What Will Be The Impact Of The AI & Streaming Data Language In The New WGA Contract?

Movie Industry

from the consequences dept

As you’ve likely heard, earlier this week the WGA worked out a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on a new contract that ended their months-long strike. By all accounts, this looks like a big win for the WGA, which is fantastic and long overdue.

The AMPTP seemed to recognize it had no leg to stand on and seemed to hope that its best strategy was to “wait out” the writers. That doesn’t appear to have worked very well. The new pay rates and guarantees seem like a big win for writers. The WGA negotiating team appears to have done a fantastic job on those fundamental negotiating points, and it’s a clear (well deserved) win for the writers.

Throughout the strike there was a lot of attention paid to the AI demands (perhaps even more attention was paid to that than the underlying economic questions), and I’m not quite sure how I feel about where things came down on that front.

As some have pointed out, in the end, the AI agreement can be read as a near complete capitulation to the writers, as it says that the producers can’t use AI to write a basic script and then hand it off to a human writer at a lower payscale to clean up. However, it does (and this is a really good thing) allow the writers themselves to figure out how to make use of AI for themselves as a productivity tool, which… makes sense. Empower the writers to figure out if it’s a useful tool, rather than thinking that the AI is going to produce anything worthwhile on its own.

One interpretation of all of this is that somewhere in the ~150 day strike, the producers had enough time to play around with AI and realize that it just isn’t able to replace writers like they appeared to hope it would do originally. As we pointed out here, though, AI can be a super useful tool in the writers hands to avoid having to deal with the drudgery part of the job, allowing them to spend more time on the actual creative act of writing. And so the framing of the agreement, at least, where it’s about empowering the writers to use the tools where necessary seems good.

But there was something that bugged me about the language of it, which writer/director/actor (and Techdirt podcast guest) Alex Winter points out in a new Wired piece: while the agreement is framed in a way that seems beneficial to the writers, it requires them to really trust the studios, as there appear to be lots of ways that they might get around what’s in the agreement. And the producers aren’t necessarily the most trustworthy folks out there. As Alex notes, the studios had been experimenting with AI prior to this and he’s not sure if they’ll just drop those initiatives. It might just be that they won’t tell writers what the AI did.

It’s hard to imagine that the studios will tell artists the truth when being asked to dismantle their AI initiatives, and attribution is all but impossible to prove with machine-learning outputs.

The other tidbit that a lot of people are celebrating is the agreement that streaming platforms will now share specific data on “the total number of hours streamed,” which has mostly been a secret. This was another big demand of the writers, mainly as part of their effort to get some sort of residuals setup going for streaming.

But, as a very interesting episode of the Search Engine podcast recently discussed, in the early days of streaming, the fact that streaming platforms didn’t share viewer data was seen as a benefit to many writers/actors/directors. It meant that they weren’t competing over numbers all the time, and weren’t focused on making something that would appeal to the widest possible audience.

That meant that a much wider variety of content was greenlit for some of those platforms, as they (especially Netflix, but also Amazon) wanted to have a really diverse set of creative shows and movies to entice people to pay the monthly subscription fee to see whatever they wanted. In that scenario, the specific numbers for any particular movie or show don’t matter as much, so long as there was enough diverse content available on the platform that it made users feel comfortable coughing up their monthly subscription fee. Indeed, that actually created incentives for more niche, quirky, diverse, wacky, experimental content, with no one ever needing to be concerned with “how is it performing?”

So, there is some reasonable fear that now that they will have to share the viewer data (privately to the WGA, not publicly), that could change. The incentive structure gets messed up a bit. There will be more incentives to create mass market content, and less ability to just create cool, different content that might appeal to a niche audience enough to get people to sign up for the monthly payment.

Now, a (reasonable!) retort to that is that the “we need all this diverse content!” made sense in the early landgrab days, but perhaps makes a lot less sense with the streaming market reaching some sort of saturation level where users are beginning to bail, and Wall St. is demanding more profits and less investment out of these platforms. If we’re already seeing streaming platforms pulling shows off the platforms for the tax breaks, perhaps this move away from supporting the weird and the wacky and the diverse was already going away no matter what.

Overall, though, it’s nice to see the writers get a strong contract that improves the underlying economics in ways that are important to their ability to make a living writing. I’m less sure that the AI language will be that impactful, though, and I’m curious to see how the incentives on the streaming side play out.

The one other bit I’m curious about: I’m kind of wondering if this experience will cause writers/actors/directors to increasingly look to route around the producers. Yes, for big productions they’re still necessary, but as tools for high quality moviemaking become increasingly cheaper and more widely accessible, I’m wondering if we’ll see a rise in more high quality self-produced works (or community produced works) that are then streamed not through the big subscription services, but elsewhere (YouTube, obviously, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see services like a “Substack-for-video” kind of thing pop up at some point).

After all, the producers can’t screw over the actual creative folks… if they’re not involved any more.

Filed Under: ai, data, incentives, movies, production, streaming, writers, writers strike
Companies: amptp, wga

A Volunteer Army Is Deploying Dirt Cheap Broadband In NYC

Wireless

from the do-it-yourself dept

A few years ago during one of our Greenhouse forums, activist Terique Boyce wrote about how an all-volunteer army had been spending their days deploying free broadband to NYC residents. It’s the latest example of frustrated communities building their own infrastructure after decades of being ripped off and underserved by powerful, local broadband monopolies.

NYC Mesh is the brainchild of a bunch of ex-Charter (Spectrum) employees who got unceremoniously shitcanned after participating in what was one of the longest ongoing strikes in U.S. history. They funneled their angst into a sort of guerilla activist project that installs wireless mesh networking antennas and routers on the top of buildings to deliver affordable (sometimes free) broadband.

CNET has done a good profile piece on the project, which charges users a $50 fee for the installation and a pay-what-you-can monthly donation to keep the network operating. DIY’ers can install the service for free. Subscribers are encouraged to share their connections with other locals. The organization says it never disconnects users for non-payment.

These aren’t the kind of next-gen fiber connections you want to run a business off of, but they do provide essential access to marginalized neighborhoods that can’t afford broadband from their regional monopoly (in NYC that’s usually Charter/Spectrum or Verizon):

“NYC Mesh is not an internet service provider, but a grassroots, volunteer-run community network. Its aim is to create an affordable, open and reliable network that’s accessible to all New Yorkers for both daily and emergency internet use. Santana says the group’s members want to help people determine their own digital future and “bring back the internet to what it used to be.”

Around a thousand U.S. communities have built some flavor of community-owned and operated broadband network, whether it’s something like NYC Mesh, fiber deployed by the city-owned utility, a local cooperative, or a direct municipal broadband build. As always, these communities wouldn’t be deploying their own networks if not for market failure at the hands of regional monopolies.

“ISPs are always trying to maximize profits. We are just trying to connect our members for the lowest cost possible,” says Brian Hall, one of the lead volunteers and founders of NYC Mesh. 

Federal policymakers talk a lot about the “digital divide,” yet routinely fail to address the core reason for it: we turned broadband into a luxury good dominated by a handful of extremely political powerful regional monopolies, hellbent on nickel-and-diming customers trapped by a lack of competition. We didn’t block mergers, we didn’t hold them accountable, and we somehow act surprised at the result.

Instead of directly tackling monopoly power (in fact the folks at the FCC under both parties routinely can’t even admit there’s a problem in public facing statements), we enjoy throwing billions in taxpayer subsidies at said monopolies in the hopes that this time, our “bad luck” will finally change.

Meanwhile, a growing list of communities countrywide have grown tired of waiting for competent federal broadband policy, and continue to take matters into their own hands. Often with zero messaging or policy support from federal regulators purportedly dedicated to “bridging the digital divide.”

Filed Under: broadband, high speed internet, mesh networking, nyc, nycmesh, wireless

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the so-sayeth dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy deploying an overused (and often abused) quote for, in this case, a very apt purpose — responding to right wing denial about Republicans pushing to censor the internet:

Sure all the evidence shows it’s republicans censoring things but…

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984

As for the second place winner, it’s also the first place winner on the funny side. The comment is from Strawb, responding to the federal judge who said drag performances are not protected speech because they aren’t “political” enough:

Ah yes, that all-important, often-overlooked clause of the first amendment: “You have the right to free expression(except if your expression isn’t very political)”.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment responding to the very incorrect notion that non-binary identities are some sort of brand new, artificial invention:

Clearly you have no interest in history… Or other cultures for that matter.

In no particular order:

• The Hijras of India
• The Akkadian Empire (Of particular note is an story about Ishtar being rescued from the underworld by Asu-shu-namir, who is explicitly stated to be non-binary)
• Related to above, the Assyrians (particularly in relation to the cult of Inanna, whom later merged with other deities to become Ishtar)
• The Faʻafafine of Samoa (admittedly contentious debate due to western cultures having quite the culture clash in terms of gender ideology)
• Two-Spirit (umbrella term, used by various native American tribes)

In addition, There is scholarly debate as to whether or not the eunuchs were effectively treated as a third gender… For that matter they also debate (starting with the early Christian Theologian Tertullian) whether or not Jesus was an eunuch.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about California’s version of FOSTA and the misguided belief that all issues can be solved without collateral damage if the nerds would just nerd harder:

We need a permalink article in the same vein as ‘You’re wrong about Section 230’ perhaps titled: “The Nerd Harder Fallacy.”

These bills and the people that cheerlead them suffer from the misapprehension that spam(bots), misinformation, CSAM, sex trafficking, youth mental illnesses and dysmorphias, etc. are really simple problems to solve, but Big Tech refuses to solve them because ‘profits,’ and so we need strong laws to force them to ‘deal with it.’

This is why court defeats don’t faze them. Court decisions on 1st Amendment grounds or standing issues sound like technicalities, not explanations on why their whole concept is wrong.

Asimov wrote “…an uninformed public tends to confuse scholarship with magicians…”
An XKCD comic was captioned “In C[omputer] S[cience] it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible.” Educating and convincing people that these are actually hard problems is going to be difficult, but is the only hope for the open Internet.

Over on the funny side, we’ve already had our first place winner above, so we move on to second place and another comment from That One Guy. It’s also about the judge denying free speech protections to drag shows:

Any day now…

Well I’m sure the usual talking heads always uncomplaining about ‘liberal judges legislating from the bench’ will be swift in their condemnation of this judge as well, I mean this is pretty blatantly a judge applying his own bigotry to suit his desires to squash speech he doesn’t like and to hell with the first amendment so I’m sure they’ll get right on condemning him for such a glaring abuse of power and attack on the first amendment.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with Nimrod and one more comment on that post:

Dress Codes

Since they’ve made attire such an issue, I submit that all elected officials should be required to wear oversized wingtip shoes, bright colored wigs and red rubber noses so that everyone is completely aware of exactly who and what they are.

Finally, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a response to a commenter fearmongering about overpopulation:

This sounds like something a comic book villain would say before trying to wipe out a significant chunk of human life.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: September 24th – 30th

Techdirt

from the that-was-then dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, a district court ignored the real issues when it dismissed the EFF’s constitutional challenge to FOSTA, while we looked at how the law was becoming another tool for silencing people you dislike, legislators were pushing for even more draconian laws under the guise of fighting sex trafficking, and the effort had begun to rewrite history and claim FOSTA took down Backpage. The New York Times sued the FCC over its refusal to adequately respond to FOIA requests about fake net neutrality comments, a bunch of people tried to explain the First Amendment to Jeff Sessions, and free speech warrior hypocrite Jordan Peterson was threatening and filing defamation lawsuits over criticism.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, Universal Music tried to use copyright to kill a wacky mashup comic, only to face a strong fair use counternotice and then back down after realizing it was a stupid, stupid crusade. Spain ratcheted up its anti-piracy laws to even more ridiculous levels with criminal penalties for linking to infringing material, while more and more research was showing that copyright law is based on fundamentally incorrect assumptions. The Brazilian president blasted the US over NSA spying in front of world leaders at the UN, while Senator Leahy was slamming them in congress, and Senators Wyden and Udall introduced a bill aimed at comprehensive reform of surveillance programs.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, China was blocking all online talk about its contaminated milk disaster, while France managed to make it more or less illegal to mention alcohol brands online. TorrentFreak discovered that a big anti-piracy contractor favored by Hollywood was running some porn websites on the side, while a whose who of entertainment and tech companies were founding yet another anti-piracy lobbying group. We looked at the RIAA’s playbook of making sure it owns any new business models, the European Parliament rejected laws that would kick file sharers off the internet, and the Senate passed the bill that would give the White House a new copyright czar.

Filed Under: history, look back

Court: Apparently Vindictive Detainment And Strip Search Are, Yep, Constitutional Violations

Legal Issues

from the being-an-asshole:-almost-always-a-rights-violation dept

You can be a law enforcement officer without being a complete asshole. I know it rarely seems to be the case, but it’s completely possible to command respect while still treating others with respect. And while assholery tends to go hand-in-hand with enforcing the law far too often, the end result of being vindictive and rude is almost always a handful of violated rights.

And that’s where qualified immunity comes into play. The Supreme Court created this doctrine under the theory that it would protect officers from the unintended consequences of split-second decisions made during tense, fast-moving situations they occasionally find themselves in.

That was the intent. But this immunity has been invoked to shield officers from the consequences of actions provoked neither by immediate danger nor time constraints. Instead, it’s something officers assume is more likely than not to excuse them from lawsuits, even when courts find they’ve violated rights. The officers are free to go, so long as they violated rights in a way that hasn’t been foreclosed by precedent.

Sometimes though, the roll of dice goes the plaintiff’s way. That’s the case here in a decision [PDF] handed down by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

It all started innocently enough. On June 5, 2014, 67-year-old Christopher Murphy sat in an Elmira, New York bus terminal, waiting for the bus taking him to his medical appointments. He boarded the bus and, shortly thereafter, police officers arrived and took him off the bus. They arrested him on a bench warrant for misdemeanor offenses related to the city’s property maintenance codes.

So far, so innocuous. Misdemeanor offenses. Code enforcement. Bench warrant. All of this should have been settled quickly, quietly, and without a strip search. Instead, officers handcuffed Murphy to a waist chain and sat him down in City Hall to wait to see a judge. The judge arrived and Murphy’s bail was set at $750. Murphy only had $400 on him, so the judge remanded him to the Elmira PD officers until he made bail or until his next hearing, which was nearly two hours later.

He was fingerprinted, photographed, and processed. Five minutes after that, his girlfriend showed up with the bail money. The officers told her Murphy was now in the custody of the Sheriff’s Department and she would need to post bail at the county jail.

Once at the county jail, Murphy was fingerprinted yet again by Glenn Gunderman, a jail employee from the Sheriff’s Department. Here’s what Gunderman told Murphy initially:

As Murphy was being fingerprinted, Gunderman said to him “[y]our bail’s sitting out there and we’re going to cut you loose” or “[w]e’ve got to cut you loose.” Gunderman also said that
Camilli [Murphy’s girlfriend] — who was attempting to post Murphy’s bail and secure his release — was “making a real fuss, making a real commotion” about the delay. Murphy’s impression was that he would be released “immediately.”

That didn’t happen. Instead, lots of other stuff did, most of it at the hands (and I mean that literally) of Admissions Officer William Washburn.

After about an hour, and about an hour before Murphy was due back in court, the Booking and Admissions Officer — defendant-appellee William Washburn — removed him from the cell. Washburn brought Murphy to a small room and conducted a visual body cavity search, requiring Murphy to disrobe, lift his scrotum, and spread his buttocks.Washburn did not touch Murphy during the search, which lasted around ten minutes.

After the search was completed, Washburn escorted Murphy out of the search room. Washburn gestured to other officers with his thumb and forefinger, which Murphy understood as mockingly connoting that he had a small penis. Murphy was then brought back to the holding cell.

On top of this insult, Washburn added more constitutional injury.

At least two or three times, in the presence of other deputies, Gunderman said “[t]his guy’s bail’s out there. We’ve got to cut him loose.”

Washburn responded: “No. We’re not done with him yet. He’s not going anywhere. He’s going to sit in my jail for a while.” Washburn made comments to this effect both before and after the strip search.

Murphy was held for two hours, and for at least an hour after he had made bail. On top of that, there was the strip search, which was neither supported by jail policy or the Constitution itself. Jail policy said strip searches were only justified if there was reasonable suspicion a detainee might be hiding contraband. Murphy was arrested on a bench warrant for city code violations while waiting for a bus, hardly the sort of thing that suggests the (perhaps hidden) presence of contraband.

According to policy, all strip searches were recorded on a “Strip Search Justification Sheet.” But the sheet Washburn presented to the court showed nothing more than “Per Post 1” in the space reserved for “explanation of the grounds or reasons for conducting the search.” The rest of the form was blank.

Washburn’s testimony — which came in the form of a sworn affidavit (he did not actually testify in court) — didn’t clear anything up. Instead, it was vague, recursive, and written in the exonerative tense.

According to Washburn, the notation “per Post 1” on the Justification Sheet meant that some supervisory officer — he did not identify whom — had authorized the search. Washburn contended that the strip search “was necessarily based on reasonable suspicion” because the Policy required it to be; moreover, Washburn averred, neither he nor any other officer “directed to perform the search[] would have had the discretion to disobey the order.” On this basis, Washburn argued, even assuming “for purposes of this motion only” that he had conducted the search, he “would have lacked discretion as to whether or not to perform” it because it “would have occurred solely based upon a direct order from a superior pursuant to Chemung County Jail policy.”

Huh. The search was justified because jail policy required it to be justified. Settle down there, Perry Mason.

Somehow, the lower court was fine with all of this. The Sixth Circuit, however, not so much.

At no point in this litigation have defendants purported to identify a legitimate penological purpose for the strip search. Furthermore, there was evidence that Washburn’s actions were motivated by malice. He mocked Murphy about the size of his penis. And when another officer noted that Murphy’s bail was “out there” and they needed “to cut him loose,” Washburn responded in a manner that could be understood to exhibit malice by saying that Murphy would not be going anywhere and was going to sit in “my” jail “for a while.” On these facts, a reasonable jury could readily conclude that Washburn was acting not to further legitimate penological concerns but purely out of vindictiveness.

On top of that, Washburn just simply isn’t a credible witness.

First, the record is muddled as to whether Washburn was in fact following the directions of a superior officer. Washburn denies conducting the strip search and argues only hypothetically that if he did, he would have been following orders. […] Washburn does not state that any order was actually given, and no evidence has been provided as to the identity of any officer who might have given an order for the search.

Moreover, Washburn’s self-serving testimony that the entry “per Post 1” on the Justification Sheet meant that a superior officer had ordered the search was not necessarily believable. Second, on this record, a reasonable jury could find that Washburn was responsible, in whole or in part, for the decision to strip search Murphy. The Justification Sheet, which was supposed to set forth the reason for the search and identify the officer who authorized it, does not provide any reason for the search, does not reveal who (if anyone) authorized the search, and provides no detail about how the search was authorized other than the cryptic designation “per Post 1.” Doc.

Contrary to Washburn’s assertion that he did not conduct the search, the Justification Sheet identifies him as the “Search Officer.” […] The absence of reasonable suspicion for the search, Washburn’s failure to properly document the search or indicate which superior officer approved it, the crude gesture he made after the search, and his comments about Murphy sitting in “my” jail “for a while” despite bail having been posted are all circumstances from which a reasonable jury could infer that Washburn was acting of his own volition and not pursuant to the orders of a superior.

The same can be said for the two-hour delay, which was largely exacerbated by Washburn’s apparently animus towards Murphy.

Again, construing the record in Murphy’s favor, Gunderman cautioned Washburn two or three times that Murphy’s bail was “out there” and that he had to be released. Yet, Washburn ignored Gunderman and deliberately kept Murphy in “my” jail “for a while.” Moreover, Washburn subjected Murphy to a strip search gratuitously, without reasonable suspicion, in contravention of the Policy. Washburn’s words and his crude gesture suggest that his actions were not merely negligent but, instead, that he was actively hostile.

And that means these are constitutional violations outside the protection of qualified immunity. Even if they might seem small compared to other rights violations we’ve covered, they’re still violations and they never needed to happen. Instead of being able to smugly walk away from the complaints of a person he vindictively humiliated, Washburn will have to return to court to explain himself to a jury.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 6th circuit, christopher murphy, detention, qualified immunity, strip search, william washburn

Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository

Culture

from the this-is-not-open dept

As a Walled Culture explained back in 2021, open access (OA) to published academic research comes in two main varieties. “Gold” open access papers are freely available to the public because the researchers’ institutions pay “article-processing charges” to a publisher. “Green” OA papers are available because the authors self-archive their work on a personal Web site or institutional repository that is publicly accessible.

The self-archived copies are generally the accepted manuscripts, rather than the final published version, largely because academics foolishly assign copyright to the publishers. This gives the latter the power to refuse to allow members of the public to read published research they have paid for with their taxes, unless they pay again with a subscription to the journal, or on a per article basis.

You might think that is unfair and inconvenient, but easy to circumvent, because the public will be able to download copies of the peer-reviewed manuscripts that the researchers self-archive as green OA. But many publishers have a problem with the idea that people can access for free the papers in any form, and demand that public access to the green OA versions should be embargoed, typically for 12 months. There is no reason for academics to agree to this other than habit and a certain deference on their part. It’s also partly the fault of the funding agencies. The open access expert and campaigner, Peter Suber, explained in 2005 why they are to blame:

Researchers sign funding contracts with the research councils long before they sign copyright transfer agreements with publishers. Funders have a right to dictate terms, such as mandated open access, precisely because they are upstream from publishers. If one condition of the funding contract is that the grantee will deposit the peer-reviewed version of any resulting publication in an open-access repository [immediately], then publishers have no right to intervene.

Accepting embargoes on green OA at all was perhaps the biggest blunder made by the open access movement and their funders. Even today, nearly 20 years after Suber pointed out the folly of letting publishers tell academics what they can do with their own manuscripts, many publishers still demand – and get – embargoes. Against this background, ACS Publications, the publishing wing of the American Chemical Society, has come up with what it calls “Zero-Embargo Green Open Access” (pointed out by Richard Poynder):

A number of funders and institutions require authors to retain the right to post their accepted manuscripts immediately upon acceptance for publication in a journal, sometimes referred to as zero-embargo green open access (OA). More than 90% of ACS authors under these mandates have a simple and funded pathway to publish gold OA in ACS journals.

For those not covered by an institutional read and publish agreement or through other types of funding, ACS offers the option to post their accepted manuscripts with a CC BY license in open access repositories immediately upon acceptance. This option expands this small subset of authors’ choices beyond the existing option to wait 12 months to post at no cost.

Great news? Well, no, because a hefty new fee must be paid:

The article development charge (ADC) is a flat fee of $2,500 USD and is payable once the manuscript is sent for peer review. The ADC covers the cost of ACS’ pre-acceptance publishing services, from initial submission through to the final editorial decision.

That is, if academics publish a paper with the ACS, their institution must pay $2,500 for the privilege of being allowed to post immediately the accepted manuscript version on their own institutional server – something that should have been a matter of course, but was weakly given up in the early days of open access, as Suber pointed out. There is a feeble attempt to justify the cost, on the basis that the $2,500 is for “pre-acceptance publishing service”. But this apparently refers to things like peer review, which is generally conducted by fellow academics for free, and decisions by journal editors, who are often unpaid too. In general, the costs involved in “pre-acceptance publishing” are negligible.

“Zero-Embargo Green Open Access” sounds so promising. But it turns out to be yet another example of the copyright industry’s limitless sense of entitlement. Publishing is constantly finding new ways to extract money from hard-pressed academic institutions – money that could be used for more research or simply paying underfunded researchers better.

This is a personal issue for me. In 2013, I spoke at a conference celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Berlin declaration on open access. More formally, the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” is one of three seminal formulations of the open access idea: the other two are the Bethesda Statement (2003) and the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) (all discussed in Walled Culture the book, free digital versions available). I entitled my speech “Half a Revolution”, and the slides I used can be freely downloaded from SlideShare, along with many more of my presentations.

My Berlin talk concluded with a call to action under the slogan “Zero Embargo Now” (ZEN). Back then, I looked forward to a world where all academic papers would routinely be available under green OA immediately, without any embargo. I’m still waiting.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. This post originally appeared on Walled Culture.

Filed Under: academic research, embargo, gold open access, green open access, open access, research, zero-embargo green open access
Companies: acs publishing

Let’s Go! Supreme Court Grants Cert To Hear Cases About Social Media Moderation Laws In Florida & Texas

Legal Issues

from the big-case-time dept

This isn’t exactly a surprise. Everyone has expected this pretty much from about the time that Ron DeSantis insisted he had a plan to regulate social media, but it got delayed by a year, because it seemed that the Supreme Court just didn’t want to deal with it yet, and punted by asking the White House to weigh in. And weigh in they did, telling the Court to take the case, but not all of it. And that’s now what the Supreme Court has done, agreeing to hear the NetChoice/CCIA challenges to Florida and Texas’s laws regulating social media moderation.

This means that the Supreme Court is finally going to review whether or not states can force websites to host speech they disagree with. That’s important, because the somewhat obvious answer to this question should be “hell no.” And that should be obvious to people across the political spectrum. Tragically, people across the political spectrum seem eager to use this power to force social media to moderate the way they want.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court will not be reviewing everything about those laws. They agreed only to grant cert on the first two questions, about moderation restrictions and the requirement to explain every moderation decision, but not the transparency mandate part or the question about viewpoint discrimination. Here’s the list of questions that they were asked to review, and you can see that they’re skipping over the last two.

That’s too bad, because, as we’ve discussed in the past, the transparency parts are actually really important. And leaving those in place will lead to real mischief. Of course, the Supreme Court can only avoid this issue for so long. The decision not to hear the transparency parts seems like another issue that the Supreme Court is just punting on (as it does), that it will have to deal with later.

Indeed, the failure to review that part is setting up a potentially really interesting fight. That’s because there are social media transparency mandate laws in some very different states. Florida and Texas both have them, but there’s also one in New York and one in California (again, highlighting how both sides of the political spectrum view this tool as a weapon to pressure companies to moderate the way they want them to).

So the Supreme Court is currently ignoring the question about transparency mandates, but with Eugene Volokh challenging the NY law and Elon Musk challenging the California law (both of which I think are good lawsuits), it’s setting up a potentially really weird scenario in which you have all of these converging on the Supreme Court together. And while the 5th Circuit has made it clear it has no problem ruling that certain things are okay “if Republicans do it,” it may be a bit more difficult for the Supreme Court to do that in a case that directly highlights the contradiction. Is it possible for the Supreme Court to say that “Mark Zuckerberg must be transparent, but Elon Musk doesn’t have to?” I mean, sure, anything’s possible, but it seems like a pretty big stretch.

Either way, this is going to be a really big and important Supreme Court case regarding the future of internet regulations.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, florida, section 230, supreme court, texas, transparency
Companies: ccia, netchoice

Ohio Cops Respond To Online Sexual Exploitation Report By Offering To Arrest The 11-Year-Old Victim

Failures

from the when-in-doubt,-target-the-weakest-person-first dept

The most cynical take on this period of historic lows in US crime rates isn’t that we’ve locked up so many people that most crime now takes place in prisons where no one cares (or tabulates) how many criminal acts are still being committed.

No, the most cynical take is this: people just got sick of reporting crimes just to have disinterested cops show up and shrug their way through the victim’s statements, making it clear they didn’t care much about solving the crime and/or providing any assistance to the victims.

Even the crimes cops care about — the ones that make headlines — are crimes cops aren’t all that great at solving. In some cities, the odds are better than a coin flip that the perp will get away with literal murder.

Most law enforcement activities now go where the money’s at: drug interdictment. And they don’t really care about the drug trafficking. They only care how much cash they can take from motorists or how good they look after stumbling into a massive drug haul while trolling the highways for loose cash.

And that’s on top of the massive backlogs of untested rape kits and law enforcement’s general unwillingness to take domestic violence seriously because that would mean placing a whole lot of sworn police officers behind bars.

Calling the cops to report a crime doesn’t tend to result in a flurry of helpful activity from the Thin Blue Line. Even at the best of times, it was ridiculous to assume cops could handle all the crime reports they received. In times like these — when cops are walking off the job rather than subject themselves to the barest minimum of accountability — the likelihood of any reported crime being dealt with, much less solved, continues to drop.

And here we have another data point — one captured on a private citizen’s camera — that shows cops don’t care much about crime that might involve them having to investigate something or, at the very least, help out a troubled parent. This is the sort of thing we’re becoming numb to, as cops tend to view people reporting crimes as nuisances, rather than valued members of the public they’re supposed to be proud to serve. (h/t Robby Soave/Reason)

A concerned parent called the Columbus, Ohio police department at 6 pm after discovering his 11-year-old daughter had been sending explicit pictures to an adult she had met online. The police response was captured by his doorbell camera, making it impossible for the involved officers to claim they weren’t involved or, at best, had been misquoted.

The father expressed his concern to the officers and suggested they might want to speak to his daughter to impress on her the potential danger of her contact with this person. This is what he got from the cops:

“She’s in bed now,” the man said. The audio is briefly inaudible as he opens the door.

“It still happened, though, right?” the female officer said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, the whole point, I just wanted you guys to come over and talk to her,” the man said. “I just want her to realize what this was. I mean, reality is not much I probably can do about it, is there?”

“I mean, she can probably get charged with child porn,” the female officer replied.

“Who, she can?” the man said. “She’s 11 years old.”

“She’s creating it, right?” the female officer said.

The man repeats himself: “She’s 11 years old.”

“Doesn’t matter. She’s still making porn.“

“No, she’s not,” the man said. “She’s being manipulated by a grown (explitive) adult on the internet.”

“Is she taking pictures, though?”

The man dismisses the officers: “You guys have a nice evening,” and starts to head inside the house. “Thank you for coming.”

He turns to say something else. “Are you serious? Have a nice evening.”

Sweet holy fuck. If this were the medical field, it would be malpractice. Neither cop offered to use their vast stores of “training and experience” to speak to the child to explain how dangerous interactions like these might me. Neither officer even bothered to ask if there was any information the parent might have gathered or might be present on his daughter’s devices that might help identify the person soliciting explicit pictures from a minor.

Nope. The cops seemed to feel the best way to handle this was tell a distraught father they could, if they so desired, arrest his daughter for the crime of [checks recording] being sexually exploited by an adult. That’s the best these two could come up with after waiting six hours to respond to an actual, live CSAM report.

Presumably, none of this made its way into the officers’ report on this incident. If it had, one would assume an investigation would have been opened before the parent’s video went viral on social media. Then again, maybe it did make its way into the report and the officers involved (along with the officers they shared it with) all had a good laugh.

Either way, these officers are under investigation now. The PD’s Inspector General is digging into this after receiving several complaints from “citizens” no doubt located all over the internet as a result of this viral video.

Better yet, the PD has put Sexual Assault Unit detectives on the case to identify and locate the person soliciting photos from the 11-year-old — something the responding officers should have done, rather than tell a parent the best way through this might be to arrest his daughter for creating child porn.

Cops aren’t regular people, folks. They will say the stupidest thing imaginable because their brains don’t work like ours do. Even if we thought something like this, we would never say anything like this to a parent concerned about his child being sexually exploited. But for cops, it’s whatever crime is easiest to solve. And, in this case, it the was the “production” of CSAM by an 11-year-old, never mind that it would never have happened if it weren’t for the efforts of the adult on the other end of the internet connection.

Filed Under: csam, ohio, police, sexual exploitation

Daily Deal: Ninja Dragon Storm X 4K Dual Camera Smart Drone

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Your future is here with the Ninja Dragon 4K Smart Drone. It’s super simple to take off and land with an optical flow positioning system that allows you to keep your hands off the controls when flying, especially if you have trouble taking off/landing from high places like trees. This model also has intelligent gesture recognition for some auto functions like following a subject or avoiding obstacles, and a compact foldable body with extended range flight capabilities so that you can experience longer flight time! It’s on sale for $93.

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

NLRB Files Complaint Against Ridiculously Overbroad Non-Compete As An Unfair Labor Practice

Legal Issues

from the non-competes-are-human-drm dept

We’ve been on this soapbox for over 15 years now. There are reams upon reams of evidence that the single greatest reason why California became the innovation hub that it became (in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood) was because it effectively outlawed non-compete agreements in the late 19th century. I have long been a vocal advocate for outlawing all non-compete agreements. The benefit is clear and the data is unquestionable. Non-competes are not just a tax on labor, it’s a huge and damaging tax on innovation.

I was cautiously happy earlier this year that the Biden administration seems to agree, and the FTC has proposed banning non-competes entirely. My concern, though, is that this might go beyond the authority of the FTC itself. I’d much rather that Congress do this and pass a law instead.

In the meantime, though, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), seems to be taking a different path. Back in May, the NLRB’s General Counsel released a memo saying that “overbroad” non-competes could be seen as an unfair labor practice.

“Non-compete provisions reasonably tend to chill employees in the exercise of Section 7 rights when the provisions could reasonably be construed by employees to deny them the ability to quit or change jobs by cutting off their access to other employment opportunities that they are qualified for based on their experience, aptitudes, and preferences as to type and location of work,” said General Counsel Abruzzo. “This denial of access to employment opportunities interferes with workers engaging in Section 7 activity in a number of ways—for example, workers know that they will have greater difficulty replacing their lost income if they are discharged for exercising their statutory rights to organize and act together to improve working conditions; their bargaining power is undermined in the context of lockouts, strikes and other labor disputes; and their social ties and solidarity leading to improvements in working conditions at workplaces are lost as they scatter to the four winds.”

And, now, the NLRB has acted on this. A new NLRB complaint against a spa in Ohio has charged the spa with unfair labor practices for its non-compete agreements. The complaint against Juvly Aesthetics quotes the company’s non-compete agreement extensively (and it’s quite a non-compete, as beyond just barring going to work for a competitor, it also includes a non-disparagement clause, and further bars an employee who does go somewhere else from “soliciting” clients to follow them, including barring them from even responding to client questions about where they’re working now). I mean… what the hell is this:

As part of your initial employment documentation, you signed a nonsolicitation and nondisparagement agreement that prevents you from communicating with the public, clients, or employees of Juvly/Contour Clinic beyond your termination, whether voluntary or involuntary. If you fail to comply with the following requirements, your actions will be considered a solicitation and/or tortious interference in which you will be liable pursuant to the above solicitation clause and any additional damages incurred by Juvly/Contour Clinic.

Do not contact any clients or notify them of your departure from Juvly/Contour Clinic.

Do not respond to any client questions regarding your employment status. You may only refer them to Juvly.com to book an appointment.

Should you choose to pursue work with any prior Juvly/Contour employee, retain all communications as this is considered a solicitation, their destruction is prohibited by law.

Do not discuss any information with any individual regarding your employment at Juvly/Contour Clinic.

Do not make any public statements to any party for any reason regarding Juvly employment, business practices, or treatment information.

That… pretty obviously, goes way beyond even a typical non-compete, so I can see why the NLRB chose to go after such an egregious form of a non-compete agreement. It’s unclear if this will lead to further cases against more typical non-competes, even as good as that would be for the economy.

Still, it’s good to see at least a little more recognition of how problematic non-compete agreements can be.

Filed Under: ftc, innovation, nlrb, non-compete agreements, non-disparagement, unfair labor practices
Companies: contour clinic, juvly