Usually I restrain myself. Tonight I'm cranky.
I stay of out shit like this, usually, and this individual is a troll, and I know that. However, fandom aside, when you bring up art and free speech and copyright law and feminism, I’m going to respond. Usually angrily.
Rant ranty rant ahead…
dance-brainless-monkeys-dance:
Alright, the title is misleading because I’m not defending Tosh. The content he allows on his website is offensive and misogynistic so I gather the dude is an asshat. With that said, this whole incident with the Gishwhes “cheese” photo getting onto his site for millions to see is not his fault.
Correct. No one is at fault for this. The woman in the picture posted it herself publicly. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m guessing that Tosh and his staff can claim fair use because they’ve used the photo for commentary. The woman has every right to ask them to take it down, and they have every right to refuse. Misha Collins has every right to call Tosh out on it.
Not necessarily. Fair use doctrine is a defense that has to be determined by a court on a case by case basis, it’s not a part of copyright law you can look at and say this or that use is covered. Until a court issues a ruling on it, it’s just copyright infringement. And if it does go to court? Even things people usually assume are automatically considered fair use, like parody, have been ruled infringing.
In other words, Tosh could *claim* fair use for using this image, but that doesn’t mean a court would agree with him.
(IMHO* it wouldn’t be ruled a fair use and he probably wouldn’t try to claim it was. Among other reasons, it is very unlikely that an image used on a commercial website would be considered fair use.)
Still, what I advise any copyright holder to do instead of mounting a public campaign to get a © photo you don’t want people distributing removed is just to quietly send the web service (if it’s in the U.S.) it was reposted on a DMCA takedown notice informing them of the copyright infringement, which by law requires it to delete the image or disable access to it in a timely manner if they want to keep their safe harbor protections (what keeps the company from being legally liable for all the copyright infringing stuff their users upload to their accounts).
As for the rest of her post, yeah, ughh, rawr, they be trollin’ trollin’ trollin’…
*I am not an attorney, nor do I play one on Tumblr
Facebook Finally Removes Its Pro-Rape Pages
YAY!
It only took two long months, over 186,000 signatures on a petition to Mark Zuckerberg, and finally a furious Twitter campaign to get Facebook to remove Pages that graphically celebrated and encouraged rape and sexual violence.
This time, anyway.
Warning: some readers might find the rest of this article and its links disturbing.
Unfortunately this was not the first time Facebook had to be externally pressured to enforce its own Terms around the flashpoint topic of sexual violence. And no, we’re not talking about consensual spanky-spanky between adults. (I’m sure Facebook would have taken that Page down much sooner.)
The first round was in August, when people demanded that Facebook take down a so-called “rape humor” page called “You know she’s playing hard to get when your [SIC] chasing her down an alleyway.”
Facebook defended keeping the rape page as a sort-of everyday, harmless thing, and in a statement to the BBC likened the pro-rape page to “pub jokes.” (Remind me to never go drinking with Facebook.)
How to Annoy Facebook
Are you pissed off at Facebook for, whatever? (Yes you are.) Users of the popular message board Reddit have undertaken a systematic campaign to annoy Facebook using arcane European privacy laws that force the company to mail their personal data to them on a CD. Heroes, one and all.
A popular thread on Reddit features instructions on “how to annoy Facebook.” The instructions are as follows:
1. Open this site:https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=data_requests
2. Enter your personal information
3. Make a reference to the following law: “Section 4 DPA + Art. 12 Directive 95/46/EG”
4. Click on SendThis is annoying to Facebook because the page is a “personal data request” form, which requires that Facebook send you your personal data, in the mail, burnt onto a CD.
Provided you’re European, that is. See, in Europe, where they still have the quaint 20th-century value known as “privacy,” there are laws known as “right to access,” which requires companies to promptly send customers’ all of the personal information they collect on them if asked. (See thisForbes article for more details.) A group called Europe v. Facebook recently started a campaignto get Europeans to request their data from Facebook, which likely spawned the Reddit post. Now the campaign’s been so successful that Europeans who request their data from Facebook are being warned that “we are experiencing a significant delay” in processing them.
Good job, internet! You know the last big tech company whose business model required it to send out thousands of CDs was AOL, and look where they are now.
Why You Never Really Log Out of Facebook
Facebook admits it went too far. The social network is quietly retracting a cookie that continued to report your Facebook user ID even after you “logged out” of the site. But it’s not sorry about five other cookies that persist after you sign off. What, you didn’t think Facebook would ever let you actually for real seriously 100 percent sign out, did you?
When Australian programmer Nik Cubrilovicfirst blogged on Sunday about how Facebook logout didn’t seem to actually, uh, log out, the company went into damage control mode, insisting that “Facebook does not track users across the web,” which was pretty funny given that Facebook has a tracking feature its CEO literally calls “Facebook Across the Web.” The company also said, “logged out cookies… are used for safety and protection…”
Except it turns out one cookie wasn’t used for “safety and protection,” as a Facebook engineer has admitted to Cubrilovic now that the press storm is subsiding. One cookie, “a_user,” continued to report your user ID back to Facebook after you logged out, until you shut down your browser entirely. The cookie was only visible to Facebook, but the site could have used it to track your visits to other sites if it wished, since a great many websites feature “Facebook Connect” widgets that load content from facebook.com — transmitting cookies to Facebook each time they do so.
The social network, to its credit, now destroys “a_user” on logout.
But there are five other cookies that still remain after you “log out” of Facebook, and that stick around even after you restart your browser. Cubrilovic runs down what each of them is ostensibly for; Facebook says they, variously, track failed login attempts to thwart hackers, track new account creations to thwart spammers, track total logins to identify computers in internet cafés, remember your browser language, remember your device dimensions, and report the time, to the milisecond, of you last few browser requests, for performance reasons.
The problem is that, whatever it says about the intent behind these cookies, Facebook could be using — or decide in the future to use — some of them to track us for less noble reasons. The milisecond request log, for example, could be trivially traced back to a specific Facebook user using the company’s server logs, as Cubrilovic points out. And given its long history of rolling back user privacy, do you really trust the social network? Cubrilovic:
These cookies, by the very purpose they serve, uniquely identify the browser being used - even after logout. As a user, you have to take Facebook at their word that the purpose of these cookies is only for what is being described.
Trust is nice, but concrete protections are nicer: Log in to Facebook using something likeincognito mode, install a privacy plugin like disconnect.me to minimize the power of Facebook’s cookies, and/or manually clear Facebook cookies in your browser preferences. Isn’t social networking fun?!
A continuation of my earlier post about BRUT’s “Some men deserve to be slapped” ad campaign and Facebook game, where failing to meet their definition of masculinity means you should be hunted down and slapped, but OMG IT’S ALL IN GOOD FUN….
Whoever run’s BRUT’s Facebook page had hit the “Like” button on the guy mocking my name. After I called them on it, it was mysteriously un-liked by the next time I went back checking for replies.
Srsly, I’ve had it up to yar with the “omg liek, they’re being tongue in cheek and you just don’t get humor!” and “It’s okay, they’re being ironic!” excuses for casual racism, sexism and homophobia. No, really, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and trading on homophobia for humor is just homophobia.
More on “Brut: The New Masculinity Police” from Ryan O’Hanlon at The Good Men Project Magazine
“This game is just the tip of the iceberg of problems with the ad campaign, which implies that Brut can be used as an actual weapon against things sometimes associated with women (and wait, since when is badmintongirlie?). The campaign still clings to that same narrow image of masculinity every advertiser has perpetuatedfor the past century, but this feels even more desperate than the rest. Companies and advertisers who can’t figure out how to appeal to men in this millennium aren’t gonna evolve quietly. No, they’ll fling a bunch of shit everywhere, stirring up as much hostility as possible to promote a fabricated gender war that exists solely to sell products.”
Willow Palin Facebook Posts: Homophobic Slurs, Curse Words & More (PHOTOS)
“Willow Palin, the 16-year-old daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, wrote multiple Facebook posts containing homophobic slurs such as “faggot” on Sunday night…”
Like, totally.
QuitFacebookDay.com
Facebook has been facing yet another backlash after announcing further changes to its privacy policy during its f8 developer conference last month. Many users take issue with the social network’s now-default opt-out inclusion of its users in new features and services and “How do I delete my Facebook account” has become a top search suggestion on Google.
But while Milan and Dee quote a number of sources (including us) on what alternatives there might be to Facebook, the reality is that few exist. We’ve all heard of Diaspora now, but do we really believe that the future of social networking lies in an alternative that needs users to have their own server and install code?
Milan has an amusing take on what he’ll do instead of continuing on with Facebook:
At this point I’d rather use 4chan to connect with my family and friends than Facebook. It might be full of pictures of prolapsed anuses and Japanese cartoon porn, but at least it has tripcodes and a healthy dialog (based in action, not words) around the evolving nature of online identity and privacy.via ReadWriteWeb
plz2reblog<3 (even if you’re not going to delete your facebook).
