Spare a thought for the users with accounts who upload content to IA for you to enjoy.

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.

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

Just a reminder that many former government staff, ex-elected officials, family members and acquaintances of current politicians, etc. are now lobbyists and/or investors in the commercial cannabis sector. For example, Smitherman (CEO of CCC) worked for 4 decades in Ontario politics before becoming a lobbyist. As the retailer quoted in this article says, these politically-connected producers are the intended beneficiaries of pricing changes, not the retailers or customers.

Unfortunately, this is standard business practice in Canada: now that they have achieved market dominance over less-connected peers, they look to the government to help protect their profits, which they will use to purchase struggling competitors to further consolidate the industry and allow them to raise wholesale prices in the future. Once only 2-3 major producers remain in the country, they will have spent two decades lobbying the government and can look forward to protectionist government intervention, price collusion, and guaranteed profits, not unlike Rogers/Bell/Telus enjoy today.

"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.

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.

Hello neighbour. Happy Canada Day to you too. It's going to be a hot one!

• Significant increase in non-human/bot accounts makes it difficult to know whether you're actually talking to a real person anymore.

• I was not personally affected by API changes and do not sympathize with for-profit 3rd party developers, however reddit's withdrawal of support for communities like Transcribers of Reddit is mean-spirited and marginalizes our friends and neighbours who want to enjoy social media like everyone else.

• Nothing good ever happens for an existing userbase when an organization/product joins the zombie death-march of publicly-traded assets. Capitalism will inevitably ruin everything it encounters, and reddit will not be spared from this outcome.