N Sims

@copyrightlibn.bsky.social

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Copyright specialist at UMN Libs, JD/MLIS. IP & techlaw, leftishness. Random pets/bugs/crafts/hyperlocal politics, etc. Gender-ambivalent, any pronouns fine.

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N Sims

Blog Post: DMCA 512(c) Helps Redbubble Defeats Copyright Lawsuit–Wallshoppe v. Redbubble blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/202...

DMCA 512(c) Helps Redbubble Defeats Copyright Lawsuit-Wallshoppe v. Redbubble - Technology & Marketing Law Blogblog.ericgoldman.org Wallshoppe makes wallpaper with copyrighted designs, such as the “Pacifico Palm Design” depicted to the right. It has a copyright registration in the design. Wallshoppe found Redbubble merchants selli...

Driving along 62 tonight in the midst of a Very Much weekend, watching various fireworks displays above the highway. Recalling similar views driving from Convergence in better years, but also appreciating that it's not one of the years watching them from Mpls Children's hospital.

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Hard side eye for any academics blorping on about using AI, it’s an ethical disaster in every dimension and the failure to acknowledge that vs trying to look shiny & clever for the bandwagon is frankly embarrassing.

Google’s emissions are up 48% in 5 years. Microsoft’s are up 30% since 2020. Those soaring figures are being driven by mass investments in data centers to power AI tools. Generative AI is a climate disaster and data center expansion must be stopped.

Generative AI is a climate disasterdisconnect.blog Tech companies are abandoning emissions pledges to chase AI market share

In MN, you don't have to be a great person to help other people with no fixed address vote.

The otherwise horrible public library director in Mankato used to do this for unhoused regulars

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N Sims

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N Sims

...at finding N African folks in the voter rolls. But since a lot of the yuppie apartment-dwellers had recently moved, a lot of them had to same-day register. When a YAD said "Hansen, -en not -on", these young workers were legitimately stumped. Hansen had to get out his ID to show them the spelling.

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N Sims

*Final observation: a few years back I was observing at a polling place with a high percentage of N African immigrant voters, but also overlapping with new yuppie apartments. Several poll workers were high school kids from the N African community (not immigrants themselves.) They were great...

Looks like MN does clean up the voter rolls from time to time. So this is another category of voter who has some protection because of same-day registration: haven't voted in a while? S'okay, we'll just update your info.

Maybe depends on what you consider purging, but if you haven’t voted in 4 years you will likely need to re-register.

People are talking about voter ID again, so I thought i'd offer some observations. I've done partisan poll-watching in Minnesota most major elections since 2012. Minnesota does not require voter ID in the way most people think of ID. I have only ever seen that be a good thing.

The inside out characters in my head (with theme music) youtu.be/MAgnTREVCXk?...

The inside out characters in my head

Buckaroo Banzai End Credits (Textless Version)youtu.be Taken from the excellent Arrow Video Blu-ray release.Blue Blaze Irregulars represent.

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N Sims

Wild, that some people that look at Project 2025 and dismiss it, when 23,000 people in Texas had to birth their rapist’s baby last year, a parent has to sign an affidavit each time their child goes to the library in Idaho, and there’s an open war on Trans people. Folks in red states are living it.

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N Sims

“In Grenada, officials said about 98 percent of the buildings on Carriacou and Petite Martinique, where 9,000 to 10,000 people live in total, had been damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s main health facility, the Princess Royal Hospital… “There is literally no vegetation left anywhere”

Hurricane Beryl Batters Jamaica as 2 Other Islands Lie in Ruinwww.nytimes.com The powerful storm, which devastated communities in the eastern Caribbean earlier this week, was headed next to the Cayman Islands.

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N Sims

Let America Be America Again x Langston Hughes

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundationwww.poetryfoundation.org Let America be America again.

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N Sims

If you’ve never seen Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the World War II internment camps and the Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned there, today is a good day to see them and to commit to making sure this never happens again. anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothe...

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N Sims

I will bring this one back every year

‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?’: Descendants Read Frederick Douglass' Speech | NPRyoutu.be In the summer of 2020, the U.S. commemorated Independence Day amid nationwide protests for racial justice and systemic reforms in the wake of George Floyd’s ...

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N Sims

Three things here: • The rule is not going into effect until September. • This ruling would block it from being enforced against the plaintiffs but is not a “nationwide injunction” blocking the rule as to everyone. • The final ruling, expected in Aug, could be more broad.

Breaking: Judge Ada Brown, a Trump appointee in N.D. Texas, has blocked the FTC’s noncompete rule, limited to the named plaintiffs, in an APA challenge as likely contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious. The rule is set to go into effect in September. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Currently blooming in my yard.

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N Sims

These are bonkers numbers. I really hope the Legislature can come back with a new process, and a ton more funding to meet this super-high demand next year. People want better ways to get around! Ebikes are such a low-cost way to provide mobility options to so many!

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Reply to

Joshua J. Friedman

NEW: Judge Merchan postpones Trump's sentencing till September (full letter via Tyler McBrien, Lawfare)

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N Sims

NEW: Here is the Trump team's pre-motion letter on why, in their view, the Supreme Court's immunity decision means Judge Merchan should set aside the NY verdict (via Frank G. Runyeon, Law360) s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24...

I'm coming up on my 15-year anniversary at UMN this month. Coincidentally, we're also changing reference-tracking software for the first time since I got here. Just downloaded my stats. ~2700 entries, or abt 180 questions/year. 📚📜

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N Sims

Reply to

Joshua J. Friedman

Baby llama?

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N Sims

IF YOU BELIEVE YOU’RE PROTECTING DEMOCRACY DON’T BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR NAZIS

And one more thing, being the political party that benefitted greatly from protests in response to Trump’s election and police brutality and then deciding to build a bunch of anti-protest training centers and moving forward with charging protesters as terrorists was stupid & even more so now.

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Fitting that I just just watched a performance of Hamilton yesterday. Who can forget the stirring words from Washington's aria as he's leaving office: "We fought to make me a leader that no law can bind; I could shoot you in the street and nobody would mind."

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Blue Heron Farm

These are the types of things I started doing in 2016, and while they won't keep you from occasional spirals, they will lift you out of a persistent feeling of helplessness. You're only helpless if you decide to be helpless. Take a bit to feel really rotten if you need it and then get to work.

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N Sims

Shorter Justice Roberts: “Look, the main thing is that it should take a very long time to figure out if Trump can be prosecuted for attempting a coup. Ideally several more years. See you again in a Term or (fingers crossed!) two.”

However, the Court’s GOP majority did not issue a test for “official” v. “Unofficial” acts so that it can remain the ultimate arbiter of what can or cannot be prosecuted

Netchoice summary:

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N Sims

Link to the immunity opinion: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p... Looks like they're telling the lower court they have to figure out whether the charges were brought are ones for which immunity apply. So, there's no way this gets resolved in a reasonable amount of time.

Immunity opinion is 6-3 except for one part which Barrett didn't join, Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson dissent, so it's gonna be bad.

www.supremecourt.gov

On this, the final day of Pride Month, I plumbed. (Not my sink.) (The snap-together mixer valve thingie is pretty slick. It all went together much more quickly than it came apart.)

One thing they don't tell you when you get a spinal fusion is that it is going to make under-sink repair work interesting. (It actually has some advantages. Just also some odd manueverability issues. 😁)

It's kind of amazing that corrective lenses are still so much of an art, 100s of years after we started using them. In other news, I should have fired my optometrist a couple years ago.