Jul (they/she)

Probably just to try to make Garmin’s product less useful in the short term while the case drags out. Or as a way to get Garmin to acquire them. Strava basically seems to have bought up some competitors that were failing and they have been on the way downhill. So at this stage usually these companies start cost cutting and using any means necessary to increase their perceived value for sale. This gives Garmin an incentive to buy them as that would end the lawsuit and they’d then acquire some additional defensive patents.

deleted by creator

Yeah, software patents in the US especially, have become a way for companies to either kill competition, or make buying up ridiculous patents and suing for infringement their primary source of income.

Primary issue is the patent office has few officers that are technical enough to understand the overlap of the specific industry and software. So, they tend to just allow anything, especially from larger companies that they’re told to assume have the expertise if they don’t since their load is too large to have time to learn new stuff and truly research if something is obvious or not.

YouTube did make some changes to their terms primarily for creators that get paid for content. They added some new LLM-based scanning of content to find stuff that is too repetitive or didn’t contain enough original content. Assuming the creators you looked at have mostly original content rather than remixing of content which may be misinterpreted by LLMs as not being “original enough”, they could be falling victim to overaggressive hits if they use a consistent format in their content since LLMs don’t really understand context, only patterns.

I’d be interested to find out if the creators got any notification from YouTube on the reason for removal of the content.

Considering the community this is posted in, I think it’s fair to mention (if maybe not directly link to) there are devices that decode DRM and other encoding and pass on a stream that can be watched without needing all of that. The ones I saw were under $100. Though it’s definitely possible that these may get cracked down on eventually either by customs or changes in the DRM that requires internet connectivity to decode which has been discussed though seems dumb to need internet to watch a broadcast signal, but greed often causes stupid things like that.

An antenna? If you don’t have a TV, you can get a tuner dongle and antenna for your PC and use VLC or other streaming video clients. Unfortunately, the services that take over-the-air signals and put them online usually get killed off by lawsuits. But tuner dongles and half decent, compact antennas are pretty cheap.

If it’s POSIX compliant then it will work on all versions of Linux/Unix. Otherwise it depends on specific implementations that have branched for decades.

X is a right-wing propaganda platform now. Bluesky is not a good alternative though. It’s just as controlled and toxic as X was just before Elan bought it and will eventually become what X is now when a major corporation or rich person decides to grab it or it goes public. The federation functionality is just for show and marketing. I wish people would stop just jumping when platforms become truly horrible and then jumping to something that will be made as horrible very easily after it becomes popular enough.

Unfortunately, the current state of the patent office is extremely understaffed and mostly nontechnical. So, there’s not enough qualified examiners to examine patents, not just in software, but medical devices, voting machines, and lots of other industries. So essentially if a patent is submitted by a major company, it just gets rubber stamped. And it’s up to the courts to sort it out. Unfortunately that sorting out is biased and understaffed, too, so usually the initial case will go to the patent holder by default and it’s not until an appeal or two on those biases and technical misinterpretations that it can be invalidated. So it’s rare for a smaller company to be able to spend that much money to invalidate an obvious idea like this. Of course this is by design to give large corporations an unfair advantage. If they want some tech, they just sue for a stupid patent, wait until the company either folds and then they can steal it legally, or goes bankrupt fighting it and they can acquire them hostilely.