I don't think you can really sue the government for copyright infringement can you? I'm pretty sure sovereign immunity means they'd have to consent to being sued.

So basically they can use all this stuff for promoting their little reactionary militia stuff all they want. In fact there was never anything stopping them from plastering Mickey Mouse over like government ads for how great social services and SNAP are (except the fact they'd never cross precious property rights for the sake of the poor workers).

So at most these companies could sue and then complain when the government declines to hear it which would get fash frothing mad and declare the brand/IP/universe "woke" but little else. That and probably get the government to try and investigate them for any badly filed paperwork.

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 15 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

hypothetically speaking

-they should do it only for precedent, because if the government wins it - the state can make drugs for free, disregarding ip as well. i don't think usa government before had flagrantly disregarded ip laws, they usually do backroom dealios. (like brand damages are obvious, government necessity - very much less so)

-ice is not sovereign in itself, it's a branch of government, they could sue individual posting it or chain of command

obviously it's all implying there is good faith to be found anywhere and desire to do stuff to spite the righties, instead of a search for profits.

[–] darkcalling@hexbear.net 9 points 4 weeks ago

they should do it only for precedent,

The precedent exists. The federal government has sovereign immunity from most claims. Though I'm not a lawyer and it seems a little confusing it seems they've only waived immunity for patent suits (for example the government starts churning out iPhones, Apple could sue them but the remedies are limited to Apple being given damages equal to the lost revenue of those products and they must go through a special court).

ice is not sovereign in itself, it's a branch of government, they could sue individual posting it or chain of command

No, not so far as I know. Government is not a magical entity kept locked up in the basement of the capital with writhing tentacles. Government is made of people. Those people are acting as part of the government not as individuals unless you can prove otherwise (in this case it's an official government account, if they posted on their person account not for government business you might have an argument though they'd argue back they were using it for government business that time and likely get the benefit of the doubt, best you could hope for). While acting for the government they are not legally a human being named say J D Vance, they are the US government legally speaking as an entity under the law. You could try and challenge that but in this case you'd lose very quickly as this is obviously a government act. We can disagree the government should be doing anything in the realm of this type of thing but they are.

Sovereign immunity would be worthless if you could just go after whoever carried out things and terrorized them all into not doing a thing by directly hitting them with lawsuits and stress. In fact this goes as far as the government at the federal level extending immunity to contractors carrying out government contracts where the government under the law steps in the way of potential suits as concerning their government contracts and work done for that and you must sue them not the contractor, they get in the way.

They could probably try and abuse the DMCA take-down system, especially automated ones to try and knock these offline though the government might appeal and threaten them into getting it back online in this case and DMCA technically has a penalty for filing false claims, not something your average person could ever hope to use in retribution but the US government certainly could though one might argue they'd lose because the take-down was good faith, it was infringing.