j-c-hewitt

Unlike trademark, you do not lose your copyright registration for failure to enforce it. However, it makes it a lot easier for prospective defendants if you have a track record of ignoring infringements. Your registration is not in danger, but your ability to win as much as possible might be. Even works with no identifiable copyright owner are not necessarily considered 'abandoned,' which creates a lot of interesting issues, such as in the case of Google Books: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

The main thing with copyright is not like the risk of trademark dilution: it's just that not enforcing it makes it easier for defendants to bargain and argue for lighter penalties.

Content ID is essentially just Youtube moderation, whereas the other process is governed by the DMCA. Is that fair or proper...? IMO no but I don't think I know enough about it to say definitively.

Youtube in general is not liable for copyright infringement on content posted by users.

People love to talk about standing up to legal bullies, but lawyers are expensive. Copyright law is extremely friendly to plaintiffs and generous in terms of damages: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html

CBS would totally show up in a small town if they knew that they had a good chance of winning. Their lawyers are already on salary. It doesn't cost them anything and they will get a lot of money. They may also just try to get the venue changed. In fact, it is their duty to enforce their copyright claims, or they risk their ability to protect their IP in the future. So, it's unwise to do the equivalent of coating yourself in butter and serving yourself up to be devoured by Viacom IP attorneys.

In the 2019 case of Epic Games, Inc. v. Lucas in which a 14 year old boy counter-claimed a copyright claim filed by Epic over the defendant's posting of Youtube footage involving cheats in Fortnite. While the case did not go all the way, Epic did successfully extract a punitive settlement from the defendant. If he had not counter claimed, the lawsuit might have never happened, or they could have settled it before it was filed.

Perjury, defamation, maybe tortuous interference, depends on the nature of the situation.

Not sure what you mean exactly in your last sentence because of the double negative. They would sue the target of the claim for copyright infringement if they believe that they will win.

You can file a counter claim through Youtube: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807684?hl=en

Generally this should be done under advice of an attorney, because these counter notices set a ticking clock of ten business days during which the copyright holder must either sue the Youtuber for copyright infringement or the complaint will be cancelled. Not all Youtube claims related to copyright are counter claimable. There is a tendency among people to misjudge their actual risk and whether or not they infringed, so it is unwise to file these counter claims without advice from an attorney.

You can also file in your local jurisdiction for declaratory judgment if you receive a formal cease and desist notice, and if that C&D contains false claims then the plaintiff may be in trouble. A truly false and malicious DMCA claim can be countered with a defamation lawsuit as well.

You can also sue someone for any reason ("It's Tuesday! I hate you! I'm suing you!") at any time, but that doesn't mean that you will win.

Using short clips of the trailer for review purposes is clearly fair use. Often times, however, Youtubers think fair use protects them more than it actually does and do go overboard such as taking entire TV episodes and commenting over them. However different judges have seen the issue differently in different situations. So, if you really did infringe, but think you didn't, and file the counter claim, you are doomed, and copyright law is very generous to victorious plaintiffs.

The battery is the fastest-degrading component. It is also one of the most easily replaceable components, speaking in general and not specifically to the way Apple designs it to be non-removable. The desire to replace the fastest degrading component to extend the life of the device makes perfect sense from the consumer's perspective.

The court ruled in favor of the government: https://ecf.cofc.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2018cv...

There were some improprieties found as it relates to the conduct of Amazon's agents and in the RFP process, but it got the greenlight overall. This might be the problem with Amazon litigating the changes to the RFP process. Oracle already litigated the previous version of the RFP. It looks like the process changed in part to head off the perception that it was rigged in favor of Amazon. Now, Amazon alleges that this re-rigging made it rigged out of its favor.

So, it went:

Oracle: "This is rigged for Amazon! These requirements can only be met by Amazon! Also it's unfair that it can only be won by a single entity!"

Judge: "The Pentagon didn't want to have multiple clouds because it would defeat the reason for the project. We didn't find that the RFP was corrupt to the point of breaking the law, but it was definitely sort of corrupt, particularly in the case of the dude who was on the committee creating the RFP while simultaneously selling a startup to Amazon while simultaneously telling the Pentagon that he wasn't breaking the law and telling Amazon he was not breaking the law, but he was totally breaking the law."

This obviously put the Pentagon between the rock of leaving the RFP as-is and being sued again for corruption and the hard place of changing the RFP and being accused of improper political influence. If Trump had avoided taking a public stance on the issue it would have been much better for the Pentagon's situation, as this now creates a situation in which no matter what the Pentagon decided they could be credibly accused of corruption.

I don't think that's crazy. Why shouldn't local authorities, state DOTs, and the national DOT be obligated to also update a database that self driving cars use? They already have such databases for their own records, usage, and analysis. In a world in which SDCs are normal that is how you would expect it to work.

It's a bigger expectation to suppose that the car will perceive the environment better than a person would and make correct on-the-fly decisions about traffic signs when snow obscures the sign and a little bit of ice and muck obscures its cameras ever-so-slightly, making some of the sensors go half-berserk.

In the hypothetical world in which self driving cars are the norm and not the exception detours would be in the system so that SDCs would not need to read signs. Even now a lot of traffic maps get updated to show detours, delays, and temporary closures due to accidents.

FWIW I am a near-term self-driving car skeptic and have been for a long time. I just think that these are not the kind of issues that really pose a major obstacle whereas drunk people wandering across the street are.

Nothing and it happens all the time. This is something that a human driver familiar with the road will notice and it will be unlikely to cause an accident. An out-of-towner might get into an accident. An automated vehicle would ideally not even be looking at signs and just operating from its stored data.

In Europe the benefits are not necessarily tied to being diagnosed with a disabling condition. In the US they are, so people do what they can to manifest a disabling condition so that they can qualify for generous benefits along with drugs that can be resold on the black market. Clearly this was not the intended result but it's sort of a third rail politically so there has been no real movement towards reforming this in any meaningful direction.

The Federal government operates a comprehensive system to manage milk prices to consumers and also to subsidize marginal dairy producers. It's also illegal to sell raw milk and other similar products in most states. The milk producers are often not making money from the sale of milk. When milk prices drop below certain levels, the federal government steps in to subsidize dairy farmers. This creates perverse incentives for the dairy farmers to produce more even when the market is signalling that more dairy farms should close and consolidate.

The entire system is currently pretty strange. Even family farms wind up feeding into corporate wholesale conglomerates. So the "small farms" that are non economic wind up supplying the corporations who pasteurize, package, process, and market the milk for retail both as milk and as other finished products. The corporations that can bear the regulatory and other costs wind up profiting from the farmers who are indentured to the government. They may not be literally indentured but it's a good metaphor for the relationship. They get bottom price milk from subsidized producers while keeping the retail profits.

Grocery stores have tons and tons of loss leaders. Anything perishable unless it is premium priced is probably going to lose money. Dealing with low priced perishable, refrigerated, fragile, leaky products is really tough. The profits are in dry goods, drugs, supplements, and prepared foods.

Some would but most aren't, so we see the same molasses drip of deceleration as companies that say they intend to hyper-grow stay stuck in a region that wants to hyper-stagnate.

The United States is one of the largest nations in the world in terms of land mass and there are thousands of counties all over the country that would bend over so far backwards that their spines would snap to enable real estate development for any number of Bay Area companies. T\he United States has a world class network of interstate highways that enables rapid motorized transit at high volumes in every state of the nation. There is also a network of third world caliber airports that are nonetheless serviceable.

Google is a company that sells multi hundred dollar clicks to lawyers, locksmiths, insurance companies, and brokerages. Plus a lot of cheap ads to everyone else. It is not very romantic to be writing software to connect people to the DUI lawyer they are looking for with incrementally improving efficiency.

It's not nuts to create a romantic narrative to motivate your employees, but it is more than a little dishonest to try to convince investors that they are buying into something that's heading into a better direction than the digital edition of the Yellow Pages. However, you can't say that investors have not wanted something to believe in -- and Alphabet was more than happy to fulfill the desire for tech stock fairy tales. Despite this the fundamentals of selling search ad insurance leads to insurance salesmen is a great business from a numbers perspective.

I think it's sort of an open question about whether or not it makes sense to burnish corporate brands with saving the world fairy tales, but the smartest people in America have decided that fairy tales are what works, so that is what they put people to work in burnishing and promoting. Obviously it has worked pretty well for a lot of companies, especially considering that they are competing with companies that sell candy, toothpaste, and fizzy corn syrup fluid for investor attention and acclaim. Even McDonalds is now saving the world with burgers or something, and that's because these kinds of spiritual fables have been so successful in helping companies to stand out from the pack.

Your Yahoo comparison is a good one. Google at the end of the day is a marginally improved iteration of Yahoo with a slightly broader product offering and better core services. However, Google's brand fluff makes it appear to be something so much different and more grand than Yahoo 2.

For what it's worth I think the old Google statement that they were here to organize the world's information and to make it more accessible and organized is a big enough goal as it is: they don't also have to be a rocketry and car navigation system company.

How is the board "independent"? Just calling it "independent" does not make it "independent." It sure sounds better, but "Facebook Creates Star Chamber of Moderators to Rubber Stamp Decisions It Wanted to Make Anyway" doesn't sound as respectable.

Right. I get the sense that most developers browse with adblock on, but the average user experience is for their computer to be effectively running Prime 95 during regular web browsing.

I used to think that people would really care about this but because only the advertisers are being defrauded everyone does tend to look the other way. I wouldn't shut up about ad fraud and how big a deal it was going to be years ago and I was just wrong because people in this sector just have a really high tolerance for crime and people are just looking the other way.

I played EQ as a young kid and I remember EQPrices! Really cool. Never bought anything, though, not having money and all that.

Blizzard accidentally stumbled on the biggest business model of the 2020s-2050s: digital retirement homes combined with the GenX/Millennial equivalent of re-releases of Beatles albums.

I realized I was aging when I figured out that WoW Classic is Oldies Radio but for people in my age bracket.

Why would you buy such an ad given that almost every election in the US is geography bound?

It's really a question of whether or not Facebook should submit to FEC regulation or not. Other media outlets that run political ads need to submit to FEC regulation. Why does Facebook get an exemption? Newspapers literally have to run political ads by their editorial board and TV has to do something similar. It's one of the reasons why political ads are so bland and content-free: they don't want to make any claims that could be evaluated as true or false.

If you want to do business in China, you have to comply with Chinese laws including those on speech. If you do not want to comply with those laws, you cannot do business in China. Both are fine and both are legal, but you cannot have it both ways at the same time.

You cannot flout the laws in China and continue to do business in China. This should also be reciprocal: Chinese companies should not be able to do business in the United States while flouting the laws of the United States.

This isn't true in most cases. Amazon does buy stuff wholesale through their Vendor program. Almost all sellers are also buying wholesale apart from manufacturers going direct to consumer.

If it is shipped & sold by Amazon, Amazon already paid for it from their supplier. If it is shipped & sold by SomeOtherStore, generally they bought it already from someone. There are a lot of dropshippers also and that is a different story.

Amazon similarly protects itself with onerous contracts that can force suppliers to eat the cost of unsold products at times, and does whatever it can to avoid buying unproven products.

Grocery stores and other retailers in general can be protected by refund policies and buyback policies so they are not necessarily taking as much risk especially on packaged products with long expiry dates. They can also liquidate stuff that doesn't get purchased to recoup some money.

They're pretty cheap, so maybe 5 or 6 mowed lawns.

He even picked the bad variant of the Amazon Basics keyboard.

Almost any top brand you can think of manufactures extensively in China.

I too can grow salad in my basement but it's pointless when I can use the sun, which is a mass of incandescent gas -- a giant nuclear furnace that I don't have to pay to use.

I got the feeling that he likes his dead dog more than the wife he met on... Tinder. If my wife had diabetes, or really any medical condition, I would never reveal that in and article written in the New York Times. Her nagging him and having diabetes appear to be her only qualities from his description in the article.

All I get from this is that Dusty was an awesome celebrity dog who died and this guy's wife whom he met on Tinder sucks and is diabetic. The structure also implies that he put his dog down so that he wouldn't get in between him and his bullying wife.

I would never write anything disparaging or potentially embarrassing about my wife in a public article.

The headline is pretty misleading and I have not seen people in the seller community interpret it in this way. SBA is just a different way to sell. They're not getting rid of the other options. It can be a good option for some kinds of brands. You would probably not pick the option otherwise.

Also big nitpick here: gray market has a specific definition and this author misuses the term. The sellers he refers to are not necessarily selling gray market products. Another inaccuracy is that you win the buy box by having the lowest price. This is not true. Any experienced Amazon person could tell you that it is a blend of price, fulfillment method (prime or not), delivery latency (is this offer for a product that is in a warehouse physically close to you), and seller feedback rating.

SBA is actually a good idea from Amazon and they even put in some volatility protections for people who enroll. It is also a good alternative to the Vendor program with some of the benefits without some of its headaches.

If you look at it from the perspective of it being a better alternative to Vendor for some brands, it makes a lot more sense. It is not pitched to conventional sellers who stock tons of brands. It's pitched to brands who want to sell direct to consumer on Amazon. Historically Vendors have also gotten the kinds of indirect marketing benefits that are being pitched to new users of SBA, so even that is not actually a big change.

For example, Vendor products (those shipped and sold by Amazon.com) have always received a massive buy box benefit even if the price is not the lowest. In the weighted buy box system Amazon has always assigned itself a massive bonus score. So in that there is not much that is changing.

Naturally, "incremental bureaucratic change pitched to brands as a middle ground between two existing bureaucratic programs at gargantuan mega-company pitched to other faceless corporations" is not that interesting of an article. This type of opt-in program would work for a very specific type of company and isn't really indicative of a big upcoming change of how the whole thing works.