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So much for the Fifth Amendment. At least in Idaho, anyway. Back in January, a magistrate judge rejected the government's attempt to force a suspect to unlock a seized phone using his fingerprints. The judge found the government's request to be a violation of two rights -- the Fifth Amendment protection against compelling a defendant to testify against themselves -- and the Fourth Amendment, since the government hadn't shown a connection between the accused and the seized device.As the magistrate pointed out, the government could not rely on "foregone conclusion" arguments because it had failed to develop any foregone conclusions. The warrant itself said the government was seeking to search the phone for "indicia of ownership" -- something the government should have been able to plausibly allege long before it started asking the court to compel the suspect to unlock the device.The judge said the government's application lacked a lot of info it needed to pursue this next step.

Back in the early days of filesharing clients and bittorrent being the focus of industry anti-piracy efforts, it was rare but not unheard of for end users to be targeted with lawsuits and criminal prosecution for copyright infringement. With the piracy ecosystem largely moving off of those kinds of filesharing platforms and more into a realm in which end users instead simply stream infringing material over the wire, rather than downloading it directly to their own machines, the focus on the consumer of pirated material has fallen by the wayside. Instead, the focus is now on the infringing sites that offer those streaming materials to the public. This makes a great deal of sense, actually, as the average user plausibly can claim ignorance as to the illicit nature of streamed material, combined with the simple fact that, unlike bittorrent technology, streaming material doesn't simultaneously offer it up to others as well.Again, this makes sense.Well, someone should reach out to the Malaysian government, because its new plans to fight piracy occurring with the aid of in-house Android boxes includes a strategy to prosecute any homeowner where such a device used for infringement exists.

A few years ago, the Parma (OH) Police Department decided to turn its hypersensitivity into a criminal investigation. A local man, Anthony Novak, created a Facebook page parodying the PD's social media front. It wasn't particularly subtle satire. Most readers would have immediately realized this wasn't the Parma PD's official page -- not when it was announcing the arrival of the PD's mobile abortion clinic or the institution of a ban on feeding the homeless. Not only that, but the official logo had been altered to read "We No Crime."The Parma PD decided to treat this parody as a dangerous threat to itself and the general public. It abused an Ohio state law forbidding the use of computers to "disrupt" police services to go after Novak. Not that there was any disruption other than the rerouting of PD resources to investigate a non-criminal act.The end result was the arrest of Novak, the seizure of his electronic devices, and a four-day stay in jail for the parodist before he was acquitted of all charges. Novak sued the police department, but the district court decided to award immunity across the board to everyone involved. The Sixth Circuit Appeals Court has rolled back some of that ruling, allowing Novak's civil rights lawsuit to proceed.The opinion [PDF] opens with a brief discussion of how parody works -- and how the court treats parody -- which is more reprimand than reminder.

While lots of people are angling to break up the big internet companies in the belief that will lead to more competition, we've long argued that such a plan is unlikely to work. Instead, if you truly want more competition you need to end the ability of these companies to lock up your data. Instead, we need to allow third parties access so that the data is not stuck in silos, but where users themselves both have control and alternative options that they can easily move to.That's why we were quite interested a year ago when Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter officially announced the Data Transfer Project (which initially began as a Google project, but expanded to those other providers a year ago). The idea was that the companies would make it ridiculously easy to let users automatically transfer their own data (via their own control) to a different platform. While some of the platforms had previously allowed users to "download" all their data, this project was designed to be much more: to make switching from one platform to another much, much easier -- effectively ending the siloing of data and (worse) the lock-in effects that help create barriers to competition. As we noted last year:

If I've learned anything from the past 20 years of J-horror remakes, these documents are the last thing Motherboard's Caroline Haskins will see before she dies.

You may recall that, recently, I posted on WIPO's bizarre decision to host a database of "pirate" sites that it would share with advertisers, encouraging them to block ads from appearing on any of the sites in the "Building Respect for Intellectual Property" (BRIP) database. As we noted in our original post, previous attempts at such databases showed how problematic they could be, as they almost always swept up perfectly legal sites, and they provided no due process, no checks and balances or anything of the like. I also had a list of questions about this for WIPO, which I noted were unanswered at the time of posting. WIPO actually did get back to me, but we'll get to that.First, I wanted to point to a Twitter thread by New Zealand internet lawyer Rick Shera, who, in response to the news of the BRIP database, gave a real world example of how such databases create real harms for internet services through false accusations with no due process. Here's a lightly edited part of Shera's tweetstorm (the full thing is longer, but you get the point). After describing how the database is set up, he tells a story relating to one of his own clients:

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The nation's four biggest broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Comcast NBCUniversal and Fox) have filed suit (pdf) against a streaming video nonprofit they say is "illegally using broadcaster content." New York based Locast offers viewers access to over the air broadcasts via the internet to roughly 13 cities (about 31% of the US market). Its website notes the operation is funded by donations and that access to this content (again, already accessible for free via an antenna) should be a consumer "right" given that US consumers technically own the airwaves these programs are broadcast over.Not too surprisingly, the big four broadcast networks disagree, something we had expected:

Last week there was a bit of news as the FTC released a proposed settlement between the FTC and Equifax over the data brokers' massive security breach that came to light nearly two years ago. We had already noted that the FTC's way of dealing with Equifax seemed particularly tone deaf, but it's getting worse. Much worse. As you may have heard, part of the "settlement" with Equifax is that you could sign up to get $125 from the company (or possibly more). It was either that or free credit monitoring. But, come on: everyone already has so many "free credit monitoring" services from previous breaches that this is a totally meaningless offer. It also costs nothing for Equifax.So, over the past week or so a ton of (helpful) news sites have been posting explainers on how to get your $125. Except... apparently too many people signed up and now the FTC is helping Equifax by telling people not to ask for money from the company any more. First, the FTC literally deleted that option from its website:

Last year, Microsoft bought the popular code repository GitHub. As Techdirt wrote at the time, many people were concerned by this takeover of a key open source resource by a corporate giant that has frequently proved unfriendly to free software. In the event, nothing worrying has happened -- until this:

We were just discussing Liverpool FC, a football club in the UK's famous Premier League, receiving a ton of backlash from the public and other football clubs over its rather audacious attempt to trademark "Liverpool". Now, Liverpool FC claimed that its trademark application was extremely targeted, claiming that it was geared specifically towards the football marketplace. Unfortunately, in the current protectionist trademark era, that doesn't mean much. First, we see trademark holders threaten and sue those across marketplace borders all the time. Second, there are other football clubs in Liverpool, meaning that the trademark application represented a direct threat to their brands.It turns out this callous attitude towards other football clubs isn't a one-off for Liverpool FC. Recent reporting reveals that the club also has attempted, and then withdrawn, trademark applications for a popular football fan chant that doesn't even originate with Liverpool FC fans.

If you're going to be touted as an "expert," the very goddamn least you can do is not make people stupider. May I present to you "Trooper Steve," the resident "traffic safety expert" for ClickOrlando.com.He comes highly-touted. None other than the Orlando Sentinel called him… well, a "traffic safety expert." Here's the headline:

Remember cord cutting? The trend that cable and broadcast execs and countless sector analysts spent years claiming either wasn't real, or didn't matter because it would end once Millennials started procreating?Well it's still very real, and once again the rate of traditional TV cancellations is setting records. The second quarter is looking to be particularly ugly, with giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Charter Spectrum all seeing big losses, but with AT&T's being particularly ugly:

A little over a year ago we wrote about a truly ridiculous lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee against the country of Russia, Wikileaks, the GRU, Julian Assange, the Donald Trump campaign, and a long list of Donald Trump associates, including Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr. and more. As we discussed in great detail, this was a pro se-level lawsuit full of absolutely crazy legal theories that stood no chance in court, ostensibly over the hacking of the DNC's computers that occurred during the 2016 election. The complaint was mostly a conspiracy theory wrapped in a legal complaint, tossing in absolutely silly CFAA claims, SCA claims, DMCA claims and (because why not?) a RICO claim, despite the fact that it's never RICO.We predicted that this lawsuit would go nowhere fast, and separately noted that many of the theories the DNC put into the lawsuit represented a very real threat to basic press freedoms. Thankfully, though not surprisingly, federal Judge John Koeltl, has dismissed the case. The order runs over 80 pages, but the judge does a nice job summarizing the many, many faults of the complaint upfront. Let's start with suing Russia. That's not how any of this works.

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It's open season on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and everyone's got ideas. Not good ones, mind you. But ideas. The latest comes from Rep. Paul Gosar whose claim to fame is that six of his own siblings took out an ad to his constituents, telling them not to re-elect their brother. Gosar also has a bit of a checkered history of his own in terms of tolerating "free speech" online. Last year, he was sued for blocking constituents on social media -- leading him to agree to stop the practice in order to settle the lawsuit.He's now introduced HR 4027, which is entitled the "Stop Censorship Act" (as opposed to Josh Hawley's Stop Internet Censorship Act). The full text of the bill is not yet up, but Gosar has put up a press release and Twitter thread about the bill, saying that it will revoke what he (incorrectly) says is the "unprecedented and unwarranted immunities given to Big Tech" and replacing it with an immunity only to remove "unlawful activity" and some sort of mandate to provide end users their own filter tools.

As expected, the Department of Justice has signed off on T-Mobile's controversial $26 billion merger with Sprint. You'd be hard pressed to find many objective folks who think greater consolidation in the telecom space is a good idea, given the deal will likely result in less competition, higher prices, and some major job cuts as redundant positions are inevitably eliminated. And in countries where four major wireless carriers were reduced to three, the resulting problems are usually pretty damn obvious.Still, both the FCC and DOJ have tripped over themselves to approve the deal after T-Mobile's full-court lobbying press, which has included hiring Trump allies like Corey Lewandowski as advisors, and pandering up to the Trump administration by ramping up patronage of Donald's hotels.To make its approval of the deal seem like a good idea, the DOJ has come up with a quirky solution: it is demanding that Sprint and T-Mobile offload prepaid brand Boost Mobile and some spectrum to Dish Network, who then will (theoretically) use those assets to create a new fourth carrier to replace Sprint. The announcement frames the proposal as such:

There's border garbage going on in Europe as well. A report by The Intercept shows border officials have cobbled together junk science, tech, and a spin on a notoriously-sketchy piece of equipment into its newest border security offering.It's called Silent Talker. It subjects travelers to lie detector tests predicated on the fiction that people call tell other people are lying just by looking at them. It's the same pseudo-science that powers the TSA's useless "Behavioral Detection" program. Only this is possibly worse because it considers itself to be a lie detector and it's been known for years lie detectors can't reliably detect lies.It works like this: travelers upload their passports to the border agency's website and are put face-to-"face" with a blue uniformed avatar. The software takes control of the device's camera to scan the traveler's face and eye movements for "signs of lying."Here's the thing: it doesn't even work when it's humans doing the face-to-face work. A report on the TSA's Behavioral Detection program found it to be completely lacking in scientific background. The justification for the program was predicated on hearsay, conjecture, and anecdotal evidence. The TSA claimed it was hard science, but actual scientists have said there's no evidence backing the claim that anyone can suss out lies just by looking at people's faces.

We have something of a long-running series of posts centering on the disheartening theme, "You don't own what you've bought." Whether it's digital products such as movies and eBooks, or more tangible products like thermostats, large companies are making backend alterations to how products previously purchased work and the public is just now starting to realize the full scope of what this means. That doesn't mean that same public isn't surprised when it happens to them, of course, but it's strange to watch the reactions to these anti-consumer practices range mostly from shrugs to actively joking around about it all.Bethesda went through its own instance of this recently. Just to be absolutely clear, the problems we are about to discuss have all been resolved by Bethesda, so good on them. These issues weren't intentional. Still, they demonstrate both how the current digital economy is one fraught with danger for people who think they're actually buying things and also demonstrates the cow-like tranquility of the reactions of those affected.In the past few weeks, Bethesda announced it was re-releasing several classic Doom games for the three modern consoles. It was great news for Doom fans, especially those that own PS4 and Nintendo Switch consoles. The re-release included the Xbox One, too, but that console had already seen a re-release of the classic Doom games. Except that gamers who had originally purchased the first re-release suddenly found that their purchases were no longer available.

A little over three years ago, we wrote about what may be one of the world's dumbest trademark disputes (involving one of the world's most beautiful places). Yosemite National Park was in a massive trademark dispute concerning the names of various places (mainly lodging places) within the park. The background was a bit confusing, but the short version is that back in 1988, the company that operated the various facilities in Yosemite, the Curry Company, registered trademarks on the names of the various sites -- including the famous historic Ahwahnee Hotel, Curry Village and Yosemite Lodge. In 1993, the concessions contract passed from Curry Company onto a subsidiary of Delaware North called DNC Parks & Resorts at Yosemite (DNCY). It appears that the trademarks that Curry Company registered passed on to DNCY, though basically everyone forgot/ignored the trademarks.Part of DNCY's contract was that if another concession company took over, DNCY had to "sell and transfer" any interest it had in the park, including "such other property." Fast forward to a few years ago, and Yosemite decided to drop DNCY in favor of concessions giant Aramark. Suddenly, DNCY "rediscovered" that it held the trademarks. It offered to lease them to the park for "free"... but only if Yosemite retained DNCY as the concessions company. Yosemite said no, and DNCY started demanding money for the trademarks. Lots and lots of money -- between $30 and $51 million at different times in the process. Yosemite, on the other hand, countered that the trademarks were worth, at best, somewhere between $1.5 and $3 million. DNCY eventually sued for $44 million.Yosemite then went with the nuclear option and renamed all the historic spots in the park. So for the past three years, the Ahwahnee has been called "The Majestic Yosemite Hotel," Curry Village became "Half Dome Village," and the Wawona Hotel became "Big Trees Lodge." I've been up to Yosemite a few times during these three years, and everyone still seemed to call the Ahwahnee the Ahwahnee (or, as I heard multiple people say, "the hotel formerly known as the Ahwahnee.")However, a few weeks ago, everyone basically split the difference and settled the lawsuit. Delaware North walks away with $12 million -- with $3.84 million of that coming from American taxpayers, and the other $8.16 million coming from Aramark. More importantly, the deal stipulates that at the end of this contract, the trademarks "will transfer at no cost to the National Park Service."It also apparently didn't take long for Yosemite to revert to some of the old names. It turns out (I'd never even noticed) that for the past few years, many of the new names were really just tarps covering the old names:

Say what you want about Senator Josh Hawley -- and we've said a lot -- but you do have to give him credit for actually proposing bills to respond to all of the problems he sees with internet companies these days. Of course, he sees their very existence as one of the problems, so the bills seem mostly nonsensical. His latest -- the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act (yeah, yeah, the SMART Act) -- is only marginally less crazy than his last bill to strip internet companies of Section 230 protections, unless they agree to allow Nazis to speak.It's... weird. It basically seems to be Congress (via Hawley) appointing itself as the new product manager for all internet services. It's taking what is a potentially reasonable concern that certain activities on various internet platforms may lead to addictive behaviors and then assuming that Congress must ban them, outright -- as well as take proactive steps to limit access to much of the internet. I'm assuming that noted Constitutional lawyer Josh Hawley will next propose a bill banning alcohol, cigarettes, TV binging, professional sports, books, and anything else engrossing in the future. Again, there are legitimate concerns about how the internet impacts people, but we're still in the very early days of understanding (1) what those issues are and how they're dealt with and (2) how society can and should respond to those things. And yet, this bill acts as if it's well established that a few very specific technology features are de facto evil and must be banned. Among them:

Another day, another major data breach.

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There must be some irony in the fact that the well-hyped documentary film about Cambridge Analytica/Facebook, called The Great Hack was released by Netflix -- a company who really is kinda famous for trying to suck up as much data as possible to build a better algorithm to keep you using its service more -- and potentially violating people's privacy in the process. I know it's ancient history in terms of internet years, and everyone has decided that Facebook and Google are the root of all internet/data evils, but back in 2006, Netflix launched a contest, offering $1 million to anyone who could "improve" its recommendation algorithm over a certain threshold. It took a few years, but the company awarded the $1 million to a team that improved its algorithm -- though, it never actually implemented that algorithm, claiming that the benefits "did not seem to justify the engineering effort."But, perhaps more interesting, was that while the contest was ongoing, some computer scientists de-anonymized the dataset that Netflix had released, leading some to point out that the whole project almost certainly violated the law. Eventually, Netflix shuttered its plans for a follow up contest as part of a legal settlement regarding the privacy violations of the original.So, perhaps feel a bit conflicted when Netflix's vaunted algorithm recommends "The Great Hack" for you to watch.This is not to say the documentary is not important, but it does highlight our troubling desire to immediately point fingers and describe certain things as "evil." Even the name -- The Great Hack -- is ridiculously misleading. Nothing Cambridge Analytica did involved a "hack" in the way most people think of the word. Yes, you could argue that it was a "hack" of the larger system -- using Facebook's platform in a way that was not intended, but easily done, but it didn't involve any technical proficiency. Just a willingness to use the data that way.But, it's interesting to me to see the press rush in to use the documentary as the exclamation point to the narrative that's become popular these days: that Silicon Valley is too obsessed with collecting data as a business model. Janus Rose, at Vice, has a big piece that describes the movie as a condemnation of "surveillance capitalism."

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 detail. But time and time again, we've noted 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 (including cell phone companies that sell your location data) act as if "anonymizing" your data is iron-clad protection from having it identified. It's simply not true.The latest case in point: in new research published this week in the journal Nature Communications, data scientists from Imperial College London and UCLouvain found that it wasn't particularly hard for companies (or, anybody else) to identify the person behind "anonymized" data using other data sets. More specifically, the researchers developed a machine learning model that was able to correctly re-identify 99.98% of Americans in any anonymised dataset using just 15 characteristics including age, gender and marital status:

Amazon isn't just handing out cheap/free doorbell surveillance cameras to cops. It's tying them into contracts that require government agency recipients return the favor by publicizing Amazon's Ring doorbells and running their PR responses through the online retailer. That's according to documents obtained by Caroline Haskins of Vice, who secured copies of Amazon Ring contracts via public records requests.

It will not come as news to the regular Techdirt reader that the folks behind Ultimate Fighting Championship truly hate pirate streams of its fight-nights. For years now, UFC has done everything from punishing some of its own biggest fans to petitioning the government and courts to strictly block any unauthorized broadcasts. In other words, UFC's stance is that it will take any action necessary to prevent people from pirating its product.In which case, UFC may want to have a word with at least one of its broadcast partners. BT Sport, the UFC's broadcast partner in the UK, recently made the decision to suddenly hit its subscribers with an additional pay-per-view fee to watch the bigger UFC matches. The move was met with catastrophic results.

It usually takes very extreme behavior from law enforcement officers to punch holes in the qualified immunity shield. Fortunately/unfortunately, there's seems to be no shortage of extremely-badly-behaving law enforcement officers.In this case, fielded by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Kansas City Police Department was investigating a homicide. Detectives managed to track the victim's cellphone to an apartment. They also managed to track down the suspect by using a combination of phone records and old fashioned police work. They arrested the suspect and applied for a search warrant for his residence.The warrant request omitted the fact they had heard the targeted phone ringing in an apartment on Winchester Street, rather than the apprehended suspect's residence (the "Bristol residence"). The SWAT team also met prior to the search and were informed the homicide suspect was already in custody.The SWAT team proceeded to the Bristol residence with a normal search warrant. Once the SWAT team arrived, it decided to do SWAT team things, even though it only had a normal warrant that didn't authorize the things it chose to do.Here's how it began, according to the Eighth Circuit decision [PDF]:

The inadvertently great thing about the New York Police Department is its random inability to keep its secrets. Journalists have referred to the agency as being more opaque than redaction masters like the CIA and FBI. Its perpetual efforts to thwart public records requesters have led to insanity like refusing to release the department's public records response guidelines or years of stonewalling over innocuous information.So, when the "fuck you, citizens" facade inadvertently crumbles, we are: All. Over. It. Back in April, Georgetown researchers received documents the NYPD surely did not mean to release. Included in the NYPD's release was a presentation on facial recognition software that it swore up and down (often in front of a judge!) was too sensitive to release to the public. This despite the fact the presentation was from a conference where any member of the public with $1,700 could view this super-sensitive slide deck.The NYPD managed to talk a court into the ordering the impossible: the post facto memory-holing of documents researchers had already seen. The court said the researchers could not talk about the presentation's content and ordered them to "return" the PDF they had received, however the hell that works.Well, fool themselves once, shame on the NYPD. Fool themselves two or more times, the court says, "You're on your own." The New York Daily News reports the NYPD has screwed the facial recognition pooch yet again. Unbelievably, it has made the same mistake twice while dealing with the same public records requesters.

This was not unexpected. As we easily predicted back when it was filed, Nick Sandmann -- the MAGA red hat wearing teenager from Covington Catholic High School who was briefly at the center of a viral social media Rorschach test -- has now lost his laughably bad defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post. As we pointed out, he never alleged any actual defamation, and federal Judge William Bertelsman did not seem at all pleased with Sandmann's legal arguments.As Bertelsman notes, at this stage (the motion to dismiss stage), all he needs to do is see whether or not an actual claim has been presented: were statements of fact made about Sandmann that were defamatory. There's plenty of explanatory text before we get to the crux:

Earlier this month, the city of San Mateo, California, decided to end its red light camera program. The official reason given is pure spin -- a transparent attempt by the city to distance itself from its failed program.

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We've spent months now highlighting how politicians (of both parties) continually misrepresent what Section 230 of the CDA says. There are open questions as to whether or not this is because they don't know the law, or they don't care, and they think lying about it helps them politically. Considering that two of the most vocal individuals are Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley -- both of whom have a long history of being Constitutional lawyers -- it is difficult to believe that both aren't fully aware that they are lying.Now the NY Times is calling them out, with an opinion piece by editorial board member Sarah Jeong, highlighting how badly they get the law wrong. She notes that the law is short and easy to read, and therefore no one has an excuse for blatantly misrepresenting it.

Wireless carriers are coming under increasing fire for failing to protect their users from SIM hijacking. The practice involves posing as a wireless customer, then fooling a wireless carrier to port the victim's cell phone number right out from underneath them, letting the attacker then pose as the customer to potentially devastating effect. Back in February, a man sued T-Mobile for failing to protect his account after a hacker pretending to be him, ported out his phone number, then managed to use his identity to steal thousands of dollars worth of cryptocoins.T-Mobile customers aren't the only users who've experienced this problem. US entrepreneur and cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin sued AT&T last summer (pdf) for the same thing: somebody ran a SIM hijacking scam on AT&T, then stole his identity and, in turn, stole $23.8 million in cryptocurrency. And while AT&T tried hard to have the case dismissed, a Los Angeles federal judge last week issued a mixed ruling that nixed AT&T's request to dismiss the case, but demanded that Terpin do a better job highlighting how AT&T is directly responsible:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is James Burkhardt with some additional details on the court decision against Richard Liebowitz:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, traffic to The Pirate Bay was yet again surging following an attempt to block it. The copyright revolving door was in full swing, with the main architect of PIPA becoming an MPAA lobbyist alongside one of Hollywood's favorite former congressmen. Italy's public prosecutor seized a giant webmail provider and cloud storage provider for shaky copyright reasons, a San Francisco eviction lawyer was abusing the DMCA to censor a protest video, and a musician whose work was at the center of a copyright lawsuit against YouTube slammed the lawsuit and copyright itself.Meanwihle, The Intercept revealed the US government's guidebook for putting people on the no-fly list, as well as the stunning extra scrutiny such people were then put under. And an ex-official from the State Department suggested that the NSA has even worse surveillance programs than the ones everyone was focused on.Ten Years AgoSometimes there are shockingly perfect parallels between the present week and the past. Yesterday, we reported on Tulsi Gabbard's frankly insane lawsuit against Google — and this week in 2009, we reported on a gamer suing Sony with the same non-starter claim: that the company violated his First Amendment rights by banning him from a PS3 game. One might have hoped this sort of constitutional nonsense would stay relegated to random gamers, rather than being elevated to presidential candidates.Also this week in 2009: LSU was fining students for filesharing while apparently deeply misunderstanding the RIAA's demands, copyright lobbyists and government officials were celebrating bogus piracy stats, BREIN was demanding the Pirate Bay itself start blocking Dutch ISPs, and the Associated Press announced its ill-fated plan to DRM the news.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, panic gripped the copyright maximalists of Europe in the face of a looming horror: some popular rock songs starting to enter the public domain. The research director for the BSA admitted that the group misleads the public with how it describes its statistics, by changing "retail value of pirated software" to "sales lost to piracy" — a massive change, but subtle to those who don't follow the subject closely. Nevertheless, Congress was pushing forward with the INDUCE act to fight piracy, holding hearings where the Copyright Office gave a full-throated endorsement of the bill and Orrin Hatch seemed not to notice that he basically admitted banning P2P systems is wrong. Congress was also pretty gung-ho on passing some sort of anti-spyware bill, details be damned. And this was also the week that Lindows became Linspire, after Microsoft gave up and just paid Michael Robertson a cool $20-million to buy the name.

Covering trademark nonsense, our posts tend to intersect regularly with the world of sports. It's relatively common at this point to witness teams and even entire leagues pulling anti-fan trademark stunts, from athletes trademarking their own nicknames no matter the fallout, to leagues considering messing with the trademark applications of video game companies, up to and including iconic baseball teams managing to trademark the derisive nickname given to them by other teams. It's all very, very stupid.Across the pond, however, teams in the Premier League have somehow managed to get trademarks on their home-city's names. Chelsea FC, for instance, has a trademark for "Chelsea" related specifically to football services and merch. This sort of thing is almost never allowed here in the States, but it's become enough of a thing that Liverpool FC is attempting the same move for "Liverpool" and it's pissing off a whole bunch of people.As was the case with Chelsea FC, Liverpool FC insists its mark will be very narrow.

For a few years now, the company behind online streaming and speedy, cheap shipping has been seeking to expand its offerings. Amazon Web Services pays the bills, providing data storage for multiple companies/governments. "We can remember it for you wholesale!" Amazon promises. But that's the old thing.The next tech bet Amazon is willing to use as a loss leader to gain market share is facial recognition. Amazon has been handing this stuff out like bank teller lollipops to any law enforcement agency with money to spend and a desire to expand its surveillance net.Naturally, Amazon is high on its own supply. Everyone else, not so much. Congress demanded answers after a test drive of Amazon's facial recognition tech (called "Rekognition" because misspellings mean the future is now) said 28 of its members were criminals.At that point, it was no longer an existential threat to people's freedom. It was now a pile of computational garbage incapable of telling a Congressperson from a criminal. That those two groups sometimes have a significant overlap was lost on everyone involved. But the upshot was the US federal government had its eyes pinned on Rekognition, for better or worse.Cops shops love tech, especially the cheap kind. They also love the sort of tech they can pretend to understand as they pitch it to city legislators who also pretend to understand it. Some legislators are ahead of the curve and are telling cops this simply isn't going to happen on their watch, but for everyone else, there's cheap facial recognition tech from a recognized brand name not really recognized (yet!) for cop tech.Sadly, not everyone is happy with the cheap goods Amazon sort of sold them. The Orlando Police Department decided to give Amazon's Rekognition program for a test drive. After 15 months and an untold amount of dissatisfaction, the department is pulling the plug on its relationship with the internet giant.

Hiring cops is hard work. That's probably why we're not exactly blessed with the best of the best. Over the past few years, police officer morale has been in a nosedive. As the public's awareness of police misconduct has increased (along with third-party footage of said misconduct), cops have discovered the job is no longer quite as fun as it used to be. Lots of power and zero accountability is a hell of a drug, but even that wears off eventually.But cop shops still need cops, so hiring continues. Law enforcement agencies endlessly recycle fired officers, giving them unearned shots at redemption. Other agencies have just given up, hiring whoever walks through the door expressing interest in the position.When the openings exceed the hiring pool, you get the mess being inflicted on the residents of Stebbins, Alaska. This horrifying report by Kyle Hopkins for ProPublica demonstrates just how low the bar can be set for new hires if your agency is desperate enough.

Everyone loves surveillance creep. Well, by everyone, I mean the government and the vendors that sell to them. Automatic license plate readers have made their way from police cruisers to malls, as has facial recognition tech that very often fails to actually recognize people.The "everyone" may now include the near-fascist organizations turning neighborhoods into glittering shrines of conformity. I'm talking about homeowners' associations -- the anal-retentive busybodies who want to make sure your grass is cut to the correct length and that no one's offending passersby with creative mailboxes.The Denver Post reports the newest customers for surveillance tech is HOAs and gated communities.

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Well, here's an odd one: the Presidential campaign for Tulsi Gabbard is now suing Google claiming, among other things, that the company has "violated her First Amendment rights" by temporarily shutting down her advertising account and also funneling some of her campaign emails to spam in Gmail. This lawsuit is a complete non-starter, and makes use of the same debunked legal theories that others have used against social media companies. First, it argues that closing her Google advertising account was obviously because people at Google didn't want her message getting out after the first Democratic Presidential debates.

This wasn't how it was supposed to go for AT&T. In AT&T executives heads, the 2015, $67 billion acquisition of DirecTV and the 2018 $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner were supposed to be the cornerstones of the company's efforts to dominate video and online video advertising. Instead, the megadeals made AT&T possibly one of the most heavily indebted companies in the world. To recoup that debt, AT&T has ramped up its efforts to nickel-and-dime users at every opportunity, from bogus new wireless fees to price hikes on both its streaming and traditional video services.Not too surprisingly, these price hikes are now driving subscribers to the exits.The company's latest earnings report indicates that AT&T not only lost another 778,000 "traditional" video subscribers last quarter (satellite TV, IPTV), but it lost another 168,000 subscribers at its DirecTV Now streaming service -- due to "higher prices and less promotional activity":

As Techdirt has pointed out many times, one of the biggest problems with the EU Copyright Directive's upload filters is that they will necessarily be automated, which means they will inevitably be flawed. After all, it can take the EU's top judges weeks to decide complex questions about whether something is copyright infringement or not. And yet Article 13/17 expects software to do the same in microseconds. This kind of collateral damage from clueless algorithms is already happening, albeit on a small scale. Boing Boing has an interesting new twist on this problem. Cory Doctorow writes about an idea that RJ Jones mentioned on Twitter:

We have been talking these past few weeks about a strange game of whac-a-mole currently being played between YouTube and a whole bunch of stream-ripping websites. While stream-ripping sites have been targeted by the music industry specifically for some time now, despite a wide range of non-infringing uses of such technology, it was only recently that YouTube decided to participate in all of this by blocking access to its platform for many of these sites. Built around claims of ToS violations, it's fairly clear that YouTube's actual goal in all of this is to appear to be attempting to bow to the music industry's wishes. Despite the blocks, many of these sites have managed to route around the blockade, thus the game of whac-a-mole.But not all such sites have taken this stance. Onlinevideoconverter.com, which initially routed around the block, has since announced that it is voluntarily leaving the hide-and-seek game and will simply stop converting YouTube videos itself.

One of the search warrants used by the San Francisco police department to go after a journalist for documents a PD employee leaked has been released. This is only one of the five warrants targeting "stringer" Bryan Carmody, whose house was raided by the SFPD back in May.This search warrant targeted Carmody's phone records. It was granted on March 1st, allowing the SFPD to obtain records from Verizon. This was done supposedly to track down which cop called Carmody over a two-day period prior to the release of the leaked document to California news agencies.Earlier this month, Judge Rochelle East quashed the warrant, saying it showed the SFPD omitted key info that would have made it clear it was targeting a journalist -- something forbidden by California's journalist shield law. The judge also unsealed the warrant. It has finally been released and it shows SFPD Sgt. Joseph Obidi writing his way around the fact that Carmody is a journalist.In the application [PDF], Sgt. Obidi cut-and-pasted part of Carmody's LinkedIn profile. The officer included the part that said Carmody was a "Freelance Videographer." But he excluded the part that said Carmody "has decades of experience shooting, editing and reporting news," as well as the long list of new agencies he had worked with. It also excluded the fact that the SFPD had issued a press pass to Carmody -- one that was still current when the warrant was obtained.This was pointed out during the hearing about the warrant by Judge East, who said the existence of a press pass should have told the SFPD to steer its investigation away from Carmody.

Very few law enforcement agencies take accountability seriously. Even when officers are held responsible for wrongdoing, their employers find ways to soften the blow. Powerful police unions make the situation worse. The gap between officers and accountability hasn't really shrunk, no matter how many recording devices we've attached to them or boards we've appointed to oversee them.Nothing is going to improve if things like this keep happening. The backstory is this: Officer Philip Brailsford responded to call about a man in a hotel room with a gun. That man happened to be Daniel Shaver. Shaver killed pests so he owned pellet guns -- one of which he had in the hotel room with him.Within minutes of Officer Brailsford's arrival, Daniel Shaver was dead -- shot five times by Brailsford whose AR-15 was decorated with the phrase "You're Fucked."Shaver was, indeed, fucked. He never had a chance to make it out of this confrontation alive. The video of his shooting shows Shaver never posed a threat. It shows Brailsford was the aggressor in this situation -- laying down a steady stream of conflicting commands with the promise of death for any failure to comply.This summary of Shaver's last nightmarish minutes of life comes via the ACLU's Jeffery Robinson:

It sometimes is difficult to get people to understand just how >utterly insane the college textbook market is. You have a captive audience who has no choice but to purchase what the professor requires (which is why it's doubly lame when professors require their own books). But even people who went to college a few decades ago may not be aware of just how much textbook prices have kept rising. A study from 2015 showed that college textbook prices had risen over 1000% since 1977. 1,000%.Another BLS study from 2016 showed that, in the education space, the price of textbooks had gone up even faster than the cost of tuition (which is also skyrocketing).In short: college textbooks are crazy, crazy expensive. And one way that people have dealt with this over the years is (1) by buying used textbooks, or (2) by selling back the textbooks at the end of the semester (or in some cases, both). However, that's the one factor that's acted as competition to the textbook market.And the publishers want to do away with it.The largest educational textbook publisher, Pearson, has now announced that it's going to phase out print textbooks and move solely to electronic textbooks. If you actually want a physical textbook, you'll only be able to "rent" it:

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The DOJ has now spent more than a year dodging an obligation it created itself. For years, FBI directors and DOJ officials have told anyone who'd listen -- conference attendees, Congressional reps, law enforcement officials -- the world was going dark. Device encryption was making it far more difficult for the FBI to collect evidence from seized devices and the problem was escalating exponentially.It wasn't. Every new "going dark" speech contained a larger number of impenetrable devices the FBI was sure contained all sorts of juicy evidence. When the FBI was asked about these devices by members of Congress, it finally decided to take a look at its numbers. The numbers were wrong. The FBI said there were around 8,000 locked devices in its possession. In reality, the number is probably less than 2,500.The problem is we don't actually know what the correct number is. The DOJ has been promising an update since May 2018, but it has yet to release this number. Instead, it has released the mouth of its top man -- William Barr, a longtime fan of domestic surveillance.Barr's keynote address to the International Conference on Cyber Security didn't deal much with cybersecurity. Instead, it was 4,000-word anti-encryption rant. William Barr wants encryption backdoors. There's no use in the DOJ denying after his verbal assault on device encryption and device manufacturers. There is no subtlety and no hedging. The only concession Barr makes is that encryption shouldn't vanish entirely. But any form of encryption that remains should leave a key under the doormat for the G-men.