The Big [Censored] Theory • Hacker News Board

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#641

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #600

MichaelCollins wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving aside the matter of Mormons and their weird puritan sensibilities, what this company essentially did was reinvent movie rental, but because they did it on the internet instead of a brick and mortar shop we're all expected to think it obvious and self evidence that what they did was horrible. In other contexts on sites like this, "do [common thing] but on a computer" patents get mocked and derided because "but…

While some Mormons may have "weird puritan" values, simply wanting censorship options for some movies is something that many families would like to have, not just Mormons. And I don't think it's necessarily puritan to want to cut out that one or two scenes of a head exploding in an otherwise family friendly flick.

I'm still astounded that Enchanted (the 2007 film) prominently features a scene of the chipmunk sidekick pooping on screen.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#642

Post by adrianN » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

tuatoru wrote: post #268

concordDance wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems untrue. Do more than a fraction of a percent of Chinese people watch the uncensored versions of things?

Not on a regular basis, perhaps. The glitches serve to remind them daily that their government is manipulating them. The dilemma that China's leaders have is that they need an educated workforce, capable of logical and critical thinking, but they can't stop that workforce thinking critically outside work.

I don't think that logical and critical thinking protects against being fine with living in an authoritarian state, or even being in favor of authoritarianism.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#643

Post by makeitdouble » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:47 AM UTC

andruby wrote: post #123

ALittleLight wrote: post #10

I can see how this might backfire. You notice a censored jump and start to feel the itch of curiosity as to what it concealed. I had to watch several of the censored scenes whereas I would have never just randomly watched clips of the show. Also, love the presentation on this page.

We (the HN crowd, often living in less-censored societies) would be very curious. I’d like to know how curious this would make non-HN people, and those living in more censored places. My assumption is that they take it for granted and just continue to watch the show. It might be hard for them to even find the uncensored clips.

> often living in less-censored societies

I think people a lot of us started to get out of the common path because of the limitations (which censorship is at the basic level) we hit. My hypothesis would be that simply “curious” people get pushed into the “hacker” bucket by getting refused something that seems reachable with some creativity.

The dumb example is people will get creative and jumping through hoops to get foreign porn. Growing non-authorized plants is another example, where people have to learn so much by themselves to make it happen. Even getting pirated non-censored versons comes to require more and more technical proficiency I think, and looking at industry’s reaction it seems there’s a decent number of people sailing the seven seas.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#644

Post by est » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:49 AM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #590

cercatrova wrote: post #453

The solution to this is, of course, piracy. I'm glad people like those on /r/DataHoarder preserve media in their complete forms so I don't have to watch them censored. A recent example is Community which has an episode of a character dressing as a dark elf, and the joke is that another character assumes it's blackface, even though it's not. Well, networks and streaming services now removed it and unless you have the…

Anyone in China? Do they still have those dvd carts on the streets? Or did they lose out to streaming? What about torrents and such? Have they been blocked by the firewall or is pirated movies still readily available online?

No DVD carts, but NAS is somewhat popular. Xunlei or BaiduPan is insanely popular.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#645

Post by Spivak » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:50 AM UTC

eyear wrote: post #592

Where is the diversity we advocate? Must the whole world accept one value? We accept homosexuality so we won't accept other people like Muslims not accepting it? So WE are definitely right and people who are different from us are absolutely wrong?

The paradox of tolerance isn’t really a paradox, it’s a proof by contradiction that the naive notion of tolerance is not sound.

Homosexuality is a natural observable phenomenon in the human species across time and cultures. It is an aspect of people as fundamental as height or skin tone. Not accepting them for any reason is intolerance and does not have to be tolerated. It is also intolerance to not accept Muslims, but you do not have to tolerate any intolerance that manifests from their beliefs.

People are not tolerant or intolerant, specific views held by and actions done by people are.

You don’t need values to reason about tolerance.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#646

Post by cuu508 » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:53 AM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #635

Ajedi32 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about first sale doctrine here, not fair use. If I did the exact same thing with a VHS tape, cutting out 10 second strips of tape and renting them out to people, that'd be totally legal under first sale doctrine. Doing that with VHS would be totally impractical but legal. Doing it with a digital file would be totally practical but illegal, since currently first sale doctrine doesn't apply to digital dis…

> Doing it with a digital file ... digital distribution ... extend first sale doctrine to digital files I fully understand, but there's got to be a better way to describe this line in the sand given that DVDs contain digital files. "Physical" doesn't work because networks have a physical layer. "Stream" is also problematic because bitstreams are present on any kind of media. Even "network" doesn't quite cut the musta…

It boils down to how much $$$ the copyright owner makes per performance on average.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#647

Post by lliamander » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:53 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #605

bentley wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always liked Antonin Scalia’s dissent in that case. “We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal] . The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries. The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than ‘the very ex…

I think Scalia is right in this descent, but applying the same textualist logic to many other decisions he made doesn't make nearly as much sense. In other words, his textualism leads to a lot of "there's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball" type decisions.

Does a specific example come to mind? I've generally been a big fan of the opinions he writes, but I'd be interested to see what some of his weaker opinions are.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#648

Post by bubblethink » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:53 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #483

js8 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America is much more sensitive about sex and nudity than a lot of other cultures Nudity.. maybe. Sex? Most American shows I have seen just CANNOT STOP talking about sex. Sure, they won't display it, but it's all about it. Even TBBT. (FWIW, comparing to Czech culture and TV series.)

Movies have gotten surprisingly sexless (MCU has even less sex than you'd expect from a superhero movie) so some kinds of TV shows have been pumping it up to compensate. Of course, they're not really TV shows anymore when they're unregulated streaming programs.

>MCU has even less sex than you'd expect from a superhero movie

That's just self censorship for the global market. Why leave it to the censors when you can make a better product that works within the constraints.

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#649

Post by somenameforme » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:58 AM UTC

delecti wrote: post #476

neither_color wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting is in the US that kind of censorship is attributed to the most mainstream religion but China is officially atheist and does the same. Whenever people tell me that it's only one religion standing in the way of equal rights for disadvantaged groups I remind them that there's an atheist superpower that's even less permissive except for on reproductive issues(although, in their case they do regulate it…

There's definitely a tendency to oversimplify authoritarians by criticizing them for other aspects. American right-wing authoritarians are bad because they're authoritarian, but get criticized for the Evangelical tone through which they enforce it. Likewise with Chinese authoritarians getting criticized for being communist while they do authoritarianism, rather than for the authoritarianism itself.

There's a very specific reason for this that can be illustrated quite easily:

The current Wiki page on authoritarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

The same page, but from 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&...

The Wiki 'definition' of authoritarianism has shifted quite radically in recent years. There's a line in the older page, completely scrubbed at some point, that's quite relevant: "Democracies rarely exhibit much authoritarian behavior except in transition to or from authoritarian states. Many (if not most) citizens of authoritarian states do not perceive their state as authoritarian until late in its development."

Recent history (that extends beyond just the past 2 years) has emphasized that the vast majority of people are perfectly fine, if not enthusiastic, about authoritarianism when they share the values of said authority. This makes it near impossible to criticize authoritarianism, in and of itself, because it trends towards immediate hypocrisy. So instead people criticize a system of values they disagree with, while using authoritarianism as a convenient slur to make the critique sound more noble and meaningful than a simple value disagreement would.

The same thing has happened to the Wiki page. The older page emphasizes quite clearly that the West has long since entered into the world of authoritarianism, but we don't want to imagine this could ever happen. So instead we've redefined the word in an effort to focus largely on the differences between the United States and "the bad guys."

Re: The Big [Censored] Theory

#650

Post by lliamander » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

bacchusracine wrote: post #534

IX-103 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they rented the customer the server that read and encoded the customer's copy of the Blu-ray on the fly and streamed it to them using bandwidth that was leased to the customer? Would that violate the studio's "performance" rights? What if the customer is in the same room as the server and loads the disk themselves? I, as a citizen and a consumer, want to know what rights I have when I purchase a product. The…

>I, as a citizen and a consumer, want to know what rights I have when I purchase a product. Step one would probably be actually purchasing something instead of licensing it.

VidAngel's model was that you are purchasing the disk.