It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy.
It definitely does some of both, and we have no obvious measure or counterfactual to know otherwise.
You also have to take into account not just if optimal reform or optimal dismantle is better, but the realistic likelihood of each, and the risk of the bad outcomes from each.
Protect even more conceptual product ideas seems pretty strongly like it will result in more of a tool for big guys only, it's patents on crack and patents are already nearly exclusively "big guy crushes small guy" tool, versus copyright is at least debatably mixed.
> It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy.
It's super obvious, unless your perspective basically stems from someone who was mad they couldn't BitTorrent a ton of movies.
I mean, FFS, copyright is the literal foundation for open source licenses like the GPL.
My sense is a lot of the radically anti-IP fervor ultimately stems from people who were outraged they could be sued for seeding an MP3 (though it's accreted other complaints to justify that initial impulse, and it's likely some where indoctrinated from secondary argumentation somewhat obscured from the core impulse).
That's not to say that there are not actors who abuse IP or there aren't meaningful reforms that could be done, but the "burn it all down" impulse is not thought through.
GPL was created as a workaround for copyright - it wouldn’t have been needed if there wasn’t copyright. There are complex arguments both for and against copyright and there’s no reason to simply assume it must always be just as now even as circumstances change.
It is ad hominem that people who see it different are just pretty criminals.
Yes it is a genius move that copy left used copyright to achieve their goal. But the name is literally reflecting the judo going on in that case. Copyleft licenses also does have a lot benefits to big companies as well too so it's not strictly a David vs Goliath victory.
I don't think it's a commonly held belief that copyright benefits small YouTube creators more than it hurts them as a concrete example, they seem to live in constant fear of being destroyed in an asymmetrical system where copyright can take away they livelihood at any moment while not doing anything to meaningfully protect it.
FWIW I have received mail from the USPS in places that had no canonical full address as well. It's not the case in reality that the USPS only delivers mail to mailboxes that have an associated entry in their canonical database here in "messy" reality.
That may be true but changing the department's name can only be done with an act of congress, which has not been done yet. Thus, the name is still officially and legally Dept of Defense.
Just because a name is more accurate doesn't mean that it's its new name. Otherwise we wouldn't be the United States of America (we are literally not united bc Hawaii and Alaska are not contiguous, and we are figuratively not united because... Well, you know)
As a recap, my reply to your reply was that DoD is the actual newspeak, and your reply to that evolution of the discussion is that you were not discussing newspeak.
In trying to understand if I'm missing something, I looked up what newspeak means. I (as well as probably a few other commenters based on the contents of their comments) was under the assumption it meant "new speak" meaning it's something new.
In case anyone else reading this was not aware of this, this is what I discovered.
It's a term from George Orwell's 1984, describing a language used to make thoughts unthinkable by removing words from the language. It has nothing to do with "age of the term."
Hence, Dept of Defense is indeed newspeak. Dept of War, while being a new name for the dept, is too literal to be newspeak.
Thanks for the opportunity for me to learn something!
Department of Defense has historically been a prime example of newspeak.
I think Department of War is also newspeak. Or at least, they didn't change the name just to get the name in line with the amount of war the department does.
They changed it because they wanted to do more even more war. The amount of war the department does under the name "Defense" has been status quo for a long time, and my take is they wanted us to think of them differently so they could do even more war, which they have since been doing.
People do have cold Rust compiles that can push up into measured in hours. Large crates often take design choices that are more compile time friendly shape.
Note that C++ also has almost as large problem with compile times with large build fanouts including on templates, and it's not always realistic for incremental builds to solve either especially time burnt on linking, e.g. I believe Chromium development often uses a mode with .dlls dynamic linking instead of what they release which is all static linked exactly to speed up incremental development. The "fast" case is C not C++.
> I believe Chromium development often uses a mode with .dlls dynamic linking instead of what they release which is all static linked exactly to speed up incremental development. The "fast" case is C not C++.
There's no Rust codebase that takes hours to compile cold unless 1) you're compiling a massive codebase in release mode with LTO enabled, in which case, you've asked for it, 2) you've ported Doom to the type system, or 3) you're compiling on a netbook.
I'm curious if this is tracked or observed somewhere; crater runs are a huge source of information, metrics about the compilation time of crates would be quite interesting.
It's never the case that only one thing is important.
In the extreme, you surely wouldn't accept a 1 day or even 1 week build time for example? It seems like that could be possible and not hypothetical for a 1 week build since a system could fuzz over candidate compilation, and run load tests and do PGO and deliver something better. But even if runtime performance was so important that you had such a system, it's obvious you wouldn't ever have developer cycles that take a week to compile.
Build time also even does matter for release: if you have a critical bug in production and need to ship the fix, a 1 hour build time can still lose you a lot here. Release build time doesn't matter until it does.
I think you are confused by terminology here and not by behavior, "immutable variable" is a normal terminology in all languages and could be says to be distinct from constants.
In Rust if you define with "let x = 1;" it's an immutable variable, and same with Kotlin "val x = 1;"
Lore and custom made "immutable variable" some kind of frequent idiomatic parlance, but it’s still an oxymoron in their general accepted isolated meanings.
Neither "let" nor "val[ue]" implies constancy or vacillation in themselves without further context.
Words only have the meaning we give them, and "variable" already has this meaning from mathematics in the sense of x+1=2, x is a variable.
Euler used this terminology, it's not new fangled corruption or anything. I'm not sure it makes too much sense to argue they new languages should use a different terminology than this based on a colloquial/nontechnical interpretation of the word.
I get your point on how the words meanings evolves.
Also it’s fine that anyone name things as it comes to their mind — as long as the other side get what is meant at least, I guess.
On the other it doesn’t hurt much anyone to call an oxymoron thus, or exchange in vacuous manner about terminology or its evolution.
On the specific example you give, I’m not an expert, but it seems dubious to me. In x+1=2, terms like x are called unknowns. Prove me wrong, but I would rather bet that Euler used unknown (quantitas incognita) unless he was specifically discussing variable quantities (quantitas variabilis) to describe, well, quantities that change. Probably he used also French and German equivalents, but if Euler spoke any English that’s not reflected in his publications.
"Damit wird insbesondere zu der interessanten Aufgabe, eine quadratische Gleichung beliebig vieler Variabeln mit algebraischen Zahlencoeffizienten in solchen ganzen oder gebrochenen Zahlen zu lösen, die in dem durch die Coefficienten bestimmten algebraischen Rationalitätsbereiche gelegen sind." - Hilbert, 1900
The use of "variable" to denote an "unknown" is a very old practice that predates computers and programming languages.
Every system has some type 1 errors and some type 2 errors. The notion that they could just have neither if they cared a little more is just kind of absurd and doesn't at all reflect the messiness of the world we live in.
Even if Google paid Harvard JDs to read every DMCA notice (of which there literally aren't enough of them), even then they would sometimes be tricked by adversaries and sometimes incorrectly think someone was an adversary some of the time.
I worked at YouTube in the past and I can tell you copyright ownership isn't even fully known by the lawyers. Concretely there's a lot of major songs where the sum of major companies affirming they have partial ownership sums to more than 100% or less than 100%. Literally even the copyright holders don't actually know what they themselves own without lots of errors, and that's without getting into a system that has to try to combat adversarial / bad-faith actors.
I feel like every single reply from them was about whether he held the copyright rather than whether he had the identity he claimed, and part of what went wrong is he kept asking about how to prove his identity in the replies.
I suspect what happened is they had some tag for what the content at that URL was and it wrongly was some other book, so the question wasn't his identity but the content's identity that had to be addressed. Their replies all look consistent with "the book at that URL is not the book you are claiming you own"
Not that their handling was good or clear, but to my eyes both sides were talking past eachother since he kept talking about his identity and the Google side wasn't disputing his identity.
>I feel like every single reply from them was about whether he held the copyright rather than whether he had the identity he claimed, and part of what went wrong is he kept asking about how to prove his identity in the replies.
On one level I would say that simply flatly untrue given the phrasing of the emails from Google. But on another level, there's an integral relation between the question of identity and copyright ownership anyway, which I think makes that distinction moot in this case. Regardless of what you call it, they abandon the topic by the third email.
I think one of the things that makes factual issues difficult to accurately process is there's a lot of tempting paths towards minimizing cognitive dissonance by taking a both sides approach, and has the satisfying psychological effect of relieving tension while freeing one from the burden close comparisons of factual details and not feeling ugly by taking sides. There's obviously a lot of powerful psychology pulling us towards rationalizing an equilibrium. It's what makes fact-checking hard, because if you confront an asymmetry, it doesn't have the convenient relief from psychological dissonance that the brain is searching for.
I'm surprised you can read Google's words as challenging his identity. Just looking explicitly again the emails:
> It is unclear to us how you came to own the copyright for the content in question, because you do not appear to be the creator of the content
Seems very explicit to me that the concern is "We don't think Jeff Starr owns the content that is at that URL" and not "we don't think you are Jeff Starr"
And then third reply was "your long multiple replies did not addressed our rejection concerns, and so you have failed the challenge script overall". I would really expect he could call a lawyer to restart the process in a way that would be worded less casually and have the necessary shibboleths for their challenge script to be passed.
Yes, and that same pattern already does exist in C and C++. Asserts that are checked in debug builds but presumed true for optimization in release builds.
Not unless you write your own assert macro using C23 unreachable(), GNU C __builtin_unreachable(), MSVC __assume(0), or the like. The standard one is defined[1] to either explicitly check or completely ignore its argument.
They have a business model and are trying to capture more revenue, fully saturating your computer isn't obviously a good business strategy.
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