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So a few weeks ago we noted how the Ajit Pai FCC has been trying to pretend that some modest recent broadband growth is directly thanks to its unpopular policies -- like killing net neutrality. Except a closer look at the report shows the data they used was only accurate up to the tail end of 2017, when net neutrality wasn't even formally repealed until June of 2018 (read: the growth couldn't have been due to killing net neutrality yet, because it hadn't technically happened yet). A lot of the "record fiber growth" Pai also tried to credit his policies for was actually courtesy of the fiber build-out conditions affixed to the AT&T DirecTV merger by the previous FCC.In short, Pai's office has been falsely taking credit for some modest industry growth in broadband availability it had nothing to actually do with. And in a few instances, the FCC tried to claim that broadband growth was due to "deregulation," when market intervention (merger conditions) was actually to thank.Now some deeper analysis shows that another huge chunk of Pai's supposed broadband growth was thanks to a... clerical error. A deeper analysis of the FCC's broadband growth numbers by consumer group Free Press showed that a company by the name of Barrier Communications Corporation appears to have dramatically overstated its broadband deployment during the period in question by a cool 1.5 million locations:

While much of the focus on the debate over the EU Copyright Directive has focused on the upload filters of Article 13, we should be equally worried about the snippet taxes of Article 11, which journalists have already made clear will be used to enrich publishers at the expense of actual journalism (that is, if it leads to any money at all -- since attempts to pass basically the same law in both Germany and Spain failed to produce the expected revenue windfall).Former Icelandic Parliament member Asta Helgadottir recently put together quite an amazing Twitter thread detailing 170 years of German news publishers demanding special extra copyrights just for their industry -- each time insisting that without it, new technologies would kill journalism. You can also read the whole thing on a single page at Threader, but here's a (lightly edited) snippet:

As Techdirt noted some years back, there has been a steady push to strengthen the protection afforded to trade secrets. Similarly, the argument is often made that transparency must be subordinated to protecting commercial interests, as happened recently in an important struggle over access to information in the EU. It concerned the safety of the chemical glyphosate, widely used as a herbicide, for example in Roundup from Monsanto (now owned by the German chemical giant, Bayer). The EU body responsible for assessing risks associated with the food chain is EFSA (European Food Safety Authority). As part of the process of renewing approval for glyphosate, which was granted in 2017 for five more years, EFSA conducted a review of the toxicity and carcinogenicity of the chemical, drawing on a variety of published and unpublished data. Whether glyphosate increases the risk of cancer is a highly contentious area, with widely differing expert views:

We've been explaining for a long time that many people don't really understand "privacy." Privacy is a tradeoff not a "thing." Assuming that privacy is a thing -- and that "it" must be protected -- leads to some bad results. Lexis Nexis has a tool called Trace IQ, that is widely used by investigative journalists to find out information about people -- including their addresses and phone numbers. Some people might argue that just addresses and phone numbers should be kept private, but it really wasn't that long ago that such information wasn't just widely available to the public, but every six months or so a giant yellow-covered book was thrown in front of our doors with listings of everyone's phone number and address in your geographic region. Remember that?However, Lexis Nexis is now cutting investigative journalists off from this service because "privacy."

An opponent of asset forfeiture has arisen from an unexpected place. Honda's finance division has taken the city of Revere, Massachusetts to court over the seizure and sale of a vehicle it still technically owned.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously last Monday in Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com, a copyright case that hinged on whether the "registration" of a work—which, by statute, must precede most kinds of infringement lawsuits—happens when the author sends in their application, or whether it happens when the Copyright Office makes a determination and sends back a certificate. There was a circuit split on the issue, in which some courts had gone with the "application approach," and others had gone with the "registration approach," and legal experts were divided on the question.As of last Monday it is resolved. The Supreme Court went with the "registration approach" and said that unless you're subject to one of the handful of statutory carve-outs you must wait until the Copyright Office does its thing before you can sue.The Supreme Court decided correctly, for what it's worth -- as Mike wrote about earlier. But, as even a dedicated copyright nerd like your humble author must admit, it's a pretty boring question. Copyright law is a field where small changes can have profound effects on people's lives, where de facto speech policies can be shaped, and where new technologies and media can be formally blessed or condemned to utter oblivion. But it's also a field of industrial regulation, cobbled together in large part by technocrats with domain expertise figuring out what works for all the parties in the room. To its credit, Fourth Estate is a case that limits its impact largely to that latter area.But the fact that one body of law must do both things is the source of a lot of headache and heartache. Writing effective policy is hard, even when you're not trying to write a single rule that governs both billion dollar studio contracts and comments on a blog. The consequences can be extreme, as Cory Doctorow once explained: "A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century: copyright policy ceased to exist. Because every copyright policy that we make has a seismic effect on the Internet, and because you can’t regulate copying without regulating the Internet." And of course, "as we make the transition from a world where everything we do includes an online component to a world where everything we do requires an online component, it’s becoming the case that there’s no such thing as 'Internet policy' – there’s just policy."But it's neither inevitable nor accidental that copyright touches every part of our lives. It's helpful to really break it down here: copyright is an enumerated bundle of restrictions that apply to things called "works."Doctorow's argument is about the first half of that expression. He elaborated in another column: because everything we do with computers (and especially networked computers) involves observable acts of making copies, copyright touches nearly every use of a work. Uses that once went unregulated are now swept up in the bundle of rights because they involve a copy. There are big commercial examples of this, like how video rental used to be an act of moving a cartridge or a disc from place to place and now it's a licensed act of making copies. But there are also a million little examples of this we encounter every day, from checking out books at the library to sharing a funny picture with friends to listening to our favorite music.So that's how the first half of the expression went awry; what was once a limited set of exclusive rights is now a mechanism to regulate all sorts of uses of things called "works." That would be bad enough. But the real problem lies in the second half, in terms of what gets called a "work."That too used to be an enumerated list. The first U.S. copyright law covered maps, charts, and books. Over the years more and more categories were added, but the real shift was more fundamental. It happened, at least in the U.S., in 1976, when the overhauled law changed copyright from a system that was opt-in to one where participation was mandatory. Works were previously only subject to copyright restrictions if the author went through "formalities,"—namely, putting a copyright notice on the work and sending in a registration to the Copyright Office. The 1976 Act removed that hurdle. Overnight, that changed the character of copyright from a regulatory system that applied to a handful of professionals consciously participating in it, to one that controlled nearly every utterance and scribble that got fixed in a tangible medium.That's the one-two punch. First, through law: applying copyright coverage to basically everything. Then, through technology: expanding the regulated uses to basically all of them.It's a bad situation, and it's that part that motivates people like Doctorow to take pursue a life of activism. With few exceptions, most people passionate about copyright reform care most about the consequences of copyright as an everything policy, and less so about the nitty-gritty of copyright as industrial regulation.Which is part of the reason why, to bring it back to Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com, the Supreme Court decision is both correct and (mostly) boring. Correct, in part, because actual litigation is something that does not and should not apply to most human beings interacting with copyrighted works, and so it's good for that to be conditioned on opt-in registration. Boring, in part, because it is (mostly) not about the side of copyright that affects blog comments, but instead the side that underpins billion dollar contracts.Copyright policy has, for decades now, labored under the fiction that there’s no distinction between the boring parts and the scary parts of the law. It’s a good thing to remember there’s a difference.

While Facebook tends to get the lion's share of (deserved) criticism, the telecom sector continues to make its case for being the absolute worst when it comes to protecting your private data. Scandal after scandal have highlighted how wireless carriers routinely collect and store your daily location data, then sell that data to a universe of shady middlemen with little to no oversight as to how the data is used. Users sign one overlong privacy policy with their wireless carrier, and that policy is being read to mean consumers sign off on the practice, which they certainly haven't.This week journalist Joseph Cox again highlighted the problems on the location data front, reporting how many stalkers and debt collectors are able to get access to this data without paying for it. How? By pretending to be law enforcement officers:

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Last week we wrote a critical analysis of Elizabeth Warren's big plan to break up "big tech." As we noted, there was a lot in the plan that was nonsensical, unsupported by the facts or just plain confused. We'll be talking more about some of these ideas a lot over the next few years I imagine (stay tuned), but there was one line in Warren's plan that deserved a separate post: it appears that a part of Warren's big attack on big tech... is to give a massive handout to Hollywood. Here's the line:

Supporters of Article 13 in the EU Copyright Directive love to insist that all of the harms and concerns that many of us raise about how it will impact user rights are wrong, because the text of Article 13 says that user rights won't be harmed. This is only sort of true. It does say that... but gives no instructions on how to make it a reality. Indeed, abiding by the rest of the law makes it impossible. In other words, it's the equivalent of a law mandating everyone flies into the Sun, and when some of us point out that we'll all burn up and die, the legislators tack onto the end of the bill "... and don't let anyone burn up and die" without any further instruction.Specifically, in the text, it says things like the following:

More censorship and encryption-breaking is on the way, thanks to the Thai government's broad interpretation of the term "cybersecurity." The government has been leaning heavily on American social media companies to disappear content critical of… you guessed it, the government. To keep the king from being insulted too often (or for too long), the government is also exploring undermining website encryption and holding service providers directly (and criminally) responsible for the words and deeds of their users.Another round of amendments has made Thailand's cybersecurity law worse. It seems almost impossible, given its history. And yet here we are, watching as the government gives itself everything it wants, leaving citizens with the dubious privilege of generating tons of data the government can access at will.

We've got a double winner on the insightful side this week, with That One Guy taking the top spot. In first place, it's a long comment arguing that we weren't hard enough on MEP Axel Voss:

It's time for another spotlight on one of the winners from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923. We've already looked at the Best Digital Game and Best Remix, and today we're looking at one of the weirder entries: the winner for Best Deep Cut, Not A Fishby J. Walton.We included the Deep Cut category because we wanted to recognize games that went beyond the "obvious" and well-known candidates from the crop of works that entered the public domain this year, and dig a little deeper into the wealth of 1923 material that doesn't get much attention. And none of the entries dug deeper than Not A Fish, which is based on a pair of science journal articles by one S. F. Light: On Amphioxus and the Discovery of Amphioxus Fisheries in China and Amphioxus Fisheries Near the University of Amoy, China.As you might have guessed, the amphioxus is technically... not a fish. But it is a window into a period of Chinese history, and the social and political implications of colonial scientific practices. The game takes chunks of narrative and information from throughout the scientific papers, weaves them together with elements of traditional Chinese mythology, and turns it all into pieces a free-flowing, exploratory jigsaw puzzle:There aren't many rules — players are simply instructed to begin laying out the puzzle pieces, and forming connections between keywords, at their leisure. The gameplay arises from the many ways in which the pieces can be put together to form a "map", and the challenge of creating a map full of coherent threads — a task that will never quite be 100% complete. Your efforts will lead you to discover interesting and unexpected connections, and a story much deeper than you might expect from a pair of scientific journals about fisheries.You can grab everything you need to print and play from the game's page on Itch, plus don't forget to check out our other winners as well as the many great entries that didn't quite make the cut. We'll be back next week with another spotlight!

There's a very slim chance some New Orleans prosecutors might have to pay for their threats and lies. But a slim chance is better than none. The Orleans Parish DA's office was caught using fake subpoenas to coerce cooperation from witnesses and victims of crimes -- a practice it had engaged in for decades before being hit with multiple complaints and lawsuits.Prosecutors sent out bogus subpoenas -- all bearing the threats of fines and imprisonment -- to hundreds of witnesses over the past several years. None of these were approved by courts overseeing ongoing prosecutions. None of the subpoenas were issued by the Clerk of Courts. The DA's office was simply cranking out fake subpoenas and hoping recipients would be too intimidated by the threat of jail time to question the veracity of the documents.Lawsuits followed the public exposure of this underhanded tactic. One of the lawsuits, filed by a number of crime victims who'd been served the bogus subpoenas, has received the green light to proceed from a federal court in Louisiana. (h/t CJ Ciaramella)Unfortunately, there's a ton of hurdles that need to be overcome by the plaintiffs. If you think qualified immunity shields too much official wrongdoing, just wait until you run up against absolute immunity, which tends to protect those operating above law enforcement's pay grade: prosecutors and judges.Fortunately for the plaintiffs, the crap the DA's office pulled with its fake subpoenas is shady enough to strip away some of this protective layer. As the court notes in its opinion [PDF], the DA's office has never had the power to issue its own subpoenas. That it has been doing exactly this is a serious problem.

California cops hoping to hide their past misdeeds from the public are going to have to get by without the help of the state's highest court. A new law went into effect January 1st, opening up police misconduct records to the public for the first time in the state's history.With few exceptions, law enforcement's response has been to pretend the law's reach doesn't extend retroactively. This runs contrary to the intent of the law as clarified directly to the courts and the state attorney general's office by the law's author, Senator Nancy Skinner.Several lawsuits have been filed -- some by records requesters and some by law enforcement agencies. Both are seeking a declaration from the courts that their side is the right side. So far, two state courts have sided with requesters, stating that the law is retroactive.Just after the law took effect, the Sheriff's Employees' Benefit Association petitioned the state supreme court directly, asking for a ruling on the law's reach. This request was denied by the court without comment, suggesting the state's top court was happy to let the lower courts handle this determination.For a second time, the state supreme court has rejected a premature examination of the law. Scott Shackford at Reason has more details:

James Clapper is going to take his Section 215 lie to his grave. One day after the first Snowden leak exposed the breadth of the NSA's phone metadata program, Sen. Ron Wyden asked the then-Director of National Intelligence if the agency collected data on Americans. Despite published documents clearly showing otherwise, Clapper went with this answer:

This isn't necessarily a big surprise, given that she's suggested this many times over the past few years, but 2020 Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has just laid out her plan for breaking up Amazon, Google and Facebook. It's certainly worth reading to understand where she's coming from, and some of the arguments are worth thinking about -- but much of it does feel like just grandstanding populism in front of the general "anti-big tech" stance, without enough substance behind it.

After years of increasing overseas drone strikes, the Obama administration briefly attempted to salvage its reputation. Having turned countries like Syria and Yemen into the Killingest Places on Earth, Obama drafted a few rules to rein in the use of drones. A charitable take was that he recognized the blowback caused by these strikes, which tended to result in the unintended killing of civilians. A less charitable take is he recognized he might be turning these powers over to the Republicans and wanted to tie them up with restrictions he would have never placed on his own administration.One of the few positive steps Obama took was mandating periodic reporting on drone strikes to assess the amount of collateral damage caused by these attacks, presumably in hopes of further reducing civilian casualties. Obama's executive order instituted yearly reporting that would (eventually) be passed on to the public.

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California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has decided there's too much First Amendment in his state. First, he ignored clarification provided directly to him by the author of the state's new public records law to declare past police misconduct records off limits. Claiming the question of retroactivity was still open, Becerra denied public records requests seeking documents created prior to January 1, 2019.His next potshot at the First Amendment occurred shortly thereafter. Journalists from UC Berkeley received a list of convicted California police officers in response to a records request. The list covered 10 years of convictions and contained 12,000 names. At this point, the journalists have not published the full list. But they have been vetting the list to prep for publication.That's where AG Becerra stepped in. He told the journalists it was illegal for them to possess "confidential information" they obtained lawfully through a public records request. He's wrong, of course. It is not illegal to possess documents received via public records requests even if the government entity has mistakenly sent you the wrong documents.As for the "confidential" claim, any convictions would already be public records, seeing as prosecutions are handled by the state's court system. What the list does is provide one-stop shopping for bad cops, which is what law enforcement agencies are doing when they run applicants against this list.So far, only three officers' names have been published. AG Becerra is trying to ensure those three names are the only ones the public will ever see. If the First Amendment needs to be damaged to protect bad cops, that's a sacrifice he's willing to make.

The late 2017 DOJ announcement that it would be suing to stop AT&T's $86 billion merger with Time Warner turned more than a few heads. While the DOJ insisted that the move was driven entirely by an interest in protecting consumers, the decision was utterly discordant with the Trump administration's often facts-optional assault on consumer protections with bipartisan support, ranging from net neutrality to basic environmental protections. And the DOJ's sudden concern about the impact of media consolidation was in stark contrast to Trump's FCC, where demolishing decades-old media consolidation rules has been a top priority.At the time of the lawsuit, many wondered if some other motivations were really at play. After all, Rupert Murdoch had been pushing Trump for more than a year to scuttle the deal for anti-competitive reasons. Time Warner rejected a News Corp. acquisition offer in 2014, and more recently AT&T rebuffed the company's attempt to buy CNN... twice. Time Warner employees quoted at the time believed Murdoch was the driving motivation for the political pressure to quash the deal:

So we recently wrote about the bizarre situation in the EU whereby the EU Parliament's official Twitter feed had tweeted a pure propaganda video in support of the EU Copyright Directive. This was weird on many levels. First of all, the Copyright Directive has not yet been voted upon, and you would think that the EU Parliament itself should be neutral on the question of whether or not a law should be passed -- especially one with as much controversy as the Copyright Directive. Second, the video was filled with a bunch of blatantly false information (mostly from MEP Axel Voss). It's one thing for the EU Parliament to be promoting a specific outcome on a legislative vote, and it's another altogether to support that with false information delivered by just one MEP. Does the EU Parliament do this on other issues as well? The third oddity, is that the video certainly looked very professionally produced, raising questions of just who put it together.MEP Julia Reda used her position as an MEP to ask those questions of the Parliament and now has the answer. The EU Parliament -- for reasons that are still unclear -- paid Agence France Press (AFP) to produce the video:

In a letter responding to Congressional inquiry, T-Mobile has confirmed that the company dramatically ramped up its patronage of Trump's hotel in DC as it sought regulatory approval of its $26 billion merger with Sprint. A copy of the letter, obtained by the Washington Post, makes it clear that the company spent upwards of $195,000 at the property since it originally announced the telecom industry's latest megadeal last April. That was a dramatic shift from the period of time before the deal was announced:

17 USC 411(a) (part of US Copyright law) states the following:

Twenty years ago, Larry Lessig published the original version of his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. A few years later, he put out a very updated version called Code 2.0. Both versions are classics and important pieces of the history of the internet -- and are especially interesting to look at now that issues of how much "code" is substituting as "law" have become central to so many debates. When the original book was published, in 1999, Mike Godwin wrote a review for a long defunct journal called E-Commerce Law Weekly. Given the importance of these issues today, we're republishing a moderately updated version of Godwin's original 1999 review. It's interesting to view this review through the lens of the past 20 years of history that we now have lived through.Imagine that you could somehow assemble the pioneers of the Internet and the first political theorists of cyberspace in a room and poll them as to what beliefs they have in common. Although there would be lots of heated discussion and no unanimity on any single belief, you might find a majority could get behind something like the following four premises:

Leaked documents obtained by an NBC affiliate show the government has taken a direct interest in journalists and activists covering the many, many happenings at our southern border. But the government isn't interested in keeping them safe or giving them the space to do their jobs. Nope, the CBP has been treating journalists like suspected criminals, hauling them in for hours of questioning and examining the contents of their phones and laptops.Oh well. I guess the First Amendment had a good run.

On Wednesday morning, there was a flurry of discussion and articles concerning Mark Zuckerberg's giant new post, laying out a new strategy for Facebook. Having first read some of the commentary -- nearly all of it someone on the spectrum from "critical" to "mocking," I expected the actual post to have lots of problems, or just be pointlessly vague, like too much of Facebook's public communications over the past few years. However, having read through the whole thing, it's actually a lot more thoughtful, nuanced, and detailed than I expected -- and there's a lot that's important in there that we should be encouraging, rather than mocking. There are still some questions raised, but rather than the kneejerk "but Facebook is pure evil" response some like to default to, I thought it might be useful to look more closely at the different aspects of what Zuckerberg is saying, where it might be really good, where it might be problematic, and where more info is necessary.At the very least, rather than simply attacking absolutely everything that Facebook says, there is value in encouraging steps in the right direction.Messaging Integration:A key part of the announcement is one that was first reported by the NY Times back in January: a plan to integrate the messaging features on Facebook's three key platforms: Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram. From Zuck's post:

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FBI Director Chris Wray is still hoping to sell Americans on trading away their security for a little bit of law enforcement convenience. Wray believes the only way the FBI and other agencies will ever keep up with criminals is to do away with encryption. The "going dark" campaign may have started with Jim Comey, but Wray has proven to be every bit as obtusely tenacious as his predecessor.Wray's latest anti-encryption pep talk occurred at the RSA Conference. CNET reports the FBI director delivered another misguided, but impassioned, speech in defense of making everything worse for everyone but the FBI.

This week House and Senate Democrats introduced new legislation that would formally enshrine net neutrality into law. The bill itself is only three pages long because it simply enshrines the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules into federal legislation, providing formal Congressional approval for the FCC's 2015 effort to declare ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Telecom Act:

Billboard Magazine reliably publishes the views of folks inside the music industry, so a recent column exploring various views regarding Article 13 in the EU Copyright Directive is enlightening. As we've discussed, the record labels released a letter saying that they no longer supported Article 13 because it "no longer meets the objectives" they originally wanted -- which was basically "Google cough up all the money."However, Billboard notes that there's significant disagreement among the three major labels concerning their views on Article 13:

Site-blocking is now officially a thing in many corners of the world, with rightsholders using the court system to restrict access to sites they complain are "pirate" sites. Between that practice and legislation being introduced by many countries in the full throes of regulatory capture, in which moneyed interests convince politicians to protect their own antiquated modes of business over the interests of the every day citizen, the censoring of the internet and the opening of wide avenues of potential abuse are in full swing.But this isn't the case everywhere. In Switzerland, for instance, some specifics in how that country operates have led its courts to do things differently. For one, Switzerland is not a member state of the EU, and so it is not bound by the same rules as most other European nations. In addition to that, Swiss copyright law is such that personal downloading or streaming of content, even if unauthorized, is not illegal. Both of those specifics came to a head when film company Praesens-Film asked the courts to order Swisscom, an ISP, to block what it said are pirate sites. The court refused. Praesens-Film decided to appeal the decision until it eventually reached the Swiss Supreme Court. That court, too, has now refused to order the blocking of pirate sites.

The California legislature handed the public a win by making police misconduct records obtainable through records requests. The transparency very few law enforcement agencies are welcoming is still being litigated, but going forward it seems clear cops will no longer be able to hide their misconduct behind a wall of government-enabled opacity.I guess California legislators believe some sort of transparency equilibrium must be maintained. They've introduced a bill that will make it more difficult for requesters to obtain documents. (via Dave Maass) The bill amends the state's public records law to create another hoop for requesters to jump through before they can get a hold of documents the law says are rightfully theirs.Here's the key amendment:

Lots of people have tried to sum up the differences between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. — but it isn't so easy to hone in on. Nevertheless, it's clear that at least some aspects of the west-coast tech approach could benefit a government that all-too-often appears incapable of accomplishing anything much. This week, we're joined by former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Code For America founder Jennifer Pahlka to discuss what the Hill can learn from the Valley.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.

BlackBerry (under its original name RIM) was always a bit of a patent troll. While it did have some early innovations in the mobile device space, and had popular actual products on the market for a while, it always had a habit of vindictively suing any company that seemed to be offering anything remotely similar to its products. Perhaps the company should have spent more time focused on its actual product rather than suing for patent infringement. Otherwise, its market share chart wouldn't have looked like this, courtesy of Statista:However, now that its business of selling actual products has bottomed out, it's gone back to its earlier focus of suing totally random companies for doing fairly obvious things, and claiming that they violate Blackberry's patents. Last year, we covered its silly lawsuit against Facebook that only got them hit with an equally silly countersuit from Facebook.And now BlackBerry has sued Twitter as well (incredibly, TechCrunch -- and nearly all other publications writing about this -- did not actually post the filing, but you can find it here). The lawsuit is completely silly, and should be embarrassing and shameful for Blackberry and its high priced lawyers (who know better). It claims that it invented "mobile messaging" and that Twitter, as a "latecomer" to the market, has "diverted" people away from Blackberry.

The program considered so "essential" NSA defenders said it couldn't even be slightly modified is apparently no longer in use. During a recent Lawfare podcast, national security advisor Luke Murry dropped a bit of a bombshell. Charlie Savage summarizes Murry's comments:

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What is it with these Canadian "free speech defenders" suing their critics for their free speech? We've already covered the ridiculous lawsuits by Jordan Peterson and Gavin McInnes against some of their critics, and now we can add a lawsuit by Michele Di Franco, whose Twitter profile notes that he is the "VP Finance" for the "uOttawa Students for Free Speech" club.You would think that, as such, Di Franco would recognize that others' free speech might sometimes reflect negatively on him, and be able to take it. But, nope. In January, Michael Bueckert wrote an article on Medium discussing how Doug Ford's government did not appear to consult many actual students in forming a plan to defund many student organizations at universities. Bueckert's article notes that it appears the only students who were consulted were the University of Ottawa Free Speech club, based on a roundtable it held that Doug Ford attended. Bueckert had some significant concerns about this, noting that (1) a club like that is not representatives of students and (2) Di Franco appeared to regularly associate with various individuals and groups whose focus was often on supporting the right to spew bigotry on campus. Bueckert tweeted out his article a bunch, often referring to the "alt-right" and in one case talking about "free speech assholes who are freely giving these white supremacists a paid platform."Di Franco lawyered up, sending a threatening cease and desist, demanding that Bueckert take down the post, stop referring to Di Franco as anything remotely connected to bigotry or the alt-right, provide a written apology and retraction, and pay $2,000 to the lawyers. Bueckert hired some lawyers of his own to respond. It's a good response:

Social media outlets like Twitter have been rightly criticized for being comically inept when it comes to handling hate, hoaxes, and propaganda. But when conversations bubble up on how best to actually solve these issues, social media tends to get the lion's share of the blame for Americans' aggressive susceptibility to bullshit. In many of these conversations, Americans' susceptibility to bullshit is somehow seen as a new phenomenon, and Twitter and Facebook are exclusively to blame for American heads getting filled with gravel and disinformation.In reality, America's gullibility problem goes much deeper, and it's going to take a lot more than some Facebook wrist slaps to actually address it. Case in point: you've probably seen something about the "Momo challenge" hoax that's everywhere. The short version: the hoax claims there's a viral game making the rounds on services like WhatsApp that involves a demonic-looking chicken lady goading young children into acts of violence or even suicide. In the game, images of said bird lady supposedly press kids harder and harder until they engage in violence like some Japanese horror flick.Except there's nothing to the claims; and the photo being used as the cornerstone of the hoax was just an art gallery piece that first bubbled up back in 2016:

As we've been noting recently, the EU really seems to be bending over backwards to pass poorly thought out laws about the internet (sometimes, though not always, with the best of intentions). For example, the GDPR certainly seems to have good intentions behind it, but in practice it has been a disaster in many specific cases, where it seems obvious that those who crafted the law simply ignored warnings about how it would intersect with real world situations -- especially those regarding free speech. Then, of course, there's the EU Copyright Directive and Article 13, where as far as I can tell, the EU is rushing forward with this effort, knowing that it's awful, because the entire point of the law is to be so awful that internet companies are pressured into grovelling before Hollywood not to sue them for violating a law with which it is literally impossible to be in compliance with.Of course, in a bit of irony, at least one German official is recognizing that the intersection of these two laws may, in fact, cause some significant concerns. Despite what supporters have said about Article 13, it will require that most online platforms use upload filters. While supporters insist the law does not say that, when pressed on this issue, they only note that filters are one way to try to comply, and basically say that tech companies might need to "nerd harder" to come up with alternatives. However, in all practicality, this law is a giant government handout to filter companies. Indeed, as we noted, some of the strongest lobbying in favor of Article 13 came from Audible Magic, which is the recognized leading independent upload filtering company (many, many other companies use its technology, with the one major exception being Google, which built its own filtering tech).TorrentFreak points us to a letter to the EU Parliament from Germany's Data Protection Commissioner (basically, the person in charge of enforcing the GDPR), warning that since there are so few filter companies, and Article 13 will more or less mandate their usage, it will raise significant concerns about all the data those companies (really: Audible Magic) will collect on people and their internet habits. The letter was first translated into English by Florian Mueller, who received an official "approval" from the German Federal Commissioner that his translation was accurate.The letter starts off by brushing away the silly claim that Article 13 won't require filters:

If we were ever to hand out some kind of award for a trademark dispute due to both its insanity and longevity, surely that award would go the US Government's attempt to strip the Mongols, a motorcycle gang, of its trademark. This whole thing actually started way back in 2008, with the government arresting several Mongols members for all manner of crimes ranging from extortion to murder. On top of prosecuting these cases and the gang, it requested it be allowed to seize the Mongols trademark on its logo, reasoning that this would allow them to simply strip any members of any biker gear that displayed the logo, even though that isn't what trademark allows one to do. This somehow continued several years later, when the remaining members of the gang claimed the group collectively owned the trademark in question, meaning that the government couldn't simply take control of it.And, amazingly, this whole thing continues to today. It looked for all the world that this case was finally going to wrap up with the trademark being handed over to the US Government. In a jury verdict, the jury had ordered exactly that to happen. To the suprise of many, however, the judge overseeing the case stepped in and disregarded that part of the judgement, arguing that it would violate the First Amendment.

The journalists at St. Louis Public Radio are the latest to dig into their state's asset forfeiture programs. Despite the state receiving a decent grade from the Institute of Justice for the controls it places on state-level forfeitures, the station found plenty of abuse thanks to the federal loophole, which allows law enforcement to bypass all the built-in protections legislators have enacted.

Given the seemingly endless privacy scandals that now engulf the tech and telecom sectors on a near-daily basis, many consumers have flocked to virtual private networks (VPN) to protect and encrypt their data. One study found that VPN use quadrupled between 2016 and 2018 as consumers rushed to protect data in the wake of scandals, breaches, and hacks that historically, neither industry nor government seem particularly interested in seriously addressing.Usually, consumers are flocking to VPNs under the mistaken belief that such tools are a near-mystical panacea, acting as a sort of bullet-proof shield that protects them from any potential privacy violations on the internet. Not only is that not true (ISPs, for example, have a universe of ways to track you anyway), many VPN providers are even less ethical than privacy-scandal-plagued companies or ISPs they're trying to flee from:

Okay, we've got quite a story today about how copyright is a total mess and not really fit for the way the internet works today. It involves a comedian, Miel Bredouw, a short silly (perhaps NSFW) video she made, the asshole dudebros over at Barstool Sports, Twitter and the DMCA. There are so many details to parse out before we get to the lessons to learn from this, so let's take this one step at a time.More than two years ago, in November of 2016, Bredouw made a 36-second video in which she muses on the fact that the well known (and probably NSFW) song Slob on my Knob by Three 6 Mafia, can be sung to the tune of Carol of the Bells, which (as you probably know) is a classic Christmas carol. The video is embedded here, though (again) I warn you that you might not want to watch it at work:Anyway, that video went fairly viral, as one of many videos on YouTube with, um, unique takes on the Three 6 Mafia song.Fast forward to the end of last year, when Barstool Sports enters the picture. We've written about Barstool Sports twice -- and both times involve them being (1) total assholes and (2) totally ignorant or abusive about intellectual property law. If you're not familiar with Barstool Sports, let's just say that it's the kind of work environment where it wouldn't just be okay to watch a video like the one above while at work, but it would likely be encouraged.Anyway, in December, Barstool Sports took Bredouw's now two-year-old video and reposted it to their own Twitter account, without any credit (and certainly suggesting it was a Barstool Sports production). Bredouw tweeted at them that this was uncool. Yesterday, Bredouw then tweeted out a thread about what happened in the intervening two months, and it is quite a story.After Barstool ignored Bredouw's request for credit, she filed a DMCA notice with Twitter, who took the video down. Once the DMCA takedown occurred, Barstool Sports finally reached out to Bredouw with an apology, asking her to "remove that strike" from their account:

Volker Rieck runs a German anti-piracy operation, and over the last year or so has been an increasingly vocal -- if somewhat unhinged -- supporter of Article 13 and the EU Copyright Directive. I won't link, but a few quick Google searches will find some examples of Rieck trying to build out conspiracy theories of big giant American internet companies secretly running the entirety of the anti-Article 13 push in Europe. You could say that some of them dip into red yarn on a corkboard territory. Of course, as we've discussed before, the idea that any attacks on Article 13 are all really because of Google has been a key part of the pro-Article 13 lobbying strategy from the beginning. Of course, as we've highlighted, if you look at the actual lobbying, it's been almost entirely from legacy copyright organizations, with very little coming from the internet industry. This has created all sorts of conspiracy theories, including the crazy claim by a German MEP that he knew the emails he was getting against Article 13 were really astroturf from Google... because many of the senders had Gmail accounts.Rieck's latest move, however, goes into really nutty territory. In a now deleted story, Rieck claimed to have found something of a smoking gun, proving that Article 13 criticism was really being driven by US corporate interests: in a "study" that he helped "conduct," and resulted in him sending an explosive "warning" letter to Members of the EU Parliament, he claimed to have uncovered that "more tweets (88,000) came from Washington (DC) alone than from the entire EU (71,000)." That would certainly be interesting if it were true.The problem with that claim? It's not even close to true. It is based on Rieck not fully understanding the software they used to do this analysis, called Talkwalker. Luca Hammer initially called into question the use of Talkwalker (while our own Glyn Moody had called out another big problem with the data used in the study months ago). But the biggest issue was this: Talkwalker itself admits that if users haven't turned on location tracking on Twitter, then it just "guesses" their location based on a few factors -- with a fallback being language. And, if there are no other indicators of location, Talkwalker will associate all English tweets with being in Washington DC, i.e., the capital of the largest country where English is the primary language.In other words, what looks like a grand conspiracy of a bot sending tweets about EU copyright policy out of the lobbying den of Washington DC, actually appears to be some pro-copyright maximalists completely misunderstanding the tool they were using to do an analysis. Not a good look.Of course, some of the supporters of Article 13, like IMPALA Music have continued tweeting this "study" despite it being totally debunked, but I guess that's to be expected.In the meantime, as law professor Annemarie Bridy correctly points out, even if this is about legislation for the EU, it's crazy to think that people in the US have no stake in the outcome. First off, EU legislation can reach well beyond the borders of the EU and into the US: witness GDPR and the Right to be Forgotten (remember, in France, they've been arguing that the RTBF, as applied in the EU, must be global in nature). Second, as we've seen for decades, copyright maximalists push ever more crazy copyright policies in one region of the world, and then demand "harmonization" elsewhere, pushing that the same rules be applied in other places. Going to Europe to get a crazy copyright law put in place, and then rushing back to the US to demand matching laws is not a new idea. It's literally how we got the DMCA in the first place.So, no, the criticism of Article 13 is not being driven by some sneaky campaign out of Washington DC, but that also doesn't mean that American voices shouldn't be able to participate in a debate that will undoubtedly impact us and the internet we use.

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It's been really quite incredible to see MEP Axel Voss -- the main EU Parliament cheerleader for Articles 11 and 13 -- making the rounds over the past few weeks to insist that all the complaints about the EU Copyright Directive are wrong. Just last week we saw him make incredibly misleading statements about which platforms were impacted by the law, leaving out that the minor exemption only applied to companies less than three years old. And now, his political group in the Parliament, EPP, has put out an astoundingly misleading interview with Voss, which makes claims that make me wonder if he even knows what's in Article 13.

If you haven't noticed by now, big telecom companies aren't particularly good at wandering outside of their core competencies. They've been government-pampered monopolies so long, innovation, creativity, and competition are concepts that are utterly foreign to their underlying genetics.Nowhere has that been more apparent than big telecom's attempt to pivot to streaming and online advertising. Verizon's first foray into media, you'll recall, was a short-lived "tech news" website called Sugarstring, which was quickly shuttered after the telco banned its reporters from discussing subjects like net neutrality or government surveillance. That was followed by a botched joint venture with RedBox. And Verizon's failed Go90 and Oath efforts, which involved mashing together two failed nineties brands (AOL & Yahoo), then pretending that would be enough to do serious battle in the space.AT&T is now following closely in Verizon's footsteps in the wake of its $86 billion merger with Time Warner (and HBO). The company this week made more than a few headlines when news broke that longtime HBO CEO Richard Plepler, responsible for the lion's share of HBO's success over the last 29 years, would be stepping down. The reason? While most news outlets beat around the bush, it's because he had a hard time getting along with hard-headed AT&T executives:

Despite following this stuff for decades, sometimes even I'm surprised at the levels of intellectual dishonesty coming from those supporting bad copyright policy. The latest is that, despite widespread controversy and criticism over Article 13, some in the EU Parliament thought the appropriate strategy was to speed up the timeline to the vote on the Directive -- specifically holding the vote before a massive EU-wide protest that is planned for March 23. Rather than recognize that millions of people across the EU are so up in arms over the problems in Articles 11 and 13, German Member of the EU Parliament, Manfred Weber, the leader of the powerful European People's Party (EPP) simply proposed voting before the protests could even happen.

My home city of Chicago has built quite a reputation for itself to date. It wouldn't be entirely unfair to suggest that the city's government is run by very silly people who think its citizens are quite stupid, while also managing to build something of a kleptocracy centered around professional corruption. With any such hilariously corrupt institutions, the corruption itself is only half the frustration. The other half is the way the Chicago government thumbs its nose at virtually everyone, so secure is it in its knowledge that its corruption will never result in any serious penalty.An example of this can be found in the way the city government responded to an ACLU FOIA request to disclose the vendor Chicago is using to monitor the social media accounts of its own citizens. If you're thinking that such a program sounds dystopian, welcome to Chicago. If you're thinking there's no way that the city should be able to hide that information from its citizens and that it was obviously disclosed publicly somewhere, welcome to Chicago. And if you thought that a FOIA request must surely be all that it would take to get this information to the public, well, you know the rest.