The UK just had a big article revealing that their Prevent database was being shared with border control (edit: link). The Prevent database covers people who have not committed any crime but have shown some indication of potentially becoming radicalised towards terrorirsm or towards some other crime. The vast majority are labelled “no further action” but still have been shared with customs. Some were children as young as 6 and 4.
You absolutely don’t need to do anything wrong to get on a list. Hell, just browsing the internet gets you put on all sorts of lists.
It is a bullshit fake restriction because it doesn’t even exist. However, it’s something of a grey area that, up until IA poked the hornets nest, allowed a bit of wiggle room to get away with breaking copyright law.
Now a judge has ruled that managing one digital copy per physical copy is explicitly against the law as written. They aren’t even trying any sort of fair use argument, they’re basically just saying “we do public good” but don’t actually explain how that means anything in law.
Meanwhile, the lawyers get paid, and IA goes on fundraising campaigns.
Publishers absolutely were in the wrong, morally, but my point is that IA stepped out of the legal grey area and into what was completely wrong in law. Then, they (and apparently their argument still does) rely on a judge basically making the law up, and in doing so left no real option for the judge but to rule against them. Now, the grey area isn’t grey anymore, it’s explicitly prohibited.
If IA hadn’t broken the one digital per physical copy rule, or if they’d settled out of court or done anything sensible with their lawsuit, they wouldn’t have made the law worse.
Staying true to the centuries-old library concept, only one patron at a time can rent a digital copy of a physical book for a limited period.
This is misleading. IA had a restriction of one digital copy per real copy scanned, however they removed this restriction during covid - and that was when the publishers sued.
End of the day, IA tried to test the limits of them and ended up having them defined better in favour of the publishers. They paint themselves as the victim, but actually it’s their actions that made things worse. Hopefully they’ll straighten things out a bit in the appeal, but IA only have themselves to blame here.
I think maybe not all apps show the automated cross-post link - I’m not seeing it right now on Jerboa. But yeah I think basically your instance checks the link against all other links it has (both local communities and federated) then it just adds cross-post links for each one, as well as a link to the new post in the old posts.
Man the worst I saw was a petrol station, when you walked in up to the tills there was this little sign on a floppy plastic thing that said they had face recognition running and a QR code to scan. The text of the sign mentioned “legitimate interests” but in no way directed users to scan the code and go to the website to object their consent.
It’s such bullshit. These companies collect up the data we produce and sell it for pure profit, without offering anything in return. The data brokerage industry is worth multiple trillions of $ per year, with only $8bn people in the world it stands to reason that the average user’s data is worth $1,000 per year, but they just pick that out of our pockets and use it against us.