The Free Law Project has updated its bot system with support for Bluesky, so our Verge-curated Tech Cases Bot now has a home there in addition to X/Twitter and Mastodon. Follow it for easy updates to cases like Epic v. Google whenever new documents are filed!
[Bluesky Social]
As 404 Media notes, an investigation into alleged “hacker-for-hire shop” Appin has been removed — Reuters says temporarily — after what Reuters calls a preliminary court order that the news outlet is fighting. There’s no clear evidence of factual errors here, which might make this a case of de facto press censorship in India. You can still read the feature here.
Sure, it’s not as eye-catching as Musk telling Disney to go fuck itself. But Musk and The New York Times’ Sorkin had a painfully ill-informed conversation about intellectual property and AI, starting with the factually wrong statement that AI companies claim they’re not training on copyrighted works. It’s been driving me up a wall, so kudos to Mike Masnick for laying out how silly it all was.
The error stemmed from a Reuters report that erroneously estimated the Trump-backed social media company as having a net loss of $73 million rather than $31.5 million, apparently misinterpreting a nebulous profit declaration. (The Verge initially reported the wrong numbers in a link to Reuters’ reporting, too. We’re not a party to this suit.)
The lawsuit will face the high standard of US defamation law. And while Truth Social’s operator frames the reports as a “coordinated” attack on Truth Social... I’d guess most other outlets (totaling around 20, including Axios, Rolling Stone, MarketWatch, and The Hill) simply trusted the venerable wire service’s analysis.
No, really: this does not surprise me at all! Unlike 404’s Jason Koebler, I did in fact read early parts of blogger and AI “doomer” Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality — it was known in nerd/fan circles, not just the effective altruist movement, and at least initially was built around the pretty funny conceit of “applying cold hyperlogic to the quirks of a children’s fantasy series.” I did not get nearly far enough to reach the namecheck of Emmett Shear, OpenAI’s new CEO.
Legal blogger and podcaster Ken White has some thoughts on Elon Musk’s yet-unfulfilled promise of a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters (for simply noting that X’s loose moderation policy lets through heinous content) and the larger pattern of insisting “freedom of speech” means “freedom from criticism”:
It would be easy to blame this contemptible nonsense on Elon Musk being socially inept, proudly ignorant, and grotesquely petulant. But when it comes to thinking that the right to free speech includes the right to silence others, Elon learned it by watching us, okay? He learned it by watching us.
Musk threatened to file that lawsuit “the split second court opens” today... a delay White also points out is completely unnecessary, because e-filing exists.
[popehat.substack.com]
