Not being facetious here! It could be step 1 in Musk’s plan to own all your data!
A ruling in two weeks could ultimately result in ALL YOUR DATA BELONGING TO MUSK, ZUCKERBERG, NADELLA, and ALTMAN!
In only two weeks, Texas Third Court of Appeals has a hearing on an emergency motion by Alex Jones’ lawyers that temporarily blocked the transfer of any Infowars assets. (Which were supposed to be transferred and sold to pay off the more than US$1 billion in defamation lawsuit judgments for the relatives of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.)
Now, whether or not you agree with that judgement or not or the sale or not, that’s not important. What’s important is that on October 14, 2024, LATHAM & WATKINS LLP, on behalf of X Corp., filed a “Notice of Appearance and Demand for Service of Papers” relating to the case and then, on November 25, 2024, filed a statement on “X CORP.’S LIMITED OBJECTION TO TRUSTEE’S PROPOSED SALE MOTIONS”.
Now if you think this has anything to do with Musk trying to protect Jones, Infowars, or its assets, you’re wrong.
Let’s take paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, 25, 26, and 36.
1: Objects to the sale of any account on the “X” platform.
2: Specifically, Infowars, Banned.Video, WarRoomShow, RealAlexJones, and any other account on X belonging to FSS or Jones
3: because accounts on X are X. Corp’s exclusive property
4: and X-Corp is the sole owner
25: and has ultimate control over the accounts.
26: While section 3 of the X Terms of Service (TOS) makes clear the account holder owns the content, section 4 gives X Corp broad rights to “access, read, preserve, and disclose any information”.
36: In addition to being a personal license, the license X Corp. grants to account holders
is an intellectual property license.
Getting the picture? Probably not. Let me spell it out.
An account belongs to the person or an authorized person from a legal entity that creates the account (and, in the latter case, can only be transferred to another person from that legal entity) and cannot be transferred to anyone else under those terms of services.
As a person, you can only access the account as long as you personally are mentally and physically capable of doing so and do not violate the terms of service. As a legal entity, as long as you remain a valid legal entity and have a valid designate to do so.
When these conditions cease to be met, your access is denied, and your account eventually shut down, but X Corp. retains the right to preserve, access, and read that data for eternity, while your (or anyone else’s) rights to such data effectively expire (unless you preserved a copy of such data off of the platform, and transferred your copyright to another entity before you died) as you no longer have a copy or the ability to prove copyright. That data then effectively becomes property of X Corp.
And this is Musk’s effort to have a Judge state that this is legally correct. Because, like its peers, xAI used every available bit of data on the internet to train its models, including every copyrighted book, song and movie/tv show in digital format they could access. And, like his peers, Musk doesn’t want his company sued. (And that’s the real reason there is a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation. It’s not to catch up to China. It’s not to ensure the government has the ability to experiment without recourse in civilian monitoring, military, and electioneering efforts. It’s so the politicians don’t lose access to the biggest money pots out there.)
This is the first step. Have a judge say that social media platforms (where internet users spend most of their time and post most of their data) legally own the service, which is defined as non-transferable in the TOS which also allows the platform to retain all data posted indefinitely. Have the the only copy of the data when the service is abandoned or terminated and assume the rights by default. Then you can’t be sued because you now own the data (because you will by the time the no AI regulations moratorium expires and laws actually get passed).
Sources:
1) CP24.com
2) KUT.org