Copyright is unwavering. The law says that the author/owner gets exclusive use of that content for a really fucking long time (something like life + a century, thank you Disney lobbyists). Full stop.

The courts recognize that that lack of nuance is unreasonable. Therefore, they have ruled that copyright law doesn't apply if the use is "fair," hence the phrase "fair use." There's no hard-and-fast way to know if something is fair use. You're basically betting that if you ever get sued, the court will be on your side. There are axioms that the court has given (for instance, if you are making money from your use, it's less likely to be fair) that help you guess if the ruling leans in your favor.

The reason for these exemptions is that it's in the public's interest for certain kinds of expression to transcend copyright, such as news and satire. (This is also where the folks belief that you can't get in trouble if it's a parody come from.)

"Clearance and Copyright," and "Free Culture" are both great books to learn more about this. The author of the latter, Larry Lessig, is the guy who fought Disney's copyright lobby in court. His experience inspired that book, and also inspired him to found the Creative Commons.

All of that is to say that there are carve outs to copyright where the public interest overrides the private content monopoly, and a public official speaking in an unflattering way certainly qualifies.

[update] apparently those axioms were actually codified into law in 1976, but they are still merely defensive - nudges for how the court might rule, not protections in their own right.

That's theoretically what "fair use" is supposed to cover.

> Prasad, a former hematologist-oncologist at the University of California San Francisco, is now *head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which makes him the chief vaccine regulator in the US.*

Howard’s entire channel has now been deleted by YouTube, which cited copyright infringement.

I never said the copyright claim is invalid. A court would need to decide on matters of fair use.

The article specifically said this regarding the content:

Creating the channel, Howard told Guardian in an interview, had been an attempt to “preserve” what these individuals had said during the early years of the pandemic, including comments that Howard said exaggerated the dangers of the Covid vaccine to children and – in some cases – minimized the risk of Covid infection, among other issues.

“These videos were nothing more than collections of what other doctors said during the pandemic, including doctors who are extremely influential and who are now the medical establishment,” he said.

Could you try to be like, even 10% less knee-jerk partisan?

It's an appointment in the FDA (which requires actual technical knowledge) and Prasad is a well-documented member of the political left, to the point where he was recently chased out of the FDA for being on the left.

It's strange to me because it seemed like the dominating issues should have been recovering from the economic destruction wrought by covid monetary policy and dealing with the overt Russian threat.

Trump tried hard to be perceived as an outsider candidate when trying to return to office. Logically, that makes no sense, but I'm sure their research showed it was important.

That‘s not change but destruction

This was a common argument in some of the poorest and most EU-dependent parts of the UK (these generally voted for Brexit). Well, they got change, alright.

Although this is only half true, you have a point - it does hold for the top social media sites which, curiously enough, end up in the same predicament.

However, this is a phenomenon that needs analysis, explanation and fixing, not just stating as inevitable reality because reality-building has been a thing at least since Karl Rove.

BTW, I did expect the downvoting of my unorthodox and out-of-band comment but I do appreciate your reply to it because in 90% of the cases downvoting is silent and no explanations are given.

Looking at the number of downvotes, I see that I've touched a nerve here, pretty sure due to the mentioning of Agent Smith's gaslighting brigade. Again, I'm not blaming the HN maintainers or the community as whole, as you noted, there's nothing unique here compared to other big social media.

> You're... expecting people... to simply take the word of someone challenging those views with a "trust me bro" approach.

Not at all. I simply shifted some of the burden of proof to the challenger who would otherwise put the speaker in a highly asymmetrical resource trap, similar to a DoS attack. I gave enough justification for it, I could prove it with a 10 word sentence but... does this matter given that we don't use the same notation?

As a result, a proof in my notation appears as "trust me bro" to you, and vice versa.

+ He wrote articles comparing the US COVID response 1940s Germany.

+ He wants to defund mRNA research.

I don't know man. Given that he's a doctor and all his publicly stated views lie right in the middle of maga it's hard to call him a liberal. Is there something about taxes or something that leads you to believe he's actually a Democrat?

Prasad was specifically attacked by Laura Loomer for being a "leftist", and resigned rather than cause trouble. Deeply ironic that the Guardian is now trying to attack from the left.