As pranksters target skeezy t-shirt sellers that mine Twitter for replies containing “I want that on a t-shirt” and then put the original Tweet on a t-shirt and shame online t-shirt sellers for underpolicing copyright, let’s not lose sight of what happens when they overpolice copyright.
Continue reading “Teespring removes Techdirt’s “Copying is Not Theft” tees for copyright infringement, and won’t discuss the matter any further”
Tag: botwars
Even without explicit collusion, pricing algorithms converge on price-fixing strategies
Literally the only kind of monopolistic behavior that the US government is willing to prosecute is price fixing, and that’s why it’s so important to read Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion, a paper by four Italian economists from the University of Bologna who document how price-fixing is an emergent property of pricing algorithms — the systems online merchants use to price-match with their competitors.
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Tumblr’s porn filter blocked Tumblr’s images illustrating what Tumblr’s porn filter won’t block
Yesterday, despite the manifest, glaring problems with its porn filter, Tumblr turned on mandatory porn-blocking for all its users’ content, so that anything that its bots identified a pornographic would be invisible.
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Sony won’t let you post “crap recordings” of a few seconds of your own Beethoven piano performance
Back when Sony’s fraudulent copyright claims resulted in a 47 second recording of pianist James Rhodes playing Bach, apologists argued that Sony and Youtube’s copyright bots couldn’t be expected to tell the difference between a highly skilled Bach performance and the ones in their own catalog.
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A bot has been finding bugs and submitting patches for them, successfully masquerading as a human
Repairnator is a bot that identifies bugs in open source software integration and creates patches without human intervention, submitting them to the open source project’s maintainers under an assumed human identity; it has succeeded in having five of its patches accepted so far.
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New York Attorney General expands law-enforcement investigation into the bots that killed Network Neutrality
The FCC justified its Net Neutrality-killing order by claiming that comments it received showed strong public support for dismantling the rules that stop your ISP from deciding which parts of the internet you get to use; but it was widely reported that the comments in the Net Neutrality docket were flooded by bots that opposed Net Neutrality, using names and personal information from stolen identities of dead people, sitting US senators, journalists and millions of others.
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A year later, giant Chinese security camera company’s products are still a security dumpster-fire
A year ago, Chinese white-label CCTV/DVR vendor Xiongmai announced a recall and security update for its devices, whose weak security meant that they had been conscripted into a massive, unstoppable botnet.
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Survey: corporate execs vastly overestimate customers’ satisfaction
A (somewhat dubious) survey of 850 business executives for firms of 500 or more employees “with involvement in the decision making process regarding customer experience in their organization” and 4,500 consumers “who have contacted a brand during the last six months with an enquiry or issue to be resolved” found a vast gap between how satisfied the executives believed their customers were and how the customers felt about their interactions.
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US governmental requests for comment are routinely flooded by pro-corporate bots
Last year, the FCC was only able to ram through a repeal of Net Neutrality by refusing to reject the millions of comments sent by bots that used the stolen identities of regular internet users, dead people, and even sitting US Members of Congress.
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Sony: OK, OK, we don’t own Bach
When pianist James Rhodes uploaded a recording of his own performance of a Bach composition to Facebook, it was immediately blocked thanks to a match with a recording that Sony had claimed copyright in; Facebook uses an automated filter of the sort that the EU voted to make mandatory for all content types and services yesterday and it can’t distinguish any competent rendition of Bach from any other competent rendition.
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