Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)
from the it's-the-only-real-story dept
While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recognizable plan unfold — a playbook we’re all too familiar with. We’ve seen how technology can be wielded to consolidate power, how institutional guardrails can be circumvented through technical and legal workarounds, and how smoke and mirrors claims about “innovation” can mask old-fashioned power grabs. It’s a playbook we watched Musk perfect at Twitter, and now we’re seeing it deployed on a national scale.
Trending Posts
- Fallout 1 & 2 Source Code Preserved Only Through One Person Refusing To Delete Copies Of It
- Community-Owned Networks Offering Locals Dirt Cheap Broadband After Republicans Dismantle Federal Low Income Program
- GOP: The IRS Should Never Target Organizations For Their Views… Until We’re In Power, Then Target Everyone
Fallout 1 & 2 Source Code Preserved Only Through One Person Refusing To Delete Copies Of It
from the phew dept
It can be really amazing just how bad video game companies have been, and currently still are, when it comes to preserving the very culture that they help to create. While groups like GOG are at least attempting to pressure more developers and publishers to take efforts to preserve older games, it’s simply a fact that there is a massive and historical headwind they’re facing. For a long, long time these companies essentially zeroed out any concern about preserving their work in favor of copyright enforcement coupled with a disinterest in their side of the copyright equation.
We’ve already seen how the ability to legitimately buy some games, such as No One Lives Forever, has been blocked for over a decade over a jumble of potential intellectual property concerns. But the story of the source code for two absolute classic games, Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, and how it almost became completely lost in the ether is a great example of the interest deficit in preservation going back years.
In April, Fallout creator Tim Cain explained that when he left Interplay in 1998 he was ordered to destroy any game assets or code he was holding onto that didn’t belong to him. This included the source code for the OG Fallout. Cain complied, which made it awkward when Interplay called a few years later asking if he had Fallout’s source code still. He thought it was a trap; turns out, Interplay had actually lost the code for it and Fallout 2. And Cain had assumed that due to Interplay’s “destroy it all” policy, the source code for the old RPGs were lost and destroyed. Thankfully, that’s not the case.
On May 5, Videogamer reported that it had heard from Interplay founder and game designer Rebecca Heineman that she had the source code for both Fallout and its sequel, as well as many other Interplay classics. She started preserving every Interplay game after working on the studio’s 10 Year Anthology: Classic Collection and realizing how poorly the company’s past work was being saved for the future.
As Kotaku goes on to note, Heineman received the same order to destroy any copies of any source code she may have made or face litigation as well. She simply chose to ignore that demand. No lawsuit was ever filed and Heineman has indicated she kept her copies because she believed any lawsuit from Interplay would be doomed to fail.
And it’s a damned good thing she did. It appears hers is the only copy of the source code for both of these games. And it should cause all of us who care about game preservation to shiver to our spine that the same company that demanded all copies of source code by deleted couldn’t be bothered to secure the master copy itself. What if Heineman had followed orders like a good soldier? The code would simply be lost to the world, gone forever.
And before anyone thinks otherwise, no, Heineman isn’t some bad actor simply looking to defy all the rules without any deference to corporate interests.
As for why Heineman hasn’t released the code to the internet, she says that could only happen with permission from Bethesda (now the owners of Fallout) as they are still selling Fallout and Fallout 2 today.
“I need expressed permission to release, despite the source code being pretty much obsolete,” said Heineman. “I [haven’t] gotten around to asking them. They are on my list.” She is a busy woman, working on bringing back MacPlay and porting more games to Mac. But hopefully, when she does ask, Bethesda is cool with her sharing these important pieces of game history online.
Yes, hopefully. Otherwise we may be back at this all over again in the future.
Filed Under: archives, fallout, preservation, source code, video game preservation, video games
Companies: bethesda, interplay
Community-Owned Networks Offering Locals Dirt Cheap Broadband After Republicans Dismantle Federal Low Income Program
from the if-you-build-it,-they-will-come dept
Last year Trumplicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak.
At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of course, was that the ACP was popular with their constituents (the majority of ACP participants were in red states) and they didn’t want Dems to take credit during an election season.
A recent report by The Brattle Group actually found that the $7-$8 billion annual taxpayer cost of the program generated between $28.9 and $29.5 billion in savings thanks to expanded access to affordable internet, remote work opportunities, online education tools, and remote telehealth services. In other words: the program more than paid for itself via downstream benefits (something DOGE dudebros and other Trump cultists have a hard time getting their heads around).
When the program was killed, 23 million Americans suddenly faced significantly higher broadband bills. In some states, community broadband networks have been filling the void. Like in Longmont, Colorado, where the local community-owned Nextlight broadband network has been offering low-income families dirt cheap broadband access.
Because it’s actually interested in serving the community instead of exploiting it, Nextlight’s broadband speeds and pricing are already much cheaper than you’d see from a regional monopoly like Comcast or AT&T. But their low-income plans are even cheaper, with the town offering symmetrical 100 Mbps broadband for $15 a month, and symmetrical gigabit broadband for $45 a month:
According to Longmont officials, the low-income discounts applied to their community-owned broadband network (which just reached 28,000 users total) now reach 14 percent more low-income locals than the FCC’s ACP did:
“The IAP provides qualified households a $25 a month discount. 906 NextLight customers received the federal discount before the ACP ran out of funds. There are currently 1,034 customers taking advantage of the IAP discount.”
That a town built its own broadband network and offers most residents super fast, very cheap fiber access is a pretty cool thing that simply… doesn’t get the kind of policy or press attention it deserves. It’s an interesting example of broadband being treated as an important utility and not exclusively a profit-seeking business, and it’s an example of government directly and efficiently working for the people. And a bipartisan coalition of people being supportive and generally happy about it!
I think it’s also a useful example of the potential, highly localized future we could build if the federal government is going to continue to be too insane, incompetent, and corrupt to function.
When Republicans killed the program the press had a hard time actively blaming Republicans. Most articles just blamed a vague “congressional refusal to fund the program.” It’s part of a toxic, propaganda-laden modern media environment where modern Republicans rarely have agency or are required to take real ownership of their own unpopular policies that harm very real people.
It’s worth remembering that Republicans also tried to ban community broadband during the height of COVID, just when these networks were demonstrating their effectiveness. They didn’t do this out of any functional value system; they did it to protect shitty regional telecom monopolies from better, cheaper, faster service with better, more local customer support.
It’s not a panacea (building these kinds of networks can be complicated, expensive, and tricky to manage), but this model of locally-owned fiber networks (especially when they’re open access) often genuinely works to boost broadband quality and lower prices. It’s the kind of government-driven “abundance” guys like Ezra Klein claim to be clamoring for, yet the efforts still aren’t getting the attention they deserve in press and policy circles.
Filed Under: ACP, affordability, Affordable Connectivity Program, broadband, fcc, fiber, gigabit, low income, municipal
Texas’s War On Abortion Is Now A War On Free Speech
from the another-censorship-bill dept
Once again, the Texas legislature is coming after the most common method of safe and effective abortion today—medication abortion.
Senate Bill (S.B.) 2880* seeks to prevent the sale and distribution of abortion pills—but it doesn’t stop there. By restricting access to certain information online, the bill tries to keep people from learning about abortion drugs, or even knowing that they exist.
If passed, S.B. 2880 would make it illegal to “provide information” on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug. If you exchange e-mails or have an online chat about seeking an abortion, you could violate the bill. If you create a website that shares information about legal abortion services in other states, you could violate the bill. Even your social media posts could put you at risk.
On top of going after online speakers who create and post content themselves, the bill also targets social media platforms, websites, email services, messaging apps, and any other “interactive computer service” simply for hosting or making that content available.
In other words, Texas legislators not only want to make sure no one can start a discussion on these topics, they also want to make sure no one can find one. The goal is to wipe this information from the internet altogether. That creates glaring free-speech issues with this bill and, if passed, the consequences would be dire.
The bill is carefully designed to scare people into silence.
First, S.B. 2880 empowers average citizens to sue anyone that violates the law. An “interactive computer service” can also be sued if it “allows residents of [Texas] to access information or material that aids, abets, assists or facilitates efforts to obtain elective abortions or abortion-inducing drugs.”
So, similar to Texas Senate Bill 8, the bill encourages anyone to file lawsuits against those who merely speak about or provide access to certain information. This is intended to, and will, chill free speech. The looming threat of litigation can be used to silence those who seek to give women truthful information about their reproductive options—potentially putting their health or lives in danger.
Second, S.B. 2880 encourages online intermediaries to take down abortion-related content. For example, if sued under the law, a defendant platform can escape liability by showing that, once discovered, they promptly “block[ed] access to any information . . . that assists or facilitates efforts to obtain elective abortions or abortion-inducing drugs.”
The bill also grants them “absolute and nonwaivable immunity” against claims arising from takedowns, denials of service, or any other “action taken to restrict access to or availability of [this] information.” In other words, if someone sues a social media platform or internet service provider for censorship, they are well-shielded from facing consequences. This further tips the scales in favor of blocking more websites, posts, and users.
In three different provisions of the 43-page bill, the drafters go out of their way to assure us that S.B. 2880 should not be construed to prohibit speech or conduct that’s protected by the First Amendment. But simply stating that the law does not restrict free speech does not make it so. The obvious goal of this bill is to restrict access to information about abortion medications online. It’s hard to imagine what claims could be brought under such a bill that don’t implicate our free speech rights.
The bill’s imposition of civil and criminal liability also conflicts with a federal law that protects online intermediaries’ ability to host user-generated speech, 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”), including speech about abortion medication. Although the bill explicitly states that it does not conflict with Section 230, that assurance remains meaningful only so long as Section 230’s protections remain robust. But Congress is currently considering revisions—or even a full repeal of Section 230. Any weakening of Section 230 will create more space for those empowered by this bill to use the courts to pressure intermediaries/platforms to remove information about abortion medication.
Whenever the government tries to restrict our ability to access information, our First Amendment rights are threatened. This is exactly what Texas lawmakers are trying to do with S.B. 2880. Anyone who cares about free speech—regardless of how they feel about reproductive care—should urge lawmakers to oppose this bill and others like it.
*H.B. 5510 is the identical House version of S.B. 2880.
Originally published to the EFF Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: abortion, free speech, mifepristone, sb 2880, texas
GOP: The IRS Should Never Target Organizations For Their Views… Until We’re In Power, Then Target Everyone
from the hypocrisy-as-a-service dept
Remember the Lois Lerner scandal? For years, it was the Republican party’s Exhibit A of Obama administration overreach — proof that Democrats were weaponizing the IRS to target conservative groups. The outrage was endless. The GOP-led congressional investigations were relentless. The rhetoric about threats to democracy was breathless.
Funny thing about that: it turned out the IRS was actually investigating both conservative AND progressive groups equally. But never mind that — the principle was clear. Using the IRS to target organizations based on their viewpoints was an unconscionable abuse of power that undermined the very foundations of our system.
It should never, ever be allowed to happen.
Unless, apparently, you’re Donald Trump and you just… declare you’re going to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status. Because you feel like it.
There’s some history here: if you want to set up a non-profit to help sick puppies, you set up a 501(c)(3) and you need to file detailed public reports and reveal all your donors. But if you want to set up a “social welfare” group that funnels unlimited dark money into political campaigns? Well, that’s what 501(c)(4)s are for. Sure, there are theoretical limits on their political activities. But in practice, after Citizens United, these groups became a favorite tool for moving vast sums of money through the political system while keeping donors anonymous. This isn’t all (c)(4)s, mind you, but after Citizens United, the market got flooded with new (c)(4)s whose purpose was almost certainly dark money laundering.
Thus, the IRS had a legitimate question on its hands: were these actually “social welfare” organizations, or just vehicles for campaign finance?
They began investigating whether or not they violated the laws that required them to (1) be for “social welfare” and (2) not engaged in excessive political activity. In dealing with the flood of new applications, some lower level employees started looking for keywords in reviewing applications. Some of those keywords were certainly coded to be about right-leaning organizations.
In the end, though, a non-partisan investigation found that the IRS equally targeted conservative and progressive startup non-profits during this time. It’s just that the GOP (as it’s been known to do) only talked about and focused on the searches that impacted conservative groups. There was a criminal investigation by the DOJ into Lerner, which closed with no charges being filed.
You would think that the Republicans who raised such a shitstorm about all that for years on end might have something to say about Donald Trump doing the same thing but actually doing it, and doing it out loud while making it entirely clear that it’s to punish organizations that are pushing back on his dictatorial authoritarianism?
And it’s not just Harvard: he’s repeatedly suggested that he’s going to remove the tax-exempt status of other groups that oppose him as well.
President Donald Trump on Thursday ramped up his threats to scrutinize the tax-exempt status of groups and colleges he disagrees with, calling out a prominent organization that’s fighting some of his actions in court.
Trump told reporters “we’re looking at” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit watchdog group that has launched litigation against his executive actions and conducted investigations into what it alleges are his conflicts of interest.
“The only charity they had is going after Donald Trump. So we’re looking at that. We’re looking at a lot of things,” Trump said.
Again, federal law prohibits this (in theory). 26 USC 7217 says that the executive branch cannot influence IRS investigations. One problem, though, is that thanks to the Supreme Court’s ridiculous ruling in Trump v. United States, that law does not apply to Donald Trump as President, so long as he can make some claim to having done these things as part of his official responsibilities. It might not protect others within the administration, though.
Let’s parse this carefully:
- The IRS under Obama looked for keywords to identify potentially illegal political activity
- Republicans called this an unprecedented abuse of power
- Trump is now explicitly saying he’ll strip tax-exempt status from groups that criticize him (not for actually violating the law)
- And thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, the law prohibiting presidential interference with the IRS doesn’t even apply to him
So to recap: What the GOP spent years claiming Obama did (but didn’t actually do) is exactly what Trump is proudly announcing he’ll do. Except, unlike in the Obama administration which was cleared of any wrong doing, Trump appears to be actually quite directly violating the law. But, also unlike Obama, Trump actually has legal cover to do it thanks to John Roberts.
The truly wild thing here isn’t just the hypocrisy — though that’s breathtaking enough. It’s the complete inversion of reality: Some questionable keyword filtering by low-level IRS employees (applied to both conservative and progressive groups) triggered years of congressional investigations and demands for criminal prosecution. But when Trump explicitly announces plans to weaponize the IRS against his critics? Just another Thursday.
We’ve moved beyond simple double standards into a world where the same people who claimed that imperfect bureaucratic procedures were an existential threat to democracy are now actively cheering as their leader promises to do what they falsely accused Obama’s IRS of doing — but this time with explicit political targeting and presidential blessing.
Yes, that’s true of so much these days, but we should at least document these examples, for when this fog of bullshit and nonsense finally lifts and people ask “how did we get here?”
Filed Under: donald trump, irs, lois lerner, non-profits, tax exempt status, weaponization of government
Companies: harvard
Daily Deal: The 2025 Complete Splunk Beginner Bundle
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
Splunk is a powerful data platform used to gather information from multiple sources and index it for efficient access. You can then use collected data to create visualizations, analytics, and a variety of automated and security-related functions. With its web-style interface, Splunk is easy to use and is utilized by many companies worldwide. The 2025 Complete Splunk Beginner Bundle has 4 courses to equip you with the fundamental knowledge and skills to leverage Splunk for effective security monitoring within a SIEM. You’ll understand how to handle inputs, utilize Splunk’s search language, and integrate apps to maximize its functionality in your SIEM environment. It’s on sale for $20.
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.
Filed Under: daily deal
Yet Again, The Data Shows Migrants Are More Law-Abiding Than US Citizens
from the make-america-safe-again dept
This has always been the truth. And it has always been ignored by people like Donald Trump, who combine “if it bleeds, it leads” media narratives with the always-exploitable fear of “others.”
Whether a migrant is in this country legally or illegally, the odds of them committing criminal acts are much lower than those for US citizens. And it makes sense. Any criminal act committed by a migrant — even one here legally — can provide grounds for deportation. US citizens, however, don’t need to worry about that. All they have to worry about is this Leader of the Free World’s ranking on the incarcerations-per-capita leader boards — one that puts a whole lot of autocratic nations to shame.
Sure, other nations might use homosexuality, being female, blasphemy, or simply adhering to the “wrong” religion as an excuse to lock up people en masse. Our kink happens to be drugs, which doesn’t make us any better than our rivals. In fact, it might make us worse because we’re not comfortable openly proclaiming we’re locking up minorities just because they’re minorities.
Anyway, back to the bullshit about immigrants being innately criminal. It’s never been true. And it’s still just as false, even if the anti-immigrant rhetoric has been amplified considerably during the Trump years. Ilya Somin directs us to the latest report on migrant crime rates compiled by the Cato Institute. What the report [PDF] says will come as no surprise to anyone — not even those who continue to deliberately ignore this evidence.
Our consistent finding is that legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates, followed by illegal immigrants, and that native-born Americans have the highest. Illegal immigrants are half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, and legal immigrants are 74 percent less likely to be incarcerated….
Here’s more of the data, which the Cato Institute agrees is somewhat stymied by the fact that the government generally doesn’t do much to track the residency status of arrestees unless it serves their political purpose. For most of the last decade, though, pushing the “immigrants are criminals” narrative has been at the forefront of immigration discussions, so it makes sense there might be more of this specific data recently. Even so, the data contradicts the narrative.
An estimated 1,617,197 native-born Americans, 67,813 illegal immigrants, and 58,515 legal immigrants were incarcerated in 2023. The incarceration rate for native-born Americans was 1,221 per 100,000; 613 per 100,000 for illegal immigrants; and 319 per 100,000 for legal immigrants in 2022. […] If native-born Americans were incarcerated at the same rate as illegal immigrants, about 806,000 fewer natives would be incarcerated. Conversely, if natives were incarcerated at the same rate as legal immigrants, about 1.2 million fewer native-born Americans would be incarcerated.
Look at that! A solution to jail overcrowding. Just allow more immigration! And if you think crime rates are still too high, this will do the trick as well, as Somin notes in his post:
In sum, immigration – including the illegal kind – is actually reducing our crime rate, not raising it.
Cato even has an answer for the racists who continue to believe the only reason US citizens commit more crimes than immigrants is because the US is home to a lot of Black people. Please read through this entire quote because the last sentence is worth the wait.
A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….
Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.
LOL. It’s truly a pleasure to watch bigots be informed that compounding their bigotry doesn’t suddenly make them right. It only makes them as wrong as they’ve always been, give or take a few percentage points.
Not that this matters to the bigots. They’ll continue to insist the facts aren’t the facts and their gut feelings about immigrants and non-white US citizens are what really matters. And they definitely love a government similarly compelled by ignorance but with the power to make their delusions a reality.
For the rest of us, this simply says what we’ve always known. Immigrants are a positive addition to this nation and have always been. That they’ve managed to survive wave after wave of hatred and government infliction of misery shows how much they’re willing to sacrifice just to give their offspring a better shot at living a meaningful life.
Those of us born in the US are just lucky to be here. We didn’t have to do anything and we’re still treated like we’ve done the most to secure what is now considered to be an exalted status. It’s not that the immigrants are trying to steal a nation from us. It’s that we’re too complacent to fully appreciate the freedoms we have. And under this administration, complacency is going to result in a nation that doesn’t provide hope for anyone, no matter where they’re from.
Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, dhs, donald trump, hysteria, ice, immigration, racism
Companies: cato institute
Sales End Tonight! This Is Your Last Chance To Secure A Copy Of One Billion Users, The Social Media Card Game
from the don't-miss-out dept
This is it: we’re about to lock in our order quantity for One Billion Users, the competitive card game about running a social media network that we funded on Kickstarter last year. If you haven’t yet become a backer of the campaign, you can still make a late pledge to order as many copies as you want. If you’re already a backer, you can fill out this form to let us know you want additional copies. Either way, today is the last day that we’re accepting orders, so if you want to guarantee that you’ll get the game, this is your last chance.
We have no plans to produce more copies of the game after this. There’s a small chance that we’ll have some leftovers after fulfilling everyone’s orders, in which case we might make them available at some point, but we can’t make any promises.
Thanks again to everyone who helped make this Kickstarter a success. We’re confident this is a game you’re going to love playing, and we can’t wait to get it into your hands. Keep an eye on the Kickstarter updates for more information as production proceeds, and for now here’s one more sneak peek at some cards from our sample copy:
Filed Under: games, gaming, kickstarter, one billion users
Trump’s Illegal Effort To Defund Public Broadcasting Stumbles Forward
from the terrified-of-the-truth dept
As recently noted, authoritarian assholes don’t like public broadcasting. Because they don’t like the idea of untethering U.S. journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based media system. If we bolstered real independent journalism or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested in telling people the truth. Yuck!
That’s at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on public broadcasting and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which uses a modest amount of taxpayer funds to help support organizations like PBS and NPR. As we noted recently, U.S. “public broadcasting” is a shadow of the true concept after years of being undermined. But it’s a major ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots all the same.
Clearly incapable of getting the votes needed to take action in Congress, Trump signed an executive order on May 1 calling for an end of taxpayer funding of U.S. public broadcasting. The claim is that both PBS and NPR exhibit a “left wing bias”:
“The CPB Board shall cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage. The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”
Except the “maximum extend allowed by law” isn’t very much. NPR and PBS are funded by CPB through 2027, and it requires an act of Congress to change that. So the EO tries to tap dance around the law by demanding the CPB rewrite grant eligibility rules by June 30 to ban funding for either NPR or PBS. This is, CPB President Patricia Harrison tells Ars Technica, very clearly illegal:
“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the president’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” statutorily forbidding “any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”
Not only is the U.S. right wing starving public broadcasting of funding forcing them to embrace more traditional commercialization, Trump’s earlobe nibbler over at the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now launching sham investigations into public broadcasting’s reliance on commercials. Carr claims, without evidence, PBS and NPR are violating on-air sponsorship or “underwriting” rules.
Trump’s efforts to dismantle the US Agency for Global Media haven’t fared particularly well in the courts, and it’s likely courts will intervene here as well.
This is all an extension of decades of right wing claims that any criticism of right wing ideology has a “left wing bias” and is to be immediately discredited. One irony is that NPR’s coverage (like CBS, WAPO, the LA Times, and countless others) has folded to this bullying by being friendlier to Republicans than ever, which actively helped normalize authoritarianism this last election season. And they are still being bullied.
The $535 million that Congress currently allocates to the CPB covers roughly 1 percent of NPR’s and 15 percent of PBS’s budget. So even calling this “public funding” is generous (especially in comparison to public media funding in Europe), and yet they’re still being bullied.
That’s because this has nothing to do with government efficiency or saving taxpayers money. It has everything to do with authoritarians controlling the flow of information and the shape of modern media, which they prefer to be a combination of right wing propaganda and feckless, obedient, oligarch controlled mush terrified of having too pointed a relationship with the truth.
Filed Under: consolidation, executive orders, journalism, media, public funding, public media, reporting
Companies: cpb, npr, pbs
Crumbl, One Time IP Bully, Hit With Massive Copyright Infringement Suit Over Music In Social Media Posts
from the the-tables-have-turned dept
You may have heard a mantra that is becoming more popular these days thanks to a certain presidential administration operating as a language-destroyer. It goes: “Every accusation is a confession.” The idea behind it is that when someone goes all firebrand accusing others of a thing, you often find the firebrand guilty of that very same thing. Think about all the family values politicians who end up being accused of all manner of infidelity, for example.
You find this in aggressors around intellectual property as well, with some of the most staunch defenders of their own IP rights being accused and/or guilty of violating the IP rights of others. You may recall how Crumbl, a national chain of cookie shops, aggressively sued another cookie shop over unprotectable trademark elements, such as how snugly the cookies fit in a box, or the fact that there were “whimsical drawings” on the packaging. That suit ended in a settlement with Crumbl getting some of the packaging changes it wanted, among other things. Crumbl was a bigger entity with a larger legal war chest to wield, so the trademark bullying worked.
But now the trademark bully has found itself in an eight-figure copyright lawsuit as a result of having used copyrighted music in all kinds of social media promotions.
Warner Music Group, which includes record labels like Atlantic Records and Bad Boy Records, is suing the cookie giant for copyright.
As obtained by Vital Law, the complaint says that the cookie brand “has achieved its success by infringing Plaintiffs’ (Warner Music Group, etc.) copyrighted sound recordings and musical compositions on a massive scale in promotional content posted on social media platforms.”
The suit says that Crumbl used at least 159 popular songs from artists represented by Warner Music Group, including Taylor Swift, BTS, Beyoncé, and Ariana Grande. According to the complaint, Warner Music Group is asking for “$150,000 with respect to each work infringed,” which brings the total request to nearly $24 million.
You can read the complaint for yourself below, but the allegations within it are detailed, the complaint includes specific screenshot examples, and it even goes into details as to how these videos came to be. Aggressive copyright enforcement, rather than companies like WMG seeing the value to their own catalogue that this sort of thing represents, is not something I’m in favor of. However, this complaint reads very, very solid from the standpoint of the law.
Importantly, not all, or perhaps not even most, of the infringing videos were directly created by Crumbl staff. Instead, the suit details out how Crumbl engaged in a partnership campaign with social media influencers to create those videos, curated them, and then reposted or otherwise promoted the videos that included the infringing music.
Crumbl creates and posts its own promotional content on social media. It also partners with “influencers”—third parties to whom Crumbl provides “perks and rewards,”3 including the prospect of “paid initiatives,”4 in exchange for promoting Crumbl. By working with popular influencers, Crumbl draws each of these influencers’ followers to Crumbl’s social media pages and to the Crumbl Videos. Crumbl recruits these individuals—including, upon information and belief, those featured in the Crumbl Videos—to “collaborate” with Crumbl, whereby participants are rewarded for promoting Crumbl products. See https://crumblcookies.com/collaborate. Upon information and belief, Crumbl actively reviews, selects, reproduces and reposts selected influencer videos on Crumbl’s own social media pages.
There are all kinds of other problems with these influencer videos, including some of them denoting the copyrighted music as “original sounds/recordings”, as well as at least some instances of those influencers not disclosing, as required, that there is a paid relationship between them and Crumbl. But for the purposes of this suit, the main point here is that, unless rebutted by Crumbl, the company takes an active role in the curation and approval of these videos that supposedly include copyright-covered works, rather than a purely passive intermediary. And that matters under copyright law.
This one seems pretty cut and dry. Either WMG has its facts wrong in a massive, massive way, or the claim of copyright infringement is legit.
What’s most interesting is how, yet again, we have the IP bully ending up as the IP infringer.
Filed Under: copyright, influencers, promotions
Companies: crumbl, warner music group
Trump Administration Sets Up ‘Military Zone’ At Texas Border To Bump Up Immigration Arrest Stats
from the malevolent-fuckery dept
There will never be enough casual evil with this administration. Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the extrajudicial renditioning of Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum security prison in [checks notes] El Salvador.
Claiming that the mere presence of foreign gang members is an act of war has allowed the DHS, CBP, and ICE to immediately purge people from the United States, even if some of those expelled are actual US citizens. Upgrading his pretend border “crisis” to a “war” has opened up the Trump playbook. While courts try in vain to keep up with daily developments, the administration continues to eject people from this country at an alarming pace.
The latest twist is declaring parts of the homeland to be “military zones.” Last month, the Overton Window was opened, with the Trump Administration declaring a 60-foot wide strip of land on the New Mexico-Mexico border to be a “military zone.”
When that resulted in minimal comment/lawsuits/national outrage, the Administration decided to go large, as Uriel Garcia reports for The Texas Tribune:
The Pentagon has created a second military zone in the El Paso area that U.S. soldiers will patrol as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on people crossing the southern border illegally, even as crossings are at a historic low.
In a statement Thursday, the military’s Northern Command said the latest military zone will be part of the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported that the area stretches about 53 miles east to the border community of Fort Hancock, according to Maj. Geoffrey Carmichael, spokesman for the Joint Task Force – Southern Border.
So, what does this declaration mean? First, it adds US military personnel to the force policing the southern border in this area, which is definitely a police state-ish move — which also happens to be not only the sort of thing Trump likes, but something he’s openly advocating for.
Second, it means that anyone — US citizens included — are subject to criminal charges if they enter this “military zone.” That’s something that’s impossible to avoid doing, since it covers border crossings (where legal border crossings take place) as well as areas US citizens have historically been allowed to access.
Broad claims about “border invasions” and lies about Venezeulan government-backed gang activity are the only things offered in support of these military zones and Trump’s Alien Enemies Act abuses. However, there’s no “invasion” at the border, as anyone willing to merely look at the data can attest:
In March, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported encountering 1,627 migrants in the El Paso sector, which includes all of New Mexico’s border as well as El Paso and Hudspeth counties in West Texas. That’s an 87% decrease from August 2024, when the downward trend began.
There’s nothing happening here, which makes the administration’s claims even more specious than they always have been. And remember what I said about this law forbidding US citizens from entering the recently declared “military zones?” Don’t worry too much about that, white folks. Trump never meant for it to be used against you.
The U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico says a total of 82 people have been charged through Thursday for unauthorized entry into the military’s new buffer zone along the border with Mexico.
[…]
Migrants have been arrested on charges of unlawful entry of military property since at least April 24 – though technically anyone, including U.S. citizens, could face sanctions.
It’s all about the hate. It has nothing to do with national security, border security, invasions, acts of war, or even just bigots being bigots. This is performance art from a guy who can’t handle finger paints who has decided being a bully with the world’s largest bullhorn is what will finally force even those who hate him to bend a knee. The shift towards a police state continues. And at some point, it will no longer just be minorities who need to fear what this country is becoming.
Filed Under: cbp, dhs, donald trump, el paso, ice, immigration, police state
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