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SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

judiciary.house.gov

181–190 of 269 posts

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#181

This is SO OFFENSIVE!!! She gives such great, clear technical answers -- they can detect child porn by a combination of reverse image search analysis and manual checks, but they can't visually tell whether a movie or song is licensed to play. Makes sense. "I'm sure we have the technology, we have the brainpower," responds some congrasshole. What fucking idiots these people are. They don't have a right to dictate term…

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Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#183

Let's see, we're ready for another exciting episode of 'Hackers Go to Washington' or 'As The Real World Turns': Step 1. At a fancy lunch spot on Rodeo Drive a lobbyist gets with someone in Hollywood, and they talk about a Hollywood dream law, e.g., shut down Internet movie sharing or some such, just to pick a hypothetical issue! Wink, wink! Step 2. The lobbyist sells the Hollywood guy on an effort to get the dream la…

The scam works just as well if it does pass, too -- and the monopolistic content industries have deeper pockets than the people paying the opposition lobbyists.

Honestly, though, I think that the most likely case is that a lame duck version of the bill will pass, resulting in an incremental rather than sweeping tightening of the noose around the Internet. That's usually how this crap happens, "As The Real World Turns".

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#184
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way for Youtube to know whether I have a license for the content. There are cases where hosting companies have taken down the artist's own websites after the labels' automated systems complained about finding "copyrighted" material there. And I've yet to see a supercomputer that can determine fair use.

Again. You stated the problem as clearly as she tried to, repeatedly, in front of the committee. What makes perfect sense to logical people is unsurprisingly nonsensical to the idiots running the country. People have suggested that there's an anti-intellectual bias ingrained in the American psyche, but I don't think that's actually the problem. It's the assumption that someone else will do the thinking for you that's…

I like the sentiment, but I believe that (unfortunately) it's not an effective strategy -- because there's no guarantee the US will get its act together if we go down that road. I think a better strategy is to fight this every step of the way, delaying the apparent inevitable until the effective state of affairs (where nobody can really enforce this mercantilistic cultural monopoly crap any longer) becomes the overwhelmingly obvious and undeniable truth in all respects, and the whole point becomes moot.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re joking, right? Who would you propose is more qualified to draft the word of the actual laws than lawyers? What lawyers are at their essence are experts in law—the word ‘lawyer’ even has the word ‘law’ in it. It's like asking a team of developers to get together and vote on whether a problem is best solved by writing more code or doing nothing. Who would you ask whether code needs to be written, then? The lawye…

I'm anti-conspiracy-theory too, but it's hard to argue that levying an enormous unfunded mandate on the most productive, most creative, most vigorously first-amendment-oriented corporate members of our society, which would force them to monitor the speech of each and every anonymous member they serve, is something that a Congress stupid enough to make the statements heard tonight would have concocted of their own acc…

It's grammatically correct, which means it's not a run-on sentence.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#186
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean YouTube has information on all of the photographs I've ever taken and who I've licensed them to? I don't recall making this information public, so I don't see how they could possibly detect copyright infringement of my content.

Throw one of your images at tineye.com. It's a reverse image analysis tool; their algorithm is under wraps, but I'm sure a few people around here could speculate on how it works. It works nicely with cropped and scaled images, which is a hint =)

Infringement depends on permission. No third party can possibly know whether or not the use of a given work was authorized or not unless told by the copyright holder.

Now, when told by the copyright holder that no use of some work is authorized, they can flag all copies of it that they are able to find and match it under the assumption that nothing is authorized. But you couldn't add anything if we assume that every user is lying about being authorized.

Moreover, as was demonstrated in the Viacom case, even the copyright holders get it wrong. In particular, Viacom had uploaded copies of their own works and made them appear leaked. Yet these were uploaded by Viacom itself and, thereby, authorized. They even had to go back and have them put up after taking them down by mistake. And they had to remove them from their complaint after being told of their mistakes. Twice. After doing due diligence with expensive lawyers.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#187

10:45am mountain time: Ted Poe (R-TX): "This panel or this committee is made up of former prosecutors, defense lawyers and there are even two former judges here." Consider the conflict of interest that exists when lawyers are making our laws. In this case if this bill passes there will be more laws and legal complexity and consequently more work to go around for everyone on the panel and all their previous and curren…

Experienced developers will always lean strongly on writing as little code as possible. Every line of code is a liability.

True, but only where "possible" accounts for the need to write some code to ensure you actually have software, and can thus accomplish the task you wish to accomplish. The best way to write no code is to find some code that someone else wrote and distributed under a license amenable to your needs -- it is not to just throw your hands up in the air and say "Well, let's scuttle every project handed to us."

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#188
post #167
post #59

Please just stop. The people/bands I download are not ones I'd pay for right out of the gate. For example: Pink Floyd. I hear a lot about them, but don't know if I'd like them. So I downloaded some of their popular albums for free and gave them a listen. After recovering from the awesomeness, I've since bought two of those albums on iTunes, and yesterday 3 friends and I each dropped $78 on tickets for a concert with…

Though these days with services like Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora, you have free, legal access to huge libraries of music. It's at least enough to allow for use cases like the one you mention. Yes, I know these services are not available in many jurisdictions and that's a shame and I believe it will change over time. Point is, the situation is getting better and the so called "need" to pirate music is increasingly gone…

Yes, the need is going down. That's one reason why this law is unnecessary.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#189

Let's see, we're ready for another exciting episode of 'Hackers Go to Washington' or 'As The Real World Turns': Step 1. At a fancy lunch spot on Rodeo Drive a lobbyist gets with someone in Hollywood, and they talk about a Hollywood dream law, e.g., shut down Internet movie sharing or some such, just to pick a hypothetical issue! Wink, wink! Step 2. The lobbyist sells the Hollywood guy on an effort to get the dream la…

The idea that they're not seriously pushing for this is flawed. Yes, they've hired expensive lobbyists, but that's not all they're doing. They've put up their own campaigns ("Makers vs. Takers" I believe they called it) and are pushing their own employees into supporting it.

Moreover, they have quite a bit of political support in this administration. They've got everyone from the RIAA lawyers now in top Justice Department spots, the new Copyright Czar, the US Trade Representative (who negotiated ACTA), several members of the House Judiciary Committee (who are sponsors of this bill), and Vice President Biden.

Don't underestimate their ability or willingness to pass crazy laws.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#190
post #62

Just watched a guy talk about countries who are using practices like this. He says "the Internet is working just fine there". One of these places is Turkey. A guy got arrested there for talking about a Chuck Palahniuk novel there on some sort of forum or similar.

We had to delay the launch of our streaming service in Turkey because our CDN was inexplicably censored by the government without recourse—and having nothing to do with us! So I can point to at least one case of significant material loss for Turkish consumers due to Internet shenanigans.

Yeah, it's insane. This law isn't that extreme yet but it's a push over the ledge towards censorship (it seems...)
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