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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Yet another way in which something labeled "smart" has a negative connotation...

Whatever technology is adopted would then have to be purchased and implemented by anyone swept up by the law—from big tech platforms to your local research library.

Big Tech aren't going to be the ones worried --- they are probably more likely to be the ones pushing for more of this shit. We already have nearly-mandatory software in the form of the browser near-monopoly, locked-down walled gardens, and the like.

Stallman's "Right to Read" is worth reading again whenever something like this comes up.

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As a general rule of thumb, things like this are named to compensate for what they aren't. Look at the PATRIOT Act.

Is there a word for this? Like misnomer but even further. Maybe “antinomer”?

Doublespeak?

I'm not sure if it's named for what it isn't or rather named to make it clear that no reasonable or virtues person could disagree with it. Another, more harmless example for me is "natural scroll direction" in macOS.

Unrelated to the main thread, but I would content “Natural” scrolling is a different epistemological process. There is/was a lot of user research on this topic. Inverting the scroll direction on a trackpad relative to the display is more in line with how people expect it should move. This configuration was determined to be the better configuration through a rigorous program of experimentation. Calling the default “inverted” or “reversed” sends the wrong message. The term “natural” is just trying make people feel comfortable with the default configuration. It is trying to convince people of the results of an experiment. Naming a law that is not passed is trying to bias the results of the experiment itself.

My point exactly was that the thing being named is not necessarily bad. I use the "natural scrolling" every day with my trackpad. It's the same pattern though where you couldn't possibly want the other thing (which btw. with a mouse is a reasonable option)

How is "intuitive" different from "natural"? They both have an empty meaning.

I find it extremely natural. Was delighted to find out that chrome books support it as well!

Every OS released in the past ten years supports it.

Only really using macOS, so I wouldn't know. But that's great to hear! Maybe they will also catch up with trackpad technology at some point, the £150 Chromebook I tried was astonishingly good!

I couldn't find out how to enable it on Windows 10 without toggling a registry key.

I only use it for a few hours a month but unnatural scrolling just feels wrong now.

Touchpad -> Scroll and zoom -> Scrolling direction.

Oh yeah I meant with a mouse. The one thing I still rely on Windows for is managing and editing my photos (Capture One, Affinity, Topaz).

I worked for Macrovision once upon a time.

There is good money to be made both making DRM to sell to content/software producers and also running shakedowns of infringement.

The Googles of the world may or may not be our saviors here. Depending on if it is cheaper to fight the bill or adopt the measures.

Google already stabbed us in the back the moment they adopted upload filtering on YouTube.

Of course, the reason why they did this was that nobody would actually license video content to an anyone-can-upload platform and have their video sit next to unlicensed Family Guy "funny moments" compilations. The whole purpose of the system was to "clean up" YouTube to make it presentable to off-platform media companies. However, because of this origin story, YouTube basically treats its on-platform creators way worse than the off-platform media creators that originally lobbied for a Content ID system.

Today's YouTubers are copyright owners just as much as large MCN/CMS partners are, but they are not treated as such. YouTube did not even offer a way for YouTubers to monetize reuploads of their own video until recently. Sure, you can send a DMCA 512 takedown notice, as the law demands, but that requires you to first search for, locate, and watch all those infringing reuploads to check for fair use. The entire genre of video essays and reviews is under constant threat of spurious takedowns, as content bots cannot adjudicate fair use and YouTube has no incentive to consider it themselves. Even worse, you can't even block your video in countries that do not have fair use, meaning that anyone who can get Japanese jurisdiction can sue the ever-loving shit out of you and win. Not even actual lawyers know how to navigate Google's system[0]. It exists purely to privilege one set of media interests over another.

There's two ways something like SMART could go.

Optimistically, it could put online creators back on a level playing field with large industry titans. Right now, copyright enforcement is extremely expensive and time-consuming; unless you happen to know how to sweet-talk Google into giving you an MCN/CMS account. Facebook wouldn't have been able to bootstrap their video platform on the backs of stolen YouTube videos had something like SMART existed: there would have been a whole database of who-owns-what that Facebook would need to respect.

More realistically, SMART will almost certainly exist for the same reasons as the CASE Act: to enable new kinds of copyright-related shenanigans while not actually fixing the problems that the people lobbying for it want to be fixed. I genuinely get the feeling that large industry titans hate DMCA 512 as much as I hate DMCA 1201, and just wish they could make their enforcement problems Google's by suing them on a daily basis. In their defense, copyright used to work that way; but we don't live in that world anymore and we don't want to go back to that world.

Google will lobby very hard to have Content ID validated by or grandfathered into SMART, because large directionless companies like pointless laws they can bullshit. I doubt they will black out their logo like a decade ago when SOPA/PIPA were on the table. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though.

[0] In the most egregious example, someone filed false takedown requests in Bungie's name to disparage them, because they were angry that Bungie had taken down their music reuploads. Google was entirely unresponsive to Bungie's pleas to retract the clearly fraudulent takedowns.

There's a canned response to the Content ID rants: https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

See also: Smart Motorways in the UK. Otherwise known as "how can we funnel billions of pounds into the construction industry for zero or negative benefits to tax payers"

https://www.electropages.com/blog/2022/03/smart-motorways-ki...

https://transportactionnetwork.org.uk/campaign/climate-chang...

I feel so uneasy driving on smart motorways. The amount of times I’ve seen morons continue to drive in closed lanes, I have absolutely no faith that if I broke down or burst a tyre that I wouldn’t end up with someone smashing into me at 70mph.

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