This guy is wrong, which is why he isn't citing any legal authority.
As anyone who has gone to law school will tell you, you can only acquire the title that the seller has. If seller stole the goods, he doesn't have any title, so he can't transfer title to a subsequent buyer. See, e.g. UCC § 2-403
There are exceptions when it comes to those who have voidable title (thieves do not have voidable title).
There are also cases where courts have more or less created exceptions close to those OP has described. For example, if Best Buy receives some stolen merchandise and sells it to good faith purchasers, courts have held that the victim needs to pursue the thief/Best Buy, not the end purchaser.
But generally, OP is wrong: if you buy a stolen bike at a flea market, you don't get title and the owner can get the bike back. Think of the policy implications if the rule was as OP claims. All thieves would have to do is immediately sell stolen goods and the owners could never get them back. That would be absurd.
OP is just claiming that there exists juristrictions where his claim holds. IANALE (I am not a lawyer EVERYWHERE), so I can't really say that he's wrong. But you seem quite certain. Why?
Coming from an American perspective (where, when you are in public, you have basically no expectation of privacy), this seems insane.
Does this mean that if I'm filming a vlog at Brandenburg Gate (which inevitably includes video of other people in the background enjoying the area), I'm in violation of privacy laws?
Does that mean if I take a video selfie of me and my family members (which, again, includes images of others in the background, and which is automatically uploaded to icloud) I'm a data processor and am in violation of privacy laws?
I assume there is some line here, but I can't think of the logic separating a person's dashcam from my examples?
The European perspective is broadly to have the "freedom from", whereas the American one is the "freedom to".
You've got the freedom to aquire an arsenal, I don't, but I prefer the freedom from other people gunning down my kids, which by extension limits the narrow personal freedoms of myself and others.
Likewise, the American perspective is to draw a hard line on "in public", the European one is more nuanced.
Yes, you can film your vlog without fear, but a random pedestrian in Berlin also has the freedom from being associated with your public vlog.
Therefore you have a responsibility to either get their permission to broadcast it, or to anonymize them.
A useful way to think about it is to shift your view from "can I do X?" to "will I bother anyone else by doing X?".
There is a lot of leeway to be had between "will I bother anyone else by doing X" and "will anyone else be bothered by me doing X": it's active interference versus passive objection-taking. Socially aware people can learn the difference.
Your response to "by that metric, essentially almost everything is disallowed" is "well yeah, just don't do it". I don't think that stance would sit well with most.
> Does this mean that if I'm filming a vlog at Brandenburg Gate (which inevitably includes video of other people in the background enjoying the area),
I don't know about the law in Germany but I think it is very impolite in any country. You should ask people's permission before putting them online. On Japanese TV they blur out faces of people passing by for example when filming an interview in the street.
> Does this mean that if I'm filing a vlog at Brandenburg Gate (which inevitably includes video of other people in the background enjoying the area), I'm in violation of privacy laws?
No (at least not in France, which also has pretty stringent privacy policy so I think it's still a relevant answer) you can film people or cars in public streets but you cannot do any kind of data processing on the things you film (you can't keep a database with the license plates you have on your personal videos for instance).
In short the line is: pictures and films by themselves are OK [1], but doing anything with the personal info you get from those video is forbidden.
[1]: (under conditions, you must not cause harm in the process: for instance no “happy slapping” videos)
As other have pointed out, the rules on photography vary from country to country within the bloc. However, the rules governing data protection and the processing of personal data (including photos) come from the GDPR, and very basically say that any processing of personal data requires a valid legal basis.
There is an exception for personal use - the household exemption - but as soon as you cross the line into commercial operations or certain activities such as publishing, creating databases, etc, you lose the benefit of that exception.
That doesn't mean you can't continue, just that you now need a legal basis and need to follow the rules (inform data subjects, allow the right to be forgotten, etc).
So in general, dashcams are fine (unless a local law prohibits them) as you have a legitimate interest in recording your driving in case of an accident. Creating a facial recognition or ANPR database with the same footage would be unlawful, however.
It's unlawful as it means you lose the household exemption, and so need a legal basis for the processing. You also need to inform others of the data collection in advance, the purpose for which the data is collected, and the contact details of the data controller.
Private ANPR-equipped vehicles are rare (and outright illegal in some EU states), but when you see them they'll have large decals with the above information on all sides.
Facial recognition is considered biometric data, which is special category data under the GDPR and forbidden to process except in very strict circumstances. Apart from law enforcement/government, it is more or less impossible to lawfully process biometric data with informed consent from the data subject. The household exemption does not apply.
There are differences between private photographs and commerical products.
Vlog/youtube would be considered to be potentially commerical .. so you would probably be responsible fore GDPR and likeness recording. (The onious is on you to blur)
Video selfie/photograph personal/non shared use - you're free do this
Making money and creating value are two separate things. There are people who create value without receiving any money in return. And there are people who receive an obscene amount of money while creating very little value — and sometimes destroying more value than they create.
Understanding that the two are separate is the only way you can question the legitimacy of our richest people. I’ll give you a hint: the most impressive CEOs journals routinely praise as geniuses, are very, very unlikely to produce as much value as the money they actually receive.
If you want to even stand a chance at critically looking at our current economic system, you absolutely need to properly separate the notions of "making money" and "creating value".
Another way to put it would be that the wealthiest people tend to own the assets that are creating lots of value. But owning is not the same thing as creating.
> You're basically saying workers don't do anything useful.
Not quite: bullshit jobs are when the workers themselves say their own job isn't doing anything useful. And apparently they comprise a sizeable portion of all workforce.
Of course, jobs people say are useless, jobs the workers themselves say are useless, and actually useless jobs, are 3 different sets. But I think we can confidently say something is wrong when so many workers say their own job is useless, even if they aren't: working a job you think is useless just isn't healthy.
This is what is known as "cope", ie, they don't feel emotionally satisfied.
Americans in particular always have pretty narcissistic ideas about what their jobs should be. You can see this from all the examples of hippies trying to start communes, which then fail because everyone appoints themselves official poet instead of farmworker.
That will catch up to us. It already has, in many parts of the world, and it's not looking like it'll get better soon.
And let's not forget, it's not just people who have paid the price.
> The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate, the historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.
All of which is to say nothing about the inequality in how that shareholder wealth is distributed, which is incredibly short-sighted for literally billions of reasons. 8 Americans own more wealth than 4 billion humans. It's perverse beyond comprehension.
You only see the curves go upward. But if you look very detailed, you see that a plateau is coming. A downward trend will follow.
When the going gets tough...
About the inequality : it is really bad, but hundreds years ago, the poor were starving because of lack of food, in stark contrast with landlords and knights and kings.
Today an equal amount of or more, people die from too much food than of too little.
My point is, you need to take a step back and look from a bit more distance to see the real trend. Things are bad now, because we are at a maximum.
> a plateau is coming. A downward trend will follow.
The plateau is not coming fast enough, not even close. Scientists are very clear on this point.
We used all that oil and gas to get more work done, but we're still working more hours per year than those feudal peasants.
> people die from too much food than of too little.
We still have thirteen million hungry children in America. 700 million hungry people worldwide.
It's all very solvable, we just don't. We could end world hunger by eating like, two or three rich [0]. Knights and Kings have nothing on our oligarchs.
These trends of irresponsible emissions and rising inequality won't fix themselves. Not in time. Not without radical action.
You mean, because they were merely negligently misleading instead of intentionally misleading? Yes, it's seems to not be under the current definition of fraud. I thought we were discussing a counterfactual that the OP suggested where negligent endorsements were actionable under a law similar to fraud.
Fraud was used by me as an example of the 1st amendment being okay with certain commercial speech being actionable.
>>it doesn't offer any meaningful advantages that would justify the enormous effort required<<
I'm blown away by the complete disregard most of this community has for crypto. Yes, it is currently full of scams and charlatans. But you honestly believe there are no meaningful advantages to decentralized currency?
How about effectively free, instant transfers at any time of day or night? Traditionally if I wanted to wire money oversees, it's a full-day affair. I can transfer any amount of crypto I want in seconds to minutes, for far less than a wire fee.
How about the ability to instantly settle debts and contracts? This was literally impossible just a few years ago.
I know it's easy to shit on crypto (and there are many legitimate reasons for doing so), but you guys need to dream bigger.
>>the notion of magic essentially means the ability to use willpower to modify physical laws<<
It's interesting that this is how you defined magic, because in a very real sense the ultimate purpose of most science is precisely to use our willpower to modify (what we previously believed to) physical laws.
Physical laws prevent human beings from flying, or breathing underwater, or viewing individual atoms. Until we literally used our willpower to design machines to overcome these "laws."
I have no doubt that eventually our collective willpower will be used to modify other "laws" we believe today, like the law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Pretty magical if you ask me :)
The “laws of nature” aren’t proscriptive (decrees on the order of nature as commanded by a divine superpower), they’re descriptive - observations about related phenomena that appear (or are theorised) as being universally true.
When humans achieved “heavier than air flight” they didn’t do so by modifying (or subverting) any physical law - they applied imagination to state of the art knowledge of what the laws suggest about reality to create technology that overcomes gravity by harnessing natural phenomena (thrust + angle of attack + properties of air = lift).
I'm going to be prescriptive and say that you meant "prescriptive" rather than "proscriptive".
"Prescriptive" means "requiring" or "normative, specifying, prescribing", while "proscriptive" means (more specifically) "forbidding". It has only a negative sense of saying something is not allowed, while "prescriptive" includes a broader sense of specifying or ordaining something in any way.
> in a very real sense the ultimate purpose of most science is precisely to use our willpower to modify (what we previously believed to) physical laws.
I don't agree at all. The purpose of science is to understand physical laws well enough that we may predict how various objects work. Sometimes this allows us to make things that we previously believed impossible possible. Sometimes physical laws and limits turn out to be different than we thought, other times we simply find a better way to work within the same laws we always knew.
> Physical laws prevent human beings from flying, or breathing underwater, or viewing individual atoms. Until we literally used our willpower to design machines to overcome these "laws."
I don't think anyone has ever believed that one of the physical laws of the universe is "human beings can't fly". We have always known that heavier than air flying was possible (since birds do it). The notion of humans flying (or breathing underwater, or seeing really small things) with some kind of assistance has existed probably since pre-history, but definitely since antiquity - have you ever heard of Pegasus, or Hermes' winged sandals, or flying chariots and such? Airplanes are just a scientific realization of those ideas.
> I have no doubt that eventually our collective willpower will be used to modify other "laws" we believe today, like the law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Pretty magical if you ask me :)
This is also something you are wrong about. If you look at the progress of science, at least since the 1600s or so, we have almost universally discovered new fundamental limits, not the other way around.
Given Newton's laws of motion, we thought that we could reach any speed we wanted to, if only we had the right technology. It was a new discovery that actually speed is limited. We also thought that an object can have any density, until GR showed that past some density, it ceases to be an object in the usual sense (it becomes a black hole). We used to think that energy can vary continuously between any two values, until we discovered that it can only vary by fixed quanta. We used to think that we can measure the position and velocity of an object to arbitrary accuracy, but then we discovered Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
So, as science advances, I'm looking forward to finding out what other thing we currently think is possible will turn out to be impossible.
If a lender is facing bankruptcy, how are they going to fund the infrastructure necessary to negotiate with tens of thousands of borrowers? If a lender is not yet on the brink of bankruptcy, but sees it coming, don't you think if this was a viable business model for a lender to avoid liquidation they would pursue it?
Your proposed law wouldn't even make life easier for anyone but the richest debtors, who don't need a law to protect them. The vast majority of people live paycheck to paycheck and have de minims savings. If you offered them a 30% discount to pay off their mortgage (or even a 50% discount), they have no way to come up with that payment without going out and obtaining another loan.
A) Not my proposed law, just being an advocate for parent post's position.
B) It's not really necessary to consider how the lender will fund the infrastructure necessary to comply with the law. That's sort of how laws work. If you want to operate in that space, you have to obey the law or not operate in that space. Either they will stay in that business or they won't. What is necessary to consider is the secondary effects of that decision, which would likely be decreased access to credit for borrowers with marginal credit. Might be OK, might not.
C) RE: whether it's a viable business model, see above.
D) RE: benefiting richer debtors proportionally more than poorer ones, that's relatively easy to handle - we have all kinds of policies that are targeted to benefit one economic class over another. Most of them are tuned to help the richest, but there are plenty tuned to help the poorest or the middlest. It's not a problem so long as we build in the correct dials to tune those parameters.
E) RE: unavailability of credit to low-income debtors to take advantage of this scheme - I have no doubt that new enterprises would form to take advantage of this economic niche. It might be higher risk, and come with a somewhat higher rate, but it might be viable to make a marginally risky $40,000 loan where it would not be viable to make that same loan at $100,000, particularly if the loan was secured by the property. That is in effect already happening, it's just the bank buying the loan from another bank that gets the benefit.
I genuinely can't tell if this is satire or not. Assuming it's not, unless your "own research" consists of actually buying a wide swath of competing products and testing them against each other, then at some point you are indeed relying on "influencers", whether those influencers are Consumer Reports, Amazon reviews, your parents/neighbors/friends, etc.
I've never seen a credit card that did not allow you to schedule your payments. If you auto-pay everything with credit cards, then by default you are scheduling your payments. Same with mortgages. For the few things that don't accept cards (rent/water/gas/electric?) you could schedule payments whenever you want through your bank, though you'd likely be paying in advance rather than in arrears.
I've never paid bills from the CC side, but from the provider side. I don't even know how I'd tell my CC to automatically pay some entity on a set schedule. It's all pulled by the service providers, separately, on whatever schedule they decide (or choose to let me configure). I know I can do it with account-to-account transfers (so, electronic checks) from my checking account, but had no idea that was a thing for credit cards. Where do you tell it to send the money? Do you have to get bank account info for the receiver?
[EDIT] On reflection, I've even built subscription systems reliant on credit card payments, and didn't know you could do this.
You don't need to tell your CC to pay some entity on a set schedule. I don't think my initial post was clear enough.
Credit cards are paid in arrears, usually with a 15 day grace period, so you are effectively getting a 15-30 day interest free loan on all purchases. When you set up a credit card, you can select any payment date you want. So, if I get a new AMEX, I can choose to have the bill due on the 1st, or 12th, or any day I want.
If I pay all my bills (i.e. Netflix, car insurance, etc.) with my AMEX, I know the AMEX bill is due every 12th (or whatever day of the month I choose). For any bill paid by the credit card (i.e. Netflix, car insurance, etc.), it doesn't matter what day of the month that particular bill gets charged to the AMEX. I only pay AMEX once a month, on the day I selected. So, by choosing what day my AMEX gets paid, I am effectively choosing which date I am required to pay all of the bills that got charged to my AMEX.
There are very few things that you can't pay by credit card. For those (i.e. mortgage, some utilities), you can schedule auto-payments on any day you want, through your bank.
As anyone who has gone to law school will tell you, you can only acquire the title that the seller has. If seller stole the goods, he doesn't have any title, so he can't transfer title to a subsequent buyer. See, e.g. UCC § 2-403
There are exceptions when it comes to those who have voidable title (thieves do not have voidable title).
There are also cases where courts have more or less created exceptions close to those OP has described. For example, if Best Buy receives some stolen merchandise and sells it to good faith purchasers, courts have held that the victim needs to pursue the thief/Best Buy, not the end purchaser.
But generally, OP is wrong: if you buy a stolen bike at a flea market, you don't get title and the owner can get the bike back. Think of the policy implications if the rule was as OP claims. All thieves would have to do is immediately sell stolen goods and the owners could never get them back. That would be absurd.