In going through these arguments, Iâll also be drawing from a few other sources, in order to give a more comprehensive description of the arguments being made.
The Authors Guild Amici Curiae Brief is a document submitted to the court by The Authors Guild in support of the plaintiffâs argument.
Combining lending with digital technology is tricky to do within the constraints of copyright.
But itâs important to still be able to lend, especially for libraries.
With a system called Controlled Digital Lending, libraries like the Internet Archive (IA) made digital booklending work within the constraints of copyright, but publishers still want to shut it down.
Itâs a particularly ghoulish example of companies rejecting copyright and instead pursuing their endless appetite for profit at the expense of everything worthwhile about the industry.
This was the precipitating announcement: VRChat releasing a beta for an in-game real-money store.
Paid Subscriptions: Now in Open Beta! â VRChat
Over the last few years, weâve talked about introducing something weâve called the âCreator Economy,â and weâre finally ready to reveal what the first step of that effort is going to look like: Paid Subscriptions!
As it stands now, creators within VRChat have to jump through a series of complicated, frustrating hoops if they want to make money from their creations. For creators, this means having to set up a veritable Rube Goldberg machine, often requiring multiple external platforms and a lot of jank. For supporters, it means having to sign up for those same platforms⊠and then hope that the creator youâre trying to support set everything up correctly.
(The problem, of course, is that âfrustrating jankâ was designed by VRChat, and their âsolutionâ is rentiering.)
Currently, the only thing to purchase is nebulous âsubscriptionsâ that would map to different world or avatar features depending on the content. But more importantly, this creates a virtual in-game currency, and opens the door to future transaction opportunities. Iâm especially thinking of something like an avatar store.
I quit playing VRChat two years ago, when they started to crack down on client-side modifications (which are good) by force-installing malware (which is bad) on playersâ computers.
Since then Iâve actually had a draft sitting somewhere about software architecture in general, and how you to evaluate whether itâs safe or a trap. And, how just by looking at the way VRChat is designed, you can tell itâs a trap theyâre trying to spring on people.
Currently, the VRC Creator Economy is just a currency store and a developer api. Prior to this, there was no way for mapmakers to âcharge usersâ for individual features; code is sandboxed, and you only know what VRC tells you, so you canât just check against Patreon from within the game1.
But the real jackpot for VRC is an avatar store.
Currently, the real VRC economy works by creators creating avatars, maps, and other assets in the (mostly-)interchangeable Unity format, and then selling those to people. Most commonly this is seen in selling avatars, avatar templates, or custom commissioned avatars.
Users buy these assets peer-to-peer.
This is the crucial point: individuals cannot get any content in the game without going through VRC. When you play VRChat, all content is streamed from VRChatâs servers anonymously by the proprietary client. There are no URLs, no files, no addressable content of any kind. (In fact, in the edge cases where avatars are discretely stored in files, in the cache, users get angry because of theft!) VRChat isnât a layer over an open protocol, itâs its own closed system. Even with platforms like Twitter, at least there are files somewhere. But VRChat attacks the entire concept of files, structurally. The user knows nothing and trusts the server, end of story.
When Iâm looking for an example of copyright abuse, I find myself returningto Nintendoa lot on this blog.
Nintendo is a combination hardware/software/media franchise company, so they fit a lot of niches.
Theyâre a particularly useful when talking about IP because the âbig Nâ is both very familiar to people and also egregiously bad offenders, especially given their âfriendlyâ reputation.
Nintendo has constructed a reputation for itself as a âgoodâ games company that still makes genuinely fun games with âheartâ.
Yet itâs also infamously aggressive in executing âtakedownsâ: asserting property ownership of creative works other people own and which Nintendo did not make.
Youâd think a company like Nintendo â an art creation studio in the business of making and selling creative works â would be proponents of real, strong, immutable creative rights. That, as creators, theyâd want the sturdiest copyright system possible, not one compromised (or that could be compromised) to serve the interests of any one particular party. This should be especially true for Nintendo even compared to other studios, given Nintendoâs own fight-for-its-life against Universal, its youth, and its relatively small position1 in the market compared to its entertainment competitors Disney, Sony, and Microsoft.
But no, Nintendo takes the opposite position. When it comes to copyright, they pretty much exclusively try to compromise it in the hopes that a broken, askew system will end up unfairly favoring them. And so they attack the principles of copyright, viciously, again and again, convinced that the more broken the system is, the more they stand to profit.
Nintendo, even compared to its corporate contemporaries, has a distinctly hostile philosophy around art: if they canât control something themselves, they tend to try to eliminate it entirely.
What Nintendo uses creative rights to protect is not the copyright of their real creative works, itâs their control over everything they perceive to be their âshareâ of the gaming industry.
Let me start with a quick history, in case youâre not familiar with the foundation Nintendo is standing on.
Nintendo got its footing overseas by looking to see what video game was making the most money in America, seeing it was Space Invaders, and copying that verbatim with a clone game they called âRadar Scopeâ:
But then Nintendo was almost itself the victim of an abuse of IP law. âDonkey Kongâ derived from King Kong, and even though the character was in the public domain, Universal Studios still sued Nintendo over the use.
Ultimately the judge agreed with the Nintendo team and threw out the lawsuit, in an example of a giant corporation trying to steamroll what was at the time a small business with over-aggressive and illegitimate IP enforcement.
This was such an impactful moment for Nintendo that they took the name of their lawyer in the Universal Studios case â Kirby â and used it for the mascot of one of their biggest franchises. It was a significant move that demonstrates Nintendoâs extreme gratefulness â or even idolization â of the man who defended them against abuse of IP law.
You would hope the lesson Nintendo learned here would be from the perspective of the underdog, seeing as they were almost the victim of the kinds of tactics they would later become famous for using themselves. But no, it seems they were impressed by the ruthlessness of the abusers instead, and so copied their playbook.
Apple puts its logo on the devices it sells. Not just on the outer casing, but also each internal component. The vast majority of these logos are totally enclosed and invisible to the naked eye.
This seems like an incredibly strange practice â especially since Apple doesnât sell these parts separately â except it turns out to be part of a truly convoluted rules-lawyering exploit only a company like Apple could pull off and get away with.
Remember, trademarks are a consumer protection measure to defend against counterfeits. Appleâs registered logo trademark protects consumers from being tricked into buying fake products, and deputizes Apple to defend its mark against counterfeits.
While some counterfeiting happens domestically the major concern is usually counterfeits imported from foreign trade. This brings us to Customs and Border Patrol, which you might know as the other side of the ICE/CBP border control system. You might be surprised to see them involved with this, since Border Patrol agents are fully-militarized police outfitted to combat armed drug cartels.
But among its other duties, Border Patrol takes a proactive role in enforcing intellectual property protection at ports of trade â backed by the full force of the Department of Homeland Security â by seizing goods it identifies as counterfeit and either destroying them outright or else selling them themselves at auction.1
To get your property back, you have to sue Border Patrol â an infamously untouchable police force â and win.
When it comes to copyright, it can be very easy to lose the forest for the trees. Thatâs why I want to start this series with a bit of a reset, and establish a baseline understanding of copyright doctrine as a whole, and the context in which our modern experience of copyright sits.
The current state of copyright law is a quagmire, due not just to laws but also international treaty agreements and rulings from judges who donât understand the topic and who even actively disagree with each other.
That convolution is exactly why I donât want to get lost in those twists and turns for this, and instead want to start with the base principles weâve lost along the way.
You donât need to understand the layers to see the problem. In fact, intellectual property is a system whose convolutions hide the obviousness of the problem.
Complexity is good only when complexity is needed to ensure the correctness of the outcome. But here, far from being necessary to keep things working right, the complexity hides that the outcome is wrong.
But that outcome, our current regime that we know as copyright policy, is so wrong â not only objectively bad, but wrong even according to its own definition â that at this point it takes significant work just to get back to the idea that
This is my controversial stance, and the premise of my series: copyright (as properly defined) is a cohesive system, and, when executed properly, is actually good for everyone.
And Iâm not âone true Scotsmanâing this either; copyright isnât just an arbitrary legal concept, itâs a system that arises naturally from a set of solid base principles.
The first step in my âunderstanding the forest for the treesâ project is separating the big, nebulous, polluted idea of âcopyrightâ out into the parts people can mostly agree on and the parts that are just evil and bad.
Fortunately, the âgoodâ and âbadâ groups line up really well with âoriginal intentâ compared to âjunk that was added laterâ.
Generally speaking, itâs not useful to just make a distinction and act like doing so is the whole job done, unless you just care about smarmy pedantic internet points. But Iâm not doing this to be pedantic, Iâm making the distinction between the core idea and the junk thatâs corrupted it because it turns out to be really important.
What weâre subjected to today in the name of copyright does not come from the real principles of copyright. Compared to the current state of US intellectual property law, the âreal copyrightâ Iâm talking about is like grass so utterly smothered by concrete that not only do no strands poke through, everyone involved has forgotten it was ever there.
The situation is so bad that even though I think copyright should be a good thing, I think our current bastardization of it may be worse than nothing at all, to the point where weâd be better off with the problems real copyright is meant to solve than with all the new, worse problems itâs inflicted on us.
But because what weâre enduring now is a corruption of another thing and not its own original evil, weâre not limited to measuring it by the harm it inflicts: we can also measure it by its deviation from what we know it should be.
So whatâs the good version? This true, unadulterated form of creative rights?
Is your website the official location of the unofficial collection webapp or is it just there now for testing?
I’ve also gotten other variations of it, so I wanted to get some thoughts down.
The UHC is, itself, unofficial, in that it isn’t acting with the authority of the Homestuck brand, and it’s not a What Pumpkin published work.
https://homestuck.giovanh.com is one further layer more unofficial than that: It’s still not endorsed by Homestuck, but it’s also not necessarily “endorsed” by the main UHC project. It’s a separate spin-off for a couple of reasons, including the fact that it uses some non-free code. But ultimately this separation lets me test experimental features and ideas before they’re released as part of the main collection.
This is meant as a way to use the offline homestuck collection in a browser, for people on mobile or platforms that don’t have a proper version, or as an “on-ramp” if you’re just getting into Homestuck and aren’t sure if you want to commit yet.
Don’t just use this to read Homestuck! Get the collection; it’s faster, it has real flash, and it costs less to host!
I still think this is the right mentality: if you’re reading through Homestuck or doing fan work, you probably still want the main desktop release. It’s also much more moddable; the browser version has some modding functionality, but it’s stripped down and isn’t ever going to be up to the standard of the main collection.
I don’t currently have any plans to move the domain name, though. I can imagine doing that at some point in the future, if governance ever changes (i.e. it’s not strictly personal, and so shouldn’t be on my personal) but I already own giovanh.com, and I think Homestuck fits nicely there.
First, hereâs a list of all the references to âAngelsâ or âHeavenâ in the text of Undertale and Deltarune, which Iâll go through one by one:
The human in Undertale is called an âangelâ for coming down from the human world (this is a red herring) (this could also refer to Asriel but it doesnât matter)
The Angelâs Heaven from Ralseiâs prophesy
The Heaven Spamton is pursuing
The Angel worshipped by the Hometown church
The Angel doll Noelle and Dess made in church youth group
Iâve decided to do a short write-up on a tool I just call âSorterâ. Sorter is something I built for myself to help me organize my own files, and it looks like this:
Itâs designed to do exactly one thing: move files into subfolders, one file at a time. You look at a file, you decide where it goes, and you move it accordingly. Itâs the same behavior you can do with Explorer, but at speed.
You can download it if you want (although it might not be easy to build; check the releases for binaries) but for now I just wanted to talk through some of the features, why I built it the way I did, and the specific features I needed that I couldnât find in other software.
Reddit is going the same route as Twitter by making âAPI accessâ prohibitively expensive. This is something they very famously, very vocally said they would not do, but theyâre doing it anyway. This is very bad for Reddit, but whatâs worse is itâs becoming clear that companies think that this is a remotely reasonable thing to do, when itâs very critically not.
Itâs the same problem we see with Twitter and other late-capitalist hell websites: Redditâs product is the service it provides, which is its API. The ability for users to interact with the service isnât an auxiliary premium extra, itâs the whole caboodle!
Iâll talk about first principles first, and then get into whatâs been going on with Reddit and Apollo.
The Apollo drama is very useful in that it directly converts the corporate bullshit that sounds technical enough to make sense into something very easy to understand: a corporation hurting them, today, for money.
Reddit and all these other companies who are making user-level API access prohibitively expensive have forgotten that the API is the product. - The API is the interface that lets you perform operations on the site. The operations a user can do are the product, theyâre not auxiliary to it!
âApplication programming interfaceâ is a very formal, internal-sounding term for a system that is none of those things.
The word âprogrammingâ in the middle comes from an age where using a personal computer at all was considered âprogrammingâ it.
What an API really is a high-level interface to the web application that is Reddit. Every action a user can take â viewing posts, posting, voting, commenting â goes from the app (which interfaces with the user) to the API (which interfaces with the Reddit server), gets processed by the server using whatever-they-use-it-doesnât-matter, and the response is sent back to the user.
The API isnât a god mode and it doesnât provide any super-powers. It doesnât let you do anything you canât do as a user, as clearly evidenced by the fact that all the actions you do on the Reddit website go through the API too.
The Reddit website, the official Reddit app, and the Apollo app all interface with the user in different ways and on different platforms, but go through the same API to interact with what we understand as âRedditâ. The fact that the API is the machine interface without the human interface should also concisely explain why âAPI accessâ is all Apollo needs to build its own app.
Public APIs are good for both the user and the company. Theyâre a vastly more efficient way for people to interact with the service than by automating interaction (or âscrapingâ). Having an API cuts out an entire layer of expense that, without an API, Reddit would pay for.
The Reddit service is the application, and you interface with it through WHATEVER. Whatever browser you want, whatever browser extensions you want, whatever model phone you want, whatever app you want. This is fundamentally necessary for operability and accessibility.
The API is the service. The mechanical ability to post and view and organize is what makes Reddit valuable, not its frontend. Their app actually takes the core service offering and makes it less attractive to users, which is why they were willing to pay money for an alternative!