Investigation: Minneapolis Cops Responded To George Floyd's Murder By Refusing To Do Their Jobs While Still Collecting Their Paychecks

from the get-busy-working-or-get-busy-retiring dept

The police in Minneapolis are giving the public what they think the public wants: fewer police officers, fewers interactions with police, and, of course, MOAR CRIME. Calls to defund the police began following the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin. Law enforcement officers expressed disdain (rather than dismay their actions had provoked this), asking rhetorically who would show up to tell people there isn't much officers can (or will!) do in response to reported crimes.

The disingenuous interpretation provided by most police departments was "Fuck 'em." Let the city fall into criminal chaos if residents continued to express their opposition to excessive force and rights violations. The application of the "defund the police" mentality by the Minneapolis PD is every bit as disingenuous as cop supporters' interpretations of "defund the police" movements -- ones that generally only want to move resources being used poorly by police departments to other entities more suited to handling common calls, like people suffering from suicidal thoughts or mental breakdowns.

Because the cops can't be honest about their own contribution to the current state of affairs in Minneapolis, they're giving residents the part that's easiest to do (fewer cops handling fewer crimes) without doing the difficult part (relinquishing their paychecks). An investigation by Reuters reporter Brad Heath shows cops are doing less cop stuff in the Twin Cities while still collecting the same salaries they always have.

Almost immediately after Floyd’s death, Reuters found, police officers all but stopped making traffic stops. They approached fewer people they considered suspicious and noticed fewer people who were intoxicated, fighting or involved with drugs, records show. Some in the city, including police officers themselves, say the men and women in blue stepped back after Floyd’s death for fear that any encounter could become the next flashpoint.

Ignored in the police response to public criticism is what's driving this fear of "becoming a flashpoint." Millions of police interactions happen every day. Only a minute percentage result in protests. So, the fear of "flashpoints" is overblown. But if Minneapolis cops think it's more likely to happen now -- following the murder conviction delivered to one of their own -- they may be correct. But they're missing the point: the protests following George Floyd's murders were the result of years of racist policing and disproportionate force deployments against minorities. Floyd may have been the flashpoint, but cops were the tinderbox.

Now, having failed to apprehend criminals their contribution to this shitshow -- one governments are now, finally, trying to get under control -- cops are admitting they're too cowardly to face this challenge and too shameless to stop cashing paychecks they haven't earned.

“There isn’t a huge appetite for aggressive police work out there, and the risk/reward, certainly, we’re there and we’re sworn to protect and serve, but you also have to protect yourself and your family,” said Scott Gerlicher, a Minneapolis police commander who retired this year. “Nobody in the job or working on the job can blame those officers for being less aggressive.”

Wrong, recent retiree Gerlicher. I can. I can blame those cops for being "less aggressive." I mean, we want cops to keep their aggression in check when interacting with the public, but the "aggression" this quitter is referring to is nothing more than doing the sort of stuff we pay cops to do… like combat and deter crime.

The upside is rights are probably being violated far less frequently, as stops of "suspicious" people have dropped more than 75% since the murder of George Floyd. On the downside, there's a bunch of self-righteous badge-wearers hanging around the office, bitterly stoking the fires of their self-pity.

“It’s self-preservation,” said one officer who retired after Floyd’s death, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He said the force’s commanders didn’t order a slowdown, but also did nothing to stop it. “The supervisor was like, ‘I don’t blame you at all if you don’t want to do anything. Hang out in the station.’ That’s what they’re saying.”

Wrong. Self-preservation is exiting a career you think no longer suits you or could be damaging to your health (both physical and mental). Self-preservation is not being paid to do a job you're no longer willing to do until the general public's internal "WE [BLANK] COPS" swings back to the ❤️ emoji.

If there's any time cops need to step up and show the public they can not only fight crime but do so lawfully, it's after incidents like these. But when the going gets tough, the people who claim to be the toughest retreat, secure in the knowledge their union contracts will keep the paychecks coming in while the cities they're employed to protect suffer the consequences of their inaction.

There are some solutions out there, but none cops are willing to honestly engage with. And then there are the useless things being done in response to the unofficial slowdown in Minneapolis. As cops continue to abandon their posts, the courts have stepped up to issue mandates that cannot possibly be enforced.

Between retirements and a surge of officers taking medical leaves, the city had 200 fewer officers to put on the streets this year than it did in 2019, a drop of about 22%. A judge this July ordered the city to hire more officers, but officials have said it will be difficult to make that happen because the embattled department has struggled to attract new recruits.

You can't just summon police recruits into existence, no matter how strongly worded the court order. And there's little to draw people to the policing business at this point in time, most likely because the PD can no longer assure potential employees there's almost zero chance they'll ever be meaningfully punished for even the most egregious conduct. When cops get rung up on murder charges, the hiring pool shrinks to bullies and assholes too stupid to understand actions will (every so often) have consequences. The cops need to be at their best. And now, thanks to years of blowing off accountability and discipline, cop shops are discovering the only people who want a job like this are people who should never be given a job like this.

The Reuters report should be seen as a damning indictment of the police officers unwilling to do their jobs while their actions are being actively scrutinized. For far too many cops, the only acceptable work environment is one that combines an immense amount of power with almost nonexistent responsibility. And, like always, it will be the public that pays the price. When the public needs them most, those still wearing a badge in Minneapolis have decided the best thing to do is hang back at the station and play poker with a deck loaded with victim cards.

Filed Under: derek chaufin, george floyd, minneapolis, minnesota, police

Clearview Tosses Subpoena To Non-Party Transparency Advocates, Demands Copies Of Communications With Journalists

from the maybe-just-scrape-gmail-you-fucking-hacks dept

Clearview is currently being sued by a small percentage of its database of scraped personal info. It is also being sued by a few state officials over privacy law violations. It is (also) also being side-eyed closely by the federal government, which has not initiated an official investigation, but has expressed its disappointment in legislative ways.

One of dozens of lawsuits Clearview is hopefully being eventually bankrupted by has resulted in a bit of the old intimidation tactics. Clearview has made some inadvertently amusing arguments in court about its alleged right to do whatever the hell it wants to amass secondhand data as well as market access to whoever the hell it wants whenever the hell it wants. We'll see how that all plays out. In the meantime, Clearview is hoping to make others as miserable as it is. And if that means doing terrible things to long-recognized First Amendment protections, so be it.

Transparency advocate Open The Government has been hit with a subpoena from Clearview, which is defending itself against several plaintiffs alleging state law violations in an Illinois-based class action lawsuit. With its livelihood being barely threatened by an ongoing suit, Clearview has decided to threaten Open the Government, which is not involved in the lawsuit in any way.

In January 2020, Open The Government and MuckRock used public records requests to expose a start-up that was scraping Americans’ images and personal information from social media sites, and selling the data to law enforcement agencies. Now, that company, Clearview AI, has subpoenaed OTG and one of its employees to turn over all of the responses we received to Freedom of Information Act requests and all First Amendment protected communications we have had with the media about this matter.

This would be ironic if Clearview were capable of irony. But it isn't. Clearview claims it has a First Amendment right to scrape sites, clear cut data, and serve it up to whoever would like to pay for access. When it comes to the First Amendment rights and protections of others, it simply doesn't care.

As OTG points out, a bunch of what Clearview is demanding with this subpoena could be had simply by accessing its account at public records request clearinghouse Muckrock, where all of its requests targeting Clearview are located.

As for the rest of it -- the communications with the media -- Clearview has no right to access those… for several reasons. First, these are protected under the First Amendment. Second, THESE ARE PROTECTED UNDER THE FIRST AMENDMENT. Third, OTG and its media connections are not a party to this lawsuit. Fourth, if Clearview wants to know what government agencies know about it, it could search its own internal communications and, if it feels it's still missing something, file FOIA requests just like OTG did.

Clearview can defend itself without brushing aside the First Amendment to demand communications from a non-party to another non-party. If it's feeling the heat because its business model is built on site scraping and a complete disregard for due diligence, so be it. It dug this grave with billions of scraped images. That it refused to consider the implications of its acts under state and federal law is its own fault. Targeting sources of information that have contributed to months of negative coverage isn't going to make Clearview any more likeable or any more capable at defending itself in court.

Filed Under: foia, journalism, subpoena, transparency
Companies: clearview, open the government

Daily Deal: The Premium Java Programming Certification Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Java is one of the most prominent programming languages today due to its power and versatility. The Premium Java Programming Certification Bundle has 8 courses to help you master the ins and outs of Java programming. Then you'll learn useful software principles, how to ace interviews, and more. It's on sale for $30.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Techdirt's 'Plagiarism Collection': A Plagiarized Set Of NFTs About Plagiarism

from the figure-this-one-out dept

As we noted last week, I'm going to be writing a deep dive paper, similar to my Protocols, Not Platforms paper, that explores the ins and outs of NFTs -- looking at the legal, cultural, economic, environmental issues related to NFTs. The idea is to explore the ways in which digital scarcity could prove to be different and interesting -- and also the many ways in which it may not be interesting at all. If you're at all interested in supporting this project, our crowdfund to back the paper (and to get a piece of the resulting NFT of the paper) is still going, though not for much longer.

As we're exploring these issues, however, we're also going to be doing a bit of experimenting with NFTs ourselves, to better understand how everything works. And the first thing we're doing is plagiarizing works by law professor/conceptual artist Brian L. Frye. You can now see our Techdirt Plagiarism Collection of eight NFTs, plagiarized (but, if I say so myself, vastly improved) from Brian L. Frye (you can see them all in the iframe below, but it's better to click through and see the whole thing). Those NFTs are now up for auction in an auction that will run for the next 10 days, ending on October 7th at 6pm PT (9pm ET).

I imagine that some of this will require some level of explanation -- though, I'm somewhat wary of killing the frog in the process.

If you're unfamiliar with Prof. Frye's work, you're missing out. You may recall us writing about his "OK, Landlord" project last year (which also became "OK, Landlord 🙄" Techdirt gear).

You may also recall that earlier this year, Frye wrote a piece for Techdirt criticizing the process of legal scholarship. Towards the end of that piece, he mentioned and linked to a recent Law Review piece he had written entitled Deodand, which as Frye describes it:

This article is a work of conceptual art reflecting on the concept of doing conceptual art in the medium of legal scholarship. It is also an homage to Yoko Ono's work Grapefruit.

The paper itself is well worth reading, explaining what "deodand" means, exploring the nature of common law, our understanding of common law, and explaining what Yoko Ono and her book Grapefruit have to do with all of this (I won't spoil all of it). I will include this tidbit that explains the structure of the paper, however:

As Ono observed, art is everywhere. But there’s still more of it in some places than others. Unfortunately, legal scholarship usually contains very little art. Or at least, legal scholarship has a hard time seeing itself as an art form. It’s a shame because legal scholarship is as good a medium as any for art—especially conceptual art. After all, every genre has aesthetic qualities, even legal scholarship. If it’s a struggle to make legal scholarship aesthetically pleasing, all the better! Artists have always had to struggle, and there’s no own like a self-own. What’s more, legal scholarship is all about concepts. Usually the concepts are boring and scholastic, but they still matter. There are a lot of mediocre genres. Even if legal scholarship is a mediocre genre, it’s entitled to a little representation, isn’t it, and a little chance? We can’t have only painting, sculpture, and music. Conceptual art is promiscuous. It loves the genre that loves it back.

So, this article is an homage to Ono’s Grapefruit in the genre of legal scholarship. It consists of a number of “pieces” intended to encourage reflection on the nature and practice of legal scholarship. Of course, it reflects my own particular interests, inter alia discussing the concept of plagiarism, especially as articulated in the context of legal scholarship.

Notably, this is the first article in which I have (intentionally) plagiarized anything. At a certain point, you just have to jump in. For what it’s worth, a considerable part of the plagiarism in this article is self-plagiarism, which is really just plagiarism for plagiarists without the courage of their convictions. But many of the pieces in this article plagiarize other legal scholars. Like any self-respecting plagiarist, I only plagiarized the legal scholars I love the very most. See if you can spot their work. I hope I added something to it.

And then, within the piece, are a long list of "instructions" regarding various topics, including eight such instructions regarding plagiarism -- a topic that Frye has also written about extensively, calling into question why plagiarism is considered "the ultimate academic crime," and suggests that we rethink plagiarism entirely. As he writes in that paper:

Plagiarism norms are primarily an extralegal, inefficient, and illegitimate way for academics to claim property rights in the public domain. Copyright cannot and should not protect ideas, and plagiarism norms are simply copyright by other means. Attributing ideas should be voluntary, not mandatory. Academics should provide citations because they are helpful to readers, not because they are an obligatory form of obeisance. We should encourage people to attribute ideas whenever helpful and appropriate, but we should refuse to recognize the self-interested and unreasonable claims of those who seek to enforce plagiarism norms for their own sake and in their own interests.

Earlier this year, Frye began exploring NFTs, and (among other things) how they fit in under existing law -- specifically securities law. He has similarly published another paper, entitled an SEC No-Action Letter Request, in which he explores whether or not selling shares of ownership in the No-Action Letter Request itself is an illegal unregistered security. In order to sell those shares, he has created NFTs associated with the No-Action letter.

Separately, Frye created a bunch of NFTs out of the different "instructions" in the Deodand paper, including the Plagiarism Pieces. This resulted in Josh Lamel, from Insight Public Affairs suggesting that someone should sell plagiarized NFTs of Frye's NFTs. We have now stepped up to do so.

Because it is plagiarism, and a key point that Frye highlights is that you shouldn't need to ask for permission, we have not done so -- though it certainly appears that Frye endorses this plagiarism, that's really neither here nor there.

We've written plenty about how people overreact to plagiarism in the past, and have noted that plagiarism can often lead to even greater creativity. Often, good plagiarism takes one work and does something else to it, to make it better, or more widely known. We believe we have done that with Frye's work. His paper, and his NFTs, were fairly boring, typical law review typeface of black letters on a white background. While using his text, we have spiced up all eight of the plagiarism pieces, adding color and (most importantly) animation. Each of the eight NFTs is different, but they are currently being auctioned off, so feel free to own a piece of conceptual art / legal scholarship / plagiarized / case study about plagiarism, ownership, digital ownership and more. Again, the auction will remain live through next Thursday evening.

Filed Under: abundance, brian frye, conceptual art, culture, nfts, ownership, plagiarism, scarcity

CIA Director Mike Pompeo Touted Kidnapping, Killing Of Julian Assange In Response To Publication Of CIA Leaks

from the kill-'em-all-and-let-god-try-to-get-the-natsec-gag-order-lifted dept

As CIA director, Mike Pompeo decided Julian Assange and Wikileaks should be promoted to Public Enemy #1. With Wikileaks leaking leaked CIA secrets, Pompeo ratcheted up his rhetoric in response to the leaks. Finding himself frustrated by the US government's understandable reluctance to pull the trigger on prosecutions of arguable acts of journalism, the CIA director decided those constitutional concerns could be waved away with the proper national security designation.

During a 2017 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pompeo -- who supported Wikileaks when it was airing the Democratic National Committee's dirty laundry -- unilaterally decided Assange was a threat unworthy of any constitutional protections.

WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service. It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It directed Chelsea Manning in her theft of specific secret information. And it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations.

It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. In January of this year, our Intelligence Community determined that Russian military intelligence—the GRU—had used WikiLeaks to release data of US victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russia’s primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.

The rhetoric worked. A couple of months after this impromptu rant, the Senate Intelligence Committee decided Wikileaks was a certified Enemy of the People™:

The committee… wants Congress to declare WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” which would open Julian Assange and the pro-transparency organization – which most of the U.S. government considers a handmaiden of Russian intelligence – to new levels of surveillance.

Some crazy shit, to be sure. But it gets crazier. While doing business as a division of Trump Holdings, LLC, the CIA and other agencies got high AF (presumably) and came up with all sorts of answers to the question, "How do you solve a problem like Maria Wikileaks?"

Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”

Welp. I guess this explains why the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi security forces was largely ignored by the Trump administration. The government had its own plans to do serious harm to a journalist it suddenly found inconvenient only months after embracing Assange and Wikileaks as truth-to-power-tellers when it leaked a virtual boatload of DNC emails.

That was only part of the wide-ranging proposals. Other suggestions went ahead as planned, though. The IC aggressively targeted Wikileaks, ramping up surveillance and seizing electronic devices from suspected members of the transparency group. Apparently every option was on the table, including extraordinary rendition.

This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.

Risk it, Pompeo didn't. A wise move, but probably not due to any actual wisdom Pompeo possesses. Kidnapping and/or killing a non-brown, non-Muslim so-called "enemy of the people" wouldn't have played well anywhere, possibly not even back home in one nation under Trump.

The CIA doesn't want to talk about this. Neither does Mike Pompeo, who seemed more than willing to do everything but drone strike the embassy Assange resided in prior to his arrest.

The plans never materialized or this post would never have been written. Instead, we'd have presented a long series of posts about the US deciding it was appropriate to kidnap or kill someone who published leaked documents -- the obvious and inevitable nadir of government power expansion under a variety of national security authorities.

That is was ever considered -- even momentarily -- shows just how dangerous the wrong person in the wrong position can be, especially when encouraged and coddled by an administration that openly displayed its hatred for the press. This is an authoritarian's spank bank. It should never have been allowed to escape this fantasy world and become a regrettable part of the history the ostensibly free world.

Filed Under: assassination, ceo, intelligence, julian assange, leaks, mike pompeo, transparency
Companies: wikileaks

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the what's-the-good-word dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a comment on our post about the Russian government abusing the law to shut down Alexey Navalny's smart voting app:

It's worth remembering that Navalny is in a labor camp for violating the conditions of his probation by not dying but getting foreign medical aid after being poisoned by Putin's thugs.

In second place, it's James Burkhardt with a comment about the unsealed documents in the Nunes family farm lawsuit against Ryan Lizza:

When the plaintiffs testify they do not know who is paying for the case, that should be an immediate dismissal unless that information can be provided (under seal) to the court and council. The funding implies a party without standing is funding the case, and while legal, it potentially means a party whose interests do not necessarily align with the plaintiffs is paying for.

Given Plaintiffs testify documents have been submitted that are false or misattributed to the plaintiff, whomever is paying for this case is probably directing the prosecution of the suit and appears to be operating against the best interests of the plaintiffs. This is furthered by Biss' attempts to prevent workers from taking the fifth on the questions of documents that prove they can legally work (taking the fifth tanks the case because it can legally be assumed by the court the reason the fifth was taken in a civil case, known as an adverse inference, but taking the fifth may be the best decision for the workers as individuals)

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from James Burkhardt, this time responding to a request for a summary and explanation of our post about the gravity of Supreme Court's actions regarding the Texas abortion law:

Courts, from the local courthouse to the Supreme Court of the United States, exist to help people settle adult arguments. Normally, they try be fair and decide the same way every time. This lets people learn how a court makes a decision. If a court changes its mind, it likes to explain the change. That way we can still understand what is okay and what is not and why.

When the court made a decision in this arguement, they changed their mind about a lot of things. One thing they changed their mind about is explaining why they changed their mind. A lot of people are very upset because now we don't know what is okay and what is not.

Next, it's another comment from that post, this time from TaboToka providing another reaction:

SCOTUS crossed the Rubicon

and it cannot uncross it.

This is symptomatic of the last decades of corrosive rule -- of putting winning at all costs to appease a small minority of oligarchs over the majority of citizens.

When FDR was faced with a social backlash to the wreckage of the Gilded Age, he helped out the average work-a-day folks with a raft of (gasp) Social programs. This lesson was not institutionalized, instead it was derided, demonized and dismantled as soon as possible.

Since 1978, purchasing power has stagnated; standards of living have slipped and more money and power has flowed upwards. Without a fair rule of law, we unwashed masses have literally nowhere to go to address our grievances. Our politicians are bought-and-sold. We can no longer rely on the courts. What's next?

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment from that same post, this time from an describing the input of an extremely odious commenter:

Don't worry, it's just a run-of-the-mill retelling of the timeless classic: "If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll recite Mein Kampf from heart".

In second place, it's Toom1275 with a comment about Sony apparently using fan art without credit:

Under the ContentID model, Sony now owes all its revenue from the movie to the artist.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Valis in response to a commenter who offered an extremely strained defense of Apple's opposition to affordable repairs:

So what's it like, working in Apple's marketing department?

Finally, we head to our post about Texas's unconstitutional social media censorship bill, where an anonymous commenter took on the notion that moderation is "conduct", and distinct from speech:

Even if moderation wasn't purely speech...

I won't stand for this! It is as plain as the shirt on my back that this is a red flag issue. Conduct often is speech.

I should start a leaflet campaign. I could have the volunteers wear matching shirts. The leaflets would be patriotic, and have the American flag on them, and every now and then we'd have the volunteers burn one.

... but y'know? It is amazing how often Texas that is the cause of these Supreme Court precedents defending the first amendment. Maybe they're looking to keep their record...

Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal!

That's all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: September 19th - 25th

from the as-you-were dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2016, Donald Trump was doubling down on Ted Cruz's argument for blocking the transition of the IANA away from the commerce department (not the only stupid argument on the subject), but the Senate came to its senses and did not support the plan. The House Intelligence Committee released a list of "Snowden's Lies" that was almost entirely false, while the Washington Post was condemning Snowden and we wondered if it would give back its Pulitzer Prize, while Chelsea Manning was facing indefinite solitary confinement after a suicide attempt. The man arrested over KickassTorrents was being blocked from talking to his US attorney, while a former UMG executive was calling for the destruction of the DMCA. And we took a closer look at the more complex reasons for ridiculous bogus takedown demands in mass DMCA filings.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2011, Righthaven was failing to pay attorney fees ordered by the court and we looked at what would happen if the company declared bankruptcy. A lawyer was seeking to wipe out critical anonymous speech, the Authors Guild was trying to play "gotcha" with orphaned works instead of fixing the problem, and we looked at the entertainment industry's coordinated effort to blame third parties for piracy. In Italy, a proposed law would ban people from the internet based on a single accusation of infringement, leading an EU Parliament Member to ask the EU Commission what it would do if the law passed — while the Commissioner was busy asking big copyright to increase its lobbying efforts.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2006, Warner Music took the lead in signing deals with YouTube, while Microsoft was launching a YouTube copycat site (leading us to remember that, a few months prior, Bill Gates had explained why Microsoft would never try to do that). A Belgian court ordered Google to stop linking to news websites, prompting the company to fight back and hit a wall. Yahoo was timidly experimenting with DRM-free music, while the press was noticing how disappointing the early online video offerings from Apple and Amazon were. And, twenty years after the fact, The Knack noticed that their song My Sharona had been sampled by Run DMC and filed a very late lawsuit.

Filed Under: history, look back

Italy Vows To Bring Entire Government To Bear To Oppose Croatian 'Prosek' Trademark

from the whining-about-wine dept

We've written a couple of times about the Consorzio di Tutela della Denominazione di Origine Controllata Prosecco, whom I have nicknamed "The Prosecco People" because I'm not typing that every time. This organization with the sole goal of protecting the "Prosecco" name from being used, or nearly used, by anyone else has taken this mission to extreme lengths historically. Serving as examples were such times as The Prosecco People opposing a French company's non-alcoholic sparkling wine brand dubbed "Nosecco", as well as bullying a pet treat company that created a drink for pets called "Pawsecco". In both cases, if you can find any real reason to worry about public confusion as to the source of those goods, you're a crazy person.

But those examples were parodies and puns that at least nodded at the Prosecco product. The latest bullying attempt to protect the Prosecco brand comes from Italian government ministers and targets the EU's consideration for protected status of a Croatian sweet wine called "Prosek."

Italy said on Wednesday it would protest to the European Commission over an attempt by Croatia to get EU-protected label status for a sweet white wine which Rome says has a name that is too similar to its own famed prosecco. Brussels agreed on Tuesday to consider an application by Croatia to have its Prosek wine classified as a recognised protected label (PDO), outraging Italian producers who said the name would create confusion among consumers.

Agriculture Minister Stefano Patuanelli told state broadcaster RAI the whole Italian government would oppose the application "in an adequate and compact way".

The whole Italian government? Dang, I guess Italy is simply not fucking around on this one. Which is a bit silly, actually, as Prosek has nothing to do with Prosecco. While the EU originally did refuse to register the name of Prosek for protected status back in 2013, the fact is that Prosek has been around for literally thousands of years, isn't a sparkling wine, doesn't use the same grapes for production, and there is not a single ounce of shared history when it comes to the origin of each's name. In other words, Prosek is a thing in the world, whether Italy wants it to be or not. In addition, it's worth noting that Prosek is made with red grapes, so even the coloration of the drinks are different.

But, despite all of that, apparently the Prosecco folks in Italy have absolutely lost their minds over this.

Luca Zaia, governor of the northerly Veneto region, which is a major prosecco producer, called Croatia's application "an absolute disgrace" and demanded vigorous opposition from Prime Minister Mario Draghi's government.

"They are stealing an important label from our country, it's as if they wanted to take away Ferrari," he said.

Yeah, not really. There is no stealing here at all. There is only Croatia seeking to get protected status on an age-old wine it has made for a long, long time. In remarks, the EU commission indicated that just because the two types of wine have some similarity in sound, that doesn't mean Prosek can't receive protected status. For that to be denied, there would need to be reasonable concern about customer confusion.

But, as you can see above, very little about Italy's stance on this is reasonable. Nor has been its past bullying over Prosecco.

Filed Under: croatia, geographical indicator, italy, prosecco, prosek, protected status, wine

Texas' Unconstitutional Social Media Censorship Bill Challenged In Court, Just As Texas Joins The Legal Fight For Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Bill

from the florida-and-texas;-what-a-pair dept

Texas and Florida. Florida and Texas. Two states with governors who have decided that culture warrioring and "owning the libs" is way more important than the Constitution they swore to protect and uphold. As you'll recall, last month Texas Governor Greg Abbott decided to use the internet services he hates to livestream his signing of the clearly unconstitutional HB20 that seeks to block social media sites from moderating how they see fit.

As we had pointed out, Florida had beaten Texas to the punch on that and a court had already tossed out the bill as an unconstitutional infringement of 1st Amendment rights. Now a state that was looking to actually do things correctly would maybe see that and recognize that maybe it's not worth wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to do the exact same thing, but Texas went ahead.

And, now, the same two organizations that sued to strike down Florida's law, NetChoice and CCIA, have similarly sued to strike down Texas' law.

At bottom, H.B. 20 imposes impermissible content- and viewpoint-based classifications to compel a select few platforms to publish speech and speakers that violate the platforms’ policies—and to present that speech the same way the platforms present other speech that does not violate their policies. Furthermore, H.B. 20 prohibits the platforms from engaging in their own expression to label or comment on the expression they are now compelled to disseminate. And in light of the statute’s vague operating provisions, every single editorial and operational choice platforms make could subject those companies to myriad lawsuits.

These restrictions—by striking at the heart of protected expression and editorial judgment—will prohibit platforms from taking action to protect themselves, their users, advertisers, and the public more generally from harmful and objectionable matter. At a minimum, H.B. 20 would unconstitutionally require platforms like YouTube and Facebook to disseminate, for example, pro-Nazi speech, terrorist propaganda, foreign government disinformation, and medical misinformation. In fact, legislators rejected amendments that would explicitly allow platforms to exclude vaccine misinformation, terrorist content, and Holocaust denial.

Additional H.B. 20 provisions will work to chill the exercise of platforms’ First Amendment rights to exercise their own editorial discretion and to be free from state-compelled speech. H.B. 20 will impose operational mandates and disclosure requirements designed to prescriptively manage—and therefore interfere with and chill—platforms’ exercise of editorial discretion. In a series of intrusive provisions, H.B. 20 requires “social media platforms” to publish how they intend to exercise their discretion, document in excruciating detail how they exercise their editorial discretion over potentially billions of pieces of content, and operate inherently burdensome and unworkable individualized complaint mechanisms—all of which together work to compel or otherwise challenge the platforms’ countless daily uses of editorial discretion.

Notably, the lawsuit does not challenge the email filter provisions in the law, which effectively means that on December 2nd, if no one else tries to stop it, spam filters may be in violation of Texas' law. As Prof. Eric Goldman has noted, any spammer whose email is caught in a spam filter will then be able to sue the filter provider and seek statutory damages. Fun stuff!

Meanwhile, also this week, just to show how totally committed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is to unconstitutional restrictions on the free exercise of editorial discretion, he also filed an amicus brief in the appeal of the Florida ruling. A bunch of other states (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina) all signed on, but this is a Texas product. Also, it's hot garbage. It insists that these bills don't regulate speech -- when they very, very clearly do.

But the district court’s First Amendment analysis is riddled with errors. It veered off course from the outset by concluding that S.B. 7072 regulates speech, when that law instead regulates conduct that is unprotected by the First Amendment: social media platforms’ arbitrary application of their content moderation policies.

I mean, what? Of course, content moderation policies are protected by the 1st Amendment. It's basic editorial discretion.

The entire amicus brief tries to claim that editorial discretion is "conduct" and not speech -- and that would upend basically all 1st Amendment precedent. And if Texas actually got its way with this, then that would enable the government to regulate who could appear on Fox News and other media organizations, claiming that those demands are "conduct, not speech."

Nothing in S.B. 7072’s neutrality and disclosure provisions regulates the speech of Plaintiffs or the members of their trade associations—they “neither limit[] what [Plaintiffs or their members] may say nor require[] them to say anything.” FAIR, 547 U.S. at 60. Instead, at most these provisions regulate the conduct of Plaintiffs and their members: their arbitrary and blunderbuss content-moderation policies

This is... wrong. Requiring them not to moderate certain content (as the Florida bill does for political speech) is absolutely requiring them to associate with speech they may disagree with -- and such compelled association is a violation of the 1st Amendment. Did Ken Paxton actually graduate law school without learning this?

Like Florida did in its case, the Texas Amicus brief relies heavily on Rumsfeld v. FAIR. The district court in Florida rightly pointed out that FAIR does not apply here and is easily distinguished:

The Florida statutes now at issue, unlike the state actions in FAIR and PruneYard, explicitly forbid social media platforms from appending their own statements to posts by some users. And the statutes compel the platforms to change their own speech in other respects, including, for example, by dictating how the platforms may arrange speech on their sites. This is a far greater burden on the platforms’ own speech than was involved in FAIR or PruneYard.

But, Texas insists otherwise -- and now we have to hope that the panel of Judges on the 11th Circuit recognizes the absolute garbage that is Texas' brief.

Filed Under: censorship, content moderation, florida, social media, texas
Companies: ccia, netchoice