cdoctorow

This is specifically what I've written on the subject (I quote this in the book):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...

> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

Yup.

For clarity, I stole "felony contempt of business-model" from Jay Freeman of the Cydia project.

I did a whole design fiction project to answer this question:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

It's not incorrect to use this word colloquially. See this post:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...

Specifically:

> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

See: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...

> Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

(proof of life: https://x.com/doctorow/status/1804638204286656974)

Yup.

> Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-...

Here's the thing:

> Misinformation about COVID being the most prescient and recent example for most people probably, propaganda from all sides that continues radicalization and polarization, and also tons of harassment campaigns arranged across sites and services too numerous to name, the most vile content you can think of in whatever stripe comes to mind for you, etc. etc., Section 230 prevents any of the websites that are caught distributing it from being held liable. And I cannot envision a situation where being held legally culpable for such material would not directly incentivize, and with ZEAL, those tech monoliths to get the shit under control.

Disinformation is not illegal. Even if platforms had joint liability for disinformation, that liability is...zero. There is nothing in US law that prohibits disinformation. Rather, there is a Constitutional right to speak without state sanction, e.g. the First Amendment.

Likewise: the vast majority of harassment (as in > 99.9%) does not rise to the level of illegal conduct, and where it does, the cases are fact intensive and the relief is almost certainly injunctive, which is to say, if you prove to a court that certain conduct is illegal harassment, the best you can hope for is that the judge will order the harasser to cease.

Which is to say: the two kinds of content you worry about the platforms carrying, for which you think shared liability will present some remedy, are legal to carry and there is no liability, shared or otherwise, for hosting it.

For avoidance of doubt, I am profoundly concerned about both harassment and disinformation... And also getting rid of CDA 230 will not create a legal obligation on the platforms to do anything about either.

I literally came out of retirement to rejoin EFF and fight DRM at the W3C. I managed to get the W3C membership to reject DRM twice, only to be overruled by the executive (the W3C's constitution allows for the director to treat votes as advisory). It was the only time in W3C history that anything remotely like this happened. In the end, EFF publicly resigned from the W3C over it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-direct...

Obviously, I failed. But I did nothing else for four years but fight DRM at the W3C. I wrote op-eds. I personally telephoned every single W3C member's rep to talk to them about this - many times. I published hundreds of articles. I did radio interviews. Podcasts. We organized an in-person protest and picketed a W3C event.

There was never a "day when EFF, Cory Doctorow...kept mum while DRM was being added to the HTML5 spec."

> a broken link and weird marketing language that's clearly not coming from Doctorow, it's like that Metal Gear 2 ending when the Colonel starts to speak in gibberish

This was the alt text for one of the images, which I accidentally pasted into the tweet. It's not "marketing language" - it's a blurb. I try to include alt text for all my images, but the thread composing tool I was using (chirr) had a glitch and I didn't see that in the preview.

I find that bizarre. It's just a mailman instance. Did the bot send you a confirmation email? Did you try emailing me instead? A few times over the 15-ish years that I ran the list, Mailman has failed to honor unsub requests, and in each case, it turned out to be because the user signed up with a different send-to than their return-to - for example, if you signed up as doctorow-list+youremail@gmail.com, and then send an unsub from youremail@gmail.com, Mailman (correctly) rejects the unsub request, because it doesn't have a subscriber called youremail@gmail.com. In those (rare) cases, I take care of it manually.

If you're still subscribed and not able to unsub, please just email me, doctorow@craphound.com, and I'll unsubscribe you by hand.

Exciting!

He really is a terrific writer.

And Adam is tremendous; I just binge-listened to so much of the Factually back-catalog!

Thank you - even I don't always agree with me.

It's not entirely a coincidence that Tim and I sound alike on this subject! We grew up together at the same hippie alternative school in Toronto and then both came under the influence of Larry Lessig in our adult lives.

Tim and I got a chance to catch up at a Brussels antitrust conference last month and it was great to go over all the ways that our backgrounds contributed to our work in adulthood:

https://www.cra-brusselsconference.com/home/Programme

All of my Twitter threads also appear as blog posts:

Here's this one: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopi...

It's also available as a Mastodon thread: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/107179959514393968

And an ad-free, tracker-free, libre newsletter: https://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/2021-October/000...

It's also mirrored to Medium: https://doctorow.medium.com/all-of-science-gets-a-general-in...

And Tumblr: https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/666303506776...

There's also fulltext RSS: https://pluralistic.net/feed/

The text itself is licensed CC BY, so if none of those formats suit your taste, you can reformat it and republish it, and even charge money for it.

ETA: Here's the methodology behind this: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

and here's the rubric for it: https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

(also available as a podcast:) https://ia601408.us.archive.org/16/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podca...

All of my Twitter threads also appear as blog posts:

Here's this one: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopi...

It's also available as a Mastodon thread: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/107179959514393968

And an ad-free, tracker-free, libre newsletter: https://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/2021-October/000...

It's also mirrored to Medium: https://doctorow.medium.com/all-of-science-gets-a-general-in...

And Tumblr: https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/666303506776...

There's also fulltext RSS: https://pluralistic.net/feed/

The text itself is licensed CC BY, so if none of those formats suit your taste, you can reformat it and republish it, and even charge money for it.

ETA: Here's the methodology behind this: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

and here's the rubric for it: https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

(also available as a podcast:) https://ia601408.us.archive.org/16/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podca...

It was me - my browser lost its cookie!

BTW, it looks like at least one version of the installer included a binary, though the creator says that's not true anymore, so you were (partially) right and I was (partially) wrong.

This is simply untrue.

The .NET file that Adobe served a DMCA512 notice on doesn't contain any of Adobe's copyrighted code. It's an unpacker and installer that users run on the software they download separately from Adobe's Chinese distributor.

This is emphatically not a copyright violation of ANY kind, but it's especially not a violation of copyright that would entitle Adobe to use DMCA 512 to have it expeditiously removed. A DMCA 512 claim is explicitly - and solely - a mechanism for removing unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work. Again, this is a .NET file that has instructions for unpacking a standards-defined .ZIP archive and then installing its components. It's NOT a copy of Adobe's code. DMCA 512 has no place here.

And while it's NOT a violation of DMCA 512 to host this batch file, it IS a violation of DMCA 512 to file a baseless takedown against it. The DMCA's requirement for a "good faith belief" that a file infringes copyright, "on pain of perjury," makes Adobe the sole lawbreaker in this story.

==

Separately: You might be wondering if this is a DMCA 1201 violation (that's the part of the DMCA that deals with "circumvention" of "a technological protection measure" that "controls access" to a copyrighted work.

It's not. There's no TPM in a ZIP file, so there's no circumvention in unpacking it.

But even if it was, Adobe didn't send a 1201 takedown (those don't really exist, because there's no 1201 safe harbor, though sometimes firms send 1201-related cease-and-desists), they sent a 512 takedown.

Again, a 512 takedown only ever applies when there is distribution without authorization. There is no distribution. It's inarguable - and provable. The .NET code is (was) on github for anyone to inspect. It is unequivocally NOT a copy of Adobe Flash or any other work that originated with Adobe.

All my stuff is mirrored on Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon, my newsletter and my blog; the easiest way to find old posts in the blog: pluralistic.net

Thank you!

Thanks, that's awfully kind of you. The third Little Brother book, Attack Surface, is out on Oct 12. We're recording the audiobook this week (fully remote - I'm in my garage, the director is in her house, and the actor, Amber Benson, is in her basement studio and we're all vtc'ed together -- Amber's amazing, but the process is...weird).

https://www.polygon.com/2020/3/13/21177769/cory-doctorow-att...

There's also a new edition of LB/Homeland coming on July 7 with an introduction by Ed Snowden.

I'm sorry if it felt like I was running away! That is, indeed, my standard joke when someone who seems to be a fully grown adult tells me they've been reading me since childhood, since in my own timesense, my entire published life feels very short.

But I'm pretty sure I wasn't running away -- more likely just moving on to the next thing (it's often the case that people who book me in for talks schedule things immediately after, like faculty meet-and-greets to justify the expense of paying my way there, etc, and I try not to leave people standing around).

Hey there. I certainly don't recall this exchange, and it sounds rather out of character for me. I have consulted for Disney on and off for a decade and was the inaugural artist in residence for the Blue Sky and R&D groups at WDI. Today my wife is the head of Studiolab at WDS (my work on the Ghost Post project last year helped WDI R&D win a Thea, and they were kind enough to credit the work to me).

I literally can't imagine having said these things (at that particular Siggraph I spent several hours chatting with the WDI R&D people who were on the committee and had booked me in, and who were kind enough to give me a bunch of laser-cut HM merch they made just for me) and I have never to my recollection been deliberately rude to someone from Disney (likewise I try to take real pains to be kind to people who do me the honor of coming up for a book signing).

But if anything I said came across as anything like this, I apologize unreservedly. I can only imagine that some kind of horribly botched joke came out very wrong indeed and I am dismayed to learn I made such a poor impression. I hope to run into you at some future event and make a better one.

Thanks,

Cory