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The DOJ has taken an open-and-shut espionage case and managed to somehow misplace the back cover. Does this say something about the unintended consequences of charge-stacking? Maybe. Whatever it is, it isn't pretty.The case against alleged Vault 7 leaker Joshua Schulte seemed pretty air tight, especially when Schulte continued to leak sensitive documents while behind bars, as well as attempting to rope his family into committing contempt of court violations on his behalf.He also, as Marcy Wheeler pointed out, gave the government pretty much everything it wanted or needed, but the DOJ's prosecutors failed to present evidence in a coherent way, resulting in a whole lot of juror confusion.

I keep trying to point out that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well for a whole variety of reasons, including the fact that sooner or later some people -- or some large groups of people -- may try to game the system in totally unexpected ways. Witness this amusing example from the London Review of Books, reporting on the situation in Wuhan, China, which was ground zero for the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak. With everything shut down in and around Wuhan, schools have moved to online learning -- and some naughty kids seem to have worked out a way to try to get out of having to do schoolwork: getting the app the schools rely on pulled from the app store via fake negative ratings.

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I will admit to being worried, when the 9th Circuit originally agreed to reopen the long running copyright dispute between the estate of Randy Wolfe (aka Randy California) of the band Spirit, and Led Zeppelin. At issue was whether or not the classic Zepplin song "Stairway to Heaven" infringed on the Spirit song Taurus. As we noted, there are some similarities between the two songs... but they also have similarities to other songs in history, including Dido's Lament from the 17th century and Bach's Bourree from the 18th century and a bunch of other songs.Thankfully, a jury, and then the 9th Circuit, both sided with Led Zeppelin originally, claiming no infringement. But, then the 9th Circuit vacated the earlier decision and re-opened the issue. We had a pair of excellent blog posts by copyright lawyer Rick Sanders highlighting why there were good reasons to revisit the case, noting some real mistakes made during the original trial and also the very, very messed up "inverse-ratio" test used by the 9th Circuit in determining if songs were infringing. As that post noted, the 9th Circuit has long used a very confusing (and legally nonsensical) "test" for whether or not one song is infringing on another. Without going too deep into the weeds, the 9th Circuit basically said the more similar works were, the less you needed to do to prove "access" to the original work. As that link above shows, this can lead to some very significant problems in copyright cases (I recommend reading that link so I don't need to redo it).A second question that the court was asked to review -- is whether or not juries should be able to hear the recordings. This was super important, because if you were to just listen to the two songs, you might hear the fact that they are, indeed, similar. But, since not everything in the recorded version is protectable (and at the time the songs were written, the federal copyright only covered the composition, but not the recording), allowing the jury to make decisions based on the recording would have been a problem. It's very difficult, upon just listening, to understand which parts are protected by copyright and which are not.Perhaps surprisingly, the 9th Circuit has now appeared to do a pretty decent job in its latest ruling on the case. The key points: "Stairway" did not infringe, juries shouldn't hear the misleading sound recording, and the "inverse ratio" rule is no longer the right one to use in the 9th Circuit. Hooray.We'll go through a few key points in the decision. First, the representative of the Wolfe estate, Michael Skidmore (after whom the case is named), argued that the deposit copy of the sheet music for "Taurus" was not the full scope of the copyright in the song, but rather a sort of "reference" to the actual song. The court says that's not how any of this works:

Last June you might recall that the Trump FCC unveiled a new robocall plan that it claimed would finally put the annoying problem to bed. And while the tech press tripped over itself to suggest the plan was a dramatic departure from FCC robocall policies of the past, the reality is there was little to nothing in the plan that was actually new. As is often the case with this FCC, a coagulation of half-measures, already existing efforts, and empty nonsense were just kind of thrown together in a pile and deemed to be something new and revolutionary.The biggest change was FCC rule adjustment that would let wireless carriers install robocalling blocking tools on consumer devices by default, in contrast to the current paradigm where consumers have to opt in (assuming the tools are offered at all). But while the plan urged wireless carriers deploy anti-spoofing technology like SHAKEN/STIR to help prevent robocallers from hiding their real numbers, there was absolutely nothing in the plan that actually requires they actually do so. Because hard, clear rules with genuine accountability make AT&T and Verizon mad, you see.Not surprisingly, the voluntary measures weren't likely to actually drive massive telecom companies to actually shore up their anti-robocall efforts. There were also justified concerns that as wireless carriers deployed anti-spoofing technologies, they'd use the opportunity to further price gouge US consumers. Realizing this, Congress passed the Traced Act, which would require wireless carriers provide anti-spoofing tech to consumers at no additional cost.Amusingly, last week FCC boss Ajit Pai announced he was considering making deployment of SHAKEN/STIR anti-spoofing technology mandatory. In the FCC announcement, Pai tries to frame the effort as something he came up with on his own, despite the fact he was actually being mandated to do so by Congress:

Axon says it won't do it. Ring, less believably, says it won't do it. Some federal agencies want everyone to do it. But here's an actual tech company willing to do it: toss facial recognition tech into its cameras.

The ongoing fight between Nintendo and RomUniverse continues! While most of the targets of Nintendo's ire in its war on ROM sites folded to the company fairly quickly, RomUniverse's Matthew Storman boldly chose to fight in court. That led to Nintendo suing the site for copyright infringement. Storman attempted to crowdsource his legal defense, failed at that, and has been fighting this battle without legal representation. That likely explains the site's lame argument that somehow first sale doctrine makes the Nintendo ROMs on its site non-infringing, as though owners of game cartridges could copy the content to the site and resell or give them away there. The court saw through Storman's argument and allowed the trial to move forward.Which brings us to the present, in which Storman has not only responded to the lawsuit by claiming, again, that first sale doctrine protects him, but has now added a claim that he had no idea infringing files were on the site at all, and has demanded that Nintendo pay him for false claims of infringement. This reply was supposed to be due to the court in January, but the judge delayed that due date... so that Storman could attend a Federal Pro Se Clinic, where he got advice on how to represent himself.

Earlier this year, we wrote about the bogus "cybercrimes" charges brought against Glenn Greenwald in Brazil for his reporting on government corruption. As has been noted, a court and law enforcement had already said that Greenwald did not break any laws in his reporting, and had followed ethical journalistic guidelines. And yet, he was still charged with a crime for reporting on leaked documents, with prosecutors claiming that Greenwald's suggestions to the whistleblower on how not to get caught constituted a "clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime." This was clearly a charade, as the Bolsonairo government in Brazil seemed mostly to just want to intimidate Greenwald and the press away from reporting on what now appears to be an extremely corrupt government.A few weeks after the charges were announced, a court again said that it was clear that Greenwald broke no laws and refused to allow the case to go forward. However, as the Freedom of the Press Foundation has now announced, prosecutors have chosen to appeal that ruling and to continue to go after Greenwald.

One of the less charming aspects of Facebook is its executives' total inability to read the room. For example, any sensible company under Facebook's recent level of scrutiny would take the contrite and humble approach -- pausing most operations to insist they'd seen the error of their ways, pummeling home the claim that they were pausing expansion ambitions to ensure they were leaving no stone unturned to fix the problem and company culture (even if the company in question never genuinely intended such a thing).Instead Facebook, one of the wealthiest companies to ever exist, engaged in repeated PR gaffes and face plants, most of which were their own making. Like thinking it was a good idea to launch a dating app in the middle of a privacy firestorm. Or thinking it was a good idea to push a "privacy protecting" VPN on users that wound up being spyware. Or, you know, thinking it was a good idea for it to push hard into the cryptocurrency space while facing numerous international investigations for being a dumpster fire when it comes to protecting its users' privacy and security.To that end, a paywalled report at The Information this week hinted that Facebook was finally backing away from its Libra cryptocurrency plan after numerous partners had wisely exited the (likely) doomed venture. Last year Facebook had already been slowly backing away from its original vision of Libra as a fully open, decentralized network, putting it in stark contrast with those excited about the decentralized nature of blockchain-based networks.But the company and the Libra Association (or what's left of it) subsequently told Ars Technica that nothing has changed:

As we've been pointing out, the Trump campaign, with the help of lawyer Charles Harder, has been suing a list of media enemies over the past week. There was the NY Times, followed by the Washington Post and (probably not) finally, CNN. We've detailed why each lawsuit is frivolous, and how they appear to be playing to Trump's base in a performative manner, attacking the credibility of the media which has done critical reporting on his Presidency, and doing so in a manner that potentially serves two purposes: gets his fans riled up about the media while simultaneously creating a chilling effect on fairly typical journalistic analysis of the Trump administration and campaign.But I wanted to focus in on a separate point: the effective "state media" of Fox News reporting on these lawsuits in absolutely ridiculous ways. Reporter Gregg Re wrote about the NY Times case, and at least included a link to the filing and noted that "lawsuits for libel against media organizations by public figures must clear a high bar." But the reporting on the next two lawsuits, done by reporters Brian Flood and Brooke Singman, were terrible. Both of them claimed that reporting on the filing of a federal lawsuit was a Fox News "exclusive." That's not what exclusive means, guys.Also, while Fox News eventually added a link to the filing in the story about the CNN lawsuit and the NY Times one, it initially did not link to the CNN one, and as of this writing has still not linked to the Washington Post filing. Indeed, as you can see above, the reporters almost gloat over the fact that Fox News "obtained" access to the lawsuit -- and then failed to provide it to their readers. And with the CNN lawsuit, a search of PACER a couple of hours after the Fox News article went live showed no evidence that the case had actually been filed yet. In other words, it's likely that someone associated with the campaign or the lawsuit handed the complaint over to Fox News to "break" the "exclusive" story.And perhaps that explains why the reporting by Flood and Singman is so, so bad. Unlike the story by Re regarding the NY Times lawsuit, this one makes no effort to explain why this lawsuit faces a huge barrier (known as the 1st Amendment). Even worse, it repeats a blatantly false statement from the campaign's "legal adviser" Jenna Ellis:

Another challenger to the First Amendment has appeared. And his name is Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas.Apparently offended by a Senate hearing witness garbed in an anti-police t-shirt, the Lt. Governor welcomed all challengers via Twitter to sue him for violating people's free speech rights.

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Just as the country starts dealing with what the hell it's going to be doing about Covid19, the President and his campaign have decided that now is the time to file laughable SLAPP suits against every one of the media entities on his usual thin-skinned enemies list. First it was the NY Times, then it was the Washington Post, and on Friday, it was the third in his triumvirate of media he loves to hate: CNN. As with the first two, this is yet another Charles Harder joint, and, as with the first two, this is suing over an opinion piece. Also, as with the first two, this is a laughably vexatious lawsuit, in which he is assaulting the very 1st Amendment he has sworn an oath to protect and defend.You can read the CNN opinion piece that the campaign is suing about. It's by Larry Noble, the former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission, and is similar in many ways to the pieces he sued about in the Washington Post, arguing that an interpretation of the Mueller report in a manner displeasing to the President is somehow defamatory. That's ridiculous and everyone involved in this lawsuit should be embarrassed.

Buried beneath the unrelenting marketing for fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet reality: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.In many areas, a "launched" 5G market consists of just a few city blocks. Most phones also don't support the standard yet, and those that do are expensive and have worse battery life because existing 5G antennas are a battery drain. You'll also likely have to pay extra to use 5G, making it not really worth it for those already happy with 4G speeds (most of us).The wireless industry seems oblivious to the fact that by misrepresenting what 5G is, what it can do, and where it's available, it's only associating 5G with hype and bluster in the minds of US consumers.The latest case in point: early tests of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra are showing that phones from AT&T and T-Mobile are displaying "5G" icons when the phones aren't actually using 5G networks to transfer data. While 5G is generally seen as one thing in the minds of most people, the three variants of the technology leaning on low band, mid-band, and high-band spectrum all deliver decidedly different experiences.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with some thoughts on Attorney General Bill Barr's various comments defending police and painting America as a warzone:

Over the past three weeks, we've featured Hot Water, Legends of Charlemagne, and 192X in our series about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. This week, we're focusing on the winner of the Best Adaptation award for the game that best embodied the original 1924 work upon which it was based: The Hounds Follow All Things Down by J. Walton.J. Walton is one of our returning winners, having taken the award for Best Deep Cut last year with Not A Fish, and this year's entry feels in many ways like an evolution of the ideas and mechanics introduced in that game: they both break a work apart into component pieces, and let players discover its hidden meaning (and generate new meanings) by finding connections in a play-space that grows outwards like a puzzle or a map. But The Hounds Follow All Things Down situates this play within its world in an ingenious and beautiful way. It's based on the 1924 novel The King Of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany — a highly-influential early work in the fantasy genre that wasn't fully recognized as such until decades after its release — which presents readers with the fantastical and majestic world of Elfland and its inhabitants. The game imagines an epic and ancient poem within this world, which has been passed down for generations in countless incarnations, and tasks the players with performing their version of this poem to an audience of elves that is always hungry for new variations.This premise speaks directly to the themes of changing culture and the public domain that directly inspired the game jam, and also to the spirit of fantasy and legend that suffuses the novel. Gameplay takes the form of a series of scenes, performed by the players and generated by drawing prompt cards and placing them in a grid where they form connections with each other. By the end the group will have composed and performed a version of this fictional poem that is entirely unique, yet intimately connected with every other version that comes out of the game and with Dunsany's world of Elfland.One of the most interesting aspects of the game is how the prompt cards were developed: by playing around with the text of the book and a predictive algorithm. The designer's notes describe the process in detail:

All regular readers here will need is to see a headline that includes both the word "trademark" and the NFL to get their eyes rolling. The NFL is notorious in its jealous protection of its intellectual property. In fact, the league goes much further than your everyday trademark bully, chiefly by pretending it has trademark rights that it absolutely does not have. This usually rears its head in the run up to the Super Bowl.But the other game of pretend the NFL likes to play is one in which it pretends to not know that Fair Use exists. That can be seen most recently in the league going after a seller or parody NY Jets gear on his Shopify site, getting the whole store taken down by asserting trademark infringement.

Two consecutive administrations have engaged in wars on whistleblowers. President Obama used the Espionage Act to punish more whistleblowers and leakers than all other previous administrations combined. President Trump promised to "drain the swamp" and reverse all the damage he believes Obama had done to this nation. Apparently that doesn't include ejecting yes men from prominent government positions or scaling back Obama's anti-whistleblower activities.Now that it's clear Bill Barr's DOJ is just an Oval Office lapdog, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Ro Khanna are trying to do something to protect journalists who receive and report on leaked documents and other whistleblower activity.The Espionage Act Reform Act [PDF] would strengthen protections for journalists and whistleblowers, shielding them from vindictive prosecutions for engaging in acts protected by the First Amendment and (supposedly) by the federal government itself.A FAQ [PDF] released with the bill makes it clear the new law would not prevent legitimate deployment of the Espionage Act to prosecute government employees who hand government secrets to those not authorized to receive them, as well as foreign spies and other agents of foreign powers.What it would do is keep journalists from being prosecuted under the law and make it easier for whistleblowers to bring their concerns up through the proper channels. Here's what the bill does:

I should preface this piece by noting that there are good reporters at the NY Times who frequently do great work. But there are also a surprising number of dreadful reporters and editors who consistently seem to get key issues wrong. And one example of this is what appears to be a near institutional-level confusion over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- and I say this even while noting that last summer, the Times had an excellent piece written by Sarah Jeong calling out politicians for misrepresenting Section 230. But she should write another piece about her own damn colleagues.Just last fall, we covered multiple stories in which the NY Times got Section 230 so badly wrong that it often had to issue embarrassing corrections, including the time it put forth a full page massive headline blaming 230 for allowing hate speech online, only to have to later run an (online only) correction saying it was actually the 1st Amendment. That was bad. What was worse was that they kept getting it wrong all through the fall. Just a day after that first mistake, they mixed up the DMCA 512 and CDA 230, blaming CDA 230 for copyright infringement, despite the law explicitly saying it doesn't apply to intellectual property. Then there was a big piece that laughably blamed Section 230 for people dying which, astoundingly, made the identical mistake in swapping out DMCA 512 for CDA 230, and where the Times had to run the word-for-word identical correction from the previous time they had made that mistake.So I guess it should be no surprise at all that with the latest attack on Section 230, the dangerous EARN IT Act -- which is a badly re-heated FOSTA with a lump of "break encryption" tossed on top -- the NY Times would get nearly every important detail wrong again. The original title, which has since been changed, claimed "U.S. to Hold Tech Firms Accountable for Spread of Child Sexual Imagery." But that's wrong on nearly every point. First, it's just a bill, it's not the law -- yet the title implies otherwise. This is Journalism 101 stuff that the NY Times absolutely should be better at.Second, the bill is not about "holding firms accountable," but putting more liability on an intermediary to try to ramp up censorship -- and the whole point of the bill is to use that as a wedge by Bill Barr and the DOJ to undermine encryption. But ridiculously the NY Times, acting as stenographers for those introducing the bill, repeated the false claim that internet companies don't currently fight "child sexual exploitation material." Take, for example, this ridiculous tweet from Associate Managing Editor Dean Murphy, claiming that it's a response to "tech companies that do too little to block images of child sexual abuse."But the whole reason the bill is coming about in the first place is that we have so much data about how widespread the issue of CSAM content is because platforms have worked closely with NCMEC to identify and delete such material, sharing hashes to block it from being reuploaded. The major platforms have gone above and beyond, including Microsoft creating PhotoDNA, which helps a bunch of platforms find, detect, and remove child exploitation photos. Facebook, Google, Twitter and more have whole teams that work on making sure such content is identified and removed rapidly. Cloudflare recently built and released similar technology for free for anyone who uses its platform (even at the free level) to find and remove exploitation images.In other words, tech platforms have taken this issue seriously for years, and have worked hard to combat things. That's in contrast to the DOJ and Bill Barr, who have literally failed to abide by Congress' mandate to fight such material. The tech companies are handing over all the information necessary, and Barr's spending his time protecting his boss's buddies from prosecution, rather than actually going after the purveyors of child porn.But, to the NY Times, this is all about tech companies "doing too little" and the US government finally "holding them responsible." It's utter nonsense, and the NY Times, of all papers, ought to do much better.

A few weeks ago there was news that a developer in New York City was being forced to dismantle twenty already-built floors in the building he built too high. If only he had thought to let some graffiti artists paint the walls of these excess floors, because then he could never take them down…I say that, of course, in response to other recent news from New York: the Second Circuit has upheld the awful decision by EDNY to sanction a building owner millions of dollars for daring to paint the walls of his own building. And, in doing so, the Second Circuit has illuminated, in stark relief, what an unconstitutional disaster the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) is.But before explaining why, first here's some background. This decision, in Castillo v. GM Realty L.P., is the latest in the litigation over "5Pointz." In brief, a developer owned a building in Brooklyn that he wasn't doing anything with, so he let some graffiti artists paint its walls. Eventually he decided that he wanted to do something else with his building, and in response the graffiti artists sued him under VARA, because his plans would cause those paintings that hadn't already been destroyed by the artists [see p. 4] to now be destroyed by him. The district court refused to enjoin the building owner, however, so he went ahead and painted over them. Upon learning of the painting over, the district court then immediately had non-enjoiner's remorse and got so angry at the building owner for doing what it had let him do that it threw the book at him. In fact, it was $6.7 million dollars worth of book it threw in punitive statutory damages, because how dare that building owner paint the building he owned after the court said he could.The appeals court decision doubles-down on all the problems with the original district court decision we flagged before, including how catastrophic it is for the future availability of public art to subject those who allow it on their property to such expensive consequences. It makes true the saying "no good deed goes unpunished" and will ensure that few will ever be inclined to offer such favors ever again.We also highlighted the manifest unfairness of punishing the building owner for doing something that the court had cleared the way for. This unfairness itself presents a constitutional infirmity, particularly in light of the enormous statutory damages award granted, and then upheld, to punish the building owner.

Today's most inexplicable legislative news comes to us from the state of Rhode Island, where legislators are apparently accepting (and submitting!) unsolicited pre-written bills from strangers on the street.

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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: