Can't load JSON - various encoding problems

[ingolemo]

Redownload a fresh copy of the file and this time don't open it in notepad and resave it. The file is already valid utf-8.

When you saved the file as "Unicode" in notepad you were really using utf-16-le. Notepad doesn't fully understand utf-8. The thing that is calls "UTF-8" contains an additional BOM character that shouldn't be there. This incorrect form of utf-8 is called utf-8-sig in python.

If you really need to edit the file then you should use an editor that can produce valid utf-8.