Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

Copyright infringement is not theft.

Theft is legally distinct. It is also morally distinct - the 'owner' of the 'intellectual property' is not deprived of their ownership if someone violates the transactional model by looking without permission.

Copyright infringement is not theft. It is interference with a business model. Please stop saying obviously incorrect things.

And FWIW, it’s very often an uploader who has to pay a fine for distributing copyrighted work (not theft). Fines for downloading are pretty rare.

However, I totally agree with the sentiment, and I’ve long felt this way about petty crimes like shoplifting, which are harshly punished and shamed, while on the flip-side you have crimes like wage theft which goes effectively unpunished and is even defended as legitimate by some.

IP companies such as media companies and patent holders often try to spin unlicensed access to media or information as theft because it sounds worse, but in practice the actual crime is "illegal access to intellectual property" or something similar to that.

However it is illegal to mass distribute movies on the net, like bittorrent-style to people you do not know personally. Yes it's a bit hard to define friends but if you find yourself burning copies of CD's in bulk, it's most likely not ok.

Usually the act of copying is not the problem, distribution is.

No. In many places simple copyright violation is not a crime, and so there are no fines. The rights holders can sue for losses. But this isn't a criminal case between the state and an alleged criminal, it's a case between two citizens (although one of them may be a corporate person).

There are things that tip copyright violation into a criminal offence: doing it as part of business (selling the DVDs that you've downloaded), doing it so much it materially affects the rights holders.

In Poland downloading music, movies and images is legal. (software is treated specially and just downloading may be illegal)

And I suspect that "always" is untrue also after limiting to USA.

No one has ever been sued for DOWNLOADING a movie. They get sued for UPLOADING a movie.

Important distinction. Mere possession is not a crime - everything is copyrighted, and it isn't the responsibility of someone holding a copy to know if the person that gave them that copy was authorized to to so.

Also, your proposed change has made most of Wikipedia illegal.

To my point -- this idea is entirely a separate concept from copyright law. It is not a modification to copyright law.

Not exactly sure what your argument is, but if you want to know what qualifies as a "creative work", the law conveniently defines it in 17 U.S. Code § 102(a).

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

If you actually humanly typed out the sentence: "My time zone is UTC, my IP address is 127.0.0.1, and my default language is set to English" that sentence would be subject to copyright.

However, since the facts themselves are still not subject to copyright, someone can still legally (as far as copyright is concerned) take your sentence and run:

    INSERT INTO data_trail (username, timezone, ip_address, language)
    VALUES ("itronitron", "UTC", "127.0.0.1", "English");

> how about Facebook making a guess that I like cats based on my previous click behavior? Isn't that an artistic interpretation of reality which should be copyrightable?

Once they record it somewhere, it is!

I'll give you an example:

Take for instance this string value: "fxtentacle is likes cats and I know it because he posted it on HN"

I have generated this string, and under US (and many other countries) copyright laws, I automatically own copyright to it, because it is my artistic interpretation of what I have observed.

You have no copyright to it, because it was my artistic interpretation, despite the fact that you are the subject of the art.

With privacy, you are generally looking to prevent the redistribution of facts, but only in specific circumstances.

Copyright does a very different thing, where it only prevents the redistribution of more creative expressions, but does so in broad circumstances.

If you take the typical data elements that you want to keep private and apply copyright law to them, I think you'll end up with more problems than solutions. Facts -- like your name -- are something that people need to reproduce just to do basic things, like have a conversation with you. I don't think we need to start all conversations with:

"By starting a conversation with me, you hereby grant and will grant me and affiliated discussion participants a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to reproduce, mention, perform, vocalize, remember and otherwise use your name for purposes of this conversation"

It sounds silly, but copyright is this broad in scope. It applies to everyone. For the purposes of privacy, you really need a much more narrow paradigm -- something that applies to strangers but not people who you expect to know things about you, like friends, family, or people you are voluntarily sharing with. This is probably why every privacy law on the planet is not an extension of copyright. They are two very different things.

So that superhuman app tracks if someone read the message; WhatApp, Telegram, and Signal do that too with their read receipts. Is that tracking? Why? Or why not? And I don't see anything about selling this data in that article btw.

People keep using all these words like "privacy" and "tracking" and "personal data", but my point was you need to clearly define what you mean with that, in a way that's workable. And "every single last bit of data that could possibly be recorded" is not really a workable definition IMO.

These kind of things are what you might call "opposition politics"; it's all very easy to make vague proposals when you're in the opposition, but once you're in government and need to actually start enacting workable realistic laws that take all the various legitimate interests in account (and I think there is some legitimate interest in collecting some data) things get much harder.

I do get the allure of cross-channel tracking and personalized Ads but maybe good enough could be reached differently.

I don't categorically reject Ads and data collection but the current data hunger is insatiable with little visible benefit to me.

The problem now is a lack of trust, not the least of which because there's often not that much transparency and very little accountability in the way of law, as well as various actors that constantly try to skirt the line (i.e. Facebook, Google, etc.)

> Like I said, they keep track of font usage. The billing is based on usage.

Adobe should be measuring usage based on referrers to their CDN.

> the privacy policy doesn't permit [...]

I'd prefer no tracking at all instead of trusting the goodwill of a company to follow through with its privacy policy.

24 seconds to load, 585 individual http requests. Crazy. You would think someone there would raise this as an issue.