Mark Lemley is one of the most prestigious copyright lawyers. Professor at Stanford University and one of the ten most cited legal scholars in history, TechDirt defined it, in words collected by Wired“how a legal thinker on the level of Lebron James or Michael JordanUntil a few days ago, in addition, the lawyer was defending Facebook after a lawsuit from a group of authors who reported that the technology giant had trained its artificial intelligence systems with its books without obtaining permission to do so. But not anymore.
A week ago and on Meta, Lemley commented that he had been thinking for some time about the best way to respond to the decline of Facebook, which in his opinion has entered a spiral of “toxic masculinity and neo-Nazi madness”. Although at first he also thought about leaving the social network, in the end he has not done so since, he says, he still finds “great value in the connections and friends” he has there. “It doesn’t seem fair that he should lose that because Zuckerberg is having a midlife crisis.. “On second thought, I have decided to stay, although I will probably be less involved than I normally was,” he said.
In any case, Lemley has announced that he has done and will do the following things: deactivate your Threads account (“and the last thing I need is to support a Twitter-like site run by a Musk wannabe”), stop buying products advertised on Facebook or Instagram and finally, stop representing Facebook in the aforementioned case against a group of authors. While he is confident they will win the trial, he can no longer serve as their attorney “in good conscience.”
In one, the prestigious lawyer says he is very concerned about “the direction the United States is taking.” “I’m especially concerned that a number of people in the tech industry seem willing to go along with it, no matter how extreme the situation. I wouldn’t want to be associated with a series of changes, from unconditional support for Trump to systematically cutting protections for LGTIBQ people going through the elimination of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs,” he commented by phone to venture “a pattern that seems to follow what we saw with Elon Musk a couple of years ago”. “We have seen where that path leads, and it is not anywhere good,” he concluded.
