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Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

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Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

#101

Post by meow »

fpgeek wrote: post #77
enmaku wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's about right. It would make YouTube legally responsible for all user-created content. According to YouTube's press statistics, 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute. If you were to hire a team of people to watch all the videos and make sure they aren't copyrighted, you'd need 2,880 people working around the clock - and that's just to keep up with the NEW videos, letalone the backlog of stuff that's al…

Why would they bother trying to vet YouTube? It seems like it would be more practical to move the servers outside the US and stop providing YouTube access to US IPs. Maybe throw in "CrippledTube" for US visitors (only registered media companies allowed to upload) if they think the cross-company infringement danger is small enough.

Considering that US is an important market in terms of ad revenues, that might be as good as shutting down youtube.

Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

#102

Post by abrahamsen »

rbanffy wrote: post #76
einhverfr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paranoid security geek in me says "You know those Microsoft contributions to SAMBA lately? Could they go for a takedown order of the open source project on the allegation of copyright infringement now and make the SAMBA project fight to get their domain back?"

No. If they contributed something, it's now under a free license.

Microsoft contributed the code under "GPLv2 or later", despite samba being under GPLv3.

GPLv2 does not contain the explicit patent grant that are part of why GPLv3 was created. And I very much doubt the courts will consider "or later" to include the patent grant.

The code in question seems very peripheral (something about using Firefox for configuration), and have received zero comments on the developers list. I would be very surprised if Microsoft had any other motivation for the release, than to make the engineer who worked on it happy.

However, it is probably not an accident that they choose the version of the GPL without a patent grant.

Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

#103

Post by vidarh »

enmaku wrote: post #66
MBlume wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SOPA is evil, but it's not going to severely injure Google. Am I reading the bill in an overly alarmist way? It sounded to me like SOPA would make YouTube basically impossible to run.

No, that's about right. It would make YouTube legally responsible for all user-created content. According to YouTube's press statistics, 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute. If you were to hire a team of people to watch all the videos and make sure they aren't copyrighted, you'd need 2,880 people working around the clock - and that's just to keep up with the NEW videos, letalone the backlog of stuff that's al…

The most chilling part is that even if they could swallow the cost, determining what a court would find infringing is hard. Of course they can filter out the obvious cases.

I have a two year old son. He loves Thomas The Tank Engine. And he loves Youtube and will frequently ask for "Thomas on the laptop". Most of the Thomas related videos on Youtube are actually re-enactments using the toy trains rather than copies of the TV show. There's apparently a whole community around this - with movies ranging from shaky clips of a kid playing to elaborate productions trying (though usually failing badly) to get close to the production values of the original series.

Some of them use snippets of the music from the TV show - how much is too much? Some use music I can't place - copyrighted or not? I can't tell. Some of them re-use dialogue. Some use text from the books. Others have invented their entirely own stories (but might still run afoul of copyright because they use the characters). Some has as their only similarly that they use the train sets as props.

The question is, how many of these would a court find infringing? (how many should they find infringing in a reasonable world?).

The end result is that to protect themselves legally, they'll need to reject everything that even has the appearance of being infringing.

This will likely throw out a massive amount of non-infringing content as well as a lot of stuff that is in a grey area legally but that the public will find ridiculous that they have to block. Vetting it will be far too hard

Of course, this latter part is perhaps the biggest light at the end of the tunnel: The chilling effect on speech are so strong and so far overreaching due to the lack of legal safeguards, that I can't imagine SCOTUS not throwing out substantial parts of this law.

Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

#104

Post by Symmetry »

sliverstorm wrote: post #63
einhverfr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paranoid security geek in me says "You know those Microsoft contributions to SAMBA lately? Could they go for a takedown order of the open source project on the allegation of copyright infringement now and make the SAMBA project fight to get their domain back?"

Is "You gave it to me!" no longer a valid defense as for why you have someone else's IP?

Yes it certainly is. And its so obvious that I bet the trial would take less than a year. But that's a year where Samba doesn't have a web page now.

Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

#106

Post by swasheck »

chollida1 wrote: post #4
swasheck wrote: post #2

Well played, MS and Apple.

I don't want this to sound snarky but.... Do you know that they were invited and declined? is it possible that no one asked them to join, or declined to let them join?

Thank you for the correction. I don't know that but just assumed (and yes, I know what that leads to :)) that they opted out given the collective weight of the other orgs involved.

Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

#107

Post by yahelc »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #52
yahelc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly in Apple's interest that this pass. Less piracy -> More iTunes customers. More iTunes customers -> More iOS devices sold. More iOS devices sold -> More profit for Apple.

These bills would also allow someone to demand the takedown of the entire iTunes store over a single allegation of copyright infringement in a single app. Consider how much trouble they've had with patent trolls in the past.

iTunes Store != App Store

Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

#108

Post by rbanffy »

abrahamsen wrote: post #102
rbanffy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If they contributed something, it's now under a free license.

Microsoft contributed the code under "GPLv2 or later", despite samba being under GPLv3. GPLv2 does not contain the explicit patent grant that are part of why GPLv3 was created. And I very much doubt the courts will consider "or later" to include the patent grant. The code in question seems very peripheral (something about using Firefox for configuration), and have received zero comments on the developers list. I woul…

It would be interesting to see the implicit patent grant in v2 (remember - you can't grant all the liberties required in the license without granting use - and the right to grant it further down the chain - of any patents embodied in the code) tested in court.

Also, unless I'm very wrong, the terms "GPLv2 or later" means you can use the software under v3 if you prefer to use it that way. The only way to block the explicit patent grant (but stay will the implicit one) would be to license it under plain v2.

Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

#109

Post by snowwrestler »

enmaku wrote: post #66
MBlume wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SOPA is evil, but it's not going to severely injure Google. Am I reading the bill in an overly alarmist way? It sounded to me like SOPA would make YouTube basically impossible to run.

No, that's about right. It would make YouTube legally responsible for all user-created content. According to YouTube's press statistics, 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute. If you were to hire a team of people to watch all the videos and make sure they aren't copyrighted, you'd need 2,880 people working around the clock - and that's just to keep up with the NEW videos, letalone the backlog of stuff that's al…

Google is already legally responsible for all the content on YouTube. The DMCA does not remove liability, it just sets out a process for managing liability--the takedown notice. If Google ignores conforming legitimate takedown notices, under the DMCA, they are fully liable for the infringing content. And as we see with Viacom, the DMCA does not actually prevent private lawsuits.

Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

#110

Post by therandomguy »

therandomguy wrote: post #16

I wonder if we can start a site called PoliticiansAgainstInternet.org, get it a lot of publicity and sway the votes away from them. It should be so popular that politicians will dread getting on that list. Maybe Anon can dig up more dirt and expose it on there?

*not sure how to edit the comment, hence replying.

The site would have "pay to promote button". People who care keeps donating which will directly fuel the ad campaigns set up on adsense, facebook ads, twitter promoted links etc. It will be all over the place.

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