Techdirt

Back in December, we wrote about the crazy situation in North Carolina, mostly unearthed by lawyer Greg Doucette, that the University of North Carolina had "settled" a lawsuit before it was even filed. The background story was crazy, and this is only the briefest of summaries. The "Silent Sam" statue was put onto the UNC campus by the "United Daughters of the Confederacy" in 1913 as part of a process that happened throughout the south many decades after the Confederacy lost the Civil War to try to put in place racist monuments and to pretend that there was some noble cause behind the war to defend enslaving people. As more and more people have recognized the racist purpose, history and intent of these monuments, many have been removed. Students at UNC toppled the Silent Sam statue a few years ago, and the University has basically just tried to avoid talking about it since, especially as racist-celebrating officials tried to legislate that such monuments to racism must stay put.Then, the day before Thanksgiving, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (not the Daughters...) announced that it had "settled" a lawsuit with UNC, in which it would be receiving $2.5 million and the statue from the University, and would be building some sort of museum to house it off campus. But among the many oddities involved in this was that UNC had approved the settlement a few minutes before the lawsuit was filed, and then the judge in the case, Allen Baddour, had approved the settlement literally minutes after the case had been filed. It seemed pretty clearly that this was a coordinated effort to create a fictitious scaffolding on which to tell a face-saving story, rather than a legitimate use of the courts.Indeed, as Doucette quickly turned up -- only to then face a bogus DMCA takedown notice over -- the head of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Kevin Stone, had sent around an email to his group's members, flat out admitting that the group had no standing to sue. Since then, various students have tried to intervene in the case, which the Judge rejected. However, now, at this belated date, he seems to have recognized that the Sons of Confederate Veterans (as they themselves admitted) had absolutely no standing to sue, and thus has voided the settlement.

Supreme Court precedent says the government needs a warrant if it wants to get cell-site location info. This ruling altered the contours of the Third Party Doctrine, making it clear not every third-party record exists outside the Fourth Amendment's protections.But that only applies to location info gathered from cell service providers utilizing the data they collect from cell tower connections. When the government wants to track the movement of individuals, it can do it, but it needs a warrant. When it just wants a bunch of location data on everyone in an area, somehow the warrant requirement disappears.That's what CBP and ICE are doing. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal [paywall], the agencies are buying location info in bulk from third-party vendors. No warrant required.

Open source voice assistant company Mycroft AI (which we actually wrote about years back) appears to be the latest startup to recognize that the only way to properly deal with patent trolls is to fight back. This strategy was first pioneered by online retailer Newegg, whose refusal to give in to any patent trolls eventually (after years of litigation) meant that patent trolls stopped trying to shake the company down. More recently, Cloudlfare has taken a similarly successful approach.It appears that these kinds of moves have inspired Mycroft's CEO, Joshua Montgomery, to take quite a stand now that a patent troll is trying to shake his company down:

The Premium 2020 Project and Quality Management Bundle has 11 courses to help you learn all about the different styles of project and quality management used today. Courses cover Agile, Scrum, PMP, Six Sigma, and more. You'll also learn about risk management and cyber security. It's on sale for $46.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

The judges have had their fun, the votes are in, and now it's time: we've got the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924! We had some amazing entries this year, and we've even got a couple returning winners. Plus, we noticed a really exciting pattern: several of the games didn't just make use of newly-copyright-free works from 1924, they actually found ways to embody the spirit of the game jam — a celebration of the public domain and the creative power of remixing and reimagining — within their themes and mechanics as well. This has only strengthened our resolve to continue with these game jams each year, and hopefully expand them as the public domain continues to grow — but first, here are the winners of Gaming Like It's 1924:Best Analog Game — The 24th Kandinsky by David HarrisAs we began reviewing entries in the game jam, this was one of the first to catch our eye, and right away we knew it was something special. The 24th Kandinsky is a marvelously conceived and executed game that you could start playing right now with almost any group in any setting and have an interesting, entertaining, and above all creative time. It is a game about admiring, sharing, remixing, creating, and collaborating on art — all quite literally, and all based on the 1924 paintings of the famed abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky. Players become what one judge called "art DJs", physically reproducing and cutting up pieces of Kandinsky's work to create a new composition on a shared canvas, with some light voting-based competition so a winner can take home the group masterpiece as a prize. This is exactly the sort of public domain celebration we hoped these game jams would inspire, and a deserving recipient of the Best Analog Game award.Best Digital Game — You Are The Rats In The Walls by Alex BlechmanThe award for the best overall digital game goes to this RPG Maker experience that employs a classic technique for reimagining a famous work: switching the perspective character. You Are The Rats In The Walls takes H. P. Lovecraft's 1924 short story of the nearly-same name and, as you've probably guessed, puts the player in the shoes of the titular rats. One thing that makes this game stand out is its excellent and amusing writing, which mines a great deal of comedy from the combination of baroque Lovecraftian prose with more modern, casual dialog. But what sealed its spot as Best Digital Game was that it goes beyond the basics of the RPG Maker engine and actually adds some real gameplay mechanics — simple ones perhaps, but enough to elevate it beyond the more rigid interactive fiction it could have otherwise been.This is Alex Blechman's second win in the Best Digital Game category, following last year's win with a quite different kind of game.Best Adaptation — The Hounds Follow All Things Down by J. WaltonAt first glance, this analog storytelling/roleplaying game based on Lord Dunsany's 1924 novel The King of Elfland's Daughter might not seem like a candidate for the Best Adaptation award, which goes to the game that most faithfully carries forth the meaning, style, and intent of the original work. And yet, something about the way The Hounds Follow All Things Down radically tears apart — then tasks players with creatively rebuilding — its source material allows it to tap in to what Charles De Lint called "the spell of legendry and wonder" that makes the novel so influential in the fantasy genre. The designer used an unusual, experimental method of procedural generation via predictive text algorithms to chop up the text of the book into curious fragments, which the players then use to construct a fictional "famous poem" within the story's setting. As such, it directly employs themes of authorship, oral history, remixing, and the way stories change over time, while strongly evoking the world of Elfland and its inhabitants.J. Walton is our other returning winner this year, after taking the Best Deep Cut award last year with a game that similarly delivers rich meaning in strange and unexpected ways.Best Remix — 192X by chloe spearsThe award for the best combination of material from multiple public domain sources goes to this Twine-based interactive fiction that clearly had such remixing at the heart of its mission. 192X weaves together the Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr., the Yevgeny Zamyatin novel We, and George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue — all works from 1924 (and thanks to the designer for noting that the game only uses the now-public-domain composition by Gershwin, not any of the still-copyrighted recordings). Moreover, it's another of the entries that brought the ideas of public domain material and remixing into the game itself, resulting in (as the designer describes it) "a game about the art we leave behind for the future, and what we allow the future to do with it". The writing is compelling and often funny, the interactivity is simple but designed with care and subtlety that enhances the story, and as one of our judges put it, "my hat is off to the creator for having the guts to even try to tell a Buster Keaton movie in words alone."Best Deep Cut — Legends of Charlemagne by AbelardsnazzThere weren't many "deep cut" entries based on works that don't appear in the popular public domain day highlight lists this year, but the competitive deck-building card game Legends of Charlemagne — based on the N. C. Wyeth paintings published in a 1924 illustrated edition of Thomas Bulfinch's famous 19th century book of the same name — would be a strong contender even in a crowded field. It first caught our eye with its striking visuals that pair the paintings with perfectly complementary card designs, but its most notable achievement is having identified this wealth of beautiful imagery in one edition of a book that has been republished and repackaged many times over the past 150 years, and which could have easily flown under the radar of everyone looking for interesting 1924 publications. Wyeth's book, magazine and advertising illustrations are an iconic part of early 20th century commercial art, and Legends Of Charlemagne gives them new life as a game that will appeal especially to fans of history, legend, fantasy, and of course competitive card games.Best Visuals — Hot Water by reltruA video game with good graphics is a tough thing to pull off in a one-month development window, but this year we have a winner for the Best Visuals category that is absolutely dripping with visual style. Hot Water, based on the 1924 Harold Lloyd silent film of the same name, is a simple and short reaction game that could use some polish on the controls and mechanics, but its delightfully anachronistic combination of retro pixel art with silent movie interstitial title cards and a black-and-white, early-film aesthetic is instantly appealing. With the music enhancing this effect, plus a little treat at the end, you've got a couple minutes of silly, diverting, and above all visually charming gameplay that will put a smile on your face.The winning designers will be contacted via their Itch pages to arrange their prizes, so if you see your game listed here, keep an eye on your incoming comments!Like last year, we'll be featuring even closer looks at each winning game over the coming weeks, and you can check out all the submissions (including all the great games that didn't quite make the cut) over on itch.io. Congratulations to all our winners, and a huge thanks to everyone who submitted a game — and finally, another thanks to our amazing panel of judges:

We've noted a few times now how US claims that Huawei routinely spies on Americans haven't been supported much in the way of actual public evidence, a bit of a problem given that's the primary justification for the country's global blackballing efforts. Previous White House investigations 18 months in length couldn't find evidence of said spying, and many US companies have a history of ginning up security fears simply because they don't want to compete with cheaper Chinese kit.The US has been making its blacklisting case for much of the last year, but had been criticized previously by Germany and the UK for being a bit light on actual evidence. That shifted slightly this week courtesy of a report in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled, here are Ars Technica and Gizmodo alternatives), which quoted US National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien as saying the US has hard evidence that Huawei has backdoor access to mobile-phone networks around the world:

You will recall our previous posts about Chooseco, the company behind those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books from the 80s, and its lawsuit against Netflix. At issue is Netflix's Black Mirror iteration entitled Bandersnatch. The episode essentially runs a choose your own adventure scenario in streaming film, with the viewer being able to control the outcome of the narrative through choice. In addition, Netflix marketed the episode with references to it being a "choose your own adventure" style story. In addition, the protagonist in the episode refers to a book that is the basis for a video game he's creating as "a choose your own adventure book." Predictably, Netflix petitioned the court for a dismissal, arguing that the First Amendment allowed it to make the references it did in the production, so long as it wasn't purposefully confusing the public with its use of the "choose your own adventure" mark. In the conclusion of that post, we wrote this:

A few years ago, The Lens exposed a super-shady tactic being used by Louisiana prosecutors. In an attempt to obtain a bit more compliance from witnesses in criminal cases, the Orleans Parish District Attorney's office started issuing fake subpoenas to witnesses that contained (an also-bogus) threat of imprisonment.Rather than do it the legal way -- using office letterhead with no threat of incarceration -- the DA's office opted for a hard sell tactic that deliberately mislead citizens. The office claimed this was fine and that no one paid attention to the big, bold print promising jail time for not cooperating.Two weeks after The Lens exposed the practice, the lawsuits began flowing in. Some lawsuits sought copies of the fake subpoenas the office had issued. Others sued over the practice itself. Crime victims, who had been falsely threatened with being treated like criminals themselves, sued the DA. The problem with this is prosecutors are generally given absolute immunity which makes them nearly impervious to civil lawsuits.Fortunately, a Louisiana federal court allowed the lawsuit to proceed, finding (on very narrow grounds) absolute immunity couldn't be stretched to cover every bit of this nasty, deceitful scheme.

We pointed out recently that Devin Nunes' ongoing campaign to file vexatious nuisance defamation lawsuits, usually in Virginia (despite being a Congressman from a California farm that is now in Iowa), had helped renew interest in having Virginia finally getting a real anti-SLAPP law. And, thanks in part to Nunes' suits getting so much attention, the Virginia state legislature has now passed an anti-SLAPP bill:

Over the last year, giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple have all faced growing calls for greater regulatory oversight and antitrust enforcement, something that isn't particularly surprising. After all, experts have noted for decades than US antitrust enforcement has grown toothless and frail, and our definitions of monopoly power need updating in the Amazon era. Facebook's repeated face plants on privacy (and basic transparency and integrity) have only added fuel to the fire amidst calls to regulate "big tech."But while Silicon Valley giants now face an endless cavalcade of outrage in DC, the telecom sector is suddenly seeing no scrutiny whatsoever. Whether it's the speed at which the problematic T-Mobile merger is being shoveled through the DOJ and FCC, or the blind eye being turned to major telecom privacy scandals (like location data), telecom lobbyists have been on a successful tear convincing well-heeled DC lawmakers to ignore the massive, obvious monopoly, privacy, and competition issues inherent in telecom to focus exclusively on the problems in "big tech."This crusade against "big tech" has seen no shortage of advocates who've historically been absent on glaring and painful monopoly and consumer protection issues in other sectors. Like Marsha Blackburn, who has rubber stamped every fleeting monopolistic and privacy-violating whim AT&T executives have ever had, yet is now branding herself as some sort of consumer advocacy and privacy expert as she rails against "big tech."Another major voice in the "battle to fix 'big tech'" has been Josh Hawley, who has been endlessly vocal about the issues with big tech, but just as absent as Blackburn when it comes to criticizing the same exact problems plaguing the telecom sector. Last week, Hawley unveiled a plan to fix the FTC (pdf) -- an agency, he correctly notes, that has been largely feckless when it comes to reining in the bad behavior of lumbering giants like Facebook:

Back in December, it's likely you heard the wacky story about the "art installation" at the Art Basel gallery in Florida of a banana duct taped to the wall, which sold for $120,000. You may have also heard about how someone stepped in and ate the banana, but the original purchasers were still happy, despite the recognized absurdity of the whole thing. Anyway, because it's been a few months since we last had a story about copyright and bananas, we need to tell you that a copyright lawsuit has been filed against the owners of the website ClickOrlando, claiming that they used a photograph of the duct taped banana taken by John Taggart without licensing it in its article about the artwork. The lawsuit was filed by frequently in trouble copyright troll, Richard Liebowitz. The lawsuit was first reported by Law360, though it's behind their paywall.Given Liebowitz's role, I immediately wondered how legit the lawsuit was. It is certainly possible that a news org might infringe on someone's copyright, though news organizations can frequently claim fair use under the law, especially since "news reporting" is one of the defined categories for fair use. After seeing the actual exhibits, I'm actually left wondering whether or not Taggart's copyright is valid at all. Straight from the complaint's Exhibit B here is the supposedly infringing use:So... I have questions. First, how is Liebowitz sure that this is Taggart's photo? The banana was on display for a few days and tons of people were able to come by and photograph it. The images do look the same, so it could be. The banana coloration certainly looks the same, though I imagine that would be true for lots of people who took a picture around the same time.But, still, remember that copyright is only supposed to cover the creative input of the photographer. Often that includes things like the positioning, framing, lighting, etc. But, in this case, how much of that came from Taggart vs. the gallery? Obviously the artwork was set up in the gallery. Taggart had no say in the positioning of the banana. The lighting was also done by the gallery. So what is the creativity here? Taking a photo head on? How much of the wall is included in the background? It is difficult to see how those choices are deserving of much in the way of copyright. That is, even if there is a copyright here, it would be a very, very thin layer of copyright. On top of that, it would seem that the site would have very strong fair use arguments. Beyond the fact that it was used for reporting, and beyond the fact that whatever copyright interest Taggart might have would be quite weak, the fact that tons of visitors to the gallery took similar pictures of the banana would suggest that Taggart's market was limited, and thus this use would not have much of an impact on the wider market.While this lawsuit might not be quite as egregiously bad as some of Liebowitz's other lawsuits, it's still pretty bananas.

Do slow web design workflows prevent you from reaching your goals? That's where the Blueprints app by Bootstraptor comes to save you! Blueprints is a prototyping tool for website ideation that will help you simplify your work using 500+ ready-made blocks, 200+ prototype starter templates, and 30+ navigation panels. Not only easy without code, the pages are also automatically adapted. This means you can view your site on any device and it will surely look great! It's on sale for $39.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Another bill containing some bad ideas is being floated in the Arizona legislature. Rep. Bob Thorpe thinks social media companies are biased against conservatives and feels the best way to address this is to steamroll the Constitution and Section 230. (via Eric Goldman)Thorpe's bill [PDF] says it will turn platforms into publishers at the drop of a bias accusation:

You'd be hard pressed to find a bigger enemy of consumer safeguards than the fine folks at AT&T. The company has a history of all manner of anti-competitive behavior, from making its bills harder to understand to help scammers rip off its customers, to routinely ripping off programs designed to help everyone from the hearing impaired to the poor. AT&T also, of course, played a starring role in killing both the FCC's 2010 and 2015 net neutrality rules, and pretty much all meaningful state and federal efforts to protect broadband and wireless user privacy as it builds a creepy new ad empire.Yet like clockwork, company executives like to pretend that despite this, they really love net neutrality, privacy, and healthy regulatory oversight. Case in point: with the courts refusing to hear an appeal of the FCC's hugely unpopular net neutrality repeal, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson again piped up to insist his company really supports a federal net neutrality law:

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has finally decided -- after more than four years -- that the government can't keep someone locked up indefinitely for contempt of court charges.Former Philadelphia policeman Francis Rawls has been locked up since 2015 for refusing to decrypt external hard drives the government claims contain child porn images. The government's claims are based on Rawls' sister's statements. She said Rawls showed her "hundreds" of child porn images that were located on these drives.The government obtained an All Writs Order demanding Rawls decrypt the devices. This was challenged by Rawls, but unfortunately he did not preserve a Fifth Amendment challenge, so the Appeals Court let the government have its victory. It was a limited victory. It still had two locked drives Rawls claimed he could not remember the passwords for. But it also had Rawls jailed on civil contempt charges.Rawls will be a free man again, but probably not for long. He challenged the indefinite incarceration, asserting that the law only provides for a maximum of 18 months in jail for civil contempt charges. The court [PDF] agrees:

It's been quite a long and frustrating walk for us in covering the lengths to which Intuit went to hide the free to file tax program. This is the program that it is legally mandated to offer. If you're not caught up, the IRS struck a deal with the big tax prep companies out there, promising not to offer and expand its own free file programs, but only if companies like Intuit offer their own free file programs. Intuit did as instructed with its TurboTax product, except that the company then went about hiding the website for the free to file program from search engines and the internet, all while dropping the word "free" into as many places on the website for the paid services site it also runs. Then, because evil is an addictive drug, Intuit went ahead and lied to a bunch of customers to avoid refunding their money when it got caught in all this, informed its own employees that it bilked the public for their own good, and was even eventually found to have wrapped itself in the American flag while swindling active duty soldiers as well.So, now you're caught up. But perhaps you're wondering why Intuit would risk all of the bad PR that comes with treating tax prep services like a game of three card monty. Well, the answer, according to a recent audit by the Treasury Inspector General, is because one-billion dollars.

Our nation's border security agencies want to be national security agencies. ICE and CBP both made it clear they expected to be treated as Intelligence Community equals and given a seat at the grown-ups' surveillance table. They got their wish. Trump's "extreme vetting" wishes opened the door for the agencies' access to NSA collections late last year.The CBP's addition to the long list of Intelligence Community agencies gives it another layer of opacity. As Ken Klippenstein reports for The Nation, being added to the OPM's list of exemptions will make it even more difficult to obtain information via FOIA requests.

Last month I wrote a long post explaining why I could not support Larry Lessig's new lawsuit against journalists and the New York Times for what he referred to as "Clickbait Defamation." Lessig argued that a NY Times headline and lede was false, while I argued that it was a different interpretation, but not "false," and thus not defamatory. I also argued that his lawsuit was a SLAPP suit, potentially harming the individuals named. Larry wished to respond to my post and I invited him on the podcast to discuss. Larry is a Harvard Law professor. I am not. This immediately puts me at a disadvantage in arguing things in a live debate, and while I don't think either of us convinced each other of anything, l definitely understand his argument more clearly, though I still disagree with it.The full discussion is now available as the latest episode of the Techdirt Podcast.As I said in my intro to the podcast, I think it's worth reading all of the background information to understand what we're talking about, including:

Combating disinformation and misinformation online is an admirable goal. However, we often criticize overly broad attempts to do so, noting that they could lead to censorship of important, accurate, and useful information. Here's a somewhat tragic case study of that in action. You may have heard late last week about anger in China over the death of doctor Li Wenliang, a physician who had tried to warn people about the new coronavirus well before most others had realized how dangerous it was. Dr. Li eventually caught the virus himself and passed away, sparking tremendous anger online:

When AT&T was busy trying to gain regulatory approval of its $86 billion merger with Time Warner, economists, consumer groups, antitrust experts, and opponents of the deal warned it should be blocked because a bigger AT&T would only act anti-competitively to raise rates and hamstring competitors. AT&T and the FCC denied those claims, only to have them all come true a short while later.Fast forward to this week and we're repeating history all over again. This morning U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero approved (pdf) T-Mobile's controversial $26 billion merger with Sprint, shutting down a multi-state AG lawsuit aimed at stopping the deal. Citing ample evidence that the reduction of four major carriers to three would dull any incentive to compete on price, a coalition of AGs tried to stop the deal after it was rubber stamped by both the FCC and FTC. But in his decision, Marrero tied himself into bizarre, esoteric knots in a bid to try and justify approval of the deal:

The Total CompTIA Core Certification Prep Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn about various CompTIA exams. You will learn about security, safety, preventative maintenance, virtualization and cloud computing, and network troubleshooting. Courses also cover configuring operating systems, risk mitigation, threat management, and more. You'll prepare for the CompTIA IT Fundamentals FC0-U61, CompTIA A+ 220-1001, CompTIA A+ Core 2 (220-1002), CompTIA Network+ N10-007, and CompTIA Security+ SY0-501. It's on sale for $39.95.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

A few years back, we wrote about how Tesla automagically extended the range of Teslas in Florida as a hurricane was approaching. While this sounded good, we warned that this wasn't a good thing, when you realized it meant that what you bought could magically and secretly be changed without your permission or desire. In the Florida case, it was for a good purpose, but that wouldn't always be the case. So, it's little surprise that approximately half of all Techdirt readers decided to send me this story from Jalopnik of how Tesla remotely disabled its Autopilot feature on a 2nd hand Tesla Model S after it had been sold:

For a country that likes to talk about "being number one" a lot, that's sure not reflected in the United States' broadband networks, or the broadband maps we use to determine which areas lack adequate broadband or competition (resulting in high prices and poor service). Our terrible broadband maps are, of course, a feature not a bug; ISPs have routinely lobbied to kill any efforts to improve data collection and analysis, lest somebody actually realize the telecom market is a broken mono/duopoly whose dysfunction reaches into every aspect of tech.If you want to see our terrible broadband maps at work, you need only go visit the FCC's $350+ million broadband availability map, which is based on the Form 477 data collected from ISPs. If you plug in your address, you'll find that not only does the FCC not include prices (at industry behest), the map hallucinates speed and ISP availability at most U.S. addresses. Part of the problem is that the FCC declares an entire region "served" with broadband if just one home in a census block has service.And guess what: it's even worse than you think. A new study by BroadbandNow, compared the FCC's data to data provided by the pre-qualification tools on ISPs' websites. What they found was that U.S. broadband gaps are probably about twice as bad as the FCC has suggested:

It appears no one's thrilled facial recognition upstart Clearview is scraping their photos to build a facial recognition database to sell to cops. But what can they do about it? Not much more than write angry letters.Twitter was the first to send a C&D to the troubling developer over this troubling development. It was presumably ignored. Google also issued a C&D, only to be not-so-gently reminded by Clearview that Google does the same thing to build its search engine database. (Of course, web site owners and developers can opt out of being crawled by Google bots -- something that's not an option with Clearview.)Added to the list of pissed scrapees are Venmo and LinkedIn, the latter known for actually suing people who have scraped its site. Facebook, however, has not done this and it's by far the largest repository of face photos and personal information on the web. Facebook claims to be asking Clearview some tough questions about its scraping and database compilation but it has not sent a formal cease-and-desist.Maybe Zuckerberg's just disappointed he didn't think of this first. Or, as Aaron Mak speculates for Slate, maybe it has something to with Peter Thiel's early investment in Clearview and his position as a Facebook board member. Thiel likes surveillance and Clearview's scraping of Facebook to compile a facial recognition database may be just the sort of vertical integration he's looking for.But the bad news gets worse. Clearview's aggressive pursuit of law enforcement agency customers -- combined with its questionable database construction methods -- hasn't won it very many friends. Not even from the law enforcement community, which has been forced to offer rebuttals to exaggerated (or downright false) claims made by Clearview in its marketing materials.Clearview isn't going to limit itself to the United States. Documents obtained by BuzzFeed show Clearview is pitching its facial recognition app to abusive governments around the world.

As the techlash continues to rage against tech and social media companies, one of the more common criticisms has been how sites track users in order to feed them advertising. Now, I won't pretend to believe that these concerns are entirely unfounded. There is something creepy about all of this. That perception is also not helped by the opaque manner in which sites operate, nor the manner in which these sites often barely inform users of the tracking that is in place. Through it all, those that have the worst opinions of the internet and tech companies often couch their concerns in hand-wringing over how these sites handle younger users.Except that, as per usual, younger users are way ahead of the adults. Rather than waiting to rely on some half-brained "for the children!" legislation, at least some youth are instead making a sport out of beating social media sites at their own game. The CNET post focuses on one teenager, Samantha Mosley, and her use of Instagram.

Late last year, a bill was introduced to study the impact of FOSTA. This is important, as all of the evidence to date suggests that it has failed by every possible measure. There is no indication that it has helped to decrease sex trafficking -- in fact the indications are that it has enabled more sex trafficking. Indeed, law enforcement has directly admitted that the law has actually made it more difficult to track down traffickers. And, of course, there's tremendous evidence that it has had a real human cost in putting (non-trafficked) sex workers at significant risk.As more in Congress realize this, it's been good to see some calling for a careful study into the impact. And now Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been the first (as far as I can tell) to come right out and say the law should be totally repealed, specifically calling out the harm that it has done to sex workers. It's great to see politicians realizing that all the lame rhetoric that was pushed out in favor of the law was bullshit.Of course, because AOC is such a polarizing figure in these insanely partisan times, the usual crew of AOC haters have immediately started spewing absolute idiocy online claiming -- falsely -- that she supports sex trafficking. It was this kind of bogus rhetoric that helped get this damaging law passed in the first place. But, since Republicans love to try to mock everything AOC says, we get silly statements like this from Rep. Pete Olson saying that she wants to "re-open the floodgates of human trafficking" and pointing to "64 human traffickers busted" in Fort Bend (in his district). While it is true that local officials arrested 64 people in a sting operation, and told the press it was for trafficking, few details have been provided. In most similar announcements, later research often found that the operations had little to do with trafficking, and were just standard sex work. Either way, if FOSTA was supposed to stop such "trafficking," it seems like Olson is flat out admitting that it didn't work here.And, of course, Senator Josh Hawley -- who you may recall, has decided that he alone should make all UI decisions for the internet -- has ridiculously claimed that this is AOC "supporting big tech and sex trafficking" when it's literally neither of those things. The idea that partisan idiots are jumping on this just because of who is suggesting it is perhaps not surprising, but still disappointing.Even if you disagree with AOC on other things, it's a good thing that she recognizes what a failure FOSTA has been and how it's put lives in jeopardy. Repealing FOSTA is the right move and kudos to AOC for being the first Congressional Rep to come out and advocate for it.

A 1996 decision by the Michigan Supreme Court set the precedent for the widespread abuse of civil asset forfeiture in the state. The ruling said being an innocent owner of property seized is no defense and any forfeiture predicated on the illegal acts of others could result in the actual owner being deprived of property without violating their Constitutional rights.The state's law enforcement agencies took this ruling and ran with it. To ensure minimum legal hassle, cops are "fighting" crime by taking small amounts of cash and 20-year-old vehicles from people they imagine might have committed a crime, were thinking about committing a crime, or happened to wander into an area where crime exists.The city of Detroit and Wayne County prosecutors are the busiest of the state's busy kleptomaniacs.

Why oh why do people still hire copyright troll Richard Liebowitz? There are just so many stories of him messing up cases and getting scolded by judges, you'd think that people would think twice. But then, yet another story of Liebowitz messing up comes to light. The latest is a real doozy. It involves the somewhat controversial person, Rachel Dolezal (who now goes by Nkechi Amare Diallo -- a name that has spun up plenty of controversy itself) , who made a lot of news five or so years ago when it was exposed that, despite calling herself a black woman for years, she was actually white. Last summer, she made some news again, when she declared on Instagram and Twitter that she was bisexual. I'm not entirely sure I understand why this was newsworthy, but some publications ran with it -- including Paper Magazine (though, it appears the story has since been deleted).Either way, in the fall, an operation called Polaris Images, represented by Liebowitz, sued Paper Mag's parent company, Enttech Media, because it had posted an image of Dolezal's Instagram post referenced above. According to the lawsuit, Dolezal had provided Polaris with an "exclusive licensing agreement" concerning various images of herself -- including the one in the Instagram post. Paper Magazine's lawyer, Robert Tauber, pointed out (among other things) that Polaris couldn't possibly be the exclusive licensee, because in posting the image to Instagram, Dolezal had granted a non-exclusive license to Instagram as well, and if you've granted a license to more than one party, you can't claim one is "exclusive" any more.Tauber also pointed out that the copyright in the image wasn't registered until a month after the article in question, and pointed out that it's almost certainly fair use for a news organization to show a social media post in a news story about that social media post. Liebowitz, in typical Liebowitz fashion, responded that "the fair use defense is borderline frivolous." No, Richard, it's not.But, you know what is frivolous? Trying to swap plaintiffs midstream. But that's what Liebowitz tried to do.Apparently the issue of whether or not Polaris actually had the right to sue over this image made Liebowitz realize that the case was in trouble. So he filed an "amended" complaint, but part of the "amendment" was to completely drop the plaintiff Polaris from the complaint and just swap in Dolezal as the new plaintiff. That... is not how things are done. Paper Mag's lawyer sent quite a letter to the court highlighting the many, many, many problems of such a filing:

The Department of Justice this morning formally announced that it has identified the Chinese government as the culprit behind the historic Equifax hack. If you've forgotten, the 2017 hack involved hackers making off with the personal financial data of more than 147 million Americans. Those victims were then forced to stumble through an embarrassing FTC settlement that promised them all manner of financial compensation that mysteriously evaporated once they went to collect it.According to the FTC's press release and the indictment (pdf), the four Chinese government employees responsible for the hack were all members of the People’s Liberation Army's 54th Research Institute, an extension of the Chinese military. The four exploited a vulnerability in the Apache Struts Web Framework software used by Equifax’s online dispute portal to first gain access to Equifax's systems, then ran more than 9,000 queries before managing to offload both consumer financial data and "proprietary Equifax info" (mostly related to databases) to a Dutch server.In a statement, Equifax was happy to see the onus shifted entirely onto the backs of the Chinese:

The Data Analytics Expert Bundle will help you learn how analytics, data visualization, and data science methodologies can be used to drive better business decisions. You will gain an understanding of the complete data analytics lifecycle, from problem definition to solution deployment. You will learn how to build visualizations, organize data, and design dashboards with Tableau, how to use Python to help with Data Science analytics techniques, how to install, configure & maintain a MongoDB environment, and how to use Excel to help you devise insights from available data. It's on sale for $49.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

It's somewhat amazing how quickly officials lean into the idea of censorship as the first response to other officials saying things they don't like. Rep. Nancy Pelosi's office asked both Twitter and Facebook to remove a tweet by Donald Trump (both companies refused). Trump's tweet showed a misleadingly cut video of Nancy Pelosi. Similarly, Rep. Ro Khanna -- who has done some great things, including looking into the harm caused by FOSTA -- demanded that Twitter delete that same tweet, falsely stating that "falsity has never been a part of the 1st Amendment," which is (to repeat myself), false.Now, if you're a Trump supporter about to get up in arms over a Democratic politician asking Twitter to delete a tweet from the President, slow down a bit, because around the same time, four Republican Senators were in the process of sending an angry letter to Twitter, telling Jack Dorsey that his company was breaking the law by allowing Iranian officials to tweet. The letter, sent by Senators Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Tom Cotton, and Marco Rubio (all of whom, I assure you, have cynically claimed to support free speech in the past), notes that Trump signed an executive order last year putting sanctions on Iranian officials and preventing US companies from providing goods and services to them:

As companies and governments increasingly hoover up our personal data, a common refrain to keep people from worrying is the claim that nothing can go wrong because the data itself is "anonymized" -- or stripped of personal identifiers like social security numbers. But time and time again, studies have shown how this really is cold comfort, given it takes only a little effort to pretty quickly identify a person based on access to other data sets. Yet most companies, many privacy policy folk, and even government officials still like to act as if "anonymizing" your data means something.A pair of Harvard students have once again highlighted that it very much doesn't.As part of a class study, two Harvard computer scientists built a tool to analyze the thousands of data sets leaked over the last five years or so, ranging from the 2015 hack of Experian, to the countless other privacy scandals that have plagued everyone from social media giants to porn websites. Their tool collected and analyzed all this data, and matched it to existing email addresses across scandals. What they found, again (surprise!) is that anonymized data is in no way anonymous:

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to the story of Disney sucking up a third of the money raised by a school fundraiser because someone played a Lion King DVD to keep the kids occupied — and more specifically, in response to one commenter who took Disney's side, and compared the event to holding public back-yard screenings of movies. In first place, it's Nathan F drawing a distinction between that and what the school did:

At the beginning of the year, we launched our second public domain game jam to encourage designers to explore all the new works exiting copyright protection in the US and turn them into new analog and digital games — and as of this month, the submissions are in! Our panel of judges is hard at work play checking out all the great games, and while they try to determine a winner, you can check them out too.Though we didn't get as many submissions as last year (after all, this wasn't the historic year in which new works began entering the public domain for the first time in a long time) the quality and creativity of this year's lineup is off the charts. You can play them all at our itch.io page, including things like: a deck-building card game about Charlemagne based on the paintings of N. C. Wyeth, a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game based on The Most Dangerous Game, a game about remixing the art of Wassily Kandinsky, and rules for a free-form LARP based on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, among many others.We'll bring you more updates as our judges get closer to choosing winners in in our six categories: best analog game, best digital game, best visuals, best adaptation of a 1924 work, best remixing of multiple public domain works, and the best "deep cut" game based on something more obscure that isn't included in the popular lists of notable newly-public-domain works. Until then, get playing, and share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments!

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, Michael Hayden was saying some worrying things about the 4th Amendment, while we learned about the FISA court's rubberstamping of questionable NSA legal theories and the DOJ was staying quiet about whether it took any action against NSA analysts who spied on "love interests". None of this seemed to be scaring Canada away from pushing for its own PATRIOT-like anti-terrorism legislation. We also learned about Germany's spies sucking up phone metadata and sharing it with the NSA, while a court in the UK was saying the GCHQ's similar behavior was illegal in the past but not anymore, and UK Lords were trying yet again to sneak through their Snooper's Charter less than a week after failing to do so.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, copyright settlement shakedowns were getting so bad that even the recording industry was criticizing them, while News.com had to help prevent a falsely-accused grandmother from being kicked off the internet by the MPAA. We wondered if the recording industry in the UK would be willing to pay for the cost of the the ISP monitoring they were demanding, while an Australian court thankfully ruled that ISPs are not liable for infringing users — leading the copyright industry to seek a government bailout. Of course, we also saw a very bad ruling in Australia, with the court agreeing that Men At Work's Down Under infringed on the folk song Kookaburra.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, the RIAA was really exposing its sloppy shakedown tactics by suing a non-computer-owner who also happened to be dead. French musicians were asking the industry to stop suing fans, while rumors that online music sales were oustripping CDs were greatly exaggerated. A scandal over supposedly missing disks of classified information from Los Alamos was dissipated when it became clear that the disks never existed in the first place, a text messaging scandal was continuing to cause massive overreaction in India, and one wrong button push almost caused the complete evacuation of the state of Connecticut. We also had a post this week about the birth of Amazon Prime which, interestingly, has amassed nearly 600 comments (trickling in all the way up to 2018) from people who were confused and angry about being automatically billed for the service.

We've highlighted in the past that there are large parts of the federal government that recognize that strong encryption is actually very, very important for national security, and that the framing by Attorney General William Barr, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and even President Trump -- that there need to be back doors to encryption for "security" reasons -- is utter nonsense. The intelligence community has long recognized the importance of strong encryption. Even many people within the FBI think their bosses' position on this issue is bonkers. Late last year, we were pleasantly surprised to see the Defense Department step up as well, with a letter to Congress talking about just how important encryption is for national security.Over at Cyberscoop, former National Security Council cybersecurity expert Ari Schwartz has a nice article explaining just how important encryption is to protecting the military. It won't tread any new ground for anyone who understands the basics here, but it's nice to see more and more people highlighting this.

There are great rivalries in this world. The United States and Russia. The Yankees and the Red Sox. All of us and our mothers-in-law. And, in the gaming space for over a decade, there has been Microsoft and Sony. Since the Playstation 2 v. Xbox iteration of this, Sony and Microsoft have gone head to head in the console wars, with Nintendo also filling in some more niche-style gaming needs. The last battle in this war, the Playstation 4 v. the Xbox One, quite famously went in Sony's favor, with Microsoft having a disastrous pre-launch PR nightmare and sales numbers that ultimately saw Sony never once trailing its chief rival.And yet, as Sony has announced its forthcoming Playstation 5 console, the man in charge of Microsoft's Xbox product recently stated that Google and Amazon are its competitors now, not Sony and Nintendo.

We've already discussed how the "cybercrime" charges against Glenn Greenwald in Brazil for his reporting activities were a clear attack on a free press -- especially given that a court and the Federal Police had already said he didn't do anything wrong. In a bit of a temporary reprieve, a judge has now refused to move forward with the charges against Greenwald, but that doesn't mean things won't change down the road:

In 2018, a report came out that added even more doubt as to the reliability of breathalyzers. A number of factors -- including incorrect calibrations and ambient air temperature -- could turn innocent breath into guilty breath. Cops value breathalyzers since they're easy to deploy and don't have the warrant impediments of blood tests. But they're often relying on faulty equipment.The 2018 discoveries were reaffirmed in 2019 when a New York Times investigation uncovered more problems with breathalyzers. Equipment used in the field was rarely recalibrated and active chemical agents rarely replaced. One breathalyzer used by Michigan police was found to have rats nesting inside of it.Faulty equipment is only one of the problems. The bigger problem is that it's almost impossible to challenge in court. The private companies behind breathalyzer equipment have inserted themselves into court proceedings, claiming any examination of devices and source code could result in the exposure of proprietary information that (they imagine) could harm their market position and future sales.Manufacturers are partially correct, but not for the reasons they've stated. The more these devices and their deployments are examined, the less they seem to be a gold standard for detecting intoxication. And now it's the producers of this equipment that might be facing criminal charges, as Blake Montgomery reports for The Daily Beast. (h/t BentFranklin via the Techdirt chat window)

We have talked in the past about the state of Utah's strange and ongoing war on pornography. The output of this war being waged from the most conservative members of a conservative state government thus far has been attempts to have pornography declared a state emergency, to have a "porn czar" position put in place, and to outright block pornography on smart phones. And now, yet another lawmaker, this time Rep. Brady Brammer, has unveiled a bill that would require pornography to carry a warning label or message warning about the harm to minors that view porn.

The Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Training Bundle has 8 courses to teach you how to effectively use the tools in the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. You'll learn how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Spark, and After Effects. Courses cover logo design, photo and video editing, and more. It's on sale for $34.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Two and a half years ago, we wrote about a nice fair use victory for Drake with regards to a track that he had sampled. As we noted in that post, it is stunning how bad courts have been in determining whether or not sampled music is fair use -- with a couple of famously preposterous rulings on the book, including one where the judge seemed more focused on giving biblical justifications for his rulings, rather than Constitutional ones. Still, in the age of Blurred Lines-like decisions, and the influx of similar lawsuits over mere inspiration, it seemed unlikely that we'd ever get a clean ruling on whether or not certain types of sampling -- such as those that use tiny bits or that alter the sample significantly -- were fair use. Yet here we are.Thankfully, the 2nd Circuit appeals court has now upheld the lower court's fair use finding, with a quick and to the point ruling -- though they made it a summary order, which means that the panel of judges "believes that no jurisprudential purpose is served by" the order, and thus it shouldn't be cited in future cases. That's actually quite disappointing, given how few cases there have been that actually ruled on the fair use of sampling.That said, as I noted in the original post, however, the details here are at least somewhat specific, which might explain the court's reasoning in making it non-precedential. Those details highlight why this is a unique case. To explain those details, I'm going to first repeat what I wrote about the background of the original case, because it's important, before getting into the new ruling.The details here are... rather specific. Drake's song Pound Cake / Paris Morton Music 2 opens with a slightly altered, but clear "sample" of famed jazz artist Jimmy Smith's Jimmy Smith Rap. You might think that the Jimmy Smith Rap is a rap song, but it's just Jimmy Smith talking (it appears extemporaneously) about the fun he and some others had making the album Off the Top. But the recording got included on the album as a separate track. It's not a song. It's just Jimmy Smith talking. The Drake song uses a large chunk of the Jimmy Smith Rap unchanged... but does make a few small edits, including changing Smith from saying "Jazz is the only real music that's gonna last. All the other bullshit is here today and gone tomorrow" to just saying "Only real music's gonna last. All that other bullshit is here today and gone tomorrow." Apparently the Jimmy Smith estate wasn't too happy with the changed meaning.But here's the oddity: Drake's label licensed that track. So everything should be fine, right? Wrong. You forgot: music licensing is a swampy mess of insanity and patched together weirdness. As we've discussed elsewhere, when using a song, there are multiple different licenses you might need to get. You have to do one thing to license the sound recording, but something else entirely to license the "composition." The theory there is that one license pays the musicians and another pays the songwriters (though, in reality, it's often middlemen who get the money). Here, it seems that Drake's label didn't license the "composition" to pay the "songwriter." And your first reaction might damn well be "what songwriter? there's no damn song!" And you'd be right. Hell, even Jimmy Smith never registered the copyright as a composition. It was only his estate that registered the copyright 31 years after the not-really-a-song was released and only after they heard the Drake song and decided they didn't like it at all.So, then, after registering the copyright on the composition (and even though the sound recording was properly licensed), the Jimmy Smith Estate sued Drake. And it's this that's found to be fair use.Frankly, I still think it's even more convincing to state that there's no composition copyright here because there's no song. It's just him talking extemporaneously, and there's already a copyright on the recording itself. However, for whatever reason, the case focused on a fair use argument, and as the appeals court notes, it clearly supports a ruling that this sample is fair use. On the first factor, they find the use clearly transformative, in part because the minor edit of the clip changes its meaning:

Since he's taken office, FCC boss Ajit Pai has repeatedly proclaimed that one of his top priorities is closing the "digital divide," or making it easier and less expensive for folks to gain access to internet connectivity. Unfortunately, most of his policies have had the exact opposite effect. From rubber stamping competition-eroding mergers to eliminating consumer protections governing broadband, the lion's share of Pai's agenda has focused on what telecom giants want -- not necessarily what's actually good for markets, consumers, or the country.Enter 5G, which is routinely framed by both Pai and the wireless industry as some sort of near-mystical panacea. Do everything wireless carriers demand in terms of 5G subsidies, deregulation, and incentives, we're told, and America will soon be awash in a new layer of inexpensive broadband connectivity and innovation.The problem: 5G isn't magic, and the technology won't fix the rot that plagues the U.S. broadband sector. It won't fix the fact we approve mergers that directly contribute to higher prices and weaker markets. It won't fix the lack of competition in the fiber lines that feed cellular towers, which also contributes to higher rates. It also won't fix the fact that FCC policy and telecom lobbying positions are virtually indistinguishable. And, contrary to carrier claims, you're still going to have patchy availability as carriers focus on the most profitable areas despite countless billions in taxpayer subsidization.5G's technical accomplishments don't mean all that much if the underlying structure is rotten, and US telecom is, if you haven't spent time on the phone talking to telecom customer service lately, very rotten indeed.And in some instances, 5G may actually make the digital divide worse. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance, for example, is correct to note that the low-income families we profess to love can't afford new, far more expensive handsets or the even higher rates companies like Verizon intend to charge users to access these networks. Telecom giants (and the current FCC) do yeoman's work focusing on unhelpful and silly "race" rhetoric, hoping to steer the conversation away from the subject that matters most to low-income families stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide -- price:

The federal government's recent past is disappearing alarmingly quickly. And the only thing that can stop this from happening is a collection of legislators who've collectively shown for years they just don't care. The National Archives has been given the monumental task of housing billions of records. It has no more room to store paper documents and has demanded federal agencies only send it digital records going forward.This has only created more problems. Federal agencies aren't being given extra funds or staff to convert existing paper documents and the National Archives has seen its budget cut by Congress for three straight years. The amount of incoming material has tripled since 1985 but the National Archives has fewer employees than it did more than three decades ago and its budget has not even kept up with inflation.So, what's the end result? Evidence of government wrongdoing is being purged, as Matthew Connelly reports for the New York Times.

Last year, via the Knight Institute at Columbia, I published my long article on Protocols, Not Platforms, explaining that there was a potential technological solution to many of the big concerns raised about big tech today, from privacy to competition to content moderation and more. The paper has been well received and even has helped influence Jack Dorsey and Twitter on rethinking what Twitter should be in the future.Our friends at the Lincoln Network have now set up a panel discussion in San Francisco on February 20th in which we'll be discussing this idea. Registration is free. The panel will consist of myself, Cory Doctorow of EFF/Boing Boing, Ashley Tyson of the Web3 Foundation, and Mai Sutton who has been working on a variety of distributed internet projects, including associate producing DWeb Camp and also been heavily involved in the People's Open Net, a community-owned mesh wireless network in Oakland.Given the panelists and the topic, I'm sure it will be fun, intriguing, and lively discussion. Sign up now.

As the 2020 presidential race kicks into high-gear, I find myself telling friends about an important lesson I learned last time primary season rolled around. During the run-up to the 2016 election, as now, vitriol filled the headlines. Rather than well-informed, reading the internet often left me feeling emotionally exhausted, powerless, and alone. So many stories were urgent but not important, and certainly not actionable.Frustrated, I decided to run an experiment. I read and engaged with dramatically less news, and spent that time reading books instead. I read ancient philosophy, fantastical adventures, historical biographies, scientific treatises, globetrotting thrillers, and mind-bending stories of magical realism. I followed my enthusiasm and read what I loved, challenging myself to think more deeply and broadly in the process.After a few months, my life and outlook had changed completely. Reading was no longer an exercise in rubbernecking and literature armed me to face the challenges of the present with fresh eyes, seek out other points of view, and put the political turmoil into perspective. Taking ownership of my media diet turned the stories I read into sources of strength, fuel to fire my own personal and public life. My wife and I volunteered to host a Ugandan refugee in our home for nine months. I helped design a game that illustrated emerging vulnerabilities in American democracy. I co-created an internet public art project that raised money for ProPublica.We are what we pay attention to. The stories we read don't just inform, entertain, or inspire, they shape our identities, become a part of us. These stories have consequences. The Allies were inspired to defeat the Nazis by stories of resisting oppression, protecting freedom, and ending humanitarian disaster. The Nazis were themselves inspired by stories of racial superiority, national dominance, and the return to a mythical past. Humans are capable of transcendence and unspeakable horror when we convince ourselves of the righteousness of our cause.So I expanded my experiment into a novel that quickly grew into a trilogy. Bandwidth explores what happens when someone hijacks our attention in order to transform us into the person they want us to be. Borderless examines the rise of tech platforms and the decline of nation-states. Breach extrapolates what might come next and how to build new institutions for the internet age. My hope is that the Analog Series inspires readers to reassess their own most deeply held beliefs with candor, kindness, and healthy skepticism.As candidates and special interest groups ruthlessly vie for your attention across the vast datascapes of the internet like gladiators in a digital Colosseum, remember that seizing control of your media diet is the first step toward acting with intention to realize your version of a better future.***Eliot Peper is the author of Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, True Blue, Neon Fever Dream, and the Uncommon Series. His writing has appeared in the Verge, Tor.com, Harvard Business Review, VICE, OneZero, TechCrunch, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has given talks at Google, Comic Con, Future in Review, and SXSW.

Clearview's business model has resulted in some mutual finger pointing. The most infamous of facial recognition tech companies outsources its database development. Rather than seeking input from interested parties, it scrapes sites for pictures of faces and whatever personal info accompanies them. The scraped info forms the contents of its facial recognition database, putting law enforcement only a few app clicks away from accessing over 3 billion images.The companies being scraped have claimed this is a violation of their terms of service, if not actually illegal. It's not clear that it's actually illegal, even if it does violate the restrictions placed on users of these services. Twitter has already sent a cease-and-desist to Clearview, but it will probably take a court to make this stick. Unfortunately, Clearview's actions could lead to some damaging precedent if Twitter forces the issue. Given the number of sites affected by Clearview's scraping efforts, it's probably only a matter of time before this gets litigious.But the finger pointed by Google at Clearview hasn't obtained the reaction Google may have hoped for. As CBS News reports, Clearview has returned fire by comparing its business model to Google's business model.

An unbelievably bad decision has been handed down by a federal court in Texas that blows past everything we know (and have long known) about the First Amendment to allow a very questionable defamation lawsuit to proceed. (h/t Andrew Fleischman)Conspiracy theorist/Fox News commentator Ed Butowsky -- represented by Devin Nunes' lawyer Steven Biss -- claimed he was defamed by an NPR article discussing a lawsuit filed by former Fox commentator Rod Wheeler, which alleged the broadcaster and Butowsky worked together to whip up some alternative facts about the death of Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich.Rich's death has been catnip for conspiracy theorists and Butowsky apparently bit. He allegedly helped propel a conspiracy theory into Fox News' broadcasts, supposedly in an effort to draw attention away from the investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to the Russian government.The NPR article mentions (several times!) that everything its reporting on was drawn from Wheeler's lawsuit. It made no difference to Butowsky and Biss, who proceeded to sue the public broadcaster for defamation. It should have made a difference to the federal judge. But it didn't.Despite years of precedent affirming journalists' right to report on allegations made in lawsuits -- whose underlying documents can (for the most part) be viewed by anyone -- the Texas court decided decades of precedent mean nothing.These are the allegations (tied to defamation, civil conspiracy, and business disparagement claims), as recounted briefly by the court. From the decision [PDF]:

Microsoft Azure is used by 85% of the Fortune 500 companies, making it a highly-demanded skill in today's large business marketplace. The Complete 2020 Microsoft Azure Certification Prep Bundle has 11 courses to get you up to speed on cloud computing, data sets, and analytics. You'll learn about Azure Storage Services, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Resource Manager, and more while also preparing to take various Azure Certification Exams AZ-103, AZ-203, AZ-300, AZ-301, and AZ-900. It's on sale for $42.90.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

As you probably recall, Donald Trump has repeatedly talked about "opening up our libel laws" and making it easier to sue people for defamation "and win lots of money." As we pointed out when he first raised this issue, while Trump cannot directly impact libel laws (which are state laws, not federal, and are bounded by the 1st Amendment, which he cannot change), he can have an impact in many other ways -- from appointing judges to blocking any attempt at a federal anti-SLAPP law that would protect people from bogus defamation lawsuits.So, back in the fall of 2018, we found it mildly amusing to see Trump himself using an anti-SLAPP law to successfully defeat a (highly questionable) defamation lawsuit from Stormy Daniels. Even more surprising was that Trump was represented in this case by lawyer Charles Harder, who has built up quite a reputation for suing media companies on behalf of the rich and powerful. As many people know, he was the lawyer in the case against us at Techdirt, in which he argued against the application of California's anti-SLAPP law to get us out of the lawsuit and to award us legal fees. An old Hollywood Reporter profile of Harder described how he, too, hoped to change the standards for defamation and make it easier to sue: