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While it always raises alarm bells when the government is taking down websites, the Justice Department's announced enforcement action against a website claiming to sell "vaccine kits" for COVID-19 appears legit. At issue was some scammer who put up a website fraudulently claiming that the World Health Organization was "giving away vaccine kits" and you just had to give this just registered website $4.95 for "shipping" and you'd get one of these kits. The website, laughably, claimed:

We all like a good facial recognition ban, and the state of Washington is the latest to (sort of) tee one up.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the sham orphan drug designation that the FDA gave to Gilead Sciences for remdesivir. As we explained, remdesivir was developed with mostly public funds, and Gilead Sciences already held three patents on it, with a fourth one pending. Orphan drugs designations are supposed to be extra incentives for drug makers to target rare diseases. The issue here was that part of the definition of a rare disease under the Orphan Drugs Act is that it has to affect fewer than 200,000 people in the United States. Ridiculously, the law does not take into account the rate at which the disease spreads -- just how many people have it at the time a drug maker requests the designation. Even worse, the law explicitly says that the FDA cannot remove the designation if the affected group later grows to over 200,000.Over the last few days, anger continued to grow at Gilead and the FDA -- including with the news that the FDA won't even say when Gilead applied for Orphan Drug status, because that's apparently "a commercial secret." Either way, this morning a ton of public interest groups, organized by Public Citizen, sent a letter to Gilead asking it to renounce its claim for orphan drug status:

China keeps being China, despite all the problems it has at home. The coronavirus traces back to Wuhan, China, and it has become clear the Chinese government is doing what it can to suppress reporting on the outbreak.The country has a fine-tuned censorship machine that works in concert with its overbearing surveillance apparatus to ensure the government maintains control of the narrative. "Ensures" is perhaps too strong a term because, despite its best efforts, information always leaks out around the edges.Citizens of China have found numerous ways to dodge censorship and surveillance over the years. But they're not being helped much by American companies, which have more often than not complied with government demands for apologies, takedowns, and other efforts that ensure access to the Chinese market at the expense of their Chinese users.The latest news is more of the same. A clever keyboard app that encrypted messages has been nuked from the Chinese app store by Apple following a takedown demand from the Chinese government.

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Update: Facing tons of public pressure and ridicule, Gilead has agreed to give up the orphan designation.I'm still pretty ticked off about the FDA's absolute bullshit decision to grant remdesivir "orphan drug" status for COVID-19 status. As I explained in the post yesterday, orphan drug status is supposed to be for rare diseases, in order to create an extra incentive for drug makers to find and deploy drugs to treat those diseases with a smaller than usual market. It would be ridiculous to argue that COVID-19 fits the bill. However, as the law in the US currently stands, the definition of a "rare" disease, is one that effects fewer than 200,000 people. The problem -- and the loophole that Gilead Sciences is exploiting here -- is that there's no concept of time and infection rate. The law was written with an idea that the rate of a disease would be relatively constant, so if you apply for orphan drug status at under 200k possible cases, it would remain that way.Gilead, instead, is exploiting this loophole by basically rushing to the FDA before we'be even tested COVID-19 enough to know how widespread it is, and before we have enough real data or understanding of how wide it has spread. However, given what's happening around the country and the globe, to argue that this is a small market drug that needs extra protections is obviously ludicrous. Even worse, under the law, having the disease later impact more than 200k people is not a reason that the FDA can remove the status.

For many of the estimated 44 million Americans who lack access to any kind of broadband at home, the nation's libraries are their only way to get online. And as libraries close up shop to slow the spread of COVID-19, that access is no longer available. That's why the American Library Association, which represents the country's 16,557 public libraries, fired off a letter to the FCC (pdf) last week asking if it would be okay if they left their WiFi hotspots operational during the pandemic quarantine.The nation's Libraries were apparently worried that the Ajit Pai FCC would penalize them under the FCC's E-Rate program, which helps subsidize broadband access to rural Americans:

Since lots and lots of (mostly government) people seem to agree these particularly desperate times call for particularly privacy-invading desperate measures, it only makes sense someone should be tracking the trackers. Enter Samuel Woodhams of Top10VPN, who has compiled a handy list of who's hoovering who to keep tabs on COVID-19 cases and coronavirus carriers.Woodhams says not everything listed here in Top10VPN's "Digital Rights Tracker" is necessarily bad. It's just that a lot of it is.

Remember the EU's unitary patent plan? No surprise if you don't -- attempts to create a unitary patent system across the region have been dragging on for decades. Back in 2012, Techdirt noted that the European Parliament had finally approved the plan to set up a new Unified Patent Court (UPC) for the EU, but it still hasn't come to fruition. Recently, the scheme has been dealt two major blows that are likely to delay it further, even if they don't kill it off entirely.The first concerns the UK. It's one of the three nations that had to sign up to the UPC agreement for it to come into force. A big question was whether it could or would do so after brexit. The answer turns out to be "no". The second problem comes from Germany, where the country's constitutional court has ruled as follows:

For a few years now, US telecom mono/duopolies like Comcast and AT&T have been trying to claim that absolutely any government attempt to hold them accountable violates their First Amendment rights. When their lobbyists were pushing to kill FCC net neutrality rules (and FCC oversight of telecom in general), they repeatedly tried to claim the rules violated their right to free speech, despite the fact that as simple conduits they don't engage in "editorial" decisions, making the argument both flimsy and silly.That hasn't stopped them from aggressively abusing the 1A argument constantly to see if it sticks anyway. Verizon has argued it has a First Amendment right to hand your call data over to the government. Comcast has argued its First Amendment rights were violated when it was told to stop blocking competing channels' access to its cable lineup. Charter has tried to argue that requiring it adhere to local video franchise agreements (it signed) similarly violates its free speech rights. Inversely, the industry-friendly FCC has falsely claimed community-owned and operated broadband ISPs pose a dire threat to free speech.And as companies try to scuttle efforts to finally pass some kind of US privacy law for the internet era, this argument has popped up yet again. As you might recall, the telecom lobby convinced the GOP-held Senate to kill off some modest federal FCC privacy guidelines back in 2017. In response, much as we've seen with the net neutrality fight, numerous states have responded by trying to fill the void with an inconsistent platter of state-level privacy guidelines.After effectively creating this problem telecom lobbyists have whined endlessly about these state laws clinging once again to the argument that it somehow violates their First Amendment right to free speech. Hoan Ton-That, the CEO of Clearview AI, has similarly been trying to claim that his company has the First Amendment right to scrape user photos from social media platforms.Given the shaky nature of the US court system when it comes to ignoring hard logic and data (Exhibit A: both the T-Mobile Sprint and AT&T Time Warner merger approvals) it's not impossible that some courts will help prop up these shaky, self-serving arguments. But Colorado Law's Margot Kaminski and Scott Thompson at Slate have a good primer on how they probably won't:

We already went over this with Newark, NJ, but now Houston's top law enforcement officer is falsely claiming he can and will prosecute people for making false statements about Houston's COVID-19 response. It started with rumors on social media that the city was going to go into lockdown -- which is not a crazy rumor given that plenty of other places in the country (and the world) have more or less done this exact thing already (including the entire state of California). But Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner tweeted that this was false information and he was asking law enforcement to investigate:That says:

With the administration no longer able to ignore the threat posed by the coronavirus, it's decided to secure some additional powers for itself while the nation's defenses are low. As Betsy Woodruff Swan reports for Politico, the DOJ is seeking to add "indefinite detention" to its list of criminal justice perks as courtrooms around the nation undergo significant operational restrictions.

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Coming up with a treatment for COVID-19 is obviously incredibly important, and I'd be perfectly content if whoever did so got filthy stinking rich for basically saving the world. But we should be pretty damn careful about what kinds of incentives we set in place, and how that might lead to a ridiculous monopolistic, exploitative situation. Unfortunately, it looks like one pharma giant -- with a hopefully promising approach -- is already abusing the regulatory process to make sure it can extract monopolistic rents for a potential treatment.It's good and exciting that various companies are pulling out all the stops to try to come up with some sort of treatment for COVID-19 (though it's incredibly dangerous and frustrating that the President of the United States seems to be regularly suggesting drug treatments based on basically no evidence of their effectiveness, and without regard to the safety -- or lack thereof -- to desperate people willing to listen to his unscientific snake oil nonsense).One of the most promising offerings, though, has been remdesivir, from pharma giant Gilead Sciences. It's an anti-viral drug that has been in testing for other viruses, such as ebola, and there were some early suggestions that it might work against COVID-19. It's promising enough that NIH clinical trials for using remdesivir to treat COVID-19 started back in February (funded by NIH, not Gilead). And, over the last few weeks, Gilead has been facing rapidly increasing demand for the drug and has been offering it under "compassionate use" rules -- though it just put a halt to that program (though it claims it is creating a better process).At this point, it's worth pausing a second to give some of the background on remdesivir. While everyone refers to it as coming from pharma giant Gilead, as with most drug breakthroughs, the reality is that most of the work in discovering remdesivir actually came from academic institutions, using US taxpayer money from NIH, including a recent influx of $37.5 million in taxpayer funds to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which developed remdesivir with some help from scientists at Vanderbilt University and UNC. Gilead's role, was as a partner of UAB to handle the clinical trials -- which are certainly expensive. But, the fact is that this drug was not "developed" by Gilead, but by a public university using public money. Still, Gilead, as is often the case, is the one running around getting all the patents for remdesivir. In the US, it has applied for four patents, three of which have already been approved. It appears that those three patents will grant Gilead exclusivity over remdesivir until October 29th, 2035.You might think that would be enough for Gilead. You'd be wrong. On Monday, Gilead was able to get the FDA to designate remdesivir as an orphan drug for the treatment of COVID-19. This is the part that's bullshit. The Orphan Drug Act was designed to give extra incentives to drugmakers to develop drugs for which there is a very small market, such that it's unlikely that (even at inflated monopolistic prices) the market can compensate them adequately for the development to treat those rare diseases.So, uh, can someone at Gilead or the FDA explain how the fuck COVID-19 should qualify?Basically, it looks like Gilead is pulling quite the scam. To get orphan designation according to the law in the US, you need to be targeting a "rare disease," with that being on the basis of it affecting 200,000 people or less in the US:

Netflix, Disney, YouTube, and Instagram have all announced they're temporarily throttling their video streams in Europe to help mitigate the bandwidth strain created by COVID-19, as millions hunker down to slow the spread of the pandemic. In a blog post, Netflix stated the company was throttling back the streaming quality of its titles by around 25% for 30 days after European regulators asked the company to do so to handle the pandemic-driven bandwidth surge:

Despite evidence to the contrary, Amazon's Ring is still insisting its the best thing people can put on their front doors -- an IoT camera with PD hookups that will magically reduce crime in their neighborhoods simply by being a mute witness of criminal acts.Boasting over 1,000 law enforcement partnerships, Ring talks a good game about crime reduction, but its products haven't proven to be any better than those offered by competitors -- cameras that don't come with law enforcement strings attached.Last month, Cyrus Farivar undid a bit of Ring's PR song-and-dance by using public records requests and conversations with law enforcement agencies to show any claim Ring makes about crime reduction probably (and in some cases definitely) can't be linked to the presence of Ring's doorbell cameras.CNET has done the same thing and come to the same conclusion: the deployment of Ring cameras rarely results in any notable change in property crime rates. That runs contrary to the talking points deployed by Dave Limp -- Amazon's hardware chief -- who "believes" adding Rings to neighborhoods makes neighborhoods safer. Limp needs to keep hedging.

It's not often you see a court actually call a police officer a liar, but it happened in this case [PDF], via FourthAmendment.com. While investigating a murder, Puerto Rico PD Homicide Division Agent Pedro Medina-Negron performed a sweep of the house to ensure there were no more victims or dangerous perpetrators inside.While performing his sweep of the scene, Agent Medina claimed to have seen several things in plain view:

If you haven't heard of the Playstation 4 title Dreams, it's a fairly fascinating little game. The entire concept of the game revolves around creating. Art, music, game mechanics, and even entire new games are all able to be created within Dreams itself. As you might imagine, while players have spent much time creating brand new content within the platform, others have also reproduced existing video game content within it as well. This is a matter of tinkering, mostly, and reproducing known content just to see what the Dreams system can do.And, because it's video games, one of the most common reproductions in Dreams are models of Mario from Super Mario Bros. Nintendo, however, recently got Sony to remove one popular Mario character model from the game over copyright concerns.

All hail the mighty drug warriors! The War on Drugs is being fought by people who like cash, easy busts, and imagined traffic violations. The "soldiers" in the "trenches" literally believe they're soldiers in the trenches, fighting a war at home -- not as protectors and servants, but as a conquering army sent in to control the local populace.The Baltimore PD has problems within its drug enforcement units. Several. Enough that the DOJ stepped in and forced the city and the PD to sign a consent agreement in which the PD would be forced to do what it always should have done: respect the Constitution and the rights of the people the PD serves.Dozens of cases were dismissed after a cop was caught by his own body camera appearing to plant drugs at the scene of an arrest. It turned out he was just doing a dramatic reenactment of his own discovery earlier, but forgot about the rolling 30-second buffer which caught him shoving drugs into a coffee can and then pretending to have just discovered it the second time around.But that's only one tip of the PD's garbage floe. Hundreds of cases are up for dismissal now. Misconduct appears to be the rule, not the exception. And it has resulted in the city's drug warriors being exposed as no better than the perps they went after. Here's Justin Fenton reporting for the Baltimore Sun:

For those who can stay at home, please do. We've all been advised to socially distance -- the safest thing anyone can do in their individual capacity.Of course, stir craziness can set in quite easily. (I'm stuck in my apartment with my dog, and while he's good company he's not much for conversation.) This is a great time to catch up on all of the books, shows, movies, and video games you've been meaning to read, watch, play, etc.While each of us is doing our part to stay indoors, rights holders can do their part to make these trying times a little less tedious for the home-bound. How? By making their content freely available for streamers and downloaders.So we're clear, I'm not talking about independent artists or those who rely on touring income. These folks are most certainly going to take a hit, and would hopefully be covered by any kind of broad-based stimulus that comes from Congress. (This would also be an excellent time to consider Dean Baker's proposal to give every American a creative works tax credit to donate to an artist of their choosing. To qualify, the artist would have to make their works public domain).No, I'm talking about the collectors of passive income, those who actually hold the rights to the content: Disney, Netflix, CBS, NBC, Amazon, etc. Rights holders for video games, like Bethesda Studios, Paradox, EA, and Activision could also help. Even if they don't want to release relatively new titles, this would be a great time to make older games free for all to stream, download, and play. Audible should also give everyone a few free downloads, and a few free months of Kindle Unlimited would go a long way.Now would also be a great time to release the directors' cuts or other deleted scenes that never made it to the theater or online. I personally would love to see the older versions of Rogue One or the rumored J.J. Abrams's cut of The Rise of Skywalker, and I'm sure there are lots of other clips left on the cutting room floor that fans would love to hear.More controversially, I implore all major rights holders to forgo prosecutions for torrenting, streaming, and other forms of infringement during these times. If illegally streaming keeps someone indoors, then let them stream.The penalties for copyright infringement are astronomical and disproportionate, and simple peer-to-peer file sharing should be decriminalized in the first place (large torrenting sites and streamers are a separate case). But now is not the time for that -- a lot of people need just a little bit of joy, and the owners of infringed copyrights must appreciate this.This is especially true when it comes to going after YouTubers and other online commentators who must make use of others' content when producing their own. A great deal of their use is fair to begin with, but dealing with a 512 notice or copystrike is the last thing they need on their minds.This is a time where everyone must sacrifice both for their own personal safety and the safety of others. Rights holders should pitch in and forgo the benefits of the subsidy that has been given to them to make everyone else's sacrifice a little more bearable.

Pretty much everyone by now should recognize that large parts of the world have needed to shutdown due to COVID-19 -- and you would hope that most people would be understanding that certain things may need to be delayed for a bit. But apparently not lawyer Michael Hierl from the law firm of Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, and his client, a copyright licensing agency called Art Ask Agency, based in Spain. On March 9th, Art Ask Agency sued a bunch of unnamed defendants (their identity to be determined later), in US federal court in Illinois, over what it calls "counterfeit" images of a unicorn designed by artist Anne Stokes. Stokes apparently does brisk work in unicorn-related merchandise, as seen by her page on Art Agency's website:And, boy, is Art Agency ever so mad that there are "counterfeit" unicorns out there, which they claim violate Stokes trademark and copyright. Art Agency is so mad, that it's tossing out totally random fantasy numbers that have nothing to do with the specific works in this case:

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Adam Mossoff is one of the most vocal IP maximalist law professors around. He's never seemed to have met a form of artificial monopoly that he didn't want to expand. His latest is that he's claiming, laughably, that we should be extending patent terms in order to incentivize the creation of coronavirus vaccines. His argument is based on a misleading complaint that has been raised by plenty of pharmaceutical companies: they need to file their patent applications at the point of discovery, but they can't market a drug until it receives FDA approval, and that can take years, which cuts into the years over which they hold a monopoly and can extract insane monopoly rents.Mossoff says that now is the time to revisit that and to roll back the law that made it so the clock started so early, and to enable patent extensions to incentivize drug makers to create a coronavirus vaccine.

Last year wasn't a particularly good one for AT&T. Despite spending more than $150 billion in mergers in a bid to dominate the streaming video space, the company instead lost 4 million TV subscribers on the year, not exactly what company executives were aiming for. Not only did AT&T's mergers saddle the company with a mountain of debt, the company then tried to extract that debt from its customers in the form of numerous price hikes, ignoring that's not how streaming TV competition is going to work. The company also bumbled its streaming TV branding so badly, it confused even the company's own marketing and support departments.That's before you get to AT&T's empty promises in 2019, which include receiving billions in regulatory favors (like killing net neutrality and privacy rules at the FCC), subsidies, and $42 billion in Trump tax cuts for promises that never materialized. Not only did they not materialize, but AT&T actually engaged in the exact opposite behavior it had originally promised, trimming overall network investment and laying off nearly 37,000 jobs just since the Trump tax cuts were announced.Now your first question is probably but how is AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson doing in the wake of all this? Well you'll be happy to know he's just fine: Stephenson received a record $32 million in compensation in 2019, despite a wave of bungled merger mania so intense it even pissed off the company's investors, triggering a revolt. But yes, good job, Randall:

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the patent troll "Labrador Diagnostics LLC" trying to block COVID-19 testing with help from the Monkey Selfie law firm. In first place, it's That One Guy summing up how most people feel:

This is it: the last in our series of posts focusing on each winner from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924! So far, we've featured Hot Water, Legends of Charlemagne, 192X, The Hounds Follow All Things Down, and You Are The Rats In The Walls, and now it's time to wrap things up with the winner of Best Analog Game and a game that, perhaps most out of all the entries, is completely suffused with a spirit of remixing and mining the public domain: The 24th Kandinsky by David Harris.This game was one of the first to draw our attention as the entries were coming in, just based on its premise: players are tasked with using visual elements from the 23 paintings that famed Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky created in 1924 to create a brand new work — a "24th Kandinsky". This is a game about not just admiring art but digging into it and picking apart its components, and all that's required to play is a blank canvas, some paper and drawing implements, a pair of scissors, and some sticky tack or tape. On each of their turns, a player selects an element from one of Kandinsky's newly-public-domain works — choosing from all the geometric shapes, swooping curves, checkered grids, intersecting lines and other abstract forms that are the hallmark of his work — and draws a replica of it, which they then cut out and affix to the canvas wherever they choose. They can overlap and underlap other elements as the new work grows, and at the end of each round all players vote to determine who made the best contribution, leaving their element in place while the others from the round are removed. Turn by turn the work grows more elaborate, until time runs out or players agree to stop, at which point the player who won the most voting rounds gets to keep the completed work.There is just so much to love about this idea and its execution. It manages to celebrate just about everything that we hope to highlight with these game jams: the value of new works entering the public domain, the incredible creative power of remixing and appropriation, the joy of artistic collaboration and spontaneous creativity, and the way games can be an ideal medium for all these things — for both game designers and players. Mechanically speaking, it does this with elegance: the rules are loose and simple, but carefully combine cooperative and competitive gameplay to achieve a balance of incentives that produces just the right mood for a game like this. It also serves as a foundation for people to create their own variants of the game: one can easily envision it being adapted to use different source material, more elaborate art supplies, and even modified rules to create different overall rhythms of play. And with every play session, a new piece of art is created, and that's a special thing for a game to achieve.You can download the rules and materials for The 24th Kandinsky on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam.And with that, we've reached the end of our game jam winner spotlight series! One more time, thanks to everyone who submitted a game or played the entries, and to our amazing panel of judges. We'll be back next year with a game jam for works from 1925, but until then, keep on mining that public domain!

The First Circuit Court of Appeals has confirmed what we've already assumed: the "community caretaking" function law enforcement performs is there to help it dodge the Constitution, not to ensure it actually takes care of the community. Citing Simpsons' episode BABF18*, Judge Selya (trigger warning: overwrought English) says nothing about the community caretaking function prevents officers from harming you. But it does not mean officers ever need to help you.*Judge Selya does not actually cite this, but let's just take a look at what these decisions actually mean:The Supreme Court has made it clear -- repeatedly -- that officers are under no obligation to "serve and protect," with emphasis on the latter. You're on your own as a citizen when it comes to harm being inflicted on you. Cops are here to file reports and investigate the tragic aftermath of the harm inflicted on you. They are under no obligation to protect you against violence, even if you've repeatedly informed them someone means to do you harm.But cops suddenly become inspired and proactive members of the community when it comes to the community caretaking exception, which allows them to perform searches and seizures without a warrant. In the interest of protecting the community, cops will tow your car and perform a pretextual search. But they'll also go into your house and there's nothing in the Fourth Amendment that can prevent that, apparently.Selya opens the First Circuit's opinion [PDF] by painting a rosy picture of cops as local heroes who would never abuse rights to achieve their own ends.

With the Coronavirus grinding everything to a halt (except for stock market losses! [sobs in 401(k)]), it's understandable that public services would be affected as well. The unexpected shift to telecommuting means everything is going to slow down as public and private entities figure out how to still serve customers/citizens while still keeping the spread of the virus to a minimum.But none of that explains this completely incomprehensible response from the FBI, which appears to be using the virus as a way to become even more tight-fisted with its stash of FOIA-able files. "FOIA terrorist" Jason Leopold reports the FBI is seeking to serve the public in the worst way possible during this national health crisis.

Shout it from the rooftops: content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Mistakes will always be made, or even "legitimate" decisions will appear "wrong" to many, many people. The latest example: Twitter -- which has received criticism for being both too aggressive in shutting down accounts and not nearly aggressive enough (sometimes by the same people) -- suspended Cory Doctorow's account earlier this week. The reasoning for the suspension? He would put various trolls onto a Twitter list called "colossal assholes" before muting them, and Twitter claimed this violated its policies (though the company only told him well after it suspended him):

It's been one full year since Rep. Devin Nunes kicked off his long series of frivolous SLAPP suits against various critics. While the suing of satirical Twitter accounts still get the most headlines, two of the lawsuits (including the first one) target Liz Mair, a political consultant who has worked on numerous Republican campaigns (and was a spokesperson for the RNC). It's still unclear why Nunes targeted Mair in particular, who has pointed out how this is a clear attempt at stifling free speech, but he seems particularly annoyed with her. Most elected officials learn that part of being in public office is that you get criticized, but Nunes seems to think that anyone who criticizes him deserves to get sued. Mair has now launched a new website, NunesVFreeSpeech.com, seeking donations for her own legal defense, and in defense of free speech. Mair also agreed to answer some questions I had about her experiences over the last year in dealing with this lawsuit.

Say hello to the coronavirus and goodbye to privacy. The government is working with a variety of tech companies -- including infamous analytics companies like Palantir -- to get a grasp on the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, this means the data citizens have generated for a variety of tech companies will become a handy way to track them and their movements, especially if they're infected or in contact with those who are.

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Nothing like a pandemic to really make it clear what a terrible person you are, huh? Law360's Bill Donahue (who is not a terrible person!) has cataloged attempts by terrible people to register trademarks related to the pandemic:

In an effort to turn an unmitigated disaster into something a bit more mitigated, governments around the world are heading towards the "drastic" end of the scale to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Cities and everything in them have been effectively shut down. Preventing the spread of the virus depends a lot on the voluntary cooperation of citizens to self-report and self-quarantine. Meanwhile, no one has any toilet paper. What a time to be alive, at least temporarily.How do you enforce "voluntary" quarantine without filling cities with cops and/or soldiers? You turn to the tracking devices nearly everyone carries. Extreme times/extreme measures and all that, so every bit of location data hoovered up by carriers of phones and/or viruses is now apparently fair game.It's already happening in the countries we expect it to happen in. China is still being China, except moreso:

Charter Communications literally has some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any company in any industry in America. Like Comcast, Charter has spent years merging its way to market domination, and now enjoys a notable monopoly over broadband in numerous U.S. markets. This monopoly, combined with regulatory capture, has resulted in a company that literally doesn't have to give a damn about its customers.As it turns out, the company doesn't treat its employees much better.For the last few days, both Gizmodo and TechCrunch have been fielding complaints from a torrent of Spectrum employees who say the company is putting them at unnecessary risk. Employees who say there's no technical reason they can't perform their work remotely have been mandated to continue coming into the office, despite CDC warnings that social distancing will be essential to slow the spread of the pandemic across the United States. Several employees sent internal memos warning all employees the company was ignoring CDC recommendations:

Senator Richard Burr is a real piece of work. In 2012 he was one of only three Senators to vote against the STOCK Act. This was a law put in place following a 60 Minutes expose about how Congress was getting filthy stinkin' rich off of insider trading, since Congress was exempt from insider trading laws. The bill did pass -- Burr's vote against notwithstanding -- and President Obama signed into law. Unfortunately, the next year, Congress passed (and Obama signed) an amendment that rolled the rules back for staffers, though it still does apply to elected officials themselves.So, it's quite interesting to see the news that Senator Burr just sold off a "significant percentage" of his stock holdings, according to a ProPublica article detailing the sale. A big chunk of that stock sale? In the hospitality industry that has been so hard hit. He had a big chunk of stock in Wyndam Hotels and Extended Stay America, but sold those off just before everything went bad. The timing is interesting:

Right-to-repair laws are still a work in progress, mainly due to industry opposition. The wants and needs of millions of device/vehicle owners don't amount to a hill of beans in this world full of interloping industry leaders, as noted DIY repairman/nightclub owner Rick Blaine once sourly noted.Allowing people to actually own the things they've purchased seems like a foreign concept to US tech leaders, even though that was the status quo long before goods went digital and the DMCA was enacted. Why should people be at the mercy of those whose profits depend on walled gardens, closed loops, and well-funded lawyers issuing cease-and-desist orders at the drop of a proprietary screwdriver? Well, as someone else sourly noted, those with the gold make the rules.While we struggle through with some piecemeal replacements for our assumed rights of ownership here in the US, it appears the European Union is going to get serious about handing customers back their purloined rights. As the New York Times reports, a right-to-repair is up for discussion -- not so much because of the impact on customers, but because of the impact on the environment.

There's a growing list of things that the COVID-19 crisis has exposed as unnecessary nonsense. Broadband usage caps come first to mind, followed quickly by a lingering disdain for telecommuting by a long list of executives. But the outbreak is also shining a light on another dumb practice that has long been a point of contention: Hollywood movie release windows.For the better part of a decade now, we've highlighted Hollywood's often vicious opposition to disrupting the traditional delay between a film's theatrical debut, and its release on home video or streaming platforms. Companies like Netflix that have attempted to disrupt this system have traditionally been quickly demonized by the industry. AMC, Regal and Cinemark have all fought tooth and nail to preserve the (usually) 90 day restriction period between a film's theater release and its availability to home consumers, even if such restrictions no longer make much sense in the broadband era.Movie patrons, like most other sensible people, are now practicing social distancing in a bid to slow COVID-19's expansion and ease the looming strain on already maxed out US healthcare systems. In some locations (like here in Seattle), movie theaters are being told to close their doors entirely. In the process, Hollywood is having to suddenly and quickly rethink its longstanding dedication to a release window model that already made no sense in the modern world, and makes even less sense in the wake of a pandemic quarantine.Disney, for example, is now considering moving big releases more quickly to its Disney+ streaming video platform:

Last summer, we wrote about yet another post-Blurred Lines decision, showing that any two random songs that sounded kinda a little similar, might be ripe for a court to find infringing. In this case, it was a Katy Perry song, Dark Horse, that was found to infringe on a little known artist named "Flame," who had a song called "Joyful Noise." As we noted at the time, the similarities between the song were simply basic and fundamental building blocks of music. As that article points out:

If at first you don't get punished, plant, plant again.

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As noted earlier this week, a Softbank-owned patent troll, Fortress Investment Group, spun up a shell company Labrador Diagnostics this month, and days after the company came into existence, it sued a company working on COVID-19 diagnostics, claiming that the technology it used for those tests violated the patents it had bought from Theranos -- the sham of a company that went down in flames, and whose founders are still facing federal charges for fraud. Oh, and Fortress/Labrador/Softbank was using the law firm Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once sued on behalf of a monkey over copyright. On a related note, the current head of the US Patent Office, Andrei Iancu, used to be the managing director of that law firm, and to this day insists that there's no such thing as a patent troll. He should perhaps talk to his former partner, Morgan Chu.As you probably heard (because Irell & Manella made sure to reach out to everyone mocking them for this lawsuit), within hours of my post going viral, "Labrador Diagnostics" (again, a company that literally did not exist a few weeks ago) put out a press release saying that (1) it didn't know that BioFire was working on a COVID-19 test (which is questionable, given that the Wall Street Journal and other publications had mentioned it, but I guess Labrador didn't even exist when that article came out, so...), and (2) that it had "offered" a royalty-free license on COVID-19 tests once it realized. As we pointed out, the details and conditions of that "offer" still have not been made clear.However, as Josh Landau at Patent Progress notes, even if Labrador/Fortress/Softbank is actually offering such a license, it's completely worthless, because the lawsuit is still claiming patent infringement on the machine BioFire is using to run the diagnostic:

Be it Cambridge Analytica, Equifax, or wireless carrier location data, the U.S. has already faced a steady parade of privacy and security related scandals. Now as countries around the world hunker down to slow the rate of COVID-19, the problem could easily grow even larger as a chain reaction of implications make privacy, security, and tools like encryption more important than ever.Millions of Americans are now telecommuting for the first time. As they do so, more than a few of them won't be wise enough to use basic security precautions while handling sensitive work or health related data. And as we've noted for years, services like VPNs often don't provide reliable protection, given it's hard to verify just how secure or trustworthy service owners are. Many services were already shady as hell, and even the reliable offerings may struggle under the load.Many folks are already using the pandemic as scam fodder. As a result, the shift to home work -- and the dramatic spike in healthcare information being shoveled around the internet -- means that the battle over encryption is also more important than ever:

As it has always been, the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it. Reporters Without Borders is ensuring forbidden information is getting into the hands of whoever wants it, no matter what their government feels they should or shouldn't read.The nexus point isn't a website tucked away on the dark web, only accessible via VPN and a Tor connection. It's right there out in the open, delivered via a platform very few governments have bothered to censor. Here's Reporters Without Borders' understated announcement of its damage-dodging info dump:

Techdirt writes about freedom of information matters often enough. Sadly, many of the stories are about governments and other official bodies refusing to comply with local Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws for various reasons, and using a variety of tricks. In other words, rights to FOI may exist in theory, but the practice falls woefully short. That makes the following story from the UK a welcome exception.It concerns Nicola Young, a local government employee in the English market town of Whitchurch, in Shropshire. Part of her job as town clerk was to handle FOIA requests for the local council. One such request asked for a copy of the audio recording of a council meeting. Apparently the person requesting the file believed that the written minutes of the meeting had been fabricated, and wanted to check them against the recording. However, the reply came back that the file had already been deleted, as was required by the official council policy.Undeterred, the person requesting the file sent a complaint to the UK's main Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which carried out an investigation. The ICO discovered that the town clerk had not only claimed that the audio file had already been deleted when it actually existed, but that she personally deleted it a few days after the FOI request was made. Quite why is not clear, but as a result:

As we've been discussing for a while, India's government has blacked out internet access in Kashmir since around August, setting records for one of the longest government-mandated internet blackouts in history. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to argue that the blackout is a necessary security precaution in the face of growing unrest in the region stemming from its loss of autonomy earlier this year. Granted, like most government internet censorship efforts, the move has a lot more to do with cowardice and fear of an informed public than any genuine concern about public welfare.Despite the Indian Supreme Court declaring such restrictions illegal last January, the problem persists. And as a pandemic threatens the planet, these restrictions are making it hard for the residents of Kashmir to access essential medical information on COVID-19:

Sing it with me, folks: content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Over the last few weeks, all of the big social media platforms have talked about their intense efforts to block misinformation about Covid-19. It appeared to be something of an all hands on deck situation for employees (mostly working from home) at these companies. Indeed, earlier this week, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube all released a joint statement about how they're working together to fight Covid-19 misinformation, and hoping other platforms would join in.However, battling misinformation is not always so easy -- as Facebook discovered yesterday. Yesterday afternoon a bunch of folks started noticing that Facebook was blocking all sorts of perfectly normal content, including NY Times stories about Covid-19. Now, we can joke all we want about some of the poor NY Times reporting, but to argue that its reporting on Covid-19 is misinformation would be, well, misinformation itself. There was some speculation, a la YouTube's warning that this could be due to content moderators being sent home -- and not being allowed to do their content moderation duties over privacy concerns, but the company said that it was "a bug in an anti-spam system" and was "unrelated to any changes in our content moderation workforce." Whether you buy that or not is your choice.Still, it's a reminder that any effort to block misinformation is going to be fraught with problems and mistakes, and trying to adapt rapidly, especially on a big (the biggest) news story with rapidly changing factors and new information (and misinformation) all the time, is going to run into some problems sooner or later.

The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals has looked at the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision and decided it applies to cell site location info, even when that information was obtained by law enforcement years before the Supreme Court came to this conclusion. (via Courthouse News)The location records obtained from AT&T without a warrant destroyed the accused murderer's alibi. From the decision [PDF]:

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Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well in the best of times, but the solutions that seem to at least keep it from devolving into a total mess almost always use a combination of humans and technology working together. But what do you do when the humans are sick, self-isolating, quarantined, etc? While I imagine some may be able to work from home, it's a difficult time to expect anyone to be at full productivity. So YouTube has made it clear that it's turning over more content moderation decisions to the machines knowing full well that some of those decisions are going to be bad: