It seems like the Earth’s billionaires are desperate to escape the planet. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are looking to outer space. Mark Zuckerberg is looking to the inner space of virtual reality. So many billionaires are buying up land and luxury survival bunkers in New Zealand that it’s hard to keep track.

Do they know something we don’t? Or do they just have the money to act on fears they themselves were instrumental in creating?

Here today to help me answer that question is Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff is a media theorist and author. His newest book is out on September 6. It’s called Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

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Police in the city of Rosenberg, Texas, were searching for a group of Black male teenagers when they pulled over an older Black couple in their vehicle one night in November 2020. But instead of letting the couple go, when they clearly didn’t fit the description of the kids, the police handcuffed them at gunpoint, searched them, and confiscated and destroyed their belongings, including vital medical equipment.

Now the couple, Michael Lewis, 67, and Regina Armstead, 57, have filed a lawsuit against the officers, the police department, and the city of Rosenberg for violating their Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizures.

“Everybody should be treated fairly, and I feel like that night we were not treated fairly,” Armstead told VICE News. “We hope this will be a warning to them and for other Black people and people of color around here.”

On the evening of Nov. 6, 2020, police received an emergency call about a group of Black teens on the south side of town who allegedly flashed guns at another group of kids before driving off in a white vehicle with tinted windows and black rims, according to a copy of the lawsuit shared with VICE News. Five officers responded to the call.

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Around the same time, Lewis and Armstead were driving home in their white Dodge Charger with silver hubcaps after picking up food at a local restaurant, according to the lawsuit. Armstead, who was driving, noticed at least three police cars with their lights and sirens on behind them.

The cops used their vehicle’s loudspeaker to order the vehicle to pull over, the lawsuit reads. They then asked Armstead to throw the car keys out of the driver's-side window, exit the car on her knees, and pace backward toward them with her hands up. After she closed the 30-foot gap between her car and the cops’, one of the officers handcuffed her while two others pointed their guns at her.

Realizing that she and her partner were being arrested, Armstead told officers that Lewis has kidney disease, according to the lawsuit. The ailment is managed through a device called an AV fistula embedded in his left forearm, so he couldn’t have tight restraints on his wrists.

But instead of listening to her warning, they placed Armstead in the back of a police vehicle while four other officers, one holding an assault rifle, ordered Lewis out of the car, handcuffed him anyway, and placed him in a police car, according to the lawsuit.

For the full 45-minute traffic stop, the couple remained handcuffed while officers searched their vehicle without requesting or receiving their consent. The officers also confiscated Armstead’s cellphone. 

Only after officers realized there weren’t any weapons or contraband in the vehicle were the restraints removed and the couple was allowed to leave the scene. When they asked what the stop was for, the cops said they’d been searching for three young men who had been “driving around and shooting at kids.” The items that were confiscated by the cops were returned hours later, but the fob used to start the car had been destroyed.

Lewis had to get three medical procedures to replace the fistula in his wrist, causing “prolonged pain and suffering,” the lawsuit says.

The couple said to this day they feel anxious anytime they see a police officer.

“Ever since they pulled us over that night with all those guns and stuff, we can’t even stand to drive down that street,” Lewis told VICE News. “We go the other way around because they might stop us again.”

The couple’s lawsuit claims the offenses against them reflect larger issues with the department: Officers who violate departmental policy by conducting warrantless searches of vehicles are not disciplined, and are in fact encouraged to do so when making an arrest.

The lawsuit lists at least 26 civilian complaints going back to 2017 that accused the department of stopping and searching people without cause.

Armstead and Lewis are also suing the department for violating the American Disabilities Act by not accommodating Lewis’ disability, and for wrongfully seizing their property without cause under state law. The couple is asking for monetary compensation as well as for the department to adopt a policy mandating the use of body and dashboard cameras.

Neither the city of Rosenberg nor the Rosenberg Police Department responded to a request for comment about the lawsuit. 

Incidents recorded on bystander video, reported in local media, or documented through dozens of civilian complaints show that the Rosenberg Police Department has a history of using excessive force when interacting with the public, and detaining people for longer than necessary.

A complaint filed just a few weeks before Armstead and Lewis’ encounter and shared with VICE News claims RPD officers pulled up to a location where people were filming a music video with their weapons drawn.

Last year, a disabled senior filed a lawsuit against the city and seven of its police officers after the officers allegedly detained him without warning. The lawsuit claims the officers took him to the ground and accused him of resisting arrest.

In 2017, the department settled with a couple who accused officers of forcefully pulling them out of their car and using excessive force. Cellphone video of the encounter shows officers punching the husband twice and leaving him bloodied, as someone off camera screams, “Dad, chill out.” It also shows another officer with a taser drawn and pointing it offscreen.

That same year, a father of three filed a complaint against the department saying officers stopped him and his three children for nearly an hour while trying to investigate whether someone tossed a piece of garbage out of the car window.

From January 2017 through April 2022, police have killed 589 people during traffic stops, and  Black people make up 28 percent of those deaths, according to the Guardian. Some cities, like St. Paul and San Francisco, have deprioritized prosecuting cases that stem from traffic stops in hopes of incentivizing cops from seeking arrests that way.

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Two years after four corporate book publishers jointly sued the Internet Archive (IA) for copyright infringement, the website’s lawyers have asked a federal judge to recognize its digital book lending practice as lawful fair use through a motion filed last week in a U.S. District Court. 

Copyright experts say the stakes couldn’t be higher. If the motion fails, they say, the resulting legal fallout would not only threaten the Internet Archive’s existence but curtail digital ownership rights for everyone on an astronomical scale. 

“I think the case with the publishers has implications not just for the Internet Archive but an attack on the libraries’ protected value to the community including the right to loan, preserve, and provide access to materials,” Kyle K. Courtney, a copyright advisor at Harvard Library and co-founder of Library Futures Institute, told Motherboard. “It’s a warning shot across the bow for libraries that loaning is a problem for publishers, enough so that they’re bringing a lawsuit about it even though we’ve been loaning for centuries.” 

At issue in the case is whether a library can lend scanned digital copies of print books that have been purchased by the library but removed from its physical shelves. This method is characterized by the software’s ability to limit the number of “copies” of a book lent out to patrons at any given time, just like it would for physical books. 

In March 2020, when people were encouraged to follow “stay-at-home” quarantine orders to help stop the spread of COVID-19, the Internet Archive temporarily removed the lending limits of 1.4 million digitized print books from its mammoth collection of online artifacts by suspending its two-week waiting period, creating what it called a “National Emergency Library.” 

Publishers and authors’ rights groups were quick to push back. In June 2020, Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and Penguin Random House LLC filed suit for “willful mass copyright infringement.” The Author’s Guild likened the Internet Archive to a piracy website, and the Copyright Alliance described its founder and executive director Brewster Kahle as someone who loots homes and throws bricks through store windows.

“This lawsuit is not just an attack on the Internet Archive—it is an attack on all libraries,” Kahle said during a press conference last week. “The publishers want to criminalize libraries’ owning, lending and preserving books in digital form.” 

For the plaintiffs, the case hinges on 127 titles the publishers have identified as commercially available and whose copyrights Internet Archive has allegedly infringed upon. These include the strictly-Grisham-Patterson-shelf titles, thrillers like Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, children’s books like Little House on the Prairie, contemporary novels like The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth, and nonfiction works from Malcolm Gladwell, Elie Wiesel, and Bill Bryson. 

The news of the case quickly spread on social media, inspiring heated debates between information access advocates and authors protective of intellectual property rights. Popular authors affiliated with major publishers have publicly stated they do not support the lawsuit, including Neil Gaiman and Chuck Wendig. 

Barbara Fister, a crime-thriller writer and retired academic librarian, says she was thrilled to see her commercial fiction books listed in the Internet Archive’s “National Emergency Library.” As she explains, her books were published back in the late aughts, which is considered “a long time ago” for librarians curating collections.

“Public libraries need current stuff, that’s what readers are looking for, so they need space and they get rid of the older things,” Fister told Motherboard. “So my books aren’t in many public libraries anymore. My books also have not been burned into library ebooks sold through a major book licensing platform like Overdrive.” 

Fister also notes that Internet Archive’s digital book lending software is less convenient than other ebook reading platforms like Amazon’s Kindle app or Overdrive’s Libby app. 

“I think the Archive’s interface is really cute but it’s not the kind of thing that people would turn to read,” she added. “It’s just a little bit more work to read books through the Internet Archive and discover books. There’s a little bit of friction in the design of the system, which is partly this intentional attention to fair use and what you need to do to induce some friction so that it doesn’t violate fair use.”

A spokesperson for the Association of American Publishers did not provide comment when contacted by Motherboard. Instead, the spokesperson pointed to the organization’s recent press release, which accuses the Internet Archive of “robbing authors and publishers of their ability to control the manner and timing of communicating their works to the public,” and claims that the nonprofit “makes no investment in creating the literary works it distributes and appears to give no thought to the impact of its efforts on the quality and vitality of the authorship that fuels the marketplace of ideas.”

In 2018, Courtney co-wrote the white paper on the controlled digital lending (CDL) of library books—the formula that the Internet Archive’s digitized print book collection used until the nonprofit suspended “National Emergency Library” waitlists. Courtney argues that removing the waitlists should be considered “fair use in a case of emergency,” and that any supposed damage to publisher profits was relatively insignificant. 

“The factors that exist under the fair use statute are designed to be flexible based on the situation that’s being presented,” Courtney told Motherboard. “In this case, again, especially during the height of the closures, we had something very interesting going on. We had collections that had been purchased and owned by all sorts of libraries and archives that were totally inaccessible. The concept here is that there was very little market harm that was going to result from this because these were books that were already purchased to be used, they were just unable to be accessed.” 

Under U.S. copyright law, the first factor determining “fair use” focuses on the purpose and character of the use—for instance, whether it is for commercial or nonprofit educational purposes. Courts also typically focus on whether the use is “transformative,” which refers to whether the work adds a new expression or meaning or if it merely copies the original work. In Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios (1984), the Supreme Court voted that Sony did not infringe on the studios’ copyrights by manufacturing and marketing Betamax VHRs, which set a legal precedent that something can be transformative if it utilizes technology to achieve that transformative purpose. In this case, Courtney says the Internet Archive can argue it was improving the delivery of content without unreasonably encroaching on the commercial entitlement of the rightsholder. 

The Internet Archive’s legal team claims it's confident in its fair use argument, though it’s painfully aware of the case’s high stakes.

“If the publishers prevail, they will be seeking damages like statutory damages and injunctive relief in the sense of preventing the Archive from continuing to operate [digital lending] with respect to these particular publishers,” Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said during a press conference Friday. “That would be a blow not just for the Archive, that would be a blow for the public, that would be a blow for all libraries.” 

Courtney believes one way the plaintiffs are trying to sway public opinion on the case is by repeatedly claiming that the Internet Archive is not a library. That way, if the Archive loses, publishers would be able to seek higher damages. This is because the law protects libraries and archives by preventing statutory damages if they can prove the infringement was a good faith effort in fair use. 

“If they’re not a library, then they can’t plea that damages provision,” Courtney said. “But libraries are winners. The public and the court understand our mission transcends a business interest. It’s a public interest.”