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You may recall a few years back that Harvard Law Professor William Fisher had one of his lectures about copyright taken off YouTube by a bogus copyright claim from Sony Music. It appears that something new has happened to the Engleberg Center at NYU's School of Law, in which a panel discussion on "proving similarity" in copyright law (a big, big topic ever since the awful Blurred Lines decision came down), was taken down itself. It wasn't just taken down by a single bogus claim, but a whole bunch of bogus claims ("whole bunch of bogus claims" is my band's name, by the way).The folks at NYU Law know the law (duh), and pointed out that the use here was unquestionably fair use (short clips, used in an educational setting, etc.) and filed various counternotices. And yet, Universal Music said "fuck that" and refused to release the claim:Now, it's especially interesting that Universal Music Group was the one who refused to back down, given that it was subject to one of the few cases in which it was determined that a copyright claiming entity must consider fair use before making a claim. But, of course, the court also made it clear that if an entity (such as UMG) chose not to do that, there really was no real punishment.As the NYU folks note, it was unclear if allowing the copyright claim to remain would result in multiple strikes against its account, given that there were multiple claims made on this one video. The only way the issue got resolved... is that NYU was able to raise enough a stink within YouTube:

So we've noted a few times how giant telecom providers, as companies that have spent the better part of the last century as government-pampered monopolies, are adorable when they try (then inevitably fail) to innovate or compete. Verizon's attempt to pivot from curmudgeonly old phone company to sexy new media darling, for example, has been a cavalcade of clumsy errors, missteps, and wasted money.Much like that time Verizon tried to launch a "tech news" website that banned reporters from talking about net neutrality or government surveillance. Or the time it launched a Millennial-focused video streaming service nobody wanted to watch. Or the time it bought Tumblr (via Yahoo), banned porn, watched everybody leave, then had to sell the whole thing for a song.AT&T hasn't been much better as it has tried to "disrupt" the TV space. You'll recall the company spent more than $150 billion to acquire Time Warner and DirecTV in a bid to dominate streaming and the online video advertising space. But the deals saddled AT&T with so much debt, it forced the company to raise rates despite rising competition, driving many of these customers to the exits. AT&T also launched a rotating array of video brands (more than 7!) that were so confusing, it even dumbfounded the company's own customers.Hoping to right the ship, AT&T this week launched another variant of its streaming video platform. Despite the fact that US consumers are clearly tired of proprietary cable boxes, sneaky fees, and quickly-ballooning promotional rates, AT&T apparently thought it would be a good idea to "compete" in the streaming space by launching a platform that incorporates all three:

A stash of documents obtained from Utah government agencies has exposed another surveillance tech purveyor who's threatening to disrupt privacy for unquantified law enforcement gains. Banjo is the innocuous name the company does business under, led by a CEO sporting a ZZ Top beard and an urban camo sports coat.The public this is going to affect wasn't cut in on the deal. But nearly everything their tax dollars pay for was. Banjo's proprietary panopticon -- with servers located on Utah government property -- draws from nearly every piece of surveillance tech already deployed by cities and law enforcement. Banjo's contribution is the algorithms it drops on top of all of this:

This Chooseco and Netflix trademark dispute story gets more and more interesting. To catch you up, Netflix produced the Black Mirror iteration entitled Bandersnatch which both was, and was marketed as, a "choose your own adventure" production, similar to the CYOA books from our youth. There was also some dialogue within the production itself that referenced "choose your own adventure." For this, Chooseco, which has a trademark on the phrase, sued Netflix. Netflix tried to get the case tossed on First Amendment grounds, failed, and has since counterclaimed to have Chooseco's trademark cancelled entirely.To highlight how stupid this all is, let's review some press from Netflix's latest iteration of its excellent Carmen Sandiego show, which includes post titles like Kotaku's Carmen Sandiego Is Getting Back To Its Gaming Roots With Netflix's Next Choose Your Own Adventure-Style Special.

In late January, we had an analysis of an absolutely dreadful bill proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal -- both with a long history of attacking the internet -- called the EARN IT Act. The crux of the bill was that, in the name of "protecting the children," the bill would drastically change Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, making companies liable for "recklessly" failing to magically stop "child sexual abuse material" -- opening them up to civil lawsuits for any such failures. Even worse, it would enable the Attorney General -- who has made it quite clear that he hates encryption -- to effectively force companies to build in security-destroying backdoors.On Thurdsay, the EARN IT Act (Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act) was officially introduced with two additional awful Senators: from the Republican side there's tech hating Josh Hawley, and on the Democratic side, there's encryption hating Dianne Feinstein.This version of the bill has a few changes from the draft version that made the rounds before, but in effect it is trying to accomplish the same basic things: forcing companies to backdoor encryption or lose Section 230 protections, while at the same time opening up platforms to a wide range of lawsuits (a la what we're seeing with FOSTA suits) from ambulance chasing tort lawyers trying to shake down internet platforms for money, while claiming to do so in the name of "protecting the children."Senator Ron Wyden, who authored Section 230 decades ago, had the most succinct explanation of why the EARN IT Act is bad on multiple levels:

It appears whatever modest amount of restraint that our President had regarding his early promise to "open up our libel laws" have gone away. As you may recall, during the campaign he made such a promise, perhaps not realizing that defamation laws are not under the purview of the federal government -- and any changes at the state level are limited by the 1st Amendment of the Constitution (not something he can write away with an executive order). Right before he was inaugurated, he seemed to back down a little on that promise -- telling the NY Times that someone had pointed out to him that with more open libel laws, he was more likely to get sued as well.Over the first three years of his Presidency, while constantly lashing out ridiculously at the press, and the Washington Post and the NY Times in particular -- including his constant authoritarian attack of calling them "the enemy of the people" -- he had not sued. Until last week when he tapped lawyer Charles Harder (who, we'll remind you, was the lawyer in the lawsuit against us), to represent the Trump Campaign (rather than Donald directly) to sue the NY Times over an opinion piece. Trump and Harder have now done so again, this time suing the Washington Post over two opinion pieces.The complaint -- like the one against the NY Times -- is laughable and will be thrown out of court. Again, opinions are not defamatory, and the articles were opinion pieces. The statements they make, that the Trump campaign declares defamatory are basically all ones based on disclosed facts. The complaint is short and not very detailed. It highlights just a single line in each post that it claims is defamatory:

The FBI's inability to rein in its agents is causing it more pain. The Inspector General's report released late last year showed agents performed some very selective editing of probable cause to unlawfully prolong the FBI's surveillance of former Trump adviser, Carter Page.Omitting evidence agents had on hand that Page was not acting on behalf of a foreign power, agents repeatedly extended FISA wiretaps, allowing FBI spooks to continue unjustified domestic surveillance. If you like your Deep State Conspiracy, you can keep it.But the most probable motivating factor isn't FBI agents' personal dislike of Donald Trump. It's more likely their all-encompassing love of surveillance. The FBI (along with the NSA) has abused the FISA court for years, allowing both agencies to perform domestic snooping under the guise of securing the nation from foreign threats. An agency that's willing to pursue "lying to a federal agent" charges when it's unable to find anything else to go after targets with is one that's willing to engage in surveillance long after it knows continued snooping will fail to uncover evidence of criminal activity.The FBI has already been told to revamp its warrant request procedures to ensure this abuse doesn't happen again. More significantly, the Inspector General has recommended one FBI official for prosecution after emails were altered to hide wrongdoing from the IG and (presumably) the FISA court. The FISA court went so far as to question nearly everything the FBI has brought to it, given the evidentiary cherry-picking uncovered by the IG's investigation.In what is possibly a first in FISA court history, the court has banned certain FBI agents from submitting warrant applications to the court. Charlie Savage reports on the latest federal embarrassment.

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Just a week after the 9th Circuit easily upheld the dismissal of Dennis Prager's silly lawsuit against Google for supposed anti-conservative bias, a district court has easily dismissed Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's quite similar lawsuit against Google for... anti-Tulsi bias or some such nonsense. As we pointed out when the lawsuit was first filed, the case stood no chance at all, and was using completely debunked and rejected legal theories.Judge Stephen Wilson made short work of the case, explaining to Gabbard and her Pierce Bainbridge lawyers how the 1st Amendment works, because the theory of it they presented in her case is... not it. Indeed, the court cites to the PragerU ruling from last week:

So we've noted for a while how while a lot of the anger against "big tech" is certainly justified, there's a sizeable segment of this growing DC chorus that's being quietly orchestrated by telecom giants. Companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast just effectively convinced the FCC to self-immolate, dismantling huge swaths of its broadband consumer protection authority (what could go wrong?). At the same time, the DOJ and FCC have been rubber stamping every terrible telecom merger than comes down the pike. When it comes to telecom monopolies, you'll hear nary a peep from the Trump administration.Contrast that to the GOP and Trump administration's sudden, breathless interest in "big tech" monopolies. In case you'd missed it, top telecom lobbyists have spent the last two years pushing ironically for a massive regulatory crackdown on "big tech" companies. For example Mike Powell, former FCC boss turned top cable industry lobbyist, put it this way at a 2018 appearance at an industry trade event:

A couple of years ago, a Reuters investigation uncovered another revamp of immigration policies under President Trump. ICE has a Risk Classification Assessment Tool that decides whether or not arrested immigrants can be released on bail or their own recognizance. The algorithm had apparently undergone a radical transformation under the new administration, drastically decreasing the number of detainees who could be granted release. The software now recommends detention in almost every case, no matter what mitigating factors are fed to the assessment tool.ICE is now being sued for running software that declares nearly 100% of detained immigrants too risky to be released pending hearings. The ACLU's lawsuit [PDF] opens with some disturbing stats that show how ICE has rigged the system to keep as many people detained as possible.

Unless you're somehow living in a cabin without electricity somewhere (in which case, how are you even reading this, bro?), you've heard all about the coronavirus. The virus is the subject of roughly all the news and at least half of our brainwaves these days, with an unfortunate amount of misinformation and spin floating around far too many governments and media. Some folks, such as social media groups used by law enforcement types, seem to think this is all a joke. Others, such as our very own United States Senate, seem to think an illness infecting and killing thousands is the perfect excuse to reauthorize surveillance powers by those same law enforcement types.China, meanwhile, isn't fucking around. While there is some analysis to do as to whether the country did enough in the early stages of the outbreak, not to mention whether it tried to downplay risks and silence dire warnings in a gamble to keep its economy going, there is no question that eventually it went full on heavy-handed to combat the virus. Since then, quarantines of metropolitan cities have been put in place, travel restrictions abound, and shutdowns of commercial and public services are the norm.But China's still gonna China, meaning the government is also banning a popular mobile game about infecting humanity with sicknesses after it surged in popularity in the country.

Back at the end of 2018, a defunct Swedish app developer sued Facebook for the changes the company made to its app platform. As detailed by Cyrus Farivar (then at Ars Technica), it appeared that the lawsuit was somehow connected to the more high profile case filed by the developer of a sketchy bikini-spotting app, "Pikini," Six4Three. At issue was that after Facebook realized that various apps were abusing the access the Facebook platform gave them to suck up data (a la Cambridge Analytica), Facebook drastically scaled back the platform and changed overall directions. Six4Three is fighting to argue that somehow Facebook owed it to developers to keep its platform open.This other company, Styleform IT, seemed to jump on board with a lawsuit that had some striking similarities to the Six4Three suit -- including sharing some of the same lawyers. Either way, Farivar alerts us to the latest in the case, which is that Facebook has filed an anti-SLAPP claim against Styleform IT, arguing that its attempt to sue Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg over the company's moderation choices violate, first, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows for Facebook to choose to moderate its platform however it wishes, and that the lawsuit itself is predicated on a 1st Amendment-violating effort to stifle Facebook's expressive decisions.

Across the ideological spectrum, there seems to be a consensus that something must be done about the biggest tech companies — that the legal mechanisms we currently have to address monopolization in the United States are inadequate to deal with the realities of the digital market. While recognizing how powerless our institutions have become in the face of Big Tech's massive lobbying power, there's an idea that's gaining traction as a viable approach to curb the societal and economic impacts of tech monopolies. The idea is to restore the core of a healthy internet ecosystem: interoperability and the revival of open protocols.Lawmakers, policy experts, and even Twitter, are advocating for tech companies to open up their platforms to enable other services and start-ups to enter the playing field. There are different approaches to doing so and varying layers of interoperability that are possible. The overarching goal, however, would be to get rid of the worst aspects of tech monopolization and bring about a new era of competition and innovation.As a writer and nonprofit tech entrepreneur who has focused on projects promoting digital justice and community networks, I became interested in these ideas. Why do we need to extend interoperability into the application layer? How do we create new Internet standards that open up our networks and platforms in ways that invite new features and applications that better respect our individual and collective rights online? As I examined the three most likely scenarios being discussed, I realized that we had much to learn from the past. We need to revive the power of standards bodies, and ensure that they stay relevant and effective by observing known principles about how to successfully govern a commons.A Brief Overview of Interoperability and CompetitionWhat made the early Internet so exciting was how quickly it changed. Different services like bulletin board systems (BBS), email, and Internet relay chat (IRC) came about and allowed people to communicate in ways that were impossible before. That rich ecosystem of tools and services were enabled by downstream innovation. New applications and features could be built with existing technologies with or without permission from the prevailing tech companies. Yes, there were plenty of lawsuits against these start-ups back then. But people were still willing to take the risk, and there were investors that wanted to back them up. There were less onerous laws hindering experimental technologies.Perhaps most importantly, much of the Internet ran on open protocols and standards. The academics and others who initially designed the protocols wanted to build a relatively free ecosystem, so they made it possible for services to interoperate with each other. Standards bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) established shared protocols in the name of the collective interest. These institutions have helped companies and organizations come together and set rules based on agreed upon needs, making them transparent and representative of the interests of more than one stakeholder. At standards bodies, companies sit alongside non-profit organizations, educational institutions, policy experts, and academics.But standards bodies have grown increasingly inefficient and exploitable. Not only were they always slow and under-resourced, tech companies grew powerful enough to bend them to their will or ignore them altogether by building walled gardens with no interoperability built into their platform (besides providing some public APIs with varying levels of consistency). In the era of Move Fast and Break Things, there was little patience for the kind of multi-stakeholder dialogue and decision-making that is required to build and conform to shared technical standards.There has been little incentive for tech companies to play well with others. Not only that, it's become the norm for tech monopolies to destroy any competition. Laws that regulate the internet such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) have had a chilling effect on the types of innovation that was characteristic of the early internet. These regulations can be weaponized by big players to crush new start-ups over even the most trivial violations. If they don’t sue them, tech companies can easily buy them out or throw all their resources into imitating the services of their smaller competitors until they crush them.Now most people communicate, get news, and publish their work through closed platforms run as web services. When people think of the Internet, they think about the platforms, not the protocols that run beneath them and make them work. To many, email is Gmail, chat is Slack, and discussion forums are Facebook.Of course the underlying protocols are still core to the Internet’s functionality. But these closed platforms severely lack the traits of interoperability. As we’ve become dependent on them, our digital lives have been left at the mercy of companies whose primary goal is to enclose as much of the Internet’s infrastructure as they can get away with. Especially when it comes to social networks, their ability to mediate every aspect of our relationships and interactions online has come at an immense cost to our right to free expression, privacy, and access to knowledge.Possible Paths Towards an Interoperable InternetThere are those who are calling for a revival of antitrust enforcement to break up the tech monopolies. But federal agencies in the U.S. such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) move too slowly and are under-resourced. And then there are others who say that breaking up the tech companies is entirely the wrong approach — that we need to build protocols to again make the Internet more interoperable as it was in the early days.The European Commission, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Mozilla, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and others are calling for a revival of interoperability as means to address Big Tech's dominance over the Internet. Among them they present three possible ways this could come about, with or without state intervention.1) State Antitrust EnforcementThrough litigation or legislative action, the state could require companies to make their platforms more open and interoperable. Mozilla's Chris Riley asserts that the agency best suited to take this on would be the FTC, which has the explicit mandate to protect consumer protection and enforce U.S. antitrust laws. Harold Feld of Public Knowledge calls for an entirely new agency empowered to oversee any implementation of any proposed law enforcing digital platform competition, given the specific technical complexities of enforcing such a law.There is precedence for this in Europe. The European Commission brought a case against Microsoft in the early 2000's that resulted in the company being required to release information enabling competing software to interoperate with Windows desktops. The U.S. and Europe have their own approaches to antitrust, of course. Interoperability enforcement would look very different depending on which state(s) had the mandate to move forward with this type of action.2) Established Platform Companies Seek StandardizationOne of the big players could willingly embark on a path to build open protocols. In December, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced Blue Sky, an initiative to help develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. In his Twitter thread about the project, Dorsey says that Twitter would fund further development of an existing decentralized standard or as he says, "create one from scratch".Many responded to him asking about ActivityPub — the protocol behind Mastodon, the federated alternative to Twitter. Why wouldn't Twitter invest its resources into that? Dorsey responded that it might be possible, but that it's up to the Blue Sky team to decide whether that protocol would be best. It's worth pointing out that ActivityPub has already gone through discussions at the W3C and is officially a recommended standard.It makes sense that a major platform would want to decentralize their platform, the most obvious reason being to relieve themselves of the responsibility over content moderation. The second reason is to fortify itself against even bigger competitors, like Facebook, that threaten to enclose even more of the Internet.3) Building Open Protocols from ScratchWithin the last seven years there's been an explosion of decentralized protocols, dealing with everything ranging from currency and commerce to social media and decision-making. We are way beyond the proof of concept stage. There are all kinds of ways to build decentralized protocols — based on gossip, distributed files, blockchains, or federated databases. The issue isn't whether decentralization is technically feasible. The issue is that there are so many ways to do it and how each protocol is appropriate for different use cases.Developer and writer Jay Graber compared a few of the most well-known decentralized social network protocols. She explains the pros and cons of each protocol and how they operate. Protocols that put users in full control over their data and identity in a network can be too technically challenging for the average user. Protocols that rely on append-only logs, such as secure scuttlebutt, make it impossible to edit or delete posts. Federated networks can carry many of the same user-friendly features as centralized networks, but still leave the server administrators hosting the network with the same challenges — such as overseeing content moderation and platform security. So while protocols can be more neutral than platforms they still contain biases.This Is a Human Problem, Not a Technical One

"The narrative" over the past few years concerning internet companies has clearly shifted. It went from one that generally praised the wonders and power of the internet to one that now blames the internet for everything. The hagiographc coverage of the past clearly went too far, but the current "techlash" seems to have gone way too far in the other direction as well -- much of it from people grasping at straws over why things they don't like have happened in the world. The good folks over at The Verge have done a big consumer survey of people's general opinions of various big internet companies and it shows that most people still like these internet services, and believe, on the whole, that they make their lives better, not worse. Even the services that get the "worst" grades, still get over a 60% "favorable" rating, while Amazon, Google, YouTube, Netflix, Microsoft, and Apple all come in over 80% positive (with Amazon, Google, and YouTube breaking 90%).A separate question asked how people view these companies' impact on society, and again, they are mostly positive -- and even in the cases where there is some level of negativity (mainly: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), the positive feelings greatly outweigh the negative:There are many more fascinating findings and I recommend checking out the full Verge story on this, though I will note a bit of generational shock, as someone who lived through the 90s era of everyone in tech absolutely hating Microsoft and not trusting the company one bit, to Microsoft now being listed as the company that people trust the most with their data. Times sure have changed.Still, as the general narrative -- and a lot of political rhetoric -- is focused on how awful these companies are and how "something must be done" about them, it does seem worth noting that most of the public seems to really like these services and feel the world is a better place because of them.Now, take that information and compare it to just how little people trust companies in the telecom sector, and you might wonder why none of the narrative seems to focus on those companies. Indeed, the only political pressure on those companies seems to be to get them to merge and consolidate faster. Also, I should note that as fond as people are of repeating the silly and misleading line that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product," compare the levels of trust between all of these free internet services (very high) and the telco services you pay for (very low), and perhaps realize that it's not the "free" or "not free" part that engenders trust.

T-Mobile, like many mobile carriers, insists in highly values consumer privacy. But that hasn't really been reflected in the company's response to ongoing SIM hijacking scandals. Nor was that dedication particularly apparent when T-Mobile (along with AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint) were all caught selling access to user location and 911 data to pretty much any nitwith with a nickel.Last week, after a year of stonewalling, the Trump FCC announced it would be doling out some light wrist slaps to companies that were caught selling access to this data. For most of the companies, the fines they received were a tiny, tiny fraction of not only their annual revenues, but the billions made over the last decade selling access to this data to law enforcement, people pretending to be law enforcement, and even stalkers. All four of the companies also just received tens of billions on dollars from the Trump tax cuts in exchange for promises they completely flaked out on.It would be a pittance to pay off the fine and move on, especially given this particular FCC is unlikely to engage in much follow up to either confirm data collection has actually stopped, or police access to the mountains of data already collected. But T-Mobile says it's intending to fight the fine anyway, because, you know, it cares just that much about consumer privacy and accountability:

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Another day, another example of copyright out of control. The latest, as highlighted by Matthew Keys, is that bogus (almost certainly automated) copyright claims by CBS ended up blocking a live stream of a Bernie Sanders speech, but similar notices also interrupted speeches by Mike Bloomberg and Joe Biden.

US courts and regulators recently rubber stamped the T-Mobile Sprint merger, ignoring forty years of history showing how US telecom megamergers almost always result in less competition, higher prices, and fewer jobs. Eliminating one of just four US wireless carriers is likely to result in higher prices (see: Canada or Ireland). Wall Street analysts and unions alike predict the deal could eliminate anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 jobs, and data suggests the consolidation could result in employees across the sector making less money even if they work at other companies.Like most mergers, T-Mobile and Sprint executives have spent a year telling people none of this will actually happen and critics were being hyperbolic. Executives like John Legere (whose leaving in April and thus won't have to bear witness to his own handiwork) insisted repeatedly that the competition-eroding deal would somehow increase competition and create thousands of new, high paying jobs. Real world analysis from numerous experts never supported that, and early returns on those promises aren't looking so hot.Light Reading late last week reported that with the ink not even dry on the merger, the company was already starting to trim jobs at one of its prepaid phone divisions, Metro:

To some cops, there's nothing more inherently-suspicious than the invocation of rights. It appears they believe only guilty people do this. The innocent have no need for rights because if they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear.It takes a court to remind officers that rights are rights everyone has, whether or not they're guilty of anything. This case deals with an officer who treated someone's invocation of his rights as the Constitutional approval he needed to search him. He was wrong. (via FourthAmendment.com)It all started with a traffic stop that really wasn't a traffic stop. Two officers staking out a "high-crime area" decided to follow a van that drove by them. After discovering the plate on the van actually belonged to a Chevy Silverado, the officers decided to initiate a stop. But it was too late. The van had already reached its destination and was parked in a driveway. The officers pulled up behind it and parked, exiting their car to speak to the driver. By the time they did this, the passenger, Antonio Arrington, had already exited the vehicle and headed towards the house.While passengers can be questioned and searched in vehicles during traffic stops, Arrington was no longer in the van when the cops pulled up behind the vehicle to perform their "stop." Arrington argued the officers had no reasonable suspicion to detain him and question him -- acts that led to the discovery of drugs and a weapon.Arrington is right, the court says [PDF]:

This Google Stadia thing is starting to move into full on failure to launch territory. If you're unfamiliar with the Stadia product, it was pitched by Google as essentially the end of console gaming. Something like trying for "the Netflix of gaming" moniker, the idea is that Google would stream games for a monthly fee, freeing gamers from the need of having dedicated gaming hardware in their homes. The initial launch of the product was met with a public mostly uninterested in or skeptical of the service. Add to all of that the problems the platform had accepting new gamers, what looks like very real resolution issues with how games are delivered visually, and Stadia's problems getting gamers to "buy in" to the platform more recently, and it's all looking to be something of a disaster.It's not the most public problem Stadia has had thus far, but yet another issue is the empty shelves in Stadia's library of games. Right now, less than 30 games are on offer, which isn't exactly the sort of library that gets gamers to give up their consoles. What's worse, based on feedback gathered from game developers, Google doesn't appear to be terribly interested in enticing more publishers onto its platform.

If this were a private business, it would have collapsed under the combined weight of its unhappy customers and its own incompetence. But it isn't. We realize you don't have a choice in your law enforcement provider and all that.The Orange County Sheriff's Department is a mess. It has been a mess for years. Some of its corruption was exposed five years ago, when an investigation by lawyers in a murder trial uncovered multiple occasions where the department had buried exculpatory information or refused to hand it over to defendants. This resulted in Orange County DA's office (including all of its 250 prosecutors) being kicked off the high-profile murder trial. The Sheriff's involvement was the strategic housing of jailhouse informants to illegally coax information out of defendants awaiting trial.The problems uncovered here were made worse when the Sheriff's Department shredded documents ahead of a DOJ investigation and then-Sheriff Sandra Hutchens claimed the omissions made by deputies during testimony were honest mistakes -- the unfortunate result of the officers supposedly not knowing what they could and could not discuss about the Department's informant database in open court.The same office "inadvertently" collected thousands of recordings containing privileged conversations between defendants and their lawyers. The department claimed a "software glitch" resulted in this windfall of rights violations.Evidence-handling continues to be a problem for this department. Last year, it managed to anger one of its best friends -- the Orange County DA's office -- by constantly booking in evidence in an untimely manner. The root cause? Very succinctly, the DA's office said the Sheriff's evidence-handling protocols had "no system of accountability."The audit of the department's extremely faulty booking process continues. And, as Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg reports for The Appeal, it's uncovering even more lax handling of criminal evidence.

Today on the podcast, we've got the first part of a panel discussion organized by Lincoln Network on a subject we've been talking more and more about around here: a return to an internet based on open protocols instead of closed platforms. The panel, which took place last week, is moderated by Marshall Kosloff and features Mike Masnick, Cory Doctorow, Ashley Tyson and Mai Sutton. In next week's episode we'll have the second half along with the Q&A at the end, but this week you can dive in to the first part of this wide-ranging discussion about protocols versus platforms.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

For many years we've talked about the silly position that many journalism organizations take, in which their interpretation of being "objective" is to have what Professor Jay Rosen has called "the view from nowhere." I understand where this inclination comes from -- with the idea that if people think you're biased or one-sided that it taints the legitimacy or credibility of what you're reporting on. But in practice it often comes off as bland nothingness, and reporters willing to repeat any old nonsense that politicians and others put forth. Indeed, I'd argue that many people in the politics realm have learned to use this to their own advantage, and to say any old bullshit, knowing that the press will repeat it in a manner that only gives the original claim more validity and attention -- rather than calling it out as bullshit.Similarly, such a bland "view from nowhere" creates a standard of "objective" reporting that is not there. Journalists always need to make choices -- choices about what to include and what not to include, who to quote and who not to quote. And, of course, journalists do have opinions and pretending otherwise is just silly. As such, we've long called out why this kind of view from nowhere is ridiculous, and journalism outlets that do silly things like ban reporters from stating opinions are not being "objective," they're denying reality.The NY Times is running a new series on "Understanding the NY Times," which I think is actually a great idea by itself. A big part of the problem with the way people (don't) understand journalism today is that so much of how journalism works is set forth in an effective code of unwritten rules that many journalists learn as they get into the business, but which the public has no clue about. Non-journalists often impute a kind of motive to journalists that is laughable if you know actual journalists (or happen to be one). So, it's good (if unlikely to impact much) that the Times has chosen to do something to open up some of the details and explain things.And yet... a recent piece in this series about how journalists "try to stay impartial" really seems to show just how silly this particular policy is. A bunch of people on Twitter commented, in particular, on a short comment provided by the NY Times' White House correspondent Peter Baker. In response to a discussion about whether or not reporters should even vote, he says the following:

In 2018, the Spanish government amended its Data Protection Law to align it with European regulations like GDPR. While doing so, it slipped in an amendment that targeted "fake news," adding to an already-problematic law that enshrined the "right to be forgotten" and mandated personal data deletion after a certain period of time.The amendment made the bizarre assertion that the existence of fake news somehow harmed Spanish citizens' free speech rights.

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A week after promising yet another defamation lawsuit, Devin Nunes and his lawyer Steven Biss have delivered, suing the Washington Post and reporter Shane Harris for defamation in Virginia federal court. Once again, I'll remind you that Virginia has a very limited anti-SLAPP law, though that may be changing soon thanks, in part, to Nunes filing so many SLAPP suits in Virginia.This latest lawsuit is more of the same. He's seeking $250,350,000 (or basically the same amount Jeff Bezos paid for the entire paper a few years back) for both compensatory and punitive damages for (I'm not joking): "insult, pain, embarrassment,humiliation, mental suffering, injury to his reputation, special damages, costs, and otherout-of-pocket expenses." Remember when Devin Nunes pretended to be a free speech supporter? Now he thinks that a newspaper owes him basically its entire value for insults and embarrassment. Come on.As is typical of a Biss LOLsuit, the complaint is more performative for Nunes supporters than it is legally persuasive for a court of law. It includes plenty of hyperbole and silly insinuations about Bezos and the Washington Post, like the following:

In many ways, the streaming TV revolution is finally delivering many of the things that consumers had been begging for for years -- more flexibility, better customer service, and cheaper overall packages. Thanks to increased competition, streaming is finally forcing the sector to adapt and actually listen to customers. At least for now, when a flood of competitors are jockeying for market share.At the same time, many of the same annoyances that have frustrated consumers for years will also be making the jump to streaming, including a steady parade of price hikes with little in the way of notable improvements for your purchasing dollar. Annoying "retrans disputes" -- where a broadcaster and cable TV provider will bicker over programming and blackout out user content (without refunds) in the process -- have also come along for the ride. That's before you get to ISPs abusing their monopoly power over broadband to disadvantage competitors, the whole reason for the entire net neutrality fracas.As the EFF's Katharine Trendacosta correctly notes at Slate, in many ways as the streaming sector consolidates into a few powerful players, consumers will slowly find they've traded in old cable TV channel bundles for entirely new "vertical" bundles:

It seems the only reason Attorney General Bill Barr opens his mouth is to apply more tongue-polish to the nearest policeman's boot.Echoing the pro-law enforcement rhetoric of his boss, Barr has expounded frequently on the rule of law, even as the administration he serves does everything it can to subvert it. It's not really a high-wire act. No one expects anything less from Bill Barr. And certainly no one expects anything more from him either.Barr has gone on the warpath against encryption, something that seemingly only stymies the Federal Bureau of Going Darkness and a few very confused law enforcement officials. He's also gone on the warpath against the public in general, demoting them to servants of public employees, rather than recognizing it's actually the other way around.He has decided to amplify the divisiveness that already plagues police departments and the constituents they're supposed to serve. He has done this by elevating cops to freedom fighters -- soldiers in the war-torn country we call the US of A. As is befitting a public industry that has already decided to clad itself in camo and deliver warrants in repurposed military vehicles, Barr summons up heroic imagery that presents everyday cops as protectors of rights and freedoms, even though law enforcement officers rarely respect rights on their way to depriving people of their freedom.Last year, Barr turned the United States into Iraq during a speech to a gathering of police union reps:

Clearview continues to make itself unpopular with the general public even as it increases its user base. Supposedly, it has worked with over 900 law enforcement agencies at this point, although it's unclear how many are actually using the software and how many have just been given trial logins.Internal documents given to BuzzFeed show a number of federal agencies (FBI, ATF, Secret Service, CBP) have performed tens of thousands of searches of Clearview's scraped-together database. But it's not just law enforcement agencies that are using Clearview's facial recognition app. The documents showed a number of private companies have also at least test-driven the software, including Macy's, Walmart, Kohl's, and Albertsons.The company continues to expand into other countries. The documents show Clearview has customers in 26 countries, including notorious human rights violators like Saudi Arabia and UAE.Over in the UK, Clearview is being used by more public and private entities -- another strange assortment of users that makes up a small part of the 2,900 institutions the company has handed its software to.

Sportsball fans are the worst.That conclusion is immediately clear in this Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals First Amendment decision [PDF]. It opens with the court commenting on the lifelong antagonism present in Fans v. Refs, which is pretty much what this case is about.

A significant part of the appeal for copyright maximalism is respect for the artist as a singular, uncompromising force for expressing their values in an otherwise crass, materialistic world. This view is traditionally identified with the artists’ rights attitude featured in the continental tradition, but has gained prominence in the Anglosphere.It’s grimly ironic, then, when copyright incentivizes artists to subvert their values for those very same crass, materialistic concerns. Recall the case of Charles Dickens, an abolitionist who came to support the Confederacy in the Civil War because of his distaste for copyright-disrespecting Northern publishers.This pattern repeats itself in contemporary Hollywood, in the form of creative choices influenced by the increasingly Chinese-moviegoer-driven bottom line. “Will it play in Beijing?” is the new “will it play in Peoria?”Casting a Chinese actor or changing some elements to appeal to the new audience is one thing, and far from unheard of. Changes to cater to the demands of an authoritarian regime are another thing entirely—a form of self-censorship that I believe is unconscionable and fundamentally immoral.The 2012 Red Dawn remake, where the conquering army was changed to North Korea from China, was an obvious move to not alienate Chinese moviegoers. Trailers for the new Top Gun film sparked controversy when Maverick’s signature jacket dropped the Taiwanese and Japanese flags. The Departed was pulled due to a scene where the Chinese government illicitly purchased military technology from Jack Nicholson’s criminal enterprise. The list goes on.I wish this weren’t the case. Indeed, I wish that major movie studios and production companies would forgo astronomical returns on their movies, settling for simply sky-high ones, by allowing blatant copying, piracy, and (already extensive) bootlegging in film markets hosted by oppressive regimes.I want to make something perfectly clear: I am not, repeat not, making an argument for any specific policy change. Rather, I want to make an appeal for rights holders to do their part by not making creative choices with an authoritarian audience in mind.As much as Hollywood likes to pretend it’s on the right side of history, it has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to kowtow to the censorial demands of the PRC.This dynamic was brilliantly displayed in an episode from South Park’s most recent season:The episode, called “Band in China,” led the show to be, predictably, banned in China. Parker and Stone released the following statement shortly after the episode aired:

At a time when people are getting hit with a lot of misinformation, and trust in law enforcement is at an all-time low, why in world would you do something like this?

Last year, Senator Tom Tillis was pushing a completely ridiculous patent reform bill that would have enabled massive patent trolling, by expanding what would count as patent-eligible subject matter. After his bill was released -- and basically everyone who wasn't a patent troll explained what a disaster it would be for American innovation, Tillis quietly let the matter drop.Given that experience, you might think that Tillis would think twice before stepping into the even more fraught arena of copyright reform. And yet, Tillis has been champing at the bit to change the DMCA to make Hollywood happier with it. Now, there are lots of complaints to be made about the DMCA. Section 512 enables blatant censorship and puts tremendous pressure on platforms to take down non-infringing content. It also favors larger platforms which can deal with a barrage of takedowns over smaller upstarts. Section 1201 of the DMCA is utter garbage and makes it "infringing" to merely talk about ways to remove DRM -- even if the underlying reason for doing so is non-infringing. There are obvious ways to fix both of those.But, instead, Tillis and his staff seem ultra focused on making Section 512 worse and importing awful ideas like the EU Copyright Directive, which forces platforms into being Hollywood's personal police, and bringing in dangerous, censorial ideas like "notice and staydown," which would require expensive and unreliable internet filters. While he's made some nod towards perhaps making a few cosmetic changes to 1201 as a "trade" for making 512 that much worse, the overall impact of what's being discussed would be terrible. 1201 would remain in some form, and what few exceptions would be made would be minimal in impact. But bringing in things like "notice and staydown" for 512 would inevitably lead to much more censorship.It's unclear why Tillis is rushing headlong into this debate, when it seems that neither he nor his staffers grasp the details of how copyright works. Given how silly and uninformed Tillis came out of last year's attempt to pass a patent bill, it's bizarre that his office hasn't bothered to be more careful on the copyright front before leaping into that arena.

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The USA Freedom Act is up for renewal, bringing with it the usual arguments for preserving the surveillance status quo. But this administration is a little bit different. President Trump remains convinced a Deep State conspiracy exists that is actively trying to unseat him. The FBI added some fuel to the conspiratorial fire by intentionally misleading the FISA court during its investigation of former Trump adviser, Carter Page. The FBI's omission of evidence it had indicating Page wasn't acting as an agent of a foreign power allowed it to continue its surveillance without legal justification.This has made Trump wary of writing a blank surveillance check. Pervasive surveillance is fine, as long as it doesn't target Trump or his staff. But Trump also firmly believes in sacrificing rights and freedoms on the altar of national security, so there's a new tension on display here.Attorney General Bill Barr is telling Republicans to listen to Barr's heart and just shove this thing through, no matter what Trump's personal preferences might be.

In its 2005 Brand X decision, the courts changed US telecom oversight forever. You might recall that in the early aughts, former FCC boss Michael Powell (now the top lobbyist for the cable industry) engaged in wholesale deregulation of the broadband sector, insisting it would usher forth all manner of intense competition. Powell had claimed at the time that a new technology known as broadband over powerline (BPL) would come in as a layer of added competition, justifying his decision to free the sector from regulatory oversight. Due to interference issues, BPL never worked out, and you may have noticed that Powell's promised deregulation-triggered wave of competition never happened.Powell's decision effectively involved classifying cable providers as an "information service" instead of a "telecommunications service," thereby freeing it from significant oversight under Title II of the Communications Act. In telecom, this mindless deregulation is always delivered alongside promises of intense new competition (see net neutrality). But with the broadband industry, a sector dominated by a handful of powerful "too big to fail" monopolies all but fused to the NSA, it never quite works that way. With neither competition nor oversight to keep them in line, regional monopolies like Comcast and AT&T usually just double down on anti-competitive behavior. It's a lesson we refuse to learn.Regardless, Powell's decision triggered a massive legal fight that began when a company named Brand X Internet sued, because the regulatory shift blocked it from accessing the networks of incumbent cable providers. The battle reached all the way to the Supreme Court, who in a 6-3 decision supported Powell's deregulation of the cable sector.But the ruling had a catch: it didn't lock cable into being classified as an "information service" permanently. It allowed the FCC to shift the definition back and forth, just as long as it provided some fairly basic justification for the move. It's a major reason FCC policy has shifted so sharply back and forth as partisans have jerked the reins from "yes, we'd like some modest oversight of telecom" to "letting the industry do whatever it wants results in Utopia" policy patty cake.This week Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissent in an unrelated case (pdf, hat tip Ars Technica) in which he suggested some regret for his original "Brand X" ruling:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy, responding to one commenter on our latest post about police abuse by noting the silver lining that nobody died:

So far, we've featured Hot Water and Legends of Charlemagne in our series about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. This week, we're taking a look at the winner of the Best Remix award, for the best game that incorporated material from multiple different newly-copyright-free works: 192X by designer Chloe Spears.Several of the designers who entered this year's jam incorporated themes related to remixing and the public domain in their games, and 192X is a stand-out in this regard. It's a text-based interactive fiction built with the open-source tool Twine, and tells a story all about the way our popular culture is preserved, how it changes and gets parodied or reimagined, and how digital technology has impacted it — or, as Spears puts it in the game description, "about the art we leave behind for the future, and what we allow the future to do with it". Replete with references to the 1924 novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and George Gershwin's 1924 composition Rhapsody In Blue, story is funny, engaging, and creative: it sends you back in time to a fictionalized dawn of computing (from a future made dystopian by ironfisted cultural restrictions that are worryingly close to today's copyright reality), and then inside the Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr. (a 1924 parody that serves as a springboard to even more contemplation of the public domain and specifically the great detective's role within it).If the story in the game sounds unclear to you so far, that's because it's difficult to summarize for all the right reasons — it's quite short but contains a lot of carefully chosen elements, without anything that feels extraneous or arbitrary. Every reference and everything that happens ties back to the central theme of how we interact with art and culture, and the prose itself is snappy and entertaining. In other words: no more spoilers, just play it!Speaking of play: the actual gameplay involved is very minimal, with most of the interactivity just advancing the story down a linear path, with one traditional game mechanic temporarily employed more as an amusing nod than as an actual challenge. But the basic interactivity wasn't slapped on either, and meshes nicely with the overall design: the text prompts and careful timing combine with the use of color to effectively punctuate, organize, and enhance the story being told. The text-based game genre also enables the otherwise-rare second-person-perspective writing, addressing the reader as "you" throughout — and while it would only take a little bit of editing to make 192X work wonderfully as a short story, the writing is undoubtedly elevated by the game format.Finally, kudos to Chloe Spears for not just exploring the idea of the public domain and mining it for material, but for expanding it by releasing 192X with a CC0 Public Domain Dedication!You can play 192X in your browser on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam. And come back next week for the another winner spotlight!

Fredrick "Hotwheels" Brennan founded 8chan in 2013 after he and a group of other fairly naive souls felt that 4chan (yes, 4chan) had become too unfriendly to "free speech" because it had started to block some harassment and abuse on the site. It's always amazing to me the people who insist that internet platforms should allow all speech, without recognizing that what they are asking for is inevitably a cesspool of garbage. Brennan eventually realized as much, relinquished control over the site to Jim Watkins, and even called for the site to be shut down and criticized Watkins. Back in November, Watkins responded by filing a criminal "cyberlibel complaint" in the Philippines. The latest news, from the Filipino site Rappler, is that warrant has been issued for Brennan's arrest.There are so many insane things about this, it's difficult to know where to start. First of all, I'm always perplexed by people who position themselves as free speech absolutists then suing people for libel. It seems to kind of prove that they don't actually believe what they claim to, and have no problem using the powers of the state to silence speech they dislike.Second, the whole idea of criminal libel -- let alone the "cyber" variety -- seems positively insane, though we've seen it used before in the Philippines, including against Rappler founder, Maria Ressa. At the very least, it would seem to go against Section 4 of the Filipino Bill of Rights, which states:

Clearview -- the latest (and most troubling) entrant into the facial recognition tech sweepstakes -- says it's product is just for law enforcement. And law enforcement has seemingly welcomed the web-scraped facial recognition database with open arms. Clearview's marketing documents claim the company works with over 900 law enforcement agencies in the United States and elsewhere in the world.Clearview's app puts the agencies a few clicks away from over three billion images scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Those being scraped aren't happy about it but there's little they can do but engage in some cease-and-desist shouting.But Clearview's claim that it's only making this available to law enforcement agencies is false. New documents, obtained by BuzzFeed, show the company is selling its product to a number of other entities, both public and private.

A bunch of folks keep asking just how Devin Nunes is paying for all of his various lawsuits against news organizations, journalists, political operatives, critics, and, most famously, a satirical internet cow. And now, a watchdog group, the Campaign Legal Center, has sent quite a letter, asking the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether Nunes is violating any ethics rules in how these cases are financed.

The fallout from the FBI's highly-questionable Carter Page investigation continues. The problems first came to light in an Inspector General's report which found the FBI did a lot of creative writing to continue its surveillance of Page, even after information came to light indicating the former Trump adviser was not operating on behalf of a foreign power.The IG pointed out the FBI warrants relied on statements that were "inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation." If the FBI did this in the Page investigation, it could easily be assumed the FBI had done it in other cases utilizing the FISA court. The protections erected to protect American citizens from surveillance by their own government were rendered useless by FBI statements the Inspector General was too kind to call lies.The FBI has been ordered to overhaul its FISA warrant process by the FISA court. The FBI has agreed to do so, while still trying to downplay its serious violations as a long string of one-offs that apparently dates back at least 30 years. A new report from Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman for the New York Times opens with the recounting of the same sort of material omissions by the FBI during its hunt for an alleged Russian mole in the CIA. In that case, agents did the same thing, adding and subtracting evidence to continue unjustified surveillance.This is, apparently, how the FBI performs its FISA business -- something acknowledged by the many agents and DOJ officials the reporters spoke to about the latest FBI/FISA fiasco.

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Steven Biss has lost again. A week after losing one of his many, many lawsuits representing Congressman Devin Nunes, and also facing possible sanctions in another case, a judge has dismissed yet another one of his SLAPP suits. Once again, as is often the case with Biss, the lawsuit was nonsense, included aspects that were much more performative than legally sound, and was somehow tied to various conspiracy theories and right wing wackiness. As we highlighted last week, it's noteworthy how many of Biss's clients seem to have connections to one another, and this case is no different.This case was filed last year by a Russian-born academic, Svetlana Lokhova, suing Cambridge academic Stefan Halper and a variety of media properties and journalists, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. At issue were effectively follow ups on a flurry of stories in early 2017 (that date becomes important in a moment), soon after Michael Flynn was forced to resign as Donald Trump's first National Security Advisor, under a cloud of suspicion on a variety of fronts. A variety of media organizations reported that US intelligence officials "had concerns" about Flynn and some possible connections to Russia, including a dinner he had with a group of people at Cambridge, which included (among others) Lokhova. Lokhova seems to blame Halper for these stories -- and thus sued him and some of the media outlets that reported them.The stories all focused on Flynn, and specifically the concerns of US intelligence agencies about Flynn. Some of them, such as the NY Times story from 2018, don't even name Lukhova, and only obliquely refer to someone who might be her. This is also true of a 2018 Washington Post story that describes Lukhova in reference to Flynn, but also fails to even name her. And yet, in 2019, Lokhova sued for defamation -- using Biss as her lawyer.What's notable here is that just a month before the lawsuit was filed, Rep. Devin Nunes (that guy?!?) referenced Lukhova in a Fox News interview right after the Mueller Report came out, and Nunes suggested that he wanted to investigate if there was someone who "set up" misleading evidence in order to create the Mueller investigation. This was part of Nunes' ongoing efforts to build up a bizarre conspiracy theory regarding the Mueller Report -- to the point that he's saying Mueller's team should face criminal charges and that he's planning to make "some type of criminal referral." Nunes seemed to argue that whoever "accused" Flynn of "having some type of Russian fling" needs to be investigated:

Border Patrol agents kill a lot of people, most of them citizens of another country. For years, agents have been able to open fire on people in moving vehicles and [checks Congressional report] people throwing rocks at them. New guidelines were handed down by the agency in 2014 following an outside investigation of the Border Patrol's use of force. The investigation contained many recommendations that could have resulted in fewer killings, but the Border Patrol rejected the conclusions and the suggested fixes.So, the killings continue. And not much is being done to stop them. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stripped qualified immunity from a Border Patrol agent who fired at leaast 16 bullets across the border at a 16-year-old resident who was allegedly throwing rocks at him. Ten of them hit the teen, killing him. The court ruled this was basically murder, something clearly not covered by qualified immunity. The Fourth Amendment governs what US government employees do. It makes no difference that the victim was not a US citizen.That finding is likely to be struck down if it makes its way to the Supreme Court. A similar case involving the killing of Mexican resident by a Border Patrol agent standing on US soil has just received the Supreme Court stamp of approval.Fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca was shot and killed by Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa, Jr. as he played with friends in a culvert along the US-Mexico border. According to Hernandez's survivors, he and his friends were running back and forth across the culvert to touch the US border fence before running back to the Mexican side of the culvert. Agent Mesa claimed the teen was "involved in an illegal border crossing attempt" and "pelting" him with rocks.The shooting resulted in an international incident. The Mexican government wanted the agent extradited to face murder charges in Mexico, the country where the murder occurred, even if the bullets originated on the US side of the border. The US government, on the other hand, decided Agent Mesa had done nothing wrong - that his deadly actions were clearly justified by the presence of rocks and/or border-crossing attempts.Hernandez's parents sued. The Fifth Circuit took two swings at the case (once at the Supreme Court's request) and both times refused to extend the scope of Bivens to cover an incident where a government agent on the US side of the border shot and killed someone on the other side.The Supreme Court likewise has refused to read Bivens as supporting a lawsuit against US government employees on behalf of a citizen of a foreign country. The Supreme Court believes doing so would upset the delicate balance currently preserved by Mexican outrage and US government indifference. From the ruling [PDF]:

As you know by now, all four major wireless carriers have been selling access to user location data for the better part of the last decade to pretty much any nitwit with a nickel. Journalists subsequently exposed how nobody was really policing the use of this data, resulting in it being abused by law enforcement, people pretending to be law enforcement, and even stalkers. Worse perhaps, wireless carriers were even selling access to even more sensitive 911 emergency location data, something that's very clearly prohibited.It's that last bit that probably finally forced the hand of Ajit "what broadband competition problem" Pai, who after a year of doing nothing is poised to announced that AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint are likely to soon face a collective $200 million fine (warning: WSJ paywall):

This really should happen more frequently than it does. You will hopefully recall the ongoing drama between Chooseco, the company behind the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books we all remember from the 80s and 90s, and Netflix, producer of the hit series Black Mirror and its recent iteration entitled Bandersnatch. To catch you up, Bandersnatch was an interactive streaming show that billed itself as a "choose your own adventure" show, allowing the viewer to influence the progression of the story via choice. Chooseco sued Netflix over this production, claiming trademark infringement. Chiefly at issue is the appearance of a book mockup in the series, trade dress and marketing surrounding the show, and the fact that a character in the show refers to his own video game creation as a "choose your own adventure" game.Separately, wielding this trademark, Chooseco inked a lucrative deal with Amazon to develop CYOA stories for the Amazon Alexa (keep this in mind for later). Chooseco also separately went after other indie game developers for using the phrase in their own marketing (again, important for later). And while Netflix sought to have the case tossed on grounds that its use of the phrase and trade dress was protected by the First Amendment, and was not protectable for Chooseco, and that there was no chance of customer confusion. The court, somewhat predictably, decided that those were arguments better made at trial.And so here we are, with Netflix setting forth those same affirmative defenses... but with one notable addition.

The "smart" internet of things era was supposed to usher forth a new era of convenience. Instead, it somehow keeps managing to advertise how dumber technology is often the smarter option, and you're not being particularly innovative if your product actually makes life harder. From "smart" door locks that are easily hackable to hackable "smart" TVs that are so smart they spy on you, there's near daily examples showing how connecting old tech to the internet and calling it innovation--is itself not particularly innovative.Smart pet feeders are apparently no exception.PetNet, whose products promise to intelligently feed your pets the right amount of food at the right time, didn't have much fun this month. Starting on February 14, the company announced that it was investigating a system outage affecting its second-generation SmartFeeders that made the feeders appear to be offline. In a series of Tweets, the company insisted that the feeders would still dispense food on a schedule, even though users couldn't change settings or use the app. The company also couldn't really specify why the system was having problems:Many consumers found that the feeders weren't working at all, and the problems continued for almost a week before the company was able to provide any clearer answers. Adding insult to injury, when customers reached out to the company to complain, they hit a complete and total brick wall in terms of functioning customer service. Emails and phone calls weren't returned, and the company simply refused to answer annoyed customer inquiries on Twitter or Facebook. Even emails to company execs wound up being undeliverable: