prosody

There's positives and negatives to each. For government domain seizure, there's due process involved but working around it is harder (the service provider either has to acquire a new proper domain or onion domain, then disseminate it to the audience somehow). For ISP level blocking there's limited due process (at least in the cited case of LaLiga seemingly just issuing a complaint to the ISP), but the audience can easily work around with it with a VPN or sometimes just an alternate DNS server.

> in an attempt to hurt relations with freer, traditionally more conservative nations

I don’t think those are the salient characteristics of the US from Canada’s perspective in this development, and because of that I don’t think of your analysis of this as motivated by short term political considerations is correct. Instead, the current US government’s unexpected decisions to turn the thumbscrews on Canada exposed Canada’s economic dependence as a vulnerability, and the Canadian government is at least trying to signal a capability to become less dependent in the future in the hopes that reduces their vulnerability as perceived by the US government. That vulnerability existed before and will outlast the current US government.

What's the motivation for blocking VPN read access for this and other services? Are AI scrapers using commercial VPNs to get around rate limiting?

Advertising a VPN endpoint in country A which in reality is in country B is a security concern for users trying to reduce their visibility to country B’s authorities. You’re right about the more fit to purpose tools, of course, but they’re more of an impediment to normal internet usage.

The specific structure and presentation of it could be, and the items individually could be. There are some jurisdictions where a dataset as such rather than just the structure and presentation have legal protections, but those are slightly distinct from copyright AIUI, and as such I imagine you'd want a tailored license for that rather than GPL. They're called database rights.

As I understand it, Cisco licenses the relevant patents and sublicenses them gratis to every user who uses Cisco’s binaries obtained from Cisco directly and not redistributed (thus also the difficulties in the article with working with Cisco’s unmaintained web server). The sublicense doesn’t apply to binaries built independently from source. I suppose this was imposed by the patent holders.

This article isn’t about that. It’s about the externalized costs that LLM companies are pushing onto webmasters because of their aggressive scraping. It’s one thing to believe that LLMs are a good thing, it’s another thing to believe that individuals and cooperative groups that run small internet services ought to be the ones to pay for that good.

I recall now the shutdown of Nekochan.net, which had been the main hub and message board at the time for SGI retrocomputing for several decades, due to concerns about the GDPR. While that might have been an overwrought reaction, and that laws like the GDPR and the Online Safety Act _can_ be followed by a dutiful webmaster, I can't fault any webmasters who choose to throw in the towel when they look at the potential penalties for failing to do so quite right. FAANG and the like can of course make the investments in compliance.

Isn’t that significantly on the Linux kernel not having stable driver ABIs?

The oldest Sanskrit text, the Rigveda, is usually dated to 1500 BC as an oral tradition. It wasn't written down until much later. The oldest surviving unambiguously Sanskrit writing is from 100 BC, using the Brahmi script. It actually isn't the surviving oldest Indic written language either, the Edicts of Ashoka date to 300 BC and are texts written using various scripts and vernacular languages.

In the case of this lawsuit they're suing unknown individuals. The case is Cengage Learning, Inc. v. Does 1-50. Apparently it's a US legal convention to just spitball the number of members of a group of unknown alleged coconspirators to 50.

Would you object if the FBI deputy director encouraged FBI agents to lawfully use their service firearms in the field to demonstrate their use to the FBI? There are real harms involved with increasing surveillance of the public and reducing judicial oversight. Placing the use of warrantless wiretapping as an end in itself rather than a possible means whose use needs to be carefully weighed necessarily means that the weighing will be less careful.