‘Big Brother Is Watching’ is one of those ‘HAHA it’s funny because it’s true’ things - like when Ajit Pai jokes about being Verizon’s bitch.

This is a ridiculous thing to have to apologize for. They aren’t even that “creepy”. They didn’t have any detailed information, they didn’t hide malware in the software or drivers, they were just physical messages inside of the hardware, completely harmless. Anyone worried about this has some serious issues.

It’s not even like they had actually scary stuff on them. They were random messages inside of the hardware. They weren’t people’s details. They weren’t hidden malware in the drivers or software. They were just physical messages inside of the hardware that most people wouldn’t even take apart, let alone give a rat’s…

The tone of this article, to the fact they had to apologize, to the total nothing level of offense in the messages themselves. The internet outrage culture is so tiresome. 

Remember when things were fun? Like...people had fun, and did fun things, and we all laughed and said, ‘hey, that was fun’? Did I dream all that up? Or was there actually a fun time, before this time, which is decidedly un-fun?

Just to add to what you said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people camp the respawn points in Apex so I doubt it will be a problem here. If anything, the campers would be going after the person delivering the respawn card but even that would be pointless because you have no idea if/when anyone would be coming to use…

I play fortnight pretty regularly at this point. My girlfriend likes watching it, and I got that free battle pass from a while back.

Being invulnerable to damage sure is a goofy choice for Fortnite to make (if it’s true). Camping those vans should be fair game. Its a battle royale after all. 

Not sure why you think they have more dignity than anybody else or that this thing is undignified. 

Nothing at all.  Went on a paintball excursion for a friend’s birthday.  A bunch of squaddies also present that day wiped the floor with anybody who wasn’t them.

What stops real professional soldiers going in and kicking everybody's asses and winning?

That’s an EULA, isn’t it? Which has never been legally binding when it’s addressing an actual law AFAIK.

But you seem ok with the scrappy upstart with stealing content as they won’t be held to the same standard as the big companies?

“This forces larger sites to actually develop better procedures.”

Sure, it theoretically protects parody works and so on, but that’s irrelevant when any method used to block actual infringing uses will inevitably pick up things like parody works, too. And there’s zero reason why they would replace the algorithms with human moderators. The amount of content is way too high for that…

This is just going to reinforce existing monopolies and increase the power copyright holders already abuse on places like YouTube. It all looks nice on paper but algorithms can’t detects fair use and the focus on fines encourages sites to play it safe.

That’s not explicitly stated, in what you posted there’s just some vague mention about sites that store a lot of content. Without defining any terms you end up in a situation where a site doesn’t know what things might apply to them.

The problem arnt the exemptions, it's the process of enforcement. That takes time, effort and money to not screw up. 

Easy fix for these companies:

Because the vast majority of streamers (that is an understatement), lose money streaming.