We are talking circular arguments rehashing the same thing over and over again. The point of the DMCA take-down process is to avoid needing a court room, in effect turning the court room into an appeals venue. There are alternative approaches that could be done beyond simply the DMCA, and you seem to be insisting that a judge is involved in every situation. That isn't even the point of a courtroom in the first place, which is where I think you miss what a judge actually does.

This isn't a matter of sacrifice, but showing a misunderstanding of the legal process as a whole.

My experience in clear-cut cases is that it doesn't take much in the way of resources. It might take some research and having somebody willing to do some pro bono work to help you prepare the case definitely helps. None the less, the judicial system isn't so completely out of touch that you should automatically roll over and let these big companies always get their way.

I don't see anything new or interesting in the articles to consider it a "discovery of a way" (e.g. http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Pag... )

In contrast this is a better article with more detail on how whales could _actually_ affect ecosystems significantly: http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
And that's a 4 year old article.

Or Tatooine (due to the fact it orbits a binary star system, not the climate).

Before we sent a generation ship, we would need to know a hell of a lot more about what's going on than just a sneaking suspicion there may be a planet and it may be in the habitable zone. At a minimum, we would want to have directly imaged the planet and verified from its spectra that it has a decent atmosphere and hopefully already has life.

Gaming typically relies on skill, not chance. If you play most games long enough, you'll be able to consistently beat certain levels. If you win at the roulette wheel, you're no more likely than before to win again. That's the difference. Otherwise, "exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior" could be stretched to describe every last industry in existence beyond the sales of food, water, shelter, and basic utilities.

With the model of directly purchasing the game itself (and no in-game purchases, like standard PC/console gaming) you can at least read about the game and have a reasonable expectation about what you are paying for. The real problem with in-game purchases is that the game is "free" or low-cost in the most technical sense, but after you invest many hours advancing the game you find that you can't really prosper without making additional purchases. It could be construed as a form of bait-and-switch.

The other problem would be that many of these games are aimed at children who make purchases the parents later get stuck with, but this problem begins in the home and should be solved within the home by actual parenting. That's not as convenient as using the tablet like a cheap babysitter but it would certainly be more worthwhile. If you wanted to solve this by government action, that's simple too: declare that these purchases are contractual in nature (the parent agreed to pay charges made to the phone bill or whatever) and that minors who make them cannot be held to a contract, therefore the companies cannot collect money when children make them. *Poof* - end of shitty business model.

In northern latitudes they pretty much have to. I do myself sometimes, in June and July, and wake up well past sunrise, which tomorrow is at 4:50. Nautical morning twilight (when the sky starts to visibly change colour) is at 2:53. (This is London, 55N. Most of Northern Europe is further north.)

(There's no "night" tonight, only astronomical twilight. But that's a technical definition -- it's dark outside.)

I'm surprised by that, as I live a good way north of most of the USA, in London.

I looked up Macinaw City (since I've been there): sunrise is 05:54, sunset 21:32, solar noon 13:43. Accounting for DST, that's 43 minutes "off".

In London, solar noon is at 13:05 (we are also on DST), sunrise 04:50, sunset 21:20. Almost an hour's extra daylight. (And no astronomical twilight at all until 22 July.)

The local Americans (quite a big group, there's an "international" school not far away) had their fireworks at 21:30, for some odd reason.

I'd like to note that I earn a professional wage off of copyrighted content. I depend upon copyright working in order for me to support and feed my family (not very lavishly either I might add). I don't have money to hire an intellectual property attorney nor drive the 100+ miles each time I need to visit a federal judge at the nearest federal court house. When I say that I think it is a stupid thing to have each possible copyright infringement go to a judge for review, I think it is not only a waste of time for that judge but also for me as well.

I have had people violate my copyright, and it hurts when that happens. I am simply asserting that in my case the DMCA is my friend in terms of even giving me a tool to enforce my copyright claims. You are asserting that such a tool shouldn't even exist. There is also a more normal cease & desist letter, but that is essentially what the DMCA take-down notice actually is in the first place, going to the ISP instead of the actual person first.

Again, under your system of strictly using judicial orders for removing content, how is copyright even going to function for somebody like me?

The risk in this situation is if you file a counter notice and then they decide to pursue additional legal action. While a counter-notice is indeed more painful than the initial DMCA take-down notice, it is much easier to do than filing an actual lawsuit where claims are subject to perjury penalties for making fraudulent assertions. It takes formal judicial action in order to go any further.

For somebody who has a viral video on YouTube, having the video taken down for a few days might hurt, but then again you have room to show actual damages too and likely win some money just for that as well. Otherwise, the few days that content is down really doesn't matter all that much and you just treat a DMCA take-down notice like a troll comment on a blog or forum.

I'm reading posts here from folks who assert that every time you end up in a court room that you will automatically lose. I think that is just utter bullshit and that is what I'm calling out.

You really have a warped sense of the law here. Note, you aren't filing a countersuit here, you are filing a counter-notice and expecting them to file a formal lawsuit against you if they want to continue. They, the guys who filed the original DMCA notice, need to spend their money filing the lawsuit and going before a federal judge to explain why they want to see you in court.

Where do you get this notion that the law doesn't apply to you, me, or anybody else other than some special elite? Are you really serious about this belief that laws don't matter and don't actually protect anybody but somebody with seven+ figures in their bank account?

If Qualcomm in this situation filed a copyright violation lawsuit over GPL'd code posted on Github, they would need to pay legal fees for that lawsuit and other costs.... something that has current legal precedence as similar lawsuits have already happened and the big guy lost against a couple of college students.

If you automatically assume judges are corrupt, I suppose that you disagree with the entire notion of the rule of law, so just go get a shot gun and fire it through the eye sockets of the guy filing the lawsuit.

Really, such assertions are bullshit even if there might be an occasional judge who is corrupt. Find a good lawyer if you get sued who has the balls to appeal when such clear-cut cases are so patently obvious that the judge in question might even be disbarred for ruling against you. That can happen too BTW. You don't need to understand computer programming to understand the GPL.

No, it is not. It sounds like a great way to earn a whole bunch of money from somebody who is having repeated brain farts about what the law actually says. Lawyers who fail to understand the law will repeatedly lose in court too, regardless of how slick their speeches might be or the quality of their stationary.

It does take knowing what the law is, and to make sure you stay on the sunny side of the law in terms of copyright in these situations. Make sure that anything you post on-line is indeed something you actually wrote, filmed, or is otherwise original content you made, something you have an iron-clad license for (like the GPL or CC-by-SA), or is very clearly fair-use. If you are in turn doing on-line activism and posting every movie you got from an underground sharing site, be prepared to face the consequences of that action too.

Simply put, I think you are being too afraid of lawyers and your ignorance of the law as well as unfounded fear of lawyers is showing through here.

I completely disagree with you, and it shows you know little of what lawyers actually do for a living. 90%+ of all legal matters are handled without even involving a judge at all, where the lawyer simply explains what the law allows or doesn't allow and resolves the whole matter without going to court. We don't need to have a judge involved each time a little kid gets a scrape on a playground or gets taunted by a bully.

The other problem with your assertion that you need to go before a judge to get the content removed is that there is a whole lot of content that really should be removed as it is a clear violation of copyright. I'm sure you've seen stuff that is a violation of copyright even if it isn't a violation of your copyright. The point of the DMCA was to make it more expensive for the copyright violators than it was for those who were trying to enforce copyright laws in the first place.

As a matter of policy you are entitled to disagree with that concept, but your solution is not on a practical basis even possible and effectively is arguing that copyright shouldn't even exist in the first place. I have seen some hardcore libertarians argue such a viewpoint which is at least logically consistent, but in a universe that has copyright as a law it is simply stupid to run to a judge each time you think something is wrong.

Would I be willing to be my house and savings against some asshole who claimed that my original content with a couple of music clips included that I obtained from a musician under a CC-by-SA license (commercial distribution is legit in this case too) is a violation of their copyright?

Hell yes, in a New York minute. I even think I would be willing to find a lawyer that could take 100% of any sort of damage award (aka I don't want anything other than to see the troll rot in hell) in exchange for the case.

The problem is if you are already in a legal grey area of copyright law, in which case you should think twice about sending the counter-notice. Stay on the sunny side of the law and you will be fine, so you don't need to sweat at all when people start to be jerks. If you have any doubts, hire a lawyer for a couple hundred dollars (it doesn't take a mortgage on your house) for a quick consultation about your situation and get a pretty solid legal opinion on the topic. It might be enough to at least know where to turn when people are being jerks.

You don't need to roll over every time.