I bet Disney's lawyers can squeeze a lot more money out of municipalities for playing the music publicly in the first place than they can out of random citizens who are uploading to Youtube.
Of course that was the point. But malicious broadcast of copyrighted material to trigger automated enforcement systems sounds pretty far from "fair use" to me. Say nothing of the bad publicity when some video is just so bad it hits the news and now your IP is the soundtrack to a cop beatdown.
When you look at it from a legal "use it or lose it" and corporate risk perspective it's quite surprising that Disney didn't even sent cease and desists.
Edit: Of course you don't lose the copyright but your ability to litigate someone else's unfair use is a lot weaker when their lawyer can trot out a million examples that you were fine with.
The tricky part is that social peer pressure requires a lack of anonymity - not just in terms of detecting whether people are recording without consent at the time - but also the posting of content online.
While the consensus is that it's likely a Russia controlled/allied battery shot it down - I'm not sure anybody thinks it was anything other than an accident, not an intentional act of sabotage.
If it was a Russian weapon (which is the most likely explanation) then it was the result of them meddling where they shouldn't be - either by supplying separatists with military equipment or by being there themselves, i.e. a part of their ongoing expansionist campaign in Ukraine.
> The ideal scenario is everyone suspects it's you but can't prove it.
Why? EU countries have shown time and time again they won't do anything. I mean for God's sake, Russia was caught sending THREE remote controlled flying bomb on a German airfield, with another one found by a passerby before it was launched.
They contained professionally made Russian explosives. There is no doubt who did it. This was not the first, or the 10th time they got caught. I mean Russia murdered someone in the UK with polonium, for God's sake.
The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd. They leave their fingerprints knowing there will be no reaction.
> The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd.
I mean they are. That is the reason they haven’t sent balistic missiles to the same airfield. They could have sent the same agents who placed those drones to the fence of the airport with a shoulder mounted missile and shot down the planes as they were departing. Or even shoot them down on the ground.
Or similarly they could send a submarine and disrupt the railway services of the Netherlands with missiles from that.
Those would be clearly attributable actions which trigger an immediate military response. That is the reason why they don’t do them.
You look at the actions they take and conclude that they don’t have any restraint or worries. But you should also be looking at the actions they could have but did not take to see that they are in fact restrained and probably quite a bit worried. If they werent they would play the game differently.
I think it's to slowly increase offenses _that won't lead to military response_. The response to each individual incident, worse than the one before, kinetic action can be delayed because "this was only a little worse than the last one".
This compounds because NATO needs to act collectively to effectively act militarily (maybe Poland could go it alone).
It's European countries that are taking this strategy, any Russia sabotage is aimed at deterring this widening of the conflict - not to encourage it.
Originally Europe didn't want to supply tanks, then it was only short range missiles, then it was longer range missiles as long as they weren't used to attack targets inside Russia - now it's actively supporting doing military strikes deep into Russia, and openly talking about European boots on the ground in Ukraine ( not that they likely didn't have deniable special forces there from the beginning ).
Strategically it's not in Russia's interests at all to have a wider escalation right now - they have their hands full. Any Russia sabotage is a direct response to missiles and drones using Western technology blowing up warehouses and oil installations deep inside Russia - widening the war is not in their interest or their aim here - they are trying to deter that.
There is the wider question of whether Russia's long term goal is to take back the old soviet states bit by bit in a way that doesn't trigger a full response - but I'd argue there is already a clear red line there - and that's the Nato border.
Really? Unless they are complete morons they realize something. If you take EU governments, any random country, as a general rule government expenditures go like this:
35% pensions (usually also has some health care here)
35% social security and health care
15% education
15% everything else, roads, bridges, government buildings, ... (army is in here @ maybe 5%)
They're also drowning in debt, of the non-tiny, only Germany does better than the US. So they can't realistically borrow to finance this for 5 years. They're trying to cheat, and treat the EU like a separate country (meaning get investors to treat the EU as a separate state that is not on the hook for the debt of member countries but levies it's own taxes, then borrow against that, but EU countries are cheating, for example using money the EU borrowed for military purposes to fund general expenses like fixing roads)
If the EU countries mobilize the army will go to 20-25% of government expenditures easily.
That means either pensions or social security HAVE TO go down 15% (or 7.5% each). That will cause a revolt since a great many people can't survive like that. At that point there will be no choice for a lot of people but to tear the government down.
part of the answer is the peace time dividend. the decrease in european spending has mostly been used for lowering or abolishing taxes on the corporations and the wealthy. if this was to be reversed (because we're not in a peace time anymore), the added tax income could be used to finance the re-armament.
i agree with this. the kremlin sees this as a win-win strategy. there are two options:
1. either their actions are ignored by the victim states, which makes this very cheap and effective sabotage to weaken EU members.
2. or alternatively, if there's military retaliation, putin can finally do the mobilization he promised not to do for his war on ukraine, because he can now assert that the country is under attack by foreign nations.
the EU / the member states are now in a pickle: they know it's russia but can't say it out loud because then they'd have to take action. they also can't do nothing because then russian sabotage could wreak havoc with the population and economy. so what can they do?
1. military support of ukraine
2. further sanctions of the russian economy, which includes getting rid of dependencies on russian goods
3. re-arming and modernizing their own military (i.e. introducing modern drone warfare capability, launching their own satelite intelligence, ...)
4. start opposing/controlling russian influence by local malicious actors, i.e. russia friendly right wing political parties (which is somewhat complicated but not impossible in a democratic setting)
Because being too blatant will galvanize the public and create support for open war.
The goal is to ensure all reasonable people know, while keeping enough deniability that Russian-funded right-wing groups can sow doubt about attribution and response policy’s
They don’t care whether it can be proven in court or by people paying close attention. They care whether it can’t be denied even by their aligned agents in western countries.
Maybe it depends on the country, but here the public automatically assumes everything like this done by Russia and these increase support for open war. I don't think Russia wants deeper European involvement in the war, so I'm having trouble understanding why Russia would be doing this. They're already having difficulties in Ukraine, how would angering the European public and increasing the support for further involvement help Russia achieve its goals?
In many countries, russia’s psyop tactics do work frighteningly well, and we see this resulting in a renaissance of the far-right, who are explicitly against supporting Ukraine, and explicitly seek the rehabilitation of russia.
Exactly. If anything, the country that would benefit most from heightened Europe-Russia tensions (as a result of these sorts of infrastructure "accidents") isn't even on the continent. I'm not ruling out Russia completely, but it would sure be stupid for them to effect this strategy. Additionally, Russians weren't the ones that blew up a pipeline at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Look up how successful the US has been in getting right wing crazy people elected as the heads of state in nearly every Central and South American country by funding right-wing groups, with the exception of Mexico and Brazil (but top minds are working on this).
Russia has been trying to get locals to elect governments on their side and even revolt and destroy their own countries to do so ... since 1917. They used the red army to make this happen in most of Eastern Europe, half of Asia, Africa, South America, Middle America ... and they're still at it in quite a few places (like Africa). They fought until their state collapsed to change the government in Afghanistan.
Just because the US does something bad, does not mean others don't do 100x worse. In both meanings of the word.
Right, but you absolutely need the suspicion. If it's too deniable, it rather loses efficacy. It seems in this situation it could be any number of actors, which rather dilutes any intended message.
You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
If you wanted you could claim you have evidence, without having any. Doesn't matter.
"This better stop or there will be sanctions, and if its not within your power to stop it, tough luck" is a valid response.
Whether that's wise is another question.
Here's a recent example where Germany so far claimed that it tied the attack to Russia, but whether that's actually true is anyone guess (since there's little publicly verifiable information released so far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Leipzig_Airport_drone_att...
It wouldn't be terribly surprising if Russia was behind it, but on the other hand it wouldn't be the first false flag incident of this war either.
Well yes technically countries can just attack others. In practice they need to justify those attacks to their allies and populace if they want to maintain the status quo with them. That's where "they started it, we're only defending ourselves" is very helpful.
Romania has reluctantly done exactly that after the drone incident and tensions have escalated. The Romanians closed the Russian consulate in Constanta as a response and sent the consul back to Russia. The Russians sent an hijacked Ukrainian drone that blew up after 5 hours in the port of Constanta just after this. Now they're slowly escalating by periodically sending drones into Romanian airspace or attacking cargo ships bound from/to Odessa while in the Romanian EEZ.
> You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
First order, maybe. But the clearer the attribution the more political capital there is to act. Just look at the article. We don’t know, and won’t know for a while, if this was caused by Russia or the FDF protestors or who. That is all confusion all kind of actors can use to criticise a government who puts more sanctions on Russia.
Using that lens then you could view the Iran war is simply a failed ( so far ) attempt to grab Iranian oil revenues, perhaps emboldened by the relatively quick success of the Venezuela adventure.
The truth is probably much more multi-headed - though hard to see how the US would have gone to war without some assessment of their own energy situation.
Eh? They didn't/aren't using their stockpiles to anywhere near the extent the US has! There reserves are much bigger - they have about a years supply - yet they used less in absolute terms than the US!
What they did was aggressively reduce demand by accelerating the switch to EV's and firing up a few more coal powerstations.
In terms of influencing the midterms - I suspect China isn't anywhere near the front of the queue in hoping Trump get's a beating given the chaos he is causing.
Complaining about foreign interference is ironically straight from the Hillary playbook.
They are strategically using their stockpiles. There are a lot of factors in their strategy and some of them conflict. This has an effect on the world market.
How much of their strategy is to change elections vs other concerns I don't know.
Frankly if I was China, I'd be conflicted about the mid-terms - Trump is currently leading the US to disastrous wars - kinetic and trade, pissing off his closest allies, under-mining the dollar, and making China look a sane and stable partner.
On the other hand the world might be better off if he was more constrained post mid-terms.
Frankly, in terms of countries wanting Trump to take a beating in the mid-terms, I'd put countries like Canada and most of Europe way ahead of China there.
And in terms of China's energy strategy - China is the worlds biggest net importer of crude therefore China's strategy is going to be focussed on managing that first and foremost.
I think it's the US who hoped that the oil crisis would impact China much more - this is the US making, not China.
As far as I can see there is no clear pricing once you go beyond the free tier - it's contact sales.
This is actually a classic enterprise software approach - as there are no fixed per unit production costs to cover, the pricing is very elastic.
ie each license is probably a negotiation - if you see your app for a one off fee then they want a one-off cut - if you sell a subscription they may want a cut of that instead.
Obviously the risk is if you bake it in and your app becomes successful they may want a larger cut than you can afford, but if they don't negotiate in good faith they won't last very long.
What's worrying for them is nothing they're doing is impossible to be recreated, if you bake it in and you don't want to pay rent you can fine tune your own model
It's legal to film publically - what's not necessarily legal is what you then do with that.
There are already precedents - for example it's legal to film ICE agents in public spaces, it's not necessarily legal to use information to dox if that can be construed as harassment.
Even if you crowd sourced the identification of somebody involved in a potentially criminal act, you can only share that with the police and not the wider public.
The law is asymmetric here because the police have powers reserved for themselves to stop vigilantism.
Perhaps an interesting angle here would be if you can make the case that companies like flock are involved in harressment themselves...
> it's not necessarily legal to use information to dox if that can be construed as harassment.
This is an incorrect understanding of the issue, these individuals are protected using a unique and unusual statute. In a mass broadcast scenario, without identifying their profession in context, there's arguably no crime here. There's certainly no crime to broadcast that you've seen their license plates with no association with their names (the statute doesn't cover that.)
> Even if you crowd sourced the identification of somebody involved in a potentially criminal act, you can only share that with the police and not the wider public.
What are you talking about? This is most certainly legally false in the United States. If you are incorrect about someone you might be found against for libel, but there's no crime here. This is basic First Amendment activity. Have you never watched the news or read a newspaper? Allegations are part and parcel.
These are also entirely the wrong analogies. Both of these are highly individualized scenarios that are not akin to Flock. "Public Flock" is more like a public traffic cam that anyone can view, and these already exist without issue.
I'm trying to distinguish the collection of information from the use. Collection is legal - however there is no point to collecting it if you can't actually use it for anything.
I'm well aware of these cases (and have commented about the specific statute in question in the past here.) The originally-purported analogy of a "public Flock" that you can "actually use" is completely different than what the statute protects. "Hey! Look! Here's an ICE agent's home address" is a lot different than "here's a list of vehicles who traveled down this street on a given date and time."
To preface: this statute is very arguably prior restraint and unconstitutional, which is likely why you only see those cases (non-affluent, non-connected defendants.) Furthermore, you'll notice that it requires "intent to threaten, intimidate, or incite the commission of a crime of violence."
I hate to get specific into this one very questionable statute, but no general/broad restrictions exist with regards to disseminating the video data or license plate information contained within. License plate data doesn't fall into the statute's definition of "restricted personal information," and the operator of a hypothetical service that doesn't single out these "protected" individuals amongst the rest of the population cannot be possibly construed as having malicious intent. This is an extremely unusual statute, few others like it exist.
A "public Flock" would let any interested party query the entire database of observed license plates. Collection isn't individualized to any one person, use and intent resides with the individual consuming the service.
The original posters premise was the way to make government dragnet surveillance banned was to do a public one. In general it's a good principle however I'm not sure in this case.
I can see how a public flock, which is just a queryable database, would be ok under the current rules. But would it make the government want to regulate? They could just continue to go after data use where legal asymmetry already exists.
You could frame almost any use as some sort of stalking/harassment.
Even in this case if they shut it down, government carve outs would apply.
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