381–390 of 1001 posts
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Matt Levine is great at writing about the difference between laws as written and how they work in practice. He's pretty fascinated by some of the cases where the two diverge sharply.
Do you happen to have a link?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levi...
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For the first 5 years videos were limited to 10 minutes. Clips of things were popular and there were things split between many videos, but that's not what I remember the people around me using youtube for.
It was filled with music uploads.
YouTube has a thousand to a million times more copyrighted content than Megaupload ever had. And no, not all of it is via partnerships with the copyright holders. Kim's problem apparently was that he didn't bribe Congress.
Can you elaborate? Is there concrete evidence of this or just a general feeling that it must have happened?
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> The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art I wouldn't be so sure about that. The overwhelming majority don't make big money, but many, many creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know what…
There are way more people that draw, paint, sing, or play an instrument for their own and their friends enjoyment than any who make a living at it. Not sure how you could think that’s not true.
Actually, that's what I do, these days. Take a gander at my work. It's not exactly "Hobby grade" stuff, but I don't make a dime from it.
I'm grateful for the many years of being a professional, that helped make it possible for me to do it creatively, these days.
A fair amount of “this is fine, governments enforce IP laws and that’s a public good” vibes in here, which is all a very reasonable perspective. I’d argue Kim was too successful and too unlikeable at the end of the day, and that was probably his downfall. Toward the end, MEGA had transitioned to actually partnering with hip hop artists for distribution. The US has a long history of IP rights holders criminalizing new…
> without cutting in the existing rights holders properly. That's the killer, right there. "existing rights holders" is a big deal, and one that has been ignored by tech bros for a long time. As a [former] artist, and [former] musician, I can say that the tech industry has been cooking the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs. The opportunity for individual financial and ego success is a huge driver for modern popular art…
Yes, the tech industry is an interloper in an industry that has had long-standing sweetheart deals with governments both liberal, neoliberal[1], and otherwise. However, that industry - the creative industry - was not at all pro-artist beyond making sure artists had something worth stealing. The tech industry started out not understanding the creative industry's norms and laws, but has long since graduated into facilitating new versions of some of its worst abuses. We're not the same tech industry that gave the world Napster anymore. The whole reason why, e.g., Apple gets to charge a blatantly supra-competitive 30% on every purchase on iPhone comes down to copyright ownership over iOS.
To wit: most of the biggest cheerleaders for generative AI are in the creative industry. You have CEOs ranting and raving about how once the plausible sentence generators are up to speed, they can fire entire classes of artists and workers. Videogame companies make voice actors audibly consent to voice cloning at the start of each recording session. The RIAA is not suing Udio to protect the role of musicians, they're suing so they can produce a "licensed" model that nicely cuts artists and bands out of their royalties.
Yes, the people in the GenAI space have a "fast and loose" interpretation of copyright, but that's less "information wants to be free" and more "we'll ask for forgiveness and take a license once all this AI fairy dust pays out". Licensed GenAI is not going to be any better than the current state of affairs because the threat of GenAI is not the copying of any one individual work. Copyright is an individualistic system, and ownership is for owners, not workers. And even if you decide you'll never license your specific work to AI, someone else will, and the system will still work the same.
As creative workers, the threat to you from GenAI is from collective obsolescence, a loss of social position and privilege, and decreases in your material standard of living due to the above. Copyright exists to perpetuate capitalism, and thus considers none of those consequences to be violations of the law. There is no copyright law that would, say, prohibit soundtracks in motion pictures so that live musicians could continue playing in theaters[2]. The law could require the specific artist who wrote and recorded that soundtrack to be paid, but that's only one person, getting a far larger windfall. Everyone else got screwed and the artistic landscape got just a bit more unequal.
[0] as in, people who want copyright-free / freely-licensed cultural works and do so legitimately through consent
[1] Fascism with extra steps
[2] To be clear, GenAI is not like having a soundtrack in a movie, the analogy just happens to be illustrative of my point.
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not really, his website was based on hong kong, this is a fight against america playing world police, which i'm on board with they have no business going after just a single man so fervently, he's a foreign national and the websites weren't based in the US
>> this is a fight against america playing world police That is how Dotcom wants it characterized. Everyone else sees a fly-by-night website run by an eccentric millionaire making money by playing fast and loose with the law. It is one thing to be an outlaw subverting oppression by distributing free bread to poor people. It is another to be a bootlegger selling vodka under the table and then throwing huge invite-only…
How would US citizens would feel if another country, say China, wanted to extradite a US citizen because he allegedly violated Chinese copyright law?
Dotcom is absolutely right in saying that US is playing world police.
A fair amount of “this is fine, governments enforce IP laws and that’s a public good” vibes in here, which is all a very reasonable perspective. I’d argue Kim was too successful and too unlikeable at the end of the day, and that was probably his downfall. Toward the end, MEGA had transitioned to actually partnering with hip hop artists for distribution. The US has a long history of IP rights holders criminalizing new…
One thing you learn over the years is that people make up everything. I can't recall the exact quote but the character Frank Underwood once said something to the effect of "the law is the law, but the law is people and I know people". Meaning he could control the situation regardless. The opposite also happens and you can see cases like this or Shkreli, Dotcom and others where they think being edgy on top of minor cr…
Kim DC is not a likeable or admirable person, but this vindictive pursuit seems even worse. It appears very similar to the treatment of Ross Ulbricht, Assange, maybe even Snowden? These are the equivalent of white collar crimes (typical massive frauds from the finance sector, etc) but they are getting a blue collar punishment of decades in jail that a successful and persistent street drug dealer could receive, NOT th…
Seems to be pretty much how the US government operates on these high profile tech cases. They are going to turn you into a martyr.
Ross is a great example of this. He received a double life sentence + 40 years + no chance of parole. By comparison, El Chapo, a dude who most certainly ordered the deaths of many and imported billions of dollars of drugs, only got a SINGLE life sentence + no chance of parole.
That is not justice, its a message.