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With a new Attorney General in charge and a new President in the White House, the Department of Justice is getting back to taking care of the uncomfortable business of investigating local law enforcement agencies. This part of the DOJ's responsibilities was largely abandoned under Trump, who opened up his presidency by declaring he would "end" the "dangerous anti-police atmosphere."Trump actually made it worse. His enthusiastic support for police and police violence did nothing to discourage the sorts of actions that create "anti-police atmosphere." Concurrently, the DOJ -- under AGs Sessions and Barr -- looked the other way as law enforcement agencies engaged in activities that violated the rights of the public.The latest law enforcement agency to under the DOJ's scope is the Phoenix, Arizona police department. The Phoenix PD last made news here at Techdirt after its union offered cops access to paid service that would "scrub" social media services of their posts. This was deployed in reaction to multiple investigations opened all around the nation after transparency activist group Plainview Project was able to link bigoted and violent social media posts to current law employment officers.There are some specifics to this investigation that indicate some parts of the Phoenix PD's enforcement efforts are more problematic than others.

Summary: In late June 2021, Twitter briefly suspended the account of Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Indian government's Technology Minister because his content violated copyright. Although Prasad was given a copy of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request, he posted a short Twitter thread that claimed this moderation action was Twitter silencing him, rather than simply responding to a takedown notice targeting alleged copyright violations.According to Prasad, the removal of his tweets and brief suspension were the result of him not aligning himself with Twitter's "agenda." He claimed Twitter would "arbitrarily" do the same to others who did not "tow the line that they draw."Prasad also claimed the takedown via DMCA notice violated Indian law. Specifically, the Technology Minister claimed Twitter violated local law by failing to provide him with prior notice before locking him out of his account. The law cited was Rule 4(8) of the Information Technology Rules 2021.Prasad's pushback against Twitter's decision to suspend his account based on claims of copyright violations came after weeks of Indian government officials' public criticism of American social media companies. Shortly after this critique, the new Information Technology Rules law went into effect on May 26, 2021.The new law affects multiple US social media platforms. It requires them to remove certain content within 24 hours of notification and forces them to set up local offices in India where complaints can be handled by newly-created compliance, contact, and grievance officers. While the new law has been in the works since 2018, its passage was accelerated by Twitter's refusal to block tweets/accounts associated with the long-running "Farmer's Protest" that greeted the Indian government's passage of laws that many farmers believe do more to aid corporate farms and large agricultural concerns than the many small, independent farmers that populate the country.Earlier in June, the Indian government issued a "final warning" to Twitter, ordering it to comply with the new law or "face consequences." Twitter has since temporarily removed nearly 500 tweets associated with the Farmer's Protests. During the same time period, its offices in India were raided by Indian law enforcement after Twitter labelled a tweet from a member of India’s ruling party as "misinformation."Company Considerations:

We've covered Twitch's no good, very bad time for many months now, which should give you an indication just how bad this time has been. If you need a brief background, the major points of contention have been the Amazon-owned company having a laughably one-sided approach to DMCA takedowns of content, its complete inept method for temp-banning its own creative community over copyright claims, and its totally vague approach to banning creators over various rule-breaking when it comes to Twitch's indecipherable guidelines and the capricious manner in which it applies them.While all of it is frankly bad, the lowest hanging fruit in all of this has always been the lack of communication Twitch has offered its own creative community when it comes to bans, copyright issues, or guidelines. For instance, Twitch, at first, would just disappear content, with little or no notice to the streamer who authored it. When it has given any notice to creators, that notice has traditionally been so devoid of any details so as to be entirely useless. Which I suppose is why the recent announcement by Twitch that it will finally tell streamers who have been hit with a copyright takedown what that infringing content is... is good?

Just last week we had Prof. Genevieve Lakier on our podcast to talk about the 1st Amendment and the concept of "jawboning": government officials using informal pressure and wink-wink-nudge-nudge efforts to pressure companies into doing things that they are allowed to do as private companies, but which the government is forbidden from doing under the 1st Amendment. The key court case on this is the Bantam Books Supreme Court ruling in 1963. But there are questions about how this applies in a social media era, when you have politicians on both sides of the aisle leaning on social media companies to remove or punish speech they dislike.Last fall, we had highlighted what we thought was potentially an interesting and important case about this involving Shiva Ayyadurai. As regular readers of Techdirt know, Ayyadurai sued us years ago for our articles highlighting the lack of evidence for his claims to be the inventor of email (claims that don't stand up to much scrutiny when viewed against the historical record). That lawsuit went on for two and a half years and was incredibly draining and frustrating.You might think, then, that we'd automatically side against Ayyadurai in his latest legal fight, but as we noted, he actually raised a really important 1st Amendment issue. The case originally was about Massachusetts government officials alerting Twitter to tweets from Ayyadurai that they claimed were election misinformation. Those tweets were extraordinarily misleading, and in the lead-up to the 2020 election, you can understand why election officials were tremendously concerned about election mis- and disinformation online. And, various government agencies and social media websites had set up processes to share information regarding such misinformation and disinformation.But, most mis- and disinformation is still protected by the 1st Amendment. So there's a really interesting question about where is the line between simply alerting private companies of such content -- i.e., using the bully pulpit of government to highlight something a private actor can fix -- and an unconstitutional move by the government to silence constitutionally protected speech? This case had the potential to explore that very issue -- and it appeared that the judge saw that point. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the case went off the rails entirely.I won't go through all of the many twists and turns the case took (there were many), but a quick summary of a few of the key points. In response to a request for a temporary restraining order from reporting his account, Massachusetts agreed that it would no longer report tweets to Twitter until after the election, thus rendering the TRO request moot. As the case went on, the judge wondered why Twitter was not included as a party, if Ayyadurai was alleging state action (I actually think the judge is wrong on this -- while there are some cases where the private actors should become parties, to me the focus should always be on the government actors who allegedly threatened or pressured the private actors -- otherwise, it's a kind of victim-blaming). Ayyadurai (representing himself) then moved to add Twitter as a party.Somewhere in this process, Twitter shut down Ayyadurai's account entirely. Ayyadurai insisted that this was because of its close relationship with government officials, and that because it happened soon after he had mentioned a Massachusetts official, it was somehow evidence that they were working hand in hand with the government. Ayyadurai then tried to file various amended complaints that included RICO/conspiracy claims and a variety of other claims. He found some widely available public documents that were produced to better educate both social media companies and election officials about how to respond to election disinformation, and claimed it was proof of the conspiracy and a manual to suppress protected speech. At a hearing in May, ostensibly about adding Twitter as a defendant, the judge strongly suggested that Ayyadurai hire lawyers for the next phase of the case, and even recommended a lawyer (Howard Cooper from Todd & Weld). The judge also hinted very strongly that the RICO claims had no chance and were likely to be dismissed, but he was interested in exploring whether or not the individual Massachusetts officials who were sued were protected under qualified immunity.Soon after that, Ayyadurai notified the court that Todd & Weld would be representing him, along with... Charles Harder's law firm (Harder, of course, represented him in his case against us) -- though, he also asked that it be what's known as hybrid representation, where he would be allowed to speak on his own behalf in the court, rather than just through a lawyer (the defendants from Massachusetts strongly opposed this request). Over the following few weeks, lawyers from Todd & Weld made their official appearances before the court, though as far as I can tell, no one from Harder LLP did so (this becomes more important shortly). There was then some more, um, somewhat abnormal back-and-forth regarding Ayyadurai's proposed agenda for a scheduling conference, in which both Massachusetts and Twitter disputed Ayyadurai's characterization of their discussions.The judge eventually set out a schedule, asking Ayyadurai to file a revised complaint by July 15. On July 14, the attorneys from Todd & Weld, who had only just appeared a month earlier, filed a motion to withdraw as counsel, noting that Ayyadurai had "terminated" their representation on the 13th. Also on the 14th, lawyer Timothy Cornell (who was also Ayyadurai's lawyer in the case against us, and had asked to file an amicus brief in this case) filed an appearance on behalf of Ayyadurai... and then on the 15th (the day the filing was due!) asked for an extra six weeks, noting that he needed time to get up to speed on the case.The defendants in the case quite understandably called foul on all of this, hinting in their filings that part of the reason Ayyadurai fired his lawyers was that they had agreed to remove the claims against various defendants in their personal capacities:

The judge, who blocked the FBI from moving forward with forfeiting property from certain US Private Vaults' customers who haven't been accused of crimes, is now ordering the FBI to return money to one of the people contesting the seizures.The FBI raided US Private Vaults in March, claiming customers, if not the owners of the business themselves, were involved in a host of crimes, including drug trafficking and money laundering. It's now August and no one has been charged. The FBI, however, has millions of dollars in currency and other property in its possession and is refusing to give any of it back.The FBI's warrant specifically said agents would only search the content of safety deposit boxes to determine ownership. The contents were to be inventoried but the FBI's affidavit suggested the agents performing the raid would not be searching the contents for evidence of criminal acts.That self-imposed restriction was ignored. And the FBI was able to move forward with seizures even without bringing criminal charges because civil asset forfeiture remains a thing in this country: the taking of people's property using only the unproven assertions that they may be the result of illegal activity. This vagueness didn't sit well with Judge R. Gary Klausner, who blocked the FBI from moving forward with some forfeitures early last month.The FBI insists it is right to keep this process in motion. However, as the judge points out in his latest order [PDF], its insistence hasn't been accompanied by any plausible justifications. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

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A newly formed patent troll is looking for big money from small business websites, just for using free, off-the-shelf login verification tools.Defenders of the American Dream, LLC (DAD ), is sending out its demand letters to websites that use Google’s reCAPTCHA system, accusing them of infringing U.S. Patent No. 8,621,578. Google’s reCAPTCHA is just one form of a Captcha test, which describes a wide array of test systems that websites use to verify human users and keep out bots.DAD’s letter tells targeted companies that DAD will take an $8,500 payment, but only if “licensing terms are accepted immediately.” The threat escalates from there. If anyone dares to respond that DAD’s patent might be not infringed, or invalid, fees will rise to at least $17,000. If DAD’s patent gets subject to a legal challenge, DAD says they’ll increase their demand to at least $70,000. In the footnotes, DAD advises its targets that “not-for-profit entities are eligible for a discount.”The DAD demand letters we have reviewed are nearly identical, with the same fee structure. They mirror the one filed by the company itself (with the fee structure redacted) as part of their trademark application. This demand letter campaign is a perfect example of how the U.S. patent system fails to advance software innovation. Instead, our system enables extortionate behavior like DAD’s exploding fee structure.DAD Didn't Invent Image CaptchaDAD claims it invented a novel and patentable image-based Captcha system. But there’s ample evidence of image-based Captcha tests that predate DAD’s 2008 patent application.The term “Captcha” was coined by a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. It’s an acronym, indicating a “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Essentially, it blocks automated tools like bots from getting into websites. Such tests have been important since the earliest days of the Internet.Early Captcha tests used squiggly lines or wavy text. The same group of CMU researchers who coined “Captcha” went on to work on an image-selection version they called ESP-PIX, which they had published and made public by 2005.By 2007, Microsoft had developed its own image-categorization Captcha, which used photos from Petfinder.com, then asked users to identify cats and dogs. At the sime time, PayPal was working on new captchas that “might resemble simple image puzzles.” This was no secret—researchers from both companies spoke to the New York Times about their research, and Microsoft filed its own patent application, more than a year before DAD’s.There’s also evidence of earlier image-based Captcha tests in the patent record, like this early 2008 application from a company called Binary Monkeys. Here's an image from the Binary Monkeys Patent:And here's an image from DAD's patent:So how did DAD end up with this patent? During patent prosecution, DAD’s predecessor argued that they had a novel invention because the Binary Monkeys application asks users to select “all images” associated with the task, as opposed to selecting “one image,” as in DAD’s test. The patent examiner suggested adding yet another limitation: that the user still be granted access to the website if they got one “known” image and one “suspected” image.Unfortunately, adding trivial tweaks to existing technology, such as small details about the needed criteria for passing a Captcha test, can and often does result in a patent being granted. This was especially true back in 2008, before patent examiners should have applied guidance from the Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice v. CLS Bank decision. That’s why we have told the patent office to vigorously uphold Supreme Court guidelines, and have defended the Alice precedent in Congress.Where did DAD come from?DAD’s patent was originally filed by a Portland startup called Vidoop. In 2010, Vidoop and its patent applications were purchased by a San Diego investor who re-branded it as Confident Technologies. Confident Tech offered a “clickable, image-based CAPTCHA,” but ultimately didn’t make it as a business. In 2017 and 2018, Confident Tech sued Best Buy, Fandango Media, Live Nation, and AXS Group, claiming that the companies infringed its patent by using reCAPTCHA. Those cases all settled.In 2020, Trevor Coddington, an attorney who worked on Confident Tech’s patent applications, created Defenders of the American Dream LLC. He transferred the patents to this new entity and started sending out demand letters.They haven’t all gone to large companies, either. At least one of DAD’s targets has been a one-person online publishing company. Coddington’s letter complains about how Confident Tech failed in the marketplace and suggests that because of this, reCAPTCHA users should pay—well, him. The letter states:

We've noted more than a few times how the AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental, historical disaster. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (DC's Vertigo imprint, Mad Magazine), and basically stumbled around incompetently for several years before recently spinning off the entire mess for a song.I just got done noting how the US press' total failure to adequately outline the scope of this mess ensures that the executives, regulators, and various megamerger cheerleaders will never be held accountable for it. That, in turn, all but guarantees it will happen again. And again. And again. America's obsession with "growth for growth's sake" and megamergers is built on the inherent promise that no matter how many times a megadeal results in layoffs, chaos, and no benefits for anyone other than executives and investors, we'll simply refuse to learn anything from the experience.That requires a lot of revisionist history. So, as if on cue, AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches this week complained that AT&T didn't get enough credit for turning HBO Max into a successful streaming brand. AT&T was forced to spin off this mess because the doddering telco sucked at running a media company. But Desroches is trying to claim the recent spinoff of its media ventures occurred because AT&T didn't get enough credit for building HBO:

It won't be a massive surprise that Manchester United, the famed Premier League football club, has made it onto our pages before. As the "Yankees of European soccer", it would be shocking if the club hadn't at some point taken aggressive action in the technology and IP space. Still, there isn't a great deal of posts in there, so you would be forgiven if you thought of Man-U as generally not bad on this sort of thing.But, no, the club is perfectly capable of being protectionist, and even occasionally taking outrageous positions. For instance, we can start with the fact that Sega's Football Manager 22 will no longer include the name of the club in the game, but will shift it to something barely different after a lawsuit was filed because of... reasons.

You may have heard that conspiracy theorist and nonsense-spouting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has, not for the first time, been temporarily suspended from Twitter for passing along conspiracy theory nonsense regarding vaccines. She's unable to tweet for 7 days. I, unfortunately, can't find the tweet now, but back in July when she was similarly suspended for just 12 hours, I saw someone jokingly note that temporarily suspending someone like Greene was the equivalent of Twitter throwing her a fundraiser, since she would immediately turn around, play the victim, and get her gullible, duped followers to throw more money at her. And, no doubt the same is true with this suspension as well. She's already put out a statement and the usual "conservative" media orgs are already talking about how "Twitter can't handle the truth" or some such nonsense.And then, of course, you have people who are reasonably ticked off at Twitter "only" temporarily suspending Greene for spreading nonsense info, rather than permanently banning her.So, in the end, you have both ends of the political spectrum mad about this setup, and trying to spin it to their own advantage. However, once again, it really seems to highlight the impossible nature of content moderation at scale, especially when some of the parties are clearly acting in bad faith.Twitter has its escalation policies in place, and they're designed (reasonably!) to deal with good faith users, who might not realize they're violating the rules or spreading dangerous disinformation. In that world, an escalating penalty system makes sense. Getting suspended for a few hours or a week generally sucks for users who actually like to use the site but it's a sort of "cool off" period combined with a gentle nudge to be a better participant on the internet. But, of course, that system kind of breaks down when you have not just bad faith actors who are deliberately testing the boundaries of what they can get away with, but who actually benefit from the suspension and the press attention that comes with it.At this point, some will say "well, that's a perfect reason to just suspend such people permanently." But, alas, that comes with its own challenges. Indeed, jumping straight to a permanent suspension only proves that the company would be treating some people differently, and would be treated by people like Greene as "proof" of "anti-conservative bias" (again, this would be bad faith, but it would allow the story to have some level of confirmation). So, Twitter can't do that without providing what a bunch of people will see as confirming evidence. So Twitter follows its rules, and continues to escalate the punishment (eventually MTG will get permanently suspended, it seems only a matter of time).Looked at realistically, the fact that Twitter is following its stated escalation policies, rather than doing an outright ban should be seen as evidence that it is not "biased against conservatives," but is treating everyone the same. If you violate the company's policies about COVID vaccines, then you go through the escalation process -- whether you made a mistake in good faith or whether your a bad faith grifter. Of course, that's not how it will play out anywhere, because no one does nuance any more.Some might argue that the obvious bad faith nature of MTG's arguments mean that Twitter should just have a policy of banning bad faith grifters. And that's certainly tempting, but how do you define bad faith grifter within a policy such that a large team of content moderation professionals can apply it consistently? The problem is that you really can't. The very nature of an escalation policy is that it does, eventually, take care of most bad faith grifters. It just takes time, and allows them to violate the rules a bunch of times before getting the final send-off.

The pandemic has brought us face to face with important questions about (among many things) the roles of technology and government in our lives, and especially the intersection of the two. One interesting example that is worth exploration is California's new digital vaccine record system, and who better to discuss it with than the person who spearheaded the project: California's Chief Technology Innovation Officer Rick Klau, who joins us this week to discuss tech, government, and what happens when the two manage to work well together.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.

We've covered the Defense Department's 1033 program several times here at Techdirt. The program allows law enforcement agencies to acquire surplus military gear at low, low prices in exchange for little more than their claim to need anything from filing cabinets to grenade launches to mine-resistant armored personnel carriers (MRAPs).Thanks to the never-ending "War on Terror" and "War on Drugs," the DoD has allowed law enforcement agencies to blur the line between serving the public and invading a war zone. Officers regularly don camouflage when rolling out of armored personnel carriers, turning warrant service into a paramilitary invasion. MRAPs tend to make appearances at protests targeting police violence, giving responding officers the appearance of an occupying force, rather than the domestic peacekeepers they're supposed to be.Multiple efforts have been made to curtail the acquisition of gear clearly designed for war zones, rather than domestic policing. None of those efforts have been permanent. The distribution of war gear to cops is subject to the whims of the sitting president and very few have felt too concerned about the program's ability to widen the chasm between the public and the people who are obligated to serve them.The Huffington Post has acquired nearly 1,200 pages of 1033 program acquisition forms via public records requests. (Unfortunately, it has decided the public will get to see them whenever it gets around to publishing them, which means it has provided no access to the underlying documents at this point.) What these show is the Defense Department rubberstamping requests for military gear (such as MRAPs) by law enforcement agencies, even when the requesting agency can barely demonstrate a need for the equipment. They also show law enforcement agencies consider the public to be their enemy -- one that must be confronted with as much force as possible.

While various states are pushing unconstitutional laws to try to compel social media websites to host content they don't want to host, it appears that some state Attorneys General are seeing what kinds of questionable things they can do even without a law. Florida's law was already declared unconstitutional, but other states are still trying to pass these laws. One feature seen in a bunch of them is the ability for residents in a state to complain to the Attorney General and to ask the AG to investigate.It appears that Louisiana and Alabama aren't waiting around for a law on that front. The Attorneys General from both states, Jeff Landry from Louisiana and Steve Marshall from Alabama, have announced plans to set up a special hotline for ignorant people who are sure they've been "censored by big tech."

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Alt-right "personality" (I guess?) Laura Loomer keeps filing lawsuits and losing them. Loomer seems to believe it's legally actionable to be moderated by social media services. No court has agreed with her. Between Section 230 and the First Amendment, Loomer doesn't have a case. Oblique approaches -- like claiming getting kicked off Twitter is tortious interference in a (nonexistent) business relationship (Loomer and Twitter, according to Loomer, but definitely not according to Twitter) -- haven't been any more successful.Grasping at straws and switching attorneys in midstream hasn't helped matters. This case involved Loomer trying to sue CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relationships) and Twitter in Florida, claiming CAIR's reporting of her Twitter account tortiously interfered with Loomer's get-rich-quick plan of being extremely extremist online. It only took six pages for a federal judge to dismiss Loomer's baseless claims.By the time that dismissal happened, it was too late for Loomer. Seven months after the lawsuit was filed (in October 2019), CAIR approached Loomer and suggested a settlement under Florida state law -- one that would have been much cheaper for Loomer. Loomer refused. That has turned out to be a very expensive decision. (h/t Techdirt reader Thad)The court [PDF] says the offer of judgment complied with Florida law and could have provided Loomer a quicker, cheaper way to step away from her doomed litigation. Loomer argued the offer wasn't proper because she was seeking injunctive relief in addition to monetary damages. A judgment offer would obviously have short-circuited injunctive relief. But the court points out Loomer only mentioned an injunction in the complaint and never bothered to follow up on seeking this particular form of relief.

Back in 2014 when Facebook bought Oculus, there were the usual pre-merger promises that nothing would really change. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who has since moved on to selling border surveillance tech to the Trump administration, made oodles of promises to that effect before taking his money and running toward the sunset. Among those promises was the promise that users would never be forced to use a Facebook login account just to use your VR headset and its games, and that the company wouldn't track your behavior for advertising.Like every major merger, those promises didn't mean much. Just about a year ago, Facebook and Oculus announced that users will soon be forced to... use a Facebook account if they want to be able to keep using Oculus hardware, so the company can track its users for advertising purposes.Fast forward a year and things have been flipped a bit on their heads.Facebook users who have their accounts hacked and subsequently locked say it's impossible to get anybody at Facebook support to even listen to them. There's no real customer support helpline, and like many places COVID has made customer service staffing harder than ever. There is apparently an online form you can use that requires you provide your driver's license and other data to unlock your account, but Facebook users say it's apparently less than useless:

Nearly two years ago -- prior to the 2020 repeal of 50-a, the statute that codified law enforcement opacity in the state of New York -- the Brooklyn DA's office released part of its "Brady list" to Gothamist. The "Brady" (or "Giglio," depending on who's naming it) list tells prosecutors (and [supposedly] defense attorneys) which cops aren't to be trusted, thanks to previous perjury/severe misconduct/evidence-planting/etc. This keeps prosecutors from calling witnesses who can be easily impeached. And it helps defense lawyers know which government witnesses are ripe for undermining.It's the latter reason that often keeps these lists shrouded in secrecy. While some law enforcement agencies are more than willing to share with prosecutors in order to keep convictions intact, they're far less willing to give the defense anything to work with. But some of this information can be obtained through public records requests. And some of it can be obtained through new transparency laws or court orders.The list handed to Gothamist in 2019 was far from complete. Now with 50-a repealed, the information is flowing more freely. The NYPD is still doing what it can to withhold its own version of its Brady list, but that's not stopping others in possession of at least part of this list from releasing what they have on hand.Once again, it's both the Brooklyn DA and Gothamist combining forces to provide more information about bad cops to the public. While others have attempted to compile Brady lists from public records requests, this proactive move by the Brooklyn DA's office far outpaces any independent collection of Brady-listed officers.The latest publication by Gothamist contains 679 records in a searchable database compiled by Tarak Shah, a data scientist for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. There are redactions, but they do not serve the NYPD's interests. As Shah notes in his statement accompanying this release, the redactions only cover information that "could have put those involved with investigating this story at risk."More than 10,000 documents are now in the hands of Gothamist, courtesy of Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez. What's in there? Plenty of cop bullshit. Here are just a few highlights:

We've made this point before, but the moment you attempt to scale up copyright enforcement, you run into problems. Collateral damage from automated systems mistaking non-infringing content for infringing, the possibility of fraud and abuse, the blind eye towards Fair Use all become problems. But sometimes those problems are so silly that they expose what a pure fiasco this has become. Several years back, we discussed Universal Pictures asking Google to delist a bunch of supposedly infringing sites, listing one of them as 127.0.0.1. Depending on how computer savvy you are, you may recognize that this IP address is how a computer or system refers to itself. In other words, it essentially means "home."And, yet, despite how silly this all is, it just keeps happening. Most recently, the anti-piracy outfit used by a Ukrainian television broadcaster may have outed its own client by also asking Google to delist 127.0.0.1.

One of the great warrant exceptions is the "inventory search." Stop a car in a high-traffic or "high crime" area, and officers will feel compelled to tow it away. But before it's towed, they'll make a list of everything in the car to ensure the vehicle's owner gets all of their possessions back when they retrieve it from the impound lot. If there happens to be contraband in the car, it's a win for the cops. The "discovery" (even if derived from a mostly-pretextual search) will be called "inevitable" and can be used against the person to deprive them of their freedom along with their car.This one simple trick usually works out for law enforcement. But every so often it doesn't. And when it doesn't work, it's usually because officers were in such a hurry to carry out the warrantless search that they completely forgot about the pretext.That's the case here in the Tenth Circuit Appeals Court's handling of a motion to suppress. The lower court denied the suppression motion, but the Appeals Court reverses [PDF] that decision, finding that the officers created an excuse to search the car, making their discoveries less than inevitable.It all started with a call to the Tulsa (OK) Police Department about Evan Woodard. The caller said Woodward was in the middle of a drug case, may have smoked PCP, had three previous gun charges, and had violated a protective order. Tulsa PD officers headed out to find Woodard and serve him with an outstanding warrant for public intoxication and the protective order he was allegedly violating.Here's what happened next:

We've talked a lot on Techdirt about the end of ownership, and how companies have increasingly been reaching deep into products that you thought you bought to modify them... or even destroy them. Much of this originated in the copyright space, in which modern copyright law (somewhat ridiculously) gave the power to copyright holders to break products that people had "bought." Of course, the legacy copyright players like to conveniently change their language on whether or not you're buying something or simply "licensing" it temporarily based on what's most convenient (i.e., what makes them the most money) at the time.Over at the Nation, Maria Bustillos, recently wrote about how legacy companies -- especially in the publishing world -- are trying to take away the concept of book ownership and only let people rent books. A little over a year ago, picking up an idea first highlighted by law professor Brian Frye, we highlighted how much copyright holders want to be landlords. They don't want to sell products to you. They want to retain an excessive level of control and power over it -- and to make you keep paying for stuff you thought you bought. They want those monopoly rents.As Bustillos points out, the copyright holders are making things disappear, including "ownership."

I went back to Ohio/but my First Amendment was goneFor those of you just joining us, allow me to catch everyone up. In the wake of protests against police violence and multiple people realizing that online anonymity only extends as far as anyone's personal opsec, an "anonymous" Ohio police officer decided to sue (anonymously!) people for claiming he was some sort of white extremist.The pseudonymous "M.R." -- who filed a lawsuit in an Ohio court claiming he was "defamed" by people pointing out his questionable posts" -- is a Cincinnati police officer. Thanks to his quotation of social media posts referring to his questionable behavior, it was pretty easy for online, part-time sleuths to link "M.R." ("Michael Ryan") to Officer Ryan Olthaus.Despite the fact that M.R. had been outed as Officer Ryan Olthaus, a local court allowed "M.R" to pursue his defamation lawsuit anonymously. Not only that, but it granted a temporary injunction forbidding the people M.R. had failed to de-anonymize from saying anything negative about the officer involved in two questionable shootings.Hello, prior restraint! This order has been appealed and both the really-not-that-anonymous-cop and people on the side of free speech are arguing about the First Amendment. Since it's Officer Ryan "M.R." Olthaus on the early winning side (as appellee), we'll deal with his ridiculous motion [PDF] first. (h/t local lawyer Jeffrey Nye, who is challenging the unconstitutional gag order.)According to M.R.'s lawyers, no one can appeal a TRO. Not only is it not appealable, but the larger issues show the aggrieved cop is right. To wit, an editorial:

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For more than a decade we've noted how the US broadband industry's biggest problem is a lack of healthy competition. In countless markets consumers either have the choice of a terrible phone company or a cable giant. The nation's phone companies have spent the last decade refusing to upgrade (or in some cases even repair) their aging DSL lines, because they don't see residential broadband as worth their while. That, in turn, is giving giants like Comcast and Spectrum an ever greater monopoly in many markets, reducing the already muted incentive to compete on price or shore up comically terrible customer service.While that may be great for cable companies, execs, and investors, it's not so great for consumers whose only choice of broadband is aging DSL from an apathetic telco. Instead of upgrading its customers to fiber across more than 20 states, US telco CenturyLink (recently rebranded "Lumen") announced it would be selling much of the company's copper DSL and phone network to private equity firm Apollo. Under the $7.5 billion dollar deal CenturyLink will keep the customers it actually cares about, then throw the (mostly rural) customers it doesn't care about at a private equity firm that isn't likely to upgrade them either.Apollo, primarily famous for acquiring old newspapers, lobotomizing them, then stripping them for parts, claims it will upgrade many of these users to fiber. But that doesn't seem particularly likely given their track record, or the track record of similar deals like this, which basically involves shuffling ownership of aging DSL lines nobody wants to actually upgrade, then milking the assets until the next sale. Many of these customers have been stuck on expensive, slow DSL for the better part of fifteen years as they get shuffled from disinterested owner to disinterested owner:

Selective leaking has always been a part of the federal government's day-to-day business. When there are narratives to massage, controlled leaking is tolerated. Leaks that make the government look bad tend to result in prosecutions, but leaks that act as highly unofficial PR or align with the motivations of the agencies they're leaked from are largely ignored.Every so often, though, oversight is asked to keep an eye on leaking, if only to make it appear that all leaks are considered equal. In the interest of perceived fairness, the FBI's Office of the Inspector General has taken a look at the incidents surrounding the selective release of information about the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server during her stint at the State Department under Barack Obama.There were questions about political motivations -- ones not helped at all by selective leaks about the investigation. This was on top of supposedly official actions, like then-FBI director James Comey's decision to hold a press conference to announce the outcome of the FBI's investigation. In the agency's determination, what Clinton did was unwise and gave the appearance of impropriety, but was not illegal.That would have been it. But shortly before the 2016 election, James Comey decided it was time for him to act unwisely and give off an air of impropriety by announcing the FBI would be reopening its investigation of Clinton and her email server, thanks to developments in an unrelated case. Comey's actions were also questionable, but apparently not actually illegal.The OIG tried to dig into the FBI's use of selective leaking during this time period. And it has arrived at the conclusion that it's almost impossible to accurately point fingers, much less discourage powerful federal agencies from doing whatever the hell they want to, policies and laws notwithstanding. (h/t Brad Heath)The report [PDF] leads off with a summary of the undoubtedly frustrating investigation. First, it points out how things should be handled…

For this post, we're going to need to provide some context when it comes to In-N-Out's fraught relationship with the entire country of Australia. The famous burger chain based here in America has made a habit of suing Australian entities that sell burgers using the same or similar names over trademark rights. If you're not familiar with the history here, that may not strike you as particularly noteworthy, especially given that some of the sued entities in question very much do use names and branding that serve as at least an homage to In-N-Out. The problem here is that In-N-Out has basically no presence in Australia. The company has no storefronts or brick and mortar businesses in Australia. As in... at all. Instead, the company has made a habit of doing pop-up restaurants in the country once every three years or so. Why? Well, because of a provision in Australian trademark law that allows this to satisfy the use-it-or-lose-it nature of trademark protection.In other words: In-N-Out has no real presence in Australia, has never shown any indication of having a real presence in Australia, and simply uses these once-in-a-while pop-up locations solely to keep its trademark registrations active.This has continued to the present, where In-N-Out is yet again suing another entity for violating the trademarks it's just barely using in Australia.

When police officers kill someone, the kneejerk reaction is to publicly disparage the dead, in hopes of making the deceased appear to have "deserved" to be killed, even if their actions during the incident didn't appear to justify the killing. To do this, officers dig into their databases and dredge up every arrest, citation, and documented interaction with law enforcement to make it appear as though the officers have (permanently) removed a threat from the streets, rather than simply applied excessive force until the person was dead.The NYPD is no different than other agencies. It did this following the killing of Eric Garner, leaking arrest records to press outlets in hopes of portraying the dead man as a persistent threat to public safety and police officers.But the NYPD breaks the law when it does this. State law is supposed to prevent access to sealed arrest records -- records that aren't tied to convictions. This law is in place to protect people from discrimination and harassment by making these unavailable to be used against them when being interviewed for jobs or seeking places to live, just to name a couple of examples.The NYPD isn't exempt from this law, but it sure seems to feel it is.

If you recall, economists repeatedly warned the $26 billion Sprint/T-Mobile merger would kill jobs, harm competition, and ultimately raise prices for consumers. To "fix" the problem, the Trump DOJ and FCC concocted an elaborate and cumbersome plan to create a replacement fourth wireless carrier out of Dish Network, despite the company's lack of experience in the sector and history of empty promises. So far none of this is going particularly well, with 5,000 and counting lost jobs, Dish and T-Mobile clearly unable to get along, and Dish... the cornerstone of the entire plan... continuing to bleed both TV and wireless subscribers.Of all the pay TV providers dealing with "cord cutting," Dish has indisputably been hit the hardest, losing another 67,000 pay TV subscribers last quarter. It technically added 65,000 Sling TV streaming video subscribers, but it wasn't enough to offset the 132,000 customers that cancelled Dish's traditional satellite TV service. With absolutely no plans to build new satellites and users shifting increasingly to streaming, Dish knows satellite TV is a dead end.That's where the company's wireless business is supposed to come in.As part of the DOJ/FCC deal, Dish obtained billions in spectrum and the Boost prepaid mobile brand from Sprint. The idea is that Dish is supposed to operate a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) as it builds out its own, full 5G wireless network.But, there too, things aren't going particularly well. Dish lost 201,000 Boost subscribers in the last quarter. And while it added 200,000 subscribers last March by buying a small wireless company named Republic Wireless, a research note by Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett indicates the overall trajectory isn't a great one:

Tech that supposedly detects gunshots has been deployed in multiple cities across the nation with the intent of providing faster response times to possible violence and to give investigators heads up where illegal activity may have occurred. The tech has some pretty serious problems, though.For one, it cannot reliably detect gunshots.

I've written a lot about the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale, and there are lots of reasons for that. But one of the most common is the difficulty both AI and human beings have in distinguishing hateful/trollish/harassing behavior from those reporting on that behavior. We've pointed this out over and over again in a variety of contexts. One classic example is social media websites pulling down human rights activists highlighting war crimes by saying it's "terrorist content." Another were the many examples of people on social media talking about racism and how they're victims of racist attacks having their accounts and posts shut down over claims of racism.And now we have another similar example. A new video series about antisemitism posted its trailer to Instagram... where it was removed for violating community guidelines.

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I'm not sure what's happening in the New York legislature, but a whole lot of NY politicians appear to believe law enforcement officers -- some of the most powerful public servants in the nation -- are some ultra-rare species of easily frightened lagomorphs, incapable of performing their jobs without being protected from the people they serve.Last week, US Congresswoman Claudia Tenney served up a bill that would codify qualified immunity for law enforcement, claiming this was necessary because people whose rights have been trampled are too litigious and cops are dying at an alarming rate. Ignored were the uncomfortable facts that qualified immunity is an enabler of the bad apples who spoil the cop bunch and cops are dying of communicable viruses, rather than the guns and bullets of bad guys.Following in the footsteps of Tenney's bad bill and an unseemly amount of so-called "Blue Lives Matter" laws, comes this terrible legislative pitch from a handful of Nassau County (NY) lawmakers. Having utterly failed to read the room, these legislators think the time is right to convert cops (and other first responders) into a protected class. (via Adam Steinbaugh)Here's the bill's [PDF] pitch in all-caps form:

Under former CEO Randall Stephenson, AT&T spent nearly $200 billion on mergers with DirecTV and Time Warner, hoping this would secure its ability to dominate the pay TV space through brute force. But the exact opposite happened. Saddled with so much debt from the deal, AT&T passed on annoying price hikes to its consumers. It also embraced a branding strategy so damn confusing -- with so many different product names -- it even confused its own employees.All told, AT&T lost 9.5 million customers in just over four years. Not exactly the kind of "domination" the company envisioned. Meanwhile, employees also paid the price. Despite billions in regulatory favors (killing net neutrality and broadband privacy rules) and a $42 billion tax break from the Trump administration for literally doing less than nothing, AT&T has also laid off more than 50,000 employees since 2017. The company also took an axe to several well-loved brands (Mad Magazine, DC's Vertigo Comic imprint) as its executives crashed and bounced their way around unfamiliar businesses.Last week AT&T finally completed its spinoff of DirecTV. Kind of a sad little whimper to the company's original vision. Yet somehow, much of the sterile news coverage of the whole mess doesn't capture the real scale or scope of the failure.The New York Post, for example, can't be bothered to mention a single layoff or a cite a single AT&T misstep. The same thing over at CNET, where the final chapter in AT&T's ugly saga is framed in this detached, oddly clinical way, completely avoiding pointing out AT&T incompetence or the human wreckage these deals left behind. This is how spending $200 billion on mergers that resulted in massive layoffs and utter organizational chaos is described by the outlet:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Blake C. Stacey with a comment highlighting the extreme breadth of the internet services the Canadian government wants to regulate with a heavy hand:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, it was revealed that the FBI's hacking tool compromised dozens of computers in Australia, while new FOIA documents showed that the FISA court once refused the FBI's request to scoop up communications along with metadata, one FBI official was comparing encryption guru Moxie Marlinspike to the KKK, and the Manhattan DA was claiming he didn't want encryption backdoors even though he certainly did. Meanwhile, we were wondering why the Copyright Office was helping to protect the cable industry's monopoly on cable boxes, and why it was so intent on changing the part of copyright that protects libraries and archives. The RIAA's latest attacks on YouTube were drawing criticism even from usual defenders of the association, and the DOJ made a smart decision about music licensing that caused music publishers to freak out.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, we highlighted the latest evidence that copy protection does not increase sales, and discussed the question of whether ISPs should cut off the entertainment industry over its constant attempts to convince them to engage in censorship — just as a new paper was arguing that ISPs should be made liable for cybercrime efforts, and the Justice Minister in Switzerland decided that ISPs should have to retain data despite no legal basis for forcing them to do so. A court found that Megaupload could be guilty of direct infringement in the Perfect 10 case, but the biggest and most important Perfect 10 ruling from the 9th Circuit said that proving copyright infringement doesn't automatically mean irreparable harm was done. We also saw a major episode in the interminable (and fascinating) Mattel lawsuit over Bratz dolls.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, we marveled (and wondered) at the absurd glut of video sharing services appearing (a bunch of them specifically from Time Warner) while YouTube took the world by storm, and also noted the interesting (but likely unimportant) fact that MSN was technically considered the leader over YouTube. There was an early discussion about the influence of Google AdSense policies on journalism, Norway was talking about banning iTunes, and — in a somewhat historic move — AOL finally became a free portal with free email addresses. Also, as expected, Limewire got sued, beginning the first big fight over the inducement standard recently set down in the Supreme Court's Grokster decision.

Good public relations, when mired in a controversy, isn't always easy, but it does tend to be quite simple. If you have a controversy on your hands, be direct, be honest, be transparent, do not attempt to paper over the controversy with other good works already done, and for the love of god do not give any indication that you're turning a deaf ear to those who are upset over the controversy.Or, if you're Activision Blizzard, do the exact opposite of all of the above and definitely trot out your own Chief Compliance Officer to do so. The context around this is that Activision Blizzard was recently sued by the state of California over its workplace practices, with specific issues revolving around reported treatment of women and people of color that, if true, are absolutely horrific.

The app formerly known as "Vigilante" is surreptitiously redefining the term "citizen journalist." The new definition will probably be capitalized and trademarked. The crime reporting app that once entertained plans to become part of the law enforcement community by partnering with private security companies is paying users to head out to crime scenes and annoy civil servants.

Last year we wrote about Facebook threatening NYU researchers who had set up a browser extension that would allow users to voluntarily collect information about ads and ad targeting on Facebook -- information that Facebook does not publicly reveal -- and provide it to the researchers' "Ad Observatory" project. As we noted at the time, Facebook's threats were definitely going too far, though you could see how it came about, as it could be argued that there were technical similarities to what the NYU researchers were doing, and what an academic from Cambridge did many years ago that turned into... the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which resulted (in part) in a massive fine from the FTC for privacy violations.But, as we explained then, the NYU Ad Observer story is clearly distinguishable from the Cambridge Analytica story. The Ad Observatory involves people installing an extension on their own computer in their own browser, and choosing to share that information. That's not something Facebook should have any right to block.Unfortunately, this week, Facebook took things up a notch and shut down the accounts of everyone associated with the project, effectively cutting off all their access to Facebook's Ad Library and other tools they were using in their research. Facebook's own explanation for this is... to claim that it was compromising people's privacy, though that appears to be bullshit (as we'll get to in a moment). Here's part of what Facebook said:

Apple is somewhat famous for its approach to security on its iPhones. Most famously, Apple went to court to fight the FBI's demand that they effectively insert a backdoor into its on-phone encryption (by being able to force an update to the phone). Apple has tons of goodwill in the security community (and the public) because of that, though not in the law enforcement community. Unfortunately, it appears that Apple is throwing away much of that good will and has decided to undermine the security of its phone... "for the children" (of course).This week, Apple announced what it refers to as "expanded protections for children." The company has been receiving lots of pressure from certain corners (including law enforcement groups who hate encryption), claiming that its encryption was helping hide child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on phones (and in iCloud accounts). So Apple's plan is to introduce what's generally called "client-side scanning" to search for CSAM on phones as well as a system that scans iCloud content for potentially problematic content. Apple claims that it's doing this in a manner that is protective of privacy. And, to be fair, this clearly isn't something that Apple rolled out willy-nilly without considering the trade-offs. It's clear from Apple's detailed explanations of the new "safety" features, that it is trying to balance the competing interests at play here. And, obviously, stopping the abuse of children is an important goal.The problem is that, even with all of the balancing Apple has done here, it's definitely moved down a very dangerous, and very slippery slope towards using this approach for other things.Apple's brief description of its new offerings are as follows:

In 2016, Turkish president Recep Erdogan visited the United States, bringing with him his security team, as most foreign dignitaries do. That much of the visit was normal. What wasn't so normal was his team's decision to attack protesters, critics, and journalists on US soil -- something that really wasn't necessary considering Washington DC's Metro police were already on the scene, keeping protesters away from Erdogan and the Turkish ambassador's residence.After a face-off between pro- and anti-Erdogan protesters, peace was restored with the assistance of the Metro PD. Then violence broke out. And recordings of the incident indicate Erdogan's security personnel were the aggressors. Here's how the DC Appeals Court describes it in its review [PDF] of the Turkish government's attempt to have a lawsuit against it dismissed.

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Three years ago a US Senate Committee report showcased that the U.S. government's cybersecurity defenses were the IT equivalent of damp cardboard. The study found numerous government agencies were using dated systems that were expensive to maintain but hard to properly secure. It also noted how from 2008 to 2018, the government repeatedly failed to adequately protect sensitive data at the Social Security Administration and Departments of Homeland Security, State, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Education.Three years have gone by and guess what: very little has actually changed. The latest 47 page report (pdf) found that little meaningful improvement was made in the last three years, with cybersecurity at those same eight federal agencies earning four grades of D, three Cs, and a single B:

The Biden administration has been talking a big game about being "tough on Big Tech" and Silicon Valley monopolies. But right now they're quietly defending a provision in the must-pass Infrastructure Bill that targets software developers who are building alternatives to the exact Big Tech systems the administration decries.The administration has been pushing a "pay-for" measure in the bipartisan Infrastructure Bill that would expand US government surveillance of cryptocurrency-related or decentralized projects. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future and 14 other civil society organizations have expressed grave concerns for the “vague and dangerous” digital currency provision of the bill.This digital currency provision has been sold as being about taxes. But it's so poorly written that it would create reporting requirements demanding people like software developers and even volunteers within decentralized tech projects hand over data or conduct surveillance of their users. There are plenty of valid concerns around cryptocurrencies & ensuring that everyone pays their fair share of taxes. However, the provision in the Infrastructure Bill would demand data from people who don't have it—effectively crushing a wide range of decentralized projects under misguided regulations.Destroying decentralized projects would be a disaster for global human rights, freedom of expression, and democracy. Cryptocurrencies and decentralized tech projects are among the most promising potential solutions to address the harms of Big Tech. Decentralization could help end the era of surveillance capitalism.If the Biden administration is serious about taking on Big Tech, it shouldn't be actively trying to shut down communities of developers, volunteers, people who run nodes, and other participants in the very software projects that could one day help us escape the clutches of Facebook, Amazon, and Google. The original cryptocurrency provision in the Infrastructure Bill amounts to a dramatic expansion of government surveillance tacked on to a must-pass piece of legislation at the last minute. Policy that impacts human rights & the future of the Internet shouldn't be made this way.Fortunately, Senators Wyden, Lummis, and Toomey have introduced an amendment that would fix the problematic language in the Infrastructure Bill. This amendment is a win-win: it ensures actual crypto brokers like Coinbase pay their taxes, but clarifies the measure can't be abused for broader surveillance or oppression of smaller decentralized projects. Now even Senator Portman, who teamed up with the White House to draft the original cryptocurrency surveillance proposal in the Infrastructure Bill, is supporting this common sense amendment. Sadly, Senator Portman, who teamed up with the White House to draft the original cryptocurrency surveillance proposal in the Infrastructure Bill, pulled his former support for this common-sense amendment and introduced his own amendment that is even worse than the original provision itself.Weirdly, the Biden administration seems to still be pushing the original language and opposing this amendment to the law that would clarify small players won’t be targeted. The administration simultaneously claims two opposing facts:First, that the current language doesn't target "small players" in the decentralization ecosystem at all.Contrarily, the administration also states that the Wyden amendment would "put a dent" in the tax revenue generated—even though the amendment would just clarify that onerous reporting requirements don't apply to people who wouldn't even possess the surveillance data that this law would require to be turned over.The White House can’t have it both ways on this. Either the language only targets actual cryptocurrency brokers, in which case the Wyden amendment would have no impact on the tax revenue generated—or the admin's "pinky swear" that it won't use this law to go after small players like software developers making wallets is false.We can and should have real conversations about what types of policies should be in place to protect people, especially low income folks and communities vulnerable to surveillance, from cryptocurrency scams. We also need to ensure that giant corporations and millionaires pay their fair share of taxes. But if the Biden administration really cares about holding Big Tech companies accountable and giving people alternatives to Silicon Valley giants, they need to start getting smarter about how technology actually works, and advance policies that actually accomplish stated goals.More than 10,000 people have called the Senate because the cryptocurrency surveillance provision in the Infrastructure Bill is a huge mess and a huge threat to digital innovation and human rights. The Wyden amendment will fix it. Democratic senators and the Biden administration should back off their hypocritical stance that calls for reining in Big Tech while also stifling any innovation that could replace it.Evan Greer is an Executive Director and Lia Holland is Campaigns and Communications Director at Fight for the Future, a digital rights organization with 3 million members celebrating 10 years of defending human rights on the internet from malicious corporate interests and ill-informed legislators.

A couple of months back, we discussed something of a silly lawsuit overseas between Oatly, a large oat-milk manufacturer, and Glebe Farm Foods over its own PureOaty drink. At issue were Oatly's own trademarks and its claims that PureOaty infringed on those marks. As we noted at the time, because the word "oat" is descriptive of the products in both cases, and with PureOaty using the "pure" as a differentiator among other things, this was a trademark claim that essentially came down to the letter "y". And, yes, that is dumb. Especially when you consider that there are significant differences when it comes to PureOaty's trade dress.There is simply little reason to be concerned about public confusion between those two products when you take everything in sum total. The colors in the branding are different, and the trade dress and placement generally doesn't lend itself towards public confusion.And it turns out that the courts in the UK agree.

There have been some questions raised about whether or not AI-created works deserve intellectual property protection. Indeed, while we (along with many others) laughed along at the trial about the monkey selfie, we had noted all along, that the law firm pushing to give the monkey (and with it, PETA) the copyright on the photo was almost certainly trying to tee up a useful case to argue that AI can get copyright and patents as well. Thankfully, the courts (and later the US Copyright Office) determined that copyrights require a human author.The question on patents, however, is still a little hazy (unfortunately). It should be the same as with copyright. The intent of both copyrights and patents is to create incentives (in the form of a "limited" monopoly) for the creation of the new creative work or invention. AI does not need such an incentive (nor do animals). Over the last few years, though, there has been a rush by some who control AI to try to patent AI creations. This is still somewhat up in the air. In the US, the USPTO has (ridiculously) suggested that AI created inventions could be patentable -- but then (rightfully) rejected a patent application from an AI. The EU has rejected AI-generated patents.Unfortunately, it looks like Australia has gone down the opposite path from the EU, after a court ruled that an AI can be an inventor for a patent. The case was brought by the same folks who were denied patents in the EU & US, and who are still seeking AI patents around the globe. Australia's patent office had followed suit with its EU & US counterparts, but the judge has now sent it back saying that there's nothing wrong with AI holding patents.

Batshit litigant and armchair legislator Chris Sevier is back! The man who once sued Apple because he could access porn from his laptop (entendre intended) is still vexing courthouses with his attempts to sue his way back into the good graces of social media platforms after being asked to leave because [taps "batshit" in opening sentence].The man who believes the only way through his addiction to porn is to sue or legislate it into the ground has filed a lawsuit [PDF] in a Florida federal court that's full of the insanity we've come to know and (well, probably not love) expect from a Sevier lawsuit.It opens with this presumptuous language:

Elaine Thompson-Herah of Jamaica won both the women's 100 meter and 200 meter gold medals at the Olympics this year, and then did the super piratey thing of... excitedly posting snippets of her victories to Instagram, which responded by blocking her account for copyright violations. She wrote the following in a now deleted tweet:

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We've noted more times than I can count how in the modern era, you no longer really own the things you buy. Thanks to internet connectivity, hardware you own can be bricked or downgraded to the point where you lose essential features. Or, just as often, obnoxious DRM means you have to jump through all kinds of bizarre hoops to actually use the thing you thought you owned, whether that's Keurig using DRM to prevent you from using competing coffee pods, to printer manufacturers using DRM to keep you from buying cheaper cartridges.Now Home Depot is experimenting further with DRM at the point of sale. The company has started embedding chips in many of the major tool brands it sells (DeWalt, Milwaukee). And unless the tool is enabled by a Bluetooth-based system at the register, it simply won't work when you take it home:

The NSO Group's latest scandal is the gift that keeps on giving. The malware purveyor has always been controversial, thanks to its decision to sell powerful cellphone exploits to known human rights violators. That these exploits have been used to place world leaders, journalists, activists, and religious leaders under surveillance is just the expected result of choosing to do business with extremely shady governments.A list of 50,000 phone numbers portrayed as potential targets for NSO's Pegasus malware is the latest black eye for the Israeli company. The list contains numbers linked to all of the sorts of individuals listed above -- not exactly the criminals and "Bin Ladens" of the world, as NSO claims its software is used to surveil.These revelations have led to a lot of obfuscation and backpedaling by NSO, which simultaneously claims its customers do not abuse its products while also claiming it has no insight into how its customers choose to deploy the Pegasus malware. So, when NSO says it takes action when customers use its product to target people who aren't suspected criminals or terrorists, it's pretty much just making stuff up because it really doesn't know the malware is being used or who it's being deployed against.This has prompted reactions all over the world. In France (where activists are being sued for claiming governments have deployed this spyware), French President Emmanuel Macron recently acquired a new phone after discovering his old one had potentially been targeted by a foreign government using NSO's spyware. This prompted a call from the French government to the Israeli government demanding some answers about NSO Group, its customers, and its targets.It also prompted an investigation into the deployment of the Pegasus malware in France. And this shows you just how quickly a government can wrap up an investigation when it's sure it will be pointing its finger at other governments or their constituents: it only took nine days to get some actionable results.

If you search for stories about McDonald's on Techdirt, you will come away with the impression that the company, like many large corporate entities, puts heavy emphasis on its intellectual property rights. Sony, the company responsible for the PlayStation consoles, exudes a similar reputation, despite some recent moves to loosen its IP grip as of late. So, just to be clear, everyone involved in this story tends to trend toward the more restrictive end of the IP spectrum.Which makes it super-duper stupid that McDonald's Australia had a plan to offer up customized PlayStation 5 controllers, but never bothered to formalize any part of this plan with Sony. And, if you're like me, that's a shame because the cosmetics on the controllers are pretty dang fun.