A Senate committee recommended serious cuts to the bill: https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2018/04/california-senate-committee-recommends-cutting-key-net-neutrality-protections
And, of course, the ISPs have been fighting the bill _hard_: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/att-and-cable-lobby-are-terrified-of-a-california-net-neutrality-bill/
If you're in CA and you support effective net neutrality legislation, let your local legislators know you want the original bill.
In 1959, the television broadcast networks were competing with... radio? Today, Apple is competing with an enormous number of Windows- (and Linux-, Android-, WebOS-...) based Internet-connected laptops (and desktops, phones, PDAs, tablets...) capable of showing the same quality video. Oh, and with television (broadcast, cables, satellite...), which has grown a bit since 1959.
It's far more than a technical fight -- it's an underlying policy fight. Apple is not wrong for calling Palm out for masquerading as their device. It's wrong for putting a bunch of engineering effort into blocking people from using the devices they own with software it has been designed to be compatible with. Palm devices only started masquerading as Apple devices after they were intentionally blocked.
Regardless if that change is a violation of the USB license, I'm not interested in paying money to a company who's spending that money making my other devices not work. If Palm made their phones not offer USB disk access when connected the the Mac, I'd drop them, as well.
Apple refused to repair my MacBook, which had 2 years of AppleCare left, citing a censor which showed evidence of liquid damage (despite my computer never having come into contact with liquids). They pointed out to me that the sensor can be triggered by high humidity, but nonetheless wanted to charge me 75% the cost of a new, better laptop to repair it. Then they sent me the laptop back with screws missing and not even booting as far as when I sent it to them. When I pointed this out in a letter, they told me "it was returned in the condition it was received."
Of course, as a result, my new desktop, laptop, and MP3 players are non-Apple products. And this type of technology can no doubt be useful and help reduce fraud. But when used blindly or by organizations with questionable support quality, it can become a way to get out of contractual obligations and avoid the cost of actually standing behind extended warranties.
I guess you did find it. Yes, they are pages after (3 wide-margin double-spaced fixed-type pages!), but they are part of the same conversation with the same lawyer and the same family. I was demonstrating the judge's attitude towards the RIAA attorney because the tone of the statement (the "dripping with sarcasm") doesn't show up in the transcript.
No, sarcasm isn't ideal from the bench, but our clippings combined demonstrates exactly why it happens. The judge is only human, and is faced with 133 cases in which an industry cartel is railroading people who don't fully understand what is happening into paying a lot of money and not defending themselves, and the judge has to ask all of these questions and eventually order the defendants to pay ridiculous amounts of money because the law demands it, and he/she has no choice.
In summary: yes, pages away, yes same conversation, yes it was sarcastic, yes that's not ideal, and yes I don't blame the judge. Nothing in there indicates that the statement about the RIAA needing money was at all made in earnest.
Please read the rest of the exchange if you're going to criticize. The judge is clearly being sarcastic. From a brief review, I also see (in the same conversation):
MR. MANN: I don't know what the merits of the case were when the earlier court rendered a judgment against Mr. Atkinson. THE COURT: There were no merits of the case, it was a default judgment, all that happened,' you sued, there was silence on the other side, and then you come up with a judgment of $4,000 because that's the statutory damages, and Congress says you can get it. These people never defended, if now they brought forward a defense --
and
THE COURT: But you understand this is a terribly vicious cycle. On the one hand, you say we bring them into court so we can examine them. They come into court without a lawyer. They haven't a clue what these proceedings are. We have been trying to explain it to people, and then because they don't respond, the numbers keep on going up and up, and at a certain point after 133 cases in my court and countless around the country, the plaintiffs are going to realize this is making no sense and making them look bad.
Obviously, Crack is cheaper and more plentiful over there. You missed the part where in the U.S., it's already 95 years for works for hire and lifetime of the author plus 70 years for plain old humans. If you want crack, we're your country.
I don't know why more people aren't talking about the DMCA safe harbor. I've heard plenty of allegations (mostly true, I imagine, electric slide videos notwithstanding) that YouTube carried copyrighted videos. I've heard few or no rumors that they've refused to take them down when notified, or have not been reasonably timely in doing so.
Of course, rumors are not evidence, but it seems likely that they're going to mount a pretty strong DMCA Safe Harbor-based defense. This is what the safe harbor is for.
Just wanted to point out that that question is a little (though not totally) misleading; it should probably read, "does copyright have any limit on its scope?" The problem is that copyright covers too many things, and that he can (he claims) copyright these dances in the first place. If anything, the DMCA is a limited positive here, because it provides a safe harbor to sites like YouTube who comply with the takedown notices; without the DMCA, this guy could just sue them and, if the copyrights are valid, win. The DMCA did not provide any new rights or abilities to sue beyond "old" copyright in this particular instance.
The downside of the DMCA here is that it provides an incentive for sites like YouTube to take the videos down without really knowing they are infringing at all, and due to the volume of such requests, they almost have no choice. But that's still not really a "scope of the DMCA" problem, but a "scope of copyright" and "DMCA incentives" problem.
I realized my response started to ramble, so here's a summary: Policy-wise, I think we have pretty similar views on what copyright should be like, or at the very list which direction it should be taken in. I just think that it's still relatively clear that those who wrote the current copyright laws intended that derivative works like mixtapes be covered -- me, you, and TJ notwithstanding.
Remember, that monopoly only exists in the first place because Thomas Jefferson (et. al.) couldn't think of a better way to encourage creativity (in fact, it's pretty clear from his letters that he despised monopolies, and considered them to be a necessary evil). If those "unlicensed derivative works" provide more of a benefit than the monopoly would, it makes sense to allow them. Since, based on other people's posts, it seems that they are indeed of more benefit (e.g. one person mentioned buying the original "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf because he heard a mix that included it), they should be legal.
We're talking not about the intent of TJ, or the intent of slashdot readers -- we're talking about the intent of Congress when they passed the Copyright Act (in its current, relevant form). We can argue forever about whether copyright should cover mixtapes or be as powerful and lengthy as it is (or not argue, since I probably agree with you), but that won't change whether or not they were covered by the intent of those passing the law.
You could probably make a decent argument that even they would think that this shouldn't be covered, and couldn't have foreseen this particular type of use, and maybe you'd be right, but I happen not to think so. They didn't have any other carve-outs for specific types of derivative works, and there was a pretty strong legislative preference for providing copyright owners with strong control over the uses, especially commercial ones, of their works. I doubt (but of course, this is pure opinion on my part) that they would have (or the current Congress will) recogniz the potential societal benefits that we recognize from allowing this type of work to be freely created.
(Another question we probably shouldn't get into, but is worth thinking about, is how to create a principled exception that covers mixtapes without creating a very ugly line-drawing problem.)
And as I said, I'm taking issue with the idea being able to make mixtapes is the entire point of copyright. If being able to make mixtapes, which are derivative works, is the entire point of copyright, then why does the language of the statute say essentially, "you can't make derivative works"? In fact, the point of copyright is to encourage creation of works by granting a temporary (ha ha) monopoly in things like derivative works, and specifically not to encourage unlicensed derivative works until the end of that monopoly.
I'm sorry if my reference to "any implication" of legality can be construed as accusing the parent of "stating" that it's legal. He did not state that. I simply wanted to counter the possible conclusion that it is legal, or even that it was intended to be legal. The intent is pretty clearly that it not be legal.
We won't, of course, go into the "limited times" copyright issue -- that's another (huge) problem.
It's funny that you chose to call them "derivative works" in an attempt to show that making them is legal. "[T]he owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: . . . (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;" 17 U.S.C. 106. That's exclusive, as in "no one else can do it without permission."
Note that I'm not making any judgments/commentary about the subject of the main article here -- just any implication that this is "the entire fucking point of copyright" or that it is, in the absence of fair use, legal.
Russia shutting them down? I suppose they're suing for damages, which they could still (in theory) get, but it's a weird time to finally get around to it.
One major problem with this is that trademarks are both territorial and (at least in the United States) industry-tied. So you can have "Spreckles" legitimately trademarked as a soda company in the United States, a shoe manufacturer in the United States, and a soda company in Brazil (chosen at random -- I know nothing about Brazilian trademark law).
Also, trademarks need not always be registered, meaning that people who might have a legitimately enforceable trademark or trademark-like right could not get a domain.
Every time they release a new product, post a mini-review:
"We would be happy to review this product, but unfortunately the company has refused to send us any samples since we [posted] a negative review of one of their products."
... with a link to the review in question. Not sure it would work, but assuming you have other companies who you can still review and which will still draw people do your site, might have a positive effect.
For the record, both the court in Arnold (Central District of California) and the 9th Circuit are both federal courts. The 9th Circuit is a court of appeals that will hear Arnold (should the government choose to appeal), and may choose to affirm or reverse it. And until the 9th Circuit hears it, it only applies in the Central District of California (big area of CA containing L.A.).
And more importantly (cause I hear it all the time), the 9th Circuit no longer has anywhere near the highest reversal rate. Nowadays, they're roughly average. Chart through 2004 and article. If you dive into the details, there are some differences in the manner in which they're reversed, but the numbers don't lie.
For the record, Montoya de Hernandez says that "routine" searches are fine, and the court in Arnold addressed Montoya de Hernandez specifically, saying that more invasive searches do require reasonable suspicion. That's settled 9th Circuit law, though I'm not sure it's ever been directly addressed by the Supreme Court. As I said, this is not the end of the matter -- we have to wait for the appeal, and if enough circuits disagree (or they somehow think it's important enough), maybe the Supreme Court will look at the question. But saying it "has been settled decades ago" is misleading at best. Think Sony and Grokster. It was well-established that there was this "safe harbor" until it turns out it didn't cover some other set of facts.
Funny that this article should come up right around the time the first federal judge addresses the question, and find that they do need to have reasonable suspicion.
Here's an interesting related article I read recently, which argues (in part) that the whole time > skill paradigm is a bad one, which would mean this whole "is using a programmable keyboard botting" question is completely beside the point.
At least one device I have -- a cheap (but flashable) APEX DVD player -- has two power buttons. There's a old-style physical power button on the device, which actually kills power to it, and there's a new-style power button on both the device and the remote, which really puts the machine in standby.
On some level, you get the best of both worlds. But in reality, I rarely use the physical power switch, and I'm sure a fair number of people out there have been confused by the two different buttons marked "power."
You're being conservative. If the works are registered (and pretty much all commercial works are), you can get statutory damages up to $30,000 per work. If they treat each song as a separate work (easy to argue), then using your math, that's $1.5 billion. Of course, if they decide you willfully infringed, the cap goes up to $150,000 per work, or $7.5 billion. For reference, Apple's current market cap is 40.62 billion.
Not saying they would get this -- the court has discretion -- but that the law very clearly supports it. Ain't life grand?
How's that for circular logic? If the law was held constitutional, then it wasn't constitutionally protected free speech. Or, if you're not just worried about the legislative branch, then spraying protesters with hoses and/or tear gas is fine, since if it happens, either the beatdown was legal, or the speech wasn't constitutionally protected.
This is why Freenet is useful. Even if, right now, speech is doing pretty well in the U.S., it wasn't always and won't necessarily always be. Not to mention that people might be chilled from speaking for plenty of reasons other than overt legal threats -- both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
What you're talking about is capitalism, and since we are not a pure capitalist system, the government "props up" lots of industries by way of subsidies and other "handouts." One of my favorites is copyright. You have it in Canada, too.
That's right, if there wasn't a government-granted monopoly, all artists would have to "st[and] or fall on their own terms," and it would be a lot harder to make a living doing anything creative or research-intensive.
In the U.S., the framers decided that for policy reasons we would be better of actually having more progress in science and the useful arts. Now, whether they've gone overboard with how much they give and who they give it to (and whether this particular handout is a good plan) is a different debate, but this blanket "government subsidy is bad" oversimplifies.
Slashdot Mirror
A Senate committee recommended serious cuts to the bill:
https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2018/04/california-senate-committee-recommends-cutting-key-net-neutrality-protections
And, of course, the ISPs have been fighting the bill _hard_:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/att-and-cable-lobby-are-terrified-of-a-california-net-neutrality-bill/
If you're in CA and you support effective net neutrality legislation, let your local legislators know you want the original bill.
In 1959, the television broadcast networks were competing with... radio? Today, Apple is competing with an enormous number of Windows- (and Linux-, Android-, WebOS-...) based Internet-connected laptops (and desktops, phones, PDAs, tablets...) capable of showing the same quality video. Oh, and with television (broadcast, cables, satellite...), which has grown a bit since 1959.
-puk
It's far more than a technical fight -- it's an underlying policy fight. Apple is not wrong for calling Palm out for masquerading as their device. It's wrong for putting a bunch of engineering effort into blocking people from using the devices they own with software it has been designed to be compatible with. Palm devices only started masquerading as Apple devices after they were intentionally blocked.
Regardless if that change is a violation of the USB license, I'm not interested in paying money to a company who's spending that money making my other devices not work. If Palm made their phones not offer USB disk access when connected the the Mac, I'd drop them, as well.
-puk
Apple refused to repair my MacBook, which had 2 years of AppleCare left, citing a censor which showed evidence of liquid damage (despite my computer never having come into contact with liquids). They pointed out to me that the sensor can be triggered by high humidity, but nonetheless wanted to charge me 75% the cost of a new, better laptop to repair it. Then they sent me the laptop back with screws missing and not even booting as far as when I sent it to them. When I pointed this out in a letter, they told me "it was returned in the condition it was received."
Of course, as a result, my new desktop, laptop, and MP3 players are non-Apple products. And this type of technology can no doubt be useful and help reduce fraud. But when used blindly or by organizations with questionable support quality, it can become a way to get out of contractual obligations and avoid the cost of actually standing behind extended warranties.
Thanks again, Apple.
-puk
I guess you did find it. Yes, they are pages after (3 wide-margin double-spaced fixed-type pages!), but they are part of the same conversation with the same lawyer and the same family. I was demonstrating the judge's attitude towards the RIAA attorney because the tone of the statement (the "dripping with sarcasm") doesn't show up in the transcript.
No, sarcasm isn't ideal from the bench, but our clippings combined demonstrates exactly why it happens. The judge is only human, and is faced with 133 cases in which an industry cartel is railroading people who don't fully understand what is happening into paying a lot of money and not defending themselves, and the judge has to ask all of these questions and eventually order the defendants to pay ridiculous amounts of money because the law demands it, and he/she has no choice.
In summary: yes, pages away, yes same conversation, yes it was sarcastic, yes that's not ideal, and yes I don't blame the judge. Nothing in there indicates that the statement about the RIAA needing money was at all made in earnest.
-Puk
Please read the rest of the exchange if you're going to criticize. The judge is clearly being sarcastic. From a brief review, I also see (in the same conversation):
MR. MANN: I don't know what the merits of the case were when the earlier court rendered a judgment against Mr. Atkinson.
THE COURT: There were no merits of the case, it was a default judgment, all that happened,' you sued, there was silence on the other side, and then you come up with a judgment of $4,000 because that's the statutory damages, and Congress says you can get it. These people never defended, if now they brought forward a defense --
and
THE COURT: But you understand this is a terribly vicious cycle. On the one hand, you say we bring them into court so we can examine them. They come into court without a lawyer. They haven't a clue what these proceedings are. We have been trying to explain it to people, and then because they don't respond, the numbers keep on going up and up, and at a certain point after 133 cases in my court and countless around the country, the plaintiffs are going to realize this is making no sense and making them look bad.
-Puk
Obviously, Crack is cheaper and more plentiful over there. You missed the part where in the U.S., it's already 95 years for works for hire and lifetime of the author plus 70 years for plain old humans. If you want crack, we're your country.
-puk
I don't know why more people aren't talking about the DMCA safe harbor. I've heard plenty of allegations (mostly true, I imagine, electric slide videos notwithstanding) that YouTube carried copyrighted videos. I've heard few or no rumors that they've refused to take them down when notified, or have not been reasonably timely in doing so.
Of course, rumors are not evidence, but it seems likely that they're going to mount a pretty strong DMCA Safe Harbor-based defense. This is what the safe harbor is for.
-puk
p.s. Mod parent up.
Just wanted to point out that that question is a little (though not totally) misleading; it should probably read, "does copyright have any limit on its scope?" The problem is that copyright covers too many things, and that he can (he claims) copyright these dances in the first place. If anything, the DMCA is a limited positive here, because it provides a safe harbor to sites like YouTube who comply with the takedown notices; without the DMCA, this guy could just sue them and, if the copyrights are valid, win. The DMCA did not provide any new rights or abilities to sue beyond "old" copyright in this particular instance.
The downside of the DMCA here is that it provides an incentive for sites like YouTube to take the videos down without really knowing they are infringing at all, and due to the volume of such requests, they almost have no choice. But that's still not really a "scope of the DMCA" problem, but a "scope of copyright" and "DMCA incentives" problem.
-puk
We're talking not about the intent of TJ, or the intent of slashdot readers -- we're talking about the intent of Congress when they passed the Copyright Act (in its current, relevant form). We can argue forever about whether copyright should cover mixtapes or be as powerful and lengthy as it is (or not argue, since I probably agree with you), but that won't change whether or not they were covered by the intent of those passing the law.
You could probably make a decent argument that even they would think that this shouldn't be covered, and couldn't have foreseen this particular type of use, and maybe you'd be right, but I happen not to think so. They didn't have any other carve-outs for specific types of derivative works, and there was a pretty strong legislative preference for providing copyright owners with strong control over the uses, especially commercial ones, of their works. I doubt (but of course, this is pure opinion on my part) that they would have (or the current Congress will) recogniz the potential societal benefits that we recognize from allowing this type of work to be freely created.
(Another question we probably shouldn't get into, but is worth thinking about, is how to create a principled exception that covers mixtapes without creating a very ugly line-drawing problem.)
-puk
And as I said, I'm taking issue with the idea being able to make mixtapes is the entire point of copyright. If being able to make mixtapes, which are derivative works, is the entire point of copyright, then why does the language of the statute say essentially, "you can't make derivative works"? In fact, the point of copyright is to encourage creation of works by granting a temporary (ha ha) monopoly in things like derivative works, and specifically not to encourage unlicensed derivative works until the end of that monopoly.
I'm sorry if my reference to "any implication" of legality can be construed as accusing the parent of "stating" that it's legal. He did not state that. I simply wanted to counter the possible conclusion that it is legal, or even that it was intended to be legal. The intent is pretty clearly that it not be legal.
We won't, of course, go into the "limited times" copyright issue -- that's another (huge) problem.
-puk
It's funny that you chose to call them "derivative works" in an attempt to show that making them is legal. "[T]he owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: . . . (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;" 17 U.S.C. 106. That's exclusive, as in "no one else can do it without permission."
Note that I'm not making any judgments/commentary about the subject of the main article here -- just any implication that this is "the entire fucking point of copyright" or that it is, in the absence of fair use, legal.
-puk
Also the #2 "define" search in Google Zeitgeist 2006.
-puk
Russia shutting them down? I suppose they're suing for damages, which they could still (in theory) get, but it's a weird time to finally get around to it.
-puk
One major problem with this is that trademarks are both territorial and (at least in the United States) industry-tied. So you can have "Spreckles" legitimately trademarked as a soda company in the United States, a shoe manufacturer in the United States, and a soda company in Brazil (chosen at random -- I know nothing about Brazilian trademark law).
Also, trademarks need not always be registered, meaning that people who might have a legitimately enforceable trademark or trademark-like right could not get a domain.
-puk
"We would be happy to review this product, but unfortunately the company has refused to send us any samples since we [posted] a negative review of one of their products."
-puk
For the record, both the court in Arnold (Central District of California) and the 9th Circuit are both federal courts. The 9th Circuit is a court of appeals that will hear Arnold (should the government choose to appeal), and may choose to affirm or reverse it. And until the 9th Circuit hears it, it only applies in the Central District of California (big area of CA containing L.A.).
And more importantly (cause I hear it all the time), the 9th Circuit no longer has anywhere near the highest reversal rate. Nowadays, they're roughly average. Chart through 2004 and article. If you dive into the details, there are some differences in the manner in which they're reversed, but the numbers don't lie.
-puk
For the record, Montoya de Hernandez says that "routine" searches are fine, and the court in Arnold addressed Montoya de Hernandez specifically, saying that more invasive searches do require reasonable suspicion. That's settled 9th Circuit law, though I'm not sure it's ever been directly addressed by the Supreme Court. As I said, this is not the end of the matter -- we have to wait for the appeal, and if enough circuits disagree (or they somehow think it's important enough), maybe the Supreme Court will look at the question. But saying it "has been settled decades ago" is misleading at best. Think Sony and Grokster. It was well-established that there was this "safe harbor" until it turns out it didn't cover some other set of facts.
-puk
Funny that this article should come up right around the time the first federal judge addresses the question, and find that they do need to have reasonable suspicion.
law.com article
opinion
Of course, this is not the end of the matter, but highly relevant.
-puk
Here's an interesting related article I read recently, which argues (in part) that the whole time > skill paradigm is a bad one, which would mean this whole "is using a programmable keyboard botting" question is completely beside the point.
-puk
At least one device I have -- a cheap (but flashable) APEX DVD player -- has two power buttons. There's a old-style physical power button on the device, which actually kills power to it, and there's a new-style power button on both the device and the remote, which really puts the machine in standby.
On some level, you get the best of both worlds. But in reality, I rarely use the physical power switch, and I'm sure a fair number of people out there have been confused by the two different buttons marked "power."
-puk
You're being conservative. If the works are registered (and pretty much all commercial works are), you can get statutory damages up to $30,000 per work. If they treat each song as a separate work (easy to argue), then using your math, that's $1.5 billion. Of course, if they decide you willfully infringed, the cap goes up to $150,000 per work, or $7.5 billion. For reference, Apple's current market cap is 40.62 billion.
Not saying they would get this -- the court has discretion -- but that the law very clearly supports it. Ain't life grand?
-puk
and they've moved the mouseball on top of the mouse. I guess the next step is an optical tracker to replace that. Or not.
-puk
p.s. I do agree about wanting feedback on clicks beyond audio. But I'll wait and see -- maybe it will feel fine.
How's that for circular logic? If the law was held constitutional, then it wasn't constitutionally protected free speech. Or, if you're not just worried about the legislative branch, then spraying protesters with hoses and/or tear gas is fine, since if it happens, either the beatdown was legal, or the speech wasn't constitutionally protected.
This is why Freenet is useful. Even if, right now, speech is doing pretty well in the U.S., it wasn't always and won't necessarily always be. Not to mention that people might be chilled from speaking for plenty of reasons other than overt legal threats -- both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
What you're talking about is capitalism, and since we are not a pure capitalist system, the government "props up" lots of industries by way of subsidies and other "handouts." One of my favorites is copyright. You have it in Canada, too.
That's right, if there wasn't a government-granted monopoly, all artists would have to "st[and] or fall on their own terms," and it would be a lot harder to make a living doing anything creative or research-intensive.
In the U.S., the framers decided that for policy reasons we would be better of actually having more progress in science and the useful arts. Now, whether they've gone overboard with how much they give and who they give it to (and whether this particular handout is a good plan) is a different debate, but this blanket "government subsidy is bad" oversimplifies.