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In the wake of last week's unfortunate decision by the EU Parliament to vote for the terrible EU Copyright Directive, Casey Newton over at the Verge has a thoughtful piece about how this could lead to the internet splitting into three.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a short and simple response to the EU's approval of Article 13:

We're down to our second last winner from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923! This week, we're looking at winner of Best Adaptation for the game that most faithfully and meaningfully adapted its source material: God of Vengeanceby JR Goldberg.One of the great things about remix culture, and one of the reason's the public domain is so important, is that creators can turn old work into something completely new with a different meaning, or something that subverts or critiques the original's purpose — but there's also a lot to be said for faithful adaptations that carry an old work's meaning forward into a new era and a new medium. And that's what God of Vengeance does with the Yiddish language play of the same name — which was first translated to English and performed in America in 1923, and led to an obscenity charge, conviction, and eventual successful appeal. Based on that you can probably figure out that this dramatic, improvisational roleplaying game is not for everyone and certainly not for children — but for those prepared to explore its subject matter, including domestic violence, sex work, and a Jewish crime family in Poland, it promises to be an engaging and challenging exercise.God of Vengeance needs four players who take on the roles in the play, with three playing the main characters and one playing the ensemble of other smaller characters. Each receives a brief description of their character and motivations, such as:

Not every law enforcement agency is refusing to comply with California's new transparency law. Effective January 1st, the law makes police misconduct and use of force records accessible to the public for the first time in the state's history.The state's attorney general isn't happy. Neither are many of the state's law enforcement agencies. And the state's law enforcement unions are definitely opposed to the new transparency, not to mention the law's apparently retroactive reach. But while the unions are busy trying to keep the law from exposing historical misconduct records, some law enforcement agencies are quietly complying with both the letter and the intent of the law.The Modesto Bee is one of the first beneficiaries of the new law. It has obtained misconduct records dating back to 2003 from the Modesto Police Department. The details contained in these are exactly the reason law enforcement unions are fighting so hard to keep these records out of the public's hands.

As we've discussed before, reporter Maria Ressa is a powerhouse journalist, who started an important Filipino news site, Rappler.com. Rappler has been (quite reasonably) highly critical of the Filipino government under President Duterte, and over the past few years, the Duterte government has responded with a bunch of highly questionable criminal complaints against Ressa, which all appear to be in direct violation of the country's 4th Amendment, which is a near carbon copy of the American 1st Amendment. It forbids any law that abridges the freedom of the press (among other things).And yet... for over a year now, the government has been trying to claim that Rappler violated the so-called anti-Dummy law in the Philippines. Apparently, the Philippines has a law that says, in certain types of industries, Filipino companies cannot have foreign ownership (this, by itself, already seems silly, but leaving that aside...). Rappler does not have any foreign owners. However, it did receive a grant from the well known Omidyar Network, and in order to receive the grant, Rappler used a semi-complicated system called a Philippine Depository Receipt (PDR), in which the company sells these assets to Omidyar, and the assets are pegged to the value of shares in the company, but they grant no ownership benefits or rights. The Filipino government has said for a while that these create a "dummy status" in pretending Omidyar isn't really taking an ownership stake when it is.All of that is nonsense, though. This is entirely about intimidating Ressa and Rappler. Last month she was arrested on bogus "cyber libel" charges (over violating a law that wasn't even a law when the supposed "libel" happened). And now, on arriving back in the country from a journalism conference abroad, Ressa was immediately arrested yet again. As Rappler notes, this is actually the 11th case filed against Rappler, its directors and its staff since the government first claimed that the Omidyar grant violated the law.This is shameful, if not surprising, by the Duterte government. Of course, it also demonstrates just how scared they are of a tiny independent news organization. If that's the case, it makes you wonder just what it is they're afraid Rappler will be reporting going forward...

We've written for some time about the scourge that is publicity rights laws and the fairly blatant way in which they tend to butt up against the First Amendment. While famous folk certainly do have the right to reserve the use of their likeness and names from those that would use either for commercial purposes, too often these laws are instead used to silence non-commercial speech, or speech that revolves instead around journalistic efforts. A famous person, for instance, cannot use publicity rights laws to keep a newspaper from printing factual information about them, or a movie maker from producing a documentary about them. This is First Amendment 101.But it seems some in the legal field skipped that class. One judge in Alabama has decided to shoulder the First Amendment to one side and favor instead the state's publicity rights laws to allow a lawsuit against the producers of famed podcast S-Town to move forward.

Following the terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, social media companies and internet platforms have faced renewed scrutiny and criticism for how they police the sharing of content. Much of that criticism has been directed at Facebook and YouTube, both platforms where video of the shooter's rampage found a home in the hours after the attacks. The footage was filmed with a body camera and depicts the perpetrator's attacks over 17 minutes. The video first appeared on Facebook Live, the social network's real-time video streaming service. From there, Facebook says, it was uploaded to a file-sharing site, the link posted to 8Chan, and began to spread.While the world struggles to make sense of these horrific terrorist attacks, details about how tech companies handled the shooter's video footage and written manifesto have been shared, often by the companies themselves. Collectively, these details in combination with the public discourse on and reaction to, as the New York Times referred to it, "a mass murder of, and for, the internet," have made clear three fundamental facts about content moderation, especially when it comes to live and viral content:1. Automated Content Analysis is Not a Magic WandIf you remember nothing else about content moderation, remember this: There is no magic wand. There is no magic wand that can be waved and instantly remove all of the terrorist propaganda, hate speech, graphically violent or otherwise objectionable content. There are some things that automation and machine learning are really good at: functioning within a specific and particular environment (rather than on a massive scale) and identifying repeat occurrences of the exact same (completely unaltered) content, for example. And there are some things they are really bad at: interpreting nuance, understanding slang, and minimizing discrimination and social bias, among many others. But perfect enforcement of a complex rule against a dynamic body of content is not something that automated tools can achieve. For example, the simple change of adding a watermark was enough to defeat automated tools aimed removing video of the New Zealand shooter.Some, then, have suggested banning of all live video. However, that overlooks activists' use of live streams to hold government accountable and report on corruption as it is happening, among other uses. Further, the challenges of automated content analysis are by no means limited to video. As a leaked email from Google to its content moderators reportedly warned: "The manifesto will be particularly challenging to enforce against given the length of the document and that you may see various segments of various lengths within the content you are reviewing."All of this is to reiterate: There is no magic wand and there never will be. There is absolutely a role for automated content analysis when it comes to keeping certain content off the web. Use of PhotoDNA and similar systems, for example, have reportedly been effective at ensuring that child pornography stays off platforms. However, the nuance, news value, and intricacies of most speech should give pause to those calling for mass implementation of automated content removal and filtering.2. The Scale, Speed, and Iterative Nature of Online Content – Particularly in This Case – is EnormousIt is a long-standing fact of the internet that it enables communication on a vast scale. Reports from YouTube and Facebook about the New Zealand attack seem to indicate that this particular incident was unprecedented in its volume, speed, and variety. Both of these companies have dedicated content moderation staff and it would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that this staff could handily keep up with what seems to be multiple copies of a single live video. But that overlooks a couple of realities:

You may have heard the famous line from early department store magnate John Wanamaker that "half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Over the past decade or so, various companies have argued that their ability to provide a ton of data, combined with whatever algorithmic magic they could throw at their platforms, could lead to a magical mythical world in which there were perfectly targeted advertisements. And, of course, in the past few years there have been literally just two places where advertisers believe they can get perfectly targeted advertisements that don't waste half (or more) of their ad spend: Google and Facebook.The end result of this thinking is that Google and Facebook need to engage in what people refer to as "surveillance capitalism," collecting a ton of data on everyone, building a huge profile about every user, and snooping on basically everything everyone does all day. This is why people have been getting more and more annoyed about the privacy trade-offs over the past few years (though, not so annoyed that they've stopped using these platforms in any significant way -- though, that could happen). It also has resulted in advertisers assuming that they must put the bulk of their ad dollars into those two platforms on the assumption that the money is better spent there. Indeed, the most recent IAB report on this noted that while the internet ad market continues to rise, 90% of the growth went to Facebook and Google (together the two companies represent about 58% of the total market share for online ads, but 90% of the growth in 2017).Advertisers have been completely sucked into the belief that if you want to get results for your ads, you simply have to throw money at those two giants, and they'll mix some magic pixie dust with all the data they've collected, and voila: perfectly targeted advertising. Everyone get so focused on magic words like "big data" and "artificial intelligence" and "machine learning" that they rarely ask the larger question: does any of it actually matter?As more and more questions are raised about the data practices of Facebook and Google, it seems worth questioning whether or not they actually need to be collecting all this data, and how much of a loss it actually is if they don't. Just recently, Facebook announced that -- as part of a settlement with the ACLU -- it was drastically changing how it handles certain ads: specifically that it would no longer allow such granular targeting for housing, employment, or credit ads -- all three of which were seen in the past as leading to discriminatory outcomes.If such targeting really was important and useful, you'd think that this would have resulted in Facebook's stock price cratering. Instead, it went up.The little secret behind all of this that very few people want to admit is that, in most cases super-targeted ads are crap. They don't perform well. That's because even if you're putting the ad in front of the right demographic, most of the time they don't care or don't want to see whatever it is that you're pushing. Or, it shows an ad for something you already have (or the ever popular laugher: something you just bought and don't need to buy again).Unfortunately, most advertisers don't quite realize this yet, and Google and Facebook are in no rush to tell anyone (though, frankly, they should be more upfront about all of this). Some are realizing this through other means. It didn't get that much attention, but back in January it was reported that, because of the GDPR, the NY Times stopped using behavioral targeting for ads... and found its revenue went up. The Times is doing much more basic targeting now: just contextual and geographical.And, if anyone should know this, it should be Google. For much of Google's existence, its big secret sauce was not deep knowledge about the people seeing the ads: it was just matching them against their search terms. That is, just a bit of simple contextual information, rather than tying it to a giant portfolio of data about you. It's really just over the last decade that Google really focused hard on building data profiles on everyone and "customizing" everything. There may be some advantages to some of those customizations -- and there are certain useful things that come with the data -- but better targeted advertisements... don't really seem to be among them.Frankly, if Facebook and Google want to get regulators off their backs, they might start by coming to terms with this basic fact themselves and choosing to stop collecting so much data on everyone. Recognizing that they can still build incredibly powerful ad-driven businesses without so much data would be a big step forward. Right now, unfortunately, it seems that everyone remains bought into the myth that they need this data, that their business models are dependent on this data, and that this data is actually useful in the advertising context. Bursting that myth might mean that advertisers aren't quite as enamored with Google and Facebook over the long haul (though, they'd still spend a ton of money with them), but it might lead to a better overall experience for users, and a hell of a lot less regulatory pressure.

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It's not really possible to predict the outcome of a court case. No matter how convinced you are that things look to be heading one way, there are still a zillion ways things can turn out otherwise.That said, however, I'm glad to discover that my cautious optimism about the Herrick v. Grindr case was not misplaced. This was a case where a terrible ex-boyfriend set up a phony Grindr profile for Herrick, which led to him being harassed by would-be suitors thinking it was genuine. It was an awful situation and no one can fault Herrick for wanting to hold someone responsible. The problem was, if he were to succeed in holding the dating app liable, it would represent a serious weakening of Section 230's platform protection, which, as we've discussed many times, would lead to the reduction of online services and censorship.Grindr has now prevailed, however, and, perhaps more importantly, so has Section 230 as a defense in the Second Circuit (albeit in a non-precedential decision).

This week the FTC announced that it would be launching a broad privacy investigation into a sector that's somehow been forgotten during our collective, justified obsession with Facebook: telecom. According to the full FTC announcement, the agency will be collecting data from all manner of broadband providers and wireless carriers to take a look at how these companies "collect, retain, use, and disclose information about consumers and their devices." From the announcement:

Most EU digital rights groups are still reeling from the approval of the EU Copyright Directive and its deeply-flawed idea of upload filters, which will seriously harm the way the Internet operates in the region and beyond. Matters are made even worse by the fact that some MEPs claim they blundered when they voted -- enough of them that Article 13 might have been removed from the legislation had they voted as they intended.But one organization quick off the mark in its response was the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), the local offshoot of the main Free Software Foundation. Shortly after the EU vote, it issued a press release entitled "Copyright Directive -- EU safeguards Free Software at the last minute". This refers to a campaign spear-headed by the FSFE and Open Forum Europe called "Save Code Share" that sought successfully to exclude open source software sharing from Article 13. As the press release said:

The Los Angeles Police Department has just received some bad news from its oversight. It's probably good news for the policed -- many of whom are being disproportionately targeted thanks to biased input data -- but the LAPD can't be pleased that its reliance on expensive, mostly-automated tools hasn't produced worthwhile results.The department relies on a handful of tech tools to aid in its policing, but it doesn't appear to be helping. It has CompStat -- a holdover from the early 2000's when Bill Bratton still ran the department. To that framework, it has added LASER -- a nifty acronym that stands for "Los Angeles' Strategic Extraction and Restoration." The program with the reverse engineered nickname actually relies on input from human analysts to determine where officers should be deployed. But this reliance on data-driven policing isn't making the city any safer, despite LASER's focus on violent crime.Here's what the LAPD's human analysts put together for the department's patrol officers.

As we've covered over the past few months, Australian courts put an absolutely ridiculous gag order on anyone trying to report about the conviction of Cardinal George Pell, the former CFO of the Vatican (often described as the 3rd most powerful person in the Vatican). Pell was convicted of sexually molesting choir boys in Australia in the 1990s. This is obviously quite newsworthy, but the courts used what's known as a "suppression order" in Australia to bar anyone from revealing the information. The reasoning was that there was still another trial for Pell over different accusations, and knowing he was convicted for one might somehow unfairly influence a jury. Of course, in the US we've long dealt with this through a process of vetting potential jurors on their familiarity, and then simply barring just that juror pool from doing any further research on the issue -- and that system works mostly fine, without keeping the public in the dark about important news, and without stifling a free press.Eventually the suppression order was lifted, after prosecutors decided to drop the second trial (which, at the very least, suggests that all this fuss to protect the sanctity of said second trial was silly all along). And, yet, prosecutors then sent out a bunch of threatening letters to journalists -- most of whom did not report publicly on the case, but who did complain about the suppression order.And now, to show just how far Australian prosecutors will go to spit on free speech and a free press, they are now seeking jail time for members of the media over this whole mess:

Though it kind of flew under the radar given countless other scandals, you might recall how Trump fixer and former lawyer Michael Cohen was also busted selling access to the President. One of the companies involved in this particular aspect of Cohen's grift was AT&T, which was found to have doled out $600,000 to Cohen, presumably under the belief that it would gain additional access and influence.AT&T's received more than a few favors in the Trump administration since, including an FCC willing to self-immolate on lobbyist demand, and the death of both broadband privacy and net neutrality rules at the agency. Not to mention the Trump tax cuts, which netted AT&T more than $20 billion up front, and at least $3 billion in savings annually in perpetuity. And while the Trump DOJ did sue to thwart the AT&T Time Warner merger, that may have had more to do with Trump's close ties to Rupert Murdoch -- and Trump's disdain for CNN -- than any animosity toward AT&T.Aside from AT&T throwing top policy man Bob Quinn under the bus for behavior AT&T has engaged in for years, AT&T saw little to nothing in the form of accountability. Amusingly, the little accountability they did witness came courtesy of AT&T's own investors. After the Cohen fiasco highlighted the secretive costs of AT&T's influence machine, some investors pushed AT&T for more transparency. The company recently responded by providing marginally more insight into the vast network of groups and organizations AT&T routinely pays to support its (usually anticompetitive and anti-consumer) policies:

I'm not done excoriating the Ninth Circuit's recent decision dismissing Homeaway and Airbnb's challenge of the Santa Monica ordinance that holds them liable if their users illegally list their properties for rent. As I wrote before, that's what the ordinance in fact does, even though Section 230 is supposed to prevent local jurisdictions from enforcing laws on platforms that have this effect. Perhaps this decision may not be as obviously lethal to the Internet as the EU's passage of the Copyright Directive with Articles 11 and 13, but only because its consequences may, at the moment, be less obvious – not because they stand to be any less harmful.Which is not to say that the court intended to herald the end of the Internet. Indeed there is a somewhat apologetic tone throughout the decision, as if the court felt it had no choice but to reach the conclusion that it did. But there is also a tone of dismissiveness that runs throughout the decision as well. The court largely minimized the platforms' arguments about how the ordinance will affect them, and by ignoring the inevitable consequences thus opened the door to them, now and in the future, far beyond the facts of this particular case.Ultimately there are (at least) two big problems with the decision. The earlier post highlighted one of them, noting how chilling it is to speech if a law effectively forces platforms to police their users' expression in order to have any hope of avoiding being held liable for it. The problem with the court's decision in this regard is that it kept [see pages 13-14, 17, 20...] incorrectly insisting, over the platforms' protest, that the Santa Monica ordinance does not force them to monitor their users' expression when, in actuality, it most certainly does.The second major problem with the decision is that the court kept trying to create an artificial distinction between imposing liability on platforms for facilitating user expression, which the court acknowledged would be prohibited by Section 230, and imposing liability on platforms for facilitating online transactions — which, per the court, Section 230 would apparently not prevent.

In the latest insane lawsuit regarding the internet and sex trafficking, a group of women who were tragic victims of sex trafficking have decided not to sue those responsible for trafficking them... but online customer relationship management (CRM) provider Salesforce.com. What? Huh? Why? You might ask? Well, apparently it's because everyone's favorite sex trafficking bogeyman, Backpage.com, used Salesforce.com for its CRM. Yup.While most of the reports on this don't show the lawsuit, CNBC thankfully posted a copy (though it's locked up in Scribd, so we can't embed our own version, unfortunately). The lawsuit makes a bunch of leaps to argue that Salesforce is somehow magically responsible for people doing illegal things on Backpage. The levels of separation between the criminal actions and the liability here are simply ridiculous. Much of the lawsuit tries to suggest that because Salesforce is good at its job in customizing its offerings to its customers, that's proof that it's magically responsible for sex trafficking:

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For months now we've all heard the refrain: Article 13 (now Article 17) of the EU Copyright Directive would not require filters. We all knew it was untrue. We pointed out many times that it was untrue, and that there was literally no way to comply unless you implemented filters (filters that wouldn't work and would ban legitimate speech), and were yelled at for pointing this out. Here's the MEP in charge of the Directive flat out insisting that it won't require filters last year:Over and over and over again, this is what they insisted. Of course, we all knew it wasn't true, and the German government quietly admitted that filters were necessary a few weeks ago. That didn't stop the vote from happening, of course, and the Parliament questionably moving forward with this plan. Still, it's rather striking that just a day after the vote, as pointed out to us by Benjamin Henrion, France's Minister for Culture gave a speech in which he admits that it requires filters and hopes that France will implement the law as quickly as possible in order to start locking down the internet. The quotes here are based on Google translate, so they may not be perfect, but you get the idea. Incredibly, in talking about the Directive, Riester starts off by saying that the passing of the Directive was "despite massive campaigns of misinformation" which seems rather ironic, since it's now clear the misinformation came from those who insisted it didn't require filters, because soon after that he says:

We've talked a lot about how while fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a good thing (in that faster, more reliable networks are always good), it's been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers and network hardware vendors looking to justify high prices and sell network gear and handsets. It has also been accompanied by what appears to be a race between cellular carriers to broadly misrepresent what 5G is capable of, and where and when it will actually be available.At the heart of a lot of this hype has been Verizon, which routinely insists 5G is the "fourth industrial revolution," and will almost mystically result in a universe of smart cities and smarter supporting technologies. Ironically, while saying all of this, Verizon executives publicly warn about carriers over-hyping 5G. For example here's a Verizon blog post from last January:

Perhaps no state has unrolled and rolled up a welcome mat set out for a federal guest faster than Utah. What was once a shiny new installation with 5-10,000 jobs attached swiftly became a PR black eye after Ed Snowden exited the NSA and sprung a leak.Suddenly, the sweetheart deal on water given to the NSA seemed like an attempt to curry favor with domestic spies, placing local politicians on the receiving end of reflected wrath from the general public. Utah's government reversed course, setting itself up as a champion of the people. An attempt was made to shut down the spy center's water supply. It never made its way into law, but the anti-panopticon tone was set. But the state is still moving forward with efforts taking on the federal government, engaged in the always-awkward grappling of the The Man sticking it to The Man.Bills forbidding state agencies from participating in domestic surveillance have been introduced elsewhere in the country. Few of these have moved forward. But the Utah legislature -- burned by its close ties with the spy agency non grata -- has proven more tenacious than most. As Molly Davis reports for Wired, the Utah government is one step away from locking the government out of access to third party records.

As an overreaction to President Trump's mostly-hyperbolic verbal attacks on the journalism profession, a few legislators from the other side of the political fence have revived their stupid idea from last year. Here's the law's author in his own words twit:

You will recall that Chooseco LLC, the company behind the Choose Your Own Adventure books that people my age remember with such fondness, decided quite stupidly to sue Netflix over Black Mirror's audience-influenced production called Bandersnatch. The lawsuit is silly for any number of reasons, including that the whole thing rests on a character in Bandersnatch mentioning a CYOA book as the inspiration behind his fictional video game coupled with the fact that the film (a third medium) lets viewers choose how the story progresses. How Chooseco thinks any of that legal pixelation resolves into an actual trademark or copyright violation is anyone's guess, because it most certainly does not. Storytelling mechanics are most definitely not protectable as intellectual property. On top of that, Chooseco subsequently announced its own licensed deal with Amazon for Alexa. The timing of it all sure seems to indicate that Chooseco might have wanted to send Netflix a thank you for revitalizing interest in its products, rather than filing a lawsuit.But since the lawsuit was filed, it was only a matter of time before Netflix tried to have it tossed.

Cue the Ron Paul "It's Happening!!!!" gif. The wheels of justice have been grinding away for years now, but they've finally generated several years for longtime copyright troll/supervillain Paul Hansmeier. After making a career out of extorting settlements from alleged porn-watching infringers, extorting settlements from small businesses with bogus ADA complaints, attempting to hide his wealth from his creditors (some of which were owed money for sanctions imposed in copyright trolling cases), and otherwise putting on a one-man show entitled "Why We Hate Lawyers," Hansmeier is facing the possibility of spending the next decade in prison.The sentencing recommendation [PDF] prepared by the prosecutors has nothing good to say about Hansmeier. In fact, the prosecutors make it clear they'd have given him even more than the 12+ years they've recommended. (h/t Virgil Abt)Here are the numbers:

Like countless other cable giants, Comcast continues to bleed cable TV subscribers at an alarming rate. These users, tired of sky-high prices, continue to flee to more competitive streaming alternatives and better customer service. That's not great news for Comcast, which has spent decades enjoying a stranglehold over traditional TV, thanks in part to the industry's walled gardens and monopoly over the cable box. And while cable giants could counter the streaming threat by competing on price, they instead continue to double down on ideas that don't make a whole lot of sense.Case in point: in a bid to try and keep users from "cutting the cord," Comcast last week introduced Xfinity Flex. According to the Comcast press release, this new Flex streaming box will be made available to existing Comcast broadband customers for a $5 monthly rental fee, providing access to a limited number of streaming services (sans live streaming services like Playstation Vue, SlingTV, or DirecTV Now that directly compete with Comcast's own offerings):

UPDATE: A spokesperson for Latch sends the following message, clarifying that the locks at the center of this lawsuit do not require a smartphone to open (emphasis in the original):

Nothing like rushing home to put your phone on the charger only to realize you can't get into your own apartment without a charged phone. Getting into locked out of your own place: there's an app for that. Maybe the app -- and the smart lock it engages with -- works fine 99% of the time. The other 1%, however, will see you locked out, even after performing an interpretive dance with your emotionless partner.The Software Shuffle:

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Remember Thomas Goolnik? Apparently, he doesn't think you should. But let's start this post off with some special notes for two specific parties, and then we'll get into some more details:

A new bill that would fully restore the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules took a major step forward this week.Earlier this month Democrats introduced the Save The Internet Act, a three page bill that would do one thing: restore the 2015 net neutrality rules stripped away by Ajit Pai, as well as restore the FCC's authority over broadband providers. As we've long noted, the net neutrality repeal didn't just kill net neutrality, it gutted FCC authority over natural broadband monopolies, shoveling any remaining authority to an FTC experts have repeatedly warned lacks the authority or resources to adequately police giants like Comcast (the entire point of the lobbyist gambit).This week the bill was marked up and approved by the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, though not before the telecom industry tried to shovel in some amendments to water down the bill. Those efforts didn't work, at least according to net neutrality activists, because of the attention ordinary folks kept on what would have otherwise been an ignored process if we were talking about any other tech-related markup effort:

Everyone's hooking up ICE with automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data. And everyone's misleading the public about it, starting with ALPR manufacturer, Vigilant. The EFF has been investigating California law enforcement's data sharing claims with relation to its Vigilant ALPRs and finding their public statements are directly contradicted by internal communications obtained with public records requests.Vigilant tries to keep as much information about data sharing under wraps by forcing purchasers to sign restrictive non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements. Law enforcement agencies are secretive by default, so this allows them to double down on opacity. Vigilant has taken a hardline approach to negative press, threatening journalists with lawsuits for asking too many questions and publishing the answers they've received.

The internet has upended journalism. It's no longer limited to long-established press outlets known for printing physical newspapers and periodicals. It can be performed by anyone, using a vast amount of resources, including search engines, public records requests, and the occasional application of shoe leather.The First Amendment provides protection to these endeavors. Except when it doesn't. Well-meaning legislators seeking to protect journalists use older definitions of journalism to exclude bloggers and freelancers. Some judges make the same mistake as well, deciding the word "journalist" only covers people trafficking in ink and paper, rather than bits and pixels.This older definition was in play in a recent decision handed down by a Nevada judge. Rather than recognize that the intent of Nevada's shield law is to protect journalists, Judge James Wilson decided the law only protects a narrow subset of those practicing the art of journalism.

Earlier today we wrote about the terrible vote by the EU Parliament to approve the Copyright Directive including the dangerous Articles 11 and 13. As we noted in the original post, the key vote was whether to allow amendments that could have deleted those two articles. That vote failed by just five votes, 317 to 312. Unfortunately, soon after the vote was finalized, a few of the MEPs who voted against the plan for amendments -- Peter Lundgren and Kristina Winberg -- said they voted incorrectly and meant to vote for the amendments in order to get rid of Articles 11 and 13. Apparently, someone changed the vote order which threw them off:

We've been covering surveillance and the intelligence community for a long time here at Techdirt, but if you had to limit yourself to just one source on the subject, even we'd probably recommend you choose Marcy Wheeler. Following the recent news that the NSA has apparently shut down its bulk records collection program — the first exposed by Edward Snowden — Marcy joins us on this week's episode to discuss the surveillance state and why it might abandon Section 215.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.

The RIAA's war to force internet access providers to become copyright cops has continued to move forward. The RIAA planned this strategy out years ago, in the wake of losing the SOPA fight. Back in 2012 we wrote about an internal plan to try to convince courts that Section 512(i) of the DMCA actually mean that ISPs had to completely kick users off the internet based solely on accusations of infringement. The end goal here is, as always with the RIAA, to get everyone else to try to police the internet.Part of the issue here is the incredibly inartful drafting of the DMCA, that has lead to multiple lawsuits over how conflicting aspects of the law should be interpreted. The results over the last decade or so of cases tend to have the courts simply deciding in favor of the more sympathetic party, rather than with any consistency as to the law itself. So, in the Viacom/YouTube case, the court required "actual knowledge" rather than the "general knowledge" that Viacom sought. Yet, in the IsoHunt case (unsympathetic defendant), the court found "red flag" knowledge to be enough. In the first case testing the RIAA's theories on 512(i) and ISPs, against Cox, the RIAA won, but mainly due to Cox's own bad behavior (specifically: internal employees mocked and did not follow the company's own repeat infringer policy).In the second case testing this theory, against Grande Communications, as was widely expected given an earlier magistrate judge's opinion, the court has said that Grande does not qualify for the DMCA's safe harbors, and therefore may be liable for infringement on its network. Once again, as with Cox, Grande's own actions appeared to doom its argument for safe harbors. The company admitted that it didn't actually have a repeat infringer policy. It had a stated one, but no effort was made to follow it internally -- and since 512(i) requires a "reasonably implemented" policy, the lack of any plan to implement it means... no safe harbors. As we noted when the magistrate judge recommended this finding, this does not mean that Grande automatically loses the case. The RIAA still will need to prove contributory infringement on the part of Grande, which might not be that easy since it will have to show that Grande actively induced people to infringe (as per the Supreme Court's standard in the Grokster case).Either way, the RIAA is not waiting around and has moved on to an even bigger target: It is now suing Charter Communications on the same basic theory concerning 512(i). The record labels make some fairly bold claims about Charter in the case:

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Debra Cruise-Gulyas received an "impeding traffic" ticket from Officer Matthew Minard. To show her appreciation for his fine policework, Cruise-Gulyas shot him the bird as she rolled away. Not the best idea but, as the district court declared, a perfectly legal hand gesture.The adage opening this post also goes for cops. Officer Matthew Minard decided the hand gesture warranted another traffic stop. Sure, he had the power to initiate a traffic stop. The problem was he didn't have any legal reason to do so. As the court noted, the infraction (speeding) Minard had only issued a warning for nevertheless completed the traffic stop. Pulling Cruise-Gulyas over again for the infraction he had chosen not to enforce to its fullest extent could not be used a probable cause for a second stop when Cruise-Gulyas was flipping the bird at a legal rate of speed.Minard appealed. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals [PDF] says the lower court had it right the first time. Officer Minard had no legal reason to effect a second stop.

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According to new analysis by Kaspersky Lab, nearly a million PC and laptop owners may have installed a malicious ASUS software update that embedded a backdoor into their computers without their knowledge. According to the security firm, state-sponsored hackers (presumed to be China) managed to subvert the company's Live Update utility, which is pre-installed on most ASUS computers and is used to automatically update system components such as BIOS, UEFI, drivers and applications.The malicious file was signed by a legitimate ASUS digital certificate to hide the fact that it wasn't a legitimate software update from the company, with an eye on a very particular target range:

Well, it was a nice run while it lasted, but the EU Parliament has just put an end to the open internet. By the incredibly thin margin of just five votes, the Parliament voted against any amendments to the proposal -- which was a necessary step to fixing or deleting Articles 11 and 13. After that, they voted to approve the EU Copyright Directive, including the terrible versions of both Article 11 and 13. This is an inauspicious day and one that the EU will almost certainly come to regret. While we now need to see how each of the member states will implement the actual laws put forth in the Directive (meaning the damage in some states may be more mitigatable than in others), on the whole the EU Copyright Directive requires laws that effectively end the open internet as an open communications medium. Sites that previously allowed content creators to freely publish content will now be forced to make impossible choices: license all content (which is literally impossible), filter all content (expensive and failure-prone), or shut down. Sites that used to send traffic to news sources may now need to reconsider, as doing so will inexplicably require payment.At best, the EU--for all its complaints about Google and Facebook--has just locked both companies into a dominant position. They can afford this. Others cannot. And, the legacy gatekeepers in the media and entertainment business will quickly pivot to seeking to export this model elsewhere.The MEPs who voted for this are up for election in two months, and hopefully the EU shows them the door, but in the meantime, today is a sad day for the open internet. I am sure that some will be celebrating on the false belief that this will magically "help artists." It will not. You just handed more power to giant companies, and took it away from creators. In time, one hopes, those who mocked the protesters and activists and actual experts will come to realize just how much they destroyed today.

Following the recent mass shooting in New Zealand, the county's government swiftly declared the live footage of the attack, along with the shooter's manifesto, "objectionable." This classification is more than a condemnation: it made both illegal to possess or distribute. Thanks to this response, New Zealand law enforcement is now rounding up and charging anyone who violates this post-tragedy decision to make newsworthy content the legal equivalent of child porn.The first reported arrest occurred March 17th, two days after the shooter livestreamed his attack on local mosques.

As MEPs get ready to vote on the EU Copyright Directive -- and specific amendments concerning Articles 11 and 13 -- many have not yet said how they are going to vote. However, two Swedish MEPs, Jytte Guteland and Marita Ulvskog, who many had believed would vote against the plan, have suddenly switched sides and say they plan to vote for it. In a rather astounding interview with reporter Emanuel Karlsten the MEPs reveal their near total ignorance of what Article 13 does and what it would require.Guteland spoke to Karlsten by phone, and he asked all the right questions. It's worth reading the entire conversation, but here are a few snippets with my commentary. When Karlsten pointed out the problems with filters, Guteland insisted that Article 13 doesn't mean filters:

In the hours leading up to the vote in the EU Parliament on the EU Copyright Directive, the German publication FAZ (which has been generally supportive of the Directive) has released quite a bombshell (in German), suggesting that the reason Germany caved to France on its terrible demands concerning copyright was in order to get France's approval of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia.If you don't recall, the German delegation had actually pushed back on the more extreme versions of Article 13 -- and, in particular, had demanded that a final version have a clear carve-out for smaller companies, so as not to have them forced out of business by the onerous demands of the law. However, after some back and forth, Germany caved in to France's demands, with many left scratching their heads as to why. However, some noted the "coincidence" in timing, that right after this, France also withdrew its objections to the pipeline which is very controversial in the EU (and the US, which is threatening sanctions).FAZ notes that there were whispered rumors about Germany and France basically trading these two proposals, with Germany effectively selling out the open public internet in exchange for easier access to Russian gas. However, it has now seen documents that support this claim. Germany's economic minister, Peter Altmaier apparently promised startups that Germany would not cave on its promise to create a carve-out for all companies with less than 20 million euros in revenue per year -- only to drop that demand the very next day.According to FAZ, the French delegation directly suggested the idea of France backing away from its opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline if Germany backed away from its concerns about Article 13. And, voila, within days, Germany gave up on its demands regarding Article 13 and, a few days later, France switched sides and agreed to support the pipeline. So, as the German MEPs go to the polls tomorrow, we'll see if they think it was a fair deal to sell out the public internet in exchange for some Russian gas.

California law enforcement's losing streak continues. Since the new state law went into effect at the beginning of the year, California police unions have been battling the new transparency, claiming the public records law does not apply to historical records of police misconduct or use of force.So far, the unions are finding no one who agrees with them. The law's author says the law is retroactive. So have a couple of state courts. The only person siding with unions on the retroactivity issue is the state's top cop, Attorney General Xavier Becerra.The state's Supreme Court has turned down two requests by law enforcement unions to step in and clear up the retroactivity question. In both cases, it rejected the petition without comment. Now, a second state appellate court has refused to review a lower level decision finding the state's new law applies to old misconduct records.

You may or may not remember that FCC boss Ajit Pai promised to operate the "most transparent" FCC ever. Initially, Pai lived up to that promise by changing FCC policy so that FCC orders would be released before they were voted on; a pretty obvious improvement of benefit to both consumers and ISP lobbyists alike. But in the year or two since, Pai has shown that genuine transparency is the very least of the chairman's priorities.For example, Pai's FCC has actively refused to aid law enforcement inquiries into who was behind the millions of bogus comments that polluted the net neutrality repeal public comment period. Similarly, the Pai FCC's general response to FOIA requests has been to stall, delay, and ignore said requests whenever possible, resulting in numerous lawsuits by media outlets attempting to get to the bottom of all manner of bizarre FCC policy decisions (like that fake DDOS attack emails show they made up to try and downplay public anger over the net neutrality repeal).One of those lawsuits was filed by journalist Jason Prechtel, whose analysis recently helped shed some light on the telecom and Trump-linked organizations who stuffed the FCC ballot box during the net neutrality public comment period -- in some cases using stolen identities. The Pai FCC repeatedly ignored or stalled in response to Prechtel's FOIA requests regarding this data, so he sued the agency back in 2017. Last week, a court ruled that the FCC (read: taxpayers) will be forced to reimburse Prechtel's legal costs to the tune of $43,000.As Gizmodo notes, it was probably money well spent if integrity and transparency actually matter to you:

Indiana law enforcement has apparently figured out a solution to the school shooting problem: round up the teachers and shoot them. Here's a jolly little anecdote from the Indiana State Teachers Association, detailing an issue brought up during a recent state Senate education committee meeting.

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In a bid to modernize its reputation as one of the least liked industries in America, the cable industry has a novel solution: to stop calling itself the cable industry. The industry's biggest lobbying and trade organization, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, first got the ball rolling in 2016 when it renamed itself the The Internet & Television Association. Despite the lion's share of its last mile still being on coaxial cable, the industry apparently hoped that eliminating "cable" from its name would somehow modernize the sector for the fiber era.Not to be outdone, the American Cable Association, the policy and lobbying arm of over 750 smaller and mid-sized cable companies, has followed suit. It announced last week it too would be dropping the word cable from its name, and will now be called America’s Communications Association. Organization boss Matt Polka put it this way:

As the EU Parliament gets ready to vote on the EU Copyright Directive and Articles 11 and 13, the desperation from the supporters of these laws is reaching a fever pitch. It's gotten to the point that their own arguments no longer make any sense and are totally inconsistent with what they've been saying for months. Late last week, a new group sprung up with a website called Manifesto4copyright.eu. It is an astounding document in so many ways, not the least of which is it admits that Article 13 is about filters, while also admitting that filters don't work.It starts off with a huge misrepresentation: that the authors supporting it are for an "open and fair internet without censorship." Except that's belied by the rest of the "manifesto," which makes about as much sense as any other ranting internet manifesto:

As expected, people took to the streets in the EU this week to protest the EU Copyright Directive, the censorship filters of Article 13, and the snippet tax in Article 11. Most of the protests took place in Germany, where reports are that over 150,000 protesters showed up to let their elected officials know that this law is a disaster (other reports put the number closer to 200,000 protesters).Indeed, things got so crazy, that the Berlin police announced that there were way more people than expected, and protesters needed to change their planned route to roads that could better accommodate such a large crowd.Many of the signs included memes, or the statement "we are not bots," which appears to have confused some in the media, such as DW.com, which claimed people said: "banners included the phrase "We are not bots," a reference to robotic-like social media posts." Uh, no. The reference to "we are not bots" is in direct response to supporters of Article 13 lying and claiming that all of the arguments against Article 13 were simply coming from internet bots as a way to discount the concerns of millions of EU residents as well as those of us around the world.Of course, what happens when the politicians who insisted it was "just bots" arguing against Article 13 have to contend with the fact that at least 150,000 real live humans showed up on their doorstep to protest? They just keep lying. German MEP Daniel Caspary, who chairs the large CDU/CSU group in the EU Parliament told a German publication a completely made up lie -- reminiscent of the kind of "fake news" propaganda that has been used elsewhere, that all of the protesters were actually paid to be there. He literally called them "bought protesters" and said that a non-profit organization offered protesters €450 to show up at the protest. And then insisted that this was all a threat to democracy (per the translation):

We've got a double-winner this week with one comment taking first place for insightful and second place for funny. Even more unusually, it's from fairly deep into a thread, and most of its meaning relies on that context — but nevertheless, Thad racked up the votes with a response to someone who claimed to have strong evidence of conservative censorship on social media: