And this is where 2600 should smear âcome at me bro!â in shit on an old newspaper and mail it right back to those trolls.
i post old records on youtube⌠Edison cylinders are by most peopleâs estimation, all in the public domain. But Iâve gotten takedown notices⌠and itâs usually because someone else has used the same public domain music in a video. I just protest it and they tend to give up automatically.
I just had a thoughtâŚ
What if these defendants counter-sued for defamation in circumstances like this?
âYou lied about us breaking the law, hurting our reputation. You didnât even bother to make sure your statement was valid. Your statement was meant to be factual in nature, but you have no way of knowing if it was true, yet you asserted it as fact anyway. Pay us back for the harm youâve done.â
2600 is still a magazine? I used to love reading their stuffâŚIâll have to look into their publication again.
If you need an algorithm to found a tree years old copyright infringement, I think you can reasonably say their is no copyright infringementâŚ
Iâd love to hear some of these old recordings. Can you give us your YouTube channel?
Itâs time for good old Arkell v. Pressdram (1971)
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkellâs attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.
Well yea, if they were in sixth grade. Still, âdo your worstâ is a great tactic. Having hard documentation that makes their case moot can be a good opportunity to waste their expensive lawyerâs time. However, I was in that position once, and they gave up after wasting no more than a few stamps.
Should I append âmetaphoricallyâ to that post? 
Iâm donât share the indignation. It doesnât appear to me that they deny using the copyrighted art. It might be fair use, but despite it being 2600, it is a commercial enterprise, and they benefit from the same copyright laws that they are complaining about. If they wanted ink splatter, they could have either created it themselves, hired it done, licensed someoneâs existing image, or found a public domain source. Somebody made a call that ânobody would notice thisâ and maybe âlicensing that image for the splatter is too expensiveâ. The splatter pattern was a cool enough aesthetic that they wanted it on the magazine, so they should either pay for it or attempt to get a court to rule this is fair use. Maybe it is, but it is not clear-cut to me.
Maybe you should re-read.
Trunk Archive is attempting fraud. By robot. And whoever signed off on their copybot needs to go to jail for up to 5 years, and/or pay 2600 $250,000 for attempting to claim their IP.
The proper legal response to such shakedowns is âGo fuck yourself, weâll see you in court.â
First, they said âRâ, and I did not listen.
Then, in their haughty way, they said âTâ, and I scoffed.
And then, rudely, they said âFâ. So, so rude of them.
Finally, they said âAâ. I never finished reading what they said, so Iâm not sure what theyâre going on aboutâŚ
We used to make copies of 2600 magazine and re-staple 'em. Small-town SD. Ironically, we used the newspaper officeâs photocopier, where one of us worked.
If you follow the trail of links to the original artistâs page (who is not, as far as we know, affiliated in any way with the copyright complainant), you will see that the image is labeled as free for non-commercial and commercial use, with no attribution required.
I agree these ârights holdersâ are scum. But their bot is not inept as claimed in the bb headline. And I donât just mean that it is technologically impressive that it matched this ink stainâI mean that filing claims on stuff the ârights holdersâ donât even own is not a bug, itâs a feature. There is no downside to their filing these spurious claims (apart from karmaâthe people responsible will have to live as cockroaches the next time around), and once in a while, perhaps more often than not, some poor chump will pay up when faced with an expensive lawsuit. The bot is doing just what it was meant to.
This is just a small preview of the world to come. We wonât have âpre-crimeâ but âpost-crimeâ where sophisticated algorithms will continually scan âBig Dataâ collected from sources we canât even imagine yet (thanks in no small part to IoT) and then we will find ourselves charged with crimes (granted it my be our grandchildren who face this problem).
What started with âtotal situational awarenessâ (I forget if that was the name of the initial program) of recording (24x7) a strip of road that was getting a lot of IED activity. There was no real intent to stop bombs in real time but to go back after a bomb went off to find out how it was done and, ideally, who was involved.
The concept of ârecord everything / search laterâ was carried over to InterWeb traffic shortly after the success of this approach was seen. Had Snowden not done what he did, most still wouldnât believe what the âFive Eyesâ were up to, let alone that so much data was being retained. But I digress.
These algorithms will be used for more than just copyright infringement, ex: person A gets charged with something where their associates can also be charged, and anyone who can be shown to have been with that person in the timeframe of that crime will then also be charged. The only evidence may be a single cell ping on the same tower and youâll have to prove you werenât an accomplice.
This is now available as Splatter Model, if one is so inclined as to generate memes at Meme Generator.
For those that didnât read the article.
A nuance I missed at first, is that itâs not that they are claiming ownership of an image that they donât have any claim over, but that the image that they are claiming ownership of itself uses a free image.
So 2600 uses portion of a free image of an ink blotch, trunkâs image uses those same ink blotches as a background for its picture of âharry potter in a vestâ, and the portion of the ink blotch that 2600 uses happens to be a bit from the trunk image that doesnât have any original (other than color shifting) content. And the bot found it.
Hilarious. (in a tragic way)
