Techdirt

One of the issues that we've discussed quite a bit on Techdirt over the years is the lengths that some people want to go to to hide court records and important public documents. The main story on this past weekend's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver tackled this issue in relation to Richard Sackler, the former chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, the company that developed and promoted Oxycontin. Much of the episode focused on questionable things said or done by Sackler, but towards the end, Oliver notes that Sackler has done an amazing job hiding from public scrutiny. There are very few pictures of him even online and no real videos they could find.Most of the Sackler family has done its very best to avoid publicly talking about the marketing of Oxycontin, or the astounding mess it has created for the world (though, some members of the family have recently been complaining about guilt by association). However, a few years ago, in a lawsuit over the marketing of Oxycontin, Richard Sackler was forced to give a deposition in the case, which has been held under seal.Somehow, ProPublica was able to get its hands on the transcript of the deposition and published it back in February. Since then the family has been fighting against the release of the actual video recording of Sackler's deposition. There is tremendous public interest in this as Oliver explains in the video above, and ProPublica wrote about upon the release of the document:

When Google Fiber launched in 2010, it was lauded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector. Initially things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the company in the hopes of breaking free from the broadband duopoly logjam. And in markets where Google Fiber was deployed, prices dropped thanks to this added competition.The fun didn't last. In late 2016 Alphabet began getting cold feet about the high costs and slow return of the project, and effectively mothballed the entire thing -- without admitting that's what they were doing. The company blew through several CEOs in just a few months, laid off hundreds of employees, froze any real expansion, and cancelled countless installations for users who had been waiting years. And while Google made a lot of noise about how it would be shifting from fiber to wireless to possibly cut costs, those promises so far appear stuck in neutral as well.The mess created by this abrupt about face was felt most in cities like Louisville, which had tripped over themselves to please Google. After passing a bunch of new pole attachment rules and fending off an AT&T lawsuit over said rules, Google suddenly left the city high and dry, announcing last February they'd be retreating from the city. A big reason for that retreat is that Google subcontractors had screwed up the fiber microtrenching (burying fiber just a few inches below the road) it was using as an alternative to using city (and AT&T) utility poles.There's plenty of animosity in Louisville about Google's sudden retreat, though the company made partial amends this week by paying $3.8 million in a bid to clean up the mess left in the company's wake:

A bit of deja vu here. Once again, the EU Parliament has done a stupid thing for the internet. As we've been discussing over the past few months, the EU has been pushing a really dreadful "EU Terrorist Content Regulation" with the main feature being a requirement that any site that can be accessed from the EU must remove any content deemed "terrorist content" by any vaguely defined "competent authority" within one hour of being notified. The original EU Commission version also included a requirement for filters to block reuploads and a provision that effectively turned websites' terms of service documents into de facto law. In moving the Regulation to the EU Parliament, the civil liberties committee LIBE stripped the filters and the terms of service parts from the proposal, but kept in the one hour takedown requirement.In a vote earlier today, the EU Parliament approved the version put for by the committee, rejecting (bad) amendments to bring back the upload filters and empowering terms of service, but also rejecting -- by just three votes -- an amendment to remove the insane one hour deadline.Since this version is different than the absolutely bonkers one pushed by the European Commission, this now needs to go through a trilogue negotiation to reconcile the different versions, which will eventually lead to another vote. Of course, what that vote will look like may be anyone's guess, given that the EU Parliamentary elections are next month, so it will be a very different looking Parliament by the time this comes back around.Either way, this whole concept is a very poorly thought out knee-jerk moral panic from people scared of the internet and who don't understand how it works. Actually implementing this in law would be disastrous for the EU and for internet security. The only way, for example, that we could comply with the law would be to hand over backend access to our servers to strangers in the EU and empower them to delete whatever they wanted. This is crazy and not something we would ever agree to do. It is unclear how any company -- other than the largest companies -- could possibly even pretend to try to comply with the one hour deadline, and even then (as the situation with the Christchurch video showed) there is simply no way for even the largest and best resourced teams out there to remove this kind of content within one hour. And that's not even touching on the questions around who gets to determine what is "terrorist content," how it will be abused, and also what this will mean for things like historical archives or open source intelligence.This entire idea is poorly thought out, poorly implemented and a complete mess. So, of course, the EU Parliament voted for it. Hopefully, in next month's elections we get a more sensible cohort of MEPs.

Saying that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) is a "gift" to internet companies that should be taken away because some people use the internet badly is like saying the interstate highway system is a "gift" to the big shipping companies, and should be destroyed because some people send illegal things via UPS or Fedex.As Section 230 is increasingly under attack, one of the most common lines we hear about it is that it was somehow a "gift to internet companies." I heard something along those lines at least three times last week, not even counting Nancy Pelosi's misguided characterization of 230, in which she said:

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The federal government isn't done tossing cases rather than let defendants have access to slightly more level playing field. A new investigation by ProPublica has uncovered more dismissed prosecutions due to the government's unwillingness to allow defendants to examine the software used to build cases against them.The cases deal with child porn and BitTorrent distribution. The defendants are hardly the most sympathetic. But, like the cases that exposed the FBI's use of malware to gather identifying information from devices around the world, child porn investigations are on the front line of the government's tech deployments. From the description of the cases covered here, it almost appears the government had enough evidence to see the prosecution through to the end. It just chose not to because continuing the cases would mean turning over info on their tracking software to the accused.

The UK Tech Editor of the Guardian, Alex Hern, is usually a very thoughtful and cogent commentator on all things digital. I usually enjoy reading his thoughts on technology and find them worth thinking about. However, he appears to have something of a blindspot concerning content moderation. A few weeks back we highlighted an odd tweet of his suggesting that if YouTube and Facebook simply employed ONE PERSON to search for "New Zealand terror attacks," they could have magically deleted all of the Christchurch shooting videos:Spoiler alert: both companies employ way more content moderators than that, and as both companies admitted soon after, it was an "all hands on deck" situation in which they sought to block as many of those videos as fast as they could.Last week, Alex was back with another hot take on YouTube content moderation arguing that it's totally possible to moderate all content on YouTube. Alex regularly deletes his old tweets, so here's his thread:

Now that the EU's awful Copyright Directive has been passed, it would be easy to give up, and assume that nothing more can be done. That's far from the case. Under EU law, this directive must now be implemented through national legislation in all of the EU Member States. Although that process is compulsory, there is still plenty of scope for interpreting what exactly the Copyright Directive's text means. As a result, the fight against the worst elements -- the upload filter and ancillary copyright for news -- can now begin at a national level.Moreover, there are other ways in which these aspects of the Copyright Directive can be challenged once they are law. A number of people have pointed out that Article 13 (now renumbered as Article 17) effectively imposes an obligation on sites to carry out "general monitoring". That's something that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the highest court of the region, has already thrown out because it runs counter to Article 15 of the EU's e-Commerce Directive. Once upload filters are implemented in national law, they can be challenged in the local courts. Since a question that affects the whole of the EU is involved -- are upload filters a form of general monitoring? -- the national court would almost certainly make a reference to the CJEU for clarification. The hope has to be that the whole approach would be ruled as inadmissible, as has already happened twice with other cases of general monitoring.That's one obvious avenue to pursue. But as the Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda mentioned in a recent Techdirt podcast, there's another route worth investigating. Article 20.11 of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada reads as follows:

At the very start of the year, we discussed a lawsuit filed by Take-Two Interactive against the Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations agency over content within the hit game Red Dead Redemption 2. Take-Two filed the suit seeking a declaratory judgement that its depiction of Pinkerton agents within the game was fair use, as Pinkerton had fired off a cease and desist notice to the game developer declaring that the game was violating its trademark rights and demanded either a lump sum payment or royalties as a result. Pinkerton, which most gamers will not know is a real-life union-busting, outlaw-getting agency that has existed since the west was still wild, probably thought Take-Two would pay it to go away. After all, the arguments for fair use and the First Amendment are quite clear when a work of fiction portrays a parody-take on an historically accurate and quite infamous agency of the wild west.We said at the time that it was hard to see how a ruling by the court in favor of Pinkerton would do anything other than force artists to license history, which is about as clearly antithetical to First Amendment law as could be imagined. It seems that Pinkerton's lawyers agreed, as Take-Two announced it has dropped its suit as Pinkerton has agreed to withdraw its demands.

A handful of Motel 6 owners and operators suddenly decided the best use of their guest info was as fodder for law enforcement agencies. In Connecticut, a Motel 6 just decided to start faxing its guest list over to the local cop shop every night. After this questionable practice was made public, the PD announced it never asked for this info and was going to route it right into the shredder going forward.Other Motel 6 owners decided ICE needed to know about every suspected illegal immigrant being housed overnight at their franchises. Using a highly-technical process that narrowed forwarded guest lists to those with foreign-sounding surnames, Motel 6 owners sicced ICE on paying customers in an effort to… I don't know… earn good citizenship awards or something.It may have netted ICE a few busts and warmed the cockles of meathead managers who had discovered a way to increase occupancy turnover rates with the federal government's help, but it also netted Motel 6 a handful of lawsuits.Last November, Motel 6 agreed to pay a $7.6 million settlement for sending guest lists to ICE offices in Arizona. NPR reports the chain is now about $20 million lighter, thanks to a similar settlement being reached in Washington.

It's time for another special cross-post from a different podcast. Mike was recently a guest on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's So To Speak podcast, for an interview about Techdirt, free speech, content moderation, and a range of other topics. If you didn't catch it there, you can listen to the whole interview here in this week's episode.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.

A few years ago the Copyright Office commenced several studies on the DMCA. One, on Section 1201, resulted in a report to Congress and some improvements to the triennial rulemaking process. But for the other study, on Section 512, things had been quiet for a while. Until earlier this year, when the Copyright Office announced it was hosting an additional roundtable hearing to solicit additional input. What the Copyright Office wanted to know in particular was how recent developments in US and international law should inform the recommendations they may issue as a result of this study.The Copia Institute had already submitted two rounds of comments, and both Mike and I had separately given testimony at the hearing held in San Francisco. This new hearing was a good chance to remind the Copyright Office of the First Amendment concerns with the DMCA we had already warned them about, many of which are just as worrying — if not more so — today.One significant, overarching problem is the way the DMCA results in such severe consequences for speech, speakers, and platforms themselves based on the mere accusation of infringement. It is unique in American law for there to be such an effect like this: in most instances, sanction cannot follow unless and until a court has found there to be actual liability. In fact, when it comes to affecting speech interests it is expressly forbidden by the First Amendment to punish speakers or speech before a court has found specific instances of speech unlawful. To do otherwise – to punish speech, or, worse, to punish a speaker before they've even had a chance to make wrongful speech – is prior restraint, and not constitutional. Yet in the DMCA context, this sort of punishment happens all the time. And since the last roundtable hearing it has only gotten worse.Several things are making it worse. One is that Section 512(f) remains toothless, thanks to the Supreme Court refusing to review the Ninth Circuit's decision in Lenz v. Universal. Section 512(f) is the provision in the DMCA that is supposed to deter, and punish, those who send invalid takedown notices. Invalid takedown notices force the removal of speech that may be perfectly lawful because they put the platform's safe harbor at risk if it doesn't remove it. Unfortunately, in the wake of Lenz it has been functionally impossible for those whose speech has been removed to hold the sender of these invalid notices liable for the harm they caused. And it's not like there are other options for affected speakers to use to try to remediate their injury.Also, it is not only the sort of notices at issue in Lenz that have been impacting speakers and speech. An important thing to remember is that the DMCA actually provides for four different kinds of safe harbors. We most often discuss the Section 512(c) safe harbor, which is for platforms that store content "at the direction of users." Section 512(c) describes the "takedown notices" that copyright holders need to send these platforms to get that user-stored content removed. But the service providers that instead use the safe harbor at Section 512(a) aren't required to accept these sorts of takedown notices. Which makes sense, because there's nothing for them to take down. These sorts of platforms are generally all-purpose ISPs, including broadband ISPs, of which there are all-too-few choices for customers to use if they are cut off from one. All the user expression they handle is inherently transient, because the sole job of these providers is to deliver it to where it's going, not store it.And yet, these sorts of providers are also required, like any other platform that uses any of the other safe harbors, to comply with Section 512(i) and have a policy to terminate repeat infringers. The question, of course, is how are they supposed to know if one of their users is actually a repeat infringer. And that's where recent case law has gotten especially troubling from a First Amendment standpoint.The issue is that, while there are plenty of problems with Section 512(c) takedown notices, the sorts of notices that are being sent to 512(a) service providers are even uglier. As was the case with the notices sent by Rightscorp in the BMG v. Cox case – the first in an expanding line of cases pushing 512(a) service providers like Cox to lose their safe harbor for not holding these mere allegations of infringement against their users in order to terminate them from their services – these notices are often duplicative, voluminous beyond any reasonable measure, extortionate in their demands, and reflective of completely invalid copyright claims. And yet the courts have not yet seemed to care.As we noted at the roundtable, the court in Cox ultimately threw out all the infringement claims for an entire plaintiff because it wasn't clear that it even owned the relevant copyrights, despite Rightscorp having sent numerous notices to Cox claiming that it did. But instead of finding that these deficiencies in the notices justified the ISP's suspicions about the merit of the other notices it had received, the court still held it against the ISP that they hadn't automatically credited all the other claims in all the other notices it had received, despite ample reason for being dubious about them. Worse, the court faulted the ISP for not just refusing to automatically believing the alleged infringement notices it had received but for not acting upon them to terminate people who had accumulated too many. As we and other participants flagged at the hearing, there are significant problems with this reasoning. One relates to the very idea that termination of a user is ever an appropriate or Constitutional reaction, even the user is actually infringing copyright. Since the last hearing the Supreme Court has announced in Packingham v. North Carolina that being cut off from the Internet in this day and age is unconstitutional. (As someone at the else roundtable this time pointed out, if it isn't OK to kick someone off the Internet for being a sex offender, it is less likely that it's OK to kick someone off the Internet for merely infringing copyright.)Secondly, the Cox court ran square into the crux of the First Amendment problem with the DMCA: that it forces ISPs to act against their users based on unadjudicated allegations of infringement. It's bad enough that legitimate speech gets taken down by unadjudicated claims in the 512(c) notice-and-takedown context, but to condition a platform's safe harbor on preventing a person from ever getting to speak online ever again, simply because they've received too many allegations of infringement, presents an even bigger problem. Especially since, as we pointed out, it opens the door to would-be censors to game the system. Simply make as many unfounded accusations of infringement as you want against the speaker you don't like (which no one will ever be able to effectively sanction you for doing) and the platform will have no choice but to kick them off their service in order to protect their safe harbor.There is also yet another major problem underlying this, and every other, aspect of the DMCA's operation: that there is no way to tell on its face whether user speech is actually infringing. Is there actually a copyright? If so, who owns it? Is there a license that permitted the use? What about fair use? Any provider that gets an infringement notice will have no way to accurately assess the answers to these questions, which is why it's so problematic that they are forced to presume every allegation is meritorious, since so many won't be.But the roundtable also hit on another line of cases that also suffers from the same problem of infringement never being facially apparent. In Mavrix v. Livejournal the Ninth Circuit considered that the moderation Livejournal was doing – as allowed (and encouraged) by CDA Section 230 – to have potentially waived its safe harbor. The problem with the court's decision was that it construed the way Livejournal screened user-supplied content as converting it from content stored "at the direction of users" to its own content, and several roundtable participants pointed out that this reading was not a good one. In fact, it's terrible, if you want to ensure that platforms remain motivated – and able – to perform the screening functions Congress wanted them to perform when it passed Section 230. Because there's a more general concern: if various provisions of the DMCA suddenly turn out to be gotchas that cause platforms to lose their safe harbor, if in the process of screening content they happen to see some that might be infringing, they won't be able to keep doing it. Perhaps this is not a full-on First Amendment problem, but it still affects online expression and the ability of platforms to enable it.

Last year, a very strange thing happened in the copyright space: a pretty major update to copyright law was passed and it wasn't that controversial. Leading up to that passage there had been plenty of concerns, but a compromise was worked out last fall that was... actually pretty good for everyone involved. It wasn't how any sane society would craft copyright law from scratch, but the key aspects of the Music Modernization Act were to attempt to fix a lot of other really broken stuff. At the time we focused on the fact that it would help expedite moving some very old music into the public domain, which was great. But the much bigger deal to the music world was a reform of the mechanical licensing process for songwriters.As we discussed in walking through one of a few lawsuits that had been filed against music streaming platforms over mechanical licensing, it was such a complex area of copyright law that basically no one fully understood it. Every single copyright lawyer I spoke to in trying to understand it would give me a totally different answer. So part of the Music Modernization Act was to clear up the questions around mechanical licensing and internet services, making it easier for songwriters to actually get royalties they're owed, without the convoluted process that used to be in place.As with all things, the devil is very much in the details, and suddenly things are looking a bit problematic. The law directs the Register of Copyrights to designate an entity to become the new "mechanical license collective" (MLC), effectively creating a brand new collection society for these mechanical royalties. The Copyright Office has an open comment period on this, which is about to end, and musician Zoe Keating has noticed that the entire process appears to be rigged to (of course) help divert money to the big music publishers and away from independent artists. She's written a very detailed, but well worth reading, description of the problematic aspect of what's happening, and is asking the Copyright Office to extend the comment period as more songwriters -- especially independent ones, learn what's going on and can weigh in.The key part in all of this is that the organization that represents the biggest music publishers, the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) is angling to run this new MLC. Indeed, it appears to be acting as if it already is in charge of it:

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In the ongoing moral panic about social media algorithms and what they recommend, there are various suggestions on how the companies might "improve" what they do -- and many of them suggest relying on newer, better, algorithms. It's the "nerd harder" approach. Mark Zuckerberg himself, last year, repeatedly suggested that investing heavily in AI would be a big part of dealing with content moderation questions. This has always been a bit silly, but as if to demonstrate how silly this notion is, yesterday, during the tragic fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, YouTube's fancy new "fact checking AI" seemed to think multiple videos of the fire were actually referring to the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the US and linked to a page on Encycolpedia Britannica with more info about the attacks:These links didn't last for very long, but at the very least, it should be a reminder that expecting AI to magically fact check breaking news in real-time is (at the very least) a long, long way off, and at worst, a nearly impossible request.This puts YouTube and others in an impossible position of their own. Just a few weeks ago, people were freaking out that YouTube and Facebook (briefly) allowed videos from the attack in Christchurch to be on their platforms -- and have been demanding that the platforms "do something" in response. Having a tool that provides at least some sort of context, or even counterpoint to nonsense (when people start posting nonsense) certainly seems like a good idea. But it requires a level of sophistication and accuracy that is currently severely lacking.One response to all of this would be to admit that human beings are not perfect, that social media sometimes reflects all aspects of humanity, and that sometimes bad stuff is going to make it online, but that doesn't seem acceptable to a large number of people. Given that, they're going to have to accept that sometimes AI is going to get this kind of stuff laughably wrong.

Last week the Trump administration and the Ajit Pai FCC held a major press conference announcing a "bold" new three-pronged program they claimed would address the nation's longstanding rural broadband issues. During the conference, the President and Pai were flanked by a chorus line of cellular industry employees and ranchers adorned in both tower climbing gear and cowboy hats, apparently in a bid to add a little authenticity to the Village People-esque proceedings:In his speech, Trump offered his insights on how the "race to 5G" (fifth generation wireless) was an administration priority and a cornerstone of the purportedly new plan:

For the past few weeks and months I've been warning people that if you were worried about the EU Copyright Directive, you should be absolutely terrified about the EU Terrorist Content Regulation, which has continued to march forward with very little attention compared to the Copyright Directive. We've detailed the many, many problems with the Terrorist Content Regulation, starting with the requirement that any site (even a one-person blog somewhere outside of the EU) be required to take down content within an hour of notification by an ill-defined "competent authority," but also covering other aspects, such as requiring mandatory content filters.When the EU Parliament's civil rights committee, LIBE, moved the proposal forward last week, it stripped out some of the worst aspects of the law, but left in the 1 hour content removal requirement. And the largest group in the EU Parliament, the EPP, has already put forth amendments to bring back all the other bad stuff in the proposal. As MEP Julia Reda notes, the EU Parliament will now vote on the Terrorist Content Regulation on Wednesday, and that will include votes on bringing back the awful stuff as well as amendments to hopefully remove the ridiculous and impossible one hour takedown requirement. Reda is explaining why EU citizens should call on their MEPs to support an amendment to remove the one hour removal requirement:

As was widely expected, the EU Council (made up of representatives of the EU member states) has officially rubber stamped the EU Copyright Directive that the EU Parliament passed a few weeks back. There had been some talk of various countries, such as Sweden, Germany and the UK possibly changing their vote. Sweden, in the end, actually did do so, but to stop the Directive, it was necessary for the UK or Germany to do so as well, and they did not.There is some irony in the UK (still a part of the EU for the moment) voting to approve this. After the EU Parliament passed the Directive, the UK's Boris Johnson (who is somewhat famously buffoonish) tweeted about how this was yet another reason for the UK to leave the EU.If you can't read that, it says:

Earlier this year, we wrote about the rather sudden emergence of Epic Games' entry into the game distribution business. In a move to directly compete with Valve's Steam, the Epic's store has been attempting to gobble up AAA titles into a program of limited exclusivity, typically six months. The lure for all this is a split for Epic and the game publisher that is more generous for the latter. Valve, meanwhile, responded to one of the larger stories about a game going Epic exclusive, Metro Exodus, by complaining that it was bad for gamers generally and Steam users specifically. That quite predictably served as a rallying cry for Steam users to go to the store pages for other Deep Silver Metro games and bomb those pages with negative reviews that had nothing to do with those games and everything to do with the exclusivity deal.All of which is at odds with Steam's policies and the platform's stated goals of preventing review-bombing of this type. But as the exclusivity wars appear to be upon us, with more games jumping on with Epic, it's becoming clearer that this is probably a purposeful strategy on Valve's end. The latest example of this is the announcement that the next game in the Borderlands series has signed on with Epic to be exclusive for six months. The backlash on Steam was almost immediate.

So we've noted for a while that T-Mobile's brand reputation as a fiesty consumer-friendly disruptor is only really skin deep. While the T-Mobile of a few years ago certainly added some much needed competition to the wireless sector at first, more recently the company has started to look a lot like the bigger competitors (AT&T, Verizon) it pretends to be superior to. From mocking groups like the EFF to opposing net neutrality, the company isn't all that different from the companies its brash CEO likes to make fun of. Especially as it snuggles up to Trump to gain approval for a merger with that Sprint nobody asked for.Meanwhile, the company's promised efforts at "disruption" aren't quite what they used to be either. The company's long-hyped new TV service, for example, was unveiled this week and doesn't appear to be much different from the traditional offerings the company had promised to supplant:

Earlier today, I posted my article about how Starz was issuing obviously bogus takedowns concerning tweets about a news story on TorrentFreak concering how a social media agency, The Social Element, had issued bogus DMCA takedown notices to Twitter, about another story on TorrentFreak about some TV shows leaking online.Last night I had reached out to Twitter, The Social Element, and Starz, but had not received a real response by the time the story went out (Starz had emailed back suggesting that I did not give them enough time to respond, but had somehow managed to issue a weird apology statement to others). Eventually, more than half an hour after my story went out, Starz emailed me the following statement:

In an effort to boost bust numbers and further cement its reputation as the ugly embodiment of punitive xenophobia, ICE set up a fake university in Michigan to ensnare immigrants attempting to do something the law allows them to do: stay in the country while they earn a degree.This wasn't just some online university with sketchy bonafides. This was a (bogus) university sporting a real campus and accreditation secured from a national accreditation service -- everything needed to start converting tuition fees into arrests and detentions. ICE took in $60,000 in application fees alone before it started rounding up people who, for the most part, were just trying to do something legal. Instead of being able to live and work in the US while they completed a degree, more than 160 duped students were taken into custody by ICE. So far, only eight are actually facing charges.In this day and age, it takes more than national accreditation to convince people you're real. You also need a social media presence. As The Guardian reports, ICE also steamrolled Facebook's terms of use while engaging in this bullshit sting operation.

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Something weird is going on with Starz over the past few days. Either it really, really doesn't want you to know that a bunch of unreleased episodes of well known TV shows were recently leaked online. Or it really, really, really wants you to know all about it. Which one of those two things is true may depend on just how familiar whoever is manning the Starz copyright-takedown desk is with the concept of the Streisand Effect.You see, a week ago, TorrentFreak published the article linked above. This is a pretty typical TorrentFreak kind of article, noting that some high profile shows or movies have leaked, perhaps providing screenshots, but not providing any links or really telling anyone how to get the shows. It is just reporting that the leaks exist. Two of the shows leaked were from Starz. As TorrentFreak wrote:

One of the stupidest fights over internet points has reached its latest nadir. It's nadirs all the way down, tbh. If you're interested, there's an entire Wikipedia page with a blow-by-blow of YouTuber PewDiePie's fight against Indian content conglomerate, T-Series. It starts with subscriber counts and ends with a court order. In between, there's racism, hacked printers, billboard purchases, invective of all varieties, and this salvo from the controversial PewDiePie: a "diss track" called "Bitch Lasagna."If you're inclined to click through and assail yourself with "Bitch Lasagna," you'll be greeted with some of the worst white boy rapping since white boys started rapping. Robert Van Winkle is rolling over in his grave. [Note: My apologies to all of us: I've been informed Mr. Van Winkle is, unfortunately, still alive.] Contained in this video are some slurs against the country of India and its inhabitants -- not all that unexpected for a diss track.What's a little more unexpected is how far T-Series will go to up its subscriber count and fan the flames of this meaningless -- but lucrative -- battle over numbers in a little red box. There's now a court involved.

In 2015, the man behind darknet drug marketplace Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, received two consecutive life sentences from a New York judge. Her rationale was that Ulbricht was no different than a "dangerous Bronx drug dealer." No leniency was given. The government, which participated in its own share of misconduct during the investigation, argued Ulbricht should be personally financially-responsible for every drug transaction on the Silk Road: a total of $184 million.The government got its win -- all of it. But it was only temporary. Silk Road 2.0 swiftly took the original's place, run by another young man who knew he was going to be pursued by law enforcement across the world as soon as he fired it up. Long before it was shut down, Silk Road 2.0 was double the size of the original Silk Road, proving once again that sellers and buyers of illicit substances will find each other, no matter how many roadblocks governments erect.The operator of this marketplace was arrested in San Francisco -- just like Albricht was. But that's where their stories drastically diverge. For one, the person arrested in San Francisco was not the founder of Silk Road 2.0. That title belonged to Dread Pirate Roberts 2 (DPR2). That person, Thomas White, was arrested by the UK's National Crime Agency.Unlike Ulbricht's prosecution -- which played out in public thanks to our justice system's presumption of openness -- White's prosecution occurred in secret, shielded from the public eye by UK law. White was arrested in 2014, but his sentence has only now been handed down. Ulbricht got two life sentences and $184 million in fees from a US court for running the Silk Road. The creator of Silk Road 2.0 -- doing double the business of Silk Road 1.0 at its peak -- is looking to be out of prison years before his inspiration sees freedom.

This week, Mason Wheeler scored a first place win on both the insightful and funny sides. For insightful, it was a response to our mention of Jack Valenti's famous "Boston stranger" comment in the launch of our new Sky Is Rising report:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, former NSA and CIA boss Michael Hayden was getting pathetically aggressive, calling Dianne Feinstein too emotional to judge the CIA torture report (which we were only learning about via piecemeal leaks), and calling congressional staffers "sissies" while accusing Ron Wyden of not acting like a man. At the same time, Mike Rogers was still pushing his "Ed Snowden is a russian spy" angle, while Snowden himself was saying the NSA lied in its claim that he didn't raise concerns through proper channels, and telling the Council of Europe about how the agency spied on Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.Meanwhile, Hollywood was piling on to the already-dead Megaupload with a far-reaching lawsuit that packed in multiple attacks on the internet in general, and was quickly followed by the RIAA filing a virtually identical suit of its own.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, Amanda Palmer was sharing insights into how her fans support her work while Trent Reznor was taking his business model experiments into the mobile space, and a new service was announced that would let musicians pre-fund their releases (and it's not around anymore — but two weeks later, Kickstarter would launch).The Associated Press announced its plans to sue news aggregators, Fox fired a movie columnist for reviewing a leaked copy of Wolverine, old-industry guard like U2's manager and Andrew Lloyd Weber were out trashing the internet, and Hollywood's favorite lawmakers were preparing for the next big copyright expansion push.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, we saw the first court ruling to state that online content aggregation was legal, setting the stage for later tantrums like the AP's, and the outrage of some publishers today. Gmail was the new kid on the internet block and people weren't sure how they felt about it (or whether it violated EU data privacy laws), just as mathematicians weren't quite sure how they felt about proofs that rely on computer calculations — while some clueless analysts were very sure about how much they hated the "fad" of camera phones. Google and Yahoo both stopped accepting ads for online casinos, seemingly out of the blue until we learned of some nasty letters recently sent out by the DOJ.This was also the week that we saw the beginnings of a terrible idea that simply refuses to die, and rises like a zombie every now and then to this day: the WIPO broadcast treaty.

You may have heard the recent news that President Trump has decided to label the the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a "foreign terrorist organization." The IRGC is Iran's powerful military/security/law enforcement apparatus -- that also owns a ton of businesses. As the White House itself admits, this is the first time a foreign government agency has been referred to as a foreign terrorist organization. This is big news in a huge variety of ways -- in large part because it could end up criminalizing lots of people and businesses who unwittingly do business with the IRGC including (checks notes) a firm called The Trump Organization.But, leaving that aside, it raises some other issues as well. We've been talking about the impact of the terrible EU Terrorist Content Regulation that the EU Parliament will soon be voting on. But, as we've discussed in the past, there are lots of questions about who decides just what is "terrorist" content. Daphne Keller tweeted about the IRGC decision, wondering what happens when one country's laws demand the removal of content from another country's government and suggests (accurately) this is going to lead to a huge mess.

Even if you haven't read through our previous stories about giant beer brewer AB/InBev being very much into protecting its intellectual property to the extreme, you probably would have guessed that to be the case as a matter of instinct. With a large legal war chest and an equally large legal team, the company has had no problem with gobbling up questionable trademarks and then wielding them as a weapon against even the smallest of non-competitors. With such a strict view on its own IP rights and such an expansive view on trademark law, you would think that InBev would be super into making sure it's own actions fell well within the bounds of trademark law.You'd be wrong. Patagonia, the rather well known clothier, has sued InBev over how it's used a trademark it received in 2012 for "Patagonia". While you're sure to be wondering how there could be customer confusion, as the apparel and beer markets are quite different, the details in this case definitely matter. We can start with what InBev did in the early days of holding the trademark, which mounts to essentially: not a thing.

In April 2018, House Republicans held a hearing on the “Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms” that focused on misguided claims that Internet platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook actively discriminate against conservative political viewpoints. Now, a year later, Senator Ted Cruz is taking the Senate down the same path: he lead a hearing earlier this week on “Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse.”While we certainly agree that online platforms have created content moderation systems that remove speech, we don’t see evidence of systemic political bias against conservatives. In fact, the voices that are silenced more often belong to already marginalized or less-powerful people.Given the lack of evidence of intentional partisan bias, it seems likely that this hearing is intended to serve a different purpose: to build a case for making existing platform liability exemptions dependent on "politically neutral" content moderation practices. Indeed, Senator Cruz seems to think that’s already the law. Questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year, Cruz asserted that in order to enjoy important legal protections for free speech, online platforms must adhere to a standard of political neutrality in their moderation decisions. Fortunately for Internet users of all political persuasions, he’s wrong.Section 230—the law that protects online forums from many types of liability for their users’ speech—does not go away when a platform decides to remove a piece of content, whether or not that choice is “politically neutral.” In fact, Congress specifically intended to protect platforms’ right to moderate content without fear of taking on undue liability for their users’ posts. Under the First Amendment, platforms have the right to moderate their online platforms however they like, and under Section 230, they’re additionally shielded from some types of liability for their users’ activity. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.In recent months, Sen. Cruz and a few of his colleagues have suggested that the rules should change, and that platforms should lose Section 230 protections if those platforms aren’t politically neutral. While such proposals might seem well-intentioned, it’s easy to see how they would backfire. Faced with the impossible task of proving perfect neutrality, many platforms—especially those without the resources of Facebook or Google to defend themselves against litigation—would simply choose to curb potentially controversial discussion altogether and even refuse to host online communities devoted to minority views. We have already seen the impact FOSTA has had in eliminating online platforms where vulnerable people could connect with each other.To be clear, Internet platforms do have a problem with over-censoring certain voices online. These choices can have a big impact in already marginalized communities in the U.S., as well as in countries that don’t enjoy First Amendment protections, such as places like Myanmar and China, where the ability to speak out against the government is often quashed. EFF and others have called for Internet companies to provide the public with real transparency about whose posts they’re taking down and why. For example, platforms should provide users with real information about what they are taking down and a meaningful opportunity to appeal those decisions. Users need to know why some language is allowed and the same language in a different post isn’t. These and other suggestions are contained in the Santa Clara Principles, a proposal endorsed by more than 75 public interest groups around the world. Adopting these Principles would make a real difference in protecting people’s right to speak online, and we hope at least some of the witnesses tomorrow will point that out.Reposted from the EFF Deeplinks blog

We have already talked about how the two separate defamation lawsuits Devin Nunes has filed against critics and journalists are bullshit SLAPP suits designed to intimidate and attack protected speech. But now Nunes himself has gone even further, admitting out loud that his intent with at least the second lawsuit, against the Fresno Bee, is to force the newspaper to give up its sources:

These are dark days for freedom on the Internet. As Cory Doctorow wrote in a recent post on Boing Boing: "We are witnessing the realtime, high-speed Chinafication of the western internet." Country after country is adopting laws that undermine freedom of speech, usually in the name of "enforcing" copyright, which is apparently more important. Add South Korea to that list of shame. The government there is proposing to give its existing Copyright Protection Agency the power to cut off access to Web sites that it says have infringing material. A new campaign, "Stop Internet Censoring", has been launched to fight the plans:

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Well, it appears that the attacks on Section 230 of the CDA are now officially bi-partisan. Following the path of Republicans Rep. Louis Gohmert and Senator Ted Cruz, now we have Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi deciding it's time to attack Section 230 of the CDA, by completely misrepresenting what it does, why it does that, and what it means to the internet. In a podcast with Kara Swisher, Pelosi said the following:

We've been covering for a while how Paul Ryan's once-heralded Foxconn factory deal in Wisconsin quickly devolved into farce. The state originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a $3 billion state subsidy if the company invested $10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where nobody at this point is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.Last October, reports emerged clearly illustrating the ever-shrinking nature of the deal. They also highlighted how Foxconn was effectively just using nonsense to justify its failure to follow through, showing that while the company hadn't built much of anything meaningful in the state, it was still routinely promising to deploy a "AI 8K+5G ecosystem" in the state to somehow make everything better. Shockingly, that mish-mash of buzz words is effectively meaningless.Fast forward to this week, and reporters who've been visiting the state to determine the progress of the project continue to find its even lamer than everybody had initially worried. One local politician effectively compares the scandal directly to the Fyre Festival, and the piece is littered with disappointment by locals who say the company is being aggressively secretive and often misleading. Even many of the "innovation hubs", which Foxconn promised would somehow be better than the ever-shrinking factory it originally proposed, are little more than empty buildings at this juncture:

Yesterday, we wrote a bit about the Julian Assange indictment, noting that it was focused on CFAA and conspiracy arguments, rather than (what many people expected) Espionage Act claims. The CFAA charge of trying to help hack a hashed CIA password that Assange instructed Chelsea Manning to supply does raise some real legal questions. However, as we noted, there were still some significant press freedom concerns linked to the case (and we fully expect those concerns to grow as the inevitable superseding indictment is released).Among the many concerns are that from what's in the initial indictment, it appears that the DOJ is, in fact, presenting perfectly normal, reasonable and legal, steps that many journalists take to cultivate and protect sources, and using that as evidence of the "conspiracy" here. From the indictment:

Update: As was pointed out by some in the comments and at other media outlets, we want to clarify that the video in quesiton was not created by the Trump campaign, but was instead created by a Reddit user and then passed around the internet by Trump himself and his campaign. None of that really changes the overall point on the hypocrisy of the President, given his widespread use of intellectual property law, nor does it change the laughable response from his campaign manager.Every political campaign season, which now apparently perpetually overlap and place us all in a never ending and hellish new reality, we always end up hearing about supposed copyright infringement by political campaigns. These claims typically involve music that accompanies candidates at public events, and the claims typically are misguided, as campaigns usually get a blanket license for this music. Still, more recently, we've also seen the occasional use of music by a campaign that actually does appear to be infringement, as both Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee have found themselves having to defend their use of music on the trail. As you keep that history in your head, place it directly next to the rather infamous view Donald Trump has taken on intellectual property in general, and even on how his campaign has used it jealously in particular.And then read about how the Trump 2020 campaign decided to release a campaign video that just flat out used music from The Dark Knight for some reason.

So we've noted how AT&T's latest round of merger mania isn't providing quite the returns the company expected. After spending $67 billion to buy DirecTV and another $86 billion to acquire Time Warner, AT&T had hoped to become a juggernaut in the internet video and online advertising space. But those efforts haven't gone quite according to plan. The company has been losing both traditional TV (DirecTV, IPTV) and streaming video (DirecTV Now) customers at an alarming rate, thanks largely due to AT&T price hikes imposed to try and recoup the massive debt load AT&T acquired during its fit of merger mania.A new lawsuit (pdf) is now complicating AT&T's ambitions further. The lawsuit, filed last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses AT&T executives like CEO Randall Stephenson of violating the US Securities Act by "knowingly or recklessly" making false statements to investors by failing to disclose that the company's DirecTV Now streaming platform wasn't doing all that well.More specifically, the lawsuit accuses AT&T of issuing press releases, filings, and other public statements that actively downplayed or omitted the fact that the company's streaming customers were headed for the exits (267,000 in Q4 alone), in large part thanks to several rounds of rate hikes on the company's DirecTV Now streaming platform.The firm backing the lawsuit focuses specifically on the June 2018 registration statement issued in connection with the stock issuance during the Time Warner Merger, which proclaimed that the losses AT&T was seeing on the traditional TV front (DirecTV) weren't that big of a deal because they'd be offset by growth at the company's new streaming service. Omitted was the fact that price hikes were actually driving subscribers away, resulting in the company's stock taking a notable dive when the collective video losses were formally announced in October of 2018:

It's always struck me as a little odd when cities and townships go out and trademark their logos and official seals. On the one hand, I get it. A city wants to control its branding so others can't abuse it, even if those methods for abuse could probably be combated by laws against fraud and so on. On the other hand, far too many city governments tend to wield these trademarks to stamp out criticism, parody, and political challengers.That said, the rush to trademark city logos and seals also isn't universal. Florida's Marathon City, for instance, has a logo that has not been registered as a trademark. Marathon City Councilman Mark Senmartin has been making all kinds of noise about how the city should absolutely codify its logo as a trademarked city seal. But when the larger city government examined the issue, it found no reason to do so.

The FBI wanted in on the cyberwar. The problem was recruits. Years of treating Americans and their rights like garbage have turned the young ones against the feds. The FBI struggled to find enough willing and able youthful whitehats to send to the frontlines of the The Great War (Internet Edition).The FBI had the budget, the permission, the power… but not the personnel. It also probably wasn't the best agency for the job. The FBI knows investigations, but its part in the CyberWar included sharing info with private sector hacking targets. Sharing isn't in the FBI's nature. It's appears to enjoy the sneakier parts of its cyber work, but when it comes to protecting companies and their customers, the FBI apparently isn't up to the task.A recently-released Inspector General's report [PDF] shows the FBI is an unorganized mess when it comes to notifying victims of cyberattacks and data breaches. The FBI's Cyber Guardian system received a purpose (notifying victims of cyber intrusions) and a nifty logo (a lion wielding a sword), but not much internal guidance or outside assistance.The FBI is breaking the law by not doing the things it's supposed to be doing. It's violating an Executive Order, as well as the DOJ's own policies on notification. Federal mandate says victims are to be notified. But failure every step of the way is apparently the process.

We've talked for a while about the sheer silliness of (mainly) Republican politicians whining about supposed "anti-conservative bias" on social media platforms. As we've pointed out, the actual evidence hasn't shown any evidence of bias. The random anecdotal examples of badly moderated content have mostly just shown how difficult it is to do content moderation at scale. The "bad" moderation decisions impact lots of folks across the political spectrum -- it's just that some grandstanding Republicans like to engage in confirmation bias (the only actual bias that seems to be occurring here) to suggest the moderation mistakes are politically motivated. We've pointed out multiple times now that crying wolf on this issue is not a good look for conservatives -- on multiple levels.Beyond the fact that the evidence seems to disprove the claims of bias (oh, and yet another study has shown no evidence of bias), for years these very same Republicans kept attacking the idea of the "fairness doctrine," which was an FCC rule in place for a few decades, demanding "equal representation" of political views on the public airwaves. It hasn't been in place for a while, but for a few years, this same group of Republicans grandstanded about false claims that Democrats were trying to bring it back. And yet, what they seem to be demanding now is the return of the fairness doctrine, but in an even more ridiculous way. Rather than on the public airwaves -- where at the very least there was some legitimate claim to the government being able to set some conditions -- these Senators now seem to want to force private companies to run businesses the way they want them to. What a bunch of hypocrites.And the largest of the hypocrites is Senator Ted Cruz, who has continued to repeat this myth, holding multiple hearings on the topic, including a new one yesterday, with representatives from Facebook and Twitter in attendance. Someone from Google was supposed to be there but (get this), Ted Cruz rejected the Google witness, likely after discovering that Google was sending a former Ted Cruz staffer, who would have done a nice job debunking his former boss's nonsense. Kinda ironic, in a hearing on platforms supposedly blocking conservatives from speaking, the Senate itself decided to block a conservative from speaking.Most of the hearing went pretty much as planned, with the usual nonsense. Cruz, once again, misrepresented the nature of Section 230 of the CDA and also made noises about changing it. He also threatened other attacks on social media companies, including antitrust. The big "gotcha" moment that some in the press have picked up on was particularly dumb. Cruz rolled out an anti-abortion quote from Mother Theresa that had been used in an ad on Twitter that was apparently blocked, and demanded that Twitter and Facebook execs answer "is this hate speech?".That, of course, misses the point massively. As Twitter's representative on the panel, Carlos Monje Jr. noted, the tweet was caught in an automated system review, but that the advertiser behind it remains as an advertiser in good standing on the platform -- and he also noted that advertisements on both sides of the abortion debate had been blocked at times on Twitter, which makes total sense, given the strong emotions and controversy felt around that issue. But the bigger point is trotting out a single example is nonsense. It's grandstanding. As we've discussed time and time again, content moderation is an arena of massive gray space, rather than black and white. There are tons of judgment calls, and much of it depends on what it is the platform is actually trying to accomplish. Some platforms don't want controversial content. Some platforms don't want "hate" speech. But what falls into those categories is an open question and in a free market system (the kind Republicans used to claim they supported), we let the companies decide for themselves.Thankfully, a bunch of conservative/Republican groups and commentators spoke out against Cruz's nonsense as well. The group Americans for Prosperity put out a statement calling out Cruz's nonsense:

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Yesterday the House voted 232-190 to approve the Save The Internet Act, three-page legislation that would fully restore not just the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules, but its authority to police the telecom sector. As we've long noted, the Ajit Pai FCC's repeal involved effectively neutering the FCC at the telecom sector's behest, then shoveling any remaining oversight authority to the FTC, which lacks both the authority and attention span to effectively police telecom giants. The idea that telecom oversight would be lost in the cracks was, of course, the entire point of the telecom lobbying gambit.The bill now heads to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell has already stated it will be "dead on arrival." The bill also needs to somehow avoid a Trump veto, which the White House all but guaranteed with a statement this week saying Trump would be advised to veto the measure. Why? The administration proclaimed it was because killing net neutrality had resulted in incredible benefits to American consumers:

Julian Assange has been arrested in the UK on behalf of the US, as Ecuador has finally tired of their overstaying asylumed house guest. We're about to see quite a major legal battle, first in the UK and then almost certainly in the US, about Assange. The current charges seem narrowly focused on a CFAA-based "conspiracy" between Assange and Manning to try to hack a CIA computer, but if they expand to other Wikileaks activities, there should be concerns over press freedom issues.I am no fan of Julian Assange or Wikileaks. However, for years I've made it clear that prosecuting him for publishing leaked documents would be a huge mistake by the US. The DOJ spent years trying to come up with an excuse to charge Assange, but kept realizing they had no case, because while he may have had malicious intent, none of his public actions in releasing documents were any different -- legally speaking -- than what any investigative journalism outlet did in releasing obtained documents. The Supreme Court has made it clear that publishing classified documents is protected by the First Amendment. If he went beyond just releasing documents, as the indictment alleges, it becomes a lot trickier -- but there's a fine line here.It's been clear in the last year or so, that despite years of not finding anything, the DOJ was finally moving ahead with plans to charge him. As we noted last year, everyone who believes in a free press should be concerned about what this might mean for press freedoms in the US as the case proceeds. And that's true, even if the specific charges right now are limited to actions that are unrelated to the publishing of the documents.A few minutes ago, the DOJ released a fairly barebones 7-page indictment, alleging he was in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning to hack into government computers to obtain documents. From the indictment, the charges are separate from releasing the documents that everyone knows Manning provided to Assange, and specifically revolve around Manning and Assange apparently working together to try to hack the CIA after Manning had finished handing over all of the documents we already know about. The indictment claims (and I kid you not) that Manning "used special software, namely a Linux operating system... to obtain the portion of the password provided to Assange." What was obtained apparently was a hashed password to a CIA computer system, that Assange was allegedly going to try to crack, in order to enable Manning to get more info out of the CIA.If all of this is true, then it certainly could go beyond issues related to press freedoms. It's one thing to receive classified documents and publish them. It is a different issue altogether to work with a source and participate in trying to hack a government system. There is no evidence that Assange was ever actually successful in cracking the password, but he's facing CFAA and conspiracy charges here that may have more staying power. If the indictment is accurate and there's evidence to back it up, then Assange could potentially be in (and this is the legal term) deep shit.But so much of what Assange did, even if we might disagree with his reasons for doing it, is little different than what many media organizations do. What will be necessary is watching closely how the case against Assange advances and changes (it is unlikely that these will be the only charges against Assange). If it is narrowly limited to the actions described in the current indictment, the dangers to press freedoms may be limited. However, if it strays beyond that into some of the other, more journalistic efforts of Assange, it could still represent a huge attack on a free press. Given our current President's near daily attacks on the free press, with repeated announcements that he'd like to change the laws to harm them, going after Assange legally (which may seem a bit ironic, given all the accusations that Assange's leaks in 2016 were designed to help Trump get elected), might be the best way to actually achieve that goal.

Update: The Internet Archive has issued a minor correction to its original story, noting that it was not actually Europol who sent the demand, but rather the French Internet Referral Unit using the Europol system, so that it looked like it was coming from Europol. Here is there update:

Late last year, we wrote about a fairly strange case of a trademark opposition involving Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals and its Black Mamba HYPERRUSH line of diet pills, and Kobe Bryant and his Black Mamba line of being a basketball player. The whole thing was both messy and rather pointless. Pointless because the pharma market and anything Kobe Bryant is involved in are quite divergent marketplaces, making the trademark opposition fairly pointless. And, yet, it's been going on for years. Messy, because the timelines are not particularly in Bryant's favor, given that Hi-Tech applied for its mark a year before Bryant applied for his, leading to Hi-Tech requesting to depose Bryant and get documents from him detailing exactly how he came up with his nickname. Bryant's lawyers rebutted the request by suggesting that deposing Bryant would be like deposing Lil Wayne, because the present is a farce we're all somehow forced to live through.Instead, Bryant's lawyers insisted he answer only written questions, all while warning that Bryant's answers would probably be entirely useless. They predicted that Bryant wouldn't recall the answers to the questions Hi-Tech would want to ask, which is more than a little odd, given that this all centers around how he came up with his now-famous nickname. But, give credit where credit is due: Hi-Tech is now complaining that Bryant has been every bit as useless as his lawyers predicted.

The ACLU has secured a win for privacy in Virginia after taking on the state law enforcement and their many, many automatic license plate readers.The state's ALPR track record isn't great. Law enforcement and other government agencies love the tech, even if they have a considerable amount of trouble showing that plate readers do anything more useful than catch property tax cheats. Law enforcement agencies have turned their plate readers on political rally attendees, raising First Amendment issues along with the usual privacy concerns.The ACLU attacked the state's use of plate readers using one of the state's own laws. According to the "Government Data Collection and Dissemination Act," the long-term collection of untargeted plate data was illegal. The state's attorney general even issued an official opinion to this end, pointing out that active collections seeking targeted plates was permissible, but passive collections with no end date and unrelated to ongoing investigations wasn't.That opinion -- issued in 2013 -- did nothing to alter law enforcement ALPR operations. A lawsuit followed when records requests showed plenty of passive collection was still taking place. The ACLU pointed out (again) these collections violated state law. Fairfax County Circuit Court judge Robert J. Smith agreed.In his 5-page opinion [PDF] granting the ACLU an injunction blocking the Fairfax County Police Department from engaging in passive, untargeted collections, the County Court agrees with the state Supreme Court's findings: the ALPRs are subject to the state data privacy law and the ALPRs -- despite law enforcement protests to the contrary -- collect protected personal info.The FCPD argued the passive license plate collection did not automatically connect plates to car owners. The additional steps officers needed to perform somehow exempted this collection from the state's data privacy law. The court disagrees, pointing to the part of the state law the FCPD decided to ignore when crafting its argument.

Late last year, we brought you the story of how the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Emmy Awards, somehow decided to oppose Emmy's Best, a pet products company named after the founder's cancer-surviving, good, good puppy. At the time, the opposition was fresh with very little back and forth between the parties, which didn't stop me from pointing out that this whole thing was plainly absurd. Television can only metaphorically be compared to a gnawing bone, after all, and it sure seems like there isn't a great deal of customer confusion to be had here. Despite that, Kevin Rizer offered to drop the application entirely, but NATAS decided that wasn't enough and has instead insisted that Emmy's Best change its name and hand over control of its website.This has continued to the present, with Rizer offering concession after concession, without success.

If there's one consistent theme that we've talked about on Techdirt over the past few decades, it's that attempts to regulate the internet based on a specifically observed "harm" almost always leads to bad outcomes. That's because trying to regulate away a harm frequently fails to take into account context and the specifics of how such laws would be interpreted. For example, over the last few years, there's been plenty of concern about fake news and questionable "political advertising" that is really just, let's say, "propaganda" from parties wishing to mess up the democratic process, rather than actually encourage effective democracy. Because of this we've seen attempts to pass "fake news" laws and "online political ads" laws that clearly come from a place of good intentions (mostly), but the actual impact can be far reaching and lead to unintended consequences.For example, just last week people suddenly realized that, with the EU Parliamentary elections coming up next month, and France's new anti-fake news political advertisements law, that Twitter would be blocking the French government's own "get out the vote" advertising campaign: