I was always struck that one of the letters in opposition to Berry's view was written by Nathaniel Borenstein, the co-inventor of MIME.
It was an odd experience for me because it was coming from such a different worldview that I generally felt I couldn't relate to what Berry was saying at all. (I could contrast that with some of Cliff Stoll's writings about his skepticism of computers, which are always coming from a culturally familiar place and are at least readily comprehensible for me.)
I also have a book Berry wrote as a rejoinder to E. O. Wilson's Consilience (called Life is a Miracle). I put the two next to each other on my bookshelf!
I remember using WordPerfect in that era and never understanding what that feature was. It seemed implausible to me that it was actually protecting human widows and orphans, but I couldn't imagine what it had to do with text layout!
Absolutely! Unfortunately for me, I probably wondered about this 35 years ago and learned the answer 15 years ago. Otherwise, I could be one of today's lucky 10,000 in the xkcd 1053 sense.
This claim was new to me recently, but I've seen it's become widespread. From other HN threads, it sounds like it's based on what Judge Alsup wrote in the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which Anthropic's destroying scanned books was one factor supporting a finding of fair use.
I could see companies wanting to try to fit their activities into the same contours that the court approved there, since they could then argue that they should be just as protected as the defendant in that case was (that is, it may have inadvertently established a set of practices that companies would like to copy). However, it doesn't seem to me that the court concluded that destroying books was necessarily required (in particular because the contrary scenario wasn't examined there). That is, the court felt that destroying scanned books made the fair use argument stronger, but didn't say, as far as I know, that the fair use argument would necessarily fail without it.
But indeed, I guess it might take a lot for a company to decide to create a different and untested fact pattern and then defend it from scratch in new litigation.
I was part of an event called "Windows Refund Day" in 1999 (I think) to draw attention to this issue. We had a march to a Microsoft office to ask for refunds (unsuccessfully). It was fun, but it's 27 years later and it's still a problem.
Is there a legal basis for the president unilaterally telling private companies what kind of equipment they can use? (Maybe there is, as part of existing formal energy industry regulations, and I'm just not aware of it.)
A US President definitely has the authority to restrict what is used on Government contracts. The Gov is the buyer so they can and do ask what they do and do not want used by the federal contractors.
Can a US President dictate for non-Gov contracts? Strong to weak to none. Strong around infrastructure providers (think power, water, electric, etc.) through the Defense Production Act of 1950 (DPA). This is where this EO falls, "banning certain foreign-manufactured equipment from the U.S. bulk-power system".
Conjecture, but i think this is targeting data centers...
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