Magnifisyncopathological

New York Times: A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web

Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

While I think this is will prove to be a disastrous business decision, I'm not going to throw a Net tantrum and start whining about "new media" and "information just wants to be free" and "golden era of blogging and linking and open discussion". This is the AP's choice and I respect that.

It also means I will not use their material until they change this policy.

Asked if that stance went further than The A.P. had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.

Again, the property principle holds here even if I think exercising it in this way is bad for the company's long-term viability. If, for example, News8Austin decided to go with this system, fine. I'd find another source for news or just brush up on my paraphrasing skills.

Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

This part I don't really understand. My approach has always been to copy and paste, a process that can easily rip out any embedded software from the original posting. How they think this'll impede that kind of propagation is beyond me. They may be thinking ahead to more integrated Web 3.0 system where everything aggregates through Digg-style websites with a single click and the vast majority of people take these automated routes rather than going manual. Choke points are easier to control.

Executives at newspapers and other traditional news organizations have long complained about how some sites make money from their work, putting ads on pages with excerpts from articles and links to the sources of the articles.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Then they should have stepped up long ago and fought for themselves rather than letting a whole cultural phenomenon cement itself into place.

Posted by drizzten at 08:55 AM | Permalink

Over at DailyKos, Edger seems quite pragmatic about his Canadian health care system:

Canada's medical system is a single payer system as many of you know. The monthly premium for a single person is about $40.

Two years ago I developed a bladder infection, so I walked across the parking lot from work to a walk in clinic on my coffee break to see a doctor. The wait was about ten minutes. I presented my medical id card, saw the doctor, was diagnosed, and she wrote a prescription for antibiotics that cost me $18.

There was no bill for the doctor visit. It was covered.

He goes on and points out all the awesome things medical socialism got him:

• kidney ultrasound
  
• consultation to discuss the ultrasound and to schedule a surgical consult
  
• surgical consult
  
• kidney removal plus three days in the hospital

He closes by saying, "Total cost to me? $18.00, above and beyond my regular medical premiums."

In the comments, DiegoUK relates a similar story and says, "Cost to me? Not one red cent. It all comes out of my taxes." (Bonus points for stating "Heath care is a right, not a privilege.")

unclejohn says, "[Massman] paid high taxes for public services that [he] actually used and benefited from. If [he] were to buy those services in the private sector, as Americans are forced to do, they would have cost [him] much more."

And finally, Barcelona says:

Where are the ads targeting each and every individual obstructionist Senator and Congressman and making the following simple point: (S)He has a gold-plated health insurance and (s)he doesn't pay a dime for it. When (s)he gets sick, YOU pay for his doctor's visit, his tests, his state-of-the art surgery by the best surgeons in the best hospitals in the country. YOU. Your tax hard-earned money, your tax dollars, the money you don't have to afford even the most god-awfully inadequate, pre-existing-condition-and-gazillion-exclusion laden health insurance. YOU.

The closest thing to a ray of rational light in this intellectual coal mine comes from The Jester, who says, "None of the 50+ million without health insurance magically get medical care FOR FREE, it's just spread out over all taxpayers."

Barcelona's rant is particularly interesting since that's exactly what socialized health care does to everyone. It forces ME to subsidize YOUR shitty health. But that's only objectionable when an elite get the benefit.

I fucking hate these people.

Posted by drizzten at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google Groups: You've been added to dyhreyuhe45y

Sunday, July 19, 2009 5:51 AM

From: "noreply@googlegroups.com"

To: Drizzten

yoh503TVG019 fr41204lghgf295@gmail.com has added you to the dyhreyuhe45y group with this message:

byIv71206OGOpVDW14UoXxe9Vk8Xeq65QA6xM3H2LQl63WieG

Here is the group's description:

rt426

The strings of garbage characters in spam have now migrated into Google Group formation.

Would anyone click on this shit who wasn't motivated by bemusement, sociological horror, or clinical observation?

Posted by drizzten at 01:22 PM | Permalink

Speaking of equality before the law...

Austin American-Statesman: Big Austin businesses undertaxed, protesters say

About 35 protesters gathered Thursday at the offices of the Travis Central Appraisal District to allege chronic undertaxing of Austin's big businesses.

"The city has asked us to choose between wading pools and services for senior citizens," activist Brian Rodgers said, referring to proposed budget cuts, "while there's money to be collected (from) property that's missing from the tax rolls."

Rodgers analyzed sale prices and concluded that the appraisal district has underestimated the value of 30 large commercial properties in Travis County, leaving untaxed $128 million in potential property value.

As a result, he said, homeowners carry a great share of the tax burden.

Copyright 2009 The Austin American-Statesman. All Rights Reserved.

This world is doomed as long as people continue to believe in and fight for government intervention. We've traveled so far down the coercive-collectivist path that "wading pools and services for senior citizens" are part of the sundry list of goodies the state attempts to provide. Then, when the state inevitably fails to fund them to everyone's satisfaction, they are objectified as the "things are so bad that we can't even have BOTH!" type of mundane moral outrage designed to inject a little activism into apathy.

I'll assume that the figures Mr. Rodgers calculated are accurate. As with the previous entry, the essential complaint is that "someone isn't being treated the same according to law." As with the previous entry, the essential problem is that treatment is thoroughly immoral at its core and, barring other extenuating circumstances, the fewer individuals and organizations subject to that treatment, the better.

Now, I'm certainly sympathetic to the point that homeowners shouldn't be responsible for "a great share of the tax burden"...but that's because there shouldn't be a tax burden in the first place. Yes, the stench of corporate-government backroom dealing is foul. Most of us don't have that kind of access and influence; most of us would probably like less of a tax burden. I'd much rather see a growing association of businesses that tell the state to piss off rather than engage in the normalized business-state cycle of corruption.

Brian Rodgers need slaves because he wants others to fund the services he uses and thinks Austinites deserve. He wants those services so badly he wants an organization to establish a fee structure for others to pay. He wants that organization to send notice to the individuals and businesses within city limits that they have to pay these fees. If they fail to pay, they will be hauled into court. If they refuse, the organization will send people with guns to enforce the fee structure. If these people resist this enforcement, Mr. Rodgers wants these people subjected to assault, kidnapping, and theft so they are beaten into compliance or have those fees (plus additional costs for all that enforcing) taken without their permission anyway.

This is the essence of taxation and because

• sending cops to fuck with innocent people
  
• detaining the innocent in jail
  
• running courts to convict the innocent
  
• administering property seizures

and so on are so damn expensive, tax advocates would rather their golden goose be docile and subservient. They would rather have people (angrily, reluctantly, proudly, ignorantly) pay taxes "voluntarily" and without incident. Tax advocates want a world where people just pay up before the deadlines and get on with their lives. This way, all those awesome state services will be funded.

In other words, they want slaves to pay for their gawddamn Constitutionally-guaranteed penumbral right to a fucking pool or fucking entertainment for their elderly parents.

Posted by drizzten at 03:53 PM | Permalink

Ars Technica via Slashdot: Pandora now pushing radio to pay for music, too

The campaign to get radio stations to pay up for the music they play marches on. With revenues from recorded music sales declining, rightsholders have turned their eyes in recent years to commercial US radio, which currently pays songwriters (but not performers or record labels) for the tunes that power their business.

The record labels now have Pandora on their side. The influential webcaster just wrapped up its own music licensing negotiations with rightsholders last week as both sides at last agreed to a deal that each could live with. With its own future secure for the next few years, Pandora is now turning its attention to the public performance debate here in the US, saying that the issue is a simple matter of fairness: why should webcasters have to pay more for music than traditional radio does?

Ars Technica © 2009 Condé Nast Digital. All rights reserved.

Pandora is now supporting the Performance Rights Act in order to force AM/FM radio into the same royalty scheme as satellite, Web radio, and other broadcasters. Currently, AM/FM broadcasters only pay royalties to songwriters whereas the others must pay royalties to the writers and the performers. Pandora and the RIAA say this is fundamentally unfair. The National Association of Broadcasters disagree.

I reacted to the Ars Technica article by retweeting it from XaqFixx:

#fr33 The correct response to government attacks on you isn't to wish similar attacks on others. Bad Pandora ( http://bit.ly/161l44 )

Why do I think Pandora's in the wrong here? Normally I can be expected to be a fan of fairness and I'm not against broadcasters paying content producers (or vice versa) for the service of spreading that content.

My problem is rather basic. Equal protection under the law is a decent concept in the abstract, but it falls apart when that law is rotten. For example, imagine a law requiring everyone to give a cash tip to law enforcement officers after they cite you for a traffic violation. I think such a law is bogus on a number of levels and would cheer any exemptions written into it for the simple reason that at least some people would be able to avoid paying the tips. Even if the exemptions were written explicitly for the well-connected elites who wrote the law, their outrageous hypocrisy would not erase the fact that they would not be forced to give an illegitimate tip to a cop.

As Murray Rothbard says within the context of discussing taxation:

Yet this [“equality before the law”] canon is by no means obvious, for it seems clear that the justice of equality of treatment depends first of all on the justice of the treatment itself. Suppose, for example, that Jones, with his retinue, proposes to enslave a group of people. Are we to maintain that “justice” requires that each be enslaved equally? And suppose that someone has the good fortune to escape. Are we to condemn him for evading the equality of justice meted out to his fellows? It is obvious that equality of treatment is no canon of justice whatever. If a measure is unjust, then it is just that it have as little general effect as possible. Equality of unjust treatment can never be upheld as an ideal of justice.

So, from the outset, my concern is very much with justice. Before arriving at the ethical weight of a specific distribution of an action, we must first arrive at the ethical weight of the action itself. In this case, we're talking about the forced inclusion of an industry into a cartelized, heavily-regulated royalty system that has little to do with the voluntary actions of buyers and sellers in a free market.

For me, there's little reason to argue this issue further. I will not condone subjecting more people to state coercion, particularly if expanding that coercion is justified on "let's do it to everyone so it's fair" grounds. Pandora is a service I like and enjoy, but the answer to the unequal application of bad law is the repeal of the bad law, not its extension to more people.

Posted by drizzten at 04:34 PM | Permalink