You 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.

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Remember his cover of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ by Guns n’ Roses?

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“We have new people whose life experiences have been radically different than ours. And so for those of us who have been here for decades or a long time, it gives us an insight into how people lived in other parts of the world, and now they’re with us and we want to learn about them. So we are one united community.”

This is such a positive take from someone in leadership re: new immigration to their community. It can be difficult to manage unexpected population growth and the federal/provincial governments offer poor support to growing communities across Canada. Mr. Morrison and his neighbours deserve lots of credit and respect for welcoming new neighbours who’ve been through a lot. They sound like good people.

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Swiss technology company that focuses on privacy products. Initially funded by a Swiss startup capital firm and now uses a subscription model. ProtonMail is not open source or non-profit, but the product they offer is privacy. Switzerland also has strict privacy laws and resists state-based information requests. Best option is to run one’s own email client server, but simple folks like me don’t have the skills to do so. (FWIW, I use ProtonMail and think it works great.)

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You are welcome at the https://lemmy.ca/c/art community. Currently, most submissions are people’s artworks, but what you describe is also seems relevant to the community and I’d post content too if there’s interest in it!

“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.

Just wanted to add that The Verge article quotes from the source document, but does not include its links, etc. Here’s a hyperlinked version, including some specific open source resources, which the author calls ‘third faction’ content: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

I just reconnected with a friend yesterday afternoon. We ended up talking for two hours and are making plans to meet in a few weeks. The ‘sorry-we-lost-touch’ part was brushed aside. It felt just like good old times again.

Try sending a text. Maybe your friend misses you too.

What 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.