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In an unprecedented move, the New York State Public Service Commission has voted 4-0 to kick Charter out of the state. According to the announcement (pdf) by the PSC, Charter has been given sixty days to file a plan with the PSC that will "ensure an orderly transition to a successor provider," including offloading the Time Warner Cable territories acquired in the merger. The PSC also notes the vote was only taken after more than a year of trying to get Charter to adhere to some pretty modest broadband build-out requirements affixed to the deal:

We see a lot of dumb trademark lawsuits here at Techdirt, but the most frustrating of them is always those that assert similarities in trade dress when it's plainly obvious that no such similarities exist. Even when afforded the greatest leeway for interpretation, there are times when one company will complain about the branding of another company that simply leaves you scratching your head.A lawsuit filed by Stripling's General Store against Carroll's Sausage & Country Store is an exmaple of this.

Some ethically sketchy patent lawyers thought they had come up with a brilliant scam to avoid having awful patents scrutinized by the special review board created by Congress within the Patent Office -- a process known as "inter partes review" or IPR. This Patent and Trademark Appeals Board (PTAB) has been a useful tool in going back and reversing the mistakes made by patent examiners in letting through bad patents. However, back in September, we wrote about a fairly devious plan by the lawyers from the law firm of Shore Chan DePumpo to help their clients avoid a PTAB review. The situation began with a PTAB ruling back in early 2017 in a review of a patent held by the University of Florida. The University claimed sovereign immunity exempted it from the whole PTAB process under the 11th Amendment (universities claiming sovereign immunity in patent cases goes way back) and the PTAB agreed it had no jurisdiction.Sensing an opportunity, the lawyers at Shore Chan DePumpo worked out a neat little scheme in which a pharmaceutical company would "sell" its patents to a Native American nation (in this case, the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe). The "sale" was in name only. The pharmaceutical companies retained not just an exclusive license to the patents, but basically all other rights as well. The only thing St. Regis got was a nice little income stream in exchange for having its sovereign status used to shield the pharma companies' patents from scrutiny before the PTAB.I'm sure it seemed like a good idea to someone at the time, but it has been an utter failure. In October, the district court made it clear that this was a scam it didn't intend to allow to go forward. Then, in February, the PTAB itself denied the tribe's motion, pointing out that the PTAB wasn't stupid and totally understood the scam being played:

The last time we discussed Slender Man on this site, it was when two young girls stabbed their friend and blamed it on this internet ghost story, leading to the site Creepypasta feeling it needed to remind everyone that fiction is fiction and not the writings of a Satanic cult. Only briefly discussed in those writings was the origin of the Slender Man meme, which started as a Lovecraftian ghost story on the Something Awful forums by Eric Knudsen, who produced two photoshopped images of people being stalked by a faceless slender creep-bomb and added some fake quotations to make something of a story out of them. From those two photos and brief captions, the internet essentially took over, building entire stories and lore around Slender Man to the point where the whole thing is a wildly popular internet meme and ghost story staple.So of course Sony Pictures bought the rights to the story from Knudsen and will now presumably ruin it all in a major motion picture. And that would be only mildly irritating, except Sony is also trying to bully a smaller studio, Phame Factory, out of producing its own horror movie, claiming it now has the copyright and trademark rights for Slender Man. This has resulted in Phame Factory suing Sony to get a court to declare its work not infringing.

You have to screw up pretty badly to step on the DOJ's toes hard enough for it to notice when it comes to asset forfeiture. After the briefest of reforms under Eric Holder, new AG Jeff Sessions reactivated the federal forfeiture escape hatch, allowing law enforcement agencies to skirt local reform efforts by having their seizures "adopted" by the feds.According to proponents of forfeiture, it's a valuable tool that cripples drug cartels. That far more seizures take place than convictions or even arrests is glossed over by fans of forfeiture who honestly (or more likely, dishonestly) believe taking money from motorists during pretextual stops somehow has an effect on the international drug trade.Gwinnett County (GA) Sheriff Butch Conway managed to cross that line, despite being invited to the White House to gush about the wonderful people at ICE. Conway blew nearly $70,000 in equitable sharing funds (the aforementioned partnership with the feds aided by federal forfeiture adoptions) on a tricked-out Dodge Hellcat. The DOJ recently sent a letter telling Butch it wants its money back.

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In the Lenz v. Universal case, otherwise known as the Dancing Baby DMCA case, it can hardly be argued otherwise than the whole saga was wildly irritating and painfully lengthy. Years of fighting over a person's child dancing to seconds' worth of Prince music on video resulting in years of litigation would be bad enough. As Cathy Gellis noted in our last post on the case, the fact that the whole thing ended in a settlement before a court could answer whether or not Universal Music should be punished for issuing a DMCA without even considering whether it would be Fair Use or not only supercharged the frustration levels of everyone who realized how stupid this whole thing was. Cathy's point in that post was in part that it was awful that the public couldn't even get the payoff of precedent for Fair Use considerations in this whole stupid thing.Which brings us to the present, mere weeks later, when Universal Music is right fucking back at it, having DMCA'd a journalist's video of Prince fans in public singing Purple Rain shortly after he died.

As we just got done noting, roughly 5.4 million Americans are expected to cut the TV cord this year, thanks largely to the rise in cheaper, more flexible streaming TV alternatives. And while some traditional cable TV providers have responded to this challenge by competing on price and offering their own cheaper streaming alternatives (AT&T's DirecTV Now, Dish's Sling TV), most of the cable and broadcast sector continues to double down on the very things causing this shift in the first place. Like a refusal to invest in customer service, an obsession with mindless merger mania, and seemingly endless price hikes.Companies like Comcast have tried to stall this natural evolution by striking marketing partnerships with Netflix and including Netflix in their set top boxes, in the apparent hopes that users won't get rid of traditional cable if they're already getting Netflix as part of their monthly cable, broadband, and phone bundle. But data released this week indicates that this effort to stop cord cutting by cozying up to Netflix isn't really working, and cord cutting is accelerating at a rate notably faster than many analysts predicted:

Three cops have just had their qualified immunity stripped by an appeals court for turning an innocuous, snarky Facebook comment into an arrest. It wasn't all the officers' fault. A "helpful" citizen playing internet telephone forwarded the comment to someone who happened to be married to a police officer and everything went from bad to worse to unconstitutional from there.Here's how the whole thing started, as related by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision [PDF]:

This week, our top comment on the insightful side comes in response to FBI boss Chris Wray's invocation of the old "if we could put a man on the moon" argument for encryption backdoors. An anonymous commenter won first place by expanding on the Matt Blaze quote we brought up in response:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, the congressional backlash against the NSA kicked into high gear with an amendment to end phone data collection from Rep. Justin Amash. Naturally the NSA's defenders flipped out, Obama opposed the amendment by insulting congress, and Keith Alexander called an emergency briefing to lobby against it. After a heated debate, the amendment narrowly failed thanks to "no" votes from 217 representatives — including several democrats led by Nancy Pelosi because, hey, you might be in communication with terrorists, right?Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, we saw the first legal battle specifically over whether people sending DMCA notices must consider fair use, while the IFPI was taking down music that the creators wanted up, the MPAA was spouting doubletalk in its war against DVRs, and Viacom had to apologize for sending a bogus DMCA notice to YouTube after promising not to. Amidst all this, we saw the introduction of the Senate bill to create a copyright czar position (which Victoria Espinel would end up filling).Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, the RIAA's lawsuit dragnet was sweeping up bewildered parents and grandparents. Some folks claimed there were protests in response, but this seemed pretty dubious — except online where some sites were blocking RIAA and MPAA IP addresses (Techdirt declined to participate, preferring they have access to our arguments against them). Meanwhile, movie studios got ready to launch a series of file-sharing guilt trip ads, a Spanish lawyer began following the RIAA lawsuit model, and software company SCO made the staggering claim that all Linux users are pirates.

We've written a couple of times about the full turmoil that is music licensing collections in Kenya. The Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) has operated there for some time, but recently had its license stripped by the government and courts due to what appears to be some very shady financial practices that mostly amount to -- you guessed it -- not properly paying artists for royalties collected. The government then went about setting up new Collective Management Organizations (CMOs) with the aim of these new CMOs being less corrupt than MCSK. The Music Publishers Association of Kenya (MPAKE) is one such alternative CMO.As we pointed out in previous posts, the MCSK has been remarkably non-compliant with the Kenyan government at pretty much every level, from refusing to open its books as requested, to not complying with requests to cease collecting royalties. That not only continues at present, but the MCSK has actually gone so far as to issue a cease and desist to MPAKE for royalty collections, despite the Kenyan government notifying the public that MCSK was not a licensed collector.

Oh, the glorious career path that is the drug enforcement wing of Chinese law enforcement! (h/t Boing Boing)

There are a number of exceptions to warrant requirements, and the government is willing to utilize every one of them to salvage evidence obtained from an illegal search. Sometimes the arguments work. Other times -- like in this instance where six years elapsed between searches -- there's no credible argument for failing to seek a warrant. (via FourthAmendment.com)Jason Gandy's cellphone was seized and searched "at an international border" in 2012. The phone was held for 48 hours for a forensic search. This did not reveal the contents of the phone, but created an electronic record of what was contained on the phone. The court's description says the search only produced a "technical description" of the phone's contents, but did not expose the contents themselves.Like it or not, this search -- even a forensic search -- fell under the "border exception" to the Fourth Amendment, which allows law enforcement to search devices for border/national security reasons without having to come up with reasonable suspicion, much less probable cause.That search was lawful. It was the second search that broke the rules, including one handed down by the Supreme Court in 2014. From the decision [PDF]:

The last time we discussed Hedman Partners, the law firm in Finland that has for some time been on a copyright trolling tear throughout the country, it was to mention how the firm appeared to have overplayed its hand. After sending out some sixty-thousand settlement letters, the firm found itself in the cross hairs of the government, with the Ministry of Education and Culture noting that the nation's copyright law was not intended to be a vehicle for milking the general public of money.While it seems that the actual government response in the intervening year and a half must have been muted, evidenced by the fact that Hedman Partners is still happily trolling away, the firm has now for a second time been dinged for its practices. This time, ironically, the Finnish Bar Association is reprimanding Hedman Partners for violating copyright law in order to send out the settlement letters to supposed copyright infringers in the first place.Now, this is something of a technicality, though it still speaks to the copyright troll's willingness to route around the very law it cites to bilk money from an unwitting public. This specific complaint revolves around how Hedman Partners is getting the account holder information it is using for its letters, and, importantly, what letters it sends to which account for each alleged infringement. The way it's supposed to work in Finland is that these trolls get an unmasking order from the courts for a specific infringement violation and then only use that account information to contact the account holder for that specific case of infringement. Instead, Hedman Partners appears to have used these unmasking requests more as a clearing house to build an IP address database.

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Hey, American citizens! Several of your Congressional representatives are criminals! Unfortunately, this will come as a completely expected news to many constituents. The cynic in all of us knows the only difference between a criminal and a Congressperson is a secured conviction.We may not have the evidence we need to prove this, but we have something even better: facial recognition technology. This new way of separating the good and bad through the application of AI and algorithms is known for two things: being pushed towards ubiquity by government agencies and being really, really bad at making positive identifications.At this point it's unclear how much Prime members will save on legal fees and bail expenditures, but Amazon is making its facial recognition tech ("Rekognition") available to law enforcement. It's also making it available to the public for testing. ACLU took it up on its offer, spending $12.33 to obtain a couple dozen false hits using shots of Congressional mugs.

So, we've kind of been over this. One of the cornerstones of the broadband industry's flimsy and facts-optional assault on net neutrality was that the rules somehow demolished broadband industry investment. Of course the press has noted time and time and time again how that's simply not true.It's simply not debatable. Close examinations of SEC filings and public earnings reports during the period highlight how this alleged investment apocalypse never actually happened. What's more, CEOs from nearly a dozen ISPs are on public record telling investors (who by law they can't lie to) that the claim was effectively bogus, and that they saw no meaningful impact from the rules. Again, that's not surprising, since many broadband industry executives have also acknowledged the rules, which were discarded last June, really didn't hurt them unless they engaged in anti-competitive behavior.Still, the false claim gained traction online thanks to industry-linked economists and the usual industry stenographers. These days, the only folks you'll find still clinging to this repeatedly debunked narrative are either ISPs, ISP-linked consultants, or the think tanks, fauxcademics and other policy voices ISPs pay to intentionally muddy the discourse waters. And oh, Ajit Pai, who again this week lied to Congress in claiming that net neutrality was a broadband investment apocalypse. From his testimony during an "oversight" (that term is used loosely) hearing:

UK's NSA -- GCHQ -- has lost legal battle after legal battle in recent years, most of those triggered by the Snowden leaks. The UK Appeals Court ruled its bulk collection of internet communications metadata illegal earlier this year. This followed a 2015 loss in lawsuit filed over the interception of privileged communications, resulting in a destruction order targeting everything collected by GCHQ that fell under that heading.Some battles are still ongoing, with several of them spearheaded by Privacy International. PI's work -- and multiple lawsuits -- have led to the exposure of GCHQ's oversight as completely toothless and a declaration that the agency's surveillance agreement with the NSA was illegal… at least up to 2014's codification of illegal spy practices. (This codification was ultimately ruled illegal earlier this year.)Thanks to another PI legal challenge, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal has found GCHQ engaged in even more illegal spying... for more than a decade. The expansion of surveillance powers following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks gave GCHQ more ways to collect data from telcos. This was supposed to be directed and overseen by the UK Foreign Secretary, but the lawsuit showed the oversight did nearly nothing and there were virtually no limits to what could be collected from phone companies.

The EU's strong data protection laws affect not only how personal data is handled within the European Union, but also where it can flow to. Under the GDPR, just as was the case with the preceding EU data protection directive, the personal data of EU citizens can only be sent to countries whose privacy laws meet the standard of "essential equivalence". That is, there may be differences in detail, but the overall effect has to be similar to the GDPR, something established as part of what is called an "adequacy decision". Just such an adequacy ruling by the European Commission has been agreed in favor of Japan:

The government wants secrecy just because and the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court isn't having it. The government entity requesting extra secrecy with zero justification is the DEA. And it's likely requesting it so other doctors it's abused won't come asking for similar settlements.The specifics of the case trace back almost two decades. Two doctors -- both working for the Henderson County Community Hospital in Tennessee -- surrendered their prescription licenses to the DEA while working through their own chemical addictions. One doctor, Tom McDonald, surrendered his all the way back in 1999. The other doctor suing the DEA, John Woods, surrendered his to the DEA in 2012. Both were reinstated a few years later -- McDonald's in 2002 and Woods in 2014. Since that point, they've worked without incident at HCCH. (And prior to that, as well.)Things changed in 2016 when the DEA showed up and ordered them to stop working until they'd obtained a waiver from the agency. This sudden enforcement effort was prompted by the addition of this clause to US code in 2014. In McDonald's case, there was 12 years of uninterrupted good behavior before the rule changed. It was Woods' more recent reinstatement that may have triggered this burst of regulatory activity. Whatever the case, it meant the two doctors were out of work until the DEA decided their years of service without abusing prescription pads meant something.The doctors sued and, eventually, a settlement was agreed to. This is what the Sixth Circuit's short, pointed order [PDF] discusses. The DEA wanted the settlement sealed. In support of this argument, it offered non sequiturs. The judges don't like the DEA's quasi-arguments and say as much:

In our ongoing coverage of Denuvo, the DRM once thought unbeatable that since has been very much beaten in record timelines, one internet handle wove a common weave through most of those stories: Voksi. Voksi, a singular human being, had done much of the work that had brought Denuvo to its knees. In fact, we recently wrote a post about how illuminating it should be when corporate DRM makers with the kind of financial backing of Denuvo could be brought down essentially by one guy with a grudge. The lesson there was if that was the state of things, it was a clear sign that Denuvo's entire business was on shaky, unsustainable grounds.Denuvo appears to have taken the opposite lesson instead, believing apparently that this one grudge-haver was something of a single point of failure in the anti-Denuvo realm. To that end, Denuvo has recently, and quite gleefully, announced that it worked with Bulgarian police forces to arrest Voksi and seize his equipment.

The NYPD's stop and frisk program was declared unconstitutional in 2013. As deployed by the NYPD, the program involved high numbers of suspicionless stops disproportionately targeting the city's minorities. Judge Shira Scheindlin heavily modified the program to steer it back in the direction of the Constitution, resulting in claims of a criminal apocalypse that completely failed to materialize.One of the modifications was the deployment of body cameras. These were supposed to record stops, preserving a record of these incidents. Officers were also given additional paperwork to fill out for each stop/frisk to provide evidence of the perceived suspicion supporting the stop.Neither of these mandates worked out particularly well. The number of stops was already decreasing rapidly before Judge Scheindlin issued her order. The stops that were still being made, however, weren't by the (new) book. A court monitor report suggested plenty of unconstitutional stops were still being made by officers without filling out the mandated form.That's where the cameras could have helped, theoretically. The NYPD's body camera program is in full effect, but it appears officers believe certain stops don't need to be recorded. Once again -- a decade into this litigation -- the stop and frisk program is being modified, as Zuri Davis of Reason reports.

A few weeks back we wrote about the awful situation in India where mob violence has been leading to people being lynched. Often this is coming as misinformation is being spread online. Rather than deal with the root causes of this violence, people have been pointing fingers at WhatsApp, the messaging software (owned by Facebook) that has been the main source of the disinformation. As we pointed out in our original post, it seemed silly to blame the messaging app. We pointed to a compelling argument that the Indian government should be the one taking most of the blame here. In that article, by Abhimanyu Ghoshal, he noted:

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Another nation's government has decided it needs more direct control of the press. It will come as no surprise it's a nation fond of our current president and understandably delighted the leader of the free world spends an inordinate amount of time bashing First Amendment-protected activity.

So back in 2015 you might recall that Republicans threw a tremendous hissy fit when the then Obama administration surprisingly threw its full support behind Title II classification of ISPs and real net neutrality. It was surprising in large part because Obama's first FCC boss pick, Julius Genachowski, was comically wishy washy, often refusing to take hard positions on much of anything. It was also surprising because Genachowski's replacement, Tom Wheeler, appeared to be the type of person to change their mind after being presented with hard evidence, a notably unfashionable trait in DC these days.The histrionic claim at the time, you might recall, was that Obama had broken some long-established law by expressing a preference for a direction of FCC policy. This despite the fact that there is no law preventing the White House from doing so, and history is filled with examples of both sides of the aisle doing just that (from George W. Bush urging former FCC Chairman Michael Powell to eliminate media ownership rules, to when Bill Clinton urged former Chairman Reed Hundt to ban hard liquor advertising on TV).Fast forward to this week when President Trump decided to have a little hissy fit about the FCC's decision to kick the Sinclair Tribune merger over to an administrative law judge, largely because even Ajit Pai's FCC couldn't sign off on some of the logistical nonsense Sinclair was engaged in to try and seal the deal:

CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) has just released another report [PDF] on device encryption. But there's a difference: this one isn't so much about encryption but what law enforcement isn't doing to access the wealth of digital data available to it. (h/t Robyn Greene)What CSIS found is there are plenty of powerful tools and options available. The problem -- especially at the local level -- is law enforcement appears to be unsure of how to proceed when seeking digital data. This results in a couple of problems, the latter of which has definite civil liberties implications.

NHL fans will likely still have fresh in their minds the surprising rookie season of the Las Vegas Golden Knights, an expansion team that took the league by storm and lost in the Stanley Cup finals. Readers here may remember the team more for the fairly odd trademark dispute it was in with the -- checks notes -- United States Army, which for some reason opposed the team's trademark application due to the Army's college and paratrooping teams that go by the same name.At the time, we pointed out that the opposition seemed worrisome for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it seems plainly ridiculous for the Army to suggest that anyone was going to be confused between its college teams, its paratrooping team, and an NHL franchise. Was anyone really worried about the public thinking that the United States military had suddenly gotten into the professional hockey business? But we added to that the gross nature of a branch of the United States military, with a long and storied and proud tradition, dabbling in trademark bullying for apparently no legitimate reason.Which makes the announcement by the Vegas Golden Knights of a coexistence settlement disappointing.

In the wake of the FCC's historically unpopular decision to gut net neutrality, more than half of the states in the nation are now exploring their own, state-level net neutrality rules. In some instances (Montana) states are signing executive orders that ban state agencies from doing business with ISPs that behave anti-competitively. Elsewhere (Oregon and Washington) states are passing new laws that largely mirror the FCC's discarded 2015 rules, and in some instances (California) are a bit tougher than the FCC on things like usage caps or "zero rating."This week, Massachusetts began finalizing approval of S2610, which initially proposed doing many of the things other such bills do (banning ISP blocking, throttling, or crippling of competitor services and websites). But the bill has since been notably reworked to instead create a state-wide registry that ranks ISPs based on how terrible their service, pricing, privacy and other behaviors are:

Earlier this year we wrote about the bad decisions by both Google and Amazon to end domain fronting. Domain fronting was a (somewhat accidental) way in which services could effectively hide certain traffic to make it quite difficult for, say, authoritarian regimes in Iran or China to block the traffic. For that reason, domain fronting was an important tool in keeping services like Signal's encrypted communications platform working for activists and dissidents in such places.Amazon and Google claimed that they never intended to allow domain fronting, and that while it helped those services work in such places it might also lead to much broader blocks by those countries trying to get at the fronted communications. Now, in an interesting move, Senators Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio have sent both companies a letter asking them to reconsider.

While it's good the FBI is seeking warrants for Stingray deployments, there's some bad news. This story from Cyrus Farviar from Ars Technica shows FBI warrant procedures are incredibly flawed -- so severely flawed they break state law when they're put to use.

Over the past decade, we've talked about music industry lawyer Chris Castle and his bizarre interpretation of reality a few times. He insists that anyone supporting the legal sharing of content via Creative Commons is "self-serving shilling for the self-absorbed on the short con," which I'm sure must have sounded clever in his mind. A key target for Castle and his friends is that Google is the representation of all that is evil in the music industry. It's a convenient foil. Castle and his friends see Google lurking behind anything that's not like the old days, similar to the way that adults freaked out that pinball machines were destroying the minds of the youths in earlier generations.Castle's latest claim, however, is positively crazy. Not only is he upset about the EU Parliament has agreed to reopen Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive for discussion, he's decided that the only reason they did so must be due to a criminal conspiracy by Google, for which he is demanding an investigation.

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Despite the FBI finally admitting it had greatly exaggerated the number of encrypted devices it can't get into, FBI Director Chris Wray keeps pushing the "going dark" theory to whoever will listen. This time it was NBC's Lester Holt. In an interview during the Aspen Security Forum, Wray again hinted he was moving towards an anti-encryption legislative mandate if some sort of (impossible) "compromise" couldn't be reached with tech companies. (Transcription via Eric Geller.)

New York State and the nation's second biggest cable provider (Charter Spectrum) aren't getting along particularly well. Early last year, Charter Spectrum was sued by New York State for selling broadband speeds the company knew it couldn't deliver. According to the original complaint (pdf), Charter routinely misled consumers, refused to seriously upgrade its networks, and manipulated a system the FCC used to determine whether the company was delivering advertised broadband speeds to the company's subscribers (it wasn't).Charter has tried to use the FCC's net neutrality repeal to claim that states can't hold it accountable for terrible service, but that hasn't been going particularly well.Meanwhile, Charter is also facing heat from the state after the State Public Service Commission found that Charter routinely mislead regulators about its efforts to meet conditions affixed to its $89 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. As part of that deal, Charter was supposed to expand service to "145,000 unserved and underserved residential housing units and/or businesses within four years." But the company was fined $2 million after regulators found it repeatedly tried to pretend it had expanded services to areas that weren't actually upgraded.Things have only gotten uglier from there. Last week, the NY PSC accused the company of gaslighting its customers after it repeatedly tried to tap dance around merger obligations despite repeated fines. The company promised a "universe of synergies" ahead of the deal, but consumers only received even higher prices and even worse customer service than the company was already known for:

Too often Techdirt writes about changes in copyright law that are only for the benefit of the big publishing and recording companies, and offer little to individual creators or the public. So it makes a pleasant change to be able to report that South Africa's efforts to update its creaking copyright laws seem, for the moment, to be bucking that trend. Specifically, those drafting the text seem to have listened to the calls for intelligent fair use rights fit for the digital world. As a post on infojustice.org explains, a key aspect of copyright reform is enshrining exceptions that give permission to Internet users to do all the usual online stuff -- things like sharing photos on social media, or making and distributing memes. The South African text does a good job in this respect:

You will recall that earlier this year we discussed the University of Illinois' attempt to trademark bully an alumnus out of making orange and black shirts that read "Make Illinois Great Again." The whole story surrounding the school's actions is somewhat more complicated than it might appear. Part of the issue is that the shirts in question used the image of Chief Illiniwek, something of a mascot the school abandoned a decade ago, and one that was the source of controversy given its cartoonish mannerisms as related to Native American tribes. So, when the school first objected to Ted O'Malley's trademark application, and then later filed suit against him, you should understand that it was done as the school remains under public pressure to disavow the previous use of this imagery. All of that being said, claims that the school's trademark gives it the right to control the word "Illinois" on all apparel were obviously silly.But trademark bullying works, as we've stated many times in the past. And it tends to work all the more when the bully has a large war chest to fund its legal team and the victim is a much smaller, much less well-funded entity. Such appears to be the case with O'Malley, who has settled with the school and essentially agreed to its demands in return for a measly $7,500 payout.

Update: A quick correction/clarification here. The hacked texts in questions were from Manafort's daughter, rather than Manafort himself, but included texts between Manafort and his daughter, as well as other texts about Paul that his daughter sent or received. Wikileaks, for its part, says it didn't publish the texts because they weren't verified. Except that multiple people confirmed the legitimacy of those texts including Paul Manafort himself. The point of the article still stands.We just wrote about why it would be a dangerous move for press freedom for the DOJ to prosecute Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents. In that post, we noted that even if you think Julian Assange is a horrible human being and proactively trying to undermine US electoral sovereignty, the mere act of publishing leaked documents should not be criminal. But, that doesn't mean that Assange can't be hypocritical and one-sided. Obviously, during the 2016 election, when Wikileaks helped spread both John Podesta's emails and the DNC's emails, some wondered if Assange would have published similar messages from the Trump campaign. While publicly Assange insisted he disliked both campaigns equally, other reports and leaked (of course) chat messages certainly suggested otherwise, as did at least some of his apparent attempts to ingratiate himself with Trump insiders, including asking Don Jr. to leak his father's tax returns to Assange to "dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality."Of course, when faced with an opportunity to post the equivalent of the Podesta emails on the Trump side, it appears that Assange decided not to do it. Public records-savant Emma Best recently chose to publish the entire collection of leaked Manafort family texts in a searchable database. These texts have long been out there and available if you knew where to look -- and had received widespread reporting in early 2017. However, beyond the excerpts, they were not fully available in a way that was searchable for most users.Best communicated with Wikileaks, who admitted that it had the entire collection as well, but chose not to publish it -- which certainly can be read as hypocrisy on Assange's part, considering the similarities with the Podesta emails. As Best notes in discussing the decision to publish these in a more accessible format:

We just wrote about why it would be a dangerous move for press freedom for the DOJ to prosecute Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents. In that post, we noted that even if you think Julian Assange is a horrible human being and proactively trying to undermine US electoral sovereignty, the mere act of publishing leaked documents should not be criminal. But, that doesn't mean that Assange can't be hypocritical and one-sided. Obviously, during the 2016 election, when Wikileaks helped spread both John Podesta's emails and the DNC's emails, some wondered if Assange would have published similar messages from the Trump campaign. While publicly Assange insisted he disliked both campaigns equally, other reports and leaked (of course) chat messages certainly suggested otherwise, as did at least some of his apparent attempts to ingratiate himself with Trump insiders, including asking Don Jr. to leak his father's tax returns to Assange to "dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality."Of course, when faced with an opportunity to post the equivalent of the Podesta emails on the Trump side, it appears that Assange decided not to do it. Public records-savant Emma Best recently chose to publish the entire collection of leaked Manafort texts in a searchable database. These texts have long been out there and available if you knew where to look -- and had received widespread reporting in early 2017. However, beyond the excerpts, they were not fully available in a way that was searchable for most users.Best communicated with Wikileaks, who admitted that it had the entire collection as well, but chose not to publish it -- which certainly can be read as hypocrisy on Assange's part, considering the similarities with the Podesta emails. As Best notes in discussing the decision to publish these in a more accessible format:

One thing we've talked about for a long time at Techdirt is the importance communities for media outlets, including our own. These days, it feels like a lot of media companies are giving up on this work altogether and outsourcing it to social media platforms — but that means foregoing some of the most powerful aspects of the internet. This week, we're joined by Josh Millard, who recently took over MetaFilter, to talk about building online communities and not relying on Facebook.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.

Let's be clear: I know that many people -- perhaps entirely reasonably -- really, really dislike Julian Assange and Wikileaks. For some people that feeling has been there for years. For others it's related directly to the role that Wikileaks played in helping to release hacked emails designed to impact the 2016 election. There certainly appears to be plenty of evidence that, at the very least, Wikileaks was in contact with Russian operatives and made plans to try to get and release documents at times that would have the maximum impact on the election. As I've said over the years, I don't have much respect for Assange who, among other things, often appears to be a total hypocrite. However, I have also made clear that prosecuting him and Wikileaks for doing nothing more than publishing leaked documents would set a horrible precedent. I feel similarly about the DNC's silly lawsuit as well.The DOJ has apparently has been trying to indict Assange for more than 8 years now with nothing to show for it yet. In large part, this is because what Wikileaks has done is really no different than what any news publication does when publishing leaked documents. There may be laws against leaking certain documents to the press, but the First Amendment completely bars lawsuits against the recipients of leaks then publishing them.This is in the news again as reports are brewing that Ecuador is expected to withdraw asylum for Assange, possibly handing him over to British officials, who may in turn hand him over to the US. When I discussed this on Twitter recently, a bunch of people responded angrily that Assange deserves to be in jail because of his role in the 2016 election. But when pressed to explain how what he did was any different than the NY Times or CNN in publishing leaked documents, people go quiet -- or the say something silly like "but those other news orgs are based in fact." But, that's a silly argument. First of all, nothing that Wikileaks has published has been shown to be false or faked (the DNC made some claims to that effect but no one ever presented any evidence or pointed to any faked documents). Second, given the propensity of some -- including the President of the United States -- to argue that the NY Times, CNN, the Washington Post and others are "fake news," do we really want to be setting the precedent that if you publish something false you can get prosecuted for it?Earlier this year, Avi Ascher-Schapiro published a piece for the Committee to Protect Journalists focusing on the DNC's silly case against Wikileaks, but much of it could apply to a federal prosecution as well:

It appears the state of Texas is offering a limited "right to be forgotten" in county courts. A few years back, the state appeals court had to get involved and remind the county no such right exists in the Texas, much less the rest of the states Texas seems to be embarrassed to be associated with. At the center of the case was an expungement order for an attorney accused of forging other attorneys' signatures on court filings.While his case may have been expunged, expungement only covers the official record. This would remove info from government databases. Texas law also provides for the removal of info from certain sites reliant on public records (mugshot sites, background check services), but the law does not go so far as to demand news sites and search engines purge themselves of articles related to now-expunged criminal acts.A lower court decided to drag Google into this, demanding it de-index anything covering the expunged crime. Google did not comply and the state appeals court reversed the lower court's order, finding it not so much a violation of the First Amendment (which it is), but that it skirted due process by not allowing Google and the sites being de-indexed to argue against the removal order in court.Eugene Volokh has again tracked down a similar -- and similarly wrong -- order from a Texas county court.

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For no clear reason at all, the Republicans* on the House Judiciary Committee released a video on YouTube earlier this week praising themselves for stopping online sex trafficking via FOSTA/SESTA. It's... quite something.The video makes a number of blatantly false claims from various members of the House Judiciary, but let's focus mainly on the claims of Ann Wagner, whose original bill kicked off the process that became FOSTA/SESTA. She's been spreading moral panic nonsense about sex trafficking and the internet for ages, so it's no surprise that she continues to do so. But, at one point in the video she states:

Last week, the FCC shocked many by sending the Sinclair Tribune merger to merger review purgatory. It was shocking, in part, because the FCC had spent the better part of the last year comically neutering decades-old media consolidation rules specifically at Sinclair's behest, only to suddenly turn around and find fault with Sinclair's logic, relegating the merger review to an administrative law judge (historically the death knell for similar deals). Many of these rules have traditionally had bipartisan support, since they prevent any one company from dominating local media and distorting public discourse.In a statement, FCC boss Ajit Pai indicated that the company appears to have misled regulators in its bid to pretend the deal would fall under the national media ownership cap, which bans any one broadcaster from serving more than 39% of the population. Again, a stark and sudden reversal for an agency that, until last week, had been taking an ax to decades-old media consolidation rules specifically to help grease the skids for the controversial deal, which would have given Sinclair ownership of more than 230 stations reaching 72% of the public.Sinclair's merger is controversial thanks to the company's comically-slanted and highly misleading local news coverage, which recently made headlines thanks to a viral Deadspin video showing the facts-optional claptrap the broadcaster forces local stations to air in somewhat creepy synchronicity. But Pai kept going out of his way not only gutting media ownership rules, but re-instating obscure bits of regulation specifically to help Sinclair tiptoe around such limits (odd for a guy that complains endlessly about "burdensome, unnecessary regulation").Pai's efforts to aid Sinclair were so blatant, he's now facing an investigation by the FCC's nonpartisan Inspector General into whether he coordinated the assault on the rules with Sinclair.In short, for Pai to retreat from his Sinclair cronyism, the company must have done something notably idiotic. That something was subsequently laid out in the full FCC order (pdf) shoveling merger review off to an administrative law judge, something traditionally seen as fatal for such deals. The order notes that Sinclair, as some consumer groups had noted, had been trying to tap dance around remaining ownership rules by offloading some broadcasters to shell companies, subsidiaries and Sinclair partners at highly-discounted rates, hoping to then reacquire those companies after the deal was approved.The FCC's order is decidedly polite about it, but repeatedly notes how Sinclair tried to bullshit its way around the fact it had business ties to many of these potential partners and would, in many instances, still be running these broadcast stations post merger. Many of these partners had absolutely zero experience running local broadcasters, and were usually tied to Sinclair in some capacity. Like Steven Fader, CEO of a car dealership, who the FCC notes would have received a decidedly "below market value" deal as part of Sinclair's plan:

Time for another reminder that the UK is not some sort of America analogue -- one that favors pomp and circumstance to opinionated bumper stickers and stabbings to shootings. The UK government may say nice things about free speech, but when it all comes down to it, its citizens might as well be colony residents still seeking to break free from the Kingdom's confines.Sir Cliff Richard has just won a lawsuit against the BBC, securing a large payout from the journalistic entity for its outrageous act of journalism. Eriq Gardner of The Hollywood Reporter has the details.

We've just written about growing discontentment among open access advocates with the role that the publishing giant Elsevier will play in monitoring open science in the EU. That unhappiness probably just went up a notch, as a result of the following development, reported here by Nature:

Keep your friends close, but your Facebook friends closer.

It's a law named after a crime victim, so you already know it's going to be questionable. Federal lawmakers are floating a bill aimed at undermining some of the Fourth Amendment just handed back to us by the Supreme Court. At stake is cell site location info, although in a much more limited amount and in much more limited form. The EFF's Dave Ruiz has more details.