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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I mean, it’s in the name. The right to make copies. Not to be glib, but it really is

    A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.

    You may notice a conspicuous absence of control over how a copied work is used, short of distributing it. You can reencode it, compress it, decompress it, make a word cloud, statistically analyze its tone, anything you want as long as you’re not redistributing the work or an adaptation (which has a pretty limited meaning as well). “Personal use” and “fair use” are stipulations that weaken a copyright owner’s control over the work, not giving them new rights above and beyond copyright. And that’s a great thing. You get to do whatever you want with the things you own.

    You don’t have a right to other people’s work. That’s what copyright enables. But that’s beside the point. The owner doesn’t get to say what you use a work for that they’ve distributed to you.







  • Customers tend to view quality more holistically than that, though. Not a lot of people are going to flip their conception of product quality on a single change, but will after a long series of changes. Once a company gets that reputation for poor quality, it’s not as simple as reversing the last corner they cut. It’s a hole that takes a lot of changes to dig out of. More than most companies are willing to reverse.





  • Probably because he has literally claimed he will be a dictator (for one day only, wink wink). And probably because he actually attempted, in a number of illegal ways, to not count the last election so he could remain in power. You know, like a dictator.

    Look, if this was literally anybody else I’d be willing to use a more charitable interpretation. Call it a gaffe at least. But Trump should have burned every last ounce of benefit of the doubt that anybody has for him the moment he abandoned his colleagues in the Capitol so he could see what the violent mob would do.

    We spent the entire 2020 election going “Oh Trump doesn’t really mean it like that.” Until he did exactly what he fucking said he would do. Why are we doing this again?



  • My understanding of the ruling is that, no, a law cannot do this. The ruling is mostly a separation of powers argument. Basically, if the president is not above the law then that means that Congress can override the Constitution by writing a law that, for example, makes the President’s constitutional duties illegal. Therefore, the president is allowed to officially do anything he wants limited only by the Constitution.

    Obligatory: this is not an endorsement of the ruling and IANAL. It’s an awful ruling and terrible for the present and future of our country. It’s a violation of primary ideals of democracy and it needs to be overturned ASAP.



  • Harris is not the country’s leader yet. She is likely to be selected as the candidate by the Democratic party, but ultimately the party is a private organization that can do basically whatever it wants to select that candidate. That’s not fascism. That’s freedom of association. In the end, nobody has to vote for the Democrats nor the Republicans. Anybody can be on the ballot with enough popular support, no party needed.

    Parties hold primaries because, ultimately, they need votes to win an election and primaries help gauge the people who will be voting. At the time of the primaries, the voters still overwhelmingly selected Biden. But in the time since, polls show large majorities of those voters support both Biden’s departure and Harris as the replacement. So this is still likely the right move if the party is trying to appeal to the public.