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Garrett Wollman

@gwollman.bsky.social

540 followers 330 following 5K posts

@garrett_wollman from the Bad Place @[email protected] I make the network go, and stop, and go again at @csail.mit.edu. Not actually a colander full of beans. He/him (or they/them).

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · Apr 6

I gave up on trying to run my own feed generator and switched to a third-party service, so unfortunately all my old skating feeds have been deleted. New feeds published on my profile for #WorldFigure, #WorldSynchro, #EuroFigure, #GPFigure, and #JGPFigure, plus a feed that's all of those together.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 6h

So is Skyline segment 2 going to open on time Thursday?

Reposted by Garrett Wollman

Jackie Wong | Rocker Skating @rockerskating.com · 9h

#JGPFigure Final qualifiers + substitutes
🇨🇦🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇳 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 JR PAIRS
🇯🇵🇰🇷🇯🇵🇯🇵🇯🇵🇰🇷 🇦🇺🇰🇷🇺🇸 JR WOMEN
🇯🇵🇰🇷🇰🇷🇯🇵🇺🇸🇧🇪 🇯🇵🇺🇸🇩🇪 JR MEN
🇺🇸🇺🇦🇨🇦🇫🇷🇺🇸🇫🇷 🇨🇦🇮🇹🇨🇦 JR DANCE

🧵Full quals below

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

Think this is wrong? Then lobby Congress to change the law! (Not a US citizen? Sorry, get your writer friends who are to lobby Congress. Or I don't know, get your government to bring the US before a WTO tribunal or something. The which they'll ignore.)

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

The corporate liability bar knows this, of course, and there's no incentive for a defendant to agree to a broader settlement class than would be entitled to statutory damages, because it's too costly for any of the excluded authors to sue, so there's no need to pay out any settlement to them.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

I think you could in theory still have a class action without these elements, but no attorney would take the case because they'd have to recover their fees solely from the representative class members (the ones who actually file the suit) who might win and still get nothing depending on the facts.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

UNFORTUNATELY, while Congress allows the Berne bare minimum -- a suit for actual damages -- it made both statutory damages and attorney's fees conditional on registration either prior to the infringement, or within three months of publication if the infringement happened immediately at publication.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

How much you can get in statutory damages depends on a few factors, notably whether the infringement was "willful", but this is the damages regime essentially any copyright class action needs to be in, because it doesn't have to be individually adjudicated and allows for awarding plaintiff's costs.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

So if you're a plaintiff, or especially their attorney, that's bad news. The alternative way you can get damages in a copyright lawsuit is what's called "statutory damages"; this is basically an amount you can claim without proving the infringer made any money at all -- *plus* legal fees.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

So it's entirely possible that, after a very long, difficult, and fact-bound inquiry for every single author, a court could determine that none of Anthropic's revenue was the result of their infringement, so the plaintiff "wins", gets nothing, and oh by the way, still pays their own legal fees.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

Remember that the infringement here was not about training the model on copyrighted works, the district court already found that this was fair use, but rather it was about Anthropic downloading the pirated books in the first place when building their training corpus.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

This has an obvious meaning if the infringer is literally selling copies of books, but it's not so clear how you prove the attribution of Anthropic's revenues to any particular work infringed during the training of their models. (Note that it *is* revenues, not profits.)

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

The default is basically disgorgement: the injured party is entitled to the revenue that the infringer collects as a result of the act of infringement.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

Berne allows this, just as it allows states-parties to require notarization or other procedures to file a claim in their domestic courts. But what's the deal with registration before the infringement, rather than just before filing suit? Well, there are two avenues for damages in civil copyright.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

The thing to understand is that, at every stage, Congress has done the *absolute minimum* necessary to comply with the Berne Convention. So yes, formalities are entirely optional -- BUT you still have to register prior to filing a suit for infringement.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 7h

I think a lot of authors are still having trouble with the Anthropic settlement, because Berne says "no formalities", right, so why does the settlement only apply to works that were formalized before the infringement? I am not a lawyer, but I think I understand what's going on here.

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Reposted by Garrett Wollman

Joseph Fink @planetoffinks.bsky.social · 16h

One blessing we have is that these are the dumbest fucking people led by a dying old man whose brain was terrible even before it started melting.

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Reposted by Garrett Wollman

Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 16h

On pedocon theory: why movement conservativism is inextricably entwined with paedophilia (and why the POTUS is probably a paedophile too):
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-talk-about-pedocon-theory/

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 14h

At least Pullman smells better than Clarkston.

Reposted by Garrett Wollman

Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social · 15h

There are three kinds of states in political science:
• supportive states that ensure citizens are educated, fed, and housed, prepared to raise economic activity,
• conqueror states that prepare citizens for war and war-supporting activities,
• failed states

www.axios.com/2025/10/10/f...

Scoop: Trump administration warns of "insufficient funds" for food stamps if shutdown continues

It's the administration's latest warning of painful consequences of a lengthy government shutdown.

www.axios.com

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Reposted by Garrett Wollman

Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social · 15h

With the elimination of both the Disease Tracking and the Morbidity and Mortality Report divisions at the CDC, this mass murderer is laying the groundwork to cover up the rise in preventable deaths his policies will ensure.

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Reposted by Garrett Wollman

Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social · 14h

It's important to note that one of the Republican Administration's "Terror Memo" says that one of the signs of "sympathy with terrorism against the United States" is any action that would reduce any police department's funding.

slowcivilwar.substack.com/p/rubber-glu...

Rubber Glue Fascism

A close reading of "NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM/NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence"

slowcivilwar.substack.com

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 16h

Ate lunch really early and feeling a bit out of sorts.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 17h

Well I guess our regional optical network no longer runs through 32AoA.

Reposted by Garrett Wollman

James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 18h

American parents, distract your kids from the US' imploding ag sector by reading them The Death of Grass.

The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 19h

In an unusual acknowledgement, the Trump administration said that its immigration crackdown is hurting farmers and risking higher food prices for Americans by cutting off agriculture’s labor supply.

Trump administration says immigration enforcement threatens higher food prices

U.S. farmers face labor shortages and potential food price hikes due to Trump’s immigration policy, the administration acknowledged in a Federal Registry document.

wapo.st

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Reposted by Garrett Wollman

K.B. Spangler @kbspangler.com · 18h

We need money to live, obviously, because capitalism, and plants and art supplies aren't free, but money for money's sake feels...I dunno. Hollow.

Scrooge McDuck had the right of it--if you're going to hoard money, turn it into your literal playground.

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