The Devil, as they say, is in the details. It’s a lesson that Warner Bros. apparently just recently had to learn after it poked the Australian Football League over its latest addition to the league, from the isle of Tasmania. You have probably already guessed where this is going.
The AFL announced recently that the newest team entering the league would be the Tasmanian Devils. The response to the announcement was immediately positive, gobbling up forty thousand memberships in the hours after the announcement was made. There actually used to be a basketball club going by the “Devils” that existed previously, which is where Warner Bros. comes in after that team folded.
The National Basketball League (NBL) featured the Hobart Devils from 1983-1986 and the Hobart Tassie Devils from 1987–1995, with the Hobart Devils name returning for the franchise’s final season in 1996.
When the club folded, Warner Brothers quickly trademarked the character and registered the name Tasmanian Devil in 1997. When the NBL announced that Tasmania would be returning to the league in the 2021/22 season, the name was unavailable because a request for the name ‘Tassie Devils’ to be trademarked had been filed by the AFL with the Federal Government.
That application has been sitting in limbo since 2019 with a final determination to be made by July 17 this year.
And Hobart eventually gave up and decided to become the “Jackjumpers.” And with WB scooping up the trademark for all kinds of market segments, including apparel and the like, the company began poking at the AFL over its chosen name. The branding looks nothing like the famous Warner Bros. character. Neither do the color schemes call back to that character. This all comes down to the name of the club and the trademark Warner holds for the character.
And much of this fight apparently centered on the fact that the Warner side of things didn’t realize that a Tasmanian Devil is an actual, real-life animal that existed on the island.
Devils chairman Grant O’Brien said it became clear during negotiations that executives from the company did not realise the character was based on the Apple Isle’s famous carnivorous marsupial.
‘I think there was, for a period of time, a lack of understanding that there was actually an animal called the Tasmanian devil. Once that was understood, things got a little easier,’ O’Brien said. ‘But anything to do with copyrights, trademarks, those sorts of things … is tricky. But we got great co-operation from Warner Bros, and it’s a name we wanted to fight for, because it’s ours, it’s the sort of animal character that we want our club to stand for.’
So… yeah. I can’t quite determine if this is completely settled, but it sure sounds like everyone thinks the team is going to keep its name once it was explained to WB that its character was based on a piece of important cultural and natural history on the island. The fact that this had to be explained, however, is a source of both amusement and aggravation.
Because at the end of the day, any calories spent as a result of an American company unknowingly appropriating and then attempting to control a piece of someone else’s culture where there was zero chance of any confusion over source or affiliation is plainly annoying.
It appears that Meta is serious about no longer bribing news orgs to keep corrupt politicians from forcing them to engage in sketchy wealth transfer schemes to news orgs. While it caved in the past in Australia and paid off news orgs there, the company is informing news orgs that they won’t be renewing the deal.
Around the globe, there remain ongoing attempts to force Google and Meta (mainly) to hand money over to news organizations. Supporters have no fundamental principle behind this other than “Google and Meta are making money, and some news companies are struggling, therefore, they should pay us.” As we’ve discussed at great length, these laws are dangerous on multiple levels. They’re an extreme form of crony corruption, forcing one industry to pay off another. They’re also an attack on the open web, because they are based on the principle of “if your users link to news too much, you have to pay for sending them traffic.”
None of this makes sense. If the news companies don’t want the traffic, they can block it. But they want the free traffic and they want to be paid for it. It’s extraordinarily corrupt.
There have been variations on the link tax model over the past decade or so. Various failed experiments in the EU were followed by Australia’s infamous news bargaining code. Mainstream news orgs continue to insist Australia’s experiment has been a huge success, but that’s because the only ones talking about it are the big media orgs that are getting millions of dollars from Meta and Google. This might cloud their reporting on the law, not that they admit that. About the only Australian news orgs I’ve seen call out the inherent corruption in these plans are the satirical Juice Media and the irreverent Crikey.
Crikey’s summary is dead on:
The logic of the news media bargaining code isn’t that of ending a rip-off perpetrated by foreign tech giants. Instead, it’s similar to Coles and Woolworths successfully demanding, on the basis of all the great work they’ve done for the community, that the government forcibly transfer profit from an international competitor that had successfully disrupted their business model.
The fact is, these link taxes have been a disaster wherever they’ve been implemented, including Australia. The Public Interest Journalism Initiative in Australia tracks changes in the journalism space across the country with laser-like precision. And its data certainly does not suggest a huge grand success for journalism in the country. Rather, it shows a lot of consolidation, and plenty of smaller journalism outlets still struggling, while there’s an increase in areas with little to no journalism coverage. However, contractions in the news business greatly outweigh expansions:
Apparently the money flowing in is — as plenty of people predicted — going to the tippy top of the market, making folks like Rupert Murdoch even wealthier. But not doing much to help journalism.
Google has been much more willing to give in and pay the demanded extortion. A decade ago, Google was willing to take a stand in places like Spain, shutting down Google News in that country. But these days, Google has been willing to cave, quickly, in both Australia and, more recently, Canada.
On the other hand, Meta has been much more willing to push back on these laws. It would be nice to think Meta is doing this to protect the open web, but no one’s going to fall for that. Meta has spent years trying to wall off the open internet, so it’s not like the company magically got a conscience on these issues. But, whether for good reasons or bad, Meta has been way more willing to push back on these laws. In Canada, the company has blocked news links, where it was quickly discovered that news orgs needed traffic from Meta way, way more than Meta needed links from news orgs. Meta has also threatened to take similar steps in the US if various state or federal laws come into effect.
In Australia, you may recall, Meta initially blocked news there, before cutting a few deals with news orgs there. Those deals (and the ones Google did as well) were not technically under the News Bargaining Code. Rather, they were blatant payoffs to avoid the invoking of the code, which would then force the companies into binding arbitration.
But, apparently, Meta has decided enough is enough. It informed the news orgs it paid off a few years ago that it will not be renewing those deals when they finish, and that it’s removing its dedicated news tab.
Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, has set itself on a collision course with the Albanese government after announcing it will stop paying Australian publishers for news, and plans to shut down its news tab in Australia and the United States.
Meta informed publishers on Friday that it would not enter new deals when the current contracts expire this year.
The news tab – a dedicated tab for news in the bookmarks section of Facebook – will also shut down in April, after a similar shut down in the UK, Germany and France last year.
Again, it’s nearly impossible to get good reporting on this stuff because all the major media sites are biased in that they are recipients of these payoffs. The Guardian report quotes a ton of politicians and news orgs decrying this, and only presents Meta’s PR quotes in response — not bothering to speak to any civil society or academics who are willing to speak out as to why these regulatory schemes are so corrupt and problematic.
But, Meta makes a fairly clear point that highlights the absurdity of these laws: what if Meta just doesn’t want to be in the news business? The company has made it pretty damn clear over the last few years that focusing on “news” as it did for a few years was nothing but a headache. It would rather people just use social media to connect with friends, not argue about the news.
Should it be allowed to do that?
“We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content – they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests. As we previously shared in 2023, news makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, and is a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people.”
Again, the reaction from people who are mad at this move just puts the exclamation point on just how corrupt the whole scheme is. They don’t care about the reasons or the problems of having to pay to allow users to link to public news sites. No, they just want cash and are mad that they don’t get cash.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told reporters on Friday the decision was “not the Australian way”.
“We know that it’s absolutely critical that media is able to function properly and be properly funded. Journalism is important and the idea that research and work done by others can be taken free is simply untenable,” he said.
But nothing is being “taken free.” It is just that users on Facebook decide they want to point people to news stories, thereby sending free traffic to that news organization by posting the link. A little bit of text and an image shows up on Facebook, but that is entirely controllable by the news org since they can set the details for the cards that show up when linked.
So, Prime Minister, what the fuck is “taken” and what was “taken free”? Because the answer is nothing.
The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, and assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, called news media companies on Friday following the announcement, advising them the government would be taking all of the steps available under the news media bargaining code.
“We’re not talking about some plucky little startup, we’re talking about one of the world’s largest and most profitable companies,” Jones said. “It has a responsibility to ensure that it pays for the content that … has been used on its platform, and frankly, that it’s making millions and millions of dollars out of it and so the government is adamant it will be backing the code we’ll be taking all of the actions that are available to us under the code.”
No, it’s not a plucky little startup, but it’s also not “using” the content on their platform. It’s allowing its users to link to that content, which is a fundamental part of the open web. And by doing so, they are sending free traffic to that website.
If Albanese and the Australian government are so concerned about things happening without payment, why aren’t they making news orgs pay Facebook for the traffic they’re getting?
It’s like they live in this upside down world.
Either way, it sounds like the end result of this is that the Australian government is likely to try to force Meta to (1) host news it has no interest in hosting, and (2) paying for that news it does not value and which it would prefer not to host.
The FBI has done some heinous things in its pursuit of its counter-terrorism objectives. While it’s true the FBI has occasionally nabbed actual terrorists, it seems to prefer creating terrorists to going after those that are already avowed terrorists.
The FBI utilizes informants and undercover agents to perform this highly questionable work. Investigations border on entrapment. Internet loudmouths, petty criminals, or people with mental health issues are pushed and prodded to make their words a reality. In most cases, the targets of these investigations can’t. They don’t have the money, the expertise, or even the will to follow through with violent acts. Informants provide the tools, weapons, plans, and constant pressure needed to turn often otherwise harmless people into so-called terrorists the FBI can swoop in and arrest them the moment they start turning the plans the informants concocted into reality.
Apparently, the FBI is not alone in its willingness to radicalize people just so it can arrest them and hit them with charges that could result in decades of imprisonment. The counter-terrorist wing of Australian law enforcement does the same thing. This truly horrific story at least has a (partially) happy ending. But the events leading up to this conclusion are cruel and inhumane.
Thomas Carrick (the pseudonym given to him by the court) is a 13-year-old with autism. Thomas has an IQ of 71 and is a recipient of national disability insurance. He became fixated on the Islamic State, spending a lot of time watching ISIS videos and, apparently, asking his parents to purchase bomb-making ingredients for him. His parents, who are not native English speakers, asked the local police for help deterring his fascination with Islamic extremism.
They provided officers with access to Thomas, his home, his phone, his mother’s phone, his room, and to personal information gathered by his school and psychologist. At the start, the police actually did what they said they’d do: they sought help for Thomas. He was assigned to a case manager and met regularly with a psychologist. An officer who accessed the contents of Thomas’ phone noted he had downloaded a lot of stuff related to China and the Communist Party, but very little related to the Islamic State. They also set him up with an imam to discuss the religion of Islam in a more peaceful context.
Had things stayed this way, there would be nothing to report. But three months after this helpful path was opened up for Thomas, the country’s War on Terror wing decided to insert itself into the mix. The Joint Counter-Terrorism Team [JCTT] (a mix of Australian federal officers, Victoria police, and Asio members) opened up a parallel investigation that actively worked to undo and undermine all the help Thomas was receiving from other law enforcement officers.
An online covert operative was tasked with communicating to Thomas using two personae: a 24-year-old Muslim man from NSW, and a more extreme person located overseas.
[…]
The operative chatted with Thomas on 55 of the next 71 days, including during breaks at school and late at night.
[…]
The first persona introduced Thomas to the second, more extreme, persona, who encouraged him to make a bomb or kill an AFP member.
But the operative gave evidence that Thomas was naive, and living a “fantasy life online”, including by asking questions like whether he could join the kids’ section of Islamic State.
On 8 August 2021, Thomas sent a photo to the operative which showed him wearing his school uniform, a hoodie and a face mask and holding a knife with “ISIS” written on it in marker.
His house was searched within days, and he was charged less than two months later.
The JCTT was well-aware the therapeutic efforts authorized by police were still underway when it decided to turn this 13-year-old into a terrorist. When seeking authorization to arrest Thomas, the detective superintendent (apparently deliberately) failed to inform his supervisors that he had evidence the JCTT’s undercover work was having a negative impact on the rehabilitation of Thomas. And, of course, that’s the point: the JCTT only wins when it arrests terrorists. If it has to do all the dirty work itself, it apparently will.
And that’s not the worst of it. There’s also this:
[Magistrate Lesley] Fleming found the JCTT also deliberately delayed charging Thomas with offences until after he turned 14, as it made it harder for him to use the defence of doli incapax, which refers to the concept that a child is not criminally responsible for their actions.
The JCTT also performed another search of Thomas’ room for criminal evidence while maintaining the pretense they were part of the parallel police effort to dissuade Thomas from fixating on the Islamic State.
Fortunately, Thomas has been freed and is no longer facing charges. Magistrate Fleming’s order rips the JCTT to shreds for its abominable actions.
“The community would not expect law enforcement officers to encourage a 13-14 year old child towards racial hatred, distrust of police and violent extremism, encouraging the child’s fixation on ISIS,” magistrate Lesley Fleming said in the decision.
“The community would not expect law enforcement to use the guise of a rehabilitation service to entice the parents of a troubled child to engage in a process that results in potential harm to the child.
“The conduct engaged in by the JCTT and the AFP falls so profoundly short of the minimum standards expected of law enforcement offices [sic] that to refuse this [stay] application would be to condone and encourage further instances of such conduct.”
Thomas had a chance to be rehabilitated. But the JCTT deliberately harmed a minor to serve its own ends.
“The rehabilitation of TC was doomed once the [operator] connected online…befriended TC and fed his fixation, providing him with a new terminology, new boundaries and an outlet for him to express, what was in part, his fantasy world.”
This is truly disgusting. One wonders how the operatives involved with the deliberate destruction of a child (and their childhood) live with themselves. What possibly justifiable ends could they have been serving with this effort? Thomas was already being closely observed by law enforcement, but in the hopes that such close supervision would encourage him to find more healthy outlets for expression.
What happened here was evil. There’s no other word for it. And the added cruelty of waiting a few months to deprive the minor of a courtroom defense is symptomatic of the sickness that seems to pervade counter-terrorist agencies. The need to win subsumes the need to serve the public’s interests. And no one’s interests were served here other than the pitiable counter-terrorists cops who can’t get through the day without the brief ego boost of an unearned “win.”
Three years ago we discussed an interesting trademark battle between McDonald’s and Hungry Jack’s in Australia. It’s interesting for a number of reasons. For starters, Hungry Jack’s is a part of Burger King, McDonald’s chief rival globally, making this something of a proxy war. Second, this suit was filed on the heels of McDonald’s losing its “Big Mac” trademark in Europe after Supermacs got it canceled in expanding into the continent. And finally, to tie those two things together, this particularly dispute was over Hungry Jack’s “Big Jack” burger, which is designed similar to the Big Mac, save some differences that Hungry Jack touted specifically in its advertising of the sandwich.
Well, the results are in, and the Australian courts have decided that there is no trademark infringement here, largely because it doesn’t see any real or potential customer confusion.
Justice Stephen Burnley, who presided over the case, found that the “Big Jack was not deceptively similar to the Big Mac”, and that the Big Mac’s strong reputation made it unlikely consumers would be confused or deceived.
“I am not persuaded that Hungry Jack’s fashioned the name Big Jack for the purpose of misleading consumers,” he said.
In addition to that, the marketing head for Hungry Jack’s specifically pointed out that the whole point of the name wasn’t to try to deceive customers into thinking there was some association with McDonald’s, but actually the exact opposite. The name was chosen to poke McDonald’s in the eye and play into the rivalry, which is material to secondary claims made by McDonald’s that Hungry Jack’s misled the public when specifically pointing out the differences between the Big Mac and the Big Jack.
In its suit, McDonald’s also claimed that Hungry Jack’s had misled consumers in a series of television adverts by claiming the Big Jack contained 25 per cent more Australian beef than the Big Mac.
After testing and weighing of the different burger patties by experts, the judge found Hungry Jack’s burgers contained “significantly less” than the 25 per cent additional beef advertised, and the company had breached consumer law through its marketing.
And it’s likely that Hungry Jack’s is going to be fined as a result of that misleading marketing. But what that also makes crystal clear is that the company was very specifically differentiating itself from McDonald’s through that same marketing, not attempting to mislead the public per McDonald’s first claim.
So, Hungry Jack’s will get a slap on the wrist fine, but this certainly isn’t trademark infringement according to the Australian courts.
Here are two things that cannot simultaneously be true: a company is very confident in the product it produces and that same company is very afraid of public discussion of its product on social media. This is generally true of pretty much every product in every category, but it gets a little more serious when we’re talking about a two-and-a-half ton hunk of metal on wheels that has to be retrofit for driving in a new country.
Which brings us to the introduction of the Toyota Tundra in Australia. The automaker has decided to enter that particular market with the Tundra through its Toyota Insider Program. The wrinkle in this is that Tundra’s are made primarily in Texas for the American market and Australian streets are flipped. The means that the trucks need to be converted from left-hand driving for the steering wheel to right-hand. Toyota has partnered with a local automotive company to do this conversion and will be piloting the program with a few hundred Tundras.
No big deal, right? Well, if Toyota were all that confident in its plans for all of this, why is part of the Insider Program an agreement that you won’t talk about your Tundra on social media, or talk about or provide the vehicle to any local press?
A letter from Toyota to prospective participants in the Tundra Insider Program advises customers will need to make their vehicles available for frequent detailed technical inspections, and to not share their experiences on social media or with motoring media outlets.
While the more frequent technical inspections are understandable – given the program was established to detect early any rectification work that may be required before ramping up production – the ban on social media activity is unusual given the vehicles will be in the public domain and on public roads.
Toyota Tundra customers who take part in the ‘Insider Program’ must agree to “avoid any comment about the Tundra on social media, and refrain from mentioning or discussing the lease agreement, or the Tundra itself, with any media outlets.”
I’d love to know how this is going to be enforced. Is the company going to monitor the social media feeds and activities of everyone in the Insider Program? Creepy! Does Toyota somehow think that these people can’t figure out a way to anonymously speak with the press if they want? Silly!
And here’s the thing: it’s very clear that Toyota has, in the words of the source post, turned “people into beta testers.” And, yeah, beta testers often have to sign NDAs or otherwise agree to keep quiet about the product they’re testing. But they also don’t typically pay for the privilege of being a beta tester, whereas the Insider Program costs over $1,000 a month for a year.
Keep in mind these are going to be vehicles on the public roadways. If Toyota really thinks it can keep everyone silent about these trucks, best of luck to them. And if the Australian press doesn’t have its alarm bells going off as a result of all this attempted secrecy, shame on them as well.
In the past I’ve sometimes described Australia as the land where internet policy is completely upside down. Rather than having a system that protects intermediaries from liability for third party content, Australia went the opposite direction. Rather than recognizing that a search engine merely links to content and isn’t responsible for the content at those links, Australia has said that search engines can be held liable for what they link to. Rather than protect the free expression of people on the internet who criticize the rich and powerful, Australia has extremely problematic defamation laws that result in regular SLAPP suits and suppression of speech. Rather than embrace encryption that protects everyone’s privacy and security, Australia requires companies to break encryption, insisting only criminals use it.
It’s basically been “bad internet policy central,” or the place where good internet policy goes to die.
And, yet, there are some lines that even Australia won’t cross. Specifically, the Australian eSafety commission says that it will not require adult websites to use age verification tools, because it would put the privacy and security of Australians’ data at risk. (For unclear reasons, the Guardian does not provide the underlying documents, so we’re fixing that and providing both the original roadmap and the Australian government’s response below). The original roadmap was somewhat lukewarm on the idea of age verification, noting that the technology was still evolving and there were privacy and security concerns, and it sounds like those concerns convinced the government to avoid going the mandatory route:
On Wednesday, the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, released the eSafety commissioner’s long-awaited roadmap for age verification for online pornographic material, which has been sitting with the government since March 2023.
The federal government has decided against forcing sites to bring in age verification technology, instead tasking the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to work with the industry to develop a new code to educate parents on how to access filtering software and limit children’s access to such material or sites that are not appropriate.
This alternative, educating parents on tools that they can use themselves, is much better and much safer, and it’s great to see Australia embrace it, especially at a time where much of the rest of the world has fallen in love with age verification technology despite its many, many, many flaws. As we’ve noted, in the US, age verification has become popular at both the state and federal levels, and among both Democrats and Republicans.
However, Australia appears to be a rare oasis of reasonableness on this issue.
“It is clear from the roadmap at present, each type of age verification or age assurance technology comes with its own privacy, security, effectiveness or implementation issues,” the government’s response to the roadmap said.
The technology must work effectively without circumvention, must be able to be applied to pornography hosted outside Australia, and not introduce the risk to personal information for adults who choose to access legal pornography, the government stated.
“The roadmap makes clear that a decision to mandate age assurance is not yet ready to be taken.”
Of course, in France, the Data Protection authority released a paper similarly noting that age verification was a privacy and security nightmare… and the French government just went right on mandating the use of the technology. In Australia, the eSafety Commission pointed to the French concerns as a reason not to rush into the tech, meaning that Australia took the lessons from French data protection experts more seriously than the French government did.
And, of course, here in the US, the Congressional Research Service similarly found serious problems with age verification technology, but it hasn’t stopped Congress from releasing a whole bunch of “save the children” bills that are built on a foundation of age verification. Blue states like California are pushing multiple bills around “age appropriate” design, that will require age verification (while pretending not to). Red states are even more aggressive in passing a wide variety of age verification laws, most of which are currently being challenged in court.
For what it’s worth, Australia’s eSafety Commission says it “welcomes” the government’s response.
But this should be a warning to US lawmakers. If even Australia recognizes that age verification technology is a problem for security and privacy, then surely they can see that the technology has serious problems and shouldn’t be mandated.
The UK government desires direct control of the internet. This has been the plan for years. A bill that would criminalize encryption while mandating client-side scanning to control the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has been on the front burner for years.
The bill would also turn hate speech into a crime and punish tech companies directly for content generated by users. It’s a bad idea all over — something UK legislators realized early on, resulting in some rebranding. What used to be called the “Online Harms Act” is now the “Online Safety Act.” The harms to internet users remain the same. The only thing that has changed is the government’s preferred nomenclature.
While we’ve been keeping an eye on similar statutes proposed by the EU — something that would also criminalize encryption if end-to-end encryption prevented client-side scanning for CSAM — the UK’s policy proposal has been embraced by its farm team, the Australian government.
This government has been seeking ways to irreparably damage encryption while increasing its domestic surveillance powers. That it would embrace a proposal that threatens encryption while increasing monitoring demands for service providers is unsurprising.
A barely noticed announcement made this month by Australia’s online safety chief is the strongest signal yet that tech companies like Meta, Google and Microsoft will soon be legally required to scan all user content.
This indication came after the federal government’s eSafety commissioner and Australia’s tech industry couldn’t agree on how companies were going to stamp out child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and pro-terror content.
Now, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant is writing her own binding rules and all signs point towards the introduction of a legal obligation that would force email, messaging and online storage services like Apple iCloud, Signal and ProtonMail to “proactively detect” harmful online material on their platforms — a policy that would be a first in the Western world if implemented today.
This all aligns with the worst aspects of the UK and EU proposals. The thing is: this won’t work. WhatsApp — Facebook’s messaging acquisition — has already made it clear it won’t break encryption to satisfy overreaching legislators. Apple has already been burnt by its own proactive client-side scanning proposal, so it’s unlikely it will be talked into further damaging its own reputation with subservience to governments demanding it do what it has decided it simply won’t do… at least not at the moment. And ProtonMail has extended a firm middle finger to any government demanding it break its encryption.
The end result of this Australian proposal won’t be greater insight into CSAM distribution. All this insistence on client-side scanning (with its obvious effects on E2EE) will do is ensure Australian residents will only have access to subpar communication platforms that have never been concerned enough about user privacy and security to implement end-to-end encryption.
As is par for the course, the ends are undeniably good: stopping the spread of CSAM and identifying those trafficking in this illegal content. It’s the means that are terrible, and not just because the proposed means mandate undermining encryption and/or fining tech companies $657,000/day over content created and distributed by their users.
Any scanning system is vulnerable to incorrect results. The DIS [designated internet services] code notes that “hash lists are not infallible” and points out an error, such as recording a false positive and then erroneously flagging someone for possessing CSAM, can have serious consequences. The use of machine learning or artificial intelligence for scanning adds to the complexity and, as a result, the likelihood that something would be wrongly identified. Similarly, systems may also record false negatives and miss harmful online content.
Even if scanning technology was completely error-proof, the application of this technology can still have problems. The eSafety commissioner expects pro-terror material like footage of mass shootings to be proactively detected and flagged but there are many legitimate reasons why an individual such as journalists and researchers may possess this content. While the national classification scheme has contextual carve-outs for these purposes, scanning technologies don’t have this context and could flag this content like any other user.
There are even examples of how content that appears to be CSAM material in a vacuum has legitimate purposes. For example, a father was automatically flagged, banned and reported to police by Google after it detected medical images taken of his child’s groin under orders of a doctor, immediately locking this user out of their email, phone and home internet.
The government has approached stakeholders (i.e., tech companies and service providers) for comments and suggestions. But it has also decided that it’s free to reject any comments or suggestions it doesn’t like, including comments that logically point out how this won’t work and will make internet users less secure.
The Australian government — at least as personified by Inman Smith — believes the tech world has had its say. Now, all that’s left is to force them to bend to the new rules.
The rejection of these two industry codes now leaves the eSafety commissioner’s office free to come up with its own enforceable regulations. Other than taking part in a mandatory consultation for the eSafety commissioner’s proposed code, Australian tech companies have no further say in what they’ll be legally required to do.
If this keeps moving forward, Australian residents will be expected to use the internet the government feels is acceptable, rather than a wide variety of services that actually seek to protect their users from malicious hackers and/or human rights violators who have no qualms about engaging in extraterritorial spying on journalists, activists, and dissidents.
This won’t end well for Australia. Hopefully, this will be met with the same push back that has forced the EU and UK to reconsider their demands for broken encryption and privacy-violating client-side scanning.
Our posts on Katy Perry in the past have been all over the place. Sometimes Perry is an intellectual property bully. Sometimes she’s more the victim of intellectual property bullying. But what is not in dispute is the Katy Perry is a cultural icon worldwide with an extremely famous, albeit misspelled, name.
In Australia, Katie Taylor is a clothing designer that sells her goods under the label “Katie Perry.” Earlier this year, Katie sued Katy over clothing sold by the singer during a tour in 2014. The courts somehow found for Taylor in that case, but limited any damages very specifically to uses by Perry’s company, Kitty Purry, for selling clothing at pop up stores and online. In the midst of that, Perry’s petition to cancel Taylor’s mark entirely was also refuted.
So why are we still talking about this? Well, Katy Perry has appealed that ruling, and this normal part of the legal process has apparently caused Katie Taylor to have a meltdown.
Ms Taylor said she didn’t want her children to see her upset so went outside and “burst into tears on the street as strangers walked by”.
She said Perry had “chosen to continue to drag the case out”.
That’s quite a take. Katy Perry did not personally attack you for appealing the court decision resulting from your lawsuit against her. Taylor started this legal process and Perry is availing herself of the rights afforded to her under the law. Pretending this is somehow a personal attack is absolutely silly.
As is, frankly, the original court decision. Perry is selling merchandise for her tour, under her nom de plume, and the idea that even in Australia her fans are somehow going to be in any way confused as to what they are buying is absurd. Or, if not absurd, at least in question enough to make an appeal of this decision rational.
So enough melodrama over having to fight an appeal of your own lawsuit.
Last fall, we wrote about Rupert Murdoch’s son, Lachlan (who seems to have won out over brother James in the Succession-style fight to lead his father’s nonsense peddling media outfit) lost his shit over an opinion piece in the Australian independent media organization Crikey and sued them for defamation in Australia.
At the time, we noted the Streisand Effect inherent in his decision, but also mentioned how ridiculous it was for Fox News to be screaming “free speech” as a defendant in the Dominion defamation case, while simultaneously screaming “defamation” down in Australia, all because of a throwaway line at the end of an op-ed mainly about Donald Trump, that mentions in passing how the Murdochs helped support Trump’s ridiculous election lies (you know, the ones that Fox was fighting to say were free speech in the Dominion suit).
It seemed that we were not alone in recognizing the link between the Dominion suit and the Crikey suit. Crikey was actually using many of the public details from the Dominion suit to argue its case in Australia.
While there was plenty of attention paid last week to Fox’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion, it’s also worth noting that in that same week, Lachlan dropped the defamation case against Crikey in Australia. He claims he did so because of the Domnion settlement, which makes no sense at all to me.
Lachlan Murdoch has dropped his defamation proceedings against the independent Australian media company Private Media, the publisher of Crikey.
Murdoch launched defamation proceedings in August against the independent news site over an article published in June that named the Murdoch family as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the US Capitol attack. The CEO of the small publisher hailed the news on Friday as a “victory for free speech”.
The Fox Corporation CEO said he was ending the case in light of the settlement in the US of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News.
Lachlan’s other comments are equally strange:
Murdoch said he was confident he would have won but he “does not wish to further enable Crikey’s use of the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and boost their profits”.
Dude. You sued them. Now you’re mad that they used the Streisand Effect to try to defend themselves? That’s ridiculous. And, I don’t see how the Dominion settlement changes the equation in any meaningful way. If anything settling that lawsuit means that fewer embarrassing things about Fox came out during the trial. That said, some are saying that the fear of having to testify about the Dominion revelations in the Crikey case might have helped contribute to the decision to drop the case. Nothing like the possibility of having to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth that makes some people look for a way out.
Of course, it’s possible that Murdoch would have won, but that has more to do with the absolutely dismal state of defamation law Down Under, which we’ve reported on many times in the past. But there have been some attempts to fix that, and many saw this case as the first real test of the new rules. But, alas, it’ll have to wait for some other SLAPP suit in Australia.
For what it’s worth, multiple news reports say that Lachlan dropping the case likely means he’ll have to pay a significant portion of Crikey’s legal fees. So, congrats, Lachlan, as even you admit that the lawsuit was turned into marketing and subscriptions for Crikey, and in the end you may have had to pay for both sides’ legal fees. Just great work all around.
Over the last decade or so, there’s been a growing chorus of people insisting (misleadingly) that the internet is a “wild west” that needs regulation. The reasons stated for this apparently necessary regulation change over time, but the underlying discussion tends to be the same: bad stuff is happening online and it needs to stop. Sometimes, the discussion is more focused on how internet companies are somehow “experimenting” with our lives and our data.
We’ve seen plenty of new internet regulations pop up and — oddly to me, at least — no one seems to comment on how these regulations themselves seem to be experimenting on the way innovation works and our ability to communicate with others around the world.
For all the talk of how tech companies need to “take responsibility” for the consequences of their actions, we see little to no effort to see if lawmakers and regulators should “take responsibility” for the consequences of the new and often experimental laws they’ve put in place.
This report is something of a follow up to our 2019 report, Don’t Shoot the Message Board, which looked at the impact on investment (generally negative) in various countries and regions that removed liability protections from websites. A few years have passed since that report, and a number of countries around the world have pushed out new laws, or had court cases that changed intermediary liability, and we decided to take a look at how things have played out.
The short answer: not well.
As we looked around the globe, first at the predictions lawmakers made about how these laws would play out, then at how they actually worked in practice, we found that policymakers greatly miscalculated their expectations for how these laws would work. They were often redundant or confusing, and did little to achieve what was promised.
Instead, there were tremendous negative consequences in a number of different areas, starting with investment in innovation, which was shown to decline (sometimes dramatically) in many cases. We saw evidence of this with laws like Germany’s NetzDG, which appeared to actually drive some areas of investment out of Germany and into nearby countries like the UK and France. Unfortunately, just recently, we saw France pass a law similar to NetzDG, and the UK is moving in that direction as well, perhaps not realizing how it may impact innovation and competition.
The research, and included case studies, show how these laws are doing real harm to innovation and competition in the market. It appears that many of these laws serve to lock in incumbents and burden smaller companies. The patchwork of laws also makes it difficult for new entrants to build up global services.
Perhaps even more concerning is the impact of these laws on speech and expression. Remember, the internet is effectively speech, and the efforts by regulators to limit how the internet works had the clear impact of limiting speech as well. While some may consider this collateral damage, it is worth calling out not just how these laws are suppressing speech in various countries that espouse freedom, but how they’ve also become the model for authoritarian countries to suppress speech, while claiming that they’re just passing internet regulations like the rest of the world.
The report details multiple examples of countries using nearly identical laws for the express purpose of suppressing those the government doesn’t like.
One other fascinating finding came out of a surprising bit of data when we looked at India, which has been removing intermediary liability protections at a rapid rate. Unlike elsewhere that we looked in the report, we noticed that there was actually an increase in investment in internet companies following those legal changes. That went against what we’d seen elsewhere, but looking more closely at the details revealed an explanation for this unexpected result: after India passed regulations to harm sites like Twitter, a flood of investment went into a local Twitter-like clone that was friendly with the Modi government.
In other words, this bit of “internet regulation” actually was used as a form of protectionism, to boost a local competitor and harm a global service.
As we note at the end of our executive summary:
As this report shows, the end result of all these regulatory changes does not appear to be an “improved” internet where there is greater “responsibility” by large internet companies, but one in which there is less competition, less innovation, and more ability by governments to abuse their power over these companies to damage speech and privacy interests. That also means an internet that is less in the public’s interest and benefit. As governments around the world rush forward with major new internet regulations, which could have even more sweeping impact than the laws discussed in this report, it is imperative that policymakers do more to understand the impact of these laws on a variety of different areas, and take care in rushing to implement new and unproven policies.
This is not to say that the internet should be “lawless” (contrary to the claims you hear from some, it never was). But so many new policies are being pushed on the internet at rapid speed with little concern for the actual consequences of these laws.
We hope that this paper will help highlight how policymakers should be more careful in rushing to regulate, while also be more open to looking back at the impact of their own policymaking. You can read the entire report and our summary info sheet (pdf links) below or in the Copia Institute Library.