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Trump Fires Top US Copyright Official

Jason Tate

Ashley King, writing at Digital Music News:

“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” said Morelle. “It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”

Morelle also linked to a pre-publication draft of a US Copyright Office report released last week—the third part in a longer report—that focuses on copyright and artificial intelligence. The report outlines that, while each case’s outcome cannot be pre-judged, there are limitations on the amount that AI companies can count on “fair use” as a defense when training their large language models (LLMs) on copyrighted work.

No Fakes Act Reintroduced in Congress

Jason Tate

Variety:

The Recording Academy’s Grammys on the Hill Advocacy Day culminated on Wednesday with a press conference on Capitol Hill with Senators Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Reps. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) and Maria Salazar (R-Fl.) to announce the reintroduction of the “NO FAKES” Act, standing for “Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe.” The bipartisan, bicameral bill is intended to advance creators’ rights by protecting their voices and likenesses from the unauthorized creation and use of digital replicas. Also at the press conference were stakeholders from the Human Artistry Campaign – where the Academy is a founding member – along with Google, MPA, RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, and YouTube.

Joe Biden Wins Presidency

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Jason Tate

Joe Biden will be the 46th President of the United States.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was elected the 46th president of the United States on Saturday, promising to restore political normalcy and a spirit of national unity to confront raging health and economic crises, and making Donald J. Trump a one-term president after four years of tumult in the White House.

Mr. Biden’s victory amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump by millions of voters exhausted with his divisive conduct and chaotic administration, and was delivered by an unlikely alliance of women, people of color, old and young voters and a sliver of disaffected Republicans. Mr. Trump is only the third elected president since World War II to lose re-election, and the first in more than a quarter-century.

The result also provided a history-making moment for Mr. Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president.

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Trump Impeached for Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress

Jason Tate

The New York Times:

The House of Representatives on Wednesday impeached President Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, making him the third president in history to be charged with committing high crimes and misdemeanors and face removal by the Senate.

While it’s improbable that he will be removed from office as long as the Senate is headed by a craven lunatic, this is still a historical moment.

Blog: What Americans Do Now Will Define Us Forever

Jason Tate

Adam Serwer, writing at The Atlantic:

In the face of a corrupt authoritarian president who believes that he and his allies are above the law, the American people are represented by two parties equally incapable of discharging their constitutional responsibilities. The Republican Party is incapable of fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities because it has become a cult of personality whose members cannot deviate from their sycophantic devotion to the president, lest they be ejected from office by Trump’s fanatically loyal base. The Democratic Party cannot fulfill its constitutional responsibilities because its leadership lives in abject terror of being ejected from office by alienating the voters to whom Trump’s nationalism appeals. In effect, the majority of the American electorate, which voted against Trump in 2016 and then gave the Democrats a House majority in 2018, has no representation.

Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS?

Twitter
Jason Tate

Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler, writing at Motherboard:

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

Blog: Democrats Are Hoping You Don’t Understand What “Impeachment” Entails

Jason Tate

Alex Pareene:

Democrats who preemptively declare impeachment off the table are mistakenly (or intentionally) conflating one possible end result of the impeachment process for the process itself. The Republican members of Congress who voted to open an impeachment inquiry into Nixon’s conduct didn’t necessarily want it to end in his removal from office; even up until his resignation it was an open question whether there were enough votes in the Senate to remove him. They were trying to get at the truth about the administration’s actions, and using impeachment to gather evidence. (They didn’t even limit themselves to Watergate. The committee eventually also voted on whether to impeach Nixon for the illegal bombing of Cambodia and for failure to pay taxes.)

All of this.

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‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration

Jason Tate

The New York Times:

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

I am constantly left speechless by just how cruel and fucked-up this administration is. If you’re feeling helpless, you can donate to the Trans Lifeline if you’re able, and this thread from Parker Molloy is a good read.

New Tariffs Causing Hell for Synthesizer Manufacturers

Jason Tate

Donald Trump’s new tariffs are going to be horrible for synthesizer manufacturers. The company behind the the Moog synthesizer has posted an open letter on their website:

A U.S. tariff (import tax) on Chinese circuit boards and associated components is expected to take effect on July 6, 2018.

These tariffs will immediately and drastically increase the cost of building our instruments, and have the very real potential of forcing us to lay off workers and could (in a worst case scenario) require us to move some, if not all, of our manufacturing overseas.

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Audio Released of Children Separated From Their Parents at the Border

Jason Tate

Ginger Thompson, writing at ProPublica:

The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe. They scream “Mami” and “Papá” over and over again, as if those are the only words they know.

The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”

Our government is torturing children. These are the kinds of things that if we read about in history books we would not be able to understand how people let this happen. There will come a time when future generations read about this era in their history books, and they will rightfully judge us. This is sickening.

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