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If you hadn't noticed, the United States has a bit of a disinformation problem, leaving it immeasurably susceptible to bullshit. It's a flaw that's easily exploitable by any company, individual, or nation willing to put in a little elbow grease. Whether it's Russian troll factories inflaming already deep U.S. partisan and racial tensions, the ongoing problem with fake reviews, the use of astroturf to foster dissent on things we even agree upon (like net neutrality), or the spread of nonsensical and often hateful prattle on social media, we're only just now coming to terms with the world we've been building.And however info-savvy we like to pretend we are as information consumers and creators, the reality is we're simply... not. We're being manipulated on an industrial scale almost constantly thanks to our cultural apathy toward critical thinking, lagging educational standards, napping regulators and unskeptical journalism. Case in point: this week a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education detailed how a student-loan refinancing company had some incredible success in getting media outlets to parrot its positions on the debt merchant industry. How? They simply created an entirely fake journalist out of whole cloth.The report discovered that a journalist by the name of "Drew Cloud" was created by a loan refinancing company by the name of LoanEDU. Cloud, his website and his various hot takes were routinely hoovered up by a large number of media outlets that were willing to parrot them entirely without question:

This story should make you very, very angry. Last month we had the basic story of how Microsoft had helped to get a computer recycler sentenced to 15 months in jail for "counterfeiting" software that it gives away for free, and which is useless unless you have an official paid-for license from Microsoft. Let me repeat that: Microsoft helped put someone in jail for criminal infringement over software that anyone can get for free (here, go get it), and which won't function unless you've paid Microsoft their due.At issue are Windows recovery discs. Way back when, these were the discs that usually shipped with new computers in case you needed to reinstall Windows. You still needed your license to make them work, of course. Then people realized it was wasteful to ship all that -- combined with enough broadband to make it easy enough to download and burn the files, and Microsoft then just made it easy to do that. But, that's still complex enough, and Eric Lundgren had a solution. Lundgren is not some fly-by-night pirate. He's spent years doing amazing things, recycling computers and helping them last longer. And he had an idea. It might be helpful to manufacture a bunch of these recovery discs and offer them to repair shops to help people who were unable to download the recovery discs themselves. He was being helpful.But Microsoft insisted that he was not just infringing on their copyrights civilly, but criminally. When we left things last month, we were waiting for the 11th Circuit Appeals Court to consider Lundgren's appeal -- and astoundingly this week the judges, demonstrating near total ignorance of technology and the actual legal issues -- rejected his appeal, which means Lundgren is going to jail for over a year for trying to do some good in the world, helping people get the exact same thing that Microsoft is offering for free, and which no one could use unless they'd already paid Microsoft its tax.Lundgren was arrested as part of a government sting when the customs officials spotted the thousands of discs he'd manufactured and just assumed they were pirated. Here's where Microsoft should have stepped in and said "this is all a mistake" and noted that Lundgren was actually doing a good thing and exactly what Microsoft should be encouraging. Instead, Microsoft sided with the US government and continues to do so to this day.But beyond being pissed off at Microsoft, we should be pissed off at clueless judges: 11th Circuit Judges William Pryor, Beverly Martin and Lanier Anderson (average age: 66) rejected Lundgren's appeal in 8 short pages of wrongness. It is depressing that vindictive, idiotic Microsoft combined with technically clueless judges can lead to a result that puts a good man in jail for doing nothing wrong. But that's where we're at.The key issue in the appeal was over the actual "value" of the discs that Lundgren made. He argued, reasonably, that the value is zero. Again, Microsoft gives these away for free. Prosecutors, idiotically, initially argued they were worth the full price of Windows itself ($300). Eventually, the lower court went with a $25 fee after a government "expert" said each disc was worth that much:

Customs and Border Protection is inflating numbers to push a narrative about dangerous undocumented immigrants. And it's not just a little bit of fudging. It's a whole new way of counting -- one that fuels anti-immigrant rhetoric and keeps the agency well-funded.As crime numbers around the nation remain at historic lows, there appears to be an explosion of violence near our southern borders, targeting Border Patrol officers.

We've discussed the various "Pirate Parties" that have sprung up around European political systems over the past few years. While the name taken by these political movements is probably unfortunate, having political interests centered around the many, many problems within copyright law and enforcement is undoubtedly good and necessary. Sadly, those parties have too often been ineffectual, often ties co-opted by standing political powers in a way that dilutes their purposes. In Sweden in particular, the past few years have seen all the worst kinds of copyright problems sprout up as though somebody had sprinkled fertilizer over the land. As this was happening, Sweden's Pirate Party had remained comparatively silent, particularly on the matter of what can only be described as a copyright troll invasion.Well, that is set to change, with the Swedish Pirate Party finally waking up to the threat of trollish extortion letters being sent to thousands of Swedish citizens and announcing plans to fight back.

We have a new item to add to the list of things law enforcement finds suspicious. And not just "hmm, that's strange," but rather, "hmm, let's stop this vehicle and search everyone and everything in it." To date, a long list has been compiled of activities law enforcement finds inherently suspicious, many of which are contradictory or encompass the routine daily activities of millions of non-criminal US citizens.People have been declared "suspicious" for being too calm or too nervous. For making eye contact and not making eye contact. Talking too much is suspicious. The same goes for not talking enough. Driving roads that connect major cities is suspicious because all major cities contain both buyers and sellers of drugs. Cops have argued that activities they've witnessed daily without affecting an arrest is suddenly suspicious when a traffic stop/fishing expedition results in a drug bust.An officer with the Waterloo, Iowa police department is adding something new to this impossibly long list of dubious traffic stop justifications: driving with valid Iowa dealer's plates in Iowa. (via Brad Heath)The traffic stop was initiated because officer witnessed something possibly suspicious two days earlier involving the vehicle officers pulled over two days later. A shooting was being investigated and appellant Joshua Rode was spotted exiting the vehicle in a gang-operated area. At the point the stop was initiated, Rode was presumably considered to be a possible gang member. But according to the officers' testimony, he was also "suspected" to have been the victim of the unreported shooting the officers were investigating.Based on this weird connective tissue, Sergeant Kye Richter radioed Officer Diana Del Valle and suggested she initiate a pretextual stop of the vehicle. Del Valle needed a bit of outside prompting to find a traffic violation to trigger the stop. From the Eighth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:

As internet platforms are aggressively expanding their “moderation” of problematic content in response to increased pressure from policymakers and the public, how can we best hold them accountable and make sure that these private censorship regimes are fair, proportionate, accurate and unbiased?As we wrote in our last piece for Techdirt at the beginning of the year, right before the first Content Moderation and Removal at Scale Conference in Santa Clara, there is a dire need for meaningful transparency and accountability around content moderation efforts in order to ensure that the new rulers of our virtual public squares–practically governments in their own right, with billions of citizens–are using their power to moderate speech responsibly. This need has only grown as the pressure on Facebookistan and Googledom to deal with the extremists, white supremacists, and fake news operations on their platforms has also grown, and as questions about whether they are abusing their power by not taking down enough content–or by taking down too much–have proliferated.This trend was most evident in the recent Congressional hearings prompted by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where some lawmakers rebuked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for not doing enough to keep certain content off the platform, while others raised concerns that Facebook had demonstrated political bias against the right when determining what content to take down. Similar concerns were voiced by Republicans at today’s hearing in the House Judiciary Committee focused on examining major internet platforms’ content moderation practices (despite the fact that claims of anti-conservative bias having been thoroughly debunked). Such concerns are not limited to the right wing, though–charges of racially-biased censorship have also been levelled from the left.In response to these growing pressures–and in no small part thanks to years of consistent demands from free expression advocates–Google and Facebook this week both took major strides towards “doing the right thing” and promoting greater transparency around their content moderation practices, in ways that mirror what we were advocating for in our previous article.First, on Monday afternoon, Google released the industry’s first detailed transparency report focused on content moderation, giving statistics about YouTube content removals based on violation of the service’s Community Guidelines. Among other things, the report highlights the total number of videos removed in the last quarter of 2017 (a staggering 8,284,039 videos), the percentage of videos flagged by human users versus YouTube’s automated flagging systems (the robots flagged four times as many videos as the humans), and a percentage breakdown of the different reasons human flaggers had flagged content (whether it was spam, sexual content, hate speech, terrorist content, etc.) This is the first time any company has published this sort of data at this level of detail–and now that YouTube has taken the first step, it certainly won’t be the last.Soon after YouTube’s trailblazing transparency report, on Tuesday morning, Facebook made a trailblazing announcement of its own. The company published a much more comprehensive version of its Community Standards, including the detailed internal guidelines the company uses to make moderation decisions, and highlighting the “spirit” of their content policies in order to generate greater understanding about why and how the company removes content. In addition, for the first time, the company is giving users the ability to appeal takedown decisions made on individual posts. Posts that are appealed will be reviewed by a human moderator on the company’s appeals team within 24 hours. Prior to this announcement, users could appeal the removal of pages and groups, but the introduction of this process for individual posts is a valuable step towards providing users with greater agency over their content and more engagement in the moderation process.Taken together, these moves have sharply increased both the quantitative transparency (Google’s numbers) and the qualitative transparency (Facebook’s explanations) around content takedowns, while also improving due process around those takedowns (Facebook’s new appeals). These are both critical first steps, but there is definitely more to be done. For example, although YouTube published a significant amount of data related to the types of objectionable content removed as a result of human flaggers, it does not produce similar data for content flagged by automated flagging systems, which is especially concerning since automated systems flagged the vast majority of objectionable content. Meanwhile, although Facebook’s introduction of an appeals process is a valuable step towards providing users with stronger due process, it currently only applies to hate speech, graphic violence, and nudity/sexual activity, which have been the most controversial categories of objectionable content. In order for this process to be truly impactful, it needs to apply to all forms of content that are being taken down–and the process needs to give impacted users a way to argue their case for why their content should stay up.Going forward, Facebook and Google also need to take a page out of each other’s books. Like Google, Facebook needs to start reporting quantitative data on its takedowns and how they have impacted different categories of objectionable content, not only for itself but for its other products like Whatsapp and Instagram. Similarly, Google needs to provide users with greater qualitative insight into the guidelines that impact content takedowns, just as Facebook has. They should also expand their takedown reporting to include other Google products and services such as Google+ and the Google Play store. Doing so could help pressure Apple to similarly report on takedowns in the Apple Store, therefore further expanding transparency reporting in this space.And that’s the real value of these new steps, beyond the transparency itself: Google and Facebook’s new efforts will hopefully push the rest of the industry to compete with them on transparency. Google’s first innovations around transparency reporting on government surveillance demands nearly a decade ago helped set the stage for a domino effect of widespread adoption once the Snowden surveillance scandal broke, as detailed in this timeline and case study on the spread of that reporting practice. In this political moment of “techlash” that has now been turbo-charged by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the adoption of strong content moderation transparency practices may happen even faster–but only if policymakers and advocates keep demanding it. That includes voices that have been pressing on this issue for years such as the ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, our own organization the Open Technology Institute, and the Ranking Digital Rights project (which just yesterday released its third annual ranking of how well tech companies’ are protecting users’ human rights. Spoiler alert: they’re not doing so great). And since we’re catching this practice at its beginning, perhaps with the right pressure we can not only get all the companies to issue reports but also get them to standardize their reporting formats. Otherwise we may end up with the same crazy quilt of formats that we have in other areas of transparency reporting, which makes it that much harder to meaningfully compare and combine data.More than pressure, though, we’ll also need continued dialogue with the companies, to better understand how their content moderation and reporting processes do and don’t work, what their biggest challenges are when moderating at scale, and where they think the technology and practice of content moderation and reporting is heading. That’s why our organization along with many others is co-hosting the second Content Moderation at Scale Conference in Washington, DC on May 7, where representatives from a wide range of tech companies both big and small will be talking in detail and on the record about their internal content moderation processes (the conference will be livestreamed and Techdirt's Mike Masnick will be co-running a session on some of the challenges of content moderation).We may see even more dominoes fall at that conference, with fresh new announcements about increased transparency and due process around content moderation on even more platforms. Let’s hope so, because internet users deserve to know more about exactly when and how their online expression is censored.

For the second time in two years, the Supreme Court has needed to weigh in and note that, of course, the US Patent Office can take another look at the crappy patents it already granted, recognize its mistake, and void the patents. A little less than two years ago, it looked at what standards could be used by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) using the Inter Partes Review (IPR) system created by the America Invents Act of 2010. The latest case was much more broad: challenging whether the IPR/PTAB process itself was Constitutional.The basic idea behind the IPR process was an admission that the USPTO is historically bad at properly reviewing patents before granting them. It grants a lot of bad patents. The IPR process allows anyone to present evidence to the PTO that it made a mistake and granted a patent that should never have been granted. If the PTAB is convinced, it can invalidate the patent. Seems pretty straightforward. Except that the usual patent lovers (mainly patent trolls and big pharma) insisted that this was some sort of unconstitutional taking of property, without the review of a court. This is wrong for a whole bunch of reasons -- starting with the incorrect view of patents as traditional "property."The Supreme Court ruled on the issue, in a case called Oil States Energy Services v. Greene's Energy Group, and basically said that of course the PTAB can invalidate patents this way. Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion with a 7 - 2 split (Gorsuch and Roberts dissented). The key issue was whether or not invalidating patents is reserved only for the courts, and most of the Justices don't see any support for that. In short, the majority opinion says what the Patent Office gives, the Patent Office can take away...

There have been ongoing debates for a while now about the stupidity of backdooring encryption, with plenty of experts explaining why there's no feasible way to do it without causing all sorts of serious consequences (some more unintended than others). Without getting too deep into the weeds, the basic issue is that cryptography is freaking difficult and if something goes wrong, you're in a lot of trouble very fast. And it's very, very easy for something to go wrong. Adding in a backdoor to encryption is, effectively, making something go wrong... on purpose. In doing so, however, you're introducing a whole host of other opportunities for many, many things to go wrong, blowing up the whole scheme and putting everyone's information at risk. So, if you're going to show up with a "plan" to backdoor encryption, you better have a pretty convincing argument for how you avoid that issue (because the reality is you can't).For at least a year (probably more) the one name that has kept coming up over and over as one of the few techies who insists that the common wisdom on backdooring encryption is wrong... is Ray Ozzie. Everyone notes that he's Microsoft's former Chief Software Architect and CTO, but some of us remember him from way before that when he created Lotus Notes and Groove Networks (which was supposed to be the nirvana of collaboration software). In recent months his name has popped up here and there, often by FBI/DOJ folks seeking to backdoor encryption, as having some possible ways forward.And, recently, Wired did a big story on his backdoor idea, where he plays right into the FBI's "nerd harder" trope, by saying exactly what the FBI wants to hear, and which nearly every actual security expert says is wrong:

There have been ongoing debates for a while now about the stupidity of backdooring encryption, with plenty of experts explaining why there's no feasible way to do it without causing all sorts of serious consequences (some more unintended than others). Without getting too deep into the weeds, the basic issue is that cryptography is freaking difficult and if something goes wrong, you're in a lot of trouble very fast. And it's very, very easy for something to go wrong. Adding in a backdoor to encryption is, effectively, making something go wrong... on purpose. In doing so, however, you're introducing a whole host of other opportunities for many, many things to go wrong, blowing up the whole scheme and putting everyone's information at risk. So, if you're going to show up with a "plan" to backdoor encryption, you better have a pretty convincing argument for how you avoid that issue (because the reality is you can't).For at least a year (probably more) the one name that has kept coming up over and over as one of the few techies who insists that the common wisdom on backdooring encryption is wrong... is Ray Ozzie. Everyone notes that he's Microsoft's former Chief Software Architect and CTO, but some of us remember him from way before that when he created Lotus Notes and Groove Networks (which was supposed to be the nirvana of collaboration software). In recent months his name has popped up here and there, often by FBI/DOJ folks seeking to backdoor encryption, as having some possible ways forward.And, recently, Wired did a big story on his backdoor idea, where he plays right into the FBI's "nerd harder" trope, by saying exactly what the FBI wants to hear, and which nearly every actual security expert says is wrong:

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When your fingerprint is your device's password, there's little you can do to prevent law enforcement from accessing its contents. In most cases, judges have sided with the government, opining that fingerprints are non-testimonial even if it results in the production of criminal evidence.The Fifth Amendment offers little protection for those using fingerprints for device security. And the Fourth Amendment offers zero protection against law enforcement using your fingerprint to access locked devices after you've departed the corporeal plain.

You'd be hard pressed to find a bigger telecom sector crony than Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn. From her attacks on net neutrality and consumer privacy, to her support of SOPA and AT&T-written protectionist state laws hampering competition, it's effectively impossible to find a subject where Blackburn didn't take the side of regional broadband monopolies over consumers. It's a major reason that as Blackburn tries to jump from the House to the Senate (to nab Bob Corker's seat) she's found herself notably behind in the polls in a state Trump won by 26 points.Last week, Blackburn took time out of her busy schedule to participate in a show pony Senate hearing pushed by entrenched telecom operators. Its purpose: to try and sell the public and lawmakers on the idea that killing net neutrality and allowing things like "paid prioritization" (letting one company buy a network advantage over another) will actually somehow be a good thing.Despite their "victory" on the net neutrality repeal, large ISPs like AT&T and Comcast are worried. They're worried that the FCC's clumsy repeal will be overturned by the looming court battle, and they're worried about how more than half the states in the nation are now pursuing their own net neutrality rules. That's why they've been pushing (with Blackburn's help) for a fake net neutrality law. One that pretends to nobly "put the issue to bed," but contains so many loopholes as to be useless. Its real purpose: pre-empt tougher state rules, and prevent the FCC's 2015 rules from being re-instated in the chance of a court loss.To sell this policy turd, ISPs and loyal foot soldiers like Blackburn have been trying to make anti-competitive behavior sound sexy. Like here, when Blackburn tries to claim that ISPs should emulate the TSA and its pre-check program as they explore the prioritization of content:

It's no secret at all (though, they tried to hide it) that Hollywood and various MPAA front-groups were heavily involved behind the scenes in getting FOSTA/SESTA passed and signed into law. It all goes back to Project Goliath, the plan put together by the MPAA a few years back to use any means necessary to try to attack the fundamental principles of an open internet. While there have been all sorts of attempts, SESTA (i.e., misrepresenting the problem of sex trafficking as being an internet problem, and then pushing legislation that won't stop sex trafficking, but will harm internet companies) was the first to make it through.But it's unlikely to be the last. Immediately on the heels of everyone now hating on Facebook, various MPAA front groups led by CreativeFuture and the Content Creators Coalition -- both of whom will consistently parrot complete nonsense about how the internet is evil (amusingly, sometimes using the very platforms they seek to destroy) -- have now sent a letter to lawmakers demanding more regulation of the internet and, in particular, more chipping away at intermediary liability protections that enable the free and open internet (the letter was first reported by TorrentFreak).Most of the letter continues to play up the exaggerated moral panic around Facebook's actions. As we've noted many times, there are reasons to complain about Facebook, but so many of the complaints are on bad solutions, and that's absolutely true with this particular letter. Specifically, this letter presents three demands:

More than two dozen hours of recordings and 600 pages of documents obtained by the Detroit Free Press have uncovered disturbing details of the senseless killing of 15-year-old Damon Grimes by Michigan State Trooper Mark Bessner last fall.Lots of killings are senseless, including many of those committed by officers authorized to use deadly force. But this one was especially senseless. Trooper Bessner decided against all policy and reason to fire his Taser at Grimes while both he and Grimes -- riding an ATV -- were traveling at 35 mph down a residential street. To add to the insanity of his act, Bessner was the passenger in the cruiser. Having initiated the pursuit, Bessner decided to end it by tasing Grimes. The result was the complete, gruesome destruction of a human being.

Well, it appears we can both confirm and acknowledge that lots and lots of people want to play the CIA's in-house training card game. As we announced on Monday, we've taken the available details of the internal CIA game Collection Deck, and are in the process of turning it a version you can actually play, which we're renaming CIA: Collect It All. To see if anyone else actually wanted it, we put it on Kickstarter and set what we thought was a fairly high bar: $30,000. And yet, we hit that in about 40 hours and we still more than three and a half weeks to go. We're a bit blown away by how many people are interested, and we're committed to making the game as awesome as we can possibly make it. We recently posted an update to the campaign concerning questions around international shipping, since that's been a big topic of conversation, so if you're interested in that, go check it out.Either way, thanks to all of you who quickly jumped in and backed the campaign (and told others about it). As we've noted in the campaign, the idea here is to do this as a one shot deal, not to keep making the game. So, while anyone can download the FOIA'd release of the rules and make your own, if you want one of our versions, you'll need to back this campaign.

Social media can be an extremely powerful tool for gathering, finding and sharing the news. It can also be... a bit of a disaster. It would be nice if such an important question had a simple answer, but they never do, do they? So this week, we're discussing and dissecting whether or not social media is "good" for the way we consume the news.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.

A tough case dealing with some horrendous behavior and a pretty broad reading of Minnesota's harassment/stalking laws has resulted in a sustained conviction on felony charges against a minor. The state appeals court summarizes the events in its decision [PDF]:

Comcast-owned MSNBC this week took a bit of a beating for an eight-minute "news" segment that was effectively little more than a sappy love letter to their parent company. The segment featured top Comcast lobbyist David Cohen, who years ago began calling himself the company's "Chief Diversity Officer" to tap dance around federal lobbying rules (Comcast yells at us whenever we point that out). The program, aired during the company's Morning Joe program, waxed poetic about Comcast's altruism, at one point using Al Sharpton to compare Comcast’s corporate volunteerism with Nelson Mandela’s lifetime of civil rights work:

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Last week, Gizmodo's Dell Cameron has a great report on how the DOJ's Amber Alert site was configured so stupidly that it could be used to redirect people to any website (this was also true of weather.gov and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). And it was being used. To redirect people to hardcore porn. Basically, the sites were designed such that just by knowing the right URL and adding a new URL to the end, it would redirect to those sites. Porn sites used this for a couple of reasons: first, since they'd now be getting referrals from high ranking sites, it can help their Google ranking. Second, because the primary URL would come from a trusted source again, it would help their Google ranking. And, finally, the links may look much more legit to people doing searches (though that would be more true of scam sites than porn sites).Redirect scripts like this used to be fairly common, but they died off long ago. Except in the federal government. From Cameron's article:

Numerous news outlets this week proudly, but inaccurately, declared that net neutrality was now officially dead. CNET was one of several outlets forced to walk back its headline and story proclaiming net neutrality's premature demise after industry watchers pointed out that wasn't actually the case. If you look at the actual net neutrality repeal order, you'll note that it's actually pretty wishy washy in terms of the actual repeal date:

A couple of years after it happened, Australian citizens are finally being (indirectly) informed their government harvested cell site location info to track their daily activities. This isn't the work of an intelligence agency or a secretive law enforcement effort. Instead, it's an (unannounced) partnership between the Australian Bureau of Statistics (which handles the Australian Census) and a cellphone service provider. The provider apparently willingly turned over cell site info without a court demand, government mandate, or consultation with its customers. Asher Wolf has the details at Medium:

Although blogging may have lost its early excitement for many, in some countries it still represents a vital channel for news that may not be available elsewhere. For example, as Global Voices explains:

Remember GEMSA (Global Equty Management (SA) Pty. Ltd.)? That's the Australian patent troll who "won" a Stupid Patent of the Month award from EFF for its silly patent (US Patent 6,690,400 on "virtual cabinets representing a discrete operating system." GEMSA sued a bunch of companies, including Airbnb and Zillow for supposedly violating the patent. Oh, and then it sued EFF in Australia, getting an order from the court demanding that EFF take down its article and barring EFF from ever publishing anything about any GEMSA patents.That kinda thing is not going to fly in the US, and so EFF went to court in the US, seeking declaratory judgment that such an Australian court order was totally unenforceable in the US under the SPEECH Act. Late last year, the court gave a thorough and complete victory to EFF, making it clear that GEMSA could not, in any way, hope to enforce its Australian order in the US, as it clearly would violate EFF's First Amendment rights.And now, the US Patent Office has basically killed GEMSA's patent that EFF called out in the first place, via the all important inter partes review system that is currently being challenged at the Supreme Court (ruling coming soon...).

It's said that there is no honor among thieves, but it should be obvious that such a blanket axiom is bound to be at least partially bullshit. Still, this mantra gets applied to the pirating community by its enemies, with those that rip and/or view pirated content labeled as ungrateful kid-slobs, simply looking for any content they can gobble up without any payment whatsoever. Any value or benefit derived from this community is denied or ignored, with the spotlight being only on the inflated injury this same community inflicts on unimaginably wealthy companies and studios.Again, it should be obvious that this is all bound to be bullshit.In fact, we've discussed the potential benefits to be found within these communities often in the past. Pirate communities can be viewed as a sort of market study companies get for free, serve as a spotlight on under-served potential customers, and not to mention that this community often buys more content then does their non-pirating cousins. None of this is to excuse copyright infringement, of course, but rather serves to remind us that the world is not black and white, and is instead muddled, complicated, and mushy.Much like Amazon's streaming service the past few weeks, actually. A fact we only really know about due to this same pirating community doing the investigative work for free.

AT&T and Verizon have enjoyed a stranglehold over fixed and mobile residential broadband for years. They also enjoy a relative monopoly over broadband business data services, a market that services everything from cellular tower backhaul to ATMs. Given that both companies have a rich, deep history of engaging in all manner of dubious behavior to keep these markets as uncompetitive as possible, there would be absolutely no shortage of ammunition for regulators seeking to punish them on antitrust grounds.Given that both companies are politically powerful campaign contributors, that generally doesn't happen, regardless of the party in power.Which is why it's arguably entertaining to see the same Trump administration that has made it easier than ever for these companies to behave anti-competitively (net neutrality, privacy) conducting an investigation into whether AT&T and Verizon colluded to making switching carriers more difficult than it needs to be:

Hopefully nothing will come of this, but one should never underestimate the creativity of city attorneys presented with the opportunity to rack up billable hours.

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Earlier this month I talked a little bit about "Facebook Derangement Syndrome" in which the company, which has real and serious issues, is getting blamed for other stuff. It's fun to take potshots at Facebook, and we can talk all we want about the actual problems Facebook has (specifically its half-hearted attempts at transparency and user control), but accusing the company of all sorts of things that are not actually a problem doesn't help. It actually makes it that much harder to fix things.The latest case in point. Zack Whittaker, who is one of the absolute best cybersecurity reporters out there, had a story up recently on ZDNet about a data mining firm called Localblox, that was pulling all sorts of info to create profiles on people... leaking 48 million profiles by failing to secure an Amazon S3 instance (like so many such Amazon AWS leaks, this one was spotted by Chris Vickery at Upgard, who seems to spot leaks from open S3 instances on weekly basis).There is a story here and Whittaker's coverage of it is good and thorough. But the story is in Localblox's crap security (though the company has tried to claim that most of those profiles were fake and just for testing). However, many people are using the story... to attack Facebook. Digital Trends claims that this story is "the latest nightmare for Facebook." Twitter users were out in force blaming Facebook.But, if you look at the details, this is just Facebook Derangement Syndrome all over again. Localblox built up its data via a variety of means, but the Facebook data was apparently scraped. That is, it used its computers to scrape public information from Facebook accounts (and Twitter, LinkedIn, Zillow, elsewhere) and then combined that with other data, including voter rolls (public!) and other data brokers, to build more complete profiles. Now, it's perfectly reasonable to point out that combining all of this data can raise some privacy issues -- but, again, that's a Localblox issue if there's a real issue there, rather than a Facebook one.And, this is clearly the kind of thing that Facebook actively tries to prevent. Remember, as we've covered, the company went on a legal crusade against another scraper company, Power.com, using the CFAA to effectively kill that company's useful service.Here's why this kind of thing matters: if you blame Facebook for this kind of thing, then you actively encourage Facebook to go out of its way to block scraping or other efforts to free up user data. That means, it ends up giving Facebook more control over user data. Allowing scrapers of public info (again, the fact that this is public info is important) could actually limit Facebook's powers, and enable other companies to pop up and make use of the data inside Facebook to build other (competing) services. The ability to scrape Facebook would allow third parties to build tools to give users more control over their Facebook accounts.But when we look on scraping of public info as somehow a "breach" of Facebook (which, again, is separate from the messed up nature of Localblox leaking data itself), we're pushing everyone towards a world where Facebook has more control, more dominance and less competition. And that should be the last thing that anyone (outside of Facebook) wants.

Apparently, you don't actually hate overpaying for cable, broadband and phone service. At least that's the takeaway from this bizarre editorial over at the Washington Post by columnist Megan McArdle. In it, McArdle ineffectively argues that while the rise in streaming video competition is great and all, over-paying your regional telecom monopoly is something we all secretly love.The odd part is there's nothing in the piece that actually supports that argument, outside of logically-flimsy comparisons between telecom services and the crappy, free shampoo you get at hotels:

A recently-released Inspector General's report shows the FBI didn't try as hard as it could to find a way into the San Bernardino shooter's locked iPhone. It appears FBI officials were more interested in obtaining a favorable court ruling than seeking technical assistance from anyone other than Apple, despite the DOJ's courtroom claims about time being of the essence.This had a lot to do with the current FBI leadership. James Comey made fighting encryption his personal crusade -- one that has been carried forward by both the DOJ and the FBI's new director, Christopher Wray. Comey's new book about his government career -- one that came to an unceremonious end when President Trump fired him -- provides a few more details about his crusade against math and personal security.A passage in Comey's new book briefly discusses his initial reaction to the news smartphone manufacturers would be moving to default encryption. Comey claims the Snowden leaks prompted a worldwide shift to encrypted communications before moving on to Apple and Google.

When we recently discussed the rather odd story of the famous burger chain In 'N Out suing an Australian burger joint over trademark concerns despite having no storefront presence in the country, there was one aspect of it glossed over in the source link and omitted by me that really deserves some fleshing out. You see, like here in America, Australian trademark law has a provision that you actually must be using the mark in question in order to retain it. More specifically, use must be established every five years in order to keep the trademark valid. Given that In 'N Out operates no storefronts in Australia, readers rightly wondered how it was possible that the company even had a valid trademark to wield in its trademark battle.The answer to that question is as cynical as it is perverse. It turns out that In 'N Out turns up so-called "pop-up" storefronts for its chain in Australia and a few other countries every so often, specifically to keep just barely within the trademark law provisions.

Eric Goldman brings us the dismissal of a lawsuit against Google that's… well, a bit on the unintentionally hilarious side. The lawsuit argues there's a First Amendment right for Google Ad placement -- one that circumvents Google's policies against allowing questionable claims like "Honey Cures Cancer!" -- and contains a request for $10 billion in damages.El Reg first reported on the lawsuit, filed by a former IBM senior engineer. Apparently tired of the rigorous science involved in his day job, Shajar Abid decided to branch out into speculative fiction.

Remember when Republicans were against the "Fairness Doctrine"? Apparently, that's now out the window, so long as they can attack Facebook. As we noted recently, Senator Ted Cruz appears to be pushing for the strangest interpretation of Section 230 around (in direct conflict with (a) what the law says and (b) how the courts have interpreted it) saying that in order to make use of CDA 230's immunity "good samaritan" clause, internet service providers need to be "neutral." Again, that's not what the law says. It's also an impossible standard, and one that would lead to results that would piss off lots of people. The similarities to the FCC's concept of the "Fairness Doctrine" are pretty clear, though such a rule on the internet would be an even bigger deal, since the Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast TV.And, it appears that Cruz's incorrect interpretation is spreading like a virus. Senator Lindsey Graham is now spewing the same nonsense.

And now for the moment you've all been waiting for: a decision from the Ninth Circuit in the Monkey Selfie case.Upshot: the case remains dismissed, and the defendants get to recover attorney fees for the appeal. There's also relatively little to say on the copyright front. This case has turned almost entirely into litigation about standing and proven to be a significant wrench in the works for any future litigation anyone, but PETA in particular, might want to bring on behalf of animals.First, the court skewers PETA over the quality of its "friendship" with Naruto, casting significant side-eye towards PETA's apparent settlement of the lawsuit, which led to its attempt to dismiss the appeal, while at the same time leaving some question as to whether Naruto himself was down with this settlement and plan to dismiss his appeal. From footnote 3:

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Yes, the CIA made a card game. And... we're releasing it. No, really. If you want to play the top secret card game that the CIA used to train analysts, you can now back our Kickstarter project for CIA: Collect It All.Let me explain how we got here...We write a lot about the CIA here on Techdirt -- often covering just how secretive the organization is around responding to FOIA requests. After all, this is the same organization that invented the famous "Glomar Response" to a FOIA request: the now ubiquitous "we can neither confirm, nor deny." And that one "invention" is used all the time. Indeed, if you have a few extra hours to spend, feel free to go through just our archives demonstrating CIA obstructionism over FOIA.But... the organization actually did recently respond to a set of interesting FOIA requests. Back in 2017, at SXSW, the CIA revealed its gaming efforts, and even let some attendees play them. That resulted in a few FOIA requests for the details of the game, including one by MuckRock's Mitchell Kotler and another by entrepreneur Douglas Palmer. In response to the FOIA requests, the CIA released the details of some of the games (though, somewhat redacted, and in typical FOIA response gritty photo-copy style), including a card game called "Collection Deck." My first reaction was... "Hey, that would be fun to play..." And then I had a second thought.There's another super popular topic here on Techdirt: the public domain and how important it is to build on works in the public domain. Remember, under Section 105 of the US Copyright Act, works of the federal government of the United States are not subject to copyright and are in the public domain.We've already been working with Randy Lubin of Diegetic Games on a few different projects (including Working Futures and others you'll need to stay tuned for). So, we started talking about making a version of the CIA's game to play for ourselves. And everyone we mentioned it to wanted to play as well. And the more we looked at the details, the more we realized that we could make a much nicer version (while paying homage to the original and its route through FOIAdom) that was playable, and maybe even offer some changes, fixes and alternative rules. We decided to name our version, "CIA: Collect It All." Not only does "Collect It All" spell out CIA and pay homage to the CIA's "Collection Deck" name, "Collect It All" was also General Keith Alexander's surveillance motto that we roundly mocked due to its inherent conflict with the old 4th Amendment. Anyway, this seemed like a way to take back the phrase a bit.And that led us to Kickstarter. We're using Kickstarter in the real original sense of Kickstarter. We had an idea that we thought was pretty damn cool that we wanted for ourselves. And we want to see if others want it as well so we can produce it at scale. If people want it, awesome. We'll make a bunch. If we're wrong and no one really wants it... well, we'll probably still make a copy for ourselves, but you're on your own, working with redacted photocopies.So... here's a chance to:

Ever since the FBI began its "going dark" crusade, crucial questions have gone unanswered. Considering the budget and technical expertise the FBI has access to, why was it so necessary to get Apple to crack an iPhone's encryption for the Bureau? Turns out it wasn't. The FBI did have a solution, but the head of the division charged with cracking open the San Bernardino shooter's phone didn't want a technical solution. He wanted a courtroom solution.The report that outed the FBI's general disinterest in using outside contractors to crack encrypted devices is now being used against the FBI. Ten (bipartisan) legislators have signed a letter demanding answers from the agency about its anti-encryption efforts. The "going dark" narrative continues to be pushed by director Christopher Wray, despite recent reports showing at least two vendors have tools that can crack any encrypted iPhones. The tools are also much cheaper than the ~$1 million the FBI spent to open the shooter's phone, which raises questions about the agency's fiscal responsibilities to taxpayers.The letter [PDF] highlights portions of the Inspector General's report indicating the agency was less than motivated to find an outside solution while engaged in a legal battle with Apple. It also points to the thousands of devices the FBI says it can't access, despite the ready availability of vendor tools designed to do what the FBI continues to claim is impossible.These are the questions the legislators want answered -- questions we've been asking for months:Have you consulted with relevant third-party vendors to understand what tools are available to help the FBI access device content?

A few years ago, annoyance at John Deere's obnoxious tractor DRM birthed a grassroots tech movement. John Deere's decision to implement a lockdown on "unauthorized repairs" turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists, after DRM and the company's EULA prohibited the lion-share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned. These restrictions only worked to drive up costs for owners, who faced either paying significantly more money for "authorized" repair, or toying around with pirated firmware just to ensure the products they owned actually worked.The John Deere fiasco resulted in the push for a new "right to repair" law in Nebraska. This push then quickly spread to multiple other states, driven in part by consumer repair monopolization efforts by other companies including Apple, Sony and Microsoft. Lobbyists for these companies quickly got to work trying to claim that by allowing consumers to repair products they own (or take them to third-party repair shops), they were endangering public safety. Apple went so far as to argue that if Nebraska passed such a law, it would become a dangerous "mecca for hackers" and other rabble rousers.Apple's efforts in particular to monopolize repair run deep. The company has worked alongside the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to seize counterfeit parts in the United States and raid shops of independent iPhone repair professionals. FOIA efforts to obtain details on just how deeply rooted Apple is in ICE's "Operation Chain Reaction" have been rejected. The efforts to "combat counterfeit goods" often obscures what this is really about for Apple: protecting a lucrative repair monopoly and thwarting anybody that might dare repair Apple devices for less money.And Apple's efforts on this front are a decidedly global affair. More recently, Apple has been harassing an independent repair shop owner in Norway named Henrik Huseby. After Norway customs officials seized a shipment of 63 iPhone 6 and 6S replacement screens on their way to Huseby's repair shop, Apple threatened to sue the store owner unless they agreed to stop using aftermarket screens and pay a hefty settlement:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous commenter with a response to the Goldman Sachs analyst asking whether curing patients is a sustainable business model:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, as the fallout for Prenda Law continued, we shifted our focus to the cybersecurity bill CISPA. While the White House was threatening to veto it if the privacy issues were not addressed, the House was rejecting all the amendments that might actually do so and its sponsors were ignoring the fact that it would render online privacy agreements meaningless. Sponsor Mike Rogers (whose wife, surprise surprise, stood to benefit hugely from the bill) made his infamous comment about the only opposition being 14-year-olds in their basement, prompting rapid and widespread backlash. We knew from history how the bill would be abused, and the only amendment that was being truly considered was pretty toothless. Then, of course, the bill was passed by the House, with 288 supporters.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, the threat to privacy was the DHS's domestic spy satellites — but more was happening on the copyright front, such as J. K. Rowling trying to use emotional appeals to block a Harry Potter guidebook and push silly legal theories like the idea that spoilers are copyright infringement. And Warner Bros. was threatening the filmmaker behind the movie Troll, which he was seeking to remake, because it happened to have a character named Harry Potter ten years before Rowling's books were written. Hollywood was starting to turn its attention to 3D movies as a way to revive cinemas, the recording industry was seeking more money because it deigned to let people transfer media between devices, and we took a look at how everyone overvalues content and undervalues services.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, it was the ten-year anniversary of the release of Mosaic, the first "major" web browser. The entertainment industry was succeeding in its crusade against piracy within various organizations, with CIO Magazine telling corporations to worry about the legal issues of employee downloading, and a bunch of Naval Academy students being disciplined for sharing music. Copyright fears were holding back books about hacking and internet security research and — in an early precursor to the sort of sharing that would be formalized by CISPA a decade later — the government was asking corporations to hand over details on their infrastructure and just trust the agencies to keep it safe.

This morning I saw a lot of excitement and happiness from folks who greatly dislike President Trump over the fact that the Democratic National Committee had filed a giant lawsuit against Russia, the GRU, Guccifier 2, Wikileaks, Julian Assange, the Trump campaign, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and a few other names you might recognize if you've followed the whole Trump / Russia soap opera over the past year and a half. My first reaction was that this was unlikely to be the kind of thing we'd cover on Techdirt, because it seemed like a typical political thing. But, then I looked at the actual complaint and it's basically a laundry list of the laws that we regularly talk about (especially about how they're abused in litigation). Seriously, look at the complaint. There's a CFAA claim, an SCA claim, a DMCA claim, a "Trade Secrets Act" claim... and everyone's favorite: a RICO claim.Most of the time when we see these laws used, they're indications of pretty weak lawsuits, and going through this one, that definitely seems to be the case here. Indeed, some of the claims made by the DNC here are so outrageous that they would effectively make some fairly basic reporting illegal. One would have hoped that the DNC wouldn't seek to set a precedent that reporting on leaked documents is against the law -- especially given how reliant the DNC now is on leaks being reported on in their effort to bring down the existing president. I'm not going to go through the whole lawsuit, but let's touch on a few of the more nutty claims here.The crux of the complaint is that these groups / individuals worked together in a conspiracy to leak DNC emails and documents. And, there's little doubt at this point that the Russians were behind the hack and leak of the documents, and that Wikileaks published them. Similarly there's little doubt that the Trump campaign was happy about these things, and that a few Trump-connected people had some contacts with some Russians. Does that add up to a conspiracy? My gut reaction is to always rely on Ken "Popehat" White's IT'S NOT RICO, DAMMIT line, but I'll leave that analysis to folks who are more familiar with RICO.But let's look at parts we are familiar with, starting with the DMCA claim, since that's the one that caught my eye first. A DMCA claim? What the hell does copyright have to do with any of this? Well...

Donald Trump's long time lawyer, Michael Cohen has been in a bit of hot water of late. As you no doubt heard, the FBI raided Cohen's office and home seeking a bunch of information, some of which related to the $130,000 he paid to adult performer Stormy Daniels. Already there have been a few court appearances in which Cohen (and Donald Trump) have sought to suppress some of what's been seized, but that doesn't seem to be going too well. At the same time, Cohen is still fighting Daniels in court, which also doesn't seem to be going too well.Given all of that, it's not too surprising that Cohen has decided to dismiss his ridiculous lawsuit against Buzzfeed for publishing the Christopher Steele dossier. As we pointed out, that lawsuit was going nowhere, because it sought to hold Buzzfeed liable for content created by someone else (oh, and that leaves out that much of what Cohen claimed was defamatory may actually have been true.And while many are suggesting Cohen dropped that lawsuit because the other lawsuits are a much bigger priority, there may be another important reason as well. As we noted last month, through a somewhat complex set of circumstances, the lawsuit against Buzzfeed may have resulted in Cohen having to reveal the details he's been avoiding concerning Stormy Daniels. That's because Buzzfeed was claiming that Cohen's interactions with Daniels were relevant to its case, and it was likely to seek that information as part of the case moving forward.In other words, dropping the Buzzfeed lawsuit (that he was going to lose anyway), Cohen wasn't just ditching a distraction in the face of more important legal issues, he may be hoping to cut off at least one avenue for all the stuff he's been trying to keep secret from becoming public. That doesn't mean it won't become public eventually. After all the DOJ has a bunch of it. But it does suggest that Cohen had more than one reason to drop the Buzzfeed lawsuit.

If you spend any time at all in Techdirt's comments, you should be familiar with That Anonymous Coward. He's a prolific and regular commenter (with strong opinions). He also spends a lot of time on Twitter. Well, at least until a week or so ago when Twitter suspended his account. It's no secret that Twitter has been getting a lot of pressure from people to be more proactive in shutting down and cutting off certain accounts. There are even a bunch of people who claim that Twitter should suspend the President's account -- though we think that would be a really bad idea.As we've pointed out in the past, people who demand that sites shut down and suspend accounts often don't realize how difficult it is to do this at scale and not fuck up over and over again. Indeed, we have plenty of stories about sites having trouble figuring out what content is really problematic. Indeed, frequently these stories show that the targets of trolls and abusers are the ones who end up suspended.You can read TAC's open letter to Jack Dorsey, which also includes an account of what happened. In short, over a year ago, TAC responded to something Ken "Popehat" White had tweeted, and referred to himself -- a gay man -- as "a faggot." Obviously, many people consider this word offensive. But it's quite obvious from how it was used here that this was a situation of someone using the word to refer to himself and to reclaim the slur.Twitter then demanded that he delete the tweet and "verify" his phone number. TAC refused both requests. First, it was silly to delete the tweet because it's clearly not "hateful content" given the context. Second, as someone who's whole point is being "Anonymous" giving up his phone number doesn't make much sense. And, as he notes in his open letter, people have tried to sue him in the past. There's a reason he stays pseudononymous:

One of the main reasons FOSTA/SESTA is now law is because of Facebook's vocal support for the bill. Sheryl Sandberg repeatedly spoke out in favor of the bill, misrepresenting what the bill actually did. In our own post-mortem on what happened with FOSTA/SESTA we noted that a big part of the problem was that many people inside Facebook (incredibly) did not appear to understand how CDA 230 works, and thus misunderstood how FOSTA/SESTA would create all sorts of problems. Last month, we noted that there was some evidence to suggest that Facebook itself was violating the law it supported.However, a new article from Buzzfeed presents even more evidence of just how much liability Facebook may have put on itself in supporting the law. The article is fairly incredible, talking about how Facebook has allowed a group on its site that helps landlords seek out gay sex in exchange for housing -- and the report is chilling in how far it goes. In some cases, it certainly appears to reach the level of sex trafficking, where those desperate for housing basically become sex slaves to their landlords.

After taking a hiatus from issuing bogus DMCA takedowns against this site, self-proclaimed poet "Shaun Shane" is back at it. The harassment of anyone who dares to publish a certain poem of Shane's -- the one about tongues made of glass -- is a (possibly) Texas-based cottage industry. The harassment continues to this day, but not much of it is directed at Google. Most of Shane's "work" is done over at Twitter, where tweets are greeted with takedown requests.Presumably, this had led to an immeasurable increase in books sales for Shane. I mean, an unauthorized tweet = 1 lost sale, if I'm not mistaken. Whatever the case is, Shane is back to abusing the DMCA process for something that neither looks like fun nor for profit. Shane has issued several bogus takedown requests over the past couple of months.Some are normal takedown requests targeting any place that has reproduced his poem. These are fine, but only by comparison. In other requests, targeting TorrentFreak, Boing Boing, Popehat, and Techdirt, some very interesting theories are being advanced. (But not respected. No one is being delisted for the imaginary crimes against IP that Shane has pitched to Google.)This notice argues contributory infringement, claiming the posting of the poem in full somehow "encourages criminal infringement." That's as sane as the notices get. From there, all bets are off.This one, targeting a Techdirt URL, attempts to fashion a defamation claim out of thin air (and all without once using the word "defamation").

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Just a few weeks ago we wrote about how a group of sex workers, in response to the passing of FOSTA/SESTA, had set up their own social network, called Switter, which was a Mastodon instance. As we noted in our post, doing so was unlikely to solve any of the problems of FOSTA/SESTA, because it's perhaps even more likely that Switter itself would become a target of FOSTA/SESTA (remember, with FOSTA, the targeting goes beyond "sex trafficking" to all prostitution).And, indeed, it appears I was not the only one to think so. The organization that created Switter, Assembly Four, put up a note saying that Cloudflare had shut down Switter claiming the site was in violation of its terms of service.

Texas attorney Mark Bennett -- instrumental in getting an unconstitutional "peeping tom" law tossed in 2014 -- has scored another win for the First Amendment by getting an unconstitutional revenge porn law tossed. It's not that anyone (except revenge porn purveyors) wants to see revenge porn go unchecked. It's that there's plenty of laws on the books already to address the problem and those written to target revenge porn tend to do collateral damage to the Constitution.Mark Bennett began this fight back in 2015, right after the law went into effect. As Scott Greenfield reports, Bennett has secured a win in the 12th District Court of Appeals, reversing the lower court's finding the law was First Amendment-compliant.