Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that President Trump has asked tech company Apple to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” after an executive order from the president that pushed the name change. “I know that the president reached out to Apple directly, so I’m sure that we may be seeing that change...
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Official confirms Trump's Apple lake-renaming request; politicians separately use copyright law to scrub the truth.
As it ran on the front
Look, renaming a lake is well within the tradition of this administration's attention to detail — the Interior Secretary confirmed the request, and frankly, geography is exactly the kind of low-stakes, high-visibility win a White House likes to notch, no different from — did I say low-stakes? I meant, ah, culturally significant. Lake names carry culturally significant — you know, let's move on.
And on the copyright front, this is simply politicians using existing law to protect their own material, the same as any content creator would, nothing unusual about officials relying on copyright law regarding footage of their own public statements, that's just standard rights management, protecting the brand, protecting the — wait, protecting the record from the public that generated it? No, that's not — strike that, I mean protecting the brand.…
…(cont) Look, you have to understand the broader context here. When you ask a private company to change the name of one of the Great Lakes, that's not erasing history, that's updating the interface, the same way you'd update an app. Lake Ontario has had that name for a long time, generations, treaties, maps, but names change, that's just — that's just cartography being responsive to leadership, is what that is.
As for using copyright law to limit the reach of unflattering statements — again, entirely legal, entirely within the rights any copyright holder has, so if you have a problem with politicians using that law on their own old quotes, take it up with copyright law generally, not with the politician who happened to notice it existed and happened to use it on himself — I mean, on his own material, which he owns, obviously, because he said it, which is also, now that I say it out loud, sort of the whole problem, isn't it. Never mind.
The point is none of this is coordinated. A guy wants a lake renamed, some other guys want their old quotes to disappear, and if it looks like the same instinct — control the record, control the name, control the version of events that survives — well, that's just an unfortunate coincidence in the news cycle. It's not a pattern. It's not. I need to stop talking now.
“One official confirms the president wants a Great Lake renamed, and somewhere else officials are using copyright law to make their own old quotes disappear. Different desks, same instinct: control the record, control the map, control what people are allowed to remember.”
“This is routine geographic housekeeping and routine copyright enforcement, two totally separate things — did I just call renaming a Great Lake 'housekeeping'? That tracks, actually, that is exactly what it is, housekeeping, that is my final answer.”
The receipts
“Politics ain’t beanbag,” but the weapon of choice in the latest story of political foul play isn’t a smear campaign or an October surprise — it’s copyright law. Ahead of Florida’s 22nd Congressional District primary, local journalists reported that news stories critical of candidate Michael Carbonara magically disappeared from Google…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.