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Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, following widespread protests, ACTA was on the verge of death — but that hadn't stopped G8 countries from already preparing to replace it. Similarly, following the SOPA defeat, the usual copyright maximalist suspects were regrouping to come up with new tactics for fighting the public (and surely the revolving door between the MPAA and the federal government would help out on that front). Meanwhile, the lawmakers behind the new awful bill — CISPA — were downplaying the protests against it, even though the White House was also (meekly) opposed to the bill.Also this week in 2012: Twitter unveiled its revolutionary patent agreement, and the Oracle/Google fight began heating up over the originally-secondary API copyright issues that would come to dominate the case.Ten Years AgoMaybe all those lawmakers should have read our post five years earlier in 2007, all about how politicians need to understand the internet before trying to regulate it. Of course, at the time, you had high new webcasting royalty rates from the RIAA, Sony's DRM on DVDs causing all sorts of problems, the Authors Guild calling writers who give away content 'scabs', and telco-funded think tanks insisting anyone who supports net neutrality is just a pirate. Some corporate competitions were getting nasty too, with Microsoft lobbing antitrust accusations over Google's purchase of DoubleClick and Ticketmaster suing StubHub over exclusivity.Meanwhile, Mike's series on the economics of scarcity drew some poorly-argued ire from sources ranging from CNN's James Ledbetter to Dilbert creator Scott Adams (the latter of which turned into a longer back-and-forth).Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, lots of people were grappling with new questions and trends raised by technology. Parents were deciding whether or not to use internet filters for their kids while workplaces were getting into the idea of monitoring employees' instant messaging; texting was becoming a favorite tool of schoolyard bullies and, unsurprisingly, sexting was already on the rise (though still unnamed). Meanwhile, a new study was showing that the death of Napster did little to change the popularity of digital music, even as the recording industry continued to blame file sharing for all its woes (rather than, say, idiotic DRM "compromises" like a CD that lets you send temporary copies that "expire" to friends).But every now and then in doing this rundown, I find one of those posts that sounded so innocent at the time and now evokes an instantaneous "oh if only you knew..." reaction — such as this brief post noting Nathan Myhrvold's "interesting idea" to start up an "invention factory." Can anyone recall how that turned out?Forty Years AgoThough the technology had already been in development and testing for some time, it was today on April 22nd that fiber-optic cable was first used to carry telephone traffic, reaching 6 Mbit/s speeds all the way back in 1977.

A few months ago, we noted that the Gates Foundation has emerged as one of the leaders in requiring the research that it funds to be released as open access and open data -- an interesting application of the money that Bill Gates made from closed-source software. Now it seems that his successor as Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, has had a similar epiphany about openness. Back in 2001, Ballmer famously called GNU/Linux "a cancer". Although he later softened his views on software somewhat, that was largely because he optimistically claimed that the threat to Microsoft from free software was "in the rearview mirror". Not really: today, the Linux-based Android has almost two orders of magnitude more market share than Windows Phone. However, there's one area of openness that Ballmer seems to have embraced whole-heartedly for his new project USAFacts, which launched this week -- open data:

I have personally made something of a crusade as of late out of my position that the world's trademark offices need to be more nuanced when it comes to the alcohol industry. Far too many disputes have arisen recently between beer breweries, wineries, and spirit-makers, when anyone with a base understanding of those industries realizes how separate they actually are, rendering the potential for customer confusion a moot argument. To the layperson less familiar with both the purpose and nuanced aspects of trademark law, however, this position can require some convincing.That shouldn't be the case for a recent dispute between a winery and a pre-packaged foods maker, however, because this dispute is between two completely different marketplaces.

Earlier this week we noted that 162 tech companies (including us) had signed an amicus brief for the appeal in the 4th Circuit (in Virginia) arguing that President Trump's travel ban executive order was unlawful. The same group of companies (plus one more -- as it looks like Pandora was added to the latest) have filed basically the same amicus brief in the appeal in the 9th Circuit (which is the appeal of the decision in Hawaii that a smaller group had filed an amicus brief on as well). As with last time, people are going to come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories over this, but the fact is this is an issue that matters to many, many people who work at these companies, and the companies have committed to speaking out about it.

We've been saying this for years, but IP addresses are not good enough evidence on which to base copyright infringement lawsuits. At some level, everyone already knows this to be true. You can tell that's the case because the typical pretenders stating otherwise are the copyright trolls with a business model that relies on gathering large numbers of supposedly infringing IP addresses, mailing out settlement demands to the supposed pirates that own the accounts of those IP addresses, and then collecting very real money from some percentage of the recipients. On top of that, even these trolls will often claim that the onus is on the account holder of an internet connection to police their own pipe, which is a delightful end-around to the common concept of punishing true infringers as opposed to innocent third parties.There are places with legal systems that have had enough of this practice and we can now add Singapore's to the list. The High Court in Singapore recently threw out requests from several copyright trolls made to ISPs there to produce account information for IP addresses they claim were used to infringe on two movies, Fathers & Daughters and Queen Of The Desert.

There's been an awful lot of talk these days about how the machines (and "AI") are coming to take all of our jobs. While I'm definitely of the opinion that the coming changes are likely to be quite disruptive, many of the doom and gloom scenarios are overblown, in that they focus solely on what may be going away, rather than what may be gained. If there's anyone out there who might be forgiven for worrying the most about computers "taking over," it would be Garry Kasparov, the famed chess champion who took on the Deep Blue chess playing computer and lost back in 1997. However, in a new (possibly paywalled) WSJ piece, Kasparov more or less explains how, even now as AI is moving into all sorts of fields previously thought safe from automation, he's come to embrace the possibilities, rather than fear the losses:

So over the last few years you probably remember seeing white hat hackers demonstrate how easily most modern smart cars can be hacked, often with frightening results. Cybersecurity researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have made consistent headlines in particular by highlighting how they were able to manipulate and disable a Jeep Cherokee running Fiat Chrysler's UConnect platform. Initially, the duo documented how they were able to control the vehicle's internal systems -- or kill it's engine entirely -- from an IP address up to 10 miles away.But the two would go on to highlight how things were notably worse, pointing out last year that they'd also found a way to kill the vehicle's brakes, cause unexpected acceleration, or even direct the vehicle to perform sudden and extreme turns:

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Juicing your SEO? Don't like what turns up during vanity Googling? There are a few right ways to solve this problem and apparently about a million wrong ones.Doing the wrong thing could easily make things worse. Bogus DMCA notices tend to result in Streisandings, which leads to even more negative comments and contents clogging up your search results. Bogus legal threats issued by stupid lawyers or using stupid, compliant lawyers' letterhead tend to have the same result.You could get more imaginative and start filing bogus defamation lawsuits to fraudulently obtain court orders for delisting. Again, once you've been rousted, the best case scenario is some more Streisanding and negative ROI. At worst, you're looking at paying legal fees and/or possibly facing sanctions for defrauding the court.If you want the worst results and the worst punishment, you could do what this jewelry company CEO did:

A Long Island judge is swiftly making a (terrible) name for himself with a (terrible) ruling in a defamation lawsuit. The ruling making Acting Supreme Court Justice John Galasso look like an unconstitutional idiot has nearly nothing to do with the defamation claims, but rather his granting of the plaintiff's unconstitutional wish to have unflattering "memories" of himself pre-erased before the underlying lawsuit even gets going.Here's a bit of background: Jessica Pelletier, an employee at a medical marijuana company, Tikun Olam, sued her co-worker Eric Lerner, as well as her supervisor, for sexual harassment and retaliation.

Obama waged a war on whistleblowers during his eight-year run. Sure, it was done under a sunny facade of "transparency," but the former president set the gold standard for whistleblower prosecutions, performing more than every other president until then… combined.Punishing whistleblowers is for amateurs. The Trump Administration will show everyone how it's done.

Corporate sovereignty provisions in investment treaties have become much better known than they were when Techdirt first wrote about them in 2012. Despite that growing awareness, and widespread outrage at the idea that corporations can request secret supra-national tribunals to make awards of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars paid from public funds, companies continue to use the system to bully governments into changing their policies. For example, here is the US pharmaceutical company Gilead successfully deploying corporate sovereignty against the Ukrainian government, as originally reported by Investment Arbitration Reporter:

So rumors have started flying that Google is about to build some ad blocker technology into Chrome, that would block ads that the company considers to be "unacceptable ads" -- as determined by the "Coalition for Better Ads." Of course, while a coalition for "better ads" sounds like a good thing, this Coalition for Better Ads has been criticized. It was put together by the biggest companies in the internet ad space, and many worry that it's just an attempt to whitewash over a lot of bad practices by declaring just the extremely egregious practices as "bad." Either way, the original report from the paywalled Wall Street Journal notes that the ad blocker might even block all ads on sites that run "bad" ads (i.e., not just the bad ads).There have been all sorts of reactions to the news of a built-in Chrome ad blocker, but a lot of people are raising the antitrust questions. Obviously, Google is unlikely to consider its own ads to be the "bad ads." And thus, an official Google ad blocker -- especially one that allows its own ads through and is default on its very popular browser -- at least raises eyebrows about antitrust issues. There's a strong argument to be made (and I'm pretty sure that some ad firms would raise this with a court within a day or so of such an ad blocker being released) that this is an anti-competitive move to suppress competing ad firms.But... then again, there's the fact that lots and lots of people (quite reasonably!) hate ads. And a system to block "bad" ads is a pretty clear consumer benefit (which I imagine would be Google's key defense). And, of course, Chrome (and other browsers) have had a form of ad blocker for ages already in that they block pop up/pop under ads. So it could be argued that this kind of thing is already done, and how different is this?Of course, there might also be a more nuanced antitrust claim -- that this is an attempt to destroy the business of other ad blockers that are more aggressive in blocking ads -- including Google's ads. The argument there is that by offering a built-in ad blocker that handles the worst of the worst ads, users are less likely to install the optional more comprehensive ad blockers, thus protecting Google's ad business. That's one that Google may have a much tougher time with.Still, it does seem... tricky, to think that by providing users with a better default experience, that might also mean antitrust problems. That, of course, is where things always get tricky around antitrust issues like this one. Improving life for consumers is good... but doing so in a way that leverages a dominant position that potentially harms other ad blockers... is almost certainly going to lead to a lot of lawyers making a lot of money. But it also puts Google in a difficult position if its goal really is to stop bad advertising (and I know some will insist that's not Google's goal at all -- but just assume that it is and figure out what can Google actually do here?). Just as in some of the search antitrust cases, where sites with bad content were pushed down the rankings and sued (and lost... but still impacted some antitrust investigations), it becomes tougher to actually take steps to improve the web browsing experience for users.If I were in Google's shoes I'm not sure I'd go through the trouble of doing this, even if it would help in other ways. With so many folks gunning for the company these days, it seems like it's going to be costly in fending off antitrust challenges.

As you'll recall, back in early February, over 100 tech companies signed onto an amicus brief, arguing that President Trump's initial plan to bar immigration from certain countries was unconstitutional and illegal. A month later, a smaller group of companies signed onto an amicus brief in the district court in Hawaii concerning the revised travel ban (and a few people noted that some of the companies that signed onto the first brief had not signed onto the second one -- wondering if that meant many companies weren't as worried about the revised ban. Except, yesterday an even larger group of tech companies (162 in total) signed onto a new amicus brief for the 4th Circuit court of appeals which is the next appeals court hearing a case on the revised travel ban. And, yes, we at the Copia Institute signed onto this one as well (we also signed onto the first two).It seems likely that some companies just sat out the Hawaii case because it's in a district court, and amicus briefs aren't always as welcome in district courts, and some lawyers view them as wasteful at that stage. Amicus briefs tend to really only matter in appeals courts (or, of course, the Supreme Court). You can read the full brief here (or below), as it makes the case that even the revised ban doesn't solve the problems of the original ban. It's worth reading carefully. It's good to see all of these companies continue to stand up for what's right, especially when it would be easy to sit back, do nothing, and play nice with the new administration.And, because I know that some people will insist that the only reason that tech companies have signed onto this is because it gets them cheap labor or some other such criticisms, I can assure you that in many cases, the participation in these amicus briefs is being driven by the employees at these companies, demanding that management stand up and speak out, rather than a top down decision. Many people feel strongly -- as I do -- that being a country that is welcoming to immigrants is an important part of being American. No one's arguing that there shouldn't be background checks and "vetting" and the like -- but the executive order goes way beyond that.

It's pretty rare for us to bring up the issue of "moral rights" over creative works in the US, and even rarer to directly reference VARA -- the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 -- and yet, here we are, twice in one week discussing VARA claims. Even more incredibly, both are about sculptures that were placed for free in parts of lower Manhattan, right off Wall St. The claim that's received lots of attention was the one over the Wall St. Bull and the fact that another statue was placed near the bull, which the artist claims changes his message, and thereby violates VARA. This other claim is from another sculptor, Steve Tobin, who is suing Trinity Church for moving his 9/11 memorial sculpture to Connecticut.VARA, if you don't remember, was a bill passed in 1990, as a half-assed way to try to pretend that the US is in compliance with the Berne Convention -- the large (and almost entirely awful) international agreement on copyright and copyright related issues. Part of the Berne Convention requires that countries signing on recognize so-called "moral rights." For the most part, copyrights are considered economic, rather than moral rights, which is why they can be bought and sold. Moral rights, on the other hand, are a concept more popular in Europe, which argue beyond the economic rights, the creators of works have certain "moral" rights in what is done with those works. In order to pretend that the US fulfilled the Berne Convention requirements without actually introducing a full moral rights regime, Congress passed VARA in 1990, which gave fairly limited moral rights only to "visual" works like paintings and sculptures. The specific moral rights granted include the right to claim authorship in the work you created, and to prevent the destruction or mutilation of your work -- which is what we discussed in the case of the Wall St. Bull (even though VARA likely doesn't apply to the Bull).So, now for the details of this case. The Art Newspaper (the link above), which first wrote about this story, did not post a link to the filing (side note: I never understand why journalists don't link to source material if they have access to it). You can read the whole thing here. But the quick summary, as explained in the link above, is this:

Now that Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy has dipped into bogus lawsuits and DMCA notices targeting supposedly-libelous reviews and comments, he's apparently stepped up his detective work. Volokh and Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen managed to expose the person behind a series of bogus lawsuits aimed at cleaning up clients' search engine reputations. (Pissed Consumer has also uncovered some of the same tactics.)Volokh has uncovered more questionable lawsuits, which have led to more questionable court orders being sent to Google to delist content. As Volokh points out, these lawsuits may be slightly more legitimate, but they still bypass a great deal of the adversarial process.

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The Trump administration is rebranding the country: Make America Fear Again. In response to a national crime wave that doesn't exist, the head of the DOJ is rolling back police reform and replacing it with extra "toughness." Under the new regime, law enforcement officers will have the full (and, apparently, unconditional) backing of the White House.The DHS is joining the DOJ in flexing its new muscle. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already stated he's looking to turn requests for visitors' social media/email account information into demands, which would include the mandatory relinquishment of account passwords.Both agency heads have expressed a desire to do battle with US citizens by revitalizing the fed's war on marijuana, despite legalization referendums being passed by popular vote in several states.

By now, most people understand that the residential broadband market simply isn't very competitive. They also understand that's in large part due to the lobbying and financial stranglehold many providers have over both state and federal lawmakers and regulators. But however uncompetitive the residential broadband market is, the business "special access market" (often called Business Data Services (BDS)) is notably worse. This important but overlooked segment of the telecom market connects schools, cell towers, ATMs, retailers, and countless others to the internet at large.But consumer groups and smaller companies for years have complained that this segment suffers under an absurd amount of monopoly control, resulting in many companies and organizations paying sky-high rates for basic connectivity. According to the FCC's own data (pdf), in the lion's share of markets, 73% of the special access market is controlled by one provider (usually AT&T, CenturyLink or Verizon), 24% usually "enjoys" duopoly control, and only a tiny fraction of markets have more than two choices of BDS providers providing this key connectivity.After ten years of industry bickering and lobbying, Tom Wheeler last year began seriously exploring changes to special access rules, including price caps on how much these monopolies and duopolies can charge smaller companies (and in wireless, smaller competitors). By and large the FCC avoids broadband price caps like the plague, and the effort to impose limits on the BDS market reflected just how incredibly uncompetitive the special access market had become. But the rules were never finalized, and new FCC boss Ajit Pai was quick to throw away the decade-long reform effort.Instead, Pai has proposed deregulating this captive market even further, a massive win to the incumbent monopolies and duopolies that control it. In a blog post, the FCC boss was quick to insist that competition in this sector is actually growing, and his (read: AT&T and Verizon's) proposal will be sure to keep regulations in place in areas where it isn't:

This is one of the strangest "but for video" cases ever. We know many cops are hesitant to clip body-worn cameras on themselves for a variety of reasons. The official statements always express concern about privacy, as though people interacting with public servants somehow believe these interactions are private. Others show concern for police officers' privacy, as though the public is really hoping to FOIA footage of officers sitting in the break room or using the restroom.Deep down, everyone knows the cameras are a tool of accountability, albeit one that's far from perfect. Body camera footage frequently goes "missing" when force is deployed questionably. And it's completely possible to make the footage subjective with strategic body positioning and constant yelling of exonerative phrases like "Stop resisting!"So, it's accountability in its infancy, run through a layer of law enforcement-friendly filters (footage is controlled by police officers and often sheltered from FOIA requests). But it's much better than what we had before, where all action had to take place in front of stationary dashboard cameras.Still, there are plenty of bugs -- both those inherent to the system and those created by law enforcement resistance -- to be worked out. We've seen cops damned by their captured footage and we've seen officers exonerated by footage that contradicts arrestees' complaints.What we haven't seen before is a camera being activated by someone other than the cop in possession of it. And we definitely haven't seen any situations where the footage captures off-duty violence. This is a new one, and it's likely to lead to another "privacy" discussion by the time it's all sorted out. (via PoliceMisconduct.net)

With broadband privacy rules dead, ISP lobbyists and their loyal lawmakers have begun quickly shifting their attention to killing FCC oversight of broadband providers and net neutrality. We've pointed out how folks concerned about this shouldn't expect a lot of help from the likes of Facebook, Netflix and Google this go round. We've also noted how folks need to begin waking up to the false arguments being used to sell the pitch (namely that gutting net neutrality and FCC authority over ISPs will be fine because existing FTC rules will protect users, which simply isn't true).Roku certainly appears to have gotten the message, with reports suggesting the company has hired DC lobbyists for the first time ahead of what's expected to be a May or June attack on net neutrality (either at the FCC, in Congress, or a combination of both):

Nearly four years after the NYPD was ordered by a federal judge to implement body cameras, the department is finally getting around to finalizing its rule set for deployment. Part of the delay is due to the NYPD seeking input from the public -- input it has apparently decided to ignore.As Scott Greenfield notes, the NYPD gets everything wrong about its policies, applying guidelines that directly contradict the responses received from everyone in New York City not wearing a blue uniform.

Should government to protect us from snooping teddy bears and untrustworthy toasters? The California State Senate seems to think so.With traditional devices on the decline, laptop and desktop computers now account for less than 25 percent of internet network traffic. Indeed, American households now use, on average, seven connected devices every day. As this so-called “internet of things” continues to expand, an array of connected objects—from toasters to lightbulbs to dishwashers—now include embedded microprocessors, multiplying the number of potential threat vectors for data breaches and cyberattacks.Notably, security researchers revealed recently that CloudPets, a company that sells connected stuffed animal toys with voice-recording capabilities, had a security vulnerability that leaked the information of more than 500,000 people. In response to accounts like these and concerns about data collection by internet-of-things devices, California is considering S.B. 327, legislation that would require certain security and privacy features for any connected devices sold in the Golden State.Device insecurity is a real threat and it's encouraging to see legislators thinking about consumer privacy and security. But this bill, facetiously called the “teddy bear and toaster act” by its critics, would create more problems than it solves. These concerns do not merit a heavy-handed and wide-reaching legislative response.First introduced in February, the bill targets a broad range of products that include “any device, sensor, or other physical object that is capable of connecting to the internet, directly or indirectly, or to another connected device.” It would require that their manufacturers “equip the device with reasonable security features.”The scope and scale of that definition would appear to cover everything from smartphones to cars to tweet-happy toasters. Sweeping such a broad range of connected devices under its rules ignores that all of these items have unique functions, capabilities, and vulnerabilities. What constitutes a “reasonable security feature” for one might be completely unreasonable for another. This one-size-fits-all regulatory approach threatens to chill innovation, as companies from a host of different sectors expend resources just to make sense of the rules.Should the bill move forward, we should also expect a range of consumer items will be equipped to blink and buzz and beep in ways more annoying than informative. The bill decrees that: “a manufacturer that sells or offers to sell a connected device in this state shall design the device to indicate through visual, auditory, or other means when it is collecting information.”For some types of devices—such as virtual and augmented reality systems and autonomous vehicles—this requirement is simply infeasible. These devices use sensors to collect data constantly in order to perform their core functions. For always-on devices like IP security cameras, Amazon Alexa or connected cars, an indicator would just be synonymous with an “on” button. Many of these indicators will be superfluous, misunderstood and costly to implement—costs that disproportionately would hit smaller businesses.Other provisions of the bill urge sellers of connected devices to notify consumers at checkout where they can find the item's privacy policy and information about security patches and updates. This is valuable information, but the point-of-sale may not be the best time to communicate it. For many devices, a verbal or web-based tutorial likely would be more effective. Companies need the flexibility to figure out the best ways to inform their customers, while these design requirements would remove that flexibility.In an interconnected world, balancing privacy rights and security is a hugely difficult undertaking. Enshrining that balance in law requires a nuanced and targeted approach. Policymakers at both the state and federal levels should focus their efforts on provable privacy or security harms, while empowering consumers with baseline information, where appropriate. Applying design requirements and compliance tasks in a haphazard way, as S.B. 327 does, will harm innovation without meaningfully improving data security.Anne Hobson is technology policy fellow with the R Street Institute.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the silly take at Wired, more or less suggesting that it was somehow Facebook's issue that a troubled individual took a video of himself randomly killing an elderly man and then uploaded the video to Facebook. Unfortunately, others have had similar takes, including the New Yorker's Steve Coll, whose piece is mostly balanced and admits that it's basically impossible for Facebook to prevent this thing... but then at the end ignores all that and says, effectively, "Well, Facebook's big so it has no excuse not to do something."

We've been discussing for some time how John Deere, Apple, Sony and Microsoft are among a laundry list of companies fighting against so-called "right to repair" bills. The bills, currently being pushed in a handful of different states, make it easier for consumers to repair their own products and find replacement parts and tools. The bills are an organic consumer response to the attempts of many of these companies to monopolize repair, driven in large part by John Deere's draconian lockdown on "unauthorized repairs" -- forcing tractor owners to pirate tractor firmware and maintenance tools just to repair products they thought they owned.Apple's been notably vocal on this subject, recently trying to shut down a Nebraska right to repair bill by proclaiming that it would turn the state into a dangerous hacker playground. Of course, propped up by the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules, Apple has utilized a rotating crop of tools to try and protect this repair monopoly. Last year, for example, Apple caused a bit of a shitstorm due to "Error 53", part of an iOS update that bricked phones that had their screens replaced by third party repair vendors.Having apparently learned no lessons from the backlash from that use of repair locks, Apple is once again taking heat for new software locks cooked into the iPhone 7, which prevent the device's home button from working after it has been replaced. Unless, that is, the replacement is performed by a certified Apple technician with the proper "re-calibration" software. The home button is used to unlock the phone, and to return the user to the home screen when pressed.In previous iPhone versions (iPhone 5S, 6, and 6S) if you replaced the home button you lost the security function, but users could still login via pin -- and the button still worked to bring users "home." But with the iPhone 7, replacing the home button via third-party vendor results in the button not working at all -- unless you take the device to Apple's Genius bar. This is, independent repair shops claim, just part of Apple's overall strategy of monopolizing repair, hampering third-party repair vendors, and restricting consumer choice:

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It's no secret that the hotel industry hates competition from Airbnb. Hell, politicians have even admitted to crafting anti-Airbnb policies to keep hotels from being disrupted. But, now, the NY Times has got its hands on a specific plan from the hotel industry to basically hamper Airbnb and burden it with legal and policy challenges (I should note, by way of some sort of disclosure, that I'm typing this while sitting at a desk at an Airbnb apartment in Washington DC -- and, similarly, that it's much nicer and significantly cheaper than comparable hotels, but I digress...).

Back in 2008, Comcast sued the city of Chattanooga shortly after the city-owned utility (Electric Power Board, or EPB) announced plans to deliver the kind of cheap, ultra-fast broadband Comcast long refused to. After being saddled with legal expenses, EPB ultimately won that lawsuit, and in 2010 began offering ultra-fast fiber broadband. But it wasn't long before the community-owned broadband network ran into another obstacle: a Tennessee state protectionist law -- quite literally written by AT&T and Comcast -- that hamstrung the operation and prohibited it from expanding.Fast forward nearly a decade, and EPB now offers symmetrical gigabit connections for around $70 a month -- at least to the parts of Chattanooga ISP lobbyists have allowed it to. A 2016 survey by Consumer Reports ranked EPB, outside of Google Fiber, as the only ISP with a truly positive consumer satisfaction rating among the 30 national ISPs ranked by the magazine. Chattanooga's Mayor, meanwhile, has cited EPB as a major contributor to the city's reinvention.Facing this weird new phenomenon known as competition, Comcast this year finally broke down and brought its own gigabit offering (technically 1 Gbps down, 35 Mbps up) to the city. But Comcast being Comcast, it simply couldn't help but saddle the offering with a number of restrictions. Specifically, Comcast's offering the gigabit option to Chattanooga residents for $70 a month -- but only if they're willing to sign a three year contract. If users refuse -- the price of the service not only is jacked to $140 per month -- but you'll face usage caps and overage fees -- which are only avoidable if you sign the absurdly long contract.Hoping to get Chattanooga residents excited about the new option when it finally arrived a few weeks ago, Comcast posted an announcement to Facebook "introducing" the city to gigabit broadband service. It didn't go well. The company began taking an absolutely ferocious beating from area locals tired of Comcast's high prices and legendarily-bad customer service:Take note of the automated Comcast "support" representative that appears to believe they're "helping" without any understanding of the context of the concerns. The beating proceeds like this for an amazingly long time, consistently citing slow speeds, high prices and poor service:You may notice a consistent theme or two brought up by Chattanooga locals. The beating was so severe it made the Chattanooga Times Free Press, via which Comcast tried to claim that the response to the company's quickly-backfiring ad campaign was a "misunderstanding":

The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has affirmed a lower court's stripping of a federal officer's qualified immunity in a… moon rock sting case. This is a thing. Relatives and friends of NASA personnel have received what they believe are gifts from them -- items containing moon rock pieces, or heat shield fragments, or whatever. The problem here is the government believes it owns anything related to its exploration missions.It's not always illegal to be in possession of these items, but as Lowering the Bar's Kevin Underhill explains, it's almost always going to be treated as illegal by the federal government.

Some more forward progress has been made against civil asset forfeiture, this time in Arizona. Governor Doug Ducey put his signature on a reform bill late last week, raising the evidentiary bar for seizures in the state.

With Steam's policy for providing refunds on digital game purchases being roughly two years old, many people forget the context of the time when Valve began offering those refunds. It's worth being reminded that at that time nobody in the neighborhood of the Steam client's popularity was offering any real avenue for getting refunds on digital game purchases. Those that did mostly did so under the most restrictive conditions, with insane single-digit day windows in which a refund could be had, and only for certain reasons, of which the game being shitty was not included. Steam's criteria was that you could request a refund during a two-week period for any reason, be it the game not living up to expectations, the gamer's machine not being able to run it properly, or anything else. The other contextual aspect to keep in mind was that Steam had endured several weeks of absolutely brutal PR, with awful customer service ratings and the whole fiasco over its attempt at creating a paid-mod system.Still, Valve broke the mold in some respects with the new policy, forcing the competition to keep up. It took two years, but Microsoft recently announced that both its Xbox and Windows 10 marketplaces will likewise offer refunds on digital purchases, with the same fourteen-day window and the same requirement that the game not have been played for more than two hours.

We've talked before about how the very nature of work is changing thanks to technology, with telecommuting being an obvious trend — but despite some early predictions about the death of the physical office, the reality is offices have been evolving and changing thanks to technology and innovation too. This week, we discuss co-working spaces and other trends in the evolution of offices.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.

We've long documented how there's a growing array of websites that seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to "defeating" ad blocking. Quite often that includes punishing customers for a website's own misdeeds, or using ham-fisted (and frankly often broken) systems that attempt to block the ad blockers. Of course, this tends to obfuscate why these users are using blockers in the first place, whether it's to keep ads from eating their broadband usage allotments, or simply as an attempt to protect themselves from "ads" that are often indistinguishable from malware.The bottom line is that thanks to aggressive, poorly designed or downright hostile ads, many consumers quite justly now feel that ad blockers are an essential part of their privacy and security. Here at Techdirt, we long ago decided to let our visitors decide what their ad experience looks like, letting visitors disable ads entirely if that's they're preference (we just, of course, hope they'll try to support us in other ways). Elsewhere though, websites are engaged in what feels like a futile game of Whac-a-Mole that seems increasingly obvious (to some) won't be "winnable."New developments on the ad block front seem to indicate this game of Whac-a-Mole may soon end up with the mole being -- well -- most decidedly whacked.Princeton and Stanford researchers say they've developed a new method of blocking advertisements that detects ads the same way human beings do -- by simply looking at things like container sizes, graphical layout, and words like "Sponsored" (usually mandated by regulations or voluntary, cross-industry commitments). Computer scientist Arvind Narayanan and his colleagues have published a new paper (pdf) and proof-of-concept code for something they're calling a Perceptual Ad Blocker. Their paper describes the new technology as such:

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Last week, we wrote twice about sculptor Arturo Di Modica and his claim that the "Fearless Girl" statue, that was placed last month in front of his "Charging Bull" statue, violates his rights. As we explained, in detail, he has almost no legal case here. His letter to New York City argues three possible claims of action -- all of which would almost certainly be losers in court (as we detailed in that last post).However, I still have seen a bunch of people arguing in support of Di Modica, claiming that he "has a point." Many have pointed to a blog post by Greg Fallis that is literally titled "Seriously, the guy has a point." Others have raised other issues in discussions I've seen (and taken part in...) on Twitter and Facebook. I still don't think he has any point at all, but I wanted to do a post addressing each of the key issues I've seen raised, and explaining why I think they fail as legitimate arguments.Fearless Girl is an adI had debated mentioning this in the first post (and only obliquely noted that "there have been some criticisms" of Fearless Girl), but decided it was really meaningless. But people keep bringing it up, so let's address it. Yes, the Fearless Girl statue is an advertisement of sorts. The whole thing was created and financed by State Street, a massive investment firm, with help from McCann, one of the giant ad agencies. And a big part of the criticism is that State Street has a "gender diversity index" whose ticker symbol is SHE, focused on tracking the performance of "companies with the highest levels within their sectors of gender diversity on their boards of directors and in their senior leadership." And Fearless Girl has a plaque that says: "Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference." Many have, quite reasonably, argued that (especially given the capitalization of SHE) Fearless Girl is just an advertisement.And the response to that should be... so what? As we've pointed out for many, many years, all content is advertising in some sense. It may be advertising for the artist. It may be advertising some idea. It may be advertising a theme. Di Modica's bull was "advertising" the resiliency of American capitalism. Just because it's advertising doesn't mean it's not artwork. And even advertising can have a positive social message. So, the claim that it's "advertising" doesn't really impact anything here. Yes. It's advertising. So what? It's also still art, and was created by a real artist whose own work and talents are unfairly diminished when you say that it's not art just because someone paid for it and it advertises something else. Or as our own Leigh Beadon points out:

The current administration is back to threatening free speech. On his way to being elected, Trump's passion for bogus defamation suits led him to declare he would "open up" libel laws to make it easier for him to sue people for saying things he didn't like.This continued after the election. Trump tweeted his opposition to "fake news," calling out pretty much any major network that wasn't Fox News and calling them "enemies of the people." His new CIA director, Mike Pompeo, is similarly threatening the First Amendment. In his remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pompeo went on a rant about Wikileaks -- one no doubt motivated by the site's recent data dumps on CIA computer exploits.

We've noted repeatedly how modern toys aren't immune to the security and privacy dysfunction the internet-of-broken-things has become famous for. A new WiFi-enabled Barbie, for example, has come under fire for trivial security that lets the toy be modified for use as a surveillance tool. We've also increasingly noted how the data these toys collect isn't secured particularly well either, as made evident by the Vtech incident, where hackers obtained the names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses of 4,833,678 parents, and the first names, genders and birthdays of more than 200,000 kids.Last fall a lawsuit was filed against Genesis Toys, maker of the My Friend Cayla doll and the i-Que Intelligent Robot. The lawsuit accuses the company of violating COPPA (the Childrens' Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998) by failing to adequately inform parents that their kids' conversations and personal data collected by the toys are being shipped off to servers and third-party companies for analysis. A report by the Norwegian Consumer Council (pdf) also found that a lot of the data being transmitted by these toys is done so via vanilla, unencrypted HTTP connections that could be subject to man-in-the-middle attacks.In Germany, where surveillance fears run a little deeper for obvious reasons, regulators last February went so far as to urge German parents to destroy the My Friend Cayla doll, highlighting that hackers can use an unsecure bluetooth device embedded in the toy to listen to and to talk to the child playing with it. Since then, Germany's Federal Network Agency has clarified its position further. It's not only banning the sale, purchase, and ownership of the toy, but it's warning families that they face fines up to $26,500 if they don't comply with demands that the toy be destroyed:

Microsoft is the latest to publish a National Security Letter, following Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Calyx, Cloudflare, and… the Internet Archive. Microsoft's NSL [PDF] was issued by the FBI (of course) and demanded the usual subscriber info.In the post accompanying the disclosure, Microsoft points out the USA Freedom Act is the only reason it's been able to release the NSL. This is one of the benefits of the recent law: a better, faster way to compel review of NSL gag orders, which used to take place almost never.In addition, Microsoft notes FISA orders are on the rise. Of course, its reporting is limited to useless "bands," so the only thing that can definitely be determined is Microsoft's FISA interactions have at least doubled.

China's censorship of the Internet is both impressively thorough, and yet surprisingly subtle at times. For example, we've already written about ways in which the boundary between censored and non-censored is often vague, which paradoxically encourages people to be even more cautious than they would be with well-defined limits. But hidden among all the uncertainty, are there perhaps some fixed rules about when posts will definitely get censored?A team of researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab decided to find out by investigating one of the topics considered most controversial by the Chinese authorities, the so-called "709 Crackdown." This refers to a major government clampdown that began on July 9 in 2015, when more than 250 Chinese rights lawyers, law firm staff, activists, and their relatives were detained by public security agents across China. Internet users are understandably keen to discuss this important event, and many of those conversations take place on the main blog site in China, Weibo, and using the messaging service WeChat, which is even more popular. But as the researchers discovered, those online conversations were subject to subtle but consistent interference:

In the wake of the success of Nintendo's Mario Maker game, Nintendo fans almost immediately began clamoring for similar versions of other classic Nintendo properties. The obvious choice for the next franchise to get the treatment was the Zelda series, of course. The desire for a Zelda Maker title reached enough of a pitch that Game Informer asked Nintendo reps in 2015 about whether the company would be producing such a game.

A number of statutes and practices have created perverse incentives for law enforcement, but none are nearly so blatant as this Alabama state law governing the feeding of inmates. The law, passed over 100 years ago, says law enforcement personnel -- mainly sheriffs -- can keep whatever's left over from state and federal inmate food stipends. This doesn't mean the leftover money is routed to a general fund or used to defray law enforcement/jail-related expenses. No, this means the money flows from taxpayers, (mostly) bypasses prisoners, and ends up in sheriffs' personal checking accounts. (via Radley Balko)This legalized skimming has resulted in the obvious: underfed inmates and sheriffs with overfed bank accounts. The law first received national attention in 2008, when Morgan County sheriff Greg Bartlett found himself in federal court, defending himself against a lawsuit brought by his prisoners. Inmates were dropping weight and going hungry while Bartlett increased his personal income by $212,000 over three years, taking home a great deal of the $1.75 per prisoner per day state funds. (Federal prisoners housed in state jails are allowed $3 per day, which can also be rerouted to sheriffs' checking accounts.)This resulted in Bartlett spending one night in his own jail. Even then, Sheriff Bartlett was violating an earlier consent decree with the federal government, which ordered his office to use *all* food funds for feeding inmates. The agreement Bartlett reached with the court (after a night in jail) promised his office would do the same thing: spend all the funds on food, rather than diverting them for personal use.Even with two consent decrees in place and a previous sheriff being hauled into court for personally profiting from inmates' hunger, another Morgan County sheriff (Ana Franklin) has repeated her predecessor's misdeeds.

Late last week (beyond filing a new document in the lawsuit against us), we also filed an amicus brief, put together by Stanford's IP law clinic and Paul Levy at Public Citizen regarding a terrible and dangerous ruling for free speech in California. We wrote about it last summer and how dangerous it is -- but let's hold off on the details of the case right now.Instead, I'd like to go back one more year to May of 2015, when we wrote about a bizarre case in which the Phi Sigma Sigma sorority was officially suing a "Jane Doe" former member, who had apparently posted the sorority's super secret handshake to the Penny Arcade forums.

As you've probably heard by now, on Sunday a horrific act of violence happened when a clearly disturbed individual apparently decided to (1) randomly murder an elderly man walking down the street, (2) film the entire process from searching for the guy, approaching him, talking to him and then shooting him, and (3) upload it to Facebook for people to see. The police initially reported that he streamed the murder live, but it was later clarified that, while he had streamed some other commentary live earlier in the day, the murder was filmed separately and then uploaded. Still, as happens all too often in these situations, people are immediately jumping to the moral panic stage and asking, as Wired did quickly after, what kind of responsibility Facebook should take. The title of the article says that Facebook "must now face itself" for streaming the murder -- but then seems to have trouble explaining just what it needs to face (perhaps because... there isn't anything for it to face).

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It will never be said that the Trump presidency began with a presumption of openness. His pre-election refusal to release his tax returns set a bit of precedent in that regard. The immediate post-election muffling of government agency social media accounts made the administration's opacity goals… um… clearer.So, in an unsurprising move, the Trump administration will be doing the opposite of the Obama administration. The American public will no longer have the privilege of keeping tabs on White House visitors. (h/t Alex Howard)

As we've explained, with Congress voting (and the President signing) a bill to kill off the FCC's broadband privacy rules, things are not necessarily as bad as some might have you believe, but they're still bad. And lots and lots of people seem to be asking their elected representatives why they did this. After all, despite the fact that the vast majority of both Republican and Democratic voters supported the rules (as they did with net neutrality rules as well...), in Congress everyone lined up along party lines over this issue, with Republican members of Congress voting down the rules.At least some are now facing backlash over this... and they don't seem to be handling it well. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner seems to have what may be the worst possible take on this after being asked about it. He told a constituent, to maybe just not use the internet if you don't like it. That linked article only has part of the quote, but here's the video of the question and the response:

The Shadow Brokers -- having failed to live up to half their name -- released more NSA exploits last week when it became apparent no one was willing to purchase the exploits from them. This dump was far more interesting than previous releases, as it contained a large number of Windows exploits and -- for some -- a very handy, easy-to-use front end for malware deployment.This dump probably ruined a few Easter weekends at Microsoft, but not nearly as many as was first presumed. While the exploits targeted older versions of Windows, they would have caused trouble for government and corporate networks still relying those versions. Those targeting unsupported versions are the most dangerous, as those holes will never be patched. They're also the ones with the smallest user bases, so that mitigates the damage somewhat.As Marcy Wheeler points out, the NSA had plenty of time to warn Microsoft about unpatched holes prior to the Shadow Brokers' latest dump.

This week, the silver lining on a horrible story of police battering an arrestee was that the deputy, at least, lost his immunity. One anonymous commenter won most insightful comment of the week by giving a nod to the victim's courage and resilience:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, Congress (apparently having learned nothing from SOPA) was pushing forward with CISPA, the new cybersecurity bill. In its original form it was really, really bad — then a new draft was released that was slightly better but still full of problems. Nevertheless, the House Intelligence Committee launched a new Twitter account to misleadingly plug the bill, and it was even supported by companies like Facebook along with a promise not to abuse it — though we challenged them to go a step further and withdraw support until it was fixed to prevent anyone from abusing it.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, the lacklustre response to the Windows Vista launch was sending ripple effects through the computer hardware industry, though it appeared to be a bad time for consumer electronics in general. Though while some were chattering about Microsoft's demise, cooler heads pointed out that might be going a bit too far.Also this week in 2007: Perfect 10 reared its head with a shotgun spray of lawsuits, a court pointed out the should-have-been-obvious fact that the First Amendment applies on MySpace as much as it does anywhere else, and Techdirt was nominated for a Webby award.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, plenty of folks were busy hacking the iPod to do new things and helping chart the future of mobile devices — right at the same time that thumb keyboards were becoming all the rage in the wake of the popularity of the Blackberry. Google was still in its pre-IPO days and trying to pin down a business model, and this was long before it came into conflict with the Authors Guild which, at the time, was moaning about Amazon for showing used book prices next to new book listings. But we took a look at the other side of that equation and saw how empowering a used book selling platform can be.One-Hundred And Twenty-Three Years AgoWe've all heard of the early "nickelodeon" movie houses where five cents in a machine let you enjoy a brief kinetoscope of a butler falling over or whatever. It was on April 14, 1894 that this started with the first paid exhibition of motion pictures at Andrew M. Holland's phonograph store in New York City.

Oregon residents will be opening up their wallets and handing out $85,000 to a citizen and her ACLU representation, thanks to a police officer being the only cop on the scene unable to handle being filmed while effecting an arrest.Carrie Medina sued the city of Portland in early 2015 after an officer seized her camera and ended her livestream of an arrest two years earlier. The lawsuit [PDF], filed by the ACLU, contains the full conversation between Officer Taylor Letsis and Medina during the livestream's premature conclusion.It contains some choice highlights in law enforcement overreach and the assertion of nonexistent authority. The confrontation starts with Officer Letsis claiming Medina's phone probably contains "evidence of a crime," and continues on through to Letsis claiming his seizure and search of the phone is neither a seizure or a search but is very definitely something he has the "legal jurisdiction" to do.After some back and forth with Medina about his supposed "legal jurisdiction," Letsis decided to seize the phone and view the recording of the arrest. And by "seize," I mean "rip Medina's phone out of her hand."