Category Archives: rights

Rights

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The ongoing dispute between the actress Scarlett Johansson on the one hand and OpenAI and its MFWIC Sam Altman on the other highlights a broader problem concerning rights, property, and rights in property.

The dispute itself concerns Altman’s attempt to get Johansson to participate in and lend her voice to OpenAI’s development of a talking assistant, ultimately named Sky. Johansson declined to participate, Sky was developed and offered to the public—and Sky sounds remarkably like Johansson.

[Johansson’s agent and of Artists Agency co-chairman Bryan] Lourd and the actress spent the morning fielding calls and emails from friends and associates, some of whom worried that OpenAI had simply appropriated Johansson’s voice without permission.

And

Emails to the actress from friends and associates streamed in asking if she’d participated in the OpenAI project.

The question extends far beyond this glorified NIL dispute, though.

Altman says that

Artists should also be able to opt out of allowing AI systems to mimic their work….

And in Tennessee,

Governor Bill Lee (R) signed into law the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Securities (ELVIS) Act in March, which makes people’s voices protected personal rights.

No. Altman is dead wrong. Artists—and anyone else—should not have to affirmatively act to opt out of anything. Those who want to use an attribute of someone, their voice, their likeness, their DNA, should have to convince that someone to opt in.

The Tennessee law is on the right track, but it stops woefully short. People’s voices, or any other of their attributes, are not personal rights to be protected, or not, by the vagaries of government.

These attributes are not merely a facet of a person’s civilly-granted property. People’s attributes are their personal property, imbued in them by their Creator, an aspect of their unalienable Right to their pursuit of Happiness. Here’s John Adams:

All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

A person’s personal attributes are inextricably intertwined with—unalienable from—those certain rights that are essential to our lives and our liberties. Technological advances have no impact on that beyond enhancing that person’s own Happiness.

That understanding badly wants renewal today.

Yet Another Example…

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…of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s disregard for our Constitution. This one comes from the supposedly independent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of Biden’s Executive Branch (we know what the statute says; we also know who appoints EEOC commissioners). The EEOC’s latest rule

elevates gender identity as a protected class under discrimination laws like race, sex, and religion.
Prohibited harassment includes “repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new regulatory document declared.

This is the Federal government attempting to dictate to Americans operating private enterprises what they must say. This is a direct contradiction of our Constitution’s 1st Amendment requirement that Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…. Of course, this limit applies to the Executive Branch, also.

Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R, NY) emphasized the Biden administration’s hypocrisy in her own response to this…overreach:

They can’t tell you [that] you have to say the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the flag. And so forcing someone to actually use pronouns that they don’t choose to use, and then holding your employer liable, to me, is going to have First Amendment problems.

It’s also a contradiction of our Constitution’s 10th Amendment which is even clearer:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In our Constitution there are no powers conferred on the Federal government authorizing it to compel particular speech. Indeed, compelling speech is the same as abridging speech, since forced words take the place of barred words.

And none of this even begins to approach the idiocy of setting gender ideology above the facts of biology.

Cowardice

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Columbia University’s managers have abjectly surrendered to terrorist supporters masquerading as pro-Palestinian demonstrators who are doing their best to prevent Jewish students from attending classes and to prevent Columbia from operating at all.

Columbia University was holding classes virtually Monday as protests over the Israel-Hamas war continue to engulf the campus.
Columbia president Minouche Shafik said she wanted to “deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps.”

Even the Wall Street Journal‘s characterization of these “protests” as being over the Israel-Hamas war is cynical and misleading. These “protestors” aren’t protesting the war, they’re objecting to Israel’s defending itself against Hamas’ war of extermination. Nor will these terrorist supporters stop. As Shafik bows down here, the “rancor” will only escalate, and the disruptors will then push for ending all support for Israel and for the “from the river to the sea” destruction of Israel.

Here’s more from Shafik:

I understand that many are experiencing deep moral distress and want Columbia to help alleviate this by taking action. But we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view.

And yet, that’s exactly what Shafik is doing when she allows these “protestors” to disrupt to the extent that in-person classes, which are what those students and their parents have paid for and which are far more effective teaching devices than individuals participating remotely via video, are no longer being held. In-person classes that are blocked, not by these terrorist supporters, but by the cowardice of Shafik and her management team. Beyond that, Shafik is refusing to do anything to alleviate the deep moral distress that the school’s Jewish students and their supporters are experiencing, and she is empirically refusing to take any action to supply her defect.

Rather than bowing and scraping at the feet of the disrupters, Shafik should authorize and require campus police to arrest them, push for New York City’s Progressive-Democratic Mayor Eric Adams to have the arrestees jailed, expel with prejudice those disruptors who are enrolled in any capacity at Columbia, and fire for cause any COlumbia employee participating in the disruption. The only way to deescalate these disruptions is to eliminate the disruptors.

Addendum: Shafik’s perfidy goes even further than merely aiding and abetting the terrorists-supporting disrupters on campus.

A [Jewish] Columbia University professor who has been a vocal critic of the administration’s response to the ongoing anti-Israel student protests was barred from campus after he tried to lead a pro-Jewish rally at the Ivy League college.
Israel-born Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School and an outspoken supporter of the Jewish state, said that when he swiped his key card at the school’s Morningside Heights campus, it read “deactivated.”

Now Shafik is actively opposing those who disagree with her terrorist-supporting disrupters.

In Thy light shall we see light. Dishonoring the school’s motto, Shafik has turned out the lights.

Concerns Regarding “Unreasonable” Searches

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There are concerns that a bill under consideration in the House, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, goes too far in protecting us Americans from 4th Amendment violations by the government at the expense of our counterintelligence capabilities.

The bill…would ban the government from buying information on Americans from data brokers. This would include many things in the cloud of digital exhaust most Americans leave behind online, from information on the websites they visit to credit-card information, health information, and political opinions.

Worse, goes the argument, the bill

would prohibit the US government from buying digital information that would remain available to the likes of China and Russia.

That last is a non sequitur, though. The fact that the data are readily available to our enemies doesn’t legitimize its collection by our government, which has Constitutional bars against most kinds of searches. It’s further the case that if we can’t be secure against the unwarranted [sic] intrusions of our own government, how can we expect our own government to keep us secure from the intrusions of foreign governments, especially enemy foreign governments?

There also is a misunderstanding buried in the claim regarding that digital exhaust [that] most Americans leave behind online. A significant fraction of that “digital exhaust” is not voluntary; it’s left behind as a condition of doing business with those enterprises that require collection of the data. Some of those data are legitimately needed by businesses: credit card account numbers if payment is being offered via credit card, shipping addresses so the seller can deliver the product, personal names so the seller can be sure of the credit card numbers and shipping addresses, and the like. Other data are demanded by the business as a condition of doing business with the customer for reasons unique to the specific enterprise.

Better would be to bar the sale, rather than bar the purchase, of such data.

That sale, too, should be barred universally, not just with respect to our government, within the following boundaries. All data that an enterprise demands be collected in order to do business needs to be barred from sale or any other transfer, to any other entity, whether government or not. There should be no default position or opt in or out; the sale or transfer of these data should be prohibited. Government legitimately can still access those data on presentation in court of a probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the [data] to be searched, and the [data] to be seized. Voluntarily left data should require affirmative opt-in before those data can be sold or transferred. Failure to choose should be taken as not opting in—the enterprise cannot sell of transfer the data.

The Disingenuousness of Government Censorship

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The Supreme Court is hearing a case centered on, among other speech-related matters, whether the Federal government illegally—unconstitutionally—pressured social media companies to suppress or delete altogether posts of which the government disapproves regarding Wuhan Virus vaccines.

The government’s arguments in the case are telling.

US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar…likened the government’s interactions with social-media companies to Ronald Reagan’s urging the media to help combat drug abuse, George W Bush’s inveighing against pornography, and Theodore Roosevelt’s denunciation of muckraking journalists.

This is one of the government’s disingenuousnesses. All of Reagan’s, Bush the Younger’s, and Roosevelt’s inveighing were publicly done. Us ordinary Americans knew what those Presidents were telling “the media” what they wanted them to do, and we knew it as soon as they spoke. The Biden administration, on the other hand, pressured today’s social media outlets behind the scenes, in secret. For instance,

When Hank Aaron died in 2021, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, suggested in a tweet that the baseball legend’s death was caused by a Covid vaccine.
The next day, a White House employee asked Twitter, now known as X, to take down Kennedy’s post. “Wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” the White House’s Covid-19 digital director wrote to two Twitter employees.
The social-media platform did so.

Here’s another of the Biden administration’s disingenuousnesses, if not an example of its outright cynicism, this one regarding the 5th Circuit’s ruling forbidding officials including the president’s counsel, press secretary, director of digital strategy, and other White House staffers from coercing, “significantly encouraging,” or supervising content moderation.

The Biden administration appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court. It warned that the restrictions would prevent the government from talking to tech companies about matters of national security and public safety, as well as urging them to protect teens from the harmful effects of social media.

Nonsense. The appellate court’s bar in no way prevented or prevents anyone in the Biden administration from talking to tech companies or anyone else about anything at all. Those officials just have to do it publicly—like those prior Presidents had done, and in the same vein those prior Presidents had—and they aren’t allowed to attempt to apply pressure to comply.

Prelogar does have an argument, of sorts.

The government is entitled to speak for itself by sharing information, urging action, and participating in debate over issues of great concern to the public[.]

Absolutely, the government is so allowed. However, government—in the present case, the Biden administration—is not speaking for itself when it moves to suppress the speech of others who disagree with the administration position.

Nor is the Biden administration “urging action” regarding the subject of a debate when it is urging suppression of views that run counter to the administration’s position.

Nor is the Biden administration participating in debate over issues of great concern to the public when it acts to suppress the speech of others, which also is of concern to the public, thereby barring the public from participating in what the Biden administration wants to be a one-sided debate.

The Biden administration should exercise its “entitlement” to speak for itself by answering disagreeing comments in the commentary with its own—public—comments saying why those disagreeing comments seem erroneous; asserting what the administration believes to be accurate information; and explaining in concrete, measurable terms why it believes its own claims to be the more accurate.

There are no alternatives in a nation that believes free speech to be a fundamental right intrinsic in each of us citizens.