Here’s my writeup of a new bill that would break up the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office, reinforcing the Library in Congress and handing the USCO over to the executive branch

Here’s @sarahjeong.bsky.social somehow going even harder than the T-shirt at the AI-copyright conference: “[AI companies] have ushered in a wholesale destruction of human knowledge and culture that is as significant as the burning of the Library of Alexandria.”

I am returning from my Bluesky productivity-induction hiatus just to complain that this NYT headline falsely implies that Lego minifigs can be "beheaded" when in fact the heads *come* detached from the arms/torso in the box

This is great stuff. Really glad to see @rooseveltinstitute.org getting into disability issues in such a big way.

[correction:] ICYMI, the DC Circuit on Wednesday effectively reinstated the Register of Copyrights (Pan and *Childs* with a per curiam order and concurrence, *Walker* dissenting). The dispute centers the salience of the Library of Congress' quasi-legislative/executive/judicial status under Wilcox.

New blog post with Internet Society: I argue Internet fragmentation is taking an "outward" turn, no longer just used for domestic or authoritarian purposes but for extending power across borders. Short piece: pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/a-new-c... Long piece: www.sciencespo.fr/public/chair...

$1.5 billion on the table for Anthropic to settle © claims. This strikes me as: (a) a lot of money for a currently unprofitable company; (b) maybe not so much for one with a $183 billion market cap; (c) a lot more than $0 (fair use); (d) a lot less than the hundreds-of-billions statutory max.

Broadcast networks should consider the risk of threats to license renewals of affiliate and O&O stations in future administrations for submitting to flagrantly coercive jawboning. Unlike social media companies, broadcast licensees have legal obligations to their audiences.

On quick scan I concur with David: the remedies against Google are pretty weak tea, though still complex enough to require a "Technical Committee" that will probably pay for a lot of beach houses. Increasingly tough to believe muscular structural antitrust remedies will emerge from current statutes.

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion here, but it's framing a critical question for cases like this: what, exactly, is the baseline against which an open-ended chatbot should be measured?

It's hard to know exactly what to make of Anthropic moving to settle the copyright class action against it without knowing the details of the settlement, but... 🍿

"We’re witnessing, in real-time, a profound consolidation of power & collusion among political & tech elites... wherein the tools and technologies that this industry has built... can now be deployed in service of an authoritarian regime" — @katie-drummond.bsky.social www.status.news/p/wired-kati...

Good pickup from @ericgoldman.bsky.social on the Ohio Google-is-a-common-carrier lolsuit. One point I’d add is that the analysis frames a fairly “Ohio-law-specific” version of common carriage law, particularly the property-transportation framing, aside from a throwaway analogy to net neutrality.

There's a snake-eating-its-tail dynamic in "AI is going to revolutionize legal practice" hype. There's a mounting professional/regulatory norm that using AI for legal practice requires independently verifying its results, but learning how to do that takes... law school and years of legal practice.

Interested in the First Amendment, the FCC, and telecom law? The new edition of Jerry Kang's, @alanindc.bsky.social's, and my Communications Law and Policy casebook is freely available. It's aimed at students, but may be of interest to practitioners, profs, journalists, and others too!

Slightly subtler version: 1) There are now many more cameras and microphones in public places 2) There are turnkey tools to connect faces to identities 3) Connecting faces to identities has become an online sport 4) Most people don't realize 1-3 and couldn't comport their behavior if they did

I don't expect the ruling will stick, but will begin the process of forcing the Humphrey's Executor issues

Tech law pals: the Law & Technology Workshop call for papers is up for Fall 2025. If you're writing in law and tech, broadly construed, please think about submitting! It's a low-pressure format with a great group of folks. Deadline's Sept. 19!

An absolute banger from @jasonkoebler.bsky.social on the dead end of AI for journalism (and easy to extrapolate the insights about audience and humanity to education, legal advice, and other info industries)

Ska is now defenseless 😭

Reminder that *every* generative AI tool is necessarily shaped by its creators' decisions; there is no abstract "neutral" baseline for measuring how they work. We're in a moment of specific decisions making that obvious, but everything about a model is a function of decisions, all the way down.

Do you have opinions about tech policy and AI? Do you enjoy yelling at Congress? Want to get paid to combine those two things? Come work with us!

Grateful to @indefenseofska.bsky.social for so many years of good listens and reconnecting me with a scene that I’d lost. And very proud to have dropped what I *think* is the only cite (so far!) to the book in a law review article. (Still has to survive the editors but I will fight for it.)

It’s different than the headline implies. The appellate court implies that the trial judge adopted a proposed order by an attorney with non-existent cases, and that the attorney then doubled down with more non-existent cases on appeal. (The judge likely failed to check, which is its own problem.)

The American system of democracy has crashed

🚨 BREAKING: DOJ has released the first round of TikTok letters that Attorney General Bondi sent to Google, Oracle, Akamai Apple, and others, purporting to relieve them of liability. The primary basis is the Trump's determination that PAFACAA would interfere with his Art. II foreign affairs powers.

The thing I'm still stuck on about the "AI moratorium" is the detachment between the semiotics and actual operation of law. There was a whole policy debate about whether "preempting AI-specific laws" was a good idea when no one ever drafted statutory text that successfully implemented that concept.

This is a travesty

There is *genuine uncertainty* about where AI will go. A massive deregulatory initiative for the industry was just written in, and then out, of the budget bill. Copyright litigation over LLM training hinges on one of the least predictable doctrines in American law. And these are *known* unknowns.

It’s right there in the First Skamendment

Just to resurface Mike's point here about how the "AI moratorium" in the budget bill might intersect with the Texas law that SCOTUS just blessed in FSC v. Paxton, there are actually two parts of the Texas law that might run into problems: 1/

Tired: leaving the Internet largely unregulated for three decades because judges aren’t sure what the word “publisher” means Wired: replacing one word with big word salad that will now be litigated in every state law case nominally involving a computer and a decision

Universities are not about the accumulation of knowledge, hoarded like gold ducats in a locked vault. Humanity’s collective knowledge is a living thing; it circulates through society like blood; it must constantly be transmitted and renewed. That is what we do.

I had three people I greatly respect offer kind and encouraging words to me this week, and it really meant a lot. Never underestimate the power or importance of encouraging others. You can have a tremendous impact on someone’s life with just a few kind words.

In addition to the very bad AI moratorium attached to the Senate's budget reconciliation bill, there is also another very bad threat to everyone's wi-fi. www.theverge.com/news/694479/...

As a bonus from FSC v. Paxton, don't sleep on fn. 4, where Thomas can't help but continue his extra-textual quest to reinterpret Section 230 to mean something different from what it says on the tin. (At least he cited it correctly.)

Thomas, who wrote Reed, now abandons it (NB it should be abandoned) for this day and train only--trying to distinguish regulating content (strict scrutiny) from regulating based on the content (intermediate scrutiny). I also wonder about RAV.

Paxton is right up there in the hall of shame of slapdash Thomas opinions, just as incoherent as Star Athletica and Town of Gilbert, but way more consequential. Embarrassingly bad. This is like a Friday morning opinion dump, hoping no one would notice with all the attention on CASA

The two faces of the Supreme Court (mirroring and enabling the two faces of the administrative state)

So I thought FSC v. Paxton would be bad, but I did not think it was going to drive a truck through 1A law by inventing a new category of scrutiny that has an unclear relationship to pretty much all of existing 1A law. Feels like exception swallows the rule territory.

oops

This is major news about the Copyright Office operating without a register and raises a serious possibility that copyright registrations currently being issued are vulnerable to challenge

Thankful for small miracles. The FCC nondelegation case goes down with a sensible 6-3 majority from Kagan despite a goofball dissent from Gorsuch and co. and a slightly worrying concurrence from Kav.

“And what do you call your act?” CJ Roberts: “The Institutionalists!”

Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway. But this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise

Yep. And you should prepare to hear this type of story over and over as the NTIA shifts broadband deployment dollars from Fiber to Satellite.

The Cato paper is worth reading and Eliot’s and Renee’s threads dismantling it doubly so. The exchange neatly illustrates how small-ball First Amendment absolutists are *still* whistling past the graveyard of democracy and ignoring oligarchical control of information systems.