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- Hacker News
- Why only rightsholders?
Non-rightsholders who submit fraudulent claims also cause blocking damage; they should be accountable also (i.e. sitting in jail).
by kazinator - I hope so, in Spain you can't access anything that uses Cloudflare, even docker images, thanks to LaLiga's president bullshitby expo98
- It's also due to Cloudflare intentionally not policing its customers even a little bit, but i still side with CF - they're the less bad guys.by microgpt
- the global trend is not good. in south korea the new law prevents anyone from posting memes of the president because they require public square operators to purchase AI hardware that is already expensive at inflated markup (with completely opaque RFP bidding process and no disclosure of beneficiaries) and every image and post be monitored for "fake news/disinformation" by a partisan government body created by the President. Bill C-22 in Canada, la Liga blocking cloudflare, UK requiring IDs....on an unrelated note Playstation store removing purchased games, zero day disclosures not being awarded so they end up in the black market leading to more data leaks....
this entire digital/internet industrial complex is beginning to show real issues. im hoping there is technology in the works that can give us back the old magic of the late 90s internet.
by zuzululu - Small networks maybe? Make a virtual network for you and some friends and don't let the public access it.by microgpt
- The sheer amount of internet disruption that goes on in Spain during soccer matches is just absolutely insane. People who pay for internet service and use it responsibly should not have their service disrupted by people pirating soccer matches. I can’t imagine the investors of the internet companies in Spain are happy about this either.by samgranieri
- Here is a dumb idea, lets do innocent until proven guilty. If you don't dispute the claim the content is taken down. If you do dispute it it stays up until guilt is confirmed, then you get fined and the content is taken down.by 6510
- Agreed
Enforcement should be a cost/benefit analysis.
RN, there is very little cost imposed on the alleged rightsholders, so they spam freely.
by mring33621 - Finally. "Rightsholders" have always been abusing the system, anything that applies a chilling effect on them is a good thing. But will it actually happen? Copyright monopolists always seem to get away with everything they do. I've kinda lost hope.
- This strikes me as the right move, but the timing isn't lost on me. Model training companies want easier access to data, and they have a lot of money and are growing their lobbying and political influence muscles.
The culture of the people should belong to _the people_. Let's make sure this doesn't just turn into a transfer of which small subset manages to profit from it.
by Arubis - The timing isn't lost on you, it's on the wrong galaxy. This is the regular requests for comments that the commission does on digital markets, the ISP's have been saying this since a while ago
> In a new filing to the Commission’s ongoing assessment of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, EuroISPA once again sounds the alarm, pointing out that the piracy blocking climate in some countries is getting more extreme. > > EuroISPA starts by explicitly referencing the Commission’s own conclusions. Its evaluation of the 2023 Recommendation on combating piracy of live events concluded that the measures had “limited positive effects” and did not lead to a substantial reduction in piracy.
They are literally saying the commission that the law is being applied in a lopsided way and to start doing the counter-balance of that.
by braiamp - The real damage from over blocking isn't a few customer service calls to the ISP or a couple of lost customers...
The real damage is the millions of hours of wasted time of the citizens of the nation.
- It's their fault to begin with, they should have not caved to blocking anyone, they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.
But hopefully this is the beginning of them growing a backbone.
- They had a court order to block it. Do you know what happens if you disobey a direct court order? There's no upper limit to the punishment you can receive for contempt of court.by someonebaggy
- >they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.
Here in the UK, that's basically what BT said back in the early days of rights holders trying to block this stuff.
The rights holders took them to court and managed to get the court to order them to use Cleanfeed (a system that was only used, at the time, to block Child Sexual Abuse Material) to block Newzbin.
Not only did it help kick all this off but, overnight, it meant there was a socially acceptable reason for people to share knowledge on how to circumvent Cleanfeed.
The rights-holders give zero shits about the collateral damage they create with stuff like this
by btasker - Such an obvious thing, should have been there from day 1.
The situation in Spain is particularly crazy. How can la liga have this much power over the Internet?
by throwa356262 - Close ties to the mafia. Same in Italy.by microgpt
- I can assure you the situation in Italy is just as bad.
We do have an independent telecommunications authority, but it's been subservient to the Serie A (rather, the companies who own the broadcasting /streaming rights) diktat almost completely.
by riffraff - It's ridiculous. Not being able to work (or having tools/certain websites fail randomly each time there's a high audience match) because "soccer" tells you a lot about the priorities of the country. Or at least of the elements that make these kinds of decisions and policies possible...
We even got an isitchristmas.com-like website to track this (https://hayahora.futbol/). I admit I find it a bit amusing.
by gadrev - In the US there is lobbying. In Spain there is soccer. I have seen crazy things done just for soccer. The town I used to live in closed my street for a few weeks during one world cup. I wasn't able to use my garage during all that time.
Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.
I hated that
by gonzalohm - It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.
Really, it comes down to this: censorship is bad. Always.
If someone violates the law, get a court judgement. With the judgement in hand, take down that specific material.
Too much work? Tough...
by bradley13 - Having gone through the court system for a civil matter, I can tell you that “get a judgment” is a lot of time and money in even the easiest of cases, and let’s go at it from the person’s end who has to fight this, and let’s just focus on cases it’s a big tech company vs. a mom-and-pop or just a random person — who hasn’t actually done anything wrong. The big company has the money to sue, and now all of a sudden if you don’t want a default judgment, you have to spend money on a lawyer to fight the lawsuit, and guess what? It’s not as if it’s free to fight a lawsuit. It’s expensive to fight it.
The merits win in a lawsuit only if you don’t run out of money first.
by gortok - > censorship is bad. Always.
Sure! Great slogan! Who can disagree! Now, let's define the terms?
What's censorship? Don't we all want some sort of censoring of content? If someone doxxxes me, posts revenge porn of me, threatens me and my family with credible threats of harm, shares my credit card numbers and bank/Bitcoin/Ethereum accounts, uploads all 400 of my password credentials and my mobile phone#, posts videos of them strangling my dog, wages a campaign to redefine my personal name into a perverted sexual practice...
Aren't those the sorts of things where we encourage the censorship of content? Do those fall outside of our definition of the term, so that "censorship" is bad, but "moderation" is good?
If someone gets a hold of "F/OSS" software and distributes it contrary to the licensing and violates that licensing, do we want their distribution censored or suppressed or, what's the term for good censorship? LLMs and generative AIs are moderated/constrained as a matter of course, and we've got the entire board here in an uproar over too much moderation, or too little? Because AI Slop Is Ruining Everything and please rein it in?
Our Founding Fathers espoused "Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion" but is that an unbounded, unchecked, lasseiz-faire freedom that they envisioned, or were there boundaries?
- That just leads to a copyright system that favors big corpos even more than it does already.by hgoel
- > It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.
Isn't it under penalty of purjury?
by bawolff - soon with the age verification laws, the mass surveillance laws coming
we'll have a great wall of Europe ... my guess is that they're following the Russian / Chinese model.
banning of VPN is a matter of time.
then the days of free or anonymous internet is behind us.
by username_my1 - Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?
If not you can get around the absolute statement “censorship is always bad” by just making more things illegal.
I think censorship is so clearly good in some scenarios that we would never think to even debate it. Like child porn.
by nonethewiser - > Too much work? Tough...
Making justice available only to people with monetary (and in US courts at least, wealth is a strong predictor of outcome) and other relevant resources is not the kind of thing that I want society getting worse on.
DMCA enforcement of copyright is thus fundamentally a good law, and in my opinion should only be tweaked to deal with the pathological cases on platforms like YouTube, and even more so what's happening in YouTube.
Some mild disincentive against incorrect DMCA takedown requests being filed seems reasonable to me, as long as it scales with the level of inflicted damage. A few dollars per false claim seems like a good starting point to consider from. That makes a legitimate mistake by a human not a major issue, but also maked unleashing inaccurate mass bots and performing extremely overly broad blocking deeply unprofitable.
Of course, the broad EU blocks aren't governed by US's DMCA, but the basic incentive argument applies there too I think.
by john01dav - Serious question, what would the ramifications of an economic solution? If you appeal content removal and your challenge is validated, the platform then applies a financial penalty to the requester? It would reduce drastically the amounts of request and thus false positives?by zoltrix303