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Gaming Like It's 1926: The Public Domain Game JamRandy Lubin is a game designer who partners with Techdirt and The Copia Institute on many of our game-related projects, including our public domain game jam. He's also the developer of Story Synth, a free and easy to use platform for building narrative games. Story Synth makes it easy for even inexperienced designers to quickly build a game, so it's a perfect way to get involved in the jam. We invited Randy to share some details on how the platform works and what you can do with it.We’re in the middle of our fourth annual public domain game jam: Gaming Like It’s 1926. If you’re thinking about designing a game, Story Synth is a free platform on which you can design a browser based game in under an hour, with no technical skill or prior experience needed. In this post, I’ll give a quick overview of what Story Synth is and how to design a game with it.With Story Synth, you can design prompt-driven storytelling games by authoring the content in a Google Sheet and then uploading the sheet at storysynth.org. The platform then automatically builds your game, complete with a homepage for your game that you can share online. The platform has live multiplayer: players in the same session will see the same prompts at the same time.Story Synth supports a wide variety of formats inspired by tabletop RPGs such as The Quiet Year and For the Queen. Other formats enable players to generate collections of random prompts and to explore a map of hexagons. You also have plenty of options to customize your game, from tweaking the visual appearance to adding on extensions such as dice rollers, editable lists, shared journals, and more. You can learn more about all of this in the Story Synth guide, or the video tour.You can get started with your design by copying a template Google Sheet. You can grab a link for the format you want at the Story Synth Formats page. Once you make a copy, start editing and adding prompts in the numbered rows. When you’re ready to upload your game, set the Sheet to publicly viewable and then paste the sheet URL in the Story Synth homepage and the site will build your game. Once your game is built, you can launch a new session and test it out; when you refresh the page, Story Synth reloads the content from your Google Sheet; that means that you can keep editing your sheet and immediately testing the changes.If you’re making a game for the Gaming Like It’s 1926 jam, then you can create an Itch.io page that links to your game on Story Synth and then submit it to the jam. Here are more detailed instructions for publishing Story Synth games on Itch.For inspiration on works entering the public domain, check out Duke University’s overview. To get a sense of what Story Synth games are like, try playing fantasy travel game Around the Realm and Seven Samurai inspired Clash at Ikara, or browse the gallery for more options.If you have any questions, feel free to drop by the Story Synth Discord.

There are lots of different antitrust actions currently ongoing against Facebook and Google, with varying degrees of quality. From the beginning, the strongest one has been the lawsuit a bunch of states -- led by Texas -- filed against Google. When it was filed, I noted that there were sections that were heavily redacted which had the potential to be pretty damning, but the redactions made it hard to tell. I also found some of the non-redacted bits questionable, as they suggested a complete misunderstanding of some aspects of the technology. Last Friday, Texas filed its third attempt at a complaint and it reveals a lot more about the stuff that was redacted in the earlier filings -- and I'll now say that this is the most serious, and the most damning, of all the antitrust lawsuits out there. How Google responds to the lawsuit will be extremely interesting and worth watching. Given the errors in the original filing, it's possible that there are errors here too, but if what Texas is alleging in this latest version of the lawsuit are accurate, then Google should be in trouble.The filing is 242 pages long, and much of it gets deep, deep into the weeds about the online advertising market. But there are two key parts that stand out as potentially very important and very damning for Google (and, partly, for Facebook as well). Most of the news coverage has focused on the claim that Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg signed off on a special deal to combat header bidding -- a form of getting around Google's position in the ad market. When the header bidding claims first came out, I found them questionable, as the early claims suggested that Google was abusing its position to kill off header bidding, which seemed ludicrous to me, because I'm contacted probably half a dozen times a day by ad companies offering their header bidding solutions for me to use. But, the details now revealed suggest Google really did work with Facebook to try to suffocate the header bidding market:

It would be nice if the public interest community and internet advocates won the SOPA fight because we had the best arguments. Instead, the bill died because of an overwhelming display of popular opposition. Americans from all walks of life urged Congress to reject the bill—and legislators listened.However, this public outcry did not detract from our excellent arguments, many of which were based around due process, maintaining the integrity and security of the domain name system, and worries about fragmenting the internet. SOPA would have created a system with costs far exceeding whatever benefits it offered private rightsholders. This isn’t a great way to approach public policy.The basic counter from site-blocking proponents was, and continues to be, that it's really difficult to track down “rogue” website operators and to enforce copyright internationally. From their perspective, it's much easier to just order DNS providers, such as ISPs, to block a list of domain names than it is to locate the people running these sites.Of course, just because this option is easier for site-blocking proponents doesn’t make it a good idea for the rest of us. Regardless, SOPA was never enacted, which leaves one to wonder: what was their Plan B? To me, a reasonable Plan B would involve locating and shutting down these “rogue” websites (and identifying what tools are needed to make this easier, in a due process-respecting way of course) rather than developing cost-externalizing shortcuts that would create an American splinternet.Remember: removing a domain from DNS doesn't even knock a site offline. It just means you have to go to the IP address directly or use a different domain. This maneuver may deter casual users, but online copyright infringement is largely driven by a small number of dedicated people with the skills necessary to find and share a workaround with the public. From the rightsholder perspective, it would be at most a partial “win.”Once more, going after “rogue” websites and their operators proves quite difficult in practice. It requires international treaties and law enforcement cooperation. There are many layers to the onion. I am no fan of putting IP provisions in trade agreements and many actually-existing copyright treaty requirements are pretty bad. Still, countries reciprocally respecting each other's rights and ensuring that foreigners have full, fair access to domestic courts is basically one of the core things that treaties are for. That, and ending wars.In the past ten years, there has been some progress in the fight to both preserve an open internet and ensure that creators are paid appropriately. The two goals are not and never have been in conflict. For example, more commercial material is available online via streaming, which addresses copyright infringement on the demand side.But many of the big ideas from the rightsholder lobby to address the supply side continue to be based around roping in more intermediaries—whether it's site blocking, suing CDNs for moving bits from A to B, or even suing broadband providers directly on the theory that they are responsible for what their users do online and should cancel a customer’s internet service upon being “notified” by a rightsholder.Unfortunately, rightsholders seem to prefer a different Plan B—one where they just wait until the time is right to call for the next site-blocking law. Instead of making it easier to locate and sue the operators of a website devoted to copyright infringement, they’d rather rewire the internet. But this is a bad idea today just as it was ten years ago.John Bergmayer is Legal Director at Public Knowledge, specializing in telecommunications, Internet, and intellectual property issues. He advocates for the public interest before courts and policymakers, and works to make sure that all stakeholders--including ordinary citizens, artists, and technological innovators--have a say in shaping emerging digital policies.This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Over the weekend, Rolling Stone reported on a new propaganda campaign the United Kingdom’s government is rolling out to try to turn public opinion against end-to-end encryption (E2EE). It’s the latest salvo in the UK’s decades-long war against encryption, which in the past has relied on censorious statements from the Home Office and legislation such as the Snooper’s Charter rather than ad campaigns. According to the report, the plans for the PR blitz (which is funded by UK taxpayers’ money) include “a striking stunt — placing an adult and child (both actors) in a glass box, with the adult looking ‘knowingly’ at the child as the glass fades to black.”This stunt, devised by ad agency M&C Saatchi, is remarkably similar to one of Leopold Bloom’s advertising ideas in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “…a transparent show cart with two smart girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blotting paper. I bet that would have caught on. Everyone dying to see what she's writing. … Curiosity.” (U154)A century ago, Bloom the ad man cannily intuited how to achieve an agenda by manipulating humans’ nosy nature. And now the UK government — possibly the nosiest humans on earth — is betting it can do the same.The evil genius of this bit of propaganda is that it works on two levels. The link between them turns on the symbolism that, as my Stanford Internet Observatory colleague David Thiel observed, an opaque box with people inside is what’s otherwise known as “a house.”On one level, the opaque room represents encrypted messaging. The audience’s inability to see what happens inside is meant to provoke sympathy for the child, who, it’s leeringly implied, is about to be victimized by the adult. This is supposed to turn the audience’s opinion against encryption: Wouldn’t it be better if someone could see in?But focusing on this shallow symbolism ignores what’s right there on the surface. On a different level, the opaque room isn’t a metaphor at all. It is just what it seems to be: an opaque room — that is, a house.A home.The audience isn’t meant to sympathize with the people inside the home, people just like them, who can shield themselves from prying eyes. Rather, they’re meant to sympathize with the would-be watcher: the UK government. On this level, it’s the frustrated voyeurs who are the victims. Their desire to watch what happens inside has been stymied by that demonic technology known as “walls.” Wouldn’t it be better if someone could see in?To be sure, the glass room is, as it seems, an unsubtle allegory meant to gain public support for banning encryption, which allows people to have private spaces in the virtual world. E2EE protects children’s and adults’ communications alike, and by focusing on adult/child interactions, this stunt hides the fact that removing E2EE for children’s conversations necessarily means removing it for adults’ conversations too. So on one level, it’s normalizing the idea that adults aren’t entitled to have private conversations online.But the campaign’s more insidious message is literally hiding in plain sight. By portraying the transparent room as desirable and the opaque room as a sinister deviation from the norm, the government is peddling the idea that it is suspect for people to have our own private spaces in the physical world.The goal of this propaganda campaign is to turn the UK public’s opinion against their own privacy, not just in their electronic conversations, but even in the home, where the right to privacy is strongest and most ancient. Were the Home Office to say that overtly, many people would immediately reject it as outrageous, and rightly so. But through this campaign, the UK government can get its citizens to come up with that idea all on their own. The hook for this hard-to-swallow notion is the more readily-accepted premise that children should have less privacy and be under more surveillance than adults. But if it’s adults who harm children, then the conclusion follows naturally: adults had better be watched as well. Even inside their own homes.This isn’t a new idea; it’s a longstanding fantasy of the British government, given voice over the centuries by authors from Bentham to Orwell. Heck, general warrants were one of the causes of the American Revolution against the British government. But the new twist of hiring an ad agency to sell people their own subjugation, using their own tax money, is just insulting. Here’s hoping the Home Office’s anti-privacy ulterior motive will be like that glass box: people will see right through it.Riana Pfefferkorn is a Research Scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

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It’s a great irony — and an awkward thing to admit — that I’m not sure if the organization of which I’m executive director, Demand Progress, would exist but for SOPA and PIPA (or really their progenitor, COICA).This month marks not just the 10th anniversary of the SOPA blackout, but also the 9th anniversary of the passing of my partner in the effort to get Demand Progress up and running, Aaron Swartz. Aaron took his own life while facing charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for allegedly downloading too many articles from the JSTOR academic cataloging service — to which he had a subscription — using MIT’s open network. We hope the organization still upholds the values that governed his work — and he certainly serves as an inspiration for so much of what we do.Aaron was several years younger than me, but we came to activism from similar perspectives — more or less unreconstructed utilitarianism — and first connected during my unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2010. A few days after the primary we launched our first couple of online campaigns as Demand Progress, which was originally intended to be a multi-issue progressive populist concern.While Aaron is above all else remembered for his advocacy for an open internet and intellectual property reform, his priorities increasingly included contesting concentrated corporate power, implementing a more equitable vision for our economy, and opposing war-making. Some observers this fall noted the continued resonance of his final tweet — an entreaty to Treasury to mint a $1 trillion coin as a solution to a debt ceiling impasse.But a second irony attendant to our founding is that, as we sought to identify a base of activists to support this progressive populist vision, Aaron was promptly pulled back into the firmament of online rights and IP activism. A petition we put forth in opposition to COICA gained hundreds of thousands of signers over a few days, demonstrating a certain void in the online campaigning ecosystem and imbuing the new organization with a sense of purpose — and providing a base of activists we could organize to make a difference.Everything Demand Progress has become since was built on that foundation.Over the course of the next year or so we worked together to build a movement to use the open architecture of the internet to save the open architecture of the internet. Aaron had a much more intuitive sense than I did of how to activate and harness the potential energy of online networks.My time in politics, starting before MySpace went online, had been shaped by a more traditional conception of political organizing - tactics like knocking on doors and phone banking. But my contribution was that I understood the legislative process and had a sense of what politicians recognize as demonstrations of power.As time passed, kindred spirits — most notably Fight for the Future — emerged. Policy groups — Public Knowledge and EFF also come to mind, but there were many organizations that undertook the often unsung work of engaging with hundreds of Congressional staffers to attune them to the details of our coalition’s concerns.It all culminated in the “blackout” of which others here have written: countless thousands of sites and users each serving as beacons, alerting their combined networks of tens of millions of people to the threat at hand, urging them to make their voices heard, and providing them the tools with which to do so. Is it cringey to say that it kind of felt transcendent? Well, it did.Idealism about the internet’s potential can seem quaint today — even to me — but for most who took part, the SOPA effort was a demonstration of a fundamental, visceral human yearning to connect with one another. You can watch a talk Aaron gave a few months later, where he discusses what all of this meant to him.We and our allies have wielded the tactics we learned and the relationships we built over the course of the SOPA campaign to agitate for other causes that have helped shape the workings of the internet — for instance in support of net neutrality and against mass surveillance.Without them it’s unlikely that we’d have secured the strong net neutrality rules that were put in place in 2015 (with the explicit backing of millions of people) only to be repealed by the Trump administration a couple years later (over the will of millions of people). We are likely on the cusp of a new proceeding to reinstitute net neutrality rules, which are overwhelmingly likely to pass because of those broad demonstrations of support — and stand a chance of being longer-lasting.My second-to-last in-person conversation with Aaron was about how we might fight against suspected abuses of the Patriot Act to spy on a vastly broader universe than was understood by the public — a case Edward Snowden would crack open just a few months later. Demand Progress’s research and lobbying efforts would eventually, during the spring of 2020, prove dispositive of the sunset of several Patriot Act provisions, including that under which the telephonic metadata collection that Snowden revealed was taking place. (Government surveillance practices remain opaque, and there’s every reason to assume nefarious behaviors continue under a variety of other real or imagined authorities.)And in the years since SOPA, Demand Progress has become an organization with a modicum of influence on the national stage — and has even been able to take on that broader remit we envisioned upon our founding.Today we work not to just to help forward online rights, but also in support of expansive macroeconomic policy, against endless wars, and for regulation of concentrations of corporate power — inclusive of some of the major platforms that were allied with us during the SOPA effort, because we think reforms are needed to bring the internet back in line with a more ideal, horizontalist conception of what it could be.The Demand Progress team and I are grateful to Techdirt for pulling together this retrospective and inviting us to participate, and for giving us the opportunity to reflect on that exciting and hopeful work so many of us undertook together a decade ago. We'd also like to acknowledge the many people and groups carrying forth causes that Aaron cared about — SecureDrop, CFAA reform, and public access to court records and scientific research, to name just a few.Davd Segal is the executive director of Demand Progress and a non-residential fellow at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. He is a former Rhode Island State Representative.This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Back in October, reports emerged indicating that AT&T had not only funded much of the creation of the popular conspiracy and fantasy channel OAN, AT&T executives had actually come up with the original idea. The channel, which routinely traffics in false election fraud, COVID, and other right-wing conspiracy theories, had seen most of its reach come courtesy of a partnership with DirecTV. As of last week, DirecTV executives informed OAN it wouldn't be having its contract renewed:

The legalization of marijuana is changing the probable cause equation all over the nation. What used to be an easy bust and/or a great way to engage in warrantless searches is no longer guaranteed. Probable cause on four legs -- police drug dogs -- can't automatically justify further intrusion by police officers. A drug dog trained to detect the odor of now-legal drugs is now more a hindrance than an enabler of warrantless searches.The other subjective contributor to warrantless searches -- "odor of marijuana" -- is no longer an automatic pass for government intrusion. Both factors -- dogs sniffs and cop sniffs -- are almost impossible to challenge, seeing as they rely solely on the officer's subjective interpretation of animal activity and/or odors in the air. Fortunately, we'll be seeing less and less of this dubious "evidence" in the future as marijuana legalization continues around the country.The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania is the latest to declare the odor of marijuana to be indicative of nothing, much less justification for warrantless searches. (via FourthAmendment.com)This case begins like so many others: with a pretextual stop. Two officers -- one still in training -- pulled over a car the troopers had decided to follow for dubious reasons. From the decision [PDF]:

A few months back, we wrote about Southwest Airlines' ridiculously antagonistic legal strategy against aggregators that would scrape information on flights and prices from Southwest.com and help people find flights and prices. The case we covered was the one against Skiplagged, but it was related to a separate case against Kiwi.com. Skiplagged had argued that it didn't violate Southwest's terms of service since it wasn't scraping info from Southwest... but rather had scraped it from a different site, Kiwi.com, which in turn had scraped it from Southwest.com.Just the fact that we're arguing over whether or not it's legal to scrape data from publicly available websites should alert you to the fact that these lawsuits are nonsense. Factual data -- such as flight routes and prices -- are not protected by any intellectual property and if you put them out there, people can (and should!) copy them and spread them elsewhere. But, unfortunately, the court ruled against Kiwi.com last fall, granting Southwest an injunction saying that Kiwi can't scrape its site for data any more. Realizing it was in trouble, it appears that Kiwi caved in and settled the lawsuit agreeing to no longer collect data on Southwest flights.Given that, the court has now made the preliminary injunction a permanent injunction barring Kiwi and any of its employees from ever scraping data off of Southwest's site. The court takes for granted that Southwest can just say in their terms of service that you can't copy data from their website and that's a valid contract. That seems dangerously empowering for terms of service. Can I add to Techdirt's terms of service that by reading this site you agree to place any copyright-covered works you create into the public domain?

"[Historical knowledge] gives understanding of how the present world came to be, and maybe more importantly, an appreciation that everything that is, never necessarily had to be" -from "History as Freedom" —Joe Costello, longtime political organizer, writerOn the 10th anniversary of the groundbreaking SOPA Blackout, a question seems to surface above all else: can any one of us really go on to change history? And how, exactly, does that happen?For the 24 million people who participated in the largest online protest in history against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the millions more who witnessed the protest in real time, the course of history was changed. Had it succeeded, SOPA would have given anyone the power to shut down entire websites over a claim of copyright infringement without recourse or the obligation to demonstrate any trespass at all.The SOPA Blackout not only killed the bill in 2012, but shook Congress so profoundly that no significant copyright legislation has been introduced in the ten years since. Because the Blackout achieved so much progress against the political order in a matter of weeks, this moment in history rewrote what we collectively think is possible in the political realm; in particular among the political set, even though triumphs of this proportion remain elusive, and power is even more entrenched.“Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole these people have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to glory..” —Bertrand RussellMuch of the disaffection with politics comes from the sense that it never seems to change. We feel on a gut level that what passes or doesn't pass is actually debuted by the spreadsheets of lobbying firms along K street, the number of saved cell phone numbers and email addresses in legislators' contacts, the social network of influence that is woven through corporate and political America, and the skyrocketing graph of expected or donated campaign dollars.Generally, power's alignments don’t get upset. And, that was almost the case with SOPA. With this bill, Hollywood was on the verge of achieving their holy grail of legislation. It was the most expensive lobbying campaign Hollywood had ever launched; they gained 100 cosponsors from both sides of the aisle and backing from a slew of companies. A swift road to passage with no organized opposition seemed guaranteed. Instead, the SOPA Blackout was the first time in recent US political history that the expected political order was turned upside down so swiftly."It often happens at critical moments in history that ideas which have long held the field almost unchallenged are suddenly discovered, not to be wrong, but to be useless; then almost everyone can see they are absurd." —“Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages,” R. W. SouthernHow did a bill of this magnitude, that was largely unknown to the public and had no organized opposition, suddenly fall apart?Yes, SOPA overreached against the will of the people to an absurd degree, but most bills of this nature still pass. Upsets against the political status quo generally depend on a highly complex set of factors and usually take years of organizing, but our SOPA protest had neither of those.Our work was different because this time, the Internet made it possible for a few people to play an outsized role in quickly catalyzing disparate voices into a large opposition, ripping the ceiling off of what was possible. The game plan—to be super clear about a riotously unjust bill that would censor the Internet, and provide the means for thousands of people to get to Congress’ inboxes with one click—allowed far-flung groups and individuals to target SOPA's passage on a mass scale.Harvard's SOPA-PIPA data study tracks the uniqueness of this bubbling up, and should be read to get some empirical grounding for the personal narrative I'm providing.One piece of our strategy was probably the super spreader mechanism: we changed the form of protest itself. The act of protesting went from the great work of petitions and articles by sites like Techdirt to the use of websites as the protest themselves. My cofounder Holmes and I, on the phone during a freak snowstorm on Halloween, simultaneously suggested that the most effective protest would be if sites actually shut down—the way they could be forced to shut down if SOPA did pass. So, we built a widget that anyone could use to “shut down” their site, with an explanation about the bill and a form for people to contact Congress to oppose SOPA.Soon, brave early adopters would join the protest and/or use the tool––Mozilla, BoingBoing, Techdirt and tens of thousands of others would follow. Working with Demand Progress, EFF, Elizabeth Stark, and others, we received a growing roster of signups and were able to tag-team to get to Tumblr––one of the largest platforms with 40 million blogs.Everyone remembers January 18th’s SOPA Blackout, but the snowball started on our first day of action, November 16th, 2011. Thanks to the creative work by Tumblr staff, tens of thousands of sites helped blindside Congress with millions of emails and close to 100,000 calls to Congress.. This was the first time an online protest of this scale sprang out of nowhere.This day in November seeded a death by a thousand cuts: Redditors, YouTubers, and the then astute 4chaners were ablaze with ideas, like boycotting the domain registrar GoDaddy for being, weirdly, a SOPA supporter. With hundreds of thousands more people mobilized against SOPA, our coalition decided to call for a full shutdown of the Internet. I spent weeks building consensus with the community behind Wikipedia, one of the ten largest sites on the web, so that they could do something that was absolutely unheard of.So, on January 18th, Internet users rose up, and the Internet shut down for a day. People couldn’t access at least 115,000 websites, including the biggest ones, Wikipedia, Craigslist, and WordPress (which powers 40 percent of the web). Because millions of people were contacting congressional inboxes, they too were completely shut down. Lobbyists and legislators weren't allowed to think about anything else. The very next day, Congress did an about face on SOPA and shelved it. Because we were the news on that day, we defined political reality.Often the way change gets reported on is that it all of sudden happens or it was inevitable. But, to have big moments, you first need to develop a critical mass around the existing milieu to build the movement that most people see. We were uniquely positioned to build a coalition invested in defending the Internet because the Internet itself gave us the tools to unify vast numbers of people, ideas, and resources. On top of that, the historical moment was different: the Internet still had a bit of utopian idealism that infected its early days. Large and vocal communities were forming around newly accessible information, and it was easy to make and share powerful tools."From the impulse to dominate the unknown, he points out, spring such desirables as the pursuit of knowledge and all scientific progress." —Maria Papova, blogger, on Bertrand RussellWhat still applies by the logic of the SOPA Blackout? The absurdity of our political system is a disgrace. This system is acceptable until it isn’t. The Internet, though, has changed. It is no longer as young, and its cornerstone players are the biggest monopolies in history.Companies are fighting for policies that are so antisocial and far-fetched that there will likely be a moment that forces a reckoning, and possibly another watershed moment. In the meantime, distaste for the system is building into a foundation for collective action––people are discussing, debating, and organizing with each other and figuring out where the lines should be drawn.Every wave of change represents an opportunity for making epic moments like SOPA happen. And, perhaps that is the most cited of the legacies of the blackout; Congress is still afraid of getting “SOPA’ed”; that a piece of legislation will set off people who aren't afraid to find new ways to create a firestorm. They’re right to be worried.How do we make the next moment happen? First, come with the impulse to dominate the absurd order of things. If you start to see a scam of grave proportions and can identify groups of people who would go to bat against it, try to feel out what your greatest leverage is—put your finger on the pulse of it.If you’re one or two people and want to build off of the moment you have and become the new zeitgeist, use a strategy that instrumentalizes all the different actors and points them in the same direction. If you fight with a thirst for blood and shoot for where it hurts, you will find how to protest in a way that matters. Who knows what will work, so try many different ways to speak to millions of people—both visually, to show what's wrong, and narratively, to pull back the curtain.Some of the biggest problems in the 21st century, like monopoly power and surveillance, won’t automatically work themselves out. A lot of scrappy lobbyists know how to manipulate Congress, but there aren't enough people who try to do exactly that for honest policy changes that maximize good for everyone. There are lots of ways to approach doing so, and we should all be trying different things. If you want to use the Internet and new tech to help bring disparate groups together for the public interest, we need you. And, we’re still looking for people for an A-team to try some things here.Tiffiniy Cheng is a Political Director for A-teams. She also co-founded Fight for the Future and is a Shuttleworth Fellow.This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

NSO Group's terrible 2021 is flowing seamlessly into an equally terrible 2022. The leak of a list of alleged targets for its malware -- a list that included journalists, activists, government critics, political officials, and religious leaders -- led to an outpouring of discoveries linking the company to abusive deployments of malware by a number of questionable governments.NSO is currently being sued by two US companies over its malware. Facebook and WhatsApp claim NSO committed terms of service violations by sending malware via the messaging service. Apple claimed the same thing, pointing to the targeting of iPhones owned by users infected with NSO spyware.Both companies are notifying users who appear to have been targeted by this malware. All over the world, people are reporting they've been targeted, often due to investigations performed by Canada's Citizen Lab and Amnesty International.Governments are getting into the act as well. The Israeli government -- which once helped NSO broker deals with nearby authoritarians -- is investigating the company. It has also drastically slashed the number of foreign governments it can sell to. Other governments around the world are engaging in their own investigations following reports of residents (or their elected representatives) having been hit with malware payloads created by NSO.NSO-related phone infections are now part of a federal case in India. The nation's top court has created a committee to look into allegations Indian citizens have been targeted by NSO's Pegasus spyware.

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Register now for our online event featuring Rep. Zoe Lofgren »As mentioned last week, today is the 10 year anniversary of the big "Internet Blackout Day" that effectively killed any forward momentum that the terrible copyright bills SOPA and PIPA had. Our new Greenhouse panel is going to be all about that, with plenty of folks who were there looking back at what happened -- and also what it means for things moving forward.But I wanted to highlight a few things from that experience that still stick with me today. The first bit was that the fight against SOPA only worked because it was joined by a very diverse group -- including some old-timers who had fought many, many battles against the draconian and anti-public expansion of copyright law. Those old timers were useful in that they knew the system and they knew the process, and understood the political levers. But -- and this is the important part -- they had basically lost every battle on copyright going back decades and they came into the fight with a kind of resolution that this battle would be lost as well. No one ever said this, but in talking to them, the mood was very much: "We'll fight, and make a lot of noise, but in the end we'll lose, because we always lose."What was different was that others joined in on the fight, and many of them were politically naïve, but had a really strong conviction that SOPA could not be allowed to pass. I don't think they ever thought it was even possible that the bill would become law, and because of their involvement, and the people they activated, SOPA was actually stopped.The very first meeting that I was aware of involving a bunch of the different activists looking to stop SOPA, it was the folks at Fight for the Future (calling in from Massachusetts to a meeting held at Mozilla) who suggested having an internet blackout (though this was targeted at the markup day in November, and was kind of a test run for what happened in January). People agreed -- and some pointed to a similar kind of blackout that was done back in the 90s, but I actually thought it was an awful idea. I thought that there was no way that enough people would care or do anything to make it matter. And, my fear was that if it fizzled, it would demonstrate how weak this coalition was, and how easy it would be to keep passing even worse legislation over and over again.I was wrong. People did get energized and all sorts of people from all different backgrounds and viewpoints came together to speak up and make it clear -- loudly -- that this was not to be.It actually wiped away much of a fairly thick layer of cynicism I had built up in watching the politics regarding policies that impact the internet. I -- like many people -- had come to believe that most of these bills are bought and sold by lobbyists and concern about the public is left aside. The reality, as I came to learn, is that while there are many bills that are passed cynically, the power of the public to speak out loudly and make change can and will outweigh the power of special interests. But, it's quite rare that that can happen. Most bills people don't have time to deal with, and most people live lives where they can't be expected to pay attention to everything that Congress does.And, at the same time, we've seen this same kind of energy abused, with certain folks in the media getting people wrapped up in believing that this bill or that bill is bringing about the end of America or some such nonsense. We've seen a kind of reverse playbook on this with Section 230 -- in which people are being fed nonsense (from across the media) about how Section 230 is damaging "democracy" or "harming free speech" or other kinds of nonsense.Another key point that I learned a decade ago, was that this was never about a single battle, but it is an unending fight. I was actually in the Capitol on the day of the blackout. I had come to Washington DC to attend the State of the Net conference, where I got to debate one of the key lobbyists for Hollywood on the importance (or not) of SOPA the day before the blackout. The next day I was wandering the halls of the Capitol, meeting with Senators, Representatives, staffers, whoever, and (this part was fun) hearing phones ring off the hook as people called in to protest SOPA.However, the very next day, while I was waiting at Dulles for my flight back home, it was announced that (without SOPA) the DOJ had seized Megaupload and (with New Zealand law enforcement) had arrested Kim Dotcom and a bunch of other executives at the company. This was interesting and disturbing for a few reasons. First, Megaupload was held up as example numbers 1, 2, and 3 as to why SOPA was needed in the first place (somewhat mirroring, years later, the DOJ seizing Backpage.com days before FOSTA was signed, even as we were told FOSTA was needed to take down Backpage). We later learned many of the questionable things done in the Megaupload case that raised serious questions about the evidence in that case.But the underlying issue was there. Even as the DOJ's indictment against Megaupload suggested that it was interpreting perfectly reasonable business and legal decisions as criminal, it showed that stopping SOPA would not stop terrible ideas around site blocking and site removals. Indeed, various pieces of SOPA and other kinds of attempts to give the government the power to shut down websites have continued to creep into various laws around the globe. And nowadays, even some of the people who fought against SOPA are supportive of some of those ideas.I still think the real lesson of the fight was how bringing together different people with different perspectives -- but with a common interest in having an open and free internet -- can lead to amazing things. But I do wonder where that will take us now. The coalition that came together around SOPA easily fractured soon after. The differing goals and perspectives of those involved were unlikely to keep that kind of coalition together for long anyway. And various other campaigns tried to co-opt that effort -- usually without much luck.However, I do still wonder if the next great aspects of building a better, more open internet are going to come from the same combination of different and unexpected forces. I see the seeds of this in some of the arguments we see today, whether it's about content moderation online, or even about things like DAOs, in which you have combinations of powerful legacy forces pushing in one direction, and then a variety of users -- some feeling strongly one way, and others feeling strongly another, arguing and fighting over how the internet should be. I'm still hoping that we'll see a new and interesting coalition emerge out of all this mess -- one that possibly includes a cynical old guard who knows why things won't work, combined with a more naïve new guard who insists it must work, and somehow finds a way to make it happen.I wrote a little about this last summer in my Eternal October post. I think that there's a path forward, building on these lessons, figuring out how to build a better future internet -- not one dominated by legacy special interests, but one in which the people on the internet are the ones who control its future and can create something wonderful.This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

According to the YouMail Robocall Index, there were 3.6 billion U.S. robocalls placed last December, or 115 million robocalls placed every single day. That's 4.8 million calls placed every hour. Despite the periodic grumble, it's wholly bizarre that we've just come to accept the fact that essential communications platforms have been hijacked by conmen, salesmen, and debt collectors, and we're somehow incapable of doing anything about it.

This week, our first place comment on the insightful side comes from our post about Elizabeth Warren cosponsoring a bill to repeal Section 230 — before it was revealed that her name was included in error, and the post was updated. One commenter defended the apparent move as a reasonable way to fight "big tech", and an anonymous commenter responded:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2017, ISPs were getting straight to work pushing for elimination of new FCC broadband privacy rules, an FCC report clearly said that AT&T and Verizon were violating net neutrality. At the same time, AT&T was planning to dodge a review of the Time Warner merger, and Verizon was claiming nobody wants unlimited data. We took a look at the effects of Oracle v. Google on copyright litigation, and Backpage officially killed its adult ads section under widespread pressure.Also, and most notably, this was the week we announced that we had been sued for $15 million by Shiva Ayyadurai.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2012, the SOPA fight continued. There was some Reddit drama that led to Paul Ryan coming out strongly against the bill, concerned tech experts finally got a chance to talk to congress (but not the Judiciary Committee), the co-chair of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus said SOPA would interfere with online security, and a study showed that news networks owned by SOPA supporters were largely ignoring the subject. Wordpress became the latest big tech company to oppose the bill, then Reddit announced its plan to black out the site for a day — an idea that gained steam with the Cheezburger Network announcing its sites would do the same, and Jimmy Wales saying he favored Wikipedia joining too but wanted the community to decide. As the bill became toxic, Congress started talking about dropping the DNS blocking provisions, which led to some uninspiring promises to "delay" them, and then it started to look like the entire bill would be delayed.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2007, cable companies were twisting themselves in knots trying to explain how price increases were actually price decreases, the fight over the broadcast flag continued, and the PERFORM Act was back from the dead. A judge in Brazil freaked out about YouTube and ordered ISPs to block it until Google followed a previous order to shut it down, but that judge apparently learned a few things about the internet and rescinded that previous order the next day.Also, this was the week that the rumor mill was replaced by reality and Steve Jobs officially announced the iPhone in his Macworld keynote address.

One of the more annoying trends in intellectual property is when regional consortiums try to lock up terms or language around a specific style of product with arguments that only that region can produce a certain thing. If you're familiar with this concept, the first thing to leap to your mind will likely be one French wine group's control over the term "champagne" in certain regions. Another example would be a consortium of Belgian chocolate makers trying to assert that nobody can advertise "Belgian-style chocolate" unless it comes from one of them. It's all very silly, as it attempts to take a term that everyone recognizes as describing the style of a product and transform it into locked up language to be controlled by some specific originators. Like I said, silly, though, far too often, these consortiums get their way.Not the case in the United States for a group of French and Swiss cheese-makers in the area surrounding Gruyeres, who attempted to get the term "gruyere" trademarked. After the the U.S. Dairy Export Council opposed the mark, and the USPTO somehow got this right for once and rejected the application over the term being generic, the Interprofession Du Gruyere and Syndicat Interprofessionel du Gruyere took the matter to the Eastern District of Virginia courts only to find the judge there has ruled against it too.

Cops are still claiming they can detect the odor of marijuana in moving vehicles. Not only that, they claim they can pinpoint the source, even when in traffic.Not every court has been supportive of this speculative fiction. A federal court in Indiana found an officer's testimony literally "incredible" when he claimed he could smell the odor of marijuana emanating from two sealed plastic bags located inside a car traveling in heavy traffic with its windows up. The court said this testimony was not only "implausible" but "contrary to the laws of nature."The same can't be said for this decision from the Eighth Circuit Appeals Court, which originated in Iowa. The same claims were made here by two officers, who used their apparently superhuman olfactory senses to locate weed in a passing car -- one that similarly travelled through heavy traffic. In this case, both the cop car and the targeted car had some windows down. But even so, it's difficult to believe officers were capable of pinpointing the odor in traffic while dealing with "swirling winds."The cops lucked out on this stop. They discovered some marijuana ash and an unsmoked blunt during the stop. They also recovered a handgun, which led to the federal charges Vernon Shumaker was hoping to have dismissed due to the apparent unreasonableness of this search.Here's how the stop was effected, according to the Eighth Circuit's decision [PDF]:

Gaming Like It's 1926: The Public Domain Game JamThis year, for the fourth year in a row, we're celebrating the entry of new works into the public domain with our public domain game jam: Gaming Like It's 1926. We're calling for submissions of games inspired by or making use of material that entered the public domain this year.We're approaching the halfway point of the jam, so there's still plenty of time to sign up on itch.io and start working on an entry! You don't need to be an experienced game designer to get involved — entries can be as simple as a page of instructions for a roleplaying game or rules that require a normal deck of playing cards. If you want to try your hand at making a digital game, there are easy-to-use tools out there like Story Synth, created by our partner in running these jams, Randy Lubin.Whatever approach you choose, be sure to read over the full rules on the jam page. And if you want to explore some newly public domain works to find inspiration, check out Duke University's overview and the Public Domain Review's countdown. On that note, while the jam is mostly to encourage the reuse of public domain works from 1926, this year we're also open to earlier sound recordings (stuff from 1922 and earlier) that also just went into the public domain due to the Music Modernization Act. The Internet Archive has made a bunch of those sound recordings available as well.At the end, we'll be choosing winners in six categories:

You most likely have never heard of Ord, Nebraska. There's no reason you should have. Obviously, the town's government would prefer you've heard of it, but it's impossible to be well-informed about every small town in a country the size of the United States. Here's how the town government pitches its wares:

Big Update: It turns out that this was a clerical error on the part of a Senate staffer, and that Elizabeth Warren is not co-sponsoring this bill from Lindsey Graham to repeal Section 230. The Congress.gov site is expected to be corrected and her name removed as a co-sponsor some time soon. I am leaving the original story below for posterity, but it's good to see that Senator Warren hasn't gone completely over to the dark side on this.Original story here:

So, just yesterday I wrote about how Democratic Senators had been shying away from co-sponsoring bills with Senator Josh Hawley. Throughout 2019 and 2020, even as Hawley's populist fascist tendencies had become abundantly clear, Democrats were willing to partner with him because he was "anti-big tech." But after January 6th of last year, suddenly Hawley was left shouting on Fox News, rather than teaming up with Democrats to sponsor bills to regulate the internet.So... it was more than a bit of a surprise that, yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren's name popped up as a co-sponsor on S.2972, a bill from Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, and Marsha Blackburn, to literally repeal Section 230.It's such a bizarre and nonsensical move. Even for Senators who support reforming Section 230, repealing it seems unlikely to accomplish what they think it will. And, even more to the point, Warren is apparently already aware of how removing Section 230 can cause significant harm. She was behind a previous bill in the Senate that was designed to study the impact of FOSTA on sex workers, after tons of people realized (way too late, and despite widespread warnings from multiple experts) that FOSTA would create massive consequences for the sex work industry (and related industries).Over the last couple of years, ever since she lost the Presidential primary, Warren seems to have shifted further and further away from the thoughtful Senator "with a detailed plan to fix things" to one who has fully embraced pure, naked, populism for the sake of political gain. She's especially leaned hard into attacking internet companies in ways that are extremely disappointing. Even if you believe that the big internet companies (and the wider internet itself) require regulation -- an argument that is easily defensible -- she has embraced truly extreme and unconstitutional positions that generate headlines and screams of support from people who just want to punish big companies, rather than create a better world.This latest move -- teaming up with three extremist Republican Senators -- on a bizarrely stupid and dangerous plan to flat out repeal Section 230 makes absolutely no sense at all, and I don't see how it accomplishes any of Senator Warren's stated goals. Without Section 230, you end up helping the largest internet companies cement their position, while punishing smaller competitors and killing them with legal liability for things that they didn't actually do.This is an unfortunate and cynical move by a Senator who I had thought was better than that.

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Harrison Greenbaum is a comedian and (sometimes) magician, who noticed that the magician Criss Angel had opened a restaurant, named "CABLP" and hadn't registered the domain cablprestaurant.com. For whatever reason, the restaurant's actual website appears to be Eatblp.com, and so Greenbaum registered cablprestaurant.com and created a very obvious parody menu. I mean:It took me way longer than it should to figure out that CABLP apparently stands for Criss Angel's Breakfast, Lunch & Pizza. Either way, this just seems like a bunch of nonsense, except that Criss Angel apparently is spending some of his very large fortune on hiring an actual intellectual property lawyer named Thomas Carulli from the law firm of KMA Zuckert to send a very bogus cease and desist letter to Greenbaum.

This week saw the introduction of the The Terms-of-service Labeling, Design and Readability Act, or "TLDR Act," for short. The bill, which, for now, has bipartisan support, would require the FTC to create rules mandating that websites must offer a truncated version of obnoxiously long and predatory terms of service (TOS) nobody actually reads. The "summary statement" websites would be obligated to provide would not only lay out the legal requirements in terms normal humans could understand, it would also require a website disclose any major data breaches that have occurred in the last three years.A breakdown (pdf) of the bill also states it will require websites to disclose what data is collected upon a user's visit, and what kind of control a user has over that data. Any violation of the new law would be declared to be within the realm of "unfair and deceptive" under the FTC Act, giving the agency the authority to act on it. Rep. Lori Trahan had this to say about the need for such a law:

Did you all just hear that? That tiny, nearly silent series of screams you hear all around you? Well, that was the entire craft beer industry crying out in fear and pain. Why? Well, because Monster Beverage Corp announced that it is going to be a brewery.

One of the hottest gifts in Wisconsin over the holiday season was Packers “common stock,” allowing fans who buy in to hold a small percentage of ownership in the NFL franchise. The Packers are selling 300,000 shares of the stock priced at $300 to raise money for stadium improvements at Lambeau Field and sold more than 100,000 in the first week alone. Many are skeptical of why fans are spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on shares that, by rule, cannot provide them with any financial benefit. You can find an explanation by looking at a seemingly unrelated technology: non-fungible tokens. An examination of the market for NFTs not only provides insight into the “common stock” phenomenon, but may also provide a glimpse at a different future for how we support and even participate in the decision-making process of our favorite sports teams.Packers Stock as an NFTThe Packers ownership structure is unique in the National Football League. The NFL has rules requiring that franchises be owned by an individual or a small group of owners. The Packers have an exemption to this rule, as the team has been owned by stockholders since 1923 when it sold shares of the organization to keep the team financially solvent and located in Green Bay. Stockholders were prevented from selling their shares to anyone but the team for a fraction of the purchase price in order to prevent the team from being sold to an individual and then moved to a larger market. The Packers held similar stock sales in 1935 and 1950.After financially stabilizing the team, further stock sales were held in 1997 and 2011 to fund additions and redevelopment to their stadium. Previous stockholders were given large splits, essentially guaranteeing that they had an outsized role in leadership decisions of the franchise.Shares sold in 1997, 2011, and 2021 provide minimal benefits to those who purchase them. They provide a uniquely numbered ownership certificate, the ability to purchase owners-only merchandise, an invite to the annual owners meeting, and votes to decide Green Bay's board of directors and a seven-member executive committee that represents the team at league meetings. The maximum number of shares an individual can purchase is 200, and stock cannot be resold and may only be transferred to immediate family members.Still, despite minimal benefits and the heavy restrictions, these sales have been enormously popular, with the offerings raising $24 million in 1997, $64 million in 2011, and a projected $90 million this time around. Today there are approximately 361,300 stockholders, including myself, who hold roughly 5 million shares.So what does Packers stock have to do with NFTs?NFTs face much of the same criticism as Packers stock. Created to provide scarcity to digital art and other online goods, the NFT market has increased rapidly in scope with many NFTs selling for millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Many see NFTs as nothing but a scam on unsuspecting customers as NFTs provide little to no tangible benefit to those who purchase them — just like Packers stock.But people who buy Packers stock or NFTs seem to value these commodities for the same reason. Packers fans are proud of their team's ownership structure and want to display the part they play in keeping the Packers a fan-owned team. And as Techdirt's own Mike Masnick recently noted in a podcast, owning NFTs is also a way to prove fandom. While NFTs do not grant a copyright on an image, the blockchain does provide a proof of ownership of the NFT for all to see.Both provide a kind of status symbol of fandom for those interested in the industry to view.While Packers stock shares traits with NFTs, it lags behind as the process of sending the stocks and verifying who owns them remains offline. Likewise NFTs have yet to contemplate what role they might play in sports beyond providing ownership of sports moments such as NBA Top Shot. The following will provide some ways in which these models might converge to bring both different experiences to fans and even provide for a decentralized governance model for sports team ownership.Stock and NFTs as FandomWithout a doubt, the most popular use of Packers stock isn't attending the owners meeting or voting on the future of the team; it's displaying the certificate of your share in your home or office. Many fans own stock from each of the major sales to display together and prove their extreme Packers fandom. In this way, Packers stock is most similar to NFTs, though the digital nature of NFTs lets them be displayed to the whole world rather than just those who can physically see the stock (photos posted on the internet notwithstanding).There is no reason a marriage of the physical and digital couldn't take place with Packers stock, or other forms of fan involvement.Some of the most obvious venues are social media platforms like Twitter, which is working on integrating NFTs into the user experience. Fans of teams are often incredibly vocal on Twitter, and sometimes that gives them the chance to interact with players and other professionals on their favorite teams. If stock ownership could be converted into an NFT to be displayed on a Twitter profile, similar to the much desired blue checkmark, an owner's praise or criticism of their team might carry extra weight. At any rate, making the stock verifiable and compatible for digital display would certainly make ownership more valuable.Still, stock ownership of a professional sports team only applies to one major American sports team. There is no reason, however, the same principle couldn't be applied to other ways of proving fandom. Many fans have season tickets which could easily come with an NFT recognizing the fan as a season ticket holder. For that matter, there is no reason a team couldn't simply sell “fandom” NFTs serving a similar purpose.Proof of fandom and displaying of NFTs certainly provides some promise, but there is far more that can be done to enhance the fan experience.As previously noted, one of the benefits of owning Packers common stock is a yearly invite to attend the owners meeting in Green Bay. While the event is well attended, nowhere close to the more than 3 million shareholders attend the event. The fact that I live more than 1,000 miles away prevents me from attending the meeting in any meaningful fashion.But virtual reality spaces could provide an opportunity for that “in-person experience” at the owners meeting without the need for travel. I could interact with fellow owners in specific rooms, attend panels or keynotes about the future of the franchise, and even take virtual tours of the new facilities or additions.Once again, this concept need not be limited to NFTs denoting stock ownership. As a season ticket holder to the New Orleans Pelicans, I was invited to a private event with the team’s head coach, but I was unable to attend in person. If my season ticket purchase had come with an NFT that granted me access to such events in virtual reality, not only would I be a happier fan, but I’d also be willing to pay more for the season tickets rather than just purchasing them on a game to game basis. (Interestingly enough, due to the recent surge in COVID-19 cases, this event was held via video call)There are any number of similar benefits that could be available to team shareholders, season ticket holders, or fandom NFT owners on social media or virtual reality. Events on Twitter Spaces could be available exclusively to those with the correct NFT. Virtual reality could host any number of events, such as an owners-only viewing party of a game, or access to exclusive opportunities to meet and talk to players and coaches. Like the physical merchandise only available to Packers shareholders, digital goods could be made exclusively available to certain fans.There is little doubt that NFTs will continue to be intertwined with sports fandom for some time to come, but the potential for better fan benefits has only just started to be tapped.NFTs as a Decentralized Ownership ModelNFTs’ capacity to showcase fandom is one thing, but what if they also offered fans the opportunity to have a real say in the future of the sports franchise they love?As previously noted, one of the benefits of Packers common stock ownership is voting rights on the future of the team. With the cap of 200 stocks per person and the generous split offered to owners of the first three stock sales, the average fan is unlikely to cast the deciding vote in any decision, nor are they allowed to vote on big decisions such as firing and hiring of the general manager.Nonetheless, marginal voting rights are still more powerful than the average sports fan has in making decisions about the team. They also prevent a single owner from having an outsized role in the future of the franchise. This is why so many fans of teams that have had little success often complain about bad ownership more than the players on the field. The Packers have been able to avoid this fate, and the lack of centralized ownership likely plays an important role in the team’s success throughout its history.There are even some ancillary benefits to this model. For example, the Packers are the only NFL team to publicly report their financial status, giving fans of every team a glimpse into the rest of the league’s finances. This provides substantial benefit to fans and politicians when NFL owners come crying to politicians about needing taxpayers to pay for a new stadium.But there is no reason the basic Packers structure couldn’t be updated for the digital age to allow fans to have a greater say in their favorite team. While the NFL has banned any other franchise from operating in this capacity (after all, what are professional sport leagues but cartels to enrich existing team owners), start-up leagues could borrow from this model. Furthermore, they already have a decentralized system for which to test this model of decision-making.Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAOs) could provide a vehicle for future ownership or decision-making for sports teams. DAOs are built with smart contracts, which are self-enforcing digital arrangements. A good way to visualize a smart contract is a vending machine. The contract is fulfilled when a user inserts the right amount of money and the correct item is automatically dispensed to the purchaser. In the DAO space, it would be inserting the correct NFT or other digital token in order to vote.A recent example of democratic governance within a DAO was the Constitution DAO, where a group of people wanted to bid on purchasing one of the 13 remaining original copies of the U.S. Constitution. The donors of the project, who donated in Ethereum, were granted the ability to vote on what to do with the Constitution if they won it. Over $40 million worth of Ethereum was donated, though the bid ultimately proved to be unsuccessful. While deciding what to do with a document isn’t as complicated as running a professional sports franchise, it certainly provides some proof that large amounts of funds can be raised in a DAO.While it might be impractical to put every decision of the team up to a disbursed number of owners, large decisions like a vote of confidence in the general manager or head coach could very well be possible.The NFL or another major sports league would prove a poor test case for this structure of sports ownership, at least initially due to the size and scope of the organization as well as the rules governing operation. But there are any number of other smaller sports leagues where this could be tested.The United States Football League, a league which previously competed against the NFL in the 1980s and even won an antitrust court case against the league, is planning a relaunch in 2022. Unlike the NFL, it is expected that the new USFL will operate as a single entity with all teams owned by the league. But instead of simply expecting fans to attend and watch games, what if the league offered them a real chance of ownership of the team by selling stock in teams as a form of NFT?This ownership of the team could be used in any number of ways. Fan ownership of the team might be a way to give people a stake in their team and create loyalty with a new franchise. The league could even decide where to put teams by letting “owners” vote on where teams should be located. If the residents of New Orleans purchased stock NFTs of the New Orleans Breakers team and voted to move the team to New Orleans, the league might feel better about their location decision. What better way to prove a particular city has interest in supporting another sports franchise than by having citizens literally be invested in the team?Additionally, without previous governing arrangements, these franchises could put far more decision-making power into owners. Everything from the large decisions like hiring or firing of general manager and head coach to choosing a starting quarterback, or smaller ideas like selecting a mascot, could be run through a vote of the DAO.Decentralized ownership provides a few benefits beyond greater fan involvement. The dispersed ownership structure of the Packers can help prevent a bad owner from making bad decisions causing the franchise to suffer. A DAO could rather easily prevent an individual or group of individuals from amassing too much power. Just ask Washington Football Team fans how they feel about Dan Snyder. Additionally, it would prevent the problem of general fan polling, where teams end up with mascots like Dogey McDogeface—presumably, fans invested in the team would like to see it succeed.This model of sports ownership could even be tried with independent baseball teams in America or as a way to support historic franchises, such as the second oldest soccer club Wrexham A.F.C, rather than relying on millionaires to pick up the tab.Whether or not the Packers model can be replicated is a serious question, but that doesn’t mean that advances in technology aren’t well positioned to impact and potentially disrupt the professional sports world. Fan interest and involvement in the sporting world remains high, and the potential for crowdfunding and decentralized decision-making are improving all the time. Sports franchises are ultimately dependent on fan support to exist. Why not give fans a bigger say in how they root for, or even run, their team?Eric Peterson is a contributor to Young Voices and lives in New Orleans.

Karl recently wrote about how Congress' antitrust efforts are flailing (even with the plan to hold a hearing on Senators Klobuchar & Grassley's antitrust bill) and one reason why the efforts have stumbled may be Senator Josh Hawley's decision to really show off his fascist side.We've been pointing out the serious problems with Hawley and his policy ideas since long before January 6th of 2021. Even though it was fairly clear from early on that his hypocritical posturing and populism were little more than a cynical attempt to get the Trumpian base to back his massive ego and ambition for a potential Presidential run, a bunch of Democrats were happy to cynically embrace Hawley because he was "anti-big tech" and willing to hate all the same people that some Democratic Senators hated as well. Of course, January 6th and Hawley's now infamous raised fist appear to have resulted in Democrats realizing that even if he hates Mark Zuckerberg too, that doesn't mean he's worth working with.Now the Washington Post has noted that since January 6th, Democrats suddenly were no longer willing to partner with Hawley on bills that regulate "big tech," which is a bit of a problem, since he was their Republican co-sponsor on a variety of "bipartisan" legislation.

For decades the U.S. newswires have been peppered with stories where somebody bought a house after being told by their ISP it had broadband access, only to realize the ISP didn't actually serve that address. Generally, the homeowner then realizes they have to spend a stupid amount of money to pay the local telecom monopoly to extend service.. or move again. Time after time, local ISPs are found to be flat out lying when they claim they can offer an essential utility (broadband), and the home buyer has little recourse thanks to the slow, steady erosion of U.S. state and federal telecom regulatory oversight.So yeah, one problem is that we continue to lobotomize our state and federal telecom regulators under the bullshit claim that this results in some kind of free market Utopia (you'd think everyday reality would have cured folks of this belief by now, but nope). The other underlying culprit has generally been America's notoriously shitty broadband maps, which let regional monopolies obscure the patchy coverage, slow speeds, and high prices created by regional monopolization so American policymakers can more easily pretend none of this is a problem.State telecom consumer protection is generally feckless, with the entirety of telecom policy in most corrupt state legislatures directly dictated by AT&T or Comcast. Washington State continues to be one of just a few exceptions. In the last few years the state has killed a protectionist law designed to hamstring community broadband, passed its own net neutrality laws in the wake of federal apathy, and has actually stood up to the longstanding telecom industry practice of ripping off consumers with bullshit fees. Now, the state is also passing a new law requiring that home sales disclose whether the home actually has broadband:

Do you want cheer fucked? Because this is how you get cheer fucked.No less than the highest court in the land said the off-campus speech of students is subject to the First Amendment, not the whims of school administrators who feel ways about online stuff. A cheerleader expressing her displeasure with school related activities posted a litany of f-bomb-laden complaints to Instagram, resulting in her being summarily dismissed from the cheer team. The Supreme Court said "fuck cheer" is protected speech, no matter how school administrators felt about it.Students' constitutional rights don't disappear just because they're students. This point has been driven home several times by courts, most famously by the Supreme Court's 1969 Tinker decision, which stated:

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Senator Richard Blumenthal seems to fill our pages with every possible moral panic about an internet he doesn't understand, but on which he's made a name over-reacting to. This goes back over a decade, honestly, since well before he was even a Senator.For the last few months he's been really ramping up the moral panic about TikTok, complaining about various trends on TikTok and demanding execs testify before him. The latest is that he has sent a letter to TikTok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, demanding an explanation of how a kid in Connecticut (Blumenthal's state) was burned by messing up a science experiment called the "Whoosh Bottle Experiment." Lots of news sites -- and Blumenthal in his letter -- imply that "The Whoosh Bottle Experiment" is some sort of TikTok thing.

Senator Richard Blumenthal seems to fill our pages with every possible moral panic about an internet he doesn't understand, but on which he's made a name over-reacting to. This goes back over a decade, honestly, since well before he was even a Senator.For the last few months he's been really ramping up the moral panic about TikTok, complaining about various trends on TikTok and demanding execs testify before him. The latest is that he has sent a letter to TikTok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, demanding an explanation of how a kid in Connecticut (Blumenthal's state) was burned by messing up a science experiment called the "Whoosh Bottle Experiment." Lots of news sites -- and Blumenthal in his letter -- imply that "The Whoosh Bottle Experiment" is some sort of TikTok thing.

For decades, like clockwork, somebody at Dish or DirecTV will try and float the idea that the two satellite TV companies should merge. Usually they'll do this by seeding the idea at trusted news outlets that additional consolidation is just what the U.S. media sector needs. Granted regulators have always balked at the idea of a Dish and DirecTV merger, given that it would only reduce competition in the pay TV space, leading to more layoffs, more price hikes, and even worse customer service (cable TV customer service is among the worst in any industry anywhere thanks to this "growth for growth's sake" mindset).Like clockwork, somebody involved in the deal-making has leaked word of yet another attempt to merge the two companies to the New York Post:

In the video game space, it has become commonplace to see creators freak out over "rip-offs" and "clones" of their games when the targets of their ire are actually not rip-offs or clones at all. This typically comes down to the all to common confusion over whether you can own or protect ideas versus specific expression. Typically in these stories, it turns out someone is complaining that they're seeing a similar idea in other games, whether it's first person shooters that share common features, the explosion of battle royale games, or even just artwork.Which brings us to Wordle, a browser-based game that I gleefully enjoy telling my fellow Techdirt readers I have not played. However you feel about the game, it's notable in that its creator has been adamant about not monetizing the game, nor has he bothered registering any copyright or trademark for it. Between that and the game's popularity, there is a ton of goodwill there, which may explain why the world smacked down another person's attempt to actually clone (basically) the game into a mobile app that then required paid subscriptions for all of the features.

Summary:In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, progressive voters in seven competitive races in the Midwest were targeted with a series of Facebook ads urging them to vote for Green Party candidates. The ads, which came from a group called America Progress Now, included images of and quotes from prominent progressive Democrats including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the implication that these politicians supported voting for third parties.The campaign raised eyebrows for a variety of reasons: two of the featured candidates stated that they did not approve the ads, nor did they say or write the supposed quotes that were run alongside their photos, and six of the candidates stated that they had no connection with the group. The office of Senator Sanders asked Facebook to remove the campaign, calling it “clearly a malicious attempt to deceive voters.” Most notably, an investigation by ProPublica and VICE News revealed that America Progress Now was not registered with the Federal Election Commission nor was any such organization present at the address listed on its Facebook page.In response to Senator Sanders’ office, and in a further statement to ProPublica and VICE, Facebook stated that it had investigated the group and found no violation of its advertising policies or community standards.Two years later, during the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, an investigation by the Washington Post revealed a “troll farm”-type operation directed by Rally Forge, a digital marketing firm with connections to Turning Point Action (an affiliate of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA), in which multiple teenagers were recruited and directed to post pro-Trump comments using false identities on both Facebook and Twitter. This revelation resulted in multiple accounts being removed by both companies, and Rally Forge was permanently banned from Facebook.As it turned out, these two apparently separate incidents were in fact closely connected: an investigation by The Guardian in June of 2021, aided in part by Facebook whistleblower Sophie Zhang, discovered that Rally Forge had been behind the America Progress Now ads in 2018. Moreover, Facebook had been aware of the source of the ads and their deceptive nature, and of Rally Forge’s connection to Turning Point, when it determined that the ads did not violate its policies. The company did not disclose these findings at the time. Internal Facebook documents, seen by The Guardian, recorded concerns raised by a member of Facebook’s civic integrity team, noting that the ads were “very inauthentic” and “very sketchy.” In the Guardian article, Zhang asserted that “the fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”Company considerations:

The state of Illinois continues to provide more protection than the US Constitution. Its privacy laws exceed what has been determined to be "reasonable" violations of privacy by decades of court precedent. This has allowed it to go after companies for violating state laws, even when the collections being prosecuted would likely be legal under the Supreme Court-created "Third Party Doctrine."State law allowed Facebook to be successfully sued over its facial recognition program -- one that detects faces and attempts to match them to Facebook profiles to "tag" photos with names of account holder's "friends." This resulted in a $550 million settlement from Facebook -- a relative bargain considering the original asking price was $35 billion.It also has allowed the state to move forward with its lawsuit against odious facial recognition tech provider, Clearview. Clearview sells access to its database and AI to government agencies for the alleged purpose of identifying criminal suspects. The AI -- finally independently tested years after its debut -- appears to be fairly solid. But its 10 billion image (and counting) database is composed of images and personal info scraped from thousands of websites and social media platforms. According to the state of Illinois, this collection violates state privacy laws because Illinois residents are not informed of this collection, nor are they given any opportunity to opt in or out.Third parties aren't the only ones availing themselves of data harvested from the web. Government agencies are taking advantage of massive collections assembled by data brokers. The assumption by law enforcement is that no warrant is needed to obtain location info and identifying information from third parties because there's no expectation of privacy in information shared with apps, websites, and service providers.It should be clear that's likely not acceptable in Illinois where state law regulates these collections to ensure end users are protected (at least somewhat) by mandates requiring notification and consent. Nonetheless, law enforcement persists in accessing this data, assuming their actions aren't illegal even if the collections they're accessing have been illegally obtained.That's going to change. A new law that went into effect at the beginning of this year says Illinois law enforcement can no longer access this information without a warrant.

Register now for our online event featuring Rep. Zoe Lofgren »Next week is the ten year anniversary of the famed "Internet Blackout Day" in which internet users, together with activists, and some internet companies, spoke up together and told Congress that passing the Stop Online Piracy Act (and the Senate Companion, the Protect IP Act), would do tremendous damage to the internet. Lots of organizations are hosting events and doing other things to commemorate that momentous occasion -- but also trying to channel that spirit towards building a better internet.And that includes us at Techdirt. We're going to be running a new Techdirt Greenhouse series with reflections from a bunch of people who were involved in the original fight, both looking back at what happened ten years ago, but also what's happened in the intervening decade, and what it means for the internet, for activism, for tech policy, and for users of the internet going forward.On top of that, we're going to be hosting a live (virtual) event on January 26th at 1pm PT, with a fireside chat between myself, and one of the main heroes of the stop SOPA movement: Rep. Zoe Lofgren. The event will also include breakout discussions and a chance to network and connect with others interested in tech policy and the future of the internet. Register now to join the event!

As you'll recall, at the end of 2020, the FTC filed an antitrust case against Facebook. Last summer, the district court dismissed the case, noting that the complaint was "legally insufficient," and didn't really back up its central claims. Based on that, the FTC went back to the drawing board and filed an amended complaint last August. As we noted, the amended complaint was better than the first one -- which was heavy on narrative, but little on support to back it up. The amended complaint had more in it, though we still felt that the market definition was odd, and some of the complaint seemed to undermine other parts of it.Either way, Facebook again asked the court to dismiss it, but this time, they're letting the case move forward. Basically, the court says that on a second pass, the FTC has actually provided at least some support of the central arguments in the complaint:

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During the COVID crisis the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), which gives lower income Americans a $50 ($75 for those in tribal lands) discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gives money to ISPs (not exactly ideal given the industry's history of fraud), which then dole out discounts to users if they qualify. But (surprise), many found that big ISPs erected cumbersome barriers to actually getting the service, or worse, actively exploited the sign up process to force struggling low-income applicants on to more expensive plans once the initial contract ended. Very on brand.The program was recently renamed the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and made permanent via the infrastructure bill, albeit at a reduced discount rate of $30 a month (still $75 on tribal lands). And because the reboot requires new rules, the FCC has proposed tightening up the rules surrounding the program to ensure the large predatory ISPs don't exploit it to make an extra buck. More specifically, the FCC says ISPs will be required to offer the discounts across all tiers, including legacy and "grandfathered" (older, possibly cheaper plans that they may not sell any more) plans:

Poland -- like far too many countries -- has a Pegasus problem. The highly intrusive (and highly effective) phone malware sold by Israel's NSO Group for the ostensible purpose of tracking down terrorists and other deadly criminals has been observed (yet again) being deployed to track government critics and political opponents.When Apple announced its lawsuit against NSO Group for targeting iPhone users, it also announced plans to notify users who had been targeted by NSO spyware. The first beneficiary of this notification program was a Polish prosecutor who was apparently targeted for trying to investigate election irregularities.That initial notification opened the floodgates. The Polish government had access to the spyware and was deploying it for reasons entirely unrelated for the reasons it stated when purchasing it.

Back in October, I noted the huge amounts of money pouring into music copyrights, largely driven by the global rise of online streaming. Since then, that trend has continued, most notably with Bruce Springsteen's sale of his recordings and songwriting catalogue to Sony, for a rumored $550 million. As I pointed out in the post, one of the problems with this "financialization" of the sector is that music copyrights become completely divorced from the original creativity that lies behind them. They become just another asset, like gold, petroleum or property. On the Open Future blog, Paul Keller has pointed out a plausible – and terrifying – consequence of this shift.As Keller notes, the more the owners of copyrights become detached from the creative production process, the less they will care about the nominal balances within the system. In particular, the central quid pro quo of copyright – that a government monopoly is granted to creators for a limited period, after which the work enters the public domain – will be perceived simply as an obstacle to greater profits. The financialization of the music world means that an artist's ability to use the public domain as a foundation for future creativity, or to take advantage of copyright exceptions, will be of no interest to the corporations and private equity firms that are only concerned about the value of their own assets. For Keller, the end-game is clear:

The New York Police Department is complaining about having to do work again. The New York Post reports officers are unhappy that they're required to do a little bit more paperwork for every stop, regardless of whether the stop results in a citation or arrest.

For years we've talked about the infamous Facebook lawsuit against Power.com. As you may recall, this was a key CFAA case against a site, Power.com, that was trying to create a social media aggregator dashboard -- in which you could login through a single interface, and access content from and post to a variety of different social media platforms. Facebook alleged that this was a form of hacking -- claiming it was "unauthorized access" to Facebook. This was even though there was no actual unauthorized access. Individual users gave Power their login credentials, so everything was completely authorized. After years of winding through the courts, unfortunately, it was decided that this was a violation of the CFAA, mainly because Facebook sent a cease & desist letter, and somehow going against that now made it "unauthorized." In my mind, this is one of the biggest reasons why Facebook has much less competition today than it otherwise might -- because it used the CFAA and cases against Power.com to create a "you can check in, but you can't check out" kind of data arrangement. Things like Power.com were an empowering system that might have made people much less reliant on Facebook -- but it was killed.In an age now where people are increasingly talking about the importance of data portability and interoperability, something like Power.com would be a useful tool.So, it's interesting (and a little disturbing) to see that Facebook's new corporate identity, Meta, has now sued another company for data scraping. It is notable that in this case, the defendant, Social Data Trading Ltd., is a lot less sympathetic a character than Power.com was. And -- more importantly -- Facebook is not using the CFAA this time (other cases have suggested that what Facebook got away with in the Power case it would no longer be able to get away with under that law). However, it is trying to use California's state law equivalent of the CFAA. And now matter how you look at it, it's still at least a little worrisome that Facebook (ok, whatever, Meta) believes it has a legal right to stop scraping of otherwise public data.So first, Social Data Trading is not sympathetic. It appears to be a sketchy service in its own right, scraping data on social media users to sell "in-depth insights into the demographics and psychographics of influencers and their audiences." Meta put in place some technical blocks to try to stop the company from scraping (which seems like fair game), but SDT would then just register new domains and continue scraping. Facebook had apparently tried to stop a predecessor company to Social Data Trading called "Deep.Social," though the complaint seems to imply that SDT is just a reworking of Deep.Social.The more difficult issue here is that part of the way that SDT did its scraping was by creating fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram, and then using those fake accounts to scrape the data. And that does bring things into a legally more complex area, but also gives Meta the route around to go after these guys without using the CFAA.At issue is that when you create one of those accounts... you agree to the terms of service, and those terms say you can't use the site for "collecting information in an automated way." Thus, the core argument here is that it's a breach of contract case, and that the SDT folks agreed to the terms and then broke them by using their fake accounts to scrape.

Politicians -- those motivated by the notion of "doing something" -- want to end encryption. They don't want this to affect their communications and data security. But they don't see the harm in stripping these protections from the general public. Often, the argument is nothing better than "only criminals want end-to-end encryption," something they trot out as a truism despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.But these politicians (and government officials) are cowards. They refuse to call a backdoor a backdoor. They come up with all sorts of euphemisms while pretending compliance with proposed laws won't result in the creation of backdoors that can be exploited by everyone, not just the "good guys." They also deploy other euphemisms to attack encryption that protects millions of members of the public, referring to good encryption as "warrant-proof" or "military-grade." Those terms never survive examination, but the narrative persists because most members of the public have no interest in closely examining falsehoods uttered by governments.The UK government has expressed an unhealthy determination to undermine encryption for years now. It has the fanciest of plans to undo protections enjoyed by UK residents for reason ranging from "the children" to "the terrorists." The underlying intent never changes even if the name on the office doors do. Regulators come and go but the desire remains. Even the bills get renamed, as though a different shade of lipstick would make the UK's anti-encryption pig any more desirable.Rebranding from "Online Harms" to "Online Safety" only changed the tablecloths in the Titanic's dining room. The UK government wants encryption dead. But presumably "safety" sounds better than "harms," especially when the government affirmatively wants to harm the safety of millions of UK residents.The Internet Society has taken a look at the revamped and rebranded bill and has delivered a report [PDF] that explains exactly where on the Internet doll the UK government plans to engage in inappropriate touching. There's no mention of backdoors or broken encryption, but complying with the law means possibly doing both.

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Like lots of other places around the globe, it appears that Israel is considering a dangerous social media censorship bill, that would force websites to remove content. It does have some safeguards, but, basically, if law enforcement claims a crime was committed via the publication of some content, a judge can issue a takedown order:

Much of last year was dominated by talk about how there was a "new, bipartisan coalition" of folks interested in "reining in big tech" via "antitrust reform." The GOP in particular, which has, for forty years, largely embraced and encouraged monopolization and consolidation at every turn (see telecom as a shining example) was repeatedly portrayed as "very serious about antitrust reform this time." At least as it applied to "big tech." There are countless U.S. business sectors where monopolies and anticompetitive behaviors are rampant that Congress simply couldn't give any less of a shit about, whether it's banking, health care, telecom, airline travel, or energy.For years, experts pointed out that U.S. antitrust reform had grown toothless and frail, our competition laws needed updating in the Amazon era, and "are consumers happy?" (the traditional consumer welfare standard) doesn't actually measure all aspects of potential harm in complex markets. You can look to U.S. sectors like telecom to see the work that needed doing. Good news! We were, the Congress, the press, and the punditry insisted, entering a bold new era of "antitrust reform" with "bipartisan support." At least in terms of "big tech." Why only big tech? Who knows! Stop asking questions.Guess what? None of the rhetoric over the last two years amounted to absolutely anything. Yeah, we did see some limited, narrow, chopped up proposals for scattered reform of select tech companies, but as we noted at the time many of those had serious problems or (again) weirdly ignored other business sectors like telecom or banking. Despite all the talk about how Congress was "serious this time" about antitrust reform, it turns out that they weren't, actually, and time is running out to get anything done ahead of the midterms: