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While we wait for Congress to get around to protecting journalists, critics, and others facing bogus defamation lawsuits with a federal anti-SLAPP law, it's good to know at least one federal agency is doing something to protect journalists from litigation deployed solely to silence them.In comments to a conference at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, said the federal government is creating a legal defense fund to protect journalists all over the world from bogus defamation lawsuits filed by subjects of news coverage and/or targets of criticism.

You might remember Canadian telecom giant Rogers. The company routinely found itself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons during the net neutrality wars, after it repeatedly tried to abuse its gatekeeper power to disadvantage other companies. Rogers is like most heavily consolidated regional telecom monopolies: a lack of competition or competent regulatory oversight both created and protects the company thanks to relentless lobbying. As a result, the company never is really challenged, and is consistently allowed to mindlessly merge and grow larger and larger and larger as harms are dismissed.But there's been trouble in paradise recently as the company attempts to shuffle around its executive leadership teams. It began with Rogers CEO Joe Natale learning he was going to be fired thanks to an internal coup attempt only revealed thanks to a... butt dial from his CFO. It only got thornier from there.Ted Rogers died in 2008, and different family factions have been battling for control ever since. Ted's son Roger was behind the covert effort to replace Natale with Rogers' CFO Tony Staffieri. Loretta Rogers and her daughters Martha Rogers and Melinda Rogers-Hixon publicly backed Natale after the takeover attempt was revealed. The whole thing has since devolved into an absolute (but highly entertaining) mess:

We were just discussing how Denuvo's inability to renew one of its domains suddenly prevented lots of paying customers from playing several of their paid-for video games. While we can laugh at Denuvo's ineptitude, the real point in all of that is once again how DRM in video games tends to prevent nothing when it comes to piracy, yet paying customers tend to get impacted for a variety of reasons. DRM, in other words, almost universally functions to punish paying customers, which is stupid.And now here we are again, with DRM suddenly preventing paying customers from playing their games, albeit for a completely different reason. Intel released a list of something like 50 games where DRM breaks playability as a result of Intel's new chip architecture. While the reason this occurs on these chips is somewhat technical, ArsTechnica has a writeup that includes a reasonable summary.

As Democrats struggle to bring together 50 votes to pass the Build Back Better Act, a major sticking point with the legislation has emerged. That is, whether it should include provisions changing the law to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, with caps on payments set based on prices paid by other wealthy nations.Concerns about such an extensive, centralized program are not unreasonable. On the other hand, patent reform is a market-friendly approach that embraces the benefits of competition and free entry to cut costs and better align the incentives for new drug development.Negotiation would indeed take a bite out of drug prices. Analyses of proposed drug price negotiation plans find savings around half a trillion dollars over ten years. That’s serious money needed for the bill to pass reconciliation. But there’s more than one way to achieve this and bring down drug costs. To that end, patent reform would be a much more worthwhile endeavor.The savings needed don’t have to come from drug price negotiation. For that matter, the popularity of such a provision doesn’t come from the specific policy. Rather, it’s popular because it means lower drug prices. Drug price negotiation is a policy with potential (though melodramatically overstated) harms. Well-designed patent reform, on the other hand, can trim prices while better orienting drug development.Drug price negotiation isn’t a riskless proposition. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a significant reduction in revenue would reduce new drug discovery by 3-5 percent (8 to 15 fewer drugs out of an estimated 300 approved). Market size and the potential return inform the decision to invest (or not) in R&D. As the largest prescription drug market in the world, the U.S. isn’t just the arsenal of democracy; it’s also the medicine cabinet. Negotiation will bring down prices and the return on investment for new drug discovery without the benefits of a competitive market created by patent reform.If savings is the goal, going after drug patents is the best way to achieve that. Dean Baker found that patent protections added over $300 billion per year to the price of pharmaceuticals in 2018. According to the FDA, the entry of one generic competitor reduces drug prices by 40 percent, increasing to a whopping 95 percent of the original price when there are six or more generic competitors.But aren’t patents necessary to ensure a return on the enormous investments needed to develop a new drug? Generally yes, even if the costs of such investments are overstated. But it’s possible to have too much of a good thing and, unfortunately, that’s where we are today. Analysis by the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK) reveals that the effective patent terms for the top-selling drugs in the U.S. are nearly twice as long as the 20 years patents are supposed to last. Drugmakers pull this off by loading up dozens of patents per drug, including ones for therapeutically trivial changes (like going from two pills to one pill a day). As a result, they can continue to charge sky-high prices long past the point when they should be facing real competition. Reforms are needed to change the incentive structure that makes extending monopolies more profitable than developing new treatments.Raising the bar for patent eligibility is a structural reform to ensure quality. But what if the holders of good patents still abuse their exclusivity? In these cases, there are tools available to the federal government to license the patents needed to legally manufacture drugs (that is, allow competitors into the market).The first is march-in rights under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which helps “subject inventions”–those made under a government contract–to be licensed. Since this power has never been utilized, its usefulness in fighting high prices is technically an open legal question. Still, there’s no time like the present to find out. Even without march-in rights, the government can use other compulsory licensing powers to pay a reasonable royalty while reaping the benefits of low costs under free-market competition.There are two ways to fight monopoly power: with the bargaining power of a large, centralized buyer like the federal government or with increased market competition. Drug price negotiation takes the former approach, and there’s a place for it. But whenever an opportunity to pursue the latter is possible, we should take it. Making sure the incentives created by the patent system don’t turn into excesses will cut costs and ensure the rewards of a patent go to innovative activity.Daniel Takash is the Niskanen Center’s regulatory policy fellow.

The ATF (the accepted not-actually-an-acronym for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) is back on its periodic charm offensive. This time the charm seems a bit more forced, as citizens and governments all over the nation are aggressively questioning force use by law enforcement officers.The murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin prompted nationwide protests targeting police violence. In apparent response to this public reckoning, the ATF has been inviting members of the press to try out its VR shoot-a-thon in hopes of convincing them (and the public reading these reports) that most killings are justified.This tradition appears to date back to late spring of this year. It's a calculated play for deference from journalists. By showing them how difficult it can be to make split-second decisions in potentially deadly situations, the ATF is hoping to head off questioning of officers' actions during shootings by police officers. This, of course, glosses over the part where officers are supposed to be better at this sort of thing than non-cops -- you know, the "training and expertise" they cite so often when seeking warrants or defending against allegations of rights violations.Here's one use-of-force seminar the ATF threw for Arizona journalists in May of this year. At least at this one, reporters tried to get something other than standard copaganda out of the trainers.

Techdirt has reported on the oppression of Tibetans by the Chinese authorities for 15 years now. More recently, the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs in Xinjiang have come in for the same treatment, with the apparent aim of breaking their spirit and imposing total obedience. But alongside the hundreds of prisons and physical repression -- sometimes leading to deaths -- the Chinese authorities have been making it increasingly hard for Tibetans and Uyghurs to preserve their distinctive, non-Han cultures. Now Chinese Internet companies are lending a hand to these cultural genocides, reported here by Protocol:

We'd already noted how telecom and media giants are hard at work trying to scuttle the nomination of consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Sohn is broadly popular on both sides of the aisle in telecom and media circles, so companies like AT&T and News Corporation are working overtime to come up with talking points politicians can use to oppose her nomination. This week, that included prodding Lindsey Graham to frame Sohn (who has decades of telecom policy experience) as an unqualified radical extremist looking to censor conservatives:

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Techdirt regular John Roddy highlighted a truly bizarre fight happening in a California court that may or may not involve billionaire Brian Sheth. Sheth was a cofounder of the high-flying Vista Equity Partners, and left it a year ago in a high profile exit, after the firm's other cofounder, Robert Smith, entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the DOJ and agreed to pay $139 million and "abandon" $182 million in deductions, related to charges of tax fraud. In the Forbes link above, Sheth claims he sought to have Smith leave Vista following this revelation, but "Smith prevailed" and so Sheth left. Nothing in that article makes Sheth look particularly bad.However... an anonymous Twitter user @CallMeMoneyBags has been tweeting criticism of lots of folks involved in the private equity space, including Brian Sheth. A year ago, just about the same time that Sheth left Vista, MoneyBags tweeted a bunch of tweets referring to Sheth, and including snapshots of women who were sometimes scantily clad. The text of the tweets wasn't particularly bad. One of them just says "Brian Sheth is the King of Private Equity" with some hashtags:Some of the tweets could be read obliquely to suggest infidelity:You'll notice that the screenshots of those tweets show the media disabled over a copyright claim, and that's the next stage of this mystery. An entity called "Bayside Advisory LLC," which barely seems to exist, sent Twitter a copyright infringement notice for the images in those tweets, and then immediately filed a DMCA 512(h) subpoena to Twitter demanding that it identify the person behind @CallMeMoneyBags.Twitter, properly moved to quash the subpoena, noting that this was all highly sketchy, and that the standard to force the disclosure of an anonymous poster is quite high, and it was not met here. Twitter rightfully noted that it was also somewhat perplexed by who the hell Bayside Advisory LLC was, and whether it had any connection to Sheth:

Clearview -- the facial recognition tech company whose unproven AI runs searches on 10 billion images scraped from the web -- has been booted from another country.Last July, Clearview pulled out of Canada while under investigation by its government. Eight months later, the investigation concluded, with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner finding Clearview's scraping of web content violated the rights of Canadian citizens by gathering their information without their permission.The same thing has just happened in Australia. An investigation by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), in conjunction with the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, has determined Clearview broke the law there as well.

It's been a while since we've mentioned Denuvo, the once-vaunted anti-piracy video game DRM that subsequently became an industry punchline. Once touted as "uncrackable", Denuvo went from there to becoming indeed crackable, then crackable shortly after release of games, to then being crackable the same day, to then being cracked in some cases hours after a game's release. As a result, plenty of publishers have taken to patching Denuvo out of their games, while Denuvo did a mini-pivot to create anti-cheat software for online games. While all that was going on, plenty of paying customers of games protected by Denuvo complained about various issues: authentication issues intermittently preventing the customer from playing the game they bought, performance issues that are linked back to how Denuvo runs and behaves, or Denuvo simply breaking games.In other words, Denuvo is a case study in real world DRM: no real protection from piracy, but plenty of headaches for paying customers. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, well, yeah. But, it's an ongoing disaster, it appears. A whole bunch of PC video games suddenly became unplayable this past week, such as Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy.

Summary: There are many content moderation challenges that companies face, but complications arise when users or companies try to make use of copyright law as a tool to block criticism. In the US, the laws around content that allegedly infringes on a copyright holder’s rights are different than most other types of content, and that creates some interesting challenges in the content moderation space.Specifically, under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), online service providers who do not wish to be held liable for user-posted material that infringes copyright need to take a few steps to be free of liability. Key among those steps is having a “notice-and-takedown” process, in which a copyright holder can notify the website of allegedly infringing material; and if the website removes access to the work, it cannot be held liable for the infringement.This process creates a strong incentive for websites to remove content upon receiving a takedown notice, as doing so automatically protects the site. However, this strong incentive for the removal of content has also created a different kind of incentive: those who wish to have content removed from the internet can submit takedown notices claiming copyright infringement, even if the work does not infringe on copyright. This creates an interesting challenge for companies hosting content: determining when a copyright takedown notice has been submitted for illegitimate purposes.In September of 2020, news was released that Nikola, an alternative energy truck company’s promotional video showing its new hydrogen fuel cell truck driving along a highway was false. A report by a research firm criticized the company, saying that the truck did not move under its own propulsion. As it turned out, the truck did not actually have a hydrogen fuel cell and was instead filmed rolling downhill; Nikola admitted that it had faked its promotional video. In Nikola’s response, it admits that the truck did not move on its own, but it still claimed that the original report was “false and defamatory.” While the response from Nikola does highlight areas where it disagrees with the way in which the research firm wrote about the company’s efforts, it does not identify any actual “false” statements of fact.Soon after this, many YouTube creators who made videos about the situation discovered that their videos about the incident were being removed due to copyright claims from Nikola. While video creators did use some of the footage of the faked promotional video in their YouTube videos, they also noted that it was clearly fair use, as they were reporting on the controversy and just using a short snippet of Nikola’s faked promotional video, often presenting it in much longer videos with commentary.When asked about the situation, Nikola and YouTube spokespeople seemed to give very different responses. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin posted the comments from each side by side:

Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company's ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are legendary. As are the company's efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can't be refurbished and re-used), and Apple's often comical attacks on "right to repair" legislation, a push that only sprung up after companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, John Deere, and others created a grass-roots counter-movement via their attempts to monopolize repair.And if the construction of the iPhone 13 is anything to go by, Apple has learned absolutely nothing in the last five years of heated debate, legal wrangling, and bipartisan anger. According to iFixit, the iPhone 13 is harder to repair than ever. The screen technically can no longer be replaced at all without the use of a microscope and special software. If you try to do it yourself, it disables the iPhone's Face ID identification technology. That's something that's been confirmed by both iFixit and numerous independent repair shops:iFixit isn't impressed:

As you'll recall, last month, journalists for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch revealed that the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website was exposing teacher and administrator social security numbers in the HTML source code. This came years after state auditors had highlighted that DESE was already collecting information it should not have been collecting. Bizarrely, DESE and Missouri governor Mike Parson, rather than thanking these journalists for helping to protect the teachers, accused them of being hackers and promising to prosecute them. After people mocked him, he doubled down on the claim and a PAC closely connected to Parson put out a bizarre add playing up the evil "hacking" by the "fake news" media, along with ridiculous talk about "decoding the HTML source code."Except that, now, DESE has (much more quietly, and with much less bombast) apologized for the data breach and offered credit and identity theft monitoring to teachers:

Seven years ago, wardriving security researchers discovered rogue cell tower simulators being operated near sensitive locations in Washington, DC, presumably by foreign governments.

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It's kind of crazy how many regulatory proposals we see appear to be based on myths and moral panics. The latest, just introduced is the House version of the Filter Bubble Transparency Act, which is the companion bill to the Senate bill of the same name. Both bills are "bipartisan," which makes it worse, not better. The Senate version was introduced by Senator John Thune, and co-sponsored by a bevy of anti-tech grandstanding Senators: Richard Blumenthal, Jerry Moran, Marsha Blackburn, Brian Schatz, and Mark Warner. The House version was introduced by Ken Buck, and co-sponsored by David Cicilline, Lori Trahan, and Burgess Owens.While some of the reporting on this suggests that the bill "targets" algorithms, it only does so in the stupidest, most ridiculous ways. The bill is poorly drafted, poorly thought out, and exposes an incredible amount of ignorance about how any of this works. It doesn't target all algorithms -- and explicitly exempts search based on direct keywords, or algorithms that try to "protect the children." Instead, it has a weird attack on what it calls "opaque algorithms." The definition itself is a bit opaque:

After months of intense wrangling, the Biden administration's infrastructure bill has finally made it through Congress, delivering a massive injection of much-needed funds to an absurdly overlooked part of the economy. You might recall the broadband component of the bill saw its overall price tag cut from $100 billion to $65 billion. There were several other changes made at the request of the telecom lobby, such as a slower speed definition standard and the elimination of language to help community broadband. But it's still the biggest U.S. broadband investment on record, and filled with a lot of great things.The Benton Foundation has done a good job breaking down what the money in the bill actually does in a multi-piece series.Most of the bill's funds ($42 billion) will be used to create a State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program that involves grants to be doled out by the NTIA. Those grants will be used to shore up broadband gaps and fund digital divide initiatives. Additional funds will be used to deliver grants aimed at shoring up so-called "middle mile" networks (between the "last mile" to your home and your ISP). In most cases this money has to be spent in the next five years.The bill also sets aside $14.2 billion to make the current Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) program permanent. The current EBB doles out $50 per month ($75 per month for tribal areas) to ISPs, which in turn use that money to provide discounts to low-income households that qualify. The bill lowers that tally to $30 a month. $2.75 billion will be used for digital inclusion and equity projects like helping seniors get online, $4 billion will fund programs at both the NTIA and USDA aimed at shoring up tribal broadband access, and another $600 million will specifically go toward addressing rural broadband gaps.To be very clear, these programs will do a hell of a lot of good shoring up U.S. broadband coverage gaps and improving affordability for millions of Americans. The bill does some other very good stuff, like revisiting mandatory transparency requirements for ISPs, requiring they disclose all hidden fees and line limitations at the point of sale.The problem with these kinds of ideas has been implementation and follow up.The U.S. has thrown billions of dollars at this problem, yet up to 42 million Americans still lack access to broadband, and another 83 million live under a broadband monopoly. The core reason for this problem is regional monopolization and the state and federal corruption that protects it. Throwing more money at the problem without seriously addressing the underlying rot means you're not going to genuinely fix it. Many states in particular are just gobsmackingly corrupt, and the idea that this corruption won't seep into these efforts at a large scale is fairly naive.Again, good bills are only as useful as the follow up. For example, there were months of reports on how major ISPs were exploiting the EBB discount broadband to basically upsell subscribers to more expensive tiers. What was done about it? Nothing, really. For decades, state and federal regulators and lawmakers threw billions of dollars in subsidies, regulatory favors, and tax breaks at entrenched regional monopolies for job growth and broadband deployments that were either half-completed or never arrived. What was done about it? Absolutely nothing.So yeah, stuff like the EBB is great, but it's just a band aid on the real cause of the problem: regional monopoly power. And things like transparency requirements for ISPs are also great, but they're only as useful as the FCC's willingness to stand up to politically powerful companies like AT&T to enforce them, which historically has been... mixed at best.U.S. broadband in 2021 isn't spotty, expensive, or slow because of technical or financial obstacles. It's spotty, expensive, and slow because the sector is dominated by a handful of powerful monopolies that don't just dictate policy -- they literally write the rules of the road. The end result is a broken, mindlessly consolidated market mired in regulatory capture. Everything, from net neutrality and privacy violations to crappy customer service and high prices, is a direct result of a conscious policy choice to pander to the biggest, wealthiest providers. Pointing this out in telecom policy is generally deemed hyperbolic or impolite.So while there are a lot of very good things in these bills that should deliver concrete help to a lot of places, we still seem to be operating under the delusion that U.S. state and federal telecom oversight isn't a corrupt mess. It won't be particularly difficult for giants like AT&T to leverage their political power (which, in a long list of states, is near-absolute) to elbow out competitors, misdirect funds they don't deserve, or otherwise hamstring anything that threatens their interests. Actually making sure these funds are spent correctly will require the kind of diligence and follow up that's long been lacking.

It should come as no surprise to regular Techdirt readers that the DMCA takedown process is not only wide open to fraud and abuse, but that those avenues are regularly used in real life for just those purposes. Takedowns to silence criticism, takedowns to try to steal traffic from others, or takedowns or monetization claims just to get some paltry amounts of streaming revenue: the point is that this shit happens all the time. What absolutely does not happen with any frequency is the folks behind these bogus actions getting punished in any way for their behavior.And so when it does happen, it's worth highlighting it, putting it on a podium, and trying to have it become the norm rather than the exception. To that end, let's highlight YouTube actually banning an account that appeared to be sending fraudulent DMCA notices.

As courts seemingly have to remind school administrators (and their partners in unconstitutional crime, school police officers), students -- even minors -- still have constitutional rights. The First and Fourth Amendments are the most frequently violated, despite there being no lack of precedent upholding students' rights.This latest rebuke of law enforcement overreach comes via the Colorado Court of Appeals (and via FourthAmendment.com). In this case, a Denver, Colorado student had his backpack warrantlessly searched by school security officers. This search resulted in the discovery of marijuana and paraphernalia, which led to juvenile charges against the minor, referred to in the opinion [PDF] as "C.C-S."The reason the search was unconstitutional has a lot to do with how the school officers got it into their heads that C.C-S. should be detained and searched. The state of Colorado maintains an anonymous tip line called "Safe2Tell" which allows students and faculty to report suspicious activity or behavior to school officials.The Safe2Tell tip that initiated this chain of unconstitutional events was old news by the time it was forwarded to DPS (Denver Public Schools) officials and, because of its origin, could not be corroborated.

Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny lately, and for very good reasons! But the anger surrounding Facebook has also resulted in plenty of criticism that is misleading or downright inaccurate in its description of how the company operates and what it does — though Facebook itself carries some of the blame for that happening, too. The goal of fixing the problems with social media isn't helped by misrepresenting what those problems are, so this week we're joined by Gizmodo's Shoshana Wodinsky to discuss all the things people get wrong about Facebook.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

The Chinese-run Hong Kong government is still finding more ways to suppress criticism. A new, very broad national security law pretty much criminalized protests or criticism of the Chinese government's long list of intrusions and impositions into Hong Kong's self-governance. The law allowed the regular police to become the internet police and the police state to become official with the appointment of law enforcement officials to prominent national security oversight positions.Silencing journalists and critics was only the beginning. There are several ways the government can be criticized but those options are drying up. Rules were imposed that shut down art displays in Hong Kong, targeting anything the government felt might be "endangering national security" -- a phrase that means anything critical of the Chinese government or its appointees in the Hong Kong government.This form of censorship has been expanded to cover other creative expressions not previously directly targeted by the national security law.

Karl wrote a bit about how the new antitrust bill from Amy Klobuchar and Tom Cotton pretends that the only industry that has competition issues is the internet industry -- despite evidence suggesting other industries are much worse off -- and briefly mentioned the fact that their bill conveniently excludes Walmart and Target. But the setup of the bill and those particular exclusions are so nefariously done, and so obviously corrupt, that they deserve a second post to call it out.First off, when the House version of this bill came out, we highlighted that the $600 billion threshold seemed curiously specific, since it seemed specifically drawn just above a ton of politically powerful companies -- including Walmart, Disney, AT&T, Verizon, Visa, Mastercard, JP Morgan Chase, Disney, Bank of America and others. But notably the House version of the bill would put down the $600 billion line as a marker, and if those companies reached that threshold, then they too would be subject to the same rules, and prevented (or, significantly hindered) from buying other companies.And that's where the Senate version is so nefarious. Under the terms of the Klobuchar/Cotton bill, it only applies to companies who are over the $600 billion line on the day the bill is signed. In other words, while the House version would eventually impact Walmart (largest employer in Tom Cotton's state) and Target (largest employer in Klobuchar's state), Klobuchar and Cotton conveniently changed the rules in the bill so that they would not impact the biggest companies in their home states.There is no way to look at that other than as corrupt.And, as Pat Hedger points out, Walmart has been growing like crazy over the last five years or so (which seems odd, considering we keep hearing that Amazon has "monopolized" commerce and is driving out all the competition):So, as I type this Walmart is valued at a little over $400 billion. That might seem far off from $600 billion, but as recently as 2016 Walmart was valued below $200 billion. $600 billion in the next few years is not at all out of the question. And if this bill passes, it won't matter for Walmart.Target is somewhat smaller, but also has been growing like crazy:So both of those companies -- which compete fairly directly with Amazon -- have been growing like gangbusters, and their own Senators are introducing a bill that will block Amazon from acquiring companies, but has a built-in exemption that keeps both of these competitors from being limited in the same way Amazon is being limited.Is there honestly any way to view this setup other than out and out corruption by Klobuchar and Cotton? Protecting the largest employer in each of their states by shackling the major competitor to each, and making sure their own companies are exempted from the law no matter how large they grow?

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The bell continues to toll for American tech companies willing to do business with China. Increasing censorship demands have made even the most obliging of platforms reconsider their obligations to the authoritarian regime, resulting in the most difficult tradeoff: a company's reputation versus access to a market containing more than a billion users.LinkedIn was one of the last to pull up its anchor and exit the country under a not-so-full head of steam. LinkedIn survives in China, albeit in a severely limited form that will make it less likely to receive content deletion requests from the Chinese government. That doesn't mean it won't receive more requests. It just means it won't have as much to delete or block when it's asked to.Most social media platforms operated by US companies are already blocked by the Chinese government, mostly due to their refusal to set up local data centers as is required by law in the country. Those that can still be accessed by Chinese citizens are subject to the censorial wishes of the government.But nothing says American tech companies are done with China like the announcement that a long-forgotten search engine and email provider is finally calling it quits. Last chopper out of Saigon this ain't. But it's still notable, even if it only affects a small customer base.

So we've noted a few times that the recent Congressional fixation on "big tech monopolies" is weirdly myopic. As in, the United States is absolutely jam-packed with heavily monopolized sectors including banking, telecom, energy, and air travel that simply aren't seeing anywhere near the same level of hyperventilation. While it's true that giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon are engaged in dodgy behavior at unprecedented scale, most of the "solutions" bandied about so far are oddly selective, sometimes harmful, and routinely performative.For example, back in June we noted how the big "antitrust reform" bills being proposed in the Senate ignored entire industries and had major carve outs that didn't make much sense. Several of the bills, for example, applied only to companies that made more than 50 million monthly active U.S. users and have a market cap of over $600 billion. They effectively ignored that countless other companies (Visa, Walmart) or industries (telecom) even exist, which is...odd.Amy Klobuchar and Tom Cotton formally introduced their Platform Competition and Opportunity Act (the counterpart to a similar bill proposed in the House) last Friday. The bill, purportedly, helps thwart companies that capture and kill their competitors via acquisition:

The Institute for Justice managed to kill off most of Philadelphia's severely abused civil forfeiture program in 2018. Litigation resulted in a consent decree that banned law enforcement from seizing cash amounts less than $250 and seizures of less than $1,000 were forbidden unless accompanied by criminal charges or if the seizure was to be used as evidence in a trial.This consent decree was necessary because the Philly PD had abused the system for years, taking minute amounts of cash off anyone they arrested as part of a catch-and-release program where alleged criminals were free to go but the PD held onto the cash. Officers were also caught buying seized houses at auction, flipping them to turn a profit, and incentivizing even more bogus property seizures.Of course, the PD took the "evidence" loophole and ran with it, seizing vehicles as supposedly instrumental to prosecutions that never happened before auctioning them off and pocketing the money.The Institute for Justice has doubled back on the impetus of its lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia, surveying victims of forfeiture programs and coming up with plenty of reasons why residents should be thrilled these programs are now (mostly) dead.Its report [PDF] on Philly forfeiture surveyed 407 residents, resulting in data that shows the PD targeted minorities frequently and poor minorities most frequently of all.

If ever there were the walking, talking embodiment of hypocrisy in modern American politics, surely Josh Hawley would be a viable avatar for such a creature. There are few better at saying one thing and doing another than he. He's a free speech advocate... who thinks social media sites should be sued for their choices on speech on their platforms. Josh Hawley loves to talk about how much he's been canceled... despite being a sitting US Senator and being given pages in massive newspapers in order to say all of that. Josh Hawley hates discriminating against folks over their politics... except when it's against the folks who's politics he doesn't like. And, finally, Hawley is a "constitutional lawyer" who, by some measure, participated in an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow an election.So forgive me if I can but laugh at Hawley's recent speech at the National Conservatism Conference about how the "war on men" is driving men to such vile hobbies as video games and pornography.

Congress is at it again, trying to legislate without bothering to understand the problems they are ostensibly trying to fix. This time it's with the INFORM Consumers Act, S.B. 936, which, instead of debating further, some of its sponsors are trying to ram through as an amendment to the must-pass NDAA. Which itself is a clue that there's something wrong with this bill, because if the only way to become law is to avoid further scrutiny, then that's exactly when such scrutiny is needed.At least this time the proposed bill doesn't take direct aim at Section 230 or antitrust, and unlike some other bills this one is at least trying to target something resembling an actual policy problem. But as is so often the case with these "let's make Internet platforms responsible for everything wrong with the world" bills, it still doesn't actually fix the problem it's trying to solve.The problem that this bill is supposedly tackling is that sometimes the products people buy online can be defective or dangerous, but then sometimes consumers can have difficulty finding the seller responsible to try to hold liable for any resulting harm. The apparent goal of the INFORM Consumers Act is to make such sellers more findable and thus more accountable, but (a) it won't really, and (b) it will create all sorts of other problems that ultimately will hurt consumers (and others) instead.The bill is flawed both in its concept and its execution. At its core, the essential failing is that instead of directly targeting the wayward vendors concerning Congress, the bill instead aims to conscript online marketplaces into formally policing online sellers, which is itself of dubious effectiveness as a regulatory strategy, let alone of dubious doctrinal consistency regarding how tort law works or of dubious constitutionality regarding how state action works. In particular, the bill wants to obligate all online marketplaces, of every size and stripe (see the definition at Section (2)(e)(4)), to collect seller information (Section (2)(a)(1)), verify it (Section (2)(a)(2)), display it (Section (2)(b)(1)), and then terminate any seller's account if they are out of compliance (see Section (2)(b)(4)). To the drafters these requirements may seem like small asks, but in practice they are far from it, especially as wrapped up in this overall legislative language.For one thing, even just asking for all this seller information creates all sorts of privacy problems, particularly for sellers who are individual people, who would have to supply all sorts of personal details, including tax IDs (Section (2)(a)(1)(A)(iii)), which may well be their social security numbers. And then the marketplaces would have to somehow safely store this government-demanded honeypot of deliciously sensitive of personal information that other regulation has actively been trying to deter them from collecting at all. (The House version of the bill, H.R. 5502, at least addresses this concern, albeit with a handwavy, "Nerd harder," sort of demand of the platforms (see Section (1)(a)(4)).)Next, policing this information is not something that a marketplace would necessarily have either the resources or competency to do, especially not at the scale the law would demand. Being forced to terminate accounts for inadequate compliance also raises due process concerns for both the marketplace and any legitimate seller so affected. And such terminations are not without consequence, including for consumers who will now have to face higher prices, lack of supply for the products they seek as vendors are driven offline entirely, or even more risk as everyone is now forced to turn to offshore marketplaces not subject to laws like these and ultimately even less accountable to American consumers than the online marketplaces bills like this are obviously intending to target.Meanwhile, even the part of the bill that forces platforms to display seller information creates a problem with compelled speech (Section (2)(b)(1)(A)(ii)). While commercial speech can sometimes be proscribed in certain ways without offending the First Amendment, a law drafted as broadly as this one is unlikely to be able to demonstrate the narrow tailoring required to surmount that constitutional hurdle. Especially when it acknowledges with its own exceptions how unnecessary some of its requirements are. Fortunately, it avoids an additional privacy problem by allowing vendors who only have a personal phone number or residential address to not have that information posted publicly (Section (2)(b)(2)(A)(i) and (iii)). Which is good, because if bills like these were to make it functionally impossible for entrepreneurial Americans to avail themselves of ecommerce, it wouldn't be good for them, the economy, or consumers who would have liked to buy their products. But, then again, since, by its own terms, the bill acknowledges that there may be more pragmatic ways of addressing vendor accountability, its overly prescriptive approach, which still lumps far too many dissimilar vendors together with identical requirements, is unlikely to pass constitutional muster. And its practical effect will still amount to being a gratuitous burden on vendors and the online marketplaces they depend on to conduct their businesses, needlessly making it more difficult and expensive to do so.Then, on top of these drafting infirmities, the House version of this bill would also give state attorney generals enforcement powers (Section (1)(d)), which is always a fraught exercise when it comes to Internet commerce, because it allows some states to exert an effective veto power over online platforms that other states might prefer to benefit from. But even the FTC enforcement power the bill proposes raises issues as well (Section (2)(c)(1)). It may be proper for the FTC to go after any vendor who dupes consumers into purchasing from them, including with the illusion of accountability. But as long as consumers are on notice that they may not be able to track down the vendor later, and not deceived into believing otherwise before making their purchase, then they are as empowered to make their purchasing decisions as the FTC has any business requiring. If consumers need more information before making their purchasing decisions, then that is a pressure they can put on the vendors or online marketplaces to deliver. We don't need a law to force it, especially not one as blunt in its effects as this one.In fact, everything about this bill is fatally blunt. Although it in theory only applies to "high volume" sellers, the definition of high volume can reach all sorts of casual sellers.

Let's just get right into this and let Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) harvest some accolades and encouragement to continue to deploy its particular brand of intrusive transparency on historically secretive entities.

A couple of Israeli spyware purveyors have finally gotten themselves disinvited from the good graces of the federal government of the United States. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security has amended its export regulations to hand NSO Group and the more mysterious Candiru a "presumption of denial," meaning they'll have to prove they're trustworthy again before US entities will be able to do business with them.The new rules also make it more difficult for NSO and Candiru to sell their products using middlemen who aren't affected by the regulations.

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So for years we pointed out how the trend of news websites killing off their comment section (usually because they were too cheap or lazy to creatively manage them) was counterproductive. One, it killed off a lot of local, community value and engagement created within your own properties. Two, it outsourced anything vaguely resembling functional conversation with your community -- and a lot of additional impressions and engagement -- to Facebook. Despite the downsides everybody ran with the idea that comment sections were utterly irredeemable and unnecessary.Turns out, much of the conventional wisdom driving those decisions wasn't so grounded in fact. This Poynter piece does a really good job revisiting whether killing the comment section was a good idea ten years on. It's true that negative comments in the comment section can tarnish a visitor's perception of the quality of an outlet's brand. But it's also true that the discussions outsourced to Facebook continue to also do that, they're just doing that over at Facebook. So many researchers argue that if you're going to have a discussion, you're probably better off having at locally at your site:

The secrecy surrounding all things national security-related continues to thwart lawsuits alleging rights violations. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has just dumped a complaint brought by Abdulaziz Ghedi, a naturalized American citizen who takes frequent trips to Somalia, the country he was born in. According to Ghedi's complaint, rejecting the advances of one federal agency has subjected him to continuous hassling by a number of other federal agencies.The Appeals Court decision [PDF] opens with a paragraph that telegraphs the futility of Ghedi's effort, as well as the ongoing string of indignities the government has decided to inflict on people who just want to travel.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the valuation of Trump's social network venture:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, people were grappling with James Comey's surprise last-minute announcement that the Clinton email investigation was ongoing (and noting that it seemed to fly in the face of the FBI's ban on investigation disclosures), followed by the agency suddenly leaking like a sieve and opening an internal investigation into one of its own Twitter accounts. AT&T was making things up in an attempt to get its Time Warner acquisition approved, and Senator Wyden warned that the merger posed a massive threat to net neutrality. Meanwhile, the copyright office screwed over thousands of sites by changing its DMCA registration policies, YouTube finally buried the hatchet with Germany's GEMA, and the DOJ sued DirecTV over collusion on regional sports programming.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, the fight was on over the ridiculously named E-PARASITE Act. We were disappointed to see GoDaddy support the bill despite being a site dedicated to theft under its definitions, and we were not at all surprised to see the US Chamber of Commerce make ridiculous arguments in favor. Many in the content industries were insisting that the bill wouldn't require rewriting the DMCA, even though its author admitted that's the plan. Then the campaign for support got really desperate: an astroturf group inflated the number of letters supposedly sent to Congress, Warner Bros. (which had just announced record profits) started pleading poverty and asking people to support the bill (part of a pattern with successful rightsholding companies), and somehow the MPAA even dredged up meaningless support from firefighters. Meanwhile, we highlighted the single best article explaining why the bill was bad.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, Universal embarrassed itself when its lawyers didn't know about its marketing plans and sent cease-and-desist letters to fans participating in a guerilla campaign. It was also a big week for abusing the DMCA, and we took a look at how takedowns were used to silence critics and any content someone doesn't like. Following the big deal between record labels and YouTube, we learned how the deal was structured such that they didn't have to share any of the money with musicians, while a lot of other creators were starting to ask questions about what they would get out of industry deals with YouTube. Meanwhile, Google was getting an early start on making deals to pay viral video creators.

Search the Techdirt pages for the term "mashup" and you will see a metric ton of ink spilled on the topic. Most of those posts deal with the copyright implications of mashup creators, be they for music or literature. It is, frankly, a tortured landscape largely littered with the metaphorical bodies of artists creating new and interesting artwork by combining previous works to create something new. Music is the easiest entry point for those not in the know. Take the music from one song and lyrical output from another, put them together, and you get something new and interesting. When done well, the results are mind-blowing. As are the constant attacks from original creators and rightsholders that seem to see such mashup work as a threat to the originals.But what about the video game space? Go poke around for terms like "video game mashup" and you'll get plenty of results, but all of them discussing theoretical mashups. You can get a Cracked article entitled "4 Video Game Mashups Too Awesome To Exist", or a GameRant post entitled "5 Video Game Mashups That Would Blow Our Minds". Even in those headlines you get a common theme: we wish we could have these things, but they don't exist.Well, at least one does. Crusader Blade is a mashup mod combining Paradox Interactive's Crusader Kings 3 and TaleWorlds Entertainment's Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. Confused? Well, this will take some brief background.Mount & Blade puts the player in a medieval fictional world and allows them to hack and slash their way to glory, fighting battles alongside the rest of their army, with some RPG elements thrown in. The battles featuring hundreds of combatants are really the sell for the game, however. Crusader Kings 3 is a medieval grand strategy game focused on diplomacy, intrigue, relationship management, managing a family dynasty, and warring with other nearby kingdoms and realms. My listing warfare last was not coincidence. The warring part of the game is extremely barebones by modern standards, literally just showing an avatar for an army that marches and then fights to a mathematical outcome. Think of the battle sequence like one in a Civilization game. It's not an afterthought, but it's close to one.What this mod has done is make owners of both games able to seamlessly use both games to play both the grand strategy portions of Crusader Kings and conduct actual battles using Mount & Blade. Yes, seriously.

This is one of the most horrendous -- and one of the most American stories -- I have ever read. It encompasses a lot of distinctly American issues, ranging from law enforcement violence to the disturbing ability of private individuals and entities to reliably summon law enforcement and bring about the destruction of others.It starts, as so many stories about police violence do, with some needlessly exonerative reporting by journalists -- in this case by Elisha Fieldstadt of NBC News.

Elon Musk's Starlink has finally exited beta, but chip shortages may mar the low-orbit broadband satellite venture's big day. The company has technically stopped calling Starlink a beta product, but warns in a new FAQ on its website that users expecting shipments of their new satellite dishes may be waiting a while:

We have a loooooooooong list of stories about copyright troll Richard Liebowitz and his never-ending antics in court. As we noted earlier this summer, he's been getting suspended from practicing law in courts all around the country (while also piling up more and more sanctions). And while he'd already been suspended in various NY federal courts, he's now been entirely suspended from practicing law in the state of New York. The NY state courts were following up on the federal court in the Southern District of New York suspending Liebowitz, and sought to impose a reciprocal suspension.The ruling from earlier this week lays out the details of just a very small fraction of Liebowitz's long history of lying to courts and other misbehavior. It then responds to Liebowitz's attempt to wriggle out of this suspension by arguing that he was simply advocating for his clients as best he could, and also that his initial suspension was temporary and "he has not had a full and fair opportunity to litigate the matter in that forum."The judges reviewing his case are... unimpressed:

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has finally found some law enforcement officers not worthy of qualified immunity. The First and Fourth Amendment violations were too egregious to be ignored, even with a lack of precedential decisions on point to work with.In January 2018, Laredo (Texas) police officers arrested a local journalist -- Priscilla Villareal, a.k.a. Lagordiloca -- for asking a couple of questions of (and receiving a couple of answers from) another Laredo PD officer. Villareal doesn't work for any local press outlet. Instead, she broadcasts directly to 120,000 Facebook followers, often adding commentary to ongoing events.The local cops don't like her. So, they decided to have her arrested under Texas Penal Code §39.06(c), which says:

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At times I've been at odds with Senators Pat Leahy and Thom Tillis regarding their view on intellectual property (though Leahy has a good history on patent law -- Tillis... not so much). However, kudos to both of them for recognizing a very, very real problem in the way in which Judge Alan Albright has been engaged in what's been called jurisdiction selling.If you don't recall, Judge Albright, who was a patent litigator before being appointed to the bench in Waco, Texas, went on tour advertising that patent plaintiffs should file in his district court (where he is the only judge). And, this resulted in a ton of cases all being filed there. And despite Supreme Court precedent that says judges need to be willing to transfer patent cases to proper venues, Albright has been thumbing his nose at higher courts and seeming to do everything he can to keep cases in his court.And now, both Tillis and Leahy are ringing appropriate alarm bells over Albright's activities. Leahy and Tillis together have sent a letter to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to call out Judge Albright's behavior. It is not often that you see two Senators (who lead the IP subcommittee, no less) sending a letter to the Chief Justice to accuse a district court judge of being up to no good. It's quite a letter.

For years we've watched major cable TV providers lose traditional cable TV subscribers hand over fist to cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. It was a trend that only accelerated during COVID. Don't feel too badly for companies like Charter and Comcast however; the companies' growing monopoly over faster fixed-line broadband across huge swaths of the country have allowed them to recoup their pound of flesh via broadband fees (or unnecessary usage caps) without much in the way of repercussion.But there's signs that the cable broadband party could be slowing down. Both Comcast and Charter (Spectrum) reported the usual number of cable TV subscriber losses, but also reported significantly fewer broadband subscribers than usual:

King.com and its flagship product, mobile game Candy Crush, have made it onto our pages several times in the past. The most common reason for that is that King appears to enjoy playing trademark bully. Fighting with the folks behind hit game Banner Saga, not to mention picking fights with any other game maker that uses the word "candy" in their titles, have become the norm. Notably, some of the time, when there is a severe public backlash over its antics, King has also shown that it is capable of running away from such disputes.But if you thought that all of this would mean that King would somehow soften its bullying ways, think again. King recently opposed a trademark application brought by International Fruit Genetics over its application for "Candy Crunch". What does IFG do, exactly? Well, essentially what it sounds like it does: breeding of fruit variants.

Summary: One of the many challenges with content moderation is the flexibility of language. When applying blocklists — a list of prohibited terms considered not appropriate for the platform — moderators need to consider innocuous uses of words that, when removed from their context, appear to be violations of the platform’s terms of use.Multiple platforms have run into the phenomenon known as the "Scunthorpe problem." In this famous case, a town whose name no one would ever mistake for offensive was deemed offensive by moderation blocklists simply because within the name of the town is the word “cunt” which many blocklists forbids.Deploying automated blocklists can be even more challenging when dealing with specialized or niche content, which may use certain terms that are offensive outside of this specific context, but are essential to discussing and understanding the relevant subject matter. A paleontologists' conference was derailed when the moderation blocklist made it impossible for participants to use words like "bone," "pubic," "stream," and "beaver."Facebook has worked continuously to refine its moderation processes, but it still occasionally makes the wrong call when it comes to their blocklists. In January 2021, residents of (and visitors to) a Devon, England landmark were surprised to find their posts and comments vanishing from the site. After a little investigation, it became clear Facebook was deleting posts containing references to the landmark known as Plymouth Hoe.In addition to being the name of a common garden tool (more on that in a moment), "hoe" also refers to a "sloping ridge shaped like an inverted foot or heel," such as Plymouth Hoe, which is known locally as the Hoe. Users were temporarily forced to self-censor the harmless term to avoid moderation, either by adding unnecessary punctuation or dropping the "h." It appeared Facebook's automated processes believed these comments and posts were using a derogatory term for a romantic partner who is only in a relationship to better their own financial position.Facebook soon apologized for the moderation error and stated it was "taking steps to rectify the error" and figure out what caused the mistaken moderation in the first place. Problem solved?Not really.The same problem popped up again, this time affecting a New York gardening group. WNY Gardeners, a group with more than 8,000 members, is the latest to be affected by Facebook's "hoe" pruning. A member responded to the prompt "most loved & indispensable weeding tool" with "Push pull hoe!" Not long after that, the member was informed by Facebook that the comment violated the site's policy on bullying and harassment.Company Considerations:

In the wake of data breaches at Target and Equifax where hackers compromised the personal information of millions of Americans and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, customers and policymakers are increasingly worried about the privacy and security of our personal information online. Unfortunately, policymakers often confuse these privacy and data security concerns with broader anti-tech fervor against America’s leading technology businesses. But simply put, kitchen-sink anti-tech responses could exacerbate, not ease, concerns regarding data privacy and security.Sen. Klobuchar’s American Innovation and Choice Online Act proposed in the Senate this month provides a clear example of how “solutions” driven by animosity towards “Big Tech” could undermine consumer privacy. Lawmakers who are currently pushing antitrust proposals to attack tech businesses are creating a scenario where companies might be unable to undertake the privacy and security features that their consumers trust and rely on.This latest legislation would undermine existing privacy features and lead to more risky sharing with third-parties which has been at the heart of many privacy scandals. By making it illegal for the tech giants covered by the law to “restrict or impede” a business user’s access to data created through the platform or to limit portability, the result is simple—this will likely undermine companies’ attempts to improve consumer privacy such as Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency. In most cases, this bill also requires companies to share their data with rivals, even those that might have ill-intentions against the company, its consumers, or even the United States.Thanks to the requirements in the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, malicious businesses, including foreign companies, could exploit its data portability loophole and gain access to user information. It opens up businesses to the very actions at the heart of other previous data privacy scandals and dilutes their ability to respond with what consumers want—better security and privacy options. And as a result, Klobuchar’s antitrust proposal would likely harm users’ privacy online and create more harm to consumers than the current tenuous claims about tech giants' market behavior.This bill won’t just harm consumer privacy, it’ll harm small businesses to boot. Under the Klobuchar bill, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple would not be able to limit the use of data by those with questionable or unethical data practices and would be greatly limited in their ability to remove fraudulent apps or other awful actors from their app stores.These companies would generally have two options: either accept all sellers into their phones and app stores, regardless of poor data privacy and security standards, distasteful products, and customer service quality, or end these programs altogether to avoid accusations of self-preferencing and significant consequences associated with it under Klobuchar’s bill.Both options would mean consumers likely lose the benefits of knowing that only approved apps can access their data, while developers of these apps and other small businesses that use these services would not benefit from the consumer trust these marketplaces currently provide.The interoperability requirements of the bill also fail to truly provide the users themselves with the increased options. Instead, they make user data and to whom it can be ported further subject to the decisions of companies and third-parties. New opportunities for data portability between platforms can provide users more control and lower the cost of switching between services. Take the Data Transfer Project, which allows users to choose to transfer certain data like photos between project member services. This gives users more options for where they can choose to keep such information. But the Klobuchar proposal structurally doesn’t help users and would require companies to provide portability and interoperability to other companies,not to the users themselves.Proponents of Klobuchar’s bill will likely point out that the bill establishes an affirmative defense to avoid these requirements if it would undermine privacy. However, this still would not solve all the concerns. Companies that pursue that route would face a high burden in court and the high costs associated with litigating such a case. As a result, many companies will favor compliance and handing over consumer data rather than risk the penalties if an affirmative defense fails, even if they believe consumer privacy may ultimately be undermined. In fact, the inclusion of an affirmative defense wouldn’t even be sufficient to overcome the additional privacy problems that Klobuchar’s bill would create.Rather than resolving data privacy concerns, antitrust proposals like Senator Klobuchar’s could make keeping our information safe online an impossible task for tech companies. Policymakers should not have consumers and small businesses pay an unfair price and lose privacy protections just so they can go after big tech companies.Jennifer Huddleston is Policy Counsel at NetChoice where she focuses on emerging technology issues like privacy, competition policy, and intermediary liability.

In 2014, the Supreme Court extended Fourth Amendment coverage to the contents of cell phones. Prior to that ruling, cops had successfully argued that searching the contents of someone's cell phone was no different than searching the contents of their pockets when arresting them. Claims -- bad ones -- were made about "officer safety" and, for the most part, courts tended to agree. If the pants pocket argument didn't work, cell phones -- with their wealth of personal information and private communications -- were analogized as the digital equivalent of car trunks or address books.This protection only extends so far, as one parolee has discovered. The key is in the wording of the Supreme Court's Riley decision, which apparently doesn't cover someone being arrested for parole violations. But the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision [PDF] seems to undercut some of the findings of the Riley decision, which recognized the personal nature of these computers capable of being carried in someone's pocket. In doing so, it appears to say this enhanced expectation of privacy simply doesn't apply to anyone on parole or probation.The opening paragraph appears to show something that oversteps the bounds of the search incident to arrest, at least in relation to the parole violation.

Last year when a bunch of the biggest publishing houses sued the Internet Archive, in the midst of a pandemic, over their digital library program, I was a bit surprised that the announcement about the lawsuit came not from any of the publishers themselves directly, but rather from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which is officially not a party in the lawsuit. That alone felt a bit... sketchy.And, now it may be an issue in the lawsuit itself. Last week, the Internet Archive asked the judge for a hearing because the AAP is attempting to withhold various responsive documents on the discovery requests that were made to the publishers themselves regarding their communications with the AAP, and a separate subpoena served on the AAP. And it appears the AAP really doesn't want that stuff to get into the hands of the Internet Archive's legal team.

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