Ryan Walters’ Plan To Teach OK Students Election And COVID Conspiracies Put On Hold By State Supreme Court

Legal Issues

from the mideducation dept

We’ve talked a lot about Ryan Walters recently, mostly because he keeps forgetting that the United States Constitution applies to him and his state. Between his attempt to inject Christian theocracy into the public school system while enriching Dear Leader Trump or his fight with his own board members in the wake of some mild porn showing up on a screen in a boardroom, this is a man who seems to enjoy making waves.

And lawsuits, too, it seems. Tim Cushing wrote about how Walters snuck some language last minute into a mandate that was voted on and approved by the Board of Education, requiring teachers in OK public schools to teach children about conspiracy theories around the 2020 election and to teach that COVID-19 came from a Chinese laboratory. Between that and the injection of religion into secular classrooms, this of course resulted in a lawsuit and the latest in that litigation is that the OK Supreme Court has ordered that Walters’ mandate be put on hold.

The state’s high court issued a temporary stay on Monday while a lawsuit filed by a group of parents and educators challenging the new standards is being litigated. The court’s order directs the State Department of Education to keep the previous social studies standards in place while the case is being decided.

“This is a victory for transparency, fairness, and the constitutional rights of all Oklahomans,” said Brent Rowland, legal director of Oklahoma Appleseed, which is helping to represent the plaintiffs. “The authority to govern comes with accountability for making decisions in the full view of the people the government serves.”

Now you would think that Walters’ reaction to all of this would be to claim that the court got it wrong. That he wasn’t trying to inject Christian theocracy into secular schools. That this wasn’t a partisan matter. That this was all some misreading of his curriculum mandate.

Instead, well…

In a statement Tuesday, Walters said the Supreme Court was “embarrassing” and out of step with most Oklahomans.

“Christianity, American exceptionalism, and conservative values are under attack and the Oklahoma Supreme Court is leading the assault,” Walters said of the nine-member court, six of whom were appointed by Republican governors.

Yes, yes, the conservative court of a conservative state is part of an attack on conservative values. Makes all the sense in the world. And it is Christianity that is on offer in the classroom, if that is what the court is “attacking.” Every accusation, as it goes, is an admission.

At some point Walters’ No True Scotsman routine is going to piss off enough people that he’s going to get himself booted from office. How that hasn’t happened yet, though, is beyond me.

Filed Under: board of education, conspiracies, curriculum, oklahoma, ryan walters

Copyright Troll Backfires: Has To Pay Up To Get Out Of Its Lawsuit Of Lies

Copyright

from the troll-defeated dept

It’s been a good while since we’ve had an old-fashioned copyright troll nonsense story around here, and boy do we have a doozy for you today. Regular Techdirt readers know that we’ve covered Paul Levy’s work for years—the man who the Washingtonian once dubbed “the web bully’s worst enemy” has been taking down copyright trolls with surgical precision for over a decade. But this latest victory against Prepared Food Photos may be his most complete evisceration yet.

The short version: a copyright troll that has been shaking down small businesses for years with fraudulent claims about its licensing fees just had to pay its own target to make a lawsuit go away. And in the process, Levy has potentially opened the door for hundreds of previous victims to sue for fraud. It’s beautiful. And that’s not even revealing all of the juicy bits.

Let’s dive into the delicious details, courtesy of Levy’s characteristically thorough (and thoroughly entertaining) write-up on the case.

Prepared Food Photos (PFP) has been running a classic copyright troll operation for years. The company would find businesses using stock photos, then send threatening demand letters claiming massive damages based on their supposed “$999 per month minimum” subscription fee. Small businesses, terrified of federal court litigation, would pay up rather than fight.

There was just one problem: it was all a lie.

And somehow, Prepared Food Photos and its copyright trolling partner-in-crime, “CopyCat Legal,” didn’t seem to think anyone would ever discover that during the course of litigation. Oops.

More than two years after Prepared Food Photos sued Pool World in federal court in Spokane Washington, alleging that a retailer had infringed Prepared Food Photos’ copyright in a stock photo of vegetables on a grill, Prepared Food Photos has agreed to pay Pool World for its consent to dismissal of the action.  Pool World agreed to keep amount of the payment confidential.

You read that right. The troll had to pay the target to allow it to dismiss the case. You know things are going badly when that’s the result. But it gets so much better.

As I explained in my most recent blog post, the claim of a $999 per month minimum, and hence the argument that Prepared Food Photos was entitled to $11,988 in actual damages for each year of alleged infringement, was a scam. (Indeed, we learned recently that, for a period of time in 2019, PFP was even offering a subscription to its entire database of photos for as little as $29.99 per month, an offer limited to small retailers with no more than three locations)

So, yes, they were claiming a $999 per month minimum while actually charging some customers $29.99? That’s not just aggressive litigation — that’s straight-up fraud.

What makes this case so satisfying is how methodically Levy dismantled PFP’s entire business model through discovery. The company tried every trick in the book to avoid having to produce documents that would expose their lies:

Prepared Food Photos continued to delay the litigation, first through dragged out mediation about which it was never serious, then moving to dismiss the suit while paying only taxable costs, which we  successfully opposed  on the ground dismissal would deprive Pool World of its entitlement to seek an award of attorney fees.  After that motion was denied, Prepared Food Photos stalled on document discovery seeking to show that most of the subscription agreements were entered to settle claims of past infringement.  After our motion to compel that discovery was granted, Prepared Food Photos produced financial records that were heavily redacted. The unredacted documents had to be compelled by a motion to enforce the earlier discovery order. Then, on the eve of depositions, they had to be cancelled. the first time because Prepared Food Photos represented that its main witness had had a family crisis that prevented her from traveling,  and the second time, three months later, on the ground that its president had been hospitalized. Somehow, there was always a reason why Pool World could not cross-examine PFP’s witnesses.

Classic troll behavior—they’re great at threatening people but terrible when they actually have to defend their claims under oath.

When the documents finally came out, the scope of the fraud became crystal clear, and PFP’s lawyers started to backtrack.

But in meantime, we were able to obtain sufficient discovery to serve a motion for Rule 11 sanctions, which forced Prepared Food Photos to amend its complaint. Initially, Prepared Food Photos initially proposed to amend in a way that maintained its fiction of a $999 per month minimum, see Exhibit AAA in this document, but when we warned PFP’s lawyer that such an amendment would still be susceptible to a Rule 11 motion, PFP amended to drop both the allegation that it had been charging a minimum of $999 per month, and the allegation that its main business was creating fine photographs and licensing access to such photographs. 

They had to literally rewrite their complaint to remove the lies. And then they had to deal with some fairly uncomfortable facts in court:

Even though depositions continued to be postponed, our document discovery enabled us to move for summary judgment, showing more than a hundred undisputed facts that painted an unflattering portrait of Prepared Food Photos. These included that (1) most of the work done by Prepared Food Photos employees entailed searching for alleged infringers and making infringement claims, (2) that roughly 95% of Prepared Food Photos’ income comes from threatening and bringing copyright infringement claims, (3) that Prepared Food Photos was not authoring any new photographs – in other words, that Prepared Food Photos is a classic copyright troll.

The undisputed facts also established that Prepared Food Photos had been securing this enforcement income (4) by lying in demand letters and court filings about its subscription policies and (5) by using deliberately deceptive and coercive statements intended to intimidate the recipients of its demand letters and lawsuits into paying excessive settlements far in excess of the level of damages that Prepared Food Photos could reasonably expect to recover in contested litigation with knowledgeable counsel on the defense side.

They also discovered that Getty Images, which the copyright holder had previously licensed the photos through before beginning this trolling scheme, used to license the photos for next to nothing, demolishing the claims of damages. Forget the $999 per month or even the $29.99 per month. These photos’ licensing value apparently was actually measured in pennies.

In addition, we secured documents from Getty Images, the company that had previously licensed the photo at issue in this case, along with some 4700 other photos, for average license fee of about a dollar per use – of which Prepared Food Photos’ predecessor Adlife received a tiny fraction, as little as twelve cents. THIS was the lost license fee that Prepared Food Photos would properly be awarded should the case go to trial.

So their entire business model was based on lies and intimidation. It’s quite something how copyright trolls always turn out to be even sleazier and more problematic than they first appear.

The financial comparison from when they were licensing things normally to when they began shaking small businesses down is pretty damn stark:

These documents afforded some spectacular numerical comparisons. Over the course of six years from 2010 to 2016, Adlife received slightly more than $11,000 per year in total income from Getty Images for licensing 4700 photos (among them the Grilled Vegetable Image at issue in this case), but in 2023 alone PFP bullied a single company named “Healthy’s” into paying $10,000 to settle a single infringement claim for use of the Grilled Vegetable Photo. And although the documentation we secured in discovery showed that Prepared Food Photos was making roughly $50,000 per year in subscription income – most of it from subscriptions obtained as part of settlements of claims for past infringement – it was garnering far more in infringement settlements, nearly two million dollars per year once CopyCat Legal had begun masterminding its enforcement strategy.

One settlement for a single photo netted them almost as much as they legitimately earned in a year from licensing thousands of photos. That’s some business model.

When Levy filed for summary judgment, PFP realized they were screwed:

At this point, Prepared Food Photos blinked. An adverse ruling on the statute of limitations would have made Pool World the prevailing party, triggering a possible application for an award of attorney fees in a very large amount. But a ruling on Pool World’s damages argument would arguably have been even more threatening to Prepared Foods Photos, because a determination that its argument for damages in the tens of thousands of dollars per infringement was improper as a matter of law could have been cited as res judicata in all future cases, endangering the basis for its revenue model.

They couldn’t risk a court ruling that would destroy their entire scam operation. So they did what bullies always do when confronted by someone who fights back: they folded and agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to get Pool Worlds to agree to let them dismiss the case (with prejudice, of course). The only concession PFP was able to get was that the amount they paid remains secret.

But in the end, Pool World, the small business PFP tried to shake down, ended up making them pay for the privilege of walking away.

This isn’t just one victory — it’s potentially opened the floodgates for all of PFP’s previous victims:

Third, now that the falsity of its claims about a supposed $999 minimum subscription fee have been exposed, Prepared Food Photos is potentially vulnerable to countersuits by the companies that were tricked into paying large settlements by the false statements in demand letters about PFP’s subscription minimum. Section 164 of the Restatement of Contracts  provides that a contract that is procured by fraud can be voidable at the option of the defrauded party, and now that we know that PFP was lying to the many businesses that received the CopycatLegal demand letters about the facts of its subscription agreements, it seems quite possible that businesses that paid many thousands of dollars to avoid being sued for using a photo whose market value was only a few dollars may well be able to void their settlement agreements, then dare PFP to sue them and face the same result as in Pool World, WeNeedaVacation or Jaber.

Translation: every business that paid them based on their fraudulent claims about subscription fees could potentially get their money back and sue for more.

Moreover, inspection of the CopyCat Legal ledgers shows that there were several hundred such victims, and the number whose settlement payment was $11,988 shows that they must have been influenced by the lie about a $999 per month minimum fee (known to PFP to have been false all along, and known to CopyCat Legal to have been false once it produced the subscription agreements in discovery during the fall of 2023). And, because there was a common scheme to defraud – virtually the same letters were transmitted on more than two thousand different times – a lawsuit might well be brought as a class action.

This could get very expensive for PFP very quickly.

Of course, when your reputation becomes too toxic even for the copyright troll business, what do you do? Rebrand!

Since the beginning of this calendar year, Prepared Food Photos has not filed a single infringement lawsuit. Instead, about two dozen suits over infringement of photos in the PFP database have been filed by a company named Rockefeller Photos, and indeed I have seen a number of CopyCat Legal demand letters over such infringements sent in the name of Rockefeller Photos. Although the complaints in these cases recite that Rockefeller Photos represents the interests of a number of photograph owners, so far as I have seen, Prepared Food Photos is the only such company. It appears that Joel Albrizio, the owner of PFP, is also the owner of Rockefeller Photos, and similarly the officers of PFP are the officers of Rockefeller Photos.

It is not clear why Rockefeller Photos has been created, but it is my guess that the stench of PFP’s reputation as a copyright troll has become so great that Rockefeller Photos is an attempt to create a new persona without the same reputational baggage. In the circumstances, all of the defenses that potentially apply to PFP will apply to Rockefeller Photos as well

Levy notes how this reminds him of the infamous Righthaven copyright troll whose attempt to game the copyright system by effectively selling a bare right to sue collapsed so badly its owners had to sell the copyrights to one of the publications they had sued to pay for their own legal fees.

Believe it or not, but there’s even more to this story that I didn’t include here. Levy recounts the details of two other cases involving PFP that go pretty badly as well, including a PFP representative falling apart during cross-examination, where she has to repeatedly admit to “mistakes” in the declaration she signed under oath. My favorite bit of that transcript:

Q. Now, ma’am, in that document, you indicated that there were — and I’m going to read it — “For any image,” and then you put in parentheses, “(including the 16 at issue in this lawsuit),” comma, “the plaintiff photographer spent hours specializing lighting, equipment and take dozens if not hundreds of images.” We’re not talking about 16 images. We’re talking about one photograph of a pork chop; right?

A. Correct.

Q. But you indicated in this affidavit that there were 16 different images that are at issue in this lawsuit, did you not?

A. There was an inadvertent six.

Q. Pardon?

A. There was an inadvertent six that was included.

Q. But — but it’s written S-I-X-T-E-E-N. It’s not inadvertent to write S-I-X — S-I-X-T-E-E-N, is it?

A. No. It was an error. It’s never been disputed that there’s only one image involved.

This is the kind of Perry Mason moment litigators dream about. She tried to claim she accidentally added a “6” to turn “1” into “16” in her sworn declaration, apparently forgetting that “SIXTEEN” was written out in full. When you’re caught lying under oath about basic facts in your own case, that’s usually a sign your litigation strategy has some problems.

While Levy (and the other lawyers who helped him, including Phil Malone at Stanford’s Juelsgaard Legal Clinic and Steve Kirby) deserve enormous credit for this masterpiece of litigation, as Levy points out, the real heroes here were Pool World, which could have easily folded rather than fight:

But the real hero of this defense is Pool World. It could easily have paid a small tribute to resolve this case, but its owner and its management were committed to defending this case to the hilt, hoping to save other small businesses from the sort of bullying to which Prepared Food Photos was trying to subject it. From my very first conversation with them, it was clear to me that they and I were on the same page about why this case was worth doing from a public interest perspective. An affidavit from business manager Pat Flynn  explained Pool World’s motivations in this case, including the decision not to refer the case to their insurance company lest Prepared Food Photos be paid off in their company’s name. Pool World’s leaders never flinched when they had to devote extensive staff time to discovery responses, or paying expert witness fees and, prospectively, paying for its lawyers’ travel expenses and deposition costs.  They read every paper before it was filed to ensure accuracy.

There’s an under-discussed tidbit in there that reveals a key part of the troll business model: Many legal bullies rely on the fact that almost any company they sue will make a claim with their insurance company, and they’re betting on insurance companies’ risk-averse calculus favoring quick settlements over costly litigation.

This explains why the legal trolling business model is so lucrative and persistent. It’s not just preying on small businesses’ lack of legal sophistication — it’s systematically exploiting insurance companies’ short-sighted willingness to keep feeding the trolls rather than fighting back. Pool World’s decision to explicitly avoid their insurance and fight on principle breaks this cycle.

But this is what it takes to stop copyright trolls — someone willing to stand up and fight, even when it would be cheaper to just pay the extortion fee.

Levy also notes that copyright trolls rely on recipients of their shakedown letters rolling over and just paying up, because copyright trolls are bullies, and bullies generally don’t want fair fights.

Either way, Levy’s story here is a masterclass in how to destroy a copyright troll operation. Through meticulous discovery work, Levy didn’t just win one case, he potentially dismantled an entire fraudulent business model and created a roadmap for hundreds of previous victims to get justice.

And in the end, watching a copyright troll have to pay its own target to make a case go away? That’s the kind of poetic justice that makes all the other frustrating copyright stories worth enduring.

Well played.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright trolls, fraud, licensing, lies, paul levy, photos
Companies: copycat legal, pool world, prepared food photos, rockefeller photos

You Don’t Own What You Buy: New Lawsuit Dings Amazon For Misleading Video ‘Purchases’

Legal Issues

from the words-no-longer-have-meaning dept

Techdirt has long lamented how in the modern era, you don’t really “own” what you buy. That game console, smart lock, or smart refrigerator can quickly become less useful (or completely useless) with a firmware update, bankruptcy, or addition of annoying subscription paywall.

The problem is particularly bad when it comes to digital rentals. In streaming video, you often have the option to “rent” or “buy” a video. But the latter is misleading given you don’t really “own” the purchase; you’re given a license — subject to the whims of an amoral, giant corporation — that can be revoked or changed by profit-seeking executives with an eye on enshittification.

That recently appears to have gotten Amazon in trouble via a new lawsuit that alleges that Amazon is misleading consumers by misrepresenting the word “buy.” From the lawsuit:

“On its website, Defendant tells consumers the option to ‘buy’ or ‘purchase’ digital copies of these audiovisual works. But when consumers ‘buy’ digital versions of audiovisual works through Amazon’s website, they do not obtain the full bundle of sticks of rights we traditionally think of as owning property. Instead, they receive ‘non-exclusive, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, limited license’ to access the digital audiovisual work, which is maintained at Defendant’s sole discretion.”

Ars Technica notes that a similar lawsuit was filed in the same court back in 2020, but was dismissed in 2021 for lacking standing. The website notes this new lawsuit stands a slightly better chance of success thanks to a new California law that bans the the sale of a “digital good to a purchaser with the terms ‘buy,’ ‘purchase,’ or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good, or alongside an option for a time-limited rental.”

The fight has parallels to efforts to hold telecom giants accountable for abusing the dictionary definition of words like “unlimited,” by promising users unlimited data, then imposing restriction, caps, and overage fees to drive up profits.

Such cases generally struggle due to companies that hide such restrictions in overlong fine print, then successfully argue this constitutes an effective and clear warning for consumers. In this instance, plaintiffs have to prove that it was clearly communicated to them that they would enjoy permanent, restriction-free “ownership” in perpetuity, and were harmed when that ownership was taken away.

Filed Under: california, digital goods, lawsuit, ownership, streaming, tv, video
Companies: amazon

How MAGA Killed Foreign Influence Research, But Now Demands Social Media Stop Foreign Influence Campaigns

Content Moderation

from the turns-out-we-need-trust-&-safety-after-all dept

It’s fascinating how quickly the tune changes when the shoe’s on the other foot. For years, we’ve been treated to endless screaming about how any effort to identify and counter foreign manipulation on social media was “censorship” and a violation of Americans’ free speech rights. The same crowd that turned researchers into pariahs and shut down entire government offices dedicated to studying foreign influence operations are now… demanding that social media platforms identify foreign accounts?

Laura Loomer, ever the consistent voice of reason, recently posted on X:

After this week, I would like to see X put country tags on X accounts so we know which country someone is tweeting from.

Too many foreigners on X pretending to be Americans for the sake of creating discord and political violence in the US.

It’s totally out of control.

This is the same Laura Loomer who has spent years railing against any kind of trust & safety interventions as “censorship.” But now that foreign accounts might be saying things she doesn’t like, suddenly identifying foreign influence is a great idea?

Loomer’s demand perfectly encapsulates the broader MAGA approach to foreign influence operations: destroy the systems that actually work, then demand magic solutions when the problem inevitably resurfaces. And, of course, this is leaving out the basic things that anyone with an ounce of knowledge about countering foreign misinformation could tell you including (1) foreign misinfo peddlers tend not to appear in a way that lets platforms know where they’re posting from, and (2) even if they did, they’d immediately switch to VPNs or other methods of cloaking their location soon after.

Because for years, many MAGA voices have been screaming that any attempt to study or counter foreign manipulation was an assault on free speech. Remember the hysteria over the Global Engagement Center? The attacks on researchers studying disinformation? The endless, mostly baseless complaints about how Big Tech was supposedly “censoring” Americans at the behest of government agencies?

With MAGA folks in control of all aspects of the government, it was no surprise that they quickly shuttered the Global Engagement Center (GEC) with a bunch of nonsense about how it was against free speech. This ignored the reality, which was that it was created and focused on helping to suss out foreign influence campaigns and to expose them to limit their power.

You know, just like Laura Loomer is now asking to have happen.

Somewhat incredibly, just days after Loomer demanded efforts to identify foreign interference on social media, Marco Rubio’s State Department gleefully announced that the US had withdrawn from an international effort designed to help expose foreign influence campaigns that had been used for years to help expose things like secret ISIS social media campaigns.

Even as the MAGA world is now clamoring for efforts to help expose foreign influence campaigns, they’re still framing efforts that were going on before as… censorship. Here was Marco Rubio lying about the GEC:

Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.  This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.  

That ends today.  Under the administration of President Trump, we will always work to protect the rights of the American people, and this is an important step in continuing to fulfill that commitment.

This is simply, fundamentally untrue. GEC did not work on silencing or censoring Americans. It worked on helping to expose and counter foreign influence campaigns.

As did many trust & safety and integrity teams across the industry, many of which have been dismantled by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, despite their efforts to expose and limit malicious foreign actors. But because of a bad faith campaign (led by MAGA and MAGA-adjacent people) to paint all trust & safety and efforts to counter disinformation as “censorship” now we’re left in a space where the people who were good at exposing these campaigns are gone… but you have people like Loomer demanding that Elon Musk magically do what he’s spent the last couple of years making sure X could no longer do.

This isn’t just run-of-the-mill political hypocrisy. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what foreign influence operations actually look like and how they work.

So now we have the same political coalition that cheered the dismantling of foreign influence research suddenly very concerned about… foreign influence. It’s almost like they never actually cared about the principle of free speech, but rather about ensuring that the speech they liked wasn’t subject to any scrutiny.

Of course, now, the systems and infrastructure that could actually identify foreign manipulation campaigns in a sophisticated way require exactly the kind of research infrastructure that people like Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee spent months attacking. The very people that Jordan and friends called the “censorship cartel” (something they never were) are exactly the folks that actually have expertise in finding foreign disinfo campaigns.

We’re left with what we’ve got: Loomer demanding that Elon Musk implement some kind of country-of-origin tagging system, apparently unaware that such systems are incredibly easy to circumvent with VPNs, and that building effective counter-measures requires exactly the kind of sustained research and institutional knowledge that her political allies just spent years dismantling.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t spend years screaming that any effort to study foreign manipulation is “censorship” and then turn around and demand that platforms magically solve the foreign manipulation problem. Well, you can, but it makes you look like either a hypocrite or someone who never understood the issue in the first place.

The truth is, dealing with foreign influence operations is genuinely difficult and requires nuanced approaches that balance free speech concerns with the need to maintain the integrity of public discourse. It requires sustained research, institutional knowledge, and yes, sometimes it means that platforms need to make difficult decisions about what content to host and how to label it.

But instead of having that conversation, we got years of performative outrage about “censorship” that effectively neutered our ability to deal with foreign manipulation. And now, when the consequences of that approach become apparent, the same people who created this mess are demanding quick fixes.

Of course, now we’ll probably have to sit through years of these same people “discovering” every other aspect of content moderation and foreign influence operations as if they’re the first ones to think of it.

Filed Under: content moderation, countering foreign influence, disinformation, elon musk, foreign influence, foreign influence campaigns, free speech, laura loomer, marco rubio, misinformation, research, state department
Companies: twitter, x

Daily Deal: Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock

Deals

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

The Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock is meticulously engineered to reduce the cable clutter and streamline your daily routine. Featuring 2 dedicated wireless charging surfaces, you can power up your phone and AirPods easily. In addition, you can charge your Apple Watch with the built-in charger mount. Stylish and compact, the dock is perfect for your tabletop, desk, or nightstand and will effortlessly charge your everyday essentials in one convenient place. It’s on sale for $33.

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

Warner Bros CEO Laments ‘Terrible’ Streaming TV Experience’ He Created, Proposes More Shitty Mergers And Price Hikes As The Fix

Failures

from the incompetent-failsons dept

We’ve mentioned repeatedly how the AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery series of media mergers were some of the most destructive and pointless business efforts ever, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs, the cancellation of endless popular programs, higher prices for consumers, and a shittier overall product.

One of the men at the heart of this dysfunction has been Warner Brothers Discovery CEO Davide Zaslav, whose outsized executive compensation packages keep skyrocketing despite no limit of bumbling. He’s highly representative of a streaming video industry that’s on the fast track to enshittification, where execs think “innovation” means big mergers, price hikes, shittier content, and crackdowns on password sharing.

At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference last week, Zaslav thought he would give some deep thought into what’s wrong with modern television. Zaslav laments what he calls a “a terrible consumer experience” across television, apparently oblivious to the fact he’s been directly responsible. His big complaint is there are too many choices and too much competition:

“The marketplace is really challenged with too many players in the market,” Zaslav said. “When people turn on — the consumers put on their TV, it’s a terrible consumer experience. In almost every market in the world, there’s just way too many choices. And you’re googling, ‘Where is it? How do I get from one to the other? How do I get into that platform?’”

Zaslav is partially right: streaming has become a fractured and confusing landscape of a myriad of different companies all rushing to the trough. Content licenses and catalogs shift without warning making it difficult to impossible for many consumers to find what they’re looking for on any consistent basis.

But Zaslav’s “solution” to this hasn’t been innovation; it’s generally been more shitty mergers like the terrible ones he’s overseen so far. He’s been an avid Trump supporter because Trump doesn’t believe in things like media consolidation limits or functional regulatory oversight, stuff Zaslav’s been excited about because he thinks it will usher forth a wave of new, unprecedented media consolidation.

Zaslav’s other ingenious solution for the streaming shitshow he helped create? More price hikes:

“The fact that this is quality — and that’s true across our company, motion picture, TV production and and streaming quality — we all we think that gives us a chance to raise price,” he said. “We think we’re way underpriced. We’re going to take our time.”

This is fairly delusional, coming from the guy who shifted HBO from The Sopranos to stuff like Fuckboy Island. It’s not clear he even sees that he’s demanding more money for shittier product, while simultaneously stripping away perks and functionality.

Guys like Zaslav fancy themselves savvy dealmakers but the irony is they’re not even particularly good at predatory capitalism. They’re fail upward overpaid brunchlord types who are engaged in a sort of weird performance for very short lived quarterly gains. Almost always at the cost of longer term company survival and a steady erosion in brand perception and customer loyalty.

The kind of stuff TV consumers actually want: cheaper, easier plans, improved customer service, more features, better designed apps, and better content — don’t sync up with the quest for impossible quarterly growth, which is why Zaslav actively opposes such things. It’s effectively the same sort of thinking that has doomed traditional cable companies.

By the time the check truly comes due for Zaslav’s mismanagement, he’ll be either headed out the door for retirement or jettisoned by yet another pointless merger (like the potential looming CBS/Ellison acquisition of Zaslav’s company, which is what all this seems to be pointed to). More consolidation, worse product, higher prices, all on repeat, with nobody in the extraction class facing accountability or learning a single useful thing from the experience.

Filed Under: competition, consolidation, david zaslav, media, mergers, prices, streaming, tv, video
Companies: warner bros. discovery

Somebody’s Lying: Susan Monarez’s Congressional Testimony Is 180 Degrees From RFK Jr.’s

Say That Again

from the liar-liar dept

When you’re brought before Congress to testify, you’re not supposed to lie. I realize that sounds rather obvious to many of you, but I’ll remind you that this is the year of our lord, 2025, and such common sensibilities are not quite as common as they used to be. Even if you’re not under oath, which was the case when RFK Jr. testified before Congress recently, you’re just not supposed to lie to Congress. While the hearing was to get Kennedy’s input on all the crazy, fucked up things he’s doing on matters of health, vaccines, and in response to health concerns, it also delved into Kennedy’s firing of Dr. Susan Monarez as CDC Director after less than three Scaramucci’s worth of time, which would have been 33 days.

Well, somebody is definitely lying, because Monarez went before Congress herself this week and her testimony stands in direct rebuttal to some rather unbelievable testimony from Kennedy. Let’s break it down.

Kennedy claims he fired Monarez because she told him, a quote according to Kennedy, that when he asked if she was a trustworthy person, she responded “no”.

Yes, that was his claim. Here it is in video form.

As I said at the time, this claim is simply not believable. It’s a form of an old catch-22. If a known liar tells you they are lying, do you believe them? If someone who is untrustworthy tells you they are untrustworthy, how do you know if you should trust that statement?

The whole thing is silly. Bad actors don’t tell others not to trust them. So… what happened?

Monarez told a different version of events on Wednesday, saying Kennedy had grown “very concerned” that she had spoken to members of Congress and told her not to do it again.

“He told me he could not trust me because I had shared information related to our conversation. … I told him, ‘if you cannot trust me, then you can fire me,’ ” she said.

That is a very, very different story from what Kennedy told. One has her telling him she’s not trustworthy. The other has him telling her that, with her responding that he should fire her if he felt that way. Related as they may be, this is not the sort of thing that would cause a case of misremembering or confusion. One of them is lying.

So, why was she fired?

In addition, Kennedy claims that Monarez’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which she claimed that Kennedy fired her because she refused to rubber stamp the newly reconstituted ACIP panel’s recommendations for vaccination schedules without a review of the scientific evidence, was a lie.

Here again, you can hear this at the beginning of the following exchange with Senator Bernie Sanders.

It’s one thing to write something in an op-ed. It’s quite another when you’re testifying before Congress. Dr. Monarez was unequivocal in her description of her firing.

Monarez also said that on August 2, she learned from media reports that Kennedy had removed liaison members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — an influential group of outside experts who advise the agency on vaccinations – essentially being blindsided by the news.

Then, “on the morning of August 25, Secretary Kennedy demanded two things of me that were inconsistent with my oath of office and the ethics required of a public official,” Monarez said. “He directed me to commit in advance to approving every ACIP recommendation regardless of the scientific evidence. He also directed me to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy, without cause. He said if I was unwilling to do both, I should resign.”

Once again, we have a complete refutation of the claim that Kennedy made.

Now, I know who I trust between the two of these individuals. But my opinion doesn’t mean all that much here. This requires investigation. Senator Bill Cassidy in particular, who was both pivotal in Kennedy’s confirmation to HHS and who has more recently expressed skepticism and reservation about Kennedy’s actions at the agency, ought to be furious. If Kennedy is lying directly to all of their faces, including his own, one would think the mere concept of professional pride would drive Cassidy to want to get to the bottom of this.

As was the case with Kennedy, it is important to note that Monarez was not sworn in for her testimony. It’s also important to note that the lack of swearing in doesn’t mean that lying to Congress by either party is not a felony under the False Statements statute, Obstruction of Congress, and Contempt of Congress.

Somebody is lying to Congress here. And somebody, whoever that may be, should be held accountable for doing so.

Filed Under: cdc, elizabeth warren, health and human services, lying, rfk jr., susan monarez

X And Canada Fight Over Takedowns And They’re Both Wrong

Legal Issues

from the how-global-is-that-internet dept

A Canadian tribunal’s $72,000 fine against X for refusing to globally remove non-consensual intimate images (NCII) exposes a fundamental tension that courts have been dodging for years: When can one country order worldwide content takedowns, and when should platforms comply regardless of legal compulsion?

Unfortunately, almost all the commentary on the case is ignoring those tensions and going for the easy layup of just framing it as “Elon Musk ignoring the law again.” That’s a fun framing, but it’s too easy for this particular case.

It actually presents two distinct questions that are getting dangerously conflated: whether Canada has jurisdiction to demand global removals, and whether X should remove credibly reported NCII as basic platform governance. Getting this distinction right matters—not just for this case, but for the future of cross-border content regulation.

The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal apparently ordered X and other platforms to remove an intimate image of a woman identified as “TR” back in March. But X chose to geofence the content rather than delete it entirely—blocking Canadian users from seeing it while leaving it accessible to the rest of the world. The tribunal wasn’t having it:

Regehr dismissed that argument, noting X’s position would call into question whether British Columbia’s law overstepped the province’s authority under Canada’s constitution.

“I have no authority to consider constitutional arguments,” he wrote. “The question about X’s compliance is a very simple one. I ordered internet intermediaries, which includes X, to remove the intimate image. X received the order, but it did not remove the intimate image. Instead, it did something less. X did not comply with the protection order.”

This hits on a fundamental tension that’s been brewing in internet law for decades: can one country’s courts order global takedowns, and when should they?

Canada actually has some history here. In the troubling landmark Equustek case, the Supreme Court of Canada made a radical departure from traditional jurisdictional limits, ruling that BC courts could issue worldwide injunctions against Google, requiring global de-indexing of websites. The Court essentially argued that the borderless nature of the internet justifies borderless judicial authority—a breathtaking expansion of territorial jurisdiction that upended decades of international law principles.

But that decision was controversial precisely because of its extraterritorial reach. Google challenged the order in U.S. courts, where judges found it conflicted with U.S. law and principles of international comity. The result? A jurisdictional standoff that highlighted how messy cross-border enforcement gets when courts start issuing global orders.

The jurisdictional issues the Equustek case raised haven’t been resolved—they’ve just been papered over by companies generally complying rather than fighting every single order. But X’s approach here suggests those tensions are far from settled.

This case actually presents two distinct issues that shouldn’t be conflated:

First, the jurisdictional question: Should a Canadian provincial tribunal be able to order a global takedown? X’s argument that it would comply within Canadian jurisdiction but not globally is actually pretty reasonable from a legal standpoint. Countries generally can’t impose their laws extraterritorially, and expecting every platform to comply with the most restrictive jurisdiction’s rules worldwide creates a race to the bottom for global speech.

Second, the trust and safety question: Separate from what Canada can legally compel, there’s the other issue: should X be taking down credibly reported NCII as part of basic platform governance? Here the answer seems pretty obvious—most platforms do remove NCII when properly reported because it’s harmful, often illegal, and violates their terms of service.

The tribunal seemed to dodge the first question entirely, with the judge explicitly saying, “I have no authority to consider constitutional arguments.” But dismissing jurisdictional concerns doesn’t make them go away—it just kicks the can down the road.

X’s geofencing response was legally defensible but ethically questionable. The tribunal’s global order was ethically motivated but legally problematic. Neither approach really serves the interests of victims or the broader internet ecosystem.

What makes this case particularly notable is how rare such jurisdictional standoffs have become. The shift toward comprehensive regulatory frameworks—from the EU’s Digital Services Act to various national online harms bills—has largely eliminated the need for case-by-case civil litigation. Platforms now face systematic compliance requirements rather than ad hoc court orders.

But X’s willingness to fight this particular battle suggests we may be entering a new phase where at least some platforms are more selective about which jurisdictional claims they’ll accept. The question, though, is where this all ends up. And whether or not the idea of a global, not fractured, internet can survive.

Filed Under: canada, elon musk, equustek, global takedowns, jurisdiction, ncii
Companies: x