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For years, journalists have highlighted how ad blocking companies have slowly but surely been compromising their ethics -- and products -- to make an extra buck. Several years ago you'll recall that numerous ad blocking companies were busted letting some companies' ads through their filters if they were willing to pay extra. Others collect and monetize "anonymized" data that's gleaned from what ads you're receiving and which ones you're blocking (recall that studies repeatedly have shown that anonymized data is not at all anonymous).Enter Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, who, this week, sent a letter to the FTC (pdf, hat tip The Verge) urging some greater scrutiny of the sector:

Given the NSA's track record with vulnerability disclosures, it's somewhat of an anomaly when it actually decides the security of millions of innocent computer users is more important than its exploitation of a security flaw. Ellen Nakishima has the details for the Washington Post:

Last week, the DOJ's counsel sent a letter to Apple asking for its assistance cracking open two phones recovered from the shooter at the Pensacola Naval Air Base. Apple replied it had already provided assistance by giving the FBI everything it could recover from the shooter's Apple accounts. The company also made it clear it would not attempt to break the encryption on the phones.This sounded like a warning shot from the DOJ -- one issued before the commencement of litigation. No formal request for assistance has been made in court yet, but the head of the DOJ has decided to apply additional pressure. Attorney General William Barr's view appears to be that if the FBI has a warrant, Apple has to let it come in. Otherwise, bad things will happen. He also accused Apple of not being helpful enough.

Anyone who reads Techdirt knows that I've been heavily influenced by Larry Lessig, and have learned a lot from him. There still are many areas where I have and continue to disagree with him, but on the whole, when he comes up with a project, or writes about something, I am compelled to listen to him. I often appreciate his willingness to effectively take on big, crazy, impossible challenges -- ones almost certainly destined to fail -- in support of a principle or an idea. In recent years, this has included his ill-suited campaign for President, his flopped attempt to create an anti-SuperPAC SuperPAC, his plan to change the way the Electoral College works, his attempt to call for a Second Constitutional Convention (to route around Congress to amend the Constitution), and, even (tragically) his attempts to use the courts to end copyright term extensions. Even when I thought the ideas were a bit silly, the very least you could say about Lessig was that he was willing to take crazy chances to make changes in the world that he thought would improve the world. You could say that he was the living embodiment of the idea that, rather than complaining about the system, you need to make a real effort to change the system, no matter how quixotic that effort might be.And, even when I disagreed with him or thought his projects to be misguided or silly, I still supported his willingness to put his best ideas out there and try to come up with clever ways to make them a reality. Indeed, I found much of it to be admirable and principled.However, I cannot and will not support his latest crusade, which is a dangerous attack on free speech, and frankly goes against everything that I thought Lessig stood for. Indeed, to me this move undermines much of Lessig's legacy, and forces me to rethink my past support for him and his projects. The short version is that Lessig has filed a defamation lawsuit against the NY Times, its executive Editor Dean Baquet, its Business Editor Ellen Pollock, and reporter Nellie Bowles. Lessig is upset about the way some blog posts he made were portrayed by the NY Times. And you can, perhaps, understand why. The NY Times' framing of Lessig's positions, regarding Jeffrey Epstein and his funding of MIT's Media Lab, was, at the very least, shaded in a manner that did not portray the nuance that Lessig hoped to convey in his Medium posts on the matter. But not fully portraying the nuance is not defamation.Furthermore, Lessig appears to be using this to kick off much more of a campaign against free speech and a free press, by saying this is his attack on what he calls "clickbait defamation." This is, unfortunately, the same sort of framing that lots of people have been using to go after journalists of late, when they don't like the framing or how they're portrayed in the media. In short, Larry Lessig appears to have filed a SLAPP suit. And that's tremendously disappointing.Let's take a step back. Lessig was tangentially associated with the mess last fall regarding Jeffrey Epstein's donations to the MIT Media Lab, which was run by Joi Ito. Reports detailed how Ito cultivated a relationship with Epstein, and then later sought to hide it from various people -- including those associated with the Lab. Ito has long been considered one of the "good" people in the tech world, and this situation upset many people who were shocked to find Ito's involvement, and his ethically dubious decisions. Ito, after immense public pressure, resigned from the Lab.Lessig, who has known Ito for many years, had signed a petition in support of Ito prior to all of the details coming out and prior to his resignation. This raised some eyebrows among those who felt that Ito's decisions had clearly crossed a line. After Ito resigned, Lessig -- as he's been known to do -- took to Medium to effectively work through his thoughts on the matter. He revealed that Ito had sought his advice before taking the Epstein investment. Lessig, who has publicly discussed how he was sexually abused as a child, had acted as something of a sounding board for Ito on whether or not it was inappropriate to take money from someone accused of similar crimes. It was clear that Lessig had extremely mixed feelings about the whole thing and was trying to "write through" his thoughts. While I can see -- and sometimes support -- the idea of writing out ideas where you're unsure of where to eventually land, doing so almost always risks people taking some of the statements (especially "on the one hand, on the other hand" or "here's how I thought about it back then..." statements) completely out of context.Without getting into the full text of Lessig's piece (though I recommend reading it), many, many people (including many supporters of Lessig) reacted very, very negatively to it. For what it's worth, my own reaction was that, in it, Lessig appeared somewhat tone deaf to the actual concerns with accepting the donations, and made a bunch of assumptions that weren't necessarily accurate -- but again, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I found it interesting that he was really clearly trying to struggle through the conflicting feelings he had about the whole mess. In particular, I actually appreciated that Lessig did what few people are willing to do: to try to break down exactly his mindset in making a decision that -- in hindsight -- he now recognized was a mistake. And thus, part of his essay could be read as a "defense" of the original decision to support Epstein's donation to MIT's Media Lab.And that quite reasonably upset people, though, for sometimes different reasons. Some were upset that they believe he was rationalizing his support for Ito taking Epstein's money. Some were upset that they read this (perhaps inaccurately) as a defense of Ito taking the money. And some were upset that his attempt to put himself back in that original mindset suggested that, even at the time, his thinking on this was... not great. Particularly troublesome (to me, at least) was his assumption of why he felt that Epstein wanted to donate to MIT (Lessig suggested it was an attempt to rehabilitate his image) and why, at the time of the initial donation, he thought it might be okay for MIT to take it: if they did it in a way that did not allow him to burnish his reputation.Specifically, Lessig suggested that Epstein was what he referred to as a "Type 3" donor, who he described as:

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The DOJ has asked somewhat politely for Apple to break the encryption on some iPhones. Last time, the request wasn't so polite. It involved a legal battle that only ended when a third-party cracked the San Bernardino's iPhone for the FBI. Nothing of interest was recovered from that phone.Another shooting and another dead shooter has brought Apple and the DOJ together again. The DOJ's counsel sent a letter to Apple asking it to break into two phones recovered from the shooter. Apple stated it had already given the DOJ all the information it could recover without actually cracking the devices. This isn't good enough for the DOJ, which believes the possession of a warrant should trump any concerns about creating encryption backdoors.There's been no demand made in court… yet. But Attorney General Bill Barr -- whose antipathy towards encryption has been stated multiple times -- is trying to apply a little more extrajudicial pressure.

As we've been discussing, India's government has blacked out internet access in Kashmir since around August, setting records for one of the longest government-mandated internet blackouts in history. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to argue that the blackout is a necessary security precaution in the face of growing unrest in the region stemming from its loss of autonomy earlier this year. Granted like most government internet censorship efforts, the move has a lot more to do with cowardice and fear of an informed public than any genuine concern about public welfare.Fast forward to this week, and India's Supreme Court has warned that the blackout is clearly illegal:

Looks like everyone roaming across the board is going to become a source of info for the US government. The DHS has already rolled out facial recognition at international airports and additional biometric collections elsewhere. The Fourth Amendment's near-nonexistence at the border has led to a steadily-increasing number of invasive device searches. Visa applicants and other long-term visitors are being forced to turn over social media information (including passwords) during the application process.Now, the DHS is hoping to collect DNA from nearly every immigrant it has in custody. The DHS first pitched this idea back in October, hoping to strike the lone exemption keeping it from collecting samples from the hundreds of thousands of people crossing southern borders every year.The previous administration said it simply wasn't feasible to collect DNA from every detainee, especially those rounded up near southern borders. This administration says it's no longer a logistical problem, so it should be allowed to collect it from everyone detained by ICE or the CBP.

Academic publishing hardly covers itself in glory, as Techdirt has reported over the years. It takes advantage of researchers' belief that they need to publish in so-called "high impact" titles for the sake of their careers, in order to pay nothing for the material they provide. Since articles are reviewed by other academics -- for free -- profit margins are extremely good: around 30-40%. In order to retain these unusually high levels, the industry does everything in its power to undermine and subvert cheaper alternatives like open access, and often takes a heavy-handed approach to the enforcement of "its" copyright -- even against the original author. Given this dismal industry background, it will come as no surprise to learn from Science magazine that Russian academic publishing has its own problems, fueled by the bad behavior of authors:

An arrest stemming from the most specious "investigation" has resulted in the denial of qualified immunity for one officer. But just barely. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals was almost able to talk itself out of denying qualified immunity to any of the four officers involved. The one officer who will now have to face a jury is was the ringleader of the investigatory debacle, but he was far from the only one guilty of rights violations.Three men searching for a store selling space heaters late at night finished their shopping trip surrounded by cops, who arrested one of them -- Christopher Bey -- for having an expired permit for the weapon he was carrying. All three men were black. Every officer involved in the stop and arrest was white. This matters, but not to the majority writing the opinion [PDF].Three of the cops were members of the Livonia PD's Special Operations Unit (SOU). They were on the lookout for "retail crimes" in response to a rash of break-ins at cellphone stores. Sergeant Andrew McKinley -- the only officer who's still facing Bey's lawsuit -- spotted the van driven by the men and decided to start following them.THINGS THAT ARE SUSPICIOUS TO A POLICE OFFICER: Driving in an old vehicle.

Harassment statutes tend to be broadly written and often undergo legislative surgery after they've been challenged in court. This isn't one of those cases. The statute stands. But the conviction does not.A New Jersey man was arrested and charged with harassment after his handwritten criticism of the Secaucus mayor was discovered and brought to the attention of the mayor, who then had to ask his daughter what the note meant.Here's a brief summary of the alleged crime from Keldy Ortiz of NorthJersey.com.

We've written a few times now about California's AB5 law that has more or less made it difficult to impossible for many freelancers/contractors to still work in California. Even though the stated intentions of the bill's author, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, and its supporters was to "protect" workers, the reality is anything but that. It's yet another case of politicians who have no clue how the world actually works, insisting that what they're doing must work fine because their intentions are good. Many people who have been impacted by this have found that Gonzalez has been dismissive of their concerns -- and at times directly rude to people on Twitter highlighting these issues. We had thought that perhaps Gonzalez had realized there might be a more constructive way at the end of last year when she asked for thoughts on a possible small tweak to the law. That change would have been wildly insufficient, but it was, at least, a step in the right direction.However, with the new year, we apparently have the same old Lorena Gonzalez. She was interviewed on local San Diego TV station KUSI, and was obnoxiously dismissive of the idea that people have actually been harmed by her law. The newscasters highlighted actual people who were losing work because of the law, and Gonzalez's response was that she doesn't believe the people. In one case, they showed an interview with a freelance translator -- who actually had worked for the state and even for Gonazlez herself, and had voted for her -- who said she can't get work any more because of AB5, and Gonzalez appears to dismiss her as not telling the truth.

Tennessee is home to an overabundance of BS defamation lawsuits. It must be something in the air area. (See also: Virginia, and Kentucky) Now that the state has a decent anti-SLAPP law, things should start changing. And it may start with Dr. Kaveer Nandigam of Nandigam Neurology in Murfeesboro, Tennessee.Dr. Nandigam decided to test drive the new law by doing one of those things that always works out well: suing a patient over a negative review. Kelly Beavers was his target. She had visited his office with her father, who was being seen for early signs of dementia. Beavers recorded the appointment on her phone, as she always does, to make sure she had all the information she needed to care for her father.Nandigam did not like being recorded. He told her to stop recording and demanded she hand over her phone. He also told her to delete the recording, which she did. Beavers -- understandably angered by Nandigam's treatment of her -- complained about his actions on Yelp.

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Almost five years ago, we warned that years of copyright maximalists brainwashing the public about ever expansive copyright and the need for everything to be "owned" had resulted in the crazy Blurred Lines decision that said that merely being inspired by another artist to make a song that has a similar feel, even if it doesn't copy any actual part of the music, was infringing. We warned that this would lead to bad things -- and it has.Over the last few years, we've been detailing story after story of similar cases being filed. It's become so common that we don't even bother to write about most of the cases. As we've said, though, this really is the industry reaping what they've sowed. It's gotten so crazy that even the RIAA (yes, that RIAA) has felt the need to tell courts that maybe their interpretation of copyright has gone too far in the direction of over-protecting copyright holders.It's now become such a fact of life that the NY Times has a giant article on how copyright is basically eating pop music these days. It describes a bunch of these cases, and notes that merely "being influenced" makes you liable for copyright infringement, and how that's causing problems for the very concept of pop music:

For decades, broadband providers have abused the lack of meaningful competition in the telecom market by not only refusing to shore up historically awful customer service, but by raising rates hand over fist. This usually involves leaving the advertised price largely the same, but pummeling customers with all manner of misleading fees and surcharges that drive up the actual price you'll be paying each month. And by and large regulators from both major political parties have been perfectly okay with this practice, despite it effectively being false advertising.CenturyLink (combined by the merger of Qwest, CenturyTel and Embarq) has been exceptionally talented when it comes to such fees. A few years ago the company began charging its broadband customers an "Internet Cost Recovery Fee," which the company's website explains as such:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the use of FOSTA to go after companies that are totally disconnected from the content in question, like MailChimp:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, the administration made the meaningless gesture of sanctioning North Korea over the Sony hack, while James Clapper was calling it the most serious cyberattack on the US to date, implying there have been no serious ones, and Neil deGrasse Tyson was offering up the incredibly helpful and realistic suggestion that the solution is to simply create unhackable systems. The MPAA was trying to get regulators to force ISPs to block sites "at the border", while still pursuing their campaign to get links to pirated content out of Google — a strategy that is both ineffective and self-defeating. And we saw more bogus DMCA takedowns, of course, both mundane and personal.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, there was plenty more copyright panic from companies: Ninentdo shut down a fan-made Zelda movie, Sony was not supporting its own movies for the Oscars out of piracy fears over sending out DVD screeners, music publishers forced another lyrics site offline, and the UFC announced plans to start suing individuals for piracy. And even as many indie filmmakers were realizing that releasing movies for free online has many benefits, one indie record label in Finland was insisting it wouldn't sign any new bands until the government stops piracy. Meanwhile, Bono came out in favor of using China-style internet censorship to fight piracy (even as China's efforts were failing in many ways), garnering confused support from Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic even as he admitted he didn't really know much about the subject. And we looked at one attempt by an ISP to actually fight back against bogus DMCA notices, which only highlighted how this is almost impossible.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, there was some debate about the nature of apparent security loopholes in Microsoft's DRM, while Bill Gates was deploying the ol' accusations of "communism" against those who call for copyright reform. Another court told the MPAA it has to actually file lawsuits to get customer information from ISPs, while the BSA was seeking to codify the just-send-a-subpoena option right into the DMCA. After an initial loss, Geico was continuing its trademark crusade against Google, while Toronto's airport was getting into the trademark threat game to stop a silly blog that posts photos of urinals. And we were completely flabbergasted by the shocking results of a critical study, which revealed the oh-so-secret fact that... entertainment industry executives were scared of file sharing.

Things have gotten worse and worse for Amazon's Ring over the past several months. Once just the pusher of a snitch app that allowed city residents to engage in racial profiling from the comfort of their homes, Ring is now synonymous with poor security practices and questionable "partnerships" with hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the nation.Ring owners recently discovered how easily their cameras could be hijacked by assholes with no moral compass and too much time on their hands. Using credentials harvested from security breaches, online forum members took control of people's cameras to entertain a podcast audience who listened along as hijackers verbally abused Ring owners and their children.Ring is now being sued for selling such an easily-compromised product. Ring's response to the original reports of hijackings was to blame customers for not taking their own security more seriously. Ring does recommend two-factor authentication but that's about all it does. It does not inform users when login attempts are made from unrecognized IP addresses or devices, and does not put the system on lockdown after a certain number of failed attempts are made.Yes, users should use strong passwords (and not reuse passwords), but blaming customers for engaging in behavior most customers will engage in is unproductive. Instead of making two-factor authentication a requirement before deployment, Ring has just repeatedly pointed to its prior statements about its "encouragement" of 2FA -- an "encouragement" that is mostly comprised of defensive statements issued in response to another negative news cycle.Since it can't keep blaming its millions of customers for its own failings, Ring is taking a very, very small step in the direction of actually taking its customers' security seriously. [Please hold your tepid applause until the end of the announcement.]

If you've been on the internet for basically any length of time, you probably know about the Downfall parody videos, sometimes referred to as the "Hitler Finds Out" videos. These are videos that take a clip from a 2004 German movie about the final days of Hitler, and post over them English subtitles of Hitler getting angry over... just about anything. We wrote about it a decade ago, and while the Downfall parodies have become somewhat less common these days, it's still a bit surprising that anyone might be offended by them.But, alas, in a yet another (more real world) example of how content moderation is impossible to do well, a popular senior lecturer of accounting, Catherine West Lowry, at UMass Amherst was removed from her teaching role after a student complained that she showed a Downfall parody about accounting made by a former student to the class (found via Reason.com).To make the class more fun, Lowry had long offered students extra credit for producing entertaining or "fun" videos about concepts in the accounting class, and someone back in 2009 (at the height of the Downfall parody popularity) made this one about accounting concepts and the class:On November 12th, Lowry showed that video to the class after some students asked her to share a video:

For much of this year, broadband customers have been complaining that Frontier Communications, the nation's third-biggest telco, had been charging its customers a rental fee for modems they already owned. Normally, you're supposed to be able to buy your own modem instead of paying your ISP a rental fee upwards of $10 per month. To nab some extra dough from captive customers, Frontier basically decided to charge its customers a rental fee anyway, giving them a polite, though giant, middle finger when they complained.And because the FCC's net neutrality repeal effectively neutered the agency's ability to police this sort of behavior (not that the Pai FCC would anyway), consumers who complained to the agency were met with a glassy-eyed stare:

Buckle up folks, because this story takes a few twists and turns, and some of them may make you angry -- though I hope people will hold back their kneejerk reactions, because that kind of thing is what created this mess in the first place.As you probably recall, a year ago, there was a whole viral media shitstorm regarding an encounter in Washington DC between some kids from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, Native American activist Nathan Phillips, and a bunch of other people, including members of a group known as the Black Israelites, who appeared to be egging everyone on. A first video that made the viral rounds on Twitter just showed the encounter between CCH student Nick Sandmann, clad in a red MAGA hat, and staring down Phillips who was banging a drum. Later videos added in more context, including the Black Israelites and their role in the whole thing. One of the points a few people raised is that your interpretation of the whole thing is very much a Rorschach test for what you already believe. You can reasonably argue that people completely misrepresented the encounter and you can reasonably argue that they did not.It is a subjective issue. You see it through your own context and experiences, and it comes down to each and everyone's opinion. I'd personally argue that there was a little bit of truth in nearly all of the viewpoints, and not having the entire context is not akin to false statements, but rather simply not having the full picture. As more context was added, many people changed their views, and that's cool too.But given that these are subjective opinions, the idea that one might sue over them is simply batshit insane. And yet, people rushed to sue. In particular, we highlighted how the CCH student at the center of all of this sued the Washington Post, and later both NBC and CNN, for their coverage. Sandmann was represented by L. Lin Wood and Todd McMurtry. (For what it's worth, Wood recently lost that high profile defamation case against Elon Musk on behalf of cave diver Vern Unsworth). We found little in the lawsuits to be compelling, and were not at all surprised when a judge tossed out the one against the Washington Post, noting that everything they published was protected by the 1st Amendment. However, that case has been reinstated on fairly narrow grounds, following an amended complaint that targets some very specific language used by the Post. I'd still be surprised if he won, but the more narrow claims do at least have slightly more validity to them, especially if the court agrees that Sandmann is not a public figure (which would lower the bar for a defamation claim).Earlier this week, news broke that CNN and Sandmann had agreed to settle that complaint -- and once again we had a bit of a Rorschach test. The terms of the settlement appear to be totally confidential, which is disappointing, but not at all uncommon. It is, in fact, possible that no money exchanged hands at all. However, many people who support Sandmann are insisting that this is vindication for him, even if that's not at all clear. Some are even saying that CNN must have paid "in the millions." Again, no information on the settlement is public, and to say that this was vindication or to speculate on any settlement amount seems ridiculous -- especially given that the entire thrust of the lawsuit was about news media commenting on issues without knowing the full details or context of the story.But the story then got even stranger. Because on Wednesday, PJ Media had a headline trumpeting that author Reza Aslan would "face the music" for tweeting that Sandmann had "a punchable face." Already that should have raised alarm bells, because there is literally nothing at all defamatory in saying someone has "a punchable face." PJ Media -- who at times pretends to support free speech -- acted as though this was a legitimate lawsuit. Of course, tellingly, even though they said they had a copy of the complaint, reporter Tyler O'Neil did not link to or publish the lawsuit. Perhaps because it's utter and complete garbage. You can read it here.It was actually filed last August. And here's where we'll go back a bit. Right after the original Sandmann incident, we had noted that infamously silly lawyer Robert Barnes, who has filed multiple trollish lawsuits that have flopped spectacularly, announced that he would represent any of the Covington kids pro bono in filing lawsuits.Yet, you will note that Sandmann's lawsuits were not filed with Barnes as his lawyer, but Lin Wood and Todd McMurtry. However, the lawsuit that PJ Media was trumpeting, about a comment on Sandmann, was filed by Barnes. So this lead to some head scratching. Had Sandmann retained both lawyers for different cases? The answer is no. Barnes simply filed lawsuits on behalf of the Covington kids as John Does.It's not even clear that any of the Covington kids are actual clients of his. They may be, but the filing doesn't confirm that this is actually true. And the key Covington kid, Sandmann, has made it absolutely clear that he is not a Barnes' client, and that this lawsuit is obviously bullshit -- because with regards to Aslan's statement, it only references Sandmann (and his allegedly "punchable face") rather than any of the other Covington kids:If you're unable to see that image, it's Sandmann asking Barnes on Twitter:

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Like pretty much everyone else, New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is using facial recognition software. Like pretty much everyone else, it doesn't really have any success stories to share.

Few things are more satisfying than watching copyright trolling efforts disintegrate. Prolific abuser of the court system, Malibu Media, has been slowly self-destructing over the past few years.In 2016, Malibu Media sued its legal reps because they were at least as corrupt as Malibu Media is. From the filings, it appeared attorney Keith Lipscomb wasn't sharing the settlements he extracted from alleged pirates. Malibu's new reps, Pillar Law Group, filed the suit for Malibu. In the court documents, Lipscomb said he felt the copyright trolling business model had outlived its usefulness and was no longer profitable. While this was likely true, it also did double duty as an excuse for Lipscomb's failure to send Malibu its cut of the settlements.The relationship with Pillar Law only lasted until last summer. As Fight Copyright Trolls notes, X-Art'/Malibu's owner is now engaged in a legal dispute with the law group in the Los Angeles County Court.Roughly about the same time this suit was filed, Malibu was sued by two investors who were promised half of all settlements and half of all profits from Malibu's media. Apparently, they haven't been paid either.This leads us to the current litigation, brought by Malibu's most recent legal reps. Once again, the non-sharing of settlement funds is the issue.

For years cable customers have been plagued by content blackouts as cable providers and broadcasters bicker over new programming contracts. So called "retransmission feuds" usually go something like this: a broadcaster demands a cable company pay twice as much money to carry the same content. The pay TV provider balks, and blacks out the aforementioned content. Consumers spend a few months paying for content they can't access, while the two sides bitch at each other and try to leverage consumer anger against the other guy. After a while a new confidential deal is struck, and customers face a higher bill with little to show for it. Rinse, wash, repeat.While some might think the innovative streaming revolution is going to fix stupidity like this, evidence suggests that's not likely. This week, AT&T's creatively-named streaming app, AT&T TV Now, was unceremoniously pulled from all Roku streaming hardware after a contract between the two companies expired and they couldn't agree on a new one. As a result, existing users can still access the AT&T streaming apps on the platform, but any new AT&T TV subscribers will suddenly find the app won't work on the most popular streaming platform on the market:

Once again, another crime has been solved with the help of smart devices that shows "going dark" is mainly just an FBI product it's having trouble moving in such a sunshine-y market.Third party apps and a surveillance camera allowed investigators to solve one crime (by determining it never happened) and charge someone for the crime that actually happened. [via Slashdot]

We've pointed out for years that there's always been some level of confusion about the boundaries of the "non-commercial" tag on a Creative Commons license. There are lots of things that are kind of fuzzy about it. Does it mean you just can't sell the work? Or does it mean you can't even use it on a website if that website has ads on it? Indeed, we've worried that the non-commercial license created a bit of a branding problem for Creative Commons. However, to the organization's credit, it has spent plenty of time and effort over the past decade or so to try to clarify some of the confusion about non-commercial licensing, saying that it really just refers to the direct sale of such works.For the past few years, that's also meant that Creative Commons, the organization, has had to step in to an ongoing lawsuit over such a license, and inform the court what a non-commercial license actually means.The issue, in the case, was that an educational non-profit, Great Minds, sued various copy shops for making copies of its educational materials, even though they were licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. That license says the work can be copied, but only under non-commercial terms. Great Minds argued that because the copy shops, like FedEx and Office Depot, made money from the copies, that made it commercial. Creative Commons kept telling the court that this was a misreading of "non-commercial" and in the Office Depot case, the 9th Circuit has agreed.It's a nice, quick, and simple ruling:

Breathalyzers have been in use for more than 100 years at this point and we still don't have all the kinks worked out. Testing equipment used by law enforcement frequently isn't calibrated or maintained correctly. Some devices have been set up improperly, which leads directly to false positives when the tests are deployed.Unfortunately, impaired driving isn't going away. And neither are the tools cops like well enough to deploy in the field, but apparently not well enough to engage in routine maintenance or periodic quality control testing. This is already a problem for citizens, who can find themselves behind bars if the testing equipment is faulty. The problem is only going to get worse as marijuana legalization spreads to more states.There's currently no field test equipment that detects marijuana impairment. A company in California thinks it has a solution.

Just last week we wrote about the good news that the European Patent Office had decided to reject AI-generated inventions for patent applications and explained why this was good. As we noted, prior to that, most of the discussion on AI and monopoly protections had been focused on copyright, and there are various lawyers and law firms eagerly pushing the idea that AI should be able to obtain copyrights, despite it going against the entire basis of copyright law. So far, we haven't had a real test of the issue in the US (though the monkey selfie case could be seen as a trial balloon for copyright for non-human creators), but apparently at least one Chinese court has already gone in the other direction.A court in Shenzhen has decided that articles generated by AI are entitled to copyright protection, according to the National Law Review. The case involved the popular Chinese site Tencent, and a news article generated by an AI software called Dreamwriter:

Ring never fails to disappoint. And by "disappoint," I mean never fails to be disappointing. This pleases me. So, I guess Ring never fails to please… by being incessantly disappointing.I realize this is beginning to resemble a beating that continues long past the point the victim has lapsed into unconsciousness. But if Ring hadn't made itself such an inviting punching bag, I would not continue to rain down printed blows on its oh so very soft body.Ring first grabbed our attention by offering up a snitch app that encouraged neighbors to start talking about suspicious people in their neighborhood. This app also happened to be a portal for the voluntary sharing of footage captured by Ring cameras, most of which were built into Ring's "smart" doorbells.From there, things went from bad to worse to godawful to horrendous to PR-team-on-constant-suicide-watch. It has been super-enjoyable for me (and hopefully for Techdirt readers) for two reasons:

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During the run up to the passage of FOSTA, we were told two key things: (1) the law was absolutely necessary to stop sex trafficking websites like Backpage, and (2) that there was no way that the law would be abused to go after perfectly innocent websites. It's pretty easy to show that both of these claims turned out to be utter bullshit. The first one was especially easy, seeing as the Feds seized the site and arrested its founders a week before FOSTA became law. The second has taken somewhat longer to show, in part because for a long while no one actually seemed to be making use of FOSTA. For a law that we were told was absolutely necessary and that any delay in passing it would mean lives put at risk, it has been notable just how few actual lawsuits have been filed under FOSTA in the 18 months or so since it became law. State attorneys general, who pushed strongly for it, claiming they needed this hole in Section 230 to go after bad actor websites have still never used the law. Not once.However, a few civil suits have just started to show up, as highlighted in a guest post at Eric Goldman's blog by FOSTA expert Alex Yelderman. She first points to two nearly identical lawsuits filed in state courts (one in Washington, one in California) against Craigslist and a bunch of hotels. Craigslist has sought to remove both to federal court as of early December. Both cases push, as Yelderman notes, "radical theories of liability" aimed at Craigslist. They also target activities that happened prior to FOSTA becoming law (as you may recall, Craigslist shut down its "erotic services" section all the way back in 2010, and then shut down all dating after FOSTA became law, noting that the liability risk was just too much).That hasn't stopped the company from getting sued under the law, though, with it claiming that just the mere fact that Craigslist had such a section a decade ago proves that it was engaged in sex trafficking under FOSTA. As Yelderman points out, the fact that FOSTA is apparently retroactive and can reach back to such things, will almost certainly be found unconstitutional. As you may recall, even the DOJ told Congress this part was unconstitutional.Even beyond that aspect, though, the claims in the lawsuit are crazy. They assume that FOSTA removed the requirement for knowledge on the part of intermediaries like Craigslist, even though supporters of the law insisted that wasn't the case. Indeed, a key part of the DOJ's defense of FOSTA in the Woodhull case that challenged the law (and which the district court rejected), was that FOSTA made no such change. As Yelderman explains:

In 2018, you might recall that Ajit Pai had to cancel his CES appearance due to clearly idiotic death threats. In 2019, Pai had to cancel a scheduled appearance due to the government shutdown. Fast forward to 2020 and Ajit Pai finally made it back to CES, and he used the opportunity to... make up some nonsense about net neutrality.In a cozy, unchallenging chat with the CTA's Gary Shapiro, Pai once again trotted out the canard that modest net neutrality rules crushed US broadband sector investment, insisting that his hugely unpopular decision to kill net neutrality has resulted in, by golly, some amazing things for American consumers:

It looks like the FBI wants to relitigate the San Bernardino shooting. After that tragedy, the FBI tried (and failed) to obtain legal precedent forcing cellphone manufacturers to crack open seized phones at the drop of a warrant. Finally, a third party sold a solution to the FBI that opened the phone and allowed it to recover nothing useful whatsoever from the shooter's device.The FBI was displeased that it didn't get this precedent. Internal communications showed FBI officials were doing everything they could to avoid using a third-party solution. The theoretical existence of evidence related to a tragic shooting was the only leverage the FBI had and a private company's cracking service took that leverage away. It could no longer claim approaching Apple directly was the only way to access the contents of the phone.The FBI is trying again. It has more locked phones and another shooting to use as leverage.

We've discussed red light cameras many times in the past, most often to point out how they really aren't great at providing any benefit in vehicle safety, but are quite good at filling up the coffers of local governments on the backs of motorists. Given that these are essentially profit centers run by governments that aren't well suited to maximizing profits, the contracts for these red light cameras are typically outsourced to private interests. And if that seems like a recipe for rampant corruption... well... yeah. Everyone from judges to my beloved home city of Chicago has found themselves being investigated, and sometimes charged, with wild corruption as part of these red light camera contracts. Contracts that, again, don't make anyone any safer.It's bad enough that the Illinois State Comptroller has decided to opt out of its duties to collect on red light camera fees entirely.

A Connecticut cop, who doesn't like the things commenters said about him on a local blog, has decided he's legally in the right to demand the identifying info of those commenters from the person who runs the blog.

Last week we announced our latest Gaming Like It's 1924: Public Domain Game Jam, and among the newly public domain works first released in 1924 is George Gershwin's classic Rhapsody in Blue, which you might better know as the United Airlines theme song.This is extremely noteworthy, because during the debate over the Mickey Mouse Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act fight in 1998, the Gershwin Estate was among the most vocal supporters and lobbyists in seeking an extension for the copyright. Indeed, the head of the Gershwin Estate, George's nephew Marc was particularly worried about losing artistic control over his uncle's work. Indeed, he seemed particularly worried that someone might make rap music out of his uncle's work:

Reverse warrants have been deployed again. And, again, Wisconsin law enforcement agencies are involved. The feds used a reverse warrant to track down robbers who hit a bank at a strip mall just outside of Milwaukee earlier this year.The feds are at it again. This time it's the ATF and the targets are two people suspected of arson.The "reverse" warrant affidavit [PDF] spends a great deal of time letting us know what Special Agent Thomas Greenwich knows: that phones generate a ton of location info using a variety of connections (WiFi, Bluetooth, cell towers) and this information tends to get hoovered up almost immediately by service providers. In this instance the target is Google and the ATF wants any records that fall within two geofenced areas surrounding the sites of two suspicious fires.If there's any upside here, it's that the geofenced locations won't be sweeping in as many non-suspects as other reverse warrants we've seen. And it includes photos depicting the areas targeted by the non-targeted warrant, which helps judges (and interested citizens) see how much potential data the ATF is targeting.There were two suspected arsons in Milwaukee, located less than 5 miles apart, occurring within three weeks of each other. Both started at the back of the houses and both used accelerants. And both houses had a common denominator: John P. Hunt. Hunt had been evicted from one address (4047 N. 7th) two weeks prior to the first fire, and had been trying to claim tools left behind by a deceased family member, which were stored at the second address (5915 N. 42nd St.). This included one unscheduled visit to reclaim the disputed possessions which had been sorted out by local law enforcement four days before the second suspicious fire.Here are the geofence coordinates included with the affidavit:The geofences here are about as limited as they can be, given the nature of the crime. These are much more constrained than others we've seen -- ones that cover entire blocks in heavily-trafficked areas.That being said, there are still a few problems. First, coarse location data isn't precise enough to exclude people living in surrounding houses. The geofenced areas will also capture foot and road traffic that passed through the area during the time frame investigators are looking at.Finally, there's the problem that simply does not ever go away, no matter how tightly-constrained the geofence is: these warrants work in reverse, providing law enforcement with location data on people who aren't suspected of committing criminal acts and allowing investigators to use a pile of non-suspicious data to develop reasonable suspicion.This data request seems almost extraneous. The ATF already appears to have a couple of suspects -- ones well-known to both federal agents and the Milwaukee Police Department. The MPD executed a search warrant at the 4047 N. 7th Street address last summer (following "10-15 visits" to the house by MPD officers during that same summer), recovering "a large amount of narcotics and several firearms." John Hunt -- the person connecting the two torched properties -- was charged with several drug and gun-related offenses.Given this fact, it would seem investigators might want to start with John Hunt and then work their way outward if that doesn't pan out. Instead, they're demanding location info on everyone in the area and then hoping to narrow this list of info down to the person (or people) they already suspect. Yes, it's always useful to have as much evidence in hand as possible before arresting someone, but that law enforcement desire needs to be weighed against the impact it will have on non-suspects just because they happened to connect to cell towers in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Back in August, Apple kicked off an already questionable lawsuit against Corellium, makers of virtualization software that would let users create and interact with "virtual" iOS devices. It is a useful tool for a variety of reasons, including (importantly) for security researchers trying to hunt down bugs on a virtual iPhone. Over the last few months, security researchers in particular have been raising the alarm about this lawsuit. Then, just before the New Year, Apple made things much, much worse, with its amended complaint, that takes Section 1201 of the DMCA to new and even more ridiculous heights.As Corellium's CEO Amanda Gorton noted in an open letter, this appeared to be Apple using copyright law to completely shutdown the idea of jailbreaking:

Buried beneath the unrelenting hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.As carriers ramp up their marketing hype and promote 5G "launches" that aren't really full launches, that theme is only continuing. One ZDNet reporter recently wandered around Miami -- a "launched" T-Mobile 5G market -- only to find coverage was nonexistent and phone support was even worse. He ultimately concluded that T-mobile's definition of "nationwide 5G" most definitely leaves something to be desired:

Oh boy. Facebook has just added fuel to the anti-encryption fire. And by doing nothing more than something it should be doing: notifying users that their device may have been compromised by malware.The Wall Street Journal article covering this standard notification is full of quotes from government officials who aren't happy a suspected terrorist was informed his phone had possibly been infected by targeted malware. [Non-paywalled version here.]

You will recall that Nintendo, as part of its sweeping new war on ROM sites initiated a year or so ago, went particularly hard at RomUniverse and its site operator, Matthew Storman. Differentiating RomUniverse from other ROM sites is some combination of the fact that it's run out of California as opposed to overseas, that the site is also a place to go get lots of other media that sure looks to be infringing on copyright, and Storman's verbose attitude in making public comments that don't paint him or his site in the best light. At the onset, as part of an attempt to crowdfund its legal battle with Nintendo, RomUniverse trotted out the claim that it was offering ROMs in an attempt to preserve video gaming history. It wasn't a particularly believable argument given the rest of the site's behavior and RomUniverse quickly opted for other legal arguments in court.Storman appears to be defending himself in the matter and attempted to have the case dismissed on two grounds. The first is that Safe Harbor protections extend to RomUniverse, which Storman claims is simply a service provider and not participating or reaping commercial benefit from infringing material. Storman claims that Nintendo has acknowledged RomUniverse as a service provider by sending DMCA takedown requests to the admin for the site, at least some of which have been complied with. That, unfortunately, is not really how any of this works, as Nintendo details in its own response to Storman's motion.

The Florida state Supreme Court is being asked to settle the open question as to whether compelled password production violates the Fifth Amendment. (via FourthAmendment.com)Last October, a state Appeals Court decided that it did. In a case involving an accident caused by a drunk driver, law enforcement sought to compel the suspect to unlock his phone so they could search it for evidence. It's unclear what evidence of drunk driving the police hoped to find on the phone, but that's the case that first made its way to one of the state's appellate courts.It all worked out, though. The court ruled that compelling a password is a Fifth Amendment issue because it could force the suspect to hand over evidence to be used against him by prosecutors. Another state appellate court came to the same conclusion earlier this year, ruling that compelling password production to unlock a robbery suspect's encrypted device violated the Constitution.In both cases, prosecutors didn't really care about the password. That's not what they were after. They wanted what was on the phones, which could be evidence.It's a big "could," though. The state didn't bring much with it but conclusory arguments which are very much not the same thing as establishing the needed "foregone conclusion." Without it, the state is seeking to violate the Fifth Amendment, and for the lousiest of reasons.

Body cameras were supposed to bring more transparency and accountability to law enforcement agencies. The change that was promised hasn't arrived. Body camera footage does little for the public. Every so often, it results in a successful lawsuit and/or prosecution.What body camera footage does best is what cops do best: lock people up. Prosecutors are making the most of recordings, using them as evidence against criminal suspects.When the idea of watching the police first started gaining traction, officials and politicians opposed to anything that might make cops more accountable claimed the recordings were nothing but a "gotcha" tactic. In their minds, someone would be reviewing all recorded footage every day, just waiting for a cop to screw up.This was a stupid stance to take. Not only was this fantasy logistically impossible, but there's hardly anyone inside law enforcement agencies all that interested in punishing officers, even when they've screwed up. What has actually happened is the millions of hours of footage recorded every day is uploaded and forgotten about until someone needs it. It usually takes a lawsuit to get this footage released, or at least the threat of one. Defense attorneys looking for footage to defend their clients must subject themselves to a variety of third-party user agreements before they're allowed to see anything.Since the police aren't going to police themselves -- not even with a slew of new self-policing tools -- accountability and transparency must be forced on agencies by other government entities. But this has been very slow in developing. And what we're being given can't even generously be called a half-measure.One (ONE!) law enforcement agency in Indiana has agreed to random inspections of body camera footage. The agreement is the result of the shooting of a black man by white police officers. No footage exists of this incident, despite the fact the officer who shot the man had a cruiser equipped with a dash cam and was wearing a body camera.The new inspection rules are incredibly lax, pretty much ensuring no South Bend cop will ever be the "victim" of this barely-there "gotcha tactic."

Remember Blackbird Technologies? This was the patent trolling firm made up almost entirely of lawyers who insisted they weren't a law firm... they just bought up patents for basically nothing and then threatened and/or sued a bunch of companies claiming patent infringement. A few years back it was suing basically everyone over some dubious patents. But it made a pretty massive strategic error in suing Cloudlfare because Cloudflare decided to fight back, not just to win its case, but to invalidate as many Blackbird patents as possible, while simultaneously reporting the ethics violations involved in pretending not to be a law firm when you really are (and in what appeared to be trying to purchase the bare right to sue, rather than the actual full patent rights).That process ended poorly for Blackbird, who lost in court and on appeal, in a fairly demeaning way (the courts gave Cloudflare a complete and total victory -- and the appeal was even ruled upon within days of the hearing, which is almost unheard of in such cases). It still cost Cloudflare hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Blackbird had lost many of its employees and had cut back significantly on filing new lawsuits.And now it's in even more trouble. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC, the appeals court that handles all patent cases) has upheld a lower court's order telling Blackbird it needs to pay $363,243.80 in legal fees to one of the companies it tried to shake down, Health in Motion LLC (HIM). The court clearly sees what's going on here, and its recounting of how Blackbird tried to get out of the case is... really something to behold. First, Blackbird sued and, following the typical patent trolling playbook, asked for $80,000 to settle. That number is (purposely) significantly less than it would take to fight the case in court. That's how the whole patent trolling shakedown process works. Sue, and then offer to settle for less than it would cost the defendant, even if they won the case. But HIM also decided to fight back and told Blackbird that it should pay them for having to waste this time on lawyers. From the CAFC summary, this is a fun read (if you're confused "Appellees" is HIM, the defendant in the case):

Amazon's Ring has been uniformly terrible ever since it decided its primary market (homeowners) should be treated with less care and concern than the market it's actually courting and subsidizing (law enforcement agencies).Since it's not really in the customer service business anymore, the end users who thought they were buying some security and peace of mind have discovered they've actually become part of a law enforcement surveillance network run by a company that doesn't really seem to be in the security business.A group of forum members found Ring cameras incredibly easy to hijack. Running scripts utilizing lists of credentials harvested from the web's many security breaches, some sociopathic idiots were able to brute force their way into taking control of devices. Their favorites were the ones equipped with mics, where they could verbally abuse and taunt unsuspecting Ring owners for the enjoyment of their podcast audience. (I really wish I were making that last part up but this is the internet we have.)When the news cycle of "hacked" Ring cameras began, Ring was quick to point out this wasn't its fault. To a certain point, Ring is right. Ring says it encourages the use of two-factor authentication and strong passwords. Great. So do lots of IoT device makers. But very few are actually forcing their users to engage two-factor authentication prior to allowing the connected device to go "live" on the web. Ring isn't doing this either.It's even worse in Ring's case. Ring says it's the customers that are wrong, but it does absolutely nothing to prevent this sort of hijacking. There's no lockout after a certain number of failed logins. No warnings are sent to owners about logins from unrecognized devices or IP addresses. Repeated failed login attempts aren't flagged as suspicious. For a company supposedly in the security business, this is a pretty insecure way to run a business.It's this latest insecurity that's getting the company sued.

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Oracle has waged a many years long war (now heading to the Supreme Court) arguing that copying APIs is copyright infringement. Many people who actually understand what an API is, have explained why that is absolutely ridiculous, but tons of non-technical (always non-technical) people keep insisting that an API is just as copyrightable as software. Indeed, they often insist that an API is no different than software itself. This includes Oracle's main lawyer on the case, Annette Hurst, who just a few months ago insisted that APIs were executable code (they are not).However, Charles Duan, over at the R Street Institute (disclosure: we've partnered with R Street on a variety of projects over the years) has written up quite an incredible article highlighting that Oracle, of all companies, appears to have copied Amazon's S3 API. Lots of companies have. But that's because copying APIs is done all the freaking time in software, because it's how you make compatible systems: