Age verification inherently means identity verification. There's no way to prove your age without first proving that you are YOU, either by showing your face or authenticating with some third party authority, usually government or a corporation.
The idea that you should be locked out of using your own computer until you do this is utterly insane. What problem does it solve that existing parental control tools don't? A generation of parents already trust their babies with iPads for this reason. And what of the millions of Americans who don't have current ID?
> In crafting its policy, Estacada incorporated feedback from parents. That led to some key decisions around the cell phone ban. Rather than use pouches or lockers, students are allowed to keep their phones safely stored in their backpacks. That was for two reasons — it allows students to contact loved ones during emergencies, and many parents use phone trackers to keep tabs on their kids.
I'm glad to hear this. They're currently trying to shill the magnetically sealed pouches in the UK, but the flaws are obvious: massive bottleneck at the pouch station would delay entry and exit from the building, phones would be unavailable during emergencies or to record incidents of crime or staff malpractice, and financial burden on schools.
Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule.
A friend's kid needs an exemption from their doctor because their phone is also their glucose monitor and diagnostic tracker, and the exception only allows them to unlock the pouch under supervision when necessary.
There can be moral (or other) panics to real dangers. That doesn't mean cool heads don't lead to better solutions.
People panic in fires, trampling one another trying to get out. The danger is real, but so is the damage caused by the panic.
Here people are responding to real harms but we're often jumping to conclusions. Trying to act too fast. Thinking it is better to do something rather than nothing. But that's not always true. We see this happen with all sorts of complex problems we face these days. People care more about having an answer than they do a solution. This one is no different. We get bad answers like the above because people are rushing and not thinking about the consequences. But if things were as easy to solve as were wish they were then they'd already have been solved. The "easy" part only comes after a lot of hard work and really only from a high level
I'd argue you don't need a study, just reasoning. I mean, a study would be good, but we also have brains on our shoulders.
Learning to read or to do mathematics is like anything else, it takes practice. We know, intuitively from our own lives and observes virtually all humans, that humans perform better with less distractions. It would be hard to learn how to play the Tuba with me screaming behind you. It would be hard to learn chess with a movie playing in front of you.
Phones are distractions. Less phones = less distractions = better performance, smarter kids, more likelihood to graduate, higher average income.
More meaningless words that can be defined as needed by you to support your rather bizarre agenda.
Numerous peer reviewed articles published in reputable journals have reported that there are advantages to banning cell phones in the classroom, yet you as the sole arbiter of "actual science" declare otherwise.
We don't actually need "actual science" to conclude that phones in classrooms are likely causing problems. We can observe them in action causing problems and take actions even if the peer reviewed double blind study hasn't been done
Kids are smart. My school district has sealed pouches.. Its amazing how many kids throw an old phone in there, and put their actual one away hidden on silent.
Which I guess gets looked the other way, since they aren't using it in class.
It's definitely a mix of the actual phone pouches and the bans giving teachers actual authority and permission to confiscate phones when they're out and disruptive. IMO there's likely a shift that happens with pouches where there are enough kids following the rules and only having one phone in the pouch that it tips the social balance over. That would be harder with just teacher enforced bans I think.
It's definitely a hard problem over all balancing their completely disruptive nature if there's no bounds to the issues around safety and parental worry from not being able to contact their kid all the time which phones have made the norm.
This is how it works in my kids' school. Not Estacada, but not that far away, and not in Portland. No pouches or lockers, just an understanding that phones which are seen will be confiscated. First time they get sent to the office and returned as the student leaves school. Second time they have to be picked up by a parent.
You'd think it would be a huge deal with rebellious teens, but my daughter says it has basically been a non-issue.
>Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule.
I'm honestly not educated on the topic right now since I haven't been in school for 15 years and have some time left before my daughter starts, but is this rule really not in place in most schools? How could any school justify not having this rule at the very least, regardless of how well-enforced it is?
I always assumed it was a lack of enforcement due to understaffing that was the problem
I tend to avoid placing the blame on individuals (parents in this case) when the problem being described is so widespread. People act as rationally as they can, so if it's that common, it's a systemic failure. Scolding the masses is a fool's errand.
We’re talking about underdeveloped minds in the face of excruciating social and physiological pressure.
I’m pretty sure the systemic failure is, in part, that parents are, en masse, abdicating their responsibilities of guiding their children through the minefield of modern technology, from iPad kids on up.
The reasons why vary - and include being addicted themselves.
I’d love to hear any anecdotal evidence to the contrary - not just a dismissal, or being called a fool.
The society that supports phoneless children no longer exists. It stopped sometime in the 2010s. Taking away phones doesn't bring that infrastructure back, it culminates in something new and worse.
One example is the tension between childrens' independence and roaming and the now lack of payphones. Taking away a cell phone doesn't bring back payphones. It either reduces a child's independence or puts them in more dangerous situations. What it doesn't do is return them back to a time when a couple of quarters could call mom or dad.
You're supposing that there existed a virtuous past in which parents taught their children respect and that if we returned to that past, there would be no need to ban smartphones in the classroom, and you believe that even though this virtuous past had no smartphones.
you’re saying the complaint is that in that era it was also thought of as a new phenomenon.
That makes some sense - it’s been a declining slope, with a huge drop-off point.
But was there also evidence of less-competent people coming out of the end of the machine that’s supposed to produce people to keep the civilization functional?
Probably happened at one time or another - but it was probably also considered a problem……
My original “as a default” verbiage is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but is there for a reason.
Huh? The validity of my take is based on some rule you have in your head? What I'm seeing is someone who is desperate to be right.
Everyone for the last 2000 years has expressed the same sentiment you did.
They all feel exactly the same way. The parsimonious explanation is that this is a bias that develops as we age and like any bias, we're especially blind to it and deny its existence as evidenced in this thread.
I know it doesn't feel good to realize you have a bias, but that rational thing is to understand it and account for it. That too is part of growing older.
> What I'm seeing is someone who is desperate to be right.
I’m desperate to understand what your point is - if it’s that I’m just another old fogie biased against the next generation, then you couldn’t be more mislead.
I’m desperate to have a conversation, for the good of this community. That’s what we’re here for.
> Everyone for the last 2000 years has expressed the same sentiment you did.
I’m not expressing a sentiment. We all are. Entire classrooms of kids are ignoring the authority figure as a default.
That’s the topic in TFA.
It’s…not my opinion. Or a sentiment. Or subject to bias.
Whatever bias you think I’m showing: you should name it! I don’t even know what sort of fallacy you’re accusing me of!
Growing older isn’t accepting someone sneering vaguely and unproductively at you.
The sealed pouches are a bit of theatre. My son's school has a policy that pupil's can take their phones to school but if one is seen or heard on the school grounds it'll be confiscated and the owner's parents called to come pick it up on their behalf. From what I hear they're not shy about applying that policy either.
Offsetting part of the punishment to the parents (having to get them to come in to the school to collect the phone) is going to help get the policy reinforced from home in most cases.
My kid’s school had a similar policy. I didn't mind having to go out of my way to collect the phone and didn’t pass any of that on to my kid, they were annoyed enough about having it confiscated that it only took a few times before they modified their behaviour accordingly.
Heh, my son goes to school in the next town over and I don't drive, which means it's either a 90 minute round trip by bus or £40 of taxi fares. I've made it abundantly clear to him that if I have to go into the school to get his phone back he's picking up the tab for my taxis.
I don't understand. We had a "no phones in class" rule when I was in school over a decade ago. It was the obvious default. How did it go away, and how is this new policy different from the obvious? Are they saying that until now their policy was that phones are openly allowed in class? Why??
At first a lot of parents get inconvenienced coming to get confiscated phones and if that doesn't inspire them to discipline their kid at home the school can move to the more draconian pouch systems.
> Parents have no business tracking their kids when they're at school
The tracker sends a notification when they're not at school, that's the point. Plus, I can lock down social media apps only during school hours. Blanket statements like this are plain ignorant. Also, I'm glad Utah finally passed a similar ban. Phones in use in class are a tremendous distraction 99% of the time.
If you kid is not at school, you will know. Kids weren't able to get away with hooky 20 years ago, let alone now. If they do it enough you'll have a court date!
I think this mostly boils down to our ever-connected society producing unreasonable expectations of communications. It is a very, very recent phenomena that you can instantly contact whoever whenever you want. Previously, it was common place to be unreachable for most of the day.
Realistically, your kid will survive, and even thrive, if you are not able to contact them for 8 hours a day. There is a downside to this kind of tether. It's a new type of ever-present anxiety, like someone breathing down your neck. Half of raising kids is teaching them what to do. The other half is leaving them alone, so they can learn to be competent adults.
This is ridiculous. The school will notify you if the student is not at school, or the teachers will eventually (or their grades/missing assignments).
Also you don't need to track your kids to enable school time mode, if you want to lock down their phone during school.
What are you going to do when they go to college? Track them? Monitor them? Make sure they go to classes?
At some point, you just have to trust your kids to do the right thing. It's a part of them learning how to grow up and be independent. It's better to make mistakes the younger you are so you can learn from them when there is less on the line.
This is even more ridiculous, how about that?? My particular school will send a message at 5pm daily with any attendance issues, but I can be notified instantly through the app. Why would I ever choose to be less informed? Also, I appreciate your points about college, but have you noticed a large number of students disproportionately boys are disenchanted with the whole education system at large and opting out of college. I'm clinging on to a hope that mine will see the value, but there are lots of different developmental speeds and some students need more guidance than others. You do realize some high school students just become burnouts, right? Your one size fits all, hands off and trust mentality is naïve and if you happen to be a parent, hopefully you'll be able to avoid the situation of parenting a student in crisis. Cell phones are a major problem in schools and I'm glad to see efforts being made to address it
I don't agree with tracking kids but you're being silly. I ditched in high school and my parents didn't find out. This is true for plenty of people. Sure, it was 20 years ago but we had cellphones too. It's not like we were in the dark ages and schools couldn't call
Usually no. If you missed multiple yeah, but mostly they didn't care.
Though they started to my senior year. You'd get detention or even suspension if you did it too much. It was especially problematic with us in the AP/IB programs. My older sibling's class (AP/IB) ditched so much it was messing with the state attendance records.
But maybe they didn't call because we were in the advanced programs. The people ditching the most were the ones getting good grades. The school still has a pretty good ranking in California (top 20%).
And frankly, if they called... just delete it off the answering machine before your parents got home.
Or the other thing, get your elder sibling to call you out. Or call in pretending to be the parent or elder sibling. People did that all the time. It's not like the school knows your parents' voice. And well, now that's easy to fake, right?
guess I'm glad you're not in charge of this shit. I can't even tell what lousy point you're trying to make under all this. Going to school doesn't matter? Skipping is easy, everybody should do it? it's good to pull the wool over your parent's eyes?
> messing with the state attendance records
whut?
At a basic level parental controls exist for a reason. I didn't make these products. Using them isn't the same as tracking your kids. Calling attentive parents names on the internet is stupid as is allowing phones in K-12 schools which is the point of the thread. Congrats on successfully skipping high school classes so well, troll
I think you've really misinterpreted my comments. I was more pointing out that the parent's assumptions were not accurate. Something it seems we agree on!
I'm in no way suggesting people ditch school nor that school is useless. This is a gross misinterpretation of my comment.
Since you're new here I want to stress that part of the HN culture is to respond to people in good faith. If you think someone's comment sounds outlandish, there's a good chance you've misinterpreted. Please see the guidelines, several of your comments are out of line with the guidelines here. You don't have to agree, but you do need to treat everyone as acting in good faith and not make assumptions about trolling
I remember in 2008, when Wizards of the Coast re-launched the official Dungeons & Dragons website to coincide with the announcement of the fourth edition rules. The site was something in the region of 4 MB, plus a 20 MB embedded video file. A huge number of people were refreshing the site to see what the announcement was, and it was completely slammed. Nobody could watch the trailer until they uploaded it to YouTube later.
4 MB was an absurd size for a website in 2008. It's still an absurd size for a website.
This may be a good alternative to the various web-based services, which suffer from various limitations (cost money, display ads, limited number of feeds, limited retention, annoying features you don't want, etc). The email-style user interface is also familiar, and you can set up filters to ignore or star certain stories.
Assuming you don't need syncing across devices, the main drawback to self-hosting is that it only receives updates while your PC is switched on. Some feeds update often enough that you'll miss stories if you don't grab them multiple times per day.
Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.
I didn't know the Online Safety Act had this proposal. Do you have a source?
I've been proposing the same thing on this site for months. IMO anonymous age verification with no record-keeping is the only form of age verification that should exist. No zero knowledge proofs, no centralized government identity provider, nothing.
Zero knowledge proofs are better than this "bearer token" proposal because all what is needed to unmask an account is for the shop to note down the name on the ID and the code that was given to them.
> Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
Not necessarily. There are facial scan tools which make a guess based on visual appearance of the face. They aren’t perfect, but they might have error rates comparable to systems which require linking to government ID systems.
The same way you prevented adults buying pornography for kids prior to the web, and the way you prevent adults from buying beer for kids now.
Namely, you don't prevent it (I was 11 when I first saw hardcore pornography, on a VHS tape, at a sleepover party), but it does place a (surmountable) barrier in the way, which will reduce access to some degree. The degree to which that happens depends on a lot of things that are hard to predict. We have culturally normalized access to a lot of things for children, and reversing that will likely take more than just changes to a law.
Sometimes this question comes up with an implied subtext of: "It needs to be bulletproof."
It really doesn't, and especially if the ostensible rationale is blocking the ills of social media. If your friends aren't there, there's less motive to waste a bunch of allowance-money dealing with a sketchy adult to get there.
> presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol
Selling alcohol to minors is illegal in the UK. Some do circumvent this by various means (e.g. fake ID or having an adult purchase on their behalf, both of which are also illegal), but the same is already true for the current age verification system.
How do you prevent people verifying other people online? Are you going to send cops to some guy's house because he has 3 google accounts? How do you prevent kids sneaking verification from others?
I mean I think these laws are stupid and would happily lend my license to anyone in my family to bypass this shit. Especially since for most verifications they literally just need a picture of my driver's license—the very definition of publicly available info.
Some of us are old enough to remember when the RIAA sued children for downloading Metallica albums on filesharing networks. They sued for $100,000 per song, an absurd amount when you consider that even stealing a physical album would amount only to around $1 per song. What was bizarre was that courts took the figure seriously, even if they typically settled cases for around $3,000, still around 30x actual damages. The legal maximum was $150,000 per infringement: when a staffer leaked an early cut of the Wolverine movie, the studio could only sue for that much.
Remember that Metallica band members played an active driving role in those lawsuits against their own underage fans. It wasn't just the RIAA / record company organizations behaving cruelly, it was Metallica themselves. Fuck Metallica.
And then, if we grant that Peart is the best of the best, the 100 names that would follow in any sane list, Lars is no where to be seen. I doubt he'd crack the top 250.
I still can't listen to a Metallica song on the radio without feeling a bit sour. I wasn't a die hard superfan or anything, but their songs were pretty good. It really didn't help that they had cultivated this tough guy image and then turned into total whiners about piracy.
I became a super fan for a brief second during the Napster days, that’s literally what got me into metal in the first place. Decades later and I’m still soured on them too. Napster days were so good for music discovery. I mean, they’re better now with all these algos, obviously, but it was weirdly fun to download a track with tons of random strings in the name and end up with some parody Weird Al track and that’s how you discovered something new.
It all went downhill after Metallica '91. Cover for Whiskey in the Jar, come on. It's okay when everyone is drunk I guess, otherwise just litsten to the Dubliners' version or Thin Lizzy's.
Killed Napster and forced them overseas to create one of the most toxic streaming platforms for music the world has ever seen. Spotify. Sean Parker used to be cool…
IIRC, Dave Grohl actually gave a lot of shit to Metallica, claiming that it would be one thing if this were some indie band selling cassettes having their music stolen, but it's another when multi-millionaires are crying that they aren't getting extra money.
They didn't. I haven't bought a Metallica album since the black album. That was a decade earlier, because everything since sucked, but as I got older I thought about maybe expanding my tastes. I avoided Metallica specifically for their disrespect of their fans.
Yeah, people with botox pumped lips, pink tops, and sporty fancy wear. Basically the cream of the commercial listener who understands exactly zero of the musical substance, but is there, because ads were aired on TikTok.
Faith is not without a sense of humor.
Btw, perhaps you may not know that there's this crossover looks now - a mix of black-metal and hiphop hoodies, and all the KPop adopted this writing for their pikachu songs.
I think they've got some ineffable qualities, and frankly there's lots of other genres where people might decide to give them a listen...
Which is really just a roundabout way of saying I think Apocalyptica did a lot to help refresh them in the modern zeitgeist (Yes I know it was older, but I remember youtube videos causing it to enter at least my and other's conscious space...)
Yeah, they're popular like Ariana Grande is after the Manchester bombing. But just about everything they released after the Black album is kind of lame. The Budapest tickets sold out pretty fast, but they're still lame regardless if people go to their concerts. Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse. And they're not a cult band like Death or The Sisters of Mercy either.
>> Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse
Hah!
COuple of years ago I was sipping beer in some local bar and there were some music video running on a TV. Aged angsty men with an "AMERICA YEAH bald eagle screech" vocals and visuals. "What a lame Metallica copycats" I thought. And then the title card shown up...
Not really, they missed that chance when they released Load and Reload and who knows what they did after that. I got fed up with their foray into commercial music and moved on to prog metal and other more interesting stuff. If they had stopped after the black album or continued to release quality works, then things would be different, but they chose money, whining, lawyers and drunk teenagers as an audience. They became lame and popular, which excludes being a cult band. Cult bands are not very popular in fact, as you have yourself pointed out.
Different styles. Slayer is more "history of death metal" thrash, Metallica is more "classic bay area" thrash. Personally I am more into the "history of death metal" type thrash and ambivalent about metallica but I appreciate them as artists.
I appreciate Metallica but I don't know whats so special about them, that style of thrash metal was already being done on a much more advanced level by bands like Razor at that time, so if you had any personal disagreements with Metallica it seems historically it would have been quite easy to drop them.
I enjoy them ironically by playing the MP3’s have of their songs that I definitely only ever got from ripping physical media that I definitely did not pirate because fuck Metallica lol.
As I said I don't mind them, personally they are not in my list of favorite thrash bands, but they are also not in my list of sucky bands, they are competent and accomplished musicians. I just felt anyone shouldn't have felt much emotionality ditching Metallica for whatever reasons as at that time other bands were already playing far more advanced thrash metal.
Most of their fans didn't know and probably still don't. In my admittedly limited exposure (N=3 or 4), folks I know that were informed on Metallica's behavior in the Napster age that have since purchased anything from Metallica is zero.
Why are all forums inundated with this ridiculous nonsense? They are "MAGA"? How so? Are people who follow MAGA typically anti-piracy or something? Bizarre.
It [calling anything you don't like "maga"] is political in-group signalling of a tribal ideology that also serves the dual purpose of destroying the meaning of language. Categorically inappropriate for HN - flag it and move on.
Or it's just going to be a generic term for play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Surely in a thread like this we can acknowledge the futility of things like Xerox trying to maintain their strict definition of the word xerox.
Quite similar. I guess serving largely the same purpose that "alt-right" used to.
However it's important to note that "woke" at least has legitimate (if politically contentious) meaning outside of its broad misuse as a sort of slur. The other two terms don't have that AFAIK.
The case of "maga" specifically strikes me as a spiteful attempt to misappropriate the descriptor (vaguely similar to winnie the pooh) whereas the rise of the other two seems organic.
The ideology has an inherent toxicity to it, along with a self own, doubling down on mistakes that would harm you and the others in longer run, embracing silly ideas and a general disregard for niceties.
Would have been nice if they didn’t hurt their own fans like that could be simply phrased as ‘being MAGA’
As if they are not allowed to make mistakes. If you watched more recent interviews, they understand that it was not cool on their part. Musically once per album they still have some interesting and somewhat innovative tracks still.
Yeah, but remember how joyful we'd have been if copyright had been this weak in 2003. As long as this flows down to regular people instead of just corps, then copyright won't halt societal development as much as previously anymore. The weakening of copyright is a great thing.
Just step back into space. Pretend you're so high that you can see your own person from outside yourself, like you are the CCTV camera in the corner. Now look at copyright, the law about the restriction of the right to copy to a select group. It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip.
This might be relief, we might hopefully get past copyright and patents and just have innovation free for all.
Sure, it can flow down to regular people now, because regular people don’t have access to 10s of millions of dollars to train a trillion parameter llm…
Do you say the same thing about being required to wear pants in public?
Agreed that the extreme it has been taken to is absurd and entirely counterproductive though. 20-ish years was already a long time. If it takes you more than 20 years to market your book perhaps people just don't really like it all that much?
Your memory may be failing you. The "maxima" you cite still exist, but they are merely statutory damages provisions. In other words, the plaintiffs can obtain such damages without proof of actual loss, i.e. strict liability. If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them.
Furthermore, in most copyright lawsuits that nerds like us actually care about (i.e. ones involving service providers and not actual artists or publishers), the number of works infringed is so high that the judge can just work backwards from the desired damage award and never actually hit the statutory damages cap. If the statutory damages limit was actually reached in basically any intermediary liability case, we'd be talking about damage awards higher than the US GDP.
So, does this mean that people can simply argue in court now (if they were to be prosecuted for downloading media via bittorrent) that it is fair use if they used it to train a local model on their machine?
People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use.
If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
Sadly, in many courts, when it comes to the corporate and the government, the judges rule on the axiom, "Show me your lawyer first, and I will rule, rather than show me the law, and I will rule".
> maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
The thing everybody ignores about this is context.
Suppose you upload a copy of a work to someone else over the internet for <specific reason>. Is it fair use? That has to depend on the reason, doesn't it? Aren't there going to be some reasons for which the answer is yes?
The "problem" here is that the reason typically belongs to the person downloading it. Suppose you're willing to upload a copy to anyone who has a bona fide legitimate fair use reason. Someone comes along, tells you that they have such a reason and you upload a copy to them. If they actually did, did you do anything wrong? What did you do that you shouldn't have done? How is this legitimate fair use copy supposed to be made if not like this?
But then suppose that they lied to you and had some different purpose that wasn't fair use. Is it you or them who has done something wrong? From your perspective the two cases are indistinguishable, so then doesn't it have to be them? On top of that, they're the one actually making the copy -- it gets written to persistent storage on their device, not yours.
It seems like the only reason people want to argue that it's the uploader and not the non-fair-use downloader who is doing something wrong is some combination of "downloading is harder to detect" and that then the downloader who actually had a fair use purpose would be able to present it and the plaintiffs don't like that because it's not compatible with their scattershot enforcement methods.
> It seems like the only reason people want to argue that it's the uploader
Well there's also the issue of enablement. If you're overly enthusiastic to turn a blind eye to illegal conduct you end up being labeled an accomplice. But of course that would seem to apply to Facebook here in equal measure.
> Well there's also the issue of enablement. If you're overly enthusiastic to turn a blind eye to illegal conduct you end up being labeled an accomplice.
That's something the industry made up out of whole cloth. If someone sells ski masks that can be used for both keeping the wind off your face when you're skiing and hiding your face when you're committing burglary and has no means to know what any given person intends to do with it, are you really proposing to charge the department store as an accomplice?
The way that would ordinarily work is that you could charge them if they were e.g. advertising their masks as useful for burglary. But now where are we with someone who doesn't do that?
> That's something the industry made up out of whole cloth.
No, that's how the law (at least in the US) generally works across the board.
Your ski mask example is misplaced. There are legitimate uses for the product and it isn't immediately apparent to the store why someone might be purchasing a given item. It's not their job to invade their customer's privacy.
Your logic regarding torrents only works if we assume that a significant number of peers are engaging in fair use. For a torrent containing copyrighted content that was never distributed by the rights holder via P2P. Thousands of peers all working together to make backup copies of their legitimately purchased products. Right.
I'll freely admit that scenario to be beyond absurd despite being no fan of the current copyright regime in the west.
> There are legitimate uses for the product and it isn't immediately apparent to the store why someone might be purchasing a given item. It's not their job to invade their customer's privacy.
You seem to be implying that nothing is ever legitimately fair use.
> Your logic regarding torrents only works if we assume that a significant number of peers are engaging in fair use.
What evidence do you have that this isn't the case? Not evidence that someone is doing it for the wrong reasons, evidence that no significant number of people are doing it for any legitimate reason.
There are a lot of things that are plausibly fair use. If you subscribe to a streaming service with a plan that includes 4k content but their broken service won't play that content on your 4k TV, can you get a 4k copy of the thing you're actually paying for? If you're a teacher and the law specifically says you can make copies for classroom use, but the copy you have has copy protection, can you get a copy that doesn't from someone else? If you're an organization trying to make software that can automatically subtitle videos based on the audio so that hearing impaired users can know what's being said, and you need a large amount of training data (i.e. existing video that has already been subtitled) to do machine learning, can you get them from someone else? What if you're an archivist and you actually are making backup copies of everything you can get your hands on to preserve the historical record?
What alternative do such people even have for doing the legitimate thing they ostensibly have a right to do?
Judges often roll this line out, but in criminal court I've seen some defendants get epic deals by going without a lawyer [0] since absolutely nobody in the justice system wants to deal with the guy who has no idea what he's doing and is going to make the most bizarre arguments about being a sovereign citizen. So they give them a really low offer and get them on their way as quickly as possible.
[0] I don't like to say "represent yourself." I once angered a judge by pointing out that you can't "represent yourself, you are yourself."
There's lots of wiggle room if you know how to start with the proper standing. The problem, from my perspective is: if you are trying to get away with wrong doing, or if you are legitimately being harmed by the law as it's being applied. If you are asking questions or making statements. Everything the court says is a legal determination, everything you say can be used against you,.
Im sure a lot has changed no with much criminality in the justice system and government.
No, but it does matter how much money the alleged infringer has.
Property law is mostly concerned with protecting the rich from the poor, so when a rich person violates the property of a poor person, the courts can't allow the inversion of purpose and will create something called a "legal fiction," which is basically the kind of bending-over-backwards that my children do to try to claim that they didn't break the rules, actually, and if you look at it in a certain way they were actually following the rules, actually.
Yes, the VC-backed startup ecosystem that was the origin of this website does rely on propagating the myth that we live in a meritocracy to ensure it has enough cheap labor to build prototypes that its anointed few can acquire at rock bottom pricing. But we've been through enough cycles of it now that we've started seeing the patterns.
History clearly establishes that the open market assigns substantial value to human life. We just happen to have outlawed trading in it. Human life has been deemed worthless by force of law.
Less facetiously, you're committing a semantic error.
"Markets clear" is one of those meritocracy myths that we the hoi paloi get taught explicitly all the while the elite will tell you to your face they don't believe. Google and Meta are massively profitable companies built on the idea that the concept of value is manipulable.
maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
Many judges take a dim view of expensive lawyers trying to pull the wool over their eyes with sophisticated but fallacious arguments. You have to deal with a lot of BS to be a long-standing judge, so it seems like resistance to BS may be selected for among judges.
Of course not. It is just yet another example of a 7-8 figure expensive attorney and their billions dollar corporation wasting everyone' time, tax payers dollars, and demonstrating that the law applies to us and not them. I expect them to just stop showing up in court in time. What can the court do when these people own the people that write the laws?
There really should be some type of panel for frivolous legal arguments. If they are used by corporation all of the lawyers, leadership and shareholders involved are thrown into jail. Could even get jury on this and have them give majority opinion.
I always wondered - were the huge fines applicable because they shared the files, or because they downloaded the files? The two things were always conflated and poorly understood in media reports at the time.
Seems like it would be impossible to prove substantial damages from one individual downloading an album, because you have only lost the potential single sale. No different than a kid stealing a single CD in terms of lost revenue.
Sharing the song on Kazaa or Limewire or Napster however means that they could have potentially illicitly provided the album to thousands or even millions of potential customers, more akin to stealing a truckload or even a whole store full of cds. In that case, it does seem plausible that you could prove (or at least convince a judge/jury) significant damages more in line with the exorbitant punitive sums.
Since they “caught” you by setting up fake peers that recorded your ip when sharing, I always assumed it was the latter that actually got people in trouble.
Those kids should have just pirated all the music they could, turned it into a multi billion dollar business, and had lawyers fight for them in court. As long as enough money is involved you can just about anything you want.
You are off a bit on the numbers. First, though, the RIAA suits were not for downloading. The suits were for distribution.
Here is how their enforcement actions generally went.
1. They would initially send a letter asking for around $3 per song that was being shared, threatening to sue if not paid. This typically came to a total in the $2-3k range. There were a few where the initial request was for much more such as when the person was accused of an unusually high volume of intentional distribution. But for the vast majority of people who were running file sharing apps in order to get more music for themselves rather than because they wanted to distribute music it averaged in that $2-3k range.
2. If they could not come to an agreement and actually filed a lawsuit they would pick maybe 10-25 songs out of the list of songs the person was sharing (typically around a thousand) to actually sue over. The range of possible damages in such a suit is $750-30000 per work infringed, with the court (judge and jury) picking the amount [1].
NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.
3. There would be more settlement offers before the lawsuit actually went to trial. These would almost always be in the $200-300 per song range, which since the lawsuit was only over maybe a dozen or two of the thousand+ songs the person had been sharing usually came out to the same ballpark as the settlement offers before the suit was filed.
Almost everyone settled at that point, because they realized that (1) they had no realistic chance of winning, (2) they had no realistic chance of proving they were were an "innocent infringer", (3) minimal statutory damages then of $750/song x 10-15 songs was more than the settlement offer, and (4) on top of that they would have not only their attorney fees but in copyright suits the loser often has to pay the winner's attorney fees.
4. Less than a dozen cases actually reached trial, and most of those settled during the trial for the same reasons in the above paragraph that most people settled before trial. Those were in the $3-15k range with most being around $5k.
[1] If the defendant can prove they are in "innocent infringer", meaning they didn't know they were infringing and had no reason to know that, then the low end is lowered to $200. If the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was "willful", meaning the defendant knew it was infringement and deliberately did it, the high end is raised to $150k.
What I should have said is that all their lawsuits included an allegation of infringing the distribution right. There weren't any as far as I know that were just downloading.
I think you are correct for the overwhelming majority of cases for the US; The unauthorized reproduction/distribution is where things get very aggressive and easy to prosecute based on existing case law.
The only case that comes to mind as far as trying to threaten just for downloading, blew up in the law firm's faces... among other shenanigans, it came out their own machines were seeding files as an attempt to honeypot.
However other countries may have different laws as far as possession vs distribution and related penalties.
> NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.
But that's the whole problem, isn't it? Consider how a P2P network operates. There are N users with a copy of the song. From this we know that there have been at most N uploads, for N users, so the average user has uploaded 1 copy. Really slightly less than 1, since at least one of them had the original so there are N-1 uploads and N users and the average is (N-1)/N.
There could be some users who upload more copies than others, but that only makes it worse. If one user in three uploads three copies and the others upload none, the average is still one but now the median is zero -- pick a user at random and they more likely than not haven't actually distributed it at all.
Meanwhile the low end of the statutory damages amount is 750X the average, which is why the outcome feels absurd -- because it is.
Consider what happens if 750 users each upload one copy of a $1 song. The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them, i.e. the total actual damages across all users from each user. The law sometimes does things like that where you can go after any of the parties who participated in something and try to extract the entire amount, but it's not that common for obvious reasons and the way that usually works is that you can only do it once -- if you got the $750 from one user you can't then go to the next user and get another $750, all you should be able to do is make them split the bill. But copyright law is bananas.
> The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them
Because they're statutory damages, because the actual point of the exercise is to make an example of the person breaking the law. Obviously in scenarios where it's feasible to reliably prosecute a significant fraction of offenders then making an example of people isn't justifiable.
> Because they're statutory damages, because the actual point of the exercise is to make an example of the person breaking the law.
That's quite inaccurate. Punitive damages are typically treble damages, i.e. three times the actual amount, not 750 to 150,000 times the actual amount.
The actual point of statutory damages is that proving actual damages is hard, and then if you caught someone with a pirate printing press it's somewhat reasonable to guestimate they were personally making hundreds to thousands of copies. The problem is they then applied that to P2P networks and people who were on average making a single copy.
What is? My claim is that regardless of the exact wording the intent behind the law in this specific case is to make an example of violators. Do you dispute that? If so, on what basis? Because I believe the past several decades of results speak for themselves.
> The problem is they then applied that to P2P networks and people who were on average making a single copy.
A person retains a single copy for himself. However he does indeed actively participate in the creation of many other copies (potentially hundreds of thousands as you say). That sure sounds like the digital equivalent of a pirate printing press to me.
What you were describing was not P2P but rather the users of pirate streaming sites. And as we see rights holders don't generally pursue such people, preferring instead to only go after distributors.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't support current copyright law and sincerely has no objections to what Facebook did here.
The notion that statutory damages were intended to exceed actual damages by such an unreasonable factor on purpose (hundreds to hundreds of thousands, when the standard for punitive damages is 3) rather than the ridiculous result of applying a law written with one circumstance in mind to an entirely different circumstance.
> A person retains a single copy for himself. However he does indeed actively participate in the creation of many other copies (potentially hundreds of thousands as you say).
Many of the early P2P networks (and some of the current ones, especially for small to medium files) don't have more than one user participating in any given transfer. If you wanted to download something on Napster it would connect to one other person and download the entire file from them, with no other users being involved.
That is also what happens in practice in modern day even for the networks that try to download different parts of the same file from different people, because connections are now fast enough that as soon as you connect to one peer, you have the whole file. A 3MB MP3 transfers in ~30ms on a gigabit connection, meanwhile the round trip latency to a peer in another city is typically something like 100ms (even for fast connections, because latency is bounded by the speed of light). So it's common to connect to one peer and have the entire file before you can even complete a handshake with a second one, and rather implausible for a file of that size to involve more than a single digit number of peers. Hundreds of thousands would be fully preposterous. And then we're back to, the number of uploads divided by the number of users is ~1, so if the average transfer involves, say, four peers, the number of uploads the average peer will have participated in for that file will also be four. Not hundreds, much less hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile you're back to the problem where splitting the files should be splitting the liability. If four people each upload 25% of one file to each of four other people, the total number of copies is four, not sixteen. If you want to pin all four on the first person then also pinning all four on the second person is double dipping.
Agreed that the magnitude of the penalty no longer matches the intent of the original law. But note that my original claim was not inaccurate. The point of the law here _is_ to make an example of people. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
I believe your claims about network speeds and peer count are largely inaccurate when it comes to torrents (and any other block based protocol that involves the equivalent of swarms) but I won't belabor it.
I'll also ask how you reasonably expect a court to go about performing the partial attributions you describe for data torrented from a large swarm. Like how would that even work in practice?
You make an interesting point about overall averages yet it seems to entirely miss the point of the law. Damages aren't reduced if I only illegally reproduce 25% of a book. A single chapter and the entire work are treated as equivalent here. It's the act and intent that the law is concerned with, not the extent (at least within reason).
The question is what color your bits are. Now how many of them you have or how many different people you obtained them from.
> The point of the law here _is_ to make an example of people. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
Whether they're mutually exclusive or not, I don't think that was even the point of the law. The point of statutory damages is supposed to be to address the problem of proving an exact amount of actual damages, by instead providing what was supposed to be a plausible estimate of them. But then they got applied in a context where the number hard-coded into the law is an exorbitant overestimate.
> I believe your claims about network speeds and peer count are largely inaccurate when it comes to torrents (and any other block based protocol that involves the equivalent of swarms) but I won't belabor it.
I'm pretty confident that's accurate for small files like a 3MB MP3. They literally do get fully transferred before the client has time to connect to a non-trivial number of peers. A lot of torrents use a 4MB chunk size, and even when the chunk size is smaller, you're still going to get multiple chunks from any given peer. Even with e.g. a 512kB chunk size a 3MB file has an upper limit of 6 peers, if you can even connect to that many before the first one has sent the whole file.
Large files could use more peers, but "hundreds of thousands" is still a crazy number. There are a non-trivial number of consumer junk routers that will outright crash if you try to open that number of simultaneous connections.
And I regularly use BitTorrent for Linux ISOs (I know it's a cliche but it's true), which are decently large files. The median number of connected peers when seeding really is zero, and the active number rarely exceeds 1, for anything that isn't a very recent release. Even if I leave the thing on indefinitely, until it's no longer a supported release and no one wants it anymore, on a connection with a gigabit upload, the average ratio will end up around 1. Because of course it is, because that's inherently the network-wide average.
> I'll also ask how you reasonably expect a court to go about performing the partial attributions you describe for data torrented from a large swarm. Like how would that even work in practice?
I mean this isn't really that hard, right? If getting the exact number for a specific person is unrealistic, we still know that total copies (and therefore total uploads) per user is ~1. So to do the normal punitive damages amount you take that number and multiply it by 3 instead of hundreds or hundreds of thousands.
> Damages aren't reduced if I only illegally reproduce 25% of a book. A single chapter and the entire work are treated as equivalent here.
But the entire work is being reproduced. The issue is that in the cases where it's a group effort, they're trying to double dip.
Suppose Alice, Bob, Carol and Dan work together to break into your shop like Ocean's 11 and steal four $1 cookies. They each get a cookie and you lost four. (Never mind whether you actually lost them or not.) If you only catch Carol, it's not always reasonable to put her on the hook for the entire amount instead of only her portion of it, but at least you could plausibly argue for it. But if you catch two of them, or all of them, expecting them to each pay the total for the whole group instead of collectively pay the total for the whole group is definitely unreasonable.
Children are afforded more lenience in sane societies (before the law and in social contexts) because they are still developing and not as well socialized/experienced as adults. I assume most pro-piracy people support personal use and not commercial use of content.
The issue is that child labor laws encourage children to pursue cybercrime if they want to make money since legitimate companies will not hire them. This results in a lot of incentive for children to commit cybercrime such as piracy and without the disincentive of punishment they are free to do it. These 2 things are incentivizing antisocial behavior in society.
We support copyright reform not piracy. The reason we do is because corporate giants have weaponized the system for their own ends and not for our useful promotion of the arts and sciences.
So.. I don't think it's appropriate for billion dollar companies to abuse copyrighted authored material for their own profit streams. They have the money. They can either pay or not use the material.
I do. And I get paid because I write it fulfill to the customer's need that's not covered by an existing solution, not because some law prevents using what already exists.
It wouldn't impact me at all. Without our hardware it is useless. And customers need certifications, support and availability guarantees. Customers aren't paying shit for code. They don't need code. They need solution to their problems. Of which my code is a very small (if critical) part of.
And yes, that's totally irrelevant. Because the mere fact that some people depend on some evil for their living doesn't justify its existence.
That’s good for you, but for the rest of us, we live in economies of scale. Copyright is the legal underpinning of most software engineers’ ability to earn a living and feed their families.
By no means were they suing for downloading alone. They were suing for sharing while downloading, and seeding after, and as "early seeders" they helped thousands obtain copies.
Right or wrong, it was absolutely not about just downloading. It wasn't about taking one copy.
In their eyes, it was about copyng then handing out tens of thousands of copies for free.
Again, not saying it was right. However, please don't provide an abridged account, slanted to create a conclusion in the reader.
Parent post brought in the comparison to stealing a CD, but torrenting isn't just taking a copy, it's distributing to others, hence the absurd damages claims
Sadly, it's Mullvad VPN itself which may be banned in the UK. VPNs will require identify verification. Not a problem for companies which require credit cards for payment, but Mullvad famously allows anonymous cash payments through the post.
Mass surveillance and living in a police state is an ingrained part of British culture.
It is no wonder to me that police procedurals are the most popular genre of TV shows in UK by quite a margin. They really are high-quality, but it does really feel like thinly-veiled propaganda (often commissioned by the BBC) portraying the State and police as the good guys in their endless quest against the baddies. Thank god there are CCTVs at every corner keeping the peace!
I didn't use the word "totalitarian", which the UK still isn't for the time being. A surveillance state doesn't necessary have to be totalitarian (the CCTVs were in good conscience put there to protect us from the baddies). But it certainly is a precondition to become that over time.
Not GP but I was born in the UK, and from 'CCTV on every corner' even as an exaggeration I'd question if you stepped outside London in those 15 years, not counting 'London' airports.
I live in central London and there are protests pretty much daily about all sorts of things. The problem is more no one paying attention to them rather than their being illegal.
I don't support that organisation, but I support the right not to be banned from walking in protest, in a pre policing move.
You can bet the static protest people will be kettled too as a defensive measure. I don't support frightening makeshift imprisonment in the street.
I don't support the requirement to get permission from the police to walk in protest either
Tell me: how much change you think you can effect with a few people stood static, self policing your words as not to cause offence to anyone, and then likely kettled by the police? Tell me that isn't banning protest
You're basically permitted to stand silent with a totally inoffensive sign (offensive or potentially to absolutely nobody) in a very small group that attracts no attention
Honestly both Labour and Conservatives are bound to take a beating next elections. I have no idea how will Greens and/or Reform government look like, we shall see.
Yes, all the episodes have now been set to private, and The Gathering was re-uploaded. Not quite "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube" as reported.
Age verification inherently means identity verification. There's no way to prove your age without first proving that you are YOU, either by showing your face or authenticating with some third party authority, usually government or a corporation.
The idea that you should be locked out of using your own computer until you do this is utterly insane. What problem does it solve that existing parental control tools don't? A generation of parents already trust their babies with iPads for this reason. And what of the millions of Americans who don't have current ID?