Devin Nunes Files Another SLAPP Suit; Sues The Washington Post Again
Furnished content.
Devin Nunes is one of the most vocal supporters of Parler, regularly insisting that he supports Parler because Parler supports free speech (of course, as we've highlighted, Parler blocks users quite frequently, contrary to its marketing claims). Of course, Nunes is a free speech hypocrite. As we've highlighted over the last few years, he seems to have an itchy trigger finger when it comes to suing the media and various critics for their free speech, in a variety of SLAPP lawsuits -- with no clear answer yet on who is actually paying for these lawsuits designed to stifle and suppress free speech.Earlier this year, Nunes sued the Washington Post and reporter Shane Harris in the Eastern District of Virginia. That case was was transferred to the federal district court in DC where it continues to move forward (slowly). Now Nunes, with his regular lawyer Steven Biss, have sued the Washington Post yet again, this time with reporter Ellen Nakashima. Once again, it was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, meaning that the Washington Post is likely to go through the same process again to try to transfer the case to the DC court.Like so many Nunes/Biss SLAPP suits, this one is... bad. At issue is the news from right after the election that a Trump loyalist and former Nunes staffer had been made the NSA's General Counsel apparently over the objections of the NSA's own director. This has raised a bunch of alarms for a variety of reasons -- and is seen as evidence that for all of the bullshit talk of "the deep state" being out to get Trump, he's spending his last couple months in office trying to construct his own deep state.It was Ellen Nakashima at the Washington Post who broke the story of the Ellis appointment, and that's the article that Nunes is now suing over. The lawsuit -- somewhat laughably -- argues that two sentences in the article are defamatory. Neither are defamatory. These are the two sentences:In March 2017, [Michael Ellis]gained publicity for hisinvolvement in a questionableepisode involving Nunes, whowas given access at the WhiteHouse to intelligence files thatNunes believed would buttress hisbaseless claims of the Obamaadministration spying on TrumpTowerNews reports stated that Elliswas among the White Houseofficials who helped Nunes seethe documents reportedly lateat night, earning the episode thenickname 'the midnight run.'[Three White House officials tiedto sharing of intelligence fileswith Devin Nunes] The filing nitpicks at both of these statements, but has a difficult time alleging false statements of fact, which is kind of necessary for there to be defamation. For example, with that second statement while the WaPo article talks about the alleged midnight run, Nunes first says it "never happened." But then almost immediately admits that he did, in fact, go to the White House -- it just wasn't at night. Whether or not the meeting was at night or "when the sun was out," as Nunes claims, is not defamatory. Even more to the point, the WaPo article highlights that its citing "news reports" and that the nighttime aspect of the meeting was "reportedly" what happened, and noting (accurately) that others have referred to this as "the midnight run." In other words, the article appropriately hedged those points and highlighted that it was covering what others were saying.And then there's this: even though the Washington Post was basing this statement on "news reports" Biss/Nunes tries to argue that those news reports somehow don't count, because they were from the NY Times which is "well-known for spreading false statements." I kid you not.Upon information and belief, one of the News reports referred to in theArticle is a report manufactured by New York Times reporters Adam Goldman,Matthew Rosenberg and Maggie Haberman, well-known for spreading false statementsand defamation on behalf of anonymous sources at the FBI and State Department. This is conspiracy theory fan fiction masquerading as a lawsuit.There is basically no attempt to get over the actual malice standard necessary for any of this to be defamation of a public figure. The complaint tries to twist some minor potential inaccuracies into evidence of knowledge that the statements were false, but that is not at all supported by the complaint. It argues, ridiculously, that she should have known certain statements from Rep. Adam Schiff should not be trusted because Schiff and his staff "had an axe to grind against Plaintiff and a reason to lie." What? That is not at all how the actual malice standard works.This is yet another ridiculously weak complaint that is hard to see as anything other than yet another nuisance SLAPP suit from an incredibly thin-skinned Devin Nunes who has now sued multiple media outlets and reporters (not to mention a satirical cow). For all his talk about supporting free speech and being against the suppression of speech, these lawsuits suggest that no one in Congress is more engaged in the blatant suppression of speech than Devin Nunes.Once again, these kinds of intimidation tactics by lawsuit are exactly why we need a federal anti-SLAPP law (and why Virginia needs to get its act together early next year and pass the anti-SLAPP bill it almost passed earlier this year).
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 19-Nov-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
Twitch's No Good, Very Bad Time Continues: Part 1
Furnished content.
I'm beginning to wonder if the folks that run Twitch are secretly attempting to commit corporate suicide. The past several weeks have seen the popular streaming platform embroiled in controversy. It began when, in response to the RIAA labels DMCA attacks on streamers, Twitch took the unprecedented step to simply nuke a zillion hours of recorded content without warning its creators. In the wake of that, the platform kept essentially silent on its actions, simply advising its creators that they should "learn about copyright". In lieu of any real crisis communication, Twitch instead rolled out the release of a new emoji, pissing everyone off. Then came Twitch's apology, where the Amazon-owned platform acknowledged that it really should have had a method for letting streamers know which content was accused of infringement instead of nuking it all, while also continuing the DMCApocalypse, getting so granular as to allow streamers to be targeted by DMCA claims on game music and sound effects, including on videos that had already been taken down.With its creators and patrons both in full revolt, it probably wasn't the best timing that Twitch's GlitchCon remote convention took place mid-November. Complaints about the convention were far-reaching, but much of it centered on the coin spent promoting it instead of Amazon simply licensing music so streamers could stream, along with the terse commentary on the turmoil itself.We'll start with the promotion of the event.The convention took place on November 14, but a difficult-to-ignore sensation of dissonance began to creep in before it even kicked off. To promote the event, Twitch sent themed trailers decked out with Twitch merch to select streamers—which streamers began tweeting about on November 13. While the streamers who’d received the vehicles seemed pleased, the response from many others was uniform: Why was Twitch spending money on glitzy trailers when it should’ve been putting every penny it could toward licensing music, thereby beheading the DMCA dragon currently terrorizing the platform?Of course, the teams at Twitch that handle event planning and DMCA-related matters are very different, and this question ignores the reality of how budgeting tends to work at large companies. However, the broader sentiment from streamers was understandable; over the course of the past month, Twitch has massively eroded community trust by leaving streamers high and dry when the music industry finally came to collect its toll, forcing streamers to delete their entire histories instead of providing them with alternatives—or even accessible means of contesting copyright claims. During the lead-up to GlitchCon, streamers were not exactly in a celebratory mood. As Kotaku notes, it's not entirely fair to simply claim that the money spent promoting GlitchCon should have been spent on music licensing instead. But it's not entirely unfair either, and the larger point is that Twitch did this to itself. By acting so callous with the work of its creators, and by then spending promotional budget dollars in a way that reminds everyone that this is a company backed by Amazon, it was inevitable that creators would throw up their hands in disgust. Whatever we might want to say about the imperfection of copyright laws, or the broken method by which copyright is policed at scale by platforms like Twitch, it most certainly is true that Amazon/Twitch could have avoided literally all of this by simply licensing a bunch of RIAA music. It's not like Amazon couldn't have afforded it. But, instead, Twitch's creators got screwed.But when Twitch CEO Emmett Shear gave his keynote to kick off GlitchCon, the pushing of any information off to a future Q&A coupled with the highlighting just how bad a job his company did in supporting streamers felt like the worst of all worlds.“It’s obvious that many of you want and deserve a lot more information from us, and a 10-minute Q&A session wouldn’t even come close to the level of depth of conversation that we want to have with you,” he said, noting that there will be a town hall devoted to the topic of DMCAs next month. He proceeded to apologize, largely reiterating what Twitch said in an apology letter it posted last week.“If you receive a DMCA takedown, you should be able to know exactly what the content is or, if you believe you are authorized, you should know how to contest the takedown. I believe it’s a failing of our email to creators on October 20 that we didn’t include enough of this information, and it’s an issue with our current systems that we’re working to improve,” Shear said during the GlitchCon keynote. “We should have had better tools for you to manage your content, and we wish we did. We’re sorry those tools weren’t available when you needed them and that so many creators had to delete their videos capturing their communities’ best moments and accomplishments.” Who this message was supposed to please is entirely unclear to me. Great, Twitch has acknowledged that it failed to support its creators with the tools necessary to do DMCA takedowns and restoration correctly. The first step to correcting a problem, as they say, is acknowledging you have a problem. But then announcing that the Twitch community deserves a ton of answers here, but they won't get them for another month? That's damned near self-immolation in the tech space. A glitzy convention put on without addressing a community in near revolt...why? Why in the world would you even take that virtual stage without being prepared to address the controversy?It's not surprising that the reaction from the Twitch community was largely negative. And, because of Twitch's bullheaded approach to mostly ignoring all of this, that negativity overshadowed the rest of the convention, including some fairly positive happenings at Twitch.Attempted corporate suicide is starting to look like a term bereft of exaggeration.
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 19-Nov-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
|
|