Aggregator | JCA-NET

We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation

Performers—and ordinary people—are understandably concerned that they may be replaced or defamed by AI-generated imitations. We’ve seen a host of state and federal bills designed to address that concern, but every one just generates new problems.

One of the most pernicious proposals is the NO FAKES Act, and Copyright Week is a good time to remember why. We’ve detailed the many problems of the bill before, but, ironically enough, one of the worst aspects is the bone it throws to critics who worry the legislation’s broad provisions and dramatic penalties will lead platforms to over-censor online expression: a safe harbor scheme modeled on the DMCA notice and takedown process.

In essence, platforms can avoid liability if they remove all instances of allegedly illegal content once they are notified that the content is unauthorized. Platforms that ignore such a notice can be on the hook just for linking to unauthorized replicas. And every single copy made, transmitted, or displayed is a separate violation, incurring a $5000 penalty – which will add up fast. The bill does offer one not very useful carveout: if a platform can prove in court that it had an objectively reasonable belief that the content was lawful, the penalties for getting it wrong are capped at $1 million.  

The safe harbors offer cold comfort to platforms and the millions of people who rely on them to create, share, and access content. The DMCA notice and takedown process has offered important protections for the development of new venues for speech, helping creators finds audiences and vice versa. Without those protections, Hollywood would have had a veto right over all kinds of important speech tools and platforms, from basic internet service to social media and news sites to any other service that might be used to host or convey copyrighted content, thanks to copyright’s ruinous statutory penalties. The risks of accidentally facilitating infringement would have been just too high.

But the DMCA notice and takedown process has also been regularly abused to target lawful speech. Congress knew this was a risk, so it built in some safeguards: a counter-notice process to help users get improperly targeted content restored, and a process for deterring that abuse in the first place by allowing users to hold notice senders accountable when they misuse the process. Unfortunately, some courts have mistakenly interpreted the latter provisions to require showing that the sender subjectively knew it was lying when it claimed the content was unlawful. That standard is very hard to meet in most cases.

Proponents of a new digital replica right could have learned from that experience and created a notice process with strong provisions against abuse. Those provisions are even more necessary here, where it would be even harder for providers to know whether a notice is false. Instead, NO FAKES offers fewer safeguards than the DMCA. For example, while the DMCA puts the burden on the rightsholder to put up or shut up (i.e., file a lawsuit) if a speaker pushes back and explains why the content is lawful, NO FAKES instead puts the burden on the speaker to run to court within 14 days to defend their rights. The powerful have lawyers on retainer who can do that, but most creators, activists, and citizen journalists do not.  

And the NO FAKES provisions to allow improperly targeted speakers to hold the notice abuser accountable will offer as little deterrent as the roughly parallel provisions in the DMCA. As with the DMCA, a speaker must prove that the lie was “knowing,” which can be interpreted to mean that the sender gets off scot-free as long as they subjectively believe the lie to be true, no matter how unreasonable that belief.

If proponents want to protect online expression for everyone, at a minimum they should redraft the counter-notice process to more closely model the DMCA, and clarify that abusers, like platforms, will be held to an objective knowledge standard. If they don’t, the advent of digital replicas will, ironically enough, turn out to be an excuse to strangle all kinds of new and old creativity.

Corynne McSherry

California Law Enforcement Misused State Databases More Than 7,000 Times in 2023

EFF update

2 months ago

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits.

The sheriff’s department’s 6,789 abuses made up a majority of the record 7,275 violations across California that were reported to the state Department of Justice (CADOJ) in 2023 regarding the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS).

Records obtained by EFF also included numerous cases of other forms of database abuse in 2023, such as police allegedly using data for personal vendettas. While many violations resulted only in officers or other staff being retrained in appropriate use of the database, departments across the state reported that violations in 2023 led to 24 officers being suspended, six officers resigning, and nine being fired.

CLETS contains a lot of sensitive information and is meant to provide officers in California with access to a variety of databases, including records from the Department of Motor Vehicles, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, Criminal Justice Information Services, and the National Crime Information Center. Law enforcement agencies with access to CLETS are required to inform the state Justice Department of any investigations and discipline related to misuse of the system. This mandatory reporting helps to provide oversight and transparency around how local agencies are using and abusing their access to the array of databases.

A slide from a Long Beach Police Department training for new recruits.

Misuse can take many forms, ranging from sharing passwords to using the system to look up romantic partners or celebrities. In 2019, CADOJ declared that using CLETS data for "immigration enforcement" is considered misuse under the California Values Act.

EFF periodically files California Public Records Act requests for the data and records generated by these CLETS misuse disclosures. To help improve access to this data, EFF's investigations team has compiled and compressed that information from the years 2019 - 2023 for public download. Researchers and journalists can look up the individual data per agency year-to-year.

Download the 2019-2023 data here. Data from previous years is available here: 2010-2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018.

California agencies are required to report misuse of CLETS to CADOJ by February 1 of the following year, which means numbers for 2024 are due to the state agency at the end of this month. However, it often takes the state several more months to follow up with agencies that do not respond and to enter information from the individual forms into a database.

Across California between 2019 and 2023, there have been:

761 investigations of CLETS misuse, resulting in findings of at least 7,635 individual violations of the system’s rules
55 officer suspensions, 50 resignations, and 42 firings related to CLETS misuse
six misdemeanor convictions and one felony conviction related to CLETS misuse

As we reviewed the data made public since 2019, there were a few standout situations worth additional reporting. For example, LACSD in 2023 conducted one investigation into CLETS misuse which resulted in substantiating thousands of misuse claims. The Riverside County Sheriff's Office and Pomona Police Department also found hundreds of violations of access to CLETS the same year.

Some of the highest profile cases include:

LACSD’s use of criminal justice data for concealed carry permit research, which is specifically forbidden by CLETS rules. According to meeting notes of the CLETS oversight body, LACSD retrained all staff and implemented new processes. However, state Justice Department officials acknowledged that this problem was not unique, and they had documented other agencies abusing the data in the same way.
A Redding Police Department officer in 2021 was charged with six misdemeanors after being accused of accessing CLETS to set up a traffic stop for his fiancée's ex-husband, resulting in the man's car being towed and impounded, the local outlet A News Cafe reported. Court records show the officer was fired, but he was ultimately acquitted by a jury in the criminal case. He now works for a different police department 30 miles away.
The Folsom Police Department in 2021 fired an officer who was accused of sending racist texts and engaging in sexual misconduct, as well as abusing CLETS. However, the Sacramento County District Attorney told a local TV station it declined to file charges, citing insufficient evidence.
A Madera Police Officer in 2021 resigned and pleaded guilty to accessing CLETS and providing that information to an unauthorized person. He received a one-year suspended sentence and 100 hours of community service, according to court records. In a statement, the police department said the individual's "behavior was absolutely inappropriate" and "his actions tarnish the nobility of our profession."
A California Highway Patrol officer was charged with improperly accessing CLETS to investigate vehicles his friend was interested in purchasing as part of his automotive business.

The San Francisco Police Department, which failed to provide its numbers to CLETS in 2023, may be reporting at least one violation from the past year, according to a May 2024 report of sustained complaints, which lists one substantiated violation involving “Computer/CAD/CLETS Misuse.”

CLETS is only one of many massive databases available to law enforcement, but it is one of the very few with a mandatory reporting requirement for abuse; violations of other systems likely never go reported to a state oversight body or at all. The sheer amount of misuse should serve as a warning that other systems police use, such as automated license plate reader and face recognition databases, are likely also being abused at a high rate–or even higher, since they are not subject to the same scrutiny as CLETS.

Beryl Lipton

【おすすめ本】中川七海『終わらないPFOA汚染』―汚染にシラを切るダイキン　気鋭のジャーナリストが肉薄＝小泉昭夫（京都大学名誉教授）<br /><br />　

日本ジャーナリストクラブ（JCJ）

2 months ago

　著者は、探査報道（調査報道）に特化したジャーナリズム組織「Ｔａｎｓａ」を主宰する渡辺周氏の弟子で、新進気鋭のジャーナリストである。　本書で追及する(株)ダイキン工業は、大阪に本社を置き、世界42か国に拠点を持つ空調機、化学製品メーカーである。このダイキンが、摂津工場で有機フッ素化合物ＰＦＯＡの汚染を引き起こしているにも関わらず、「健康障害の証拠がない」（＝無害だ）と 24年間も言い続けている。　その間、ＷＨＯの専門機関であるＩＡＲＣがヒトへの発がん性を認定。米国や欧州..

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