Google Bans ‘Downloader’ App: TV Outfits Claim Browser Violates Injunction
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
It's obviously a bit in the future, but I look forward to the day when you can just use AI to generate new music, movies, TV shows, etc that are unencumbered so you can watch them wherever and whenever you want, even in 4k on Linux! I'll have sympathy and sadness for the individual creatives that lose the ability to support themselves, but not for the mega corps that have brought us to where we are now.
I promise that the content that is being hosted at location X is mine, that I did not give Y person permission to publish it, and I'm willing to face the fine of perjury if I'm actually lying.
Like, in a functioning society that seems like the right tool to start a legal dispute over the right to distribute copyrighted works?
Trash companies attacking random internet websites with the permission of copyright giants can do as they please. Nintendo lies and defrauds with these notices all the time but there's no way anyone is going to take them to court over it.
It's not just the entertainment industry either. HackerRank was a notable example of an IT company that willingly abused DMCA takedowns, for example. There were a whole bunch of bogus takedowns, many of which still haven't been reverted, but when one of them made it to the HN frontpage they finally seemed to have fixed their policy. There's no doubt their competitors are abusing DMCA the same way, except that they hire more competent DMCA takedown companies.
In many places, the DMCA has the right idea, but it lacks serious abuse prevention. It also places a lot of unilateral power with copyright holders, more than I'm comfortable with. The whole "reverse engineering is a crime if it's copyright protection software" racket has little to do with protecting individual copyrighted works and only serves to let large media and tech companies keep their monopolies.
The huge power differential puts the reportee in an impossible situation where the "neutral" third party is completely unreachable and executes their actions often without human intervention/judgment.
A better law would be one that has actual penalties for wrongful reports, possibly (when the third party acts as a gate keeper like Apple, Google, etc) holding the third party liable for a wrongful judgment might help balance the scales as well because "erring on the side of the reporter" won't be a no-brainer risk-wise.
We have general law that provides remedies for false damaging statements and for improper attempts to interfere with existing contractual relationships. I don’t think the absence of an additional cause of action specific to DMCA takedown notices actually has much effect.
Why is "victims" in quotes there?
And even of there was a specific unique cause of action for DMCA misrepresentation, that would take a lawsuit too.
How do you imagine a penalty exists without legal action? (You can create a public cause of action, too, but then the victim still has to convince the relevant public authority that the case is meritorious and a priority, which can be hit or miss.)
Because some people lose their minds if you use the word "victim" to refer to a person who has suffered a light crime, rather than reserving it only for people who have suffered a particularly egregious violation.
> And even of there was a specific unique cause of action for DMCA misrepresentation, that would take a lawsuit too.
> How do you imagine a penalty exists without legal action? (You can create a public cause of action, too, but then the victim still has to convince the relevant public authority that the case is meritorious and a priority, which can be hit or miss.)*
It's not an all or nothing, and not all legal action is equally arduous. Adding penalties on top of actual damages would shift the scales significantly and add some protection for the consumer (remember for companies it's all about balancing liability). Having to prove actual damages in a civil suit as is currently is essentially impossible, but reporting would not be.
The law could also be changed to make it clear that you can't DMCA a tool or script simply because it could be used to violate somebody's copyright. There could be penalties for wrongfully DMCAing something (that don't require the person to lawyer up and prove actual damages, something essentially impossible for the average person).
To be clear, are you saying you like the current DMCA? That it's a good law?
Google is already forced to judge the case. If someone fills enough bogus cases (bogus in Googles opinion) or a ridiculous one they (google) can stop processing them.
Say I fill a complaint against a restaurant about food poisoning - but I didn't eat there. People might waste their time investigating it but surely it wont happen when I complaint for a second time?
But I do think deleting all web browsers is a very reasonable judgement from Google. No more Chrome, no more Safari, no more Edge, linux would probably have to be banned entirely because you know, everyone will find a way to install a browser and visit that Hebrew website to watch TV programs in Hebrew, all... what is it, 9 million users of the language? I'm sure it will be just a slight inconvenience for the 5 billion/rest of us.
We do have to be reasonable at times.
Google can already do that if it judges that the risk that the complsinant has a legitimate case is low enough that they don't need a safe harbor against them. The only consequence for not honoring a takedown is that if you would have been liable to the company's for copyright infringement before considering the DMCA safe harbor, you don't eliminate that liability.
Your version seems sane, but I'm not sure the law works that way.
It has nothing to do with copyrights. How can you pretend it does? Maybe Curl should be removed, hell why not get rid of the console entirely? Perhaps delete the internet? Maybe we should ban computers? It all starts with electricity?
All those connectors on the TV set, those could be used to access web browsers.
How do we stop it?
I agree that modern copyright law is atrocious and stifling, but the whole "I have sympathy for artists, but..." thing is just grimly exhausting and depressing at this point. I feel nothing but despair. I've spent a lot of time interacting with ChatGPT and image models, and when people say this, all I can do is wonder how other people interact with art and literature.
Every iteration of ChatGPT I've seen is an astoundingly bad prose stylist. At a sentence-to-sentence level, everything that burbles forth from ChatGPT's maw is joyless, flavorless garbage. It's an undifferentiated slurry that has all the verve of a corporate onboarding manual, mated with a self-help book, written by Reddit's gestalt consciousness.
Statistically aping surface form is low-hanging-fruit. Even if you just want (ugh) 'content' in the raw sense of the word - stuff that fills time between when we're born and when we're dead - I am skeptical current Large-Whatever-Models will get there. Everything they do is wholly divorced from being an agent in a physical reality. This is why image models can't even do (what-do-you-call-them, oh yeah) hands. There's a difference between regurgitating variants on two-dimensional representations of hands and drawing hands. I am similarly skeptical that a large-text-model can ever do anything that captures inner experience in a truly novel way. I just firmly do not believe that a text model trained on works written prior to Faulkner's career - regardless of how much goading you gave it - could produce "As I Lay Dying."
Wake me when a GPT model can write a thriller that delivers the rainsoaked weltschmerz and dread of Le Carre's 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.' Until I see an AI put out something on par with "Move. Once you stop, you never start again: there is a special stage-fright that can make you dry up and walk away, that burns your fingers when you touch the goods and turns your stomach to water. Move," I will fear the idea of AI being pushed as any sort of salvation from the overreach of copyright law.
If it does end up being the solution we get, I worry we will have to augment the free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech axes with free-as-in-dumpster-diving.
It totally might be 10 or 20 years away, but eventually I think we'll figure it out. There was another discussion today about "humanizing" drum machine output by subtly introducing minor timing variance and it makes it feel "human." At some point I tend to think we'll figure that out for AI art
- Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phlox.tvwe...
- Source code: https://github.com/truefedex/tv-bro
I think TV Bro is the only free and open source browser app available on Android TV. The current version lets you choose between GeckoView (Firefox engine) and the default Android WebView (Chrome engine). It integrates an ad blocker and has more features than Downloader.