@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

neuralgraffiti

@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social

Software guy turned lawyer, but please don't hold it against me.

SFBA team member.

I like: #SFBA, #SFF, #burritos, #patents (and #BurritoPatents), #IPlaw, #LawFedi, #FLOSS, the #indieweb, playing #RPGs, and outdated internet technology.

❤️ https://sfba.social/@Vanessa (👶🏻, 👦🏼, 🐈‍⬛, 🐈‍⬛).

Speaking only for myself. Endorsements will be enthusiastically boosted.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

neuralgraffiti, to random
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

For my birthday dinner I made a childhood favorite for myself: kuře na paprice or paprika huhn, depending on which side of the family we’re talking about.

neuralgraffiti, to random
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

Curious about moderator workload in the fediverse? Here's a couple data points:

In putting together our end-of-year report for Open Collective, I took a quick look at how much trash we had to take out this year for sfba.social.

Our mod team rejected 680 spam signups and suspended about 2700 accounts† in 2023. That's almost 10% of our total user base!

† I didn't do any rigorous categorization of reasons for suspending accounts, but most suspended accounts are spam/scams/bots. I think we tend to limit accounts and delete posts for other kinds of infractions, and we we've been lucky not to see too much truly awful stuff.

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@beeoproblem Yes to both. I reject and/or suspend a handful of new accounts most days, but we’ve had some big sprees of spam accounts, like the huge numbers we saw last May (https://sfba.social/@announcements/110385032358277791).

neuralgraffiti, to animals
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

‘Tis the season to festively torment your

luis_in_brief, to random
@luis_in_brief@social.coop avatar

A legal brief on the definition of “double spacing”, with not-so-gratuitous swipes at Microsoft Word, is total catnip to me. https://matthewbutterick.com/pdf/jones-line-spacing-motion.pdf

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@luis_in_brief I have a former colleague who was on the receiving end of an Order to Show cause for spacing at exactly 24pt in Word!

design_law, to random
@design_law@mastodon.social avatar

Honestly felt like this one needed a disclaimer:

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@design_law
Love this. I think more law school curricula should acknowledge that, in practice, a lot of case law ends up being messy to apply.

skinnylatte, to SanFrancisco
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

The two best Japanese curry spots in San Francisco are: (1) Muracci’s in FiDi and (2) Nippon Cafe in Marina (they are a franchisee of a popular chain from Japan, Hinoya). Sadly, the popular ones in Japantown and in the west side of the city are pretty weak sauce, despite claims to the contrary.

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@skinnylatte Thinking about having Muracci’s in walking distance again is almost enough for me to wish for a return to office.

andrew, to Matrix
@andrew@esq.social avatar

Evenin' peoples. Come join the cool kids + me in our general legal room: https://chat.matrix.esq.social/#/room/:matrix.esq.social

For those that don't know, Matrix is to Slack what Mastodon is to Twitter. We're a good group, I promise.

@law

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@andrew Can I join these rooms using an existing Matrix account, or do I need to create a new one at esq.social?

luis_in_brief, to random
@luis_in_brief@social.coop avatar

woooooof, that’s (1) an interesting rule of thumb and (2) would really cause problems for a lot of lawyers.

@simon there’s some literature (that sadly I can’t find right now) on how copy/paste made contracts longer, and automated citation searches made court judgments longer. I suspect your ethical (etiquette?) suggestion will ... not fare well in the long run.

https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/110793056983308781

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@luis_in_brief @simon I want to say "not good lawyers," and yet...

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@luis_in_brief @simon Totally. I was also thinking of the value (in litigation) of raising the other side’s costs, as much as I hate that aspect of the practice.

hewittlaw, to random
@hewittlaw@mastodon.social avatar

You think you've seen it all and then you see a patent issued in 2019 for a moderated online marketplace. What?! Patent No. US 10 339 576 B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US10339576B2/en?oq=US10339576

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@hewittlaw
👀

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@hewittlaw Given the law firm behind it, I'm not surprised to see the quality of the patent at issue. I see they've fled Delaware for N.D. Ill.

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

A profoundly dissonant and slightly baffling pattern that I've heard from half a dozen social & political commentators at this point: in a single piece of commentary (blog, podcast, video) they will say both "facebook is evil, I hate that threads is taking over the world, social media monopolies need to be broken up, boo big tech" and then "ugh this mastodon thing with the multiple servers is too confusing nobody will use it". Like what do they all think 'broken up' social media will look like?

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@glyph @scott Strongly agree! (Like much of this thread). I think the server choice problem will remain a sticky point for onboarding for a while.

It'd be nice if there was something like Joinmastodon.org that filtered a little more for servers that were a little less hobby and a little more proven.

My first account was on what turned out to be an ephemeral server. I didn't come back here for years, and I have the technical/social wherewithal to help admin our server.

design_law, to UXDesign
@design_law@mastodon.social avatar

Good news: There is now a link where you can "Download [a] PDF" of a patent in Patent Center.

Bad news: When you try to "save as," the PDFs obtained this way produce the same 110 error as those the ones you can pull from the PPubS quick search

Page in Patent Center for application no. 29/866,971, "DISPLAY SCREEN OR PORTION THEREOF WITH GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE"

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@design_law
USPTO "create a non-broken website" challenge (difficulty: impossible).

neuralgraffiti, to random
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

All Subarus should come with antlers.

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@cd24 And head-butting all the the other cars 😆

seb, to random
@seb@sfba.social avatar

Dear Community!

After some team work and prep work, we have now updated all nodes that run Mastodon code to 4.1.4.

This should close the known vulnerabilities.

If you see any issues, please don't hesitate to reach out to the team.

Big shoutout to @cd24 for maintaining our code repo including SFBA's custom code and merging it with the latest Mastodon releases!

Please express your gratitude to all our SFBA team members, when you see them online!

@cd24 @Ingurido @neuralgraffiti @Moritz @jeffkibuule

Also, if you'd like to contribute to the hosting costs (roughly $1.2k/month) of SFBA, please do so through our OpenCollective here: https://opencollective.com/sfba-mastodon

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@AppleTalk @seb @cd24 @Ingurido @Moritz @jeffkibuule 1024 characters

drahardja, (edited ) to random
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

Took a stroll down Castro St. in and felt pretty sad about all the stores there that didn’t make it through the lockdowns. I visited Maru Ichi once a month for their delicious handmade ramen. The sign is still up, but they’re long gone.

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@drahardja That’s a bummer. I used to eat there all the time when I worked in Mountain View.

drahardja, to fediverse
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

I am once again encouraging to add a clause to prohibit using their server’s data for machine training into their Terms of Use, because at some point in the near future there is likely going to be a lawsuit against some major company for scraping and exploiting users’ data, and we should make sure we have a legal leg to stand on.

Please ask your server’s admin to do this.

@seb please consider doing this. https://mastodon.world/@Chimaera/110652906429977656

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@drahardja @seb Hi Dave! This is something the admin team is already working on, along with some other policy updates.
I'll push this to the top of the queue.

We have a lawyer on the team (that's me), so no need to collect money for the updates; I do SFBA work on a pro bono basis.

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@integerpoet @drahardja It’s a mixed bag. I the work I do, but I miss being a developer sometimes.

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@pmonks @drahardja @seb Not a dumb question at all. We don't apply a particular license to the content right now, which means it's copyright to the poster (the legal default).

ActivityPub doesn't currently support applying varying licenses to content, although @timbray has proposed a protocol enhancement to support it: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/c118/fep-c118.md

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@pmonks @drahardja @seb @timbray Nope, definitely not required. I was more addressing the second part of your question re user’s choosing licenses.

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@pmonks @drahardja @seb @timbray Yes to the per-user case. You could put a license in your profile or something and license your posts however you want.

As for the need for a default, there already is a server-wide default as far as copyright licensing goes. Any post eligible for copyright in the first place is automatically protected as soon as it posted.* So applying, e.g., a Creative Commons license by default would essentially take some rights away from our users by making their posts available for non-commercial use by others or whatever other permissions the license grants. (1/2)

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@pmonks @drahardja @seb @timbray Circling back to the initial reason for this thread, where things get a more complicated is the interaction between contract law and copyright. In broad strokes, you can apply contract law to protect things that aren’t necessarily covered by copyright. The arguable reason to put something in our Terms of Service is that some pro-ML folks argue that using data for training a model is a fair use. If they are right, then it’s not a copyright violation to use the data, regardless if what license you’ve granted to the public. But it could be a violation of a provision in a ToS, giving you a breach of contract claim against someone improperly using the data.

This is putting aside some other complications, like implied licenses and such, but this is already a long post for my phone…

  • The legal standard is that it is protected when it is “fixed in a tangible medium.”
    (2/2)
announcements, to twitter
@announcements@sfba.social avatar

Hello !
We wanted to let you know we're seeing unusually high traffic right now as people from explore fediverse alternatives. We're excited to see all this traffic but it may occasionally make the website feel a little slow.

We're looking into it, but in the meantime if you find yourself looking for a smoother experience try checking out a 3rd party application to access the website. We recommend trying @elk: https://elk.zone.

There are some many amazing native clients too, and we’d love to hear about your favorite in the comments! What's your favorite way to use ?

neuralgraffiti,
@neuralgraffiti@sfba.social avatar

@MonaApp @mookie I had never noticed that option down there, thanks!

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