If you need a reminder on how we got here, here you go. In June of ’25, Kennedy fired every single member of the CDC’s ACIP panel, a group of advisers that recommends vaccine schedules for the country. He then appointed what were eventually 13 new members to ACIP, nearly all of them virulent anti-vaxxers or otherwise aligned with Kennedy’s misinformed views on medicine and science. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued earlier this year, arguing that Kennedy had violated the American Procedures Act (APA) by his actions, specifically because he did not follow evidence, proper procedure, or factual science in the appointments. The court agreed, ruling against the administration and issuing a preliminary injunction on HHS for staffing ACIP with the new appointees and nixing any of the recommendations it had made thus far.

And so now the administration has appealed that ruling, though it’s any wonder as to what the administration’s arguments will be for the appeal.

A filing Wednesday evening in the District of Massachusetts indicates the administration is appealing Judge Brian Murphy’s order March 16. Murphy put any decisions made by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee on hold, ruling that Kennedy replaced the committee “unlawfully.”

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate signed the appeal.

The Justice Department could file a motion for emergency relief to get the court to act on its appeal immediately. That would require the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to act quickly in deciding whether to stay, or pause, the March 16 ruling.

Regardless, the court activity on this will likely eventually take months to work out. The AAP isn’t backing down, with its attorney vowing to respond to the appeal and taking the posture that it believes they will prevail. Reading the APA statute, I very much tend to agree, but this is Trump 101 stuff. Never back down, exhaust every legal avenue to get your way, and hope someone along the way fucks this up so you get your way. That the final leg on this journey might be a Supreme Court that often looks like another part of the Executive Branch, rather than an independent arm of government is certainly part of the calculus.

But in the meantime, two things remain true. The Trump administration, which has at times made noises about wanting to rein in Kennedy and his nonsense, is working hard to allow him to continue to make America sicker. And because of Kennedy’s refusal to follow basic protocol and science, the country is without a competent body to advise on vaccination schedules.

Meanwhile, the status of the advisory panel — a key group meant to be composed of vaccine experts independent of government influence — is in limbo.

A meeting that had been scheduled for March at which members were expected to discuss Covid shots has been postponed indefinitely. The committee is supposed to meet again in late June. There is no agenda yet.

Given the current makeup of the panel, that may indeed be the best possible outcome currently. But it’s not a long term plan, nor a long term positive. ACIP existed for a reason. The country needs intelligent, sincere, and sane people advising the country on how to combat infectious diseases with medicine and technology.

We are without that right now, purely because Trump thought putting Kennedy in charge of HHS was anything other than a form of national self-harm.

The Google Books Library Project can be instructive. In the mid-2000s, research libraries partnered with Google to digitize and preserve millions of volumes in their collections. To solve the problem of how to store and provide access to a massive number of scanned books, research libraries banded together to create HathiTrust, a secure, searchable repository that remains in use today. Of course, this didn’t happen without legal challenges. Authors Guild separately sued Google and HathiTrust for copyright infringement in what came to be known as the “Google Books” cases. But these cases ultimately established the legal precedent that copying books to create a digital searchable database is fair use. Based on this precedent, research methods such as text and data mining are possible because of mass digitization, and lawful under fair use.

Based on Google Books and other litigation, libraries put a stake in the ground when it comes to copyright law: training AI models on copyrighted works generally is fair use, a position articulated by the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) in 2023, and updated in light of recent court decisions. In two of those decisions, Kadrey v. Meta and Bartz v. Anthropic, judges held that training AI models on copyrighted works is transformative and therefore fair use. It’s worth noting that these cases are in a commercial context. It is likely that a court would rule in favor of AI uses in educational, research, and scholarly contexts, as those are favored uses under fair use.

Meanwhile, disagreements over AI safety, harm prevention, bias mitigation, and abuse have held up federal AI legislation in the US. But these are not new problems for libraries, which have developed norms to balance the collection and preservation of sensitive information in archives and special collections with the imperative to provide the broadest possible user access to digitized content. One example is the 2010 ARL principles to guide vendor/publisher relations in large scale digitization projects with special collections, which calls for libraries to make material available to the public while providing context to aid in the understanding of that material. Libraries have also developed frameworks for stewarding materials of vulnerable communities and historically marginalized groups, like the Library of Congress access policy on culturally sensitive materials relating to Indigenous peoples, which includes transparent procedures for controlled access and use of culturally sensitive materials.

Congress has also been legislating in the dark around issues like transparency and provenance in AI training, and many of the proposals we have seen so misunderstand these concepts that they threaten to bring the university-based research enterprise to a halt. Libraries already do what Congress is trying to mandate — authenticating, contextualizing, and documenting collections — but the legislation is too disconnected from this expertise, and as a result unworkable for the institutions that actually practice rigorous provenance.

As AI governance debates continue to stall on Capitol Hill, library norms offer a foundation for approaching AI training and research in a way that is responsible, steeped in library expertise, and advances the public interest.

With gratitude to Betsy Rosenblatt, Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University Law School

Katherine Klosek is the Director of Information Policy and Federal Relations at the Association of Research Libraries.

More specifically, tech companies like Cisco and IBM were pushing Colorado lawmakers to sign off on  SB26-090, the Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair law, which would neuter much of the state’s existing protections under the pretense of making the public safer.

After previous journalism from the likes of Ars Technica and Wired drew some unwanted attention, the effort appears to have failed, according to Wired:

“SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House’s State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely.”

Like many similar efforts, tech companies falsely tried to convince lawmakers that making things cheaper and easier to repair would pose entirely new privacy and security risks, and that independent repair shops would be prone to make constant and dangerous mistakes. Pre-Trump Lina Khan era FTC studies had repeatedly indicated those claims are false.

In this case, IBM and Cisco had tried to use an updated definition of “critical infrastructure” that was so large and vague as to render all the protections meaningless. While they failed this time, they’ll be back. Countless companies, across countless industries, are desperate to boost revenues by monopolizing repair and driving up the cost of ownership for consumers and other companies alike.

Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. And of those states, not one has actually managed to enforce their new laws despite no shortage of targets, something that gets curiously omitted by most reporting, and indicates the movement has a lot of work left to do.

Patel serves at the president’s pleasure, as all political appointees do. But Trump’s pleasure is more unpredictable than most. Perhaps realizing his time frame for making hay is extremely short, Patel has done very little in terms of leadership, preferring to spend his time (allegedly) partying it up when not (allegedly) failing to gain the trust and respect of the Bureau.

When not saying stupid things on social media or during press conferences, Patel likes to leverage his position to do things like… hang out in the US Olympic hockey team locker room as they celebrated their gold medal win.

Consequently, plenty has been published about Patel’s (alleged) inability to stay sober and/or do his damn job. A shocking expose of Patel’s (alleged) constant insobriety prompted Patel to respond in the fashion he’s been accustomed to during his tenure as FBI Director. He filed a libel lawsuit against The Atlantic over its reporting on his months of (allegedly) unprofessional behavior.

Hilariously, Patel and his lawyers relied on a previous lawsuit he had filed against MSNBC for its earlier reporting on pretty much the same subject, taking particular objection to this statement made by reporter Frank Figliuzzi:

Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building. 

Perhaps he should have waited until his first lawsuit had been fully litigated. The lawsuit he used as part of his arguments in favor of “actual malice” was dismissed, with the judge finding in favor of MSNBC and Figliuzzi.

So, this is one the things Patel seems to be involved in daily, which isn’t actually a part of his day-to-day duties as FBI Director. The other thing he seems to be doing on a regular basis is ensuring the people who still work for him won’t want to work for him for much longer.

FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, and has been described as being in panic mode to save his job and find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development.

[…]

The director has also avoided meeting this week with some key operational leaders of the bureau, the people said, raising concerns inside the FBI about Patel’s ability to stay abreast of pressing threats and investigations in order to make the best decisions.  

Will this reporting prompt another lawsuit from Kash Patel? I would hope his lawyers are smarter than Patel appears to be, because going back to the same well so quickly following a libel lawsuit loss might add sanctions to the humiliation of another public loss in a federal court.

The funniest thing about this reporting is that the FBI official spokesman, Ben Williamson, refused to deny the use of polygraph tests, instead deciding to deny the assertion that Patel isn’t regularly attending meetings with key FBI officials. It’s not like Williamson couldn’t have just lied about the polygraphs. This is an administration that is willing to lie about pretty much anything at any time. Having their lies exposed doesn’t regularly result in firing, which means blatantly lying has nearly no professional consequences. But Williamson just decided to ignore a question he didn’t want to answer.

The refusal to even address this claim implies that it’s true. And why shouldn’t it be? This is nothing new for Kash Patel and his particular version of the FBI:

Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself.

In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel, according to two people with knowledge of the questions and others familiar with similar accounts. In one instance, officials were forced to take a polygraph as the agency sought to determine who disclosed to the news media that Mr. Patel had demanded a service weapon, an unusual request given that he is not an agent. The number of officials asked to take a polygraph is in the dozens, several people familiar with the matter said, though it is unclear how many have specifically been asked about Mr. Patel.

Those were the (alleged) facts on the ground as of July 2025. Since then, Patel hasn’t done much to distance himself from allegations of misusing his position for personal gain, whether it’s trying to get special treatment from the Bureau itself, or crashing Olympic celebrations just because he can.

I find it hard to believe even Patel himself thinks he’s actually leading the FBI. After all, this is the same guy who (allegedly!) thought he’d been fired when he bungled one too many login attempts. But he’s the perfect guy for the Trump administration: someone who spreads falsehoods, yells “fake news” whenever publicly criticized, files lost-cause lawsuits against people protected by the First Amendment, and will quietly accept his dismissal whenever Trump decides to turn on him.

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As you’ll recall, when Elon Musk first started buying up Twitter stock, before he officially decided to buy the whole company, he blew past the SEC-mandated deadline to reveal publicly that he had accumulated over 5% of the stock. Indeed, Musk waited until he held nearly 10% of the company’s stock before revealing his position at all. Many shareholders were rightly pissed off about this, because it likely diminished the value of their shares. There’s a reason the law says you need to disclose crossing that 5% line.

And, to be clear, this isn’t one of those gray areas of the law. This is a case where Elon pretty clearly violated the law in very obvious ways. But because the Biden admin was so terrified of looking even remotely biased against Elon, the SEC took nearly three years investigating the case (and yes, part of that was Elon trying to ignore investigatory demands) before finally suing him… in the last week of the Biden admin.

I’m somewhat amazed it took this long, but earlier this week, the Trump SEC announced a settlement. Despite the blatant flouting of the rules — which likely cost Twitter shareholders millions of dollars — the settlement requires Elon to pay $1.5 million. That’s basically pocket change to the world’s richest man. It’s not even a slap on the wrist, which might sting a bit.

And, of course, plenty of people are noticing what kind of signal this sends during one of the most corrupt US Presidential administrations in history:

“I do think that it suggests if you’re wealthy or powerful enough then there aren’t going to be consequences,” said Fagel, who previously led the SEC’s San Francisco office. “The optics of this are terrible.”

Perhaps in the grand scheme of things this doesn’t much matter. No real fine was going to matter much to Elon Musk. He has enough money to be shielded from effectively any monetary punishment — they could fine him 99% of his wealth and he’d still be richer than basically anyone reading this.

But it’s this kind of thing, and the lack of real consequences for it, that undermine our trust in institutions and the rule of law. The message being sent is hard to miss: if you’re wealthy enough and loyal enough to Trump, the rules simply don’t apply to you.

Now a coalition of press groups, including Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and Reporters Without Borders, are pressing Paramount regarding “potentially corrupt acquisitions and deals” they argue could undermine shareholder value by degrading the (already sagging) quality of journalism at CBS News and CNN, while “relinquishing editorial control of major news outlets to the Trump administration.”

In a letter sent to former Trump DOJ “antitrust enforcer” (using that term ironically) turned Paramount top lawyer Makan Delrahim, the groups highlight all the dodgy bullshit that we’ve well-covered over the last year, whether it’s CBS paying the president a $16 million bribe to gain merger approval, CBS agreeing to install an “ombudsman” to ensure the network is consistently kissing the president’s ass, or Paramount billionaire owner Larry Ellison privately meeting with his friend Trump to promise he’d fire certain CNN anchors if the government allowed him to buy Warner Brothers.

The journalism groups make the point that the Ellison family effort to turn CBS into a Trump and Netanyahu-friendly agitprop machine has been disastrous for the company’s share price. And because both organizations are technically shareholders, they’re demanding deeper access to the Paramount books to see what other dodgy bullshit may not have been revealed yet:

“Since Paramount Skydance announced its most consequential Trump-friendly changes at CBS News in October — acquiring The Free Press and appointing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief — the company’s market capitalization has decreased by 40%, wiping out more than $8 billion in shareholder value. Ratings for key programs, like “CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil,” have also dropped precipitously. Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders, which are both shareholders in Paramount Skydance Corp., are entitled to inspect the company’s books and records related to these developments under Section 220 of the Delaware General Corporation Law.”

They’ve given Paramount five days to respond to their request for more documents and data related to any promises Paramount may have made the Trump administration. I’m not convinced the gambit will go anywhere, but it’s nice to see these kinds of groups (historically absent from many of these fights) suddenly paying closer attention to media consolidation.

Larry Ellison’s interests here are two-fold. He wanted to gift his nepobaby son David with two major Hollywood studios so David can pretend he’s a very big boy doing very serious things. But he’s also keen on dismantling what’s left of journalism at places like CBS News and CNN (already reeling from years of corporate cowardice) turning them into right-wing friendly agitprop mills that are even more friendly to his favorite autocrats (Trump and Netanyahu).

You’ll recall Bari Weiss sold herself to Paramount as an expert who could modernize CBS News through virality and mass audience appeal (despite having no actual experience in journalism). But Weiss, who got her start at the helm of a strange contrarian troll blog, has the instincts and ideas of a 90 year old man, and clearly isn’t capable of generating watchable propaganda in any ratings-grabbing way that actually appeals to anyone (even MAGA folks, who already have no limit of agitprop options).

The Trump administration will certainly rubber stamp the deal. Paramount will likely keep this effort locked up in the courts indefinitely. And the Democrats’ demand for the FCC to investigate the dodgy Chinese and Saudi financing propping up the deal isn’t likely to go anywhere. That leaves a collaborative looming lawsuit by state AGs as the most likely path toward ensuring this deal never gets off the ground.

But even if the deal gets approved, this giant company’s long-term survival is far from guaranteed. Especially given the shaky state of Hollywood, the steady enshittification of streaming, and the fact that there’s very little evidence that the any of the Paramount folks are competent.

There’s a very high likelihood that the combination of Paramount’s massive debt load from both the CBS and Warner deals– and fleeing audience (either bored by bad product or disgusted by the companies’ Trump allegiances) — combines with Larry Ellison’s over-extension on AI to result in some very precarious financial footing.

These major media deals always go terribly for consumers and labor, but execs often benefit from tax breaks, temporary stock boosts, and compensation in no way dictated by competency (see: CEO David Zaslav). But this series of deals is so massive and problematic, it could generate some very significant pain for the extraction class, and make all past merger disasters seem adorable by comparison.

I’d explain it, but the comments don’t allow for a script that loads a completely different explanation every time you glance at it or respond to it, whatever serves the argument in the moment.

In second place on the insightful side, it’s another comment on that same post, with a more accurate description of the absurdity of the claim:

This feels like Robert E. Lee telling slaves that they shouldn’t criticize him for fighting the North so hard in order to preserve the “right” of slaveholders to enslave them.

It’s an inherently patronizing and blatantly bullshit take. He also seems to think unpopular just means “people don’t like it” rather than “it’s actually an unconstitutional power grab.”

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from that post, this time from Berenerd offering another rebuke of Roberts:

Flying flags upside down in solidarity with insurrectionists, overturning decades old precedents including one that there was no real case before the court, but it was seen anyway because Pro-Choice kills babies. I think even on was overturned taking the exact opposite of the text of the law in question but I can’t find it…

Nope, nothing to suggest they are not trying to legislate from the bench.

Next, it’s Drew Wilson with a comment about the media’s approach to reporting on Trump:

It’s a clear cut example of sanewashing by the media. Yet, when you point out that it’s obvious sanewashing, the media types will whine about how they are not sanewashing and that they are just “clarifying” or “explaining” what the president meant. Then, the media will turn around and wonder why so few trust them anymore afterwards. It’s all frustrating, but it has also been going on for years now. It’s gotten to the point that this is hardly surprising.

Even the Canadian media when covering the US president does it. Live footage gets put out with Trump with his usual senile crazed rantings that make no sense at all, then when they cut back to the reporters who “break it down for all of us”, they basically do everything in their power to make Trump look as presidential as humanly possible. Sometimes, they’ll admit that he can be “unpredictable”, but that’s about it. Why the Canadian media contributes to the sanewashing of a president who is actively trying to undermine Canadian sovereignty is something I’ll never fully understand.

Over on the funny side, things are pretty quiet this week. We’ve already had the first place double-winner above, but there wasn’t much activity beyond that, so we’ll forego the editor’s choice and just highlight the second-place winner. It’s a commenter going by Magic 8 Ball in response to a comment suggesting Trump will hire, well, a magic 8 ball to replace the National Science Foundation board:

Outlook not so good

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week In 2016

• The Chilling Effect Of Mass Surveillance Quantified
• Once Again All Of Whatsapp Is Being Blocked In Brazil Because A Judge Is Upset It Won’t Turn Over Data
• Zappa Threatens Zappa Over Zappa Plays Zappa
• French National Assembly Votes (Sorta) To Finally Kill Its Three Strikes Hadopi Program
• DOJ Deploys Highly-Questionable Legal Arguments In Attempt To Save FBI’s Hacking Warrants
• When A Fingerprint IS The Password, Where Does The Fifth Amendment Come Into Play?
• Do You Own What You Own? Not So Much Anymore, Thanks To Copyright
• Homeland Security Wants To Subpoena Us Over A Clearly Hyperbolic Techdirt Comment

This Week In 2011

• Judge Slams Copyright Troll Lawyer John Steele’s Latest ‘Fishing Expedition’
• The EU Commission Tries To Defend ACTA And Fails Miserably
• Copyright Law Is Not Supposed To Protect Someone From Being Upset
• Perfect 10 Sues Again: This Time It Goes After Usenet Provider Giganews
• Senator Wyden Warns That Domain Seizures And COICA Undermine Internet Freedom
• Homeland Security Demands Mozilla Remove Firefox Extension That Redirects Seized Domains
• Righthaven Hires ‘Star’ Copyright Maximalist Lawyer To Try To Dig Itself Out Of The Deep Hole It’s In
• Hollywood Pushing EU To Sign ACTA Before It Has A Chance To Study The Legal Implications

This Week In 2006

• Monitoring Website Visitors Not The Same As Violating Privacy
• Epson Stops E-Tailers From Selling Off-Brand Ink Cartridges
• Senate Telecom Bill More About Granting Favors Than Improving Telecom?
• Big Content Goes Back To Sneaking Bad Rules In Through Treaties
• Teaching Artificial Intelligence Through Twenty Questions
• Data Retention Backer Mystified That Anyone Would Oppose Such A Plan
• Misplaced Blame Over iTunes Pricing
• More Lawsuits Against Google… To Protect The Children

So, how’s it been going for Denuvo since? Well, it’s essentially been rendered completely useless at this point.

As recently reported by Tom’s Hardware, on April 27, a large Reddit thread tracking which games using Denvuo DRM still needed to be cracked or bypassed officially hit zero. (This list tracks games that don’t require an online server connection, not MMORPGs and other games that do.)  What that means, effectively, is that according to Denuvo modders and hackers, the DRM tech is no longer able to stop pirates from downloading and installing games for free. This milestone for hackers is largely thanks to the MKDev collective and modder DenuvOwO. It was these people who created the hypervisor-based bypass (HVB) that installs a kernel-level driver to bypass Denuvo’s DRM checks.

Technically, Denuvo is still in the game, but it isn’t functioning as it should, and pirates can play without paying. And there is already some evidence that bypassing Denuvo has led to performance improvements in titles like Resident Evil Requiem, which might push some people to use the bypass even if they bought the game legally. We saw this in a previous Resident Evil game when hackers bypassed Denuvo in 2021.

This is always the life cycle of DRM in video games. Whatever audacious claims a DRM company might want to make early on with its product, the technology is eventually defeated to one degree or another and all that is left are the byproducts of the DRM that serve to do nothing other than annoy legitimate customers of a video game. If the technology is so intrusively bad that even legit buyers of a game want to crack it out of their games, and the pirates are completely unencumbered by it as well, then it’s a wonder why anyone would bother including it in their games to begin with.

DRM is pretty much always bad. The desire to protect a game from pirates is understandable, but ultimately pointless. There is almost never enough benefit in terms of generating more sales by trying to fight piracy to be worth pissing off your actual paying customers. And tactics such as what publisher 2K has decided to do in the wake of Denuvo’s complete failure aren’t any better.

2K Games has apparently begun adding 14-day online check-ins to some of its PC games. The check-in has apparently been added to NBA 2K25, NBA 2K26, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. These games now reportedly use a “fixed offline authorization token” that expires after two weeks. Once that happens, the game will not be playable until you connect to the internet and let the game ping Denvuo to get a new token. Pirat Nation and hackers are claiming this new countdown isn’t properly disclosed on the games’ Steam Store page or in each title’s respective EULA.

I’ll just add that pushing this new requirement out via an update to existing purchases is also a problem. Customers bought these games with the understanding of how they would work or not when offline. 2K suddenly changing the product in a meaningful way after it had already been purchased is a flatly anti-consumer move.

And I have no doubt that this online check requirement will be defeated by the same folks who defeated Denuvo. This arms race continues, but it shouldn’t. Why not focus on making great games and connecting with your paying customers to give them reasons to actually pay instead?