Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "SomeOrdinaryGamers" channel.

Clearly nobody ran this past legal when they were deciding to push the limits so far. There are libraries available throughout the developed world that have ebooks available these days. And if you're not in the developed world, then copyright laws are much less likely to be enforced the way they are in the US. The whole thing was just asking for trouble. And yes, I think it's rather ridiculous that so much is currently under copyright protection, but it is what it is and this type of action just leads to bad outcomes. Even under the best case scenario, all we would get out of it is a favorable precedence, but given the way the courts have been going in the US, that was never going to happen.
16
That person is a national hero and should be awarded a medal for it.
8
I've been with Firefox since before they were Phoenix, then Firebird then finally Firefox. It's been really depressing watching the project be mismanaged to the point where it's barely relevant. That being said, with sidebery and multi-account containers, it is actually a pretty good browser still and the extensions are still pretty strong. Admittedly not as strong as before they started separating the processes for the actual tabs out, but still pretty good.
6
Could be worse, at least Switzerland is a lovely country, if a bit on the small side.
6
@drizz1744 It's not that easy. I know somebody that shares a name with somebody on the list. It's an incredibly common combination of Irish names that happens to be shared with a known member of the IRA. I don't think that retroactively going back to when he was born and changing the name is a reasonable suggestion. This is literally just a list of names with little other identifying information being provided there are countless people who share names with people on the list. Even if the individuals intended to be on the list are who security thinks they are, there's no oversight to ensure that any of them are actually guilty of anything and I'd be shocked if none of them were on the list for having dumped an intelligence agent with access to the list.
5
@DeaDiabola It's sexual assault, and hardly uncommon. The TSA goes way above and beyond what private security can legally do when they do those searches. I used to work security , and I'd have lost my license and been arrested if I tried any of what the TSA is allowed to do.
5
@de6um I think the issue is that there hasn't been sufficient consideration paid for the middle ground here. There's a lot of work that's really only of commercial value for a couple years, and some of it may not even be relevant to anybody apart from historians after 10. But, then there's things that do have more staying power, things like the early Disney movies, Agatha Christie novels, early jazz recordings. I wish the system were designed with a better balance because some books are like that and can take time to attract an audience. Moby Dick was published in 1851, but didn't become popular until sometime in the earl 20th century. Meanwhile, a bunch of media is popular for a few years and then is completely lost.
5
@feckert7301 Moby Dick is probably the best example. It was written in 1851, but it took many decades before it got a reputation as a classic. During his lifetime it sold fewer than 2,000 copies. Personally, I liked it, although I recommend skipping the chapters about whales as those are rather dated and not super interesting. They're mostly just interesting as a matter of what people of that era thought about whales,very little of it is still considered to be factual in nature.
5
The same reason why nobody took issue with Apple's illegal monopoly over digital music decades back, there was a focus on money in terms of enforcement and even there they weren't super motivated to do things that the donors didn't like
4
I remember when Amazon deleted 1984 from people's kindles.
4
@drizz1744 The constitution says otherwise. People have the legal right to travel between the states without having to go through border control. The fact that it's an airplane doesn't change that fact. As far as it being a privilege, I had to pay for a ticket in order to fly in order to go to my uncle's funeral. There's no way I could have driven or taken a train to get there, it had to be plane or no go. You'll notice that there is no restrictions on car travel, walking, trains or bus service between states. So, why would those be rights, but not the airplane? The system we had was working just fine where the airlines decided who was allowed on the planes. It's just because the intelligence services got embarrassed that now we have to take our shoes off at security an go along with them molesting old people with diapers. It wouldn't be so bad if they actually caught terrorists once in a while. I don't think most of the people flying would be flying if they had a viable option to reach their destination in the time that they've got. The train is in general a much more pleasant experience, but it also takes several days to cover the ground that a plane can cover in a few hours of flying.
4
The good news is that with names revealed, it means that there will finally be people with standing to file suit over the existence of the list. I know somebody who shares a name with an Irish terrorist, so he has issues flying and they've got the Irish equivalent name of John Smith, as in it's a lot of people sharing that name, most of whom have no involvement with the IRA. The whole thing was completely unconstitutional from the get go, but SCOTUS is so cowardly that they weren't willing to deal with the issue over the last couple decades. With the list's release, they'll have to find a new reason to allow the completely unconstitutional security situation to continue.
3
@drizz1744 It's not a handful of collisions and without access to the list we don't know for sure how common it is. But, given that they usually don't tell you why it's happening, it's hard to say how many of these people were on the list and how many were just really, really unlucky with the screenings.
3
TBH, a digital copy takes only slightly less time to make than a physical one does these days. There needs to be some way of ensuring that there's the money available for people to create these works. We can't just give everybody that thinks they want to be a writer or some other sort of artist money in case they create something of value. And there have been times when people have come out of nowhere to create great works of art. I think the real solution is to try to return copyrights to something a bit more moderate. Cut the maximum length down to something reasonable, if you can't generate enough money over the course of 75 years from creation, then you probably spent too much creating it and very few works that are so expensive wind up benefiting society if they are able to continue getting royalties. Most of the royalties typically come in the first few years.
3
One of the issues is that school libraries are often the best source of material that kids have. It's a place for the school to get kids hooked on reading books, a skill that greatly improves the mind more than just about anything. If they aren't allowed to carry books for political reasons rather than developmental ones, that causes a lot of problems.
3
@TheThreatenedSwan Those aren't typically banned, the libraries just don't buy them if they aren't developmentally appropriate for kids. Even without a ban, there's no point in librarians having those in school libraries as school libraries tend to be smaller and feature a curated collection that's focused on the needs of students of the appropriate age. Books that are going to get a lot of parental complaints are just not going to be in there even without a formal ban.
3
@chri-k That's not a bad thing, if publishers don't enforce their rights,then it can be extremely hard to figure out if anybody owns the rights to a particular piece of media. There's a lot of things that over the years were protected and then they weren't because nobody cared enough to extend the registration. Or, the necessary supporting paperwork was lost. If you put something up and years later nobody has challenged it, that's a pretty good hint that the material was at risk of being lost forever.
2
People have known about that for years. It's just a bunch of security theater to cover for the fact that CIA trained and equipped militants went rogue and attacked the US on 9/11. It's also widely known in security circles that practically none of the security changes made when screening passengers have any impact on safety. The restrictions on liquids do make sense, but even there, they could just handle it the way that the Chinese do and make you open and drink some of it. It is pretty effective as most of the things that they're trying to keep out are going to taste and smell terrible. Either they'll smell the volatile chemicals, or the would be terrorist would make some sort of a face trying to drink it.
2
@MoonieLovegood They don't, but by the same token, the school library is supposed to have some. The sorts of books that you're probably talking about are by publishers that are pretty protective of their rights. As I've already said, the right way to handle this is to not get the entire project shutdown because the morally right thing to do isn't the legally right thing to do. Getting shutdown over such stupid actions does nobody any good.
2
The issue here is that they've gone from preserving to distributing. The wayback machine was somewhat iffy from a legal perspective, but creating a library that shares copyright materials is clearly illegal.
2
@panachevitz You should have paid more, mine is 1,2,3,4,5 . You know, just a bit more secure.
2
@FroggyHopScotch30 Yes, if he's not up to no good, then why is he refusing to walk?
2
They say that, but TSA agents are the bottom barrel of security workers as nobody in their right mind wants to work their. The agency's entire existence is unconstitutional and involves a lot of illegal activities. Those searches that they do are completely illegal. Or, they would be if the feds didn't declare airports to be and exemption. I used to have a private security license for a few years, and we were absolutely not allowed to do most of what the TSA regularly does, in large part because it's illegal to perform those kinds of searches without either being law enforcement or having permission. And saying that people at the airport are giving permission is a joke. Most of them don't have time for other forms of travel.
2
If you care that much, it's better to just completely avoid all their stuff. Piracy gives them the sense that those pirated copies could be converted into paying copies in some fashion. Avoiding them completely makes it pretty much impossible to make money off that without changing their practices.
2
@lotus_flower2000 I pretty much stopped flying after the reforms were made. I've only been on I think 3 or so trips that required flying out of an American airport in the last 20 years. Previously, I had flown United on 9/10/2001, that next morning was surreal in a very literal sense as I was still waking up when I heard about what happened. Knowing who is on the list would allow for legal challenges to finally get a court hearing.
2
@mateushtommason6314 It is possible for the same reason that the no fly list is possible. It would be pretty weak if the listed individuals could just wait 366 days between flights and not be on that list.
2
That gets complicated. If the patents are in Canada, then it can get rather messy as only Canadian distribution would be impacted. Nintendo had a similar issue with the Game Genie where the Canadian courts allowed sales to continue whereas the US courts issued an injunction. Ultimately, Nintendo lost, but because sales had been allowed to continue in Canada, Galoob was able to get a ton of damages due to being able to use Canadian sales to provide an estimate about just how much money they had lost as a result of Nintendo's suit.
2
@adamk.7177 I stopped paying them because they're stuff has sucked ever since WoW came out. I'm not much of an MMORPG player, so I include WoW, but people that don't mind the genre would probably put that a bit later.
2
There's that, but a lot of this stuff would be far less prevalent if organizations took security seriously and had the guts to just refuse to pay.
2
When it was just archiving the web, I think they had a fairly strong leg to stand on, but now that they're duplicating media that's available elsewhere they've crossed the line into definitely a pirate site.
1
Don't worry, Mozilla is doing it's best to see that that doesn't happen. It amazed me watching them copying Chrome's stupid decisions. The major versions bumping multiple times a year, breaking the extensions, the way that they screwed up the UI on desktop computers to make it the same as for smaller computers. I've got a 24" screen, I'm OK having a proper set of menus at the top. That being said, I wish they wouldn't hide things like multi-account containers and sidebery as they make for a much better experience than just about anything I've seen other than Arc Browser.
1
Only cool movie hackers have the mad skills to hack the Gibson after all.
1
@VetrDraugr Oh yes, they'll come down and create a minor inconvenience, if that's alright. 😛
1
Probably, but there might be a similar drive to have random people just downloading the entirely of the site the way that folks did when Geocities finally shutdown. I'm mostly surprised the site has lasted this long given that it's basically the world's largest pirate site.
1
@arandompasserby7940 No, there is a massive difference between refusing to support the system using legal methods and refusing to support the system that just throws more fuel on the fire. There's also a recognition that there's a lot to be lost if something like the IA gets shut down due to this sort of sloppy activity.
1
@matthewboire6843 But, it doesn't, and that's sort of the point. If we're talking about political activism via such civil disobedience, that's more the sort of thing for a smaller organization that isn't in a position to have that much stuff in the archives that could be wiped out with one court ruling.
1
The issue is that that would be very expensive and thanks to how expansive copyright terms have become, that would be very expensive. By the time you know if something really is abandoned, there may not be any available copies to work form.
1
@TheJudge_Carls_Junior_Rep Not really, most of those stories were old enough that they could have found a version that was already expired under the current age requirements. The second of the Grimm Brothers to die died in 1863, so life +70 years would have put that at 1933. Hans Christian Anderson would have been off limits until 1945. I think it's mostly folks like Mark Twain that would have been an issue as he died in 1910, which mean that work wouldn't have been made available until 1980 if the current limits were in place. Those are some more recent sources of material, there were a bunch of other Greek and Roman stuff, as an example, that have never been copyrightable in the US, or really anywhere, due to predating copyright laws by centuries at a minimum.
1
@zf8496 2014? It started going wrong during the browser wars where Netscape and Microsoft were releasing competing standards to break the web for the other browser.
1
They bought it from iTunes because after a while, that was the only place to buy digital music if you didn't want the entire disc. They had so many exclusivity deals that it was effectively impossible to have an MP3 player with legally obtained music that was from any of the other digital music stores as Apple wouldn't allow their DRM to be licensed to other manufacturers. IIRC, if you wanted that music, you had to have an iPod, either by Apple or HP.
1
This is part of why i stopped using Arc Browser and returned to Firefox. As much as I liked the tabs as bookmarks and it's way of handling spaces, the fact that it's built on Chrome means that it's beholden to whatever Google wants to do, and depending on how they go after the adblockers, it will eventually be something that's so intrusive that it can't be worked around without an extensive effort. That being said, ti's largely futile as ML tools will evolve to just cover up the ads or claim to be running when they aren't ever visible to the viewer. Even on YT, eventually it will likely be the case where people just queue up the videos and let AI identify the ads and then just watch the result later on and I'm not really sure what they could do about it. And, I doubt they care because so many of the ads that I've seeing are for outright scams.
1
That information will be provided in the suit. The Japanese court system is different from the US, but it can't be that different that the company will be completely in the dark until they show up in court. This was just the notification letter, I'm not a lawyer and I haven't had any business law classes dealing with Japan, so I don't know how unusual it might be to not include it in that notification of the incoming lawsuit letter.
1
@NoraIconiq Yes, although software patents are typically garbage patents where the actual code used doesn't necessarily need to be included the way the equivalent would be for other types of patents. They will have to prove whatever their claims are, but if it's related to Pokemon related capture mechanics, that should really be expired by now as there were Pokemon games for the GB and those patents should be expired by now, they haven't even sold the GB system in over 25 years a this point.
1
@kaijuultimax9407 Patents covering that presumably expired years ago.
1
I'm kind of curious what Pokemon related patents could still be relevant. But, we'll have to see.
1
No, in fact one of the reasons why we still have that stupid list is that it's not subject to FOIA requests, so you have people like a family friend that shares a name with an IRA militant that has a great deal of trouble getting on planes, but since you can't just look at the list, there's no standing to file suit over it without having access to the list. And if you don't have standing to file suit, discovery gets shut down pretty quickly and the insanity continues. I'm hoping now that some patriot has liberated the database that this will lead to a bunch of lawsuits that forces change. But, I won't hold my breathe.
1
That's just their cover for all the horrible things they do. There hasn't been an era of the agency where they weren't hopelessly corrupt and engaged in undermining democracy in favor of fascism.
1
@ThoraeJenkins Yes, I liked Arc Browser, but it's Chrome based and it's a right pain to export your spaces from. In fact, it can't be done at all without 3rd party software. Personally, I find Fx with sidebery to put the tabs and bookmarks on the side to be the right call and then I'll combine that with the multi-account containers to get a similar effect to Arc Browser's spaces.
1