Not if the automation can be somehow gamed. If someone manage to find a flaw in the system, the company is at risk of losing big before it figure out the issue. Will this money be lost for good is probably not a question that company wants to find an answer for the hard way.
Tangential question: are there other giveaways than download time for a cached document which could be used by malicious scripts?
I ask because I don't understand why a zero download time for a cached document couldn't be simply masked by some (random) wait by the browser instead of downloading the file again.
From the chrome update page linked in the article, the explanation is:
> However, the time a website takes to respond to HTTP requests can reveal that the browser has accessed the same resource in the past, which opens the browser to security and privacy attacks, [...]
which seems to indicate that only time matters in the attacks. Yet, the third bullet point suggests:
> Cross-site tracking: The cache can be used to store cookie-like identifiers as a cross-site tracking mechanism.
as a possible attack based on the cache, which doesn't seem to involve document download time.
> should have the right to receive all unpublished footage [of the licensed work]
I think it should be read that way. You are not conflating copyright and privacy, you are conflating scopes of content production (the licensed work vs the whole work of the artist).
In your example, the topic of the licensed video is the albatross, not the artist holidays. That clarification being made, there's probably some truth in the privacy issue (you brought that example for a reason): one must make a distinction between works of fiction and other works : reporting, biography, and perhaps other kinds. Games are works of fiction, just like movies and music, while someone's holidays isn't. Maybe one may see that as another form of scoping.
> the licensed work vs the whole work of the artist
Ahh, I think I see the source of the confusion: in my analogy, the two-minute albatross video is cut and edited from the five-hour holiday footage. Sorry, that was my fault for being unclear.
Let's talk about intent. In the example of wanting the studio to give you all their unedited footage so you can make your own cut, all of that footage was taken with the intent to produce a movie with it (obviously all of it did not make the cut, but the intent was there).
For this holiday video, it was taken with the intent to -- privately -- document someone's holiday. Incidentally, the person taking the video happened to find a two-minute segment that they thought might be interesting to others, and they were comfortable giving away (because that portion of the video didn't intrude on their privacy).
The point I'm making here is that situations are different. Situations have nuance. You can't just presume equivalence and throw an argument in someone's face along the lines of "if you want someone to do X then you have to be comfortable with Y". Because no, you don't, and it's not logically inconsistent to hold that view.
(For the record, I don't think the studio should be required to give you all their unpolished, pre-cut footage. But I also don't think it's contradictory to imagine a world where that was the norm, but it was not the norm to expect people to post their entire holiday video when they just want to post a short segment.)
I think that piracy overall isn't a simple issue: trying to put every pirates in the same bag isn't going to work, because not everyone has the same set of motivations: some have issues with packaging, some with price, and perhaps there are other kinds of issues?
What can be done on the other hand, is to figure out what are the main reasons for piracy (ie, on average, what are the driving factors), and what can be done to remove them.
Packaging in the music industry took a while to adjust: they first fought really hard against Napster and the like, when the customers were quite ready to accept digital content, but the DRM solutions were mostly in the way, or the network technology wasn't quite ready. Nowadays, everyone takes for granted that music is bandwidth cheap, and content owners realized that removing the packaging issue did remove a large part of the piracy, because those who pirated for lack of good delivery didn't have to anymore, and with this market share acquired, the revenues increased, which meant that prices could go down, and thus another chunk of the piracy crowd became customers as well.
I guess that my point is that price isn't a completely solvable problem, but it's not entirely orthogonal to the other issues.
Clearly, price cannot be reduced down to zero, there will always be people finding this or that to be too expensive for what it is. Note that ads do not reduce cost to zero for the consumer in the case of digital streaming: they still have to pay in ad view time, which leads to ad blockers, yet another form of piracy.
> If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers.
Even if Netflix is working perfectly well, they can't have the monopoly of creativity. They might produce good content (something you seem to disagree with, I personally don't have an opinion on that), but they cannot prevent other distributors to do the same. The main reasons for this are that:
- again people cannot be put all in the same bag: what one will be interested in might bore the next,
- "topics" can be exclusive (GP alluded to that): For instance, Disney owns "Star Wars", and if you want to watch some of that stuff, you'll have to go to them.
You're right on price, there's definitely a certain nuance to be had there. I tried adding it to my original post, but it only diluted my point, so I kept it about convenience.
You won't ever get rid of piracy, but you can reduce it to negligible levels by offering what people want: a reasonable price & a good user experience. Music offers this currently, and piracy is pretty much a solved problem for them: only 2.9% of piracy is music [1]. I'd argue most people prefer having access to all the music they want on the device they want just a click away, for 10-15$ per month, than tracking down & downloading a good-quality torrent that won't give you a virus. Ad-sponsored versions are also an option here, and broadcast TV & radio's rich histories would indicate that's a pretty good business model. Just don't get greedy & do both (looking at you, Cable TV).
I think that simple should be understood here as easy to use. As a crude analogy, the mechanical principles underlying a car with an automatic shift aren't simple, but the abstraction it provides makes driving much easier to learn.
A more mathematically grounded example could be the complex plane compared to the real line: when encountered for the first time, it is not simple in any way, but it offers a clean solution to many (originally real valued) problems (perhaps by the fact that it is algebraically closed?).
NB: the author of this library also made a very interesting presentation of geometric algebra (using this library as vehicle) for SIGGRAPH 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo
In Germany a work can only enter the public domain after the copyright expires. The author is not allowed to waive their copyright and intentionally put their work in the public domain before that. If you want to make something available without restrictions you have to grant people a license to your copyrighted work.
One of the things that is different is the matter of Moral Rights such as the right to be attributed as the author of the copyrighted work. In some jurisdictions those rights cannot be waived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
