"The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court."
Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.
This is like saying "we put a lock requested by court and where found guilty because plantif hacked us after"
The article rightfully mentions the Sony case, but the article is actually mainly about another company:
> beIN, a Qatari company with offices in France, previously sought to force Quad9 to block resolution for a set of domain names they assert are participating in copyright infringement of its audiovisual rights on sports event broadcasts.
This seems to be the relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIN_Channels_Network
...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.
...it's like going after the independent printshop who printed your local telephone directory book to redact known ne'er-do-wells from the directory because a local weed drug deal took place 5 minutes ago but the next telephone directory print isn't scheduled for another 6 months.
also, doesn't DNSSEC prevent this anyway?
> I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers
It could always be worse, like here in Spain, where they got one court order a few years back, and just arbitrarily block half the internet (i.e. all of Cloudflare) whenever the futbol is on...
Ah is that what's happening? I thought Cloudflare hated me. Thanks, I will check that next time it happens.
I have zero awareness of when futbol is on because I hate sports. So I didn't correlate it.
Some countries turn the internet off when there's a big protest against the government. Others turn the internet off when the football is on telly.
To be fair, football hooligans do look like violent protestors. Except, the only thing they seem to be protesting is their brains.
You may wish to bookmark https://hayahora.futbol/
This is hilarious, thanks for sharing. I had no idea.
> ...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.
There's a youtuber who breaks down samples in songs by hip hop artists, and he gets striked or all his earnings taken by someone who stalks his videos, he used to cut samples to below 15 seconds, and still gets striked. You can't even defend yourself, and arguably he is within FAIR USE of the content.
Someone, somewhere is going out of their way to strike their videos. It's ridiculous, do they strike news channels when copyrighted music plays in the background without their control too?
> do they strike news channels when copyrighted music plays in the background without their control too?
Yes, they do. In Brazil, to avoid some news reports about stores selling contraband items, the store owners started playing Disney songs in the background, meaning they weren't able to publish the videos or broadcast them.
Maybe I haven't considered this enough but couldn't they just remove the audio and put subtitles up with what was said? Just preface this segment segment with the information that the owners of the store are playing copyrighted Disney music in an attempt to prevent them from recording them. Maybe have a voiceover explaining the situation if dead air is unacceptable for some reason.
The general public didn’t even make it through this comment, unfortunately.
Things are pretty dire, attention-wise.
Hopefully someone has pointed this youtuber at Rick Beato / Legal Eagle's initiative in this direction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8HxQkk0PSY
That seems much more sensible than what is being discussed. Sure fair use offers some protections, but youtube the platform is not required to protect individual youtuber revenues for fair use. Fair use effectivly entails an exception to the normal rules, and as such, requires actual judgement on a case by case basis instead of being something that can be scaled like content id. If you actually got sued, you could use Fair Use as a defense in court, and the judge would decide if you are right or not. In the case you are discussing, no-one got sued because youtube handled it without a court, so fair use never really comes into play.
What is being discussed would be more like if a court tried to get Google to take down individual spam bot youtube accounts that had popped up that same morning. Its rediculous because the legal system doesn't move that fast (nor does DNS), so things that require that level of heavy-handedness are typically much slower processes taking months or years.
> also, doesn't DNSSEC prevent this anyway?
As per usual, the answer is no. DNSSEC prevents resolver cache poisoning for trusted resolvers which validate DNSSEC. That is literally it. It provides no security against the vast majority of attacks against DNS.
Also limited protection against MitM upstream of the resolver, spoofing is prevented but denial of service is still possible.
So much this.
It's like prosecuting the asphalt guys who paved the road the bank robbers used
Sometimes when I come up with analogies they miss the mark. Yours was on point.
> Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
Isnt this what gets all tech companies into trouble all the time. Something objectionable happens (ChatGPT helping someone bulid a bomb for instance) and we go like "Do better".
I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Here, if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both because it's plain impossible for you to block all means of VPN/proxy regardless of how perfect your service tries to detect it. There's no payment, there's no account, there's no anything - you're just serving DNS to an IP that reports to be out of Germany according to German law. At some point it stops being a mistake/malintent of the company and one of the user. Where that transitions probably depends on the person though.
> if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both
Yes. This is also how physical products work. The internet makes it easy and the default to offer a service worldwide, hence also making it easy to get in conflict with the law worldwide. You have to pick and choose which laws to break, which laws to comply with by minimizing exposure, and which laws to comply with by making a tailor-made version for a specific market.
You say this confidently, but this is merely one theory about how things should work.
If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time. (Unless your country is powerful enough to violate the sovereignty of my nation.)
In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product. I simply offered it to anyone who came to my “store” (server). I admit that this dynamic changes if you directly pay me for something.
Your framework implies that every social website needs to make a decision on whether or not users are allowed to insult the Thai monarch[0], and then must block access to Thais if they decide it’s allowed. In reality nobody does this, although they may choose not to put a server in Thailand if they are worried about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thai...
> If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time.
Except the analogue to your ISP for your example is UPS and they are far less (if at all?) responsible for the content of packages they deliver.
It’s just a metaphor and it breaks down if you dig into the specifics too deeply, as with all metaphors. But if you insist, I as the seller am not responsible either. If I’m a bookseller and I send a banned book to you via UPS, after you paid me in person in cash, and your customs seizes it, you don’t get your package and nothing happens to me. YOU might get in trouble though.
Now if I keep sending banned materials to your country, it might be a bad idea for me to travel there. But nothing else is going to happen, unless you’re a global power and you drone me or compel my government to extradite me. (Or if my own country was foolish enough to make mutual extradition agreements for such things.)
(Note, I specified in person in cash above because as I mentioned before, electronic payments make things messy. But most websites are “free”.)
UPS is partially liable for incorrect declarations of international packages and for attempting to deliver packages they should have known were illegal...
> In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product.
Offering a website to a certain country is not something ISP decided for you, but you actively did that yourself. I cant create a gambling website and host it in Monaco and then serve it to someone in CA and say that, it isnt on me, but on Comcast.
How do you "actively" offer a website to a country?
Websites aren't broadcasting, they are waiting there and responding to requests. Why should it be on every server in the world to have to figure out whether they're allowed to respond to a given request based on the client's country?
Why is it not the user's responsibility to not send requests? Why isn't it the ISP's responsibility to not route the requests? And every single router in between?
FWIW, this theory was attempted in court with a bittorrent case in Hong Kong. [1]
Defendant's lawyer argued that seeding a copyrighted movie was not (active) distribution but merely "making it available" (which was not associated with a criminal offense in HK law as opposed to "distributing infringing copies").
Didn't work out.
---
[1] HKSAR v Chan Nai Ming [2005] 4 HKLRD 142
This is someone in HK judged under HK jurisdiction. That's fine.
My point is it's weird to expect website operators to be aware of every jurisdiction on the planet and take steps to comply with each of them.
If that expectation becomes common, the obvious way to go isn't to block the countries you aren't allowed to serve. It's to only allow the ones you know you are allowed.
Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.
False. Making a website accessible from the internet is not “offering” it to anyone. You might have a claim if I were paying to advertise in that country, maybe.
And actually you can just make a gambling website overseas, people have done that since forever. You might have trouble with accepting payments, though.
See also the UK's Online Safety Act and the UK's regulator Ofcom, which stated:
'Ofcom told the BBC: "We are aware of this lawsuit. Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based."
A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'
The US-based lawyers for the services in question take a very different view....
For those not aware, note that Ofcom have effectively conceded defeat on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167028
> A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'
Hm yeah but "action from Ofcom" doesn't really mean very much to a party half a world away.
> A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.
Manifestly, the British still think they are a world power.
> I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Yes, and Quad9 could have done better in the German court case. At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency, and then could have ensured that their DNS service is offered only to registered users.
> At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency
This would have been a massive burden to them, and (as we have seen from the ongoing data leaks) a gigantic privacy risk to its users. It would have also been a big overreach, as the German ruling would have mostly impacted non-German users.
Let's take this level of user tracking for DNS would be accepted & fine by Germany as well as what folks were thinking was feasible for the company to do as a given, how does it prove the user+ip who registered is the user+ip who submitted the request instead of the place it got proxied? Or malware enabling the same?
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
Just shift the legal burden of ensuring that no unauthorized users use an IP to the legitimate user of the IP /s
Germany did this, it made free wifi illegal.
It is my understanding that getting infected by a botnet is not illegal yet, so there is room for improvement.
It could be in Germany until the law was reformed. You were civilly responsible for whatever the botnet did.
How would you imagine this could work?
A recursive DNS resolver is identified just by an IP address for your system level DNS resolver to use (eg. in /etc/resolv.conf). Even if you assigned a random, secret IPv6 address for every individual user, they could simply share that with anyone else too. In IPv4, pretty much impossible.
User authentication is not a function of DNS. You are requiring an entirely new protocol to be designed. And the nobody will use it.
This is an insane take. Where does it stop? Are we going to be tracked and surveilled from every service?
As we should. These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist. PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi called our objections to the "you'll own nothing" future a "mentality issue".
I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.
> These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist.
The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
> The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
If that's true, so is the private property space in general.
But what you say isn't true. The "intellectual property space" is not pure rent seeking. If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
Intellectual property critics have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are problems with IP, but those specific should be fixed through reform.
Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this. Copyright has always benefited the publishing industry and was established at the request of publishers in the first place, after they lost the monopoly they had under the previous censorship regime (the "star chamber"). Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job."
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?
Among the various options:
- Pay in advance, before the product exists.
- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)
- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.
> Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money
For books and music maybe the difference is not quite that big, but for games and movies these 0.0..01% cost so much more to make that they would definitely not get made if they made significantly less money.
Nobody is stopping you from monetizing your own creative work via the methods you described without a publisher involved today. If those ways of getting paid would create a “rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things”, why doesn’t it already exist?
They do already exist, in multiple forms. The reason why they're not the norm, and copyright law still exists, is because the publishers with the most money won't make as much money that way.
How are the publishers forcing creators to engage with copyright law? Anyone who creates a work can decide to waive their rights under copyright law today, no need to wait for it to be abolished. Why do so few of them do it?
You don't need to motivate people to create. That's a spontaneous move of human beings. Humans were making music and were paintings on walls far before any obsession of legal owning started to haunt their mind.
Crowdfunding. Services like Patreon, Kickstarter, GitHub Sponsors.
People should be paid for the labor of creating, not for artificially scarce copies of the finished product.
Patronage has been known as an alternative to copyright since around 200 years ago:
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
The cited drawbacks are valid: creators are beholden to the elites who fund their work, and their influence in their creative process is felt to this day.
With modern technology, however, funding is diffused through large groups of people which minimizes this impact through diversification.
The ideal model is one where lots of people pitch in to fund a creator for the full cost of creating something, then the resulting work is released directly to the public domain.
> Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this.
That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers [edit: published as a for-profit activity dependent on copyright]. Why would the 20/21st century experience of publishing a scientific paper have any bearing on what it's always been?
Scientific publishing is messed up because, unlike most other creative work, it has a different funding model (basically state patronage), which basically makes the publishers very profitable parasites. That should be addressed directly instead of abolishing copyright for all works.
> Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job." ... or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
That's more bizarre logic: "Authors don't get paid enough, so lets take away their rights so they get paid less."
> At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore.
Copyright was setup before the industrial revolution, so your statement doesn't make sense. Also, at least in some countries, its foundation is the moral rights of the author, not some argument about production.
> We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It seems like you have gripes coming from a particular problem area (scientific publishing?) and are too narrowly focused on that. "I have this gripe, lets decommission this important legacy system, and then rewrite it completely from scratch!" is usually not a good plan.
> That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers
Firstly, this isn’t true, but more importantly it doesn’t matter because the parent’s claim doesn’t depend on scientific papers predating copyright.
The first scientific paper was Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in London on March 6, 1665 (or you can go back as far as Aristotle if you prefer). The first copyright law is England’s Statute of Anne (1710).
> copyright predates the existence of scientific papers
[citation needed] /s
"Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publ...
"Modern copyright law was invented on April 10, 1710, with the enactment of the Statute of Anne in Great Britain"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
see also the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790: Signed into law by President George Washington on May 31, 1790 and the Berne Convention (1886)
> "Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
My bad. I edited out a "probably" I shouldn't have, and was writing based on the intuition that there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists.
> there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists
Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old. And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease. Even while simultaneously correctly understanding that virtually every person who writes, sings, raps, dances, etc will never be able earn anything but trival sums from doing so even under the current legal regime.
It's worth going to read Macaulay's speeches from the early nineteenth century to see how little what copyright supporters claim as the intent of copyright was seen as such at the time these ideas were being rendered into law.
https://ia601406.us.archive.org/34/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.2... beginning at p 156/pdf page 180
> Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old.
Yeah, and a lot of that was either amateurish or in the thrall of some wealthy elite (either the creator was an elite themselves, or directly dependent on them).
> And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease.
Come on, you're being black and white about it? Without copyright, will it stop? No. Will it change, for the worse? Probably. More paid for and catering to the whims of the wealthy, far less "middle class" creation, and almost no "middle class" professional creation, etc.
the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?
are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
i think we can do just fine treating IP like other work - you pay for the creation of it, not the consumption
> the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?
> are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
My example was a simplification, so don't take it to literally.
It's also worth noting that other property rights have no time limit. Except in China, whoever owns that apartment building can own it forever.
>It's also worth noting that other property rights have no time limit.
This is wrong.
In the UK, property rights are mostly leasehold, just as they are in Singapore for HDB flats.
>the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?
they do if they build their own house and rent it out
Toll roads exist because sometimes that's the best way to make the money to construct a road. But they are the exception, not the rule, and they don't last forever either.
It's called copyright as things change when works are easy and cheap to copy.
Replicating work of an electrician or builder is very similar effort to their original work.
Making a copy of a novel or software program or art today is practically free.
In case of work for hire, things pretty much work the same way already — company owns the copyright, except in some jurisdictions where actual humans keep "moral rights" and reserve the right to renegotiate the fee if the work produces disproportionate earnings (one cannot even transfer these rights away).
But if you did the work out of pocket, how should it work? Any recipient could trivially and cheaply produce a copy and distribute it. If you do not get any exclusivity at all, others would profit a lot more and you'd get nothing at all.
So in general, there are multiple things:
* exclusivity lasts too long (I understand some motivation like supporting your children off it, especially if work only became profitable late in your life or in death, but you could have different mechanisms too — akin to moral rights, exclusivity could run from the moment it turns a significant profit like an average annual salary, and for a fixed, much shorter period after)
* types of works which are utilitarian (like software tools) should have entirely different treatment
* it should ensure both transferability and perpetuity of use (no licensing bullshit and your games/music are gone because our service does not offer them anymore)
...
Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government on what's essentially numbers. It's a lot like democracy: utterly terrible, yet somehow the least bad way to accomplish some goal, in this case compensating creators for their labor.
In its current form, it is absolutely rent seeking. We will be dead and buried long before our culture enters the public domain. The so called "stakeholders" have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.
Limit copyright duration to at most 20 years and it will still be a disgusting monopoly on numbers, but at least it won't be intolerable. We might actually forget that we can use technology to trivially copy stuff at negligible costs.
They are the same yes, except we don't have yet a technology to instantly copy whatever macrosized object ad nauseam like we can with intellectual work in digital era.
If anyone could duplicate the whole universe at will, of course current human laws would all seem as silly as those covering random virtual monopoly on cognitive experience possibilities.
Exactly. Digital IP can be transferred infinitely and cheaply (by copying it) without loss of use. Physical items cannot (yet!?) be transferred infinitely and cheaply without loss of use. Once the item is transferred, the previous holder of the physical item loses use of it.
> If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time. Intellectual property is a non-rival good, meaning if somebody else copies your song or story, you still have that song/story! It's a very different moral claim; the apartment is "I built it, so nobody should be able to take it away from me without paying", while the IP is "I built it, so nobody else should be able to copy it without paying".
> They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time.
I don't think that distinction is as important as you make it out to be. Private property law allows individuals to own far, far more physical goods than they can personally use.
If were going to talk about abolishing intellectual property, how about lets talk about abolishing private property too? Maybe replace it with some kind of active-use right.
Anyway, lets destroy it first and work the details out later. /s
ChatGPT isn’t “dumb pipes” like DNS or ISP infrastructure. Judgment/intelligence is the entire product for ChatGPT.
EDIT: Look at that, downvotes but no rebuttals. (:
There is nothing 'dumb' about DNS. It is a 'sophisticated software to translate human readable addresses to machine-understandable and infinitely routable identifiers'.
Anything can be reduced down to 'dumb' if you try hard enough. Officer, these are just chemicals in a specific quantity and just goes boom when mixed together.
It's as clever as a phonebook. Better now?
I know what you're getting at, and I agree DNS is simple for folks who hang out in HN but at its core DNS is pretty complicated.
Try explaining top level authoritives, ttl, DoH etc etc to a lay person. Yes, it is example.com in, a.b.c.d out but it is anything but simple.
My larger point is calling "phone book" doesnt make DNS dumb.
Phone books get updated!
You missed the point spectacularly. “Dumb pipes” doesn’t denigrate DNS, it means that DNS doesn’t make judgment calls, there is no intelligence making decisions about where and whether to route things.
I'm confused; how does the geoIP block they implemented in Germany differ from the planned end of service for French users?
My question as well. I suspect they will update their terms of service to forbid use within France. Then anyone who uses their services from France will be in violation of the terms, which opens them up to legal penalties themselves.
Or perhaps they are just planning to physically withdraw any operating presence in France, so as to not have any facilities, equipment, or employees who are located in French jurisdiction.
But it wasn't clear from the article, unless I missed it.
I had the same question and read through it to get an answer but it is indeed not there :)
My guess is that they brought Germany example of doing GeoIP as the model they'll use but mostly noted as a fun quirk that even that solution received a weird challenge which they managed to fight off (at cost, though).
Obviously, it'd be nice to get a direct response from them as it is unclear.
Reply in separate thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50200111
Lately Sony Corpos have been really getting into their supervillain arc aren’t they?
Lately? Did you forget the rootkit they installed on everyone of their customers PCs?
In the last year, I have started to think that the internet was a mistake.
My theory was 'the death of the internet'. Once everyone has been scammed, once everyone has been hacked and stripped naked in public, when there are more lies than truths, when you are the tool and the computer uses you, when everything has been sold and you have nothing: then you would say, this was a mistake.
Actually, I don't know much about the history of the internet. The Sony stuff is before my time. Now you mention this, perhaps the idea that the internet was designed to be beneficial was actually a total lie.
The Internet was a project to build resilient military communications during the Cold War. It was designed so that in case Russia would nuke the USA, the USA would still be able to nuke Russia, and all its other targets. This was not going to help people.
keeping the ability to nuke Russia always available is very much helping people
That was 20 years ago
WP article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
While it is indeed 20 years ago, it should not be forgiven, if they continue to pull off shitty things like this lawsuit.
Ok but Sony is not a time-contiguous person. Half the people there 20 years ago are dead or retired by now.
You're right. The people working there now have had plenty of time to learn about these egregious crimes and implement better policy so that they don't repeat the crimes of their predecessors... Right?
Heard this one about microsoft on HN as well. How did that turn out?
Companies culture tend to degrade over time, rarely improve.
It's perfectly faire therefore to requiere overwhelming demonstration of good faith to invalidate such a massive bad behavior.
They Never did So they deserve the PR hit.
Which honestly they didn't take nearly as much as they should have.
Stop defending the billion dollars corps. They have proved over and over they are not our friends.
At best our interests are temporarily aligned.
People working for them are not innocent either. They know the company past, they signed their contracts, and stayed despite the culture.
There is such thing as free will, they have their responsability too.
The "a few bad apples" argument is old and tired now. And the "not all People have a choice" have been repeated a nauseam.
And it makes it our problem exactly how?
Young assholes replace old assholes, and on and on it goes.
Yes, they've been at it for that long.
Sony once was a great company. Excellent electronics, great service.
Then they became a media empire...
Japanese companies have always been heavy enforcers of IP, at least since the 1980s. For example, IIRC, they're one of the top filers of patents. Sanrio makes more money globally on their characters than Disney does. And Japan pushes for stronger international IP enforcement systems than even the US.
Japan is just quiet about it. Sony is no aberration.
So it proves that this behavior is not new.
It's my Roman Empire.
Would you consider 20 years "lately"?
Depends on how old you are :D
> I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.
While trolls are awful, something like trolls can always exist in a free society. The root problem here is the French courts enabling the trolls with unworkable rulings. Both the French and Italian justice systems have a history of making some clueless and even incoherent rulings which are never corrected.
I wait for Netflix (and other streaming services) to be fined due to their users accessing content that shouldn't be available in a certain territory via a VPN.
isn't that precisely why they block most VPNs now? I worked for one, and all of our content licensing agreements stipulated that we had to block VPNs, and which vendors were allowed to give us the list of VPN addresses to block. (it's Digital Element, by the way.)
Of course, we weren't liable for failing to block any VPN address not on the list, but we also weren't allowed to not block an address that was on the list, which resulted in customer complaints.
And for contempt of court nonetheless. That's meant for when you blatantly don't do the thing the court told you to do, not when you did it but it didn't work how the court wanted.
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