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Comment by som33 | Hacker News Reader

Because you live in a lawless oligarchy that has been rubber stamping the rich's laws for 2 straight centuries. See the endless extension of copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/...

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"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012844.

This isn't necessarily an unrelated controversy.

Excessive record sealing, secret legal opinions, pay-walled public records, and the fact that Federal courts are only available to large businesses while the rest of us are forced into arbitration, are all closely related issues.

There is a good faith argument that copyright term extensions are but another example of the common thread connecting those issues.

No reasonable person would say som33's comment was an "unrelated controversy," it's a clear response to the question "Why was a case involving a wealthy corporation sealed?" The way HN is moderated does not welcome this line of questioning, though. You're not allowed to suggest that VC-funded tech might be a source of evil or bad ethics.

Proof? Here's a similar "flame-baity" comment under this topic that sits on the other side of the argument, but dang doesn't care enough to respond or detach it from its parent: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=23013083&goto=item%3Fi...

Oh you guys. The GP comment was just the sort of flamebait that we don't want on HN, regardless of flavor. We'd moderate it just the same the other way [1]. Big denunciatory rhetoric is just not what this site is for. Repetition and indignation are the two things that most kill curiosity, so repetition of indignation is the worst. [2]

An arbitrary link doesn't prove anything except that we may not have seen a post. That's the simplest explanation, and the likeliest [3]. HN gets millions of comments a year. We don't come close to reading them all, and we can't moderate what we don't see.

We rely on community members to flag the posts that most require moderator attention. You haven't flagged any, including the one you're complaining about here, so it's not clear to me how much you care about this. It sort of spoils the game of get-the-moderators when the mods finally show up and sweep the floor or whatever. For a while it was a sport on Twitter to pass such links around ("see what horrors the Hacker News moderators approve of!") but I hear that's mostly died out.

[1] By the way, the last time you were upset about moderator bias, I ended up giving you an extremely detailed reply. You may not have seen it, though, because it took me a couple days to get back to the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920602. Read those links—"The mods here are radical liberals", "socialist-leaning mods", "far-left social justice agenda" and the rest—and see how much evidentiary value you still think these gotcha games have.

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

There is some irony in claiming that the GP comment kills curiosity.

Nothing kills curiosity faster or more completely than the concealment of relevant facts. Legal opinions in this case. See e.g. USSR.

I don't agree that the comment was primarily factual (it was ranty-rhetorical), nor that the material was relevant (most readers would regard jumping to copyright law from this article as a massive leap off-topic). Even granting all that, though—nothing about copyright is concealed on HN. It's a well-discussed topic here. In fact, #1 thread on HN the very same day as this one was largely about copyright:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010435

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-04-28

... , and you can find endless debate about every aspect of copyright and copyright law in HN's archives. If that's the USSR, I'm Vladimir Mayakovsky.

I wasn't suggesting that HN or its moderators kill curiosity.

I was suggesting that legal secrecy and related problems do.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, though.

It was a generic tangent, though, as your comment makes clear by outlining the genera. Since the rule says "and", I didn't feel the need to edit it.

As for flamebait, flamewar topics, and not having anything genuinely new to say, the comment had all that covered mightily, so this was not a borderline call.

Interesting choice since the extension of copyright ended in 2019 and works have started entering the public domain again.

I'll believe that if mickey mouse becomes public domain. Currently slated for 2024, apparently.

Copyright for pre-1972 recordings was effectively extended in 2018 an additional 25 years, depending on your state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Modernization_Act#Title_...

State-based copyright for recordings in California, for example, was 70 years. The extension of federal copyright to cover pre-1972 recordings ensures a 95-year duration--longer for some earlier works.

Blunt, but accurate.

Was there any state governor in the first 100 years of this country that wasn't on somebody's payroll? They didn't even bother to hide it.

Read about the Hawaii coup sometime if you want to see ugliness. Notice how all those tall buildings in downtown Honolulu are named after Westerners?

Is it any different today?

Is there a government in existence now or at any time in the past that didn't solely exist to rubberstamp the rich's laws? The peasants republic of Dithmarschen?

I mean, yeah. There have been a lot of revolutions in world history. They did not exist _solely_ to rubber stamp the laws of the rich.

Even those revolutions that were overtly for the people were subvertly actually for elevating and empowering the inner circle of the revolution leaders. I'd love to find an example of a national government that prioritizes the well being of the majority rather than the personal profits of the oligarchy, but I don't believe one exists or has existed for some time.

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