Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Have any actual courts ruled in favor of this nonsense? Because I thought fair use was tied to things like public benefit and transformation more than a direct number of copies. Like, I'm pretty sure that I'm not allowed to fax a book to myself even if I put the original through a shredder, and that's ignoring the question of how much gets inexorably lost in the process.
Complementing sibling, consider Google Books. This is where the question first arose: if one puts a book through a scanner, non-destructively, then surely they have made a digital copy of the book? There's the related question: if the scanner destroys the book, then that surely means no copy? The bounds of this were tested with the concept of CDL, which courts did rule against in Hachette v. Internet Archive; they said that CDL is clearly copying. But they also said in HathiTrust that digital preservation is transformative. So preserving is possibly fair but copying is probably infringing; in general one can have a private library but they can't copy it out to other people.
Hopefully it makes a bit more sense from that perspective. Copyright's still stupid as fuck, though. Previously, on Awful, I made a prediction:
Alsup put this as a point in Anthropic's favour in the recent authorial class action, so now it's received wisdom.