She provided (under duress of course) information that only the killer could have had, and it was verified.
If you trust the dismissed evidence to prove her guilt then you're making a grave error.
GP is not "trusting" the dismissed, beaten confession to infer the debated "factual guilt". Of course a person will fabricate confessions to stop a beating, and you cannot implicitly trust that. GP instead infers factual guilt from further evidence prompted by the confession. For example: "Alright, stop hitting me! geez! I killed him and threw the gun in the bushes." So then investigators search the bushes, and there's the gun with Alice's finger prints and the victim's blood, registered to Alice, caliber matches, etc etc.
In this example the confession cannot be trusted alone, it was obtained via illegal beating. From a non-legal perspective however, the evidence found as a result of information gained in the illegal beating is pretty iron clad, while legally that entire bevy of evidence is inadmissible due to the shady means by which investigators learned to look in that area.
Thus, an illustration of that which is plainly demonstrable diverging from that which is is legally demonstrable. Rightly so however, the ends of finding definitive evidence ought never justify the means of beating (or water boarding) someone for the information.
Seeing lots of magic numbers in code indicates a failure of good programming practices, not the need for a new high-tech system to decode those numbers.
Er, but if you are trying to refactor such terrible code written by your predecessor, then yeah, you'll want to know what those numbers are about, and a new high tech system may be just the trick.:P
Yeah, I disagree. I think the primary driver for all netbook sales is the low price tag in some form or another.
Nobody wants a "smaller, possibly less expensive MacBook".. that's what they think their Iphone is after all. The niche of the Netbook is both low cost and utility: you can log on to WiFi and get things done in a pinch. Utility is simply not Apple's style.
Apple limits their interests exclusively to aesthetic elitism and aggressively minimalist UI, which they are proud to charge a mint for. There are simply no key points within the NetBook revolution that free them to play that tune, and as much as there may be a market for MacOS running on actually inexpensive, miniaturized hardware; that would deflate the artificially scarce value of Apple's main lines and cannibalize their markets.
I don't want it. I just don't want you coming to my site on your terms
This is a hot topic right now. Many content providers hope to float their expenses solely on the back of advertising dollars, and rely completely on advertising networks that do little to match the aesthetic or sensibility of an advertisement to the needs of any of the publishers' readerships.
The pattern is, Joe has a website and creates content. Maybe it's a blog, maybe it's an aggregator like/. is. Joe tries to put his website in the black by putting ads on his site. Perhaps at first, Joe vetos the annoying ads, but soon he learns that A> this requires paying attention to the ads, which costs Joe time he doesn't have, and B> this cuts into his bottom line. So he eventually allows virtually all ads though, and continues tacking on more ad networks until there are no more to add. Joe is still in the red, but has starry eyed visions of making ends meet just around the corner as his readership tanks. The last thing that Joe wants is to introduce any alternate profit models or put his eggs in more than one basket. For example, premium memberships which allow access to stories earlier than free membership, a community of commenters creating content for free and driving traffic and participation, such efforts would be fools errands and sound a little bit too much like work.
If you don't want to view the ads, then don't block them - because you consume resources and cost us money and we get nothing.
To Joe, every visitor with an AdBlocker is eating away at his profits. After all, (example numbers, YMMV) the hosting account is $20/mo for the first gigabit of transfer and $5 per gigabit thereafter, and Joe invests $2,000 per month in fixed cost generating and maintaining the content. That adds up to $2020/mo if transfer stays under a gigabit, which could baloon to $2025/mo if a ton of Adblocker readers hit the site!
Of course an AdBlocker user cannot click on the ads, but the worst part is that they never drive cross traffic either. When ad AdBlocker user sees an article he likes, he never just sends a link to his friends who lack AdBlock. Instead, AdBlocker users just sit on the same page hitting refresh constantly while cackling at the money the publisher is losing, penny by penny.
Users obviously have all the control - they can block (most) ads, they can simply stop visiting sites
One thing people don't often consider is that the internet is a great equalizer. The user and the webserver are on equal footing and have equal power. You do not have to allow those who block ads to see your website, you can use similar filtering features to keep them out and make an arms race of it.
Just like AdBlockers identify images of certain size, from certain domains, and urls that match certain regex as advertisements and block them (with the false-positive side-effects of sometimes blocking or mangling content), you can put your ads in Iframes and load the content asynchronously, contingent on the advertisement payload being delivered before the user gets to see the goods.
You will also incur false positives of innocent readers getting shafted, but that's OK, right? Just like RIAA and James Murdoch are teaching us, You don't make money by delivering content to people who play by your rules, you make money by causing misery for whoever takes too many napkins.
Remember, your most important revenue streams are spreading FUD, making people feel guilty, and optionally implementing DRM and expanding bureaucracy. You are not in the business of providing content to the people who want it, that would be silly. The only way to make money is to maximize bleeding, suffering, and eye raping.
Remember, the world is rife with people who want to patronize your content, and some will even fork cash over to you. It is your responsibility to deploy
Haha, "you can't watch my video content without shit flickering off to the sides" is a happy medium now? What content feature will you turn off if users don't want to see the goatse porn shock ads?
I think the point here is that no users appreciate garish, distracting, confusing, sometimes fraudulent ads. (No really, this is an antivirus warning dialog in this 468x80 ad space! And it's wobbling and flashing!) It detracts from the content. It hurts the reputation of the site that hosts it. Only confused old ladies click on it, and then only because they can't tell the content from the ad.
Why would you defend this on your site? Are you a sadist? You get paid for making your users uncomfortable and unhappy instead of by facilitating product conversions? Nobody voluntarily spends their money on the company with the eyeraping ad. The companies who rely on toxic advertising are desperate and about to go out of business, replaced by new companies who find themselves in similar straights. If you base your content delivery model on such shifting sand, you must be within a year or two behind them, and you do not have my pity.
The guy lied to the AP (or rather their software),... Taken in by his deception, they accepted the money.... Clearly, they have committed a dastardly crime.
I know, right? It's called a test case. He demonstrated that the system was flawed by purposefully taking steps to cause it to express a failure state. Test cases are a Good Thing, you see it is best to discover problems like this before they are exposed disastrously in the wild.
When someone is trying to genuinely use the service, it is going to be because they are quoting a news story that says "Copyright AP" at the bottom. The user will by definition not be an AP subscriber. So, 2short: do you care to elaborate how such a hardworking sap, only trying to do the right thing, will be able to confirm who really owns the quote? Is it from the AP original text? Was it added by the tertiary source? Was it a typo, and the story was really from Reuters?
That is supposed to be the point of this tool. Contrary to your earlier misapprehension, it is not an overglorified word counter. If it were, it would be the most expensive kind I have ever heard of. Who wants a computer to count words for them so badly they would pay $12 for the service?
No, I am certain both you and AP will be perfectly happy when anyone tries to use the tool, then as they are sued for millions usd by the true author of any section of text either loosly- or mis-labeled as copyright AP by a tertiary source, then AP will email them back with "rats, sorry about that!" and refund the poor sap his $12. Of course, only for the 1 out of a hundred citations he has paid for that applied in such a case. Who knows how many of the other 99 AP collected on gratuitously?
More hilarious still would be when AP sues the schmuck anyway. Schmuck brandishes his icopyright receipt in court, and AP lawyers need merely cite TFA as evidence the tool is unreliable to begin with. Or else perhaps they could claim the licence was revoked just before schmuck published his citation; check your spam filter mebe? Well, we'll take the $12 out of the damages we're suing you for, just to be nice.
LOL, so you want them to do a full text search of, what, the Internet?
Well no, I was rather thinking it would be a good idea to focus the search to the matter at hand. AP's newswire. You know, the feed of original stories that they actually sell to subscribing journalists? It's kind of the core of their business, and it is delivered to every (modern) news office digitally over the internet.
So.. they already have the material sitting around on servers, and subscribing journalists already do full text searches through it to determine what news they wish to republish.
Of course, non-subscribing journalists have no access to the raw AP feed. That is what subscribers are paying for to begin with. Non-subscribers only have access to tertiary sources online, such as other subscribers re-printing and often modifying or adding to stories.
Thus, the target audience is in no position to tell if a quote is actually copyrighted by AP or not. It might be an extension of the original story, thus belong to the tertiary source. It might have been mistakenly posted with an AP copyright notice when it really came from Reuters. The only people in the world who can know for sure is AP themselves, or their paying subscribers.
However, I am certain AP does not care. Why should they provide any kind of actual service to people who aren't already paying them for full access to realtime feed? It's much more lucrative to spread copyright FUD like SCO and then try to convince bloggers to cough up funds for the privilege of feeding traffic to their subscribers. Either the sap will never be sued, or if they are their hard earned receipt (or the 1 out of a hundred that applies) won't be worth a thin dime when it actually matters.
I'm sorry, I am accustomed to practitioners of the English language using pronouns to refer to no more than one neutral subject at a time. You know, in order to avoid ambiguity. Your sentence ended with both an "it" and a "that" which easily could have refered to the same subject. Of course these are pronouns, so you could have intended them to refer to your head and your arse. I choose the most immediately obvious rendering instead. Take a course on Writing and Composition if you wish to get your meaning across more reliably next time.
FWIW though, "The sentence in question is 7 words long." is totally a sentence, albeit eight words long.. the way the rest of your post was going I didn't feel as though your talking about word counting and then failing to do so accurately yourself was such a surprise.
Oddly, I don't see "verify and confirm authorship" in even your list of the sites intended functions.
Neither do I, though I do see at the end of that list "provide copyright licence to article quotes". I see that instead of "promise not to sue".
You see, oddly enough the two are not in any way the same thing. Licensors make no promise not to sue licensees, instead they grant limited privileges over the work licensed. Overstep the privilege, or simply confuse the licensor and they will still sue you (though if you are in the right and can prove it then you'll win). However, (and IANAL but) providing licences to rights you do not own has got to be illegal. You know, sort of like printing fake driver's licences, selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge, office space when you don't own the building, etc.
It's a pretty difficult task as any AP article could be quoting something that they don't own, and therefore is now included within copyright protection. They would have to flag individual paragraphs and sentences throughout an article to ensure they licence exactly what they own, and not sources they simply quoted from elsewhere.
That is precisely the reason they need to confirm the quoted content is theirs. If I wish to cite an NYT article copied from AP's feed, it is entirely possible (though a lot to expect from NYT) that the journalist did some investigation of his own and added copy. That might be the bit I am trying to cite. If so, AP has no power to protect my from NYT should they file claim against me.
However, since NYT got the article from AP, it is a cake walk for AP to simply check my words against their own raw feed.
The only reason they do not do this — and instead simply take your money and thereafter forget who you are — is because it takes a modest amount of effort, and you would have to explain the complex realities of copyright to people who are too busy to care and only wish there to be a slot to feed money into to feel as though they have covered their own arses.
Essentially, it is the same scam SCO was pulling: frighten middle managers who were locked into Linux into paying SCO unnecessary sums of cash.
Why is it their responsibility to protect you from being an idiot and paying for permission for something you don't need a licence for?
Grimmelmann has rendered a test case to illustrate a flaw in a piece of software. Like all test cases, it involves purposefully following steps which would lead to failure. Test cases exist to expose flaws before any person accidentally triggers the same condition in the wild. But then again, you probably think the Q&A engineers at Honda are "idiots" for intentionally crashing cars.
The fact is this tool is useless. It's a fancy donation box and a political stunt to attempt to demonstrate a market for copyright over citation.
No AP subscriber needs this service since their subscription alone allows them full use of AP content. Non-subscribers have no access to the raw feed, so if they choose to cite a news source there is no guarantee the text they cite really comes from AP. It could be a piece from Reuters where the journalist hastily slapped on the wrong copyright notice. It could be an AP piece, but the journalist in question did his own research to add data, and that's the data you are pulling from.
So what right does AP have charging the public for text they cannot confirm is theirs? The public has no way of knowing, and can only trust the primary source (who may have been negligent, or else may sue for citing extended content without their permission) and AP themselves. If AP cannot be bothered to compare your submission with the text in their own bloody article, then they are providing zero service.
Fine. Go to the pick and mix, and throw in a load of sweets they don't sell.
Or to compare with a situation we actually care about, one in the wild. Go to pick and mix (I've never heard of them) and try to buy sweets after someone else has tainted the bin. Should PnM not be held liable if you and a dozen other people contract anthrax from their candy?
I would see a problem with it if they were doing it out of malice or with an intent to defraud. Do you really think that's the case here?
Yeah, pretty much.
What is it with everyone tripping over the fact that the experiment is contrived? Yes, Grimmelmann knew that the words were not in the article when he paid for them. So what happens when Source A prints a story that says "copyright AP" at the bottom, and you go to quote the story, so you use AP's copyright tool to do so? Then the true author of the story sues you and source A (and probably the AP to boot) for the fiasco. Will your licence from AP indemnify you from harm? Or will they refund you $0.46/word while you pay someone else thousands in damages?
The point is that AP cannot keep track of what they own and what they do not. A store is a bad analogy because AP does not DOES NOT have an inventory. They do not have walls. They are just standing out in the field with a cash register. Apparently, you can bring them any rock or twig and they will happily take your money in exchange for their blessing, and apparently some people are wandering around, getting twigs, and then AP sues them. However, there is NO authoritative way for non AP members to tell what AP claims to own.
I believe AP is fully aware of this and is happy to take money from any sucker and refuse to provide a service when needed. If it's like anything, it's like being sold bad insurance. It's like using a contrived example to get a CA to certify a clearly invalid certificate, showing that the CA does not actually certify anything at all.
Really though, this has nothing to do with accidentally overpaying. This has to do with being sold non-goods.
It's like paying $12 to buy a raffle ticket which is demonstrably invalid, just to prove that the rafflers have no intent on honoring any of the legit-seeming tickets that they sell. They just take your money and then forget you exist.
Thus, TFA could care less about the $12 he sacrificed on his point. He cares about the $X arbitrary journalists around the world might pay for the licence to quote articles without being sued, given that AP cannot and will not defend you from suit because they cannot even correctly tell if they have a right to the material you are asking about.
If I tell you "The sentence in question is 7 words long.", do you interpret that as authorization to claim I said it?
Yeah, pretty much. If you say something, I assume it is ok to claim that you said it.
MSWord does word counts, does that mean I can attribute anything I type into it as an official MS position?
Oh I'm sorry, you are in the wrong thread. This article is about licence.icopyright.net, a self-service website created by AP specifically to charge for and provide copyright licence to article quotes. You are looking for the "AP launches word-counting service to put M$ Office in it's place" thread, I sadly do not have a link for that.
Do you really expect someone to write code that would contextually differentiate public IP content from private on the fly? Really?
No, but I had rather hoped that before selling me a licence to content, AP's software would at least check to see if the text I was after belonged to them or not. TFA discusses public content, simply because that by definition cannot belong to AP. AP has all of their content digitized (how else would they know what to sue over?) so the matter of checking my request against that content is covered by this groundbreaking algorithm.
Rule #1 of laying property claims: mark off your god damned property. If you can't be bothered to tell where your property ends, then it's not really yours to begin with.
TFA is not upset about the loss of $12 in bait, he was upset by the non-product delivered. If AP cannot tell if text belongs to them or not, then they cannot legally licence you to use it, which is precisely what this web tool claims to do.
It's like a tool on a carpenter's website to get a fence built.
Except that carpenters are not in the business of keeping track of intellectual property.
It's actually more like using a website constructed by a municipality to approve building permits. You key in the area where you wish to build, website calculates the fee, takes payment online, and you print your legally binding permit without getting out of your jammies.
Several months and millions of construction dollars later, the state tries to sue you for building on land with the wrong zoning and code. You flourish your permit which states that the city is in charge of the zoning for that parcel, and you have their approval. State reps tell you the city has overstepped their bounds and takes you to court. Now is the city going to go to bat for you because their software loused everything up for you, or let you blow in the wind?
Grimmelmann had the good sense to test the service before anyone was put in a similar position (getting sued after paying AP for copy AP never owned). The service is broken, and the message is that you should never trust AP to keep track of their own goods. If you pay them money through this website, the money might as well be burned because you get no service from AP as a result. If the agreement they forge with you cannot protect you from third parties, why should we believe it will protect you from AP on legit content? You think they won't charge you for the licence and then find a way to sue you once you print anyway? They could even cite this article in court to demonstrate how worthless the licence is.:P
It's like at a dollar store, every item costs the same.
I see, so you've never been to a dollar store.
Go some time. Not only will you find inexpensive knickknacks and junk, but you'll see that they scan every single thing. Two reasons:
Firstly, not everything is really a dollar. Some things are X for a dollar.
Secondly, for those of you not lucky enough to live in Oregon, they'll calculate sales tax and I don't believe all items tax just the same way. For example, some items may be exempt.
Thirdly, to give you a receipt. You know, listing what you have actually bought that you physically take from their possession and care into your own? So that everyone can keep track of liability if some piece of candy you buy turns out to be laced with arsenic? So that you won't be charged for things they don't sell?
AP has built a website claiming to use automated processes to sell you license to any collection of words they have a right to. This article is a story because AP's software simply ignores that last part instead of actually doing the only work a copyright holder is even required to do in the current legal system. Refunds and being charged for things have nothing to do with the matter. The issue at hand is simply demonstrating that there is no product being sold here. This is like charging the public $100 a pop for bottled water that you are secretly just filling from the tap, and then suing anyone you see drinking any water at all who can't show a receipt that they bought a bottle from you. How can AP justify demanding renumeration from the public for using their material if they cannot even recognize their own material?
Every day I am amazed how more and more copyright apologists seem to forget that money should never be expected to change hands unless there is some counterweight of value being provided by the vendor. Either the "licence" you get from this website actually shifts liability over the content agreed upon from yourself to AP, or else what purpose does it serve at all? Is this nothing more than a complicated donation box?
Offline is still a valuable destination for much data, says I. I am rather annoyed by how lazy many people are that they feel they cannot manage their own data, need the cloud to handle every piece of minutiae.
We should embrace the diversity of being able to store or access content online (Spotify, Hulu, Youtube) and being able to locally archive said content in case the original, ameture work gets a DMCA takedown notice for being too popular and independent.. or just for when you leave the coverage area (DownloadHelper, XBMC, Ipod)
I've never heard of a band going with a certain record label because "they have better sound quality";)
Well, that's half my point. Now extend the fast food analogy to the consumers. Modern pop bands are so digitally post synthed, before the compression that the quality of the original source becomes irrelevant.
Final point: The Brother's Chaps of Homestarrunner.com fame have a sound room. That's from working full time on a free, flash animation site selling nothing but tee shirts, and DVD copies of cartoons you can have for free online. They did NOT start out with a soundroom, and as mentioned in the interview you can hear this by checking their old material.
My core point is: good content survives poor delivery.
I have. I don't feel that I can give money to the major record companies in good conscience.
On top of that, I simply can't bloody afford albums that cost more than DVD's anymore. Hell, I can't afford the DVD's either. We are in a recession, remember?
So you are pretty much saying that because copying electronic content is possible, its free to do?
As in, people are free to make money from pirated copies by selling those on the street?
I'm not certain if GP would own up to as much, but I will.
I maintain that such behavior is in fact perfectly acceptable (up to but not passing the point where you deceive people into thinking the label endorses your copy in case it is defective in some way, which would be the separate offense of fraud).
I do not feel as though my tax dollars should be wasted protecting a dying industry from the inevitable penny ante concerns of bootlegging. If you attempt to sell bits as though they were a scarce commodity, and then lobby and sue the world into pretending they are handling a scarce commodity, then you simply deserve to fail.
Besides, 99/100 consumers who are unconcerned about copyright would nab a copy online for free instead of paying for plastic on the street. So, I don't see the bootleggers having any profit margins either in developed countries (and police have never hassled them to begin with in less developed areas:P)
Slashdot Mirror
Two lbs of filing cabinets in gallons?
Um.. Cinnamon! Louis and Clark! ... ??? ... 42!
Can I buy a vowell? D:
Hey, I say, whatever puts Jobs on the board of Disney baby! ;D
She provided (under duress of course) information that only the killer could have had, and it was verified.
If you trust the dismissed evidence to prove her guilt then you're making a grave error.
GP is not "trusting" the dismissed, beaten confession to infer the debated "factual guilt". Of course a person will fabricate confessions to stop a beating, and you cannot implicitly trust that. GP instead infers factual guilt from further evidence prompted by the confession. For example: "Alright, stop hitting me! geez! I killed him and threw the gun in the bushes." So then investigators search the bushes, and there's the gun with Alice's finger prints and the victim's blood, registered to Alice, caliber matches, etc etc.
In this example the confession cannot be trusted alone, it was obtained via illegal beating. From a non-legal perspective however, the evidence found as a result of information gained in the illegal beating is pretty iron clad, while legally that entire bevy of evidence is inadmissible due to the shady means by which investigators learned to look in that area.
Thus, an illustration of that which is plainly demonstrable diverging from that which is is legally demonstrable. Rightly so however, the ends of finding definitive evidence ought never justify the means of beating (or water boarding) someone for the information.
It wasnae meant to sonny.
"Wasnae"? What in the.. *squints*
Holy Gods, he's typing in Scottish! :O
Seeing lots of magic numbers in code indicates a failure of good programming practices, not the need for a new high-tech system to decode those numbers.
Er, but if you are trying to refactor such terrible code written by your predecessor, then yeah, you'll want to know what those numbers are about, and a new high tech system may be just the trick. :P
Yeah, I disagree. I think the primary driver for all netbook sales is the low price tag in some form or another.
Nobody wants a "smaller, possibly less expensive MacBook".. that's what they think their Iphone is after all. The niche of the Netbook is both low cost and utility: you can log on to WiFi and get things done in a pinch. Utility is simply not Apple's style.
Apple limits their interests exclusively to aesthetic elitism and aggressively minimalist UI, which they are proud to charge a mint for. There are simply no key points within the NetBook revolution that free them to play that tune, and as much as there may be a market for MacOS running on actually inexpensive, miniaturized hardware; that would deflate the artificially scarce value of Apple's main lines and cannibalize their markets.
I don't want it. I just don't want you coming to my site on your terms
This is a hot topic right now. Many content providers hope to float their expenses solely on the back of advertising dollars, and rely completely on advertising networks that do little to match the aesthetic or sensibility of an advertisement to the needs of any of the publishers' readerships.
The pattern is, Joe has a website and creates content. Maybe it's a blog, maybe it's an aggregator like /. is. Joe tries to put his website in the black by putting ads on his site. Perhaps at first, Joe vetos the annoying ads, but soon he learns that A> this requires paying attention to the ads, which costs Joe time he doesn't have, and B> this cuts into his bottom line. So he eventually allows virtually all ads though, and continues tacking on more ad networks until there are no more to add. Joe is still in the red, but has starry eyed visions of making ends meet just around the corner as his readership tanks. The last thing that Joe wants is to introduce any alternate profit models or put his eggs in more than one basket. For example, premium memberships which allow access to stories earlier than free membership, a community of commenters creating content for free and driving traffic and participation, such efforts would be fools errands and sound a little bit too much like work.
If you don't want to view the ads, then don't block them - because you consume resources and cost us money and we get nothing.
To Joe, every visitor with an AdBlocker is eating away at his profits. After all, (example numbers, YMMV) the hosting account is $20/mo for the first gigabit of transfer and $5 per gigabit thereafter, and Joe invests $2,000 per month in fixed cost generating and maintaining the content. That adds up to $2020/mo if transfer stays under a gigabit, which could baloon to $2025/mo if a ton of Adblocker readers hit the site!
Of course an AdBlocker user cannot click on the ads, but the worst part is that they never drive cross traffic either. When ad AdBlocker user sees an article he likes, he never just sends a link to his friends who lack AdBlock. Instead, AdBlocker users just sit on the same page hitting refresh constantly while cackling at the money the publisher is losing, penny by penny.
Users obviously have all the control - they can block (most) ads, they can simply stop visiting sites
One thing people don't often consider is that the internet is a great equalizer. The user and the webserver are on equal footing and have equal power. You do not have to allow those who block ads to see your website, you can use similar filtering features to keep them out and make an arms race of it.
Just like AdBlockers identify images of certain size, from certain domains, and urls that match certain regex as advertisements and block them (with the false-positive side-effects of sometimes blocking or mangling content), you can put your ads in Iframes and load the content asynchronously, contingent on the advertisement payload being delivered before the user gets to see the goods.
You will also incur false positives of innocent readers getting shafted, but that's OK, right? Just like RIAA and James Murdoch are teaching us, You don't make money by delivering content to people who play by your rules, you make money by causing misery for whoever takes too many napkins.
Remember, your most important revenue streams are spreading FUD, making people feel guilty, and optionally implementing DRM and expanding bureaucracy. You are not in the business of providing content to the people who want it, that would be silly. The only way to make money is to maximize bleeding, suffering, and eye raping.
Remember, the world is rife with people who want to patronize your content, and some will even fork cash over to you. It is your responsibility to deploy
Haha, "you can't watch my video content without shit flickering off to the sides" is a happy medium now? What content feature will you turn off if users don't want to see the goatse porn shock ads?
I think the point here is that no users appreciate garish, distracting, confusing, sometimes fraudulent ads. (No really, this is an antivirus warning dialog in this 468x80 ad space! And it's wobbling and flashing!) It detracts from the content. It hurts the reputation of the site that hosts it. Only confused old ladies click on it, and then only because they can't tell the content from the ad.
Why would you defend this on your site? Are you a sadist? You get paid for making your users uncomfortable and unhappy instead of by facilitating product conversions? Nobody voluntarily spends their money on the company with the eyeraping ad. The companies who rely on toxic advertising are desperate and about to go out of business, replaced by new companies who find themselves in similar straights. If you base your content delivery model on such shifting sand, you must be within a year or two behind them, and you do not have my pity.
The guy lied to the AP (or rather their software), ... Taken in by his deception, they accepted the money. ... Clearly, they have committed a dastardly crime.
I know, right? It's called a test case. He demonstrated that the system was flawed by purposefully taking steps to cause it to express a failure state. Test cases are a Good Thing, you see it is best to discover problems like this before they are exposed disastrously in the wild.
When someone is trying to genuinely use the service, it is going to be because they are quoting a news story that says "Copyright AP" at the bottom. The user will by definition not be an AP subscriber. So, 2short: do you care to elaborate how such a hardworking sap, only trying to do the right thing, will be able to confirm who really owns the quote? Is it from the AP original text? Was it added by the tertiary source? Was it a typo, and the story was really from Reuters?
That is supposed to be the point of this tool. Contrary to your earlier misapprehension, it is not an overglorified word counter. If it were, it would be the most expensive kind I have ever heard of. Who wants a computer to count words for them so badly they would pay $12 for the service?
No, I am certain both you and AP will be perfectly happy when anyone tries to use the tool, then as they are sued for millions usd by the true author of any section of text either loosly- or mis-labeled as copyright AP by a tertiary source, then AP will email them back with "rats, sorry about that!" and refund the poor sap his $12. Of course, only for the 1 out of a hundred citations he has paid for that applied in such a case. Who knows how many of the other 99 AP collected on gratuitously?
More hilarious still would be when AP sues the schmuck anyway. Schmuck brandishes his icopyright receipt in court, and AP lawyers need merely cite TFA as evidence the tool is unreliable to begin with. Or else perhaps they could claim the licence was revoked just before schmuck published his citation; check your spam filter mebe? Well, we'll take the $12 out of the damages we're suing you for, just to be nice.
LOL, so you want them to do a full text search of, what, the Internet?
Well no, I was rather thinking it would be a good idea to focus the search to the matter at hand. AP's newswire. You know, the feed of original stories that they actually sell to subscribing journalists? It's kind of the core of their business, and it is delivered to every (modern) news office digitally over the internet.
So.. they already have the material sitting around on servers, and subscribing journalists already do full text searches through it to determine what news they wish to republish.
Of course, non-subscribing journalists have no access to the raw AP feed. That is what subscribers are paying for to begin with. Non-subscribers only have access to tertiary sources online, such as other subscribers re-printing and often modifying or adding to stories.
Thus, the target audience is in no position to tell if a quote is actually copyrighted by AP or not. It might be an extension of the original story, thus belong to the tertiary source. It might have been mistakenly posted with an AP copyright notice when it really came from Reuters. The only people in the world who can know for sure is AP themselves, or their paying subscribers.
However, I am certain AP does not care. Why should they provide any kind of actual service to people who aren't already paying them for full access to realtime feed? It's much more lucrative to spread copyright FUD like SCO and then try to convince bloggers to cough up funds for the privilege of feeding traffic to their subscribers. Either the sap will never be sued, or if they are their hard earned receipt (or the 1 out of a hundred that applies) won't be worth a thin dime when it actually matters.
Reading comprehension: Try it sometime
I'm sorry, I am accustomed to practitioners of the English language using pronouns to refer to no more than one neutral subject at a time. You know, in order to avoid ambiguity. Your sentence ended with both an "it" and a "that" which easily could have refered to the same subject. Of course these are pronouns, so you could have intended them to refer to your head and your arse. I choose the most immediately obvious rendering instead. Take a course on Writing and Composition if you wish to get your meaning across more reliably next time.
FWIW though, "The sentence in question is 7 words long." is totally a sentence, albeit eight words long.. the way the rest of your post was going I didn't feel as though your talking about word counting and then failing to do so accurately yourself was such a surprise.
Oddly, I don't see "verify and confirm authorship" in even your list of the sites intended functions.
Neither do I, though I do see at the end of that list "provide copyright licence to article quotes". I see that instead of "promise not to sue".
You see, oddly enough the two are not in any way the same thing. Licensors make no promise not to sue licensees, instead they grant limited privileges over the work licensed. Overstep the privilege, or simply confuse the licensor and they will still sue you (though if you are in the right and can prove it then you'll win). However, (and IANAL but) providing licences to rights you do not own has got to be illegal. You know, sort of like printing fake driver's licences, selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge, office space when you don't own the building, etc.
It's a pretty difficult task as any AP article could be quoting something that they don't own, and therefore is now included within copyright protection. They would have to flag individual paragraphs and sentences throughout an article to ensure they licence exactly what they own, and not sources they simply quoted from elsewhere.
That is precisely the reason they need to confirm the quoted content is theirs. If I wish to cite an NYT article copied from AP's feed, it is entirely possible (though a lot to expect from NYT) that the journalist did some investigation of his own and added copy. That might be the bit I am trying to cite. If so, AP has no power to protect my from NYT should they file claim against me.
However, since NYT got the article from AP, it is a cake walk for AP to simply check my words against their own raw feed.
The only reason they do not do this — and instead simply take your money and thereafter forget who you are — is because it takes a modest amount of effort, and you would have to explain the complex realities of copyright to people who are too busy to care and only wish there to be a slot to feed money into to feel as though they have covered their own arses.
Essentially, it is the same scam SCO was pulling: frighten middle managers who were locked into Linux into paying SCO unnecessary sums of cash.
Why is it their responsibility to protect you from being an idiot and paying for permission for something you don't need a licence for?
Grimmelmann has rendered a test case to illustrate a flaw in a piece of software. Like all test cases, it involves purposefully following steps which would lead to failure. Test cases exist to expose flaws before any person accidentally triggers the same condition in the wild. But then again, you probably think the Q&A engineers at Honda are "idiots" for intentionally crashing cars.
The fact is this tool is useless. It's a fancy donation box and a political stunt to attempt to demonstrate a market for copyright over citation.
No AP subscriber needs this service since their subscription alone allows them full use of AP content. Non-subscribers have no access to the raw feed, so if they choose to cite a news source there is no guarantee the text they cite really comes from AP. It could be a piece from Reuters where the journalist hastily slapped on the wrong copyright notice. It could be an AP piece, but the journalist in question did his own research to add data, and that's the data you are pulling from.
So what right does AP have charging the public for text they cannot confirm is theirs? The public has no way of knowing, and can only trust the primary source (who may have been negligent, or else may sue for citing extended content without their permission) and AP themselves. If AP cannot be bothered to compare your submission with the text in their own bloody article, then they are providing zero service.
Fine. Go to the pick and mix, and throw in a load of sweets they don't sell.
Or to compare with a situation we actually care about, one in the wild. Go to pick and mix (I've never heard of them) and try to buy sweets after someone else has tainted the bin. Should PnM not be held liable if you and a dozen other people contract anthrax from their candy?
I would see a problem with it if they were doing it out of malice or with an intent to defraud. Do you really think that's the case here?
Yeah, pretty much.
What is it with everyone tripping over the fact that the experiment is contrived? Yes, Grimmelmann knew that the words were not in the article when he paid for them. So what happens when Source A prints a story that says "copyright AP" at the bottom, and you go to quote the story, so you use AP's copyright tool to do so? Then the true author of the story sues you and source A (and probably the AP to boot) for the fiasco. Will your licence from AP indemnify you from harm? Or will they refund you $0.46/word while you pay someone else thousands in damages?
The point is that AP cannot keep track of what they own and what they do not. A store is a bad analogy because AP does not DOES NOT have an inventory. They do not have walls. They are just standing out in the field with a cash register. Apparently, you can bring them any rock or twig and they will happily take your money in exchange for their blessing, and apparently some people are wandering around, getting twigs, and then AP sues them. However, there is NO authoritative way for non AP members to tell what AP claims to own.
I believe AP is fully aware of this and is happy to take money from any sucker and refuse to provide a service when needed. If it's like anything, it's like being sold bad insurance. It's like using a contrived example to get a CA to certify a clearly invalid certificate, showing that the CA does not actually certify anything at all.
Really though, this has nothing to do with accidentally overpaying. This has to do with being sold non-goods.
It's like paying $12 to buy a raffle ticket which is demonstrably invalid, just to prove that the rafflers have no intent on honoring any of the legit-seeming tickets that they sell. They just take your money and then forget you exist.
Thus, TFA could care less about the $12 he sacrificed on his point. He cares about the $X arbitrary journalists around the world might pay for the licence to quote articles without being sued, given that AP cannot and will not defend you from suit because they cannot even correctly tell if they have a right to the material you are asking about.
If I tell you "The sentence in question is 7 words long.", do you interpret that as authorization to claim I said it?
Yeah, pretty much. If you say something, I assume it is ok to claim that you said it.
MSWord does word counts, does that mean I can attribute anything I type into it as an official MS position?
Oh I'm sorry, you are in the wrong thread. This article is about licence.icopyright.net, a self-service website created by AP specifically to charge for and provide copyright licence to article quotes. You are looking for the "AP launches word-counting service to put M$ Office in it's place" thread, I sadly do not have a link for that.
Thanks for trying! :D
Do you really expect someone to write code that would contextually differentiate public IP content from private on the fly? Really?
No, but I had rather hoped that before selling me a licence to content, AP's software would at least check to see if the text I was after belonged to them or not. TFA discusses public content, simply because that by definition cannot belong to AP. AP has all of their content digitized (how else would they know what to sue over?) so the matter of checking my request against that content is covered by this groundbreaking algorithm .
Rule #1 of laying property claims: mark off your god damned property. If you can't be bothered to tell where your property ends, then it's not really yours to begin with.
TFA is not upset about the loss of $12 in bait, he was upset by the non-product delivered. If AP cannot tell if text belongs to them or not, then they cannot legally licence you to use it, which is precisely what this web tool claims to do.
It's like a tool on a carpenter's website to get a fence built.
Except that carpenters are not in the business of keeping track of intellectual property.
It's actually more like using a website constructed by a municipality to approve building permits. You key in the area where you wish to build, website calculates the fee, takes payment online, and you print your legally binding permit without getting out of your jammies.
Several months and millions of construction dollars later, the state tries to sue you for building on land with the wrong zoning and code. You flourish your permit which states that the city is in charge of the zoning for that parcel, and you have their approval. State reps tell you the city has overstepped their bounds and takes you to court. Now is the city going to go to bat for you because their software loused everything up for you, or let you blow in the wind?
Grimmelmann had the good sense to test the service before anyone was put in a similar position (getting sued after paying AP for copy AP never owned). The service is broken, and the message is that you should never trust AP to keep track of their own goods. If you pay them money through this website, the money might as well be burned because you get no service from AP as a result. If the agreement they forge with you cannot protect you from third parties, why should we believe it will protect you from AP on legit content? You think they won't charge you for the licence and then find a way to sue you once you print anyway? They could even cite this article in court to demonstrate how worthless the licence is. :P
It's like at a dollar store, every item costs the same.
I see, so you've never been to a dollar store.
Go some time. Not only will you find inexpensive knickknacks and junk, but you'll see that they scan every single thing. Two reasons:
Firstly, not everything is really a dollar. Some things are X for a dollar.
Secondly, for those of you not lucky enough to live in Oregon, they'll calculate sales tax and I don't believe all items tax just the same way. For example, some items may be exempt.
Thirdly, to give you a receipt. You know, listing what you have actually bought that you physically take from their possession and care into your own? So that everyone can keep track of liability if some piece of candy you buy turns out to be laced with arsenic? So that you won't be charged for things they don't sell?
AP has built a website claiming to use automated processes to sell you license to any collection of words they have a right to. This article is a story because AP's software simply ignores that last part instead of actually doing the only work a copyright holder is even required to do in the current legal system. Refunds and being charged for things have nothing to do with the matter. The issue at hand is simply demonstrating that there is no product being sold here. This is like charging the public $100 a pop for bottled water that you are secretly just filling from the tap, and then suing anyone you see drinking any water at all who can't show a receipt that they bought a bottle from you. How can AP justify demanding renumeration from the public for using their material if they cannot even recognize their own material?
Every day I am amazed how more and more copyright apologists seem to forget that money should never be expected to change hands unless there is some counterweight of value being provided by the vendor. Either the "licence" you get from this website actually shifts liability over the content agreed upon from yourself to AP, or else what purpose does it serve at all? Is this nothing more than a complicated donation box?
Offline is still a valuable destination for much data, says I. I am rather annoyed by how lazy many people are that they feel they cannot manage their own data, need the cloud to handle every piece of minutiae.
We should embrace the diversity of being able to store or access content online (Spotify, Hulu, Youtube) and being able to locally archive said content in case the original, ameture work gets a DMCA takedown notice for being too popular and independent .. or just for when you leave the coverage area (DownloadHelper, XBMC, Ipod)
oh right, nobody's "profiting" off this change - can't allow anything to happen that doesn't make the rich richer, can we?
Not when decades of their propaganda have turned the public so effectively in favor of bits-as-commodity that Kim Jong Il even began taking notes.
"You wouldn't steal a car.. would you?" Never in all my years have I heard such a good promotion for auto theft. ;P
I've never heard of a band going with a certain record label because "they have better sound quality" ;)
Well, that's half my point. Now extend the fast food analogy to the consumers. Modern pop bands are so digitally post synthed, before the compression that the quality of the original source becomes irrelevant.
Final point: The Brother's Chaps of Homestarrunner.com fame have a sound room. That's from working full time on a free, flash animation site selling nothing but tee shirts, and DVD copies of cartoons you can have for free online. They did NOT start out with a soundroom, and as mentioned in the interview you can hear this by checking their old material.
My core point is: good content survives poor delivery.
I have. I don't feel that I can give money to the major record companies in good conscience.
On top of that, I simply can't bloody afford albums that cost more than DVD's anymore. Hell, I can't afford the DVD's either. We are in a recession, remember?
You're ugly, but you intrigue me.
I so do not, I'm just a boring bat. :P
So you are pretty much saying that because copying electronic content is possible, its free to do?
As in, people are free to make money from pirated copies by selling those on the street?
I'm not certain if GP would own up to as much, but I will.
I maintain that such behavior is in fact perfectly acceptable (up to but not passing the point where you deceive people into thinking the label endorses your copy in case it is defective in some way, which would be the separate offense of fraud).
I do not feel as though my tax dollars should be wasted protecting a dying industry from the inevitable penny ante concerns of bootlegging. If you attempt to sell bits as though they were a scarce commodity, and then lobby and sue the world into pretending they are handling a scarce commodity, then you simply deserve to fail.
Besides, 99/100 consumers who are unconcerned about copyright would nab a copy online for free instead of paying for plastic on the street. So, I don't see the bootleggers having any profit margins either in developed countries (and police have never hassled them to begin with in less developed areas :P)