The concept of corporate personhood is way older than you think, it goes back to at least ancienct Rome around 800 BC. Other countries have that as well, eg. the German constitution says very explicitly “Fundamental rights shall also apply to domestic artificial persons insofar as the nature of such rights shall permit.”. That’s not really the issue, the actual issue is the extreme reliance of political campaigns on donations coupled with the exorbitant costs of political campaigning in the US.

Citizen’s United is very often misrepresented as being about corporate personhood, when in fact this concept isn’t even referenced in the ruling at all. Instead the ruling says that political speech rights aren’t contingent on the identity of the speaker at all. Even if you abolish corporate personhood (which would bring a whole host of other issues with it because for example corporate property ownership hinges on the legal person concept as well) that still wouldn’t overturn Citizen’s United.

Yeah, many here are celebrating a bit to early because they’ve only read the bullet point in the press release and not the actual regulation.

Quote:

A portable battery should be considered to be removable by the end-user when it can be removed with the use of commercially available tools and without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless they are provided free of charge, or proprietary tools, thermal energy or solvents to disassemble it. Commercially available tools are considered to be tools available on the market to all end-users without the need for them to provide evidence of any proprietary rights and that can be used with no restriction, except health and safety-related restrictions.

So no, there’s no requirement that the battery must be easily swappable on the go. In fact there isn’t even the requirement that you must be able to put in a new battery, just that you must be able to remove the old one. “Commercially available tool” might even be a wire cutter to destructively cut the wires that are soldered onto the device’s main board. Because this regulation isn’t actually about consumer rights, it’s about battery recycling. They want people to be able to easily remove the battery at the end of the device’s life so that the battery can be collected separately from the electronics. Nothing more, nothing less.

It doesn’t target phones or tablets specifically, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t include in “portable devices and appliances”. The sentence you quoted simply suggests that there should be additional regulation on top of the currently pending in the future.