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Late last year, Pro Publica and the NY Times published an incredible, long and infuriating article, mostly about how a high school in NY destroyed an immigrant student's life, due to a mixture of moral panics about "MS-13" gang activity (whipped up by the federal government), over-aggressive policing within schools, and deeply troubling decisions by ICE. The story touches on a number of things that we normally write about -- and I've been stewing over writing a post for weeks. The topics herein are most frequently covered on this site by Tim Cushing, rather than me. But I took this article, because the high school at the center of the article, Huntington High School in Suffolk County, New York, is the high school I attended. It's the high school I went to for 4 years, and it's the high school where I gave a speech at graduation on the same football field you can see in one of the photos used to illustrate the story.Everything about the article is infuriating in so many ways, that it's been difficult to figure out where to even start, but if we have to start someplace, let's start with this: the rise of embedding police into schools -- so-called School Resource Officers (SROs), who are employed by the local police, but whose "beat" is a school. Those officers report to the local police department and not the school, and can, and frequently do, have different priorities. We've long raised concerns about the increased policing of schools. Traditionally, schools handled their own disciplinary matters directly, within the school, with a focus on what was best for the learning environment of the students. They were not always good at this, but adding in an element where the end result could be criminal charges has always seemed misguided, and never more so than in this particular story and the case of "Alex" in the news story.As the article notes, this trend of putting police in schools came about as a result of the original "famous" school shooting, the one in Columbine, which resulted in a variety of moral panics:

It took the press the better part of a decade to finally realize that cellular carriers have been routinely hoovering up and selling your daily location data to every nitwit on the planet with zero meaningful ethical guidelines or oversight. And while this stuff is certainly nothing new, the recent Motherboard report showing how cavalierly your private data is bought and sold along a massive chain of shady operators seems to have finally woken everybody up on the subject.Whether we actually do something about it is another issue entirely.Pressure has started to mount on FCC boss Ajit Pai in particular. Why? While people rightfully obsessed on Pai's attacks on net neutrality, the repeal itself effectively involved neutering most FCC oversight of ISPs and wireless carriers, then shoveling any remaining authority to an FTC that lacks the authority or resources to really police telecom. This neutering of already tepid oversight was always the telecom lobby's plan, and unless you've got a severe case of denial, it's obvious the Pai FCC acted as a mindless rubber stamp in helping the industry's biggest players achieve this goal.Of course the GOP helped as well, by quickly kowtowing to telecom sector lobbyists and, in March of 2017, voting to kill some fairly modest FCC privacy rules before they could take effect. Those rules, in addition to some other requirements, would have given consumers far more power over how their location data is shared and sold among what, in some instances, has been proven to be a chain that in at least one case was some 70 companies long.The problem for Pai is he now has to go before Congress and explain how demolishing the FCC's ability to actually police this problem serves the common good. And, as Gizmodo notes, how he worked very closely with industry to specifically ensure these companies can't be seriously held accountable for a long, long history of really dubious behavior:

No one's ever going to confuse China for a free and open country, but it seems like the government is trying just a bit too hard to let citizens know they belong to the government, rather than the other way around.Just recently, the government began engaging in door-to-door censorship, sending cops to citizens' houses to order them to delete forbidden tweets. That's certainly not going to help the tweeter's Citizen Score -- a dystopian credit score that takes far more than debt into account to measure the worthiness of the country's billion-plus citizens. The score tracks purchases, social circles, and online opinions to raise and lower scores. Certain purchases will raise scores while others that the government doesn't consider worthwhile (like videogames) will lower it.It's far worse than that, though. Low-scoring members of your social circle can lower your score as well, forcing people to ditch their unhelpful friends and replace them with people more closely aligned with the government's preferences. There are perks attached to higher scores, which basically give citizens the privilege to travel after they've proven themselves worthy servants of the state.On top of that, there's the pervasive surveillance. Facial recognition tech is everywhere, used to do everything from fine jaywalkers to lock people out of public housing. The government has plans to erect 600 million CCTV cameras to ensure nothing citizens do in public goes unobserved.The latest addition to the government's citizen repression toolkit is something that would break a reader's suspension of disbelief if were included in dystopian sci fi novel:

The criminal justice system appears to be outsourcing a great deal of its work. On the law enforcement side, automatic license plate readers, facial recognition tech, and predictive policing have replaced beat cops walking the streets and patrolling the roads. Over on the judicial side, analytic software is helping make sentencing decisions. This is supposed to make the system better by removing bias and freeing up government personnel to handle more difficult duties algorithms can't handle.As is the case with most things government, it works better in theory than in practice. ALPRs create massive databases of people's movements, accessible by a hundreds of law enforcement agencies subject to almost zero oversight. More is known about facial recognition's failures than its successes, due to inherent limitations that churn out false positives at an alarming rate. Predictive policing is the algorithmic generation of self-fulfilling prophecies, building on historical crime data to suggest future crimes will occur in high crime areas.While the judicial side might seem more promising because it could prevent judges from acting on their biases when handing down sentences, the software can only offer guidance that can easily be ignored. That and the software introduces its own biases based on the data it's fed.

The saga of TVEyes and its battles for fair use is over, and unfortunately fair use has lost. Following the news that the Supreme Court had refused to hear its appeal of a weird and troubling ruling by the 2nd Circuit, the company has now ended its ongoing lawsuit with Fox by agreeing to no longer carry Fox News content on its service.If you don't recall, TVEyes was a very useful media monitoring service used by tons of journalists and politicians to effectively search and find content that was airing on TV. Fox had sued, claiming that this was both infringement and a violation of the obsolete "hot news" doctrine. The court easily rejected the hot news claim, and the district court originally (and correctly) found in favor of TVEyes, saying that its service was clearly fair use (even as it was being used for profitable purposes). The key point: TVEyes was transformative. It wasn't offering a competing service, but rather (similar to Google books) helping people search and find content that they might not otherwise find.A later ruling, however, found that only parts of TVEyes service was truly fair use. It could archive content -- but allowing downloading and sharing of clips failed the fair use test. Eventually, that resulted in an incredibly restrictive permanent injunction against the company, and an appeal that favored Fox News, again focusing on the feature that allowed users to download and share clips.That's what was petitioned to the Supreme Court, and having lost that, TVEyes faced an expensive lower court process to determine how much it would need to pay in damages. This settlement, and an agreement to drop Fox News from its service entirely, avoids that.From a "public good" perspective, however, this is a horrific result. It means that copyright will make it that much more difficult for the media and politicians to follow and report on what Fox News is doing. While anyone can watch and record Fox News itself, losing the useful features of TVEyes will surely make it that much more difficult for there to be effective media monitoring of the cable news network. That's not a good public policy result. Indeed, this case really has little to do with copyright at all. Again, TVEyes was not competing with Fox News in anyway, but copyright has now been used to make it that much more difficult for anyone to hold Fox News accountable.And at a time when there is growing evidence of the role that Fox News in particular has played in today's societal mess, that seems like a huge loss for society.

Here at Techdirt we've taken issue with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), not because there's anything wrong with online privacy, or even all online privacy regulation. But there's definitely something wrong with regulating it badly. As we've seen with the GDPR, not only does poor regulation struggle to deliver any of the intended benefit, but it also causes all sorts of other harm. Thus it's enormously important to get this sort of regulation right.But that's not the current iteration of the CCPA. Born out of an attempt at political blackmail, rather than considered and transparent policy making, even with several small attempts at improvements, it suffers from several showstopping infirmities. These were set forth in a letter to the California legislature organized by Eric Goldman, who has been closely tracking the law, and signed by 41 California privacy lawyers, professionals, and professors (including me). As he summarized in a blog post hosting a copy of the letter, these defects include:

When a well-lobbied Congress eliminated consumer privacy protections for broadband back in 2017, many folks understandably rushed to VPNs for some additional privacy and protection. And indeed, many ISPs justified their lobbying assault on the rules by stating that users didn't need privacy protections, since they could simply use a VPN to fully protect their online activity. But we've noted repeatedly that VPNs are not some kind of panacea, and in many instances you're simply shifting the potential for abuse from your ISP to a VPN provider that may not actually offer the privacy it claims.Top10VPN, for example, recently took a closer look at 150 VPN apps being offered in the Android marketplace and found that 90% of them violated consumer privacy in some fashion, either by the inclusion of DNS leaks, a failure to adequately secure and store user data, or by embedding malware:

The wholly-expected has occurred as a result of Eugene Volokh's exposure of bogus takedown demands targeting unflattering content -- like criminal complaints and factual news articles detailing criminal acts. The Volokh Conspiracy has been targeted by two bogus takedown requests by the same party who engaged in the bogus takedown requests Volokh previously wrote about.The first one received targeted a post of Volokh's hosted at the Washington Post. Hilariously, it claims Volokh is the real troll here.

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A decade ago, when there were still people laughably insisting that the internet was the worst thing that ever happened to musicians, I kept pointing out examples of artists who were creatively embracing the internet to great success -- connecting with fans, building new business models, and succeeding. And every time I did that, people would complain that this example was an "exception" or an "anomaly." And, they had a habit of qualifying any success story -- even if the qualifications were contradictory. For example, if I highlighted an independent artist's success, people would say "well, that's just a small independent artist, they have nothing to lose, no big rock star could ever succeed that way." And then, when I'd highlight a big rock star having success embracing the internet, I'd be told "well, it's easy for him, he already had a huge following." It got so silly that back in 2008 one of our commenters coined "Masnick's Law" to describe this phenomenon:

However bad American broadband and wireless service can be, generally speaking Canadians have it worse. Plagued by the same sort of revolving door regulator approach taken in the US, Canada pretty routinely makes an even poorer showing than the United States when it comes to broadband pricing, availability, and service quality. And, just like the United States, Canada's solution is often to appoint industry lobbyists to positions of power, who immediately get to work making things worse for their entrenched incumbent pals. Here in the States that's Ajit Pai; in Canada it's Ian Scott.Needless to say, installing revolving door industry sycophants to solve problems the industry refuses to even acknowledge doesn't work out particularly well for consumers, competition, startups, or innovation in general -- as consumers and small businesses run face first into entirely unnecessary usage constraints. Constraints made worse if you've, say, killed off net neutrality protections, or have net neutrality protections nobody actually wants to enforce.As Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist explores this week, data illustrates how Canadian telcos make some of the biggest profits on the planet thanks to limited competition. That, in turn, results in carriers implementing arbitrary usage caps and charging an arm and a leg per gigabyte, which in turn results in less actual usage by folks afraid of running afoul of arbitrary network restrictions specifically designed to nickel and dime users:

Here in the United States, the term "fake news" is used (most prominently by the President) to declaim news stories the reader doesn't like. It has little to do with whether or not the content is untruthful and almost everything to do with swinging public opinion against the press outlet and its reporting.The term has become a handy tool for autocrats and authoritarians seeking to punish journalists and others who publish content they don't like. The stakes in the United States are still low. Elsewhere in the world, real jail time is involved. If government officials don't like their dirty deeds exposed or their policies questioned, they just turn to a handy new set of laws predicated on a term no one can define.Daniel Funke at Poynter catches up on the story of Cameroonian journalist Akumbom Elvis McCarthy. McCarthy sent messages detailing brutal acts by law enforcement and the military, warning that the government treats reports of abusive behavior as "fake news." His call-out of the government's dismissive behavior towards its own problems was greeted with charges -- and six months in jail -- for disseminating "fake news."

We've got a double winner on the insightful side this week, with Mason Wheeler taking both of the top spots. In first place, it's a comment on the subject of fan fiction in response to Lucasfilm stepping in to defend a fan film from a copyright attack by Warner Chappel:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, Dianne Feinstein was defending the NSA on the basis that they are so "professional", while ignoring declassified facts that contradicted some of her statements. Then the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board released an anticipated report that destroyed the arguments for bulk collections — and noted that the FISA court didn't even bother evaluating the legality of such collections until after the Snowden leaks. TV news stations, meanwhile, seemed intent on giving NSA defenders all the air time in the world, and though NSA critics got a bit of time too, sometimes they had to cut away due to critical events beyond their control... like the latest Justin Bieber news.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, as usual, the recording industry was engaged in multiple battles. The RIAA was considering trying to bribe ISPs into playing along with its copyright strikes program, while its British equivalent was convincing the UK government to force them to do so, and a bunch of labels were launching the first infringement lawsuit directly targeting an ISP in Ireland. But the biggest fight was the developing Joel Tenenbaum case, where the RIAA was so opposed to it being streamed online that they appealed the judge's order (supposedly out of fear that people might remix it to make them look bad, as if they needed any help with that) — and they even sought sanctions against Tenenbaum's lawyer.Fifteen Years AgoThe Tenenbaum case was in response to the RIAA's mass lawsuit strategy, and the same week in 2004 was a prime example, with the agency suing 532 new John Does in the hopes of subpoenaing their information. Meanwhile, Kazaa was suing the industry in an audacious move of its own. Pepsi put a bunch of kids sued by the RIAA in a commercial for their limited time iTunes promotion, while Coca-Cola was struggling to keep its ill-fated music download service up and running (it was a weird time).The photography industry was trying to drag on the quality of camera phones, thus missing the point which is that people can do new things with them, like the early discovery that they could be bar-code scanners. And, in an event that seems worth noting given today's insane and chaotic news climate, this was around the time that dedicated "fact-checking" sites started popping up online.

File under: Things No One Asked For

It's been quite frustrating to watch the music industry continually turn its legal gaze to whatever it insists is the "new" threat. From the traditional piratey-scapegoats like Napster, to torrent sites, and on to file-lockers, before finally moving over to stream-ripping sites -- it's been quite predictable, if a bit silly. As with so many industry-led crusades against technology tools, this attack on these types of sites carries with it the misguided notion that because a site or tool can be used to infringe on music copyrights, it therefore is an enemy and must be shut down entirely. We've seen this same tactic used against tons of technology tools that have had perfectly legal uses in the past, but in the case of stream-ripping sites, most have decided to simply fold.Which makes it somewhat noteworthy that one foreign site is fighting back and winning against a legal challenge in the US, if only on jurisdictional grounds.

This is, of course, no surprise at all, but Google has officially asked the Supreme Court to fix the Federal Circuit's ridiculously bad ruling concerning copyright of APIs. Remember, this was the Federal Circuit's second awful ruling in this same case, both regarding the copyright status of APIs. The first bad ruling is still a travesty, in that a technically illiterate court couldn't comprehend that an API is like a recipe or instruction set that is not subject to copyright under Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act that explicitly states:

Over the past few years, politicians and intelligence officials have floated the idea of hacking back. When not pushing the idea of treating cyber wars like declarations of actual war, these officials have seen nothing wrong with hacking back against cyberattackers or allowing private companies to do the same.It may seem like there's nothing wrong with a "best defense is a good offense" theory of deterrence, but it's not that simple. First of all, attribution is often more difficult than these officials imagine. Hacking back against the wrong party is only going to escalate tensions. At worst, it could result in international incidents where those hacking back have broken laws in other countries. At best, it will just become another forever war countries throw money at -- one that's sure to result in expanded government power at the expense of the taxpayers, both in terms of tax dollars and civil liberties.France has been scratching its itchy trigger finger for awhile now. Roughly a year ago, the government shot down a proposal giving private companies the right to retaliate against cyberattacks. It felt doing so would only lead to further "instability in cyberspace." That assessment is likely correct. But the French government apparently only felt private hack backs would lead to instability. If the government did it, no such instability should occur… apparently.

Back in the fall of 2017, we wrote about a somewhat crazy situation in which one of President Trump's favorite law firms, Kasowitz Benson Torres, seemed to be building up a new kind of SLAPP practice: helping various developers file not just bogus lawsuits against environmental groups, but specifically filing RICO SLAPP suits, in which they also claimed that any protests against these developments were violations of RICO (racketeering laws). As you probably already know -- and as Ken "Popehat" White has made clear for years -- when plaintiffs claim "RICO" in civil suits, it is almost always utterly ridiculous. He's pointed out, multiple times, that many plaintiffs use "RICO" as a sort of exclamation along the lines of "and this is really bad!" rather than actually matching the (very difficult) standards of an actual RICO claim.Historically SLAPP suits -- or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation -- came about as developers went after protesters using bogus defamation lawsuits. So adding RICO claims on top of defamation appeared to be quite an escalation, as it potentially made the defense of these bogus suits that much more expensive and troubling. In October of 2017, a court threw out one of these lawsuits filed by Resolute Forest Products (RFP), which was represented by Kasowitz partner Michael Bowe. But that didn't stop RFP from almost immediately refiling an amended lawsuit.And now, the court has mostly dumped that new case, dismissing all of the RICO claims and most of the defamation claims. On the defamation claims, the court clearly recognizes that RFP just stacked up claims in an apparent attempt to overwhelm the defendants:

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Over the past few days, a social media shit-storm formed over footage of Catholic private school students in MAGA hats apparently engaging in some bigoted behavior while attending an anti-abortion march at the nation's capital. As more footage of the incident was released, the formerly crystal clear narrative of bigoted, privileged white dudes antagonizing a Native American demonstrator became a bit more muddied.By the time the additional footage came to light, it was too late. Decisions had already been made about the mindset of the Catholic school teens, most of which were posted to Twitter. Some journalists and celebrities were in the mix as well, including a few that went so far as to ask for the kids to be doxxed.What was made of the situation seemed to come down to preexisting notions of what kind of person would wear a Make America Great Again hat. Most of those notions were in agreement: a person wearing that hat is a racist. In some cases, this is probably true. It's unknown whether the students being called racists on Twitter are actually racist, but there's hardly enough clear evidence on hand to declare this a fact.Whatever you make of the situation (and the hats), there's an article written that comes down firmly on your side. Robby Soave's article at Reason says everyone calling these kids racist is wrong because the extended footage shows details that don't align with the skewed narrative created by edited clips. Over at Deadspin, Laura Wagner says don't doubt your preconceptions: the footage shows exactly what people thought it showed.The end result was a handful of teens being called racists, along with their private school, parents, and school administrators. Naturally, someone wants to sue about this. That someone is stunt lawyer Robert Barnes, who was previously seen here at Techdirt declaring a court's indication it would dismiss Chuck Johnson's lawsuit against Twitter a victory for his client. He also represented a person who trolled reporters into calling her a racist when she sued the trolled reporters who called her a racist.Barnes says he will take any Covington student's case pro bono to sue anyone who called this student a racist. Barnes graciously gave everyone threatened by this uber-vague threat 48 hours to remove the supposedly libelous content. Some have complied. Others have doubled down. Most people appear to not care one way or the other.Barnes has been making his way around right-leaning press outfits (Fox News, PJ Media) to inform everyone about his intent to sue. So far, he has yet to name any secured clients, but that hasn't stopped him from claiming he's going to sue people for forming an opinion.

Why it's almost as if the Ajit Pai FCC and broadband industry haven't been entirely honest with us.This week we noted how Wall Street is predicting that the telco and cable industries will see notable declines in network investment next year, despite the FCC and industry's repeated, breathless claims that killing net neutrality would somehow spur network investment. This, as we've long noted, was based on the bogus industry claim that net neutrality somehow stifled such investment, a claim repeatedly disproven by public SEC filings, earnings reports, and even statements by more than a dozen major ISP CEOs.Almost as if on cue, Comcast released the company's latest earnings report showing, you guessed it, that the company saw a 3% dip in cable network CAPEX last quarter despite all of that sweet, potent, "internet freedom" Ajit Pai claims to have been spreading around:

If all goes well, we may end up with a little more Fourth Amendment here in the USA. The Supreme Court is currently considering reviewing a case that will more clearly define what Fourth Amendment implications cops' four-legged friends bring to the (search) party.A Minnesota state supreme court case (Edstrom v. Minnesota [PDF]) dealing with a K-9's door sniff in an apartment hallway is up for review by the nation's highest court. The state court found in favor of the government, stating that a K-9 sniff only needs reasonable suspicion to comply with the Fourth Amendment and state's own Constitution.Should we expect a higher standard for dog sniffs? One would think so, considering cops already refer to K-9s as "probable cause on four legs." The Supreme Court recognized in the Rodriguez decision that artificially prolonging pretextual traffic stops solely for the purpose of developing probable cause -- in many cases waiting for a drug dog to arrive at the stop -- violated the Fourth Amendment.More captive audiences -- residents in their own homes -- shouldn't be treated to a lower standard just because they're never technically "free to go." An apartment resident can't demand officers leave publicly-accessible areas and they certainly can't just pack up their place and leave just because law enforcement doesn't have probable cause to perform a search. But officers can troll hallways with drug dogs based on only the hunch that something illegal may be occurring out of sight.Drug dogs are trained to do only one thing: detect the odor of drugs. When they alert, officers then have probable cause to effect a search of residence. Limited searches then can be performed without a warrant under the theory that evidence may be destroyed if the residence is not secured while a warrant is obtained.The home is supposed to be afforded the utmost in Fourth Amendment protections. But when a drug dog is involved, much of that heightened protection dissipates, replaced with non-verbal statements from an animal that can easily be triggered by nothing more than the dog's desire to please its handler. You can't cross-examine a dog to determine its trustworthiness or state of mind. All you can do is hope there's enough failure on the record to call into question the sniff's veracity and that sort of evidence is almost impossible to obtain.Whether or not the Supreme Court decides to take this case largely depends on how the justices feel about the Jardines decision. In 2013, the Court ruled that taking a drug dog onto a person's porch to sniff for drugs was a search under the Fourth Amendment. But a lot of that reasoning relies on the definition of curtilage. For distinct homes, the privacy begins at the end of the driveway -- something further defined in 2018's Collins decision. In that case, the court held that the Fourth Amendment was violated when the officer entered an open carport to look at an allegedly stolen motorcycle.But curtilage isn't so easily defined in shared spaces like apartment buildings. Officers can traverse halls just like residents can, provided the common spaces aren't otherwise secured with keypads or card entry. And if they can be in the hall, they can certainly take their dogs in with them. This is gray area the court hasn't directly addressed, and if it refuses to do so in this case, it allows the Fourth Amendment to be applied unequally. Zero protection for common areas that provide access to residents' doors (and their residences beyond) makes the Fourth Amendment a rich (or richer) man's protection, leaving those unable to purchase or rent their own home subject to the whims of police officers and their dogs.

In far too many of the trademark disputes we cover here, those disputes center around two competing logos or trade dress that look nothing alike, save for one very generic component. To get a sense of what I mean, you can refer back to the Chicago Cubs and Washington Nationals bullying a financial services company because its logo used a capital "W." Or the time one sausage company sued another because both logos had, sigh, a pig in them.Or, now, when clothier Roots Corp. tried to nullify a trademark held by YM, Inc. because both had clothing lines with logos that included log cabins.

Another day, another crazy trademark story. As you may recall, back in December we wrote about how President Trump's personal lawyer, and former NYC mayor, Rudy Giuliani -- who considers himself a cybersecurity expert -- made an utter fool of himself. It started with him making a typo in a tweet, in which he left out a space after the period ending a sentence. The second sentence started with "In" but after a period it became ".in" which is the TLD for India. Someone then registered that domain and pointed it to a site critical of Trump. Rather than recognize he made a typo, Giuliani ridiculously tweeted that Twitter had "allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message." Except that didn't happen. Incredibly, months later, Giuliani's nonsense tweet is still up.This resulted in people hunting through previous Giuliani tweets, and they discovered that Giuliani had made a similar typo with a similar autolink effect a few months earlier for the URL "collusion.so" specifically with this text:

It's no secret the FBI engages in social media surveillance. It has a contract with Dataminr to sift through tweets directly from Twitter's firehose. For years it has engaged in suspicionless pre-investigation "assessments," which compile every publicly-available piece of information the agency can gather without a warrant or subpoena. (Assessments also allow the agency to gather info from law enforcement-only databases, but that's not the issue at hand here.) From this starting point, the FBI can decide whether or not the person it targeted in its non-investigation investigation is worth investigating.Public posts on social media services have zero expectation of privacy. All the same, one likes to believe the government has better things to do with its limited resources than scour the public-facing web for unlawful tweets or whatever. Clearly, the software the agency uses limits manpower expenditures while allowing the feds to act as unseen followers/friends of thousands of people's social media timelines, but it's still haystacks someone needs to make sense of.The FBI's social media surveillance is an open secret. Of course, now that it's being pressed for details by the ACLU, it's trying to pretend it has no idea what everyone -- including the FBI -- is talking about.

Turnabout, as they say, is only fair play.If you hadn't noticed, Wikileaks isn't quite the transparency operation it used to be. Staffers who routinely helped rein in Assange's less noble impulses long ago left the effort behind, leaving us with the often bizarre comedy that is Wikileaks in 2019. And while that doesn't justify the misguided DNC lawsuit or the potential threat to transparency posed by government efforts to prosecute leakers, that doesn't change one undeniable fact: modern Wikileaks is increasingly seen in infosec and policy circles as a poorly-written joke, long-since buried under the rubble of numerous scandals and Assange's bulbous ego.That's not to say that Wikileaks didn't provide an invaluable service in its prime. Its early operations lit a much-needed fire under a press routinely terrified of speaking truth to power, especially in regards to the United States' often bipartisan, mindless unchecked international militarism. These days, however, Wikileaks is more about pandering to MAGA kids for bitcoin donations, selectively avoiding transparency, and levying silly legal threats against the press rather than actually adhering to its core mission of a decade ago.Still, there's no doubt that Wikileaks of old contributed to a marginally braver press, even if it remains obvious that a lot of work on this front still needs to be done. And its influence continues to be mirrored by subsequent incarnations looking to improve on the formula, even as those efforts criticize Wikileaks' increasingly erratic behavior in the wake of a percussive parade of unflattering revelations.Case in point: transparency activist and long-time infosec reporter Emma Best has unveiled the creation of Distributed Denial of Secrets. The organization is expected to make waves this week with the publication of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails and gigabytes of leaked documents, some of which come from previous hacks of Putin aides like Vladislav Surkov.Unlike Wikileaks, DDoS will focus more on compiling and curating information, much of it coming from past hacks and breaches, building a sort of museum and library of now easily-accessible information. Especially information related to the Russian government and its bone-grafted relationship to Russian organized crime; stuff, project supporters claim, Wikileaks has steered clear of in recent years:

Gaming Like It's 1923: The Newly Public Domain Game JamWe're down to crunch time. As announced on January 1st, we're co-hosting a fun public domain game jam to celebrate the fact that works from 1923 are finally in the public domain, after years and years of lobbying efforts by the legacy copyright industries kept pushing out and blocking the release of cultural works into the public. When the works from 1923 were first published, they all expected to be in the public domain by 1979 at the latest. But intense anti-public lobbying by Hollywood and other copyright holders have held that off for decades, doing significant harm to culture and our access to culture. I still believe that these copyright term extensions were unconstitutional, but tragically the Supreme Court disagreed.Either way, we finally got a public domain, and while it's way late, we should absolutely be not just celebrating it, but making use of it (as a side note, we'll also be celebrating it at the "Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain" event being put on by Creative Commons and the Internet Archive). Our game jam is a chance to explore and experiment with ideas to make use of newly public domain works to create games -- video games, tabletop games, role playing games, etc. We're encouraged that we've already received a bunch of entries (I expected most people would wait until the last minute to submit, but it hasn't worked out that way).Either way, there's one week left to enter the contest -- and even if you don't think of yourself as a game designer, you can jump right in and give it a try (while the video games need to work in a browser, analog games just need to include the instructions, and there are all sorts of ways to create interactive fiction as well). These games don't need to be polished. The whole point of a game jam is for people to just create something new and get it out there. We have an all-star panel of judges listed on the site, who will be reviewing the games in February, and we'll be giving out prizes for the best ones in a few different categories -- so don't miss out.

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As the EU continues to discuss and negotiate over the EU Copyright Directive, most of the attention is focused on the mandatory filters of Article 13, but the tax on news aggregators in Article 11 remains equally problematic. Last week, Google apparently started experimenting with showing a barren news search results page to demonstrate what Google News would look like if it complied with Article 11... and it basically would look like your internet connection was broken and Google News didn't load properly:In response, the giant EU news publishers -- who are the ones pushing heavily for Article 11 and who think that it will somehow magically force Google to rain down cash into their bank accounts -- started whining that this was a publicity stunt and "scaremongering."

For some time now, a man by the name of Chris Sevier has been waging a fairly facts-optional war on porn. Sevier first became famous for trying to marry his computer to protest same sex marriage back in 2016. He also tried to sue Apple after blaming the Cupertino giant for his own past porn addiction, and has gotten into trouble for allegedly stalking country star John Rich and a 17-year-old girl. Sevier has since been a cornerstone of an effort to pass truly awful porn filter legislation in more than 15 states under the disingenuous guise of combating human trafficking.Dubbed the "Human Trafficking Prevention Act," all of the incarnations of the law would force ISPs to filter pornography and other "patently offensive material." The legislation would then force state residents interested in viewing porn to pony up a one-time $20 "digital access fee" to whitelist the internet's naughty bits for each internet-connected device in the home. The proposal is patently absurd, technically impossible to implement, and yet somehow these bills continue to get further than they ever should across a huge swath of the boob-phobic country.Once people have realized the ignorant futility (and under-handed sales pitch) of such model legislation, it usually fails to gain any steam in most states. But it's back this week with a decidedly new wrinkle in Arizona, where State Rep. Gail Griffin is pushing Arizona House Bill 2444. HB 2444 would mandate that any Arizona internet user would need to file a request if they want to access porn online, proving they're at least 18 years of age. Porn seekers would then pay a one-time fee of $20 (plus additional fees) to access porn. Of course since this effort (like past efforts) is technically futile, the proposal is going nowhere.But it's getting some extra attention this week because the bill mandates the creation of something called the "John McCain Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Prevention Fund," which, if past precedent for these bills holds, likely has less than nothing to actually do with, and was never sanctioned by, the family of John McCain.That fund, in turn, would go to a number of different causes, including a program designed "to uphold community standards of decency" and develop "programs for victims of sex abuse." But Arizona's incarnation of this dumb law has a small wrinkle in that Griffin is trying to claim this money could also be used to help fund Trump's unnecessary border fence:

As a full-time writer I have an interest in copyright. However arguable its principles and arbitrary its scope, I benefit from it. When I trip over an online pirate version of one of my books, I shamelessly snitch the pirates to my publishers.But would I want the platforms that enable this piracy to be liable for it? No. Because then the platforms – mostly giant corporations whose names we all know – would have every incentive to screen for any content that might conceivably breach copyright. Given the volumes involved, they would have to attempt to automate their filters. Good luck with designing an algorithm that can distinguish rip-offs from fair dealing!Far greater than my interest in copyright is my interest in a free and open internet – or, failing that, in keeping the internet as free and open as it is now. The internet is already a long way from the wild wonderland I first stepped into in the mid-1990s. Predictably enough, that early free-for-all has shrunk to a handful of giant corporations, who -- like some fast-forward cartoon version of the last chapter of Marx's Capital: Vol 1 -- usurp and monopolise all the advantages of this process of transformation.It's tempting to think that the EU is standing up to the corporate behemoths in the interest of creators. But Articles 11 and 13 of the proposed directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market aren't an instance of democracy against capitalism. Drafted with scary imprecision, they at best licence one group of corporate behemoths – the big publishers and creative industries – to harass another, the digital platforms. At worst, they enable the digital platforms to further censor and blinker us, their users.The European Parliament would do well to ditch the offending articles, leave creators and publishers to deal with egregious rip-offs of their work, and leave the rest of us to meme and link and parody and remix as we please.Kenneth Macrae MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer who’s published books such as The Star Fraction (1995) to The Restoration Game (2010). In 2009 he was a writer in residence at the ESRC genomics policy and research forum at Edinburgh University. He’s won numerous awards including the BSFA award and Prometheus Award, both for Best Novel.

In the dual golden ages of internet and snark, individuals and companies are offered many opportunities to decide how to deal with people using social media to have fun at their expense. In most cases, this goes exactly how you'd imagine: strong-arm tactics to shut down social media accounts, lawsuits to silence fake or parody accounts, and even entire government agencies getting upset over one of its own tweeting against the agency line. Missing in all of this, as you may have noticed, is any sense of humor or fun about this sort of thing.But level heads do occasionally prevail. Such appears to be the case with the folks at Table Talk Pies, a century-old pie-slinging company that decided in the past few years to have a better online presence, but also recently discovered someone out there is impersonating the company on Twitter.

As we noted earlier this year, the California Supreme Court wisely sided with Yelp in a legal fight over whether or not the company could be forced to remove reviews based on another legal dispute of which Yelp was not a party. The crux of the case was about Section 230 of the CDA. As we detailed back in 2016, a lower court had initially ordered Yelp to take down a review that the court found to be defamatory (though, it was on default judgment as the defendant in the case decided to not show up in court). The case was brought by a lawyer, Dawn Hassell, who sued a former client, Ava Bird, claiming that Bird had posted a negative review of Hassell's legal work. Bird then ignored the lawsuit, leading to the default judgment -- all of which is fine. But then the court issued an injunction against Yelp, ordering it to take down the review, despite Yelp not even being a party to the lawsuit.The California Supreme Court properly ruled that the injunction should be thrown out, based on CDA 230, which (as we've discussed over and over again) says that an internet service provider (such as Yelp) cannot be held liable due to the speech of a user (such as Ava Bird). This was a pretty standard and "easy" ruling on CDA 230, and the court had many cases to cite. And thus, it's good news that the US Supreme Court has denied Hassell's cert petition to hear the case -- meaning the California ruling stands. It shouldn't be a surprise that the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case, as there is widespread agreement that this is exactly how CDA 230 is meant to work and it's how basically every circuit that has ruled on this issue has found, sot here's no circuit split to deal with. Having the Supreme Court refuse to hear a case isn't always newsworthy, but it's at least a bit of a relief that the court apparently didn't think this one was an issue worth reconsidering. The internet and the services we all use, remain protected... for now.

Late last year, a Seattle newspaper petitioned the court to unseal dockets related to electronic surveillance by law enforcement. The position was clear: the First Amendment provides citizens with a right to information, hence the presumption of openness that's supposed to govern court proceedings. The government has long argued the need to protect law enforcement means and methods outweigh the public's right to know, and has secured a lot of compliance from judges at all levels of the court system.In recent years -- no doubt at least partially as a result of the Snowden leaks -- courts have begun pushing back. Warrant affidavits are receiving more scrutiny from some judges and litigation has resulted in courts agreeing to unseal large numbers of proceedings involving law enforcement surveillance tech.The Seattle case deals with the same concern: law enforcement is increasingly deploying secretive tech and locking the public out of the discussion by sealing documents and dockets. The good news is the federal court presiding over the case agrees with the EFF and The Stranger, the Seattle publication that put the litigation in motion.

As you might have heard, the famed pranksters The Yes Men were recently involved in something of a parody news story. They printed up and handed out a ton of parody Washington Posts, dated May 1, 2019 (note: a date a few months in the future) with a cover story claiming to be about President Trump being removed from office. People who got their hands on the printed edition said that they looked pretty similar to an actual Washington Post. The pranksters didn't just print out newspapers, they also set up a website at my-washingtonpost.com. The Washington Post itself was not amused and appears to have sent an incredibly stupid cease-and-desist letter from a publication that should know better.Actually, let's be clear: the Washington Post does know better. As Public Citizen lawyer Paul Levy notes in a post we'll talk more about down below, the Washington Post's double standard shines through based on its reporting on other parodies in comparison:

You'll recall that one of the top reasons for killing popular net neutrality rules was that they had somehow supposedly crushed broadband industry network investment. Of course, a wide array of publicly-available data easily disproved this claim, but that didn't stop FCC boss Ajit Pai and ISPs from repeating it (and in some cases lying before Congress about it) anyway. We were told, more times that we could count, that with net neutrality dead, sector investment would explode since carriers would be "unchained" from "burdensome regulation."You'll be shocked to learn this purported boon in investment isn't happening.A few months ago, Verizon made it clear its CAPEX would be declining, and the company's deployment would see no impact despite billions in tax cuts and regulatory favors from the Trump FCC. Both AT&T and Verizon have similarly announced massive workforce reductions as well. Some investment growth is happening in wireless as carriers prepare for fifth-generation (5G) wireless service (which they would have deployed regardless of the attacks on net neutrality). But even that's a bit lower than Wall Street and sector analysis expected.And according to the latest analysis from MoffettNathanson, both fixed-line telcos and cablecos are expected to see notable declines in CAPEX and investment:

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The evidence the feds use to lock people up continues to be laughable. Well, laughable under any other circumstances. Freedom is a high price to pay for bad science, but the FBI seems to believe the tradeoff between lost freedom and junk science is a net gain for society. Judges seem to agree. It's difficult to challenge the sufficiency of evidence against you, nevermind the underlying "science" backing dubious forensic evidence like hair or bite mark matching.The gold standards in forensic evidence aren't even gold. DNA is a hitchhiker which can put people never involved with a crime at the scene just by hitching a ride on first responders. Fingerprints have been considered individual markers for years, but even that assessment appears to have been overstated.But dig deep enough into the FBI's forensic toolkit and you'll find some truly surprising forms of "evidence." ProPublica has done exactly that, uncovering so-called science that far more resembles faith. Convictions have been obtained thanks to FBI forensic experts claiming mass produced products like shirts and jeans are just as distinct as fingerprints and DNA.

One of the key themes we've been hearing for years now concerning the EU's awful Article 13 section of the EU Copyright Directive, was that no one should pay any attention at all to the critics of Article 13, because it's all just "big tech lobbying" behind any of the criticism. In the past, we highlighted a few of these claims:

India's government is still seeking more direct control of the internet, using ill-defined buzzwords ("hate speech," "fake news") as justification for broken encryption and holding tech companies directly responsible for content created by users. The Indian government may have passed and killed a "fake news" law in the space of 24 hours, but the term lives on as a useful enabler for censorship.

Techdirt writes plenty about copyright in the US and EU, and any changes to the respective legislative landscapes. But it's important to remember that many other countries around the world are also trying to deal with the tension between copyright's basic aim to prevent copying, and the Internet's underlying technology that facilitates it. Recently, we covered the copyright reform process in South Africa, where some surprisingly good things have been happening. Now it seems that Singapore may bring in a number of positive changes to its copyright legislation. One of the reasons for that is the very thorough consultative process that was undertaken, explained here by Singapore's Ministry of Law:

On the surface Herrick v. Grindr seems the same sort of case as Daniel v. Armslist (which we wrote about last week): it's a case at an appeals court that addresses the applicability of Section 230, meaning there is a reasonable possibility of it having long-lingering effect on platforms once it gets decided. It's also a case full of ugly facts with a sympathetic plaintiff, and, at least nominally, involves the same sort of claim against a platform – in Armslist the claim was for "negligent design," whereas here the claim is for "defective design." In both cases the general theory is that because people were able to use the platform to do bad things, the platforms themselves should be legally liable for the resulting harm.Of course, if this theory were correct, what platform could exist? People use Internet platforms in bad ways all the time, and they were doing so back in the days of CompuServe and Prodigy. It is recognition of this tendency that caused Congress to pass Section 230 in the first place, because if platforms needed to answer for the terrible things their users used them for, then they could never afford to remain available for all the good things people used them for too. Congress felt it was too high a cost to lose the beneficial potential of the Internet because of the possibility of bad actors, and so Section 230 was drafted to make sure that we wouldn't have to. Bad actors could still be pursued for their bad acts, but not the platforms that they had exploited to commit them.In this case the bad act in question was the creation and management of a false Grindr profile for Herrick by an ex-boyfriend bitter about their breakup. It led to countless strangers, often with aggressive expectations for sex, showing up at Herrick's home and work. There is no question that the ex-boyfriend's behavior was terrible, frightening, inexcusable, and, if not already illegal under New York law, deserving to be. But only to the extent that such a law would punish just the culprit (in this case the ex-boyfriend who created the fake profile).The main problem with this case is that Herrick is seeking to have New York law extend to also punish the platform, which had not created the problematic content. But the plain language of Section 230 – both in its immunity provision along with its pre-emption provision – prevents platforms from being held liable for content created by others. Herrick argues that Grindr should be held liable anyway "because it knowingly facilitated criminal and tortious conduct." But that's not the standard. The standard is whether the platform created the wrongful content, or, at minimum, in the wake of Roommates, had a hand in imbuing it with its wrongful quality. But here there is no evidence to suggest that Grindr had anything to do with the creation of the fake profile. It was the awful ex-boyfriend who was doing all the malfeasant content supplying.But here's where the two cases part company, and where the Grindr one gets especially messy. The good news for Section 230 is that this messiness may make it easy for the Second Circuit to resolve in favor of Grindr and leave Section 230 unscathed. The bad news is that if the Second Circuit decides the other way, it will be very messy indeed.One of the core questions in most lawsuits involving Section 230 is whether the platform itself is an interactive computer service provider, and thus protected by Section 230 for lawsuits seeking to hold them liable for content created by others, or whether it is instead a non-immune "information content provider." Part of the problem with this case is that when Herrick filed the lawsuit originally, the pleading acknowledged that it was an interactive computer service provider. Later when he was fighting the motion to dismiss he changed its mind, but that's a problem. You don't usually get to change your mind about these critical elements of your complaint without repleading it. (Which is one of the reasons Herrick is appealing; the dismissal was "with prejudice," meaning it wouldn't easily be able to re-plead at this point, and Herrick wants another chance to amend his complaint.)But that's only one of the pleading problems. A plaintiff also has to put forth a plausible theory of liability at the outset, in large part so that the defendant can be on notice of what it is being accused of to defend itself. It's not unusual for theories of liability to evolve as litigation proceeds, but if the theory changes too much too late in the process it raises significant due process problems for the defendant. Which seems to be happening here. The story Herrick told the Second Circuit about why it thought Grindr should be liable for the harm Herrick suffered differed in significant ways from the story it had told at the outset, or to the trial court. This change is one reason why the case is particularly messy, and may be messier still if the Second Circuit allows it to continue anyway.At issue is what Herrick told the Second Circuit about his harassment. According to him now, strange men were showing up in his life not just constantly but everywhere he went. Yet according to the record at the trial court, they only showed up in two places: his home and his work. Which is not to say, of course, that it's ok for him to have these people harass him at either place (or any place). The issue is that this "everywhere" v. "only in two places" distinction significantly affects his theory of the case and therefore the merits of his appeal.Because the argument he pressed at oral argument was that it was Grindr's geolocation service that removed the case from Section 230's purview. According to him there must be some bug in Grindr that allows these strange men to know where he is and seek him out, and so, he thinks, Grindr should be liable for not fixing this defect.However there are a number of problems with this theory. First, it is highly implausible. For it to be true Grindr would need to not only still be tracking him (even as an ex-user) but then, for some unknown reason, somehow unite the location data of the actual Herrick person with the fake Herrick profile. Herrick tried to argue that the first part was likely, citing for instance Google's location services continuing to track users after they'd thought it had stopped. But even if it were true that Grindr had continued to track him, it would be really random to associate that data with any other account he didn't control. From Grindr's point of view, his real account and the fake account would look like two completely separate users. Sure, Grindr could have a bug that mis-associated location data, but there's no reason for it to pick these two completely different accounts to merge the data from. It would be just as arbitrary as if it mixed up his data with any other Grindr account.Furthermore, there is zero evidence to suggest that the fake account used the geolocation data of anyone at all, other than perhaps the ex-boyfriend, who was operating the account. There certainly is no evidence to suggest that it was somehow using Herrick's actual data, and that's why the factual distinction about where he was harassed matters. If it truly was everywhere then he might have a point about the app having a vulnerability, and if so then perhaps his defective design claim might start to be colorable. But the only information he's alleged is that he was harassed in those two places, home and work, and no one needed to use any geolocation data to find him at either of these places. The ex-boyfriend knew of these places and could easily send would-be suitors to them directly via private messages. In other words, the reason they turned up at either of these places was because of content supplied by a third party (the ex-boyfriend). This fact puts the case clearly in Section 230-land and makes the case one where someone is trying to hold a platform liable for harm caused by how another communicated through their system.Finally, an additional problem with this theory is that even if it were correct, and even if there were some evidence that the geolocation was allowing strangers to harass him everywhere, it needed to have come up before the appeal. The purpose of the appeal is to to review whether the first court made a mistake. Belatedly supplying more information for the benefit of the appeals court will not help it decide whether the first court made a mistake because that court could only have done the best it could with the information available to it. It isn't a mistake not to have had the benefit of more, and to add more at this late date would be incredibly unfair to the defendant. As it was, by pressing this new "he was tracked everywhere" theory at oral argument it left Grindr's counsel in the unenviable and risky position of having to field extremely hypothetical questions from the judges about their client's potential liability based on facts nowhere in the underlying record. It was uncomfortable to listen to the judges push Grindr's lawyers on the question of whether some hypothetical software bug that they had never contemplated, and likely doesn't exist, might undermine their Section 230 protection. To their credit they fielded the hypo on the fly pretty well by reminding the judges that Section 230 covers how platforms are used by other people, regardless of whether they are used appropriately or exploitatively. But given the way this case was pleaded from the outset, this hypo should never have come up, especially not at this late juncture.So one of the overarching concerns about this case is that because this theory did not coalesce until it had reached the appeals court, it left the central legal questions it raised under-litigated, thus inviting poor results if the Second Circuit now gives them any credence. But that's not the only concern. It may still be an ominous harbinger, for even if Herrick loses the appeal, it may not be the last time we see this "software vulnerability makes you lose Section 230 protection" theory put forth. It foreshadows how we may see future privacy litigation wrapped-up as defective design cases, and, worse, it may encourage plaintiffs seeking to do an end-run around Section 230 to try to package their claims up as privacy cases.Also, what Herrick asked for in his appeal was a remand back to the trial court to explore all these under-developed evidentiary issues. Was there a software bug? Was Grindr continuing to track former subscribers in a way they didn't know about? Was there a privacy leak, where the fake profile was somehow united with the geolocation of a real person? Herrick believes the case shouldn't have been dismissed without discovery on these issues, but early dismissal is a big reason why Section 230 provides valuable protection to a platform. It is extremely expensive to go through the discovery stage – in fact, it's often the most expensive stage – and if platforms had to endure it just so plaintiffs could explore paranoid fantasies with no evidence to give them even a veneer of plausibility, it will be extremely destructive to the online ecosystem.On the upside, however, unlike the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in the Armslist case, after listening to the oral argument I'm relatively confident that the judges will be able to respect prior precedent upholding Section 230, even in these awful cases, and resist reaching an emotional conclusion that strays from it. Also, given the issues with the pleading and such – which at oral argument the judges flagged – there may be enough procedural problems with Herrick's case to make it easy for the court to dispense with it without causing damage to Section 230 jurisprudence in the Second Circuit in the process. But if these predictions turn out to be wrong, and if it turns out that these procedural issues pose no obstacle to the court issuing the remand Herrick seeks, then we might have to contend with something really ugly on the books at a federal appellate circuit level.

It's that time again! Mike spent the week before last at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, checking out all the latest technology that companies are most eager to show off, and now once again he's joined on the podcast by CES veteran Rob Pegoraro for the CES 2019 Post-Mortem.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 shocking and brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by members of the Saudi Arabian government late last year was breathtaking in its audacity and execution. Lured to the Saudi consulate in Turkey by Saudi government officials, Khashoggi was strangled and dismembered by a team of Saudi security operatives.Khashoggi was a legal resident of the United States, in self-imposed exile from Saudi Arabia as a result of the government's treatment of dissidents. As a lawful resident, Khashoggi was technically protected by the many of the same laws and rights US citizens are. While the US government limits those rights and protections when legal residents (but not citizens) travel out of the country, the US intelligence community still bears a "duty to warn" lawful residents of any violent threats against them.The IC knew Khashoggi was a target of the Saudi government. It knew Riyadh had "something unpleasant" waiting for Khashoggi should he return to Saudi Arabia. A plan to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia was intercepted by US intelligence. No one knows whether Khashoggi was ever warned by US intelligence of these plans.The Committee to Protect Journalists -- along with the Knight Institute -- wants to know if any attempts were made to inform the murdered journalist of Saudi Arabia's plans. So far, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has refused to publicly comment on the IC's "duty to warn." These two entities have filed FOIA requests seeking info about the IC's duty to warn Jamal Khashoggi, asking each of the IC's five components to release documents detailing their actions/inactions. These were filed shortly after news broke of Khashoggi's murder. So far, none of the agencies have handed over any documents.As the Knight Institute points out, there definitely should be documents related to Khashoggi and the government's "duty to warn."

We've written many times about privacy activist Max Schrems, who almost single-handedly brought down the silly privacy safe harbors between the EU and the US. Last year, we wrote about his newest project called noyb.eu, which stands for "None Of Your Business."Last week, Schrems and noyb announced a big list of GDPR complaints filed in Austria, against basically every streaming media company, none of which -- they claim -- are in compliance with the GDPR. Schrems also provided everyone with a handy dandy chart showing the basic details of the results of the GDPR requests they made to eight different streaming platforms, where they fell down, and how much they might be on the hook for:If you'd like to see the actual complaints, here they are for Amazon, Apple, DAZN, Flimmit, Netflix, Soundcloud, Spotify, and YouTube.I have lots of thoughts about this, so let's list them out:

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When it comes to Star Wars, both Lucasfilm and Disney have shown themselves to be perfectly insane when it comes to IP protectionism. Examples of this are legion, and neither company has come out of them with a stellar or fan-friendly image, generally speaking. That is probably why when Toos, the guy behind the quite popular Star Wars Theory YouTube channel, decided to put out a Darth Vader fan-film, he went out of his way to attempt to follow all the rules.

To be clear, T-Mobile initially had an indisputably-positive impact on the wireless sector. The company's decision to eliminate consumer pain points like long-term contracts and early termination fees was quickly mirrored by other carriers thanks to a strange concept known as "competition." And CEO John Legere's relentless attacks on giants like AT&T and Verizon have proven to be immensely entertaining over the years. All told, T-Mobile has built its entire brand on the back of the idea that it was a polar opposite of the type of ethically-dubious giants that have dominated telecom for a generation.In more recent years the company's "uncarrier" branding schtick has started to look a little worn around the edges. From supporting efforts to kill net neutrality to weirdly attacking the EFF, the company occasionally lets its mask slip, showing it's not all that different from the companies it professes to be better than. This shift has been particularly obvious as the company has tried to sell the press, public, and Trump administration on the company's job and competition killing merger with Sprint (like that time it hired Corey Lewandowski to "consult" despite his comments mocking a kid with Down Syndrome).As it rushes to consolidate the wireless sector from four to three carriers, T-Mobile's increasingly engaging in behavior it used to mock AT&T and Verizon for. Not least of which being the company's empty promises to police the sale of user location data to dubious third brokers and aggregators, something T-Mobile was perfectly happy to do in lock-step with other carriers.That brings us to this week's revelations that T-Mobile executives booked 9 rooms at Trump's DC hotel the day after it first announced its Sprint merger ambitions. T-Mobile execs have been regular patrons ever since as they try to sell the government on the latest telecom sector megadeal nobody asked for:

As if government agencies needed any new ways to thwart accountability and transparency. Oregon legislators are introducing a host of alterations to the state's public records law, but one of those looks like nothing more than an easily-abusable tool to be wielded against public records requesters. Jessie Gomez of MuckRock has more details: