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As you are likely already aware, there is something of a debate about debates that occur on college campuses these days. Amidst a climate of ultra-polarized politics, there have been several high profile incidents on college campuses involving a revolt by student bodies -- and, allegedly, outside troublemakers -- over specific speakers invited onto campus and topics opened for debate. In reaction to these revolts that generally end with colleges uninviting speakers, some states have decided to try to legislate against this sort of thing in the name of free speech. It's one of those unhappy circumstances in which everyone on every side appears to be wrong. Student revolts and petitions to uninvite speakers are themselves a form of speech and worthy of protection, even if that sort of thing is antithetical to the university experience and ultimately works counter to the aims of the students doing the revolting. Meanwhile, the uninvited and their supporters are shouting about censorship in a way that suggests their views must be tolerated without reaction, which is a complete misunderstanding of how free speech works. As for the politicians, the haphazard decision to legislate on matters of speech in this matter betrays a lack of understanding of how sacred our free expression laws are in America and the care with which any lawmakers ought to take on the topic.For an example of that, we need only look to Wisconsin, where a bill is being considered in reaction to all of this that would essentially force universities to take no position on any current topic that can be seen as controversial. School administrators are rightly concerned about the laughably vague language in the bill.

The TSA continues to expand the intrusiveness of its searches, supposedly justified by an increased threat to air travel that doesn't seem to have materialized. In fact, the TSA has admitted attacks on airplanes are the threat voted Least Likely To Occur. One only needs to look at the recent string of terrorist attacks to see there are far more efficient ways to attack the populace than purchasing a ticket and making your way past security.Nevertheless, the charade continues, only with more of it as often as possible. Fliers are now being asked to stow explosive batteries in the cargo hold and liquid limits are still being enforced to ensure dangerous things like medication and breast milk aren't brought on board.Now, the TSA wants to know what you're reading. As airlines have increased rates for checked bags, travellers are packing more and more into their carry-on luggage. This is causing problems for the TSA's X-ray machines, which are having more trouble discerning what's actually being carried in passengers' bags. The densest materials are the hardest to "see" through, so TSA agents will now be demanding access to reading materials travelers are carrying.

There's been no unified push for encryption backdoors from world leaders, but the number of those suggesting it might be a good idea has increased in recent months. UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently said terrorists shouldn't be allowed to use Whatsapp to hide their conversations from law enforcement even as her own party members routinely use the app to engage in secure communications. Newly-elected French president Emmanuel Macron said basically the same thing while campaigning, stating a preference for compelled access to encrypted communications.Shortly before he was shown the exit door, former FBI director James Comey floated the idea of an "international framework" for encryption backdoors. It appeared Comey realized he wasn't going to be able to sell this idea at home, so perhaps a little international peer pressure would push US legislators towards mandating lawful access.Comey may get his wish, even if he won't be able to take advantage of it himself. Australian Attorney General George Brandis is stating he'll be pushing for backdoors at the next Five Eyes meetup.

This week, there was lots of talk about the lawsuit against HBO's John Oliver from Bob Murray over a report about his coal company. There was some back-and-forth about Oliver's political leanings and the like, during which one anonymous commenter won most insightful comment of the week by cutting through some of the partisan fog:

Five Years AgoThe Charles Carreon saga continued this week in 2012, with a lawsuit against Matthew Inman and the charities he was raising money for. When the full details of the suit became public, so did all sorts of nuttiness contained therein. Inman came to the table with an open letter, telling Carreon to take some time off and cool down — but he didn't listen, and promised to subpoena Twitter and Ars Technica over a parody account mocking him. Finally, at the very end of the week, he admitted the initial lawsuit was a mistake — but kept on digging anyway with new bizarre theories and attacks.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, NBC was on a copyright warpath, trying to get the FCC to force ISPs to monitor traffic for infringement, and trotting out the now famously hilarious attempt to blame movie piracy for hurting corn farmers. Viacom was still going full-force against YouTube and bulldozing over fair use in the process, even as YouTube (which played a big role in ending P2P's dominance of web traffic) was unveiling its video editing tool to encourage more user-generated content. And EMI was oh-so-shockingly discovering that people responded positively to the sale of DRM-free music.Fifteen Years AgoThere are a variety of reactions I often have to these stories from these early days of Techdirt. Sometimes they include amusingly incorrect predictions or shockingly precise ones; sometimes it's simply intriguing to see the small beginnings of something that would later become a big deal. This week in 2002, there was one post that fell into that latter category in a particularly striking way that makes it very funny to read now in all its early innocence, and so I think it's worth reposting in full. In the days when the web was still fresh, before some of the bigger cyberwar panics, and long before today's perplexing geopolitical landscape, there was this small post entitled Can't Hack The Kremlin:

It ain't easy being a high-profile celebrity these days. A job that once mostly involved ducking cameras and putting out the occasional press release has evolved into one where multiple social media platforms must be updated so that fans feel that real connection that can only come with a carefully managed social media message. The brand is the ultimate product rather than any athletic or artistic output. To that end, even these social media messages come with sponsorships, carefully cultivated relationships with large companies itching to attach their names to well-followed celebrities and their social media accounts.Speaking of athletes, the NBA draft just happened. Many young men realized their dream to play in the NBA after years of hard work. Because they are young, many of those athletes have social media accounts with the expected platforms. And many of them posted messages about how happy they were with the draft day results. Like Markelle Fultz, for instance, who was drafted number one overall by the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers and immediately took to Instagram to let his fans know completely, organically and authentically how pleased he was.

App-maker King, of Candy Crush fame, has built up a reputation for itself as a trademark bully. The company has previously attempted to threaten pretty much any game or mobile app that utilizes the words "candy" or "saga." And if that sounds insane to you, you're not alone, as there have been several instances of severe backlash against how King goes about "protecting" its trademarks.As this site's version of the saying goes: live by the intellectual property, die by the intellectual property. Well, not die, perhaps, but it's slightly amusing to watch King have its "Crush" trademark opposed by Dr. Pepper.

See Something, Say Something (UK Edition) has arrived! In the wake of terrorist attacks, local law enforcement are urging people to report "suspicious" activities. There's a long list of things to be on the lookout for, but most notable is the call to view certain internet use as suspicious, as Joseph Cox reports.

So (for good reason), we keep noting that if you want to see how the American broadband market really works, you should take a close look at West Virginia. As in most states, a lack of competition keeps broadband prices high and speeds slow, with far too many consumers forced to pay a tidy sum for DSL speeds circa 2002. But the state has also been embroiled in scandal after scandal involving Frontier Communication's mismanagement of taxpayer subsidies that were intended to try and resolve this problem.Local Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre has quietly done an amazing job the last few years chronicling West Virginia's immense broadband dysfunction, from the State's use of broadband stimulus subsidies on unused, overpowered routers and overpaid, redundant consultants, to state leaders' attempts to bury reports supporting allegations that Frontier engaged in systemic, statewide fraud on the taxpayer dime.Eyre is back again directing readers to a new report by the US Commerce Department's Office of Inspector General (pdf) which found that Frontier pretty consistently tried to game the subsidy system, imposing various "loading" and "invoice processing" fees -- outlawed by federal grant rules governing stimulus funding -- on to invoices submitted to the state. Frontier consistently used these fees to pad their bills to the tune of $4.7 million, and internal memos feature employees clearly demonstrating that Frontier saw this bill padding as a way to glean some additional profit on the taxpayer's dime:

Everything anyone has ever said about staying safe while interacting with the police is wrong. That citizens are told to comport themselves in complete obeisance just to avoid being beaten or shot by officers is itself bizarre -- an insane inversion of the term "public servant." But Philando Castile, who was shot five times and killed by (now former) Officer Jeronimo Yanez, played by all the rules (which look suspiciously like the same instructions given to stay "safe" during an armed robbery). It didn't matter.Castile didn't have a criminal record -- or at least nothing on it that mattered. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been allowed to own a weapon, much less obtain a permit to conceal the gun. Castile told Yanez -- as the permit requires -- he had a concealed weapon. He tried to respond to the officer's demand for his ID, reaching into his pocket. For both of these compliant efforts, he was killed.Castile's shooting might have gone unnoticed -- washed into the jet stream of "officer-involved killings" that happen over 1,000 time a year. But his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, immediately live-streamed the aftermath via Facebook. Her boyfriend bled out while responding officers tried to figure out what to do, beyond call for more backup to handle a dead black man sitting in his own vehicle. Only after Yanez fired seven bullets into the cab of the vehicle did officers finally remove his girlfriend's four year old daughter.To "win" at killing citizens, you must start the spin immediately. Yanez spun his own, speaking to a lawyer less than two hours after killing Castile. Local law enforcement did the same thing. Documents obtained by Tony Webster show Special Agent Bill O'Donnell issued a warrant to Facebook for "all information retained" by the company on Diamond Reynolds, Castile's girlfriend. This was to include all email sent or received by that account, as well as "chat logs," which presumably means the content of private messages. The warrant also demands any communications that may have been deleted by Reynolds, as well as metadata on photos or videos uploaded to Facebook. It came accompanied with an indefinite gag order.Why would law enforcement want (much less need) information from the victim's girlfriend's Facebook account? It appears officers were looking to justify the killing after the fact. The following sworn statement was contained in the affidavit:

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Yesterday we wrote about coal company Murray Energy and its CEO, Bob Murray, actually following through and suing John Oliver -- something that Murray's lawyers had threatened to do when Oliver and his team had reached out to Murray for a piece Oliver was doing on coal. The result of being threatened was that Oliver spent nearly half of the 24 minute segment on Murray, carefully detailing some of Murray's history and positions. If you missed it, watch it again here:Anyway, when we wrote about the case yesterday, we noted that we had to do it based solely on the reporting of the Daily Beast, as they broke the story and -- for reasons I still don't understand -- refused to post the actual complaint. However, now we've obtained the full complaint and can dig in on how incredibly silly it is. It appears to be a quintessential SLAPP lawsuit, where the entire point is not to bring a legitimate cause of action, but to chill free speech that criticizes Bob Murray. As Ken "Popehat" White notes, it's "lawsuit as theater" and "an unapologetic political screed" -- that is, apparently designed to rile people up, rather than to present a reasonable legal argument.Let's dig in. It certainly starts out on a high note with the rhetoric:

Here on Techdirt we've written much about the way Western pharma companies fight for their "right" to charge unaffordable prices for medicines in emerging and developing economies. In particular, they routinely take governments and local generic suppliers to court in an attempt to shore up highly-profitable monopolies on life-saving drugs. But to be fair, it's not only poorer people who are dying as a result of Big Pharma's desire to maximize profits: Western drug companies are equally happy to charge even higher prices in richer countries -- notably in the US. That's old news. But there is a pharmaceutical saga unfolding that manages to combine all the worst aspects of this kind of behavior, and to throw in a few new ones.It concerns something really exciting and important: a vaccine that shows great promise against the devastating Zika virus, which can cause microcephaly, blindness, deafness, and calcification of the brain in children whose mothers were infected during their pregnancy. If effective, such a vaccine could be a tremendous boon not just for developing countries, but for Western ones too, since the Zika virus has already begun to spread in the US, and Europe. The vaccine was developed at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research, and the Department of the Army funded its development. Great news, you might think: the US public paid for it, so it's only right that it should have low-cost access to it. Moreover, as an act of compassion -- and to burnish its international image -- the US could allow other countries to produce it cheaply too. But an article in The Nation reports that the US Army has other ideas:

Wall Street is finally starting to realize there's a storm brewing on the horizon for the nation's biggest cable companies. Cable stocks took a notable dip this week after MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett downgraded the entire cable sector because of worries surrounding cord cutting and streaming video competition. Moffett, who not that long ago used to mock cord cutters for being irrelevant basement dwellers, has seen the light -- more recently noting that 2016's 1.7% decline in traditional cable TV viewers was the biggest cord cutting acceleration on record.And in a lengthy research note to investors this week, the analyst warned that the cable industry's approach to cord cutting (raising rates and offering horrible customer service while hoping it all works out) simply isn't going to cut it given the competitive threats to come:

The history of Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange is a tortured one, to be sure. Once the darling of the left for exposing important misdeeds by the American government, the site then became a tool for the right in the last Presidential election with the publishing of emails stolen in a hack of the DNC. From there, some have accused Wikileaks of being an arm of Moscow's intelligence efforts, while the America government has made noise about prosecuting the site and Assange under the Espionage Act. Still others support the site for its efforts in exposing the secrets governments wish to keep hidden from the citizens to whom they are beholden.Through it all, Assange and Wikileaks have remained firm in their mission to expose information and secrets that were previously kept from the public. Except, it seems, when that information has to do with Wikileaks itself. According to the makers of a documentary about Wikileaks entitled Risk, on the topic of Wikileaks, Wikileaks is chiefly interested not in open journalism and unvarnished truth, but rather on its own image. And apparently the site is willing to wield legal threats and lawyers in a way that is almost absurdly hypocritical.

Facial recognition software is getting to the point where there are some very interesting things that can be done with it in everyday life. That includes really bad ideas like enabling the police to run record checks on everyone who passes in front of their body-worn cameras. But it also means that businesses can start applying the technology in novel ways. Here's what is happening on a trial basis in some German supermarkets and post offices, as reported by Deutsche Welle:

The Miami-Dade Police Department has decided to drop its wide-area surveillance plan in the face of public backlash. The MDPD tried to slip it past residents and the county government by claiming the acquisition of a secret spy plane was too important to be done properly.

With the ubiquity of social media presence in people's daily lives, the past few years has seen the rise of concern over people's privacy of their social media accounts, as well as concern over how content shared on those accounts could be used against the account holder. In America, this commonly breaks mostly into concerns about prospective employers reviewing social media accounts during the hiring process and how government reviews social media accounts for law enforcement purposes. While there are real concerns to be had in both cases, however, it's useful to be reminded that there are places where it is so much worse. Useful in that it's good to be reminded what privacy advocates are fighting to keep us from. Such as death.In Pakistan, the government there has reached the unfortunate milestone of sentencing its first ever person to death over content he put on Facebook.

Under the guise of fighting sex trafficking, legislators have been offering up a slew of bills that will make things much worse for plenty of people not involved in this heinous crime. Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who is the go-to expert on all sorts of government abuse done in the name of sex-trafficked children, has tallied up the current stack of legislative paperwork floating around the halls of Congress. Spoiler alert: it's a lot.

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We've covered a lot of ridiculous defamation lawsuits here at Techdirt. A ton. MANY. We like covering them so much we bought the company. But this defamation lawsuit passed on to us by Adam Steinbaugh is just baffling. Even more baffling, it's been filed with professional representation. Its attempt to fashion a libel lawsuit out of nothing bears far more resemblance to those filed by plaintiffs with fools for lawyers.In March of last year, Jim Myers of the The Tennessean wrote an article about some staff changes at a local university's culinary arts program. If this seems like extraordinarily innocuous subject matter, you're obviously not former director Tom Loftis or his legal representation. Loftis has formally shouted "defamation" in a crowded courthouse. But his accusations aren't levied against Myers or The Tennessean, but rather against someone featured in the article: new culinary arts director Randy Rayburn.His complaint [PDF] tries to turn Rayburn into the libelous villain by attributing things Myers wrote about Loftis and Rayburn into direct quotes by Rayburn.

Some enterprising Colorado residents have turned a small tech panic into a stupid ballot measure. (via Free Range Kids)Dr. Timothy J. Farnum apparently doesn't like the way his teenaged kids act. He blames this on smartphones.

Back when Verizon first began expressing interest in pivoting from broadband duopolist to media and advertising, you might recall that it launched a short-lived technology blog named Sugarstring. Sugarstring quickly made headlines for all the wrong reasons however, after it was revealed that Verizon was banning any new hires from writing about hot-button subjects like net neutrality, or the fact that companies like Verizon and AT&T are now bone-grafted to the nation's intelligence and surveillance apparatus.Sugarstring is long-since dead, replaced in large part by Verizon's acquisitions of Yahoo and AOL, which also brought Huffpo, Engadget, and Techcrunch under the Verizon umbrella. And while Verizon itself has been busy using fake reporters to blatantly lie about the company's ongoing role in killing net neutrality, there's no indication (yet) that the company has pressured any of its own news outlets to quiet down on the subject. In fact, we've noted previously that some of the best reporting on net neutrality in recent months has originated at TechCrunch (this piece in particular is worth a read).But while Verizon hasn't yet tried to get its own news outlets to quiet down on net neutrality, other now-Verizon-owned companies that used to be very active on the subject have gone dead quiet. Case in point: Tumblr, which was an integral ally in the SOPA/PIPA fight and an outspoken protector of net neutrality, is now utterly radio silent as FCC boss Ajit Pai attempts to kill the popular consumer protections. Insiders at the company this week expressed their concern to the Verge that Verizon is pressuring CEO David Karp to keep his mouth shut on the subject:

This one is clearly no surprise at all, given that -- as we wrote about just a couple days ago -- Bob Murray and his company Murray Energy were threatening John Oliver with a SLAPP suit if Oliver's satirical report about the coal industry was used to "defame, harass, or otherwise injure Mr. Murray or Murray Energy." Of course, Oliver's report did no such thing... but, alas, Murray has now sued Oliver, HBO, Time Warner... and the writers of the story. The lawsuit was filed in West Virginia state court. In my original post, I suggested it might be filed in Ohio, where Murray Energy is headquartered, but it does also have operations in West Virginia as well. Either way, as with Ohio, West Virginia is a state with no anti-SLAPP law.Unfortunately, I don't have the full lawsuit. The Daily Beast, which first wrote about the case has chosen -- for whatever reason -- not to post the document, which is pretty lame. However, having watched the John Oliver piece multiple times, I can't see how any of it comes anywhere even remotely near defamatory. It falls into a variety of clearly protected categories, including opinion, satire and rhetorical hyperbole. The idea that there were materially false and defamatory statements that were put forth knowing they were false (or with reckless disregard for the truth) is laughable. There is no way that this lawsuit succeeds -- but, as we've been pointing out -- that's not really the point of most of these kinds of lawsuits. SLAPP lawsuits are designed to create a chill on free speech, by making that speech costly. Obviously, HBO/Time Warner can afford this, and have access to great lawyers, so there's almost no chance that Murray wins the lawsuit, but that's not the point. It will still cost money and lots of time to deal with the lawsuit and that's a hassle.Murray Energy put out a bizarre statement that does little to support the idea that Murray has an actual case here:

Remember CETA, the "Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement" between the EU and Canada? After years of on-off moments, including one last burst of uncertainty in March of this year, it finally seemed that everything had been settled, and that the deal would soon come into force. But it turns out that there is another, hitherto-unsuspected problem -- cheese:

The Orange County (CA) District Attorney's office remains in the news. It's not often an entire prosecutors' office gets booted off a high-profile murder case, but that's what happens when misconduct occurs on a massive scale. An open-and-shut murder case with eight victims is now the DA's perpetual nightmare. Judge Thomas Goethals kicked the agency to the curb after uncovering repeated discovery violations committed by prosecutors.But the problems go back further than this case. The office has hidden the existence of a law enforcement database from defense lawyers (and judges) for a quarter century -- a database holding all sorts of information about jailhouse snitches that may have made the difference in a number of cases.A quarter-century of obfuscation followed by outright lying on the stand by prosecution witnesses is something you'd think would be addressed by a swift housecleaning. You'd be wrong. So far, there have been no announcements from the DA about pending investigations -- either into its own misconduct, or the repeated abuses of the jail's snitch program run by the local sheriff's office.Add to that yet another revelation from the current criminal case: the sheriff's office shredded documents ahead of an announced investigation by the DOJ.

While Congress is still doing its thing to try to make the US healthcare system an even bigger laughingstock around the world, the White House is apparently considering an executive order targeting high drug prices. Of course, it handed this power over to Joe Grogan, a (very recent) former lobbyist for a giant pharma company, Gilead, that has been at the center of some controversy over its highly priced drugs. Grogan is apparently leading this effort despite not having an ethics waiver, which means he's supposed to recuse himself from these discussions, rather than lead them. But, you know, that's not happening in the swampy, swampy waters of Washington DC. So just what would Grogan suggest as a way to lower drug prices? How about extending pharmaceutical patents? Yes. Extending.

James Comey may have been unceremoniously dumped by the Commander-in-Chief, but his device encryption legacy lives on.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the details of the Supreme Court's ruling in Packingham v. North Carolina -- the case that said a North Carolina law that barred convicted sex offenders from using social media was unconstitutional. There were some good lines in the ruling, but this may be the most important:

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In addition to high costs and the slow pace of digging up streets, one of the reasons Google Fiber is contemplating a pivot from fiber to next-gen wireless broadband is the boring old utility pole. As it stands now, new market competitors often have to navigate an archaic, elaborate and expensive process to attach fiber to poles. Quite often, attaching fiber requires having any other ISPs in the area notified in writing, then waiting for each one to move their own equipment piecemeal, one of several bureaucratic processes incumbents have long abused to slow down the arrival of new competitors.When Google Fiber began more seriously deploying fiber, it proposed new "one touch make ready rules" in many municipalities. Under these revised rules, a licensed, insured third-party contractor is allowed to move any equipment on utility poles with owner approval. In many instances, these contractors are the very same ones used by large ISPs themselves. The regulatory reform is estimated to streamline the pole attachment process by six months to a year.But because this regulatory reform would make it easier for broadband competitors to come to market, large ISPs like AT&T, Comcast and Charter (Spectrum) decided to sue cities like Louisville and Nashville for proposing such reforms. Of course these regional mono/duopolies can't admit they're predominately motivated by anti-competitive reasons, so they've tried to argue they're simply worried that the reform will cause rampant outages (again, these are licensed, insured contractors already employed by many ISPs). Charter even tried to claim the reforms violated its First Amendment rights.But something shifted this week in this long-standing, if under-noticed and important debate. Verizon has decided to buck AT&T and Comcast, and has published a blog post throwing its full-throated support behind Google's one touch utility pole reform (though you'll note they're careful not to mention their arch-nemisis Google by name). Verizon is quick to highlight the often-absurd bureaucracy at the heart of this process:

Distracted driving laws and the crusade against distractions in the car have a history that goes back many years. Generally, the trend has been to try to ban each new distraction that comes along, and to seek to place the blame on device makers and automakers for not figuring out how to reliably disable those devices. There was even a ruling in California that made it illegal for a driver to use a mapping app. But now, the state of Colorado has done something unexpected, and perhaps even... reasonable.The state has made it legal to text while behind the wheel, unless it's done in a "careless or imprudent manner." While the new law does give a reprieve to those who use their phones in a safe manner (e.g., while at red light, or stopped in traffic), it also significantly increases the penalties for those who run afoul of the "carelessness" provision. As we've written before, there are many potential distractions inside a vehicle, and eliminating them all would be impractical, if not impossible. So this new law puts the focus on the dangerous behavior instead of the potential distraction itself, holding the driver responsible for unsafe actions.

Prosecutors seeking to justify a lengthy sentence (and the abuses that had already occurred) in the Chelsea Manning case insisted the documents she leaked had caused serious damage to those exposed by them. They said this even as multiple government officials admitted the most the United States had suffered was some embarrassment.Jason Leopold has obtained an official assessment of the Manning leaks which shows the same thing: no real damage was done.

Whether it's rolling back already agreed upon merger conditions, killing net neutrality, or eliminating broadband privacy protections, giant ISP lobbyists are having a field day under the Trump administration, slowly but surely stripping away oversight of one of the least competitive -- and most anti-competitive -- sectors in American industry. We've noted repeatedly that as giant cable providers like Comcast nab an ever larger monopoly over next-gen broadband services, the end result of this myopic pursuit will be even higher rates -- and even worse customer service -- for everyone.But there's a problem in this quest to create a new, golden era of telecom sector monopoly dysfunction: individual states.In the wake of the attack on the FCC privacy rules, more than a dozen states have rushed to enact new privacy protections for consumers, requiring that ISPs are very clear about what data they're collecting and who they're selling it to. And in the wake of federal apathy to consumer complaints about some of the worst customer service in any industry, individual states have also started pushing back, as evidenced by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's lawsuit against Charter Communications for advertising speeds company execs knew they couldn't deliver.Ironically, cable lobbyists (and the politicians, sock puppets, think tankers and policy wonks paid to love them) have quickly rushed to defend "states' rights!" when it comes to giant ISPs' ability to write protectionist state laws that hamper broadband competition. But now that several states are actually passing legislation that might help consumers, the broadband industry and current FCC have launched a concerted effort to keep states from meddling in their attempts to build utterly-unaccountable media, advertising, broadband and television conglomerates.Case in point: the FCC is already making noise about their plans to somehow prevent states from passing consumer broadband privacy laws. And last week, cable industry lobbyists began petitioning the FCC in the hopes of making it much more difficult for states to investigate claims of substandard broadband service and speeds, allowing them to hide behind the "up to" marketing language most of us are familiar with:

It seems like not a week can go by without some silly trademark dispute in the alcohol industries. This latest example comes to us from Ireland and provides a vivid demonstration for why trademarks ought to only be granted on unique and original names and not, say, on a mark based on common geography.Leo Mansfield of the Connemara region of Ireland opened a storefront business and called it "Conn O'Mara" after the titular fictional character he created as something of a mascot for the store. He registered the name "Conn O'Mara" as a trademark in 2009, as well as the logo for the Conn O'Mara character he created. All of this is perfectly original stuff, a fun and fictionalized nod to the Irish region where the storefront is located. In 2015, however, Mansfield decided to release a line of craft beer through the store as well and filed for a trademark on the name and logo to be used on his brews. Beam Suntory, headquartered in Chicago with two distilleries in Ireland, filed a notice of opposition to Mansfield's trademark, claiming that it has a registered mark for "Connemara" for the liquor marketplace.

This past weekend on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, he took on the issue of "coal" and some politicians' obsession with coal jobs as the only true "American" jobs. The whole segment is interesting, but obviously not the kind of thing we'd normally write up. What we do frequently write about, however, is censorious threats, often from wealthy execs, designed to try to silence people from commenting on issues regarding those doing the threatening. And, it appears that's exactly what happened with coal exec Bob Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, when he found out that John Oliver was doing a segment that included some bits about Murray.I recommend watching the whole thing, but the parts about Murray include a brief bit around 4:45 in the video and then a much longer section starting around 12:30 in the video, where Oliver notes:

This week's episode is all about copyright and culture, with a pair of the best guests you could ask for on the subject. Almost ten years ago, law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins released a comic book about copyright called Bound By Law, and now they are back with a sequel: Theft: A History of Music. This week, James and Jennifer join us to discuss the new comic and the history of copyright and music (with lots of fair use music snippets to demonstrate the legacy of 'theft')!You should also be sure to check out the comic itself! You can download a digital copy for free of course, but for those who want to get their hands on the beautiful paperback edition, we've got a limited time offer for Techdirt fans: you can get it for only $8.99 at Createspace (that's 40% off!) when you use the discount code 2FESBPRQ within the next two weeks. It's also available on Amazon with a free Kindle edition included when you buy.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.

Going all the way back to 2002 (and many times after that), we've talked about courts struggling with whether or not it's okay to ban people from the internet after they've committed a crime. The question comes up in many different cases, but most prevalently in cases involving child predators. While courts have struggled with this issue for so long, it's only now that the Supreme Court has weighed in and said you cannot ban someone from the internet, even if they're convicted of horrific crimes -- in this case, sex crimes against a minor. The case is Packingham v. North Carolina, and the Supreme Court had to determine if it violated the First Amendment's free speech clause and the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause, to make it a felony for convicted sex offenders to visit social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as was the case under a North Carolina law.In this case, Lester Packingham is a convicted sex offender for an event that happened back in 2002. In 2010, he went on Facebook to brag about getting a traffic ticket dismissed -- using his middle name as his last name. A local police officer saw the post and connected the dots to figure out that the poster "J.R. Gerard" was actually Lester Gerard Packingham and charged him with violating that NC law on using social media as a sex offender. Various state courts went back and forth with the NC Supreme Court eventually saying that the law was "constitutional in all respects." The Supreme Court of the United States, however, did not agree.The ruling is interesting on a number of levels. It cites, pretty directly, EFF's amicus brief, noting just how important and central to our lives sites like Facebook have become.

You've probably heard about the horrific tragedy in the UK of the Grenfell Tower fire that killed many people. There are all sorts of awful stories related to the tragedy, but there is one that hits close to home: the use of SLAPP threats to silence residents who warned about fire dangers in the building. You see, a group of residents in the building who were concerned about safety issues, calling themselves the Grenfell Action Group have been blogging about problems in the building for years -- including this horrifyingly prescient blog post from last November, which included the following paragraphs:

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If you wanted even more leeway for government officials to bypass accountability, you've got it. Courtesy of the US Supreme Court, the immunity for federal officials has just been expanded. On a day when the court handed down two significant First Amendment victories, the court has dialed back an avenue of redress for people whose rights have been violated by federal employees.This case has its origins in the 2001 Twin Towers attack. In the wake of the attack, the government engaged in some questionable behavior (not unlike some of its World War II actions), rounding up undocumented Arab immigrants and detaining them under harsh conditions.When they were finally released, they sued the US government for violating their rights. Unfortunately, options for directly suing federal officers are severely limited. Up until the Supreme Court's 1971 Bivens decision, plaintiffs had almost no way to seek redress for rights violated by federal employees. Bivens produced a new option, but its limited scope still made it very difficult for plaintiffs to secure a ruling in their favor. It's especially useless in cases like the one before the Supreme Court -- a case where the plaintiffs have no other way to bring a suit against the government other than going the Bivens route, thanks to their status as undocumented aliens at the time the rights violations allegedly occurred.This new decision limits Bivens even further by adding national security concerns to the mix. In cases like these -- prompted by federal government reactions to a domestic terrorist attack -- the Supreme Court comes down on the side of the US government. But it's not just national security playing a limiting factor in seeking justice for violated rights. It's pretty much any case where the government hasn't seen this particular sort of violation before.Cornell law prof Michael Dorf points out how severely restricting this ruling is for plaintiffs who have a single recourse option available to them:

If there's any real creativity in the broadband sector, it often has little to do with the actual products and services offered. More often than not, the real creativity in the sector involves finding ingenious new ways to bilk consumers out of additional money, or charge them significantly more money for the exact-same service. Whether talking about hidden below the line fees or arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps, the lack of real broadband competition has resulted in a gold rush -- at least when it comes to creatively-misleading charges.CenturyLink (the end product of a series of telecom sector mergers involving Embarq, Qwest and CenturyTel) has already pursued usage caps and overage fees, as well as an incredibly misleading, unnecessary and nonsensical "Internet cost recovery fee" it tacks on to the bottom of every broadband bill. But the company is now being accused of taking things notably further. One former employee has filed suit in Arizona, accusing the company of signing up subscribers for a rotating crop of services they didn't want and didn't order -- simply to help company reps meet sales targets.Former customer service agent and case plaintiff Heidi Heiser says she and other support reps began noticing that consumers were being signed up for lines or services they didn't order, and that company higher ups didn't seem to much care:

It appears the NSA hasn't learned much since Ed Snowden left with several thousands of its super-secret documents. Agency officials were quick to claim the leaks would cause untold amounts of damage, but behind the scenes, not much was being done to make sure it didn't happen again.A Defense Department Inspector General's report obtained via FOIA lawsuit by the New York Times shows the NSA fell short of several security goals in the post-Snowden cleanup. For an agency that was so concerned about being irreparably breached, the NSA still seems primed for more leakage. Charlie Savage reports:

Sometimes I think purgatory must be filing a lawsuit over a wrongful DMCA takedown notice. I'm pretty sure that's how Stephanie Lenz feels. After all, she's been fighting against Universal Music issuing a bogus DMCA takedown against her dancing baby, and I'm pretty sure that "baby" will be graduating high school before too long. Last we'd checked in, the Supreme Court was debating hearing the appeal in the case, and had asked the White House to weigh in. The White House responded last month with a truly bizarre argument, agreeing that the 9th Circuit's ruling contained a "significant legal error" but said that this case was "not a suitable vehicle for correcting that mistake."Whether it was for that reason or for no reason at all, the Supreme Court has now decided not to hear the appeal, meaning that the case is back (once again) in District Court, where it may actually go to trial to determine if Universal Music knew that the video was fair use when it issued the initial takedown.As we've discussed time and time again, this particular case is an important one, if Section 512(f) of the DMCA -- the part that says you cannot file bogus DMCA takedowns -- is to have any teeth. The problem, right now is that there are piles upon piles of abusive DMCA takedowns, targeting all sorts of content that is perfectly legitimate and non-infringing. Yet, because there is basically no punishment for issuing such takedowns, they continue. Unfortunately, this particular case keeps coming out with "mixed bag" rulings that probably won't help very much in the long term. While we may have hoped that the Supreme Court would clear things up and make sure 512(f) actually does its job, it appears that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

It's not like we need any more evidence showing asset forfeiture has almost nothing to do with enforcing laws or breaking up criminal organizations. But law enforcement agencies just keep generating damning data.The Charleston Post and Courier's article on the subject runs under an innocuous title that seems to put the blame on the federal government for the asset forfeiture sins of local police, but the article tells a completely different story. The officers and officials quoted in the story make noises about taking down criminals, but the greedy devil is in the details.

Remember Rightscorp? This is the wannabe "friendlier" copyright troll, that sends smaller bills than the traditional copyright trolls. Over the years, it's actually struggled to make any money... and has struggled with some of its more bizarre legal theories. Unfortunately, in late 2015, one of Rightscorp's partners got a big ruling against Cox, arguing that Cox violated the DMCA by not properly terminating repeat infringers (as we noted at the time, this was based on a tortured interpretation of the law. The case is still winding its way through the appeals process, but Rightscorp and its partners have continued to push forward, using the ruling in that BMG v. Cox case to pressure others. At least one other ISP has already been sued.And, now, the company is out claiming that it's talking with "top ISPs" to get them to incorporate Rightscorp's copyright trolling efforts directly into their own infringement mitigation procedures:

We've written a few times now about the case involving the band "The Slants" and their fight against the US Patent and Trademark Office concerning whether or not the band could trademark its own name (and, yes, this case is indirectly tied to the fight over whether or not the Washington Redskins can keep its team name trademarked). The key issue is a part of trademark law -- §1052(a) -- that says that the USPTO can deny trademarks if they "disparage... or bring into contempt or disrepute... persons, living or dead." When we first came across this case, a few years back, I argued that this clause did not violate the First Amendment. My argument, originally, was that a failure to grant a trademark was not restricting speech in any way (in fact, it was the opposite -- it was allowing more speech, since the registered trademark could no longer be used to block the speech of others).But the issue is a tricky one, and after thinking about it more, reading much more and talking to a number of lawyers, my position shifted. And the hinge on which it shifted was this: the problem with 1052(a) was that it involved the government determining whether it "blessed" something with a trademark based on the content. And that, right there, has always been seen as a problem for the First Amendment. The government should not be making any subjective decisions based on expression -- and, yet, under 1052(a) it was. And now... the Supreme Court has agreed with that view and has struck down 15 USC 1052(a) as unconstitutional under the First Amendment, which makes this a big win for the First Amendment. And, on top of that, the Court went so far as to state upfront that a favorite claim of lots of angry people (on all sides of the political spectrum) these days -- that "hate speech" is somehow not "free speech" -- is simply untrue. The full ruling is 39 pages, which includes different Justices agreeing on some parts and not others, and writing separate concurring opinions -- but the overall point is clear. The court notes that the government, itself, is protected by the First Amendment and can take its own viewpoint on things, but this is different, because it's not content created by the government:

A GOP data firm has accepted responsibility for leaving the personal data of 198 million Americans (aka: most of the country's voting populace) openly accessible on an Amazon server in the biggest voter data leak in global history. Deep Root Analytics, the owner of the data, has long been contracted by the Republican National Committee to measure voter opinions on a wide variety of issues, from health care to gun control. As part of their contract with the RNC, the group pulls voter information from a wide variety of sources, ranging from Reddit to the Karl Rove super PAC American Crossroads.This data, which includes religious affiliation and ethnicity, is then utilized to help craft PR efforts and other messaging, as well as to determine turnout and voter preferences. And, according to analysis of the data and previous profiles of the company like this one over at Ad Age, this firm was hugely influential in getting Donald Trump's "populist" message out to voters during the last election cycle.But last week, UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered that Deep Root had been storing a massive amount of this data on Amazon servers, publicly accessible via the internet, with absolutely no apparent security precautions whatsoever:

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