You could also try booting something from MicroSD so it’s easier to revert.

Seconding contacting Valve support, too.

I recall hearing a story about law enforcement identifying an otherwise-anonymous phone by other phones that pinged the same cell towers at the same times. Essentially, the person had two phones on them, so they were able to uniquely identify the individual based on the shared location history of the two devices.

So there’s that, too, assuming my memory isn’t just some CSI bullshit. (It seems reasonable that this attack vector is technologically possible, though, and it may not matter if it’s legal if the identification technique isn’t used as evidence in court.)

Seriously… I’ve downloaded 2TB in a week before.

I get that it’s not about the bandwidth, though; it’s about needing to upgrade their security since they scraped the site without needing to log in, so obviously their site wasn’t secure. They’re claiming IT costs as damages.

In case anyone else needed to look it up, “trading while insolvent” means conducting regular business (“trading”) while having liabilities that exceed assets (“insolvent”). Like (I think) ordering product from a vendor you can’t pay for, or having employees continue to work when you can’t make payroll.

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.

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?

I don’t want to quote dump multiple paragraphs, but Stout explicitly explains that’s not correct in the following paragraphs, citing relevant case law where appropriate.

I’m not a lawyer, but that article reads pretty clearly to me; I’d be interested to hear if you read it and get a different interpretation.

There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

– Lynn Stout, professor of corporate and business law, Cornell University

An Omdia report from April 2023 claims Valve sold 1.62 million units of the Steam Deck in 2022, which was expected to grow by 14 percent to 1.85 million units in 2023. If we assume the 14% growth continues, and those numbers are accurate, then Valve is closing in on 4½ million units sold.

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

But Anna’s Archive is probably easier.

This is the first I’ve heard it that way. I haven’t read the contract though, so I can’t say I’m correct with confidence.

Yeah, exactly. Steam gets very little money from me (well, aside from the Deck), but I get all the benefits from their services. Not sure how that’s monopolistic…

Essentially, this hinges on whether demanding price parity with other platforms is anticompetitive… I think that’s going to be a tough hill to climb, especially as they’re only asking to not be undercut as a supplier. There’s no requirement to sell exclusively through Steam, and Steam even allows developers to give Steam keys on other platforms, including with game bundles that have a total “value” well below Steam sale prices.

Like, I use Steam daily, and buy multiple games most months in game bundles, but in the last few years, I’ve only made a handful of purchases on Steam. One game and my Steam Deck Dock were my only Steam purchases this calendar year, and my Steam Deck OLED and two games were my only purchases last year, but in that time I added about 150 new games to my Steam library.

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.)