Naturally capitalism will not cease to exist merely because most things are automated. There will be buying and selling of the things that remain scarce. But its importance will decline as costs do. And there are substitutes when physical scarcity becomes oppressive. The rare earth metals are only required to achieve higher efficiency. You can still make wind turbines without it, you would just need more of them. Ditto solar panels. And solar thermal doesn't require anything particularly exotic in the first place.
Nobody dies because they live in a high rise apartment instead of a ranch. If you like to live in the country, fine. Scrape together some money and buy some land. If someone can't afford that, and that's their biggest problem in life, I don't feel especially sorry for them.
If the money exists then somebody has it. When you replace someone's job with a machine, the former employee doesn't have the money, which means that somebody else does: The customer who pays lower prices, the employer who makes more profits, etc. Whoever ends up with it wants to get something for it, and what they can get is the labor of the person who is now unemployed.
So in the end, he accumulates more and more money while the guy who lost he's job has still lost his job.
Except that the owner doesn't take the money and stick it in his mattress. If he doesn't buy a widget then he buys a bond or a share of stock or whatever you like, and then whoever sold it has the money. That person might use the money to buy a different share of stock and it goes around again, until at some point it ends up in the hands of someone who spends it buying more gadgets.
The problem comes when someone earns some money and they do stick it in a mattress. Then they have the money instead of the gadget. But that happens totally regardless of how much automation there is: Whenever someone decides they would rather have the cash than the gadget (or the stock), someone else comes that much closer to losing their job. It doesn't matter if it was the owner or the employee who decided to do that, and it doesn't matter how much automation there is. Your argument is basically that the owner is more likely to stick the cash in his mattress than the employee, but there isn't any reason to think that. The owner might be more likely to invest it and the employee more likely to spend it, but investing it just moves the question of whether it promptly gets spent to the person who sold the investment, who again we have no reason to assume is more likely than the employee to stick the cash in a mattress instead of promptly spending or reinvesting it.
An increase in production assumes an increase in consumption. If you can make twice as many widgets with the same amount of labor then everybody gets (on average) twice as many widgets.
Naturally the things people want are not always just a larger number of the things they already have, but that doesn't really change anything. There is something that everybody wants that they don't already have. People take the money they saved not paying Joe to make widgets and they use it to pay Joe to do something else they want; since people always want stuff they don't have, there is always a job to do. At worst there will be a period of temporary unemployment where someone has to live on savings or government assistance while they learn how to do a job that people are hiring others to do.
Then consider it as a closed system. Is it better to pay a hundred people slave wages, or five people middle class wages? Does it change your answer if automation allows overall production to increase by a factor of 20, so that the same total number of people are employed, but now all of them can live a middle class lifestyle?
What they didn't realize, but should have been blindingly obvious, is that the company that hires those two people would, instead, just fire one of them and make the other guy do BOTH jobs in an 8 hour day. So instead of the 1950's era vision of a future utopia with people doing less work and enjoying their life more, we have half the people unemployed (and miserable with no money) and the other half over worked (and miserable with no time).
Not exactly. What you're missing is that because widgets now cost half as much to produce, there is now additional consumer (or producer) surplus. So the customer gets his widgets for $500 instead of $1000, or (if there is no competition) the business owner makes an extra $500 in profit per widget, and there is now an extra $500 in someone's pocket that they can buy stuff with. He can buy a gadget in addition to a widget when before he only got a widget. The guy who lost his job making widgets can get one making gadgets because there is increased demand as a result of the extra money in people's pockets.
The existing unemployment isn't a result of automation. It's a result of the mortgage crisis. People aren't spending money because they're trying to get out from underwater on their mortgages. The jobs are no longer needed to make the things they're no longer buying. If you want to fix the economy, you find a way to reduce consumer debt so that that money can go to buying stuff rather than paying interest.
I used to think that, but what do you think happens to capitalism when there is no more need for human labor? Why does "location location location" matter to real estate pricing if you have no job to commute to and free or near-free products are transported to wherever you happen to be, from anywhere in the world? It's not like there is a scarcity of land in the middle of nowhere, even assuming you couldn't just have a machine build an extra 10 floors onto each apartment building or condo in the city until there is space enough for everyone.
The real trouble seems to be energy, but I'm not sure it isn't still the same thing. If you can sufficiently automate the production of renewable energy facilities then you don't literally have an unlimited source of energy, but you certainly have enough that everyone could at least maintain their existing standard of living.
The risk isn't automation itself. The risk is despots in control of the machines. You're screwed if Skynet takes control and decides to kill all humans. You're screwed if Stalin takes control and decides to make a "worker's paradise" where everyone is "guaranteed" a job digging holes and filling them back in for a subsistence wage, while members of The Party eat caviar and fly around the world in space ships.
It's not so bad if you create a government that gives everyone food and shelter for free because it's so cheap and then lets them live their lives however they want as long as they don't commit violence.
You're assuming a closed system. As an American, would you rather see an automated factory in America that employs five Americans for decent wages, or a work camp in China that pays slave wages to a hundred Chinese?
The problem is that eventually you won't even be able to get a part time job - and then you won't even be able to afford the house in 5 years. It is one problem I believe that the free market can never solve.
Except that it's an inverse relationship: The more automation there is, the fewer jobs but also the cheaper things get.
The key is to make sure that the production of necessities falls to near-zero cost before the production of non-necessities. Fully-automate farming, freight, retailing and home construction first. Then people will still have jobs designing smart phones and curing diseases when it comes to the point that saving a half year's wages will give you food and shelter for the rest of your life. At that point "unemployment" becomes "I decided to become an artist because I know I'll never starve to death."
Surprisingly little, honestly. The government could continue funding itself in the interim either by issuing bonds or printing money. The uncertainty would cause the stock market to take a big hit, but once the new tax system is finalized it should mostly recover, assuming the new tax system isn't even more of an abomination than the existing one. And the short-term uncertainty would have the benefit of keeping bond interest rates down against increased number being issued.
The economy (as distinct from the stock market) would probably improve in the short term because people would have extra money to spend. The long term would naturally depend on what the replacement tax system looked like, but you can't go very wrong with something simple like a single rate VAT combined with a basic income of whatever size you deem necessary to achieve the desired level of progressivity. (And the basic income would have the added benefit of obsoleting a whole host separate government programs from social security to unemployment insurance to the minimum wage.)
The biggest downside I can see is that you would end up increasing the size of the debt by a little over a trillion dollars over the six months you aren't collecting any taxes.
And realistically, there is no good reason to stop collecting taxes under the existing system while you're working out the new one. You have the same problem in both cases, which is that nobody will agree on the contours of the new system. Any revenue-neutral modification to any tax system will have the result that some people lose out and others profit, and there is a known human psychological tendency to be more aggressive in preventing losses than in gaining profits, which creates a tendency to preserve the status quo even where a change would have net social benefits merely because the change isn't Pareto efficient.
I don't see how that's "backwards" at all. My point was that the interests of the top 20% or even the top 45% more closely resemble those of the top 1% than of the bottom 1%. Anybody can claim to be the 99% by drawing the lines that way and ignoring the lack of cohesiveness, but it doesn't get you anywhere. Solidarity doesn't help if you don't have an agenda, and neither does it help if the agenda you have is dictated by a minority of your own group who set out to benefit themselves at your expense.
That is incidentally how the middle class is always getting screwed over. The rich convince them that they're rich and should want things that benefit rich people. The poor convince them that they're not so rich and should want things that benefit poor people. And so the middle class ends up paying a large share of the taxes for benefits they're ineligible to receive based on means testing, meanwhile they end up in huge debt because the banks and other corporations are more than willing to go along with "tax cuts" that creates large incentives for consumer borrowing and large disincentives for saving without the benefit of international corporate tax shelters, and "corporate tax" that small business pays and big business doesn't.
The real problem is that they have no cohesive plan or unified ideals. Let's say you want to demand that Congress pass a law that takes a trillion dollars from the top 1% and gives to to everybody else. OK great, everyone's agreed. Wait, so who gets the money?
Like take the proposal to forgive student loan debt. Ask any academic and they'll tell you how ridiculous that is. You know what though? The end result is going to be to take money from the first quintile, then give it to the middle three quintiles and give nothing to the last. It's not really "progressive" at all. You've giving benefits to nurses and engineers and giving nothing to the sufferers of the McJob. But the middle class has taken the brunt of the government wealth redistribution apparatus for a lot of years. They pay taxes and then they're told they make too much money to qualify for benefits. So you know what? I think it's a great idea. Forgive all the student loans.
And if the middle class would stand as a cohesive unit, they could make themselves a lot better off than they are. Their interests are much the same as others like them. But it would require throwing the bottom 20-30% under the bus to a certain extent. And then they're not "the 99%" anymore. But what do you want? To have 99% of the votes and a giant stalemate that gives the win to the top 1%, or to have 55% of the votes and a check made out to you for $75,000?
People are confused because they think that corporations and governments are different animals. All they are is manifestations of the control.
The key is to see to it that you are among those that control the governments and corporations. That is what democracy is about: You put the general public in control of the biggest control organization, at least when it's working as described.
The thing people don't seem to get is that there is no 99%. There is the 1%, and the next 1%, and the 1% after that, etc. If you think the fifteenth 1% and the ninety ninth 1% have all the same interests you've got another thing coming.
If they have any shared interests at all, it's in taking what the first 1% have and then dividing it up between them. But all this sitting in the street talking about laws that will never pass isn't going to get you there. You're talking about taking from the powerful, you have to go the traditional route: You find out who they are, then you go and kill them and take their stuff. They do the same to you, they just call it the justice system.
And if you find that too extreme, fine. That's totally understandable -- nobody wants to risk life and limb just to get a few gold pieces. Taking on a SWAT teams so you can take their stuff and use it is nobody's idea of fun. But you don't overthrow the ruling class by sitting in the park.
Google has no right to decide whether it's a parody or not. That's up to the courts. If they receive a DMCA complaint, they have to take it down.
The idea of the safe harbor is that it gives them a set of things they can do to be pretty damn sure they'll have no liability. But it doesn't work the other way around: Just because you don't follow the requirements doesn't automatically make you liable. Google could tell Universal to suck it if they felt like standing up for the principle, and then they'd just have to make the fair use argument instead of relying on the safe harbor.
Of course, the incentives don't work out that way. The penalty for infringement is stupidly high so they don't want a mistake, and paying lawyers to evaluate the merit of each take-down notice is prohibitively expensive.
As I understand it, if someone complains about your work under the DMCA, the hosting provider is supposed to forward the complaint to you, and immediately pull your work. If you respond to the DMCA asserting you have the rights to the work (for whatever reason, including fair use), the host is supposed to put it back up, and let you and the complainant duke it out in court.
The trouble is that the counter-notice is a neon sign sent directly to Universal that says, "I'll use your video in my video whether you like it or not, if you don't like it you can sue me, here's my name and other info so you know where to send the lawsuit. Thanks."
You have to have some brass ones to actually send it without being a millionaire, because after that you can't stop them from filing the lawsuit, and MAFIAA members are not exactly known for their restraint. Being right doesn't get you out of paying a lawyer to prove it.
The purpose of case law is consistency. The legislature is continuously passing laws that contain ambiguities. When a court encounters one, it has to decide what the legislature meant, and from then on that is how that ambiguity is resolved. If you take it away then the ambiguities get resolved differently in each case based on the price of the lawyer's suit.
if YOU are paying the lawyer he is working FOR YOU. if the STATE pays the lawyer he is working for THE STATE, end of story.
That isn't really the problem. The lawyer isn't doing the state's bidding just because the state is signing his paycheck. The problem is that the state doesn't pay public defenders anything close to the prevailing wages for private defense attorneys, and consequently the public defender's office is most places is criminally understaffed. If they actually paid public defenders the prevailing wages in private practice and hired enough of them to handle the office's caseload, the situation would be completely different. But no politician wants to spend millions of tax dollars funding defense attorneys for "criminals" so we get the status quo.
There was an obscene antitrust case about this a couple of decades ago. The trial lawyers went to the government and complained about how unconscionably low the pay was for representing indigent criminal defendants. The government responded that they understood how bad the situation was and wanted to help, but it wasn't politically expedient, and it would help if the lawyers would collectively refuse to accept indigent defendants so that they would have the political cover necessary to pay them a little more. So they did. Then the FTC filed an antitrust suit against the lawyers (FTC v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association) because "group boycotts" like that are against the antitrust laws (and the lawyers weren't a union, which have special antitrust exemptions). And the FTC won.
Suffice it to say it is a problem with an obvious solution, but the solution is politically intractable.
That would be "A carpenter..." instead of "A good carpenter..."
No it wouldn't. Because the whole point is that "a good *insert profession* doesn't buy crappy tools or use them wrong." Which provides no opportunity for the 'good' carpenter to have to issue blame in the first instance.
By contrast a 'not good' carpenter who buys crap tools and uses them wrong is liable to be a jackass who blames the tools rather than himself.
I also find the overall US legal system somewhat contradictory here. In the US, free speech is often touted as some sort of self-evident virtue as codified in the First Amendment, and the default position seems to be to permit speaking first and consider the consequences later. This seems paradoxical in a legal system that also admits concepts such as defamation, intellectual property rights, and penalising those who shout "fire" in a crowded theatre.
With the exception of "intellectual property," the common theme is that you're allowed to say what you like as long as it isn't objectively false. You can shout "fire" in a crowded theater, but only if there is a fire.
More than that, the historical trend has been to avoid "prior restraints" -- what you do when you want to prohibit a falsehood is you don't stop someone from saying it, you just punish them afterwards. And then only after you have a trial, where they get to defend themselves, do research, present evidence, make constitutional arguments, appeal to a higher court, etc.
It also seems strange to protect the privacy of an anonymous individual who may be hiding behind that very anonymity shield to unfairly/illegally infringe on the privacy of another.
It isn't really about privacy. It's about "chilling effects." If you require information to be traceable to its origin then people will refrain from disclosing certain things. You lose politically unpopular viewpoints because the author doesn't want his friends, his boss, etc. to know that he holds them. He doesn't want to be on the enemies list of Richard Nixon, or of King George. More than that, when someone with few resources is disclosing the misconduct of someone dangerous, wealthy or in a position of power over that individual, attaching their identity to the information could put them in peril of violence, selective prosecution, frivolous litigation, losing their job, etc.
You can think of it along the same lines as copyright: We want people to disclose misconduct and air unpopular viewpoints, so the incentive we use is strong protection for anonymity. Because if we don't provide anonymity then that information will never see the light of day.
So you rightly point out the conflict: If someone anonymously posts an accusation, you shouldn't reveal their identity or take down the comment if they're telling the truth but you should if they aren't. You propose a temporary take down until the poster can present his case as a compromise, but it isn't really a compromise: It's giving the whole game to whoever issues a take-down. If the take-down is valid, the issuer wins -- nobody is going to challenge a valid take down because they know they'll lose, and even if they do, they will still ultimately lose. On the other hand, if the take-down is fraudulent, the only time it will get challenged is if the poster was only posting anonymously out of convenience and didn't actually care about their identity being attached to the post. A poster who actually needs the protection anonymity provides will be screwed, because they have to choose between sticking out their neck to keep their speech available and not speaking the truth in order to avoid unjust retaliation.
Which is really the problem with this:
Some of the remaining problems could be mitigated by having a system where a preliminary view could be taken by a suitable court within a matter of hours, without necessarily requiring a potentially at-risk party to divulge their identity to anyone but the court first.
In all the cases where anonymity is really doing anything for you, the poster is going to be skittish. If there is any chance of the court getting it wrong and disclosing their identity if they lose, or of a powerful adversary being able to influence the law or the judge, you're making it less likely that someone will stick their head up.
On top of that, having a judge on-call to make these sort of decisions is
Marketing only gets you so far. It's certainly an essential element of the equation, but for continued, increasing success you actually need to back it up with a good product.
You're right about that -- it's not like they're pulling a Microsoft and putting a pound of sugar on a shit sandwich so that they can advertise how sweet it is. Apple makes good products. (And they had better for what they cost.)
The thing is, other people make good products too. Sometimes better products. Apple is not special. There is nothing "revolutionary" about Siri either before Apple bought it or after. That doesn't make it useless or poorly executed, it just makes it overhyped.
Which comes back to the original point: A good carpenter never blames his tools. Because one way or another it's your own fault: Either you bought a crap tool, or you're doing it wrong.
To be fair, FTP is most decidedly designed around the sharing of files, and it (like The Pirate Bay) is completely agnostic as to whether they're 'illegal' or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Naturally capitalism will not cease to exist merely because most things are automated. There will be buying and selling of the things that remain scarce. But its importance will decline as costs do. And there are substitutes when physical scarcity becomes oppressive. The rare earth metals are only required to achieve higher efficiency. You can still make wind turbines without it, you would just need more of them. Ditto solar panels. And solar thermal doesn't require anything particularly exotic in the first place.
Nobody dies because they live in a high rise apartment instead of a ranch. If you like to live in the country, fine. Scrape together some money and buy some land. If someone can't afford that, and that's their biggest problem in life, I don't feel especially sorry for them.
If the money exists then somebody has it. When you replace someone's job with a machine, the former employee doesn't have the money, which means that somebody else does: The customer who pays lower prices, the employer who makes more profits, etc. Whoever ends up with it wants to get something for it, and what they can get is the labor of the person who is now unemployed.
So in the end, he accumulates more and more money while the guy who lost he's job has still lost his job.
Except that the owner doesn't take the money and stick it in his mattress. If he doesn't buy a widget then he buys a bond or a share of stock or whatever you like, and then whoever sold it has the money. That person might use the money to buy a different share of stock and it goes around again, until at some point it ends up in the hands of someone who spends it buying more gadgets.
The problem comes when someone earns some money and they do stick it in a mattress. Then they have the money instead of the gadget. But that happens totally regardless of how much automation there is: Whenever someone decides they would rather have the cash than the gadget (or the stock), someone else comes that much closer to losing their job. It doesn't matter if it was the owner or the employee who decided to do that, and it doesn't matter how much automation there is. Your argument is basically that the owner is more likely to stick the cash in his mattress than the employee, but there isn't any reason to think that. The owner might be more likely to invest it and the employee more likely to spend it, but investing it just moves the question of whether it promptly gets spent to the person who sold the investment, who again we have no reason to assume is more likely than the employee to stick the cash in a mattress instead of promptly spending or reinvesting it.
An increase in production assumes an increase in consumption. If you can make twice as many widgets with the same amount of labor then everybody gets (on average) twice as many widgets.
Naturally the things people want are not always just a larger number of the things they already have, but that doesn't really change anything. There is something that everybody wants that they don't already have. People take the money they saved not paying Joe to make widgets and they use it to pay Joe to do something else they want; since people always want stuff they don't have, there is always a job to do. At worst there will be a period of temporary unemployment where someone has to live on savings or government assistance while they learn how to do a job that people are hiring others to do.
Then consider it as a closed system. Is it better to pay a hundred people slave wages, or five people middle class wages? Does it change your answer if automation allows overall production to increase by a factor of 20, so that the same total number of people are employed, but now all of them can live a middle class lifestyle?
What they didn't realize, but should have been blindingly obvious, is that the company that hires those two people would, instead, just fire one of them and make the other guy do BOTH jobs in an 8 hour day. So instead of the 1950's era vision of a future utopia with people doing less work and enjoying their life more, we have half the people unemployed (and miserable with no money) and the other half over worked (and miserable with no time).
Not exactly. What you're missing is that because widgets now cost half as much to produce, there is now additional consumer (or producer) surplus. So the customer gets his widgets for $500 instead of $1000, or (if there is no competition) the business owner makes an extra $500 in profit per widget, and there is now an extra $500 in someone's pocket that they can buy stuff with. He can buy a gadget in addition to a widget when before he only got a widget. The guy who lost his job making widgets can get one making gadgets because there is increased demand as a result of the extra money in people's pockets.
The existing unemployment isn't a result of automation. It's a result of the mortgage crisis. People aren't spending money because they're trying to get out from underwater on their mortgages. The jobs are no longer needed to make the things they're no longer buying. If you want to fix the economy, you find a way to reduce consumer debt so that that money can go to buying stuff rather than paying interest.
I used to think that, but what do you think happens to capitalism when there is no more need for human labor? Why does "location location location" matter to real estate pricing if you have no job to commute to and free or near-free products are transported to wherever you happen to be, from anywhere in the world? It's not like there is a scarcity of land in the middle of nowhere, even assuming you couldn't just have a machine build an extra 10 floors onto each apartment building or condo in the city until there is space enough for everyone.
The real trouble seems to be energy, but I'm not sure it isn't still the same thing. If you can sufficiently automate the production of renewable energy facilities then you don't literally have an unlimited source of energy, but you certainly have enough that everyone could at least maintain their existing standard of living.
The risk isn't automation itself. The risk is despots in control of the machines. You're screwed if Skynet takes control and decides to kill all humans. You're screwed if Stalin takes control and decides to make a "worker's paradise" where everyone is "guaranteed" a job digging holes and filling them back in for a subsistence wage, while members of The Party eat caviar and fly around the world in space ships.
It's not so bad if you create a government that gives everyone food and shelter for free because it's so cheap and then lets them live their lives however they want as long as they don't commit violence.
You're assuming a closed system. As an American, would you rather see an automated factory in America that employs five Americans for decent wages, or a work camp in China that pays slave wages to a hundred Chinese?
The problem is that eventually you won't even be able to get a part time job - and then you won't even be able to afford the house in 5 years. It is one problem I believe that the free market can never solve.
Except that it's an inverse relationship: The more automation there is, the fewer jobs but also the cheaper things get.
The key is to make sure that the production of necessities falls to near-zero cost before the production of non-necessities. Fully-automate farming, freight, retailing and home construction first. Then people will still have jobs designing smart phones and curing diseases when it comes to the point that saving a half year's wages will give you food and shelter for the rest of your life. At that point "unemployment" becomes "I decided to become an artist because I know I'll never starve to death."
Surprisingly little, honestly. The government could continue funding itself in the interim either by issuing bonds or printing money. The uncertainty would cause the stock market to take a big hit, but once the new tax system is finalized it should mostly recover, assuming the new tax system isn't even more of an abomination than the existing one. And the short-term uncertainty would have the benefit of keeping bond interest rates down against increased number being issued.
The economy (as distinct from the stock market) would probably improve in the short term because people would have extra money to spend. The long term would naturally depend on what the replacement tax system looked like, but you can't go very wrong with something simple like a single rate VAT combined with a basic income of whatever size you deem necessary to achieve the desired level of progressivity. (And the basic income would have the added benefit of obsoleting a whole host separate government programs from social security to unemployment insurance to the minimum wage.)
The biggest downside I can see is that you would end up increasing the size of the debt by a little over a trillion dollars over the six months you aren't collecting any taxes.
And realistically, there is no good reason to stop collecting taxes under the existing system while you're working out the new one. You have the same problem in both cases, which is that nobody will agree on the contours of the new system. Any revenue-neutral modification to any tax system will have the result that some people lose out and others profit, and there is a known human psychological tendency to be more aggressive in preventing losses than in gaining profits, which creates a tendency to preserve the status quo even where a change would have net social benefits merely because the change isn't Pareto efficient.
I don't see how that's "backwards" at all. My point was that the interests of the top 20% or even the top 45% more closely resemble those of the top 1% than of the bottom 1%. Anybody can claim to be the 99% by drawing the lines that way and ignoring the lack of cohesiveness, but it doesn't get you anywhere. Solidarity doesn't help if you don't have an agenda, and neither does it help if the agenda you have is dictated by a minority of your own group who set out to benefit themselves at your expense.
That is incidentally how the middle class is always getting screwed over. The rich convince them that they're rich and should want things that benefit rich people. The poor convince them that they're not so rich and should want things that benefit poor people. And so the middle class ends up paying a large share of the taxes for benefits they're ineligible to receive based on means testing, meanwhile they end up in huge debt because the banks and other corporations are more than willing to go along with "tax cuts" that creates large incentives for consumer borrowing and large disincentives for saving without the benefit of international corporate tax shelters, and "corporate tax" that small business pays and big business doesn't.
The real problem is that they have no cohesive plan or unified ideals. Let's say you want to demand that Congress pass a law that takes a trillion dollars from the top 1% and gives to to everybody else. OK great, everyone's agreed. Wait, so who gets the money?
Like take the proposal to forgive student loan debt. Ask any academic and they'll tell you how ridiculous that is. You know what though? The end result is going to be to take money from the first quintile, then give it to the middle three quintiles and give nothing to the last. It's not really "progressive" at all. You've giving benefits to nurses and engineers and giving nothing to the sufferers of the McJob. But the middle class has taken the brunt of the government wealth redistribution apparatus for a lot of years. They pay taxes and then they're told they make too much money to qualify for benefits. So you know what? I think it's a great idea. Forgive all the student loans.
And if the middle class would stand as a cohesive unit, they could make themselves a lot better off than they are. Their interests are much the same as others like them. But it would require throwing the bottom 20-30% under the bus to a certain extent. And then they're not "the 99%" anymore. But what do you want? To have 99% of the votes and a giant stalemate that gives the win to the top 1%, or to have 55% of the votes and a check made out to you for $75,000?
People are confused because they think that corporations and governments are different animals. All they are is manifestations of the control.
The key is to see to it that you are among those that control the governments and corporations. That is what democracy is about: You put the general public in control of the biggest control organization, at least when it's working as described.
The thing people don't seem to get is that there is no 99%. There is the 1%, and the next 1%, and the 1% after that, etc. If you think the fifteenth 1% and the ninety ninth 1% have all the same interests you've got another thing coming.
If they have any shared interests at all, it's in taking what the first 1% have and then dividing it up between them. But all this sitting in the street talking about laws that will never pass isn't going to get you there. You're talking about taking from the powerful, you have to go the traditional route: You find out who they are, then you go and kill them and take their stuff. They do the same to you, they just call it the justice system.
And if you find that too extreme, fine. That's totally understandable -- nobody wants to risk life and limb just to get a few gold pieces. Taking on a SWAT teams so you can take their stuff and use it is nobody's idea of fun. But you don't overthrow the ruling class by sitting in the park.
Google has no right to decide whether it's a parody or not. That's up to the courts. If they receive a DMCA complaint, they have to take it down.
The idea of the safe harbor is that it gives them a set of things they can do to be pretty damn sure they'll have no liability. But it doesn't work the other way around: Just because you don't follow the requirements doesn't automatically make you liable. Google could tell Universal to suck it if they felt like standing up for the principle, and then they'd just have to make the fair use argument instead of relying on the safe harbor.
Of course, the incentives don't work out that way. The penalty for infringement is stupidly high so they don't want a mistake, and paying lawyers to evaluate the merit of each take-down notice is prohibitively expensive.
As I understand it, if someone complains about your work under the DMCA, the hosting provider is supposed to forward the complaint to you, and immediately pull your work. If you respond to the DMCA asserting you have the rights to the work (for whatever reason, including fair use), the host is supposed to put it back up, and let you and the complainant duke it out in court.
The trouble is that the counter-notice is a neon sign sent directly to Universal that says, "I'll use your video in my video whether you like it or not, if you don't like it you can sue me, here's my name and other info so you know where to send the lawsuit. Thanks."
You have to have some brass ones to actually send it without being a millionaire, because after that you can't stop them from filing the lawsuit, and MAFIAA members are not exactly known for their restraint. Being right doesn't get you out of paying a lawyer to prove it.
Indeed.
The purpose of case law is consistency. The legislature is continuously passing laws that contain ambiguities. When a court encounters one, it has to decide what the legislature meant, and from then on that is how that ambiguity is resolved. If you take it away then the ambiguities get resolved differently in each case based on the price of the lawyer's suit.
if YOU are paying the lawyer he is working FOR YOU. if the STATE pays the lawyer he is working for THE STATE, end of story.
That isn't really the problem. The lawyer isn't doing the state's bidding just because the state is signing his paycheck. The problem is that the state doesn't pay public defenders anything close to the prevailing wages for private defense attorneys, and consequently the public defender's office is most places is criminally understaffed. If they actually paid public defenders the prevailing wages in private practice and hired enough of them to handle the office's caseload, the situation would be completely different. But no politician wants to spend millions of tax dollars funding defense attorneys for "criminals" so we get the status quo.
There was an obscene antitrust case about this a couple of decades ago. The trial lawyers went to the government and complained about how unconscionably low the pay was for representing indigent criminal defendants. The government responded that they understood how bad the situation was and wanted to help, but it wasn't politically expedient, and it would help if the lawyers would collectively refuse to accept indigent defendants so that they would have the political cover necessary to pay them a little more. So they did. Then the FTC filed an antitrust suit against the lawyers (FTC v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association) because "group boycotts" like that are against the antitrust laws (and the lawyers weren't a union, which have special antitrust exemptions). And the FTC won.
Suffice it to say it is a problem with an obvious solution, but the solution is politically intractable.
Protocols in general are content-agnostic.
So are torrent sites. If you post an Ubuntu torrent on The Pirate Bay, they don't take it down because it isn't infringing.
That would be "A carpenter..." instead of "A good carpenter..."
No it wouldn't. Because the whole point is that "a good *insert profession* doesn't buy crappy tools or use them wrong." Which provides no opportunity for the 'good' carpenter to have to issue blame in the first instance.
By contrast a 'not good' carpenter who buys crap tools and uses them wrong is liable to be a jackass who blames the tools rather than himself.
I also find the overall US legal system somewhat contradictory here. In the US, free speech is often touted as some sort of self-evident virtue as codified in the First Amendment, and the default position seems to be to permit speaking first and consider the consequences later. This seems paradoxical in a legal system that also admits concepts such as defamation, intellectual property rights, and penalising those who shout "fire" in a crowded theatre.
With the exception of "intellectual property," the common theme is that you're allowed to say what you like as long as it isn't objectively false. You can shout "fire" in a crowded theater, but only if there is a fire.
More than that, the historical trend has been to avoid "prior restraints" -- what you do when you want to prohibit a falsehood is you don't stop someone from saying it, you just punish them afterwards. And then only after you have a trial, where they get to defend themselves, do research, present evidence, make constitutional arguments, appeal to a higher court, etc.
It also seems strange to protect the privacy of an anonymous individual who may be hiding behind that very anonymity shield to unfairly/illegally infringe on the privacy of another.
It isn't really about privacy. It's about "chilling effects." If you require information to be traceable to its origin then people will refrain from disclosing certain things. You lose politically unpopular viewpoints because the author doesn't want his friends, his boss, etc. to know that he holds them. He doesn't want to be on the enemies list of Richard Nixon, or of King George. More than that, when someone with few resources is disclosing the misconduct of someone dangerous, wealthy or in a position of power over that individual, attaching their identity to the information could put them in peril of violence, selective prosecution, frivolous litigation, losing their job, etc.
You can think of it along the same lines as copyright: We want people to disclose misconduct and air unpopular viewpoints, so the incentive we use is strong protection for anonymity. Because if we don't provide anonymity then that information will never see the light of day.
So you rightly point out the conflict: If someone anonymously posts an accusation, you shouldn't reveal their identity or take down the comment if they're telling the truth but you should if they aren't. You propose a temporary take down until the poster can present his case as a compromise, but it isn't really a compromise: It's giving the whole game to whoever issues a take-down. If the take-down is valid, the issuer wins -- nobody is going to challenge a valid take down because they know they'll lose, and even if they do, they will still ultimately lose. On the other hand, if the take-down is fraudulent, the only time it will get challenged is if the poster was only posting anonymously out of convenience and didn't actually care about their identity being attached to the post. A poster who actually needs the protection anonymity provides will be screwed, because they have to choose between sticking out their neck to keep their speech available and not speaking the truth in order to avoid unjust retaliation.
Which is really the problem with this:
Some of the remaining problems could be mitigated by having a system where a preliminary view could be taken by a suitable court within a matter of hours, without necessarily requiring a potentially at-risk party to divulge their identity to anyone but the court first.
In all the cases where anonymity is really doing anything for you, the poster is going to be skittish. If there is any chance of the court getting it wrong and disclosing their identity if they lose, or of a powerful adversary being able to influence the law or the judge, you're making it less likely that someone will stick their head up.
On top of that, having a judge on-call to make these sort of decisions is
Marketing only gets you so far. It's certainly an essential element of the equation, but for continued, increasing success you actually need to back it up with a good product.
You're right about that -- it's not like they're pulling a Microsoft and putting a pound of sugar on a shit sandwich so that they can advertise how sweet it is. Apple makes good products. (And they had better for what they cost.)
The thing is, other people make good products too. Sometimes better products. Apple is not special. There is nothing "revolutionary" about Siri either before Apple bought it or after. That doesn't make it useless or poorly executed, it just makes it overhyped.
Which comes back to the original point: A good carpenter never blames his tools. Because one way or another it's your own fault: Either you bought a crap tool, or you're doing it wrong.
To be fair, FTP is most decidedly designed around the sharing of files, and it (like The Pirate Bay) is completely agnostic as to whether they're 'illegal' or not.