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Earlier this week we wrote about the absolutely ridiculous coalition of folks who were lobbying against the US supporting a TRIPS intellectual property waiver to support fighting COVID. As we noted, it was totally expected that Big Pharma would object to it, but the surprising thing was seeing Hollywood and the legacy entertainment industry -- an industry that needs COVID to go away to get back to normal -- coming out strongly against the waiver as well. They claimed they had to do so since the waiver would apply to copyright as well, but that's nonsense. The waiver (1) explicitly excluded entertainment products and (2) is expressly limited to "prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19."On top of that, the waiver process was built into the TRIPS agreement, and if a full on global pandemic that has already killed over 3 million people (and counting) isn't the time to use the waiver, then the waiver is effectively meaningless.Thankfully, the US has now announced that it will be supporting a waiver. USTR Katherine Tai made the announcement:

Summary: There is an inherent tension in handling content moderation of world leaders -- especially more controversial ones. If those leaders break the rules on social media, some reasonably call for the content, or the accounts, to be removed for violating policies. Others, however, point out that it is important for the public to be aware of what world leaders are saying, rather than removing and hiding the speech.Twitter has had a public interest exception for tweets from world leaders since at least 2019. Under that policy, Twitter may choose to leave up some content from a world leader that the company admits violates its rules, under the belief that it is more important that the world know what that leader has said. Since 2019, Twitter announced that when it found such content, it would label it clearly -- publicly noting that it violated the company’s policies, but was being kept up due to the public interest.The policy was put to the test in October 2020, following the murder of a teacher in a Paris suburb, after the teacher had shown students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad while discussing the controversy over such drawings. A week later, three people were stabbed in Nice, in southern France. French President Emmanuel Macron described both attacks as “Islamist terrorist attacks."Soon after the latter attack, former prime minister of Malaysia Mahathir Bin Mohamad posted a Twitter thread discussing both attacks. While the thread touched on a variety of points, urged people not to scapegoat entire religions, and said he did not approve of the killings, the twelfth tweet raised many concerns by stating: "Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past."Twitter posted its public interest notice on this particular tweet, noting that it violated Twitter’s rules about glorifying violence, but Twitter felt that it “may be in the public’s interest for the tweet to remain accessible.”Many disagreed with this decision, including French officials. France’s digital minister, Cédric O, claimed that if Twitter did not remove the tweet, it would make the company an “accomplice to a formal call for murder.”Decisions to be made by Twitter:

One of the nice things about being a telecom giant in a country with limited competition, feckless politicians and hog-tied regulators is there isn't much in the way of accountability. As a major broadband provider like Charter or Comcast, you're allowed to monopolize the telecom market, jack up prices, elbow out competitors, then lobby state and federal government to ensure nobody does anything about it. Hell, thanks to a timid press that can't call a spade a spade, half the time nobody can even be bothered to point out that you're a monopoly in the first place.In US telecom, regional monopolies like Charter and Comcast continue to dominate market share as residential telcos effectively retreat from network expansion in any areas that aren't profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street's liking. Unfortunately for them, they still have to deal with rising competition on the video end of their businesses.But as the pay TV sector gets more competitive thanks to streaming, these telecom monopolies can simply extract their pound of flesh from captive broadband customers. Charter Communications, (which operates under the brand name Spectrum), lost another 156,000 residential pay TV subscribers in the first quarter, a notable uptick from the 70,000 pay TV subscribers lost during the same quarter a year ago. The reasons aren't mysterious: users are fleeing endless price hikes and some of the worst customer service in America for the cheaper, more flexible, more consumer friendly TV offerings of streaming operators.Cable companies' broadband customers would be doing the same thing but they can't because there are no other options to flee to. This is then interpreted by cable executives as something caused by their own innate business genius:

There's been plenty of talk lately about the "Techlash" which has become a popular term among the media and politicians. However, what if the general public feels quite differently? Vox, which is not exactly known for carrying water for the tech industry, has released a new poll that shows that the public is overwhelmingly optimistic about technology, and thinks that technology has been a force for good in the world. This applies across the board for Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

Today is Facebook Oversight Board Hysteria Day, because today is the day that the Facebook Oversight Board has rendered its decision about Facebook's suspension of Donald Trump. And it has met the moment with an appropriately dull decision, dripping in pedantic reasonableness, that is largely consistent with our Copia Institute recommendation.If you remember, we were hesitant about submitting a comment at all. And the reaction to the Board's decision bears out why. People keep reacting as though it is some big, monumental, important decision, when, in actual fact, it isn't at all. In the big scheme of things, it's still just a private company being advised by its private advisory board on how to run its business, nothing more. As it is, Trump himself is still on the Internet – it's not like Facebook actually had the power to silence him. We need to be worried about when there actually is power to silence people, and undue concern about Facebook's moderation practices only distracts us from them. Or, worse, leads people to try to create actual law that will end up having the effect of giving others the legal power to suppress expressive freedom.So our pride here is necessarily muted, because ultimately this decision just isn't that big a deal. Still, as a purely internal advisory decision, one intended to help the company act more consistently in the interests of its potential user base, it does seem to be a good one given how it hews to our key points.First, we made the observation that then-President Trump's use of his Facebook account threatened real, imminent harm. We did, however, emphasize the point that it was generally better to try not to delete speech (or speakers). Nevertheless, sometimes it might need to be done, and in those cases it should be done "with reluctance and only limited, specific, identifiable, and objective criteria to justify the exception." There might not ultimately be a single correct decision, we wrote, for whether speech should be left up or taken down. "[I]n the end the best decision may have little to do with the actual choice that results but rather the process used to get there."And this sort of reasoning is basically at the heart of the Board's decision: Trump's posts were serious enough to justify a sanction, including a suspension, but imposing the indefinite suspension appeared to be unacceptably arbitrary. Per the Board, Facebook needs to make these sorts of decisions consistently and transparently from here on out.

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Australian mining billionaire and former politician Clive Palmer has been hit with a $1.5-million judgement over unauthorized use of the song "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister. The suit was brought by Universal Music after, as part of a 2019 political campaign, Palmer made videos using a modified version of the song with the lyrics "Australia ain’t gonna cop it, no Australia’s not gonna cop it, Aussies not gonna cop it any more". Setting aside the rather questionable scansion, it's a pretty obvious modification of the famous song, giving it at least a chance of qualifying for the fair dealing exception for parody and satire that exists under Australian copyright law. But in a ruling today the court has rejected that argument entirely:

So we've noted for a long time how efforts to monopolize repair have resulted in a growing, bipartisan interest in right to repair legislation in more than a dozen states. Whether it's Sony and Microsoft's efforts to monopolize game console repair, Apple's tendency to monopolize phone repair (and bully independent repair shops), or John Deere making its tractors a costly nightmare to fix, a sustained backlash has been growing against draconian DRM, rampant abuse of copyright, and other behaviors that make repairing products you own as annoying and expensive as possible.Granted this anger has extended into the medical arena, where the problem isn't just a costly hassle, it's a matter of life and death. This was particularly true during COVID, given many hardware manufacturers made getting access to repair manuals and parts cumbersome and expensive, if not impossible. As such, several states (including Texas) have been pushing both right to repair legislation that generally protects consumers, as well as legislation that takes aim at device manufacturers that make it an expensive headache for hospitals to repair their own equipment in a timely fashion.Granted as more and more states push such legislation, more and more companies have taken to pushing misleading claims about what this legislation does. Whether it's Apple's attempt to claim that such legislation will turn states into "meccas for hackers" (which sounds kind of cool, honestly), or the auto industry's false claim that such laws will help sexual predators, there's been no shortage of sleazy efforts to undermine such laws using specious reasoning and unethical claims. And given that legislative efforts keep getting blocked, it has proven pretty effective.Enter the Wall Street Journal, which this week joined the fun with a nonsensical editorial claiming that medical device right to repair legislation being pushed in Texas is somehow harmful to human health. The piece basically just consists of several paragraphs of author Tom Giovanetti lauding the miraculous innovation of copyright, while claiming the bipartisan right to repair movement is some kind of "leftist" plot. Why would the activist and reform groups operating on a shoestring budget do this? They hate innovation, apparently:

In a few hours, the Oversight Board will announce its decision regarding Facebook's decision to ban Donald Trump from its platform. As we noted back when Trump was removed from Twitter and Facebook, Trump does not lack in ways to be heard. Indeed, we suggested that he could very, very easily set up his own website with tweet-like statements, and it was likely that those would be shared widely.And... as we wait for the Oversight Board ruling, it looks like Trump has done exactly that. He's launched a new blog site that has short Tweet-style posts, and includes simple sharing buttons so people can post the text to both Twitter and Facebook:It's not hard to see how that... looks quite like his Twitter feed. For what it's worth, a friend notes that while you can "like" Trump's new missives, you cannot unlike them once you've done so (this is a metaphor for something, I'm sure).The messages on the site go back to March 24, even though the site was just launched today, so it makes you wonder if this is the infamous rumored result of Trump writing down "insults and observations" that he would have said on Twitter if he still had an account.In a video he currently has posted to the top of the site, announcing the site, Trump says that it will be "a beacon of freedom" and "a place to speak freely and safely" (whatever that means). It's unclear if they just mean for Trump himself, or if this is the rumored first pass of his own social network.Either way, if he doesn't let anyone else post to the site, under his own definition of censorship, wouldn't that mean that he's censoring everyone but himself? Or, if he does allow others to post, it will be absolutely fascinating to see what content moderation policies he ends up putting in place. The existing terms of service on the site makes it clear that he wants to be able to moderate everything:

An attorney in Virginia found out what happens when you make cops angry. According to Cathy Reynolds' lawsuit, the Roanoke PD targeted her for some extra attention after she successfully defended her stepson from murder charges.Prosecutors really wanted Darreonta Reynolds for murder, but security camera footage from the convenience store where the shooting took place appeared to show Reynolds shooting Jean De Dieu Nkurunziza in self-defense when Nkurunziza came after him with a gun. The jury agreed with the defense's case, acquitting Reynolds after ninety minutes of deliberation.This apparently angered someone somewhere in the Roanoke Police Department because this is what happened next. From the lawsuit [PDF]:

The past several years have done a lot to expose the failings of the "marketplace of ideas", as disinformation and harassment campaigns have shown an ability to spread and flourish despite ample amounts of counterspeech. This triumph of mob behavior, especially on Twitter, has challenged a lot of people's preconceptions about how free speech functions, and one person who has been exploring these issues is FIRE's Sarah McLaughlin, especially in two topical articles on her Substack. She joins us on this week's episode to discuss Twitter, free speech, and the challenge mob behavior presents to online discourse.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Tomorrow, the Oversight Board is set to reveal its opinion on whether Facebook made the right decision in banning former President Trump. And that will get tons of attention. But the Board came out with an interesting decision last week regarding a content takedown in India, that got almost no attention at all.Just last week, we wrote about an ongoing issue in India, where the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has failed in almost every way possible in dealing with the COVID pandemic, but has decided the best thing to focus on right now is silencing critics on Twitter. That backdrop is pretty important considering that the very next day, the Oversight Board scolded Facebook for taking down content criticizing Modi's government.That takedown was somewhat different and the context was very different. Also, it should be noted that as soon as the Oversight Board agreed to take the case, Facebook admitted it had made a mistake and reinstated the content. However, this case demonstrates something important that often gets lost in all of the evidence free hand-wringing about "anti-conservative bias" from people who wrongly insist that Facebook and Twitter only moderate the accounts of their friends. The truth is that content all across the board gets moderated -- and often the impact is strongest on the least powerful groups. But, of course, part of their lack of power is that they're unable to rush onto Fox News and whine about how they're being "censored."The details here are worth understanding, not because there was some difficult decision to make. Indeed, as noted already, Facebook realized it made a mistake almost immediately after the Oversight Board decided to look into this, and when asked why the content was taken down, basically admitted that it had no idea and that it was a complete and total mistake. Here was the content, as described by the Oversight Board ruling:

Let's be clear about something. The U.S. doesn't really do "accountability" particularly well. It's a major reason why we often repeat the same mistakes over and over again without learning much from history or experience. That's been made particularly clear by a U.S. press that continues to not only platform the insurrectionists who spread election fraud lies leading to the violent events of January 6, but treats these lies as valid and meaningful opinions. That, understandably, has led to concerns that it's going to happen again. But worse.Case in point is the Washington Post, which this week decided, for whatever reason, to give Senator Josh Hawley oodles of free publicity for his latest book. Washington Post Live hosted Hawley as part of a chat, providing him ample free marketing for his book complaining about the "tyranny of big tech" (tyrannically sold by Amazon, and heavily marketed by Hawley on Twitter). Not only that, the Post couldn't be bothered to craft an accurate bio for Hawley, instead using the one provided by his publicist that paints Hawley in an aggressively inauthentic light:Not too surprisingly, the Post marketing doesn't really bother to inform readers that Hawley's anti-monopolist credentials are largely nonexistent. Like most of the GOP, it's literally impossible to find an instance where Hawley, for example, so much as criticized a telecom monopoly. And, like most of the press, it's rare you'll find outlets like the Washington Post pointing out that a primary platform of the GOP for forty fucking years has been to encourage monopolization, whether we're talking about telecom, airlines, banking, or countless other marginally competitive and largely broken U.S. business sectors.The GOP isn't engaged in histrionics over "big tech" because it genuinely cares about monopolization or unchecked corporate power. Decades of policy history make it abundantly clear that's not remotely true.The GOP is angry at big tech because a handful of social media companies belatedly started policing disinformation and race-baiting, cornerstones of party power and recruitment in the face of an aging, sagging, and shifting electorate. There are plenty of very valid criticisms of "big tech," but the U.S. press seems incapable of acknowledging that many of the GOP's concerns on this front aren't entirely in good faith.NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has long lamented the U.S. media's obsession with the "view from nowhere," and how this undermines accountability while letting bad actors off the hook. Rosen wasn't particularly impressed with the Post offering free book marketing to a guy who just got done spending months filling the American public's heads with dangerous fluff and nonsense, and shows absolutely nothing that could be mistaken as contrition in the wake of January 6:

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We were quite perplexed in late 2019 when Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff (never one to shy away from expressing his opinions on anything at all) announced that Section 230 should be abolished. It seemed like an extremely poorly thought-out statement from a CEO who was wholly unfamiliar with the issues, but who has sort of relished tweaking the noses of the big consumer internet companies over the past few years (after spending the first decade or so of Software.com's existence tweaking the noses of enterprise software companies). As we wrote at the time, Benioff didn't seem to understand 230 at all, and seemed just angry at Facebook.Of course, this is coming back to bite him hard. Just a few months later, lawyer Annie McAdams, who seems to have made it her life's mission to file blatantly silly attacks on Section 230 in court, sued Salesforce.com (and not for the first time!), claiming that because Backpage.com had used Salesforce as its CRM system, Salesforce was somehow magically liable for any sex trafficking that happened on the platform. In the complaint, McAdams cited Benioff's comments:

We've noted repeatedly how fifth-generation wireless (5G) was painfully over-hyped. To spike lagging smartphone and network hardware sales, carriers, equipment makers, and the lawmakers paid to love them spent years insisting that 5G would change the world, ushering forth amazing new cancer cures and the revolutionary smart cities of tomorrow. But while 5G is an important evolutionary step toward faster, more resilient networks, it's more of an evolution than a revolution, particularly here in the US, and most of the loftier claims have proven to be a bit hollow.Several studies have now shown how US 5G is significantly slower than overseas networks, thanks in part to our failure to push more high speed, high-range middleband spectrum to market. And within the United States, many 5G networks have shown to actually be slower than 4G. Throughout this, Verizon has particularly hyped its millimeter wave "ultrawideband" (mmWave) flavor of 5G, which offers ultra-fast speeds, but struggles a bit with range and things like building wall penetration.But a new OpenSignal report indicates that despite years of hype, Verizon's ultra-fast 5G variant is only actually available to consumers with 5G-capable phones around 0.8% of the time:To be clear, the speeds seen on Verizon's ultrawideband 5G network have reached 692.9 Mbps, an incredible benchmark for wireless service. But those kinds of speeds are only really useful if they're consistently available, and they simply... aren't:

Way back in 2016, we discussed how Blizzard was very busy shutting down fan-made and hosted World of Warcraft servers, pretending like intellectual property forced it to do so. At the time, these fan servers were hosting WoW's vanilla experience, mimicking what the game looked like upon first release, rather than then current iteration of the ever-evolving MMORPG. While Blizzard has since come out with a vanilla experience product of its own, at the time, these fan servers were filling a market desire for a product that didn't exist. Rather than figuring out a way to work with these fans, Blizzard just shut them down.And now it's all happening again with Riot, makers of League of Legends, an online game that similarly is ever-evolving. Fans of the game once more created a fan server that hosted the older, vanilla version of the game for those who wanted to play it that way. What makes this situation different, however, is that Riot only sent its C&D notice to the developers after the developers posted online an exchange they had with a Riot representative which took on a very 1920's wise guy tone.

The Fifth Circuit is the worst place to bring a civil rights lawsuit against law enforcement officers. But that may slowly be changing, thanks in part to the Supreme Court, which has played its own part in making qualified immunity an almost insurmountable obstacle in civil cases. Over the past few months, the Supreme Court has reversed and remanded two cases handled by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling that the lower court's extension of qualified immunity was the incorrect conclusion.This case [PDF] may reflect the Supreme Court's qualified immunity attitude adjustment. Or it just may be that there's no excusing what happened here: a man suffering a mental health crisis being helped to death by San Antonio (TX) police officers.Jesse Aguirre was reported to dispatchers by drivers on a heavily traveled eight-lane highway. Drivers noted Aguirre seemed to be "mentally disturbed" and possibly in danger of being injured or killed since he was walking on the thin media strip dividing the eight lanes of traffic. Officers arrived at the scene and things just kept getting worse for Aguirre. Fortunately, it was all documented by the dashcam on an officer's vehicle.Here's the first "offer" of "help" Aguirre received from a police officer:

A new poll from Morning Consult indicates that only around 14% of Americans think that communities should not be allowed to build and operate their own, local broadband networks:That of course operates in pretty stark contrast to the 18 states that have passed obnoxious laws, usually written by incumbent broadband providers, that hamstring such efforts or ban them entirely. That total used to be 19 (Arkansas eliminated many of their restrictions earlier this year), and will soon be 17 (given Washington State just passed a law eliminating its restrictions as well).The survey found that Democrats and urban residents are more likely that rural and Republican residents to support such options. But that too runs a bit in contrast with reality, given that the majority of community built broadband networks exist in more conservative leaning cities. Like a lot of tech subjects (net neutrality comes to mind), entrenched business interests have successfully framed community broadband as a "partisan issue," which is a great way to stall consensus on a subject you oppose for purely selfish, successful reasons.Industries, and the captured regulators and lawmakers who love them, adore demonizing such efforts as "socialism run amok" or automatic taxpayer boondoggles. But that's again not based on reason. Such efforts are an organic, grass roots reaction to market failure and monopolization. The efforts aren't pursued because their fun, they're pursued because Americans have, over thirty years, grown increasingly frustrated at the high cost, slow speeds, and terrible customer service that's the direct result of regional monopolization.Christopher Mitchell, one of the country's top experts on the subject, tells me that COVID has really highlighted how stupid and unnecessarily punitive such restrictions are. But overall, it has proven harder and harder for regional monopolies to buy laws restricting community broadband:

Rep. Lauren Boebert is one of the new crew of elected Republicans who claims to be "pro-Constitution" and "pro-freedom" but when you get down into the details, it seems that the only part of the Constitution that matters to her is the 2nd Amendment. The website for her campaign proudly states that she's "Standing for Freedom" and is "Pro-Freedom, Pro-Guns, Pro-Constitution."You do have to wonder if she skipped over the 1st Amendment in her rush to defend the 2nd, however. This morning, her press secretary Jake Settle (who came to her office after working on Mike Pence's communications team) sent quite a fascinating threat email to the operator of a Lauren Boebert parody site, TheLaurenBoebert.com.The operator of that site, comedy writer Toby Morton, tweeted an image of the letter this morning:

A couple years we wrote about What3Words, and noted that it was a clever system that created an easy way to allow people to better share exact locations in an easily communicated manner (every bit of the globe can be described with just 3 words -- so something like best.tech.blog is a tiny plot near Hanover, Ontario). While part of this just feels like fun, a key part of the company's marketing message is that the system is useful in emergency situations where someone needs to communicate a very exact location quickly and easily.However, as we noted in our article, as neat and clever as the idea is, it's very, very proprietary, and that could lead to serious concerns for anyone using it. In our article, we wrote about a bunch of reasons why What3Words and its closed nature could lead to problems -- including the fact that the earth is not static and things move around all the time, such that these 3 word identifiers may not actually remain accurate. But there were other problems as well.And, apparently one of those problems is that they're censorial legal bullies. Zach Whittaker has the unfortunate story of how What3Words unleashed its legal threat monkeys on a security researcher named Aaron Toponce. Toponce had been working with some other security researchers who had been highlighting some potentially dangerous flaws in the What3Words system beyond those we had mentioned a few years back. The key problem was that some very similar 3 word combos were very close to one another, such that someone relying on them in an emergency could risk sending people to the wrong location.The company insists that this is rare, but the research (mainly done by researcher Andrew Tierney) indicates otherwise. He seemed to find a fairly large number of similar 3 word combos near each other. You can really see this when Tierney maps out some closely related word combos:

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Throughout the COVID pandemic, it's been truly shameful to watch how patent maximalists have tried to insist that we just need more patents to deal with COVID -- even though the incredible breakthroughs that brought such quick development of vaccines were not due to patents, but rather the free and open flow of information from a bunch of researchers and scientists who didn't care about whether or not information was locked up for profit, but did care about saving millions of lives.And now that we've got vaccines, we're dealing with significant problems in rolling them out around the world -- and patents are often in the way, holding that rollout back. And we actually have a way of dealing with that: what's known as a TRIPS waiver. TRIPS is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, which set up a variety of standards among member nations and the WTO regarding intellectual property. I have many problems with TRIPS (and the WTO), but TRIPS does include a process to grant waivers on intellectual property rights. This was in response to (very legitimate!) concerns by less well off nations that rich nations would use the patent system to block access to important life saving medicines.So, to ease such concerns, the TRIPS agreement includes a process by which the WTO can grant a compulsory licensing regime that will allow others to make patented drugs, and thus increase availability. A key point of this so-called waiver is that it allows for better allocations of certain drugs during medical emergencies. Given that, issuing such a waiver right now seems like a no-brainer. But... it has not been.India and South Africa put forth a a fairly straightforward waiver request for dealing with COVID-19. The key part of the request is that intellectual property requirements under TRIPS solely in relation to the "prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19" should be waived during the course of the pandemic. It seems pretty straightforward. Even reliable patent maximalist sites like IP Watchdog are now publishing articles saying that the TRIPS waiver "is a necessary first step towards facilitating increased, rapid production of vaccines" and noting that it won't undermine the value of innovation in any way.We've already noted that Big Pharma is lobbying against it -- which is to be expected. However, what is perhaps less expected is the fact that Hollywood is vehemently lobbying against it as well. Why? Well, they claim that because the waiver is not limited to just patents, it will be used to wipe away copyright as well.This is... misleading at best. It is true that the waiver would cover copyrights, but only in an extremely limited fashion. As the part I quoted above notes, it only applies to intellectual property protections that are blocking the prevention, containment, and treatment of COVID-19. And, that can include a very limited set of copyrights. For example, there still remain shortages of ventilators in many parts of the world, and early on in the pandemic, people were working on 3D printing replacement parts to help deal with this extreme shortage. However, with some companies issuing threats over these 3D printed parts, there are legitimate concerns that copyright could be used to shut down such operations. Another area where a copyright waiver is likely to help is in allowing researchers easier access to important scientific journals and research that may help them develop more and better solutions.As if to make Hollywood calm down, South Africa and India included an explicit statement in the waiver request to say that the waiver cannot be used for entertainment products: "The waiver in paragraph 1 shall not apply to the protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms (Sound Recordings) and Broadcasting Organizations under Article 14 of the TRIPS Agreement." That's literally the 2nd paragraph in a four paragraph waiver request. Already, it's kind of insulting that officials crafting this waiver request in an attempt to save lives had to waste time making sure that Hollywood wouldn't get angry at them.And even then it didn't work.

For decades now, cable TV consumers have been subjected to idiotic cable TV "retransmission feuds" that black out content consumers pay for as broadcasters and cable operators bicker over rates. And while streaming TV was supposed to remedy many of the dumber aspects of the traditional cable TV model, that's not really happening. The names and gatekeepers are simply shifting.Case in point: last year, bickering between AT&T and Roku over ad data sharing and contract details prevented AT&T's HBO Max from appearing on Roku devices. Later on last year, Sinclair-owned CBS stations were pulled from Hulu completely because the two sides couldn't put on their big boy pants and agree to a new contract without taking it out on paying subscribers.This week, it's Roku and Google (YouTube TV) in a standoff that resulted in the YouTube TV app being pulled from the Roku channel store. YouTube TV (not to be confused with vanilla YouTube) is Google's live TV streaming alternative to traditional cable. Users who already have it installed can still use it, but those who just bought the service and want to install it can't do so as of today. Fortunately this isn't a full ban either, since there's still a workaround that involves casting content from your phone, tablet, or PC to the Roku in a way that's a little more cumbersome but doesn't require the YouTubeTV app.Why the hassle in the first place? Roku, in a statement earlier this week, claimed Google was abusing its "monopoly position" (which really doesn't make sense when talking about live streaming TV, where they're a relatively niche player) to do all sorts of dastardly things:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is CSMcDonald, who raised a specific issue with Marco Rubio's comparison of speech he doesn't like to pollution:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, the DOJ dropped one of its big cases over iPhone encryption after the defendant suddenly remembered his passcode, while documents revealed that the FBI hid surveillance techniques from federal prosecutors in case they one day became defense lawyers. The FBI was also planning to ignore any court orders telling it to reveal its Tor browser exploit, while another court was joining the crowd saying one of the agency's hacking tools constituted illegal searches. And that wasn't all for the FBI: we also learned that the $1.3-million price tag for unlocking Syed Farook's iPhone just got them the phone unlocked, not the details of the exploit. Meanwhile, Congress was pressing James Clapper to properly admit how many Americans are spied on by the NSA, and the House voted unanimously to require a warrant for email searches — although some rule changes approved by the Supreme Court were moving in the opposite direction.Ten years AgoThis week in 2011, everyone was trying to get a look at the supposedly-finished ACTA text, but negotiators were remaining secretive about it — although Homeland Security was complaining to the USTR that it was a threat to national security, one of its former officials was calling the text "a sweetheart deal for IP owners", and a CRS report (also withheld by the USTR) confirmed that the language was quite questionable. And it was confirmed that, as some suspected, the US was the lone holdout country refusing to release the full text. Meanwhile, Righthaven was smacked down by another judge (while continuing to make crazy demands in other cases), but we noted that even though copyright trolls were failing left and right in court, their shakedowns were still working.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, some questions were raised about whether music labels were honest to the DOJ regarding collusion on song download prices, while we also got a closer look at how inconvenient movie studio's new download offerings were, and the RIAA managed to once again sue a family that didn't own a computer. Schools were claiming "bandwidth scarcity" as the latest excuse to ban MySpace, while a prescient judge realized that internet use at work is normal and can't be the grounds for firing someone.

We have been banging the drum for some time now that the way the DMCA has been setup and is put in practice is wide, wide open for fraud and abuse. A huge part of the problem is how content owners police the internet in general, with the overwhelming majority of DMCA notices coming from bots and automated systems. Because of the imperfections of this technology, and our allowance of its use, the end result is that copyright policing on the internet is done with a shotgun rather than a scalpel, leading to all manner of mistakes and collateral damage. But even setting those instances aside, the fact is that DMCAing content on the internet requires so little in the way of verification that there is any true ownership of the content rights in question that bogus DMCA takedowns are the norm, not the exception. And, given how little consequence comes along with issuing a bogus DMCA notice, bad actors are practically encouraged to perform this sort of chicanery.This leads to all sorts of subterfuge from bad actors looking to fool the people or, more likely, the automated systems policing any of this. One story from Plagiarism Today serves as a nice primer on just how intricate and annoying these nefarious actors behave. Writer Victoria Strauss tells the story of having one of her online articles removed over a DMCA claim. Strauss was understandably confused, as she was absolutely the original writer of the piece, and so she went digging into the details.

Summary: Craigslist -- the online marketplace that pretty much still looks the way it looked when it went live all the way back in 1995 -- has the same problems every online marketplace has: spammers and scammers.The battle against people seeking to abuse the system has been ongoing since the site's inception, but in 2008, Craigslist implemented a new control measure that temporarily stymied spammers who had found several ways to beat the systems previously employed by the online market.To mitigate spam and limit the effectiveness of scam operations, Craigslist began requiring a phone number for verification on certain postings. This posed a problem for spammers hoping to engage in mass distribution of their "offerings" since it was unlikely any spammer or scammer would want to have their personal phone tied to their illegitimate (if not actually illegal) operations. When an ad was submitted to Craigslist, the site's automated verification process would call the ad poster to relay a one-time code that would permit the listing to be posted.That wasn't the end of this new weapon against spammers deployed by Craigslist. If successfully-posted ads were subsequently flagged by other users as spam/scams, the phone number associated with the ad placement would be blocked.This led to a pitched battle between Craigslist and scammers/spammers who were interested in exploiting the market's reach. A long discussion on a message board frequented by spammers suggested several workarounds to avoid the countermeasures implemented by Craigslist. (To give you some idea how far back this discussion goes, there are recommendations for utilizing pay phones.)Some suggested using a method favored by drug dealers and other criminal conspirators: burner phones. This was an admittedly-expensive workaround for a business model that requires hundreds of views to attract a few paying victims.Others suggest buying subscriptions to online spam enablers -- ones that provided users with tons of disposable numbers without the expense of buying new phones every time a phone number was rendered unusable.Many of these suggestions were rejected by forum members, which suggests spam is only profitable when costs hover near $0. Some members speculated Craigslist was eliminating even more options by rejecting any numbers linked to VoIP services -- the cheapest option for aspiring scammers. No solution appeared to work for everyone, strongly suggesting the phone verification move by Craiglist at least temporarily put a dent in scammers' efforts.Decisions to be made by Craigslist:

While the Biden administration still hasn't fully staffed the gridlocked FCC, it does appear to be ready to reward a top Comcast lobbyist and key Biden fundraising ally with a cushy new post.According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration appears poised to "probably" give top Comcast lobbyist David Cohen the position of Canadian Ambassador, with a planned announcement likely coming in May:

It's Canada's turn in the carousel of attempts at terrible internet regulation around the world. The ruling Liberal party, which professor and internet law researcher Michael Geist has called the most anti-internet government in Canadian history for its wide variety of planned new internet laws, has been working for months on a bill to amend the Broadcasting Act and greatly broaden its scope, giving the CRTC (Canada's counterpart to the FCC) authority over all kinds of online video and audio.Canada has a long history of requiring broadcasters to support and air Canadian content, setting percentages of airtime that must be dedicated to it. While this is controversial and of questionable efficacy, it is at least coherent with regards to television and radio broadcasting over public airwaves — but Bill C-10 would bring streaming services and many other websites under the same regulatory regime, which also includes even more concerning powers to regulate political speech. Supposedly, this is targeting services like Netflix and Spotify — which already raises some serious questions as to how such regulation would work — while the bill's champion, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, has repeatedly insisted that it will not cover social media and user generated content. The clause excluding such content was already worryingly narrow, and now the government has removed it anyway. And yet Guilbeault continues to insist user generated content has nothing to worry about, even though there are multiple reasons this is clearly untrue — not least of which is a new "exception that proves the rule" amendment setting the contours of UGC regulation, to be considered soon:

Earlier this year, we noted that a wide variety of states (mostly those controlled by angry, ignorant Republicans) were looking to pass blatantly unconstitutional bills that sought to force social media companies to host all speech and not moderate. As we noted in that article, Florida seemed to be leading the way, and now both houses of the Florida legislature have passed the bill that is blatantly unconstitutional, and will only serve to waste a large amount of taxpayer dollars to have this law thrown out in court.The bill, like so many other such state bills, would violate the 1st Amendment by compelling websites to host speech they have no desire to host. It's not even worth going through the bill bit by bit to explain its many different unconstitutional parts, but like so many of these bills, it tries to say that social media websites (of a certain size) will be greatly restricted in any effort to moderate their website to make it safer. There is no way this is even remotely constitutional.But, it gets worse. Seeing as this is Florida, which (obviously) is a place where Disney has some clout -- and Disney has famously powerful lobbyists all over the damn place -- it appears that Disney made sure the Florida legislature gave them a carveout. Florida Senator Ray Rodriques introduced an amendment to the bill, which got included in the final vote. The original bill said that this would apply to any website with 100 million monthly individual users globally. The Rodriques amendment includes this exemption:

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Well, look at that. The gossip newsletter Popbitch revealed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's personal phone number (in a somewhat hilarious way). The latest edition included this up at the top:

Back in 2014, Verizon decided it wanted to get into the media business. So it launched a website dubbed "Sugarstring." It didn't go very well. The website immediately gained attention for the fact that Verizon informed new journalist hires that they couldn't write about surveillance or net neutrality, two subjects Verizon is intimately involved in. The backlash was immediate, employees realized it was a shitshow and headed for the exits, and the whole thing was quickly shut down. But it was a good indication of what was to come.Years later, Verizon moved on to an equally ill-fated effort, the acquisitions of both AOL (bought for $4.4 billion in 2015) and Yahoo (bought for $4.48 billion in 2017). Apparently, the executive brain trust at Verizon thought it would be a great idea to buy two sharply declining 90's media brands and mush them together, hoping this would allow them to magically elbow in on the Google ad revenues they'd coveted for so long. Of course that didn't go particularly well either.There was the huge Yahoo hack, a massive privacy scandal where Verizon was busted modifying wireless data packets to track them around the internet without telling them (whoops!), and then of course the face plant by Go90, Verizon's attempt to rebrand itself as a sexy, Millennial-friendly streaming video service. Despite making a great stink about rebranding its AOL/Yahoo media and ad empire "Oath," by late 2018 Verizon was forced to acknowledge the whole thing was effectively worthless.In 2019, Verizon wound up selling Tumblr to WordPress owner Automattic at a massive loss after a rocky ownership stretch. Last year it offloaded the Huffington Post. And this week, somebody leaked word to the press that Verizon was finally considering selling the whole mess, now creatively dubbed "Verizon Media Group":

Way back when Epic released its Epic Store PC game storefront, the release of this new competitor to Steam focused on two major selling points. The first was timed exclusives that it shelled out tons of money for, allowing it to sell games the public couldn't get anywhere else for a certain period of time. This pissed off lots of people, as the public generally doesn't like exclusives. That said, Epic did mention that it would end its exclusivity practices if the rest of the gaming storefront world, especially Steam, mirrored the Epic Store's second key selling point, which was a far more favorable split offered to game developers than the "industry standard" 70/30 split that sees places like Steam getting nearly a third of game revenue just for hosting the game on its platform. Instead, Epic's store has a 88/12 split, meaning the platform is willing to take less than half of the revenue Steam extracts from gamemakers.In other words, Epic positioned its exclusivity program as merely a method to get the other storefronts to take less money away from game developers, which softened the blow with the public and surely made it a great many fans in the gaming industry.Well, Steam hasn't caved yet. But Microsoft did just announce that it is moving to match the splits offered by the Epic Store, marking some movement in the industry and perhaps an indication of things to come.

On Monday, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried came out with a blog post announcing not only a cutback in employee benefits, but that it would be banning social and political conversations on the company's platforms as well:

The upload filters required by the EU's Copyright Directive are not yet in operation -- even though France seems keen to bring them in as soon as possible. So we have been spared for the moment the inevitable harm to freedom of speech and loss of online users' rights that this ill-conceived and dishonest legislation will cause. But a minor case in the Czech Republic provides a foretaste of what is to come. It concerns the Czech file-sharing and hosting site Ulož.to. TorrentFreak has the details:

The United States Postal Service is still in the spying business. The USPS has been scanning pretty much every piece of mail that runs through its system, creating a massive database of metadata that serves whatever purpose the USPS imagines it does. "National security" or whatever the fuck.When not helping the DEA find cash and the occasional drug shipment, the USPS is also apparently keeping tabs on social media users. This includes social media services with smaller, but perhaps more concerning, user bases. The name of the game is still "national security," but it's unclear why the Postal Service -- which has a hard enough time divvying up its limited resources -- is engaged in this sort of surveillance.A two-page report [PDF] from the USPS's "iCOP" (Internet Covert Operations Program) [again, why is this actually a thing?] -- first reported by Yahoo News -- details the internet sleuthery of US Postal Service Inspectors.

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Joe Biden has never been a particularly big free speech supporter. For years, as a Senator, he consistently sided with the entertainment industry in their never-ending quest to have the government help attack free speech on the internet via aggressive and oppressive copyright laws. Throughout his campaign he railed against protected speech online that he disliked. And last night, during his first full address to Congress, he trotted out the very dangerous "fire in a crowded theater" trope:He did it in a very dumb way too. In talking about his push for gun control, he pushed back against the idea that things like background checks and certain limitations on firearms would violate the 2nd Amendment... using the trope about the 1st Amendment:

We've talked about the problem with bloated, expensive cable TV channel bundles for a long time. You might recall the push for "a la carte" TV channels (being able to buy cable TV channels individually) was even a pet project of the late John McCain, though his legislative efforts on that front never really went anywhere. And while the rise of streaming competition helped mitigate the problem somewhat, the tactic of forcing US cable TV consumers to buy massive bundles filled with channels they don't watch remains a very real annoyance.The latest case in point: many folks are realizing that the attempt to drive advertisers away from white supremacy apologists like Tucker Carlson aren't really working, in part thanks to the traditional cable TV bundle. In short, because Fox News is included in most cable TV lineups, millions of Americans are throwing money at Fox News despite never watching the channel:

For sure, the most frustrating examples of dumb trademark disputes are when one party bullies into silence another party for doing something that actually helps the bully. If you need an example of this, you can look to the time Olive Garden tried to take down AllOfGarden.com, a site with a satirical take on the Olive Garden menu. That example is particularly instructive for two reasons. First, AllOfGarden was essentially a tongue-in-cheek love letter to the restaurant chain run by someone who was very much a fan of said chain. Second, Olive Garden eventually apologized and rescinded its threat, due in part to the public backlash and the fact that it must certainly have realized that the site, if anything, helped drive some measure of interest in the restaurant itself.We will have to see if supermarket chain Publix ends up handling this the same way, because it has apparently bullied someone running social media accounts alerting fans to the availability of a particular sandwich into silence.

Summary: Apple controls what apps get onto iPhone and iPads via its full control over the iOS App Store. Every app (and its updates) need to be reviewed by Apple staff before it’s allowed in the store -- and Apple puts in place its own rules for what is and what is not allowed.One of those rules is that Apple takes a 30% cut of any sales. That fee has become somewhat controversial, especially among service providers who don’t rely on the App Store for discovery, but whose customers likely come on their own -- including Spotify and Epic Games. Spotify, in particular, has urged users to subscribe directly, to avoid having to pay the additional amount per month to cover Apple’s fees. In response, Apple forbade Spotify from even mentioning that it’s cheaper to subscribe outside of the App Store, which is now a central piece of an antitrust fight that is ongoing in the EU.Perhaps because of all of this, Apple has had to make decisions about whether or not to allow apps in the App Store that seek to avoid paying Apple’s cut of the fees. In August of 2020, Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, and the founder/lead developer of the WordPress content management system, announced that the iOS app for WordPress had been frozen by Apple. The given reason was that Apple believed that WordPress was trying to avoid the fees for in-app purchases.This was the cause of much confusion, as many people noted that the app did not actually sell anything. While WordPress.com does offer paid hosting plans (and domain reselling), that was not a part of the WordPress app. However, as Mullenweg’s tweet showed, Apple was noting that because somewhere else in WordPress.com’s business, it sold things, that meant that WordPress had to pay it a 30% cut of those sales (even though they were outside of the app itself) in order to keep the app in the App Store.Decisions to be made by Apple:

Senator Marco Rubio keeps trying to act Trump-like, but he just can't pull it off. He actually knows what he's saying is bullshit and unlike some other politicians, it's pretty obvious when Rubio is play-acting populist nonsense, rather than having any real conviction behind it. His latest is a NY Post opinion piece in which he takes on the new favorite punching bag of Republicans-who-have-no-principles-left: what is stupidly being referred to as "woke" corporations.. This is, of course, somewhat hilarious for anyone who followed decades of Republican politics in which over and over the politicians insisted that companies could do no wrong. But now that some companies are pushing back on Republican-inspired nonsense, suddenly they have to be labeled as "woke" and punished.I won't go through the entire op-ed, but I will just pull out a quote towards the end that sums up how ridiculous and authoritarian this kind of nonsense truly is. In it, Rubio basically says that political views from companies he disagrees with are on the same level as pollution.

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office decided to bring some of its predictive policing nonsense indoors. It also started looking for smaller targets. The program used to harass residents over things like uncut lawns and missing mailbox numbers was extended to schoolchildren, who were subjected to the same sort of spreadsheet bullshit. Low grades? Miss a few school days? Victim of domestic violence?According to the Pasco County Sheriff "juvenile intelligence analysts," these were all risk factors that could signify future criminal behavior. The Sheriff claimed it wasn't trying to pre-crime children, but its own documentation said "analysts" should use the so-called "predictors" to "identify at-risk youth who are destined to a life of crime."Not only is the program arguably morally wrong, it's also generally wrong. Predictive policing rarely works as intended since it relies on skewed data. Those inputs produce more skewed data, sending officers into the same areas they already believe criminal activity will occur and aims them at the same people they've already assumed are criminals. It's basically confirmation_bias.xls. But this program targets kids and uses data it's not clear the Sheriff's Office has any legal right to access.That means the program may also be legally wrong. As in "illegal." Analysis of the program and the data-sharing agreements with schools by student privacy advocates resulted in the determination that this access to student data without parental consent violated FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) -- a federal student privacy law passed in 1974.This conclusion prompted Congressional reps to step in and request a federal investigation into Pasco County's pee-wee league pre-crime program. Four months after that request was made by Representative Robert C. Scott, the US Department of Education is moving forward with its review of the program.

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office decided to bring some of its predictive policing nonsense indoors. It also started looking for smaller targets. The program used to harass residents over things like uncut lawns and missing mailbox numbers was extended to schoolchildren, who were subjected to the same sort of spreadsheet bullshit. Low grades? Miss a few school days? Victim of domestic violence?According to the Pasco County Sheriff "juvenile intelligence analysts," these were all risk factors that could signify future criminal behavior. The Sheriff claimed it wasn't trying to pre-crime children, but its own documentation said "analysts" should use the so-called "predictors" to "identify at-risk youth who are destined to a life of crime."Not only is the program arguably morally wrong, it's also generally wrong. Predictive policing rarely works as intended since it relies on skewed data. Those inputs produce more skewed data, sending officers into the same areas they already believe criminal activity will occur and aims them at the same people they've already assumed are criminals. It's basically confirmation_bias.xls. But this program targets kids and uses data it's not clear the Sheriff's Office has any legal right to access.That means the program may also be legally wrong. As in "illegal." Analysis of the program and the data-sharing agreements with schools by student privacy advocates resulted in the determination that this access to student data without parental consent violated FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) -- a federal student privacy law passed in 1974.This conclusion prompted Congressional reps to step in and request a federal investigation into Pasco County's pee-wee league pre-crime program. Four months after that request was made by Representative Robert C. Scott, the US Department of Education is moving forward with its review of the program.

The government of Malaysia has never been shy about censoring uppity citizens for doing things like, say, exposing massive government corruption. But it also has some royalty to shield from the content created by disgruntled citizens. That's why it recently welcomed a "fake news" law into the fold, giving the government (and the royalty it ultimately serves) yet another censorial weapon to deploy.A local artist is the latest under the jackboot, accused of making Queen Tunku Azizah Aminah Maimunah feel bad by compiling a [checks report] Spotify playlist.

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Back in February, we wrote about how the Indian government was threatening to jail Twitter employees if the company wouldn't block various tweets that were critical of the government's handling of farmer protests in that country. While Twitter pushed back, eventually it did block a bunch of content, though it appears it did so reluctantly, and only because it had no other choice.And now we're seeing it happen again. The COVID pandemic situation in India is a completely out of control, and rather than fix its completely bungled response to the pandemic, the Indian government has been demanding that Twitter block tweets criticizing the government's response.As first spotted by Medianama, Twitter agreed to block access to 52 tweets for users in India. People elsewhere can still see them, so we can see what kinds of tweets the Modi government doesn't want people to see. Tweets like this:

An ambassador who last worked as a US ambassador more than two decades ago recently sued Apple and Google for… well, let's go to the tape. Apparently, it's somehow these two companies' fault that Telegram users make anti-Semitic comments and otherwise make "Ambassador Marc Ginsberg" (as the plaintiff refers to himself in his complaints) feel unsafe.Ginsberg owns two phones -- one of each variety. That's why he's suing both Apple and Google. There's no indication Ginsberg has ever downloaded or used Telegram. Nor is there any indication he's even seen firsthand any of the content he's suing about. But in both lawsuits, he claims the mere existence of Telegram in app stores has personally harmed him and somehow devalued both of the phones he uses.These lawsuits make no sense. And that's why Ginsberg has retained the representation of Keith Altman, last seen chucking lawsuit after lawsuit into federal courts claiming Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are directly responsible for real-life terrorist attacks. So far, the firms last associated with Altman and his particularly stupid brand of litigation have yet to secure a win at any level of the federal court system.Google was last to be sued but the first to respond. And it raises the expected defenses, including the "the plaintiff has chosen the wrong defendant." (h/t John Roddy)Google's motion to dismiss [PDF] starts with a few facts that make it pretty much unnecessary for anyone -- including the presiding judge -- to read any further. Here's the opener: