Posts by Peter Graham
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to nzlemming,
We’ve been seeing that for a while with Sony building MP3 and video players that you have to break copyright to load up. I think it gets resolved around the board table rather than in court, especially if both divisions make money.
Universal sued Sony in 1983 for making Betamax recorders because they're mostly used for copyright infringement.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to nzlemming,
To differentiate between copies of the same show/film/software you would have to review every file individually, and compare it with all other files. And you would have to do this using humans, which would have huge cost implications and probably make the operation barely profitable.
YouTube does automatically compare audio and video against a database of works whose owners have complained to YouTube. See YouTube vs Fair Use and Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System. I think they do this to make their media partners happy and not because they are legally required to. YouTube makes good money off content licensed from big media.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The DMCA requires that the content be removed on notification of infringement, not that a link to the content be removed.
The DMCA requires that content providers "remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing". A sensible law, since it can be difficult to quickly remove all copies of a file from a internet service.
This is what intrigues me. Does anyone really believe YouTube management has no idea it's hosting potentially infringing content until explicitly advised by the owners?
They absolutely know there's infringing content somewhere on YouTube. They aren't legally responsible unless they know about specific content which infringes copyright.
If I run a photocopy shop and let people photocopy stuff unsupervised should I be liable for any copyright infringement my customers are committing using my service?
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Geoff Lealand,
I sometimes wonder how a one-armed person would turn it on (control/alt/delete).
With this
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Google's explanation of search results.
If you have a Google account you can turn off Web History to get non-personalised searches. You used to be able to put &pws=0 in your search query to turn off personalisation when you weren't logged in but that seems to have been broken by recent changes. You can also go to google.com/ncr to turn off automatic country redirection so you can use google for any country and see how the localisation affects searches. Google also claim that you will see a 'View customizations' link if your search results have been personalised, but I've never seen it myself.
Also, go to http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/ to see how Google targets ads at you based on your browsing.
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Hard News: Te Qaeda and the God Squad, in reply to Paul Campbell,
My guess is that the cops crossed some (still secret) line in their evidence gathering – there was a lot of cellphone and texting intercepts going on here, maybe someone didn’t get the required warrants? will there be repercussions
"The search warrants police used to secretly film allegedly military-style training camps on private land in the Ureweras did not give them the necessary legal authority, it can now be revealed."
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to George Darroch,
That again, is ill informed. Quite apart from the horror inflicted on those who suffer through their last years and those who lose family members much earlier than they otherwise would (13 years earlier, among men, 14, among women), the costs of end-of-life healthcare, particularly for cancers, is extreme. A person in a cancer-ward can easily consume hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment, equivalent to decades of paid taxes.
As tussock pointed out, most deaths are from cancer or cardiovascular disease whether or not they're caused by smoking. You're going to die of something and it's unlikely to be pretty or cheap to treat.
Interestingly, one study has found that thin non-smokers had higher lifetime medical expenses than either smokers or obese people because non-smokers live longer. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
That meme has been going around for a while now. It sounds attractive, but it’s not actually true – if you think of the individual words as units (which dictionary attacks allow) then the security of a string of words is pretty low, especially considering most people’s active vocabulary (well under 40,000 words
If you choose a five word password from a 40,000 word vocabulary you get ~10^23 total passwords. To get the same security from an ascii password you'd have to have to remember 12 random characters.
Using random words as a password works better than random characters because people are better at remembering a sequence of random words than a sequence of random characters.
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There’s a similar trademark issue with ugg boots. ‘Ugg’ is a trademark owned by Deckers Outdoor Corporation in the US, and possibly other countries. Deckers used to claim they owned the trademark in Australia and tried to defend it in court, although they eventually lost. They have successfully defended the trademark in the US.
Here's the IPONZ decision, if anyone is interested.