Lawsuit listicle
I didn’t have time to blog last week because I was too busy going to my full-time job and also having fun on the weekends. Luckily, I came down with a 103 degree fever yesterday. My bed is soooooo cozy right now.
Buzzy tech lawsuits ranked by how serious I think they are
From 10 (extremely unserious) to 1 (existential danger).
10. Current Twitter owner v. Previous Twitter CEO
When Apartheid Clyde bought Twitter in 2022, he immediately fired three executives and apparently refused to pay their severance. In a shocking turn of events, they are now suing him.
Ordinarily, CEOs and other three-letter necktie jobs have obscenely large severance packages stipulated in their contracts. That way, if they ever get Successioned, it’s no big deal.
Handing over the company to a hostile bidder is bad for [the CEO] in a lot of ways (less prestige, handing her beloved company to a rude interloper) but, with the severance package, it is also good for her in some other important ways (bag of money, doesn’t have to come to the office anymore).
Obviously, ex-Twitter CEO and friends definitely are going to get their bag of money back from Mr. Clyde — a total of $128 million between the three of them.
Rank: 10 — Extremely Unserious. Cut-and-dry billionaire-on-millionaire violence. A kindergartner could waive their right to counsel and still win this one probably.
9. Current Twitter owner v. OpenAI
Simultaneously, Mr. Clyde is suing Microsoft’s OpenAI for secretly doing capitalism rather than nonprofit charity. His suit alleges that the company behind ChatGPT “is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.”
It is not true that OpenAI is developing an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is not a real thing that will ever exist. It is true that OpenAI is developing ChatGPT primarily to maximize profits for Microsoft, which is a publicly-traded company that sells technology to generate more wealth for its shareholders. However, there is no such contract, agreement, or even vague reason for Mr. Clyde to have been misinformed about either of those things.
The important thing to know is that the richest person in the world is now trying to tell a court that he somehow detrimentally relied upon the promises of a nonprofit when he donated millions of dollars to it with no written contract. This is, at the very least, extremely funny.
From there, the complaint continues to fade into a wet fart …
Rank: 9 — Not A Real Lawsuit.
8. Scary China App v. The House of Representatives
Earlier this week, some really cool congresspeople proposed a bill which would designate TikTok an intelligence asset of a foreign adversary and effectively ban the app nationwide. But there’s a catch: if ByteDance sells TikTok to an American company, then we would all say JK and forget about it. Make China go away with this one easy trick!
Put simply, these very smart congresspeople claim TikTok is functionally Chinese spyware because ByteDance is based in China (which is not very true).
We might suggest that, by the same logic, Instagram is American spyware because it’s based in America.
No, they respond, because China’s surveillance state renders Chinese software inherently less private and secure than American software, which is famously very private and secure, and also China is bad.
Okay, we reply, and then we go take a nap.
If TikTok is bought by an American company, it will continue to collect every little byte of personal data it can manipulate out of you, and it will give that data to the government if asked politely. The difference is that its revenue will flow to the U.S. now, not China.
Rank: 8 — Could Be Concerning If I Cared Much. Possibly deleterious precedents for transnational communications infrastructure, but unlikely to actually pass IMO. There’s already like three other TikToks. My dad is partial to Facebook reels.
7. Grandma v. Cops who know how iPhones work
Back in 2022, the Denver Police Department sent a SWAT team to vandalize the home of a 78 year old woman in search of a stolen vehicle that was not there.
The police used a battering ram to get into Johnson’s garage even though she had explained how to open the door and broke the ceiling tiles to get into her attic, standing on top of one of her brand new dining room chairs, according to the lawsuit. They also broke the head off a doll created to look just like her, complete with glasses, ACLU of Colorado legal director Tim Macdonald said.
Why? Because one cop, who now owes the grandma $3.76 million, mistakenly obtained a warrant for her home based only on location data from Apple’s Find My app, which he used to track an iPhone inside the stolen vehicle.
How was the cop able to legally access the iPhone’s location data? Perhaps in a similar way that the Chinese government is able to access TikTok data, if interested: by telling the company that owns the software to give it to them. The normal way.
Rank: 7 — Reassuring That Grandma Won. This was already illegal, but good for her.
6. Texas v. PornHub
Texas is one of several states that recently took action to block PornHub’s most devoted demographic: teenage boys. Supposedly, when you type pornhub.com into your incognito mode browser in Texas, you’re supposed to see a pop-up window verifying you are 18 or older. In some states, you’re now required to provide age-verifying identification to watch porn — assuming you don’t know how to use a VPN.
Apparently PornHub is still accessible without age verification in Texas, so they’re suing.
Rank: 6 — Weird and Ineffective On Principle. The internet is for porn. I’m always saying this. If you don’t want your kid to watch porn, take their phone away. Good luck with that.
5. Facebook v. News enjoyers down undah
Australia might sue Meta (Zuckerberg’s joint) for choosing to end its content deals with Australian news outlets and eliminating the “News” tab from Aussie Facebook users’ feeds. I didn’t even know there was a news tab on Facebook.
Meta started paying Australian news outlets for their content back in 2021, when it was lowkey forced to under the country’s News Media Bargaining Code. The logic goes like this: We know that social media, and Meta apps in particular (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), drive a large portion of web traffic. People expect to get news from Facebook. Meta should have to pay news publishers for the content that people use their website to access — otherwise, why would anyone use Facebook?
Well … most people actually don’t get most of their news from social media, and they don’t really like the news they do see there. Kinda awkward for Australia. Clearly, Facebook is not for news. It’s for porn.
Rank: 5 — Good Luck With That One. You will not win an IDGAF war with Mark Zuckerberg.
4. The New York Times & friends v. A guy named Steve
In its lawsuit against OpenAI, the New York Times alleges that a guy named Steve¹ memorized the paper’s entire library — millions of articles — and now sometimes regurgitates its content verbatim, passing the text off as original work to paying customers. The suit includes 100 examples of Steve plagiarizing the Times as evidence. A few local groupies have now filed their own lawsuit to similar effect.
OpenAI says the Times tricked Steve into plagiarizing, and that “normal people do not use Steve in this way.” As we all know, normal people only use Steve for cheating on their English homework, which is fine.
In Ars Technica, dynamic duo Tim Lee and James Grimmelmann think that the Times might win. In “an essay-length tweet,” a guy named Daniel Jeffries thinks that it won’t.
“We all learn for free,” Jeffries wrote in his tweet, summing up the view of many in the AI community. “We learn from the world around us and so do machines.”
The argument seems to be that if it’s legal for a human being to learn from one copyrighted book, it must also be legal for a large language model to learn from a million copyrighted books—even if the training process requires making copies of the books.
Except that it is illegal for a human being named Steve to solicit goods and services in exchange for material plagiarized from the book he learned from. And OpenAI did not even purchase the books it gave Steve to read in the first place.
Rank: 4 — Likely Already a Lost Cause. AI chatbots are slot machines; users are expected to “hack” them for better results. 90% of judges have no clue how any of this works.
3. Axel Springer & friends v. Google
On the European front, 32 media companies with names you cannot pronounce filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, which would have been nice back in, like, 2009.
Basically, Google holds a monopoly on the online advertising market by virtue of its monopoly on the internet search engine market, which means that European media companies with names you cannot pronounce are getting screwed out of their fair share of ad revenue, despite being the guys who made all the useful results in Google’s search engine in the first place.
However, counterpoint: the internet is not for news. It’s for porn.
Rank: 3 — The Information Environment Is Degrading As We Speak. It would be nice if news organizations could make enough money to pay their staff.
2. Texas & Florida v. Social media content moderation
Last week, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito asked, rhetorically:
Let’s say YouTube were a newspaper. How much would it weigh?
To which sarcastic tryhard Phillip Bump at the Washington Post responded:
5 billion words of daily YouTube output, matched with lots of photos, would yield about 2.9 million front-page-style pages of content. That would be just north of 50,000 pounds of newspaper.
Okay?
Or, put another way, to get your newspaper delivered to your house each day, you’d see two semis pull up, one of which disgorged its entire contents and the other of which dropped off a tenth of what it had in its cargo space. If you wanted to get the entirety of YouTube delivered to your house, it would weigh…
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.
Stick your fingers in your ears for a moment and try to concentrate. Here’s the thing: Right now, Florida has a law that fines social media companies for removing political candidates or journalists who violate their terms of use, and Texas has a law that supposedly bans “viewpoint” discrimination (removing posts with COVID misinformation or racist stuff).
Don’t worry though: Iconic alleged teenaged serial sex pest Brett Kavanaugh, who has a very large brain, is capable of making George Orwell analogies. He suggests that the first amendment has nothing to do with the content moderation policies of private social media companies, which is correct.
Rank: 2 — I Like That There’s Not Very Many Nazis Posting On Instagram, Personally. The crazy thing about social media is that if you don’t like an app you can just leave. Literally no one is asking you to post. Please stop.
1. Amazon, Trader Joe’s, & SpaceX v. The NLRB
Crossover from last blog. I’m going to let this legend, who represents the Amazon Labor Union, do the talking.
If Space X, Trader Joe’s, or Amazon were to prevail, the operations of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) would come to a halt. This would result in employees being stripped of their rights and union organizing being severely hindered. Administrative Law Judges would be unable to issue rulings and the Board would be blocked from making decisions. As a result, employers could potentially rush to federal court to obtain injunctions against ongoing board trials, preventing board members from issuing decisions. This would also impede the Board's ability to enforce 10(j) injunctions in federal court. Furthermore, employers may seek restitution from employees who have previously received NLRB awards, as the agency's adjudication powers would be deemed unconstitutional.
TLDR: Amazon et al. wants to abolish the NLRB so that you have less immediate and efficient federal protections from labor rights violations, like being forced to pee in a bottle, for example.
Rank: 1 — Existential danger. The NLRB is like a public restroom — you never think about it until you need it, and by then it might be too late.
Sorry for the boring blog. Next time I’ll do a silly one. I’m going on a hiatus until after I’ve taken my very stressful standardized test next week. TTYL.
¹ As noted in previous posts, this blog ascribes to the Guy Named Steve model of AI ethics, which posits that all ethical dilemmas arising from AI output can be resolved by replacing the word “AI” with the name “Steve.” In any given instance, if it is not okay for some guy named Steve to do that, then it is also not okay for AI to do that.
