In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law. At the time, most of the attention was on Section 512 - AKA "notice and takedown," which absolves platforms from liability for users' infringement provided they respond quickly to removal demands.
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Over the years, this has been horrifically abused, with everyone from post-Soviet dictators to sexual predators to cults and literal Nazis using spurious copyright claims to censor their critics, often without consequence.
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But the real ticking time-bomb in the DMCA is Section 1201, the "anti-circumvention" rule, which makes it a felony (punishing by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine) to help people tamper with "access controls" that restrict copyrighted works.
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The Davis Graveyard is a Portland, Oregon treasure: a family run, nonprofit annual haunt that is indescribably ambitious, spooky and brilliantly executed.
The Davises have been serving their city for more than a decade, but in Sept they announced that they would not be putting on a show this year, due to the risk of exacerbating the pandemic. It was a heartbreak, but it was also the right call.
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But this story has a happy ending. The Clackamas County Scare Fair is a 20-30 minute drive-through, pandemic-safe haunt with a soundtrack broadcast on low-power FM radio, and the Davis Haunt has been integrated into it!
The area below NYC's Union Square was once called "Book Row" - a six-block stretch boasting nearly 40 bookstores, many of them used and rare bookdealers. Today, the sole survivor is @strandbookstore, whose "18 miles of books" encompass new, used, rare and academic books.
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It's hard to overstate what an anchor for bookselling, writing and reading The Strand is. Each of my last three tours has taken me there: twice in the rare book room's event space, and, last week, on the store's Zoom channel.
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The Strand is a family owned business, now in its sixth generation. Like America's other great multigenerational bookselling dynasties - thinking of @WellerBookWorks in SLC - the sense of holy mission and history pervades the store.
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In 2017, Donald Trump declared victory. Working with the far-right Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, he had brokered a deal to bring high-tech manufacturing jobs back to America, with a new, massive Foxconn plant that would anchor the new Wisconn Valley.
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Right away, there were three serious, obvious problems.
I. Foxconn are crooks. It's not just the Apple device factories where they drive workers to suicide, it's a long history of promising to build massive factories, absorbing billions in subsidies, and then bailing.
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It's a con they'd already pulled in Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil and in Pennsylvania. The US heist happened only four years before the Wisconsin deal (which offered $4b in subsidies!) was signed.
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