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Reddit mod jailed for sharing movie sex scenes in rare “moral rights” verdict

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A Reddit moderator known as “KlammereFyr” was recently convicted by a Danish court after clipping and posting hundreds of nude scenes that actresses filmed for movies and TV shows but apparently never expected to be shared out of context.

As TorrentFreak reported, dozens of actresses had complained about the mod’s sub-reddit, “SeDetForPlottet” (WatchItForthePlot), with some feeling “molested or abused.”

Demanding Danish police put an end to the forum, the Rights Alliance—representing the Danish Actors’ Association, two broadcasters, and other rightsholders—pushed for a criminal probe.

The groups argued that KlammereFyr removed the artistic context and immorally sexualized actors, sometimes by cropping scenes or “changing the lighting to accentuate certain features,” TorrentFreak reported.

To groups, it seemed clear that KlammereFyr was violating a rarely tested part of copyright law that protects artists’ “integrity” by shielding their “moral rights.”

In Denmark, the “right of integrity means that even in cases where you are allowed to make use of a work, you are not allowed to change it or use it in a way or in a context that infringes the author’s literary or artistic reputation or uniqueness,” a resource for Danish researchers noted.

Ultimately, a now 40-year-old man was charged after confessing to violating moral rights by sharing at least 347 clips featuring over 100 actresses that a Danish outlet reported were viewed 4.2 million times. He was also charged with sharing over 25 terabytes of pirated content, using a private torrent tracker called Superbits.org, TorrentFreak noted.

Following his confession, the Court of Frederiksberg convicted the Redditor, sentencing him to a seven-month conditional prison sentence, followed by 120 hours of community service. Next, the Reddit mod will face a separate civil lawsuit to determine damages, which could be substantial. Rightsholders are seeking between $2,300–$4,600 per nude clip, TorrentFreak reported, putting the maximum possible award above $1.5 million.

Landmark case may influence how US views “moral rights”

The conviction represents the “first criminal conviction” based on the Danish copyright law’s “right of respect,” TorrentFreak reported. In a statement, special prosecutor Jan Østergaard praised the court for taking the issue seriously.

Similarly pleased with the outcome, Maria Ventegodt, director of the Danish Actors’ Association, issued a statement celebrating the ruling. She suggested the win goes beyond giving actors peace of mind when filming or choosing roles.

“The decision is also important for the art of film and the opportunity to make good stories on film, because the actors can now have confidence that the authorities will crack down hard on the screening of nude scenes out of context,” Ventegodt said.

Whether the landmark ruling will impact how other countries view sex scenes from movies taken out of context remains unclear. TorrentFreak noted that there are plenty of sub-reddits dedicated to sharing nude scenes from Hollywood movies that could possibly be targeted if the US were to agree they violate artists’ moral rights.

However, the US doesn’t offer the same level of strong protections for artists’ moral rights, a Copyright Office study concluded in 2019 after serving laws like Denmark’s. “The right to prevent prejudicial distortions of one’s work,” the study found, is only protected “through a patchwork of federal and state laws, as well as industry customs and private ordering.”

To address gaps or strengthen protections, the Office provided a roadmap to update laws, like amending the Lanham Act and the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. The US could also pass a federal right of publicity law, which could “serve as a floor for minimum protections for an individual’s name, signature, image, and voice against commercial exploitation during their lifetime,” the Office recommended.

Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund suggested that moral rights will become even more important, as artificial intelligence advancements have made it easier than ever to create convincing fake sex scenes or nudes. So-called deepfakes are already banned in the US under the Take It Down Act, and Fredenslund said it will only become more “crucial” for legal systems to clearly mark “where the line is drawn” when it comes to respecting artists’ integrity “in a future where we expect far more AI-generated and manipulated content.”

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fxer
17 hours ago
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My artistic vision!
Bend, Oregon
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The Mac calculator’s original design came from letting Steve Jobs play with menus for ten minutes

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In February 1982, Apple employee #8 Chris Espinosa faced a problem that would feel familiar to anyone who has ever had a micromanaging boss: Steve Jobs wouldn’t stop critiquing his calculator design for the Mac. After days of revision cycles, the 21-year-old programmer found an elegant solution: He built what he called the “Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set” and let Jobs design it himself.

This delightful true story comes from Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org, a legendary tech history site that chronicles the development of the original Macintosh, which was released in January 1984. I ran across the story again recently and thought it was worth sharing as a fun anecdote in an age where influential software designs often come by committee.

Design by menu

Chris Espinosa started working for Apple at age 14 in 1976 as the company’s youngest employee. By 1981, while studying at UC Berkeley, Jobs convinced Espinosa to drop out and work on the Mac team full time.

Believe it or not, Chris Espinosa still works at Apple as its longest-serving employee. But back in the day, as manager of documentation for the Macintosh, Espinosa decided to write a demo program using Bill Atkinson’s QuickDraw, the Mac’s graphics system, to better understand how it worked. He chose to create a calculator as one of the planned “desk ornaments,” which were small utility programs that would ship with the Mac. They later came to be called “desk accessories.”

Espinosa thought his initial calculator design looked good, but Jobs had other ideas when he saw it. Hertzfeld describes the scene: “Well, it’s a start,” Steve said, “but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.”

Screenshot: The Mac OS 1.0 calculator seen in situ. The Mac OS 1.0 calculator seen in situ with other desk accessories. Credit: Apple / Benj Edwards

For several days, Espinosa would incorporate Jobs’s suggestions from the previous day, only to have Jobs find new faults with each iteration. It might have felt like a classic case of “design by committee,” but in this case, the committee was just one very particular person who seemed impossible to satisfy.

Rather than continue the endless revision cycle, Espinosa took a different approach. According to Hertzfeld, Espinosa created a program that exposed every visual parameter of the calculator through pull-down menus: line thickness, button sizes, background patterns, and more. When Jobs sat down with it, he spent about ten minutes adjusting settings until he found a combination he liked.

The approach worked. When given direct control over the parameters rather than having to articulate his preferences verbally, Jobs quickly arrived at a design he was satisfied with. Hertzfeld notes that he implemented the calculator’s UI a few months later using Jobs’s parameter choices from that ten-minute session, while Donn Denman, another member of the Macintosh team, handled the mathematical functions.

That ten-minute session produced the calculator design that shipped with the Mac in 1984 and remained virtually unchanged through Mac OS 9, when Apple discontinued that OS in 2001. Apple replaced it in Mac OS X with a new design, ending the calculator’s 17-year run as the primary calculator interface for the Mac.

Why it worked

Espinosa’s Construction Set was an early example of what would later become common in software development: visual and parameterized design tools. In 1982, when most computers displayed monochrome text, the idea of letting someone fine-tune visual parameters through interactive controls without programming was fairly forward-thinking. Later, tools like HyperCard would formalize this kind of idea into a complete visual application framework.

The primitive calculator design tool also revealed something about Jobs’s management process. He knew what he wanted when he saw it, but he perhaps struggled to articulate it at times. By giving him direct manipulation ability, Espinosa did an end-run around that communication problem entirely. Later on, when he returned to Apple in the late 1990s, Jobs would famously insist on judging products by using them directly rather than through canned PowerPoint demos or lists of specifications.

The longevity of Jobs’s ten-minute design session suggests the approach worked. The calculator survived nearly two decades of Mac OS updates, outlasting many more elaborate interface elements. What started as a workaround became one of the Mac’s most simple but enduring designs.

By the way, if you want to try the original Mac OS calculator yourself, you can run various antique versions of the operating system in your browser thanks to the Infinite Mac website.

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fxer
17 hours ago
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Bend, Oregon
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Valle delle Cartiere (Paper Mill Valley) in Toscolano Maderno, Italy

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Museo della Carta

Just behind the lakeside town of Toscolano Maderno lies the Valle delle Cartiere (Paper Mill Valley) a narrow limestone gorge that once powered a thriving industry. From the 14th century onward, the valley’s water-driven mills supplied Venice with fine handmade paper for merchants, printers, and artists. At its peak, over 60 mills operated along the Toscolano stream, filling the gorge with the rhythmic sounds of papermaking.

When production ceased in the mid-1900s, the forest slowly reclaimed the ruins. Today, visitors can explore these moss-covered remains, many of which are safely accessible and marked with interpretive signs. The beautifully restored Maìna Inferiore mill now houses the Museo della Carta (Paper Museum) where hands-on exhibits trace how rags, water, and skill were transformed into sheets that carried ideas across the world.

Part industrial site, part nature trail, and part history museum this area offers a rare blend of beauty, craft, and culture.

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fxer
2 days ago
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Bend, Oregon
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Monumental Stone Sphere in Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Tucked in an outdoor alcove between Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography and the Department of Anthropology rests an astonishing relic of ancient craftsmanship, a perfectly carved stone sphere. Standing 3 feet 7 inches tall and weighing around 5,000 pounds, the sphere was created by Pre-Columbian peoples of what is now Costa Rica, sometime around 600 CE.

Fashioned from granitic rock using only stone tools and sand for polishing, the sphere’s flawless symmetry remains a marvel of early engineering. Hundreds of similar spheres have been found across Costa Rica, though their purpose is still debated. Some believe they were symbolic representations of the universe, while others suggest they were statements of power, artistic feats that demonstrated immense control over resources and labor.

This particular sphere was unearthed in 1948 when the United Fruit Company cleared land for banana plantations in Costa Rica. Two spheres were later exhibited at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, one ultimately given to National Geographic, and the other to the Peabody Museum, where it remains today. For Costa Rica, these stone spheres are more than archaeological curiosities, they are symbols of national identity and enduring testaments to the ingenuity and artistry of the ancient Osa culture.

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fxer
2 days ago
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Bend, Oregon
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Democrats: Caving Like The Losers That They Are

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Paul and Scott have already covered the basics of all of this in detail, but I am absolutely, 100% disgusted at the Democratic Senate caucus for caving in return for absolutely nothing. What better sums up the Democratic Party than this? Very slowly, glacially slow, the Democratic Party is realizing how to face Republicans. But after a month–even if the face of kicking Republicans ass on Tuesday in part because of the shutdown–there was just no way that weak ass losers like Tim Kaine and Gary Peters and Jeanne Shaheen were going to have the courage to hold on. They simply care more about traveling by air than they do about the poor or about health care. This is an absolutely clear 100% victory for Trump. Democrats are a shameful party. Maybe it will change one day. Maybe we will still have a country worth saving at that time. Maybe I will outlive all these centrist fucks and get to write their grave posts about being the pathetic loser pieces of shit that they are.

Fuck the Democratic Party. I am deeply ashamed of it and you should be too.

The post Democrats: Caving Like The Losers That They Are appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

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fxer
2 days ago
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📉
Bend, Oregon
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Keegan-Michael Key joins Panthers team meeting to show support for Rico Dowdle

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Keegan-Michael Key continued to support Rico Dowdle after his TD celebration, pledging to donate $15,000 to the charity of his choice.
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fxer
3 days ago
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Seven grand a pump
Bend, Oregon
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