How did the DMCA ever get passed? It's an absolutely insane, ludicrous set of laws.
I'm going to start selling shirts that say "Today I Broke The DMCA". No matter who wears it, it's probably true.
I'm going to start selling shirts that say "Today I Broke The DMCA". No matter who wears it, it's probably true.
I think there's something valid about a government protected temporary monopoly. But in the case of copyright, for example, it's life plus 70 or more years. It is ridiculous, as in, worthy of ridicule. Medical patents are 20 years, which itself is too long, but it's made worse by rather permissive ways in which they can be effectively renewed by barely changing the medicine.
You know what it is? It's a way to get white collar work to continue to pay out more than, and longer than, the actual amount and duration of work on a thing takes. It's an incentive to do that kind of work. But I agree that it's grossly lopsided when you can't do repair or research on that same material - that's one of the original points of patent and copyright law. Put your ideas on paper so that you not only get protection for a while, but others can create derivatives that are better, and thereby we learn more about it all.
Society/the government is ostensibly afraid nobody will invent if they are not artificially advantaged. Those with working intellect consider that trade secrets are enough of a protection against competition.
The article went further into how trade secrets allowed a company to have its employees sign non disclosures and actually sue the employee and whoever else used the employer's "stolen" knowledge in criminal court, while patents changed this to be only civil and prevented employees from being sued at all.
As everything in life, a balance between the two is probably the most optimal. So I agree patents might have started going too far one way, but I doubt trade secrets would be any better in addressing OP's complaint that patents prevent the free transfer of knowledge and limits innovation.
While I never lived when trade secrets were the norm, I believe most people supporting it in favor of patents suffer from the same problem a lot of younger programmers suffer from. We keep reinventing the wheel and making the same mistakes over and over. It's all a cycle, we'll go back to trade secrets and then their issues will become more "apparent", people will have forgotten the inherent issues with patents and we'll move back to patents again, repeating the cycle.
So I personally disagree with both, you rarely solve issues by reverting back to older ways which the people before us had already tried in vain. We have to try something else, maybe a hybrid, maybe something totally different.
He didn't work alone, did he? I think he had a company, but you can bet he got a sweet deal with his employees on those patents.
Actually most libertarian are strictly against any form of IP and patents. They prefer trade secrets over state regulation.
But then again I don't know if you mean real libertarians or just crypto-statists calling themselves libertarian because they don't know better...
The objectivists just find it to be to their advantage, these days, to make it appear that they might. The controversy that you suggest is as manufactured as the controversy about anthropomorphic climate change.
And I'm aware a sizeable chunk of anarcho-capitalists think IP as a concept is bullcrap.
Then there's the shift in power that comes from control over weapons and infrastructure ... but AFAIK the coordinated masses still have power on their side - partly from the assumption that given enough "external" disagreement, some people on the inside are likely to cross over.
Indeed, one could argue that the most terrifying part about the Snowden disclosures on mass surveillance, is that the current government is poised to deploy counter-measures long before any opposition consolidates and organizes. This might take the form of buying out individuals - or "dissappearing" or taking out individuals that are perceived to be in the process of becoming important.
That actually happened with DeCSS.
Many many years ago, in an internet far far away, some clever hackers determined how to decrypt DRM-protected DVDs. They even built a decryption program and named it DeCSS. Several court cases followed, usually based upon WIPO CC, the treaty that the DMCA implements.
In DVD CCA v. Bunner, a California court issued a preliminary injunction against a website owner for hosting DeCSS. As an entirely predictable result, the internet responded by disseminating it far and wide.
Some people even put it on t-shirts: http://www.design-reuse.com/news_img/20080804_1.gif
More recently, this happened with the decryption key that starts with 09 F9...
Maybe one with a custom EULA, "By talking to me you acknowledge that you are agreeing to these terms. Should you not agree, say nothing further."
You can now run a social network and not get sued into oblivion for users putting up copywrighted content, so long as you're not too complicit in the behaviour. Safe harbor is a win for the internet in my book.
Without safe harbor, Google would be liable for re-distributing movies that people keep on uploading to the site. Takedown requests get a bad rap, but it's not the worst possible scenario IMO.
So tech companies want Safe Harbor. Media companies understand that safe harbor will enable some shadier businesses like megaupload (where the site owners are complicit in the content and hide behind safe harbor). So they say " OK for safe harbor, but we want a bit more protection for us, the content producers, as well." Thus a compromise is formed.
Most laws are comprises to get most people at the table, this seems like one of them.
In reality this is only a win if you have the deep pockets of google and are able to implement all the things that Safe Harbor Requires, respond to all of the Automated and primary bogus requests in a timely fashion, and are willing to have to your platform censored to the extreme. YouTube can withstand it because of its inertia, many new platforms have tried and failed.
Safe Habor, as written, ensures YouTube's dominance in online self uploaded video.
Further Safe Habor does not protect you from being sued, it simply gives you a defense should you be sued. See the YouTube vs Viacom case.
AS such one will still have to pay lawyers to defend them, this results in many content platforms being shutdown, or never being created in the first place
No in reality Safe Habor only seems like a good thing on paper, and then only if you are a Copyright Maximalist that believe the current copyright law is acceptable or does not provide enough protection.
If I remember correctly, YouTube originally gained popularity because practically anything could be uploaded on the service. A huge percentage of it was blatantly copyrighted material.
To this day, if you want to watch a weird, obscure series that nobody remembers, and thus was never put on the big streaming sites, Youtube is your best bet.
It is revisionist history at best.
Yes there was copyrighted content on YouTube, as there is today, but no that is not why is gained popularity.
It gained popularity because it made video accessible to everyone. Before youtube attempting to host your own videos, be it a cat video, or a major movie was EXPENSIVE.
Back then, as today, most of the "violations" are actually fair use.. Copyright Maximalist however believe copyright gives them total control over their work, meaning if a person using a 1 second clip for commentary, or happens to have a song playing in the background while their baby does something cute on video and uploads it to Youtube that is a violation of copyright.
No, I remember watching full movies, episodes and seasons of shows on YouTube. I remember music videos, full albums and re-uploads of content from other websites.
I remember reading from multiple sources that in the early days, YouTube willfully ignored DCMA takedowns and allowed infringing content to be shared for the views.
>It gained popularity because it made video accessible to everyone. Before youtube attempting to host your own videos, be it a cat video, or a major movie was EXPENSIVE.
There were a handful of free video hosts around at the time.
Popularity, is about views, not submissions.
It's weird that you've started this paranoid rant about history being re-written, when you're the one who is totally off mark. (and seem to have eluded common sense)