#public interest lawyering

[lazycranberrydoodles]

its prosecutor jiang wanyin!!!! oh fuck!!! / gifs + au rambling below the cut / follow for more mdzs x aa crossover stuff :3

all the gifs i made (poses traced off franziska):

hes so similar to franziska when you think about it. theyre both deeply insecure tsundere adoptive younger sibling of successful main characters. who carry whips. something something edgeworth choosing death and wwx actually dying also

his share code is HWFEFF if you wanna use him in a trial! you can't share backgrounds but heres the scenery from the donghua i used.

the easiest way to put custom stuff into objection.lol is to send it in discord and then use the link from opening it in your browser :)

a whole lot of AU stuff

the art im making is for if mdzs was an ace attorney game, playing from WWX's POV to solve various mysteries/cases over the course of the plot. so this scene would be from turnabout goddess, which would loosely cover the dafan mountain mystery.

cases include:

Turnabout Revenge (Mo Manor, quick introductory first case)

Turnabout Goddess (Dafan mountain, the good times flashback)

Turnabout Saber (the man-eating castle (omg hiii nhs))

The Blind Turnabout (Yi City arc)

Turnabout Deviation (the Koi Tower conference, Empathy on NMJ ala turnabout memories or beginnings. opening cutscene is his qi deviation)

The Blood-Soaked Turnabout (second Burial Mounds siege, flashbacks: Xuanwu, Sunshot, YLLZ, Nightless City massacre)

Turnabout Lotus Seeds (testimony about JGY, tree scene, golden core reveal, bathtub scene. opening cutscene could be JGS' death but that would make it canon rather than ambiguous)

Turnabout Confession (Guanyin temple)

the problem with splitting novel!mdzs into turnabouts is that flashbacks are a huge chunk of the book but they don't have mysteries/ cases to solve so they've gotta be lumped together with present day stuff. imo? many of the flashbacks would likely have to be abridged so they could be retold ala DL-6, SL-9, or the fourth grade incident, where characters talk about it over some pieces of art. this is really difficult when theres a metric ton of unspoken, complex, and signifcant history between every character lmao

there's not as much of a problem with the cql timeline but i have not finished it. so.

the opening cutscenes in ace attorney always show the murder and/or the murderer plotting. the first cutscene of the game would be MXY summoning WWX, muttering about getting revenge on his family (it would also be good for him to mention the yllz being dead because that's how the novel starts.) cut to WWX's POV as he wakes up covered in blood and the investigation segment begins.

for investigations of monsters (goddess, saber, etc) the cutscene would be a scene of some poor throwaway cultivator getting their shit wrecked.

it would be cool to make a breakdown for JGY but again I need to review that scene cause I don't know who I'd base him on. maybe Vasquez or Dahlia.

tell me your thoughts!! i'm working off of a mdzs summary/ skimming the novel because i don't remember it too well so if i get anything wrong please yell at me

Jin Ling's sprites & Nie Huaisang's sprites / masterpost

#PLEAAAASE send it to me if you do actually use my animations in a case🥺 #here im adapting mdzs to aa gameplay rather than making a mdzs AU where they are lawyers #so jiang cheng is not a prosecutor in this hes just angry. and on the right side of the screen #that man has not graduated law school but then again no one in ace attorney has either #the names are based off of how ace attorney cases are either named after a distinctive item/location (bigtop bridge samurai etc) #or the main emotional/character type thing that happens (goodbyes reminiscence farewell) #the mdzs/aa au where the stories get blended (ie my tags on the nhs post) is very interesting but i would have to think about it very hard #and i dont want to . i would rather think about what the court record would look like (its full of severed limbs) #MDZS' EXPLORATIONS OF MORALITY MAKE ME CHEW ON ROCKS #urrgh i got carried away writing this post & wrote a couple hundred words comparing aa and mdzs' attitudes towards morality & public opinio #i could write an essay on this topic tbh. #can i call this an au? its the same story in the same universe just in a different format. hmm #mdzs #aa #art #mo dao zu shi #ace attorney #grandmaster of demonic cultivation #cql #the untamed #jiang cheng #jin ling #objection.lol #flashing image tw #pixel art #animation #my art #franziska von karma #i guess?? #mdzs aa au

[klanced]

katie your lawyer au tags have me on my knees I never thought guys in suits doing stuff would seem interesting but wow…wow. your mind

Thank u Anon this AU is incredibly indulgent for me.......... ok time 4 more world-building.

I think @heynhay's original idea of Keith & Lance working together at the same firm is best. For both plot reasons but also for my own morale LOL

So everyone works at a fairly large private firm that splits its practice and has some of its associates doing profit-driven law (i.e. corporate or finance) which subsidizes the public interest/service work that the other associates do.

The firm is like "Altea & Daibazaal LLP" or something. Yes I am implying that the firm was started by Alfor and Zarkon. Yes I am implying that Allura and Lotor are nepo babies.

I know I originally said that Keith and Lance were law school rivals but I've changed my mind... (RIP to the law school rivalry dynamics

Instead I'm making it so that Keith and Lance are the same age but Lance has been practicing longer because he went straight into law school after college. Whereas Keith started working after college and got like a Master's degree in Social Work or something before deciding on law school at 26. (I just think Keith is the kind of person who goes to law school later in life.)

Okay onto the specific Klance dynamics... Keith and Lance are both pushing 30 and are also literally lawyers so they are professional and serious about their work... But there is wiggle room for them to still be rivals :p

Lance and Keith are both junior associates at the firm. Lance has seniority because he's been at the firm longer but he's still a year or so away from formally becoming a senior associate.

Lance really, REALLY wants to make partner and he sees Keith as his biggest threat/rival because Keith is Shiro's little brother, and Shiro recently made partner at the firm, so Lance thinks Keith might be a nepo hire. Also some of the senior associates recently left the firm so now Lance is stuck showing Keith the ropes and he's lowkey super bitter about it.

Basically TLDR Lance starts off Not Liking Keith at all for various real or imagined reasons and begins a work rivalry with him. Keith doesn't actually GAF about making partner because he's only planning on working at the firm for a few years to help pay off his student loans, but Lance doesn't know that. However, Keith is a naturally very competitive person, and he also likes having Lance's attention, so Keith immediately goes all in on the rivalry.

Lance, internally: "This Fucking Guy."

Keith, internally: "I am so good at flirting."

The first few months are rough between them. However both are also incredibly productive in their work.

The romcom part of the AU kicks in once the two of them have to start working together on a huge high stakes civil case and they're both like wow.... *twirls hair* he's so competent.............. <3

Anyway misc. things:

TBH I have no idea what kind of law Keith and Lance might private practice... I'm also really torn on what Shiro, Allura, and Hunk would practice hdjsksdhedf

Pidge is hired on a fellowship for either environmental law or data security/privacy law.

Coran does employment law.

Keith went into law school planning on going into public interest/not-for-profit legal aid and swore he would never, ever do corporate law but then he saw his student loans and was like. Hm. Okay maybe some Biglaw is okay. And that's how he ended up at the firm.

Keith:

#lawyer au #voltron #klance #keith #lance #otp: we are a good team #ask #anonymous #katiecanons #the thing is is that like. i want to write them as public interest lawyers soooo bad because that's what i plan on doing. #but the reality is that public interest work is incredibly stressful and depressing and time-consuming #and i genuinely cannot imagine klance having the time/energy to start a relationship if they were both doing civil legal aid #like ngl. i am feeling very discouraged after my first month of law school. i feel very disillusioned by the whole process and the field. #hopefully it's just because i'm stressed and burned out right now and things will become more manageable soon #anyway sorry for not elaborating more on the plot of the au but i have SO much reading left to do

[gikairan]

Everyone taking the Steamboat Willie design and making it do things Disney wouldn't sanction like....

you could have done that anyway. Disney would not have sued you for that. He didn't need to be in the public domain for you to do that.

Disney would have had a problem with you if you tried to sell Steamboat Willie. Not that you made him swear ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Public Domain is about being able to sell your version of the character, not "do whatever you like with it for free". You could do whatever you like with it on the internet anyway, you will not face consequence. Just as long as you didnt try to make money off of it - no one was going to come after you.

#like so much of what im seeing is like.... you could have done that on december 31st #disney would not have sent the lawyers after you lol #the only thing that actually seems to understood the public domain thing is.... a video game that has potential ties to nazis so uhhhh #dont support that thank u #(and as a general rule - be sceptical of ANYTHING you see using 88) #public domain means someone can make their own shorts or write a book about the character #.... instead we just seem to see cheap cash ins in the horror genre bc 'what if family friendly thing is NOT haha we're so funny' #like theyre generally not even GOOD and its just boring that THATS the only take people HAVE #ppl make a big fuss over these characters being in the public domain but they dont actually know WHAT to do with them #because. honestly? .... theyre not that interesting #is winnie the pooh that easy to write new stories with WITHOUT the rest of the cast (Who are slowly entering public domain)?? #does anyone ACTUALLY care about steamboat willie??? #we only care bc its sticking it to the Mouse House #but no one actually has any ideas for these characters outside of that #if Disney hadnt adapted winnie the pooh... would that terrible horror film have been made? #probably not!

[faxxmodem]

thinkin about the amanda's law post all morning and going nuts about the state of prosecution in sawtown, usa

so by the laws of the states most often headcanoned as sawtown locations someone prosecuted for killing another person in a saw trap would probably be looking at a charge of involuntary manslaughter - there's a lot of language in these laws about 'reasonable provocation' and 'extreme emotional disturbance' that can be interpreted many different ways, all of which would likely include being kidnapped and put into a death game

now while there might be a distinction between allowing someone to die out of necessity and actively killing them in a trap (simone in pound of flesh versus brit stabbing luba), it would hinge on there being evidence of malice beyond the provocation/disturbance standard--difficult if not impossible to get in most cases due to lack of evidence and the fact that an individuals state of mind is very hard to prove in court

and though we know full well how sawtown metro PD feels about evidence, i think the sawtown prosecutors office might hesitate to go after survivors when they've got nothing to show for the jigsaw investigation except a pile of dead bodies and horror stories on the evening news... not to mention the potential threat of being tested yourself for targeting someone who's been 'fixed'

#saw #saw 2004 #DISCLAIMER: i am not a lawyer or legal student im just here to take things too seriously #if any lawyers or law students disagree i would love to hear about it! #< genuine about this btw i have a longstanding interest in how the criminal punishment system functions #and don't know enough lawyers to talk shit about it with #i wanted to talk about public opinion of survivors too but i think that's a different post #sorry i haven't cited sources im pretending to work but if you search (state name) and various crimes you can find most state laws #posts from sawtown usa #fxmdm meta

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A New York City directive allowing first responders to enforce a state law that allows them to potentially involuntarily commit people experiencing a mental health crisis can proceed after facing legal challenges by mental health advocates, a judge has ruled.

The ruling, issued Monday by U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty in the Southern District of New York, denied a motion brought by individuals and mental health organizations in December. The legal challenge asked a judge to issue a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the city’s implementation of the policy.

The motion was filed on December 8 as part of an existing lawsuit that alleges New York City has consistently failed to provide safe and appropriate care to New Yorkers experiencing mental health crises. The plaintiffs argued the city’s plan is unconstitutional and violates an individual’s “freedom to live without unlawful seizures and excessive force by law enforcement.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams first announced the directive in November as part of an attempt to address concerns about homelessness and crime.

Adams said it was a myth that first responders can only involuntarily commit those who displayed an “overt act” showing they may be suicidal, violent or a danger to others, CNN previously reported. Instead, he said the law allowed first responders to involuntarily commit those who cannot meet their own “basic human needs” – a lower bar.

New York Lawyers for Public Interest, a non-profit civil rights law firm, said in a statement to CNN it was disappointed by the court’s ruling.

“The rights of New Yorkers with mental disabilities, particularly those who are unhoused, remain imperiled by the city’s new involuntary removal policy. Our litigation challenging the city’s use of New York Police Department officers as first responders when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis continues,” reads the statement from the firm, which was one of the plaintiffs in the December lawsuit.

Nicholas Paolucci, the director of public affairs at the New York City Law Department, said in a statement to CNN that the defendants are “pleased the court agreed plaintiffs have no legal standing to halt the Mayor’s sound and compassionate plan.”

NEW YORK CITY’S PLAN DRAWS CRITICISM

As part of the city’s plan, New York Police Department officers and first responders will get additional training to help them make such evaluations and a team of mental health technicians will be available, either via a hotline or video chat, to help them determine whether a person needs to be taken to a hospital for further evaluation, CNN previously reported.

The city also plans to develop specialized intervention teams to work side by side with NYPD officers.

Adams said first responders weren’t consistently enforcing the law because they were unsure of its scope, reserving it only for cases that appeared the most serious.

New York state enacted a law in 2021 to allow first responders to involuntarily commit a person with mental illness who needs immediate care. The directive led to a mixed response from officials, who acknowledged the challenges of properly and humanely treating mentally ill people.

“This is a longstanding and very complex issue,” NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell said in a statement. “We will continue to work closely with our many partners to ensure that everyone has access to the services they require. This deserves the full support and attention of our collective efforts.”

Mental health advocates argued in their legal challenge that the city’s policy will authorize officers with “little to no expertise in dealing with individuals with mental disabilities…to determine whether an individual should be forcefully – often violently – detained against their will.”

“If the Involuntary Removal Policy is permitted to continue to be implemented, Plaintiffs and countless other New Yorkers will suffer irreparable harm, including a substantially increased likelihood that they will be subjected to unlawful detention and involuntary hospitalization just for exhibiting behavior perceived by a police officer to be unusual – whether the individual has a mental disability or not,” the advocates’ December motion stated.

#us politics #news #cnn #cnn politics #new york #new york city #new york police department #involuntary holds #involuntary hospitalization #mental health services #Judge Paul Crotty #sdny #Mayor Eric Adams #New York Lawyers for Public Interest #Nicholas Paolucci #New York City Law Department #first responders #Keechant Sewell #Involuntary Removal Policy #unlawful detention #2023

[aedicula]

not to be overly earnest but it is really like what are any of us supposed to do. climate change...get fucked. even if voting worked and even if we had candidates making meaningful commitments to genuinely progressive platforms, i guess let’s let the supreme court decide if it’s okay to make things better. and btw they are going to say it is illegal for us to want more from the world we live in. like. ad infinitum about everything. 

like it’s all a mechanism to wear us down into thinking everyone around us is targeting us and to force us to target them and assign blame in turn to gain advantages but essentially none of us could ever have thrown this shit off course in any serious way. it is really villainous.

#in that i have had significant privileges allowing me to become a public interest lawyer who does actually get to use the law to obtain seri #ous benefits for my clients #and even i am like it’s cool how half of the work is just resisting and overcoming these totally artificial distinctions or pointless #barriers #erected solely to maintain a status quo that essentially only benefits evil overlords playing 3d chess

[corvidcall]

honestly one of the problems i have just. making decisions about my life and future in general. is that my family, though i love them, is frequently very judgy and not particularly supportive (at least, not in ways that i need and enjoy. i think they think they are being supportive??) so there are things id be interested in, or would even like a second opinion on, but i dont want to bring it up because i dont want to hear how theyll respond. either theyll shoot down my idea and I'll feel foolish, or theyll get really fixed on it and then I'll HAVE to do it. there's just not a lot of flexibility

#anime life #anyway this post brought to you by me wondering if i would do well as a lawyer #tbh all the ai art stuff has gotten me very interested in IP law!!!!! #but also my dad is a public defense attorney #so i feel like if i suggested i might go into law. hes gonna have An Opinion!!!! #and i just don't feel like hearing it!!

[jeezypetes]

The couple’s massage my gf got for us for valentines day just got rescheduled for a third time… I didn’t think anything of it the first two times bc of course it gets busy around valentines day and the second time they said the masseuse had a family emergency and promised extra free services but now I’m starting to think i got so caught up in the euphoria of couples massage with my wonderful gf i was living in a world where homophobia didn’t exist

#now I’m like keep canceling bitch my brother is a public interest lawyer #i want a free facial

[shokuto]

I'm stuck between Ganke going to college to be a biochemist, an architect, or a lawyer

#biochemist because he produces Miles' web fluid and that's definitely not a simple thing to replicate even *with* the instructions #Architect because of the legos #The lawyer thing was just random but Ganke going to law school while Miles is in regular college speaks to me #But if it's a lawyer there should be an arc about coming to terms with the fact that he'll only be able to serve whoever has the most $ #Unless he chooses to work pro bono or as a public defender #Idk. There's a lot of disillusionment in law school and it'd be interesting to explore that

[philologique]

reading a fic and feeling like the writer definitely went down a long probate rabbit hole and possibly even lawyer-picked their fic bc it is almost right(!!)

#they addressed the fact that wills have no legal force until someone is declared dead #they also said wills are public record at that point. which. not really. only after probate #but after the character went to the decedent's lawyer the lawyer directed them to find another lawyer* due to conflicts of interest!!!! #*in the office. they didn't know conflicts are imputed to everyone else at a firm but still! PROGRESS in fanfic featuring lawyers!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Good riddance to the Open Gaming License

Last week, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop — a leaked report of Hasbro’s plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:

https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634

The report set off a shitstorm among D&D fans and the broader TTRPG community — not just because it was evidence of yet more enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken WOTC and the OGL at their word.

Gamers were right to be worried. Giant companies love to rugpull their fans, tempting them into a commons with lofty promises of a system that we will all have a stake in, using the fans for unpaid creative labor, then enclosing the fans’ work and selling it back to them. It’s a tale as old as CDDB and Disgracenote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History

(Disclosure: I am a long-serving volunteer board-member for MetaBrainz, which maintains MusicBrainz, a free, open, community-managed and transparent alternative to Gracenote, explicitly designed to resist the kind of commons-stealing enclosure that led to the CDDB debacle.)

https://musicbrainz.org/

Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word “irrevocable.” That means that if you build on licensed content, you don’t have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It’s rugproof.

Now, the OGL does not contain the word “irrevocable.” Rather, the OGL is “perpetual.” To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time. In lawyerspeak, a “perpetual” license is one whose revocation doesn’t come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is “irrevocable,” the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.

This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers — rather than public-interest nonprofits — unleash “open” licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.

The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As Rob Bodine— an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer — wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/26/part3ogl/

The issue lies with what the OGL actually licenses. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is “intellectual property,” and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.

The copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because copyright just doesn’t work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember SpiceDAO?):

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

Copyright is a lot more complex than “anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it.” For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright does not apply to ideas — the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically not copyrightable.

Copyright also doesn’t cover abstract systems or methods — like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a “balanced” system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That’s what “uncopyrightable” means.

Finally, there are the exceptions and limitations to copyright — things that you are allowed to do with copyrighted work, without first seeking permission from the creator or copyright’s proprietor. The best-known exception is US law is fair use, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on “four factors” that determine whether a use is fair or not.

In reality, the four factors are a starting point that courts are allowed and encouraged to consider when determining the fairness of a use, but some of the most consequential fair use cases in Supreme Court history flunk one, several, or even all of the four factors (for example, the Betamax decision that legalized VCRs in 1984, which fails all four).

Beyond fair use, there are other exceptions and limitations, like the di minimis exemption that allows for incidental uses of tiny fragments of copyrighted work without permission, even if those uses are not fair use. Copyright, in other words, is “fact-intensive,” and there are many ways you can legally use a copyrighted work without a license.

Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses. The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC can’t copyright — “the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines.” In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things you don’t need permission to use.

But maybe the OGL grants you permission to use more things, beyond those things you’re allowed to use anyway? Nope. The OGL specifically exempts:

Product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark…

Now, there are places where the uncopyrightable parts of D&D mingle with the copyrightable parts, and there’s a legal term for this: merger. Merger came up for gamers in 2018, when the provocateur Robert Hovden got the US Copyright Office to certify copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/14/angels-and-demons/#owning-culture

If you want to learn more about merger, you need to study up on Kregos and Eckes, which are beautifully explained in the “Open Intellectual Property Casebook,” a free resource created by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/openip/#q01

Jenkins and Boyle explicitly created their open casebook as an answer to another act of enclosure: a greedy textbook publisher cornered the market on IP textbook and charged every law student — and everyone curious about the law — $200 to learn about merger and other doctrines.

As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh writes in her must-read analysis of the OGL, this means “the only benefit that OGL offers, legally, is that you can copy verbatim some descriptions of some elements that otherwise might arguably rise to the level of copyrightability.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators

But like I said, it’s not just that the OGL fails to give you rights — it actually takes away rights you already have to D&D. That’s because — as Walsh points out — fair use and the other copyright limitations and exceptions give you rights to use D&D content, but the OGL is a contract whereby you surrender those rights, promising only to use D&D stuff according to WOTC’s explicit wishes.

“For example, absent this agreement, you have a legal right to create a work using noncopyrightable elements of D&D or making fair use of copyrightable elements and to say that that work is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons. In many contexts you also have the right to use the logo to name the game (something called “nominative fair use” in trademark law). You can certainly use some of the language, concepts, themes, descriptions, and so forth. Accepting this license almost certainly means signing away rights to use these elements. Like Sauron’s rings of power, the gift of the OGL came with strings attached.”

And here’s where it starts to get interesting. Since the OGL launched in 2000, a huge proportion of game designers have agreed to its terms, tricked into signing away their rights. If Hasbro does go through with canceling the OGL, it will release those game designers from the shitty, deceptive OGL.

According to the leaks, the new OGL is even worse than the original versions — but you don’t have to take those terms! Notwithstanding the fact that the OGL says that “using…Open Game Content” means that you accede to the license terms, that is just not how contracts work.

Walsh: “Contracts require an offer, acceptance, and some kind of value in exchange, called ‘consideration.’ If you sell a game, you are inviting the reader to play it, full stop. Any additional obligations require more than a rote assertion.”

“For someone who wants to make a game that is similar mechanically to Dungeons and Dragons, and even announce that the game is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, it has always been more advantageous as a matter of law to ignore the OGL.”

Walsh finishes her analysis by pointing to some good licenses, like the GPL and Creative Commons, “written to serve the interests of creative communities, rather than a corporation.” Many open communities — like the programmers who created GNU/Linux, or the music fans who created Musicbrainz, were formed after outrageous acts of enclosure by greedy corporations.

If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked — and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along — there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t — but they could.

This is a great moment to start — or contribute to — real open gaming content, licensed under standard, universal licenses like Creative Commons. Rolling your own license has always been a bad idea, comparable to rolling your own encryption in the annals of ways-to-fuck-up-your-own-life-and-the-lives-of-many-others. There is an opportunity here — Hasbro unintentionally proved that gamers want to collaborate on shared gaming systems.

That’s the true lesson here: if you want a commons, you’re not alone. You’ve got company, like Kit Walsh herself, who happens to be a brilliant game-designer who won a Nebula Award for her game “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”:

https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/

[Image ID: A remixed version of David Trampier's 'Eye of Moloch,' the cover of the first edition of the AD&D Player's Handbook. It has been altered so the title reads 'Advanced Copyright Fuckery. Unclear on the Concept. That's Just Not How Licenses Work. No, Seriously.' The eyes of the idol have been replaced by D20s displaying a critical fail '1.' Its chest bears another D20 whose showing face is a copyright symbol.]

#pluralistic #copyfraud #wizards of the coast #wotc #dungeons and dragons #d&d #ogl #open gaming license #eff #fair use #kit walsh #consideration #licenses

[k-star-holic]

"In Another World With My Smartphone Trying to Protect Death" Chinese Character also has a stunning black box video (Hanbley)

Source: k-star-holic.blogspot.com

#Lawyer #In Another World With My Smartphone #Accident #Public interest

[fashion-runways]

hi!! new pinned post, because the last one had gotten long again-- if you want to read previous posts, here's the first one, here's the second one. the tl;dr from those is that my dad got wrongfully imprisoned abruptly, our place was raided, the cops broke a bunch of shit and took a bunch of our things and still haven't returned them, they left all the broken things for us to spend money in repairing, we had to spend money on a lawyer, trips to visit him, new clothes, medicine and food for him in jail, etc. it was a mess, way more details in both posts. he's back home now, with an ankle monitor because technically his case isn't being investigated yet, they haven't done anything about it at all, the case hasn't moved one ounce lmao it's great, always trust the judicial system and cops!! ugh, anyway!

we found a therapist for my dad who can help her deal with all the stuff he had to deal with while in prison, all the bullying, the depression, the starving, the separation, etc. he needs to get a bunch of other medical appointments, has to get surgery, among other things, but for now things are much better on that front. that being said, he did lose his job and my old redbubble account got suspended without a warning months ago, plus argentina's economy is... really bad right now. food prices rise every day, public transportation prices went up like a 200% in a couple of weeks, salaries are low and stuck there, subsidies are gone, the local peso keeps falling, we have an absolute psychopath as a president who spends more time insulting or threatening anyone who oppose him than caring about people. it's a disaster. for updates on argentina in english, this person on twitter makes very good informative threads if you're interested.

anyway, i used to make around 30/40 dollars a month in redbubble, and that used to help adding up to the donations i got here, and it got suspended, so now i make like 1/2 dollars on teepublic monthly. so... it's a huge loss. there's a lot of things me and my mom are in charge of paying-- groceries, power and water and gas, medicine (she's diabetic, i have some sort of chronic sinusitis), our dog and cat's food and medicines, wifi, phone bills, public transportation, healthcare, my dad's new therapist... so, you know, i really need anything people can donate. even if it's just a single dollar, literally any amount helps. i love fashion so much and i love this blog, i work really hard on it even when my brain says no, and i really appreciate how much you guys love it too. i love seeing people discover new styles, new designers, new things to be inspired by. so, yeah... i'm never going anywhere, but i do need help to basically stay afloat.

as usual, my kofi link is this one: https://ko-fi.com/fashionrunways and my teepublic link is this one: https://www.teepublic.com/user/dinah-lance. thanks for being around and sharing and reblogging my posts, thanks for asking questions about fashion, and of course thanks for helping to the ones who can, and thanks to the ones who can't too, i know how that feels like, don't worry about it. love you 💖

#text posts

[astroninaaa]

wtf is going on with cellbit - by a brazilian law major student

hey besties ever since the day cellbit released that PDF i’ve been keeping up with his shit bc as a law student (only two years to go!!!!) in brazil it’s kinda really interesting to see how it goes, specially since i don’t think we’ve ever had this sort of judicial action taken by an internet celebrity, like, ever. so i’ve decided to kinda explain what’s going on. if anyone has any questions after this i’d be really up to talk about it i love talking about law 🫶 xoxo let’s start. also sorry if anything reads weird english is not my native language okay

for those who don’t know, very recently, a judicial action taken by cellbit has made public. in this action, he’s suing over 200 people for the crime of defamation.

the action was taken to court in january, but it was under what we call “secret of justice”, which means only cellbit himself and twitter’s lawyers had access to it. now that there have been decisions by the judge and everything, the process’s been made public.

basically, cellbit started an action against twitter (NOT THE PEOPLE WHO COMMITTED THE CRIME YET), citing a little over 200 tweets that accused him of crimes like SA, psychological abuse, pedophilia, and others. all of those are real crimes in brazil — and accusing someone of committing crimes (specially as awful crimes as those) without proof is a crime in itself (defamation). he claimed that the tweets were harmful to his honor, mental health, and reputation, besides categorizing as defamation, since there’s no investigation going on against him for all these infractions he’s being accused of.

with that, he asked twitter to delete all the tweets, and to provide him with the personal information of said twitter accounts so he can sue them directly for defamation. he did these requests through something called “tutela cautelar”, which means the judge gets to decide whether or not twitter has to do these things before proof production and proper investigation, since, if twitter doesn’t do those things, the damage to his honor and reputation will be ongoing + he won’t be able to sue the proper people in time.

the judge conceded to his requests, and twitter has already deleted all the tweets. the main discussion going right now is wtf do they do about the international accounts — does our law apply to them? what’s gonna happen? we don’t know yet. that’s being discussed in court for the moment and, considering brazilian courts, it might take quite a while.

so, yeah, all those people aren’t being sued YET. but they will, probably somewhat soon.

it’s also important to mention that this lawsuit is from january and was only now released to the public. there’s probably a lot more coming after the whole fiasco that led him to releasing his statement, including a lawsuit against his ex herself.

now, other topics — could he sue other twitter accounts for cyber bullying or death threats? probably, but my personal opinion is that suing for defamation and focusing on accounts that were accusing him of having committed crimes was a much better move because it’s a much stronger case.

there’s very little room for discussion when a person has outright said “cellbit committed this crime”. death threats have more room for discussion: “oh, but they’re hundreds of miles away, it wasn’t a serious threat”, “they didn’t mean it”, “it was a joke”. same thing goes for cyberbullying: it can get too subjective.

defamation isn’t subjective. you accuse someone of a crime they didn’t commit? boom, defamation, at least according to our laws. so, to me, personally, it makes a LOT of sense for his lawyers to focus on that: he’s a LOT more likely to win than if he was suing for cyberbullying, threatening, insult, or any of that. also, he’s a lot more likely to win FASTER.

when he gets to sue the actual people who committed the crime, that is. for now, he’s only requested twitter to give him the necessary information to get to these people, which i think they’ll very likely be obligated to do. there are digital data protection laws in brazil, but a crime is a crime. digital data protection isn’t gonna protect you from the court.

another thing: LGPD (brazil’s general law of personal data protection) forces all social media companies to keep records of all the content posted by their users for AT LEAST six months. many companies keep it for way longer. that’s a law created for judicial purposes, in case something published to twitter, facebook, or instagram needs to be analysed by a court. that’s why even tho twitter has deleted the tweets, they still have them, and why it doesn’t matter if the people responsible are deleting the tweets, the accounts, the fucking app itself. the records are still there, and they will be used judicially.

i think that’s the overall for the situation, but i’m willing to answer any questions and to discuss it if anyone wants to! i’m a big law enjoyer. also personally i think cellbit is so fucking right for this like YEAH people don’t get to commit fucking crimes on twitter and get away with it. really interested in how this is gonna go law-wise, but in general also really glad to see someone take action like this.

#cellbit #qsmp #cellbit qsmp

[neil-gaiman]

Dear Neil,

Thousands of taxpayers' pounds are being spent on very expensive lawyers by Local Authorities to bully vulnerable disabled people from their homes, and my brother is one of them. They came for him last year on his 21st birthday and failed, and two weeks ago they started this process again. Last time we spent £23k and he received £11.7k in Legal aid when we were in the Judicial review process. We think the LA/ICB spent in excess of £60k and are still awaiting an FOI. There is more detail about our experience at this link: https://gofund.me/c33018db

Fortunately we are not alone in Cambridgeshire. There is a group of parents who are experiencing the same pattern of abuse, who have come together to support each other and share our stories. Since they have come for us again, our family has decided to go public and expose their shocking practices. We have Nikki Fox from the BBC interested, and are talking to Panorama next week.

I would be incredibly grateful if you could share our gofundme page on your platform. There needs to be reform in this entire process; I don't believe a petition to parliament alone is going to get us heard. We have had amazing amounts of love and support from people in our immediate circles, and we want your help to reach further to stop this practice in Cambridgeshire and beyond. No special needs child and their family deserves the abuse we had from the organisation that is employed by the taxpayer to support us.

Like many others, I love Good Omens and its TV adaptation, as well as the Sandman show, and your support of our campaign would inform thousands of fans of all your work that their taxes are being used for terrible purposes.

I am aware that you receive a huge number of asks every day, but nevertheless, I hope that this one catches your eye.

Many thanks.

Good luck.

[groupstudying]

THE COMPONENTS OF PUBLIC INTEREST

THE COMPONENTS OF PUBLIC INTEREST

The work done by public interest lawyers has covered a wide range of activities. for some people, the type of work or the way of working is the most critical component of job satisfaction. There are some examples of types of work that such lawyers may do. Here are some references which are discussed to give a gist of day-to-day activities which is associated with the different types of legal…

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