<story><title>Save Netflix</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-netflix</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>&amp;quot;Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn&amp;#x27;t begin in 2016.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve often thought all web search engines would be considered grotesquely illegal if they hadn&amp;#x27;t been there since the beginning, but only started today. It is at times a fragile existence as it is even so.</text></item><item><author>stegosaurus</author><text>Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn&amp;#x27;t begin in 2016.&lt;p&gt;The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store).&lt;p&gt;Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.&lt;p&gt;I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it&amp;#x27;s never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll be fine as long as my old machines survive - but how are businesses going to produce mass market software when all the popular hardware is locked down?&lt;p&gt;Just to pick an arbitrary example - how does a project like Bitcoin take off when all we have are tivoized devices that won&amp;#x27;t run un&amp;quot;trusted&amp;quot; code? The community of a few hundred hardware hackers isn&amp;#x27;t big enough.&lt;p&gt;Not only that, despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots. It&amp;#x27;s a deliberate design decision to force the use of the network.&lt;p&gt;The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What&amp;#x27;s the next step?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>growt</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re right. In germany there is a law called &amp;quot;Leistungsschutzrecht&amp;quot; that makes it illegal to publish snippets of news stories of the big publishing houses especially in search results such as google news. After some months the publishers realised that now they weren&amp;#x27;t getting as much pageviews as before (go figure) and granted google an exclusive license to publish their stuff. So now there is a law that would require any new search engine to make deals with every major newspaper in germany.
On the other hand we do not have such a thing as fair use, so I imagine that image search is an endless ongoing lawsuit in germany, as every image thumbnail is illegal publishing of copyrighted material.</text></comment>
<story><title>Save Netflix</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-netflix</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>&amp;quot;Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn&amp;#x27;t begin in 2016.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve often thought all web search engines would be considered grotesquely illegal if they hadn&amp;#x27;t been there since the beginning, but only started today. It is at times a fragile existence as it is even so.</text></item><item><author>stegosaurus</author><text>Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn&amp;#x27;t begin in 2016.&lt;p&gt;The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store).&lt;p&gt;Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.&lt;p&gt;I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it&amp;#x27;s never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll be fine as long as my old machines survive - but how are businesses going to produce mass market software when all the popular hardware is locked down?&lt;p&gt;Just to pick an arbitrary example - how does a project like Bitcoin take off when all we have are tivoized devices that won&amp;#x27;t run un&amp;quot;trusted&amp;quot; code? The community of a few hundred hardware hackers isn&amp;#x27;t big enough.&lt;p&gt;Not only that, despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots. It&amp;#x27;s a deliberate design decision to force the use of the network.&lt;p&gt;The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What&amp;#x27;s the next step?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CamperBob2</author><text>Same with public libraries, for that matter.  Can you imagine the hue and cry that the major publishers would raise if someone were just now suggesting buying one copy of a book for the express purpose of lending it to hundreds of readers?  Or worse, having the government pay for it?&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;d be burning up the telephone lines to Washington and hiring lobbyists by the trainload.</text></comment>