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A few weeks ago, we wrote about Cloudflare's decision to punch back hard against a patent troll, Blackbird Technologies, that had sued the company over a questionable patent (US Patent 6,453,335). Beyond just challenging the claim of infringement, the company also filed ethics complaints against the lawyers who run Blackbird, noting that the company appeared to be a law firm masquerading as a company, and breaking a number of local rules about law firms and "buying" a proprietary interest in a lawsuit. At the same time, Cloudflare set up a $50,000 fund to offer prizes to people who could find prior art not just to invalidate the patent that Cloudflare was sued over but also every other patent held by Blackbird Technologies.Apparently, the company has now received a ton of submissions -- many of which it claims are quite thorough. And it's upping the ante. An anonymous donor has agreed to match the $50,000 fund, and so now Cloudflare is offering $100,000 for prior art to invalidate Blackbird Tech patents. The company says that it's received 140 separate prior art submissions so far, targeting 18 of the 38 patents and applications it knows about, but wants to go after the rest as well.

Just last week, we reported on how a British human rights activist was held at London's Heathrow airport by UK border police, and risked prison for failing to hand over his passwords. Now we learn from the Independent about a Brazilian journalist, Diogo Bercito, who was detained at Manchester airport for reading a book during his flight there:

It's no secret that there are those in the current UK government who are just itching to kill encryption. Earlier this year, Home Secretary Amber Rudd made some profoundly ill-informed comments about how encryption on the internet was "completely unacceptable" and saying that they needed to stop companies from providing end-to-end encryption. And, in the recently leaked Tory Manifesto, it was made clear that the current government sees breaking encryption as a priority:

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You may remember, a few years ago, Verizon attempted to start its own tech blog, called "SugarString," where the founding editor they hired was telling potential reporters they couldn't write about net neutrality. After that got mocked around the web, the whole idea of SugarString faded away. However, these days, Verizon actually owns a ton of content sites. It bought AOL in 2015, which already owned the Huffington Post, Techcrunch, Engadget and more. More recently, of course, it bought Yahoo as well. Suddenly, Verizon owns a ton of tech reporting.And here's the amazing thing: some of the best reporting about how awful Ajit Pai's net neutrality proposal is... is coming from those sites now owned by Verizon. For example, over at Yahoo News, Rob Pegoraro has been doing a great job debunking many of Ajit Pai's claims about the history of the internet. In particular, Pai and his supporters keep insisting that the move by then FCC boss Tom Wheeler in 2015 to reclassify broadband under Title II upset a consensus going back to the Bill Clinton years that broadband was not under Title II. Except that's... just wrong:

Like clockwork, every few months you'll see a Comcast executive pop up like a meerkat to proclaim the company has seen the error of its ways, and will henceforth focus on dramatically improving its historically abysmal customer service. In 2014, that involved the well-hyped hiring of a new "customer experience" VP who was supposed to "reimagine the customer experience and ensure that we are delighting our customers at each touch point." But these heavily-marketed promises are never matched by measurable improvements in satisfaction studies, where Comcast remains among the worst companies in any industry when it comes to customer satisfaction and support.In fact, despite these promises by Comcast, things are somehow getting worse.The well-respected American Consumer Satisfaction Index ranks customer satisfaction across 43 different industries. Their latest rankings of pay TV providers has found that Comcast has slipped four points in the ACSI rankings, from 62 to 58. That fall places it as the second worst-ranked cable TV provider in the United States -- six points worse than the already-bad national average for cable TV providers, and thirteen points lower than industry leader Verizon FiOS:That's a different story than the one Comcast keeps telling the press, featuring a supposed relentless dedication to shoring up customer service and support. For example, a company executive recently told the Chicago Tribune that Comcast's evolution is moving along so nicely, execs don't even think of Comcast as a cable company any longer -- but as a premiere technology brand more in line with Google and Apple:

Three years ago, we brought you the horrifying story of Diego Gomez, a grad student in Colombia. While working on his own research, he relied on and cited a paper that he couldn't find anywhere else online. As was common practice in Colombia, Gomez uploaded that paper to Scribd so that others could follow his own work and understand his citation. As a research practice, this is a really good idea. Under copyright law, however, it gets stupidly problematic. And it was made much more stupidly problematic by the insane copyright law passed in Colombia -- under pressure from the US -- which made this a criminal act for which Gomez faced up to 8 years in prison along with monetary fines.Again, he absolutely did upload someone else's paper to the internet -- but this was an academic paper, it wasn't for Gomez's own profit, but for perfectly reasonable academic purposes, to make sure people were better informed. Not only that, but as soon as he found out the paper's author was unhappy, he deleted the paper from Scribd. And yet he's spent the past few years dealing with criminal charges over it. Thankfully, just this week Gomez was cleared of any wrongdoing. It just cost him four years of absolute hell. And it's not totally over yet. While the judge has given a "not guilty" verdict, the prosecutor has already announced plans to appeal.

A few weeks back, I wrote about IndieGogo shutting down a crowdfunding project for a small notetaking/speaker device called Titan Note. As I pointed out at the time, there were a lot of alarm bells about the product, but I had still backed it just to see if it might actually work. IndieGogo shutting it down actually had me relieved because the more I thought about it, the less sure I was the project was legit. Making things even more bizarre -- and leading to my post about it -- was the news that the guy behind Titan Note had sent a bogus DMCA takedown notice to the Verge over its skeptical take on the product. The DMCA notice targeted the use of Titan Note's promotional images -- which are clearly fair use for news publications.A few days after that all went down, I went to see if the guy behind Titan Note had anything to say about it. There was a post on Facebook claiming that it was all IndieGogo's fault and promising it would be on another "more trusted" platform soon:

The U.S. Senate is about to consider mostly pointless legislation that would make the nation's register of copyrights—the individual who heads the U.S. Copyright Office, officially a part of the Library of Congress—a presidential appointment that would be subject to Senate confirmation.While the measure has earned praise from some in the content industry, including the Motion Picture Association of America, unless senators can find better ways to modernize our copyright system, they really should just go back to the drawing board.The Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017 already cleared the U.S. House in April by a 378-48 margin. Under the bill and its identical Senate companion, the power to select the register would be taken away from Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden. Instead, the president would select an appointment from among three names put forward by a panel that includes the librarian, the speaker of the House and the majority and minority leaders of both the House and Senate. And the register would now be subject to a 10-year term with the option of multiple reappointments, like the Librarian of Congress.The legislation is ostensibly the product of the House Judiciary Committee's multiyear series of roundtables and comments on modernizing the U.S. Copyright Office. In addition to changes to the process of selecting the register, the committee had recommended creating a stakeholder advisory board, a chief economist, a chief technology officer, making information technology upgrades at the office, creating a searchable digital database of ownership information to lower transaction costs in licensing and royalty payments, and creating a small claims court for relatively minor copyright disputes.Alas, while it’s billed as a “first step,” the current legislation gives up most of those more substantive reforms and instead amounts largely to a partisan battle over who will have the power to select the next register: Hayden, who was appointed by Barack Obama, or President Donald Trump.Opponents argue the bill will make the register and the Copyright Office more politicized and vulnerable to capture by special interests, while ceding more power to the executive. They argue that vetting the register through the nomination process could delay modernization efforts. Hayden needs the position to be filled expeditiously to implement her modernization program, and Trump already faces a sizable confirmation backlog.Meanwhile, proponents argue a more independent register, less tethered to the will of the Library of Congress, will make USCO more accountable. They say it will make the office run more efficiently and allow it to modernize. They also believe it will address important constitutional questions, such as the separation of powers and oversight by the president.At the heart of these constitutional questions is the fact the Library of Congress has both significant legislative and executive functions. Housed within the legislative branch, it also sets royalty rates and rules on exemptions from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Critics have derided the Copyright Office for being slippery about whether it is serving a legislative or executive role, depending on who’s asking. The contention is that this unusual arrangement renders USCO a “constitutional chameleon.”Of course, it is not uncommon for entities in one branch to perform the functions of another. The president has a role in the legislative process through his veto power. The International Trade Commission performs judicial functions, but is an independent agency housed within the executive branch. The federal government's separation of powers is not absolute. But there does come a point where those lines become so blurred as to call the original classification into question. In that respect, Congress should consider taking certain functions—such as the Copyright Royalty Board or the Triennial Section 1201 Proceeding—out of the Copyright Office.Some would propose moving the entire Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress and rendering it a standalone agency, which would elevate the register’s position to one of an officer of the United States. Under that highly controversial scenario, the Constitution's Appointments Clause definitely would require the job be filled by the president. But for now, since the librarian still has ultimate authority over the substantive regulatory powers surrounding copyright, changing who appoints the register won’t change anything outside of a short-term political calculation of who the next register is.The bottom line is that the current bill simply doesn’t do that much, good or bad. Making the position a presidential appointment is unlikely to speed up IT modernization efforts, at a time when the office has faced numerous setbacks and problems getting that IT infrastructure in place. The original policy proposal drafted by the House Judiciary Committee was a more comprehensive and substantial approach to modernization and many of its provisions were supported broadly. First step or not, this is a feeble try.As the Senate considers the bill in the coming weeks, they should either amend the legislation so that it will do something to modernize copyright, or just jettison it entirely. As currently written, the bill serves no purpose, and Congress shouldn’t waste its time on it.Sasha Moss is Technology Policy Manager for the R Street Institute

While the Boston Globe has had a paywall on its site for some time -- the metered sort that lets you read a certain number of articles for free before insisting you sign up for an account with a subcription -- that paywall also featured an open tunnel allowing anyone running their browsers in private or incognito mode to drive right through it. This workaround was well known and used since at least 2014, although hunting around on google search results seems to make it clear that this was all found out because people generally like to use privacy and incognito modes in their browsers for the very reasons the browsers developed them: security and privacy.Two things that perhaps the folks at the Boston Globe don't consider terribly important as they have elected to simply block all readership from browsers running in privacy modes unless the reader signs up for a subscription.

The GOP’s leading campaign and fundraising arm, the Republican National Committee, has thrown its support behind an initiative that could allow marketing firms and robocallers to spam your voicemail inbox -- without your phone ever ringing. Under former FCC boss Tom Wheeler, the agency notably ramped up its assault on annoying robocalls. That included some particularly notable pressure on AT&T, which for years had provided a rotating crop of excuses as to why its customers continued to get hammered by phone marketers even if included on the National Do Not Call Registry.Under current law, marketers aren't allowed to annoy you via your cellular phone unless you give your express, written consent. In the hopes of boosting revenues without running afoul of the law, the industry has begun pushing for exemptions in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act for "ringless voicemail," which would allow a company to leave you a marketing message in your voicemail, without your phone ringing. Of course you'd be hard-pressed to find a single consumer that thinks this is a good idea, which is apparently why the current FCC is exploring precisely this option:

The world's most thin-skinned "leader" is at it again. Perpetually-insulted Turkish super-villain Recip Erdogan is still firing off court orders to Google, expecting the immediate banishment of anything he finds offensive. Dean Jones of the invaluable Shooting the Messenger has more details:

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Legislator Tom Graves is pushing his cyber defense bill again. So far, his bill -- which we covered here in March -- is still in the drafting stages and has yet to be introduced. It has a unmemorable name (Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act) [but a much better acronym (ACDC)] and a handful of ideas that are questionable at best.The bill would amend the CFAA to give companies the ability to "hack back" to shut down attacks and identify the attackers. It would not allow them to go on the offense proactively and it doesn't actually grant companies new statutory permissions. Instead, it provides them with an affirmative defense against CFAA-related charges, should someone decide to take them to court.The good news about the bill's slow crawl is it's being rewritten before being introduced. According to the Financial Times, Graves and his team are consulting with cybersecurity experts to craft a better bill.

As we recently noted, more than 40% of the 2.5 million comments filed with the FCC on net neutrality are entirely fake. The comments, which oppose net neutrality, have been posted using a bot that's pulling the names used from a hacked database of some kind. When the people that own the actual names behind these comments have been contacted by the media, many have stated they didn't make the comments, and/or have no idea what net neutrality even is.In an ideal world, the FCC would easily parse out these obviously fraudulent, duplicate comments and shore up the abuse of its API. But because these comments support the current FCC's belief that meaningful net neutrality protections are somehow an assault on "American freedom," the FCC appears poised to completely disregard the fact that a malicious actor is manipulating the FCC's systems. The FCC isn't candidly admitting this, but FCC boss Ajit Pai's non-statements and statements alike so far indicate he's inclined to include the obviously fraudulent comments:

Back in 2015, Wikimedia's lawsuit against the NSA -- filed with several other plaintiffs and with the help of the ACLU -- was tossed out by the district court. Wikimedia argued it was illegally the subject of NSA upstream surveillance, thanks to the nature of this Section 702 collection. Wikimedia's reach is global, making it highly likely the NSA was gathering its content and communications while snagging data off internet backbones.To further demonstrate the probability of this happening, Wikipedia submitted leaked Snowden documents, including an NSA presentation slide that contained Wikimedia's logo.>No dice. The district court said Wikimedia had no standing to pursue these claims, even with the unexpected buttress of leaked NSA documents. The court went even further, disabusing Wikipedia of its "99.9999999999% certainty" notion that the NSA had illegally harvested at least one of its trillions of internet transactions. In all, it was a very ugly day for Wikimedia and its lawsuit.Fortunately, for Wikimedia, its lawsuit has been revived on appeal. The Fourth Circuit Appeals Court is far more amenable to Wikimedia's claims, finding them to be more credible than the lower court determined. From the opinion [PDF]:

By now, Tinder is probably in the common lexicon. The dating app has been fairly successful, boasting something like 50 million people using it and managing to make something like 12 million matches per day. It's a household name, in other words, which is what makes it a bit strange to see the company bother to oppose a fairly silly trademark application by one guy who designed a dating app to get dating matches for exactly one person: himself.

It appears that a vendor working for Comcast sent a totally bullshit cease-and-desist letter regarding a pro-net neutrality site: Comcastroturf.com, created by our friends over at Fight for the Future. The Comcastroturf website was set up as a tool to see if someone filed bogus FCC comments in your name. As you probably recall, there is a bot that has been flooding the FCC comment site with bogus anti-net neutrality comments, filed in alphabetical order. Reporters contacted some of the individuals whose names appear on these comments, and they had no idea what it was about. People are still trying to track down who is actually responsible for the bogus comments, but Fight for the Future set up this neat site to let you check if your name was used by whoever is behind it.And, of course, the name "Comcastroturf" is pretty damn clever, given the topic. Kudos to Fight for the Future for coming up with that one. It is, of course, totally legal to use the domain name of a company that you're protesting in your own domain. There are numerous cases on this issue, normally discussed as the so-called "Sucks Sites." There's clearly no legal issue with Comcastroturf, and any reasonably informed human being would know that. Unfortunately, it would appear that Comcast hired a company that employs some non-reasonably informed humans.The cease-and-desist letter was sent by a company called "Looking Glass Cyber Solutions" (no, really), which used to be called "Cyveillance" (only marginally less bad). We've written about Cyveillance twice before -- and both times they were about totally bogus takedown requests from Cyveillance that caused serious problems. The most recent was the time that Cyveillance, working for Qualcomm, filed a bogus DMCA notice that took down Qualcomm's own Github repository. Nice move. The earlier story, however was in 2013, and involved Cyveillance -- again representing Comcast -- sending a threatening takedown demand to some more of our friends over at TorrentFreak, claiming (ridiculously) that public court filings were Comcast's copyright-covered material, and threatening serious legal consequences if it wasn't taken down. Eventually, Comcast stepped in and admitted the cease-and-desist was "sent in error." You'd think that maybe this would have caused Comcast to think twice about using Cyveillance for such things. But, nope.The rebranded Looking Glass Cyber Solutions has told Fight for the Future that "Comcastroturf" violates Comcast's "valuable intellectual property rights" and that failure to take down the site may lead to further legal action around cybersquatting and trademark violations.Of course, there's no way that Comcast would actually move forward with any legal action here. In fact, I'm pretty sure it already regrets the fact that the numbskulls at this vendor they hired to police their brand online just caused (yet another) massive headache for their brand online. Maybe, this time, Comcast will finally let Cyveillance/Looking Glass Cyber go, and find partners who don't fuck up so badly. Meanwhile, the fact that Looking Glass Cyber can't even figure out that Comcastroturf is a perfectly legal protest site makes the company's website -- which is chock full of idiotic buzzwords about "threat mitigation" and "threat intelligence" -- look that much more ridiculous. The only "threat" here is Looking Glass/Cyveillance and their silly cluelessness sending out censorious threats based on what appears to be little actual research.Of course, without true net neutrality, if Comcast really wanted to silence Comcastroturf, it would just block everyone from accessing the site...

When the "death of the MP3" started being reported, we were among the very few blogs that said umm, no — but the deluge of eulogies for the still-thriving format has been overwhelming and quite surprising. This week I join the podcast to discuss why the MP3 isn't dead, and how so much of the tech press got it so wrong.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.

Everyone's favorite abusable statute is back at it. Anyone can file a DMCA takedown request. Not everyone gets theirs granted. But it's a zero-cost, mostly-zero risk effort that takes about five minutes from start to finish. It's no wonder it's been abused by a handful of ex-cons and, very memorably, by a revenge porn purveyor who suddenly developed concerns about personal privacy.In this case, it's someone named in an Albuquerque Journal article about a federal fraud indictment. The most obvious pick would be the couple named early on in the article by Nicole Perez: Michael Jacobs and/or Ruth Handler-Jacobs. But there are others listed as well, co-conspirators Rienzie Edwards (of Sri Lanka), F.K. Ho (a broker located in Singapore), and a couple of other Americans, Laurence Lester and Rachel Gendrau.It could be any one of these people (though the fractured English in the takedown request would seem to point overseas), but there's no way to know for sure because the DMCA notice is clearly falsely filed in the name of the journalist who wrote the article. This appropriation of someone else's name and profession leads to one of the most unlikely claims ever made in a DMCA notice: that journalists refer to publishing articles as "posting a content."Here's the whole BS claim:

Over the last year, we've noted the surge in so-called "right to repair" laws, which would make it easier for consumers to repair their electronics and find replacement parts and tools. It's a direct response to the rising attempts by companies like John Deere, Apple, Microsoft and Sony to monopolize repair, hamstringing consumer rights over products consumers think they own, while driving up the cost of said product ownership. John Deere's draconian lockdown on its tractor firmware is a large part of the reason these efforts have gained steam over the last few months in states like Nebraska.In New York, one of the first attempts at such a law (the "Fair Repair Act") has finally been making progress. But according to New York State's Joint Commission on Public Ethics, Apple, Verizon, Toyota, Lexmark, Caterpillar, Asurion, and Medtronic have all been busy lobbying to kill the law for various, but ultimately similar, reasons. And they're out-spending the consumer advocates and repair shops pushing for this legislation by a rather wide margin:

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As information about police use of cell tower spoofers began leaking out, those who had kept the public (including defendants, judges, and even some prosecutors) out of the loop began defending their use of domesticated military technology. They said pay no attention to the possible civil liberties violations. Just think of all the good they're doing. They promised Stingrays would only be used on the worst of the worst, and only when time was of the essence: terrorists, murderers, kidnappers, etc.But then even more Stingray documents made their way into the public domain. These showed the devices were deployed in bog-standard drug investigations or, worse, used just because agencies had them. This perhaps reached its nadir when a police department fired up its Stingray to hunt down someone who had stolen less than $60 worth of fast food. To make matters worse, the Stingray failed to track down the alleged thief.Of course, anyone paying attention knew Stingrays would be used for nothing of importance, despite public officials' statements otherwise. The first person to start digging into Stingray use was Daniel Rigmaiden, who was doing time for fraud. Not exactly the sort of crime one would associate with exigent circumstances and possible danger to the public.And, of course, because it's now the government's foremost priority to toss undocumented immigrants out of the country, Stingrays are being used to accomplish this goal. And, just like the defensive statements made on behalf of IMSI catchers, the federal government has claimed it's only interested in removing the most dangerous of undocumented individuals first. These statements are also false.

Apparently, giant broadband providers don't much want to put their sudden, mysterious love of net neutrality into writing. Last week, the FCC voted to begin killing net neutrality, opening the door to a 90-day comment period ahead of a broader rule-killing vote later this year. In the wake of the move, the same large ISPs that have spent a decade trying to kill meaningful regulatory oversight comically went out of their way to (falsely) claim that the killing of the rules doesn't mean all that much -- because these duopolies love net neutrality so much any hard rules simply aren't necessary.Verizon went so far as to publish a violently misleading video claiming that net neutrality isn't dying and large ISPs aren't trying to kill it. Comcast's top lobbyist David Cohen penned a blog post claiming that the FCC was only trying to "protect the open internet" from "dangerous and inappropriate Title II." And the day before the FCC voted to begin killing the rules, the cable industry's biggest lobbying organization (the NCTA) took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post, pledging the cable industry's "commitment to an open internet":

Jason Leopold has obtained the FBI's training slides for its "insider threat" program. This would be the same program the FBI refused to discuss in detail with the Senate, walking out of the briefing when asked how the program would avoid sweeping up legitimate whistleblowers.The federal government acts as though it's receptive to whistleblowing, but then undermines that sentiment with pretty much everything else it does. These insider threat programs have only become more severe after the Snowden leaks, asking federal government employees to treat normal, everyday behavior as inherently suspicious.The Defense Department's insider threat program declared such innocuous things as visiting foreign countries and being in debt as warning signs. Worse, anything less than full support for US government policies was considered threatening behavior.The FBI's presentation [PDF] isn't much better. FBI employees are encouraged to say something if they see something… and there are a lot of observable "somethings" on the list.

The European Union's top court has just handed down an important ruling about an otherwise minor trade deal between the EU and Singapore. The two sides initialled the text of the agreement in September 2013, and since then it has been waiting for the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to hand down its judgment. The issue is who gets to sign off on the deal: is it just the European Union, or do all 28 Member States of the EU need to agree too? There's clearly a big difference there, because in the latter case, there are 28 opportunities for the deal to be blocked, whereas in the former situation, the EU can simply wave it through on its own.The CJEU ruling (pdf) is fairly straightforward: the EU can sign and conclude trade deals covering most areas, but not for a few that must involve the EU Member States. Of most significance is the following:

This is just a periodic reminder that these are the sort of people whose "experience" and "expertise" are routinely granted massive amounts of deference by judges (and stenographers pretending to be journalists). Warrant affidavits providing more detail about the requesting officer's law enforcement career than the target of the search are often rubberstamped into actionable pieces of paper. (But not always!) And yet, these experienced experts look far more mortal when their actions are given something more than a cursory examination.Exhibit A: the Odessa PD's crack team of trained experts who participated in a daring no-knock raid of an empty motel room.

The FBI (and other US government agencies) are already moving forward with facial recognition technology, which will allow law enforcement to scan people like license plates, if everything goes to plan. So far, consultation with the meddling public has been kept to a minimum, as have any government efforts to address civil liberties concerns.Just because the public's been kept out of the loop (except for, you know, their faces and other personal information), doesn't mean members of the public aren't working hard to ensure police officers can start running faces like plates, even when there's no legitimate law enforcement reason for doing so.Digital Barriers, a somewhat ironically-named tech company, is pushing its latest law enforcement offering -- one that supposedly provides real-time face scanning.

Another Supreme Court case on patents, and another complete smackdown of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the court that is supposed to be the "expert" on patent cases. This morning the ruling on the TC Heartland case came out, and it could help put an end to jurisdiction shopping for patent cases. As you've probably heard, for years now patent trolls and other aggressive patent litigants have been filing their cases in East Texas, as it's become a jurisdiction that is ridiculous friendly to patent holders. The towns of Marshall and Tyler, Texas have practically built up industries around the fact that they are "patent friendly" jurisdictions. In the past few years, a second favored jurisdiction has popped up: Delaware, after a few academic studies showed that the courts there may have been even more friendly than East Texas. The TC Heartland case was about a case filed in Delaware, and raised the issue of whether or not this kind of patent forum shopping was okay. CAFC, in its usual CAFC manner, said "sure, that's great, we love jurisdiction shopping and have since our 1990 ruling in VE Holding v. Johnson Gas. This was kind of ironic, as one of the key justifications given for setting up CAFC in the first place was to put an end to jurisdiction shopping in patent cases.Either way, CAFC once again blessed the ability of patent holders to sue in plaintiff friendly locations, and the Supreme Court -- which has spent the past decade reteaching patent law to CAFC every chance it gets -- has done so again. Once again, the decision was unanimous, with the court voting 8 - 0 that trolls can't just file over and over again in East Texas (Gorsuch, having just joined the court after the case was heard, did not take part). The opinion, written by Justice Thomas, goes through the history of jurisdiction issues related to where one can bring lawsuits, noting that historically, where a company was incorporated was the proper jurisdiction.While most of the ruling is deep in the weeds about definitions in the law, and whether or not Congress intended to change certain definitions, here's a simplified version of what happened: some have interpreted patent law to mean that a patent holder can sue an alleged infringer anywhere that a product is sold/available. In the age of the internet, this generally means "anywhere." Thus, as long as your product was available in Texas or Delaware, trolls could sue in those locations -- even if the company was nowhere near those locations. Here, however, the Court has said that the lawsuits are supposed to be filed where the company "resides," which it says is the state where the company is incorporated. This is a huge win for companies who are targeted by patent trolls. Rather than being dragged across the country to courts like East Texas or Delaware, which have built up large practices and reputations for supporting patent trolls over actual innovators, now cases will need to be filed where the alleged infringer is actually incorporated.Expect to see the usual whining from patent trolls and their supporters about this -- but just remember: if they have a serious case of infringement, they should be fine filing it wherever the defendants actually are. Their concern is not about how this is somehow bad for patent owners. It's really about how certain courts were biased in their favor and they can no longer take advantage of that. Of course, this might mean that the ice rink in Marshall, Texas needs to find a new sponsor.

The FCC apparently doesn't want to talk much about its plan to gut meaningful oversight of some of the least competitive companies in any American industry. Last week, we noted that the FCC had voted to begin the process of gutting popular net neutrality protections, ignoring the overwhelming public support for the rules registered at the FCC's website. This notice of proposed rule making (NPRM) is followed by a 90-day public comment period (you can comment here) ahead of a finalizing vote to kill the consumer protections later this year.Since the FCC has been getting a few mean tweets over its decision to give consumers the policy equivalent of a giant middle finger, it's understandable that the agency is a bit on edge. That said, veteran defense beat reporter John Donnelly stated last week that this tension culminated in him being shoved up against the wall by two FCC staffers during their May 18 net neutrality meeting. Donnelly was, he stated, "manhandled" for simply trying to ask the agency a question:

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With UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently calling for a new election there, which she is expected to win easily (despite recent reports of narrowing polls), last week May's Conservative party released its Manifesto (what we in the US tend to call a party's "platform"). There are all sorts of things in there that are getting press attention, but for the stuff that matters here on Techdirt, let's just say May's view of the internet is not a good one. A part of the plan is basically to regulate, tax and censor the internet, because the Conservative Party leadership doesn't seem to much like the internet -- and they especially dislike the fact that Google and Facebook are so successful.What's hilarious is that the manifesto basically promises to put in place all sorts of rules that will absolutely kill off any internet economy in the UK, as no company in its right mind would agree to these restrictions, while, at the same time, it talks up how important it is to support digital businesses in the UK. Of course, some of the plan is couched in nice sounding language that should actually scare you:

We've noted for some time how T-Mobile's crazy idea to be nice to consumers (well, if you exclude their attacks on the EFF and net neutrality) has been a great thing for American consumers. Thanks to more consumer-friendly policies, T-Mobile has been adding more subscribers per quarter than any other major carrier for several years running. This pressure recently resulted in both AT&T and Verizon being forced to bring back the unlimited data plans the companies had been telling consumers they didn't actually want for years.This added competition has really annoyed Wall Street, which has been grumbling about the shift back to unlimited plans for months. Wall Street had grown comfortable with the non-price competition in the wireless market, where plan pricing often obscured the fact that Americans pay more for mobile data than most developed countries. AT&T and Verizon used a lack of competitive pressure to kill off unlimited data plans in 2011, allowing them to introduce significantly more expensive metered plans -- just as video consumption on mobile began to take off. For the giant incumbents, things were going swimmingly.Of course as T-Mobile grew, improved its network, and fashioned its often brash and amusing new identity, it slowly but surely became a more viable competitor, forcing both companies to respond. And, just as Wall Street worried, the shift back to unlimited data is having a negative impact on cellular revenues. How negative? According to respected wireless industry analyst Chetan Sharma, cellular data revenues dropped last quarter for the first time in seventeen years. This was part of a number of firsts for an industry not-entirely-familiar with this whole competition thing:

The NSA's exploit toolkit has been weaponized to target critical systems all over the world. So much for the debate over the theoretical downside of undisclosed vulnerabilities. (It also inadvertently provided the perfect argument against encryption backdoors.) The real world has provided all the case study that's needed.It appears the NSA finally engaged in the Vulnerabilities Equity Process -- not when it discovered the vulnerability, but rather when it became apparent the agency wouldn't be able to prevent it from being released to the public. What's happened recently has been devastating and Microsoft -- whose software was targeted -- has expressed its displeasure at the agency's inaction.Maybe the agency will be a bit more forthcoming in the future. Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg of the Washington Post report former NSA employees and officials had concerns about the undisclosed exploit long before the Shadow Brokers gave it to the world.

This week, we covered the disturbing story of a cop whose huge number of impaired driving arrests turned out to stem from his arbitrary decisions about who was impaired as though it was some sort of magical ability. Roger Strong took a firm line on responding to this, and enough people agreed to make it the first place winner for insightful:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, a Microsoft-funded effort to disrupt BitTorrent was drawing scrutiny, EMI was gloating over the demise of MP3Tunes, and the MPAA was cheering on legal rulings against the Pirate Bay. Of course, one of those rulings was called into question when a Dutch judge's connections to anti-piracy groups drew accusations of corruption, and one of TPB's founders was taking the legal fight over a Swedish ruling to the EU courts. Meanwhile, protestors against the TPP were getting creative, Chile was threatening to drop out of the negotiations all together, Rep. Darrell Issa posted an old leaked version of the agreement for discussion, and the USTR was still attempting to claim that listening to people counts as "transparency".Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, while the MPAA was making some curious changes to its opaque and esoteric ratings system, the RIAA was getting journalists to parrot its propaganda about its copyright shakedowns, and Microsoft was spreading unoriginal FUD about Linux infringing on its patents (prompting Sun to remind it that real companies don't litigate, they innovate). Cinemas were lashing out at the idea of getting rid of movie release windows, CBS was learning why trying to build its own online video destination was a bad idea, and the latest update to AACS was cracked before it even hit the market. We also witnessed the birth of The Copyright Alliance at the hands of the RIAA, MPAA, Disney, Viacom and more.Fifteen Years AgoSometimes — such as this week in 2002 — cracking CD protection was as easy as using a black marker or some electrical tape. Then again, other times the CD might lock up your iMac and force you to take it in for repairs. While the copyright world was discussing big, sweeping ideas like blanked licensing fees paid to ISPs and compulsory licenses for music downloads, the recently-announced Creative Commons was launching in earnest.Also, you know that oft-mentioned fact about how everyone from Europe is descended from Charlemagne as a matter of mathematical inevitability? It was this week in 2002 that those numbers were first crunched.One-Hundred And Fifteen Years AgoMost of you are probably at least vaguely familiar with the Antikythera mechanism, an shockingly advanced astronomical calculator/analog computer from Ancient Greece. It was on May 17th, 1902 that the mechanism was discovered by an archaeologist examining the remnants of a ship, itself discovered on the sea floor two years earlier by sponge divers.

Certain senators have repeatedly pushed for encryption bans or encryption backdoors, sacrificing personal security for national security in a move that will definitively result in less of both. Former FBI Director James Comey's incessant beating of his "Going Dark" drum didn't help. Several legislators always managed to get sucked in by his narrative of thousands of unsearched phones presumably being tied to thousands of unsolved crimes and free-roaming criminals.It will be interesting if the anti-encryption narratives advanced by Sens. Feinstein and Burr (in particular -- although others equally sympathetic) continue now that senators can officially begin using an encrypted messaging system for their own communications.

The South China Morning Post has a story about a new requirement for drone owners in China to register with the country's civilian aviation regulator starting next month. So is this yet another example of the Chinese authorities clamping down on a potentially subversive new technology by ensuring that drone use can be tracked? Well, that might be one reason, but it's probably also to do with this:

We've often discussed the darker side of the repurposed war tech that's made its way into the hands of local law enforcement. Much like backdoored encryption (something some in law enforcement would like to see), rebranded war surveillance gear like Stingrays may sound great when touted by good guys, but we should never forget bad guys have access to the same equipment.The seldom-discussed capabilities of Stingray devices are on full display in other countries. So far, we haven't seen US law enforcement use Stingrays to intercept communications or purposefully disrupt them. (A lack of public evidence doesn't mean it hasn't happened, however.) The power is there, though. Stingrays act as faux cell towers and force all phones in the area to route their communications through them. This has the potential to be more than merely disruptive to cell service. The devices carry the capability to act as roving wiretaps. They also have the power to act as very frightening purveyors of government propaganda.

Consternation over so-called "joke stealing" goes back roughly as long as comedy itself has been a thing, but these past few years have seen something of a rise in awareness whenever a comedian is accused of copying a joke. Honestly, much of this hand-wringing is overblown, likely born of an ownership culture that values protectionism over expanded culture, and devoid of the understanding that a joke is much more than the words used to tell it. After all, timing and delivery factor into the success in telling any joke, and it almost seems too obvious to have to point out that multiple comedians come up with similar jokes all the time. For that reason, the bar for copyright infringement on jokes has tended to be very high in the few cases that actually get tried. On top of that, the common method for policing such copying involved the massive reputational hit the accused takes -- rather than legal action. And that's only accelerated thanks to the internet's public shaming engine. Because of that, actual lawsuits over this sort of thing are few and far between.Which brings us to Conan O'Brien, who is still in the midst of a years-old copyright infringement suit over the claim that he and the writers of his show used several jokes from a freelance joke writer without authorization.

You recall, of course, the Panama Papers? The massive leak of documents about offshore shell companies last year, that a large coalition of reporters worked on for many months before releasing a bunch of stories at the same time. The documents were leaked from a law firm, and highlighted more than a few cases of what appeared to be questionable activity by the rich and powerful in moving money around in offshore accounts. Apparently the subject of one such story, Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, wasn't happy that he and some of his colleagues were mentioned in some of the reporting on this, and filed a defamation case against Matthew Caruana Galizia, the reporter who wrote up some stories, using the Panama Papers, arguing that Muscat and his chief of staff were involved in a scheme to get kickbacks on the sale of Maltese passports.Caruana Galizia, who is a journalist at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and who coordinated the mass reporting effort on the Panama Papers (and who won a Pulitzer Prize as part of that), had posted those stories to his Facebook page. In addition to facing this defamation lawsuit, Caruana Galizia has also noted that Facebook has deleted some of his posts and locked him out of his account temporarily. It would appear that someone has complained to Facebook about those posts, claiming they were terms of service violations. Once again, this should be a reminder of the problem of relying on someone else's platform for posting your stories, as they get to make up the rules for what's allowed.But there are two larger issues here: First, this appears to be a classic SLAPP-style lawsuit, in which reporters are being sued as an attempt to chill free speech on reporting that the subject doesn't like. I'm no expert in Maltese defamation law, but it does appear that there has been a lot of concern about abuse of Maltese defamation law to intimidate reporters and chill speech (amusingly, that article focuses on Daphne Caruana Galizia who has been sued a few times for defamation, and who appears to be Matthew's very proud mother). There have also been attempts to update defamation law in Malta, but there appears to be nothing akin to a an anti-SLAPP provision. Indeed, it's not even clear if there's a "truth" defense.The interview with Daphne Caruana Galizia is quite detailed in how officials in Malta use defamation laws to chill the free speech of journalists:

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A brief review of our past stories about copyright collection societies should paint you a fairly complete picture on how these businesses operate. While they pimp themselves as proxies for content creators to police the known world for unauthorized use of that content, as well as operators working to license the use of that content, instead these companies work as syphons sucking money from both sides. They will be genuinely creative in their attempts to find infringement everywhere, liberally interpreting copyright law and what constitutes requirements for various licenses for things like art and music, while at the same time often being found to feign brain-death when it comes to paying the copyright holders' share for the money they collect.While the tactics used by collection societies regularly flirt with absurdity, it's not terribly often that they behave in a way that will garner broad disdain. One collection society in Japan, though, has decided to cross that line, unilaterally informing music schools that they must now pay up for daring to teach students how to play music. The schools, it seems, are not taking this lying down, having banded together and planning to sue the collection society.

Two lawsuits filed by victims of terrorist attacks against Facebook have been dismissed. Both suits alleged Facebook was complicit in acts of terrorism simply because it (subjectively) didn't do enough to discourage use of the platform by alleged terrorists.One lawsuit (Cohen v. Facebook) plead on behalf of "20,000 similarly-situated" residents of Israel who continue to face the threat of violence at the hands of terrorist organization Hamas. The other (Force v. Facebook) also featured multiple plaintiffs but was limited to families of victims of Hamas attacks. Neither case presented legitimate complaints and both advanced novel arguments in an attempt to avoid a dismissal under Section 230.The alternative routes to judgment worked out no better for the plaintiffs, as Eric Goldman reports. The Cohen class action presented a legal theory that couldn't even be addressed by the court due to a lack of jurisdiction. From the decision [PDF]:

As Techdirt readers will recall, in 2013 David Miranda was held by the UK authorities when he flew into Heathrow airport, and all of his electronic equipment was seized, in an act of blatant intimidation. His detention was under Schedule 7 of the UK's Terrorism Act, which, as its name implies, is supposed to be used only if someone is involved in committing, preparing or instigating "acts of terrorism."That was clearly ridiculous in Miranda's case, and it's just as outrageous in the latest example of UK border bullying, this time against Muhammad Rabbani. He's a British citizen, and the international director of Cage, which describes itself as "an independent advocacy organisation working to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror." The Guardian fills in the background:

For years, we've pointed out that the "Right to be Forgotten" (RTBF) in Europe is a dangerous tool that has been and will continue to be abused as a tool to censor freedom of expression, while hiding behind a claim that it is to protect "privacy." While the concept has been around for a while, it really took off online with a EU Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling from three years ago, saying that Google's search results index counted as a data repository on someone, and thus, an individual could force Google to "delink" certain results from searches on their names. But, the court left some leeway to Google to decide whether or not the requests were valid. Basically, if the information is no longer relevant for the public to know about the person, then Google should delink it. Now, obviously, that's a horribly subjective standard, and Google has had to staff up on people to determine whether or not any requested delinking qualifies.Part of the problem with all of this is that it seems to produce tremendous liability. Fail to get a delinking request "right" and Google is right back in court, which is exactly where we are today. Google has rejected just under 60% of requests to delink info in Europe, and four individuals in France were so upset by this, that they complained that their rights were being violated. The French data protection regulator, CNIL, actually agreed with Google that the information shouldn't be "forgotten." However, the four have appealed their case, and it's been kicked back to the European Court of Justice. The four individuals are claiming that the information is "sensitive data" and are suggesting that just being "sensitive data" alone is enough to require forgetting -- no matter what the "public interest" may be in that info.As Google has noted in a blog post, there are serious questions here about whether or not people can hide information from their past that may be relevant:

Because good ideas are rare but bad ideas eternal, the New York State Senate has just given its blessing to a stupid bill aimed at protecting people armed with guns, power, the weight of the law, and numerous immunity options. The "justification" for New York's addition of cops and first responders to the state's hate crime law is this:

While we've viewed much of the hyped up discussions about cyberwarfare with some trepidation here, we now live in a reality where it would be clearly silly to suggest that the internet and internet-connected devices are not an emerging battleground for rival nations. While much was made these past few years about what mostly amounted to the penetration of private business networks, the discussion about several democratic elections throughout the country and the clear interference in them, potentially by state actors, has pushed the overdrive button on all of this. As you can imagine, groups in charge of defense for the nations of the world have been paying attention, including the US Department of Defense.But it seems the DoD has a problem: it isn't meeting its recruitment goals for its Cyber Command division.

Last week there were reports claiming that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was just about ready to ban any laptops from being in the passenger cabin on any flights between the EU and the US. As we pointed out this made no sense, even if there were credible reports of terrorists turning laptops into bombs (as the rumor goes). The plan was supposedly set to go into effect last Thursday, but on that day DHS said it hadn't made a final decision yet. Of course, apparently some over eager airline employees had official signs printed up claiming the ban was already in place (leading to later apologies).

Surprising absolutely nobody, the FCC today voted 2-1 along strict party lines to begin dismantling net neutrality protections for consumers. The move comes despite the fact that the vast majority of non-bot comments filed with the FCC support keeping the rules intact. And while FCC boss Ajit Pai has breathlessly insisted he intended to listen to the concerns of all parties involved, there has been zero indication that this was a serious commitment as he begins dismantling all manner of broadband consumer protections, not just net neutrality.As you might have expected, the FCC was quick to release a statement claiming that gutting the popular consumer protections would usher forth a magical age of connectivity, investment, and innovation: