The original title is:
> Victory! California Appeals Court Refuses to Revive Surveillance Tech CEO’s Meritless Lawsuit Against Journalist
12,092 karma · joined May 13, 2023
> Victory! California Appeals Court Refuses to Revive Surveillance Tech CEO’s Meritless Lawsuit Against Journalist
> Ban Kids From Social Media And They’ll Just Chat In Public Radio Podcast Comments
> Councilmember, residents push back on AI ‘blight scores' given to thousands of homes
> EFF to San Francisco Police: Drones are Powerful Surveillance Tools That Require a Robust Policy
> For one, if the court’s statutory interpretation about the power to affect the operation of delivered software were correct, then pretty much any software product, at least those still subject to vendor-supplied updates, could be considered supply chain risks, given that any update could make substantive changes. In any case, it would seem to mean that any AI model would be too risky for the government to use, because there is nothing unusual about Anthropic’s model-control architecture—to the extent Anthropic could still control its model, so could any other AI vendor potentially control theirs. Whether they would or not would depend on the contract restraining them, and the only thing potentially different about Anthropic is that it did not want to be contractually obligated to allow certain functions that Hegseth really wanted—functions that were ethically dubious at best and monstrously dangerous at worst.
> But because that contractual reluctance upset Trump and Hegseth, they singled Anthropic out, alone, for negative treatment, turning their pique that “we can’t agree with Anthropic on how the software would need to be designed for us to be able to buy it” into “and because we can’t agree then NO ONE ELSE IN THE GOVERNMENT CAN EVER USE IT.” Per the DC Circuit, such an overbroad measure—after all, not every agency had the same concerns about changeability that the military might, yet Hegseth was deciding for them, too, whether they could use Claude, even when its architecture created no particular risk to them—and clearly punitive measure was perfectly fine because it implicated the implicit “national security” exception to the First Amendment the Founders apparently wrote into it in invisible ink.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/25/dc-circuit-oks-hegseths-...
[1] https://www.votebeat.org/texas/2026/09/23/dps-error-backlogg...
> The Federal Agency That’s Supposed to Protect Consumers Just Made Another Business-Friendly Move
> D.C. Circuit Must Vacate a Drone Flight Restriction That Criminalized Recording Immigration Agents
I still think you have misinterpreted EFF's stance on copyright, whether you meant copyright as a concept or copyright as implemented.
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> EFF is generally not very pro-copyright
I thought you and the other replies downthread of your comment were referring to the current implementation of copyright, rather than the concept of copyright. From what I've read, EFF generally supports the concept of copyright. If I misinterpreted you, I apologize. In my reply to dgellow's comment, which included
> copyright is what enables FLOSS to exist in the first place
, I was simply arguing that the current implementation of copyright theoretically could be reduced overall in a way that would not weaken the legal power of FLOSS licenses.
Neither my words nor EFF's words suggested anything like that.
> so it is a derivative work.
Just because one work is derived from or relies on another does not implicate copyright. Copyright is not use-right or rely-right (nor should copyright be expanded to be them). (Contracts such as EULAs can go beyond the scope of copyright and may include use-restrictions.) If there is no substantial similarity (including obfuscated or mangled similarity) between the derivative work and the original work, then the derivative work does not infringe copyright.
> AI reads everything, so it is not a clean room implementation.
Very true, but substantial similarity matters. If there is no substantial similarity between the output and the original work, then an output is not an "implementation" of the original work. When I say output or Thing, I mean the output of an LLM or a human, not the LLM itself. If (if) a particular LLM itself infringes copyright, not every output of the LLM necessarily infringes copyright. If a particular output of an LLM infringes copyright, the LLM itself does not necessarily infringe copyright. (Maybe someone could, with Herculean difficulty, demonstrate that the particular LLM might as well be incapable of producing non-infringing output?)
There's no guarantee that a non-clean-room implementation always constitutes copyright infringement, especially considering that for software in particular the functional aspects are not always separatable from the creative expression. Theoretically, both clean-room and non-clean-room implementations of a very optimized program designed for non-entertainment purposes would be unavoidably substantially similar to the original work. (Related reading: the merger doctrine [1].) Substantial similarity is necessary, but not sufficient, to copyright infringement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distin...
The answer is, they didn't end up on that side. Copyright infringement does not involve merely using a copyrighted work. Copyright infringement involves copying part of a work's copyrightable expression into another Thing (for lack of a better word).
In the US, if no part of the Thing is substantially similar [1] to any part of the original work's expression, then the Thing does not infringe on the original work's copyright. The EFF's "side" is that in such cases, there is no categorical obligation to add/include copyright management information (CMI) of the original work to the Thing, and it makes no legal sense to argue that the CMI was "removed" from the Thing. Not every LLM output contains expression substantially similar to any particular copyrightable expression in the training set. Whether LLM output infringes copyright can be different on a case-by-case basis.
> "it is ok to strip out my copyright string from my code"?
No, if part of the output (whether human output or LLM output) is substantially similar to (even an obfuscated or mangled version of) the copyrightable expression in your code.
> Preliminary Learnings and Questions Document
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I was wrong to say:
> Adults cannot choose to withold both their own age info and the age info of their children. Older children in abusive parental situations cannot both get their own (standard) devices and withold their age info.
I fix both sentences by adding to the end of each one "unless they lie about the age info".
The other parts of my previous comment remain unchanged so far:
> The California Digital Age Assurance Act forces operating systems to collect age info.
[...]
> I oppose such an implementation because a more privacy-respecting implementation is available: the government could mandate that operating systems provide device owners with an option to reveal their age info or their children's age info.
Are the proponents of the California Digital Age Assurance Act satisfied with the law despite the elephant-shaped "they can select any age they want to" loophole? If not, then the spirit of the law does not respect privacy. If yes, I would still oppose the law. I want both the text and spirit of the law to respect privacy, not merely be compatible with privacy. An illustrative example: even if there were a technology or magic that literally prevented law enforcement from searching a house without a warrant, I would still want the legal system to have a law (in the constitution, specifically) recognizing a right to have one's house not be searched by the government without a warrant.
If the website doesn't want to make a filtered version than the metadata can mark the page as R with an additional indication that PG content is present on the page. The parent can manually select the PG content or someone will make parental controls that can automatically select or (like an ad blocker) filter for only the PG content.
[...]
> It's unclear whether NYC will appeal the recent decision or instead accept that the law needs to be rewritten. A better idea would be to scrap the misguided idea entirely.
(Notwithstanding the other arguments in TFA), the author is arguing that so-called non-"traditional" workers don't need and thus might not deserve "just cause" protections. The author also frames "just cause" for non-"traditional" employees as a primarily progressive political objective.
> One of the hallmarks of the gig economy is flexibility. Drivers work when they please and often use multiple platforms, while the labor supply is ideally meant to fluctuate dynamically based on demand. Attaching more rules to driver deactivation inevitably raises labor costs as platforms are less able to weed out bad apples. In the end, the flexibility that drivers themselves most prize when it comes to gig work will be eroded, as companies respond to the regulations by potentially limiting the number of drivers they allow on the platform.
The supposed "flexibility" is usually Uber's flexibility at the expense of Uber drivers' flexibility [1]. Assuming that the drivers do "most prize" their flexibility, it would be easy to most prize one not quite good aspect of the job that is much better than the other aspects of the job. What's more, the premise is that everything that burdens gig companies with massive profits will (not is likely to, will) necessarily burden the drivers. If Uber/Lyft were to maliciously comply (I'm using the word "malicious" idiomatically [2]) with a just cause law by needlessly terminating or reducing the job quality of drivers whom wouldn't have been terminated before the existence of the law, the author would attribute most blame to the just cause law and not to Uber/Lyft.
> A companion "just cause" bill for food delivery drivers also recently passed in New York and was not opposed by gig platforms like Uber, likely because it lacked the onerous 14-day notice provision of the rideshare version.
> It's unclear whether NYC will appeal the recent decision or instead accept that the law needs to be rewritten. A better idea would be to scrap the misguided idea entirely.
If I seem to inappropriately attribute an anti-labor sentiment to the author that you believe isn't there, please take notice: The author is asking people to give up on the idea of making "just cause" laws for gig drivers. There's no rewritten version (not even a version similar to the other bill for food delivery drivers) that would be better than nothing, the author concludes.
As for my opinion, a better, safety-respecting just cause law for drivers might let companies immediately suspend the driver for just cause proceedings so long as the company provides some level of pay during the suspension period or sets up back pay.
> Governor Newsom Signs Student-Backed Digital Literacy Bills Alongside Misguided Bans
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/opinion/911-patriot-act-t...
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/11/since-9-11-fear-has-driv...