Topic: Law (Page 4)

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🔗 999-Year Lease

🔗 Law 🔗 Lists

A 999-year lease, under historic common law, is an essentially permanent lease of property. The lease locations are mainly in Britain, its former colonies, and the Commonwealth.

A former colony, the Republic of Mauritius (The Raphael Fishing Company Ltd v. The State of Mauritius & Anor (Mauritius) [2008] UKPC 43 (30 July 2008)) established legal precedent on 30 July 2008 in respect of a 'permanent lease' on St. Brandon.

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🔗 Miller test

🔗 Law 🔗 Sexology and sexuality 🔗 Pornography

The Miller test, also called the three-prong obscenity test, is the United States Supreme Court's test for determining whether speech or expression can be labeled obscene, in which case it is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and can be prohibited.

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🔗 The Indiana Pi Bill

🔗 United States 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Law 🔗 History of Science 🔗 United States/Indiana

The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, rather than to establish a certain value for the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by the crank Edward J. Goodwin, does imply various incorrect values of π, such as 3.2. The bill never became law, due to the intervention of Professor C. A. Waldo of Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.

The impossibility of squaring the circle using only compass and straightedge constructions, suspected since ancient times, was rigorously proven in 1882 by Ferdinand von Lindemann. Better approximations of π than those implied by the bill have been known since ancient times.

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🔗 Wills of Tadeusz Kościuszko

🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Poland

Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746–1817), a prominent figure in the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the American Revolution, made several wills, notably one in 1798 stipulating that the proceeds of his American estate be spent on freeing and educating African-American slaves, including those of his friend Thomas Jefferson, whom he named as the will's executor. Jefferson refused the executorship and the will was beset by legal complications, including the discovery of later wills. Jefferson's refusal incited discussion in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Kościuszko returned to Europe in 1798 and lived there until his 1817 death in Switzerland. In the 1850s, what was left of the money in Kościuszko's U.S. trust was turned over by the U.S. Supreme Court to his heirs in Europe.

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🔗 Jedi Blue

🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Law 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Google

Jedi Blue is an agreement between Alphabet and Meta Platforms that allegedly gave Facebook an illegal advantage in Google's ad auctions in exchange for Facebook's word that it would end its own ad service plans.

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🔗 American cover-up of Japanese war crimes

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Law 🔗 Psychology 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Japanese military history 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Japanese military history 🔗 United States/U.S. history 🔗 Military history/Military culture, traditions, and heraldry 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography

The occupying United States government undertook the selective cover-up of some Japanese war crimes after the end of World War II in Asia, granting political immunity to military personnel who had engaged in human experimentation and other crimes against humanity, predominantly in mainland China. The pardon of Japanese war criminals, among whom were Unit 731's commanding officers General Shirō Ishii and General Masaji Kitano, was overseen by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in September 1945. While a series of war tribunals and trials was organized, many of the high-ranking officials and doctors who devised and respectively performed the experiments were pardoned and never brought to justice due to the US government both classifying incriminating evidence, as well as blocking the prosecution access to key witnesses. As many as 12,000 people, most of them Chinese, died in Unit 731 alone and many more died in other facilities, such as Unit 100 and in field experiments throughout Manchuria.

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🔗 Artificial Intelligence Act (EU Law)

🔗 International relations 🔗 Technology 🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Law 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Robotics 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 European Union 🔗 Science Policy 🔗 Artificial Intelligence

The Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is a European Union regulation concerning artificial intelligence (AI).

It establishes a common regulatory and legal framework for AI in the European Union (EU). Proposed by the European Commission on 21 April 2021, and then passed in the European Parliament on 13 March 2024, it was unanimously approved by the Council of the European Union on 21 May 2024. The Act creates a European Artificial Intelligence Board to promote national cooperation and ensure compliance with the regulation. Like the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, the Act can apply extraterritorially to providers from outside the EU, if they have users within the EU.

It covers all types of AI in a broad range of sectors; exceptions include AI systems used solely for military, national security, research and non-professional purposes. As a piece of product regulation, it would not confer rights on individuals, but would regulate the providers of AI systems and entities using AI in a professional context. The draft Act was revised following the rise in popularity of generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT, whose general-purpose capabilities did not fit the main framework. More restrictive regulations are planned for powerful generative AI systems with systemic impact.

The Act classifies AI applications by their risk of causing harm. There are four levels – unacceptable, high, limited, minimal – plus an additional category for general-purpose AI. Applications with unacceptable risks are banned. High-risk applications must comply with security, transparency and quality obligations and undergo conformity assessments. Limited-risk applications only have transparency obligations and those representing minimal risks are not regulated. For general-purpose AI, transparency requirements are imposed, with additional evaluations when there are high risks.

La Quadrature du Net (LQDN) stated that the adopted version of the AI Act would be ineffective, arguing that the role of self-regulation and exemptions in the act rendered it "largely incapable of standing in the way of the social, political and environmental damage linked to the proliferation of AI".

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🔗 Outer Space Treaty

🔗 International relations 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 British Overseas Territories

The Outer Space Treaty, formally the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, is a treaty that forms the basis of international space law. The treaty was opened for signature in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union on 27 January 1967, and entered into force on 10 October 1967. As of June 2019, 109 countries are parties to the treaty, while another 23 have signed the treaty but have not completed ratification. In addition, Taiwan, which is currently recognized by 14 UN member states, ratified the treaty prior to the United Nations General Assembly's vote to transfer China's seat to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1971.

Among the Outer Space Treaty's main points are that it prohibits the placing of nuclear weapons in space, it limits the use of the Moon and all other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes only, and establishes that space shall be free for exploration and use by all nations, but that no nation may claim sovereignty of outer space or any celestial body. The Outer Space Treaty does not ban military activities within space, military space forces, or the weaponization of space, with the exception of the placement of weapons of mass destruction in space. It is mostly a non-armament treaty and offers insufficient and ambiguous regulations to newer space activities such as lunar and asteroid mining.

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🔗 WGA screenwriting credit system

🔗 Film 🔗 Law 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Film/Filmmaking

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) writing credit system for motion pictures and television programs covers all works under the jurisdiction of the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW). Since 1941, the Screen Writers Guild and then the WGA has been the final arbiter of who receives credit for writing a theatrical, television or new media motion picture written under their jurisdiction. Though the system has been a standard since before the WGA's inception, it has seen criticism.

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🔗 Stenotype

🔗 Technology 🔗 Law 🔗 Business 🔗 Occupational Safety and Health

A stenotype, stenotype machine, shorthand machine or steno writer is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use. In order to pass the United States Registered Professional Reporter test, a trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively. Some stenographers can reach 300 words per minute. The website of the California Official Court Reporters Association (COCRA) gives the official record for American English as 375 wpm.

The stenotype keyboard has far fewer keys than a conventional alphanumeric keyboard. Multiple keys are pressed simultaneously (known as "chording" or "stroking") to spell out whole syllables, words, and phrases with a single hand motion. This system makes real-time transcription practical for court reporting and live closed captioning. Because the keyboard does not contain all the letters of the English alphabet, letter combinations are substituted for the missing letters. There are several schools of thought on how to record various sounds, such as the StenEd, Phoenix, and Magnum Steno theories.

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