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To my delight, Dunford cited *Lenz* here, which is the infamous "Dancing Baby" case that @eff successfully litigated on behalf of Stephanie Lenz, whose video of her adorable (then-)toddler dancing to a few seconds of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" was censored by Universal Music Group:

https://www.eff.org/cases/lenz-v-universal

Dunford's towering rage is leavened with incredulous demands for explanations: how on *Earth* could a lawyer knowingly send such a defective, illegal threat?

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Lenz v. Universal

After more than 10 years of litigation, Stephanie Lenz and Universal Music Publishing Group have resolved their dispute, often referred to as the “Dancing Baby” case.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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They're taking orders for their next resupply, shipping on June 1. Gotta love that Streisand Effect!

https://www.thecolacorporation.com/

I'm generally skeptical of political activism that takes the form of buying things or refusing to do so. "Voting with your wallet" is a pretty difficult trick to pull off. After all, the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and generally, the monopoly party wins.

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The Cola Corporation | KILL AMERICAN MYTHS

The United States has made a bunch of myths about itself. Making the World Safe for Democracy, Shining City on a Hill, Land of Opportunity―all lies. The Cola Corporation exists to contradict those lies with clean, clear visual statements.

^{The Cola Corporation}

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This is where Matt Bors's Mr Gotcha comes in: "ooh, you want to make things better, but you bought a product from a tainted company, I guess you're not really sincere, gotcha!"

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

There's a great example of this in Zephyr Teachout's brilliant 2020 book *Break 'Em Up*.

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Mister Gotcha | The Nib

Calling out all hypocrisy all the way.

^{The Nib}

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Canada is one of the most monopoly-friendly countries in the world. Hell, the Competition Act doesn't even have an "abuse of dominance" standard! That's like a criminal code that doesn't have a section prohibiting "murder." (The Trudeau government has promised to fix this.)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-an-overhauled-competition-act-will-light-a-fire-in-the-stolid-world-of/

There's stiff competition for Most Guillotineable Canadian Billionaire. There's the entire Irving family, who basically own the province of New Bruinswick:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/dynasties-2-the-irvings/

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An overhauled Competition Act will light a fire in the stolid world of Canadian business

Unianimous support on Parliament Hill led to big changes in the rules that govern competition

^{The Editorial Board (The Globe and Mail)}

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There's Ted Rogers, the trumpy telco billionaire, whose serial acquire-and-loot approach has devastated Canadian TV and publishing:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/canadaland-725-the-rogers-family-compact/

But then there's Galen Fucking Weston, the nepobaby who inherited the family grocery business (including Loblaw), bought out all his competitors (including Shopper's Drug Mart), and then engaged in a criminal price-fixing conspiracy to rig the price of bread, the most Les-Miz-ass crime imaginable:

https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2023/06/what-should-happened-galen-weston-price-fixing/

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Here's what should have happened to Loblaws' Galen Weston for price fixing

Even though Galen Weston Jr. is no longer at the helm of Loblaw Companies Ltd., the supermarket oligarch and his family will forever remain hated b...

^{Becky Robertson (blogTO)}

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This is the man who decided that the discount on nearly-spoiled produce would be slashed from 50% to 30%, who racked up record profits even as his prices skyrocketed.

It's impossible to overstate how loathed Galen Weston is at this moment. There's a very good episode of the *excellent* new podcast *Lately*, hosted by Canadian competition expert Vass Bednar and Katrina Onstad that gives you a sense of the national outrage:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-boycotting-the-loblawpoly/

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Boycotting the Loblawpoly

The Globe and Mail offers the most authoritative news in Canada, featuring national and international news

^{The Lately staff (The Globe and Mail)}

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All of this has led to a national boycott of Loblaw, kicked off by members of the r/loblawsisoutofcontrol, and it's *working*. Writing for *Jacobin*, Jeremy Appel gives us a snapshot of a nation in revolt:

https://jacobin.com/2024/05/loblaw-grocery-price-gouge-boycott/

Appel points out the boycott's problems - there's lots of places, particularly in the north, where Loblaw's is the only game in town, or where the sole competitor is the equally odious Walmart.

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Loblaw’s Great Canadian Grocery Gouge

Loblaw’s shareholders are laughing all the way to the bank while Canadians struggle to put food on the table. A recent consumer boycott of the grocery giant has sparked a national debate on food affordability and corporate profits.

^jacobin.com

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In response, Ticketmaster has mobilized its own Loblaw-like shill army, who insist that all the anti-monopoly activism is misguided populism, and "anti-business." In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tears these claims apart, and provides one of the clearest explanations of how Ticketmaster rips us all off that I've ever seen, leaning heavily on Ticketmaster's own statements to their investors and the business-press:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-break-up-ticketmaster

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Antitrust Enforcers to Break Up Ticketmaster and End the "Ticketmaster Tax"

The "People's Lawyer" Jonathan Kanter wants to make concerts and live events more affordable, and today the Department of Justice filed suit to make it happen.

^{Matt Stoller (BIG by Matt Stoller)}

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But for industry insiders, those workings are all too clear. When Rebecca Giblin and I were working on our book *Chokepoint Capitalism*, we talked to insiders from every corner of the entertainment-industrial complex, and there was always at least one expert who'd go on record about the scams inside everything from news monopolies to streaming video to publishing and the record industry:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

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(no title)

a book about why creative labor markets are rigged - and how to unrig them Competition is supposed to be fundamental to capitalism.

^{chokepointcapitalism.com}

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That's something we could use a lot more of, especially in platform regulation. The other big tech news about Big Tech last week was the progress of a bill that would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act at the end of 2025, without any plans to replace it with something else.

Section 230 is the most maligned, least understood internet law, and that's saying something:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

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Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act

Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I apologize if it feels a bit cold and rude to resp…

^Techdirt

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The war-criminals, rapists, murderers and rip-off artists who currently make do with bogus copyright claims to "manage their reputations" will be able to use pretextual legal threats to make their critics just *disappear*:

https://www.qurium.org/forensics/dark-ops-undercovered-episode-i-eliminalia/

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Dark Ops Undercovered: Episode I – Eliminalia

Since November 2020, Qurium has received several mails from fake lawyers asking us to remove articles related to corruption in Angola involving Isabel dos Santos or Vincent Miclet.

^{www.qurium.org}

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This week on EFF's Deeplinks blog, I published a piece making the connection between abolishing Section 230 and reinforcing Big Tech monopolies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/wanna-make-big-tech-monopolies-even-worse-kill-section-230

The Big Tech platforms really *do* suck, and the solution to their systemic, persistent moderation failures won't come from making them liable for users' speech.

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Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230

In an age of resurgent anti-monopoly activism, small online communities, either standing on their own, or joined in loose “federations,” are the best chance we have to escape Big Tech’s relentless surveillance and clumsy, unaccountable control.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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The platforms have correctly assessed that they alone have the legal and moderation staff to do the mass-deletions of controversial speech that could survive a post-230 world. That's why tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg *love* the idea of getting rid of 230:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/facebooks-pitch-congress-section-230-me-not-thee

But for *small* tech providers - individuals, co-ops, nonprofits and startups that host fediverse servers, standalone group chats and BBSes - a post-230 world is a mass-extinction event.

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Facebook’s Pitch to Congress: Section 230 for Me, But not for Thee

As Mark Zuckerberg tries to sell Congress on Facebook’s preferred method of amending the federal law that serves as a key pillar of the internet, lawmakers must see it for what it really is: a self-serving and cynical effort to cement the company’s d…

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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Ever had a friend demand that you take sides in an interpersonal dispute ("if you invite her to the party, *I'm* not coming!").

Imagine if your refusal to take sides in a dispute among your friends - and their friends, and *their* friends - could result in you being named to a suit that could cost *hundreds of thousands of dollars* to settle:

https://www.engine.is/news/primer/section230costs

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Primer: Value of Section 230

Engine supports the growth of technology entrepreneurship through economic research, policy analysis, and advocacy on local and national issues.

^{Evan Engstrom (ENGINE)}

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One of the reasons I love working for EFF is our ability to propose technologically informed, sound policy solutions to the very real problems that tech creates, such as our work on interoperability as a way to make it easier for users to escape Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Every year, EFF recognizes the best, bravest and brightest contributors to a better internet and a better technological future, with our annual EFF Awards.

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Interoperable Facebook

In this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use socia…

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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Nominations just opened for this year's awards - if you know someone who fits the bill, here's the form:

https://www.eff.org/nominations-open-2024-eff-awards

It's nearly time for me to sign off on this weekend's linkdump. For one thing, I have to vacate my backyard hammock, because we've got contractors who need to access the side of the house to install our brand new heat-pump.

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Nominate the Next EFF Award Honoree

For over thirty years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented awards to key leaders and organizations in the fight for freedom and innovation online.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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This is the most solarpunk thing I've read all week, and it makes me insanely jealous of Japanese people. The *second*-most solarpunk thing I've read this week came from *The New Republic*, where Aaron Regunberg and Donald Braman discuss the possibility of using civil asset forfeiture laws - lately expanded to farcical levels by the Supreme Court in *Culley* - to force the fossil fuel industry to pay for the energy transition:

https://newrepublic.com/article/181721/fossil-fuels-civil-forefeiture-pipeline-climate

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A Big Tool to Fight Climate Change Is Hiding in Plain Sight

Civil forfeiture is usually used against people suspected of drug offenses. Instead, we could be using it to make Big Oil pay for its role causing mass death.

^{The New Republic}

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All right, the heat-pump guys *really* need me to vacate the hammock, so here's one last quickie for you: Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier's new paper, "Seeing Like a Data Structure":

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structure

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Seeing Like a Data Structure

Our data-centric way of seeing the world isn't serving us well. Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier argue that we need new socio-technical systems that leave room for the inherent messiness of reality.

^{Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs}

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