For half a decade now, we have followed along with the war that Nintendo decided to wage on its own fans’ celebration of what is admittedly great music coming from Nintendo games. Starting in 2019, Nintendo has continuously ramped up its war efforts, particularly against YouTubers and their accounts. It started with the takedowns of a few hundred videos, before that exploded into the thousands. Both those YouTubers and fans alike have pointed out throughout all of this that much of this music remained entirely unavailable to fans through any sort of legit means.
That led to some speculation over the past few years that Nintendo was planning to release this music through some official means and was clearing the way for that release. Well, it turns out that speculation was somewhat true, with Nintendo recently announcing its Nintendo Music mobile app. Here’s the announcement video from, ironically, YouTube.
Now, some outlets, and even some fan feedback, have had some positive things to say about the app. Much of that positivity is geared towards the slick, minimalist nature of the UX. You know, the exact thing that Nintendo is quite famously good at pulling off.
But much of the other reaction is roughly what I’ve been saying about this for years. The music catalogue is a fraction of what was available via YouTube. Much of the rest of the video game industry has already released its music via streaming services like Spotify, or else they have just let the YouTube videos be, noting that they serve as a multiplying force for bringing and keeping fans of their games top of mind.
In other words, Nintendo didn’t have to build its own dedicated app for fans to enjoy its music. There are professional platforms out there already that know precisely how to do that and have tons of subscribers already. All Nintendo had to do was relinquish a modicum of control over its IP.
Look, I love video game music. I’ve been writing here about it for years and listening to it for longer than that. That Nintendo decided to build a legit method for streaming some of its excellent video game music is a good thing in and of itself.
But street-sweeping away music content from YouTube and other places in order to do so is a huge miss.
RT, formerly Russia Today, has appeared a few times here on Techdirt. As the long article about RT on Wikipedia explains, the TV channel has morphed from an attempt to create a state-supported international news network along the lines of the BBC or France 24, but one that offered a Russian perspective on the world, to something that is now regarded as little more than a mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda (disclosure: I was interviewed by Russia Today a couple of times over a decade ago.).
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RT is now banned in many Western nations, but still commands audiences in other countries and online. As a result, considerable resources are still expended on RT and on the programs it produces. It is also continuing to explore new ways to reach people, and perhaps to save money, judging by a story on the independent Russian media site Agentstvo. It reports on statements made by RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan (original in Russian, translation by DeepL):
A ‘significant proportion’ of RT’s TV presenters do not exist, they have been created by artificial intelligence, Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state channel, told TVC [TV Centre, a channel owned by the city administration of Moscow]. According to the propagandist, the artificial presenters also run their own social networks.
‘We have a significant proportion of TV presenters who do not exist. They don’t exist, they are artificial completely. This person doesn’t exist, and never did. This face never existed, we generated the voice, everything else, the character,’ the RT chief said.
One of the non-existent presenters had invited people to subscribe to her Telegram channel, promising the first readers [of the Telegram channel] amnesty ‘when we come to power,’ Simonyan retold the joke of her ‘colleague.’
Of course, with the head of a propaganda channel, there is always the risk that such statements are just more propaganda designed to mislead. But using AI-generated presenters makes a lot of sense here. They will never go off script, as humans might; the script that they read can be tweaked endlessly without the presenter getting tired or bored; and the spoken words can even be translated into the other languages in which RT broadcasts, read out by the same presenter with different mouth movements, or by a completely different one. A later comment from Simonyan seems to confirm this is happening:
RT has given up on broadcast editors; now images are selected or created by AI, Simonyan noted. This makes the process much cheaper, she explained. AI is involved in the dubbing of a new film about the Great Patriotic War [Russia’s name for the Eastern Front in World War II], using it to re-translate Vladimir Putin’s words into other languages, Simonyan said.
Journalism, as the ‘dark one’ of professions, will eventually disappear, like the coachmen did, the propagandist believes.
Moving towards a completely virtual, AI-generated network, complete with AI presenters and editors, would raise huge questions if the plan were to present conventional news reporting or features, with the underlying aim of presenting facts and the truth (whatever that means). But as a network that is designed to broadcast Russian propaganda, those questions are irrelevant. All that matters for Simonyan and her ultimate boss, Vladimir Putin, is whether the propaganda works, and if it can be generated in larger volumes, and more cheaply. Unfortunately, as is evident from everyday experience online, AI-generated fakes and lies do indeed work remarkably well. What is less clear is if other broadcasters, especially state-funded ones, will be able to resist the pressure to start using more AI, at least for backroom editorial functions, but maybe even for presenters, in order to compete in this brave new (artificial) world.
Donald Trump just took his war on the free press to a new level of absurdity, filing an FEC complaint against the Washington Post for — wait for it — promoting its own reporting. Apparently, Bezos’ attempt to appease the MAGA crowd with his endorsement cop-out didn’t do the trick.
We had warned Jeff Bezos that his decision to capitulate-in-advance and block the Washington Post from publishing a Kamala Harris endorsement would lead Trump to push for even more. And now it’s here. The complaint claims that the WaPo’s decision to run ads promoting its reporting was “illegal corporate in-kind contributions” to Harris’ campaign.
Really.
And, yes, we just covered another of Donald Trump’s blatant attacks on the First Amendment with his crazy lawsuit against CBS over how it edited a 60 Minutes interview that the show did with Harris. But this story is more about Bezos, and the utter stupidity of thinking that capitulating to Trump and blocking the endorsement would magically make the MAGA world “trust” the Washington Post.
The FEC complaint is ridiculous on multiple levels. The crux of his complaint is based on a report in Semafor, that the Washington Post was doing paid promotion of some of its articles about the campaign, and tended to promote “neutral” stories about Harris, but “critical” stories about Trump. Really.
The Washington Post recently announced it would not endorse a presidential candidate, a decision the Post’s owner defended on the basis that “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election.”
Yet, on October 30, 2024, the news website Semafor published a report titled “Washington Post pays to boost stories critical of Trump as subscribers flee.” The Semafor article discloses that, starting “on Monday,” October 28, 2024—just over a week before Election Day—The Washington Post has “aggressively ramped up its paid advertising campaign, boosting dozens of articles related to the election.”
As Semafor reported, this is no simple commercial marketing campaign.: “While the [Post] articles about Vice President Kamala Harris were relatively neutral in tone”—if not flattering—“and focused on her … digital strategy, her policy proposals, and her chances of winning …, the articles that the Post paid to highlight about [President] Trump told a different story.” In fact, Semafor reported, the Washington Post has paid to “boost[] multiple critical articles” of President Trump through this sudden, last-minute advertising campaign.
So, yeah, he’s now trying to make a thing about the Washington Post’s decisions on what articles it’s promoting through advertising. The simple reality is that the Post is advertising the kinds of stories it thinks will get the most attention. That some of those are about how Donald Trump is out of his mind isn’t on the Post. It’s on him.
“The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and all these papers. They’re not endorsing anybody. You know what they’re really saying – because they only endorse Democrats – they’re saying this Democrat’s no good. They’re no good. And they think I’m doing a great job. They just don’t want to say it,” he said.
Once again, this is an example of Donald Trump trying to punish anyone who says anything negative about him, betraying his willingness to suppress speech that he doesn’t like.
But, at the same time, it should be a loud siren for those thinking that they, too, will capitulate-in-advance. It won’t magically make MAGA folks trust you or like you. They will only continue the attack and ask for more and more. Donald Trump won’t be satisfied until the Washington Post is full of pro-Trump propaganda and nonsense.
Bezos’ initial step towards that didn’t help. It only encouraged Trump to push for more.
I have no particular interest in the British royal family, but nevertheless I’ll be forever grateful to Princess Kate for telling the world about her cancer. It was probably not easy, nor likely her preference, to be so public at such a difficult moment. But whether she knows it or not, by sharing her story she made it much easier for other cancer patients to face their own moments. I know it did because her announcement came right around the time that I received my own cancer diagnosis, and her candor made it much easier for me to deal with my own situation. If nothing else it helped me find the words to tell people what was going on (“So it turns out I have a Kate Middleton problem…”). But it also helped immeasurably to know right off the bat that I wasn’t alone.
Which is a big reason why I am choosing to talk about what I’ve gone through publicly, to pay it forward so that others suddenly finding themselves in our shoes can also know that they aren’t alone either. But I’m also talking about it here, at Techdirt, and now, because so much of my situation is directly related to what we talk about here, and the constitutional crossroads the country finds itself at.
Not everything about my situation is salient to what we normally discuss here, of course. As I’ve been dealing with my disease I’ve come to have many things to say about the practical realities of getting treatment as a patient in America. But Techdirt isn’t (generally) a healthcare policy blog, and (at least up to now) I’ve not been a healthcare policy advocate, so what I may have to say along those lines will be saved for another day and likely another venue.
But what we do talk about here at Techdirt are issues like personal liberty and innovation, all of which are directly relevant to my situation. Especially given my type of cancer: ovarian. Having a gynecological cancer means that the way personal liberty and innovation have already been assaulted, and remain at risk to be further assaulted, puts my own ability to survive equally under fire. So although Techdirt is also not (specifically) a reproductive freedom blog, and I’m not (specifically) a reproductive freedom advocate, there is no daylight between those issues and the ones we do talk about. While we sometimes speak of them in the abstract, here they directly affect me and my life, and whether I’ll be able to keep it.
Not just because I found the cancer as a result of trying to prepare for IVF, which is itself becoming illegal. While my cancer would have been found at some point eventually, and maybe not too long after it was, ovarian cancer is virulent – my survival chances hinged on discovery being as quick as it was. Had IVF not been something I was free to pursue, and access to the healthcare professionals I needed to pursue it something I had access to, it might not have been discovered until it was too late. But the freedom I needed to make my own reproductive decisions, and the freedom the professionals needed to help me with them, is now under fire, and in some parts of the country already lost. And with it lives too.
But more than that, the very science of my life is being threatened. The loss of reproductive freedom, and the punitive consequences for any caregiver engaged in it, is leading to a loss of the expertise needed to address gynecological illnesses. My health depends on practitioners expert in how these anatomical parts work. But when applying that knowledge can be construed a crime few will master it. And all that knowledge, hard-won over the years, will be wasted. For centuries and millennia, and even recent decades, women simply ended up dying when some part of their reproductive system had an issue. We just didn’t know how to treat it. But now we do. Yet now we can’t. The loss of reproductive freedom is a loss of so much more than “just” that freedom; it is an abandonment of the science we need to survive, not just our pregnancies but any reproductive infirmity. Losing it does not end abortion; it just means that the only thing being aborted now is women’s futures.
And it’s not just my life and the life of other women being threatened, but everyone’s. The attack on reproductive science is an attack on the freedom to pursue medical science at all. The human body is a tricky machine, and it is amazing that we have accrued any of the understanding that we have about how bodies work. But there is still so much to learn if all humans are going to be able to survive and thrive, and what we are seeing with the criminalization of reproductive medicine is the slamming of the door on any further innovation and understanding, not just for reproductive care but inevitably all care. If the government can force experts to surrender what we have already learned about how to keep patients alive, by now prohibiting that care, it will undermine not just reproductive science but all healthcare science.
For me that science so far means that I can live on. I responded well to treatment and appear to now be cancer free. But ovarian cancer is a cancer that likes to rear its ugly, recurrent head, and if it does I’ll need more science to help me fight it. Just like every cancer patient does with theirs, and anyone else facing any other infirmity does as well.
And the treatment was not without its trauma, as it necessitated losing the organs I needed for pregnancy, organs which, as this episode began, I was hoping to use. But it has actually occurred to me that there is a bitter “upside,” which is that now, if something is growing inside me that could kill me, I won’t have to worry about some states barring me from dealing with it. Cancer may still kill me, but at least pregnancy won’t. Pregnancy, until extremely recently, used to be a survivable condition, even when it went wrong. Now it’s not. And even though on the one hand I grieve the loss of my fertility, on the other I still feel some palpable relief from the anxiety growing post-Dobbs that trying to carry a pregnancy could be the last thing I ever do. This relief of course came at the cost of my reproductive agency, but at least it wasn’t the government that took it away. It’s bad enough that fate can take away reproductive choices; no politician should be able to as well.
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As we head into the election tomorrow, there has been some general talk about how many people think that Donald Trump is somehow better on things like free speech and the economy. It’s pretty clear that that is wrong. On the economy, it’s evident he has no clue what he’s talking about and his plan on both tariffs and deportations would tank the US economy massively.
Late last week, Donald Trump filed another one of his anti-free speech lawsuits, and this one is way crazier than the others. First of all, this one is directly with him as the plaintiff (some of the ones in the past have been on behalf of his campaign). But this one isn’t even about what a media property said about Donald Trump. No, he’s suing CBS claiming that the way it edited a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris violates that Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA).
This action concerns CBS’s partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to (a) confuse, deceive, and mislead the public, and (b) attempt to tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party as the heated 2024 Presidential Election—which President Trump is leading— approaches its conclusion, in violation of Tex. Bus. & Comm. Code § 17.46(a), which subjects “[f]alse, misleading, or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce” to suit under Tex. Bus. & Comm. Code §17.50(a)(1). See Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act (the “DTPA”), Tex. Bus. & Comm. Code § 17.41 et seq.
This is one of the most blatant attacks on free speech rights and the First Amendment I’ve seen in a while. It’s literally saying that he can sue a news organization if he doesn’t like how they edit a story. Editorial discretion is among the very clearly protected rights of a news organization under the First Amendment.
Trump’s entire argument is that when she appeared on 60 Minutes (which also invited Trump, though he skipped out on it after initially agreeing) they edited one of her answers to make it shorter. But, um, that’s what they always do? In an edited “magazine style” TV show, as Trump well knows having done a bunch of these, they talk to you for a much longer time than they have to air, and then they air only portions of both the questions and the answers.
Indeed, it’s easy to show that if anyone has benefited from the media’s willingness to take rambling, incoherent answers and make them sound normal, it’s Donald Trump. The media does this to him nearly every single day.
Anyway, if we’re talking about word salad, here’s Donald Trump last night appearing to practically fall asleep mid-sentence talking about how “a whistleblower released the information on the 18 on the 800,000 [pause] cobs plus [longer pause]. The whistleblower said, you know, there were not 800,000 and 18,000, you add ’em upissst, and then you add 100 and think of it. 112,000 jobs.”
Trump: "A whistleblower released the information on the 18 on the 800,000 cobs plus."
In the case of CBS, it aired the shorter, more concise version of Harris’s answer on 60 Minutes, leaving out some of the explanatory rambling before getting to the details. Earlier, on Face the Nation, they played a longer clip that included some explanatory language that wasn’t a “word salad” as the complaint argues (yes, the complaint directly calls it a “word salad”) but is perhaps not particularly eloquent.
In both versions of the Interview (the “October 5 Version” and the “October 6 Version”), Whitaker asks Kamala about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Whitaker says to Kamala: “But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.”
In the October 5 Version, aired on the CBS Sunday morning news show Face the Nation, Kamala replies to Whitaker with her typical word salad: “Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in several movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
In the October 6 Version, aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Kamala appears to reply to Whitaker with a completely different, more succinct answer: “We are not gonna [sic] stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
Incredibly, the complaint itself includes Trump ranting about all of this, kinda highlighting how he is way more prone to “word salad” than his opponent.
As President Trump stated, and as made crystal clear in the video he referenced and attached, “A giant Fake News Scam by CBS & 60 Minutes. Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better. A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!”). See President Donald J. Trump, TRUTH SOCIAL (Oct. 10, 2024)
Yes, somehow Trump’s lawyers think this makes him look good. They also seem to think that referring to Trump as “President Trump” but referring to Vice President Harris as “Kamala” makes this look like a serious case.
It is not. It is clearly an attack on basic First Amendment rights and free speech law. It is an attack on the editorial discretion of CBS, the very same editorial discretion that Trump regularly benefits from.
He is attacking the First Amendment and free speech by using bogus lawsuits to challenge those in the media who don’t portray things the way he wants them portrayed. That is a fundamental attack on free speech.
And, as Eugene Volokh explains, these issues have been covered before in court, in the context of “false” statements. This case isn’t even about false statements, just Trump not liking how an interview was edited.
That said, Trump filed this case in the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division, guaranteeing that Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk will hear it. Kacsmaryk is considered one of a small group of “the worst judges in America” as someone in a single judge division who is known as the go-to judge for Trumpists looking to “rubber-stamp their looniest ideas.”
There is no reason for this case to be in Texas, as Trump is a Florida resident, and the two CBS organizations he is suing are based in New York and Delaware. By any sane measure, the case would be tossed on jurisdiction alone.
I’ve also seen some people argue that RFK Jr.’s embrace by Trump is again about “free speech,” but that is similarly nonsense.
So, if you’re following RFK Jr.’s logic, it’s an obvious First Amendment violation that Facebook blocked his anti-vax statements which violated their own policies, because the White House also agreed that RFK’s anti-vax claims were dangerous. But it’s not a First Amendment violation for Donald Trump to “pull CBS’s license” for how it edited an interview?
The only “principle” here is “it’s not okay if it happens to me, but it’s totally okay if we do it when we’re in power.”
That’s not about principled free speech.
And that’s not even getting into how little either Trump or RFK Jr. understand how this works. CBS doesn’t have “a license” to pull. Affiliate stations have broadcast spectrum licenses, and the government isn’t supposed to punish them based on what they cover or how. Yes, CBS has a small number (15 across the country) of affiliates that are “owned and operated” by the company, but the vast majority (236) are owned by other entities. So even the idea of “pulling CBS’s license” makes no logical sense.
But, either way, as we head into election day, the idea that Donald Trump is a free speech supporter is literally backwards. He’s spent years suing people for their speech, and now he’s even doing it in response to editorial discretion he dislikes. Donald Trump has no conception of free speech. He only supports speech he likes, and he is eager to punish any speech he dislikes.
I’ve written for years about how U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband.
They’re big fans of creating fake consumer groups that then attack community broadband networks under the pretense of being “locally concerned citizens,” which you might recall is something Charter recently got busted for in Maine.
They also enjoy funding various “think tanks” who don’t “think” about policy issues, so much as they parrot false industry attacks. Usually under the pretense of being objective, concerned locals simply looking out for the public welfare.
Like in Idaho and Massachusetts, where telecom-financed groups like the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) and the Mountain States Policy Center have been peppering local news outlets with misleading local editorials that lie to locals, and portray community broadband as some sort of inherent government boondoggle. Like this editorial by the TPA in the Cape Cod area:
“The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) has reported on the dangers of GONs to taxpayers and electric ratepayers through such reports as “GON with the Wind: The Failed Promise of Government Owned Networks.” GONs frequently fail to achieve their coverage goals and taxpayers of the municipalities where they exist often end up paying for the revenue shortfall themselves.”
So there are countless different types of community broadband networks, including municipal networks, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, or even public-private partnerships. There’s also a broad variety of ways to fund them, many of which never touch a dime of taxpayer money. A lot of these networks have been helped greatly by the billions in subsidies included in 2021 COVID relief and infrastructure bills.
Telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast are concerned that some of the $42.5 billion in looming infrastructure bill broadband subsidies might (gasp) fund competition in their existing, stagnant markets. Or worse (double gasp) that the money might me used to help fund a broadband network actually owned by local community members with a vested interest in actual locals (shiver).
So they’ve been priming the policy pump all over the country to ensure the lion’s share of money gets dropped into their back pocket, and vilify community broadband as a waste of taxpayer money wherever and however possible.
Popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn, who you might recall was booted from an FCC nomination after the telecom industry ran a successful smear campaign against her in the media, is now the Executive Director of an organization called the American Association For Public Broadband. Her org has been busy trying to counter the disinformation telecom-backed groups are pushing to the public.
“The groups roll out outdated claims, insisting that public broadband networks are failures. Yet they ignore that the vast majority of community broadband networks are thriving, including two of the oldest and most successful public networks in Idaho Falls and Ammon Idaho.”
These community owned networks usually have broad, bipartisan support. And they routinely offer locals symmetrical gigabit fiber for as little as $70 a month, without usage caps, weird fees, long-term contracts, and other misleading crap. They tend to treat broadband as an essential utility and public good, with a priority on consumers. You can see why AT&T and Comcast wouldn’t like that.
One popular trick AT&T and Comcast like to employ is to fund these groups pretending they’re just super concerned about taxpayer waste. But you might notice their attacks only attack community broadband. They never take aim at the billions upon billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies giants like AT&T and Comcast receive in exchange for fiber upgrades that are routinely half delivered. Notes Sohn:
“They also argue that it’s unfair for so-called “private networks” to compete with “government-funded” networks. This is laughable. Every single one of the largest broadband providers has taken millions and in some cases, billions of state and federal dollars. And they are all champing at the bit for a piece of the $42.5 billion in BEAD funding that the states and territories will soon distribute.”
If you’re a local monopoly like AT&T, it’s pretty trivial to throw a few thousand dollars at some dodgy proxy organizations, think tanks, and consultants in order to create a sound wall of illusory “astroturfed” opposition to what’s actually a very popular idea.
But it’s a pretty tired playbook at this point. Regional telecom giants dismantle all meaningful competition via regulatory capture, take billions in subsidies for networks they don’t consistently upgrade, raise prices endlessly, and then fund covert attacks on anybody that might dare do things differently, whether that’s reformers at key regulatory agencies, or locals trying to build their own reliable fiber network.
None of this is to say that community broadband networks are some kind of magic panacea. Like any business plan, they’re highly dependent on smart budgeting and savvy local leadership. But they’ve proven time and time again that not only are they a useful way to upgrade long-neglected communities, they’re a lovely motivator for entrenched regional monopolies that simply stopped trying years earlier.
