Feel free to include http://levien.com/Social%20rule.puz , which has a Recurse theme. It's not top quality but I've had a number of people tell me they enjoy it.
Raph! I loved that puzzle (and I've solved it in cursewords)! I may try to get together a collection of freely licensed demo puzzles, and I'd be honored to include this.
ArchiveTeam and URLTeam do great work, but those projects and the OP have different goals. (I'm the OP.) This bot will NOT produce any kind of corpus of tweeted links or links shortened by Twitter's t.co shortener; in fact, it bypasses t.co entirely and I don't have any kind of record of those shortened links.
Instead, it backs up the contents of the pages that are linked to at the time of the tweets. Frankly my tool doesn't do anything interesting at all with the URLs — it just submits the "expanded URL" that was tweeted to the Wayback Machine and lets it sort out any and all 301s.
(1) the tweet-detail page, for the tweet that includes the link;
(2) the t.co mapping, so that the tweet-detail page's t.co link can somehow be resolved to the (archived) page to which it links.
I don't think there are any blocks against doing (1).
Unfortunately for (2), Twitter has a blanket robots.txt prohibition in place for domain t.co. Perhaps IA could be convinced to ignore that robots.txt in the public interest.
Alternatively, perhaps another site could be set up that itself accepts t.co link-paths, in the background queries t.co, and returns both an HTML page and working redirect that isn't robots.txt-blocked. LinkArchiver (and any other similar sites) could as a convention archive responses of this other site whenever they'd like to archive t.co.
Right, but my point was that resolving the 301 and storing the result is more efficient overall than doing a full mirror of a URL only to find out that it's an alternative URL with their tracking stuff appended to the end of the URL.
But yeah, if you want to bypass t.co (meaning that it's not useful for archeologists) it makes sense to just archive them.
Well defoo means abandoning your family and cutting all ties. So it would fit here if you extended the meaning a little to mean cutting ties with any relation not specifically family.
Disclosure up top: I work for the EFF on copyright activism, and submitted this article here, but didn't write it.
Just wanted to say that, as others have noted, the excerpted words come from a 71 page reply, but I wouldn't say it was anything like picking four unrepresentative words. Take, for example, this longer paragraph from the filing:
> Hacking video game access controls facilitates piracy and therefore undermines the core anti-piracy purposes of Section 1201. As explained above, hacking the video game access controls requires, by definition, hacking of the video game console or similar device in order to play the hacked video game. Once the access controls for the video game console are hacked, regardless of the purported purpose or intent of the hacker, any content, including pirated games, can be played on a video game console.
> What's more, console hackers may distribute their console-hacking solution to gamers that have no intention of using it for the purposes stated in the proposed exemption. The risk of piracy is even greater on personal computers and similar devices that do not utilize device-based access controls to prevent the installation of unauthorized software. The individual can use consoles to make and store infringing copies of copyrighted games and other content and to distribute these unlawful copies online to a large audience.
You can't really go line-by-line through a 71-page comment, but it's fair to say that that sort of rhetoric—conflating "hacking" with piracy with illegality, regardless of context—runs throughout, and is what my colleague highlighted here.
You're quoting individual grafs from a 4-page executive summary. The entire rest of the document goes into excruciating detail about the myriad of objections ESA has to the exemption proposal.
You can, in fact, go line-by-line through a 71-page comment. When you purport to summarize it, you are obliged to capture it in its entirety, or else disclaim the fact that you're responding only to a fragment. EFF failed to do that here.
9 minutes later
The ESA document isn't 71 pages long. It's 29 pages, plus exhibits. I read all 29, and mined out all the arguments I could find (excuse the typos, I tried to go as fast as I could):
sweeping scope
burden is on exemption asker
no concept of “abandoned game” in copyright law
exempts modifications on non-gaming platforms
applies to games other than those eft claims it does
turning off online services doesn’t abandon game
access controls used for more than just enabling matchmaking
implicates controls fundamental to the platform like code
signing
copyright owner entitled to benefits/revenue from online
services
fails to meet burden that “most use would be noninfinging”
online services licensed separately from game, so modifying
game itself infringes
six month time duration has no basis in law
exemption is broader than fair use (preservation and study)
significant commercial non transformative use
involves reproduction/distribution of copyrighted game
assets
amount of code implicated is sweeping and unreasonable,
unlike book excerpt
has the effect of circulating tools also used for piracy,
which harms market
too many market alternatives to support argument of
irreparable harm to consumers, including 1p games
copyright holders already doing preservation work with
museums
consumer harm proposed by eff is hypothetical
games aren’t abandoned when they have thriving communities,
so benefits are minimal
librarian is obligated by congress to consider adverse
effect of exemptions
eff identifies no actual nonprofit or archival project that
would benefit
online services have no impact on criticism comment or news
reporting
creates confusion among users about what is or isn’t lawful,
thus increasing piracy
impacts not just copyright but also brands and trademarks of
game publishers
---
Do you honestly think EFF's summary of these arguments was honest? This took me 9 minutes to read and type up. EFF didn't have 9 extra minutes to get it right?
In the end, all those arguments basically say "any exemption to hackers legitimizes hacking and helps pirates" along with a few tired arguments about disappearace not equaling disappearance, which is the same rule that keeps so many old books locked away decades after the rights owners have all but vanished.
It's the same song the ESA has sung for years to step in the way of legitimate hacking, and is not too far away from "won't someone think of the children!"
>In the end, all those arguments basically say "any exemption to hackers legitimizes hacking and helps pirates" along with a few tired arguments about disappearace...
No, no they don't. You're doing exactly what the EFF is doing - being intellectually lazy and recasting their arguments into unrepresentative excerpts that you then proceed to dismiss. A number of points tptacek listed are nuanced legal arguments, and I see nobody addressing them.
Umm, not really. They say there's no legal definition for 'abandoned game' but the EFF is trying to make one, as is permitted in the DMCA exemption process. They say that turning off online services isn't 'abandoning' the game... c'mon, really? They're 'only' making it unavailable and ensuring that the general public--who will collectively OWN all of this property when the copyright expires have no way to preserve their property from destruction.
Please also note that it would require a constitutional amendment to make copyright terms unlimited ... not that they're not trying to backdoor that by creating 'extensions' whenever some are about to run out.
I also read the ESA's brief, and I think the reason the EFF didn't mention many of these arguments is that explaining and then rebutting each of these arguments, many of them utterly specious, and some mutually exclusive, would result in an article too long for a casual reader, so they had to pick what they perceive as the core argument and the actual reason game studios oppose this change. Someone interested in the detail can always do what you've done, and read the actual briefs.
Some of these points are obvious grasping at straws. First, there is denying the problem exists:
- no irreparable harm to consumers
- games aren’t abandoned when they have thriving communities, so benefits are minimal
- turning off online services doesn’t abandon game
The farcical:
- exempts modifications on non-gaming platforms (by which they mean computers, both desktop and mobile)
- copyright owner entitled to benefits/revenue from online services
And the remaining arguments are mostly technical legal arguments about copyright holder rights and time durations, which may have legal merits, but don't address fairness concerns. If someone sold an e-book, then came back years later and removed half the chapters while simultaneously claiming that no one should be able to archive or distribute those redacted chapters, AND that the seller is entitled to benefits from those chapters they redacted, AND that there was no harm to consumers, we would rightly ridicule the incoherency of those mutually exclusive arguments.
If there are words in the original post that give the impression that we're providing an exhaustive summary, let me know and I'll see how we can clarify.
One of the arguments ESA made seems to resonate with people. I don't think it's at all dishonest to point that out.
We will address the comments more completely with the response filing. In the meantime, I'm glad your 9 minute list exists in case people prefer it to the original.
There was no indication given that ESA had presented arguments any more nuanced than "hacking is illegal", nor was there a link to ESA's argument. Your comment, too, is a bit... uncharitable in its assessment of our intelligence.
Here is EFF's chosen title for this article:
Videogame Publishers: No Preserving Abandoned Games, Even for Museums and Archives, Because All "Hacking" is Illegal
Well, that, and about thirty other things.
Later, summarizing EFF's own article, is this sentence, which is its own graf:
Behind this hyperbole, ESA (along with MPAA and RIAA) seem to be opposing anyone who bypasses game DRM for any reason, no matter how limited or important.
I must disagree strongly. For one, there was no need to indicate that any more nuanced arguments had been given at any point, since the argument of "hacking is illegal" is already completely and inarguably inacceptable. This is for the following reasons:
The word hacking was carefully chosen as means of emotional manipulation (see: https://www.google.de/search?q=hacker&tbm=isch ) and is used profusely in the document, mirroring the manner by which the advertisement industry burns brands into the collective memory. The excuse of it standing in for an activity defined as "modify the video
game’s access controls" is only given in a footnote, instead as a glaring bold definition, which is intended to hide the fact that the word was redefined. Further, the redefinition itself is laughable since there already exists a solid term for that act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_cracking
There may be further arguments in the document, but it is fairly obvious that they are not the primary payload and are only present to fulfill legal requirements and provide a hull on which the primary payload is carried.
Edit: In short: If you read this document only as a legal document instead of the piece of advertisement aimed at manipulating human emotions it is, you miss the true nuance. And that is what the EFF was crudely pointing out.
Sorry, I think that's really disingenuous. Observing that lockpicking can facilitate burglary is not equivalent to conflating locksmiths with criminals, and even the short excerpts that you quote above do not disregard context, but point out the existence of a wider context.
I don't want to get into a long argument about it, but from your tone I almost get the impression that you don't think the ESA has a legitimate interest in preventing piracy.
I think the ESA has a "legitimate interest in preventing piracy"
... and I also think that shouldn't prevent anyone from doing anything they like with any electronic devices or digital bits they acquired legally.
The sticking point is the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions. We're talking about exemptions from these provisions. These provisions should not exist in the first place. "hackers" aka smart people who use computers should absolutely be allowed to do whatever they want to make their own purchased games work, even if the ESA member companies are working against them.
Let ESA member companies do stupid DRM stuff which makes their products worse for paying customers.
Let paying customers do whatever they want with what they bought, including making it work even when it's not supposed to work anymore.
(EDIT: I should probably mention the rather undermined first-sale doctrine. You obviously should be able to buy or be given an old game from someone else who bought it, and make it work)
This is why EFF had no need to misrepresent ESA's argument: their entire audience believes that ESA's constituents don't have the right to enforce licenses that restrict end-user rights to modify game titles.
The fact is that the idea that you can "do anything you like with any electronic devices or digital bits you acquire legally" has no current basis in US law. Promises agreed to in contracts that restrict your ability to modify games are enforceable. Generally, the manner in which game publishers and console vendors secure those promises are recognized by the law.
You can want the law to be otherwise (I might too!), but that's not germane to the actual situation EFF faces, which is a legal argument with ESA in the venue of the Library of Congress.
> Promises agreed to in contracts that restrict your ability to modify games are enforceable.
Could you provide some case law for that statement. Contract law is a complex area, and Meeting of the minds is critical aspect in order for it to be enforceable.
As a consumer, I have bought my fair share of games, and not a single time was I informed about a contract. When talking about consent, EULA agreement is as far away from reality as you can make. People have signed away their eternal soul (http://boingboing.net/2010/04/16/video-game-shoppers.html), while a study showed that average users spend less than 8 seconds to read agreements (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1753326.1753689). A similar study done earlier in 2001 looked at privacy policy documents and found that only 3% of consumer read privacy policies, and once they read it, they were less sure about what it meant than those who didn't.
But the legal system is complex and not always about common sense, so lets look what the court has said in specific cases. Looking at shrinkwrap licenses, about 4 know cases has ruled against enforceability and 3 has ruled for it (http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/program/law/08-732/Transactions/Shr...). The primary argument seems to be about when the contract is formed, as in the store when money and product change hand, or at some later time. One camp states its in the store, and the other when the customer has performed a arbitrary number of steps (purchase, picking something up, turning a thing on, ...). The first camp is focused on the consumers ability to consent to a contract they haven't seen or understood, and the second camp is focused on current industry practices. The conclusion seems to be a distinct lack of supremer court cases to decide which camp is right.
> Generally, the manner in which game publishers and console vendors secure those promises are recognized by the law.
So aren't you arguing for an exemption in the DMCA since contract law already covers this? What is the need to prevent this using the DMCA if it can be prevented on a case by case basis using contracts?
I do think there probably should be some kind of limited, narrowly-tailored exemption, in the spirit of "interoperability", for restoring online functionality to titles whose online components have been decommissioned.
That would leave a large list of games lost to history and never again playable. There are quite a lot of titles that were protected by dongles, anti-emulation code, etc. in addition to those where the servers have been taken down due to the publisher making no profit off of them and the existing proposal is quite reasonably tailored to preserving works that would otherwise be lost with little impact on works that are still commercially viable.
If anything, keeping old works alive helps boost the inevitable remakes, e.g. how I just bough Elite: Dangerous the other night because of what I knew about the original Elite.
But isn't the decision of whether to let old games rot or to give them new life and potentially monetize it a decision of the property owner? Why should somebody else decide for them?
They only own the copyright for the fixed term of copyright law. So in that sense, you could compare them to 'renters' as their rights will expire. Why should the public be unable to preserve what will become it's common property?
And yes, I'm aware that there are a few unusual legal constructions, such as the copyright on Peter Pan which do not expire. These are relatively few in number and outside the scope of the concern here. I don't think any video games have such a copyright, anyhow. That said, I can see legal efforts to abolish the constitutionally-established limited term of copyright.
Fair enough. I gave you some upvotes as it seems you were misunderstood.
That said, the new one looks much cooler, but it has one hell of a steep learning curve. You can die from pretty much anything, including the training to leave a station.
Accidentally shooting the station pretty much equals death.
>The fact is that the idea that you can "do anything you like with any electronic devices or digital bits you acquire legally" has no current basis in US law.
Is there basis in law for the opposite? If so, could you cite that? To a laymen I'm forced to compare this to what I know - namely that there are very few, if any, purchases I could make of _physical goods_ with legal restrictions on me taking them apart, physically.
As I said I'm basically in favor of the EFF's proposal. My beef is with their mischaracterization of the ESA's position; they're making them into a boogeyman instead of acknowledging that they have some legitimate interests here and looking for a way to bridge the gap.
Using your analogy, ESA wants to ban practicing lockpicking skills in the privacy of your home because once you learned it, you could use it to commit burglary. I think EFF is completely correct to oppose it and completely justified to expose guilt by association and slippery slope fallacies in ESA's argument.
ESA has interest in preventing piracy, but that does not give them any more rights. I have interest in acquiring a million dollars, but it would be a poor argument for me to justify robbing a bank with that interest. In the same way, the fact that ESA is interested in something does not constitute good argument to prevent harmless activities having nothing to do with piracy - because there are much better and less rights-infringing ways to further the same interest.
> I almost get the impression that you don't think the ESA has a legitimate interest in preventing piracy.
Well, there's legitimate and there's legitimate. We're not discussing here whether they should try to prevent piracy, it's whether they should block efforts to get a small temporary exemption related to non-infringing uses of abandoned software put in place for the next three years.
It's frustrating to me that ESA and some of the other respondents here try to bootstrap from a copyright purpose to non-copyright ones. Nothing in this exemption would render infringement legal; if granted, it would just remove legal uncertainty from circumvention for limited non-infringing uses. In that sense, the legitimacy of the underlying copyright concern is kind of irrelevant.
> Observing that lockpicking can facilitate burglary is not equivalent to conflating locksmiths with criminals
I have to disagree with you here. Both in this filing and in their broader campaigns, they've done everything they can to conflate copyright infringement with hacking/viruses/etc. and many of their references are irrelevant or unsupported, they just want to put the words piracy and hacking together at every opportunity.
Which is itself disingenuous, as ESA member Sony is itself infamous for using malicious hacking in its attempt to stop copyright infringement (e.g. the Sony rootkit). Although I will admit that I'm maligning them given the chance. I haven't bought anything from Sony since that very day.
Apropos of being disingenuous. Sony BMG (now Sony Music Entertainment), which is infamous for using malicious hacking is not and have never been an ESA member. The ESA member is Sony Computer Entertainment. And no, it's not the same org. Both are subsidiaries of the same holding company so they are as related as HBO and Time Warner Cable or GEICO and See's Candies.
I am sorry, I don't follow.
Two different companies did two different things (installing rootkit and being an ESA memeber), you seem to believe they are the same company. I have corrected you.
What does moral culpability have to do with any of this?
Actually you've been talking to Natus, Inc. and the person you wanted to correct is Natsu, LLC. Because we're completely different imaginary entities that merely happen to share an account, you're actually the one who is confused here. Hopefully this clarifies things for you.
On a more serious note, if I can't hold the owners responsible for their actions via their own subsidiaries, then what? This is why I find them to both be 'Sony' enough to share blame and I don't particularly care for it when people try to play shell games with corporate identities. The particulars of their corporate governance are simply not relevant to what I was saying.
Ok. So you believe Sony Corp owners (who are mostly institutions) both made the decision to install rootkit in Sony BMG and signed off the ESA publication in SCEA?
Good for you, I guess. This belief is definitely more popular on HN than reality.
I'm not saying they made the decision, necessarily, only that they can be held responsible for it. If they can't be responsible for anything their corporations have done, who can be?
How about this: people who make the decision are responsible for it and people who have nothing to do with it... are not? If you have 401K you might be owning Sony yourself. If you have a savings/CD account you might also own Sony. So by your own standard you are likely responsible for every action any Sony's subsidiary and any subsidiary of any other corporation you invested do.
I could agree with that for the most part, but I have a hard time seeing how there can be no one anywhere in Sony who had anything to do with Sony's decisions.
Also, I've read a fair number of proxy statements, but I've never had a chance to vote on what sort of lobbying they should do or what projects they should work on.
I am pretty sure there is nobody anywhere at any Sony subsidiary who had anything to do with Sony Music and SCE decisions in question simultaneously. As same as there is nobody in Berkshire Hathaway who is simultaneously deciding on the candy recipies and on the insurance policies.
And I don't think that lobbying efforts are undertaken without the involvement of senior management (unlike, say, candy recipes), so we'll have to disagree here.
I think that's exactly what is happening. This is often used in politics, and is akin to "I'm just saying..."
"He may or may not have criminal intentions, I don't know, I'm just saying..."
It's intentionally drawing loose correlations and leaving the equivalence up to the reader. Once the suggestion is made, however, it's hard to dissociate.
I agree with one of the ancestor posters - the ESA has no dog in this fight other than fearing that allowing any hacking is a slippery slope, and it is in their favor to make sure "hacking" is never seen in a positive light.
I'd have to disagree based on reading the ESA's position statement. Essentially they point out that in order to circumvent the restrictions on a particular video game, one must circumvent the restrictions on the video game console, which is covered by a different section of the law.
Creating and distributing kits for the circumvention of the console restrictions has a drastically broader application than merely playing abandoned games.
Given that such an exception would essentially gut the law, the ESA most certainly has a dog in the hunt.
You have been commenting righteously about how the EFF misrepresents the ESA's position but you haven't stated what the misrepresentation is besides telling people to read the 71 page paper and that "the ESA has a legitimate interest in preventing piracy", which is the same thing the EFF is saying: the ESA is conflating hacking old games with piracy.
This is correct. I uploaded the images and used names like facebook.png, which sometimes produces false positives on those extensions. I can confirm they're being served from eff.org and are not doing any tracking.
I've got no evidence that it was an actual DMCA notice, and the language suggesting it was an automated match seems much more likely to me.
That said, I don't think I have any insider knowledge from my time there, but also wouldn't want to give the impression that I was revealing non-public facts about their processes. It may be an abundance of caution, but it would certainly paint a target on the argument.
A major, major problem across many, many UGC sites is that, because the DMCA does not require them to forward takedown notices in their entirety affected users, there is information asymmetry at play. I filled out a dispute form on the site, which required consenting that my counter-notice would be forwarded on to the complaining party (if such a party exists).
If there is a DMCA notice, and if I can get it, and if I can show it was in bad faith, I'd absolutely raise the idea of pursuing a 512(f) claim against "the assholes" you mention. But 512(f) doesn't work against what I wager happened, which is just a media partner engaging in copyfraud unbeknownst to SoundCloud.
If that's what happened, SoundCloud likely has a contract saying that the media partner won't do that, and could terminate their agreement or, who knows, sue over breach of contract. But I, the user, don't have that course of action available to me.
Could have been, but it isn't :) I call it the "Houston, we have a problem" clip just because that's how everybody knows it. (There's a comment on the original article to that effect, but Medium doesn't really show those prominently.)
These are good questions, though I disagree with the characterization here. Like: I don't think anybody's circumventing the DMCA, so much as tacking on additional measures not required by law. Anybody who's doing algorithmic enforcement, including YouTube and newly Vimeo, is in the same boat; in large part it's the result of negotiations with media partners who demand it in exchange for access to content. So, they're doing something separate from what the law requires (in addition to what the law requires) in order to satisfy partners... not really circumvention.
BUT it sucks. And it especially sucks when it's done in a way that doesn't respect users. And I've written about that lots, though not so much in this particular piece.
Sites have all kinds of "guidelines", and some of them are offensive and others aren't as much. Vimeo used to prohibit video gameplay uploads, for example; that's probably not something I'd campaign on.
I probably should have put an extra sentence at the end to explain what I mean by the line you quoted, but I guess I didn't think people would read it as "bootlicking horseshit." In fact, I'm sorry to say I think you've read it exactly backwards.
I meant to emphasize: the issue is not my particular upload of Apollo 13 audio, which is obviously also available from a million other places. If you read the thing and think it's about my complaining that this particular audio is taken down, that gives SoundCloud WAY too easy an out: they just comply with their own policies, maybe expedite the process for a (1) former employee who (2) works in copyright policy and (3) got the dispute to the top of Hacker News, and then they can wipe their hands of it.
No, making this issue about any one piece of content, my own included, misses the forest for the trees. I am mad, and I will stay mad even once SoundCloud's reasonable employees doing their job flick a switch and reinstate my upload. I don't want other people to feel like they can relax once my upload is back in place. It will be back in place, but what we need is systemic improvements to eradicate the creeping permissions culture.
>I don't think anybody's circumventing the DMCA, so much as tacking on additional measures not required by law. Anybody who's doing algorithmic enforcement, including YouTube and newly Vimeo, is in the same boat; in large part it's the result of negotiations with media partners who demand it in exchange for access to content. So, they're doing something separate from what the law requires (in addition to what the law requires) in order to satisfy partners... not really circumvention.
To me, it seems that these hosting providers have traded safe harbor under the law, for safe harbor under contract with their media partners, in exchange for content. In so doing, they enable those partners to send what effectively amounts to takedown spam, where under the DMCA regime they'd open themselves to a lawsuit if they didn't conduct due diligence.
How is that not circumvention?
Excuse the tone of my posts here: I'm very perplexed. I get that you're upset, but you seem to be completely ignoring, and here even dismissing, the underlying cause for your spurious takedown notice.
DMCA says: if you want to have a safe harbor, these are the basic things you have to do. You have to name an agent, take notices, takedown promptly, have a repeat infringer policy, etc. If you don't do those things, you lose your safe harbor.
SoundCloud does all those things, so they get the safe harbor.
The additional systems they have chosen to put in place are just that, additional. Adhering to DMCA is not required (though you don't get the safe harbor if you don't) and it's not a ceiling on what kinds of arrangements companies can make with each other.
But again, you're right that it's the thing that burned me here, and I think they merit a lot more scrutiny than they get, and I'm trying to lead that scrutiny more in other places. Prohibiting additional measures would also tangle up other site "guidelines" like the Vimeo one I mentioned, or even YouTube's ability to do content matching and revenue splitting.
You've identified a really key problem though, that those additional rules, whether offensive or inoffensive, are made completely at the discretion of online services and generally without input from users.
