How long until cloud providers are forced to scan block devices, so you can't even self-host a file erroneously flagged by the ML? (Actually, how long until this is integrated with the "security engine" in CPUs, so you can't even hide with encryption? Everyone is talking about on-device voice-recognition and CSAM recognition, but no doubt the copyright lobby is going to push hard for this as well.)
It hurts me to even think about this. We're headed towards such a bleak future. The only solution I can think of is to kill copyright in order to save computing freedom. Otherwise our computers will eventually no longer be ours.
We are in the middle of the hostilities, and we can always appreciate if more young idealists, as well as practical and hands-on militias want to join the revolution:
I think there needs to be more work on open source hardware (and the associated fab capabilities to make what people want) in order to preserve computing freedom. I have no idea how to actually do this, but it feels like it should be prioritized
For sure, but companies didn't win by building a better product. They won because of copyright laws that helped them to enforce their goal of profits.
If we want computing freedom, or in other words: consumer rights, then we need to enact laws that are pro-consumer to ensure an open future. Things like being able to repair our devices were taken away (Apple) and brought semi-back with right-to-repair laws (albeit only proposed atm), ownership of software and your data taken away by online services (Adobe, etc), and lots others.
Having open source hardware won't stop companies trying to take control away. We already see Microsoft and their SecureBoot problems with Linux. Or maybe they just won't support those open source machines by refusing to deploy their OS or whatever. Then what audience are you gonna have to make that product successful to become the new standard?
Laws are the only way to force everyone to play nice. We can have the nicest open source stack, but that's nothing if companies can just seize them with their own laws.
> Having open source hardware won't stop companies trying to take control away. We already see Microsoft and their SecureBoot problems with Linux. Or maybe they just won't support those open source machines by refusing to deploy their OS or whatever. Then what audience are you gonna have to make that product successful to become the new standard?
We need to get rid of those products and replace them with free software instead. It doesn't even matter if it's better or worse, as long as it's ours. This is the most sensible long term investment since it's the only thing that will truly benefit humanity forever.
I agree. The only reason these "stakeholders" have any leverage at all with which to push this is the fact semiconductor fabrication currently costs billions of dollars. So while it is possible for us to make our own freedom-respecting software, freedom-respecting hardware is out of our reach. Hardware manufacturing is concentrated in the hands of few corporations and those are friendly towards the copyright industry and good targets for government regulation and intervention.
Some kind of innovation that lets people fabricate at home is necessary. Just like the free software compiler changed the software world, the free as in freedom fab must do the same for computer hardware. Access to fabrication must somehow be democratized or we'll never be free.
Making fabrication accessible would definitely be nice.
In the meanwhile, I'd be interested in finding a community that puts "relatively open" hardware to good use. That includes old computers that won't grow antifeatures on their own, but also e.g. microcontrollers. I believe the dual-core 125MHz $1 Raspberry RP2040 is more powerful than my first PC was (although it might have less RAM and unfortunately can't be transparently expanded as far as I know). It's not exactly open hardware but it's well documented, and even the boot rom is open source (that is rare). You don't exactly have lots of integrated peripherals (e.g. ethernet) so it'd be very difficult for them to have some kind of remote backdoor. It's also quite simple to program; a hacker scale operating system is entirely feasible.
And that is of course just one of many choices out there. There are far more powerful microcontrollers out there. And by their nature, it's not going to be very easy for the copyright mafia to get their slimy tentacles between you and the core.
You'd give up a lot of power but on the other hand, I could buy 500 of them for the price of my laptop. I don't know, maybe we don't need to run everything on a single high performance CPU and could instead have a small cluster; perhaps each chip running its own application?
It's definitely not a "ready world" but I see lots of possibilities and am excited for the future of microcontrollers. But I'm also seeing the line between microcontrollers and processors getting blurred.
True, but it's harder to compromise a fully programmable device. In essence, you'd have to somehow prevent certain kinds of programming while still permitting all the rest. How is the device to know that flipping pin 121 and 122 in a specific pattern is actually clocking bits from a storage device?
I think the web is broken (user-hostile) for the same reason. It's been made to support arbitrary programming, and now you have to play this weird cat and mouse game of trying to prevent a particular kind of programming -- that can be used against you -- without breaking all the rest of the web. Google can block your browser because they can run code in your browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512
Furthermore I would add that the silicon die of an FPGA has a particular look which is very homogeneous compared to the die of a CPU or microcontroller, so if the vendor is including a small malicious CPU as a physical part of the FPGA, you should be able to detect that just by carefully scrutinizing the die with a microscope.
It does seem to some extend the higher the level of abstraction, the more potential for inappropriate controls or restrictions. More restrictions exist in apps vs OS vs cpu, or in cloud services like gdrive vs an EBS volume on AWS. So FPGAs are at least a step closer to free (or harder to secure). Even if they are under control of the manufacturer, there is a lot more flexibility and less potential for "oversight" at the gate level.
There is still the question of all the peripherals, I'd be worried about internet and video and other i/o adapters only being compatible with proprietary hardware, and impossible to use with a home programmed fpga
Depending on what your performance target is, you might do without adapters. Low speed USB can be bitbanged even with 8-bit attiny. RP2040 with PIO can run DVI, 720p@30Hz (though you do need to overclock the chip heavily). I don't know how to implement Ethernet with digital logic (it uses pulse amplitude modulation) but bandwidth-wise it's not too challenging. Gigabit signals to PHY are 125MHz using RGMII. I think 100Mbit Ethernet would use 25MHz but I'm not actually sure. All doable using commodity microcontrollers without an FPGA.
I could see a long road to a dystopia where these legacy protocols are deprecated and they push out devices that only speak new protocols that won't let unapproved devices talk.. but I'm not that pessimistic. I can't see the copyright mafia chasing things down so far, and they'd rail up against all the industrial users.
There are people trying to make hardware more open source and user friendly for the average user right now. The Framework laptop, for example, is not a perfect product with DIY silicon but it's well on it's way to open, repairable hardware, open bare iron code, and other user-friendly attributes.
It's also quite expensive because by definition such things will always be more expensive. Vote with your wallet and not just your HN post and you'll push the world just the tiniest bit in the direction you want.
Do we need to kill copyright? Couldn't we just kill vigilante enforcement of it? Maybe we should make it the law that if you see a copyright violation, your only legal options are (1) nicely ask the infringer to stop voluntarily, or (2) sue.
Copyright is fundamentally a monopoly on data. The very name implies that you can restrict who can copy data, how many copies can be made. Copying data is among the most basic, fundamental computer operations. Therefore all computers are inherently capable of violating copyright, they merely need to be instructed to do so. It's the 21st century and copyright is absolute nonsense. Computers make it seem absurd by trivializing copying to the point artificial scarcity is exposed for the illusion it always was.
So in order for copyright to exist in the 21st century, it must be impossible for us to instruct computers to do anything. They must own our computers. They must ensure computers obey them so that they can make it refuse to copy data without approval. We cannot be allowed any control because we can easily subvert their business model.
So in this matter it really is us or them. Either the copyright industry loses, or we lose computing freedom and everything hackers stand for will be history. There's also the looming threat of government encryption regulation which faces the exact same problem. I say computers and the internet are jewels of humanity and too important to be compromised by these governments and stakeholders, and I'd sacrifice a thousand copyright industries to keep them alive and free.
> So in order for copyright to exist in the 21st century, it must be impossible for us to instruct computers to do anything.
This is not true. It could be enforced by courts and not by computers.
Courts are slower and more expensive, so they'll only be used for the most egregious violations. But that's fine. Those are the high value ones. You wrote some code or made a movie, Netflix wants to use it, Netflix has to pay you for it. Because Netflix is big and you can sue them.
> We cannot be allowed any control because we can easily subvert their business model.
The assumption here is that everybody wants to subvert their business model. For the RIAA that might be true, but we don't need the RIAA. They can lose. Specifically because they're crooks and nobody respects them.
But already right now I can find basically the entire Netflix catalog on BitTorrent sites, and still I pay them.
And look at Substack. You have people making content, the readers respect the writers, so they pay. In many cases even when the articles are available without paying or after only a short delay. Because the readers know they won't be created if the creator has to go dig ditches instead for money.
We should get rid of DMCA 1201 (prohibiting circumvention of DRM). We don't need to get rid of the law that prevents Google News from hosting the full articles on their own servers while stripping out the subscription links.
> This is not true. It could be enforced by courts and not by computers.
No, this doesn't get you through the century with copyright intact. Bandwidth and storage only get cheaper, and copyright-able files are not getting proportionally larger.
Eventually--and the 21st century does seem like a reasonable timeframe--something like Google Glass is going to become the norm, for all people, all of the time. Somehow or other we will patch the imperfections of memory and information exchange; think of it like recording everything you see and hear and being able to instantly share those recordings with those around you. We can already do this with a sentence or two of text or the gist of a melody! In the future it'll be a full book, or a song. It's no different from inventing vehicles that allow us to travel at hundreds of miles per hour.
What does copyright look like as the ease of recording and repeating an experience increases at the rate of the past few decades? If technology is in reach that would blur the line between "recording" and "remembering", and "recounting" and "copying", are we going to just say "no" to it? Allow our memories and communication skills to remain in their ancestral, imperfect state just because it is imperative that those who "own" certain bitstreams be paid whenever they reach a new consciousness?
Human courts can't enforce copyright when faced 2050's technology. Not when we can "memorize" and "repeat" everything we hear with the same ease that we memorize or repeat a haiku today.
> Bandwidth and storage only get cheaper, and copyright-able files are not getting proportionally larger.
We're already at the point where these costs are negligibly low. It takes more effort to think about the cost of transferring the text of a book over the internet than the actual cost of doing so. That's not what it's about.
> think of it like recording everything you see and hear and being able to instantly share those recordings with those around you.
If you're the one recording it, you are (in general) the copyright holder. If you're the copyright holder, you can choose to share it without charging anyone money or placing any restrictions on anything.
> We can already do this with a sentence or two of text or the gist of a melody! In the future it'll be a full book, or a song.
Let's say you're right. So now instead of taking a few days to read a book, it takes a few minutes or seconds. Great, now you can read more books. Which means each book gets read more times. Which means each reader doesn't have to pay as much in order for the author to make the same amount of money.
But if you set the price all the way to zero, how does the author make rent? And then where do the books come from?
> We're already at the point where these costs are negligibly low. It takes more effort to think about the cost of transferring the text of a book over the internet than the actual cost of doing so. That's not what it's about.
No, we're really not there yet. You're overestimating the similarity of future technology to today's. Remember, we've got 80 years left in the century.
Here's what negligible transfer costs actually look like: The time it takes to transfer not just "a book", but the entirety of Sci-Hub, Spotify, Netflix, and every other content library that exists today, is limited only by the speed of light. The cost of storing all of that information is totally negligible. And technology is so totally integrated into our everyday interactions, that the act of "copying" it isn't even a conscious decision! When you reference a song or movie, you seamlessly link your statement to its entire contents, which are transferred like a parenthetical along with the statement itself. You might not even notice yourself doing it; it's just how you communicate in 2070.
> If you're the one recording it, you are (in general) the copyright holder. If you're the copyright holder, you can choose to share it without charging anyone money or placing any restrictions on anything.
Songs you hear, movies you see, pictures, speeches, etc. Hear a song once, remember it perfectly. Just an imperfection of the flesh to be resolved by technology. Doesn't matter if it was over the radio, on YouTube, or at a friend's house. Doesn't matter if it was given to you in an "ad-supported" way; you can cut those ads right out of your memory. You saw/heard it, it's yours to replay forever because you have perfect memory. It's not a "secret" you're obliged to keep either. Communicating memories to others is just what we do, we're just kind of bad at it right now so copyright can still sort of survive. We won't be bad at it in the future. We shouldn't be bad at it, we should be great at it.
> So now instead of taking a few days to read a book, it takes a few minutes or seconds.
I think you might be implying a whole other thing, which is the ability to "absorb" information orders of magnitude faster than we can today. I don't see that on the horizon in the same way that I see what I'm talking about, which is the perfection of "memory" and "communication of memories". You might not be able to read any faster, but you will be able to pass the whole Written Works of Man around in an instant, without even realizing that you're doing it.
> But if you set the price all the way to zero, how does the author make rent? And then where do the books come from?
The business model that we fabricated out of thin air with laws is insane. The idea that by writing a book you have some sort of infinite claim over all people that ever experience that book, regardless of whether they ever made a deal with you or your associates, is absurd. Imagine we made contact with a Second Earth, and some pirate sent them all our books, which they then read. Did today's authors really take trillions of dollars in damages from that act? Because we didn't even know about Second Earth until YESTERDAY. What if it was a secret? How can you have half your "property" wiped out in an instant by copyright violations and not ever know about it?
There's massive demand for media. Hell, there's even demand to be the person who creates media, just for the fame. Stop enforcing copyright and there will be a blip in creative works that will resolve itself within a decade. Authors and songwriters will get paid just like scientists, software engineers, and most online visual artists today: By commission. This is just one of the cool things markets are capable of: Somebody wants something to exist which does not, so they pay somebody who is capable of bringing that thing into existence to do so. If that thing is very expensive to produce (say, it requires the top artist of the day to work for a year), then maybe they have to pool their money with many others. Like local companies funding the construction of a large office building.
So business models are shaken up, different people do probably get paid different amounts (sorry to copyright lawyers and enforcement firms, especially), and in the end art continues to be made like it always has been. People love "consuming" it, and a subset of those people are more than capable of paying for it. The same transactions we've been making simply switch spots in the timeline. I don't pay $10 for the album that was just released, I pay $10 so that the next album gets released. And once it's out there, it's everybody's forever, like all songs and stories and ideas used to be, and should be.
And to preempt the contention that "if that worked it would already work that way", I'd say, we took a wrong turn a really long time ago. When that happens, interests get extremely entrenched. Beliefs get entrenched as well. The concepts of copyright and "intellectual property" are deeply ingrained in our expectations (though not, I would point out, anywhere near as deeply as our expectations of "actual property" law, which is telling). Making this shift is very hard. Probably a long transition period and obscene amounts of money given to existing copyright holders would be required. But it absolutely has to happen. We can't just look superhuman powers in the face and decline them because they would make some recently-invented business models untenable. Everybody should have bit-perfect, infinite memory and bit-perfect communication of arbitrary segments of that memory, because that's a thing that Gods have and you don't decline Godhood.
Cameras made it easy to copy things, so did printing presses, photocopiers and now computers. None of them have killed copyright, which is still functioning just fine. Musicians still sell music, directors still make films, the apocalypse simply isn’t happening.
Yes there are occasional abuses, unfair YouTube takedowns and crap like this from Google. They must be fought, no argument there. Life will go on.
You seem to be arguing that modern digital technology must by necessity drive a fundamental shift in the intellectual property economy that eliminates things like copyright forever. That simply isn't happening. It didn't happen to music, not to film and television, not even books. I'm a gamer and regularly buy games and supplements in PDF form, the hobby role-playing game market for indie games in PDF has never been stronger.
You can argue until you're blue in the face that what's happening right now is impossible, but it is happening. Look at the massive investment Amazon, Netflix, Disney, HBO and Apple are putting into streaming video. They are very successful businesses fighting over massive revenue streams. We're 20 years into the post-napster digital online revolution, and this is the way things have worked out.
The arrival of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society. - Wiki
> photocopiers
A primary obstacle associated with the pre-xerographic copying technologies was the high cost of supplies: a Verifax print required supplies costing US$0.15 in 1969, while a Xerox print could be made for $0.03 including paper and labor. - Wiki
> Not at massive global scales. Not at negligible costs. Not with complete impunity. Not in a way that was accessible to everyone.
You're trying to split hairs to justify a belief here. It doesn't seem like you're making a compelling case by stringing together conditions that you think are unique to the modern day.
The printing press changed the world but it was huge expensive hardware and if you had one it meant you were a major industry player and therefore an easy target for copyright enforcement.
Copiers were also expensive machines owned by businesses and they also worked with physical paper. There were inherent limits to the scale of any copying operation.
None of this is comparable to what we have today. Now everyone has a computer that fits in their pockets and is more than capable of instantly creating an unbounded number of copies of any data at nearly zero cost as well as transmitting those copies to anyone else connected to the global network. People infringe copyright every day, most of the time without even realizing it.
> The printing press changed the world but it was huge expensive hardware and if you had one it meant you were a major industry player and therefore an easy target for copyright enforcement.
I do suspect you are thinking about the industrial revolution, which came centuries later. Like 1760+
The Gutenberg press was something that relatively poor could produce, over time, in pieces with basic carpentry and blacksmithing (if you had the money), in the mid 1400s.
You could make it even cheaper with purely wooden components (no double sided, sorry), which would require routine repair and was generally inefficient. Paper had been around since before the Egyptians but started becoming commonly understood and circulated in Germany around this time. It was difficult to obtain and make. Interestingly enough, you could use cloth/leather or another material instead. Gutenberg was relatively well funded once he started kicking out Bibles so he didn't think about these things, as he really just wanted nice Bibles produced. Innovative stop-gaps were part of how it's notoriety spread so rapidly. That left the traditional oil-based ink which could reasonably be made of anything (oil, sap, soot, filth, etc) with effort and a suitable substrate.
Printing was manual before, which was slow and expensive. Within a century of "the press", the ability to read was nearly ubiquitous. This jump-started the Enlightenment period.
> Printing was manual before, which was slow and expensive. Within a century of "the press", the ability to read was nearly ubiquitous. This jump-started the Enlightenment period.
Copying and distribution was slow and expensive before. Not even a century after computers, the ability to copy was nearly ubiquitous. This jump-started the age of information.
> It's the 21st century and copyright is absolute nonsense.
This is an awful, terrible take. We know that intellectual property is much more artificial than pretty much every other type of property right, but we still want governments to enforce copyright and other IP law because it's a good way to make sure that people have a financial incentive to be creative or do R&D.
Copyright needs reform (and many types of DRM need to be banned), but just because you'd gladly sacrifice thousands of industries (how many jobs is that? millions?) to have some ideological purity, it doesn't mean that such a decision would be broadly supported or even in the best interest of society as a whole.
Source: work in copyright, have seen firsthand how shitty IP protections can destroy businesses that produce excellent content.
> we still want governments to enforce copyright and other IP law because it's a good way to make sure that people have a financial incentive to be creative or do R&D.
I have to believe that there must be alternatives. We need better post-copyright business models. This artificial scarcity thing is simply not going to work anymore. At least not without sacrificing everything about computers that make them special.
Maybe crowdfunding where creation is treated as an investment. Maybe patronage where it's treated as a subscription. I really don't know for sure. I just know it can't go on like this.
Without copyright you cannot write contracts about creative works, because there is no value to exchange. Creative works without legal protection are free and therefore cannot be investments or subscriptions. Just like I can’t get people to invest in or subscribe to the air in front of my house.
I think you are headed down the wrong path here. You don’t need to eliminate intellectual property to preserve general purpose computing. You just have to change the guardrails on how IP enforcement works.
They’ve changed many times and they can change again. And it’s way more achievable than ripping copyright out of society entirely.
> Without copyright you cannot write contracts about creative works, because there is no value to exchange.
There is no value even with copyright. Its value is made up, created via artificial scarcity whose days became numbered the minute computers were invented. There's no point in perpetuating this system.
The true value is the labor of creators. Data is abundant. Creators are rare. They need to somehow get paid for the labor of creating rather than copies of the finished product.
> Creative works without legal protection are free and therefore cannot be investments or subscriptions.
We can invest in the creator. Paying them up front like investments, or continuously every month like patronage.
> You don’t need to eliminate intellectual property to preserve general purpose computing. You just have to change the guardrails on how IP enforcement works.
I'm not convinced the copyright industry will ever stop. The situation gets worse every year. How is this supposed to change with copyright holders still around? Their lobbying power is immense.
> They’ve changed many times and they can change again.
They've changed for the worse. How many times has copyright duration been extended? How many of our rights eroded? Fair use rights? Public domain rights? They mean nothing anymore. When was the last time some work entered the public domain?
Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain 24 days ago. And value has a legal meaning in the context of contracts, regardless of how you personally feel about copyright.
You’re convinced that copyright industry has tremendous power; but apparently you are also convinced that the only way forward is to 100% defeat them. I’m just saying there may be more options than the extremes of total fail / total win.
Also, your ideas about investing in creators are orthogonal to copyright; you can do all of that today and copyright will neither help nor hinder. Commissioning creative works is great and in fact predates copyright.
> There is no value even with copyright. Its value is made up,
And I'm sure that's why Disney makes billions of dollars selling movie tickets every year, right? The moviegoers who drag themselves out of the house just can't be trusted to determine value?
Yeah, the value is determined by scarcity. That's the point of IP law. Otherwise the value would be zero, and these movies would not be made because they'd instantly get copied ad infinitum and anyone proposing to spend more than fun money on one would be shunned.
> The true value is the labor of creators.
No, and this sounds an awful lot like the Labor Theory of Value. The value of IP is what people are willing to pay for it, same as any other market good. Comic book franchises were basically worthless until Disney and WB blew them up, for example. It's rare for any media to succeed without marketing. Value requires far more than just creators and it's absurd to pretend otherwise.
> We can invest in the creator. Paying them up front like investments, or continuously every month like patronage.
There are far, far more creators than there could ever be works of great cultural significance, and the creators building valuable IP are compensated for it far more than they would under any other practical scheme.
> I'm not convinced the copyright industry will ever stop. The situation gets worse every year. How is this supposed to change with copyright holders still around? Their lobbying power is immense.
By passing laws. It's literally that simple. You can replace "copyright holders" with "oil barons" or "AT&T" and see how silly that sounds. Copyright, unfortunately, is at the very bottom of everyone's list of priorities, and for obvious reasons.
You ask "how is this supposed to change?" as if the situation is unbearable, but it's really not. A big reason for why nobody cares is that your average consumer now can consume pretty much everything more cheaply than ever before - fully legally. And so what if Google makes an obvious and stupid mistake with Google Drive every now and then? They'll generally fix it pretty quickly, and there are a million similarly-priced competitors that don't do this if you're not satisfied with the quality of the (free) service.
> When was the last time some work entered the public domain?
Given that copyright is automatic and requires no registration, there's a steady flow of works entering the public domain. OG Mickey Mouse lost copyright a few years ago, IIRC.
tl;dr there's a gigantic jump from "copyright protections are frequently onerous and stupid" to "we should abolish IP law." You are giving evidence for the first and acting like it justifies the second.
Copyright is spelled out in the US Constitution as distinct from property, for clear and well-justified reasons.
Every move to make copyright more like property makes copyright less useful for its designated purposes, and more a drain on the public interest. But copyright holders are continually pressing courts and legislators to try make copyright law subservient to property law, and succeeding, incrementally, so case law on copyright has become hard to distinguish from property law. Nowadays copyright lawyers even call themselves "Intellectual Property" lawyers, deliberately trying to obscure the difference.
The consequence is that Copyright, which was once a benefit for the public interest, is now a benefit only for entrenched media companies. Eliminating it would once have been taking away from the public. Now, eliminating it would benefit the public. But, since copyright is now a matter of international treaty, we no longer have, even in principle, the power to eliminate it: treaties override the Constitution.
Since you work in copyright, you've probably also seen firsthand how overzealous copyright enforcement can destroy businesses that produce excellent content.
Frankly, your bias shows and you might have a case of EverythingLooksLikeANailitis. The copyright industry may be "protecting" jobs in some ways, but it's also destroying jobs in others. It's halting progress in so many cases.
You also need to look at who, in practice, is protected by copyright. The grand majority of the money being protected is that of big, rich industries. Even when the Little Guys are protected, it's usually by a bigger company that gets the way bigger cut from it (eg. stock photo and music artists).
A world without copyright is a different one. IP lawyers and copyright enforcers might be out of a job, but it doesn't mean it'd be one without music or art. We'd find a different way to make it work, hopefully a way that doesn't drive the next Aaron Swartz to suicide.
> Frankly, your bias shows and you might have a case of EverythingLooksLikeANailitis. The copyright industry may be "protecting" jobs in some ways, but it's also destroying jobs in others. It's halting progress in so many cases.
No, I have a case of "I'veSeenWhatHappensWhenCopyrightIsIgnoreditis." A blind man could see that copyright needs serious reforms, but it's absurd to pretend like other systems produce the diversity and scale of works that the current one does.
> You also need to look at who, in practice, is protected by copyright.
Believe it or not, I do every day.
It's crazy that your solution to "small creators get ripped off" is "make ripping them off legal." The actual solution is to reduce the cost of enforcing copyright - right now it takes a court case, which obviously is a nonstarter for anyone who isn't making bank off of their copyright.
> A world without copyright is a different one. IP lawyers and copyright enforcers might be out of a job, but it doesn't mean it'd be one without music or art.
As long as there are humans, there'll be art and music. What there won't be are people who make a living off of it, and we'll rewind to like 300 years ago when the only people who could afford to create art were born rich or willing to find a rich person who'd individually sponsor them. When people have more time to spend on art, they produce better art. I really hope that isn't controversial.
> We'd find a different way to make it work, hopefully a way that doesn't drive the next Aaron Swartz to suicide.
I'd really rather we didn't use a deeply individual instance of suicide as a political talking point. It's kind of tasteless and you can find plenty of examples of suicide for virtually any problem.
> The actual solution is to reduce the cost of enforcing copyright - right now it takes a court case, which obviously is a nonstarter for anyone who isn't making bank off of their copyright.
Making it easier will result in even worse systems than YouTube's insane extralegal "copystrike" process which enables such abuses as police playing copyrighted songs to prevent people from sharing videos of them.
The opposite should happen. It should be much harder to enforce, it should most definitely not be automatic, it should cost copyright holders huge amounts of money, it should require them to go to actual court, there should be severe penalties for fraudulent claims.
> we'll rewind to like 300 years ago when the only people who could afford to create art were born rich or willing to find a rich person who'd individually sponsor them
If we keep going like this we'll rewind about 100 years to the status quo before the invention of computers. We'll have them but they'll be restricted to the point they're equivalent to old mass media. Their potential squandered in the name of keeping old industries alive. Everything the internet was meant to be, destroyed due to the surveillance and control necessary to enforce copyright.
> Making it easier will result in even worse systems than YouTube's insane extralegal "copystrike" process which enables such abuses as police playing copyrighted songs to prevent people from sharing videos of them.
No, it'll make it easier for watchdogs to fight bullshit like this. A poorly rendered version of "Shake it Off" that just so happens to be played in the background of some police brutality is fair use - but guess where you have to go to claim fair use as a defense?
> If we keep going like this we'll rewind about 100 years to the status quo before the invention of computers. We'll have them but they'll be restricted to the point they're equivalent to old mass media. Their potential squandered in the name of keeping old industries alive. Everything the internet was meant to be, destroyed due to the surveillance and control necessary to enforce copyright.
People have been saying this for twenty years, and computers now have only become more capable. It was an exaggeration then and it's an exaggeration now.
Well, the problem is that all this "vigilante[0] enforcement" was there to enable online services to work at all; and it has been further extended by private business agreements to give copyright owners powers above what the law requires.
Any tort in law also has secondary liability attached to it, and it's generally accepted caselaw that online service providers get secondary liability if someone uses them to infringe. Congress decided that said providers should be able to disclaim that liability if they participate in a notice-and-takedown process; and the EU has gone further and replaced that with a very context-sensitive "best practices" approach that almost certainly will be interpreted as "video sites must have an equivalent to YouTube Content ID".
From an old media perspective, this is crazy. If CBS licenses a TV show that infringes upon a third-party copyright, they cannot disclaim liability by saying it's the licensee's problem. If they could, then you could construct a bunch of LLCs to separate the infringement from the liability. And this is effectively what online services have done: YouTube, for example, gets to automatically[1] recommend you infringing content, and those who have been infringed only have the legal recourse of sending takedown notices.
Getting rid of the takedown system would mean that copyright owners would have to go back to suing individual users, which is both expensive and, IMO, wrong. YouTube gets to own online video and infringe copyright with impunity, because they passed the buck onto individuals that largely cannot afford to pay damages on infringement. If you're a legitimate[2] user of copyright, you can't economically get the infringement to stop or go underground. Furthermore, if you are a copyright troll, this does nothing to stop you; you will still be able to sue individuals and coerce them into settling baseless claims.
The underlying problem is that online platforms want to half-ass copyright. You can decide whether this is because they understand the draw that infringing content provides to them, or if proper enforcement interferes with the FAANG business model of "own the platform and take 30%". Either way, it's a compliance cost. We don't want people just suing individuals, and we don't want people suing online services to the point where any amount of third-party content is too legally perilous to touch. The answer was supposed to be notice-and-takedown, which is designed basically as a way for online service providers to push papers around between copyright owners and users without having to resort to an expensive lawsuit.
However, nobody likes this. Online service providers that try to do things "by the book" wind up with all sorts of legal pitfalls for both themselves and their users. So even the current notice-and-takedown regime in the US has been subverted by private agreement. For example, DMCA 512 requires copyright owners to actively monitor infringements of your work; but YouTube Content ID instead provides a turn-key solution to find infringing work on that platform. It also lets you just monetize the infringements instead of taking them down, which is also a sort of backdoor license for Google. I suspect some sort of similar arrangement is involved with Google Drive, where you can't share files that trip whatever content ID system is involved here.
So even "killing vigilante enforcement" would not be good enough, because Google has already found it lucrative to privilege copyright owners over regular users. You need to specifically regulate these takedown alternatives rather than just getting rid of takedowns.
[0] Technically speaking, a DMCA takedown notice from someone who does not own the copyright to the work in question is legally deficient and can be safely ignored by Google. However, most online service providers do not do a good job of checking.
[1] As per Mavrix v. LiveJournal, the process has to be automatic. Human curation takes you out of your DMCA 512 safe harbor. This is effectively a "willful blindness" requirement, IMO, which is also bad.
[2] As in, you're interested in preventing sharing of newly-published works for a reasonable time frame, rather than keeping an ironclad grip on Steamboat Willie or Super Mario Bros forever.
May I ask if you are a lawyer? I've read many of your posts before and they're always extremely informative. You've taught me a lot of things about copyright. I'm not sure if you'd agree with what I say but I still wanted to say thank you.
I am, however, an American tech enthusiast born in the 90s, which means I got exposed to a lot of anticopyright, Creative Commons, Free Software, and Open Source propaganda at a very young age. Of course, my actual positions nowadays are a lot more nuanced than the ones I had decades ago.
Furthermore, I'm involved with software reimplementation[0]. And one constant of that whole field is that it's often unofficial, if not outright adversarial to the original hardware or software. If you aren't being very careful about copyright at every stage of the process, you are liable to get sued with the full force of the law. There's zero leniency with copyright these days, so you either have to be legally untouchable or go deep underground. I chose the former path, which means that I have to know a lot of this shit, even though I'm not a lawyer.
[0] Specifically I am one of the contributors to Ruffle, a Flash Player reimplementation that works in modern web browsers.
I don't think we need to kill copyright, but we sure as hell need to control how it's used. To start with, we need to spay and neuter the out of control copyright enforcers, and especially every form of copyfraud.
I don't entirely disagree with you. I think copyright is insane but it could certainly be made tolerable enough. Most importantly, it needs to have reasonable duration. 5 years is more than enough time for these creators to make their money several times over. I don't think these copyright holders would ever accept anything that reduced their monopoly power though.
I think 5 years is too short. It assumes the creation[tm] will work out of the box and get immediate momentum. Whereas for music and literature it may well take a decade before the thing bubbles up to someone's consciousness.
I'd say 20-25 years from first publication would be a good time window. If your creation has not become worth anything in that time, it wasn't timely or of real interest. On the other hand, if a creation[tm] does become part of cultural background, 25 years is more than enough to reap the benefits. And at the end of the term, if something is part of the cultural scenery, it needs to be in public domain no matter what.
What a window like that would ensure is that creators can earn royalties over time, but it would prevent the inter-generational rent seeking dynasties. Copyright is supposed to encourage creation, by handing over a strictly temporary monopoly, but also guaranteeing that the monopoly remains short enough to enable culture to evolve.
The surface is larger than just copyright and includes anything the government can enforce in the name of protecting or preventing ... [children, terrorists, money laundering].
Lobbyists wondering why not slip this into appropriations bill and make MS put this in desktop.
It's also larger than that; I believe one of the biggest threats to freedom today is complexity. That's why people are so bitter at Mozilla for example, and perhaps to a lesser degree systemd. But it applies to a lot of stuff, for example everyone who complains about GPU drivers on Linux (or "Linux is not there yet" in general) complains because they feel powerless to fix the issues. I'm glad AMD is doing their part but I'd be happier if we didn't need them to.
If things weren't so complex, a small group of hackers would "shut up and hack" and fix their grievances and give the community something new to play with. Instead, we've gotten to the point where most people realize that they are too small in face of all the complexity. Then what choices do you have left? Give up, or get bitter and angry because those who have the resources to maintain a browser or Linux distro aren't doing what you want (and eventually you give up anyway because shouting into the void doesn't fix anything). One can go against the grain but they will be left in the dust; I saw lots of bitter Palemoon users who were ignored as the web moved on and sites started breaking on their increasingly outdated Firefox fork. I can't blame those users.
Open standards mean nothing if only one company on earth has the resources to implement them (and they deliberately push out others). Open standards mean nothing if they require you to implement user-hostile, freedom-disrespecting features that enable behavior like above.
Google blocking browsers is understandable, they're trying to stop apps from implementing Sign In with Google in a webview because that's a security issue. (Apps could steal passwords or non-oauth session information) Some actual browsers (mostly built around those same webview tools) got caught up in the blocks too. If they were blocking everything except Chrome, that'd be a different story, but they're not.
My take on this is that you always have plausible deniability when you deny freedoms "for security." I don't like it.
Blocking everything except Chrome would immediately raise way too many eyebrows, but allowing the few big (non-) competitors while making life hard for any potential rising stars has value if you want to maintain the status quo (near monopoly on browser market).
In any case, I don't really even care about Google's motivations here. I have a problem with the fact that they can do this at all. Open technology should not enable overriding user control and arbitrarily blocking clients based on prejudice.
I agree. Attempts to regulate cryptography, to force computers to police and snitch on their own users... It's all deeply concerning and all of it depends on their covert ownership of our computers.
The first and last Apple hardware I bought must have been over 15 years ago, a really thick 80 GB iPod with an actual hard drive inside it. I got rid of the Apple software and installed a custom OS on it. If I remember correctly, it was called rockbox. Now it's unthinkable that an Apple device would let me have this sort of control.
What happened to Apple is what will eventually happen to all other manufacturers. They want to own us.
Gab.com is how to run a service that gets kicked off all cloud providers. They had to build their own bare metal infrastructure. That's right! They use zero cloud infrastructure. No AWS, etc. They even have release announcements about how they've upgraded or bought more servers so things should go faster and they can enable more features and so forth.
I have an email from myself to myself sent in 2007 in GMail. I can't open the attachment because "it is malicious." It doesn't, just a schematic, but there's no way to tell GMail to let me download it anyway.
If Amazon didn't offer EBS block device encryption (with a key that's ostensibly only accessible to the customer), then customers would just use full disk encryption instead.
