Listen, someone like Elon Musk openly wondering why Democrats aren’t getting assassinated while also holding massive multi-billion dollar government security contracts is the inevitable wage of neoliberalism. The government can work with private business, sure, but when you outsource huge parts of the government to private corporations so that government, like higher education can be “run like a business,” this is what will eventually happen. You empower the worst people in the world, i.e,, billionaires with our core national security interests, all while having no regulation, no control, no other option than to work with them.

This kind of thing is as much on the Bill Clintons and Barack Obamas of the world as any Republican. People wanted to deify our billionaires. Well, deify Elon Musk then as he calls for the assassination of Democratic leaders.

Alternatively, we could nationalize Musk’s holdings and run national security from the government, in conjunction with private business, but not handing them the keys.

The post The Inevitable Wage of Neoliberalism appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

It’s a testament to the power of money and influence-peddling that this asshole still has a security clearance:

Aside from the obvious, if a political argument is based on an unnamed “they” the chances that it is being made by a moron approach 100%.

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A funny thing about the outside contributors chosen by the New York Times to provide commentary on the debate and the Democratic convention — liberals are not invited:

If you read yesterday’s New York Times, you likely came across a feature headlined “‘Trump Brought Darkness; Harris Brought Light’: 14 Writers on Who Won the Presidential Debate.” If you read it closely, you might have noticed that of the 14 writers in question, eight work directly for The New York Times and six are outside contributors. The eight Times employees include a relatively even mix of liberals and conservatives. The six outside contributors, on the other hand, are 100 percent conservative.

Wild, right? Well, we’re just getting started.

The New York Times published similar features after each night of the Democratic convention last night. Four nights, four pieces, a total of 13 appearances by outside contributors with clear ideological backgrounds or affiliations … all 13 of them conservatives.

And we are not done yet!

In July The New York Times did the same thing for the Republican convention: Four nights, four pieces, a total of 17 appearances by outside contributors with clear ideological backgrounds or affiliations … all 17 of them conservatives.

All together these nine opinion roundups feature 36 appearances by outside contributors with readily-apparent ideological backgrounds or affiliations — and all 36 are conservatives. (To be clear, there are fewer than 36 people involved; the Times turned to most of the right-wing writers multiple times.)

Here’s the list:

Dan McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review (4 times)

Josh Barro, former Manhattan Institute fellow (3 times)

Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason Magazine editor (4 times)

Kevin Williamson, most famous for advocating hanging women who have abortions

Kristen Soltis Anderson, Republican pollster (8 times)

Liam Donovan, Republican strategist formerly with the National Republican Senatorial Committee (5 times)

Matt Labash, writer formerly with The Weekly Standard (7 times)

Matthew Continetti, founding editor of Free Beacon; also previously of National Review and The Weekly Standard

Peter Wehner, worked in three Republican presidential administrations (3 times)

That’s two (2) guys named Matt who used to work for The Weekly Standard and zero (0) liberals.

Two (2) people who are literally Republican Party political operatives, and zero (0) liberals.

Obviously, not all of these people are Trump supporters — some of them might even be voting for Harris — but it remains striking that the Times could find an actual liberal to provide commentary even as a token. And needless to say there’s zero chance they would invite a roster of nothing but people on the left to balance out Bret Stephens and David Brooks.

The post All the conservatives fit to print appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Despite the truly unquantifiable benefit to the public, the Second Circuit decided:

Within the framework of the Copyright Act, IA’s argument regarding the public interest is shortsighted. True, libraries and consumers may reap some short-term benefits from access to free digital books, but what are the long-term consequences? If authors and creators knew that their original works could be copied and disseminated for free, there would be little motivation to produce new works. And a dearth of creative activity would undoubtedly negatively impact the public. It is this reality that the Copyright Act seeks to avoid.

In other words: even though libraries have been around far longer than the Copyright Act itself, libraries are now a threat to authors. The true meaning is clear: publishers’ abilities to extract exorbitant rents and exert control over readers outweigh the incredible benefits of increased public access to books.

Addendum: National Emergency Library

Publishers have seized on a brief program by the Internet Archive to vilify their controlled digital lending program, and it seems they have had some success in misleading the public on this point, so it is necessary to address it here.

The National Emergency Library was a decision by the Internet Archive lift the one-to-one lending restrictions on its online catalog during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many libraries were closed. On March 24, 2020, the Archive announced that for a temporary period:

Users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist, ensuring that students will have access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar, and that people who cannot physically access their local libraries because of closure or self-quarantine can continue to read and thrive during this time of crisis, keeping themselves and others safe.

On June 16, the Archive ended the program two weeks earlier than intended due to the lawsuit from the publishers. Many have suggested that the Internet Archive provoked the lawsuit by implementing the NEL, and that if only they hadn’t pissed off these powerful publishers, this wouldn’t have happened.

For one, that gets the history wrong. As Gio points out, the plaintiffs themselves have acknowledged that they were preparing their lawsuit against the Internet Archive well before the NEL:

As a point of clarity, we sued Internet Archive on June 1, 2020, for its entire practice of “controlled digital lending,” not only the extra-extreme version that it rolled out in March 2020 with its hyperbolic “National Emergency Library” (NEL) and shut down on June 16, 2020, shortly after the U.S. Copyright Office suggested it was likely outside the bounds of fair use. We previewed a suit in February 2019 with this public statement, which regrettably was ignored. When the pandemic hit, the underlying suit was already being prepared.

Furthermore, the opinion extends to one-to-one controlled digital lending, not just the more extreme lending through the NEL. Even if the court decided the NEL lending was disallowed, that is not itself a reason to overstep and prohibit controlled digital lending entirely. “They had it coming” is typically not a great legal theory.

Artificial intelligence

This decision is coming at a strange time, as AI companies have been openly training models on every scrap of content they can get their hands on, copyrighted or not. This, quite understandably, rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

Indeed, there are court battles playing out between publishers, authors, artists, and others who contend that these AI companies are infringing their copyrights. Many have been dismissed pre-trial. Those that haven’t have not yet gone to trial.

While I agree that this just feels wrong, I disagree that copyright is the tool with which to protect artists and writers against non-consensual AI scraping. Copyright has, generally speaking, been a bad deal for actual creators, and it is the media monopolies that have reaped the benefits of copyright expansions. As Cory Doctorow writes:

Under these [monopoly] conditions, giving a creator more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid extra lunch money. It doesn't matter how much lunch money you give that kid – the bullies will take it all, and the kid will still go hungry (that's still true even if the bullies spend some of that stolen lunch money on a PR campaign urging us all to think of the hungry children and give them even more lunch money).

If any plaintiffs prevail in these copyright suits, it is the big tech companies and publishing conglomerates that will benefit — not creators. Creators need true worker protections, and should not buy the story that copyright will somehow protect them this time when it has demonstrably done the opposite in the past.⁴

It could be worse

There’s a lot of bad news in the Hachette decision. I am both devastated and terrified by it. I am hoping the Internet Archive will appeal to the Supreme Court, but I am also extremely cynical about this Supreme Court’s ability to make any good decisions, and frightened by the possibility they could set damaging precedent.

However, although there is a lot of bad news, it is not all bad. I wouldn’t say any of it is really good news, per se — but it could be worse.

Some interpreted this recent news about the lawsuit to mean that the Internet Archive or the Open Library will be shutting down wholesale. I haven’t seen anything that suggests that, and would be surprised if it came to it as a result of this case. Beyond this case, there are constant threats to the Internet Archive (such as a separate lawsuit from a group of music industry giants seeking $400 million in damages) that could be existential. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the Internet Archive’s whole existence pushes the boundaries of copyright law, and so threats like this are a part of the territory. But hopefully, and with our support, they will continue to weather the storm.

Finally, although around 500,000 books have been removed from the Open Library’s lending program (including 1,300 banned books) at publishers’ request, many still remain. The Internet Archive is still able to make the removed books available via programs including interlibrary loan and their project to provide access to those with qualified print disabilities. The Archive is also still able to display short previews of removed books, such as where Wikipedia citations reference a specific book page. Finally, the decision does not impact the lending of books that do not have e-book versions offered for sale.

We still need to fight like hell to reverse this decision, preferably not just by seeking to have it overturned in the courts, but by proactively enshrining in law the right for people to read freely, and creating properly equitable protections for writers and other creators that do not pit them against those seeking to enjoy their work. Despite what publishers might like you to believe, readers and libraries are not threats to authors — they are allies.

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