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Portable alcohol testing equipment (a.k.a. breathalyzers) have been called "magic black boxes" and "extremely questionable" by judges. And yet, they're still used almost everywhere by almost every law enforcement agency. They're shiny and sleek and have knobs and buttons and digital readouts, so they're not as immediately sketchy as the $2 drug-testing labs cops use to turn donut crumbs into methamphetamines. But they're almost as unreliable as field drug tests.Even when the equipment works right, it can still be wrong. But it so very rarely works right. Cops buy the equipment, then do almost nothing in terms of periodic testing or maintenance. A new report from the New York Times shows this equipment should probably never be trusted to deliver proof of someone's intoxication. And the failure begins with the agencies using them.

There have been plenty of stories that have made the rounds over the years arguing that Google/Facebook have "killed" the journalism business by sucking up all the advertising revenue. In the past, I've pointed out how silly and tiresome this argument can be, and certainly looking through the data, it simply does not support the narrative. Instead, it appears that the success of Google and Facebook is much more a scapegoat for the legacy news business' own failure to adapt to a rapidly changing marketplace -- one in which their previous competitive advantage (limited competition within a geographical region) was completely eroded.That said, even understanding that properly doesn't answer the question of how one can actually save the journalism business, which has faced a huge variety of challenges over the last couple of decades. Lydia Polgreen, writing for the Guardian, has an interesting proposal that argues that the big internet platforms can both save journalism and deal with their big misinformation problems in one single move, by throwing a huge sum of money at journalism organizations. Among other things, she compares the rise of misinformation and the collapse of journalism to the impacts of industrial pollution, and suggests that internet companies could create a parallel to how businesses have now begun focusing on sustainability programs regarding environmental impact. Except, instead of dealing with things like carbon emissions, they could help deal with the pollution of misinformation via funding journalism efforts:

Dallas residents are now going to be $345,000 lighter thanks to the actions of one Dallas Area Rapid Transit cop. (via Reason)DART officer Stephanie Branch decided the law was on her side when she demanded photographer Avi Adelman stop recording EMS personnel dealing with an apparent overdose. Officer Branch claimed Adelman's photography violated the medical privacy rights of the person being attended to, saying things about HIPAA (not at all relevant here) and "establishing a perimeter." Branch was in the wrong. She was violating DART policy by shutting Adelman down and she compounded this error by making twenty-three "false or misleading" statements in her report of the arrest.Adelman spent 20 hours in jail after being charged with criminal trespassing. That charge was dropped and DART itself apologized to him for the actions of its "rogue" officer. Officer Branch escaped being held liable for violating Adelman's First Amendment rights as the right to record public employees in public areas wasn't clearly established in the Fifth Circuit until a year after Adelman's arrest.His Fourth Amendment claim moved forward though and Officer Branch appealed the stripping of her qualified immunity on this count. Her appeal was rejected by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which found Branch's arrest of Adelman unreasonable. As the court pointed out, Branch's actions directly violated a DART policy issued two years before the 2016 incident. Branch tried to reclaim her immunity shield by claiming ignorance, but the court shot that down.

The Trump FCC has made it abundantly clear it isn't particularly keen on state, city, or local rights, especially when they interfere with AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast's ability to make a buck. The problem: when the FCC neutered its ability to police the telecom sector at lobbyist request as part of the net neutrality repeal, it may have ironically obliterated its authority to tell states or cities what they can do.The agency fiercely opposes your town and city's right to build its own broadband networks, even if nobody else will and locals have voted for it. The Pai FCC has also tried (illegally and unsuccessfully so far) to ban states from trying to protect consumers from predatory telecom monopolies in the wake of federal apathy. And a number of other FCC policy changes have attempted to hamstring your town or city's ability to stand up to wireless carriers over things like environmental reviews for cell tower placement, or the money they can collect for hosting telecom equipment in public rights of way.This week, the FCC was sued by a broad coalition of cities which say they've had enough. Dozens of states have joined forces to sue the FCC over an August ruling cities say not only limit how much money cities can collect for things like environmental impact reviews on cell tower placement, but hamstrings their ability to stand up to giants like AT&T and Verizon on pretty much any issue of substance. The FCC claimed the changes were necessary to accelerate our positioning in the "race to 5G," though cities say the changes are little more than a giant gift to the nation's biggest telecom conglomerates:

I've never seen a Presidential administration so thoroughly pissed off it's in power. Despite having his boy in the White House and a Senate majority, the DOJ's top man spent most of a memorial lecture complaining about how hard it is to be in charge.Attorney General William Barr's main complaint -- which runs for a majority of his speech to the Federalist Society -- is that the Executive Branch just doesn't have enough power. Barr believes one part of the co-equal government should be more equal than the others.The most telling moment is this: Barr believes things began to go downhill for the Executive Branch during an administration that made the best case for limiting Presidential power.

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You may have read something of late about the battle over so-called "C Band spectrum," the wireless frequencies that lie between 3.7 GHz and 4.2 GHz. This spectrum will be hugely beneficial for deploying 5G wireless, and wireless carriers and activists alike have been pressuring the FCC for years to repurpose much of it for 5G. How this should be done has been a point of contention, however. And given there's upwards of $60 billion to be made off of auctioning this spectrum, the typical alliances you'll see in telecom have been more complicated than usual.Consumer advocates want the spectrum auctioned off publicly by the FCC, allowing it to be transparently bought by folks in rural areas eager to use it for point-to-point backhaul and rural broadband expansion. Satellite providers, unified under the C-Band Alliance, have been opposed to public auction and instead want the spectrum auctioned off behind closed doors, promising they'd then kick back some of the money to the FCC (read: American taxpayers, who technically own the airwaves in question). Incumbent wireless carriers have split opinions on how to proceed, with T-Mobile backing a public auction.While this sort of stuff usually is ignored by Congress, the fact this spectrum could net upwards of $60 billion has driven some politicians, like Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, to push for public auctions where the government receives bids (and money) semi-transparently, instead of, as Kennedy has complained, this money being shoveled off privately to satellite providers in "Luxembourg." That money in turn can be used for any number of efforts; in Kennedy's case, a big impractical wall. Kennedy recently met with Trump to try and pressure the FCC, a move that appears to have worked.Pai, who had seemingly been teetering toward the idea of a private auction, came out this week in favor of a more transparent, public auction of the C Band spectrum instead:

The ACLU is one step closer to obtaining documents detailing the FBI's use of social media monitoring tools. The FBI replied to the ACLU's FOIA request with a Glomar and a denial.First, it neither confirmed nor denied it had responsive records. Then it said even if it did have some, it still wouldn't release them. According to the FBI, releasing documents about the government's well-known use of social media monitoring software would somehow allow criminals to take a peek at super-secret law enforcement tools. It made these assertions despite the fact it publicly secured contracts for social media monitoring tools.The ACLU sued. And now, it's obtained at least a partial victory. The court says it's not quite accurate to say the DOJ has already publicly acknowledged use of social media monitoring tools. Citing the ACLU's victory in an FOIA lawsuit over drone strike documents, the court points out the bar to clear first is whether it can be said the DOJ -- not the FBI -- has made it clear it's in the social media monitoring business. From the decision [PDF]:

Earlier this month, we discussed how DirectTV was one cable operator the Colarado Attorney General is investigating over how it extracts varied and confusing fees from customers and more specifically how DirectTV managed to continue charging customers for a regional sports station that had been blacked out. The overall tenor of the post was, first, that cable operators charging fees in as confusing a manner as possible is par for the course and, second, that even in that landscape continuing to charge customers for a channel it wasn't offering sure felt like a bridge too far.Well, apparently the folks over at DirectTV were listening in on our post and decided to email us with a statement. That statement said first that, by the time the story posted, the broadcaster had come to terms and was back on the air. Second came a claim that refunds had been issued... if customers specifically asked for one.

As we noted last week, there's a laundry list of potential issues plaguing Google's attempted entry into the game streaming space via Google Stadia, not least of which is the US' substandard broadband networks and arbitrary broadband caps. Stadia eliminates the physical home game console and instead moves all game processing to the cloud. And while it's clear that this is the inevitable path forward and somebody is going to eventually dominate the space, there's no solid indication yet that it's going to be Google.Initial Stadia shipments went out this week (some anyway, many orders never shipped), and so far the press response has been a large, collective, "meh." Most reviews cite a fairly pathetic launch lineup filled with titles that were first released years ago. And while the service works in ideal conditions on good broadband lines, the $120 entry fee (plus $10 subscription cost) is being derided as largely a public paid beta:

The privacy activist Max Schrems has been conducting a battle on multiple fronts against Facebook's use of personal data. Last year, Techdirt wrote about one of the skirmishes, which saw the EU's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), ruling that Schrems could use the GDPR to litigate in Austria, where he is based, rather than in Ireland, where Facebook has its international headquarters. The latter option would have been prohibitively expensive for Schrems, and would probably have meant he dropped the case.Schems has now begun his legal action in Austria, before the Vienna Regional Court. According to Schrems, Facebook admitted that it has been collecting and processing data without users' consent since the introduction of the GDPR last year. However, in an interesting move, Facebook has claimed that it is not breaking EU law for the following reason:

Dave Ramsey is a radio host/"personal finance guru" whose religious beliefs appear to be a key part of his public persona. A long and detailed story in the Daily Beast a few years back showcased another apparent part of his persona: what appears to be significant anger towards those who criticize him or his company, including former employees:

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Federal judges appear to be tiring of the government's long-running entrapment programs. One of the federal law enforcment's favorite "enforcement" efforts is creating crime in order to bust "criminals." Agencies like the ATF and DEA find someone in need of cash -- usually a minority someone -- and use undercover agents and confidential informants to convince them to raid a drug stash house for some easy money.The twist is the drug stash house is fake. There are no drugs. There are no armed guards protecting the drugs. Once the mark arrives with a weapon and a plan of attack, the ATF arrests the person for thinking about robbing a fake stash house to steal nonexistent drugs.The other twist is the prosecution. Since the drugs never existed, the ATF is free to claim the targeted stash was large enough to trigger mandatory minimum sentences.A handful of judges have already found stash house stings to be a questionable use of government resources, if not ultra-shady operations that put the government in the position of being the judge and the jury by fabricating drug amounts to ensure longer sentences are handed down.Here's what federal judge Ruben Castillo had to say about stash house stings:

We've long noted that T-Mobile's brand reputation as a feisty consumer-friendly disruptor is only really skin deep. While the T-Mobile of 2012 or so certainly added some much needed competition to the wireless sector (killing ETFs, eliminating long-term contracts, and eroding international roaming costs), more recently the company has started to look a lot like the bigger competitors (AT&T, Verizon) it pretends to be superior to. From mocking groups like the EFF to opposing net neutrality, the company isn't all that different from the companies its brash CEO John Legere likes to make fun of.The disconnect between the T-Mobile consumer friendly "uncarrier" brand and reality has proven particularly notable as T-Mobile and Sprint have kissed up to the Trump administration to gain regulatory approval for their controversial $26 billion megamerger.From hiring Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski days after he mocked a kid with Down Syndrome on TV, to trampling the Constitution's emoluments clause by ramping up patronage of Trump's DC hotel to get merger approval, it hasn't been a pretty sight. Not a week goes by where Legere, who spent years mocking other companies' "bullshit," can't be found making false promises related to the megadeal.While the deal has unsurprisingly received the DOJ (now run by former Verizon lawyer Bill Barr) and FCC (now run by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai) blessing thanks to T-Mobile's relentless ass kissing, it still faces a looming lawsuit by a bipartisan coalition of 13 state AGs. Which makes it an interesting time for T-Mobile CEO John Legere to announce he'll be leaving the company starting next May to be replaced by current T-Mobile COO Mike Sievert. Legere likely realizes it's best to go out on top. He also likely realizes that he probably shouldn't stick around to watch his company slowly become everything he claims to despise:

The latest law enforcement agency to offer up its opinion on end-to-end encryption doesn't seem to like it either. Joseph Menn reports for Reuters that Interpol is siding with the FBI, DOJ, and a handful of European government agencies in finding that encryption is bad and lets bad people do bad things.

While Netflix's Narcos has certainly been a hit show for the streaming platform, it's still a bit surprising that there has been so much intellectual property strife surrounding the show. To date, the most notable IP dispute has been Pablo Escobar's brother's attempt to sue Netflix for one billion dollars. As Netflix was having Narcos actors pretend to threaten to shoot the public for pirating the show, Roberto Escobar was busy making no headway with his lawsuit, eventually dropping it.But another lawsuit had been filed against Narcos as well, by a famous Colombian journalist who had a years-long affair with El Jefe. Virginia Vallejo wrote about her time with Escobar and the affair she had with him in a memoir, scenes from which were depicted in the Netflix series. She went on to claim that such depictions constituted copyright infringement. Unfortunately for her, a Miami judge ruled for Narcos producers on summary judgement, finding that the Netflix show had depicted only facts that were similar to Vallejo's accounts, while the rest of the depictions in two scenes the journalist calls out were not substantially similar to her retelling in her book.The ruling itself is a rather, ahem, steamy read as far as these things go. The reason for that is that one of the scenes in question is a bedroom scene involving a revolver being used in new and creative ways.

The trickle of "Brady lists" continues, further enraging New York City's police unions. The last batch of cops considered too dishonest or crooked to be called on to testify in court led the Sergeants Benevolent Association to claim the Bronx DA's release of its "naughty list" was an attempt to "smear honest, hardworking cops."It was a super-strange claim to make about cops that were too dishonest to be allowed in court, suggesting the SBA felt misconduct and perjury were just part of everyday police work. It's a stretch to call a list of cops even prosecutors don't trust a smear attempt. These reputations are already besmirched. The only difference is that the public now knows, rather than just Bronx prosecutors.Another list of bad cops has been released to Gothamist. This one comes courtesy of a public records request sent to the Brooklyn DA's office.

Yeah, it's real easy to sit back and second guess the hard work of law enforcement officers. Secure and safe in our warm homes, far away from the mean streets and thin blue line separating us from the criminal apocalypse, we have it easy. As one of the NYPD's unions pointed out, citizens like us are clueless. We've (and I'm directly quoting here) "grown up on the nipple of what's easy." We "have no clue what a NYPD officer does," and yet we criticize and disparage them.Then one day -- after years of criticism and disparagement and [re-reads tweet] nipples -- we'll find we need them. "Evil will be at our door," as the NYC PBA says. When that happens, we cop-haters will call for help. We will finally recognize we need them. After all, when all hell breaks loose, who else is going to respond to our calls for help and… um… sell our personal info to insurance scam artists?

As we showed earlier this year in our latest Sky Is Rising report, revenue in the entertainment industry continues to shoot upwards -- and not because of draconian new anti-piracy laws, but almost entirely because of successful innovations from internet companies that have opened up massive new markets for content creators. You'd think that maybe this would make some copyright system supporters think twice about continuing to push for expansionary copyright policies that are likely to hamstring the very internet services that have provided them this windfall, but that would be expecting self-reflection from an industry famous for blaming everyone else for everything that has ever gone wrong.Case in point, CISAC, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (a sort of mega group of most of the various performance rights collections societies around the globe) recently released its annual report on revenue, showing that things were looking up, up, up for songwriters and composers in getting paid. This report fits well with the annual IFPI report, which covers similar data for recording artists (generally speaking, IFPI covers revenue for recorded music, while CISAC covers revenue stemming from performance rights and songwriting royalties). In all cases, these show pretty massive increases, nearly all of it stemming from growth in internet services:

Oh, guess what? The NSA has ended another third party data collection -- one it hopefully ended right after the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision was released. Spencer Ackerman fills in the details at the Daily Beast.

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Andrew Yang has been a bit of a surprise Presidential candidate this year, and is often described as a former "tech exec" or "Silicon Valley's presidential candidate". The "tech exec" claim seems a bit exaggerated, as he was a lawyer, and then ran a test prep company before a non-profit. Still, he got lots of attention for being a bit wonky and at least speaking the language of tech. His main claim to fame has been to support Universal Basic Income of $1,000/month which is a popular idea here in Silicon Valley.However, the more we hear from Yang about his tech policy ideas, the more ridiculous and completely disconnected from the actual tech world he seems. He got a lot of flak a couple months back when he advocated for voting via your mobile device via blockchain which he declared to be "fraud proof." This was universally mocked by security professionals and cryptocurrency experts, including one who described the proposal as "unbelievably dumb."So, his pro-tech campaign had already hit some choppy waters, and they got much, much worse last week when he introduced his official policy for regulating technology firms that is so filled with bad ideas that I initially thought it was a parody. It may be the single worst tech policy proposal of any current or former candidate for President (and, frankly, nearly all of them are pretty bad). It's as if he took all the terrible ideas that Senator Josh Hawley has been proposing over the last year or so and said "Oh, I can top all of those with worse proposals."Let's go through the details one by one.

For more than a decade we've noted how the US broadband industry's biggest problem is a lack of healthy competition. In countless markets consumers either have the choice of a terrible phone company or a cable giant. The nation's phone companies have spent the last decade refusing to upgrade (or in some cases even repair) their aging DSL lines, because they don't see residential broadband as worth their while. That in turn is giving giants like Comcast and Spectrum an ever greater monopoly in many markets, reducing the already muted incentive to compete on price or shore up comically terrible customer service.Many US telcos now exist solely to milk subsidies while doing the absolute bare minimum. This dynamic often results in some absurd dysfunction. Like in West Virginia, where incumbent telco Frontier has repeatedly been busted in a series of scandals involving substandard service and the misuse of taxpayer money. The graft and corruption in the state is so severe, state leaders have buried reports, and, until recently, a Frontier executive did double duty as a state representative without anybody in the state thinking that was a conflict of interest.Frontier has also been facing investigations in states like Minnesota, where regulators have questioned why the company has received taxpayer subsidies for doing little to nothing. Unsurprisingly the company has been struggling with using apathy as a business model, and there's chatter that a long awaited bankruptcy may finally be imminent. Unlike AT&T and Verizon, telcos like Frontier, Windstream, and CenturyLink don't have wireless income to offset the losses:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Toom1275 with a response to Universal Music's copyright claim over a public domain song:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, the amicus briefs were rolling in on Google's first attempt to get SCOTUS to hear the Oracle case. We were surprised when Obama called for real net neutrality, and not so surprised when the broadband industry and T-Mobile's CEO and the rest of the anti-net-neutrality brigade freaked out in response. Meanwhile, Techdirt got dragged into the Roca Labs affair when Roca bizarrely sued Marc Randazza largely over a post we wrote, just before it began issuing bogus DMCA notices to Google over PissedConsumer reviews. This was also the week we launched the Techdirt podcast.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, a Danish anti-piracy group was withdrawing all its lawsuits against individuals after it lost most of them, though this just spurred the IFPI to say it would start seizing computers to get more evidence. The UK was moving towards forcing ISPs to retain user data and kicking people off the internet, while Rupert Murdoch was audaciously claiming that fair use could be struck down entirely by the courts, and we took a look at how a lot of Murdoch's own websites contained aggregators just like the ones he was so angry about. Verizon started passing on RIAA letters to users, the MPAA got a town's public wi-fi shut down over one single unauthorized movie download, and we looked closer at Bluebeat's bizarre "psycho-acoustic simulation" copyright claim on Beatles songs.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, Monster Cable was establishing its reputation as a trademark monster, Blockbuster was making the questionable decision to buy more stores, and the entertainment industry just couldn't quite give up on self-destructing DVDs. The deluge of video ads on the web was just beginning, though it probably wasn't yet quite as annoying as AOL's very stupid TV commercials. The notion of selling instead of going public was becoming mainstream for tech startups, and Google's not-so-revolutionary IPO was not kickstarting the Dutch Auction trend many people expected. And lastly, this was the week Firefox officially hit version 1.0.

Earlier this week we already covered infamous and oft-sanctioned copyright troll lawyer, Richard Liebowitz, showing up in court to explain to the judge why he lied about the timing of the death of his grandfather multiple times over the course of many months as he tried to explain away why he missed a discovery conference. As we noted, Liebowitz actually showed up in court this time (good call, considering that the judge made it clear she was considering sending him to jail), and brought a lawyer with him (also a good call). He did remain out of jail, though Judge Cathy Seibel noted that she had referred the matter to the Grievance Committee, which could lead to sanctions. She also warned that her various contempt rulings against Liebowitz will require him to disclose the sanctions both to other courts and to prospective clients.At the hearing, it was mentioned that Liebowitz's newly found lawyers, had sent a letter to the judge, but that letter was not public yet. Late yesterday, the letter was finally added to the docket and I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. You can pretty much tell that the lawyer writing the letter, Richard Greenberg, admits, that he has just been brought into this shit show of a situation, and has decided the best strategy is to throw himself on the mercy of the court. And, apparently, Greenberg decided the best way to do this is to treat Liebowtiz as if he's a little kid who just didn't know any better that lying to a judge is a bad idea. It honestly does read like the kind of note a parent would write for a kid, so I have to admit that this little tidbit at the end of the letter puts much of the rest of it in context:

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has denied immunity to a cop involved in a no-knock raid that left the raided house's resident, Julian Betton, paralyzed. This case was touched on briefly in a previous post discussing legal arguments made by law enforcement officers that attempt to portray people in their own homes as dangerous aggressors when police crash through their doors unannounced.In this case, South Carolina police officer David Belue's legal rep tried to tell the court Betton's response to a bunch of heavily-armed men rushing through his door -- grabbing a gun and moving into the hallway from the bathroom -- created a situation where Betton deserved every bullet fired at him by officers. In other words, if Betton didn't want to get shot, he shouldn't have been in his own house when it was invaded by officers who never informed him they were police officers.Here's a recap of the events leading to the lawsuit, from the Fourth Circuit's decision [PDF]:

Some big news out of the Supreme Court this morning, as it has agreed to hear the appeal in the never-ending Oracle v. Google lawsuit regarding whether or not copyright applies to APIs (the case is now captioned as Google v. Oracle, since it was Google asking the Supreme Court to hear the appeal). We've been covering the case and all its permutations for many years now, and it's notable that the Supreme Court is going to consider both of the questions that Google petitioned over. Specifically:

The list of convicted cops the California Attorney General tried to keep secret has just been made searchable by the Sacramento Bee. It contains hundreds of current and former police officers who've been convicted of criminal acts over the last ten years.This collaboration of multiple newsrooms and journalism advocates began with an unforced error by a state agency. Taking advantage of a new state law allowing the public to access police misconduct records, journalists asked the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training for relevant documents. The agency handed over a list of 12,000 former and current officers -- a list that apparently was never supposed to be made public.The state's Attorney General claimed the journalists had broken the law simply by possessing a document the Commission never should have given them. This couldn't be further from the truth, but AG Xavier Becerra continued to make this claim, as though it were possible to codify something just by saying it out loud often enough.I can see why AG Becerra wants this list buried. There's nothing on it that makes cops or their oversight (which includes Becerra) look good. While the 12,000 officers in the database are a small percentage of the total number of California law enforcement officers employed over the past ten years, this small portion includes a number of cops who were never fired from their agencies despite committing criminal acts that would have put regular people out of a job.

When is it defamatory to call people "racist douchebags?" Well, let's start with the "douchebag" part. This is always a statement of opinion and never actionable. Calling someone (in this case, several someones) a "douchebag" is like calling them an "asshole." It's not something that is possible of defaming anyone since it's always, without exception, a statement of opinion.Calling someone a racist is almost always a statement of opinion. Unlike calling someone a felon or a child molester, claims of racism are based on perception. This makes them closer to a statement of opinion than an actionable fact.So, calling people "racist douchebags" isn't defamatory. And it certainly isn't defamatory in a situation like this, where the group of people being called "racist douchebags" acted like racist douchebags. In this case, six members of a South Carolina high school football team sued the Charleston City Paper for calling them "racist douchebags." The events leading to the Charleston paper's column were filled with douchebaggery of the racist variety. (h/t Adam Steinbaugh)Here's the super-dry take on the events from the South Carolina Appeal Court's decision [PDF] -- a take made even drier by the school's press conference statements.

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We've joked in the past that, given the insane state of copyright maximalism, if libraries were invented today, it's quite clear that book publishers would insist they were dens of piracy and had to be stopped at all costs. It is, at best, the luck of history that libraries got "grandfathered" in before copyright system maximalists went completely out of their minds. But, in fact, copyright holders still do appear to hate libraries and wish they'd go away. Case in point: publishing giant Macmillan, which has decided that libraries shouldn't be lending ebooks any more. Back in July it announced a new plan, starting November 1st, to "embargo" ebooks offered to libraries.If you're not already aware, most libraries offer ebook lending -- which gives borrowers temporary access to an ebook, just like borrowing a hard copy library book. I use this all the time to borrow ebooks from my local library (which has also resulted in my buying permanent copies of many of those books). However, Macmillan has decided to crack down on the practice. In a letter to authors defending this move, Macmillan claimed that library ebook lending was cutting into its bottom line:

Plenty has been made of the President's unwillingness to adhere to anything close to reasonable security when using his mobile phones. Whereas the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the National Security Agency usually work in concert providing state leaders with "hardened" devices that are heavily encrypted, routinely updated, and frequently swapped out, Trump has refused to use these more secure DMCC-S devices (effectively a Samsung Galaxy S4 device utilizing Samsung's Knox security architecture) because they apparently infringe on his ability to Tweet.Just a few months ago, Senators sent a letter expressing concern that Trump's mobile phone practices were leaving the President open to potential hacking by foreign entities:

Sci-Hub describes itself as "the first website in the world to provide mass & public access to research papers". At the time of writing, there were 77.5 million academic papers available on the site. Many, perhaps most, of them were funded by taxpayers, through government grants to researchers working at educational institutions. The person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, presumably sees her site as a way of letting people have access to the work they paid for. The publishing giant Elsevier doesn't agree. For some reason, it seems to think it has a right to a profit margin of 35-40% arising from its role as a gatekeeper to the papers that the public has paid for.The resulting David and Goliath battle between Sci-Hub and Elsevier has been raging for years, and follows a predictable pattern. Elsevier spends lots of money getting a court somewhere to shut down one way of accessing Sci-Hub, and the latter simply finds an alternative -- by moving to a new domain, for example. As TorrentFreak reports, Elsevier has just "won" another pointless legal battle:

It probably shouldn't be all that surprising that there is a decent volume of trademark disputes that occur over restaurant menu items. Somewhat like the craft beer industry, the restaurant industry has for a long, long time looked toward creative output for menu items as a way to stand out. Because there are only so many ways you can name food or a dish, occasionally this creative naming practice causes trademark issues.A recent example of this occurred in Canada, where multiple diners were making omelettes and calling them "mish-mash." Beauty's is a Montreal staple that has served a mish-mash omelette, composed of the normal egg ingredients alongside items like hotdogs, peppers, and salami, for several decades. It was only in 1989, though, that Beauty's got a trademark on the name. Other diners, such as Cosmos and Bagel Etc., have offered up their own mish-mash omelettes going as far back as the early 1980s. Despite the trademark, there were no disputes over the menu items until this year, when Beauty's sent C&D notices to several restaurants.

On November 19, Google is expected to finally launch the company's long awaited game streaming platform, Google Stadia. Stadia is being heralded as the vanguard of a new push to eliminate your local game console, and shift all of the computing and processing power to the cloud. The shift to game streaming is likely inevitable, the only problem is that Stadia may be a little ahead of its time. And, like so many Google projects (like Google Fiber), game developers are apparently worried that Google may waffle on its commitment to the project:

There has been a debate over the past few years about the legality of "doxxing," which would loosely be defined as identifying individuals and/or their personal information which they'd prefer to remain secret. This is coming up in a variety of contexts, including effort to unveil the whistleblower who first called attention to President Trump's questionable call with Ukraine's President. However, we also noted in passing, last week, that the new privacy bill from Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo contained an anti-doxxing clause, which states:

Just a few days ago, copyright troll lawyer Richard Liebowitz was being threatened with jail time for refusing to provide a judge with some evidence his grandfather had died. If that doesn't seem like something most judges would demand, you're right. It takes a special kind of lawyer to drive a federal court judge to start demanding proof of death from an attorney.Liebowitz had blown off a discovery conference. When called on it, he claimed his grandfather had died on April 12th, forcing him to miss the scheduled conference. The judge had other reasons to doubt Liebowitz's claim -- like other screwing around he had performed during this litigation, as well as his short, but colorful (read: sanction-heavy) litigation career.This information was demanded again and again by the judge. Liebowitz again and again refused to provide documentation of his grandfather's death. Sanctions were handed down, rising from $100/day to $500/day as Liebowitz continued to refuse to respond to the judge's order. The judge gave Liebowitz one more chance to turn up in court with the proper paperwork. If he failed to do so, he was to be arrested.Since then, there have been a couple of developments. William Bastone of The Smoking Gun managed to find evidence of Liebowitz's grandfather's demise.

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As you're probably aware, on January 1st of this year, we actually had a public domain day in the US for the first time in over two decades. Prior to that Congress (with the help of Hollywood lobbyists) had worked to continually extend copyright law whenever new works were due to go into the public domain. These extensions still seem to violate the spirit of the copyright clause in the Constitution, given that it is granting Congress permission to create such monopolies only so much as those monopoly rights "promote the progress." Any reasonable interpretation of that clause means that copyright law should be allowed in cases where it creates the incentive to create. But it's difficult to see how extending copyright law decades after the work has been created does anything to incentivize that work in the first place.Nonetheless, this year, Hollywood finally realized that it was probably too much to ask to get another copyright term extension and finally let works from 1923 enter the public domain. One of the signature works of the public domain class of 1923 was the song Yes! We Have No Bananas by composers Irving Cohn and Frank Silver. As of January 1st, anyone was free to make use of that song. Indeed, in our own Public Domain Game Jam competition, we actually had not one, but two separate game entries based on "Yes! We Have No Bananas."But, of course, even if Hollywood wasn't going to push for term extension, that doesn't mean it won't do what it always does, and pull other levers. Glenn Fleishman had posted a video of the song to YouTube in celebration of it entering the public domain earlier this year. He even titled it "Yes! We Have No Bananas, now in the public domain." The video is of him and friends/family singing it at a New Year's Eve Party:However, that video has now been "claimed" by Universal Music and various subsidiaries, meaning that they could "monetize" it or force it offline, despite them literally having no rights to speak of.

US wireless carriers have spent much of the last year under fire for hoovering up your location data, then selling that data to any nitwit with a nickel. More recently they've been busted even selling access to E-911 location data, which is increasingly even more accurate in tracking users than traditional GPS. We've noted repeatedly that lax ethical standards result in this data often being abused by dubious third parties, or used illegally by law enforcement or those pretending to be law enforcement.Throughout these evolving scandals, the Trump FCC hasn't done anything to ensure the public this is being adequately looked into. There's been no critical statement about this practice issued by the FCC, and despite some early hints at a potential investigation, there's been zero public traction of any kind. Last week, some lawmakers wrote to the FCC boss Ajit Pai calling him out for doing nothing in response to the scandal:

There's a bit more Constitution in the "Constitution-free zone." A federal court in Massachusetts has ruled [PDF] border agents can no longer perform suspicionless device searches. This ruling aligns itself with the decision handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year. If the government wants to dig into travelers' phones and laptops without a warrant, it needs to show it believes contraband will be located on the seized device.It's not quite a warrant requirement, which would align it with the Supreme Court's Riley decision. No court has been willing to apply this decision at the border, but requiring reasonable suspicion is a step in the right direction.The lawsuit was filed by 11 travelers whose devices were seized and searched by CBP and ICE agents. For some of the plaintiffs -- represented by the ACLU -- this happened multiple times. The court provides a snapshot of the intrusions central to the group complaint.

As we've detailed for some time now, while contract blackouts have almost always been an annoyance in the cable television industry, they are becoming increasingly prevalent alongside the rise of cord-cutting. Normally when we discuss cable blackouts, the discussion revolves around the entirely predictable strategy by both the broadcaster and cable operator to blame one another, all while paying customers sit without the channels they're paying for. While annoying, that is usually the extent of our comments on the matter.But DirectTV has forged a new path on how to handle broadcast blackouts. In Colorado, both DirectTV and Comcast were hit with a blackout of the Altitude Sports Network, the broadcaster for the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, and more. ASN wanted, as per usual, higher fees for its broadcast rights. DirectTV and Comcast did not want to pay those higher fees. But, as part of a larger investigation into the fees Comcast and DirectTV assess their customers, the Colorado AG is looking into why DirectTV kept charging customers the regional sports fee for the channel it was no longer showing.

Another bang-up job by our nation's drug warriors (which included the use of flashbangs!) has resulted in yet another lawsuit alleging a host of rights violations. The Louisville (KY) PD's SWAT team was in such a hurry to raid a supposed drug dealer's house, the swearing officer couldn't be bothered to get any of the facts right. (via Reason)Fourteen officers descended on Ashlea Burr and Mario Daugherty's home on October 26. The no-knock raid began with the breaking of the home's glass front door and didn't end until everyone in the house -- including three teenage children -- had assault rifles pointed at them. Despite the assurances of Detective Joseph Tapp that there would be drugs found in the house, there were no drugs found in the house.The lawsuit [PDF] and the warrant affidavit [PDF] are disturbing reads. It shows just how little is needed to secure judicial permission to point guns at innocent people. They're best read together to highlight how much bullshit Det. Tapp shoveled onto the affidavit's pages to come up with something approaching "probable cause."From the affidavit:

We've made it abundantly clear that California's new privacy law is aggressively undercooked, and will require some very serious fine tuning if it's going to be workable for many California companies. At the same time, giant companies like Google, Comcast, and AT&T have spent a lot of time aggressively misrepresenting what the law actually does, running ads outright lying about the bill's impact, and downplaying the fact that states wouldn't be wading into the privacy waters if these companies hadn't lobbied to kill modest federal privacy requirements in the first place.Whereas companies like Facebook have repeatedly and routinely tripped over themselves in almost dystiopian fashion to make their existing regulatory headaches worse, it has been interesting to watch Microsoft, steeled from its experiences in the late 90s, navigate the current minefield more deftly. That was on display again this week when Microsoft came out in seemingly total support of California's new privacy law, with a blog post by Chief Privacy Officer Julie Brill stating the company intends to apply its adherence to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) law nationwide:

Two separate news reports last week highlighted how both Twitter and Instagram appear to be taking to heart arguments made about how both of those platforms may (inadvertently) encourage questionable behavior. Instagram will begin hiding "likes" from users in the US to cut down on the dopamine rush of trying to maximize those bits of pointless social validation:

Nothing owns like a self-own. And Ring -- Amazon's doorbell surveillance project -- is so into self-abuse, it's almost kinky. It's a DOM when it picks up another submissive law enforcement partner (400+ at last count, so maybe get tested if you install a doorbell without protection). Any other time, it seems to be a relentlessly cheery masochist. Hopefully it's deriving some pleasure from the endless negative news cycles. Maybe 95% market share heals all wounds.Ring is putting the "creep" back in the phrase "surveillance creep." While there's some value to keeping an eye on your front doorstep when you're expecting an expensive delivery, the downside is Ring might be letting cops know you've got a camera on your house. What it won't be letting you know is that it will part with your footage at the drop of a subpoena.If you're not eyeballing your neighbors by proxy, you're not living right. That's the message of the Neighbors app, which is pushed by Ring and cops alike. Breaking down "sharing" barriers is the first step toward bypassing the warrant process. Ring is the grease and the wheel.The pushback against Ring's law enforcement adoption offensive has had minimal effect on the company. It continues undeterred, even as it attempts to explain both its lack of interest in adding facial recognition software to its doorbells and its retention of a facial recognition division head. It's things like this that make one believe the public's opinion ultimately doesn't matter, not if Ring can convince enough cop shops to start pushing its offerings on the public.Ring is back in the news again. And, again, it's not because it did anything right. Or competently.First, Buzzfeed reports the doorbell company is as tone deaf as it is dominant in its market sector. What Ring thinks is cute and fun is actually just very, very creepy.

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Well, here we go again. So many politicians seem to think that Section 230 is the root of anything bad they see online, and insist that it needs to be removed to fix things that have nothing to do with 230. The latest is Joe Biden, who has a pretty horrible record regarding his own understanding of technology and the internet. In a weird comment on CNN about what to do about Facebook and moderating political advertising... Biden shifted the conversation to Section 230 after first making some false statements about what the law requires.