It would be clearer that they are requiring you to read the tweet first if the notice said “You MUST read the article on Twitter before retweeting”. Using “can” implies it’s optional when it apparently isn’t.
Not that I’m trying to excuse the idiots though...
Is there a legal difference between the FBI demanding the data and them paying for it? If Sabre is willing to sell this data and it is being paid for, is there anything (short of passing New US Privacy legislation) that the courts could do to stop the FBI from buying it from them anyway?
How legal/illegal is copyright trolling? If the only real cost of doing it is the court filings, why haven't opponents to the copyright maximalists ever sued politicians pushing this kind of thing for (possibly fake) copyright violations using the laws they wrote?
This might make some interesting blog stories: Politicians indicted/convicted by the laws they wrote (or voted for at least).
I just looked up my wife’s name (I had already reported the entries against mine) and I found at least 7 entries all with the “In 2015” text shown in the post and on the same 8/27 date but for different addresses across the US. There may be people with that name at those addresses but the chances of them *all* submitting the same text on the exact same date (even via some “press this button now” service) have to be effectively zero.
I wasn't 100% sure at first glance whether “People Would Pay A Hell Of A Lot More…” meant “People Would Have To Pay A Hell Of A Lot More…” or “People Would Be Willing To Pay A Hell Of A Lot More…”. I know Techdirt has long promulgated the latter, but in today's world ambiguity tends to feed trolls.
If publishing links can be infringement, what's the easiest way to get a court to publish links to infringing content and hence to become infringers themselves? Presumably electronically filing something that includes an attached document full of links would get that document published on the court's website; do courts check everything included in filings?
The problem would presumably be that whoever tries it would want to avoid any repercussions to themselves, so they should be links to material that the filer has permission to publish but no rights to pass on that permission to anyone else (such as the court). Would that give the rights-holder standing to sue the court?
Does the law grant courts publishing rights to everything that gets filed in a legal case? (I guess there are probably rules which says a filer is responsible for redacting anything that shouldn't be made public, but IANAL so I don't know).
So now that we have the GOP in charge of both houses and soon as POTUS, how long will it be before they take aim at CDA-230? Have the tech companies been paying^Wlobbying them enough to prevent it?
As a foreigner I don't want to apologize for the NSA, but having worked with scientific systems that have to collect continuously arriving data I can understand why it might be technically impossible for them to stop destroying old data.
The front end data collection process for each source is likely to be putting that raw data into a large circular buffer, such that incoming data overwrites the oldest data stored � the length of the buffer and the average data rate thus control how long you end up keeping that raw data. While the raw data is still in that buffer it can be queried and extracted, but to stop destroying old data you would have to stop collecting any new data that is going to overwrite it.
Now each data source that they're monitoring is going to have its own buffer like this which is probably placed very close to the point where the data is collected, and the system will be designed to do the querying and extraction locally as well. This means that the bandwidth between that buffer and the NSAs external storage (such as that big data center in Utah) can be much smaller than the incoming raw data rate, so they just can't copy all of the buffered data to offline storage; there's just too much data in the buffers for that.
This could also explain why they claim that they're not "collecting" data on everyone; until they actually enter a query that will select a particular data item and send it back to their data center, all those circular buffers are just holding the past history temporarily and aren't doing anything with it. If they wait too long it will get overwritten, thus fulfilling their limited time legal requirements.
Anyone who gives out one of these phones has the same problem that the Allies had in WW2 with the decrypts that came out of Bletchley Park � you have to be extremely careful how you use the information, because you won't want your target to suspect what access you have to their actions. As soon as they find out, they'll stop using the phone for the kinds of activities that you want to follow...
If GOP were able to give the White House trade promotion authority, then after the TPP started to cause problems they could use that as political ammunition against the democrats in the future ("Obama ruined the US legal system for ever" etc.). Maybe I'm being really cynical here, but if someone doesn't care about the means (i.e. the effects the TPP would have), that end could have a political justification. From what has been leaked the USTR seems to have been listening to some of the GOP's best backers anyway, so this could be a double plus for them.
One of the reasons I use Reader (and Bloglines before it) is because it's more efficient for a central service to poll the feeds of all its users once rather than have each user doing the same polling. I have at least 5 different machines (laptop, tablet, phone, work PCs etc.) that I use to visit Reader at different times, and I don't want to see stories more than once or have to maintain lists of feeds in multiple places, so I need cloud storage of where I've got to in each feed. I explicitly do not want my own client programs on each machine, unless they're querying a server which is following all my feeds for me.
Here is a CNET article that gives a list of 5 possibilities and which platforms they run on (Web, iOS, Android). I've only tried Feedly on iOS though, and as a long-time G-Reader user I wasn't too impressed, but it might work out with a bit more testing. The feedly.com website seems to be getting hammered (by all us Reader users?) just at the moment though, which could be a bad omen.
If this new court gets created, it should also accept cases of wrongful DMCA take-downs, and be able to force the notifier to compensate the victims. At least that could have a useful effect...
Glen wrote: This is exactly how open source software works: anyone can take the code and build on it, but they must give back their additions to the community so that others can build upon them in exactly the same way.
Actually that's not what the Open Source Definition says. It only requires that you provide your source code if you give your version of the software to someone else. Even for code under the GNU GPL (one of the stronger OS licenses) you can make as many private changes as you like to the code without having to give back your source for those changes. The requirement to provide your source only kicks in when you distribute your code to someone else, and even then you only have to give your source to people who have copies of your version. In general you do not have to hand your changes back to "the community" that you got the code from, although you can't stop your customers from passing copies on. [IANAL, TINLA, read the specific license for the code]
... a treaty rather than a softer non-blinding recommendation ...
Personally I would be very much against a blinding recommendation, although I can't really imagine what a recommendation that actually triggers loss of eyesight would look like.
Someone must have lost out, although we don't know who that was. If most of the money to pay the musicians came from the video budget maybe they're paying for fewer camera operators, or they'll be do less work in post-production so the result might be less polished. I'm not trying to find out the full details, but to imply that nobody has lost out because of the change is obviously incorrect.
<rant>
Mike, why can't you publish PDF files like this directly on the TD website? By all means use other services as well so people can view such files directly in their browsers if that's what they want to do, but my laptop has a much nicer PDF file viewer than any of the browser-based services, and I refuse to give out my email address just to read a document (they almost all require a sign-up nowadays before they'll let you download the original file).
</rant>
Twitter’s wording could be 5% to blame
It would be clearer that they are requiring you to read the tweet first if the notice said “You MUST read the article on Twitter before retweeting”. Using “can” implies it’s optional when it apparently isn’t.
Not that I’m trying to excuse the idiots though...
Do they pay?
Is there a legal difference between the FBI demanding the data and them paying for it? If Sabre is willing to sell this data and it is being paid for, is there anything (short of passing New US Privacy legislation) that the courts could do to stop the FBI from buying it from them anyway?
The wishy-washy part of the theorem:
It's a pity the last 3 words can't be made stronger somehow, although I have no suggestions how...
Taste their own medicine?
How legal/illegal is copyright trolling? If the only real cost of doing it is the court filings, why haven't opponents to the copyright maximalists ever sued politicians pushing this kind of thing for (possibly fake) copyright violations using the laws they wrote?
This might make some interesting blog stories: Politicians indicted/convicted by the laws they wrote (or voted for at least).
Obvious Fraud
Ambiguous blog title...
I wasn't 100% sure at first glance whether “People Would Pay A Hell Of A Lot More…” meant “People Would Have To Pay A Hell Of A Lot More…” or “People Would Be Willing To Pay A Hell Of A Lot More…”. I know Techdirt has long promulgated the latter, but in today's world ambiguity tends to feed trolls.
Can they be hoist by their own petard?
The problem would presumably be that whoever tries it would want to avoid any repercussions to themselves, so they should be links to material that the filer has permission to publish but no rights to pass on that permission to anyone else (such as the court). Would that give the rights-holder standing to sue the court?
Does the law grant courts publishing rights to everything that gets filed in a legal case? (I guess there are probably rules which says a filer is responsible for redacting anything that shouldn't be made public, but IANAL so I don't know).
Republican action?
Re: Difference
Re: "Kilts"? Ye gods.
Depends on their system design
The front end data collection process for each source is likely to be putting that raw data into a large circular buffer, such that incoming data overwrites the oldest data stored � the length of the buffer and the average data rate thus control how long you end up keeping that raw data. While the raw data is still in that buffer it can be queried and extracted, but to stop destroying old data you would have to stop collecting any new data that is going to overwrite it.
Now each data source that they're monitoring is going to have its own buffer like this which is probably placed very close to the point where the data is collected, and the system will be designed to do the querying and extraction locally as well. This means that the bandwidth between that buffer and the NSAs external storage (such as that big data center in Utah) can be much smaller than the incoming raw data rate, so they just can't copy all of the buffered data to offline storage; there's just too much data in the buffers for that.
This could also explain why they claim that they're not "collecting" data on everyone; until they actually enter a query that will select a particular data item and send it back to their data center, all those circular buffers are just holding the past history temporarily and aren't doing anything with it. If they wait too long it will get overwritten, thus fulfilling their limited time legal requirements.
It's hard to use the information though
Isn't this just party politics as usual?
Re: RSS Reader
Replacements
DMCA take-down mis-use correction?
Read the OS Definition
Actually that's not what the Open Source Definition says. It only requires that you provide your source code if you give your version of the software to someone else. Even for code under the GNU GPL (one of the stronger OS licenses) you can make as many private changes as you like to the code without having to give back your source for those changes. The requirement to provide your source only kicks in when you distribute your code to someone else, and even then you only have to give your source to people who have copies of your version. In general you do not have to hand your changes back to "the community" that you got the code from, although you can't stop your customers from passing copies on. [IANAL, TINLA, read the specific license for the code]
Medusa?
Personally I would be very much against a blinding recommendation, although I can't really imagine what a recommendation that actually triggers loss of eyesight would look like.
Works out for everybody?
I hate sites like docstoc
Mike, why can't you publish PDF files like this directly on the TD website? By all means use other services as well so people can view such files directly in their browsers if that's what they want to do, but my laptop has a much nicer PDF file viewer than any of the browser-based services, and I refuse to give out my email address just to read a document (they almost all require a sign-up nowadays before they'll let you download the original file).
</rant>
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