In a first for these game jams, Geouug is a double winner, having taken the prize in two different categories with two different games. As I Lay Flying is the more ambitious submission of the two: it’s a challenging physics-based game based on William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, which tells the story of the Bundren family’s effort to return their recently deceased aunt’s body to her hometown. In the book, it’s a journey of diverse trials and tribuilations; in the game, it’s a slapstick adventure about launching a wagon through the sky.

It’s a fun if slightly finnicky challenge that’s easy to understand but hard to master. There’s more than just the core physics gameplay too: progressing requires purchasing upgrades using the money you earn with each attempt, and the selection of these upgrades is crucial to finishing each stage.

The resource management layer turns As I Lay Flying into a complete game, and it was a strong competitor for Best Digital Game. But even more than that, the game stands out for its graphical ambition, completeness, and attention to detail. Everything is designed to fit into the style and setting, and no interface element is left plain and generic: they are rendered in wood and paint and cloth, with little touches like period-appropriate stamps to mark purchased upgrades. During the main gameplay there are parallax-scrolling backgrounds and physics-based animation of the wagon and its occupants, and the levels are bookended by dialogue and narration scenes illustrated with photos and original character portraits.

Though most of the graphics are composed of very simple pieces (stock grass textures and vector tree silhouettes abound), the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. No corners are cut and nothing feels overlooked. For achieving such a comprehensive graphical style that ties together every element of the game, and with some fun gameplay to boot, it’s this year’s winner for Best Visuals.

Congratulations to Geouug for the win! You can play As I Lay Flying in your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1931!

But this post is not about DLSS 5. Rather, it’s about the video itself and how it was briefly taken down over automated copyright claims thanks to an Italian news channel. Please note that the source material here was written while the video was still down, but it has since been restored.

And now, here we are in April, and NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 announcement trailer is no longer available to watch on YouTube on the company’s official GeForce channel. And no, it’s not because NVIDIA is responding to the feedback and retooling the technology for a re-reveal or re-announcement; it’s now blocked on “copyright grounds.”

A clear mistake, but also one that highlights the limitations of Google’s automated system for YouTube. Apparently, the Italian television channel La7 included footage from the DLSS 5 reveal in a recent broadcast and has since copyrighted it. From there, essentially every video on YouTube with DLSS 5 trailer footage was issued a copyright strike and said to be in violation, with the videos taken down with the following message: “Video unavailable: This video contains content from La7, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.”

Yes, this was clearly a mistake. But it’s a mistake that I’m frankly tired of hearing about, all while Google does absolutely nothing to iterate on its copyright process and systems to mitigate such mistakes. The examples of this very thing are so legion as to be laughable. Whether due to error or due to malicious intent, videos that include content from other videos for the purposes of reporting and commentary, which are then copyrighted and result in takedowns of the source material, happens all the damned time.

This is almost certainly all automated, which means there are no human eyes looking for an error in the flagging of a copyright violation. It just gets tagged as such and taken down. And, no, the irony is not lost on me that we need human eyes to keep an automated copyright takedown on a video about AI from occurring.

What makes this alarming is that the video was taken down with seemingly no human interaction or input, as it’s clear that NVIDIA not only created DLSS 5, for better or worse, but also the trailer that has been a hot topic of discussion this year. We’re assuming this will be resolved fairly quickly. Still, it will be interesting to see whether YouTube responds to this case and claims that false copyright infringement notices like this are prevalent on the platform.

Google hasn’t been terribly interested in commenting on the plethora of cases like this in the past, so I strongly doubt it will now. Which is a damned shame, honestly, because the company really should be advocating for all of the users on its platform, if not especially those that are negatively impacted by this haphazard process.

But, for now, the video is back, so you can go hate-watch it again if you like.

In March, the administration released its National AI Legislative Framework, directing Congress to “prevent the United States government from coercing technology providers, including AI providers, to ban, compel, or alter content based on partisan or ideological agendas.” This policy against government interference with AI is consistent with the administration’s purported light-touch approach to regulating the technology—but contrary to its recent actions.

In February 2025, Vice President Vance denounced “excessive regulation of the AI sector,” endorsing a “deregulatory flavor” of AI policy. Several months later, the administration released its AI Action Plan, pledging to “dismantle unnecessary regulatory barriers” and “onerous regulation.”

At first, the Trump administration followed through on this deregulatory promise. Three days into his second term, President Trump revoked an Executive Order from President Biden which established a government-wide effort to regulate and guide the development of the AI industry. Next, as directed by President Trump’s AI Action Plan, the Office of Science and Technology Policy initiated a proceeding to identify federal rules and regulations “that unnecessarily hinder” AI in order to implement “regulatory reform” and “promote” the technology. Last December, the Federal Trade Commission, led by two Trump appointees, set aside a Biden-era enforcement action against Rytr, an AI-powered writing assistant. The FTC explained that, “after reviewing the final order in response to President Trump’s AI Action Plan,” it concluded “the order unduly burdens innovation in the nascent AI industry.”

Despite the laissez-faire gesturing, however, the administration demonstrates a tyrannical impulse to control AI. In the same breath as denouncing excessive regulation, Vice President Vance demanded that “AI must remain free from ideological bias.” President Trump’s AI Action Plan echoed this command, directing AI companies to design their models “to pursue objective truth rather than social engineering agendas.” This rhetoric elides the fact that the First Amendment bars the government from deciding what constitutes “truth.”

In recent months, the administration has sought to exert control over the industry under the guise of combatting so-called “woke AI.” Last July, President Trump issued an Executive Order on Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government, prohibiting government procurement of AI models unless they are ideologically “neutral,” i.e., “nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI.” In January, Secretary of Defense Hegseth issued a memo instructing the Department of Defense to “utilize models free from usage policy constraints” and banning the DoD from “employ[ing] AI models which incorporate ideological ‘tuning.’”

The memo set the stage for the ongoing dispute between the administration and Anthropic, an American AI company. In July 2025, the DoD contracted with Anthropic to deploy its AI models for national security applications like intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, and cyber operations. In the contract, Anthropic stipulated that the government could not use its models for mass domestic surveillance or to power fully autonomous weapons—arguably violating Hegseth’s rule against usage constraints.

Consequently, in late February, Hegseth threatened to cut ties with Anthropic unless the company allowed the military to use its AI for “all lawful purposes.” When Anthropic refused, President Trump directed federal agencies to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology,” deriding the firm as “A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY.” He threatened to “use the Full Power of the Presidency to make [Anthropic] comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.”

The DoD then designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018, defined as an entity that “may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, extract data, or otherwise manipulate” the technology it provides “so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise manipulate” the use of the technology or the “information stored or transmitted” thereon. The government has never applied this designation to a U.S. company; it is typically reserved for foreign intelligence agencies, terrorists, and hostile actors. As a result, Anthropic may not provide products or services to the DoD, and contractors may not use its products while working on DoD projects. 

On March 9, Anthropic sued the administration in federal court, challenging the designation and seeking an injunction blocking its implementation. The company pleaded that the Trump administration has “harm[ed] Anthropic irreparably,” jeopardizing public and private contracts and costing it “hundreds of millions of dollars in the near-term,” as well as attacking “Anthropic’s reputation and core First Amendment freedoms.”

On March 26, the District Court for the Northern District of California sided with Anthropic and granted a preliminary injunction barring a variety of federal agencies from terminating their contracts. The court also blocked the DoD and Hegseth from implementing the supply chain risk designation. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin observed that the Trump administration is “punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government’s contracting position,” which “is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation.” Last week, the administration appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit.

Hegseth accused Anthropic of “duplicity,” but it is the Trump administration that has been duplicitous about its approach to AI. Despite championing deregulation, the administration has weaponized the federal government to punish an American AI company for refusing to bend to its will. Abusing the government procurement process to crush domestic AI firms is the opposite of light-touch regulation.

Judge Lin described the Trump administration’s actions against Anthropic as “Orwellian.” The administration has shown its ugly side on AI, and it looks a lot like tyranny. 

Andy Jung is associate counsel at TechFreedom, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank focused on technology law and policy.

Trump recently announced a “cease fire” with Iran (which apparently isn’t even a cease fire), but refused to state what the conditions of the cease fire or long term peace actually are. The Iranian Security Council issued a list of ten demands that, if agreed to, would leave Iran in a stronger position than when this whole idiocy started:

Some news outlets, like CNN, simply reported directly on what Iran had claimed. This, as you might expect, upset Donald Trump and his top FCC censor Brendan Carr, who are now threatening an “investigation” of CNN for simply repeating what was publicly stated:

Not mentioned (of course) is the fact that Fox News also reported the Iran statement, yet avoided being called out by the president:

Trump later would issue another statement over at his right wing propaganda website, calling for criminal action against CNN (and CNN only), while making up a whole bunch of nonsense (he may or may not believe is actually true):

Trump’s sensitivity here suggests they’re well aware that a massive, superior military has been getting dog-walked by Iranians because Trump and his advisors were too stupid to understand modern, cheap drone warfare and how shipping in the Straight of Hormuz actually worked. The shipping logjam is driving up gas prices and making life difficult for Republicans ahead of the midterms.

There is, of course, absolutely zero basis for any meaningful criminal action against CNN here of any kind that wouldn’t be laughed out of court on free speech grounds. As we’ve seen with corporate media that doesn’t mean they won’t still capitulate embarrassingly, but so far CNN is standing its ground. As it should, since again, all it did was report on an Iranian statement in a very basic way alongside dozens of other news outlets.

The bigger threat, as I keep noting, is CNN’s looming acquisition by Larry Ellison as part of the Paramount Warner Brothers merger. CNN under current management is already very friendly to right wing ideology (see its enthusiastic platforming of MAGA bullshitter Scott Jennings). Under Ellison’s ownership (see: Bari Weiss at CBS) there’s little doubt CNN will be converted into yet another Trump agitprop network.

At which point, Trump will move on to threatening any remaining U.S. corporate media outlets that haven’t either embarrassingly capitulated or been purchased by a right wing billionaire. This is, as I keep repeating, an exact copy of Victor Orban’s autocratic media policy in Hungary, which involves having party-loyal oligarchs buy up all corporate media outlets and pummel the public with propaganda while the government strangles what’s left of real, independent reporting just out of frame.

During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect. Many of them are ten or twenty years old, with the oldest we have found so far being a now-patched 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD—an operating system known primarily for its security.

That’s quite the tool, if it can help find vulnerabilities so that they can be patched.

But it’s also quite the tool to help find vulnerabilities so that they can be exploited. Like so many tools, including technological tools, whether they are good or bad depends entirely in how they are used. A hammer is a really helpful tool for building things, but it also smashes windows. And with this news, AI now has the capability for some really destructive uses.

To try to prevent them, Anthropic is working with some of the largest tech companies in the world to let them use a preview of its model on their own software to help QA them and proactively patch vulnerabilities. As Casey Newton reports:

Anthropic announced Mythos alongside Project Glasswing, an initiative with more than 40 of the world’s biggest tech companies that will see Anthropic grant early access to the model to find and patch vulnerabilities across many of the world’s most important systems. Launch partners in the coalition include Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco and Broadcom.

They’ll be tasked with scanning and patching their own systems along with the critical open-source systems that modern digital infrastructure depends on. Anthropic is giving participants $100 million in usage credits for Mythos, and donating another $4 million to open-source security efforts.

This sounds like a great program. It also should be noted that the Mythos model is not consumer-grade AI; it takes expensive, dedicated infrastructure to run, which means that, at least for the moment, there’s not an imminent danger of it being misused. But trouble is nevertheless brewing, and someday it will be here, which raises certain questions, like:

(A) What about other AI models, which will inevitably be similarly powerful? What if they are produced by less ethical companies, who would have no compunction against rogue actors using their systems in destructive ways that Project Glasswing won’t have intercepted?

(B) And what about every single legacy technology system in use, which Project Glasswing is unlikely to be able to retroactively fix? Large, resourced companies may be able to weather the on-coming storm, but what about your local dentist office? Or a hospital? Municipal IT systems? Networked technology is everywhere, and these smaller businesses and institutions are likely to both have older, unpatched technology and also fewer resources to update and secure them, or deal with the consequences of a hack, which can be devastating for the business or the people they serve.

On the other hand, there does seem to be one other bit of good news with this revelation: governments, including that of the United States, have often engaged in the dubious practice of hording zero-days, or collecting information about vulnerabilities that they then kept secret so that they could exploit them themselves by using them on an adversary. For those unfamiliar, “zero-day” refers to a vulnerability that has yet to be disclosed, which is why it’s on “day zero,” or before the first day of it being a known vulnerability that could now be fixed.

Mythos’s capabilities would seem to obviate this strategy, because suddenly the stash of unknown vulnerabilities isn’t really going to be such a secret, since anyone using the model will be able to find them. Mythos’s existence changes the balance of interests, where the stronger national security play by the government would be to disclose any discovered vulnerability to the vendor as soon as possible so that they can be patched and our nation’s systems more secured. Arguably that was always the better national security play, but now there’s definitely no upside to trying to keep them secret because it now definitely needs to be presumed that adversaries will be able to find and exploit them. They’ll have the tools.

With these AI models we’re going to need to presume that everyone is going to have the tools to know about every vulnerability. Up to now there has been at least the illusion of some security, because vulnerabilities couldn’t be exploited if no one knew about them, and finding vulnerabilities is hard. But now that it will be easy, the risk to the nation’s cybersecurity is greater than we have ever before contended with.

It is also not really a great harbinger that we know about Mythos because… a copy of the software got leaked. It’s just the software that was leaked and not the models it uses to tune its “reasoning,” which means that anyone trying to now build their own Mythos is still missing an important piece if they want to mimic its full capabilities, but they would have a lot. Which is probably why Anthropic has been sending DMCA takedown notices to have the leaked software removed from the Internet.

But doing so raises a related issue: the role of copyright law when it comes to “vibe coding,” or “having an AI system write the software rather than a programmer, just by instructing it on what to do. It’s especially important in light of the cybersecurity concerns always raised by software (and including vibe-coded software, as we’re having to trust that what’s produced does not have vulnerabilities). Copyright requires a human author, which raises the question: can software written by an AI be copyrightable? The answer would appear to be no, unless there was a great deal of creative effort on the part of a human being to instruct the AI or modify the output. But as Ed Lee chronicled, per Anthropic itself, even its own software (“pretty much 100%”) is being written by AI. And if that’s the case, then Anthropic has no business sending takedown notices for its software because DMCA takedown notices are only for demanding the removal of copyrighted works, which, it would appear, Anthropic’s own code does not qualify for.

But maybe it’s better if software stops being subject to copyright. “Vibe coding,” is becoming increasingly efficient, to the point that there is likely no need for copyright to incentivize its authorship. Instead, what public policy really needs to emphasize is that whatever software is produced is secure software. But in many ways copyright obstructs that goal, like through its lengthy terms, which mean that while a copyright holder might not still be maintaining its older software, no one else can maintain and patch it either, without potentially infringing the software’s copyright.  Or through its privileged secrecy (unusually for copyright, when it comes to software you don’t actually have to disclose all the actual code to register a copyright in it!) and other powers to lock out security research efforts, like through Section 1201 of the DMCA, when such efforts aren’t specifically supported by the developer–assuming the developer supports any security testing at all, as right now there aren’t necessarily the incentives to make them care about it.  Instead public policy has given them the ability, like with copyright, to escape oversight of the security of their software products, even as those products end up embedded in more and more of our lives.

It’s time to change that focus and get copyright out of the way of making software security our top policy priority.

And fast.

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The horrors seen in jails and prisons are often compounded at immigrant detention facilities. While some duty of less-than-minimal care might be extended to imprisoned US citizens, it’s far more often ignored when federal officers believe (mistakenly) that migrants aren’t protected by the Constitution.

The litany of violations stretches back forever. Techdirt doesn’t stretch back quite that far, but let’s take a stroll down memory lane.

From 2022, back when Biden was still in office and people like me were thinking no one would ever elect Trump to office again:

ICE’s ‘Fierce Commitment’ To Ensuring Detainees Are Cared For Properly Includes Inadequate Staffing, Unsanitary Facilities

That’s taken from a report demanding (“Management Alert”) the immediate removal of all detainees from this New Mexico detention center due to numerous violations, including a shortage of 112 employees and no less than 83 cells with “inoperable” sinks and toilets.

Going back further to Trump’s first administration:

Report Shows ICE Almost Never Punishes Contractors Housing Detainees No Matter How Many Violations They Rack Up

In this Inspector General’s report, we learned that only 28 of 106 contractors were provided with the tools needed to meet minimum “performance standards.” We also learned that the $3.9 billion being thrown to private contractors was shored up by absolutely no level of accountability. ICE approved 96% of waivers requested by contractors who failed to meet minimum housing standards for detainees.

While it’s been a persistent problem, things are significantly worse now. The Trump administration is detaining more migrants than ever before. It’s also far more willing to pawn these duties off on private prison contractors who prioritize making money over taking care of the people thrust into their care by Trump’s top bigots.

On top of that, the administration is fighting wars on several litigation fronts in hopes of preventing any form of oversight from slowing its roll towards total migrant annihilation. Everything that was bad before is getting so much worse.

Thanks to the White House Merchant of Death, RFK Jr., measles outbreaks are being reported at detention facilities. Thanks to absolutely every-fucking-body else in the administration, reports of inhumane conditions are somehow still on the rise, even after years of regularly reported inhuman conditions at ICE facilities.

Here’s even more. At a facility where guards were caught setting up suicide “death pools” for inmates, more evidence of deliberate cruelty and inhumane treatment has surfaced. The host of ongoing atrocities is none other than Camp East Montana, comfortably nestled in the heartland of the “who gives a fuck about immigrants” Fifth Circuit: El Paso, Texas.

Here’s the New York Times with the details of more man’s inhumanity to man, as personified by “immigration enforcement” forces of Trump’s second term.

An inspection in February of Camp East Montana in Texas, one of the country’s largest immigration detention centers, found dozens of violations of national standards, including instances that may have exposed detainees to illnesses and uses of force that were not documented, a new report found.

[…]

The inspection, which was carried out by the agency over three days in February and included interviews with 49 detainees, found that there were at least 49 overall “deficiencies” from national standards at the camp. Of all the deficiencies, 22 involved use of force and restraints, and five involved issues related to medical care. 

ICE actually released this inspection report. However, it did make sure names were changed redacted to protect the innocent guilty. While it’s uncharacteristically protective of the inspectors, it also makes sure we may never know which “Creative Corrections” employees helped make this detention center the hell hole it is.

Other censorship by the administration deliberately denies Americans access to the facts. What possible purpose is served here, other than allowing the government to pretend its rights violations were somehow excused by the [redacted] passage of time?

The government not only censored the number of detainee files reviewed, but also the ratio of files in noncompliance. What escapes ICE’s black-boxed attempts to redeem itself is this, which is plenty damning on its own:

[I]nitial classification process and initial housing assignments were not completed within 12 hours of detainees’ admission […]; rather they were completed 14 hours to 25 days after [admission]…

Everything that might show how often (or how frequently) violations occurred has been removed. It’s a deliberate muddying of the statistical waters. Who knows what’s behind the black box? It could mean rights were violated 10% of the time. Or it could mean rights were violated almost every time. But we the people — you know, the ones expected to foot the bill for this bullshit — aren’t allowed to know the actual details of what’s being done in our names.

If the government wants to play it that way, fine. We’ll just assume the worst and dare it to provide evidence to the contrary. And we know it never will. If or when the government decides to unredact this report, it will undoubtedly show us what we’ve always assumed: The administration and its contractors routinely abused detainees and violated their rights because the people in charge made it clear they don’t consider migrants to be humans.

And that makes this news as inevitable as it is deplorable:

So far this year, 14 people have died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, including a Mexican man who was found unresponsive last week at a facility outside Los Angeles, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

If that seems like a low (or worse, an acceptable) number of deaths, think again:

In 2025, ICE reported 33 total in-custody deaths and in 2024 there were 11.

Deaths in ICE custody tripled under Trump during his first year back in office. If this pace continues, we’ll be looking at 56 in-custody deaths, which would nearly double the same number Trump managed to triple in 2025.

This will only get worse. The administration is still trying to buy up any warehouses it can to repurpose as detention centers. The workload is being stretched even thinner, leaving private citizens more poorly trained than current ICE officers in charge of the lives and well-being of thousands of detainees. The misery and death will continue. Unfortunately for us, this administration not only welcomes blood on its hands, but revels in it.

But there’s trouble in paradise: a judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the merger from proceeding. For now.

“Defendants must immediately cease all ongoing actions relating to integration and consolidation of Nexstar and Tegna,” wrote Troy Nunley, the chief judge in US District Court for the Eastern District of California.

The savior in this case is curiously DirecTV, not-long-ago spun off from its own disastrous union with AT&T. DirecTV filed suit saying that the consolidation in local broadcast TV will erode what’s left of competition in the local broadcast TV sector, harming product quality, opinion diversity, and labor, while resulting in higher overall prices (for everyone) in exchange for even worse product.

From the restraining order:

“Nexstar admits the merger will greatly increase its already huge “scale” and its “leverage,” i.e., the ability to force its TV distribution customers, including Plaintiff, to pay even
higher fees for local news, live sports, and other content they distribute to their subscribers.
Plaintiff alleges Nexstar will also shut down local newsrooms in dozens of markets, reducing the amount, variety, and quality of local broadcast news that Americans rely on for trusted
information about their communities. Plaintiff asserts those harms from reduced
competition are precisely what antitrust laws are designed to prevent.”

Nexstar was so certain the merger was a done deal, it had begun changing the physical signs and logos on many of the acquired stations it had begun integrating, something it’s since been forced to reverse. The company has also tried to insist it can’t comply with some of the Judge’s demands because some aspects of the early integration “can’t be undone.”

The deal would combine Nexstar’s stable of more than local 200 stations with Tegna’s 65 outlets in major markets nationwide, blowing past restrictions that no company can control more than 39 percent of households (the new combined company reaches 54.5 percent). In addition to the NexStar lawsuit, the companies are also being sued by a coalition of eight attorneys general and consumer groups.

Since Rupert Murdoch convinced Ronald Reagan to eliminate laws preventing one mogul from owning a paper and TV station in one market, Republican policies (and corporations) have pushed relentlessly to pursue the goal of a monolithic, highly consolidated media in exclusive service to the extraction class and corporate power. The result has been anything but subtle.

Media scholars have been warning about the perils of this for decades, but only recently, under the ham-fisted efforts of Trumpism, have people truly begun seeing the full outline of the threat. The media sector (like most U.S. sectors) desperately needs an antitrust renaissance; and if the federal government is no longer willing to engage in adult supervision, other parties will have to fill the void.

They were wrong about that, as we said in the previous post. Creative works are given wide latitude in trademark law, specifically in that the Rogers test typically applies. Even in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s terrible ruling on parody in the case of the Bad Spaniels and Jack Daniels lawsuit, this was always a situation in which the Rogers test would definitely apply. Specifically, SCOTUS’ decision that Rogers doesn’t apply when the offending trademark is used as a source identifier, because we’re talking about a fictional team used in a wider work of fiction, meaning the use isn’t an identifier or any source.

Netflix and Warner petitioned for dismissal for those very reasons and the now the court has agreed and the suit has been dismissed.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia Valenzuela said ‌on Tuesday , opens new tab that the fictional Los Angeles Waves basketball team in “Running Point” did not violate the Malibu, California, school’s rights because the show did not use the “Waves” name and ​logo as trademarks.

The ruling goes into much more detail, of course. It very specifically examines whether the Rogers test applies, deciding it does based on the usage. For example:

Here, Plaintiff fails to allege that the Waves mark was used by Defendants to exploit the success of Plaintiff’s sports teams or to create an association between the Running Point series and Pepperdine’s teams. Rather, at most, the FAC shows that the Waves mark is “immediately recognized” to identify the Running Point series, and that its use is synonymous with the series. These allegations, which Plaintiff concludes show that the Waves mark is used to “identify the show” are still not sufficient to show that the Waves mark was used as a designation of source for the series. Plaintiff’s repeated use of the words “identify” and “source-identification” do not actually show how the Waves mark was used to identify the source of the series. Rather, here, Defendants clearly claim to be the source of the series.

Finally, the Court is not persuaded by Plaintiff’s arguments regarding the marketing of the show or Defendants’ behavior in similar uses. Although Plaintiff alleges that Defendants’ used the Waves mark in marketing the Running Point series, this does not alter the Court’s above analysis that the Waves mark is not used to identify the source of the series. And the fact that Defendants have obtained trademarks in fictional businesses central to their shows in the past again does not show that Defendants have used the Waves mark to identify the source of Running Point here.

The ruling goes on to note that if Rogers applies, the Lanham Act does not. With source identifying out of the equation, the only remaining question is if the use in this case is artistically relevant. As the fictional team the main character owns, the name of that team is obviously artistically relevant.

Pepperdine has been given leave to amend its complaint into something that is actually legally sound, but I’m struggling to understand what that would even be. In lieu of an amended complaint, it seems that some creative works are still protected some of the time from nonsense trademark infringement claims, even in a post Bad Spaniels world.

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In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Fadza Madzingira, a digital policy expert with a decade of experience at Meta, Salesforce, Ofcom and currently Twitch, where she leads the policy, outreach and education teams. Together, they discuss:

• Exclusive: Meta has discussed ending funding to the Oversight Board (Platformer)
• Spotlight: Five Years of the Oversight Board, from Experiment to Essential Institution (Ctrl-Alt-Speech)
• What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots (The New York Times)
• Early Lessons from Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban for the Rest of the World (Tech Policy Press)
• Stuck in the Middleware with Youth with Vaishnavi J (Ctrl-Alt-Speech)
• Greece to ban social media for under-15s from 2027, calls on EU action (Reuters)
• The Family Tech Cycle: Navigating Screens, Devices, and Social Media (Joan Ganz Cooney Center)

We’re still yet to find a Ctrl-Alt-Speech 2026 Bingo Card winner — could this week be your lucky day? Play along.