Those of you who release designs to the public will be interested in this (quoted from Billboard.com):
Congress Passes CASE Act as Part of COVID-19 Relief Bill
The legislation creates a copyright claims board at the U.S. Copyright office to hear small claims cases of infringement.
After 10 years of haggling, Congress officially passed the The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act late Monday evening (Dec. 21) as part of the Omnibus COVID-19 Relief Bill. The bill will streamline copyright disputes by creating a small claims tribunal within the U.S. Copyright Office that will adjudicate small claims infringement cases.
Cases would be decided by a three-judge panel of experts in a forum where damages would be capped at $15,000 per claim and $30,000 total. Providing an avenue for copyright infringement disputes to be heard outside of expensive federal copyright litigation creates an affordable process for independent creators to enforce their rights without having to hire attorneys or pay hefty court fees.
I do not understand how the US govt functions. Well, actually maybe it isn’t functioning come to think of it.
How does a relief bill contain 5,000 pages, including CASE, streaming/twitch bill, foreign aid, military budgets and all this other nonsense? It’s not that the other things shouldn’t be debated but why in this bill?
As far as I can see this happens all the time in US govt, all sorts of things stuffed into the portmanteau of a focussed bill.
To my mind it’s as corrupt as hell - each and every policitician saying “give me this or I won’t support the real thing we’re trying to do”.
And at the end of the day, you guys are getting peanuts at a personal level while the corporations and billionaires are still getting massive bailouts.
Repeat after me, “trickle down was an invention, there has never been any evidence that it works”
At least in the UK we’ve only got a bunch of incompetents who can’t complete Brexit in 4 years against the will of the majority. Oh, and the worst death rate in Europe. Still worse than the US, though you are catching up fast.
You know voting for politicians has to be the worse way to get a government.
Long live the Queen then? I hear monarchies were all the rage back in the day, and no one anywhere ever had a complaint about them. Dictators too. They seemed to be in vogue the last century.
Uneducated & overeducated people en masse voting for politicians could be though.
There’s a really good argument that benign dictarship is the best form of govt.
Apart from anything else, a dictator/king is much harder to bribe and doesn’t change every 4 years.
So to some extent they have to act with a long term view of what’s best for the country.
Whereas an elected politician - especially in the US - needs heavy “donations” to get elected in the first place and has a 4 year horizon for any action.
Right now I know the pundits are all saying McConnel caved in order not to lose the Georgia vote.
That sort of sums up the whole issue with democracy in a nutshell.
I do actually have a proposal:
Instead of 4 yearly elections, all governor/senate etc elections are spaced out over the 4 years, so at any one time only a couple of seats are up for election - that helps promote a long-term action.
All politicians should wear jackets with emblems of their largest sponsors proportionate to donation.
In order to vote, you must be able to pass at least some measure of political awareness, univeral franchise is not a great thing really.
Companies should not be allowed to donate to political parties - especially ones that don’t pay taxes.
Politicans have a maximum term of 12 years - at the end of which they will be shot. That way you only enter higher levels of govt if you feel a genuine calling
It wasn’t just a relief bill. The COVID relief was attached to the government budget. That’s why there’s so much in there. The bill is meant to lay out government funding until September. Although to be fair, sneaking in pet legislation onto unrelated bills is a standard and annoying practice in this country.
I fell out of my chair laughing at this bullet point.
My father lives in a town in middle-America where a good chunk of the population dropped out of high school in grade 10. Government class in most states is a 11th or 12th grade required class.
Not sure that mess is veto proof, so don’t put any money on it yet.
An awful lot of legislation was slipped into what was suppose to be an appropriations bill, with a side of covid relief.
^^^This. But to be fair, that’s not something even the president seems to be aware of. Legislative leaders thought it best to combine them both. Probably because that way they could get enough votes for the Covid stuff because otherwise there are an awful lot of people who didn’t want another relief bill (due to fiscal conservatism - and yes I’m LMAO while writing that).
