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41·2 months agoSpare a thought for the users with accounts who upload content to IA for you to enjoy.
3·4 months agoYou are correct: the ruling simply affirms the plaintiff’s claim against IA.
Any out-of-copyright and non-copyright items, as well as items with permissive terms (e.g., Creative Commons licenses) will still be available on IA. Previously, the plaintiff Hachette offered a deal that IA rejected, in which IA would be allowed to make digital copies of Hachette texts that are either out-of-print titles, or titles for which digital copies have never been produced.
Right now, it’s up to Hachette and the other publishers affected in the case whether that offer is still available.
edited: hyphens.
I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong.
The publisher-plaintiffs did not prove the “obvious wrong” in this case, however US-based courts have a curious standard when it comes to the application of Fair Use doctrine. This case ultimately rested on the fourth, most significantly-weighted Fair Use standard in US-based courts: whether IA’s digital lending harmed publisher sales during the 3-month period of unlimited digital lending.
Unfortunately, when it comes to this standard, the publisher-plaintiffs are not required to prove harm, rather only assert that harm has occurred. If they were required to prove harm they’d have to reveal sales figures for the 27 works under consideration–publishers will do anything to conceal this information and US-based courts defer to them. Therefore, IA was required to prove a negative claim–that digital lending did not hurt sales–without access to the empirical data (which in other legal contexts is shared during the discovery phase) required to prove this claim. IA offered the next best argument (see pp. 44-62 of the case document to check for yourself), but the data was deemed insufficient by the court.
In other words, on the most important test of Fair Use doctrine, which this entire case ultimately pivoted upon, IA was expected to defend itself with one arm tied behind its back. That’s not ‘fair’ and the publishers did not prove ‘obvious’ harm, but the US-based courts are increasingly uninterested in these things.
edited: page numbers on linked court document.
2·4 months agoWhat an experience!
The F-22 impressed us. In this photo, it is flying over the lake, which when compared to objects in the foreground shows how big it is. In the second photo, it flew vertically upward, was suspended for a moment to light off two flares, and briefly dropped line a stone before pulling out again. Dramatic stuff. These redditors have a bit more context on the significance of it flying here.
We were inspired by your recent photos. We’ll post more.
deleted by creator
“In my view, a lot of the general associations we have with drinking in public are negative, like drunkenness in public, drinking and driving, like drunken hoodlums, all of these things — which make the news, but aren’t necessarily the only way people consume alcohol in public.”
Dr. Malleck quoted here gets close to the source of the problem, which is classism.
Most mayors, city councilors, etc. are doing well financially and they own their own houses (as well as cottages, investment properties, etc.), so the idea of going to a public park to drink outside with friends seems unusual to them. They view public parks as community spaces, but only within their personal perspectives as homeowners, and therefore what is allowed in parks is restricted to class-based moral sensibilities. It’s easy for Councilor So-and-So to bring her laptop to her backyard garden patio for another Zoom meeting. The line worker who just wants to sit outside with her family after 12 hours inside sorting chicken meat for Councilor So-and-So’s BBQ that weekend… she was an afterthought when it comes to these kinds of public space bylaws.
This disconnect between how municipal leaders and many apartment/condo-dwelling constituents live also explains the conflicts during the pandemic when people wanted to leave the isolation of their apartments for fresh air, but homeowner leaders (with their backyards, cottage retreats, ‘working’ holidays, etc.) told them to go back inside and threatened them with fines.
We do we have these bylaws? Ignorance rooted in class.
1·1 year agoWhat I mostly remember is the sense of hard work and discovery.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, after the internet became a public phenomenon, but before it totally dominated our lives, spending time on the web felt very different than it does today. There was no publicly-accessible index of websites, search was in its infancy, and link aggregators as we know them today just didn’t exist. For the first time, you didn’t need to be a tech-savvy person to experience the WWW, but it was still pretty incomprehensible to most people, who didn’t understand what the internet was for.
New “homesteaders” developed websites on free hosts like GeoCities/Tripod/Angelfire; the former host organized itself into “neighbourhoods” of sites because we still thought about the internet as a physical space. Web rings served as pilgrimage routes that connected websites together, irrespective of domain or host, into self-selected communities. They organized around subjects/themes, like Lemmy communities, subreddits, hashtags, etc. are today. They emerged around the same time as public bulletin boards which, for people who were not familiar with BBS, were also a transformative technology, and also the source of life-changing memories.
I am so privileged to have been around to explore the early internet.
Legally, the question is whether the removal of separated bike lanes in Toronto meets the criteria set by the Supreme Court of Canada, originally in 2002 and again this summer, for legislation that is either clearly unconstitutional or “was passed in bad faith or an abuse of power.” Unfortunately, our laws allow the provincial government to interfere in municipal affairs however it wants, even street by street. Toronto does not enjoy the same powers of self-governance as most large cities in the developed world so Ford’s decision is neither unconstitutional, nor an abuse of power, at least in the formal legal sense.
If the City of Toronto or a third party sued the province over the removal of bike lanes, in theory the decision would depend on whether Ford acted in ‘bad faith’, which effectively means that provincial courts will make a subjective claim about the intent of the law/lawmakers. This subjective interpretation of the facts is due to the vague wording of the Supreme Court’s decision, which SC Justice Rowe warned against in his 2024 dissent.
However, recent judicial history and the court’s piecemeal decision-making suggests that Ford would succeed in court. Only a few years ago, both the Ontario Court of Appeal and SC upheld the provincial government’s right to interfere in the city’s municipal election and halve the number of city councilors during the election itself. They justified his interference in our local self-governance by noting his constitutional right to do so, ignoring the question of bad faith entirely (much less the legitimacy of our democratic process). There’s simply no reason to believe these same justices would rule differently today.
Those of us who support bike lanes must find other ways to address this interference, not from within the system itself.