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It has been frustrating, to say the least, to watch many of the big Silicon Valley tech firms bow down to Trump and do his bidding, especially when it directly contradicts things they’ve said and done in the past. I’ve tried to explain to tech company execs why this doesn’t end well for them, but it seems it’s a lesson they’re going to have to learn from… what’s that they say…? Oh right, from “first principles.”
Silicon Valley comms expert Aaron Zamost has a new piece in the New York Times calling out the big tech companies for their cowardice in the face of authoritarianism. As he says, “this is how Silicon Valley lost its spine.”
It’s hard to square the idealistic YouTube of the late 2000s with the one that in September paid President Trump $24.5 million to settle ameritlesslawsuit over his post-Jan. 6 account suspension.
Big Tech once fought the good fights. Google in 2007 forced the Federal Communications Commission to impose openness conditions on some of the country’s most valuable airwaves, paving the way for the mobile ecosystem we take for granted today. Twitter filed lawsuits to be able to publicly disclose how often government agencies requested user data. Apple in 2016 refused orders to help the F.B.I. unlock an iPhone, defending user privacy even under government pressure. These actions took place under presidents of both parties but shared a common goal — they put the needs of users ahead of the interests of those in power.
To paraphrase the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, the Silicon Valley of the early 2010s was a mind-set, not a location. Its leaders saw themselves as revolutionaries: fighting for everyday people, resisting entrenched authority, all while creating technology that pushed society forward. And the products matched the posture — cellphones untethered from carriers, cars that didn’t run on gas, and pocket-size credit card readers that let anyone start a business.
So what happened? As Zamost notes: “courage doesn’t scale.”
The answer is simple, if dispiriting: For tech companies, courage doesn’t scale.
Google, Apple and their peers now act like the self-preservation-obsessed incumbents they once disrupted. They move slower, talk safer and patrol the moat. They’ve traded risk for complacency — too afraid of offending the president, losing access or inviting a subpoena. Big Tech now serves power before it serves its users.
This is such an important point in a world where companies are desperate to hyperscale, but where scale creates all kinds of new problems. One of those problems, it appears, is that companies are less willing to stick their necks out. Less willing to stand on principle. And that means they can be rolled by an authoritarian who threatens their power.
But it’s an important observation about this industry. The biggest players, who came up in a world where they really were disruptive and willing to stand up for the right thing, are now a lot less likely to do so. They may have more power, but courage doesn’t scale with power. So now they act protective of their power, which means kowtowing to anyone who might try to take it away.
And, with each capitulation, the next one becomes easier. They’re all able to be cowards together.
It leads to pathetic, embarrassing situations like this:
Meta is the most egregious example. It sprinted to announce that it was dismantling its fact-checking system before Mr. Trump returned to office, then loosened its hate-speech rules in the name of “mainstream discourse.” By the end of January, Meta had reached a deal with Mr. Trump, agreeing to pay $25 million to settle his lawsuit over being suspended from Facebook and Instagram in the wake of Jan. 6. All before Mr. Trump had spent 10 days back in office.
The surrender is now routine. In April, Amazon publicly quashed reports that it would display the cost of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on product pages. Apple recently caved to pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi and pulled an app that alerted users to nearby ICE agents. This is the same Apple whose chief executive, Tim Cook, in 2017 said, “Apple would not exist without immigration,” and quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in criticizing Mr. Trump’s Muslim ban.
The biggest, wealthiest companies in the world groveling, capitulating, and (in some cases) enabling the least popular president in decades. All because he nakedly threatens their own power. It’s pure cynicism over principles. From companies who spent so many years telling us how principled they were.
As Zamost notes, this is really bad in a variety of ways. Having tech actually work well for people, not just as an extractive tool for billionaires, is kind of important. And the big tech players are making it clear that they’re not the ones to rely on for that:
Major changes are coming whether we like it or not — to the economy, to culture, to how we live and work. This is not the time for faith in tech to be atsuch lows. Adoption depends on public trust, not just in the products themselves, but also in the people and principles behind them. Unfortunately, the tech industry’s leaders have become its worst spokespeople. The problem isn’t their messaging. It’s their credibility.
For years, Silicon Valley symbolized progress. Its retreat from its core values leaves no clear heir — no other industry fights for the future in the same way. When tech is the villain instead of the hero, the future feels leaderless. And a country that stops believing its innovators can make the world better stops believing in much else, too.
Innovation should still be a force for good. It should be an enabling tool for good. But as these companies have grown, as they’ve centralized and consolidated power, that made them targets. Their own scale created their own weak spot. And Trump exploited it.
I am still optimistic that newer upstarts that are built from the ground up to decentralize things and put power back in the hands of users can take up that mantle. But these old guard tech giants had every resource, every advantage, and every opportunity to hold the line. Instead, they chose to abandon the principles that made them matter in the first place. They torched their own credibility for temporary protection from a petty autocrat. That’s not just disappointing—it’s unforgivable.
A coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for the elimination of a longstanding FCC rule the Trump administration abused to “bully” ABC and CBS into kissing the president’s ass (I’ll use the term bully loosely since both companies seemed very eager to roll over for the far right wing).
Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored at the time, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and trampled the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense.
CBS/Paramount was looking for regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance (run by Larry Ellison’s kid David). Trump and his FCC boss Brendan Carr quickly zeroed on on this, and began using merger approval as leverage to bully CBS into even more feckless coverage of the administration.
One of the FCC rules they abused during this whole process was the FCC’s “Broadcast News Distortion” policy. The policy, created in 1949, gives the agency the power to punish media companies for ethical violations featuring a clear distortion of “a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.”
Ideally, this would be something like a media company taking a bribe from a company or public official to kill a story. The FCC has only actually used the rule eight times between 1969 and 2019, and few of those actions actually resulted in serious, substantive punishment.
Carr’s already grossly abused the rule twice; one to bully CBS into weakening its journalism, and once to try and bully ABC/Disney into pulling Jimmy Kimmel off the air for making fun of Republicans. Both times, Carr leveraged the rule to launch fake “investigations” into the companies to create the illusion he’s a very big boy doing very serious things.
In response to recent abuse of the rule by Trumpism, a coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for its elimination entirely. A bipartisan coalition of seven former FCC chairs and commissioners, including five Republicans, have filed a petition with the FCC urging for the elimination of the rule, saying it’s a threat to free speech and functional journalism:
“The News Distortion Policy gives any administration a tool to target outlets that provide unfavorable coverage. Chairman Carr’s recent threats against ABC and Disney demonstrate exactly this risk.
After ABC aired Jimmy Kimmel’s commentary on Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened to revoke the network’s licenses for alleged news distortion. The message was clear: Criticize those in power and face government retaliation.
As petitioners warn: What a Republican FCC Chairman can do today, a Democratic FCC Chairman could do tomorrow. The only solution is to eliminate this dangerous tool entirely.”
Of course, FCC boss Brendan Carr refuses to give up any power so this is a non-starter for him. Carr has made a big stink about eliminating all manner of “burdensome FCC regulations” as an act of “government efficiency.” As we’ve noted, this mostly involves important consumer protections and media consolidation limits his friends in the media and telecom sector don’t like.
Carr’s still keen to maintain FCC authority he can abuse to stifle speech. He’s also keen, as we saw with TikTok, to just make up authority the FCC doesn’t have whenever it suits him.
So it’s little surprise that his response to this petition from a bunch of his predecessors was to mock it, rather than live up to his promise to eliminate “burdensome FCC regulations.” Apparently that doesn’t matter when he has the power to punish media companies for their First Amendment-protected speech:
That’s Brendan Carr tweeting the following in response to a story about this petition:
How about no
On my watch, the FCC will continue to hold broadcasters accountable to their public interest obligations.
And it is quite rich for the exact same people that pressured prior FCCS to censor conservatives through the news distortion policy to now object to the agency’s even-handed application of the law.
There’s another irony here; for generations, telecom and media giants routinely whined about the FCC “abusing its regulatory authority” and engaging in “radical extremism” any time it engaged in even the softest act of consumer protection. This was a cornerstone of “free market Libertarian” complaints. Remember the histrionics over some fairly basic, loophole-filled, net neutrality requirements?
Yet when the worst abuses of FCC authority finally did arrive, it came at the hands of far-right extremists.
That doesn’t mean we should abandon FCC oversight of corporate power (including media consolidation and diversity ownership rules) entirely, though I suspect that between good faith worries about abuse, and bad faith lobbying by corporate power, that’s the most likely outcome.
This week, all our winning comments came in response to our post about Donald Trump falling for satire from a website called The Dunning-Kruger Times. In first place on the insightful side, it’s That One Guy with a comment about how this is hardly surprising:
He fell for it because he WANTS to believe it(and he’s incredibly stupid)
Of course he fell for it, and I’ve no doubt that a massive number of his cultists had/have fell for it too, they are all in a post-fact cult where reality is is determined not by what can be shown and demonstrated to be real but by what you want to be real, and he and his cultists deeply want Obama to be engaged in an illegal kickback scheme like that so they can criticize both the ACA and Obama as terrible.
That was true. But it’s not any more, because this administration has done its best to purge the people and destroy the agencies producing accurate information.
Not that I’m excusing the mad would-be king from his own stupidity: this is who he’s always been. But I think it’s worth noting that mechanisms which took decades to carefully build, in order to ensure that decision makers in government had the highest quality information at their fingertips, have been gutted in favor of wishful thinking, fabrication, propaganda, and outright lies.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ll briefly move away from that post for a pair of comments on our post asking if Microsoft is really cool with the DHS using imagery from Halo to promote fascism. First, it’s Arianity focusing attention on a comment from the CEO:
Cowardly way to signal your support for fascism but okay…
Premise 1: Companies like Nintendo and Microsoft are prone to going legally nuclear if someone uses one of their properties without permission and it garners enough attention.
Premise 2: The regime has used properties from both companies, Pokemon from Nintendo and now Master Chief from Microsoft.
Premise 3: Neither of them have filed lawsuit or even objected to the use of their properties.
Conclusion: Both Nintendo and Microsoft support the use of and association with the regime and it’s actions.
I have to believe Trump’s “wow” is in response to the idea of somebody getting paid $40 million slowly over 15 years, rather than in a few months of lump-sum frivolous lawsuit settlement bribes.
For editor’s choice on the funny side, it’s another week where the truth is the funny comments were few and far between (those two winners were the only ones to crack more than a couple votes). So we’ll stick with just one editor’s choice comment, this time from Tavis in response to the degrees-of-connection system by which the government is justifying blowing up boats supposedly involved in drug trafficking:
In Other News
Kevin Bacon is currently seeking sanctuary in an undisclosed location over extensive records suggesting traffickers’ Bacon numbers are suspiciously low.
We’ve written about Buc-ee’s a couple of times recently, given the famed convenience store chain of the south’s aspirations to become the Monster Energy of convenience stores when it comes to nonsense trademark bullying. Buc-ee’s has gone after all kinds of other companies, almost always for the crime of having a cartoon animal in their logos. The company appears to think that it somehow has the exclusive right to such imagery, which is obviously bullshit. Buc-ee’s also appears to not have any concept of parody and parody’s protected status.
But I suppose if anyone is going to fight back against this sort of trademark bullying, it might as well be an underwear company called Nut Huggers. Jarrad Hewett, ownder of Nut Huggers Apparel, said he received a threat letter from Buc-ee’s over his company’s logo.
Hewett said he received the letter weeks after having his most profitable month of sales on record. His company focuses on underwear and apparel, using a patent to redesign the inside of its underwear to accommodate more active people. Hewett said he came up with his logo, which features a cartoon squirrel holding two acorns.
“We went with kind of tongue-in-cheek humor,” said Hewett.
After sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into his business and finally seeing it succeed, he said he was shocked to get the letter from Buc-ee’s.
Now, according to Hewett, Buc-ee’s made some very familiar claims that his company logo was trademark infringement for using a “cartoon character” with “buck teeth” and that the company must refrain from using such imagery as that, along with “cartoons, rodents, baseball hats, and the colors red, yellow, and brown. Hewett was also instructed to only use front-facing images.”
And that, dear friends, is complete and utter bullshit. Buc-ee’s has no standing to make those general demands. Its trademark affords it no monopoly on those generic types of images. And, to make it all the worse, even after Hewett wrote back agreeing to alter his logo to remove the specific colors Buc-ee’s objected to, Buc-ee’s refused to meet him half way and insisted he comply with every single demand it had made.
And, now, here are the logos in question.
Buc-ee’s:
And Nut Huggers Apparel:
Those are not similar. They’re not the same overall color scheme. They’re not the same animal. Both logos prominently feature the name of each business. They’re not in the same market categories in terms of products. And variations of the Nut Huggers logo aren’t really substantially closer to the Buc-ee’s logo.
And for those reasons, Hewett plans to fight.
“I think that it’s time that somebody stands up and says, this isn’t right. There’s no infringement here,” said Hewett. “You all don’t have the right to be doing this and take away people’s local livelihoods.”
I fear I may have no choice but to write much more about this in the future, if only because a trademark dispute between a nut-hugging squirrel and a beaver practically writes itself.
This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was supposed to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness data from across federal agencies to expose illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement.
DHS had recently incorporated confidential data from the Social Security Administration on hundreds of millions of additional people into the tool, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. The added information allowed the system to perform bulk searches using Social Security numbers for the first time.
The initial results, however, didn’t exactly back up President Donald Trump’s contention that noncitizen voting is widespread. Texas identified 2,724 “potential noncitizens” on its rolls, about 0.015% of the state’s 18 million registered voters. Louisiana found 390 among 2.8 million registered voters, a rate of about 0.014%.
Instead, experts say, the sweeping data-sharing agreement authorizing DHS to merge Social Security data into SAVE could threaten Americans’ privacy and lead to errors that disenfranchise legitimate voters.
The details of the agreement, which haven’t previously been reported, show it contains alarmingly few guardrails to ensure accuracy and scant specifics on how the data will be kept secure, election and privacy lawyers who have reviewed it say. Further, it explicitly does not bar DHS from deploying the SSA data for other purposes, including immigration enforcement.
Until this year, SAVE contained information only on immigrants who’d had contact with DHS, such as those with permanent resident status, and had been assigned immigrant identification numbers. State and local officials typically used the system to verify immigrants’ status when they applied for benefits such as SNAP or to check, one by one, whether individuals who were registering to vote were citizens.
Under the May 15 data-sharing agreement, which was posted recently on the Social Security Administration’s website, the system added information, including full Social Security numbers, on millions of Americans not in DHS databases. The combined dataset joins together this information with addresses, birth dates and criminal records, along with immigration histories.
The agreement allows the SSA’s data to be used for searches to check voters’ citizenship, along with “other authorized inquiries from Federal, State, territorial, tribal and local government agencies seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of individuals within their jurisdiction.”
In doing these searches, SAVE stores not only the voter data that election officials upload but also the outcome of their queries, according to the data-sharing agreement and other documents from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE. The documents do not explain who can access this information or how it can be used.
Experts say adding Social Security data to SAVE could help election officials verify, en masse, if voters are U.S. citizens, but it shouldn’t be used to make final determinations that people aren’t citizens.
That’s because multiple audits and analyses have shown that SSA’s citizenship information is often outdated or incomplete, especially for people who became naturalized citizens. With the 2026 midterms about a year away, Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters of the United States, said she fears the expanded use of SAVE will lead to errors.
“The Trump administration is hunting people to try to purge people from the rolls who are lawfully registered, and they are doing it by looking at unreliable, outdated data,” Short said.
Several privacy lawyers said they believe it’s illegal for DHS to expand the use of SAVE without taking steps required in federal law, such as issuing a system of records notice to inform the public how the additional data will be collected, stored and used. Last month, advocacy groups sued the federal government, alleging that its expansion of SAVE and other data consolidation efforts violate the Privacy Act, a federal law that prohibits public agencies from misusing private information.
Officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services declined to answer questions from ProPublica.
In a filing responding to the advocacy groups’ lawsuit, federal officials said that another statute, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that agencies would exercise caution in determining whether voters are noncitizens.
“There is zero basis to assume that State officials have any interest in haphazardly and unlawfully removing large numbers of U.S. citizens from their voter rolls, and no credible evidence that any such thing has happened or is going to happen any time soon” the filing says.
Still, Leland Dudek, acting SSA commissioner until early May, told ProPublica he doesn’t trust that DHS will accurately flag noncitizens as officials try to cross-match data and files from multiple systems.
“They are probably going to make some massive mistakes,” he said.
This summer, the Justice Department started demanding access to state voter registration lists, saying this was necessary to ensure compliance with federal voter roll maintenance laws. The agency has filed lawsuits against a number of states that have refused to comply.
Some of the states that have refused to provide voters’ private information directly to the Justice Department have entered into agreements with DHS under which they upload that same information into the SAVE system.
According to a document obtained by the ACLU, which sued the administration for SAVE-related records, a growing number of states are signing agreements with DHS to use SAVE to vet voter rolls. Ten states had signed such agreements coming into 2025; as of July, another 10 had signed on, the document shows.
As counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit voting rights group, Naomi Gilens specializes in issues related to privacy and technology. Gilens said it’s important for Americans to consider if they want the government — including future administrations, not just this one — to have so much consolidated information on them.
“That is a very invasive picture that starts to be painted, in one place, for every individual who lives here’s private lives,” she said.
As of last month, Homeland Security officials had run more than 33 million voters through SAVE, USCIS told NPR. So far, the agency has declined to say publicly what the outcome of these queries have been.
But the initial results are tucked into another document obtained by the ACLU.
As of late August, about 96.3% of the voters checked in the SAVE system were identified by the system as U.S. citizens. For an additional 3.1% of voters, the system either couldn’t find them or needed more information to determine their citizenship status. About 0.5% of voters checked had died, the system found. And 0.04% showed up as noncitizens.
According to copies of 12 state agreements with DHS obtained by the ACLU and reviewed by ProPublica, election officials are required to take additional steps to verify SAVE results for voters the system identifies as other than U.S. Citizens. Then, if SAVE still can’t verify citizenship, the election officials “must contact the registrant or registered voter to obtain proof of citizenship.”
Dudek and Kathleen Romig, a former Social Security official who now works at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, worry even those steps won’t be enough to prevent mismatches from happening.
People’s names can be misspelled or listed differently in the various datasets. Many states collect partial, not full, Social Security numbers from voters and matches using partial numbers will be even less accurate, since many people share the same names, Dudek and Romig said.
“If there’s Jane Smith that is a citizen, and a Jane Smith that isn’t, you don’t want to disenfranchise the citizen Jane Smith by accident,” Romig said.
Federal officials aren’t done adding data to SAVE. Next up, according to a recent USCIS presentation to election officials shared with ProPublica: passport information from the State Department. (The State Department referred ProPublica’s request for comment to DHS, which did not respond.)
A couple months ago we offered up the few remaining copies of our social media card game, One Billion Users, after fulfilling orders from our Kickstarter backers. Quite a few of you took the chance to snag one, and now we’re down to an extremely small number remaining: at time of writing, we only have ten undamaged copies of the game, and a few dozen of the damaged copies that we are offering at a deeper discount.
So if you haven’t gotten a copy yet, or you know someone who might want one, now’s your chance. And remember, gift-giving season is nearly upon us!
Also: there are still some of our original Kickstarter backers who haven’t completed their surveys, meaning we can’t yet send out their games. Don’t worry, we’re holding onto them and not selling them as part of this sale. If you’re reading this and you’re one of these backers, please complete your survey as soon as possible (if you’re having issues, there’s more information in this Kickstarter update).
The Trump administration has been ramping up its rhetoric against Venezuela since Day 1. Efforts to arrest up to 3,000 migrants a day focused on Venezuelans, many of whom had fled to the United States seeking a land with actual freedom.
Those who weren’t simply locked up in ICE’s many forever prisons were sent to places even worse than the autocratic government they had fled. Many Venezuelans were branded Tren de Aragua gang members by faulty databases, fired cops, and a collective of bigots willing to push Trump’s xenophobic agenda.
That meant many alleged gang members were sent off to be tortured by the corrupt El Salvadoran government while imprisoned in the country’s infamous CECOT. The few people who managed to fight back against the Trump regime were soon faced with options even less palatable than an indefinite stay in El Savador’s CECOT hellhole.
The Trump administration simply can’t find enough people to arrest to satisfy ghoulish racist/Trump advisor (but I repeat myself) Stephen Miller’s desire to eject one million brown people from this country by EOB 12/31/2025. Now, it’s decided it can bump those bigoted numbers up by simply murdering people in boats seen heading north from Venezuela.
The Trump administration has constantly engaged in war rhetoric to defend its actions. First, it claimed the mere existence of foreign gangs justified its mass deportation efforts. More recently, it’s claiming the mere existence of an international drug trade is all the justification it needs to engage in extrajudicial killings.
To date, the Trump administration — headed up by hard-drinking, OpSec-ignoring, leader-in-name-only Pete Hegeseth — has murdered the occupants of at least 17 boats in international waters. As has been the case almost always with Trump 2.0, the administration acted first and bodged together legal justifications later.
It’s unlikely these legal justifications will hold up in court — at least any court that isn’t 5/9ths wholly subservient to Donald Trump. But, for now, no court has stopped the administration from doing what it wants, which means it continues to kill people it openly admits it doesn’t have the evidence to bring criminal charges against. Instead, it continues to angrily tap the “King Trump” signs it has placed around the Oval Office, daring anyone in the government to try to rein in the Executive Branch.
The narrative is this: drug trade is roughly equal to terrorist attacks that justify violent military responses. Bringing drugs to purchasers and middle men is nothing more than an act of war. Therefore, killing people just because is nothing more than the US defending itself against an undeclared war perpetrated by… I guess… uncut fentanyl?
Unlike the Trump administration, the US press is actually putting people on the ground and talking to those directly affected by its new War on Boats. Venezuela isn’t a safe place to visit, much less leave. And yet, the Associated Press has managed to talk to people in that country who are now seeing people they know being straight up murdered to satisfy the GOP’s racist blood lust.
In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.
Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.
Now, most Trump fans will immediately point to this as evidence that the administration is right about the people it’s killing in international waters. But even the most charitable readings of administration statements will prove this wrong. Trump and Hegseth have continually portrayed the people they’ve killed as “narco-terrorists” with ties to the upper levels of international drug cartels. The reality — at least for a small portion of the people murdered by our government — is that these are people just trying to make a little bit of money to make their lives back in Venezuela a little less miserable.
The US government has killed at least 66 people this way. And that includes people who just happen to have operable boats at a time when that’s really all that’s needed to put your in the cross hairs of the next military drone strike.
One of the people killed in a boat strike was Robert Sanchez, who was just a fisherman trying to make a living and, hopefully, obtain a better boat to increase his success chances while out in open waters. But because he went fishing off the coat of Venezuela, he was determined eligible for death from above:
Sánchez had just finished offloading a day’s catch last month when he told his mother he would be taking a short trip and would see her in a couple of days. They had no idea where he was going.
After seeing clips on social media that mentioned his death, relatives broke the news to his mother, but not until after ensuring she had taken her blood pressure medication. Sánchez’s youngest son, a third grader, could not accept for days that his father was gone. He kept asking adults if his father could have survived the explosion, noting he might still be at sea.
No, the adults told the boy. His father was gone.
Even if we decide — for the sake of argument — that everyone killed by boat strikes was a person in a boat carrying drugs to another destination, that still doesn’t excuse the administration’s actions. Sure, there’s been a “War on Drugs” ever since Richard Nixon deputized a drug-addled Elvis Presley, but that war has always been carried out using the USA’s accepted rules of engagement. While due process might be a bit of joke — what with the reliance on plea bargains and sting operations that are pretty much just entrapment — it was at least considered something worthy of lip service, if nothing else.
Now, it’s just the US government sinking boats and killing people and pretending this is all OK because… well… the Trump administration says it’s OK. But if you’re OK with this, you’re pretty much going to be OK with any expansion of extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers. If there’s no significant push back, the administration will move these efforts inland, much like it has with its “border security” actions. CBP and Border Patrol officers are now wandering the streets of cities far removed from this nation’s southern border. It’s only a matter of time before this administration decides that the quasi-legal stuff it does in non-US territory is what needs to happen on US city streets.
At that point, your belated objections will mean nothing. The time to protest is now. Waiting until you have to step over the bodies of your fellow US residents to express your displeasure with this administration will be far too little and far too late.
A key theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is that copyright, born in an analogue age of scarcity, works poorly in today’s digital world of abundance. One manifestation of that is how lawmakers struggle to adapt the existing copyright rules to deal with novel technological developments, like the new generation of AI technologies. The EU’s AI Act marks a major step in regulating artificial intelligence, but it touches on copyright only briefly, leaving many copyright-related questions still open. The process of aligning national copyright laws with the AI Act provides an opportunity for EU Member States to flesh out some of the details, and that is what Italy has done with its new “Disposizioni e deleghe al Governo in materia di intelligenza artificiale.” (Provisions and delegations to the Government regarding artificial intelligence). The Communia blog explains the two main provisions. The first specifies that only works of human creativity are eligible for protection under Italian copyright law:
It codifies a crucial principle: while AI can be a tool in the creative process, copyright protection remains reserved for human-generated intellectual effort. This positions Italian law in alignment with the broader international trend, seen in the EU, U.S., and UK, of rejecting full legal authorship rights for non-human agents such as AI systems. In practice, this means that works solely generated by AI without significant human input will likely fall outside the scope of copyright protection.
The second provision deals with the legality of text and data mining (TDM) activities used in the training of AI models:
This provision essentially reaffirms that text and data mining (TDM) is permitted under certain conditions, namely where access to the source materials is lawful and the activity complies with the existing TDM exceptions under EU copyright law
The Italian AI law is about clarifying existing copyright law to deal with issues raised by AI. But some EU countries want to go much further in their response to generative AI, and bring in an entirely new kind of copyright. Both Denmark and the Netherlands are proposing to give people the copyright to their body, facial features, and voice. The move is intended as a response to the rising number of AI-generated deepfakes, where aspects such as someone’s face, body and voice are used without their permission, often for questionable purposes, and sometimes for criminal ones. There are good reasons for tackling deepfakes, as noted in an excellent commentary by P. Bernt Hugenholtz regarding the proposed Danish and Dutch laws:
Fake porn and other deepfake content is causing serious, and sometimes irreversible, harm to a person’s integrity and reputation. Fake audio or video content might deceive or mislead audiences and consumers, poison the public sphere, induce hatred, manipulate political discourse and undermine trust in science, journalism, and the public media. Like misinformation more generally, deepfakes pose a threat to our increasingly fragile democracies.
The problem is not that new laws are being brought in, but that the Danish and Dutch governments are proposing to use the wrong legal framework – copyright – to do so:
If concerns over privacy and reputation are the main reasons for regulating deepfakes, any new rules should be grounded in the law of privacy. If preserving trust in the media or safeguarding democracy are the dominant concerns, deepfakes ought to be addressed in media regulation or election laws. The Danish and Dutch bills address and alleviate none of these concerns.
It’s a classic example of copyright maximalism, where wider and stronger copyright laws are seen as the solution to everything. As well as being a poor fit for the problem, taking this approach would bring with it a real harm:
both deepfake bills conceive the new right to control deepfakes as a marketable, exploitable right, subject to monetization by way of licensing.
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The message both bills convey is not that deepfakes are taboo, but that deepfakes amount to a new licensing opportunity.
In other words, the copyright maximalist approach makes everything about money, not morals. Ironically, taking such an approach would weaken copyright itself, as Communia’s submission to the Danish consultation on the deepfake proposal explains:
the proposal risks undermining the coherence of copyright law itself by introducing doctrinal inconsistencies. Copyright protects original expressive works, not a person’s indicia of personal identity, such as their image, voice or other physical characteristics. It is awarded for a limited duration in order to incentivise the creation of new works, and the existing corpus of limitations and exceptions has been designed with this premise in mind. Extending copyright to subject matter of an entirely different nature, for which marketisation is not an intended objective, will inevitably create legal uncertainty.
Communia points out a further reason not to take the copyright route for protecting people against deepfakes. The Danish bill would grant performing artists a new and wide-ranging copyright in their performances that would have a negative impact on the public domain:
the proposed extension of protection to subject matter that does not constitute a performance of an artistic or literary work raises significant concerns as to scope and proportionality. The introduction of a new exclusive right with such a wide scope would unduly restrict the Public Domain, interfering with the lawful access and reuse of subject matter that is currently out-of-copyright and that should remain as such, in the absence of clear economic evidence that such expansion is needed.
Moreover, as Communia notes:
The recitals of the draft [Danish] bill themselves acknowledge that multiple legal bases for acting against deepfakes already exist, including within criminal law. If individuals face difficulties in asserting their rights under the current framework, the appropriate course of action would be for the legislator to clarify the existing legal position. Introducing an additional and conceptually flawed layer of protection risks creating confusion and may ultimately prove counterproductive.
There’s no doubt that the harms caused by AI-generated deepfakes need tackling. The situation is made worse by advanced AI apps explicitly designed to make deepfake generation as easy as possible, such as OpenAI’s Sora, which are currently entering the market. But introducing a new kind of copyright is the wrong way to do it.
