nobody acted on it, would still not be a good idea. :-)
It's not practical to kill someone just so that their works will be available for your company to exploit in 70 years. By contrast, people are killed for their inheritance every day, knowing that it will be distributed a few days later. Change copyright to end at death + zero days as was suggested previously, and you'll quickly find out how it would change.
That's irrelevant. You can always compete with free copies as long as most people see those copies as illegitimate. If that copy is being sold by Amazon, people see it as legitimate. That's the difference you're failing to acknowledge.
Worse, even if people realize that those big companies are cheating the original creator, it still won't encourage sales through channels that don't, because if a big company thinks it's okay, then it's okay. In effect, destruction of copyright legitimizes piracy—people taking things for free. But that's still not the worst part....
It's not that people wouldn't want to pay him for his work. It's that there would be no realistic way for them to determine whether or not they were actually paying him for his work. A big part of copyright's primary purpose is keeping the middlemen honest. Without copyright, his ISP could redirect to a page of their choosing, sell his work in a way that fully appears to be a direct sale from him, and then pocket the money. So there's literally no good way to confirm that you're really paying him other than physically walking to this guy's house, checking a photo ID, and handing him cash.
This is an even bigger problem if you actually want anything with physical distribution, because you have no real choice but to have middlemen like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local bookstores, local music stores, or whatever simply because you cannot be everywhere at once.
I guess maybe you could come up with a clever way of using trademarks to badge the goods as being legitimate, but that can get a bit expensive ($400 per trademark every ten years), and even then, you're relying on one of those government-issued protections that you so despise. It's also a *lot* harder to enforce because the book printers, DVD manufacturing houses, etc. can't be held liable for abetting the violation of a trademark, which means they have no reason to watch for trademark violations as they do with copyrights.
For digital delivery, in theory, digital signing could solve some of the problems, but it would be nontrivial, and more importantly, would require the cooperation of the middlemen, who would have no real incentive to set up such a system in the first place.
Uh, no. New businesses depend on strangers, but nothing comes for free. They're expected to pay it back with interest.
Wake up. It's not funny how completely off-topic the rest of your post was.
I believe that's Bookinator 3: Rise of the Freelance Editors.
You're wrong. He merely was selective about the degree to which he enforced it. The most crucial of those protections are automatic, and are entirely outside his control.
The primary purpose of copyright is not to prevent piracy. That's at best an externality, and at worst, a minor annoyance. The main purpose of copyright is to prevent people from selling your work without your permission. Without copyright, nothing would have prevented large companies (e.g. Amazon) from selling his video and keeping the royalties for themselves. Indeed, it would be almost inevitable that most such companies would do so. It's truly naïve to believe that any company would be so altruistic as to pay royalties if none were legally owed.
More to the point, with the possible exception of contracts to the contrary, nothing would have prevented even his own distributors from reporting only a few percent of the sales and pocketing the rest.
There are exactly two ways to make money by selling creative works: selling lots of copies of the work with copyright protection, and selling individual works for thousands of dollars apiece. Artists tend to do the latter, but that is only feasible for works whose scope (in terms of creation time) is measured in days, or at most, weeks. It is unlikely that anyone would pay a hundred grand for a well-written novel that took a few years to write, so this model doesn't really work for most other creative works. That pretty much leaves copyright as the only viable option. Anything else is hopelessly dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Not at all. The derivative works would still have copyright protection. The movie company assassinates the author, then takes the script, revises it a little, and makes it into a movie, which is protected by copyright for 30 years. The movie industry couldn't have it much better than that.
Similarly, the music company does the recording as a work for hire. The artist agrees to a small flat fee for the recording, knowing that he or she will get songwriter royalties. The artist dies in a mysterious boating accident. The royalties are never paid because they are no longer owed, but the music company owns all rights to the recording (because it is a derivative work).
The author's death should not play into it at all. Copyright should be for a certain number of years, period. That said, if you're going to make the author's death a factor, copyright should last until the author's death or n years, whichever is longer, where n is the same as the length of a corporate copyright.
Either way, individual copyrights should certainly not have a shorter period than corporate copyrights as is the case now. Corporations can afford to burn money to create new works. Individuals have to either squeeze it into the gaps in their work schedule or starve in order to create new works. Individuals suffer far greater hardship in order to achieve their creation, so the protection of individually copyrighted works should be commensurately greater.
Since that's contrary to every stat I've ever read, I'm going to just say [citation needed].
http://www.calinst.org/pubs/balance2003.htm provides a pretty thorough breakdown of how those numbers are calculated. I'm not seeing anything wrong with the methodology.
There were serious problems with rampant corruption and lawbreaking in Mexico (particularly along the border) long before the drug wars happened. That's just the latest aggravating factor.
I would think that if there is any situation in which E85 is an advantage, you should be able to design hybrid engines that burn exclusively E85 and use always run the engine in that optimal state, thus resulting in an overall improvement in efficiency. Unless, of course, wide open throttle at E85 is still less efficient than the best point in the torque curve on a gasoline engine, in which case, E85 is pointless.
What you're missing is that the people saying that Ethanol takes more energy to produce are not including the sun's energy that causes the corn to grow, nor are they including the sun's energy that caused the plants and animals to grow that eventually turned into oil. They're talking about the production process itself. If the production process itself takes more energy than it produces, then the system as a whole isn't just a net loss; it's a *huge* net loss.
It would be as though the amount of gasoline your chainsaw took to chop down the tree could produce more heat than burning the tree. That's what happens with ethanol. That just isn't true for gasoline, coal, or wood. I'm not certain about the lab assistants. They generally don't like it if you try to burn them for warmth.
Although I do agree that the Democrats are remarkably conservative by world standards, the traditional meaning of the terms refers to seating position, which is determined (in most legislative bodies) by political party affiliation. Therefore, the Democrats are, by definition, left, regardless of how conservative their position on a given issue might be.
First, the GP said nothing about the state budget.
Second, that's a perfect example of the broken window fallacy. The citizens pay the Federal Government, and in so doing, give it money that cannot be spent for other things. The correct question is how much the citizens of California as a whole send to the federal government versus the amount that the federal government sends back. The answer to that is "a lot more", with the sole exception of the last couple of years (in which California has gotten more than it sent in, but so has every other state). In most years, California gets back somewhere in the ballpark of eighty cents for every dollar it sends to the feds.
Again, the amount is immaterial. What's important is the cost-benefit ratio. The blue states, on the average, get far less benefit for their federal tax dollars than the red states. This is fairly well established and can be trivially proven by examining the numbers.
Unless, of course, you consider the security benefits. Consider how the wide difference in wealth between the U.S. and Mexico has caused serious safety problems near our Southern border. Now consider what would happen if the Southern U.S. were similarly poor because California stopped propping them up. And that is why the argument of California getting less out than it puts in falls flat—not because it isn't true from a purely numbers point of view, but rather because there are unquantifiable externalities that the argument fails to take into account.
That's grossly incorrect.
You misspelled Goa'uld.
Don't worry. We just have to stall it until December 21.
And yet SOPA/PIPA were/are supported by both of California's Democrat senators and many of its Democrat representatives as well. Right wing bill, my ass.
No, this was very much an interdenominational bill. It was supported by most career politicians, regardless of whether they preferred fifties or hundreds.
Only to a point. It's hard to imagine any sort of societal structure in which no maximum ratio of criminals to law enforcement exists beyond which that society would cease to function. Indeed, we're already seeing a complete enforcement failure in the area of copyright infringement. At this point, it seems pretty unlikely that the U.S. government will ever be able to get piracy under control.
We're also seeing near-complete enforcement breakdown in other areas:
And so on. It looks, at least from my perspective, like the government is rapidly losing control over an awful lot of crime, and historically speaking, that is often a precursor to much more serious problems. I hope I'm wrong. I really hope I can earn enough money to be safely on my own private island before the U.S. comes apart at the seams.... :-D
But seriously, the real problem is that our political leaders don't actually understand crime. Trying to stop crime through enforcement alone is like trying to stop mice by picking them up and carrying them outside. Ten minutes later, the mice are back, and they've brought their friends. It just doesn't work.
There's really only one way to really get crime under control, and that is to eliminate its causes. Eliminate the wide disparity in income between the richest and poorest people. Eliminate the barriers to the poorest people improving their positions in society. Eliminate black markets by creating legal, regulated markets in their place, where possible, and by creating better alternatives where regulated markets would be unacceptable (e.g. human trafficking). Eliminate the culture of acceptance towards violating the law at every turn—a culture that has its roots in the corruption at the highest levels—a culture in which those who should be role models lead us down the path towards destruction by setting poor examples.
Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. The status quo is probably the best that we can hope for, realistically... and that's just sad.
Like storing authentication information on a separate server from user information. This tends to make the info a lot less useful.
Ooh. User ID #67215298's password is "correct horse battery staple". Who is user ID #67215298? Uh... we haven't cracked that server yet.
If they don't start again soon, they're liable to have a rude awakening. The fundamental social contract between the public and governments is built on mutual respect for the law. If the government ceases to respect the law, it's only a matter of time before the general public starts to imitate them. Down this path lies chaos.
So you think they're dumb enough to hand the EFF grounds for a permanent injunction against their entire operation on a silver platter? The last thing they want to do is actually deny a vocal opponent of the TSA access to a flight, as that would give that person clear standing to sue them for all they're worth.
Getting? It was ridiculous eight years ago. At this point, they've crossed the line into gross criminal negligence, reckless endangerment, and willful malfeasance. They should not merely be abolished. They, along with everyone who voted to create them, should be sent to prison with very, very long terms to set an example for anyone who might contemplate usurping the Constitution of this great nation in the future.
Throwing them out on the street with no jobs is way, way too good for these unAmerican traitors.
You'd think this would be detected rather quickly. Unfortunately, history disagrees with you. It took almost two years. And this one wasn't even deliberately obfuscated by anyone.
You can legally time shift a program from TV. So what's the difference between time shifting it using your own TiVo and time shifting it using a copy recorded by someone else's TiVo? I would argue that the only difference is the extent to which your hardware is tied up. And if your TiVo *was* recording it and failed for some reason, even that distinction goes away. Any argument against piracy at that point is purely pedantry; it's technically a copyright violation, but it is only "wrong" in the most purely bureaucratic sense.
See that's the problem with anti-piracy arguments. They don't ever take into account the "why". If you paint every pirate with a broad brush, rather than analyzing the range of reasons for piracy, you're completely missing your opportunity to combat it in any useful sense. At that point, as far as I'm concerned, the government no longer has any responsibility to give you a second chance to combat it....