good shout, I think some recent typography changes made the bolding more subtle on mobile. I've pushed an update underlining them and it should be live momentarily!
1,971 karma · joined March 24, 2011
Even following Bridgeman though, there is a teeny bit of analysis that you have to do to determine that the reproduction is a faithful photographic copy of the original. In most cases that's straightforward, but again, if you really want to limit risk and as in this case your application doesn't require a particular image, it might be worth cutting out that analysis altogether and going with media that is simply outside of the range of copyright terms.
Really lucked out here that .gov is explicitly enumerated in a published list. For basically any other TLD your first (big!) issue will be finding such a list.
I also uploaded the collection to Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:USD...
And for several years have run a Twitter bot that posts one image every few hours: https://twitter.com/pomological/
In case you want to try out my defaults: `tab` and `shift+tab` advance/retreat words to the next blank, and `page up` and `page down` (on a Mac, `fn` + `up` or `down`) do blank-agnostic word advance/retreat.
(I also haven't documented this yet, but `[`/`]` and `{`/`}` do cursor-perpendicular box-wise movement in blank-agnostic and blank-aware steps, respectively. One of the hardest parts of this is just describing these kinds of movement.)
Instead, it backs up the contents of the pages that are linked to at the time of the tweets. Frankly my tool doesn't do anything interesting at all with the URLs — it just submits the "expanded URL" that was tweeted to the Wayback Machine and lets it sort out any and all 301s.
One of the arguments ESA made seems to resonate with people. I don't think it's at all dishonest to point that out.
We will address the comments more completely with the response filing. In the meantime, I'm glad your 9 minute list exists in case people prefer it to the original.
Well, there's legitimate and there's legitimate. We're not discussing here whether they should try to prevent piracy, it's whether they should block efforts to get a small temporary exemption related to non-infringing uses of abandoned software put in place for the next three years.
It's frustrating to me that ESA and some of the other respondents here try to bootstrap from a copyright purpose to non-copyright ones. Nothing in this exemption would render infringement legal; if granted, it would just remove legal uncertainty from circumvention for limited non-infringing uses. In that sense, the legitimacy of the underlying copyright concern is kind of irrelevant.
Just wanted to say that, as others have noted, the excerpted words come from a 71 page reply, but I wouldn't say it was anything like picking four unrepresentative words. Take, for example, this longer paragraph from the filing:
> Hacking video game access controls facilitates piracy and therefore undermines the core anti-piracy purposes of Section 1201. As explained above, hacking the video game access controls requires, by definition, hacking of the video game console or similar device in order to play the hacked video game. Once the access controls for the video game console are hacked, regardless of the purported purpose or intent of the hacker, any content, including pirated games, can be played on a video game console.
> What's more, console hackers may distribute their console-hacking solution to gamers that have no intention of using it for the purposes stated in the proposed exemption. The risk of piracy is even greater on personal computers and similar devices that do not utilize device-based access controls to prevent the installation of unauthorized software. The individual can use consoles to make and store infringing copies of copyrighted games and other content and to distribute these unlawful copies online to a large audience.
You can't really go line-by-line through a 71-page comment, but it's fair to say that that sort of rhetoric—conflating "hacking" with piracy with illegality, regardless of context—runs throughout, and is what my colleague highlighted here.
DMCA says: if you want to have a safe harbor, these are the basic things you have to do. You have to name an agent, take notices, takedown promptly, have a repeat infringer policy, etc. If you don't do those things, you lose your safe harbor.
SoundCloud does all those things, so they get the safe harbor.
The additional systems they have chosen to put in place are just that, additional. Adhering to DMCA is not required (though you don't get the safe harbor if you don't) and it's not a ceiling on what kinds of arrangements companies can make with each other.
But again, you're right that it's the thing that burned me here, and I think they merit a lot more scrutiny than they get, and I'm trying to lead that scrutiny more in other places. Prohibiting additional measures would also tangle up other site "guidelines" like the Vimeo one I mentioned, or even YouTube's ability to do content matching and revenue splitting.
You've identified a really key problem though, that those additional rules, whether offensive or inoffensive, are made completely at the discretion of online services and generally without input from users.
I've got no evidence that it was an actual DMCA notice, and the language suggesting it was an automated match seems much more likely to me.
That said, I don't think I have any insider knowledge from my time there, but also wouldn't want to give the impression that I was revealing non-public facts about their processes. It may be an abundance of caution, but it would certainly paint a target on the argument.
A major, major problem across many, many UGC sites is that, because the DMCA does not require them to forward takedown notices in their entirety affected users, there is information asymmetry at play. I filled out a dispute form on the site, which required consenting that my counter-notice would be forwarded on to the complaining party (if such a party exists).
If there is a DMCA notice, and if I can get it, and if I can show it was in bad faith, I'd absolutely raise the idea of pursuing a 512(f) claim against "the assholes" you mention. But 512(f) doesn't work against what I wager happened, which is just a media partner engaging in copyfraud unbeknownst to SoundCloud.
If that's what happened, SoundCloud likely has a contract saying that the media partner won't do that, and could terminate their agreement or, who knows, sue over breach of contract. But I, the user, don't have that course of action available to me.
These are good questions, though I disagree with the characterization here. Like: I don't think anybody's circumventing the DMCA, so much as tacking on additional measures not required by law. Anybody who's doing algorithmic enforcement, including YouTube and newly Vimeo, is in the same boat; in large part it's the result of negotiations with media partners who demand it in exchange for access to content. So, they're doing something separate from what the law requires (in addition to what the law requires) in order to satisfy partners... not really circumvention.
BUT it sucks. And it especially sucks when it's done in a way that doesn't respect users. And I've written about that lots, though not so much in this particular piece.
Sites have all kinds of "guidelines", and some of them are offensive and others aren't as much. Vimeo used to prohibit video gameplay uploads, for example; that's probably not something I'd campaign on.
I probably should have put an extra sentence at the end to explain what I mean by the line you quoted, but I guess I didn't think people would read it as "bootlicking horseshit." In fact, I'm sorry to say I think you've read it exactly backwards.
I meant to emphasize: the issue is not my particular upload of Apollo 13 audio, which is obviously also available from a million other places. If you read the thing and think it's about my complaining that this particular audio is taken down, that gives SoundCloud WAY too easy an out: they just comply with their own policies, maybe expedite the process for a (1) former employee who (2) works in copyright policy and (3) got the dispute to the top of Hacker News, and then they can wipe their hands of it.
No, making this issue about any one piece of content, my own included, misses the forest for the trees. I am mad, and I will stay mad even once SoundCloud's reasonable employees doing their job flick a switch and reinstate my upload. I don't want other people to feel like they can relax once my upload is back in place. It will be back in place, but what we need is systemic improvements to eradicate the creeping permissions culture.