HN user
I get your point but let's keep in mind that the AIs that we have today are a result of our world, they are trained with data expressed by humans, their input is human thoughts, emotions, and everything in between. So there is some kind of religious element to it I would say; AI is made in our spirit. And if you think about it, it could only be made out of OUR spirit. If we accept this, then you will have answers to your questions.
This is giving me a bit of a Zizek-ian "wisdom" feeling. E.g. in "Putting things off for the future is the biggest waste of a life. You deny yourself the present by promising the future." one can make the counter-argument of the entire marshmallow experiment with children where the whole point is to actually put things off for the future!
Because not all the network was down/inaccessible; only KPN. So I'm guessing the alternative numbers were on the still reachable networks.
Disagree. A constant stream of news unbalanced towards the negative doesn't necessarily reflect what is "reality". Reality contains as many positives as negatives!
Then several infringement cases have to be opened, in each country according to its specific copyright laws. This may drown the author in costs and time spent to fight these claims that he/she may be discouraged and shut the business down. However this orchestrated "attack" would require coordination from the accusing parties. Further the complexity of such cases requires highly educated lawyers educated in law in cyberspace which means that they are expensive. That is why copyright laws cannot be solved easily in a decentralized way, if they are deemed to be a problem of course. I would claim even that there is no economic feasibility in such infringement claims i.e. there's no money to be made in them directly (acquired from the infringing party) and since the documents are public already, they hold implicitly no monetary value, thus even indirectly there is no money to be made there.
So what are two essential differences from google?
This is the real question. He could do it legitimately, as google doesn't really care where your income comes from. Hence the implication of google in this story as a party.
"Seems like it may be just one guy." One cannot make this statement weaker. We don't know and we cannot know now whether it is just one guy.
Mules are a possible answer. I don't buy it either.
Doesn't the owner first have to claim copy rights on the content for it to be illegal?
They probably did, but someone made the mistake to put them somewhere where they were publicly available. Also the "russian" made tools available for taking down the content, tools which according to the article were working in an effective and timely manner.
Anyone remembers something akin to "TV tax" ? It was a tax paid to sustain national TV (media) in a large scale, which provides them the possibility of being independent and not struggle with financing problems. It is simple, and it works, but I guess it's not an option anymore. Without a guaranteed unbiased source of money we cannot claim to have independent news or news that serves global interests (with global meaning the pool of contributors which in this case is close to global). Local news are not interesting. If you want to know what happened in your neighborhood, go out and ask your neighbors, talk to them.