At most, linking to illegal material should be an "accessory to the crime" situation with penalties much less than the person who actually committed the crime. If linking to illegal content is legally/penalty-wise the same as hosting illegal content, then where does it end? I link to a page which links to a page which hosts illegal content. The link to the illegal content is itself illegal so obviously my link to that link should be illegal as well. At the same rate as the illegal content, to boot. What if we put another link or two in between my link and the "points to illegal content link"? At what level would my link become non-infringing? Or maybe that's the plan. Every page that links to another page on the Internet could potentially be linking to illegal content and so is, itself, illegal.
Of course sustained focus is *checks incoming e-mail message... nah, just spam* possible all you need to do *need to remind myself to update my to do list... ah, I'll just do it now... ok, done* is cut back on distractions and *wonder if there are synonyms for distraction.... looks them up on Thesuarus.com... ooh, "divertissement" is nice... nah, I'll stick with distraction. Speaking of sticking, I wonder when the next episode of Spider-Man is coming on and what it will be about. Maybe I should check Wikipedia.*
Don't forget that they should be printed out, not electronic. This way, to properly sift through them, the trolls would need to re-type the whole thing back out. (Make sure to use a "creative" font to make scanning them difficult.)
The first rule in politics seems to be "Ignore where the rule comes from and just protest the people who passed or most recently used it." The second rule is don't actually do anything about it beyond using it as leverage to win an election.
This comes into play with various Senate/House rules as well as laws. Democrats will decry the Republicans for using some obscure Congressional "trick" to keep a bill from getting a vote. Instead of fixing the "trick", though, they'll whine and complain to their constituents who eat it up and vote for them/against the Republicans. When the Republicans are in power, however, the situation reverses with the Democrats using the Congressional "trick" and the Republicans complaining about how they are just obstructing the process.
Remember, neither party wants to "fix" the situation because they know that soon enough they'll be in power or will be out of power and they will want to use the various tricks that come with those positions.
I don't mind penalties exceeding damages and I understand that the element of prevention is important. However, the law as it stands now doesn't just attempt to prevent the crimes, but bankrupts individuals with excessive penalties. The Thomas verdict (after appeals adjusted the verdict) would up assigning a penalty of $9,250 per song shared. This is move than 9,000% of what the price of the songs are. If you shoplifted a CD, would you be fined $135,000?
The copyright infringement penalties were set when home piracy was limited (trading mix tapes) and commercial piracy (run off a hundred copies of a CD and sell them) was the main concern. There should be different levels of fines depending on whether you were doing this for profit or not. The "not for profit/home user" fines should be high enough to cause someone to think twice before sharing music without permission, but not so high that it would bankrupt people. For example, if the penalty was capped at 100x the market price of the item, then Thomas's verdict (on 24 songs) would have been $2,376, not $222,000. Two thousand dollars isn't cheap at all and can put a financial strain on someone, but it won't completely ruin them financially like $222,000 would.
I have no problem with penalties exceeding immediate damages. I have a problem when the penalties are orders of magnitude higher. For example, in the Thomas case, the final amount was $9,250 per song or over 9,300%. These amounts were initially set when "pirating music" meant that you were selling your copies on the street corner for profit or running a massive bootlegging operation. They didn't have home copying (with no profit motive) in mind. Joe Smith who shares out 10 songs should face a different set of penalties than Jim Doe who has copied ten CDs and is selling the copies on the street corner.
I have no problem with the legal system being used, if the legal system were fair and equitable. But the solution isn't to introduce a "Pay $35 to appeal an accusation" system. That's just using a DIFFERENT flawed system, not fixing the root cause.
The main problems with the legal system are that penalties completely outstrip harm and it is too costly to defend yourself. If I share out a music file and five people download it, I've caused about $5 worth of damage. (Assuming that each person who downloaded it would have purchased it. Perhaps not a fair assumption, but let's give it to them for a second.) However, were I sued, I could face a fine of between $750 and $150,000. They wouldn't be able to prove how many times it was downloaded, so that's the rate for ONE file shared.
Obviously, during any legal suit, they would threaten me with the $150,000 figure. Since this is much more money than I have, and in fact could bankrupt me, and since legal fees and time spent defending a case can be pricey, I would be pressured to accept any settlement they offer. No matter how one-sided it is. Such as their standard: "I will pay you $3,000, admit that I'm a dirty criminal, and never say a bad word about the RIAA ever again" agreement.
But surely they don't have proof, right? Unfortunately, they have enough high priced lawyers to turn one line from an automated script into a convincing sounding proof that I'm a horrible pirate that deserves the worst possible punishment. (Some judges have begun to reject their arguments, but not nearly enough.) And if the case is going my way? They can drop it and walk away without a potentially precedent setting verdict against them. Meanwhile, I'm left with legal fees to pay. Otherwise, they can drag the case on until I'm bankrupt to make an example of me. So even if I win the case, I lose (my house, car, savings, credit rating, etc).
And the laws that should be in place to protect me from overbearing situations like this? Written by politicians who are paid by the RIAA and similar organizations. Sometimes written BY those organizations and introduced by the politicians.
Fix the legal system and I would have no problem with lawsuits against those who infringe copyright. Of course, that would be hard to do. It's so much easier to introduce a "slightly less bad" system and spin it as pro-consumer.
Exactly. They might have a right to free speech, but they don't have a right to be heard. If I stand on a street corner passing out flyers to people, it isn't a violation of my freedom of speech if someone refuses to take a flyer just as it isn't a violation if they take it and toss it into the trash unread.
Thanks to this ruling, people are being forced to receive the phone books. Will they next be forced to read the phone books instead of tossing them outright? After all, those ads are useless if nobody reads them and if the RIAA/MPAA has taught us anything it is that the government should force the public to prop up failing business models no matter how idiotic.
There were a couple of articles over at Broadband Reports following the exploits of companies like Phorm and NebuAd which helped ISPs track the sites users' activities online. Here's one of them: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/102517
Phorm's Wikipedia page gives a brief run-down of their activities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
My problem with the Scroogled ad campaign is that they make it sound like there's an actual person at Google who is reading people's e-mails, taking notes about them, and then telling advertisers this information. "We'll put your add for hemorrhoid cream on Thomas Smith's screen. He recently e-mailed his brother, Reginald Smith, mentioning about pain he experienced while sitting down. Just to cover all bases, we'll also put your lower back balm ad there too."
Instead, Google's computers build up a profile about the person based on the content of their e-mail. When advertisers buy ads on keywords, those ads are targeted based on the user's profile. There's no human reading the e-mail and the advertisers don't know whose specific screen their ads are appearing on.
Microsoft is exaggerating the situation and inferring that it is worse than it actually is in order to scare people away from Google. (While likely doing the exact same thing that Google is doing.)
Many ISPs were caught using deep packet inspection services, not to check for viruses or spam, but to identify what their subscribers were looking at online so the information could be sold. Your ISP is doing it, Google is doing it, and I guarantee even Microsoft is doing it. If you move into the offline world, credit agencies do it too. They accumulate tons of data on you and then sell access to that data to credit card companies and other organizations. (Thus all those "You've Been Pre-Approved" offers you get in the mail.)
They do lock up. I know not because I tried taking a cart, but because I saw one just past the line once as I parked my car and decided to be nice and bring it back to the supermarket with me. The front wheels were locked until I got it back to the "correct" side of the line. Suddenly the wheels worked just fine.
Since any form of exercise does this then, by the Congressmen's reasoning, all Americans should stop exercising. To make sure we don't exercise, we should make physical movement difficult by, say, adding two hundred pounds to every person. McDonald's is now proud to announce the McPatriot. It's a five thousand calorie burger that all patriotic Americans should eat. By eating five of these a day, you should put on your two hundred pounds of patriotic, exercise-preventing fat very quickly. (Don't worry about the lack of competition. Burger King is coming out with an All-American Whopper. KFC has said that they were ahead of the curve with their Double Down sandwich.) As a bonus, all of this fat will mean that Americans won't live as long which should solve the Social Security crisis.
I don't even think it's a certain percentage split per person every day. Various factors can increase or decrease that productivity. Did you stay up too late the night before? You might knock 10% off your productive time. Are you having family problems? Perhaps you knock off 30%. (Or, sometimes, I try to "drown out" problems by hyper-focusing on work and actually increase my percentage.) Is the project that you are working on one that you are very excited about? Then you might raise your percentage by quite a bit. In the end, you might average a certain amount, but you will have days where you blow that amount away and days when you struggle to get any productive work done at all.
There's a difference in the degree and immediacy of negative consequences between the two.
If you spend an hour surfing porn and masturbating at work, even if you got all your work done, chances are you will be fired and perhaps even criminal charges will be brought against you. (Depending on if, say, a female co-worker enters your office as you are "distracted.")
If you spend an hour looking at funny cat videos, if you got your work done, you will likely get away without any major punishment. If a female co-worker enters while you are distracted with these videos, she will likely comment on how cute that cat is, not bring you up on charges.
Since the consequences of watching porn at work are both more immediate and more severe, it is a lot easier to find the willpower to avoid it than it is to find the willpower to avoid funny cat videos. Or, to put it another way, it is a lot easier to rationalize viewing that funny cat video at work than it is to rationalize watching porn at work.
In addition, both sides can try to spin the situation as "We tried our best to avoid this but THE_OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY wouldn't seriously negotiate with us. It's all the fault of THE_OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY."
When they price a service out of reach of the average consumer, of course few will take it. The same will be done if they ever offer ala carte TV. You will be given a "cable connection" for a base fee and then each channel will be a certain amount more. Of course, the way it will be priced, you will quickly top the bill for regular, bundled cable TV if you add even a handful of channels. Then, when few people take them up on this "deal", they will declare that there is no demand for it and kill the project.
William Shatner has over 1.3 million Twitter followers. If we assume that every vote was thanks to his plea for votes, then he had about a 13% response rate. Not too shabby.
(For the record, Leonard Nimoy has 450,000 Twitter followers.)
My main problem with using robots (or, more likely, remotely piloted-semi-autonomous war machines) on the battlefield is that it makes war too easy. Right now, drones aside, war is a costly matter. You need to put actual lives at risk and that acts as a check on what generals/politicians would want to use troops for. Want to invade North Korea and Iran to stop them from being a threat once and for all? Well, that's going to wind up costing tons of lives which is going to make it harder to sell to the public. (Lives on the other side count too, but - let's face it - they don't count as much because it is all too easy to dehumanize the enemy.)
However, let's assume millions of soldiers were seated at a "video game console" while their robotic avatars were out in the battlefield killing North Koreans or Iranians. Suddenly, the only cost is money spent on damaged avatars. Spending billions on war can eventually cause public sentiment to shift against the war, but not the same way as the prospect of thousands of body bags coming home does. I fear that, once war becomes a "real life video game", we'll become a much more war-mongering nation due to the reduced "cost" of war.
Hulu never stood a chance. It's run by the same people who want to protect their non-Internet-TV businesses so they weren't going to let it do anything innovative. Meaning, nothing that could jeopardize the classic-TV-business in any way. Anything that wouldn't interfere with their current TV business in any manner that any executive could envision? Hulu was free to do that.
In other words, Hulu's legs and arms were chained to a wall and then the executives wondered why Netflix was outrunning them.
Exactly. In an alternate universe, the music industry didn't sue Napster into submission (resulting in Gnutella and the P2P wave). Instead, the music industry bought Napster and turned it into the first major online music store. You were still allowed to share songs freely (under a certain bitrate - the equivalent of taping off the radio for free) but were also given the option to purchase reasonably priced DRM-free MP3s as well.*
* Hey, I said it was an alternate universe. This is one strange alternate universe. The movie industry there also is known for their fair and accurate accounting practices.
Slashdot Mirror
At most, linking to illegal material should be an "accessory to the crime" situation with penalties much less than the person who actually committed the crime. If linking to illegal content is legally/penalty-wise the same as hosting illegal content, then where does it end? I link to a page which links to a page which hosts illegal content. The link to the illegal content is itself illegal so obviously my link to that link should be illegal as well. At the same rate as the illegal content, to boot. What if we put another link or two in between my link and the "points to illegal content link"? At what level would my link become non-infringing? Or maybe that's the plan. Every page that links to another page on the Internet could potentially be linking to illegal content and so is, itself, illegal.
Of course sustained focus is *checks incoming e-mail message... nah, just spam* possible all you need to do *need to remind myself to update my to do list... ah, I'll just do it now... ok, done* is cut back on distractions and *wonder if there are synonyms for distraction.... looks them up on Thesuarus.com... ooh, "divertissement" is nice... nah, I'll stick with distraction. Speaking of sticking, I wonder when the next episode of Spider-Man is coming on and what it will be about. Maybe I should check Wikipedia.*
(5 hours later)
What was I posting about again?
Don't forget that they should be printed out, not electronic. This way, to properly sift through them, the trolls would need to re-type the whole thing back out. (Make sure to use a "creative" font to make scanning them difficult.)
Eastasia. And we've always been at war with them.
The first rule in politics seems to be "Ignore where the rule comes from and just protest the people who passed or most recently used it." The second rule is don't actually do anything about it beyond using it as leverage to win an election.
This comes into play with various Senate/House rules as well as laws. Democrats will decry the Republicans for using some obscure Congressional "trick" to keep a bill from getting a vote. Instead of fixing the "trick", though, they'll whine and complain to their constituents who eat it up and vote for them/against the Republicans. When the Republicans are in power, however, the situation reverses with the Democrats using the Congressional "trick" and the Republicans complaining about how they are just obstructing the process.
Remember, neither party wants to "fix" the situation because they know that soon enough they'll be in power or will be out of power and they will want to use the various tricks that come with those positions.
I don't mind penalties exceeding damages and I understand that the element of prevention is important. However, the law as it stands now doesn't just attempt to prevent the crimes, but bankrupts individuals with excessive penalties. The Thomas verdict (after appeals adjusted the verdict) would up assigning a penalty of $9,250 per song shared. This is move than 9,000% of what the price of the songs are. If you shoplifted a CD, would you be fined $135,000?
The copyright infringement penalties were set when home piracy was limited (trading mix tapes) and commercial piracy (run off a hundred copies of a CD and sell them) was the main concern. There should be different levels of fines depending on whether you were doing this for profit or not. The "not for profit/home user" fines should be high enough to cause someone to think twice before sharing music without permission, but not so high that it would bankrupt people. For example, if the penalty was capped at 100x the market price of the item, then Thomas's verdict (on 24 songs) would have been $2,376, not $222,000. Two thousand dollars isn't cheap at all and can put a financial strain on someone, but it won't completely ruin them financially like $222,000 would.
I have no problem with penalties exceeding immediate damages. I have a problem when the penalties are orders of magnitude higher. For example, in the Thomas case, the final amount was $9,250 per song or over 9,300%. These amounts were initially set when "pirating music" meant that you were selling your copies on the street corner for profit or running a massive bootlegging operation. They didn't have home copying (with no profit motive) in mind. Joe Smith who shares out 10 songs should face a different set of penalties than Jim Doe who has copied ten CDs and is selling the copies on the street corner.
I have no problem with the legal system being used, if the legal system were fair and equitable. But the solution isn't to introduce a "Pay $35 to appeal an accusation" system. That's just using a DIFFERENT flawed system, not fixing the root cause.
The main problems with the legal system are that penalties completely outstrip harm and it is too costly to defend yourself. If I share out a music file and five people download it, I've caused about $5 worth of damage. (Assuming that each person who downloaded it would have purchased it. Perhaps not a fair assumption, but let's give it to them for a second.) However, were I sued, I could face a fine of between $750 and $150,000. They wouldn't be able to prove how many times it was downloaded, so that's the rate for ONE file shared.
Obviously, during any legal suit, they would threaten me with the $150,000 figure. Since this is much more money than I have, and in fact could bankrupt me, and since legal fees and time spent defending a case can be pricey, I would be pressured to accept any settlement they offer. No matter how one-sided it is. Such as their standard: "I will pay you $3,000, admit that I'm a dirty criminal, and never say a bad word about the RIAA ever again" agreement.
But surely they don't have proof, right? Unfortunately, they have enough high priced lawyers to turn one line from an automated script into a convincing sounding proof that I'm a horrible pirate that deserves the worst possible punishment. (Some judges have begun to reject their arguments, but not nearly enough.) And if the case is going my way? They can drop it and walk away without a potentially precedent setting verdict against them. Meanwhile, I'm left with legal fees to pay. Otherwise, they can drag the case on until I'm bankrupt to make an example of me. So even if I win the case, I lose (my house, car, savings, credit rating, etc).
And the laws that should be in place to protect me from overbearing situations like this? Written by politicians who are paid by the RIAA and similar organizations. Sometimes written BY those organizations and introduced by the politicians.
Fix the legal system and I would have no problem with lawsuits against those who infringe copyright. Of course, that would be hard to do. It's so much easier to introduce a "slightly less bad" system and spin it as pro-consumer.
Exactly. They might have a right to free speech, but they don't have a right to be heard. If I stand on a street corner passing out flyers to people, it isn't a violation of my freedom of speech if someone refuses to take a flyer just as it isn't a violation if they take it and toss it into the trash unread.
Thanks to this ruling, people are being forced to receive the phone books. Will they next be forced to read the phone books instead of tossing them outright? After all, those ads are useless if nobody reads them and if the RIAA/MPAA has taught us anything it is that the government should force the public to prop up failing business models no matter how idiotic.
So did I and, sadly, it made sense.
"I'm contributing $Y to the political party I support."
"Oh yeah? Well, I support the opposite political party so I'm going to contribute $X where X > Y!"
There were a couple of articles over at Broadband Reports following the exploits of companies like Phorm and NebuAd which helped ISPs track the sites users' activities online. Here's one of them: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/102517
Phorm's Wikipedia page gives a brief run-down of their activities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
My problem with the Scroogled ad campaign is that they make it sound like there's an actual person at Google who is reading people's e-mails, taking notes about them, and then telling advertisers this information. "We'll put your add for hemorrhoid cream on Thomas Smith's screen. He recently e-mailed his brother, Reginald Smith, mentioning about pain he experienced while sitting down. Just to cover all bases, we'll also put your lower back balm ad there too."
Instead, Google's computers build up a profile about the person based on the content of their e-mail. When advertisers buy ads on keywords, those ads are targeted based on the user's profile. There's no human reading the e-mail and the advertisers don't know whose specific screen their ads are appearing on.
Microsoft is exaggerating the situation and inferring that it is worse than it actually is in order to scare people away from Google. (While likely doing the exact same thing that Google is doing.)
Many ISPs were caught using deep packet inspection services, not to check for viruses or spam, but to identify what their subscribers were looking at online so the information could be sold. Your ISP is doing it, Google is doing it, and I guarantee even Microsoft is doing it. If you move into the offline world, credit agencies do it too. They accumulate tons of data on you and then sell access to that data to credit card companies and other organizations. (Thus all those "You've Been Pre-Approved" offers you get in the mail.)
As well as everyone who commented on this article. Wait a second.... *run from the comments section screaming*
They do lock up. I know not because I tried taking a cart, but because I saw one just past the line once as I parked my car and decided to be nice and bring it back to the supermarket with me. The front wheels were locked until I got it back to the "correct" side of the line. Suddenly the wheels worked just fine.
Since any form of exercise does this then, by the Congressmen's reasoning, all Americans should stop exercising. To make sure we don't exercise, we should make physical movement difficult by, say, adding two hundred pounds to every person. McDonald's is now proud to announce the McPatriot. It's a five thousand calorie burger that all patriotic Americans should eat. By eating five of these a day, you should put on your two hundred pounds of patriotic, exercise-preventing fat very quickly. (Don't worry about the lack of competition. Burger King is coming out with an All-American Whopper. KFC has said that they were ahead of the curve with their Double Down sandwich.) As a bonus, all of this fat will mean that Americans won't live as long which should solve the Social Security crisis.
I don't even think it's a certain percentage split per person every day. Various factors can increase or decrease that productivity. Did you stay up too late the night before? You might knock 10% off your productive time. Are you having family problems? Perhaps you knock off 30%. (Or, sometimes, I try to "drown out" problems by hyper-focusing on work and actually increase my percentage.) Is the project that you are working on one that you are very excited about? Then you might raise your percentage by quite a bit. In the end, you might average a certain amount, but you will have days where you blow that amount away and days when you struggle to get any productive work done at all.
There's a difference in the degree and immediacy of negative consequences between the two.
If you spend an hour surfing porn and masturbating at work, even if you got all your work done, chances are you will be fired and perhaps even criminal charges will be brought against you. (Depending on if, say, a female co-worker enters your office as you are "distracted.")
If you spend an hour looking at funny cat videos, if you got your work done, you will likely get away without any major punishment. If a female co-worker enters while you are distracted with these videos, she will likely comment on how cute that cat is, not bring you up on charges.
Since the consequences of watching porn at work are both more immediate and more severe, it is a lot easier to find the willpower to avoid it than it is to find the willpower to avoid funny cat videos. Or, to put it another way, it is a lot easier to rationalize viewing that funny cat video at work than it is to rationalize watching porn at work.
In addition, both sides can try to spin the situation as "We tried our best to avoid this but THE_OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY wouldn't seriously negotiate with us. It's all the fault of THE_OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY."
Texas bans robots.
Robots' response: "Fine! I'll build my own state! With blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the state."
When they price a service out of reach of the average consumer, of course few will take it. The same will be done if they ever offer ala carte TV. You will be given a "cable connection" for a base fee and then each channel will be a certain amount more. Of course, the way it will be priced, you will quickly top the bill for regular, bundled cable TV if you add even a handful of channels. Then, when few people take them up on this "deal", they will declare that there is no demand for it and kill the project.
William Shatner has over 1.3 million Twitter followers. If we assume that every vote was thanks to his plea for votes, then he had about a 13% response rate. Not too shabby.
(For the record, Leonard Nimoy has 450,000 Twitter followers.)
My main problem with using robots (or, more likely, remotely piloted-semi-autonomous war machines) on the battlefield is that it makes war too easy. Right now, drones aside, war is a costly matter. You need to put actual lives at risk and that acts as a check on what generals/politicians would want to use troops for. Want to invade North Korea and Iran to stop them from being a threat once and for all? Well, that's going to wind up costing tons of lives which is going to make it harder to sell to the public. (Lives on the other side count too, but - let's face it - they don't count as much because it is all too easy to dehumanize the enemy.)
However, let's assume millions of soldiers were seated at a "video game console" while their robotic avatars were out in the battlefield killing North Koreans or Iranians. Suddenly, the only cost is money spent on damaged avatars. Spending billions on war can eventually cause public sentiment to shift against the war, but not the same way as the prospect of thousands of body bags coming home does. I fear that, once war becomes a "real life video game", we'll become a much more war-mongering nation due to the reduced "cost" of war.
Hulu never stood a chance. It's run by the same people who want to protect their non-Internet-TV businesses so they weren't going to let it do anything innovative. Meaning, nothing that could jeopardize the classic-TV-business in any way. Anything that wouldn't interfere with their current TV business in any manner that any executive could envision? Hulu was free to do that.
In other words, Hulu's legs and arms were chained to a wall and then the executives wondered why Netflix was outrunning them.
Exactly. In an alternate universe, the music industry didn't sue Napster into submission (resulting in Gnutella and the P2P wave). Instead, the music industry bought Napster and turned it into the first major online music store. You were still allowed to share songs freely (under a certain bitrate - the equivalent of taping off the radio for free) but were also given the option to purchase reasonably priced DRM-free MP3s as well.*
* Hey, I said it was an alternate universe. This is one strange alternate universe. The movie industry there also is known for their fair and accurate accounting practices.