Mike Linksvayer 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (38) comment rss

  • On the post: New Open Source Standard Hopes To Cure The Internet Of Broken Things Of Some Awful Security Practices

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 27 Mar, 2018 @ 02:55pm

    This week these groups shed a little more detail on the new effort, which it claims is the first step in reinstilling some degree of trust in the internet of very broken things. The standard is still very much under development, and the groups are looking for your help in spreading the word.

    I couldn't figure out from the PDF linked to in the article text above what the context of this was. Here's the blog post announcing the PDF:

    https://www.newamerica.org/oti/blog/raising-standard/ (March 23)

    The only new detail shed is that they're starting a promotional effort for The Digital Standard. Which is good!

  • On the post: Argentina Plans To Increase Copyright In Photos From 20 Years To Life Plus 70 Years, Devastating Wikipedia

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2015 @ 11:04am

    link to impacted photos on Wikimedia Commons

    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:PD-AR-Photo

    10,060 photos. Some could be old enough to not be impacted, but at a glance those are a small proportion.

  • On the post: BSA Caught Using Infringing Image For Its 'Snitch' On Your Colleagues Anti-Piracy Campaign

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 24 Mar, 2014 @ 09:42am

    Re: Blacklist the BSA

    A more effective way to blacklist the BSA is to only use free/open source software.

  • On the post: To Honor Doug Engelbart, Who Passed Away Last Night, Please Go Watch His 1968 Demo

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 03 Jul, 2013 @ 09:49pm

    condolences, but stay out of the Great Man gutter

    The computing world we live in today would likely be very, very different if there had never been a Doug Engelbart.


    Maybe very, very, considering the path dependency of computing development, in detail. But so what, would it have been very, very delayed or otherwise worse? I doubt it very much. Independent contemporaneous invention and all that.

  • On the post: French Politicians Worry That Free Creative Commons Works Devalue 'Legal' Offers

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 26 Feb, 2013 @ 10:12am

    Yes, apparently the way to "increase the value" is to no longer allow Creative Commons content to "circulate freely" because it might compete with other business models


    That reading isn't obvious to me, but I'm only reading the translation.

    Could just as easily mean that cracking down on not-explicitly-permitted noncommercial sharing increases the value of explicit permission, eg public licenses. I don't want to see public licenses value increased in such a manner, but it is a more charitable reading than the implication of preventing circulation of public licensed material.

    If the uncharitable reading is correct, and they see a real threat from public licensed works, GREAT! Now to push forward and realize that threat.

  • On the post: Scientist Refused Permission To Call Hominids 'Hobbits', Even Though Word First Used In Print In 1895 — And Not By Tolkien

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 26 Oct, 2012 @ 01:14pm

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denham_Tracts cites Michael D.C. Drout, ed., J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, Routledge (2006), p. 121. ISBN 0-415-96942-5 as saying Tolkien may have gotten the term from the Denham Tracts.

  • On the post: We Should Stop Calling Fair Use A 'Limitation & Exception' To Copyright; It's A Right Of The Public

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 23 Jul, 2012 @ 04:26pm

    Re: Exceptions to exceptions

    Indeed copyright is wrong (I mean wrong name, but also plain wrong :)) and ought be called copyrestriction or worse.

  • On the post: Not Only Can You 'Compete With Free' You Have To If You Don't Want Your Business Overrun By Piracy

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 04 Jun, 2012 @ 12:53pm

    compete?

    you must compete with free
    Only if your business is selling copies, ie you=publisher (which is indeed what the linked column assumes). But if you=artist or anything else, competing with free isn't a must (though you can) and competing with free is the wrong way to see free. Often you want to, um, leverage free to connect with fans, and give them reasons to buy stuff that complements free. :-)

    I guess the last paragraph of this post can be read to say that, but "deal with" still sounds pretty negative -- "leverage" would be the (maybe equally inaccurate) positive spin.

  • On the post: Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 31 May, 2012 @ 03:33pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: DRM restrictions in CC license?

    Regarding easily broken, CSS is arguably not an "effective" technical measure, eg https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/05/effective-technological-measures-it-means-what-it-says-says-finnish-court

    But the general issue remains, eg with Blu-Ray.

  • On the post: Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 31 May, 2012 @ 10:38am

    Re: Re: Re: DRM restrictions in CC license?

    There's two issues: the copyrighted work restricted by DRM, and the DRM system itself. Often the entity that can give permissions around the first doesn't control the second. But I think it is socially responsible to give whatever permissions one can to circumvent DRM given the horrible policy environment. If you look closely at GPLv3 it addresses both cases as best it can (2nd if someone is silly enough to use GPLv3 code in a DRM implementation). See section 3 of https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ... hopefully CC 4.0 licenses will do something along these lines as well.

  • On the post: Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 31 May, 2012 @ 10:30am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: DRM restrictions in CC license?

    You or another AC quoted relevant text above. Regarding whether language implicitly allows parallel distribution, maybe. A lawyer that worked for CC in 2006 gave the following non-opinion on that:

    This argument can certainly be
    made. CC does not feel that it, as
    license steward, should opine on the
    likelihood with which a court in any
    jurisdiction would uphold this
    argument if the issue were litigated.

    from first answer in http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/attachments/20060908/da9db6a3/attachment.pdf

  • On the post: Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 31 May, 2012 @ 10:25am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: CC0 ?

    If those things are not "inherent in copyright," then the copyright holder has no legal basis to impose it as a condition.


    Exactly why "impose" is the wrong way to think about it. Permissions can be conditioned on things that aren't inherent in copyright. That's exactly what conditions on no DRM, or requiring source revelation (GPL) do.

    If someone thinks they can outright plagiarize a CC0 work, then it's up to people like us to set them straight.


    No attribution does not always equal plagiarism, depends on context. Just to set the record straight. :)

  • On the post: Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 31 May, 2012 @ 12:01am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: CC0 ?

    Actually I think imposing (more accurately, conditioning permissions upon) restrictions are quite the same thing as granting permissions (successfully or not). Conditions can be things not inherent in copyright. DRM conditions discussed in other comments being an example. A bit more on this at http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2012/01/31/copyleft-regulates/

    Also, I look forward to the day when someone uses a work under CC0 without attribution and gets sued by the CC0 licensor/affirmer in Europe. Really, it'll be a curiosity.

    (And I realize you're not trying to rag on CC, but don't mind if anyone does, and does so well.)

  • On the post: Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 30 May, 2012 @ 11:41pm

    ps

    It was launched by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, who indeed was dismissive, even contemptuous, of the potential of fair use to address copyright imbalance.


    I'm sorry to hear that.

    I've interacted with lots of the people involved in CC and the range of opinions on fair use (and other exceptions & limitations; it is a global project) from respect to fangirlism. Personally, I'm for fair use maximalism. :)

    Even people who depend upon CC licenses, such as the makers of open educational resources?scholarly materials of all kinds, available free on the web?still sometimes need fair use. That is because most new work refers to existing culture. When that happens, people need to exercise their right of fair use, because most work is not in the copyright-light, fenced-in zone.


    Indeed. For reasons similar to those that make most people using public licenses for software oppose software patents, people using public licenses for other works need to demand broader fair use -- otherwise publicly licensed works must be impoverished with workarounds.

  • On the post: Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 30 May, 2012 @ 11:15pm

    CC and other public licenses do loosen policy

    This makes CC a copyright-light zone rather than copyright-free zone,


    It's worth mentioning that CC0 gets as close as legally possible to a copyright-free zone.

    and of course it does nothing (and doesn?t pretend to) to loosen long and strong copyright policy?rather, it depends upon it.


    CC licenses only depend on copyright to the extent one views them as not contracts, which is the preferred view, but one Europeans tend to violently disagree with, and more substantially, to the extent one views their conditions as more important than the permissions they carve out. Granted without copyright or similar, those permissions would be superfluous, but in the way a bandage is superfluous if one is not wounded -- great, hardly a critique of the bandage.

    Furthermore, only under a narrow and unimaginative interpretation of doing something to influence copyright policy can CC licenses (and other public licenses mostly used for software) be said to be doing nothing. The whole policy environment isn't just the letter of copyright and related law. Public licenses (more directly, projects that use them) are evidence in favor of loosening copyright, and give policymakers easy choices for effectively loosening copyright in specific areas, eg products of public funding by mandating such projects be released under public licenses, as is happening increasingly.

    A CC license, intended to promote circulation of work, may limit it to the alternative CC world it was born into. This is precisely because it is designed to be an alternative to rather than a feature of the copyrighted environment.


    CC licenses are non-exclusive and I'm not sure how they supposedly depend on copyright (see above) but are not a feature of the copyrighted environment.

  • On the post: Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 30 May, 2012 @ 10:56pm

    Re: Re: DRM restrictions in CC license?

    CC licenses thus far don't permit DRM so long as non-DRM version is included. This is known as a "parallel distribution" option and has been rejected, but there's some small chance could be tweaked in version 4.0 of the licenses which are being developed now, see http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/Technical_protection_measures

    In any case, CC licenses are non-exclusive, so the DVD publisher could get different terms from the copyright holder/licensor.

  • On the post: Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 30 May, 2012 @ 10:51pm

    Re: Re: CC0 ?

    CC0 does the best it can to waive attribution. It certainly doesn't *impose* attribution. At worst, it doesn't successfully get rid of it. I recommend reading https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode

  • On the post: South Korea Still Paying The Price For Embracing Internet Explorer A Decade Ago

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 09 May, 2012 @ 11:38am

    it gets even better...

    Via the Wikipeida article on SEED, someone wrote about the resulting monoculture 5 years ago http://www.kanai.net/weblog/archive/2007/01/26/00h53m55s

    Why was SEED developed in the first place?

    South Korean legislation did not allow 40 bit encryption for online transactions (and Bill Clinton did not allow for the export of 128 bit encryption until December 1999) and the demand for 128 bit encryption was so great that the South Korean government funded (via the Korean Information Security Agency) a block cipher called SEED.


    Those export controls keep biting.

  • On the post: What Will The Future Of Copyright Look Like? Contest Offers Prize For Best Proposal

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2012 @ 01:12pm

    Why can't people dedicate their entries to the public domain with a Public Domain Mark or a CC0 license, or retain their rights but make the submission freely available?


    CC-BY-SA is nonexclusive, so anyone who wants to can also offer other terms. If I were to make a submission, it would additionally be dedicated to the public domain (using CC0; the Public Domain Mark is not relevant, as it is not a license or dedication and is only for marking works already in the public domain). These are just nits that don't fully address your complaint of bias, but then I saw no intention of eliminating bias, of which there are many sources, from the sponsors to the announced judges to the name of the contest.

  • On the post: If Your Business Strategy Relies On Suing Others, You're Not A Business, You're A Leech On The System

    Mike Linksvayer ( profile ), 09 Sep, 2011 @ 07:56pm

    How about a business that relies on selling protection from being sued by said business (ie sells copyright or patent licenses)?

Next >>