1,787 karma · joined August 3, 2020
IT hobbyist. I run my own servers for fun.
Except, by choosing to honor it, they decided that it is legally valid.
The appropriate response to a copyright claim against material that the claimant clearly does not own is 'unless you can prove that you own this material, come back with a court order.'
At one point Microsoft was issuing DMCA takedowns against (then) openOffice.org mirrors, allegedly on the grounds that any large file with a name that contained the word 'office' must be a 'pirated' version of MS Office. Taking these takedowns at face value would have ended the openOffice.org project and absolutely could not have been respected in good faith.
These kind of abuses are ongoing from multiple parties, including bots, copyright trolls, and crazed ideologues who file completely fraudulent DMCA takedowns to force anonymous personalities to disclose their identities. There is no alternative but to consider DMCA takedowns on legal merits because so many of them have no merits whatsoever.
Having the funding to do this 'at scale' is just as much a cost of doing business as paying for power and connectivity. If hosting platforms don't want to do this, then they should purchase an amendment to the DMCA to impose criminal sanctions on entities that serve fraudulent DMCA takedowns.
Intellectual property law is about controlling what you can see, and do, with your own eyes, ears, and hardware.
If you stream a video on YouTube, YouTube can arbitrarily take it away from you whenever they want. If you download a video from YouTube, it's yours to keep. Tools like youtube-dl take away the power YouTube has over you, and that's an unacceptable loss to the ownership class even if they suffer no financial losses.
In recent years, the police in London had a policy to harass anyone who was seen using a camera in a large, but completely unpublished, geofenced region of the city. That's not US/China/Saudi-level police state bad--as in, the UK police aren't able to arbitrarily confiscate cash or shoot people with impunity for having the wrong skin color--but it's bad enough that I consider such behavior a feature of a police state.
Any jurisdiction where it's not possible to perform the normal functions of everyday life, including creating works of art through photography, without fear of hostile police interaction is to some degree or other a police state.
Factually speaking, Trump did blow up the deficit, and failing to report that, instead of reporting it, would be indicative of bias.
Budgets requested by Republican vs Democratic administrations are different as the parties have different spending and taxation priorities. Reporting budgets without acknowledging that the parties are spending/borrowing/taxing in different areas would be a lie.
Printing news stories that make Republicans look bad is not indicative of bias if those stories are, as is usually the case, factually true. The solution to this problem is not to complain about media bias but rather for the Republican party to do fewer things that look bad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_States_federal_bud...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud...
If you do not consider those news outlets adequately centerist, that may be an indication that your personal Overton window is somewhat skewed.
Just look at how badly most of the world has handled COVID-19.
In contrast, the Republican party stole medical supplies from blue states[0] during the acute phase of the pandemic and chose to minimize the federal response to SARS-CoV-2 because the pandemic was only killing Democrats[1]. Depriving your political opponents of medical supplies during a pandemic is arguably a crime against humanity.
Neither of these choices are particularly good, but one choice is far worse than the other.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-admin-seizing-ppe/
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-s...
Google and DDG, however, are very good at finding authentic reviews in niche market segments where authentic reviews are still common. The fact that search engines can find these reviews suggests that the lack of authentic reviews for mainstream products is much more due to a lack of authentic reviews on the web rather than a problem with search engines.
Definitionally, companies without viable competitors are monopolies. Microsoft still has a defacto monopoly on PC operating systems as Linux isn't a viable choice for 95%+ of PC users. This market situation is extremely detrimental to consumers but isn't illegal.
DDG won't even return Stack ("Your question has been deleted as a duplicate") Overflow results for technical questions.
If you Google '$PRODUCT review' and only get Amazon-affiliate scam sites pretending to be review sites, it's not because Google has been SEOed but rather because there are no actual reviews of $PRODUCT.
Aside from a botched update last year, where Google would only return results that were selling things, Google Search is still very good at finding information that exists.
A monopoly does not mean literally zero competition; it need only mean no competitors that are good enough to be viable.
https://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2...
On what timescale?
Freedom House's metrics on freedom and democratic governance have been in retreat for over a decade now[0], due both to increasing authoritarianism in the underdeveloped world and the rise of illiberal[1], anti-democratic, movements in the developed world.
Human development indicators--such as the percentage of the global population in extreme poverty--have certainly been rising up to the end of 2019, but the pandemic has been forecast, by some, to undo several decades of those improvements[2].
> I would posit that what has happened is that second order effects are now more visible like the crime that was not reported and is now reported.
This is absolutely true. In the US, the crime rate has been falling since the 1990s but most Americans continue to believe that the crime rate is rising.[3] In part some of this perception is due to media sensationalism but a very large part of it is, to be blunt, the result of deliberate political propaganda.[3]
> A Hoover dam would probably not be built now because the communities affected are more empowered and have the resources to mobilize political opinion. ... I am not saying this is a bad thing or a good thing
I believe the privileging of local preferences over collective needs has been extremely bad for society as a whole because it has prevented collective needs from being addressed. For example, the housing affordability crisis that is gripping much of the anglosphere is largely due to local preferences against housing construction to override the need for a growing population to have housing. Collective needs that impact millions of people are more important than the whims of local NIMBYs. The same applies to public infrastructure and mega-projects, including nuclear power. We most likely need nuclear power to save the planet, and that need is far more important than the property values of people who are in the immediate area of new power plants. Our current NIMBY-first system does not allow for this.
[0] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2019/democracy...
[1] This word does not mean 'conservative.'
[2] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/half-billion-people-...
[3] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-conv...
American corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder return. The entire public company system in the US is a paperclip maximizer that is designed to vacuum up every bit of economic value available on the face of the earth and give it to shareholders.
With 80% of all US stock value owned by 10% of Americans[0], the emergent goal of the economy is to suck up every available cent and give it to people like Bezos and Zucker------.
For people like Bezos and Zucker------, that's a good thing. For the rest of us? Not so much.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/...
The other big example of this problem is the massive overgrowth of the FIRE sector, which has largely eaten the US economy whole while accomplishing nothing other than its own enrichment.
[0] For the purposes of this argument, 'actual stuff' does apply to intangible goods, like software, that expands the production possibilities curve.
US response towards Saudi can best be summarized as completely indifferent.
That was the start of Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs, but the current leadership in China has adopted a broad policy of persecuting racial minorities. I'm not sure what their ultimate motivations are but they are targeting many, if not most, of China's non-Han ethnic groups without regard to whether they pose a terrorism risk or not.
Breaking up the Chinese government is not on the table.
Facebook was used as a platform for a well-funded campaign to identify ill and vulnerable people to bring them to extremist churches specifically for the purposes of political radicalization.
This is a step change in the level of 'wrong' from churches merely using Facebook-guided advertising to exploit vulnerable people for religious purposes.
The entire principle of popular sovereignty, as exercised through representative democracy, is that leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the people. Minority rule--no matter how it is codified or how long it has been in effect--is incompatible with this principle.
America can be either a country ruled by a Republican party answerable accountable only to rural interests or it can be a democracy. It cannot be both.
I've noticed that random comments which go against the shibboleths of the -- for lack of a better term -- 'orange man good' narrative can be subject to strange downvoting behavior.
Some of the posts that get hit by this, such as yours, are so innocuous that I'm not convinced that the targeting is organic as opposed the effects of some strongly opinionated s---head with a botnet and nothing better to do with his time.