Chamber of Progress Says Tariffs Are an Excuse to Infringe Copyrights

tariff

Politico reported yesterday that the astroturf organization called Chamber of Progress stated that because Trump’s tariffs will be a “gut punch” to Silicon Valley stock prices, California legislators should decline to aggravate matters by passing a law that would require transparency among AI developers using copyrighted works in model training. Granted, the tone was more circumspect, but that’s what the argument boils down to:  Tariffs are going to screw our stock values, so we need to screw creators to offset the harm.

According to Chamber of Progress economist Kaitlyn Harger, the cost of compliance with AB 412, sponsored by Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, would cause a dip in stock values that “…could carve $381 million out of California’s tax haul from the four tech giants, all key players in the generative AI boom,” Politico reports.

I won’t comment on the numbers, especially because they are speculative, but I will note the amount of SOP fluff being used to package this argument against the transparency bill. Adam Eisgrau, senior director of AI, creativity, and copyright policy at Chamber of Progress states that founding this anti-AB 412 argument in the tariff controversy is “not opportunistic,” when of course it is. He states, “It is fair to call tariffs a tax, and I think it’s fair to call this bill an innovation tax.”

Kudos for dinging tariffs and taxes and promoting innovation in one sentence, but Eisgrau is parroting a longstanding practice of Silicon Valley, calling any price it would pay for necessary materials a “tax” on progress. While compliance with AB 412’s transparency provisions would naturally cost the tech giants something, why is that cost, let alone the effect of tariffs, a basis for ignoring the creators’ whose works are being mined for AI training?

Assuming tariffs will hit every sector and increase prices across multiple supply chains, that universal condition is not a rationale for tech giants getting a supply of copyrighted works for free. The creators who make those works aren’t getting their supplies for free—and most creators barely make a living wage if they’re lucky. Meanwhile, if the California Assembly is looking broadly at the state’s economy in this North v. South narrative, even a cursory review of the numbers shows that motion picture production supports more jobs than the tech giants.

“Bauer-Kahan’s proposal has the backing of Hollywood labor groups,” Politico states, “including the powerful actors’ guild SAG-AFTRA and the National Association of Voice Actors. But it’s been side-eyed by tech industry critics who say it would upend fair-use protections and turn AI training into a lawsuit in waiting.”

This “upend fair use” claim, whether it comes from Eisgrau or any other tech representative, is standard parlor trick of that industry. First, they advocate a broad, generalized application of fair use (a doctrine that defies generalization) and then claim that any counterargument to their position would “upend” some standard that has been established. This is simply false.

AI training with protected works presents a novel set of facts to be weighed in context to fair use case law, and, thus, a finding that training is not fair use would not “upend” precedent. On the other hand, the rhetoric used by Big Tech in this regard asks for a “fair use” application so sweeping that it would be tantamount to a statutory carve-out for all machine learning now or in the future. That is asking to upend fair use.

The consensus appears to be that Trump’s tariff tactics can only sow chaos and drive up the cost of living for all Americans—including, by the way, creators of works protected by copyright. But despite the prospect of universal economic pain, the Chamber of Progress asks California lawmakers to shield a few of the wealthiest corporations on Earth from the rights and financial interests of the creators whose works those companies are exploiting. Wow.

Photo by Beebright

Maybe Now, Copyright Critics Know What Censorship Looks Like

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Twelve years ago, when I first engaged in copyright advocacy, I was surprised to discover how many critics argued that copyright rights conflict with the speech right. Initially, I thought this had to be a fringe, internet thing—a vibe cooked up in the adolescent blogosphere that no legal scholar or expert took seriously. It would seem obviously contradictory to believe that any creative professional opposes the speech right. But no. It became clear that the main theme underlying the anti-copyright agenda—from academia to “digital rights” organizations to Techdirt et al.—was the premise that copyright rights are a means of censorship that should be minimally tolerated, if they are tolerated at all.

To support this view, and especially with regard to enforcing copyright rights online, it was apparently necessary to vilify creators as elitist, greedy, lazy, and even untalented individuals who expected society to pay for their “hobby.” Artists are used to this kind of criticism, historically from ultra-conservative voices, but the allegedly “democratizing” promise of the internet convinced many traditional liberals, and liberal organizations, to parrot this same anti-creator rhetoric.

Those familiar pejoratives are being recycled today by AI developers claiming that their products are just too damn important to let elitist, greedy, lazy creators stand in the way of machine learning. But let’s pause the AI skirmish a moment and back up. Because we should not lose sight of the fact that the original premise—that copyright rights conflict with speech was 1) bullshit; and 2) dangerous bullshit.

I lost count of how many posts, blogs, articles, and academic papers I read and/or rebutted trying to claim that copyright enforcement was making information, criticism, or important new expression disappear. None of those claims have been borne out by evidence, but more insidious was the fact that those who advocated the copyright-is-censorship theme were obscuring what real censorship looks like and, worse, feeding the very mechanisms by which true censors might come to power.

And come to power they have. As the Trump administration and likeminded state officials attack a wide spectrum of both creative and informative speech, will the anti-copyright crowd acknowledge how ridiculous their claims were that authors and publishers were ever the censors? No they will not. Will they acknowledge that the rights of authors are among the constitutional rights being trampled in Trump’s stampede toward national illiteracy? No they will not. Because it ain’t the authors and publishers trying to “memory hole” history. And it was ridiculous to suggest that they ever were.

But worse than the absurd premise that creators’ rights were a meaningful tool of censorship is that the anti-copyright narrative was promoted with substantial funding by the same companies whose technologies were destined to be exploited by the civil rights-infringing kakistocracy that now holds power. This was not just foreseeable; it was almost inevitable. As cited in my last post about the book Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s description of various authoritarians, including Trump, using the Facebook algorithm to micro-target disinformation is as unsurprising as it is shocking. What the hell did anyone imagine was really financing these “free information” machines? Goofy memes and mash-up videos?

Every time Mark Zuckerberg rebutted the idea of content moderation by saying, “We don’t want to be the arbiters of speech,” he was masking the truth that Facebook would take anybody’s money and guide them to effectively aim any misinformation at any parties for any purpose. It didn’t matter if the narrative was Brexit, the CCP spying on its own citizens, rallying Buddhists into murderous rage in Myanmar, or amplifying every delusional, unconstitutional syllable in Trump’s slow insurrection against the United States. The mantra of yellow journalism was If it bleeds, it leads, but the mantra of social media is If it pays, it stays.

Not that the anti-copyright crowd would ever admit they had anything to do with the damage Trump is doing to the Republic, but at least they might now concede that their claims about copyright making “information disappear” were as unworthy of attention as they were unfounded in fact. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote in Harper and Row v. Nation Enterprises, “The Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression.” And so it has been. Meanwhile, the tech industry that opposes those rights has proven to be an engine of so many calamities the Framers dearly hoped Americans would avoid.

Photo by Treephwood

Careless People: The Book Meta Doesn’t Want You to Read

careless people

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams could almost be one of Christopher Buckley’s Beltway satires. Like Thank You for Smoking or The White House Mess, the first-person protagonist takes the reader on a journey from dream job to absurd nightmare—each chapter an ironic critique of the powerful characters depicted. Except Wynn-Williams is real, and so are the truly awful people and events she describes. “…like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them,” she writes in the prologue.

The subtitle, A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism aptly describes this memoir, which begins with Wynn-Williams’s story of surviving a shark attack at the age of 13 in her native New Zealand and ends with her being escorted by security from the shark-infested headquarters at Facebook twenty-five years later. Hired in 2011 as the Manager of Global Public Policy, Wynn-Williams conveys her initial enthusiasm as a true believer in the power of Facebook to be a force for good and, on that basis, how she pitched the idea of a policy role for herself at a time when the leadership did not yet grasp why the company would need to build relationships with state leaders.

Initially, Wynn-Williams’s expertise as a former New Zealand diplomat reads like a satirical counterpoint to the fumbles of tech-nerds who don’t understand state craft. An early chapter, for instance, describes the visit of German delegates to Facebook’s Washington office and their bewilderment upon seeing the open-plan office with all the facades stripped away to expose the ducts and bare fixtures to “symbolize” the company’s nascent status. “‘You dismantled the furnishings of a proper office to make it look like this? Like it is under construction?’ one of the officials inquired, incredulous,” Wynn-Williams writes.

This image of the deadpan German thinking he is meeting with unserious people would be funny if not for the very real and deadly events that are indeed foreshadowed. As the narrative unfolds like a thriller, the protagonist discovers unbounded arrogance, callousness, hypocrisy—and ultimately—dangerous and criminal conduct among her superiors. The faux feminism of Sheryl Sandberg and lechery of Joel Kaplan become subplots about elite executives whose worst crime against humanity, so far, is arguably Facebook’s role in fostering rampant hate-speech which fueled the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar between October 2016 and January 2017.

As discussed in an earlier post, Senators Hawley et al., motivated in part by Wynn-Williams’s testimony and accounts in the book, have stated an intent to investigate Facebook’s misconduct designed to appease the Chinese Communist Party. But to me, the most compelling part of the memoir is the glimpse into Mark Zuckerberg’s character, especially as a putative oligarch in context to the Trump-led assault on the constitutional order of the United States.

Wynn-Williams’s portrait of Zuckerberg, an avatar of Big Tech leaders, combines the patriarchal vanity of John Galt with the innocent savagery of Jack Meridew—a boy billionaire, who plays board games that his staff let him win, but who ultimately embraces the destructive power he controls. Specifically, the chapters describing Zuckerberg’s psychological process upon learning that Facebook was catalytic to the 2016 election of Donald Trump can be described as denial, anger, pride, and corruption.

During a flight on the private jet to Lima for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Elliot Schrage, VP of global communications, marketing, and public policy, explains to Zuckerberg how, “A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages,” Wynn-Williams writes.

Initially, Zuckerberg clings to the belief that his platform is a neutral conduit for free speech and “connecting people,” but he then becomes angry at the irrefutable evidence presented by Shrage. Then, at the APEC summit, Zuckerberg’s incipient sense of his own power, and test of his character, is described by Wynn-Williams as he is buffeted between foreign leaders kissing his ass one minute and President Obama in a side meeting lecturing him about the dangers of misinformation on Facebook.

Rather than introspection, Zuckerberg responds like a petulant comic book villain—so offended by the criticism of the U.S. President that he decides to use the power of his technology for his own run at the office. “After all, not only does Mark now have Trump’s playbook, he owns the tools and sets the rules,” Wynn-Williams writes. “And he has something no one else has, the ability to control the algorithm with zero transparency or oversight.”

Again, the image of the staff reacting to Zuckerberg’s announcement that he wants to hold events in swing states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania et al. would make great satire but for the fact that, as Wynn-Williams puts it, “He could run for president and not ask anyone for a dime.”

Of course, the real point is not the prospect of President Zuckerberg—at least not yet—but rather Wynn-Williams’s courageous exposure of the mindset behind the allegedly “greatest tool for democracy ever invented.” And she does so at tremendous personal risk–threatened by Meta, which tried to stop publication of the book, tried to stop her testifying before Congress this month, and threatens to sue her for $50,000 per negative comment about the company.

In many ways, Careless People reveals what many of us already knew about Meta and the other social media giants—at least since 2017:  that they are not designed or operated according to principles that ever justified the populist rhetoric of “democratization.” That was a lie more than a decade ago, and the lie is exponential in the battle over development and application of artificial intelligence. Wynn-Williams sums it up well with her thoughts about the travesty in Myanmar:

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what unfolded next in Myanmar, and Facebook’s complicity. It wasn’t because of some grander vision or any malevolence toward Muslims in the country. Nor lack of money. My conclusion:  It was just that Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, and Mark didn’t give a fuck.”