The 26 Words that Created the Internet

Recall having this being pointed out to us when we started advertising online.  Plan to buy. 

JEFF KOSSEFF

Important book,  Supreme Court today arguing on today on  related work.  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.   Ordering capability at  the link.    Plus new book also mentioned below.

See Book:   'The 26 Words that Created the Internet'

Jeff Kosseff is an associate professor of cybersecurity law in the United States Naval Academy’s Cyber Science Department. He is the author of four books and more than 20 academic journal articles.  

In fall 2023, Johns Hopkins University Press will publish his latest book, Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation, which examines and defends legal protections for false speech. In 2019, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to support his 2022 book The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech. His 2019 book, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, traced the history of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. He also is the author of Cybersecurity Law, a textbook and treatise whose third edition was published by Wiley in 2022.  

His articles have appeared in Iowa Law Review, Illinois Law Review, Wake Forest Law Review, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Computer Law & Security Review, and other law reviews and technology law journals. His research interests include cybersecurity regulation, online intermediary liability, and the law of armed conflict as applied to cyberspace.

Jeff practiced cybersecurity, privacy, and First Amendment law at Covington & Burling, and clerked for Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Before becoming a lawyer, he was a technology and political journalist for The Oregonian and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and recipient of the George Polk Award for national reporting.  

He received a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, and a B.A. and M.P.P. from the University of Michigan.   .... '   (Much more at the link) x

Are the Robots Responsible for What they Say?

 First I had heard of this, lots of implications.

The Supreme Court could be about to decide the legal fate of AI search

 Are the robots responsible for what they say?

The Supreme Court is about to reconsider Section 230, a law that’s been foundational to the internet for decades. But whatever the court decides might end up changing the rules for a technology that’s just getting started: artificial intelligence-powered search engines like Google Bard and Microsoft’s new Bing.

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, one of two complementary legal complaints. Gonzalez is nominally about whether YouTube can be sued for hosting accounts from foreign terrorists. But its much bigger underlying question is whether algorithmic recommendations should receive the full legal protections of Section 230 since YouTube recommended those accounts to others. While everyone from tech giants to Wikipedia editors has warned of potential fallout if the court cuts back these protections, it poses particularly interesting questions for AI search, a field with almost no direct legal precedent to draw from.

Companies are pitching large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the future of search, arguing they can replace increasingly cluttered conventional search engines. (I’m ambivalent about calling them “artificial intelligence” — they’re basically very sophisticated autopredict tools — but the term has stuck.) They typically replace a list of links with a footnote-laden summary of text from across the web, producing conversational answers to questions.

Old-school search engines can rely on Section 230, but AI-powered ones are uncharted territory

These summaries often equivocate or point out that they’re relying on other people’s viewpoints. But they can still introduce inaccuracies: Bard got an astronomy fact wrong in its very first demo, and Bing made up entirely fake financial results for a publicly traded company (among other errors) in its first demo. And even if they’re simply summarizing other content from across the web, the web itself is full of false information. That means there’s a good chance that they’ll pass some of it on, just like regular search engines. If those mistakes cross the line into spreading defamatory information or other unlawful speech, it could put the search providers at risk of lawsuits.  ... '