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Lots of anti-harassment laws have been written over the years. The creation of these laws has sped up as legislators look to find some way of handling cyberbullying and online harassment. These laws have been uniformly bad. Those that make it to governors' desks are often struck down shortly thereafter by courts.The problem is legislators try to target certain behavior with these laws, but seldom consider the amount of protected speech that will be caught in the laws' webbing. Or maybe these thoughts never enter the minds of legislators, who tend to write these bills badly and broadly.We've seen multiple statutes come tumbling down after a Constitutional challenge. Eugene Volokh -- along with Venkat Balasubramani -- is challenging Washington state's harassment law over its stripping of free speech protections.

At some point, even the dimmest of lawyers will understand that parody and fair use are not infringement. There may be all sorts of reasons why big companies send dubious cease-and-desist letters over protected speech. Sometimes it's because lawyers are misinformed. Sometimes it's to silence criticism.But in an odd and all around hilarious exchange between the company that owns the Olive Garden chain of restaurants and the owner of a website that reviews Olive Garden dishes, I can't think of a single reason why a sane lawyer would want to fire off the following letter to allofgarden.com.

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It only took a month for a court to dump a bogus defamation suit brought by someone who sued one person for things someone else said. Jim Myers wrote an article for The Tennessean discussing changes made to a culinary arts program. The former director of the program -- Thomas Loftis -- didn't like characterizations made in the article. For reasons known only to him and his lawyers, Loftis sued the new director of the culinary arts program, rather than the columnist or the paper that published his article.The lawsuit is now dead, thanks to a swift, verbal ruling by the presiding judge. Following a couple of complaints and motions to dismiss, attorney Daniel Horowitz has secured a win for his client.

You might recall that when HBO comedian John Oliver originally addressed net neutrality on his show in 2014, the FCC website crashed under the load of concerned consumers eager to support the creation of real net neutrality rules. When Oliver revisited the topic last May to discuss FCC boss Ajit Pai's myopic plan to kill those same rules, the FCC website crashed under the load a second time. Both instances did a fantastic job highlighting how satire often tops traditional journalism in driving interest toward what can often be rather wonky tech policy issues.But then something weird happened. In the midst of all the attention Oliver was receiving for his segment, the FCC issued a statement (pdf) by FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray, claiming that comprehensive FCC "analysis" indicated that it was a malicious DDoS attack, not angry net neutrality supporters, that brought the agency's website to its knees:

Last month we wrote about the tragic and hugely problematic ruling in Canada that said a Canadian court could order global censorship of content it deems to be illegal. As lots of people pointed out, that is going to have dangerous consequences for speech around the world. If you accept that Canada can censor the global internet, what's to stop China, Iran or Russia from claiming the same rights?And now we'll get to find out if the EU similarly believes in the ability of one country to demand global censorship online. In another case that we've been following, French data protection officials had been demanding Google censor content globally, and Google had been refusing. Now, the issue has been sent to the EU Court of Justice, the very same court who created this mess three years ago in saying that Google was subject to "right to be forgotten" claims. Google had reasonably interpreted the law to just apply in the EU (where the jurisdiction existed). But now the same court will decide if EU officials can censor globally.One hopes that the sheer absurdity of the situation may lead the CJEU to start to recognize just how problematic its ruling was back in 2014, but somehow, that's unlikely. We'll certainly be paying attention to this case...

If you need any more proof the NYPD hates transparency, you need look no further than Keegan Stephan's victory in a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit:

A Massachusetts lawmaker is looking to give law enforcement another way to bust people and seize vehicles. Modify a vehicle you own in a certain way and you can expect to never see that vehicle again.

If you're not familiar with Perfect 10 by now, it is a company that billed itself as a smutty porn magazine that was actually mostly in the far more immoral business of copyright trolling. Rather than peddling skin, Perfect 10 mostly peddled laughably frivolous copyright lawsuits against roughly everyone, managing in this process to suffer legal losses to Google, CCBill, Amazon, and Visa among others. One of those others was Usenet provider Giganews, which won big in its court battle with Perfect 10 to the tune of the latter being ordered to pay over $5 million in attorney's fees to the former. Perfect 10 immediately cried poor at that point, stating it didn't have the money to cover the award, leading the court to put its assets in receivership. At the time, Mike wrote:

A few weeks ago, we warned about a dangerous new German law that would fine social media companies if they didn't magically block "hate speech" on their platforms. As we pointed out, this would lead to widespread censorship, as the risk of liability for leaving up even borderline speech would be massive. And, equally important, this would embolden oppressive, dictatorial and autocratic regimes to press on with their own crackdowns on free speech by using laws like this one and claiming that they're doing the exact same thing as supposedly democratic nations like Germany.We didn't have to wait long. Reporters Without Borders points us to the news that Russia has now rushed out a bill that is basically a cut and paste of the German law:

Oh, James Woods. He has now "settled" the ridiculous lawsuit he filed against someone mocking him on Twitter... but is still fighting a fairly similar lawsuit that was filed against him -- complaining that it's an attack on his free speech rights.If you don't recall, the rather opinionated actor sued a trollish Twitter user who went by the name Abe List, after Abe referred to Woods as a "cocaine addict" in a clearly hyperbolic tweet. As the case progressed, "Abe List" died unexpectedly, leading to Woods obnoxiously gloating on Twitter that List had "dropped" his anti-SLAPP appeal, and when people pointed out it was only because List had died, Woods demonstrated what kind of character he is by cheering on the fact that someone died.Nice guy, huh?And, of course, that leaves out that Woods had a history of tweeting similarly hyperbolic statements about others who he disagreed with:So, Woods was already looking fairly hypocritical here, but as you'll see soon, that level of hypocrisy is becoming more pronounced.Either way, after "List" died, you might think that Woods would just drop the case, but given his clear animosity (see tweet above) towards a guy making a silly statement on Twitter, he kept the case going in order to unmask the real identity of "List" and to potentially pursue the case against his estate. As first revealed by Eriq Gardner at THREsq, Woods has finally agreed to settle the case, but at least part of the terms of the settlement is that he got attorney Ken "Popehat" White (who you probably know if you're reading Techdirt, and who has represented us at times) to write a silly letter stating what basically everyone in the world already knew: specifically that when Abe List referred to Woods as a "cocaine addict" it wasn't meant to be taken literally:

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It's always been true: if you give a government agency increased powers for a limited purpose, the limitations and the purpose will soon be shrugged off. The ACLU of Massachusetts is trying to get some prosecutorial power reeled back in, thanks to administrative subpoena mission creep.

When Ajit Pai was first appointed as the new head of the FCC, he promised to be a stickler for transparency at the agency. And in one way he followed through, by making it standard operating procedure to now publish FCC orders a month before they're voted on (even though former staffers and consumer advocates believe he only did so to give ISP lobbyists more time to construct counter-arguments and their legal and policy assaults). Elsewhere, this supposed dedication to transparency has been decidedly lacking however, especially in regards to his efforts to repeal net neutrality protections.When he first proposed killing popular net neutrality protections (pdf), he insisted he would proceed "in a far more transparent way than the FCC did" when it first crafted the rules in 2015. But Pai has also long tried to argue that a lack of broadband competition (and the resulting symptom of this disease that is net neutrality violations) isn't a real problem, despite the obvious, repeated evidence to the contrary.There's of course some very solid evidence that can clarify whether or not net neutrality is a "solution in need of a problem," and that's the 47,000 (give or take) complaints consumers have filed with the FCC since the rules were passed in 2015. Back in May, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request to obtain copies of these complaints, and urged the FCC to extend the public comment period on the net neutrality proceeding for sixty days, providing time to analyze the data.The group has repeatedly argued these complaints are relevant in analyzing whether or not Pai's attempt to repeal the rules runs contrary to the public interest:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn't much interested in the "justice" side of the Department of Justice. Instead, it appears he'd like to throw on his letterman's jacket and head back to his glory days as a hard-nosed, 1980s-vintage drug warrior. Things were better when Sessions was a federal prosecutor in Alabama, ringing up drug convictions at a rate four times the national average.The word "reactionary" is thrown around a lot when describing Trump and his cabinet. But in Sessions' case, the term fits. Violent crimes rates have fallen steadily since the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, drug prices have dropped and purity has increased, despite four decades of harsh enforcement and trillions of dollars being thrown at the problem. Devil weed -- gateway drug and longtime conspirator in the violation of American women by filthy non-whites -- is now a socially and medically-accepted drug, legal in several states.But there are violent crime increases in a few major cities. He's not sure what's to blame for this potential historical blip, but he has several theories. It might be soft-on-drugs Obama-era policies embraced by his predecessor's DOJ. It might be a lack of respect for law enforcement, which Sessions feels is a failure of the American public, rather than the failures of those who serve them. It might be rambunctious legislators scaling back asset forfeiture all over the country. Whatever it is, the current course needs to be reversed and the policies that failed for multiple decades be allowed to fail again.Where else would Sessions espouse his "brave new old world" plan than standing over the desiccated corpse of a federally-funded program that did fuck all to curb drug use by teens and tweens: the 30th D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) Training Conference.

Civil asset forfeiture continues to be curbed by legislatures around the country. Belatedly realizing the harm done to citizens by opportunistic law enforcement, lawmakers have been engaged in serious reform efforts over the past few years. Some have fallen apart on the way to approval, thanks to harmful concessions to powerful law enforcement lobbies. Other have made it through intact, potentially ending years of abuse.Thirteen states have already added conviction requirements for forfeitures, all but eliminating the "civil" process that cuts property owners out almost completely. Connecticut has just become the fourteenth.

The New York Civilian Complaint Review Board has just released a report [PDF] indicating NYPD officers are slow learners when it comes to recognizing citizens' right to record police officers. It's not that these officers have never been told. They have. The NYPD's "Finest Order" was handed down in 2014, telling officers citizens had a First Amendment right to film police. It's a response to a 2012 order by the Washington DC PD and a First Amendment lawsuit filed that year. It followed this up with internal policy changes two years later. And yet, problems persist.

While we often talk about oversteps regarding copyright protectionism and lawsuits in these here pages, it's not as though there aren't understandable disputes that exist. Likewise, while we often detail bad actions by aggressors on copyright issues, it's not as though those on the defending side of that coin are always virtuous in the way they handle the dispute. The issue of game and mobile application cloning serves as a good ecosystem to show plenty of examples of both, with the latest dust-up between Riot Games and Shanghai Moonton Technology offering a specific look at how a party on the defense from a copyright claim can get everything wrong.First, some background. Riot Games recently filed a lawsuit against Moonton for copyright infringement over three Moonton games: Mobile Legends 5V5 MOBA, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and Magic Rush: Heroes. A cursory look at the evidence Riot Games offered up in the filing sure makes it look like Moonton was simply cloning League of Legends, from title screen to in-game design.

When AT&T, Verizon and Comcast convinced lawmakers to kill broadband consumer privacy rules earlier this year, everybody in this chain of campaign-cash dysfunction got notably more than they bargained for. As with net neutrality, the relatively-modest privacy protections had broad bipartisan consumer support (our collective disdain for Comcast magically bridges the partisan divide). As a result, when the FCC's rules died, more than a dozen states rushed in to craft their own privacy rules that largely mirror the discarded FCC protections.And while that creates the problem of multiple, potentially discordant (or just plain bad) state laws, that's probably something the broadband industry should have thought about before paying Congress to axe the FCC's privacy rules.Obviously worried that states would step up and protect consumers where the FCC will not, ISP allies like Marsha Blackburn quickly got to work trying to pass new federal regulation that pretends to address privacy concerns, but is being designed primarily to pre-empt state efforts on this front. FCC boss Ajit Pai, who has previously defended protectionist ISP-written state laws as a "states rights" issue, suddenly turned on a dime here, stating he would be exploring ways to use FCC authority to keep states from protecting consumer privacy in the wake of repealing the FCC's privacy rules.In California, Assemblyman Ed Chau introduced AB 375 (pdf) earlier this year. AB 375 mirrors the FCC proposal in that it requires that ISPs transparently disclose what private data is being collected and sold, while requiring ISPs provide working opt out tools. In some ways it goes further than the FCC's proposal, in that it specifically bans ISPs from charging broadband subscribers more money to protect their privacy -- something both AT&T and Comcast have flirted with. Needless to say, large ISP lobbyists are desperate to prevent this law from taking root.The EFF has been documenting this week all of the misleading claims being made by ISP lobbyists as they attempt to scuttle the legislation. The ISPs, with their rich history of violating consumer trust on this subject, are telling the California legislature that privacy protections aren't necessary because ISPs have done nothing wrong. That ignores how Verizon was caught covertly modifying packets to track users around the internet, how ISPs have hijacked search queries for financial gain, how AT&T and Comcast made efforts to charge more for privacy, and how ISPs made efforts to use credit data to offer lower quality customer service to less affluent customers.Again, these behaviors are all symptoms of a broader disease that nobody in either political party really wants to fix for fear of upsetting powerful campaign contributors: a lack of broadband competition. And while these regulatory patches certainly aren't ideal, until we actually decide to do something about a lack of competition -- these protections are/were the only thing standing between your family and Comcast's ability to nickel and dime the living hell out of you in a rotating array of creative new ways.The EFF notes that in addition to ignoring obvious, documented history (not even mentioning AT&T's cozy relationship with the NSA), AT&T lobbyists are also pushing the narrative that the state law isn't necessary because FTC authority over broadband providers is plenty good enough moving forward:

For years now, large ISPs like Comcast have tried to have it both ways on net neutrality. They consistently profess to support the concept of net neutrality, but they don't want any meaningful rules actually holding them to their word on the subject. And if there are rules, they want them to be so loophole-filled as to be utterly useless. That's effectively what the FCC's initial 2010 rules did, and that's why companies like Comcast are now pushing to have the tougher 2015 rules killed and replaced with a new net neutrality law they know either won't happen, or will be quite literally written by the industry itself.This have your cake and eat it too approach continued in this week's Comcast comment on the FCC's proceeding to kill net neutrality. In it, Comcast again pats itself on its back for the company's non-existent dedication to net neutrality, uses industry-paid economists to falsely claim net neutrality rules hurt broadband investment, and trots out all manner of flimsy justifications for the kind of feeble rules that look meaningful to the nation's nitwits, but allow Comcast the leeway to act anti-competitively whenever it likes.One long-standing ploy used by giant ISPs to scare people into compliance is to argue that net neutrality rules will somehow prevent ISPs from prioritizing medical network traffic. That point was most starkly made when Verizon tried to argue that net neutrality protections would hurt the deaf and disabled by preventing ISPs from being able to prioritize needed communications tools. That's never actually been a problem, and every set of rules we've had so far carves out obvious, glaring exceptions to these services. But that didn't stop Comcast from trotting out this bogeyman once again in its FCC filing (pdf):

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DHS boss John Kelly continues to push for ultimate government intrusiveness, whether at the borders where the CBP will handle the getting all up in your everything, or at airports, where the TSA will examine the hell out of travelers' electronics while overlooking explosives, guns, and other more dangerous contraband.The DHS is no longer perched atop a slippery slope. It's enthusiastically sliding down it with both hands in the air. The Center for Democracy and Technology asked the DHS the same questions a few legislators have: what are you doing to protect the rights of US citizens at the border? The answer, in the form of a noncommittal letter, is an official shrug of indifference.

As most of you probably noticed, last week saw a massive, online protest against FCC boss Ajit Pai's plan to completely ignore consumer welfare and gut popular net neutrality protections. Giant ISPs like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon responded to the protest in the way they've always done: by comically insisting that the press somehow got it wrong, and these companies actually really love net neutrality -- despite a decade of documented anti-competitive behavior, and the fact they've spent millions upon millions of dollars trying to kill any meaningful neutrality protections.AT&T took things a bit further by hysterically saying the company loved net neutrality so much, it too would be participating in the protest -- a PR ploy that was pretty soundly ridiculed by ourselves and others. But a deeper look at AT&T's "participation" in the protest found that AT&T used the opportunity to trick its customers into opposing real net neutrality protections -- and convinced many to root against their own self interests.The Verge was the first to notice that AT&T spent the day sending e-mails and other notifications to customers professing the company's dedication to net neutrality. These missives even showed up on AT&T set top boxes, as several users noted on Twitter:

It looks like China is continuing to set the gold standard for internet censorship. For a long time, the Great Firewall has been actively censoring content based on keywords. Activists and dissidents have worked around this filtering by placing text in images, but that doesn't appear to be working nearly as well as it used to.Toronto's Citizen Lab noticed some unusual things happening in days surrounding the death of China's only Nobel Peace Prize winner (and longtime political prisoner), Liu Xiaobo.

One point I fear doesn't get made enough when it comes to trademark law is that trademarks ought to be both unique and specific in order to fulfill the law's purpose of keeping the public from being confused as to the origins of goods and services. There's a level of nuance severely lacking in the way trademarks are both granted and enforced such that the law is used far less for the benefit of the public than it is a revenue generator for those who would lock up common names and words. A perfect example of this would be the trademark application for "Elvis Juice" by the brewery BrewDog being blocked by the Elvis Presley Estate.Now, the last time we wrote about BrewDog, it was having its own issues with trademark enforcement. A pub in Birmingham had received a notice from the brewery's lawyers that it's planned name, The Lone Wolf, infringed on a spirit of the same name created by BrewDog. After the public backlash that ensued, BrewDog quite quickly backed off, both allowing the pub to keep its name while also publicly promising to leash the lawyers and only use them when truly warranted. This time, the shoe is on the other foot, with the Elvis Presley Estate blocking BrewDog's trademark application for "Elvis Juice", claiming that the public would associate the use of that somewhat common first name with the long-dead singer. The hearing officer for the UK Intellectual Property Office somehow agreed with this line of reasoning.

Some people get really worked up about fonts. Here, for example, is a thread on Reddit, spotted by Leigh Beadon, about the appearance of the serif font Cambria on the show "Better Call Saul". The problem is that the show is set in the years 2002 and 2003, while Cambria was designed in 2004. The (mock?) outrage about this slip-up is all good fun, but obviously nothing too serious. Unlike in Pakistan, where another apparent font faux pas is leading to calls for the country's prime minister to resign.As the Guardian explains, the daughter of Pakistan's prime minister is being investigated by the country's supreme court as a result of revelations in the Panama Papers that linked her to expensive properties in London. Documents produced in her defense had a slight problem, as spotted by font aficionados:

You may have heard the joke: the best way to do product design for Facebook is to get a job at Snapchat. We've all seen how, after failing to buy the company, Facebook has wasted little time in building its own versions of most of Snapchat's key features. So... is this a problem? That's the subject on this week's episode, were we discuss the ins and outs of this kind of copying and what it might mean for the future of social media.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.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just handed down a terrible decision in a fight against National Security Letter gag orders. The EFF has been working with plaintiffs Cloudflare and Credo Mobile to have these indefinite gag orders found unconstitutional.Unfortunately, there's still nothing hopeful on the horizon in terms of government transparency. The Appeals Court has upheld the lower court's decision, finding this form of prior restraint somehow Constitutional. From the decision [PDF]:

As you probably heard, over the weekend, famed filmmaker George Romero passed away. Romero's influence on film making is legendary -- and people today still seem amazed to find out that basically everything you think you know today about the concept of "zombies" exists almost entirely because of Romero and Night of the Living Dead. He really invented the entire genre, and the use of zombies as social commentary. But, perhaps just as importantly -- you may not realize that a big part of why Romero's vision of zombies as flesh/brain-eating undead creatures taking over the world -- is because his key movie is already in the public domain:

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The DOJ is in court arguing the use of Stingray devices by the FBI and local cops shouldn't require a warrant. The government's lawyers are fighting a suppression motion by Purvis Ellis, charged with racketeering and the attempted murder of a police officer.The events of the case happened in 2013, two years before the DOJ instructed federal agents to seek warrants when deploying Stingrays. For this investigation, the Oakland PD used a pen register order, as was the style at the time. (And perhaps still is. Despite the DOJ's internal instructions, warrant requirements are all but nonexistent when it comes to local law enforcement agencies' use of cell tower spoofers.)As Cyrus Farivar points out, the PD's Stingray couldn't locate Ellis, so it brought in the FBI. All without warrants and all without informing the defense about the additional Stingray deployment.

Yesterday we posted our comments to the FCC on net neutrality. Tons of others did as well, but I wanted to call out the comment submitted by Senator Ron Wyden. For two decades, Wyden has been a leading advocate of keeping the internet free from burdensome regulations, thus allowing tremendous innovation to occur. This echoes our position as well. However, both of us have advocated strongly for keeping the net neutrality rules in place. As we've pointed out, such rules are actually necessary in keeping the internet free and open -- because access to the internet has become dominated by just a tiny handful of giant companies with a history of bad behavior towards consumers, and repeated statements about plans to defy the internet's end-to-end principles.However, Wyden is particularly annoyed that FCC chair Ajit Pai uses Wyden's own words out of context to support his plan to do away with the open internet rules. You see, in Pai's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), he quotes a letter that Wyden sent back in 1998 about internet regulations:

Ever since social media sites like Facebook and Twitter became household names here in America, we've occasionally had really stupid debates about just what type of access to those accounts employers should get from their employees. Some states have even passed laws that would allow employers to demand social media passwords from employees and applicants, presumably so that company reps can comb through private messages and posts shared only with the employee's or applicant's friends. If all of that seems stupid to you, that's because it totally is!But it's not remotely as dumb as what the EU has decided to do in regulating corporations such that they are disallowed from viewing public social media information about an applicant unless it directly relates to the job for which they have applied. To be clear, this new regulation is non-binding at the moment, but it will be the basis of data protection laws set to come out in the future. Still, preventing a company from viewing publicly available information doesn't make much sense.

The sharing economy -- actually better-described as a rental economy -- is very much in vogue, inspired by the high-profile examples of Airbnb and Uber. But Western enthusiasm pales in comparison to that of Chinese entrepreneurs, who seem to have taken the view that the model will work for anything. For example, alongside the companies that rent out homes and cars, there are now some that will let you pick up an umbrella in a public spot, use it for a short while, and then return it. At least, that's the theory. But the South China Morning Post reports that the Sharing E Umbrella startup ran into a few problems:

In gaming circles, Capcom is often seen as the company that brought you the Street Fighter and Resident Evil series of games. More recently, Capcom has become notable for its Ace Attorney series of games as well. But in intellectual property circles, Capcom will always be the game studio that pimped SOPA to the public, foisted broken DRM on its customers, and treated Resident Evil customers both to a secondary-market killing DRM that allowed only one play-through of the game and the removal of promised features and only alerted customers to it after sales had begun rolling in. I think it's fair to say, in other words, that Capcom has been known to be almost cartoonishly pernicious.Speaking of which, Capcom also recently shut down a fan-translated play-through of an Ace Attorney game only available in Japan. Consistency!

Deescalation isn't something most police officers want to talk about -- especially those who allow their unions to do all their talking for them. But shootings by police have achieved critical mass, forcing the issue to be confronted by law enforcement officials. There are no national guidelines for force deployment. Local law enforcement agencies don't have much in the way of best practices or standards, pretty much allowing officers to decide how much force is necessary on their own, relative to the amount of "reasonable fear" officers can later credibly swear to in court.Cities and police departments may be forced to confront this sooner, rather than later, if for no other reason than to limit the bleeding -- both literally and metaphorically. Civil rights lawsuits are filed daily and settlement amounts continue to escalate. Officers in the US kill ~1,000 people per year, with that number being completely untethered from the "safety" of the job -- at least as compared to violent crime rates and/or officers being killed in the line of duty. Generally speaking, there's less crime in America than there has been for decades, but cops are "fearing for their safety" like it's 30 years ago.Over the past several days, police station CCTV video of a Bangkok police officer disarming a knife-wielding man has gone viral. Instead of greeting a threat with violence, Officer Anirut Malee greeted the potential attack with words… and neutralized the threat completely with a hug.For this act of bravery, Officer Malee was given an award by Thailand's national police chief. And he's become the unofficial poster boy for deescalation. Every situation is unique, some will argue, and what worked here won't work for every person wielding a weapon. This is true, but in the US almost every situation involving a mentally disturbed person carrying a weapon is handled the same way: with a deployment of force, most of it deadly. So, arguments about nuance are worthless in a law enforcement climate where officers are allowed to calm their nerves by firing guns.And the situation above really isn't that unique. A recent controversial killing involved mental distress and wielded knife. Only this one happened in Seattle, and ended in the shooting death of a pregnant woman.It's not as though the officers went into the situation unprepared. They were responding to Charleena Lyle's call to report a burglary. Audio recordings of the officers included discussions about her mental health issues and previous police interactions. And the seemingly-inevitable shooting was preceded by cops telling Lyle they weren't going to shoot her. This shooting took place under a DOJ consent decree meant to curb the use of excessive force by Seattle officers. It doesn't necessarily indicate the decree isn't working, but it definitely doesn't suggest the Seattle PD is approaching these sorts of situations with deescalation in mind.It's almost impossible to imagine a US law enforcement officer approaching a situation like that confronting Officer Malee without a weapon drawn and a whole lot of shouting. There's very little reason for officers to change their approach -- not with courts continually deferring to assertions of fear by police officers and cops who do deescalate situations being fired for supposedly endangering other officers.But the problem isn't just going to go away. Cities and PDs need to address this now, if for nothing other than purely mercenary reasons. It costs money to defend lawsuits and more money to pay settlements. Even if officials don't really care whether the police maintain a healthy relationship with the communities they serve, they can't keep asking taxpayers to pay for the sins of government employees -- not when there appears to be little effort made by these employees to improve the level of their service.

Earlier today, we published Mike Godwin's excellent post about why why everyone should file a comment with the FCC about their views on net neutrality (and, again, we highly recommend reading Gigi Sohn's excellent advice on what to include in your comment if you do). I see a lot of comments on that post with the defeatist and cynical response of "it doesn't matter, Pai's already decided what he's going to do."This is self-defeating, dumb and wrong for a variety of reasons. First, everyone was saying the same damn thing about Tom Wheeler three years ago, and that turned out to be wrong. Despite being a former lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries, and his initial indications that his proposed rules would be weak and allow all sorts of mischief, Wheeler was eventually convinced to go in a different direction. Second, this goes beyond just this current FCC. Even if (as is widely expected) Pai ignores these comments and reclassifies broadband anyway, there is still a court case that will follow -- as well as Congress considering what to do. In both cases, having strong, clearly thought out arguments concerning net neutrality on the record that we can show Pai ignored will help possibly stop Pai's plan from moving forward. Pai is not the end of the story.Third: it's the right thing to do. This is a chance to make your voice heard and participate in the process -- and you should take advantage of that. If you don't, and then you whine about how no one listens to you and how the bureaucrats and politicians don't pay attention to the people -- then you are a big part of the problem. You have a chance to weigh in here and you should.With that said, below is what I just submitted to the FCC. My comments talk about how we, as a company, have relied on an open internet, but also why the existing rules have shown real promise in increasing competition. But, more important, it also discusses why I changed my mind on this issue. Many people here -- even long term readers -- may forget that in the mid-2000s, Techdirt was against having official open internet rules, either via Congress or the FCC. We were afraid that these rules would be bad and harmful. We worried that they would be written in a way that would stifle internet innovation. And, most importantly, we felt that they were missing the point: that the true problem was the lack of competition in broadband access. If there was a real focus on competition, net neutrality would fade away as a problem, as there would be competitive reasons to keep the internet open.But, as we note in our comment, over the past couple decades things have changed. We've seen less and less competition, and now near-total domination of the broadband market by a few players. Even worse, those players have long histories of anti-consumer behavior and have repeatedly made it clear that they wish to end some of the basic principles of the open internet in order to put in place additional toll booths, charging extra to successful internet companies for merely carrying traffic. Finally, with the rules of 2015, we've seen a decrease in bad behavior by internet providers -- such as throttling Netflix upstream via interconnection disputes (even though that's not technically a part of the open internet rules). Similarly, we've seen that the new rules have inspired third parties like Sonic and Ting to increase their competitive broadband buildouts.Given all of that, while we're generally worried about any kind of "regulation" for the internet, this was a case where the market had clearly failed to deliver a truly competitive and innovative market, and light touch rules as blessed by multiple courts under a Title II regime clearly made sense, and they have been working for the past two years. Changing that now makes no sense. And if we could change our mind concerning such rules, so can the current FCC.

The weird and persistently silly copyright reform process in the EU Parliament continues to get more and more bizarre and stupid. Last month, we told you about the first committee vote, which we feared would be terrible, but turned out to be only marginally stupid, as the worst parts of the proposal were rejected. Now, two more committees -- the Culture and Education (CULT) and Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) Committees -- have voted on their own reform proposals and the results are really, really bad if you support things like culture, education, research and the public. And, yes, I get the irony of the fact that the Culture and Education Committee in the EU just declared a giant "fuck you" to culture and education with its vote.Among the many problematic aspects approved by these committees is a filter requirement that would block users from uploading legally obtained media into the cloud. This makes no sense -- especially given that the EU already has additional "you must be a pirate" taxes on situations where individuals are making copies of their legally acquired works.And then there's the whole "snippet tax" which legacy newspapers are demanding because they've failed to adapt to the digital age, and they want Google News to send them money for daring to send them traffic without monetary compensation. The whole concept is backwards... and here, it's been expanded. As Copybuzz explains:

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The global war against privacy tools, VPNs and encryption continues utterly-unhinged from common sense, and the assault on consumer privacy remains a notably global affair. Reddit users recently noticed that India's fifth largest ISP, YOU Broadband, is among several of the country's ISPs that have been trying to prevent customers from using meaningful encryption. According to the company's updated terms of service, as a customer of the ISP you're supposed to avoid using encryption to allow for easier monitoring of your online behavior:

Despite DHS hints that foreign airports were falling down on the "security theater" job, it appears a few customs officials are more than happy to engage in local versions of "extreme vetting." New Zealand customs officials are way ahead of the DHS in this department, having turned airports into rights-free zones where nearly anything can happen... to travelers.

Today is the deadline for the first round of the FCC's comment period on its attempt to roll back the 2015 open internet "net neutrality" rules. The deadline is partly meaningless, because there's a second comment period that is technically to respond to earlier comments -- but allows you to just file more comments. However, it is still important to make your voice heard no matter which side you're on. We'll be posting our own comments later today, but first, we wanted to share Mike Godwin's thoughtful discussion on why you should comment and why you should provide a thoughtful, careful "quality" comment, which he first posted to the R-Street blog, but which is being cross posted here.If you count just by numbers alone, net-neutrality activists have succeeded in their big July 12 push to get citizens to file comments with the Federal Communications Commission. As I write this, it looks as if 8 million or more comments have now been filed on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to roll back the expansive network-neutrality authority the commission asserted under its previous chairman in 2015.There's some debate, though, about whether the sheer number of comments—which are unprecedented not only for the FCC, but also for any other federal agency—is a thing that matters. I think they do, but not in any simple way. If you look at the legal framework under which the FCC is authorized to regulate, you see that the commission has an obligation to open its proposed rulemakings (or revisions or repeals of standing rules) for public comments. In the internet era, of course, this has meant enabling the public (and companies, public officials and other stakeholders) to file online. So naturally enough, given the comparative ease of filing comments online, controversial public issues are going to generate more and more public comments over time. Not impossibly, this FCC proceeding—centering as it does on our beloved public internet—marks a watershed moment, after which we'll see increasing flurries of public participation on agency rulemakings.Columbia University law professor Tim Wu—who may fairly be considered the architect of net neutrality, thanks to his having spent a decade and a half building his case for it—tweeted July 12 that it would be "undemocratic" if the commission ends up "ignoring" the (as of then) 6.8 million comments filed in the proceeding.

This week, after we talked about a worrying DMCA ruling for Zazzle, one commenter suggested that selling merchandise eliminates safe harbors, and compared it to an anime fan site. An anonymous reply won most insightful comment of the week by laying out the problems with that comparison:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, we saw the folks who had recently been defeated by the internet try to sneakily get their way. In Europe, that took the form of resurrecting the all-but-dead ACTA inside the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (and writing clueless columns, of course). In the US, it was Lamar Smith trying to sneak SOPA through in bits and pieces in other bills, seemingly having learned nothing from the experience. The public wasn't oblivious though, and soon a backlash led to some of the problems of CETA being fixed and Smith's new bill falling apart.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, webcasters lost their fight to delay a big royalty hike when the court denied the requested stay, but then SoundExchange surprised us all by actually being just a little bit decent and holding off on actually enforcing the royalties. Sony BMG tried to redirect some of the blame for its rootkit fiasco by suing a company that supplied one of the pieces of copy protection software, while the silly DRM game of AACS was serving only to annoy legitimate customers. And surprise, surprise: a study found ripped DVDs weren't even a big source of piracy compared to file sharing.Fifteen Years AgoThe battle over webcasting had already begun five years earlier in 2002, when it was clear that the labels wanted internet radio stations to go away. Meanwhile, after much concern about various pieces of bad internet legislation, it looked like Congress wasn't going to be moving on any of it anytime soon — but that didn't mean we could ignore a new bad bill that would basically eliminate people's fair use rights, which was unsurprising at a time when it looked like only one person in all of Congress really understood or cared about user rights.Also this week in 2002, in a move that would further cement them both as tentpole internet platforms for years to come, eBay bought PayPal.

Trump's pick to head the FBI -- former DOJ prosecutor Christopher Wray -- appeared before the Senate to answer several questions (and listen to several long-winded, self-serving statements). Wray's confirmation hearing went about as well as expected. Several senators wanted to make sure Wray's loyalty lay with the nation rather than the president and several others hoped to paint him into a Comey-bashing corner in order to belatedly justify Trump's firing of his (potential) predecessor.Wray also spent a lot of time not talking about things he claimed he was unfamiliar with -- covering everything from presidential directives, to Donald Trump Jr.'s Russian emails, to questions about CIA human rights violations that went unnoticed/unprosecuted during his tenure in the DOJ.Sen. Orrin Hatch -- as he did during a recent Comey hearing -- brought up the subject of encryption. Hatch claims he "agrees with Tim Cook," which places him in opposition to Sens. Feinstein and Burr. It also puts him in opposition of the possible new FBI boss, who had this to say about encryption. (h/t Politico's Eric Geller)

The last thing anyone heard about Five Eyes surveillance partnerships via official channels was more than seven years ago. In the intervening years, leaked documents have shed a little light on the information sharing Five Eyes countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) engage in. But the last Five Eyes agreement released is now more than 60 years old.

Man's best friend remains a cop's worst enemy. At least, that's what the numbers appear to show. Cops claim the job is dangerous -- hence the ~1,000 people killed every year by law enforcement officers. Trigger-happy cops: "Hold our beer."

About a month ago, Buzzfeed's founder and CEO, Jonah Peretti summed up my feelings about watching old news media organizations running around everywhere blaming Google and Facebook for their own failure to innovate:

Oh boy. It's no secret that the Australian government -- led by George Brandis (who has made it abundantly clear he has no clue what a VPN is or what metadata is) -- is pushing strongly for mandated backdoors to encryption. At this point, it's beating a dead horse, but this is a very, very bad idea for a whole host of reasons -- mainly having to do with making absolutely everyone significantly less safe.And it appears that Brandis' ignorance has moved up the chain of command. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has now put out what may be the single dumbest statement on encryption yet (and that's a pretty high bar). After being told yet again that safe encryption backdoors violate basic mathematics, Turnbull became super patriotic about the ability of Australian law to trump mathematics:

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