I feel I need to start out posts like this by reminding anyone that nudification apps are bad. They’re almost exclusively used to abuse and harass people, most often women. That said, if you’re going to ban them legally, you can’t just say “nudification apps are illegal.” That’s not how the First Amendment works. And, yet, that’s what the state of Minnesota did earlier this year. The dreadfully bad drafting of the law was also bizarre, because a decade earlier the state had passed a much more carefully crafted anti-nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) law, which had gone through a constitutional challenge and survived.

That ruling laid out the conditions as to why the NCII law could survive strict scrutiny (necessary to avoid being found unconstitutional under the First Amendment). Notably, that included things like the law having careful, narrow definitions of what images violated the law, requirements that the sharing be done with knowledge, that the images be non-consensual, and that there were clear exemptions for non-illegal uses like images for medical reasons, journalism, or science.

So the state Supreme Court listed out all these factors which were necessary to make the NCII law abide by the First Amendment. And… the Minnesota legislature decided to… ignore every single one. The law in question is broadly written and applies to plenty of perfectly legal speech. It doesn’t even include requirements for the images to be non-consensual or that there be intent, which means that if you wanted to get any AI tool provider in trouble, you could literally tell it to make a nudified image of yourself, send it to Minnesota’s Attorney General, and technically the company (that simply did what you told it to do with an image of yourself) could face fines of up to $500,000 per use.

So, even as xAI’s Grok tool is being credibly accused of generating non-consensual nudified images of people (in some cases children), we thought that xAI made a reasonable filing to try to block the law from going into effect. Bizarrely, the judge rejected both the Temporary Restraining Order request and the Preliminary Injunction request in short order, but without ever considering the merits of the complaint.

Instead, the judge was laser focused on a single issue: the law was passed in May, and set to go into effect in August, but xAI… had waited until the end of July (nearly three months) to sue. That was effectively the entirety of the judge’s analysis, saying that if you wait too long (how long is too long is not explained) then you can’t have a law blocked, no matter what the merits.

Last week, however, the Eighth Circuit appeals court jumped in and put the law on hold. There’s no explanation. The entire order is literally:

Appellant’s motion for injunction pending appeal is granted.

So, Minnesota’s AG, Keith Ellison, cannot currently enforce the law against xAI, but the case is far from over. It would be nice if at least one court actually looked at the law and asked whether it’s constitutional… but we’ll have to wait on that.

It would also be nice if the Minnesota legislature actually chose to write its laws in a manner compatible with the First Amendment, which I sorta feel shouldn’t require me asking them to do so.

Of course, the cynical take I’ve now heard from multiple people is that the Minnesota legislature deliberately wrote this law badly to bait Elon into suing over it, so they can get all the headlines about how Elon is “suing to protect nudification apps” and to rile people up about the court “blocking” that law. I’ve seen some of that happening on social media, where people are (understandably, but wrongly in this case) quick to condemn Elon and his apps.

The author of the law, state Senator Erin Maye Quade’s statement on the Eighth Circuit ruling completely misses the point:

“This ruling is another devastating reminder of how little the safety of women and children mean to men with money and power. Minnesota is the only state that has cut off predators’ access to technology to commit AI-image sexual abuse — and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals just gave child predators their favorite tool back, with no legal reasoning in the ruling. Nudification technology is overwhelmingly used to sexually abuse women and create child sexual abuse material. Since Minnesota’s law passed in May 2026, at least four lawsuits have been filed by children and women accusing Elon Musk’s company of engaging in image-based sexual abuse.

“To Musk, his company and its users: it is still illegal to disseminate nonconsensual sexual deepfakes, and dissemination includes sending to one or more persons. Each and every time his company generates a sexual deepfake and disseminates it to a user, the company is breaking the law.”

The thing is, if Senator Maye Quade actually wanted to protect the safety of women and children from “men with money and power,” then why didn’t she follow the roadmap the Minnesota Supreme Court laid out for her regarding how to write a similar law that can pass strict scrutiny? Even her comment regarding the illegality of “nonconsensual sexual deepfakes” shows that she knows about the earlier NCII law and how it was deemed acceptable under the First Amendment. So why didn’t she follow the same path with this law? It’s a question Minnesota journalists should be asking.

But the simple reality here is that Minnesota wrote a really badly drafted law here, which undermines any actual effort to deal with the very real problem of how people use nudification apps for abuse and harassment. Write a law that’s almost certain to get tossed by the courts — as Maye Quade did here — and victims end up with nothing, while abusers get to point to a court ruling and claim the law is on their side.

Writing a thoughtful, careful law that targets the actual harms would take actual work. Writing a poorly drafted law to goad one of the country’s most hated individuals into suing over it to make him look like a creep in headlines that help the politicians is easy. One is politics. The other is actually legislating to help people. Whether by design or by sloppiness, Minnesota went with the politics.

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Yet another one of Trump’s many, many, often blatantly illegal playbooks is on display here. It seems Trump really doesn’t know who’s going to be loyal enough to satisfy him and also able to pass the rudimentary screening we generously call the Senate Confirmation Process.

So, what tends to happen is that Trump places someone in a lead DOJ role, bypassing the confirmation process entirely. He is allowed to do this, but only temporarily. If the president fails to get a nominee officially confirmed, the ball is now in the court’s… uh… court. The judges in the affected jurisdiction get to choose their own replacement for the vacant position. If the president wants to replace that person, he’s got to go through the confirmation process.

For the most part, none of that is happening. What is happening is that Trump names someone to the position, the clock runs out, the judges replace the prosecutor with their own selection, and within minutes to hours, Trump fires the court-appointed prosecutor.

It took nearly five hours for Trump to fire Donald Kinsella less than five hours after he was appointed to replace Trump’s unconfirmed appointee (and former personal lawyer) John Sarcone. Roger Rogoff, who was appointed by the court to replace Trump’s past-their-expiration-date personal selection for the Washington (state) US Attorney post, was fired only 54 minutes into his judicial appointment.

Rogoff, however, wasn’t willing to let Trump get away with this. He sued for wrongful termination. And he has emerged victorious, as the Associated Press reports:

A judge on Thursday overturned President Donald Trump’s decision to fire the court-appointed top U.S. prosecutor in Seattle, the latest development in a legal tug-of-war over the administration’s efforts to control who occupies the powerful Justice Department posts.

The question being answered here is who has the power to fire court-appointed prosecutors. Trump seems to think he can, but it’s certainly not because he feels his actions are supported by judicial precedent… because there isn’t any.

Judge Stanley Bastian’s order reinstates Rogoff and forbids Trump or the DOJ from firing him (again) until this case is entirely resolved. The answer Trump doesn’t want to hear is that nothing in the law allows him to fire anyone but his own appointees.

Can the President fire a court-appointed U.S. Attorney? No. The President cannot unilaterally fire a U.S. Attorney appointed by the Court. A court-appointed U.S. Attorney is not an acting U.S. Attorney nor are they an interim U.S. Attorney. Section 546(d) provides that a court-appointed U.S. Attorney serves until “the vacancy is filled,” which can only be done by the nomination/confirmation process.

It also makes it clear that the courts are going to keep doing this if Trump’s continues to bypass this process. Why? Because that’s what the law actually says. It doesn’t provide an exemption for Donald J. Trump and whatever he wants the law to be.

Once that time expires, the District Court may appoint a U.S. Attorney until that vacancy is filled.
It does not say until that person is fired by the President.

Of course, the administration has already appealed. The Ninth Circuit has issued a stay of its own, but it doesn’t undo the lower court’s block of any attempted firings. All it does is prevent anything else from happening until the appellate court hears the case. Roger Rogoff won’t have a final answer on this legal question until later, but for now, it seems pretty clear the law — as usual — isn’t on the side of the self-proclaimed “rule of law” president.

Meta’s agentic AI product Muse has had a rocky few weeks since launch. The product, which features an animated avatar named Jolly (one presumes to make mass hyper surveillance seem adorable) is supposed to help you offload busywork like making restaurant reservations, paying bills, or ordering groceries.

Despite Meta having claimed repeatedly that Muse was built with a heavy focus on privacy and security, the AI agent launched with a nasty zero-day flaw that made it possible to spy on Mac users. When one tech YouTuber put Muse in charge of their Facebook Marketplace sales, it sold his stuff way below acceptable rates and doled out their home address (the user apparently didn’t understand the permissions he set).

Somebody else found that you could trick Muse into giving root access on the device it’s running on by simply pretending to be a Muse agent yourself. Others found that Muse software not only accesses people’s private messages without approval, it often ignores all permissions and uploads them to the cloud – even if you specifically tell it not to.

That last problem was bad enough that Apple needed to change its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories:

“Friday’s announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.”

Meanwhile, Wired found that Muse consistently creates detailed profiles of all your friends, family, colleagues, “collaborators,” and people you “follow.” Obviously much of that information is necessary for the agent to get to “know” you, but this being Meta, people are understandably uncomfortable with this sort of massive ramp up of data collection in a country, under authoritarian control, that’s too corrupt to pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers:

“These [AI assistant] tools are actively soliciting users to plug their whole lives in—their emails, calendars, financial institutions, everything in order to be helpful assistance,” Bogen says. “That’s dramatically more information than people might have otherwise given to some of these companies. The breadth of access to information that these tools have will lead to a ballooning of what they know about users.”

But wait, there’s more! 404 Media found that in the weeks before launch, Meta was in a mad dash to quickly and sloppily fix multiple other vulnerabilities but refused to delay Muse’s launch to actually make sure the product was secure:

“The Meta source said they felt security teams were asked to push hot fixes to these bugs as quickly as possible and in a way that wouldn’t delay Muse’s launch, leading to what they described as “half-baked protections being rushed out to enable the launch. Many senior engineers believe it’s inevitable we’re going to have a massive data breach as a result of Hatch.” Muse is called “Hatch” internally and in Meta’s codebase.”

Many folks build their own agentic AI solutions with cobbled together open source hardware and software to ensure they have clear understanding of, and control over, what’s actually happening in their name. Meta, a glorified ad monopoly with a history of ethical “lapses,” not only wants to dominate the space, it will spend a lot of time in the new year lobbying against on device, open source, foreign, and/or open weighted alternatives to Meta.

Despite Meta’s claims that privacy and security would be a priority for Muse that’s clearly not the case; it’s also extremely clear that Meta doesn’t fear any meaningful government accountability or oversight, or the product would have spent significantly more time in the oven. Tech giants that had already clearly abandoned quality control at impossible scale are engaged in a mad dash to the trough with new product launches before their funny math causes a market correction.

Such is life in a country that has had most consumer protection regulators (and cybersecurity standards) lobotomized by corrupt authoritarians. Authoritarians guys like Mark Zuckerberg enthusiastically supported because they didn’t like paying taxes — and hated former FTC antitrust boss Lina Khan.

Muse’s early privacy and security problems are the kind of stuff anybody with a head on their shoulders could see coming miles over the horizon. And it’s all inevitably going to get more dangerous — and ridiculous — over the next year as unethical tech oligarchs fully exploit their successful lobotomization of the federal regulatory state. You know, for the love of innovation.

The measles outbreaks in America, and specifically in Pennsylvania, are getting worse instead of getting better. And, while RFK Jr. has and will continue to attempt to lay blame for this total failure of federal leadership at the feet of state officials, anyone with a few brain cells to rub together knows that’s bullshit. While Kennedy spins conspiracy theories, at one point doubting publicly that the deaths reported by Pennsylvania officials had even occurred and reportedly intervening to keep public reporting of those deaths behind a curtain, even a public CDC site about the current measles crisis, one which we know is both out of date and which contains inaccurate counts and information, outlines the government’s failure. While we set records for measles in 2025, 2026 has the CDC reporting more cases, more hospitalizations, with only deaths lagging behind because of the game-playing around reporting them.

And then there’s this.

There have been 40 new outbreaks** reported in 2026, and 95% of confirmed cases (3,478 of 3,659) are outbreak-associated (2,094 from outbreaks starting in 2026 and 1,384 from outbreaks that started in 2025).

Forty (!!!) new outbreaks throughout the country. Outbreaks of a disease that was declared eradicated at the turn of the century. That is a failure of breath-taking proportion. And make no mistake, this all got really, really bad once Kennedy took office.

And, now, despite Kennedy’s attempts to hide his failures from the public, we unfortunately have learned that a 5th person in Pennsylvania has died as a result of contracting measles.

A fifth, unvaccinated person has died of measles in Pennsylvania, the state’s health department announced Wednesday. The department identified the deceased as a resident of Lancaster County, which is the epicenter of a raging outbreak that began in late April. The updated case count as of Wednesday is 943 across 39 counties, including 119 cases reported in just the last seven days. At least 176 people have been hospitalized.

Meanwhile, health officials in Pennsylvania are racing to vaccinate residents amid the deadly outbreak. The health department reports that state nurses have administered more than 8,500 doses of measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine this year, including more than 5,500 doses given at pop-up clinics in outbreak areas.

Those same officials face headwinds, some of them created by Kennedy himself. Of course, there are many bad actors out there trying to claim that all of this news is an attack on the Amish population. They claim that it’s an infringement on their religious liberty. That’s not true; we’ve been over this before and there is no religious prohibition in the Amish community against getting vaccinated for measles. None, zero, it’s not a thing.

Instead, the real headwinds come from Kennedy’s decades pushing anti-vaxxer nonsense, as well as his collection of sycophants. Sycophants which, to be clear, are not on one side of the aisle or another. There are plenty of granola-crunching liberals who have sworn off vaccines as well. In fact, I would argue that the group that mostly pushed the anti-vaxxer nonsense in its early days was left-leaning, largely Hollywood celebrities. What hath thou wrought, Jenny McCarthy?

But the main point is that none of this is getting better. In fact, it’s all getting worse, because that’s what happens when you allow a highly infectious disease to spread after pumping the country full of vaccine misinformation. These deaths are on the heads of those who told and circulated these lies.

And I hope those deaths are heavy upon their shoulders.

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 V: The Finished Internet

In Part IV, the argument shifted from individual storms to the changing digital climate. Part V examines another consequence of that change: how an internet designed to remain open and unfinished gradually became a collection of increasingly complete, privately governed environments.

There is an observation that appears repeatedly in the history of architecture. Buildings designed to accommodate uncertainty often outlive those designed to achieve perfection. Medieval townhouses become workshops, then apartments, then cafés. Former factories are transformed into galleries. Railway stations become museums. The structures endure because they were never so complete that they resisted reinvention. Their longevity lies not in their efficiency but in their incompleteness.

The same principle has shaped some of humanity’s most enduring systems. Languages survive because they constantly absorb new words. Constitutions persist because they leave room for interpretation. Scientific knowledge advances because every answer generates new questions. Healthy ecosystems are not stable because nothing changes within them; they are stable because change is built into their very nature.

The internet belonged to this family of unfinished systems. This is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of its design. We often describe the internet as open, decentralized or interoperable, and while each of these descriptions is accurate, they are ultimately consequences of a more fundamental characteristic. The internet was deliberately incomplete. Its architects resisted the temptation to determine in advance how people should use it because they recognized that no one could anticipate the forms of innovation that would emerge decades later.

That decision required an unusual degree of intellectual humility. The protocols that underpin the internet perform remarkably modest tasks. They move packets from one place to another. They identify computers, route traffic and establish common rules through which independently developed systems can communicate. They do not prescribe what applications ought to exist, which services deserve prominence or what business models should prevail. In this respect, the internet resembles less a finished product than a constitutional framework. Its purpose is not to dictate outcomes but to create conditions under which countless different outcomes remain possible.

This architectural restraint proved unusually fertile. Email was not foreseen in its modern form. Neither was the web, online commerce, video streaming, collaborative encyclopedias or social media. Each emerged because the underlying network imposed positively few assumptions upon those building at its edges. Innovation flourished precisely because the center remained intentionally modest.

The major platforms inherited that openness and initially extended it. They built services upon common protocols, benefited from the web’s extraordinary reach and attracted users through products that genuinely expanded what the internet could do. In their early years, they felt less like destinations than gateways. Search engines pointed users toward independent websites. Social networks drove readers to blogs, newspapers, and forums. Video platforms introduced audiences to creators who maintained homes elsewhere on the web. The internet remained larger than any individual service.

At some point, almost imperceptibly, that relationship reversed. The platforms stopped behaving as participants within a broader ecosystem and began organizing the ecosystem around themselves. Their success no longer depended primarily on helping users explore the web; increasingly, it depended on reducing the need to leave the platform at all. Links became interruptions rather than invitations. External websites loaded inside proprietary browsers. News articles were hosted directly on platforms rather than by publishers. Native content received greater visibility than material residing elsewhere. Every additional minute spent beyond the platform gradually came to be understood as value escaping the system.

None of this represented a conspiracy against the open internet. It emerged from incentives that were, from the perspective of individual firms, entirely rational. Every company seeks to improve user experience, reduce abandonment and strengthen customer loyalty. Yet rational decisions at the level of individual organizations do not always produce desirable outcomes for the larger systems within which those organizations operate. Economists have long recognized this tension. Ecologists encounter it constantly. The pursuit of local optimization often degrades the health of the wider environment.

The internet increasingly exhibits precisely this pattern. The more successful the largest platforms became at perfecting their own environments, the less space remained for the kind of distributed experimentation that had characterized the web’s formative decades. Independent blogs gave way to creator platforms. Personal websites yielded to profile pages. Conversations migrated from open forums to proprietary feeds. Software developers increasingly built applications for ecosystems rather than for the web itself. Even innovation began to change its character. Instead of asking what new possibilities the internet might enable, entrepreneurs increasingly asked how new ideas might fit within the rules established by the dominant platforms.

This shift carries consequences that extend well beyond commercial competition. General-purpose technologies derive much of their value from uses that cannot be predicted in advance. Nobody designed the web specifically to produce online education, open-source software, citizen journalism, or remote work. These emerged because the underlying architecture permitted combinations that no planner had anticipated. Economists sometimes describe this as combinatorial innovation: progress generated not by isolated breakthroughs, but by the continual recombination of existing capabilities into unexpected forms. The internet excelled precisely because it lowered the barriers to such experimentation.

Finished systems rarely possess the same generative quality. A finished system is elegant because its boundaries are well defined. Every component has a designated function and interactions are carefully orchestrated. Unexpected behavior is treated as a bug rather than a possibility. This approach works exceptionally well for products. It works less well for civilizations.

The distinction matters because the internet was never merely a product. It became one of the foundational infrastructures of modern society, not unlike roads, electricity or the postal system. Such infrastructures succeed when they enable activities far beyond those imagined by their creators. Their greatest contributions are often indirect. We value roads less because of the asphalt itself than because of the countless journeys they make possible. Likewise, the internet’s greatest achievement has never been any particular product or service but its capacity to generate applications that nobody had the foresight to invent.

There is another, subtler consequence of completeness. Finished systems cultivate a particular kind of confidence. Their designers begin to believe that the most important questions have already been answered. Improvement becomes a matter of optimization rather than imagination. More efficient recommendation engines; more accurate behavioral prediction; more personalized advertising; better artificial intelligence. These are not trivial achievements; on the contrary, they represent extraordinary feats of engineering. Yet they all operate within an existing conceptual framework. They assume that the future consists primarily of making the present work more effectively. History rarely rewards that assumption.

The technologies that reshape societies seldom emerge from the centers of existing power. They arrive from the margins, where experimentation remains inexpensive because failure carries fewer consequences. The personal computer was not born inside the mainframe industry. The web did not emerge from the telecommunications monopolies. Open-source software challenged assumptions held by the largest software companies of its time. Innovation repeatedly enters history through spaces that established institutions have overlooked precisely because those institutions are busy refining what they already possess.

This is the paradox confronting today’s technology giants. No companies have invested more heavily in imagining the future. Their research laboratories employ some of the world’s finest scientists while their capital expenditures rival those of nation states. Their ambitions increasingly encompass artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, and space. Yet for all this extraordinary capacity, they often seem curiously reluctant to imagine a future in which the internet itself might once again become larger than the platforms they have built upon it.

Perhaps that is because every successful institution eventually begins to confuse its own permanence with the permanence of the system that made it possible. The internet has never made that mistake. Its greatest strength has always been its willingness to remain unfinished.

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

The other day the Copia Institute filed an amicus brief at the Fourth Circuit in a case involving West Virginia attempting to punish Apple for not filtering CSAM the way it thinks it should. The issue raised in the appeal was in some respects a narrow one: could Apple cause the case West Virginia brought against it to be heard in federal court, rather than a West Virginia state court, and by using the removal statute at 28 U.S.C. Section 1442(a)(1) in particular. But the implications are much broader than just this particular procedural question. What West Virginia is trying to do, imposing liability on a platform for how it intermediated user expression, interferes with several statutes Congress passed—including Section 230—which sought to shield them from that liability, and for all the sound reasons Congress believed minimizing that potential liability the better policy to pursue.

For one thing, when governments can force platforms to search their systems for evidence of wrongdoing, like through the threat of liability, then the evidence the platforms discover, warrantlessly, will be inadmissible against those users who put it there and thus it will be very hard to successfully prosecute them. The only way to use evidence platforms find is if they find it on their own volition, and that discovery is only volitional when platforms can be legally able to look for it without fearing liability however they do. So Congress passed several statutes to make it safe for platforms to try to police this most odious expression: Section 230, which insulates platforms for liability in most forms wrongfulness they find others used their services for, and the PROTECT Act, which is a separate statute that makes it safe for platforms to police for CSAM in particular.

For West Virginia to now try to impose liability on the platforms because they did not do that policing as it demands means that the results of their search are no longer volitional and instead coerced by the government. As Apple pointed out in its brief, it would make those results inadmissible, and in our brief we showed how a similar principle works in the First Amendment context too, showing how, as NRA v. Vullo explained, the government cannot target someone by targeting someone else they depend on instead. The Constitution will not allow the government to do indirectly what it cannot do directly; if it wants to directly police for CSAM it will need a warrant, as the Fourth Amendment requires, and otherwise, if it wants the help of the platform, as Murthy v. Missouri explained, it will need to make sure platforms are free to offer that help on their own volition.

That Congress wanted these discoveries of CSAM to be prosecutable reflected a significant federal interest, which is undermined by West Virginia meddling trying to impose liability where Congress had specifically imposed immunity. Identifying an “overriding federal interest,” such as ensuring CSAM can actually be successfully prosecuted, is important for being able to remove a case to federal court under that 1442(a)(1) statute. But, as we also argued in our brief, it’s not the only federal interest in play.

With Section 230 Congress also wanted to create an online ecosystem that fostered the most beneficial expression and minimized the most detrimental generally. It did so by purposefully providing platforms with statutory immunity for both its facilitation and moderation of user expression so that they could be safe to do each as best they could. Yet all these state prosecutions of platforms undermine that statutory ecosystem by now imposing liability on the very same functions that Congress sought to protect—functions which, as the Moody v. Paxton case indicated, may themselves be protected by the First Amendment.

The practical freedom Congress tried to afford platforms to do both facilitate and moderate can no longer exist when a platform now has to worry about a state taking issue with how it has done either. Even if the subject of West Virginia’s liability may not represent wrongfulness specifically immunized by Section 230, given the federally criminal nature of its wrongfulness, (1) Congress still immunized platforms for it via the PROTECT Act, and (2) having platforms fear liability for a particular type of wrongfulness makes them fear it for all of it. As we additionally pointed out, West Virginia wanted Apple to look for illegal needles in an enormous haystack of perfectly lawful expression, but if a platform had to fear liability if it didn’t find all the needles as the state wanted it would not be able to facilitate nearly so much lawful hay; it just couldn’t afford the consequences of the government’s disapproval.

Worse, it is not just West Virginia that platforms would have to worry about. State after state has been seeking to impose liability on platforms when they do not intermediate others’ expression exactly how these states wanted, facilitating or moderating either too much or too little for each state’s taste—see, for example, the Florida and Texas efforts behind the Moody v. Paxton case itself. There is always something that some state wants platforms to do more or less of when it comes to intermediating others’ expression, and that something may not even be consistent with what another state wants. Platforms are ending up so pulled into pieces by state regulatory regimes that the statutory protection Congress afforded them is becoming all but useless, because, at the moment, instead of being immune from liability, platforms are ending up targeted by every single local jurisdiction’s.

Which is why Congress had sought to pre-empt this problem through a literal pre-emption provision, telling states (and an infinite number of local jurisdictions) that they were not in the platform regulation business. No state could come up with a regulatory scheme that conflicted with the online ecosystem Congress was trying to foster, one that got the most good and least bad online thanks to immunity that made it safe for every platform to attempt to achieve both. Yet every state trying to impose liability on platforms for what Congress sought to immunize inherently conflicts with it. In fact, it completely obviates the regulatory regime Congress designed because platforms cannot be both free and hindered in how they perform the same intermediating task. All the benefits of immunity are lost once liability is introduced, and all the policy Congress sought to advance with its statutory protection is now subordinated to what individual states would prefer instead.

It reflects a strong federal interest to ensure that the policy Congress sought to vindicate—in clear, unambiguous language—not give way to these state enforcement efforts. At minimum Section 230 is enough to warrant removal into federal court in any of these cases where states are trying to superimpose their policy desires on platforms. But it really needs to start being something that stops them in their tracks altogether.

Update: About four hours after this article went up, Warner/Chappell backed down and released their ridiculous claim on the video, so it’s now back online.

Techdirt has been around for almost 30 years now, and the one internet law issue that never seems to change is the bullshit use of copyright to take down speech. It’s run through basically our entire history. Back in 2020 we wrote about a copyright dispute involving an author of, well, “wolf-kink erotica” using the DMCA to remove works by a competitor writing books in the same genre. The YouTuber Lindsay Ellis did a (very good) explainer video about it all and then… faced a ridiculous copyright legal threat herself.

About a week or so ago, Ellis published a video on a very different topic: cruise lines. It was something like two and a half hours long. Ellis — who I would say is a skeptic of the entire concept of cruises — decided to go all in, taking a bunch of different cruises in a row to see what all the fuss was about and how the various lines compare. After seeing the video mentioned on Bluesky, I clicked on it and… ended up watching the whole thing (albeit at 2.5x speed). I’m not that interested in cruises, but Ellis is a great sardonic storyteller and the video is really well done, mixing details about the individual cruise lines and how they treat their workers (mostly not well) and the environment (potentially even worse) with her own experiences on those trips.

But, apparently that video is currently gone from YouTube (she has kept it up on the subscription service Nebula)… because of copyright, as Ellis explained in a YouTube short.

Yeah. In the middle of a two-plus hour video about cruise lines, there’s a clip — just a few seconds long — of a friend who joined Ellis on one of the trips singing karaoke. And that caused the entire video to come down while the “dispute” was adjudicated.

And, as Ellis notes, YouTube by default sides with the copyright holder, because the nature of copyright law is that it very, very, very strongly encourages intermediaries to side with the copyright claimant, even if that claim is obvious bullshit and clearly fair use (as is the case here). YouTube’s ContentID system is basically built with that in mind. Even as YouTube spent years fighting back against copyright maximalism and winning the massive DMCA case Viacom filed against it, in the end, to keep the big copyright holders happy, ContentID is really designed to strongly favor copyright claimants, even when their claims are bullshit.

The culprit in this case? Apparently our old friends at Warner/Chappell, which, let’s just say, have a history of this sort of absolute bullshit. Warner/Chappell is a music publisher, and publishers tend to be even more copyright maximalist than the labels themselves. It’s likely that Warner/Chappell holds the copyright on the underlying composition that is playing in the background, and which can barely be heard for the few seconds while Ellis’ friend is singing karaoke. That’s clearly fair use and similar to the dancing baby case from over a decade ago, where some music playing incidentally in the background shouldn’t lead to a video being taken down (the difference here being that it looks like this is a ContentID claim, rather than a full DMCA takedown which would require Warner/Chappell to take fair use into consideration).

On Bluesky, Ellis points out that this wasn’t an automated takedown. Her lawyers asked people at Warner/Chappell to pull the claim and they refused, claiming (incredibly) that because the song “was not the topic of the video” they wouldn’t pull the claim.

That is… not how any of this is supposed to work.

Ellis also notes that she uploaded the video weeks before publishing it (as YouTube encourages creators to do) precisely so ContentID could flag any potential issues — and nothing came up until the video passed a million views. Then suddenly Warner/Chappell put in a claim, as Ellis says, just “to be an asshole.”

This sort of nonsense happens all the time, but it’s pretty incredible that we’re now nearly three decades into the DMCA itself and we’re still dealing with this kind of blatant abuse of copyright, which is mostly just a shakedown from companies like Warner/Chappell which will then run to Congress and claim they need more copyright expansion to protect them from “piracy.”

Maybe what we actually need are laws that protect the people doing the creative work from parasites like Warner/Chappell.

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Finally. Now, it doesn’t matter what Trump wants his DOJ minions to do. If he’s going to try to pin a botched repair job on people who just happened to stick a hand into his algae-infested, liner chunk-filled Reflecting Pool/metaphor for his entire presidency, he’s going to have to stick it to someone other than former Olympian David Hearn.

The DOJ went about as honest as it possibly could under these Trumpian circumstances when US Attorney Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss the vandalism case against David Hearn after discovering the Department of Interior had withheld information on the source of the pool’s many, many problems. The true source of the damage was Atlantic Industrial Coating’s rushed refurbishing, which not only led to plenty of liner separation, but also to some truly spectacular algae growth acceleration.

One of the government’s own witnesses made this clear during the grand jury proceedings. Somehow, the grand jury still decided the DOJ could move forward with Trump’s petty revenge plan — one that sought to hold regular citizens responsible for his own failures.

What the DOJ didn’t do, however, was dismiss the case with prejudice. It certainly had every reason to do so, but it chose not to. And that only encouraged Trump to suggest he’d just find a better loyalist to re-open the case.

Well, that’s not going to happen now. The court handling the case has done what the Trump loyalists in the DOJ refused to do: shut it down permanently. (h/t Kyle Cheney)

The dismissal [PDF] swiftly (and pointedly) discusses the background of the case, which necessarily recounts the president’s refusal to take the L. (Emphasis in the original.)

In July 2026, the United States secured an indictment against Defendant David C. Hearn for felony destruction of property based upon allegations that he had damaged the lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Within a month, the government recognized that its prosecution lacked merit. It reached this conclusion not because it had misidentified Mr. Hearn as the perpetrator of the alleged act, but because no crime had occurred: the observed damage to the Reflecting Pool was due to a contractor’s “rushed and botched” installation of the lining while conducting renovations, and Mr. Hearn’s actions had no effect on the value of the Pool.

While the DOJ more often than not dismisses cases without prejudice, it had no reason to believe it could actually bring a credible case at some point in the future — not with what it had stated in court during its motion to dismiss. That it chose not to accept Hearn’s motion to dismiss with prejudice was similarly stupid, prompting the court to demand an explanation in person from DOJ lawyers.

The court isn’t going to let the DOJ keep Hearn dangling until Trump leaves office/the statute of limitations expires. There’s no case here now, says the court. And there’s no case waiting further up the road, either.

While the government wishes to hold open the possibility of the development of evidence that would support a future prosecution, its own representations make plain that such a possibility is theoretical at best, and more likely, is simply fanciful.

What makes this different from dozens of other dismissals without prejudice by the DOJ is that this isn’t the DOJ just hedging its bets. There’s the real and persistent threat that Trump’s DOJ will try again, no matter how “theoretical” or “fanciful” the case will be. That’s because Trump has been applying pressure since the first dismissal and openly stated he’s going to try again as soon as he can find someone willing to do this particularly dirty work.

These unique facts mean the court can’t stand idly by and hope Trump and/or his DOJ find something better to do with their time. Hearn was absolved by the DOJ’s own admissions. There’s no reason he needs to spend the next six years living under the threat of possible prosecution.

The Court respects the authority of the Office of the United States Attorney to decide which cases to prosecute and which to dismiss. However, in the exceptional circumstances posed by this case, the government has no right to retain the ability to compound the errors it has already made, or even to threaten to do so, at Mr. Hearn’s expense.

That’s it. This case is permanently closed. And everything admitted to by the DOJ and the pool contractor itself should hopefully result in dismissals of charges against the other handful of people rounded up by the DOJ to satisfy Trump’s braying bloodlust.

Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr loves to insist he’s being tough on robocalls, which have increasingly rendered U.S. voice communications networks less and less usable. Except whenever you actually dig into his plans, it usually involves making it easier for big companies and Republicans — who often use the same tactics as outright scammers — to hammer you with spam calls you don’t want.

One recent case in point: the Trump FCC is calling for public comment on a petition by the advocacy group Club for Growth that would allow political robocalls — including those using an AI-generated voice — to reach out to cellphones without prior consent.

According to the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), FCC approval of the new scheme would subject people to more unwanted, automated calls and could spread misinformation and “deepfakes” mimicking recognizable voices ahead of the midterm elections:

“A federal law, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), requires robocallers to obtain consent before making automated calls to cellphone numbers. Callers who ignore the law can face expensive private lawsuits or government enforcement actions. 

But the Club for Growth wants to scrap that protection. The petition proposes, instead, that callers be allowed to make AI-generated political calls to cellphones as long as they are limited to three calls per 30-day period and stop within 10 days of being asked to stop – a limitation advocates warn is meaningless due to the multitude of political action committees, campaigns, and non-profits that could make unsolicited, AI-voice robocalls. Allowing calls to continue for 10 days after a stop request will let political callers of any party bombard voters in the run-up to the election.”

Folks interested in providing Brendan Carr some feedback can head to the FCC comment website, type 02-278 on the “Proceeding(s)” line; enter your name and address, type your brief comments sharing your concerns with AI-voiced political robocalls; agree to the privacy terms; review; and submit your comment.

The NCLC has been pointing out for years that letting your voice communications networks get taken over by corporations, debt collectors, and scammers isn’t normal. It’s the direct result of captured politicians like Carr endlessly creating new loopholes that benefit big companies and politicians — which in turn weakens oversight of all offenders and makes the robocall problem endlessly worse.

According to the YouMail Robocall Index, Americans were bombarded with 3.9 billion unwanted robocalls during the month of August alone. Or the equivalent of 5.2 million robocalls every single hour. And those are summertime numbers that generally climb once the fall arrives.

In late April, the Trump FCC also announced it was also considering the development of new “Know Your Customer” rules requiring that the buyer of any new phone present a government ID, a physical address, a full legal name, and an existing phone number at the point of sale. This has raised eyebrows among activists who say there are numerous good reasons to protect cell phone anonymity, and the effort is less about stopping scams and fraud and more about ramping up surveillance in coordination with ICE.

This week, our first place winner is danderbandit with a comment about the California ruling against a rogue sheriff who seized 650,000 ballots:

So a sheriff broke the law, was confirmed by the state’s top court on two counts. But he is still working as the county sheriff. When is he going to be held to account and what will be the consequences?

Don’t bother looking it up, I have it here. He will be allowed to ride out his current term of office and ride off into the sunset. Or he will be allowed to resign his position and retire with his pension.

Very rough consequences!

In second place, it’s Rocky with a comment about AI-generated mathematical proofs that no human understands well enough to explain:

If we don’t understand it and can’t explain it, is the proof then really complete?

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with another comment about the sheriff, this time from an anonymous commenter:

we live in a country where you can be fined millions of dollars for downloading music but stealing ballots gets you a “hey, cut that out”

Next, it’s Stephen T. Stone spelling out the difference between Trump’s and Obama’s attacks on the press:

Yes. Yes, it is. Also: Obama tried to ban Fox News from a single press pool interview of a low-level cabinet official, whereas Trump tried to ban three major news outlets from the White House entirely (including CNN, which is one of the five networks that share press pool duties). Also also: Obama voluntarily backed off the attempted ban soon after trying, whereas Trump needed a court order to tell him “lmao no stop your shit” and he’s still trying to see how far he can go without potentially involving the Supreme Court. Funny how context changes things, huh?

Over on the funny side, we’re back to the sheriff post again for our first place winner Thad, who responded the question of whether said sheriff would end up in Trump’s FBI:

I dunno, how much bestiality does he do?

In second place it’s Immortan Joe with a little quip about the overuse of the word “addiction”:

Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one last anonymous comment about the California sheriff:

“… and therefore we find Mr. Bianco to be guilty of an aggravated felony under color of law and thus order him imprisoned for the term of one day per seized ballot, to be served consecutively, with the possibility of parole or early release no sooner than halfway through his sentence, and to pay a fine of $100 per ballot…”

“beep beep beep beep WHUMP”. Sorry, that was my alarm clock going off. Maybe I can dream a little longer…

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about Trump’s push to rename AI:

Super Intelligence is to Trump what Super Bowl is to bowls.

That’s all for this week, folks!