Mr. Thiessen's writing doesn't represent the WaPo directly. Only in their decision to run the article are they involved.
In other words, don't think the WaPo is defending their bottom line, attacking accountability, etc. They have a pretty solid reputation for fighting for transparency.
A) Only in their decision to run an article - calling for criminal action by the U.S. Government to silence an organization built to ensure transparency
B) No. At one time they had a pretty solid reputation for fighting for transparency. I was watching that slowly die in favor of trying to court the partisan right and do hit jobs for them even when I was in the military, and by the mid-nineties they had burned through whatever accumulated karma reserve they had with me. And it's only gotten worse since.
I look at all these relics of the Nixon administration that got us into this, and can't help but think . . . as much as I have to believe that Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in good faith, so much of their actions seems to me to indicate that they took that pardon as a validation of the kind of imperial presidency Nixon sought to create. "If he had been *wrong*, then why would Ford have pardoned him?" goes the rationalization in my mind.
And I have to wonder, are we going to be dealing with these fools again in another 30 years. McCarthy begat Nixon, Nixon begat Cheney, Cheney begat . . . Yoo, Thiesen, Gonzales, Bush himself . . . another cabal of contemporaries determined to rewrite history after the fact, to show the world "No . . . we were *right* and we will prove it to you" again in thirty years.
We can't keep having this "Well, politics is politics" attitude that pardons and covers for the crimes of an administration as Obama and the Media has done here. We need to make sure that the historical record is clear that these people are war criminals.
Or we're going to go through this again in a generation.
The whole thing is based in a inane Rand Paul-esque argument, that saying the government can impose conditions on how you offer your good or service to the public qualifies as a regulatory 'taking'.
And yes, I use the term Rand Paul-esque advisedly - this not a slipperly slope argument, but a statement that imposing quality controls on medicine, or forcing a phone service to allow any phone to be attached, or forcing a business to serve people regardless of gender/race, are all regulatory 'taking'.
The one legal theory Scalia espouses that I am forced to agree with is that any interpretation of a commerce clause (or other clause power) that results in there being no effective limitation on commerce clause power is, by definition, an incorrect interpretation.
God knows he's an unprincipled hack, but he's right about that.
Mmmm - Even taking that into account (And although I am a layman, I'm fairly well educated in copyright law, and I've never heard of it being expresses in quite that manner.) the photograph of the Eiffel Tower is in fact a copy of the Eiffel Tower in another medium. Thus even arguing for that implies the concept of 'copy'right.
This is entire different - This is asserting that, say, a new style of elevator designed around the elevator shaft of the Eiffel Tower is by the nature of being designed in this way, subject to whatever licensing the owners of the Eiffel Tower design choose to assert upon it . . . even should it never be used in the tower.
That's a fundamental shift; They make some noises in the article about why this logic wouldn't follow from this particular case, but to be honest I find those disclaimers shaky at best.
Given this interpretation at all, Someone with a lot of money is going to make a case "If that, why not this?", and the only good case I can see to stop 'this' is to say 'not that' in the first place.
Rather than Roads I shall say "The sum total of the regulatory structures that codifies the building, inspection, and usage of - Roads, Bridges and other land based transport mechanisms".
Or . . . Not. You may take this as read for each other example - there is no Medicare program without Medicare regulations anymore than a computer program somehow exists without the underlying code being written, and trying to hide in technicalities to pretend otherwise is as crazy as saying it's impossible to write good open source code and then ignoring Linux as a counter-example because that's not code it's an operating system.
You may not like my counter-examples, but trying to pretend they aren't counter-examples because they are the results of regulations rather than the individual paragraphs and sub-paragraphs is just intellectually dishonest.
As a layman, this overreaches the scope of a license (ANY license) badly. That the theme in question is subject to the GPL code because it includes GPL codes I happily grant. But that's not what they are arguing for here.
If the kind of interactivity described here, that the fact that design of item B is dependent upon the design of item A, in and of itself makes it subject to the license of A as a derivative product . . . .
Think long and carefully about who is going to pick up that gun before you put it on the table. This reading of the power of a license is going to affect your rights to every scenario you build for a game, every mod, every bit of machanima. Taken only a hair past what they're positing here, it could very well affect the interpretation of the ownership of files produced by licensed software.
This interpretation of a License is a Microsoft Wet Dream.
I'm all for strict ethical standards, and I won't claim to have gone through more than a half dozen of these PDF's checking them.
That said - the six or so files I looked at were exclusively issues about some fairly well established naming conventions, the repetition of which is about as unlikely as finding an elm street and sycamore street 'coincidentally' close to each other in both our home towns and calling it 'evidence' the city planner of one stole the plans of the city planner of the other.
I've heard people claim in several posts that "Well, if you looked at the PDF's that weren't cherry picked for ridiculousness..." there are 'obvious' copying of code. That may be, but I'd like someone to actually link to a pdf with this obvious copying of code - burying the evidence in bullshit data is what you do when the evidence is against you and you *don't* want the other side to find it, not when it's in your favor and you're trying to make your case.
At a minimum, the fact that he has buried his 'evidence' in with other bs data doesn't make it very clear he knows what actual evidence of copying would look like.
Yeah, pretty much. My House is ~50/side, and that's just too damn close at sea. I'm not sure what we're photographing from here, but 65 feet from large industrial equipment at sea, unless someone's looking for a clear shot of BP executives sacrificing baby dolphins to their Cthulu'esque masters with the willing assistance of the Dunwich coast guard contingent, I just don't see the issue.
Notably, there are four tests four fair use . . . to be taken into account. Failing two of them (or indeed three of them) doesn't mean it's not fair use.
Given the strength of the political argument for commentary, in and of itself, well, yeah it *is* hard to fail with just that one test. That case in California where the candidate tried to claim his use of Don Henley songs was political commentary is the failure point - most things inside that limit have been allowed.
Of course, even giving it up, the Nevada Dems have a win: "How extreme are her political views? After 'cleaning up' the right wing propaganda from her website, she sued to keep her previous version secret and offline! Sharron Angle - She stands by her positions . . . if you only could find out what they were . . .."
Unstoppable by people that go to a website and run software because someone cold called them over the phone and told them too?
Just so I'm clear on this. What I need to tell my mother is, "If someone calls you on the phone and tells you to run software on your computer . . . don't do that."
No. 10: They support changing the law to reduce damages for copyright infringement.
Yes. As a policy, these people make an argument that the damages are too high. You argue the other way. An Argument about whether the fine for violating the speed limit is or is not to high is not an argument about whether or not there should be either a fine or a speed limit.
No. 9: They support the elimination of statutory damages for secondary copyright infringement.
Similarly an argument about whether car manufacturers should be fined for creating engines that can surpass the speed limit is not an argument about whether there should be a speed limit.
No. 8: They favor rolling back copyright extension; in some cases, radically.
By the same token, and argument about where the speed limit is too low or high, is not an argument about whether there should be a speed limit.
No. 7: They favor the elimination of the songwriter and publisher rights for server, cache and buffer copies.
Nice analogy, but hey, it falls down here. What you are saying, seriously, is that you won't be satisfied until you can fine people for automated processes that have nothing to do with the actual violation. You're saying this in public?
No. 6: They oppose efforts to obtain the identities of individuals engaged in massive copyright infringement.
Citation needed. I am not aware of any effort to block this. I am aware of efforts to hold people attempting this to a legal standard of accuracy.
If you confuse the two, you are incompetent.
No. 5: They support extreme versions of orphan works legislation.
Define 'Extreme' Please.
No. 4: They have filed legal briefs supporting anti-copyright positions of Grokster, Napster, LimeWire, Cablevision, Google, YouTube and Verizon.
They have filed briefs making valid arguments against extending copyright past the current state, which many reasonable people consider overreaching not only the law, but the constitutional provisions explicitly underlying the law. You get to file arguments. Then a judge decides.
That's the system, and you have used it regularly. I won't say you're not allowed to bitch about it, but decent people have the good sense not to throw tantrums in public over a system they have happily used.
No. 3: They oppose graduated-response protection for copyright owners.
The difference between "Destroy them" and "Destroy them, their livelihoods, their family, their employer, and get their little dog too" is, by some unreasonable souls, not considered 'graduated response'. Learn what you look like from outside please.
No. 2: They oppose treaties that support copyright enforcement like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
ACTA does not 'support' enforcement. It supports enforcement is ways that many reasonable people find questionable. You have the option of defending those methods, you've chosen instead to indulge in erecting straw man arguments.
No. 1: They actually argue that illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic helps the economy and doesn't hurt songwriters.
More to the point, they present arguments that the assessments of that harm has been inflated far past any reasonable assessment of that harm would indicate, and that the attempts to inflate those assessments are conscious and dishonest.
In doing so, they have presented genuine numbers, how they arrive at them, and why they find your numbers unlikely. Your reaction has been flat denials, without successfully undermining their assumptions, the facts they present, the economic evaluations they use to assess the damage, finally resulting in your being unable to undermine their final assessments.
Their final assessment is that you are attempting to cause panic as if there were an ebola epidemic, when a reasonable assessment is that there is a cold or mild flu. Additionally your methods for preventing the cold from spreading would be to shut down numerous public options that do far more than simply allow the spread of
Without commenting about your masturbatory habits, the record on that is pretty clear. If you are unaware of that record it's willful ignorance of the sort I usually only see applied towards saying evolution or climate change aren't 'proven'.
Slashdot Mirror
Thomas and Scalia are both idiotic ideologues; Scalia just happens to be an intellectually sharp, fairly unprincipled, yet still idiotic ideologue.
Think Bush versus Cheney.
Pug
Mr. Thiessen's writing doesn't represent the WaPo directly. Only in their decision to run the article are they involved.
In other words, don't think the WaPo is defending their bottom line, attacking accountability, etc. They have a pretty solid reputation for fighting for transparency.
A) Only in their decision to run an article - calling for criminal action by the U.S. Government to silence an organization built to ensure transparency
B) No. At one time they had a pretty solid reputation for fighting for transparency. I was watching that slowly die in favor of trying to court the partisan right and do hit jobs for them even when I was in the military, and by the mid-nineties they had burned through whatever accumulated karma reserve they had with me. And it's only gotten worse since.
Pug
I look at all these relics of the Nixon administration that got us into this, and can't help but think . . . as much as I have to believe that Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in good faith, so much of their actions seems to me to indicate that they took that pardon as a validation of the kind of imperial presidency Nixon sought to create. "If he had been *wrong*, then why would Ford have pardoned him?" goes the rationalization in my mind.
And I have to wonder, are we going to be dealing with these fools again in another 30 years. McCarthy begat Nixon, Nixon begat Cheney, Cheney begat . . . Yoo, Thiesen, Gonzales, Bush himself . . . another cabal of contemporaries determined to rewrite history after the fact, to show the world "No . . . we were *right* and we will prove it to you" again in thirty years.
We can't keep having this "Well, politics is politics" attitude that pardons and covers for the crimes of an administration as Obama and the Media has done here. We need to make sure that the historical record is clear that these people are war criminals.
Or we're going to go through this again in a generation.
Pug
Assistant professor; My bad: http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/fac-staff/deans-faculty/lyonsd.html
The whole thing is based in a inane Rand Paul-esque argument, that saying the government can impose conditions on how you offer your good or service to the public qualifies as a regulatory 'taking'.
And yes, I use the term Rand Paul-esque advisedly - this not a slipperly slope argument, but a statement that imposing quality controls on medicine, or forcing a phone service to allow any phone to be attached, or forcing a business to serve people regardless of gender/race, are all regulatory 'taking'.
Daniel Lyons is an Assistant Professor at Boston College acting as a stalking horse for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. God save us from idiot libertarians and Ayn Rand wannabees.
Pug
The one legal theory Scalia espouses that I am forced to agree with is that any interpretation of a commerce clause (or other clause power) that results in there being no effective limitation on commerce clause power is, by definition, an incorrect interpretation.
God knows he's an unprincipled hack, but he's right about that.
Pug
You know, the same way Rand Paul says they lack that authority - {G}
Pug
The 14th Amendment, the same one that says I can't, as a public service, discriminate among my customers on the basis of sex or race, begs to differ.
There are differences between what can be done in private and what I can do when providing a service to the public.
Pug
I find it simply disturbing that an officer in an unmarked car even considered pulling someone over;
Most states actively prohibit unmarked cars from pulling people over, on the simple basis that sets people up for carjacking;
Pug
Mmmm - Even taking that into account (And although I am a layman, I'm fairly well educated in copyright law, and I've never heard of it being expresses in quite that manner.) the photograph of the Eiffel Tower is in fact a copy of the Eiffel Tower in another medium. Thus even arguing for that implies the concept of 'copy'right.
This is entire different - This is asserting that, say, a new style of elevator designed around the elevator shaft of the Eiffel Tower is by the nature of being designed in this way, subject to whatever licensing the owners of the Eiffel Tower design choose to assert upon it . . . even should it never be used in the tower.
That's a fundamental shift; They make some noises in the article about why this logic wouldn't follow from this particular case, but to be honest I find those disclaimers shaky at best.
Given this interpretation at all, Someone with a lot of money is going to make a case "If that, why not this?", and the only good case I can see to stop 'this' is to say 'not that' in the first place.
Pug
Oh by all means let's get technical;
Rather than Roads I shall say "The sum total of the regulatory structures that codifies the building, inspection, and usage of - Roads, Bridges and other land based transport mechanisms".
Or . . . Not. You may take this as read for each other example - there is no Medicare program without Medicare regulations anymore than a computer program somehow exists without the underlying code being written, and trying to hide in technicalities to pretend otherwise is as crazy as saying it's impossible to write good open source code and then ignoring Linux as a counter-example because that's not code it's an operating system .
You may not like my counter-examples, but trying to pretend they aren't counter-examples because they are the results of regulations rather than the individual paragraphs and sub-paragraphs is just intellectually dishonest.
Pug
As a layman, this overreaches the scope of a license (ANY license) badly. That the theme in question is subject to the GPL code because it includes GPL codes I happily grant. But that's not what they are arguing for here.
If the kind of interactivity described here, that the fact that design of item B is dependent upon the design of item A, in and of itself makes it subject to the license of A as a derivative product . . . .
Think long and carefully about who is going to pick up that gun before you put it on the table. This reading of the power of a license is going to affect your rights to every scenario you build for a game, every mod, every bit of machanima. Taken only a hair past what they're positing here, it could very well affect the interpretation of the ownership of files produced by licensed software.
This interpretation of a License is a Microsoft Wet Dream.
Pug
Gee, I don't know . . .
Vaccination Programs
School Lunches
Schools, in general
The road you drive on
The Internet I'm typing on
Social Security
Medicare
Food Stamps
Pug
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Starglider
That is definitely true, but the video itself seems to have had any reference to "The Onion" stripped out.
I'm presuming you mean, besides the 'onion' motif replacing the standard C in C-Span?
Because I'm not particularly observant and I caught it.
Pug
I guess I don't even particularly like the 'entertainer' argument.
Glenn Beck is to 'Entertainment' what BP is to the Environment.
Pug
You know Slashdot has a sig field right? So why don't you use it? Everyone else is smart enough.
Okay, what the hell I'll bite. You mean the .sig field currently holding my, ah, signature? That .sig field?
or some other .sig field follies?
Pug
I'm all for strict ethical standards, and I won't claim to have gone through more than a half dozen of these PDF's checking them.
That said - the six or so files I looked at were exclusively issues about some fairly well established naming conventions, the repetition of which is about as unlikely as finding an elm street and sycamore street 'coincidentally' close to each other in both our home towns and calling it 'evidence' the city planner of one stole the plans of the city planner of the other.
I've heard people claim in several posts that "Well, if you looked at the PDF's that weren't cherry picked for ridiculousness ..." there are 'obvious' copying of code. That may be, but I'd like someone to actually link to a pdf with this obvious copying of code - burying the evidence in bullshit data is what you do when the evidence is against you and you *don't* want the other side to find it, not when it's in your favor and you're trying to make your case.
At a minimum, the fact that he has buried his 'evidence' in with other bs data doesn't make it very clear he knows what actual evidence of copying would look like.
Pug
Yeah, pretty much. My House is ~50/side, and that's just too damn close at sea. I'm not sure what we're photographing from here, but 65 feet from large industrial equipment at sea, unless someone's looking for a clear shot of BP executives sacrificing baby dolphins to their Cthulu'esque masters with the willing assistance of the Dunwich coast guard contingent, I just don't see the issue.
Pug
Notably, there are four tests four fair use . . . to be taken into account. Failing two of them (or indeed three of them) doesn't mean it's not fair use.
Given the strength of the political argument for commentary, in and of itself, well, yeah it *is* hard to fail with just that one test. That case in California where the candidate tried to claim his use of Don Henley songs was political commentary is the failure point - most things inside that limit have been allowed.
Of course, even giving it up, the Nevada Dems have a win: "How extreme are her political views? After 'cleaning up' the right wing propaganda from her website, she sued to keep her previous version secret and offline! Sharron Angle - She stands by her positions . . . if you only could find out what they were . . . ."
Pug
Unstoppable by people that go to a website and run software because someone cold called them over the phone and told them too ?
Just so I'm clear on this. What I need to tell my mother is, "If someone calls you on the phone and tells you to run software on your computer . . . don't do that."
Pug
No. 10: They support changing the law to reduce damages for copyright infringement.
Yes. As a policy, these people make an argument that the damages are too high. You argue the other way. An Argument about whether the fine for violating the speed limit is or is not to high is not an argument about whether or not there should be either a fine or a speed limit.
No. 9: They support the elimination of statutory damages for secondary copyright infringement.
Similarly an argument about whether car manufacturers should be fined for creating engines that can surpass the speed limit is not an argument about whether there should be a speed limit.
No. 8: They favor rolling back copyright extension; in some cases, radically.
By the same token, and argument about where the speed limit is too low or high, is not an argument about whether there should be a speed limit.
No. 7: They favor the elimination of the songwriter and publisher rights for server, cache and buffer copies.
Nice analogy, but hey, it falls down here. What you are saying, seriously, is that you won't be satisfied until you can fine people for automated processes that have nothing to do with the actual violation. You're saying this in public?
No. 6: They oppose efforts to obtain the identities of individuals engaged in massive copyright infringement.
Citation needed. I am not aware of any effort to block this. I am aware of efforts to hold people attempting this to a legal standard of accuracy.
If you confuse the two, you are incompetent.
No. 5: They support extreme versions of orphan works legislation.
Define 'Extreme' Please.
No. 4: They have filed legal briefs supporting anti-copyright positions of Grokster, Napster, LimeWire, Cablevision, Google, YouTube and Verizon.
They have filed briefs making valid arguments against extending copyright past the current state, which many reasonable people consider overreaching not only the law, but the constitutional provisions explicitly underlying the law. You get to file arguments. Then a judge decides.
That's the system, and you have used it regularly. I won't say you're not allowed to bitch about it, but decent people have the good sense not to throw tantrums in public over a system they have happily used.
No. 3: They oppose graduated-response protection for copyright owners.
The difference between "Destroy them" and "Destroy them, their livelihoods, their family, their employer, and get their little dog too" is, by some unreasonable souls, not considered 'graduated response'.
Learn what you look like from outside please.
No. 2: They oppose treaties that support copyright enforcement like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
ACTA does not 'support' enforcement. It supports enforcement is ways that many reasonable people find questionable. You have the option of defending those methods, you've chosen instead to indulge in erecting straw man arguments.
No. 1: They actually argue that illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic helps the economy and doesn't hurt songwriters.
More to the point, they present arguments that the assessments of that harm has been inflated far past any reasonable assessment of that harm would indicate, and that the attempts to inflate those assessments are conscious and dishonest.
In doing so, they have presented genuine numbers, how they arrive at them, and why they find your numbers unlikely. Your reaction has been flat denials, without successfully undermining their assumptions, the facts they present, the economic evaluations they use to assess the damage, finally resulting in your being unable to undermine their final assessments.
Their final assessment is that you are attempting to cause panic as if there were an ebola epidemic, when a reasonable assessment is that there is a cold or mild flu. Additionally your methods for preventing the cold from spreading would be to shut down numerous public options that do far more than simply allow the spread of
Without commenting about your masturbatory habits, the record on that is pretty clear. If you are unaware of that record it's willful ignorance of the sort I usually only see applied towards saying evolution or climate change aren't 'proven'.
Pug
My Dad could connect to the internet over ham radio sans dstar almost 20 years ago,
Just Sayin' - Pug
Good News - it's pretty.
Bad News - It'll take awhile.
Pug