> Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
I am not saying he is using it to say ‘things are getting worse’ but rather ‘things are being optimized in ways we don’t like by large companies’ which is meaningfully different.
However, because he’s using ‘platforms’ so broadly it’s not just marketplaces but basically any business. It’s hard to draw a meaningful circle around Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Google, and Unity that excludes Walmart’s online store.
> Misinformation about COVID being the most prescient and recent example for most people probably, propaganda from all sides that continues radicalization and polarization, and also tons of harassment campaigns arranged across sites and services too numerous to name, the most vile content you can think of in whatever stripe comes to mind for you, etc. etc., Section 230 prevents any of the websites that are caught distributing it from being held liable. And I cannot envision a situation where being held legally culpable for such material would not directly incentivize, and with ZEAL, those tech monoliths to get the shit under control.
Disinformation is not illegal. Even if platforms had joint liability for disinformation, that liability is...zero. There is nothing in US law that prohibits disinformation. Rather, there is a Constitutional right to speak without state sanction, e.g. the First Amendment.
Likewise: the vast majority of harassment (as in > 99.9%) does not rise to the level of illegal conduct, and where it does, the cases are fact intensive and the relief is almost certainly injunctive, which is to say, if you prove to a court that certain conduct is illegal harassment, the best you can hope for is that the judge will order the harasser to cease.
Which is to say: the two kinds of content you worry about the platforms carrying, for which you think shared liability will present some remedy, are legal to carry and there is no liability, shared or otherwise, for hosting it.
For avoidance of doubt, I am profoundly concerned about both harassment and disinformation... And also getting rid of CDA 230 will not create a legal obligation on the platforms to do anything about either.
I literally came out of retirement to rejoin EFF and fight DRM at the W3C. I managed to get the W3C membership to reject DRM twice, only to be overruled by the executive (the W3C's constitution allows for the director to treat votes as advisory). It was the only time in W3C history that anything remotely like this happened. In the end, EFF publicly resigned from the W3C over it:
Obviously, I failed. But I did nothing else for four years but fight DRM at the W3C. I wrote op-eds. I personally telephoned every single W3C member's rep to talk to them about this - many times. I published hundreds of articles. I did radio interviews. Podcasts. We organized an in-person protest and picketed a W3C event.
There was never a "day when EFF, Cory Doctorow...kept mum while DRM was being added to the HTML5 spec."
> a broken link and weird marketing language that's clearly not coming from Doctorow, it's like that Metal Gear 2 ending when the Colonel starts to speak in gibberish
This was the alt text for one of the images, which I accidentally pasted into the tweet. It's not "marketing language" - it's a blurb. I try to include alt text for all my images, but the thread composing tool I was using (chirr) had a glitch and I didn't see that in the preview.
I find that bizarre. It's just a mailman instance. Did the bot send you a confirmation email? Did you try emailing me instead? A few times over the 15-ish years that I ran the list, Mailman has failed to honor unsub requests, and in each case, it turned out to be because the user signed up with a different send-to than their return-to - for example, if you signed up as doctorow-list+youremail@gmail.com, and then send an unsub from youremail@gmail.com, Mailman (correctly) rejects the unsub request, because it doesn't have a subscriber called youremail@gmail.com. In those (rare) cases, I take care of it manually.
If you're still subscribed and not able to unsub, please just email me, doctorow@craphound.com, and I'll unsubscribe you by hand.
Yeah i did email you, it was a long time ago (10 years?). I got a typical spam email to my "x-craphound" alias.
I guess you got hacked twice back then.
It's not entirely a coincidence that Tim and I sound alike on this subject! We grew up together at the same hippie alternative school in Toronto and then both came under the influence of Larry Lessig in our adult lives.
Tim and I got a chance to catch up at a Brussels antitrust conference last month and it was great to go over all the ways that our backgrounds contributed to our work in adulthood:
This weekend I got back to doing a little bit of work on my TerseNet concept, inspired by one of your articles "https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n..." and things like the Gemini Protocol with the idea of combating monopolies by making protocols simple enough for the average programmer or small team to implement them.
That's amazing, such a small world! I been following Tim Wu since I first heard of him way way back when he was a guest on an early video series produced by The Verge (the video series unfortunately, is now defunct, these were the Josh Topolsky days). No idea you guys were connected in any way.
He's an amazing writer on the subject of information systems and broader society, in my opinion. I was drawn to your work via Factually! of all things.
Going to take a moment to mention - though I shared a disagreement elsewhere in the comments, I respect the work you've been doing Cory and I regret not saying so in my comment. I'm glad you're make a case for adversarial interop and I hope people do give it a shot.
The .NET file that Adobe served a DMCA512 notice on doesn't contain any of Adobe's copyrighted code. It's an unpacker and installer that users run on the software they download separately from Adobe's Chinese distributor.
This is emphatically not a copyright violation of ANY kind, but it's especially not a violation of copyright that would entitle Adobe to use DMCA 512 to have it expeditiously removed. A DMCA 512 claim is explicitly - and solely - a mechanism for removing unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work. Again, this is a .NET file that has instructions for unpacking a standards-defined .ZIP archive and then installing its components. It's NOT a copy of Adobe's code. DMCA 512 has no place here.
And while it's NOT a violation of DMCA 512 to host this batch file, it IS a violation of DMCA 512 to file a baseless takedown against it. The DMCA's requirement for a "good faith belief" that a file infringes copyright, "on pain of perjury," makes Adobe the sole lawbreaker in this story.
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Separately: You might be wondering if this is a DMCA 1201 violation (that's the part of the DMCA that deals with "circumvention" of "a technological protection measure" that "controls access" to a copyrighted work.
It's not. There's no TPM in a ZIP file, so there's no circumvention in unpacking it.
But even if it was, Adobe didn't send a 1201 takedown (those don't really exist, because there's no 1201 safe harbor, though sometimes firms send 1201-related cease-and-desists), they sent a 512 takedown.
Again, a 512 takedown only ever applies when there is distribution without authorization. There is no distribution. It's inarguable - and provable. The .NET code is (was) on github for anyone to inspect. It is unequivocally NOT a copy of Adobe Flash or any other work that originated with Adobe.
BTW, it looks like at least one version of the installer included a binary, though the creator says that's not true anymore, so you were (partially) right and I was (partially) wrong.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-...