Low Orbit Satellite Companies Respond To Scientists’ Concerns About Light And Environmental Pollution With Even Bigger, Brighter Satellites

Broadband

from the blot-out-the-sun-for-the-sake-of-innovation dept

Scientists say that low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations being built by Amazon, Starlink, and AT&T pose a dire threat to astronomy and scientific research, and that too little is being done to address the issue.

Back in 2022, scientists declared Starlink satellite constellations an “existential threat for astronomy,” noting that the reflection and light pollution (Musk claimed would never happen in the first place) is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. That’s bad.

Worse, perhaps, is that more recent studies have shown that the disposable nature of these satellites means a lot of them will be constantly burning up in orbit, releasing all kinds of problematic chemicals and metals upon re-entry. It’s bad enough that scientists say it could imperil the repairs we’ve made to the ozone layer. That, is also, in case it’s not clear, bad.

In response, companies like AT&T and their Texas-based startup partners have responded by launching hundreds of even larger and brighter low-Earth orbit disposable satellites:

“The prototype satellite, BlueWalker 3, launched in September 2022 and unfurled its array around two months later. The company was quite proud of its size, “Made in TX—size matters!” Avellan boasted on Twitter, when referring to BlueWalker 3. Astronomers, however, were not amused.

BlueWalker 3 appeared as bright as two of the ten brightest stars in the night sky, Procyon and Achernar, through the lenses of different telescopes, according to a Nature study published in October 2023. Before unfurling its array, the satellite had a brightness magnitude of around +3.5, making it visible to the naked eye. However, after deploying its antenna array, its brightness increased by about two magnitudes.”

The justification for these services is that the companies are helping connect the disconnected. But the high price tag of services like Starlink means that the people most in need of connection (tribal, rural areas) often can’t afford them (AT&T has never been known for affordability).

Basic physics and capacity issues mean these services often don’t scale well, inevitably resulting in weird network throttling, caps, and other restrictions you’re not going to see on traditional fiber or even 5G wireless. Such networks are also expensive to maintain.

Low-Earth orbit satellite service definitely has its place. It’s great for niche applications (disaster recovery, war, some scattered rural access for those who can afford it), but it’s not really any sort of broad panacea for U.S. broadband access. In many instances, you’re still better off pushing “future proof” fiber deeper into rural areas and then using 5G or fixed wireless to deliver last mile access. Especially once you factor in the potential harm to the environment or scientific research.

U.S. regulators have taken a mostly hands-off approach to the disposable satellite market for fear of “stifling innovation” with anything even vaguely resembling competent corporate oversight.

There have been some recently-passed FCC rules designed to ensure companies don’t just leave space junk in orbit permanently, but they’ve yet to be meaningfully enforced at scale, and the agency’s authority is in jeopardy thanks to recent Supreme Court rulings designed to undermine regulatory independence.

Barely or badly regulated companies flinging mountains of metal into orbit with an almost total disregard for significant harms to scientific research and the environment? All so a few folks with disposable income can get a hundred megabits per second at their second vacation home or RV? I mean, really, what could possibly go wrong.

Filed Under: 5g, bluewalker 3, broadband, fiber, high speed internet, leo, low earth orbit, satellites, telecom, wireless
Companies: at&t

Yet Another Study Shows ShotSpotter Can’t Fight Crime Or Get Help To Shooting Victims Faster

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the no-reason-to-keep-throwing-money-away dept

This would seem like a truly extraneous nail in the coffin of ShotSpotter deployment in Chicago, but there are far too many city council members still willing to prop up under-performing tech with faith-based arguments. And there’s the company itself, which has shifted narratives (along with redoing the company letterhead) over the past several months in hopes of keeping this part of its revenue stream flowing.

Chicago does have a problem with violent crime, a lot of which involves guns and gunshots. ShotSpotter appeared to be a solution. But, after several years of implementation, the city’s Inspector General’s office decided to look at the data. What it discovered was that the city had been paying millions of dollars a year in exchange for almost no reduction in gun crime or corresponding increase in successful prosecutions of those engaging in gun violence.

Mayor Brandon Johnson decided the city shouldn’t continue to pay for a service that provided no actual services. Several council members — perhaps urged on by ShotSpotter’s own pleas for its continued existence — fought back. These efforts were expected. And, to their credit, some council members even got creative with the city’s parliamentary rules in hopes of reviving the expiring ShotSpotter contract.

As noted earlier, ShotSpotter (now doing business as SoundThinking) fought back against the IG report by claiming the city was using the wrong metric to measure its effectiveness. It claimed the real value was speedier EMS responses to reporting gunshots, not any reduction in crime levels or increase in crime-fighting effectiveness.

It was a weird flex, considering the company deployed most of its marketing muscle (prior to several high-profile failures) claiming ShotSpotter was an essential crime-fighting tool. Now, it’s just a thing that might scramble ambulances faster. But even by that metric (one certainly chosen due to the dearth of comparative data in cities where ShotSpotter is used), ShotSpotter still under-performs. Some people have claimed otherwise, using cherry-picked data. But the truth is ShotSpotter is likely no better at saving lives than it is at reducing crime rates.

Here’s WBEZ Chicago’s Chip Mitchell, speaking to Michael Topper of the Social Science Research Council about the findings of his study [PDF] of ShotSpotter’s alleged life-saving abilities:

From your research, how likely is it that ShotSpotter enables police to solve more crimes or to reduce shootings or other gun crimes such as robberies?

What we’re finding is that there isn’t any evidence that this technology is actually benefiting crime clearance or crime reduction efforts. Because of the cost of these officers arriving slower and not arresting as many perpetrators on 911 calls, we don’t have the benefit of gun-related arrests and higher clearance rates across the city.

That’s pretty much the same conclusion the city’s Inspector General reached a couple of years ago. While ShotSpotter continues to dispute this, this is pretty much the same thing other law enforcement agencies in major cities have discovered when comparing clearance rates to ShotSpotter deployment.

The new twist is this: ShotSpotter isn’t getting emergency personnel to shooting scenes faster. Thanks to the gunshot detection system, scare resources aren’t often available where they’re needed most. And that means ShotSpotter likely isn’t saving nearly as many lives as it claims to.

This is explained in more detail in Topper’s report:

[R]eallocating resources to gunfire detection changes an officer’s time allocation. On one hand, this reallocation could be beneficial—ShotSpotter may frequently place officers closer to locations that foster higher volumes of crime. In this situation, an officer’s time of arrival may be reduced. On the other hand, these investigations of previously unreported gunfire may incapacitate officers from attending to reports of other crimes in the form of 911 calls—a lifeline for citizens in distress. In effect, these calls may suffer from increased response times, as officers are busy investigating ShotSpotter detections. Consequently, this may have far reaching implications given the critical importance of rapid response, which has shown to alter the probability of crime clearance and victim injury. Furthermore, response times may affect timely medical treatment, as emergency medical personnel are required to delay their services until police arrive if their safety is compromised.

Then there’s the next part of this ugly equation: as economist Michael Topper discovered during his scouring of the available data, ShotSpotter’s claims of faster EMS response times appear to have been cherry-picked to present something far more effective than it actually is. At best, the studies ShotSpotter uses to cite are making suppositions based on data sets that are far too small to truly represent the reality of the situation.

A new analysis by the University of Chicago Crime Lab suggests the shooting fatality rates — the odds a gunshot victim dies of the wounds — are about 4 percentage points lower in areas with ShotSpotter. The analysis suggests the technology likely saves roughly 85 lives per year in Chicago. How does that jibe with your findings?

I took a look at this analysis. It relies on a research design known as regression discontinuity. It could be, for instance, a boundary in the middle of a street. On one side of the boundary are ShotSpotter detectors. On the other side, there are no ShotSpotter detectors. So they are comparing the sides of the boundary and finding that ShotSpotter is possibly saving lives. The main assumption here is that nothing else changes across the boundary except for the ShotSpotter detectors. But we can all agree there are many things that could change across the boundary. Just the next block over could be a lot safer. The other thing that this sort of analysis relies on is having a lot of data on both sides of the boundary. And, while I know that Chicago is more violent than many other U.S. cities, the analysis still requires a lot of data — a lot of gunshots and a lot of shooting victims on both sides of this boundary. So, I think the study needs more vetting before we take these estimates very seriously.

Topper doesn’t go so far as to claim ShotSpotter is completely useless. He points out similar research that indicates ShotSpotter isn’t worth paying for suffers from many of the same problems his does: namely, a lack of data. But what data does exist (and can be accessed by researchers — ShotSpotter is a private company that has no legal obligation to turn over this data to researchers or public records requesters) doesn’t have anything positive to say about ShotSpotter’s ability to reduce crime rates or EMS response times.

The financial bottom line is clear: ditching ShotSpotter would free up $10-15 million a year and a whole lot of police officers. And that could mean better response times to reported shootings and EMS scenes requiring a police presence. None of that is guaranteed, no matter how the city ultimately handles the expiring ShotSpotter contract. Having more resources available won’t mean much if officers are going to spend their extra free time doing things like chasing Pokémon or frisking every minority person they come across. But, at worst, taxpayers won’t be shelling out another $10+ million a year to obtain the same level of under-service they’ve become accustomed to since ShotSpotter’s arrival.

Filed Under: acoustic detection, always on surveillance, brandon johnson, chicago, chicago pd, gunshot detection, michael topper
Companies: shotspotter, soundthinking

Daily Deal: 2-in-1 Keychain Wireless Charger for iPhone and Apple Watch

Deals

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

This 2-in-1 Keychain Wireless Charger with 2,500mAh battery will charge your Apple Watch 3-5 times on a full charge. Its magnetic design ensures perfect alignment and it works seamlessly with all Apple Watch series. It features Type-C port for versatile charging options for other devices. It’s on sale for $19.

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

Quick Let’s Watch Everyone Flip Sides On Twitter’s Handling Of The Hunter Biden Laptop vs. The JD Vance Dossier

Content Moderation

from the watch-the-rationalizations-fly dept

It’s been all of [checks calendar] one freaking day since we wrote about Elon Musk’s hypocrisy on free speech compared to the old Twitter regime, and he has to go and make another example.

Twitter, under old management: Briefly limits sharing of (at the time) unverified Hunter Biden laptop story. Elon: “Outrageous censorship!” and possibly a “First Amendment violation!”

ExTwitter, under Elon: Blocks links to leaked JD Vance dossier. Also Elon: “Most egregious doxxing ever!” Hmm…

As we’ve discussed for years now, very few people fully understand what happened four months ago with Twitter and the NY Post’s story about the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Two years ago, we pieced together what actually happened based on information from lawsuits, but also from what Elon released after taking over Twitter (though he did so misleadingly).

In short, Twitter had a very, very broad policy (too broad!) regarding “hacked materials.” We had criticized how that policy had been used to hide news reports before the whole Hunter Biden laptop story came out, warning that the policy was too broad and resulted in blocking legitimate news based on leaks.

At the same time, there were widespread (legitimate) concerns that foreign entities might engage in “hack and dump” efforts to leak critical information, as had happened in 2016. The folks who had access to the details of the laptop had shopped the contents around to multiple news sources who all refused to publish it, including Fox News. Eventually, the NY Post bit on the story, though even the main author of it was so unsure of the story he asked for his name to be taken off the byline. The actual content revealed in the story was… not really particularly interesting or revelatory.

Given the general concerns about amplifying a “hack and dump” campaign perhaps by a foreign adversary, and with no direct communication by the government, Twitter had a quick internal discussion. Then, they decided to limit access to the NY Post’s story under the “hacked materials” policy (as they had done before) until they knew more about the provenance of the laptop content. At that point, users were unable to share the link to just that story.

The internal leaks from the company showed that the decision makers inside the company struggled with how to deal with this, but politics did not come into play. Instead, they noted that given it “is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear” and the risks, they decided to err on the side of caution and limit the distribution.

This did not actually limit interest in the article (hello Streisand Effect), which got way more traffic once Twitter made that decision.

Just one day later, Twitter admitted it had made a mistake, changed the policy, and again began allowing users to share that story.

Following that, there have been years of nonsense. This includes a firm (false) belief that Twitter actively tried to stifle the story for political reasons, that it blocked the story for months, that it knew the story was real, that the FBI and/or the non-existent Biden administration (remember Trump was the President at the time) had ordered Twitter to suppress the story.

An election interference lawsuit was filed… and rejected. There were Congressional investigations from Jim Jordan, which turned up nothing (but which he still spun as exposing conspiratorial actions).

But to many, including Elon Musk and many of his most vocal fans, it is taken as fact that old evil Twitter deliberately censored that story for political reasons, possibly changing the course of the 2020 election (even though literally none of that is accurate).

When his own company released the fact that the Biden campaign (not administration) asked Twitter if it might remove five tweets that showed Hunter Biden dick pics that were revealed as a part of the leak, Elon claimed that this story was a quintessential “violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment,” even as the tweets clearly violated Twitter’s policy against the sharing of non-consensual nude images.

Indeed, many people cite that false narrative as a reason they’re happy that “free speech absolutist” Elon took over to make sure such a thing would never happen again.

Fast forward to yesterday…

Hold onto your hats, folks. This year, there are widespread (legitimate) concerns about foreign interference in the election including “hack and dump” efforts. Over the last month, there have been tons of stories regarding how Iran had hacked Trump officials, obtained a bunch of things, and shopped them around to a variety of media sources, who all refused to publish it.

Eventually, one dipshit decided to publish at least some of it: the Trump internal dossier on JD Vance. In this case, the dipshit was Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter, known for his terrible reporting as well as his willingness to beg for attention on social media.

The actual content revealed in the story was… not really particularly interesting or revelatory. It’s a dossier of all the reasons why Vance might be a bad VP choice. There’s little that’s surprising in there.

So, the scenario has an awful lot of similarities to the Hunter Biden laptop story, right? Almost eerily so. But this time, Elon Musk is in charge, right? And so, obviously, he left this up, right? And he let people share it, right? Free speech absolutism, right? Right? Elon?

Hahaha, of course not.

And if you try to share the link to Ken’s article? According to multiple people who have tried, it does not work. Here’s one screenshot of a few that I saw showing what happens if you try:

You also can’t share the link via DMs.

Another user on Twitter notes that their own account was temporarily suspended not even for tweeting out a link to the Vance dossier story, but for tweeting a link to Ken’s post about getting suspended!

ExTwitter Safety claims Ken’s is a “temporary” suspension (just like Twitter’s temporary limit on the NY Post — though in that case they didn’t suspend the account as they did here). And the reason given is that the dossier supposedly revealed Vance’s physical addresses and “the majority of his Social Security number.”

As opposed to, say, Hunter Biden’s dick pics.

That said, the link posted to ExTwitter did not, in fact, reveal the addresses or partial SSN. It linked to an article that Ken wrote about the dossier, which then did include a link to the file, but it’s still two clicks away from ExTwitter.

Ken points out that this particular info (Vance’s addresses and partial SSN) is widely available online or via data brokers. That still seems a bit iffy, and it feels like he could have easily redacted that info, but chose not to. There are plenty of cases that many people consider to be “doxxing” that are little more than getting info from a data broker.

Elon, though, is insisting that this was “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen.” Which is laughably untrue.

And, of course, unlike the old Twitter regime, which made no public displays of support for presidential candidates, Elon has publicly endorsed Donald Trump, become one of the largest donors to his campaign, and turned ExTwitter into a non-stop pro-Trump promotional media site. So, unlike the old Twitter regime, Elon has made it clear that he absolutely wants to use the site to elect his preferred candidate and would have political reasons for trying to suppress this marginally embarrassing dossier.

So… is Jim Jordan going to launch an investigation and hold hearings, like he did about Twitter and the NY Post over Hunter Biden’s laptop? Is he going to haul Elon before Congress and demand he explain what happened? Will Elon release the “X-Files” revealing the internal discussions he and his employees had over banning Ken and blocking the sharing of the link?

Or nah?

Already we’re seeing Musk’s biggest fans trying to come up with justifications for how these stories are totally different. But they’re literally not. On basically all important details they’re effectively identical.

Again, I said at the time (and even before the Biden laptop story came out) that I thought Twitter’s policy was bad and they were wrong to temporarily block the sharing of the link. I also think that Elon is wrong to suspend Ken and block the sharing of the links as well.

But watch the rank hypocrisy fly. The old Twitter regime at least struggled with this decision internally (later revealed by Elon) and recognized that they were making a quick call based on imperfect information that they quickly reversed course on and apologized.

Somehow, I doubt Elon’s going to do any of that.

Filed Under: content moderation, elon musk, hunter biden, hunter biden laptop, jd vance, ken klippenstein
Companies: twitter, x

Meta, Deutsche Telekom Standoff In The EU Is Something To Keep An Eye On

Broadband

from the pay-me-twice-for-doing-nothing dept

Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to force internet companies to pay them billions of extra dollars for no coherent reason. These efforts, routinely dressed up as serious adult policy, usually involve false claims that tech companies are getting a “free ride” on the Internet, and should therefore give telecoms billions of dollars. You know, just because.

The effort has been particularly heated of late in the EU, where former EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, a former CEO of France Telecom, had been pushing a plan to effectively tax tech companies on behalf of telecoms (already being paid an arm and a leg for bandwidth by tech companies and consumers alike).

It’s bad faith bullshit all the way down, and it’s an extension of the decades old net neutrality wars, which also involved predatory telecom monopolies hungrily eyeing the fat revenues of tech service companies, then concocting elaborate, creative new ways to redirect a lot of that money to themselves.

This month there’s been a notable standoff between Meta and one of the biggest EU ISPs, Deutsche Telekom (DT). DT has been demanding an end to traditional, reciprocally beneficial, free transit peering relationships in favor of charging Meta extra money simply to reach DT customers.

In a blog post explaining the stand off, Meta (correctly) refused to play along, and says it’s now striking a new partnership with a third-party transit provider:

“Following months of discussion, we are surprised and disappointed by the breakdown in negotiations with Deutsche Telekom. Meta has taken significant steps to keep its apps available directly through Deutsche Telekom, but given the court ruling concerning the unprecedented and unacceptable fees demanded, we are now routing our network traffic through a third-party transit provider, instead of exchanging traffic directly with Deutsche Telekom.”

Meta routinely operates in bad faith on a litany of issues, but this is one policy standoff in which they’re absolutely in the right.

You might recall a similar standoff between Verizon and Netflix, which resulted in Netflix users seeing streaming video slowdowns because Netflix initially refused to play along. The goal, again, is to eliminate industry standard free peering arrangements and replace them with new, barely regulated systems in which everybody pays telecoms more money than ever.

The shift is particularly problematic if you’re a company that lacks the budget or political influence of companies like Google, Netflix, or Meta.

Net neutrality expert and Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick warns in a blog post that the next step for DT is to specifically punish Meta by slowing all traffic over that third party transit route, making Meta-owned services work more poorly for potentially millions of EU residents:

“If DT does this, then millions of DT internet subscribers could have WhatsApp messages that won’t load, Instagram stories that stutter, and Facebook updates that don’t update. 

Ultimately, the result of this showdown could determine whether the internet will pivot to a disastrous model where every app and site has to pay every ISP in the world.”

Some groups have warned that the EU’s telecom industry’s plan to tax Big Tech giants would simply drive up online costs for consumers, given Big Tech companies would just pass these added costs on to users already paying an arm and a leg for bandwidth. Other organizations have warned the internet could become inherently less stable as online companies try to reroute their traffic around such fees.

And in South Korea, where telecoms convinced regulators to implement a similar tax on Big Tech companies, ISPs have taken to suing Netflix simply because Squid Game was popular with consumers and that resulted in a bandwidth consumption spike. The added costs of simply existing literally drove Twitch out of the country late last year because they couldn’t afford all the additional telecom surcharges.

This idea that big ISPs are inherently owed a cut of the revenues of services traveling over their networks is what launched the net neutrality wars around the world several decades ago, when AT&T insisted Google “wouldn’t ride our pipes for free.” It’s evolved in dumber and dumber ways ever since.

These modern incarnations are easily identifiable. They usually begin with a false claim that tech companies (be it Google, Netflix, or Meta) are getting a “free ride” on the internet, despite the fact they (and their customers) spend billions of dollars on bandwidth, hosting, transit, CDN, and other telecom costs. It is, as van Schewick observes, simply an effort by telecoms to “double dip”:

“Like all of Europe’s biggest telecom companies, DT wants to get paid twice for accepting and delivering the data its customers request – once by its own internet service customers, and again by the websites and services these customers want to use. “

Telecoms have gotten the press and some policy makers to portray these efforts as good faith reforms, usually by claiming that if you let them impose broad new nonsensical taxes on internet services, it will somehow improve broadband deployment and make life better for everyone.

But in broken, heavily monopolized telecom markets (be it the U.S. or EU) it doesn’t work like that.

Tech companies pass on the new costs to consumers, raising the costs of internet-based services. Telecoms and investors pocket the proceeds while charging captive customers ever-higher rates, because they can. And everything generally becomes more unstable as companies try to navigate around the new, pointless, bureaucratic logjams created by telecoms’ insatiable need to double dip.

Trump’s chosen FCC pick Brendan Carr, who has been angling for FCC chiefdom for most of the last decade (mostly through whining about Chinese-owned social media companies he doesn’t regulate on cable TV), will absolutely be making such a system a top policy priority should Trump retake the White House in November (he wrote a Project 2025 chapter about it).

It’s all a pointless, costly, giant mess you’d like to think U.S. policymakers could competently avoid.

Filed Under: eu, sender pays, telecom, transit
Companies: deutsche telekom, meta

Gates Foundation Shows That ‘Gold Open Access’ Was A Mistake, And ‘Diamond Open Access’ Is The Future

Culture

from the proper-open-access dept

The Gates Foundation is one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is the second largest charitable foundation, and as of 31 December 2023 had an endowment of around $75.2 billion. That makes a shift in its publishing policy hugely important.

An article in Chemical & Engineering News explains that hitherto the Gates Foundation has paid the publication charges of work carried out using its grants, provided the final version is available freely. That’s what is known as gold open access. A number of Walled Culture articles have explained why that approach has failed. In March of this year, the Gates Foundation announced a “refresh” of its open access policies to “address ongoing challenges and advance systemic change in scholarly publishing”. From January 2025 the Foundation will be:

Requiring preprints and encouraging preprint review to make research publicly available when it’s ready. While researchers and authors can continue to publish in their journal of choice, preprints will help prioritize access to the research itself as opposed to access to a particular journal.

Discontinuing publishing fees, such as APCs [Article Processing Charges]. By discontinuing to support these fees, we can work to address inequities in current publishing models and reinvest the funds elsewhere.

Along with many other open access supporters, Walled Culture has been advocating a move to preprints as the primary publication medium for research. But the approach is not without its problems, notably in terms of the risk that bad players can use them to disseminate flawed research or intentional misinformation. In an attempt to deal with that issue, a new “verified preprint platform”, VeriXiv, has been launched by the Gates Foundation together with F1000, part of the Taylor & Francis group:

While preprints make the latest research available more quickly, their growing use in sharing findings ahead of peer review has added to concerns about the potential for disseminating misinformation. To support greater research integrity, VeriXiv will conduct rigorous pre-publication checks. Each VeriXiv submission will undergo twenty ethics and integrity checks to assess a range of issues, including plagiarism, image manipulation, author verification, and competing interests.

In addition, open research transparency checks will also check whether the data is available in an appropriate repository and whether methods have been included to support reproducibility. Each preprint will have clear labeling so that readers know the level of verification conducted on the article and which levels have been passed.

Preprints are a key element of diamond open access, where there are no charges for either the reader or the researcher. The momentum behind what was once a fringe approach seems to be growing. Last year, the open access group cOAlition S made an important move towards diamond open access based around preprints. In July of this year, the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance was announced at a UNESCO event. The switch by the Gates Foundation from supporting gold open access to requiring preprints is another important signal that diamond open access is the way forward for the widespread, free dissemination of academic knowledge – something that copyright has prevented for too long.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.

Filed Under: diamond open access, gold open access, open access, preprints, research
Companies: gates foundation, verixiv

Trump Loses Copyright Suit Over ‘Electric Avenue’ 2020 Campaign Video In Summary Judgement

Copyright

from the and-then-we'll-take-it-higher dept

Here’s a phrase I have to use but hate doing so: let’s go back to the 2020 presidential campaign. During what was essentially a multi-year advertisement for just how absolutely petty, stupid, and disingenuous a political system could possibly be, the 2020 American presidential election also featured a video sent out by the Trump campaign on social media that resulted in a copyright infringement lawsuit. You can see below a news clip that features the video, which is an admittedly fairly funny poke at his then rival, Joe Biden, but which also uses a healthy chunk of the Eddy Grant song Electric Avenue within it.

The Trump campaign used the music without permission. That appears to have pissed off Eddy Grant, who filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Trump campaign as a result.

Now, it’s important to point out that this is unlike many other infringement claims we’ve seen in the past and in the present from bands and musical artists unhappy about Trump using their music at campaign rallies and events. As we’ve pointed out before, those uses are often covered by licenses that the venues themselves have to play the music. Again, that’s not always the case, and in fact some of those licenses give artists an opt-out for specific uses by campaigns, but that’s not the norm.

In this case, however, there is no defending this through venue licenses. The song wasn’t played in a venue at all. It was played in a campaign video tweeted out by the campaign. As a result, the Trump campaign’s defense was instead fair use. And, as I detailed in my original post above, the fair use defense in this case is fairly laughable.

The judge overseeing the case apparently agrees, having found for Eddy Grant on summary judgement. The court went through the four factors test for fair use and found that every one of them was in favor of Grant and against fair use. The use of the song could encourage other political campaigns to make use of Grant’s work unlicensed, impeding his ability to market his song in that way. The song played for the majority of the video, making it an important factor in the overall video production. The song is obviously a creative work. And on the topic of transformation, well:

The court first found that Trump’s use did not “transform” Grant’s original work. In its words, “the video is best described as a wholesale copying of music to accompany a political campaign ad,” . . . “[T]he video’s creator did not edit the song’s lyrics, vocals or instrumentals at all.”

Fair use as a defense here was always going to be a longshot. And while I don’t make a habit of agreeing with creative artists in stories on Techdirt when it comes to infringement claims, this one is fairly straight forward. Trump made a campaign video, used an artist’s song for it, and didn’t bother to license it or get permission.

Now because this is 2024, I’m quite sure the judge will be accused of being “woke”, or a “communist”, or maybe a feline-consuming person of some national origin or another. Explain it away however you like; Donald Trump’s campaign committed copyright infringement, full stop.

Filed Under: campaign video, copyright, donald trump, eddy grant, electric avenue, fair use

DoNotPay Has To Pay, After FTC Dings It For Lying About Its Non-Existent AI Lawyer

Legal Issues

from the robot-lawyer-malfunctioned-when-confronted-with-the-ftc dept

Remember “DoNotPay”? They were the company, run by Joshua Browder, claiming to be the “world’s first robot lawyer.” There were all sorts of sketchy things going on, some of which dated back to “DoNotPay’s” earliest days. But things really came to a head last year when legal investigator extraordinaire, Kathryn Tewson, started digging in and finding an awful lot of questionable things going on.

In May of last year, we noted that the FTC had put out a notice which we interpreted as directly targeted at DoNotPay’s myriad false and misleading claims. It looks like we were right.

On Wednesday, the FTC announced actions taken against five different companies making misleading claims about AI, including DoNotPay.

An FTC complaint claims U.K.-based DoNotPay told people its online subscription service acts as “the world’s first robot lawyer” and an “AI lawyer” by using a chatbot to prepare “ironclad” documents for the U.S. legal system. The complaint also says DoNotPay told small businesses its service could check their websites for law violations and help them avoid significant legal fees. In fact, according to the complaint, DoNotPay’s service didn’t live up to the hype. You’ll have 30 days to comment on a proposed settlement between FTC and DoNotPay, which requires DoNotPay to stop misleading people, pay $193,000, and tell certain subscribers about the case.

The details of the complaint are pretty damning.

Respondent described the Service as “the world’s first robot lawyer” and an “AI lawyer” capable of performing legal services such as drafting “ironclad” demand letters, contracts, complaints for small claims court, challenging speeding tickets, and appealing parking tickets. Through a chatbot, subscribers would submit prompts or queries to an AI “robot lawyer” that purportedly operated like a human lawyer, including by applying the relevant laws to subscribers’ particular legal and factual situations; relying on legal expertise and knowledge to avoid potential complications, such as statutes of limitations, compensation limits, and jurisdiction, when generating legal demand letters or initiating cases in small claims court; and detecting legal violations on subscribers’ business websites and providing advice about how to fix them. In fact, the DoNotPay Service was not designed to operate like a human lawyer in these respects.

The complaint confirms basically everything that Tewson reported, and based on the timing of the investigation, it sure looks like the FTC was inspired by Tewson’s work.

They also point out that, beyond just misrepresenting the whole “AI lawyer” thing, Browder and DoNotPay inflated a user-generated comment on a site for kids that the LA Times ran as an LA Times review of the service. Really.

The donotpay.com website has prominently featured a quote that purports to come from The Los Angeles Times newspaper and states, “What this robot lawyer can do is astonishingly similar – if not more – to what human lawyers do.” Compl. Exh. F.

In fact, the foregoing quote derives from a high-schooler’s opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times’ High School Insider website, a user-generated content platform for young people.

I dunno, but it sure feels like Joshua Browder has a problem with being honest.

The complaint goes on to detail a whole bunch of claims DoNotPay made about legal services its system could offer, including suggesting it was specialized in legal expertise and could help you avoid having to hire a lawyer. But, the FTC notes:

DoNotPay did not test whether the Service’s law-related features operated like a human lawyer. DoNotPay has developed the Service based on technologies that included a natural language processing model for recognizing statistical relationships between words, chatbot software for conversing with users, and an Application Programming Interface (“API”) with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. None of the Service’s technologies has been trained on a comprehensive and current corpus of federal and state laws, regulations, and judicial decisions or on the application of those laws to fact patterns. DoNotPay employees have not tested the quality and accuracy of the legal documents and advice generated by most of the Service’s law-related features. DoNotPay has not employed attorneys and has not retained attorneys, let alone attorneys with the relevant legal expertise, to test the quality and accuracy of the Service’s law-related features.

That all seems a bit important? Maybe?

Then there’s the “diagnostic feature” that DoNotPay offered, where it said it would scan your business website and see if you violated any federal or state laws based on your email address. But, as the FTC notes:

DoNotPay’s website diagnostic tool did not, in fact, analyze a consumer’s small business website for hundreds of federal and state law violations based solely on an email address.

Also, apparently the State Bar of California had investigated DoNotPay in late 2021 and accused it of unauthorized practice of law. According to the complaint, Browder agreed to change their marketing behavior:

On or about January 21, 2022, the Chief Executive Officer for DoNotPay promised the California Bar that DoNotPay would no longer represent that the DoNotPay Service was the world’s first robot lawyer

Take a wild guess how that went?

Nevertheless, DoNotPay continued to make this representation.

On June 15, 2023, the California Bar sent a cease-and-desist notice alleging the DoNotPay Service amounted to engagement in the unauthorized practice of law. On the same day, Respondent affirmed that it had removed: a) all mentions of “robot lawyer” from the DoNotPay website and related social media; b) all products on the DoNotPay website that allowed consumers to generate legal documents; and c) any mention of “sue anyone” from the DoNotPay website. Notwithstanding these representations to the California Bar, the DoNotPay website and social media account continued to promote the Service as the “World’s First Robot Lawyer” and advertise “sue anyone” claims

Still, having to pay $193,000 seems like small potatoes for a company that has raised over $25 million from some big names like Andreessen Horowitz and DST Global (oh and convict Sam Bankman-Fried).

The company does have to alert a bunch of users to this settlement as well which might reasonably cause customers to think twice about doing business with such a problematic company.

But also, the settlement includes a consent order, which says DoNotPay cannot keep misrepresenting its products. And this is often how companies get into serious trouble with the FTC. First they do something bad and get a slap on the wrist that contains a consent decree. And then they violate the consent decree. At that point the FTC can come down on them hard.

Anyway, the company is no longer pitching itself as an AI robot lawyer, but rather your “AI consumer champion.”

Would you trust a company that just got rung up for lying to the public by the FTC about its AI capabilities to be your “AI consumer champion”? I wouldn’t.

Filed Under: ai, ai lawyer, ftc, joshua browder, kathryn tewson, robot lawyer
Companies: donotpay