the upsides of the Paramount/Warner stuff:
1. Nobody at Paramount seems remotely competent
2. The U.S. isn't Hungary
3. The huge debt makes collapse very likely
4. Humans still have agency
5. Every time anybody has tried to use Warner to dominate media (see: AT&T) it has failed spectacularly
🧵TL;DR the biggest AI companies and the New York Times are destroying history and accountability at the same time. www.techdirt.com/2026/02/17/p...
Our director @evangreer.bsky.social penned an op-ed for @erininthemorning.bsky.social on how @warren.senate.gov is blatantly ignoring Boston LGTBQ+ orgs who are speaking out against KOSA. Please read it + tag her below telling her to drop support for KOSA!
www.erininthemorning.com/p/op-ed-with...
In Q4, CC continued our work in international fora that shape cultural rights and copyright, as well as our advocacy for AI policies that serve the public interest.
Read the full policy review: buff.ly/hBal5Z2
"Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building," Carol M Highsmith, 2007, CC0, Flickr.
Like @mmasnick.bsky.social, I also said Breton's letter to Elon was extraordinarily stupid, and had very different views on how to handle antivax propaganda than CCDH. But that was CCDH's speech. The censorship is the state action happening now.
This is the right take:
www.ms.now/opinion/marc...
Google Built Its Empire Scraping The Web. Now It’s Suing To Stop Others From Scraping Google
Last week, Google filed suit against SerpApi, a scraping company that helps businesses pull data from Google search results. The lawsuit claims SerpApi violated DMCA Section 1201 by circumventing Google's…
As the former Google Associate General Counsel for web search -- a product built on scraping third party content without permission -- I'm having a lot of trouble processing Google's new lawsuit against someone else for scraping search results. storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog...
The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.
Holy shit.
Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa.
www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...
the sort of user 'bill of rights' @anildash.com speaks to remains important, even as the context changes. See also: www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/w... ; www.eff.org/deeplinks/20... ; www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/bul...
The boundaries between where publisher control ends and user agency begins are getting relitigated today, and unfortunately the debate rarely centers users. It's framed as "AI companies' bots" versus publishers. But what if it's the user's bot? And where do we draw that line?
Was doing some research around AI agents, and ensuring users' rights - and @anildash.com was really cooking here. In 2013! www.anildash.com/2013/03/19/t...
a data point, if not a dispositive one: search is much more profitable than display ads & other formats. In turn, cannibalizing the latter to serve the viability of the former (inc. other 1st party ads) may be net profitable, or at least better than alternatives...
Would certainly bet on any 'solution' that does not involve going after the root cause - the major sports monopolies. When Ted Cruz called a hearing on streaming earlier this year, the NFL flat refused to show up - now that's power. www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/5/field...
www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...
Building evidence and driving toward scientific consensus around AI’s impact on youth mental health is not going to be straightforward, but industry can and should engage with and support better research, says Betsy Masiello, cofounder of Proteus Strategies.
buff.ly/79VTteV
Cornell is seeking postdocs for the Empire AI Fellows program. The focus is on technical research, but if this looks interesting to you and your technical AI work has connections to law, please reach out!
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971
worth reading this alongside www.techdirt.com/2025/10/24/r... - while my article is about (c) and reddit's claims is a weird mutant, important to consider the competitive implications of these claims against AI services
@mcarrier.bsky.social and @derekslater.bsky.social explain how copyright's competition-promoting tools can be used to combat Big Tech's monopoly power and foster a robust AI marketplace. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/worr...
#Reddit’s ‘#AI #Scraping’ Lawsuit Is An Attack On The #OpenInternet - www.techdirt.com/2025/10/24/r... important detailed analysis by @mmasnick.bsky.social of very bad, very reckless behaviour
Put another way, this feels like the sort of "adversarial interoperability" that folks like @eff.org and CoryD have championed. I get that the antitrust remedies were about forced sharing, but the goal is the same -- get Google to share their SERP to enable competition.
also: as a policy matter, this seems incongruent with what antimonopoly advocates have sought and in part achieved in the Search antitrust case. Perplexity is using Google's SERP to create a competing product; Reddit says they shouldn't be able to.
I'm unimpressed by Reddit's lawsuit against Perplexity et al. In the process of pleading notably weak DMCA claims, I think Reddit pleads itself out of court on its state-law claims.
1/
cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/u...
Some of us are old enough to remember when Reddit cared about the open web and recognized the DMCA shouldn’t be used as a hack around fair use. x.com/lehogg/statu...
This is an interesting tactic by Cloudflare, but I don't believe the legal hook that Prince suggests will influence Google exists under U.S. law. arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/i...
We're so relieved to see Germany reaffirm its opposition to the dangerous Chat Control proposal--the one that would mandate mass scanning of communications. Germany's long been a solid champion of privacy, and the news that it was considering backing mass surveillance was alarming. 1/
Sure, re unpacking / unbundling the issue -
There's generation ("video generation tools);
There's distribution and sharing ("social features");
There's deepfakes v non deepfakes;
And we might evaluate, among other factors, support for content provenance ("traceable")
Even if we just focus on deepfakes - might be interested in this testimony from the Motion Picture Association on why regulation here must be narrowly tailored, to avoid hurting positive uses: www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/u...
Think it's worth unpacking what was clear in 05 and to whom. It was not self evident and was actively contested and fought by many.
Then, why can't many of the same positive video uses from UGC be applied to gen AI? (Including the myriad gen AI video that is *not* a deepfakes)
