English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:28 AM

@Cerberus Because under US law we have to comply with DMCA requests - no matter how silly - or risk losing our "safe harbor" protections. At which point, we'd pretty much be screwed.

Cerberus

@Shog9 But you don't need the safe harbour if the request is bogus.

That's the point.

If you comply, you cannot be sued at all; if you do not comply, you can be sued, but you will win on the merit of the case.

Shog9

@Cerberus Being perpetually in court isn't really "winning".

2

Cerberus

@Shog9 Who says you would be?

That evil CipherCloud company has little to gain from suing you.

Shog9

@Cerberus not a lawyer; from what I've been told, we have a short period of time to comply (2-3 days or some such) after which the author can dispute and get it put back up (they're sent a notice to the same effect at the same time). That's assuming we want to comply with the DMCA. If we don't, we can certainly put up with litigation from whoever whenever... But that's pretty much just a way to burn money without any hope of getting anything in return.

Cerberus

Is the principle of not giving in to trolls abusing the legal system worth something?

Besides, I don't think you would get sued at all.

Going through the trouble of even censoring comments is...worrying.

Shog9

12:33 AM

@Cerberus they didn't have much to gain from sending the take-down either - they got a huge amount of bad press over it, and far more people ended up reading the answers there than would've ever seen it otherwise.

Cerberus

Yes, but they didn't know that yet, and sending that take-down itself was cheap.

Shog9

@Cerberus IIRC, it's not a setup where you can pick and choose which ones you feel have merit. Either you operate under DMCA safe harbor rules for all copyright claims, or you forgo the protection even in cases where the claims are legit.

Cerberus

I don't believe that is true?

Shog9

Like I said, I'm not a lawyer. This is how I've understood it.

Cerberus

Did your lawyer look at it? Is he a copyright specialist?

From what I understand, it doesn't work that way. It wouldn't make sense.

Shog9

12:36 AM

Recall in the Viacom vs YouTube cases, the primary claim was that YouTube was claiming safe harbor protection but being picky about what they actually took down.

(IIRC, this has never been proved)

Cerberus

Viacom was recently and definitively defeated.

Youtube won.

Cerberus

12:52 AM

@Shog9 In any case, I think at worst the safe harbour would be removed only in that specific lawsuit, and only against the specific "works" you would be accused of infringing upon in that specific lawsuit.

Shog9

That would make more sense to me. But then again, not a lawyer.

Cerberus

1:03 AM

@Shog9 Would you have removed the info if it had been your own post?

Immediately, without question?

Shog9

1:26 AM

@Cerberus I generally avoid moderating my own posts

And really, I'm rarely involved in DMCA stuff anyway; I handled these because it was a weekend and no one else was around.

Cerberus

Do you/we get many DMCA requests?

I meant, what if the request had been about a Stack Exchange blog post by, say, Joel?

Shog9

I don't think so. But, I really don't know either. There's a contact person for those who handles them and involves us only in weird situations.

This situation was weird because the actual take-down notice (which you can find posted elsewhere on the site) asked for the entire question to be removed... And it was.

Cerberus

Would SE important stuff from Joel's post if the request had been about his post?

Shog9

That was truly excessive, but doing just the images required access the person handling it didn't have; hence my involvement.

Cerberus

@Shog9 Trolls always do that, make completely absurd requests.

Shog9

1:29 AM

yes, they do tend to do that.

Cerberus

So what if it had been a post by SE itself?

Shog9

@Cerberus I honestly have no idea how that would be handled. Pretty sure "safe harbor" doesn't apply when you're the person posting the content, but it probably comes down to how badly whoever wanted to be a jerk about it.

I suspect more lawyers would be involved.

Cerberus

Right.

Shog9

I try to stay away from lawyers.

Cerberus

Still, I think the info should be reinstated.

Can you make the user post a counter-claim?

Shog9

1:33 AM

79

Q: CipherCloud DMCA notice

CipherCloud just filed a DMCA notice with stack exchange to take down the question How is CipherCloud doing homomorphic encryption? (now deleted by stackexchange). Since I obviously can't post the full question+answers here, a short summary of what it contained: The question itself asks if/how...

@Cerberus can't make users do anything

IIRC, a few of them discussed doing it, but I don't know that any did

Cerberus

Suggest.

Encourage.

Inform.

tchrist

2:14 AM

Stridulation

Stridulation is the act of producing sound by rubbing together certain body parts. This behavior is mostly associated with insects, but other animals are known to do this as well, such as a number of species of fish, snakes and spiders. The mechanism is typically that of one structure with a well-defined lip, ridge, or nodules (the "scraper" or plectrum) being moved across a finely-ridged surface (the "file" or stridulitrum—sometimes called the pars stridens) or vice-versa, and vibrating as it does so, like the dragging of a phonograph needle across a vinyl record. Sometimes it is the st...

tchrist

2:31 AM

Amazingly, a cup of Kopi Kuwak typically costs about $90. Or, you can pick up a pound of the beans for around $1,000. Just getting a cup of the coffee typically requires an appointment.

That’s what Stephen Fry gave Prince Charlie on his second wedding.

MετάEd

7:00 AM

A good excuse to quote Monty Python:

0

A: Is there a name for when the same word is used at the beginning and end of different phrases/sentences?

You are describing a variation on the classic rhetorical device anadiplosis, “the repetition of the last word (or phrase) from the previous line, clause, or sentence at the beginning of the next”.1 In your variation, anadiplosis is combined with ellipsis, “omission of a word or short phrase easil...

RegDwighт

9:03 AM

@tchrist "Yahoo News: selling as news today what has been known to the world entire since the last millennium!"

Yahoo News, 8 hours ago: "Coffee snobs can now take it to a whole new level. The world’s most expensive cup of coffee is made from beans that are extracted from the excrement of a small animal."

Frigging Wikipedia, for crying out loud: "During the era of Cultuurstelsel (1830—1870), the Dutch prohibited the native farmers and plantation workers from picking coffee fruits for their own use. [...] Soon, the natives learned that certain species of musang or luwak consumed the coffee fruits, yet they left the coffee seeds undigested in their droppings. The natives collected these luwaks' coffee seed droppings, then cleaned, roasted and ground them to make their own coffee beverage."

Cerberus

11:30 AM

Odd.

RegDwighт

12:07 PM

So the whole site is down now or what?

I was just reading the DMCA takedown thread.

Looks like now they've taken down the babby and the bathwater.

David Wallace

@RegDwighт So the Dutch are to blame for all the overpriced shit?

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