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Over in the EU Parliament, they're getting ready to vote yet again on the absolutely terrible Copyright Directive, which has serious problems for the future of the internet, including Article 13's mandatory censorship filters and Article 11's link tax. Regrading the mandatory filters, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser, has written about a a very disturbing experiment he ran on YouTube, in which he kept having public domain music he had uploaded for his students get taken down by ContentID copyright claims.
[...] I decided to open a different YouTube account “Labeltest” to share additional excerpts of copyright-free music. I quickly received ContentID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner. Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain. I appealed each of these decisions, explaining that 1) the composers of these works had been dead for more than 70 years, 2) the recordings were first published before 1963, and 3) these takedown request did not provide justification in their property rights under the German Copyright Act.
I only received more notices, this time about a recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5, which was accompanied by the message: “Copyrighted content was found in your video. The claimant allows its content to be used in your YouTube video. However, advertisements may be displayed.” Once again, this was a mistaken notification. The recording was one by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Lorin Maazel, which was released in 1961 and is therefore in the public domain. Seeking help, I emailed YouTube, but their reply, “[…] thank you for contacting Google Inc. Please note that due to the large number of enquiries, e-mails received at this e-mail address support-de@google.com cannot be read and acknowledged” was less than reassuring.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 05 2018, @03:04PM (6 children)
It is a system that for the most part only answers to the short-term interests of the tiny minority of rich people rather than the vast majority of poor people, that's what's wrong with it. Which is the same problem as capitalism 2.0. It's also the same problem as the feudalism and monarchies that preceded capitalism 1.0, and the Roman Empire before that, and the Roman Republic before that. And the Greek city-states. And probably the Sumerians, ancient Egyptians, and Maya. Oh, and both the Soviet-leaning and Chinese-leaning communists too.
No single political or economic system devised so far has ever simultaneously solved the 2 key problems of social organization on a scale larger than about 200 people:
1. A powerful person or cabal ruining things for everybody else.
2. A mob of ill-informed idiots ruining things for everybody else.
Some combinations of ideas, like northern European social democracy, seem to be working better than many of the alternatives, but there is no panacea currently in existence, and to claim otherwise is mostly to demonstrate ignorance of the problems that existed in thr social systems of another time and/or place.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:03PM
tldr: free market is incompatible with banking and fiat money, capitalism never happened, communism is incompatible with man, communism never happened.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:38AM (4 children)
Well how much answering does that system need to do for the "vast majority" of poor people? It already provides food, shelter, security, and something to do, with a great deal of freedom on how to obtain all that.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:29PM (3 children)
Except when it doesn't. For instance, having people without homes while there are more than enough empty homes available looks like a problem to me. Ditto for situations where lots of food is getting thrown in the garbage while other people are going hungry. As for "something to do", you seem to be claiming that legitimate unemployment cannot exist even though it has ever since feudalism ended.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 07 2018, @03:48AM (2 children)
There's a simple solution to that. Don't allow banks to hold foreclosed property for years at a false pre-2008 valuation.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday September 07 2018, @03:22PM (1 child)
Another approach: You could create a squatter's rights law similar to what the UK had until quite recently that legalizes breaking into unoccupied buildings and living in them until the owners assert their rights. So, for instance, if an absentee home investor buys up a bunch of property in an area, but doesn't do anything with them, they might find otherwise homeless people occupying those homes, and would need to go through something similar to eviction to remove them. This also incentivizes landlords to reduce homelessness in the area around their properties, since fewer homeless equals lower risk of a squatter moving in.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:58AM
Encourage people to break the law? Well, I guess they'd get a place to sleep in jail, right?