Creativity, The Fifth Freedom & Access To Knowledge

Culture

from the freedom-of-knowledge dept

This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological evolution while safeguarding the rights of creators and ensuring AI’s development serves the broader interests of society. You can read the first, second, third, and fourth posts in the series.

In April 2007, Janez Potočnik, then European Commissioner for Science and Research, introduced the concept of the Fifth Freedom: the “freedom of knowledge.” His vision was simple but ambitious—enhance Europe’s ability to remain competitive through knowledge and innovation, the cornerstones of prosperity. Fast forward to today, the momentum for this Fifth Freedom is building once again, with both the Letta Report and the Mission Letter of the new EU Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation emphasizing its significance.

But how does this freedom of knowledge intersect with creativity and copyright?

AI, Learning, and the Limits of Copyright

Machine learning (ML) systems learn in a way strikingly similar to humans—by observing and copying. This raises an important question: should ML systems be allowed to freely use copyrighted materials as part of their learning process? The answer is not just about technology; it goes to the heart of what copyright law aims to protect.

Traditionally, copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. This is an important distinction because it allows others to take inspiration, innovate, and build upon ideas without infringing on someone else’s creative output. When an ML system is trained, it doesn’t care about specific creative choices—like the lighting or composition of a photo. It just wants to learn the underlying pattern, such as recognizing a stop sign. Similarly, a natural language model uses written text not because it appreciates the author’s unique writing style, but because it needs to learn the structure of language.

Humans also do this all the time. We often replicate expressions when learning, but our goal is not to plagiarize someone’s unique creative touch—it’s to grasp the idea behind it. This concept is embedded in many legal precedents. For instance, in the American Geophysical Union v. Texaco case, photocopying was used not for the beauty of the prose, but simply as a convenient way to access scientific ideas. Similar issues arise in cases about software interoperability, functional objects like clothing designs, and even in disputes over yoga routines. Copyright should protect creative expression—not the ideas, facts, or functional elements that underpin them.

Why This Matters for Machine Learning

This distinction is particularly important for ML. If we allow copyright law to get in the way of machines learning from data for purely non-expressive purposes, we’re potentially hampering technological advancement. Allowing ML systems to copy for learning—without trying to replicate the creative aspects of the original work—is essential for innovation. This is not just a matter of advancing technology but also of staying true to the spirit of copyright law, which is meant to balance the interests of creators and the public good.

However, as Professor Lemley has pointed out from a U.S. law perspective, the freedom for ML to learn should have limits. If an ML system is being trained to create a song that mimics the style of Ariana Grande, it’s no longer just about learning—it’s about copying a creative expression. In such cases, the question of whether it qualifies as fair use becomes much tougher. Yet, even here, it’s crucial that copyright doesn’t end up controlling unprotectable elements like a musical genre or a broad artistic style.

Finding the Balance: Innovation and Protection

The concept of the Fifth Freedom—freedom of knowledge—cannot thrive if copyright is used to restrict learning and innovation. We need a balanced approach: one that protects the hard work of creators, while ensuring that copyright doesn’t stifle the fundamental right to learn, innovate, and build upon existing knowledge. This is especially relevant now, as AI and machine learning shape the future of creativity and the knowledge economy in Europe. If we get this balance right, we can ensure that both creativity and innovation continue to flourish in the digital age.

Caroline De Cock is a communications and policy expert, author, and entrepreneur. She serves as Managing Director of N-square Consulting and Square-up Agency, and Head of Research at Information Labs. Caroline specializes in digital rights, policy advocacy, and strategic innovation, driven by her commitment to fostering global connectivity and positive change.

Filed Under: access to knowledge, ai, copyright, creativity and ai, fifth freedom, freedom of knowledge, knowledge, machine learning

LinkedIn Joins The Parade Of Cowards: Quietly Strips Anti-Trans Protections To Appease MAGA Mob

Content Moderation

from the cowards dept

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited hateful content.

LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.

Similarly, the platform removed “race or gender identity” from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively “disparaging another member’s […] perceived gender”, not mentioning race or gender identity anymore.

The move is particularly cowardly because LinkedIn made the change with zero public announcement or explanation. When pressed by a reporter at The Advocate, the company offered the classic corporate non-answer: “We regularly update our policies” and insisted that “personal attacks or intimidation toward anyone based on their identity, including misgendering, violates our harassment policy.”

But here’s the thing: if your policies haven’t actually changed, why remove the explicit protections? Why make it harder for users and moderators to understand what’s prohibited? The answer is as obvious as it is pathetic: LinkedIn is preemptively capitulating to political pressure in this era of MAGA culture war.

This follows the now-familiar playbook we’ve seen from Meta, YouTube, and others. Meta rewrote its policies in January to allow content calling LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” and portraying trans identities as “abnormal.” YouTube quietly scrubbed “gender identity” from its hate speech policies, then had the audacity to call it “regular copy edits.” Now LinkedIn is doing the same cowardly dance.

What makes this particularly infuriating is the timing. These companies aren’t even waiting for actual government threats. They’re just assuming that sucking up to the Trump administration’s anti-trans agenda will somehow protect them from regulatory scrutiny. It’s the corporate equivalent of rolling over and showing your belly before anyone even raises their voice.

And it won’t help. The Trump administration will still target them and demand more and more, knowing that these companies will just roll over again.

And let’s be clear about what deadnaming and misgendering actually are: they’re deliberate acts of dehumanization designed to erase transgender people’s identities and make them feel unwelcome in public spaces. When platforms explicitly protect against these behaviors, it sends a message that trans people belong in these spaces. When they quietly remove those protections, they’re sending the opposite message. They’re saying “we don’t care about your humanity, and we will let people attack you for your identity.”

LinkedIn’s decision is especially disappointing because professional networking platforms should be spaces where people can present their authentic selves without fear of purely hateful harassment. Trans professionals already face discrimination in hiring and workplace environments. The last thing they need is for LinkedIn to signal that it’s open season for harassment on its platform.

The company is trying to argue that it still prohibits harassment and hate speech generally. But vague, general policies are much harder to enforce consistently than specific examples. When you remove explicit guidance about what constitutes anti-trans harassment, you make it easier for bad actors to push boundaries and harder for moderators to draw clear lines.

This is exactly the wrong moment for tech companies to be weakening protections for vulnerable communities. Anti-trans rhetoric and legislation have reached fever pitch, with the Trump administration making attacks on transgender rights a central part of its agenda. This is when platforms should be strengthening their commitment to protecting people from harassment, not quietly rolling back safeguards.

Sure, standing up for what’s right when there’s political pressure to do otherwise is hard. But that’s exactly when it matters most. These companies have billions in revenue and armies of lawyers. If anyone can afford to take a principled stand, it’s them.

Instead, we’re watching them fold like cheap suits at the first sign of political headwinds. They’re prioritizing their relationships with authoritarian politicians over the safety of their users. And they’re doing it in the most cowardly way possible: quietly, without explanation, hoping no one will notice.

The message this sends to transgender users is clear: you’re expendable. Your safety and dignity are less important than our political calculations. And that message isn’t just coming from fringe platforms or obvious bad actors—it’s coming from mainstream services owned by some of the world’s largest companies.

This isn’t just bad for transgender users. It’s bad for everyone who believes that online spaces should be governed by consistent principles rather than political opportunism. When platforms start making policy decisions based on which way the political winds are blowing, they undermine their own credibility and the trust users place in them.

Hell, for years, all we heard from the MAGA world was how supposedly awful it is when platforms make moderation decisions based on political pressure.

Where are all of those people now?

The irony is that these companies are probably making themselves less safe, not more. By signaling that they’ll cave to political pressure, they’re inviting more of it. Authoritarians don’t respect weakness—they exploit it.

LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and the rest need to understand: there’s no appeasing the anti-trans mob. No matter how many protections you strip away, it will never be enough. Stick to your principles and protect your users regardless of political pressure.

But instead of showing backbone, these companies are racing to see who can capitulate fastest. It’s a disgraceful display of corporate cowardice at exactly the moment when courage is most needed.

We all deserve better than watching supposedly values-driven companies abandon their principles the moment it becomes politically inconvenient to maintain them.

Filed Under: content moderation, deadnaming, harassment, hate speech, misgendering, prohibited conduct, trans
Companies: google, linkedin, meta, microsoft, youtube

He Was Asked About His Tattoos And A TikTok Video In Court. Five Days Later, He Was In A Salvadoran Prison.

Failures

from the the-cruelty dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.

Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.

More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.

He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.

That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.

I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.

Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.

I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.

As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.

The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.

We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.

On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.

The result is a database we published last week including profiles of 238 of the men Trump deported to a Salvadoran prison.

From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.

Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.

We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”

While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.

Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that’s my priority.”

It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.

Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.

Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.

We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.

Filed Under: asylum, cecot, due process, el salvador, human trafficking, immigration, tattoos, torture, tren de aragua, venezuela

Daily Deal: The Courses Digest, Labs Digest, and Exams Digest Bundle

Deals

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

The Courses Digest, Labs Digest, and Exams Digest Bundle gives you unlimited access to expertly crafted online courses, interactive labs and study tools. Whether you’re aiming for industry-recognized certifications or expanding your tech expertise, this bundle will help you get there with courses on CompTIA, AWS, Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, and more. It’s on sale for $80.

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

Don’t Vibe Check Me, Bro; Or How To Deal With Comments In An Era Filled With Post-Factual Nazis

Techdirt

from the we-write-what-we-want dept

A whole lot of bad faith arguing continues [and is amplified!] now that Donald Trump has somehow regained his position as The Person Most Likely To Abuse His Power While Serving As The Most Powerful Man In The World. [Cut to yearbook photo of an 18-year-old Donald Trump with a magnificent head of hair and a half-smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.]

Stolen valor even then.

Let that image burn its way into your psyche as I head off to rant and rail against the irritants in the commentary flow, who not only fuck shit up for the rest of us, but also think (one way or the other) that facts shouldn’t mean as much as their personal feelings.

Those of you who tune in regularly know that I don’t care for Trump. Never have. Never will. And I am not only flabbergasted he’s managed to be elected twice, but consider this unwelcome second coming to be a leading indicator of this nation’s willingness to go fascist on main, rather than just another anomaly we’ll hopefully soon be footnoting in American history.

The weird thing is that my extremely caustic takes on Trump have provoked two equally strident and stupid responses.

On the more persistent end, there’s a commenter out there who seems to believe I’m cutting Trump a blank check on rights violations by referring to his current term as an “administration,” rather than a regime.

Well, if I may be so bold (and who’s going to stop me!), fuck right off. I’ll call it a “regime” on the regular if Trump somehow manages to get the nation’s top court to approve of a third term, which would probably result in Franklin Roosevelt rolling over in his grave, if only he weren’t so incapacitated by his presumably lingering polio.

Speaking of polio, let’s not forget Mr. Measles, the guy currently running the Dept. of Health and Human Services into the deeper, darker parts of worldwide life expectancy charts. Hey, hitting 80 is no longer an expected outcome in the Free World. If you’re lucky, you’ll die of rape-related pregnancy complications in the Federal Republic of Texas as doctors do nothing they can to prevent a child from being born into abject poverty and abuse, even if it means killing the mother to give this kid a shot at shooting up his school.

On the other hand, I have commenters complaining I’m “too biased” when I cover issues related to the hateful ratfucking bigots currently running this country.

Please enjoy my apology to these weirdos, who seem to think encroaching fascism should be covered “fairly” — something composed and performed by punkish victims of every housing crisis over the last 20 years, Japanther:

And that’s the weird thing about this so-called “discourse.” Some people want you to be angrier. Other people want you to be less angry.

But they’re both wrong. You can’t always get what you want, as every cover band has ever said when covering the Rolling Stones past 11 pm. (The “Satisfaction” crowd has already left to drive home the babysitter. The crowd that remains may still want some crowd-pleasers, but just as equally they want the stuff that makes them feel bad.)

You get this instead, sickos:

And that’s how it goes here at Techdirt. You may be pleased by certain posts — or perhaps all posts. But your pleasure isn’t the impetus for the post’s creation. We obviously hope you’ll be pleased by our posts (a hopefulness that covers everyone from the other Tim to Mike to Karl to Glyn to Cathy to every other writer who allows us to publish their stuff under the Techdirt logo), but your personal pleasure is not what drives the creation of content, despite the fervent belief of certain commenters.

What we do is what we want to do. And while I’m always willing to accept criticism over factual and/or legal inaccuracies in my posts (how else would I learn?!), I’m extremely opposed to vibes-based criticism of my work. If you have facts, bring them. But don’t expect any writer here to neuter their posts just because it didn’t appeal to people who think other terms should be used just so they might feel a little more comfortable reading the content.

That’s the way it works here. We don’t write because we want to please everyone. We write because WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY. If you want “both sides” writing, you’ve got everything from the NYT editorial board to the back of mayonnaise packets to give you what you want. But if you’re showing up here specifically to bitch about perceived biases, you’re in the wrong place. The bias exists. And it is SPECTACULAR.

Don’t bring vibes to a fact fight. Get in or get out, but don’t expect Techdirt to bend a writer’s will to satisfy particularly lazy and argumentative commenters. We write what WE BELIEVE. For everything else, there’s… I don’t know… most of the rest of internet?

Don’t be these people, whether you’ve bought into the Krassensteins or the weird concept that reporting on events that affect your life should be an affect-less drone you can tune out until you feel like adding your particular bitching to a site’s comment section. Either way, you’re just performative but somehow feel you’re justified in attacking people who have been doing this for real for years before it even mattered to you.

Filed Under: comments, shut the fuck up, vibes

Trump Infrastructure Bill Revamp To Net Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk Billions In New Subsidies For Broadband They Can’t Really Deliver

Broadband

from the naked-cronyism dept

There’s $42.5 billion in broadband grants are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents).

But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable to poor people, and to ensure that Elon Musk gets billions in new broadband subsidies for his expensive and increasingly congested satellite broadband company, Starlink.

The rewrites delayed the underlying grant program, forcing many states to revamp their plans for the already earmarked funds. That includes a new bidding process. Unsurprisingly, in states like Tennessee and Colorado, Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper and Elon Musk’s Starlink are now poised to dominate the bidding process, resulting in a lot of taxpayer funds likely going toward satellite services… instead of fiber:

“SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper flooded the Tennessee office with applications, submitting more than twice as many broadband grant applications as fiber builders, while requesting on average about 10 times less in funding – at least according the application areas.”

Republicans revamped the program to make billionaires happy. Though they claim they revamped the program because they were looking to cut costs. But we’ve noted repeatedly how these Low-Earth orbit satellite broadband efforts have massive problems that make them ill-suited to tackling America’s digital divide at any serious scale.

Starlink has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand is expensive and not guaranteed.

One recent study found that Starlink struggles to deliver the FCC’s already flimsy definition of broadband – 100 megabits per second (Mbps) down, 20 Mbps up – in any areas where Starlink subscribership exceeds 6 households per square mile. In many areas, these capacity constraints are causing Starlink to issue “congestion” charges as high as $750.

So yes, it’s technically cheaper for taxpayers to fund expensive, congested satellite broadband service, but it results in slower, more expensive service that can’t actually deliver on the promises it’s going to be making. Republicans don’t really care about that, and later on, after the subsidies have been doled out and public is frustrated by the substandard result, they’ll just ignore the problem they caused.

The other problem is money directed to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is money directed away from a lot of locally owned municipal and cooperative broadband providers that have been recently using taxpayer money to deploy “future proof”, symmetrical gigabit fiber for prices as low as $60 a month.

Many states had only just started funding these promising emerging competitors, but the Trump revamp of this BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment) program means that if the Trump administration doesn’t like your proposal (it doesn’t reward Musk, it tries to help the poor, or it funds community broadband access) your state could lose millions or billions in funds, permanently.

Another problem: the Trump administration’s lower standards means that companies like Comcast that had originally been encouraged to deploy fiber, are now deploying slower (but still as expensive for consumers) cable broadband service. From Tennessee:

“In the initial round of funding, Comcast applied for funding for 27 project areas. In the Benefit of the Bargain round, Comcast applied to serve 39 project areas. The key difference is that, in the initial round, Comcast proposed to serve these areas with fiber broadband and is now proposing to serve them with cable broadband at a lower cost.”

Fiber providers may have higher up front construction costs, but they’re fixing the problem permanently and properly. As opposed to throwing the lion’s share of taxpayer money at a technology that literally and technically can’t accomplish what’s being asked of it. And, in at least one case, into the lap of a company owned and run by an overt white supremacist with a head full of conspiracy theories.

Ideally, you want taxpayer money going primarily to fiber. After that, to stuff like fixed wireless and 5G wireless. After that, you fill in the gaps with LEO satellite service. LEO satellite service shouldn’t be the primary choice. But because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, that logic’s flying right out the window, and most of the funding is now poised to get dumped into the laps of Trump’s favorite billionaires.

Filed Under: affordable, bead, broadband, cable, environment, fcc, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, leo, project kuiper, satellite, starlink
Companies: amazon, spacex, starlink

Credit Card Companies Fielding A Ton Of Complaints Over NSFW Games Disappearing On Platforms

Culture

from the just-take-our-money dept

A week or so ago, Karl Bode wrote about Vice Media’s idiotic decision to disappear several articles that had been written by its Waypoint property concerning Collective Shout. Collective Shout is an Australian group that pretends to be a feminist organization, when, in reality, it operates much more like any number of largely evangelical groups bent on censoring any content that doesn’t align with their own viewpoints (which they insist become your viewpoints as well). The point of Karl’s post was to correctly point out that Collective Shout’s decision to go after the payment processors for the major video game marketplaces over their offering NSFW games shouldn’t be hidden from the public in the interest of clickbait non-journalism.

But that whole thing about Collective Shout putting on a pressure campaign on payment processors is in and of itself a big deal, as is the response to it. Both Steam and itch.io recently either removed or de-indexed a ton of games they’re labeling NSFW, chiefly along guidelines clearly provided by the credit card companies themselves. Now, Collective Shout will tell you that it is mostly interested in going after games that depict vile actions in some ways, such as rape, child abuse, and incest.

No Mercy. That’s the name of the incest-and-rape-focused game that was geo-blocked in Australia this April, following a campaign by the local pressure group Collective Shout. The group, which stands against “the increasing pornification of culture”, then set its sights on a broader target – hundreds of other games they identified as featuring rape, incest, or child sexual abuse on Steam and itch.io. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us,” said the group of its latest campaign.

The move was effective. Steam began removing sex-related games it deemed to violate the standards of its payment processors, presenting the choice as a tradeoff in a statement to Rock Paper Shotgun: “We are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam.”

Itch.io followed that up shortly afterwards with its de-indexing plan, but went further and did this with all NSFW games offered on the platform. Unlike Steam, itch.io was forthcoming as to their reasoning for its actions. And they were remarkably simple.

“Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform,” Corcoran said. “To ensure that we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our payment partners and take immediate steps towards compliance.”

Digital marketplaces being unable to collect payment through trusted partners would be, to put it tersely, the end of their business. Those same payment processors can get predictably itchy about partnering with platforms that host content that someone out there, or many someones as part of a coordinated campaign, may not like for fear that will sully their reputation. And because these are private companies we’re talking about, their fear along with any of their own sense of morality are at play here. The end result is a digital world filled with digital marketplaces that all exist under an umbrella of god-like payment processors that can pretty much dictate to those other private entities what can be on offer and what cannot.

And, as an executive from Appcharge chimed in, the processors will hang this all on the amount of fraud and chargebacks that come along with adult content, but that doesn’t change the question about whether payment processors should be neutral on legal but morally questionable content or not. Because, as you would expect, the aims of folks like Collective Shout almost certainly don’t end with things like rape and incest.

It’s possible that Collective Shout’s campaign highlighted a level of operational and reputational risk that payment processors weren’t aware of, and of a severity they didn’t expect. “I’m guessing it’s also the moral element,” Tov-Ly says. “It just makes sense, right? Why would you condone incest or rape promoting games?”

Tov-Ly is of the opinion that payment processors offer a utility, and should have no more role in the moral arbitration of art than your electricity company – meaning, none at all. “Whenever you open that Pandora’s box, you’re not impartial anymore,” he says. “Today it’s rape games and incest, but tomorrow it could be another lobbying group applying pressure on LGBT games in certain countries.”

We’ve already seen this sort of thing when it comes to book and curriculum bans that are currently plaguing far too much of the country. When porn can mean Magic Treehouse, the word loses all meaning.

What is actually happening is that payment processors are feeling what they believe is “public pressure”, but which is actually just a targeted and coordinated campaign from a tiny minority of people who watched V For Vendetta and thought it was an instruction manual. Well, the public has caught wind of this, as have game publishers that might be caught up in this censorship or whatever comes next, and coordinated contact campaigns to payment processors to complain about this new censorship are being conducted.

Gilbert Martinez had just poured himself a glass of water and was pacing his suburban home in San Antonio, Texas while trying to navigate Mastercard’s byzantine customer service hotline. He was calling to complain about recent reports that the company is pressuring online gaming storefronts like Steam and Itch.io to ban certain adult games. He estimates his first call lasted about 18 minutes and ended with him lodging a formal complaint in the wrong department.

Martinez is part of a growing backlash to Steam and Itch.io purging thousands of games from their databases at the behest of payment processing companies. Australia-based anti-porn group Collective Shout claimed credit for the new wave of censorship after inciting a write-in campaign against Visa and Mastercard, which it accused of profiting off “rape, incest, and child sexual abuse game sales.” Some fans of gaming are now mounting reverse campaigns in the hopes of nudging Visa and Mastercard in the opposite directions.

If noise is what is going to make these companies go back to something resembling sanity, this will hopefully do the trick. We’re already seeing examples of games that are being unjustly censored, described as porn when they are very much not. Not to mention instances where nuance is lost and the “porn” content is actually the opposite.

Vile: Exhumed is a textbook example of what critics of the sex game purge always feared: that guidelines aimed at clamping down on pornographic games believed to be encouraging or glorifying sexual violence would inevitably ensnare serious works of art grappling with difficult and uncomfortable subject matter in important ways. Who gets to decide which is which? For a long time, it appeared to be Steam and Itch.io. Last week’s purges revealed it’s actually Visa and Mastercard, and whoever can frighten them the most with bad publicity.

Some industry trade groups have also weighed in. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) released a statement stating that “censorship like this is materially harmful to game developers” and urging a dialogue between “platforms, payment processors, and industry leaders with developers and advocacy groups.” “We welcome collaboration and transparency,” it wrote. “This issue is not just about adult content. It is about developer rights, artistic freedom, and the sustainability of diverse creative work in games.”

This is the result of a meddling minority attempting to foist their desires on everyone else, plain and simple. Choking the money supply is a smart choice, sure, but one that should be recognized in this case for what it is: censorship based on proclivities that are not widely shared. And if there really is material in these games that is illegal, it should obviously be done away with.

But we should not be playing this game of pretending content that is not widely seen as immoral should somehow be choked of its ability to participate in commerce.

Filed Under: censorship, nsfw, payment processors, prude police, video games
Companies: collective shout, itch.io, steam, valve

ICE, Georgia Sheriff’s Office Combine Forces To Keep A Salvadoran Journalist Locked Up Indefinitely

Legal Issues

from the America-hates-foreigners-for-their-freedom dept

This too will be swept away by this administration’s steady stream of injustices, but it’s still worth highlighting before it’s buried by even worse news later.

The mass deportation program enacted by Trump — one that intends to turn ICE into the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency — has already seen innocent foreigners declared “gang members,” college students arrested for opinion pieces they wrote for the school paper, and streets, businesses, homeless shelters, and courtrooms invaded by people in masks everyone is just supposed to assume work for the US government and have the legal authority to do the things they’re doing.

Due process rights have been universally ignored, along with a whole lot of other constitutional rights, ranging from free speech protections to warrant requirements for ICE officers.

Now, there’s this: another inexplicable — and apparently unending — violation of constitutional rights the US has extended to foreign-born residents and visitors for most of its history as an independent nation.

Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist imprisoned in a south Georgia immigration detention center after being arrested covering a “No Kings Day” protest in June, is being “punished for his journalism”, first amendment rights groups said.

“The charges were dropped, yet he remains detained by Ice,” said José Zamora, the regional director for the Americas at the Committee to Protect Journalists, during a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Georgia capitol with Guevara’s attorneys and family. “Let’s be clear, Mario is being punished for his journalism. He is now the only journalist in prison in the US in direct retaliation for his reporting.”

And there it is: Guevara was arrested for reporting on a “No Kings Day” protest — the nationwide protests that pissed in Trump’s birthday Cheerios so hard he immediately walked back earlier comments suggesting he’d no longer target the hardworking migrants employed by so many of his big business supporters.

Everything happening to journalist Mario Guevara right now is extremely vindictive, which is extremely on-brand for the Trump administration and the dozens of local law enforcement agencies willing to be even worse than they are already just to score some brownie points with the current regime.

Guevara was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of “pedestrian in roadway” while documenting a “No Kings” protest in Doraville, Georgia. When he was arrested, he was streaming his coverage to more than 1 million Spanish-speaking followers on Facebook.

Law enforcement officers (after a lot of fucking him around) seized his phone and tossed him into a nearby ICE detention center — one currently “supported” by “mass deportations give us a money boner” private prison firm, GEO Group. This all happened despite the arresting agency dropping the charges against Guevara.

Rather than allow Guevara — who is apparently in this country legally while his green card process continues — to return to the streets, another law enforcement agency stepped in to keep him locked up.

Though charges from the protest were quickly dropped, the sheriff of nearby Gwinnett county laid a second set of unrelated misdemeanor traffic charges shortly after Guevara’s arrest. The Gwinnett county solicitor subsequently dropped those charges as well, but not before Gwinnett’s sheriff’s office seized his cell phone with a search warrant.

Given that the charges brought (and dropped) against Guevara by the Gwinnett County sheriff’s office were traffic-related, there cannot possibly be any probable cause to support the seizure of his phone, much less his continued detention at the ICE facility in Folkston, Georgia.

According to Guevara’s lawyer, no agency — federal or local — is capable or willing to explain what happened to his phone, nor whose possession it’s in when (or if) he’s given a chance to retrieve it.

“Everybody’s saying we don’t see a warrant in the system,” Diaz said, describing his office’s inquiries with the sheriff and other agencies. “So, one of two things happened. Some other agency that hasn’t contacted us took it – US attorney’s [office], Ice, somebody else has it – or the phone was just plain stolen.

The rationale for this phone seizure — as well as Guevara’s continued detention (which included a brief stay in general population at an Atlanta federal prison) — appears to be nothing more than “Because fuck you, that’s why.” That’s the standard operating procedure for ICE, something that’s only become more common and more emboldened under Trump and his compliant band of bigots.

All of this will likely stay buried by ICE and its local enablers for as long as possible. And there’s no guarantee anyone involved with this will actually comply with any order from any court involved in the litigation that will inevitably follow Guevara’s release. The administration has made it clear it doesn’t believe courts have the power to stop it from doing whatever it wants. And that attitude is certainly going to spread to every local law enforcement agency that aids and abets the administration’s unconstitutional activities.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, 5th amendment, 6th amendment, dhs, due process, free speech, georgia, ice, mario guevara, mass deportation
Companies: geo group

Judge Pulls Opinion Full Of AI-Style Hallucinations, But No One Is Willing To Say It Was Written By AI

Legal Issues

from the chatgpt-is-not-westlaw dept

Let’s say you’re a federal judge, and you need to write an opinion about a securities case. You could do it the time-tested old-fashioned way: read the briefings, read the relevant caselaw, check your quotes, make sure you’ve got the holdings right. Or you could try one of these new AI tools that everyone’s talking about. Just feed it a prompt like “write me a securities opinion with lots of citations about scienter” and see what happens.

What could go wrong?

Well, you might end up like Judge Julien Xavier Neals of the District of New Jersey, who just had to withdraw his entire opinion after a lawyer politely pointed out that it was riddled with fabricated quotes, nonexistent case citations, and completely backwards case outcomes. The kind of errors that have a very specific signature—the same signature that’s gotten lawyers sanctioned for over a year now.

Now, there are a few possible explanations here. Maybe Judge Neals was having the worst research day in judicial history and just happened to make multiple errors that perfectly mimic AI hallucinations through pure coincidence. Maybe there’s some other explanation for why a federal judge would confidently cite cases for propositions they directly contradict.

Or maybe—and this is just a thought—Judge Neals used the same AI tools that have been getting lawyers in trouble for over a year, and somehow expected a different result.

The particularly puzzling part is that courts have been sanctioning lawyers for exactly these AI hallucination mistakes since 2023. If you’re a federal judge, you’ve probably seen some of these cases come across your desk. You know what AI hallucinations look like. You know they’re a problem. So what’s the excuse here?

Let’s catalog the damage, shall we? According to the complaint letter from lawyer Andrew Lichtman, Neals’ opinion included:

• Multiple quotes attributed to cases that don’t actually contain those quotes
• Three cases where he got the outcomes completely backwards (motions that were granted described as denied, and vice versa)
• A case supposedly from the Southern District of New York that doesn’t exist there (probably confused with a similar case from New Jersey)
• Quotes attributed to defendants that they never actually made

The fake quotes are particularly telling. They sound perfectly legal-ish: “classic evidence of scienter,” “false statements in their own right,” “the importance of the product to the company’s financial success supports the inference of scienter.” These are exactly the kind of plausible-sounding but ultimately fabricated language that large language models love to generate.

Now, if you’re thinking “this sounds familiar,” you’re right. We’ve been covering lawyers getting hammered for AI-generated fake cases since 2023. Just recently, three lawyers got kicked off a case for citing five hallucinated cases. The pattern is always the same: cases that sound real, citations that kind of make sense, but turn out to be complete fiction when you actually check.

And you’re supposed to check.

The legal profession has been learning this lesson the hard way. Courts have been clear: if you use AI tools, you’d better verify everything. But apparently that memo didn’t make it to the federal bench in New Jersey.

You might recall that Judge Kevin Newsom on the Eleventh Circuit actually wrote a thoughtful opinion about how AI tools could be useful in legal practice. He went into detail on all the ways that using a tool like this only makes sense in a very narrow set of circumstances: not for drafting an opinion, but for trying to query the common understanding of a word or phrase.

It’s almost like Neals read that opinion and thought, “You know what? I bet I can do better.”

But here’s the really concerning part: this stuff doesn’t stay contained. Other lawyers in a separate case had already cited Neals’ now-withdrawn opinion as persuasive authority. Those made-up quotes and backwards case outcomes were starting to burrow their way into the legal record, creating fake precedent that could influence future cases.

Neals’ June 30 opinion has already influenced a parallel case also playing out in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey. That case also centers on allegations by shareholders that a biopharma company—in this instance, Outlook Therapeutics Inc.—lied to them about a product.

Citing Neals’ decision as a “supplemental authority,” lawyers for Outlook shareholders argued against the company’s motion for dismissing the class action.

This is the nightmare scenario that legal tech experts have been warning about. When a private lawyer cites fake cases, it gets caught pretty quickly by opposing counsel or judges. But when a federal judge publishes fake legal standards in an official opinion? Other lawyers assume it’s reliable. They cite it. Courts rely on it. The hallucinations metastasize through the system.

In that other case, lawyers for Outlook had to also alert the judge that the CoreMedix decision “contains pervasive and material inaccuracies,” which is a nice term for “judicial AI slop.” But, still, what a world in which you need lawyers to waste time telling judges that the cases opposing counsel are citing may be real cases… but are based on a ruling by a judge who appears to have used AI.

Bloomberg notes that there’s “no mention of AI in the complaints the attorneys have directed at Judge Neals.” Which, sure, maybe the judge was just having a really, really bad day and happened to make multiple errors that perfectly mimic AI hallucinations through pure coincidence.

But come on. Everyone in this story—the judge, the lawyers, the reporters—knows exactly what this looks like. They’re just too polite to say it.

Look, we get it. AI tools are tempting. They can draft reasonable-sounding legal language faster than you can type. But as we’ve seen over and over again, they’re also perfectly happy to make stuff up with complete confidence. That’s why verification isn’t optional—it’s literally the bare minimum of professional competence.

This isn’t really a story about one judge making some mistakes. It’s about the broader pattern of people in positions of authority not understanding the tools they’re using.

The technology isn’t going away. AI tools will probably become more sophisticated, and they’ll certainly become more ubiquitous. But that doesn’t change the fundamental responsibility to verify what they produce. Lawyers learned this lesson the expensive way—through sanctions, being kicked-off cases, and professional embarrassment. Apparently, some judges are going to have to learn it too.

The fact that he had to withdraw the entire opinion suggests these weren’t minor errors that could be fixed with a quick correction. According to the lawyers who complained, the opinion contained “pervasive and material inaccuracies.” That’s not a typo—that’s a fundamental breakdown in the basic duty to get the facts right.

So what happens next? Maybe Judge Neals will issue a corrected opinion—one where he actually reads the cases he cites and verifies that the quotes are real. Maybe he’ll quietly implement some verification procedures in his chambers. Or maybe he’ll just hope everyone forgets this happened.

But the broader lesson is pretty clear: if you’re going to use AI tools to help with legal work, you’d better understand their limitations. They’re great at generating plausible-sounding text. They’re terrible at accuracy. And if you’re a federal judge whose opinions carry the weight of law, that’s probably something you should have figured out before hitting “publish.”

Filed Under: hallucinations, judges, julien xavier neals, llms, opinions

ICE Is Spending More Time Targeting The Least Dangerous People In America

Failures

from the sticking-it-to-the-least-of-us dept

The “worst of the worst” ruse was never taken seriously by anyone, least of all those who performatively repeated it to serve as cover for their hatred and bigotry.

The mantra means nothing. The same agency that claims it’s doing “God’s work” is going all out to rob the meek of their inheritance.

Because there simply aren’t enough criminals to satisfy Trump ghoul-in-chief Stephen Miller’s 3,000 arrests per day quota, ICE and the DHS are now targeting anyone seeming vaguely foreign, no matter how much reality the Trump administration has to ignore and how many rights it needs to violate to accomplish this.

Rather than find dangerous criminals, Trump’s hate squad is going after taxpayers, productive workers, poor people in need of medical assistance, and literally anyone who looks brown enough to be detained for possible removal.

Migrants are more respectful of US laws than natural-born, whiter citizens. They also do the jobs most people fortunate enough to be born here won’t do. There’s a vacuum being created that will never be filled as long as people like Trump are in charge.

ICE has been behaving like a rogue agency for years now, but has been given explicit permission to go wild now that Trump’s back at the helm. That’s why things like this — incidents that have no (non-World War II) parallel prior to Trump’s second term in office — are making headlines almost daily across the nation:

Wilder had just concluded a session in the batting cages with a group of new kids. He saw six ICE agents approach. “I thought they were speaking about baseball,” he said. “And then I heard, ‘Where are you from? Where are your parents from?’ ” Four had face masks. All had guns and tasers.

Why were they questioned? “Our kids are from Washington Heights and Dyckman and the South Bronx and parts of Queens,” Wilder said. “They are Black and Latino. They come from the projects. Kids who love baseball who can’t afford baseball.” He went on, “We also have Milo. Milo is a white kid who actually is from Harlem and is proud of it, too.” All were American citizens. 

That’s NYC youth baseball coach Youman Wilder relating his recent run-in with ICE officers. I’m sure the officers saw an opportunity to round up a bunch of kids without being subjected to invocations of rights or other objections from their parents. Unfortunately for them, they ran into Wilder, who refused to allow ICE to intimidate these kids into an ICE detention center.

ICE, of course, issued a statement that is just as meaningless as its untargeted operations all across the nation:

(A spokesperson said that ICE had not conducted any recent “enforcement activity” in the vicinity of the park.)

Of course it didn’t. This wasn’t actually “enforcement activity.” This was just some ICE officers hoping to luck into a few detentions. It wasn’t an operation. It was a crime of opportunity. So, it obviously can’t be called “enforcement activity,” especially when the officers decided to back down once they encountered a slight bit of resistance. This is an empty statement, one as hollow as the souls of everyone standing behind it.

That’s why ICE has been spotted roaming around homeless shelters, schools, libraries, and even a Puerto Rican history museum — despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are, in full fact, natural born American citizens!

And the deflection above makes even less sense when you take a look at the directive Trump’s DHS rescinded to make way for the oppression of some of the most powerless people in this nation, especially if they aren’t recognizably white.

Issued January 20, 2025 — literally the same day Trump was sworn in for the second time — this memo rescinds a directive issued by then-DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas less than four years earlier. What got rolled back by Trump’s DHS were blanket protections for areas mostly filled with children or people seeking help from medical providers or other government agencies.

The list of “protected areas” ICE should not be engaging in untargeted enforcement efforts included schools, daycares, healthcare facilities, places of worship, playgrounds, youth centers, day care providers, foster care operations, social service providers, disaster relief centers, funerals, weddings, and people attending/participating in protected First Amendment activity like protests or rallies.

And, of course, this is where the current version of ICE is looking to pick people off. While most of its efforts have focused on places of employment (again, an extremely dubious use of resources), it has expanded to cover a lot of places that might have seemed a bit too close to the lines drawn by this previous guidance to be considered an acceptable risk.

It’s not that ICE is any better or worse in terms of personnel since Trump took office. It’s that those overseeing ICE operations have gotten worse and somehow have found enough people in the ICE ranks willing to send officers into places that previously would have been considered off-limits, if not actually morally repugnant to ICE officers supposedly tasked with finding “the worst of worst” migrants to deport.

And if there are a lot of ICE officers who disagree with the new tactics, it’s on them to exit the department before they become a further part of the problem. Standing by while others engage in evil doesn’t absolve you of their sins. It just makes you complicit in them. And if you’re the sort of thug who actually thinks it’s a good idea to accost kids playing baseball, you’re a terrible human being who should never have been allowed to wield as much power as you do. You’re no soldier in God’s army and you sure as shit aren’t worthy of living in the nation that employs you.

Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, ice, kristi noem, mass deportation, todd lyons, trump administration