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Is it possible to arrest an unarmed homeless person without destroying the residence he's hiding in? To the Fresno County Sheriff's Department and Clovis PD (and far too many other law enforcement agencies), the question remains rhetorical.David Jessen's farmhouse felt the full, combined force of two law enforcement agencies and all their toys last June. According to his lawsuit [PDF], a homeless man was rousted from a nearby vacant house after he was discovered sleeping in the closet. He left peacefully but was soon spotted by the construction crew breaking into Jessen's house. The construction worker, god bless him, called the police because he thought they could help.Jessen was notified shortly thereafter. He returned home to find four sheriff's office cars parked at his residence (one of them "on the lawn," because of course it was) and a deputy yelling at his house through a bullhorn. According to the deputies, the homeless man refused to come out and threatened to shoot anyone who came in. Jessen was asked if he had any guns in the house. He replied he did, but two were unloaded and had no ammo and the third was hidden so well "only he could find it."Jessen was asked to move his pickup truck and leave the area for his own safety. The deputies also asked for a house key and for the garage to be opened before he left. Jessen and his family went to a friend's house about a quarter-mile away. Several hours later, he was told he could return home. This is what Jessen returned to:

Late last year Google Fiber announced it would be pausing expansion into several new markets, axing its CEO, and shuffling a number of employees around. Reports subsequently emerged suggesting that Alphabet higher ups were growing frustrated with the high cost and slow pace of fiber deployment, and were contemplating an overall larger shift to wireless. While the company continues to insist that there's nothing to see here and that everything is continuing as normal, signs continue to emerge that the ground Google Fiber is built on may not be particularly sturdy.This week numerous Kansas City residents say they were told that the company was cancelling their installations after waiting eighteen months for service. Users there are frustrated by Google's complete lack of explanation for the rash of cancellations:

Update: The bill has now officially been introduced.Well, we all knew this was coming, but Rep. Bob Goodlatte has been passing around a draft of a bill to move the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress. Specifically, it would make the head of the Copyright Office, the Copyright Register, a Presidentially appointed position, with 10-year terms, and who could only be removed by the President.This is a bad and dangerous idea. It's one that's designed to give Hollywood and the recording industry even more power and control over an already deeply captured agency. As it stands now, having the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress provides at least some basic recognition of the actual intent of copyright law, as established by the Constitution to Promote the progress of science. That is, as we've pointed out for a long, long time, the intent of copyright is to benefit the public. The mechanism is to provide temporary monopolies to creators as an incentive, before handing the works over to the public. Yet, the Copyright Office eschews that view, insisting that the role of the Copyright Office is to expand those monopoly rights, and to speak out for the interests of major copyright holders (rarely the creators themselves).Either way, by making this a Presidential appointment, the MPAA and RIAA know that it will give them significantly greater say over who leads the office. Right now they can (and do!) lobby the Librarian of Congress on who should be chosen, but the Librarian gets to choose. One hopes that the Librarian would take into account the larger view of copyright law, and who it's actually supposed to benefit -- and we're hoping that the current Librarian will do so (if given the chance). But making it a Presidential appointment will mean heavy lobbying by industry, and much less likelihood that the public interest is considered.The usual think tankers and industry folks will tell you -- incorrectly -- that the Copyright Office is only in the Library due to "an accident of history." But that's not the case. The role of both overlap dramatically -- collecting, organizing and cataloging new creative works. Almost everyone agrees that the Copyright Office needs to be modernized, and that the previous Librarian failed (miserably) to do so. But because we had a bad librarian in the past is no reason to remove the Copyright Office entirely from the Library and disconnect it completely to its constitutional moorings designed around getting more creative works to the public.Make sure to let your Congressional Representative know not to support this bill -- especially if they're members of the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Goodlatte has said that he'd only propose copyright reform bills that have widespread consensus. This is not such a bill.

Here come even more revelations of surveillance abuse by UK law enforcement. To date, various law enforcement agencies have been exposed as participating in very broad readings of very broadly-written anti-terrorism laws to spy on journalists and activists. The latest abuse detailed by The Guardian concerns the surveillance of activists by UK law enforcement on behalf of a foreign government.

Despite a last-ditch effort by the EFF and other consumer and privacy groups, Congress today voted to dismantle privacy protections for broadband subscribers in a 50-48 vote. The rules, passed last October by the FCC, simply required that ISPs clearly disclose what subscriber data is being collected and sold by ISPs. It also required that ISPs provide working opt out tools, and required that consumers had to opt in (the dirtiest phrase imaginable to the ad industry) to the collection of more sensitive data like financial info or browsing histories.Another part of the rules, which simply required that ISPs were transparent about hacking intrusions and data theft, had already been killed off quietly by new FCC boss Ajit Pai.The rules were seen as important in the face of greater consolidation in an already uncompetitive broadband market, where said lack of competition eliminates any organic market punishment for bad behavior on the privacy front (unlike the content or other industries). Now, with neither broadband competition -- nor meaningful regulatory oversight -- privacy advocates are justifiably worried about the repercussions to come.The rules were killed by using the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to dismantle recently approved regulations with a simple majority vote. While the rules really were relatively straightforward, telecom lobbyists spent months deriding the rules as "onerous regulations" that would be "too confusing" for consumers, potentially stifling sector "innovation." Industry lobbyists also consistently pushed "studies" proclaiming that ISPs really don't collect much consumer data, in stark contrast to, you know, the truth.One of the proposals sponsors, Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, went so far in a speech Wednesday night to suggest that the rules somehow "restricted constitutional rights" (of giant ISPs like Comcast, apparently):

Last summer, we wrote about a potentially important case going to the Supreme Court, technically about the copyright design of cheerleading uniforms. As we've discussed, copyright is supposed to apply to artistic expression, and it's been considered not to apply to functional products or industrial design -- sometimes referred to as "useful articles." Along those lines, things like fashion design, have always been considered not subject to copyright. In this case, Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, the question was raised about the design of certain stylistic elements on cheerleading uniforms, and whether one copy using similar elements on its cheerleading uniforms infringed on the copyrights of the other. A district court said no, the appeals court said yes. And now the Supreme Court has weighed in saying that the designs can be covered by copyright and creating a new test on such matters (previously, there was something of a mess of different tests that judges would apply, sometimes haphazardly). Having a single test seems better than a mishmash of competing tests, but the situation here is... potentially very dangerous to a variety of innovations.First up, here's the new test:

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There has been an effort underway these past few years to make tax season less stressful, less complicated, and less expensive for a large swath of Americans. These efforts have produced plans to make tax season "return free" for many, with pre-populated tax forms prepared by the government that can either be signed if accurate, or ignored if not with a separate filing then being produced by the person in question. That is, since the IRS already should have most of the details on how much you earned from the companies that paid you, it can send you a pre-filled out tax return document, rather than forcing everyone to redo the same work with the same documents hoping that you don't make some mistake that will make the IRS man mad. Again, for those who want to go a different way, they can. But for those who find the IRS's pre-filled documents to be okay, it will make tax filing significantly less of an issue. If you live outside the US, this may sound strange to you, because much of the rest of the world alread does it this way. In a recent episode of Planet Money, the analogy is made that the way we do taxes in the US would be like if credit card companies sent you a "bill" that was a blank sheet of paper, expecting you to fill out all your charges over the past month, and if you got anything wrong, you'd be punished. On taxes, most of the rest of the world the taxes are more like your credit card bill. In the US, it's more like a blank sheet of paper. And, as in years past, some are finally trying to fix things in the US.This plan has unfortunately run into the extreme distrust of all things government currently weaving its way through America and the gobs and gobs of money from Intuit and H&R Block that is making corporate use of that fear. The lobbying efforts of the tax prep industry has been a multi-year campaign (we've been writing about it since at least 2010) in which money is given to politicians essentially to have them work directly against the interest of their constituents on the subject of paying taxes into the government. It's absolutely bonkers (and partially helped along by anti-tax groups saying that anything that makes paying taxes easier should be stopped because taxes are bad).But since bonkers is quickly becoming SOP in our government, these lobbying efforts have only ramped up recently, with an increase in dollars spent likely correcting for how simple technology is making tax preparation for most Americans.

Once upon a time, Netflix was among the fiercest supporters of net neutrality, and a consistent critic of arbitrary and unnecessary broadband usage caps. So much so that the company effectively became public enemy number one at many of the nation's broadband providers, resulting in a steady stream of bizarre policy and lobbying attacks on the company. Netflix, we were told by a rotating crop of ISP-tied mouthpieces (even by current FCC boss Ajit Pai), was a dirty freeloader, and a nasty company responsible for most of the internet's ills.But as Netflix has grown larger and more powerful, the company's positions on usage caps and net neutrality has, well, softened.Back in January, a company letter to shareholders downplayed the looming death of net neutrality, suggesting that Netflix was so popular -- any attack on it would be seppuku:

The Santa Maria (CA) Police Department -- like the FBI -- is in the fake news business. Last February, it issued a bogus press release via online service Nixle, falsely stating it had apprehended two suspects. This was picked up by local news sources and redistributed. It wasn't until until December that the ruse was uncovered. The Sun -- which hadn't released a story on the bogus press release -- discovered this fact in a pile of court documents. (h/t Dave Maass)

People tend to have a hard time discussing the two mathematical concepts of zero and infinity. It's not hard to understand why this is, of course, with reality being a material thing and both the lack of and the infinite amount of something being somewhat foreign. And this manifests itself in all sorts of disciplines, from cosmology to spirituality to physics. And, of course, economics, particularly in the digital age where many of the axioms surrounding physicality no longer apply to digitized goods. Zero and infinity play heavy roles here, both in the discussion of free content (zero) and the concept of digital and freely copyable goods as a resource (infinity). The economic nature of these concepts have long vexed established industries, even as some of us have pointed out how efficient and useful infinite digital goods can be if properly applied.Industry rebuttals to the economics of all of this have mostly amounted to facile derision in the form of slandering younger generations who either "just want free stuff" or "want stuff they cannot afford." Neither makes much sense, with both claims easily disproven given statistics demonstrating how much more is spent by "pirates" than those who don't pirate content. The truth is that, while the average citizen likely can't speak eloquently about the economic laws at work for digital goods, they certainly can understand them intuitively. And this can be shown with piracy statistics for eBooks, which a recent study shows that eBook pirates tend to be both older and relatively affluent.

Perhaps the thinnest skinned politician on the planet -- Recip "Gollum" Erdogan -- is at it again. His legacy of injunctions, legal threats, and even copyright abuse continues. The latest to draw Erdogan's wrath is Switzerland, which, to be fair, has drawn his wrath in the past. The repeat "offender" was targeted by Erdogan in 2016 for an art exhibit he didn't care for. This wouldn't have happened if Switzerland didn't have a law on the books forbidding insulting foreign leaders. Erdogan has the uncanny ability to sniff out foreign laws that might help him remain un-insulted, but so far has only managed to Streisand himself into infamy.This time around, it's a Swiss tabloid earning the Turkish president's disdain/threats of prosecution.

In a ruling this week that will cheer up patent trolls, the Supreme Court said patent owners can lie in wait for years before suing. This will allow trolls to sit around while others independently develop and build technology. The troll can then jump out from under the bridge and demand payment for work it had nothing to do with.The 7-1 decision arrives in a case called SCA Hygiene v. First Quality Baby Products. This case involves a patent on adult diapers but has a much broader reach. The court considered whether the legal doctrine of "laches" applies in patent cases. Laches is a principle that penalizes a rightsholder who "sleeps on their rights" by waiting a long time to file a lawsuit after learning of a possible infringement. It protects those that would be harmed by the assertion of rights after a lengthy delay. For example, laches would work against a patent owner that saw an infringing product emerge yet waited a decade to sue, after significant investment of time and resources had been put into the product.The ruling in SCA follows a similar decision in Petrella v. MGM holding that laches is not available as a defense in copyright cases. The Supreme Court has generally rejected "patent exceptionalism" and has often reversed the Federal Circuit for creating special rules for patent law. So this week's decision was not especially surprising. In our view, however, there were compelling historical and policy arguments for retaining a laches defense in patent law.Together with Public Knowledge, EFF filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court explaining the many ways that companies accused of patent infringement can be harmed if the patent owner sleeps on its rights. For example, evidence relevant to invalidity can disappear. This is especially true for software and Internet-related patents. In his dissent, Justice Breyer cited our brief and explained:

For decades now the FCC has been an expert at imposing utterly meaningless merger conditions. Usually these conditions are proposed by the companies' themselves, knowing full well these "demands" are utterly hollow -- and FCC punishment for ignoring them will be virtually non-existent. The end result has been a rotating tap dance of merger conditions that sound good upon superficial press inspection, but wind up being little more than hot air. It's a symbiotic relationship where as the telecom sector consolidates (often at the cost of less competition) the FCC gets to pretend it's not selling consumer welfare down river.But last year something weird happened.When Charter proposed its $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, former FCC boss Tom Wheeler brought in net neutrality advocate Marvin Ammori to help hammer out conditions that wound up actually being meaningful. Under the deal, Charter was banned from imposing usage caps, engaging in interconnection shenanigans with content providers like Netflix, or violating net neutrality (even if the rules themselves were killed) for a period of seven years. Charter was also required to expand broadband to 2 million additional locations.Not too surprisingly, broadband providers and the new incumbent-cozy FCC are getting right to work trying to eliminate those conditions entirely. New FCC boss Ajit Pai is circulating an order that would kill requirements that Charter overbuild into competing ISP territories, something demanded recently in a letter to the FCC by the American Cable Association. As is kind of telecom sector status quo, smaller cable companies say they'll take their investment ball and go home if the threat of additional, regulator-mandated competition isn't eliminated:

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that passwords can be compelled with All Writs Orders. Handing down a decision in the case of Francis Rawls, a former Philadelphia police officer facing child porn charges, the court finds the order lawful, but doesn't go quite as far as to determine whether compelling password production implicates the Fifth Amendment.The Third Circuit doesn't touch the Fifth Amendment implications because Rawls failed to preserve them.

Back in 2012, a federal court ruled US websites were "places of public accommodation." The ruling (overturned on appeal) came in a lawsuit brought against Netflix by the National Association of the Deaf. It seems like an obvious conclusion -- more people get their information, news, and entertainment from the web than other sources. But the ruling had plenty of adverse consequences, especially for smaller, less profitable purveyors of online content.Professor Eric Goldman -- who analyzes a ton of internet-related lawsuits -- had this to say at the time:

Back in 2012, a federal court ruled US websites were "places of public accommodation." The ruling (overturned on appeal) came in a lawsuit brought against Netflix by the National Association of the Deaf. It seems like an obvious conclusion -- more people get their information, news, and entertainment from the web than other sources. But the ruling had plenty of adverse consequences, especially for smaller, less profitable purveyors of online content.Professor Eric Goldman -- who analyzes a ton of internet-related lawsuits -- had this to say at the time:

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For many years, we've written about the craziness of the so-called "border search exception" to the 4th Amendment, in which the US government has insisted that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply at the border, and thus it's allowed to search people at the border. The initial reasoning was -- more or less -- that at the border, you're not yet in the country, and thus the 4th Amendment doesn't apply yet. But that's expanded over time -- especially in the digital age. Perhaps, back when people just had clothes/books/whatever in their luggage, you could understand the rationale for allowing a search, but today, when people carry laptops and handheld electronic devices that basically store their whole lives, the situation is a lot scarier. Unfortunately, (with just a few small exceptions) the courts have simply taken the historical ability to search luggage at the border and expanded it to cover electronic devices. Then, things got even more ridiculous, when Homeland Security decided that anywhere that's within 100 miles of the border could be "close enough" to count as a "border search," making the "border search exception" apply. That's... messed up.There's now a case in the 4th Circuit that shows how this is expanding even further, and on Monday we joined with the Cause of Action Institute and the Committee for Justice to file an amicus brief in the case of Hamza Kolsuz (the ACLU has also filed an amicus brief). Kolsuz had his phone searched under a "border search exception" -- but here's the thing: He was in the process of leaving the country, not entering it. A regular bag search turned up handgun parts in his checked luggage, for which he was arrested. After that, his iPhone was seized and searched without a warrant. Remember, just a few years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that you need a warrant to search a mobile phone in the Riley case. But here there was none.Law enforcement tried to get around this by claiming that since Kolsuz was at the airport, the search of his phone should count as a border search exception. But that's crazy. Unfortunately, the district court accepted this reasoning -- and now the case is on appeal. We signed onto this amicus brief for a variety of reasons, but a big one is that, as journalists, protecting sources and documents is important. We shouldn't be subject to warrantless searches of our work every time we just happen to be in an airport. As the brief notes:

The broadband, advertising and marketing industries are absolutely thrilled about plans to kill the FCC's new broadband privacy protections for consumers. Passed last year, the rules simply require that ISPs provide working opt-out tools, go to reasonable lengths to protect data and notify users of hack attacks, and be transparent about what data they collect and who they sell to. The rules also require that ISPs obtain opt-in consent (public enemy number one for marketing folks) for the collection and sale of more personal data like financial details or browsing histories.Given that empowered, informed consumers cost the marketing and broadband industry billions, they've been waging a massive campaign to have the rules killed -- and they're about to succeed. New FCC boss Ajit Pai quickly and covertly set about killing the rules' hacking-related requirements. Meanwhile Senator Jeff Flake and Rep. Marsha Blackburn have gotten quickly to work introducing Congressional Review Act resolutions that would kill the rest of the new rules before they're even allowed to take effect.Needless to say, the marketing industry is pretty excited. In a joint statement by numerous ad policy and lobbying groups including the Association of National Advertisers and American Advertising Federation, the ad industry went so far as to try and claim that protecting consumer privacy was somehow "anti-consumer":

As Techdirt has reported, the election of Donald Trump has turned the world of US trade deals upside-down. The US officially pulled out of TPP, although some still hope it might come back in some form. TAFTA/TTIP seems to be on ice, but Trump's choice for US trade representative has just said he is open to resuming negotiations, so it's not clear what might happen there (or with TISA). Against that confusing backdrop, the European Union has been quick to emphasize that it is in favor of trade deals, and is keen to sign as many as possible, presumably hoping to fill the economic and political vacuum left by the US.One of the negotiations that has been going on in the background is for a major trade agreement between the EU and Japan. It began back in March 2013, but has garnered little attention, as people focused on the more imminent threats of TPP, TTIP, CETA and TISA. That's just changed, thanks in part to a joint statement signed by dozens of civil societies in both the EU and Japan, who write:

Techdirt has just written about ResearchGate, which claims to offer access to 100 million academic papers. However, as we wrote, there's an issue about whether a significant proportion of those articles are in fact unauthorized copies, for example uploaded by the authors but in contravention of the agreement they signed with publishers. The same legal issues plague the well-known Sci-Hub site, which may deter some from using it. But as further evidence of how the demand for access to millions of academic papers still locked away is driving technical innovation, there's a new option, called Unpaywall, which is available as a pre-release add-on for Chrome (Firefox is promised later), and is free. It aims to provide access to every paper that's freely available to read in an authorized version. Here's how it works:

Another "ag gag" law is in the works in Arkansas. These bills are brought under the pretense of safety -- both for the person supposedly breaking them, as well as for the employees of the entity "trespassed" upon. The unspoken aim of these laws is to prevent whistleblowing, and they often spring into existence after someone has exposed horrible practices at local businesses -- in most cases, the mistreatment of animals. The other consequence of most of these laws -- unintended or not -- is to deter employees from speaking up about questionable business practices, as there often is no exception carved out for employees of the companies protected by these laws.Kaleigh Rogers of Vice reports another ag gag bill has passed the Arkansas state House and is on its way to a Senate vote. And once again, the bill's wording would deter whistleblowing and make journalistic efforts a civil violation.

In December, we wrote about how (thanks to EFF's lawyering) mobile phone provider CREDO Mobile was finally (after many years) allowed to reveal the National Security Letter (NSL) it had received from the DOJ back in 2013. As per usual, the NSL had a complete gag order, barring the company from admitting it had received such a letter. Then, just about a month later, Cloudflare was similarly ungagged over an NSL it had received in 2013 as well.On Wednesday, EFF will be back in the 9th Circuit appeals court arguing that these NSLs are First Amendment violations, but for the first time, it can actually name those two companies as its clients. Even though those NSLs were finally allowed to become public in the last few months, the case itself still did not include their names, until Monday, when the court was told by the DOJ, that since the FBI had concluded the various investigations, and because it had enabled each of the companies to reveal those specific NSLs they had received, that it no longer required the plaintiffs' names in the case to be sealed. Of course, we don't know how many other NSLs are still gagged (possibly even with these two companies). Indeed, the EFF's announcement certainly hints at more:

Always-on, voice-operated assistants are on the rise, and most of the industry seems to have agreed that Amazon's Alexa is at the top of the pack. Podcast host Dennis Yang was and is an early adopter of these devices, so this week he's brought along Alexa, Google Now and Siri as guests for a discussion about the future of this technology.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.

Late last year, we wrote about the crazy case in which journalist Kurt Eichenwald was suing an anonymous Twitter troll, claiming that the troll had sent Eichenwald a flashing gif designed to cause some small percentage of epileptics to have a seizure. Eichenwald claimed that it had worked and he'd had a seizure on the spot. As we noted at the time, we're no fans of Eichenwald. In our opinion, he's an absolutely terrible journalist with a fairly long history of really weird issues, and a strange obsession with massively overselling stories. He has me blocked on Twitter and has indicated that he's no fan of us either.Still, the lawsuit was interesting. At a first pass, the very idea that a "tweet" could be a weapon seems preposterous, and even troubling. But as we noted in that story, Eichenwald actually could have a legitimate case. We cited a bunch of lawyers and law professors, who each laid out why a tweeted image, deliberately designed to cause real harm to someone, could certainly violate the law. Of course, many people (reasonably!) wondered if the troll would ever be found. It's not too difficult to hide your identity behind a fake Twitter account (in this case, the rather unsubtle "@jew_goldstein"). But, then again, perhaps we didn't expect that the troll would do this:That, is an image of John Rivello holding up his own driver's license. And it's attached to the very iCloud account that was attached the iPhone that he used, via an "untraceable" Tracfone prepaid account, to set up the @jew_goldstein Twitter account. And we know that because the DOJ arrested Rivello late last week and released the criminal complaint and affidavit that explains how Rivello the troll was tracked down. It's quite fascinating.The short version is this: when setting up the Twitter account, a real phone number was used. That information was obtained via a search warrant to Twitter -- which also turned up a bunch of direct messages that are kinda useful to prosecutors:If you can't see those, it's a series of Direct Messages from the "@jew_goldstein" account, saying things like that Eichenwald "deserves to have his liver pecked out by a pack of emus." "I hope this sends him into a seizure." "Spammed this at [Eichenwald] let's see if he dies." "I know he has epilepsy."Those statements are kinda useful for law enforcement when charging someone under a cyberstalking law -- 18 USC 2261A that includes this:

It's been a very long time since I last flew somewhere without my laptop. I actually am more productive than usual on planes, and I tend to use flying time to just focus in and get a ton of stuff done. I can't even begin to explain how ridiculously frustrating it would be to find out that I wouldn't be allowed to bring a laptop onto a plane, and yet it appears that our new Homeland Security overlords have put in place new restrictions on flights to the US from certain countries in the middle east barring tablets and laptops from the cabin (apparently no American carriers are impacted -- just foreign ones). Passengers are being told to check such things (which is odd, since normally you're not supposed to check lithium ion batteries...). Flights from 13 countries are being hit with this, and Homeland Security won't give any further explanation beyond the usual "national security." And, just this morning, the UK announced that it would be doing the same thing.Homeland Security has been hinting that this is due to some sort of specific threat -- so it sounds like there's intelligence around a planned attack using such a device. Perhaps then the extra precaution is sensible. But, once again, this feels like a form of overkill security theater: inconveniencing basically everyone (to extreme levels) based on the slight possibility of a very small number of bad actors. There has to be a better way. Every time one of these new restrictions is put in place, it not only completely inconveniences people, but it shows people that if they somehow convince the scaredy cats at DHS of some new type of threat, they can inconvenience people even more. It's almost as if each additional inconvenience is impacting things way more than an actual exploding laptop or whatever might.Of course, it should be no surprise that former TSA boss Kip Hawley, is now running around arguing that this is no big deal and Wired is happy to tell everyone to calm down and just "buy a book." But that's kind of crazy -- especially for people who have important or sensitive information on their laptops and don't want to hand them off to baggage carriers with a history of snooping through bags and stealing expensive electronics.Also, since this is limited to just a few Middle Eastern airports, it's not hard to think that if there are terrorists planning something, they'll just head to different airports instead. Yes, I'm sure that someone saw something that they thought was a threat, and it's reasonable to put in place plans that try to minimize some of that risk. But it has to take into account the cost side too, and there has to be a better way to deal with it than such a blanket ban impacting so many people.

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Because abusing the DMCA process only goes so far, some reputation management entities have begun exploiting an inattentive legal system to push lawsuits past judges. In some cases, these suits have featured fake plaintiffs filing bogus libel lawsuits against fake defendants and using a fake affidavit to fraudulently obtain court orders requiring Google to delist URLs.Those engaged in this fraudulent behavior aren't likely to get away with it for much longer. Paul Alan Levy and Eugene Volokh managed to track down the person behind one set of bogus lawsuits and get the presiding judge to take a closer look at the bogus documents he was being handed. Pissed Consumer has also been reporting on others using the same MO, and has headed to court to get these suits examined and tossed.The end of line for supposed reputation manager Richart Ruddie came at the hands of Volokh and Levy, with the judge granting discovery to the defendant after being apprised of the apparently fraudulent filings. Now that Richart Ruddie of Profile Defenders has been exposed, it looks as though he's given up the fight. Levy reports Ruddie has settled anti-SLAPP claims brought against him and is paying restitution for his reputation mismanagement.

Despite the rise of heavily-hyped-but-highly-scattered gigabit deployments, the broadband industry is actually seeing less competition than ever before across huge swaths of the country. Once upon a time, broadband "competition" consisted of an equally matched telco going head to head with the incumbent cable provider (if you were lucky). These days, most phone companies lack the finances or competitive motivation to improve lagging DSL speeds across their footprints -- speeds that don't even meet the FCC's base definition of broadband (25 mbps).That's resulting in a growing monopoly for the nation's cable broadband providers, who have quietly been absolutely butchering phone companies over the last several years. Just take a look at the latest data from Leichtman Research, which notes that while cable broadband providers collectively added 2.7 million net additional high-speed Internet subscribers last year, phone companies collectively shed roughly 600,000 broadband users.That's the most net additions the cable sector has seen in any year since 2007. And the 122% 2016 net additions are a notable bump up from the 106% of net additions seen by cable providers in 2015, and 89% of net additions seen in 2014. It paints a rather clear picture of a broadband industry that, frankly, is even less competitive than public wisdom dictates (and most of us already knew it's one of the least competitive sectors in technology):In countless markets, phone companies like AT&T and Verizon are simply giving up on unwanted DSL users, quite happily driving them to cable via the one-two punch of price hikes or apathy (their focus now is more expensive wireless, and gobbling up various media companies). Elsewhere, smaller telcos (Windstream, Centurylink, Frontier) have saddled themselves with so much debt by gobbling up AT&T and Verizon's aging copper customers, they're incapable (or unwilling) to invest in necessary broadband upgrades en masse.Many of these companies quite simply don't even want to be in the residential broadband business, resulting in a palpable, active disdain by many of these phone companies for their own paying customers. The residential broadband industry simply isn't profitable enough, quickly enough for modern investors, so most of these companies have shifted their entire focus elsewhere. For smaller telcos like Windstream, it's gobbling up companies like Earthlink to expand a focus on enterprise customers. For AT&T and Verizon, it's gobbling up media empires in the quest to be millennial ad juggernauts.All of this is wonderful news for companies like Charter and Comcast. This reduction in overall competition is eroding the resistance to the rise of completely unnecessary and arbitrary usage caps, meaning broadband (and competing streaming) services are getting more expensive than ever before. And remember, most of these companies have written and successfully lobbied for state bills preventing your town or city from doing much about it. As icing on the cable cake, new Ajit Pai-run FCC has made it clear that nibbling these companies' earlobes is going to pass for regulatory policy for the foreseeable future.All of this tends to get overshadowed each time an ISP proudly announces the expansion of expensive gigabit broadband lines in highly-selective areas. But for the countless markets in the States, phone companies have effectively given up -- resigning consumers to at least a decade of higher prices and the cable industry's particular knack for atrocious customer service.

Over the last few years, we've written a ton about "corporate sovereignty" provisions in trade agreements. Technically, these tend to be called "Investor State Dispute Settlement" or ISDS provisions, but I really believe that a decent part of the reason they're called something so boring is to stop people from paying attention to just how nefarious these provisions truly are. One of the reasons we first started paying attention to these provisions -- as they were showing up in agreements under negotiation, such as the TPP and TTIP -- was following a story involving the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly demanding $100 million from Canada for rejecting two of its patents.The issue was that Canada had rejected these two patents because the company couldn't prove that the patented drugs were actually useful. Eli Lilly claimed that Canada had no right to reject patents on that basis, arguing that it was a "dramatic" shift in how patents were reviewed, and thus it was "expropriating its property" and undermining the company's "expected future profits." Think about that for a second. By the time this case went to an actual tribunal, the amount that the company was demanding had ballooned from $100 million to $500 million. This battle has waged on for many years -- and for Eli Lilly, this was a huge deal. Management at the company basically bet the company on continuing to get new patents, and any hiccup -- even a rejection of patents for not being useful -- could be a disaster for the company. The company even pushed to get Canada slammed during diplomatic proceedings in the infamous Special 301 Report for the USTR for daring to reject its patents -- and the USTR complied.Well, it looks like all of that may have been for nothing. That's because Eli Lilly has lost entirely, and not only won't it be getting the $500 million it wanted, but it also has to pay Canada's $5 million in legal fees. You can read the final award here or down below. Of course, some may argue that this shows that the ISDS corporate sovereignty provisions work out fine in the end, with tribunals getting things right (even if that's not actually true in many cases), but just the fact that the Canadian government had to go through this massive and expensive process for many years just for rejecting two bad patents should show why ISDS provisions are such a problem.In the ruling, the tribunal even notes the Special 301 report that Eli Lilly worked so hard to have call out Canada's patenting practices, but more or less dismisses it, by noting that others, such as Mexico didn't complain similarly:

For far too many years, the video game industry struggled to assert its place as a true artform, one deserving of the kind of respect granted to movies, music, television, and literature. This has been a source of frustration to those of us who can recognize the powerful storytelling device that video games represent, as well as the way modern games contribute to art and social commentary. But by its nature as a relatively new medium, games have also struggled to preserve the industry's history in the way more widely and permanently disseminated artforms have accomplished. And that's where the gaming industry has taken a turn against its own artistic interests, often demonizing methods for preserving gaming history over intellectual property concerns. Emulators are the chief method at hand, where games that are ancient by gaming standards can be digitized and preserved for posterity, save for the threat of legal action over copyright infringement and the industry's attempts to stave off these useful tools.Like so many issues in the intellectual property world, it's not hard to understand the gaming industry's consternation. There's no doubt that many people use emulators simply to play games from old consoles and cabinets rather than pay for physical copies. Still, there's also no doubt that these same emulators work to preserve the artistic output in the gaming realm. This was most recently evidenced in two games that might never have seen the light of day again, save for emulators.

A couple of weeks ago, a federal judge in Utah decided prior restraint was the best way to handle a recently-filed defamation suit against Honest Mattress Reviews by Purple Innovations, makers of the Purple Mattress.Purple's lengthy filing contained numerous allegations of harm caused by Honest Mattress Reviews' extended commentary on the white plastic powder covering every mattress Purple ships. It also alleged HMR was just a front for site owner Ryan Monahan's brand management work with Purple's competitor, Ghostbed. Rather than give HMR a chance to respond, the judge decided the review site could publish nothing further about Purple or the lawsuit. It wasn't even allowed to refer to its previous rating of Purple's mattress.Honest Mattress Review didn't care much for this decision -- one it had been given no chance to contest. It immediately posted an article about the case and offered to comply with the letter of the order, but perhaps not its spirit.

Despite being considered one of the technology capitals of the country, San Francisco and the Bay Area continue to suffer from a lack of broadband options -- just like the rest of us sorry sods. If they're lucky, most locals there still only have the option of one of two large ISPs: AT&T and Comcast. Both companies have a long, proud history of fighting competition tooth and nail, often by quite literally writing shitty state telecom law that ensures the status quo remains intact. Attempts to break through this logjam and bring faster, better broadband service to the city have seen decidedly mixed results.Like most areas, ultra-fast next-generation broadband in particular is notably lacking. Some estimates suggest that just 2.6% of San Francisco residents have access to gigabit broadband service. Sonic CEO Dane Jasper, whose company is also busy deploying gigabit services to the Bay Area, tells me he believes those figures are stale and gigabit penetration rates in the city are closer to 17%. And while Google Fiber had tinkered with the idea of bringing fiber to the city, the company's pivot to wireless has left that added avenue of competition up in the air.Last week, numerous Mayors and city officials in California and Arizona penned a letter to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, complaining that not only is AT&T not upgrading many DSL customers to fiber, they're not adequately maintaining existing copper (now that AT&T's primary focus appears to be media, and acquiring Time Warner):

It looks as though the Supreme Court may have to step in and settle a particularly thorny question involving the First Amendment, Second Amendment, national security interests, and 3D-printed weapons. Cody Wilson and his company, Defense Distributed, sued the State Department over its demands he cease distributing instructions for the creation of weapons and weapons parts.The State Department came along too late to make much of a difference. It claimed Wilson's instructions violated international arms distribution laws, but by the time it noticed what Defense Distributed was doing, the instructions were all over the web. They still are, and no amount of litigation or government orders is going to change that.What Defense Distributed is doing is perfectly legal in the United States. The State Department says it's illegal to put these instructions in the hands of foreign enemies. Since it can't control internet traffic, it's decided to take down the publisher.That's the First Amendment implication, which can't really be separated from Second Amendment concerns considering the legality of distributing these instructions domestically. Last September, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court found [PDF] in favor of the government and its national security concerns.

So, let's just say that things probably haven't been looking very good for Prenda's Paul Hansmeier lately. Obviously, there was a long series of legal losses in the Prenda and Prenda-related cases, but those are in the distant past now. Back in September, he lost his law license for some of the Prenda copyright trolling activities (if you haven't been playing along, Prenda set up their own honeypots with their own films --which they pretended were some other company's, filed bogus CFAA charges to try to get IP addresses, demanded cash from people to drop lawsuits, lied in court multiple times and more...). Then, in December, the two main players: John Steele and Hansmeier were finally indicted and arrested. Then, just a couple weeks ago, Steele took a guilty plea, making it clear he's thrown Hansmeier under the bus and will testify against him (given the history of Steele throwing many others under rapidly approaching buses, this is no surprise).So... that's not a really good position to be in. But it may be getting worse. As you may recall, in July of 2015, after a number of cases went against Prenda, and Steele and Hansmeier were told to pay large sums of money in opposing legal fees and sanctions, Hansmeier declared bankruptcy. Except, as with so much related to Hansmeier, that was a disaster too. It got so bad that Hansmeier's own lawyer admitted to the court that "he's a bad actor." As the bankruptcy process wore on, it became apparently worse. Turns out that he denied a certain trust fund was under his control, but that wasn't actually true. Oh and also more shell companies. Oh, and also $180,000 in cash hidden under his bed. As we noted all the way back in 2015, even before all of this came out, bankruptcy fraud is a bad idea.And now, according to some of the latest filings in Hansmeir's bankruptcy case (also submitted in his criminal trial), Hansmeier admits that he's aware he's being investigated for bankruptcy fraud as well (ht: SJD):Oh, and back in December it was reported that the FBI was also investigating his ADA trolling efforts. So that makes him indicted for Prenda and under investigation over more potential (serious) issues for doing more Prenda-like activities with the ADA and then also for bankruptcy fraud. As Paul Hansmeier himself once said in an angry threat letter: "welcome to the big leagues." Amusingly, that was in a letter to a critic threatening litigation for daring to suggest that Hansmeier had been involved in criminal activities.Oh, and that's not all. Also via SJD, we find out that the trustee in the bankruptcy case, noting the indictment, has been asking Hansmeier to "waive his discharge" (effectively forcing Hansmeier to remain in bankruptcy, rather than being able to discharge his debts). The trustee (who is, somewhat amazingly, a former law school classmate of Hansmeier's) sent Hansmeier an email to this effect, noting that assuming Hansmeier would invoke the 5th Amendment in his criminal case, that will "allow the bankruptcty court to draw numerous adverse inferences against you."Ouch. The document below, in which Hansmeier reveals the bankruptcy fraud investigation, is actually part of his effort to have the bankruptcy court to hold off on these proceedings while all this other stuff gets taken care of. But, even if he weren't facing criminal charges where his partner in crime has already admitted everything and agreed to testify against him, and even if he weren't also facing separate investigations over bankruptcy fraud and ADA trolling, it appears that Hansmeier's bankruptcy case is getting even worse than it was before. This is beyond big leagues. This is beyond the All-Star game. This is truly Hall of Fame material.

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If all else fails, blame the millennials.

There's something to be said for an informed electorate, although it really shouldn't be elected officials advocating for it. They'd benefit least from people knowing more about sausage and the making thereof. And legislators definitely shouldn't be robbing the First Amendment to pay for better information, as a few California lawmakers are attempting to do.A new bill, pointed out by the EFF's Dave Maass, seems to be a response of sorts to "fake news" and other political detritus of this highly-partisan system. Ostensibly, the bill is aimed at keeping voters from being misled on issues that affect them. The problem is, this bill would allow the government to determine what is or isn't misleading and apply to a citizen's social media posts, blog, etc.California's existing "political cyberfraud" law (yes, really) already contains wording that forbids cybersquatting, misleading redirects, and otherwise tricking internet users who are seeking information on ballot measures. The existing law is more concerned with acts along the lines of false impersonation and deliberate fraud. The amendment, however, isn't. It adds a couple of new aspects, both making the bad law worse.First, the law would no longer be limited to "cyberfraud" related to pending ballot measures. It would expand to protect political candidates from being bested by wily web denizens. Where it really goes downhill is this new clause, which criminalizes even more speech.

Google is constantly under pressure from all sides to change how it ranks just about everything. There's a massive SEO industry, a decent portion of which is dedicated into tricking Google into ranking some stuff higher than others (or downgrading content that someone doesn't like). And, then, of course, there are the "outside" interests. For years, the legacy recording and movie industries would misleadingly blame Google for piracy and demand that it downrank "pirate" links. Google caved in and did so, and the end result has been kind of a mess. Because it's based on DMCA notices in to Google, the company now gets flooded with an ever increasing number of DMCA notices -- many of which are completely bogus (and potentially just designed to mess with search rankings).On top of that, in cases where it does downrank so-called "pirate" sites, since people are still looking for unauthorized content anyway, they end up going to more dangerous sites, where they're more likely to get malware. And, of course, as we predicted, despite caving in and giving the RIAA/MPAA a tool to shape search results, those industries still aren't satisfied. Because they'll never be satisifed. That's because they fail to understand that the problem isn't Google. Google is just a representation of what's on the internet -- and many people on the internet want access to content that is otherwise difficult to get. That's not Google's fault.A couple of years ago, Google also announced that it would allow people to remove "revenge porn" results from search. And you can certainly understand why pretty much everyone would want this as an end result. But, still, once you make that tool available, there's reason to fear that it, too, will be abused. And even if a company as large as Google may be able to properly staff up to go through and review each request, this only puts pressure on everyone else -- including much smaller, less well-staffed, less well-resourced players to do something similar.And now... for reasons that are unclear, Google has announced that it opened up a tool that will let people report "offensive" results and potentially downrank those results.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad, responding to Ed Sheeran's stand against takedown bots with a good observation about the broken incentives of the DMCA:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, politicians were still reeling from recent public opposition. Don't get SOPA'd had become the new mantra in DC, while the European Commission was blaming ACTA's failure on social media and starting to worry about its upcoming copyright directive. Rep. Lamar Smith was unperturbed though, which is why people were working to fund a "Don't Mess With The Internet" billboard in his district.Also this week in 2012: Mojang and Bethesda settled their dispute over the Scrolls trademark, Megaupload was negotiating with the government to let users retrieve their files from the service, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica ended an era by discontinuing its print edition.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, Viacom followed up on its mass YouTube takedowns with a now-infamous billion-dollar lawsuit — just as some of those who had their videos taken down were suing Viacom. Meanwhile, Hollywood was trying to export DRM around the globe even as the EU Commissioner was making veiled threats about stopping DRM on music. While one Microsoft executive was admitting the company benefits from piracy, the video game industry was joining the BSA, RIAA, MPAA et al in spreading bogus piracy stats. And we were pleasantly surprised to discover at least one person in congress who understood mixtapes and mashups.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, plenty of things were on the horizon. Augmented reality was making early waves (very early, obviously), people were warning about mobile phone viruses, news broadcasters had only just really started using green-screen sets instead of fancy newsrooms, and plagiarism-detection software was just starting to get the attention of universities. While Canada was trying to pass its levy on blank storage media (which still plagues its blank CDs to this day), webcasters and record labels were actually on the same side fighting against high internet radio royalties (if you can believe it). Meanwhile, the legal saga of "sucks" sites played out another chapter in the courts.

The First Amendment Lawyer's Association (FALA) is hoping to end the California Attorney General's crusade against Backpage. The website has already ceded ground in the face of constant criticism, investigations, and legal threats. Earlier this year, it shuttered its adult ads rather than continue to bleed money and time defending itself against bogus prosecutions and investigations.Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris -- who blew off court decisions against her office to continue to prosecute Backpage -- has now moved on to the US Senate. But just because Harris has moved on doesn't mean the local AG's office isn't going to continue with Harris' unfinished business.The letter from FALA is covered (but not published[?]) by Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason.

Here's the latest instalment in the long-running Techdirt series "just when you thought there was nothing left to control, China comes up with something else it wants to throttle", as reported by the South China Morning Post:

It's remarkable how quickly drones have become a familiar part of the modern world. Like most tools, they can be used for good and evil, but it tends to be the latter that is highlighted when it comes to drones. In the last few days, it was widely reported that President Trump has given the CIA power to launch drone strikes against suspected terrorists, in addition to being able to use the technology to locate them. Dealing death from the skies may be the most dramatic application of drones, but there are plenty of other, more benign, uses, even if they receive less attention. For example, activists in Hungary have been deploying them in a variety of innovative ways in order to bolster transparency and openness in a country where these are increasingly under threat. That's because the country's prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is a self-confessed believer in the "illiberal state," which Wikipedia describes as follows:

Last month, we noted how New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Charter Communications for knowingly providing broadband service well below advertised speeds. After an initial first read I didn't think much of the lawsuit (pdf), but upon closer inspection it provides some pretty damning evidence that Charter not only knowingly failed to provide decent service (and just didn't care, since this is the uncompetitive broadband industry), but in some instances actively made connections worse for its own competitive advantage.The AG's suit highlights how Charter manipulated data for a program run by the FCC to monitor consumer connection speeds. This program, co-operated by a UK outfit dubbed SamKnows, gives volunteers custom-firmware embedded routers to monitor connection quality and speed. The FCC was then using this data to name and shame ISPs that failed to deliver advertised speeds. The lawsuit highlights how Charter executives worked to intentionally deliver faster speeds to just these customers in order to trick the FCC into believing its network was performing better than it actually was.The suit also seemed to confirm something that content and transit operators have been complaining about for a few years -- namely that large incumbent ISPs were intentionally letting interconnection points get saturated to extract additional fees from backbone and content providers like Netflix. This behavior quickly ended thanks in large part to the FCC's new net neutrality rules, which currently protect such interconnection relationships from abuse by incumbent telecom mono/duopolies. With these rules possibly dying this year, it's a problem you can be sure will re-emerge.Not too surprisingly, Charter is trying to have this case thrown out. Recent court filings (pdf) indicate that the company successfully had the case moved from state to federal court, with Charter lawyers arguing that the Communications Act completely preempted claims under state law. Charter lawyers even went so far as to justify this position using the exact same 2015 FCC net neutrality rules ISPs lobbied, repeatedly, to destroy:

It's been nearly a year since we started offering Techdirt t-shirts, hoodies and more on Teespring, and in that time we've seen quite a few tweets showing off some great photos (and one video!) of the gear upon arrival or out in the wild. Since we've just put most of last year's designs back in the store — and since we're gearing up to launch a new design next week — I figured it might be time to show off some of those photos and encourage those of you who already have Techdirt gear, or are getting it soon, to share new ones!Most recently, a few folks have been tweeting photos of our I Invented Email gear, including one of our favourite parody accounts...

The history of copyright law in Australia is somewhat tortured, with the government there far too often bending the knee to entertainment industries both local and abroad. Still, while much of this history is fraught with protectionism reared intentionally, one of the more curious aspects of Australian copyright law appears to have originated as something of an accident. That aspect is that the kind of safe harbor protections that exist in America are rather limited in Australia. Specifically limited to commercial ISPs, as opposed to websites or institutions that provide internet access generally speaking. We'll get a bit more into how this came to be in a moment. We'll start instead with news that recently offered amendments to copyright law in the country that would shore up safe harbor protections more generally have received the support of Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull.

The standard for warrants is probable cause. The warrant obtained by Edina, MN police doesn't even approach reasonable suspicion. In its attempt to locate the person behind a fraudulent bank transfer, the Edina police have asked Google to bring them everyone, as public records enthusiast Tony Webster reports.

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