While we await public release of the final TPP text, here is a review of a draft IP chapter, http://www.freezenet.ca/an-analysis-of-the-latest-tpp-leak/. We need specialists and journalists to present credible analysis for the hundreds of millions of people who would be bound by the proposed laws.
"... breaking a copyright protection system (i.e. DRM, TPM, etc.) would land you in hot water ... if you need to circumvent a DRM for personal use, you are now liable for criminal penalties. Traditionally, for many jurisdictions, circumventing DRM is typically reserved for civil penalties. Criminal penalties implies that the government would foot the bill for enforcement. In civil cases, it is typically rights holders that go after individuals.
... civil damages do apply. How much are civil damages if an alleged infringer is found guilty? Well, that is up to rights holders, not a judge. Prosecution is able to determine the damages and a judge would have to accept whatever number comes out regardless of evidence to the contrary. A good example might be that a song may be sold for 99 cents, but the damages sought could be in the millions for all the prosecutors are concerned.
... an act of copyright infringement as set forth in this “trade” agreement doesn’t actually have to occur before the authorities are sent after you. There just has to be evidence that infringement is taking place or is about to take place.
... if you have a cell phone, and you have something on it that could be considered infringing, authorities have the right to seize it because you are suspected of trafficking. Of course, you could also be liable for civil and criminal penalties as earlier outlined and could be fined any amount copyright holders feel like.
... you could be fined on the spot because of your cell phone on top of it all. No need for a judge here. Also, no, you may not get your cell phone back. It could be destroyed ... Who gets to pay for all of this? According to page 77, you do."
I'm not convinced this analysis is reading the draft fairly:
... if you need to circumvent a DRM for personal use, you are now liable for criminal penalties. Traditionally, for many jurisdictions, circumventing DRM is typically reserved for civil penalties. Criminal penalties implies that the government would foot the bill for enforcement. In civil cases, it is typically rights holders that go after individuals."
Except that here's the actual text:
> Each [7] Party [US/SG/MX/NZ/PE/JP/BN/AU/CL/MY propose: shall] [CA propose: may] provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied where any person is found to have engaged willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or financial gain in any of the above activities.
That doesn't sound like "if you need to circumvent a DRM for personal use, you are now liable for criminal penalties" to me.
Depends on how you define "financial gain". Bootleggers are one thing -- but if some big company decides that you saving money on DVDs you would have purchased otherwise is "financial gain", things could turn very quickly, right?
The mere possibility of a criminal penalty POSSIBLY applying is a big move.
Your quoted text is a sub-clause of (ii) below, which applies to device supply chains.
Personal, non-commercial circumvention of DRM is addressed in (i) below.
"(i) knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know,[174] circumvents without authority or any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work,[175] performance, or phonogram;[176] or
(ii) manufactures, imports, distributes[177], offers for sale or rental to the public or otherwise provide devices, products, or components, or offers to the public or provides services, that:"
So this sounds like using one of the Youtube Downloader applications could land you in hot water -- even though there isn't any cryptographic DRM on youtube videos, it could be argued that since there isn't a Download button on the page, this is an "effective DRM measure", and that the downloader app could be a circumvention measure.
No it isn't. It's part of the superordinate clause (a), and you can tell that because the subclause of (ii) that you mention has further subclauses ((A),(B),(c)) which end with a period. Think about how this would be indented:
1. *Blah blah blah.* Blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah:
(a) blah blah blah; blah blah, blah blah blah where
(i) blah blah, or
(ii) blah blah blah, blah:
(A) blah,
(B) blah blah, or
(C) blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah. *<< this is still part of subclause (1)(a)*
(b) Blah blah blah [...]
One of the depressing aspects of this whole TPP/TTIP debate here on HN is that although most people here either write code for a living or at least know how to do so, very few have ever thought through the fact that there are rules of scope in legal documents as well.
I appreciate that such documents are very confusing, even more so when they are in draft form and include multiple 'live' options (rather like improperly declared constants in programming), and more so again when they're presented as just a big wall of text without any typographic structuring that would make them easier to read. Parsing such complex documents is difficult; if it were easy then courts would be less busy than they are. But a great deal of the 'analysis' of the impending trade agreements (as well as other legal stuff that is sometimes posted to HN) seems to start with an assumption about meaning or purpose, and then go through the text looking for clues to back it up. This is a fast track to self-deception and eventual defeat in the event of a dispute.
Neither; as I said, I think it's part of a superordinate (higher) clause, of which (i) and (ii) were subclauses. Mind, I am just going off the short extract on the Freezenet page- I didn't bother to dig out the original document and work back from page 63 to get back to the very top context. I've decided to wait the 30 days for the final text to appear and then make a decision to support it or not based on the final text rather than a draft.
You're welcome. I think it's a great shame (and probably no accident) that really important stuff like legislation that can affect the lives of millions of people is still presented in a form that makes interpretation extremely difficult for non-specialists.
A variation on the legal-DSL inquiry upthread: what do you think about open-source code that ships with open-source legal terms-of-service which are enforced by the code? Even something as simple as attribution for CC-BY-4.0 does not have a "reference implementation" or lint-checker.
I'm very interested in this subject, but not especially expert at it, plus I haven't kept up with the technology on a daily basis for over a year, so I have no clue what the cutting-edge trends are right now. There is a HNer that has organized a couple of conferences around this theme at Berkeley and Stanford in the last few years. I will try to do some catching up on the issue and post anything cool I find.
I have a question that's off topic from the TPP/TTIP debate. I have another friend that is interested in this topic. Do you think it's possible to create a computer parsable Domain-Specific Language for legal documents? Or maybe to cover a certain subset of legal document types?
No. (well, I guess it depends on your definition of 'possible').
(have degrees in software engineering & law, have during law school reviewed much of the existing literature in this field from several societies/journals, of which one of my professors was a prominent contributor; there has been much published on this type of stuff, and none of it is deemed (even by the people working on it) remotely feasible for implementation or actual use.)
Start searching e.g. by reading the publications of http://jurix.nl and the literature referenced therein; or google scholar'ing on 'legal ontologies' and going from there.
I disagree with Roel_v and see no fundamental reason why legal texts could not be formalized, but there are good arguments for both positions. Also, he's more knowledgeable than I am so you should discount my opinion a bit. But not too much because I'm super smart :-p
Try to create a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be considered fraud, without invoking the concept of reasonable or relying on the contents of the alleged perpetrator's mind.
Human judgement turns out to be pretty important in deciding whether or not something is a crime. That judgement is influenced by argument, guided by precedent, and reviewable by higher authorities, but it is ultimately judgement. It's somewhere between very, very hard and impossible to write laws that catch the edge cases without ensnaring innocent people or being subject to human interpretation.
While true, I think there could be significant merit in defining one where no complex decision is made by a machine at all. When trying to read these legal documents I struggle a bit with holding all the various bits in my head, a section only applies if A and B are true, and C is over 16, but not if ...
Those same definitions will be used several times. Could they be extracted out? Could we have something that we're able to turn into a series of questions that a lay person could have at least a crack at? I've seen some of those done for tax law in the UK and it really simplifies things (although these are made manually).
Basically, keep humans making those decisions of what is malicious or wilful, and have the law written in such a way as to allow (but not require) a computer to take and combine those decisions.
Laws mean only what they are interpreted to mean. So, as in the drift of interpretation of the 2nd Amendment over the years (for example), any formal DSL you could devise would be at the mercy of any sustaining cultural narrative going on around any particular law in question. People aren't computers.
Don't be naive. If you circumvent DRM or protection, i.e jailbreak your phone. Then you share it with the world on your website, because you believe in user's freedom.
Well, you're screwed if you have ads on your site. Imagine, your site get's popular. You make lots of money from google ads. Ooops, you did it for financial gain. Try proving you didn't.
What part is contended? In your example, the person is making a profit from willful copyright infringement. If this is the most sympathetic hypothetical 'victim' you can come up with, you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone of the 'injustice' of this agreement...
Point is the person didn't decide to break DRM to make a profit. They did it, they have ads on their site. Maybe they don't have ads, but they get a job offer because of their ability to break DRM. It's very easy for the lawyers to stretch what it means to make profit. Perhaps someone sends them the new iphone13z for free and to break. All that is "profit".
> We need specialists and journalists to present credible analysis for the hundreds of millions of people who would be bound by the proposed laws.
Let's hope we get them. Personally, I expect Reddit to be able to deliver the necessary attention and expertise to cover the issue thoroughly.
EDIT to downvoters: that was not meant as a joke. Reddit is usually orders of magnitude better information source than any media outlet. Just ignore the front page and look at a relevant subreddit.
Not yet. I expect that after the TPP becomes available to read, people from various political, news and law-related subreddits will pool up and revive /r/TPP or start something new. A sticked post will likely emerge, that will be linked to from various subreddits, which will serve as an entry point to the analysis of the topic. It'll be easy to find.
That doesn't appear to be an un-biased sub. From its description:
>The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multinational trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement.
No, that is honest to God truth. Reddit is known for doing orders of magnitude better coverage of pretty much everything than mainstream media in the same way Hacker News is orders of magnitude better than any tech-related media source. I always thought it was an obvious observation, but it seems not, so let me list some reasons for why this is so:
- (an important point to start, because it's what many people are missing) ignore the frontpage, head for topical subreddits; pretty much any topic you could imagine has a moderated, HN-quality-like subreddit for it
- you can't really spin an agenda on Reddit; too many people from all sides participating -> bullshit is eventually identified as such
- like here, content on Reddit is created by people who care about the issue at hand, unlike media outlets which usually care about influence and advertising money
- unlike mainstream media outlets, Reddit users aren't under direct or indirect pressure from governments and corporations to spin the story in a particular way
- there are lots of actual experts on Reddit, from every occupation imaginable; so for instance on /r/spacex you'll find actual aerospace industry professionals, actual historians on /r/History, etc; they all participate in their free time and have no incentive, monetary or otherwise, to bullshit, nor their contributions are twisted by editorial staff to say whatever the outlet wants them to say like mainstream media does all the time
- whatever bullshit the mainstream media publishes, Reddit users will find and debunk (again, just like we do here on HN with tech/hard-science-related news)
- Reddit does even care about the form more; the main post on the TPP will likely have less typos than the main article in NYT
Anyway, what I expect to happen is that the discussions on TPP will quickly turn into a group organizing around a subreddit that will collect and summarize analyses of experts both from mainstream media and Reddit natives. Like usual, there will likely be a sticker post with a huge FAQ directing to detailed answers to all the questions you could possibly ask. All information in one place, throughly verified and free from bullshit.
TL;DR: people accusing me of being sarcastic are probably missing out on one of the few bullshit-free sources of information on the Internet.
Off the top of my head, for an example of a sticky post, check out this[0] entry point to Ukrainian Conflict on /r/worldnews, which also links to this[1] sticky post on /r/ukraine. Also be sure to see the live thread[2], which has been going for something like two years now.
EDIT or check out [3] on NSA leaks. Less discussions there, but find me a better place to find all the information about pretty much every single leak and surveillance-related story recently. Be sure to check out the sidebar - the list of posts is sortable by topics and there's also a Wiki.
> TL;DR: people accusing me of being sarcastic are probably missing out on one of the few bullshit-free sources of information on the Internet.
My experience with Reddit has been that, like most other places on the Internet, it's a mixed bag.
Specifically, some of the moderators are authoritarian dicks (e.g. /r/technology) who evaluate rules without nuance and ban people for sharing a link even when given explicit permission by another moderator to share it.
Other subreddits are a bit better (e.g. /r/php), others are probably worse. My opinion of /r/netsec has changed frequently over the past few months.
> My experience with Reddit has been that, like most other places on the Internet, it's a mixed bag.
That I will agree. It's a very mixed bag, the worst subreddits are utter crap, but the best ones are pretty much the best source of knowledge on the Internet. You have to find the ones you like, but fortunately it isn't hard :).
Personally, I still prefer HN as my primary procrastination target. On Reddit I usually hang out only on /r/KerbalSpaceProgram. However, I turn to Reddit whenever I need to research particular interests. Almost always there exists a high-quality subreddit for the topic I want to explore. I'm usually less interested in the on-going discussion then, and more in the accumulated knowledge.
For example, I actually went (successfully) on a diet with Reddit. When researching ways to lose weight I ended up browsing dieting subreddits, and eventually ended up on /r/keto. The ongoing discussion is, as you may suspect, mostly photos of people trying to lose weight mixed with topics covering minutiae of the ketogenic diet. The sidebar, however, is a trove of knowledge and experience that community has collected over the years. It linked me directly to books, research, experiences and best tips that helped me set up and execute my plan.
> Reddit is known for doing orders of magnitude better coverage of pretty much everything than mainstream media
This is just farcially false. Reddit has good coverage in some areas and bad coverage in other areas. There are a few places where it's gives you the absolute best coverage but, as a counterexample, if Reddit was your only source for news you might think America's #1 problem was an epidemic of false-rape complaints.
Reddit is about where Wikipedia was 5 years in, a sometimes great resource and at the same time a constant punchline about not being a great resource. It has the potential to grow into something as useful or moreso but the jury is still out.
While I'm certain there will be areas of concern, I'm unclear how we are supposed to intelligently send our concerns along if the text of the agreement will not be available for 30 days. We'll look like idiots if we start quoting language from a 2 month old leak if that language was not in the final agreement.
But as a counterpoint, the crypto war. The second one we're in right now. Didn't this get settled? Oh wait, new administration. Time for the powers that shouldn't be to try again.
Instead of telling Washington about my dissatisfaction I've decided I'm going to piss in the ocean. I suspect the outcome will be the same, except it feels so great to piss in the ocean.
With that attitude that will be the expected outcome indeed. SOPA was after enough resistance from the public successfully repealed. This can be done again.
What money started, patience will finish. Unpopular legislation needs only be proposed again and again until it passes. Corporations (who cannot die) always have time on their side.
I think you can make a compelling argument now that can be summarized as "since unfortunately the review period for such a complex treaty is extremely short I am writing ahead of its release to highlight areas of deep concern that were in the draft. Specifically ... . it is of critical importance that if any of these rules remain or if like rules which would ...have some problem... have been introduced that you vote against this treaty " and so on. You can state what you feel it must do or not do to warrant passing without knowing the final text.
If you think they would never hassle people over this stuff, let me remind you that every day the TSA holds people without the ability to contact a lawyer.
This makes me think that it would be nice to have two passwords for your device. One to access it, and one to erase the device and go back to default settings.
Unless that is illegal too.
That would be called tampering with evidence, and is very illegal in the United States. You would likely be able to be charged with that and obstruction of justice just for giving them the kill-password.
Good luck on plausible deniability when they have your device, enter the password that you told them, and see the device factory reset. The fun part is, regardless of whether or not the device held incriminating evidence, the act of clearing it is still illegal.
Even if you cleared the device before it was taken into custody, they could still have a case if they can reasonably show that you cleared it with suspicion that it would be taken into custody. Obviously, that can be difficult to show, depending on the burden of proof required.
The point of plausible deniability is that you have an entire fake partition, with operating system and innocuous data, which looks like it's the only one on the hard drive.
There is no such thing as "plausible deniability". It's a nerd's fantasy of how they think things work, starting from the faulty assumption that "law" in the broadest sense of the word is a closed rule-based decision tree.
VeraCrypt (for example; previously TrueCrypt) allows for using separate passwords to access different data depending on which one was entered: one would be a dummy volume on which you would plant convincing data, and the other ("hidden") volume would contain your actual data. Since the encrypted data are indistinguishable (ideally!) from randomness, you have plausible deniability.
For those that down voted the above is a reference to Orwell's 1984 where big brother watches us all and the above nations are in perpetual conflict to keep the population in line. In light of my understanding of some of the TPP provisions I thought it was an apt reference.
The incumbent powers will say that this promotes a lot of freedom and a lot of rights. Free trade, free markets, freedom, freedom, freedom. Property rights are individual rights! You don't want to be a dirty socialist, do you? Property rights are the underpinning of all freedom. If you refuse to strengthen them, you refuse to strengthen liberty, you monster!
Here we see property rights being strengthened to the point of undermining popular sovereignty! How can they be called rights when the stronger they are and the more aggressively they are enforced the more authoritarian the world feels?
Music, entertainment, simple generic drugs and many other things are being made too inexpensive thanks to technology and globalization. I think these trade deals are attempts to put that genie back in the bottle and increase the price through extension of artificial rights and enforcement of criminal penalties against violators.
There's a big difference between drugs (which did legitimately cost someone at some point many millions to research and prove effective and safe) and music (which anyone with a modicum of talent can make in their garage and which costs millions only to market).
As a corollary, get your music from people with no marketing budget. They'll be forced to charge what it actually costs.
Regarding drug cost and development, I wonder what the drug market would look like without patent law? Right now, and for the foreseeable future, drug R&D is expensive. If companies could not patent their drugs they would not make enough money off their product to be profitable. What would this do to the market?
One possible way it would work is that all drug development would be done by non-profits and government sponsored labs. Then drug R&D would be paid for directly by the people who want the drugs upfront and anyone could produce them. The final cost of drugs would be just a markup on the manufacturing cost.
The alternative is that people would not develop drugs, but I find it hard to believe that this would be the case.
The problem with drug research is that current incentives reward companies to focus on new (or sufficiently new to patent) medicines of little advantage and compete for market share at high prices, rather than to develop clinically superior medicines by focussing on social benefit vs costs. More publicly funded research into drugs with high social benefits would also help.
They're really hurting themselves with this legislation, I for one welcome it.
If pirating Beyoncé will put you in jail, more people will be willing to listen to all of the great free music on sites like bandcamp and soundcloud.
That's the major benefit to this legislation as I see it. Overpriced pop media garbage will become decreasingly popular in exchange for better but less-popular works. As recording and film companies see large swathes of the population leaving their works for independent producers, they'll lower their prices to try to stay relevant.
I say this even as a frequent media pirate -- this is not the end of the world, far from it. If this legislation has teeth, it will birth a new world of free creativity, of the people and for the people.
Edit: The same, I propose, will be true of opensource hardware.
I think you're going to be disappointed about the future. Given I need music to keep focused at work, I got a subscription to Google Play. Now I've got access to all the Beyonce I need for $10 / month. It kind of sucks because my desktop is not capable of caching music for offline use, only my Android can. Plus, if I end my subscription, I get to keep nothing. It's a great way to discover new music though. And I don't like SoundCloud because the signal to noise ratio is not that good and I don't have the patience.
My point is that the notion of buying songs and albums is coming to an end. I personally don't like it, but there you have it. And sorry to say it, but for this future in which we rent music, I also blame piracy. I also think ad-blockers will be the catalyst for a similarly dark future for websites.
The underlying cause is always people illegally using and not willing to pay for other people's work.
Except the law will not be applied to protect the rights of independent musicians. Only of big business. Everyone will pirate the indies and those rights holders will be ignored. This law, like all laws today, will not be applied evenly. It's not meant to serve us. It's meant to serve power.
Piracy will never be stamped out. People are already paying for VPN access so they can torrent stuff without getting caught. Either that or they go to a private tracker instead of a public one.
The Pirates will just develop a new technology to avoid detection, even making a Mesh Network off of the Internet that is a private network that stores pirated files and other stuff. You'd have to know someone to get access to this Mesh Network. But I imagine people in colleges will make their own Wifi Mesh Networks for students to use to share files and then extend the range to allow people near the college to share files as well.
People will invest in a Seedbox to download torrents for them and share access to it with their friends.
Much as I'd like to see independent artists get considered, most people still go for what is popular based on what they hear on the radio or in TV shows or movies.
A little early to freak out, don't you think, EFF? Sure, there was some nasty crap in the leaked text, but what's going to actually be debated and potentially passed as law is the text that was agreed in the wee hours of the morning and isn't available yet. Some things in the negotiations seem to have actually gone against the U.S. IP approach, e.g. biologics protection term. To me it seems wiser to wait until the final text is out before deciding whether/in what ways to oppose it.
I’d argue that it’s implausible to claim that TPP could add more than a fraction of one percent to the incomes of the nations involved; even the 0.5 percent suggested by Petri et al looks high to me.
These gains aren’t nothing, but we’re not talking about a world-shaking deal here.
So why do some parties want this deal so much? Because as with many “trade” deals in recent years, the intellectual property aspects are more important than the trade aspects. Leaked documents suggest that the US is trying to get radically enhanced protection for patents and copyrights; this is largely about Hollywood and pharma rather than conventional exporters.
104 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] thread"... breaking a copyright protection system (i.e. DRM, TPM, etc.) would land you in hot water ... if you need to circumvent a DRM for personal use, you are now liable for criminal penalties. Traditionally, for many jurisdictions, circumventing DRM is typically reserved for civil penalties. Criminal penalties implies that the government would foot the bill for enforcement. In civil cases, it is typically rights holders that go after individuals.
... civil damages do apply. How much are civil damages if an alleged infringer is found guilty? Well, that is up to rights holders, not a judge. Prosecution is able to determine the damages and a judge would have to accept whatever number comes out regardless of evidence to the contrary. A good example might be that a song may be sold for 99 cents, but the damages sought could be in the millions for all the prosecutors are concerned.
... an act of copyright infringement as set forth in this “trade” agreement doesn’t actually have to occur before the authorities are sent after you. There just has to be evidence that infringement is taking place or is about to take place.
... if you have a cell phone, and you have something on it that could be considered infringing, authorities have the right to seize it because you are suspected of trafficking. Of course, you could also be liable for civil and criminal penalties as earlier outlined and could be fined any amount copyright holders feel like.
... you could be fined on the spot because of your cell phone on top of it all. No need for a judge here. Also, no, you may not get your cell phone back. It could be destroyed ... Who gets to pay for all of this? According to page 77, you do."
... if you need to circumvent a DRM for personal use, you are now liable for criminal penalties. Traditionally, for many jurisdictions, circumventing DRM is typically reserved for civil penalties. Criminal penalties implies that the government would foot the bill for enforcement. In civil cases, it is typically rights holders that go after individuals."
Except that here's the actual text:
> Each [7] Party [US/SG/MX/NZ/PE/JP/BN/AU/CL/MY propose: shall] [CA propose: may] provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied where any person is found to have engaged willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or financial gain in any of the above activities.
That doesn't sound like "if you need to circumvent a DRM for personal use, you are now liable for criminal penalties" to me.
The mere possibility of a criminal penalty POSSIBLY applying is a big move.
Personal, non-commercial circumvention of DRM is addressed in (i) below.
"(i) knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know,[174] circumvents without authority or any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work,[175] performance, or phonogram;[176] or
(ii) manufactures, imports, distributes[177], offers for sale or rental to the public or otherwise provide devices, products, or components, or offers to the public or provides services, that:"
I appreciate that such documents are very confusing, even more so when they are in draft form and include multiple 'live' options (rather like improperly declared constants in programming), and more so again when they're presented as just a big wall of text without any typographic structuring that would make them easier to read. Parsing such complex documents is difficult; if it were easy then courts would be less busy than they are. But a great deal of the 'analysis' of the impending trade agreements (as well as other legal stuff that is sometimes posted to HN) seems to start with an assumption about meaning or purpose, and then go through the text looking for clues to back it up. This is a fast track to self-deception and eventual defeat in the event of a dispute.
I'm not a lawyer, just a law nerd.
Do you agree that the quoted text was in the scope of the "devices" (ii) branch rather than in the scope of the "circumvention" (i) branch?
http://keionline.org/sites/default/files/Section-G-Copyright...
Some attempts have been made at Finance DSLs, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23448/dsl-in-finance
(have degrees in software engineering & law, have during law school reviewed much of the existing literature in this field from several societies/journals, of which one of my professors was a prominent contributor; there has been much published on this type of stuff, and none of it is deemed (even by the people working on it) remotely feasible for implementation or actual use.)
Start searching e.g. by reading the publications of http://jurix.nl and the literature referenced therein; or google scholar'ing on 'legal ontologies' and going from there.
https://computationallegalstudies.com is the blog of law professor Dean Katz, and will probably be of considerable interest to you.
Human judgement turns out to be pretty important in deciding whether or not something is a crime. That judgement is influenced by argument, guided by precedent, and reviewable by higher authorities, but it is ultimately judgement. It's somewhere between very, very hard and impossible to write laws that catch the edge cases without ensnaring innocent people or being subject to human interpretation.
Those same definitions will be used several times. Could they be extracted out? Could we have something that we're able to turn into a series of questions that a lay person could have at least a crack at? I've seen some of those done for tax law in the UK and it really simplifies things (although these are made manually).
Basically, keep humans making those decisions of what is malicious or wilful, and have the law written in such a way as to allow (but not require) a computer to take and combine those decisions.
How effective is a measure if it was just circumvented 'without authority'?
I'm sure this is just one of many contradictions in the final document. I guess we'll get to see soon.
Any programmers in the negotiating committees perchance?
Well, you're screwed if you have ads on your site. Imagine, your site get's popular. You make lots of money from google ads. Ooops, you did it for financial gain. Try proving you didn't.
No, the person is not. Removing DRM does not infringe copyright. A jailbreak does not infringe copyright.
Let's hope we get them. Personally, I expect Reddit to be able to deliver the necessary attention and expertise to cover the issue thoroughly.
EDIT to downvoters: that was not meant as a joke. Reddit is usually orders of magnitude better information source than any media outlet. Just ignore the front page and look at a relevant subreddit.
Take a look at, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nl4sz/e... and tell me you've actually seen a better summary by a mainstream media outlet.
>The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multinational trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement.
is just mind boggling if you are interested in classical music.
note: some of the early links to some YouTube links are dead but it is not hard to search for alternative given the information provided.
That was sarcasm, right?
- (an important point to start, because it's what many people are missing) ignore the frontpage, head for topical subreddits; pretty much any topic you could imagine has a moderated, HN-quality-like subreddit for it
- you can't really spin an agenda on Reddit; too many people from all sides participating -> bullshit is eventually identified as such
- like here, content on Reddit is created by people who care about the issue at hand, unlike media outlets which usually care about influence and advertising money
- unlike mainstream media outlets, Reddit users aren't under direct or indirect pressure from governments and corporations to spin the story in a particular way
- there are lots of actual experts on Reddit, from every occupation imaginable; so for instance on /r/spacex you'll find actual aerospace industry professionals, actual historians on /r/History, etc; they all participate in their free time and have no incentive, monetary or otherwise, to bullshit, nor their contributions are twisted by editorial staff to say whatever the outlet wants them to say like mainstream media does all the time
- whatever bullshit the mainstream media publishes, Reddit users will find and debunk (again, just like we do here on HN with tech/hard-science-related news)
- Reddit does even care about the form more; the main post on the TPP will likely have less typos than the main article in NYT
Anyway, what I expect to happen is that the discussions on TPP will quickly turn into a group organizing around a subreddit that will collect and summarize analyses of experts both from mainstream media and Reddit natives. Like usual, there will likely be a sticker post with a huge FAQ directing to detailed answers to all the questions you could possibly ask. All information in one place, throughly verified and free from bullshit.
TL;DR: people accusing me of being sarcastic are probably missing out on one of the few bullshit-free sources of information on the Internet.
EDIT or check out [3] on NSA leaks. Less discussions there, but find me a better place to find all the information about pretty much every single leak and surveillance-related story recently. Be sure to check out the sidebar - the list of posts is sortable by topics and there's also a Wiki.
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1w4090/ukraine_r...
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1vuj6v/ukrainian_p...
[2] - https://www.reddit.com/live/3rgnbke2rai6hen7ciytwcxadi
[3] - https://www.reddit.com/r/NSALeaks/
My experience with Reddit has been that, like most other places on the Internet, it's a mixed bag.
Specifically, some of the moderators are authoritarian dicks (e.g. /r/technology) who evaluate rules without nuance and ban people for sharing a link even when given explicit permission by another moderator to share it.
Other subreddits are a bit better (e.g. /r/php), others are probably worse. My opinion of /r/netsec has changed frequently over the past few months.
That I will agree. It's a very mixed bag, the worst subreddits are utter crap, but the best ones are pretty much the best source of knowledge on the Internet. You have to find the ones you like, but fortunately it isn't hard :).
Personally, I still prefer HN as my primary procrastination target. On Reddit I usually hang out only on /r/KerbalSpaceProgram. However, I turn to Reddit whenever I need to research particular interests. Almost always there exists a high-quality subreddit for the topic I want to explore. I'm usually less interested in the on-going discussion then, and more in the accumulated knowledge.
For example, I actually went (successfully) on a diet with Reddit. When researching ways to lose weight I ended up browsing dieting subreddits, and eventually ended up on /r/keto. The ongoing discussion is, as you may suspect, mostly photos of people trying to lose weight mixed with topics covering minutiae of the ketogenic diet. The sidebar, however, is a trove of knowledge and experience that community has collected over the years. It linked me directly to books, research, experiences and best tips that helped me set up and execute my plan.
This is just farcially false. Reddit has good coverage in some areas and bad coverage in other areas. There are a few places where it's gives you the absolute best coverage but, as a counterexample, if Reddit was your only source for news you might think America's #1 problem was an epidemic of false-rape complaints.
Reddit is about where Wikipedia was 5 years in, a sometimes great resource and at the same time a constant punchline about not being a great resource. It has the potential to grow into something as useful or moreso but the jury is still out.
LOLOLOL
Because Reddit's reader/membership is obviously a balanced and unbiased sample of the world's population, right?
It doesn't matter, it's not like the peoples complaints will mean anything.
Even if you cleared the device before it was taken into custody, they could still have a case if they can reasonably show that you cleared it with suspicion that it would be taken into custody. Obviously, that can be difficult to show, depending on the burden of proof required.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/forcing-suspects-...
(but they might just have you enter them yourself instead :/)
VeraCrypt (for example; previously TrueCrypt) allows for using separate passwords to access different data depending on which one was entered: one would be a dummy volume on which you would plant convincing data, and the other ("hidden") volume would contain your actual data. Since the encrypted data are indistinguishable (ideally!) from randomness, you have plausible deniability.
https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Plausible%20De...
Here we see property rights being strengthened to the point of undermining popular sovereignty! How can they be called rights when the stronger they are and the more aggressively they are enforced the more authoritarian the world feels?
As a corollary, get your music from people with no marketing budget. They'll be forced to charge what it actually costs.
One possible way it would work is that all drug development would be done by non-profits and government sponsored labs. Then drug R&D would be paid for directly by the people who want the drugs upfront and anyone could produce them. The final cost of drugs would be just a markup on the manufacturing cost.
The alternative is that people would not develop drugs, but I find it hard to believe that this would be the case.
If pirating Beyoncé will put you in jail, more people will be willing to listen to all of the great free music on sites like bandcamp and soundcloud.
That's the major benefit to this legislation as I see it. Overpriced pop media garbage will become decreasingly popular in exchange for better but less-popular works. As recording and film companies see large swathes of the population leaving their works for independent producers, they'll lower their prices to try to stay relevant.
I say this even as a frequent media pirate -- this is not the end of the world, far from it. If this legislation has teeth, it will birth a new world of free creativity, of the people and for the people.
Edit: The same, I propose, will be true of opensource hardware.
My point is that the notion of buying songs and albums is coming to an end. I personally don't like it, but there you have it. And sorry to say it, but for this future in which we rent music, I also blame piracy. I also think ad-blockers will be the catalyst for a similarly dark future for websites.
The underlying cause is always people illegally using and not willing to pay for other people's work.
Um, how? Why not blame high-speed internet instead?
The Pirates will just develop a new technology to avoid detection, even making a Mesh Network off of the Internet that is a private network that stores pirated files and other stuff. You'd have to know someone to get access to this Mesh Network. But I imagine people in colleges will make their own Wifi Mesh Networks for students to use to share files and then extend the range to allow people near the college to share files as well.
People will invest in a Seedbox to download torrents for them and share access to it with their friends.
Much as I'd like to see independent artists get considered, most people still go for what is popular based on what they hear on the radio or in TV shows or movies.
I’d argue that it’s implausible to claim that TPP could add more than a fraction of one percent to the incomes of the nations involved; even the 0.5 percent suggested by Petri et al looks high to me.
These gains aren’t nothing, but we’re not talking about a world-shaking deal here.
So why do some parties want this deal so much? Because as with many “trade” deals in recent years, the intellectual property aspects are more important than the trade aspects. Leaked documents suggest that the US is trying to get radically enhanced protection for patents and copyrights; this is largely about Hollywood and pharma rather than conventional exporters.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/tpp-at-the-nabe/