Not good enough. The person who got killed was not one of the people involved in the game. The guy who was the target to be swatted gave a false address to the person calling him out. Not playing the FPS would not protect you in this case.
That's what makes this so much worse - the guy who got killed never knew why the cops were there, which is presumably why he was confused and made the mistake that killed him. He died because he was innocent.
It goes both ways. If Thiel's money was necessary for Hogan to get justice, that is indeed a problem with the US legal system.
But, on the flipside, Thiel was financing numerous lawsuits against Gawker due to a personal vendetta, many of them much more frivolous and defensible than the Hogan case. He clearly intended to bury Gawker, the Hogan thing was just a way he found to do it quickly rather than waiting for their legal defense funds to run out.
Both of these are problems. What's troubling/chilling is that Thiel hasn't stopped, he's just agreed to finance other peoples' vendettas (in the first case, Shiva Ayyadurai, about whom Techdirt are telling the absolute verifiable truth when they say he's lying about inventing email). That's where it crossed the line, and created a dangerous precedent that has a real chilling effect.
Actually, the chilling effect is due to that the lawsuit against Gawker only went as far as it did because Hogan teamed up with Peter Thiel, who had a personal vendetta against them over a story they had written about him. By all accounts, the issue was going nowhere until he got involved and funded Hogan. Thiel has now turned his attention on other outlets, currently attacking Techdirt for the (true) stories they wrote about Shiva Ayyaduria (who Thiel was also helping in a lawsuit against Gawker, among numerous other suits he was financing). That's the important part here - lots of lawsuits, some much more frivolous than others - were being launched because a billionaire doesn't like the outlet. If the Hogan case didn't bury them, he had plenty more lined up until something did.
What's being exposed is a situation where pissing off the wrong guy can bury companies in court (and legal fees even if they're found innocent), and that it's too easy for one rich guy with a vendetta to do this. The issue is muddied because Gawker were clearly in the wrong, both legally and morally, with the Hogan tape. But, this will still have a chilling effect on people writing factually and morally correct articles if they fear they'll piss off the wrong guy. That's the issue - Thiel is going around trying to shut down media outlets he doesn't like, the fact that Gawker were a horrible outlet to begin with doesn't negate that.
"There is a monumental difference between that and writing a negative article."
Yes, and his current target wrote negative articles about his current client, articles that are backed by solid evidence that they are true. Nothing Techdirt has said is demonstrably false, and their attacks on Shiva's claims are always backed by verifiable evidence. The Techdirt case is far more defensible than the Gawker one, but the same principles apply, as does the chilling effect it will be having on other outlets.
You won't get DRM free, because Netflix don't sell you the content, they rent it. Or, more specifically, they sell you access to the platform to stream the rented content.
I'm all for DRM-free purchases, but you're never going to get DRM-free rentals.
Their stuff, and everyone elses, is easily available for download, DRM free, without a fee of any kind. DRM has never stopped that. Netflix knows that. I have no doubt DRM is required for every contract they have with other studios, but they could show they're not fools by allowing me to stream their original content without having to allow closed, proprietary binaries to run on my machine to do it. I have no interest in maintaining terabytes of video and manually managing distribution to multiple device. I don't think many people would. I'd rather pay the $5 a month. I won't enable DRM in my browser, ever.
"I also hate the suggestions and that I can't edit them and ban them."
If you thumb down a suggestion it will usually disappear from the suggestions list. Also, if you keep getting suggestions based on something watched that you didn't like, you can edit you viewing history and remove it.
"they are selling a very well understood, easily replicated goods - namely content"
No, they're not. They're selling a service that allows you to rent content and have it stream to you instantly. The content library is what attracts people, of course, but their core business is selling the service.
"Unless we went back to the big studio era when talent was locked up with multi year contracts"
Erm, they already produce Netflix Originals, which are exclusively locked up on there (and their competitors all do the same thing). How does that differ from your suggestion?
"nothing can stop a Hulu from poaching a great show runner from NFLX"
...and nothing can stop Netflix from getting the licence to a show that used to be on Hulu. Also nothing to stop them both licencing the same show at the same time.
"Its long term success is suspect to me, debt or not."
Just Netflix, or do you also think that Hulu, Mubi, Filmstruck, etc. are all doomed as well? (I left Amazon out because obviously Prime streaming obviously isn't their core market) If just Netflix, what differs in your view that makes them more vulnerable to their competition?
Apart from your point about Netflix selling access to content rather than content itself (which I'll get to), I feel you are making exactly the same point as I am without your realizing it.
Netflix is trafficking in a commodity over which it cannot have monopolistic control. Take, for example, your own instance - licensing shows which used to be on Hulu.
Producing originals isn't something only NFLX has the expertise to do. AMC was home to some of the best shows of this century. No monopoly for NFLX there.
For NFLX to be spoken of at the same level as FB, Goog, and Amazon, I'd have thought they had an insurmountable moat - Social in the case of FB, search relevance for GOOG, and 2-day fulfillment for AMZN. When I don't see a monopoly, I start to wonder why NFLX is so loved by Wall Street and not treated as a commodity like any other content channel is.
I suspect NFLX will end up being just another dividend paying stock like a utility. That's not a failure at all but it isn't ever going to justify being gushed about along with the other companies in FAANG.
Back to your point about a service which lets me rent content - that would be true if they were truly a content aggregator which lets anyone including Hulu serve content to renters and kept a haircut for themselves. Amazon's Marketplace is a great example of service which is designed purely to act as a platform for 1st and 3rd party vendors. Obviously, right now, NFLX isn't interested in this.
No, Netflix are interested in providing a streaming service where you rent movies instantly from their catalogue for a fixed monthly fee. Nothing you said changes this.
You also didn't answer my point - if Netflix's model is doomed, why only them? You seem to avoid the idea that the entire sector runs on the same models, so what is Netflix not doing to protect themselves that Hulu, etc. are doing?
I can't speak for Wall Street as I really don't care about that side of things. You do seem to have a massive crush for them over their competitors, though, I'm just curious why that is.
"Netflix is trafficking in a commodity over which it cannot have monopolistic control"
So are a lot of businesses, online and offline. Especially service providers that run using someone else's content/platform. So what?
I did initially question their path to success but I later made it clear that I saw them becoming dividend paying, slow moving utility type companies. I said that same thing in multiple ways in my reply to you.
The competitors like HBO or Hulu are privately held and are therefore less susceptible to market sentiment turning against them.
(Also, I may be wrong about this but your tone sound antagonistic to me. Please don't impute motives like "crush for them over their competitors." Not only do I not know what you mean by it, I really don't feel like engaging with anyone who talks like this.)
The bike example is a very poor analogy - the data isn't removed from LinkedIn, it's merely copied. It doesn't matter how many times the site is scraped, the data is unchanged and still available. A better analogy would be me taking a photo of the bike while walking past. It shouldn't matter how many times you tell me to stop, if it's on public property you can't really stop me from taking the photo.
If you have an issue with that, you should be moving your bike somewhere people can't take a photo from the public street. Not have someone creatively interpret a law that says where I am is suddenly not public property, because you asked me to stop using my camera.
Not sure why you're being down-voted, the Web were designed to be public. If you want to prevent me from taking pictures of the exterior to your Cafeteria on the public street you'd have to build a wall / put it behind a login. But then don't complain that you are loosing customers because they can't see it or can not find information to your site through search engines.
Ok, if I left the prototype for a new bike on the pavement, and you came along and 3D printed an exact replica. Sure, the original still exists, but you just violated trademark/registered design laws because it was there. It's not the same as a photo because a photo of a bike doesn't give you the same value as the actual bike, whereas scraping the content of a webpage does give you the same value.
Perhaps my analogy wasn't great, but the grey area is around going to LinkedIn's server (whether or not this is "public" or their property they allow you access to is another philosophical question, though in the eyes of the law it appears it's the latter), deliberately extracting value from it, and then getting annoyed when you're asked not to.
Inherently it seems as though it's the old question of whether a server is public, or private but accessible (like those POPs [0] there was a thread on recently).
> A better analogy would be me taking a photo of the bike while walking past.
Taking a photo of the bike is also a poor analogy. Scrapers don't take one photo, they take photos of all the bikes. And scrapers don't keep the photos for themselves, they sell them for a profit. Also, the original bike isn't parked, it's placed in a gallery (probably with an admission fee? I don't know the business model of linkedin).
The number of photos is irrelevant to the analogy, though, as is what people do with the photos afterwards. If the bikes are visible from the public street, people can take as many pictures of every bike they want, and then make money from them if they want. It doesn't affect the owners' usage of the bike (unlike the original analogy, where the owner loses access, which was what I was trying to correct)
Physical analogies for this kind of thing are always flawed, it's just dishonest/misleading to pretend that copying data is ever analogous to taking a physical object (the owner of the original is never deprived of the original when data is copied).
"I don't know the business model of linkedin"
Most of it is selling premium features to recruiters and other businesses. I'm not sure if Hi-Q's service interferes with that or not, but LinkedIn should not be trying to have their cake and eat it by leaving things in public then complaining when the public accesses it in a way they don't like.
> The number of photos is irrelevant to the analogy
Actually, the size of the data and the number of requests is very relevant. More data means more information, means more money. It also means more bandwidth and processing power required to process requests. You're not taking a photo of the bike, you're asking the bike to give you a photo of it.
> it's just dishonest/misleading to pretend that copying data is ever analogous to taking a physical object (the owner of the original is never deprived of the original when data is copied).
Leaving LinkedIn aside, possession of the original data is never the issue with digital piracy. It's a straw man. The hurt occurs when people benefit from the work the original author put into creating that data without proper compensation. Just because you can clone my gizmo (which I spent years working on) without taking the original one doesn't mean you're not hurting me. That gizmo could give me an advantage you wouldn't otherwise have. I place hours of working into something that doesn't put food on the table because you can clone my work, but I can't clone my food.
There's a reason an empty CD costs 50c but a music album costs $10. You're not paying for the physical medium. You're paying for the IP. And yes, digital distributions are cheaper because of this, but that doesn't make them free.
> Most of it is selling premium features to recruiters and other businesses.
I'd say it's pretty obviously interfering with their business model.
> LinkedIn should not be trying to have their cake and eat it by leaving things in public then complaining when the public accesses it in a way they don't like.
LinkedIn could ban IPs that make unreasonable number of requests in a short amount of time.
If LinkedIn are being that negatively affected by a single scraper, they should deal with it - block it, only allow a specific number of requests from an IP per day, anything that doesn't involve lawsuits. The problem is them trying to pretend that publicly visible content is really private if they say so, without them trying to protect it in any real way.
"The hurt occurs when people benefit from the work the original author put into creating that data without proper compensation"
Not necessarily. If I'm paying for print of some imaginative artwork that was created using the picture of the bike, that doesn't mean the bike owner lost anything, even if he spent time building the bike with his own hands. Similarly, if the only reason why people paid Hi-Q was for the extra work that they put in, LinkedIn didn't lose money because people would not have bought their product without that extra work.
There is certainly an argument that Hi-Q should have licenced the content first, but it's public data. If they want to make licence deals, don't put it in the view of the public street then whine when people are documenting what's in public.
"It's a straw man."
No, the straw man is pretending that a copy is the same as theft. Theft is theft because someone is depriving you of the original, not because you imagine you might have had more sales if the copy didn't exist. There's a reason why there are different words for different things, and pretending that a copy is the same as taking a physical object it a lie. Period.
"I place hours of working into something that doesn't put food on the table because you can clone my work, but I can't clone my food."
But, you put the price up too high, so I opted not to buy it. Maybe borrow the CD from a friend, or listen to something else. Or, you decided I couldn't buy it in the format or region I wanted. There are real issues, but pretending that a copy = a lost sale is utter bull that's been debunked time and time again, yet is regularly repeated by people trying to inject emotional arguments instead of facts.
"I'd say it's pretty obviously interfering with their business model"
Then perhaps they should address the business model or not put their content out there in public unprotected if it's that valuable to their income.
"LinkedIn could ban IPs that make unreasonable number of requests in a short amount of time."
Yes they could. Which would not have to involve the courts in any way. Or, they could protect the content in some other way that (for example) requires a log in and adherence to T&Cs, with which they could easily kick violators off their site for non-compliance.
The issue is that LinkedIn are trying to have it both ways - gathering the benefits of public content while blocking others who use the now-public content in ways that are usually acceptable for public content to be used. Sorry, not acceptable, you pick one - take the content away from the public street or accept that some people will use what has been shown to the public.
> If LinkedIn are being that negatively affected by a single scraper, they should deal with it - block it, only allow a specific number of requests from an IP per day, anything that doesn't involve lawsuits. The problem is them trying to pretend that publicly visible content is really private if they say so, without them trying to protect it in any real way.
With this, I agree 100%.
> No, the straw man is pretending that a copy is the same as theft. Theft is theft because someone is depriving you of the original, not because you imagine you might have had more sales if the copy didn't exist. There's a reason why there are different words for different things, and pretending that a copy is the same as taking a physical object it a lie. Period.
That's just pedantry. The debate isn't between "copy" and "theft", it's between "theft" and "copyright infringement".
> But, you put the price up too high, so I opted not to buy it. Maybe borrow the CD from a friend, or listen to something else. Or, you decided I couldn't buy it in the format or region I wanted. There are real issues, but pretending that a copy = a lost sale is utter bull that's been debunked time and time again, yet is regularly repeated by people trying to inject emotional arguments instead of facts.
This is wrong on so many levels, I'm not sure there's any point in continuing this debate. Are you accusing me of using emotional blackmail instead of facts because I point out that "you can clone my work, but I can't clone my food"?
I'm not using myself as an example because I want pity. I'm doing it because it's easier in writing, and because I'm a software developer.
My work takes hours of hours of time and effort (not accounting the hours I spent in school). If it' ok for everyone to clone my work, I won't make any money from it. We still live in a society where goods and services are exchanged with money. I exchanged my hours of work for no money, but I can't exchange no money for basic living necessities such as food. There's no feelings involved here. In the current economy, work going in, and no food coming out is not a viable business model. And if nobody payed for digital content, there would be a lot less digital content.
> pretending that a copy = a lost sale is utter bull that's been debunked time and time again
This is another straw man. Whether or not an illegal copy is or isn't a lost sale is irrelevant. You don't have the right to make that copy in the first place. If everyone made illegal copies, there would be no sales. So then why should only some be entitled to illegal copies? There isn't a distinction between people who can make copies and people who must pay for copies, so either everyone must pay for copies or no one must pay for copies. That's how law and economy work. You can't make exceptions by yourself. Either everyone is allowed, or no one is allowed. And for digital content that is for sale, no one is allowed illegal copies. If laws are made that allow poor people to receive goods for free, these laws must address both digital and physical goods.
But the owner is offering the images up for free to the public. hiQ is taking those publicly-available photos and annotating them with, "red bike", "pink bike", "broken bike", "professional bike", etc.
You have to keep in mind that an entire generation was brainwashed that personal data isn't that "personal", so Google, FB and the rest can have amazing profits.
Most of these discussions are stained by general unawareness of the privacy and copyright law.
Ofc because the value of the data supplier (usually a single person, etc) these never reaches the courts, which just reinforces the ongoing misconceptions.
If you really want to test this, try copying the content from Google, Facebook hiQ or whoever that's big enough to go after you.
But people somehow believe that it's okay for businesses to do what regular persons aren't allowed to.
That's what makes this so much worse - the guy who got killed never knew why the cops were there, which is presumably why he was confused and made the mistake that killed him. He died because he was innocent.