Downloading content is almost definitely legal in Canada, and non-commercial digital distribution has never gone to court, so its legality hasn’t been established.

I can’t find the source, but I recall reading speculation that sharing backup copies between owners of the media is likely legal in Canada but, again, it hasn’t been tried by courts, so its legality hasn’t been firmly established.

Anyway, with non-commercial digital distribution not having any legal teeth in Canada, it’s effectively legal and its literal legality is unknown.

Depends on your jurisdiction.

As far as I know, that’s never been tried in court in Canada, and there’s reason to suspect that may not be the case here. (Although I’m not a lawyer, so I may be mistaken.)

You can if you own the Mario game…

… but I just downloaded a 1TB Batocera Switch image to run from MicroSD.

Indeed. As a silly example, I had a Pacman clone game that ran based on CPU cycle speed. I needed to turn the in-game speed setting way down and toggle turbo off to make it slow enough to be playable.

Sentencing hasn’t happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.

Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it’s just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.

I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.

Maybe a nice neutral woman’s name… Like, Anna?

And it’s more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.

Yeah, Anna’s Archive. Great name. Let’s go with that one.

I don’t follow. The Internet Archive only allows 1 copy of each physical book to be loaned at a time. If someone has the book you want already, then you need to wait until their loan expires. It’s not like shadow libraries that allow unrestricted DRM-free downloading.

And publishers’ profits are rising and don’t seem to be at all correlated to library access, so of course nobody is suggesting they should close.

What am I not understanding?

Thoroughly explained and well supported. I want to save this in case this topic ever comes up again so I can copy-pasta this.

Yeah, fair. It’s frustrating when prices fluctuate; I’m lucky that we don’t have many “must have” items on our shipping lists, and I’m very price sensitive, so I just don’t buy things that are expensive. And I only used to go to Superstore at most weekly, so I’d never have noticed daily fluctuations.

Beehaw never defederated with lemmy.ml. Most notably, Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world which is one of the main reasons I’m happy to stay here. If Beehaw moves away from Lemmy, I’ll definitely need to find another instance that’s defederated with Lemmy.world.

To be fair to Loblaws, I’ve never seen them change prices with these mid-day, so they’re not engaged in “surge pricing” that I’ve heard of. (I haven’t been to Loblaws since the start of the boycott, but I don’t expect it’s changed.)

But I do wonder about the legality of that; right now, if the price at the till doesn’t match the item price, you get the first one free and the rest at the marked price (up to $10 items; above that it’s $10 off the marked price for the first item). But my impression is that policy is from Loblaws signing some sort of grocery code ages ago when scanners came in, essentially to assure consumers that they wouldn’t be scammed by scanners ringing up items at higher prices than advertised. I don’t think that is legally mandated.

So, then, what happens if the price changes between when you put it in your cart and when you arrive at the till? Anyone engaging in surge pricing where the timing isn’t clearly marked in advance is going to get into a lot of trouble with consumer backlash, at the very least, but I hope it’s illegal, too.

There’s probably something in the terms about it, and it would take a very expensive legal battle to settle it. And I doubt it has enough legal merit to be taken on as a class-action lawsuit.

So, really, does it matter if it’s illegal? With the asymmetrical power imbalance, they literally don’t need to care about the laws. Realistically, no EU regulator is going to fine them for cancelling “a purchase made in India”, either.

This seems like it might work really well. We’ve evolved to be social creatures, and internalizing the emotions of others is literally baked into our DNA (mirror neurons), so filtering out the emotional “noise” from customers seems, to me, like a brilliant way to improve the working conditions for call centre workers.

It’s not like you can’t also tell the emotional tone of the caller based on the words they’re saying, and the call centre employees will know that voices are being changed.

Also, I’m not so sure about reporting on anonymous Redditor comments as the basis for journalism. I know why it’s done, but I’d rather hear what a trained psychologist has to say about this, y’know?

I don’t want to quote dump multiple paragraphs, but Stout explicitly explains that’s not correct in the following paragraphs, citing relevant case law where appropriate.

I’m not a lawyer, but that article reads pretty clearly to me; I’d be interested to hear if you read it and get a different interpretation.

There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

– Lynn Stout, professor of corporate and business law, Cornell University

An Omdia report from April 2023 claims Valve sold 1.62 million units of the Steam Deck in 2022, which was expected to grow by 14 percent to 1.85 million units in 2023. If we assume the 14% growth continues, and those numbers are accurate, then Valve is closing in on 4½ million units sold.

Yep. Z-Library loaded fine for me with their app, which leads the darknet site.

But Anna’s Archive is probably easier.

This is the first I’ve heard it that way. I haven’t read the contract though, so I can’t say I’m correct with confidence.

Yeah, exactly. Steam gets very little money from me (well, aside from the Deck), but I get all the benefits from their services. Not sure how that’s monopolistic…

Essentially, this hinges on whether demanding price parity with other platforms is anticompetitive… I think that’s going to be a tough hill to climb, especially as they’re only asking to not be undercut as a supplier. There’s no requirement to sell exclusively through Steam, and Steam even allows developers to give Steam keys on other platforms, including with game bundles that have a total “value” well below Steam sale prices.

Like, I use Steam daily, and buy multiple games most months in game bundles, but in the last few years, I’ve only made a handful of purchases on Steam. One game and my Steam Deck Dock were my only Steam purchases this calendar year, and my Steam Deck OLED and two games were my only purchases last year, but in that time I added about 150 new games to my Steam library.