This type of license is generally required for a service to operate. They could scope it more carefully, but there is nothing _necessarily_ underhand going on here.
> By posting Content to the Service, you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through the Service.
This says you grant the service a license to store and run your content.
> You retain any and all of your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Service and you are responsible for protecting those rights.
This says you still own your content and responsible for how it is shared. You only gave the service a license.
> You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of the Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms.
This says you give permission for the service to make the content available to others. It does not mean the service will. This part could be worded better. It is presumably linked to sharing or publishing functionality.
> You represent and warrant that: (i) the Content is yours (you own it) or you have the right to use it and grant us the rights and license as provided in these Terms, and (ii) the posting of your Content on or through the Service does not violate the privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights or any other rights of any person.
This part says you're not infringing anybody else's rights by putting content into the service.
So, yes, they could possibly have made it clearer in the license under what circumstances they would make content available to others, but most people don't look to the license to understand that so it's not uncommon to have language like this.
What's missing is the limitations on how they will use it. They need some license for all of the things listed, but this is the maximum permissions rather than the minimum
I've been using Chartist for the last couple of years for line charts. The ability to style with CSS has been a useful benefit. For example, I have dark/light mode just by setting a class on the body element of the page and this flows throughout the site including the graphs with no extra effort.
> The US is the most deregulated, pro-market, capitalist developed nation of size
Well, here in the US, I still buy electricity from the government. Consumer energy deregulation in the UK started in the late 80s and electricity has been sold through private companies for years.
It's not so much energy deregulation that's the problem, more the fact that we gave away the resources of oil and gas for peanuts and now pay through the nose for them, compared to say Norway or Saudi Arabia where they oil and gas stayed as a semi-state-owned resource.
That's not true for all civil cases, though. The Seventh Amendment says, "In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, ..." As has been described elsewhere here, this was interpreted to provide a jury right in suits at law but not in equity. You can also waive your jury right by agreeing not to invoke it, say in a contract.
At the founding, the Constitution documented all the things that were going to be different, but courts were intended to continue to apply the rest of the common law as it was. So, it's less about being beholden to England's legal history as much as it is being beholden to American history as it was at the time. It's just that most of the legal writing that courts depended upon was published by English legal scholars.
One of the downsides of the fixed written Constitution being hard to change is that you end up with these strange rules where the law today is dependent upon intuition about how a current problem would have been viewed through the lens of the common law at the time of the founding, and we mostly only have English legal treatises to fall back on, so it feels like being beholden to English legal history.
That's not quite how it works. In practice, in the US, liability comes not so much from giving a positive or a negative review, but from giving an incomplete one. This is most apparent as a result of giving a positive review and leaving out the bad bits. In this case, you might be liable for the negative consequences of hiring someone based on your positive review.
For an extreme example, see Randi W. v. Muroc Joint Unified School Dist [1]. In that case, the plaintiff sued several school districts for fraudulently or negligently providing positive recommendations for a teacher who ultimately sexually assaulted her. The California state Supreme Court held that the school districts were liable because there was a substantial, foreseeable risk of physical injury to a third-party resulting from the misrepresentations.
For this reason, it is common practice for businesses to decline to provide a review and instead simply confirm a prior employment relationship and the dates of the employment.
That’s a great point, but at least as far as negative references go, you have libel/slander law with robust free speech protections. It’s nothing like Europe.
In most states in the United States, the notion of consent in the employment context is very different than, say, European privacy law. In European law, consent from an employee is almost impossible to obtain for any significant decision because of the inherent power imbalance in an employment relationship.
However, in the United States, where most employees are employed "at will," deciding to remain an employee is often considered to be consent. The law considers that you have choice: you choose to work there and consent, or you chose to not work there.
In this story, it appears that there is a separate law considering religious freedom and not privacy that requires employers to make some accommodations when not too burdensome.
I'm not sure it's that bad. It's still the law in the United States that you cannot claim a religious exemption to a (state) law of general applicability. If the law applies to everyone regardless of religion and was not intended to impact a particular religious practice, then you cannot challenge it you because you claim that it affects your right to exercise your religion. See City of Boerne v. Flores, which affirmed Employment Division v. Smith despite Congress's attempt to legislate it away.
I'm not sure what point you are making here. Presumably your obvious answer is "yes"? For example, there are indeed some states that outlaw tattooing minors (although many states do permit it with parental consent).
I think he is pointing out that you could never ban circumcisions, but that it's scaring children for life, which is otherwise banned (tattoos). (and morally objectionable)
I'm not sure there isn't a path to banning circumcisions. After all the first amendment really only applies to the exercise of religious beliefs that affect your own personal autonomy. You can't claim a first amendment right to murder your enemies highlander style.
Ergo, while traditional, the fact that you are requesting the modification of another human (not yourself), I could see this not surviving a challenge down the line.
After all, female genital mutilation (which is obviously far worse) represents a similar request for modification of a living human - not yourself - for religious purposes, and it is outright banned in the overwhelming majority of the United States. While a Federal ban was struck down, it was not struck down on First Amendment grounds but rather due to same being outside the scope of enumerated powers of the federal government and not covered by the commerce clause. [1]
This leaves the state laws in force in all but 9 states.
Agreed. I think it's very likely that a ban would be upheld against a Free Exercise challenge (even though at least one lower court did strike such a proposal down on this ground).
Some people think it would not survive a Due Process challenge, though, because there isn't a strong enough basis to overcome a parent's fundamental right to make decisions about their child. I could see that being a close question.
I agree, and I think the prevailing climate would have to change first. However I don't see anything that would make such a law fundamentally and obviously unconstitutional.
The case I could make is that it may prevent the child's right to future free exercise of a religion in which the, uh, package should be, err, OEM.
btw, IMO, I don't think parents should be in a position to make any irrevocable physical modifications to their children for religious or aesthetic purposes.
Once you turn 18, by all means, feel free to take a little off the top.
