Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | bryanrasmussen's commentslogin

>I'm not against fact checking, but it absolutely felt like a punch in the gut coming from a non-dev. There was no "trust" there.

Maybe I'm just cynical but I don't think I ever see that much trust for anyone's opinion or expertise; devs think managers don't know what they're doing, managers think devs don't, people on HN think lawyers are wrong when they state their legal opinion, devs think other devs are wrong about their areas of expertise even though they have no reason to think that, hell I've worked with people who basically lie for some reason about technical issues that they have no expertise in, in order to get some benefit that is unclear to me. I've also seen people of great technical expertise gaslight industries in order to derive very clear benefits for their employers, so I'm not sure why there should be trust.

I'm sure that various AI agents will maybe add another interesting wrinkle to this, but I sort of feel like you must have had a nice life up until AI if that was feeling like a gut punch.


there was an institution my son went to for therapy for his various handicaps, and one of the major taxi routing solutions in Denmark had the route wrong, I think the one based on Google maps actually, so when you called for a taxi it always drove nearly a block away that you had to walk through a couple of back alleys to get to. And then the taxi driver would call me up and complain I wasn't there, and I had to guide them to the place where they actually had to be at over the phone.

Sometimes they were not capable of following the instructions though.


The magnitude might be greater in specific sub areas, for example if you are doing chrome first, how is your accessibility on Safari? I don't know myself, but I think there are holes people don't notice with this approach.

Also I agree the thing about Meerita's post being flagged and dead seems wrong. There is evidently nothing wrong with the post and it should not be.


it works, in an American context, because the states would have to take it to court and determine if this actually fell under the rules of making a recording.

Argument for, there is no recording stored anywhere thus it does not need consent.

Argument against, there is obviously a recording made. A recording is made and transmitted between devices and Apple and afterwards deleted, that this happens almost real time as the conversation does not change the fact a recording exists for some short time.

Probably Argument for wins, but assume at some point the transcriptions become nearly perfect then expect it to be litigated again.


Argument for only wins because of the weight of the lawyers they can bring to bear. Clearly ephemeral recording for the purposes of processing violates the spirit of the statute at least. And there is this, from the MGL:

    The term ''interception'' means to secretly hear, secretly record, 
    or aid another to secretly hear or secretly record the contents of
    any wire or oral communication through the use of any intercepting
    device by any person other than a person given prior authority by 
    all parties to such communication.
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Cha...

Oh wait, they are not helping another person to "hear", only to see the words spoken or a summary thereof. Oops, MGL has you there too:

    The term ''contents'', when used with respect to any wire or
    oral communication, means any information concerning the identity
    of the parties to such communication or the existence, contents,
    substance, purport, or meaning of that communication. 
So if you wear a watch in a conversation without consent, and then after the fact the watch tells you who was in the conversation or what it was about, that seems like a facial violation. Maybe it falls under a common carrier exemption, but then that puts legal liability on the wearer not Apple.

This may become a case of we don't enforce the laws against large companies.


since they didn't specify a specific state I suppose it probably varies, but yeah, there is obviously one case in which it looks like a pretty clear cut violation.

> This may become a case of we don't enforce the laws against large companies.

Why would Apple be a party here at all? Would Sony be a party if someone records another with a walkman?


If the Walkman is recording all the time, then of course they would be a party.

Apple is potentially a party because Apple processes and provides a recap of what was processed.

Why would the manufacturer of a recording device be liable for its use counter to law?

Even beyond this, if you create circumstances where mass commission of consequential felonies is an inevitable result, I suspect that is also illegal. 100% this just gets ignored by the Mass attorney general though.

What is the law you are basing your theory?

As I lay dying here in this basement surrounded by my art, without food or basic necessities as I have given up all thought of material comfort in hopes of bettering the lives of others, I too wonder why others do not follow my example and live with no thought of their own comforts or position in society and strive to do things that may somehow benefit the species as a whole, especially the Billionaire part of that species.

it sounds like we can't all agree, but frankly I also think the writing on the wall is that there won't be much out there that isn't paywalled, and much of that will have a bunch of ads.

sort of agree, but also sort of think an accusation with lots of people arguing is not exactly the same as being caught.

Firstly, for the Americans, yours is not the only country and so while it is true that you made laws regarding copyright for a particular purpose it is not the same reason that copyright exists in much of the rest of the world, in most of the EU it exists because it is supposed that the creator has rights to what they made and that's it, whether it benefits society or not.

It has to be said basically every time one of these things comes up here.

The U.S is also connected via lots of treaties regarding copyright. Essentially to do any of the things that are always suggested about copyright in these threads you would need to violate all those treaties. Good news that Trump is President I guess, because there's a real shot.

While I agree that many of the problems of Copyright, especially from the American view, is its length, that is not all of them. The DMCA is not at fault for the length of copyright, and it is one of the main sources of copyright problems nowadays.

When discussing the solutions to lengths of copyright, which I've noticed here go down to as little as a couple of years, it's instructive to consider the cases of outliers such as Peter Beagle and the years he had to spend to get the rights to earn money on his book https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-sad-strange-legal-battle...

Obviously you can create a law to handle these situations, but the fact is he has spent much of his life not earning from that book. Someone will probably make the observation that outliers are not a good source for structuring laws but that's in cases for example where you are making laws regarding trade or similar things, and then the outliers have to lump it, but if you are making laws about rights you should consider the outliers.

Of course the American conception does not have copyright as a right, whereas the European conception does, so it is unlikely that if the U.S shortened the term of copyright that the EU would go along, and essentially everyone would have to still keep to the EU rules for anything they sold there. So if you wanted to make use of EU copyrighted material you would essentially not be able to make money in that market, meaning it isn't going to happen if you're in the business of making money.

Furthermore if you are a big moneymaking entity with copyrighted stuff and some of your stuff is in parts of the world with longer copyright terms than the U.S, then, depending on how your business is structured it might totally be possible to sue and get all the money made in the U.S for what the local courts consider copyright infringement, so if you're a big moneymaking entity you will not be doing any business with the stuff making use of things still in copyright in longer copyright terms of the world.

Normally when I read HN it is refreshingly non-parochial, and knowledgeable about the world, but when copyright comes up, it is not that.

Let us now go back to the DMCA and similar things that effect how copyright is policed as opposed to how long it is.

I think here Beagle is instructive, although I can also find other authors. One of the reasons for the creation of copyright is so that people do not get ripped off (that is to say in America, to foster innovation you allow people to profit from it, and make it so that it is criminal for various people to profit from your work). If they have copyright for all their lives if they get ripped off they can probably recoup their losses etc.

However as HN readership is generally aware, the ease with which one does DMCA takedowns etc. means that the people who have made something and own the copyright have a hard time getting their rights enforced against people who are taking advantage and screwing them over.

Personally I would expect if copyright were shortened to a really short period of time that, much as was the case before copyright even existed, people would run around creating fake versions of things and selling them, and people who control distribution channels would try to screw those who had the copyright out of any money for the few years in which they had to pay the money and then it would be a free for all.

Why do I expect this? Because there is already a lot of screwing of people over who make things, if you only had to worry about them for a couple of years think how easy it is to screw someone over and delay paying for a couple years and then having to pay is gone and you restructure some stuff and yippee you keep all the money!!


> for the Americans, yours is not the only country

Indeed! There are nations and cultures such as China and India, where copying the work of your hero or mentor is an act of homage and honor, whether or not you give them credit!

This thread shows so much evidence of ignorance. If people do not know what copyright is, or how it works, perhaps it is rash to agree with any changes to it. And, changes to copyright are a matter of international treaties and conventions, so the world is more likely to capitulate to Greta Thunberg's demands, than agree at the U.N. to "Abolish Copyright".


> There are nations and cultures such as China and India, where copying the work of your hero or mentor is an act of homage and honor, whether or not you give them credit!

Source: dream?


I think their delusion is probably in what they consider a small business. A lot of people on here, given their work experience, think of small as something with a few hundred employees.

Given that we're on HN I probably should've said startup, though depending on the business itself it's not unrealistic for some of those 200-400 employee companies to sit on a free Cloudflare plan if their entire website is static + a back-office CRUD app.

If you're building a tiktok competitor, that's definitely going to require an enterprise plan, even if you have only 4 employees.


> ... think of small as something with a few hundred ...

Yes, plus a strong bias toward IT-heavy businesses. Vs. if my company is doing commercial landscaping, or machining gears for automobile transmissions? Several hundred employees still gives me no reason to pay much for web hosting.


lots of efficient government happens outside of a serious crisis, but then you don't notice it.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: