An amended version of America's controversial proposed EARN IT Act has been unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee – a key step in its journey to becoming law. This follows a series of changes and compromises that appear to address critics' greatest concerns while introducing fresh problems.
The draft legislation [PDF] is nominally supposed to help rid the web of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by altering Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which strongly shields websites and apps, like Facebook and Twitter, from liability regardless of whatever their users share on those platforms, plus or minus some caveats. The proposed law rather ignored the fact that Section 230 already doesn't protect internet giants if their netizens upload illegal content, though.
Initial drafts of the law also contained two proposals that raised serious concerns from a broad range of groups and organizations. Firstly, the creation of a new 19-person committee that would be led by the Attorney General and dominated by law enforcement which would create content rules that tech companies would have to follow to retain legal protections. Secondly, and the suggestion that has security folks up in arms, is that those rules could require tech companies to provide Feds-only access to encrypted communications.
The idea is that companies would have to "earn" their legal shield – hence the name of the bill, EARN IT – by following the best practices created by the committee.
Following significant pushback on those points, the Judiciary Committee made changes aimed at gaining the full approval of all its members. In the now-OK'd version of the bill, the commission, called the National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention, would still create its rules but it would be "voluntary" for online platforms to follow them. Instead, if tech companies did follow the commission's rules, it "would be a defense in any civil suit," said committee chair Lindsay Graham (R-SC).
Concerns over the law being used to force tech companies to introduce encryption backdoors led to an amendment [PDF], put forward by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), that stated online platforms won't face civil or criminal liability if they are unable to break end-to-end encryption in their own services.
Taken together, the amendments are intended to attract wide congressional support for the bill, and pave the way to open up Section 230. And in this instance, it worked, with the committee green-lighting the revised version by 22-0 votes on Thursday, allowing it to progress a little further toward the statute books.
However, privacy advocates and tech titans, as well as some lawmakers, remain strongly opposed to the law. For one, the proposed commission will not be made up of elected officials, and will still be able to create rules that do not need congressional approval, putting an extraordinary amount of censorship power into the hands of very few people with limited accountability.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:01AM (46 children)
End poverty, caused by artificial scarcity. Often it is Desperate parents that pimp their own children to get money to feed them.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:12AM (45 children)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:12AM (39 children)
No such thing any more. Humans can distribute anything anywhere anytime. All scarcity is artificial now. It is necessary for your predatory economic systems to function. Abundance is its antithesis
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:27AM (38 children)
Yes, people just work in distribution chains for free. No delivery charges, logistics trails, setup times at all, none of that exists. Necessary supplies just magically appear wherever it is needed and in perfect order.
Its all in the cloud man!
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:34AM (17 children)
If you had a little more introspection, you'd realize that your attempt at having a macho personality results in nothing less than a full-on slave mentality. Carry on.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:25AM (12 children)
I guess this is the "my ignorance is your slavery" argument.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:33AM (11 children)
You guessed wrong.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:38AM (10 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:16AM (9 children)
You did that wrong too.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:11AM (8 children)
So not only does the original claim that a significant source of poverty comes from artificial scarcity ring false, it's not even a particularly good windmill to tilt at. Too much useful stuff is done with artificial scarcity.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:40AM (7 children)
The purpose of money is to allocate scarce goods. If goods aren't scarce then we don't need money.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @10:27AM (1 child)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:38PM
""IF". You have this implicit assumption that every good can be made plentiful"
No one said that every good can be made plentiful or that money doesn't apply to scarce goods. I'm not sure what the point of your post is other than to look foolish by making obvious straw man arguments. Are you trolling? Because you certainly aren't making those that support your position look good.
One of the things that's taught in economic theory is that it applies to scarce goods. It doesn't apply the same to those goods that are infinite. So for scarce goods money makes sense. For infinite goods the theory is different.
Not to say that IP shouldn't exist but the purpose should be to serve a public interest. To increase aggregate output and to expand the public domain so that we can have more. Things should enter the public domain in a reasonable amount of time.
I feel like the pro-IP firms are re-hiring the idiots again. They kicked out the educated people, they cost too much money, and reinstated the minimum wage workers to argue their case.
and yes, pro IP firms do post on message boards. Their IP addresses have been identified on Techdirt in the past. It's not a crazy conspiracy theory.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @10:50AM (4 children)
Similarly, removing artificial scarcity has the potential to moderately improve the economy one time. Technology developments that greatly increase our productivity have the potential to vastly improve our economy. But they haven't happened yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:31PM (3 children)
No one said to throw away our economic infrastructure with respect to scarce goods. Just that the same economics for scarce goods doesn't apply the same for infinitely abundant goods.
That you are so dense as to pretend that you don't understand the difference shows what kind of character you are.
You are either dishonest in which case I don't trust your views have any regard for the public interest.
Or you are stupid in which case why should anyone take you seriously.
"Sure, there are a variety of artificial scarcities and other economic inefficiencies, such as, corruption, rent-seeking and increasing barrier to entry, income redistribution, overregulation, etc, that collectively slow us down. "
So you admit that these things do slow us down. IOW they are bad things.
"But there's limits to how much we can gain from completely removing it all."
So lets just start burning houses, cars, stores and their various goods and services. The utility they provide us is limited after all so let's not have them.
What a silly argument. Really?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:53PM (2 children)
Infinitely abundant goods don't exist, though I grant too cheap to meter does exist.
That didn't happen let us note. Imaginary misdeeds should mean as little to you as they do to me.
And your point is? I never claimed there weren't bad things in the world and as I acknowledged above some of these bad things are variants of artificial scarcity and some artificial scarcity is a bad thing. Some isn't all.
Are houses, cars, and stores in the category of "corruption, rent-seeking and increasing barrier to entry, income redistribution, overregulation, etc"? Else I wouldn't have proposed to remove them. Nor did I advocate not bothering with reducing the above whether or not the benefit would be limited.
Instead a better analogy is claiming outsized gains for the building one of the above. If I build this house, I will cure poverty. I think that's exactly what happened here with the artificial scarcity arguments.
What a silly straw man. I'm not surprised that you have these beliefs and this inability to reason.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:41PM
"Infinitely abundant goods don't exist, though I grant too cheap to meter does exist."
When they are so cheap that the only limiting factor to how much we consume is how much we want to consume then they are effectively infinitely abundant. We breathe as much air as we want. Yes, you can argue that it's not technically infinite. But for all practical purposes, with regard to our breathing, it is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @05:35PM
"I never claimed there weren't bad things in the world and as I acknowledged above some of these bad things are variants of artificial scarcity and some artificial scarcity is a bad thing. Some isn't all."
So do you agree that excessive IP is bad?
Not that all IP is bad but excessive IP is bad.
I believe the current state of copyright is very excessive. Do you agree?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:33AM (3 children)
That's because your womanly brain fails to understand the complexity behind delivering everyday goods to everyday people everywhere, you think it just appears in a grocery store shelf.
You ignore the clerks stacking them, counting them, checking the expiry date, auditing the inventory, and that's just at the store.
Hey, as long as everything moves like clockwork, out of sight out of mind right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:02AM (2 children)
All I see is...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:34AM (1 child)
So go ahead and tell us we're macho, blind, etc rather than deal with us in good faith. We'll ultimately shrug and ignore it because little child arguments have no place here.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:43PM
Artificial scarcity is a necessity as long as artificial divisions (of nationality, race, class etc) keep resources scarce (and actual scarcity will still exist on some level, but after a certain point in reducing artificial scarcity the real scarcity become edge cases). When resources are no longer scarce, money will go away on it's own, without any need for revolutionary action.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:35AM (16 children)
Friction, or transaction costs, are not nearly the same thing as a physical scarcity. All modern shortages are distribution inefficiencies, usually aimed at skimming off the top, what in any other system would be called sabotage.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:19AM (4 children)
Its called physical scarcity because you can't get a your products distributed instantaneously. Just because there are millions of cars in a warehouse doesn't mean you can get it the moment you pay for it.
Try getting off the internet sometime, physical goods can't be copy and pasted like your itunes music.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:04AM (3 children)
...stupid macho bullshit!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:19AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @10:23PM (1 child)
Yet more macho bullshit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 09 2020, @12:41PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:37AM (10 children)
If "any" other does this, then surely, you can name one such, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:39AM (1 child)
You love word games don't you?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:02AM
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:45AM (7 children)
In any non human system it would be sabotage. But I can't think of any other animal besides humans that sabotage their supply chains to create shortages as a means of price support and to control labor costs. Can you?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:17AM (6 children)
Well, when you can think of an animal besides humans smart enough to do that, you get back to us on that argument. Until then, this is pretty dumb even by your low standards.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:25AM (5 children)
For your simple mind, artificial scarcity is caused by human sabotage
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @10:32AM (4 children)
Sabotage gives an incorrect connotation. Money for example is artificially scarce yet generates considerable positive value for its users.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday July 08 2020, @05:32PM (3 children)
Sabotage gives an incorrect connotation.
No it doesn't. It is the precise name for what is being done to keep things scarce. Your bankers demand it, or they will die from lack of interest
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 09 2020, @01:50PM (2 children)
So does anyone who doesn't want to fall back to a barter system in order to survive. The thing to keep in mind is that bankers didn't create the system, they operate/feed on it. If we didn't have a system that mostly works in the first place (including such things like fiat currencies and fractional reserve), we wouldn't have bankers.
Further, why the care? You're not a toady to the bankers, right? So why care so much about their interests rather than yours or mine? Are we to burn down our societies because otherwise it'd help a banker?
I grant that there is a tedious futility to these conversations with you as several other Soylentils. You didn't reason your way into these beliefs, so it's going to be hard to reason you out of them. But we operate on a different time scale than normal conversation.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 09 2020, @06:28PM (1 child)
To pound it into your head one more time (as if it will do any good). All scarcity is artificial. It takes sabotage to create it. Your entire financial system (your banks) cannot work without it. It is to your benefit to deny it, so I expect no logical or rational or reasonable response from you.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Friday July 10 2020, @04:50AM
Sorry, this is Orwellian doublespeak and you don't even bother to defend it. You just say it over and over again. Repetition doesn't make right.
You can whine till the end of time, but I'm not going to give you a lollypop, kid.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:52AM
Govern by direct democracy and ballot initiatives. The workers themselves would approve the number of hours needed of work per person per year annually by passing a ballot initiative, which may be competing among several initiatives. The workers also propose the ballot initiatives. With our work, we build society and may freely and equitably enjoy all its benefits, and we have an equal say in what those will be.
The global information and distributed processing network will host the necessary 24x7 absentee voting infrastructure.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:52AM (1 child)
The current copy protection laws were passed unilaterally by corporations. It was Disney that extended copy protection terms. The one sided penalty structure was passed because corporations lobbied for them. The fact that it's now opt out, and not opt in, was also passed due to Hollywood. Not due to protests by artists and not due to public pressure.
This is supposed to be a democracy. For IP extremists to support the undemocratic passage of laws shows the character of those that support these extreme laws. and I don't trust the character of those that support undemocratically passed laws to tell me that they are in my best interest. I have absolutely zero reason to and I have zero reason to believe these laws were passed in my best interest or the best interests of artists.
Not saying IP is completely bad. But it should not be one sided.
1: Term limits need to be substantially shortened. Retroactively.
2: The penalty structure needs to be less one sided. Stronger penalties for false takedowns. More reasonable penalties for infringement.
3: It needs to be opt in and not opt out. The LOC should store a copy so that when it hits the public domain it can be publicly available.
4: Copy'right' needs to be renamed. It's not a right. A more appropriate name needs to be found.
Perhaps Soylentnews, Techdirt, the EFF, or Public knowledge should host a petition. They should also list the number of signatures. As the number of signatures increases over the years it will bring more and more awareness of the issue to everyone.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @06:32AM
> Copy'right' needs to be renamed. It's not a right. A more appropriate name needs to be found.
Imaginary monopoly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:24AM (3 children)
Already done.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:04AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:12AM (1 child)
Fortunately, reality doesn't depend on you agreeing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:03AM
Speaking of reality, you care to mention how any of that reality is relevant to your interests here? Say via evidence, for example?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:53PM
"How about we fix poverty caused by natural scarcity first?"
How about we attack both problems at the same time. Just because poverty due to natural scarcity exists doesn't mean that we can't attack the problems caused by artificial scarcity as well.