Once Apple’s leasing program kills off a competing used phone market, they can also raise the cost of the lease to reflect that, which also benefits Apple over the longer term.

Apple would be stupid not to try leasing their phones.

I think at least for the bigger and for the less niche communities moderation needs to be democratic.

The upvote brought democracy to content ranking. It’s possible to bring democracy to moderation.

And this will still leave the option of private despotic moderation available. Both styles of moderation can act as a check on each other. The same community can be reproduced twice, with private and with democratic moderation. Then if the tyrants are out of control you can escape to a democratically managed community. And if the so called “mob” is out of control and the privately moderated space is nicer, you can escape there. The whole system will eventuanly self-regulate to a nice daily hum.

Same.

Whenever I brought up freedom of speech, the reddit mods would mock me with “freeze peach.” Many of the mods and admins are overtly hostile to free speech and hate democracy.

Ironic, because democracy is what made reddit great once upon the time. I remember leaving digg to go to reddit precisely because I felt I had more control and more weight there as a commenter. And they took an axe to everything that was once great.

Needless to say I have been banned on reddit since a long time ago.

Copyright started out in the USA at 14 years plus another optional 14 year extension. I am going by my memory here.

The purpose of the law was to balance public and private interests.

The public benefits from uninhibited copying. Private interests benefit from a monopoly on copying. The law at first recognized both of those interests as legitimate, which is why copyrights were relatively short at first.

Then the rich companies like Disney lobbied the govrnment to change all that.

Now copyright is something like lifetime of an author (who can be a corporation and does not even need to be a human) plus something like 150 years, plus/minus.

Basically the interests of the public were tossed out the window.

The public libraries were and still are the bullwark providing free access to copies, but the private interests hate the libraries too.

I don’t want the artists to starve. Right now the biggest holders, abusers and beneficiaries of the heinously immoral (as it currently stands) copyright regime are the giant gorporations, not the starving artists.

Plus, now a new crop of giant corporations decided to ignore copyright that was recently serving primarily other giant corporations. I hate all of them, and all of IT. Fuck them all.

Copyright law needs a reform now.

• 10 year term, no extensions.
• Can only be owned by the actual humans and never the legal entities. One exception is an estate of a human who passed on suddenly, who may hold the copyright for the benefit of the author’s family.
• No sales or transfers permitted.
• All licensing is mandatorily non-exclusive to prevent the giant corps from hoarding rights by forcing the authors to give them exclusivity. Basically an author should always be able to make new deals, full stop.

So in summary, center the human author, and balance the public and the private iterests.

And while we wait, harrrr, harrr, harrr, sail the high seas.

P.S. Fashion is one form of creative output not covered by any monopoly protection. The fashion industry is doing fine.