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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Stephen T. Stone with a comment about our latest example of brazen DMCA abuse:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2017, outgoing FCC boss Tom Wheeler warned about the perils of killing net neutrality, while leaked details of Trump's FCC transition plan revealed his plans to gut all the agency's consumer protection powers — then, on Friday, it was confirmed that Ajit Pai would become the new FCC boss. Meanwhile, we marked the five year anniversary of the SOPA protests (and be sure to check out our much bigger celebration for the ten year anniversary) by reminding lawmakers of what happened and discussing what it could teach them about tech.Also, in surprising but welcome news, this was the week that President Obama commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence.Ten Years AgoThis is it: the week of the 2012 SOPA/PIPA blackout protest. First, it was announced that Wikipedia was officially on board. Then Google promised to do something big, and the Internet Archive announced plans, as did Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The day before the protest, Lamar Smith and the MPAA brushed it all off as a publicity stunt and Smith announced that markup on SOPA would resume in February.Then, on Wednesday, it began. Many sites went dark, Google blacked out their logo, and here at Techdirt we focused on covering the events as they unfolded. Although the MPAA was in denial, and being condescending (and one-upped by the RIAA the next day), the effects were clear: Rep. Lee Terry was the first co-sponsor to remove his name from SOPA, then Senator Marco Rubio ditched PIPA followed by several other senators — and when the dust settled, we couldn't help but notice that most of them were Republicans, since Democrats seemed to be dropping the ball. Ultimately, the internet won, and the bills were officially, indefinitely delayed.But, of course, the week couldn't be all good news. At the very same time as this was all going down, the DOJ unilaterally shut down Megaupload and arrested many of the principles with the help of New Zealand law enforcement. The details of the case raised massive concerns, and the internet was quick to strike back: Anonymous managed to take down the DOJ, RIAA and MPAA websites. The war for internet freedom was far from over...Fifteen Years AgoThat was a lot of detail on 2012, and this week in 2007 was nowhere near as exciting — but there were two developments that were small and interesting at the time, but in hindsight were pretty big deals. First, DVD rental company Netflix started rolling out a new feature allowing some users to stream a limited selection of movies. Second, we covered the announcement of a curious experiment that aimed to support dissident government employees in oppressive regimes: "a new site called Wikileaks".

You will recall that we had several posts covering when Microsoft acquired Zenimax Media for $7 billion, as well as some of the potential fallout from that acquisition. Much of the focus was on what the purchase of Zenimax and its child studios, such as Bethesda, would mean for long-running game franchises from those studios going exclusive to PC and/or Xbox. Microsoft made a bunch of vague, lightly-conflicting statements on the topic before ripping the bandaid off by making the next Elder Scrolls game an Xbox/PC exclusive.Most folks in the gaming community are either agnostic about exclusives, or decidedly hate them. There are very few cheerleaders for exclusives in other words, which is why most news about larger publishers acquiring small or mid-sized publishers is greeted with very narrow eyes.That being said, there are acquisitions, and then there are acquisitions.

It's been obvious for a while that the future of internet television is starting to look increasingly like traditional cable. Initially, the streaming sector was all about innovation, choice, and lower costs to drive subscriber interest. But as the market has matured and become dominated by bigger players, some familiar patterns have emerged, including giant companies trying to lock down as much content as possible in exclusives, and a steady parade of price hikes that slowly, surely, start to erode the value proposition.Last week Netflix announced that the company would be imposing yet another price hike. Here in the U.S., the company's 720p "basic" tier is increasing $1 to $10 per month, its 1080p "standard" tier is increasing $1.50 to $15.50 per month, and its 4K "premium" will see a $2 increase to $20 per month. Similar hikes are also on their way to Canadian subscribers. In a statement, Netflix justified the hikes using familiar rhetoric about "improving the customer experience":

Ten years ago this week, I watched my computer screen as much of the Internet slowly switched off. Over a hundred thousand websites, including that of our predecessor organization CEA, were going dark in a last-ditch protest of a House bill called the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, the “Protect IP Act” (PIPA).These bills were backed by large content companies concerned that the Internet would disrupt their longstanding business models. While we sympathized with their concerns about unauthorized downloading, we could not agree with their proposed solution: allowing content owners to easily "take down" entire websites, without due process or notification, if they claimed that the site hosted unauthorized content.If these bills had passed, the consequences for the Internet would have been devastating. Any website featuring third-party content, including libraries and community bulletin boards, would have been vulnerable to sudden and permanent removal after a single complaint. Sites would vanish and have little recourse. Bad actors would run rampant, using the SOPA-PIPA process to harass competitors and censor opposing viewpoints.Opposition to SOPA-PIPA had been slowly growing. A strange-bedfellows coalition ranging from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the Heritage Foundation was opposing the bills. Artists like Amanda Palmer and OKGO denounced the bills’ impacts on creativity. A group of startup founders including Alexis Ohanian, Micah Shaffer, and Christian Dawson walked the Capitol meeting with legislators, many of whom had never previously been face-to-face with an internet entrepreneur. And at the 2012 CES, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden stood together and declared they would do anything in their power to stop the bills.But this opposition, vigorous as it was, shrank in comparison to the bills’ support. SOPA and PIPA were backed by dozens of DC's biggest players, including the Motion Picture Association, the Recording Industry Association, and the powerful US Chamber of Commerce. SOPA had dozens of Congressional sponsors, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith.In the Senate, PIPA sailed unanimously through the Judiciary Committee and Majority Leader Reid announced that he planned to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. By normal DC rules, the game was over and the bills were sure to pass.But the Internet blackout drew public attention, and the tide quickly turned as Americans began calling and emailing their members of Congress. In total, more than 14 million Americans contacted their lawmakers to protest the legislation. I remember sitting in a legislator’s office the morning after the blackout and watching in sincere astonishment as the phone rang off the hook.The impact was swift, as legislators rushed to take their names off the bills. For the first time, policymakers realized that the Internet wasn’t some fringe domain for computer geeks, it was a central and treasured element of their constituents' daily lives. Within a week, SOPA and PIPA had been pulled from consideration in the House and Senate.The death of SOPA/PIPA unleashed a Cambrian Explosion of online innovation. Companies like Instagram, Tinder Slack, Patreon, and thousands of others changed the way we work, play, and live. Anyone who attended CES 2022 could not help but see the extraordinary dynamism and competition that currently exists in the technology industry.The content industry also thrived once they stopped treating the internet as an enemy and began treating it as an asset. While content companies once declared that ”you can’t compete with free,” in the wake of SOPA-PIPA they pivoted to offering well-designed, consumer-friendly services at reasonable prices.According to the RIAA, U.S. recorded music revenues grew 9.2% in 2020, with 83% of the revenue coming from Internet streaming. The movie industry has seen similar gains, with global streaming video revenue projected to hit $94 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, independent creators used new internet platforms to present their work directly to fans without having to go through gatekeepers or intermediaries.Most importantly, the post-SOPA-PIPA Internet has proven to be the most impactful communications platform in human history. On May 25, 2020, 17-year-old Darnell Frazier used her smartphone to document the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Posted to Facebook, this video kicked off an ongoing national conversation on race and injustice.Similarly, in 2017 women took to the Internet to respond to sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and describe their own experiences under the hashtag #MeToo. Widespread media coverage changed the way our society responds to sexual harassment. For the first time, regular people have been empowered to speak to millions on important issues, and they are using the power to change society for the better.Over the last decade, we have learned many lessons. We have learned that the Internet, while it provides tremendous benefits, is not perfect. That is why we need clear federal guidelines in areas like online privacy and digital currencies that protect consumers and promote innovation.We have learned that Americans continue to care passionately about the Internet. Over the last two years during COVID, millions have gone online to work, educate their children, access health care, keep in touch with loved ones, and arrange delivery of critical goods. No wonder online companies rank highly in surveys of America’s most-loved brands.However, the SOPA-PIPA fight is not over. In “Groundhog Day” fashion, threats to the free and open Internet are reemerging. Policymakers are threatening to increase government control over Internet speech, and impose other limitations that would harm online companies and small businesses.Many of those pushing today’s “anti-tech” narrative are the same disgruntled competitors and legacy industries that engineered SOPA-PIPA. In fact, some broadcasters and content companies are even opposing an eminently qualified FCC nominee, Gigi Sohn, because of her correct and pro-consumer opposition to SOPA-PIPA a decade agoCongress is now considering legislation that would eliminate products like Google Docs and Amazon Prime. These services are woven into the lives of millions who rely on them to surmount the difficulties of COVID. If Congress breaks these services, the reaction from voters could make the SOPA-PIPA earthquake look like a mild tremor. Similarly, you could predict a SOPA-PIPA-type backlash if the government places unreasonable restrictions on the 46 million Americans who own digital assets.A few weeks after SOPA-PIPA died, I was ordering coffee when the barista pointed at the “STOP SOPA” sticker on my laptop. “I emailed my member of Congress about that, and it worked…It was the first time I felt I could actually change things in Washington,” he said.Thankfully, ten years after SOPA-PIPA, the Internet’s ability to empower American expression and innovation is only just beginning.Michael Petricone is the Senior VP, Government Affairs, at the Consumer Technology Association.This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Vice News has some really great reporters on tech issues who work for its Motherboard publication. For reasons that don't make sense, last week they had some other reporter write an absolutely ridiculously bad story trying to argue that the "stop the steal" idiots were helped along by the amazingly important work done by folks in the famed "Voting Village" at the DEFCON conference. The full article is long and bad and has the ridiculous and misleading title: How an "Ethical" Hacker Convention Is Fueling Trump's Big Lie. But the very premise of this story is not just wrong, but dangerously stupid. It's shameful that anyone at Vice thought this was an appropriate story to publish.The facts are this: there have been quite reasonable concerns about the security and technology in certain electronic voting machines going back decades. In fact, Techdirt covered tons of these stories, which were often about problems with the security in early machines, the lack of paper trails for the votes, and (perhaps most importantly) the unwillingness of the voting machine companies to work transparently with actual security researchers who could help harden those machines. Voting Village was set up in DEFCON as a response to that, in which these ethical hackers would get their hands on voting machines, seek out the vulnerabilities in order to help harden the security and improve these machines. It's how cybersecurity has always worked.And while it is true that some of the Stop the Steal grifters have tried to take some of the headlines or presentations from DEFCON and pretend that they prove that the 2020 election was hacked or broken or whatnot, that's got nothing to do with Voting Village "helping" them. If it weren't for Voting Village, those same grifters would have found other reports and other news stories to misinterpret and to make their unsubstantiated claims.The simple fact is that just because security researchers have concerns about some voting machines, and have worked to highlight where security vulnerabilities might be, that does not mean that an election is easily hacked, or that any election was actually hacked. That's the kind of thing that the "stop the steal" grifters have never been able to show and all of the evidence to date has failed to substantiate.Paragraphs like this are utter nonsense:

Multiple governments have been relying on contact-tracing apps to limit the spread of COVID. This has gone on nearly uninterrupted for the last couple of years in more than a few countries. Given the type of data collected -- contact information and location data -- it was only a matter of time before some government decided to abuse this new information source for reasons unrelated to tracking COVID infections.I guess the only surprise is that it took this long to be abused.

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Crony capitalism is alive and well, and can only be contained (if at all) by sustained popular action. SOPA/PIPA were broadly bipartisan bills designed to adapt techniques developed from the financial arm of the war on terror to pad the pockets of one of the most powerful business lobbies in Washington DC.The bills proposed to create an extrajudicial process, invoked and driven either directly by industry lawyers or by their revolving door colleagues in the White House (the MPA and RIAA leveraged bipartisan neoliberalism), which would trigger obligations, levied with all the fine precision of a sledge hammer, for payment systems providers and advertising delivery systems to cut off whole sites that the industry lawyers alleged were hosting copyrighted made available without a license or privilege.It was, in other words, a travesty to anything remotely resembling a balanced, expression-respecting version of copyright law. None of this troubled the bipartisan alliance of sage legislators who supported the bill—too ignorant to study its details; too captivated by the ideology of private property; or too corrupt to care.The bill embodied the kind of public-private-partnership that Niva Elkin Koren and Michael Birnhack had warned about a decade earlier: the Invisible Handshake. An alliance between states and companies handing off to each other functions that neither could do on its own, with companies harnessing the state to do their work in SOPA/PIPA, in this case, just as other companies were collecting data for the state in ways disclosed by Edward Snowden not long after.For those who now yearn for bipartisan regulation of content moderation, at a time with Mark Zuckerberg is asking for regulation—be careful what you wish for. If it really constrains business, it won’t be broadly bipartisan. It will be hard fought and narrowly won, and only with hard, sustained political mobilization.Networked mobilization has played an important democratizing role, using the same affordances that also undergird radicalization. How quaint to remember that ten years ago people still thought that copyright policy was a big enough deal to go out on the streets in the US and Europe, carrying signs like Stop ACTA!In this world of ours, when the US seems to be teetering on the edge of an authoritarian takeover, at least for a while or in some major states; in which hundreds of thousands went out on the streets to protest police killings of Black men and women; that seems like a time long, long ago.But the core lesson was that online mobilization, coupled with real-world protests, can and does work. It’s not just armchair activism; or at least it isn’t if it wants to be effective. As Zeynep Tufekci argued effectively, what we’ve learned in the past decade is that mobilization on social media is far from a silver bullet, and has real costs alongside benefits; but it is a source of enormous power.As we read, day in day out, about online mobilization of the far right, disinformation and propaganda, and imagine new ways for networks to police their users’ radical politics, let’s not forget that radically decentralized protest has worked across the political spectrum, pursuing liberatory and oppressive projects alike. Whatever powers of suppression we invest in the parties to the Invisible Handshake will be at least as available to would-be authoritarians are they are to would-be egalitarians, and likely more so because of the shamelessness of the former.Democratically governed critical infrastructures are central to the power of a citizens’ strike. On January 18, 2012, ProPublica recorded 80 supporters and 31 opponents of SOPA/PIPA. On January 19, the ratio in favor had shifted from 80:31 to 65:101. By January 20, the ratio would continue to go against passage of the bills to 55:205.What happened on January 18 was the Internet Blackout, when thousands of sites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, blacked out. What happened was a massive citizens strike, but it was centrally anchored around democratically governed critical infrastructures, none more critical than Wikipedia.Yes, I know, Wikipedia is far from a utopian democratic public sphere. And yet, here was the world’s most important knowledge utility shut down following extensive public debate, in which over 2,000 Wikipedia editors participated, because the community reached a conclusion to shut it down to stop a grave threat to the core values of the community.Other than Wikipedia itself, there are no other democratically produced and governed pieces of Internet infrastructure on a global scale. There continue to be efforts at platform and open cooperatives, and periodically open source alternative platforms are developed. But we all know that more and more of our online infrastructures are fully commoditized and controlled centrally.That’s why the protests of employees of those companies have become such a critical dimension of democratic resistance. But increasingly internet activism of this type is limited to consumer boycotts or ethical consumption, which usually garners more symbolic support than actual behavioral change. With the overwhelming corporatization and enclosure of all levels of the infrastructure, we are losing a critical base of power for democratic accountability that can be based outside of the twin pillars of crony capitalism.Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

This week Representatives Anna Eshoo and Jan Schakowsky, and Senator Cory Booker introduced the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, which the trio proclaim will dismantle the snoopvertising industry and make everybody immeasurably safer:

Missouri Governor Mike Parson is perhaps best known these days for trying to convert a right-click menu option into criminal hacking with his relentless (and relentlessly uninformed) desire to turn the people who exposed a security flaw in the state's Department of Education website into nefarious criminals.Governor Parson seems to believe intimidation is better than accountability. Whatever can be used to deter normal people from exposing the shortcomings of better people (i.e., government employees) is fair game. For years, the state's public records law have served this same purpose: increasing the distance between the state's government and the lowly people who have the misfortune of living in this state.In 2016, the state's laws were used to justify something that looked a whole lot like extortion. Non-profit group Reclaim the Records asked the state for birth and death records dating back to 1910. To be sure, this was a big ask. But it wasn't nearly as big as the state agency portrayed it. According to the state's Department of Health and Senior Services, compiling these records for release would involve more than 23,000 hours of labor at $42.50 an hour, resulting in a $1.5 million bill for services rendered.This wasn't acceptable to Reclaim the Records, which chose to hire a lawyer rather than issue a $1.5 million check to the Missouri government. Once the group lawyered up, the DHSS changed tack, informing Reclaim the Records it simply wouldn't be releasing the data at all. It became apparent the agency was only interested in profiting from information it was required to collect and compile. Any third-party with enough money could buy this data from the DHSS. But public records requesters were being asked to pay full retail plus a sizable markup for information the agency was obligated to turn over to them.A few years later, the transparency rating of the state and its "sunshine law" took another hit when the state's attorney general arrived in court to argue the government had a First Amendment right to withhold records. The AG deliberately conflated rights afforded to residents (the protection that allows them to make complaints about government officials without fear of retaliation) with the state government's nonexistent right to withhold records under the First Amendment.With the state governor and his office undoubtedly facing hundreds of public records requests related to his inexplicable decision to treat responsible reporting of security flaws as criminal hacking, the governor's office is backing (and directing) efforts that will make it more difficult for public records requesters to obtain documents and data from government agencies.

When we've talked about any plans to put in online DRM pings when it comes to console gaming, we've typically centered that discussion around the console makers themselves. For older Xbox consoles and, well, all things Nintendo, this has been a particularly annoying problem. Nintendo wanting online checks is just so on brand so as to be only mildly annoying. If you buy Nintendo, you know what you're getting. Microsoft's plan to have online checks for the Xbox made less sense. Piracy of console games isn't nonexistent, but it isn't exactly a massively huge problem given the technical know-how needed in order to use pirated games on modern consoles. Even for game publishers like Activision Blizzard, which has found itself in the headlines for entirely more significant reasons as of late, DRM was typically only included on PC ports of games, not on the console versions themselves.Until now, it seems. Owners of Diablo 2 Resurrected have discovered that it has an online check that makes the game unplayable if the game hasn't checked in within 30 days, even on consoles.

It's no secret the Chinese government wants to control its population through pervasive surveillance. It's also no secret the government wants very badly to eliminate a certain sector of its population with (in every sense of the words) extreme prejudice.China's minority Uighur Muslim population presents an existential threat to a government that is tasked with controlling the hearts and minds of billions of residents. The Uighurs don't buy into the government narrative or whatever passes for a national religion in a country where almost every religious expression has been suppressed.The Chinese government claims to have no national religion. This may be true. But it will only tolerate so many, and Islam isn't one of them. The government has engaged in the mass disappearance of this minority. And it has done so with an alarming amount of assistance from non-Chinese entities, ranging from American tech companies to foreign government officials.It's not like anyone's having trouble divining the Chinese government's intent when it comes to its Uighur population. But even multinational entities charged with keeping the (worldwide) peace and preventing large-scale human rights abuses are giving China what it wants.Enter the United Nations, which has apparently become Nations United Against Uighurs, according to this report for Newsweek by Josh Feldman:

Last week, we wrote about how entertainer/magician Criss Angel sent a ridiculous threat letter to comedian/magician Harrison Greenbaum after Harrison created a parody website/menu gently mocking Criss Angel's bizarrely named restaurant, CABLP. Greenbaum had announced on Twitter that he wasn't going to stand for this kind of bullying, and apparently he made the very smart decision to have Public Citizen Litigation Group lawyer Paul Levy respond on his behalf. If you've been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you should probably know that if you're on the receiving end of a letter from Paul Levy, you've probably done something very dumb. But, damn, Paul's letters are just so entertaining -- you can just picture the grin on his face as he writes these. And I'm not going to mention all the puns/references to magic, because I'll let you spot them all on your own.It opens up pretty much as you'd expect: this is the situation, your client sent a dumb letter demanding ridiculous things, and no, my client isn't going to cave to your demands:

This week (January 18) marks the ten-year anniversary of the successful campaign against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States. This proposed legislation threw up grave challenges to the future of an open Internet, including freedom of expression and access to information, by creating a blacklist of censored websites to be blocked and made inaccessible to the public.Although originally intended to target websites having copyrighted and illegal content, this legislation potentially threatened websites containing political and dissident ideas. Joining this fight were a host of organizations in the private sector and civil society who fought for a free Internet.An integral part of the fight was the campaign to ensure that anti-censorship tools were protected. In the world envisaged by the SOPA, anti-censorship tools like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), could be banned. VPNs are legitimately used to ensure privacy and anonymity while accessing the Internet. They are also used to access content such as critical commentary or dissident ideas which might have been blocked online in some country contexts.That would have been the worst possible outcome for people including journalists, whistleblowers, human rights defenders and others who depend on them for secure access to censored material online and for whom these tools allow secure transmission of sensitive information. This would have been true for the United States, and the effect on the American market would have had knock-on effects on the range of products available in other countries.Although the SOPA fight was won, this fight is far from over in other areas of the world.Just last week (week of January 9), the Nigerian government finally unblocked Twitter after blocking it for 7 months, beginning June 4 2021. Seven months prior, Twitter removed a Tweet by the Nigerian President in which he threatened the Igbo ethnic group who were agitating for an independent state away from Nigeria. Twitter deemed the Tweet in violation of its rules. The Nigerian government thought otherwise and in response ordered Nigerians to stop using Twitter and instructed ISPs to cut off access to Twitter from the Nigerian cyberspace, commencing the indefinite suspension of Twitter.Nigerians largely ignored the order not to Tweet, recognizing it as a violation of their fundamental human rights to expression and opinion. Nevertheless, Twitter was now censored in the country and could only be accessed via VPNs by millions of Nigerians whose rush to download VPNs saw a huge spike in VPN adoption from the country by over 1400%.ExpressVPN, a popular VPN service, reported a 200% increase in downloads from Nigeria on June 6, two days after the Twitter ban. The successful impact of VPNs as anti-censorship tools for accessing Twitter in Nigeria could be observed via Nigerian topics and conversations trending in countries such as Canada and the Netherlands where VPNs used as exit nodes.The Nigerian government responded to those who continued to use Twitter through VPNs by threatening legal action but relented after public backlash.However, this is not the case everywhere. An avenue they could have explored was the blocking of VPN services in the country. Russia’s ongoing blocking of the Tor anonymity network and the blocking of VPNs by the Great Chinese FireWall is a case which demonstrates that anti-censorship tools are vulnerable targets for blocking. Australia is another country where VPN use has been threatened. When anti-censorship tools are blocked, it becomes much harder to access the open Internet.On this anniversary of the campaign against SOPA, we must never lose sight of the broader, ongoing global fight against an open Internet. An important struggle in this fight is to ensure that anti-censorship tool use remains legal and access to them is unfettered. Particularly as we grapple with a world where there is Great Power competition — and thrown in this rivalry are competing versions of how free the Internet should be, what content should be allowed and whether these tools should be freely accessible.Drawing from the success of the SOPA campaign and the lessons from that struggle — including the indispensable role of a broad and determined coalition in the fight for an open Internet, we can ensure that we dig in and continue the resistance which secures and expands its gains, especially across borders.Babatunde Okunoye is a researcher on digital society, particularly in the context of the global south. This post was originally posted on his Medium.This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Just as we're in the midst of a Greenhouse series all about SOPA, copyright industry lobbyists, and former copyright industry lawyers now running the Copyright Office are conspiring to make copyright law worse and to favor Hollywood and give the big giant legacy copyright companies more control and power over the internet.And, yet, we pay almost no attention to how they massively abuse the power they already have under copyright law to silence people. The latest example is the book review blog, Fantasy Book Critic. I'd link to it, but as I'm writing this all you now see is a message that says "Sorry, the blog at fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com has been removed."Why? Because two of the largest publishing companies in the world, Penguin Random House and HarperCollins, hired a ridiculously incompetent service provider called "Link-Busters" which specializes in bullshit automated DMCA takedowns for the publishing industry. Link-Busters' website looks like basically all of these sketchy, unreliable services, promising to "protect IP" and (even more ridiculously) "turn piracy into profits."The company also claims on its website that "you can be assured your work will be protected to the fullest extent," and also: "According to multiple independent metrics, Link-Busters quarantines and/or eliminates more pirated content than other anti-piracy services." Of course, it's easy to get more things taken down if you don't give a shit as to whether or not it's actually infringing. And apparently, that is Link-Busters' secret sauce: sending bogus DMCA takedowns for things like book review websites.On Monday, Link-Busters, on behalf of Penguin Random House and HarperCollins sent over 50 bullshit takedown notices to Google, claiming that various reviews on Fantasy Book Critic were actually infringing copies of the books they were reviewing. Each notice listed many, many blog posts on the site. This is just a small sample of four such notices.The actual notices do contain some links to websites that appear to have pirated copies of some books available, but also lots of links to Fantasy Book Critic's reviews. The whole thing just seems incredibly sloppy by Link-Busters. Some of the "allegedly infringing" books in some of these notices didn't even include links to allegedly infringing pages.And then some show the only allegedly "infringing" links being... Fantasy Book Critic's reviews:That link, which again, does not exist any more, can be seen on the Internet Archive where you see that not only is it clearly a review, and not piracy, but it directly links visitors to places where they can buy the book. Turning piracy into profits, huh? By taking down review sites pushing people to places where they can buy the book?Of course, the real problem here is that there are no consequences whatsoever for Link-Busters or Penguin Random House or HarperCollins. While the DMCA has Section 512(f), which is supposed to punish false notifiers, in practice it is a dead letter. This means, Link-Busters can spam Google with wild abandon with blatantly false DMCA notices and facezero consequences. But, more importantly, publishing giants like Penguin Random House and HarperCollins (which are currently suing libraries for offering lendable ebooks), can get away with this abuse of the law over and over again.Fantasy Book Critic was reduced to begging on Twitter for Google to look more closely at Link-Busters bogus notifications and to restore their blog. They even contacted Link-Busters which admitted that they fucked up (though, perhaps they should have checked before sending these bogus notices?)

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The SOPA blackouts of 2012 marked an important milestone in the power of online activism to influence policy at the highest levels, but it would be a mistake to view it as either the start or the end of the struggle it represents. It is still among the most strikingly-effective examples to date, but it built on years of policy work that continues to this day.Online activism is notoriously poorly preserved, and it rarely produces the salient visuals of offline protests. Massive crowds of people taking part in an online action can’t be photographed extending down city blocks; no hand-painted signs with powerful slogans or sea of faces with resolute determination will become the iconic image representing the moment.As a result, it’s easier to forget the early Web blackouts of 1996 protesting the passage of the Communications Decency Act, or the Gray Tuesday event of copyright civil disobedience in 2004, to name a few I spoke about the legacy of these three events, taken together, at re:publica 2014).The SOPA protests provided a counter-example, in part, both because of the memorable visuals of the online “blackouts” and the in-person events coordinated in cities around the country. Images of Aaron Swartz, who had been a key organizer against the bill, addressing crowds at a New York rally illustrated articles about the online protests.As important as the unprecedented scale of the online actions was the reception by the press, the public, and the political sphere. The SOPA blackout represented a moment of online grassroots activism demanding to be taken seriously, and getting the coverage and reception it deserved. Every major news outlet reported on the protests and, as an indicator of its prominence, each of the candidates vying for the Republican nomination for president were asked onstage about SOPA at a January 19 debate — surely a first for a copyright proposal. Their criticism was ample evidence of the cracks in the bill’s inevitability.One long-term effect of the SOPA blackouts: it has seemed to meaningfully shift, perhaps permanently, the policy environment around copyright in particular. In 2011 and early 2012, SOPA appeared to be inevitable, in part because earlier industry-favored copyright proposals had both passed with near unanimity and withstood challenges that laid their irrationality bare.After SOPA’s flame-out, it no longer seems like copyright law is something that can be hammered out by industry representatives behind closed doors (admittedly, this shift has corresponded with the rise of tech companies as lobbying giants with a different copyright agenda than the existing players, which has surely played a role). As just one example: In 2011, SOPA was inevitable, but so was an eventual expansion to the Copyright Term Extension Act, continuing the public domain freeze that had been running since 1998. Of course, that never came to pass, and the public domain has grown on January 1 every year since 2019.That change wasn’t the result of the “war being won” — far from it. Increasing the costs of pushing through copyright policy has mostly shifted the battlegrounds in two major ways.First, big changes to how copyright gets enforced in the United States happen through private agreements with online platforms. YouTube’s ContentID system already existed in 2012, but the importance of that tool and others like it has increased immensely in the years since. The result is a landscape of platforms that do what Professor Annemarie Bridy has called “DMCA-plus enforcement,” extending the effective contours of copyright without a change in the law.If there is an upside to this arrangement, it has been that actual copyright law discussions have had the heat turned down slightly, and may have become less of a fact-free zone. It’s hard to play out the counterfactual, but I think the right-to-repair movement and the Music Modernization Act have been beneficiaries of this change.Second, and perhaps more nefariously, copyright proposals that had been proxies for regulating online speech more broadly have migrated to other areas of the law. Most notably in the past decade, these attacks have focused on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In some cases, the overlap is almost comical, like when op-eds pushing for changes cite the wrong law, and the New York Times has to issue a correction. In other moments the effect is more depressing. Watching FOSTA/SESTA skate through to passage, despite all the organizing against it, was a low point for online speech.In my work with journalists today, copyright continues to be a chokepoint for silencing unfavorable reporting, but it is only one arrow in the quiver of would-be censors. We see police officers attempting to limit the distribution of their statements by playing mainstream music in the background, or right-wing activists issuing takedowns for newsworthy photographs documenting their associations, but we also see frivolous SLAPP suits by elected officials, a dramatic rise in arrests and assaults on journalists, and existential legal threats to entire outlets.The overwhelming majority of people who are passionate about freedom of expression and access to knowledge online aren’t paid to work on those issues. I have been very lucky that, since 2011 I have been able to focus on these important topics as my job, first at the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a copyright activist, and now as the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. SOPA was among the very first issues I worked on in this field, and I’ve carried its lessons through the decade of activism that I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in.Parker Higgins is the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. From 2011 to 2017, he worked on the activism team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright and speech issues.This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

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. The whole feud has been fairly bizarre, with the FAA refusing to transparently "show its math" at several points, but taking the time to leak its scary claims to select press outlets.More specifically: the FAA (and a big chunk of the airline industry) 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 if you implement some fairly basic safety precautions (like limiting deployments immediately around airports, and utilizing a 220 MHz guard band that will remain unused as a buffer to prevent this theoretical interference).The FCC says there's not actually a problem here. And the wireless industry, having spent billions of dollars on middle band spectrum, obviously wants to move forward with deployment. Especially given criticism that U.S. 5G underperforms many overseas deployments thanks to a dearth of middleband spectrum. The U.S. has deployed substantial low band 5G spectrum (great range, lower speeds), and high band millimeter wave spectrum (poor range, poor building penetration, great speeds), but unlike many nations overseas, not much middle band (both good speeds and good range).The whole C-band mess escalated significantly this week after the CEOs of several major airlines issued a public letter effectively proclaiming their businesses would grind to a halt if wireless carriers continue to deploy 5G in these spectrum ranges:

There is no "going dark." Despite the FBI's protestations otherwise -- mostly embodied by FBI directors with axes to grind and narratives to sell -- investigators aren't finding encryption to be much of an impediment.The FBI claimed -- using stats irrationally inflated by (according to the FBI) malfunctioning software -- that law enforcement agencies were drowning in devices whose content they couldn't access. That turned out to be a lie. Perhaps it wasn't a deliberate lie but it had certainly proved convenient. Once the FBI recognized its error, it promised to deliver an accurate count. In May 2018, the DOJ and FBI promised to release an updated number. The agencies still have yet to do so.That brings us to the events of last January, when a bunch of dipshits decided the only way to restore democracy was to destroy it. A raid on the Capitol building in Washington DC -- egged on by lame duck president Donald Trump and a handful of Congressional toadies -- culminated in BlueLivesMatter hashtaggers attacking cops who stood between them and their twisted perception of justice. The effort failed, but the stain on American history -- perpetrated by self-declared "patriots" -- will last forever.Since then, the FBI and DOJ have engaged in hundreds of investigations and prosecutions. The OPSEC of Capitol raiders was sometimes nearly nonexistent, but more than a few participants knew enough to utilize encrypted services for their communications. The fact that the government has investigated, arrested, and charged hundreds of Capitol raiders shows encryption isn't holding it back.The blockbuster indictment brought against several members of the Oath Keepers -- one that includes seldom-seen sedition charges -- makes it clear the FBI still has plenty of options when it comes to dealing with encryption.

It's funny sometimes how quickly a company can go from being known for making a great product to being known for being a litigious intellectual property bully. And if that doesn't accurately describe the heel-turn pulled off by the folks behind PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, then I don't know what does. To be clear, PUBG, as it's lovingly referred to, was a groundbreaking video game. While the game didn't invent the battle royale concept, it certainly ushered that genre into an era. And just like any breakthrough genres suddenly having success, that means others are going to start trying their own hands at the genre. While plenty of other entrants have gotten into the battle royale game, PUBG has fought battles with several of them, most notably Epic's Fortnite title.Now, while PUBG has managed to get some settlements out of other legal action against battle royale game developers, it's worth noting that it ended up dropping its suit against Epic. Why? Well, because unlike some of its other targets, Epic has a huge legal war chest of its own to fight back. And, as tends to be the case with PUBG's suits, all of its complaints were over non-protectable elements of those games. Much of what is in these suits that PUBG files are for supposed copyright infringement of what ends up being ideas, rather than specific expression. The battle royale concept, for instance, or the manner in which some of the gameplay is conducted, are not protectable expression, but mere ideas for a genre of games.Well, the PUBG folks are at it again, with publisher Krafton suing Garena over its Free Fire mobile game. Apple and Google are also named in the suit, both of them for putting Free Fire on their app stores, and Google additionally for hosting some videos of the game's gameplay and other footage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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