Posts by Turtle

@nuked

"Google consistently demonstrate that they are outside of the law, due to their value and influence, and unless a sizeable nation slaps them back into place, they will continue to do whatever the hell they like."

And the very surprising thing about this is that they are just an advertising company, for heavens' sake. They are not a company that produces anything that anyone really needs, a physical good of some sort that no one else could produce. They are wholly parasitic on other people's content as ad-bait. Google's £2.5bn in revenue in UK is simply a tax, the cost of which is added to whatever goods and services you buy. It's very much like the operation that those extortionists at ICANN have got: most businesses have to buy their own names and trademarks as keywords simply to prevent other entities from hijacking them.

(And although no one here really cares, I'll point out that this Google tax is a highly regressive tax that affects the poor disproportionately. Furthermore, I'll point out that Google further harms your economy by destroying the value of creative work [of i.e. photographers, musicians, film-makers, journalists, coders] solely for the sake of ad-bait and making it extremely difficult to earn a living from those pursuits.)

@Jon Green: Very Serviceable.

"...smell-by date..."

That is a very serviceable addition to the set phrases of the English language.

Re: Words on paper

"Sentimental value is one thing, commercial value another. "

It should be obvious that any work stolen is going to be stolen because it does have value to someone. If it is stolen it is only because it has value to someone. That is to say, So this law will only really effect works with value - i.e. works that re going to be stolen. And those are the works that need protection. I don't know if I am making this sufficiently clear for you. That most photos on the internet do not fall into this category is really irrelevant and should not mean, as you think it should, that no works and their creators need or should have protection against theft.

Incidentally, it's often impossible to know in advance what will have commercial value. Here's a hypothetical example: someone finds a picture of your daughter and puts a caption in it that says "Meet horny girls who want casual sex right now!" and uses it to advertise their website. There's some unexpected commercial value.

"Making money from photographs is a very tough road."

Especially when the entities that would normally pay for photographs can now just steal what they find on the web and claim that they are "orphan works".

What you are evidently just a bit too dim to understand, is that this legislation is being pushed through in order to benefit the parties that want it enacted. Do you think that they're doing that because it's not going to benefit them financially? Do you think that the politicians and bureaucrats who favor it don't have clients who expect to benefit from it? How do you think that the world works, anyway?

Re: Either El Reg selectoquoting or a goldmine of confusion

"I thought she had been in the biz for 25 years?"

She's in a very different biz now, though.

"its 1.4 million members not 140 million"

And right you are! (And thank you for actually taking the time to look which I should have done myself.) Still, leaving out the decimal point should have inflated the number by 10x to 14 million and not by 100x to the 140 million given in the story. That's still over £7 million (nearly US$11 million) a month though.

"Siluhd.com, founded 10 years ago has grown into a leading blu-ray site in China gathering tens of thousands of blu-rays as well as quality music and games, with more than 1.4million members and daily average concurrent users of over 30,000." (From the Caijing link given in the article.)

Re: This would sound better...

"Google search would not work as well without behavioral analysis...."

I don't agree with this and have no reason to think that it's actually true. When I search for something I want the results listed in terms of popularity. That requires no "behavioral analysis" (not in any meaningful sense for those wishing to carp and be pedantic). And as for the ads that get shown along with the search results: whatever "behavioral analysis" is involved is wasted as far as I'm concerned, because I and most people too, make the eminently reasonable assumption that those ads are being shown for Google's benefit and purposes, not for mine, and on that basis alone should be ignored.

As I have said before in regard to "targeted advertising", "behavioral analysis" is also targeted at gullible advertisers. Its effectiveness on end-users has got to be negligible; witness Google's constant battle to divert attention from the fact that first three results on any page of search results are paid ads and not actual search results - Google knows that people, in their turn, know that the the ads shown are for the benefit of Google and its advertisers, and not for the benefit of its users.

(Of course, if you have proof that Google's "behavioral analysis' is anything more that marketing bullshit meant to mystify suggestible media buyers and that it is effective in more than a just a few edge cases and in anything more than a few unique circumstances, I will revise my opinion.)

"Pseudo-Ethical"

"Why do they invoke so much fanboyism, they're just phones."

Not for Eadon they're not. No, for Eadon they're part of a whole fucking pseudo-ethical bourgeois ideology.

How many people... - Addendum

Here's what Google said at the time they decided to not join the Nortel patent consortium:

"Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android – and having us pay for the privilege – must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. "

I think that they can now change the words "must have seemed like" to "certainly was (and in fucking spades, too)".

( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/04/microsoft_hits_back_at_google_conspiracy_claims/ )

@hplasm: Re: Damn....

"Next contestant!"

As far as I'm concerned, there could not be enough upvotes for that!

@ribosome

"Quaker here, and quite angry. The US has flooded its own country, South America, and the Middle East with cheap weapons and the results are all too obvious."

Well, ignorant moralizing is actually the essence of Quakerism, is it not? (It's actually a rhetorical question; I am just curious to see if you will admit it or not.)

And bear in mind that...

And bear in mind that one of Reddit's co-founders was, amusingly, Aaron Swartz, the "supporter of noble causes' as one particularly clueless commenter called him. Irony enthusiasts and fanciers will like this a lot!

Re: @Evil Auditor

"Who the fuck is Turtle?"

You'll never know!

Damages

"Personally I can't see how winning a court case on every count, against a multi-billion dollar multi-national, then finding you're 6 figures in the red is anything short of bat-shit crazy, as legal systems go. "

Damages to the defendant are determined objectively (or, if you prefer, impartially) by the courts. If Oracle has to pay her legal bills, then the damages that Oracle has to pay are being determined by the complainant's lawyers. (I am classing any money paid to the complainant, including court and legal costs, as damages here. Technically that would be in correct but it will pass muster here.)

The solution, as far as I see, is that the party bringing suit has to have lawyers who agree that their maximum fee can not be more than the award that will be obtained. Complainant needs to seek a lawyer who will agree to such terms.

And in any event, the lawyers need to know what a reasonable expectation of the award will be: that's one of the bits of specialized knowledge that lawyers can be expected to have; award judgements are not made in a vacuum and generally fall in line with past awards. If she chose lawyers who did not have such knowledge, or if she insisted on proceeding with the suit because she was not satisfied with Oracle's settlement offer in spite of warnings from her lawyers about her potential award being less than the potential legal bills, then there's no one to blame but herself.

And I am not saying that the complainant looked at this as an opportunity to get rich quick with a multi-million dollar award, but maybe that was a factor too.

Hammer.

"Allow me to take a hammer to it."

Ah, I see that you read the same technical journals that I do!

Re: Insurance.

"That's the attitude which got man on the moon..."

You do understand that there is a difference between a government agency and a tv production company, right?

Re: @Turtle - So they tax Android slabs...

"Microsoft is suing each and any distributor of Android mobile devices hoping they will be convinced to stop producing them and wait for the day when Microsoft could come up with something decent. It is relevant and it is a fail."

Microsoft is suing companies to get them to stop producing handsets, and start producing NOTHING, until Microsoft gives them something decent to produce? Is Microsoft going to pay the salaries of the all the eimployees and make good the losses in stock prices and dividends to investors while the handset manufacturer is not making any money by sitting around not manufacturing handsets? Oh, maybe everyone will go on vacation until they get something from Microsoft, eh? Is Microsoft going to pay for those vacations too?

You're quite mistaken. (And deluded, too, apparently.) Microsoft is very content to grant royalty-bearing licenses. Unless, of course, you can show me that Microsoft has been attempting to obtain and enforce exclusion orders on all Android handset makers. Or even *some* of them. I can't think of a single instance in which Microsoft somehow attempted to convince any Android handset maker to "stop producing them and wait for the day when Microsoft could come up with something decent."

The idea that Microsoft would expect any handset manufacturer to stop manufacturing handsets until Microsoft came up with something decent is just... bizarre. Someone needs to, uh, learn you some economics. And maybe some business management and administration too.

@Gerard Krupa: Re: A Year To The Day.

"Is it the fourth of Febtober already?"

Well that's the bug that caused the failure!