This had the potential of being a positive development brought by Trump's election: many behaviors by the US three letter agencies that were glossed over for the past 8 years (due to the party in power being "on the right side of history") are again reprehensible and deemed a threat to be fought by the tech community.
I'm not a US citizen, but if I was, I would want professionals sworn to defend my country and the constitution to be able to modernize their capabilities. Today, these tools are essential to defense. It may turn out to have been the best defense against RU attempt to Balkanize USA.
The best offense is a good defense. Improving the quality of software in general would be far more beneficial than developing zero-day short-sighted tools.
I've never heard the phrase "the best offense is a good defense," but I have heard a great many times the phrase "the best defense is a good offense." I don't have any data to back it up, but inclined to believe the more popular form of the statement.
Some people have connected Trump's Putin connections with the Russian connections of Calexit to conclude that they are part of a coordinated effort to exacerbate regional divides in the US to the point of Balkanization.
I agree but unless every other nation stops doing this there is little value in being the only "clean" country (assuming somehow we stop). And what are the implications of doing so? We used to believe that free and open societies would naturally prosper compared to authoritarian/totalitarian societies but what if that was all a lie? "Five Eyes" dates back to the 1940's, ECHELON at least the 1980's - none of this is new. Maybe we are all just naive to the realities of geopolitics? Is this just the modern version of "We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."?
Personally, I'd rather live in a world dominated by America/Europe than one dominated by Russia or China. All parties have lengthy histories of atrocious behaviour but the US/Europe doesn't have a "Great Firewall" and critics of our leadership are not disappeared (yet?). I just hope "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." remains fictional....
> We used to believe that free and open societies would naturally prosper compared to authoritarian/totalitarian societies but what if that was all a lie?
Then give up your freedom and start advocating for monarchy in America.
> unless every other nation stops doing this there is little value in being the only "clean" country (assuming somehow we stop)
If there is little value in being "clean", intelligence agencies have minimal to 0 oversight and accountability, and a non-trivial percentage of the population wants them to dominate geopolitics through any means necessary, how will we ever have an open/free society again?
Given the track records of the US intelligence community in that regard [1-4], I honestly don't understand how anyone could possibly believe them when they say they aren't using their tools domestically. There is insufficient oversight of their activities for anything they say to be believed, given their long history of lying directly to the American public. Saying the CIA doesn't use their hacking tools on the American public is like arguing the sky is green.
I think you are confusing my hypothetical question with me somehow condoning mass surveillance, disagreeing that it is currently happening, or disagreeing that it wouldn't happen in a hypothetical future?
I have no doubt that these tools are used against domestic targets, perhaps not from the CIA but certainly by agencies like the FBI - I work in aviation and routinely see mystery flights. Everyone in the office can guess what they are (http://imgur.com/a/17hSR - 6 hours of circling - Maybe they had a warrant, who knows.
My point was that even if we could somehow stop domestic mass surveillance, I'm not sure it we would stop using them internationally or even have any obligation to do so?
Nothing will stop them from using their tools anywhere, which is my point. When the agencies themselves are fundamentally untrustworthy, as they have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be, the distinction between surveillance domestically and abroad isn't meaningful. Especially with the data sharing rules Obama pushed through at the end of his presidency.
I don't think it's possible to value open and free societies while spying on the entire world for the purposes of asserting your geopolitical dominance. Freedom for me but not for thee.
The tech community has been pretty up in arms against the three letter agencies ever since Snowden's revelation, so I'm not sure how Trump's election is going to change that; if anything it might produce the opposite effect since these agencies seem to be feuding with Trump on some level. Besides, wikieaks is a pro-Trump organization so I doubt that Trump losing the election would have caused them to go more softly with their criticisms of the government.
> I'm not sure how Trump's election is going to change that; if anything it might produce the opposite effect since these agencies seem to be feuding with Trump on some level
A big part of Trump's appeal is that he's seen as anti-establishment. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that he may make significant changes at those agencies as a result of their "feuding" with him.
> wikieaks is a pro-Trump organization
I don't believe that for a moment. WikiLeaks helped Trump's campaign, certainly - but their reason for doing so was orthogonal to Trump himself.
If WikiLeak's behavior during the 2016 election was driven by anything personal or partisan, I would say it was Assange's own personal vendetta against Hillary Clinton.
> I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that he may make significant changes at those agencies as a result of their "feuding" with him.
And? What does that have to do with the tech community being critical of three letter agencies?
> but their reason for doing so was orthogonal to Trump himself.
I don't care what the reasoning is, Assange explicitly stated that he wasn't going to release info on Trump because he felt the media was sufficiently critical of him and he has kept up with that promise and maintained a mostly positive disposition regarding Trump, that's Trump support. Don't misunderstand, I don't think supporting Trump invalidates any of the info that wikileaks has released, my point is precisely the opposite, that this info was released despite their support for Trump so if Trump hadn't have won the election, it makes sense that they would have been just as critical if not more so.
Can you source Assange stating this? As far as I remember, his explanation was that since there was already a bevy of mainstream media ready to publish any dirt on Trump, leakers did not have to go to Wikileaks to publish their stories, therefore it was unlikely anyone would send their leaks there.
“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Assange said.
So this seems like a clear admission that they are in possession of controversial material regarding Trump, but Assange figures, why bother publishing it, it's not much more controversial than what comes out of Trump's own mouth, so we won't bother publishing it, nothing to see here.
Anyone that thinks the Trump administration is going to lead the charge on reforming these agencies is foolhardy.
Governments rely on information to function.
Once an administration comes into power and sees the amount of information provided to them through these means, there's no way they would relinquish it in any meaningful sense.
> Anyone that thinks the Trump administration is going to lead the charge on reforming these agencies is foolhardy.
I think they were saying that the public (and tech community especially) will demand the reforms because they view Trump as nefarious; not that Trump & co will freely relinquish them.
> The strength of a defense based on the non-copyrightability of pornography rests on whether pornography promotes the progress of science and useful arts as prescribed by the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
> An argument in favor of refusing copyright protection is the very reason why copyright protection is granted in the first place: it gives incentives for creation.
> Allowing copyright protection on pornographic works, then, would only give more incentive for pornographic creations.
That's a losing battle right there.
First because the Supreme Court already affirmed adult entertainment as encompassed by the first amendment.
Second because it is a dangerous precedence to remove legal protections off something based on subjective standards. Today it is for adult entertainment, tomorrow it could very well be (for instance) for political comedy.
whether pornography promotes the progress of science and useful arts
The creation of sexual pleasure is a useful art. People clearly care enough about sex to devote significant parts of their lives to it, and it has major interactions with their health and happiness. Why then should its practice and technique not be fit subjects for art? What is the purpose of music but to supply aural pleasure, or of paintings and sculpture but to supply visual pleasure?
To be sure, pornography of one kind or another may not appeal to people. What of it? Many art works in other media leave me cold or even repulse me. I can cite artists whose work I loathe looking at but yet consider to be extremely high in art value, partly because they make me so uncomfortable. I see no reason for art based on sexual performance to be any different.
I find this whole proposition offensive, designed to devalue the interests, creativity and effort of one group of people in order to maintain the convenience of others - the very definition of oppression. In a broader sense, telling people in general that their sexuality is inherently lacking in worth is little more than a crude bid for psychosocial control by associating a center of bodily excitement and pleasure with feelings of shame and uselessness.
We already removed legal protections based on subjective standards. Subjective standards is pretty much all of case law. More to the case at hand, there are obscenity cases, not all of which are immediately cast out on first amendment grounds. Specifically, I'm thinking of Max Hardcore's felony obscenity conviction that resulted in a four year prison sentence.[0]
What would be interesting, would be if the Wong didn't just claim that porn isn't useful, and so it isn't copyrightable (which seems like a losing strategy), but rather claimed that the porn in question was criminally obscene, and that the criminal nature of the work rendered the copyright void. Ironically, a successful defense would then potentially open you up to some sort of obscenity trafficking charge. Hoisted on your own petard as it were.
Unfortunately for Wong, this appears to be just run of the mill heterosexual porn, so unlikely to be ruled obscene. So the moral of the story is to download only the really really kinky stuff.
>> What would be interesting, would be if the Wong didn't just claim that porn isn't useful, and so it isn't copyrightable (which seems like a losing strategy)
Just as a quick aside, the copyright part of U.S. Const art. I, § 8, cl. 8, is actually the phrase 'Science', and not 'the useful Arts.'
Edit: I know the misuse of the 'useful arts' phrase was from the blog post itself, and replied to this post only because it was the first I saw that mentioned that part of the post.
This was one of the more interesting things I learned during law school that can be easily explained without a lot of background knowledge in the U.S. Copyright and Patent systems.
Now, I am not sure how that wikipedia article refutes what I said. If it is because the article refers to U.S. Const, art I, § 8, cl. 8 as the "Copyright Clause", you can also see under the heading "Other Terms" the article refers to that same clause also as the "Copyright and Patent Clause", "Patent and Copyright Clause", "Copyright Clause", "Patent Clause", "Intellectual Property Clause", and the "Progress Clause." Copyright and Patent Clause is probably the best name for it as the clause deals with both subject matters, (I dislike calling it the Intellectual Property clause, because other areas of IP, such as trademark and geographic indicators fall under other clauses).
Additionally, that article actually supports what I said. In the first paragraph under "Effect", the article discusses how "[s]ome terms in the clause are used in archaic meanings, potentially confusing modern readers." Specifically it discusses how "useful Arts" refers to people skilled in manufacturing crafts and not artistic pursuits, and how "Science" addresses general knowledge and not scientific inquiry.
While wikipedia may not be the best source for this, other wikipedia articles may be illustrative on the original meanings of these words, such as the article on the term Useful art itself. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_art)
But again, the cool thing, is that we can discover this connection ourselves by just looking at the text of the clause. In looking at the clauses construction we can see an A and B pattern being followed. Where A refers to copyrights and B refers to patents. Here is the clause with the A and B pattern annotated.
"To promote the progress of (A) science and (B) useful arts, by securing for limited times to (A) authors and (B) inventors the exclusive right to their respective (A) writings and (B) discoveries;"
Learning this distinction was actually helpful to me in my following coursework, as it helped me understand why in patent law we use phrases like "prior art" and "person of ordinary skill in the art" and why copyright law applies to works outside of creative endeavors, such as scientific journal articles or news articles.
Now, as far as legal effect, these words have very little to do with how we apply the laws of Copyright and Patent. They merely explain the reasons why we empower the federal government with the power to pass laws affecting copyrights and patents. Pass any constitutional challenge that the copyright laws and patent laws are beyond Congress's power, U.S. art I, § 8, cl. 8 is little help in assessing a copyright or patent case.
This seems like a really important distinction. Though, the fact that other works can be copyrighted seems like that distinction isn't that important.
Also, doesn't the US have international agreements regulating copyright, and couldn't those protections be much more broad than the constitutional protections anyways?
There is no right to copyright; in fact Congress could abolish copyrights altogether tomorrow if it wished. Rather, there is an enumerated power for Congress to create copyright. If one could prove that a certain aspect or application of copyright law falls outside of that enumerated power, then it would be void as Congress had no power to create it in the first place.
If it weren't specified in the US Constitution then it would devolve to common law and State constitutions because of the elastic clause. The right of copyright was invented before the US Constitution.
>Subjective standards is pretty much all of case law.
Some areas of law are more objective standards - using bright line rules in lieu of balancing tests, but you are correct there is always an element of subjectivity in the application of facts to law no matter the standard.
1st Amendment law is notoriously full of balancing tests, probably best exemplified by Justice Stewart:
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
> Unfortunately for Wong, this appears to be just run of the mill heterosexual porn, so unlikely to be ruled obscene. So the moral of the story is to download only the really really kinky stuff.
Given the community standard stuff I'm not so srue.
Which is why this would be a dangerous precedent for the kinds of political comedies that rely on copyright protection for their existence. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all the ones that matter.
>> The strength of a defense based on the non-copyrightability of pornography rests on whether pornography promotes the progress of science and useful arts as prescribed by the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Hollywood movies don't promote "useful arts" nor "science", so they should be
denied copyrightibility as well.
Although I disagree and would argue a movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is very much useful art, I'm also in favor of rolling back the last thirty years of Disney and MPAA-sponsored legislation and restoring copying duration to something reasonable like 30 years and throwing out the DMCA entirely.
I have seen a lot of stuff in porn that I did not thought possible the human body can take/do ... so I guess it has both scientific and (somewhat)useful arts value.
There's also the case of child pornography, which can't be reasonably defended against copyright infringement in countries where it is illegal to even possess. But there are other incentives (money, sharing with your neighbor) which keep it going, which do well enough.
The idea that you can't claim copyright infringement stops new things from being made is a fallacious one.
It reminds me of the XY problem [1] that plagues both our field and any other field where one can devise a solution to a problem without formalism or thoroughly understanding what's being solved.
> The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help.
> - User wants to do X.
> - User doesn't know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y.
> - User doesn't know how to do Y either.
> - User asks for help with Y.
> - Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve.
> - After much interaction and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y wasn't even a suitable solution for X.
I'm sure that's not the name of the phenomenon you are asking but it is certainly a closely related one.
There are plenty of behaviors that people, specially young people going through the "rebellious" phase of their lives, engage for the shock value, for the "I'm the only sane man among sheeps" feeling and that can usually be explained by the lack of maturity and contact with the real world.
The only result that comes with ostracizing these people is to throw them at the arms of the only groups that will accept them with open arms: people seriously sharing the same ideology and that will welcome this person with open arms.
The real solution to ignorance is not to cut the ignorant from the flock but to show them the errors on their ways.
People tend to grow out of these phases and helping them out in that path instead of cutting them and punishing them is a much better way to deal with this problem.
There's very little that makes me as sad as seeing extremist behaviour become the norm on both sides of the aisle. Seeing people not listen to each other and fighting empty devils.
I first saw it with gamergate a while back. As someone very close to the games industry, and in games media back then, I was very interested by the movement (which, at the time anyway, wanted to put a spotlight on corruption in games media)... then after it did some good, it turned into a "hunt all the SJWs" parody of itself and very much became an example of what the alt-right is today.
What happened there was simply people not listening... and instead of listening, sharing whatever story fell in line with the narrative. Twitter makes it easy to block dissenting opinions. Reddit naturally silences disagreement with downvotes. Facebook just natively doesn't show you the stuff you don't like. Social media is a fucking scourge, I swear.
As the movement becomes more and more extreme, it attracts more and more extreme people and the moderates naturally leave (or convert), as they have no way to fight the trend back on a platform that amplifies the majority.
And of course both "sides" in a fight become involved in a cherry-picking fight of who can find the worst of the other's community and showcase it as proof of how relentlessly EVIL the "other side" is. Because, you know, everybody's like that, right?
It's fucking impossible to be a moderate nowadays. This is probably the main reason why I enjoy commenting on HN, where discussion is possible (probably because of details such as upvote counts not showing and a really nice sorting algorithm). Though it has its own issues with community flagging - Take this post for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12977633 (A moderate article that looked at issues on the left, flagged out despite 100+ upvotes)
The part of the Net Neutrality debate that is so often disregarded (and probably the reason conservatives oppose it vehemently) is that it gives FCC (an unelected body of government, part of the executive branch) power to legislate.
Not passing judgement or touching the merit of the whole subject but it is a very consistent position of the right in the United States to oppose regulation passed down by unelected officials of the executive branch instead of legislation created and approved by the legislative body through their elected representatives.
It is a similar phenomenon to the one occurring in Europe with its maximum exponent being the Brexit process, also motivated in a lot of ways by the perceived interference in the day to day life of the British by regulations passed down by unelected officials of the European Union instead of legislation created and approved by the local legislative bodies through their elected representatives.
In America, opposing FCC mandating net neutrality through regulation is akin to other similar rejections of "legislation by the executive":
- DEA or Department of Health legislating controlled substances
- FAA legislating personal drones
- FCC legislating TV language and obscenity
- ATF legislating gun ownership, possession and storage
- Treasury Secretary legislating penalties for failure to enroll in government approved healthcare (Obamacare "Tax Penalty")
It is all part of the same phenomenon, people pushing back against what they perceive as a federal overreach in areas that deny people proper representation in contesting the regulations imposed.
Trump got elected on that exact platform by the detractors of such overreach and it is only natural that he is going to follow the desire of his electoral constituency.
It is completely normal and accepted for various agencies to make rules within the confines of the laws that have empowered them. It is in fact necessary considering how complex our society is. Congress cannot possibly control everything.
If congress has power to pass certain laws, they have power to relegate some of such authority to a governing body. If the FCC's rules are in accordance with the laws that empowered it, then there is nothing wrong.
And no Trump never said he is against net neutrality. If he did that, he might have lost the election -- net neutrality is very popular.
Clearly he understands what net neutrality is. I'm so glad he took to Twitter to show everyone his strong opinion on the thing he understands.
Repealing net neutrality is far more likely to shut down his alt-right nightmare sites as they fall under the cost margins of eyeball ISPs artificially inflating their peering costs (turns out playing out your Slytherin LARP fantasies in the real world doesn't provide the same revenue as companies like NBC can get).
Yikes! So he doesn't actually know what Net Neutrality is. He's come out against the AT&T/TW merger. Maybe at some point he'll realize that NN is also an attempt to fight excessive concentrations of power in media companies.
Personally I would give up NN if we could separate transport from content completely and have real competition among ISPs.
> If congress has power to pass certain laws, they have power to relegate some of such authority to a governing body. If the FCC's rules are in accordance with the laws that empowered it, then there is nothing wrong.
Yes, and people who don't like these regulations have the power to vote politicians who would revoke this authority. Your argument is unlikely to convince anyone. Especially people who are concerned that governments regulate too much, as parent states.
> It is completely normal and accepted for various agencies to make rules within the confines of the laws that have empowered them. It is in fact necessary considering how complex our society is. Congress cannot possibly control everything.
You are ignoring the obvious possibilities of letting local or state government legislate those things, or simply not legislating them.
There is essentially zero complaining about the FAA's quasi-legislative power. All of the regulatory agencies have quasi-legislative, executive, judicial activity. This is not new. If conservatives don't like what the FCC or FAA are doing, its about businesses complaining to them directly. It has nothing to do with conservative ideology being reluctant with the nature of regulatory agencies.
The FAA regulates kites. So of course they can regulate drones, personal or commercial.
Depends on the philosophical basis of their conservative or libertarian beliefs. Many conservatives have had fundamental issues with the administrative state, since they first opposed it in Prussia. Many of the problems which they have with the administrative state have to do with the incentives of the administrators, and the broad, arbitrary power delegated to the regulators.
I have yet to hear a single argument that stems from that philosophical basis that does not turn out to be suspiciously aligned with corporate interests.
No those viewpoints can be traced back to old school liberalism where power comes from the individual, and individual citizens delegate a revocable portion of that power to form a government to do things on their behalf. And in this case it's competition law (anti-trust), and consumer protection.
If you want to argue Liberalism as an ideology has a component of statism attached, fine, but so does Conservatism. From Conservatism we got the 1st and 2nd constituions, and Liberalism became the more dominant of the two ideologies since the 14th amendment (and I'd say right now we might be looking at a regression but a. that's biased, and b. it's unproven, that part will take a while).
Certainly true of the libertarian right, but not of the social conservative right, who have been rather inconsistent in opposing "FCC legislating TV language and obscenity" and "DEA or Department of Health legislating controlled substances".
As a self-identified member of the libertarian right I absolutely agree. I get into this debate with so-called Conservatives frequently: smaller government and less regulation means marriage equality (at the state level,) the dismantling of the DEA (leaving it to states to make their own rules,) and the elimination of the Dept. of Education (leaving that to states as well,) among many other things. It also calls for overturning Roe v. Wade (but not for the reasons the social-right wants but because it's really a 10th Amendment issue.)
By the way before I get downvoted for my views, I am merely pointing out that actual conservatism is a position of Federalism rather than a position on a particular agendas of certain groups.
That means a government should be closer to the people it obsensibly represents and decision should be made at the lowest level until such time as it affects a higher level. For example, if California wants to legalize heroin, that's for California to decide -- it has no practical effect on people in Louisiana.
The problem with many social conservatives is that they are intellectually inconsistent -- you can't call for government to enforce what 'you' want but then call for smaller government when it comes to what 'they' want.
It's a question of the scope of government and at what level government ought to be acting -- it really isn't about specific issues but the bigger question of "Is this the role of the Federal government."
That makes it seem like federalism is a procedural issue orthogonal to any particular substantive policies. But the US is, Constitutionally, an economic free trade zone. As a result, states cannot use the most potent economic tools to ensure enforcement of their laws. Even if the majority of people would prefer to have environmental or worker protection laws, a minority of people in a few states can create a nationwide race to the bottom.
As a practical matter, saying that some issue is the proper domain of the states is equivalent to saying it can't be effectively regulated at all.
And it's not like the framers were unaware of that dynamic. They empowered the federal government to regulate interstate commerce precisely as a foil to the prohibition on states to do so.
No, saying that an issue is for the states to decide is simply acknowledging that US citizens are individuals, and they know better than the Federal government what they want. Regulation at the Federal level removes choice and freedom.
You can't enforce many regulations at the state level, even if people want them, because the Constitution forbids discriminating against out of state commerce or citizens. If Californians wanted to have single payer health care, their system would be very susceptible to abuse because people should could cross the border when they got sick. Then Arizonans get the best of both worlds--they don't have to raise taxes to pay for healthcare, but they can still get the service if they need it. Same thing with environmental regulations. Even if everyone in California voted to have environmental regulations, that just creates an opening for goods manufactured in environmentally harmful ways in Arizona to undercut California goods in price.
Citizens don't really have the freedom to choose on issues like that unless they have the freedom to close their markets to people who do not play along. The Constitution takes away that freedom.
> [California legislation] has no practical effect on people in Louisiana
People underestimate the side effects of state-level or city-level legislation. Due to the size of the California economy the laws in California absolutely have practical effects on people in Louisiana. This is why national and international laws and agreements matter.
For example, environmental regulations on automobiles (this interview transcript is obviously one example and needs to be evaluated in the context of alternative information, but I think it's adequate to demonstrate the point that interactions between states are significant to a degree that dismissing them is risky): http://e360.yale.edu/feature/californias_clean_car_rules_hel...
Aristotle said that a city should only be as large as to encompass everyone that could hear the sound of a ram's horn or trumpet. Beyond that, you weren't part of the city or it's governance. Seems like a good rule which would prevent taking money from Florida and giving it to Alaska.
How about the USDA inspecting meat to prevent shady companies from passing off improperly stored meat as safe? Or the Department of Housing making sure that people don't add lead to paint without it being labeled as such?
Do you trust five unelected FCC commissioners, who are quite technically incompetent, to regulate the internet for 330 million Americans? Frankly, I'm quite weary.
The FCC commissioners are appointed by the elected president. Stating that they are unelected seems disingenuous to me, as it is diverting from the fact that they are doing their work on behalf of the elected official.
> The part of the Net Neutrality debate that is so often disregarded (and probably the reason conservatives oppose it vehemently) is that it gives FCC (an unelected body of government, part of the executive branch) power to legislate.
Completely wrong. It gives to the FCC the authority to write rules. In fact, Congress cannot delegate its legislative authority to the Executive branch short of a Constitutional amendment. They tried that with the line item veto and Clinton but it was struck down in the Courts.
Rules and laws are very different. Here is a primer:
And BTW, the United States population is about 320M and the GDP is about $18T. Shit's complicated. The idea that Congress should write every rule is blithering populist nonsense.
Going by the argument of opposing regulation/"interference" by unelected officials, conservatives could claim that the FDA (also an unelected body of government, part of the executive branch) frequently oversteps its bounds when it bans substances and products found to be harmful. How is a harmful product supposed to be taken off the market - wait for legislation from Congress while the product remains freely available?
I think delegation of authority is inevitable in a complicated administrative system.
You're right, that's the argument. It ignores the fact that the position makes no sense. In the UK, most laws are made by civil servants, under the direction of ministers, within the mandate of parliament. Under Brexit, this function will grow, not shrink.
Stephen Phillips, a prominent and heavily Brexit-supporting Conservative, appears to have figured out that Brexit means a huge increase in executive power, not a reduction. He's resigned from the party. Sadly, he appears to be alone.
In practical terms, the amount of legislation a modern country needs is far in excess of what its elected bodies can deliver. The question isn't if someone other than the body should be legislating, it's who, and with what oversight.
My theory (not substantiated in any provable way) is that:
1) there is an automated system recently implemented that suspends accounts that receive a set number of reports within a set period of time
2) jack's account is a constant target for reporting, specially by detractors of his platform
3) his account received a recently increase in attention thanks to all the news about his efforts to sanitize the twitter environment and turn it into a safer space
The combination of these three factors may have accidentally led to his account to be suspended.
As I said, there is nothing to substantiate this theory apart from flimsy speculation
A decentralized way to authenticate users securely and privately would be an exceptional addition to the open internet.
Unfortunately in this case the financial incentive and favors those building "information silos" where the purpose is information collection for profit.
I wonder if SMTP would ever see the light of the day with the current mindset as opposed to a "Facebook Messenger"-like multitude of services, much like what happened with the IM fragmentation.
The sad state of the internet and the world wide web, from a decentralized network envisioned to withstand nuclear armageddon [1] to a series of services so intertwined and full of single points of failure that a focused attack can take cause worldwide outages and disrupt communications everywhere.
Your presupposition is that it is in Google's (and Youtube's) best interest to guarantee that videos are correctly allowed or denied based on the balance of copyright, trademark and fair use.
It could very well be that their best interest is in satisfying their big customers, the companies that invest massive amounts of money in advertising, publishing and divulging their products and services through Google platforms.
Hence the existence of Content ID as a tool for takedown as opposed to rely simply the existing tools like DMCA takedown notices.
The later is, in theory, fair as it gives the accused a clear remedy for false accusations (demand reinstatement of the video and wait for the court battle with the video in place) while the former is a process completely in control by Google and it is up to their discretion to fix the situation.
It's amazing how people act like they have the "right" to post some content anywhere.
Youtube, facebook, reddit, hacker news are all private organizations. They are not legally obligated to host your content (in some cases, like copyright infringement, they are legally obligated to NOT host your content).
The only thing that keeps these sites from arbitrarily censoring their users is money. If facebook deleted every article that zuckerberg disagreed with, people would eventually stop using facebook (there might be some speculation about how their "top stories" algorithm "filters" stuff out).
Less users means less ad revenue. But on the flip side, if samsung accounts for a noticeable chunk of ad revenue and that becomes at risk, less ad revenue means less ad revenue too. If blindly DMCA'ing videos yields a loss of 2% of users, but keeping the video up yields a loss of 5% of ad revenue (from samsung's share), then I imagine they will always prefer to side with samsung.
This isn't illegal, this is just one of the truths about capitalism. If a company exists to make money, it will side with money. if a company exists to provide a quality service, it will side with quality service. Quality service often doesn't have the marketing team though.
>It's amazing how people act like they have the "right" to post some content anywhere.
It's amazing how, every time a private organization is criticized for how it handles speech on its platform, some tedious rando jumps out of the woodwork to smugly lecture everyone about how private organizations don't have legal obligations to host anything.
Yes. We know. We know, we know, we know, we all know. The First Amendment does not apply. We are not saying that Google is legally required to do anything. We are saying that Google's behavior is not in the spirit of free speech and chills discourse. That's it. Can we take it as read that everyone's up to speed on this and move on without the pointless derail, please?
It's amazing how widespread the idea that that, because it's legal for private organisations to take down whatever content they like, no-one should criticise them for it has become. However could this belief that benefits those with immense influence over the public discourse have become so common?
Your tone suggests some sort of nefarious plot, but in the US that idea is widely consistent with fairly prevalent preferences for strong private property rights and a distrust of regulation that predates mass media.
A business owner is seen as more like the average person than is a regulator or other academic "public discourse"-spouting person.
Today they're telling Youtube what to do, tomorrow they're telling your company what to do...
See also positions on NIMBYism vs "it's my land, why can't I build whatever I want?", Uber and AirBNB vs existing regulations, and many others.
I don't think there's any kind of actual conspiracy going on; it's just that this argument is a convenient political soldier. If these companies were censoring the other side politically, it's the other political side that would be deploying it.
On on the side of, society extends corporations a lot of rights and protection. Stand to reason that demands that they serve the public interest aren't unreasonable. Especially in this case where the claim is corporations are abusing a right; copyright and trademark protection.
They object to the speech and decline to host it. Juggle the words however you like to make it more emotionally palatable to you. My goal is to speak precisely.
If your goal is to be precise, you should double check the definition of objectionable. It means that the common man would deem it offensive, not that a particular party would object to it for a reason like saving face.
Going even further, another way to interpret the 1st Amendment is that it is the federal governments responsibility to protect those freedoms, and that it would be well within the power of Congress to enact laws prohibiting the censoring of free speech, even on so called private platforms. This sort of thing has been done in the past, for example by prohibiting discrimination based on race even in private establishments.
Actually, I don't think this is a valid interpretation of the First Amendment, which is written specifically to circumscribe the powers given to Congress, beginning "Congress shall make no law..."
You are totally right, we should disown whoever posseses the digital main-street. Its outrageous the public, the people of the constitution have to be beggars in some private backyard.
Huh? I absolutely have a right to come out and publicly say that YouTube or Facebook is practicing censorship of ideas for political or financial gain on their platforms, and express the fact that this is a bad thing for users. Expressing such an opinion is not tantamount to stating I have any "rights" under their platforms or being entitled; you are connecting those dots in your head without basis just to be snide.
Many of the safe-harbor laws protect a service only so long as the service is neutral. If they can make a good-faith argument that their mechanisms are used only to neutrally remove content based on good-faith assertions of copyright infringement, OK. If anyone can make a case that it's used as an editorial tool based on the opinions or ideas expressed in the removed content, well, that's the ballgame. YouTube suddenly has a negative value because losing its safe-harbor status will allow it to be pummeled into bankruptcy by lawsuits.
So maybe before you come rushing in to post your "ha-HA! Literally no one in history has ever considered that this is a corporation, or pointed this out, or had exactly this discussion, I must smugly educate them on that fact" lecture next time, you should do your homework first?
Its amazing how people act like money and short-term metrics are all that the matters, and the the only purpose of money is to accaccumulate it as an end in itself, and that the public shouldn't communicate to applysocila pressure and consequences to bad actors.
Their entire business model of distributing arbitrary uploads is a grant from the government, one which was very controversial until the overton window passed.
edit: We can certainly decide that it's in the public interest to place limits on the editorial control over sites that rely on safe harbor, just as phone companies aren't allowed to censor particular conversations. Things get to be rights because we collectively decide that they are.
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edit: Deleted, because it is completely wrong.
[Your libertarianism ignores the law. In order to qualify for safe harbor under DMCA, their ability to exercise arbitrary editorial control is limited. If they want to choose what they host, they are choosing to be legally responsible for what they host.]
That's not actually libertarianism; it's crypto-fascism. There is no distinction between a totalitarian government and a perfectly "libertarian" company which owns all land and property, so true libertarians must be concerned with how power is actually distributed.
Tech giants have scale and effects on par with government, especially as these "independent" companies tend to make decisions in lock step. Thus libertarians should be primarily concerned with the rights of the distributed actors within these ecosystems.
A centralized directory that hosts no content will be DMCAed or sued just as easily as one that does, so they will have to implement the same kind of result censorship. And decentralized directories are very vulnerable to spam.
Funny how people tend to view things like malls and social media as public places. It's a mass illusion we all place on what is inevitably a biased corporate product fully intended to make money.
It would be interesting to see what a municipal social media platform would look like.
that being said, I think there is probably legal precedent in holding Youtube accountable to the public interest given its breadth and depth. Looking at the typical 1st amendment litmus test re: falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater - even if that theater is private, what is yelled inside becomes public interest if it affects the public welfare.
Capitalism is great, but if it gets out of hand, government intervention is needed. Two good examples are the breakup of Ma Bell and US v. Microsoft (2001). For a present day problem, look no further than ISPs.
Ironically, an implication of your words is that a state owned video sharing site would not only adhere to the 1st amendment much better but would also serve consumer interest in a more balanced way.
> Donations are often used as a way to make others ‘pay up.’ By giving the pneumonia vaccine away for free, pharmaceutical corporations can use this as justification for why prices remain high for others, including other humanitarian organizations and developing countries that also can’t afford the vaccine.
> Countries, which continue to voice their frustration at being unable to afford new and costly vaccines such as PCV, need lower prices as well to protect children’s health.
Medicine and the pharmaceutical industry must strike a balance between the increase in innovation only healthy competition can bring (the promise of capitalism) and the public utility of their discoveries.
When that doesn't happen governments sometimes are forced to step in and take harsh measures. It happened in Brazil in the first years of the XXI century, when the government forced compulsory licensing of anti-HIV drug patents [1] so it could produce it cheaply on their own laboratories.
> It happened in Brazil in the first years of the XXI century, when the government forced compulsory licensing of anti-HIV drug patents [1] so it could produce it cheaply on their own laboratories.
The mistake rather lies in the fact that the patents were granted. If you want competition instead of a monopoly dictating the prizes you should better not allow patents in this area.
The problem here is that we are currently paying for vaccine research by promising the monopoly to allow research to recoup their costs (and the risks of plausible therapies that go nowhere). Removing that monopoly and not replacing it with something else will mean that no new therapies get developed. If we want new therapies to be developed, then we have to pay for it somehow.
We could also reduce the cost of bringing new therapies to market by having the FDA say "if your drug is approved by the EU, you can sell it in the US" as per S. 2388
> Removing that monopoly and not replacing it with something else will mean that no new therapies get developed.
Given that medical research is probably as close as you can get to a textbook case where patents are useful, and how obviously true many smart people think this statement is, there just _must_ be lots of robust peer reviewed academic research empirically supporting that statement.
Could someone point me to one such peer-reviewed paper?
Note that there are also opposing views. Switzerland did not have pharmaceutical patents until 1978. A quote from a famous anti-IP book[1]:
"In particular, at least between 1850 and 1980, most drugs and medical products should have been invented and produced in the United States and the United Kingdom, and very little if anything in continental Europe. Further, countries such as Italy, Switzerland and, to a lesser extent, Germany, should have been the laggards of the pharmaceutical industry until recently. Instead the opposite was true for longer than a century"
Reading the opposing viewpoint paper is confusing. Drugs will be developed wherever the talent for their development lives, then exported to a protected environment to be sold.
Even if 100% of drugs are available patent-free in Germany, it wouldn't be very helpful to people living in the US.
> We could also reduce the cost of bringing new therapies to market by having the FDA say "if your drug is approved by the EU, you can sell it in the US" as per S. 2388
But what reason does the pharmaceutical company have to reduce the drug price in this case if it has a patent (i.e. a monopoly to dictate the price) instead of simply having more profit because of these (potential) changes in regulations?
> We could also reduce the cost of bringing new therapies to market by having the FDA say "if your drug is approved by the EU, you can sell it in the US" as per S. 2388.
This is exactly the sort of thing that TTIP is trying to do. For some reason, though, there is a lot of opposition to TTIP, not only in general, but on exactly this kind of provision.
My issue is that pharmaceutical companies would shop around for the country with the slackest approval requirements.
Some countries may be willing to ease approval requirements without regard to safety to draw pharmaceutical company operations there and in others whether through official policy or corruption agencies may become fee for approval businesses.
Once reciprocation is in place whether through treaty or act of Congress, due to the power of the pharmaceutical companies it will become almost impossible to end even when abuse is apparent.
In regards to S. 2388 I also oppose the provision allowing Congress to override the FDA decision to not allow a particular drug or device. It is yet another attempt to make what should be scientific decisions political ones.
