Ted's "Why is there never a cop around when you need one?" problem can be solved by installing a cashcam. At the very moment he's muttering about some "idotic driver", his dashcam will have captured the evidence. Instead of expecting Flock et al to solve his problems while he sits on his bum and moans, he can take some responsibility and get involved by turning the footage over to the cops.
Each encounter (Ted being near enough to another idiot to capture footage) is random chance and occurs in public so there are no real "privacy" or "tracking" implications. The biggest problem is that, at least where I live, the cops couldn't give a tinker's cuss about dashcam footage from mere mortals - unless they need footage as additional evidence to support an existing charge.
Ted would be better off arguing for a nationwide "CopTube" service where the average Jo could upload footage and know there was some chance of it being actioned. Simply cataloguing footage to license plates would allow the cops to wait until there are, say, 10 uploads by different citizens all focusing on the same plate, and then go after the idiots for patterns of unsafe driving.
Can I ask a dumb question, please. If Comey just photographed and uploaded a sea shell arrangement created by someone else, doesn't that make the "someone else" the "another information content provider" and Comey the "user of an interactive computer service" whom Section 230 says can't be treated as the "publisher or speaker" of the sea-shell speech?
Her birth name was Katie Jane Perry. I can think of at least one reason why a person might change her family name and I'm sure you can too.
It also should not be forgotten that Katy Perry is a stage name. The singer is Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson.
The issue is, given two items of apparel, one branded Katie Perry, the other branded Katy Perry, is an ordinary consumer likely to be confused? The courts seem to have decided the answer is "yes". The High Court has just upheld the Katie Perry trademark. The current name of the person who owns that trademark is irrelevant.
I might be mistaken but I can't escape the feeling that there's a tinge of "our famous singer done wrong" in this article.
First, let's look at "who started it?" It began with the threat of legal action. The singer "started it" by issuing a cease and desist to the fashion designer. You seem to overlook that step merely because the singer didn't follow up with any court action. The singer choosing not to follow-up left the designer in legal limbo. It looks to me that, in the absence of further moves by the singer, the designer sought legal certainty. That's something we are all entitled to do. It's one of the functions of courts.
Second, what the High Court decided was that just being extremely well known in one field does not entitle the singer to claim exclusive rights over the name in every field of human endeavour. At the relevant time, the singer was known as a singer, not a fashion designer. The fact that singers go on tours, and tours come with merchandising opportunities, some of which involve branded clothing, does not mean the singer's rights to the name automatically override the designer's rights to use a very similar name, particularly as the designer's clothing line already existed and the brand was trademarked at that point. The High Court found that there was no risk of confusion when the singer used the name as a performer vs the designer using the name on apparel. Confusion would only arise if the designer took up singing and tried to develop a presence using that name, or if the singer started marketing apparel using that name, which is what happened.
That's the bit the High Court said the Federal Court got wrong. The Federal Court now needs to take that decision on board and begin with the fact that the designer is entitled to her trademark for apparel. It seems to me that if, in the original case, the Federal Court found in favour of the singer and ordered the designer's trademark cancelled, it's implied that the court must have concluded that the two apparel brands were sufficiently similar and confusing for an infringement to have occurred. Whether the Federal Court will maintain its original position that an infringement occurred and, from there, conclude that the singer committed the infringement, or will reverse its earlier decision and find that neither party infringed and that the two brands can co-exist, is something we will have to wait to see.
Meanwhile, I read a report on Ars Technica - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes/ - which, in the context of this article and comments, makes me wonder about a few things.
Assume, for the moment, that Thaler's Quest becomes precedent meaning that, absent "sufficient" human contribution, there's a legal presumption that any product of any AI agent lacks any and all IP protections.
Do "senior engineers" signing off on "Gen-AI assisted changes" add "sufficient" human contribution for the code changes to acquire IP protections, or is their work merely akin to a human looking at "Recent Entrance to Paradise" and saying, "I {love|hate} that image" (or "if that's paradise, I think I'll wait for the next train")?
Over time, as more and more contributions to a corporation's code base originate with AI agents, at what point does the entire code base lose IP protections and become public domain? Is it triggered on the first AI contribution or, at the other extreme, will a single remaining human-written module be sufficient to maintain a corporation's IP claims to the entirety of the code base? Or is it somewhere in between?
If private ownership vs public domain depends on the proportion of lines of code that had human or AI authorship, that's going to be a tricky (but not impossible) thing to track. It would also likely mean that accountants will want to revalue IP assets downwards to accurately reflect the proportion that the corporation actually owns. Will we see shareholder lawsuits based on corporations mischaracterising the true origins of lines of code in their software products?
Maybe Mr Wilson is right. Maybe companies will have more incentive to use human software engineers if they want the traditional control they like having for monetization and licensing - or maybe society will become the winners when things like Office and Creative Suite suddenly fall into the public domain.
I've long thought that this should be the rule for all software, not just games. I don't care if it's a paid up front or subscription model. If you've paid any amount at all for software and some network dependency can no longer be satisfied then the rest of it should remain in a functional state - including when you naturally migrate to newer machines etc.
Over the years I've bought very useful apps from the App store which function across any number of OS upgrades. And they seem to make the journey to upgraded equipment but as soon as you tap on the icon you're told "no longer available" and the icon vanishes. No advance warning at new equipment purchase time that some apps will be nuked (and they definitely have the data to do that). And no mention of a refund either. Bait 'n switch.
Or some other organisation that used to charge five arms and three legs upfront for every software upgrade - everything locked down with licence servers - then went "subscription", shortly after which they just switched off the licence servers. Lost me as a customer forever.
Here's a thought. Treat it like all those food products with "may contain traces of nuts" warnings on the labels.
If Techdirt's servers decide the user is in NY then shove up a big ugly splash screen with "may contain addictive features such as [the complete list]" with three buttons: "close the window and leave the site", "ignore and continue to the site", and "inform yourself on this topic" which leads to links of the various excellent TechDirt articles debunking this nonsense.
Perhaps also include a "write your governor" button leading to an email window pre-addressed to "Dear Kathy" plus some sample paras that can be dragged-and-dropped. You could even add a veneer of "balance" by providing paras containing both pro (drawn from Kathy's own press releases) and con stances (the science). It'd be interesting to see which paras were chosen by NYers because, in my experience, they don't take kindly to BS.
At the ripe old age of >70 I'm long past being "carded". Even before this "age [assurance | verification | whatever] became the political moral panic du jour, I always voted with my feet. Paraphrasing Groucho Marks, I refuse to spend money with, or contribute to, any organisation that expects me to prove diddly squat just to walk in the door, whether that door is bricks-and-mortar or electronic. I'm used to "free" meaning that I'm the product but there's no way I'm paying for the privilege by forking over personal info for corporates to lose and otherwise abuse.
In any event, I don't have all that many social media accounts. Never been on UglyMugBook (couldn't stand the owner). Decamped Twitter the day it came over all toXic. Never seen the point of TikTok (or other "shorts") and don't give so much as a particle of nevermind re the political-cum-Sinophobic piddle about who owns it. If Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord or even this august publication start carding me, so be it. Account abandoned. Kiss my ring. No regrets.
The best I can hope for is either someone with the means and nous challenging the stupid laws and them being found unconstitutional, or so many people refusing to be carded and abandoning their accounts that the Big End of Town starts screaming at the nitwit pollies who came up with this puerile twaddle.
That all said, there is one situation where I might be prepared to play the game. If there was a government app/site where I could mint one time tokens which did no more than confirm "this token entitles the bearer to claim s/he is over [age] years of age" then that might work. No names. No addresses. No dates of birth or any other personally identifying information. If parents want to mint tokens for their kids then I reckon that's a parental right (anathema to the control freaks who want to impose their weird and morally suspect ideas on everyone else). The one-time nature would prevent sharing and cross-site tracking. It would not interfere with the right to speak either under your own name or anonymously. All the well-established nom-de-whatevers would be unaffected (eg S. J. Rozan can still write as Sam Cabot), and neither would the right to lurk (to read/watch and be informed without needing to speak) be compromised.
Anyone care to take bets on the likelihood of something sensible happening?
This story made my day, week and year. Most days it's nothing but woe and despair as far as the eye can see on the news horizon. A bully getting it shoved where the sun doesn't shine reminds you that there are still a few good people around.
I can't escape the impression that I'm seeing a fair bit of actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth throughout this saga. Would it not be ironic if "Times v Mamdani" became the counterpoint for "Times v Sullivan"?
I've been a Mac person since 1987. I'm not such a fan that feel any need to rush out and buy the latest product but it's fair to say that the next whatever is more likely to be from Apple than any other manufacturer.
However, I have never been a fan of the App Store 30%. I've always seem it as something outrageous that Apple decided to do simply because it could and where the iPhone was the perfect "lock down" vehicle; and which they would love to extend to the Mac.
So, for me, the fact that Apple just got a serious whack from the courts is something that should have happened 20 years ago, had regulators not been asleep at the switch and foreseen the anti-competitive nature of the whole plan.
Ultimately, I hope Apple is (metaphorically) hung, drawn and quartered, with a serious message being sent to the entire tech sector that consumer choice must be preeminent. I've also long been of the opinion that many corporate execs park their consciences at the door when they come to work and fully expect to hide behind the corporate shield, and that the only way to deal with this problem is to haul them out of their offices and throw them in the pokey. Incarcerate one, educate a thousand!
I think you're being unfair to the judge, Mike.
I can hear the withering sarcasm in the printed version of the judge's remarks. It comes through very clearly.
Citing the Surgeon General with approval for topic X (because it suits your political agenda) while ignoring the Surgeon General on topic Y (because it doesn't suit your political agenda) is the kind of thing that even has small children yelling "hey, you can't have it both ways" at their parents when their eagle eyes detect inconsistency and hypocrisy.
I read the judge as saying, "well, if you want to cite the Surgeon General on a moral panic about under 16s then please first agree with the Surgeon General that COVID was and is serious, and that masks were and are an effective method for reducing transmission. If you want to have it both ways then you can eff right off."
Leaving stuff that would be in plain view if you didn't have tinted windows is just as dumb as assuming tinted windows are an effective barrier.
Like the advice to drivers of cars towing trailers, "cover your load". Heck, even a blanket would have done the job.
I'm afraid this is one of those (rare) TechDirt stories where I find myself thinking the cops and courts got this one right.
I have noticed the phrase "if Congress just does its job" a number of times over recent weeks. And not just here on TechDirt.
But what can Congress actually do at this point? Even if those on the hill agreed to pass new laws designed to tie Musk's hands, there are no guarantees that Trump wouldn't just veto the laws. If you assume Trump would sign new laws or that Congress could muster the numbers for an override, then there's the problem of enforcement and that would need the DoJ to resume normal service rather than misleading the courts. Then, assuming courts made decisions enforcing the new laws, there are no guarantees that Musk and co wouldn't continue ignoring any laws they don't like. But even if we assume new laws could get on the books and be obeyed, that all takes a huge amount of time when everything is being wrecked on an hourly basis.
The only other thing I can think of that Congress could actually do would be a "nuclear option" of not passing appropriation bills and starving the beast. That kind of strategy takes time to plan and a willingness to strike at the opportune moment.
If there are other things that Congress can actually do that would have actual teeth and stop what's going on, right now, it might be better to actually point out what strategies might work, explicitly, because, judging by the last couple of months, it sure as heck seems like Comgresscritters have no ideas either.
You might well be onto something there. After all, unless I missed it, nobody has come out since the most recent election to assert that Dominion Voting Systems or Smartmatic machines were rigged, hacked, whatever. That was all private prosecution. It seems that even the wackiest conspiracy-theory-prone nut-jobs' heads can be reached via their wallets.
I hope it succeeds.
Assuming this money did come from Meta and not Zuck's considerable personal funds, isn't this the kind of scenario where Meta shareholders could mount a class action against Zuck and the board? It'd be interesting seeing "protection" being justified in court as a legitimate business expense. Still, maybe all Meta's shareholders have MAGA hats in their closets and secretly approve.
I suppose it depends on your definition of weaponisation.
Most laws aimed at corporate behaviour/accountability are a kind of performance art. The legislators pretend they're tough. The corporates pretend they'll follow the law. It's all designed to fool the rest of us into believing it will work.
Corporates then set about undermining such regulators as exist ("regulatory capture") and legislators routinely deny the regulator the necessary funds to operate properly. And that's all well before we get to questions of corrupt behaviour like regulators doing deals with miscreant corporates because they're eyeing better-paying jobs, or chaps phoning chaps behind the scenes to arrange mere slaps on the wrist ("cost of doing business")..
It's really only when people like noyb come along that we make much progress. Their "weaponisation" (as I see it) is drawing public attention to the whole farcical "performance" in an attempt to shame (or, in some cases, force) the regulators into actually applying the law. I really can't think of a better term than "weaponisation" for their activities. Do you have a suggestion?
If regulators always acted against corporate misbehaviour with the same application and diligence as applies to, say, speeding fines and demerit points, the world would be a much better place.
Perhaps the USPTO has observed intellectual property bullying carried out by the NHL (eg strikes for YouTubers running fanzines) and is holding them to a higher standard.
That'd be a great policy - first TM granted on the basis we assume you're a reasonable person/organisation - but if you use it to fuck around, then you're gonna find out when you come asking for the next TM.
Get a dashcam
Ted's "Why is there never a cop around when you need one?" problem can be solved by installing a cashcam. At the very moment he's muttering about some "idotic driver", his dashcam will have captured the evidence. Instead of expecting Flock et al to solve his problems while he sits on his bum and moans, he can take some responsibility and get involved by turning the footage over to the cops. Each encounter (Ted being near enough to another idiot to capture footage) is random chance and occurs in public so there are no real "privacy" or "tracking" implications. The biggest problem is that, at least where I live, the cops couldn't give a tinker's cuss about dashcam footage from mere mortals - unless they need footage as additional evidence to support an existing charge. Ted would be better off arguing for a nationwide "CopTube" service where the average Jo could upload footage and know there was some chance of it being actioned. Simply cataloguing footage to license plates would allow the cops to wait until there are, say, 10 uploads by different citizens all focusing on the same plate, and then go after the idiots for patterns of unsafe driving.
Shouldn't 230 kill this dead?
Can I ask a dumb question, please. If Comey just photographed and uploaded a sea shell arrangement created by someone else, doesn't that make the "someone else" the "another information content provider" and Comey the "user of an interactive computer service" whom Section 230 says can't be treated as the "publisher or speaker" of the sea-shell speech?
It's her birth name
Her birth name was Katie Jane Perry. I can think of at least one reason why a person might change her family name and I'm sure you can too. It also should not be forgotten that Katy Perry is a stage name. The singer is Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson. The issue is, given two items of apparel, one branded Katie Perry, the other branded Katy Perry, is an ordinary consumer likely to be confused? The courts seem to have decided the answer is "yes". The High Court has just upheld the Katie Perry trademark. The current name of the person who owns that trademark is irrelevant.
Perry confusing
I might be mistaken but I can't escape the feeling that there's a tinge of "our famous singer done wrong" in this article. First, let's look at "who started it?" It began with the threat of legal action. The singer "started it" by issuing a cease and desist to the fashion designer. You seem to overlook that step merely because the singer didn't follow up with any court action. The singer choosing not to follow-up left the designer in legal limbo. It looks to me that, in the absence of further moves by the singer, the designer sought legal certainty. That's something we are all entitled to do. It's one of the functions of courts. Second, what the High Court decided was that just being extremely well known in one field does not entitle the singer to claim exclusive rights over the name in every field of human endeavour. At the relevant time, the singer was known as a singer, not a fashion designer. The fact that singers go on tours, and tours come with merchandising opportunities, some of which involve branded clothing, does not mean the singer's rights to the name automatically override the designer's rights to use a very similar name, particularly as the designer's clothing line already existed and the brand was trademarked at that point. The High Court found that there was no risk of confusion when the singer used the name as a performer vs the designer using the name on apparel. Confusion would only arise if the designer took up singing and tried to develop a presence using that name, or if the singer started marketing apparel using that name, which is what happened. That's the bit the High Court said the Federal Court got wrong. The Federal Court now needs to take that decision on board and begin with the fact that the designer is entitled to her trademark for apparel. It seems to me that if, in the original case, the Federal Court found in favour of the singer and ordered the designer's trademark cancelled, it's implied that the court must have concluded that the two apparel brands were sufficiently similar and confusing for an infringement to have occurred. Whether the Federal Court will maintain its original position that an infringement occurred and, from there, conclude that the singer committed the infringement, or will reverse its earlier decision and find that neither party infringed and that the two brands can co-exist, is something we will have to wait to see.
Will AI coding agents lead to public domain software?
Meanwhile, I read a report on Ars Technica - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes/ - which, in the context of this article and comments, makes me wonder about a few things. Assume, for the moment, that Thaler's Quest becomes precedent meaning that, absent "sufficient" human contribution, there's a legal presumption that any product of any AI agent lacks any and all IP protections. Do "senior engineers" signing off on "Gen-AI assisted changes" add "sufficient" human contribution for the code changes to acquire IP protections, or is their work merely akin to a human looking at "Recent Entrance to Paradise" and saying, "I {love|hate} that image" (or "if that's paradise, I think I'll wait for the next train")? Over time, as more and more contributions to a corporation's code base originate with AI agents, at what point does the entire code base lose IP protections and become public domain? Is it triggered on the first AI contribution or, at the other extreme, will a single remaining human-written module be sufficient to maintain a corporation's IP claims to the entirety of the code base? Or is it somewhere in between? If private ownership vs public domain depends on the proportion of lines of code that had human or AI authorship, that's going to be a tricky (but not impossible) thing to track. It would also likely mean that accountants will want to revalue IP assets downwards to accurately reflect the proportion that the corporation actually owns. Will we see shareholder lawsuits based on corporations mischaracterising the true origins of lines of code in their software products? Maybe Mr Wilson is right. Maybe companies will have more incentive to use human software engineers if they want the traditional control they like having for monetization and licensing - or maybe society will become the winners when things like Office and Creative Suite suddenly fall into the public domain.
Should apply to everything
I've long thought that this should be the rule for all software, not just games. I don't care if it's a paid up front or subscription model. If you've paid any amount at all for software and some network dependency can no longer be satisfied then the rest of it should remain in a functional state - including when you naturally migrate to newer machines etc. Over the years I've bought very useful apps from the App store which function across any number of OS upgrades. And they seem to make the journey to upgraded equipment but as soon as you tap on the icon you're told "no longer available" and the icon vanishes. No advance warning at new equipment purchase time that some apps will be nuked (and they definitely have the data to do that). And no mention of a refund either. Bait 'n switch. Or some other organisation that used to charge five arms and three legs upfront for every software upgrade - everything locked down with licence servers - then went "subscription", shortly after which they just switched off the licence servers. Lost me as a customer forever.
May contain nutjobs
Here's a thought. Treat it like all those food products with "may contain traces of nuts" warnings on the labels. If Techdirt's servers decide the user is in NY then shove up a big ugly splash screen with "may contain addictive features such as [the complete list]" with three buttons: "close the window and leave the site", "ignore and continue to the site", and "inform yourself on this topic" which leads to links of the various excellent TechDirt articles debunking this nonsense. Perhaps also include a "write your governor" button leading to an email window pre-addressed to "Dear Kathy" plus some sample paras that can be dragged-and-dropped. You could even add a veneer of "balance" by providing paras containing both pro (drawn from Kathy's own press releases) and con stances (the science). It'd be interesting to see which paras were chosen by NYers because, in my experience, they don't take kindly to BS.
Two Washingtons, no waiting
So, in your grand rationalisation to dispense with hot spares, which Washington should go to the junk pile?
At the ripe old age of >70 I'm long past being "carded". Even before this "age [assurance | verification | whatever] became the political moral panic du jour, I always voted with my feet. Paraphrasing Groucho Marks, I refuse to spend money with, or contribute to, any organisation that expects me to prove diddly squat just to walk in the door, whether that door is bricks-and-mortar or electronic. I'm used to "free" meaning that I'm the product but there's no way I'm paying for the privilege by forking over personal info for corporates to lose and otherwise abuse. In any event, I don't have all that many social media accounts. Never been on UglyMugBook (couldn't stand the owner). Decamped Twitter the day it came over all toXic. Never seen the point of TikTok (or other "shorts") and don't give so much as a particle of nevermind re the political-cum-Sinophobic piddle about who owns it. If Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord or even this august publication start carding me, so be it. Account abandoned. Kiss my ring. No regrets. The best I can hope for is either someone with the means and nous challenging the stupid laws and them being found unconstitutional, or so many people refusing to be carded and abandoning their accounts that the Big End of Town starts screaming at the nitwit pollies who came up with this puerile twaddle. That all said, there is one situation where I might be prepared to play the game. If there was a government app/site where I could mint one time tokens which did no more than confirm "this token entitles the bearer to claim s/he is over [age] years of age" then that might work. No names. No addresses. No dates of birth or any other personally identifying information. If parents want to mint tokens for their kids then I reckon that's a parental right (anathema to the control freaks who want to impose their weird and morally suspect ideas on everyone else). The one-time nature would prevent sharing and cross-site tracking. It would not interfere with the right to speak either under your own name or anonymously. All the well-established nom-de-whatevers would be unaffected (eg S. J. Rozan can still write as Sam Cabot), and neither would the right to lurk (to read/watch and be informed without needing to speak) be compromised. Anyone care to take bets on the likelihood of something sensible happening?
Bliss
This story made my day, week and year. Most days it's nothing but woe and despair as far as the eye can see on the news horizon. A bully getting it shoved where the sun doesn't shine reminds you that there are still a few good people around.
I can't escape the impression that I'm seeing a fair bit of actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth throughout this saga. Would it not be ironic if "Times v Mamdani" became the counterpoint for "Times v Sullivan"?
I am an Apple fan boy
I've been a Mac person since 1987. I'm not such a fan that feel any need to rush out and buy the latest product but it's fair to say that the next whatever is more likely to be from Apple than any other manufacturer. However, I have never been a fan of the App Store 30%. I've always seem it as something outrageous that Apple decided to do simply because it could and where the iPhone was the perfect "lock down" vehicle; and which they would love to extend to the Mac. So, for me, the fact that Apple just got a serious whack from the courts is something that should have happened 20 years ago, had regulators not been asleep at the switch and foreseen the anti-competitive nature of the whole plan. Ultimately, I hope Apple is (metaphorically) hung, drawn and quartered, with a serious message being sent to the entire tech sector that consumer choice must be preeminent. I've also long been of the opinion that many corporate execs park their consciences at the door when they come to work and fully expect to hide behind the corporate shield, and that the only way to deal with this problem is to haul them out of their offices and throw them in the pokey. Incarcerate one, educate a thousand!
Sarcasm flies over some people's heads
I think you're being unfair to the judge, Mike. I can hear the withering sarcasm in the printed version of the judge's remarks. It comes through very clearly. Citing the Surgeon General with approval for topic X (because it suits your political agenda) while ignoring the Surgeon General on topic Y (because it doesn't suit your political agenda) is the kind of thing that even has small children yelling "hey, you can't have it both ways" at their parents when their eagle eyes detect inconsistency and hypocrisy. I read the judge as saying, "well, if you want to cite the Surgeon General on a moral panic about under 16s then please first agree with the Surgeon General that COVID was and is serious, and that masks were and are an effective method for reducing transmission. If you want to have it both ways then you can eff right off."
And the moral of this story is
Leaving stuff that would be in plain view if you didn't have tinted windows is just as dumb as assuming tinted windows are an effective barrier. Like the advice to drivers of cars towing trailers, "cover your load". Heck, even a blanket would have done the job. I'm afraid this is one of those (rare) TechDirt stories where I find myself thinking the cops and courts got this one right.
Doing its job
I have noticed the phrase "if Congress just does its job" a number of times over recent weeks. And not just here on TechDirt. But what can Congress actually do at this point? Even if those on the hill agreed to pass new laws designed to tie Musk's hands, there are no guarantees that Trump wouldn't just veto the laws. If you assume Trump would sign new laws or that Congress could muster the numbers for an override, then there's the problem of enforcement and that would need the DoJ to resume normal service rather than misleading the courts. Then, assuming courts made decisions enforcing the new laws, there are no guarantees that Musk and co wouldn't continue ignoring any laws they don't like. But even if we assume new laws could get on the books and be obeyed, that all takes a huge amount of time when everything is being wrecked on an hourly basis. The only other thing I can think of that Congress could actually do would be a "nuclear option" of not passing appropriation bills and starving the beast. That kind of strategy takes time to plan and a willingness to strike at the opportune moment. If there are other things that Congress can actually do that would have actual teeth and stop what's going on, right now, it might be better to actually point out what strategies might work, explicitly, because, judging by the last couple of months, it sure as heck seems like Comgresscritters have no ideas either.
You might well be onto something there. After all, unless I missed it, nobody has come out since the most recent election to assert that Dominion Voting Systems or Smartmatic machines were rigged, hacked, whatever. That was all private prosecution. It seems that even the wackiest conspiracy-theory-prone nut-jobs' heads can be reached via their wallets. I hope it succeeds.
Assuming this money did come from Meta and not Zuck's considerable personal funds, isn't this the kind of scenario where Meta shareholders could mount a class action against Zuck and the board? It'd be interesting seeing "protection" being justified in court as a legitimate business expense. Still, maybe all Meta's shareholders have MAGA hats in their closets and secretly approve.
I suppose it depends on your definition of weaponisation. Most laws aimed at corporate behaviour/accountability are a kind of performance art. The legislators pretend they're tough. The corporates pretend they'll follow the law. It's all designed to fool the rest of us into believing it will work. Corporates then set about undermining such regulators as exist ("regulatory capture") and legislators routinely deny the regulator the necessary funds to operate properly. And that's all well before we get to questions of corrupt behaviour like regulators doing deals with miscreant corporates because they're eyeing better-paying jobs, or chaps phoning chaps behind the scenes to arrange mere slaps on the wrist ("cost of doing business").. It's really only when people like noyb come along that we make much progress. Their "weaponisation" (as I see it) is drawing public attention to the whole farcical "performance" in an attempt to shame (or, in some cases, force) the regulators into actually applying the law. I really can't think of a better term than "weaponisation" for their activities. Do you have a suggestion? If regulators always acted against corporate misbehaviour with the same application and diligence as applies to, say, speeding fines and demerit points, the world would be a much better place.
Petard + hoist
Perhaps the USPTO has observed intellectual property bullying carried out by the NHL (eg strikes for YouTubers running fanzines) and is holding them to a higher standard. That'd be a great policy - first TM granted on the basis we assume you're a reasonable person/organisation - but if you use it to fuck around, then you're gonna find out when you come asking for the next TM.