Hello -- I interrupt the past two weeks of ranting about SCOTUS and #Section230 to bring you this *really freaking important* piece of legal scholarship by @ericgoldman.
This article pissed me off and I hope it pisses you off too. Welcome to Jess after dark🧵
What if told you that there's an emerging popular litigation scheme that involves throwing as many defendants into a complaint as a Plaintiff can think of regardless of cause, jurisdiction, or the basic rules of civil procedure?
(we're talking like hundreds of defendants)
What if I told you that those same plaintiffs don't typically incur additional costs for this throw-defendants-at-the-wall scheme?
In fact what if I told you that plaintiffs are usually rewarded for their chaotic evil behavior?
AND what if I told you that plaintiffs actually have a ton of incentives to engage in the scheme because most of the time, judges never bother to assess improper joinder, service of process, or jurisdiction of every single 'Schedule A' defendant?
often resulting in an ex parte TRO or a straight up default judgment...
Worse, what if I told you that you yourself might be a Schedule A defendant and you just don't know it yet because Judges typically allow plaintiffs to SEPARATELY SEAL THE SCHEDULE A LIST OF DEFENDANTS..............
This is literally litigation via DDOS.
Anyway, you might say, Jess that's ridiculous. We have rules for a reason. Surely, you're exaggerating.
So, the next time you hear someone assert that the U.S. should embrace and adopt EU / UK Internet regulations, bring up this paper as the ultimate display of FUCKERY that is the U.S. litigation system.
EU litigation is child's play by comparison.
I have waited so long to bring this article to y'alls attention. Pls read and not enjoy.
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Today, the Supreme Court announced their opinion in Murthy v. Missouri.
This case illustrates the complexities of online content moderation and offers some interesting insight into how the Court might rule on the long-awaited NetChoice & CCIA cases. 🧵 supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…
The COVID-19 era was as confusing as it was terrifying. It was an era of extensive mask wearing, wiping down amazon packages, zoom funerals, online classrooms, and lots and lots of mis and disinformation about the disease.
Horse tranqs, bleach injections, you name it.
At the time, much of this mis/disinformation spread on various online services, Facebook and Twitter included. The sources were a mix of so-called experts, public interest groups, conspiracy theorists, and even our own government.
I’m excited (and sad) to share that I will be leaving @ProgressChamber. I’ve accepted joint research fellowship positions at @santaclaralaw and @AkronLaw, focused on producing AI scholarship.
In other words, I’m officially in my academic era!
Last year, during my annual evaluation, I told @adamkovac that there was only one thing that could entice me to seriously consider leaving Chamber of Progress.
As many of you know, that one thing is an opportunity to achieve my lifelong dream of becoming a TT law professor.
At the time, I hadn't expected this opportunity to present itself anytime soon. In fact, I told Adam "but don't worry, that's like 5-6 years from now."
Turns out, like my Supreme Court predictions, I was only slightly off...
I published an article on California SB 1047, a bill that would effectively prohibit new AI model developers from emerging.
The bill does not apply to existing (derivative) AI models or models built upon existing models. It's the worst I've seen yet. 🧵 medium.com/chamber-of-pro…
If you're going to talk about me, why not @ me? Are you afraid of my response?
At no point did I say my tweets are representative of my employer. And you know that -- as you said, I'm tweeting on a Sunday afternoon, outside of working hours.
[the following is my own opinion, not my employer's].
Last night, @ CreatureDesigns (Mike Corriero) posted an image of @brianlfrye, a Jewish law professor, depicted as hitler + an image implying Brian's pending execution.
Pure violence and hatred.
Prior to that post @ CreatureDesigns was engaged in a "discussion" with myself and Brian about fair use and AI. Brian and I are notoriously pro-AI innovation and pro free expression (for which the Fair Use Doctrine is intended).
That's one of the major issues with the current discourse around Gen AI and 230. We have to understand the Gen AI stack before we can even consider liability.
In assessing liability we have the platforms that provide the Gen AI services, the developers who create and fine tune the models. We have the folks who create the datasets and the folks who implement the datasets to train their models. We have users who supply inputs.
And we also have the platforms (again) that provide the "guidelines" and guardrails to determine what kinds of AI outputs are acceptable and aligned with the platform's overall editorial position.
Each of these aspects can involve different parties.