Pat @Pat@qoto.org

@mc

>"A plot for a sci-fi movie?"

Yeah, that would make a great plot for a scifi. I've been seeing more and more scifi's recently about topics related to the pandemic.

It's ironic that I never really listened to all of the lyrics of that song.

"...it's good advice that you just didn't take..."

@freepeoplesfreepress

More people died yesterday from COVID-19 than died in the deadliest mass shooting so far this year.

Everyday more people die from COVID-19 than die from any mass shooting you've heard about in the news recently.

#COVID-19 #respirator #mask #vax

@freepeoplesfreepress

>"Gun-related deaths from preventable, intentional, and undetermined causes totaled 48,830 in 2021..."

Nearly 10X that many deaths happened during that same period because people failed to wear a respirator.

That's 469,966 preventable deaths in 2021.

#COVID19 #respirator #mask

@freemo

Maybe the cat getting run over was bad karma for the cat because he was chasing all those friendly, harmless, trustworthy birds.

@freemo

>"Nope, and please dont bring that up again or I will have to report you."

I don't understand.

>"No mine are about perfectly ordinary friendly birds that absolutely dont spy on you. In fact they are so obviously not spying that they are a perfect choice to tell all your secrets to!"

I'm pretty sure this is sarcasm, so maybe the first sentence was, too.

Did you ever hear the story about the cat that a spy agency put a bug in, with an antenna in the tail.

They released it and it immediately got run over by a car.

@freemo

Yours is about spy birds, right?

@freemo

Is this related to this story?

https://qoto.org/@Pat/110526950046160847

@gojonnes

I didn't watch the video, but I assume that clocks turn clockwise because sundials move that way in the northern hemisphere.

* "were", not "we're"

There's a huge plot hole in this episode. The whole point of the thing is that the word "serve" has two different meanings in English but the aliens don't speak English. So in their language the same word wouldn't have the two different meanings, so the whole point of the plot twist doesn't make any sense. Also they are using cryptographers to try to decode the alien language which is stupid because the aliens wouldn't use cryptography to write their book, it would just be encoded in their language, not encrypted.

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

The Twilight Zone, To Serve Man (1962)

A lot of people rate this episode as one of their favorite Twilight Zone episodes. It's about a first contact with an alien species that comes to Earth. I recently found out that this was based on a short story of the same name written by Damon Knight a dozen years earlier and it pretty much follows very closely to that story, accept in the short story the aliens are humanoid pigs while in the Twilight Zone episode they're just tall, 350-pound humanoids called Kanimits.

The Kanimits don’t talk like humans, they use a voice synthesizer. They promise the people of Earth that they will share their advanced technology with humans for the betterment of humanity. But people are skeptical and they give the alien representative a lie detector test which the alien passes.

This episode is highly recommended.

- - - - -

Accessible video description:

a black and white video of one of the aliens who is seated with wires hooked up to him taking a lie detector test, the alien is dressed in a white robe and has a large, bald head with dark circles under his eyes, two humans are in the room operating the equipment which shows the needles of the chart recorder on a polygraph machine.

(fair use clip from the episode in which the alien demonstrates how to pass a polygraph test.)

- - - -
#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #ET #extraterrestrial #firstcontact #epicurian #UN #crypto #LostInTranslation #TruthBeTold

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Wouldn't it be ironic if COVID-19 was actually 100% fatal and that these initial infections during the first few years of the pandemic we're just the infection phase of a virus that goes into a dormant stage for about a decade, only to re-emerge and kill every single person who got infected?

Wouldn't that be ironic?

#COVID19 #respirators #N95 #pandemic #irony #vax #masks #CDC

@freemo

>"And no, saying that "I put all the stuff i stole in a 3x2 grid" would not be considered transformative."

Yeah, I don't know what the courts would say and that's the problem. It's really vague.

I know a lot of it has to do with who the parties of the case are. If they are black, they are more likely to lose the case. If they are part of the Washington elite, the courts are more likely rule in their favor.

This vagueness is why I always try to stay well within the limits when I post stuff. When I do movie reviews, the clips I show are well under 10% of the original work and I usually do a custom arrangement of them and mark my trailers as "unauthorized" (when I remember) so people will know that it is something new and not just a trailer put out by the film distributor.

If I was one of the privileged Washington elites, I wouldn't have to do that because I'd know that courts would be on my side.

In any case, like others have said here, nobody cares because it's like maybe dozen people who actually see stuff on most Mastodon instances - it's not worth the effort to even bother with a DMCA.

@coyoty @nyquildotorg @stux

@freemo

But those were two cases in which the entire work was reproduced in full quality under fair use. (The Sony case was not just time-shifting, it was copying for personal use. People are allowed to make backup copies to play over and over again as long as it's for their own personal use.)

Stux's toot incorporated those images, but his criticism, the way he grouped them together; that was transformative as well as a critique.

@coyoty @nyquildotorg @stux

@freemo

>" ...but no, you can **not** reproduce something in full simply because you want to critique it.. show a court case that says that, none exists!"

Here are two:

- Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.

- Blanch v. Koons

@coyoty @nyquildotorg @stux

@freemo

If the purpose of the reproduction is to harm the marketability of the work against the copyright holder, then yeah, that is not allowed.

But if they show a high-quality reproduction and say, "look at how high-quality this is, people should go buy one", the reproduction doesn't harm the market for the thing, then it's fine.

Google's reproductions actually harm the copyright holders, because people often get to see those images and sometimes that's it, they don't visit the site itself and then the copyright holder loses becasue of that. But SCOTUS has said that that is just fine. So it should be fine for someone to reproduce a work as I've indicated above.

@coyoty @nyquildotorg @stux

@freemo

>"In fact fair use **always** requires a low-quality reproduction as a universal criteria among others."

No that's not true. What if you are critiquing how good the quality is? Then you need to show that.

@coyoty @nyquildotorg @stux

@freemo

There are no "4 criteria" hard and fast rules. There have been dozens of court opinions on this.

The whole purpose of fair use is to allow criticism of works, and to let people reproduce works for educational purposes.

@coyoty @nyquildotorg @stux

@freemo

Fair use allows people to reproduce copyrighted material for purposes of criticism. Stux was okay until the last sentence, which is questionable. He was critiquing the material. If that last sentence was meant satirically, then he's okay with that, too. But if he was seriously asking people to reproduce the material for use other than for fair use purposes, then that's problematic.

As long as he says something about it, or even implies something about it, that's fair use.

Google reproduces copyrighted images all the time in their search results at a fairly high resolution and SCOTUS has ruled that that is fine.

That's my opinion. 🙂

@coyoty @nyquildotorg @stux

@peterdrake

I want door Number 4, Monty.

#conflation #extension