… not really though.
The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own. They uncapped that restriction, openly, and they admitted to it.
This is an incredibly open and shut case.
It’s stupid as hell, and that law needs to die, but there was no corporations doing people dirty here. This could have ended so, so much worse for IA.
This isn’t about right or wrong though. It’s explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.
They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.
If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say “Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won’t you little chickenshit.” then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.
Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.
Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I’m not holding my breath.
Not sure about an article, but they themselves announced that their emergency covid library would not set limits on the amount of copies that could be checked out. That’s literally the law they broke, that it has to be 1 to 1 outside of any other agreement.
Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
Kang also effectively got defeated by Loki in a TV show too, where that instance of him should have been the strongest (as the one who conquered the multiverse and wove it into a single reality/sacred timeline).
To be fair, Kang essentially let himself be killed because he believes/d that he’s an inevitability of reality so in some sense immortal. But he still also lost. He was just taunting in death.
But now that the multiverse is back and being held together by Loki, all there should be left Kang-wise are the ones that weren’t powerful enough to conquer the whole multiverse, so how are they supposed to be as threatening?
And again, all of this content was only in a spinoff show rather than hinted at and weaved through the movies.
I have no idea who greenlit that idea, or where they go from here to make it feel impactful.
Off the absolute top of my head there’s the redcap. Depending on the material it can be depicted as a gnome, goblin, or kobold with a jaunty looking red hat (generally long and pointy like a gnome hat or like Link’s hat in Legend of Zelda).
It keeps the hat red by dying and regularly re-dying it with its victims’ blood.
There’s also a number of depictions of pixies as essentially flying piranha.
But this sort of mythology isn’t some deep secret, it’s everywhere outside of the kid friendly/disney filtered stuff. I’m sure a simple search will net you tons of content.
This is upsetting, but yet again this is ignoring the real reason they are being slammed and is misrepresenting things to try and support (the legitimately amazing) internet archive.
They willfully, intentionally, and very loudly broke the laws/agreements about how many copies of each book they could lend out simultaneously. I hope they win this. I hope more people become aware of this situation.
I also hope more coverage about this starts to be more honest and straightforward about why this is occurring.
Hey Elias, found some confounding info: looks like Perplexity AI doesn’t respect the methods of blocking scrapers through robots.txt so this might just be an issue with them specifically being assholes.
Couldn’t figure out how to tag you in a comment on the other post, so I’ll edit this comment in a moment with the link.
I miss the “Tales from…” subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.
More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.
In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular “event” posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it’s a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.
A big benefit of the fediverse is that it’s still so small that it’s pretty easy to just block the assholes without a constant sea of new ones coming in to take their place.
Whoever the asshole you’re replying to is, I already have them blocked.
Did the lemmynsfw instance die or something?
I’ve tried to do this a few times, and unfortunately it feels like you really have to go all in on managing your own content library.
Like many, I had stopped pirating shit when netflix etc were “good”.
None of the streaming services want you to use them outside of their official sites/apps, so you end up being limited to like 720p when running them through kodi etc.
No worries, microplastics are equal opportunity! You can find microplastics at any of your local ovaries today!
Also, now introducing kids microplastics! Don’t want to wait for your microplastics? Simply be born in the current era and we’ll send you kids microplastics absolutely free! That’s a $60 value, absolutely free! Other companies might trick you into buying fast by making that a limited time offer, but we know you’ll love microplastics so much that this is a forever offer!
Microplastics- we’re already inside you!
Similar to your #2, but less serious, I once wrote a script to power down virtual machines for a data center move. It was a nice piece of work too, grouping them in batches, sending shutdown commands to the guest OS, falling back to forcing a power off through the hypervisor after a configurable timeout…
I don’t recall the specifics of the problem or the virtual infrastructure I was working with, but in short I didn’t have sanity checks on what was being shut down. Ended up force shutting off the hypervisor/virtual infrastructure management system.
Added an extra few hours the move with that.
Pretty big assumption that you’d be able to afford augments that were in any way cool helpful to you, or quality.
What’s far more likely is that you’ll be “heavily incentivized” through “optional work benefits” to get augments through your employer to best suit their needs of you, effectively turning your body into flesh scaffolding for whatever it is cheaper for them to not fully roboticize. Refusal would, at best, prevent you from meeting metrics tailored to those augmented.
These corporate provided augments will be designed by the lowest cost vendor, built by the lowest cost manufacturer, installed by the lowest cost surgeons, running software designed/programmed by the lowest cost developers. Imagine every little bug, frustration, design flaw, safety issue, batshit lack of sanity you have ever encountered with workplace systems/software/equipment/procedure now inherently installed into your own body parts.
Companies will use this to offset costs to you. Like auto shops requiring mechanics to buy and maintain their own tools, but with whatever corners they can cut to save money. It’s not our job to maintain your shoulder sockets, despite the fact that our chosen hardware regularly exceeds safe limits on force. Good luck proving that it’s your employers fault in court after it’s already injured you!
Oh, the “safe lift leg and back support unit” has loose wiring that can come loose in scenarios involving certain repeated movements, which can cause a short, which can cause the unit to heat up to the point it’s slowly cooking your remaining natural organs?
Point is, regulation will never keep up with the horrors that companies will be able to justify against their employers. We’re in for a long long time of more laws being written in blood and corpses
Also, much like health insurance in the US effectively chaining people to a workplace, can you even imagine how much worse that would be when you got your arms from your job?
One of the most often overlooked meta problems with the cyberpunk genre is that you pretty much have to focus on characters that are in universe upper class to have any stories that aren’t just unendingly depressing in every single detail.
The software you’re probably thinking of is f.lux
Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.
It’s a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That’s useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are “good enough” to ensure reliability of transaction logs.
In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They’ll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.
Do like Netflix and start putting hardware in every datacenter and at backbone split point you possibly can.
For-profit vs. Non-profit is an entirely different distinction under US law, with specific legal definitions for each. This is entirely separate under US law from publicly traded vs. privately owned, which has separate specific legal definitions.
Valve is a for-profit privately owned company. That is what allows it to not maximize shareholder value, and is the unstated distinction that allows your quote to be true.
For-profit publicly traded companies do have a legal responsibility for such.
I’m pretty sure they’ve had almost this exact exchange in the Clone Wars show.