It's legal armageddon as NBC, CBS and Fox sue Dish Network over its new DVR feature allowing users to automatically skip ads, and in response, Dish sues them right back - and adds in ABC for good measure.

DrJulianBashir · 1 day

Taking out the broadcast symbol but leaving the rest of the frame is not the same thing at all. You are just ignoring part of the broadcast by taking out the frame entirely. There is no law anywhere that says if you view part of a copyrighted work, you have to view the whole thing. And in any case, the program is not for copyright reasons even considered the same thing as the commercials that come in between its breaks. The commercial is not part of the show. If it were they would sell DVDs with commercials in the breaks.

If the company showing you the television programming has the right to say the commercials must be accepted by the DVR and recorded, then they should also have the right to make it impossible to turn the TV off during commercials. Or here's something even crazier: by that line of reasoning you could then argue that a person had to watch not just part of an episode but the whole thing because there is a sweet cliffhanger that will boost the ratings thereby increasing ad revenues in the future. To have a DVR that never recorded the last 10 minutes of a show would also be "changing how it was originally meant to be viewed" in such a way that it reduces the possible later revenues of the ad-selling company, just as is being claimed here. Obviously a person is free not to watch any part of this broadcast, so why should the commercials be different?

By the way copyright is not concerned with sponsorship. It is concerned with authorship. It allows you to determine when and how the work will be distributed, not what parts of the work the viewer may choose to ignore.

realitysandwiches · 1 day

I'm not German or Jewish but I find this claim

Many suggest that by remembering your grandparents as loved family members, you also accept to adopt their guilt if they were alive at the time of the holocaust, supported the persecution of Jews or did nothing to prevent it.

to be a little BS. It would be one thing if Jewish persecution in Germany were still a huge problem, but as far as I know it isn't? Which is not very far. I don't see how that stance serves anyone's goals. You should recognize what the people who came before you did and recognize what effect that has on your life today. Like in the case of slavery in the US, contrary to what dumbasses think, much of the poverty and hardship of the black experience today can directly be traced to slavery and insitutionalized racism. So it sort of does make sense to say some of the guilt can be inherited if you are a white person that is gaining a comparative advantage in society even today. But I don't know of anything analogous in the Jewish communities of Germany, and in Israel, well that's now a separate place and community entirely. But of course I say all this as a non-German gentile, so hey maybe there's something I don't know.

visual77 · 1 day

There is that factor. But the wildlings that Qhorin would fight are not all unskilled or unarmed. In fact I would guess quite the opposite. I think my point is that I am diminishing the role of a specific set of abilities that is collectively called "skill". The knights would be good at a certain type of fighting whereas rangers would be good at another type of fighting. Someone who has been fighting more or less continuously for years is gonna be able to hold their own against even a great knight, I think.

AKnightWhoSaidNi · 1 day

I think they just generally did not get along. I can easily believe a guy like Robert would make decisions for petty reasons like this.

visual77 · 1 day

I'd disagree. I would guess that there are a lot of random dudes out there who are as good as or better at fighting than the famous warriors like the Cleganes or Barristan. Mainly because for great warriors, they don't seem to spend a lot of time fighting. Whereas a mercenary is always fighting somebody. Being clever and fighting dirty will win you a swordfight. As a matter of fact if you read some stuff on modern recreations of medieval European swordplay, they say in manuals or treatises to fight dirty- your sword is not your only weapon.

visual77 · 1 day

In addition to the other stuff people said about single combat, if you'll recall in aDwD Mance disguised as Rattleshirt schooled Jon in a sword fight. Like it was basically no contest as I remember. I don't know where Jon goes in the rankings but Jon is pretty good and so is Rattleshirt, and he was way better than both of them.

Does that make him on the level of Barristan the Bold or Kingslayer, or Sword of the Morning? The way Jon was describing it, Mance does seem like he could go toe-to-toe with them, especially because of how fast he is. Plus he is a tricky fucker as we have often seen. Also you gotta remember, those knights are just the famous guys. Purely in terms of swordsmanship you're bound to meet random night's watch guys and mercs who just from sheer field experience could take any one of them. One thing that's weird about knights is that for great warriors, they don't seem to spend a whole lot of time fighting. Yeah when a threat to their liege comes along they fight, but think about guys like Bronn and Mance and Qhorin Halfhand, those guys spend all of their time tracking wildlings and then fighting them, or fighting the Nights Watch in Mance's case. Mercenaries are always looking for a fight because that's how they eat. So I would guess that Mance could totally go toe-to-toe with one of them.

dejerik · 1 day

You know for all the complaints about the descriptions of the food and the clothes, that never bothered me. I usually just think wow, sweet feast bro. I guess the only specific reason I can think of for liking is it gave you a good idea of the relative wealth of some of the houses, or like who is extravagant and who is conservative. Like, he would describe a really awesome feast at Joffrey's Wedding but then they would be at the Freys and he would talk about the food being kind of gross. You sort of get what hanging out at certain people's castles is like. Like you had that one friend as a kid who always had a ton of snacks in the pantry and fridge, and then you had another friend who never had anything but peanut butter or milk. Or whenever he says, "it was meager fare, but nothing had ever tasted better", it's like, man I know what that feels like.

dejerik · 1 day

I surprised myself when I actually did remember who that was.

dejerik · 1 day

One thing that really changed my perspective re-reading aGoT was how strongly GRRM hints at R+L=J. I didn't notice at all until after I finished aFfC and started reading the internets.

But the other thing I would say is not directly from the books, but I feel that Robb's story is a lot more tragic. In the show they building his character up more to show that he never really wanted to be King in the North at all. All he ever wanted was to bring his family back together and go home to Winterfell. Poor guy :(.

DrJulianBashir · 1 day

So, this lawsuit makes no sense for several reasons. I predict it will be thrown out rather quickly. High paid attorneys do have a record of sometimes making nonsense claims sound meritorius, but here I think there are some fatal errors (although I haven't read the complaint).

This has nothing to do with copyright whatsoever. Copyright is about preventing unauthorized distribution of work, not forcing distribution of work on a presumably captive audience. There is the DMCA saying that technologies that circumvent copyright protections are illegal more or less, but that isn't what is happening. The Hopper looks like it is just not displaying certain data that it receives. Copyright would in theory give them the right to distribute it, not force people or technologies to accept it. So I would expect a judge to throw it out based on the fact that they law clearly does not apply to what they are talking about, and there was no good reason to suppose that it did. In other words, the plaintiffs have not apparently stated a sufficient cause of action because there is no law that makes what the defendants doing illegal. There is no coherent legal theory as to why the plaintiffs should get what they want.
The plaintiffs here have no standing. Standing is the concept in court that if you sue for something, you have to show why you would be directly harmed by not getting the specific result. In other words, you can't ask for something that would help someone else and not you. If you can show that someone has no standing, the judge will automatically throw out their case without looking at anything else. So, think about it- whose copyright are they supposedly violating? I'm not sure about the details, but I have never heard of NBC, CBS, or Fox don't owning copyright to the commercial. That would be the people who made the commercial. They cannot sue on behalf the commercial creators to distribute the commercial. So yeah maybe they get distribution rights to put that commercial out, but if I were the defense I would still raise the issue that the plaintiffs don't hold the copyright that is supposedly being violated and even if they did have the rights, this technology has no bearing on that right. They can still distribute all they like, and viewers can ignore all they like. Even if that weren't true, this still does not mean they would be directly harmed. This technology does not mean they can't sell ads any more, nor does it mean that no one will buy ads from them anymore.

edit: Hunh? why the downvotes?

DrJulianBashir · 1 day

Yeah, I don't see what any of this has to do with copyright. I mean I guess there is an extremely tenuous relationship to the DMCA which says you can't make technologies available that circumvent copyright protections, but there is no copyright protection being circumvented here. It's just not displaying the data that the consumer doesn't want to see.

DrJulianBashir · 1 day

How would that be different? Whether it is deleting the data or storing it but not displaying it, there is still no modification of the broadcast signal. It just not keeping the data that is sent to it. If you could sue for that, then that would open up to someone getting sued because they turn their TV off during the commercials. If you think that's extreme, you don't know many lawyers.

ringmaster_j · 1 day

That episode gave me the weirdest boner.

DerpwinRommel · 1 day

If he is confident in himself and his interests, has a job and the money to do this, and isn't a complete asshole, then he probably does.

koavf · 2 days

See I guess this is where we disagree:

In theory, if the police were to change the itinerary arbitrarily, you'd go in court and ask the judge to outrule their request. The courts is very keen on ruling against the police when they acted outside of the law, even when it was based on an interpretation of the law by the police. They understand how important but also fragile the confidence that citizens put into the police force is. Every year, criminal are being released because the police did not respect the law - even though we had proof against these criminals. In the end, the law is interpreted by judges, not by the police.

In my experience, the exact opposite happens. The courts defer to the police and don't give two shits about the confidence the public has in the police, nor do the police themselves. They don't need to. They have guns, they follow the orders, and the courts consistently back them up. To the extent that anybody gets a fair trial or actually gets released based on new evidence or whatever, that's only if you're lucky and/or rich. You'd be very surprised how many innocent people will take a plea deal even when they have done nothing simply because they don't have adequate representation. Why should the arresting cop give a shit? As long as he makes his quota for arrests that month, or as long as they suppress that protest, they aren't gonna get fired. All they have to do is say "furtive movements" or "disturbing the peace" and the court will rule that they were acting within the scope of their duty.

You say "at some point" the police twist things they want, and I say that that point is at the earliest possible one, and such points are ubiquitous from then on. Police act in bad faith all the time. Yeah maybe I can send them an intinerary and then some news organizations will get pissed off, but that doesn't fix the systematic problem of abuse of the law and abuse of the methods of police force by the state. I have seen this shit firsthand dude. It happens every god damn day.

Edit: And everything your saying is forgetting one important fact - there was no reason whatsoever to suddenly pass this law at this time because the protests were peaceful. So what's all the concern about maintaining order? They must mean maintaining the order where the powerful get what they want and everybody else gets fucked.

koavf · 2 days

Which is still a lot of fuckin people protesting. Just to give you a scale. The NY Metro area is around 22 million people. 300,000 out of 4 million is 7.5%. 7.5% of 22 million is 1.65 million. Imagine passing a law that 1.65 million people in New York - which is larger than the population of Manhattan- took to the streets of Manhattan to protest. That has gotta be a fucking fucked up law.

patrikmonger · 2 days

The point is, I don't give a shit about spelling errors.

koavf · 2 days

Here is the key piece you are missing:

It's not at their own discretion, they have to be able to justify the change and it has to be reasonable.

They can take anything and make a claim that is bad for maintaining peace, order and public security. Police everywhere consistently abuse language of policy in exactly this manner and I see no reason why it would not happen in Quebec. Maybe they can't stop the protest from happening but there easy to ways to make castrate it or make it pointless. I'm not basing this on anything anyone else is saying. I'm basing this on my encounters with the police and the experience of other protestors. The letter of the law and the real world effect of the law can be quite different.

ObiWanBonogi · 2 days

So all the things you are saying about Asha are part of my point- there is no monolithic woman who suffers in some monolithic way. Asha is at first doing quite well, and then she is being held captive because her side lost. All captives in GRRMs world rightly feared the possibility of mistreatment. Asha fears rape for this reason and because she is a woman. Tolisa is not a captive. Clayton Suggs made those comments, but that was Clayton Suggs. He is a dick, and on top of that many knights are violent assholes. He doesn't necessarily speak for anyone else in the camp, although he might. Also he has specific reasons to actively want to hurt Asha given that they are enemies in this war (as opposed to Tolisa is actively helping those people she is in the camp with). So again, the likelihood of her mistreatment is strongly dependent upon her circumstances. And the people she is around. Its not "woman with no weapon or protector = raped."

You claim you've thoroughly examined why Tolisa is accepted, when it isn't clear that she is accepted in the way that you mean, first of all, and second she hasn't even been in that many episodes so we don't know what she's been through or how she got where she is, or that she will come out of all this unscathed.

And again, just because she is a foreigner again does not mean they would automatically disregard her as a human being and pass her around and rape her and treat her like shit by default. You said the only women in the camp were prositutes, but I have no idea what you are basing that on. Surely you cannot believe that all women will react in a single way to an event like a war, and that not all the soldiers in that war will all react in a single way to all women. Nothing you have said, in fact, explains why they would do that.

As far as why Tolisa is not treated badly, I already explained that any person who shows up and makes a point of healing the injured and sick to the best of their ability in a war camp where people are likely to be constantly sick or injured has a strong chance of being regarded as a person of value, regardless of whether that person is highborn, lowborn, male female or whatever. We are dealing with human beings here, not robots who have their every action dictated to them exactly by the prevailing social norm. It doesn't make sense to reduce them to that either when we are talking about them because GRRM and the writers of the show specifically avoid that. That would be bad writing. What you take from that character and what you learn from them only you can say. Apparently you think there is nothing you can learn, which I have no control over.

Your response to my comments about Robb's character make me think that you are more upset about the fact that it was changed at all rather than what they changed it to. Specifically because you say:

I really think the storyline would have worked out better if he accidentally married Jeyne in this season and then his arc next season is about his doubts since now he literally has nothing to do in ASOS except wait to die.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. That sounds pretty uninteresting to me. I would respond to you by saying this: The writers of the show are writers too. They deserve to be allowed to take creative liberties that stay true to the heart of the story. I don't see what's so unlikely about Tolisa's presence, but even if it you insist that it is, remember GRRM's version of the world is not necessarily the same as the TV version. Since the show creators have demonstrated that they intend on being respectful to the books, we should regard the TV version and book version on equal footing. I always think of the example of Batman. When you watch the Dark Knight, you don't automatically compare it to the original Bob Kane version. They are two different ways of treating the character that are equally valid. I think the same ought to apply here.

patrikmonger · 2 days

I mean...whatever. Probably in GRRMs world some of the Castameres didn't even know how to spell Castamere. We just saw how Amory Lorch was functionally illiterate (in the show).

tgtac · 2 days

I know the wights don't care about obsidian and the Others are not that concerned about regular fire. I was just making the point that the "Other team" is vulnerable to fire related stuff.

I didn't really go into all the reasons I think the CotF had a hand in creating the Others and why I am almost certain they used to be living, but I have more specific ones if you care to hear them.

ObiWanBonogi · 2 days

I don't see how her brand of feminity is superior. I don't even see how it's a brand of femininity. I also do not believe that "the entire story is about how difficult it is to rebel against society and its norms". That is certainly a theme, but that doesn't mean that every person who does not fit into the cookie cutter should automatically be miserable. As I said, I just don't think that would be realistic. Every society has norms, and every society has people who buck those norms, some who are more successful than others. Tolisa can probably get away with it because she was highborn and had at least a decent sum of money and came from a foreign land and was intent on making herself useful as more than a baby factory. Women are treated much worse than men in their system, but that doesn't imply that every man she meets is going to completely disregard her as a human being. To write it that way really would invalidate their struggles because that would be a caricature. It would be a lifetime original movie rather than a realistic portrayal.

My question for you is what about Asha/Yara. The Ironborn are all about raping and pillaging. By your line of reasoning, Asha should have been raped and murdered like 50 times over. What part of Westerosi society is a better example of the awful treatment of women than the Ironborn? Yet not only is Asha doing fine, and in control of her life, especially her sex life, she commands multiple ships and they almost made her queen. Why? Because she simply insisted on proving her worth in the way that a man would and didn't take shit off anyone. Does her success invalidate Brienne's or Arya's struggle? That's something that GRRM wrote, not the writers of the show. You might argue she was protected by her father, but then why do they continue to follow her commands after her father dies? And since Tolisa is at least claiming to be highborn, why couldn't she have been afforded a similar sort of protection in her journey?

So as I said, some people would find success bucking the norms and going against the grains, and others would not. To really deconstruct the tropes and validate their struggles we shouldn't dismiss people who don't struggle in the same way, we should analyze why Asha has success but Brienne less so. Why Tolisa can get away with it but not Arya. That would do true justice to what each of these women stands for.

edit: Now as far as why Robb wants to get with Tolisa, that's a different discussion. One of the main reasons I like the change is because it really offers a new perspective on Robb's character. When says, "I don't want to marry the Frey girl." and then he goes on to say "I don't care about that bridge." It's like he's admitting to himself for the first time, he never really wanted to be king. He even said in that same episode, "I was raised to be Lord of Winterfell, not King." (paraphrase). Robb never wanted any of this. You can see it in all of his scenes. When he is striking the tree in anger after his father dies. When he seems just a little bit reluctant for a moment as his bannermen name him the King in the North. When he struggles with all the decisions he has to make about how to conduct the campaign. He is shouldering this huge burden that he never thought he would have to take on but he stands up tall because its what his father would have done, and he owes it to his men. But that takes a toll on a person, and Tolisa is one of the few people who seemed to understand that. That's why they didn't get along at first- she saw how he really felt and that made him feel defensive. That's why she repeatedly asks him what it is he thinks he is doing, "So you're going to kill Joffrey? And then what?" (paraphrase). But in this last episode he is admitting to himself what they have both known for a while. Robb really just wants to go home to Winterfell and have it all be over. You could kind of see this in the books, but I like that they are really focusing on it in the show because its great to see how the TV version complements the book version. One thing I love about the show is we are getting to see some of the stuff we didn't see in the books, the other sides of things, new perspectives.

So Robb's struggle is still about honor, and fulfilling what he believes is his duty, and when he gets with Tolisa he is still flouting that duty. And keep in mind we don't know how their relationship is going to play out. I agree with this change because it adds a lot more depth to both their characters that we don't really see in books. The fact that we see more clearly Robb didn't even want to fight in the first place makes the Red Wedding that much more heartbreaking and tragic because ultimately Robb was just a kid who was put in an extraordinary position. I think that is very true to the book version.

I_Joe_Cooper · 2 days

I'm more concerned about the shrouds part. Like, Joffrey already went down. And Myrcella was puts on sunglasses cutting it close, shall we say?

koavf · 2 days

If they have to inform the police, and then the police may then dictate how and when they protest and for what reason, that's tantamount to requiring police approval. You are falling for their stupid bullshit.

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