The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!
If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!
And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.
Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.
"Friends of the Court," ProPublica's investigation into Supreme Court justices' beneficial relationships with billionaire donors, has been awarded the #Pulitzer Prize for Public Service!
Here are the highlights from the reporting (THREAD)
Stories like this remind us why being mindful of protecting one's privacy online is important and that "private" messages in the majority of places aren't private at all without end-to-end encryption.
Be mindful of what sensitive data you're relinquishing to companies.
Meta blocked a story critical of its climate change ad policies on all of its platform. An independent journalist asked permission to repost the story verbatim on her substack. It was blocked too.
Pay attention to what's happening in this case: the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just essentially ruled that it's fully legal to jail journalists for reporting leaked information, or any information they obtain from government officials without going through "proper channels."
Police tried to extract a confession from this guy, and told him his father was dead when he actually wasn't.
Then they said they'd kill his dog:
"At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. 'OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,' said an investigator."
This is probably useless, but if anyone is a CA lawyer, I have a SLAPP lawsuit against me for a page that I don't even host but does have text I wrote.
An attempt to sue me for 2 million dollars for what others have described as "a review, like on yelp". I gave a friend anti-transgender hate-speech filled emails someone sent me to publish.
Need help using CA anti-SLAPP to dismiss it.
You can PM and I will give you my email if you think you can help.
Affirmative action was never about admitting unqualified Black kids. It was always about ensuring qualified Black kids could also get accepted despite a world of systemic racism.
The “unqualified admission” you’re thinking of are legacy students—like how Kavanaugh got into Yale.
And there was reporting/testimony he sexually assaulted Dr. Ford and at least one other classmate.
This week: When #Brownsville ISD had an 11-year-old boy arrested and placed in #solitary confinement, we dug deeper. What we found was horrifying: Over 75 fifth-grade students have been arrested there this year.
Important decision from MA Supreme Judicial Court regarding "black box" algorithm digital forensics. The prosecution tried to use iPhone "frequent location history" evidence against the defendant to prove his presence at the scene. The SJC excluded the evidence as unreliable because the prosecution could not prove the methodology was reliable or testable.
U.S. #law schools should discourage students from applying for clerkships with #ClarenceThomas; faculty should refuse to recommend students for those clerkships; firms and other legal employers should refuse to hire people who have chosen to clerk for Thomas starting this year (when the large extent of his corruption became known). To do otherwise is to be complicit with Thomas’s unethical conduct. #LawFedi#LegalEthics#JudicialEthics
George Monbiot offers a concise summary of the current state of #Britain:
#Inequality 'demands oppression. The more concentrated wealth & power become, the more those who challenge the rich & powerful must be hounded and crushed. In other words, economic inequality is mirrored by inequality before the law. You can dispense with all the other indices of democracy. The best measure of the health of a political system is who gets prosecuted'!
If scotus says Presidents are immune from any prosecutions, Biden can break all the justices’ knees with a baseball bat and the justices can’t do anything to stop him or punish him afterwards.
I wrote something because I could no longer stay silent. I hope you won't either.
We hear echoes in 2023 America of the Nazi Party’s propaganda and the violence it wrought. Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, said, “We must always take a side. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
His lawyer says it's unfair Eastman should have to fight #criminal charges in #Georgia w/o being able to earn money as a #lawyer to pay his #legal bills.
This is like a convicted drug dealer saying it’s unfair he can no longer sell crack because he has to pay his lawyer.