Blake E. Reid
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chup.blakereid.org
Blake E. Reid
@chup.blakereid.org
Simple country tech law professor, multidisciplinary dilettante. Ska, Crocs, fizzy water, chup. Need just one more guitar pedal. Someone is wrong on the Internet and it might be me. No legal or good advice; opinions my own, bad
Grateful to @indefenseofska.bsky.social for so many years of good listens and reconnecting me with a scene that I’d lost. And very proud to have dropped what I *think* is the only cite (so far!) to the book in a law review article. (Still has to survive the editors but I will fight for it.)
July 6, 2025 at 3:57 AM
The first reg implicates a mess of questions around the "generally applicable law" carveout. The second, likewise, around the "facilitate the development or operation of" carveout. 4/
June 30, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Second, there's the regulation of third parties that provide age verification systems, which arguably *compels* the use of an some kind of identification system (all of the possibilities of which are arguably themselves ADS) and imposes a nominal privacy regulation on those parties 3/
June 30, 2025 at 3:55 PM
First, there's the regulation of "knowing and intentional publication on an Internet website" which at any scale is going to involve something at least in the ballpark of what the budget bill calls an "automated decisionmaking system" 2/
June 30, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Tired: leaving the Internet largely unregulated for three decades because judges aren’t sure what the word “publisher” means
Wired: replacing one word with big word salad that will now be litigated in every state law case nominally involving a computer and a decision
June 30, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Cosign @kendraserra.bsky.social's suggestion to read Kagan's dissent first. It cuts right to the chase: Thomas' opinion is openly results-oriented, but sloppily tries to cover that up with a mess of self-contradictory reasoning from which everyone else will have to try and divine a coherent rule.
June 27, 2025 at 6:23 PM
As a bonus from FSC v. Paxton, don't sleep on fn. 4, where Thomas can't help but continue his extra-textual quest to reinterpret Section 230 to mean something different from what it says on the tin. (At least he cited it correctly.)
June 27, 2025 at 6:00 PM
I also don’t think “leaving the Copyright Office without an active boss” is an accurate characterization of what Perlmutter’s lawyers argue will cause dysfunction. They’ve been quite explicit that she “remains the Register of Copyrights.”
June 27, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Judge Chhabria knew that his opinion in Kadrey v. Meta would be publicly consumed and misunderstood, so he wrote a GIANT CAVEAT ABOUT THE LIMITED SIGNIFICANCE OF THE HOLDING THAT EVERYONE REALLY SHOULD READ BEFORE ISSUING HOT TAKES. It's very short and I'm not even going to summarize it. Read it!
June 25, 2025 at 9:14 PM
...and just in case you thought Judge Alsup's framework for generative AI and copyright was going to uncontroversially become the law of the land, here's Judge Chhabria coming off the top rope with a sharp critique and a totally different approach
June 25, 2025 at 9:10 PM
One last thing: I’ve said that these technologies often look like they are designed by engineers who’ve locked their copyright lawyers in the broom closet. I’ve been focused a lot on the user interfaces. But where this really materialized in this case was in the data set assembly.
June 24, 2025 at 6:41 PM
To be specific I’m not sure the info asymmetry is the same on either side or that the same kind of transparency is plausible
June 20, 2025 at 3:05 AM
It's unfortunate that Kevin and @caseynewton.bsky.social obscure what are directionally useful and journalistically reasonable descriptive points about AI's proliferation and social salience with anecdotal, performative provocations, half-baked policy prescriptions, and strawman-burning of critiques
June 17, 2025 at 5:50 PM
"No coding needed" tools long predate generative AI and the perennial problem with them is that maintenance and updates inevitably create dependencies. (The long term mechanisms for maintaining and updating a codebase are as or more important than the code for a software project of any complexity.)
June 6, 2025 at 8:51 PM
A (truly) friendly suggestion: next time you want to make a significant change, try doing it with another tool (or do it manually, or let a coder friend take a look and give you an estimate for what they'd charge). If the experience is along the lines of what you've described here...
June 6, 2025 at 8:46 PM
Glad to see @waldo.net making the observation that should be beat-you-over-the-head obvious to any CS major who's taken a software engineering course, which is that problem assessment and refinement and tool selection are at the threshold of any major software project.
June 6, 2025 at 4:43 PM
Lastly, Judge Hinkle is already tired of this case. He won't compel detailed discovery from all of NetChoice's members because, to summarize, the state law as drafted is a total dumpster fire and he doesn't need to know all the gory details of every internet company to figure that out. 12/
June 4, 2025 at 11:00 PM
Also not surprising to see a more detailed treatment of vagueness here, given how unclear it is how these statutes actually work. (Cf. @mmasnick.bsky.social's colorfully titled piece on the Texas statute. www.techdirt.com/2022/05/12/j...) 11/
June 4, 2025 at 10:56 PM
It *doesn't* look like the court will simply rest on its previous 230 preemption holding, but rather will take on some more searching review of the question, presumably given the SCOTUS demand for details on the 1A issues. 9/
June 4, 2025 at 10:52 PM
More importantly, the court tees up the possibility that it will knock out at least some of the issues in the case with Section. 230 rather than the First Amendment, which I have long speculated might happen. (Indeed, this court did just that in the first round of litigation!) 8/
June 4, 2025 at 10:49 PM
Anyway, I'm not sure how novel this is, but it's pretty interesting to see the court discuss the use of Section 1983 as a claim against state laws that trod on Section 230. 7/
June 4, 2025 at 10:43 PM
The court makes a sly little dig at Justice Thomas by pointing out at that he raised standing as an issue when the case was before SCOTUS, and implies that the rest of the Justices tacitly blessed standing by ignoring him. LOL. 6/
June 4, 2025 at 10:40 PM
Anyway, common carriage sloganeering doesn't work on the internet, because we have lots of different definitional buckets that work in counterintuitive ways. Here, the Florida statute applies beyond traditional social media because the drafters sloppily based their definitions on Section 230. 4/
June 4, 2025 at 10:32 PM
Aside: I could not agree more with @ericgoldman.bsky.social on the nebulousness of the term "ISP," which is one reason my coauthors and I spend a whole chapter in our textbook on classification problems! 3/
June 4, 2025 at 10:27 PM
First, I'm thrilled that the court frames the case first as a classification problem—a key telecom concept, which further underscores my argument that NetChoice is a telecom case! 2/
June 4, 2025 at 10:24 PM