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As you likely know, for most of the past nine months, we've been dealing with a defamation lawsuit from Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims to have invented email. This is a claim that we have disputed at great length and in great detail, showing how email existed long before Ayyadurai wrote his program. We pointed to the well documented public history of email, and how basically all of the components that Ayyadurai now claims credit for preceded his own work. We discussed how his arguments were, at best, misleading, such as arguing that the copyright on his program proved that he was the "inventor of email" -- since patents and copyrights are very different, and just because Microsoft has a copyright on "Windows" it does not mean it "invented" the concept of a windowed graphical user interface (because it did not). As I have said, a case like this is extremely draining -- especially on an emotional level -- and can create massive chilling effects on free speech.A few hours ago, the judge ruled and we prevailed. The case has been dismissed and the judge rejected Ayyadurai's request to file an amended complaint. We are certainly pleased with the decision and his analysis, which notes over and over again that everything that we stated was clearly protected speech, and the defamation (and other claims) had no merit. This is, clearly, a big win for the First Amendment and free speech -- especially the right to call out and criticize a public figure such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who is now running for the US Senate in Massachusetts. We're further happy to see the judge affirm that CDA Section 230 protects us from being sued over comments made on the blog, which cannot be attributed to us under the law. We talk a lot about the importance of CDA 230, in part because it protects sites like our own from these kinds of lawsuits. This is just one more reason we're so concerned about the latest attempt in Congress to undermine CDA 230. While those supporting the bill may claim that it only targets sites like Backpage, such changes to CDA 230 could have a much bigger impact on smaller sites like our own.We are disappointed, however, that the judge denied our separate motion to strike under California's anti-SLAPP law. For years, we've discussed the importance of strong anti-SLAPP laws that protect individuals and sites from going through costly legal battles. Good anti-SLAPP laws do two things: they stop lawsuits early and they make those who bring SLAPP suits -- that is, lawsuits clearly designed to silence protected speech -- pay the legal fees. The question in this case was whether or not California's anti-SLAPP law should apply to a case brought in Massachusetts. While other courts have said that the state of the speaker should determine which anti-SLAPP laws are applied (even in other states' courts), it was an issue that had not yet been ruled upon in the First Circuit where this case was heard. While we're happy with the overall dismissal and the strong language used to support our free speech rights, we're nevertheless disappointed that the judge chose not to apply California's anti-SLAPP law here.However, that just reinforces the argument we've been making for years: we need stronger anti-SLAPP laws in many states (including Massachusetts) and, even more importantly, we need a strong federal anti-SLAPP law to protect against frivolous lawsuits designed to silence protected speech. The results of this case have only strengthened our resolve to do everything possible to continue to fight hard for protecting freedom of expression and to push for stronger anti-SLAPP laws that make free speech possible, and not burdensome and expensive.You have not heard the last from us on the issue of the First Amendment, free speech and anti-SLAPP laws -- or how some try to use the court system to silence and bully critics. Step one of this is our new Free Speech edition, which we announced just a few weeks ago, where we are focusing more of our reporting efforts on issues related to free speech and anti-SLAPP. We intend to do a lot more as well. For years, we've talked about these issues from the position of an observer, and now we can talk about them from the perspective of someone who has gone through this process as well.Of course, if you have to face something like this, it helps to have great lawyers--and we're immensely grateful for the incredible hard-work of Rob Bertsche, Jeff Pyle and Thomas Sutcliffe along with the rest of the team at their firm, Prince Lobel Tye LLP.Finally, I can't even begin to thank everyone who has supported us over the past nine months -- whether by kind words (you don't know how much that helped!) or through our survival fund at ISupportJournalism.com or by becoming a Techdirt Insider. We just passed Techdirt's 20th anniversary and while it's one thing to think that people like and support you, it's another thing altogether to see how people come out to support you when it matters most. And we were overwhelmed by the support we received over the past nine months, and the kind words and help that many, many people offered. It was beyond heartening, and, once again, it reinforces our resolve to continue to speak up for free speech and to do what we can to protect others' ability to speak out as well.

A decision [PDF] handed down by the Appeals Court presiding over military cases that almost affirms Fifth Amendment protections against being forced unlock devices and/or hand over passwords. Almost. The CAAF (Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces) doesn't quite connect the final dot, but does at least discuss the issue, rather than dismiss the Fifth Amendment question out of hand. (h/t FourthAmendment.com]The case stems from a harassment case against a soldier who violated (apparently repeatedly) a no-contact order separating him from his wife. After being taken into custody, Sgt. Edward Mitchell demanded to speak to a lawyer. Rather than provide him with a lawyer, investigators asked him to unlock his phone instead.

Jolly new Attorney General Jeff Sessions can't wait to put the screws to all those Americans who didn't have the sense to seek employment as law enforcement officers. Sessions wants harsher drug sentencing, less oversight, and the revival of programs abandoned in the 80s and 90s after they proved to have zero effect on rising crime rates.Sessions, with the support of the Trump Administration, is rolling back the last administration's minor reforms to the 1033 program, which allowed local law enforcement agencies to obtain MRAPs, assault rifles, grenade launchers… whatever it took to defend the annual Mule Day Parade from terrorist attacks. Fun fact: these same items are apparently crucial components of flood rescue efforts in Houston, TX. [Cue shooting star and the words "The More You Know," soon to be riddled with bullet holes for startling MRAP-riding 1033 recipients with their sudden appearance…]Asset forfeiture is coming back, too. Sessions has opened the federal loophole closed by his predecessor, allowing local agencies to give the finger to legislators and the people they serve as they bypass local reform efforts and cash in on other people's property. Sessions appeared to be this close to visible arousal when discussing the return of the Federal Forfeiture Loophole during a law enforcement conference in Alabama.

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Hold on tight: we're going to get down into the weeds a bit on a copyright issue. In early 2016, we wrote about the "insanity of music licensing" as it related to streaming music, and Spotify in particular. This was in response to a series of class action lawsuits filed against Spotify by songwriters, claiming a failure to properly license so-called "mechanical rights." As I noted at the time, I talked the case over with a large number of copyright lawyers -- and many were left scratching their heads regarding what the lawsuit was actually about. Spotify, of course, is famous because it's a licensed music streaming service. That's it's whole thing. But, as we discussed, part of the problem is that there are a ridiculous number of different possible licenses out there -- many of which were designed for different types of technologies, and, when it comes to internet services, some people seem to assume that the services need to license roughly "all of them."So, it was always known that a company like Spotify needed to secure negotiated license to use the sound recordings (that's from whoever holds the copyright on the actual recording -- not the composition). And they had to get public performance licenses from Performance Rights Organizations (PROs). But the question in these lawsuits was about an entirely different license -- the "mechanical" license. As you may have guessed from the name, a "mechanical" license comes from way back in the day, when the companies manufacturing records needed to get a license from the composer for the sake of reproducing and distributing the songs which those songwriters wrote.And here's where we do some copyright 101. Section 106 of the Copyright Act includes a definitive list of six rights that copyright may grant the holder an exclusive right to (absent something such as fair use). These then are the specific exclusive rights under copyright law:

While ISP lobbyists are pushing the government to kill net neutrality protections, they're also pushing hard for a new net neutrality law. Why? With our current historically-dysfunctional and cash-compromised Congress, large ISPs like AT&T and Comcast know that their lawyers and lobbyists will be the ones writing the law -- if it gets passed at all. The end result will be a law ISPs will profess "puts the debate to bed," but which contains so many loopholes as to be effectively meaningless when it comes to protecting consumers and competition.As a cornerstone of this new push, lawmakers in July sent out invitations to CEOs of major tech companies and major ISPs for a September hearing to be held in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The meeting was, the invitation claimed, an opportunity for stakeholders (only apparently the wealthiest ones) to "rethink the current regulatory model and build new rules from the ground up" in Congress. Again, this is something ISPs have been lobbying for knowing it either won't happen, or if it does will be so loophole-filled as to be worse than useless.Amusingly, however, none of the invited CEOs from telecoms or Silicon Valley's biggest, wealthiest companies were interested in testifying publicly at the hearing:

Once again, someone's suggesting the best way to combat the spread of terrorist-related communications online is to make the tech companies do it, have them foot the bill, and do it all without being legislated into submission or making impudent comments like "That's not how any of this works."Traveling beyond the groundwork of "necessary hashtags" and constant threats to bludgeon tech companies into mandatory, worldwide speech policing, the UK's independent reviewer of terrorism laws -- former key terrorism prosecutor Max Hill QC -- suggests the better route lies not through legislation, but through some sort of tech wizardry.

Better late than never is the motto of Canadian law enforcement Stingray Squads. Documents obtained by Vice Canada show police scrambling to obtain warrants for equipment they were already deploying.

You will recall that a few weeks back we discussed the Paris Olympic Committee's open attitude towards looking at eSports for inclusion in the upcoming 2024 Olympic Games. This refreshing stance from an Olympic committee was a welcome step in the eSports trend, although it came with no promises taht we would actually see eSports in Paris seven years from now. The IOC, as always, would have the final say, and we all knew the massive headwind eSports would face with the grandpappy Olympic committee: eSports aren't real sports. Hell, I'm sure many advocates for competitive gaming were already gearing up to fight that fight.Unfortunately, it looks like the IOC is likely to turn its nose up at eSports for entirely different and far, far more stupid reasons. The first of those dumb reasons, according to IOC President Thomas Bach, will indeed have a familiar ring to gamers.

UK law enforcement has proudly been using facial recognition for tech for a few years now. As is the case with any new law enforcement tech advancement, it's being deployed as broadly as possible with as little oversight as agencies can get away with.As of 2015, UK law enforcement had 18 million faces stashed away in its databases. Presumably, the database did not contain 18 million criminals and their mugshots. Concerns were raised but waved away with promises to put policies in place at some point in the future and with grandiose claims of 100% reliability. The latter, naturally, came from the police inspector who headed the facial recognition department. Caveat: this had only been tested on a limited set using "clear images."What works well in theory and/or with limited datasets doesn't work especially well in practice. Here's how things went down when the facial recognition program was deployed in the wild.

The US court system has hosted a large number of lively discussions about the tactics used by the FBI in its Playpen child porn investigation. A lot of new ground was broken by the FBI, not all of it good. First, the agency kept a darkweb child porn site running for two weeks after it seized it. It did this to facilitate the distribution of malware designed to uncover information about the computers (and users) accessing the site.Adding to the mess was the malware itself. The FBI's Network Investigative Technique (NIT) was deployed across the US (and across the globe) via a single warrant signed by a magistrate judge in Virginia. Plenty of courts have declared the FBI's warrant invalid, as the search performed violated Rule 41's jurisdictional limitations. (Those limitations no longer exist, so chalk up a win for the DOJ.) Many have also called the NIT's extraction of IP addresses and device-identifying info a search. But very few judges have seen fit to suppress the evidence obtained, either finding no privacy expectations in IP addresses or granting the FBI "good faith."At the appellate level, only two Playpen cases have been heard, but both courts returned decisions in favor of the government. The process continues in full force at the lower levels, where the DOJ is still working its way through the dozens of cases springing from its NIT deployment.In Texas, a federal judge has decided [PDF] against suppressing evidence obtained with the FBI's NIT. But Judge Xavier Rodriguez does so while using a descriptive term the government vehemently disagrees with. [h/t Brad Heath]

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While large Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook are often credited for being "net neutrality supporters" in the media, their actual support of the concept is often incredibly flimsy. Though it's quick to claim otherwise, Google hasn't really supported net neutrality since around 2010 or so, progressively walking back its dedication as it pushed into the fixed and wireless broadband sectors. Similarly Facebook often says all the right things, but internationally has been repeatedly accused of trampling the open internet in its quest to dominate developing nation advertising markets.We're also now seeing similar behavior from companies like Netflix, which aggressively supported net neutrality when the streaming company was a scrappy upstart, but has since walked back its support now that it's an international video juggernaut. While these companies still occasionally pay lip service to the concept of net neutrality via their joint policy organizations, these are often token gestures -- leaving consumers, consumer advocates and smaller companies and startups alone and under-funded in the quest to maintain something vaguely resembling an open and level internet playing field.Apple has also paid little more than fleeting lip service to neutrality over the years -- and has been largely quiet as the Trump administration works to remove most meaningful oversight of the barely-competitive telecom sector. But last week the Cupertino giant took things a little further, filing comments with the FCC in support of protecting net neutrality. Sort of. Apple does make it clear that it doesn't think ISPs should indiscriminately block, throttle or otherwise hinder competitors' content:

Update:: The lawyers representing Dr. Phil's production company, Peteski Productions, have contested some of the statements made both in the original link we used from The Hollywood Reporter, and in our post below. THR has updated its story, and we've matched those updates. In particular, Peteski says that the video that Rothman copied -- which she claimed was evidence for her false imprisonment claim -- was actually something else entirely. From the filings, Rothman says that the video was a "bona fide example of Dr. McGraw's conduct for her lawsuit," but Peteski says it was not showing evidence of the "false imprisonment" claim at all. Peteski's lawyers argue it was something she sought to use "for commercial gain" (which the Judge disagreed with as noted below). Peteski's lawyer also implies that the false imprisonment claims are frivolous (noting that 200 to 300 people were at the meeting, and only Rothman sued -- and argues that the real reason she used her iPhone to copy the nine second video was for "exploiting it with other media." We've updated the article to clarify that the video is not of the claimed "false imprisonment" -- and that there is some dispute over what the video actually could be used for.We've seen some awful copyright rulings over the years, but this latest one from Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Texas* is a real corker. First covered by Eriq Gardner, over at the Hollywood Reporter, the story is a complex one involving TV personality Dr. Phil and accusations of him imprisoning a producer who worked for him. What could that possibly have to do with copyright? Well, read on...* If you recognize the name, it's because for the past few years, he's handled a huge number of patent cases. Indeed, last year alone, he (yes, just this one judge) handled 20% of all patent cases in the USGardner sums up the background to the lawsuit nicely:

Update:: The lawyers representing Dr. Phil's production company, Peteski Productions, have contested some of the statements made both in the original link we used from The Hollywood Reporter, and in our post below. THR has updated its story, and we've matched those updates. In particular, Peteski says that the video that Rothman copied -- which she claimed was evidence for her false imprisonment claim -- was actually something else entirely. From the filings, Rothman says that the video was a "bona fide example of Dr. McGraw's conduct for her lawsuit," but Peteski says it was not showing evidence of the "false imprisonment" claim at all. Peteski's lawyers argue it was something she sought to use "for commercial gain" (which the Judge disagreed with as noted below). Peteski's lawyer also implies that the false imprisonment claims are frivolous (noting that 200 to 300 people were at the meeting, and only Rothman sued -- and argues that the real reason she used her iPhone to copy the nine second video was for "exploiting it with other media." We've updated the article to clarify that the video is not of the claimed "false imprisonment" -- and that there is some dispute over what the video actually could be used for.We've seen some awful copyright rulings over the years, but this latest one from Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Texas* is a real corker. First covered by Eriq Gardner, over at the Hollywood Reporter, the story is a complex one involving TV personality Dr. Phil and accusations of him imprisoning a producer who worked for him. What could that possibly have to do with copyright? Well, read on...* If you recognize the name, it's because for the past few years, he's handled a huge number of patent cases. Indeed, last year alone, he (yes, just this one judge) handled 20% of all patent cases in the USGardner sums up the background to the lawsuit nicely:

Members of a New York "Black Lives Matter" group are suing the town of Clarkstown and its police department over illegal surveillance. The plaintiffs allege they were placed under surveillance by the Clarkstown PD's Strategic Intelligence Unit (SIU) for a number of reasons, none of which were legal uses of the agency's spy wares.It would seem the lawsuit [PDF] has a good chance of paying off. Allegations of racial profiling and illegally surveilling citizens for their First Amendment activities are backed by the results of investigations and one police official's own admissions.A letter to the US Attorney's office in New York, attached as an exhibit, bolsters the claims made in the BLM lawsuit. In it, Clarkstown town Supervisor George Hoehman details a long list of surveillance violations and other police misconduct.According to the letter [PDF], the SIU began surveillance of members of a play entitled "A Clean Shoot?" performed by a group called "We the People." The surveillance included constant monitoring of their social media profiles and the deployment of geofencing in hopes of capturing anyone else who might be involved with the group and/or the play.The Clarkstown PD shared the information it gathered with the Haverstraw Police Department -- information that included the results of searches of criminal databases. Clarkstown's SIU "warned" Haverstraw the next production of the play would be in September, but noted that participants posed no threat of violence despite harboring "strong opinions."When setting up the geofences, Clarkstown PD lumped BLM and We the People members in with gang members, terrorists, and other more legitimate targets of police surveillance. This continued even though they were told (repeatedly) by the local district attorney's office they should not have Black Lives Matter listed as a surveillance target.In August 2016, the special prosecutor handling the investigation of this surveillance demanded Clarkstown PD hand over communications pertaining to its spying on the two groups. He never received anything. Instead, Police Chief Michael Sullivan deleted all of the data from his issued cellphone. He also allowed Sgt. Steven Cole-Hatcher (head of the SIU) to wipe his own cellphone and to delete possibly-incriminating files from his departmental computer. Sullivan was suspended for fifteen days. Cole-Hatcher was given the opportunity to retire. He's now suing to get his job back and it's his filings that have generated a lot of the evidence needed by BLM to successfully pursue this lawsuit.The letter also alleges things unrelated to the BLM lawsuit, but equally disturbing. Local law enforcement officials have apparently engaged in election interference, surveillance of judges, and monitoring of the town supervisor's social media profiles with the department's surveillance software.Much of what's in the most recent lawsuit retreads allegations made previously. Fortunately, some of those allegations have already been sustained. The lawsuit pleads violations of the First and Fourth Amendment and seeks damages and injunctions against future unlawful surveillance.Chief Sullivan has (unhelpfully) explained BLM and We the People weren't singled out for unlawful surveillance. He stated "many other groups and individuals" were surveilled by the SIU -- a statement he made without clarifying whether these others instances were for legitimate reasons.Adding the latest allegations to those already sustained suggests local law enforcement agencies have more in common with cancerous growths than the "protectors and servants" ideal.

The EFF and ACLU have achieved a victory in an acronym-heavy public records case. The California Supreme Court has ruled the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (LASD) will have to turn over data acquired by their automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).Both entities tried to keep these records from the EFF and ACLU by claiming every single one of the millions of plate records were "investigatory records," exempt from disclosure under California's public records law. This apparently included the millions of "non-hit" records never utilized in any LAPD/LASD investigation. With the plate readers collecting 1.5-2 million records per week, they were basically arguing every driver passing by an ALPR was under investigation.That's not how the state's Supreme Court sees it [PDF]. The "investigatory records" exemption pertains to targeted, ongoing investigations. The public records law cannot be stretched to cover indiscriminate mass surveillance.

This week (or last week, I suppose — this post was moved for the long weekend!) our first place comment on the insightful side comes in response to Attorney General Jeff Sessions using Hurricane Harvey as an argument for increased police militarization. An anonymous commenter set things straight:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012 started out with us catching up on something that happened late on the previous Friday: the jury in the Apple/Samsung patent trial released a surprise snap verdict that Samsung had infringed. Worryingly, they pretty much admitted that they ignored prior art and other key factors to do so — and the foreman's explanation in interviews showed he didn't really understand prior art to begin with. Of course, the whole thing seemed to be simply demonstrating the viability of Samsung products as an alternative to iPhones and iPads — and as you likely know, just last December, SCOTUS overturned this verdict.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, the RIAA managed to score a victory in one of its attempts to get a judge to say that "making available" counts as distribution, and immediately began pushing to spread that ruling to other courts. Viacom got meta in its habit of awful YouTube takedowns by taking down someone's video of a Viacom-owned show airing one of his YouTube videos without permission. Congress was trying to get ISPs to be copyright cops and introduce the nightmare of copyright to the fashion industry. And the first iPhone was successfully unlocked, leading AT&T to predictably and pointlessly lash out.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002 there were lots of new and emerging things that people were grappling with (though it was not the first freak-out about ultra-violent video games nor would it be the last). There was the realization that becoming suddenly internet famous comes with a cost that not everyone enjoys; there was the attempt to figure out online diploma mills. All those things are pretty pervasive today and no longer new, but here's one that fifteen years later is still an "emerging" trend like it was then: artificial intelligence and its implications. Excitement over AI has crested and dipped for a long time, much like another piece of tech that was in the same post-overhype torpor in 2002 that it appears it might be headed for today: virtual reality.

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We have often criticized the Patent Office for issuing broad software patents that cover obvious processes. Instead of promoting innovation in software, the patent system places landmines for developers who wish to use basic and fundamental tools. This month's stupid patent, which covers user permissions for mobile applications, is a classic example.On August 29, 2017, the Patent Office issued U.S. Patent No. 9,747,468 (the '468 patent) to JP Morgan Chase Bank, titled "System and Method for Communication Among Mobile Applications." The patent covers the simple idea of a user giving a mobile application permission to communicate with another application. This idea was obvious when JP Morgan applied for the patent in June 2013. Even worse, it had already been implemented by numerous mobile applications. The Patent Office handed out a broad software monopoly while ignoring both common sense and the real world.The full text of Claim 1 of the '468 patent is as follows:

America's largest sheriff's department is rolling towards an accountability train wreck. Despite years of discussing the issue, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department still has no cohesive policy on body cameras, nor has it taken steps to outfit its officers with the devices.This less-than-ideal situation is being made worse by deputies purchasing their own body cameras with personal funds.

We've noted time and time again how numerous websites have been killing news comments because they're too lazy and too cheap to cultivate an on-site community, and/or don't like having story errors pointed out in quite such a transparent, conspicuous location. Of course editors and publishers can never admit this is their real motivation, instead offering a rotating crop of disingenuous prattle about how they're muzzling their readers and shoving them over to Facebook because they're just so very into building relationships and are breathlessly-dedicated to improving conversation.This week Al Jazeera joined the hottest trend in media, penning a missive over at Medium about how they're banning public news comments as part of their quest to... wait for it... give a voice to the voiceless:

For those of us that advocate principles of free speech, the most hallowed battleground for that fight must necessarily be in schools. If these ideals are to win the day on the longer timeline, it will be because subsequent generations take up the banner of free speech and conversation in more numbers than do their opponents. In the West, these fights amount to issues that are indeed important, but pale in comparison to what occurs elsewhere in the world. To that end, it's as important to see how far we've come as it is to understand how far we have to go.Take Pakistan, for instance. Most of us will know that Pakistan has not taken the same trajectory in terms of speech compared to America. Differences of this sort are to be expected, but they can reveal themselves in stark ways. For instance, a local school in Pakistan with a tradition of singing John Lennon's famous song Imagine has this year decided to remove the song from the annual concert for reasons that you've likely already guessed.

We've discussed many times about how unfortunately toothless section 512(f) of the DMCA is in practice. That's the section that can supposedly be used against "misrepresentations" under the DMCA. But, in practice, nearly all attempts to use DMCA 512(f) have failed. That's why it's always so interesting to see one that is succeeding. But as law professor Eric Goldman notes, there's a case where a 512(f) claim has survived a motion to dismiss.The background to the case is a bit involved, but apparently someone named Shirley Johnson was posting YouTube videos criticizing "New Destiny Christian Center" and the "Paula White Ministries." Paula White Ministries claimed copyright infringement to YouTube and Johnson counternoticed. Paula White Ministries then sued, claiming copyright infringement over Johnson's use of images and videos in her criticism. The case was dismissed, but the judge suggested that Johnson file a lawsuit against the plaintiff for "malicious prosecution." She did so, though included in that suit was also a claim about "false copyright infringement complaints." The court dismissed those claims, noting that those are not part of a malicious prosecution claim, so a separate lawsuit was filed claiming 512(f) violations. The defendants in this case made a motion to dismiss, but the big news here is that the 512(f) claim lives on.

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Over the last few weeks, we've written a number of times about how systematically bad internet platforms are at determining how to deal with abuse online. This is not to mock the platforms, even though many of the decisions are comically bad, but to note that this is inevitable in dealing with the scale of these platforms -- and to remind people that this is why it's dangerous to demand that these companies be legally liable for policing speech on their platforms. It won't end well. Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about how Twitter suspended Ken "Popehat" White for posting an email threat he'd received (Twitter argued he was violating the privacy of the guy threatening him). From there, we wrote about a bunch of stories of Facebook and Twitter punishing people for documenting abuse that they had received.But this latest story is even slightly crazier, as it appears that abusers were taking advantage of this on purpose. In this case, the story involves Russian Twitter bots. First, the Atlantic Council wrote about Russian Twitter trolls trying to shape a narrative after the Nazi event in Charlottesville. In response, those very same Twitter bots and trolls started bombarding the Twitter feeds of the researchers. And here's where the story gets even weirder. When Joseph Cox, writing for The Daily Beast, wrote about this (at the link above), those same Twitter bots started targeting him too.And... that caused Twitter to suspend his account. No, really.

So we've noted time and time again how the vast majority of consumers support net neutrality, and the current rules on the books protecting it. Survey after survey (including several from the telecom industry itself) have found net neutrality has broad, bipartisan support. To try and undermine this reality, ISPs have spent more than a decade trying to frame the desire for a healthy, competitive internet -- free of entrenched gatekeeper control -- as a partisan debate. And they've largely been successful at it, sowing division and derailing discourse on a subject that, in reality, isn't all that controversial in the eyes of the Comcast-loathing public.This was highlighted again this week, when a broadband industry-funded study found that 98.5% of the original comments filed with the FCC oppose the agency's plan to kill net neutrality. Of the original, unique comments filed with the FCC (people that took the time to write out their thoughts instead of just signing a form letter), 1.52 million said they opposed the FCC's plan, compared with the 23,000 individuals that think gutting consumer protections was a nifty idea. Again, there's no debate here: the public (which the FCC is supposed to represent) viciously opposes this plan to dismantle Title II, and by proxy, the net neutrality rules.Large ISPs like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T have used every trick in the book to try and distort this reality, from publishing videos claiming that nobody's trying to kill net neutrality, to actively trying to con their own users into supporting gutting the essential protections. Shortly after this week's latest study was published, AT&T got right to work blatantly lying about what the study said, insisting that most of the "legitimate" comments filed with the FCC support killing net neutrality protections:

Back in 2012, we wrote about Onity, the company that makes a huge percentage of the keycard hotel door locks on the market, and how laughably easy it was to hack its locks with roughly $50 of equipment. Surprisingly, Onity responded to the media coverage and complaints from its hotel customers with offers of fixes that ranged from insufficient (a piece of plastic that covered the port used to hack the door locks) to cumbersome (replacing the circuit boards on the locks entirely) and asked many of these customers to pay for these fixes to its broken product. Many of these customers wanted to sue Onity for obvious reasons, but a judge ruled against allowing a class action suit to proceed. That was our last story on the subject.So... what happened? Well, Onity ended up springing for the fixes for some of their larger chain hotel customers, but not all of them. For the rest, it was on each hotel to decide to pay for the fix or not. Many, many of them absolutely did not and did nothing about the Onity locks on their doors, while those that did get the fix involving the plastic port cover quickly found out that the fix wasn't much of a fix at all. To see the fallout from all of that, one need only look at Wired's longform piece on the hellacious crime spree undertaken by one troubled young man, Aaron Cashatt, who managed to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff from hotel rooms using the afore-mentioned $50 worth of gear.The entire post is worth your time, with its fascinating look into Cashatt's background, the revelations of the Onity lock's failures, and where those two stories converged. One of the key points in all of this was that even before Cashatt started his crime spree, everyone, from Onity to the hotel chains to any member of the public that cared to know, was aware of how laughably insecure Onity's locks were, except that, for the most part, nobody bothered to do anything about it.

As multiple Techdirt stories attest, farmers do love their "ag-gag" laws, which effectively make it illegal for activists to expose animal abuse in agricultural establishments -- although, strangely, farmers don't phrase it quite like that. Big Ag -- the giant seed and agricultural chemical companies such as Monsanto, Bayer, and DuPont -- seem to have decided they want something similar for seeds. As an article in Mother Jones, originally published by Food and Environment Reporting Network, reports, it looks like they are getting it:

Earlier this year, real estate litigator and aggrieved homeowner Barbara Andersen sued Zillow for providing a lower "Zestimate" than she believed her house was worth. She alleged Zillow violated Illinois state law by portraying its estimates as appraisals, even though it lacked the proper licensing to perform appraisals. Andersen sought an injunction blocking Zillow from posting information about her home (even publicly-available information) and offering a "Zestimate" on its selling price.Andersen has just had her case tossed, although she's now representing others in a proposed class action against Zillow. At some point between February and earlier this week, Andersen's case was moved to a federal court and she's now listed on the bottom of court documents (as counsel of record), rather than up top as a plaintiff.The new lead plaintiffs are three Patels disputing Zestimates of their multi-million dollar properties. (This rearranging of plaintiffs and lawyers [and lawyers who were also plaintiffs] is unsettling, especially for those of us who learned what we know of the real estate business via repeated viewings of "Glengarry Glen Ross.")The Patels (and "others similarly situated") aren't happy with Zillow. The Patels (collectively) have multiple properties on the market, all listed at prices considerably higher than Zillow's Zestimates. They claim, as Andersen did, that Zillow violates state law by offering something homebuyers might believe is an appraisal. A variety of interconnected laws results in the Patels attempting to coax a federal court into killing Zillow's estimates. As Eric Goldman summarizes, the Patels have gone down on strikes.

We've well established that the internet of things (IOT) market is a large, stinky dumpster fire when it comes to privacy and security. But the same problems that plague your easily hacked thermostat or e-mail password leaking refrigerator take on a decidedly darker tone when we're talking about your health. The health industry's outdated IT systems are a major reason for a startling rise in ransomware attacks at many hospitals, but this same level of security and privacy apathy also extends to medical and surgical equipment -- and integral medical implants like pacemakers.After a decade of warnings about dubious pacemaker security, researchers at Medsec earlier this year discovered that a line of pacemakers manufactured by St. Jude Medical were vulnerable to attacks that could kill the owner. The researchers claimed that St. Jude had a history of doing the bare minimum to secure their products, and did little to nothing in response to previous warnings about device security. St. Jude Medical's first response was an outright denial, followed by a lawsuit against MedSec for "trying to frighten patients and caregivers."Ultimately, the FDA was forced to issue its first ever warning about the security of a pacemaker earlier this year, though the agency somewhat downplayed the potentially fatal ramifications:

We've talked a lot over the years about the importance of standing up to patent trolls. Newegg, famously, has its "Never Settle" mantra for dealing with patent trolls. And we covered the case of Fark's Drew Curtis, a few years back, who simply refused to give in when a patent troll tried to shake him down. Part of that standing firm was that when he eventually "settled" the case, he demanded that he be allowed to reveal that the settlement was for $0 (usually trolls require a gag clause on settlements to avoid anyone finding out what happened). But it appears Kaspersky Labs has taken this up a notch.Two years ago, we wrote about the patent troll with the somewhat on-the-nose name of Wetro Lan (get it? "we trollin'") that was threatening lots of companies. One company it went after was Kaspersky Labs, which it eventually sued in East Texas (naturally). Things didn't quite go according to Wetro Lan's plan. As Joe Mullin at Ars Technica explains, by the end of the case, Wetro Lan had to pay Kaspersky to get the company to agree to let the case die.During discovery, Kaspersky's lawyer was able to discover the settlements that Wetro Lan actually got out of other companies, while also making it quite clear to Wetro Lan, that it's claims in this suit were completely bogus. So then it flipped the script:

Techdirt has been covering the slow and painful attempts by the EU to make its copyright laws fit for the digital age for nearly four years now. Along the way, there have been some good ideas, and an astonishingly bad one that would require many online services to filter all uploads to their sites for potential copyright infringements. Despite the widespread condemnation of what is now Article 13 in the proposed Copyright Directive, an important new leak (pdf) published on the Statewatch site shows that EU politicians are still pushing to make the censorship filters mandatory.The document is an attempt by Estonia, which currently holds the Presidency of the Council of the EU -- one of the three main European Union bodies -- to come up with a revised text for the new Copyright Directive. In theory, it should be a compromise document that takes into account the differing opinions and views expressed so far. In practice, it is a slap in the face for the EU public, whose concerns it ignores, while pandering to the demands of the EU copyright industry.Estonia's problem is that the whole idea of forcing Web sites to filter uploads contradicts an existing EU directive, one from 2000 on e-commerce. This created a safe harbor for sites that were "mere conduits" or simply hosting material -- that is, took no active part in publishing material online. The Directive explicitly says:

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Earlier this week, we wrote about Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions bringing back the Defense Department's 1033 program, which helped militarize local police forces with surplus military equipment. We've been covering all sorts of problems with the 1033 program over the years, and people like Radley Balko have written entire books on the problem. And the previous ban on the 1033 only put a fairly narrow limit on the practice of militarizing police -- but now even those modest limits are gone.What's truly incredible, however, is the complete nonsense being used to justify this. Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech about this on Monday, in which he trotted out his standard misleading and out-of-context stats, falsely claiming that there's some massive new crimewave across the country, when there's really just been a tiny bump after decades of decline in crime rates (the use of percentages by Sessions shows the he likely knows the absolute numbers are so meaningless that he has to mislead with percentages working off a small base).But, even with the usual misleading claims about violence and violence directed towards police, I still never expected him to... point to Houston and the impact of Hurricane Harvey as a reason for increased police militarization. But that's exactly what he did:

Let's not mince words: the FCC's plan to gut net neutrality protections in light of severe public opposition is likely one of the more bare-knuckled acts of cronyism in modern technological and political history. That's because the rules have overwhelming, bipartisan support from the vast majority of consumers, most of whom realize the already imperfect rules are some of the only consumer protections standing between consumers and giant, uncompetitive companies like Comcast. Repealing the rules only serves one interest: that of one of the least liked, least-competitive industries in America.That said, the broadband industry and the FCC keep trying to obfuscate this reality, and failing. The latest example: a new study funded by the industry itself took a closer look at the 21.8 million comments filed with the FCC so far on its plan to roll back the rules, and found, once again, the vast majority of the citizens the agency is supposed to represent oppose the FCC's plan. The full study was conducted by consulting firm Emprata and funded by Broadband for America, a lobbying front organization backed by Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Charter and most large wireless carriers.As we've consistently reported, somebody has been backing an attempt to fill the FCC's comment proceeding with entirely bogus, bot-crafted support for the FCC's plan. There have even been bogus comments filed in support of killing net neutrality made in my name (which the FCC has said they'll do nothing about). The Emprata study found that even including this farmed detritus, the majority of the comments are in favor of retaining the rules. Including spam, bot-posts, and form letters (the latter being used by both sides), the study found 60% were opposed to the FCC's plan.But when the firm only analyzed original comments coming from actual human beings, it found that 98.5% of original comments filed support keeping the rules intact. And while form letters are utilized by both sides of this asymmetrical debate to galvanize public action, the study also found very few original comments in support of Ajit Pai and friends' handout to the telecom sector:

A federal court in Oakland, California has come to a conclusion the DOJ definitely didn't want it to reach, as Cyrus Farivar reports for Ars Technica.

Searching for stories about Sega here at Techdirt results in a seriously mixed bag of results. While the company has managed to be on the right side of history on issues like SOPA and fan-made games, it has also managed to be strongly anti-consumer on game mods and has occasionally wreaked havoc on the YouTube community, all in the name of copyright protectionism. Despite all of this, Sega has gone to some lengths to successfully craft for itself a public image more accessible and likeable than its long-time rival Nintendo.Stories like the following will put dents in that image, however. Sega recently ported its new title Sonic Mania to the PC and released it on the Steam platform. The port also included Denuvo DRM and an always-online requirement, except that it (oops!) forgot to tell anyone about either.

A case involving a bogus arrest stemming from a citizen's attempt to record officers has resulted in the denial of qualified immunity to the officers involved. The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court upheld the lower court's decision on both First and Fourth Amendment issues.Plaintiff Brian Hoyland was awakened by the sound of police activity in his front yard. Opening his door, he found officers trying to arrest his wife, who was the passenger in a car suspected of being involved in reported drag racing. This is what Hoyland did from 30-40 feet away, ultimately resulting in him being arrested for obstruction. From the opinion [PDF]:

Leaving aside the AAA publishers for a moment, the video game industry is actually starting to get really good on recognizing better ways to react to copyright infringement other than pounding their fists on their tables and knee-capping their customers with DRM. This still occurs, of course, but we've also seen stories of publishers treating pirates as potential customers with whom it's worth connecting, giving away Steam keys on torrent sites, or just playfully messing with pirates instead of screaming at them. These efforts generally are done to the tune of great PR and the humanization of a content company that can only help their businesses.And, thankfully, it's not a trend that is slowing down. Acid Wizard Studio, publishers of the game Darkwood, made some recent news by deciding to put its own game on the Pirate Bay.

The government will be paying its opponent's legal fees after needlessly drawing out FOIA litigation, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has decided [PDF]. The First Amendment Coalition sued the Department of Justice after it refused to produce documents discussing the legal rationale for extrajudicial drone strikes targeting American citizens.The legal memo FAC sought was the same legal memo the ACLU and New York Times sued the DOJ for refusing to release. (Or so the FAC thought. But its litigation -- along with the ACLU/NYT litigation -- made it clear the government was holding on to more than one legal memo.) In the NYT/ACLU case, the Second Circuit Court told the DOJ to cough up its justification for killing Anwar al-Awlaki, pointing to several public comments made about the drone strike by prominent US government officials. The court wasn't interested in the DOJ's arguments something publicly discussed frequently would be too "sensitive" to put in the hands of the ACLU and New York Times.The DOJ made the same arguments in this case, but the Second Circuit decision undoes its attempt to fend off FAC's legal fees claims. Factoring into the Ninth's conclusions is the leak of a white paper by the US government providing its legal analysis of extrajudicial drone strikes. This was then followed by an official release of the same white paper.This leak -- and the court-ordered release of the DOJ's legal memo to the ACLU and New York Times -- prompted the FAC to ask the district court to vacate its decision in favor of the DOJ's secrecy and award it legal fees, since it was seeking the same document. This motion was filed nearly three years ago, just to give you some idea how long the DOJ has dragged out a losing legal battle.The Appeals Court notes the documents might not have been released by the government if it hadn't been for its entanglement in multiple FOIA lawsuits. As the court points out, the fact that the government voluntarily handed the documents to the FAC after the drone strike white paper's official release doesn't absolve it of racking up FAC's legal fees for no apparent reason.

For years now, we've discussed why it's problematic that people are demanding internet platforms moderate more and more speech. We should be quite wary of internet platforms taking on the role of the internet's police. First, they're really bad at it. As we noted in a recent post, platforms are horrendously bad at distinguishing abusive content from those documenting abusive content and that creates all sorts of unfortunate and bizarre results, with those targeted by harassing content often having their own accounts shut down. On top of that, the only way to actually moderate content at scale requires a set of rules, and any such set of rules, as applied, will create hysterically bad results. And that's because the scale of the problem is so massive. It's difficult for most people to comprehend even slightly the scale involved here. As a former Facebook employee who worked on this stuff once told me, "Facebook needs to make one million decisions each day -- one million today, one million tomorrow, one million the next day." The idea that they won't make errors (both of the Type 1 and Type 2 category) is laughable.And it appears that the scale is only growing. Facebook has now admitted that it shuts off 1 million accounts every single day -- which means that earlier number I heard is way low. If it's killing one million accounts every day, that means it's making decisions on way more accounts than that. And, the company knows that it gets things wrong:

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We've always had difficulty understanding why copyright or trademark law should even have "criminal" components to them. It seems fairly obvious that they can be handled easily enough with civil actions, without involving law enforcement. And this matter is only reinforced every time law enforcement tries to get involved in copyright and trademark enforcement. They seem oddly... almost unable to comprehend that infringement is different than theft and that it requires a different thought process and analysis. Time and time again, we see this crop up, both in the US and around the world. And it remains consistent no matter who is in charge. Under Obama, the DOJ was terrible on intellectual property issues, and that's now carrying over to the Trump administration.Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein just gave a talk at the Interpol International Law Enforcement IP Crime Conference -- which, as you can imagine, is not a place where nuanced discussions on infringement are expected. And Rosenstein lived down to low expectations in delivering a speech full of silly analogies and misleading statements that show little understanding of the deeper underlying issues when it comes to copyright, trademark and patents. It starts out with a particularly silly analogy:

For years, HBO and owner Time Warner fell into the trap of telling customers what they wanted instead of the other way around. You might recall that HBO and Time Warner spent years waging a rather scorched earth assault on piracy and other "unauthorized viewing," going so far as to poison show torrents and shut down "Game of Thrones" viewing parties. A major problem with this approach is that HBO wasn't fully providing pirates an alternative. While HBO was offering streaming to existing cable customers, it spent years ignoring consumer calls for a standalone streaming video platform that didn't require cable.There were any number of reasons for this myopia, the biggest being that like any good legacy company, HBO and Time Warner execs were afraid of wounding the traditional cable cash cow (even if said cow was already showing signs of notable mortality at the time). More specifically, HBO was afraid of hurting the cozy, heavily-subsidized relationship HBO enjoys with many cable providers, who all but give the channel away on occasional promotion. So while offering a standalone streaming platform was essential in evolutionary context, HBO consistently insisted it just couldn't make the economics work for such an option.So while Time Warner and HBO execs were busy trying to downplay cord cutting as a fad, the piracy of HBO programs continued to smash BitTorrent swarm and other piracy records. That was until March of 2015 when HBO was forced to finally acknowledge the changing tides and launched HBO Now, its standalone streaming app. Fast-forward a little more than two years, and that decision is looking pretty good now in hindsight:

In a move that will have major implications for the online world in India and beyond, nine Supreme Court judges have ruled unanimously that privacy is a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution. As part of a decision spanning 547 pages (pdf) they declared:

We've noted time after time how the trend du jour in online media is to kill your news comment section, muzzle your valuable on-site community, then couch the decision under all manner of disingenuous prattle. Reuters and Recode, for example, killed visitor news comments several years ago because, they claimed, the companies really value conversation. The Verge also tinkered with killing comments, purportedly because it just really valued relationships. As we all know, nothing quite "builds relationships" and gets the conversation going like a muzzle, a wave, and a swift digital kick in the ass.Other websites couch their decision to mute their users under the pretense that it's just an "experiment," and the website will return with something more interactive and wonderful down the line. More often than not, this never happens. Case in point is NPR, which announced last summer that it too would be banning all public community feedback out of a deep rooted love for building community and audience engagement:

On June 14th, the New York Times published an editorial concerning violent rhetoric being deployed during political races. In it, the author made an incredibly bad claim:

Just over a year ago, when Pokémon Go was taking the world by storm, we dedicated an episode of the podcast to discussing what made it so successful, and ended up with some differing predictions about what its future would be. Now, with the hype long and truly over but the game still far from dead (though just how far is up for debate), it's time to revisit the subject and figure out who, if anyone, was right about the future of Pokémon Go.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.