Tech Talk: Allied for Startups and Asserting Creative Control
CDT’s Tech Talk is a podcast where we dish on tech and Internet policy, while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. You can find Tech Talk on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Play.
Melissa Blaustein of Allied for Startups
Today we’ll be talking about global startups and tech policy. Political leaders love to talk about job creation and innovation, and they love when new businesses start in their communities. But are these lawmakers effectively engaging entrepreneurs and startups in policy debates, and do these startups know the most effective ways to engage? Allied for Startups is working to address these challenges and its founder, Melissa Blaustein, joined us to tell us how they are doing this.
We’ll also talk about intellectual property laws, which most certainly impact startups. Our Free Expression Fellow, Taylor Moore, tells us about a legal clinic she is helping launch for all creators aimed at helping them take control of their IP. She also discusses her forthcoming paper on IP and social justice. Yes, they are very much connected.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
