I know this forum is about curious conversation, but in this case, fuck Google and the system it uses. It’s overreaching and again the classic “you don’t talk to humans Google, unless you are a rich or famous company/person.”
Which is why I'm particularly worried about Google getting involved with healthcare. "We're sorry, the malgorithm has denied you access to your health records. Go ahead and sue us, but good luck surviving long enough to see resolution with both you and your doctor locked out of your health records."
And yes, I'm aware that Google doesn't currently seek to be in a position where they could lock you out of your own records, but the octopus's tentacles only grow. I'm also aware that Google Health is quite old... it was around back when I worked on Google's indexing system a decade ago.
Edit: This month, expiration of Google's legacy free tier of whatever they now call Apps For Your Domain is forcing me to get off of my butt and migrate my vanity domain away, and start moving the keys to my digital life off of Google's "free" services. It'd be rather painful if I got locked out of GMail today, and I don't have any financial leverage to get back in.
You can confirm it's non-commercial and they let you keep it for free... for now.
They made the change fairly late in the process, and supposedly there was a way to undo the paid migrations by opening a support ticket, but I saw lots of posts about people being unable to migrate back and get refunded.
Thanks; great info! However, I think it's long past due for me to move the keys to my kingdom onto a paid service. However, maybe I'll leave one of my vanity domains on Google services. (Roughly 70 people worldwide share my surname, so it was easy to pick up a few vanity domains.)
Honestly though, it's not "fuck Google," it's "fuck Congress."
Google needs to err on the side of caution with DMCA because it's the immediate response to the requests that provides the safe harbor to Google under the law.
You had Disney (et al) lobbying like crazy decades ago to get the most insane laws passed when it came to digital IP.
Now we live in a world where those lobbying efforts were successful, which of course sucks for everyone that didn't have millions of dollars to spend on lobbying their interests and far outnumber those that did.
Minority rule through corruption causing a pseudo-oligarchy is sucking more and more every day, and DMCA takedowns are simply a small part of that larger sucking.
Even before congress there is a lot of wiggle room for Google to step in. Why is this possible? : “The immediate challenge for Bungie was that the company either didn’t know or couldn’t prove the identity of the culprit before filing the lawsuit.”
The takedown notice should come with a verifiable address. Google has a business directory for crying out loud! Just make it mandatory you have a business listing account.
Honestly though, it's not "fuck Congress", it's "fuck the electorate".
One of the great ironies about the rise of corporate fascism in the US is that the democracy does function on a technical level. If enough people worked together to do the right things, ballots could be cast and there is no dictator to prevent the will of the people from being heard.
Of course, that does not happen. The people have proven ineffective at self-governance.
At this point I'm wondering if we should just hand all governance over to a consortium of industry leaders that are accountable to shareholders. If we're going to do an oligarchy, let's at least be efficient about it.
That seems better to me than the current system of an easily brainwashed public electing whoever has the best disinformation campaign.
Do you think we'd have all these crazy IP laws if the big IP holders and big tech companies had to get in a room together and actually figure out what the law should be?
> we should just hand all governance over to a consortium of industry leaders that are accountable to shareholders. If we're going to do an oligarchy, let's at least be efficient about it.
All the fascist stuff is pretty bad -- nationalism, strongman leaders, isolating an "other" with violence, grifters selling out the people's interests to corporations -- I'm not down with any of that.
But maybe we could have some kind of system where corporations are forced to vote on governance that applies to all other corporations for the collective good of capitalist progress?
There needs to be some kind of unified governing principle to make everyone's lives better.
We can't go on with BIG_CO hiring lobbying firms to most efficiently snake their legislation through the system unchecked.
In my thought experiment here, most corporations would want to enact policy responsibly for the public good. Cooperation between corporations would happen, but the default position would be for more happy consumers.
So far we've tried letting representative democracy work out hard issues and that hasn't gone well. We've also tried deferring governance entirely to the courts with poor results.
The system YouTube uses backs up onto the DMCA. If you submit a copyright counter notice, the claimant needs to engage in legal action within a certain amount of time or YT will reinstate the video.
During which the content creator misses out on revenue, much of which they often can’t recoup because the content may not be evergreen.
If I release a video about election results during an election and it takes weeks - hell let’s be generous and say 72 hours - to go out because of a bogus DMCA claim, that’s a huge financial loss for me.
90 days? No way. In the world of online content creation that’s a death sentence. That’s not even remotely a solution.
This is one of the few things Vimeo (at least used to, it’s been a while since it happened to me) does right.
I got a notice that I used licensed music and they took my video down, I appealed and my video immediately went back up during the appeal process. This all took place within about half an hour of my posting it. I sent them the email showing the artist gave me permission, and a few days later the notice was lifted. All through this process my video was only down for about 15min.
For YouTube: Freeze the transfer of the revenue on that one video until it’s resolved but keep the video up and let it still collect revenue. It’s not great if you depend on the income but it’s a hell of a lot better than losing the income entirely. This solution is much better, if still imperfect.
> (f)Misrepresentations.—Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1)that material or activity is infringing, or (2)that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee...
In practice, as far as I know nobody has ever been prosecuted or civilly sued under this section of the DMCA. Maybe this will be the first case to do so.
Try to look at it from small content owner perspective:
Google is making content you own available online and monetizing it through subscription fees and ads.
Then when you ask them to stop, they require you to start with law suit before doing anything. That costs money and takes time. Meanwhile there might be already couple more channels with the content, requiring more lawsuits.
When I worked for them a decade ago, it was an in-joke that internal surveys were anonymous, but you needed to be logged in to fill them out.
One year, my manager said he was in a meeting where they told him that he was the only manager in New York where nobody on the team said that they thought it was highly likely that they'd be at Google in 5 years (or was it 10 years?). What a hell of a way to find out that the survey really isn't anonymous. What was management thinking in leaking that to him? The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Edit: as I remember, the survey asked things like "Which office are you in?" and "What's your seniority level?", but didn't ask who our managers were, leading to some plausibility that login information wasn't being used to aggregate the data, but it turns out they were aggregating down to the team (4-6 people) level.
