Internet Archive joins opposition to the “SMART Copyright Act”
blog.archive.org
blog.archive.org
> There are instructions on how to control an internet forum, including tips on “consensus cracking”: using a fake persona to express the ideas you oppose in such a weak and unconvincing manner that you can then use another fake persona to knock them down.
Here is Peter speaking [2] a week ago at a Stanford conference on disinformation where Obama gave the keynote [3].
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41717504-this-is-not-pro...
> And it’s not just conflicts or elections that are affected. I see people I have known my whole life slip away from me on social media, reposting conspiracies from sources I have never heard of, some sort of internet undercurrent pulling whole families apart, as if we never really knew each other, as if the algorithms know more about us than we do, as if we are becoming subsets of our own data, which is rearranging our relations and identities with its own logic, or in the cause of someone else’s interests we can’t even see.
> When she interviewed Al-Qaeda recruits and their families, what struck her was how normal their backgrounds were, how distant fundamentalist purity was for most of them. Bin Laden's trick had been to take the different grievances of different groups and give them the illusion that if they united globally, they would achieve a better world, if only they could get rid of unbelievers.
> Russia, with its social media squadrons, haunts these [social media network] maps. Not because it is the force that can still move earth and heaven as it could in the Cold War, but because the Kremlin's rulers are particularly adept at gaming elements of this new age, or at the very least are good at getting everyone to talk about how good they are, which could be the most important trick of all.
A key use of propaganda is demoralisation. Sapping the enemy's resolve and sowing seeds of doubt. It's a long march. For years I've noticed certain voices in tech forums who are not merely fearful of the negative effects of some technologies against liberal democracy, they positively celebrate them.
"Liberal values are doomed." - they tell us. "The battle is already lost." Their relentless message is that authoritarian technology is inevitable. It's already ubiquitous. Privacy is an illusion we are better to give up on. The corporations are too powerful. Against state actors there is no point even trying to secure your digital world. Regardless your choice or morals, eventually everyone will be forced to fall into line... etc etc ad-nauseum.
I see this as a corrosive meta campaign by voices that have unwittingly been recruited as denouncers of liberal democracy. They sound like the mocking voice of Lord Haw-Haw or the German denouncer in Saving Private Ryan, calling;
"The Statue of Liberty ist Kaput!"
BTW: This looks like a very interesting book I may be buying. Thanks for posting these snippets.
I wonder whether things like these are more intuitively understood by someone who grew up in the shadow of USSR and is always on the lookout for misinformation and propaganda.
That said, it seems some parts of the book could help me clarify/support my own experiences and provide wider context and more examples.
Why does this necessitate the neologism "concensus cracking" rather than the well-established term "false flagging"?
But also, a false flag pins blame on someone else in order to change public opinion.
Cracking consensus is any disguised action and does not require blaming someone else. It can just be secretive actions like a mod removal where the removal is not apparent to the logged-in author, like on Reddit.
Unfortunately, the only way the left (I chuckle at any conservatives/libertarians who claim to actually oppose corporate campaign finance) has managed to get people into congress is a couple people per election. People on the whole just aren’t in to campaign finance reform, even when it’s decoupled from the so-called “woke agenda”.
It has consistently had its advocates over the centuries. I too feel it's underrated as a method. Plato was basically right all those years ago; those who actively seek power generally don't deserve it. I seriously wonder if we'd be better off with a legislature selected of random citizens, and an executive council selected the same way.
It did work for the Ancient Athenians for some 300+ years. Democracy in ancient Greece meant selection by lottery and most offices in the Athenian democracy were picked that way. Following selection there was a public interview during which any citizen could pose questions and the candidate could at that point be disqualified for a legally established reason by a vote of the previously-elected archons. (The main exception was military generals, who were elected by popular vote. Competence and respect were considered more important than incorruptibility for that particular office.)
Sortition does that probabilistically, so it would be better in that sense. OTOH, most of the other proposed benefits of sortition are dubious.
E.g., it's often portrayed as insulation against corruption because people aren't dependent on corporate cash to get reelected. OTOH, with most politicians not careerists with a relatively reliable fallback of various cushy sinecures in periods where they are out of office, the amount of money you need to dangle in front of randomly chosen and soon to revert to normal life citizens to radically change their post-term life drops considerably, and neither public enforcement nor media outlets are going to be able to devote the bandwidth necessary to police corruption in the firehouse of people pumped through government.
Basically the (proportionally) representatively elected career politicians in the lower chamber would become experts at law making, and build up reputations and relationships with the public and each other, but any law they proposed would have to get through the screening process of a chamber of "ordinary" people.
By not allowing the upper chamber to draft its own proposed legislation, there would be less risk of them falling into some populist mania and pushing through some half-baked idea that was trending on Twitter.
> And with the rise of social media, the Philippines has become a capital for a new breed of digital era manipulation. I meet with "P"...
> ... By the age of twenty, he claims he had fifteen million followers across all platforms. The modest middle-class boy from the provinces could suddenly afford his own condo in a Manila skyscraper.
> ... He pitched his approach to several parties but the only candidate who would take P on was Rodrigo Duterte, an outsider who looked to social media as a new, cheap route to victory.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/wo5tDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gb...
You think Americans are only unconcerned about campaign financing because they think they are going to get a job from the out of control spending?
Why?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biggest-isps-pai...
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...
> The SMART Copyright Act is a thinly veiled proxy war over mandatory filtering of copyrighted works. . . mandatory filters are error-prone in ways that hurt consumers, and they raise entry barriers in ways that reduce competition.
> More generally, the SMART Copyright Act would give the Copyright Office a truly extraordinary power–the ability to force thousands of businesses to adopt, at their expense, technology they don’t want and may not need, and the mandated technologies could reshape how the Internet works.
They're the ones stretching. If we were restricted to talking about only one or the other at a time, that would unnecessarily limit our ability to brainstorm. Fortunately, we have the freedom to discuss what we want and when.
Is there that big of an overlap between content owners and ISPs? For example, is Disney an ISP?
Right, the trouble is that our democracies really haven't proper ways of handling this type of monopoly. It seems to me that the problem will not be solved until individuals are no longer allowed to hide behind corporate walls and thus not able to be individually held accountable or liable for their actions.
Fear of public exposure and ridicule not to mention penalties imposed on them for their actions would stop most of this behaviour. The trouble is that large corporations have such a stranglehold on governments that it's proving very difficult to do anything about the problem.
It's one of the biggest problems facing our democracies, I only wish I knew how we could solve it.
The public sphere changed with the advent of social media. At first, corporations and governments found themselves at the whims of people, and then it flipped. I believe we may be able to bring back some balance with reviewable moderation such as via a site I made, https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/
We should know who these individuals are whether they're making decisions that are in our interests or otherwise.
As it stands now many of the individuals who've the power and who have altered our lives for good or worse by their decisions remain hidden completely anonymously behind both corporate and government bureaucracies. Anonymity, has in many instances enabled them to act without accountability and with complete impunity.
This is the crux of the problem, until these individuals know that their decisions will be gone over with a fine-toothed comb by the population at large and that they will be held accountable then nothing will change.
Both now and in the past the argument against this approach is that such scrutiny will make decision-makers ineffective in that they'll be too scared to make hard or effective decisions. This is a weasel argument argued by bureaucracies to protect themselves and to make their lives easier. There are numerous ways to protect individuals who make 'sensible' decisions from, say, an over-zealous citizenry or unreasonable shareholders who may not understand all the facts but that's for another discussion.
Change has to come because this anonymity has allowed fairness and due process to be so abused that our institutions now have an ethical crisis. It's why so few people have faith in or have respect for them anymore.
It's happening, even while they are anonymous. When unscrupulous mods cannot maintain the theater of innocence while continuing to manipulate, they tend to step aside themselves or be put aside by Reddit [4-6].
Deanonymizing the internet isn't going to happen because that would be hugely unpopular. But also, you'd need to wall it off because it will always be possible to be anonymous in certain parts of the world.
It may not be enough to know who's in charge. Consider how many actions public figures take that we don't know about.
> This is the crux of the problem, until these individuals know that their decisions will be gone over with a fine-toothed comb by the population at large and that they will be held accountable then nothing will change.
This is precisely it. Knowing their actions alone may be enough. It's hard to grow a following, so when faced with knowledge of their actions, mods are incentivized to incorporate users' feedback into their moderation style. Perhaps surprisingly, this can all happen while they are anonymous! And that's a good thing because again, there are parts of the world we just can't deanonymize, to say nothing of the backlash such a policy would have in the free world.
The more who know about Reddit's secret removal feature [1], the more difficult it will be for Reddit to keep that feature as is. I've observed positive changes in communities that know about it. Mod behavior does change when users are informed about removals.
Still, Reveddit is not widely known, and it can be difficult to share since mods often remove it. When I first made this site I assumed it would go viral immediately. I overlooked the fact that mods would often remove it or even add it to their automod configurations [2] so that it becomes unmentionable.
> Both now and in the past the argument against this approach is that such scrutiny will make decision-makers ineffective in that they'll be too scared to make hard or effective decisions.
Yes, I've heard that. Former presidential advisor Ben Rhodes, at a recent panel on disinformation, remarked [3] that it used to drive him insane that in 2014-2015 he was unable to immediately declassify imagery of Russian weapons and personnel flowing into eastern Ukraine, even though that imagery was commercially available. He says 2022's instant declassification process is clearly much more effective.
> Change has to come because this anonymity has allowed fairness and due process to be so abused that our institutions now have an ethical crisis. It's why so few people have faith in or have respect for them anymore.
In my opinion, it's not the anonymity that is the significant issue, it is that the actions themselves are hidden in a way that users do not expect. That may be why some mods consider it to be so effective.
[1] https://www.reveddit.com/images/removed-views.png
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/ocflqy/has_anyo...
[3] https://youtu.be/Nd1CKG3o818?t=24473
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/tluuv5/genzedong...
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/txucxj/genzedong...
Exposing individuals in a fucked system is a blunt tool but it's better than nothing (or when other approaches fail or when unavailable).
Right, the digital era has thrown up challenges that are far from resolved. The problem as I see it is that far too few people are interested in seeing that these issues are solved and even fewer are actively engaged in doing something about solving them. The world seems more preoccupied with nonsense and trivia like yesterday's news headlines about a Kardashian wearing an ancient Monroe outfit than resolving issues that would actually improve people's lives.
I'm cynical enough to believe that these trashy distractions are encouraged, after all the technique's not new, one of the reasons why emperor Vespasian built the Colosseum was to distract the masses from serious issues such as food shortages.
The video is good but long so I've only seen the beginning of it so far.
I forgive people for not knowing. The worst mod abuses are hard to see. When you reveal them, the behavior disappears; either the mods leave on their own accord or Reddit removes them. Then, when you can no longer point to an egregious case, people who didn't see the previous abuses wonder what the problem is: what they see isn't that bad. I guess the solution is to continue sharing and chip away at the problem.
About the video, I only meant to share that linked clip, 30 seconds or so, although that last panel is quite good.
> I'm cynical enough to believe that these trashy distractions are encouraged
I don't think that's cynical. The book by Pomerantsev that I mentioned in another comment, "This Is Not Propaganda", argues such distractions are part of the propaganda targeting democracies.
I think revealing what gets removed gives people a better idea for how forums are managed and encourages healthier conversations by treating us all as equally worthy of access to information. Not necessarily free access, but equal access to what's publicly accessible.
It isn't enough to mark news as fake. Some people won't believe you. But when you start to show what is removed, then people start to have a better sense for what is propaganda and what is not.
Right, we're (a) not training people properly and a young enough age and (b) we're not telling them the truth - so they end up cynical or misinformed or both.
Haven't read Pomerantsev but his background would give him great insight. Similarly, Chomsky's works are full of it - here's just one: Manufacturing Consent, etc.:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent. Trouble is, Chomsky is heavy going for the average person, it's dense and almost turgid, it's got all the good oil if one is prepared to mine his books for it. (I actually met him once on a lecture tour 20-plus years ago - he's much easier to understand in person than from reading his books).
We need to get simple versions of these ideas out to the population at large but it's always proven difficult.
The issue of course is that for quite some time we've pretty much an overview of what the problems are but we don't have the same power resources to implement them as does the 'Establishment'. (Again, there's no doubt that we know the facts: Pomerantsev, Chomsky et al have documented this stuff ad nauseam—latest developments, social media etc. only add nuance to the basic facts—the problem is that we've failed to implement the fixes.)
"It isn't enough to mark news as fake. Some people won't believe you. But when you start to show what is removed"
Right again, but this takes training (and it can be slow) if it's to be done well. It comes back to what I was saying above about training. One doesn't start training a six-year-old with fake news (although that's difficult not to do these days), rather you train basic logic such as arguments have subjects and predicates or otherwise they make little sense, and to understand simple fallibility tests, false/contradictory statements, etc. such as 'All swans are white' and 'Western Australia has black swans'. Even very young kids can quickly see that just one exception—even if it's on the other side of the planet—makes the first statement false.
In essence, kids need to develop good bullshit filters at a young age. As they grow older, they'll learn to fine tune and better filter what they hear.
What concerns me is that this sort of training isn't done as a matter of course. (I suppose I was luckier than many, it was taught at my primary school.)
Could be. With or without education, many people are shocked to discover how social media platforms permit anonymous moderators to remove content and, at the same time, still pretend that this content is live to the author of the content. The fact that it's possible to set up a system that way doesn't mean it is expected. I wouldn't say people are dumb for not knowing or expecting that.
> Chomsky
I understand Chomsky has a lot to say about propaganda. How much attention does he give to the censorship part of the manipulation equation? Pomerantsev, I am discovering, gives no attention to it that I can find.
> Right again, but this takes training (and it can be slow) if it's to be done well.
Yes and no. Show someone something they posted that's been removed without them knowing and they immediately understand the potential for wider abuse. The trick may be showing people things they care about being removed.
> What concerns me is that this sort of training isn't done as a matter of course. (I suppose I was luckier than many, it was taught at my primary school.)
Where was that, if you don't mind me asking?
No, it's not merely arguable. Large portions of the Republican Party in government, including every Republican member of the FCC, are overtly their allies on this.
Whatever technology is adopted would then have to be purchased and implemented by anyone swept up by the law—from big tech platforms to your local research library.
Big Tech aren't going to be the ones worried --- they are probably more likely to be the ones pushing for more of this shit. We already have nearly-mandatory software in the form of the browser near-monopoly, locked-down walled gardens, and the like.
Stallman's "Right to Read" is worth reading again whenever something like this comes up.
I only use it for a few hours a month but unnatural scrolling just feels wrong now.
There is good money to be made both making DRM to sell to content/software producers and also running shakedowns of infringement.
The Googles of the world may or may not be our saviors here. Depending on if it is cheaper to fight the bill or adopt the measures.
Of course, the reason why they did this was that nobody would actually license video content to an anyone-can-upload platform and have their video sit next to unlicensed Family Guy "funny moments" compilations. The whole purpose of the system was to "clean up" YouTube to make it presentable to off-platform media companies. However, because of this origin story, YouTube basically treats its on-platform creators way worse than the off-platform media creators that originally lobbied for a Content ID system.
Today's YouTubers are copyright owners just as much as large MCN/CMS partners are, but they are not treated as such. YouTube did not even offer a way for YouTubers to monetize reuploads of their own video until recently. Sure, you can send a DMCA 512 takedown notice, as the law demands, but that requires you to first search for, locate, and watch all those infringing reuploads to check for fair use. The entire genre of video essays and reviews is under constant threat of spurious takedowns, as content bots cannot adjudicate fair use and YouTube has no incentive to consider it themselves. Even worse, you can't even block your video in countries that do not have fair use, meaning that anyone who can get Japanese jurisdiction can sue the ever-loving shit out of you and win. Not even actual lawyers know how to navigate Google's system[0]. It exists purely to privilege one set of media interests over another.
There's two ways something like SMART could go.
Optimistically, it could put online creators back on a level playing field with large industry titans. Right now, copyright enforcement is extremely expensive and time-consuming; unless you happen to know how to sweet-talk Google into giving you an MCN/CMS account. Facebook wouldn't have been able to bootstrap their video platform on the backs of stolen YouTube videos had something like SMART existed: there would have been a whole database of who-owns-what that Facebook would need to respect.
More realistically, SMART will almost certainly exist for the same reasons as the CASE Act: to enable new kinds of copyright-related shenanigans while not actually fixing the problems that the people lobbying for it want to be fixed. I genuinely get the feeling that large industry titans hate DMCA 512 as much as I hate DMCA 1201, and just wish they could make their enforcement problems Google's by suing them on a daily basis. In their defense, copyright used to work that way; but we don't live in that world anymore and we don't want to go back to that world.
Google will lobby very hard to have Content ID validated by or grandfathered into SMART, because large directionless companies like pointless laws they can bullshit. I doubt they will black out their logo like a decade ago when SOPA/PIPA were on the table. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though.
[0] In the most egregious example, someone filed false takedown requests in Bungie's name to disparage them, because they were angry that Bungie had taken down their music reuploads. Google was entirely unresponsive to Bungie's pleas to retract the clearly fraudulent takedowns.
https://www.electropages.com/blog/2022/03/smart-motorways-ki...
https://transportactionnetwork.org.uk/campaign/climate-chang...
The internet archive, EFF, and ACLU are all very important organizations to protect internet freedoms.
PS - You should also consider using Amazon Smile for "bonus" donations to your favorite charity. Gave an additional $100 that way.
A recent interview with Brewster Kahle, the Archive’s founder, is here:
- ACLU supports vaccine mandates because it increases civil liberties by protecting our most vulnerable: https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/civil-liberties-an...
- ACLU supported mask mandates in some settings to protect vulnerable children: https://www.aclu.org/podcast/school-mask-mandate-bans-discri...
- Your school curriculum transparency item seems like government censorship that the ACLU was fighting: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-comment-curriculum-...
- last, “fighting to compel speech for teachers” is a bit of a stretch — they were pushing for teachers to use students’ correct pronouns, which is a common courtesy in most settings. https://acluva.org/en/cases/byron-tanner-cross-et-al-v-loudo...
What a bizarre rhetorical maneuver, civil liberties aren't increased by trying to "Protect the most vulnerable", civil liberties are increased by leaving people the fuck alone.
You can acknowledge the fact that there's often a tension between individual freedom and public good and try to defend the ACLU by making a case that they chose what they view as (and many others don't share their view) public good, but twisting words to forcibly paint them as liberty defenders when they are doing the exact opposite is just strange.
>supported mask mandates in some settings to protect vulnerable children
The same children that study after study shows are psychologically damaged and learning-impaired by not seeing their peers' and their teachers' faces[1]. So instead of the few vulnerable children being exempted from school and taught at home or online or in special masked classes, we impose a rule that harms all children and affect, possibly permanently, their psych and development.
Good call.
>government censorship that the ACLU was fighting
No, it isn't government censorship. It's the public deciding what the public schools they fund through taxes can and cannot teach.
This is perfectly legal and perfectly moral, teachers are hired and paid salaries to teach what the school says they should teach. Especially when the allegedly "banned" topics are sexually explicit material featuring minors and debunked pseudo-history invented literally a year ago.
It isn't censorship when your employer forces you to use or not use a programming language, it's how jobs work.
>“fighting to compel speech for teachers” is a bit of a stretch — they were pushing for teachers to use students’ correct pronouns
So, they _were_ fighting to compel speech for teachers, but that's a good thing because pronouns?
>which is a common courtesy in most settings.
No it's not, it's a practice invented 4 to 6 years ago by a minority of delusional individuals living in a very specific place and time, and the vast majority of people in time and space can correctly identify the 3rd person pronoun most suitable for a person on their own and call them by it without any special requests.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/01/28/1075842341/growing-calls-to-t...
You could get rid of nearly all civil liberties with that reasoning.
Well, you’ve convinced me the ACLU is against free speech. Fighting to force people to speak “correctly” and with “courtesy” is the opposite of defending free speech.
Why yes, sacrificing the individual in the interest of "society" is truly the greatest thing for civil rights.
Well from the point of view of describing material reality, these may well be the incorrect pronouns, if they are self-chosen.
Allowing students to choose their own third-person pronouns, assuming these to be the correct ones where they conflict with reality, and punishing those who don't use said pronouns, is only acceptable if you subscribe to the ideological practices of gender identity.
The ACLU of old would have argued for the opposite position - that these teachers must not be compelled to follow an ideology they don't believe in.
> - ACLU supported mask mandates in some settings to protect vulnerable children
Couldn't you support 24 hour solitary confinement or execution for minor crimes in order to protect our most vulnerable? Should the ACLU have switched to protecting the vulnerable in general, rather than protecting those whose freedom to exercise their civil rights is endangered?
I mean, we do breast cancer research in order to protect the vulnerable, but if the ACLU is doing breast cancer research, it's not doing the thing that it specialized in or that people donate to it for.
I say this as someone who supports vaccine mandates and mask mandates.
> “fighting to compel speech for teachers” is a bit of a stretch — they were pushing for teachers to use students’ correct pronouns, which is a common courtesy in most settings.
"Common courtesy" is compelled speech. It's also not a thing that people agree on, so it's not common. It's related to "common sense" in that people only mention common sense when they want to call other people stupid without any evidence, and common courtesy when they want to accuse of being discourteous without any agreed context. To some people, not calling out the person who hired you for sexually harassing you could be common courtesy, or being obligated to have sex with someone who paid for dinner is common courtesy.
If anything, compelling common courtesy seems like the opposite of what the ACLU traditionally did. If nazis marching through a suburb full of holocaust survivors isn't a breech of common courtesy, I don't know what is.
I am ardent supporter of individual rights.
This is largely also the difference between the EU/Canda and the US. where the US has traditionally and correctly placed the most importance on individual rights. Where as the EU places the focus more on society in general or groups in society over the individual
The smallest, most oppressed minority of them all is the individual. Individual rights are minority rights.
2. Opinion piece; ignoring
3. It looks like the reporting is "some people are concerned the first amendment isn't being staunchly defended enough"... so every other civil liberty is on lock? That seems pretty awesome to me.
After reading that comment, I can't help but feel that you're not familiar with the history of the ACLU. Check out the documentary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
The internet archive is definitely worthy of a donation though.
There's a natural process by which organizations revert to the mean. Support the exceptional ones while they're exceptional.
Lobbying isn’t exclusive to supervillain-y agendas, it’s strange that deep pockets with a lot to lose aren’t being more active / fiscally vocal about their opposition to this type of legislature.
And can you imagine the sheer footprint of this type of tech? Given that there is no incentive to make filtering software efficient for these lobbyists, this could spell doom for companies that would need to scale it to ridiculous sizes; e.g. imagine what this would mean for Twitch, which already has a tough time with DMCA, as they would be legally mandated to run bloated filtering software on hundreds of thousands of live video streams all at once.
All I’m saying is if you have to name your legislature “SMART” you’re clearly compensating…
Steve Mould, one of the better known Science You Tubers, brought up one of the few solid cases most people in my circles thought could make sense: Tickets
A record of both attending and having paid for being able to attend an event seems like a great use of the NFT, but it's not too sexy and I am quite sure the likes of Ticket Master would have something to say about the idea, and would want their share. (which always seems to be a bit more than people feel makes sense)
Cancel copyright altogether. Or better, put it back at its original 15 years, only belonging to the specific individuals if they unanomously agree to register, no exclusive licenses.
Driving automobiles on public roads is a privilege. Driving your own vehicle on your own property (or with the consent of the owner(s)) is an application of property rights. Though some consideration must be given for the fact that those roads were paid for, in part, by taking the prospective driver's money without their consent—unlike rules governing use of private property, those who are excluded from using public roads are still forced to pay for them.
Your natural reaction to this is based on sound moral principles, and I think those same principles were at work when the 3rd Amendment was written. Here's an article that tries to draw a parallel between mandating spyware and the quartering of soldiers in people's homes:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/07/22/third-amen...
Don't be surprised if a later law piggybacks onto this and requires similar filters for preventing the spread of "terrorist" content, then "foreign disinformation".
Like with the Snowden leaks, it would probably be decades before we found out that such a law created a system of blackboxes and secret warrants that were used in unconstitutional ways against law-abiding citizens.
I bet CSAM will also be mentioned, because then they could start calling opponents pedophiles.
Makes a good keyword for finding related previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=infocalypse&prefix=true&sort=b...
Though looking back now, seems like piracy and misinformation could take the place of gangsters and drug dealers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Bo...
If the government can decide your free speech is illicit because it doesn't conform to the government's stated position there is no free speech.
The proof that this power will expand is found in the history of the DHS itself. It was formed after 9/11 to make sure knives and explosives didn't get on planes. Now, it governs public discourse. This is unbelievable scope creep. So to say its governance of public discourse is limited to only a few topics of conversation is unencouraging.
Well, what does happen?
Having an opinion that patriotic Americans think that Russians would like you to have is the same as being a traitor. It's like an accidental terrorist. That's what a pinko was; a person who believed in civil rights, worker's rights, etc.. They weren't red, they were pink.
edit: this was greatly foreshadowed after 9/11 when the courts managed to jail some people for "material support" of terrorism for simply expressing approval of terrorism. You see, expressing approval of terrorism in public could lead to people being convinced that terrorism is good, and those people could join terrorist groups, and those terrorist groups could harm America with their help. Like gods, rendering the immaterial material.
That's always been the punchline of the Al-Awlaki case. We've been guided into focusing on the murders of his young children or his American citizenship because children are sympathetic and individualist nationalists are more concerned when things happen to Americans without a legal process than when things happen to others without a legal process. The punchline is that Al-Awlaki was drone killed for being a propagandist, not any terrorist act.
This was also back when the ACLU was a coherent organization, so they objected.
That is the TSA. DHS was formed as a major reorganization of existing government agencies dealing with immigration, customs, border patrol, and many other functions, including the new TSA.
There doesn't seem to be any political will in Canada to oppose it, so it's likely to pass.
That is more or less the goal, yeah.
I'd expect big tech to be especially opposed to this because they're cashing in on reposted, copyrighted content that shows up in feeds and recommendations
Hopefully this does not pass and we do not go down this road again...
Ambiguously formulated paper where apparently half the voters didn't know what they were voting for. And despite that the vote wasn't repeated. And that's supposed to be a democracy?
The youth protested, for the 1st time in decades many young people went to the streets and demonstrated all throughout Europe.
But they were called bots, yeah bots wrote the officials, not real people. The conservatives made up lies against the young people. But not just young people.
Article 13. Then they changed it to be Article 17. Dirty tricks. Just like they formulated the vote sentence ambiguously.
Beware and do EVERYTHING you can that this doesn't pass and make sure it will never pass, not even in 20 or 40 years or longer next and next generations.
This is a systematic, worldwide attempt of censorship and removal of freedom. Do NOT allow this to happen!
Governments are increasingly pushing anti human ideology and policies that many citizens will become increasingly opposed to, by isolating individuals and controlling information flow it will be possible to protect us all from our own human nature.
One can disagree with this policy without resorting to a position such as this which is essentially baseless, and which really rises no higher than a conspiracy theory.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Statione...
> During the Tudor and Stuart periods, the Stationers were legally empowered to seize "offending books" that violated the standards of content set down by the Church and state; its officers could bring "offenders" before ecclesiastical authorities, usually the Bishop of London or the Archbishop of Canterbury, depending on the severity of the transgression.
As printing replaced hand-copying, enforcement of "authorized" printing (as in printing only what the government approves) came to include the "copy right", a rule devised by the Stationer's Guild wherein only certain printers were granted the privilege of printing certain books. Anyone who was not a guild member, or who didn't accept the government's censorship, would not be granted the "copy right" and would be punished for attempting to print or distribute the unauthorized books.
This is where copyright originated, as an outgrowth of monopoly privileges designed for the purpose of censorship. The Statute of Anne took the term "copyright" in a somewhat different direction, emphasizing the privileges of authors over printers, but in the beginning (from ca. 1557 to 1695) it was designed precisely to "control the mass distribution of information [the government] doesn't like".
If your service doesn't work for a significant period, you likely can receive some compensation enforced by a government body.
Keep in mind that streaming services are sold as a reoccurring monthly service, it is remarkably easy to cancel service, and they fulfill the full month even if you cancel early. It is difficult to regard the those business practices as deceptive. (At least in the case of services that I have subscribed to.) This is very much unlike the horror stories that I have heard of for other subscription services, and have experienced in a couple of cases.
On a personal level I also think there's paradoxical social net negatives from overly-insulating people from their own poor decisions while in tandem raising barriers to entry for services (basically, why I choose not to live in California).
2. It's insane to want the government to "protect" you from … not using Netflix. You seriously think it's okay for the government to force this?
No one is compelling you to pay for a streaming service. In fact there are many ways to pay per-show/movie if you prefer that model, which range from a short term digital "rental" to physically owning a disc.
Applying this to other monthly costs is also an interesting exercise: If I don't just my gym membership, do I get that back? If my house doesn't burn down, should I get a refund on my fire insurance?
You can already do this, you just have to do it yourself with a bunch of clicks.
A moth ate some words – it seemed to me
strangely weird – when I heard this wonder:
that it had devoured – the song of a man.
A thief in the thickness of night – gloriously mouthed
the source of knowledge – but the thief was not
the least bit wiser – for the words in his mouth.(Why did the ACLU step away from what made them great? Just a side bar, but WTF? We need that more than ever right now!!)
Please consider supporting the archive. Many here are discussing why. I think I want to just say our digital history is important. As I get older and see how far we have come, I seem to value our roots more. And that means I value the archive more.
In my view, this works like our very early history did. We, as a species, didn't develop the tech needed to communicate our early history until too late to really get the golden lessons possible from it! And this may be a general law of some sort we will find out in the future when we've got a sample size greater than ourselves. I really suspect it is. Why bother talking about this?
The same might be true for digital tech. Once people move to this level of abstraction, basically running history and the machinery of the people digitally, one step removed from the rules of the world, basic materials, means, methods, the rapid pace of change and the implications of non-human readable information technology really mean just take a while to sink in. By the time it does, it's gonna be late --too late perhaps. We are gonna just make it, and still will have lost a lot, but not so much we can't glean the golden lessons from our past. The Internet Archive is going to be a part of that success.
This SMART act isn't smart. And part of the struggle here, in addition to the tech issues and our failure to grok how it will play out, also leaves room for bad law. A. LOT. OF. BAD. LAW. Case in point, infringement vs theft. Many simplify this down to theft. And hey, no judgement! Many of the reasons are not unreasonable. And some of the intent is right there too. However, the fact is we have the word infringement because the important parts of theft, the very things that make theft need to have a word, are not part of infringment!!
I don't want to derail this. Piracy is bad. 'nuff said, other than it's also necessary because law, society and tech are misaligned right now. Above, I said we are going to just make it, in the sense of capturing our own history with enough fidelity to learn from it, get the benefit of having done it all.
And despite that being true, we are still going to make more bad laws, this one being the primary example of the day. Making money can be put above everything and there is real, consistent and effective pressure to do that every day too. But, the people do matter more. They are why making money makes any sense at all, and our history matters more, because that is where the good lessons, insight is, and it's where our stories are. Lives are stories and they all have value, but we only realize that value when the stories get told, shared, talked about, explored, learned from.
I bet we see theft plugged in where infringment should be. It's happened every time, and bad word use leads to bad laws and that happens because when we use the wrong words --we simplify just a bit too much so as to bias the process and everyone's thinking toward the preferred goal, we make law that is not well aligned to realities. Everyone is basically worse off for it having happened too. Even the people who wanted the law, though they may not realize it for a good long while.
Worse? What happens with laws people do not respect? That's right, they get ignored, violated, and the original purpose for the law gets lost in the noise, leaving us with kind of a mess we know is supposed to be doing good somehow, but it isn't doing that good, or so little of it we may ask, "why did we even bother?" And the answer will either be, "nobody knows", or something along the lines of what I am writing right now.
Use the right words, which will lead to better, or arguably the right law, or even better, law that aligns with realities well enough to stand on it's own and be obvious in purpose, mutually respected and abided by as it all should be.
Thanks again Internet Archive for making this more visible.
Here is my take on the situation and the most likely outcome.
European Court of Justice just cleared similar law in Europe and give it a final stamp of validity [1]. Similarly like GDPR, this law will take precedent in most settings because it applies earlier in the life of content than the current US law, DMCA [2]. What I mean by that, Article 17 of EUCD requires "best effort" in licensing prior publishing, while DMCA applies immediately after publishing.
This means the US legislators will eventually try to come closer to this law because they don't like not having power over the platforms. If you look at the SMART Copyright Act, it uses STM (standard technical measure) in the existing law (DMCA) to essentially achieve similar outcome without having to change the law itself. The "only" significant change is that they are giving power to determine compliance to the US Copyright Office over the courts. This is significant considering that in Europe this is left to the courts.
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Our approach [0] around this is a bit different while still complaint with the laws. We offer our services free of charge for platforms large and small and focus on the attribution. That means we care about creators getting credit for their creation but leave the result of the attribution to them. That means creators can put their creations into public domain and we make sure nobody else makes money from it. They can also charge for it or completely prohibit certain use cases.
The way we make money is by underwriting the liability, so technically an insurance, which is directly correlated with revenues. More platform makes, more expensive the policy is. We can cover platforms up to $50M in damages per case [3].
The other thing we are doing differently is that we partnered with WIPO [4] to escalate all cases of fair use/exceptions to a real human being that is properly trained in the copyright laws in each jurisdiction. This also is provided free of charge to all participants.
Our larger goal is to introduce VISA-like solution for digital rights and allow the millions of creators be in charge of their works while explicitly leaving the decision making in their hands.
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[0] https://pex.com
[1] https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/cjeu-backs-copyri...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
[3] https://pex.com/blog/introducing-pex-platform-guarantee-enab...
[4] https://pex.com/blog/pex-partners-with-world-intellectual-pr...