GN used Bloomberg clips of US Gov officials speaking on AI chip matters, fully under fair use.
And Bloomberg did a DMCA takedown through youtube, copystrike in parlance which pulled the video down for a week. GN had no recourse other than to wait and counterclaim.
Week timed out, Bloomberg did nothing but be the bully.
As always, Louis is being a bit sensationalist and stretches the truth to whip up outrage. Contrary to what he claims, GN could have easily quoted the president without Bloomberg's video, and that would be fine. "that outlet now has a monopoly on who is able to quote the president" is just a totally false premise. Moreover he tries to argue that GN's video falls under fair use, because it's a 1 minute clip in a 3 hour video. However it's not hard to think of a rebuttal to this. If news organizations can copy each other's clips of official speeches, who would bother going out and making such recordings? Usually how this would be resolved would be by citing precedents, but he doesn't bother citing any.
I disagree. HN discussions seem to have wildly liberal views of US copyright law and, in particular, fair use. Gamer's Nexus is surely commercial because they either make money (1) directly from YouTube, (2) directly from adverts / product placements, or (3) indirectly from merch.
I agree with the parent poster's point: "If news organizations can copy each other's clips of official speeches, who would bother going out and making such recordings?" When you see a head of state (or other VIP) making a speech and they show the media, there are normally 10+ different camera crews. If competitors can claim "fair use" for any of that footage, why would so many different media outlets send camera crews? The question answers itself.
A good counterpoint for fair use would be Wikipedia. They are very conservative about claiming fair use. I assume they have had pro bono (or not) lawyers review their policy and uses to confirm the strength of their claims. After hundreds of hours of reading Wiki, I can recall only once or twice ever seeing an artifact claim fair use. I think it was a severely downscaled photo of a no-longer-living person.
I think Wikipedia's relatively conservative (one might say erring on the side of safety) stance on free use is easy to understand when considering that they have a bank account stuffed to the brim with cash, minimal spend on hosting and developers compared to income and savings, and copyright lawsuits are one of very few of their exposed legal surfaces.
Additionally, folks don't like to rely on free use because the tests, though they have been well articulated, are inherently subjective and must be decided by a judge or jury. It's the sort of defense one wants to have available, but not depend on if possible, as a result.
Re: commercial use, in the US, just because a work is commercial does not automatically mean it loses fair use protection. Commerciality is only one factor of the four to be considered. Commercial parodies, for example, can still be fair use, especially where the work is transformative. IOW commerciality may weigh against fair use, but it is not dispositive. Google v Oracle involved fair use which was clearly commercial, for example.
GN's case would also be helped by the nature of the information being factual as opposed to artistic.
There are a lot of factors in whether or not an org can successfully take something to trial. Venue, judge, representation, jury selection, evidentiary rulings, all kinds of stuff. An imbalance in representation could easily swing it. So when I say that I think GN has a reasonable case, it's just me using the Supreme Court's rubric and some theoretical idealized court room which doesn't really exist. All I can say is that a good job could be done in arguing it. Whether or not GN could afford that work, or would want to, IDK.
Perhaps you should re-read what I wrote for comprehension. 50% of their spending may be on tech, but their total spending is only 4% of their income. Apparently I'm more familiar with their financial statements than you.
I think people misunderstand the 4 tests. They are not in-or-out tests. Commercial use doesn't mean it's not fair use. Each factor is weighed against others.
In this case this case the purpose is for critique or review and it justifies fair use since the clip is only a small part of the video, GN isn't in the same business as BB and isn't substitutive for BB's work, and the clip was a recording of a factual event and had didn't have a substantial creative element.
>Brother, wait until you learn about the associate press.
The same AP that licenses content to its members and charges non-members for the privilege of reusing their content?
"Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative. As part of their cooperative agreement with the AP, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. "
> GN's use seems to satisfy all four factors.
It's weakest at #1 and #4.
#1: it's a commercial piece of work (so far as I can tell GN isn't a non-profit), and the use of the clip specifically isn't critical to the work. If you're critiquing a movie or something, and need to show a screengrab to get your point across, then that makes sense, but if the purpose of the video is just to establish "Trump said this", the video isn't really needed.
#4: see above regarding making recordings of official speeches.
Moreover I'm not trying to argue that GN is definitely not fair use, only that there's a plausible case otherwise. If there's actual disagreement over it's fair use or not, then the DMCA process is working as intended, and Bloomberg isn't abusing it as Louis implies.
Yeah yeah, everyone enforces their copyrights to the maximum extent possible. But this does not prevent massive amounts of both licensed copying and free use copying. The framework I outlined above is from the US Supreme Court's rulings on fair use so applies for everyone in the US.
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Re: #1, GN's work while commercial is an educational investigative journalism / documentary piece which are well established users of Free Use protection. GN's use is absolutely transformative.
#4: Bloomberg would have to prove a financial loss to have standing. That would mean that GN must have no other option than to use Bloomberg's clip, and pay the license, which I don't think would fly. GN would have just produced the segment differently.
With regard to whether or not a work is transformative, the Supreme Court’s formulation from Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, a case about parody, asks whether the new work merely supersedes the original, or instead adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message.
A practical way to think about it is this:
What is the new use for?
Courts look first at whether the secondary use serves a different purpose from the original, not just whether it looks different. Uses for criticism, commentary, parody, scholarship, search/indexing, or other new functions often have a stronger transformative argument.
Is there new expression, meaning, or message?
That still matters, but after Warhol, a claimed new meaning by itself is usually not enough, especially when the secondary use is being exploited in a similar commercial market as the original. The Court emphasized that the inquiry is tied to the specific use at issue and whether that use has a distinct purpose.
Does it substitute for the original in the same market?
Even if the new work has some new meaning, it looks less transformative if it is serving basically the same licensing or audience function as the original. That overlaps with factor 4 as well.
How much was taken, and was that amount justified by the new purpose?
A use is more defensible when it takes only what is reasonably needed for the transformative aim. In parody, for example, some copying may be necessary to “conjure up” the original, but not more than needed.
All of which I think can fairly be evaluated in GN's favor. Though as you point out, the lawyers are paid to argue each point.
They did have the video uploaded to archive.org (or at least link to someone else who did) and gave permission to anyone else to repost it. Which is how I saw it, some rando burner account on YouTube :)
Equally important, it was of a US government official speaking, not content Bloomberg specifically created, such as one of their employees giving analysis.
The problem with fair use is that the rules are subject to challenge and interpenetration. Defending an argument for fair use costs a lot of money, and involves significant risk.
The content creators know this, and they'll leverage their money and legal teams to sue for copyright violation, ignoring fair use. Fair use is a valid defense, but the defense must be presented and adjudicated, and that takes time and money.
There's a non-zero possibility of that actually happening. It's already happening in Europe. Trump has mentioned the idea of a JV with Chinese companies. It is possible for this to happen in the upcoming Trump-Xi meeting. Chinese companies have started pursuing more foreign investments as a way to avoid "involution" -- fierce and unprofitable domestic competition. Their profit margins when going aboard is considerably better than at home. Maybe it won't be $33k but it might be $45k, which for a car with those kinds of specs, it would be a steal. China's EV advantage doesn't come just from labor costs but also from vertical integration of the entire supply chain. The mining stage is pretty low margin but China does it because it enables the next stage, which is batteries where profits are better, and then you get to even more profitable stage with cars, etc.
Just a dumb estimate. I'm just making an uneducated guess on what the car would cost if it was assembled using American labor with Chinese parts. I honestly don't know what the actual price would be. It's very possible for it to be 33K.
I would be OK if we tariff or effectively ban Chinese EVs (as is the case now) for a little while to give our auto industry time to retool and catch up. The current situation with a ban but no long term EV adoption plan in place is just incredibly short sighted. We could end up like certain developing nations that has an indigenous auto industry that are nothing more than glorified assembler of foreign cars or the American consumer continues to buy cars that are more expensive and less performant to use and operate while making all of us vulnerable to oil price shocks.
So instead of being able to buy a 10K BYD car, Americans have to buy 30k cars that are inferior in many aspects.
It would be easier to just pay fired American Auto workers directly over protecting inefficient auto companies. I have no sympathy for Ford who keeps making the F-350 or whatever bigger and more expensive every single year. Nobody needs a $90,000 truck
The only way to get American auto manufacturers to step up their game is completion. Worked when the Japanese cars came, American car quality improved dramatically in response because it had to.
And the quality's back through the floor again. How many recalls have the domestic slovenly-built Big Three had to put up with in the last ~6 years? Ford alone is showing just how bad the UAW's building on the factory floor.
The amount of trim and garbage I've had to take our domestic-built Ford Escape back in for service and factory bodge fixes for is staggeringly high. Meanwhile, my Mexican-built Fusion? Rock solid.
Even Ford has fallen out heavily from just 20 years ago. It used to be much more common to see the Ford badge in Europe when the Ka, Fiesta, Focus line-up was around.
Thinking now the only times I see the Ford badge are on work vehicles like vans or the odd Mustang Mach-E (well, not literally the Ford badge but the Mustang one).
I haven't seen (or at least noticed) any of the new cars in the Ford line-up in Sweden: Puma, Capri, Kuga, Bronco, etc.
I wouldn't encourage that and I don't think it will be necessary. In Europe, most Chinese brands aren't selling exactly well, while domestic manufacturers really sped up their timelines and pushed for competitive pricing, so generally I don't think there's much of a demand for Chinese EVs, except for the genuinely nice brands, like XPeng and Nio.
There's also the issue, it that in most places in Europe outside of Scandinavia, the charger infrastructure is lacking, and regular people are quite rightly averse of getting an EV if you step out of the tech bubble.
I have a friend who's a high-level manager in automotive retail, and he said he thinks Chinese EVs will be like Chinese smartphones - yes they are nice, and cheaper, but still the market looks like 70% of it is controlled by Apple/Samsung, and the rest of the manufacturers fight over what's left
I don't know about EVs specifically, but there seems to be demand in Europe for Chinese PHEVs: "Chinese automakers nearly double Europe market share to 8% in February as PHEVs drive growth" [1].
I mean it's a bit hard to take away hard data from just monthly sales across the whole of Europe. 10% is a lot, but far from overwhelming, and individual popular models can create big changes in overall stats.
For example, the Brits love their SUVs, and the Jaecoo undercut the market, so that particular model has been selling very well.
I think we should wait and see for stats to stabilize over time. Chinese smartphones did something similar - initially they were way better for way cheaper, but other manufactures adapted, so they failed to grab huge chunks of the market.
The report uses the number of newly registered vehicles AFAIU and correlates them to the total % of Chinese vehicles sold, so that's not really the monthly sales but the general trend, no?
Market cap amounts to 10% as an absolute figure but that isn't what I find most important from reading that article - it is the trend I find intriguing, which doubles or triples by each year, so if such or similar trend continues, Chinese manufacturers will penetrate into the market substantially more.
They innovate at much higher pace at much lower price points and at pretty high quality as the evidence we have so far suggests. So IMO it's going to be hell of a ride for European manufacturers to adapt - they need to start moving faster and deliver at much lower cost. This means complete restructuring which I find hard to believe it will happen any time soon.
Well, I wouldn't extrapolate much from this. Look at what happened to entry level EVs - brands like BYD and MG undercut VW, Kia and others, and their cars came fully loaded with extras missing from Western models.
In response VW and co. dropped prices, so Chinese cars are not that much cheaper again.
Just to understand where I'm coming from - if the Chinese would put out a better car for less money, I would buy it in a heartbeat. But from listening to reviews, as well expert opinion, you don't get better stuff for the same money just by buying Chinese
I don't really see that, perhaps if you could give a reference to the price points it would be clearer but new cars, especially the ones coming from German manufacturers, have never been so expensive. Mid-range vehicle used to be around 35k EUR few years ago and today it is no less than 50k. Upper mid-range is 60-70k EUR. And premium is almost 100k EUR. Chinese vehicles are almost at half of that price point, even with the tariffs that were imposed on them.
> I've heard that mechanics raised similar concenrns about the quality of rust protection as well as the thickness of steel on BYDs.
They have to comply with European standards so something like Euro NCAP safety tests. BYD in particular scores 5 stars across their models so "thickness of steel" sounds exaggerated and subjective.
Wrt rust the most notable example of that issue is Tesla. Many ADAC reports have been made pointing out exactly that problem, however, I haven't seen the same for Chinese models. They may exist though although my personal gut feeling is that this is also FUD.
The charging infrastructure has changed a lot in the last few years. You can very comfortably travel all the way across Europe without even thinking about where to charge. There is a Tesla Supercharger every 50 miles or even less all the way from the Netherlands via Germany to Austria. And the same via Belgium to the South of France. And that's only Tesla, you also have Ionity building chargers, and Fastned, and you see more and more chargers at Shell and BP petrol stations.
It's been pretty great the past 3 years at least, just last summer I drove from Stockholm -> North Italy and had no anxiety about finding chargers on our way.
Here in spain i suddenly see a lot of them (chinese brands) and not in a bader meinhof way. They are advertising more and i see a lot more on the streets. I was picked up from the station by a BYD. Not sure about the numbers, but something is definitely happening.
I think they do have a moat because they dominate the supply chain not just in the raw material and processing but also in some of the actual technical experience, i.e. the experience of running such processing facilities, and also a monopoly on making the equipment that you need to build such a facility. They put export controls on those equipment and restricted their citizens who work in the rare earths industry from traveling aboard.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
I have worked with the Chinese REE industry, and we've often bumped heads and shared ideas together with them and I can confidently tell you, the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already. What they do have is executing rarely-used techniques confidently at scale, but all of that is already often published in the West. The only reason the West hasn't done it is because these techniques are less profitable, and, surprise, the CCP actually forces processors to minimize ecological damage, which further bumps up the costs to the point only large-scale players can exist making such lower profits. You'll often find them using some obscure process alteration that was published minutely in the West.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
> the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
> my experience with theory is that it includes time and effort considerations
I would never disagree with you here. But the point is that the time and effort you spend on theory doesn't translate to time and effort spent on practice.
What I mean is that since the peak of American REE in the 1970s and 1980s(?) a lot of the engineers who have working knowledge are retired. There's nothing theoretical we can't dig up but I think there will need to be a number of years for the US to catch up in terms of craft knowledge or "metis" (as Dan Wang likes to call it) and processing equipment and plants.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
No, you're right. China, and even India and Russia, also do not have the same talent problem of the West, in that there is an undersupply of engineers, especially in the geological, processing and chemical sectors. In the US, the average age of the chemical process engineer was touching 50 a few years back. The average age of a process safety engineer is well past 50. While Russia and India lose their technical talent to brain drain, the Chinese govt has done quite a lot in trying to reverse that.
The real barriers are talent and the regulation vs profit motive balance. What I mentioned in my previous comment was effectively an effect of the intersection of the two - you can't find novel ways of processing harmful substances without having the technical talent to find these out in the first place, nor without giving them a free reign after deprioritizing profit.
Let's take arsenic for instance, a substance that's a harmful byproduct arising out of most mining operations. We already have the technology in the West to lock away arsenic into glass, but a.) apart from the big ones, most companies are unaware of them, and b.) even if they were aware of it, the tech is a significant line item that shies investors and companies away from investing into it.
> What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be?
Never. Yes, there are a few companies still engaged in trying to secure REE supply (Glencore being the most notable), but due to Western regulatory and policy limbo, the answer is never. For this to change, you need regulators open to experimentations and a concerted effort by the government in trying to reestablish REE independence, both in extraction and in processing, but I have yet to see either happening. It's telling when frankly the US is the country in the West most likely to catch up still, but the gap is deeper than the Darien Gap .
Japan is also particularly well positioned because China had used rare earths against them first in 2014. Since then they've created basically a strategic rare earths reserve and done research on how to build some components without them. It's not an absolute solution but between this and future development in friendlier nations, I don't think the rare earth risk is as acute for Japanese automakers.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
> People hold up China as an example but China was not displacing any local industry including its own. It's incredibly easy to do that because it's greenfield. Fast forward 20 to 30 years when new thinking might impact BYD or CATL's bottom line? They may not look so forward-thinking.
I would add that despite joint ventures, China's domestic internal combustion engine industry never really caught up. In fact their best engines were made by wholly domestic companies but those were not nearly as good as those made by Western and Japanese companies.
As Warren Buffet noted over a decade ago, BEV is an opportunity for China to simply skip over all of that and just leapfrog everyone else. So it's even better than greenfield. It's green field for them while allowing them to completely disrupt existing foreign competitors.
> A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.
This makes me really curious because that behavior seems very maladaptive for a species. That leads me to wonder if something else, ie. the environment or domestication, is leading to this behavior rather than pigs being really, really prone to wiping out their own species. Does anyone know why they do this in a farm environment?
Pigs breed like rabbits so their evolutionary path hasn't been to ensure individuals survive at the highest possible rate, their path was to have a dozen babies at a time so that even if 80% of them get killed or eaten, their population still grows and thrives. For a farmer losing 20% of their pigs because the mother sat on babies and suffocated them is a massive loss of money, for a wild pig it doesn't matter as much because 3x more will get eaten by predators and there is already another dozen on the way within a week or two of giving birth to the first litter.
Some of the loss likely is due to keeping them penned up, however there are also losses for not keeping them penned up and letting baby pigs run among a herd of many adult pigs, some of which will attempt to kill piglets, especially females who have not had piglets yet. Pigs can be absolute viscous as hell and will readily eat other living animals if they think they can get away with it, including other pigs, and some mother pigs have been known to cannibalize their young even under ideal situations. Pig farmers have themselves been killed by pigs from passing out or getting knocked out in pig pens and the pigs seeing them as a free meal not to be wasted.
This is exactly how effective censorship works. For example, what most people don't understand about Chinese censorship is that the foundation of their system is that everything is attributable to someone eventually. So they start by targeting anonymity. Then when something they don't like is published and gains traction, the originating party and the major distributors are punished -- sometimes very publicly. The chilling effect is that people will learn to self censor. Oh and they keep the rules really vague so you always err on the side of caution.
CBS self censoring is basically the same thing.
The Chinese government can then say "What censorship?" or "It's rare" and now the FCC can do the same.
Playing whack-a-mole is not a good strategy for censorship. The chilling effect of self censorship is the winning strategy.
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