Dr. Moose

Ive been a pirate since the late 90s and it’s a service problem for the most part. So saying a song name on Spotify and getting what you want 99.9% of the time is an unbeatable experience. Not to mention curated and generate playlists. No piracy setup matches this that I’ve seen.

And where do I get the music? Every time I want to listen to something I’m spending 20 minutes searching for it on some forsaken pirate websites? I’m way too old and not poor enough for this.

I’ve tried to get away from Spotify for years and the reality is the competition still sucks. I still have Tidal and YT music subscriptions but 90% of my music is on Spotify. I don’t know why is it so hard to match this.

Self hosting music is absolutely not worth it though it seems like that’s the only way to match Spotify quality of the experience.

US states are turning into legal trolls - that’s how you know the empire is done for.

It launched wayyyy too early and basically killed the project.

UK has always been a nanny state. Surprised it took them so long.

If you want to be part of a bot net sure.

I don’t think this precedence will ever get set because we don’t have universal global IP protections. The west will never set it due to fear of China winning the AI race.

In their opinion (which I agree with) this is the greater good and someone’s mastodon posts or similar being fed to AI training machine is a lesser evil compared to losing technological advantage to the biggest authoritarian state in the world.

Listen man I’ve been working with web scraping for years though now I do the exact opposite (anti bot tech) and robots.txt is absolutely meaningless and there’s zero precedent in the US or elsewhere of it doing anything but providing web crawlers a map of your web site.

I can tell you the thing we tell to all of our clients - the only way to sue bots is to sue for direct damages not for automation. This has always been true and will continue to be true for foreseeable future in the US because you its impossible to set a precedent here as there are just too many players involved that benefit from web automation.

You can actually check out:

• Meta v. Bright Data
• hiq labs v. inkedIn

These cases are very recent and huge in web automation community and went all the way to the Ninth Circuit and settled at Supreme Court in favor of bots.

I’m telling you man copyright is so ruined that it’s really just a machine for feeding middle managers and lawyers. But hey it gives me a great job security and I can afford to work on actual free software which as you might know is invredibly hard to fund otherwise!

Well it depends on the use. If its a movie that I copied then I can watch it, if it’s a picture I can print it and put it on a wall at my home. Even AI training currently its considered to be entirely legal to train on copyrighted data. You can even parse copyrighted data for analytics which is entirely legal as well.

So you can do a lot with copyrighted data without breaching the copyright, including AI training as it’s the article topic.

Those are entirely different laws you’re thinking about like DMCA, EUCA, database protection laws (yeah lol it’s a real thing) etc. Copyright on its own is about distribution.

That being said data law is really complex and more often than not turns to damage proof rather than explicit protections. Basically its all lawyer speak rather than an actual idealistic framework that aims to protect someone. This is primary argument why copyright is a failed framework because it’s always just a battle of lawyers and damages.

No, there are several types of legal agreements on the web in this particular case there’s:

• click wrap where the visitor must explicitly agree with terms of service by clicking a button - that’s what you see when you register an account.
• browse wrap where the visitor implicitly agrees with ToS by just browsing the web.

The former is enforcable while the latter is almost impossible to enforce in free western countries because you just cannot agree with something just by browsing a public space as that’d be crazy.

No that’s not how copyright works. Copyright prohibits distribution not copying.

No it doesn’t because all mastodon data is public and does not require ToS agreement to be collected.

Mastodon could only argue damages but that would be impossible to litigate in any extent due to decentralized and free nature of Mastodon and Fediverse. Except for some backward countries like China or Japan where there’s no information freedom protections and any corporation can sue you for damages for any information infringement (even if it’s not yours).

This is a good thing. Mastodon shouldn’t control anything related to the legality of data flowing in the fediverse - that’s the entire point.

What really triggers me is that digital products that are significantly cheaper, easier and safer (environment etc) than physical counterparts have significantly worse rights and protections.

Even if I agreed with the idea of copyright the economical implementation is so absurd.

Yeah isn’t that crazy?

Copyright by itself only protects distribution but then laws like DMCA (US) and EUCA (EU) make drm removal illegal. Its hard to believe that these laws exist and should be opposed at every possible opportunity.

Can you imagine buying an ebook and being told you can’t remove malware from some strings of text or you’ll go to prison? Also you have no consumer protections like refunds or ability to pass down the license so you’re literally have worse consumer rights than a physical product and digital data costs nothing!

The current copyright framework is so broken and so toxic it needs to be completely destroyed.

everything is open source except half of all things.

Lol

Nah the points are laughably easy to game even in centralized reddit since this moderation aspect never made any sense. As if bad actors can’t upvote themselves, buy upvotes or just repost any random garbage to /r/funny.

Its a terrible system that turned Reddit into a content desert. Once you decline some new person because “they dint have enough karma” they’re never trying to contribute again and you end up with power users who have a moat around content production.

Shared moderation lists already do all of this in an actually functional way. You can subscribe to Bob’s list of douchebags and have the client block them. This is something bluesky added quite recently but it already exists on fediverse to instance admins tho afaik not individual users yet.

Tailscale is awesome. Alternatively if you’re more technically inclined you can make your own wireguard tailscale and all you need is to get a static IP for your home network. Wireguard will always be safer than each individual service.

I disagree.

All bots and astroturfers had no problem getting 500 karma or whatever with one /r/funny repost. Which just meant new users can’t contribute and every subreddit is left with power users and trolls.

This would be even easier to game on Lemmy as it’s much more open and federated so getting 500 karma by a bot would be super easy.

The only reliable way to moderate is manual review with technical fingerprint. I work in online fraud detection.