Current regulations allow digital music providers to pay a lower music royalty rate if their paid music subscription offering is bundled with other legitimate product offerings. Seeing an opportunity, Spotify has exploited this regulation by converting all Premium Plan music subscribers into a new, bundled subscription offering without consumers’ consent or any notice. Spotify’s intent seems clear—to slash the statutory royalties it pays to songwriters and music publishers.
Spotify has priced its Audiobook Access plan with 15 hours of listening time per month from a limited catalog of 200,000 audiobooks at $9.99/month. In contrast, Spotify’s music-only Basic Plan—which includes unlimited hours of listening from a catalog of over 100 million songs—is priced only a dollar more. Under the regulations, the higher the Audiobooks Access plan is priced, the lower the music royalty Spotify must pay.
The second problematic provision — found within Section 43201(c) of the House reconciliation bill — would impose a 10-year ban on the enforcement of all state and local laws that regulate artificial intelligence (AI), including rules for AI’s use in political campaigns and elections.
From what I've read about reconciliation bills, provisons need to be mainly about the budget rather than policy. What does banning AI regulation at lower levels of government have to do with the federal budget?
[18 U.S. Code] Section 111 makes it a crime to “forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere with” federal officials engaged in their duties. But here’s the problem: You don’t even need to know they’re federal officials. You can be convicted for shoving someone you think is just someone yelling in your face, even just placing them in “reasonable fear of harm” without physical contact—if they turn out to be a plainclothes agent. That’s not hypothetical. That’s precedent, courtesy of the Supreme Court over 50 years ago.
Which means this: An undercover agent embedded in a protest, a public meeting, even a constituent town hall could claim to have been “impeded,” and the federal government can treat that moment as a federal crime. Under the current administration’s appetite for authoritarianism, that’s not a loophole, it’s a feature.
Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.
Australia has never contemplated imposing a similar tax. New Zealand tried but backed down last week after the United States threatened to impose higher tariffs on New Zealand goods.
What happened in New Zealand is almost certainly what will happen in Australia. This will go nowhere.
Well the AI companies and investors should have understood that building an industry off of doing something questionable was risky and risks don't always work out.
When President Donald Trump and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred met at the White House last month, they discussed one of the president’s passion projects — reinstating baseball star Pete Rose to make him eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
This week, that’s exactly what Manfred did.
When I heard Pete Rose was going to be eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame my immediate reaction was to joke that "Somehow this is Donald Trump's fault". I didn't think I'd be right.
“How can I return him to the United States? Am I going to smuggle him? Of course I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said while sitting beside President Donald Trump. “The question is preposterous.”
Ideally you would return him because the president of the United States asked you to, but I suppose Trump doesn't think the Supreme Court's ruling that the US government needs to "facilitate" Garcia’s return requires such an extraordinary level of effort.
It's ridiculous that the US government is paying a foreign government to detain prisoners on its behalf and seems to be claiming it didn't put anything in the contract about a way to get the prisoners back.
The article is out of date. According to this one, the game has been removed from sale on Steam in the UK, Canada and Australia, and the dev is going to withdraw it from Steam entirely.
Zerat Games has announced it will withdraw its sexually explicit visual novel from Steam after it was removed from sale in the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Posted to the game's Steam page, which is no longer accessible to those who have not previously purchased the game, the developer defended its title but confirmed it would be removed from the platform.
"We don't intend to fight the whole world, and specifically, we don't want to cause any problems for Steam and Valve," the developer said.
Influencers like Mike Cernovich and Charlie Kirk accused her of betraying conservative values despite past praise.
Just to be clear, this was after she voted to block some DOGE stuff; they're not claiming that wanting to keep people from being deported on flimsy justifications with no due process is a betrayal of "conservative values" (yet).
CNBC doesn't mention it, but othercoverage says China has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization. It's weird how little the WTO comes up in relation to Trump's trade war.
The DOJ had asked Ho to toss the case “without prejudice,” which would have allowed charges to be refiled against the mayor in the future.
As for why that could be bad:
Ho, in his order on Wednesday, wrote that dismissing the case without prejudice “would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration.
The judge also said it would create the perception that Adams, who is seeking re-election this year, “might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents.”
“That appearance is inevitable, and it counsels in favor of dismissal with prejudice,” Ho wrote.