Well, I am not a gmail user for precisely this reason.
Also, Google is not scanning for ads in order to provide you with free email service, they are providing free email service in order to be able to show you ads. The 'free email' is just a cost of doing business - the selling of ads is worth much more than that expense.
The big difference between scanning for spam and scanning to place ads is that scanning for spam benefits me, and scanning for ads is for Google's benefit.
I guess that is why when we ship something that is sensitive enough to require a shockwatch there is a giant 'check shockwatch before accepting' printed on the box. Seems a hell of a lot easier than some bluetooth device. Plus, has the added benefit that every point in the delivery chain can make sure they are getting an undamaged package, and the presence of the shockwatch and warning will probably cause handlers to be more careful.
If you are just trying to see if handlers have abused your package (not sure what value that would be) a device hidden inside the package makes sense. If you are more concerned about your package being delivered undamaged, a device and warning on the outside makes more sense.
You just repeated what the other guy said, and it is still wrong. There is no `statement of noninfringement` in a counter notice, just a statement that you believe the material was removed by mistake or misidentification. `By mistake or misidentification` does not mean `I think this is not infringing, therefore it was a mistake to delete it`, it means that you believe the person who filed the notice made a mistake or misidentification when they said the work was theirs.
The person making the notice says, under penalty of perjury, that he believes the work is his. The person making the counter notice says, under penalty of perjury, that he believes the work is not what the notice says it is.
Now, if you think that your use of a work should be fair use and you send a counter notice saying the work was taken down because of a mistake or misidentification (the only option there is), then you would be liable for perjury, because you said you believe the work was misidentified when actually you know it was identified correctly, but you feel you are allowed to use it. That is not being held l Iiable for saying it was noninfringing, it is being held liable because you lied.
Eh, what? Exactly where in the law does it says that 'falsely claiming to not infringe is punishable as perjury'? Nowhere. The only thing punishable by perjury is if, in bad faith, you state that the material is not what the person filing the notice says it was. How exactly is that a 'higher standard' than making the person filing the notice state that they are authorized to represent the work?
What exactly are the 'things you can do in a notice that you can't do in a counter notice' that would be perjury in the counter notice but not in the notice?
Both takedown notices and counter-notices are already made under penalty of perjury. Since you can't be bothered to educate yourself:
Under Elements of Notification
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Under Contents of Counter Notification
(C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
Penalties (criminal and civil) are identical in each case.
And how would a host 'intentionally and knowingly' violate copyright? How would they know? Maybe by receiving some sort of notification that they are infringing, and if they ignore it they are liable for copyright infringement in court? That is exactly what we currently have - the notification is called a DMCA takedown notice.
Or are you just trying to set up a situation where the host can always say 'I didn't know it was infringing', (because you have eliminated the method by which they find out it is infringing) and thus be free from all liability? That was one of the options I already presented.
Or, the other option I already presented, was that each and every case winds up in court, and the host is liable for all infrigement, whether they 'knew' or not.
You still have not provided any alternative to either the status quo (shielded if takedowns are done), full liablility for the hosts, or full immunity for the hosts.
I am not following what you mean. If we discard DMCA takedown notices, what do we have left? Either hosts are somehow shielded from ever being liable for copyright infringement, or they are not. If they are shielded, then there is no effective copyright protection. If they are not shielded, then they are liable for any and all infringement on their site.
The first option is effectively no copyright protection, and hence no way to enforce copyright. The second option is effectively the end of user-provided content hosts. What other options are there?
I said 'better or realistic'. You may consider lack of copyright protection 'better', but since industries that depend on copyright and/or other IP protection are a major source of jobs and money in America's economy it is in no way realistic to think it will ever happen.
I don't see how your 'third option' is actually a third option. If you remove the takedown notices, you are left with only the two options I already gave.
Yes, you are correct that everything is legal except that which has been specifically forbidden, and that you are only liable for your own actions.
Here is the problem: copyright infringement (reproducing or distributing without authorization) has been illegal in the US for more than 200 years. When someone watches a video on YouTube (for instance) it is YouTube, and not the person who uploaded it, who is distributing without authorization and is therefore liable for copyright infringement. YouTube would not be liable for the actions of someone else (whoever made the copy on YouTube in the first place), they would be liable for their own action of distributing copyrighted material without authorization.
So the DMCA carved out a special provision in copyright law in order to allow services like YouTube to exist. You will not be held responsible for distributing copyrighted material as long as you remove the copyrighted material when you are informed that you are not authorized to distribute it.
And you can't say that these service are being held liable for the actions of others. They are the ones who say 'we will distribute whatever anyone uploads, no questions asked'. That is their action, not someone else's. Look at it this way: suppose you ran a consignment shop, and offered to sell whatever anyone gave you. Do you think you would get away with saying 'not my fault' when some of the things you were selling turned out to be stolen or illegal? No, you would not.
Can you explain why repeal of the DMCA would be considered 'ideal'? Have you actually thought at all about what that would mean?
Repealing the DMCA would mean that web sites that host 'user-supplied' content (such as YouTube, word press, github, flickr, et al) would be liable for every piece of copyright-infringing material that someone puts on their site. They would no longer have the 'safe harbor' that the DMCA provides. Now, how many of these sites do you think would still exist when they are forced to have an army of lawyers to defend the thousands of legitimate copyright infringement lawsuits brought against them?
As for the idea of making 'foreigners' pay an escrow, etc, forget it. As soon as we did that, every foreign country would do the same to us. No way that is ever happening (nor should it).
Your freedom of the press buts zero onus on anyone else. You have the right to publish what you want, nobody has the responsibility to give you the means to do so. Or do you think every book publisher, newspaper, magazine, TV station, etc is somehow required to publish everything anyone sends them?
Oh, and another thing: you are not the only one with the right to freedom of the press. The actual 'press' has the, say it with me, freedom to decide what they will and will not publish.
That is already the law. Here is the relevent text (USC 17 section 512):
(f) Misrepresentations.— Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
Part (1) is making a false claim (ie not in good faith), part (2) is making a false counter-notice. Punishment is exactly the same in both cases.
Bullshit. The purpose of the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA (which is what this is about) is to allow sites to host user-supplied content at all. How many of these sites do you think would exist if every time one of their 'users' put up some copyright infringing material the site had to go defend themself in court?
DMCA notices do not bypass courts or in any way eliminate 'due process'. You have no 'right' to have your stuff hosted on YouTube, wordpress, or anywhere else. No 'due process' or court is required for someone to decline your business, ever.
Nobody is required to honor any takedown notices, there is no such law that requires that. Hosts honor takedown notices because it is to their benefit. Therefore, any host who wants to operate in your prefered way is completely free to do so right now. Of course, that means that these hosts will be driven out of business by the inevitable landslide of lawsuits and judgements against them.
Your proposal means there are basically two choices: a) hosts are always responsible for any copyright infrigement by stuff on their site, or b) hosts are never responsible. Neither one of those options is in any way realistic or better than the current situation.
You coveniently left out the point that in all those previous points in history you had to wait for the musicians you wanted to hear perform. I am pretty sure that you did not get to carry a bunch of musicians with you and have them perform at your whim. So why is it ok that now you can have the benefit of their work anytime you want, but they don't get to benefit from their own work?
I am pretty sure that people were aware that hot things glow long before Edison came along (we had been working with iron for a few millenia by then). And I am pretty sure that people working with electricity were aware that a current produces heat. And I am pretty sure that putting a glass globe around hot things was pretty much standard practice. So what did Edison really do? He found, through experimentation, the right material that could sustain the heat without being destroyed in the process.
So how is that process of experimenting and finding the right material a 'major invention', but experimenting and finding the right material to make a very thin but powerful battery 'nothing major'? Why are the thousands of 'minor' inventions that make up a cell phone 'not invention', but a lamp filament is?
I guess you missed the part where it was smart enough to know it didn't know the correct answer (it gave a very low confidence factor for the answer). And the IBM team explained why it gave that answer, which had nothing to do with not being 'smart enough'. The biggest factor was that they put very little weight on the category (US Cities), because the categories are often misleading.
But I care deeply about obesity, and now I find out that some of these EVIL COMPANIES are directly supporting the junk food industry by supplying donuts or pizza to their employees on occasion. If they had been up front about that fact I would have known not to buy their products. See how fucking stupid that sounds?
I love the idea that any transaction between to private parties is automatically 'shady' if the details of that transaction are not revealed to the public.
I am guessing that these evil companies also have (by your definition) 'shady' transactions with their employees, their landlords, their utility companies, their equipment suppliers, etc. Or are things only 'shady' if one or more of the parties is someone you personally do not approve of?
Physics: more people using WiFi does not increase speeds. Quite the opposite.
Technology: No matter how many 'connections' you have, they are all using the same shared oversold resource. Using more of that resource on one connection means there is less bandwidth available for the other connections.
Legal: This is no doubt very much against your TOS
Do you know what 'view' means? Here is a hint: it has nothing to do with computers. So again I say, cite a case where someone is accused of copyright infringement for viewing (that thing you do with your eyeballs) a movie, or listening (that thing you do with your ears) to a song.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I am not a gmail user for precisely this reason.
Also, Google is not scanning for ads in order to provide you with free email service, they are providing free email service in order to be able to show you ads. The 'free email' is just a cost of doing business - the selling of ads is worth much more than that expense.
The big difference between scanning for spam and scanning to place ads is that scanning for spam benefits me, and scanning for ads is for Google's benefit.
I guess that is why when we ship something that is sensitive enough to require a shockwatch there is a giant 'check shockwatch before accepting' printed on the box. Seems a hell of a lot easier than some bluetooth device. Plus, has the added benefit that every point in the delivery chain can make sure they are getting an undamaged package, and the presence of the shockwatch and warning will probably cause handlers to be more careful.
If you are just trying to see if handlers have abused your package (not sure what value that would be) a device hidden inside the package makes sense. If you are more concerned about your package being delivered undamaged, a device and warning on the outside makes more sense.
You just repeated what the other guy said, and it is still wrong. There is no `statement of noninfringement` in a counter notice, just a statement that you believe the material was removed by mistake or misidentification. `By mistake or misidentification` does not mean `I think this is not infringing, therefore it was a mistake to delete it`, it means that you believe the person who filed the notice made a mistake or misidentification when they said the work was theirs.
The person making the notice says, under penalty of perjury, that he believes the work is his. The person making the counter notice says, under penalty of perjury, that he believes the work is not what the notice says it is.
Now, if you think that your use of a work should be fair use and you send a counter notice saying the work was taken down because of a mistake or misidentification (the only option there is), then you would be liable for perjury, because you said you believe the work was misidentified when actually you know it was identified correctly, but you feel you are allowed to use it. That is not being held l Iiable for saying it was noninfringing, it is being held liable because you lied.
Eh, what? Exactly where in the law does it says that 'falsely claiming to not infringe is punishable as perjury'? Nowhere. The only thing punishable by perjury is if, in bad faith, you state that the material is not what the person filing the notice says it was. How exactly is that a 'higher standard' than making the person filing the notice state that they are authorized to represent the work?
What exactly are the 'things you can do in a notice that you can't do in a counter notice' that would be perjury in the counter notice but not in the notice?
Both takedown notices and counter-notices are already made under penalty of perjury. Since you can't be bothered to educate yourself:
Under Elements of Notification
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Under Contents of Counter Notification
(C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
Penalties (criminal and civil) are identical in each case.
And how would a host 'intentionally and knowingly' violate copyright? How would they know? Maybe by receiving some sort of notification that they are infringing, and if they ignore it they are liable for copyright infringement in court? That is exactly what we currently have - the notification is called a DMCA takedown notice.
Or are you just trying to set up a situation where the host can always say 'I didn't know it was infringing', (because you have eliminated the method by which they find out it is infringing) and thus be free from all liability? That was one of the options I already presented.
Or, the other option I already presented, was that each and every case winds up in court, and the host is liable for all infrigement, whether they 'knew' or not.
You still have not provided any alternative to either the status quo (shielded if takedowns are done), full liablility for the hosts, or full immunity for the hosts.
I am not following what you mean. If we discard DMCA takedown notices, what do we have left? Either hosts are somehow shielded from ever being liable for copyright infringement, or they are not. If they are shielded, then there is no effective copyright protection. If they are not shielded, then they are liable for any and all infringement on their site.
The first option is effectively no copyright protection, and hence no way to enforce copyright. The second option is effectively the end of user-provided content hosts. What other options are there?
I said 'better or realistic'. You may consider lack of copyright protection 'better', but since industries that depend on copyright and/or other IP protection are a major source of jobs and money in America's economy it is in no way realistic to think it will ever happen.
I don't see how your 'third option' is actually a third option. If you remove the takedown notices, you are left with only the two options I already gave.
Yes, you are correct that everything is legal except that which has been specifically forbidden, and that you are only liable for your own actions.
Here is the problem: copyright infringement (reproducing or distributing without authorization) has been illegal in the US for more than 200 years. When someone watches a video on YouTube (for instance) it is YouTube, and not the person who uploaded it, who is distributing without authorization and is therefore liable for copyright infringement. YouTube would not be liable for the actions of someone else (whoever made the copy on YouTube in the first place), they would be liable for their own action of distributing copyrighted material without authorization.
So the DMCA carved out a special provision in copyright law in order to allow services like YouTube to exist. You will not be held responsible for distributing copyrighted material as long as you remove the copyrighted material when you are informed that you are not authorized to distribute it.
And you can't say that these service are being held liable for the actions of others. They are the ones who say 'we will distribute whatever anyone uploads, no questions asked'. That is their action, not someone else's. Look at it this way: suppose you ran a consignment shop, and offered to sell whatever anyone gave you. Do you think you would get away with saying 'not my fault' when some of the things you were selling turned out to be stolen or illegal? No, you would not.
Can you explain why repeal of the DMCA would be considered 'ideal'? Have you actually thought at all about what that would mean?
Repealing the DMCA would mean that web sites that host 'user-supplied' content (such as YouTube, word press, github, flickr, et al) would be liable for every piece of copyright-infringing material that someone puts on their site. They would no longer have the 'safe harbor' that the DMCA provides. Now, how many of these sites do you think would still exist when they are forced to have an army of lawyers to defend the thousands of legitimate copyright infringement lawsuits brought against them?
As for the idea of making 'foreigners' pay an escrow, etc, forget it. As soon as we did that, every foreign country would do the same to us. No way that is ever happening (nor should it).
Your freedom of the press buts zero onus on anyone else. You have the right to publish what you want, nobody has the responsibility to give you the means to do so. Or do you think every book publisher, newspaper, magazine, TV station, etc is somehow required to publish everything anyone sends them?
Oh, and another thing: you are not the only one with the right to freedom of the press. The actual 'press' has the, say it with me, freedom to decide what they will and will not publish.
That is already the law. Here is the relevent text (USC 17 section 512):
(f) Misrepresentations.— Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
Part (1) is making a false claim (ie not in good faith), part (2) is making a false counter-notice. Punishment is exactly the same in both cases.
Bullshit. The purpose of the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA (which is what this is about) is to allow sites to host user-supplied content at all. How many of these sites do you think would exist if every time one of their 'users' put up some copyright infringing material the site had to go defend themself in court?
DMCA notices do not bypass courts or in any way eliminate 'due process'. You have no 'right' to have your stuff hosted on YouTube, wordpress, or anywhere else. No 'due process' or court is required for someone to decline your business, ever.
Nobody is required to honor any takedown notices, there is no such law that requires that. Hosts honor takedown notices because it is to their benefit. Therefore, any host who wants to operate in your prefered way is completely free to do so right now. Of course, that means that these hosts will be driven out of business by the inevitable landslide of lawsuits and judgements against them.
Your proposal means there are basically two choices: a) hosts are always responsible for any copyright infrigement by stuff on their site, or b) hosts are never responsible. Neither one of those options is in any way realistic or better than the current situation.
You coveniently left out the point that in all those previous points in history you had to wait for the musicians you wanted to hear perform. I am pretty sure that you did not get to carry a bunch of musicians with you and have them perform at your whim. So why is it ok that now you can have the benefit of their work anytime you want, but they don't get to benefit from their own work?
It doesn't matter how straightforward a category is if you put very little weight on categories. And I have no idea what your second sentence means.
Um, the first customer of Watson is a health insurance company.
I am pretty sure that people were aware that hot things glow long before Edison came along (we had been working with iron for a few millenia by then). And I am pretty sure that people working with electricity were aware that a current produces heat. And I am pretty sure that putting a glass globe around hot things was pretty much standard practice. So what did Edison really do? He found, through experimentation, the right material that could sustain the heat without being destroyed in the process.
So how is that process of experimenting and finding the right material a 'major invention', but experimenting and finding the right material to make a very thin but powerful battery 'nothing major'? Why are the thousands of 'minor' inventions that make up a cell phone 'not invention', but a lamp filament is?
I guess you missed the part where it was smart enough to know it didn't know the correct answer (it gave a very low confidence factor for the answer). And the IBM team explained why it gave that answer, which had nothing to do with not being 'smart enough'. The biggest factor was that they put very little weight on the category (US Cities), because the categories are often misleading.
But I care deeply about obesity, and now I find out that some of these EVIL COMPANIES are directly supporting the junk food industry by supplying donuts or pizza to their employees on occasion. If they had been up front about that fact I would have known not to buy their products. See how fucking stupid that sounds?
Tried to hide it? Where is evidence of that?
I love the idea that any transaction between to private parties is automatically 'shady' if the details of that transaction are not revealed to the public.
I am guessing that these evil companies also have (by your definition) 'shady' transactions with their employees, their landlords, their utility companies, their equipment suppliers, etc. Or are things only 'shady' if one or more of the parties is someone you personally do not approve of?
Um, yeah. Only three little problems to overcome.
Physics: more people using WiFi does not increase speeds. Quite the opposite.
Technology: No matter how many 'connections' you have, they are all using the same shared oversold resource. Using more of that resource on one connection means there is less bandwidth available for the other connections.
Legal: This is no doubt very much against your TOS
Do you know what 'view' means? Here is a hint: it has nothing to do with computers. So again I say, cite a case where someone is accused of copyright infringement for viewing (that thing you do with your eyeballs) a movie, or listening (that thing you do with your ears) to a song.
Show a single case where any of those claims were made.