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Most analysts don't think any tech companies have profited from video hosting. And the idea that you should pay people for hyperlinking to them is against the v

Most analysts don't think any tech companies have profited from video hosting. And the idea that you should pay people for hyperlinking to them is against the very foundation of the Web and Fair Use. The organizations behind these laws aren't the 'little guy' content creators, it's large rent-seeking publishing guilds that often fuck over artists and creators. And this results in insane things like their lawyers doing blanket takedown on video game live streamers whose game happened to have some background music that was licensed. Do you want to live in a world where you have to worry about the licenses in the transitive closure of every bit of content you've ever consumed? Human beings don't have the bandwidth for this amount of bureaucracy, it's like a nightmare Ayn Rand world where everyone must have contractual agreements between each other for microtransactions. We used to think that the information age would remove bureaucracy and intermediary rent seekers and censors, but nearly 3 decades after the web's creation, here we are headed for a bantustan internet. Sigh.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
You repeatedly cite video hosting, when the amount and types of content Google lifts is so much more expansive than just video. YouTube is harmful, yes, but there are plenty of other examples. For instance, Google killing CelebrityNetWorth, by leaving them the impossible choice to either let Google steal all of their value and ad revenue by putting their content in Knowledge Graph, or blocking Google entirely and removing themselves from search: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... There is no "link tax", the law does not require that you pay to link to someone. One of the most incredible marketing angles here is that big tech has managed to rebrand the laws with their own preferred, and loaded terminology, and push that to the point that conversations around the law define it by the term they chose. However, if you want to steal their value entirely, as Google Search often does with increasing frequency, Google is going to have to pay for it.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  There's no copyright for factual data, and if the entire value proposition of your site can be summarized in two sentences, you've got a problem. Especially since Wikis have also been collecting this data, for example, WikiNetworth, also Wikipedia itself often has net-worth info on celebrities. This doesn't seem like a compelling use case for onerous regulation that can do far more harm than good. I personally think anything published on the internet that's not behind a paywall is ripe for forking and summarizing. It may be nice and polite to ask permission, but to me, the raison d'etre of the web, is that it's a communal forest for permissionless innovaton. We all harvest from it, and we should all give back to it, so that the next group of people can benefit from it. CelebrityNetWorth themselves are guilty of taking data without acknowledgement. They don't list their sources and what information they're republishing, much of which comes from industry trade journals, where beat reporters zealously follow celebrities and publish everything from houses, cars, or other luxury goods they own, to any new publishing, actoring, or singing contracts they've acquired. The internet should be a resource for everyone on the the planet to harvest, filter, and remix, reinterpret, and republish, and I feel like excessive copyright on these transformations violates that spirit. Not many people may share my position, but I grew up on the internet from the 80s, before large scale commercial activity arrived, back when 'information wants to be free' was the mantra, and I've never really given up on that ideal. Eventually, lots of people are going to be turning loss NLP AIs on text all over the internet and extracting out Q&A systems. In ten years from now, it won't just be Google's fact box you have to worry about, they'll be tons of these agents around. Europe is still tooling their policy for a pre-AI world.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

You repeatedly cite video hosting, when the amount and types of content Google lifts is so much more expansive than just video. YouTube is harmful, yes, but there are plenty of other examples. For instance, Google killing CelebrityNetWorth, by leaving them the impossible choice to either let Google steal all of their value and ad revenue by putting their content in Knowledge Graph, or blocking Google entirely and removing themselves from search: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... There is no "link tax", the law does not require that you pay to link to someone. One of the most incredible marketing angles here is that big tech has managed to rebrand the laws with their own preferred, and loaded terminology, and push that to the point that conversations around the law define it by the term they chose. However, if you want to steal their value entirely, as Google Search often does with increasing frequency, Google is going to have to pay for it.

cromwellian 8y ago
There's no copyright for factual data, and if the entire value proposition of your site can be summarized in two sentences, you've got a problem. Especially since Wikis have also been collecting this data, for example, WikiNetworth, also Wikipedia itself often has net-worth info on celebrities. This doesn't seem like a compelling use case for onerous regulation that can do far more harm than good. I personally think anything published on the internet that's not behind a paywall is ripe for forking and summarizing. It may be nice and polite to ask permission, but to me, the raison d'etre of the web, is that it's a communal forest for permissionless innovaton. We all harvest from it, and we should all give back to it, so that the next group of people can benefit from it. CelebrityNetWorth themselves are guilty of taking data without acknowledgement. They don't list their sources and what information they're republishing, much of which comes from industry trade journals, where beat reporters zealously follow celebrities and publish everything from houses, cars, or other luxury goods they own, to any new publishing, actoring, or singing contracts they've acquired. The internet should be a resource for everyone on the the planet to harvest, filter, and remix, reinterpret, and republish, and I feel like excessive copyright on these transformations violates that spirit. Not many people may share my position, but I grew up on the internet from the 80s, before large scale commercial activity arrived, back when 'information wants to be free' was the mantra, and I've never really given up on that ideal. Eventually, lots of people are going to be turning loss NLP AIs on text all over the internet and extracting out Q&A systems. In ten years from now, it won't just be Google's fact box you have to worry about, they'll be tons of these agents around. Europe is still tooling their policy for a pre-AI world.