News

Wednesday 2026-09-30

06:00 AM

Reckless Ben Finally Listens To Some Lawyers: Files Anti-SLAPP Motion Against Bricks & Minifigs [Techdirt]

Last week, “Reckless” Ben Schneider did Wired’s “Autocomplete Interview” which is always fun. At one point, one of the questions is “Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?” and his answer is amusing (for anyone who isn’t one of Reckless Ben’s current lawyers):

Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?

My whole thing with when it comes to the law is it’s so boring. And so, how do you create entertaining content about something that’s so boring? You do the exact opposite!

I basically just think like, what would a lawyer tell me to do? And then I’m like, I just, okay, let’s scrap that idea. Let’s do the exact opposite.

You know, I want to make a lawyer like cringe in his chair, you know, cuz that’s what’s fun.

And so, no, I don’t have a law degree because if I did, I’d probably be more careful and then being more careful would result in me being more boring.

Watch the whole thing here:

This really shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given that many of the posts I’ve written about him have basically been begging him to speak to a lawyer before digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself, legally.

Still, he does seem to have taken at least some of the “get a lawyer” talk to heart in the case that Bricks & Minifigs (“BAM Franchising”) filed against him (the same case in which BAM settled with the Mansells and dropped its claims against Bryan Mansell, while still pressing ahead against Schneider and some of his colleagues — though Mansell is now claiming that BAM did not, in fact return all the Lego sets he’s owed, and some of the sets it gave him were not from his collection).

Specifically, Schneider and his colleague Victor Nguyen have filed an anti-SLAPP motion against BAM. Utah only got its current, much stronger anti-SLAPP law in the middle of 2023, becoming just the fourth state to adopt a standardized anti-SLAPP law known as the UPEPA, for Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. Since then, a bunch more states have followed (the Uniform Law Commission tracks the enactments, currently at 17), which is great to see.

Schneider’s lawyers, from the firm of Spencer Fane, make it clear that BAM’s lawsuit is an obvious SLAPP:

Plaintiffs do not like that Reckless Ben highlighted the Mansells’ predicament, the methods used, and the publicity generated by the videos. But Plaintiffs cannot weaponize the courts to suppress Reckless Ben’s work or his First Amendment rights, particularly where Plaintiffs have now “recognize[d] that the Mansell family experienced a genuine loss,” as reported by Reckless Ben….

Utah’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), Utah Code section 78B-25- 101 et seq., is meant to prevent precisely this type of effort. UPEPA is “an ‘anti-SLAPP’ act” or a statute protecting parties faced with a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” UHS of Provo Canyon, Inc. v. Bliss, 2024 WL 4279243, at *3 (D. Utah Sept. 24, 2024). Although “SLAPPs are often cloaked as otherwise standard claims of defamation, civil conspiracy, tortious interference, nuisance, and invasion of privacy, just to name a few,” UPEPA combats the misuse of such claims to avoid the “unifying features” of SLAPPs, which “make them a dangerous force” by “ensnar[ing] their targets in costly litigation that chills society from engaging in constitutionally protected activity.” …

The same dangerous features exist here, but Plaintiffs took additional steps to chill protected speech. Faced with negative exposure, Plaintiffs filed this lawsuit and immediately sought an overreaching temporary restraining order (TRO) based on assertions of fact in a Verified Complaint. Reckless Ben had no opportunity to object to the TRO but was immediately prohibited from speaking about the evolving story, violating his First Amendment rights and impairing his livelihood. At the same time, Plaintiffs freely spoke about the situation, attempting (unsuccessfully) to convince the world they had done nothing wrong. In doing so, however, Plaintiffs directly contradicted key allegations they made in filing this suit and obtaining the TRO. While this unfolded, Reckless Ben was silenced by a TRO that operated as a gag order.

Although the TRO has since been amended by stipulation, Plaintiffs have not abandoned their suit. Despite admissions undermining their case and despite multiple significant flaws with the claims, Plaintiffs persist with thirteen causes of action, most of which fail as a matter of law but will inevitably require substantial costs to defend.

The Court should stop this quintessential SLAPP effort by applying UPEPA and dismissing most of Plaintiffs’ claims.

The filing walks through the basics of the dispute, including the fact that BAM never actually identifies any specific statements that were defamatory.

Ben’s lawyers also make the same point I did, that when BAM settled with the Mansells, they effectively undermined their whole RICO case against Ben.

BAM now admits “the Mansells experienced a genuine loss and a great deal of uncertainty and frustration” and has agreed to dismiss all claims against Mr. Mansell and to pay for the LEGO collection at issue…. In public statements, including a joint statement with the Mansells, BAM confirmed it paid a settlement amount and “issued an unqualified apology to the Mansell family for the losses and pain suffered from the events surrounding this dispute.”… With payments for the property at issue and unequivocal apologies, Reckless Ben correctly reported that BAM “stole” the LEGOs, to the extent such statements can be deemed defamatory at all. As such, BAM’s claims based on defamation must fail.

There’s a lot more in the filing about how both the defamation and RICO claims are ridiculous and should fail, but the key part is that under the UPEPA anti-SLAPP law, if Schneider prevails here, the fee award is mandatory, and BAM would be on the hook for his attorneys’ fees and costs, which would be quite a satisfactory conclusion to this particular story.

So yeah, sometimes what the lawyers do is boring. But it might also get you out of a massive, censorial lawsuit that seeks to bankrupt you… and get the other side to pay for it all.

But speaking of people in this dispute who should speak to lawyers, well, Joshua Johnson (one of the guys who took over the shop that had the consignment deal) might want to get on the phone with one quickly. Because he apparently took a phone call from “some random guy” with a YouTube channel, spoke to him for about an hour, and appears to have said a bunch of things that undermine this very case in which Johnson is one of the named plaintiffs. Oops.

Daily Deal: uTalk Language Education [Techdirt]

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Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

04:00 AM

Documents Expose Even More About Stephen Miller’s Ghoulish Anti-Migrant Directives [Techdirt]

Let’s start this off by clearing the air: Stephen Miller looks exactly like the sort of person who wants to elevate white people above everyone else. Sure, he doesn’t have the Hitler ‘stache or a blond pompadour, but he’s the same bit of unspectacular “whiteness” Hitler was. Miller is bald, mostly chinless, and looks like someone who’s been banned from both Venmo and Uber for being way too violently creepy. Bro looks like he’d ask Pat Sajak if he could buy a jowl.

But we’re not here to insult Stephen Miller’s looks. I mean, we did do a bit of that but that’s not the larger, more salient point. Miller’s proximity to the president — and more importantly, to Trump’s vague goals of making the country more “white” and more less-white people dead/disappeared/hunted — has generated the onslaught that similarly generated the kind of things no MAGA shitheel would utter publicly: violence against white citizens who have chosen to defend migrants against ICE’s kidnapping squads.

Whatever killing the government can’t get done in the streets, it can (non-verbally) ask other countries to do on their behalf. After shuttling arrestees from detention center to detention center ahead of court filings, these migrants are then violently ejected from the country. That’s not a phrase I’m using lightly. This administration has made a concerted effort to secure agreements with various hellholes around the world in order to inflict as much misery as possible to people it doesn’t even consider to be human beings.

And that’s where Stephen Miller has been so instrumental. DHS and ICE encourage voluntary “deportation,” promising migrants tens or hundreds of dollars for leaving the country of their own free will and volition. (This is also a lie, but what else did you expect?) For those swept up in ICE purges that most frequently target areas bereft of Trump voters, the alternative is much worse. If you don’t end up in El Salvador’s worst prison, you’ll likely be dumped in whatever war-torn, human-rights-violating country that will have you, especially in exchange for federal payments they’d be otherwise banned from receiving.

The New Republic, building on earlier reporting from the Washington Post, expounds on just what a horrific human being White House advisor Stephen Miller is.

Relying on a series of leaked documents, the Post reports that at Stephen Miller’s direction, the agency is effectively paying out huge sums of taxpayer money to some really nasty governments in exchange for their acceptance of third-country deportees who, for various reasons, cannot be returned to their countries of origin.

It’s really sleazy, ghoulish stuff. The administration has authorized or pledged over $400 million for such agreements with more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America. As the Post reports, the deals place many migrants in countries to which they have no previous connections, and are structured to skirt “human rights safeguards” that typically are built into U.S. foreign assistance payments abroad.

Any normal administration that just wanted to toughen up migration law enforcement would round up migrants and ship them back to the countries they came from. That’s simply not painful enough for this administration, especially when it’s allowing Stephen “Please, My Father Is Mr. Ghoul” Miller to be the brass knuckles he wished to see in the (anti-migrant) world.

Instead, the White House is actively seeking agreements with some of the worst countries in the world to engage in some perverse form of “revenge” against migrants. In many cases, the migrants being subjected to this Trump-specific cruelty aren’t criminals. They’re just people who’ve recently seen their protected status unilaterally revoked, their still-valid visas stripped, or their attempts to abide by the legal naturalization process preemptively terminated by a government that just wants to see as many non-white people ejected/destroyed as possible.

To reiterate: this administration, under the “advisement” of Stephen Miller, is seeking to inflict maximum pain on people who desired nothing more than to live a life free of violence and persecution. The message being sent now is the opposite: “Get fucked for trying, non-whites. Smooches, the US Government.”

The truly vile kicker here? Also at Miller’s direction, this agency is turning the original purpose of the State Department’s refugee architecture on its head. The Office of Remigration is a part of the department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which has historically been devoted to resettling people fleeing horrors abroad in the United States.

But now, civil servants who previously carried out that mission are leaking to the Post their dismay at being ordered to do the opposite. They’re now working to get other countries to agree to accept deportees who have no ties whatsoever to their new destinations, even as we pay these countries foreign assistance money to do so. 

Are you happy with your representation? I direct that question to the MAGA faithful as well — people who seem to believe the USA is the best country ever, but only if no one desiring access to our level of freedoms ever dares to seek asylum here. And by “no one,” we’re not counting white South Africans, who are, of course, free to take our jobs and leech off of our social services and fuck with the purity of our fluids.

Miller and the people who listen to him are exactly who we think they are: Nazis who don’t have the strength of character to actually own it.

So “remigrations” are understood as part of a civilizational rescue mission of sorts: Masses of human civilizational contaminants are rounded up, expelled from the West, and dumped outside our charmed hemisphere, into that geographic mass that Trump calls “shithole countries,” which is of course where they belong. If this is terrifying, so much the better. It’s all rooted in a series of delusions, not least delusions of world-historical grandeur.

The DHS and its agencies continue to make transparently false claims about ridding this nation of the “worst of the worst.” Trump continues to just be casually racist on the regular. Stephen Miller lurks behind the curtain, touching himself furtively as all of his white nationalist dreams become reality. Being exposed won’t change his Nazi tendencies, though. All it’s likely to do is provoke him to double-down on his blatant hatred.

Pluralistic: Lindsay Owens's "Gouged" (29 Sep 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

  • Lindsay Owens's "Gouged": The end of a fair price and what that means for your wallet.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Doonesbury on 9/11; Suspicious Looking Device; Elephant-shit paper; The Onion x TSA liquid rules; Borders goodbye letter; Voting machines suck; EFF v DRM; Matt Furie on the hijacking of Pepe; Austerity v last steam-loom; Facebook x "disinformation" criticism.
  • Upcoming appearances: Boston, Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The cover for Lindsay Owens's 'Gouged.'

Lindsay Owens's "Gouged" (permalink)

Lindsay Owens is the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, who have done some of the most important work on surveillance pricing (using computers to spy on you to rip you off) and algorithmic wage discrimination (using computers to spy on you and steal your wages). Today, she publishes Gouged, a comprehensive, accessible guide to this modern scourge:

https://gougedbook.com/

Owens and Groundwork have done as much as anyone to publicize and fight against the use of corporate power, computers and vast troves of commercial surveillance data to pick your pocket, shrink your paycheck and make the worst people on earth far richer. It was Katie Wells, a Groundwork fellow, who co-authored the report describing how the apps nurses use to get shiftwork collude with data-brokers to find out how much money nurses owe on their credit cards, so they can pay the most desperate nurses lower wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

Owens helped coin the term "the age of recoupment," to describe this current moment in which companies that chased all their competitors out of the market with predatory pricing are now jacking up prices, knowing they're the only game in town:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

And Owens helped lead a study that showed that Instacart was using surveillance data to jack up prices by 20% or more based on inferences about your willingness and ability to pay (after the study was published, Instacart promised they'd stop doing it):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

Owens and Groundwork have a keen eye for the structural conditions that allow companies to screw their workers and customers, especially the role that competition plays in keeping companies' greed in check. Take their proposal for "street pricing" in sports stadiums: like everyone, they understand that sports stadium owners know that you can't easily step outside for a snack, so they've raised prices to the sky:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies

They have a simple solution: just force vendors to charge the same prices as the shopkeepers in the neighborhood – the ones whose customers can take their business elsewhere. This proposal polls high (Groundwork does a lot of polling), both with Democrats and Republicans (despite the latter group's allergy to "price controls"). It's a good example of the kind of policy work Groundwork does: diagnosing a problem and coming up with a solution that's easy to administer and easy to explain, in terms that are popular with people from all walks of life.

This is the spirit of Gouged: laying out the baroque, data-driven scams that underpin an ever-increasing part of your life in plain language and tracing those scams back to specific policy choices.

Owens does important work here: sector by sector and scam by scam, she lays out how companies collude – often with the assistance of a captured and tame state – to reduce competition in order to raise prices, from groceries to rents to airline tickets. She describes how online sellers exploit their information asymmetry, their ability to both directly observe you and millions of other consumers, and to augment those observations with sensitive information purchased from the wild west of data brokers, to steer you into paying more and getting less. These schemes run the gamut from subscriptions you sign up for with a single click but can't get shut off without canceling your credit card to lengthy check-out processes that end with a long set of junk prices that tack another 10 or 20% onto the cost you thought you were about to pay.

All of this raises a deceptively simple-sounding question: what is a fair price? Owens takes us through the history of pricing, and the American tradition – begun by Quakers – of replacing haggling with price-tags, and setting those prices at "cost plus a reasonable percentage." She describes an ideological project, a cousin to the neoliberal revolution of Carter and Reagan, to replace this "fair price" with a "market price" that was calculated to be whatever the market would bear. She introduces us to the men who spent a generation dreaming of the technology to change every price for every customer, every time that customer entered the marketplace, and she shows us how, when they got their wish, they shifted billions away from workers and shoppers to owners.

Remember: a wage is also a price: it's the price you get for your labor and the precious, irreplaceable hours of your life. The same men who committed to making prices you pay as high as possible were every bit as committed to ensuring that the price you charged for those unrecoverable moments of the only life you will ever live as low as possible. Every scam to make you pay more has a mirror-image scam that ensures you are paid less. This is the logical trajectory of the gig economy – a way to bring that same exploitable information asymmetry to labor markets, where the boss can observe everyone on the payroll and how much (how little) they've accepted from job to job, but workers don't even know who the other workers are, much less what they're getting paid.

All of this is laid out with admirable clarity and detail. By the time you get to the last chapter, you'll know exactly how you're getting scammed, who is scamming you, and why they're getting away with it. The final chapter is meant to be the "What do we do about it?" chapter, and regrettably, it's weaker than other parts of the book. Owens urges you to have conversations with your friends about these things, she urges you to take basic measures to defend your privacy, and lists some businesses that have steered clear of the scams she describes in the book, with the implication that you could bring your business to these companies and ones like them.

There is nothing wrong with this advice. Every word of it is sound, and your life – and the world – will be better off if you follow it. But this wasn't what I hoped for from someone with such an excellent track record of devising shovel-ready, highly leveraged, popular policy proposals. I would much rather have been presented with a half-dozen well-thought-through, well-explained rules or laws that could really strike at the root of these problems.

The pathologies Owens presents in this book can be traced to the Chicago School, a group of radical economists who won favor with Carter, Reagan, Thatcher, and other architects of neoliberalism. The Chicago School's chief strategist was Milton Friedman, who spent decades advocating for the policies that went on to destroy the world as we knew it. Before Friedman was ascendant, his colleagues would ask him how in the world he expected his plans – totally alien to the political consensus of the day – to ever turn into action.

Friedman had a stock answer for this question: "In times of crisis, ideas move from the periphery to the center. Our job is to 'keep ideas lying around' so that when the crisis strikes, we will be able to seize the moment."

Friedman was a monster, but he was right. There's always a crisis, eventually – the world is big and complicated and subject to all kinds of shocks. Friedman didn't need a crystal ball to predict a crisis – the next crisis was eminently foreseeable. Today, crises are coming thicker and faster than ever, as Friedman's program of autocratic rule and extraction reaches a boiling point.

Each of the scams that Owens lays out in her book is a crisis in waiting. When those crises arrive, I would love to go into it knowing which policies could have prevented it, so that I can blame our policymakers for failing to prevent it, and, after they've been defenestrated, I can demand that anyone who seeks to replace them promise to take meaningful steps to end the crisis and prevent it from happening again.

Throughout this excellent book, Owens makes an indisputable case that the problems she describes have a systemic root. They're not caused by wickedness or greed – they're caused by a system designed to reward wickedness and greed. There's nothing wrong with giving people some simple measures they can take to protect themselves from such a system, but those protections will only ever be partial and temporary. I would have been far more energized if those personal measures had been a prelude to a chapter designed to equip me with a list of bold, muscular policy demands.

Long ago, Owens convinced me that the system is rigged and we all deserve better. This book made that case even clearer. I want to know how we get beyond modest personal protections and make our way to a better world for all.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Doonesbury on 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20020309055239/http://www2.uclick.com/feature/01/10/01/db011001.gif

#20yrsago Suspicious Looking Device exists to incite unease https://web.archive.org/web/20061107112421/http://junkfunnel.com/sld/

#20yrsago HOWTO make elephant-shit paper https://web.archive.org/web/20061020105837/https://intensehumour.blogspot.com/2006/09/elephant-dung-paper.html

#20yrsago The Onion on TSA liquid restrictions https://web.archive.org/web/20061001102305/https://theonion.com/content/node/53536

#15yrsago Goodbye letter from Borders employee(s) (?) spills secrets of bookselling trade https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/30/goodbye-letter-from-borders-employees-spills-secrets-of-bookselling-trade/

#10yrsago Electronic voting machines suck, the comprehensive 2016 election edition https://web.archive.org/web/20160930060538/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-voting-technology/

#10yrsago Shadow Regulation: the secret laws that giant corporations cook up in back rooms https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/shadow-regulation-back-room-threat-digital-rights

#10yrsago EFF to court: don’t let US government prosecute professor over his book about securing computers https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-court-block-us-prosecuting-security-researcher-detecting-and-publishing

#10yrsago Matt Furie on the experience of having his Pepe the Frog character hijacked by white supremacists https://riylcast.tumblr.com/post/151123916140/episode-187-matt-furie-bonus

#10yrsago Arkansas lawmaker who pushed law protecting right to video police is arrested for videoing an arrest https://web.archive.org/web/20160930151809/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/30/lawmaker-who-pushed-bill-to-protect-people-filming-police-arrested-for-filming-police/

#10yrsago Austerity kills the last steam-powered loom in the world https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-37512136

#5yrsago Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation" https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

03:00 AM

What sort of fuel? [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

We avoid this question all the time, and it costs us.

Don’t put kerosene in an electric car. It won’t work. Don’t give your dog dark chocolate, it’ll make him sick.

And yet, we often hesitate to be honest about what gets us moving.

What puts something at the top of your priority list, or pushes you to put in extra effort? What challenges or rewards do you keep coming back to, gig after gig, job after job?

Here are few to get you started:

  • Extinguishing emergencies
  • Going a little faster than the person next to you
  • Pleasing the boss
  • Undermining the boss (class clown)
  • Establishing a web of safety
  • Running away from safety
  • Earning trust
  • Getting your way
  • Feeling safe
  • Feeling alive
  • Feeling vindicated
  • Showing the skeptics that we’re right
  • Staying out of the spotlight

Someone who is free climbing at Yosemite probably has different fuel than the person on the treadmill at the gym. The emergency room doctor is not the same as someone working in public health.

The structure, shared measurements and near universal recognition of a quest for an Olympic medal can capture an athlete’s life for ten years–but then, once they retire from this special condition, it’s possible that they’ll never again find this sort of motivation.

“How are you?” is a benign question, but the honest answer might reveal which fuel we’re focusing on, helping us see what we’re drawn to–and it’s rarely universal. That’s part of the hiding. We’d like to believe that anyone else facing the same choices we have would use the same fuel and demand the same priorities we do. Look around. Fuel isn’t universal.

If the fuel you’ve chosen is helping you get to where you want to go, that’s fabulous. For most of us, though, it might be worth a pause to consider whether it’s what we really need to fill our days or create the change we seek.

      

12:00 AM

New Release: Tor Browser 15.0.24 [Tor Project blog]

Tor Browser 15.0.24 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

Windows Package Signature Issue

The DigiCert EV code-signing certificate we use to sign Windows installation packages is expired since September 1st and we are currently in the process to renew it. Unfortunately, this process is delayed and not yet complete.

This has caused Windows users trying to install Tor Browser 15.0.21 and 15.0.22 from scratch to receive "bad signature" warnings.

As a temporary work-around, for Windows only we're keeping Tor Browser 15.0.20 (the latest correctly signed version) listed on our download page, relying on automatic updates (which are signed with a different key, not involving this expired certificate) to bring Windows users to the current version.

Users who prefer to download the latest version directly, ignoring the certificate expiration warning, can download it from https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/15.0.24/.

New PGP subkey

This release is signed using a new subkey. If you previously used gpg to verify Tor Browser downloads, you may need to refresh the Tor Browser signing key (0xEF6E286DDA85EA2A4BA7DE684E2C6E8793298290) in your local keyring. For more details you can read our page about signature verification, specifically the section "Refreshing the PGP key".

Send us your feedback

If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve this release, please let us know.

Full changelog

The full changelog since Tor Browser 15.0.23 is:

Kanji of the Day: 肌 [Kanji of the Day]

肌

✍6

中学

texture, skin, body, grain

キ

はだ

肌荒れ   (はだあれ)   —   bad skin
美肌   (びき)   —   beautiful skin
敏感肌   (びんかんはだ)   —   sensitive skin
鳥肌   (とりはだ)   —   gooseflesh
肌色   (はだいろ)   —   flesh color (of a Japanese person)
地肌   (じはだ)   —   texture
肌触り   (はだざわり)   —   the touch of
山肌   (やまはだ)   —   mountain's surface
肌で感じる   (はだでかんじる)   —   to understand from experience
岩肌   (いわはだ)   —   bare rock

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Tuesday 2026-09-29

11:00 PM

Reporting Confirms: Stupid Over-Reliance On Palantir AI Helped Lead To US Bombing Of Iranian Schoolgirls [Techdirt]

In the piece Dave Willner and I published last week about why “the apocalypse won’t be sexy,” we discussed how the real threat wasn’t “rogue” out of control AI tools, but rather humans doing stupid shit, sometimes because they stop thinking in the presence of these AI machines. A deeply reported Bloomberg article by Ben Bartenstein and Krishna Karra details how the now infamous bombing of an Iranian girls elementary school was due to Pentagon officials deep over-reliance on Palantir’s Maven system.

Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.

In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments.

To understand how we got here, you need a timeline that stretches back the better part of a decade. Project Maven was, somewhat famously, a project to use AI in the Pentagon, that Google was originally tapped to build. However, in 2018, due in large part to employee protests, Google announced it would drop the contract. Days later, Google announced that it would not allow its AI to be used for “weaponized systems.”

Around that time, I was asked to be on a panel debating whether or not it was good for employees to protest contracts like this with one of Palantir’s founders. Little did I know that the reason that founder was so vehement in his contempt for the Google employees protesting was because, right at that moment, Palantir was swooping in to grab the contract that Google was dropping.

Secretive data analytics company Palantir is working on Project Maven, the US Department of Defense program that Google dropped in March following protests inside of the company, according to people familiar with the project.

That takes us to earlier this year, when Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth kicked off their disastrous, stupid, and short-sighted war in Iran with an initial bombing campaign that (among other things) blew up a girls elementary school, killing at least 100 girls (later reports put the toll at more than 165, most of them children). While Hegseth and Trump tried to pretend it wasn’t them or that it wasn’t a school, the evidence piled up pretty quickly.

At almost the exact same time, the Pentagon got into its (now deemed unconstitutional) petty spat with Anthropic, which included some debate about whether or not the Defense Department could get around Anthropic’s guardrails against using its AI for autonomous weaponry. Not surprisingly, this resulted in plenty of speculation about whether or not the bombing of the Shajare Tayyiba Elementary School was due to an AI failure. Reports noted that the site used to be a military compound, but satellite imagery by 2017 had showed the outdoor play area, and intelligence analysts should have removed it from any target list. Hell, the school was apparently clearly labeled… on Google Maps.

Days later, Semafor (a publication with a history of platforming credulous takes regarding the Trump admin) insisted it had the scoop: US officials told it that AI had nothing to do with the bombing.

The error was one that AI would not be likely to make: US officials failed to recognize subtle changes in satellite imagery, while human intelligence analysts missed publicly available information about a school located inside the Revolutionary Guard compound (or failed to add it to the database used for targeting). AI has its notorious failings, from hallucinations to sycophancy, but it’s also able to take in far more information than current, human-led systems — and a deeper look at satellite imagery or, simply, an internet search could have forestalled the disaster. Even a scan of Iranian business listings turned up the school, according to Reuters.

That article discusses Palantir’s Maven — calling it “a kind of DoorDash for deadly missile strikes” — but then suggests it wasn’t really involved in this process:

The tragedy at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school led to an immediate rush to blame AI for the fatal missile attack. And while the initial speculation turned out to be wrong, it does suggest that civilian deaths stemming from automation will be viewed differently than those caused by humans, even if autonomous weapons prove safer in the aggregate.

Except, the Bloomberg report suggests, Palantir’s Maven was definitely involved in the process, even if human stupidity (naturally) made the final calls.

Basically, the Bloomberg report details that people at the Pentagon assumed (incorrectly, obviously) that Palantir’s Maven would magically alert them “hey, this might be a school.” But that’s not how it works. Then again, why would anyone expect a system sold as “intelligent” to apply any actual intelligence to vetting potential targets?

Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations.

Yeah, okay, maybe “it’s not clear why” people expected it, but really? It kinda is, isn’t it? Palantir and all the AI companies play up the “smarts” of their systems and it leads people into a false reliance on them as all-knowing, all-seeing beings, rather than just automation machines that can handle fuzzy inputs and outputs better than old deterministic systems.

Of course, the fact that it was humans who over-relied on Maven lets Palantir wash its hands of the whole thing and yell “not our fault” as loudly as it can:

A Palantir spokesperson said that the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there’s no evidence that its software was at fault in the Minab strike.

Yes, the human is responsible. But people over-relying on the tech because you oversold it is kinda part of the issue, just as Elon Musk overselling the safety of his “full self driving” feature needs to fall partly on Tesla.

And here, even though there were “humans in the loop,” it seems clear that in their rush to find places to bomb, they were perfectly happy to let Palantir’s Maven do the actual work:

High on Centcom’s list: the naval division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful force across the country’s military, economy and politics. It’s tasked with defending — and at times, disrupting — the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz. The Minab school site — with its uncorrected classification as an IRGC facility — was fed into Maven along with other potential targets. It ultimately emerged as one of the recommended day-one targets, people involved in the investigation said.

As all targets do, the Minab site moved through a multi-stage assessment process known by the military as the “kill chain.” Steps in that process have traditionally involved intelligence analysts, imagery specialists, targeteers, lawyers, operational commanders and launch crews, according to US military doctrine and interviews with current and former defense officials. Today, Maven sits at the heart of those operations — between the initial intelligence inputs and the latter review stages, officials said.

Part of that “kill chain” process was supposed to include the “civilian harm mitigation” (CHM) team to carefully review the target to see if there were risks of civilian harm and (you guessed it), how to mitigate that. But, you know, Hegseth finds “CHM” to be way too woke, and got rid of most of them in his quest to make sure he seemed as manly and bloodthirsty as possible. And, besides, they had Palantir’s Maven AI to do the hard work? Who needs a CHM team when Maven can do it…

In past conflicts, preparing lists of proposed targets — work that includes assessing how they align with an operation’s objectives — had taken hours for staffers to complete. Ahead of the US attack on Iran, much of that work was condensed into several minutes via Maven, people involved in the Pentagon’s internal review said.

Officials involved in the investigation pointed to gaps that they said were left after Hegseth dismantled most of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation, or CHM, units — cutting headcount across a number of teams by roughly 90% to fewer than 20 staff members, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Centcom’s team was reduced from 10 to 1.

No CHM team member reviewed the Minab site before the strike, according to officials involved in the internal investigation. That was a consequence of the cuts in staffing but also a decision not to involve the group in planning and operations, the officials said.

So, no, Palantir’s AI didn’t make the decision… but it sure did make Hegseth and Centcom feel pretty confident that they could rush the kill chain process and skip the CHM part which, you know, might have caught the pastel painted walls around the school, the soccer pitch, and the playground markings.

There’s a lot more in the article detailing how the bombing came about, how Hegseth’s obsession with killing off programs he deemed to be too woke, and prioritizing speed and “lethality” all contributed to what is pretty clearly a war crime. But in the end, the point that Dave and I made in our piece earlier this week stands. The apocalypse won’t be sexy. It’ll look like overconfident people skipping the boring checks because they assumed the fancy AI system had already done them for them.

10:00 PM

IFPI Wants Open Source YouTube Downloader yt-dlp on EU Piracy Watch List [TorrentFreak]

ifpi logoIn October 2020, the RIAA used a DMCA notice to remove the popular YouTube download tool youtube-dl from GitHub.

The RIAA argued that the software circumvented YouTube’s rolling cipher technology. A few weeks later, GitHub reinstated the repository and set up a $1 million defense fund for developers facing similar claims.

The music industry had more success in Germany, where labels won a lawsuit against Uberspace, the hosting provider of youtube-dl’s official website. In November 2024, the Hamburg Court of Appeal rejected the host’s appeal.

While youtube-dl was never formally shut down, active development has been largely taken over by the open source fork yt-dlp. In fact, people who visit the original .org domain of youtube-dl’s former website are redirected to yt-dlp.

The yt-dlp project launched in 2021 and has more than 16,000 forks and more than 190,000 stars on GitHub, making it the 32nd most-starred project on the site.

IFPI Flags yt-dlp as “Major Problem”

The music business is well aware of these developments and continues to see this type of software as a problem. In a new policy submission, music industry group IFPI highlights yt-dlp as a major problem, naming four developers by their online handles.

The callout is part of IFPI’s submission to the consultation for the 2027 EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. Among other things, it asks for yt-dlp to be added to the list of stream ripping services, alongside Savefrom.net and two Y2mate sites.

“YT-DLP is a major problem for the music industry as it provides freely available open-source software that enables users to download and permanently store music and audiovisual content from licensed streaming platforms, including YouTube, without authorisation,” IFPI writes.

A Major Problem

a major problem

IFPI’s overview describes the project’s history, its stream ripping capabilities, and the copyright-critical Unlicense it’s released under. The group also explains why the software is hard to stop.

“Its open-source nature, extensive developer community and its widespread distribution results in the tool being difficult to contain and/or remove, while continuing to facilitate stream ripping at scale and depriving right holders, artists and licensed services from legitimate streaming and downloads.”

Four GitHub Handles

The submission identifies the project’s founder as GitHub user pukkandan, who it says was lead maintainer from 2021 to 2024. It also lists three current core maintainers: coletdjnz, bashonly and Grub4K. These handles are publicly listed on GitHub.

From yt-dlp’s GitHub

dlp

This is the first time we’ve seen yt-dlp, or the original youtube-dl, named as a target in a Watch List or Notorious Markets submission.

Besides the listing, the yt-dlp callout doesn’t ask for anything concrete. There is no takedown request, call for blocking measures, or any action against the developers. The submission also doesn’t mention that the software can be used for lawful purposes.

Circumvention?

The yt-dlp description does not mention the word ‘circumvention’ either, but the general stream-ripper intro does. IFPI argues that YouTube uses technical protection measures to prevent downloads.

“Stream ripping sites are circumventing these measures that enjoy legal protections under the international treaties and EU law,” the submission reads.

Legal protections

legal protections

The music group also cites the German youtube-dl ruling, where the court held the website’s host liable for aiding and abetting the circumvention of these measures.

However, the submission itself describes the tool as “parsing webpage and player data, and interacting with platform-specific playback endpoints.” How circumvention potentially fits in there is not mentioned.

Officially Hosted in the United States

The European Commission’s Watch List highlights marketplaces and services outside the EU that reportedly engage in or facilitate piracy and counterfeiting. While the location of the developers isn’t discussed, GitHub is called out as the hosting platform.

“Github is YT-DLP’s official source; it serves as the main platform for accessing the scripts latest updates, source code, pre-compiled binaries and installation instructions,” IFPI writes, while adding that forks and copies are also available elsewhere.

GitHub is a Microsoft-owned company, based in the United States, which would make the yt-dlp repository US-hosted.

AI ‘Ripping’ Threats

IFPI’s submission is not limited to traditional threats. It also flags a newer type of ripping tool. AI music apps Rythmix and MusiQ AI allow users to paste a YouTube link and turn the recording into an AI cover song with a cloned artist voice.

Rythmix

Rythmix

Both these tools are available in Apple’s App Store, and Rythmix is also on Google Play, where it was already downloaded more than five million times.

In the months to come, the European Commission will go over all submissions and decide which of the proposed targets make it into the 2027 edition of the list. Whether that includes yt-dlp or the AI apps has yet to be seen.

—

IFPI’s submission to the EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, which includes a variety of additional targets, is available here (pdf).

We reached out to the yt-dlp maintainers and GitHub for a comment on IFPI’s submission, but they did not respond before publication.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

04:00 PM

03:00 PM

More Xbox Layoffs They Promised Wouldn’t Happen After Acquisition Blitz [Techdirt]

I’m starting to think we have unknowingly entered the age of great American civic nihilism. The impetus for that belief most recently has been RFK Jr. and the wider government’s complete acquiescence to his bald-faced lies and betrayals. If nobody can be bothered to lift a finger over that man, then they obviously don’t think any of this whole civics thing matters at all.

But it is not, nor has been, all about Kennedy. I’m not naive enough to believe there was ever a time when everyone on both sides of the government and private interests coin was completely honest with one another all the time, but the modern era is so full of blatantly cynical lying on both sides that it’s disheartening. And if you want to see an example of this in action that isn’t on the government side, you need only look at what Microsoft has done after its acquisition blitz.

While battling the government to acquire Activision Blizzard, Microsoft stated to the FTC and to the courts that this acquisition would result in more consumer options and would not result in consolidation-based layoffs. Shortly after the purchase was allowed to go through, Microsoft laid off 2,000 staff. Then it laid off more staff. Then it warned it would lay off even more staff, which was a promise it actually followed through on. Then, over this past summer, Xbox cut 20% of its staff.

Most recently Microsoft — you guessed it — cut even more staff and sold or shuttered a bunch of its studios.

This time, not only are people losing their jobs, but the various studios that employed them are being shuffled around, amalgamated together, or shut down entirely, while foundational Xbox IPs are changing hands. Across social media, the gaming community is reacting to the news with a mixture of frustration and resignation.

These moves are big. For example, the most famous first-party Xbox title of all, Halo, is moving from 343 Industries over to Activision. That has resulted in sad situations like one developer literally receiving a promotion and a pink slip in the same week. While Xbox once had over a dozen studios under its umbrella, those are now being either sold, closed, or consolidated with one another, which is the exact thing Microsoft promised wouldn’t happen.

All of this was predicted by game journalists, industry insiders, and the FTC. Microsoft said this wouldn’t happen, but it is. And it was always the plan. And what will the consequences of all that lying be?

Nothing. Regulatory capture is the rule, not the exception. Government inaction is often the best we can hope for, but here it’s debilitating. People lost jobs because of a combination of regulatory apathy and what can barely be called a corporate con-job, so transparent was the con.

And the gaming public is worse for it all.

02:00 PM

You’re Now Paying for Trump’s Campaign Ads [The Status Kuo]

Screenshot from recent Trump ad

During Fox’s broadcast of the Washington Commanders–Seattle Seahawks game on Sunday, a fairly creepy ad aired. There was Donald Trump, looking dour and striding down a hallway as his own voice intoned, “We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists!” If that wasn’t WTF enough, the ad closed with an on-screen disclosure that it was “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

The spot, “Final Battle,” also aired during the Carolina Panthers–Cleveland Browns game, on “Saturday Night Live” and during “Fox News Sunday.” It promised, without a trace of irony, to “expel warmongers” from the government. The ad is nearly identical to one from Trump's 2024 campaign, before he himself became chief warmonger in his second term.

It is at least the third government-funded Trump ad to air since Wednesday. Others include one set to a song titled (checks notes) “Love Me” and one filmed at Mount Rushmore, which doesn’t bear Trump’s face, at least not yet (spits, throws salt).

The White House insists the ads are “public service announcements.” They are “about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders and abroad,” a spokesperson said.

The ads return repeatedly to a single enemy: communism. That’s hardly a PSA. Earlier this month, at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump repeatedly branded Democrats as communists, warning, “It’s going to be a communist country if they win.” The same week the first ad debuted, Trump welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping, who leads China’s Communist Party, for a state visit.

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What the ads say

The White House’s claim that these are PSAs rather than political ads is laughable. Consider the evidence.

The “Love Me” spot, which debuted Wednesday night during Fox News’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” opens with Trump declaring, “Together we will defeat communism, socialism and Marxism in America. America will never be a communist country.” Photos of the president flash by, showing him at rallies, pardoning turkeys, standing with the FIFA trophy, flanked by military brass and posing outside the Taj Mahal, all set to JMSN’s song “Love Me.” On-screen text promises the “Largest Tax Cuts in History,” “Reigniting American Manufacturing” and “Defend Law and Order and Police.”

As is usual with this regime, nobody asked the artist. JMSN said he never licensed the song. “To anybody who has followed my career and knows what I stand for and built my career on, it should go without saying that I would never authorize my music to be used for ANY political agenda or campaign,” he wrote.

The spot also features UFC CEO Dana White’s voice from the 2024 Republican National Convention. “He is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was gonna stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves.”

Here’s the full ad if you can stand it on a Monday morning:

On Sept. 13, the White House posted a nearly identical video to its YouTube channel without the “government paid for this” language. The ad also resembles commercials the nonprofit wing of Trump’s political organization released earlier. One spot from Securing American Greatness titled “Toughest Guy” was built around the same Dana White tribute.

The “Final Battle” spot is basically a recycled campaign ad. Along with vowing to cast out communists, warmongers and Marxists, Trump pledges to demolish the deep state. It nearly duplicates a campaign video Trump posted to Truth Social in 2024, which ran six seconds longer and carried his campaign logo and a number supporters could text. That version closed by urging viewers to “Join President Trump’s Fight for America.”

Another ad, which aired on CBS stations Thursday evening, recounts the U.S. capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and features Trump alongside top Cabinet officials.

The Mount Rushmore spot runs a full minute. Trump’s voice, lifted from an address he delivered at the monument over the July Fourth weekend for the country’s 250th birthday, plays over nighttime shots of the carved presidents. “This is only the beginning of the Golden Age of America,” Trump says.

Some Golden Age, huh?

Why they’re running the ads

In August, Trump began pressing supporters to treat the midterms as a referendum on him. “So what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote,” he told a rally in Myrtle Beach, S.C., adding, “It’s so important.”

Days later, The Atlantic reported that the president had adopted a new game plan.

The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”

You could hear GOP candidates groan across the country.

Zeteo reported that the taxpayer-funded campaign addresses an even more personal grievance. Several advisers and officials told the outlet that Trump has repeatedly complained that too many Republican candidates and lawmakers are leaving him out of their TV ads. One adviser said they had shown the president GOP campaign sites that had downplayed or deleted mentions of him, and a source said Trump phoned one allied candidate to demand why they weren’t campaigning harder on his second-term accomplishments.

Trump hates disloyalty more than anything, and he needs everything to be about him, so these betrayals stung doubly. Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, explained that GOP candidates have concluded Trump now hurts them more than he helps and are keeping their distance. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen that,” Madrid said.

Two sources told Zeteo that Trump’s team made sure the “Love Me” ad ran on Fox and in the Washington, D.C., media market, where he is widely despised and where the ad was unlikely to sway many voters, all so the president would see it on TV at the White House. Zeteo notes that his team ran a similar play in the summer of 2020, buying campaign ads in Washington, where Trump has little voter support, to ease his worries that Republicans weren’t backing him enough.

Voters want solutions, not hype

The ads’ on-screen promises center on tax cuts, manufacturing and policing, all framed by the fight against “communism.” Voters heading into November, however, have other priorities. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Aug. 28–31, 47 percent of registered voters named the cost of living as the top factor in their midterm vote. That cost has only gone up since then. A whopping 71 percent of adults disapproved of Trump’s handling of the issue.

The Iran war has added to those cost pressures. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that higher energy prices from the conflict added 2.3 percentage points to annualized inflation in the second quarter of 2026. In that quarter, inflation in the personal consumption expenditures price index, a broad measure of the prices Americans pay for goods and services, reached 5.3 percent.

Some Republican Senate candidates have begun campaigning against the war on pocketbook grounds. In a new ad filmed in a grocery store, Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers says, “The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly.”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that after campaigning in battleground states, he has found parents lying awake at night over one issue. “They’re worried about the cost of living,” he said.

There’s a law against this

Congress has included a ban on government propaganda in its annual spending bills since the 1950s, including the funding package Trump signed in February. The current version, Section 718 of division E of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, reads:

No part of any appropriation contained in the act or any other Act shall be used directly or indirectly, including through a private contractor, for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has held that the prohibition reaches communications that are “purely partisan” or designed to aid a party or candidates.

GAO has also recognized that administrations may spend public money to explain and defend their policies. Kevin Kosar, who wrote the Congressional Research Service’s 2014 report on government advertising and is now a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, was blunt about the “Love Me” spot: “This advertisement looks like puffery.”

The White House’s defense rests on Trump’s absence from the ballot. “The President is not on the ballot and the ads don’t have a call to action,” an official said. (Recall that a month earlier, Trump had asked his supporters to “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”)

The White House also points to public service campaigns under earlier presidents, including George W. Bush’s ads about a Medicare law and the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccination drive. Those campaigns, the White House claims, promoted specific policies. “When prior Administrations utilized the airwaves, it was called ‘public education,’” the White House said. “When this Administration promotes pride in our country, many of those same voices call it ‘propaganda.’”

[Narrator, interrupting: “It is propaganda.”]

In March 2004, GAO cleared a Bush administration Medicare television ad, finding it was neither self-aggrandizing nor “so partisan in nature” as to violate the ban, and noting the health department’s explicit legal authority to inform beneficiaries about program changes. Two months later, however, GAO ruled that prepackaged Medicare news segments, presented by people posing as reporters, were illegal covert propaganda because viewers were never told the government produced them.

In 2015, GAO found an EPA social media campaign on water regulations illegal on the same ground.

On Sunday, White House communications director Steven Cheung posted on X, “Don’t let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv.”

The disclaimer on Trump’s ads blunts one line of attack. GAO has treated concealment of the government’s role as central to findings of covert propaganda, and these spots identify their sponsor. Columbia law professor Richard Briffault said the ads likely don’t violate election law because they don’t endorse a candidate, though he agreed they raise questions under the propaganda ban.

Democrats aren’t splitting these hairs. Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Jack Reed (D-RI) (both powerful Democratic appropriators) and senior Democrats including Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD) demanded after the first ad aired that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles pull it immediately and discipline the federal employees who worked on it.

“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” they wrote. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) separately asked Wiles to disclose the contractors involved, the source of the funding and whether money had been diverted from federal agencies.

But nearly a week after the first ad aired, it remains unclear which government agency made the ads or paid to air them.

Criticism also came from inside the GOP. “[U]sing taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orbán,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). Substack writer Heather Delaney Reese drew the same comparison, pointing to the taxpayer-funded billboards Orbán’s government put up across Hungary. She argued, “This may actually be where Trump and his enablers got the idea in the first place, as Trump had considered Orban a friend and carefully followed his rise and fall from power.” (Fun fact: Earlier this year, Hungarian voters ousted Orbán’s party after 16 years in power, electing Péter Magyar in a landslide.)

Kennedy also noted, “I don’t think any public official, including President Trump or Kristi Noem or John Kennedy, should spend public money [on] private ads for themselves,” adding that a rule against spending public money on self-promotion probably already exists.

Yeah, so what now?

It's a question this regime keeps raising: If they broke the law, what can we do about it?

The staffers who made or bought time for the ads could potentially face Hatch Act scrutiny. The Hatch Act bars federal employees from using official resources for political activity. Public Citizen noted in its complaint to GAO and the Office of Special Counsel, “Though the Hatch Act does not apply to the president, it does apply to White House staff.” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) went further. “This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes.”

But enforcement, as always with this lawless White House, is another matter. According to the Congressional Research Service, no single agency oversees department advertising budgets. Public Citizen says it has filed a dozen Hatch Act complaints with the Office of Special Counsel over the past year and that, to its knowledge, the agency has ignored all of them.

Going the normal route—writing letters, filing complaints, even filing suit—hasn’t reliably stopped this White House from acting illegally and misusing funds. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly lifted lower-court injunctions restricting administration actions while litigation proceeds.

The silver lining, if one exists, is that the ads really aren’t going to help the GOP. If anything, they are a disaster. They drill home the very idea that most Republican candidates want to run from: that the GOP is tied to the terrible Trump policies driving up fuel, food and health care costs and does nothing to rein in its president.

So Trump wants us to pretend he’s on the ballot and vote accordingly? Challenge accepted.

10:00 AM

09:00 AM

The Metric Is Not The Mission: When The Maps Became The Territory [Techdirt]

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part III: When the Maps Became the Territory

In Part II, the story turned on a crucial distinction: measuring behavior is not the same as understanding people. Part III takes that idea further, examining what happens when the platforms’ representations of the world begin to substitute for the world itself.

There is a curious tendency among successful technologies to disappear. Not physically, of course, but cognitively. Once they become sufficiently embedded in everyday life, they cease to be experienced as technologies at all. Electricity is no longer a marvel of engineering but an expectation. We do not admire the plumbing each time we turn on a tap, nor do we reflect on the extraordinary complexity of global logistics every time fresh fruit appears on supermarket shelves in the middle of winter. The greatest infrastructures become invisible because they succeed so completely that we mistake them for part of the natural order.

The internet reached that point sometime during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Yet something else happened along the way that proved far more consequential. As the network itself faded into the background, the platforms through which most people experienced it moved decisively into the foreground. Increasingly, users no longer spoke about “going online.” They spoke about opening an app.

That linguistic shift deserves more attention than it usually receives. Language often reveals structural change before statistics do. To “browse the web” implied movement across an open landscape whose boundaries were undefined. One followed links, discovered obscure websites, stumbled upon ideas that had not been recommended by anyone, and occasionally became gloriously lost. The experience resembled wandering through an unfamiliar city with no particular destination in mind. Serendipity was not a flaw in the architecture; it was one of its defining virtues.

Applications altered that relationship almost without anyone noticing. They replaced geography with destination. Instead of entering a network whose possibilities remained unknown, we entered environments that had already been organized on our behalf. The internet did not disappear, but it became increasingly hidden beneath layers of interface, recommendation and curation. Like passengers traveling through an airport without ever seeing the city beyond the terminal, we continued moving through digital space while encountering only the carefully managed environments that had been prepared for us.

This transformation is often described as an inevitable consequence of convenience. While accurate in its own right, this explanation offers an incomplete narrative. Convenience was certainly the language through which the platforms justified many of their design choices. Friction was treated as the great enemy of the digital age. Every additional click became an obstacle to be eliminated. Every decision that users might otherwise make for themselves could instead be anticipated by software. Recommendation replaced search. Autoplay replaced choice. Infinite scrolling replaced endings. The future, we were told, belonged to experiences so seamless that they would feel almost effortless. And they did.

It is difficult to criticize convenience because convenience is genuinely valuable. Few people wish to return to an internet in which finding information required memorizing obscure web addresses or navigating labyrinthine directories. The platforms did not succeed by forcing people into inferior experiences. They succeeded because, for many years, they built better ones.

Yet convenience has always carried an intellectual cost. Every technology that removes friction also removes moments of deliberation. The elevator spares us the staircase but also the awareness of distance. Satellite navigation ensures that we rarely become lost, while quietly diminishing our ability to construct mental maps of the places through which we travel. Streaming services relieve us of searching for entertainment, but in doing so they also shape the boundaries of what we are likely to discover. Every act of technological simplification transfers a small measure of agency from the individual to the system.

The internet had originally been built on a different assumption. Its underlying protocols did remarkably little. They did not decide which website deserved prominence, which ideas should travel furthest, or which communities ought to flourish. Their genius lay precisely in their restraint. They created conditions under which others could innovate without first requesting permission. The web itself functioned less like a product than like a constitutional order: a simple framework within which extraordinary diversity could emerge.

Platforms gradually adopted the opposite philosophy. They did not merely provide the rules of the game; increasingly, they became active participants in every interaction taking place within it. They selected what deserved attention, inferred what users might prefer before users themselves knew it, prioritized certain relationships over others and determined, through millions of microscopic computational decisions, the contours of everyday experience. The architecture became less constitutional than managerial.

There is an illuminating parallel here with the history of cities. The most enduring cities are rarely the ones that have been planned in every detail. They are those that accumulated layer upon layer of human activity over centuries, adapting continuously to changing needs without ever fully surrendering their unpredictability. One finds unexpected bookshops beside cafés, workshops hidden behind apartment blocks, public squares appropriated for demonstrations one week and festivals the next. Their vitality emerges not from perfect organization but from the freedom they grant people to appropriate space in ways that planners never anticipated.

Shopping malls operate according to an altogether different logic. They are meticulously designed environments in which every entrance, corridor, sightline, and seating area has been carefully considered. Music, lighting, and architecture work together to produce an experience that feels spontaneous while being anything but. There is comfort in their orderliness. They are clean, efficient, and reassuringly predictable. Yet no one mistakes a shopping mall for a city. Its purpose is not to cultivate civic life but to optimize a particular set of behaviors within a privately governed space.

The analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are, but it captures something essential about the transformation of the internet. The early web invited participation because it remained fundamentally unfinished. It assumed that users would contribute to shaping it. Today’s dominant platforms present themselves as complete worlds. Participation still exists, but it takes place within boundaries established elsewhere. Users generate the content while the architecture remains firmly in corporate hands.

Perhaps this is why the language of “community” has begun to feel strangely hollow. Communities, in the classical sense, are rarely designed. They emerge through shared experience, mutual obligation, and a degree of unpredictability that no algorithm can fully reproduce. Platforms, by contrast, increasingly treat community as an engineering problem to be optimized. They recommend friendships, suggest conversations, rank relevance, suppress friction, and amplify interaction according to models whose objectives are necessarily commercial because the organizations that develop them are commercial enterprises.

None of this should be understood as an accusation of bad faith. Many of the engineers responsible for these systems genuinely believed they were improving people’s lives. The difficulty lies elsewhere. Every large institution eventually begins to confuse the optimization of its own internal metrics with the fulfillment of its original purpose. Universities sometimes mistake publication counts for scholarship. Hospitals occasionally confuse efficiency with care. Governments become preoccupied with administrative process rather than public service. Technology companies are no different. The indicators that make sense within an organization slowly become proxies for the world outside it. The metric is not the mission. This is the point at which the maps begin to replace the territory.

The extraordinary quantities of behavioral data collected by digital platforms produce an understandable confidence. When one can observe billions of interactions each day, it becomes tempting to believe that society itself has become legible. Human behavior appears measurable, predictable and, increasingly, governable. The platform begins to resemble reality because so much of reality passes through the platform.

Yet the map is never the territory. It captures what can be measured, not everything that matters. A map records roads but not the reasons people travel. It identifies cities without conveying the lives unfolding within them. Likewise, recommendation systems observe behavior with astonishing precision while remaining largely indifferent to experience itself. They recognize patterns without necessarily understanding meaning.

That distinction mattered little while the platforms continued solving the problems that had made them indispensable. It becomes far more consequential once they begin confronting a world that no longer resembles the one for which they were originally designed. Because societies have changed; politics has changed; and, the internet has changed. The question is whether the companies that grew powerful by interpreting one era have noticed that another has already begun.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

06:00 AM

YouTube And Meta Reverse Course On Musk Documentary Ads. X, Unsurprisingly, Does Not. [Techdirt]

Content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Which also means it’s sometimes difficult to tell garden variety fuckups apart from the rich and powerful putting their finger on the scale. On Friday, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that all of the major social media platforms were rejecting attempts by distributor Bleecker Street to advertise the upcoming Alex Gibney four hour epic Musk documentary.

We’ve already discussed how Elon Musk’s favorite lawyer Alex Spiro was threatening everyone associated with the film, and there were reports that Comcast NBC was getting cold feet about releasing the film (which they’ve since denied). Still, the film — which digs into Musk’s Tesla safety record, his Mars ambitions, and his four-month stint running DOGE — is scheduled to hit theaters on October 9th. But it was notable that all the big social media platforms were in lock-step in refusing to allow ads for it:

YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and Facebook owner Meta are all declining to run the trailer for Musk, along with X itself, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

And, I mean, sure, X refusing the ads on its “free speech absolutist” owner’s platform is no surprise. We already know that he’s losing his shit about the documentary, what with the threat letters and the public whining. We also already know what a censorial brat Elon is, so there was zero chance he’d allow such ads.

But those others? Come on.

The real question is how much of this is just crappy systems and how much is billionaire oligarchs having each others’ backs. In the case of Meta, there have been complaints in the past that its automated ad review tools are notoriously quick to reject any documentary film, so this might just be run-of-the-mill “we’re bad at this” rather than Zuck protecting Musk (Zuck’s got his own Aaron Sorkin movie to worry about this week).

Meta’s ad policy specifically lumps together “ads about social issues, elections or politics” into one category, which presents challenges for social-issue documentaries, because the platform treats political ads—for example, those that are made to support a particular candidate—exactly the same as ads that support a social issue or cause. Though all advertisers need to adhere to basic Meta’s Community Standards, ads about “social issues, elections or politics” require further restrictions. 

Either way, after a weekend of public outrage, at least YouTube and Meta appeared to back down, claiming it was all a big mistake:

Following an outcry over potential suppression, YouTube and Meta are changing direction on an ad for an Elon Musk documentary.

Bleecker Street, the studio behind Alex Gibney’s upcoming Musk, will be allowed to buy an ad for the trailer on the platform after all, a YouTube spokesperson tells The Hollywood Reporter. The trailer “was temporarily restricted by our system. Following review, the ad has been cleared to run,” the company said, also posting the message to social media.

Meanwhile, a Meta spokesperson tells THR that a decision to reject the ad “was an error and we’re restoring the ads.”

TikTok and X, however, still appear to be blocking the ads. Oh, and X has reportedly gone a step further, refusing ads for any Bleecker Street-distributed movie.

X is reportedly refusing to communicate with Bleecker Street, and has so far refused to accept advertising for any of its upcoming films.

Gosh, the “free speech absolutist” sure seems picky about which speech he’ll support promoting on his platform.

The whole situation is a reminder of two important things about moderation decisions: (1) not all of them are made by scheming bosses intent on evil. Sometimes they just make stupid mistakes. But also, (2) some of them are deliberately done. The real problem is that it’s next to impossible to sort out the difference between the two, and that often leads people to assume that mistakes that fall into camp (1) are really from camp (2).

Oh, and one important coda to all that: public pressure can work to reverse the stupid mistakes. Meta and YouTube, at least, have enough people on staff who realized just how bad the rejection of the ad buys looked, and were able to reverse course within a couple days. It’s unlikely that X will do the same.

Anyway, even without the ad buy, the latest trailer is available as a normal video on YouTube, so you can watch that just fine.

It seems quite likely that the attention paid to the original rejections drove a ton of “earned” media to that trailer. Way more than would have come through the ad-backed versions. Yet another example of The Streisand Effect in action. You’d think that Elon would recognize that, given that he regularly refers to The Streisand Effect whenever people he dislikes are accused of suppressing content…

A social media post from Elon Musk that reads, "The Streisand Effect on this will set an all-time record!" dated June 1, 2023.
A post by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) that reads, "I love Barbara Streisand lol".
A social media post from Elon Musk that reads, "The Streisand Effect 😂".

Free Speech, Consumer Groups Make Last Ditch Effort To Block Paramount Merger [Techdirt]

Last week California Democrats — including Governor Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass, and AG Rob Bonta buckled under pressure and got 12 states to drop their antitrust lawsuit against Paramount’s $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. Worse: they did so without affixing any meaningful conditions or divestments, ensuring that the deal, as with all big deals before it (see: AT&T/Warner Bros), results in mass layoffs, higher prices, and less competition.

Free speech and consumer rights groups are attempting one last Hail Mary to try and block the deal: they’re urging U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín to refuse to approve the settlement. In a government filing, lawyers for groups like Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Future Film Coalition say the settlement provides “virtually nothing,” and that Bonta “publicly criticized the very behavioral remedies that the parties now ask the Court to approve.”

They also take direct aim at Bonta for criticizing many of Paramount’s proposed weak settlements before ultimately buckling to political and lobbying pressure and rubber stamping them:

“The Attorney General for the lead Plaintiff State, California, publicly criticized the very behavioral remedies that the parties now ask the Court to approve. But whatever the reasons for the States’ about-face, neither time nor circumstance changes the fact that this merger lessens competition.”

A cornerstone of the settlement is the requirement that the new, bigger Paramount produce 30 traditional big films a year. Though the groups note this is less films in total than the two individual companies had already planned to produce in 2027. Another major condition involves a “CBS and CNN oversight board” staffed by people hand-picked by Paramount executives.

Martínez-Olguín indicates that she’ll take a closer look at the complaints made by Senator Cory Booker in a letter to the court, but isn’t giving a timeline on an expected final ruling:

“In her prefatory remarks, Martínez-Olguín said, “The court isn’t a rubber stamp of your agreement… I have some questions.” The judge said she wanted to “shore up the idea that this is not something that was the result of collusion, but instead was more of an arm’s length process.”

There would have to be something exceptional disclosed for Martínez-Olguín to declare that the settlement doesn’t meet the bare minimum legal standards for “fairness and reasonableness.” It seems unlikely she will block the deal, and Paramount is incentivized to get the final approval signed off before it has to start paying millions in potential “ticking fees” to Warner shareholders starting October 1.

Having covered countless deals like this over the years I can tell you exactly what happens next.

Paramount spends the next 6 months pretending this additional consolidation is driving more competition and innovation to market. With their other hand they start firing thousands of employees. To pay down debt the company will also accelerate already annoying streaming price hikes, cut corners resulting in lower-quality product, and cancel countless promising projects. Larry Ellison will steadily make CNN, like CBS before it, even more friendly to global oligarch and authoritarian interests.

At that point, all the folks who pushed for settlement, including Newsom, will have nothing to say, and will simply pretend none of the obvious negative impacts of consolidation ever happened.

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03:00 AM

Driver Ticketed For No Insurance Despite Having Insurance Just Because Flock Said She Didn’t [Techdirt]

We’ve moved past cops doing stuff because a dog gave them permission to do it. Now, we’re at the post-truth era of policing, where cops will do stuff because a machine told them to do it.

We already know ALPRs (automated license plate readers) generate false positives. And we know that these false positives can generate the sort of guns-out “encounters” no law-abiding citizen is prepared to handle. When you add addled “certainty” (an erroneous ALPR ping) to citizen bewilderment, things can get deadly pretty quickly.

But even when the guns don’t come out, it’s not because actual justice is being done. Cops are increasingly relying on tech to make decisions for them. And while your regular human being might acknowledge a blown judgment call of their own, they seem incapable of recognizing a mistake when it’s made by a computer.

That’s how we end up with situations like these, which seem like outtakes from a dystopian farce, rather than the new reality of American policing.

Supporters of Flock cameras and other automatic license plate readers often say that you have nothing to worry about if you’ve done nothing wrong. Yet a student in Georgia now has to fight a citation for not having insurance, despite presenting a valid insurance card when she was pulled over. It’s all thanks to an ALPR alert on her new car, reports WSB-TV. 

There are things we’ve always been told are wise — if not imperative — to carry in any care we’re driving: driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance. You do know why they call it proof of insurance, right?

Well, despite the fact that the officer could have verified all three of these things using the handy-dandy laptop that fired off the Flock alert, the officer apparently refused to do so and took Flock’s word for it instead.

“Upon showing proof of insurance in this instance, she was still issued a ticket citation,” Jones said in an interview with WSB-TV. She did everything she was supposed to do, including having insurance and presenting proof when requested. Apparently, even the proof that law enforcement requires isn’t good enough when the computer says otherwise. This wasn’t even a one-time fluke, either. The very next day, she got pulled over in nearby Cobb County for exactly the same reason.

The computer says you’re a criminal. The stuff law enforcement has always considered proof of legal vehicle use is no longer acceptable. The people cops tend to refer to as “subjects” in police reports are now being made aware that this isn’t a term of law enforcement art, but rather a reference to their position in comparison to those who supposedly enforce the law. Your word against a cop’s, as the “fighting a losing battle in court” saying goes. Now, it’s your word against a cop’s computer. And even if your word is the same word cops trusted prior to Flock’s arrival, it’s no longer worth the paper it’s printed on.

Pluralistic: Priceful (28 Sep 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

  • Priceful: So worthless we can tell you what it's worth.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Nasdaq allows post-9/11 penny stocks; USAF can shoot down civilian aircraft; TSA bans calling Kip Hawley an idiot; Wells Fargo sued for firing fraud-refusing tellers; The real AI apocalypse; Encryption didn't cause 9/11; Bat-person costume; British Library on DRM and CC; NYT v OWS; "The Brave Little Toaster"; Bounty for Trump's tax return; Chinese real-estate bubble; Corbyn's Labour conference speech; HP blinks; "Are you calling me a racist?"; "Yuge"; Debts that can't be paid won't be paid.
  • Upcoming appearances: Edmonton, Boston, Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A pastoral landscape with a cablecar system running overhead. A procession of old-timey cash registers are being moved through the sky on it.

Priceful (permalink)

Digital rights activists have long railed at the use of the term "IP," criticizing it for being deceptively imprecise and also rhetorically dishonest. I get where these objections are coming from, but I think they're misguided.

Start with "deceptively imprecise." "IP" covers a lot of legal ground, from the "big three" of copyright, trademark and patent, to a whole arcane bestiary: anticircumvention, noncompete, trade secrecy, nondisparagement, database and publicity rights, and more. Each of these has a radically different policy basis and radically different contours.

Take copyright and trademark. Copyright is designed to allow companies (and the creators they hire or contract with) to commercially exploit creative works. In the US, copyright is a creature of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-2/ALDE_00013064/

Fun fact: there are only two clauses in the Constitution that include a rationale: the Second Amendment ("A well regulated Militia") and the copyright clause ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"). Everything else is one of those "truths" that the framers "held to be self-evident." In these two cases, they decided to explain their thinking.

So the point of copyright is to incentivize investment in creative works, and its mechanism is a set of limited rights over those works, for limited times. Copyright expires, and it is subject to "limitations and exceptions," including "fair use," a very broad set of highly situational rights to use works even if the rightsholder objects:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/07/aimsters-revenge/#effective-means-of-access-control

Now consider trademark: trademark could not be more different from copyright! Trademark is a consumer protection rule: it empowers companies to sue competitors who engage in deceptive conduct that could confuse their customers. The idea here is that if you get a pair of fake Nikes that fall apart within a matter of days, or eat at a fake McDonald's whose food is (somehow?) even worse than regular McDonald's food, you are unlikely to take action. You're not going to hire a lawyer over a hamburger.

So trademark deputizes companies to sue on behalf of customers who have been or might be deceived by unscrupulous competitors whose merchandising and marketing are likely to confuse the public. Unlike copyright's "fair use," trademark has other defenses, like "nominative use" ("This case fits an iPhone" is not a trademark violation, provided it's true). Also, many trademark claims can be dispensed through simple disclaimers: for example, my debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom features a prominent notice informing readers that it wasn't endorsed by the Walt Disney Company. No confusion, no problem.

Unlike copyright, which (eventually) expires, a trademark can carry on for so long as it is associated with a company's products or services. Procter & Gamble's moon logo has enjoyed trademark protection since the mid-19th century, 50 years before the first federal trademark law, and 100 years before the Lanham Act, the current federal trademark law.

This is where the imprecision comes in. There are many activities that are legal under trademark and prohibited under copyright, and vice-versa. By claiming an "IP" violation, you can induce confusion in your target's mind about which rule you're discussing.

If you say, "That's my copyrighted image and your use of it is confusing my customers," I might reply, "Well, that sounds like a trademark issue. Do you have a trademark, too?" Whereas if you say, "That's my IP and you're confusing my customers," that's some tactically useful ambiguity. I can't know if you're talking about copyright, patent, trademark, or, you know, a sui generis broadcaster's right under the Treaty of Rome.

I might walk away from my creative, expressive activity even though it's totally legal, because you've got me to conflate the restrictions of copyright and trademark. This makes "IP" a kind of bully's charter, whose imprecision lets you invoke all weird rights we call "IP," no matter whether they apply to the situation at had.

That's the first objection, then: this deceptive and corrosive imprecision. It's a fair point. But then there's the other objection: the use of the world "property" to describe this motley assortment of regulatory fiats.

"Property" is the established catechism of the Church of Late-Stage Capitalism. "Property" is the most sacrosanct right in public orthodoxy, elevated above every other right. My property right lets me destroy perfectly good food while you starve outside my door:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights

Before "IP" came into wide usage, we didn't generally try to group this miscellany under one umbrella, but when we did, the term we used wasn't "IP," it was monopolies. These regulatory fiats were (correctly) considered to be government-granted, government-enforced monopolies. The adoption of IP was a branding exercise, a very successful attempt to transform the public's perception of these rules as natural, freestanding property rights that the law merely ratified – not a set of regulatory gifts designed to protect the self-interest of commercial firms.

I get it. Between the tactical confusion and the invocation of "property," "IP" feels like terrain worth fighting over. Once you let your adversary frame the debate in terms of property, you've already lost half the battle.

For many years, I bought into this. But lately, I've grown more skeptical of this matter. Back in 2020, I published a long essay proposing that far from being confusing or ambiguous, "IP" has a crisp, widely understood meaning: "Any law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company to exert control over my competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is the common factor that binds together that mess of legal oddments, from trademark/copyright/patent to nondisparagement and noncompetes to anticircumvention and personality rights.

I think this is both true and a powerful framing. It correctly puts IP in the category of "things corporations do to control you and the rest of the world."

I've been trying this out for six years now, and I think it's a winner. But it was only a month or two ago that I realized there was a way in which the use of "property" can also be used to undermine the bullying, censorship and extraction of corporations wielding their IP.

Property rights may be our state religion, but they are also the worst tool for several important jobs that need doing. Think of privacy: the standard for privacy is for you to click through an "agreement" that nominally trades your privacy rights for some product or service. Google spies on you constantly for ad-targeting, you get to see Youtube videos (after watching a bunch of ads).

This is a catastrophe. Virtually every vendor you engage with, from your landlord to your corner deli, wants you to install an app whose terms of service requires you to sign away all of your privacy rights, forever, in exchange for nothing. You get the same sandwich, but you "pay" more, in the form of all your private data, which is flushed into the unregulated data-broker sector to be weaponized against you in a thousand ways, including higher prices and lower wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/11/your-risk/#my-reward

Worse: because you have "entered into a contract" to "sell" your privacy rights, anything you do to claw those rights back is violation of your end of the contract. Using a tracker blocker like Privacy Badger makes you the cheater:

https://privacybadger.org/

Even if you could get actually paid for the use of your private information, the sums involved would round to zero. Companies like Facebook make pennies from your private data, and inflict harm on you that totals up to hundreds of times more than they actually make. The commercial surveillance industry are poster children for corruption: concentrated gains that are far exceeded by diffuse harms:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

But just because privacy doesn't fit well into a property rights framework, it doesn't follow that there's no way to do privacy well. We have lots of other rights frameworks besides property, and it's taken the concerted work of generations to get us to forget that these rights exist at all.

Imagine if our privacy regime was modeled on the human rights system we rely on when it comes to sex, bodily autonomy and consent. In this framework, no one is allowed to do anything to you unless you give your continuous, informed consent, which you can withdraw at any time. "I changed my mind" is a perfectly valid thing to say in the middle of a sexual encounter. It's not a violation of your contract. Quite the opposite: someone who ignores your withdrawal of consent is guilty of criminal assault.

If we apply a consent regime (not a property regime) to privacy rights, then the entire commercial surveillance industry would cease to exist. There's no way you can give "informed consent" to a laundry-list of terms of service that are as impenetrable as they are lengthy, and even if you did, you could withdraw that consent at any time, and Facebook et al would have to immediately stop processing your private information and disgorge it.

Like all forms of property rights, "IP" has severe limitations that can only be addressed by applying a different framework to your disputes. Think of the way that the expansion of copyright has failed creative workers. For 50 years, we've monotonically expanded copyright in every dimension, so that today, copyright covers more works, restricts more uses and inflicts higher statutory penalties.

Over those 50 years, media companies have gotten richer and more profitable while the creative workers whose art these media companies sell have gotten poorer, both in real terms and as a share of the earnings our labor generates for our bosses. This seems like a paradox at first, but really, it's just a built-in feature of property law: that people who have assets but lack bargaining leverage end up selling those assets for peanuts.

In a market dominated by five publishers, four studios, three labels, two app companies and one ebook/audiobook company, giving a creative worker more to bargain with is just giving them more to bargain away. Giving us more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch money: no amount of lunch money will get that kid fed.

This is why arguments about copyright and AI training are such a dead-end. Even if you stipulate that AI training isn't fair use (far from a certainty), or if you want legislative action to establish that every creator gets to decide whether their work can be used to train an AI, you won't help creative workers win the class struggle against AI companies.

Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? It's the only time in history that creative workers have defeated AI, so it's worthy of close study. Specifically, remember that workers on those picket lines weren't striking against the AI companies, they were striking against the studio bosses, artist-hating billionaires like Warner's David Zaslav and Disney's Bob Iger, whose careers have been defined by a relentless quest for ways to pay creative workers less. It was studio bosses, not AI bosses, who wanted to replace screenwriters with AI.

These are the same studio bosses who are now suing AI companies for copyright infringement. That's not because the studio bosses want to get rid of AI models or keep them out of the writers' room. They absolutely want to fire writers and replace us with AI. The studio lawsuits over AI training want to make training a licensable activity so that the studios can get paid for the use of "their" training data to make models that they absolutely want to use to fire most of their writers and then knock down the wages of the survivors of the AI layoffs.

Many creative workers have cheered on these media companies as they chase the AI companies through the courts, and some artists' groups have even submitted amicus briefs on their behalf. But the New York Times – a company that has repeatedly used the dirtiest union-busting tactics imaginable against its workers – is not suing OpenAI to ensure that creative workers don't lose wages to AI. They're suing to make sure that the Times gets a bigger piece of the action when that happens.

If the Times, Disney and Warner prevail, they will immediately amend their standard, non-negotiable contracts to require every creative worker who does any work for them to exclusively and irrevocably sign over the right to train AI with our labor, and the resulting models will be used to attack our jobs and wages.

In other words, the media company/AI company lawsuits are a fight to see who gets the biggest piece when creative workers get eaten for dinner. We don't want either side to win: we want to be taken off the menu altogether.

Which is exactly what the Hollywood writers accomplished, and they didn't use copyright to do it. They used something far more important and powerful: labor rights.

Like all the Hollywood guilds, the Writers Guild of America has a nearly unheard-of labor right. They are able to engage in something called "multi-employer bargaining," itself a weak form of "sectoral bargaining," which is when all the workers in a sector bargain with all the bosses in that sector. Sectoral bargaining was made practically illegal under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and its last vestiges are to be found in Hollywood.

But as vestigial as Hollywood's unique labor rights system may be, it was still enough to let thousands of freelancers beat back AI in their writers' rooms. Indeed, they even retained the right to use (or not use) AI if they chose, without any threat to their wages or headcount:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

This is something you can only get with labor rights, not copyright and certainly not property rights. If we limit ourselves to property rights, the only question we need to ask is "Who owns that writers' room?" And since the answer is "the studio" then whatever the studio says goes.

It's precisely because labor rights get workers benefits at their bosses' expense (and copyright cannot) that we have been subjected to generations of pro-copyright messaging, told that we aren't workers at all – we're small businesses, LLCs with MFAs!

Creative workers have been taken for a ride. We've been told that we're not workers, so we shouldn't advocate for labor rights. We've been told that copyright is better than labor rights, because copyright is a property right. It puts a price on your work, which means you can get paid.

But prices are things we assign to things that are so worthless that we can say what they're worth. The most valuable things in the world aren't property, and describing them as property would cheapen them. Human beings aren't property. The fact that we're not property doesn't mean we're worthless, it means we're priceless. That's why "murder" isn't "theft of life" and "rape" isn't "theft of sex." Your life and bodily integrity are worth too much to be bought and sold.

Property rights have a role to play in the assertion of human rights and other rights, but it is a subordinate role. Property rights might someday end the barbaric practice of homeless encampment sweeps and the confiscation of all the worldly goods of the poorest, most vulnerable people in our midst:

https://projects.propublica.org/impact-of-homeless-sweeps-lost-belongings/

But property rights must be subordinate to human rights, otherwise they'll let landlords evict tenants willy-nilly.

Which is all to say, by all means, let our adversaries claim "IP." Let them admit that they have this doctrine by which they attempt to assert control over their critics, customers and competitors. They can assert control, and we'll keep autonomy and consent. Let them say that they have property rights, things so cheap they can have a price. They can be priceful, we can be priceless.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Nasdaq allows sub-$1 shares to avoid mass delisting after 9/11 https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/28/business/moratorium-by-nasdaq-on-listing-rules.html

#25yrsago USAF makes it much easier to shoot down civilian aircraft https://www.chicagotribune.com/2001/09/28/rules-revised-for-downing-airliners/

#25yrsago Don't blame encryption for 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010930005338/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1272-210-7320099-1.html

#20yrsago Disneyland parking structure repeatedly robbed at gunpoint https://web.archive.org/web/20061031031505/https://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1291046.php

#20yrsago HOWTO: Make a bat-person costume out of an old umbrella https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2006/how-to-build-a-better-bat-costume/

#20yrsago American Airlines bans in-flight kissing https://web.archive.org/web/20061004214421/https://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060925ta_talk_collins

#20yrsago British Library takes on Creative Commons and DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20061022143612/https://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/ipmanifesto.pdf

#20yrsago TSA: calling Kip Hawley an idiot is not allowed https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/checkpoints-borders-policy-debate/606142-i-detained-tsa-checkpoint-about-25-minutes-today.html#post6440005

#15yrsago Who’s occupying Wall Street, and why is the NYT only interested in the kooks? https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/nyregion/protesters-are-gunning-for-wall-street-with-faulty-aim.html?_r=2&hp

#15yrsago Podcast: my story “The Brave Little Toaster” https://dn710605.ca.archive.org/0/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212_Brave_Little_Toaster.mp3

#10yrsago The dubious upsides of having a Syrian passport https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/29/i-am-lucky-to-have-a-syrian-passport/

#10yrsago State of California imposes 12-months’ worth of sanctions on Wells Fargo https://web.archive.org/web/20161003194157/http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/news/releases/2016/20160928.asp

#10yrsago 2600 Magazine offers $10K for Trump’s tax return https://web.archive.org/web/20160930162135/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-zine-says-it-will-pay-10000-for-trumps-tax-returns

#10yrsago Black voter registration is inversely correlated with black death at police hands https://www.wired.com/2016/09/intriguing-link-police-shootings-black-voter-registration/

#10yrsago Chinese real estate bubble is “biggest in history” https://web.archive.org/web/20160929135157/http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/28/investing/china-wang-jianlin-real-estate-bubble/

#10yrsago Notes from Jeremy Corbyn’s barn-burning speech at the Labour Party conference https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/8-key-points-jeremy-corbyns-8936364

#10yrsago Douglas County, OR using dirty ballot tricks to finish off the slow murder of its libraries https://web.archive.org/web/20160930155357/https://action.everylibrary.org/douglascounty

#10yrsago HP blinks, says it will restore printer functionality, but there’s a LOT more it needs to do https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/dont-hide-drm-security-update

#10yrsago The Doonesbury Trump retrospective proves that Garry Trudeau had Drumpf’s number all along https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/29/the-doonesbury-trump-retrospective-proves-that-garry-trudeau-had-drumpfs-number-all-along/

#10yrsago Ex-Wells employees who were fired for NOT committing fraud launch $2.6B lawsuit https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/26/495454165/ex-wells-fargo-employees-sue-allege-they-were-punished-for-not-breaking-law

#10yrsago Inside a multimillion dollar fake Kindle book scam https://www.zdnet.com/article/exclusive-inside-a-million-dollar-amazon-kindle-catfishing-scam/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo execs will lose a few millions out of the hundreds of millions they got for abetting massive fraud https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/wells-fargo-ceo-stumpf-hit-with-41-million-in-clawbacks-head-of-community-bank-dinged-19-million.html

#10yrsago Youtube’s new “offline first” product for India treats telcos as damage and routes around them https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-go-youtube-reimagined-for-next/

#5yrsago Shelter is a toxic asset https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

#5yrsago Democrats, health care monopolies, and market failures https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#luxury-bones

#5yrsago Wells Fargo can't stop criming https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#too-big-to-jail

#5yrsago "Are you calling me a racist?" https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

#5yrsago Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#debt

#1yrago The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

#1yrago Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack) https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/28/works-well/#fails-well

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Friday's words: 525 (19747 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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ISSN: 3066-764X

01:00 AM

Two ways to use lock-in/loyalty [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Organizations invest to create an audience that sticks with them, either because they have no choice or because of an emotional connection.

When this occurs, most then take profits. They decrease service, increase pricing and generally seek payback for the work they did to get to this position.

But there’s another path.

Every change creates tension. And if you’ve got lock in and loyalty, you can create that tension without losing too many customers.

What if you use that tension to persistently and markedly improve the experience? Not to make it more convenient, but to make it worth the effort to learn to do better?

On a good day, that’s what companies like Apple do.

Most of the time, the MBAs push for the short-term profit taking we’re all used to (and tired of).

But if you get the chance, perhaps you can help people get to where they seek to go, even if the journey requires effort for you and for them.

      

12:00 AM

HOOK 2026/27: Hands Off Our Koma [General Union]

Every year, universities decide next year’s koma (コマ, teaching slots/classes) long before teachers hear a word about it. HOOK—Hands Off Our Koma—is how we get in first. We declare our presence, put universities on notice, and demand our members’ teaching loads and conditions stay intact. Don’t wait until the timetable is set and the damage is done. Organise early, intervene early, make it harder for employers to quietly cut people’s work.

This year HOOK has grown. We’ve send demands to 55 universities and colleges, covering 124 teaching appointments. Some members work at several institutions, so HOOK isn’t just a list of names—it’s union presence spread across the sector. Every declaration tells an employer: there’s a union watching what happens to next year’s classes, wages and conditions.
The demands are out. Now we wait for replies. HOOK isn’t just an annual letter-writing exercise—it maps where our members work, where our strength is concentrated, and where trouble is brewing before it becomes a crisis. If a university’s planning cuts, we want to know early enough to stop them.

Next up: The Great University Wage Survey

HOOK has protected part-time university teachers for years—defending class numbers, stopping cuts to income. But holding the line isn’t enough anymore. Wages across the sector aren’t rising fast enough. In many workplaces they’re barely moving at all. That’s why the Universities and Colleges Branch is launching the Great University Wage Survey: a real picture of pay across the sector, reaching beyond our own members to find out what university teachers are actually earning.
First we defend the koma. Now we push the wages up.

Shakai Hoken and Retirement – A Member’s Story [General Union]

In 1995 I got my first full time contract to teach at a Junior College. I was told I had to enroll in Shakai Hoken. I told the college that because I wasn’t intending to stay in Japan for much longer I did not want to enroll. They replied that it was the law and I couldn’t refuse. I then replied that “I definitely refuse to join shakai hoken”. But in the end they were paying my salary and they said I had no say in the matter.

I felt dejected, this stupid Japanese system. I thought avoiding it was the best option. I was wrong.

Wind the clock forward to 2026. Shakai Hoken helped me pay for my family’s health insurance, helped me secure a home loan, paid for my wife’s health insurance and National Pension, and now I am entitled to my Japanese employee pension.

I am so lucky that my employer made me join Shakai Hoken, back when I didn’t realize how important it was, and detrimental it is for workers if employers try to avoid enrolling you. My advice to all is you should definitely enroll for yourself, your family and your future.

C.F

Kanji of the Day: 店 [Kanji of the Day]

店

✍8

小2

store, shop

テン

みせ　たな

店舗   (てんぽ)   —   shop
お店   (おたな)   —   merchant's home (esp. used by apprentices, etc.)
商店街   (しょうてんがい)   —   shopping district
書店   (しょてん)   —   bookshop
店員   (ていいん)   —   employee (of a store)
百貨店   (ひゃっかてん)   —   department store
飲食店   (いんしょくてん)   —   restaurant
支店   (してん)   —   branch office
店内   (てんない)   —   inside of a store (restaurant, cafe, etc.)
店主   (てんしゅ)   —   shopkeeper

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 頓 [Kanji of the Day]

頓

✍13

中学

suddenly, immediately, in a hurry, arrange, stay in place, bow, kowtow

トン　トツ

にわか.に　とん.と　つまず.く　とみ.に　ぬかずく

頓挫   (とんざ)   —   setback
無頓着   (むとんじゃく)   —   indifferent
整理整頓   (せいりせいとん)   —   keeping things tidy and in order
頓服   (とんぷく)   —   dose of medicine to be taken only once
整頓   (せいとん)   —   orderliness
頓珍漢   (とんちんかん)   —   absurdity
頓着   (とんじゃく)   —   being concerned about or mindful of
頓智   (とんち)   —   quick wit
素っ頓狂   (すっとんきょう)   —   wild
頓服薬   (とんぷくやく)   —   dose of medicine to be taken only once

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Monday 2026-09-28

11:00 PM

Trump Orders The FCC To Punish A Reporter. Where Did All The ‘Ministry Of Truth’ Screamers Go? [Techdirt]

Remember the Disinformation Governance Board? As we were quick to point out, this organization was named in the dumbest possible way by some incompetent people within the Biden administration, which only fed into the [ahem] disinformation around it. The program, a part of DHS, was an advisory group with no enforcement capabilities, and was tasked with coordinating standard best practices for government agencies to respond to and counter foreign disinformation campaigns. But it was launched with a blatantly over-the-top Orwellian name and with only vague details of its actual role, leaving the field open to everyone to speculate… or to pollute.

And speculate they did. Almost immediately the media was awash in people screaming about how Biden was creating a “Ministry of Truth” who would “police your speech.”

WSJ Opinion: Biden Establishes a Ministry of Truth

Fox News absolutely lost their minds, apparently mentioning the Board and its named director, Nina Jankowicz approximately 300 times in the course of just eight months. According to a (somewhat misguided and unsuccessful) lawsuit that Jankowicz later filed, Fox News became obsessed about claiming she was the new censorship czar of America:

The next day, on April 29, 2022, 11 different speakers referenced Jankowicz and the Board on 11 separate segments. Hannity repeated the falsehood that the Board was “in charge of policing disinformation,” and that Jankowicz is now “the person that polices our thoughts.” Fox News tweeted: “What you’re seeing is a full-scale attack on free speech in a country that has been free for nearly 250 years.”

On Fox & Friends, Carly Shimkus said Jankowicz is “lead[ing] a government board in charge of deciding what we can and cannot say.” On Outnumbered, Emily Compagno said Jankowicz is “now the official referee of disinformation” and also a “self-obsessed social media neophyte [who the country has now set as] as the champion, as the arbiter of truth.” Greg Gutfeld followed suit on Gutfeld!, warning that the Board “will likely target you,” and stating unequivocally that the goal of the Board is “to police your opinions, to hide their bad news or magically turn it into good news.”

This went on and on and on and on, despite all of it being nonsense. The board had no enforcement authority at all. It wasn’t about policing anything, let alone free speech or “truth.”

Even today you’ll hear MAGA folks claim that Biden had planned to launch a “Ministry of Truth” to try to censor Americans for their political wrong think.

Now contrast that with the coverage of Trump from a month ago openly telling his FCC to get more aggressive about policing speech. We mentioned it briefly, and there were a few news reports talking about how Donald Trump was demanding his FCC punish speech about his negative polls.

THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL, AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT. FCC TO THE RESCUE! President DJT

And then he demanded that the FCC punish news anchor Kristen Welker for the thoughtcrime of noting that in recent elections Trump had a bit of a “mixed record” on the success of his endorsements.

A tweet from Donald J. Trump criticizing Kristen Welker and "Meet the Press" regarding his candidate endorsement results.

He literally says: “she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.”

That was a month ago. What have you heard about Trump “Ministry of Truth” since? There’s obviously been coverage of his banning of some White House reporters, but the story of him literally demanding the FCC start punishing reporters for not reporting things the way Trump wants them to report was literally him demanding the FCC act as a Ministry of Truth, with Brendan Carr gleefully at the helm.

And, unlike Jankowicz, who went out of her way to explain that she wasn’t policing anyone’s speech, and who resigned within weeks after the death threats and harassment made the job untenable, Carr has embraced the role of actual speech cop. Hell, a year and a half ago when The Hollywood Reporter called out Carr’s role as Trump’s speech police attack dog, Carr responded with a screenshot of the caricature of him as an attack dog and tweeted “woof woof.”

A social media post by Brendan Carr shares a Hollywood Reporter article titled "Trump's Media Pit Bull is 'Off the Leash'" featuring an illustration of Donald Trump holding a pit bull on a leash. Carr tweets: "woof woof !"

And, of course, when questioned about Trump’s latest ridiculous speech police demands, Carr immediately promised to dutifully get his Ministry of Truth working on it.

In an appearance on “The Sunday Briefing” on Fox News, the Trump-appointed Carr was asked about the president’s threat against Welker. Carr responded by suggesting that broadcast news channels could face consequences if the agency interprets their reporting to not serve the public, citing “fake polls” designed to “suppress” voters as a potential risk.

“President Trump is over the target. We’re looking at a lot of actions,” Carr said, responding to host Peter Doocy. “There’s a lot of interest right now in fake polls that are out there. The FCC may put guidance out soon to remind broadcasters about their obligations with effect to not airing fake polls, particularly if they’re done to suppress people heading into the fall.”

And yet, that story lasted all of what, two days? Does anyone even remember that it happened?

It’s incredible the double standard at work. Biden launches something that is very far from being “the Ministry of Truth,” and the MAGA media machine spends the next eight months — and, really, the next four years — blasting out the fake news every damn day that Biden had hired someone to police everyone’s speech.

Four years later, Donald Trump publicly demands that the FCC — a supposedly independent agency that, unlike the DGB, actually does have enforcement powers, in theory limited by the First Amendment — punish a network anchor. And the guy running it hops right to it, promising to go after polls showing Trump’s popularity is in the dumps.

And the story disappears.

In 2022, we got nothing but hand-wringing from the loudest “but muh free speech” voices. Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press” had an article “All Hail America’s New Truth Czar!” about the controversy:

A screenshot of an article from THE FP titled "All Hail America's New Truth Czar!" by Katie Herzog, featuring a portrait Nina Jankowicz

And Weiss herself went on Fox News (naturally) to mock it as the Ministry of Truth.

Now that the FCC is actually acting as the Ministry of Truth with Weiss running CBS News (complete with Brendan Carr’s designated “bias monitor” to police its speech)… I can find zero coverage from CBS News — a newsroom with vastly more resources than The Free Press — of Trump demanding that his FCC police the speech of one of CBS’s main competitors.

Gosh. I wonder why.

The Disinformation Governance Board (still a terrible name and roll out plan) had no enforcement power and no authority over American speech. It never actually launched and was completely abandoned within weeks. Yet it received 300 Fox News segments over the rest of 2022, and to this day people will insist that Biden launched a “Ministry of Truth” to police domestic speech.

Meanwhile, the FCC actually licenses broadcasters, and its chair just took orders directly from the president to “punish” reporters for truthful speech, and said he’s “looking at a lot of actions.”

That news cycle lasted about two days and is barely remembered.

Woof woof!

09:00 PM

Unified U.S. Site Blocking Bill Targets ISPs and DNS Resolvers But Spares VPNs [TorrentFreak]

blockedLast week, we reported that the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) puts virtual private networks on the list of intermediaries that could be ordered to block pirate sites.

This wasn’t the only bill in the works. As expected, there’s now competition from a unified bill, officially introduced by Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren: the DEFEND IP Act.

Both lawmakers had already been working on similar legislation and the DEFEND IP Act merges Lofgren’s Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) and Tillis’s Block BEARD draft into a single bicameral bill.

While the bill’s title works on its own, it’s actually an acronym for “Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging Intellectual Property.” Senators Chris Coons, Marsha Blackburn, and Adam Schiff are co-sponsors of the Senate bill, while Rep. Ben Cline co-leads the House effort.

“I am proud to work across the aisle on this smart, targeted approach to crack down on foreign piracy while protecting Americans’ free speech and access to a free and open internet,” Rep. Lofgren says in her announcement.

DEFEND IP Act

bill

The Senate version of the bill, S. 5529, is now with the Judiciary Committee. Congress.gov has yet to publish the text, but Lofgren’s office has posted a copy of the House version of the bill, which allows us to take a closer look.

VPNs Are Exempt

Like Issa’s ACPA, the DEFEND IP Act allows copyright holders to obtain court orders that require intermediaries to block foreign pirate sites. The key difference is which intermediaries can be targeted.

The DEFEND IP Act covers broadband providers with at least 50,000 subscribers, as well as public DNS resolvers with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The latter would likely include Google and Cloudflare.

VPN services are not on the list, however. The bill’s definition of a service provider explicitly excludes “an entity that exclusively provides virtual private network services or similar service that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers.”

VPN Exemption

vpn

This is different from the ACPA bill, where VPNs are included. The word “exclusively” leaves some room for interpretation, however. The bill doesn’t explain how the exemption applies to companies that offer a VPN alongside other services.

DNS resolvers get a similar exemption, but only if they provide their services “exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols,” such as DNS over HTTPS. This is a high bar and it likely means that major public DNS resolvers including Cloudflare and Google, which also handle unencrypted queries, would have to block on their encrypted services as well.

Designate First, Block Later

The blocking process itself follows the same two-step approach as Issa’s ACPA bill. The first step is for a federal court to classify a website as a “foreign digital piracy site.”

To qualify, the site must be primarily designed for piracy, have no commercially significant purpose other than piracy, or be intentionally marketed as a piracy destination. Operators have 20 days to respond, but the court doesn’t have to wait for them and can issue an ex-parte order when the requirements are met.

With the designation in hand, the rightsholder can return to the same judge and request a blocking order. The court then has to decide whether blocking is “technically feasible and effective” or whether there are less burdensome options available.

Blocking orders remain valid for a year and can be renewed. When a pirate site moves to a new domain or IP address, rightsholders can ask the court to update the order.

As with ACPA, the DEFEND IP Act also covers live streaming events, including sports. Rightsholders can request a court order when a live transmission “will likely violate” their rights, which means that a site can be flagged before the match starts.

Hollywood Applauds, Public Knowledge Objects

As with earlier proposals, service providers get several safeguards. Blocking orders can’t prescribe specific blocking techniques, providers are immune from liability when they comply in good faith, and they can ask rightsholders to cover part of the costs.

Websites that are blocked by mistake can ask the court to modify the order. However, unlike Issa’s bill, which offers up to $250,000 in compensation, the DEFEND IP Act has no payout for collateral damage.

The unified bill has broad industry support from the start, with more than a dozen organizations backing it, including the MPA, RIAA, Copyright Alliance, SAG-AFTRA, and the Directors Guild.

“By enacting this legislation, our country can deploy a highly effective tool to protect creators and consumers from overseas digital piracy, all while safeguarding free speech and preserving the open internet,” MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin says.

Public Knowledge, which also opposes Issa’s bill, sees it differently. The group views both site blocking proposals as part of the same push.

“For the second time in as many weeks, rightsholders have convinced Congress to build out an expansive infrastructure for censorship rather than go after the root of the problem: operators of overseas piracy websites,” Public Knowledge writes.

“Let us repeat: Applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers causes global blocks,” the group adds.

More than fourteen years after SOPA was shelved, two site blocking bills are now competing for support in Congress.

Time is limited, however. Both bills expire when the current Congress ends in January. Rep. Issa is retiring and Senator Tillis is not seeking reelection, so neither will be around to reintroduce their proposals next year.

Whether either proposal will get further than SOPA did remains to be seen.

—

A copy of the DEFEND IP Act, as published by Rep. Lofgren’s office, is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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