It’s very gross for this to be any sort of “I told you so” opening to this post, but the measles outbreak in America continues to get worse, as predicted. While last years case counts and deaths from the disease, which had been vaccinated to the point of eradication back in 2000, were a record-breaking shitshow, 2026’s case and death counts have already outpaced it significantly. There are more than double the total cases of measles already compared with last year, and triple as many deaths. Through it all, RFK Jr. and his HHS agency have battled the outbreak through inaction and obfuscation of data.

The worst of the outbreaks has been in Pennsylvania this year. Unfortunately, highly infectious diseases don’t respect state borders. Measles is already spilling out into neighboring states. Weeks ago, New York State declared a state of emergency due to measles infections. And, now, the state has sadly reported its first fatality from measles.

It’s the first known measles-associated death in the state in over 30 years, health officials said.

“We are deeply saddened by the death of a child in Lewis County associated with the ongoing measles outbreak,” the New York State Department of Health and Lewis County Public Health said in a joint statement on Monday. “We extend our heartfelt condolences to the child’s family and loved ones and ask that their privacy be respected during this difficult time.”

No additional information on the case was released.

We don’t have any more information on the specific case or victim beyond that. But we do know that it was another child that died. Children have represented the overwhelming percentage of case counts and fatalities thus far. We also know that this death needn’t have happened. Until RFK Jr. got into government, America had not had a measles fatality recorded in decades. Through vaccination programs and the resulting herd immunity, even those medically unable to get vaccinated against measles were protected. The anti-vaxxer movement undid all of that, of course, and the avatar for that movement is Kennedy.

A major concern among health professionals right now is measles cases occurring during pregnancy, given how dangerous it can be for both the person pregnant and the fetus upon birth. The CDC reportedly wanted to issue an informational alert to health professionals about the dangers of such cases and how to handle them. Unfortunately, it seems the powers running those government health agencies would prefer to hide that information from the public.

Days before the seventh preventable measles death, The Washington Post reported on Kennedy’s latest push to thwart public health efforts: Career scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which is under Kennedy’s control—were blocked from publishing an urgent health alert to clinicians regarding the risk and management of measles cases during pregnancy.

Given the previous success of vaccines and vaccination campaigns, many clinicians have never seen such cases in their careers. But measles infections during pregnancy pose severe, life-threatening risks to both pregnant people and fetuses. As such, CDC scientists wanted to issue an informational advisory through the CDC’s Health Alert Network.

But the CDC Director’s Office declined to provide the required approval for the alert, sources told the Post. The scientists have since moved to trying to publish the information in the CDC’s publication, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). But the peer-review process for the publication is longer than that of an advisory. Further, vaccine-related studies already approved for publication in MMWR have been suspiciously delayed, the Post reported.

Here again we see sociopathic behavior from Kennedy and its detrimental impact on the health of Americans. Kennedy doesn’t want government studies on vaccine related information because, obviously, those studies don’t align with Kennedy’s preferred conspiracy theories about vaccines. Likewise, he doesn’t want alerts going out to medical professionals about measles during pregnancy because either they put the lie to Kennedy’s claim that he has this whole measles thing under control, because the advice given in those alerts would be to encourage more vaccination, or both.

There is no explanation for why informational alerts about an ongoing health crisis that were otherwise approved for publication should be blocked by someone with no medical degrees or background. This is hiding information from the public, and from doctors. It’s evil.

People are getting sick and dying, most of them children. That Kennedy is prioritizing his own ego and pet projects over those lives isn’t surprising, but it is horrifying. And it must be stopped.

In courts across the country, publishers and creators are suing large AI companies for training generative AI models on copyrighted works. It’s easy to see these cases as a David-and-Goliath showdown between authors and publishers fighting for a cut of Big Tech company profits. But this fight is actually much larger. It affects billions of people who aren’t represented in the case at all, including researchers, artists, activists, journalists, people with disabilities, and anyone who accesses and shares content online.   

That’s why EFF is stepping in to defend the public’s rights in these cases. Last week, EFF filed an amicus brief in In re OpenAI, explaining how the court’s ruling on fair use could impact people worldwide. If fair use gets narrowed, it will impede work that benefits the public, like medical research and investigative journalism, and even limit access to privacy protection tools.

Let’s be clear: creators and workers deserve support as AI changes their fields, and Big Tech companies must be held accountable for the harms they cause. But giving copyright holders more control over the web won’t accomplish either of these goals. If the plaintiffs prevail in these cases, courts would have to rewrite copyright law in ways that hurt everyone except powerful media and tech companies.

Rewriting Fair Use Makes Everyone Worse Off

Copyright exists for one reason: to stimulate creativity and innovation in service of the greater public good. Unfortunately, the plaintiffs in this lawsuit are arguing to limit everyone’s fair use rights, in ways that would thwart the basic purpose of copyright. The harms of shrinking fair use will go far beyond generative AI, impacting everyone.

Initial speculation that AI models would be infringement machines, churning out works highly similar to those on which they were trained, has proven unfounded. And courts have already found fair use in cases where copyrighted works were used to train generative AI models, recognizing that training uses those works for a fundamentally different purpose.

Plaintiffs in these cases argue that, even if the use is transformative, using their works to train AI is still unfair, because the AI models could generate new, non-infringing works that might compete with plaintiffs’ own works. They also argue that scraping or downloading the data without permission—or in some cases, from websites containing infringing copies—was independently infringing and/or rendered any subsequent uses of that data unfair.

These arguments would put beneficial research and reporting at risk. First, if copying without permission rules out fair use, the law will never protect transformative uses that benefit us all. Researchers, journalists, and other watchdog groups gather information the same way AI companies do—but they do it to serve the public interest, and often to hold Big Tech itself accountable. For example, journalists and nonprofit researchers have used “crawling” or “scraping” to investigate potentially anticompetitive practices by tech companies, and research misinformation and hateful content posted on X. Their data acquisition techniques are virtually identical to those used by AI giants—but they lack those companies’ deep pockets.

Requiring users to show that copyrighted material was lawfully obtained would also threaten everyday internet use. As EFF’s brief explained, that requirement would “cast legal doubt on the billions of copies we collectively make every day through routine online activities like opening emails, clicking on an embedded link, visiting websites, sharing pictures, streaming music, and watching videos. All of this activity requires intermediate copying.”

Fair use is what lets us all use the internet without being compelled to track the source of every image, video, and article that we click on, and make sure the rights are all cleared.

Additionally, while rightsholders are understandably concerned about competition from AI generated works, copyright law exists to promote new creation, not protect authors who published first. Under the plaintiffs’ theory, no one could stand upon the shoulders of giants. Copyright could prevent people from writing new books inspired by themes in a favorite novel or genre, or prevent academic researchers from publishing literature reviews that distill insights from prior research—simply because readers might prefer those new publications over those that came first.

Finally, general-purpose AI models are neither designed nor usually used to create works targeted at any particular market. These models have been used to generate new insights and tools for medicine, science, journalism, art, and accessibility. For instance, an AI-powered tool called Be My AI uses Open AI’s GPT models to provide visual descriptions for people who are blind or have low vision. Generative tools have also accelerated scientific research, and researchers have used these tools to develop new medical treatments and medications for conditions previously thought to be incurable.

Mandatory Licensing Would Entrench Big Tech

Some creators and publishers argue that AI developers should just get a license. But requiring permission for every work used would give the largest companies massive advantages over small competitors and impede academic research. As Professor Lawrence Lessig recently noted:

If all training requires a license, then none but a handful of tech giants will be able to afford the costs of training. That’s not because authors are greedy but because the copyright system is the least efficient property system known to man.

Moreover, creators are unlikely to benefit from these licensing arrangements in many cases. Media and entertainment giants have exploited the imbalance between themselves and underpaid working artists for decades. Trying to help creators by giving them more rights under copyright is, as Cory Doctorow has written, like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take. Artists aren’t getting good deals from record labels or publishers now; there’s no reason to think these companies, which already own the copyrights, will treat artists more fairly once they control the data that powers AI.

The Future of AI Is Too Important to Leave to Big Content or Big Tech

AI technologies will affect all of us, and copyright law is ill-equipped to address many of these consequences. The rules governing these technologies should be rules that serve the public—not just the small number of companies that can afford to litigate copyright battles for decades, or settle for billions.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

For the past few weeks on Techdirt, we’ve been publishing The Metric Is Not The Mission, a ten-part series by internet governance and digital policy expert Konstantinos Komaitis which is now available as a single, complete paper. This week, Konstantinos joins the podcast to talk all about his argument in the paper and why it’s a necessary part of understanding big tech.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

So, it’s come to this. The good ship USS Revenge Prosecution is sinking. And the deserting rats are deciding which rats should desert first, apparently based on nothing more than the current state of the organizational chart.

Two people figured heavily into the disastrous attempt to prosecute a handful of Chicago residents for engaging in protected First Amendment activity. The DOJ, urged on by the DHS and Trump himself, wanted to ring up hundreds of people on federal charges for engaging in anti-ICE protests. By the time the DOJ got things in front of a grand jury, the number of defendants had dwindled to… six.

They were the so-called “Broadview Six.” And while the DOJ — represented locally by US Attorney Andrew Boutros — thought it had secured a handful of wins via the grand jury sign-off on the charges, it only took an initial visit to federal court to find out how wrong it was.

Here’s what Boutros did to salvage what was left of his reputation when everything suddenly went disastrously sideways in from of federal judge April Perry:

Boutros announced the decision to dismiss the remaining charges in court following a closed-door meeting over redacted grand jury transcripts. He told U.S. District Judge April Perry he was unaware until recently of the alleged misconduct, including a prosecutor meeting with a grand juror outside proceedings and other jurors who disagreed with the case being dismissed and prevented from participating. Boutros did not dispute the allegations, saying the conduct was upsetting and the reason the case was being dismissed.

“Not good enough!” said the righteously outraged court, which demanded more answers from the DOJ, as well as raising the specter of sanctions if said answers weren’t acceptable:

Although I am not going to prejudge the issue without a hearing, I will say that I was incredibly shocked by the redactions that were made. I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.

And this was all over a handful of federal misdemeanor charges, after Boutros and his subordinates (1) did shady shit with a grand jury, and (2) couldn’t actually get anyone to bite on felony charges against the “Broadview Six.”

US Attorney Boutros still has his job, despite being this debacle’s ringleader. The person who has been permanently turfed — former special agent in charge of the Chicago field office, Douglas DePodesta — wasn’t actually involved in the failed prosecution. But he was the one who paid the price for this DOJ failure, as WBEZ Chicago reports:

When charges were dropped against the “Broadview Six” amid revelations of apparent prosecutorial misconduct, “Boutros began a campaign within the Department of Justice to blame DePodesta for the unraveling of the case.” Boutros’ complaints to superiors in Washington ultimately led to DePodesta’s ouster, the lawsuit says.

More succinctly put:

“I was forced to leave my job,” DePodesta said. “I was ordered to leave my job.”

DePodesta’s ouster is likely the result of a couple of things. First, Boutros desperately needed a patsy to take the hit on his behalf so he could continue his disservice to his office and his country. Second, DePodesta was a holdover from Christopher Wray’s stint as Trump’s FBI Director — an FBI director Trump only likes slightly more than James Comey.

The lawsuit [PDF] alleges that DePodesta’s rights (First, Fifth, and others) were violated by this forced resignation. It hopes to secure not only back pay and other damages, but also a formal statement from the Trump administration admitting to violating the former FBI SAIC’s rights.

Most likely, none of that will happen. But while it works its way to not happening, we can hope that it will result in a bunch of discovery that exposes more of the inner workings of Trump’s DOJ-enabled revenge operations.

But before we give DePodesta the ol’ “Comey is my homey” treatment, let’s not forget that he wasn’t exactly opposed to Trump’s anti-migrant/anti-civil rights overtures. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune shortly after his elevation to the top spot in the FBI’s Chicago office, DePodesta not only echoed a bunch of dumb fentanyl-related talking points, but also affirmed his loyalty to the Bigoted New World Order Trump sought to create by turning every federal law enforcement agency into little more than DHS deputies:

DePodesta said the Chicago FBI, which has more than 1,000 total employees, has partnered locally with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, embedding some of the FBI’s 450 agents on the street “helping them effect arrests.”

The targets, DePodesta said, “are people that have removal orders that have a criminal history — murderers, rapists,” adding that the effort was “ongoing” and had no timetable for a conclusion.

“It is not a surge; it is a sustained effort,” DePodesta said. He said no new agents have been added to fulfill the FBI’s role in immigration enforcement — instead, agents from other squads have rotated and worked overtime.

DePodesta was onboard with rerouting FBI resources to help with mass deportation efforts. His contribution here contributed to the events that led to the bullshit charges against anti-ICE protesters. And, until we see something in forthcoming documents that states otherwise, there’s little reason to believe DePodesta wasn’t, at best, just saying nothing as the DHS and ICE utilized shared resources to surveil protesters and use whatever they could find to generate criminal charges.

So, while DePodesta wasn’t involved at all with the extremely questionable prosecutions the DOJ engaged in here, he also doesn’t seem to have done much to keep himself or his direct employees from becoming the very tools of vengeful oppression he’s suing about now that he’s out of a job.

Again, some judgment can be withheld here because all the facts aren’t available. But I’m willing to bet that once they are made public (assuming the administration doesn’t just write a check to DePodesta and tell him to walk away from this), it will not only expose the DOJ’s complete subjugation, but will likely show DePodesta’s agreement to contribute to the mass deportation effort won’t see him emerge from this lawsuit as an anti-MAGA hero.

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While Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have tried to downplay Aaron Swartz’s role in “founding” Reddit, he was still an instrumental part of the company’s early journey. His “infogami” project was rolled into Reddit, and the founder credit was a part of the deal. Part of the point of infogami was to support open access to information — which was Swartz’s lifelong mission. The code behind infogami is considered instrumental in the launch of the Internet Archive’s Open Library.

So it’s a real shame that Reddit has been doing its best to hammer the final nails into the coffin of the open internet. The latest, of course, is Huffman announcing that Reddit is moving to a “logged-in-only” experience.

Reddit will start testing the login requirement in “select,” non-US markets in Q4. The company will use those tests to decide what a logged-in-only Reddit will look like “globally,” per Huffman.

“Pretty much all of the major ad-based platforms have gone through this transition. We are excited and moving quickly,” the CEO added, noting Reddit’s intent to become a “direct daily habit for every Internet user.”

Huffman admits that he’s doing this in part because traffic from Google had declined massively, which can be (understandably) blamed on Google’s AI summaries on search results.

“During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. If this rate of decline continues, current trends would suggest that total DAUqs [or daily active unique users] could fall in Q4, by a low-double-digit percentage from our current base of 130 million DAUqs,” Huffman wrote.

People have long known that for certain searches on Google you got better results by adding “reddit” to the keywords you searched for, so that Reddit results got prioritized. At the time, people argued that this showed Reddit was becoming a “better search engine than Google,” and that the company had room to build on that and maybe even compete with Google.

It hasn’t really turned out that way. Over the last few years, Reddit and Huffman seem to be seeing how much of the open web they can cut off in pursuit of locking things into silos they can charge for. You may recall three years ago when Reddit cut off a bunch of third party developers (some of whom made it possible for subreddit mods to do their job) all in pursuit of a paid API with the belief that by locking down its tools, the company could profit off the content of its users (despite Reddit not holding the copyright on their content, and not sharing any of the money it would make back with the content creators).

Reddit signed a big $60 million/year API deal with Google, and that should have been seen as the beginning of the end. Now, instead of working on making its site better for users, Reddit was deep down the enshittification curve of making it worse for users to support its business partners who paid the bills. Last year we called out the company for its horrifyingly problematic lawsuit against SerpApi, in which it claimed that because SerpApi made Google search results available to third parties as an API, it violated the DMCA 1201’s anti-circumvention clause.

The whole thing made little sense, because it was difficult to see how Reddit could claim standing with a straight face. It was complaining about a service that operated on Google, not Reddit, that made it possible that others could find links to Reddit posts, with content from Reddit’s users (again, not Reddit’s own IP). That case is still ongoing, but it was yet another attack on the open internet by Reddit, as it seeks to wall off the openness in pursuit of a form of scarcity it can charge extra for.

And, certainly, part of this new effort is in the hopes that the more they lock up their own content, the more they may be able to cut licensing deals.

Cutting off logged-out visitors is just the latest step. In Huffman’s writeup, he admits that this is an anti-open internet move, which he claims is new to him:

And I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.

But, again, Huffman has been moving squarely in this direction for the past three years, so I wouldn’t say it’s entirely accurate to say this is a “big change” for him.

Huffman and Reddit think this will lock more users into Reddit, but I would bet that long term it will do the opposite. Just as locking down the API to cut a deal with Google didn’t bring more traffic to Reddit itself, locking out logged-out readers seems likely to push people toward alternative sources of information rather than into Reddit’s silo. Huffman argues that logged in users are more profitable and valuable for the company, so is betting that this strategy will trade drive-by visitors for more valuable logged-in users, but I wouldn’t take that bet.

There is some extra irony here as well, given that when the Australian government began pushing its “under 16 social media ban” and included Reddit in the list of social media, we were told it wasn’t really a ban, because you could still enjoy Reddit without an account. You just couldn’t have an account if you were under 16. But now, if you don’t have an account, you’ll be much more limited in what you can access. There apparently will still be a front page that you can read without logging in, and they want to build some sort of “incognito” mode, but the site is clearly moving to a siloed logged-in experience.

It’s also why I’m concerned about efforts to require a license for all scraping, which is exactly the logic behind Reddit’s lawsuit. That would also be the death of the open internet. The more we wall off the internet to fight AI, the more we lose the wonders and value of an open internet. If people want to support a true open internet, where anyone can build, we’re going to have to figure out a better overall system than just putting up walls and saying everything must be licensed.

Meanwhile, I’m extremely biased on this, but I will note that ATproto Spaces has been in alpha for a couple months now and should be more widely available soon. And one thing it will enable developers to do is to create Reddit-like spaces on the open internet that no central entity can control. As the old web starts closing down, perhaps we can see the rise of a new open web, where the users are in control, rather than giant companies on the enshittification curve.

For more than a generation, U.S. media academics have warned anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either “news deserts,” or local news that’s mostly just low-quality infotainment and agitprop.

Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” doing quality local journalism just wasn’t profitable enough for the dipsy brunchlords that fail upward into positions of prominence at most media companies, so the internet… didn’t. As a result, all sorts of terrible stuff has rushed to fill the vacuum where quality local journalism once existed.

That includes not just your usual collection of propaganda like Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Sinclair Broadcasting, etc., but also so-called “pink slime” fake local newspapers that try to look like a real local paper, but are basically just partisan agitprop.

Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University did the definitive study on the subject in 2022, and found that there were 1,200 bogus local news outlets around the country, all feeding gullible readers a steady diet of misleading bullshit. In the years since, such fake newspapers have outnumbered real ones. They’re often even better funded.

This partisan ratfuckery historically was heavily dominated by Republicans. But in recent years Democrats have gotten in on the action. And increasingly as voters turn to AI to inform them about upcoming elections, AI chatbots are leaning on these fake pink slime newspapers as reliable sources of local information:

“As a citation, ChatGPT linked to a website called the Kalamazoo Beacon. The Beacon labels its articles as “news articles” in the website’s source code. The outlet also describes itself in the site’s source code as “Reporting on Kalamazoo, southwest Michigan, and the issues shaping lakeshore communities.”

But the Kalamazoo Beacon has only published 16 stories, all about [Michigan Democrat Democrat Sean McCann], his policy positions and his record as a state legislator, NPR’s review shows.”

When the “both sides” press covers this pink slime phenomenon, they sometimes try to imply that this kind of stuff is happening perfectly symmetrically among both major parties (as this Financial Times story does). But NPR’s own previous reporting (which this newer piece curiously fails to mention) indicates that Republican pink slime efforts outnumber Democrats by around ten to one.

In this newer case, nobody can actually seem to track this new smattering of pink slime newspapers to an actual source:

“It’s unclear who operates the websites. NPR was unable to find or reach the site operators. One of the Democrats promoted by the network, JoAnna Mendoza of Arizona, said she wasn’t behind the websites and doesn’t know who is. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the House Democrats, denied involvement in a phone call with NPR. Other candidates the websites promoted, including McCann, as well as other Democratic super PACs that support the candidates, including American Bridge 21st Century, Tomorrow Together and House Majority PAC, did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.”

Regardless of the party of origin, the tactic represents a very ugly problem in a country increasingly being devoured by artifice and disinformation. There’s an active extraction class effort to not only undermine sources of expertise (journalism and academia), but to “flood the zone with shit” to disorient Americans (or their AI chatbots) that go hunting for reliable information.

The death of local news divides the public, can actively shift electoral outcomes, reduces electoral participation, makes a populace more susceptible to propaganda, and can even increase municipal borrowing costs (less local truth-to-power journalism means less oversight of waste, which results in more waste, which results in higher interest rates for municipal bond lenders).

Journalism ideally is the glue that contributes to a healthy civic nervous system. We’ve lost that tether, and therefore (quite intentionally) our sense of a collective, shared reality. You may have noticed a few… repercussions here and there.

There are ample paths out from inside the problem (better media literacy training, enforcing antitrust law, funding public media, restoring media consolidation and media diversity ownership requirements, creating better funding models for real journalism). And while there are organizations spending a lot of time working on the problem (see: the creation of state “civic information consortiums“) they’re consistently out-financed and in desperate need of additional support.