30% jokes, 30% attempts at academic discussions, 40% spewing my opinions uninvited to find out what might be missing from my perspective.

I’ll usually reiterate this in my posts, but I never give legal advice online. I can describe how the law generally tends to be, analyze a public case from an academic perspective, and explain how courts normally treat an issue. But hell no am I even going to try to apply the law to your specific situation.

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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah I was scratching my head at this one. Cop had better have a really good reason here because otherwise, have fun getting Section 1983’d. I am not sure qualified immunity would apply against the right to peacefully assemble, unless either there was reasonably a threat of danger, or some legal authority made the assembly or its actions illegal (e.g. no one allowed on school campuses after 9pm, a citywide noise ordinance on weekdays, etc).

    • am not a licensed lawyer and this is neither advice nor guaranteed correct analysis… just in case.

  • Advice against phishing emails can be reduced to, “1: Never click on a link, call a phone number, download an attachment, or follow instructions you found in an email unless you were already expecting this exact email from this exact sender. 2: If you really want to do those things, search up the organization’s website directly and use the contact info they provide there instead.”

    imo it’s the ad-hungry articles stretching everything into 10+ pages that’s making advice so inaccessible to people. Super annoying because it dilutes the real, simple message that’s already there, it’s just locked behind an adwall.




  • Completely speculating btw:

    Separate complaints are generally addressed separately, even within the same suit. It’s unlikely one could have “tanked” the other.

    I briefly looked over the original federal complaint vs desantis and the original state law countersuit vs the oversight district. The complaints in the other suit do point to different laws.

    Since we all know these cases are going to get appealed no matter what, it’s entirely possible Disney could be trying to entice the Supreme Court into taking on the federal case down the line by whittling it down to just one issue (free speech).

    Single issue cases revolving around constitutional arguments are like crack to the Supreme Court, they love to take these so that they can announce new rules or reasoning before applying it to the case, which they get to do when “”“interpreting”“” the Constitution.

    Disney might suspect that the current Justices are drooling at the possibility of ruling expansively in favor of free speech.


  • Without taking a stance myself - I doubt anyone disagrees with the principle, but rather on the implementation. How do we know who’s responsible enough; can we write a law that accounts for:

    • A 50-year-old woman who committed robbery in a moment of desperation as a 16-year-old and has since shown remorse, attended therapy, and held a stable job,

    • A 40-year-old businessman who’s never been convicted of anything, seemed okay when he saw a therapist once last year, but privately he gets into vicious screaming matches with his wife and has really inappropriate temper tantrums when he’s drunk, and

    • A 21-year-old college graduate who seems smart and stable enough, but their social media page is full of harsh criticisms of the government, projections of what would happen if various officials were theoretically assassinated, and more than a few references to “hoping for another civil war”?

    While balancing that with the idea that the government isn’t supposed to protect something as a “right” while also preemptively taking that right away from people they think might be dangerous, if they can’t point to highly credible evidence. (Otherwise, it becomes possible to arrest people for ‘thought crimes.’)

    Idk the solution personally. Seems impossible to balance unless gun access legally becomes a privilege to qualify for, rather than a right to be restricted from. But that would put the power into states’ hands, and then states would have the power to decide that no one can have guns except the police.




  • Umm the actual court order the article refers to is super generous to the plaintiffs lol. Whoever’s representing them made such basic mistakes that I’m not even sure how they passed the bar exam:

    The Plaintiffs’ first cause of action lists–in a single paragraph that spans four pages–fifty
    different state (and DC) consumer-protection statutes.

    (This is a no-no in every federal court in every state.)

    In either event, the Plaintiffs concede that they’ve failed to meet the requirements of Mississippi and Ohio law–even as they ask us not to dismiss those claims.

    (Wtf? lol)

    we agree with Burger King that a reasonable person wouldn’t have interpreted Burger King’s TV and online ads as binding offers.

    (This is well-settled law and taught to most first-year law students.)




  • That’s true, but thinking about AI that is made to generate speech, processing power is still expensive enough that developers are careful with it. But what happens as memory gets cheaper and calculations get faster, and ordinary developers are able to train their own generative AI?

    For example, what happens when a developer decides to train a LLM extensively on scam emails, and spammers love to buy copies of it - but the developer markets it as just “a helpful generative AI”? Or, what if a person trains their LLM on an extremist forum full of hate speech and disinformation, then offers it to a suicide prevention center as a 24/7 alternative to human labor? (Treating these as hypotheticals, where we assume the difference isn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps they also used some legitimate training data, so that most outputs seem innocent enough.)

    To me it sounds more involved than selling just a word processor with autocorrect, but less involved than selling an instruction manual for committing crimes.



  • Completely speculating, because I don’t know many courts that have been willing to decide either way, but maybe:

    If it causes harm in a way that was reasonably foreseeable, the person who turned it on and/or the person “operating” it might be generally liable on a theory of negligence (but not always).

    If the harm was unpredictable, it might be on the manufacturer and the retailer under a theory of products liability (but not always).

    Or it could be treated as “ferae naturae,” where owners are liable for their ‘dangerous animal’ pets because they knew the pets were dangerous and still decided to keep them (but not always).

    If it’s an AI not associated with a physical device, maybe the programmer who “authored” the lines of code could be criminally liable for criminal “speech” (writing an AI) that incites and enables crime, even as a conspirator – that’s reeeaaally doubtful on Due Process grounds, but it would definitely light a fire under every developer’s chair to make sure their algorithms are explicitly trained against criminal behavior. (but still not always.)




  • afaik Amazon tries to offload the work of vetting its vendors by requiring them to have a registered trademark. This led to all the sketchy sellers making tons of fake companies with random strings of letters as names, knowing the USPTO is going to approve “AEGIJDU Clothing” because nobody is ever going to contest that name.

    That’s why you see a ton of identical products listed with supposedly different, super random brand names, in case Amazon tries to take down one of the “vendors” (aka, one of the real vendor’s many fronts).