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A chief federal judge in Chicago has handed down a scathing opinion calling ATF stash house stings an "ends justifies the means" evil that needs to be "relegated to the dark corridors of our past." The opinion shuts the door on two defendants hoping to show the ATF's fake robberies of fake stash houses filled with fake drugs were racially-biased, but it does show even without the taint of bias, the sting operations are exploitative and useless. (via Brad Heath)The opinion [PDF] has nothing good to say about the stash house stings. It opens with numbers that certainly appear to show racial bias and it doesn't let up from there.

It's become quite fashionable these days to gripe about the Internet. Even some of its staunchest allies in Congress have been getting cranky. Naturally there are going to be growing pains as humanity adapts to the unprecedented ability for billions of people to communicate with each other easily, cheaply, and immediately for the first time in world history. But this communications revolution has also brought some extraordinary benefits that we glibly risk when we forget about them and instead only focus the challenges. This glass is way more than half full but, if we're not careful to protect it, soon it will be empty.As we've been talking about a lot recently, working its way through Congress is a bill, SESTA/FOSTA, so fixated on perceived problems with the Internet (even though there's no evidence that these are problems the Internet itself caused) that it threatens the ability of the Internet to deliver its benefits, including those that would better provide tools to deal with some of those perceived problems, if not outright make those same problems worse by taking away the Internet's ability to help. But it won't be the last such bill, as long as the regulatory pile-on intending to disable the Internet is allowed to proceed unchecked.As the saying too often goes, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. But this time let's not wait to lose it; let's take the opportunity to appreciate all the good the Internet has given us, so we can hold on tight to it and resist efforts to take it away.Towards that end, we want to encourage the sharing and collection of examples of how the Internet has made the world better: how it made it better for everyone, and how it even just made it better for you, and whether it made things better for good, or for even just one moment in one day when the Internet enabled some connection, discovery, or opportunity that could not have happened without it. It is unlikely that this list could be exhaustive: the Internet delivers its benefits too frequently and often too seamlessly to easily recognize them all. But that's why it's all the more important to go through the exercise of reflecting on as many as we can, because once they become less frequent and less seamless they will be much easier to miss and much harder to get back.

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The UN has decided it's possibly Facebook's fault things are going so badly in Myanmar. Muslims have been fleeing the country in droves thanks to Myanmar security forces engaging in widespread acts of violence (including rape) against them, urged on by hardline nationalist monks.For all intents and purposes, Facebook is Myanmar's internet. Loosening of restrictions on social media access has resulted in a large portion of the population getting all their news (along with all the hate speech the UN is complaining about) via the social media giant. The UN is looking into genocide accusations but has decided to speak up against Facebook first.

Last fall, the Department of Justice announced it would be suing to block AT&T's $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner. According to the DOJ, it sued to block the lawsuit to protect consumers, arguing that the deal would likely make it harder for streaming competitors to license the content they need to compete with AT&T (especially HBO programming). Consumer advocates have long argued that AT&T (with its decade of well-documented and often comedic anti-consumer behavior in tow) would simply use its greater leverage and power to hamstring competition and jack up rates for consumers (especially with net neutrality dying).While some have argued that the DOJ is simply following antitrust protocol, others (including AT&T lawyers) think the lawsuit is driven by other motivations.That's not a hard case to make given the Trump administration's anti-consumer, anti-innovation, and anti-competition tendencies on other fronts (like net neutrality). Trump's pick to head the DOJ's antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, was also on record, before joining the DOJ, stating he saw no real problems with the deal. Meanwhile Trump's disdain for Time Warner-owned CNN is also well established, and reports have indicated that Trump pal Rupert Murdoch spent much of last year trying to scuttle the deal for competitive reasons (Muroch has also approached AT&T twice about buying CNN).Adding fuel to this fire was a bipartisan group of ex-DOJ officials (from US Attorney Preet Bharara and Nixon White House counsel John Dean) that, last week, filed an amicus brief with the court urging an inquiry into whether any potential laws were broken. The brief doesn't even mention Murdoch, and instead focuses on the obvious, inherent problems in scuttling a merger just because the President doesn't like one of the media outlets involved:

We've made the point for a long time that, on a long enough timeline, pretty much everybody is a pirate. The point is that the way copyright laws have evolved alongside such useful tools as the internet makes knowing whether common sense actions are actually copyright infringement an incredibly dicey riddle to solve. Often times without even trying, members of the public engage in infringing activities, up to and including the President of the United States.And, it appears, up to and including entire branches of the United States military, though claims of accidental infringement in this case would appear to be rather silly. Bitmanagement, a German software company that produces virtual reality software, is accusing the US Navy of what can only be described as massive levels of copyright infringement.

Given the sensitive nature of their work, lawyers need to take particular care when communicating online. One way to address this -- quite reasonable, in theory -- is to create a dedicated system with strong security built in. That's the route being taken by Germany's Federal Bar Association (Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer -- BRAK) with its "besondere elektronisches Anwaltspostfach" (special electronic mailbox for lawyers, or beA). However, the reality has not matched the theory, and beA has been plagued with serious security problems. As a post on the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) site explains (original in German)

Supposedly completely of its own volition, Maryland's court system has decided to extend extra rights to law enforcement officers. Going to bat for opacity, the Maryland Judiciary has made it harder for the public to find out what officers are doing (or how often they're being sued). This comes against a backdrop where more sunlight would seem essential, what with several Baltimore police officers facing corruption charges in a wide-ranging investigation that has already netted a handful of convictions and guilty pleas.Citing a favorite cop excuse, the state's courts have decided the public should be less informed.

Law professor Danielle Citron -- best known at Techdirt for her attacks on Section 230 immunity -- has written a paper attacking Google, Facebook, etc., but not for the reasons you might think. Her paper [PDF] points out policy changes that have been made by several tech companies not in response to users or US government activity, but to get out ahead of increasing regulatory pressure in Europe. In the recent past, these platforms routinely defended the rights of everyone around the world to engage in free speech, even if that meant offending local governments. Now, with the internet headed towards enforced Balkanization backed by hefty fines, US companies are now routinely engaging in preemptive censorship of content perfectly legal in the US (and arguably legal elsewhere).

We've written about Trump's long-term personal lawyer Michael Cohen a few times before. The first time was back in 2015 when he made a particularly stupid threat against reporters for reporting on Cohen's own stupid comments. In case you don't remember:

Spoilers suck, sure, but this is the internet and some things cannot be avoided. Still, for those that produce content, there are better and worse ways to handle the issue of spoilers. Some large entertainment groups try to sue over spoilers, but it rarely works. Others settle for mere DMCA takedowns. Most entertainment groups, meanwhile, don't do a damn thing about spoilers, because that's the correct course of action.Still, even with that wide spectrum of past responses, sending legal threats to journalists over spoilers, such as the Lucha Underground wrestling show has done, is a new one for me. The legal threats rest on the NDAs the audience has to sign before attending a show.

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Update: Late this evening ProPublica retracted and corrected a story from last year, saying that Haspel was in charge of the Thai CIA prison site while Zubaydah was tortured. That does suggest that some of the accusations against Haspel actually should be blamed on her predecessor. As the correction notes, she did not arrive to run the base until October of 2002, after Zubaydah's torture had concluded. However the report quotes the NY Times saying that she did still oversee the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and that she was still involved in the destruction of the video tapes of the torture sessions -- both of which should be disqualifying from the job.In addition, these kinds of mistakes wouldn't be made if the government actually came clean over what it did and who did it. Revealing who ran that prison site and what they did would not harm national security. It would provide an accurate accounting of what really went down. I'm sure that some Haspel supporters will argue that this correction mean that all of the concerns about Haspel are "fake news" even though that's clearly not true at all. Instead, this seems like even more evidence for why the details of her involvement needs to be declassified prior to facing confirmation hearings in the Senate. Our original article is below.As you've probably heard, with the latest in the neverending rotating cast of characters that makes up the current Trump administration, a set of dominoes has been knocked over with the tweeted firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the nomination of CIA boss (and former Congressional Rep/longtime defender of surveillance and torture) Mike Pompeo to replace him. While Pompeo was a vocal supporter of the CIA's torture program, he didn't actually have any hand in running it. Instead, that distinction goes to Gina Haspel, whom Trump has nominated to take Pompeo's place. Haspel not only oversaw parts of the CIA's torture program, she was also directly involved with the destruction of the video tapes showing the torture procedures. The still classified 6,700 page Senate report on the program apparently contains a lot of details about the program that Haspel ran while running a CIA blacksite in Thailand. Annabelle Timsit has helpfully pulled together some details of what is currently known from the heavily redacted declassified executive summary (you may recall we spent years writing about the fight to just release that summary). What's stunning is that the program so disgusted CIA employees that some were at the "point of tears and choking up" and multiple people on site asked to be moved to other locations if the CIA was going to continue these torture techniques. From the report (see the update above, noting that these quotes were from a couple months before Haspel took over):

Earlier this year, California introduced new net neutrality legislation as part of similar efforts across more than half the states in the nation. At the time, we noted how the EFF wasn't a particular fan of California's proposal, arguing that the wording of the effort left the law open to challenges by the FCC, which has (at AT&T and Comcast behest) promised to block states that actually try to protect consumers in the wake of its unpopular net neutrality repeal. But a new California proposal has no such Achilles heel, goes notably further than the first effort, and now has the EFF's full support.California state senator Scott Wiener this week introduced SB 822, a much tougher, more comprehensive proposal that would prohibit not only the blocking and throttling of websites and services by ISPs, but would ban "paid prioritization" deals that would allow deep-pocketed content companies (like, say, ESPN) from buying an unfair advantage against smaller competitors and startups. The bill also takes aim at the kind of interconnection shenanigans and double dipping that resulted in Netflix performance issues back in 2014, while leaving the door open to reasonable network management practices.In some ways the proposal goes a bit further than the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules, in that it more concretely addresses the problem of "zero rating" ( when ISPs let a partner's content or their own bypass usage caps while still penalizing others). Zero rating in general is allowed, but only if entire classes of content are whitelisted. Individual efforts to whitelist only specific partners (as we saw with T-Moble's controversial "Binge On" efforts), would be forbidden, as would pay to play approaches where content companies are allowed to buy a zero rating advantage over a competitor:

It almost seems like half a lifetime ago, but only a half-decade has passed since James Clapper lied to Ron Wyden about the NSA's domestic collections. Wyden pointedly asked Clapper during an intelligence committee hearing whether or not the NSA was collecting "any type of data at all" on American citizens. Clapper gave two answers, both untrue: "No, sir" and "Not wittingly."A couple of months later, the first Snowden leak -- detailing massive amounts of call data being captured in the Section 215 dragnet -- undid Clapper's careful, under-oath lies. Since then, nothing has happened. The DOJ refused to investigate Clapper for lying to his oversight. Clapper exited office a few years later, becoming a go-to national security expert for a variety of news programs. He has since offered a variety of excuses for lying, but none of them are particularly good.As of March 12, the clock has run on perjury charges. James Clapper has violated federal law and gotten away with it.

It almost seems like half a lifetime ago, but only a half-decade has passed since James Clapper lied to Ron Wyden about the NSA's domestic collections. Wyden pointedly asked Clapper during an intelligence committee hearing whether or not the NSA was collecting "any type of data at all" on American citizens. Clapper gave two answers, both untrue: "No, sir" and "Not wittingly."A couple of months later, the first Snowden leak -- detailing massive amounts of call data being captured in the Section 215 dragnet -- undid Clapper's careful, under-oath lies. Since then, nothing has happened. The DOJ refused to investigate Clapper for lying to his oversight. Clapper exited office a few years later, becoming a go-to national security expert for a variety of news programs. He has since offered a variety of excuses for lying, but none of them are particularly good.As of March 12, the clock has run on perjury charges. James Clapper has violated federal law and gotten away with it.

I've had the opportunity to write about many trademark disputes in these pages, but it's been rare for any of them to hit very close to home. That changed this week when we learned that Ravinia Festival in the northern Chicago suburbs, at which I have seen many a concert, has decided to bully a startup brewery over its use of the word "Ravinia" in its name.

The Defense Department's 1033 program has allowed law enforcement to muddy the water on the distinction between police force and military force. Given the right reasoning (most commonly cited: Wars on Terror/Drugs), police departments are allowed to pick up surplus military gear, often for free (utilizing DHS grants) and start pretending they're an occupying force, rather than public servants.This came to a head following protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where viewers around the world were treated to the sight of local law enforcement rolling up on residents in mine-resistant vehicles while clad in gear that made officers look far more like soldiers than cops. This prompted a rollback of the 1033 program by Obama, limiting the sort of gear police departments could obtain to more innocuous surplus, like computers and furniture.That has since changed. President Trump, showing his support for all things law enforcement, rolled back Obama's rollback, giving police departments access to assault vehicles and military weapons. With this comes a rollback in trust, as it has been shown giving military gear to cops makes them believe they're soldiers in a war zone, rather than public servants in a community.Not everyone abuses this program, but those that do, do so spectacularly. An 11-member police force for a Delaware town with 400 residents has availed itself of more than $3 million in 1033 gear over the last five years. This first came to light late last year when documents obtained by Muckrock prompted town officials to wonder why they hadn't been notified of the department's stockpile.

Over the last few months, if you haven't been hiding under a tech news rock, you've probably heard at least something about growing concerns about so-called "Deepfakes" which are digitally altered videos, usually of famous people edited into porn videos. Last month, Reddit officially had to ban its deepfakes subreddit. And, you can't throw a stone without finding some mainstream media freaking out about the threat of deepfakes. And, yes, politicians are getting into the game, warning that this is going to be used to create fake scandals or influence elections.But, at the same time, many of the same politicians suddenly concerned about deepfakes are still pushing forward with SESTA. However, as Charles Duan notes, if SESTA becomes law, it will make it much more difficult for platforms to block or filter deepfakes:

You will recall that Dennis Prager, the conservative commentator who also runs a YouTube channel to inform his viewers of his perspective on a variety of topics, recently sued YouTube. The meat of Prager's claims is that YouTube is censoring some of his videos purely because he is a conservative -- with the clear implication being that YouTube is a liberal bastion of conservative-hating video hosting. Just to be clear, there is no real evidence for that. What there is evidence for is that YouTube is trying very hard to sort through its hilariously enormous trove of video content for objectionable material, and that it often does this quite badly. None of that amounts to, as Prager claims, a liberal conspiracy against some conservative guy.While Prager is seeking a preliminary injunction against YouTube to keep it from administering its own site as it sees fit, YouTube is asking for the case to be dismissed outright. There are two claims at issue: first, that YouTube classifying some of his videos in its "restricted mode" amounts to YouTube censoring him and, second, that YouTube is doing this "censoring" for purely partisan political reasons. If you find yourself sympathetic to those claims, perhaps it's because you have heard them repeated often elsewhere, over and over again (or because you've seen Prager sending out fundraising notices making exactly these claims), then you really should read the declaration from Alice Wu, part of the Trust and Safety management team at YouTube, filed in the case last week. Wu directly takes on both of Prager's claims and dismantles them completely to the point that it's almost embarrassing for Prager.We'll start with the claim that YouTube classifying some Prager videos for its restricted mode being a form of censorship. She notes first that the Prager's videos that were flagged for restricted mode were done so purely for its content and amounted to something like a "teen rating."

A federal judge is going to let a bunch of people keep suing Yahoo over its three-year run of continual compromise. Yahoo had hoped to get the class action suit tossed, stating that it had engaged in "unending" efforts to thwart attacks, but apparently it just wasn't good enough to prevent every single one of its three billion email accounts from falling into the hands of hackers.

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Last week I asked for anyone to explain how SESTA would (in any way) reduce sex trafficking? Not a single person even tried to answer. Because there is no answer. Sex trafficking is already illegal, and yet people do it. Nothing in SESTA makes sex trafficking more illegal. Nothing in SESTA makes it easier for law enforcement to find or crack down on sex trafficking or to help the victims of sex trafficking. Indeed, as we've detailed, it does the exact opposite. It puts criminal liability on internet sites that are somehow used in conjunction with prostitution (going beyond just trafficking, thanks to the FOSTA addition to SESTA), and uses a vague, poorly drafted, unclear "knowledge" standard that none of SESTA's supporters can adequately explain or define. As we noted, from our experience in covering what happens when you pin liability on a platform instead of its users -- especially using vague and unclear standards -- bad things usually result.But over the past few days, it's becoming increasingly clear just how dangerous this bill could actually be. Last week we wrote about Alana Massey's powerful article on just how much damage SESTA could actually do to sex workers, including shutting down the various resources that they use to protect themselves, keep safe, or even get information to get out of sex work (for those who wish to do so). It also will mean that sites that provide tools and information for victims of sex trafficking may also be forced to shut down. It's hard to see how that's a good thing.Over at Jezebel, Tracy Clark-Flory notes that the bill "is a disaster for basically everything it touches," and highlights how survivors of sex work have set up their own Survivors Against SESTA website that lays out in stark detail just how dangerous SESTA will be for everyone.

Several years back Verizon paused all serious residential fiber deployment to shift its focus to slinging video ads at Millennials, an effort that isn't going all that well. While Verizon was busy attempting to pivot from stodgy protectionist telecom monopoly to sexy new media brand, one of its core legacy businesses (fixed line broadband) was simply allowed to wither and die on the vine. As such, the company has spent the last few years bombarded with complaints up and down the east coast about how it neglected repairs and upgrades across a massive swath of its telecom empire.One one hand, Verizon's disinterest in residential broadband has resulted in a growing cable broadband monopoly as frustrated users flee to their only option for current-generation speeds. That in turn results in less competitive pressure than ever, resulting in higher prices, worse service, and the slow but steady deployment of arbitrary and punitive usage caps across the board. Meanwhile, customers on aging DSL lines who stick with Verizon face repair delays and higher prices as Verizon literally tries to drive away customers it simply no longer has a genuine interest in serving.Despite the fact that many of these lines were taxpayers subsidized, occasionally Verizon's behavior results in something vaguely resembling a wrist slap. Case in point: after highlighting the massive state of disrepair of Verizon's network in New York, the Communications Workers of America this week managed (with the help of the NY Public Service Commission) to force Verizon to upgrade a notable chunk of its neglected networks across the state. An announcement by the CWA notes that Verizon not only has to repair neglected infrastructure, but expand real, fiber broadband in New York City:

Something pretty ugly has been attached as a rider to a routine reauthorization bill. If the bill manages to move forward without this being stripped, future elections would resemble those held by dictatorial governments, where the outcome is assured before the first voter is even intimidated.

The open access movement believes that academic publications should be freely available to all, not least because most of the research is paid for by the public purse. Open access supporters see the high cost of many academic journals, whose subscriptions often run into thousands of dollars per year, as unsustainable for cash-strapped libraries, and unaffordable for researchers in emerging economies. The high profit margins of leading academic publishers -- typically 30-40% -- seem even more outrageous when you take into account the fact that publishers get almost everything done for free. They don't pay the authors of the papers they publish, and rely on the unpaid efforts of public-spirited academics to carry out crucial editorial functions like choosing and reviewing submissions.Academic publishers justify their high prices and fat profit margins by claiming that they "add value" as papers progress through the publication process. Although many have wondered whether that is really true -- does a bit of sub-editing and design really justify the ever-rising subscription costs? -- hard evidence has been lacking that could be used to challenge the publishers' narrative. A paper from researchers at the University of California and Los Alamos Laboratory is particularly relevant here. It appeared first on arXiv.org in 2016 (pdf), but has only just been "officially" published (paywall). It does something really obvious but also extremely valuable: it takes around 12,000 academic papers as they were originally released in their preprint form, and compares them in detail with the final version that appears in the professional journals, sometimes years later, as the paper's own history demonstrates. The results are unequivocal:

For game developers and publishers, there are lots of ways to react to the modding community that so often creates new and interesting aspects to their games. Some companies look to shut these modding communities down completely, some threaten them over supposed copyright violations, and some developers choose to embrace the modding community and let mods extend the life of their games to ridiculous lengths.But few studios have gone as far to embrace modders as developer 1C, makers of IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover. The flight-sim game, released way back in 2011, burst onto the gaming market with decidedly luke-warm reviews. Most of the critiques and public commentary surrounding the game could be best summarized as: "meh." But a modding community sprung up around the game, calling itself Team Fusion, and developed a litany of mods for IL-2. Rather than looking at these mods as some sort of threat, 1C instead worked with Team Fusion and developed an official re-release of the game incorporating their work.

The apparent success of MoviePass raises a whole bunch of interesting business model questions — and privacy concerns about the data-harvesting portion of that business model add another layer of complexity. So this week, we're going back to a good old-fashioned formula for the podcast, and dedicating an episode to examining the company in detail and trying to figure out where it might be headed.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.

Just recently, Senator Amy Klobuchar suggested that the government should start fining social media platforms that don't remove bots fast enough. We've pointed out how silly and counterproductive (not to mention unconstitutional) this likely would be. However, every time we see people demanding that these platforms better moderate their content, we end up with examples of why perhaps we really don't want those companies to be making these kinds of decisions.You may have heard that, over the weekend, Twitter started its latest sweep of accounts to shutdown. Much of the focus was on so-called Tweetdeckers, which were basically a network of teens using Tweetdeck software to retweet accounts for money. In particular, it was widely reported that a bunch of accounts known for copying (without attribution) the marginally funny tweets of others and then paying "Tweetdeckers" for mass promotion. These accounts were shutdown en masse over the weekend.Twitter noted that the sweep was about getting rid of spammers:

A small town in Iowa has decided one of its residents has too much First Amendment. Boldly marching forward in the face of mild criticism, Sibley's government had its lawyer threaten a local man with a lawsuit if he didn't take down or alter his website that criticized the town government for its repeated failure to address a serious problem in the town.Sibley has less than 3,000 residents but it is the home to a large animal byproduct processing plant. Iowa Drying and Processing went into operation five years ago. Unaffectionately nicknamed the "Blood Plant," IDP's operations were the subject of complaints due to the pervasive foul odor emanating from it.Local programmer Jeremy Harms set up a website advising people to stay away from Sibley after repeated calls for action were met with a lot of doing nothing by city politicians. His website previously answered the question about relocating to Sibley with "No." Thanks to the city's legal threats, the answer has been upgraded to "Maybe." In addition to pulling his hard "no," Sibley also amended his original post to reflect the few positives the town has.After his website went locally viral (2,000 hits from a town with less than 3,000 residents), the government decided to act. It didn't approach the Blood Plant about taming the fumes. Instead, it sent a letter to Harms threatening him with a lawsuit if he didn't stop criticizing the town and its government. On top of that, the city's attorney (Daniel Dekoter) ordered Harms to stop talking to the press. These dubious demands were backed by a dubious interpretation of state law.

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Over this past weekend, it was revealed that (1) the adult film actress Stormy Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford), who has claimed she had an affair with Donald Trump and then was given $130,000 to stay silent about it, is scheduled to appear on 60 Minutes next weekend and (2) President Trump's lawyers are considering going to court to block CBS from airing it. This is silly, dumb and not actually allowed by the law.

For years we've noted how the traditional cable TV industry is slowly-but-surely bleeding customers tired of paying an arm and a leg for bloated bundles of often terrible programming. And for just as long we've documented how far too many cable and broadcast executives are hell bent on doubling down on all of the bad behaviors that cause these defections in the first place. That has ranged from knee jerk price hikes in the face of growing streaming competition, to efforts to stuff more ads into every viewing hour, whether by editing down programs or speeding them up to ensure maximum commercial load.The ugly truth most cable and broadcasting executives can't face is that the era of the sacred cable TV cash cow is over. Television simply isn't going to be as profitable in the wake of real competition and the more flexible, cheaper pay TV alternatives that competition is providing. And while countless industry executives still somehow think this is a fad they can wait out, there's growing evidence that at least a few industry executives are finally getting the message.Fox executives, for example, last week signaled that they intend to dramatically lower the ad load to two minutes an hour across their networks by 2020 (it's currently 13 minutes for broadcast networks and 16 minutes for cable):

I have no idea what is going on with this decision. A federal judge in Michigan has decided a stupid trademark lawsuit is not a stupid trademark lawsuit and is allowing it to go forward. We'll just have to follow along with the decision [PDF] -- brought to our attention by Eric Goldman -- because taking any other route would lead to madness. I mean, more so.Reliable Carriers sued Moving Sites, LLC for trademark infringement. Did Moving Sites -- particularly its review site TransportReviews.com -- use Reliable Carriers trademark in any way that would be infringing? The answer appears to be "no," and that's coming straight from the recitation of facts that opens the opinion.

Readers here will be familiar with the Streisand Effect, by which a topic or information becomes wildly viral due to the very attempts at censoring it. The idea is that by trying to keep Subject X out of the news, the public suddenly is far more exposed to Subject X as a result of news coverage of the cover-up. This story slightly deviates from the Streisand Effect formula, but only in the most hilarious way.People should know by now that Vladimir Putin is a strong-arm "President" that runs the country like a fiefdom. As such, most if not all wings of his government serve him personally far more directly than they do his constituents. Evidence of this is practically everywhere, especially in how his government and non-government organizations in Russia react to his political opponents. Typically, his political rivals are jailed, silenced, or otherwise tamped down viciously in terms of how much exposure they can get to challenge his political position. A recent example of this concerns presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, whose supporters painted the ice on a frozen river in St. Petersburg with the mildest anti-Putin slogan, reading "Against Putin." As a result, Roskomnadzor, the government agency featured in our pages for its censorship of websites in the name of literally anything it can dream up, ordered news groups to censor the contents of the message-on-ice in any reporting on the incident.

This is how things go in the US, where law enforcement is treated like a favored religion and everyone who isn't on the inside is just grist for prosecution mills. Here's the setup, via Matt Pearce.

In countries that put far less an emphasis on expanding human rights and personal liberty, it's become somewhat common for them to use strong-arm tactics to stifle dissent. One aspect of that is often times the suspension or shutdown of mobile networks, the theory being that the messaging and social media apps dissenters use on their phones allow them to organize far better than they otherwise could and therefore cause more trouble. Frankly, this has become something more expected out of Middle East authoritarian regimes than in other places, but they certainly do not have a monopoly on this practice.However, there are governments with the ability to reverse course and go back in the right direction. One Pakistani court in Islamabad recently ruled that government shutdown of mobile networks, even if done under some claims for national security, are illegal. The news comes via a translation of a bytesforall.pk report. As a heads up, you will notice that the translation is imperfect.

A few weeks back, following the DOJ's indictment of various Russians for interfering in the US election, we noted that the indictment showed just how silly it was to blame various internet platforms for not magically stopping these Russians because in many cases, they bent over backwards to appear to be regular, everyday Americans. And now, with pressure coming from elected officials to regulate internet platforms if they somehow fail to catch Russian bots, it seems worth pointing out the flip side of the "why couldn't internet companies catch these guys" question: which is why couldn't the government?Declan McCullagh has an excellent article over at Reason pointing out that all these government officials trying to blame internet companies should probably look a little more closely at their own houses first.

There's no time like the near future to be conscripted into military service. Due to citizens' declining interest in being personally involved in the government's multiple Forever Wars, the Commission on Military, National and Public Service is exploring its options. And one of the options on the table is removing restrictions on certain draftees (or volunteers) headed for certain positions in the armed forces.

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For many, many, many years, we've talked about how the legacy entertainment industry will seek to kill the Golden Goose by strangling basically any innovation that is helping it adapt to new innovations. We saw the same pattern over and over and over again. The simple version of it goes like this: the legacy entertainment industry sits around and whines about how awful the internet is because it's undermining its gatekeeper business model that extracts massive monopoly rents, but does nothing to actually adapt. Eventually, companies come along and innovate and create a service (a) people want that (b) actually is legal and pays the legacy companies lots of money. This should be seen as a win-win for everyone.But the legacy companies get jealous of the success of the innovator who did the actual work. They start to overvalue the content and undervalue the innovative service. The short version of this tends to pop up when a legacy entertainment exec says something like "why is innovative company x making so much money when all it's doing is making use of our content?" Of course, if the service part was so obvious, so easy, and so devoid of value, then the legacy entertainment companies would have done it themselves. But they didn't. So with the jealousy comes the inevitable demand for more cash from the innovator. And, usually, demands for equity too, which the innovator has basically no ability to resist, because they need to have a "good" relationship with the content companies. But the demands for more (and the jealousy) never go away.The end result, of course, is that tons of innovative businesses that created amazing services that people liked get crushed. Completely. Venture capitalist David Pakman (who founded one of the companies, which I used way back in the day, that was eventually crushed, called MyPlay) detailed how the legacy recording industry used this strategy to bury more than 150 companies over the past two decades. It's the same story over and over again. Any company becomes too successful and the legacy copyright holders squeeze them to death, whining the whole time about how they don't pay enough. As Pakman wrote:

In the wake of the FCC's extremely-unpopular repeal of net neutrality, more than half the states in the country are now pursuing their own net neutrality rules. Some of these efforts are taking the form of actual legislation that closely mirrors the discarded FCC rules (as seen in Oregon and Washington), while others involve the creation of executive orders adjusting state policies to ban states from doing business with ISPs that engage in anti-competitive net neutrality violations. In most instances these rules carve out vast exemptions for "reasonable network management," only outlawing anti-competitive behavior.ISPs have of course been quick to whine about the unfairness of having to adhere to 50 different rules governing net neutrality, even though most implementations closely mirror the FCC rules these same lobbyists just successfully killed. US Telecom, a lobbying organization primarily managed by AT&T, lamented the unfairness of this scenario in a conversation with the Washington Post:

To ensure no good deed goes unpunished, Microsoft is trying to get a computer recycler tossed in prison because he almost provided Windows recovery disks to users who needed them. Eric Lundgren, who's made heroic efforts to prevent dangerous computer parts from filling landfills, is facing a 15-month sentence and a $50,000 fine for manufacturing 28,000 recovery disks. His sentence is based on two charges: conspiracy and copyright infringement.Tom Jackman has the whole story at the Washington Post and it's half-tragedy, half-farce. Lundgren runs a company that prevents tens of millions of pounds of harmful chemicals and metals from ending up in landfills. In return for doing more than his part to save the planet, he'll gets a chance to spend a year in jail and hand Microsoft $50,000 in compensation for sales it never "lost" from recovery discs he never got a chance to distribute. (h/t Techdirt reader Tom Sparks)

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side take a similar approach, responding piece-by-piece to the FBI director's insistence that it's possible to create compromised-but-secure encryption. The first place winner is That One Guy:

Five Years AgoThe saga of Prenda Law really jumped into high gear this week in 2013, first with Prenda, John Steel and Paul Duffy all filing astonishing defamation lawsuits against critics. Then, as Brett Gibbs was finally forced to answer a few questions, the judge ordered everyone to show up in court the following Monday. We speculated about what would happen, while John Steele dropped his defamation lawsuit, leaving only the other two to continue. A massive 300-page filing teased at new details, Brett Gibbs objected to pretty much everything, then Paul Duffy doubled down in truly insane fashion by demanding the IP addresses of every visitor to certain blogs in the past two years. And, unsurprisingly, the team tried desperately to get out of having to show up in court on Monday.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, the House made the tiny positive move of removing higher copyright fines from the Pro IP bill (without interfering with all the other awful, awful stuff of course), while we asked why we continue to use the term "intellectual property" at all. HBO was still ever-so-gently dipping its toe into online distribution, while Trent Reznor was diving in head-first and swimming strongly. Meanwhile, as audio DRM continued to die at the hands of most major online retailers, a lot of journalists got really confused and thought it meant the death of copyright (if only!)Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, there were rumours about that Apple would launch an online music store — and they'd come true just under two months later. Australia was admitting the failure of its recommended online content filters while China was apparently slowing down access across the country with its surveillance efforts. And in case you forgot just how different the web was in 2003: an investigation discovered the bizarre fact that the RIAA's website was hosted by one man out of his house, reports of which led them to move it to a server run by a small accounting firm. Go figure.

Almost seven years ago, DEA agents borrowed a truck (and an employee) from Craig Thomas Expeditors. Craig Patty, proprietor and employer of Lawrence Chapa, had no idea this was happening. The DEA never approached Patty and, for all he knew, Chapa was taking the truck down to Houston for some service. This was all a ruse. The DEA loaded Patty's truck with marijuana (and his driver) and went down to Houston to engage in a drug sting.This wasn't the first sting the DEA had deployed using Patty's truck and his driver. But it was the last. Instead of a controlled purchase followed by several arrests, the DEA ran into an ambush instead. Patty's truck was riddled with bullets, as was Patty's driver. In the middle of it all, a plainclothes cop from one Texas agency was shot by a plainclothes cop employed by another.After this debacle, Patty was finally informed that his truck and employee had been part of a tragic DEA misfire. He was also informed that the federal government would not be shelling out a single cent to repair the $100,000 worth of damage to the truck. (It said even less about the cost of the life it had taken from Patty's driver.) The DEA said it did not have to pay anything for the damage because it occurred during a law enforcement operation. Patty's insurance company said the same thing.Patty sued the DEA. This went nowhere. The government argued -- successfully -- that clandestine operations like drug stings don't require notification of citizens whose private property is put to use. It also argued it was immune from liability because undercover operations are more important than protecting assets owned by law-abiding citizens. The court agreed and tossed Patty's case.This appeared to be the end of it. But I'm happy to report that's not the case. Nearly seven years has elapsed since the DEA destroyed Patty's truck, but a federal judge for the Federal Claims court has said Patty can move ahead with his lawsuit seeking compensation for his "borrowed" truck. (via FourthAmendment.com)The denial of the government's motion to dismiss [PDF] is pretty weedy, but basically comes down to competing interpretations of Patty's allegations. The government argued Patty's complaint alleged illegal actions by the DEA, which would mean this court lacked jurisdiction over the case. The judge points out Patty's complaint doesn't actually do that. What Patty is alleging is something different: a violation of the Takings Clause. The government took property of Patty's without permission and failed to compensate him for the damage done to it.

Wikimedia, like many other internet platform these days releases a transparency report that discusses various efforts to takedown content or identify users. We're now all quite used to what such transparency reports look like. However, Wikimedia's latest is worth reading as a reminder that Wikipedia is a different sort of beast. Not surprisingly, it gets a lot fewer demands, but it also abides by very few of those demands. My favorite is the fact that people demand Wikimedia edit or remove content. It's a wiki. Anyone can edit it. But if your edits suck, you're going to be in trouble. And yet, Wikimedia still receives hundreds of demands. And doesn't comply with any of them. Including ones from governments. Instead, Wikimedia explains to them just how Wikipedia works.

As we wrote about, the White House's announcement of a summit with video game executives was initially a one-sided affair, with nobody in the video game industry having any idea what Sarah Sanders was talking about. The White House clarified afterwards that it would be sending out invites to industry representatives after the announcement -- which is weird! -- and it made good on that promise. We learned several days later that several invites had been accepted from within the industry, such as Robert Altman of Bethesda, Strauss Zelnick of Take-Two, and Michael Gallagher from the Entertainment Software Association. These are pretty much the names you would expect to be called to discuss video game violence, given the games produced by each organization, such as the Grand Theft Auto series.Less expected was the list of fierce video game critics that were also invited, including Brent Bozell and Representative Vicky Hartzler of Missouri. Hartzler has been an avid critic of violent video games, while remaining a staunch supporter of gun rights, while Bozell is the founder of the Parents Television Council. The PTC is exactly the type of organization you're already imagining: a money-making machine built on the premise of the desire for a puritanical entertainment culture and one that is about as partisan as it gets. One other attendee at this summit of great minds was Retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who trains police and advocates that they use more force rather than less, apparently at least in part due to his belief that officers that kill suspects will go on to have the best sex of their lives afterwards -- but for some reason still insists that violent video games are horrible and anyone who disagrees is the equivalent of a Holocaust denier.In other words, this was almost perfectly crafted to be a shit-show.And it seems that Trump's summit didn't disappoint in this regard. Reports indicate that the whole thing opened up, video game execs on one side of the table and their critics on the other, with Trump showing a sizzle reel of violent video games while commenting on how awful it all is.

Richard Liebowitz of Liebowitz Law Firm has had a bad couple of weeks in court. Unfortunately for him, as one of the most prolific copyright trolls, that's kind of where he makes his home. According to two recent orders handed down by two different judges, Liebowitz has filed more than 500 copyright cases in the Southern District of New York alone over the last two years, most often representing photographers.Booth Sweet LLP -- which has gone head-to-head with other copyright trolls -- pointed out the most recent loss Liebowitz has suffered. His lawsuit is still ongoing, but the court has ordered him to post a $10,000 bond to cover the legal fees he'll be responsible for if he loses. And if a judge is ordering a bond, it's likely because the judge expects the lawsuit to end badly for the person ordered to front the cash.The order [PDF] is an entertaining read for people who detest copyright trolls. (Hey! Welcome to Techdirt!) Liebowitz is suing Hearst Communications over the publication of a photo he says belongs to his client, Ray Reynolds. Reynolds claims he gave the photo to the Trump campaign but expressly forbade its release to anyone else. The photo was given to Elle magazine to accompany an article about Melania Trump. Reynolds sued, and apparently chose poorly when it came to representation.It's nothing but bad news for the prolific troll. The order begins with a recounting of Liebowitz's lies/omissions/failures.

Cool. Cool. More two wrongs make a right legislation is being routed through the federal government. The first wrong? Facebook and Google have "too much" power, apparently, and they're strangling the life out of news agencies. Allegedly. This would seem to raise antitrust issues, if they're actually big enough to throttle newspapers and other publishers into submission. That's a big if, but why wait until the facts are in to decide? How do you fight a supposed monopoly? By allowing more monopoly, apparently.