For those who don't know the specifics of intellectual property law:
Copyright is unwavering. The law says that the author/owner gets exclusive use of that content for a really fucking long time (something like life + a century, thank you Disney lobbyists). Full stop.
The courts recognize that that lack of nuance is unreasonable. Therefore, they have ruled that copyright law doesn't apply if the use is "fair," hence the phrase "fair use." There's no hard-and-fast way to know if something is fair use. You're basically betting that if you ever get sued, the court will be on your side. There are axioms that the court has given (for instance, if you are making money from your use, it's less likely to be fair) that help you guess if the ruling leans in your favor.
The reason for these exemptions is that it's in the public's interest for certain kinds of expression to transcend copyright, such as news and satire. (This is also where the folks belief that you can't get in trouble if it's a parody come from.)
"Clearance and Copyright," and "Free Culture" are both great books to learn more about this. The author of the latter, Larry Lessig, is the guy who fought Disney's copyright lobby in court. His experience inspired that book, and also inspired him to found the Creative Commons.
All of that is to say that there are carve outs to copyright where the public interest overrides the private content monopoly, and a public official speaking in an unflattering way certainly qualifies.
[update] apparently those axioms were actually codified into law in 1976, but they are still merely defensive - nudges for how the court might rule, not protections in their own right.
A work performed by a Government employee in connection with their job is not copyrightable in the US. (The UK has "Crown copyright", but the US has nothing similar.) Most of these people were Government employees speaking on Government business.
Where does YouTube get off taking them down? That's way out of line for Google.
Meanwhile, move them over to PeerTube or something.
But that work is directly related and highly relevant to his work as a government employee now. If you were right, any politician could silence anyone from speaking about his former transgressions, affairs or whatever.
In fact, a state Rep in California (R) tried that after his bragging was caught by an open mic, he graphically bragged to a colleague about having sex with a lobbyist and then claimed copyright on that "work" and his own name.
Although what I’m about to say would be taken to a logical extreme by some, that is just fallacy —
It is of course immaterial that someone later becomes a government employee. If we were to pass a law along these lines, then any expert who later becomes a government employee would not be entitled to the protection of prior intellectual property.
Barack Obama penned many items prior to the commencement of his government employment. His interest in those pieces where he discussed topics relevant to his interests or expertise in constitutional law is not abridged because he entered public service.
In this case with Prasad, there is other nuance, but none of it material to that specific point.
A much more fruitful focus would be on the doctrine of fair use and the examination of the credentials and claims of those who do enter public service.
Honestly, I'm tempted to see if Gemini can write a Sublime Text plugin that implements this protocol.
Feels like a lot of mindshare has shifted towards VSCode, so that's where the tooling investment goes. I don't want to be forced off of subl because new tools stop supporting it - it's a great editor, and it's not sponsored by a massive company.
As you suggest, I've had a moderately successful time trying to get AI to write its own Sublime Text plugins so our favorite editor doesn't get left behind, so might be cool to try with this too?
Shouldn’t be too hard. I wrote this emacs plugin to do similar things but without this protocol - https://github.com/kgthegreat/protagentic . Heavily used AI assisted coding for it.
Working with open source software is definitely a strength of AI. Makes Nix a lot more approachable too, since just about every use of their language ever is on GitHub.
15 years ago, I was using EC2 at work, and realized it was surprisingly easy to SSH into it in a way where all my traffic went through EC2. I could watch local Netflix when traveling. It was a de facto VPN.
Details are not at the top of my mind these years later, but you can probably rig something up yourself that looks like regular web dev shit and not a known commercial VPN. I think there was a preference in Firefox or something.
The issue these days is that all of the EC2 IP ranges are well known, and are usually not very high-reputation IPs, so a lot of services will block them, or at least aggressively require CAPTCHAs to prevent botting.
Source: used to work for a shady SEO company that searched Google 6,000,000 times a day on a huge farm of IPs from every provider we could find
Here's a question on expected value. Do you think Epic makes more money if:
(a) they agree to Apple's demands and have Fortnite on the App Store during its peak of popularity for years and eat the junk fees on mtx or
(b) they fight an extremely costly lawsuit, which they have no guarantee of winning, for years, during which time Fortnite could leave the cultural zeitgeist (which it to some extent has) and maybe eventually one day get closer to 95% of mtx money?
If you think it's not (a), I would love to know why. Sweeney seems not that motivated by money, he's already filthy rich.
I think he wants to be Steam. He wants to grow to be a foundational pillar of the market. He is to a certain degree with Unreal Engine, but that's split with Unity. He wants Epic to be the top player. Might be ego/power more than cash, but it's still coming from a place of greed.
So maybe he wants to use mobile as the lever to make the Epic Store relevant, and suing the first party markets is the path to do that.
Or maybe he's just used to being the richest guy in the room and doesn't like to be pushed around.
Either way, I think it's misplaced to herald him as a folk hero. I don't think he actually cares about individual freedom. He cares about whatever is good for Tim/Epic.
Epic's got its own anticompetitive bullshit. They don't let you play their games on Linux. They make excuses about Linux being a haven of cheaters, but really, they're just trying to add friction to keep people from moving to SteamOS.
Ambition and high mindedness are not necessarily disjoint.
He sees the potential for his company to be a bigger platform, and Apple has put itself in the way of him attempting to do so on the merits. That must feel as wrong to him as it would to any individual whose potential is being blocked.
Most principles that get upheld in society, are fought for by people who benefit from them.
Banning apps like Kindle and Patreon from linking to their own payments should never have happened. Especially Patreon - Apple wrote a rule commandeering 30% of a then-five-year old app's revenue and coerced them into using IAP to get it, nobody should be supportive of this whatever Sweeney's shortcomings or motivations.
No I disagree that we need a "better" person to disrupt what Apple is doing, that's just shifting the goal posts to favor Apple doing it longer. The best person to do it is the one who did it.
Once again, not the proposition that was being offered. It's not that he's better. It was claimed he has a spine and it was pointed out that he doesn't. It's not a comment on if Apple is good or not. It's not a comment on whether or not there is someone better. It is a comment on Tim's motivations.
- Bazzite takes community contributions; whereas, SteamOS is packaged and distributed by Valve, and
- Bazzite is based on Fedora, so the work to support Fedora should bubble over to Bazzite.
I'm curious though, is there a big difference in functionality for SteamOS vs Bazzite. Are there things that work in Bazzite that wouldn't in pure SteamOS?
Copyright is unwavering. The law says that the author/owner gets exclusive use of that content for a really fucking long time (something like life + a century, thank you Disney lobbyists). Full stop.
The courts recognize that that lack of nuance is unreasonable. Therefore, they have ruled that copyright law doesn't apply if the use is "fair," hence the phrase "fair use." There's no hard-and-fast way to know if something is fair use. You're basically betting that if you ever get sued, the court will be on your side. There are axioms that the court has given (for instance, if you are making money from your use, it's less likely to be fair) that help you guess if the ruling leans in your favor.
The reason for these exemptions is that it's in the public's interest for certain kinds of expression to transcend copyright, such as news and satire. (This is also where the folks belief that you can't get in trouble if it's a parody come from.)
"Clearance and Copyright," and "Free Culture" are both great books to learn more about this. The author of the latter, Larry Lessig, is the guy who fought Disney's copyright lobby in court. His experience inspired that book, and also inspired him to found the Creative Commons.
All of that is to say that there are carve outs to copyright where the public interest overrides the private content monopoly, and a public official speaking in an unflattering way certainly qualifies.
[update] apparently those axioms were actually codified into law in 1976, but they are still merely defensive - nudges for how the court might rule, not protections in their own right.
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