Anybody who's looked up recipes online recently knows that they're being used mainly as a way to serve you ads. Before the recipe is a bunch of ad-ridden prose about the recipe itself, with some pictures. Then, at the bottom of the page is the recipe. Google was making the content more easily available, but destroying the ad revenue.
Gotta publish....
They're focusing on this sort of thing:
Betty Smith will give to her mother Gloria Smith (hereinafter "Gloria") one million dollars (the "Payment") on December 1st (the "Payment Date"). Gloria agrees to deposit the Payment at First National Bank (the "Bank") on the Payment Date.
And saying that you only do that in legal writing, not when you're telling a narrative story.
In a narrative story, you might say this:
Betty gave her mom $1M in December 1st. On that date, she deposited it at First National Bank.
There's ambiguity in the narrative story (who did the deposit -- Betty or her Mom?) In legal writing, you're trying to avoid that ambiguity even if you end up with long hard-to-read sentences. If you're telling a story, it's ok to have a little ambiguity and you trust that the reader will figure it out.
It's not surprising that non-lawyers start to use those mid-sentence definitions when they write legal documents -- they're trying to solve the same problem with ambiguity that the lawyers try. It's like saying "novice coders end up using variables just like experienced coders do."
According to the Article, it looks like it was a guy in Houston who got a bit under $291,000.
Not sure how much luck JPMorgan is going to have in the lawsuit department -- people who do this sort of thing aren't exactly the sort of people who are likely to just invest the money. Chances are it's mostly gone.
Note that the online terms are what govern CloudStrike's relationships with small businesses where the size of the business doesn't justify CloudStrike's negotiating a separate agreement. Bigger companies negotiate their own agreements. If you're in the legal department at, say, American Airlines, you don't say "Oh, your extremely one-sided terms of service are perfectly ok with us." Instead, you hand CloudStrike your 40-page agreement that is very one-sided in your favor. And then you spend a couple of months negotiating that agreement.
But, in the final agreement, there will be a section addressing liability. And, in general, CloudStrike is going to have standards of what they will agree to v. what they won't. CloudStrike just isn't going to agree to be responsible for all the harm suffered by its customers -- there's just no way they could buy enough insurance to cover all that risk and, if they did, the price of their product would go through the roof. So, they're going to say something like "Look, you can get your money back (or 3x your money back, or 5x your money back)" or "You can get back at most $5M" and they'll say "If you need more coverage than that, then you need to get your own insurance."
Uh. No. Section 230 says that Cox won't be treated as the publisher. That doesn't help it with the copyright issues, which are governed by Section 512 of the Copyright Act (the DMCA). Under Section 512, an ISP isn't liable for the activities of its users if it implements a policy for terminating the accounts of repeat infringers. The claims against Cox were that Cox didn't actually implement that policy, so that liability shield (the "DMCA Safe Harbor") didn't apply to it.
(1) GOODs have an obligation to be fit for their intended use. If they're not, then that's either a warranty question or a products liability question. SERVICES, on the other hand, are governed by contract. And, in Google's terms of service for Google maps, they specifically disclaim this sort of liability.
(2) In any case, the suit is in negligence, not products liability. And, there they run into a problem because North Carolina is a contributory negligence state. This means that if the driver could have avoided the accident by acting prudently, then *even if Google breached its duty of care* the driver can't collect.
(3) the "You were told about this multiple times" argument doesn't really go that far. Google can't change something just because it's gotten multiple reports. If it did, then you could easily see a group of teenage pranksters reporting things that just weren't true. And, it's not like they have somebody actually reviewing every image taken with Google Street view.
(4) One thing going against the driver is that it's been 9 years. If it really were the case that a reasonably prudent driver wouldn't have noticed, then you would have expected somebody else to have done the same thing in the previous 9 years.
> Everyone has a foot
Exactly. And, not only does everybody have a foot, they have a foot with them ALL THE TIME. People use body-based measurements largely because of convenience, not because of accuracy.
Last week, I had to check to see if a washing machine would fit through a doorway. I put one hand on each side of the washing machine, stepped back, holding my hands in place, then stepped up to the door and compared where my hands were with the width of the door. That's a body-based measurement. I could have used a tape measure, but the extra benefit in accuracy wasn't worth the time in finding the tape measure.
You don't even need to get to fair use. Copyright protects a set of exclusive rights: the right to copy, to prepare derivative works, to distribute and to display publicly. If you're not doing one of those, then you're not infringing. Further, copyright only protects *expression* -- the underlying *ideas* are not protected. Derivative works are things like translations, screenplays, and so on. ChatGPT isn't doing that, AND it's not re-using the original expression.
All extremists should be taken out and shot.
