Writers and Editors

With updates.

 

• The Decision That Upends the Equal-Protection Clause (Adam Harris, The Atlantic, 6-29-23) 'Legally, the decision is a landmark, taking a tool—the Fourteenth Amendment—meant to prevent discrimination against Black Americans in a post–Civil War landscape and turning it on its head, into a guarantor of a “race neutral” approach.'...In this case, the Court took Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” to upend that historical purpose, a result that Justice Thurgood Marshall had in some ways predicted four decades ago. “It would be the cruelest irony for this Court to adopt the dissent in Plessy now and hold that the University must use color-blind admissions,” Marshall wrote.'

     "The term affirmative action first came into the federal lexicon in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925, aimed at banning discrimination in the federal government and diversifying its workforce. In short order, colleges—which had become subject to enhanced federal antidiscrimination laws after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Higher Education Act of 1965—began to implement affirmative-action programs to build up their enrollment of students from historically marginalized communities."

• Affirmative action in the United States (Wikipedia) An overview of the history (legal and otherwise) of this issue in the United States, arguments for and against it, its implementation, complaints and lawsuits, and public opinion on the issue. 'In general, "affirmative action" is supported by the general public, but "considerations based on race" are opposed.'

• A New Legal Blitz on Affirmative Action (Liam Knox, Inside Higher Education, 9-20-23) Challenges to race-conscious policies are surging in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action, including a new lawsuit against West Point. Students for Fair Admissions, the group that spearheaded the Supreme Court cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, filed a lawsuit challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The organization is also revisiting lawsuits that were stayed pending the outcome of the Harvard and UNC cases (those against Yale, the University of Texas at Austin, and others).

• Ketanji Brown Jackson Torches Clarence Thomas for Bulls--t Take on Affirmative Action (Bess Levin, Levin Report, Vanity Fair, 6-29-23) The Supreme Court’s conservative majority effectively ended affirmative action, and dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson chided her "conservative colleagues, one of whom has a well documented history of being anti-affirmative action—of straight up being racist." She accused them of "not having an earthly clue—or having one and just not giving a f--k—about the history and impact of racism in this country, which persists today, and which Thursday’s decision will only make worse."

• The Court Unleashed (The Weekly Sift, 7-3-23) "Until this week, the final week of its annual term, the Supreme Court seemed to be backing away from the rogue behavior of last year, in which it had repeatedly ignored precedent, invented fanciful readings of history, and generally found excuses to go wherever its right-wing ideology might lead.
       "Recall that last year, the Court didn’t merely eliminate abortion rights, its logic in Dobbs rejected the doctrine of substantive due process, potentially setting up the elimination of all rights that rely on that doctrine: same-sex marriage, access to birth control, the right of consenting adults to choose their own expressions of sexuality, and many others. In Bruen, it not only threw out a century-old New York State gun control law, it cast doubt on all gun-control laws that are not “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” as Justice Thomas interprets that history.
     "Until this week, the final week of its annual term, the Supreme Court seemed to be backing away from the rogue behavior of last year, in which it had repeatedly ignored precedent, invented fanciful readings of history, and generally found excuses to go wherever its right-wing ideology might lead.
       "In the term’s final week, the Court burned its centrist credibility. It ended affirmative action in college admissions (and blew away the justification for any form of affirmative action), shot down the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program, and inserted an enormous loophole into all anti-discrimination laws. This Court is increasingly untethering itself from all traditional restraints on judicial power."

• On Race and Academia (John McWhorter newsletter, for NY Times subscribers, 7-4-23) "As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account....I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others. That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time....the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make."

• ‘There Was Definitely a Thumb on the Scale to Get Boys’ (Susan Dominus, NY Times Magazine, 9-8-23) Declining male enrollment has led many colleges to adopt an unofficial policy: affirmative action for men.

• Is College Worth It? (The Daily podcast , 9-20-23) Podcast and transcript. The new economics of higher education makes going to college a risky bet.
        See also Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That? (Paul Tough, NY Times, 9-5-23) Outside the United States, meanwhile, higher education is more popular than ever. What changed in the last decade to make a college education — and higher education as an institution — so unappealing to so many Americans? The college wage premium: How much you owe for going to college. How much net wealth does a typical college graduate accumulate over their life span, compared with that of a typical high school graduate? Millennials with college degrees are earning a good bit more than those without, but they aren’t accumulating any more wealth. The likely culprit: cost--the rising expense of college and the student debt that often goes along with it. Since 1992, the sticker price has almost doubled for four-year private colleges and more than doubled for four-year public colleges, even after adjusting for inflation. And In a 2017 Gallup poll, the No. 1 reason Republicans gave for their declining faith in higher ed was that colleges had become “too liberal/political.”

• Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action Programs at Harvard and U.N.C. (Stephanie Saul, NY Times, 6-29-23) The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful and sharply curtailing a policy that had long been a pillar of higher education. In earlier decisions, the court had endorsed taking account of race as one factor among many to promote educational diversity. Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench, a rare move that signals profound disagreement, and said that affirmative action was crucial to countering persistent and systematic racial discrimination.

• Harvard’s Admissions Is Challenged for Favoring Children of Alumni (Stephanie Saul, NY Times, 7-3-23) After the Supreme Court banned race-conscious affirmative action, activists filed a complaint, saying legacy admissions helped students who are overwhelmingly rich and white. Harvard’s special admissions treatment for students whose parents are alumni, or whose relatives donated money, has been called affirmative action for the rich, and in a complaint filed on Monday, a legal activist group demanded that the federal government put an end to it, arguing that fairness was even more imperative after the Supreme Court last week severely limited race-conscious admissions.

• Heather Cox Richaradson, 6-29-23)" If this fight sounds political, it should. It mirrors the current political climate in which right-wing activists reject the idea of systemic racism that the U.S. has acknowledged and addressed in the law since the 1950s. They do not believe that the Fourteenth Amendment supports the civil rights legislation that tries to guarantee equality for historically marginalized populations, and in today’s decision the current right-wing majority on the court demonstrated that it is willing to push that political agenda at the expense of settled law. As recently as 2016, the court reaffirmed that affirmative action, used since the 1960s, is constitutional. Today’s court just threw that out."

To be continued...

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"Generative AI will change the nature of content creation, enabling many to do what, until now, only a few had the skills or advanced technology to accomplish at high speed." ~ article in Harvard Business Review

 

See also Artificial intelligence (AI): What problems does it bring? solve? What the heck is a bot?

• Is A.I. the Death of I.P.? (Louis Menand, New Yorker, 1-22-24) Generative A.I. is the latest in a long line of innovations to put pressure on our already dysfunctional copyright system. "I.P. ownership comes in several legal varieties: copyrights, patents, design rights, publicity rights, and trademarks....David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu use the story of Sony’s big Springsteen buy to lead off their lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely book, Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, Norton), because it epitomizes the trend that led them to write it. The rights to a vast amount of created material—music, movies, books, art, games, computer software, scholarly articles, just about any cultural product people will pay to consume—are increasingly owned by a small number of large corporations and are not due to expire for a long time."
• Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence (United States Copyright Office)
• What is fair use? US Supreme Court weighs in on AI’s copyright dilemma (Luke Huigsloot, Cointelegraph: The Future of Money, 5-30-23) Many firms with generative AI models are being sued for copyright infringement, and the Supreme Court may have just ruined their primary legal defense. On Feb. 3, "stock photo provider Getty Images sued artificial intelligence firm Stability AI, alleging that it copied over 12 million photos from its collections as part of an effort to build a competing business. It notes in the filing:
     “On the back of intellectual property owned by Getty Images and other copyright holders, Stability AI has created an image-generating model called Stable Diffusion that uses artificial intelligence to deliver computer-synthesized images in response to text prompts."

    "While the European Commission and other regions are scrambling to develop regulations to keep up with the rapid development of AI, the question of whether training AI models using copyrighted works classifies as an infringement may be decided in court cases such as this one."
     "On May 18, the Supreme Court of the United States, considering these factors, issued an opinion that may play a significant role in the future of generative AI. The ruling in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith found that famous artist Andy Warhol’s 1984 work “Orange Prince” infringed on the rights of rock photographer Lynn Goldsmith, as the work was intended to be used commercially and, therefore, could not be covered by the fair use exemption.
      While the ruling doesn’t change copyright law, it does clarify how transformative use is defined.

  
• Examples of artificial intelligence: Manufacturing robots. Facial detection and recognition. Self-driving cars. E-Payments. Smart assistants. Healthcare management. Search and Recommendation Algorithms. Automated financial investing. Virtual travel booking agent. Social media monitoring. Marketing chatbots.  Maps and navigation. Text editors or Autocorrect. Chatbots. Digital assistants.  Aspects of social media.

• Thousands of authors urge AI companies to stop using work without permission (Chloe Veltman, Morning Edition, NPR, 7-17-23) "Thousands of writers including Nora Roberts, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood have signed a letter asking artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Meta to stop using their work without permission or compensation. It's the latest in a volley of counter-offensives the literary world has launched in recent weeks against AI. But protecting writers from the negative impacts of these technologies is not an easy proposition. Alexander Chee, the bestselling author of novels like Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, is among the nearly 8,000 authors who just signed a letter addressed to the leaders of six AI companies, including OpenAI, Alphabet and Meta.

• What are the Open AI companies? Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.

• Authors Guild Recommends Clause in Publishing and Distribution Agreements Prohibiting AI Training Uses (3-1-23)
• Authors Sue OpenAI Claiming Mass Copyright Infringement of Hundreds of Thousands of Novels (Winston Cho, Hollywood Reporter, 6-29-23) Courts are wrestling with the legality of using copyrighted works to train AI systems. The proposed class action filed in San Francisco federal court on Wednesday alleges that OpenAI “relied on harvesting mass quantities” of copyright-protected works “without consent, without credit, and without compensation.”
---AI is the wild card in Hollywood's strikes. Here's an explanation of its unsettling role (Andrew Dalton, ABC News, 7-21-23) Getting control of the use of artificial intelligence is a central issue in the current strikes of Hollywood's actors and writers. As the technology to create without creators emerges, star actors fear they will lose control of their lucrative likenesses. Unknown actors fear they’ll be replaced altogether. Writers fear they’ll have to share credit or lose credit to machines.
     "It may be fitting that "voice" comes first on that list. While many viewers still cringe at the visual avatars of actors like Hamill and Jackson, the aural tech feels further along.
      "The voices of the late Anthony Bourdain and the late Andy Warhol have both been recreated for recent documentaries.
       "Union members who make a living doing voiceovers have taken note."
---A.I. Needs an International Watchdog, ChatGPT Creators Say (Gregory Schmidt, NY Times, 5-24-23)

"To regulate the risks of A.I. systems, there should be an international watchdog, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the organization that promotes the peaceful use of nuclear energy, OpenAI's founders, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, and its chief executive, Sam Altman, wrote in a note posted Monday on the company's website."
---A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn (Kevin Roose, NY Times, 5-30-23) Leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and other A.I. labs warn that future systems could be as deadly as pandemics and nuclear weapons.

---The future of intellectual property law in the era of artificial intelligence (Wisconsin Law Journal, 4-3-23) "Another challenge is how to protect intellectual property rights in the face of AI-enabled infringement. AI systems can be used to create counterfeit goods, to automate the process of copyright infringement, and to even generate fake news. This makes it more difficult for creators to protect their work and to enforce their intellectual property rights.The rise of AI also raises questions about the future of patent law."

• Europe takes another big step toward agreeing an AI rulebook (Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch, 6-14-23) "Parliamentarians backed an amended version of the Commission proposal that expands the rulebook in a way they say is aimed at ensuring AI that’s developed and used in Europe is “fully in line with EU rights and values including human oversight, safety, privacy, transparency, non-discrimination and social and environmental wellbeing”.
    "Among the changes MEPs have backed is a total ban on remote biometric surveillance and on predictive policing. They have also added a ban on “untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases” — so basically a hard prohibition on Clearview AI and its ilk.    
     "The proposed ban on remote biometric surveillance would apply to both real-time or post (after the fact) applications of technologies like facial recognition, except, in the latter case, for law enforcement for the prosecution of serious crimes with judicial sign off.
     "MEPs also added a ban on the use of emotional recognition tech being used by law enforcement, border agencies, workplaces and educational institutions.
     "Parliamentarians also expanded the classification of high-risk AI systems to include those that pose significant harm to people’s health, safety, fundamental rights or the environment, as well as AI systems used to influence voters and the outcome of elections."

• ‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon (Samantha Cole, 404 Media, 8-29-23) Experts are worried that books produced by ChatGPT for sale on Amazon, which target beginner foragers, could end up killing someone. A genre of AI-generated books on Amazon is scaring foragers and mycologists: cookbooks and identification guides for mushrooms aimed at beginners.

• Speech in the Machine: Generative AI's Implications for Free Expression (Summer Lopez, Nadine Farid Johnson, and Nadine Farid Johnson, PEN America, 7-31-23) See also PEN's Twitter feed

"We cannot anticipate exactly how these technologies will be used or the magnitude of the risks."

      "In the hands of bad actors—whether public or private—generative AI tools can supercharge existing threats to free expression. If machines increasingly displace writers and creators, that poses a threat not only to those creative artists, but to the public as a whole. The scope of inspiration from which truly new creative works draw may be narrowed, undermining the power of literature, television, and film to catalyze innovative ways of thinking.
       "Generative AI tools have democratized and simplified the creation of all types of content, including false and misleading information; now they are poised to catapult disinformation to new levels, requiring new thinking about how to counter the negative effects without infringing on free expression. Without further attention to the ways in which generative AI could potentially escalate the threat of online abuse, those targeted may be more likely to leave online spaces, and those at risk of being targeted might be more likely to self–censor to avoid the threat.
      "The use of generative AI in targeted political ads and campaign materials could make those messages even more effective, further hardening existing divides and making constructive discourse across political lines even more challenging. Because generative AI tools are trained on bodies of content, they can easily reproduce patterns of either deliberate censorship or unconscious bias. The use of generative AI in creative fields could produce works that are less rich or reflective of the expansive nuances of human experience and expression. . . [These] tools could be wielded—or weaponized—to manipulate opinions and skew public discourse via subtle forms of influence on their users."

 

PEN's Recommendations for Government:
Pass long overdue, foundational legislation.
Establish and maintain multi-stakeholder policymaking processes
Ground regulatory frameworks in fundamental rights
Engage in policymaking that is measured and iterative
Build flexibility into regulatory schemes
Emphasize and operationalize transparency

PEN's Recommendations for Industry:
Promote fair and equitable use:
Facilitate secure and privacy–protecting use
Emphasize and operationalize transparency
Provide appeals and remedy options
Consider revenue models
Safeguard the ownership rights of writers, artists, and other content owners.
 
• Marvel’s Secret Invasion AI Scandal Is Strangely Hopeful (Angela Watercutter, Wired, 6-23-23) News broke this week that the show’s opening credits were made using artificial intelligence. Fans immediately cried foul.
     "It’s only slightly coincidental that news of AI in Secret Invasion came a day after star Samuel L. Jackson told Rolling Stone that he’s long been cautious of studios wanting to use his likeness in perpetuity, saying when he encounters those clauses in contracts “I cross that shit out.” A few months ago, Keanu Reeves told me that he's long had a clause in his contracts saying that his performances can't be digitally altered without his approval. Actors, and their lawyers, have been wary of the implications of technology and AI for a while. So have writers. Now, as AI infiltrates everyone’s daily lives, fans are monitoring the invasion."
    More Wired stories on the topic:
---This Is the Worst Part of the AI Hype Cycle (Angela Watercutter) Feeling hype burnout? You're not alone.
---Workers Are Worried About Their Bosses Embracing AI

    And there are many more. Search for "Wired" and "AI" or artificial intelligence.

 

• Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem (Gil Appel, Juliana Neelbauer, and David A. Schweidel, Harvard Business Review, 4-7-23) "Generative AI, which uses data lakes and question snippets to recover patterns and relationships, is becoming more prevalent in creative industries. However, the legal implications of using generative AI are still unclear, particularly in relation to copyright infringement, ownership of AI-generated works, and unlicensed content in training data. Courts are currently trying to establish how intellectual property laws should be applied to generative AI, and several cases have already been filed. To protect themselves from these risks, companies that use generative AI need to ensure that they are in compliance with the law and take steps to mitigate potential risks, such as ensuring they use training data free from unlicensed content and developing ways to show provenance of generated content."

 

• Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law (Legal Sidebar, Congressional Research Service, 5-11-23) A long, important article. "Recent innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) are raising new questions about how copyright law principles such as authorship, infringement, and fair use will apply to content created or used by AI. Socalled “generative AI” computer programs—such as Open AI’s DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT programs, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion program, and Midjourney’s self-titled program—are able to generate new images, texts, and other content (or “outputs”) in response to a user’s textual prompts (or “inputs”). These generative AI programs are trained to generate such outputs partly by exposing them to large quantities of existing works such as writings, photos, paintings, and other artworks. This Legal Sidebar explores questions that courts and the U.S. Copyright Office have begun to confront regarding whether the outputs of generative AI programs are entitled to copyright protection, as well as how training and using these programs might infringe copyrights in other works."

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• New US copyright rules protect only AI art with ‘human authorship’ (Daniel Grant, The Art Newspaper, 5-4-23) The US Copyright Office has eased its stance in new guidelines, and a decision on a comic book created using artificial intelligence. Shows "Detail from the cover for the comic book, Zarya of the Dawn (2023), whose author, Kris Kashtanova, used the AI-powered text-to-image generator Midjourney to create the illustrations. She was granted copyright in the book but not its AI-generated images.'

 

• AI and art: how recent court cases are stretching copyright principles (Hetty Gleave and Eddie Powell, The Art Newspaper, 3-28-23) Two specialists from a leading London law firm analyse the issues raised in recent lawsuits relating to the use of artwork images by tech companies in order to “train” their artificial intelligence tools.

 

• Artists and visual media company sue AI image generator for copyright breach (Daniel Grant, The Art Newspaper, 2-15-23) Lawsuits against firm behind Stable Diffusion image generator in recent attempt to define the legal status of such images.

 

• How We Think About Copyright and AI Art (Kit Walsh, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 4-3-23) "This legal analysis is a companion piece to our post describing AI image-generating technology and how we see its potential risks and benefits." An interesting analysis. As with most creative tools, it is possible that a user could be the one who causes the system to output a new infringing work by giving it a series of prompts that steer it towards reproducing another work. In this instance, the user, not the tool’s maker or provider, would be liable for infringement.

 

• Artificial Intelligence and Seinfeld (“Nothing Forever”) Aharon Schrieber, Seinfeld Law, 6-13-23) "If an AI generates a TV show apparently in the style of Seinfeld, but without using content from Seinfeld, is that a copyright violation?"

 

• Nothing Giant. Nothing Forever (Aharon Schrieber, Seinfeld Law, The Browser, 6-17-23) The AI generated Seinfeld parody “Nothing, Forever,” ran '24 hours a day until February 6, 2023, but the show was completely procedurally generated via artificial intelligence. While the show was pretty well received, with even the official Seinfeld twitter account linking to the Twitch channel, “Nothing, Forever” opens up a series of new questions regarding the intersection of copyright law and artificial intelligence. Most importantly, does Seinfeld, Jerry, the actors, NBC, or any other person or entity with rights to Seinfeld the show have a copyright claim against “Nothing, Forever?”

• I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires) (Jane Friedman, 8-7-23) "Garbage books getting uploaded to Amazon where my name is credited as the author. Whoever’s doing this is obviously preying on writers who trust my name and think I’ve actually written these books. I have not. Most likely they’ve been generated by AI."
"Hours after this post was published, my Goodreads profile was cleaned of the offending titles. However, the garbage books remain available for sale at Amazon with my name attached."

• What is generative AI? Everything you need to know (George Lawton, Tech Target) Scroll down for interesting timeline of Generative AI's Evolution. Transformers, large language models (LLMs), innovations in multimodal AI, etc. "Recent progress in transformers such as Google's Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), OpenAI's GPT and Google AlphaFold have also resulted in neural networks that can not only encode language, images and proteins but also generate new content."

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First of all, freelance editors and writers are often sent boilerplate contracts that include clauses requiring liability insurance--which might make sense if you are rebuilding a wing of a building, but rarely make sense for a writer and certainly not for an editor. My advice (gained from others' experiences): Cross out that clause and tell the client that it isn't relevant because (if true) you don’t have employees, work onsite, travel on behalf of the client, see clients in your home office, operate heavy equipment, endanger the general welfare, and so forth. (H/T to Ruth E. Thaler-Carter for the wording.) If you raise an objection based on common sense, the client is likely to tell you just to strike the clause. If they don't and the fee is low, it probably won't make financial sense to sign the contract, or at least I would not do so. See also what Will MacPheat reports, in the Comments section.

Meanwhile, here's the best round up of information I have come up with for if you DO find yourself in a situation where you need to buy the insurance. Media perils liability insurance (or publishers liability insurance) may provide you with protection for such traditional claims as copyright infringement; libel; defamation, plagiarism; invasion or privacy or publicity or infringement of privacy or publicity rights; misappropriation of trademark, title, or slogan; defamation; misappropriation of property rights; personal injury; contextual errors and omissions.
Media liability insurance is a specialized form of errors and omissions policy specifically designed for media clients who are at risk from liability claims brought by third parties.
        What is covered depends on  Read More 

 

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• Chirp: How It Works
• Is Chirp Audiobooks Worth It? (Eline's review on LovelyAudiobooks)
• Chirp Audiobooks Review: Pros, Cons, and How to Use It (Kaelyn Barron, TCK) The owners of BookBub have stepped in to change the way you shop for audiobooks with Chirp, a free service that notifies readers of limited-time deals on quality audiobooks. Read about the pros and cons of using Chirp, how it compares to Audible, and who the platform is best for.

 

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How to download the Chirp app:

 

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• 10 of the Best Websites to Download Free Audiobooks (Kaelyn Barron, TCK Publishing)

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(aka The Student Loan Program)

Student debt has more than doubled over the last two decades. As of September 2022, about forty-eight million U.S. borrowers collectively owed more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loans. Additional private loans bring that total to above $1.7 trillion, surpassing auto loans and credit card debt.

• Why Aren’t Student Loans Simple? Because This Is America. (Ron Lieber,Student Loan Debt Relief, NY Times, 9-3-22) Instead of making higher education free, we subsidize it later through repayment plans and attempts at debt cancellation. The complexity is disrespectful. If we want higher education to cost less, we should make it cheaper when people enroll.
• The Subprime Loans for College Hiding in Plain Sight (Ron Lieber, Student Loan Debt Relief, NY Times, 9-17-22) Many families can borrow most of the cost of college using a Parent PLUS loan. This will not end well.

       “The honest truth is that Congress created a subprime lending program unintentionally,” said Rachel Fishman of New America, the left-leaning think tank. Most parents don’t pay for college using this loan. But about 3.6 million of them — with about $107 billion in outstanding debt — have. Within that group are a number of low-income Black families at schools that may not have given their kids enough help in the way of scholarships. Many of those families are struggling to repay the money that the federal government so freely offered up.

         An Urban Institute report from 2019 summed up the sorry state of affairs in this way: Parent PLUS loans are “a no-strings attached revenue source for colleges and universities, with the risk shared only by parents and the government.” "Unlike student loans ... Parent PLUS loans are not going to help them earn more. Repayment can last up to 25 years, which can push the bills well into what are supposed to be the retirement years."
• Is Rising Student Debt Harming the U.S. Economy? (Backgrounder, Council on Foreign Relations, 10-20-22) Covers the main issues and links to many other articles, from various angles, about the student debt problem.
• Three Questions About Student Debt Forgiveness (Roger W. Ferguson Jr., Council on Foreign Relations, 9-6-22) What is the rationale behind President Biden's recent student debt relief announcement, who benefits and pays for it, and finally, what might be some unintended consequences from it? The Biden program might be overly generous, particularly given the strongest argument for such a program is to help the neediest. Most importantly, the fundamental weaknesses of the American higher education system—low completion rate, dependence on loans, and rapidly increasing college costs—still need to be addressed.
• Defending Student Loan Cancellation (National Consumer Law Center, 2-28-23) Two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court challenge President Biden’s transformational plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for eligible borrowers. The outcome of these cases will affect millions of borrowers who are eligible for relief. National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) experts are providing analysis and resources about the cases: Biden v. Nebraska (22-506) and Department of Education v. Brown (22-535). Excellent links and references, especially for students seriously debating the issues.
• Biden’s Student Loan Plan Squarely Targets the Middle Class (Jim Tankersley, NY Times, 8-25-22) The big winners from Mr. Biden’s student loan plan are not rich graduates of Harvard and Yale, as many critics claim. It's the middle class. Independent analysts suggest this would be his most targeted assistance yet to middle-class workers — while trying to repair what he casts as a broken bridge to the middle class.
• Biden’s Student Debt Relief Program Is Excellent, but Student Loans Suck to Begin With (Timothy Noah, New Republic, 8-24-22) Bernie Sanders got this right: We’ll have to make college free, or close to it. Student loans were an invention of the conservative economist Milton Friedman and that they turned out to be a poor substitute for the direct investment in higher education that Friedman succeeded in averting—in large part because the loans never managed to impose the market efficiencies Friedman predicted. The student loan model is unsustainable and the time to shift toward debt-free access to higher education is now, before the whole thing collapses.
• Beware of Scammers Trying to Capitalize on Student Loan Forgiveness (Ann Carrns, NY Times, 9-2-22) The recent action on student debt is fodder for spam callers, who often try to trick borrowers into paying for loan cancellation.
• What About Tackling the Causes of Student Debt? (Kevin Carey, NY Times, 11-18-2020) Pros and cons of loan forgiveness aside, there’s a more fundamental problem.

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• How the Biden Administration Can Free Americans from Student Debt (Astra Taylor, New Yorker, 11-23-2020) The books and authors referred to: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber and Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition by Collective Debt
• Who owes all that student debt? And who’d benefit if it were forgiven? (Adam Looney, David Wessel, and Kadija Yilla, Policy2020, Brookings,1-28-2020)
• President-elect Joe Biden says student loan forgiveness does figure in his economic plan: "It should be done immediately." (Tweet, Good Morning America, 11-16-2020) Read the comments.

• Dept. of Education Fail: Teachers Lose Grants, Forced to Repay Thousands in Loans (Cory Turner and Chris Arnold, Morning Edition, National Public Radio, 3-28-18) "Without any notice, [my grant] was suddenly a loan, and interest was already accruing on it," says Maggie Webb, who teaches eighth-grade math in Chelsea, Mass. "So, my $4,000 grant was now costing me $5,000."
     Since 2008, the Education Department has offered these so-called TEACH grants to people studying to get a college or master's degree. The deal is, they get to keep the grant money if they spend four years teaching a high-need subject like math or science in schools that serve low-income families.
If they don't keep their end of the bargain, the grants convert to loans that need to be paid back. But, the study finds, many teachers believe they kept their end of the bargain but are now being asked to repay that money anyway.
        Some early red flags were raised a few years ago by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO investigated the TEACH grant program and noted that teachers were improperly having their grants taken away. At least 2,252 grants were erroneously converted to loans by the servicer. Part of a special NPR series, The Trouble With TEACH Grants (click on that link to get to the full series).
• Were Your TEACH Grants Converted To Loans While You Were Teaching at a Qualifying School? (Chris Arnold, NPR, 12-9-18)
• Teachers, Lawyers and Others Worry About the Fate of Student Debt Forgiveness (Anya Kamenetz, NPR, 4-5-17)

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• Teachers With Student Debt: These Are Their Stories (Elissa Nadworny and Julie Depenbrock, Morning Edition, NPR, 7-26-17) Teachers have one of the lowest-paid professional jobs in the U.S. You need a bachelor's degree, which can be costly — an equation that often means a lot of student loans. Factors that make teaching vulnerable to a ton of debt include chronically low teacher pay, the increasing pressure to get a master's degree, and the many ways to repay loans or apply for loan forgiveness.
• Student Loans: To Solve the Problem, Understand the History (Chad Chubb, Kiplinger, 6-10-19) If you plan on making $60,000 out of college, you should not take on more than $60,000 in loans. If you plan to make $60,000, but your education will cost $180,000, don’t do it!
• Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me (MH Miller, The Baffler, also a Guardian Long Read: The Inescapable Weight of My $100,000 Student Debt, ) M.H. Miller (the arts editor for The New York Times Style Magazine) left university with with more than $100,000 of debt, for which her father was a cosigner. "In a matter of months, my father had lost everything he had worked most of his adult life to achieve—first his career, then his home, then his dignity....The delicate balancing act my family and I perform in order to make a payment each month has become the organizing principle of our lives...The foundational myth of an entire generation of Americans was the false promise that education was priceless—that its value was above or beyond its cost."

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•  The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined (Ben Miller, NY Times, 8-25-18) New data reveals how colleges are benefiting from billions in financial aid while students are left with debt they cannot repay. The new data makes clear that the federal government overlooks early warning signs by focusing solely on default rates over the first three years of repayment. That's the time period Congress requires the Department of Education to use when calculating default rates. For-profit institutions have particularly awful results."The secret to avoiding accountability? Colleges are aggressively pushing borrowers to use repayment options known as deferments or forbearances that allow borrowers to stop their payments without going into delinquency or defaulting. Nearly 20 percent of borrowers at schools that had high default rates at year five but not at year three used one of these payment-pausing options."
• Student Loan Debt Can Sink Your Retirement Plan (Harriet Edleson, AARP, 9-18-18) If you've defaulted on a federal student loan, beware: The federal government can take up to 15 percent of your Social Security benefit. ... Most of those whose Social Security money was seized were receiving disability benefits, rather than retirement or survivor benefits, the GAO report said.
• An Administrative Path to Student Debt Cancellation (PDF, report by Luke Herrine, Greater Democracy Initiative, Dec. 2019)
• Is Student Loan Forgiveness Worth It? – Pros & Cons (Sarah Graves, Money Crashers) Followed by links to additional stories.

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I can produce an audiobook myself, but will any of the audiobook companies agree to distribute it, or must it be produced "in-house"?

 

Guest post by Maggie Lynch

 

If your audiobook is being produced by an audio publisher, they have their own distribution sources.

 

If you are doing the audiobook yourself or hiring a narrator and you will get the physical files to distribute, I would recommend Findaway Voices. They have the largest audio distribution market. The larger company, Findaway, merged with Spotify in 2022 so their distribution is even stronger and they are trying new marketing options to capitalize on that relationship.

 

Another good audio distribution service is Author's Republic. They have a great reputation for clear communication and monthly royalty payments and they distribute to about 50 places. Every author I know who uses them loves them.

 

Publish Drive, Lantern Audio (used to be Listen Up), and BookBaby also have good reputations, distribute books to the big guys, and then use Findaway to reach the rest of the places. My thought is, why not just go with Findaway to begin with.

 

You can load directly to the big places like Amazon (Audible),  Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Apple, but I personally find that too time- consuming, and if you want to make changes in metadata—cover, pricing, description, etc.—it's a lot of places to go to. I'd rather have a book in one place with wide distribution so I can make changes at any time and know it will populate to all the distributors they cover.

You can learn more about Maggie Lynch here.

Answer from David Kudler, publisher at Stillpoint Digital Press:

Lightning Source (LSI) and IngramSpark (IS) are both portals offered by Ingram Content Group (the world's largest book distributor) to access their print-on-demand (POD) and distribution services. They are very similar, but have a few minor differences.
    

LSI is older — it was a standalone company founded in 1996 and acquired by Ingram about fifteen years ago. It was intended to offer publishers of all sizes POD services — especially useful for low-selling backlist titles, but also for popular titles that outsold their print runs.      

 

Ingram started IS in 2013 specifically as a service to the burgeoning micro- and self-publishing community — allowing them access to the same POD and worldwide distribution as major publishers, and allowing them to release their books in print without the high-risk investment of printing thousands of copies of their books (and then having to store them and ship them).

 

They both use the same worldwide network of printing plants. They both offer the same access to Ingram's distribution network. The print quality is the same.

There are differences between the two portals, reflecting their different origins.
      LSI allows the publisher to offer discounts from the industry-standard 55% (which ends up being a 40% discount to retailers) down to 20% (8% retail discount). IS has a set 55% discount. (Some publishers like to be able to lower the discount in order to drop the price for certain books. It generally means you won't get the book into any brick-and-mortar stores or libraries, but they may not be your target anyway.)
     IS offers ebook distribution (they take a higher than standard 20% cut); LSI is print-only.
     LSI charges an annual $12 "catalog" fee for each edition, and has slightly higher fees for revising your books (I avoid the setup fees as a member of IBPA).
     LSI offers printing discounts on titles that sell well (BoLT).
     As of this month, ScribeCount (the online sales tracking service) imports sales from IS, but you have to hand-enter them for LSI. Other than that, they're essentially the same.
     I use LSI, but only because I started before IS existed. I have played with "short" discounts, but mostly stick to the standard 55%. The ScribeCount situation has me seriously considering switching, but… if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

 

     For what it's worth, I strongly recommend that my clients use IS rather than LSI to distribute to the book trade — it's easier to set up, has slightly lower costs, and most of the high-end features of LSI aren't going to come into play. Then we use Amazon's KDP Print to distribute to Jeff Bezos's domain.

   
    Ebooks, of course, are another issue altogether.

 

    Thanks for permission to reprint this useful post to David Kudler.

This replaces an early version of this post that appeared in June 2018. 

Updated 10-30-23.

 

The Basics about AI
• What is AI? Everything you need to know about Artificial Intelligence (Nick Heath, ZDNet, 2-2-18) An executive guide to artificial intelligence, from machine learning and general AI to neural networks.

• What is an Internet bot? (Wikipedia) An Internet bot, web robot, robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity on the Internet, such as messaging, on a large scale.
• What is a bot: types and functions (Digital Guide IONOS UK, 11-16-21) What is a bot, what functions can it perform, and what does its structure consist of? Learn about Rule-based bots and self-learning bots, the different types of good bots, the different types of malware bots, and how they work. What types of attacks can botnets perform?
• ChatGPT (AI) This chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022 is being used to write novels, among other things. It has a problem with factual accuracy. See also section on this website on ChatGPT (AI)

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Writers/journalists/creators and artificial intelligence and issues like copyright protection, flaws and inaccuracies, and how frank creators must be about using AI
• FAQs on the Authors Guild’s Positions and Advocacy Around Generative AI
• A crash course for journalists on AI and machine learning (Video, 51 min., International Journalism Festival, 4-7-22)

• The AI is eating itself (Casey Newton, Platformer, 6-27-23) Boy, is this post packed with info and insights. The third paragraph alone kept me online for an extra half-hour, following links to more good reading.
• The AI takeover of Google Search starts now (David Pierce, The Verge, 5-10-23) Google is moving slowly and carefully to make AI happen. Maybe too slowly and too carefully for some people. But if you opt in, a whole new search experience awaits.
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born (James Vincent, The Verge, 6-26-23) Generative AI models are changing the economy of the web, making it cheaper to generate lower-quality content. We’re just beginning to see the effects of these changes.
• New Tool Could Poison DALL-E and Other AI to Help Artists (Josh Hendrickson, PC Mag, 10-27-23) Researchers from the University of Chicago introduce a new tool, dubbed Nightshade, that can 'poison' AI and ruin its data set, leading it to generate inaccurate results.
---This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI (Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, 10-23-23) The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models.
• Godfathers of AI Have a New Warning: Get a Handle on the Tech Before It's Too Late (Joe Hindy, PC Mag, 10-24-23) Two dozen experts warn that 'AI systems could rapidly come to outperform humans in an increasing number of tasks [and] pose a range of societal-scale risks.'
• How AP Investigated the Global Impacts of AI (Garance Burke, Pulitzer Center, 6-21-23) "When my editor Ron Nixon and I realized that too few journalists had gotten trained on how these complex statistical models work, we devised internal workshops to build capacity in AI accountability reporting....No surprise, FOIA and its equivalents are an imperfect tool and rarely yield raw code. Little transparency about the use of AI tools by government agencies can mean public knowledge is severely restricted, even if records are disclosed.Viewing predictive and surveillance tools in isolation doesn’t capture their full global influence.The purchase and implementation of such technologies isn’t necessarily centralized. Individual state and local agencies may use a surveillance or predictive tool on a free trial basis and never sign a contract. And even if federal agencies license a tool intending to implement it nationwide, that isn’t always rolled out the same way in each jurisdiction."
• AI is being used to generate whole spam sites (James Vincent, The Verge, 5-2-23) A report identified 49 sites that use AI tools like ChatGPT to generate cheap and unreliable content. Experts warn the low costs of producing such text incentivizes the creation of these sites.
• The semiautomated social network is coming (James Vincent, The Verge, 3-10-23) LinkedIn announced last week it’s using AI to help write posts for users to chat about. Snap has created its own chatbot, and Meta is working on AI ‘personas.’ It seems future social networks will be increasingly augmented by AI.

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• AI Art for Authors: Which Program to Use (Jason Hamilton, Kindlepreneur, 12-9-22) There are dozens of AI art tools out there, many with unique specialties. But most would agree that three stand up above the rest:
    Midjourney
    Dall-E 2
    Stable Diffusion.

Hamilton discusses how to access them, what they cost, how they can be useful, and why he recommends them (or not, and what for, illustrated), with a final section on AI art's copyright problems: Are they copying exist art on the collage principle (a little here, a little there), or are they facing legal and copyright problems?
• Artificial Labor (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At, 5-12-23) With the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, "we are entering a historical battle between actual labor – those who create value in organizations and the world itself – and the petty executive titans that believe that there are no true value creators in society, only “ideas people” and those interchangeable units who carry out their whims...The television and film industries are controlled by exceedingly rich executives that view entertainment as something that can (and should) be commoditized and traded, rather than fostered and created by human beings. While dialogue eventually has to be performed by a human being, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers clearly views writing (and writers) as more of a fuel that can be used to create products rather than something unique or special....entertainment’s elites very clearly want to be able to use artificial intelligence to write content."

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• The Fanfic Sex Trope That Caught a Plundering AI Red-Handed (Rose Eveleth, Wired, 5-15-23) Sudowrite, a tool that uses OpenAI’s GPT-3, was found to have understood a sexual act known only to a specific online community of Omegaverse writers. The data set that was used to train most (all?) text-generative AI includes sex acts found only in the raunchiest of fanfiction. "What if your work exists in a kind of in-between space—not work that you make a living doing, but still something you spent hours crafting, in a community that you care deeply about? And what if, within that community, there was a specific sex trope that would inadvertently unmask how models like ChatGPT scrape the web—and how that scraping impacts the writers who created it. (H/T Nate Hoffelder, Morning Coffee)
• AI art tools Stable Diffusion and Midjourney targeted with copyright lawsuit (James Vincent, The Verge, 1-16-23) The suit claims generative AI art tools violate copyright law by scraping artists’ work from the web without their consent. Butterick and Saveri are currently suing Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI in a similar case involving the AI programming model CoPilot, which is trained on lines of code collected from the web.
• The lawsuit that could rewrite the rules of AI copyright (James Vincent, The Verge, 11-8-22) Microsoft, its subsidiary GitHub, and its business partner OpenAI have been targeted in a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the companies’ creation of AI-powered coding assistant GitHub Copilot relies on ---“software piracy on an unprecedented scale.”

---"Someone comes along and says, 'Let's socialize the costs and privatize the profits.'"

---“This is the first class-action case in the US chal­leng­ing the train­ing and out­put of AI sys­tems. It will not be the last.”
• The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next (James Vincent, The Verge, 11-15-22) The last year has seen a boom in AI models that create art, music, and code by learning from others’ work. But as these tools become more prominent, unanswered legal questions could shape the future of the field.
`
• Wendy’s to test AI chatbot that takes your drive-thru order (St. Louis-Post Dispatch) (Erum Salam, The Guardian, 5-10-23) 'The Guardian' reports that Wendy's is ready to roll out an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot capable of taking customers' orders. Pilot program ‘seeks to take the complexity [the humans] out of the ordering process’
• In a Reminder of AI's Limits, ChatGPT Fails Gastro Exam (Michael DePeau-Wilson, MedPage Today, 5-22-23) Both versions of the AI model failed to achieve the 70% accuracy threshold to pass.
• Some companies are already replacing workers with ChatGPT, despite warnings it shouldn’t be relied on for ‘anything important’ (Trey Williams, Fortune, 2-25-23)
• ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead (NY Times, 5-1-23) For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm.
• Teaching A.I. Systems to Behave Themselves (Cade Metz, NY Times, 8-13-17)

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On the plus or minus side:
• Smarter health: How AI is transforming health care (Dorey Scheimer, Meghna Chakrabarti, and Tim Skoog, On Point, first piece in a Smarter Health series, WBUR radio, 5-27-22, with transcript) Guests Dr. Ziad Obermeyer (associate professor of health policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. Emergency medicine physician) and Richard Sharp (director of the biomedical ethics research program at the Mayo Clinic, @MayoClinic) explore the potential of AI in health care — from predicting patient risk, to diagnostics, to just helping physicians make better decisions.
• Artificial Intelligence Is Primed to Disrupt Health Care Industry (Ben Hernandez, ETF Trends, 7-12-15) Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the prime technologies leading the wave of disruption that is going on within the health care sector. Recent studies have shown that AI technology can outperform doctors when it comes to cancer screenings and disease diagnoses. In particular, this could mean specialists such as radiologists and pathologists could be replaced by AI technology. Whether society is ready for it or not, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, or any other type of disruptive technology will be the next wave of innovation.
• How will large language models (LLMs) change the world? (Dynomight Internet Newsletter, The Browser, 12-8-22) Think about historical analogies for 'large language models': the ice trade and freezers; chess humans and chess AIs; farmers and tractors; horses and railroads; swords and guns; swordfighting and fencing; artisanal goods and mass production; site-built homes and pre-manufactured homes; painting and photography; feet and Segways; gull-wing and scissor doors; sex and pornography; human calculators and electronic calculators.

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• Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider. Can robots really be conscious? Is the mind just a program? "Schneider offers sophisticated insights on what is perhaps the number one long-term challenge confronting humanity."―Martin Rees
• Top 9 ethical issues in artificial intelligence (Julia Bossmann, World Economic Forum, 10-21-16) In brief: unemployment, income inequality, humanity, artificial stupidity (mistakes), racist robots (AI bias), security (safety from adversaries), evil genies (unintended consequences), singularity, robot rights. She makes interesting points!
• AI in the workplace: Everything you need to know (Nick Heath, ZDNet, 6-29-18) How artificial intelligence will change the world of work, for better and for worse. Bots and virtual assistants, IoT and analytics, and so on.
• What is the IoT? Everything you need to know about the Internet of Things right now (Steve Ranger, ZDNet, 1-19-18) The Internet of Things explained: What the IoT is, and where it's going next. "Pretty much any physical object can be transformed into an IoT device if it can be connected to the internet and controlled that way. A lightbulb that can be switched on using a smartphone app is an IoT device, as is a motion sensor or a smart thermostat in your office or a connected streetlight. An IoT device could be as fluffy as a child's toy or as serious as a driverless truck, or as complicated as a jet engine that's now filled with thousands of sensors collecting and transmitting data. At an even bigger scale, smart cities projects are filling entire regions with sensors to help us understand and control the environment."
• Beyond the Hype of Machine Learning (Free download, GovLoop ebook, 15-minute read) Read about machine learning's impact in the public sector, the 'how' and 'why' of artificial intelligence (AI), and how the Energy Department covers the spectrum of AI usage.

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• Can Artificial Intelligence Keep Your Home Secure? (Paul Sullivan, NY Times, 1-29-18) Security companies are hoping to harness the potential of A.I., promising better service at lower prices. But experts say there are risks.
• What will our society look like when Artificial Intelligence is everywhere? (Stephan Talty, Smithsonan, April 2018) Will robots become self-aware? Will they have rights? Will they be in charge? Here are five scenarios from our future dominated by AI.
• Amazon Is Latest Tech Giant to Face Staff Backlash Over Government Work (Jamie Condliffe, NY times, 6-22-18) Tech "firms have built artificial intelligence and cloud computing systems that governments find attractive. But as these companies take on lucrative contracts to furnish state and federal agencies with these technologies, they’re facing increasing pushback  Read More 

• FOSTA/SESTA. A new law intended to curb sex trafficking threatens the future of the internet as we know it (Aja Romano, Vox, 7-2-18) Trump signed into law a set of controversial bills intended to make it easier to cut down on illegal sex trafficking online. Both bills — the House bill known as FOSTA, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and the Senate bill, SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act — have been hailed by advocates as a victory for sex trafficking victims, but the law doesn’t appear to do anything concrete to target illegal sex trafficking directly, and instead threatens to “increase violence against the most marginalized.” And makes it a lot easier to censor free speech on small websites — as evidenced by the immediate ramifications the law has had across the internet, affecting such sites as Reddit, Craigslist, and Google.
• Public Law 115–164—APR. 11, 2018, 115th Congress An Act To amend the Communications Act of 1934 to clarify that section 230 of such Act does not prohibit the enforcement against providers and users of interactive computer services of Federal and State criminal and civil law relating to sexual exploitation of children or sex trafficking, and for other purposes.
• The Woodhull Freedom Foundation's constitutional challenge to FOSTA/SESTA Woodhull has filed a lawsuit against the legislation.
"Two highly controversial, harmful, and misleading bills, the House bill known as FOSTA, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and the Senate bill, SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (collectively known as SESTA/FOSTA) represent the most broadly-based censorship of Internet speech in the last 20 years. The law did not succeed at its disingenuously stated purpose – to end human trafficking for sex. That goal was a complete failure.
     "What SESTA/FOSTA did do was drive large swaths of constitutionally-protected speech off the Internet. Even the Department of Justice warned Congress about the overreaching provisions of the law before it was passed. But Congress went ahead and voted this massive travesty into law." You can read about Woodhull's lawsuit against the legislation here.

Specifically, FOSTA:
1. creates new criminal and civil liability for website operators who host third-party content that “promotes or facilitates the prostitution of another person,”
2. expands criminal and civil liability such that any speaker online who allegedly “promotes” or “facilitates” sex trafficking can be treated as though they are participating in “a venture” with those who are directly engaged in trafficking,
3. removes protections for websites whose users’ speech might be seen as in violation of the law,
4. applies to speech that occurred even before FOSTA was enacted. That means anyone who operates an online platform is now liable for online speech that occurred well before Congress passed the law – so it violates the Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws.

• Know Your Rights (Survivors Against Sesta site, archived) "Even though we have formally sunset as an organizing formation, we are still maintaining the instagram account @survivorsagainstsesta to amplify and promote SWer led actions and initiatives around the country/globe. Feel free to continue to send those requests for signal boosting to us via DM on that platform."
• What Is Sesta/Fosta (sourced with permission by Hacking/Hustling). "Section 5 of the law states: ENSURING FEDERAL LIABILITY FOR PUBLISHING INFORMATION DESIGNED TO FACILITATE SEX TRAFFICKING OR OTHERWISE FACILITATING SEX TRAFFICKING. This Act also makes allowances for States Attorneys to specially prosecute these cases. It is a very vaguely worded law, but its specified targets are online platforms, websites, companies/corporations behind site hosting.
What has FOSTA/SESTA criminalized?
      "This bill has expanded liability for internet platforms which host content generated by third parties around holding that information. While the bill creates liability for those websites for “knowingly facilitating sex trafficking,” there is not clarity for what that means. It also allows more people to file civil suits against websites.
      "People who own/operate/maintain websites which host third party content, listservs, (and maybe apps? Jury’s still out… or hasn’t been bought in yet), which promote and facilitate prostitution are subject to a federal crime. What’s facilitating prostitution? Also unclear. The bill being vague is a part of the problem."

       "Individual workers are not directly in the line of fire because of SESTA/FOSTA."
• More Evidence that FOSTA Benefited No One (Eric Goldman, Technology & Marketing Law Blog, 10-15-22) "FOSTA did not permanently reduce the volume of ads for commercial sex. The quantity bounced back after FOSTA, but distributed across more sites. ...as predicted for Congress, FOSTA scattered the ads worldwide rather than changing any of the underlying supply or demand factors.

    "FOSTA did not suppress commercial sex ads and it did not increase sex trafficking enforcement. The paper suggests that maybe FOSTA didn’t make things worse for women based solely on homicide and rape metrics, but (1) this ignores the impacts on male sex workers entirely, and (2) sex workers experienced many other physical, psychological, emotional, and financial harms due to FOSTA. The paper also does not model FOSTA’s detrimental impacts on speech, which continue to reverberate today.

• Decriminalize Sex Work FAQs about the decriminalization of sex work.The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), signed into law, effectively suspend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which stipulates that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

       In simpler terms, it allows user-generated speech, such as comment sections and discussion boards, to remain uncensored.
      SESTA/FOSTA amends Section 230 by suspending its protection in cases where online platforms are perceived to be promoting prostitution.
      Online providers can now be held liable for posts perceived to be advertising sex on their sites. State law enforcement can prosecute these cases at their discretion.
• SESTA Bill Will Not Prevent Sex Trafficking But Will Silence Online Speech (National Coalition Against Censorship) "While the sponsors of these bills contend that they are aimed at stopping sex trafficking, neither bill actually helps sex trafficking victims confront their abusers and instead both focus on curtailing online speech. Even sex workers oppose the bills, which are likely to make consensual sex work more dangerous. The National Coalition Against Censorship joins with our allies in the free speech community to oppose this bill." See From Section 230 to The EARN IT Act and still controversial (blog post with links to more on this issue)

• Sex trafficking law looms large over latest bid to weaken Section 230 (Cristiano Lima, Washington Posst, 2-10-22) "In 2018, Congress passed FOSTA-SESTA, a contentious measure that opened digital services up to lawsuits if they knowingly facilitated sex trafficking on their sites. Despite its aims, critics warned that the measure could have an unintended chilling effect on free speech and harm sex workers trying to safely communicate online.
     "Now, civil liberties advocates, human rights groups and tech industry leaders are again sounding the alarm that the new bill could endanger the people it’s seeking to protect.
     "The legislation, called the EARN IT Act, would create a commission tasked with issuing recommendations to platforms on how to best curtail child abuse on their products. It would open platforms up to liability under any federal and state civil laws, as well as state criminal laws, related to hosting child abuse material. (Section 230 allows for liability under federal criminal law.)

• "SESTA/FOSTA Explained (Decriminalize Sex Work) This group explains how FOSTA/SESTA endangers sex workers, keeps victims of human trafficking in danger, and censors free speech on the Internet.

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Subtopics: Row v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges, abortion, same-sex marriage, race and the 1619 Project, George Floyd, gun politics, separation of church and state, privacy, recreational drug use, homosexuality, censorship and banned books, climate change (in the wake of the 1997 Kyoto Treaty), pedophilia, gender identity, gay people, Trump and January 6th, academic freedom, teacher tenure, student rights, campus free speech, educational gag orders, whether the study of American history should be a "celebratory" or "critical" undertaking, separation of church and state, and orthodox Christian positions on premarital sex, contraception, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and divorce. Anything else?

• Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American, 5-2-21) on Republican attitudes toward multiculturalism. 'On Friday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and 36 Republicans sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona accusing him of trying to advance a “politicized and divisive agenda” in the teaching of American history. This is a full embrace of the latest Republican attempt to turn teaching history into a culture war....

     "The prime object of Republican anger is the 1619 Project, called out in McConnell’s letter by name. The project launched in the New York Times Magazine in August 2019 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first landing of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans at the English colony of Virginia....

     'The 1619 Project argued that the landing of the Black slaves marked “the country’s very origin” since it “inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years.” ...The Pulitzer Center, which supports journalism but is not associated with Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prizes, produced a school curriculum based on the 1619 Project; Republican legislators in five states—Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Dakota—filed virtually identical bills to cut funding to any school or college that used the material.'
• Why Republicans are obsessed with pedophilia, gender identity, gay people, and abortion (Robert Reich, 5-7-22) "Voters, don't be deflected by “culture war” messages intended to deflect the public’s attention from how badly big corporations and the super wealthy are shafting them. Americans won’t understand how these economic abuses all relate to record amounts of income and wealth at the top, and what must be done to reverse this imbalance (break up monopolies, enact a windfall profits tax, raise taxes on large corporations and the super wealthy, strengthen labor unions, reform campaign finance, stop corporate welfare, and so on).
      "Oh, and by focusing on pedophilia, gender identity, gay people, and abortion, Republicans don’t have to talk about Trump and January 6."
• With Rising Book Bans, Librarians Have Come Under Attack (Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, NY Times, 6-7-22) Caustic fights over which books belong on the shelves have put librarians at the center of a bitter and widening culture war. The reporters spoke to two dozen librarians and library associations across the country for this article. For more on the topic, see Banned and challenged books with links to articles on

---Lists of banned and challenged books

---What you can do to fight book bans and challenges

---Academic freedom, teacher tenure, student rights, campus free speech, and educational gag orders.
• The Next Culture War (David Brooks, NYTimes, 6-30-15) "Christianity's gravest setbacks are in the realm of values. American culture is shifting away from orthodox Christian positions on homosexuality, premarital sex, contraception, out-of-wedlock childbearing, divorce and a range of other social issues... [Many] conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution....Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution....Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose."
---Okay, David Brooks, Which Culture War Should We Fight? (Joe Rigney, The Federalist, 7-2-15) "Isn't the sexual revolution one of the main culprits (aided and abetted by presumptuous Supreme Court decisions that insist on removing these debates from the democratic process, with Roe and Obergefell at the top of the list)?... But we social conservatives, and especially those of us who are Christians, recognize deep connections among these issues, many of them having to do with what sex is for, what marriage is for, indeed what people are for."
---David Brooks on ‘The Next Culture War’ (Rod Dreher,The American Conservative, 6-30-15) Should Christians fight? Retreat? Brooks suggests a third way
• After Obergefell: A First Things Symposium (Various authors, First Things, 6-15) How should we respond to the ruling by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage? What’s next? 
• Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter (published in 1992). An account of how Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have joined forces in a battle against their progressive counterparts for control of American secular culture.The struggle to make sense of the battles over the family, art, education, law, and politics. On an increasing number of "hot-button" defining issues—abortion, gun politics, separation of church and state, privacy, recreational drug use, homosexuality, censorship—there existed two definable polarities.

     See recap of the discussion on Wikipedia. "The culture wars influenced the debate over state-school history curricula in the United States in the 1990s. In particular, debates over the development of national educational standards in 1994 revolved around whether the study of American history should be a "celebratory" or "critical" undertaking and involved such prominent public figures as Lynne Cheney, the late Rush Limbaugh, and historian Gary Nash." This Wikipedia entry is one of the most useful I've seen, including a wide range of references and useful discussions and explanations.
• Deep Water: An Encounter with Whiteness (Deepa Iyer, Medium, 10-30-18) See also her Solidarity Is This about different aspects of the effects of white supremacist culture and From Silos to Solidarity: Learning from 2017’s Resistance Movements. We "must also sharpen our solidarity work: we must move beyond race as the single and sole organizing force to bring communities together; we must work within our own communities to lovingly challenge biases as we proclaim unity with other movements; and we must ensure that we are not caught in a cycle of rapid response and emergency postures that end up harming our own people and organizations."
• Climate Science as Culture War (Andrew J. Hoffman, Stanford Social Innovation Review, SSIR, Fall 2012) "Today, there is no doubt that a scientific consensus exists on the issue of climate change....And yet a social consensus on climate change does not exist. Surveys show that the American public’s belief in the science of climate change has mostly declined over the past five years, with large percentages of the population remaining skeptical of the science."

     "The public debate around climate change is no longer about science—it’s about values, culture, and ideology. 'Climate change has become enmeshed in the so-called culture wars. Acceptance of the scientific consensus is now seen as an alignment with liberal views consistent with other “cultural” issues that divide the country (abortion, gun control, health care, and evolution). This partisan divide on climate change was not the case in the 1990s. It is a recent phenomenon, following in the wake of the 1997 Kyoto Treaty that threatened the material interests of powerful economic and political interests, particularly members of the fossil fuel industry."
• Everything you wanted to know about the culture wars – but were afraid to ask (Andrew Anthony, The Guardian, 6-13-21) Politicians like to provoke them, academics like to analyse them. Yet most people don’t even know what they’re all about.The historian Dominic Sandbrook agrees that a culture war is under way but cautions against overstating its dimensions. He thinks that more often than not it’s a dispute between two sides of an educated elite. Scroll down for key flashpoints, mainly from UK viewpoint, but they include the murder of George Floyd and the European Union referendum (the issues surrounding Brexit were as often as not cultural at root).

 'Everything that gets labeled "far-left" in the US is common sense policy in the rest of the industrialized world. Guaranteed health care. Paid family leave. Government drug price negotiation. Gun control. It isn't radical. We're talking about the basics of a functioning society."
~ Public Citizen @Public_Citizen