The full order is linked in the article: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/NYT-v.... If you read that it becomes more clear: The person who complained here filed a specific "motion to intervene" which has a strict set of requirements. These requirements were not met. IANAL, but it doesn't seem too strange to me here.
> Also, rejecting something out of hand simply because a lawyer didn't draft it seems really antithetical to what a judge should be doing. There is no requirement for a lawyer to be utilized.
This is also mentioned in the order: An individual have the right to represent themselves, but a corporation does not. This was filed by a corporation initially. The judge did exactly what a judge what supposed to do: Interpret the law as written.
1. a court order that a dating service saves off all chats and messages between people connecting on the service (instead of just saving off say the chats from a suspected abuser)
2. saving all text messages going through a cell phone company
3. how about saving all google docs? Probably billions of these a day are being created.
4. And how has the govt not tried to put out a legal request that signal add backdoors and save all text messages (because there will no doubt be nefarious users like our own secretary of defense). I think it would take a very significant reason to succeed against a private organization like signal.
The power and reach of this makes me wonder if the US govt already has been doing this to normal commercial services (outside of phone calls and texting). I recall reading back in the day they were "tapping" / legally accessing through some security laws phone company trunks. And then we learned about tapping google communications from Edward Snowden.
Point of order, phone companies already do that. Third Party Doctrine. I don't believe they should, but as of right now, that's where we're at.
this is a strange turn of phrase
1. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/savin...
2. https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Service/End-User-S...
In both cases it's being used for "copying".
We can also see it was used as early as 15 years ago on this very site ( https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=1182478 ), so it's not a new turn of phrase.
My experience has definitely been that I've heard it more online and in San Francisco, and not very often in Germany, Texas, or Russia. Are you in one of those areas?
I feel like the etymology is something like "print off a few sheets" becoming "copy off a sheet with the copier", and then to the more general digital copy meaning.
Conceptually, I think that the "off" serves the purpose of aligning it with something like "split off"—you're essentially forking the history by creating a separate saved copy.
Quick question. Should your percieved "right to privacy" supersede all other laws?
To extrapolate into the real world. Should it be impossible for the police to measure the speed of your vehicle to protect your privacy? Should cameras in stores be unable to record you stealing for fear of violating your privacy?
We can all observe the world in the moment. Police can obtain warrants to wiretap (or the digitial equivalent) suspects in real-time. That's fine!
The objection is that we are ending up with laws and rulings that require a recording of history of everyone by everyone - just so the police can have the convenience of trawling through data everyone reasonably felt was private and shouldn't exist except transiently? Not to mention that perhaps the state should pay for all this commercially unnecessary storage? Our digital laws are so out-of-touch with the police powers voters actually consented to - that mail (physical post) and phone calls shall not be in intercepted except under probable cause (of a particular suspect performing a specific crime) and a judge's consent. Just carry that concept forward.
On a technical level, I feel a "perfect forward secrecy" technique should be sufficient for implementers. A warrant should have a causal (and pinpoint) effect on what is collected by providers. Of course we can also subpoena information that everyone reasonably expected was recorded (i.e. not transient and private). This matches the "physical reality" of yesteryear - the police can't execute a warrant for an unrecoreded person-to-person conversation that happened two weeks ago; you need to kindly ask one of the conversents (who have their own rights to privacy / silence, are forgetful, and can always "plead the 5th").
> Not to mention that perhaps the state should pay for all this commercially unnecessary storage?
Unfortunately, that often creates incentive for the business to error on the side of sharing too much with the authorities, even when proper procedure (warrants) have not been followed. It's the only way to retroactively get payed for all that storage and for the code to retrieve that data.
Cellphone location data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
Thermal imaging a home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
Biometric unlocking: https://cdt.org/insights/circuit-court-split-lays-the-ground...
In these cases, privacy, or rather, the constitution, does supersede all other laws.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/communications_law/public...
Beyond that, no, it didn’t impact anything other than abortion.
When the SCOTUS ruled the constitution protected the right to engage in gay sex, and later gay marriage, precidents were overturned.
Conservatives claimed this might make it easier to overturn Roe. It didn’t.
Roe wasn’t in danger until SCOTUS had six reliable anti-Roe justices.
The reasoning behind Roe was generally regarded as tenuous even by the justices that supported it. Overturning it was required to defend the government’s Constitutional authority for agencies like the FDA, which was undermined by inconsistencies introduced by Roe v Wade. Eventually those judicial inconsistencies come home to roost.
tl;dr: Roe being overturned had little to do with privacy and more to do with protecting specific regulatory powers from being unconstitutional using the same reasoning introduced in Roe v Wade.
Removing such decisions from Federal purview was an elegant solution to the problem, with the practical effect of deferring all such decisions to voters at the State level.
Speed cameras only operate on public roads. The camera in the store is operated by the store owner. In both cases one of the parties involved in the transaction (driving, purchasing) is involved in enforcement. It is clear in both cases that these measures protect everyone and they have clear limits also.
Better examples would be police searching your home all the time, whenever they want (This maps to device encryption).
Or store owners surveilling competing stores / forcing people to wear cameras 24/7 "to improve the customer experience" (This maps to what Facebook / Google try to do, or what internet wire tapping does).
What? How does OpenAI map to your home at all? This is pure nonsense. You seem to have entirely dismissed the comparison to driving a little too out of hand.
The internet is, like the roads, public infrastructure. You can't claim that encryption makes all traffic on the public infrastructure as private as staying home.
You sound like one of those "free man of the land" guys: "I'm not driving your honor, I was traveling."
It's extremely unlikely that a protected class is going to start treating a non-protected class with the same regard in society.
I'm not even sure how there could be a constitutional issue here, but it probably isn't for this court to figure out anyways.
This is 100% wrong. Pro Se litigation is well regulated, in the first case a non lawyer tried to file in representation of his company, which is not himself so it's not pro se, and you need to be a licensed lawyer to represent someone else.
"So because the lawsuit pertains to copyright, we can ignore possible constitutional issues because it'll make things take longer?"
Not quite, the contention is that the judge doesn't see how it would be successful, so it would be a delay that never addresses a constitutional issue by her judgment.
What constitutional issues do you believe are present?
> There is no requirement for a lawyer to be utilized.
Corporations must be represented by an attorney, by law. So that's not true outright. Second, if someone did file something pro-se, they might get a little leeway. But the business isn't represented pro-se, so why on earth would the judge apply a lower standard appropriate for a pro-se party so a sophisticated law firm, easily one of the largest and best in the country?
When you are struggling to reason around really straightforward issues like that, it does not leave me with confidence about your other judgments regarding the issues present here.
The PDF is easy to read and really lucid once you get past the formatting. Ars should have just converted it to markdown.
4th Amendment (Search and Seizure)
So I think that this is more so an artefact of the parameters than an outcome of some mechanism of law.
There is a reasonable expectation that deleted and anonymous chats would not be indefinitely retained.
> The court is just requiring OpenAI to maintain records it already maintains and segregate them.
Incorrect. The court is requiring OpenAI to maintain records it would have not maintained otherwise.
That is the crux of this entire thing.
Not quite. The court is requiring OpenAPI to maintain records longer than it would otherwise retain them. It's not making them maintain records that they never would have created in the first place (like if a customer of theirs has a zero-retention agreement in place).
Legal holds are a thing; you're not going to successfully argue against them on 4A grounds. This might seem like an overly broad legal hold, though, but I'm not sure if there are any rules that prevent that sort of thing.
the government is not involved at all in this dispute, neither state or federal.
Or, perhaps, that's not something known by most. I didn't struggle to understand that, I simply didn't know it. Also, again, the article could have mentioned that, and I started my statement by saying maybe the article was doing a bad job conveying things.
> What constitutional issues do you believe are present?
This method of interrogation of online comments is always interesting to me. Because you seem to want to move the discussion to that of whether or not the issues are valid, which wasn't what I clearly was discussing. When you are struggling to reason around really straightforward issues like that, it does not leave me with confidence about your other judgments regarding the issues present here.
>Or, perhaps, that's not something known by most. I didn't struggle to understand that, I simply didn't know it.
Sorry you struggled to not understand your own concept that you put forward that because a lawyer isn't required (not true, but granting you this for the sake of this conversation), we shouldn't hold lawyers up to the standard of a lawyer anyway? That's facially silly.
I literally just repeated to you what you said to me. But, yeah, I'm the petty one.
> Sorry you struggled to not understand your own concept that you put forward that because a lawyer isn't required
What? Why are you misinterpreting everything I wrote?
> we shouldn't hold lawyers up to the standard of a lawyer anyway? That's facially silly.
Where in the world did I say this?
"Even if the Court were to entertain such questions, they would only work to unduly delay the resolution of the legal questions actually at issue."
So because the lawsuit pertains to copyright, we can ignore possible constitutional issues because it'll make things take longer?
Also, rejecting something out of hand simply because a lawyer didn't draft it seems really antithetical to what a judge should be doing. There is no requirement for a lawyer to be utilized.