Let me put an alternative perspective to the AC e-mail security guy who wrote the parent post.
I am the IT officer for a local non-profit organisation, with a few thousand members. We run a mailing list, to provide announcements to those members. The list is opt-in (double opt-in to verify all addresses, in fact) and moderated, and everyone on it has explicitly asked to be there.
Our service provider has recently sent a notice to their announcements list (to which I subscribe) indicating that certain major names, including Hotmail and AOL, are no longer accepting mail from our provider. They don't even bounce it properly; they silently drop it. This is all done in the name of fighting spam, so they claim, because our service provider forwards a lot of spam onto them. (Our service provider forwards any mail received at a paying customer's address to any forwarding address requested by that customer, in fact.) The content of any given mail, and the specific people it's going from and to, are irrelevant to this blanket ban.
As a consequence of this, we now find that some of our members who use e-mail accounts at those hosts are not receiving mails they have explicitly asked for. Neither we, nor our members, nor our service provider is doing anything unreasonable. The only reason this system is broken is because of an arbitrary decision by a big name provider to throw their weight around, by blocking all incoming mail from a small provider (who are not the only ones being hit by this problem -- far from it, by the sounds of things), even if this goes against the explicit wishes of one of their own paying customers.
Now, you can rationalise that decision all you like as a big IT honcho, but the simple fact is that these organisations are screwing their own customers, and ultimately undermining the entire working of the Internet e-mail system, by being incompetent and not playing nice with others. Sooner or later, people are going to start missing really important messages as opposed to just convenient or entertaining ones, and those providers are going to learn a harsh lesson. I imagine a few small providers will start bringing anti-competition lawsuits if the big names carry on down their current road as well. But in the meantime, your approach sucks for your customers, it sucks for people working with your customers, and it sucks for other service providers working with you. It is an indefensible attack on the openness of the Internet, and you deserve to be shot down for it.
You could mod me down if you want, Mr AC, but you'd still be wrong, at least in my jurisdiction. As someone who helps organise a lot of dancing-related events, I'm very familiar with the rules and regs in this area, and I guarantee you that recording a performance (including complete sound-track) other than for personal use can get you in trouble. As it happens, it's rarely worth Big Media's time to chase you, and it's normally the venues (whose licenses with the various umbrella organisations could be under threat as a consequence of the infringement) who get worried, but that doesn't change my point.
I'd like to see some serious commentary on this, and not just the assumption that youtube voilates copyright. I spend probably and hour a week watching stuff on youtube, and I'm sure over 95% of what I see does NOT violate any copyrights.
Whereas at least half of the stuff I've seen on YouTube and the like blatantly violates copyright (for example, because it's a complete copy of a special interest DVD), and a lot more is infringing on technicalities (for example, because it's video from a dance competition, but all the music in the background isn't licensed for redistribution).
Pretending that "fair use" is some sort of silver bullet in copyrightland is just wishful thinking. YouTube's entire business model revolves around people coming to see their content, and a great deal of their most popular content is clearly infringing. It's a matter of time before (a) they take draconian steps to remove it all (and dramatically slip down the list of popular web sites), or (b) they get seriously spanked in court.
And yes, reproducing a complete five-minute segment from a TV show "just because" is clearly a copyright violation. It's the difference between using a 30 second excerpt from each of The Daily Show and CNN to illustrate a write-up of the recent "Daily Show news is as good as the news channels" discussion, and copying a whole segment from either source because you found it informative and wanted to share it.
i expect google will force these companies to deal with it and accept the internet isn't gonna go away (and share some ad revenue)
That's one possible outcome. Another is that Google, already treading a very fine line with several of its existing offerings, has just taken a step too far and is about to be slapped down hard.
If I were a betting man, I would actually bet against Google on this one. Admittedly, that is partly because I don't like the way they've started taking liberties with others' work and assuming something is OK as long as they're the guys doing it. But mainly, it's objective analysis: Google have some good products, but they have little that's unique, and none of their big revenue generators has a great barrier to entry. They're currently target number one for several other big tech firms, and fighting on all fronts, and I'm sure Sun Tzu had something to say about the wisdom of that approach.
If they only took excerpts and made them searchable, then they would likely be well within fair use and the authors and publishers couldn't touch them.
I'm not so sure. Would/should providing relevant excerpts from, say, a dictionary or encyclopedia constitute fair use, in your opinion?
After all, the series started with tens of billions of rather meaningless deaths.
Not at all; those deaths were an essential part of the storyline. And of course, they did have meaning to the side causing them. The one I mentioned didn't really add anything. It didn't lead to any new angles on the storyline. It didn't trigger an essential subplot. It didn't fundamentally shift a balance of power in a way that would matter later in the series. It just happened, because.
As I've pointed out before, killing off good characters "just because" doesn't make for "gritty realism", it just damages the storytelling. If you go too far with that idea, you get Spooks, a series that started with a lot of promise but shafted so many characters in pointless and unnecessary ways that no-one I know watches it any more. You'd have a greater life expectancy as the guest crew member with the red shirt or the agent in charge of the CTU when Jack Bauer's in town!
No we don't, pretty much every agrees it was mismanaged by Fox (plus, while great, it wasn't the most mainstream of shows). It wasn't because of people downloading it.
That may be true, or it may not. It doesn't really matter, because that's not what the studio execs looking at funding the next Firefly (or deciding whether to commission a fourth series of BSG) will see.
In fact, quite the opposite; the movie got made largely because so many people bought the DVDs.
Right. So linking to illegal torrents instead of the DVD box sets' pages on $ONLINE_VENDOR isn't exactly promoting the future prospects of BSG, is it?
Lexx was just strange, from the one episode I ever saw of it. Of course, that turned out to be the last episode, and it was 3am, and I was a bit drunk and a lot tired.
I agree that BSG touches on a lot of deep issues, and generally does it well. Last time we had a discussion about it around here (before the season two box set was out) I said that I thought the series was good, but suffered from always being so negative, with hardly any lucky breaks, or happy endings, or even hope. Someone suggested that this changed somewhat in the middle of season two, in the mid-season extended episode.
While I've now seen the box set and understand the point that reply was making, I still think it's a shame the series is so "heavy" all the time. Sure, there have been flashes of hope: the first time the count goes up in series one, for example, and a couple of the big plot twists I won't spoil in series two. But after watching the whole season within a few days (I do that with new DVD box sets...), my overwhelming emotions are still very negative. I can't think of a single character who really has a happy "story so far" at this stage, and while some of the fear and hardship and loss is integral to the plot, some of it (I'm thinking of one recurring character's death in particular here) seemed to be entirely without purpose, and to break one of the few genuinely positive things about the storyline.
There are no clearly defined goodies and baddies.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that:
Cylon: No harm done.
Adama: No harm! You completely annihilated our race, destroyed our civilization.
I think it's pretty clear who the bad guys are! They're just not cookie-cutter bad guys who are "miscellaneously evil" (as the Wraith from SG: Atlantis were once described around here). And yes, some of them do have silly masks, though I'm more of a Tricia Helfer fan myself.;-)
Yeah, great move. We finally get another great sci-fi show, and you want to kill it by encouraging people to download it illegally rather than spending the modest asking price to buy a DVD set that can be had from Amazon within 24 hours.
And we wonder why shows like Firefly got canned. Sheesh.
Without giving spoilers for anyone who didn't see Serenity, I think there are several pretty clear reasons that it couldn't carry on, at least not with anything like the same atmosphere as the original Firefly series.
The maker of a tool is not responsible for misuse of that tool
That's not always true, either morally or legally. Technology is neutral by default, but building and supplying a tool that you can reasonably know will be used to commit illegal acts is dodgy. In my hypothetical scenario, where the condition is that a work has leaked, then Google would be in exactly that position.
On the other hand, should you be able to prove that Google Books is negatively effecting the market for these books because they are leaking, then Google may well lose the right to republish excerpts in this way, under the fair use doctrine.
Exactly. That's all I was saying, really.
Of course, there are two kinds of copy being made here: Google's own, internal copy of the complete work for their index, and then any excerpts (or leaked full works) that Google supplies to others. Both of these are infringing by default, and the onus is on Google to demonstrate that they should qualify for an exemption such as fair use.
Right now, Google could make a reasonable case that the fair use criteria will be satisfied. (That's not to say their opponents can't make a reasonable case the other way: are Google really claiming that they have perfect security in today's IT world, Your Honour?) However, if anything ever leaked, it would suddenly become very difficult for Google to justify either form of copying under fair use rules, since one is there to facilitate the other, and the other would demonstrably be damaging.
I'll accept your argument, as long as you get Google to agree that should any digitized copy of a work in their system leak so that more than small excerpts are available on-line, Google will immediately (a) compensate the copyright holder of that work at the same high rate of punitive damages that other copyright violations such as through P2P fall under in the US, and (b) shut down their system, since any argument about being fair use because is does no harm to copyright holders will have been completely annihilated. Fair?
Common practice can become a part of law through judicial rulings,
This behaviour boils down to three businesses wanting to make more money, ignoring decades or centuries of background to the copyright principle that is even recognised explicitly in the Constitution of the US, in statute law in many other jurisdictions, and under international treaties. I don't think "everyone's doing it" is going to hold a whole lot of weight with any sane court here, no matter how expensive the legal teams.
and in this case there is arguably a good reason for this database (seeing as how a database suh as this does not exist in the public realm, nor is there any real impetus to create one)
Surely if there were no real impetus to create one, then either Google wouldn't be doing it, or public libraries wouldn't exist? However, we (the people of many countries) have explicitly decided through our legislative processes to recognise the concept of copyright, with limited exemptions. Public libraries may qualify as one such exemption. I'm not sure why a private, profit-making company should expect the same treatment, nor that what Google is doing is at all equivalent in its practical effects (particularly if it goes wrong) to what public libraries do with books.
If they can show something like selective enforcement [...] Then the suit would either need to be dropped or expanded to include MS, Yahoo and all the rest.
How? You're going to force copyright holders to sue more than one infringing party at once? Surely going after one case to get the precedent is the oldest one in the book?
It's now going to US DHS, who are going to "facilitate" passing the data on to other security agencies, apparently. I'm sure we can all work out where this one is going to end.
And yes, it does quite flagrantly violate the spirit of EU data protection laws, even if they've found a technicality to work around the letter. The correct response was to deny the US any information that isn't clearly necessary to allow them to take reasonable security precautions, and if the US threatened to deny landing rights, to call their bluff, loudly and publicly.
I do appreciate that you were writing figuratively. In effect, so was I.
In any case, I challenge your view of the "inherent" state of the world. Many things that are natural in a primitive, unconstrained world are considered inappropriate in a modern society that establishes rules and conventions for the collective good. An example I often give in these discussions is that if you have a rock, the natural state of things is that if I am bigger and stronger than you, then I can take it and it is now "my" rock. There is no natural concept of property of any kind, physical, intellectual or otherwise. Property is merely a convention, codified in law.
Similarly, the natural state of things is that people with valuable information will want to keep it as securely as they can. DRM, hardware-secured "trusted" platforms and the like are the natural recourse when faced with quick, cheap mass distribution technologies. Do we really want an "arms race"?
I also find your economic argument flawed, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere. Essentially, your single-trading model is not equivalent to today's copyright-enabled mass distribution with low costs for any individual recipient. Look at it this way: if your $x is not enough benefit to justify my spending time producing a work, then no-one gets any benefit. On the other hand, perhaps $y (which may be less than $x) from each of N people, producing N*$y (which would be greater than $x), would be enough, and then N people could benefit from it, not just you.
We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web
Speak for yourself.
Personally, I'm not at all convinced. I value my own privacy. Perhaps more objectively, I recognise that no-one is perfect, and if you dig hard enough you can turn up dirt on anyone. I also recognise that most people in the world are basically good, decent people, and I would prefer to respect a reasonable level of privacy and live in a world where we saw the good in people. You can't do that in a world where everyone's whole life story is computerised, often against their will and without their knowledge, and the media delight in data mining on anyone of any conceivable interest (or at least, worth a few more sales).
Now, governments on the other hand, they should have no right to privacy; on the contrary, IMHO they should be required to justify any attempt to withhold information from the public to an independent authority. Businesses should also be subject to much stricter openness requirements than individuals.
But there's a difference between a key that expires, at some time that is known and accepted from the start, and a key that can be arbitrarily revoked under unspecified circumstances at any time. One is a known quantity, and you buy it if it's worth it to you. The other is a liability, and I can't believe many sysadmins are going to accept that kind of risk given Microsoft's poor track record of getting activation technologies right.
Tesco probably do get something like one pound in eight of all retail spending.
Yes, that is where the figure comes from. IIRC, people were getting this right when the figure first started making it into articles, but Chinese whispers appear to have corrupted the definition somewhere along the line.
I submitted the same story (some time ago! <mumble> <mutter>) and suggested that now would be a good time to short their stock. I'm just not sure which of Tesco and Microsoft/Symantec/etc. "their" refers to here...
Slashdot Mirror
Let me put an alternative perspective to the AC e-mail security guy who wrote the parent post.
I am the IT officer for a local non-profit organisation, with a few thousand members. We run a mailing list, to provide announcements to those members. The list is opt-in (double opt-in to verify all addresses, in fact) and moderated, and everyone on it has explicitly asked to be there.
Our service provider has recently sent a notice to their announcements list (to which I subscribe) indicating that certain major names, including Hotmail and AOL, are no longer accepting mail from our provider. They don't even bounce it properly; they silently drop it. This is all done in the name of fighting spam, so they claim, because our service provider forwards a lot of spam onto them. (Our service provider forwards any mail received at a paying customer's address to any forwarding address requested by that customer, in fact.) The content of any given mail, and the specific people it's going from and to, are irrelevant to this blanket ban.
As a consequence of this, we now find that some of our members who use e-mail accounts at those hosts are not receiving mails they have explicitly asked for. Neither we, nor our members, nor our service provider is doing anything unreasonable. The only reason this system is broken is because of an arbitrary decision by a big name provider to throw their weight around, by blocking all incoming mail from a small provider (who are not the only ones being hit by this problem -- far from it, by the sounds of things), even if this goes against the explicit wishes of one of their own paying customers.
Now, you can rationalise that decision all you like as a big IT honcho, but the simple fact is that these organisations are screwing their own customers, and ultimately undermining the entire working of the Internet e-mail system, by being incompetent and not playing nice with others. Sooner or later, people are going to start missing really important messages as opposed to just convenient or entertaining ones, and those providers are going to learn a harsh lesson. I imagine a few small providers will start bringing anti-competition lawsuits if the big names carry on down their current road as well. But in the meantime, your approach sucks for your customers, it sucks for people working with your customers, and it sucks for other service providers working with you. It is an indefensible attack on the openness of the Internet, and you deserve to be shot down for it.
In your country, perhaps. We don't have the DMCA here (though the EUCD is almost as bad on several counts).
You could mod me down if you want, Mr AC, but you'd still be wrong, at least in my jurisdiction. As someone who helps organise a lot of dancing-related events, I'm very familiar with the rules and regs in this area, and I guarantee you that recording a performance (including complete sound-track) other than for personal use can get you in trouble. As it happens, it's rarely worth Big Media's time to chase you, and it's normally the venues (whose licenses with the various umbrella organisations could be under threat as a consequence of the infringement) who get worried, but that doesn't change my point.
Whereas at least half of the stuff I've seen on YouTube and the like blatantly violates copyright (for example, because it's a complete copy of a special interest DVD), and a lot more is infringing on technicalities (for example, because it's video from a dance competition, but all the music in the background isn't licensed for redistribution).
Pretending that "fair use" is some sort of silver bullet in copyrightland is just wishful thinking. YouTube's entire business model revolves around people coming to see their content, and a great deal of their most popular content is clearly infringing. It's a matter of time before (a) they take draconian steps to remove it all (and dramatically slip down the list of popular web sites), or (b) they get seriously spanked in court.
And yes, reproducing a complete five-minute segment from a TV show "just because" is clearly a copyright violation. It's the difference between using a 30 second excerpt from each of The Daily Show and CNN to illustrate a write-up of the recent "Daily Show news is as good as the news channels" discussion, and copying a whole segment from either source because you found it informative and wanted to share it.
Blockquoth the AC:
That's one possible outcome. Another is that Google, already treading a very fine line with several of its existing offerings, has just taken a step too far and is about to be slapped down hard.
If I were a betting man, I would actually bet against Google on this one. Admittedly, that is partly because I don't like the way they've started taking liberties with others' work and assuming something is OK as long as they're the guys doing it. But mainly, it's objective analysis: Google have some good products, but they have little that's unique, and none of their big revenue generators has a great barrier to entry. They're currently target number one for several other big tech firms, and fighting on all fronts, and I'm sure Sun Tzu had something to say about the wisdom of that approach.
I'm not so sure. Would/should providing relevant excerpts from, say, a dictionary or encyclopedia constitute fair use, in your opinion?
Hmm... Doesn't seem so bad...
;-)
Not at all; those deaths were an essential part of the storyline. And of course, they did have meaning to the side causing them. The one I mentioned didn't really add anything. It didn't lead to any new angles on the storyline. It didn't trigger an essential subplot. It didn't fundamentally shift a balance of power in a way that would matter later in the series. It just happened, because.
As I've pointed out before, killing off good characters "just because" doesn't make for "gritty realism", it just damages the storytelling. If you go too far with that idea, you get Spooks, a series that started with a lot of promise but shafted so many characters in pointless and unnecessary ways that no-one I know watches it any more. You'd have a greater life expectancy as the guest crew member with the red shirt or the agent in charge of the CTU when Jack Bauer's in town!
That may be true, or it may not. It doesn't really matter, because that's not what the studio execs looking at funding the next Firefly (or deciding whether to commission a fourth series of BSG) will see.
Right. So linking to illegal torrents instead of the DVD box sets' pages on $ONLINE_VENDOR isn't exactly promoting the future prospects of BSG, is it?
Lexx was just strange, from the one episode I ever saw of it. Of course, that turned out to be the last episode, and it was 3am, and I was a bit drunk and a lot tired.
Oh, you're gonna go to the special hell for bringing her up...
I agree that BSG touches on a lot of deep issues, and generally does it well. Last time we had a discussion about it around here (before the season two box set was out) I said that I thought the series was good, but suffered from always being so negative, with hardly any lucky breaks, or happy endings, or even hope. Someone suggested that this changed somewhat in the middle of season two, in the mid-season extended episode.
While I've now seen the box set and understand the point that reply was making, I still think it's a shame the series is so "heavy" all the time. Sure, there have been flashes of hope: the first time the count goes up in series one, for example, and a couple of the big plot twists I won't spoil in series two. But after watching the whole season within a few days (I do that with new DVD box sets...), my overwhelming emotions are still very negative. I can't think of a single character who really has a happy "story so far" at this stage, and while some of the fear and hardship and loss is integral to the plot, some of it (I'm thinking of one recurring character's death in particular here) seemed to be entirely without purpose, and to break one of the few genuinely positive things about the storyline.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that:
I think it's pretty clear who the bad guys are! They're just not cookie-cutter bad guys who are "miscellaneously evil" (as the Wraith from SG: Atlantis were once described around here). And yes, some of them do have silly masks, though I'm more of a Tricia Helfer fan myself. ;-)
Yeah, great move. We finally get another great sci-fi show, and you want to kill it by encouraging people to download it illegally rather than spending the modest asking price to buy a DVD set that can be had from Amazon within 24 hours.
And we wonder why shows like Firefly got canned. Sheesh.
Without giving spoilers for anyone who didn't see Serenity, I think there are several pretty clear reasons that it couldn't carry on, at least not with anything like the same atmosphere as the original Firefly series.
That's not always true, either morally or legally. Technology is neutral by default, but building and supplying a tool that you can reasonably know will be used to commit illegal acts is dodgy. In my hypothetical scenario, where the condition is that a work has leaked, then Google would be in exactly that position.
Exactly. That's all I was saying, really.
Of course, there are two kinds of copy being made here: Google's own, internal copy of the complete work for their index, and then any excerpts (or leaked full works) that Google supplies to others. Both of these are infringing by default, and the onus is on Google to demonstrate that they should qualify for an exemption such as fair use.
Right now, Google could make a reasonable case that the fair use criteria will be satisfied. (That's not to say their opponents can't make a reasonable case the other way: are Google really claiming that they have perfect security in today's IT world, Your Honour?) However, if anything ever leaked, it would suddenly become very difficult for Google to justify either form of copying under fair use rules, since one is there to facilitate the other, and the other would demonstrably be damaging.
I'll accept your argument, as long as you get Google to agree that should any digitized copy of a work in their system leak so that more than small excerpts are available on-line, Google will immediately (a) compensate the copyright holder of that work at the same high rate of punitive damages that other copyright violations such as through P2P fall under in the US, and (b) shut down their system, since any argument about being fair use because is does no harm to copyright holders will have been completely annihilated. Fair?
Or you could just not connect your entire Windows network to the Internet without putting adequate, Windows-independent safeguards in place...
This behaviour boils down to three businesses wanting to make more money, ignoring decades or centuries of background to the copyright principle that is even recognised explicitly in the Constitution of the US, in statute law in many other jurisdictions, and under international treaties. I don't think "everyone's doing it" is going to hold a whole lot of weight with any sane court here, no matter how expensive the legal teams.
Surely if there were no real impetus to create one, then either Google wouldn't be doing it, or public libraries wouldn't exist? However, we (the people of many countries) have explicitly decided through our legislative processes to recognise the concept of copyright, with limited exemptions. Public libraries may qualify as one such exemption. I'm not sure why a private, profit-making company should expect the same treatment, nor that what Google is doing is at all equivalent in its practical effects (particularly if it goes wrong) to what public libraries do with books.
How? You're going to force copyright holders to sue more than one infringing party at once? Surely going after one case to get the precedent is the oldest one in the book?
It's now going to US DHS, who are going to "facilitate" passing the data on to other security agencies, apparently. I'm sure we can all work out where this one is going to end.
And yes, it does quite flagrantly violate the spirit of EU data protection laws, even if they've found a technicality to work around the letter. The correct response was to deny the US any information that isn't clearly necessary to allow them to take reasonable security precautions, and if the US threatened to deny landing rights, to call their bluff, loudly and publicly.
I do appreciate that you were writing figuratively. In effect, so was I.
In any case, I challenge your view of the "inherent" state of the world. Many things that are natural in a primitive, unconstrained world are considered inappropriate in a modern society that establishes rules and conventions for the collective good. An example I often give in these discussions is that if you have a rock, the natural state of things is that if I am bigger and stronger than you, then I can take it and it is now "my" rock. There is no natural concept of property of any kind, physical, intellectual or otherwise. Property is merely a convention, codified in law.
Similarly, the natural state of things is that people with valuable information will want to keep it as securely as they can. DRM, hardware-secured "trusted" platforms and the like are the natural recourse when faced with quick, cheap mass distribution technologies. Do we really want an "arms race"?
I also find your economic argument flawed, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere. Essentially, your single-trading model is not equivalent to today's copyright-enabled mass distribution with low costs for any individual recipient. Look at it this way: if your $x is not enough benefit to justify my spending time producing a work, then no-one gets any benefit. On the other hand, perhaps $y (which may be less than $x) from each of N people, producing N*$y (which would be greater than $x), would be enough, and then N people could benefit from it, not just you.
Speak for yourself.
Personally, I'm not at all convinced. I value my own privacy. Perhaps more objectively, I recognise that no-one is perfect, and if you dig hard enough you can turn up dirt on anyone. I also recognise that most people in the world are basically good, decent people, and I would prefer to respect a reasonable level of privacy and live in a world where we saw the good in people. You can't do that in a world where everyone's whole life story is computerised, often against their will and without their knowledge, and the media delight in data mining on anyone of any conceivable interest (or at least, worth a few more sales).
Now, governments on the other hand, they should have no right to privacy; on the contrary, IMHO they should be required to justify any attempt to withhold information from the public to an independent authority. Businesses should also be subject to much stricter openness requirements than individuals.
But there's a difference between a key that expires, at some time that is known and accepted from the start, and a key that can be arbitrarily revoked under unspecified circumstances at any time. One is a known quantity, and you buy it if it's worth it to you. The other is a liability, and I can't believe many sysadmins are going to accept that kind of risk given Microsoft's poor track record of getting activation technologies right.
Yes, that is where the figure comes from. IIRC, people were getting this right when the figure first started making it into articles, but Chinese whispers appear to have corrupted the definition somewhere along the line.
I submitted the same story (some time ago! <mumble> <mutter>) and suggested that now would be a good time to short their stock. I'm just not sure which of Tesco and Microsoft/Symantec/etc. "their" refers to here...