Devon's clippings · Clipped: Tue-18-Jan-2022 · Original:
techdirt.com/articles/20220114/14583548284/remembering-fight-against-sopa-10-years-later-what-it-means-today.shtml
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Techdirt Insider Discord
The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...
- BentFranklin: [article]
- Outrageous that github took over his repo
- Mike Masnick: It's happened before. We wrote about a similar story years ago
- John Roddy: tl;dr: it's the xkcd comic about infrastructure, right?
- https://xkcd.com/2347/
- BentFranklin: [article]
- John Roddy: [article]
- [link]
- Hoooo boy
- Cathy Gellis: Wait, why are we arguing about Florida law here...?
- John Roddy: Because the first amendment is unconstitutional.
- Cathy Gellis: But... but... but... that's not even a First Amendment question. That's more like a federalism question...
- John Roddy: Well then the constitution is unconstitutional.
- Now please grant this injunction forcing Twitter to reinstate the account of me and my antivax friends.
- katana: [article]
- Brutal self own.
- Mike Masnick: *cough* [link]
- katana: Soz, I haven't been keeping up.
- John Roddy: [link]
- Judge denies Trump's move to consolidate the "BIG TECH" lawsuits.
- Vidiot: I'm telling my kids that when I'm old, enfeebled and shipped off to "the home", they should set me up with a laptop and a bookmark for Court Listener... a new rabbit-hole with every click. Seriously, productivity stops cold when I start reading this nonsense.
- Mike Masnick: I feel like you're becoming my assignments editor, and it's not a bad thing...
- John Roddy: There's a reason Leonard French offered to let me find stories for him. ^_^
- Mike Masnick: hey techdirt insiders... this event we're having with Zoe Lofgren should be fun, so I'm going to suggest folks register: [link]
- Samuel Abram: Is this like the time you had the authors of Section 230 over?
- Timothy Geigner: For the craft beer industry....something wicked this way here comes the trademark lawsuits.... [article]
- More to come, Insiders
- Samuel Abram: Well, at least it's not just the Belgian beer manufacturers this time
- Timothy Geigner: LOL..... https://twitter.com/zachshakked/...
- Vidiot: Here's one I'd missed up til now... last April, the FCC created a rule requiring broadcast outlets to disclose when leased programming originates from a foreign government. Broadcasters are apparently unwilling to figure that out. Yes, more complicated to discern (in some cases) than it seems, but really... [article]
- Cathy Gellis: That's fascinating. It's an online moderation problem, but this time with spectrum licensing changing the First Amendment analysis...
- Mike Masnick: Yup. Similar...
- BentFranklin: [link]
- Mike Masnick: those articles always strike me as so weird. almost everything they discuss apply to the early days of the web too. that's not to say that the web3 approach will work, but the early dismissal without looking at the various attempts to fix those things is this weird blindness
- BentFranklin: NFTs and various Coinz have nothing to do with what the web is, other than to use it along with everything else that uses the web. So claiming that stuff is somehow "web3" is gross appropriation.
- Mike Masnick: eh. i'm not going to argue this. i honestly don't understand the people who refuse to accept that there might possibly be something useful here. i get the general thinking -- i'm skeptical about *most* of it. but the immediate (and often angry and spiteful) dismissal of ALL Of IT strikes me as not just short sighted, but weird
- BentFranklin: I can find any number of tech evangelists/apologists by swinging a cat. I'm here for tech DIRT.
- Mike Masnick: i'm not evanglizing or apologizing for anything. again, this is the bit i don't understand about the people who kneejerk insist that EVERYTHING that comes out of this space is pure garbage. it's the opposite of the evanglists/apologists. I'm neither. I'm trying to sort through what's actually useful and what's not. And some people are like "HOW DARE YOU, NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY BE USEFUL." All I'm trying to do is see if anything is, and that means not offhand dismissing absolutely everything. And then people yell at me for being an evanglist? C'mon
- mildconcern: Yeah, it's guilt by association. It's pretty clear that most of the NFT space right now is a towering pile of scam laden crap that probably encrusts a fair amount of money laundering and even worse things. And it might also turn out to be a total nothingburger beyond the answer to a bar trivia question in ten years.
- but the web itself was a similar tower of scam laden crap around 99-00
- So, it seems odd not to want to poke at the core tech a little just beacuse a lot of assholes are using it at this time
- Mike Masnick: yes.
- and i mean, out of the crap in 99-00 some interesting and useful things came out of it. i'm focused on trying to find those things AND ALSO to convince those building them to steer away from the hype and scams and towards building a better internet
- mildconcern: I mean, the fact that there are people out there paying $15k for a note about a jpg of a monkey is right up there with the valualtions of Pets.com
- but as Pets.com was coming along, so was Amazon.
- I think I would say I'm 80% convinced that NFTs aren't much of anything. But the 20% is intriguing.
- (NFTs as theory, not just as practiced now, which is .... much more Not Much of Anything)
- Mike Masnick: heh. i'm probably 90% nothing / 10% intriguing on that scale. but the 10% could be very interesting
- mildconcern: Yeah. I have zero precision behind my numbers there, 90/10 might be more right.
- A friend of mine who is ... a really nice guy but a little credulous tried to get me to "get into NFTs" a month ago. I failed at finding a tactful way of telling him to run away.
- Mike Masnick: but i'm amazed at how my 10% view is turned by so many people into claims that i'm somehow an "evangelist" or a "booster". it's getting frustrating to me.
- BentFranklin: I meant to follow up and say I do not accuse you of being a fanboi AT ALL, but I got a phone call and forgot. Sorry.
- mildconcern: I do think there's a lot of impulse out there to treat NFTs like they're a magic wand that can overcome actual practical barriers they cannot do anything about. It's the engineering AM/FM problem. They're mostly FM right now.
- BentFranklin: I'm open to the possibility of actual practical use of crypto beyond PKI, but I haven't seen it yet (and that NFL article definitely isn't it). So until then we need to push back hard on anyone pitching this woo because people are getting hurt, losing their savings. Not to mention, any day now we'll have "NFT Backed Securities" and NBS derivatives and the whole economy will melt down all over again. And that all comes at a time when we need to be using less energy, not more.
- mildconcern: Yeah the energy use for crypto in general is sort of concerning. Though I found it odd when that crypto farm flooded and folks were bemoaning how many GPUs there were ruined and how it was a waste to use them on crypto and not on "something like gaming"
- and I'm .... gaming is an essential productive use of energy how?
- BentFranklin: All the Coinz and DAOs are structures built on top of a whole lot of non-crypto electronic infrastructure, physical infrastructure, political infrastructure, and ecological and biological infrastructure. But we are neglecting all these lower layers, and it's all very rickety right now, so the top stuff is a very low priority for me, especially as propping it up just makes the lower layers worse off and so accelerates the top layer's demise.
- Thermodynamics: it's the law.
- Gaming has some benefits even beyond bread and circuses. It's social, it hones skills. Play is considered by psychologists to be beneficial, even necessary. I value gaming much higher than gambling and speculation. And when a game is over it's over. You don't need to keep it in memory on thousands of computers forever.
- mildconcern: Ah, but for many people gambling and speculation are gaming
- My dad would always bet $10 on monday night football when his favorite team wasn't playing because he got more enjoyment out of watching when he had a stake.
- His absolutely horrendous record on betting would suggest this was not just because of his wish to win anything
- I told him I'd take the opposite end of his bet any week and he called me 'a little shit'. I acknowledged the truth of it.
- That all said I find NFTs more coherent than cryptocurrencies, anyway, which isn't saying much.
- it's curious to me that the same crew that used to be all about gold since it supposedly has an independent metric of worth over fiat currency are now claiming that strings of numbers are now inherently better because they're in a big database.
- BentFranklin: But the db is decentralized, or so they think. Decentralization is their byword. It amazes me that the blockheads think they can build a society based on lack of trust.
- Mike Masnick: btw, folks, just posted an important update on the elizabeth warren story. apparently it was a clerical error and she is not supporting...
- John Roddy: I was really confused about that earlier.
- As weird as she's gotten in the past few months, she usually does go all-in on vocally supporting bills she actually signs onto.
- The complete lack of statement or even acknowledgement just made no sense.
- Samuel Abram: Gaming insofar as they're not games of chance or involve unfair stuff like loot boxes are fun and engaging
- mildconcern: Oh sure, I'm not saying entertainment is worthless, but the subtext of the hand wringing over those lost GPUs and the power that was used on them made it sound like if they had been used on playing Halo instead of mining Dogecoin we'd have the cure for cancer by now.
- Samuel Abram: I got the notification from @Mike Masnick retweeting a Popehat quote-retweeting the crypto bros in question
- Oops, @BentFranklin deleted it
- BentFranklin: Sorry I deleted because it may have been wrong
- Samuel Abram: It's unclear what the cryptobros' motivations are
- BentFranklin: https://twitter.com/TheSpiceDAO/... https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft...
- Samuel Abram: Yes, I read that tweet
- BentFranklin: Their plan is to scan the book and sell NFTs of the JPGs.
- and then burn it
- Samuel Abram: They seriously don't have a clue about © law, do they?
- Even after the napster wars
- and the long time when file downloads were the dominant way to listen to music and watch movies.
- It's as if they were born yesterday
- This quote by `Defaulteduser` makes sense, legally speaking: > Hello, a couple of comments on your suggestions (mainly regarding the publishing and copyright aspect of it, as that is where my expertise lies). > > Firstly, it is my understanding you would be allowed to place JPEG scans on a blockchain , provided they’re a direct scan, and only one is issued. > > I’d suggest against destroying the book, as I believe you will actually lose rights if you do that (there are certain rights conferred with physical ownership of something that ceases to exist once the object is no longer owned by you, and that includes if it is destroyed). > > Lastly, the ownership of the book unfortunately does not give you rights to create anything new based upon the Dune franchise. That said, it is completely possible to reach out to the appropriate rights holders and see if some sort of deal can be made. While you might not have the rights that you seek, they too don’t have certain rights in relation to your particular book (I’d have to see the particulars of the legal in this book to truly speak to it, but I believe that to be the case).
- from the forum in @BentFranklin's link
- John Roddy: The most offensive part to me is the "JPG" part.
- Who scans *anything* as JPGs?
- That's what TIFF is for.
- Samuel Abram: For the longest time, until I found out that the "J" in "JPEG" stood for "Joint", I always assumed it stood for "Japanese" as in "Japanese Picture Experts Group"
- I was about in junior high, so you could forgive me for thinking that
- John Roddy: It's pronounced "gay-peg."
- BentFranklin: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger https://www.stephendiehl.com/blo...
- [article]
- Samuel Abram: [article]
- Microsoft is acquiring Activision. I guess Microsoft is like Disney in their imperial acquisitions. Otherwise, Nintendo is like Disney.
- Timothy Geigner: ......more exclusive non-exclusives coming to a reality near you!
- Samuel Abram: I would say this is the interactive/video-game equivalent of Disney buying Fox.
- It's also strange that the definitions of "Big Tech" don't include Microsoft for some reason…
- It's also wild that Microsoft now owns former Sony (Crash and Spyro) and Nintendo (Rare) properties!
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