Sony’s decision to stop producing PlayStation discs starting in 2028 was met with a ton of initial backlash, especially in the wake of Sony reminding its customers yet again that a digital purchase of content isn’t actually a purchase of content at all and what you’ve bought can be ripped away from you with the barest of notice. But for some, including this writer, there was an assumption that the initial backlash is where this would all end. After all, the anti-consumer nonsense around digital products has been happening for over a decade now and little if anything has been done about it. Some others assumed that feckless gamers would end up just accepting the fate that Sony has planned for them.
And maybe they still will, but it seems that some folks are at least attempting to put up a fight first. Some activists have organized what they are calling the PSBlackout, attempting to get PlayStation owners to not make a purchase or even log into their consoles for a full calendar week in August, all in protest of Sony going disc-less.
As spotted by Push Square (via Eurogamer), the “PSBlackout” protest was announced by the game preservation and consumer rights group DoesItPlay last night on July 26, and it’s already starting to pick up some steam on social media.
DoesItPlay has scheduled the protest to run from August 23 to August 30, and asks that those who take part refrain from logging into, playing, or purchasing any content on PlayStation-related platforms during the week-long blackout.
“Whether it’s closing beloved studios like Bluepoint, pursuing a misguided live-service strategy, cancelling fan events, leaving PS VRS2 to die, or being completely out of touch with the franchises players want to see return, PlayStation has never felt more disconnected from its community,” reads DoesItPlay’s statement on X. “Ending physical discs in 2028 feels like the last straw.”
Now, Sony’s strategy for dealing with online and customer backlash in the past has been to simply wait it out. The company has also very clearly decided to employ that strategy in this case as well. Given enough time, Sony believes the anger will wane and be replaced by complacency, ultimately allowing the company to have its way.
A week long non-participation protest by PlayStation gamers, even if gets wide participation, is not going to cripple Sony. It’s not going to cripple any of its first-party or secondary studio partners. But it will make a statement at the very least, which might just be enough to make Sony’s ostrich routine no longer tenable.
And it’s not as though PSBlackout is the only form of backlash brewing over all of this.
Plus, provided news of the planned protest reaches enough ears, there’s certainly a sizable enough contingent of pissed-off fans out there ready to mobilize. The “Don’t Kill The Disc” Petition has continued to gain momentum over the last few weeks, having shot up from roughly 120,000 signatures on July 6 to just over 345,000 signatures on July 27.
Physical media shouldn’t go away. Not entirely, at least. The current consumer rules around digital purchases aren’t good enough to protect customers. There’s too much risk in non-preservation of gaming culture if everything is digital, thanks largely to copyright laws. And there’s still a sizable percentage of customers that want their shiny discs.
Now we’ll see if this protest gains momentum, or if the feckless gamer cliche is true.
You may recall that Donald Trump and his supporters have insisted that he’s the “free speech” President. His first day in office this term, he issued an executive order “restoring free speech” saying that “no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
Well, I’d like to report a federal government officer violating that executive order… in the form of the President of the United States issuing another executive order which tries (weakly) to figure out a way to criminalize the burning of the American flag, which is not something the President can actually do.
Our great American Flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America, and of American freedom, identity, and strength. Over nearly two-and-a-half centuries, many thousands of American patriots have fought, bled, and died to keep the Stars and Stripes waving proudly. The American Flag is a special symbol in our national life that should unite and represent all Americans of every background and walk of life. Desecrating it is uniquely offensive and provocative. It is a statement of contempt, hostility, and violence against our Nation — the clearest possible expression of opposition to the political union that preserves our rights, liberty, and security. Burning this representation of America may incite violence and riot. American Flag burning is also used by groups of foreign nationals as a calculated act to intimidate and threaten violence against Americans because of their nationality and place of birth.
The executive order is so weak because, as it acknowledges, the Supreme Court has made it clear that the burning of the American flag is almost always protected expression under the First Amendment.
Most notably, in Texas v. Johnson in 1989, the Supreme Court was pretty clear about all this. As the Court stated explicitly:
If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
It also highlights the point that flag burning is not just highly expressive, but the fact that America allows for the burning of its flag as a form of speech highlights American ideals:
We are tempted to say, in fact, that the flag’s deservedly cherished place in our community will be strengthened, not weakened, by our holding today. Our decision is a reaffirmation of the principles of freedom and inclusiveness that the flag best reflects, and of the conviction that our toleration of criticism such as Johnson’s is a sign and source of our strength. Indeed, one of the proudest images of our flag, the one immortalized in our own national anthem, is of the bombardment it survived at Fort McHenry. It is the Nation’s resilience, not its rigidity, that Texas sees reflected in the flag — and it is that resilience that we reassert today.
The way to preserve the flag’s special role is not to punish those who feel differently about these matters. It is to persuade them that they are wrong.
And, of course, the MAGA crowd knows all of this even if they’re pretending to forget it this week. You may recall that just last year the Heritage Foundation chose to fly the American flag upside down over its headquarters after Donald Trump was found guilty by a jury.
Similarly, the very MAGA Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito, was found to have flown an American flag upside down (he blamed his even more MAGA wife).
So, yes, MAGA folks know that the “desecrating” the flag is a form of expression.
The executive order pretends to get around all of this by pretending that it’s only talking about “unconstitutional” versions of flag burning, which they claim are when it amounts to “fighting words” or likely to incite imminent lawless action:
Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s rulings on First Amendment protections, the Court has never held that American Flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to “fighting words” is constitutionally protected.
This is constitutional nonsense on multiple levels. The “fighting words” exception has been effectively neutered by decades of Supreme Court decisions, and the Brandenburg “imminent lawless action” standard sets an incredibly high bar that peaceful flag burning never meets.
More fundamentally, the EO falsely claims these exceptions haven’t been tested in flag burning cases. That’s wrong. Texas v. Johnson directly addressed both, starting with “fighting words”:
Nor does Johnson’s expressive conduct fall within that small class of “fighting words”that are “likely to provoke the average person to retaliation, and thereby cause a breach of the peace.” Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire,315 U. S. 568,315 U. S. 574(1942). No reasonable onlooker would have regarded Johnson’s generalized expression of dissatisfaction with the policies of the Federal Government as a direct personal insult or an invitation to exchange fisticuffs.
As for imminent lawless action, the court similarly rejected that argument from Texas in the same case, first saying that nothing in the ruling prevents Texas from keeping the peace:
We thus conclude that the State’s interest in maintaining order is not implicated on these facts. The State need not worry that our holding will disable it from preserving the peace. We do not suggest that the First Amendment forbids a State to prevent “imminent lawless action.” Brandenburg, supra, at395 U. S. 447. And, in fact, Texas already has a statute specifically prohibiting breaches of the peace, Tex.Penal Code Ann. § 42.01 (1989), which tends to confirm that Texas need not punish this flag desecration in order to keep the peace.
But it notes that simply burning the flag does nothing at all that could be considered as such:
Texas claims that its interest in preventing breaches of the peace justifies Johnson’s conviction for flag desecration.
However,no disturbance of the peace actually occurred or threatened to occur because of Johnson’s burning of the flag. Although the State stresses the disruptive behavior of the protestors during their march toward City Hall, Brief for Petitioner 34-36, it admits that “no actual breach of the peace occurred at the time of the flagburning or in response to the flagburning.” Id. at 34. The State’s emphasis on the protestors’ disorderly actions prior to arriving at City Hall is not only somewhat surprising, given that no charges were brought on the basis of this conduct, but it also fails to show that a disturbance of the peace was a likely reaction to Johnson’s conduct. The only evidence offered by the State at trial to show the reaction to Johnson’s actions was the testimony of several persons who had been seriously offended by the flag burning. Id. at 6-7.
The State’s position, therefore, amounts to a claim that an audience that takes serious offense at particular expression is necessarily likely to disturb the peace, and that the expression may be prohibited on this basis.Our precedents do not countenance such a presumption. On the contrary, they recognize that a principal “function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”
In other words, the executive order is hot garbage.
It is an attack on the First Amendment while pretending otherwise. It seems little more than a provocation trying to overturn Texas v. Johnson by pretending there could be some form of flag burning protest which could be criminalized.
Trump’s remarks while signing the order reveal the real game. He attacks Texas v. Johnson as coming “from a very sad court” before launching into fabricated claims about flag-burning riots:
The transcript speaks for itself (in part by showing how much word salad this man spews):
This is very important. Flag burning all over the country. They’re burning flags all over the world. They burn the American flag.
And as you know, through a very sad court, I guess it was a five to four decision, they called it freedom of speech.
But there’s another reason which is perhaps much more important.It’s called death.Because what happens when you burn a flag is the area goes crazy.
If you have hundreds of people, they go crazy. You can do other things. You can burn this piece of paper. You can and it’s but when you burn the American flag, it incites riots at levels that we’ve never seen before.
People go crazy in a way both ways. There are some that are going crazy for doing it. There are others that are angry angry about them doing it.
A good reporter would ask for a single example of someone burning a flag (let alone it “happening all over the country”) where hundreds of people went crazy and started “riots at levels that we’ve never seen before.”
None of this happened.
But it’s clear the intent here is to try to overturn Texas v. Johnson and use it to imprison anyone who is protesting Trump’s fascistic tendencies. Even though the EO pretends that this will only lead to prosecution if the flag burning is done to incite violence, Trump then makes it clear he thinks the flag burning alone deserves a year in prison (something he doesn’t get to decide, he’s not a king).
And what the penalty is going to be if you burn a flag you get one year in jail. No early uh exits. No, nothing. You get one year in jail.
He then claims as soon as he signs it, flag burning will stop immediately.
Except, of course, the opposite happened. Later in the day after signing it, an American veteran went in front of the White House in a clear sign of expressive protest, announced he was burning a flag to protest Donald Trump and his signing of the executive order:
This US veteran burnt an American flag in protest of the EO Trump signed today that contradicted 2 SCOTUS rulings (1989 & 1990).
And no riot occurred. No violence. No death. But the guy was still arrested for exercising his free speech:
A man, near the White House, who describes himself as a "retired disabled combat veteran," after burning an American flag tells bystanders "I am being detained because I expressed my First Amendment rights."
This arrest proves the executive order’s real purpose in real time. There was no “imminent lawless action.” No “fighting words.” No riots or violence—just peaceful symbolic speech criticizing the government. Yet the speaker was criminalized anyway, demonstrating that this isn’t about preventing violence or maintaining order. It’s about using state power to silence dissent and punish symbolic speech that criticizes the government.
This is what authoritarianism looks like in practice: using the power of the state to criminalize symbolic criticism of the government while wrapping it in patriotic rhetoric. Trump’s executive order isn’t about protecting the flag—it’s about weaponizing law enforcement against dissent. And the fact that he’s doing this while simultaneously claiming to be the champion of “free speech” only makes the constitutional violation more brazen.
The Supreme Court got it right in Texas v. Johnson: “The way to preserve the flag’s special role is not to punish those who feel differently about these matters. It is to persuade them that they are wrong.” Trump’s approach does the opposite—it reveals a government so insecure that it must silence its critics rather than answer them.
I guess this is going to become a theme for who knows how long. For reasons I cannot begin to understand, the Trump administration’s distaste for any criticism of itself, as well as any politics it does not agree with, is resulting in many in corporate America folding into alignment with those desires. Whether it’s the capitulation to an anti-DEI stance or an exit from any kind of political entanglements, the general stance appears to be that all the boots must be licked as thoroughly as possible.
That puts companies like Ben & Jerry’s, famous for its social stances, in a tough spot. The company has not been shy about criticizing the Trump team, going all the way back to the first administration. Nor has it been shy about taking moral stances on conflicts around the world, with one such stance notably resulting in some level of backing from its parent company, Unilever.
While Ben & Jerry’s has decades of activism as part of its corporate tradition, Unilever appears to have tried to stamp that out starting in 2025. The parent company refused to allow B&J to issue corporate statements criticizing the Trump administration on matters of politics. This resulted in a lawsuit against Unilever, with B&J claiming that Unilever is contractually obligated to allow for B&J’s independent ability to make those statements as part of the acquisition. This ramped up even further more recently with the news that Unilever terminated B&J CEO David Stever as a result of his activism.
In an amended complaint filed Tuesday in New York, lawyers for the ice cream brand said that rules stemming from its 2000 merger “protects Ben & Jerry’s interests by precluding the unilateral removal of its CEO,” but Unilever did just that — “removing and replacing” CEO David Stever by not following the proper protocols and said it was because of the brand’s continued comments on progressive issues.
The lawsuit said that Unilever’s motive for the removal of Stever was due to his “commitment to Ben & Jerry’s Social Mission and Essential Brand Integrity … rather than any genuine concerns regarding his performance history.”
This elective censorship in order to appease ranking politicians ought to scare the hell out of everybody. Whatever you might think about B&J’s opinions on politics, we surely don’t want to foster an ecosystem of feigned group-think. The only thing that changed between 2024 and 2025 was the new presidential administration. The stances by B&J haven’t changed. The company’s desire to speak on those stances hasn’t changed. The type of rhetoric in those desired statements haven’t changed.
This is purely about Unilever deciding, counter-contractually as alleged, that it wants to bow at the altar of Donald Trump. And the tactics from Unilever appears to be decidedly heavy-handed.
Ben & Jerry’s initial lawsuit, filed in November 2024, alleged Unilever silenced its attempts to publicly support Palestinian refugees and resolutions to end military aid to Israel, where the company had done business since 1987.
It also alleged that Unilever threatened to dismantle Ben & Jerry’s board and sue members because the company’s management and board planned to issue a statement calling for “peace” and a “permanent and immediate ceasefire.”
This is a marriage of the free market and free speech, ideals that the conservative party in America has long championed. If people don’t like B&J’s politics, they’re free to buy a different brand of ice cream. If Unilever doesn’t like those politics, but are disallowed contractually from censoring them, then Unilever can sell the company to someone else, which is reportedly exactly what Unilever is doing.
If corporate America is simply going to rollover based on the whims of every change in administration, that kind of whipsawing on corporate stances is going to get real confusing, real fast. If this is only being done with this administration out of fear, which I believe is the case, that should be setting off all kinds of alarm bells.
And if the so-called speech-champions can’t be bothered to get out of bed to advocate for speech protections they don’t agree with, then we can cease calling them champions of speech, full stop.
I’ve banged on for quite a while about how video games have long not gotten the recognition they deserve as a major and growing part of the cultural landscape throughout the world. While there is no doubt that there has been a shift in this as time has gone on, it’s still the case that a hefty percentage of the world, particularly older populations, simply don’t put video games on the same cultural footing as literature, movies, television, and music. Which is ultimately quite silly. Video games represent creative and cultural output and the number of people playing them, and the amount of time those people devote to them, has grown consistently throughout the past several decades.
And so we look for barometers to use to point this out to people. Well, I think we got a big one recently. Ukraine, suffering from a war of aggression by a thuggish Vladimir Putin, has called on the gaming and esports organizations of the world to initiate something of a gaming embargo against Russia.
Mykhailo Fedorov, the Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, has publicly called on “all game development companies” to “temporarily block all Russian and Belorussian accounts” in response to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
In a tweet from his verified account, Fedorov also called on esports platforms to “temporarily stop the participation of Russian and Belorussian teams and gamers in all international esports events and cancel all international events holding [sic] on the territory of Russia and Belarus.”
Now, if such actions were implemented, they would be a mirror to many other corporate and cultural actions already taken on the internet and among IRL sports leagues and organizations throughout the world. The point isn’t that such an action would be novel. Rather, the point is that Ukraine at least sees gaming in the same cultural categories as these other cultural outputs. Whether Ukraine is right about that is something we may get to see answered in real time, as Federov has said this call comes as a way to motivate Russian citizens by denying them cultural output that is definitely in high demand.
These moves, Fedorov suggests, “will motivate the citizens of Russia to proactively stop the disgraceful military aggression” by the Russian government. “In 2022, modern technology is perhaps the best answer to the tanks, multiple rocket launchers… and missiles.”
Whether this works as intended is yet to be seen. First the gaming embargo would have to be initiated and then we’d have to watch how the Russian citizenry reacts. Still, gaming culture in Russia and Ukraine is strong. There are hundreds of game companies with offices in Ukraine, for instance. This, combined with actions that Apple and other tech companies have taken, would certainly be felt on the ground in Russia. Admittedly perhaps not as much as the global community coming together, amazingly, with the seeming goal of obliterating the Russian economy as much as possible, but still it would be felt.
And, while this is far less important, even the call for this places video games in the cultural stratosphere it deserves.
We live in such fascinating times. We’ve had some posts concerning people getting (rightly) angry about Blizzard banning a top player who supported the protests in Hong Kong. In order to make the company feel more heat, apparently some pissed off players have been plotting to weaponize the GDPR and flood the company with data requests. This started with a Reddit post directly telling users that if they’re upset about Blizzard’s decisions regarding Hong Kong, to hit back with a GDPR request:
I know a lot of people, myself included, are upset by Blizzard/Activisions spineless decision to ban Blitxchung. After personally uninstalling all of my Blizzard games, I thought, “what else can I do?”. The answer, is GDPR requests. Let me explain.
Under EU law, you’re allowed to request all information a company has on you, along with the purpose of this information collection. What most people don’t know, is that these requests are VERY hard to comply with, and can often take a companies legal group 2-7 days to complete PER REQUEST. If a company doesn’t get you the information back in 30 days, they face fines and additional issues. In extreme cases, a company can request an additional 2 months to complete the requests if there is a large volume, but suffice to say, if a company gets a significant amount of requests, it can be incredibly expensive to deal with, as inevitably they will have to hire outside firms/lawyers to help out. So, if you want to submit a GDPR request, and live in the EU, you can use the following form letter….
I’ve actually been in the middle of investigating a different story about a possible weaponizing of the GDPR, but the details there have been a bit murkier, so it’s fascinating to see things laid out so clearly here. To be clear, there does appear to be some cleverness here, though, it’s true that such requests are a pain in the ass to comply with and can be costly and resource intensive. And while it may be fun and cathartic to use that power against a company like Blizzard as a way to punish it for its ridiculous stance, be clear that these kinds of weaponized GDPR requests are likely to be used against many others as well, including companies you might actually like.
This is yet one more reason why, even if you support the overall goals of the GDPR, you should be very, very concerned with how the law is actually implemented.
Lawsuits were threatened after students from a Kentucky Catholic school were portrayed as engaging in racist behavior during an anti-abortion march at the nation’s capital. An edited video swiftly circulated the internet, showing student Nick Sandmann facing off with a Native American protester while wearing a seemingly-smug file on his face and a Make America Great Again hat on his head.
More footage of the incident appeared later providing a bit more context, making the obvious racism seem less obvious. But the Twitter ship had sailed and there was little hope of turning it around. Lessons could have been learned from rushing to judgment, but Nick Sandmann and his family’s lawyers have decided this lessons should be taught via libel lawsuits. They’ve got an uphill battle as nearly everything said about Sandmann and the incident was protected opinion, but a lack of credible arguments has never prevented lawsuits from being filed.
As Buzzfeed reports, one of the first targets is the Washington Post. Sandmann’s complaint [PDF], composed by attorneys Lin Wood and Todd McMurtry, is about half op-ed, half federal complaint. Here’s the lead off:
The Post is a major American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. which is credited with inventing the term “McCarthyism” in an editorial cartoon published in 1950. Depicting buckets of tar, the cartoon made fun of then United States Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “tarring” tactics of engaging in smear campaigns and character assassination against citizens whose political views made them targets of his accusations.
In a span of three (3) days in January of this year commencing on January 19, the Post engaged in a modern-day form of McCarthyism by competing with CNN and NBC, among others, to claim leadership of a mainstream and social media mob of bullies which attacked, vilified, and threatened Nicholas Sandmann (“Nicholas”), an innocent secondary school child.
The Post wrongfully targeted and bullied Nicholas because he was the white, Catholic student wearing a red “Make America Great Again” souvenir cap on a school field trip to the January 18 March for Life in Washington, D.C. when he was unexpectedly and suddenly confronted by Nathan Phillips (“Phillips”), a known Native American activist, who beat a drum and sang loudly within inches of his face (“the January 18 incident”)
Moving along…
The Post ignored basic journalist standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented, biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump (“the President”) by impugning individuals perceived to be supporters of the President.
[Scrolls to the bottom of the filing to make sure it wasn’t composed by Larry Klayman…]
In this country, our society is dedicated to the protection of children regardless of the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, or the cap they wear.
But the Post did not care about protecting Nicholas. To the contrary, the Post raced with a reckless disregard of the facts and truth because in this day and time there is a premium for being the first and loudest media bully.
The Post wanted to lead the charge against this child because he was a pawn in its political war against its political adversary – a war so disconnected and beyond the comprehension of Nicholas that it might as well have been science fiction.
Let’s just try to find the factual allegations. It’s established that Sandmann’s lawyers wish to offer their opinion that the Washington Post is a bully that targeted Nick Sandmann because he supported a president the Post dislikes. But that’s all that’s been established — despite the use of the term “defamation” here and there — by the time the lawsuit drops its first mention of damages. Some weird eye-for-an-eye demand is being made by Sandmann’s attorneys.
In order to fully compensate Nicholas for his damages and to punish, deter, and teach the Post a lesson it will never forget, this action seeks money damages in excess of Two Hundred and Fifty Million Dollars ($250,000,000.00) – the amount Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, paid in cash for the Post when his company, Nash Holdings, purchased the newspaper in 2013.
Eight pages in, we finally have an allegation that doesn’t sound like an angry blog post:
On January 19, 20 and 21, the Post ignored the truth and falsely accused Nicholas of, among other things, “accost[ing]” Phillips by “suddenly swarm[ing]” him in a “threaten[ing]” and “physically intimidat[ing]” manner as Phillips “and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave,” “block[ing]” Phillips path, refusing to allow Phillips “to retreat,” “taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd,” chanting “build that wall,” “Trump2020,” or “go back to Africa,” and otherwise engaging in racist and improper conduct which ended only “when Phillips and other activists walked away.”
Seems straightforward except for a number of inconvenient facts. As the lawsuit admits, these reports were based on an edited video that led many, many people to the same conclusions. The lawsuit claims the Post acted carelessly by not acting on information it became aware of four days after it published its first article.
By January 23, the Post conceded that the @2020fight account that was largely responsible for the edited video going viral on social media may have been purchased from Shoutcart.com for that specific purpose.
With no investigation into the @2020fight account, the Post actively, negligently, and recklessly participated in making the 2020fight Video go viral on social media when on January 19 at 9:21 a.m., Post reporter Joe Heim re-posted the 2020fight Video.
The lawsuit says the Post recklessly published a piece on the incident on January 19th, four hours after the edited video went viral. Somehow this is defamatory because the Post “recklessly” did not act on information it didn’t have (the extended video posted a day later) prior to publishing this article. Then the lawsuit wanders off to discuss the investigation of the incident by a firm hired by the Catholic school Sandmann attends, as though this should have some bearing on an article published prior to an investigation the Washington Post wasn’t involved with.
When it comes to narrow down the alleged defamation, the lawsuit somehow gets even worse. It spends four paragraphs enumerating “false and defamatory gists” — a legal concept usually offered as a defense, rather than an accusation. Then it accuses the Washington Post of defaming Sandmann by publishing statements made by other people to the Post reporter.
In its First Article, the Post published or republished the following false and defamatory statements:
(a) The headline “‘It was getting ugly’: Native American drummer speaks on the MAGA-hat wearing teens who surrounded him.”
(b) “In an interview Saturday, Phillips, 64, said he felt threatened by the teens and that they suddenly swarmed around him as he and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave.”
(c) “Phillips, who was singing the American Indian Movement song of unity that serves as a ceremony to send the spirits home, said he noticed tensions beginning to escalate when the teens and other apparent participants from the nearby March for Life rally began taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd.”
(d) “A few people in the March for Life crowd began to chant ‘Build that wall, build that wall,’ he said.”
(e) “‘It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ Phillips recalled. ‘I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.’”
(f) “‘It clearly demonstrates the validity of our concerns about the marginalization and disrespect of Indigenous peoples, and it shows that traditional knowledge is being ignored by those who should listen most closely,’ Darren Thompson, an organizer for the [Indigenous Peoples Movement], said in the statement.
(g) “Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Lakota People Law Project, said the incident lasted about 10 minutes and ended when Phillips and other activists walked away.”
(h) “‘It was an aggressive display of physicality. They were rambunctious and trying to instigate a conflict,’ he said. ‘We were wondering where their chaperones were. [Phillips] was really trying to defuse the situation.’”
(i) “Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder who also fought in the Vietnam war, has encountered anti-Native American sentiments before . . . .”
From there, it discusses about a second article by the Washington Post, alleging it was somehow defamatory for the Post to publish a statement from the Covington Diocese decrying the teen’s behavior. It also says a third article from the Post was defamatory — again listing only things other people said to the Post’s reporter. Then there’s more stuff about “defamatory gists.” And on it goes for several more pages, highlighting each Post article about the subject while failing to point out any defamatory statements actually made by the Washington Post.
This is a garbage lawsuit. It makes zero credible defamation accusations, spending its entirety either stating its own opinions about the paper or attempting to hold it legally responsible for statements made by other people. It’s not winnable. Its sole purpose appears to be to exist loudly, hoping to create a deterrent effect simply by banging about the place self-importantly. It will go nowhere, but it will do so as noisily as possible. If this is all Sandmann’s parents wanted from their legal representation, they should have accepted the pro bono offers being made, rather than sink money into this ostentatious waste of time.
Efforts to reverse the FCC’s historically unpopular attack on net neutrality using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) have been stuck in neutral for several months, but activists are backing one last push in a bid to get the uphill effort over the hump.
The CRA lets Congress reverse a regulatory action with a simple majority vote in the Senate and the House (which is how the GOP successfully killed broadband consumer privacy protections last year). And while the Senate voted 52 to 47 back in May to reverse the FCC’s attack on net neutrality, companion efforts to set up a similar vote in the House haven’t gained much traction as the clock continues to tick. A discharge petition needs 218 votes to even see floor time, and another 218 votes to pass the measure.
But the needed votes have lingered at around 172 for months, split (quite stupidly, given broad public support) along strict partisan lines.
Hoping to push the effort over the line and drum up the needed votes ahead of the December 10 CRA deadline, net neutrality activist groups like Fight for the Future are holding one last online protest on Thursday, November 29. This time around they’ve drummed up the support of numerous musicians and celebrities in the hope of getting the attention of a public that’s clearly weary of the entire debate:
“The effort is backed by musicians and celebrities like Hollywood star Evangeline Lilly (Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Hobbit, Lost), Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, and EDM star Bassnectar, along with startups and major web companies like online selling platform Etsy, delivery service Postmates, publishing platform Tumblr, Private Internet Access VPN, popular blog BoingBoing, domain registrar Namecheap, search engine StartPage, and speaker company Sonos.”
The problem, of course, is that all the public screaming in the world has yet to shift the thinking of well-lobbied net neutrality opponents in Congress, and adding Tom Morello or Sonos to the proceedings, while appreciated and notable, isn’t likely to move the needle much. Even if the vote succeeds, it still would have to avoid a veto by Trump. And while activists I’ve spoken to have argued that a House vote could appeal to Trump’s “populist” side and pressure him to let the restoration ride through, that’s simply not very likely.
That said, it was worth trying as a hail Mary pass anyway, and there’s absolute value in both naming and shaming corrupt lawmakers, something Fight For the Future has toyed with via crowdfunded billboards. There’s also value in keeping the issue in the public headspace ahead of next year’s Congressional battles. Still, users looking to this effort to actually restore the FCC’s rules should probably temper their enthusiasm. Our existing Congress has made its disdain for the public interest abundantly clear, and the real fight for net neutrality is next year.
The best chance at saving net neutrality rests with next year’s net neutrality court battle, the opening arguments for which begin next February. It’s there that a handful of companies like Mozilla, and 23 state attorneys general, will make their case that the FCC ignored the public and violated the Administrative Procedure Act in aggressively dismantling popular consumer protections, while basing their entire justification for the repeal on telecom industry lobbying bullshit.
Should the FCC lose that lawsuit, the agency’s 2015 rules would be restored — though Ajit Pai’s FCC isn’t likely to enforce them during his tenure (however long it lasts). Should the FCC and its ISP BFFs win that case, they still need to find a way to prevent a future FCC or Congress from passing net neutrality rules (or laws) with real teeth. That’s why companies like AT&T have been pushing loyal foot soldiers like Marsha Blackburn to table loophole-filled, fake net neutrality legislation with only one real purpose: preempting tougher state or federal rules.
But with a shifting Congressional makeup, and net neutrality supporters in Congress not eager to anger activists by signing garbage legislation, that gambit isn’t likely to succeed. The net result: like privacy, we’re going to need to have a real conversation about what a realnet neutrality law might look like. And it’s going to require a Sisyphean effort to prevent countless industries and their loyal political foot soldiers (with a vested interest in uneven playing fields and turf protection) from polluting the entire process.
While many are fatigued by the entire net neutrality fight, it’s worth remembering that net neutrality doesn’t just live or die based on the passage or restoration of rules or laws. It’s a never-ending fight that will continue for however long the broadband industry maintains a stranglehold on meaningful competition. Given telco upgrade apathy, 5G’s overhype as a competitive panacea, a growing cable monopoly over next-gen speeds, and Pai-era regulatory apathy, that’s a problem that’s not going away anytime soon.
Late last week, Torrentfreak had a fascinating story about Bahnhof’s response to a court case demanding it block the site Sci-Hub due to demands from Elsevier that Sci-Hub was inducing infringement of academic papers. We’ve written in the past about Sci-Hub. Rather than an evil piracy site as Elsevier likes to imply, it is a very clever system to allow academics to share and access other academic works. Of course, Elsevier prefers to lock up academic research that it did not pay for, which is a travesty. And it has gone after Sci-Hub in multiple jurisdictions, and is constantly playing a form of Whac-a-Mole as Sci-Hub keeps on moving around (not to mention each attempt at taking it down only seems to add to Sci-Hub’s popularity). In this case, Elsevier sought a blocking order in Sweden. The Swedish ISP, Bahnhof, which has spent years pushing back against copyright maximalist extremism, but without much luck.
These are not full “blocks” per se. After reading Bahnhof’s protest message, you can then apparently click through to the original site.
I posted this on Twitter on Friday and it got a huge response, with many people cheering it on. I think many of them had an initial gut reaction that this was a clever (and somewhat amusing) way to protest what many people feel is an unjust blocking order by turning the tables on those who requested and approved the blocking order. Indeed, that was my instinctual reaction as well. But, I don’t think we should be that celebratory about this.
For one thing, this is exactly the kind of thing that many of us warn about concerning a lack of net neutrality laws. In this case, many people support this because they all agree that Elsevier is being ridiculous and censorial here. But… it’s not hard to imagine a different situation. How would people feel if an ISP were, say, putting up a similar block page for anyone trying to visit a union webpage of striking telco workers? Because that happened once in Canada. Then… it feels a bit more like a giant company using its market position to silence critics in its workforce. We shouldn’t change our views on what is and what is not okay for an ISP to do based solely on whether or not we like who is put out by the decision.
Sweden doesn’t currently have net neutrality rules as far as I can tell, though ironically it appears that Bahnhof sells a pro-net neutrality hoodie. But blocking sites — even to make a good point in the ridiculousness of the site blocking order — still goes against net neutrality and raises serious questions about whether anyone should want an ISP inspecting the sites that we go to and interjecting its own man in the middle attack to make a political message.
Suddenly… it doesn’t look quite as clever in that light. I understand the value of protesting an unjust court ruling, and this certainly feels like just desserts for Elsevier and the court, but we should always see it as problematic when an ISP is getting between us and the sites we want to visit, even if it’s for a good cause.
While we were still in the middle of the heat storm over Donald Trump’s decision to enact a zero tolerance border policy that resulted in children being separated from their parents at the border in far greater numbers than previous administrations, there was some interesting background coverage about the employees and customers of big tech companies like Microsoft receiving backlash for contracting with ICE. While much of that backlash came from outside those companies, there was plenty coming from within as well. Microsoft in particular saw throngs of employees outraged that the technology they had helped to develop was now being turned on the innocent children of migrants and asylum-seekers.
In an open letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent today, employees demanded that the company cancel its $19.4 million contract with ICE and instate a policy against working with clients who violate international human rights law. The text of the employee letter was first reported by the New York Times and confirmed by Gizmodo.
“We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits,” the letter, signed by Microsoft employees, states. “We request that Microsoft cancel its contracts with ICE, and with other clients who directly enable ICE. As the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit. We are part of a growing movement, comprised of many across the industry who recognize the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm.”
The 300 employees that signed the open letter represent a fraction of Microsoft’s total work force, of course, but you can bet that those willing to sign such a letter also represent a fraction of the staff that share the letter’s viewpoint. For its part, Microsoft condemned the Trump separation policy (how brave!), but the company has also refused thus far to acknowledge whether the ICE contract includes facial recognition software or AI. Such powerful tools would seem to be in the wheelhouse of what ICE would want as it carries out this ridiculous policy and Microsoft’s refusal to say such tools are not included in its contract with the agency sure seem to suggest that they are.
Of course, Microsoft is niether the only tech company going through this, nor the company that has had the largest in employee backlash. That distinction likely goes to Google, where employees not only voiced displeasure over the company’s contract to provide AI technology for the Pentagon’s drone warfare program, but where many people actually up and quit.
The resigning employees’ frustrations range from particular ethical concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in drone warfare to broader worries about Google’s political decisions—and the erosion of user trust that could result from these actions. Many of them have written accounts of their decisions to leave the company, and their stories have been gathered and shared in an internal document, the contents of which multiple sources have described to Gizmodo.
Google has long had a culture that encouraged employee feedback on the products it produces, in some cases such influence resulting in real policy shifts. The employees protesting Google’s drone contract say that has changed recently, with upper management far less transparent about what work the company is doing and far more deaf to the opinions of the employees that actually carry that work out. Combine it all with the growing distrust of Google in the public and it can appear that Google is trying to pantomime the caricature it is so often painted to be: faceless corporate greed-hounds without soul or morality.
And then there is Amazon, where the company’s AI contracts with the government and its granting of access to data-mining company Palantir also resulted in anger from within.
Amazon employees objected to the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy at the U.S. border, which has resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents.
“Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents,” the letter, distributed on a mailing list called ‘we-won’t-build-it,’ states. “In the face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and DHS.”
Amazon employees want the company out of the policing and immigration business, and have gone further by calling on the company to boot customers working with ICE off of its platform. Leadership at Amazon, as elsewhere, has been mostly silent, but it’s worth noting that Amazon shareholders actually kicked off the angry protests even before its employees did so. Whatever shakes out of this, this isn’t something Jeff Bezos is going to be able to ignore.
This is a good time to remind people that companies, including big tech companies, are not comprised of the steel and glass that makes up their offices, but of the people that run and work within them. It’s also worth acknowledging that the government has been after big tech firms for some time over the very tools that are likely in this contract. The lesson in this is that the government needs tech companies to carry out this disaster of a policy more than tech companies need the government for anything at all.
In other words, if these companies decided to put some moral courage on display en masse, it would have an effect. If they elect to do otherwise, their employees may force their hand. After all, the people signing these government contracts are certainly not the ones fulfilling them. That work is being done by the very employees revolting in protest. Given that there is pressure coming from not just within these companies to get out of the immigration business, but from outside as well, business interests may be lining up to give these companies an excuse to show a little backbone.
As you know, last year the Supreme Court made a very important ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case, in which it basically said that merely doing something on a general purpose computer didn’t automatically make it patentable. This has resulted in many courts rejecting patents and the USPTO being less willing to issue patents, based on that guidance. The USPTO sought to push out new “guidance” to its examiners taking the ruling into account. Soon after the Alice ruling, it issued some “Preliminary Examination Instructions.” However, it then issued the so-called 2014 Interim Guidance on Subject Matter Eligibility and sought public comment through March 16 of this year.
Plenty of folks did comment, including the EFF. However, the USPTO apparently was offended at parts of the EFF’s comment submission, claiming that it was an “improper protest.” In response, the EFF refiled the comment, but redacted the part that the USPTO didn’t like. Here’s what page 5 of the document on the USPTO site looks like:
However, EFF also added the following footnote (footnote 8) on page 6:
On April 2, 2015, the PTO contacted EFF to request that we remove a portion of these comments on the basis that they constituted an improper ?protest.? We respectfully disagree that our comments were a protest under 35 U.S.C. ? 122(c). Rather, our comments discussed a specific application to illustrate our broader points about the importance of applying Alice. Nevertheless, to ensure these comments are considered by the Office, we have redacted the relevant discussion in this revised version of our comments. Our original comments remain available to the public at: https://www.eff.org/files/2015/03/18/eff_comments_regarding_ interim_eligibility_guidance.pdf.
And, of course, if you go to that link, you get the full, unredacted version of the EFF’s filing.
As you can see by the full filing, the EFF filing isn’t some sort of improper protest. Rather it is a clear demonstration of how the USPTO does not appear to be living up to what the courts are saying in the wake of the Alice ruling. It is difficult to see what the USPTO was thinking in trying to silence the EFF’s comment. It is beyond ludicrous on multiple levels. First, it suggests a skin so thin at the USPTO that you can see right through it. Second, it suggests that the USPTO doesn’t want people to recognize that its guidance is problematic in light of what actual federal courts are saying. And, finally, it suggests (still) a complete lack of understanding of how the internet and freedom of expression works, thereby guaranteeing that the EFF’s complete dismantling of the USPTO’s guidelines will now get that much more attention…
Has anyone patented a method and system for self-inflicted shaming for being overly sensitive to someone pointing out your flaws?
