The key word is "try." They try through the art of persuasion, to make buyers think copyright law says something other than what it says.

Google is free to completely ignore these bullshit requirements and stop doing business in Europe.

For whatever reason, they have chosen to keep transacting with Europeans. Perhaps they chose poorly, and should have instead consulted Slashdot posters about whether or not making tons of money is worth the outrageous indignity.

Doesn't adding the disclaimer truly fix the problem, though? Apparently nontechnical users didn't understand what incognito does, so a sufficiently-well-written disclaimer ought to be able to fully correct the misunderstanding.

On the techie side, we all know that a browser setting isn't going to somehow magically keep other peoples' computers from remembering users' requests, but non-techies didn't understand that magic isn't a thing, so Google's understandably under some pressure to better-document the incognito feature.

Imagine the [unlikely?] case where someone wants to implement FACstamp on their own computer. Can they?

They'd end up facing a similar problem as DRM standards: whoever backs it can't allow any independent implementations, because that would undermine the purpose: preventing people from signing the "wrong" data.

So this FACstamp idea requires proprietary software for every step of the process, with a key obfuscated or hidden inside a TPM chip or something like that. Wanna write something that is interoperable with it? You can't.

Authors can license textbooks instead of selling them, but do they?

I guess I wouldn't be surprised if kids these days (yes, I'm old) are agreeing to EULAs when they open their textbook apps. But I know for sure that tens of millions of people still alive today, purchased textbooks instead of licensing them. If those textbooks still exist, then the knowledge is attainable without any contracts, so there's no means of discriminating against computers.

Just avoid the weird textbooks (ones that require special software to read) and anyone's LLM can get around the problem you're describing.

Wow, Google advocates that I should be able to maintain a media player without any particular weird dependencies?

Maybe you can really get this stuff moving fast toward the midpoint, but how do you stop at the destination?

With onboard propulsion you would just flip the craft at the halfway mark, and fire the rocket (or whatever) in the other direction, but if this is using the momentum from Earth photons to go, I'm drawing a blank on how to decelerate. Do I have to .. *shudder* .. RTFA?

My rips from 20ish years ago are all in Vorbis and so I still play Vorbis files occasionally, but it's slowly becoming less frequent. For the last few years I've been re-ripping all my old CDs to FLAC, but I'm super-lazy. Every few months I have a burst of giving-a-fuck and I'll rip another boxfull, but then I put it aside for another few months. I suspect it'll be years until I get rid of the last Vorbis file, if ever.

Everything new is FLAC.

I do still use Vorbis for Navidrome's on-the-fly transcoding for my remote players (i.e. phone), but probably ought to upgrade to Opus.

Stop making jokes about us, or else a customer service agent will be with your shortly.

If I not-hypothetically bought a $100,000 Cybertruck with debt tomorrow, I'd receive an asset arguably worth $100k

You're the best kind of correct on definitions, but Cybertruck is arguably the worst example.

It was recommended to me in the mid-00s by a guy in a Christian metal band! Despite this, I actually did read it. In fact, I drove to the Christian book store where he worked (because of course he worked at a place like that), and bought the book there. I met a lot of musicians back then and wasn't going to let a Christian scare me off.

It was a pretty good read and seemed reasonable while also "not the thing for me" because dammit, Jim, I'm a computer programmer, not a landlord. When this Christian metalhead told me that the money he spent on dog food (and lots of other things, but it was the dog food that really stood out) was accounted for as an expense by his LLC, I backed away slowly (because the Christian stuff wasn't bad enough?!).

In my defense, I gotta say he was a really good guitar player and his band had top-notch headbangable riffs (to go with their mostly stupid lyrics). IMHO at the time they were tied for first place as the best metal band in Albuquerque. I loved them and it probably mystified them that I kept showing up to their gigs.

Life is funny.

banks get bailed out by the taxpayer.

They're supposed to get "bailed out" by the interest they charge their other customers. I wish the taxpayers would, just once, insist on sticking to the former arrangement.

I'd be concerned about seeing VPNs as a "solution." If a 17-year-old in Montana uses a VPN whose endpoint is in New York and they access porn, they and the pornserver have still violated the law, haven't they? The VPN doesn't cause the violation to cease to exist. The VPN merely makes it hard for the pornserver to know.

If I were the kind of person who advocated for these new laws, I would set up a "sting" and show that pornserver violated the law, just like how you might send an underage person to try to buy booze from a convenience store.

Using a VPN is like using a fake ID for the booze. It might provide a "it's too hard" defense, but it also might not. You don't know until a judge or jury says "not guilty."

It's a lot more than a mere "marketing stunt" if he establishes a legal precedent that inventors can't use some kinds of optimization algorithms to sift through possible solutions.

I hate to say this, but that sounds like an argument in favor of the plaintiffs against Internet Archive.

If a "typical library" uses DRMed books, then the only way to avoid violating DMCA (both when people read the books, and when the library trafficks in software which lets people read the books) is to get authorization from the copyright owners. So those libraries must be using licensing, rather than relying on the exemptions codified in copyright law or things like Fair Use in common law.

So you're really just calling attention to the fact that Internet Archive must be doing things very differently from typical libraries, blowing off licensing "deals" and instead relying on copyright. But if the works are DRMed, then they can't do that legally, thanks to DMCA. The whole point of DMCA is to nullify anything in copyright law which is in favor of the user rather than the copyright owner. If it didn't do that, then the pieces of shit who voted to enact DMCA would not have been paid. Bitrot and other disadvantages are the point.

The People need to repeal 1201. (Or even better, outlaw DRM, so that situations no longer exist where 1201 can be applied.) Barring that, then IA needs to get authorization from the copyright owners, before they can legally lend the books (and worse: trafficking in the software is going to require some authorization too, but that gets into some complexicated issues). They didn't do that, so they're going to lose.

I wonder if we could possibly manipulate Republicans to repeal 1201, on the basis that people who write books are four-eyed liberal academic LGBTQ-friendly elitist intellectuals -- exactly the kind of monsters that the government is supposed to be hurting. If we have to live through this ridiculous era, then we should at least try to get something from our American Khmer Rouge. DMCA IS A WOKE PLOT!!!!1