Techdirt

Last week we noted how the FCC was acting incredibly suspicious in regards to its May claim that a DDOS attack, not annoyed John Oliver viewers, brought down the agency's website shortly after Oliver's latest rant on net neutrality. Despite pressure from journalists and several Senators, the FCC is simply refusing to release any data providing the existence of the attack, resulting in many media outlets not so subtly implying that the agency was lying:

Learn how to create, effectively manage and deliver desired results by learning Project Managment skills. For $49.99, the Project Management Professional Training will help you learn the skills needed. It features over 35 hours of training approved by the Project Management Institute. At the end, you will have knocked out the 35 contact hours requirement and be ready to sit for the PMP and CAPM exams (not included in the deal) in order to gain your certification and set yourself apart in the job market.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

The Defense Department's 1033 program allows local law enforcement agencies to buy military equipment. Often, the purchases are made easier with sizable grants, meaning agencies can load up on assault rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles, and extra ammo at nearly no cost. (They can also get computers, office furniture, etc. through these grants, but if that were the extent of the program, there would be zero controversy.)The 1033 program is supposed to be tightly controlled and every acquisition vetted to prevent high-powered military gear from falling into the wrong hands. We've already noted local agencies aren't performing much in the way of oversight, resulting in several agencies receiving suspensions for failing to account for the whereabouts of purchased gear.The problem, however, isn't just on the receiving end. The Defense Department isn't doing much in the way of due diligence when adding new agencies to the list of military gear purchases. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) performed a sting operation, setting up a fake law enforcement agency to see if it could acquire used military gear. By the end of it, the fake agency had obtained $1.2 million in gear, all without ever having to speak directly with anyone at the Defense Department. From the GAO's report [PDF]:

Needless to say, consumer advocates and smaller competitors aren't too keen on AT&T's $89 billion plan to acquire Time Warner. They argue that AT&T's long history of unethical behavior, empty promises, and anti-competitive shenanigans make it extremely likely the company will use its greater size and leverage to ill effect. They worry that AT&T will make it harder for competitors to license content necessary to compete with AT&T's DirecTV Now streaming service, and arbitrary usage caps and other tricks like zero rating to similarly put competitors at a disadvantage.Traditionally, these kinds of vertical integration deals aren't blocked because it's harder to clearly prove potential antitrust harm, even if AT&T has a thirty-year documented history of all manner of fraudulent behavior. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised that this was a deal his administration simply would not allow, given the "concentration of power" the deal would deliver:

Things have been mostly quiet as Congress heads towards the possible renewal of Section 702 surveillance powers. The NSA, oddly, made the most noise by dropping its "about" collection because it simply couldn't (or wouldn't) stop harvesting US persons' communications. As usual, privacy activists are sounding the alarm but the general level of noise at the Congressional level is nothing compared to the runup to Section 215's renewal.Quieter is better for the Trump administration, which has already expressed its desire for a clean reauthorization. There are plenty of surveillance hawks who would rather no one messed with the approval process and a few of those have the power to stonewall any legislative reforms that might make their way to the House or Senate in the coming months.But the noisiest silence is emanating from the tech sector, whose platforms and services are integral to the NSA's harvesting of internet communications and data.

A story about surveillance in China is hardly notable -- Techdirt has run dozens of them. But there are some unusual aspects to this report on the Sixth Tone site that make it a little out of the ordinary:

Last month, we discussed a strange spate of DMCA notices going out from Alex Mauer, a video game music composer. Through her DMCA blitz, she managed to get a game removed from Steam, as well as getting several DMCA strikes against several YouTubers that had covered that game, all apparently as a result of a contract dispute she had with Imagos Softworks and her general inability to understand contractual language and copyright law. The tone of that post was justifiably critical, but some are now concerned that there is a well-being issue at hand. For starters, Mauer has now targeted a second game via DMCA takedown and has managed to get Steam to remove the game from its listings.

For decades now, broadband ISPs have abused the lack of meaningful competition in the telecom market by not only refusing to shore up historically awful customer service, but by raising rates hand over fist. This usually involves leaving the advertised price largely the same, but pummeling customers with all manner of misleading fees and surcharges that drive up the actual price paid post sale. And by and large regulators from both major political parties have been perfectly ok with this practice, despite it effectively being false advertising.CenturyLink (combined by the merger of Qwest, CenturyTel and Embarq) has been exceptionally talented when it comes to misleading fees. A few years ago the company began charging its broadband customers an "Internet Cost Recovery Fee," which the company's website explains as such:

That buzzing noise that never seems to leave the Intelligence Community's ears is Sen. Ron Wyden. Wyden's questions -- often unanswered -- are dog whistles for privacy advocates but ear-bleeding tinnitus for agency officials. Persistence is key in Congressional oversight and few are better at it than Wyden is.For years, Wyden has been asking how many Americans have been hauled in by the NSA's Section 702 dragnet. And for years, the NSA and ODNI have sidestepped the question. The surveillance bosses got close to returning an answer -- right before they announced they were shutting down the collection that netted the most Americans.Right before Trump was elected, James Clapper finally said he'd cough up the numbers. But with the regime change, the promise is no longer a promise. The NSA may try to keep this buried, using time and distance from the abruptly-abandoned "about" collection to stiff-arm additional requests for domestic surveillance data.Ever persistent, Wyden has returned with another set of questions [PDF] regarding NSA surveillance. This one pertains to the least-discussed surveillance authorization and the one almost everyone -- including members of oversight committees -- knows nearly nothing about: Executive Order 12333.Like Section 702, there's a good probability intelligence gathered under this authority is being used by domestic agencies. Backdoor searches of NSA intel have been unofficial common knowledge for years now, so there's very little reason to believe the NSA's most mysterious authority doesn't have its own built-in peepholes for the FBI and other federal agencies.Wyden is asking for details on this authority, specifically the number of times it has been used to surveil Americans. As he points out, the order allows the deliberate targeting of American citizens with the Attorney General's approval.

I thought writing about San Diego Comic Con being censorial assholes would be the strangest story we'd write about Comic Con this year, but leave it to airline security to come up with an even more bizarre story. Apparently United Airlines (because of course it would be United) put up a sign at the airport in San Diego telling people that all books needed to be removed from checked bags. A Twitter user named Adi Chappo tweeted a picture of the sign at the airport:United, being United, responded that the TSA was demanding that all comic books from San Diego Comic Con could only go in carry on luggage.Chappo asked for more detail and United told him to reach out to the TSA directly.This wasn't just a one-off either. Another Twitter user posted a Twitter direct message conversation with United, in which it claimed that there was a TSA restriction on any comic books in checked luggage:

Final Draft 10 is the standard software for professional screenwriters and studios the world over. It automatically paginates your script to entertainment industry standards and gives you over 100 templates and formatting tools to turn your ideas into real scripts. You can collaborate in real time with a writing partner, outline acts, scenes, and sequences more efficiently, store multiple lines of dialogue in the same script, and more. Final Draft 10 is on sale for $150 (40% off of retail) for a limited time in the Techdirt Deals Store.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

As threatened during comments to an association of district attorneys, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is bringing back asset forfeiture. Specifically, Sessions is loosening the restrictions placed on federal adoption of local seizures by Eric Holder during the last years of the Obama presidency. Holder's directive prevented local agencies from routing cash or vehicle seizures through the feds to dodge local rules. That's all over now. An order [PDF] and directive [PDF] issued by the DOJ are welcoming local law enforcement agencies to once again skirt restrictive state forfeiture laws by asking the DOJ to "adopt" their seizures.

So for years Verizon Wireless refused to compete on price, insisting that the company's network was just so incredible, it didn't have to. Then came increased competition from T-Mobile, which forced the company to not only start competing a little more seriously on price, but to bring back unlimited data plans Verizon had spent years telling customers they didn't need. And while Wall Street cries about this rise in competition hurting earnings at least once a week, it has generally been a good thing for consumers.But there's two things waiting just over the horizon that could ruin everybody's good time. One is a looming merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, which would significantly reduce competition in the wireless sector, eliminating much of the pressure on mobile providers to compete. The other is the impending death of net neutrality protections at the FCC, which currently keep these carriers from abusing this lack of competition to drive up costs and hamper content competitors.But another, important part of net neutrality rules is the requirement that carriers are clear about just what kind of connection you're buying. Last week, Verizon apparently got a running start in being less transparent when it decided to begin throttling its wireless customers without telling anybody. Users at Reddit began noticing that when they streamed Netflix content or accessed Netflix's Fast.com speedtest, their connections were magically limited to 10 Mbps. When they used other companies' speedtests or used a VPN to mask their traffic, they received the full speed of their mobile connections.To be clear, being restricted to 10 Mbps isn't that big of a deal in and of itself. 10 Mbps is more than enough to stream video at 1080p60 and 1440p30, though users say they're running into buffering at 1440p60 or 4K (not that most users care about 4K content on mobile devices anyway). But it was the fact that Verizon couldn't be bothered to tell anybody this was happening that's raising a few eyebrows. And when pressed, Verizon was only willing to give a rather vague answer about how they were simply conducting "tests" that didn't hurt anybody:

It's well known many confidential informants are criminals. Acting as informants is supposed to keep their criminal acts to a minimum while providing access to bigger criminal fish. The same goes for undercover officers and agents. Some illegality is presumed but those running CIs are expected to be making the world a better place, not ignoring vast amounts of criminal activity simply because the informant is now on their side. But that doesn't seem to be the case.The DEA's informant program is being run with almost no oversight, according to an Inspector General's report. Money flowed to informants who were still under federal investigation and no one up top seemed too concerned about the program's bang/buck ratio. The FBI made abusable programs worse by hiding payments to informants and giving them a cut of forfeited property.It's not that informants can't break the law. In some cases, they must. But the illegal acts must be done with permission and as an integral part of an investigation. But that's not how things work out. Trevor Aaronson of The Intercept tells the story of FBI informant Mohammed Agbareia, who participated in terrorism stings while making a healthy, illegal profit on the side.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous comment, saying something that shouldn't need to be repeated so often but for the weird anti-regulation absolutists who need to be reminded over and over:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, we saw some copyright insanity when BMG issued a YouTube takedown on a Mitt Romney campaign ad for including a clip of Obama singing an Al Green song, and then the next day went on to take down the original clip, because even the President was a pirate in the eyes of the entertainment industry. Thankfully, by the end of the week, YouTube decided the videos were fair use, and restored them. Meanwhile, Viacom was blacking out web clips as part of a spat with DirecTV, leading Jon Stewart to blast them on their own network and get them to reverse the decision for at least some clips. And in New Zealand, the judge in Kim Dotcom's extradition trial spoke out against the TPP and copyright extremism, which forced him to step down from the case (even though the same thing never seems to happen to pro-copyright judges).Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, the RIAA finally found itself on the hook for legal fees in one of its aggressive lawsuits, despite its usual strategy of dropping cases whenever that looked like a possibility. The head of an LA news agency who made headlines by being the first person to sue YouTube for copyright infringement decided he might take his misguided fight to Apple as well. The MPAA was speaking out against net neutrality because it might interfere with anti-piracy enforcement, Clear Channel was trying to use the Sirius-XM merger as a reason to get looser restrictions on terrestrial radio ownership, and Microsoft was making promises about future Windows editions as damage control after the poor reception of Vista.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, webcasters were appealing the new royalty rates that would cripple them, tech executives were seeking a better starting point for a conversation about piracy with Hollywood, and Universal was doing the kind of thing Universal does and appointing a new "senior vice president of anti-piracy". At least one analyst was looking at broadband adoption in a more positive light than usual at the time, while others were not too sanguine on the future of 3D TV — but we also took a moment to celebrate how it's often unglamorous technology that changes history the most, on the 100th birthday of the air conditioner.

As you may know, San Diego Comic Con is going on right now. And, like many techie/geeky people, while I've never attended the show, I always look forward to what comes out of the event. However, SDCC is increasingly looking like a massive censorial bully. A few years ago, we covered what we believed to be a fairly silly trademark dispute that SDCC had filed against the organizers of the Salt Lake Comic Con. We pointed out that trademarking "Comic Con" seemed silly and there was no problem with multiple Comic Con's happily co-existing. And, really, SDCC is the 800-lb gorilla here. It's the dominant comic con and has been for many, many years, as it seems to grow larger and larger. Other cities having their own comic conventions doesn't take away from SDCC (if anything they tend to reinforce the dominance of SDCC).Last month, in covering some news about the case still going on, we added a long (longer than the post itself...) editor's note about the truly weird situation in which SDCC had sent us a ridiculous subpoena demanding (among other things) any internal documents ever mentioning SDCC and implying that we had some sort of business relationship with the organizers of the SLC event (to be clear, we have zero relationship with anyone involved in either event -- we just found a story written about the case and used that as the basis for our posts on the topic). We pushed back on SDCC and noted that it really appeared that their fishing expedition was an attempt to intimidate the press from reporting on this case. It was... really strange.And now, with SDCC happening right now, the Hollywood Reporter has the latest on the case, in which SDCC has filed for one of the strangest legal gag orders I've seen in a while. I mean, I've seen these kinds of gag order requests filed by pro se plaintiffs, but rarely by competent lawyers working at giant famous law firms.You can read the demand for a protective order here or below, and if I had to summarize it, it's basically: "it's no fair that Salt Lake Comic Con is getting good press coverage and we're being mocked, so the court should silence them." I read through the document and I kept expecting more... and... that's really it. They literally complain that they're losing in "the court of public opinion" and argue that it's somehow unfair that one side is talking about this case publicly and they should be barred from any further conversation. And, it gives some more context to the paranoid view that was clear in the subpoena we received: SDCC and/or its lawyers are so focused on the negative press coverage that they seem to assume that something more nefarious is going on... beyond the basic likelihood that lots of people think this lawsuit is over-aggressive bullying by SDCC.

It's no secret that Major League Baseball has proven themselves to be happy bullies regarding its trademarks. Between thinking it owns the letter 'W', forgetting that fair use exists, and its decision to bully amateur baseball leagues, the legal staff for MLB has shown that they can produce some really head-scratching moments.Which brings us to the present, in which Major League Baseball has asked for an extension to decide if it wants to oppose the new logo for Overwatch League, the eSports league dedicated to playing -- you guessed it -- Overwatch.

The Maryland Court of Special Appeals has handed down a ruling [PDF] on quasi-cell site location info. The evidence offered by the state isn't being so much suppressed as it is being rejected. The information wasn't obtained illegally and no rights were violated. Rather, the court finds the evidence to be questionable, as in "evidence of what, exactly?" [via EvidenceProf Blog]The defendant in the case is charged with murder. Bashunn Phillips filed a motion to exclude the evidence, which was granted by the lower court. The state appealed. But there's nothing in it for the state.The "evidence" -- which is going to carry around scare quotes for the remainder of this post -- doesn't tie Phillips to anything. What was submitted isn't even the equivalent of coarse cell site location info. What the state submitted is something that can easily be obtained without a warrant… because it doesn't actually target any person at all.

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.

Learn how to use the fundamental building blocks of the Web with the $29 Beginner Web Development Bundle. The four courses cover HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. You'll learn how to work with these tools through a series of lectures and hands-on projects, and will finish with a firmer grasp of the basics of web development.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

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:

Project management is a booming field, but you may have heard that there isn't just one way to manage a project. There are a wide variety of disciplines and methodologies employed across different industries. The $59 IT Process and Project Management Super Bundle is packed with 11 courses covering different IT and project management methodologies including CompTIA Project+, PRINCE2, Six Sigma, Scrum, Agile and more. Each course also helps to prepare you to take various certification exams that are widely recognized in the field. Go through them all at your own pace over one year and gain a solid understanding of Process and Project Management.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

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):

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics are flying into the mainstream, but these advanced technologies have been creeping into our everyday lives for awhile now. Machine learning and AI are used regularly in data security, healthcare, financial trading, and more. In recent years, we've seen self-driving cars become one of the greatest technological frontiers. In this $49 Robotics and Machine Learning course, you'll learn the fundamentals and key concepts that apply to self-driving cars.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

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:

Get the $49 2017 Zero to Hero Game Developer Bundle and dive into 83 hours of training in industry-standard tools and tech. Whether your goal is to build games for fun, start your own studio, or become a professional, this training contains everything you need to get started. The courses cover Unity, C#, Python, Swift3, Blender and more concepts. You'll be designing fun and addictive games in no time.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

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.