This makes no sense especially given that even a human observer could not tell instantly just by looking at a piece of content whether the content is properly licensed. As others have said, there no reasonable way to 100% correctly detect and filter restricted or copyrighted content based purely on the content itself.
Just look at the mess that is the patent system... even "experts" in a field or art are making huge mistakes when it comes to judging obviousness and originality. Why do people think a machine will do as well, let alone better when trying to judge legality of a piece of content?
I think what it comes down to is the content industries wanting to force technology companies to fight piracy for them. Technology companies know that trying to fight something like this (past a certain point) just leads to an arms race with huge amounts of collateral damage on either side. Media companies are throwing in the towel, they just want companies like Google to fight for them, and in doing so bear all of the responsibility and cost (while gaining zero benefit).
I like to fantasize about transitioning to a technocratic government. Decisions are made by subject matter experts and those with intellectual capital, not political capital.
Whenever someone starts fantasizing about transitioning to a technocratic government, I start fantasizing about hoarding guns in preparation the coming civil war / revolution it would result in.
The very concept of a technocratic government assumes people know and agree what the goals should be and fully understand the consequences. If that was the case, the current political system would "work". Instead people disagree on what the goals should be, and will change their opinion on what the goals should be if the goals the initially chose causes changes they dislike.
E.g. if you present proof that legalizing cannabis would have only positive effects, don't expect most people who are against it to change their mind, expect them to change their argument for why it should remain illegal.
Any technocratic government would necessarily need to be dictatorial and heavily oppressive - one that wasn't wouldn't stay in power for any amount of time.
I keep seeing this idea prop up - especially over on Reddit. And it scares me. I've said there that I'd be first in line to take up arms against a government like that, and I'm serious, as I'd see it as a massive threat against my freedom.
Italy just installed a technocratic government. If they manage to save Italy from completely imploding (which is the course it's democratic government set it on), then you may have reconsider your stance on this.
That they needed to (begrudgingly) install a technocrat at the 11th hour simply to stave off total and utter destruction of their economy (and the wider EU economy) is, in my opinion, proof enough that Technocratic governments are the way to go.
Democracy is the tyranny of the majority. When the majority are idiots, you have a real problem that will always lead to catastrophic results.
I see idiots as a threat against my freedom. And considering their inability to think strategically or consider long term scenarios, I think the civil war war between the intellectuals and the morons you predict would be over very quickly.
In a very, very limited sense. A government in a country with a parliamentary system is subject to support of parliament. As such, its powers are drastically limited compared to the US executive, for example, as it can be overthrown by parliament at any time. In this case they have a very narrow mandate from parliament, and can expect to be forced to resign if they don't consult with parliament very closely on everything they do.
In other words this is a show to give confidence to investors. Nothing would have stopped Berlusconi or another politician from running the government but actually take advice from economists seriously in the first place. If anything, Italy is a demonstration of why a technocracy will not be accepted longer term - it is only begrudgingly tolerated as a stage show even now because they're staring down the abyss and are hoping it will calm things down, while they could have taken advice from the exact same people at any time in the past years.
Why didn't they? Because they didn't like the answers given when they asked for advice, and the voters wouldn't have voted for them if they did follow it.
The moment things looks better, the same squabbling will continue, because the only reason there's anything resembling a truce between the parties in Italy now is that they all agree that for the moment the debt is the controlling issue, and everything up to and including this stage show is better than a default.
Also, look up the history of Italy. The Italian government changes more often than some people changes clothes, because the parliament has generally been extremely quick to replace the sitting government if it makes decisions parliament does not like. Berlusconi's government has been a massive aberration. This is not a culture that will tolerate a government that takes decisions they don't like unless they see it as absolutely impossible to avoid.
> That they needed to (begrudgingly) install a technocrat at the 11th hour simply to stave off total and utter destruction of their economy (and the wider EU economy) is, in my opinion, proof enough that Technocratic governments are the way to go.
This is a ridiculous argument. They chose to install a government lead by an economist as a temporary measure to try to fix a problem. It does not follow that this government will be given free reign - Italy has a parliamentary system, and the government can be voted down at pretty much any time, as mentioned above. Nor does it follow that this government will sit very long - in Italy that would be the exception rather than the rule for any government. Nor does it follow that this government will make good decisions if it tries to make decisions outside of the one area where it has a real mandate from parliament.
Nor does it follow that it will actually solve the problem in a way more beneficial to Italians than a government composed out of politicians. Keep in mind that this government was put in place by politicians out of desperation - the same politicians that participated in creating the mess in the first place.
If you don't trust these politicians to make the right decisions in the first place, why would you trust their decisions in installing this government?
> Democracy is the tyranny of the majority. When the majority are idiots, you have a real problem that will always lead to catastrophic results.
Yes, you will have problems, but you will have even greater problems when someone thinks they have objective measures for what is "right" despite the will of the majority. Quite a lot of despots got started this way - if you don't have popular support, either you won't have a government or you will need to start the oppression.
As much as a lot of things could be a lot better under a lot of minority governments, ultimately the only way for this to come to pass would be oppression. I'll take the government of idiots over an effective oppressive dictator any day.
> I think the civil war war between the intellectuals and the morons you predict would be over very quickly.
It would not be a civil war between intellectuals and morons, but between wannabe dictators (arguable they are the real morons) and everyone else, including most intellectuals. And yes, it probably would be over very, very quickly, as the very people who fantasize about this kind of government tend to do so because they are disgusted about the very type of politics required to gain the popular or military support required to install one.
Yeah, I was broad in my definition of Technocracy when applied to Italy, I'll give you that. But Technocracy isn't defined as well as Democracy because there's no real context from history to draw on, so I stand by it. Italy has a Technocratic government right now.
That said, A Technocracy does not imply dictatorship. Nor does it imply despotism. These are two "aspects" of a Technocracy you've just made up on the spot to support what you believe.
All I ask is that my chancellor be a qualified and learned economist. That my minister for health be qualified in a related field such as medicine or biology. That the scientific/ethical debates in parliament (or congress) be argued between scientific experts and philosophers and economists, not by people who have never actually had a real job outside of politics, or have little to no education in the field they are responsible for. When our leaders can say sincerely "I asked God what to do", and everyone thinks that's ok, we've lost the plot. That's Tyranny.
What I want is to feel confident that the people making the decisions that govern my life know what the hell they're talking about. What I have right now, what we all have right now, are leaders who make decisions based on how much money someone is willing to pay them, what they feel in "their gut" to be right, or what some magical fucking tyrant living in the sky tells them to do.
Maybe he meant that if you hooked up all the meth addicts in his state to a 24/7 feed of pirated movies, clockwork orange style, they'd be able to detect the pirated ones using their special paranoid powers of perception.
"YouTube does have automated copyright detection though"
And it is complete shit. I uploaded a video of my son playing Fur Elise on the piano and got an automated noticed from Google that I had uploaded a video infringing on some company's work. Completely absurd.
When I googled the company's name, I found countless people complaining of the same thing. One guy had a video in which a siren was going off and they claimed that was copyrighted!
There's no way for Youtube to know whether I have a license for the content. There are cases where hosting companies have taken down the artist's own websites after the labels' automated systems complained about finding "copyrighted" material there. And I've yet to see a supercomputer that can determine fair use.
Again. You stated the problem as clearly as she tried to, repeatedly, in front of the committee. What makes perfect sense to logical people is unsurprisingly nonsensical to the idiots running the country.
People have suggested that there's an anti-intellectual bias ingrained in the American psyche, but I don't think that's actually the problem. It's the assumption that someone else will do the thinking for you that's the real nasty, seedy little heart of the matter.
I really look forward to the gov't expending taxpayer dollars it doesn't have, and endless amounts of energy, chasing down ghosts and persecuting middlemen in defense of trillion-dollar interests. Because the sooner the US becomes the laughingstock of the western world, the sooner it's likely to get its house in order and gag the busybodies, wingnuts, corporate interests and degenerate senators who are creating its current policies.
I like the sentiment, but I believe that (unfortunately) it's not an effective strategy -- because there's no guarantee the US will get its act together if we go down that road. I think a better strategy is to fight this every step of the way, delaying the apparent inevitable until the effective state of affairs (where nobody can really enforce this mercantilistic cultural monopoly crap any longer) becomes the overwhelmingly obvious and undeniable truth in all respects, and the whole point becomes moot.
The Bitcoin community's already gearing up for this to be the end of Visa/MC if it passes. Once they're forced by fiat to shut down their largest clients and put in a squeeze between continuing service or getting sued by the RIAA, capital will go elsewhere. This could be sort of, to the American economy, what the Iran/Iraq war was to authoritarians in the middle east; great way to spend energy while the civilized free world passes you by on the highway.
No. Catastrophic failure does not somehow naturally lead to reform and success. Look at all the catastrophic failures out there that are not in the middle of dazzling recoveries.
In fact success is a rare and fragile confluence of many conditions that is hard to find.
They don't detect _copyright_, as far as I know. Videos are sometimes blocked or muted because a copyright-holder claims a violation, but this is a mass action based on the video or song itself, NOT on the copyright of the song. Because of this, you occasionally see videos that are posted by a legitimate user (for example, the band itself) that are deleted as part of a sweep, then restored later once it becomes clear that it's not supposed to have been deleted.
You mean YouTube has information on all of the photographs I've ever taken and who I've licensed them to? I don't recall making this information public, so I don't see how they could possibly detect copyright infringement of my content.
Throw one of your images at tineye.com. It's a reverse image analysis tool; their algorithm is under wraps, but I'm sure a few people around here could speculate on how it works. It works nicely with cropped and scaled images, which is a hint =)
Infringement depends on permission. No third party can possibly know whether or not the use of a given work was authorized or not unless told by the copyright holder.
Now, when told by the copyright holder that no use of some work is authorized, they can flag all copies of it that they are able to find and match it under the assumption that nothing is authorized. But you couldn't add anything if we assume that every user is lying about being authorized.
Moreover, as was demonstrated in the Viacom case, even the copyright holders get it wrong. In particular, Viacom had uploaded copies of their own works and made them appear leaked. Yet these were uploaded by Viacom itself and, thereby, authorized. They even had to go back and have them put up after taking them down by mistake. And they had to remove them from their complaint after being told of their mistakes. Twice. After doing due diligence with expensive lawyers.
I think his point was that you can certainly detect an image in use on other sites but that does not matter because it may or may not be infringement. Nobody could possibly know if he licensed his work to be used by certain sites or not.
The comment you guys are responding to was in jest. I wrote the original post in this subthread. My point about Tineye was that it's obviously capable of picking up duplicates (which is the immediate question I was responding to) and equally incapable of determining which of those duplicates are licensed.
True. But it can be gotten around by flipping the video or adding a second soundtrack. Even if it detected that, people would find ways. There's no reason that one yahoo --pun intended-- posting pirated material should be able to screw the whole company. Too much power for the yahoo. Also, un-american, as far as I've been led to believe.
Anyway, what about remixes and magazine photos and quotations longer than a paragraph?
