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Autonomous vehicles are much in the news these days, and seem poised to enter the mainstream soon. One of their key aspects is that they are digital systems -- essentially, computers with wheels. As such they gather and generate huge amounts of data as they move around and interact with their surroundings. This kind of data is increasingly valuable, so an important question poses itself: what should happen to all that information from autonomous vehicles?The issue came up recently in a meeting of the European Parliament's legal affairs committee, which was drawing up a document to summarize its views on autonomous driving in the EU (pdf). It's an area now being explored by the EU with a view to bringing in relevant regulations where they are needed. Topics under consideration include civil liability, data protection, and who gets access to the data produced by autonomous vehicles. On that topic, the Swedish Greens MEP Max Andersson suggested the following amendment (pdf) to the committee's proposed text:

For over a decade, we have been making the point that the internet is a communications platform, not a broadcast medium. This seemingly obvious statement of fact has long been the subject of legacy content provider objections, which is part of what has led to much of the ongoing conflicts centering around intellectual property and digital business models. With big content players feeling control over their content slipping away in the internet, they have attempted to wrestle back that control by pretending the internet is something it isn't. For that reason, it's always a useful thing to point out to examples that remind people that the internet simply isn't a movie theater or television.The latest example of that is provided by, of course, Netflix. Netflix is reportedly working on some new shows that are something of a "choose your adventure" type experience, which is something that traditional television simply isn't capable of.

For years we've talked about how the broadband and cable industry has perfected the use of utterly bogus fees to jack up subscriber bills, a dash of financial creativity it adopted from the banking and airline industries. Countless cable and broadband companies tack on a myriad of completely bogus fees below the line, letting them advertise one rate -- then sock you with a higher rate once your bill actually arrives. These companies will then brag repeatedly about how they haven't raised rates yet this year, when that's almost never actually the case.Despite this gamesmanship occurring for the better part of two decades, nobody ever seems particularly interested in doing much about it. The government tends to see this as little more than creative financing, and when efforts to rein in this bad behavior (which is really false advertising) do pop up, they tend to go nowhere, given this industry's immense lobbying power.The latest case in point: US Rep. Anna Eshoo last week quietly introduced a bill that would require broadband and cable TV providers to include all charges in their advertised price. Eshoo explains the proposal as such in her announcement:

A bipartisan group of New York assembly members has introduced a bill that doesn't appear to have much of a chance at becoming an actual law. But what a bill it is. If it does receive the governor's signature, it would drastically revamp how the NYPD (and other agencies) handle the massive amount of video and data they collect daily.

We've had plenty of stories revolving around content owners and publishers issuing DMCAs over trailers and advertisements. These stories are always head-scratching in one way or another, typically centering around the question of why anyone would ever want to take down free advertising, even imperfect free advertising. We've also seen plenty of examples of content owners accidentally sending DMCA notices over their own content, all of which help to highlight both the flaws in the DMCA process and just how difficult it is for even content owners themselves to know just what is infringing and what isn't.But when these two worlds collide, it becomes something special. We're not yet 100% certain, but it sure looks like Epic Games DMCA'd its own trailer for the upcoming Fortnite Season 6.

For years we've noted how the American press has an absolutely horrible tendency to run guest Op-Eds without disclosing the author's financial conflicts of interest(s). Jesse Jackson, for example, can sometimes be found comparing efforts to bring competition to the cable box to racism in the 60s, without disclosing the cable industry's underlying influence. Similarly, former Representative and fair use champion Rick Boucher can often be found praising CISPA, denying a lack of competition in broadband or attacking net neutrality in Op-Ed pages nationwide on behalf of AT&T with zero disclosure of his real financial motivations.The act of republishing these missives without clearly disclosing financial conflicts of interests isn't just unethical, it pollutes the national discourse, undermines already shaky trust in media, and contributes to a sound wall of disinformation as giant companies try to sell their latest megamerger, pass anti-consumer regulations and legislation, undermine a competitor, or justify terrible behavior.One more recent example of this phenomenon comes courtesy of Boeing, which is being accused of running a covert smear campaign against Space X via media outlets that fail to adequately disclose ulterior financial motives of Op-Ed authors.Back in August, just around the time that Boeing was hyping the company's Starliner spacecraft program, a series of Op-Eds began showing up in newspapers nationwide attacking Space X and its allegedly unsafe fueling practices. The articles, which appeared everywhere from the Houston Chronicle to the Washington Times, all purported to simply be worried about astronaut safety. All were penned by Richard Hagar, who worked for NASA during the Apollo program, but now resides in Tennessee. All implied repeatedly that Space X was ignoring safety standards and putting astronauts at risk.But amusingly, when Ars Technica tried to track down Hagar, they discovered that he didn't actually write the vast majority of the Op-Eds published in countless news outlets nationwide under his name. Instead, the missives were penned by a PR and policy shop with an expertise in astroturf and other disingenuous messaging:

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holy_shit(1).pdf [PDF]:

Despite endless government initiatives and countless promises from the telecom sector, our national robocall hell continues. Robocalls from telemarketers continue to be the subject the FCC receives the most complaints about, and recent data from the Robocall Index indicates that the problem is only getting worse. Consumers continue to be hammered by mortgage interest rate scams, credit card scams, student loan scams, business loan scams, and IRS scams. In September, the group found that 4.4 billion robocalls were placed to consumers at a rate of 147 million per day. The trend is not particularly subtle:The trend continues skyward despite the fact that the FCC passed new rules in 2015 expanding the ability of telecommunication companies to block robocalls and spam messages at the request of customers. And in 2016, the agency created a "robocalling strike force" tasked with crafting solutions for the problem. Additional rules dropped in 2017 taking aim at robocall spoofing.So why is this still a problem? For one thing, cheap, internet-routed calling and spoofing options have outpaced both legal and technical solutions, leaving regulators and lawmakers in a perpetual race to catch up from behind. Flimsy security standards embedded in most caller ID systems also make spoofing phone numbers relatively trivial. Enforcement is also inconsistent (in part because smaller robocallers are often much easier to defeat in court than major companies), and years of apathy, blame shifting, and tap dancing by major carriers like AT&T certainly didn't help.To that end, 34 State attorneys general signed a formal request this week urging the FCC to do more to thwart the problem. Comments made to the FCC make it clear that the FCC's 2017 spoofing rules didn't go far enough, so the AGs are requesting that the FCC create additional, more tailored rules to tackle things like "neighbor spoofing":

The DHS is back in court, arguing for its "right" to expand border searches to cover the entire country. The case in which Homeland Security investigators are making this dubious claim involves the placement of a GPS device on a truck crossing the Canadian border… which FBI agents then tracked all the way down into California.The "bust" carried out in Southern California turned up plenty of legal frozen pastries and four bags of a cocaine-like substances known as regular-ass sugar. The FBI posited this was a trial run for actual drugs and chose to take its collected evidence to court, where it was promptly thrown out by the presiding judge. As the judge saw it, tracking a vehicle inland requires a warrant. The "border exception" to warrant requirements can't be expanded to cover searches performed miles from the 100-mile "Constitution-free zone."The government maintains the judge's opinion is wrong, according to this report by Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica.

A little over a year ago, we discussed how Acushnet, the company that owns brands like Titleist and FootJoy in the golf gear industries, had sued I Made Bogey, a company that created parody golf gear. Crude parodies, at that, with the headlining product being a hat styled after Titleist's famous golf hat that read "Titties" instead of "Titleist." While Acushnet had brought claims of trademark infringement and dilution, we noted at the time both that these claims were fairly specious -- the parody only works in all of this if you are clear on the difference between golf's waspy culture and I Made Bogey's sophmoric take on it -- and that the case would almost certainly be settled out of court. It's not like I Made Bogey had the same gobs of money to throw at the case as Acushnet, after all.Well, it seems like this might be turning into a game of litigious whac-a-mole, as Acushnet has now sued another company pulling the exact same parody and joke, and a whole bunch more.

Over the years we've expressed some concerns about the NonCommercial license option from Creative Commons. Even as we're incredibly supportive of CC, the NonCommercial license often seemed to raise more questions than answers -- to the point that some have argued that it actually harmed CC's brand and resulted in significant confusion for how CC licenses work. There have even been suggestions that CC should drop the NC license option altogether.To its immense credit, people at Creative Commons have appeared to take these concerns quite seriously over the past few years, doing quite a bit of work to try to clarify what NonCommercial means for the purpose of the license. Our specific concern is that NonCommercial could mean all different things to different people. If you're using a NonCommercial CC-licensed image on a personal blog and you have ads on that blog (even if you don't make much money from it) is that non commercial? If you use it in a tweet and your Twitter bio promotes your business is that non commercial?Two years ago we wrote about Creative Commons stepping in to file an amicus brief in a case that raised some specific issues concerning a NonCommercial license. An educational non-profit, Great Minds, sued FedEx over FedEx Office shops photocopying some Great Minds works for educational entities, even though the works were licensed under CC's BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Great Minds argued that because FedEx made money from copying, it's "commercial" and thus in violation of the license. Creative Commons stepped into that lawsuit and explicitly stated that Great Minds interpretation was wrong.In the FedEx case, both the district court and the 2nd Circuit appeals court rejected Great Minds' interpretation and tossed out the lawsuit saying that the license in question did not limit FedEx from charging for copies. Great Minds also filed a nearly identical case against Office Depot in California, which also was dismissed, despite Great Minds claiming that this case is different than the FedEx one (specifically, it argued that Office Depot employees were "actively soliciting" schools to copy Great Minds' works). The court didn't buy it.That case has now been appealed to the 9th Circuit (who, as we've noted all too frequently, mucks up copyright cases). And Creative Commons is back again asking the court if it can file an amicus brief again. This seems like the perfect situation for an amicus brief, given that Creative Commons certainly should understand its licenses the best. The proposed brief is well worth a read.

Starting next year, California law enforcement agencies will finally be subject to a bit more scrutiny and accountability. For years, law enforcement officers have been able to hide misdeeds behind super-restrictive public records laws -- laws so restrictive even law enforcement's best friends (i.e., prosecutors) couldn't see them.For the general public, this meant near total opacity. For criminal defendants, this meant rarely having the chance to impeach an officer's testimony by offering evidence of past misconduct or routine untruthfulness.Over the past few years, efforts have been made to roll back the restrictions built into California's public records laws. All of these efforts died on the way to the governor's desk, most riddled with rhetorical bullets fired by California police unions who claimed making this information public would endanger the lives of bad cops.The status quo -- in place for the last forty years -- is being disrupted. Two bills have been signed by Governor Jerry Brown, creating holes in law enforcement's law-enabled opacity.

Judging by the headlines, there are Russian spies everywhere these days. Of course, Russia routinely denies everything, but its attempts at deflection are growing a little feeble. For example, the UK government identified two men it claimed were responsible for the novichok attack on the Skripals in Salisbury. It said they were agents from GRU, Russia's largest military intelligence agency, and one of several groups authorized to spy for the Russian government. The two men appeared later on Russian television, where they denied they were spies, and insisted they were just lovers of English medieval architecture who were in Salisbury to admire the cathedral's 123-meter spire.More recently, Dutch military intelligence claimed that four officers from GRU had flown into the Netherlands in order to carry out an online attack on the headquarters of the international chemical weapons watchdog that was investigating the Salisbury poisoning. In this case, the Russian government didn't even bother insisting that the men were actually in town to look at Amsterdam's canals. That was probably wise, since a variety of information available online seems to confirm their links to GRU, as the Guardian explained:

Stupid unconstitutional stuff is happening in Texas. "Again?" I hear you ask, irritated but not surprised. "Yes," I repeat. "In Texas, and involving local politicians and law enforcement." "Again?" I hear you say (again) and the circle of commentary life continues uninterrupted.A resident of Hamilton, Texas, posted a political sign in her front yard composed of a white label board remix of political cartoonist Ann Telnaes' remix of the GOP logo.Here's the original:

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If you don't remember, the momentum around FOSTA/SESTA was that it was going nowhere, until suddenly Facebook did an about face and abruptly (and strongly) supported the bill, leading Congress to incorrectly believe that the tech industry now supported the bill. Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, who became the public face of supporting the bill, insisted that there were no problems with the bill, that it wouldn't create any real problems for internet companies, and that it would be useful in the fight against sex trafficking.At the time, we pointed out that under the broad definitions in the law, it certainly appeared that Facebook was potentially violating the bill in multiple ways. Even if it turned out that courts rule that the vague language of FOSTA should be construed much more narrowly, the damage is already done, as some companies will have to battle the issue out in court.And... perhaps not surprisingly... one of the first such cases has been brought against Facebook itself along with Backpage, Backpage's execs and some local motels (hat tip to Eric Goldman). As you can see, it's a "Jane Doe" lawsuit filed against Facebook in Harris County, Texas, and the core of the lawsuit is basically tying Facebook to Backpage:

A few weeks back we noted how Verizon found itself in hot water for throttling the cellular connections of California firefighters as they battled one of the state's biggest wildfires on record. There was nothing surprising about the story, which again highlighted how cellular carriers advertise their connections as "unlimited," then impose all manner of arbitrary and confusing restrictions. Quite often, the restrictions are imposed simply to help Verizon make even more money (like when Verizon effectively banned HD video on its network, then hit its "unlimited" users with charges if they wanted the videos to display as the origin source intended).In the case of the California firefighters, Verizon repeatedly throttled the connection being used by firefighters mobile command center for seemingly no reason and in violation of Verizon's first responder policies. When the firefighters complained to Verizon, the company's first reaction wasn't to immediately understand the gravity of the situation and fix it -- it was to try to upsell them to a more expensive plan during an emergency. As you might expect, Verizon's friends at the FCC saw absolutely no problem with any of this.Hoping to move beyond the scandal, Verizon has released a new ad spotted by Ars Technica in which the company professes its adoration for first responders, and pats itself on the back for heroically helping heroes be, you know, heroic:Verizon was so keen on people adoring it for its adoration of firefighters, the company issued an accompanying press release attempting to drive the point home by proclaiming that "what we do saves lives." Verizon and AT&T have been trying to nab taxpayer funds as part of a bid to shore up nationwide cellular emergency networks after said networks did a face plant on 9-11. This being AT&T and Verizon, those efforts have gone just about as well as you might expect. But Verizon pretty clearly felt the need to try and shore up its image after its assault on net neutrality and first responder fiasco earlier this year.Unsurprisingly, Verizon was forced to shutter the comments on its YouTube video after the public reception was... frosty. The video received more than 20,000 dislikes and was delisted by Verizon in a little under 24 hours after the video was posted. Reddit has also been having a good time lambasting the ad:

The DOJ rounded up the cast and crew from Backpage and threw a 93-count indictment at them. It did this prior to FOSTA's passage -- legislation portrayed as the only way the government could take sites like Backpage down. History is being rewritten to give FOSTA the credit for the Backpage takedown, but the truth is the government didn't need the legislation to target the site. Of course, for all the talk of sex trafficking, sex trafficking is not among the 93 charges the government brought against the site's personnel.Now that it has Backpage execs facing criminal charges, the government is doing what it can to make sure they can't mount a solid defense. The government is coming after their money via civil asset forfeiture, hoping to lock up their property even if it can't lock up the Backpage site runners.The complaint [PDF] -- titled "United States of America v. Various Internet Domain Names" -- claims everything the site's personnel owned was obtained through illegal activity, even if it's likely at least some of the assets are completely unrelated to Backpage's income. It also must be noted these assertions are being made prior to anything being proven in the DOJ's prosecution, but will receive far less scrutiny from the judge making the determination on the ultimate ownership of the property.The complaint also contains a large amount of "surrendered" property, which was apparently handed over voluntarily after the arrest of Backpage execs. This list includes internet detritus such as domain names and bitcoin. There are millions of dollars at stake, scattered across multiple banks located around the world. The DOJ is busy consolidating its purloined fortune in advance of convictions.This is a bullshit, but completely legal, tactic. In addition to depriving the accused of the finances needed to secure solid legal representation, it also forces them to fight a legal battle on two fronts. The money the defendants no longer have access to won't help them find top lawyers willing to take on the government in both criminal and civil actions.In addition, the complaint plays small ball to hoover up funds from accounts in the names of Backpage execs' family members. Sure, the governments wants what's in joint accounts or those controlled by significant others, but the decision to empty personal checking accounts of what appear to be the children of the defendants seems unnecessarily punitive.Here's what listed under Backpage co-founder James Larkin's seizable assets:

Video game addiction as a concept has been tossed around for the past decade or so, with mixed feelings coming from all sides. Disagreement abounds as to whether or not gaming addiction is a real thing, both among medical professionals as well as the public. There's even disagreement among Techdirt writers (disclosure: I don't think it's a thing).But as the concept continues to infect the common public lexicon, it's something we're going to hear more and more about. It's something of a checkpoint, therefore, that the issue has risen to the level of an NHL team instituting a ban on gaming for players while on the road visiting other cities.

Let's get this out of the way upfront: if you're one of those people who pedantically feels the need to sneeringly point out that the economics Nobel is "not a real Nobel Prize," shut up: no one cares.Now, let's get on to the point: for basically the last decade, I've been specifically waiting for Paul Romer to finally win this prize and each year I've been disappointed when someone else did. Finally, this year he won it and did so with William Nordhous, which is even better, as I'll explain shortly. Both Romer and Nordhous have greatly influenced my thinking on many of the things I write about here at Techdirt, specifically when it comes to the economics of innovation, and, more specifically, the economics of information and so-called "non-rivalrous" goods (I prefer to call them "infinite goods"). I've reference Romer multiple times in the past, specifically in discussing how innovation creates economic growth in powerful ways. One of my favorite Romer quotes is as follows:

For this week's episode of the podcast, we're featuring a recent panel discussion from Mozilla's Speaker Series. Mike Masnick sat down with Guillaume Chaslot from Algo Transparency, hosted by Mozilla Fellow in Residence Renée DiResta, to talk about the challenges of online content moderation and its implications for freedom of expression. Enjoy!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.

While California's new net neutrality law grabbed the lion's share of press headlines, the state last week also passed legislation attempting to fix an equally complicated problem: bots. The rise of bots has played a major role in not only helping companies and politicians covertly advertise products or positions, but they've also played a starring role in Russia's disinformation efforts. That in turn has fueled what's often not-entirely-productive paranoia, as users online accuse those they disagree with of being bots, instead of, say, just genuinely terrible but real human beings.Last Sunday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed SB1001, a bill that requires companies or individuals to label any bots clearly as bots. The bill explains the legislation this way:

A stupid law firm supposedly specializing in IP rights enforcement has decided (again!) to jam its dangling appendages into one of the internet's more ferocious hornets' nests. When you're in the business of threatening litigation over hot-linked images (yep), you probably don't pay much attention to the URLs you target.The law firm of Higbee & Associates should know better than to go to this well twice. But it doesn't. Due diligence doesn't seem to be a priority. If it was, some of its "pre-litigation" specialists might have noticed the firm went after Something Awful in 2015 for using an image from Under the Skin in its review of the movie. Obviously, this was fair use and a little bit of web searching turns up multiple uses of the same image, suggesting it had been made available by the studio for promotional purposes.You'd think one failure to turn Something Awful (SA) into an ATM would have been enough for Higbee & Associates. Apparently not. Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka -- having taken over SA's legal department after the departure of Leonard "J" Crabs -- received a demand letter from the law firm over the supposedly unauthorized use of a picture of (go figure) Hitler.The law firm apparently thought the threat letter would result in Kyanka cutting a check to prevent being sued for up to and including $150,000. But the firm's stupidity goes further than simply trying to threaten a site it had failed to threaten successfully in the past. The demand letter references an image not hosted by Something Awful but one posted to a forum thread by an SA member.Here's Kyanka's take on the legal conundrum posed by Higbee's ridiculous letter.

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You'll recall, of course, that prior to the GDPR, there was a big case against Google in the EU that created, out of thin air, a "right to be forgotten" (perhaps, more accurately, "a right to be delinked") saying that for certain classes of information that showed up in Google's search index, it should be treated as personal data that had to be delinked from that user's name as no longer relevant. This never made any sense at all. A search result is not like out-of-date customer database info, yet that's how the Court of Justice in the EU treated it. Unfortunately, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect earlier this year, the "right to be forgotten" was even more officially coded into law. We've noted recently, there have been a few attempts to use the GDPR to delete public information on American sites, and now we at Techdirt have been hit with what appears to be just such an attempt.This particular attempt goes back to some previous attempts under the pre-GDPR "right to be forgotten" setup. We need to dig into the history a bit to understand the details. You see, soon after the floodgates opened on delinking names from Google, we wrote about an article in the NY Times discussing how five of its articles had been delinked via RTBF claims. It was not 100% clear who had made the requests, but we did highlight some of the names and stories, including one where we called the removal "questionable." It involved a NY Times article from 2002 about a legal action by the FTC which went after a group of companies allegedly run by a guy named Thomas Goolnik. The companies -- TLD Network, Quantum Management and TBS Industries -- were accused of "unfair or deceptive acts or practices" by selling domains that did not exist at the time (specifically, they were trying to sell domains using top level domains that did not exist, including .sex, .bet, .brit, and .scot.)The FTC eventually settled with Goolnik and the companies with some significant concessions:

So we've noted for a while now how the U.S. government has deemed Chinese hardware vendor Huawei a nefarious spy for the Chinese government, and largely blackballed it from the U.S. telecom market. From pressuring U.S. carriers to drop plans to sell Huawei phones, to the FCC's decision to ban companies from using Huawei gear if they want to receive federal subsidies, this effort hasn't been subtle. But there's numerous problems with the Trump administration's efforts here, ranging from protectionism to blistering hypocrisy.While it's certainly possible Huawei helps the Chinese government spy on American consumers en masse, nobody has been able to provide a shred of actual public evidence supporting that allegation. That despite an eighteen month investigation by the White House finding no evidence of actual spying on U.S. consumers. Also ignored: the fact that U.S. hardware vendors like Cisco routinely like to hype this threat to scare gullible lawmakers toward protectionism and providing Cisco an unearned advantage in the network and telecom market.Even if you want to ignore those facts and still claim Huawei routinely spies, you'd have to ignore the fact that countless hardware, including gear made by U.S. companies, contains an ocean of Chinese-made parts that could just as easily be used to spy on Americans. The reality is that China doesn't even need Huawei to spy on Americans. The internet of broken things sector alone provides millions of new potential attack vectors annually that are often exploited by intelligence agencies.If you still want to assume Huawei is up to no good without any public evidence, you'd also have to ignore the United States' blistering hypocrisy on this subject, given how Edward Snowden documents revealed that not only did the NSA break into Huawei starting in 2007 to steal source code and implant its own backdoors, but that the agency also intercepted Cisco hardware en route to customer delivery for the same purpose.None of this is to say Huawei doesn't engage in bad behavior like every other telecom industry giant, only to state that we've let nationalism and protectionism get in the way of clear thinking on this subject. Occasionally you'll see a bigger media outlet courageous enough to bring up the fact that the evidence justifying total blackballing is shaky at best, but not often. Even reporters who traditionally chatter at length about objectivity in reporting aren't particularly good at seeing how nationalism can infect a hot take.While the folks pushing this stuff may seriously think they're doing the U.S. a favor by trampling a security threat to help boost Cisco revenues, a filing this week by Huawei argues that the United States is only shooting itself in the foot. By banning carrier access to cheaper Chinese hardware, the government is only driving up prices for domestic network gear, while also potentially slowing U.S. next-gen wireless (5G, or fifth generation) deployment plans:

The lawsuits against social media companies brought by victims of terrorist attacks continue to pile up. So far, though, no one has racked up a win. Certain law firms (1-800-LAW-FIRM and Excolo Law) appear to be making a decent living filing lawsuits they'll never have a chance of winning, but it's not doing much for victims and their families.The lawsuits attempt to route around Section 230 immunity by positing the existence of terrorists on social media platform is exactly the same thing as providing material support for terrorism. But this argument doesn't provide better legal footing. No matter what approach is taken, it's still plaintiffs seeking to hold social media companies directly responsible for violent acts committed by others.Eric Goldman has written about another losing effort involving one of the major players in the Twitter terrorism lawsuit field, Excolo Law. Once again, the plaintiffs don't present any winning arguments. The California federal court doesn't even have to address Section 230 immunity to toss the case. The Anti-Terrorism Act allegations are bad enough to warrant dismissal.Here's what the court has to say about the direct liability arguments:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is John Roddy with a fairly straightforward reply to a tiresome complaint:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, as we discussed how the NSA had essentially built its own "shadow" social network, we learned and then confirmed that the agency was collecting GPS data from mobile phones. A We The People petition calling for a pardon for Ed Snowden was being quietly ignored, while Michael Hayden was joking about putting Snowden on a 'kill list'. We also learned that the NSA was storing all metadata for at least a year, and performing man-in-the-middle attacks with the help of telcos. Plus, it was working hard to compromise Tor, despite James Clapper's claims that they were just trying to "understand" it.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, the House followed the Senate in creating a copyright czar position, even as it let orphan works legislation die and the Senate moved on to more international piracy shaming. Cox was quietly adopting a copyright three strikes policy and lying about it being required by the DMCA, a comprehensive review of the RIAA's lawsuit strategy showed just how much of a failure it was, and The Pirate Bay was launching its own copyright lawsuit to expose the absurdity of the system.Fifteen Years AgoFive years earlier in 2003, in the early days of the RIAA's lawsuits, another 63 people gave in to its shakedown letters this week, while the agency concluded a Senate hearing by promising to at least leave a little time in between the letters and the lawsuits in future — but at least one senator wanted much more substantial change. There was talk about compulsory licensing for music and a lot of questions about how it could be abused depending on how you define "music" — not to mention talk about how the cost of making music was going way, way down. It was also around this time that the practice of bundling TV, internet and phone service was picking up steam.

Here we go. For years I've been talking about how we really need to move the web to a world of protocols instead of platforms. The key concept is that so much of the web has been taken over by internet giants who have built data silos. There are all sorts of problems with this. For one, when those platforms are where the majority of people get their information, it makes them into the arbiters of truth when that should make us quite uncomfortable. Second, it creates a privacy nightmare where hugely valuable data stores are single points of failure for all your data (even when those platforms have strong security, just having so much data held by one source is dangerous). Finally, it really takes us far, far away from the true promise of cloud computing, which was supposed to be a situation where we separated out the data and the application layers and could point multiple applications at the same data. Instead, we got silos where you're relying on a single provider to host both the data and the application (which also raises privacy concerns).Despite some people raising these issues for quite some time, there hasn't been much public discussion of them until just recently (in large part, I believe, driven by the growing worries about how the big platforms have become so powerful). A few companies here or there have been trying to move us towards a world of protocols instead of platforms, and one key project to watch is coming from the inventor of the web himself, Tim Berners-Lee. He had announced his project Solid a while back: an attempt to separate out the data layer, allowing end users to control that data and have much more control over what applications could access it. I've been excited about the project, but just last week I commented to someone that it wasn't clear how much progress had actually been made.Then, last Friday, Berners-Lee announced that he's doubling down on the project, to the point that he's taken a sabbatical from MIT and reduced his involvement with the W3C to focus on a new company to be built around Solid called inrupt. inrupt's new CEO also has a blog post about this, which admittedly comes off as a bit odd. It seems to suggest that the reason to form inrupt was not necessarily that Solid has made a lot of forward progress, but rather than it needs money, and the only way to get some is to set up a company:

Weird stuff is happening in Philadelphia. Things have changed drastically since Larry Krasner became District Attorney. Anyone who enters this office and immediately earns the undying hatred of the local police union is probably someone actually serious about accountability.Right after taking office, DA Krasner secured 33 resignations from prosecutors and staff who weren't willing to get on board with his reform efforts. He went after the bail system, pointing out it did little else but ensure the poorest Philadelphians spent the most time in jail while still presumably innocent. Then he pissed off the police union by daring to tell incoming police cadets force deployment -- especially deadly force -- is a power to be used only when necessary and handled with the utmost of respect.Accountability INTENSIFIES. A bogus pedestrian stop performed by two cops has led to [rubs eyes in disbelief] the arrest of the two cops who performed the stop. (h/t Max Marin)The statement [PDF] issued by the DA's office says two Philly PD officers, Matthew Walsh and Marvin Jones, stopped a citizen for "apparently using narcotics." This citizen filed a complaint, resulting in an Internal Affairs investigation.The narrative delivered by the two cops on their report was undone completely by video obtained by Internal Affairs.

The battle against encryption is being waged around the world by numerous governments, no matter how often experts explain, often quite slowly, that it's a really bad idea. As Techdirt reported back in August, Australia is mounting its own attack against privacy and security in the form of a compelled access law. The pushback there has just taken an interesting turn with the formation of a Alliance for a Safe and Secure Internet:

Way back in 2007, we shook our heads sadly as Motion Picture Academy decided that takedowns over past Oscar clips and a lawsuit against a website, OscarWatch.com, would somehow drive more attention to the current year's Oscar broadcasts because of... reasons? In that case, the MPA was mostly making trademark claims, laughably stating that allowing a site like OscarWatch would confuse the public into thinking that the site was in some way affiliated with the MPA. In actuality, the site was a fan-site that put out analysis of The Oscars and had a nice big disclaimer that it wasn't associated with the MPA right at the top of its site.Ten years later, the organization that manages the Heisman Trophy, college football's most prestigious award, has decided to one-up the MPA by filing a similar suit against HeismanWatch.com, but also tacking on a copyright claim stating that online depictions of the trophy is violating the copyright on the original artwork that is the trophy itself.

We recently wrote about how a guy in France, Michael Francois Bujaldon, was using the GDPR to try to delete a public court docket involving a case in which he is a defendant, and has been sued for real estate and securities fraud. As we noted, at least two websites that host public court dockets have felt compelled to either delete or change that particular docket.Last week, the Free Law Project, who operates the CourtListener website (and runs RECAP -- the very useful system that will help automatically free up costly PACER dockets and documents that other RECAP users visit) noted that it, too, had recently received a GDPR demand about a docket (they do not say if it was the same one) and then go into a detailed description of why they are not taking action. The post notes that the general policy of the site has always been that they won't remove a docket without a court order (though it may remove links from search engines).More importantly, however, the Free Law Project notes that it is not subject to the GDPR:

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Israeli exploit/malware developer NSO Group says its products are marketed to governments for legitimate national security and law enforcement purposes. Yet somehow it keeps ending up in the hands of governments with terrible human rights records and deployed against journalists, dissent groups, and activists.The software sold by NSO is being deployed against journalists in Mexico -- ones looking to expose government corruption. This report by the Columbia Journalism Review provides more details on the hacks, building off Citizen Lab's exposure of NSO's "Pegasus" spyware.

You might recall that when the FCC repealed net neutrality, the agency's open comment period (the only opportunity the public had to voice their concerns) was plagued with all manner of bogus comments and identity fraud. From bots that lifted the identities of dead people to create fake enthusiasm, to the hijacking of legitimate identities (like Senators Jeff Merkley and Pat Toomey, or my own) to forge bogus support. The FCC not only refused to do anything about it, it actively blocked law enforcement efforts to do so. The agency told me there was nothing they could do when my own identity was lifted in this fashion.A year later and a few brave journalists are still trying to find the culprit. Who benefited should be obvious. Who they paid to do the dirty work, less so.And while the fake net neutrality comments got the lion's share of public and media attention, the reality is this is a problem that's been plaguing government proceedings for years. For example, new information obtained via FOIA request highlights how the NFL was involved in sending fake fan comments to the FCC as early as 2014 as the league tried to fight FCC efforts to eliminate the so-called "black out rule," which requires that broadcasters black out certain game broadcasts if real-world attendance doesn't meet the league's liking. It didn't work because the rule was so monumentally stupid, but nobody really seemed to much care about tracking down those responsible:

Techdirt has been writing about China and patents for years. One recurrent theme is that the West is foolish to encourage China to embrace patents more enthusiastically, since the inevitable result will be more Chinese companies suing Western ones for alleged infringement. The second theme -- related to the first -- is that the Chinese government is unwise to use patents as proxies for innovation by offering incentives to its researchers and companies to file for patents. That leads people to file as much as possible, regardless of whether the ideas are original enough to warrant patent protection. One of the surest guides to the value of a patent is whether those who filed for them are willing to pay maintenance fees. Clearly, if patents were really as valuable as many claim they are, there would be no question about paying. An article in Bloomberg reveals how that is working out in China:

In gamer circles, Good Old Games, or GOG, is everybody's favorite go-to retort whenever someone brings up the necessity for DRM. While the platform has always been something of a kid brother to Valve's Steam, GOG has made a name for itself by refusing to allow DRM on any titles it sells and, more importantly, being hyper-engaged with its customers and community and fostering that relationship by being genuinely open and human. What many people might not know, however, is that GOG first started in Europe, trying to figure out how to compete with piracy and the grey market long before it waged its war on DRM.Well, GOG is taking a moment to remind everyone of that fact while celebrating its 10 year anniversary.

Earlier this week, a bunch of organizations -- including Techdirt's own sister organization, the Copia Institute -- announced the launch of a new project, called Future Congress. It's a coalition of organizations, some of whom rarely agree on anything with some of the other members. It is made up of organizations with a variety of political viewpoints and policy ideas. But, this coalition does agree one one thing: we need to stop Congress from being so damn clueless about technology.For many years, we've talked about the unfortunate decision by a Newt Gingrich-led Congress back in the mid-90s to dismantle the Office of Technology Assessment (or OTA). This was the organization that was a non-partisan, careful think tank focused on providing useful technology briefings to anyone in Congress who needed it. And yet, just as technology was becoming central to our every day lives, Congress defunded it (technically, the office still exists on the books, but it has no funding and no staff). Over the years there have been many calls to bring OTA back, and every so often someone in Congress floats a bill... which always gets shot down (the latest was just a few months ago).The goal of the Future Congress coalition is to try to convince Congress to fix this -- for its own good. For many, many, many years now, we've highlighted how every time there's a hearing related to issues regarding technology, nearly all of our elected officials come off looking totally clueless to a degree that is outright embarrassing. They could easily fix this -- in a way that will both stop making them look clueless in front of the world and likely lead to better policy outcomes. Hopefully, they realize this.I will note that last month there were some baby steps towards this, with Congress putting some language into an appropriations bill that fund a study of reviving the OTA while also moving to let the GAO take on some of the work that OTA used to do. It's unclear if this will actually survive or do very much, and Congress should be willing to step up and do much more. Hopefully, this Future Congress coalition will help make it clear to Congress why it should stop being so ignorant on technology -- especially when it has the means to better educate itself.

Spain's speech laws continue to be a nightmare. What started out as merely terrible has progressively gotten worse over the years as the government continues to strip protection from speech for the stupidest of reasons. The country's laws against hate speech have resulted in the prosecution of comedians, artists, and critics of the government. The laws forbidding speech supporting terrorism have seen more of the same locked up as jokes about a politician's assassination were determined to be promoting an "unhealthy humoristic environment" and "justifying terrorism."Yes, the Spanish government gets to decide what's funny in Spain. It also apparently gets to decide how offended followers of certain faiths will be when dead/imaginary religious figures are disparaged on social media. Thanks to Spain's insane laws, a complaint from a religious group is enough to get someone arrested.That someone is an actor and activist who made the mistake of saying nasty things about Jesus and his mom.

Just recently we wrote about how a guy in France, Michael Francois Bujaldon, who had been sued in the US and accused of securities and real estate fraud, had apparently been using the GDPR's right to be forgotten features to get the court docket about this lawsuit deleted from the web (in at least one case) or have his name removed from it (in the other). Our story focused on the situation with the website PlainSite, which is run by Aaron Greenspan and hosts tons of public court dockets. In our comments, it was interesting to note that at least one person seemed hellbent on trashing Greenspan. Greenspan and I have had our own differences throughout the years, and he has been a vocal critic of the way I've covered him in the past, but these comments seemed to go way over the line.And now, Greenspan informs me that someone is trying to get his original tweet -- which alerted me to this abuse of the GDPR to delete public documents -- disappeared from the internet as well. On Wednesday morning Greenspan discovered that both his PlainSite Twitter account and his personal Twitter account were "limited" due to reports. It's unclear why his personal account was limited, but Twitter told him that his original tweet about Bujaldon violated its rules on "posting personal information."It is difficult to see how a tweet that simply reads "French scam artist Michael Francois Bujaldon is using the GDPR to attempt to remove traces of his United States District Court case from the internet. He has already succeeded in compelling PacerMonitor to remove his case. We have 24 hours to respond" (and then links to the PlainSite docket) could possibly violate any Twitter rules, but the company told him he needed to delete the tweet in question:Once again, we're in a situation where if you hand people tools to delete content they dislike -- whether it's a DMCA takedown process, a GDPR "right to be forgotten" or a private platform's "report abuse" button -- some percentage of people are going to abuse that. And, as we've discussed many times, with the private platform decision making process involving overworked, underpaid workers who have to make determinations on each "report" with about 5 seconds to consider the report, many, many mistakes are going to be made. This is yet another one, and is yet another example of why we should be careful about giving people even more tools for deleting content.

The problem with giving law enforcement access to so many databases full of personal info and so many tech tools to fight crime is that, inevitably, these will be abused. This isn't a law enforcement problem, per se. It's a people problem. When the job demands the best people but still needs to maintain minimum staffing levels, things like this happen:

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One of the reasons why I'm so adamant about the negative impacts on free speech from making internet platforms liable for the speech of their users, or even just by pushing for greater and greater content moderation by those platforms, is that this is not a theoretical situation where we have no idea how things will play out. We have reams and reams of evidence, just in the US alone (and plenty outside of the US) by looking at the copyright world. Remember, while CDA 230 makes platforms immune from a civil lawsuit regarding content posted by users or for any moderation choices regarding that content, it exempts intellectual property law (and criminal law). On the copyright side, we have a different regime: DMCA 512. Whereas CDA 230 creates a broad immunity, DMCA 512 creates a narrower "safe harbor" where sites need to meet a list of criteria in order to be eligible for the safe harbor, and those criteria keep getting litigated over and over again. Thus, we have quite a clear parallel universe to look at concerning what happens when you make a platform liable for speech -- even if you include conditions and safe harbors.And it's not good.Corynne McSherry, EFF's legal director has put together an excellent list of five lessons on content moderation from the copyright wars that should be required reading for anyone looking to upset the apple cart of CDA 230. Incredibly, as someone who lives and breathes this stuff every day, it's quite incredible how frequently we hear from people who haven't looked at what happened with copyright, who seem to think that the DMCA's regime is a perfect example of what we should replace CDA 230 with. But... that's only because they have no idea what a complete and total clusterfuck the copyright/DMCA world has been and remains. Let's dig into the lessons:

If you hadn't noticed, the telecom industry has been on a tear lately, completely dismantling most government oversight of its natural monopolies. From killing net neutrality to gutting FCC and state authority to rein in ISP bad behavior, companies like AT&T dream of a future where neither competiton nor even modest regulatory oversight prevent it from its god-given mission to rip off and otherwise overcharge the company's largely captive customer bases.At the same time, AT&T is now part of a coordinated effort between the telecom sector and the Trump administration to saddle Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google with additional regulation while demonizing them as out of control monsters. Why? As AT&T and Comcast push deeper into the online ad industry, they're looking for any advantage they can get against entrenched search and social media giants. And, given their political power, domination of the broadband last mile, and the government's apathy to both problems, those advantages run deep.At the heart of this little stage play sits our national conversation about what new privacy laws might look like. Last week, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing consumer advocates weren't even invited to. Instead, companies with utterly terrible track records of privacy abuses were given starring roles in dictating just what said privacy legislation should look like. That included Facebook but also AT&T, which for weeks has been quick to claim on multiple fronts that it just really, really, loves the idea of comprehensive privacy protections for consumers:

New Zealand's "digital strip searches" of travelers' electronic devices are now backed by law. When we covered this last year, customs officials were already seizing devices and performing invasive searches. But a new twist has been added with the enactment of New Zealand's most recent customs law: compelled password production.

Techdirt has written a number of stories recently about unfortunate developments taking place in the African digital world. The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI ) site has usefully pulled together what's been happening across the continent -- and it doesn't look good:

The Institute for Justice has secured a big win in Philadelphia. The city's asset forfeiture program is being torn down and rebuilt as the result of IJ litigation.