I started to highlight bits to cut out and highlight as the key points, but it became pretty quickly that that link already is the executive summary. It’s already basically in outline form, and a super quick read.

You don’t need to rely on the headline.

Is web of trust still a thing?

That was intended to be kind of a distributed way to determine who didn’t suck.

For interaction? Pseudonyms with a ramp up into being able to interact fully is the middle ground. Your activity on that specific site will be monitored to kick you out if you behave inappropriately, but it shouldn’t carry across sites unless you voluntarily use a third party identity provider (which is a good option to have).

Massive scale is a big part of the issue. It raises the barrier to entry for competing platforms (because being able to scale to rapid growth is a huge up front investment, and can easily cripple your platform if you don’t do so), and brings the moderation responsibilities beyond anything actually manageable. Small to mid sized communities being the norm is much more manageable, much easier to develop for, and much healthier generally.

It doesn’t matter if the copy is all at once. Every bit of the file touching your computer involves multiple copies. It is fundamentally impossible to share any file without copies being made. The original digitization is already probably illegal because it’s for the purpose of distribution and not one of the fair use exceptions. Again, this is exactly identical to the claim that pirate sites providing streaming is legal.

Libraries do not make copies. Legally, it’s exactly that simple. There is no ambiguity in any way. It is copyright infringement under current law. It is not possible to defend this without throwing current law in the trash and starting over from scratch. If the judge did somehow rule in IA’s favor the Supreme Court could overrule him in about 30 seconds with basically no deliberation. Courts do not have the authority to change the law.

There’s no possible way to apply the law where the Internet Archive is permitted to do their lending program. It very clearly is illegal copyright infringement that does not come anywhere close to fair use.

The judges do not have the authority to completely overrule both the text of the law and the massive body of precedent. The Supreme Court could, except the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the right to regulate IP how they see fit, and the law is super clear that you can’t do anything that resembles what IA is doing in any way.

There’s also a lot less owls, that are a lot harder to find than dragonflies.

I have shots I like, but they’re pretty much all reasonably common animals because that’s what I have access to, mostly in my back yard. Or flowers I mostly grew, or whatever. Getting an owl, especially doing cool stuff like that, adds the whole element of actually finding the right spot where they live and play, etc. It’s a whole additional layer of work involved.

I made it a chain of replies with one per post instead so my whole app doesn’t crash every time I open it. One of the others actually is a dragonfly. Huge pain in the ass because of how fast they move, and because they’re too small for my autofocus (that’s also probably too slow). But really satisfying when you get a clean one (though I definitely had to massage that one in post).

I found ~f/10 with as fast a shutter as you can get away with is your best bet to get a clear shot with a decent chunk in focus. More open than that and the plane in focus is just too narrow for me to get anything.

There. Splitting them into posts doesn’t crash I guess.

Another “I want to, but…”. The places to realistically do that are basically sites like instagram that I see as actively malicious. I’ll get to the point of just hosting myself on my own hardware to make visible to people who care, but definitely not promoting or anything. I just have a bad habit of stacking up too many other things to develop simultaneously, then doing none of them to read a book or play video games or do one of the different outdoor things I want to do instead.

But if you’re curious I can throw a couple here. (And this post won’t load for me after because my app can’t parse multiple images in a post lol.

I’m not anywhere near that level anyways. It’s definitely a straight hobby for me, that I started with the idea of having shots for photogrammetry and other types of image processing and went down kind of a rabbit hole of just enjoying chasing birds (and bees, and butterflies), for the sake of the mechanical challenge. Getting from seeing something with your eyes to a balanced, focused shot is genuinely hard on its own. It would be cool to play with some of those $5k (or $50k) lenses, but one $500 lens every few years is way more in line with my budget.

But I’m not a huge fan of just being at crowded events drowning in people (again, sports are an exception, because the focus is the game), so the stress of needing to get a lot of really good shots and capture unique, irreplicable moments on top of that would definitely not be fun. And being customer service on top of that, another job I’d hate?

Yeah, I was going to just list the broad strokes of the actual skill/work required, but actually paying the bills while doing it seriously is just too much to easily ignore. There are some genuine ways to do stuff like that as a job or freelance, but not enough to support too many people. I’m guessing a good number need to rely on event photography to pay for their equipment, and I can tell you that’s sure as hell not for me. (Unless I could be on a football sideline. But being a wedding photographer would be a nightmare for me.)

Digital definitely helps because you can just spam the hell out of the shutter. And I have no doubt that a shot like this has an obscene investment in equipment because I’ve seen the limitations of my own (still expensive for me, and realistically pretty decent) stuff. But the top end is something different.

Then on top of that equipment, you need some decent work into scouting locations where you can get close enough without scaring stuff away, you need to invest a bunch of time actually in those locations, with a reasonably high degree of focus, understand your camera and settings well enough to maximize the shot for the lighting, and react and get shots lined up in seconds a lot of the time.

Plus actually find a way to make a living on it or do it in your spare time between an actual job that pays the bills and for all your expensive gear. It’s seriously impressive and there’s a reason most people can’t do it.

That is an amazing shot.

I would much rather pay full price than still pay for a DRMed version that’s effectively guaranteed to be supporting some sort of organized crime group. Mass distribution at scale, with DRM, by definition means Russian organized crime, or a drug cartel, or some other global bad actor on that scale that’s doing shit like trafficking humans, arms dealing, drugs, etc, as well.

But ignoring that (and that I generally buy my content), I wouldn’t pay $.10 for an illegitimate copy that had an added layer of DRM on it. It’s fundamentally fucking repulsive for some subgroup whose whole business relies on bypassing someone else’s copy control to add their own.

Memorizing everything is impressive for a human.

It’s less impressive for a computer.

DRM on pirated games is fucking gross as shit.

Because the libraries have explicit licenses from the IP holders.

The encryption is literally entirely irrelevant.

The argument that a copy in your browser is legally defensible is the equivalent of claiming that sites can legally stream movies to you. It is a copy, both legally and in reality.