It's not that hard to argue it was legal. The IA had some pretty solid arguments backed by some fairly well known copyright lawyers. If you read the break down of the case and all the precedent the IA cited and the judge ignored to come to his ruling I think you'd be a bit surprised.

It's not really shocking that the IA lost but that the judge ruled so firmly against them and rejected almost every argument they made in full was a surprise. The appeal will be interesting as he certainly gave the AI plenty they can cite for why his ruling was incorrect.

Will it still make Mac Laptops sound like they are a high powered drone?

God I hate Teams. Faster performance is a good step but it’s still so much worse than slack.

>The entire rationale for this plan seems to be “news organizations used to be rolling in easy money, they failed to innovate with the times, and now Google and Meta are rolling in easy money, so we should just make Google and Meta give news orgs cash

>Sometimes people try to get all high minded and talk about the importance of journalism, which I agree is important and which certainly could use new sustainable business models, but that doesn’t explain why they should break the fundamental nature of the internet (everyone can link to everyone) to solve that problem.

>Also, none of it explains why internet companies should magically be responsible for paying journalism outfits.

>At best supporters of these plans come up with this rationale: Google and Meta take a huge percentage of digital advertising, and it’s likely that those ad budgets used to be what supported news orgs, so therefore, they should share some of the cash.

>When people look askance at that — or point out that under that logic any business that successfully competes with a legacy business should be forced to share its revenue with the business they out competed — they might say “but Google and Meta “use” news without paying for it.

>Google News is an aggregator/news search engine that sends traffic to people’s sites by linking to those news stories.

>Meta’s Facebook property similarly allows its users (who often include news sites themselves) to link to their stories elsewhere and drive traffic to them.

>If those sites fail to monetize that traffic, that’s kinda on them.

>Now, when I point that out, some people claim that those links don’t really send that much traffic, because too many people just see the link/headline/snippet and decide they don’t need to click...it’s difficult to see how that’s Google or Facebook’s fault.

>Good journalism has to add value, and part of that is building up a reputation that readers should want to read the details and nuances.

>If Google and Facebook sending them traffic was really a problem, they could easily fix that themselves.

>They can use robots.txt to block Google. They can use referrer tags to block traffic from Facebook. They can change the social graph content to make it less appealing.

>But, of course, they do the opposite of that. They hire Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing experts to try to help them “rank better” on these sites and get more traffic. They explicitly try to get better promotion from those sites because they already get tremendous value from that traffic.

>Now they want to get paid for that traffic that they already value! It’s basically news orgs saying “hey Google and Meta, not only must you advertise us for free, you must ALSO pay to advertise us.” The whole equation seems backwards.

>And, of course, the only way that these link tax plans actually work is by breaking the most fundamental element of the open web: the hyperlink.

>For the entire history of the open web, a key attribute was the freedom to link to others. Now, those others could block the traffic, or put up a paywall, or whatever else they wanted.

>But everyone must be free to link to one another.

>These “big tech pays news” schemes break this fundamental idea. They announce that some companies, these big companies who apparently no one likes, must suddenly pay to link.

>And sure, you can easily state (1) these big companies can afford it, and (2) no one likes them any way, so maybe you think that’s good. But nothing good comes from breaking the fundamental principles of the open web.

>Once you break this concept of the freedom to link, you’re flinging open Pandora’s box to all sorts of mischief.

>Once industries learn that the government has no problem stepping in and forcing companies to pay for links, does anyone really believe it will stop at news organizations? Of course it won’t.

>Then the whole internet just becomes a food fight for lobbyists to argue with politicians over which industries they can force to subsidize other industries.

>It’s pure unadulterated crony capitalism at its worst. Those with the best connections get to have the government force those with weaker connections to subsidize their own failures to innovate and compete.

>And yet, this idea remains inexplicably popular (I mean, it’s quite explicable for the news orgs, but it’s inexplicable why so many others have jumped on board). As you’ll recall there were a few early experiments with this in Europe.

>In Belgium, when such a law passed, Google threatened to block any publisher who didn’t give them a free license, and all the publishers rushed in to give Google a free license, showing again how much they actually value the traffic.

>In Germany, the tax was applied to snippets, so Google did the only sensible thing and removed snippets, causing the publishers to freak out again.

>In response, Spain passed an even more problematic version that said that Google literally couldn’t block those it didn’t want to pay. They literally said that if you have a news aggregator product, paying for links is mandatory.

>So Google did the only reasonable thing: shutting down Google News in Spain. Still the program went ahead, and, of course, it was the smaller news orgs who suffered the most.

>Of course, the biggest success for all this, not surprisingly came in Australia, where everyone freely admitted that it was a plan to extract money from Meta and Google and hand it to Rupert Murdoch, who has been most pleased with the arrangement. Yet again, while this subsidy to Murdoch may have made him happy, it served to screw over smaller publications.

>This whole scheme has now come to North America. Last year, Senator Amy Klobuchar pushed to help Rupert Murdoch and to harm the open internet with her JCPA. While that failed, it’s quite likely it’ll come back in some form — probably worse — soon.

>But now the biggest push is up in Canada, where bill C-18 has been a big point of discussion for months. As in Australia, backers of the bill insist it’s not a link tax, it’s just a law to require a negotiation on how much to pay. But… pay for what?

>The answer is to link. It’s a link tax. The people claiming otherwise think you’re stupid.

>Already, both Google and Meta have said they’ll block news links in Canada if this bill passes. And, again, this is the only reasonable move: if the government taxes something you expect to get less of it.

>The stupidest thing in all of this is not only is the government trying to force the payment of something that is fundamentally free, they seem to expect the sites to just continue letting news flow across their platform, despite its costs.

>The Canadian government is so mad that Google and Meta are doing exactly what the government is pressuring them to do by taxing an activity, that they’re calling it “intimidation” and demanding internal communications from both companies.

>It’s kind of a galaxy brain take to say “you’re engaged in intimidation by following the incentives we’re creating, so in response, we’re going to intimidate you by demanding your private communications.”

>...The bill’s title is: “An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada.”

>Google and Facebook are not “making news content available” to people in Canada. They’re linking to that news that the news organizations are themselves making available.

>...The days of the open web where concepts like “linking” were unquestioned may be coming to an end.

At this rate, starship will be human rated before Boeing

Im on team skynet

Webex is better for web meetings - Teams is absolutely trash level for that.

Yep, not to mention ads on YouTube getting increasingly longer and UNSKIPPABLE. 🤬

Zimbabwe went from the breadbasket of Africa to a failed state under local rule within a few years, because they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

VSCode uses electron. Nothing wrong with it if you actually know what you're doing.

And that's already been solved with banning it on government devices. Congress doesn't need to give all these powers to the secretary of commerce in order to mitigate that threat.

That was a lot of reading to find out my Samsung phone can't use this OS. That's too bad, it would have been nice to have the an OS that could restrict app permissions on google stuff.

i was extremely bothered when i read the title. the article is pretty good, and i definitely agree with what i've read here. the title is more of the bullshit increasing the public misunderstanding of the actual issue. like the james cameron interview, because terminator exists.

"“Governments and philanthropy will need to play a major role in ensuring that it reduces inequity and doesn’t contribute to it. This is the priority for my own work related to AI," he wrote. "

maybe write "Bill Gates warns that Inequality may worsen if the benefits of A.I. are funneled to the wealthy."

not the dumbassery that is "Bill Gates warns that artificial intelligence can attack humans"

i fucking hate modern journalism.

Gates warned that a pandemic was coming and he was right.

We got 10 years guys

That would be wonderful. So how many gigs will I be able to automate using these new AIs?

I wonder how much the judge is getting paid.

Kind of funny how it's obvious from the comments not a single person read the article. "The headline disagrees with my pre-existing belief? Damnable lies!"

Garbage subreddit.

Unfortunately, that's not how IP law works though. Different copies come with different licenses as far as what you can do with them. It is what it is.

> There's also the issue that in this case internet archive had moved away from distributing copyrighted material on a strict 1:1 basis with a corresponding physical copy so this particular case was more complex than the lending of personal property.

The judge ruled that this was irrelevant though, which was really stupid. Buying 1 copy should mean that you have one copy to lend out through physical or digital means. It shouldn't matter what form it was in when you bought it.

The terminology is irrelevant. His point is about job displacement which is relevant

I think it's more than this, at least for FB. FB has always strived to manipulate feeds. Before it left chronological feeds just over a decade ago, they were busted for doing psychological experiments by manipulating user feeds without user consent. Of course that 'consent' came in the form of the ToS, which gradually evolved over so many years. Needless to say, FB has pissed off tons of users. Even through Covid and the election, a large chunk of people left and they left because they do'nt want the manipulation. Unfortunately, the newer generation is growing up with this as the new normal.

The article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-sorry-secret-psychological-experiment-users

Doesn't Google already know what channel each user is watching by simply tracking the app usage?

Is this thing ever going to launch?

I prefer Zoom, but there is no AI feature

I wonder if they fixed any real issues, like actual full screen video conferencing.