Taylor Swift, Evermore Theme Park Dispute Escalates As Swift's Team Countersues

from the swift-response dept

In early February, we discussed an extremely dumb lawsuit brought by a theme park in Utah called Evermore against Taylor Swift, who recently released an album called Evermore. The whole thing is buckets of stupid, with the Evermore theme park claiming that because it released a couple of songs on Apple Music, this somehow puts them in the same marketplace as Taylor Swift. Then there were complaints that Swift's album pushed search results down for the theme park, which doesn't trademark infringement make.

Swift's response dismantled the claims the theme park made, but when on to note that Evermore theme park had actually gone on social media and responded to messages about Swift's album trying to associate the park with the album. In other words, the only potential for public confusion appears to have been generated by the theme park itself.

And now this is going to escalate further as Swift's management company has countersued the park for the unauthorized use of Swift's music.

Now, her company TAS Rights Management has countersued, alleging that the park played Swift songs on its grounds “without authorisation or license agreement”. They allege that the park “blatantly ignored the numerous notices from [US performance rights organisation] BMI and opted instead to continue to benefit from the free and unauthorised public performance” of three Swift songs.

Specifically, TAS alleges that one of the attractions of the park is a section where several park actors perform and sing copyrighted music, including a couple of Swift songs. From the filing:

At a section of Evermore Park known as “the Burrows,” two actors regularly and routinely perform copyrighted songs, including the Works at issue in this action, to large crowds of patrons at Evermore Park. These unlawful musical performances are marketed as a central attraction of Evermore Park. For instance, Evermore Park’s website advertises that visitors can “[c]reate fanciful music” with Park actors and describes one of the Park’s main activities as “Musical Character Performances.”

Also noted in the filing, and perhaps most damning, is that the Evermore park reached out to BMI once this lawsuit became imminent and attempted to get a retroactive license to cover these past performances of copyrighted works. Combined with exhibits brought by Swift's team detailing the several times that BMI has informed Evermore that its use of copyrighted songs was infringing, all of which were ignored by the park, the suit makes the case that the park's infringement was willful. Frankly, it's hard to formulate much of an argument against that assertion.

Which makes it useful to reiterate that all of this appears to be a result of Evermore theme park first filing a ridiculous trademark lawsuit of its own. In other words, they decided to poke the hornet's nest and are now getting stung.

Filed Under: copyright, evermore, licensing, taylor swift, theme park, trademark
Companies: evermore, tas rights management

Utah Prematurely Tries To Dance On Section 230's Grave And Shows What Unconstitutional Garbage Will Follow If We Kill It

from the not-dead-yet dept

As Mike has explained, just about every provision of the social media moderation bill being proposed in the Utah legislature violates the First Amendment by conditioning platforms' editorial discretion over what appears on its services—discretion that the First Amendment protects—on meeting a bunch of extra requirements Utah has decided to impose. This post is about how everything Utah proposes is also barred by Section 230, and why it matters.

It may seem like a fool's errand to talk about how Section 230 prohibits state efforts to regulate Internet platforms while the statute currently finds itself on life support, with fading vital signs as legislators on both sides of the aisle keep taking aim at it. After all, if it goes away, then it won't matter how it blocks this sort of state legislation. But that it currently does preclude what we're seeing out of Utah it is why it would be bad if Section 230 went away and we lost it as a defense against this sort of speech-chilling, Internet-killing regulatory nonsense from state governments. To see why, let's talk about how and why Section 230 currently forbids what Utah is trying to do.

We often point out in our advocacy that Congress wanted to accomplish two things with Section 230: encourage the most good content online, and the least bad. We don't even need to speak to the law's authors to know that's what the law was intended to do; we can see that's what it was for with the preamble text in subsections (a) and (b), as well as the operative language of subsection (c) providing platforms protection for the steps they take to vindicate these goals, making it safe for them to leave content up as well as safe for them to take content down.

It all boils down to Congress basically saying to platforms, "When it comes to moderation, go ahead and do what you need to do; we've got you covered, because giving you the statutory protection to make these Constitutionally-protected choices is what will best lead to the Internet we want." The Utah bill, however, tries to directly mess with that arrangement. While Congress wanted to leave platforms free to do the best they could on the moderation front by making it legally possible, as a practical matter, for them to do it however they chose, Utah does not want platforms to have that freedom. It wants to force platforms to moderate the way Utah has decided they should moderate. None of what the Utah bill demands is incidental nor benign; even the requirements for transparency and notice impinge on platforms' ability to exercise editorial and associative discretion over what user expression they facilitate by imposing significant burdens on the exercise of that discretion. Doing so however runs headlong into the main substance of Section 230, which specifically sought to alleviate platforms of burdens that would affect their ability to moderate content.

It also contravenes the part of the statute that expressly prevented states from interfering with what Congress was trying to accomplish with this law. The pre-emption provision can be found at subsection (e)(3): "No cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section." Even where Utah's law does not literally countermand Section 230's statutory language, what Utah proposes to do is nevertheless entirely inconsistent with it. While Congress essentially said with Section 230, "You are free to moderate however you see fit," Utah is trying to say, "No, you're not; you have to do it our way, and we'll punish you if you don't." Utah's demand is incompatible with Congress's policy and thus, per this pre-emption provision, not Constitutionally enforceable on this basis either.

And for good reason. As a practical matter, both Congress and Utah can't speak on this issue and have it yield coherent policy that doesn't subordinate Congress's mission to get the best online ecosystem possible by letting platforms feel safe to do what they can to maximize the most good content and minimize the least bad. Every new threat of liability is a new pressure diverting platforms' efforts away from being good partners in meeting Congress's goal and instead towards doing only what is needed to avoid the trouble for themselves these new forms of liability threaten. There is no way to satisfy both regulators; Congress's plan to regulate platform moderation via carrots rather than sticks is inherently undermined once sticks start to be introduced. Which is part of the reason why Congress wrote in the pre-emption provision: to make sure that states couldn't introduce any.

Section 230's drafters knew that if states could impose their own policy choices on Internet platforms there would be no limit to what sort of obligations they might try to dream up. They also knew that if states could each try to regulate Internet platforms it would lead to messy, if not completely irreconcilable, conflicts among states. That resulting confusion would smother the Internet Congress was trying to foster with Section 230 by making it impossible for Internet platforms to lawfully exist. Because even if Utah were right, and its policy happened to be Constitutional and not a terrible idea, if any state were free to impose a good policy on content moderation it would still leave any other state free to impose a bad one. Such a situation is untenable for a technology service that inherently crosses state boundaries because it means that any service provider would somehow have to obey both the good state laws and also the bad ones at the same time, even when they might be in opposition. Just think about the impossibility of trying to simultaneously satisfy, in today's political climate, what a Red State government might demand from an Internet platform and what a Blue State might. That readily foreseeable political catch-22 is exactly why Congress wrote Section 230 in such a way that no state government gets to demand appeasement when it comes to platform moderation practices.

The only solution to the regulatory paralysis Congress rightly feared is what it originally devised: writing pre-emption into Section 230 to get the states out of the platform regulation business and leave it all instead to Congress. Thanks to that provision, the Internet should be safe from Utah's attack on platform moderation and any other such state proposals. But only so long as Section 230 remains in effect as-is. What Utah is trying to do should therefore stand as a warning to Congress to think very carefully before doing anything to reverse course and alter Section 230 in any way that would invite the policy gridlock it had the foresight to foreclose these twenty years ago with this prescient statute.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, free speech, pre-emption, section 230, utah

Oregon Court: A Stop So Pretexual Cops Forgot About The Pretext Is A Rights Violation

from the also:-seizure-begins-when-cops-start-barking-instructions dept

Pretextual stops are legal. The courts have said repeatedly that it's ok for cops to stop people for one thing to facilitate mini-investigations about other things. As long as the pretext holds up -- and reasonable suspicion about other things develops quickly enough -- cops can turn a failure to yield into a drug bust or a lucrative seizure.

This is only one form of lying blessed by the courts. Cops can also lie to people they're questioning to drag confessions out of them. That some of these confessions are false or completely tainted by the cops' lying doesn't seem to matter much. Overturned convictions and wrongful arrest lawsuits haven't changed the criminal "justice" matrix much over the years. Cops can lie and courts will say it's ok, apparently operating under the assumption no innocent person would admit to a crime and those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear.

But back to the pretext. Cops can initiate traffic stops to perform deeper investigations. But officers need to remember why they initiated the stop. And they need to provide the legal connective tissue between the initial stop and its eventual endpoint. In this case, the officers involved forgot what they were doing when they first started lying. (via FourthAmendment.com)

And that's what costs them their arrest. This opinion [PDF] by the Oregon Court of Appeals draws some (more) lines in the criminal justice sand. It may only apply in this state, but it's still significant. All sorts of detentions have been treated as consensual encounters by courts, even when it seems clear no regular citizen would feel free to walk away from cops. But this one is different. The seizure -- at least under the state's constitution -- begins when officers make it clear any movement other than what was directed would be considered an attempt to flee and/or endanger officers.

“[J]ust keep your hands where I can see them,” Officer Leininger ordered defendant as he stood next to her car door armed and in uniform, his patrol car with its lights flashing not far behind, his partner, Deputy Gravel, at the driver’s door of the Volkswagen Jetta in which defendant had been riding on the passenger side. She complied. Was defendant seized for purposes of Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution?

We took this matter into full court to consider that question, a question we answer yes.

That's all it takes. And this rule should apply nationwide. The moment cops tell you to stop moving (or to perform only certain motions), you're no longer allowed to move freely. That's where a stop should become a seizure. That's where constitutional rights are affected. If you can't walk away without fear of arrest or violence, you've been "seized."

But that's not the only damning indictment of police behavior handed down by the Appeals Court. There's more. Pretext only counts if you can support it with almost literally anything. These cops couldn't.

In a stop so pretextual the pretext got lost, Gravel and Leininger pulled over the Jetta in which defendant was a passenger.

The two officers were on a "street crimes mission" that evening. That meant they were looking for "narcotics and guns, that sort of thing." These are direct quotes from the officers. They were looking for crime-type stuff. So they randomly pulled over a car and decided the passenger might be a criminal. But they forgot to connect the dots and went right into the rights violations.

Once the vehicle was stopped, the cops forgot all about their fake reason for stopping the car.

After locating and then stopping the Jetta, Gravel and Leininger, who were armed and in uniform, left the patrol car with its overhead lights on and flashing. They approached and flanked the Jetta, with Gravel taking the driver side and Leininger taking the passenger side. Because he had been concerned by defendant’s movements as he approached the car, Leininger directed her to “keep your hands where I can see them.” She complied. Gravel and Leininger spoke with the driver and defendant, obtaining their names, but Tux, the dog attached to their street crimes mission, and his handler, Deputy DiPietro, arrived within 30 seconds of the start of the stop, soon circled the car, and detected drugs. No one gave any further thought to the California stop and too-wide turn reported by the Beaverton narcotics officer, and no one filled out a traffic citation. Instead, as was the point of that night’s “street crimes mission” all along, Tux’s detective work gave rise to probable cause to conduct a drug investigation. The investigation revealed that defendant had in her possession 70.28 grams of methamphetamine, multiple methamphetamine pipes, $3,231 in cash, a large quantity of empty plastic baggies, a digital scale, and eight cell phones. That discovery led to defendant’s arrest and the indictment for one count of unlawful delivery of methamphetamine (charged as a commercial drug offense), ORS 475.890(2), and one count of unlawful possession of methamphetamine, ORS 475.894.

Congratulations all around, I guess. But rights still matter even when cops are pursuing a vague "street crimes" directive. The lower court let the officers slide, saying the running of a drug dog around the car (one supposedly stopped for a minor traffic violation) didn't violate the US Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision because the officers had the dog with them. According to the lower court, speedy constitutional violations aren't violations because the violation was concurrent with the pretextual stop.

That may work at the federal level (although not always…) but it doesn't work in Oregon. Supposed "unavoidable lulls" during pretextual stops no longer work in favor of cops who stop people for one thing just in order to do something else entirely once they have them stopped.

That would seem to require reversal. The trial court denied defendant’s motion based on its conclusion that, on the facts of this case, the deployment of Tux was authorized under the unavoidable lull doctrine. But the unavoidable lull doctrine is no longer a valid doctrine, and, as noted, Tux’s deployment does not comport with the subject-matter limitations that Arreola-Botello placed on traffic stops.

Part of the problem was the officers' decision to treat the passenger as an aider and abettor of the imagined traffic violations. That's where the seizure under the state constitution begins. Both people in the car were approached and both were ordered to ID themselves and put their hands where the officers could see them.

On these facts, it would be easy to conclude that defendant was seized from the very outset of the traffic stop. It is important to keep in mind that not all stops of cars are traffic stops; cars can be stopped for many different reasons. Under the circumstances here, defendant and the driver of the car had little reason to think that the stop was a traffic stop of the driver, as distinct from a criminal investigatory stop targeting both of them. There is no evidence that the Jetta was involved in any traffic violations after Gravel and Leininger started tailing it, so defendant and the driver would have had little reason to think they were being stopped for traffic violations. The officers’ conduct of flanking the car would communicate to the occupants of the car that the show of authority was directed at both of them. Finally, neither officer testified that he had communicated to either the driver or defendant the basis for the stop; instead, each officer testified that he obtained identifying information from the person he was talking to. Under those circumstances, a passenger in defendant’s position would not understand the officers’ show of authority to be directed solely at the driver for the purpose of processing a traffic violation, contrary to the rationale for the rule that a traffic stop does not automatically result in a seizure of passengers.

And the speedy deployment of the drug dog doesn't matter. It was a traffic stop. That the officers happened to have a drug dog with them doesn't change anything. Under state precedent, running the drug dog prior to establishing reasonable suspicion to do so violated the rights of both occupants of the vehicle.

The state has never identified any theory or facts that, for purposes of Article I, section 9, would justify the seizure of defendant for any reason other than safety and lawfully processing the traffic stop of the driver for the rolling stop and too-wide turn. Consequently, because the only plausible justification for seizing defendant in the context of the traffic stop was to ensure the safe and lawful processing of it, when Tux’s sniff extended the traffic stop in violation of the subject-matter limitations recognized in Arreola-Botello, it also unlawfully extended the related ancillary seizure of defendant. Defendant’s own rights under Article I, section 9, were violated by that unlawful extension, so her motion to suppress must be granted.

Telling someone not to move, put their hands where they can be seen, and identify themselves all add up to a seizure under Oregon's constitution. When someone is given no choice but to cooperate with law enforcement officers, they can't truly be considered "free to go." And when cops immediately abandon their pretext to get to the real reason for the stop, more rights violations occur. This decision only affects Oregon cops and Oregon residents. The latter now enjoys more protections than residents of other states do. But these protections are still continuing to evolve. With any luck, federal courts will start demanding more from cops who engage in bullshit stops.

Filed Under: oregon, pretextual stops

Utah's Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Terrible, Censorial 'Free Speech' Bill Is A Disaster In The Making

from the that's-not-how-any-of-this-works dept

A month ago, we noted that a bunch of state legislatures were pushing blatantly unconstitutional bills to try to argue that social media websites can't moderate "conservative" views any more. All of these bills are unconstitutional, and most are just silly. The latest one comes from Utah -- and stunningly seems to have legs as it's been moving through the Utah legislative process with some amount of speed over the last week or so.

The bill, SB0228 from state Senator Michael McKell, is so bizarrely wrong on just about everything that it makes Utah look really bad. It's called the "Freedom from Biased Moderation Act" and already that's a pretty clear 1st Amendment problem. Leaving aside the question of whether or not there's any evidence about "anti-conservative bias" in social media moderation (and, just so we're clear: there is no such evidence), if there were moderation decisions that were biased against political viewpoints that would be protected by the 1st Amendment. For good reason.

Courts have made it clear, repeatedly, that the 1st Amendment bars the government from compelling anyone to associate with speech they disagree with. Yet, that's exactly what this bill, and others like it, are seeking to do. Any law that bars the ability to moderate would violate this key part of the 1st Amendment.

But this bill is even more nefarious, in that it couches many of its proposals in ideas that sound reasonable, but they only sound reasonable to people who are totally ignorant of how content moderation works. A key part of the bill is that it requires social media companies to "clearly communicate" the "moderation practices" including "a complete list of potential moderation practices." That's ridiculous, since many cases are unique, and any company doing this stuff has to constantly be responding to changing context, different circumstances, new types of attacks and abuse, and a lot more. This bill seems to presume that every content moderation decision is an obvious paint-by-numbers affair. But that's not how it works at all. Senator McKell should be forced to listen to Radiolab's Post No Evil episode, which details how every time you think there's an easy content moderation rule, you discover a dozen exceptions to it, and you have to keep adjusting the rules. Every damn day.

Then the bill says that a social media company can not "employ inequitable moderation practices." But what does that even mean? Again, every moderation decision is subjective in some way. When we ran 100 content moderation professionals through a simulator with 8 different content moderation decisions, we couldn't get any level of agreement. Because so many of these are judgment calls, and when you have thousands or tens of thousands of moderators making thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of these judgment calls every day, you're always going to be able to find some "inequitable" results. Not because of "bias" but because of reality.

And how would you even define "inequitable" in this situation anyway? Because context matters a lot. All sorts of factors come into play. Someone in a position of power saying something can be very different from someone not in power saying the exact same thing. Something said after an attack on the Capitol might look very different than something said before an attack on the Capitol. Every situation is different. Demanding the same treatment ignores that the situations will always be different.

Indeed, just recently in discussing Facebook bending over to keep Trumpists happy on the platform we noted that the company was confusing equitable results with equitable policies. Part of the issue is that, right now, you have more utter nonsense and misinformation on the Republican side of the aisle, and if you use "equitable policies" you will get inequitable results. But this bill seems to think that inequitable results must mean inequitable policies. But that's... just wrong.

Next, the bill requires a "notice" from a social media company for any moderation, that includes an explanation of exactly why that content was moderated. Again, I understand why people often think this is a good idea (and there are times when it would be nice for companies to do this, because it is often frustrating when you are moderated and it's not clear why). However, this only works if you're dealing with non-abusive, honest actors. But a significant amount of moderation is to deal with dishonest, abusive actors. And having to explain to each one of them exactly why they're being moderated is not a recipe for better moderation, it's a system for (1) having to litigate every damn moderation decision as the person will complain back "but I didn't do that" even when they very clearly did, and (2) it's training abusive, dishonest trolls how to game the system.

Then, the bill has this odd section where it basically would attempt to force social media companies to hire Facebook's Oversight Board (or some other brand new entity that does the same basic thing) as an independent review board:

A social media corporation shall engage the services of an independent review board to review the social media corporation's content moderation decisions.

While this might be a good idea for some companies to explore, for the government to mandate it is absolutely ridiculous. I thought the Republican Party was about keeping government out of business, not telling them how they have to run their business. It gets even sillier, because the Utah legislature thinks that it gets to dictate what types of people can be on such independent review boards:

The independent review board shall consist of at least 11 members who represent a diverse cross-section of political, religious, racial, generational, and social perspectives.

The social media corporation shall provide on the social media corporation's platform biographies of all of the members of the independent review board.

If this law actually passed, and wasn't thrown out as obviously unconstitutional, I'd love to see the Utah legislature determining if the mandated review board for... let's say OnlyFans, had the proper "religious, generational, and social" diversity...

As an enforcement mechanism, the bill would give the Utah Attorney General the ability to take action against companies deemed violating this law (which, again, would be every company because it sets up a nonsensical standard not based in reality).

This bill is an unconstitutional garbage fire of nonsense, completely disconnected from anything even remotely recognizable as to how content moderation works at social media companies. Utah should reject it, and maybe should get someone to teach Senator McKell some basics about the 1st Amendment and how social media actually works.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, bias, content moderation, inequity, michael mckell, utah
Companies: facebook, twitter

Daily Deal: Project Management Fundamentals Course

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

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

Filed Under: daily deal

Why The Problems With Police And Social Media Both Are Symptoms Of The Same Disease: A Failure Of Society To Actually Help Those In Need

from the a-link dept

I've written in the past, many times, about how so many people keep wanting to blame social media companies, or intermediary liability laws, for what are only a manifestation of larger societal issues. Social media is only serving to make evident what was previously hidden. A few weeks ago, we quoted UK tech policy expert Heather Burns noting that intermediary liability laws were being expected to pick up the slack for a wide variety of other failures regarding mental health care, social safety nets, criminal and civil justice issues and more. Basically, a whole bunch of government failures were leading to problems in society, which were then being seen online. And rather than trying to fix the underlying causes of those, people were... blaming the internet. Burns later came on our podcast and we had a great detailed discussion about this issue.

A few days later, I heard a fascinating interview on NPR's Fresh Air. The interview was with Rosa Brooks, a law professor and human rights activist, who joined the Washington DC police force as a reserve officer for a period of four years (for most of the Trump administration). The interview is really quite fascinating on a variety of levels, but one thing stood out to me -- that actually connects back to the point that Burns raised about how we're expecting the internet and intermediary liability laws to fill in for all the massive failures of society. To some extent, Brooks made the same point about the police: we've undermined so many other social safety nets, that we now expect the police to fill in for just about everything else.

This isn't a new idea, of course. Tim Cushing has covered this point over and over again right here on Techdirt, including just recently, in writing about Denver's test to switch to sending out mental health professionals rather than police on distress calls that did not appear to involve criminal behavior, and how it had been a huge success. For many years, Tim has posted other similar stories, where it's just so dumb to send police to deal with a societal failing -- often in the mental health arena, but elsewhere as well.

In the Brooks interview, she notes how silly it is to have armed cops handling traffic stops. So many needless police shootings involve traffic stops where the cops overreact and shoot someone they stopped for some minor infraction. We could easily separate out the roles, and make traffic enforcement done entirely differently, by traffic enforcers who are not police with guns, but have a more administrative role.

And when you combine all of this, you realize that both of these threads really are about the same thing, from different angles. Society has failed to deal with mental health. It has failed to deal with extreme poverty. It has failed to deal with criminal justice and civil justice reform. And those are all creating messes. But rather than expect the government and public policy to actually clean up the messes -- we're dumping them on social media companies... and the police. And both are leading to disastrous outcomes.

Filed Under: mental health, police, safety nets, social media, society

AT&T Appears Committed To Being Comically Hypocritical On Section 230

from the not-helping dept

Telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T have spent the last three or four years pushing (quite successfully) for massive deregulation of their own monopolies, while pushing for significant new regulation of the Silicon Valley giants, whose ad revenues they've coveted for decades. As such, it wasn't surprising to see AT&T come out with an incredibly dumb blog post last August throwing its full support behind Trump's legally dubious and hugely problematic executive order targeting social media giants and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law integral to protecting speech online.

In it AT&T, a company that just got done having a ten year long toddler moment about how the FCC's attempt to apply some fairly modest oversight of telecom giants was "government run amok," pivots to support having the FCC regulate social media -- despite having no authority to actually do so. Again, AT&T isn't operating in good faith here; the company is simply looking to make life more difficult for Silicon Valley competitors whose ad revenues the telecom giant has always had a weird obsession with. Mike did a an excellent post breaking down the particulars of AT&T's inconsistent arguments.

Granted, AT&T's dodgy arguments have been (not at all coincidentally) perfectly mirrored by the painfully inconsistent arguments of FCC Commissioners like Brendan Carr, who spent the entirety of of the Trump administration acting as an AT&T rubber stamp in human form. Not long ago, Carr tried to use AT&T's bad faith commentary to suggest there was some "growing consensus" that 230 needs to be "reformed" (read: dismantled for no coherent reason):

But there was no consensus. In large part because most sensible people seem to realize the assault on 230 is being driven by a Trumpist GOP whose only real goal is to punish social media platforms for finally taking disinformation and hate speech (cornerstones of the Trump movement) seriously. With Trump's election loss and a shift in makeup at the FCC, the plan to have Trump BFFs Carr and Simington attack Section 230 at the FCC is dead as a doornail. AT&T, however, continued to offer up its two cents at this week's AT&T Policy forum, with CEO John Stankey often stumbling into what felt like satire:

Yes that's AT&T, a company that routinely and repeatedly uses any dirty tactic it can find to disadvantage competitors, giving advice on how to avoid having companies disadvantage competitors. It should be fairly clear that AT&T's motivations in supporting the attack on Section 230 aren't being conducted in good faith. Especially after AT&T got caught using astroturf to try and generate bogus "support" for the effort. Again, what AT&T wants is the Congressional focus off of its broadband monopoly, and on competitors whose video ad revenues it wants to elbow in on. By any measure, it's been a smashing success.

Granted Section 230 wasn't the only subject tackled in bad faith at AT&T's latest policy forum. The company, literally the week after it saw nationwide press attention because a 90 year old had to take out an $10,000 Wall Street Journal ad just to get his shitty AT&T DSL line upgraded, also threw out some platitudes about how its broadband ideologies are dedicated to the "social good":

That's probably going to be a surprise to the countless marginalized communities that have been complaining for years about how AT&T refuses to upgrade low-income and minority communities (aka "redlining") to fiber. AT&T's love of "social good" is also likely a surprise to California regulators, who just this week found the company has a 10 year history of neglecting its infrastructure while increasingly imposing ever skyward monopolistic rates.

There's a lot of things AT&T could chime in on that it has ample expertise in. How to cozy up to law enforcement and intelligence agencies to dodge anything resembling accountability, for example. Or perhaps how to engage in sleazy astorturfing and the use of fake and dead people to generate bogus support for bad policy. Or perhaps some nice insight on how to crush competition, monopolize a US business sector, then lobby state and federal lawmakers into pretending that's not happening? Or hey, maybe a panel on how to ghost write shitty, terrible state-level legislation?

But when it comes like stuff like healthy competition, level playing fields, integral laws like 230, or much of anything else, taking policy advice from AT&T is like turning to Jeffrey Dahmer for lessons in dinnertime etiquette.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, john stankey, section 230
Companies: at&t

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the things-were-said dept

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come from our post about the latest story showing Facebook bent over backwards to have different rules for "conservative voices" on the platform, to avoid accusations of anti-conservative bias. The first place comment comes from bhull242, responding to the assertion that the terms "misinformation and hate" just mean something you disagree with:

How are death threats, advocacy for genocide, the organization of an attack on the nation’s Capitol, claiming vaccines cause autism, claiming that there is a secret sex trafficking ring run by high-ranking Democrats in the nonexistent basement of a pizzaria in DC, claiming that Sandy Hook and other mass shootings were hoaxes, claiming that all/most homosexuals/bisexuals/transgender people/blacks/Hispanics/Jews/Muslims are out to destroy America and/or kill white Christian Americans, claiming that chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay, claiming that COVID-19 is a hoax, etc. not misinformation or hate? How is treating American far-right people and their followers differently from literally everyone else not bending over backwards to create a special rule?

In second place, it's Baron von Robber responding to the more specific invocation of the Hunter Biden laptop story as proof of anti-conservative bias:

Because the Hunter laptop was a joke. Even the reporters for the NY Post wouldn't sign their names to it, it was so bad. It was failed before it started.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we've got two more comments from that post. The conversation about the Hunter Biden story continued, with the original commenter insisting they believed it due to a lack of evidence disproving it, garnering this excellent anonymous response:

Human perception of truth is not binary. You don't have to believe something is true just because you haven't seen proof that it isn't, anymore than you have to believe something is untrue just because you haven't seen proof that it is.

The more common and likeliest scenario is that you don't have enough information to make a good judgment either way, in which case choosing to pretend it must be true because you haven't seen evidence to contradict your bias is just you wanting to believe bullshit.

Next, we've got a comment from Bloof who is clearly, understandably, tired of this nonsense:

So big tech are biased against conservatives, while simultaneously being run by soulless right wing libertarians, prioritising conservative content (Who hasn't gotten a Prager U propaganda piece or Ben Shapiro clip recommended to them after watching actual news?) and downgrading leftleaning outlets, changing their rules to avoid banning conservatives as much as possible and quietly rescinding even the mildest of punishments handed out to anyone on the right as swiftly as they can even though they're still doing the things they were punished for in the first place?

Let's be honest, you will scream bias until the day conservatives are in the same position online as they are on talk radio, left completely immune to suffering the consequences of their online and left wing content is excluded from major platforms entirely.

Over on the funny side, both our winning comments come in response to a different post: the story of Tennessee politicians asking state colleges to forbid student athletes from kneeling during the national anthem. An early anonymous comment took first place for funny, and racked up a whole lot of insightful votes too:

"The flag represents freedom...No, not that freedom...No, not that one either...Okay, okay. The flag represents our freedom to tell you what to do when you participate in our most holy religion: college sportsball."

In second place, it's another anonymous commenter with another reaction:

I was in church the other day and I was shocked, shocked to see so many people kneeling. They knelt when they came in. They knelt whenever Jesus was in the room. How disrespectful. They clearly hate God.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from crade about Oracle helping Chinese law enforcement dig through private data:

The most surprising thing about this article is that Oracle is actually working on something that isn't a lawsuit

Finally, we come full circle back to the post about Facebook making exceptions for conservative content, where Stephen T. Stone offered up a quotation:

“I have become Overton, shifter of windows.” – Zuckerberg, probably

That's all for this week, folks!

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here

from the gaming-like-it's-1925 dept

So far, we've featured ~THE GREAT GATSBY~ and The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game in this series of posts about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. Today, we move on the pair of games that were tied as winners in the Best Remix category: Art Apart by Ryan Sullivan and There Are No Eyes Here by jukel.

Both games were obvious contenders for the category, and ultimately it proved too difficult to choose one over the other, because they are so intriguingly similar yet completely different. Both could be described as "art puzzles", and both remix multiple public domain works, but neither clearly rises above the other.

Art Apart is the more straightforward of the two: it's just a plain old jigsaw puzzle game using a series of paintings from 1925 and a fairly unpolished interface. But while this meant our judges didn't expect much from it at first glance, it proved to be a very pleasant surprise: carefully made, easy to use, employing a great selection of paintings complemented by public domain background music, all put together with an elegance that drew people in and had them solving entire puzzles when all they intended to do was poke around for a few minutes. In the process, they got to spend some time closely examining and appreciating five paintings that entered the public domain this year.

There Are No Eyes Here is the more abstract of the two games, which is fitting since it focuses on a single artist: Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract art. Kandinsky's works made an appearance in one of last year's winners, which explored a series of paintings he created in 1924, and this game picks up the following year with five Kandinsky paintings from 1925. While Art Apart is a traditional jigsaw puzzle, There Are No Eyes Here is about custom-made manipulations of its subject works: the player finds the elements of each painting that can be clicked to trigger animations in which Kandinsky's abstract shapes and forms begin shifting around, eventually unlocking the next painting in the series. Our judges noted that, to the artistically-inexperienced, the game was a perfect invitation to study this seminal artist's work with a level of attention to detail they might otherwise never have given it.

So there you have it: two games, both remixing multiple paintings and turning them into puzzles, both doing it completely different ways. One more traditional, one more abstract, both successful at making the player take time to admire and enjoy some of the 1925 work that now belongs to us all — and both well deserving of the Best Remix award.

Play Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here in your browser on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to both designers for the win! We'll be back next week with another game jam winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1925, public domain, winner spotlight