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Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

themarkup.org

21–30 of 106 posts

Re: Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone agrees that this is theft No.

I'm not aware of any court case where downloading and watching movies without the rights owner's permission was considered OK. Instead, the downloader always had to pay a fine.

That does not make it theft.

Copyright infringement is not theft.

Theft is legally distinct. It is also morally distinct - the 'owner' of the 'intellectual property' is not deprived of their ownership if someone violates the transactional model by looking without permission.

Copyright infringement is not theft. It is interference with a business model. Please stop saying obviously incorrect things.

Re: Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone agrees that this is theft No.

I'm not aware of any court case where downloading and watching movies without the rights owner's permission was considered OK. Instead, the downloader always had to pay a fine.

That’s not what you said.

And FWIW, it’s very often an uploader who has to pay a fine for distributing copyrighted work (not theft). Fines for downloading are pretty rare.

Re: Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone agrees that this is theft No.

If you scope "everyone" to "everyone who matters" - courts, legislators, law enforcement - it's a pretty accurate statement.

Sure, if you also scope "theft" to something that is "not theft".

Re: Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

#24

I feel like we should unify the copyright and privacy laws. If I copy a Disney movie without their knowledge and then extract value from it, for example by watching the movie without paying, everyone agrees that this is theft. And punishment is generally strong to excessive. If a website copies my private data without my knowledge or even after I decline permission by sending DNT headers, that is somehow considered c…

Copyright protects the creator of a work, not the subject of it. Additionally, it applies to creative works, not bare facts.

The fact that "John Smith's IP address is 127.0.0.1" is neither creative, nor something John Smith created.

Re: Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone agrees that this is theft No.

I'm not aware of any court case where downloading and watching movies without the rights owner's permission was considered OK. Instead, the downloader always had to pay a fine.

While I agree with you in spirit, I believe penalties for downloading usually have to do with redistribution via BitTorrent. People sometimes forget (or never know in the first place) that when you download via BitTorrent you’re also distributing.

However, I totally agree with the sentiment, and I’ve long felt this way about petty crimes like shoplifting, which are harshly punished and shamed, while on the flip-side you have crimes like wage theft which goes effectively unpunished and is even defended as legitimate by some.

Re: Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone agrees that this is theft No.

I'm not aware of any court case where downloading and watching movies without the rights owner's permission was considered OK. Instead, the downloader always had to pay a fine.

In many jurisdictions, "theft" specifically implies the taking of goods. When you copy a file, the original file still exists. No items get taken, therefore no theft took place. I am not familiar with American law, but I don't expect it to have a definition where watching illegal movies is considered actual theft.

IP companies such as media companies and patent holders often try to spin unlicensed access to media or information as theft because it sounds worse, but in practice the actual crime is "illegal access to intellectual property" or something similar to that.

Re: Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

#29
post #5

I tried some sites I thought might get a high score. Mostly news sites and webstores since they like to know a lot about you. Fox News [1] and Breitbart [2] got scarily high scores [1] https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=foxnews.com [2] https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=breitbart.com

First one I tried was https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=nytimes.com

12 trackers and 6 third-party cookies

I'm surprised that they're not bad with tracking given how bad news sites tend to be. I thought maybe it could be explained by them being a paid site, but the WSJ is too and their analysis was abysmal with 32 trackers, 53 third-party cookies, fingerprinting, and session recording.

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