Hollywood's support For SESTA is about filtering the Internet
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
They are big enough that they can eat the cost of censorship and don't care if they become worse services, so long as no new services arise to take their place. And with laws like this in place they never will.
The single biggest hurdle I found to building a distributed search engine was the various illegal materials all over the world. Be it insults to religion, hate speech, copyrighted material, child pornography, all need to be copied onto a local machine to be indexed and categorized. In most countries this would lead the police to come knocking. Any case will (probably) eventually be ruled to be legal, but the average user will never be able to deal with the case since they will probably go bankrupt long before a victory.
Even the people who set out to run a system like tor, knowing full well what the risks are, as a form of mild civil disobedience eventually fold [0].
[0] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/5394ax/the-operat...
Isn't the majority (if not the whole) of the web copywrited? It seems like part of the reason why Google has monopoly over search is because search by crawling and indexing is fundamentally illegal. It also seems like the reason they're not prosecuted is because they're so big and useful that no website owner minds that their site is crawled by Google, even though most of them set Terms and Conditions in place that forbid crawling, scraping, or otherwise automated compilation of information from their site. It's a double standard.
It is unclear that crawling and indexing are a violation of copyright. A library card catalog does not violate the copyright of the material it indexes. If you don't want to be indexed, you can just put the appropriate entry in robots.txt and all the major search engines will comply.
Caches are on shakier ground and archives like the IA are on shakier ground yet. Pretty much everyone turns a blind eye however because it's useful and again you can always opt out with robots.txt.
Further if you actually try to crawl a website you'll find yourself blackholed by a lot of websites pretty quickly.
Just to be clear, it's not really Google's crawling that I meant to criticize, but rather the double standard employed by the majority of website owners that strengthens Google's monopoly. If anything, I wish more website owners wouldn't mind automated use and copying of their site from anyone and not just major players like Google.
The one useful thing I got out of it is the realization how much illegal content there is everywhere. I pointed a badly written spider at vairous forums and chans and let it collect data from there. The 'ranking' was a list with the number of times a post with a link was quoted. I had plans on how to propogate the numbers through the graph of links, but after I looked at what I'd gotten in 2 hours I promptly deleted everything and reformatted that drive.
Later also CEO Sony Entertainment, and COB Snapchat.
> At a breakfast cohosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and The New Yorker Thursday, Lynton wasn’t just trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”
> Lynton tried out another simile. Referring to the Obama administration’s goal to spread broadband access without, he said, regulating piracy, Lynton compared it with building highway systems without speed limits or driver’s licenses. “We do need rules of the road,”
US society is composed of many little overlapping subcultures. With diverse views. Often with major groupthink and filter bubbles. And some stable for decades.
[1] http://wwd.com/business-news/media/memo-pad-uniqlo-nabs-deyn...
His argument doesn't delight me either, but individuals are rarely the problem.
Most people's beliefs reflect the beliefs of some culture of which they are part. It's rarely just one person who believes something.
Even in authoritarian dictatorships, the king's decisions and survival usually rest on a weave of broader interests.
When someone says something with which one strongly disagrees, it can be fruitful to approach this as a source of insight into their cultures.
Cultures which often last longer than individuals. Lynton is retired now, or soon will be. The LA subcultures in which his remarks were relatively unremarkable, continue on. And will continue to shape government policy for years to come.
Perhaps it's those cultural beliefs on which more long-term attention might usefully be focused. Perhaps we would be in a better place now, if more hollywood types had been appointed to tech boards over the years?
EDITED to improve clarity.
In other words, it's not just Hollywood seeing a bill that gets them what it wants and suddenly speaking up in favor of it... this is Hollywood helping to make this bill happen in the first place as part of its ongoing effort to remake the internet away from being a communications medium for everyone, and into a broadcast/gatekeeper dominated medium where it gets to act as the gatekeeper.
Full on attack on the internet and people's right to share content and ideas, basically an attack on people's 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.
Tie this in with the Marriott person fired for 'liking' a post on accident, or on purpose really, that was driven by China not wanting the company to recognize Tibet, and China's large investments in Hollywood and Hollywood's appeasement of those aims, and you have a scary situation where internet content and thoughts could be regulated by people in more authoritarian regimes around the world.
Hollywood used to spread ideas of liberty, living a good life and democracy, now we have them actively exploiting side issues for their aim of content filtering, and we have other countries dictating what free people can do with the internet, full on attack on freedoms and a strike against progress and the idea of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.
Hollywood was never so nice
Hollywood can explain tough society situations through a conduit story that can lessen people's biases when it is a fictional story. It can help understanding and has been a huge part of the American Dream marketing that makes people want to come to the US and contribute.
Entertainment and education are two of the things the US attracts people with besides opportunity. Part of that opportunity is built by Hollywood or at least the perception of it.
Movies and TV are an escape but also show what it is like to live others lives or come away enlightened, maybe not so much with the consolidated companies of today but back in the day for sure.
Take a look at the history of United Artists and Charlie Chaplin influence for a take on this [1].
Lol!
Agreed. People have been saying this for years.
It isn't just hollywood. The news media, the political elites, NGOs, etc are supporting this for the same reason. It's also the reason for the attacks against social media and the push against net neutrality.
Instead of the internet/social media/search engines/etc being a medium where people proactively communicate and look for things that interest them. These corporatists and politicians want the internet to be a medium of broadcast where they choose what you see and how you communicate.
It's been a going on for years. Look at how google now filters search and how youtube pushes their content. Look at all the content being removed from reddit. And soon ISPs will start throttling content they disagree with.
The people with money and power want this so it'll continue to happen. And they aren't doing it all at once. They are doing it in stages. Each iteration, there is more censorship. Us mere mortals can't do anything about it. Sadly, it's happening all over the world now. Europe, Russia, China, etc are all turning the internet from a medium of open and free communication to a broadcasting platform.
It's why many countries are so fond of regulating manufacturing. When you strip access to the means of production from the everyman and lock it behind regulatory barriers, it's far easier to control what can and can't be done.
Not a pitch for any ideology. Merely an observation.
And you're just about to enter a trade war with China! Talk about a shot in the foot...
I'm not saying that everywhere else is nice, i.e. Deep Learning is barely legal for commercial use in Europe with GPDR!
But man, the weather is not nice...
Wasn’t aware of that. What is the reason for it? To protect consumer privacy?
https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/03/gdpr-machine-learning-ille...
edit:typo
At present, there's zilch. WSJ focuses on plaintiff attorneys.[2] :) LA Times seems to only have an editorial[3], which swipes at big tech, but is surprisingly competent.
I've formed an impression of the big press, NYT et al, in contrast to say industrial/professional media, that even when they manage to get facts right, they pervasively manage miss the point. It reminds me of coverage of unfamiliar foreign cultures, after the local foreign bureau has closed. Context, and reality check, and insight, and clue, all become unavailable. Even here, even dealing with their familiar political DC subculture.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/search/sex%20trafficking%20hollywood... https://www.washingtonpost.com/newssearch/?query=sex%20traff... https://www.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=sex%20traffick... http://www.latimes.com/search/?q=sex+trafficking+hollywood [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/political-sex-trafficking-explo... [3] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-sex-traffick...
The connection becomes even more tenuous when you realize that News Corp isn’t actually “Hollywood”. Yes, they used to own 21th Century Fox, but that was sold last year.
Instead of trying to find some sinister motivation underlying people’s actions, it may be more useful to actually listen to them. It seems entirely believable that people privy to the details of human trafficking and sexual exploitation develop rather strong opinions on the subject. That conviction may lead them to advocating policies you may disagree with, especially when they see companies turning a blind eye to obvious underage sex trafficking on their platforms.
So do engage with their arguments and make a better case. But don’t belittle their concerns with hamfisted conspiracy theories.
Where and how does this happen? Do you have data? Can you cite a single instance of a pedophile ring was using open platforms in an "obvious" fashion to promote their product - as opposed to darknet/secret forums that don't care about SESTA? In the unlikely cases where it does happen, how do you think the majority of sex-service consumers would react to being offered underage sex?
This seems to be a classic example of using a fringe issue - online pedophiles - to justify a major encroachment against civil liberties. In this case driven by a puritanical position that in fact wants to declare war against all forms of prostitution.
With the only practical effect of waging war against the prostitutes themselves by denying them access to online platforms and pushing them straight into the hands of organized human trafficking rings. The consumers will not stop demanding sex services and they will get them somehow.
Here what sexworkers themselves have to say about it: http://www.new.swopusa.org/2018/03/02/house-passing-of-misle...
Note that even though my comment above received the full ire of HN, I do not necessarily support this legislation. I just think the article's game of 7-degrees-of-seperation and guilt by association are fundamentally weak arguments.
They are primed to expect conspirational thinking so they see it even when the reality is not so sinister.