Yeah. As they argue, what's going to happen when an isp shuts off service to a hospital due to automated systems put in place to mitigate this ruling? Mistakes can be corrected in due time, but how much damage will be done in the interim?
It's so exhausting that we don't just commit to net neutrality. It's the obvious logistical answer to this with direct comparisons in telephone service. Should have been settled years ago, but for some reason were letting the corporate copyright class spend money to slow it down.
Typically most institutions such as hospitals have multi T1 lines from separate providers. Ignoring piracy/automated systems, sometimes isps just have outages, so it's the same problem.
In my experience, a lot of places that want to do redundant wired Internet have the local fiber provider and local cable provider going into some failover or SD-WAN setup. T1 would be rare (but possible) for Internet access, not rare for phone (funny thing is the phone might be SIP over Internet over T1).
You might even have crappy situations due to people not understanding what they are buying (or other weird reasons) where 2 ISPs share 1 LEC circuit, e.g. a single physical fiber line.
But anyway, a provider cutting you off permanently is more than an outage. You need to get another ISP.
I'm not sure if you're able to comment, but my intuitive speculation is that institutions have ISP connections that are in what I imagine to be a "dedicated service" tier.
My hunch is that these accounts would be exempt from certain actions compared to residential accounts.
Modern hospitals are designed to run ‘offline’ from infrastructure such as water, electricity and sewer for a period of time, typically a few days. When there’s a major disaster (earthquake, hurricane, terrorist attack) these services can fail at the exact time that hospitals see a flood of injured people.
I haven’t specifically looked into internet but I’d be surprised if they were unable to provide care with a down internet connection.
... and medical device vendors and patient record systems have done their very best to make that impossible.
Hospitals can work without water, electricity and sewage ... but not without internet. Well, it's possible, but at 50% or so capacity (and I'm sure that number is going up)
A hospital filled up assuming 100% capacity that falls back to 50% capacity, however is going to be VERY tough to keep running for the doctors.
A lot of these systems are locally hosted on hospital infrastructure to guarantee that when internet service goes out, medical records can still be accessed. And I cannot name many hospital medical devices that are Internet connected, rather than just connected to a local Intranet.
it is related in the sense that ISPs have no business or should not be burdened with policing the data their customers transfer. if someone violates the law it is up to the courts to prosecute them and if appropriate deny them internet access. however given that internet access is now as important as a phone used to be, this should practically never happen.
It's worth pointing out that society is shifting HARD on the idea that pipe service providers should be "neutral" with respect to the traffic they're carrying. Recent pushes around scam calls and texts have resulted in policies with providers to more heavily screen their customers from the start, requirements for text campaigns to submit their content for review, internal evaluation of traffic for fraud patterns and dropping it before it gets to the end point, enforcement of the "STOP" thing for texts, and even things like STIR/SHAKEN which while not specifically about the content of the message (other than the caller id info) still involves each layer asserting what degree of "trust" they give what they're carrying.
Realistically every time you see someone lamenting that telecoms aren't dropping scam callers and texts and policing that better, you're seeing an advocation against net/carrier neutrality.
> Realistically every time you see someone lamenting that telecoms aren't dropping scam callers and texts and policing that better, you're seeing an advocation against net/carrier neutrality.
I agree based on the strict definition of net neutrality but disagree based on implementation in practice. Spam can be made an exception to net neutrality laws.
I do think that phone service providers and internet service providers should be common carriers, but letting phone service providers drop spam callers is socially compatible with banning service providers from dropping calls from my hypothetical family member who is a terrorist on death row: some kinds of calls - such as phone calls from family members, work colleagues/managers, friends once removed, etc. - are the kinds of calls which people tacitly mutually agree to receive. I would want phone service providers to turn a blind eye to calls between people with a social relation. Spam calls, on the other hand, are unsolicited calls usually from strangers with no social relation to the receiver. (How to identify spam is a different question, but I'm only arguing about the motivating principles.) The same applies to fraud, which some spam is (your car's extended warranty, etc.).
With internet websites, the user usually wants the traffic they request from the website. So ISPs should not be allowed to voluntarily restrict such traffic, and government bodies should be prohibited (with very narrow exceptions) from making ISPs restrict traffic. Where government bodies could instead put penalties on users and website owners, governments should not also target ISPs. (Privacy-violating third-party elements such as ads are not always wanted by the user, but that can be solved with privacy laws rather than exceptions to common carrier laws.)
>Spam can be made an exception to net neutrality laws.
Sure, spam can be an exception. And so can fraud, and terrorism. And then so can piracy, and porn, and drug content. And once we're back into the exceptions for "immoral" content, the world is our oyster and nothing is off limits for the sake of the children.
For any neutrality to work it must be completely neutral with respect to 100% of content. If providers are not to be involved in regulating the content that goes over the wires they provide, that must be held to the furthest extent possible. Spam, piracy and everything else that society decides it doesn't like MUST be dealt with another way that is entirely divorced from requiring or allowing providers to get in the middle of it. Anything else isn't neutrality, it's just conveniently aligned with your current interests, which may or may not be a stable situation.
I should have been better about my word choice. In my previous comment, I shouldn't have lumped phone carriers in with ISPs, since the net neutrality debate in 2017 was not about phones, and calling/texting service is different from internet service. When I mentioned spam in my previous comment, I was referring only to spam calls and spam text messages, not spam websites. Consider my previous comment overriden by what I write in this comment.
In this comment, when I say "net neutrality", I am referring to internet service providers, and internet service provided over cellular service but not the other aspects of phone service. I think that net neutrality should have a few specific exceptions, but spam is not one of them.
With the two exceptions I'll mention later, governments should not restrict access to websites if users request the content (most website visits).
Terrorism, piracy, porn, drug, and non-malware spam websites fall under this category for adults. (Children are a separate matter, but parents and caretakers bear the responsibility of managing childrens' internet and phone usage.) Porn is off-limits to government restrictions due to the First Amendment. In the cases of piracy, terrorism, illegal drugs, and non-malware spam, governments can target the website operators for their crimes (not for their websites, excepting CSAM) and shut down the websites directly without asking ISPs to do anything other than provide information in response to court orders. I'm not sure how to categorize fraud websites, but non-malware fraud can be corrected after the government deals with the fraudsters, so I'll lump non-malware fraud with these previous kinds of content. My model of net neutrality is that ISPs can look at the content, but they must turn a blind eye to the previously listed categories. Which data ISPs can collect, retain, and share with the government is something for privacy laws to decide. (No sharing with non-governmental parties.)
So governments should not be allowed to pressure ISPs to restrict traffic nor force ISPs to even identify it, except if the traffic in question goes to/from a website that spreads CSAM or tries to visitors' computers with malware. CSAM is firmly outside of the First Amendment (while terrorism-related speech is ambiguous in legality), and malware is much more time-sensitive than the above kinds of content. Governments should be able to force ISPs to report identified CSAM. Malware, I'm leaning toward otherwise because I don't know whether the federal government would bother telling affected citizens about it.
Regarding phone carriers:
Websites receive automatically and are quiet unless configured to be otherwise. The user requests a webpage, and the server sends it. Unlike websites, phone calls interrupt the receivers and force the receiver to check the caller. Spam calls are intrusive in a way that doesn't apply to spam websites, so I'm okay with government regulations of spam calls where I'm not okay with comparable regulations of spam websites.
My ideal would be for phone carriers to do block spam calls voluntarily, but that hasn't worked out so far. So my idea is to force phone carriers to identify spam numbers (of both spam callers and spam texters) and to give users the option to delegate blocking of spam numbers to the phone carrier. If the user doesn't want the carrier to block spam, then that's that, though the user can still rely on third-party spam services such as Google's.
It's not net neutrality, but it is conceptually related. Net neutrality is the principle that an ISP should treat internet traffic equally regardless of content, sender, or receiver [1]. Put another way, ISPs should not have the discretion to restrict internet traffic or internet access. If your personal concept of net neutrality is limited to an ISPs voluntary decisions, then the court case in the article is merely adjacent to net neutrality.
On the other hand, I believe that the principle of net neutrality should extend to US governments: for the most part, governments should not be allowed to restrict internet traffic or internet access.
1. Internet traffic is speech and expression. The First Amendment makes freedom of expression the default.
2. Internet access is increasingly necessary for work, school, politics beyond a local level, and getting internet access. See appendix A for bonus information.
3. Internet users and websites usually are the people who decide what traffic the users see, government interventions over the content (regarding such as CSAM and copyright infringement) should directly sue users and website owners (and not ISPs), because lawsuits to ISPs rather than to ISP users are less visible to those users and therefore less likely to attract the users' opposition.
4. Letting a government block internet access even for a reason like copyright infringement is a slippery slope toward willful blindness to false positives and excessive punishments. See appendix C for bonus info.
Appendix A: Regarding my earlier claim that Internet access is "increasingly necessary": Seeking a sufficiently paying job, never mind working, is hard without internet. Students need internet to get emails, use online learning management systems, collaborate, video call, etc. Fact checking what you read/hear offline or see/hear via internet-less TV about politics beyond a local level is impossible. (Asking a friend to do it for you on the internet is not allowed in this thought experiment.) Getting internet access requires contacting an ISP in the first place, and getting the phone number without visiting the ISPs website is hard without internet.
Appendix B: The net neutrality debate in 2017 was actually a debate about the FCC's entire authority to protect consumers in the internet access market [B1].
> A big part of the FCC’s plan involves rolling back the FCC’s tailor-made authority over broadband providers, then shoveling all remaining government oversight to an FTC ill-equipped to handle it.
> Why is that a problem? The FTC has no rule-making ability, and can only move to protect consumers after a violation has occurred. And that action can only occur if it’s painfully clear that an ISP engaged in “unfair and deceptive” behavior, something that’s easy for an ISP to dodge in the net neutrality era, where anti-competitive behavior is often buried under faux-technical jargon and claims that it was done only for the health and safety of the network.
And let's be clear, internet access remains mostly the same since 2017 (deceptively priced, overpriced, slow, not fiber, data capped, not available in rural places) because states passed net neutrality laws [B2].
Appendix C: Orrin Hatch wants to destroy the computers of people who commit copyright infringement [C1]. (I kept the Wikipedia bracket citations in the quote so that you can control-F for each paragraph in the original article.)
> Hatch was long a proponent of expanding intellectual property rights and in 1997 introduced the Senate version of the Copyright Term Extension Act.[89] Hatch believed that intellectual property laws should, in general, more closely mirror real property laws, and offer greater protections to authors and creators.[89]
> Hatch caused an overnight controversy on June 17, 2003, by proposing that copyright owners should be able to destroy the computer equipment and information of those suspected of copyright infringement, including file sharing, he stated that "This may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."[90] In the face of criticism, especially from technology and privacy advocates, Hatch withdrew his suggestion days later, after it was discovered that Sen. Hatch's official website was using an unlicensed JavaScript menu from United Kingdom-based software developer Milonic Solutions. Milonic founder Andy Woolley stated that "We've had no contact with them. They are in breach of our licensing terms." Shortly after the publication of that story in Wired magazine, the company that runs Hatch's website contacted Milonic to start registration.
Safe Harbor in DMCA does say that repeat infringers should be terminated from service. I do think it’s government overreach because for many, you only have one ISP as an option, and cutting you off from internet access is very severely impactful to many. This seems like a court matter directly between the copyright holders and the infringing end user.
Perhaps I’m biased in this regard, not really sure how the law shakes out. I will say that Grande was an amazing ISP. I had them for probably 8 years before I moved out of Texas, and my boss for several years was a former Grande employee. Everyone had great things to say about them. One time, our internet went down during a historic flood, and they ended up flying a fiber line across the flooded river using a drone to get service back to everyone. It was entertaining to follow that.
I’ve heard they’re owned by someone new now; not sure if they’re still good.
Internet should be classed as a human right like water and electricity. Unilaterally deciding to terminate access over some allegation that isn't proven in a court of law is draconian to say the least.
We need to rework creator payment mechanics before we do that. If you ban copyright the first thing that will happen is that a pile of companies and people will make copies of all the best-selling books and put them on sale on Amazon for a penny over cost. The books for sale by the authors will be buried and they'll make nothing.
Same for movies. It's going to be slim pickings when only people who can afford to and desire to make movies to give away for free actually make movies.
I give away my stuff for free online, but do sell paper copies of books for profit. (People can print their own personal copies cheaper if they want.)
That said, I'd be FUCKING PISSED OFF if other people who did nothing were making all the money off my stuff and I were making nothing. Because that's some unjust bullshit right there.
I think the copyright term should be dropped to 14 years plus an optional one-time 14-year renewal. Or, to simplify the paperwork, just a single 28-year term. I'd also support no corporate ownership of copyrights, but I haven't thought that through yet.
Because it does far more harm than good. Enforcement of copyright requires all kinds of authoritarianism and infringement upon people's rights to use their own property/devices, which hardly seems a fair trade just for more entertainment media. Especially when there are enough creatives out there who do the work purely for passion that'd we'd never run out of media to consume even if nobody could use copyright to profit from it.
Copyright also applies on media that is not for entertainment or "consumption". Where would the money come from to pay for important news reporting, for example? There are a lot of people in this world who are not hackers and have other needs.
As somebody who grew up in the time of government-only media, let me assure you that you don't want the world to regress to that. Copyrighted information is better than no information.
I broadly agree with the underlying sentiment, however this is a classic false dichotomy espoused by people and interests heavily invested in maintaining the status quo. I would argue that news organizations like ProPublica could exist without copyright, and does not rely on public funds. NPR and PBS are publicly subsidized, but not to the extent that they are obliged to operate as state media (or can even be credibly accused of bowing under pressure from government actors). It’s a convenient myth that copyright is somehow inevitable or necessary, or that it fosters creative endeavors.
Sure, if we lived in a society that valued people enough intrinsically to support them regardless of their value in the capitalist marketplace... But we don't. Too bad people need to eat and pay their rent.
Lots of drugs cost little to manufacture but lots to develop. Ideally the costs for robust research and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals would be shared by all people equally because we all benefit from improving the human condition... But they're not. And since pharmaceutical companies can't just blow a whole bunch of money on research for things that will bring them no money, they charge enough for the pill to make their money back, and unfortunately, usually, far beyond that until it's able to be made generically. I believe that windfall profits from prices that keep people from treatment are wrong. But allowing everyone to make new drugs developed by other pharmaceutical companies to sell at generic prices would just mean those companies wouldn't research new drugs... Win? Not without a way in-place to replace that research. And anyone considering some glib argument questioning the value of new drugs, you're full of shit. Not every new drug is a Viagra knock-off.
Lots of people in the tech crowd have adopted this convenient romantic notion that real art must be non-commercial, and that all real art is made by people toiling in obscurity, driven solely by the need for self-expression and the distant hope that they'll someday be discovered, become famous, and have their name in art history books... Or even that hobby art could replace professional art. That, of course, is complete bullshit. Art is no different than any other intellectual pursuit and equating VFX artists for AAA game titles and professional session musicians to weekend basement studio oil painters and people with hobby bands is like equating immigration attorneys writing depositions and technical writers to people who are serious about their personal fanfic blogs.
Saying we need to abolish copyright means the things that are copyrighted have enough value to want; demanding we do that without first demanding an alternate way to support people who do intellectual work is a self-absorbed demand for free stuff. Saying they should get another job and continue to produce that valuable work for free— like a public slave in ancient Rome— is not an answer any ethical adult could entertain in good faith.
Clearly this person thinks people base their moral opinions solely on what would make them more money. "It's impossible to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it."
> Especially when there are enough creatives out there who do the work purely for passion that'd we'd never run out of media to consume even if nobody could use copyright to profit from it.
“Because I think people should work for free to entertain me”
"I deserve automatic compensation (rent) for 100+ years for any one who consumes this media just because I recorded any bit of audio, put one mark on a paper, or created 1 frame of a motion picture."
> "I deserve automatic compensation (rent) for 100+ years for any one who consumes this media just because I recorded any bit of audio, put one mark on a paper, or created 1 frame of a motion picture."
Pure straw man argument.
Nobody is talking about “automatic compensation”. Nobody is getting paid for putting “one make on a paper” if nobody wants to buy it.
People get to price their works. If you don’t like the price or don’t think it’s worth it, you don’t pay for it. Nobody gets “automatic compensation” if nobody wants to buy their work. These are such obvious ground truths that you’re ignoring for the sake of trying to make a strained point.
Sorry, you’re not entitled to the output of other people’s labor for free, just like I’m not entitled to the output of your labor for free.
I'm pretty sure copyright law in it's current form was lobbied by the mouse company™ rather than individuals.
> just because I recorded any bit of audio, put one mark on a paper, or created 1 frame of a motion picture
What's your opinion on books, for example, where almost all the work was done by an individual? Do they deserve lifetime compensation or similar?
Disney might be a big name behind it, but don't let that fool you into thinking individuals haven't tried to shape this too, see Sonny Bono for one. But you can also look around at the current massive fight over AI and see a lot of individuals who are fighting very hard for stronger enforcement of copyright in its current form. Even here in the tech community we see a lot of people wanting to keep their public sites and code from being used in these models, which is a significant change from the "Information wants to be free" days of yore.
IMHO it should be similar timeframes to patents, for all media types, and network infrastructure should not bear the responsibility to enforce it.
For things requiring lots of research and development, I think some mechanism should exist to document and extend the period, or "pay per year" scheme, but no longer than 30 years.
What is the point of art entirely, in the context of telling me what I can do and watch with my own Internet connected computing/media devices? Should we fully subsidsize anyone who calls themselves an artist? Should we track all media usage for this purpose?
> What is the point of art entirely, in the context of telling me what I can do and watch with my own Internet connected computing/media devices?
It’s fascinating to see people in this thread pretend like art exists in a vacuum and act like the people who created it shouldn’t be involved in the equation at all.
Something tells me those same people would get very upset if we suggested their own work, code, or labor should be freely used by anyone who wanted to, including their employer. I’m guessing they like to be paid for their work. They just don’t like paying other people for their work.
> Should we fully subsidsize anyone who calls themselves an artist?
Why are you trying to talk about subsidies and how people identify?
You’re throwing out straw man arguments to try to distract from the real point: People get to decide how much to charge for their work. If you don’t want to pay that amount, you are not entitled to receive it for free.
The way some people are pretending like they have a moral entitlement to the labor of other people in this thread is wild.
Good art will outlive its creator - either in the form of the work itself or through inspirations to others. The relation between a work of art and its creator cannot be "ownership like the physical sense" forever.
> Something tells me those same people would get very upset if we suggested their own work, code, or labor should be freely used by anyone who wanted to, including their employer. I’m guessing they like to be paid for their work
For the record, I think it should work like this: I'm an artist. You want art from me. You tell me what you want, I create it, you pay me. This is straightforward and obvious.
> People get to decide how much to charge for their work. If you don’t want to pay that amount, you are not entitled to receive it for free.
It costs many dollars to make copy 1 of Y. You worked, you should get paid for copy 1.
It costs 0 dollars to make copy 2 of something. Anything you think you should receive above 0 for copy 2 is only justifiable with moral entitlements to the money of other people.
> Good art will outlive its creator - either in the form of the work itself or through inspirations to others. The relation between a work of art and its creator cannot be "ownership like the physical sense" forever.
Yet another strawman! Nobody demanded ownership forever, but some form of compensation for things you enjoy.
> For the record, I think it should work like this: I'm an artist. You want art from me. You tell me what you want, I create it, you pay me. This is straightforward and obvious.
What you describe isn't art, but the service of creating an artwork on demand as a service.
> It costs many dollars to make copy 1 of Y. You worked, you should get paid for copy 1.
If we were doing that, society would be at a net loss, because pretty much nobody was able to pay the cost for an artwork upfront - a single movie costs up to several hundred millions of dollars to manufacture. This leads to a world where most media simply wouldn't exist. I doubt that's the one you'd prefer living in.
Instead, by spreading this amount over consumers, we can have accessible content for most people, and a way for artists to make a living from creating artworks as a service.
> Yet another strawman! Nobody demanded ownership forever, but some form of compensation for things you enjoy.
> What you describe isn't art, but the service of creating an artwork on demand as a service.
Not a strawman (and also relevant to copyrightable art) while copyright is able to used to enforce royalties. Fair compensation is 1 work = 1 payment, not 1 work = pay over 100+ years.
(Related aside: Private entities have the right to enter into contracts they wish (e.g. if you personally want to pay an artist over and over during your lifetime, fine), but when it seeps into law that enables third parties to sue, then it is no longer a private matter.)
> If we were doing that, society would be at a net loss,
> Instead, by spreading this amount over consumers, we can have accessible content for most people
Mass media dilutes art, makes it impersonal, limits attention span by encouraging a "fad/fashion" approach to creative works, and forces art to be subservient to things like advertising. You sure it wouldn't be a net gain?
It does make artists lives more difficult, but things that are more important to society are difficult as well, such as being a doctor, so ... no sympathy.
If this was true, people wouldn’t try to pirate copyrighted content because they’d be busy with this supposed abundance of free creative media.
People pirate because they want content that other people produced with the expectation of getting paid.
People like getting paid for their work. I suspect you do, too, but you think that people who do creative work don’t deserve to be paid because you are the consumer.
As Valve's Gabe Newell once said: piracy is a service problem. As such, if the paid for version provides a good service, people will use that instead. Lots of stuff getting pirated doesn't even get consumed, and people don't have unlimited money. Not as if people would've suddenly bought everything they pirated. That is a pipe dream.
IMO copyright should be drastically shortened, and should possibly have a mechanism for varying the length based on the application - for instance, aerospace software can take literal decades just to be permitted for use, so if the copyright only lasts 10 years then aerospace software basically isn't covered.
In contrast, perhaps the average videogame might need only five years of copyright to sufficiently incentivize their production. Hypothetically. In such a scenario, there's no one-size-fits-all solution, so we need a different system than just a flat copyright duration.
While I agree in theory, I'm afraid that disputes over what is sufficient in what industry would result in 10 years for one kind of work, 40 for another, and 5 for yet another. I would accept a one-size-fits-all solution in the form of a lowest-common-denominator which simultaneously is much closer to the original US copyright term. Surely 15 years of monopoly privileges after publishing - or 20 years after writing/making, whichever is sooner - is sufficient. (No extensions, although I might accept something like Bill Willingham's proposal of giving licensees 10 years total and max [1].) If that's not enough incentive then the prospective author isn't confident that the work would sell well in the best conditions, and a government should not further distort a market to make an at-best-poorly-selling product sell well.
It should also be strictly limited to original works, not vaguely applied to "derivatives." A cover of a song should be considered an original work, and not infringing upon the original. As should a song that uses sections of melody or samples.
I'd also say that durations should be shorter than the original terms, due to the much higher volume of works produced today and greater accessibility of those tools. 5-10 from publication at the most.
After all, a massive supply of something with a relatively static demand simply means it has a lower value than it once did.
Because it's not private property. When something is a private property, that means that if I have 100% of it, you have 0% of it. That doesn't happen with, for example, songs. I can have 100% of a song and listen to it as much as I want and that doesn't mean you can't have and listen that song as well.
Copyright (and patents) are a limited monopoly granted by the state, thus they are inherently immoral, as everything that any government does, as they do that by the use of force.
Other way to look at it is that ideas are not scarce at all and it's copyright/patents/the government that creates scarcity where there's abundance.
We only have it to promote useful arts and science. With more books than you can read in a lifetime is copyright necessary? Is it the most useful way to ensure more art is created considering the cost?
Years from now we're gonna look back and realize that copyright industry groups effectively destroyed the internet, and none of us would be laughing about it as we do now.
Years from now? I've been mad at this for at least a decade.
Look at how much control media companies have exerted over pretty much everything. Look at all the anti-piracy stuff with HDCP, or the DRM stuff in browsers, and how some services don't allow you to watch high-definition streams with some browsers. And unskippable ads on DVDs, ultimately enforced by the movie industry.
Also, look at how music files are treated so differently from regular files on iOS. And copyright strikes and demonetization on youtube and others, the Sony rootkit scandal, the list goes on.
These people have inserted themselves into every aspect of our digital lives, and (along with advertisers) basically ruin everything or at least make everything more complicated just to protect their revenue streams.
Edit: Wait, a decade is only 2013? How did that happen. Make that two decades.
As much as I agree that copyright in its current form is a joke, I don't believe it's responsible for destroying the internet. The internet is a wasteland because too many people are on it. It started out as a thing for academics, then became available to non-academics with enough skills to use it (and whom appreciate it), then young people got access to it in school, then smartphones put it in everyone's pocket, and finally we have virtually everyone in every part of the bell curve on it whether they comprehend it or not. The greater the audience, the more the internet is dragged towards the mean. Of course it will no longer serve the same purpose it once did. The original types who were on it early make up less than 1% of the current internet population.
Don't get me wrong, copyright enforcement has degraded many things, but the old internet wouldn't be significantly different today if all other variables remained static.
I often wonder if we could start a new sub-internet. Like a wide area mesh VPN. Perhaps something like tor but not so focused on anonymity so it doesn't immediately degrade into the cesspool that tor has become.
Another instance of this is Urbit. I wish it didn't use ETH for namespace but it is a pragmatic solution and funds development, the rest of the architecture is free of blockchains. I especially like the model of moving your "ship" from one "pier" to another if you don't like the moderation, tho the network hasn't really gotten big enough to actually experience a netsplit like mastodon - it's a couple thousand users if that. The fact that a 32bit name costs money adds a bit of a durable reputation factor, but 128bit names are free.
This debate predates facebook by a while. Napster came out 5 years prior, and that's when I remember the biggest push from media companies, but there were efforts even before this to limit the free exchange of information.
I've been thinking recently about what sort of impact two significant changes to IP law might have in shaping things.
1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone. The idea here is that if an idea continues to have value for a company, then it continues to have value to the person who created it. And if Disney or whoever decides that something isn't worth having anymore, the creators are free to go out and find someone who does value it.
Immediate concern here is how messy this gets deciding what anyone actually owns. Do animators own the copyright to a character jointly? Separately? Do they only own the copyrights to their specific drawings and a character is then inherently uncopyrightable? Joint ownership seems obvious, but then how is that any better for the individuals than Disney having exclusive ownership? It only takes one to prevent you from making money on your work. Separate but equal ownership seems interesting, but how much do you have to contribute to get that? Does everyone who ever drew a sketch for Lilo and Stitch now own the IP rights to the entire character? Likewise how would you keep licensing agreements from looking like convoluted versions of modern copyright anyway? I guess that's more on the unions and guilds but if every employee signs a 200 year exclusive license, that's not any different from what we have today really.
2) Trademarks can not be sold. A trademark's purpose is to assure a buyer of the source of a given good. The whole reason we protect them is because if I buy a product with Apple's branding on it, I want to know I got it from Apple, not from "Bob's Fancy Electronics Shack and Bait Shop". Problem is, if you can sell a trademark, you've changed who is actually the source of the good, but the consumer may not know that. Food items make a good example here. "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" might be a small company, but when Kraft buys them out, it's not Uncle Roger who's selling it anymore, it's Kraft. And Kraft may change that recipe, or otherwise make decisions that Uncle Roger wouldn't. A consumer should know it's no longer "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" they're buying, it's now "Kraft MSG" and while it might be based on Uncle Roger's recipe, it's not from Uncle Roger and Kraft should have to rebrand it and fight for brand reputation all over again. Zombie brands are another example of this. Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore, and they're not the same, and shouldn't be sold as the same.
Again there are some immediate concerns that come to mind. Part of the value of buying a company is that trademarks carry the reputation of the company. Distinguishing between a change of owners as part of the course of business and a change of owners as in a sale of the whole company is also difficult. I don't think if "Uncle Roger" and "Auntie Helen" split and the 50/50 ownership structure becomes 100% ownership, does that require a rebrand? Probably not, but then what are the limits of this? If Kraft sells Uncle Roger a 0.0001% ownership in Kraft, does that also mean there's no need to rebrand?
> Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore
It never was. Sears, even many decades ago, always contracted other vendors to make their products, just like Costco does with their house brand now. The product numbers even used the first three digits to identify the vendor.
A Kenmore appliance would be made by Whirlpool, Maytag, LG, Samsung, whatever. It would be a distinct product, with its own exterior design and feature set (rather than just changing a logo). It definitely was worth finding out who made which, to favor manufacturers like LG over Whirlpool.
Craftsman was made by the Stanley/Black&Decker/DeWalt corporation for a long time before they finally bought the brand during the final Sears collapse a few years ago.
I recall seeing references to companies like "Tandy" for some electronic products, which should indicate that this practice goes back well into the 70s and 80s...
> 1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone.
This is, as I understand your idea, the situation that actually exists in Germany in the Urheberrecht. Here, two concepts exists:
- Urheberschaft (authorship): the property of being the author and be attributed as such; cannot be sold.
- Nutzungsrechte (usage rights): these can be sold
With the copyright, multiple creators could work on it with a signed deal saying they'd be paid, but the sole ownership would go to a single person. A profit sharing plan could be put in place if desired.
Not challenging you, just had an eye brow nearly leave my face... I've been coming to HN for years now and genuinely interested in where your angle comes from? I'm missing something and would like to know... thanks
My guess is that Meta employees are a small minority of HN readership, so I think you’ll need to explain how you think the HN community is responsible. Unless you just mean the tech community at large. But that’s tautological, as the enshittifiers of tech are categorically a subset of the broad tech community.
The framing is guaranteed to draw downvotes because many here are doing all they can to resist enshitification, even within FAANG, but unfortunately large corporations will always bend towards profits and the average consumer will always bend towards cheap and convenient. At the end of the day it’s extremely difficult to see what any individual (even the business folks) can really do to effect broad change. Some systemic change would be necessary, but it’s hard to see what changes would lead us in the right direction, especially given the inherent corruptability of incentives in any human-instituted system.
The whole thrust of tech for 20 years now has been to commodify every part of human relationships, knowledge, and experience that can be commodified, sell the commodified versions in place of the real thing, and sweep the unmeasurable/uncommodifiable values under the rug without talking about it too much.
If I pirate some content, how is that different to them compared to me just not buying it? Should they be allowed to disconnect my internet because I don’t buy their content?
The studios can so easily kill all piracy, and they just about did it with Spotify and Netflix. But no, the greed made them split up into a dozen different services nobody wants, and here we are again.
Because you are getting something produced by someone for free if you pirate it and you are relying on others to fund your consumption. Take that to the logical extreme: everybody pirates everything. That is _very_ different to everyone not buying it. There is demand for the product and it has a cost to produce. If you steal something from somebody, there is recourse in law.
I don't disagree about the greed part, but I guess fragmentation is almost inevitable until the profit margin is driven down to near zero. Shortsighted, probably, but it would essentially require all the producers to back (and therefore yield profit to), one or two Netflix/Spotify type entities.
Taking this to the logical extreme is fallacious. The piracy wars up to this point have already shown that people buy content if it’s reasonably priced, and that piracy in many cases actually increases sales of the original content. The fact that piracy is back in the limelight has everything to do with the failing business models of greedy companies, and is the market reacting accordingly.
The fact that there are penalties for stealing physical goods does not imply that just any penalty is fine. The analogy doesn’t work. Removal of Internet access in 2023 is debilitating. Punishments are supposed to fit the crime, and the complete loss of access to what has become a fundamental point of access does not fit the crime.
And there’s also the very old arguments that I won’t rehash here about the clear difference between digital copies of content and physical items.
If I don't think a product in the shop is reasonably priced, I don't have the right just to take it. The shop can decide to reduce the price in response to the market - they may make less profit than before and make up for it in volume. However, that is entirely their perogative.
There is zero difference between a digital and physical item if you are the producer. A digital good has the cost of production front loaded, it just has next to zero marginal cost. That may be the cost of education and experience, for example. If you make something of value, you absolutely have the right to choose how you are rewarded - if the buyer decides that choice isn't right for them, you can either change the offer or you look for your next customer. You may choose to give it away, if your reward is the satisfaction of someone using it, but that is your choice, not the consumer's.
>There is zero difference between a digital and physical item if you are the producer
There's absolutely a difference. If you produce a physical good, and somebody takes it, you no longer have it. If you produce a digital good and somebody copies it, you still have the original, you're still free to use and enjoy it as you see fit.
Fundamentally property rights are a negative right: you have the right not to have your stuff taken. Negative rights don't conflict with eachother, that's why they make a good basis for society. Intellectual property is a positive right: you have the right to control how other people use their property, which conflicts with people's right to use their property as they see fit.
Intellectual property is a response exactly to the difference in the marginal cost because it recognises the threat to the value creating producer. Just because you don't tangibly see the cost of the IP, that doesn't mean it was free to produce.
You can absolutely argue that IP law is cynically applied, but in principle it protects high capital and low operating expense businesses from those who would like to do the low operating expense part without bothering about the high capital part.
> If I don't think a product in the shop is reasonably priced, I don't have the right just to take it
We need to collectively stop using these kinds of physical goods analogies in discussions about piracy. To claim that there is no difference is a fundamental miscalculation.
To be clear, I do not condone piracy. I purchase the content that I view. But these kinds of fallacious analogies are misleading and dangerous to Internet freedom.
In what way is it fallacious? Or dangerous? (That's a genuine question).
Fundamentally, it's the same problem - producers have to adjust their prices to reflect the threat to their income. If I produce something, and I forecast X% of my overall market to be stolen, I have to adjust my selling price according. It doesn't matter if that something is physical or digital.
If I produce something that is digital I have the luxury of being able to reduce the cost as low as I like to capture as much value as I can, but that is still my choice as the producer.
These arguments have been rehashed for decades at this point, and I think it’s best that I just link to an overview [0].
The bottom line is it there is a lot of nuance here, and simple analogies that make one act appear to be the same as the other lead to some reductionist conclusions that have been repeatedly taken up by lawmakers who do not understand these nuances.
Thank you for the link, appreciate the read and the nuance is important and I don't at all believe in the fundamentalist view on either side. I'm in complete agreement that threatening someone with massive legal ramifications is not good, but I do believe that people who make things of value should be able to do so with proportionate recourse to law to protect their livelihood. Law is, of course, made (or at least moulded) by those with money/influence so weighing the proportionality is the issue.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t think people should be free to pirate with impunity, but I get very very uneasy when people trot out life ruining penalties (not saying you’re doing this).
I’ve been transitioning away from a career in tech into creating educational content for a niche I love, and I’m sensitive to the need for recourse. At the same time, I think I’m far less likely as an individual creator to have much recourse because I don’t have a team of lawyers.
This is the other aspect of these piracy discussions that always bothers me. It’s really the behemoths vs. individuals, which to me points at very misaligned thinking when it comes to the resulting policy/laws.
If you sell a table, I am absolutely free to pirate that table by going home and making a copy of it. Totally legal. Creator gets no money for their work.
Digital goods have far more legal protection against this than physical ones.
agreed, other than your "Punishments are supposed to fit the crime statement." that's one ideal out of many. I would say that companies that create things that are beneficial for people to learn how to use, but that are prohibitivly expensive for students, and younger people to afford to learn how to use like how Adobe products used to be, should always put systems in place to allow people to obtain free access to their products where that kind of thing is obviously applicable. Things that are meant for consumption (movies, tv shows, music) only should be paid a fair market price for in one way or another by the people that consume it. I say this as a both a member of the music industry and the software development industry.
Do remember that Adobe, say, does not give away their product to students out of the goodness of their heart: they want you to use their product when they start working and ask your employers to shell out the full amount.
People who are convicted of drunk driving are often permitted to drive again (especially if they need to to go to work) but are required to put a breathalyzer interlock on their ignition so they can't drive drunk.
Perhaps similarly, people convicted of internet piracy could be required to operate with their torrent ports blocked, or with some sort of nanny state spyware installed on their devices.
> Perhaps similarly, people convicted of internet piracy could be required to operate with their torrent ports blocked, or with some sort of nanny state spyware installed on their devices.
So we need a pirate registry? And if you're convicted of 'internet piracy' (a term that is an excellent example of propaganda) then you forfeit any rights you have protecting your privacy and shielding you from warrantless government searches. Doesn't sound like an appropriate punishment for the offense to me.
People who drive drunk and regain their privileges do so with restrictions that are meant to protect the people around them. The breathalyzer interlock is made to ensure that this person cannot endanger other people.
I think it’s extremely problematic to compare piracy to drunk driving, and to model a punishment for piracy on the punishment for drunk driving for the reasons stated above.
Obviously you have to believe that the behavior causes harm to justify a restriction, but if you don't accept this premise then you cannot have an opinion on what would be an appropriate response because you believe there should be no response.
I'm not trying to take a position on this either way, but within the context of 'internet piracy causes some sort of damage' I don't think the comparison is particularly problematic.
The word piracy was obviously chosen to create exactly this sort of confusion, but piracy on the internet is fundamentally different than stealing which is not buying someone's stuff and also depriving them of the ability to sell it to someone else.
I think the word piracy is worse honestly, because what it really means is to swashbuckle on the open seas. And i don't think stealing physical goods or digital goods is quite comparable to that.
You are, instead, "stealing" the means for the producer to make more if they can't afford to do it any more because you've normalised using people's work without compensation. It doesn't really matter if the marginal cost of reproduction is near zero, it is the producer's choice what to price their product at, not yours. You're pushing the cost on to others to subsidise your consumption.
But now we're getting into a much more nuanced argument about the shape of society. If I, as a lone actor, hook my tape deck into the output of my radio and "steal" the newest Britney Spears track have I normalized the act of piracy?
If everyone is doing it then it does seem pretty normalized, but if everyone is doing it then your presumption as to society's values seems flawed.
In reality these media producers seem to be making healthy profits so perhaps internet piracy is not as normalized as you think.
> but I guess fragmentation is almost inevitable until the profit margin is driven down to near zero
Precisely. You can't just take stuff people made at cost, that's violating copyright! You need to instead be a megacorporation that competes so brutally on intermediating yourself in the pipe that profit is driven towards zero, so you can't afford to pay any artists!
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. --Thomas Jefferson
That is about patents, not about copyright. Patents protect ideas/inventions, and are controversial. Copyright protects works, and aside from what should happen with it if the author dies, is not really controversial.
When the fruits of your labor are something that can be endlessly reproduced for nearly zero cost, I don’t think you have a very strong right to be paid.
There is no scarcity in digital media. Supply and demand will inevitably drive down the price to near zero.
Agreed this is overboard. I always wondered what percentage of people would have bought the pirated material given they had no option to pirate it. I have to imagine a large chunk of people pirate things they’d never buy.
I loathe that piracy needs to exist. But it's a natural response to greedy media industries. People pirate material that copyright holders refuse to release/rerelease, they steal when popular media gets silo'd behind yet another wildly overvalued streaming service, they pirate so media can reach places corporations deem unvaluable to do so themselves, etc.
Piracy was naturally on a decline as streaming seemed to be settling on Netflix + a couple premium/niche providers, in much the way that mainstream music piracy is largely dead today. Now, it's on the rise again as people are tired of being nickel and dimed by Peacock, AMC, Max, Disney+, Prime, Netflix, Hulu, ESPN+, Fubu, CBS All-Access, etc.
Theft clearly seems to be seen as acceptable when it comes to corporations taking away access to purchased content. I don't see why that shouldn't work both ways.
UBI would transform society. No longer would we push to protect income streams that we all know are a bit messed up but hey a man's gotta eat. End this vast circus of crumb-snatching.
I've been caught stealing
Once when I was 5
I enjoy stealing
It's just as simple as that
Well, it's just a simple fact
When I want something,
I don't want to pay for it
I walk right through the door
Walk right through the door
Hey all right!
If I get by, it's mine
In the USA, it's a civil violation, not a crime. You can't go to jail for downloading. Uploading is what gets people in real trouble. Unfortunately bittorrent counts as uploading, which is ridiculous. Some people make a business of piracy and going after those people would be a little more reasonable.
> Unfortunately bittorrent counts as uploading, which is ridiculous
Piracy laws aside, I don't see why BT counting as uploading is ridiculous; you are aiding in the distribution of the content just as much as if you had setup a public FTP server with the content on it.
It's so exhausting that we don't just commit to net neutrality. It's the obvious logistical answer to this with direct comparisons in telephone service. Should have been settled years ago, but for some reason were letting the corporate copyright class spend money to slow it down.