This system is already working well for books, music and graphical art. But a common criticism of the approach is that it could never work for films, which therefore require copyright protection for them to be made. In support of that claim, people often point to the extremely large budgets of many films, often running to hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, the argument goes, such sums could never be amassed through the donations of true fans.

One issue with that argument is the widespread practice of “Hollywood accounting”, which Wikipedia explains as:

the opaque or “creative” set of accounting methods used by the film, video, television and music industry to budget and record profits for creative projects. Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in taxes and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit.

In other words, those huge budgets may not reflect the real costs of making a film, but are often a scheme for depriving people such as actors and others of their promised share of the profits by minimizing or even eliminating the latter. Moreover, a recent development certainly suggests that successful films do not requires such inflated budgets, discussed here on the BBC site :

Which film would you expect to be a summer hit – a family-friendly action-adventure which is based on tried-and-tested IP (intellectual property)? Or a creepy low-budget horror film dreamt up by a first-time director? Until very recently, most of us would have put our money on the first option.

But this summer, it’s looking as if low-budget horror will be triumphant, with two indie films, Backrooms and Obsession, vanquishing two megabudget extravaganzas, Masters of the Universe and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.

The figures speak for themselves:

The difference between the appeal of tired IP and original movies is illustrated by this weekend’s US box office figures. Masters of the Universe, which derives from a 1980s Mattel toy range and cartoon about a loincloth-sporting, perma-tanned warrior prince, is a new release which made just $29m (£21.7m). The Mandalorian and Grogu, which came out in May, is faring poorly for a Star Wars film: this weekend it made $10m (£7.5m).

By contrast, Backrooms “took $81m (£61m) in the US on its opening weekend. It’s total in the US is now $135m (£101m).” Obsession did even better:

Not only did it have a healthy opening weekend, but it’s also the first film since ET the Extra Terrestrial in 1982 to have its takings go up rather than down in its second and third weekends in cinemas. Its total take is now $152m (£114m) in the US and $225m (£169m) globally.

Those figures are impressive, but what is really noteworthy is the gulf between the respective production costs of the two classes of film. According to the BBC article:

The budget of The Mandalorian and Grogu is reported to be $165m (£124m), and the budget of Masters of the Universe is reported to be $200m (£150m). Take into account the marketing costs, and those films have to make between $300m and $400m (or £225m and £300m) just to break even.

…

The budget for Backrooms, on the other hand: $10m (£7.5m). And Obsession? $1m (£750,000), tops. Suddenly, spending a fortune to make a fortune no longer seems like a winning formula.

The latter sum in particular is easily something that true fans’ funding could amass.

The dynamics behind the growing success of low-budget films – something the BBC article calls “a Hollywood earthquake” – are precisely the ones discussed in the closing chapter of Walled Culture the book. An article on the Guardian Web site puts it this way:

“Going to the movies has become a way to connect with friends and share the moviegoing experience in person. Somewhere you can turn your phone off for a few hours and just disconnect from the world,” says 22-year-old film TikToker Florence Rose.

It is about the sense of community, which lies at the heart of the true fans idea, one that extends beyond the cinema experience:

Apps such as Letterboxd – essentially the Goodreads of cinema – allow users to distil their reactions into sharp, ironic one-liners and scroll through the takes of other viewers. “Gen Z are yearning for community, and through apps like Letterboxd, which continues to see an increase in popularity, people can find that community of like-minded individuals and share their thoughts and feelings about films,” says Rose.

The rise of Letterboxd is indicative of the hunger for precisely this kind of community-based experience:

The platform, whose core audience is 18- to 24-year-olds, has grown from 1.7 million users in 2020 to 26 million in 2026, adding more than nine million since January 2025 alone. “When a movie is released in the cinema, online conversations are sparked, which drives more people to the cinema so they can feel like they can join in and be a part of those conversations,” Rose adds.

This move from the Hollywood-style blockbusters to low-budget films made by new directors – often emerging from the world of YouTube – and new production houses is great news for audiences eager for new experiences and a sense of community. It not only brings fresh talent to the art form, it also opens up the possibility of fan-funded films that manage the difficult trick of being thoughtful and popular.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

In October 2025, EFF warned the public that Flock was rolling out a new feature called “Distress Detection” that would be deployed through their acoustic gunshot detection devices (formerly known as Flock Raven, now called Audio Detection). This feature purported to use high-powered microphones scattered throughout a city to search for sounds of human distress, with original advertisements from the product indicating it would search for “screaming.” (Since the publication of our original blog post, Flock quietly amended the ad on this webpage to say “distress” instead of “screaming.”)

Now, Flock has published a blog post stating that “[a]fter careful consideration and community consultation, we decided to remove the feature.” Good riddance. 

We said it when the product was announced and we’ll say it again: this was a misguided and dangerous feature because of the civil liberties concerns it poses, the possibility it could summon armed police to every loud interaction happening on the street, and because in several places this type of spying would be illegal under state eavesdropping laws. 

We were not quiet about this potential new feature. Flock even mentioned our concern about Distress Detection in an attempt to rebut our opposition to the mass surveillance their products enable.

The suspension of Distress Detection, however, does not mean that these high-powered microphones are now magically safe or beyond our concern. Acoustic gunshot detection is still a dangerous and often highly inaccurate technology that has resulted in real world harm, as in Chicago where it resulted in police shooting at children lighting fireworks. As Flock itself states, “No acoustic system is perfect, and we don’t claim otherwise.” But police response to a situation where they believe guns are actively in use seems like a pretty high-stakes situation to be making, selling, and deploying technology known to be imperfect. Flock’s devices also listen for more than just gunshots. Their marketing materials admit to be listening for “community disruption,” which includes “non-violent” threats like car sideshows and fireworks. 

Flock’s failed attempt to roll out Distress Detection teaches us a few important lessons about the current state of police surveillance. First, we should not assume that just because these companies are large and well-funded, that does not ensure that they are complying with local privacy laws before floating new products to customers. Second, companies roll out and police adopt invasive technology under the justification that it will be used to address our society’s very worst crimes. However, both the companies and police will leverage deployed surveillance infrastructure to introduce new uses without necessarily seeking the consent or approval of the public. Gunshot detecting microphones eventually being used to listen for screaming is exactly the type of mission creep that we’ve seen happen with other pieces of surveillance technology, including Flock’s license plate readers. Finally, gun violence is too serious and complex of an issue to purport to solve with one flawed piece of technology. It has become too easy for police and cities to listen to the fancy marketing pitches of tech companies claiming they’re going to solve all crime instead of doing the hard work of addressing the root causes of societal issues. And, in the meantime, that technology creates more problems and hazards for the communities they blanket in police surveillance. 

As we’ve also seen with people across the country pushing back on Flock license plate reader contracts in their communities, public pressure can sometimes work to influence both companies and lawmakers that control a city’s purse strings to discontinue or divest from harmful products. Flock’s decision to end “Distress Detection” for human voices is a win.  

Originally posted to EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

While some will argue this is more acceptable, as it was Musk doing it to himself, it still generated a ton of extra attention to the idea that Grok would gladly, publicly, undress just about anyone and put them in a bikini. To Musk, apparently, it all seemed like good fun.

As more and more of the media pointed out that this was being done to children, in some cases potentially creating illegal child sexual abuse material, Musk eventually came out with a statement claiming that anyone using Grok that way will “suffer consequences.”

In the interim, a number of people have been arrested for using Grok to produce CSAM, in some cases based on X’s reports to NCMEC. Of course, the company is also being sued by a bunch of people, claiming that it should be liable for the non-consensual imagery that it created. Some of the details of the lawsuit linked above are particularly horrifying:

Jane Doe 4, a female from Wyoming, said her stepfather uploaded a photo of her when she was 11 and lying on a couch to his phone. Using Grok, the stepfather created more than 7,000 CSAM-related images of her. He also shared and traded the images with others on social media platforms.

The lawsuit alleges that the stepfather opted for Grok “because the platform was less restrictive than other AI models and responded to his prompts to generate sexually explicit material using an image depicting a prepubescent minor.”

It also claims that in February, xAI did generate a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding the images, but the company only submitted the original, authentic image as evidence. According to the suit, xAI did not respond when law enforcement requested the thousands of Grok-generated images based on the photo and IP address information that would have quickly helped identify her stepfather as the perpetrator.

Perhaps recognizing that this story is getting worse, xAI (the parent company of X since it acquired the social network in yet another deal of Elon “selling” one of his companies to another of his companies) has now directly sued one of its own users, Terry Harwood, for creating CSAM with Grok, arguing that the indemnification clause in the terms of service means that the court should order Harwood to pay for xAI facing lawsuits from Harwood’s victims.

The lawsuit, filed in Musk’s favorite federal court — the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas — was immediately assigned to Musk’s favorite judge, Reed O’Connor. It sure seems like the company is trying to get out ahead of this story before it gets even worse — by suing one of its own users for doing, in a horrific and illegal way, exactly the kind of thing Musk himself had promoted.

The filing, of course, tries to play up the claim that X is a good actor in this space, taking its responsibility seriously:

There are bad people in the world and not all users have good intentions, so Plaintiff draws a bright line on permissible usage: the tool may be open and truth-seeking but is not a safe harbor for illegal, harmful, or abusive conduct. Plaintiff takes violations of this rule extremely seriously. It enforces its rules against violators through account suspensions, account terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (“NCMEC”). Indeed, Plaintiff has suspended 52,222 accounts and made 73,604 reports to NCMEC in 2026, resulting in (at least) 244 arrests.

In addition and when necessary, Plaintiff will pursue civil accountability against bad actors who abuse its tool to harm others.

Plaintiff strictly prohibits any use of Grok in connection with illegal, harmful, or abusive activities. These prohibitions are set forth in plain language in the xAI Terms of Service and the xAI Acceptable Use Policy. Among the expressly forbidden activities are:

• “Using [Grok] in a way that infringes, misappropriates or violates a person’s privacy or their right to publicity”;
• “Undressing or nudifying real persons, or otherwise altering a real person’s image or likeness to depict them in an intimate or sexual context”;
• “Depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner”; and
• “Sexualizing or exploiting children.”

Which all sounds well and good if you simply ignore the whole “yeah, but your CEO kinda laughed about and promoted this use of the tool” part.

Also, it’s quite a move to sue a user for using a tool that you offer in a manner that you enabled the tool to work. I’ve long argued that users themselves are the ones who should be liable for any violative actions they make rather than the platform but I don’t recall ever seeing a platform actually sue one of its own users for using their own tools. It really feels like them looking at all the lawsuits coming their direction for Grok’s usage and… pulling the whole “we’re all looking for the guy who did this” hotdog costume meme in the form of a lawsuit.

I have no idea if it’ll work, but suing your own users for the very thing that other people are suing you over is quite a statement. Yes, in this case it involves potentially criminal behavior (the guy was arrested after all), but are Musk and X suggesting that if you violate any part of their terms of service, Musk can take you to court in front of his favorite judge? Because it sure seems to suggest that. Much of the argument is based on laying out X’s Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy and detailing why this guy violated them. This kind of argument does not at all appear to be limited to law-breaking activity:

Defendant breached the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy by leveraging Grok to generate non-consensual sexually explicit images and CSAM.

Among Defendant’s various other breaches described herein:

a) Defendant manipulated Grok to create sexually explicit images of others without their consent, in contravention of the xAI Terms of Service, which prohibit, among other conduct, using Grok to aid in violating a person’s privacy or their right to publicity.

b) Defendant manipulated Grok to create CSAM, in contravention of the xAI Terms of Service, which prohibit, among other conduct, the sexualization or exploitation of children.

Plaintiff has been damaged by Defendant’s breaches of the xAI Terms of Service.

The lawsuit leans heavily on the indemnification clause in their terms of service to argue that they want the court to order Harwood to cover any legal expenses that might stem from potential lawsuits from the people Harwood victimized with his CSAM.

The xAI Terms of Service contain a clear and conspicuous indemnification provision that states: “You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless xAI, its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any and all claims, demands, losses, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees and court costs) arising out of or in any way related to (a) your access to or use of the Services, (b) your User Content or Outputs, (c) your violation of these Terms or any applicable law or regulation, or (d) any third-party claim resulting therefrom, including but not limited to claims of privacy violation, right-of-publicity infringement, or harm caused by content you generate or distribute using the Services.”

Defendant’s conduct directly triggered this indemnity obligation. As detailed above, Defendant knowingly and intentionally used Grok to circumvent safeguards, alter nonconsensual images, and generate and distribute CSAM and NCII.

There is no indication as far as I can tell that Harwood’s victim(s) have taken legal action against xAI at this point, so it’s a little unclear what they’re hoping to get out of the indemnification here other than to present themselves as taking a (somewhat late) stance against this kind of illegal usage of a tool that they failed to properly lock down while wink-winking at how they expected people to use the tool.

Harwood, assuming the allegations and criminal charges hold up, did something genuinely monstrous, and his victims deserve real justice. But it does feel very wrong that the same company whose CEO demonstrated this use of Grok on himself for laughs, and whose product made this kind of abuse trivially easy to produce at scale, is now standing in front of Musk’s favorite judge asking to make one user personally responsible for some of the fallout — while the “we built and promoted the machine” part stays out of the complaint entirely.

And, honestly, given how much Musk has promoted X as “the anything app” where you can do and say anything, it does seem notable that he’s now suing a user for… doing exactly that.

While the Fifth Circuit continues to play coy about the 14th Amendment’s existence, the rest of nation’s courts have resoundingly made it clear that detainees are owed a bond hearing, rather than simply be expected to ride out an indefinite detention with zero options until the administration finds some random country to dump them in.

With ICE and a compliant DOJ doing everything they can to prevent detainees from filing habeus corpus motions — using methods ranging from shuffling detainees from state to state to deny them standing to multiple purges of DOJ attorneys who aren’t sufficiently loyal to Trump — lots of judges aren’t actually seeing the entirety of the administration’s illegal actions. The administration is “flooding the zone” to create a “fog of war” in a way that’s as inelegant and brutish as my mixed metaphor.

But the administration can’t stop acts of God from exposing what ICE and the DOJ would have preferred remained hidden. Brush fires in Miami-Dade County forced the evacuation of an ICE detention facility. And that let a judge handling cases in that jurisdiction see clearly exactly how many times the administration had flouted direct court orders.

[The fires] opened a can of worms in federal court after a federal judge was notified that 47 of those detainees were shipped outside the Southern District of Florida in direct violation of court orders. When Miami-based Judge Michael Moore was alerted to the 47 violations, he ordered a deeper look into how often ICE had violated similar court orders in recent months.

The answer alarmed him, and prompted him to respond with force in a hearing on Thursday morning.

Attorneys at the Department of Justice alerted Moore that an estimated 116 detainees have recently been removed from South Florida in direct violation of court orders, a significant increase from the original 47 number. Some of those violations were never reported to the court until Moore started asking.

While Judge Moore understood the fires might mean moving detained migrants to other locations, the government was supposed to inform the court if it attempted to move people with pending petitions out of the court’s jurisdiction. This never happened. And it was happening even before wildfires created this crisis. According to the judge, the DOJ and ICE had done this previously, including one case where the judge wasn’t informed of a relocation until the date of the hearing, which was weeks after the court had told the government to bring this migrant to a bond hearing.

Moore’s takedown of the administration occurred before a packed house of observers, including dozens of interns and federal court clerks. And Moore lit them up:

“I don’t want you to hide behind the brushfire, because there are cases that didn’t have to do with the brushfire,” Moore told ICE and DOJ attorneys. “There have been a number of transfers over the previous months that had nothing to do with the brushfires.”

He noted that some detainees not only had been moved to other states, but some have been “removed from the United States” in direct violation of court orders.

The law is settled (at least for the moment) in this circuit. The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court ruled two months ago that the government had to provide bond hearings to all detained migrants — something that has always been the case prior to this administration’s refusal to respect the Constitution.

This is how the administration wants to play it, which meant the judge had minimal patience for the DOJ lawyer caught up in the middle of this mess.

Matthew Feely, the DOJ attorney on the case, apologized for the court order violations and said the Southern District of Florida’s office has been overwhelmed with habeus corpus petitions, stemming from the Department of Homeland Security’s stance that it does not have to offer bond hearing to immigrant detainees. 

[…]

In 2022, there were only 23 habeus corpus petitions filed in the district, he said. In 2023 there were 31. But between June of 2025 and July 10, 2026, there were about 1,800 petitions filed.

At the same time, Feely said the amount of attorneys handling civil cases in the Southern District of Florida has plummeted by 40% since last year.

“We’re struggling here, your honor,” said Feely, while adding that the DOJ is trying to hire to fill the vacant positions.

“I’m sympathetic, but it looks like a crisis of your own making,” responded Moore, who was appointed to the court by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. “If you didn’t advance these legal theories you would not be getting sued.”

There it is. This administration does not follow court precedent. It does not respect the Constitution. It makes up its own rules that are completely unsupported by case law. Then it fires everyone who won’t assist the administration with its dirty work. 1,800 petitions in a single federal district, being handled by a DOJ office that has seen 40% of its workforce resign or get fired for refusing to play by Trump’s rules. And as court orders continue to pile up, the administration still refuses to comply with them.

It’s an unmitigated good that this played out in the open. The problem that hasn’t been addressed is how you rein in a rogue regime that deliberately ignores a co-equal branch of the government. Courts need to start considering their options, including this one:

In cases where federal marshals fail to act to enforce court orders (or contempt of court findings), courts can turn to state and local law enforcement agencies.

Federal judges have the authority to deputize state law enforcement officers to carry out federal court orders, particularly in cases of contempt or defiance by federal officials. State attorneys general, governors, and local sheriffs can be called upon to enforce judicial rulings.

The usual stuff isn’t working. Extreme measures are needed. The question is whether anyone in the court system — or in state law enforcement — has the will to get this done.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

This is classic psychopathic abuser language. “Baby look what you made me do.”

It should never be coming out of the mouth of a government official. It’s horrifying and disqualifying. No, calling ICE murderers for the murders they committed should have zero impact on future murders, and if (accurately) calling ICE murderers leads them to murder more people, then what the fuck are we doing here? Shut down ICE. Fire everyone associated with them, including Tom Homan.

Of course, Homan wasn’t just blaming people for calling murderers murderers. He also wanted to blame the people they murdered for not “complying.”

Once again, saying shit like that should lead to an immediate firing and possibly an investigation. First of all, it’s clear from the videos released after some of the recent ICE shootings that it had nothing to do with people not complying, and appeared to be almost entirely about raging ICE agents who had no interest in de-escalating situations and seemed to be looking to cause harm.

But, more to the point, not complying with a law enforcement demand (especially a ridiculous one) should not result in your execution.

Tom Homan has been credibly accused of accepting $50,000 in a fast food bag to try to curry favor with President Trump. Does Tom Homan think it would have been okay for law enforcement to shoot Tom Homan dead in a Cava restaurant, claiming that he was clearly violating the law in accepting a bribe? Or does he only accept due process when it comes to himself and his friends?

And just as bad, Tom Homan, like so many MAGA leaders, absolutely positively refuses to take any responsibility at all for his own mistakes. First he claims that the mess in Minnesota he inherited didn’t involve any mistakes at all.

Of course it’s funny because in that clip he suggests that he was the one who refused to buy ICE body cams because of the government shutdown (which is a lie; ICE received a ton of money in the earlier budget bill, and Homan knows this. ICE can afford body cameras). But then a couple minutes later, when a reporter asks about the now-revealed anger issues and mental health problems of one of the ICE murderers from last week, suddenly Homan deflects and says to talk to someone at ICE instead.

Dude. Weren’t you just talking about how you were in charge of properly outfitting ICE.

It’s truly astounding how this MAGA administration appears to be fundamentally allergic to ever taking responsibility for anything. This seems like an impossibly short-term strategy. Or simply the product of a government run by people who are in way, way over their heads, but too vain to admit it.

California and eleven other states last week filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, pointing out that the consolidation would undermine market competition, and result in layoffs, higher consumer prices, and product quality hits as the merged company attempts to pay down a massive debt load. As we’ve previously mentioned, every deal involving Warner Brothers has resulted in such an outcome.

Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted a 14-day restraining order after hearing arguments from both sides last Friday. The delay has the potential to be doubled as the courts debate the merits of the state antitrust case. Such delays can sometimes prove fatal for transactions of this size, resulting in mergers being scrapped before antitrust litigation can fully debate the deal merits.

“Plaintiff States’ showing at least demonstrates that serious questions going to the merits remain, weighing in favor of preliminary injunctive relief,” the judge wrote. “Paramount and Warner Bros. will continue to operate as separate, viable companies competing in the marketplace while they wait for the Court to adjudicate this case. The balance of equities, combined with the public’s vital interest in antitrust enforcement, therefore tips sharply in favor of the requested injunctive relief.”

Paramount had previously indicated that the company wouldn’t be harmed by delays until at least the end of September, at which point things could get complicated for Paramount’s merger, and Larry Ellison’s broader media domination ambitions.

Ellison and Oracle are aggressively over-leveraged on AI, and should an AI bubble pop trigger economic reverberations during the antitrust debate, Ellison’s ability to manage the deal debt load and financing could prove less tenable. Especially given that as of September 30, Paramount has promised shareholders a “ticking fee” compensation amounting to about $7 million per day if the deal isn’t closed.

As the antitrust lawsuit loomed, Paramount executives seemed increasingly desperate to rush the deal to completion, at one point (falsely) threatening to leave California, and at another point (falsely) claiming that opponents of the deal were engaged in antisemitism.

]]> https://www.techdirt.com/2026/07/21/paramount-forced-to-delay-warner-bros-merger-after-california-antitrust-lawsuit/comments/feed/ 9 546537 https://www.techdirt.com/2026/07/20/uspto-denies-mlbs-insane-attempt-to-trademark-play-ball/ https://www.techdirt.com/2026/07/20/uspto-denies-mlbs-insane-attempt-to-trademark-play-ball/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2026 03:06:25 +0000 https://www.techdirt.com/?p=546022&preview=true&preview_id=546022 There is no shortage of examples of Major League Baseball attempting to wield overly broad trademarks its obtained to bully others, nor examples of MLB attempting to stretch its trademark rights much further than they go. MLB opposed a trademark for a Brooklyn burger joint on behalf of the Dodgers, a team that hadn’t played in Brooklyn for over five decades at that point. The league, at one point, tried to bully a local Little League for using the names of MLB teams, but not their logos, which is something that roughly every Little League team everywhere does. It attempted to trademark the names of three cities in which MLB teams play. And, my personal favorite and most appropriate for this post, the league opposed a finance company’s trademark application because it claimed two of its separate teams both owned the rights to the letter “W”.

The real lesson in all of this is that the League can’t be trusted with anything other than very narrow trademarks. Anything more broad than that causes them to act the fool. And perhaps this is a lesson the USPTO has actually learned, given that it recently denied MLB’s attempt to trademark the phrase “Play Ball”.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office denied MLB’s application to trademark “Play Ball” for clothing, the USPTO wrote in a final action filing on Friday.

“In this case, the applied-for mark is a commonplace term, message, or expression widely used by a variety of sources that merely conveys an ordinary, familiar, well-recognized concept or sentiment,” the USPTO wrote in its denial.

The USPTO also wrote phrases “that merely convey an informational message are not registerable.”

Those are things that MLB’s well-dressed lawyers absolutely know, of course. But they attempted to bank on a complacent trademark office to try to sneak one past the goalie anyway, to mix metaphors. And if the league had gotten the mark, you can be one hundred percent certain it would have gone on yet another bullying campaign targeting apparel makers, other sports leagues, and who knows who else.

In fact, the most surprising part of all of this is that it appears to have taken 4 years for the USPTO to reach this decision. Josh Gerben breaks it all down like this.

Gerben said the rejection and public domain nature of phrases could depend on the class. Other companies have trademarked “Play Ball,” including a food company for bubble gum, a minerals company for surfacing playgrounds and “The Play Ball” for the gala fundraiser for the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

“In this case they are saying that the phrase has become so ubiquitous and it has this underlying meaning,” Gerben said. “For a clothing brand, the government doesn’t think it’s unique enough to be registered.”

Somehow, some way, we have to get past this practice of looking at trademarks as some kind of retroactive profit center, where a business gobbles them up and then corners a market that was already in existence. That’s all that this sort of attempt to lock up language is. The term “play ball” can be associated with Major League Baseball, certainly. It can also be associated with other sporting activities, or business negotiations, or any other number of things. That’s because it has become a generic phrase, no longer an identifier of the source of a good or service.

Again, MLB’s lawyers knew all of this before applying for the mark. They just didn’t care.

Youth sports have a significant impact on the development of all children. Sports provide children opportunities to build their social skills and confidence, as well as improve their sense of belonging and physical fitness.

What happens to these spaces when adults are given permission to inspect a child’s body to determine their gender?

The Supreme Court rulings on Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. decided that transgender girls cannot play sports that align with their gender identity. Not only does this ruling essentially prohibit transgender kids from participating in most youth sports – codifying the exclusion this vulnerable population already experiences – it also puts all children at risk of the harmful consequences of body surveillance.

I am a social work scholar who studies LGBTQ+ belonging and organizational climate. I’m also a former NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete, and I know firsthand what it’s like to have uninvited scrutiny of your body because strangers doubt your gender.

Based on my research and experience, when policies allow for the bodily surveillance of children, all children are at risk of losing the benefits of youth sports – not just transgender children.

Youth sports as developmental spaces

School sports are not just about competition. They can provide children an important developmental space.

Youth sports can help children improve their sense of competence and confidence. They offer opportunities to practice life skills, such as setting goals, solving problems and thinking positively. Sports can also help protect against depression and stress by bringing supportive adults and positive role models into children’s lives.

However, when youth sports environments become overly stressful, unfair or humiliating, they can also serve as grounds for potentially harmful experiences. For example, coaches and parents can negatively affect a child’s body image by repeatedly criticizing their weight. Teammates and peers can also pressure each other in destructive ways.

The developmental value of youth sports depends on the environment it creates. It stands to follow that ensuring youth sports spaces have as many positive influences as possible is in the best interest of all children.

Research suggests that policies legalizing bodily surveillance are not a positive influence for any child in youth sports.

Bodily surveillance as an avenue for harm

Bodily surveillance plays out in significant ways for all children in youth sports, not just transgender youth. Policies that legalize bodily surveillance for youth open the door to causing harm in unsuspecting children.

Researchers define bodily surveillance as “viewing the body as an outside observer” through active judgments of a person’s physicality, superficial appearance or perceived gender presentation. While bodily surveillance claims to regulate women’s sports in the name of fairness, experts contest the scientific basis of these claims.

Women’s sports have been the site of bodily surveillance for decades, and the cisgender women involved in those sports are all too aware of the ways their bodies are judged through the lens of sexism. Often, how their bodies are judged are influenced by a definition of femininity based primarily on white bodies.

Bodily surveillance can involve assessing how tall is too tall for someone to be a girl? How strong is too strong? How fast is too fast? Who decides when a child exceeds that threshold, and what happens to that child if they do?

Children who compete at the top of their division or class will have to contend with invasive procedures. To evaluate claims of unfair advantages, strangers may request hormone or genetic testing to look for common biological variations that cisgender children and their parents may not even be aware of. Testing may also include genital or pelvic inspection to look for the presence or absence of a penis, or even transvaginal ultrasounds to detect the presence of ovaries.

Strangers are already policing children’s bodies

Bodily scrutiny is not restricted to just transgender children – it already affects cisgender children, too.

In 2022, a high school athlete in Utah was secretly investigated after she defeated other children in a sports competition. Parents of the second- and third-place finishers raised a complaint that led the high school athletics association to analyze her school records back to kindergarten to determine the child’s gender, without consulting her parents. This is a strong example of how people can initiate investigations simply because the child does not look “feminine enough.” In this case the child in question was indeed a cisgender girl.

In 2023, two adults harassed a 9-year-old child at an elementary school track meet. The adults, claiming the girl was transgender, stopped the entire event and demanded she show “certification of her sex.” This was also a cisgender female child.

Strong, athletic women are often subject to suspicion because of their so-called “masculine traits.” As a taller-than-average person who was assigned female at birth, I personally experienced countless moments of bodily scrutiny during my time as a NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete. These experiences made me want to shrink out of public view and did not give me confidence in my athletic performance. Moreover, the effects of this scrutiny bled into my personal life, significantly affecting my self-esteem and self-perception throughout my young adulthood.

Imagine if that scrutiny happened when I was much younger, when I did not yet possess the emotional maturity or life experiences to cope with it. Research shows that such bodily scrutiny is already damaging transgender youth and that bodily shame can significantly affect young people’s mental health, leading to disordered eating and other physical and psychological harm.

When societies give formal permission to scrutinize a child’s body and question whether they belong in a sport, it opens the door to potential harm against all children. Children’s bodies, regardless of their gender identity, become open for people to inspect, create rumors about or render public judgment against them, often without any recourse for the children experiencing harm.

Children who had previously never faced the harms of bodily surveillance may soon be subject to its violence because of this law.

Inclusivity benefits all children

Just as all children can potentially suffer from bodily surveillance regardless of their gender identity, embracing inclusivity can improve the well-being of all children.

Research shows that LGBTQ+-inclusive environments can help all children succeed in school. A 2012 study of nearly 16,000 students in 45 schools found that the presence of a gay-straight alliance reduced truancy, smoking, drinking and suicide attempts. A 2020 study of over 895,000 children found that those in LGBTQ+-inclusive environments reported doing better in school, lower substance use and better mental health.

On the other hand, a 2024 study found that anti-LGBTQ+ language in youth sports negatively affected the self-esteem of all children, including those who do not identify as LGBTQ+.

Youth sports, just like schools and churches, are not just places where children compete, learn facts or practice their faith. These community institutions are places where children build the confidence, relationships and sense of belonging that can shape their adult lives and the impact they’ll have on their family and community in the future.

The scope of sex-based bodily surveillance by necessity extends beyond transgender students, and the effects of this surveillance negatively affects all children involved in youth sports, regardless of identity.

Megan Gandy is Associate Professor of Social Work, West Virginia University

Just recently there were reports of an insane level of market manipulation, in which Trump would buy certain stocks and then pump them up on Truth Social. That alone feels like an impeachable offense, but why stop at merely one layer of corruption when you can profit off of others getting in on the corrupt bargain? Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the company that runs Truth Social, is now going to start selling “early access” to Trump’s posts via an API.

The product, called ‘Truth API’, will deliver posts from the 10 most influential accounts to customers at a significantly faster pace than a regular push notification on the Truth Social platform, a spokesperson said.

The feed is designed for organizations “most impacted by the cost of a delay in information”, such as algorithmic trading firms, the company said in a statement. “Until now… firms that prioritize tracking influential Truth posts have relied on manual monitoring. Truth API closes the gap.”

The move is TMTG’s first step into data licensing, and opens up a new revenue stream for the company, which has faced challenges in scaling its media business amid stiff competition from larger social media firms.

I can pretty much guarantee that delivering such posts from the “10 most influential accounts” is nine accounts too many. This offering is entirely about giving high frequency trading firms that millisecond advantage to front run the market and execute trades based on Trump’s posts to try to get ahead of the chump trades from retail investors swayed by Trump.

TMTG’s CEO doesn’t even try to claim it’s anything else:

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts … As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company,” TMTG’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn said.

And, yes, lots of other internet companies offer licensed API access to content, but for other reasons. The only reason anyone could possibly want this is to get a split second advantage to trade on pronouncements the President of the United States makes. The value of this offering does not grow over time. It has a clear limit: the day Trump is no longer president, the value drops back down close to nothing at all.

If there were an actual legitimate reason to offer such a service, then McGurn could have expressed it, but he just out and out admits that it’s because markets move based on Truth Social posts (he conveniently leaves out that those posts all come from a single user: the president himself, who just happens to own the platform and directly profits off of any of its success).

Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm before taking office to avoid even any whiff of potential conflict. Donald Trump is leaning into the conflict and putting a price tag on it. He’s announcing to the world that they can get early access to pronouncements from the President of the United States… for a price. There is no world in which that should be allowed.