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Law enforcement has a pretty cavalier attitude towards private property. Whatever property they aren't unjustifiably seizing from drivers and passengers, they're razing to the ground. Sometimes they destroy whole houses during plain vanilla warrant service. Other times, situations are determined to be stand-offs in need of wholesale destruction, even when officers are facing down an empty house.You'd think this sort of brazen and unjustified destruction would result in successful lawsuits to recover costs and damages incurred by these actions. But you'd be wrong. A successful lawsuit for law enforcement destruction of private property is more rare than a successful lawsuit over property seized via asset forfeiture.Courts tend to defer to law enforcement expertise, often opining that this collateral damage is just an unfortunate side effect of good police work. Officers are free to overcome any obstacles placed in the way of their objectives, and if that means entire walls of houses need to be destroyed, that's just the way it is. Who are we (this is the judges speaking) to second-guess decisions made in the heat of the moment, even when said moment is a daylong "standoff."Two Appeals Courts have issued precedential decisions that affect two entire circuits (the Ninth and Tenth), which make lawsuits brought in those jurisdictions even more unlikely to prevail. But a recent lawsuit -- featuring representation by the Institute for Justice (which has also had success fighting bogus forfeitures) -- has just experienced some limited success. It was brought by a woman whose residence was the victim of an overzealous Texas SWAT team that apparently felt the only way it could apprehend a suspect was by causing more than $50,000 of damage to her home.It's not like the McKinney PD didn't have options. Vicki Baker, the plaintiff, gave them plenty, as Billy Binion reports for Reason.

More troubling news has surfaced about Apple's and China's relationship. Apple relies on Chinese manufacturing to make its phones and the Chinese government relies on its massive amount of power to leverage deals that allow it to achieve its ends, many of which are oppressive.An exclusive report by The Information (paywalled) details a $275 billion deal Apple struck with the Chinese government, apparently in hopes of exempting the company from new regulations that would have negatively affected its products and services. That deal was signed in 2016 and apparently includes an option for a sixth year, which would extend it through 2022.Here's what appears to have been the end result of this deal, which required Apple to invest heavily in China and work with the government to develop new technologies and cultivate Chinese tech talent. The South China Morning Post notes Apple is now back on top of the Chinese phone sales charts.

Folks may know that when Jonas Salk created the polio vaccine he chose not to patent it, and when asked who owns the patent on it, responded: "Well... the people I would say. There is no patent... Could you patent the sun?"Whenever people bring this up, patent maximalists -- especially those in the pharma world -- like to come up with all sorts of excuses about how that was "different" somehow. My favorite excuse was that he did this because "the public had funded the vaccine."Fast forward to today. Moderna, somewhat famously, helped produce one of the very first COVID vaccines using its mRNA technology. It's a great thing (I got two Moderna shots in my own arm as soon as I could). You may have heard a lot about Moderna as well. While the company had been around for a decade, this vaccine is its first product on the actual market. It had been experimenting with mRNA technology, but hadn't actually come out with anything until the COVID vaccine.But -- and this is the important part -- it was the US government, and by that we mean "the US public," who mostly funded Moderna's COVID vaccine... and it was actually US government employees who did a lot of the important work. At the beginning of the pandemic, the US government gave Moderna $483 million dollars to work on the COVID vaccine. A few months later it gave another $472 million.Also, Moderna now admits that US government employees were critical to the development of the vaccine:

Clearview is again on the receiving end of an order demanding it delete all the local data it scraped from thousands of websites and social media platforms.Canada led the way in booting the facial recognition company, ordering its exit in February. A government investigation concluded Clearview had broken the country's privacy laws with its web scraping and ordered it to delete all Canadian data.Australia was next, kicking Clearview out in November. It too concluded (after an investigation) that laws were broken by the country. The United Kingdom followed suit, more or less. It didn't kick Clearview out but threatened it with a $23 million fine and forbade it from processing any more data collected in the UK.Now, it's France's turn. The GDPR is in play this time, which means this announcement is likely to be followed by similar orders from other members of the European Union. Richard Nieva reports on the latest for BuzzFeed.

For good reasons, Alex Berenson has been dubbed the "pandemic's wrongest man." He played up the fact that he once wrote for the NY Times and turned that into a weird, shady attack on pot, before going all in on medical misinformation. In the early days he played down the threat of COVID, and has since become a leading vaccine disinfo spreader. He had built a large Twitter following for his nonsense, and shortly before his Twitter account was finally shut down, he had warned that if it was shut down he would sue Twitter... for defamation. Then, once he was banned, he (in typical grifter fashion) immediately went into fundraising mode even though the extraordinarily wealthy heir of a frozen food fortune promised to fund such a lawsuit.It's unclear whether or not your frozen TV dinners from the 1980s are now funding it, but a Berenson has now filed his long-awaited lawsuit against Twitter. Somewhat amazingly, given the multitude of bad legal theories put forth in the complaint, it doesn't include a defamation claim. Instead it has eight claims, and they start out laughable and, incredibly, only gets worse from there:

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Thanks to the ongoing onslaught of negative press involving malware merchants like Israel's NSO Group, tech companies whose devices and platforms have been used to deploy exploits targeting journalists, activists, and religious leaders are punching back. You're a human rights abuser with high-dollar spyware at your disposal? Too bad. Ask for a refund, I guess.Apple sued NSO Group for targeting iPhone users a few weeks ago. It also began notifying users who were targeted by NSO spyware, potentially nullifying further surveillance efforts by unfriendly nation-states.But before Apple got in on the anti-NSO action, Facebook sued the company for using WhatsApp to deploy malware. Both lawsuits contain some troubling implications for the CFAA -- something that could pose future problems for researchers who scrape data and security researchers who search for security flaws. The unintended consequences of this litigation have yet to be seen, but it's enough to justify holding your applause until the lawsuits have run their course.Denying state actors the fruits of their purchased spyware labor is now the name of the game, something that benefits everyone. Facebook (now Meta) has just thrown a decently-sized tech wrench into the malware works of an unknown number of entities.

"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" isn't just a quaint saying. Especially in tech or telecom policy. If you don't learn from the mistakes you made the last time you tried to tackle a complex policy issue, you're just going to repeat some or all of the process and see similar results. But it often seems as if the United States has a severe allergy to learning from history and experience, especially if it's in certain companies' best interests that we not learn from our past policy failures (see: banking, airlines, insurance, energy, health care, pharma...).Our inability to learn from past mistakes is particularly pronounced in telecom where we just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Back in 2010 the Obama FCC released a massive, heavily-hyped "National Broadband Plan." The goal of this plan was to bring broadband to everyone who needed it, driving innovation and bolstering the entirety of the internet economy. As we noted at the time, the plan wasn't likely to see much success because it failed to identify and target the real cause of U.S. broadband dysfunction: limited broadband competition (monopolies), and the state and federal corruption that protects monopolies.Eleven years later, as we gear up for yet another massive broadband investment and plan, few folks in telecom policy have bothered to look backward to help us look forward. Except perhaps Christopher Terry, Assistant Professor of Media Law and Ethics at the University of Minnesota. He's made a bit of a habit of popping up to remind policymakers that their massive 2010 broadband "fix" wasn't much of one. And he often doesn't get the attention he deserves:

It's widely known that artists of all kinds often get a raw deal from the contracts they sign. But this kind of legal unfairness is not the only danger they face: copyright can also be turned against creators in other, illegal ways. For example, according to a report on MarketWatch:

NSO Group spent years supplying some of the world's most untrustworthy governments with powerful spyware capable of completely compromising targeted devices. It managed to weather a few years of reports tying its malware to surveillance of journalists and activists, but all hell broke loose earlier this year, resulting in a steady stream of reports linking its tools to surveillance of government officials, journalists, dissidents, government critics, religious leaders, and, in one incredible case, the ex-wife of the king of Dubai.It couldn't have come at a worse time for NSO. It has racked up an impressive amount of debt, something it likely assumed it would be able to manage as it continued to grow its market. That growth has stalled but the payments must still be made. NSO was downgraded by ratings firm Moodys, which warned that NSO was in danger of defaulting on its debts.That, combined with Israel drastically reducing NSO's customer base and the blacklisting by the US Commerce Department, has resulted in the company considering shutting down its offensive spyware division (the one responsible for developing Pegasus) and putting its remaining assets up for sale.It might not be that easy to divest, nor find a way back to solvency. Bloomberg reports that one of NSO's debt managers has decided it's no longer interested in providing these services to this particularly toxic asset.

If you've spent any meaningful time trying to build a "smart home" you've probably run face first into no shortage of problems. Gear is expensive, frequently complicated, and more often than not different devices don't play well together. It's a sector filled with various walled gardens by gatekeepers looking to lock you into one ecosystem, placing the onus on consumers to figure out which devices work with other devices and ecosystems, forcing the end user to spend countless calories trying to fix interoperability issues when they inevitably arrive.The resulting mess has slowed adoption by those who (quite understandably) find dumb home tech (ordinary door locks, for example) to be the smarter option.While various standards have tried to unify the space, they've not been particularly successful. In part because the central control of all these devices has been fractured across different standards and technologies (Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth) all jostling for primary control despite none of them working particularly well. Enter Matter, a new open-sourced connectivity standard created by over 200 companies that's attempting to bring some sanity to the space.Matter is an emerging communication protocol leaning on numerous existing technologies -- Thread, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ethernet -- with the goal of letting all of your smart home devices communicate with each other locally, without the need for a controlling gateway and hub. The Verge has a great breakdown on how the standard hopes to accomplish this (namely by being IP-based and integrating with existing technologies):

Let me be clear upfront: I'm a huge fan and supporter of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. After all, just last week, that organization stepped up to defend my rights after Representative Thomas Massie decided to trample on them. The Knight Institute was also the publisher for my Protocols, Not Platforms paper, and their guidance and editorial support with that paper were tremendously helpful. I've been involved in a few other projects with them as well, and have found every one of them worthwhile.But, I have to admit that I'm perplexed by an argument the Institute has been putting forth, including in an amicus brief regarding Florida's unconstitutional social media law, and more recently in the pages of the NY Times, arguing that while the laws in both Florida and Texas are clearly unconstitutional, that the 1st Amendment arguments by the internet company trade groups go too far, and would create wider problems for the internet.I think the argument is incorrect -- and it seems somewhat odd for a "First Amendment Institute" to be arguing that the 1st Amendment does not, in fact, protect editorial discretion. There is, of course, some more nuance to the argument, but the NY Times piece summarizes the argument here:

A case involving the first criminal suspect to be notified by the DOJ that evidence against him was derived from Section 702 surveillance has just reached an end. The Tenth Circuit Appeals Court has decided there's nothing wrong with the government's FISA-enabled warrantless surveillance programs. It also says the word "speedy" can be redefined at will by the government's national security concerns, changing the definition to "however long it takes."The ACLU, which helped represent the US resident whose communications were collected and intercepted with FISA court orders, summarizes the outcome of this decision:

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Last month we wrote about adults completely freaking out about supposed viral "TikTok challenges" to do violence in schools. We highlighted a truly excellent Reply All podcast episode and a thorough debunking at Curbed, both of which showed that while there may be some kids doing some stupid stuff on TikTok (because kids and because TikTok) there's no evidence that any of the really bad stuff actually happened, and what little stuff did happen didn't appear to actually go viral. What did go viral were adults -- school cops ("School Resource Officers") and administrators -- spreading weakly sourced claims about such challenges.And it appears we're going through that all over again. A bunch of schools around the country are closed today or on "heightened alert" due to ambiguous claims of a "TikTok challenge" to shoot up schools. And, obviously, coming so soon after another very tragic school shooting (which was not inspired by any TikTok challenge) you can completely understand why administrators, teachers, and parents alike are at least concerned. But... let's put things in a bit of perspective here. Because with a huge percentage of schools around the country sending home "warning" notes, and the local news blasting stories about this, I'm curious which went more viral? The TikTok "challenge" video that not a single one of these articles has identified or shown or even described? Or all of the many news stories about it?

Very worried about the possible restoration of net neutrality at the Biden FCC, the telecom sector has taken to using telecom industry-friendly news outlets to parrot things you may be surprised to learn aren't actually true.This week a coalition of infotainment outlets, including Fox News, The Hill, Reason, and the Washington Examiner all pushed stories with the same underlying narrative: four years ago net neutrality was repealed and the internet didn't explode, therefore repealing net neutrality must not have mattered. The narrative also bumbled around Twitter thanks to former Ajit Pai assistant Nathan Leamer, who now works for Targeted Victory, a DC internet comms and policy shop whose members have (surprise) telecoms like AT&T as a client.All of the coordinated stories (likely requested by AT&T and/or Comcast, then funneled through their K Street policy shops to friendly news outlets) sent some variation of the same message. Because the internet didn't grind to an absolute halt, gutting net neutrality just didn't matter:

Regular readers here need only hear the name Malibu Media to get their eyes rolling. This copyright troll that emerged from pornography producer X-Art has made quite a name for itself by attempting to shake down hundreds of accused copyright infringers, often using all kinds of shady tactics. Expert witnesses that nobody is quite sure even exist, failing to serve defendants, attempts to quickly dismiss cases against those who are willing to fight back: it all paints the picture of a shady operation looking to use shady tactics in order to collect shady infringement settlements. All, mind you, in the name of law and order in the realm of copyright law.Except, as with most shady operations predicated on the law like this, the hypocrisy from Malibu Media is quite stunning. For example, Malibu Media accused defendant "W.M." of infringement in court, only to have the defendant file a counterclaim demanding any actual evidence the company had of their infringement. No evidence was produced, leading the court to decide in favor of "W.M." and to issue an order for Malibu Media to pay him/her nearly $50,000. In the least surprising news ever, Malibu Media didn't pay that amount as ordered.

Customs and Border Protection continues to protect our borders against… stuff. Much like the TSA struggles to catch any terrorists (or, indeed, any items actual terrorists might use) but still issues press releases crowing about the agency's ability to identify and seize novelty items and the occasional gun someone decided not to check, the CBP is more than happy to point out how a system that relies on millions of facial images collected at ports of entry every so often stops someone from entering the country.As of the end of 2020, CBP's biometric systems installed all over the country had gathered 50 million facial images. This was all done in service of identifying fewer than 300 "imposters." CBP claimed this ratio was a sign of its effectiveness -- that being able to identify 292 imposters who were previously denied entry to the United States was acceptable ROI for millions of dollars of biometric collection/comparison equipment and new impositions on people who cross the borders hundreds of times a year for legitimate reasons.2021 is wrapping up and we haven't heard much about the CBP's imposter identification program. Until now. If the goal is national security, this release by the CBP isn't any more reassuring than the previous report of ~300 imposters caught at borders -- none of which appear to have been terrorists or members of dangerous criminal cartels. The former group appears to have been mostly composed of people who've already been rejected once at the border for whatever reason.This latter group of one was rejected for a more timely(?) reason: a lack of proper antibodies.

While this may feel like Washington DC insider baseball, it's fairly notable that the "big" internet trade/lobbying group, the Internet Association has announced it's shutting down (Emily Birnbaum at Politico had the scoop the night before the official announcement). There will likely be a bunch of post mortems and discussions about this happening just as the big internet companies (who came together to set up IA in the first place) are under such regulatory threats. But, to me, this is good riddance. It was an organization that more often than not made things worse for the internet, rather than better. And that's too bad, because it had a real chance to do the opposite. This is not to say there weren't good people who worked there -- there absolutely were. But as an organization, it missed a ton of opportunities to do the right thing.The Internet Association was formed in 2012, soon after the SOPA fight. I was asked to meet with some of the folks putting it together at the beginning, and was a bit confused as to what purpose it would serve. There are, already, a few trade groups that represents internet companies, and I wasn't entirely clear on the need for a new one. The story I heard (more or less) was that the "big" trade groups -- including the RIAA, (then) MPAA, NTIA, NCTA had all "professionalized" the trade group space, and that they were seen as much more official and powerful than the more scrappy trade groups representing the internet companies -- like CCIA. While there was also CTA (at that time, still known as CEA), which was bigger and "professional," it was seen as having too broad a coverage, representing not just the internet (on which it actually does a great job), but the wider technology/electronics industry.However, what struck me at the time of its founding, and in various meetings I had with people at the Internet Association over the years was that they seemed to have no fundamental principles behind their lobbying and advocacy. It seemed to be entirely a political organization. Obviously, any lobbying/trade group is -- perhaps by definition -- a political organization, which is often responsible for figuring out which ways the wind blows on certain regulations. But, still, the more successful trade groups always seem to have some core, fundamental principles that they fight for (even if those core fundamental principles are sometimes silly and misguided -- see: RIAA, MPAA, etc.). And that's what makes their advocacy more powerful. The Internet Association never seemed to really stand for anything.This all came to a head, most notably, in the Internet Association's about face on FOSTA. As you may recall, there was a pretty unified front against FOSTA from the entire internet, and then suddenly -- almost completely out of the blue -- the Internet Association endorsed it. As I wrote in a big post mortem about how FOSTA became law, much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the Internet Association. It is true that Facebook and Netflix (two giant members at the time, though Netflix later left) decided that FOSTA wasn't a fight they were interested in. This pissed off smaller members of IA tremendously. Days after the announcement, I spoke to someone at a smaller (but still quite successful) internet company, who spent the better part of an hour venting angrily about how the Internet Association screwed them over, and that many other smaller members felt similarly.I later met with two different executives at IA who both tried to defend the decision as "if we didn't do this, something worse was coming," but no one else seems to believe that (and Congressional staffers told me that wasn't true -- and that they had actually been very close on something that would have been much better). It was, yet again, a political move, rather than a principled one. And, after that, the Internet Association just couldn't be trusted any more.And as if to just put a huge exclamation point on the idea that the Internet Association was political rather than principled, it pulled this bit of nonsense:

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »It's that time of the year again! Four years ago, the US finally started adding older works back into the public domain after a decades-long period of time in which those cultural works were kept from the public (under dubious legal theories). It still remains somewhat ridiculous that we're waiting 95 years for works to enter the public domain, but at least some things are coming into the public domain! For the past four years we've been celebrating newly public domain works each year by hosting a public domain game jam -- and this year, it's Gaming Like It's 1926!.There are plenty of interesting works to draw on, including:

RIP NSO Group. Cause of death: investigative reporting.It's probably too early to celebrate the demise of Israel's most infamous export, but it's looking like NSO is running out of options. The Israeli government recently (and drastically) reduced the number of approved governments NSO could sell its powerful Pegasus malware to, trimming down the permitted list from 102 countries to 37. That followed blacklisting by the US Commerce Department, which means American tech companies aren't permitted to sell exploits, hardware, or devices to NSO without securing a waiver they're unlikely to receive.That followed weeks of revelations about how NSO customers were using its Pegasus spyware. According to multiple reports, governments and the occasional king were using NSO tools to target journalists, dissidents, government critics, religious leaders, US State Department employees, an ex-wife, an ex-wife's lawyer, and government officials.I guess when it's no longer feasible to sell spyware to authoritarians and human rights violators, the only option is to default on your debts and shut down your most toxic product.

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Canada, despite being our friendly neighbor to the north, has been known to have some not great laws regarding speech. Over the years, we've covered a few too many distressing lawsuits that attack speech, including by going after intermediaries rather than the speakers themselves. While sometimes (but not always), Canadian courts eventually get to the right decision, it's often many years later, and after a whole lot of censorial nonsense.It's happening yet again. A Canadian businessman, Frank Giustra, is mad at Twitter. He's really mad at some idiots on Twitter who claimed he was somehow tied into Pizzagate because he's done some philanthropic work with the Clinton Foundation, but it's turned into a lawsuit against Twitter itself -- because silly people continually want to go after the intermediary, rather than the speaker. Obviously, in the US, any such case would be dead in the water, because common sense, the 1st Amendment, and Section 230 would all protect Twitter. Unfortunately, Canadian courts have none of those three to rely on. So, back in 2019, Giustra sued Twitter in Canada, and not the silly people who may have actually defamed him. Because why go after the actual speakers, when you can go after the tools they use?Twitter had argued that Canada has no jurisdiction over the case, and it should be filed in California (where it would be tossed out immediately). Unfortunately, earlier this year, a court sided with Giustra over Twitter and now the appeals court has now ruled that Giustra's lawsuit against Twitter can move forward, upholding the original decision. The full ruling is difficult to read without repeatedly wanting to scream about how dumb it is, but that's what happens when you have no real intermediary liability protections, and people want to go after websites instead of actual speakers.What happened in this case was that a bunch of stupid, ignorant people said ridiculously stupid stuff about Giustra online as part of the Pizzagate nonsense, a precursor to today's metastasized Q-anon conspiracy theory. Giustra was (understandably!) upset about this and alerted Twitter about how people were spewing nonsense about him. Twitter then actually took down the vast majority of the tweets in question, and made most of the rest unviewable in Canada. But then Giustra, who lives in both California and Canada decided to engage in some libel tourism, seeking out the friendliest jurisdiction to go after Twitter: and that's Canada. As the ruling itself notes:

As we've noted, the recent infrastructure bill will deliver a record $65 billion to be spent on improving lagging U.S. broadband access. Roughly $42 billion will be used specifically to expand broadband coverage, mostly via state grants doled out by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). By any measure this is a good thing, and the investment should result in significant improvements in patchy, expensive U.S. broadband access.The problem, as the Washington Post discusses this week, is the U.S. still can't seem to measure the scope of the problem it's trying to fix. U.S. broadband maps have been notoriously terrible for decades, and the FCC has deemed a census block "served" with broadband if an ISP claims that just one home in that census block can receive coverage. The result: an inaccurate and rosy picture of both broadband availability and competition, something that has long served entrenched telecom monopolies invested in maintaining that profitable status quo.After decades of this, it only began to change in just the last few years, thanks to state lawmakers eager to grab their slice of the subsidy pie. That resulted in the Broadband Data Act, which directed the FCC to not only fix its flawed methodology, but funded the agency so it can do more to hold ISPs accountable for false coverage claims, and utilize a more extensive array of crowdsourced data in determining which areas do or don't have service.The problem: most of those fixes are still several years away, and there are tens of billions of dollars that need to be spent now as part of a once in a lifetime opportunity to improve U.S. broadband. Not just the $42 billion from the infrastructure bill, but tens of billions more in subsidies that arrived as part of COVID relief and other efforts. As the Washington Post notes, it's hard to fix a problem you haven't measured, which has resulted in many states taking matters into their own hands:

There are two ways to go about using the DMCA as a content provider in order to keep copyright infringement at bay: the right and good way, or the bad and lazy way. The right and good way is to use DMCA takedown requests sparingly, to be very targeted in their use, and to do some minor legwork to ensure that the target is in fact an infringing actor. The wrong way is how most large companies go about it instead, which is to go on a DMCA blitz on multiple targets all at once, often timed around some big event or product release, and in a way that nearly always results in at least some collateral damage. These here Techdirt pages are littered with examples of the latter.And now we can add one more such example to the list, where EU football league UEFA went on a DMCA blitz targeting pirate IPTV providers, only to end up also delisting Mega.tv from Google, despite it being a very legit traditional television channel.

Summary: Nintendo has long striven to be the most family-friendly of game consoles. Its user base tends to skew younger and its attempts to ensure its offerings are welcoming and non-offensive have produced a long string of moderation decisions that have mostly, to this point, only affected game content. Many of these changes were made to make games less offensive to users outside of Nintendo’s native Japan.Nintendo’s most infamous content moderation involved a port of the fighting game Mortal Kombat. While other Sega (Nintendo’s main rival at that point) console owners were treated to the original red blood found in the arcades, Nintendo users had to make do with a gray colored “sweat” — a moderation move that greatly cemented Nintendo’s reputation as a console for kids.Nintendo still has final say on content that can be included in its self-produced products, leading to contributors finding their additions have been stripped out of games if Nintendo’s moderators feel they are possibly offensive. While Nintendo has backed off from demanding too many alterations from third-party game developers, it still wields a heavy hand when it comes to keeping its own titles clean and family-friendly.With the shift to online gaming, came new moderation challenges for Nintendo to address. Multiple players interacting in shared spaces controlled by the company produced some friction between what players wanted to do and what the company would allow. The first challenges arrived nearly a decade ago with the Wii, which featured online spaces where players could interact with each other using text or voice messages. This was all handled by moderators who apparently reviewed content three times before allowing it to arrive at its destination, something that could result in an “acceptable” thirty minute delay between the message’s sending and its arrival.Thirty minutes is no longer an acceptable delay, considering the instantaneous communications allowed by other consoles. And there are more players online than ever, thanks to popular titles like Animal Crossing, a game with social aspects that are a large part of its appeal.While it’s expected Nintendo would shut down offensive and sexual language, given its perception of the desire of its target market, the company’s desire to steer users clear of controversial subjects extended to a worldwide pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.Here’s what gaming site Polygon discovered after Nintendo issued a patch for Animal Crossing in September 2020:

China's efforts to subdue the turkic-speaking Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region will be familiar to Techdirt readers. International awareness is increasing, too, not least thanks to the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics that the US and other countries have announced. That presents an interesting challenge to the Chinese authorities: how to counter the growing evidence of pervasive surveillance and large-scale arrests of the Uyghurs. Using official outlets like China's Global Times is one way, but its articles are easily dismissed as crude propaganda. Much more interesting is the approach described by the New York Times, which looks at how China is helping Western YouTubers to report on the country:

We keep trying to highlight the pitfalls and dangers of attacking the problems seen on social media as if Section 230 is the cause of them, rather than the mirror highlighting societal problems that other policies have failed to fix or have exacerbated. We already have one strong example of how attacking 230 only makes societal problems worse with FOSTA, which has put sex workers' lives at risk, made it much harder for law enforcement to track down sex traffickers, and has done absolutely none of the things the backers of the law promised in terms of solving societal problems.Now, other people representing the interests of more marginalized groups are beginning to speak out and warn about similar pitfalls. Ryan Hampton, a recovery advocate, who has written extensively on opioid addiction and recovery, has a very thoughtful opinion piece over at The Hill noting how Section 230 reform will be a disaster for harm prevention and recovery efforts. While I disagree when he refers to Section 230 as "obscure," he's correct that chipping away at it will cause tremendous harm to his efforts to help those in recovery and those seeking to deal with drug addiction.

For a few years now, information has come to light showing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been engaged in the sort of activity that's gotten other federal law enforcement agencies in trouble in the past: the targeting of journalists.To be clear, no law enforcement agency -- federal or otherwise -- should target a journalist unless the journalist is suspected of criminal activity. Journalists' sources may be suspected of criminal activity from time to time, but that does not justify the direct targeting of journalists to identify their sources. The First Amendment -- as interpreted in multiple court decisions -- protects journalists and their sources. Federal agencies should know better and yet they far too frequently ignore these protections to hunt down leakers and whistleblowers.The CBP has been at this for a while now. In 2019, leaked documents showed CBP had created a watchlist related to the immigrant caravan approaching the US border -- one that contained plenty of journalists, activists, and immigration lawyers. Shortly thereafter, it became apparent the rights-violating watchlisting was a multinational effort, with the Mexican government pitching in to keep an eye on these individuals on its side of the border.An DHS Inspector General's investigation followed. It found plenty of targeting of journalists but decided that since the CBP never engaged in retaliatory activities against press members, there was no wrongdoing... for the most part. No harm, even if there was clearly a foul.Another Inspector General's report -- one that hasn't been publicly released in unredacted form -- shows even more CBP targeting of journalists, something the agency apparently considered to be a normal part of its day-to-day counterterrorist operations.

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We'd already noted that the FAA had been pushing to impose limits on 5G deployments in certain bands due to safety concerns. The problem: the FCC, the agency with the expertise in spectrum interference, has repeatedly stated those concerns are unfounded based on the FCC's own research. Worse, the FAA has proven a bit intractable in providing the FCC with data proving their claims of harm. The FAA claims that deploying 5G in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz "C-Band" will cause interference with certain radio altimeters. But the FCC has shown that more than 40 countries have deployed 5G in this band with no evidence of harm.That didn't seem to sway the FAA, which prodded both AT&T and Verizon to pause deployment in the C-band. The FAA's refusal to listen to the FCC, or be transparent about sharing any data to support its claims, has pissed off the FCC. To the point where a bipartisan coalition of six former agency commissioners and bosses wrote a joint letter politely tut-scolding the agency for being bull-headed:

We're going to keep repeating this until it becomes common knowledge: trademark law is designed to keep the public from being confused as to the source of a good or service, not as some mechanism for businesses to lock up language in a competitive marketplace. In other words, if there is no risk of customer confusion, trademark laws very rarely come into play in terms of disputes or infringement.Which brings us to Papa's Burgers in Texas and its announcement that it will be changing its name and branding.So, a company that has existed as Papa's Burgers for 8 years is changing its name due to a C&D notice. So what's going on here? Well, the company decided to finally get around to trademarking its name but was advised by its counsel that there was another large restaurant group that had a similar name. That company was Pappas Restaurants, which operates a wide swath of venues, such as Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, Pappas Seafood House, and, yes, Pappas Burger.Due to the that input from counsel, Papa's Burgers owner Robert Walker sent a letter to Pappas Restaurants explaining his respect for their business and his intention to trademark his business name. Kind of a nice thing to do. His reward for that was receiving the C&D notice.

While it's certainly possible to sometimes do biometrics well, a long line of companies frequently... don't. Voice print authentication is particularly shaky, especially given the rise of inexpensive voice deepfake technology. But, much like the continued use of text-message two-factor authentication (which is increasingly shown to not be secure), it apparently doesn't matter to a long list of companies.Banks and telecom giants alike have started embracing voice authentication tech at significant scale despite the added threat to user privacy and security. And they're increasingly collecting user "voice print" data without any way to opt out:

Might a free PACER finally be on the horizon? For years, activists and a handful of Congressional reps have attempted to strip the fees from PACER, the federal court system's antiquated database that provides online access to court documents.The antiquation doesn't begin with the fees. The system is outdated and hasn't improved much over the years, despite the fact that PACER regularly turns a profit. PACER looks and performs like a holdover from the 1990s. The UI is its own barrier to entry. The search function barely functions, vacillating between drawing a blank or producing several pages of irrelevant search results.And that's where the fees kick in. PACER operates like a library copy machine, charging users $0.10/page for everything. Search results and dockets are treated like they're being printed out at the central PACER desk. Useless search results are $0.10/page. So are dockets, which may or may not contain the documents. These fees add up before users even locate the documents they're looking for. Those documents are also $0.10/page to download in PDF form, putting price on ones, zeroes, and the fractions of cents needed to generate, store, and transmit the documents.The US Courts System has blown PACER profit on in-court niceties like new TV screens and furniture. Almost none of the millions PACER generates has gone towards improving PACER itself or lowering access fees. The federal court system has argued it will cost billions to overhaul PACER and provide free access to users.But according to the Congressional Budget Office investigation and former government technologists, the actual outlay for an improved, free PACER is much less. The CBO says free access would only cost about $1 million a year. Technologists estimate the overhaul would only cost $10-20 million and require less than $5 million a year to maintain.These facts helped push a bill mandating free access to PACER through Congress late last year. But that's only half the battle. And it's the far easier half of the battle. The Senate still needs to create and pass its own version, meld that with the House of Representatives offering, and drop a cohesive bill on the President's desk.Well, we're one step closer to that happening, as Nate Raymond reports for Reuters.

Back in high school, I read Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea's Illuminatus! Trilogy back-to-back with Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and ended up being amused and fascinated at the intersection of conspiracy theories and pranksters. If you're unaware, both books satirize the nature of conspiracy theories. Soon after I picked up a copy of Re/Search's Pranks! book, which, to this day, is on my book shelf between a copy of the Mondo 2000 book and The Book of the SubGenius (with a copy of the tiny Loompanics yellow version of Principia Discordia sitting next to them). Soon after reading those, I got to college, and thanks to the wonders of the internet (and Usenet in particular) discovered a group of somewhat merry internet pranksters who dubbed themselves "The Flat Earth Society" -- as a purely ironic group who enjoyed the mixture of absurdity, satire, pranking, with an appreciation for the occasional conspiracy theory worth mocking (I'm still in touch with some people from that group decades later, again, thanks to the internet).That's all preamble to note that I not only recognize, but really appreciate what's going on with a group of Gen Z pranksters, who cooked up a rather brilliant satirical conspiracy theory, better known as "Birds Aren't Real," which has been making the rounds for a while now, and only was officially "exposed" as a prank in a thoroughly delightful NY Times article last week.

MyPillow CEO/election fraud conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell apparently understands defamation law about as well as he understands cybersecurity, social media, and election machine operation. Lindell will be learning more about defamation law as he defends himself against voting machine manufacturer Dominion which has sued him (and a bunch of other Trumpists) over his alleged defamation.But we'll see if he learns anything from this other lawsuit -- one he filed after the Daily Mail published an article claiming he pursued a relationship with 30 Rock actress Jane Krakowski. Now, most people would not feel insulted after being romantically linked to an actress, but this apparently bothered Lindell so much he decided to sue over it.There's no defamation there says the New York federal court handling Lindell's complaint. The ruling is short, punchy, and instructive, although the court is dealing with a student especially resistant to learning lessons from stupid mistakes. (via Courthouse News Service).The decision [PDF] says nothing in the Daily Mail's article, which alleged Lindell and Krakowski had a nine-month relationship during which Lindell sent her gifts like bottles of champagne, even approaches defamation, no matter how much Lindell would like to construe it otherwise.Lindell immediately informed the Daily Mail the romance never happened. So did Krakowski. Both denials were included in the article. Even if the article was false, it wasn't defamatory and it contained denials that would allow readers to draw their own conclusions about the Mail's claims, which were allegedly supplied by friends of the actress.But Lindell's main problem isn't his alleged relationship with the sitcom star. No, he's far more bothered by the implication that he -- a clean and sober recovering drug user and alcoholic -- would deign to buy alcohol for other people, even as a gift.

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In the past we've pointed out how western politicians' attacks on social media are only serving to play into the hands of authoritarians around the globe, justifying their crackdowns on free speech and critics. And that doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon. The latest is Turkey's President repeating the exact lines that US/EU politicians have been using to slam social media as "dangerous to democracy" in order to justify even more draconian crackdowns on speech and the press in his country.We've written about Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for years -- mostly covering his regular attacks on free expression. Erdogan has sued thousands of people for "insulting" him online. Even more serious is his regular practice of jailing journalists by falsely calling them terrorists. He's also lead aggressive campaigns to ban any website that portrays him in an unflattering light.So, you'd think that maybe US/EU politicians might recognize the problems of someone like Erdogan using their own words to further push his agenda. This weekend, Erdogan announced that social media is a "threat to democracy" and pushed for new laws that would criminalized "fake news" being spread on social media.

Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services. Sometimes (like in Chicago) this has involved expanding an existing amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar entertainment) to online streaming. Other times this has involved trying to leverage existing cable TV laws or ordinances to try extract their pound of flesh from Netflix. In both, it involves taking rules written for the physical world, and applying them to the internet. Often haphazardly.That's what's happening in Austin, where the city just joined a growing Texas lawsuit trying to force Netflix to pay the same taxes as local cable providers. Texas law allows cable and video providers to deliver cable TV via publicly-owned utility poles on public land in exchange for remitting 5% of gross revenue to the municipality. So the argument has generally been because Netflix bits technically travel over those same lines, they should also be responsible for paying that tax:

There's a constitutional right not to be framed by cops for a crime you didn't commit. This shouldn't even need to be argued in court once, much less twice. But "framed by cops" is exactly what happened to James Dennis, who spent 25 years in prison after being falsely accused of murdering a high school student back in 1991.After having his wrongful conviction vacated in 2013 (and this decision affirmed by the Third Circuit Appeals Court in 2016), Dennis sued the cops that took 25 years of his life away by hiding exculpatory evidence and creating a narrative that put him behind bars.Back to the Third Circuit goes Dennis again, with the Appeals Court handling an attempt by two detectives to escape Dennis' lawsuit [PDF]. The district court stripped immunity from the detectives who built the case against Dennis. The detectives appealed but they're not going to be able to walk away from this one.The allegations are severe. According to Dennis, detectives Frank Jastrzembski and Manuel Santiago hid evidence that would have cleared Dennis and worked together to railroad him into a murder conviction. Buckle up, there's a lot to take in here.

Back in April of 2020, which feels roughly like a damned lifetime ago, we discussed a much-publicized report that indicated explosive growth in traffic to pirate torrent and streaming sites for movies, music, television, and video games. Much hand-wringing ensued, which was largely silly. All kinds of media consumption traffic rose during the initial lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic and it only made sense that piracy traffic would follow suit, particularly when you consider the broader economic impact of the pandemic. This wasn't some new paradigm shift in the piracy landscape; it was literally one of the most predictable things that could have happened.But now, almost two years later, where are we at? Well, per a recent study by the EU Intellectual Property Office, piracy traffic hasn't just fallen, it's fallen sharply.

Last month, we noted that the DOJ had announced it was going to intervene in Donald Trump's bombastically silly lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for suspending his account for violating the websites' terms of service. Those lawsuits have not been going well. While Trump filed them in his home court in Florida, they've all been transferred to California. His decision to use the case to claim Section 230 is unconstitutional only served to wake up the Justice Department, and have them step in to respond to that particular point.The DOJ has now filed its briefs -- we'll just share the one in the Twitter case since they're all basically the same -- to say (1) it's easy to dismiss this case without bothering to explore the constitutionality of 230, but if it feels otherwise (2) it's blatantly obvious that 230 is constitutional.On point one:

Julian Assange and Wikileaks did a lot over the past few years to destroy the goodwill they'd managed to accumulate prior to that by being a fearless publisher of leaked documents. At times, Assange has acted hypocritically and there's some evidence he worked with Russian operatives to gather information in an attempt to damage the Democratic Party's 2016 election hopes.That being said, the on-again, off-again attempt to prosecute Assange over alleged Espionage Act violations threatens journalism as a whole. The DOJ occasionally appeared to recognize this, hence its stop-start prosecution effort. Attempts were made to get President Biden to drop the case, but there appears to be no turning back now. The US government has won its appeal of the UK court's decision to refuse extradition.Here's a very brief summary of the UK court's decision [PDF]:

We'd already noted how telecom and media giants eager to keep their spoils from the Trump era have been waging a not so subtle smear campaign on Biden FCC Commissioner nomination Gigi Sohn, using loyal GOP lawmakers as marionettes. Sohn is broadly popular across both sides of the aisle, but she's also a fairly fierce advocate of functional regulatory oversight, transparency, and market competition. So companies like AT&T and News Corporation have been seeding a lot of gibberish in DC and in select press outlets about how she's a "radical" who wants to "censor conservatives" and hurt puppies.Last week the Fraternal Order of Police joined the fray with a facts-optional missive opposing Sohn's nomination, claiming it creates "serious public safety considerations." Their problem? Sohn supports (gasp!) encryption:

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Understanding the "bipartisan" approach to internet regulations over the last couple of years really boils down to "both parties want to control the internet" and twist it to their own advantage. Almost everything you hear about "harms" from the internet are disingenuous nonsense from grandstanding politicians. That's not to say there aren't real problems with things on the internet or how it's structured -- but there is almost no realistic exploration of those issues by those in various legislatures. It's all about grabbing control over the internet. Two recent articles highlight pretty clearly how both Republicans and Democrats are clearly salivating to control speech online for their own benefit -- and not for the actual good of society or the internet.First up, we have The Spectator. To be honest, this publication has been a garbage publication recently, pushing out all sorts of nonsense, but apparently there are still a few people there who can publish something good. Taylor Millard has written a short and to the point article noting, accurately, that so much of the bipartisan attacks on the internet lately are really about one thing: how both parties want to control your speech online. We've discussed how the policy plans of Republicans and Democrats often feel at odds, with Republicans complaining about too much moderation, and Democrats complaining about too little, but the truth is slightly more nuanced, and both are really just looking to have control over speech online -- control that is simply not allowed under the 1st Amendment.The Democrats' attacks on free speech are pretty straightforward:

Another one of ICE's (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) data spigots has been shut off. Don't cry too many tears for poor old ICE. It still has plenty of options. It's still hoovering up location data from app developers who either don't know or don't care that this data is buyable through data brokers. It also still has plenty of privileges, thanks to laws and judicial decisions that say most constitutional rights are null and void within 100 miles of our nation's ports of entry (borders, coasts, and -- making this far more concerning -- any domestic airport offering international flights).Plenty of data can still be had (and plenty of brokers willing to sell it), but ICE has just lost access to one source of data it uses to track down immigrants: utility bill information gathered, packaged, and sold to government agencies by third parties like Equifax and Reuters.Equifax gathers this information ostensibly to assess the creditworthiness of United States residents. (It also leaks this information on occasion.) Thomson Reuters uses the same information (called "utility header data") in its CLEAR database, which contains "billions of data points" and "leverages cutting-edge public records technology." Its potent combination of bulk data and profit-seeking is sold to whoever wants access, which includes US law enforcement agencies.ICE no longer has access to this data through CLEAR. At least the "utility header data" part of it. So have the nation's law enforcement agencies. Following pressure from Senator Ron Wyden, utility companies will no longer allow this data to be resold by Equifax to private entities like Reuters. (Possible paywall ahead. Alternate link.)

This week, three out of our four winners come from our post about Rep. Thomas Massie skipping past the First Amendment and blocking people for their responses to his gun-laden tweet celebrating the Second Amendment with insulting timing. In first place on the insightful side, it's Rocky responding to the claim from another commenter that Usenet groups don't moderate posts like social media platforms, and it works out fine:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, we got a good example of how "just metadata" could still be dangerous, the FBI was smacked down for using outdated boilerplate on a National Security Letter, and a bunch of online platforms made a terrible agreement to block "terrorist content". A shortsighted newspaper association was asking Trump to whittle down fair use, congress was beginning to consider a new round of terrible copyright reform, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn said ISPs have an "obligation" to block "fake news". We also took a look at all the terrible trade deals floating around, and asked if there's a better way to do them.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, we learned more about how much big media firms were donating to the sponsors of SOPA and PIPA, while the bills were leading to internal fights at various organizations: Kaspersky left the BSA over its initial support of SOPA, and the American Bar Association was warring with itself over its position. We wrote about other realms of collateral damage from the bills like people with disabilities and human rights groups, and about how the arguments from supporters made no sense. A more reasonable (though not perfect) alternative proposal was, as expected, totally hated by the SOPA brigade and continued trying desperately to buy "grassroots" support. And we were very much not shocked when two congressional staffers who helped write SOPA and PIPA became entertainment industry lobbyists.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, a judge ruled that it was legal for the FBI to spy on people using the microphones in their phones. Countries around the world began reacting to YouTube, with Japan's entertainment industry demanding an end to unauthorized uploads while Iran decided to just block the entire site outright. Tracfone was freaking out about the DMCA anti-circumvention exception for unlocking mobile phones even though it was hardly a big deal. Meanwhile, in the UK, an impressively balanced report on intellectual property sparked the expected backlash, with a group of 4,000 musicians signing a petition calling for "fair play" that didn't sound too fair — and then it turned out that the list of signatures included several from dead musicians.

We had just been talking about how Mark Fitzpatrick, a YouTube personality who focuses on doing reviews and let's draws for anime properties, had been targeted by Toei Animation for the takedown of over a 150 of his videos over copyright claims. Toei is the animation house for several popular animes, including the Dragon Ball series. While Fitzpatrick's videos fall squarely in the category of fair use, as they are chiefly commentary and reviews that use snippets of the animes in question in order to illustrate points, because of the onerous way YouTube enforces such claims, his videos were taken down first and remain down at the time of this writing.Well, if Toei was hoping this would all fly under the radar, it most certainly is not. Fitzpatrick's own video complaining about how Toei is behaving itself has over 700k views. And now streaming icon Pewdiepie is inserting himself into all of this, squarely on on Fitzpatrick's side.