I think your rosy predictions for the future are missing one very real possibility, Mr. Masnick. The technology behind the internet can be made much more complex by the ubiquitous use of security and tracking technology, and the entire current model can then be moved online intact, thus preserving the banking industry's interest in having guaranteed profits and the general interests of the very powerful in keeping a lid on free expression without having to actually arrest anyone.
This is basically what happened with satellite. It was far to easy for people to get satellite dishes, and no one was buying that it was criminal to set up a dish to catch the signals now being sprayed pell mell across the face of the earth. But with the introduction of encryption, we simply banned decryption without permission. The technology was just complex enough to prevent easy access, and the legal sanction just strong enough and acceptable enough to prevent commercial circumvention.
No one was able to do anything because we do not have control over our government any more.
What I did was oppose it. What you did was support it. Your apparent glee at the outcome speaks volumes about what is wrong with this nation these days. It's not -just- the government. The general population is grossly unethical and immoral.
You and people like you are the problem that needs addressing. What would you suggest I do about you? Not respond? Let your vindictive and petty notion of how the economy and the legal system should run be published unopposed by any other viewpoint?
You wouldn't be here if you didn't know how important what is going on here is.
Oh, so you're a supporter of prosecuting people for doing nothing wrong and harassing them until they kill themselves because it helps you make money? That does explain your position.
And then you wonder why so many people are losing faith in your system?
Who do you think you're kidding? There is no part of the various industries that collect and distribute "content" that is not connected directly to the other through the use of copyright law. What happens to one happens to all, and you can bet that the reason for this prosecution is that powerful elements from somewhere in the midst of these industries pushed for this prosecution or policies that led to it.
In the meantime, the actual "victims" had no public interest in pressing the issue.
I sometimes feel like the Lone Ranger out here in the wilderness complaining about IP law, but you not only complain, you DO something about it. For whatever it could possibly be worth, I am proud there are still people in the US who will FIGHT for their rights every step of the way and never give in.
When I was younger, I did not believe people like you existed.
For the record, it is impossible to find out what the probability of two fingerprints being identical even is. You have to have a certain number of fingerprints and then check for uniqueness to even get an outside figure using mathematical probability calculations.
Whenever they finally get IPv6 rolling, the number of unique IP's will be 3.4?10^38 if you want to take Wikipedia's word for it. Whatever it is, it is going to be significantly less than the effectively infinite variety of fingerprints.
And the IP address is not associated with any specific person, which you and yours continually ignore.
Some people in this world do not like to deal in facts, but instead dangerously cling to whatever they perceive as the authority of their time. Sadly, facts trump perceptions of authority, and have a well documented influence over who wins physical conflicts.
I've watched a man die because of current application of IP law coupled with the utter mismanagement of our monetary system and our medical system. Life saving treatment is too expensive in no small part because of IP law. Artificial money, constantly inflated to keep up with the interest payments necessary to motivate bankers to lend, pools in what investors perceive to be reliable investments. Medical technology is a secure investment because people, by and large, will pay whatever it takes to stop suffering or to prolong life. Therefore, the cost of medical care skyrockets in comparison to other living costs, and people cannot afford it.
In trying to right this wrong artificially while maintaining our ridiculous monetary and IP laws, various systems have been put in place. The catch all in the US was supposed to be that if you had an emergency, you went to the emergency room where they were not allowed to refuse treatment.
The man I am speaking of had a grapefruit sized tumor growing on his neck when he walked into the emergency room. Since he was not strangling to death yet, they sent him home. This happened on at least one more occasion.
Predicably, the man strangled to death in his sleep a week or two later.
I hold you and people like you accountable for what we have become as a nation. Wake up, sir. Wake up.
Stories like this always remind me that I have no real sympathy for artists anymore.
Art has ALWAYS been a fairly limited profession that depends upon the largess of some sort of patron or other. I, personally, hold artists accountable for the patronage they are willing to take.
The entertainment industry, top to bottom and side to side, is at this point one of the most dangerous aspects of our society. The control a tiny minority have over what we hear, see, and therefore think about is unacceptable.
I'm beyond freetardism at this point. I believe all intellectual property is an active violation of the natural right of people to do things for themselves barring direct, personal wrongdoing to another person.
Making your own copy or version of anything is not doing any such direct harm. You will not find any mention of a punishment for making copies in ancient works such as the Bible, Q'ran, or the Dao De Jing. The legal history of intellectual property is one of disorganized, experimental laws leading eventually to an openly totalitarian and centralized control over speech and information. This sort of control has been deemed inappropriate. The utility of intellectual property apart from centralizing control has now run its course as well. It is destroying rather than encouraging innovation and progress.
The rights being infringed here are mine, not theirs.
The problem with trying to demonize surveillance is there isn't actually anything wrong with it. In times past the search itself was a form of "punishment" in that it was invasive and extremely inconvenient. To this day, police are not required to put things back the way they found them if searching, and that I think is as much if not more of a concern to me than the "invasion of privacy" that goes on when someone inspects something of "yours" that is stored on someone else's computer or traveling along someone else's communication equipment or across the open airwaves.
Does everyone, absolutely EVERYONE, violate society's expectations of how we should behave in private? I doubt it. There have always been situations where something that is not alright to do in public is perfectly ok in private. The real issue is that the government and media are both complicit in using this sort of information to demonize a person before any actual legal issue is brought into play.
I remember "Wide Stance" Larry Craig "caught" trolling for gay sex in a public bathroom. His "solicitation" however was basically to touch someone's foot with his own foot and to sweep his hand under the stall partition. This only happened after a couple of foot tappings that were purportedly a signal for gay men in that area. Did the police officer not respond? If he did, how was this a violation of any sort? Are people not allowed to communicate back and forth in public restroom stalls? Who was being harmed?
It seems likely that all he did was to respond to the solicitation of an undercover police officer. This would under any normal circumstance be entrapment, but because of his position the information that he had been involved in such a thing at all destroyed his professional life and probably deeply disturbed his private life as well.
No high tech was involved.......
The issue is not that you are being watched. The issue is what we allow people to do with that information. If we establish that lying about people or sharing personal information about them without their consent is a crime, what I think will follow is that it will become counterproductive to do all this surveiling because by law it will be inadmissible to court and a violation of law to publicize without the express consent of the individual involved.
This has implications for art, and therefore copyright, as well. It has become accepted that a person does not have any rights over images of them taken by other people in public places, but as this line between public and private places is slowly destroyed by technology and (it is to be hoped) replaced by concepts of personal privacy, the right of a person to control what is done publicly with their own words and images will take center stage, and be set up against the rights of "artists" and "journalists" to their supposed "work" of merely capturing images, likenesses, or snippets of conversation.
I think we have had this exactly backwards for generations, and part of our trouble is we are straining to protect two mutually exclusive concepts - that a person creating an image or capturing the likeness or words of another has more right to decide what to do with that product than the subject of that image on the one hand, and that people have a right to be free of government or private harassment on the other.
I couldn't read this past the part accusing the photo altering apps of being childish. Acknowledging the reality that different races look different - the more or less fundamental distinction between races - and having a little fun with that is not racism.
This reminds me of a man I knew who used the LPMud engine. The creators of LPMud had a license attached to it that forbade commercial use, among other things, but then distributed it for free. Because this person was a lawyer, they simply ignored the license because they understood that it was basically unenforceable.
Prenda ignores the judge because there are no teeth in the law regarding what they do.
Seriously? The guy is bummed because he has too many choices? There are too many good musicians now? How many of us have abandoned our fondness for music, meanwhile, because the real problem is a metric ton of stuff that sounds pretty much the same?
Maybe his real problem is that music, after all is said and done, is not the meaning of life, nor is the process of buying it.
Whatever. Because no one ever heard of avoiding religious entanglements when attempting to make a philosophical point that has nothing to do with religion.
Is this not BestNetTech? I mean, do we not constantly see how, because of intellectual property abuse, people are FORCED to rely on a limited number of outlets for certain types of information?
If Twitter lied in order to get money from this company, they are liable. Period. It has nothing to do with PeopleBrowsr's service.
If they find out their contract sucked, they may turn around and sue their law firm, but barring that, let this one ride because it is totally legit.
While modern legal code is loaded down with artificially created torts in lieu of actual criminal law where business is concerned, a lawsuit is not on its face an accusation of crime. This looks to be a nuanced situation where the people at PeopleBrowser spent a lot of money setting up a service reliant upon Twitter. The disagreement here is whether or not Twitter misrepresented its intentions when taking money from PeopleBrowser, most likely. It has nothing to do with PeopleBrowser accusing Twitter of breaking the law. Page 6 of the document begins to spell this out.
You can't just take someone's money while promising a future relationship, then change your mind and keep the money. Whether or not Twitter actually did this is the issue at hand, not whether or not it was legal.
More and more I come down on the side of copyright law being a violation of free speech. "Increasing the value of scarcities" is just a fancy way of saying "marketing". What is really at issue is business models where one is in the business of selling information. Any limitation on spreading information is, on its face, a violation of free speech. I am not even sure I am willing to give our "Founding Fathers" a pass on not fully understanding this. They were not at all kind to the veterans of the Revolutionary War. They were as well schooled as anyone in the art of ripping off their perceived inferiors.
I don't know for sure, but if you are doing something like this on a shoestring, Kickstarter seems to be a nice place to test the waters to see if there is even any reason to put money into it to start with.
Most living beings are somewhat risk averse. It keeps you alive.
I have a friend in real estate, so I went to find his score. He is a top seller in the Katy, TX are. His score was low. There was absolutely no explanation for why his score was low on the site. There is, however, a link for the agent to "claim their profile".
I am not a fan of how MLS services work. I agree they are gatekeeper organizations, and I do not like them. The entire real estate market is a gatekeeping organization designed from the ground up to make it harder for people to get the straight scoop on a piece of property, its history, and its value. That is no excuse though for a site like "NeighborCity". Putting scores on people that imply good or bad performance without any explanation for the scoring, then trying to get the agents to come in and do something about that, possibly eventually trying to get them to pay for a "Service" of getting them a better score, is just idiotic.
The Other Solution
I think your rosy predictions for the future are missing one very real possibility, Mr. Masnick. The technology behind the internet can be made much more complex by the ubiquitous use of security and tracking technology, and the entire current model can then be moved online intact, thus preserving the banking industry's interest in having guaranteed profits and the general interests of the very powerful in keeping a lid on free expression without having to actually arrest anyone.
This is basically what happened with satellite. It was far to easy for people to get satellite dishes, and no one was buying that it was criminal to set up a dish to catch the signals now being sprayed pell mell across the face of the earth. But with the introduction of encryption, we simply banned decryption without permission. The technology was just complex enough to prevent easy access, and the legal sanction just strong enough and acceptable enough to prevent commercial circumvention.
The same will be done with the internet.
I'm not entirely sure you would actually object.
Re: Re: Rage
No one was able to do anything because we do not have control over our government any more.
What I did was oppose it. What you did was support it. Your apparent glee at the outcome speaks volumes about what is wrong with this nation these days. It's not -just- the government. The general population is grossly unethical and immoral.
You and people like you are the problem that needs addressing. What would you suggest I do about you? Not respond? Let your vindictive and petty notion of how the economy and the legal system should run be published unopposed by any other viewpoint?
You wouldn't be here if you didn't know how important what is going on here is.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Just a guess but...
Oh, so you're a supporter of prosecuting people for doing nothing wrong and harassing them until they kill themselves because it helps you make money? That does explain your position.
And then you wonder why so many people are losing faith in your system?
Entertainment Industry
Who do you think you're kidding? There is no part of the various industries that collect and distribute "content" that is not connected directly to the other through the use of copyright law. What happens to one happens to all, and you can bet that the reason for this prosecution is that powerful elements from somewhere in the midst of these industries pushed for this prosecution or policies that led to it.
In the meantime, the actual "victims" had no public interest in pressing the issue.
Why do you imagine it happened then?
Why would I?
Manning is being prosecuted for things outside of the UCMJ.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/904
10 USC ? 904 - Art. 104. Aiding the enemy
Give 'em Hell
I sometimes feel like the Lone Ranger out here in the wilderness complaining about IP law, but you not only complain, you DO something about it. For whatever it could possibly be worth, I am proud there are still people in the US who will FIGHT for their rights every step of the way and never give in.
Thanks, Mr. McIntosh!
Fingerprints and IP numbers
When I was younger, I did not believe people like you existed.
For the record, it is impossible to find out what the probability of two fingerprints being identical even is. You have to have a certain number of fingerprints and then check for uniqueness to even get an outside figure using mathematical probability calculations.
Whenever they finally get IPv6 rolling, the number of unique IP's will be 3.4?10^38 if you want to take Wikipedia's word for it. Whatever it is, it is going to be significantly less than the effectively infinite variety of fingerprints.
And the IP address is not associated with any specific person, which you and yours continually ignore.
Some people in this world do not like to deal in facts, but instead dangerously cling to whatever they perceive as the authority of their time. Sadly, facts trump perceptions of authority, and have a well documented influence over who wins physical conflicts.
I've watched a man die because of current application of IP law coupled with the utter mismanagement of our monetary system and our medical system. Life saving treatment is too expensive in no small part because of IP law. Artificial money, constantly inflated to keep up with the interest payments necessary to motivate bankers to lend, pools in what investors perceive to be reliable investments. Medical technology is a secure investment because people, by and large, will pay whatever it takes to stop suffering or to prolong life. Therefore, the cost of medical care skyrockets in comparison to other living costs, and people cannot afford it.
In trying to right this wrong artificially while maintaining our ridiculous monetary and IP laws, various systems have been put in place. The catch all in the US was supposed to be that if you had an emergency, you went to the emergency room where they were not allowed to refuse treatment.
The man I am speaking of had a grapefruit sized tumor growing on his neck when he walked into the emergency room. Since he was not strangling to death yet, they sent him home. This happened on at least one more occasion.
Predicably, the man strangled to death in his sleep a week or two later.
I hold you and people like you accountable for what we have become as a nation. Wake up, sir. Wake up.
The Poor Artists
Stories like this always remind me that I have no real sympathy for artists anymore.
Art has ALWAYS been a fairly limited profession that depends upon the largess of some sort of patron or other. I, personally, hold artists accountable for the patronage they are willing to take.
The entertainment industry, top to bottom and side to side, is at this point one of the most dangerous aspects of our society. The control a tiny minority have over what we hear, see, and therefore think about is unacceptable.
I'm beyond freetardism at this point. I believe all intellectual property is an active violation of the natural right of people to do things for themselves barring direct, personal wrongdoing to another person.
Making your own copy or version of anything is not doing any such direct harm. You will not find any mention of a punishment for making copies in ancient works such as the Bible, Q'ran, or the Dao De Jing. The legal history of intellectual property is one of disorganized, experimental laws leading eventually to an openly totalitarian and centralized control over speech and information. This sort of control has been deemed inappropriate. The utility of intellectual property apart from centralizing control has now run its course as well. It is destroying rather than encouraging innovation and progress.
The rights being infringed here are mine, not theirs.
Surveillance Vs. Enforcement
The problem with trying to demonize surveillance is there isn't actually anything wrong with it. In times past the search itself was a form of "punishment" in that it was invasive and extremely inconvenient. To this day, police are not required to put things back the way they found them if searching, and that I think is as much if not more of a concern to me than the "invasion of privacy" that goes on when someone inspects something of "yours" that is stored on someone else's computer or traveling along someone else's communication equipment or across the open airwaves.
Does everyone, absolutely EVERYONE, violate society's expectations of how we should behave in private? I doubt it. There have always been situations where something that is not alright to do in public is perfectly ok in private. The real issue is that the government and media are both complicit in using this sort of information to demonize a person before any actual legal issue is brought into play.
I remember "Wide Stance" Larry Craig "caught" trolling for gay sex in a public bathroom. His "solicitation" however was basically to touch someone's foot with his own foot and to sweep his hand under the stall partition. This only happened after a couple of foot tappings that were purportedly a signal for gay men in that area. Did the police officer not respond? If he did, how was this a violation of any sort? Are people not allowed to communicate back and forth in public restroom stalls? Who was being harmed?
It seems likely that all he did was to respond to the solicitation of an undercover police officer. This would under any normal circumstance be entrapment, but because of his position the information that he had been involved in such a thing at all destroyed his professional life and probably deeply disturbed his private life as well.
No high tech was involved.......
The issue is not that you are being watched. The issue is what we allow people to do with that information. If we establish that lying about people or sharing personal information about them without their consent is a crime, what I think will follow is that it will become counterproductive to do all this surveiling because by law it will be inadmissible to court and a violation of law to publicize without the express consent of the individual involved.
This has implications for art, and therefore copyright, as well. It has become accepted that a person does not have any rights over images of them taken by other people in public places, but as this line between public and private places is slowly destroyed by technology and (it is to be hoped) replaced by concepts of personal privacy, the right of a person to control what is done publicly with their own words and images will take center stage, and be set up against the rights of "artists" and "journalists" to their supposed "work" of merely capturing images, likenesses, or snippets of conversation.
I think we have had this exactly backwards for generations, and part of our trouble is we are straining to protect two mutually exclusive concepts - that a person creating an image or capturing the likeness or words of another has more right to decide what to do with that product than the subject of that image on the one hand, and that people have a right to be free of government or private harassment on the other.
3d
High def tv's are going down in price, to be sure, but for 3d to be worth the trouble I need a wall sized tv with 3d.
When they start taking the price of that down under $500.00, someone Skype me.
Racism?
I couldn't read this past the part accusing the photo altering apps of being childish. Acknowledging the reality that different races look different - the more or less fundamental distinction between races - and having a little fun with that is not racism.
Period.
End of story.
Confusing Legal Issues
This reminds me of a man I knew who used the LPMud engine. The creators of LPMud had a license attached to it that forbade commercial use, among other things, but then distributed it for free. Because this person was a lawyer, they simply ignored the license because they understood that it was basically unenforceable.
Prenda ignores the judge because there are no teeth in the law regarding what they do.
Making the Internet Safer for Children
makes it more dangerous for adults. The more snooping, the more false accusations and runaway prosecutors.
Plus, it so happens kiddy porn is already as illegal as we can make in in a nation full of sex pervs.
Consumerist Nightmare
Seriously? The guy is bummed because he has too many choices? There are too many good musicians now? How many of us have abandoned our fondness for music, meanwhile, because the real problem is a metric ton of stuff that sounds pretty much the same?
Maybe his real problem is that music, after all is said and done, is not the meaning of life, nor is the process of buying it.
Obfuscate and Subtract illumination
Whatever. Because no one ever heard of avoiding religious entanglements when attempting to make a philosophical point that has nothing to do with religion.
You just keep on rollin' there dood.
Re: "Only themselves to blame"
Is this not BestNetTech? I mean, do we not constantly see how, because of intellectual property abuse, people are FORCED to rely on a limited number of outlets for certain types of information?
If Twitter lied in order to get money from this company, they are liable. Period. It has nothing to do with PeopleBrowsr's service.
If they find out their contract sucked, they may turn around and sue their law firm, but barring that, let this one ride because it is totally legit.
Lawsuits are not primarily about legality.
While modern legal code is loaded down with artificially created torts in lieu of actual criminal law where business is concerned, a lawsuit is not on its face an accusation of crime. This looks to be a nuanced situation where the people at PeopleBrowser spent a lot of money setting up a service reliant upon Twitter. The disagreement here is whether or not Twitter misrepresented its intentions when taking money from PeopleBrowser, most likely. It has nothing to do with PeopleBrowser accusing Twitter of breaking the law. Page 6 of the document begins to spell this out.
You can't just take someone's money while promising a future relationship, then change your mind and keep the money. Whether or not Twitter actually did this is the issue at hand, not whether or not it was legal.
"increasing the value of scarcities"
More and more I come down on the side of copyright law being a violation of free speech. "Increasing the value of scarcities" is just a fancy way of saying "marketing". What is really at issue is business models where one is in the business of selling information. Any limitation on spreading information is, on its face, a violation of free speech. I am not even sure I am willing to give our "Founding Fathers" a pass on not fully understanding this. They were not at all kind to the veterans of the Revolutionary War. They were as well schooled as anyone in the art of ripping off their perceived inferiors.
Re: Low Budget requests
I don't know for sure, but if you are doing something like this on a shoestring, Kickstarter seems to be a nice place to test the waters to see if there is even any reason to put money into it to start with.
Most living beings are somewhat risk averse. It keeps you alive.
Score is Indecipherable
I have a friend in real estate, so I went to find his score. He is a top seller in the Katy, TX are. His score was low. There was absolutely no explanation for why his score was low on the site. There is, however, a link for the agent to "claim their profile".
I am not a fan of how MLS services work. I agree they are gatekeeper organizations, and I do not like them. The entire real estate market is a gatekeeping organization designed from the ground up to make it harder for people to get the straight scoop on a piece of property, its history, and its value. That is no excuse though for a site like "NeighborCity". Putting scores on people that imply good or bad performance without any explanation for the scoring, then trying to get the agents to come in and do something about that, possibly eventually trying to get them to pay for a "Service" of getting them a better score, is just idiotic.