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The FBI uses National Security Letters like regular people use copy paper. It issues thousands of these every year. It works out great for the FBI because it gets to bypass judicial review. If it wants some identifying info, it just writes out its own subpoena, signs it itself, and slaps on an indefinite gag order preventing the company receiving the NSL from informing the targeted users, much less the rest of its customers that the FBI is poking around in its innards.The passage of the USA Freedom Act made things a bit more difficult for the FBI. It now has to review its gag orders periodically to make sure they're still necessary. Of course, the FBI more often than not decides they are and recipients must ask a court to make the final determination.When this happens, the FBI likes to rely on its national security arguments. These arguments also tend to bypass judicial review as many courts are willing to grant the agency deference on these issues, assuming the FBI knows more about the national security implications of lifting a gag order than the courts do.But it doesn't always work. Some courts are probably just tired of the FBI shouting "National security!" every time someone wants to talk about its NSLs. The federal court in the northern district of California is one of these courts. It likely sees far more challenges than any other court in the land, thanks to its coverage of the Silicon Valley. As Nicholas Iovino reports for Courthouse News Service, this FBI request for indefinite silence has been shot down.

A case out of Missouri is highlighting yet again the stupidity and vindictiveness that defines civil asset forfeiture. In January 2017, law enforcement seized $626,000 from two men as they passed through the state on their way to California. According to the state highway patrol, the men presented contradictory stories about their origin, destination, and the plans for the money found during the traffic stop.The complaint filed against the money made a lot of claims about the government's suspicions this was money destined for drug purchases. Supposedly evidence was recovered from seized phones suggested the two men were involved in drug trafficking, utilizing a third person's money. Despite all of this evidence, prosecutors never went after the men. They only went after the money.

While we've been busily pointing out that the practice of copyright trolling is a plague across the globe, it seems there is something of a backlash beginning to build. For far too long, copyright trolls have bent the court system to their business model, with discovery requests and subpoenas allowing them to unmask internet service account holders on the basis of IP addresses, and then using that information to send settlement/threat letters to avoid trials altogether. Put simply, that is the business model of the copyright troll. The backlash against it has been multi-pronged. Canada has begun restricting what types of threat letters trolls can force ISPs to send to their customers, for instance. Elsewhere, Swedish ISPs have have led something of a legislative crusade against copyright trolls. In the US, some courts are finally realizing how bad IP addresses are as evidence, pushing trolls to get something better.But the key to ending the plague of copyright trolling has probably been best outlined in a recent decision by a US Magistrate Judge against Strike 3 Holdings, in which the judge argues using Strike 3's own statistical analysis that it is abusing the court system to the detriment of innocent people.

The topic of what (if anything) to do with Facebook was hardly fading from public discourse anyway, but it received a bump when co-founder Chris Hughes called for the company to be broken up. This week, we've got two returning guests on the podcast with plenty to say on the subject — UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye, and famed internet lawyer Mike Godwin — to discuss the many sides of the Facebook question.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.

Well, here we go again. One of the common themes here over the past few years is how in the digitization of everything, the very meaning of "ownership" and "property" has changed -- and not necessarily in good ways. The latest example: last week Google more or less announced the end of its "Works with Nest" program, as it migrates Nest from a separate entity into the Google mothership, and trying to move other "internet-of-things" devices into the Google Assistant ecosystem instead. As the Verge notes, this will upset a bunch of systems that used to work one way, and no longer will going forward.

The repeated answer to the question, "How does the GDPR work?" is: "Not well." The privacy law enacted by the European Union is a regulatory omnishambles that was first greeted by non-European websites telling Europeans their business was no longer welcome.From there, the convoluted law the EU Commission itself can't even comply with properly has been used to vanish everything from documents on US court dockets to trash cans inside an Ireland post office. When it's not providing new attack vectors to cybercriminals, it's being co-opted by the powerful to control what the public gets to see and hear about them.The latest repurposing of the GDPR into an offensive weapon occurred in the pre-Brexit UK, which may give the royal family a reason for remaining united with the rest of Europe. Britain's literal ruling class has never shied away from dragging publications and paparazzi into court, but this latest case -- involving photos of house being rented by Prince Harry -- has a new GDPR twist.

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Among the many narratives making the rounds these days about how terrible the internet and social media apparently are, one popular trope is the idea that using social media makes people depressed. Just last year there was a study purporting to show that limiting your social media use could limit depression. But that study was conducted by an undergrad at UPenn, based on just 143 other UPenn students. Not exactly the most rigorous of studies. A much more thorough, careful, and methodologically sound study was just released finding little impact on "adolescent life satisfaction" from using social media. The study was conducted by three researchers at Oxford's well-respected Internet Institute, including Professor Andrew Przybylski, who has a history of very thoughtful work in this space. The conclusions suggest that there's perhaps more of a moral panic among some about social media than any actual evidence:

So we've noted several times now how the US efforts to blacklist Huawei from global telecom markets haven't much in the way of, oh, supporting evidence. The Trump administration and FCC have taken all manner of actions to try and blackball the company, 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.The underlying justification for these moves has centered on the idea that Huawei operates as a surveillance extension of the Chinese government, something that still hasn't been proven despite a decade's worth of claims to this effect, and an eighteen month investigation by the White House.That's not to say the Chinese government is an innocent little daisy. Nor is it meant to suggest that it's impossible that Huawei spies on Americans. But the lack of any actual public evidence of spying remains troubling all the same, given that if the shoe were on the other foot, there'd be no shortage of face-fanning consternation on the part of American politicians and industry.Enter Google, which this week decided that it'd be joining the evidence-optional festivities by announcing it would be severing Huawei's Android license. The move forces Huawei to rely on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), cutting it off from critical Google apps and services. The move, as Reuters notes, could prove devastating for one of the nation's biggest smartphone manufacturers:

Kazakhstan police unintentionally helped a protester prove his point. To protest the lack of free speech protections in the country, Aslan Sagutdinov engaged in a physical representation of a thought experiment.

Brexit, as most of you will know, is still a full on mess. And, frankly, it's been a mess since the historic vote was taken and the British public rode a wave of nationalism draped in false promises to decide to economically scuttle their own country. In the nearly three years since, the British government has managed to put on an impressive performance piece on dysfunctional government, managing to refuse to agree on how to actually implement the will of their own people.At the same time that all of this has been going on, some opportunistic folks have been attempting to cash in on the Brexit story by trademarking the term, without even having a plan for how to use those marks. As we've pointed out in past posts, this sort of attempt to cash in is fully annoying, but not illegal. Which makes it sort of strange to watch the EU throw everything against the wall just to see what's sticky enough to deny a UK brewer his trademark for Brexit Beer.Upon first reviewing the application, the EU's IPO denied it on the insane grounds that the term "Brexit" is offensive.

As consecutive heads of the FBI have whined about the general public's increasing ability to keep their devices and personal data secure with encryption, a number of companies have offered tools that make this a moot point. Grayshift -- the manufacturer of phone-cracking tool GrayKey -- has been selling hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of devices to other federal agencies not so insistent the only solution is backdoored encryption.ICE is one of these agencies. It led all federal agencies in phone-cracking expenditures in 2018. It spent $384,000 on these tools last year. It wasn't just ICE. Other agencies like the DEA and [checks notes] the Food and Drug Administration have also purchased these devices. But ICE led the pack, most likely because ICE -- along with DHS counterpart CBP -- are engaging in more suspicionless, warrantless device searches than ever.When you don't have a warrant or consent, a third-party tool that can undermine device encryption is the next best thing. ICE must have a lot of phones to search -- or plans on amping up its search count -- because it's more than doubled its spending on GrayKey devices alone. Thomas Brewster of Forbes has more details.

In another judicial rarity, a magistrate judge has rejected a warrant request by the federal government to compel a criminal suspect to unlock a phone found during the search of his residence. It won't set precedent but it does present some arguments suspects will find useful when faced with orders for compelled production of passcodes or passwords.Earlier this year, a California magistrate came to the same conclusion, finding that compelled production of fingerprints or faces to unlock phones violated the Fifth Amendment rights of the suspects targeted by the warrant. Equating biometric security features with passwords, the judge denied the warrant request, stating that if it's a Fifth Amendment violation to compel password production, it's a Fifth Amendment violation to force someone to apply their fingerprints to a locked device.The device in this case is apparently secured by a swipe pattern. This would require more input from the suspect than simply applying a finger to the device. The court finds [PDF] that this act would be testimonial -- covered by Fifth Amendment protections against self-implication. But it goes further, finding that attempting to violate Fifth Amendment rights causes violations of Fourth Amendment rights.

Like we said, Intuit apparently wants to keep digging this hole for itself. After our initial coverage of ProPublica's excellent posts on how Intuit was going to crazy lengths to keep anyone from finding its free to file tax prep site, we followed up with reports of how many Intuit reps were lying to keep from giving people refunds. Those lies included claims that Intuit and TurboTax don't even run the free to file program and that it was instead operated by the IRS itself with TurboTax branding. Another lie was that ProPublica's reporting was all wrong and that the news organization was about to run a retraction. Spoiler alert: no they are not.But it seems that the Intuit brass aren't content only to lie to the public. Intuit's CEO managed to cobble together an internal video -- which of course leaked -- so that he could lie to his own staff as well.

It appears Intuit has decided to make things worse rather than better. Just after tax season, we discussed ProPublica's excellent research article on the extreme lengths Intuit had gone to keep its Free File service an unknown to the public. This service is the result of an agreement the top tax prep companies out there reached with the IRS. Essentially, by promising to allow members of the public that earn under a certain amount of money to use their services to file their taxes for free, the IRS in turn has agreed not to pursue its own free to file service. It's an extremely dumb deal for any number of reasons, one of which being how much more efficient it would be for the IRS to carry the weight here, given that it already has all the information most taxpayers need to file.The other reason, as it turns out, is because Intuit has decided to behave pretty much as cynically as it possibly can. As we detailed in our previous post, the company engaged in a strategy coupling the buying of ads for Google searches and hiding the free to file via the robot.txt file. As a result, something like 3% of eligible taxpayers file for free using the system, while Intuit set up a layer of websites and landing pages all designed to direct the public to paid services, without ever telling them they qualified for free to file tax prep.As a result of the ProPublica post, many who paid for these services called up Intuit and asked for refunds. If you thought that this public light on shady behavior would lead to an attitude adjustment for Intuit, you're sadly mistaken.

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Just last week, we talked about the new Christchurch Call, and how a bunch of governments and social media companies have made some vague agreements to try to limit and take down "extremist" content. As we pointed out last week, however, there appeared to be little to no exploration by those involved in how such a program might backfire and hide content that is otherwise important.We've been making this point for many, many years, but every time people freak out about "terrorist content" on social media sites and demand that it gets deleted, what really ends up happening is that evidence of war crimes gets deleted as well. This is not an "accident" or such systems misapplied, this is the simple fact that terrorist propaganda often is important evidence of war crimes. It's things like this that make the idea of the EU's upcoming Terrorist Content Regulation so destructive. You can't demand that terrorist propaganda get taken down without also removing important historical evidence.It appears that more and more people are finally starting to come to grips with this. The Atlantic recently had an article bemoaning the fact that tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes, highlighting how such videos have actually been really useful in tracking down terrorists, so long as people can watch them before they get deleted.

We've noted for a while how a lot of the US protectionist security hysteria surrounding Huawei isn't supported by much in the way of hard data. And while it's certainly possible that Huawei helps the Chinese government spy, the reality is that Chinese (or any other) intelligence services don't really need to rely on Huawei to spy on the American public. Why? Because people around the world keep connecting millions of internet of broken things devices to their home and business networks that lack even the most rudimentary of security and privacy protections.Week after week we've documented how these devices are being built with both privacy and security as a distant afterthought, resulting in everything from your television to your refrigerator creating both new attack vectors and wonderful new surveillance opportunities for hackers and state actors.The latest case in point: a popular Chinese GPS tracker, used to track everything from vehicles to kids and the elderly, has been found to contain a significant flaw that can trick the device into handing over GPS data using little more than a text message. The devices, which are made in China and rebranded and sold by more than a dozen companies, can also be used as remote surveillance devices, notes cybersecurity researchers:

At the heart of patents lies a quid pro quo. In return for a time-limited, government-backed intellectual monopoly, companies place their inventions in the public domain after the patent has expired. The theory is that granting patents encourages innovation, although there is plenty of evidence that it doesn't. In the world of drugs, this approach is supposed to allow other pharmaceutical companies to produce generics -- low-cost versions of drugs -- once they are off patent. People benefit because they can buy drugs at much cheaper prices than when they were still under patent.But as Techdirt has reported, for many years, Big Pharma companies around the world have been trying to renege on that deal with society. One of the main ways is through "pay for delay" schemes. A drug company holding an expired patent buys off manufacturers of generics so that it can continue to enjoy monopoly pricing. A new lawsuit brought by 44 states suggests another way Big Pharma may have been cheating the public. It alleges that top pharmaceutical companies, including Teva, Pfizer, Novartis and Mylan, conspired to inflate the prices of over 100 generic drugs by as much as 1000%:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a very simple anonymous response to a lengthy complaint about Section 230:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, we took a look at how the administration's terrible track record on transparency had made lawsuits a default part of the FOIA process, and got an example of how FOIA requests were resulting in agencies sharing less information than they would otherwise. Congress was busy pretending SOPA was actually the law even though it wasn't, the DOJ was trying to downplay its lies to the Supreme Court while also arguing that Americans have no fourth amendment protections for communication with foreigners. Meanwhile, a dangerous court ruling affirmed Europe's right to be forgotten and, predictably, opened the floodgates for abuse. We were also fresh off the Google/Oracle ruling declaring APIs to be copyrightable, which spurred Automattic to pledge that it will not claim such copyright.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, we learned that the recently-discovered fake medial journal published by Elsevier to boost Merck products was not at all an isolated incident. We also saw the beginning of an incredibly important lawsuit that would eventually invalidate the patenting of isolated genes, as the ACLU teamed up with cancer patients to sue Myriad Genetics. It was a question that should have been addressed much earlier.Meanwhile, Sony's CEO was admitting the company should have taken a more "open" approach to digital music, but they comments were pretty similar to what he'd said years earlier, and the CEO of Sony Pictures was almost simultaneously out saying he thinks no good has come from the internet, at all, period. Universal and YouTube were working on their collaboration to create Vevo, Jammie Thomas refused to settle with the RIAA, and France finally approved its three strikes system for copyright infringement — an approach with problems well illustrated by Ed Felten's modest proposal about applying it to print media as well.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, phone networks were still being stupidly hesitant about selling phones with WiFi because they viewed it as a threat instead of an opportunity, much like newspapers did with text messaging. TiVo was fighting to regain some dominance in the DVR market, IBM was making an early foray into web-based office software suites, and an enterprising scammer bilked several people who should have known better out of millions of dollars by telling gibberish lies about moneymaking opportunities tied to a Google IPO. The press was still misreporting fines for distributing music online as fines for downloading, while the creator of a Japanese file sharing system was worryingly arrested for abetting copyright infringement. And, with the school year nearing its end, we got a handful of stories about students getting in serious trouble, and even arrested, for trying to hack their grades.

If you hadn't noticed by now, Trump and Paul Ryan's once-heralded Foxconn factory deal in Wisconsin quickly devolved into farce. The state originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a $3 billion state subsidy if the company invested $10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew to $4.5 billion the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where nobody at this point is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.Reports last fall detailed the ever-shrinking nature of the deal, highlighting how Foxconn was using nonsense to justify its failure to follow through, showing that while the company hadn't built much of anything meaningful in the state, it was still routinely promising to deploy a "AI 8K+5G ecosystem" in the state to somehow make everything better. Those empty buzzwords were accompanied by the promise of fully staffed "innovation centers" around the state.Back in March, reporters visited many of these innovation centers scattered around Wisconsin and found them to be largely empty. Apparently not liking the bad press, Foxconn executives like Alan Yeung attempted to claim that these centers were in fact not empty and that the reports contained “a lot of inaccuracies." But according to locals in the state these supposed innovation centers are, you'll perhaps be shocked to learn, still empty:

Everything about the botched no-knock raid by the Houston Police Department just keeps getting worse. Here's how everything has gone down so far:

We welcome the city of San Francisco’s decision to ban the use of AI-enabled facial recognition technology by police and other municipal agencies. Facial recognition technology is prone to misidentification and biased targeting, particularly among members of vulnerable communities. It also opens the door to intrusive surveillance -- beyond the scope of existing technology. Until the technology improves to avoid such harms, its use should be heavily restricted. And even with improvements, the public must confront tough questions about how closely governments should monitor their behavior.Regrettably, global trends are headed in a reverse direction from San Francisco’s decision. From Azerbaijan to Singapore, governments are enthusiastically embracing facial recognition technology. Led by China, such systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Facial recognition has been incorporated into smart city platforms. Cities are placing them on public lampposts and integrating them into security operations centers. While there is greater public awareness of China’s surveillance strategy – particularly its establishment of artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition repression in Xinjiang -- few realize that numerous other countries are developing facial recognition capabilities as well.This is particularly problematic in countries that lack basic rule of law protections and are already committing major human rights abuses. In countries such as Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, facial recognition is a dangerous tool that further augments those governments’ arsenals of digital repression by giving them an enhanced capacity to deploy targeted monitoring in public places, to track and harass dissidents and opposition figures at will, and to suppress democratic political activity.But even in democracies like the United States, government use of facial recognition technology, in its current form, corrodes civil rights and civil liberties because its errors disproportionately impact vulnerable communities. Astudy published earlier this year by MIT’s Media Lab, for instance, found that Amazon’s facial recognition software, which the company has peddled to police departments and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more frequently misidentified an individual’s gender if they were female or dark-skinned.Concerned about such disparities, San Francisco’s decision prohibits municipal agencies from using facial recognition technology except at federal facilities like the airport. Taken under the Stop Secret Surveillance ordinance, municipal agencies must also seek approval for any new surveillance technology they want to acquire. The decision passed 8-1 with overwhelming public support.Even for a state like California that prides itself on trailblazing legislation (among many ‘firsts’, California led the way in requiring that corporate boards include women and enacting a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program), San Francisco’s decision is extraordinary. Most of the current commentary points out that San Francisco is the first American city to ban government use of facial recognition technology. However to our knowledge, it’s not just the first American city to do so-- it’s the first city in the world; a feat made only more remarkable by the city’s position as the seat of technological innovation -- a rare instance of Silicon Valley putting values ahead of profits.San Francisco’s decision also has important international implications. Facial recognition surveillance remains relatively nascent in most countries. While governments are interested in expanding their use of it, few states are deploying facial recognition at scale…yet. The world still has an opportunity to institute global safeguards and norms to shape how governments use facial recognition.San Francisco’s ban is receiving widespread attention. We sincerely hope that this attention will lead to technological innovations that fix facial recognition’s bias problem and, notwithstanding such improvements, a healthy public discourse about facial recognition’s repressive potential.Charlotte Stanton is a fellow in the technology and international affairs program and the director of the Silicon Valley office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Steven Feldstein is a non-resident fellow in Carnegie’s democracy, conflict, and governance program and the Frank and Bethine Church Chair of Public Affairs and Associate Professor in the School of Public Service at Boise State University.

Oh Canada. Not satisfied with a ridiculous plan to fine social media companies for ill-defined "fake news," a Canadian Parliamentary Committee has come out with one of the most laughable copyright reform papers I've ever seen. And I've seen some crazy ones. I'd post the whole report here, but the report itself warns that doing so might violate its copyright, and really, how could the Parliament be incentivized to create fantasy stories masquerading as copyright reform proposals without copyright?Michael Geist provides the bizarre background on the origination of this report:

Click Here to Support TechdirtIt's possible that some of you saw the news earlier this week that the legal dispute, in which Shiva Ayyadurai sued us for defamation over 14 posts on Techdirt, has been settled. Many people -- including lawyers I know -- had been under the impression that this case ended a long time ago, but it has actually continued for nearly two and a half years. As you may recall, back in September of 2017, the district court dismissed the case, largely on First Amendment grounds, saying that everything we wrote about Ayyadurai was protected speech. Unfortunately, the court did not accept our argument that California’s anti-SLAPP law should apply, which would have allowed us to recover our legal fees.Ayyadurai appealed this dismissal, and we cross-appealed the anti-SLAPP question. For the past 18 months, we have held ongoing negotiations to settle the case, which concluded with the announcement earlier this week. The settlement is that we agreed to add links on the articles at issue, to a statement on one of Ayyadurai's sites that he says is a response to our articles. No money exchanged hands. We found the terms of this settlement acceptable, as basically all of our posts were linking to and responding to Ayyadurai's claims in the first place, so, if he wants to repeat those claims, he is more than free to do so. We have no interest in silencing anyone. We continue to stand by everything that we wrote about those claims, and suggest that you read our posts as well.You may wonder how it could possibly take 18 months to negotiate a settlement about adding links to old articles -- and, indeed, I wonder that myself. The entire process has been quite a pain for us. I cannot and would not describe this result as a victory, because this has been nearly two and a half years of wasted time, effort, resources, attention and money just to defend our right to report on a public figure and explain to the world that we do not believe his claims to have invented email are correct, based on reams of evidence.During those 18 months, we stopped all the fundraising we had done around the lawsuit, as, for nearly all of that time, it did appear that a settlement was close, and we did not wish to mislead anyone into believing that we were raising money on the premise that our continued existence was in grave danger only to settle the case immediately after doing so. We did not, in any way, expect this process to drag out this long, and we now have significant legal and other bills that we still have to pay. We are glad the lawsuit is done, but we now need to ask for your support. If we are able to raise more than our bills, any excess will go towards our ongoing reporting. If you would prefer to support us in other ways -- including via Patreon or in exchange for t-shirts and other merch, all the various options are available to check out here.We are glad this chapter is behind us, and we have a bunch of other plans that we've been working on, which we hope we can now focus on without this major distraction.Separately, we would like to give a tremendous thank you to our legal team at Prince Lobel Tye, mainly Rob Bertsche and Jeff Pyle, who were truly wonderful partners through this harrowing experience. While I personally hope to never require their services again -- for anyone on the receiving end of this kind of lawsuit, I cannot recommend them more. I'd also like to say thank you to Chris Bavitz at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society for his help and support.Contribute to the Techdirt Survival Fund and help us recover from this legal fight »

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Oh good. Now Canada wants in on the "fake news" action.

In 2012, the Supreme Court decided that GPS tracking devices require warrants. Notably, this wasn't because the GPS data was deserving of Fourth Amendment protections but because officers had to trespass on private property (a car parked in a driveway) to attach the device.That left law enforcement with a lot a gray area in which to operate. Since there was no distinct finding that GPS data was protected, it could theoretically be harvested from third-party devices without a warrant. The Supreme Court's decision in the Carpenter case, however, appeared to extend protections to the records themselves. It declared the acquisition of cell site location info requires the use of the warrant, extending Fourth Amendment protections to third party records of people's movements. It could be argued this decision covers GPS data pulled from third party services, since it's basically the same thing: gathering records of a person's movements.In a recent federal case [PDF], both of these Supreme Court decisions are in play. It appears law enforcement thought it had found a way to route around the Jones decision. Investigating a robbery, detectives approached the dealership that had sold the vehicle spotted at the scene of the crime. The dealership had installed a tracking device to make the car easier to find in case of a repo. This was the data detectives obtained without a warrant.

The digital rights group Privacy International has won a major victory against UK government surveillance after a five-year legal battle. One of the many shocking revelations of Edward Snowden was that the UK security and intelligence services break into computers and mobile phones on a massive scale. Privacy International challenged this "bulk" surveillance at the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the "judicial body which operates independently of government to provide a right of redress for anyone who believes they have been a victim of unlawful action by a public authority using covert investigative techniques". In February 2016, the IPT dismissed Privacy International's challenge, ruling that:

It's no secret that Disney is almost solely responsible for the wild expansion of copyright law that has occurred over the course of decades. In addition to the near constant lobbying for longer copyright term lengths and a heavy-handed approach to enforcement, Disney has also found itself attempting to assert copyright in areas of broad ideas rather than literal copying. Perhaps to some, then, it was a shot of schadenfreude to watch Disney face its own lawsuit brought by screenwriters over its Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Way back in 2000, two writers and a producer pitched a script about pirate Davy Jones to Disney, which the company ultimate rejected. In 2004, Disney released the first of its own Pirates movies starring Johnny Depp.But no amount of just desserts ought to change the legal principles in copyright law, so it's still a good thing to see that the court has struck down the copyright suit on the grounds that the scripts aren't actually similar, aside from some non-protectable ideas, rather than explicit expression. We can start with the purported similarities brought by producer Tova Laiter, which should immediately stand out to you as not protected by copyright law.

"I got a recording. I got a recording of this idiot." A Scandinavian-accented voice declares over voice chat. "Can someone tell the people from [the other player's guild] what he just did?"That was the subject of a Reddit post giving a "daily reminder that Sharphealz is a ninja." Instead of shuriken-wielding shadow warriors, "ninja" is here slang for a thief of valuable in-game items. The above video was taken from a private World of Warcaft (WoW) server, emulating the 2006 iteration of the popular online game, soon to be officially re-released by Blizzard as World of Warcraft Classic. Yet, the bootleg version of the massively-multiplayer icon is a special beast beyond just game mechanics. Some of its core social dynamics serve as excellent - if accidental - microcosms of real-world phenomena.These servers are third-party clones of proprietary software, and hence are of questionable legality. Taking advantage of spotty IP protections, most are hosted overseas - in Russia, for example. They are typically organized into non-profit "projects," or amateur initiatives to create versions of the 2006 iteration of the game. Each private server project hosts at least a couple of "realms" or instances of the game world in which players can interact.Most large private servers carry thousands of people, and tend to be radically weighted towards a single primary realm in population. Players from around the world fight, banter, organize and develop a virtual social system in their free time. It is a fairly close-knit group, but only lightly moderated by volunteer Game Masters. Players themselves must play a role in this community moderation if they wish to coexist productively.The mixture of old-school WoW's original quirks, private servers' laissez-faire ethos, and their small but dense populations render them petri dishes for "natural" social experiments. At issue is how near-total strangers are able to make their own rules and institutions, and cooperate effectively and on the fly for common rewards.Servers may have their share of delinquents - okay, a large share - but the anarchy is more orderly than you'd anticipate, given the difficulty of developer-side rule enforcement. In fact, the conditions that allow for unplanned cooperation among strangers are extremely important topics among the big debates in social sciences and public policy. Political scientist Mancur Olson identified problems in the real world in which individuals' conflicting interests impede common goals as "collective action problems." Concern with such dilemmas dates back to philosophers David Hume and Thomas Hobbes.One of the largest and most consequential collective action problems is the "Player vs. Environment" (PvE) raiding scene in the game. Old-school WoW has several large "raid" dungeons pitting 20 and 40-player teams against powerful computer-controlled monsters. These encounters are typically the most difficult end-game challenges, but also the most rewarding. Not only is the loot found within among the best around, but "raid gear" confers a sort of prestige, and obviously, we all want to saunter around Ironforge with shinier stuff than the next guy.So there's huge incentive to raid, but you might have to spend often upwards of six hours in the crucible of high-end PvE with 39 other people, many of whom desperately want the same valuable stuff you do. They are also probably total strangers.That's basically what Blizzard left us with in 2004, and it sounds like a powderkeg of potential disputes over who deserves loot, or whom is at fault for getting everyone killed. Yet, players have overcome these challenges, using a variety of creative avenues.With nobody officially in charge at the outset, leaders come out of the woodwork to direct these complex operations. Some raid leaders do it for the joy of accomplishing something difficult or for the bragging rights provided by a "server first" boss kill, while some experienced players may behave entrepreneurially by putting together raids for in-game money. In a scenario of mutual efforts but uncertain, scarce rewards, one of the first things that must emerge is a rule system. This is a de facto necessity - even "first-come-first-serve" is a rule system. Since the infancy of this gaming genre, enterprising players have invented various systems of their own, with no one system being "official." It's a marketplace of institutions in which players converge on the rulesets that that benefit them most.Eventually, a few dominant systems rose from the massively-multiplayer gaming community. The iconic DKP system is a points-currency scheme, where players receive "Dragon Kill Points" for participating in raids, which they can save or spend in player-organized auctions for loot, whereas "gold-bid" systems use in-game currency (the proceeds of which often provide income for those "entrepreneurial" leaders).Most raids, especially informal pick-up-groups, tend towards "Need Before Greed" (NBG) systems. Players can roll the virtual dice against each other for items their characters genuinely need for advancement, as opposed to items that are more of a luxury. Since what constitutes real need is frequently disputable, secondary rule systems dictating priority in cases of competing claims on a given item may crop up in NBG raids as well.Sometimes new, influential raiders can introduce rule schemes. On one server, the status quo consisted mostly of Need Before Greed and auctions, but after a merge with another server, a large influx of experienced raiders became the new kids on the block. Having many successful dungeon runs under their belt, they imported the "Wishlist" system, in which each raider may reserve one item for themselves. If multiple players reserve the same item, they then roll the dice on it. The efficiency of this idea soon became obvious, and within a few weeks Wishlist (and the players that imported it) took over the raiding scene.Joining a raid group is a significant investment, in time, effort and in-game resources. Players are putting a lot on the line, and expected rewards can be highly uncertain. Given this investment risk, players have sought out means to ensure not only the use of fair loot rules, but institutional mechanisms to make sure they can complete the dungeons regularly and smoothly. Hardcore raiders' best tool for this is the game's Guild system, offering built-in organizational features such as a common chat channel and active roster of members. A competent raiding guild offers members a chance to clear dungeons in an organized manner with skilled leadership, and to win items in a loot system that is reliable and fair.Like "Sharphealz," the ninja looter in the video, there is a strong incentive to abscond with others' items, or to just coast on everyone else's efforts in the heat of battle. To hedge against this behavior, guilds offer ingredients to reduce the likelihood of cheating: longevity and reliability, accountability, as well as simple bonds of friendship. Guilds frequently expel members who violate rules or behave boorishly, and a player without a guild is one at a big disadvantage. A player can get to know and care for their guildmates' welfare, and everyday social interaction builds rapport between members. It's tough enough to be kicked from a guild, tougher still to lose your in-game friends.The accountability mechanisms within guilds rely heavily on reputation, much like within the broader game community. Since the vast majority of players are stuck on the same realm, and the community is fairly small, informal social sanctions provide punishment for rulebreaking. Sharphealz' widely shared video provides documentation of his crimes, and it cemented the player's reputation as a troublemaker for quite some time. It is not uncommon to hear public shaming in the game's chatbox, marking various players as cheaters or slackers. A person with a bad reputation doesn't get invited to groups - a big handicap in an inherently collaborative environment. Indeed, many hotly contest public accusations for this reason.There are, of course, "troll" players who thrive on infamy. The original ninja looting video was recorded by the thief himself. Indeed, a side effect of this melting pot of a server is that although players may cooperate to achieve certain gameplay goals, large strains of animosity and angry flare-ups run through the community. Many raiding guilds keep "blacklists" of prohibited players for this reason, while others collapse from their own internal strife. Some particularly frustrating raid encounters are wryly dubbed "guild-breakers" for their propensity to spark conflict.What is clear from the common problem of raid organization is that players can figure it out naturally, overcoming complex challenges of focus and coordination as a hobby. They jerry-rig institutions to provide accountability and avoid disputes, as well as to bring people together in the first place.The power of community networks, anticipation of future opportunities, and high-value payoffs influences our behavior on Earth in myriad ways, and there is no reason why it would be otherwise on Azeroth.Anne Hobson is a program manager at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Leo Plumer is an MA Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

San Francisco is getting out ahead of the tech curve. Instead of waiting until after law enforcement had already deployed a suite of surveillance tools, city legislators have passed a ban on facial recognition tech by government agencies.

Yesterday, there was a big process, called the Christchurch Call, in which a bunch of governments and big social media companies basically agreed to take a more proactive role in dealing with terrorist and violent extremist content online. To its credit, the effort did include voices from civil society/public interest groups that raised issues about how these efforts might negatively impact freedom of expression and other human rights issues around the globe. However, it's not clear that the "balance" they came to is a good one.

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After months of fact-free complaints about bias against conservatives on social media, the White House has finally decided to engage in a fact-finding mission. And by "fact-finding mission," I mean "knock together a shitty webform to collect complaints." Or build a mailing list for the 2020 election run. Who knows. But here it is in all of its "will this do" glory.It opens with this statement before it starts harvesting personal info.

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.If you looked past press releases you'd notice that Verizon's early launches required the use of $200 battery add on mod because we still haven't really figured out the battery drain issues presented by 5G's power demands. You'd also notice the growing awareness that the long-hyped millimeter wave spectrum being used for many deployments have notable distance and line of sight issues, meaning that rural and much of suburban America will not likely see the speeds you'll frequently see bandied about in marketing issues, and many of the same coverage gap issues you see with current-gen broadband are likely to persist.If you looked past the headlines you'd probably noticed that even Wall Street was concerned that 5G was being over-hyped and wasn't yet ready for prime time. Those concerns continue to be expressed largely in industry trade magazines, where you'll often find stock jocks noting that most of the purported promises of 5G remain well over the horizon:

I thought this was America, but whatever. Secrecy in all things government, despite the (often misheld) presumption that our public servants will be open and honest about issues that affect us.It's no secret voting systems and databases are not secure. These are problems that date back 15 years, but have shown little improvement since. Election interference is just another tool in the nation-state hacking kit, and the US is far from immune from these attacks.Federal agencies investigating election interference are at least speaking to officials in states affected by these efforts. But those officials are apparently not allowed to pass on this information to those affected the most: voters.

UPDATE: Alex Howard reports the DC Council has tabled this amendment so it is no longer being considered during this round of budget debates.Buried at the bottom of Washington, D.C.'s 2020 budget report [PDF] is a gift to legislators who value opacity. The so-called "Freedom of Information Clarification Amendment" would make it much more difficult for requesters to obtain the documents they're seeking.The amendment to the district's FOIA law would require requesters to know exactly what documents they're seeking when they request them. It's a nearly-impossible bar to hurdle -- one that turns FOIA requests into games of Battleship.

Buried at the bottom of Washington, D.C.'s 2020 budget report [PDF] is a gift to legislators who value opacity. The so-called "Freedom of Information Clarification Amendment" would make it much more difficult for requesters to obtain the documents they're seeking.The amendment to the district's FOIA law would require requesters to know exactly what documents they're seeking when they request them. It's a nearly-impossible bar to hurdle -- one that turns FOIA requests into games of Battleship.

Sex-trafficking victims in California are suing Salesforce, claiming the company helped the now-defunct website Backpage, a classified ads website, in enabling prostitution. Whatever your view on the harm to the plaintiffs, this suit could hurt American innovation. By holding Salesforce accountable for the actions of its customer, the suit opens the door for other innovators to be held responsible when users post illegal content – a dangerous precedent in today’s internet era.The question of who is responsible for online content is a difficult issue. Intermediary liability protection is the common-sense idea that internet platforms are not responsible for content posted by users. Enshrined in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, this law allowed American companies to be the innovators of the internet. In fact, the internet as we know it functions because of Section 230. Without Section 230, any site hosting user-generated content would have to screen every submission to avoid lawsuits.On a practical basis, doing this in real time would be impossible due to the sheer amount of content created: Twitter alone hosts 350,000 tweets per minute; 200 billion tweets per year. Similarly, YouTube would be liable for any of the content its 1.9 billion monthly users might upload. If any single user post could lead to legal action against the social media platform, that platform would shut down.Today's internet experience would be virtually impossible.And so Section 230, the cornerstone of today’s innovative internet, was considered inviolable – until 2018, when Congress was approached by groups representing victims of sex trafficking (and quietly backed by Hollywood studios, the hotel industry and others who saw the chance to weaken online competitors that were taking their customers and disrupting their businesses). While some groups advocating for sex-trafficking victims opposed it, many of these proponents pushed FOSTA/SESTA into law, which allows trial lawyers to sue social media sites that “facilitate” sex trafficking – and, although undoubtedly well-intentioned, the bill takes aim at Section 230.Though (oddly), the Salesforce lawsuit doesn't invoke FOSTA/SESTA, the law's hastily written language was so broad and vague it could potentially impose liability to any website with a comments section. And immediately, internet services began pulling down popular forums featuring consumer-generated content. Other websites eliminated sections or imposed broad filters. Congress made the internet experience less rich for users and more difficult for entrepreneurs, all while doing very little to protect actual victims of sex trafficking.For all the damage done to free speech online, FOSTA/SESTA has had little upside. Backpage was seized by the FBI before the bill was signed into law, proving that FOSTA/SESTA was not necessary to take down wrongdoers. More, FOSTA/SESTA forced sex traffickers underground, making it harder for authorities to identify and rescue victims.Fortunately, our nation knows how to choose freedom over fear and innovation over regulation. Consider the successful SOPA/PIPA protests of 2012, which pushed back against overbroad copyright laws that would have crushed the burgeoning digital economy. Thanks to the protests, websites with user-generated content continue to flourish today.Section 230 is the legal foundation of the internet – not a shield for criminal liability. But it remains an important protection to encourage entrepreneurs and innovators to start internet businesses. We can't allow misguided rulemaking and ruinous litigation to discourage that. We must keep the internet open for innovation.Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the U.S.trade association representing more than 2,200 consumer technology companies, and a NewYork Times best-selling author. He is the author of the new book, Ninja Future: Secrets toSuccess in the New World of Innovation. His views are his own.

For years we've noted how as a product of the cable and broadcast industry, Hulu spent many years going out of its way to avoid being truly disruptive. Past owners 21st Century Fox, AT&T, Disney and Comcast/NBC spent a lot of time ensuring the service wasn't too interesting -- lest it cannibalize the company's legacy cable TV cash cow. As a result, Hulu spent a good chunk of the last decade stuck in a sort of existential purgatory, with a rotating crop of execs trying to skirt the line between giving consumers what they actually want, and being a glorified ad for traditional cable television.As cable and broadcast executives slowly realized that cord cutting was a threat that wasn't going away, things began to shift. More recently, owners like 21st Century Fox and AT&T have headed to the exits to focus on their own streaming efforts. That exodus continued this week with Comcast announcing it would be giving up full operational control of Hulu to Disney effective immediately.You might recall that Comcast was banned from meddling in Hulu management as a condition of its 2011 merger with NBC/Universal, with regulators worried that the company would attempt to undermine Hulu to protect its traditional cable TV revenues. Comcast being Comcast, the company largely ignored those conditions, one of several reasons regulators balked at its attempted acquisition of Time Warner Cable years later.Under the terms of this new deal, Comcast has the option of selling its entire stake to Disney by 2024:

Back in December, we wrote about how Rep. Jerry Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which is in charge of any copyright reform proposals, was hosting a party for music industry lobbyists at the Grammy's this year (along with Chair of the Democratic Caucus, Hakeem Jeffries). To party with Nadler and Jeffries at the Grammys -- the recording industry's biggest event of the year -- you "only" had to pay $5,000 per ticket. A bargain.Whether or not you believe this is outright corruption, it certainly meets Larry Lessig's definition of "soft corruption." That is activity that may be perfectly legal, but to the vast majority of the public certainly feels corrupt, and raises questions about who's influencing our elected officials. Nadler, of course, has long been deeply in the bag for the recording industry. Years back, he pushed a bill that was little more than a bailout for the RIAA, and he's attacked the idea that if people buy something, they then own it as "an extreme digital view."But it appears that the more mainstream media is beginning to notice Nadler's conflicts. His hometown NY Daily News has a whole article that talks about Nadler's money grab at the Grammys as well as much, much more.

In sad but unsurprising news, Canada is no better than the US when it comes to ignoring its citizens' rights at the border. The Canada Border Security Agency (CBSA) has also been given the green light to perform invasive, warrantless searches of people's devices at the border. And, like its US counterpart, it seems to be using this power frequently.

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The American Law Institute, among other things, publishes various "Restatements" of law, which it describes as follows:

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 (200,000 complaints annually, making up 60% of all FCC complaints), 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. 4.9 billion such calls were placed in April alone.There's plenty of blame to go around when it comes to fixing the problem. The FCC, now little more than a rubber stamp for industry under Ajit Pai, has been lax in holding carrier feet to the fire. Carriers in turn have blamed everyone but themselves for their own lax response. Similarly, many carriers have been slow to offer customers free robocall blocking tech, and even slower in adopting call authentication technology (like SHAKEN/STIR), which would go a long way toward hampering the call spoofing at the heart of the problem. This John Oliver segment is worth a watch:Enter FCC boss Ajit Pai, who has been increasingly under fire for not doing more to expedite solutions to our great, national robocall apocalypse. This week Pai proclaimed that he has "demanded" that carriers finally adopt call authentication technology this year, something that isn't much of a "demand" since most carriers have said they'd already planned to deploy the technology this year. His other solution popping up this week is being framed by media outlets fairly inaccurately as well. For example. Pai is allowed to insist via Reuters that carriers haven't deployed automatic call blocking technology because they didn't think the FCC would allow it:

Axon -- formerly Taser -- is betting big on police body cameras. It doesn't care much about the hardware. That's the just the foot in the door. The real money is subscription and storage fees. These contracts are worth far more than the hardware, which Axon is willing to give away to secure a far more profitable revenue stream.Axon not only charges for storage of recorded footage but also for access. It provides a front end for law enforcement agencies to search uploaded footage. It also makes defense lawyers do the same thing -- putting itself (and a lot of contractual language) between accused criminals and the evidence they're legally entitled to have.Emails obtained via a public records request show Axon plays hardball with municipalities who decide they'd rather use a different vendor. When a California city decided to take its business elsewhere after four years with Axon, its representatives responded by threatening to trash the city's credit rating. Beryl Lipton has the details for public records request powerhouse MuckRock.

Since 2016, when the Chicago Cubs became magically relevant in baseball again, the team has also become relevant in intellectual property discussions. The Cubs have gone to war with the street vendors that have long set up shop near Clark and Addison, and the team has been party to an ongoing battle with roughly all the uses of the letter "W" in commerce.But as the team's lawyers appear to have been invigorated by its on the field success, that isn't to say that every single trademark dispute it initiates is one in which it's the bad guy. For instance, one Iowa man decided to trademark the term "Cubnoxious", but apparently didn't have any actual plans to use it when the Cubs came calling.

Last week we wrote about how annoying it was that major media publications were misrepresenting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and suggesting -- completely without merit -- that the law was designed to keep platforms "neutral" or that they were mere "pass through" vehicles, rather than actively engaged in moderation. We pointed out that online trolls and grandstanding politicians were making this incorrect claim, but it was not an accurate statement of the law, and the media should know better. In our comments, some people called me out for not suggesting that the media was being deliberately dishonest, and in response I noted that there wasn't any evidence of deliberateness from most of them (not so much with the trolls and especially grandstanding politicians like Ted Cruz, who have been told, repeatedly, that they are misrepresenting CDA 230). I hoped that it was just a mistake that would be corrected.Perhaps surprisingly, the author of the Vox article that I called out, Jane Coaston, did exactly that. After a few others called out her article, including Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain, Coaston has now apologized and done a massive rewrite on the original article to make it more accurate: