> But other ad companies don't get to set those rules.
Strictly, neither does Google, as long as they are following the industry group's standard. Sure, Google is a member of that group and may be able to influence the standard, but so are a lot of other companies, from Facebook to the Washington Post. I doubt any one company can run away with the standard without the others having a say, or at least making a big stink.
Maybe I'm reading it incorrectly (IANAL) but that article left me thinking the mistake was signing the original deal with Sony. Does fair use actually cover what the platform did at at the time?
In my reading of the law they clearly broke fair use. According to the letter of the law, factors in consideration of fair use include:
1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107)
Rap genius was/is a for profit corp and they reproduced the copyrighted work in full, on their own servers. I don't see how they could argue fair use. In addition, their use is arguably non transformative, in that they leave the original intact.
The writing was on the wall, Sony deal or not. It was just a question of copyright holders noticing/acting on the violation. The initial round with Anderssen Horowitz for 15 million in 2014 prompted swift response.
Were I a lawyer I would argue that they are covered under points (1) and (4). For (1), even though they aren't nonprofit, they aren't using the work directly to gain profit. Rather, they are using it as a base on which to annotate. For (4), I would argue that the primary market for lyrics is not the lyrics themselves, but instead productions of those lyrics in song form. This can be seen by the fact that any number of websites reproduce them at little cost.
I don't know if this is sufficient grounds to argue fair use, but it is clear that the case is not cut-and-dry.
The four factors are ALL considered in determination of fair use. You are not "covered" under any one of them. It is the opposite: violating any one of them can be used as basis for challenging fair use exemption.
The gold standard for fair use is academic citation. Genius use of the lyrics was clearly commercial (because it benefited financially and is a for profit organization). The terms "direct" or "indirect" are not in the language of the guidelines. In (4), it would be enough for copyright holders to show potential for future harm.
A strong case of fair use needs to clear each of the four factors. For example, just posting the lyrics online (without profit) violates (2) in that it is not transformative, (3) in that the work is reproduced in its entirety, and (4) in that it harms the "existing or future" market for the product.
By contrast, an academic citation, a sentence of a novel, for example, is non-commercial, transformative, partial, and non-damaging. Incidentally, things get more complicated with poetry---scholars working on short-form lyrical poetry often need to clear the rights for publishing their research. Poems are short, it is therefore difficult to avoid reproducing them in full, which violates (3). Courts prefer partial reproduction for fair use.
But if the effect of RapGenius's hosting of lyrics led to them being the first results for all searches of lyrics, whether the lyrics were significantly transformed or not, it could be argued that they are directly profiting from unfair use of those lyrics. Else, what would stop any site from copying and republishing any material wholesale and claiming that users come to the site to comment via Disqus?
Yes. Note that direct or indirect is not in the language of the guidelines. copyright.gov says:
"Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes: Courts look at how the party claiming fair use is using the copyrighted work, and are more likely to find that nonprofit educational and noncommercial uses are fair. "
Why? Sure you will get some things that might initially end up looking significant but aren't, but it's not that hard to retest those things from scratch to minimize that.
In general if you're going to provide a critical comment I think it would be better for the community here to expound on it a bit so everyone can understand your argument.
Except that time he intentionally sabotaged the 1968 peace talks to end the Vietnam War because he thought it might help him win an election. For reference, the war continued until late 1975. He is directly responsible for each and every casualty and atrocity committed in those 7 years, as well as the thousands upon thousands of irreparably mentally and emotionally damaged veterans that survived.
7 years. Iraq and/or afganistan were/are far longer. Every US president has their war. More often than not those wars have ties to domestic politics. That a president uses a war for political gain is expected. It is for the people to hold that in check... which they did with nixon. If not for vietnam he probably would have stayed in office. He spent all his political capital and, when the inevitable scandle hit, he had to go. Other presidents stayed on after far worse.
Divesting would actually be the more direct form of profiting from the status quo. Lock in the gains that the status quo created for you before the culture becomes so toxic the company folds. Keeping your holdings and releasing this letter is actually the bravest thing you could do as an investor.
I'm actually hard-pressed to think of any non-gaming interface that is better suited by a native app than a web app in 2017.
Five years ago native apps made a level of UX possible that was unheard of on the web, to say nothing of mobile. But today not only has HTML/js closed the gap, but whiz-bang native animations aren't impressive just on account of being novel anymore.
Would you mind sharing an example or pointing me to a good guide that explains this concept? How does functional programming make a problem less complex than OO or imperative? I've heard this a couple of times, but the intuition has never quite clicked for me.
Its state. Functional programs tend to have less state as their output is the same for some given input. With things like jquery you quickly introduce state, say is some dropdown open, which your next function will have to check is true or false before proceeding. And so on.
I'll give it a shot; functional programming style--some languages enforce it, some languages merely have features that allow for it if the author is disciplined enough to do so (JavaScript is in the latter camp)--generally eschews mutable state and side effects, i.e. a variable `foo` that is declared outside of the function cannot be altered by the function. Some "pure" functional languages restrict all functions to a single argument. This may feel like an unnecessary constraint (and opinions vary), but one thing that can't be denied is that it keeps your methods small and simple; in any case, it can be worked around by applying a technique called "Currying"[1], which is named after the mathematician & logician Haskell Curry, not the dish (also the namesake of the eponymous functional programming language [the mathematician, not the dish]).
Because nothing outside of the function can be changed, and dependencies are always provided as function arguments, the resulting code is extremely predictable and easy to test, and in some cases your program can be mathematically proven correct (albeit with a lot of extra work). Dependency injection, mocks, etc are trivial to implement since they are passed directly to the function, instead of requiring long and convoluted "helper" classes to change the environment to test a function with many side effects and global dependencies. This can lead to functions with an excessively long list of parameters, but it's still a net win in my opinion (this can also be mitigated by Currying).
A side-effect (hah) of this ruleset is that your code will tend to have many small, simple, and easy to test methods with a single responsibility; contrast this with long and monolithic methods with many responsibilities, lots of unpredictable side effects that change the behavior of the function depending on the state of the program in its entirety, and which span dozens or hundreds of lines. Which would you rather debug and write tests for? Tangentially, this is why I hate Wordpress; the entire codebase is structured around the use of side-effects and global variables that are impossible to predict ahead of runtime.
There is much, much more to functional programming (see Monads[2] and Combinators[3]), but if you don't take away anything else, at least try to enforce the no-side-effects rule. A function without side-effects is deterministic; i.e. it will always give you the same output for any given set of inputs (idempotence comes for free). Because everything is a function, functions are first-class citizens, and there are only a few simple data structures, it becomes easy to chain transformations and combine them by applying some of the arguments ahead of time. Generally you will end up with many generalized functions which can be composed to do anything you require without writing a new function for a specific task, thus keeping your codebase small and efficient. It's possible to write ugly functional code, and it's possible to write beautiful and efficient object-oriented code, but the stricter rules of functional style theoretically make the codebase less likely to devolve into incomprehensible spaghetti.
Manning Publications has a book[4] on functional programming in javascript, which I own but haven't gotten around to reading yet, so I can't vouch for it. However, it does seem highly applicable.
The correct version of the argument is that Facebook can afford to pay for extra bandwidth and reduced latency, but new market entrants cannot. Snapchat has plenty of funding.
It also has knock-on effects in the allocation of financial gains of successful startups. The more money required to launch/scale a company, the more likely it is that investors (capital) get a larger share of the profits than founders or employees (labor). That's not necessarily a direct reason to oppose/favor net neutrality, but is worth considering alongside all the other data points.
I have a really hard time putting much stock in metaphors that have so many components and work backwards from the metaphor to the real world. Too easy for the truth and usefulness of the advice to get stretched out to make the comment as a whole flow properly.
Uber/Airbnb/et al aren't still private just because there's some uncomfortable risk they're afraid will push away public investors. There's a whole host of reasons to stay private (lawyers, executive time/energy, SEC compliance, public investors are generally more myopic than private ones, etc, etc, etc). The "nut" you mention might be an inconvenience, but it's surely not even close to the most important reason to stay private.
I certainly agree that reasoning by analogy can only go so far in conveying the complexity of the situation. Startups do not exist in a vacuum.
That said, while I agree with you that there are lots of reasons a perfectly functioning, operationally cash flow positive company might choose to stay private. None of those reasons apply to companies that are diluting themselves with additional investment in order to stay in business.
The money gets more and more expensive from investors, and more and more people get screwed, and then all that's left is to write the amazing journey blog entry.
