leigh

I’m issuing an opinion that they’re getting off cheap. But their careers have suffered irreparable harm, so it’s alright. 🙂

Oh yes, a handful of players wouldn’t wear pride night jerseys, so our struggle for human rights and acceptance is “a distraction”. Surely this decision will also boost the visibility of other important causes, like reconciliation with First Nations. 🙄

“Ontario only”, says the (very) small print, even though the ad is in an online stream and they know the audience is in BC. 🙄

I feel certain they’ll settle this suit for a tiny fraction of the extra money they “earned” using this anti-consumer strategy.

I mean this for real: I had an easier time cancelling a gym membership than I did a Prime membership. 🤦‍♀️

I’d like to heartily congratulate Mr. Cullinan on becoming the only good kind of nazi.

I can’t see how they could possibly market a “Game Boy Advance” handheld successfully. It’d have to be something fundamentally different from the Game Boy Colour. 😉

For the average consumer, it’s all about the games. If the next platform has awesome games you can’t play on the current-gen platform, it’ll sell. (Well, barring some disastrous marketing…)

Wishful thinking at best. Nintendo has no incentive to rush forward with a new platform yet. Hardware ain’t where the money is, and they’re not struggling to sell software when they have something good.

As my spouse often remarks, “The ‘P’ in HIPAA stands for ‘portability’, not ‘privacy’.” 😩

Exactly so! 🙂😭

I completely agree with the overall point you’re making, but would like to correct the legal aspects. I am not a lawyer, but I do have a pretty good understanding of US copyright law which is the most relevant in this case.

Having possession of data isn’t sufficient to legally establish the rights to do as a company pleases. In general, an individual author immediately has copyright on a creative work as soon as it’s recorded in any medium. The main exception to this is “work for hire” — a legal agreement that employers hold copyrights since they’re paying for the work. It’s usually part of the paperwork an established company has you sign when you start a job.

Because of this, and because we users aren’t employees of Reddit, they need a license to duplicate and display our copyrighted posts. The terms of service for any online service almost always stipulate a “worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual license”. In other words: you still own the copyright to your post and can still share it elsewhere, but by sending it to Reddit, they get to put it anywhere they want and you can’t ever take that right away from them.

If Meta begins slurping up data from the Fediverse, things get tricky. They’re probably violating copyright law if they do that, just as ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc… likely have. However, legal enforcement of our rights would be near-impossible. Everyone who has ever had an account with any of Meta’s properties has most likely agreed to an binding arbitration provision. (These are utterly immoral, they force you — as a precondition of doing business! — to preemptively waive your legal rights before anything occurs that would cause you to need them.) These provisions also prohibit any sort of class action, so each individual person would have to initiate their own case against Meta. And then you’d have to somehow prove to an arbitrator from an organization selected by and paid by Meta that Meta violated your copyright. And Meta’s high-priced lawyers will have all kinds of ways of referencing prior cases to argue why what they did is fine.

So yeah. But again, I completely agree with your main point. Meta will (if they haven’t already) collect all the data they please from the Fediverse and use it to further their business interests. And those business interests are not aligned with our best interests.

Legit question: As a non-BlahajZone and non-LemmyNSFW user, why do you care how our instance handles this?

Each Lemmy instance is its own community (in the dictionary sense, not as used by Lemmy), not unlike a bunch of different web forums. Running the same server software doesn’t mean each instance must or even should cache content from anywhere in the fediverse. If this community doesn’t want to have that sort of content available here, so what? Nothing stops anyone from creating accounts on multiple instances, and I expect there will soon be iOS and Android apps that make using them easier.

Federation reduces friction and encourages wider participation, but that’s not always what’s best for a community. And each instance has a list of instances it blocks, so all of us are free to look through the list to see if it’s anything we care about and go visit directly if we so choose.

(For the record: I haven’t looked at the content in question, but I’m happy to take Melmi’s word for it and am in favour of defederating.)

It’s unfortunate that a handful of replies here are demonstrating exactly why the Beehaw community leaders felt they had to make this choice. 😞

If Lemmy instances are like web forums, federation basically gives us a “Sign in with your [home instance] account” option. (That’s not technically accurate at all, I’m only talking about the user experience.) It reduces user friction and helps people participate more widely. They just stopped allowing that from certain instances because they think adding a bit of friction back in will be healthier for the Beehaw communities. If you’re on one of the defederated instances, you aren’t banned. Yeah, it’s inconvenient for you, but you just need a different sign-in (at least for the time being).