Professional sports is now fully in the weeds trying to navigate reopening live sports events during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It's not going great, frankly. NFL players are beginning to opt out of the season, citing health concerns. Golfers have been trickling out of events due to positive COVID-19 tests. MLB, meanwhile, just found itself with four teams unable to play the other night due to roughly a third of the Florida Marlins popping positive for the virus. Given that these leagues just started reopening, it's not a good sign.

Still, I won't lie and say it hasn't been nice to see baseball back on my TV again. And, as we wrote about recently, what the league is trying to do with innovation around piped in crowd noise and its MLB app is downright cool. But not all tech solutions are good ones and Fox Sports' use of video game graphics to input fake crowds into stadiums on the screen is pretty terrible.

While I would still argue that even that promo video shows some of the problems with trying this, please don't be fooled with how relatively good it looks. The Cubs played on Fox the other day and I was shocked at how bad it all looked. From the pitching angle camera, the crowds aren't there. During wide cutaways, they suddenly were, but not in the seats along the foul walls or right behind home plate. Any view of the crowd that was closer than a wide shot looked childish.

Fox Sports felt like that without a crowd, the games would feel like practice, so it enlisted production company Silver Spoon, which does motion capture and character creation, to create the virtual fans.

“Our goal is to make sure that the view looks normal,” says Zager. Normal this ain’t, but neither is 2020.

Sorry, but it doesn't. While I certainly appreciate the attempt to make us feel like we're in normal times, there are limits to what technology can do and creating realistic and consistent fake crowds at MLB games is apparently one of those limits. We got the crowd noise, but I think we're going to have to cede stadiums filled with fans to COVID-19.

Forty-five years after a law was passed in New York allowing public agencies to withhold employees' disciplinary records from the public, it was finally taken off the books by the state's legislature. The law -- known by its statute number "50-a" -- hadn't really been an obstacle to the limited transparency begrudgingly extended by the NYPD until the department suddenly decided it was no longer interested in sharing information about disciplined officers with journalists.

The decision to start following the letter of the law occurred in 2016. Four years later, the state legislature erased it, making these records accessible again. The Police Benevolent Association (PBA) -- one of two NYPD unions -- sued to block the release of records created by the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). The PBA secured a temporary restraining order earlier this month, blocking the release of these records. The federal judge also forbade the ACLU from releasing documents it had already obtained until the PBA's appeal has been addressed.

Here's the strange thing: the New York branch of the ACLU isn't a party to this suit. The PBA sued the city and mayor over the records. The ACLU is going to fight the bizarre order from Judge Katherine Polk Failla. But ProPublica also has a copy of these records. And it's not going to bother with speaking to Judge Failla. After all, it's not a party to this lawsuit either. The temporary restraining order the PBA obtained is permanently worthless.

Today, we are making this information public and, with it, providing an unprecedented picture of civilians’ complaints of abuse by NYPD officers as well as the limits of the current system that is supposed to hold officers accountable. We’ve published a database that lets you search the police complaints so you can see the information for yourself. Data experts can also download the data.

The database doesn't include everything obtained from the CCRB. It only includes information on officers who've had at least one substantiated allegation against them. Even so, the data set includes 4,000 officers, more than 10% of the NYPD's workforce.

There are more caveats as well, but they don't make the NYPD look any better. The data set is further limited by the CCRB's reach, which has been deliberately limited by the NYPD itself.

Investigators are often not able to reach conclusions on cases, in significant part because they must rely on the NYPD to hand over evidence, such as footage from body-worn cameras. Often, the department doesn’t do so, despite a legal duty to cooperate with CCRB investigations.

On top of that, the term "exonerate" is used very loosely by the CCRB. In some cases, the CCRB was able to substantiate claims of abuse but found that the abusive acts were actually permitted by the NYPD's lax guidelines on force deployment.

Even with all the limitations, it's still possible to detect patterns of abusive behavior by certain officers. As ProPublica notes, more than 300 officers have at least five substantiated allegations. A small group of officers are apparently angling for union leadership positions.

Thirty-four officers have had 40 or more allegations against them.

This release by ProPublica is a major step towards the transparency the NYPD has spent years fighting. It provides some insight into the NYPD's disciplinary issues. While the records may only cover a small percentage of the total force, the high number of substantiated allegations against a number of still-employed officers makes it clear it takes an incredible amount of abuse before one of New York's finest finds themselves out of a job. As ProPublica notes, you're more likely to end up out of a job if you expose an officer's record of abuse. Compare the fate of the leaker to that of the uniformed killer of Eric Garner:

The city investigator who revealed the existence of the officer’s record was forced to resign in 2017; the officer himself wasn’t fired until 2019.

The best part of this is that the records are now public and there isn't anything the PBA -- or the NYPD officers it represents -- can do about it. This release was probably inevitable, what with the repeal of 50-a. But rather than having to sit through rounds and rounds of motions and appeals, the public has access to records the NYPD would have never released on its own.

As we mentioned on Friday, on Monday, the NTIA followed through on a key part of Trump's executive order on Section 230, asking the FCC to weigh in on interpreting the law. Everything about this is crazy. The NTIA request was almost certainly written by a recently hired lawyer who has spent the last couple of years attacking Section 230. He's also the same lawyer who sued Twitter on behalf of a white supremacist, and when I had reached out to him over email to ask him how that made sense under 230, insisted to me that Section 230 was a narrow statute that only applied if it was about protecting children. I can't say for sure, but my email exchange with him suggested to me that he was wholly unaware of Section 230 prior to me asking about it. Either way, that case failed spectacularly, and Adam Candeub has spent the past two years attacking 230 on various panels. And now he's deputy secretary at NTIA in charge of this issue.

The petition to the FCC is performative nonsense, just like the Executive Order that preceded it. The FCC has no authority over internet edge providers. It has no authority to interpret Section 230. That's for the courts. And if Congress doesn't like how the courts have interpreted the law, then it's on Congress to change the law. The FCC has literally no authority at all to deal with this issue. And, you would think that since we're living in an era where the current FCC, under Chair Ajit Pai, has been literally giving away whatever authority the FCC actually has regarding the area it does have oversight concerning (namely internet access providers), that it would take a similar hands off approach to the NTIA request. Unfortunately that doesn't seem likely.

Pai has remained basically silent on this issue since the executive order came out. His fellow Republican Michael O'Rielly has suggested it's probably unenforceable gibberish. However, the third Republican on the Commission, Brendan Carr, has spent the last few months gloating and tweeting Trumpian nonsense about how "big tech" is censoring conservatives and something must be done (that this is 100% diametrically opposed to his views on regulating broadband access providers is not something he thinks you should concern yourself with -- this is a Trumpian world we're living in and so all that seems to matter regarding regulatory control is which companies you like and which you don't like).

Carr published a hilariously ridiculous plan to regulate big internet companies in Newsweek to coincide with the NTIA petition, which he knew was coming. He claims -- hilariously incorrectly -- that the success of big internet is not because of the free market, which he as a good Republican has to pretend to support, but rather through "crony capitalism" like... Section 230. In fact, he flat out misleads everyone in claiming that Google abused its power to shut down the comments of The Federalist because it's a conservative publication. Carr ignores that Google did the same thing to us, even though he knows they did it to us, because I told him about it and he follows me on Twitter.

But to argue that 230 is crony capitalism is to ignore facts (apparently, a Carr specialty). Section 230 does not favor any particular company. It applies equally to all websites, including small ones. Indeed, our empirical study showed that 230 helped create more competition, not less.

On the Democratic side, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel seems to be alone in being willing to call bullshit on this ridiculous NTIA petition:

Section 230 has been called “the twenty-six words that created the internet,” and it has helped free expression flourish online for decades. Like most things with the internet, it has its supporters and detractors. It has those who want to see it continue in its current form and others who want to adjust it to reflect the realities of the current digital age. But if you look far and wide, you won’t find a community that believes having the FCC use Section 230 to regulate speech online is the way to go.

Still, the Administration is insisting. Remember, at the highest level of our government we’ve had rants about social media bias and accusations that certain companies are stifling speech. But the First Amendment is not present to protect the President from media. It’s present to protect media from the President. Nonetheless, those rants eventually found their home in an Executive Order—which brought this issue to the FCC.

As a Commissioner, I don’t think we should take the bait. While social media can be frustrating, turning the FCC into the President’s speech police is not the answer. The FCC needs to reject this effort to deploy the federal government against free expression online. In fact, if we honor the Constitution, we will do so immediately.

I worry my colleagues at the FCC won’t. I also worry that this petition is not just about changing the law. Because any legal expert worth their salt will tell you that changing the law like this is not the job of a regulatory agency like mine. It’s the job of Congress. I think the NTIA knows that. But even just proposing something like this has consequences. Governments that threaten to chill speech can discipline private sector actors without changes in law ever becoming necessary. So what we have here is an invitation from the President for the FCC to chill online speech and organize it in his favor. We need to reject this loud and clear.

Kudos to Commissioner Rosenworcel for being willing to speak out so clearly and forcefully on this silly dog and pony show for an insecure President. It's too bad that the Commissioners on the other side of the political spectrum haven't been willing to say things this clearly, and you have someone like Carr who seems all too willing to suck up to the President on this unconstitutional attack on free speech.

And it is unconstitutional. Our post last week dug into the many, many reasons why it's unconstitutional, but at the simplest level it's this: it's an attempt to pressure internet companies to leave up speech that is supportive of the President, no matter how false or how dangerous that content might be. That's not what the government is supposed to be doing.

The NTIA's petition reads like it was written in an alternate universe that is divorced from reality. It pretends that the FCC needs to regulate speech to protect free speech, which is not how any of this works. The petition misrepresents the law, the same way that Trumpists have been misrepresenting Section 230 in court, including this silly claim:

These platforms function, as the Supreme Court recognized, as a 21st century equivalent of the public square.

And then it has a footnote pointing to the Packingham ruling ignoring that that ruling is saying simply that the government cannot pass laws that kick people offline, and does not say that companies can't kick racists and assholes off of their own platforms. Indeed, in the more recent Halleck case, the Supreme Court made it abundantly clear that it does not consider social media to be a state actor subject to such regulations. For NTIA to pretend otherwise is ridiculous, and shows just how biased this petition is.

As for the specific requests, it wants the FCC to do the following:

• clarify the relationship between 230(c)(1) and (c)(2);
• explain the meaning of “good faith” and “otherwise objectionable” in section 230(c)(2);
• specify how the limitation on the meaning of “interactive computer service” found in section 230(f)(2) should be read into section 230(c)(1); and,
• explicate the meaning of “treated as a speaker or publisher” in section 230(c)(1).

Again, none of these are within the FCC's authority, and even if they were they have no binding or persuasive power at all. The courts have already ruled on these issues for the most part, and there's little to clarify here. If Congress was upset about the court's interpretations, it's had nearly 25 years to clarify and it has not. There is no role here for the executive branch, let alone an independent agency tasked with overseeing broadband access and public spectrum, not regulating the internet.

The FCC should listen to Rosenworcel and tell the administration "that's not our job, and you shouldn't even ask."

On Friday, we wrote about the bad reporting concerning Nick Sandmann's settlement with the Washington Post, that nearly every knowledgeable lawyer figures was likely for "nuisance value" to get rid of the lawsuit. We noted that the NY Post's coverage of it misleadingly suggested that the kid got many millions of dollars, when there's no evidence to support that conclusion, and plenty to suggest he got very little. If you want a thorough debunking of "the kid got paid" narrative, this thread by @RespectableLawyer lays out the details. As we had noted in our post, the court had already rejected nearly all of the claims in the case, and only allowed it to be reinstated to allow for very narrow discovery on very narrow issues which Sandmann almost certainly would not have won on. There was basically no chance Sandmann would win the case. So, a nuisance fee settlement makes it worthwhile to everyone. The paper gets out of the case for less than the cost of going through discovery and the whole summary judgment process, and Sandmann gets to say he got paid, without ever saying how little.

However, on Monday, Sandmann's lawyer, L. Lin Wood (who you may recall from his ability to lose one of the rare defamation cases that I thought actually had a chance to succeed, against Elon Musk) completely lost his shit on Twitter because enough people were calling out the fact that Sandmann most likely got peanuts, which destroyed the narrative Wood has been trying to sell. Wood, who apparently is now a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory based on his willingness to include the #WWG1WGA tag in his Twitter profile (if you're not familiar, it stands for the silly QAnon phrase: "where we go one, we go all"), has apparently decided that merely speculating on the settlement amounts violates agreements people were not a party to.

Either way, Wood started threatening people and CNN. In separate tweets he accused both Brian Stelter (an on-air CNN personality) and Asha Rangappa (a lawyer and law professor who sometimes appears on CNN) for "speculating" on the settlement between Sandmann and the Washington Post. He even said that if Stelter isn't fired, he'll sue CNN.

Wood is arguing that CNN on air talent is violating a confidentiality agreement that was part of the settlement in a different case (CNN settled a similar case with Sandmann, likely on similar terms, back in January, at which point we wrote about similarly misleading reporting regarding the settlement). With Stelter, he's arguing that merely retweeting a lawyer suggesting that the most likely outcome of the Washington Post case was a nuisance fee settlement is a violation of that confidentiality agreement. With Rangappa, it's her own speculation.

First off, neither Stelter nor Rangappa are even remotely connected to the Washington Post settlement, so they're not parties to the case and clearly are not restricted by any confidentiality agreement and are free to speculate (or in Stelter's case, to retweet someone else's speculation) of the Washington Post settlement. The only way there might be a tiny (extremely weak) argument is if they were employed by the Washington Post. But even then they would have no actual insight into the actual settlement terms or amounts, and speculating is not violating a confidentiality settlement when they have no awareness of the terms. But to say that CNN employees are somehow violating the confidentiality agreement in a separate case for speculating on a different case is... just wacky nonsense.

Of course, many lawyers who understand this stuff pointed out that Wood freaking out that it violates confidentiality agreements to say that he settled the Sandmann cases for nuisance value... certainly seems to suggest that Wood is effectively confirming that it's true. Of course, after a bunch of people started to say that, he started insisting that his problem is with "false speculation" violating confidentiality agreements, but that makes no sense. That's like when the White House tries to argue that a leak of classified information is false. If it's false, it's not classified info. Claiming it's a leak confirms it's accurate.

Here, if anyone is violating a confidentiality agreement (which, again, they are not) it would be in revealing information to that is covered by the agreement. Speculating -- and even more bizarrely -- speculating falsely, is unlikely to be much of a violation. At best, Wood might be able to argue that there's some sort of total gag order that came with the settlements saying that CNN/WaPo and staff won't ever discuss anything having to do with Nick Sandmann and his sketchy lawsuits. I'd be surprised if either company agreed to such things, but it's not crazy, and the insurance companies backing CNN might have even been willing to agree to such nonsense terms.

But that's still not going to do very much here. There's no way on-air talent was privy to any of the details, and it's hard to see how a gag order would extend to them.

Also, it kind of makes you wonder why Wood would be so insistent on this here. If he really pressured CNN into agreeing to such a total gag order, why would he do that unless it's to hide a terribly tiny settlement for his client? If he actually won big money for Sandmann, he'd be excited about it, not negotiating for CNN to keep the details quiet. And why would he be so angry about anyone talking about the details of the settlement unless he didn't want people speculating on how little he was actually able to secure?

The whole Twitter freak out did his own client a huge disservice, and filing any followup lawsuits will likely only serve to harm his client even more.

Infamous copyright troll Richard Liebowitz didn't have a very good Monday. Facing massive sanctions and quite an incredibly detailed order exposing his long trail of disobeyed orders and lies to courts across the country, with just a week before he had to comply, Liebowitz (1) appealed to the 2nd Circuit to put a stay on the original order, and (2) asked the original judge to lift the non-monetary sanctions as being unfair. The district court judge, Jesse Furman, wasted almost no time at all in rejecting that request highlighting (among many other things) that Liebowitz and the actual lawyers he hired to represent him waited until about the last possible minute to make that request.

If Liebowitz was hoping the 2nd Circuit would bail him out as well, that didn't work either. As first pointed out by Mike Dunford, the 2nd Circuit has denied the request for a stay, and has said the larger appeal will be heard the week of August 10th. That's a pretty quick turnaround. But, worse for Liebowitz, this denial of the stay comes on the deadline by which Liebowitz was required to file a copy of the original opinion and order from Judge Furman in every docket of any currently pending case brought by Liebowitz.

For much of the day yesterday, we wondered if Liebowitz would actually obey the order, and late last night, he finally got around to it, trying to squeeze it in just as the deadline ran out. It would be nearly impossible to check every single one of his remaining cases, but it does appear that he filed the order in some of his ongoing cases, though he included a petulant note on the cover page:

On June 26, 2020, in another action, the Honorable Jesse M. Furman of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York entered an Opinion and Order directing that Mr. Liebowitz and LLF file a copy of that Opinion and Order in all currently pending cases. A copy of Judge Furman’s order is attached hereto.

Mr. Liebowitz and LLF strongly contest Judge Furman’s factual findings and legal conclusions, and have appealed the Opinion and Order to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

To be fair, in rejecting Liebowitz's request last week to remove this requirement, Judge Furman did include a footnote saying: "Notably, the Court’s Opinion and Order does not preclude Mr. Liebowitz from doing so in a manner that notes his disagreement with the Court’s findings and sanctions or the fact that he plans to challenge them on appeal." Though, it still feels like the manner in which he did this is fairly jerky. But, really, at this point, what does he have to lose.

Tracking every single Liebowitz case is next to impossible (indeed, even he seems unable to do so, which is why he has admitted in court that he recently had to set up a new case management system to try to avoid continuing to fuck up every case). It does appear that he magically decided that yesterday would be a good day to "settle" a few of his cases as well. I do wonder if he informed the opposing party of all this prior to reaching a settlement?

I did check the infamous Craig v. PopMatters cases (both of them) and don't see the filing included in either one. In the Southern District of Illinois last week there was a disastrous and painful telephonic hearing in which Glen Craig had to answer questions from a judge about his letter that he was unaware of the case (Liebowitz insists he was informed, and in the hearing, Craig, effectively unrepresented, made an even bigger mess of things, and gave confusing and conflicting statements). Liebowitz appears to have chosen not to file the Judge Furman ruling in that case.

My guess is that Liebowitz would argue those cases are no longer "pending" because they've already been dismissed -- but the fight for attorneys' fees is still ongoing. If I were in Liebowitz's shoes, I probably would have filed them in those cases as well, out of an abundance of caution, but I'm not in Liebowitz's shoes, because if I was, I'd never have let things get this fucked up. Either way, we'll see how Judge Furman feels about all this and, eventually, what the 2nd Circuit has to say.

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For years and years we've pointed out that, if they were invented today, copyright maximalist authors and publishers would absolutely scream about libraries and probably sue them out of existence. Some insisted that we were exaggerating, but now we've seen nearly all of the big publishers sue the Internet Archive over its digital library that acts just like a regular library.

But, perhaps the most frustrating part in all of this, is that whenever these copyright maximalist authors and publishers are confronted about this, they twist themselves into knots to say "well, I actually love libraries, but..." before beginning a bunch of arguments that show they do not, in fact, like libraries. Sometimes, however rarely, a maximalist just comes out and admits the facts: they fucking hate libraries.

The latest example of this is Kenneth Whyte, a small publisher of Sutherland House Books in Canada, who seemed to think now was the time to take to the pages of The Globe & Mail to whine about libraries competing with book stores that sell books. Of all the things to be bothered with right now. Even the setup of this column is just ridiculous, arguing that libraries -- with their public taxpayer funded support -- are unfair competitors to booksellers:

Public libraries, too, were affected by the lockdown, with various systems across North America furloughing staff. But libraries operate largely with public funding, which has been disrupted far less than commercial revenues their competitors rely upon. As a result, libraries are likely to gain still more market share at the expense of booksellers in the months and years ahead.

It may seem strange to think of booksellers and libraries as competitors. Most booksellers I know don’t. Ask them to name their competition and they’ll point to Amazon and Indigo, not the public library. There’s a logic to that: They’re booksellers, and libraries don’t sell books.

That, however, is a fatally narrow lens through which to view the book marketplace. Booksellers are in competition with libraries whether they want to admit it or not. Just ask the libraries.

As someone who frequents the library (and was thrilled when our local library finally introduced curbside pickup after months of pandemic closure) but also owns way too many books (and literally has been talking about renovating a large closet in a bedroom to turn it into more bookshelves), it's silly to argue that the two compete. I end up buying books all the time that I first found at the library. And libraries serve a public service for people who cannot or would not ever buy those books, but for whom having access to those books might be incredibly useful.

This is why we have libraries. But to Whyte, it's all very unfair. He seems particularly upset that some libraries have advertised the fact that you can borrow books for free as a cheeky way to get people to pay more attention to their local library:

Last November, the Toronto Public Library (TPL) ran this advertisement: “Black Friday Special: 100% Off All Books! Print! Digital! Audio!”

“Don’t miss the deals,” it said, “every day at the TPL.”

It was clever. It was hilarious. Except, perhaps, to people who make a living selling books.

The thing is, libraries have always lent books for free, and the fact that they "compete" with booksellers has never changed the fact that people buy a ton of books. Whyte then goes on to use a calculator set up by the American Library Association to show how much value libraries create each year, and basically uses that to argue that the value of libraries is effectively losses to booksellers. This kind of "we copyright holders must capture all the value" zero sum thinking is ridiculous at the best of times, but is particularly pernicious here. The nature of value creation is that it's not a zero sum game. Borrowing books from libraries helps to educate people, enables them to do things that, in turn, may help the world in lots of other ways. Some of that may lead to more books sold. Some of that may lead to just society being a better place.

It goes on and on like this for a while, with consistently dubious math about just how much libraries are supposedly stealing from those poor, poor publishers. Of course, towards the end, he includes one of those lame "we love libraries" claims after many paragraphs complaining about libraries:

Writers are loath to draw a line between the fact that they’re poor and the fact that four out of five of their patrons get their books at no charge. Most of us grew up in libraries. We love libraries. Our first library card was as important to us as our first driver’s licence. We do our research in libraries and meet our audiences in libraries. We think libraries are important civic institutions. It is difficult to conceive of them as problematic, so we ignore inconvenient facts to shield libraries from embarrassment.

But then he immediately doubles down on the ridiculous claim that libraries are the problem. Oh sure, he admits, there may be other factors (all of which are dubious, by the way) but the real issue: free books at libraries!

Of course, libraries are not the only reason author incomes are low. There are more authors and more books than ever. Especially in the fiction world, a flood of low-priced, self-published digital offerings has hurt prices for some established, traditionally published authors. Looser copyright laws have hurt sales to educational markets. But these factors pale in comparison to the simple fact that four out of five books are read at no charge.

As for the claim that libraries lead people to buy books -- he doesn't care:

Librarians defend their activities by claiming that they introduce readers to new authors and that surveys show people who borrow books sometimes also buy books. That is all true, but it doesn’t alter the fact that four out of five books are read at no charge.

Even if this is true (and it's not), that doesn't mean those 4 other books would have been purchased absent the existence of libraries. So he's willing to grant that... but only just a little bit -- saying that even if 25% of books represented "lost sales" that would be too much.

Librarians claim that a borrowed book is not a lost sale. That would be easier to accept if they weren’t claiming a one-to-one relationship between borrowings and savings in their advertisements. But say only one in four borrowings replaces a sale. Gaining that sale would be sufficient to double the income of our starving authors.

On what does he base that 25% number? No idea. But it's almost certainly not accurate.

Then he hits back at the idea that people improve their lot in life by having access to a library. Why? Because popular entertainment (gasp!) is available at the library. And apparently that's bad.

The dirty secret of public libraries is that their stock-in-trade is neither education nor edification. It’s entertainment. The top three reasons people patronize libraries, according to a massive Booknet survey, are to “relax,” for “enjoyment” and “for entertainment.” That is why the TPL system has 90 copies of Fifty Shades of Grey and six copies of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.

These entertainment readers are not a benighted underclass for whom Tom Clancy is a stepping stone to literacy and employment. They are people who can afford books: disproportionately middle-class, upper middle-class and well-educated.

Pushing bestsellers in competition with book retailers, to the detriment of publishers and authors, has become an addiction for librarians who, again, rely on steady or growing patronage statistics to justify their funding requests.

It has to stop.

No. It doesn't. Because that's why libraries exist. There are all sorts of reasons why people go to the libraries -- some people get recent books. Plenty of people get other works that they otherwise would never have access to. My own kids now like reading because every week we'd try out new books from the library to find what kinds of books they like -- including (gasp!) some "entertainment" books. Should we have had to waste money on lots of books they'd never read until we found the ones they liked?

But, Kenneth Whyte, thanks for making the truth clear: copyright maximalists have always hated libraries. It's just rare to get one to outright admit it like Mr. Whyte has here.

Whyte concludes with suggestions on how to "fix" the "problem" he concocted himself. He thinks that people should have to pay a subscription fee to borrow books from the library. He also thinks that libraries should pay a lot more for books. Or maybe libraries should just give authors money. He suggests if none of those are okay, then publishers should stop offering their books to libraries (apparently unaware that fair use rights mean they can just go buy the books elsewhere). Of course, this is why we've been concerned that publishers have already been trying to jack up the prices on ebook lending for libraries, while limiting how many ebook licenses they can purchase.

The whole article is quite incredible, but at least it's a copyright maximalist admitting to what many are thinking: they hate libraries and would sue them out of existence if they weren't grandfathered into our broken copyright system.

While the United States talks a lot about our heroic efforts to combat robocalls and unwanted text messages, the reality is we just aren't very good at it. Most of our initiatives go comically out of their way to fixate exclusively on "scammers," ignoring that the biggest source of unwanted robocalls and spam texts is usually legitimate companies and debt collectors, who often utilize many of the same tactics to harass targets they know can't pay. And while we like to crow often about "record" fines levied against bad actors, the FCC has only collected $6,790 in actual penalties of the $208 million in fines doled out so far.

When it comes to text message spam campaigns, we've bungled that as well. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 is a dated piece of befuddling legislation that's been interpreted to mean that you can't send unsolicited text message spam en masse. But marketers and political campaigns have long wiggled around the restrictions via P2P text message efforts, which still let you send blanket text message campaigns -- just somewhat individually via pre-scripted templates. These efforts were ramped up by the Sanders campaign, and have since been heavily embraced by the Trump campaign.

But there was trouble in paradise earlier this month when anti-spam companies working for wireless carriers blocked a massive new text message fund raising campaign by the Trump administration, purportedly because wireless carriers were worried the effort would violate the 1991 law and wireless industry guidelines. Carriers clearly felt the Trump administration wasn't doing enough to gain consumer consent for the message, especially given there are several lawsuits that have already been filed against both the Trump and Sanders campaigns for just this sort of thing.

Wary of angering Trump, wireless carriers pussyfooted around defending themselves, and as a result couldn't even be bothered to comment on the record:

"Representatives for the telecom companies declined to comment for the record. But people close to Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T said the decision was not made by them, but rather by third-party administrators they employ to monitor text messaging and protect consumers from spamming. They strenuously denied that there was any partisan intent and say they were merely following guidelines conveyed by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, a trade group that represents mobile phone outfits.

The organization declined to specify what the Trump campaign had done wrong, but said in a statement, “We expect all senders — whether airlines, schools, banks or campaigns — to include clear opt-out language and gain prior consent before sending a text."

It's fairly clear the wireless industry, traditionally fans of Trump, didn't believe the campaign adhered to the rules. Likely because it didn't obtain prior consent. But as is usually the case with the Trump administration, it was quick to run for its victimization cloak, insisting the blockade was a form of "partisan censorship" (there's zero evidence to support that claim). Also much in character for the Trump administration and its FCC, when journalists pressed it for clear answers as to how exactly its campaign adhered to the law, the campaign couldn't muster a response:

"We asked the Trump campaign to explain exactly why the texts are legal and shouldn't have been blocked but did not get a response. The Trump campaign also did not answer our questions about how many people it tried to send the texts to and about whether the texts were unsolicited or sent to people who had signed up for campaign communications.

We also asked both the Trump campaign and carriers if they've come to any agreement on how to handle texts for the rest of this year's presidential campaign but did not get any answers."

As usual, this is all largely a self-inflicted wound. Our 1991 cornerstone law governing this stuff desperately needs updating, but Congress doesn't want to because it might make it harder for giant corporations to spam you. Regulators have also routinely issued rulings that muddy the water, usually because they're trying to carve out giant loopholes for debt collectors and deep-pocketed corporations. Add a lovely dose of regulatory capture to ensure enforcement is feeble, and it shouldn't be particularly surprising that our robocall and text spamming protections, like most US consumer protections, are a confusing and heavily-litigated mess.

Surprising exactly no one, an NYPD official has declared NYPD officers to be above the law. In response to the George Floyd killing -- a killing carried out by a Minnesota police officer who crushed Floyd's throat with his knee until no pulse could be detected… and then continued for another three minutes -- resulted in the city passing a new law forbidding officers from choking the life out of arrestees. Seems reasonable.

Top brass disagrees. The NYPD's Chief of Department told officers no stupid law was going to keep them from restraining people to death.

“We can’t be afraid. We’ve got every D.A. come out and say they’re not going to charge that,” Chief Terence Monahan said at a recent CompStat meeting, at which department brass discuss crime trends.

“We can’t be afraid to do what we do. We can’t walk away,” Monahan bellowed at the meeting.

I guess the NYPD is above the law because those above these law enforcement officers are selective about what laws they'll enforce or against whom. The Chief feels no DA will charge a cop for violating the new law. At least one DA sort of disagrees.

Asked for comment, Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance’s spokesman pointed to a statement Vance made on NY1 saying the city law likely won’t survive legal challenges, partly because it’s pre-empted by the state’s chokehold ban, which doesn’t include the city law’s language meant to stop cops from blocking a suspect’s diaphragm.

Here come the conflicts of law to take away the "threat" posed to officers who like to ensure compliance by depriving them of oxygen. I'm sure the laws conflict. That's what laws tend to do when they're written quickly in response to incidents that demand an immediate response. But I'm sure Vance feels way more conflicted about the possibility he'll have to bring charges against NYPD officers -- men and women who tend to see him as an ally, rather than a neutral enforcer of laws.

Even the asshole fine gentleman who runs one of New York City's police unions thinks Chief Monahan's statement was out of line. But his only complaint is that it wasn't a memo issued to New York's finest, giving them a free pass on chokeholds.

Patrick Lynch, the head of the Police Benevolent Association, said Monahan’s belief city prosecutors won’t enforce the city law is misplaced.

“If every DA believes that, they need to say so publicly to the cops on the street,” said Lynch. “Otherwise, we have to assume that we are risking arrest any time we lay hands on a criminal who won’t go quietly.”

It's amazing that Lynch can still play the victim, presenting the officers he represents as pawns in an unjust system. It appears Lynch believes officers should stay away from anyone they might have to use force to subdue. To do otherwise is to risk criminal charges because there's apparently no middle ground where officers can effect an arrest without choking someone.

Meanwhile, other NYPD brass are offering up the parade of horribles they believe will be visited upon them by the city's new law. The trolley car problem presented by the new law says an officer can avoid choking someone or they can choke someone and possibly face criminal charges. But this official says the only choice presented here is arrest or not arrest, with "arrest" directing the city's law train right across the bodies of officers tied to the tracks of this false dichotomy.

“Their thing is, they’re concerned .... They’re concerned about a bag of crack off the right person, the right dealer, and their knee accidentally, unintentionally going on their back, and then being arrested,” said Manhattan North detective bureau head Deputy Chief Brian McGee.

Come on, Bri. Do you seriously think DAs aren't going to give officers every possible benefit of a doubt before bringing criminal charges? Do you really think an inadvertent move -- corrected quickly -- will be viewed as the intentional violation of the chokehold law? This isn't what's going to get officers charged. It's going to be clear, deliberate violations. And even that might not be enough. This is a panic over nothing more than a slight dent in police officers' autonomy -- one that asks they be a little more considerate of the lives in their hands.