So the government is a protection racket. What else is new?
How is fining someone for discharging a high powered rifle along the shoulder of a public road a "protection racket?"
A protection racket, if you could even dream one up for the circumstances being discussed, would involve something more along the lines of a farmer being told that he's not allowed to shoot a crop-destroying deer on his own property unless he pays a weekly fee to a third party. The protection racket model involves the actless act of "protecting" you from harm that you yourself are threatening to do to someone. As in: give me money, and I'll protect you from the harm I would otherwise do you. It's called a protection racket because the perpetrators operate under the (completely transparent) scam/illusion that it's other people who are the threat, and that they're really going to protect you from those other people.
In short, fining (and sometimes, jailing) poachers and reckless road-shooters isn't anything at all like a protection racket. Whine all you want about The Man, but you're completely tone deaf on this one.
Of course, that's also true of driving on most public roads, but at least I have airbags in my Evil SUV. I don't wear anything, personally, that will stop someone who got his first 30-.06 for Christmas yesterday and thinks it's OK to shoot at a sound in the bushes. Living in the DC area, I can tell you that only the most really-a-PITA-to-get-to public grounds are safe from that class of casual hunter that seems to include both the lazy and the dangerous.
Unless I'm fortunate enough to have been invited to some private property, I don't bother going out unless it's bow season. Even a real jerk will have a harder time accidentally killing you with a bow from 200 yards away. I love venison, but when you have to value it in terms of How Many Times You Risked Your Life Per Pound, it's frustrating, that's for sure.
If the DoD cannot find a solution to this kind of email, they should outsource its management to countries like India and Russia. Isn't it true that a good amount of our defense contracts are outsourced?
Um, they just did enact a solution.
And, no. You don't really have Indian outsourcing operations involved in the day-to-day admin of communications to and from the Pentagon. No.
Satan, or Bush, has taken over the public information channels, and the minds of the young and stupid.
Oh, come on. Try again: MTV, YouTube, and every other attention-span killing, passive-consumption bit of fluff and sound-bite-world-view bling-bling = self-worth bit of nonsense is where this comes from. Whether one politician or idealogy takes hold because kids are just skulls full of goo is a separate issue. Whether it's Rosie O'Donnel's witless rants that resonate, or some preacher's feel-goodiness, it's the lack of critical thinking skills (which should be introduced by parents and polished in school) that have created this intellectual wasteland.
So if I have a window in my house overlooking a screen from a drive-in and charge deaf people to sit and look out my window, is that copyright infringement?
Hard to say how that would play... but in practical terms, you can't do that for an audience of thousands or millions the way that you can with a leeched-material web site. I'm betting that charging admission to look over the fence at a drive-in movie theatre is a bad enough example that we'll have a hard time really coming to an agreement on the specifics (local zoning thing? theft of services thing? copyright? no business license to do that in your house? etc), but it doesn't matter. Only a morally rudderless person would even spend a moment wondering if that's an ethically bankrupt business model, or that - regardless of your take on DCMA, etc - it's plainly oozing money off of someone else's work and property.
Doesn't matter. Content leeches are parasitic scum, and everyone knows it. The particular mechanism by which you stop them is a practical matter... but anyone who defends them on principle is made of some odd stuff.
What's the moral difference between leeching someone's content and using AdBlock to leech most sites' content? Most Slashdotters seem to have no problem with the latter. No, I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I see virtually no difference. The argument in both cases is either, "view what the content creator wanted you to see" or "view what the hell the 'net allows you to". Make your collective minds up.
That's a great question. Ethically, it's pretty much the same thing, as you suggest. But in practical terms, here, there's a big difference... the leecher (the guy embedding the other guy's videos on his own site) was presenting this material as if it was his own, burning up the other guy's bandwidth, and attempting to make money off of doing so. He was misrepresenting his rights to the material.
Presumably, someone using AdBlock is saying that he's never going to click on an ad, whether it's shown to him or not. Now, a site may prefer simply not to allow visitors that want to put on those blinders, and of course there are technical approaches to that... but we're not, in that case, dealing with a question of someone else hijacking another person's material and pretending it's their own (classic infringement).
And I think the solution may be for this judge to talk to the one(s) that have ruled that just linking to copyrighted material is infringement.
Except... the other judge did not say that. The guy in question wasn't just "linking to" someone else's content... he was embedding someone else's copyrighted videos in his own site, making it look like it was his material, while still burning up the other guy's bandwidth. It was classic leeching, and he was making ad money off of doing it.
If there a pet shortage in Japan? Dogs/Cats also respond realistically when you interact with them.
Anyone that's spent any real time interacting with actual dogs and cats is going to find something like this cold comfort indeed. Perhaps they're thinking of patients in the throws of dementia or something - or just assuming that a lot of elderly Japanese have never actually had a real animal in their lives.
That being said, a lot of elderly patients have comprimised immune systems. And as nice as it is to have a real dog give you a friendly lick on the face, it's worth remembering that, without question, is was recently licking its ass.
Don't want some people to see your restricted content?
That's not the point. The case in question involves someone else portraying your material as his and making money off of that... and using up your bandwidth while he's at it. Surely you see the difference.
When you publish something on a Web server, you are giving people permission to access it. Whether you secure it and require payment to view it is up to you, but don't confuse the access restrictions with copyright issues
When someone else embeds your streamed material within their own website, contextually characterizing it as their own stuff and generating ad revenue while doing so, it isn't a matter of "access." It's a matter of someone else earning money off of the illusion of distributing material to which they don't have copyright, and - to pour salt in the wound - burning up your bandwidth to do it. It makes no difference that a web browser is the tool that's used, indirectly. The person running the web site that's attempting to pretend it's their material is infringing in every sense that matters. You say no copies are being made, but that makes no difference. It's exactly the same as re-broadcasting copywritten material and pretending it's yours to broadcast.
Basically, this judge has given webmasters grounds to sue people in lieu of learning how to do their damned jobs properly.
That's like saying people don't have an expectation of privacy in their homes if they don't plan ahead and install shielding that will prevent someone with a million-dollar thermal imaging system from watching them from a van on the street. It doesn't matter how precise that analogy is or not - you're preaching an arms race, rather than a rational civil ethic.
Sorry, that scenario doesn't pan out. If one of the people who has requested the free videos is in turn running, say, a local cable-access show... and weaves some of your material into their broadcast, then we're closer to the mark. Or someone runs a web site, and is looking for more traffic, and links directly to someone else's material while conveying the impression that the site being visited is the one that's rich with motocross videos - that's not only more like it, it's exactly like it.
Someone who is trying to create the illusion of a content-rich site by hot linking to copywritten files that will play browser-side without any contextual sense that the file is being presented by someone that doesn't have rights to represent it as their own... well, they deserve a smacking.
You're not getting it. Linking to a site is like pointing someone to a copy of Time Magazine, not committing copyright infringement.
But presenting someone else's video files (as is the case here) from within the context of your own web site, as method of enriching the apparent content of your site (to increase traffic, improve your image, and raise more ad revenue) absolutely is. A typical visitor to such a site can't tell the difference between a video that the site has created and is hosting itself, vs. one that he's slipped into the presentation of his site while leeching from somewhere else. A reasonable person can certainly conclude that the leeching site is simply trying to sponge off of someone else's material, and when he didn't stop when asked, the situation escalated. There's more to this than a link that says "hey, go over to site X and check out this cool video he has there - he'll appreciate the traffic!" No, he's saying welcome to my site, and watch this cool video. Can't you see the difference?
Your analogy is incorrect. By the logic of the judge, anyone giving the location of Time Magazine (a copyrighted piece of content) to another person (without first listing the content of every ad in Time Magazine, in every issue ever published) would be required to pay Time Magazine for profit deprivation.
You'd be right if that's what we were talking about, but we're not. Having your own web site, and making it appear to have more content by linking to files that some else is hosting (and which someone else created!) as if those were pieces of your site, or resources that you have the right to bring to your audience in the context of your site (running your revenue-generating ads!) is what's really at hand, here.
I wonder how they prevent people from seeing the cover in bookstores and supermarkets then. Hmm.
It doesn't matter! That's their choice and part of their sales process. Representing some subset of their content as your own isn't even part of the same topic.
Come come now, I dont think you really need the help of an electrician to flip a circut breaker...
Yeah, and not everyone needs to hire a server admin or engage a consultant to make sure that fundamentally changing the way your web site works won't have any unpleasant consequences, either. And some people do.
I wonder if I met someone at a party and I said, hey you should check out this link and I just "told" them about the URL, would I be violating the law if the URL's owner objected?
The difference that matters is, using your example, you're not running a web site and trying to make your site more popular by appearing to have richer content that's really someone else's (and served using that other person's bandwidth!). That's an easy distinction to make, and the judge did it just fine.
One can argue that the patent and copyright systems are all about the government securing profit for businesses and individuals.
There are plenty of non-profit people and organizations that still make use of their copyrights. Not least so that other unscrupulous people can't make money off of their volunteered time, etc. Everyone has those rights to their own work, whether they're personally choosing to make money or not.
I'm always amazed at how carefully someone will pick apart a casual analogy in order to avoid actually conceding that a leeching jackass is a leeching jackass.
To work better with your framework, though, it's more like someone cleverly positioning a mirror on their house to make it appear that the neighbor's display is actually his own, and using that illusion to bolster his own reputation among his visitors and prospective advertisors. You really don't have to disect analogies to conclude that the guy - who was asked to stop - was leveraging someone else's material in a way that implied it was his own to work with.
Depriving someone of their ability to feed, clothe, and/or shelter themselves is a very small step from imprisonment.
Whew! Then it's a good thing that all you have to do is stop pretending you're the source of copyrighted material when you're not, and the problem goes away. There's plenty of precedent to suggest that all an infringer like this has to do is stop when asked to. Piece of cake, and no lawyers, courts, costs, or civil penalties anywhere in site.
That is like having a big billboard in front of your store and free stuff in the back, and suing someone because they are telling people that you can bypass the billboard and go straight to the back.
No, this is like a neighbor running a business that depends on people thinking he's cool and has a lot going on, and who helps with that image by giving away the stuff you keep in your back yard, which you otherwise would provide under different circumstances. Who cares how good a fence you could put up if you want, and whether it would work - the other guy's an ass (partly for doing it in the first place, but mostly for not stopping when simply asked to).
And bringing a lawsuit (against one individual) is cheaper than turning on referrer logging (which solves the problem in perpetuity for all leeches)? What colour is the sky on your planet?
What's your point? That principle should mean nothing? That the only structure we should have in place to stop people from ripping you off is a physical barrier to their ability to do so? How about a more open situation where most people are reasonable and don't rip you off, and you tell the few people that do to knock it off, and when they say "screw you," you have some recourse?
You're advocating an arms race, and I'm advocating a civil society.
No, what's usual -- and appropriate -- would be for the copyright holder to take down content he doesn't want other people to see, not whine to the court (using up public resources) to cover for his own stupidity!
So, Time Magazine should stop putting its magazines on the shelf because otherwise they can't stop you from taking out your digital camera, making a copy of the cover, and using it on your web site as if the artwork were your own material?
Slashdot Mirror
So the government is a protection racket. What else is new?
How is fining someone for discharging a high powered rifle along the shoulder of a public road a "protection racket?"
A protection racket, if you could even dream one up for the circumstances being discussed, would involve something more along the lines of a farmer being told that he's not allowed to shoot a crop-destroying deer on his own property unless he pays a weekly fee to a third party. The protection racket model involves the actless act of "protecting" you from harm that you yourself are threatening to do to someone. As in: give me money, and I'll protect you from the harm I would otherwise do you. It's called a protection racket because the perpetrators operate under the (completely transparent) scam/illusion that it's other people who are the threat, and that they're really going to protect you from those other people.
In short, fining (and sometimes, jailing) poachers and reckless road-shooters isn't anything at all like a protection racket. Whine all you want about The Man, but you're completely tone deaf on this one.
that's why I avoid public hunting grounds
Public Hunting Grounds = Death Wish
Of course, that's also true of driving on most public roads, but at least I have airbags in my Evil SUV. I don't wear anything, personally, that will stop someone who got his first 30-.06 for Christmas yesterday and thinks it's OK to shoot at a sound in the bushes. Living in the DC area, I can tell you that only the most really-a-PITA-to-get-to public grounds are safe from that class of casual hunter that seems to include both the lazy and the dangerous.
Unless I'm fortunate enough to have been invited to some private property, I don't bother going out unless it's bow season. Even a real jerk will have a harder time accidentally killing you with a bow from 200 yards away. I love venison, but when you have to value it in terms of How Many Times You Risked Your Life Per Pound, it's frustrating, that's for sure.
Clicking only happens with revolvers!
Hey, the fact that you even know that there's a difference between a pistol and a revolver puts you in a tiny little minority, even here.
If the DoD cannot find a solution to this kind of email, they should outsource its management to countries like India and Russia. Isn't it true that a good amount of our defense contracts are outsourced?
Um, they just did enact a solution.
And, no. You don't really have Indian outsourcing operations involved in the day-to-day admin of communications to and from the Pentagon. No.
Satan, or Bush, has taken over the public information channels, and the minds of the young and stupid.
Oh, come on. Try again: MTV, YouTube, and every other attention-span killing, passive-consumption bit of fluff and sound-bite-world-view bling-bling = self-worth bit of nonsense is where this comes from. Whether one politician or idealogy takes hold because kids are just skulls full of goo is a separate issue. Whether it's Rosie O'Donnel's witless rants that resonate, or some preacher's feel-goodiness, it's the lack of critical thinking skills (which should be introduced by parents and polished in school) that have created this intellectual wasteland.
So if I have a window in my house overlooking a screen from a drive-in and charge deaf people to sit and look out my window, is that copyright infringement?
Hard to say how that would play... but in practical terms, you can't do that for an audience of thousands or millions the way that you can with a leeched-material web site. I'm betting that charging admission to look over the fence at a drive-in movie theatre is a bad enough example that we'll have a hard time really coming to an agreement on the specifics (local zoning thing? theft of services thing? copyright? no business license to do that in your house? etc), but it doesn't matter. Only a morally rudderless person would even spend a moment wondering if that's an ethically bankrupt business model, or that - regardless of your take on DCMA, etc - it's plainly oozing money off of someone else's work and property.
Doesn't matter. Content leeches are parasitic scum, and everyone knows it. The particular mechanism by which you stop them is a practical matter... but anyone who defends them on principle is made of some odd stuff.
What's the moral difference between leeching someone's content and using AdBlock to leech most sites' content? Most Slashdotters seem to have no problem with the latter. No, I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I see virtually no difference. The argument in both cases is either, "view what the content creator wanted you to see" or "view what the hell the 'net allows you to". Make your collective minds up.
That's a great question. Ethically, it's pretty much the same thing, as you suggest. But in practical terms, here, there's a big difference... the leecher (the guy embedding the other guy's videos on his own site) was presenting this material as if it was his own, burning up the other guy's bandwidth, and attempting to make money off of doing so. He was misrepresenting his rights to the material.
Presumably, someone using AdBlock is saying that he's never going to click on an ad, whether it's shown to him or not. Now, a site may prefer simply not to allow visitors that want to put on those blinders, and of course there are technical approaches to that... but we're not, in that case, dealing with a question of someone else hijacking another person's material and pretending it's their own (classic infringement).
And I think the solution may be for this judge to talk to the one(s) that have ruled that just linking to copyrighted material is infringement.
Except... the other judge did not say that. The guy in question wasn't just "linking to" someone else's content... he was embedding someone else's copyrighted videos in his own site, making it look like it was his material, while still burning up the other guy's bandwidth. It was classic leeching, and he was making ad money off of doing it.
If there a pet shortage in Japan? Dogs/Cats also respond realistically when you interact with them.
Anyone that's spent any real time interacting with actual dogs and cats is going to find something like this cold comfort indeed. Perhaps they're thinking of patients in the throws of dementia or something - or just assuming that a lot of elderly Japanese have never actually had a real animal in their lives.
That being said, a lot of elderly patients have comprimised immune systems. And as nice as it is to have a real dog give you a friendly lick on the face, it's worth remembering that, without question, is was recently licking its ass.
Don't want some people to see your restricted content?
That's not the point. The case in question involves someone else portraying your material as his and making money off of that... and using up your bandwidth while he's at it. Surely you see the difference.
When you publish something on a Web server, you are giving people permission to access it. Whether you secure it and require payment to view it is up to you, but don't confuse the access restrictions with copyright issues
When someone else embeds your streamed material within their own website, contextually characterizing it as their own stuff and generating ad revenue while doing so, it isn't a matter of "access." It's a matter of someone else earning money off of the illusion of distributing material to which they don't have copyright, and - to pour salt in the wound - burning up your bandwidth to do it. It makes no difference that a web browser is the tool that's used, indirectly. The person running the web site that's attempting to pretend it's their material is infringing in every sense that matters. You say no copies are being made, but that makes no difference. It's exactly the same as re-broadcasting copywritten material and pretending it's yours to broadcast.
Oh, and Merry Christmas. Happy Solstice, etc.!
Basically, this judge has given webmasters grounds to sue people in lieu of learning how to do their damned jobs properly.
That's like saying people don't have an expectation of privacy in their homes if they don't plan ahead and install shielding that will prevent someone with a million-dollar thermal imaging system from watching them from a van on the street. It doesn't matter how precise that analogy is or not - you're preaching an arms race, rather than a rational civil ethic.
Sorry, that scenario doesn't pan out. If one of the people who has requested the free videos is in turn running, say, a local cable-access show... and weaves some of your material into their broadcast, then we're closer to the mark. Or someone runs a web site, and is looking for more traffic, and links directly to someone else's material while conveying the impression that the site being visited is the one that's rich with motocross videos - that's not only more like it, it's exactly like it.
... well, they deserve a smacking.
Someone who is trying to create the illusion of a content-rich site by hot linking to copywritten files that will play browser-side without any contextual sense that the file is being presented by someone that doesn't have rights to represent it as their own
You're not getting it. Linking to a site is like pointing someone to a copy of Time Magazine, not committing copyright infringement.
But presenting someone else's video files (as is the case here) from within the context of your own web site, as method of enriching the apparent content of your site (to increase traffic, improve your image, and raise more ad revenue) absolutely is. A typical visitor to such a site can't tell the difference between a video that the site has created and is hosting itself, vs. one that he's slipped into the presentation of his site while leeching from somewhere else. A reasonable person can certainly conclude that the leeching site is simply trying to sponge off of someone else's material, and when he didn't stop when asked, the situation escalated. There's more to this than a link that says "hey, go over to site X and check out this cool video he has there - he'll appreciate the traffic!" No, he's saying welcome to my site, and watch this cool video. Can't you see the difference?
Your analogy is incorrect. By the logic of the judge, anyone giving the location of Time Magazine (a copyrighted piece of content) to another person (without first listing the content of every ad in Time Magazine, in every issue ever published) would be required to pay Time Magazine for profit deprivation.
You'd be right if that's what we were talking about, but we're not. Having your own web site, and making it appear to have more content by linking to files that some else is hosting (and which someone else created!) as if those were pieces of your site, or resources that you have the right to bring to your audience in the context of your site (running your revenue-generating ads!) is what's really at hand, here.
I wonder how they prevent people from seeing the cover in bookstores and supermarkets then. Hmm.
It doesn't matter! That's their choice and part of their sales process. Representing some subset of their content as your own isn't even part of the same topic.
Come come now, I dont think you really need the help of an electrician to flip a circut breaker...
Yeah, and not everyone needs to hire a server admin or engage a consultant to make sure that fundamentally changing the way your web site works won't have any unpleasant consequences, either. And some people do.
I wonder if I met someone at a party and I said, hey you should check out this link and I just "told" them about the URL, would I be violating the law if the URL's owner objected?
The difference that matters is, using your example, you're not running a web site and trying to make your site more popular by appearing to have richer content that's really someone else's (and served using that other person's bandwidth!). That's an easy distinction to make, and the judge did it just fine.
One can argue that the patent and copyright systems are all about the government securing profit for businesses and individuals.
There are plenty of non-profit people and organizations that still make use of their copyrights. Not least so that other unscrupulous people can't make money off of their volunteered time, etc. Everyone has those rights to their own work, whether they're personally choosing to make money or not.
I'm always amazed at how carefully someone will pick apart a casual analogy in order to avoid actually conceding that a leeching jackass is a leeching jackass.
To work better with your framework, though, it's more like someone cleverly positioning a mirror on their house to make it appear that the neighbor's display is actually his own, and using that illusion to bolster his own reputation among his visitors and prospective advertisors. You really don't have to disect analogies to conclude that the guy - who was asked to stop - was leveraging someone else's material in a way that implied it was his own to work with.
Depriving someone of their ability to feed, clothe, and/or shelter themselves is a very small step from imprisonment.
Whew! Then it's a good thing that all you have to do is stop pretending you're the source of copyrighted material when you're not, and the problem goes away. There's plenty of precedent to suggest that all an infringer like this has to do is stop when asked to. Piece of cake, and no lawyers, courts, costs, or civil penalties anywhere in site.
That is like having a big billboard in front of your store and free stuff in the back, and suing someone because they are telling people that you can bypass the billboard and go straight to the back.
No, this is like a neighbor running a business that depends on people thinking he's cool and has a lot going on, and who helps with that image by giving away the stuff you keep in your back yard, which you otherwise would provide under different circumstances. Who cares how good a fence you could put up if you want, and whether it would work - the other guy's an ass (partly for doing it in the first place, but mostly for not stopping when simply asked to).
And bringing a lawsuit (against one individual) is cheaper than turning on referrer logging (which solves the problem in perpetuity for all leeches)? What colour is the sky on your planet?
What's your point? That principle should mean nothing? That the only structure we should have in place to stop people from ripping you off is a physical barrier to their ability to do so? How about a more open situation where most people are reasonable and don't rip you off, and you tell the few people that do to knock it off, and when they say "screw you," you have some recourse?
You're advocating an arms race, and I'm advocating a civil society.
No, what's usual -- and appropriate -- would be for the copyright holder to take down content he doesn't want other people to see, not whine to the court (using up public resources) to cover for his own stupidity!
So, Time Magazine should stop putting its magazines on the shelf because otherwise they can't stop you from taking out your digital camera, making a copy of the cover, and using it on your web site as if the artwork were your own material?