Techdirt

A quick followup to yesterday's post about officials in Peachtree, Georgia looking to pass a resolution that would allow city officials to spend taxpayer money to sue their own critics for defamation. There were all sorts of problems with this... and it appears the taxpayers weren't happy. At the city council meeting last night, lots of those taxpayers made it clear this was a bad idea:

I know that some will argue that "every week" is a bad week for Facebook with regards to privacy, but this week in particular is looking especially awful, with (last I checked!) three "big" stories regarding the company's bad decisions and handling regarding data. Of course, because this is Facebook, I still think the reporting is getting the story a bit wrong. The story that has gotten the most attention is the least concerning, while the ones getting less attention are the real problems.First up is the NBC News story going through a big pile of leaked internal documents from its ongoing lawsuit with app developer Six4Three. If you don't recall, the company, which made a skeezy app to let you find pictures of other people on Facebook wearing bikinis, got mad and sued Facebook when Facebook (finally) realized that maybe it shouldn't give app developers access to so much data, and cut them all off (effectively killing Six4Three's entire ability to operate). Many people reacted to this week's story as if it was some big reveal that Facebook cut favorable data deals with some partners, and that it toyed around with business models selling access to data, but frankly, I don't see all that much that's different from the cache of documents that was released back in December.As I said then, most of the stuff that people are freaking out about appears to be taken out of context. Facebook investigating different business models isn't inherently bad. And many people are framing those discussions completely outside of the context of what Facebook was actually doing at the time or how people viewed the data it had access to. A lot of focus is on the fact that Facebook put a dollar value on the data -- but that doesn't actually mean (as many are suggesting) that it ever planned to "sell the data." It did look at charging app developers to access the data, but that's not a particularly crazy idea -- and one that lots of people discussed at the time, and one that plenty of companies with lots of data use.There are, certainly, reasonable concerns to be raised about Facebook looking to deliberately undermine competitive services via its platform -- and that was the part that most concerned me back in December as possible antitrust violations. But, there doesn't really appear to be that much new on that front. Facebook looks sketchy, but when hasn't it looked sketchy?And, because some will erroneously call me a Facebook shill, let's look at the other two privacy blunders this week because there's nothing redeeming about either of them. Both are straight up awful. They're the kinds of security mistakes that tiny startups with no real understanding of security make. Not something that a company like Facebook should ever make. If you want to be concerned about Facebook and privacy, focus on these two stories that suggest not so much a cavalier attitude towards privacy as an incompetent implementation of basic security practices.First up, Business Insider revealed that Facebook was asking users for their email password and then sucking up all your contacts without asking for permission. While you might wonder what idiot would hand Facebook his or her email password for no obvious reason (a valid question) that doesn't absolve Facebook from even asking. After pressing Facebook on this, the company admitted that it sucked up the email contacts of 1.5 million users this way, and that it's now deleting it.

A leading book summary service for entrepreneurs, executives, and business coaches, Readitfor.me condenses the most important books into twelve-minute summaries that will keep you up to date on the most important trends in the business world. You'll get summaries of best sellers, classic reads, and books that will help you solve specific problems like productivity, tough conversations, management, and more. The one year subscription is on sale for $29.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Back in 2011 DOJ regulators blocked AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile, arguing that that the deal would have harmed consumers and resulted in higher rates by eliminating one of just four major wireless players. That's a pretty easy argument to make, given every time a country allows four wireless carriers to morph into three, the sector gets less competitive and prices go up (see: Ireland or Canada). Blocking the deal wound up being a good thing: T-Mobile went on to be even more disruptive, and has helped introduce a number of consumer-friendly market shifts like cheaper international roaming and the death of long-term contracts.In 2014 T-Mobile and Sprint tried to merge, and regulators (quite correctly) pointed out the deal wouldn't be good for consumers or the market, and blocked it from happening.Fast forward to 2019, and T-Mobile is once again trying to merge with Sprint, hoping to take advantage of the Trump era to finally overcome regulatory scrutiny. Both companies have been telling everyone who'll listen that reducing the total number of competitors will somehow boost competition in the sector. Not too surprisingly, even in this era of blind telecom sector fealty, regulators are having a hard time swallowing this particular pill. Both Reuters and the Wall Street Journal cite DOJ insiders who say that the DOJ isn't likely to approve the deal in its current form:

The First Amendment is getting no help from the nation's highest court. Yet again, the Supreme Court is declining an opportunity to answer a very important question about free speech: where is the dividing line between threats and violent -- but protected -- speech?The Supreme Court already punted on this issue in 2015 with the Elonis v. United States case. In that case, Anthony Elonis posted a bunch of nasty stuff online about his ex-wife. He ended up being jailed for these, with the court finding his posts -- which he claimed were merely him venting in the form of ultraviolent rap lyrics -- constituted threats.His appeal went all the way to the top but the Supreme Court had nothing for him. It did overturn his conviction, but it left the First Amendment question unanswered. The Supreme Court said the trial court adhered to the wrong negligence standard -- one that said Elonis should have known his posts were threatening if any "reasonable person" would find them threatening. The correct standard to use was mens rea, meaning the government needed to prove Elonis knew his posts were illegal (i.e., that they were "genuine threats") when he posted them.As for the First Amendment, the Supreme Court seemed happy to avoid this issue completely. Having decided the wrong standard was used by the trial court, the Supreme Court declared it did not need to hand down an opinion on the First Amendment implications, leading to the mess we're in now, with lower courts drawing disparate conclusions about the line between threats and protected speech.The mess will continue. Pittsburgh rap artist Jamal Knox was jailed for the lyrics of his song "Fuck the Police." An obvious tribute to the 1988 N.W.A. track, Knox's song included the names of two officers that had previously arrested him and some very descriptive violent acts involving them.

Undaunted by the fact that internet filters never actually seem to work, the UK continues its quest to censor the internet of all of its naughty bits.The UK has long implemented porn filters in a bid to restrict anybody under the age of 18 from accessing such content. New age verification controls were also mandated as part of the Digital Economy Act of 2017. But as we've previously noted, the UK government has seen several fits and starts with its proposal as it desperately tries to convince the public and business sectors that the ham-fisted effort is going to actually work. This week the country formally announced that its filter proposal officially now has a start date: July 15.According to the UK government, websites that fail to comply with the country's age verification program face fines up to £250,000, risk being taken offline, or may lose access to payment services:

We've not been shy about pointing out that the recent practice by famous athletes of trademarking their nicknames all seems somewhat silly. The whole thing smacks of some combination of a money-grab over terms often not coined by the athletes themselves, and the kind of protectionism by the famous that is just all the rage these days. A recent incidence of this concerning the trademark application for Luka Doncic's nickname carried with it a twist, however, in that the applicant was not by Doncic himself, but by the Dallas Mavericks, the team for which he plays. The thrust of our post on the matter was roughly: well, that seems kind of shitty. After all, NBA players tend not to play for the same teams forever, though it's worth pointing out that the Mavericks pulled this off with Dirk Nowitzki, so there's that. Still, should Doncic move to another team, what happens to that trademark on his nickname?Mark Cuban appeared to show up in the comments.

Recently, the Greene County (TN) Sheriff's Department spent the day being owned on Twitter. It wasn't necessarily the sheriff's fault. The Tennessee Dept. of General Services decided to show off the Sheriff's armored vehicle, obtained via the Defense Department's 1033 program. This program allows agencies like the GCSD to obtain military equipment so they can ensure the safety of [checks census figures] the 68,000 residents of Greene County.This is the tweet from the Department of General Services that became the landmine under the Sheriff's Department's MRAP's wheels:

What is it with the state of Georgia and its attempts to stifle free speech and a free press? It's the state that argues its official copy of the law is covered by copyright and cannot be posted online. The same state that is currently trying to regulate journalism by creating "ethical standards" they have to follow. The same state that is so bad in responding to public records law that an official was actually criminally charged for it?The latest, as sent in by a few people, is that tonight, Peachtree City, a suburb of Atlanta, is voting on a laughably obviously unconstitutional provision that would allow city officials to file bogus SLAPP suits, using taxpayer funds, against critics. Really. Specifically, the proposal says that the city will provide "coverage for legal expenses when a City official has been defamed in a public media outlet or otherwise slandered or libeled to the public..." It does note that the defamation must be a "valid claim for defamation... under Georgia law." So, one might argue that filing a bogus SLAPP suit wouldn't be covered by this policy -- but it's unclear how that will work.We see bogus defamation lawsuits filed all the time to censor critics, and as a public official, the bar to a successful defamation lawsuit is (for very good reasons) quite high. So, under this proposal, will the city officials have to pay back the city treasury if such a case is tossed out? One would hope that's the case, but the text of the proposal has no language to that effect. The only language is has regarding reimbursement is that if the lawsuit is "settled in the City's favor, the City shall seek reimbursement for the actual legal costs incurred in successful pursuit of the defamation ruling by the person or persons committing the defamation."It has no provision for what happens when it turns out there wasn't defamation and the city just wasted taxpayer funds suing critics who didn't actually defame anyone.It is already dubious that any public official should ever be suing critics -- but to have taxpayers have to foot the bill for SLAPP suits is both deeply obnoxious and unconstitutional, that it seems perfect for Georgia.The city manager, Jon Rorie, is quoted in a few different articles about this, basically making the same extraordinarily bad point

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing last week to discuss the spread of white nationalism, online and offline. The hearing tackled hard questions about how online platforms respond to extremism online and what role, if any, lawmakers should play. The desire for more aggressive moderation policies in the face of horrifying crimes is understandable, particularly in the wake of the recent massacre in New Zealand. But unfortunately, looking to Silicon Valley to be the speech police may do more harm than good.When considering measures to discourage or filter out unwanted activity, platforms must consider how those mechanisms might be abused by bad actors. Similarly, when Congress considers regulating speech on online platforms, it must consider both the First Amendment implications and how its regulations might unintentionally encourage platforms to silence innocent people.Again and again, we’ve seen attempts to more aggressively stamp out hate and extremism online backfire in colossal ways. We’ve seen state actors abuse flagging systems in order to silence their political enemies. We’ve seen platforms inadvertently censor the work of journalists and activists attempting to document human rights atrocities.But there’s a lot platforms can do right now, starting with more transparency and visibility into platforms’ moderation policies. Platforms ought to tell the public what types of unwanted content they are attempting to screen, how they do that screening, and what safeguards are in place to make sure that innocent people—especially those trying to document or respond to violence—aren’t also censored. Rep. Pramila Jayapal urged the witnesses from Google and Facebook to share not just better reports of content removals, but also internal policies and training materials for moderators.Better transparency is not only crucial for helping to minimize the number of people silenced unintentionally; it’s also essential for those working to study and fight hate groups. As the Anti-Defamation League’s Eileen Hershenov noted:

We've talked a lot over the years about the importance of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in helping to create and enable the internet and all of the free speech on the internet. Expect us to continue to talk about it as it is increasingly under attack. Professor Eric Goldman has now released a short, and very worth reading, paper about Section 230, with the provocative title: Why Section 230 Is Better Than the First Amendment. The importance here is that many have argued that CDA 230 and the 1st Amendment go hand in hand. At times, in the past, I've argued that in a reasonable world we shouldn't even need a CDA 230, because the proper application of liability should obviously be with the person posting the law-breaking content, rather than the platform hosting it. But, that was clearly talking about in an idealistic world that does not exist. Given the frequency of lots of people -- plaintiffs, journalists, politicians, and more -- going after platforms for actions of their users, CDA 230's broad immunity is absolutely necessary if we're to have free speech online. Goldman's paper makes this clear:

Unlike other eLearning courses that bog you down with dull voiceovers and boring videos, the Excel Data Analyst Certification School features real, hands-on projects to turn you into an Excel master; and you'll even have access to your own personal mentor to guide you along the way! You'll explore data manipulation, analytics and problem-solving, produce data visualizations and business intel reports, and much more. Complete the bootcamp, and you'll emerge with an interview-ready portfolio and a CPD accredited certification to back up your know-how. It's on sale for $49.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Former FBI director James Comey's move to the private sector has been… well… annoying, if we're honest. After being booted by President Trump for allegedly failing to pledge his fealty to the Oval Office throne, Comey has become a hero of the so-called Resistance. Those lionizing Comey as some sort of truth-to-power speaker seem to have forgotten he ignored everything ever about pre-election propriety to announce his reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, and his years spent trying to undermine encryption.You can take a man out of the FBI, but you can't take the g-man out of the man. Comey may be as unimpressed as many of us are with the current White House leadership, but that only makes him somewhat relatable, not some hero molded from the fires of the long tradition of reshuffling agency leadership with every peaceful transfer of power.Comey will speak to whoever will listen and/or publish his thoughts. He recently spoke at a conference and offered up his limited apologies for the War on Encryption he waged following the San Bernardino shooting.As apologies go, it isn't one. Comey says the only error he made was being a bit too aggressive when seeking to undermine the security of millions of device users. (h/t Riana Pfefferkorn)

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 that have 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:

Okay, let's start with this even higher up this time:

Way back in late 2016, we asked the same question that has been on the minds of all of humanity for eons: who gets to trademark Iceland? If that seems like an odd question to you, perhaps a little context will help. See, Iceland has been a sovereign nation since the early 1900s, whereas Iceland Foods has been a grocery chain in the UK since the 1970s. And, yet, somehow the latter managed to get an EU-wide trademark for the term "Iceland" and then went around bullying companies from Iceland out of using that term in their own names, even when they weren't competing in the grocery marketplace. How did the EU manage to think it would be okay to grant this trademark in the first place, you ask? By not putting a whole lot of thought into it, would be my guess.Well, when Iceland, the country, applied for a trademark for "Inspired by Iceland", only to have it blocked by Iceland Foods, it apparently represented the last straw. Iceland petitioned the EU to invalidate this absurd trademark, leading to reps from Iceland Foods trekking to meet with the nation's officials. The outcome of that meeting was apparently Iceland Foods being totally confused as to why Iceland wasn't just being cool, maaaaan.Well, this story has finally reached its conclusion, and that conclusion is the EU reversing its original error and invalidating the trademark.

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

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

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

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

TREBLAB Z2 Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones feature top-grade, high-performance neodymium-backed 40mm speakers. The Z2s use T-Quiet active noise canceling technology to drown out unwanted background noise and have a signal range of 38 feet. With a 35 hour battery life, you can listen for multiple days between charges. They're on sale for $79.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

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

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

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

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

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

It's time for another special cross-post from a different podcast. Mike was recently a guest on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's So To Speak podcast, for an interview about Techdirt, free speech, content moderation, and a range of other topics. If you didn't catch it there, you can listen to the whole interview here in this week's episode.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

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

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

As a leading networking provider, Cisco's name carries a great deal of weight in the IT scene, and their certifications can be major assets if you're looking to climb the career ladder. Ideal for network video engineers, IP network engineers, and more, the Cisco CCNA Collaboration certification helps you develop and refine your collaboration and video skills with an awareness of how voice, video, data and mobile applications are coming together. This two course bundle will prepare you to ace its two requisite exams. It is on sale for $19.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Raspberry Pi 3B+ Starter Kit is perfect for anybody with an interest in STEM projects. You'll get a new Raspberry Pi 3B+, along with a Sensor Kit that has 37 sensor modules along with instructions for 35 products, allowing you to launch your Raspberry Pi journey. Great for kids and adults alike, this kit will help you build games, robots, tools, and much, much more. It is on sale for $130.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between our smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and the like, we tote around a wide variety of gadgets on the daily. And, keeping them all energized is next to impossible, unless you're willing to lug a tangled mass of chargers wherever you go. Enter SCOUT Portable Charger. Sporting a built-in wall charger, built-in cables, quick-charging USB port, and intelligent charging technology, SCOUT is hands-down a good way to juice up your entire tech collection. It even supports Qi-compatible devices. It is on sale for $40.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.