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Last week, as you may recall, we wrote about a bizarre situation in which print-on-demand t-shirt maker, Teespring (who we had happily used for most of our t-shirts for years), had taken down our "Copying Is Not Theft" t-shirt, first claiming that it was infringing on someone else's work (it was not). When we escalated the issue (as per their instructions), we were suddenly told it had nothing to do with infringement (despite the initial email) but because it violated their Acceptable Use Policies -- which, again, I assure you, we did not.We had thought that, perhaps, it was a bizarre overreaction to an ongoing saga of people trying to shine a light on automated bots taking popular "this ought to be on a t-shirt" tweets and turning them into possibly infringing t-shirts. However, there's perhaps an even larger reason why various print-on-demand t-shirt companies may be a bit extra twitchy with their takedown trigger fingers lately: because of some bad court rulings that effectively removed the DMCA's safe harbor from some of these companies. Back in the summer of 2017, we wrote about a court ruling against Zazzle, one of the oldest print-on-demand operations out there. That ruling more or less said that because Zazzle prints on physical goods, that gives it the "right and ability to control the sale of products" it creates, and thus, the safe harbors no longer apply.This is nonsensical, as it's basically saying that even though the process (user generated content) is exactly the same, the fact that it goes from a computer screen onto an actual physical good like a t-shirt, that suddenly changes the liability protection for intermediaries. That jury went on to find Zazzle owed almost $500k in awards for infringement. However, some of those awards were over $30,000, and that's the cap for non-willful infringement. The judge claimed that the infringement by Zazzle was not willful and reduced the amounts of those awards.That ruling was appealed to the 9th Circuit which, just last month, said that the court should revisit the willfulness bit, as Zazzle's failure to stop infringement could be seen as willful. In a very short (4 pages) per curiam (i.e., no judge put their name to the opinion, but it's effectively the joint opinion of the three judges) non-published opinion. It's technically not precedential for the 9th Circuit, but it's still not good:

Last October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC was within its authority when it buckled to telecom providers and eliminated not only the agency's net neutrality rules, but its authority over telecom providers. The ruling was a mixed blessing for big ISPs like Comcast and AT&T however, given that while it eliminated the federal guidance, it blocked the FCC from banning states from passing their own consumer protections. As a result, the telecom sector now faces a sometimes discordant patchwork of state protections, a problem of the industry's own making.Fast forward to late last week, when Mozilla and a coalition of consumer groups petitioned the court to rehear the case. A press release from Mozilla proclaims the appeal is driven by the belief that the court ruling conflicts with D.C. Circuit or Supreme Court precedent, and the court failed to seriously contemplate the fact that the repeal itself was built on a foundation of false allegations and bogus data (namely the provably false claim that the repeal was necessary because sector investment was harmed):

Here in the United States, asset forfeiture is pretty straightforward. In civil asset forfeiture, the government decides it wants something you have and files the paperwork to take it. In criminal asset forfeiture, the government takes your stuff pre-trial to prevent you from mounting a decent defense and finalizes the transfer of wealth post-conviction.In both cases, the government takes stuff before anything's been proven in court. Only in criminal asset forfeiture does the government have to do much work convincing a judge it should have your property instead of you.Legalized theft in the United States is scary, abusive, and the target of much criticism. It's a one-sided process that favors the accusers.But at least you still get to keep the clothes you're wearing, unlike in the Netherlands. Dutch police are willing to disrobe anyone they suspect can't afford (at least not with legally-obtained funds) the clothes on their backs, the watches on their wrists, and any other accoutrements cops think a person couldn't have purchased without ill-gotten gains.Meanwhile, the UK government allows law enforcement to secure "unexplained wealth orders," which allows them to seize anything someone can't produce receipts for. To move forward with these orders, there has to be at least some articulable suspicion the wealth may have been derived from a serious criminal act. The downside is the power has also been granted to tax collection authorities, which turns less-serious crimes like owing back taxes into "serious" crimes since it's subject to the same legalized theft program. No convictions need to be secured before the government can start taking stuff away from people. And the burden of proof rests almost entirely on the person whose property is being taken.It appears Trinidad and Tobago has instituted the same sort of government-enabled theft program. And it actually beat the Brits to it by a couple of months. The islands' "explain your wealth" law went into effect in April of this year, but it took until December for anyone to take it out for a test drive.The law allows law enforcement to freeze/seize assets, utilizing either restriction or forfeiture orders. The process starts with the filing of a request by law enforcement or revenue officers. All the government needs to do is tell the court it suspects the wealth is unexplained. The burden of proof is on the accused.

Faulty drug tests deployed by law enforcement continue to ruin lives. Usually, it's cheap field tests used by officers during traffic stops that turn legal substances into illegal substances, resulting in hefty criminal charges for people who've never used drugs, much less carried them around in their cars.The current faulty drug test debacle isn't likely to generate as much sympathy or result in wide-ranging investigations of drug testing tech. These drug tests are negatively affecting people who are already locked up, which isn't quite as disturbing as minor moving violations escalating into felony drug charges.But it's still disturbing, even if it isn't taking innocent people off the streets. Documents leaked to Gothamist show hundreds of inmates have been subjected to harsher punishments, extended sentences, and loss of privileges thanks to drug tests corrections officials knew were unreliable.

Readers here will be familiar with the practice of copyright trolling and the toll this extortion by threatened litigation has had on the public and the court system. You will also be aware that a huge chunk of copyright trolling efforts in America have been undertaken by two companies: Malibu Media and Strike 3 Holdings. Both companies have had setbacks as of late, between ownership and investor issues, and a series of both losses in court and judges who are finally starting to catch on to the shady way these trolls attempt to extort money from people with scant evidence.It is perhaps in part due to those struggles that both companies have essentially gone dark in federal courts as of late.

Tennessee sheriff's deputy Daniel Wilkey has racked up some amazing stats during his short law enforcement career. At the age of 26, Deputy Daniel Wilkey is at his second law enforcement agency, having left the Rhea County Sheriff's Office for the Hamilton County in 2018.During his time as a Rhea County deputy, Daniel Wilkey was named in one (1) federal lawsuit for fatally shooting a person. Since his arrival in Hamilton County in February 2018, Wilkey has been hit with five (5) civil rights lawsuits. Fortunately, none of these involve Wilkey killing anyone.More unfortunately, about half of them break new ground in civil rights violation territory. One alleges an unlawful roadside anal search that injured the searchee. Another involves a super-weird forced baptism in a nearby lake, supposedly in exchange for leniency with a drug arrest. Both of those were filed on the same day.Yet another two (2) lawsuits involve minors, roadside strip searches, and Wilkey's bizarre personal blend of religious affirmations and verbal abuse.But Wilkey's biggest numbers are his latest. Via Cacobot comes this update: Deputy Wilkey is facing almost as many felony charges as he is years-old.

As you'll recall, earlier this month we wrote about this bizarre situation in North Carolina, in which the University of North Carolina agreed to give a bunch of racists $2.5 million to settle a lawsuit before the lawsuit had even been filed. The details of the story came out due to some inquisitive digging by North Carolina lawyer Greg Doucette. And, in response to him publishing the details, including a "victory" letter sent by the head of the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans (in which it is admitted that they obviously had no legal standing to sue), Doucette's Dropbox account was blocked thanks to a bogus DMCA letter from the group. Doucette retained lawyer Marc Randazza, who sent the Sons a letter demanding they use the $2.5 million to fund scholarships for African American UNC students or face a lawsuit for the bogus takedown. That letter argued that the bogus DMCA notice violated Section 512(f) of the DMCA, which (in theory) is supposed to stop abusive takedowns by punishing "misrepresentations" in takedown notices.As I noted at the time, Section 512(f) of the DMCA is effectively dead, as courts rarely enforce anything about it and, at best, have said that those issuing a DMCA notice simply only need to consider fair use and if they, in their minds, think it's not, can still send the takedown. However, Randazza and Doucette have decided to move forward anyway and have sued the NC Sons of Confederate Veterans, along with its leader Kevin Stone, and Dropbox (who blocked Doucette's account). As is fairly typical of a Randazza filing, it's an entertaining read:

In an ideal world, companies that profess to be dedicated to protecting users from malware and privacy threats probably shouldn't contribute to the problem. In the world we live in however, that's often not the case--as everybody saw when Facebook tried to sell its users on a "privacy protecting VPN" that actually hoovered up their browsing data, providing insight into user behavior when they aren't using Facebook. Facebook did ultimately shut the project down, but it took a year before they were willing to do so.Enter antivirus and security firm Avast, which has been taking heat after it was discovered that the company's services are collecting user browsing data. Back in August, Wladimir Palant, the creator behind Adblock Plus, wrote a blog post detailing how Avast Online Security and Avast Secure Browser were covertly collecting the browsing data of the Czech company's 400 million users. In response earlier this month, both Opera and Mozilla pulled Avast extensions from their respective add on markets, though Google has lagged in any comparable response.Hoping to calm the waters a bit, Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek this week tells Forbes that there's no actual privacy scandal here, because the data the company collects is anonymized:

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For the past few years, there's been a really bizarre "fight" going on in the copyright world. I had considered writing about it nearly two years ago when it first seemed to flare up, but I had hoped that facts and cooler heads might prevail. Silly me.This involves a few issues that are fairly deep in the weeds if you're not a lawyer, so I'll try to provide a quick overview of what's happening for non-lawyers. The American Law Institute (ALI) is a non-profit organization which states its mission is to help to "clarify, modernize and otherwise improve the law." Its most well known products are the so-called "Restatements" of various laws. Restatements are, generally speaking, attempts to provide significant additional annotations on the law, based on caselaw. That is, it's a very useful tool for courts to understand how various aspects of the written law have been interpreted by judges before them. They are scholarly works, put together by bringing together large groups of legal experts in a field to work out a very balanced review of how courts have interpreted the law.Seeing as these are merely effectively annotations on the law, they are, in no way, binding on a court. Instead, they are designed to be useful in helping judges understand the current state of the law. A few years back, ALI decided to put together a Restatement of Copyright Law. It's been a long, slow process. To put it together, ALI has brought together a large and diverse group of copyright lawyers, practitioners, and scholars representing pretty much all sides of the various copyright debates. If you were planning to release a document that was one-sided and "biased" this is not the way you would do that.Among the people working on the Restatement there are some of the most famous names in copyright scholarship -- many of whom historically have supported a more maximalist interpretation, including David Nimmer, Jane Ginsburg, and Peter Mennell. Others working on this with a long history of copyright maximalism, include former Copyright Office General Counsels Jacqueline Charlesworth and Sy Damle. You have a bunch of current and former RIAA and MPAA folks, including former RIAA lobbyist and current federal judge Beryl Howell. There's also Michael Fricklas, former General Counsel of Viacom, Michael Kane from Disney, former Warner Bros. and MPAA VP Dean Marks, former RIAA General Counsel Steven Marks, current Senior VP and Associate General Counsel at the MPAA Ben Sheffner, and also Shira Perlmutter, a well known maximalist currently at the USPTO, but previously at the Copyright Office, IFPI, and Time Warner.In short, there are very few of the big names in copyright maximalism I can think of who aren't among the team tasked with this process.But it also includes plenty of people with more enlightened views on copyright -- those who recognize that copyright was supposed to be designed to benefit the public first and foremost. Basically, it's a pretty balanced list. In the years since the Restatement has been announced, it's appeared that it's this very balance of those working on the Restatement that has so upset the maximalists. As a whole, they've basically been getting their way with their interpretation and ever-growing expansion of copyright law. Over and over and over again. The idea that anyone who actually recognizes the original intent of copyright law might even weigh in on helping to explain to judges what courts have said is worrisome to them. This is silly. The point of the Restatement is to explain what courts have said. Restatements don't say what the law should be or what anyone hopes it should be. It's very much about highlighting what the caselaw says.Two years ago, the Copyright Office put out a letter whining about the Restatement process, (despite so many people related to the Copyright Office being on the team putting together the Restatement). At the time, I spoke to someone else on the team who told me that the whole thing was purely a "turf battle," in which the Copyright Office wants the courts to look to it for legal interpretations (generally not something the courts have done), so this is seen as a "competitive" effort. But the bigger issue, honestly, seems to be one factor and one factor only: Hollywood and its friends decided long ago that the public interest has no business in copyright. And this Restatement process even acknowledging those who have worked to remind people that copyright is supposed to be in the public interest is seen as a threat to their views.But here's where things get insane. The lobbyists for copyright maximalists have now convinced one senator and four members of Congress to pressure the ALI to drop the entire Restatement of Copyright Law project.In case this is not clear: members of Congress are telling a private organization that it should not give its opinion or analysis on the state of the law. That's fucked up no matter how you look at it. Senator Thom Tillis, and Representatives Ben Cline, Ted Deutch, Martha Roby, and Harley Rouda, have some explaining to do. Using the power of Congress to say that a private organization shouldn't talk about the law is insane.Even the specifics in the letter are crazy -- and clearly were talking points from lobbyists.

One of the most visible manifestations of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the "cookie banner" that pops up when you visit many sites for the first time. These are designed to give visitors the opportunity to decide whether they want to be tracked, and if so by whom. Any business operating Internet sites in the EU should theoretically use them or something similar, or risk a GDPR fine of up to 4% of global turnover. Cookie banners may be tiresome, but at least they give users some measure of control over how much they are tracked online. But do they? Few of us have the skills or the time to check that our wishes are obeyed by every site. Fortunately, three researchers in France -- Célestin Matte, Nataliia Bielova, Cristiana Santos -- possess both, and have conducted the first rigorous study of this area. They've written a good summary of their full academic paper.An initial scan of 22,949 Web sites from the EU domains, as well as .org and .com, showed 1,426 that had cookie banners based on the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe Transparency and Consent Framework, the main industry standard for this area. Of those, the team of researchers took a close look at 560 Web sites from .uk, .fr, .it, .be, .ie and .com domains to detect possible GDPR violations. Shockingly, they found four types of violations in cookie banners, across 305 Web sites -- 54% of the sample:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Anonymous Anonymous Coward with a response to the phrase that got our t-shirt taken down from Teespring — copying is not theft:

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Some good news for journalists in Nevada, via FourthAmendment.com. A decision made earlier this year by a state court has been reversed, resulting in an expansion of the protections offered by the state's journalist shield law.In March, Judge James Wilson -- overseeing a defamation lawsuit filed by Storey County Commissioner Lance Gilman against blogger Sam Toll -- decided the journalist shield law only protects journalists who work for printed newspapers. While it acknowledged the 1969 law also covers television journalists, it refused to extend these protections to Sam Toll and his blog, the Storey Teller.Toll was actually a member of the Nevada Press Association at the time he was sued, but Judge Wilson said that didn't matter because the alleged defamation occurred before he received these credentials. Wilson ordered Toll to divulge his sources. Toll challenged this decision, resulting in the state's Supreme Court letting the lower court know it can't define "journalism" so narrowly.The decision [PDF] says the court needs to buy a few more dictionaries. The definition of "print" the lower court used isn't the only one available.

As we've discussed in the past, the DMCA system is enforced in such a way as to make it wide open for abuse. One of the chief problems is that, while the DMCA does include potential punishments for filing bogus notices under 512(f), the courts have traditionally appeared to have forgotten that this part of the law even exists. The end result is that anyone looking to censor or extort others by either filing or threatening to file bogus DMCA notices is mostly free to do so without risk. The times when 512(f) actually gets a spotlight are so few and far between as to be news when it happens. This has been going on, and has been pointed out by various publications, for years.And yet it still goes on. Earlier, Mike wrote about Apple sending a questionable DMCA takedown to Twitter regarding a tweet, but there was a separate part of that story. Beyond the takedown to Twitter -- which everyone (including Apple) recognized as coming from Apple -- there were other takedowns sent to Reddit, leading the subreddit /r/jailbreak to go into lockdown. This followed the removal of several posts discussing how that Apple encryption key was taken down (as explained in the earlier post). Many leapt to the conclusion in both the media and wider internet that Apple was behind the shuttering of /r/jailbreak as well.

We've long noted how community broadband networks are often an organic response to the expensive, slow, or just-plain unavailable service that's the direct product of a broken telecom market and regulatory capture. While you'll occasionally see some deployment duds if the business models aren't well crafted, studies have shown such local networks (there are 750 and counting now in the States) offer cheaper, faster service than many incumbents. Chattanooga's EPB, for example, was rated the best ISP in America last year by Consumer Reports.This direct grass roots threat to incumbent revenues is a major reason why ISP lobbyists have passed protectionist laws in around 20 states trying to block your town's ability to even consider the option. It's why industry cozy FCC officials have falsely tried to suggest community broadband is an ominous assault on free speech. And it's why you'll find an endless parade of telecom-linked think tankers, consultants, and lobbyists routinely trying to portray this organic response to market failure as "vile socialism" or an inevitable boondoggle.Enter Bernie Sanders, whose new broadband plan was released last week and appears to have been cobbled together from the collected nightmares of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast executives. The plan would not only restore the FCC's net neutrality authority and the agency's authority over ISPs in general, but it would restore the FCC's broadband privacy rules scuttled in 2017 by telecom lobbyists. It would also ban arbitrary and unnecessary broadband usage caps and overage fees, and ban the sneaky fees ISPs use to covertly jack up the advertised price post sale.But the plan takes some extra time to highlight how a Sanders administration would embrace community broadband, including the elimination of protectionist state laws, and the doling out of $150 billion to be used largely toward building alternatives to the private sector telecom status quo:

Copyright continues to serve its purpose as a tool for censorship, it seems. This week there was some hubbub over Apple's highly questionable decision to send a DMCA takedown notice over a tweet by a security researcher who goes by "Siguza," and who appeared to publish an iPhone encryption key on Twitter:

More nonsense is being perpetrated in Tennessee, the recent home to an inordinate amount of stupid defamation lawsuits. The timing on this one is a bit off. Tennessee just adopted a new anti-SLAPP law -- one that actually has some teeth.After receiving a stinging -- but not apparently defamatory -- review of his services, Dr. Kaveer Nandigam of Nandigam Neurology decided to sue his patient for $25,000. Here's the review (which is still live on Yelp) that prompted the lawsuit:

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Various health fads come and go. One particular one that I guess has been around for a bit is the idea of drinking "green smoothies." This was made popular by Robyn Openshaw, who is called "The Green Smoothie Girl" and has written a bunch of books, all around her views on approaches to losing weight and health, including the aforementioned green smoothies, and various "detox" plans. There's also something about "vibrations," but that's about as deep into the weeds as I was going to get on her views on staying healthy.I have no opinion on whether or not any of that stuff works or is good for you (do your own research!) but it does appear that the Green Smoothie Girl, Robyn Openshaw, is not at all happy about negative reviews. People who merely posted on Facebook saying that Openshaw's claims were "unproven" among other things, started receiving threatening messages demanding that these mildly negative reviews be taken down or they would face lawsuits:

Unless you're in fairly stark denial, it's clear the Trump Federal Communications Commision has been a rubber stamp for the every fleeting whim of the telecom sector, be it the agency's decision to effectively neuter itself at telecom lobbyist behest, or the attack on net neutrality rules with widespread bipartisan support. But such revolving door regulation has more subtle casualties, as well. The Wall Street Journal this week for example offered up an interesting deep dive into how ISPs successfully pressure the FCC to ignore slower broadband speed test data when analyzing whether ISPs are delivering the speeds they promise:

To add to all the bad news that is Ring camera's life cycle to this point comes the report that a group of malcontents has been exploiting default/weak credentials to gain access to cameras. Joseph Cox has the this-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-scary details at Motherboard.

You may have noticed something of a steady stream of posts from us on the topic of a "Taco Tuesday" trademark held by the chain Taco John's. Taco John's has used this descriptive trademark to bully all kinds of other restaurants into not advertising their own taco Tuesday offerings, while also leaving alone the vast majority of small purveyors of tacos on Tuesdays. The ubiquity of Taco Tuesdays is mostly what has everyone confused as to why Taco John's is acting like Taco Jerks: the term is descriptive and, even if it weren't, fully generic at this point.It was enough to, and I can't believe I'm saying this, get LeBron James involved. You see, just like dragons, LeBron loves tacos. And he likes promoting his own consumption of tacos on Tuesdays and he very much thinks that everyone should be able to use the phrase as they please. To that end, LeBron took to the Trademark office pretending to want to trademark "Taco Tuesday" for himself when he was actually hoping to get denied due to the generic and descriptive nature of the mark... which is exactly what happened. We said then that it was now only a matter of time before someone decided to go on the offensive to take Taco Tuesday back by inviting Taco John's to issue a threat so that this hero group could point to the Trademark Office's denial of LeBron's trademark, with the ultimate goal being invalidating the Taco John's trademark.Well, that has now happened. The Orange County Restaurant Association has gone all in, going so far as to by the tacotuesday.com domain.

A good ruling [PDF] has been issued by a Florida Appeals Court -- one that not only affirms its earlier warrant requirement for Stingray use, but also reminds law enforcement that the good faith exception isn't as expansive as they think it is. (via FourthAmendment.com)In 2018, the same court said the use of cell site simulators required warrants. Unlike collecting cell site location info from third parties (which was fine until the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision), Stingray devices turn the government into the second party, coercing location info from phone users by forcing them to connect to law enforcement's fake cell towers.That decision doesn't bring precedential force to this case, which deals with events that happened six years before the state appeals court's 2018 ruling.

There are very few things in life that former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden and I agree on. For years, he was a leading government champion for trashing the 4th Amendment and conducting widespread surveillance on Americans. He supported the CIA's torture program and (ridiculously) complained that having the US government publicly reckon with that torture program would help terrorists.But, there is one thing that he and I agree on: putting backdoors into encryption is a horrible, dreadful, terrible idea. He surprised many people by first saying this five years ago, and he's repeated it a bunch since then -- including in a recent Bloomberg piece, entitled: Encryption Backdoors Won't Stop Crime But Will Hurt U.S. Tech. In it, he makes two great points. First, backdooring encryption will make Americans much less safe:

The Inspector General's report [PDF] on the FBI's investigation into Russia's connection to the Trump election campaign has been released. In the 480-page report, there's enough to satisfy both sides of the argument. Those who believe the investigation was never politically-driven will have their hunches confirmed. Those that believe there's a concerted Deep State effort targeting Trump will find just enough in it to affirm those beliefs as well.The Inspector General behind the report, Michael Horowitz, has never been afraid of calling bullshit on the numerous agencies he oversees. These agencies, on the other hand, do everything they can to thwart his investigations, so if anything crucial seems to be missing from this report, you can probably blame the FBI.The report clears the FBI of any wrongdoing, at least as far as the "politically-driven" allegations. The IG concluded the FBI did things badly, but did not do them for anti-Trump reasons.That being said, the more disturbing aspects of the report deal with the FISA court and the FBI's casual abuse of its surveillance authorities. Not much is known about the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts -- at least not those authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. While the FBI routinely performs "backdoor" searches of domestic communications harvested by the NSA's foreign-facing surveillance efforts, we have yet to see an actual FISA affidavit from the FBI.The affidavits reviewed by IG Horowitz involved the surveillance of Carter Page, hat-wearer and foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign. The super-secret process has rarely been this closely examined before. What it shows is the FBI playing fast and loose with its surveillance powers. Here's Charlie Savage's take for the New York Times:

Perhaps one of the more annoying points that people like to make when you point out that certain services are "free" is for them to point out, pedantically, "but you pay with your data" or some other such point. This is annoying because it's (1) obvious and (2) not the point. When people say something is "free" in this context, they don't mean "free of all consequences." They mean "it doesn't cost money." However, it appears that Hungary's Competition Authority is playing this pedantic game on a larger scale and has fined Facebook approximately $4 million because it advertises its services as "Free and anyone can join" on its front page:The Hungarian Competition Authority claimed that this was misleading because Facebook profited from their data:

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At Techdirt we're no strangers to people disagreeing — often, let's say, vehemently — with our views on copyright. But I've still often been surprised by how angry some people get about the simple, factual observation that copying is not theft. We've made the point many times (and it remains true even if you think copyright infringement is a dastardly crime), and a few years ago we put it on a t-shirt and some other products via the print-on-demand platform Teespring, where we sell a bunch of gear. But you won't find the shirt at those links anymore, because last week we received notice from Teespring that it had been taken down... supposedly for copyright infringement.At first, it seemed like this was likely a simple error from an automated system (the takedown notification explained that it was not based on a complaint from a third party) and I suspected we had been caught up in Teespring's response to an unrelated (and amusing) phenomenon that was taking place at the same time: a bunch of artists and others online were aiming to prove that there are bots out there copying artwork from social media and selling it on print-on-demand sites, by spreading funny and extremely-infringing images which did, indeed, show up on several print-on-demand t-shirts soon afterwards.

It seems like only yesterday that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was promising on live television that if Trump followed through on his tax cuts, the company would dramatically boost investment, in the process creating thousands of new jobs. Not "entry-level jobs," mind you, but "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in the ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year." Each $1 billion in new investment, AT&T insisted, would result in 7,000 new jobs. "Lower taxes drives more investment, drives more hiring, drives greater wages," Stephenson said.Yeah, about that.Here on planet Earth, AT&T has revealed that the company's slated CAPEX for 2020 will actually be decreasing by about $3 billion next year. The company is also preparing to engage in a new round of significant job cuts as it fights off an ongoing investor revolt triggered by the company's bumbling obsession with merger mania, and a continued exodus of video subscribers caused by relentless price hikes and branding incompetence.It's unclear how many employees will lose their jobs and/or benefits with this latest round of cuts (one of several in just the last few years), but the scale isn't expected to be subtle:

Be careful what you wish for when you demand that internet platforms police the internet for any and all bad stuff. There was a lot of fuss and cringing when this story broke that part of TikTok's content moderation strategies included suppressing videos by disabled, queer, and fat creators.

Earlier this year, after Netflix released an iteration of its Black Mirror series entitled Bandersnatch, which allowed the viewer to choose their own story path through the narrative, the company behind the famed Choose Your Own Adventure books from our childhood sued. Chooseco, armed with a trademark registration for "Choose your own adventure", claimed that Bandersnatch infringed on that trademark, first because the film has a nod of homage to the literary series within the script, and second simply because many in the public compared the film with the books of their youth. Meanwhile, thanks to the renewed attention that Netflix gave CYOA books -- for FREE! -- , Chooseco inked a deal with Amazon to create CYOA style narratives for the Alexa device.That success hasn't stopped Chooseco's bullying ways, however. Recently, itch.io's leadership has publicly warned indie game developers to stop describing their games as choose your own adventures on the site after Chooseco issued several takedowns of games that did so. In case you were concerned that the facts before the public didn't perfectly convey how absurd this all is, never fear:

The Blurred Lines lawsuit is the case that just keeps on giving... if the gift you're looking for is legal shenanigans and ridiculous situations. As you'll recall, that was the case in which Marvin Gaye's family suggested that because the Pharrell/Robin Thicke song "Blurred Lines" paid homage to Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up" with a similar groove, that it was infringing on Gaye's copyright. The whole thing was crazy -- and somehow the court bought it. Despite there not being any actual copying of any copyright-protected content, just the mere similarity of feeling in the song is enough to infringe.This has created quite a frenzy of nonsense, with artists now afraid to even mention their inspirations, lest they get sued, and sued again for every song they release. The situation has gotten so insane that even the RIAA has stepped in to say that perhaps copyright has gone too far in protecting works. Yes, the RIAA said that copyright may be protecting too much. This is pigs flying, snow in hell, cats and dogs living together, madness.And, believe it or not, the original case apparently is not fully over yet. During the original case, Pharrell gave a deposition claiming that he didn't intend to copy Marvin Gaye:

More than a quarter-century ago, then-Attorney General William Barr gave the DEA something it shouldn't have had and something it certainly hadn't earned. The War on Drugs was a forever war and it demanded an expansion of the government's powers. AG Barr OK'ed it: the warrantless bulk collection of multiple third party records, including call records, banking information, and the tracking of purchases.Twenty-seven years after the fact, the DOJ's Inspector General released its review of these programs, finding they had been crafted and deployed with no underlying legal basis. Some of these programs are defunct. Others have been codified into quasi-legitimacy by War on Terror-related government power expansions.Twenty-seven years later, William Barr is Attorney General once again. And he's likely just as interested in expanding law enforcement surveillance programs (without worrying too much about how legal they are) as he was three decades ago. He has shown no love for the public nor their rights since he took office, making it crystal clear that neither the administration he works for nor the law enforcement agencies he oversees should be questioned by other branches of the government, much less the public they're supposed to be serving.More questions are on the way, though. Senator Ron Wyden and Senator Pat Leahy want some answers from the DOJ about Barr's past legal misadventures and what he's doing now to address the findings of the long-delayed Inspector General's report.

As Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham has continued his latest quest to undermine encryption with a hearing whose sole purpose seemed to be to misleadingly argue that encryption represents a "risk to public safety." The Defense Department has weighed in to say that's ridiculous. As you may recall, the DOJ and the FBI have been working overtime to demonize encryption and pretend -- against nearly all evidence -- that widespread, strong encryption somehow undermines its ability to stop criminals.However, it appears that other parts of the government are a bit more up to date on these things. Representative Ro Khanna has forwarded a letter to Senator Graham that he received earlier this year from the Defense Department's CIO Dana Deasy, explaining just how important encryption actually is. The letter highlights how DoD employees rely on the kind of strong encryption found on mobile devices and in VPN services to protect the data of their employees, both at rest (on the devices) and in transit (across the network).

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With the DOJ (run by former Verizon lawyer William Barr) and the FCC (run by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai) eager to rubber stamp Sprint's $26 billion, competition-eroding merger with T-Mobile, a lawsuit from a bipartisan coalition of states is now all that stands in the way in the deal.That lawsuit began Monday, with state AGs making it very clear that every meaningful economic metric indicates the deal will erode competition, raise rates, and result in thousands of layoffs as redundant employees are inevitably eliminated. While Sprint and T-Mobile (and the army of consultants, lobbyists, think tankers, and government officials paid to love them) insist the deal will be wonderful for America, financially independent economists paint a decidedly different picture. One in which ongoing consolidation in the space only drives up wireless data pricing for American consumers who already pay some of the highest prices in the world for what's routinely ranked as mediocre service (whether we're talking about speeds or overall video quality).But underneath the deal's marketing veneer, industry giants know very well the reduction in competition will let them charge higher rates. You'll notice that AT&T and Verizon haven't lifted a finger to thwart the deal, suggesting they're perfectly fine with its impact (something that wouldn't be happening if they actually thought the end result would be a more competitive sector). And at the trial this week, AG lawyers highlighted that Sprint executive emails make it perfectly clear they know the deal will raise rates:

It looks like Twitter is making a bet on protocols over platforms for its future.

Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy highlights a very unusual court order that seems to think the First Amendment is only for people who haven't pissed off judges.The background of the case is this: Davin Eldridge frequently attended proceedings at the Macon County Courthouse. Despite signs stating that recording devices were prohibited in the court, Eldridge brought in recording devices and recorded proceedings.He was caught on more than one occasion, with Eldridge's latest attempt at not-all-that-much-subterfuge-tbh interrupted by the presiding judge. From the court order [PDF]:

You will recall that last month we discussed the latest iteration of T-Mobile's ongoing war to defend its trademark on the color magenta, as well as close variants of that color. While there are instances in which a particularly unique color or shade of color can be trademarked by a company, this case involved T-Mobile's parent company, Deutsche Telekom, bullying insurance company Lemonade out of using the color magenta in its branding. Given that the insurance and mobile phone industries are quite disparate, this never should have been a dispute, regardless of how ridiculous it is for a company to have exclusive rights to a color like magenta.The folks at Lemonade appear to agree. While the company complied with Telekom's C&D, it also launched a PR blitz to highlight how insane this all is. First, Lemonade launched its #FreeThePink campaign to raised public awareness, and is taking its case to EUIPO to try and invalidate the trademark. But that wasn't all. The staff of Lemonade has now released a Chrome browser extension that, ahem, helps enact T-Mobile's vision of being the only purveyor of pink out there.

There still remains little to no evidence that the silly games played by Cambridge Analytica actually did anything at all to influence voting practices in the US. However, Facebook allowing the company to get a bunch of data was a big part of the basis for hitting the company with a $5 billion fine earlier this year. The FTC also went after Cambridge Analytica, targeting the company, its CEO Alexander Nix, and the academic/app developer Aleksandr Kagan, whose app was used to grab all that Facebook data.Of course, Nix and Kagan settled with the FTC a while back and Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018. The company -- whatever is left of it -- completely ignored the FTC, and thus the FTC has now issued a mostly meaningless opinion, saying that the company violated the already problematic EU-US Privacy Shield agreement around transferring data across the Atlantic, and because of that Cambridge Analytica (which, I should remind you, is no longer around) is now barred from doing this again.

The DHS continues with its social media vetting program targeting foreign visitors despite questions about its Constitutionality and its effectiveness. Once a government agency decides to do something, it's difficult to talk it out of it, even if it appears to be throwing money down an unconstitutional hole.That's not to say a government agency can't be deterred from doing something awful. It's just that deterrence seems to be more effective prior to deployment than after a program is already in place.Speaking out against social media vetting hasn't really gotten us anywhere, so it's time to start suing. The Knight First Amendment Institute and the Brennan Center for Justice are suing the DHS on behalf of two US-based documentary film organizations, the International Documentary Association and the Doc Society. (via Just Security)It's not just the privacy side of the Fourth Amendment that's affected by the DHS's social media deep dives and demands for account passwords. It's also the First Amendment. There's a definite chilling effect being felt now that the DHS can demand access to accounts during the visa application process or at the border when incoming foreign visitors arrive. From the lawsuit [PDF]:

On Monday morning, the Washington Post released The Afghanistan Papers, an incredible (though, tragically, not surprising) collection of unpublished notes and interview transcripts revealing that the past three administrations -- Trump, Obama, and Bush -- all lied consistently and repeatedly about how bad things were going in Afghanistan, pretending that various actions were succeeding, while the reality was they knew it was an unwinnable war.

A handful of Congress members seem to think we need a War on Porn to go with our War on Drugs and our War on Terror. They think they have the right person in the DOJ to get this war machine mobilized.Yes, it's Bill Barr. The same man who decided the DOJ should start pushing obscenity prosecutions back in 1992 when he was Attorney General is being petitioned by a moral minority in the House to Make America Unconstitutional Again.The letter, signed by Reps Jim Banks, Mark Meadows, Vicky Hartzler, and Brian Babin, asks Bill Barr to turn the DOJ into an anti-porn organization again. A statement accompanying this attempted First Amendment broadside was sent to the National Review by Rep. Banks. It includes two links to Fight The New Drug -- the group of non-medical/psychological experts behind the push to label porn a "public health crisis" -- and one to the UK's infamous Daily Mail, to give you some idea what sources these reps consider credible.

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Verizon's often sad efforts to pivot from curmudgeonly old telco to sexy new Millennial advertising giant have not gone as the company had hoped. From the failure of its Go90 streaming service to its clumsy effort to turn AOL and Yahoo into a Facebook-killing ad empire, Verizon often can't get out of Verizon's way. The "consumer comes last" executive mindset of the government-pampered telecom monopoly is frequently reflected by its policies, like Verizon's decision to acquire Tumblr, ban one of the most compelling aspects of the service (adult content and art), then turn around and sell it at a massive loss.When archivists attempted to try and preserve a lot of the adult-themed art that Verizon was jettisoning, Verizon responded by banning archivist IP ranges for no coherent reason. Much like Facebook, Verizon positively adores looking at a controversial situation, then coming up with the worst possible policy and PR response. You know, like that time they hired a fake journalist to pretend the company wasn't trying to kill net neutrality.Another case in point. Back in October, Verizon and Yahoo informed users of Yahoo Groups that the 20 year community would be shut down coming this December 14. Archivists set about trying to catalog and store the decades of conversations, images, and content on the platform. But Verizon being Verizon, those archivists now say the company is actively undermining their efforts, including banning Archive Team email addresses being used to archive content, and actively blocking tools used for the same purpose:

France was the most vocal supporter of the EU Copyright Directive's upload filters provisions (originally known as Article 13, but Article 17 in the final version). Despite promises that the law wouldn't require a filter, right after the Directive passed (which only happened after the French negotiators strong-armed Germany into a questionable deal), French officials promised that it would be be first in line to "transpose" Article 17 into a new law.While it wasn't quite as quick as they initially promised (there was talk of having it ready last summer), France has now proposed to put Article 17 into law in that country and it's just about as bad as you could possibly imagine. Indeed, the law appears to simply ignore wholesale the already weak requirements that were put into Article 17, promising that the laws would protect user rights. That's not what France was pushing for it. Instead, it was all in on the copyright maximalism, so user rights -- the rights of the public -- can apparently be ignored.

"You know what would be cool," said the consumer product that wished it was a cop? "If everything we made catered to law enforcement rather than the end user." That's the Ring business model: make inroads with security-conscious homeowners by inserting them into a toxic ecosystem that includes a snitch app that amps up the worst aspects of humanity, and breaks down the walls between "sharing" and "giving law enforcement agencies footage they can keep and distribute forever without limitation."Ring doorbells have 95% of the doorbell camera market. That's a lot of "fuck you" market share. Ring says all doorbell camera footage belongs to homeowners, even as it renders homeowners extraneous by handing over footage stored in the cloud in response to subpoenas. Ring says it cares about the privacy of its customers, even as it tallies up doorbell rings and partners with law enforcement in sting operations.The never ending negative news cycles continues for Ring with these details tucked away in another long, scathing report on the the doorbell company that wants so badly to be deputized, it's willing to cross lines most tech companies aren't willing to cross.Caroline Haskins of Vice has been tracking Ring's incestuous relationship with law enforcement for several months now, using a slew of public records requests to make the things Ring and law enforcement don't want to discuss publicly public.In her latest post -- one that should be read start to finish, especially if you haven't kept current with Ring's endless deluge of self-owns -- Haskins points out some more reprehensible behavior by the home security company that thinks it's a domestic surveillance contractor.Being a good citizen involves more than flying an American flag over your driveway.

We've talked quite a bit over the years about Rozcomnadzor, the Russian agency in charge of policing the internet for copyright infringing content... and really anything else that the Russian government decides it doesn't like. The agency operates exactly as deftly as you would expect, routinely blocking entire sites that are in regular use in Russia over a tiny percentage of "illicit" use. The problem, of course, is that Rozcomnadzor often interprets "illicit" uses of the internet to mean embarrassing public Russian figures with ties to the government, criticizing the government itself, or using basic internet security tools such as VPN to keep the Russian government out of one's internet use. This makes it all the more infuriating that American groups such as the MPAA have happily signed on with the Russian agency in an effort to protect copyright content, despite the agency's more widespread aims.It keeps happening. Recently, stock photo site Shutterstock -- all of it -- suddenly appeared on the Russia banned sites list. You might be assuming that this is a copyright issue, but it isn't.

A little over a year ago when cave diver Vern Unsworth sued Elon Musk for defamation, we noted that (unlike many defamation cases), it did not appear to be an out-and-out SLAPP case. That said, we noted that many of the claims in the lawsuit did not look to be about defamatory speech at all, and that would make much of the lawsuit an uphill battle. The part that appeared to be the most problematic for Musk, however, was the emails he had sent to Buzzfeed reporter Ryan Mac after the initial tweets, in which he made more detailed accusations, including what appeared to be factual statements implying deeper knowledge about Unsworth.However, as the case played out, Unsworth dropped any defamation claims regarding the emails. It appears that Musk had hit back on those claims by suggesting that if they were defamatory, they were actually Buzzfeed defaming Unsworth, since it was Buzzfeed that had published Musk's quotes. Perhaps to avoid getting bogged down in that fight, Unsworth's legal team chose to focus just on the tweets, and not the email -- even though the email seemed to go closest to the line (if not over) of defamation. Musk's legal team still then asked for the Buzzfeed emails evidence to be excluded from any damages calculation, which the judge allowed. In the end, the focus was just on his tweets, and that allowed for a courtroom explanation of how insults fly freely on Twitter, suggesting that most people engaged on Twitter know better than to take random accusations and insults as factual statements.In the end, the jury sided with Musk with the reasoning more or less being the "subtweet defense." Because Musk didn't directly name Unsworth in his tweets, they couldn't reach the high bar of defamation: