Copyright doesn't prevent me from telling stories. I'm trying to make the point that copyright is an artificial construct without traditional roots.
Are you an anarchist? I don't think we can have anything like a modern civilization with anarchy, so I disagree with you there.
If not, government does need money to operate, and we are required to pay more or less our share. Otherwise, we get a very serious free rider problem. Taxes are as non-intrusive as they can be: the government takes a certain value of property, your choice, no demands on what you do with any other property. I'm not even required to pay taxes, as long as I don't have income or significant assets. Copyright puts specific restrictions on what I can do with what, and is therefore more intrusive.
It looks to me like we're better off with one entity with authority over the EM spectrum. Two entities claiming authority are going to disagree, and different people will assert the right to different parts of the spectrum.
Politicians are not in general the worst of the worst. Many are in politics largely to help people. The same is true of business people. Many politicians and business people are primarily out for their own gain, and come in various shades of callousness and ruthlessness.
Most of what government does is benevolent; similarly, most of what business does is benevolent. Neither can be counted on, and I like having them somewhat opposed, since it hinders either in steamrollering me.
Right now, people are angry at United. We'll see if there was any lasting effect later.
Did anyone actually say something that stupid, or are you manufacturing straw men? There are principled arguments for and against copyrights, and how they should be applied. Hence, there are principled reasons to try to create an environment where people can get copyrighted material without paying for it. There are also people who just want stuff for free, but I doubt that's motivation to do all the work to set up and maintain the Pirate Bay.
In the first case, there's an explicit invitation to say "OK Google". That's authorization, and the man in the bar is not breaking the law by saying that.
If I had one of those devices (seems unlikely, but...), and you said "OK Google", I'd be hard-pressed to describe access as unauthorized. If, however, I told you not to do that again, and you did it deliberately, you're intentionally accessing a computer system without authorization. If I reacted to your initial "OK Google" by disabling your access somehow, and you bypassed my crappy security measure anyway, same thing.
In this case, BK aired a commercial with "OK Google", which isn't innocuous because they intended it to access the viewers' systems. Authorized or not? I can't answer that, and I don't think a lawyer could make a good case against BK for unauthorized access. Google responds by disabling the access on the commercial. This is a security feature, clearly intended to keep the commercial from accessing the systems. It isn't much of an access control, but the judicial system.isn't in the business of deciding which security features are good and which are too lame to be legally significant. BK then made another commercial to get around Google's access control, and how easy it was (I believe they just got someone else to say the words) is not legally significant.
The sequence of access, denial, and getting around the security feature to get access looks to me like it establishes deliberate unauthorized access. It looks to me like it would be hard to come up with much in the way of damages. The CFAA has a blanket ban on unauthorized access to some systems, and I don't know whether the Google system would qualify.
First, I'm saying that a Muslim country could be admitted into the EU, provided it measured up to the standards. Islam comes into play as it's part of what keeps Turkey back from meeting the standards. Currently, it's used as an excuse or inspiration for a lot of bad things.
Second, I know some Christians, who do seem to try to follow what Jesus was doing. My idea of what Christianity should be is based largely on them and the Gospels. Their brand of Christianity is at least as valid as a lot of other people calling themselves Christians. I don't try to define Christianity, and I'm not interested in pointing out hypocrites.
It's not a No True Scotsman fallacy. The fact that Turkey is Muslim does not keep it out of the EU. If Turkey was a reasonably secular state, with a free society and more economic development, it would fit right in despite its religion. The fact that Turkey is Muslim explains much about why Turkey isn't reasonably secular with a free society and more economic development, but it has nothing directly to do with whether or not it can get into the EU.
I feel I do have reason to compare what Christians say and do to what Jesus is recorded as saying and doing. Unfortunately, to be a Christian it isn't a requirement to think that Jesus guy probably had a clue, because I rather admire Jesus.
Politically motivated movie ratings are not the same thing as politically motivated politics. Votes from people who've never seen a movie are different from people voting on who will represent them in government for the next 2-6 years.
The nice thing about his similarity to Hitler is that he doesn't run a country that's very powerful both with industry and military strength. I'm more worried about Russia, which also reminds me of Nazi Germany, with the Crimean Anschluss and the Sudetenland-equivalent in east Ukraine.
Speaking as one insistent that Han shot first, I liked the movie.
It was obviously a remake of Star Wars (later Star Wars: A New Hope), and had the quick scene at the beginning to establish the First Order as bad guys and get rid of the Republic. That was lame, but it beats the prequels as setup. After that, it was lightsabers and X-wings and Force users and fighting, with characters I found more interesting than the originals and more depth in the plot, partly because it seemed like there was more of a Universe behind the movie. Star Wars always felt to me like a stand-alone movie with later films retconning it; this is more a movie in a series. It has some of the qualities of Star Wars and some of The Empire Strikes Back.
These aren't reviews. These are ratings. It's easy to take a pile of ratings and display the average, but it's not possible to do that with actual reviews, and many more people will submit a numerical value than will submit a thought-out description.
Traditionally, there's a difference between reviewing and rating. Rating is a one-dimensional number indicating how good the movie is, and often disagrees with my own taste. Reviews are descriptions. A really good review is one that tells everyone how much they'd like the movie, whatever their tastes are. Internet reviews can't be aggregated well, but ratings can.
The Gallipoli landing failed, mostly due to astoundingly incompetent leadership on the allied side, but also due to the brilliant and decisive leadership of Mustafa Kemal on the Turkish side.
The Allied leadership at the site was reasonably good, much like the Turkish leadership. The amazing performance of Mustafa Kemal is mostly politically motifated retconning.
The Allied failure was at the highest levels. The original idea was to force the channel with warships, and that failed catastrophically* (partly because they didn't have adequate minesweepers). The original plan was to try this, and if it didn't work, give up and try something else somewhere else. Instead, the new plan was to invade from the sea. Since the Allies couldn't spare enough troops from fighting the Germans on the main front (much as the RN didn't think it could spare sufficient fast minesweepers), the operation was always conducted with too few resources to accomplish anything but so many that the losses were impressive. The experience of the Australians contributed to the separation of Australia from British, the Australians feeling like they'd been thrown into a bloody and futile battle that the British didn't want to fight.
*The old battleships lost were of little value, but they took a lot of their crews down with them.
Editing videos fraudulently to make accusations of illegal actions is against the law. Making movies favorable to the Armenians, KKK, or left-handed homosexual furries is legal.
On the other hand, there are reasonable regulations AirBnB should have to abide by. They're half of a publicly available commercial hotel service, and can't operate without the other half. While some of the regulations are doubtless there to protect the hotel business by setting up barriers to entry, others are not.
The AirBnB system, as a whole, needs to avoid illegal discrimination. It needs to comply with local zoning. The rented-out units need to be in safe condition, and as advertised. There may be other local requirements.
Currently, AirBnB is in the Uber situation of being able to compete by evading the normal regulations. It is listing places that are not legal to hire out as short-term accommodations. If AirBnB is able to come into conformance with reasonable regulations, that's great.
You caused your computer to send an HTTP request that fetched a web page. The page also came with other HTTP requests, which your computer executes because that's a normal part of modern HTML processing and you didn't forbid it. Everything going on is part of a process you deliberately started. If a television commercial told you to load a web page, it's entirely up to you whether to do it then, at another time, or not at all. You may have a legit complaint if what you requested is not what was described, but everything is a direct result of your actions.
You set up a listening device in your house that responds to voice commands. You then turned the TV on. These are two unconnected things. By turning on the TV, you do not intend to activate the device. Having the TV activate your device is not in the normal process. Doing this may be stupid (I once did a combination of two things that left a severe vulnerability, resulting in a Romanian intruder using my system to DDOS a place in Sweden), but it isn't authorization, particularly when the device receives an update to disable the commercial.
As far as your analogy goes, I'm unaware of any smartphones that come already set to send nude photos of me to anyone else. (People who might see these photos should feel relieved.) I'd have to go to a good deal of trouble to set things up to send nude photos of me to any poor sap who said something near my phone. I would have deliberately set up an action. In this case, Google presumably did not intend the device to be used to respond to TV shows, and for some reason failed to block that, and the device owners presumably didn't intend that either. It's bad security, not a deliberate setup.
Please tell me what authorization BK had. Google's response was to deny authorization to the commercial. BK then deliberately violated that access control.
The CFAA has been used against "harmless hacks". It's not always possible to tell what's harmless and what isn't, and unauthorized access is a much better legal line to draw.
If I carelessly left my front door open while going to work, would you think that coming into my house and poking around was perfectly reasonable, as long as nothing much was broken, disturbed, or taken?
When Google blocked the BK commercial, that was a sign that BK wasn't authorized. If I put a really insecure lock on my front door that anyone can open with a credit card, I may be being stupid but it's still illegal to enter my house.
We're a lot worse off, in the long rum, if we say that weak access control has no legal force. Who defines "weak"? Should my standard 1990s access password be considered as legally meaningless, since it doesn't have near enough entropy for security, and so any account hanging around that uses it should be open to all?
Of course we don't sue the people who use the product. We sue the people who deliberately exploit the lack of security of the product. Particularly when they deliberately do an end run around an access restriction.
How about we treat unauthorized access as unauthorized access, since it's much cleaner than trying to figure out what an intruder may have done? In this case, it's obvious what has been done, but that isn't the cause for all such access.
It was an anticompetitive practice. It's legal to have a monopoly, but there's legal restrictions on how you can use it. There are things most people can do that a monopolist can't legally do.
In this case, there was a competitive browser market, with Netscape and Microsoft as the main players, and Microsoft used its monopoly OS position to undercut Netscape.
It makes sense when you've grokked the laws about monopolies and why they're there.
They instituted an access control, blocking access from the first BK commercial. BK deliberately circumvented the access control.
Legally, it doesn't matter how good the access control is. If you set up your computer to use a default account and not require a password, I'm still not authorized to use it.
No, you have not granted authorization. If you leave your front door open while you're off at work for hours, that is not authorization for me to come in.
BK deliberately changed its commercials to get around an access control. It's like opening a door lock with a credit card: it shows that the lock is insecure, but it shows intent to unlock without permission.
Firing a gun is not an imprisonable offense where I live. Firing it at where someone else is is. Lots of things are perfectly legal in some circumstances and serious crimes in others.
BK deliberately accessed other people's computers. When there was a fix in place to stop that commercial, they deliberately changed the commercial. That is intentional unauthorized access of computer systems.
Specifically, IIRC, someone noticed that the URL they were using to deal with a company on-line had what appeared to be an account number embedded in it, which from a security perspective is probably dumber than an always-on interface. The guy methodically went through account numbers. Technically, it was using the URL as designed. Legally, it was unauthorized access, and the methodical search showed intent.
There are things that are illegal even with the victim being stupid and careless. If you leave your purse on a bench in a shopping mall while you find the ladies' room, it's still illegal for me to take it, and a prosecutor will happily go after me. We do not want the law to establish an unprotected class of stupid people who do not get the benefit of the law.
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Copyright doesn't prevent me from telling stories. I'm trying to make the point that copyright is an artificial construct without traditional roots.
Are you an anarchist? I don't think we can have anything like a modern civilization with anarchy, so I disagree with you there.
If not, government does need money to operate, and we are required to pay more or less our share. Otherwise, we get a very serious free rider problem. Taxes are as non-intrusive as they can be: the government takes a certain value of property, your choice, no demands on what you do with any other property. I'm not even required to pay taxes, as long as I don't have income or significant assets. Copyright puts specific restrictions on what I can do with what, and is therefore more intrusive.
It looks to me like we're better off with one entity with authority over the EM spectrum. Two entities claiming authority are going to disagree, and different people will assert the right to different parts of the spectrum.
Politicians are not in general the worst of the worst. Many are in politics largely to help people. The same is true of business people. Many politicians and business people are primarily out for their own gain, and come in various shades of callousness and ruthlessness.
Most of what government does is benevolent; similarly, most of what business does is benevolent. Neither can be counted on, and I like having them somewhat opposed, since it hinders either in steamrollering me.
Right now, people are angry at United. We'll see if there was any lasting effect later.
Did anyone actually say something that stupid, or are you manufacturing straw men? There are principled arguments for and against copyrights, and how they should be applied. Hence, there are principled reasons to try to create an environment where people can get copyrighted material without paying for it. There are also people who just want stuff for free, but I doubt that's motivation to do all the work to set up and maintain the Pirate Bay.
In the first case, there's an explicit invitation to say "OK Google". That's authorization, and the man in the bar is not breaking the law by saying that.
If I had one of those devices (seems unlikely, but...), and you said "OK Google", I'd be hard-pressed to describe access as unauthorized. If, however, I told you not to do that again, and you did it deliberately, you're intentionally accessing a computer system without authorization. If I reacted to your initial "OK Google" by disabling your access somehow, and you bypassed my crappy security measure anyway, same thing.
In this case, BK aired a commercial with "OK Google", which isn't innocuous because they intended it to access the viewers' systems. Authorized or not? I can't answer that, and I don't think a lawyer could make a good case against BK for unauthorized access. Google responds by disabling the access on the commercial. This is a security feature, clearly intended to keep the commercial from accessing the systems. It isn't much of an access control, but the judicial system .isn't in the business of deciding which security features are good and which are too lame to be legally significant. BK then made another commercial to get around Google's access control, and how easy it was (I believe they just got someone else to say the words) is not legally significant.
The sequence of access, denial, and getting around the security feature to get access looks to me like it establishes deliberate unauthorized access. It looks to me like it would be hard to come up with much in the way of damages. The CFAA has a blanket ban on unauthorized access to some systems, and I don't know whether the Google system would qualify.
Which doesn't exonerate BK at all, any more than an open unlocked front door exonerates an intruder.
First, I'm saying that a Muslim country could be admitted into the EU, provided it measured up to the standards. Islam comes into play as it's part of what keeps Turkey back from meeting the standards. Currently, it's used as an excuse or inspiration for a lot of bad things.
Second, I know some Christians, who do seem to try to follow what Jesus was doing. My idea of what Christianity should be is based largely on them and the Gospels. Their brand of Christianity is at least as valid as a lot of other people calling themselves Christians. I don't try to define Christianity, and I'm not interested in pointing out hypocrites.
It's not a No True Scotsman fallacy. The fact that Turkey is Muslim does not keep it out of the EU. If Turkey was a reasonably secular state, with a free society and more economic development, it would fit right in despite its religion. The fact that Turkey is Muslim explains much about why Turkey isn't reasonably secular with a free society and more economic development, but it has nothing directly to do with whether or not it can get into the EU.
I feel I do have reason to compare what Christians say and do to what Jesus is recorded as saying and doing. Unfortunately, to be a Christian it isn't a requirement to think that Jesus guy probably had a clue, because I rather admire Jesus.
Politically motivated movie ratings are not the same thing as politically motivated politics. Votes from people who've never seen a movie are different from people voting on who will represent them in government for the next 2-6 years.
The nice thing about his similarity to Hitler is that he doesn't run a country that's very powerful both with industry and military strength. I'm more worried about Russia, which also reminds me of Nazi Germany, with the Crimean Anschluss and the Sudetenland-equivalent in east Ukraine.
Speaking as one insistent that Han shot first, I liked the movie.
It was obviously a remake of Star Wars (later Star Wars: A New Hope), and had the quick scene at the beginning to establish the First Order as bad guys and get rid of the Republic. That was lame, but it beats the prequels as setup. After that, it was lightsabers and X-wings and Force users and fighting, with characters I found more interesting than the originals and more depth in the plot, partly because it seemed like there was more of a Universe behind the movie. Star Wars always felt to me like a stand-alone movie with later films retconning it; this is more a movie in a series. It has some of the qualities of Star Wars and some of The Empire Strikes Back.
It's not a great movie, but I enjoyed it.
These aren't reviews. These are ratings. It's easy to take a pile of ratings and display the average, but it's not possible to do that with actual reviews, and many more people will submit a numerical value than will submit a thought-out description.
Traditionally, there's a difference between reviewing and rating. Rating is a one-dimensional number indicating how good the movie is, and often disagrees with my own taste. Reviews are descriptions. A really good review is one that tells everyone how much they'd like the movie, whatever their tastes are. Internet reviews can't be aggregated well, but ratings can.
The Allied leadership at the site was reasonably good, much like the Turkish leadership. The amazing performance of Mustafa Kemal is mostly politically motifated retconning.
The Allied failure was at the highest levels. The original idea was to force the channel with warships, and that failed catastrophically* (partly because they didn't have adequate minesweepers). The original plan was to try this, and if it didn't work, give up and try something else somewhere else. Instead, the new plan was to invade from the sea. Since the Allies couldn't spare enough troops from fighting the Germans on the main front (much as the RN didn't think it could spare sufficient fast minesweepers), the operation was always conducted with too few resources to accomplish anything but so many that the losses were impressive. The experience of the Australians contributed to the separation of Australia from British, the Australians feeling like they'd been thrown into a bloody and futile battle that the British didn't want to fight.
*The old battleships lost were of little value, but they took a lot of their crews down with them.
Editing videos fraudulently to make accusations of illegal actions is against the law. Making movies favorable to the Armenians, KKK, or left-handed homosexual furries is legal.
On the other hand, there are reasonable regulations AirBnB should have to abide by. They're half of a publicly available commercial hotel service, and can't operate without the other half. While some of the regulations are doubtless there to protect the hotel business by setting up barriers to entry, others are not.
The AirBnB system, as a whole, needs to avoid illegal discrimination. It needs to comply with local zoning. The rented-out units need to be in safe condition, and as advertised. There may be other local requirements.
Currently, AirBnB is in the Uber situation of being able to compete by evading the normal regulations. It is listing places that are not legal to hire out as short-term accommodations. If AirBnB is able to come into conformance with reasonable regulations, that's great.
You caused your computer to send an HTTP request that fetched a web page. The page also came with other HTTP requests, which your computer executes because that's a normal part of modern HTML processing and you didn't forbid it. Everything going on is part of a process you deliberately started. If a television commercial told you to load a web page, it's entirely up to you whether to do it then, at another time, or not at all. You may have a legit complaint if what you requested is not what was described, but everything is a direct result of your actions.
You set up a listening device in your house that responds to voice commands. You then turned the TV on. These are two unconnected things. By turning on the TV, you do not intend to activate the device. Having the TV activate your device is not in the normal process. Doing this may be stupid (I once did a combination of two things that left a severe vulnerability, resulting in a Romanian intruder using my system to DDOS a place in Sweden), but it isn't authorization, particularly when the device receives an update to disable the commercial.
As far as your analogy goes, I'm unaware of any smartphones that come already set to send nude photos of me to anyone else. (People who might see these photos should feel relieved.) I'd have to go to a good deal of trouble to set things up to send nude photos of me to any poor sap who said something near my phone. I would have deliberately set up an action. In this case, Google presumably did not intend the device to be used to respond to TV shows, and for some reason failed to block that, and the device owners presumably didn't intend that either. It's bad security, not a deliberate setup.
Please tell me what authorization BK had. Google's response was to deny authorization to the commercial. BK then deliberately violated that access control.
The CFAA has been used against "harmless hacks". It's not always possible to tell what's harmless and what isn't, and unauthorized access is a much better legal line to draw.
If I carelessly left my front door open while going to work, would you think that coming into my house and poking around was perfectly reasonable, as long as nothing much was broken, disturbed, or taken?
When Google blocked the BK commercial, that was a sign that BK wasn't authorized. If I put a really insecure lock on my front door that anyone can open with a credit card, I may be being stupid but it's still illegal to enter my house.
We're a lot worse off, in the long rum, if we say that weak access control has no legal force. Who defines "weak"? Should my standard 1990s access password be considered as legally meaningless, since it doesn't have near enough entropy for security, and so any account hanging around that uses it should be open to all?
Of course we don't sue the people who use the product. We sue the people who deliberately exploit the lack of security of the product. Particularly when they deliberately do an end run around an access restriction.
How about we treat unauthorized access as unauthorized access, since it's much cleaner than trying to figure out what an intruder may have done? In this case, it's obvious what has been done, but that isn't the cause for all such access.
It was an anticompetitive practice. It's legal to have a monopoly, but there's legal restrictions on how you can use it. There are things most people can do that a monopolist can't legally do.
In this case, there was a competitive browser market, with Netscape and Microsoft as the main players, and Microsoft used its monopoly OS position to undercut Netscape.
It makes sense when you've grokked the laws about monopolies and why they're there.
They instituted an access control, blocking access from the first BK commercial. BK deliberately circumvented the access control.
Legally, it doesn't matter how good the access control is. If you set up your computer to use a default account and not require a password, I'm still not authorized to use it.
No, you have not granted authorization. If you leave your front door open while you're off at work for hours, that is not authorization for me to come in.
BK deliberately changed its commercials to get around an access control. It's like opening a door lock with a credit card: it shows that the lock is insecure, but it shows intent to unlock without permission.
Firing a gun is not an imprisonable offense where I live. Firing it at where someone else is is. Lots of things are perfectly legal in some circumstances and serious crimes in others.
BK deliberately accessed other people's computers. When there was a fix in place to stop that commercial, they deliberately changed the commercial. That is intentional unauthorized access of computer systems.
Specifically, IIRC, someone noticed that the URL they were using to deal with a company on-line had what appeared to be an account number embedded in it, which from a security perspective is probably dumber than an always-on interface. The guy methodically went through account numbers. Technically, it was using the URL as designed. Legally, it was unauthorized access, and the methodical search showed intent.
There are things that are illegal even with the victim being stupid and careless. If you leave your purse on a bench in a shopping mall while you find the ladies' room, it's still illegal for me to take it, and a prosecutor will happily go after me. We do not want the law to establish an unprotected class of stupid people who do not get the benefit of the law.