Isnt this what gets all tech companies into trouble all the time. Something objectionable happens (ChatGPT helping someone bulid a bomb for instance) and we go like "Do better".
Here, if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both because it's plain impossible for you to block all means of VPN/proxy regardless of how perfect your service tries to detect it. There's no payment, there's no account, there's no anything - you're just serving DNS to an IP that reports to be out of Germany according to German law. At some point it stops being a mistake/malintent of the company and one of the user. Where that transitions probably depends on the person though.
Yes, and Quad9 could have done better in the German court case. At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency, and then could have ensured that their DNS service is offered only to registered users.
This would have been a massive burden to them, and (as we have seen from the ongoing data leaks) a gigantic privacy risk to its users. It would have also been a big overreach, as the German ruling would have mostly impacted non-German users.
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
A recursive DNS resolver is identified just by an IP address for your system level DNS resolver to use (eg. in /etc/resolv.conf). Even if you assigned a random, secret IPv6 address for every individual user, they could simply share that with anyone else too. In IPv4, pretty much impossible.
Again, I don’t endorse that framing. But that’s where a lot of lawmakers are at. They’re not corrupt or fascists or hysterical about porn or whatever (well, plenty are, but not most). They’re trying to correct what they identify as a dangerously uncontrolled area.
Yes. This is also how physical products work. The internet makes it easy and the default to offer a service worldwide, hence also making it easy to get in conflict with the law worldwide. You have to pick and choose which laws to break, which laws to comply with by minimizing exposure, and which laws to comply with by making a tailor-made version for a specific market.
If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time. (Unless your country is powerful enough to violate the sovereignty of my nation.)
In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product. I simply offered it to anyone who came to my “store” (server). I admit that this dynamic changes if you directly pay me for something.
Your framework implies that every social website needs to make a decision on whether or not users are allowed to insult the Thai monarch[0], and then must block access to Thais if they decide it’s allowed. In reality nobody does this, although they may choose not to put a server in Thailand if they are worried about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thai...
'Ofcom told the BBC: "We are aware of this lawsuit. Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based."
A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'
The US-based lawyers for the services in question take a very different view....
Hm yeah but "action from Ofcom" doesn't really mean very much to a party half a world away.
Manifestly, the British still think they are a world power.
Offering a website to a certain country is not something ISP decided for you, but you actively did that yourself. I cant create a gambling website and host it in Monaco and then serve it to someone in CA and say that, it isnt on me, but on Comcast.
Websites aren't broadcasting, they are waiting there and responding to requests. Why should it be on every server in the world to have to figure out whether they're allowed to respond to a given request based on the client's country?
Why is it not the user's responsibility to not send requests? Why isn't it the ISP's responsibility to not route the requests? And every single router in between?
Defendant's lawyer argued that seeding a copyrighted movie was not (active) distribution but merely "making it available" (which was not associated with a criminal offense in HK law as opposed to "distributing infringing copies").
Didn't work out.
---
[1] HKSAR v Chan Nai Ming [2005] 4 HKLRD 142
My point is it's weird to expect website operators to be aware of every jurisdiction on the planet and take steps to comply with each of them.
If that expectation becomes common, the obvious way to go isn't to block the countries you aren't allowed to serve. It's to only allow the ones you know you are allowed.
Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.
It's a difficult issue for sure. It's almost a geopolitical problem -- the larger economic blocs (eg. EU, China, USA) can basically dictate terms and expect general compliance (eg. GDPR) because most companies can't avoid operating in those areas, while smaller countries can't really do much unless they're part of a bigger economic bloc.
And actually you can just make a gambling website overseas, people have done that since forever. You might have trouble with accepting payments, though.
Except the analogue to your ISP for your example is UPS and they are far less (if at all?) responsible for the content of packages they deliver.
Now if I keep sending banned materials to your country, it might be a bad idea for me to travel there. But nothing else is going to happen, unless you’re a global power and you drone me or compel my government to extradite me. (Or if my own country was foolish enough to make mutual extradition agreements for such things.)
(Note, I specified in person in cash above because as I mentioned before, electronic payments make things messy. But most websites are “free”.)
I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.
The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
If that's true, so is the private property space in general.
But what you say isn't true. The "intellectual property space" is not pure rent seeking. If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
Intellectual property critics have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are problems with IP, but those specific should be fixed through reform.
are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
i think we can do just fine treating IP like other work - you pay for the creation of it, not the consumption
Replicating work of an electrician or builder is very similar effort to their original work.
Making a copy of a novel or software program or art today is practically free.
In case of work for hire, things pretty much work the same way already — company owns the copyright, except in some jurisdictions where actual humans keep "moral rights" and reserve the right to renegotiate the fee if the work produces disproportionate earnings (one cannot even transfer these rights away).
But if you did the work out of pocket, how should it work? Any recipient could trivially and cheaply produce a copy and distribute it. If you do not get any exclusivity at all, others would profit a lot more and you'd get nothing at all.
So in general, there are multiple things:
* exclusivity lasts too long (I understand some motivation like supporting your children off it, especially if work only became profitable late in your life or in death, but you could have different mechanisms too — akin to moral rights, exclusivity could run from the moment it turns a significant profit like an average annual salary, and for a fixed, much shorter period after)
* types of works which are utilitarian (like software tools) should have entirely different treatment
* it should ensure both transferability and perpetuity of use (no licensing bullshit and your games/music are gone because our service does not offer them anymore)
...
> are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
My example was a simplification, so don't take it to literally.
It's also worth noting that other property rights have no time limit. Except in China, whoever owns that apartment building can own it forever.
This is wrong.
In the UK, property rights are mostly leasehold, just as they are in Singapore for HDB flats.
they do if they build their own house and rent it out
They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time. Intellectual property is a non-rival good, meaning if somebody else copies your song or story, you still have that song/story! It's a very different moral claim; the apartment is "I built it, so nobody should be able to take it away from me without paying", while the IP is "I built it, so nobody else should be able to copy it without paying".
I don't think that distinction is as important as you make it out to be. Private property law allows individuals to own far, far more physical goods than they can personally use.
If were going to talk about abolishing intellectual property, how about lets talk about abolishing private property too? Maybe replace it with some kind of active-use right.
Anyway, lets destroy it first and work the details out later. /s
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
- Pay in advance, before the product exists.
- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)
- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.
If most of the people around you believe that making money is the logical way to survive then making money will become the goal of many to most human interactions. People will choose big publishers because big publishers guarantee them some amount of money (and services around publishing) in exchange for the ownership and monetisation rights (and then the right to sue somebody into oblivion when they break copyright law).
So the rich and vibrant ecosystem can be reality, just not within current society.
For books and music maybe the difference is not quite that big, but for games and movies these 0.0..01% cost so much more to make that they would definitely not get made if they made significantly less money.
People should be paid for the labor of creating, not for artificially scarce copies of the finished product.
Patronage has been known as an alternative to copyright since around 200 years ago:
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
The cited drawbacks are valid: creators are beholden to the elites who fund their work, and their influence in their creative process is felt to this day.
With modern technology, however, funding is diffused through large groups of people which minimizes this impact through diversification.
The ideal model is one where lots of people pitch in to fund a creator for the full cost of creating something, then the resulting work is released directly to the public domain.
That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers [edit: published as a for-profit activity dependent on copyright]. Why would the 20/21st century experience of publishing a scientific paper have any bearing on what it's always been?
Scientific publishing is messed up because, unlike most other creative work, it has a different funding model (basically state patronage), which basically makes the publishers very profitable parasites. That should be addressed directly instead of abolishing copyright for all works.
> Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job." ... or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
That's more bizarre logic: "Authors don't get paid enough, so lets take away their rights so they get paid less."
> At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore.
Copyright was setup before the industrial revolution, so your statement doesn't make sense. Also, at least in some countries, its foundation is the moral rights of the author, not some argument about production.
> We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It seems like you have gripes coming from a particular problem area (scientific publishing?) and are too narrowly focused on that. "I have this gripe, lets decommission this important legacy system, and then rewrite it completely from scratch!" is usually not a good plan.
Firstly, this isn’t true, but more importantly it doesn’t matter because the parent’s claim doesn’t depend on scientific papers predating copyright.
The first scientific paper was Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in London on March 6, 1665 (or you can go back as far as Aristotle if you prefer). The first copyright law is England’s Statute of Anne (1710).
[citation needed] /s
"Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publ...
"Modern copyright law was invented on April 10, 1710, with the enactment of the Statute of Anne in Great Britain"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
see also the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790: Signed into law by President George Washington on May 31, 1790 and the Berne Convention (1886)
My bad. I edited out a "probably" I shouldn't have, and was writing based on the intuition that there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists.
Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old. And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease. Even while simultaneously correctly understanding that virtually every person who writes, sings, raps, dances, etc will never be able earn anything but trival sums from doing so even under the current legal regime.
It's worth going to read Macaulay's speeches from the early nineteenth century to see how little what copyright supporters claim as the intent of copyright was seen as such at the time these ideas were being rendered into law.
https://ia601406.us.archive.org/34/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.2... beginning at p 156/pdf page 180
Yeah, and a lot of that was either amateurish or in the thrall of some wealthy elite (either the creator was an elite themselves, or directly dependent on them).
> And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease.
Come on, you're being black and white about it? Without copyright, will it stop? No. Will it change, for the worse? Probably. More paid for and catering to the whims of the wealthy, far less "middle class" creation, and almost no "middle class" professional creation, etc.
If anyone could duplicate the whole universe at will, of course current human laws would all seem as silly as those covering random virtual monopoly on cognitive experience possibilities.
In its current form, it is absolutely rent seeking. We will be dead and buried long before our culture enters the public domain. The so called "stakeholders" have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.
Limit copyright duration to at most 20 years and it will still be a disgusting monopoly on numbers, but at least it won't be intolerable. We might actually forget that we can use technology to trivially copy stuff at negligible costs.
EDIT: Look at that, downvotes but no rebuttals. (:
Anything can be reduced down to 'dumb' if you try hard enough. Officer, these are just chemicals in a specific quantity and just goes boom when mixed together.
Try explaining top level authoritives, ttl, DoH etc etc to a lay person. Yes, it is example.com in, a.b.c.d out but it is anything but simple.
My larger point is calling "phone book" doesnt make DNS dumb.