Category: Uncategorized

This week, the clock started ticking on the UK’s Online Safety Act. Ofcom, the regulator charged with enforcing it, published its codes of practice and guidance, which come into force on March 17, 2025. At that point, websites that fall into scope – in Ofcom’s 2023 estimate 150,000 of them – must comply with requirements to conduct risk assessments, preemptively block child sexual abuse material, register a responsible person (who faces legal and financial liability), and much more.

Almost immediately, the first casualty made itself known: Dee Kitchen announced the closure of her site, which supports hundreds of interest-based forums. Ofcom’s risk assessment guidance (PDF), the personal liability would be overwhelming even if the forums produced enough in donations to cover the costs of compliance.

Russ Garrett has a summary for small sites. UK-linked blogs – even those with barely any readers – could certainly fit the definition per Ofcom’s checker tool, if users can comment on each other’s posts. Common sense says that’s ridiculous in many cases…but as Kitchen says all takes to ruin the blogger’s life is a malicious complainant wielding the OSA as their weapon.

Kitchen will certainly not be alone in concluding the requirements are prohibitively risky for web forums and bulletin boards that are run by volunteers and have minimal funding. Yet they are the Internet’s healthy social ecology, without the algorithms and business models that do most to create the harms the Act is meant to address. Promising Trouble and Power to Change are collaborating on a community of practice, and have asked Ofcom for a briefing on compliance for volunteers and small sites.

Garrett’s summary also points out that Ofcom’s rules leave it wide open for sites to censor *more* than is required, and many will do exactly that to minimize their risk. A side effect, as Garrett writes, will be to further centralize the Net, as moving communities to larger providers such as Discord will shift the liability onto *them*. This is what happens when rules controlling speech are written from the single lens of preventing harm rather than starting from a base of human rights.

More guidance to come from Ofcom next month. We haven’t even started on implementing age verification yet.

***

On Monday, I learned a new term I wish I hadn’t: “government identity as a service”. GIAAS?

The speaker was human rights campaigner Edward Hasbrouck, in a talk on identification Dave Farber‘s and Dan Gillmor‘s weekly CCRC/IP-Asia Zoom call.

Most people trace the accelerating rise of demands for identification in countries like the US and UK to 9/11. Based on that, there are now people old enough to drink in a US state who are not aware it was ever possible to just walk up to fly, get a hotel room, or enter an office. As Hasbrouck writes in a US election day posting, the rise in government demands for ID has been powered by the simultaneous rise of corporate tracking for commercial purposes. He calls it a “malign convergence of interest”.

It has long been obvious that anything companies collect can be subpoenaed by governments. Hasbrouck’s point, however, is that identification enables control as well as surveillance; it brings watchlists, blocklists, and automated bars to freedom of action – it makes us decision subjects as Gavin Freeguard said at the recent Foundation for Information Policy Research event.

Hasbrouck pinpoints three components that each present a vulnerability to control: identification, logging, decision making. As an example, consider the UK’s in-progress eVisa system, in which the government confirms an individual’s visa status online in real time with no option for physical documentation. This gives the government enormous power to stop individuals from doing vital but mundane things like rent a home, board an aircraft, or get a job. Its heart is identification – and a law delegating border enforcement to myriad civil intermediaries and normalizes these checks.

Many in the UK were outraged by proposals to give the Department of Work and Pensions the power to examine people’s bank accounts. In the US, Hasbrouck points to a recent report from the House Judiciary Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government that documents the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s collaboration with the FBI to push banks to submit reports of suspicious activity while it trawled for possible suspects after the January 6 insurrection. Yes, the destructors should be caught and punished; but also any weapon turned against people we don’t like can also be turned against us. Did anyone vote to let the FBI conduct financial surveillance by the million?

Now imagine that companies outsource ID checks to the government and offload the risk of running their own. That is how the no-fly list works. That’s how airlines operate *now*. GIAAS.

Then add the passive identification that systems like facial recognition are spreading. You can no longer reliably know whether you have been identified and logged, who gets that information, or what hidden decision they may make based on it. Few of us are sure of our rights in any situation, and few of us even ask why. In his slides (PDF), Hasbrouck offers a list of ways to fight back. He has hope.

Illustrations: Edward Hasbrouck at CPDP in 2017.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Privacy technologies typically fail for one of two reasons: 1) they’re too complicated and/or expensive to find widespread adoption among users; 2) sites and services ignore, undermine, or bypass them in order to preserve their business model. In the first category are numerous privacy-enhancing technologies that failed to make their case in the marketplace. Among examples of the first category are numerous encryption-related attempts to secure communications. Repeated failures in the marketplace, usually because the resulting products were too technically difficult for most users, they never found mass adoption. In the end, encrypted messaging didn’t really took off until WhatsApp built it into its service.

This week saw a category two failure: Mozilla announced it is removing the Do Not Track option from Firefox’s privacy settings. DNT is simple enough to implement if you can stand to check and change settings, but it falls on the wrong side of modern business models and, other than in California, the US has no supporting legislation to make it enforceable. Granted, Firefox is a minority browser now, but the moment feels significant for this 13-year-old technology.

As Kevin Purdy explains at Ars Technica, DNT began as an FTC proposal, based on work by Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, that aimed to create a mechanism for the web similar to the “Do Not Call” list for telephone networks.

The world in which DNT seemed a hopeful possibility seems almost quaint now: then, one could still imagine that websites might voluntarily respect the signal web browsers sent indicating users’ preferences. Do Not Call, by contrast, was established by US federal legislation. Despite various efforts, the US failed to pass legislation underpinning DNT, and it never became a web standard. The closest it has come to the latter is Section 2.12 of the W3C’s Ethical Web Principles, which says, “People must be able to change web pages according to their needs.” Can I say I *need* to not be tracked?

Even at the time it seemed doubtful that web companies would comply. But it also suffered from unfortunate timing. DNT arrived just as the twin onslaught of smartphones and social media was changing the ethos that built the open web. Since then, as Cory Doctor wrote earlier this year, the incentives have aligned to push web browsers to become faithless user agents, and conventions mean less and less.

Ultimately, DNT only ever worked insofar as users could trust websites to honor their preference. As it’s become clear they can’t, ad blockers have proliferated, depriving sites of ad revenue they need to survive. Had DNT been successful, perhaps we’d have all been better off.

***

Also on the way out this week is Cruise’s San Francisco robotaxis. My last visit to San Francisco, about a year ago, was the first time I saw these in person. Most of the ones I saw were empty Waymos, perhaps in transit to a passenger, perhaps just pointlessly clogging the streets. Around then, a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who’d been hit by another car and then dragged her 20 feet. San Francisco promptly suspended Cruise’s license. Technology critic Paris Marx thought the incident would likely be Cruise’s “death knell”. And so it’s proving. The announcement from GM, which acquired Cruise in 2016 for $1 billion, leaves just Waymo standing in the US self-driving taxi business, with Tesla saying it will enter the market late next year.

I always associate robotaxis with Vernor Vinge‘s 2006 novel Rainbows End. In it, Vinge imagined a future in which robotaxis arrived within minutes of being hailed and replaced both public transport and private car ownership. By 2012 or so, his fictional imagining had become real-life projection, and many were predicting that our streets would imminently be filled with self-driving cars, taxis or not. In 2017, the conversation was all about what ethics to program into them and reclaiming urban space. Now, that imagined future seems to be receding, as skeptics predicted it would.

***

American journalism has long operated under the presumption that the stories it produces should be “neutral”. Now, at the LA Times, CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong thinks he can enforce this neutrality by running an AI-based “bias meter” over the paper’s stories. If you remember, in the late stages of the US presidential election, Soon-Shiong blocked the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris. Reports say that the bias meter, due out next month, is meant to identify any bias the story’s source has and then deliver “both sides” of that story.

This is absurd. Few news stories have just two competing sides. A biased source can’t be countered by rewriting the story unless you include more sources and points of view, which means additional research. Most important, AI can’t think.

But readers can. And so what this story says is that Soon-Shiung doesn’t trust either the journalists who work for him or the paper’s readers to draw the conclusions he wants. If he knew more about journalism, he’d know that readers generally don’t adopt opinions just because someone tells them to. The far greater power, I recall reading years ago, lies in determining what readers *think about* by deciding what topics are important enough to cover. There’s bias there, too, but Soon-Shiong’s meter won’t show it.

Illustrations: Dominic Wilccox‘s concept driverless sleeper car, 2014.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

The themes at this week’s Scrambling for Safety, hosted by the Foundation for Information Policy Research, are topical but not new since the original 1997 event: chat control; the online safety act; and AI in government decision making.

The EU proposal chat control would require platforms served with a detection order to scan people’s phones for both new and previously known child sexual abuse material – client-side scanning. Robin Wilton prefers to call this “preemptive monitoring” to clarify that it’s an attack.

Yet it’s not fit even for its stated purpose, as Claudia Peersman showed, based on research conducted at REPHRAIN. They set out to develop a human-centric evaluation framework for the AI tools needed at the scale chat control would require. Their main conclusion: AI tools are not ready to be deployed on end-to-end-encrypted private communications. This was also Ross Anderson‘s argument in his 2022 paper on chat control (PDF) showing why it won’t meet the stated goals. Peersman also noted an important oversight: none of the stakeholder groups consulted in developing these tools include the children they’re supposed to protect.

This led Jen Persson to ask: “What are we doing to young people?” Children may not understand encryption, she said, but they do know what privacy means to them, as numerous researchers have found. If violating children’s right to privacy by dismantling encryption means ignoring the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, “What world are we leaving for them? How do we deal with a lack of privacy in trusted relationships?”

All this led Wilton to comment that if the technology doesn’t work, that’s hard evidence that it is neither “necessary” nor “proportionate”, as human rights law demands. Yet, Persson pointed out, legislators keep passing laws that technologists insist are unworkable. Studies in both France and Australia have found that there is no viable privacy-preserving age verification technology – but the UK’s Online Safety Act (2023) still requires it.

In both examples – and in introducing AI into government decision making – a key element is false positives, which swamp human adjudicators in any large-scale automated system. In outlining the practicality of the Online Safety Act, Graham Smith cited the recent case of Marieha Hussein, who carried a placard at a pro-Palestinian protest that depicted former prime minister Rishi Sunak and former home secretary Suella Braverman as coconuts. After two days of evidence, the judge concluded the placard was (allowed) political satire rather than (criminal) racial abuse. What automated system can understand that the same image means different things in different contexts? What human moderator has two days? Platforms will simply remove content that would never have led to a conviction in court.

Or, asked Monica Horten suggested, how does a platform identify the new offense of coercive control?

Lisa Sugiura, who campaigns to end violence against women and girls, had already noted that the same apps parents install so they can monitor their children (and are reluctant to give up later) are openly advertised with slogans like “Use this to check up on your cheating wife”. (See also Cindy Southworth, 2010, on stalker apps.) The dots connect into reports Persson heard at last week’s Safer Internet Forum that young women find it hard to refuse when potential partners want parental-style monitoring rights and then find it even harder to extricate themselves from abusive situations.

Design teams don’t count the cost of this sort of collateral damage, just as their companies have little liability for the human cost of false positives, and the narrow lens of child safety also ignores these wider costs. Yet they can be staggering: the 1990s US law requiring ISPs to facilitate wiretapping, CALEA, created the vulnerability that enabled widescale Chinese spying in 2024.

Wilton called laws that essentially treat all of us as suspects “a rule to make good people behave well, instead of preventing bad people from behaving badly”. Big organized crime cases like the Silk Road, Encrochat, and Sky ECC, relied on infiltration, not breaking encryption. Once upon a time, veterans know, there were four horsemen always cited by proponents of such laws: organized crime, drug dealers, terorrists, and child abusers. We hear little about the first three these days.

All of this will take new forms as the new government adopts AI in decision making with the same old hopes: increased efficiency, lowered costs. Government is not learning from the previous waves of technoutopianism, which brought us things like the Post Office Horizon scandal, said Gavin Freeguard. Under data protection law we were “data subjects”; now we are becoming “decision subjects” whose voices are not being heard.

There is some hope: Swee Leng Harris sees improvements in the reissued data bill, though she stresses that it’s important to remind people that the “cloud” is really material data centers that consume energy (and use water) at staggering rates (see also Kate Crawford’s book, Atlas of AI). It’s no help that UK ministers and civil servants move on to other jobs at pace, ensuring there is no accountability. As Sam Smith said, computers have made it possible to do things faster – but also to go wrong faster at a much larger scale.

Illustrations: Time magazine’s 1995 “Cyberporn” cover, the first children and online pornography scare, based on a fraudulent study.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon.

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality
by Renée DiResta
Hachette
ISBN: 978-1-54170337-7

For the last week, while violence has erupted in British cities, commentators asked, among other things: what has social media contributed to the inflammation? Often, the focus lands on specific famous people such as Elon Musk, who told exTwitter that the UK is heading for civil war (which basically shows he knows nothing about the UK).

It’s a particularly apt moment to read Renée DiResta‘s new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. Until June, DiResta was the technical director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which studies misinformation and disinformation online.

In her book, DiResta, like James Ball in The Other Pandemic and Naomi Klein in Doppelganger, traces how misinformation and disinformation propagate online. Where Ball examined his subject from the inside out (having spent his teenaged years on 4chan) and Klein is drawn from the outside in, DiResta’s study is structural. How do crowds work? What makes propaganda successful? Who drives engagement? What turns online engagement into real world violence?

One reason these questions are difficult to answer is the lack of transparency regarding the money flowing to influencers, who may have audiences in the millions. The trust they build with their communities on one subject, like gardening or tennis statistics, extends to other topics when they stray. Someone making how-to knitting videos one day expresses concern about their community’s response to a new virus, finds engagement, and, eventually, through algorithmic boosting, greater profit in sticking to that topic instead. The result, she writes, is “bespoke realities” that are shaped by recommendation engines and emerge from competition among state actors, terrorists, ideologues, activists, and ordinary people. Then add generative AI: “We can now mass-produce unreality.”

DiResta’s work on this began in 2014, when she was checking vaccination rates in the preschools she was looking at for her year-old son in the light of rising rates of whooping cough in California. Why, she wondered, were there all these anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, and what went on in them? When she joined to find out, she discovered a nest of evangelists promoting lies to little opposition, a common pattern she calls “asymmetry of passion”. The campaign group she helped found succeeded in getting a change in the law, but she also saw that the future lay in online battlegrounds shaping public opinion. When she presented her discoveries to the Centers for Disease Control, however, they dismissed it as “just some people online”. This insouciance would, as she documents in a later chapter, come back to bite during the covid emergency, when the mechanisms already built whirred into action to discredit science and its institutions.

Asymmetry of passion makes those holding extreme opinions seem more numerous than they are. The addition of boosting algorithms and “charismatic leaders” such as Musk or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr (your mileage may vary) adds to this effect. DiResta does a good job of showing how shifts within groups – anti-vaxx groups that also fear chemtrails and embrace flat earth, flat earth groups that shift to QAnon – lead eventually from “asking questions” to “take action”. See also today’s UK.

Like most of us, DiResta is less clear on potential solutions. She gives some thought to the idea of prebunking, but more to requiring transparency: platforms around content moderation decisions, influencers around their payment for commercial and political speech, and governments around their engagement with social media platforms. She also recommends giving users better tools and introducing some friction to force a little more thought before posting.

The Observatory’s future is unclear, as several other key staff have left; Stanford told The Verge in June that the Observatory would continue under new leadership. It is just one of several election integrity monitors whose future is cloudy; in March Facebook announced it would shut down research tool CrowdTangle on August 14. DiResta’s book is an important part of its legacy.

As the world and all knows by now, the UK is celebrating this year’s American Independence Day by staging a general election. The preliminaries are mercifully short by US standards, in that the period between the day it was called and the day the winners will be announced is only about six weeks. I thought the announcement would bring more sense of relief than it did. Instead, these six weeks seem interminable for two reasons: first, the long, long wait for the announcement, and second, the dominant driver for votes is largely negative – voting against, rather than voting for.

Labour, which is in polling position to win by a lot, is best served by saying and doing as little as possible, lest a gaffe damage its prospects. The Conservatives seem to be just trying not to look as hopeless as they feel. The only party with much exuberance is the far-right upstart Reform, which measures success in terms of whether it gets a larger share of the vote than the Conservatives and whether Nigel Farage wins a Parliamentary seat on his eighth try. And the Greens, who are at least motivated by genuine passion for their cause, and whose only MP is retiring this year. For them, sadly, success would be replacing her.

Particularly odd is the continuation of the trend visible in recent years for British right-wingers to adopt the rhetoric and campaigning style of the current crop of US Republicans. This week, they’ve been spinning the idea that Labour may win a dangerous “supermajority”. “Supermajority” has meaning in the US, where the balance of powers – presidency, House of Representatives, Senate – can all go in one party’s direction. It has no meaning in the UK, where Parliament is sovereign. All it means is Labour could wind up with a Parliamentary majority so large that they can pass any legislation they want. But this has been the Conservatives’ exact situation for the last five years, ever since the 2019 general election gave Boris Johnson a majority of 86. We should probably be grateful they largely wasted the opportunity squabbling among themselves.

This week saw the launch, day by day, of each party manifesto in turn. At one time, this would have led to extensive analysis and comparisons. This year, what discussion there is focuses on costs: whose platform commits to the most unfunded spending, and therefore who will raise taxes the most? Yet my very strong sense is that few among the electorate are focused on taxes; we’d all rather have public services that work and an end to the cost-of-living crisis. You have to be quite wealthy before private health care offers better value than paying taxes. But here may lie the explanation for both this and the weird Republican-ness of 2024 right-wing UK rhetoric: they’re playing to the same wealthy donors.

In this context, it’s not surprising that there’s not much coverage of what little the manifestos have to say about digital rights or the Internet. The exception is Computer Weekly, which finds the Conservatives promising more of the same and Labour offering a digital infrastructure plan, which includes building data centers and easing various business regulations but not to reintroduce the just-abandoned Data Protection and Digital Information bill.

In the manifesto itself: “Labour will build on the Online Safety Act, bringing forward provisions as quickly as possible, and explore further measures to keep everyone safe online, particularly when using social media. We will also give coroners more powers to access information held by technology companies after a child’s death.” The latter is a reference to recent cases such as that of 14-year-old Molly Russell, whose parents fought for five years to gain access to her Instagram account after her death.

Elsewhere, the manifesto also says, “Too often we see families falling through the cracks of public services. Labour will improve data sharing across services, with a single unique identifier, to better support children and families.”

“A single unique identifier” brings a kind of PTSD flashback: the last Labour government, in power from 1997 to 2010, largely built the centralized database state, and was obsessed with national ID cards, which were finally killed by David Cameron’s incoming coalition government. At the time, one of the purported benefits was streamlining government interaction. So I’m suspicious: this number could easily be backed by biometrics and checked via phone apps on the spot, anywhere and grow into…?

In terms of digital technologies, the LibDems mostly talk about health care, mandating interoperability for NHS systems and improving both care and efficiency. That can only be assessed if the detail is known. Also of interest: the LibDems’ proposed anti-SLAPP law, increasingly needed.

The LibDems also commit to advocate for a “Digital Bill of Rights”. I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble: “digital rights” as a set of civil liberties separate from human rights is antiquated, and many aspects are already enshrined in data protection, competition, and other law. In 2019, under the influence of then-deputy leader Tom Watson, this was a Labour policy. The LibDems are unlikely to have any power; but they lead in my area.

I wish the manifestos mattered and that we could have a sensible public debate about what technology policy should look like and what the priorities should be. But in a climate where everyone votes to get one lot out, the real battle begins on July 5, when we find out what kind of bargain we’ve made.

Illustrations: Polling station in Canonbury, London, in 2019 (via Wikimedia).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon.

It was tempting to skip wrapping up 2023, because at first glance large language models seemed so thoroughly dominant (and boring to revisit), but bringing the net.wars archive list up to date showed a different story. To be fair, this is partly personal bias: from the beginning LLMs seemed fated to collapse under the weight of their own poisoning; AI Magazine predicted such an outcome as early as June.

LLMs did, however, seem to accelerate public consciousness of three long-running causes of concern: privacy and big data; corporate cooption of public and private resources; and antitrust enforcement. That acceleration may be LLMs’ more important long-term effect. In the short term, the justifiably bigger concern is their propensity to spread disinformation and misinformation in the coming year’s many significant elections.

Enforcement of data protection laws has been slowly ramping up in any case, and the fines just keep getting bigger, culminating in May’s fine against Meta for €1.2 billion. Given that fines, no matter how large, seem insignificant compared to the big technology companies’ revenues, the more important trend is issuing constraints on how they do business. That May fine came with an order to stop sending EU citizens’ data to the US. Meta responded in October by announcing a subscription tier for European Facebook users: €160 a year will buy freedom from ads. Freedom from Facebook remains free.

But Facebook is almost 20 years old; it had years in which to grow without facing serious regulation. By contrast, ChatGPT, which OpenAI launched just over a year ago, has already faced investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission and been banned temporarily by the Italian data protection authority (it was reinstated a month later with conditions). It’s also facing more than a dozen lawsuits claiming copyright infringement; the most recent of these was filed just this week by the New York Times. It has settled one of these suits by forming a partnership with Axel Springer.

It all suggests a lessening tolerance for “ask forgiveness, not permission”. As another example, Clearview AI has spent most of the four years since Kashmir Hill alerted the world to its existence facing regulatory bans and fines, and public disquiet over the rampant spread of live facial recognition continues to grow. Add in the continuing degradation of exTwitter, the increasing number of friends who say they’re dropping out of social media generally, and the revival of US antitrust actions with the FTC’s suit against Amazon, and it feels like change is gathering.

It would be a logical time, for an odd reason: each of the last few decades as seen through published books has had a distinctive focus with respect to information technology. I discovered this recently when, for various reasons, I reorganized my hundreds of books on net.wars-type subjects dating back to the 1980s. How they’re ordered matters: I need to be able to find things quickly when I want them. In 1990, a friend’s suggestion of categorizing by topic seemed logical: copyright, privacy, security, online community, robots, digital rights, policy… The categories quickly broke down and cross-pollinated. In rebuilding the library, what to replace it with?

The exercise, which led to alphabetizing by author’s name within decade of publication, revealed that each of the last few decades has been distinctive enough that it’s remarkably easy to correctly identify a book’s decade without turning to the copyright page to check. The 1980s and 1990s were about exploration and explanation. Hype led us into the 2000s, which were quieter in publishing terms, though marked by bursts of business books that spanned the dot-com boom, bust, and renewal. The 2010s brought social media, content moderation, and big data, and a new set of technologies to hype, such as 3D printing and nanotechnology (about which we hear nothing now). The 2020s, it’s too soon to tell…but safe to say disinformation, AI, and robots are dominating these early years.

The 2020s books to date are trying to understand how to rein in the worst effects of Big Tech: online abuse, cryptocurrency fraud, disinformation, the loss of control as even physical devices turn into manufacturer-controlled subscription services, and, as predicted in 2018 by Christian Wolmar, the ongoing failure of autonomous vehicles to take over the world as projected just ten years ago.

While Teslas are not autonomous, the company’s Silicon Valley ethos has always made them seem more like information technology than cars. Bad idea, as Reuters reports; its investigation found a persistent pattern of mishaps such as part failures and wheels falling off – and an equally persistent pattern of the company blaming the customer, even when the car was brand new. If we don’t want shoddy goods and data invasion with everything to be our future, fighting back is essential. In 2032, I hope looking back shows that story.

The good news going into 2024 is, as the Center for the Public Domain at Duke University, Public Domain Review and Cory Doctorow write, the bumper crop of works entering the public domain: sound recordings (for the first time in 40 years), DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page. and the first of Mickey Mouse. Happy new year.

Illustrations: Promotional still from the 1928 production of The Front Page, which enters the public domain on January 1, 2024 (via Wikimedia).