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?

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?

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

But Anna’s Archive is probably easier.

I’ve been playing a lot of Ziggurat 2 which is a roguelite fantasy-themed FPS with 4 categories of weapons. Instead of spamming Y to cycle through weapons, I can select my weapon directly with the back buttons.

I’d just email the CEO, media relations, and legal (if you can get all their email addresses), inform them of their non-compliance with the GPL and ask them to resolve this swiftly before it needs to be escalated. Then if you don’t hear back in 2 business days, reply all again CCing someone they might care about: local media to their jurisdiction, the FSF, the EFF, etc.

In Canada, I’ve never bothered with a VPN. Nobody in Canada has ever been successfully sued for torrent downloading of media, and BC courts have thrown out mass John Doe cases as a waste of the legal system’s time.

Even if it does go to court, there’s a principal in Canadian law that damages can be at most three times the value of the good (for punitive damages). For BluRay that’s, what, $50? They don’t want to go all the way to a judgement to set the legal precedent of a $150 judgement.

Even if courts go beyond treble damages, there’s a maximum fine of $5000 for non-commercial infringement. Even that isn’t with their legal costs to pursue.

So non-commercial piracy is de facto legal in Canada.

(IANAL, this is not legal advice.)

I don’t know the terminology, but so long as the torrent is active, you’re uploading. If you selectively download files, then you can only upload the chunks you have downloaded, obviously. Is that “seeding” if you aren’t a “seed” with 1.00 availability? idk.

I’d still count that as “seeding” since you’re running the torrent for upload only, but idk if there’s a precise definition somewhere.

I don’t think that’s an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.

Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there’s a “complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped” torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.

You could even get a situation where there are no “seeds” but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.

I’m not fully looped in to why Anna’s Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I’d be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I’m not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that’s useless to me without the full archive.

Yeah, I don’t blame them.

I looked into this after posting, and it seems like getting Android emulating working on the Deck isn’t too hard. I haven’t checked FTL’s compatibility with the emulator, though.

It’s a shame FTL has such terrible touch controls on PC. I wonder about emulating the Android version of the game; I haven’t looked into it at all, but that might work well if possible.