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Another police department has "learned" it has to respect the First Amendment rights of citizens. A settlement obtained by the ACLU as the result of a civil rights lawsuit will result in additional training that surely should be redundant at this point in time.

In the wake of San Diego Comic-Con winning its years-long lawsuit against Salt Lake Comicon over its trademark on the term "comic-con", much of the media coverage was somewhat apocalyptic as to what the consequences would be for cons across the country. Despite the payout for winning the suit being a paltry $20k, more focus was put on just how other cons would react. The early returns are mixed, with some proactively undergoing name-changes to avoid litigation and others staying stalwart. The point we have made all along is that this win for SDCC was not some ultimate final act on the matter.And, as many predicted, it appears that win wasn't even the final act with regards to its SLCC foe, as the Utah-based con has filed for a new trial.

When the Snowden leaks dropped, plenty of people rushed to criticize his actions, saying he should have brought his concerns to officials via the proper channels. Always assumed to be mostly worthless, the intervening four years have proven nothing shoots messengers faster than the "proper channels." Despite periodic legislative attempts to institute better whistleblower protections, working within the system rarely produces positive changes. It does, however, subject the whistleblower to plenty of retaliation.This sad fact is personified by Dan Meyer -- the former official whistleblower channel for the Intelligence Community. Meyer blew the whistle himself, pointing out wrongdoing by top IC officials. Now, he's being forced out of office, clearing the path for the IC's attempt to rebrand whistleblowers as "insider threats." Meyer is facing an ad hoc Star Chamber of IC Inspector Generals, all of them apparently gunning for his swift removal.

As discussed in this post below, on February 2nd, Santa Clara University is hosting a gathering of tech platform companies to discuss how they actually handle content moderation questions. Many of the participants have written short essays about the questions that will be discussed at this event -- and over the next few weeks we'll be publishing many of those essays. This first one comes from Professor Eric Goldman, who put together the conference, explaining the rationale behind the event and this series of essays.Many user-generated content (UGC) services aspire to build scalable businesses where usage and revenues grow without increasing headcount. Even with advances in automated filtering and artificial intelligence, this goal is not realistic. Large UGC databases require substantial human intervention to moderate anti-social and otherwise unwanted content and activities. Despite the often-misguided assumptions by policymakers, problematic content usually does not have flashing neon signs saying "FILTER ME!" Instead, humans must find and remove that content—especially with borderline cases, where machines can't make sufficiently nuanced judgments.At the largest UGC services, the number of people working on content moderation is eye-popping. By 2018, YouTube will have 10,000 people on its "trust & safety teams." Facebook's "safety and security team" will grow to 20,000 people in 2018.Who are these people? What exactly do they do? How are they trained? Who sets the policies about what content the service considers acceptable?We have surprisingly few answers to these questions. Occasionally, companies have discussed these topics in closed-door events, but very little of this information has been made public.This silence is unfortunate. A UGC service's decision to publish or remove content can have substantial implications for individuals and the community, yet we lack the information to understand how those decisions are made and by whom. Furthermore, the silence has inhibited the development of industry-wide "best practices." UGC services can learn a lot from each other—if they start sharing information publicly.On Friday, a conference called "Content Moderation and Removal at Scale" will take place at Santa Clara University. (The conference is sold out, but we will post recordings of the proceedings, and we hope to make a live-stream available). Ten UGC services will present "facts and figures" about their content moderation operations, and five panels will discuss cutting-edge content moderation issues. For some services, this conference will be the first time they've publicly revealed details about their content moderation operations. Ideally, the conference will end the industry's norm of silence.In anticipation of the conference, we assembled ten essays from conference speakers discussing various aspects of content moderation. These essays provide a sample of the conversation we anticipate at the conference. Expect to hear a lot more about content moderation operational issues in the coming months and years.Eric Goldman is a Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute, at Santa Clara University School of Law. He has researched and taught Internet Law for over 20 years, and he blogs on the topic at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Last November, Strava Labs released its "global heatmap" -- a stockpile of data created by millions of health-conscious people worldwide. Strava Labs is the GPS brain many fitness trackers rely on, allowing devices to record billions of steps recorded by millions of users. The company pulls data from big players like FitBit and Jawbone, as well as having its own fitness-tracking app. Here's what Strava Labs handed over to the general public:1 billion activities3 trillion latitude/longitude points13 trillion pixels rasterized10 terabytes of raw input dataA total distance of 27 billion km (17 billion miles)A total recorded activity duration of 200 thousand years5% of all land on Earth covered by tilesHere's what Strava's activity data looks like transposed on a map.All this metadata -- anonymized GPS points -- builds up quite a record of human movement. On top of tracking favorite jogging routes, the data is detailed enough to indicate where frequent exercisers live and work. This has been a problem for a few years now.Two years before this data was published, Strava announced a new feature which allowed users to turn solo workouts into ad hoc competitions.

There's been a lot of hand wringing and hyperventilation over a new report claiming that the Trump administration wants to nationalize the nation's looming fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks, despite the fact the proposal has a snowball's chance in hell of ever actually materializing. According to a leaked PowerPoint deck and memo drafted by a "Senior National Security Council official," the Trump administration wants the U.S. government to build and own a centralized, government-controlled 5G network in order to, purportedly, fight Chinese hackers.More specifically, the memo claims this plan would be akin to the "21st century equivalent of the Eisenhower National Highway System," creating a "new paradigm" for the wireless industry and for national security. Fear of Chinese hackers drives the proposal from stem to stern, suggesting the plan needs to be completed in three years to protect American interests worldwide:

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We've long complained about civil asset forfeiture in the United States. Law enforcement agencies, thanks to a series of perverse incentives, have grown to love taking people's property (usually cash) without charging them for crimes. The excuse is that lifting a few thousand dollars from some random person somehow chips away at drug cartels located overseas.It would seem to be more crippling if criminal charges were pursued and suspects interrogated, jailed, and flipped. But law enforcement has no time for that, not when a pile of cash is only a few pieces of paperwork away from changing ownership.They're taking asset forfeiture to a whole new level over in the Netherlands. Dutch cops will now be taking the clothes off people's back if they "suspect" the clothing might be out of the spending range of the person wearing it. (h/t Charles C.W. Cooke)

Once a month like clockwork, somebody in the tech press proudly decides to inform their readers that you can't save any money by cutting the traditional TV cord and going with cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. The logic in these reports almost always goes something like this: "Once I got done signing up for every damn streaming video service under the sun, I found that I wasn't really saving much money over traditional cable."Writers leaning into this lazy hot take almost always tend to forget a few things.One, the same broadcasters dictating cable TV rates dictate streaming video rates, so in some ways pricing will be lateral. Two, adding a dozen streaming services to exactly match your bloated, 300 channel cable subscription misses the entire point of cord cutting, which is about customization and flexibility. Three, if writers actually stopped and talked to real consumers (like in the cord cutting subreddit), they'd be told (repeatedly) how customers routinely save money each month by breaking free of the traditional, bloated cable TV bundle.Last week it was Quartz's turn to prop up the flimsy narrative that "streaming’s live-TV bundles aren’t actually saving cord-cutters money." Their report was at least somewhat more scientific in nature, leaning heavily on data provided by a research firm by the name of M Science, which acknowledged that the average cord cutter saves around $20 per month by going with a streaming alternative. But the firm then tried to claim that this savings disappeared when you factored in cable company "triple play" bundles:

Every year, right about this time, this site is forced to remind everyone that the NFL is completely full of crap when it comes to how it enforces its supposed trademark rights for the Super Bowl. While the NFL does indeed have some rights to the phrase and to controlling how it's used, those rights generally amount to prohibiting companies from falsely implying sponsorship of the game or a relationship with the NFL in commercial speech. What the NFL pretends is the case, on the other hand, is that it can somehow prohibit any company from even mentioning the Super Bowl in any context, up to and including simple factual statements.All of this leads to the absurdity of every company that has chosen not to sponsor the NFL diving into the euphamism business, gleefully referring to the Super Bowl by any other name. "The Big Game" is the most popular of these, although the NFL has actually gone so far as to look into trademarking that phrase as well. The end result is the Picasso-ing of reality in which companies make references which every member of the public gets but that fall short of calling the NFL's biggest show by its proper name, something you would think the NFL would want everyone everywhere talking about.With the Super Bowl a week away, we're already seeing this practice ramp back up. In Philadelphia, the home city of one of the competing teams, some small local businesses are getting into the act in hilarious ways.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes in response to our post about law enforcement's use of "parallel construction". That One Guy suggested a tweak to the language:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, the world continued to react to the death of Aaron Swartz, with more attention being turned towards prosecutorial misconduct, and direct criticism of the handling of Swartz's case — though US Attorney Carmen Ortiz doubled down and said her office wouldn't change anything. Meanwhile, we looked at the many other cases of prosecutors bullying "hackers", while misguided editors at the Globe & Mail were spewing nonsense and hackathons around the world were preparing to carry on Aaron Swartz's work.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, while AT&T was getting ready to filter copyrighted content at the ISP level, Time Warner was rolling out its overage charges for heavy users — and, funny thing, Time Warner-owned HBO was simultaneously putting its shows online for the first time. And Canadian lobbyists were pushing to make ISPs liable for piracy themselves. Meanwhile, we saw too trends in their infancy: adults moving into the young person's world of social media (to the consternation of many young people), and PC game companies experimenting with the freemium model that would later become a staple of mobile gaming (this was before the PC publishers figured out they could charge $60 for the game and have microtransactions).Fifteen Years AgoEarly this week in 2003, it was the RIAA seeking money from ISPs, with then-head Hillary Rosen calling for a P2P levy — though a journalist who called the RIAA found them denying she said it, and claiming the opposite. But then, midweek, Rosen announced her resignation. Meanwhile, Microsoft was introducing its own DRM technology, while Sony was trying out some DRM that charged people $2 to copy a song from a CD. Amidst this anti-circumvention obsession, tech firms were getting more aggressive in their fight against Hollywood's DRM demands.

The same legal team that helped get the song "Happy Birthday" officially cleared into the public domain has done it again with the song "We Shall Overcome." As we wrote about, the same team filed a similar lawsuit against The Richmond Organization and Ludlow Music, who claimed a highly questionable copyright in the famous song "We Shall Overcome." As the lawsuit showed, the song had a lengthy history long before Ludlow's copyright claim.Last September, the judge made it clear that the song's claimed copyright was on weak grounds, rejecting arguments that key parts of the song were subject to copyright. Apparently, Ludlow Music tried to salvage something out of the wreck by just promising to offer a "covenant not to sue" against the plaintiffs... which the judge said wasn't good enough earlier this month.So, now the two sides have come to a settlement clearly admitting that the song is in the public domain:

You will likely know that we've been following the absurd threats that Roberto Escobar, brother to and former accountant for noted drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, launched at Netflix and the makers of its hit show Narcos. The threats kicked off as something of a publicity rights challenge, with Roberto Escobar demanding one billion dollars over a show in which he does not appear and is not named. Escobar has appeared to believe that his knowledge of the inner workings of the Escobar cartel somehow granted him authority over the show, while pretty much everyone else has agreed that the First Amendment would ultimately torpedo any lawsuit that might actually get filed.But then things got even stranger. Escobar's lawyers began making noises that indicated the show was about to capitulate to the threats and demands. Meanwhile, the legal team on the other side were at the exact same time pointing out just how absurd and ficticious some of Escobar's claims were, such as that he had been using the term "Narcos" in conjunction with operating a website and providing computer gaming services on a computer network since 1986. For those of you who are too young to remember a time without a widespread internet, there basically was no such thing as a publicly facing website in 1986. Meanwhile, a location scout for the show was murdered in Mexico while scouting for the series' fourth season, with Escobar offering cryptic and coy commentary on the matter that bordered on suggesting he was somehow involved.All of that had just been happening in the fall, which might make it slightly less surprising that this whole thing will now go away.

The route to equipping the NYPD with body cameras ran through a federal courtroom. As part of the remedies handed down in a civil rights lawsuit against the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program, body cameras became required equipment for officers.NYPD officials seemed to support the plan. Not so the ostensible representative of the NYPD, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA). The NYPD's union fought the cameras much as they have fought anything with a hint of accountability. A report by the NYPD's internal oversight found officers much less concerned about body cameras and access to footage than their supposed union reps.A long-delayed camera policy finally rolled out, making it clear cameras would serve officers and prosecutors much more than they would the general public. Now, the PBA is going to court to block the release of camera footage to the public. The PBA hopes the court will read public records laws the way it does, tossing body cam footage into the gaping hole of New York public records exemptions.

We've routinely noted how countless communities have been forced to explore building their own broadband networks thanks to limited competition in the market. As most of you have experienced first hand, this lack of competition routinely results in higher prices, slower speeds, worse customer service, and massive broadband deployment gaps. And thanks to telecom industry regulatory capture (taken to an entirely new level during the Trump administration), countless well-heeled lawmakers make it a personal mission to keep things that way.Needless to say, the threat posed by angry users building or supporting their own networks is a major reason ISPs have lobbied (read: literally bought and written) laws in twenty-one states banning towns and cities from pursuing this option. In some states, towns and cities are even banned from striking public/private partnerships, often the only creative solution available to the traditional broadband duopoly logjam.Not too surprisingly, a new study out of Harvard details just what AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter (Spectrum) are afraid of.The study found that averaged over a four year period, service offered by community ISPs tends to be significantly cheaper that broadband service made available from privately-owned alternatives. In some areas, the researchers couldn't directly compare community-owned broadband with private service, either because the private ISP in question couldn't even offer the FCC definition of broadband (25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream), or because ISPs went to great lengths to prevent users from seeing their actual prices. But in 23 out of 27 cases, the community option provided lower prices:

Notification of state-sponsored hacking attempts has revealed another weak spot in the US government's defenses. The security of the government's systems is an ongoing concern, but the Senate has revealed it's not doing much to ensure sensitive documents and communications don't end up in the hands of foreign hackers.The news of the hacking attempt was greeted with assurances that nothing of value was taken.

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I cannot wait to see FBI Director Christopher Wray try to escape the petard-hoisting Sen. Ron Wyden has planned for him. Wray has spent most of his time as director complaining about device encryption. He continually points at the climbing number of locked phones the FBI can't crack. This number signifies nothing, not without more data, but it's illustrative of Wray's blunt force approach to encryption.I'm sure Wray views himself as a man carefully picking his way through the encryption minefield. But there's nothing subtle about his approach. He has called encryption a threat to public safety. His lead phone forensics person has called Apple "evil" for offering it to its users. He has claimed the move to default encryption is motivated by profit. And if that's not the motivation, then it's probably just anti-FBI malice. Meanwhile, he claims the FBI has nothing but the purest intentions when it calls for encryption backdoors, even while Wray does everything he can to avoid using that term.He claims the solution is out there -- a perfect, seamless blend of secure encryption and easy law enforcement access. The solution, he claims, is most likely deliberately being withheld by the "smart people." These tech companies that have made billionaires of their founders are filled with the best nerds, but they're just not applying themselves. Wray asserts -- without evidence -- that secure encryption backdoors are not only possible, but probable.Senator Ron Wyden has had enough. He's calling out Director Wray on his bullshit. Publicly. His letter [PDF] demands Wray hand over information on his encryption backdoor plans. Specifically, Wyden wants Wray to name names. [via Kate Conger at Gizmodo]

The FCC and its large ISP allies are trying to change the subject in the wake of their hugely unpopular attack on net neutrality. With net neutrality having such broad, bipartisan support, the FCC is trying to shift the conversation away from net neutrality (which remember, is just a symptom of a lack of broadband competition), toward a largely-hollow focus on expanding broadband to rural areas. The apparent goal: to convince partisans that net neutrality is only a concern among out of touch Hollywood elites, and the FCC is hard at work on the real problem: deploying broadband to forgotten America.This attempted pivot was exemplified in a statement last week by FCC boss Ajit Pai, when he tried to argue his attack on net neutrality was already magically paying dividends for broadband expansion:

The city of Sarajevo passed a law in 2000 forbidding anyone but the city of Sarajevo from using the name Sarajevo. Not much has been said about it because the Sarajevo city council hasn't done much about it. But recently owners of Facebook pages containing the word "Sarajevo" have been receiving legal threats from the city's government.Sarajevo resident Aleksandar Todorović wrote a long blog post detailing the stupidity of this law, which contains firsthand accounts of Facebook page owners who've been threatened with criminal proceedings for failing to secure permission to use the name of a city on their pages. As Todorović notes, his blog post is illegal, simply because it hasn't been pre-approved by Sarajevo's city council.The law can be read here (and loosely translated by Google). It basically states the city owns the name and all others wishing to use it must ask the city council for permission before using it. It also states there are some requests that just aren't going to be granted.

The privacy implications of collecting DNA are wide-ranging, not least because they don't relate solely to the person from whom the sample is taken. Our genome is a direct product of our parents' genetic material, so the DNA strings of siblings from the same mother and father are closely related. Even that of more distant relations has many elements in common, since they derive from common ancestors. Thus a DNA sample contains information not just about the donor, but about many others on the relevant family tree as well. A new paper published in Nature Genetics (behind a paywall, unfortunately) shows how that fact enables the genomes of long-dead ancestors to be reconstructed, using just the DNA of their descendants.As an article in Futurism explains, the unique circumstances of the individual chosen for the reconstruction, the Icelander Hans Jonatan, aided the research team as they sought to piece together his genome nearly two centuries after his death in 1827. The scientists mainly came from the Icelandic company deCODE Genetics, one of the pioneers in the world of genomics, and highly-familiar with Iceland's unique genetic resources. The following factors were key:

The last time we checked in with Vice Media it was firing off a cease and desist letter to a tiny little punk band called ViceVersa, demanding that it change its name because Vice Media has a trademark for the word "vice" for several markets. In case you thought that occurrence was a one-off for Vice Media, or the result of an overzealous new hire to the company's legal team, Vice Media is again trademark bullying another comany, Vice Industry Token. VIT is apparently a pornography cryptocurrency company, which is a three-word combination that I bet god herself could never have imagined being uttered. The claim in the C&D notice that VIT got is, of course, that Vice Media has a "vice" trademark and that this use infringes upon it.

The FBI set the first (and second!) rules of Stingray Club: DO NOT TALK ABOUT STINGRAY CLUB. Law enforcement agencies seeking to acquire cell tower spoofing tech were forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement forbidding them from disclosing details on the devices to defendants, judges, the general public… sometimes even prosecutors.A new wave of parallel construction washed over the land, distancing defendants from the source of evidence used against them. Pen register orders -- used to cover the tracks of Stingray searches -- started appearing en masse, as though it was 1979 all over again. If curious lawyers and/or judges started sniffing around, agencies were instructed to let accused criminals roam free rather than expose details about Stingray devices. According to the FBI, public safety would be irreparably damaged if Stingray details were exposed. Apparently the return of dangerous criminals to the street poses no harm to the public.Another NDA has been uncovered, thanks to a lengthy public records lawsuit. The document finally handed over by Delaware State Police to the ACLU was once referred to as "mythical" by the DSP in court. Yes, the State Police once claimed this NDA never existed. It did so while claiming it had zero communications with Harris while acquiring its Stingray. The ACLU obviously found this hard to believe and the court sent the DSP back to search harder. The Harris NDA is real. And it's spectacular.

As Techdirt noted back in November, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement was not killed by Donald Trump's decision to pull the US out of the deal. Instead, something rather interesting happened: one of the TPP's worst chapters, dealing with copyright, was "suspended" at the insistence of the Canadian government, which suddenly took on a leading role. At the time, it wasn't clear whether this was merely a temporary ploy, or was permanent. With news that the clumsily-named "Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership" (CPTPP) has been "concluded", it now seems that the exclusion of both copyright and pharma patent extensions is confirmed. As Michael Geist writes:

Spain's government has gotten into the business of regulating speech with predictably awful results. An early adopter of Blues Lives Matter-esque policies, Spain went full police state, passing a law making it a crime to show "disrespect" to law enforcement officers. The predictable result? The arrest of someone for calling cops "slackers" in a Facebook post.Spain's government is either woefully unaware of the negative consequences of laws like this or, worse, likes the negative consequences. After all, it doesn't hurt Spain's government beyond a little reputational damage. It only hurts residents of Spain. When you're already unpopular, thanks to laws like these and suppression of a Catalan independence vote, what difference does it make if you're known better for shutting down dissent than actually protecting citizens from hateful speech?One Catalan resident is getting the full "hate speech" rap-and-ride.

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There's no denying that Rupert Murdoch built up quite a media empire over the decades -- but that was almost all entirely focused on newspaper and pay TV. While he's spent the past few decades trying to do stuff on the internet, he has an impressively long list of failures over the years. There are many stories of him buying internet properties (Delphi, MySpace, Photobucket) or starting them himself (iGuide, Fox Interactive, The Daily) and driving them into the ground (or just flopping right out of the gate). While his willingness to embrace the internet early and to try things is to be commended, his regular failures to make his internet ventures successful has pretty clearly soured him on the internet entirely over the years.Indeed, over the past few years, Murdoch or Murdoch surrogates (frequently News Corp's CEO Robert Thomson) have bashed the internet at every opportunity, no matter how ridiculous. Almost all of these complaints can be summed up simply: big internet companies are making money and News Corp. isn't -- and therefore the problem is with those other companies which should be forced to give News Corp. money.A few years back, I ended up at a small media conference where Rupert's son James Murdoch spoke at great length about his plans for News Corps' internet business -- and what struck me was that he was almost 100% focused on copying the pay TV model. This wasn't a huge surprise -- I think at the time he was running Sky TV -- but it shocked me that he appeared to think through force of will he could turn the internet into a walled garden a la cable and satellite TV systems. Not surprisingly, Rupert is thinking along similar lines, and earlier this week released a bizarre and silly statement saying Facebook should start paying news sites "carriage fees" a la cable companies:

The General Accounting Office (GAO) says the agency will launch an investigation into the fraud that occurred during the FCC's rushed repeal of net neutrality rules. Consumers only had one real chance to weigh in during the public comment period of the agency's misleadingly-named "Restoring Internet Freedom" proposal. But "somebody" paid a group or individual to fill the comment period with bogus comments from fake or even dead people, in a ham-fisted attempt to downplay massive, legitimate public opposition to the plan.The FCC then blocked a law enforcement investigation into the fraud, refusing to hand over server logs or API key data that could easily disclose the culprit(s). FOIA requests and public requests for help (one coming from myself) were also promptly ignored by the Trump FCC.To help speed things along, the GAO says it will launch an investigation into the bogus comments and the FCC's response to them, though they warn in a letter that it may be at least five months before they have the staff and resources for such an inquiry:

Law enforcement officers will often testify that seeking warrants is a time-consuming process that subjects officers' sworn statements to strict judicial scrutiny. The testimony implies the process is a hallowed tradition that upholds the sanctity of the Fourth Amendment, hence its many steps and plodding pace. The problem is law enforcement officers make these statements most often when defending their decision to bypass the warrant process.Criminals move too fast for the warrant process, they argue. Officers would love to respect the Fourth Amendment, but seem to feel this respect is subject to time constraints. Sometimes they have a point. And when they have a legitimate point, they also have a legitimate exception: exigent circumstances. In truly life-threatening situations, the Fourth Amendment can be shoved aside momentarily to provide access to law enforcement officers. (The exception tends to swallow the rule, though. Courts have pushed back, but deference to officers' assertions about exigency remains the status quo in most courtrooms.)The exigent circumstances exception remains intact, something law enforcement can lean on when the warrant process takes too long. When lives or evidence are at stake, sometimes corners have to be cut to ensure officers can get their man/woman and any evidence on hand. But the oft-stated claim that warrant acquisition is a long and difficult process is undercut completely when underlying facts about warrant approval are examined. Jessica Miller and Aubrey Weaver of the Salt Lake City Tribune took a close look at electronic warrants approved by Utah judges and found even the most exigent of exigent circumstances rarely evolve faster than warrants can be obtained.

Techdirt posts about sexting have a depressingly similar story line: young people send explicit photos of themselves to their partners, and one or both of them end up charged with distributing or possessing child pornography. Even more ridiculously, the authorities typically justify branding young people who do this as sex offenders on the grounds that it "protects" the same individuals whose lives they are ruining. Judging by a story in The Local, reporting on a press release that first appeared on the MyNewsDesk site (original in Danish), the police in Denmark seem to be taking a more rational approach. Rather than charging the two young people involved for sexting, they are charging 1,004 people who shared the video and images afterwards, some several hundred times:

Any reading of our thorough coverage of Denuvo DRM could be best summarized as: a spasm of success in 2015 followed by one of the great precipitous falls into failure in the subsequent two years. While some of us are of the opinion that all DRM such as Denuvo are destined for eventual failure, what sticks out about Denuvo is just how stunningly fast its fall from relevancy has come about. Once heralded as "the end of game piracy," even the most recent iterations of Denuvo's software is being cracked on the timeline of days and hours. You would be forgiven if, having read through all of this, you thought that Denuvo was nearly toxic in gaming and security circles at this point.But apparently not everyone thinks this is true. Irdeto, the company out of the Netherlands we last saw pretending that taking pictures of toys is copyright infringement and insisting that a real driver of piracy was winning an Oscar, has announced that it has acquired Denuvo.

A few weeks ago we posted an update on Montagna v. Nunis. This was a case where a plaintiff subpoenaed Yelp for the identity of a user. The trial court originally denied Yelp's attempt to quash the subpoena – and sanctioned it for trying – on the grounds that platforms had no right to stand in for their users to assert their First Amendment rights. We filed an amicus brief in support of Yelp's appeal of that decision, which fortunately the Court of Appeal reversed, joining another Court of Appeal that earlier in the year had also decided that of course it was ok for platforms to try to quash subpoenas seeking to unmask their users.Unfortunately, that was only part of what this Court of Appeal decided. Even though it agreed that Yelp could TRY to quash a subpoena, it decided that it couldn't quash this particular one. That's unfortunate for the user, who was just unmasked. But what made it unfortunate for everyone is that this decision was fully published, which means it can be cited as precedent by other plaintiffs who want to unmask users. While having the first part of the decision affirming Yelp's right to quash the subpoena is a good thing, the logic that the Court used in the second part is making it a lot easier for plaintiffs to unmask users – even when they really shouldn't be entitled to.So Yelp asked the California Supreme Court to partially depublish the ruling – or, in other words, make the bad parts of it stop being precedent that subsequent litigants can cite in their unmasking attempts (there are rules that prevent California lawyers from citing unpublished cases in their arguments, except under extremely limited circumstances). And this week we filed our own brief at the California Supreme Court in support of Yelp's request, arguing that the Court of Appeal's analysis was inconsistent with other California policy and precedent protecting speech, and that without its depublication it will lead to protected speech being chilled.None of this will change the outcome of the earlier decision - the user will remain unmasked. But hopefully it will limit the effect of that Court of Appeal's decision with respect to the unmasking to the facts of that particular case.

It should be no surprise that I'm an unabashed supporter of free speech. Usually essays that start that way are then followed with a "but..." and that "but..." undermines everything in that opening sentence. This is not such an essay. However, I am going to talk about some interesting challenges that have been facing our concepts of free speech over the past few years -- often in regards to how free speech and the internet interact. Back in 2015, at our Copia Summit we had a panel that tried to lay out some of these challenges, which acknowledged that our traditional concepts of free speech don't fully work in the internet age.There are those who argue that internet platforms should never do any moderation at all, and that they should just let all content flow. And while that may be compelling at a first pass, thinking beyond that proves that's unworkable for a very basic reason: spam. Almost everyone (outside of spammers, I guess) would argue that it makes sense to filter out/moderate/delete spam. It serves no useful purpose. It clutters inboxes/comments/forums with off-topic and annoying messages. So, as Dave Willner mentions in that talk back in 2015, once you've admitted that spam can be filtered, you've admitted that some moderation is appropriate for any functioning forum to exist. Then you get to the actual challenges of when and how that moderation should occur. And that's where things get really tricky. Because I think we all agree that when platforms do try to moderate speech... they tend to be really bad at it. And that leads to all sorts of stories that we like to cover of social media companies banning people for dumb reasons. But sometimes it crosses over into the absurd or dangerous -- like YouTube deleting channels that were documenting war crimes, because it's difficult to distinguish war crimes from terrorist propaganda (and, sometimes, they can be one and the same).An even worse situation, obviously, is when governments take it upon themselves to mandate moderation. Such regimes are almost exclusively used in ways to censor speech that should be protected -- as Germany is now learning with its terrible and ridiculous new social media censorship law.But it's not that difficult to understand why people have been increasingly clamoring for these kinds of solutions -- either having platforms moderate more aggressively or demanding regulations that require them to do so. And it's because there's a ton of really, really crappy things happening on these platforms. And, as you know, there's always the xkcd free speech point that the concept of free speech is about protecting people from government action, not requiring everyone to suffer through whatever nonsense someone wants to scream.But, it is becoming clear that we need to think carefully about how we truly encourage free speech. Beyond the spam point above, another argument that has resonated with me over the years is that some platforms have enabled such levels of trolling (or, perhaps to be kinder, "vehement arguing") that they actually lead to less free speech in that they scare off or silence those who also have valuable contributions to add to various discussions. And that, in turn, raises at least some questions about the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" model of understanding free speech. I've long been a supporter of this viewpoint -- that the best way to combat so-called "bad speech" is with "more speech." And, you then believe that the best/smartest/most important ideas rise to the top and stomp out the bad ideas. But what if the good ideas don't even have a chance? What if they're silenced before they even are spoken by the way these things are set up? That, too, would be an unfortunate result for free speech and the "marketplace of ideas".In the past couple of months, two very interesting pieces have been written on this that are pushing my thinking much further as well. The first is a Yale Law Journal piece by Nabiha Syed entitled Real Talk About Fake News: Towards a Better Theory for Platform Governance. Next week, we'll have Syed on our podcast to talk about this paper, but in it she points out that there are limitations and problems with the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" working the way many of us have assumed it should work. She also notes that other frameworks for thinking about free speech appear to have similar deficiencies when we are in an online world. In particular, the nature of the internet -- in which the scale and speed and ability to amplify a message are so incredibly different than basically at any other time in history -- is that it enables a sort of "weaponizing" of these concepts.That is, those who wish to abuse the concept of the marketplace of ideas by aggressively pushing misleading or deliberately misguided concepts are able to do so in a manner that short-circuits our concept of the marketplace of ideas -- all while claiming to support it.The second piece, which is absolutely worth reading and thinking about carefully, is Zeynep Tufekci's Wired piece entitled It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech. I was worried -- from the title -- that this might be the standard rant I've been reading about free speech somehow being "dangerous" that has become tragically popular over the past few years. But (and this is not surprising, given Tufekci's previous careful consideration of these issues for years) it's a truly thought provoking piece, in some ways building upon the framework that Syed laid out in her piece, noting how some factions are, in effect, weaponizing the very concept of the "marketplace of ideas" to insist they support it, while undermining the very premise behind it (that "good" speech outweighs the bad).In particular, she notes that while the previous scarcity was the ability to amplify speech, the current scarcity is attention -- and thus, the ability to flood the zone with bad/wrong/dangerous speech can literally act as a denial of service on the supposedly corrective "good speech." She notes that the way censorship used to work was by stifling the message. Traditional censorship is blocking the ability to get the message out. But modern censorship actually leverages the platforms of free speech to drown out other messages.

As we've been warning for a while, the next phase in the war on net neutrality for giant ISPs is pushing a new "net neutrality law" in name only. ISPs are nervous that the FCC's net neutrality repeal won't survive a court challenge due to the numerous instances of fraud and other procedural gaffes. As such, they've convinced blindly-loyal lawmakers like Marsha Blackburn to push fake net neutrality legislation whose entire purpose is to prevent the FCC's 2015 rules from being restored, or real, tough rules from being passed later.These proposed "solutions" ban behaviors ISPs had no intention of doing (like the ham-fisted blocking of websites), but avoid addressing any of the numerous areas where net neutrality violations now occur, from usage caps, overage fees and zero rating, to interconnection shenanigans designed to drive up costs for streaming video competitors like Netflix. But with Democrats hoping to use net neutrality as a wedge issue in the coming midterms (and pushing for a repeal reversal via the CRA), these bogus solutions haven't seen much traction outside of paid editorial support by telecom lobbyists.Enter AT&T, who this week bought full-page ad space in the New York Times and Washington Post to publish this love letter from AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson to American consumers. In it, Stephenson proclaims that despite having spent millions trying to gut consumer protections of every color, the company is a breathless advocate for the "open internet," and is really eager to lead the charge for "new laws that govern the internet and protect consumers":

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No one knows how to handle "fake news." Rather than step back and see what light-touch approaches might work, governments all over the world are rushing forward with bad ideas that harm speech and threaten journalism. No one seems to be immune to the "do something" infection and everything proposed is just another way to give governments more direct control of social media platforms and news outlets.In Italy, the government control of speech under the guide of "fake news" deterrence is being done in the worst way possible. It's not being handed to a regulatory body with instructions to sort of keep an eye on things. Instead, as Poynter reports, it's rolling out as a heckler's veto backed by armed officers.

We've long noted how state legislatures are so corrupt, they often quite literally let entrenched telecom operators write horrible, protectionist laws that hamstring competition. That's why there's now 21 states where companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have successfully lobbied for laws banning towns and cities from building their own broadband networks, even in instances where the incumbent refuses to. In many states, these laws even ban public/private partnerships, often the only creative solution for better broadband in low ROI markets.FCC efforts to pre-empt states from engaging in this kind of protectionism have been shot down by the courts, and voters continue to elect lawmakers whose top priority is protecting entrenched telecom duopolies, ensuring this cycle of pay-to-play dysfunction continues.Occasionally lawmakers propose bills attempting to shake up this cronyism, but the ISP-stranglehold over lawmakers usually ensure they go nowhere. Case in point: Rep. Anna Eshoo has introduced the Community Broadband Act of 2018 (HR 4814), which would not only ban states from passing rules prohibiting community broadband, but would ensure that any community broadband networks that get built don't get preferential treatment by regulators if they compete with private-sector ISPs. As bill co-sponsor Mike Doyle notes, these networks are often the only way many towns and cities get decent service:

Dr. Douglas Berger, an American psychiatrist offering services to ex-pats in Japan, recently sued a bunch of Redditors for telling other Redditors to steer clear of his services. Berger's lawsuit was exhaustive, covering several months of disparaging comments delivered by Redditors, but much of what Berger considered libel fell under the category of "protected opinion."Berger's ultimate goal appeared to be a revamp of his Google search results. Sitting ahead of multiple URLs linked to Berger and his Japanese business (many which appear to be owned by Berger himself) were links to multiple Reddit threads with unhelpful (for Berger anyway…) titles like "Stay away from 'psychiatrist' Doug Berger." In these threads, Berger was accused of everything from a lack of attentiveness during sessions to harassment to dodging income taxes.It wasn't pretty, but Berger's lawsuit was even uglier. Berger wanted a court to unmask multiple anonymous Redditors, while offering up little more than his opinions about opinions. While there were a few marginally-actionable statements listed in the lawsuit, Berger targeted every Redditor who'd ever said anything less than favorable about him.The Redditors put together a fundraising page for legal fees and secured the help of Marc Randazza. The good news is most of this is now unnecessary.

This post will come as no surprise to those of us super-interesting people that for some reason have made trademark law and news a key fulcrom point in our lives, but the United States Army has filed an opposition to the trademark application for the Las Vegas Golden Knights. Some background is in order should you not be one of the roughly twelve of us in America that are hockey fans.Starting around 2007, the United States Army went on something of a trademarking spree, filing for marks long in use, including some of the monikers for well known units and/or what I would call "show units", or units that chiefly serve to be seen at entertainment venues such as air and water shows. Included in these marks were the Army's "Black Knights" mascot for its military academy athletic teams and its Golden Knights paratrooping unit that performs at air and water shows all over the country. The army uses these trademarks to rake in millions of dollars in merchandise.The Las Vegas Golden Knights is an NHL expansion hockey team started by a graduate of West Point, Bill Foley, who wanted the team's garb and name to serve as an homage to his military roots. To that end, he had initially wanted to name the team "The Black Knights", but switched to "The Golden Knights" after the Army voiced its displeasure. The color scheme for the team is a clear call back to the paratrooping team that shares the name.It has been these clear admissions of homage that the Army has pointed to as an indication that this is obvious trademark infringement.

As the result of a public records battle with a local newspaper over court records, two Virginia politicians have decided to address the issue with legislation. One hopes to further open court records to the public.

In the midst of the political chaos in America and the world at large, a whole lot of attention has been turned to Facebook and its role in modern democracy. The social network has responded by announcing another round of news feed changes, the true impact of which (if any) remains far from clear. This week, we're joined by Mathew Ingram from the Columbia Journalism Review to talk about Facebook's changes, and whether we can or should expect them to fix anything.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.

Two of the most important developments in China's clampdown on the digital world took place last year, when the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology declared that all VPN providers needed prior government approval to operate, and then apps stores were forced to remove the many VPNs on offer there. In some parts of China, VPNs were banned completely, but such a total shutdown is not really an option for cities with many businesses that require secure overseas communication channels. That put the Chinese authorities in something of a quandary: how could they reconcile their desire to prevent VPNs being used to circumvent online controls, while ensuring that the country's increasingly important corporate sector had access to the encryption tools it needed for operating globally? An article in the FT provides us with the answer (paywall). In recent months, international companies and organizations have found their VPNs blocked more frequently:

If you've been napping, Comcast lobbyists recently convinced the government to kill net neutrality rules, dismantle broadband privacy protections, and bury efforts to make the cable box market more competitive. And they're just getting warmed up. Comcast lobbyists have also successfully convinced the Trump administration to eliminate nearly all state and federal oversight of large telecom monopolies. Should they be successful, consumers and innovators will face a massive new era of little to no accountability for one of the most despised, least-competitive business sectors in America.This new wave of regulatory capture comes at an inopportune time for American consumers and the nation's startups. Comcast was already facing less broadband competition than ever in many markets thanks to incumbent telcos effectively giving up on upgrading millions of aging DSL lines. With neither government oversight nor healthy competition present to keep Comcast in check, the company's awful customer service has become legend, and the rise of arbitrary, unnecessary fees and usage caps have become the norm.As an added bonus for Comcast, the conditions applied to the company's 2011 merger with NBC just expired over the weekend, raising additional concerns about the potential impact of an unshackled Comcast on the emerging streaming video market. Those conditions prohibited Comcast from charging streaming competitors unfair rates, or from meddling in Hulu management to prevent disruption of Comcast's own services. They also required Comcast adhere to some aspects of the FCC's 2010 net neutrality rules, even if they were dismantled in court (they were).With the DOJ suing to block AT&T's own media megamerger, some FCC Commissioners are wondering why Comcast gets a free pass here:

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The teenage hacker who tore CIA director John Brennan a new AOL-hole is awaiting sentencing in the UK. Kane Gamble, the apparent founder of hacker collective Crackas With Attitude, was able to access classified documents Brennan has forwarded to his personal email account by posing as a Verizon tech. Social engineering is still the best hacking tool. It's something anyone anywhere can do. If you do it well, a whole host of supposedly-secured information can be had, thanks to multiple entities relying on the same personal identifiers to "verify" the social engineer they're talking to is the person who owns accounts they're granting access to.Despite claiming he was motivated by American injustices perpetrated around the world (Palestine is namechecked in the teen's multiple mini-manifestos), a lot of what Gamble participated in was plain, old fashioned harassment.

In the wake of the federal repeal of net neutrality rules, numerous states have responded by proposing their own net neutrality rules that either mirror the FCC's discarded rules, or impose new restrictions on net neutrality violating ISPs trying to secure state telecom contracts. New York, Massachusetts, Washington and California are among a dozen states considering their own rules. These efforts come despite the fact that Comcast and Verizon successfully lobbied the FCC to include provisions trying to ban states from protecting consumers in the wake of federal apathy on the subject.Unwilling to run the legislative gauntlet, Montana has taken a shortcut. Montana Governor Steve Bullock has signed an executive order banning ISPs from being able to secure state contracts if they violate net neutrality. Bullock on Twitter proclaimed that the state's future depended on the internet, well, actually working properly:

Hot-button topic "fake news" is going to be the downfall of the internet. All over the world, governments are trying to tackle the non-issue by introducing harmful legislation that will only result in increased direct control of the press by the governments passing these bills. "Fake news" defies definition. It could be read to encompass satire and parody. It could also cover legitimate news that deals with subject matter certain people don't like. That's pretty much how it's been defined by the party in power here: whatever Donald Trump doesn't like is deemed "fake news" by the Commander in Chief, even if the news is based on factual events and credible statements.Allowing the government to get in the speech business is a bad idea. All "solutions" proposed by world government officials are vehicles for abuse by the state -- a way to suppress anything that doesn't align with the party in power's narrative. On a smaller scale, it also creates a handy heckler's veto for social media platforms, putting brigades a click away from shouting down stuff they don't like.In Brazil, fake news is under attack… and in the worst way possible. Governments nudging media platforms and press agencies towards self-censorship is one thing. Handing this over to men with guns is another.

The last time that Techdirt wrote about Tunisia was back in 2011, when the Internet helped bring about a major regime change there. Although violent protests against the government have flared up recently, in general, the processes that are being applied to shift national policies in Tunisia are both peaceful and successful. Here, for example, is some good news from Access Now on the privacy front:

We see all kinds of crazy copyright disputes and lawsuits around here. It is, after all, kind of our thing. Still, occasionally you come across a copyright lawsuit so completely head-scratching as to make you question reality. Thus is the case with the lawsuit Crytek filed against CIG, makers of the long-anticipated Star Citzen game, for both breaking a licensing agreement between both parties and copyright infringement. Strangely, if you read the complaint, all of this centers around CIG choosing not to use the Crytek engine.