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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • The US has a law to limit the liability of gun manufacturers.

    The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) is a U.S law, passed in 2005, that protects firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products. Both arms manufacturers and dealers can still be held liable for damages resulting from defective products, breach of contract, criminal misconduct, and other actions for which they are directly responsible. However, they may be held liable for negligent entrustment if it is found that they had reason to believe a firearm was intended for use in a crime.




  • Current regulations allow digital music providers to pay a lower music royalty rate if their paid music subscription offering is bundled with other legitimate product offerings. Seeing an opportunity, Spotify has exploited this regulation by converting all Premium Plan music subscribers into a new, bundled subscription offering without consumers’ consent or any notice. Spotify’s intent seems clear—to slash the statutory royalties it pays to songwriters and music publishers.

    Spotify has priced its Audiobook Access plan with 15 hours of listening time per month from a limited catalog of 200,000 audiobooks at $9.99/month. In contrast, Spotify’s music-only Basic Plan—which includes unlimited hours of listening from a catalog of over 100 million songs—is priced only a dollar more. Under the regulations, the higher the Audiobooks Access plan is priced, the lower the music royalty Spotify must pay.











  • The article is out of date. According to this one, the game has been removed from sale on Steam in the UK, Canada and Australia, and the dev is going to withdraw it from Steam entirely.

    Zerat Games has announced it will withdraw its sexually explicit visual novel from Steam after it was removed from sale in the UK, Canada, and Australia.

    Posted to the game’s Steam page, which is no longer accessible to those who have not previously purchased the game, the developer defended its title but confirmed it would be removed from the platform.

    “We don’t intend to fight the whole world, and specifically, we don’t want to cause any problems for Steam and Valve,” the developer said.






  • No, because they can afford the legal fees. It will be worst for smaller sites. From the article:

    With Section 230, if a website (or a user!) wants to defend its right to keep content up (or take it down), winning such a case typically costs around $100,000. Without those protections, even if you’d ultimately win on First Amendment grounds, you’re looking at about $2 million in legal fees. For Meta or Google, that’s a rounding error. For a small news site or blog, it’s potentially fatal. And this includes users who simply forward an email or retweet something they saw. Section 230 protects them as well, but without it, they’re at the whims of legal threats.