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The Ajit Pai FCC's attacks on net neutrality have received ample attention. Less talked about is the fact that the attack on net neutrality was just one part of a much broader effort to eliminate what was already pretty tepid oversight of one of the least liked and least competitive tech sectors in America.The Pai FCC's Orwellian-named "Restoring Internet Freedom" order not only killed net neutrality rules, it dramatically rolled back FCC authority over big ISPs like Comcast, shoveling any remaining authority to an FTC ISP lobbyists know full well lacks the authority or attention span for telecom oversight. In addition to that, the FCC (again at big telecom's behest) has set about trying to claim states can't protect consumers either. With neither competition nor state or federal oversight keeping natural monopolies in line, it shouldn't take a degree in genetics to ferret out the potential pitfalls.One of the key arguments underpinning most of the telecom sector's lobbying shenanigans of late involves one central claim: that state or federal efforts to hold giant ISPs accountable somehow violates Comcast and other ISPs' First Amendment rights. You'll recall ISPs tried to claim that net neutrality somehow violated ISPs' free speech rights, despite the fact that as simple conduits they don't engage in "editorial" decisions, making the argument rather silly.The courts didn't agree with broadband providers then, but in his dissenting opinion during those earlier court battles new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh did. Susan Crawford over at Wired offers up a solid piece explaining why, with Kavanaugh now positioned in the highest court of the land, ISPs are very eager to start pushing this argument more forcefully in the months and years to come:

Seven years ago, the First Circuit Court of Appeals released its Glik decision. This decision found that recording public officials was protected by the First Amendment, overriding Massachusetts state law. The state wiretap law says recordings must have consent of everyone captured on the recording. The Appeals Court said recording police officers while they performed their duties in public was clearly covered by the First Amendment. The opinion also dealt with some ancillary Fourth Amendment issues, but seemingly made it clear these recordings were protected activity.The law remained on the books unaltered. Thanks to legislative inaction, the law is still capable of being abused. Since the Appeals Court didn't declare the law unconstitutional, or even this application of it, it has taken another federal court decision nearly a decade later to straighten this out. (h/t Courthouse News Service)The ruling [PDF] deals with two First Amendment cases. One deals with activists recording cops. The other deals with another set of activists -- James O'Keefe's Project Veritas -- and its secret recording of Democratic politicians. The specifics might be a bit different, but the outcome is the same: recording public officials is protected by the First Amendment. The state law is unconstitutional.

Athletic clothing maker Under Armour has graced our fair pages a few times in the past, always for being on exactly the wrong side of the trademark equation. Between trying to torpedo tiny Christian companies like Armor & Glory, and ensuring that every member of the public is aware that its own executives don't have a sense of humor that they are aware of by suing Ass Armor, the mega-company has been quite busy making sure the entire world knows that only it is allowed to use the word "Armour." Notably important in all of this is that the company is exactly wrong in this claim, as trademark law nearly always comes down to whether customers will be confused by the use of words and trade dress, and it is not a platform for a single company being able to lock up a fairly common word.This is a lesson that apparently hasn't stuck for the folks at Under Armour, however, as the company has recently fired off a C&D letter to another tiny clothier, Cascade Armory.

Predatory publishing -- the pay-for-play practice that allows anyone to have their research published as soon as the check clears -- may end up costing a professor his job. Derek Pyne, associate professor of economics at British Columbia's Thompson Rivers University, has managed to turn his own campus against him simply for telling the uncomfortable truth.His 2017 paper, The Rewards of Predatory Publication at a Small Business School, exposed the ugly side effects of the constant pressure on researchers and academics to be published. "Publish or perish," the saying goes. And if you can't get published by someone who thinks your research is worth publishing, get published by someone who thinks everyone with enough cash on hand deserves to be published.What Pyne found was schools rewarding publication, whether or not the publication was bought and paid for.

So we already knew numerous reporters, the GAO, and the New York State AG's office are already looking into who was behind the millions of bogus comments that plagued the FCC's net neutrality repeal. And we've already noted how the Ajit Pai FCC has been trying its very best to hinder those inquiries, whether we're talking about the way that it has been blocking and stalling on journalist FOIA requests, or actively ignoring numerous, previous inquiries from law enforcement.The FCC's efforts to obfuscate the culprit by refusing to share data on this subject may have just become more... complicated. Over the weekend, Daily Beast reporter Kevin Collier noted that two additional AG's offices (Massachusetts and Washington, DC) -- and the FBI -- have also started digging into those fake comments as well:

Last week, as the last round of "trilogue" negotiations were getting underway in the EU on the EU Copyright Directive, we noted a strange thing. While tech companies and public interest groups have been speaking out loudly against Article 13, a strange "ally" also started complaining about it: a bunch of TV, movie and sports organizations started complaining that Article 13 was a bad idea. But... for very different reasons. Their concerns were that regulators had actually finally begun to understand the ridiculousness of Article 13 and had been trying to add in some "safe harbors" into the law. Specifically, the safe harbors would make it clear that if platforms followed certain specific steps to try to stop infringing works from their platform, they would avoid liability. But, according to these organizations, safe harbors of any kind are a non-starter.Those same groups are back with a new letter that's even more unhinged and more explicit about this. The real issue is that they recently got a ruling out of a German court that basically said platforms are already liable for any infringement, and they're now afraid that Article 13 will "soften" that ruling by enabling safe harbors.

DMCA takedown abuse is nothing new. But it normally involves bogus takedown requests claiming copyright violations. TorrentFreak has uncovered a new form of abuse that involves the DMCA, but unlike normal copyright claims, doesn't allow the target to contest the claims.

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Have you heard that all of the opposition to the EU Copyright Directive and its hugely problematic Articles 11 and 13 is really being driven by Google lobbying? Most of you probably realized this was nonsense, but it now turns out that not only was the lobbying almost entirely dominated by the legacy copyright players, but a key plank of their lobbying campaign was to falsely allege that all opposition was just Google.If you've been paying attention at all to the crazy fights over the EU Copyright Directive, you may have heard some claims being passed around that it's somehow "Google" lobbying heavily against the bill. Indeed, all over Twitter, that's the talking point from tons of EU Copyright Directive supporters. After the EU Parliament put the brakes on the bill back in July, I even saw a former RIAA exec (who has since blocked me on Twitter, so I can't show it to you) tweet that this was a clear perversion of the "will of the people" by Google's corporate lobbying. Of course, it's hilarious for that to come from an ex-RIAA exec, who was heavily involved over the past 3 decades in pushing through all sorts of protectionist, anti-public, anti-musician legislation and trade agreements.But... it's a talking point. And it's one that lots of people have jumped on. Digital Music News, who is always quick to restate the recording industry's talking points, claimed that Google spent more than $36 million lobbying over Article 13. Billboard Magazine published a similar claim. Various music industry groups, in what appeared to be closely coordinated messaging, all started blaming Google and "the tech giants" for any opposition to the EU Copyright Directive -- which, mind you, would change the fundamental ways in which the internet works. Yet, in their minds, all of the opposition came from the internet giants.Here's Geoff Taylor from BPI:

So for years we've been pointing out that Verizon's attempt to pivot from grumpy old telco to sexy new Millennial ad brand hasn't been going so well. Oddly, mashing together two failing 90s brands in AOL and Yahoo, and renaming the coagulated entity "Oath," didn't really impress many people. The massive Yahoo hack, a controversy surrounding Verizon snoopvertising, and the face plant by the company's well-hyped Go90 streaming service didn't really help.This week, Verizon was forced to acknowledge that Oath was now effectively worthless, at least in full context of what Verizon paid for it, and the company's past claims that the company would be taking on Facebook and Google in the online advertising wars for a generation to come:

UK spies are changing their minds. Rapidly. Sure, bulk data collection is cool. But you know what's really cool? Mass interference with electronic devices.

We've been discussing Iowa State University's bold attempt to twist itself into a knot over its trademark policy for some time now. This all started when the school attempted to bow at the alter of certain Iowa state government reps to disallow a pro-marijuana alumni student group from using school iconography. For its efforts, the alumni student group beat the school in court on First Amendment grounds, eventually resulting in a $600k judgement against the school. Rather than learning its lesson, the school reacted to all of this by rewriting its trademark policy for student groups, pulling back permission of all kinds for groups to use the school's name and symbols. This, predictably, led to a full on revolt by students, with all kinds of groups refusing to associate themselves with the school at all. The student government, meanwhile, pointed out that the policy was written with zero input from students or student representatives.In other words, ISU managed to piss off its own students by trying for iron grip control for... reasons?With the revolt in full swing, you might have thought that perhaps this would be the thing that caused ISU to wake up and reverse course. Noooooooope. Instead, the school's administration simply penned what reads like a canned letter to its students about the trademark policy, explaining its reasoning for doing whatever the fuck it wants and brushing student concerns aside.

A year ago, Techdirt wrote about the interesting economics of bike-sharing services in China. As the post noted, competition is fierce, and the profit margins slim. The real money may be coming from gathering information about where people riding these bikes go, and what they may be doing, and selling it to companies and government departments. As we warned, this was something that customers in the West might like to bear in mind as these Chinese bike-sharing startups expand abroad. And now, the privacy expert Alexander Hanff has come across exactly this problem with the Berlin service of the world's largest bike-sharing operator, Mobike:

We've got another panel discussion from the Lincoln Network's Reboot conference this week, all about the law on everyone's minds lately: Section 230 of the CDA. The debate includes law professor Eric Goldman, the EFF's Corynne McSherry, and Dr. Jerry A. Johnson from National Religious Broadcasters, offering up a wide spectrum of opinions on Section 230 and political bias.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.

If it exists, the DEA probably wants to stash a camera in it.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic a trenchcoat-wearing lurker. Apple's AirDrop app, which allows anyone to share files with anyone else using the app, has become the new way to send unsolicited dick pics.Granted, there's a bit of a perfect storm aspect that sets it apart from the ChatRoulettes of the world. Users of the app must allow messages from "Everyone" (rather than just people on their Contacts list) and be within Bluetooth range of the amateur photographer.Of course, since it can conceivably happen to someone, it has happened to someone. And the New York Post was there to report on the easily-avoidable menace.

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There are a million different things going on these days when it comes to preventing the powers that be from destroying the internet that we know and love. There are dozens of mostly bad ideas for regulating the internet here in the US, and of course, over in Europe, they're doing their best to destroy everything with the poorly thought out GDPR, the new Copyright Directive and the upcoming Terrorist Regulation (more on that soon). With all of that keeping everyone trying to protect the internet busy, it appears that the MPAA and the RIAA have decided that now would be a good time to re-introduce SOPA. No joke.Every year, the US government's "IP Enforcement Coordinator" -- or IP Czar -- takes comments for its "Joint Strategic Plan for Intellectual Property," which is supposed to lay out the federal government's yearly plan for protecting Hollywood's profits. As questionable as that is already, this year, the comment submissions seemed to go a bit further than usual. The RIAA's submission, the MPAA's submission and the (almost so extreme as to be a parody) Copyright Alliance's submission all seemed to push a pretty consistent theme. Despite the incredible abundance of content creation happening these days, despite the myriad new ways to distribute, to build a fan base, to create new works and to make money from those works... these legacy gatekeepers all insist that the internet is truly a horrible attack on creativity and must be stopped.And how to stop it? Well, how about widespread censorship in the form of outright site blocking. In short, these legacy gatekeepers want to bring back SOPA, the law that they tried to ram through seven years ago, only to be embarrassed when the internet stood up and said "no fucking way."Let's start with the RIAA submission, which admits that, hey, the music business is pretty good these days, and almost all of that is because of innovations in technology that the RIAA fought at every freaking step (well, they don't admit that last part), but, my god, there are still some people out there who don't pay every single time they hear a song, and that must be stopped. And thus, they request changes to the law, including this:

We've noted a few times now that while Facebook gets a lot of justified heat for its privacy scandals, the stuff going on in the cellular data and app market in regards to location data makes many of Facebook's privacy issues seem like a grade-school picnic. That's something that was pretty well highlighted by the recent Securus and LocationSmart scandals, which showcased perfectly how cellular carriers and location data brokers routinely buy and sell your daily travel habits with only a fleeting effort to ensure all of the subsequent buyers and sellers of that data adhere to basic privacy and security standards.Over the weekend, the New York Times had an interesting read that offers some fresh insight into just how commonly your daily location data is traded and shared without much in the way of meaningful protection or oversight. There's a certain naive shock by both the Times authors and its subjects as they suddenly realize that apps on mobile devices routinely hoover up users' daily movement patterns, often without anything in the way of real consent or transparency, then sell that valuable data to every Tom, Dick, and Harry in a bid to monetize it:

Earlier this year, Microsoft faced backlash for appearing to be working with ICE to provide it with facial recognition technology. A January blog post from its Azure Government wing stated it had acquired certification to set up and manage ICE cloud services. The key bit was this paragraph, which definitely made it seem Microsoft was joining ICE in the facial recognition business.

Two common topics here at Techdirt are about to converge in what will likely serve as a lovely example of how piracy is often a scapegoat rather than a legitimate business issue. The first topic is Denuvo, the once-unbeatable DRM that has since become a DRM that has been defeated in sub-zero days before game releases. The exception that used to prove the rule that DRM is always defeated has become another example that yet again proves that rule. On the other hand, we've also talked at length that the real antidote for piracy is creating a great product and connecting with fans to give them a reason to buy. The flipside of that formula is that no amount of piracy protection is going to result in big sales numbers for a product that sucks.While that's typically obvious, we're all about to watch what happens when a game both has its piracy protection fail completely and is deemed to be a shitty product, with Just Cause 4 having its Denuvo protection defeated a day after launch while the game is suffering from withering reviews.

Atlanta, Georgia, August 23, 2016:

I will never tire of judges handing down benchslaps to IP trolls. Perhaps I'll never tire of it because it just doesn't happen often enough. Or perhaps it cannot happen often enough, given the sheer amount of troll litigation judges preside over. Not every dismissed case can be given the court's full attention. But this opinion, from Judge Royce Lamberth, should certainly get Strike 3 Holding's attention.The brutal nine-page opinion [PDF] opens with this caustic appraisal of the porn company's business model. (h/t Eric Goldman)

As we've been discussing the "Trilogue" negotiations between the EU Commission, EU Council and EU Parliament over the EU's Copyright Directive have continued, and a summary has been released on the latest plans for Article 13, which is the provision that will make upload filters mandatory, while (and this is the fun part) insisting that it doesn't make upload filters mandatory. Then, to make things even more fun, another document on the actual text suggests the way to deal with this is to create a better euphemism for filters.When we last checked in on this, we noted that the legacy film and television industry associations were freaking out that Article 13 might include some safe harbors for internet platforms, and were asking the negotiators to either drop those protections for platforms, or to leave them out of Article 13 altogether and only have it apply to music.The latest brief description of the recommendations for Article 13 appear to be an attempt by bureaucrats who have no understanding of the nuances of this issue to appease both the legacy copyright industries and the tech companies. Notably absent: any concern for the public or independent creators. We'll dig in in a moment, but frankly, given the state of Article 13 demonstrated in this two-page document, it is horrific that these discussions are considered almost concluded. It is obvious that the vast majority of people working on this have no idea what they're talking about, and are pushing incredibly vague rules without any understanding of their impact. And rather than taking in the criticism and warning from knowledgeable experts, they're just adding in duct-taped "but this won't do x" for every complaint where people warn what the actual impact of the rules will be for the internet.That's why, throughout this document, they keep insisting that there will be no mandate for filters. But, there's no way you can actually avoid liability without filters. Indeed, in order to appease the film and TV folks, the proposal now includes a notice-and-staydown provision. We've spent years explaining why a notice-and-staydown provision is not only unworkable, but would lead to tremendous amounts of non-infringing content being removed. Copyright is extremely context specific. The exact same content may be infringing in one instance, but protected in another. Yet a notice-and-staydown does not allow the protected versions. It requires they be blocked. That is outright censorship.On to the document. It starts with seven "guidelines."

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The Australian Parliament has passed a law ordaining compelled access to encrypted devices and communications. The legislation was floated months ago and opened up for comment, but it appears the Australian government has ignored the numerous complaints that such a law would violate civil liberties and otherwise be an all-around bad idea. But that's OK. It's completely justified, according to the Prime Minister.

While AT&T's marketing wing often likes to pat itself on the back for "innovation," the company's real skill set revolves around finding creative and ways to nickel-and-dime its own customers. Like the multiple times the company was caught aiding drug dealing directory assistance scammers, IP Relay credit card scammers, or crammers because it was getting a cut of the profits. Or the time the company started charging everybody more money for broadband if they wanted to protect their own personal privacy. Or the company's well-documented net neutrality shenanigans.This week, AT&T's under fire yet again for some new bill changes that will, once again, result in users paying the company significantly more money. More specifically, the company has announced that it will now keep broadband and TV customers' money if you cancel in the middle of a billing cycle:

If anything might make police-community relations better, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA) -- the union representing NYPD officers -- is against it. PBA President Pat Lynch has come out against body cameras, community policing, and even his own union members.The battle over the court-ordered revamping of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program rages on five years after Judge Scheindlin found it to be unconstitutional. So does the PBA, which is now arguing keeping data on stops is throwing sand in the NYPD's gears.

This week, we covered the fallout of FOSTA, which can be summarized as "nothing positive accomplished, plus dumb new rules at sites like Tumblr". Both our winning comments on the insightful side came in response to people attacking this evaluation in various flawed ways. In first place, it's Wyrm correcting an incorrect assertion about the impact on sex trafficking ads:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, we saw a spate of worrying changes around the world, with a German court telling Wikimedia that it's liable for user content, a French court ordering a search engine to make an entire website disappear over copyright infringement, and Italian politicians looking to have copyright handled by regulators, not courts — but at least in the UK, a court was also ruling that software functionality is not subject to copyright. Back in the US, just before the MPAA reached a settlement with Hotfile that would assuredly not actually help any artists, the agency was surprisingly told it couldn't use the words "piracy", "theft" or "stealing" during the trial. And there were developments in two major long-term IP court battles, with the appeals court overturning the ruling exempting APIs from copyright in the Oracle/Google case, and the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Alice software patent case.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, before Denuvo became the leading name in the useless and annoying DRM world, it was SecuROM driving gamers nuts while failing to stop pirates — and so nobody was happy when RockStar decided to use it for Grand Theft Auto (apparently having learned nothing from seeing the high-profile failure of Spore's DRM). Warner Music was trying to talk universities into making students pay a piracy tax, while copyright apologists were arguing that schools which refuse to do so were protecting "terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers [and] identity thieves". The MPAA, meanwhile, was trying to claim that its desire for selectable output control on media devices was a pro-innovation stance being opposed only by the luddites at the CEA...We also saw a few key copyright developments in the courtroom: the banning of Bratz dolls (we covered this fascinating fight in a podcast this year), and Joe Satriani's lawsuit against Coldplay.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, the spam wars heated up as the world headed into the holiday shopping season, with spammers using new techniques to get around filters and even designing extensive spam campaigns just to annoy and hinder anti-spam companies — which were themselves becoming a lucrative industry. Alongside all this, we were beginning to realize just how much spam was coming from networks of hijacked computers. Meanwhile, with every damn tech company trying to launch an online music store, even Hewlett Packard was trying to get in on the action, while the RIAA was filing more insane filsharing lawsuits including one infamously targeting a 79-year-old retiree with no computer.

Normally, on the weekend, we look back at what we wrote about on Techdirt five, ten and fifteen years ago, but I'm going to pre-empt at least a bit of that with this post. Ten years ago, we wrote about the 40th anniversary of the famous and iconic "Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart on December 9th, 1968. A little over five years ago, we wrote about it again, unfortunately on the occasion of Engelbart's passing.But, Sunday will now mark the 50th anniversary of the demo, and there's a very impressive looking Symposium about it happening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.It's interesting, in Silicon Valley, how much disdain some have for the past. After all, it's here that we're always talking about inventing the future. Engelbart's demo, 50 years ago, was exactly that. Before even the idea of a graphical user interface for a computer, or the concept of a wider internet, was conceived of, Engelbart was literally demoing a ton of ideas, products, concepts and services that we all use regularly today. Even the demo itself (let alone what he was demoing) was somewhat historic, as the demo showed what was happening on his computer on-screen, but part of it was done via teleconferencing and video sharing (again before most people even had the foggiest idea what that could mean). It demonstrated, for the first time, ideas like the computer mouse, a word process, windows, a graphical user interface, computer graphics, hypertext linking, collaborative editing, version control, dynamic linking and more.I watch the entire 90 minutes every few years, and it's amazing how inspiring it is. How miraculous it is. Every time we link to it, it ends up moving around or appearing in different chunks online, but the Doug Engelbart Institute now has it in three separate parts (each about 30 minutes) on YouTube, so I'll post that version here:Or, if you really don't want to watch the entire thing, there's a nicely done "interactive version" that breaks it down into sections and sub-sections, so you can just watch the clips that are of most interest to you (though, I still recommend watching the entire thing for context).Part of what's so inspiring about the demo, of course, is that we're watching it in retrospect. We now know what transpired over the next 50 years. If none of what Engelbart had presented became common, the demo would probably just be seen as quirky nonsense, a la predictions of flying cars and moon bases. But, that's not what happened at all. Instead, we know that watching Engelbart's demo is watching real history in action.It's watching the impossible, the magical, become reality. It's the very thing that has made Silicon Valley so much fun for the past 50 years. Making the impossible not just possible, but everyday. Enabling people to do amazing things.Of course, we're living now in an age where the narrative on technology has shifted. People are recognizing that innovation and advancement isn't always all good for everyone. People are recognizing that it has consequences and creates problems -- sometimes serious ones. And those conversations are vital.But as that narrative has shifted, I worry tremendously about throwing out all of the good things that have come with innovation in our rush to prevent any possible downsides. I'm glad that there's some level of reckoning happening, and people are proactively trying to think through the impact (both good and bad) of what they're creating these days. But, I worry that the narrative has shifted so far that in order to prevent "bad" we're going to end up tossing out much of the good that is set to come as well.I'm not quite 50 years old yet, but the amount of technological change and innovation in my lifetime has been amazing -- and I'd argue that the vast majority of it has been good. It has opened up new worlds. It has enabled new ways to communicate. It has brought knowledge and information to far flung corners of the globe. It has enabled people all over the world to have an impact. And it continues to change as well.Watching the Mother of All Demos once again lets us wonder about what will happen in the next 50 years. And it gives us a chance to appreciate all that has happened (and has been allowed to happen) over the past 50 years. Engelbart didn't lock up his ideas. He didn't block others from using them. There aren't stories of nasty patent fights (even if he had a bunch of patents). He shared these ideas for the world to see, and the world took these ideas and ran with them, built on them, improved on them and created the amazing world we now live in. This should not be the end of the history of innovation, but a sign of what happens when people do allow for great innovation, and seek to make the impossible, possible.

In the pantheon of dumb trademark disputes, you would probably expect there to be some correlation between the volume or level of dumb of a dispute and the involvement of a member of the entertainment industry. Without having any hard data in front of me, I still feel quite comfortable stating that this expectation is almost certainly correct. The entertainment industries are notoriously protective of all things intellectual property, after all. Still, sometimes you run across a dispute that is so silly it takes your breath away.Meet Kevin Rizer. Kevin owns a pet products company in Texas. When he named his company, he drew inspiration from his own furry, four-legged friend, his cancer-surviving dog, whose name is Emmy. Thus, Emmy's Best was created to make pet products, and, damn it, you already know where this is going, don't you?

Why is routine police misconduct a problem police departments can't seem to solve? It's a mystery, says Elkhart, Indiana law enforcement.

Well, well. As we've covered for a while now, FOSTA became law almost entirely because Facebook did an about-face on its position on the law -- which only recently was revealed to have happened because COO Sheryl Sandberg decided it was important to appease Congress on something, even against the arguments of Facebook's own policy team. As we pointed out at the time, this was Facebook basically selling out the internet, and we wondered if Facebook would then help clean up the collateral damage it causes?The early indications are that, not only will it not help clean up the mess it caused, it's leaning in on this new puritanical internet that it wants to create. We've already noted that Facebook has been sued under FOSTA by someone arguing that it has helped facilitate sex trafficking. And now, just days after Tumblr's weird pivot away from sex, Facebook has put up a bunch of new guidelines in its "community standards" document, under the head of "sexual solicitation" that ban a wide variety of things from naughty words to expressing a sexual preference.Among the banned:

Earlier this week we noted how the Ajit Pai FCC again shot down journalist FOIA attempts to find out who was behind the millions of bogus comments that plagued the agency's net neutrality repeal. The move prompted one of the agency's commissioners, Jessica Rosenworcel, to accuse her own agency of a coverup--since Pai refuses to work with either journalists or law enforcement investigations trying to uncover the truth of who was behind the comment fraud.In an uncharacteristically snarky statement (pdf) issued the same day, Pai attempted to dismiss the criticisms as purely partisan attacks. But he also acknowledged something we already knew...that 500,000 or so of the email addresses used in the FCC's comment form came from users purportedly on Russian ISPs. From his statement:

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For years we've been writing about the weird US government infatuation with the Chinese telco equipment firm, Huawei. The company has built a widely successful business, but going back many years there's been a loud whisper campaign that the company's equipment would send information back to the Chinese government. Of course, when our own government investigated this, it could find no evidence at all that this was true. It also seems notable that Huawei itself asked for this investigation, claiming that it would clear the company's name, since it wasn't doing anything that people were accusing it of doing. This doesn't mean that the company isn't doing something nefarious, but such claims should have some sort of evidence to back them up, and so far they've been lacking.Of course, this may have been one of those situations where people assumed that whatever we would do to others, others must be doing to us, because what we do know, is that the NSA broke into Huawei's computers and grabbed a bunch of emails and source code. That bit seems to get left out of all the fear mongering reporting about Huawei. Oh, and it later came out that much of the whisper campaign about Huawei spying for the Chinese government... originated from the US firm Cisco, which was seeing its market share eroded by Huawei.So we've long taken the claims about Huawei with a large grain of salt, even as most in the media have been willing to repeat the allegations about Huawei without mentioning the lack of evidence, Cisco's involvement, or the fact that the US government swiped a bunch of stuff from Huawei, even though all of those things seem kinda relevant.By now, of course, you've probably heard that Canadian officials arrested Huawei's CFO, Meng Wanzhou, who also happens to be the daughter of the founder, and there are plans to try to extradite her to the US. While no charges have been revealed, most people claim it has to do with violating US sanctions on Iran by shipping US made equipment to Iran. The details here will matter, but it's still incredibly unusual to have a friendly country arrest a top exec and then try to extradite them.Even if the official charges have nothing to do with the ongoing trade war with China, as nearly everyone is pointing out, there's no way this doesn't create massive blowback on any new trade agreement. Remember it was just a few days ago (was it really just a few days?) that President Trump announced that he'd agreed to end the senseless trade war he'd started (which has created a massive import tax on American businesses and consumers). Of course, when the Chinese gave their version of the story, it sounded remarkably different than Trump's version.But, at least it sounded like progress was being made, and maybe we could end the insanity. But, of course, by having an ally arrest a top exec, it's thrown everything up in the air. Imagine, for example, if Sheryl Sandberg was on a trip to Pakistan, and was arrested by authorities there and extradited to China to face criminal charges. That's kind of the equivalent of what the US has just done via Canada.Then, take it a step further. White House officials have told the press that they believe Meng "could be used as leverage with China in trade talks," and you realize this has fuck all to do with Iranian sanctions. No, that's the White House more or less admitting that they've taken a hostage in a trade war. That's hellishly dangerous. Because China will not hesitate to retaliate. If I were an American business exec, I'd stay far away from China or any of its allies right about now.Arresting an executive over such a thing, and then admitting you want to use her as "leverage," just as you're negotiating a complex trade deal is... the kind of thing that turns a trade war into an actual war. It's an incredibly dangerous move that should concern everyone.

So every year like clockwork since 2011 the FCC has released a report naming and shaming ISPs that fail to deliver advertised broadband speeds. The Measuring American Broadband program, which the FCC runs in conjunction with UK firm SamKnows, uses custom-firmware embedded routers in subscriber homes to collect data on real-world speeds (an improvement from years past when the FCC would just take ISPs' at their word).In the years since, the program has been an effective way to name and shame ISPs that fail to deliver speeds promised to consumers. For example, in the first report, the FCC announced that some ISPs, like New York's Cablevision, had delivered just 50% of advertised speeds during peak hours. By the next report Cablevision had moved to fix its under-provisioning issues, and the FCC found that the company was now offering more bandwidth than advertised at peak hours. In the absence of more competition, simply using real data was a useful way to motivate apathetic regional monopolies to try a little harder.Of course last year that all changed under Ajit Pai, when the FCC boss refused to release the report at all. After being pressured by telecom beat reporters to explain why, the FCC this week finally released some of the data... buried in the appendix of a much larger report (pdf) few will actually read. The data again showcases how many broadband providers -- mostly telcos selling aging, slow and pricey DSL -- routinely fail to deliver speeds consumers are paying for:In the years since the program launched, many cable providers have been successfully nudged toward over-provisioning their lines to remain on the FCC's good side (though it should be noted that one cable provider, Charter Spectrum, was busted by the NY AG contemplating ways to game the system). This wasn't particularly hard; DOCSIS 3.1 cable upgrades are relatively inexpensive anyway, and have helped the cable sector deliver gigabit speeds (at least downstream).The problem is that cable is slowly but surely securing a monopoly over these next-gen speeds because the nation's phone companies no longer really want to be in the fixed-line broadband business. AT&T and Verizon have shifted their focus to wireless, video, and ads, and providers like CenturyLink have shifted their focus to enterprise. As a result, millions of customers are stuck on aging, expensive, (and often unnecessarily usage capped) DSL lines nobody really wants to upgrade because the return on investment is too slow for Wall Street's liking.The result: less competition, higher prices, slower speeds, and worse customer service as cable secures a monopoly over high speeds. And no, 5G wireless is not going to magically fix these problems, as we've explored previously.Of course because the Measuring American Broadband program highlighted these issues via a very clear stand alone report, it seems fairly likely that broadband providers didn't much like this. Like so much Pai does (like killing net neutrality rules), burying the report was framed by the FCC head as a noble effort to simply improve agency efficiency. But in a statement to Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin, Pai's fellow Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel seemed unsold on that explanation:

The thing about asset forfeiture is it's stocked full of perverse incentives. With a minimum of civil paperwork, law enforcement agencies can directly benefit from the property they seize and all without the hassle of having to deal with the uncertainty of criminal proceedings. The property is seized and its former owners are free to go. Minimum expenditure, maximum profit, and it's all totally legal.The best way to reform civil asset forfeiture is to attack these incentives. Some states, like Maine, have done this by forcing law enforcement agencies to deposit forfeiture proceeds into the general fund. Highway robbery now enriches the entire state, which won't be much comfort to victims of forfeiture programs. But there should be fewer victims of forfeiture now that the seizing agency doesn't have a personal stake in the forfeiture.Should be. The solution looks good on paper. The execution, however, leaves something to be desired. (via the ACLU)

A cursory review of our posts on Nintendo will reveal a company all too willing to wield intellectual property purely as a way to combat anything it doesn't like. The gaming giant jealously protects its IP, sure, but it also deploys its lawyers for such purposes as scaring the shit out of ROM sites, silencing YouTubers, shutting down fan-games from its biggest fans, and holding its consoles hostage unless customers agree to updated EULAs. Outside of Nintendo, many groups have tried to use copyright laws and the DMCA to combat leaks about content, or the content itself. This is rarely a good idea, what with the opportunity to use such leaks as free promotional material being an option instead.Well, as you may have heard, Nintendo suffered its own high-profile leak recently, with the forthcoming Super Smash Bros. Ultimate finding its way onto the internet before the game has even been released. As you would expect, Nintendo got its lawyers busy firing off DMCA notices for all kinds of sites that were hosting the actual game that leaked. It also, however, decided to issue copyright strikes on YouTubers who showed any of the games content.

Back in 2015, we wrote about a really dumb trademark dispute between a financial services firm and two Major League Baseball teams, the Washington Nationals and Chicago Cubs, over the letter "W." This insanity went on for years, with the MLB teams claiming there would be some sort of customer confusion in the public between professional baseball teams and a company that provided money management.Well, in case you thought that this was insanity of the one-off variety, both baseball clubs are back at it with an opposition for the trademark of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, whose logo is, you guessed it, a "W."

Recently Reuters had a fascinating article all about the new patent thicket in pot that is appearing, thanks to legalization efforts in the US and around the globe.

The TV industry is certainly skilled when it comes to ignoring the will of the customer. You'll recall that as the cord cutting and ratings free fall began, the sector's very first impulse was to double down on a lot of bad ideas, from mindlessly raising rates, to editing down programs or speeding them up to shove more ads into each viewing hour. And as new innovations like ad skipping DVR technology emerged, the industry's very first impulse was to first sue companies in a bid to ban the tech, then "innovate" by charging users more if they did want to skip ads.This week, both AT&T and Hulu (which AT&T now owns a chunk of via its Time Warner merger) unveiled their latest "innovation" in delivering ads that users don't want: ads that run when you press pause and leave the room. According to AT&T, the tech should emerge sometime next year for its DirecTV and IPTV (formerly branded U-Verse) TV customers:

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Because the state is an idiot, the attorney general of California is appealing the federal court decision permanently preventing the state's government from enforcing its ultra-stupid "anti-ageism" law. The law -- which would do absolutely nothing to prevent movie studios from engaging in biased hiring -- targeted the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), preventing it from publishing facts about actors and actresses. This asinine, First Amendment-trampling law was prompted by failed litigation against IMDb by an actress who felt she was losing roles to younger actresses because the site had published her birthdate.The federal court needed only six pages to tell the state how terrible its law was and what impact it would have on protected speech. This ridiculous argument -- supported by beneficiaries of the First Amendment (the Screen Actors Guild) -- was quickly dismantled by the presiding judge:

The telecom industry (and by proxy Ajit Pai's) primary justification for killing net neutrality -- and FCC authority over ISPs in general -- was that sector oversight was stunting network investment. Of course repeated analysis of the data shows that simply isn't true, but that hasn't stopped telecom lobbyists and the lawmakers who love them from repeating those claims in the hopes that repetition forges reality.And while telecom lobbying organizations like US Telecom continue to cling tight to this false narrative, the "science" they've been shoveling out in recent months to try and "prove" these claims leaves a little something to be desired. Last October, for example, US Telecom released a study it claimed somehow proved that the Ajit Pai's attacks on net neutrality had boosted broadband investment:

A lawsuit originally filed early last year makes some very disturbing allegations about police officers and their relationship with their vendors. New York resident Silvon Simmons was shot three times by Rochester Police Officer Joseph Ferrigno. Simmons was unarmed, but was hit with three of the four bullets fired by Ferrigno as he ran way from the officer.Shortly before being shot. Simmons had been engaged in "Minding Your Own Business," which can apparently be nearly-fatal. Returning from a trip to a convenience store shortly after 9 pm, Officer Ferrigno cut in front of him, hit Simmons with his spotlight, exited his car with his gun drawn, and opened fire when Simmons began running. According to Simmons' amendment complaint [PDF] filed in August, Ferrigno never stated he was police officer before opening fire. Simmons, blinded by the spotlight, was unsure who was shooting at him. Even if he had known it was cop, he still would have had no idea why he was being stopped, much less shot at.The number of bullets fired matters, as Tracy Rosenburg of Oakland Privacy reports. Something seriously messed up happened after the shooting. A gun was found in the yard several houses away from where Simmons was stopped. Cops tried to tie this weapon to Simmons to justify Ferrigno's deadly force use, despite the gun being located in the opposite direction of Simmons' flight path.Not that it would have mattered if it had been found in the same yard where Simmons lay "playing dead" in order to not get shot again by his unseen assailant.

The annals of copyright are littered with acts of extraordinary stupidity and selfishness on the part of the publishers, recording industry and film studios. But few can match the refusal by the publishing industry to make it easier for the blind to gain access to reading material that would otherwise be blocked by copyright laws. Indeed, the fact that it took so long for what came to be known as the Marrakesh Treaty to be adopted is a shameful testimony to the publishing industry's belief that copyright maximalism is more important than the rights of the visually impaired. As James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), wrote in 2013, when the treaty was finally adopted:

In a short decision, the Supreme Court of the State of New York reminds federal agents what they can and can't do while operating under the color of law. In this case (via The Newspaper) a CBP officer, who was supposed to be keeping an eye on the ultra-dangerous Canadians, decided he wanted to be a traffic cop instead.Spotting a driver "engaging in dangerous maneuvers," the CBP agent (who is unnamed in the decision) decided to pursue the vehicle. He called the Buffalo (New York) Police Department to relay his observations. Deciding it would take too long for Buffalo PD officers to respond -- and supposedly concerned about the danger posed by the driver -- the CBP agent activated the lights on his vehicle and pulled the driver over.The CBP agent did not approach the driver until a Buffalo police officer arrived -- not out of concern for the Constitution, but rather for his own personal safety. The CBP agent left after more police officers arrived. A gun was discovered during the stop and the driver was charged under New York law with illegal possession of a firearm.The driver moved to suppress the evidence, arguing the stop itself was unlawful. The court found the CBP agent had the "powers of a peace officer," a fact that's relevant to its final determination. As such, the CBP agent can do certain things related to customs/border protection, but pulling drivers over for traffic violations isn't one of them. From the decision [PDF]:

As expected, UK Parliament Member Damian Collins released a bunch of documents that he had previously seized under questionable circumstances. While he had revealed some details in a blatantly misleading way during the public hearing he held, he's now released a bunch more. Collins tees up the 250 page release with a few of his own notes, which also tend to exaggerate and misrepresent what's in the docs, and many people are running with a few of those misrepresentations.However, that doesn't mean that all of these documents have been misrepresented. Indeed, there are multiple things in here that look pretty bad for Facebook, and could be very damaging for it on questions around the privacy protections it had promised the FTC it would put in place, as well as in any potential anti-trust fight. It's not that surprising to understand how Facebook got to the various decisions it made, but the "move fast and break things" attitude also seems to involve the potential of breaking both the law and the company's own promises to its users. And that's bad.First, the things that really aren't that big a deal: a lot of the reporting has focused on the idea that Facebook would give greater access to data to partners who signed up to give Facebook money via its advertising or other platforms. There doesn't seem to be much of a bombshell there. Lots of companies who have APIs charge for access. This is kind of a standard business model question, and some of the emails in the data dump show what actually appears to be a pretty thoughtful discussion of various business model options and their tradeoffs. This was a company that recognized it had valuable information and was trying to figure out the best way to monetize it. There isn't much of a scandal there, though some people seem to think there is. Perhaps you could argue that allowing some third parties to have greater access Facebook has a cavalier attitude towards that data since it's willing to trade access to it for money, but there's no evidence presented that this data was used in an abusive way (indeed, by putting a "price" on the access, Facebook likely limited the access to companies who had every reason to not abuse the data).Similarly, there is a lot of discussion about the API change, which Facebook implemented to actually start to limit how much data app developers had access to. And the documentation here shows that part of the motivation to do this was to (rightfully) improve user trust of Facebook. It's difficult to see how that's a scandal. In addition, some of the discussions involve moving specific whitelisted partner to a special version of the API that gives them access to more data... but in a way that the data is hashed, providing better privacy and security to that data, while still making it useful. Again, this approach seems to actually be beneficial to end users, rather than harmful, so the attempts to attack it seem misplaced -- and yet take up the vast majority of the 250 pages.The bigger issues involve specific actions that certainly appear to at least raise antitrust questions. That includes cutting off apps that recreate Facebook's own features, or that are suddenly getting a lot of traction (and using the access they had to users' phones to figure out which apps were getting lots of traction). While not definitively violating antitrust laws, that's certainly the kind of evidence that any antitrust investigator would likely explore -- looking to see if Facebook held a dominant position at the time of those actions, and if those actions were designed to deliberately harm competitors, rather than for any useful purpose for end-users. At least from the partial details released in the documents, the focus on competitors does seem to be a driving force. That could create a pretty big antitrust headache for Facebook.Of course, the details on this... are still a bit vague from the released documents. There are a number of included charts from Onavo included, showing the popularity of various apps, such as this:Onavo was a data analytics company that Facebook bought in 2013 for over $100 million. Last year, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Facebook was using Onavo to understand how well competing apps were doing, and potentially using that data to target acquisitions... or potentially to try to diminish those competing apps' access. The potential "smoking gun" evidence is buried in these files, but there's a short email on the day that Twitter launched Vine, its app for 6-second videos, where Facebook decides to cut off Twitter's access to its friend API in response to this move, and Zuckerberg himself says "Yup, go for it."Now... it's entirely possible that there's more to this than is shown in the documents. But at least on its face, it seems like the kind of thing that deserves more scrutiny. If Facebook truly shut down access to the API because it feared competition from Vine... that is certainly the kind of thing that will raise eyebrows from antitrust folks. If there were more reasons for cutting off Vine, that should come out. But if the only reason was "ooh, that's a potential competitor to our own service," and if Facebook was seen as the dominant way of distribution or access at the time, it could be a real issue.Separately, if the name Onavo sounds familiar to you, that might be because earlier this year, Facebook launched what it called a VPN under the brand name Onavo... and there was reasonable anger over it because people realized (as per the above discussion) that Onavo was really a form of analytics spyware that charted what applications you were using and for what. It was so bad that Apple pulled it from its App Store.The other big thing that comes out in the released documents is all the way at the end, when Facebook is getting ready to roll out a Facebook app update on Android that will snoop on your SMS and call logs and use that information for trying to get you to add more friends and for determining what kinds of content it promotes to you. Facebook clearly recognized that this could be a PR nightmare if it got out, and they were worried that Android would seek permission from users, which would alert them to this kind of snooping:That is bad. That's Facebook knowing that its latest snooping move will look bad and trying to figure out a way to sneak it through. Later on, the team is relieved when they realize, after testing, that they can roll this out without alerting users with a permission dialog screen:As reporter Kashmir Hill points out, it's notable that this "phew, we don't really have to alert users to our sketchy plan to get access to their logs" came from Yul Kwon, who was designated as Facebook's "privacy sherpa" and put in charge of making sure that Facebook didn't do anything creepy with user data. From an article that Hill wrote back in 2015: