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0 pointsgojomo3y ago0 comments

Wait, why are books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, & flyers a bad faith analogy?

Those are exactly what hundreds-of-years of copyright law, by explicit statute and court interpretation, have addressed. The precedents for private actors, and especially noncommercial entities like libraries & schools, to retain those copies, and to a large extent, reshare/redisplay them, are very strong.

Further, by design, every delivery of content across the web necessarily creates copies at every network node, and perhaps multiple proxies/caches, on the way to the web browser. The web browser necessarily creates & displays a copy – and normally keeps one, at least for a little while for user convenience. Anyone choosing to core web protocols has already implicitly authorized lots of necessary copying.

Why wouldn't the recipients of such display-copies, and especially non-profit libraries, have on the web the same assumed right to keep/transfer/format-shift/redisplay that freely-delivered copy, in the same way they've always had the right to do with copyrighted books/magazines/newspapers/newsletters/pamphlets/flyers?

If copyright maximalists & DRM fans want a new right to remotely recall/destroy such copies – indefinitely, retroactively, and unlike the traditional copyright balancing-of-interests – they should make the case to lawmakers & courts for that, or use the technical measures already built-into the web for expressing such limits, and opting-out of the web's and copyright's defaults. You shouldn't let them simply assert that right without reasoning or a case for why it's better than tradition. Nor, allege criminality or 'bad-faith' against people just using the worldwide-web as it was designed, and enjoying readers' rights as they've been traditionally interpreted.

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_ktx23y ago

> Wait, why are books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, & flyers a bad faith analogy?

Because they're comparing an individuals blog or Twitter profile to those things, of which they are not analogous. Not to mention you use rhetoric like this:

> If copyright maximalists & DRM fans

It just goes to show the juvenile nature that some people will stoop to in order to prove their point. In this case, "some people" is you. Not everybody out here are the little demons you've dreamed up in your soul; most of the people responding on this thread are just privacy advocates who have seen how these policies go wrong, often first-hand. A little further down the thread someone makes a very salient point about the queer community and how these tools are used in unmasking.

> Nor, allege criminality or 'bad-faith' against people just using the worldwide-web as it was designed, and enjoying readers' rights as they've been traditionally interpreted.

The internet as a technological invention did not arrive with legalities already paved. They were very much in flux and have been in flux. It's okay if you don't like that, but asserting that the internet was created with commons as the default is junk; that's a very US-American law that has dominated cultural perception. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, we have countries figuring out nuanced ways to implement the right to be forgotten - notice none of that legislation is geared towards large corporations, it's focused on individuals.

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Getting to the rest of your argument that wasn't distastefully written: I do agree that it shouldn't be a copyright free for all, but you can't have the Internet Archive and other folks creating weapons. There should be limits on both ends and I don't think those exist.

One really obvious limit is stop treating government entities and individuals the same. Stop treating large publishers and individuals the same. The former have immense resources to coordinate their communication and undergo thorough review processes, so their publications are more well thought out. Most blogs and social media posts are not nor do they have the same level of impact. Privacy advocates wouldn't need a copyright crutch if people could summon enough humanity and empathy to understand that. That would separate privacy advocates from copyright trolls on this issue.

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Another edit

This is rich: https://twitter.com/gojomo http://xavvy.com/

You used to work for archive.org? That might be a thing you should call out in discussion.

Some posts:

- http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2001/01/

- http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2000/08/

- http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2002/07/

- http://news.oreilly.com/2008/06/gordon-mohr-takes-us-inside-... (This link looks dead)

- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,42438,00.html (This link looks dead, but was summarized by you as, "about the tug-of-war between personal privacy and copyright enforcement, March, 2001.")

gojomoOP3y ago

The internet has given everyone the tools to publish a personal newsletter/blog/profile-page, just as only the few could do so earlier. It not only allows essentially-free publishing to the whole public, but also extreme narrowcasting with any level of access-control one desires.

You've not made a case that personal writings should be treated any differently, on either copyright or privacy grounds, nor that the law does treat them any differently.

You've made unsupportable allegations of "flaunting privacy" or "direct attack on individual privacy", and accused those who simply reason from copyright-history as making "bad faith" arguments. And, you are asking for the roughly the same level of expansive copyright interpretation – not at all a feature of the jurisdictions where the Internet Archive primarly operates – that copyright maximalists and DRM advocates do.

Just as you misrepresented the Archive's process for exclusion as requiring a DMCA request – even though your own links complimented the Archive's "straightforward" process – you're now confusing an imaginary claim of "commons" (no rights) versus my narrower claim of traditional balance, fair use, and implied licenses.

And if you think the straightforward, sympathetic, norm-respecting noncommercial policies of the San Francisco' based Internet Archive are a threat to queer and other often-persecuted lifestyles – rather than the opaque data-collection efforts of hundreds of other unobserved entities, platforms, apps, & persistent threats, up to and including actual nation-states – I believe you've made a dangerous category error. The Wayback Machine is a friendly canary reminding people of the risk and responsive to their concerns; others represent the fatal dangers of privacy blowback.

Thanks for promoting my Twitter & old blog posts!

My current & former affiliations are well-disclosed across my web presences - and I often mention my once-upon-a-time Archive involvement here on HN if more directly commenting on Archive details, as opposed to broad principles involved.

But I've not been full-time there for about a decade – and the specific blogspot posts you've chosen to highlight actually predate my tenure at IA. I don't speak for IA nowadays, only myself, as myself.

Yes, my work history is congruent with my beliefs about privacy & copyright on the internet, and prominently disclosed. (My jobs don't dictate my views; my views dictate my jobs.)

Your broken links are, thankfully, available at the Wayback Machine:

2008 "Gordon Mohr Takes Us Inside the Internet Archives" https://web.archive.org/web/20080619045327/http://news.oreil...

2001 "Security Fears for Peers" https://web.archive.org/web/20010331094133/http://www.wired....

How heavenly it might be if only every paid employee (and potentially, compensated advocate) of big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies – as they pile-on the votes & comments here & elsewhere – were similarly open about their affiliations!

_ktx23y ago

> How heavenly it might be if only every paid employee (and potentially, compensated advocate) of big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies – as they pile-on the votes & comments here & elsewhere – were similarly open about their affiliations!

Luckily I'm not paid to talk about privacy. While there's probably some people who monetize privacy they're usually looked at negatively. Apple is a good case study of that. The closest you could get to saying that I'm paid to talk about privacy is my work on cryptography orchestration, but that was not built to be monetized - it was built to protect information and put users in control.

> My current & former affiliations are well-disclosed across my web presences...

> But I've not been full-time there for about a decade

> Yes, my work history is congruent with my beliefs about privacy & copyright on the internet, and prominently disclosed. (My jobs don't dictate my views; my views dictate my jobs.)

Doesn't really matter, disclose your affiliations - especially for the kind of wild statements you make (eg: comparing thread commenters to "big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies".)

> Just as you misrepresented the Archive's process for exclusion as requiring a DMCA request – even though your own links complimented the Archive's "straightforward" process –

I didn't misrepresent it. https://medium.com/wednesday-genius/how-to-remove-your-websi... Quite literally, the most expedient way to get them to remove content is to frame it as a DMCA. Just because the changed process is "easy" or "straight forward" right now, doesn't mean that won't change on a dime. I already noted they removed a web norm and replaced it with email.

> you're now confusing an imaginary claim of "commons" (no rights) versus my narrower claim of traditional balance, fair use, and implied licenses.

I agree, commons is the wrong term, "fair use" is what IA legally rides on.

> And if you think the straightforward, sympathetic, norm-respecting noncommercial policies of the San Francisco' based Internet Archive are a threat to queer and other often-persecuted lifestyles

IA is part of the larger problem, I'm not playing whackamole with giant businesses acting badly, or as you put it pushing boundaries for some imaginary libertarian-esque greater good. Regulation will solve anyone who wants to host or do business on US soil.

> The Wayback Machine is a friendly canary reminding people of the risk and responsive to their concerns; others represent the fatal dangers of privacy blowback.

I am literally speechless at this logic. The idea that doing harm is somehow a canary for larger potential harm and is worth continuing to do is awful reasoning. IA can make their services less harmful without harming their larger mission, I've also proposed ways to do that that you have not responded to.

> You've made unsupportable allegations of "flaunting privacy" or "direct attack on individual privacy"...

I supported both of those statements. They took a self-service, automated system that is a web norm (which you apparently like) and replaced it with emails for DMCA takedowns. You can disagree with me, but they're not unsupported.

> ...accused those who simply reason from copyright-history as making "bad faith" arguments

I reasoned that people like you know that your comparison to organized, for-profit publishers are not cogent. Every time you respond I become more confident of that assertion, especially when you accuse me of being a shill for some "big copyright" conspiracy.

Lastly, probably the most salient point I've ever heard:

> "Copyright holders aren't going to be happy with Freenet and Gnutella," Mohr said. "They are going to want to start monitoring people at the ISP level, and that means there is going to be a coming war between individual privacy versus network security."

Ironically, years later you went to work on what would end up becoming a privacy eroding tool. I wish I was talking to the gojomo of back then, I think there'd been a much more productive conversation than this has been.

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