Posts by Andrew Orlowski 1435 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Sep 2006
@Ole "In any case, from my, and many people's perspective, the only way to create a fast lane is to add a slower one. I guess that makes me a cretin. There's a lot of us."
Yes it does, in the same way as thinking the Earth is flat makes you a cretin. If "many people" believe the Earth is flat, that still doesn't make it an accurate description of physical reality.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/09/net_neutrality_explained_and_how_to_get_a_better_internet/
Getty made 35m images free to embed back in May to bloggers, etc.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/06/getty_image_embed_opens_up_35m_for_bloggers/
One-click licensing should be here in the UK by the end of the year.
http://www.copyrighthub.co.uk
Then there's "free shit" people can legally license.
Microsoft has little excuse for not keeping up with the news.
Joseph Haig:
>> I do not recognise it in the description as a "bureaucratic, centralised scheme".<<
Neither do I. You're putting 2+2 together and getting 94, there.
We'll have a centralised scheme working in a few days in England and Wales, taught with reluctance, by exhausted non-experts. Any guesses how it'll turn out?
@Levente: "UNLESS it's claimed by someone it is public domain BY DEFAULT."
Well, that explains a lot. You don't understand how copyright works.
The first Berne Convention in 1886 specified copyright is automatic. You don't need to register, fill out any paperwork, or draw a symbol. You don't need to re-apply to retain your rights. Almost every country is a Berne signatory today.
@veti:
"A single short season of a modern show, such as Sherlock, will set me back $30."
"even if I'm lucky enough that it's one of the tiny handful that's actually available at all"
The first two Sherlock seasons are on Netflix, to watch as many times as you like. Season 3 streamed a month ago.
"I just go without these cultural treats. "
Because you didn't want to pay $4.99?
That is pretty fucking tragic.
@moiety
"All rights holders need to do is make their products available everywhere, to everyone, at a reasonable price and much of their infringement problems will go away."
Well everyone wants cheaper beer.
That's what everyone was saying ten years ago. Now everything pretty much *is* available for free or at very low cost; even Sky has unbundled itself, and flogs it off piece by piece via Now TV.
Some people spend a fortune, most people don't mind paying ... but some people absolutely don't like paying at all. The average pay out by Spotify is shockingly low. This is now affecting production. Only rich kids can afford to do art now.
A change in the law would ensure you would never be paid anyway, no matter how popular your work became globally.
Generally it is better to strengthen people's rights, and then allow them to opt-out from being paid if they wish, rather than weaken *everyone's* rights and hope a few people remember to opt-in, before they're ripped off.
In fact, why stop there? Why not make the interest banks pay on your deposits and savings optional, too? Fairly soon with low rates, nobody would expect to get any interest, and most people would forget to "claim" their interest.
"Because the one I use doesn't offer me any expectation of compensation."
Background music is already licensed, so you are not describing a realistic threat. As the EU concluded, the problem here isn't lawsuits, because there aren't any - it's individuals not realising their rights, and being ripped off.
Internet aggregators rely on people being mugs, and having low expectations. Your probably should be a bit more demanding.
"the right of ordinary people to be paid"
Ah, so fair remuneration for a popular work is "moonwalking". The plebs should just give up!
I think having naively pushed for this for so long, you're now being confronted with the consequences. Which are anything but "fair" or "progressive". So it goes...
@Man With Burning Brain:
Your comment shows some difficulty with reading comprehension.
Android is open source and GMS is a binary blob. The MADA contracts, which interest the authorities, put conditions on the access to GMS. Google is free to put conditions on GMS and has good reasons to do so, to avoid fragmentation. However, a real or inferred Roach Motel clause that prevented a phone maker from making a non-GMS phone in their product range could be considered to be anti-competitive.
Yes, Google own GMS and "get to decide what's what". But only up to a point. This is one of the perils of being a monopoly.
@ Man With Bleeding Brain
I'm not convinced you tried very hard to read the article. Google's GMS is a binary blob that sits on the open source Android base. The MADA contracts that interest DG-COMP govern access and conditions for use of GMS, not the open source base.
Yes, Google own GMS and "get to decide what's what". But if accepting the GMS "privilege" means you can't then make a non-GMS phone in your product range, because you break the GMS contract, then this may be anti-competitive.
@Pott:
Business regulation is necessary to ensure a monopoly incumbent doesn't prevent superior services from reaching the public.
"Google doesn't have everyone's best interests at heart, but neither does Microsoft...and it's Microsoft that's behind this, mark my words."
Cute speculation, but irrelevant here. It doesn't matter who is "behind it". (Conspiracy Theory Alert). European investors, entrepreneurs, coders, and even the old lady next door to me all want better services and more competition. A Roach Motel clause may or may not be preventing that. We shall see.
"They are no longer the only notification method "
They never were, WP always had Toast notifications.
WP tiles should have a Large (2x) size by now, as they do on Win 8.x desktop, and be able to display more than one email /calendar entry etc.
One thing I didn't notice in the Dev Preview: "Some of your applications are running in the background and are using power, would you like to close them?"
Just like Android.
Google makes editorial decisions every day. It made 12 million domains disappear one day. Google has some more responsibilities because it can no longer evade EU law, but these are nowhere near as onerous as Google makes out.
(Google would not be in this position if it had chosen the option of protection as a publisher - an option it declined.)
You are free to argue for the abolition of data protection laws in the EU, but if they're there, you can't argue Your Favourite Corporation doesn't have to abide by them.
He's sort of right, although Safe Harbour is a technical term that doesn't apply here. Applied metaphorically, he's on the right lines.
The ECJ wasn't "chasing search engines" - it has to apply European data protection law as it's written. There is an exemption (a "derogation") for publishers and Google could have applied to be one. And saved itself all this both. But it declined to take that route.
If the EU wants search engines to be exempt it will have to pass a rule that says they are. But given Google's behaviour with regard to data protection, that's not very likely now. And even less likely given how it's behaved in response to Gonzalez.
What Tierney is saying is that a commenter does not have the right for the article to be removed from the search results, because their privacy is not being breached. At least, not by the CJEU's criteria.
But Google removed it anyway.
Remember that Gonzalez only won because the law had not kept pace with technology; a) the info being continually re-published is irrelevant and out of date and b) Google is a massive, pervasive information source, with huge social impact, and it's continually republishing this info via its search results "snippets".
A responsible search engine would have done this:
"Oh, hello, we've got a request from a commenter on some page we've indexed. We'll reject it and they can complain to the ICO".
"And how much would it cost Google for lawyers and administration to individually dispute each and every one of those 50,000 (and counting) requests?"
Given that it's free, not very much. 40 per cent have come from Germany. The UK ICO deals with thousands already, and most are not appealed; the appeals procedure is free in the UK up to the highest level.
A month ago Google fanbois argued it would be too expensive for Google to de-link on request, Google couldn't possibly do it. It would go broke trying. Now Google will go broke appealing a couple of dozen decisions a year. Funny, that.
Perhaps, but that contradicts what Google itself argued - that it would be too expensive to de-link on demand. Google would grind to a halt if it de-linked. The web would break.
Now it's decided it's politically useful to "break the web" and de-link on demand, intentionally, and hope the blowback doesn't blow its way.
Before writing that, you did know appealing an ICO decision is free, didn't you?
So Google says it's removed a link, inferring Stan O'Neal complained. Emails Peston expecting him to cry "Censorship!", "The internet is broken!" etc.
But Stan O'Neal hasn't complained and the link hasn't been removed. Peston doesn't perform the little jig that Google expected. Funnily enough, neither does James Ball.
The Comments is a red herring. Either way, Google was entitled to reject the complaint, and it was up to Joe Bloggs to then complain take it up with the Information Commissioner.
A responsible search engine would have been expected to do that - if it takes freedom of expression seriously.
It's more about the future loss and risk from basic terms being re-defined in a whacky way - which is what a ruling favourable to Aereo would have meant. It's up to Congress to define those terms.
The Supremes decided Aereo was really a cable company - but cable companies have extremely cushy terms, they can use a compulsory license and pay a set rate far below market value for their content. No one denies Aereo has value - and that their technology could be useful to consumers and the industry if they licensed it. Much like picocells are useful to operators.
This story simply demonstrates what we already know - that the whole case was designed around fighting and winning court battle.
@JohnyQuiz: It is not directly a copyright case but it is very much about whether either copyright can be avoided.
There is a compulsory license regime for US cable companies - so they can use the free-to-air transmissions and TV companies can't stop them, but they must pay a statutory below-market rate.
This sounds like the opposite of what you would wish to see, which is control but not compensation.
Aereo was arguing it was *not* a cable company, but the Court used the "looks like a duck" test to decide that really, it was.
You probably need to reassess the power balance in light of the YouTube indie contracts, and Amazon's new contracts for publishers. Particularly the YouTube contract, which relies on piracy for leverage to keep YouTube stuffed with music against the owners' permission. Google can try this on not because these property rights are too strong or too long, but because they cannot be enforced effectively.
It isn't 1995 any more.
Not really. They want to control their stuff for sure, and they want to be paid for it.
Aereo has useful features, there is no denying that. They can still build a business adding value to other people's TV. What they can't do is build an ersatz cable business that pretends it isn't.
Neil, You're looking at "how it does it" and hoping this defines "what it does": the process defines the purpose.
The Court concluded the opposite: that Aereo is an ersatz cable operation, and should have the privileges and responsibilities of being a cable operation. That's all.
The "windowing" I referred to here is being able to choose which distribution channel gets the new tracks and when. In music, I think long lead times for radio disappeared ages ago. The tracks are released on iTunes and Amazon etc within a day or two - only journalists get to hear them earlier. It doesn't make sense for The Black Keys to put their albums on Spotify, if you were The Black Keys, neither would you. And there is no excuse for not paying for something if you want it - other than being an unethical cheapskate :)
So many good posts in your posting history Xenobyte, but on this you have a real blind spot.
"Taking down the actual page/file, fine"
That's censoring the press. Literally.
If you read the ruling, the justification for the decision is explained really simply and clearly. Hint: massive reputational damage infringes a citizens privacy. A newspaper or Lexis doesn't have the same societal impact.
I'm intrigued that in the age of mass electronic surveillance, you put "privacy rights" in scare quotes. GCHQ will be happy to read that.
A/C: I can see you love this corporation deeply, but I don't think "I love Google, and want its children" is a very persuasive argument for rewriting data protection and privacy laws that some countries care very strongly about, simply so that corporation can evade them.
Best of luck trying, though. I'd brush up on my French and German if I were you.
A/C: "If you really think that the ICO will put up with 50,000 requests for the removal of data to be adjudicated every month..."
The uncorroborated figure of 40,000 that Google quoted was for the entire EU. The most requests came from Germany. As we have pointed out, the media reporting gave them the false impression that they merely had to ask and Google would remove.
The ICO rejects thousands of requests already.
You can guesstimate the cost to Google of *complying with the law* quite easily. Then compare it against Google's profits, the amount of tax it has avoided, etc.
" Spanish court, rather than take the sensible approach of ordering La Vanguardia to stop its continual republication or at least indicate to Google that it should not be indexed, instead ordered Google to make it less findable."
This doesn't make sense. 'Less findable vs. not indexed' is a distinction without a difference.
I am puzzled why you think suppressing a free press was preferable? Then the Vanguardia article couldn't be read anywhere. Not even on Vanguardia's own site.
Charlie, Nesta is not subject to FoI requests any more - otherwise you would know a lot more about how this decision was made.
It was the Cabinet Office which gave Nesta the money and administrative duties, which is why I focused so much on the Cabinet Office in the original article. The enthusiasm of the bureaucrats there for accountability and transparency should be evident from the FoI replies.
From what I can tell the social network does this with every schleb's photo as they assume its the schleb owns the rights. A clumsy and stupid assumption.
Stray thought: if copyright could not be assigned by the creator, no social network would dare do this.
Yes, Tim like every individual needs strong law to protect his digital property rights. So justice can be done. I'm glad you agree that stopping copying is so important.
(The rest of your comments just reflects your intellectual confusion. But that's only really a problem for you.)
Reg: "A judge ultimately decides"
AC: "Not true. A judge does not ultimately decide if Google just says 'yes' at the first step."
Indeed, the 'first step' is not the 'ultimate step'. This is a good way of judging Google's commitment to 'uncensored' search results or freedom of expression, two things Google insists it cares very deeply about. If Google agrees to every removal request, automatically, then the Courts are not involved - correct. But Google can refuse and also appeal every removal request for years through the Courts, without paying costs. Many "data controllers" do this.
If Google does as you suggest and takes down every link it's asked take down, it can't then say it's committed to fighting censorship and fighting for freedom of expression. It can't have it both ways. So we'll just have to see, won't we?
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