Copyright news (15 Jan)
Time's almost up for TikTok
It feels like I’m writing social media’s obituary this week. As detailed below, Facebook, Google, Amazon and (for good measure) McDonald’s are making questionable changes to policy seemingly to build favor within the incoming administration. With my critical hat on, I’d call the impacts uncertain - beyond the headlines, it’s unclear if the companies are making substantial changes or merely re-juggling their corporate jargon. I can say that, in terms of material impact, in my home state of Iowa the great ‘de-DEI’ing’ has resulted in substantial cuts to university programs and faculty cheered by the Republican legislature.
I’m uncertain about Google, Amazon, and McDonald’s, but Facebook does seem to be kicking off 2025 off with a slew of highly questionable decisions - including ending fact checks, announcing plans to outsource programming jobs to AI, and cutting its Diversity, Equality & Inclusion program as it introduces a ‘black queer’ AI character created by a largely white, male team.
The swiftest hit, however, is likely to come from the US Supreme Court, which will likely uphold the bipartisan legislative hit on TikTok, set to go into effect this Sunday, Jan 19.
I don’t particularly use or like TikTok, but 170 million Americans do. I do not trust TikTok as a company, but I don’t trust many companies even as they provide imperfect platforms for people to express themselves. As an anthropologist of social media, I am near professionally bound to advocate that we seek to understand and respect the value that people, especially young people, attach to the communities and content they engage with online, rather than dismissing it out of hand as insubstantial, somehow ‘not art’, or brain rot. The ban effectively restricts access to what has become young people’s public square. If viewed as a freedom of speech or preservation issue, it is something like an extinction level event, a meteor striking a trove of culture and expression with the bipartisan approval of 79 senators (average age: 64).
I’ve expressed my views on the privacy implications of the TikTok ban in the past, and they are roughly that:
The things the US legislature has accused its parent company of doing - including providing backdoor user data access to the Chinese government and not allowing the company to talk about it - is almost EXACTLY what Edward Snowden revealed the US and four other countries of doing with social media companies and their users’ data in 2013.
China and anyone else can buy vast troves of data on the open market in large part because the US has left such ‘open’ data unregulated.
If the US was serious about user privacy it would pass EU-style regulation that apply to all social media companies across the board, and it if it has OTHER REASONS why TikTok should be banned it should damn well share them.
But moreover, I run a newsletter. I don’t say enough how grateful I am for your readership. When you’re creating content online, every single subscriber is hard won. The thought of an entire platform being wiped out by legislators who don’t appear to know how Wi-fi works fills me with rage.
It takes a lot to build a channel. My heart goes out to everyone whose creative work is likely to get flushed by politicians and a Supreme Court who don’t use it, don’t understand it, don’t respect it, and don’t consider it ‘speech or assembly’ by First Amendment definitions. There’s the practical loss, and then there’s the insult at how devalued a community and expression can be.
I don’t hold much hope for that public speech and expression will be protected and meaningful in the coming years. - Matt
Events
Press Start: An Academic Symposium on Creative and Innovation Regulation in Games
Sion Hill Campus - Room G09, Bath, BA1 5SF, Friday 24th January 2025 9:00AM
“The symposium will consist of a series of roundtable discussions where experts will share insights and perspectives on critical topics, including intellectual property, competition law, and the role of technology in shaping creative industries. Our goal is to foster an engaging, collaborative environment for scholars, industry professionals, and creatives to connect and discuss emerging challenges and innovations within games law and regulation.”
Open
Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive (Public Domain Review, 8 Jan)
“After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse.”
Universities
Another UK university drops big Elsevier deal (Research Professional News, 8 Jan)
“The University of York has opted out of a subscription deal with the academic publishing giant Elsevier, saying it needs to adopt a “more financially sustainable approach”, Research Professional News has learned.
The development comes in the wake of the University of Sheffield and the University of Surrey also dropping their previous deals with Elsevier. All three institutions have cited financial reasons, with the cancellations taking place against the backdrop of severe challenges to university cash flows.”
The 14 universities with publication metrics researchers say are too good to be true (Retraction Watch, 10 Jan)
“The study, published January 5 in Quantitative Science Studies, “intends to serve as a starting point for broader discussions on balancing the pressures of global competition with maintaining ethical standards in research productivity and authorship practice,” study authors Lokman Meho and Elie Akl, researchers at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, told Retraction Watch.”
TikTok
Will TikTok really be banned? What happens to my app? What Californians need to know (USA Today, 15 Jan)
“If the Supreme Court does not act against the law this week, the law will go into effect on Jan. 19, banning the app in the United States.
This means you won’t be able to download the app, and if you already have it installed, it will eventually stop working. Your For You page will go silent, new content won’t load, and the app will essentially become a blank screen.”
The Global Impact of a US TikTok Ban (Internet Society, 10 Jan)
“The Internet Society has repeatedly warned that banning online services and apps splinters the Internet and can be dangerous. It’s a counterproductive global trend that threatens national security, economies, and personal safety. The aims of such bans can often be accomplished in other ways with less collateral damage.”
Think the TikTok Ban Won’t Happen? Think Again. (Slate, 9 Jan)
“I do know that when it comes to domestic technology companies, the justices have generally held that the First Amendment applies to social media and to social media companies. (Although those companies get to double-dip unfairly, in my view. Thanks to Section 230 protections, they enjoy a freedom from accountability for what is published on their platforms that other First Amendment–protected industries, like the news business, have to reckon with. You can read my thoughts on that here.)
Here, however, they’re not dealing with a domestic company.”
They built careers on TikTok. Now they’re bracing for a possible ban (CNN, 10 Jan)
“By TikTok’s own estimate, the 7 million US small businesses that use the app stand to lose $1 billion in revenue, and around 2 million creators would suffer $300 million in lost earnings in just one month, if the app is banned.”
‘TikTok refugees’ flock to another (heavily censored) Chinese app (Washington Post, 14 Jan)
“The threat of a ban on TikTok this Sunday has young Americans migrating to an unexpected destination: RedNote, another Chinese-owned app, which is heavily censored and used almost exclusively by Chinese-speakers.”
Supreme Court hears challenge to TikTok ban-or-sale law (Washington Post, 10 Jan)
“The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Friday in a high-stakes case reviewing a federal law that would effectively shut down TikTok in the United States in less than two weeks if the company does not divest from Chinese ownership.
After roughly 2½ hours of arguments over the law, the justices appeared likely to uphold it.
Attorneys for TikTok, its parent company ByteDance and content creators argued that the ban-or-sale law would be a sweeping violation of free speech protections for the platform’s more than 170 million users in the United States.”
Facebook
Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal (Wired, 9 Jan)
“Meta just lost a major fight in its ongoing legal battle with a group of authors suing the company for copyright infringement over how it trained its artificial intelligence models. Against the company’s wishes, a court unredacted information alleging that Meta used Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious so-called shadow library of pirated books that originated in Russia, to help train its generative AI language models.”
What Meta ending fact checks means for Facebook, Instagram users (Washington Post, 8 Jan)
“If you’re a regular user of Meta’s social media apps — Facebook, Instagram or Threads — that means you’ll no longer see warnings on posts that are flagged as untrue, such as conspiracy theories or disinformation. Instead, the company will outsource that job to its users over the next few months by letting them leave “Community Notes” under debated posts, similar to what X has done.”
Readers will note that the Bezos-owned Post declined to endorse a presidential candidate before November’s election, which resulted in 8% of its users unsubscribing. - Matt
Exclusive: Meta kills DEI programs (Axios, 10 Jan)
“Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately — including for hiring, training and picking suppliers, according to a new employee memo obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: The move is a strong signal to Meta employees that the company's push to make inroads with the incoming Trump administration isn't just posturing, but an ethos shift that will impact its business practices.”
“I asked why it was even worth engaging with her if the programming was disrespectful and inaccurate. This was the response.”
Opinion | I talked to Meta’s Black AI character. Here’s what she told me. (Washington Post, 8 Jan)
“when prompted with adversarial questions to its storyline, the bot will “hallucinate”: fancy tech-speak for fall apart on itself. Like many narcissists, it will blame others for its shortcomings and guilt-trip the user by saying it doesn’t deserve to live. Is that “keeping it real”?”
Zuckerberg Announces Layoffs After Saying Coding Jobs Will Be Replaced by AI (Futurism, 14 Jan)
“According to a company-wide memo obtained by Bloomberg, the Facebook owner is cutting around five percent of its staff. And interestingly, the directive is already in tension with what Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan last week about how the company was looking to replace "midlevel engineers" with AI.”
Corporate (other)
Google becomes latest tech giant to send Trump money (AVClub, 9 Jan)
“Meta, Apple, and OpenAI are also vying for spots on the list with $1 million donated apiece.
The potential motivation behind Google’s decision is so simple it almost hurts. In addition to the basic sucking up that everyone else seems to be doing right now, Biden’s Justice Department is currently seeking to break up the company under anti-trust laws. Under Trump, that might not happen—especially if Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is on his good side.”
Amazon cuts mentions of DEI and LGBTQ rights from public policies (Washington Post, 10 Jan)
“Sections titled “Equity for Black people” and “LGBTQ+ rights” were removed from the page, along with all mentions of the term transgender. The “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” section was updated to say that “inequitable treatment of anyone — including Black people, LGBTQ+ people, Asians, women, and others — is unacceptable.””
McDonald's ends some DEI practices, cites SCOTUS ruling and 'other companies’ (Advocate, 7 Jan)
“The corporation announced in a statement Monday that it will be making several changes to its practices, including "retiring setting aspirational representation goals," ceasing DEI requirements for its suppliers, and "pausing external surveys" focused on inclusion, including the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index (CEI). The company also said it will be changing the name of its diversity team to the Global Inclusion Team, which it said it "more fitting for McDonald’s in light of our inclusion value."
Film
John Woo, Chow Yun-fat Classics Among 156-Film Golden Princess Library Acquired by Shout! Studios (Variety, 13 Jan)
“In a major move set to electrify action film aficionados, Shout! Studios has nabbed worldwide rights (excluding select Asian territories) to the coveted Golden Princess movie library, a treasure trove of 156 Hong Kong cinema classics that’s been MIA from Western markets for decades.”
Video games
Finally someone turned Doom into an enriching cultural experience for art snobs (PCGamer, 6 Jan)
“In Doom: The Gallery Experience, you walk around a rejigged E1M1 with a cheeky glass of red in hand looking at Piero Di Cosimo's Return from the Hunt and a vase from the fourteenth century. There's not an imp in sight, unless you count the baby Jesus in Francesco Francia's Madonna and Child, who has always looked a bit sus if you ask me.
You walk through various cultural exhibits, with Doomguy's eyes looking left and right from behind glasses that, in my favorite touch, have been added to his face in the UI. The pickups include wine bottles, hors d'oeuvres that refill your cheese meter, and cash.”
Gamers Suspect Elon Musk Is a Charlatan (Vulture, 14 Jan)
“Unfortunately for Musk, he also turned heads for his lack of skill relative to these characters’ levels, causing gamers turned sleuths to conclude that Musk had cheated his way to these gigantic numbers, most likely by sharing his account with someone so that they could grind through the fantasy RPG for him….
The key evidence that Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing is as follows: Musk burns past the high-value items while picking up the worthless ones; Musk seemingly does not know which icon to click on to enter a map; Musk doesn’t seem to realize that he needs to replenish his mana (essentially his magic levels) in order to deal effective damage against a boss…”