A rock star (who shall remain unnamed) told me he wanted to give away his latest work to the public domain. I helped him get the work in open non-proprietary formats.

I told him in principle that Creative Commons licensing would be what he is after, but that it has problems. Creative Commons license text contains links to the creative commons website which then hooks in more licensing terms. There is nothing wrong with the terms but the CC website is jailed in Cloudflare’s walled garden and the URL is part of the licensing text.

I told the artist he would be liberating his work but at the same time he would be technically subjecting users to a bullying US tech giant who makes content arbitrarily exclusive by shutting out some demographics of people and also abusing the privacy of those who are privileged to obtain access to the license text.

I suggested modifying the CC license to remove the CC URL and exclude Cloudflare from being a license gatekeeper, noting of course the big pitf

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27313127

Summary

Chief Justice John Roberts is facing the consequences of the Supreme Court's broad immunity grant to Trump, as the Trump defies judicial orders and undermines the legal system.

In a controversial move, Trump deported Venezuelan immigrants to an El Salvador prison, disregarding a federal judge’s order and claiming immunity under foreign affairs powers.

Roberts issued a rare statement defending judicial independence.

Trump’s efforts to impeach the judge and challenge legal accountability reflect an erosion of democratic norms, prompting urgent concerns over constitutional crises and the rule of law.

The Trump Administration is setting out on a constitutional collision course by impounding funds that Congress has already appropriated.

The question will be: Does the president have the power to halt, delay or not spend money that Congress has appropriated for specific projects or agencies?

Article 1 Sec. 9 Clause 7 gives Congress the power of the purse. Congress has the power to appropriate money. Presidents are to carry out the will of Congress regarding spending.

For clarification, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 which provides the president with a mechanics to withhold funding but not cancel it.

However, before delaying or withholding funds, the president must send a “Special Message” to Congress stating the reasons for the impoundment along with an estimate of the fiscal, economic, and budgetary effects.

The bill also says that the president may not withhold Social Security or Medicare funding.

The U.S. Supreme Court also unanimously found in the 1975 Tr

The abuse of power, the lack of respect for our institutions, the rule by edict ... can those of us opposed to these create coherent rebuttals in the form of constitutional amendments that will address our time of crisis? What will these amendments say?

cross-posted from: https://linkage.ds8.zone/post/341870

I signed an agreement with a creditor that obligates me to pay them using a bank inside the country. This was fine initially but then I moved out of the country and the acct was closed. Other banks will not open an account for me and the creditor refuses cash. So the creditor is treating me like a non-payer to a quite harsh extent.

I have over-simplified here but I just want to know very generally what the common practices are around the world for contract law situations where someone without much bargaining power signs a contract that obligates them to do something that’s only achievable if other 3rd-parties agree to serve them, and then those other 3rd-parties later refuse.

BTW, I am not interested in advice on situational hacks and angles like “find a friend to pay for you”. I want to know how courts treat the situation when all options have failed. Are people typically held accountable for agreeing to something w

The Lenexa City Council has approved a special permit for a proposed in-home daycare business over the objections of a homeowners association whose bylaws stipulate against it.

On Tuesday, the city council voted 5-2 to approve a special use permit for The Learning Playhouse, 8115 Acuff Ln., an in-home daycare that plans to at least temporarily serve up to 12 children.

Councilmembers Bill Nicks and Mark Charlton voted in dissent. Councllmember Joe Karlin was absent.

The homeowner’s request to open a daycare in her house prompted a vocal protest from the Oak Hill Homes Association, the bylaws for which don’t allow for a business to be run out of a home.

Why did the council need to weigh in?

The Learning Playhouse is owned by Megan Todd, the applicant and owner of the home out of which the daycare will operate.

Todd says her hours will be 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. Pick-ups and drop-offs would be staggered to avoid congestion in the neighborhood, according to city d

This is crazy. Disney is claiming that a wrongful death lawsuit cannot go forward (paraphrasing):

“sorry, your husband signed up to a Disney+ trial a couple of years ago, hence they accepted T&Cs that clearly stated that any dispute about our products should go through arbitration rather than through courts”.

Even if a consumer carefully reads the terms and conditions, how could they reasonably expect the ToS for a video game would affect the terms they are under at a Disney restaurant? That’s fucking nuts.

Future parents: “sorry kids, you cannot play that video game because there is an arbitration clause and one day you might want to visit Disney’s amusement parks.”

I’ve boycotted Disney for over a decade because of how conservative the corp is and how right-wing extremist they are with politics. IIRC Disney financed the campaign of a politician looking to eliminate background checks on firearms. Indeed, the company who entertains kids is happy to fight against basic gun control

The FCRA requires credit bureaus to disclose to consumers the identity of the sources of information in your credit file. Yet if you look at your credit report from any of the 3 major giants (TRU, EFX, EXPN), they list out all addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses with no indication of who fed them that info. If you request that info, they ignore or refuse.

The penalty for FCRA violations in that section is $1k. So you might think: “how cool is that? I can simply sue all three credit bureaus for $1k each”. It should work like that, but doesn’t. IIRC, it was a lawyer for a credit bureau who told me in so many words: case law shows that you must incur damages in this particular case. So if you can prove damages, then you can claim $1k (even if the actual damages are $1). But how do you even prove $1 in damages?

I have some ideas but generally this is such an uphill battle that credit bureaus can simply bluntly ignore the law. Which is what they do. It’s a good demonstration of

According to 15 U.S.C. 7704 §5(a)(5):

INCLUSION OF IDENTIFIER, OPT-OUT, AND PHYSICAL ADDRESS IN COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL.—

(A) It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission of any commercial electronic mail message to a protected computer unless the message provides—

(i) clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation;
(ii) clear and conspicuous notice of the opportunity under paragraph (3) to decline to receive further commercial electronic mail messages from the sender; and
(iii) a valid physical postal address of the sender.

When my text-based mail client receives an HTML-only email message, it tries to render the HTML as text. It’s sometimes a jumbled up unreadable heap of garbage because the HTML is malformed and relies on a forgiving/tolerant rendering engine. Even when the HTML is well formed, hyperlinks are not exposed in the text rendered. E.g. a msg will say “to unsubscribe and stop receiving ema

Some banks have started demanding proof of address when they realize that the address they have on file is “commercial”, e.g. like a UPS Store PMB type of address. How would this play out in court? The law¹ states:

“(i) Customer information required—(A) In general. The CIP must contain procedures for opening an account that specify the identifying information that will be obtained from each customer. Except as permitted by paragraphs (b)(2)(i)(B) and (C) of this section, the bank must obtain, at a minimum,the following information from the customer prior to opening an account:

1. Name;
2. Date of birth, for an individual;
3. Address, which shall be:
   (i) For an individual, a residential or business street address;
   (ii) For an individual who does not have a residential or business street address, an Army Post Office (APO) or Fleet Post Office (FPO) box number, or the residential or business street address of next of kin or of another contact individual; or …
   1

Some tax forms ask information that seems to have no effect on the bottom line. No matter how you answer the question, your tax bill is the same either way. In Europe, this sort of thing would violate the data minimization principle of the GDPR. So the question is, what happens to people who either leave the intrusive fields blank, or they give bogus info? I’ve heard that tax penalties are generally a constant × the amount of underpayment. If underpayment is zero then so is the penalty, correct?

My credit union has been spamming me for years. As the volume of their bulk junk mail increases, I’m looking for a way out. Their email is HTML-only. So my text mail client only renders the raw text “To unsubscribe and stop receiving emails click here”. And “here” is obviously just text because it’s a text terminal.

Is that legal?

Suppose it is. So I dissect the HTML and fish out the link from a heap of garbage. The link does not go to the credit union’s website (if it did, that would be a non-starter anyway because I canceled my web account when they started blocking Tor). The link goes to a 3rd party site which also blocks Tor. So apparently as a precondition to opting out of spam I must share my personal IP address with a 3rd party agent of spam. Perhaps I can play whack-a-mole with a series of VPNs but I’m not interested. I just want to know if the opt-out procedure can legally be exclusive in this way. Can a legal challenge be mounted that forces them to provide an opt-out mecha