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The US Trade Representative's annual Special 301 Report repeatedly points out how other countries are "failing" US IP industries by not doing enough to prevent piracy. The "name and shame" approach hasn't done much to curb piracy, although it has generated a few pressure points to leverage during trade negotiations.Countries appear to be tiring of the annual shaming. Michael Geist reports the Canadian government has issued a rebuttal ahead of this year's Special 301 hearing.

Company [allegedly] does bad stuff. Gets busted. Someone points it out online. Company sues commenter for pointing out facts because details are slightly off. That's just how oil company SG Interests rolls apparently.Popehat's Ken White has caught another case -- a First Amendment-rustling libel lawsuit filed in hopes of shutting a critic up. The Popehat Signal hasn't been lit, but the defendant does have a legal fund supporters can contribute to as he goes up against a presumably very well-funded opponent.The comment that started the whole thing actually quotes a DOJ press release, so there's a substantial amount of factual basis for the commenter's allegations -- even if the allegations aren't completely on the nose in terms of the company's settlement with the feds.An article about the Bureau of Land Management's cancellation of oil leases appearing on a local news site drew the attention of Peter Kolbenschlag, an activist and PR strategist. The comment SGI is suing over claims the company was fined for collusion and bid rigging.

Earlier this year, we wrote about growing concerns that President Trump's executive order stripping those who are not US citizens of certain rights under the Privacy Act could have major consequences for transatlantic data flows. Now two leading civil liberties groups -- the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) -- have sent a joint letter to the EU's Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, and other leading members of the European Commission and Parliament, urging the EU to re-examine the Privacy Shield agreement, which regulates transatlantic data flows, as well as the US-EU umbrella agreement, a data protection framework for EU-US law enforcement cooperation. The joint letter calls on European politicians to take into account what the ACLU and HRW delicately term "changed circumstances" -- essentially, the arrival of Donald Trump and his new agenda.The first worry concerns the Executive Order that excluded foreigners from privacy protections. The joint letter goes into more detail about why other laws, for example, the Judicial Redress Act, are not an adequate replacement for those protections. The ACLU and HRW also raise another issue: the lack of a functioning Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). That matters, because the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said oversight was needed to ensure that EU data receives appropriate privacy and other fundamental rights protections when it is exported to other countries. The joint letter explains why effective US oversight and redress mechanisms are absent:

How much do "Blue Lives" matter? More than non-Blue Lives, apparently, given the national legislative enthusiasm for generating stupid, easily-abused, redundant legislation.Louisiana -- one of the few states where legislators have agreed to extend greater protections to an incredibly-protected group -- has already seen its newly-minted "Blue Lives Matter" law abused by law enforcement. It's been abused so badly that even law enforcement's best friend -- local prosecutors -- has refused to pursue charges under the statute.But most state legislatures have yet to entertain this ridiculous idea to its illogical conclusion. As Julia Craven reports for Huffington Post, fourteen states have floated "Blue Lives Matter" laws -- a total of 32 legislative trial balloons.The good news is most of these have gone nowhere. The data compiled by Craven shows a majority of these have died shortly after introduction -- most likely due to them being both (a) bad laws and (b) redundant. All 50 states already have some sort of sentencing enhancement on the books for perpetrators of violent acts against law enforcement officers. Trying to twist legislation meant to protect underprivileged groups to include some of the most privileged members of our society hasn't found much support beyond police unions and others similarly self-interested.For whatever reason, Mississippi's legislature is the nation's leader in failure and redundancy, as far as "Blue Lives" legislation goes.Any bills that have managed to pass make things worse for anyone who has the misfortune of interacting with police. Existing laws already engage in book-throwing when it comes to violence against police officers. "Blue Lives" laws just add more severity, for no tangible reason.

Probably not the best idea, but it's something some legislators and private companies have been looking to do for years: hack back. Now there's very, very, very nascent federal legislation in the works that would give hacking victims a chance to jab a stick in the hornet's nest or work on their attribution theories or whatever.

Last month, we discussed the stark reversal by the Chinese government in the matter of many trademarks for President Trump's businesses. In that post, we tried to tackle the question of whether China's sudden approval for a "Trump" trademark on construction services was a violation of the emoluments clause. How you answer this question tends to fall along political fault lines, which is unfortunate. Notably, those that did not find a violation by the trademark approval often suggested that this was one trademark that had been in dispute for years, long before Trump began his campaign for the presidency. Is one single trademark being granted to a sitting President that claims to no longer control his business directly really going to amount to a constitutional violation? Many didn't think so.But now the conversation will change drastically, as the Chinese government has given preliminary approval on thirty-eight more trademarks to the Trump business, just in the last few weeks. And these trademark applications were filed during the Trump campaign, mind you.

Following the Shadow Brokers' partial dumping of NSA exploits, a new batch of CIA exploits has hit the web via Wikileaks. Contained inside both sets of leaks was information explaining why encryption isn't much of a problem for the intelligence community. The NSA has put plenty of time and money into breaking encryption, but much of its Tailored Access Operations -- much like the contents of the CIA dump -- involve access efforts that bypass encryption completely by making themselves at home on the targeted hardware/device.Despite these leaks, FBI Director James Comey is still insisting encryption is a problem. In his recent appearance at Boston College's cybersecurity conference, Comey had this to say:

There has been a great deal of conversation recently about the news media and its ability to do both its job and rebuild trust amongst the public. Trust is the key word there, as that's really all a news organization has to sell its readers. If there is no trust, deserved or otherwise, then the news has no product to sell the public.With that in mind, I can't even begin to imagine why several Gothamist websites began purging stories about the Ricketts family after, or just before, the Ricketts-owned DNAinfo organization acquired it.

Last summer, Mike reported the EU Commission was about to institute a "link tax" on news snippets. In essence, the tax would have punished search engines for sending traffic TO news sites. Not only is that part of it a stupid, backwards idea, but previous attempts by European countries to institute link/Google taxes were abject failures, resulting in Google refusing to list taxed news articles in its search results.Readers were invited to comment on the proposed tax. It's not clear whether those comments were heard above the overly-confident dull roar of industry lobbyists, but whatever the turning point was, the link tax idea is dead. What's being offered to publishers is something completely different: an opportunity to sue Google, et al for supposed infringement.

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Journalist Jason Leopold (currently in residence at Buzzfeed) has been given the nickname "FOIA terrorist" for his numerous requests and almost as numerous FOIA lawsuits. The government has taken notice of Leopold's activity. The Pentagon once offered Leopold a stack of documents in exchange for him leaving it alone. (He declined.) The FBI played keepaway with James Comey talking points, telling Leopold they were all exempt from disclosure. This obviously wasn't true, as these same talking points had been handed over to Mike Masnick by the agency months prior to the bogus denial it gave Leopold.Now, it's the NSA using Leopold's "FOIA terrorist" nickname against him. (This is weird because federal employees gave Leopold the "terrorist" nickname. He didn't come up with it himself.) In Leopold's ongoing FOIA lawsuit against the agency, the NSA has asked for an "Open America" stay. What this would do is push Leopold's request back in line with the others the NSA has received. The agency argues that Leopold's decision to file a lawsuit over the agency's lack of a timely response shouldn't give his request precedence over FOIA requests that arrived before his did.The agency points out its FOIA workload has increased significantly since "a former NSA contractor began a series of unprecedented, unauthorized, and unlawful disclosures" in 2013. The agency still processes thousands of FOIA requests a year, but it's unable to keep up with the increase in FOIA traffic.What the NSA wants is more time. Three of Leopold's requests -- two of them dating back to 2014 -- are at the center of this lawsuit. The NSA wants to prevent Leopold's lawsuit from letting him jump the queue. From the filing [PDF]:

For years, we've noted how many cable and broadcast executives have decided that their best reaction to the growing threat of cord cutting is to bury their head in the sand and pretend it isn't happening. Some industry executives like to insist that cord cutting remains an unimportant trend that will magically disappear once more Millennials begin procreating. Others -- often with help from the press -- like to insist the idea of cord cutting is some kind of myth perpetrated by mean bloggers, just to ruin everybody's good time.As a result, too many in the cable and broadcast industry have decided that the best response to a changing TV marketplace is more of the same: more rate hikes, more advertisements, more tone deafness, and more denial.You may be shocked to realize that this isn't working. In fact, MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett, the telecom industry's top media quote machine, pointed out this week that 2016's 1.7% decline in traditional cable TV viewers was the biggest cord cutting acceleration on record thus far:

A couple of years ago, the MPAA was freaking out about a piece of free software called Popcorn Time. Even though it was hugely popular as a result of its ease of use -- and access to large numbers of infringing copies of films -- it had a serious weakness. Since Popcorn Time was basically a BitTorrent client with an integrated media player, it was often possible to track down people who were using it. That fact, and the increasingly heavy-handed legal action taken against some sites that only had a vague connection with the Popcorn Time software, led to people moving on to more discreet alternatives that are based on direct streaming. One of the most popular today is Kodi, which describes itself as a "software media center for playing videos, music, pictures, games, and more." Like Popcorn time, it is also open source, but it does not include a BitTorrent client. Instead, as its website says:

For as long as I've spent time screaming about trademark issues in the alcohol industry in these here pages, I've repeatedly made the point that trademark laws the world over should be more nuanced when it comes to defining competitive marketplaces. The alcohol industries are perfect examples of this, with a fairly discerning customer base that is quite capable of knowing the difference between a beer and a single-malt whisky, or a bottle of wine, or the horror upon humanity that is sangria. But too many governing IP offices and courts take the lazy route of lumping these micro-markets into a macro-market for the purposes of claiming competition in trademark disputes.But the courts don't always get this question wrong. Some, in fact, do bother to take the time to weigh the sophistication of the likely buyers of products within a marketplace when rendering a decision on a trademark dispute. And that seems to have been at least in part at play in a recent decision to allow a trademark to proceed for a whisky brand despite the objection raised by a beer brewer.

This might be laziness. Or ineptness. Or just another indicator of how much citizens' rights mean to their public servants. Whatever it is, it's definitely not good policing. A drug bust that fortuitously rolled into the lap of the Colorado Springs Police Department has now rolled back out of it, thanks to a Colorado federal court. (via Brad Heath)Here's the story. The PD suspected someone known as "S.B." to be engaged in drug trafficking. S.B. owned a white BMW that was apparently used during drug deals. Detectives obtained a warrant to place a GPS locator on the car and track its location for 60 days.Three weeks after the tracking device was placed on the vehicle, detectives noticed the car's rims had been removed and a "For Sale" sign placed in its window. A couple of weeks after that, the car's location data shifted dramatically. It was no longer spending a great deal of time parked in S.B.'s driveway. It was spending a majority of its time at a new address -- one with no association to S.B. and the location data previously obtained.Colorado Springs detective Michael Gannett obviously felt the vehicle was in the possession of a new owner. His report noted the new location data and his efforts to verify if a change of ownership had taken place. Plainclothes detectives walked past the vehicle at its new address. They saw some drug trafficking activity being performed by the driver, but were unable to determine whether it was the person they had under investigation or someone else entirely.Rather than get this all sorted out, the PD chose to leave the GPS on the vehicle and continue tracking its location. This warrantless deployment resulted in someone else being arrested on drug charges -- not the person the PD was originally looking for.This person, Charles Wood, challenged the evidence obtained from the illicit tracking. The court agrees [PDF] with Wood's Fourth Amendment assertions.

This might be laziness. Or ineptness. Or just another indicator of how much citizens' rights mean to their public servants. Whatever it is, it's definitely not good policing. A drug bust that fortuitously rolled into the lap of the Colorado Springs Police Department has now rolled back out of it, thanks to a Colorado federal court. (via Brad Heath)Here's the story. The PD suspected someone known as "S.B." to be engaged in drug trafficking. S.B. owned a white BMW that was apparently used during drug deals. Detectives obtained a warrant to place a GPS locator on the car and track its location for 60 days.Three weeks after the tracking device was placed on the vehicle, detectives noticed the car's rims had been removed and a "For Sale" sign placed in its window. A couple of weeks after that, the car's location data shifted dramatically. It was no longer spending a great deal of time parked in S.B.'s driveway. It was spending a majority of its time at a new address -- one with no association to S.B. and the location data previously obtained.Colorado Springs detective Michael Gannett obviously felt the vehicle was in the possession of a new owner. His report noted the new location data and his efforts to verify if a change of ownership had taken place. Plainclothes detectives walked past the vehicle at its new address. They saw some drug trafficking activity being performed by the driver, but were unable to determine whether it was the person they had under investigation or someone else entirely.Rather than get this all sorted out, the PD chose to leave the GPS on the vehicle and continue tracking its location. This warrantless deployment resulted in someone else being arrested on drug charges -- not the person the PD was originally looking for.This person, Charles Wood, challenged the evidence obtained from the illicit tracking. The court agrees [PDF] with Wood's Fourth Amendment assertions.

Techdirt has been warning about the problems with the Creative Commons Non-Commercial License (CC NC) for many, many years. Last September, Mike wrote about an important case involving the CC NC license, brought by Great Minds, an educational non-profit organization, against FedEx, the shipping giant. Copy shops owned by FedEx photocopied some of Great Minds' works on behalf of school districts. The material had been released by Great Minds under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license -- that is, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The issue was whether a company like Fedex could make copies on behalf of a non-commercial organization, of material released under a license that stipulated non-commercial use. Happily, the judge in the case has ruled that it can (pdf):

So if you've spent any amount of time around here, you probably already know that the security and privacy standards surrounding the internet of (broken) things sit somewhere between high comedy and dogshit. Whether it's your refrigerator leaking your gmail credentials or your children's toys leaking kids' conversations, putting a microphone and camera on everything that isn't nailed down -- then connecting those devices to the internet without thinking about security and privacy -- hasn't been quite the revolution we were promised.Obviously for the NSA and CIA, the internet of broken things is a field day, and the fact that the intelligence community would exploit this paper-mache grade security should surprise nobody. In fact, James Clapper made it abundantly clear last year that the internet of not-so-smart things was a massive target for surveillance:

Welp, it looks like the quite long history of Perfect 10 filing frivolous copyright lawsuits and losing (while setting useful precedent) has finally come to a close. A court has now put Perfect 10's assets into receivership to be sold off.We've written a ton about Perfect 10 over the years. As we've noted, while the company officially styled itself as a porn magazine company, it was an early form of copyright troll, focusing on suing basically every large company imaginable for being somehow kinda partially related to any of Perfect 10's pictures showing up online. As such, Perfect 10 was astoundingly useful in setting some really fantastic and useful precedents concerning intermediary liability protections, and making sure that third parties and platforms weren't held liable for copyright infringement. The key, frequently cited, cases include:

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The Wrap, a Hollywood-focused online publication, has a somewhat bizarre article by First Amendment/entertainment lawyer Susan Seager. It's officially about California's anti-SLAPP law (which we've written plenty about) and how it's popped up in a bunch of cases in Hollywood over the past few years, protecting a number of people and companies from having to go through questionable lawsuits based on their speech. This is exactly what the law is supposed to do. But Seager, for some reason, seems to imply that the law should only be used for "small-town citizens" and shouldn't be used by larger players. The article goes through a number of example cases, and then notes:

There are about 100 AT&T lobbyists currently making the rounds in Washington, trying to convince regulators and the press that the deal will provide an incredible boon to consumers. The folks who actually try to protect consumers aren't so sure, arguing that a larger combined company could make it harder than ever for streaming competitors to license the content they need to compete with AT&T (and its own streaming service, DirecTV Now). And that's before you even get to the fact that AT&T's using usage caps to give its own services an unfair leg up in the market (aka zero rating).But AT&T's path toward deal approval just got notably easier. While the deal will be reviewed by the DOJ, AT&T and Time Warner are configuring the deal so that it doesn't trigger any of the requirements for FCC review. As it stands, the FCC's jurisdiction would only extend to the deal with the transfer of certain spectrum licenses, or one of Time Warner's TV stations in Atlanta. But Time Warner just got done stating they'd be selling that station ahead of the merger. And new FCC boss Ajit Pai says he doesn't see the need for FCC involvement in the review process:

We've just written about the use of body cameras in UK schools. One reason these trials are taking place is probably because the technology is now relatively cheap, which lowers previous barriers to deploying it. So it should perhaps come as no surprise to learn from a new report from Big Brother Watch that body cameras are also widely used by UK local government departments (pdf). Here are some of the figures Big Brother Watch gathered using Freedom of Information requests to over 400 UK councils:

Update: The original story incorrectly suggested that the USPTO had allowed a trademark on "the Kitchen" when that's not the case. We've edited the article to correct that impression, and apologize for the error.Generic terms that are allowed trademark protection are the bane of those that still believe trademark law serves a useful function. For the law to work as intended, to protect the public's ability to know what they're buying and from whom they are buying it, trademarks need to be both unique and identifying.Take one current trademark dispute, for instance, which happily includes such big names as Wolfgang Puck and the brother of Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk. Those two are currently battling over whether or not the term "the kitchen" ought to be trademarked for the restaurant industry. Puck is opening new digs in Chicago with the name "The Kitchen by Wolfgang Puck." Musk is one of the founders of The Kitchen Cafe out of Colorado. Musk filed a lawsuit against Puck in Colorado over the trademark issue, with Puck's lawyers filing a motion to dismiss while also filing suit in Illinois to have the Chicago area be the venue for the litigation.The Colorado complaint filed by Musk's company makes the following claim.

It's been more than a bit perplexing to watch ESPN, sports television giant though it may be, shrug its shoulders at the cord-cutting trend that has refused to bend to the network's pleasure. With streaming being a thing, and that super-charging the cord-cutting revolution, we've made the point for some time that the sports broadcast industry was eventually going to feel the grip of fewer subscribers, as has been the case with much of the rest of the television medium. Yet ESPN barely reacted at all to cord-cutting, other than to insist that established ratings systems are crap and that its loss of millions of subscribers over the past few years was of no concern, mostly because those subscribers were poor. ESPN President John Skipper said just last year:

From its humble origins as an online bookseller that many people worried might not survive, Amazon has grown into a critical piece of the web's backbone via its Amazon Web Services platform. Last week's S3 outage made this painfully clear, and understandably raised lots of concerns — especially after it was revealed that the whole thing was caused by a typo. So this week we're discussing whether something needs to be done, and what that might be.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

The first major ruling [PDF] by a Canadian court applying the country's anti-circumvention laws has been handed down and it's not good news. The law provides for a few exceptions to its broad restrictions on bypassing technological protection mechanisms (TPMs), but as the court sees it, any anti-circumvention process that might lead to infringement violates the statute.Not that the courts have done a great job interpreting the law to this point. In 2015, a Canadian judge ruled that simply asking for a copy of a paywalled article was illegal circumvention. The lawsuit at hand -- reported by Michael Geist -- isn't a great test case for exploring the outer limits of the anti-circumvention law. But the conclusions reached have severely negative implications for others not quite so entangled in facilitating infringement.Go Cyber Shopping made mod chips for Nintendo products that allowed users to bypass built-in protections to play "homebrew" games and, of course, pirated carts. Go Cyber defended its products by attempting to highlight the "homebrew" aspect, rather than the chip's ability to defeat Nintendo's copyright protection schemes. As is to be expected, Nintendo's lawyers did a far better job presenting their case than Go Cyber's did.

As you've probably heard by now, this morning Wikileaks started releasing a new cache of information regarding CIA hacking tools. This is interesting on a variety of levels, but many of the reports focus on the claims that encrypted chat apps like Signal, Whatsapp and Telegram may be compromised. See the top two links in this screenshot:Wikileaks itself may have contributed to this view with the following paragraph in its release:

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We've been writing about the sheer insanity of asset forfeiture for many, many years. If you happen to have missed it, civil asset forfeiture is the process by which the government can just take your stuff by arguing that it must have been the proceeds of criminal activity. They literally file a lawsuit against your stuff, not you. And, here's the real kicker: in most places, they never have to file any lawsuits about the actual crime, let alone get a conviction. They just get to take your stuff, say that it must have been the proceeds of a crime, and unless you go through the insanely expensive and burdensome process of demanding it back, they effectively get to walk off with your stuff. Law enforcement has literally referred to the process as going shopping. Most people who understand what's going on recognize that it's just state-sponsored theft.I'm constantly amazed to find people who simply don't believe civil asset forfeiture could possibly work the way it does. The whole process is so crazy and so lacking in basic due process, that many people literally find it unbelievable. And while some states have moved towards requiring a criminal conviction to keep the stuff, many don't have that, and our President and Attorney General are huge fans of civil asset forfeiture -- so it's unlikely to change any time soon.That is, unless the courts get involved. While the Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal on yet another egregious case of civil asset forfeiture, Justice Clarence Thomas issued an accompanying statement suggesting that he's having trouble understanding how civil asset forfeiture could possibly be legal in its current form. The case in question is egregious, but not all that unlike many other cases we've written about. People travelling with a large sum of cash (for a perfectly legit reason) are stripped of the cash by law enforcement who doesn't believe their reasons -- and then never files any criminal charges or anything, but just takes off with the cash:

While Trump, the GOP and new FCC boss Ajit Pai really want to kill net neutrality protections for AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, it likely won't happen at the FCC. As it stands, rolling back the rules via the same FCC process that birthed them would require showing the courts that things have dramatically changed since the FCC's major court win last year. Such a process would also involve another lengthy public comment period, during which the record-setting four million public comments filed during the rule creation could appear diminutive.So if you're an ISP lobbyist looking to kill net neutrality rules, how do you accomplish this without causing a massive public shitstorm? Why you table ghost write (corrected, thanks commenters) a bill that pretends to save and protect net neutrality, while wording it to do the exact opposite, of course!It's widely believed that the GOP intends to table a net neutrality bill sometime this year, either as a standalone bill or part of a Communications Act rewrite (with a heavy emphasis on killing the FCC's consumer-protection authority). The man likely to lead that effort is Senator John Thune, who last week took to the op-ed pages of Ars Technica to begin making his public case for such a proposal. Thune begins his sales pitch with, unfortunately, a lie:

Time for German parents to have "The Talk" with their kids. Unprotected sexual activity is probably fine. But casual seeding? That's a problem.TorrentFreak reports that a German court has decided to hold a parent responsible for his child's infringing activity. This doesn't have much to do with the rightsholder being unable to extract fines from a minor, but rather a perceived parenting failure.

Remember all the bravado behind John Steele and his copyright porn trolling? I've noted in the past that Steele reminded me of some guys I knew in college who believed that they were so smart that they could do whatever they wanted, and talk their way out later if they got into trouble. And, for many years, it seemed that Steele was fairly successful in doing exactly that. Remember all his big talk right after Judge Otis Wright referred Steele and his partners to law enforcement over his copyright trolling efforts? At the time, he yelled and screamed about how it was unfair and unprecedented, and insisted loudly that he would prevail.

So if you hadn't been paying attention, most of the "smart" products you buy are anything but intelligent when it comes to your privacy and security. Whether it's your refrigerator leaking your gmail credentials or your new webcam being hacked in minutes for use in massive new DDoS attacks, the so-called "smart" home is actually quite idiotic. So-called smart-televisions have been particularly problematic, whether that has involved companies failing to encrypt sensitive data, to removing features if you refuse to have your daily viewing habits measured and monetized.Last month Vizio joined this not-so-distinguished club when it was discovered that the company's TVs had been spying on users for the last several years. Vizio's $2.2 million settlement with the FTC indicates that the company at no time thought it might be a good idea to inform customers this was happening. The snooping was part of a supposed "Smart Interactivity" feature deployed in 2014 that claimed to provide users with programming recommendations, but never actually did so. In short, it wasn't so much what Vizio was doing, it was the fact the company tried to bullshit its way around it.And while Vizio may have settled the FTC investigation into its snooping televisions, the company now faces an additional class action after a California federal judge late last week denied the company's motion to dismiss. The court ruled that Vizio customers' claimed injuries were "sufficiently concrete" to bring suit under the Video Privacy Protection and Wiretap Acts:

For reasons unknown, a federal judge has said the hell with free speech and steered the court into the First Amendment-troubling waters of prior restraint.It's another defamation lawsuit that doesn't spend too much time dealing with defamation, preferring to focus on Lanham Act violations and tortious interference. Purple Innovations, maker of a (purple) bed-in-a-box mattress, is suing the Honest Mattress Reviews website, along with Ryan Monahan, former "Chief Brand Officer" for Purple Innovations competitor, Ghostbed, and creator of the site.Unlike other defamation suits we've covered here -- especially those attempting to dodge anti-SLAPP motions by presenting themselves as trademark suits -- Purple's complaint is long and detailed. Purple feels multiple posts at Honest Mattress Reviews have falsely disparaged the company and its products. All of the posts center on the white "powder" Purple uses to coat its mattresses during packaging to prevent it from sticking to itself.Purple's Lanham Act claims rest on Monahan's alleged conflicted interests, even as it admits in its filing that Monahan is no longer associated with GhostBed. It points to several statements posted at Honest Mattress Reviews which infer the powder used by Purple might be dangerous or unhealthy. HMR offers no proof of these assertions, but very few of them are actual assertions. In most cases, they're merely implications, surrounded by phrasing and pull quotes that help make the patent-pending substance appear more dangerous than Purple claims it is. Purple hasn't offered too many specifics in defense of its white powder, citing its pending patent as the reason it can't be more specific about the powder's composition.At this point, we don't know much about the merits of Purple's arguments, and nothing at all about the merits of Honest Mattress Review's defense. The defendants haven't been allowed to respond yet. The path to Purple's granted restraining order has been completely non-adversarial. Not a single document has been filed or motion entered by the defendants. [click through to enlarge]In less than a week, Purple has:(a) accidentally sued itself(b) had the case transferred from a magistrate to district court judge(c) asked for a restraining order(d) received a restraining order(e) asked for contempt charges to be brought against the defendantsPurple has filed a 102-page complaint [PDF] and a 174-page restraining order request [PDF], the latter of which is basically the 102-page complaint with 70 pages of website screenshots. Without seeing anything more than Purple's allegations, Judge Dee Benson has granted the request [PDF]. Not only does it require Honest Mattress Reviews to take down existing posts about Purple Innovations and its packing powder, it forbids the defendants from discussing the lawsuit in any way the court disapproves of.

There's been something of a trend recently in which the digital realm of video games have begun penetrating reality. This has taken several forms, from many countries attempting to dress up their real world military capabilities using video game footage, to infractions within the gaming realm resulting in real world criminal charges. This has come to be in part because gaming has become a dominant form of entertainment for so much of the population and in part because of how realistic games have become.But neither seems to be much of a factor in what I think is a first: Bolivia has filed a dipolomatic complaint with France in response to the country's fictionalized portrayal in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands.

For years we've pointed out the sheer insanity of the TSA's security theater, which is intrusive, insulting and does little to actually make us any safer. One aspect (of many) that has been particularly troubling is the way that the TSA has basically enabled sexual assault of travelers. If you felt that wasn't too bad, have no fear, the TSA is apparently increasing the sexual assaulty nature of these searches:

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You'd think city lawyers would talk to other lawyers before sending cease-and-desist letters to citizens. Or, at the very least, page through a few pamphlets on intellectual property law before threatening people with legal actions completely unmoored from statutory authority. But if they all did this, what would we write about?The city of Tamarac, Florida, is the latest participant in the long-running MMO we call "The Streisand Effect." Apparently, the city doesn't like its logo being used by someone who has little respect for the city's governance. It would presumably approve of its logo being adjacent to more respectful writing, but the lack of legal threats directed at home-teamers makes it difficult to gather test cases.As the Miami New Times reports, the city of Tamarac is unamused by a blogger's disrespectful parodying of its logo/leader.

Uber, but for private jets. That's JetSmarter's pitch. But just as Uber has engaged in some questionable behavior in its quest for marketshare, so has JetSmarter. You won't be able to find many negative reviews of the service because any journalist taking a test flight without delivering a puff piece is going to see their bank account take a hit.The Verge received this highly-questionable offer to "review" JetSmarter.

Considering the new administration has stepped up its ousting of immigrants, expressed its disinterest in pursuing civil rights investigations of the nation's law enforcement agencies, applauded asset forfeiture, and declared war on leakers, it comes as no surprise the White House supports a clean reauthorization of Section 702 surveillance.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes in response to Sean Spicer's about face on the Confide app, which prompted one anonymous commenter to point out a second layer of hypocrisy:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, we saw a somewhat parallel pair of bogus takedowns followed by apologies. First, there was the infamous Rumblefish incident in which a YouTube copyright claim was issued over birds singing in the background of a video, leading the CEO to explain the series of errors that lead to the mistake while missing most of the core point. The other incident targeted us here at Techdirt: one of our key posts about SOPA/PIPA was stripped from Google after a bogus DMCA takedown notice, garnering multiple apologies.Also this week in 2012, the Aereo lawsuit finally began, and two pieces of memorable viral content were introduced: The Oatmeal's comic about the difficulty of legally obtaining Game Of Thrones and the fantastic Polish essay We, The Web Kids about the anti-ACTA generation (if you haven't read it in a while, read it again).Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, Mike was at the Tech Policy Summit, where Howard Berman was blaming the pharmaceutical industry for holding back patent reform and the patent panel couldn't come up with any real solutions for the system. Overall, the event seemed to suffer from a lack of tech in the tech/policy balance. Meanwhile, following the Oscars, the Motion Picture Academy made the inexplicable decision to pull all videos of the ceremony off the web with the bizarre reasoning of wanting to whet the appetite for the next year's awards.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, the W3C was engaged in a critical fight over how to handle patented technologies in web standards, mirroring today's fight over EME in the nature of the problem (but not, so far, in the nature of the solution). CNN was musing about the future of charging for news online while the New York Times was deeming blogs a fad. Jack Valenti was arguing with Lawrence Lessig over copy protection schemes, a Senator was bashing Intel over the same thing, and the music industry was predictably blaming its problems on downloaders.Perhaps most notably, it was this week in 2002 that the EFF and various law schools launched ChillingEffects, the irreplaceable resource now known as Lumen.Two-Hundred And Twenty-Six Years AgoLong ago in the history of communication technology, there was a revolution that often goes under-discussed: the semaphore line. Though some designs exist from as early as the 17th century, it was on March 2nd, 1791 that one of the first practical experiments happened: at the height of the French Revolution, the Chappe brothers used a system based on colored panels, clocks and telescopes to transmit a message nearly 10 miles from Brulon to Parce.

Crisis management must be a full-time job at Uber. I've argued in the past that some of the attacks on the company are greatly exaggerated, but it keeps running into crisis after crisis -- many of them avoidable. The latest is a big scoop in the NY Times about how Uber has a special program called Greyball (a play on "blackball," get it?) that helped it determine if regulators were trying to get rides and then avoid sending a car. Here are the basics from the article by Mike Isaac:

The latest arena for deployment of cell tower spoofers is prisons. Along with the diminished rights and lowered expectation of privacy afforded to prisoners, those incarcerated can now expect their cell phone calls to be blocked or intercepted.The Register reports a new bill being introduced in the UK would give prisons legal authority to install IMSI catchers to monitor prisoners' communications and track/locate contraband devices. The use of Stingray devices in prisons isn't exactly new, although it hasn't really received much attention. Last year, Motherboard reported the Scottish prison system had been deploying cell tower spoofers for one specific reasons: to make prisoners' cell phone communications impossible. The devices blocked 2G and 3G signals, according to FOI'ed documents. (The documents also noted prisoners had already defeated the repurposed cell tower spoofers, so whatever was included in those documents is already outdated.)In the US, prisons are using similar devices, although no one has copped to deploying a name-brand Stingray within the walls of a prison. ACLU tech head Chris Soghoian's 2014 report on Stingray devices cites a Commerce Department paper on the use of cell tower spoofers to thwart communications and locate contraband devices.There's a twist in the UK legislation, though, that takes it past previous prison surveillance efforts. This bill would compel the cooperation of telcos, rather than make use of existing cell tower spoofer technology.

Public servants discussing public business. Should be public records, right? California politicians don't think so. The city of San Jose has spent eight years litigating the issue, hoping for the state's courts to find it permissible for public officials to hide official communications in personal email accounts and personal devices.In 2009, activist Ted Smith requested records from the city of San Jose, triggering a long-running lawsuit which has only now reached its conclusion. A state appeals court previously ruled for the city, finding records stored in personal accounts/devices to be beyond the reach of the state's public records laws.Fortunately, as the EFF reports, the state's supreme court has overturned that decision, making it much more difficult for public officials to stay out of the public eye. The decision [PDF] deals with the many arguments the city made -- several of which attempted to rewrite public records laws on the fly by taking certain phrases out of their context -- but the bottom line is this: public records still belong to the public, no matter where they're stored.

Techdirt has always been a place where we have discussed new emerging business models for the entertainment industry, including the music business. For far too long, there has been a battle about how musicians should monetize their art, with one side claiming that infinitely reproducable music files should be costly out of respect for the musicians and the labels that produce them, and the other side pointing out that this doesn't make any economic sense and that there are plenty of ways for artists to monetize their work without pretending the internet doesn't exist. Free music has always been at the forefront of this discussion, as some artists have given away music files as a way to make money elsewhere: live concerts, merchandise, etc. Yet, no matter how much money the new models can and do make for those musicians that embrace them, there is a stigma about what is essentially art enjoyed for free. And that stigma is often dressed up as a concern for artists.Yet that concern must wane as examples of artists making the internet work for them have proliferated. And those examples are no longer relegated to smaller artists with short music lifespans. Recently, Killer Mike and El-P from the exploding hiphop group Run The Jewels were guests on The Daily Show (we can't embed the video because Comedy Central, stupidly and inexplicably, doesn't use HTTPS — but you can view it at that link, or this one for our Canadian readers). While most of that conversation didn't revolve around the music industry, the first few minutes of the interview certainly did and both artists' explanation for why they chose to give away their music should sound quite familiar to Techdirt readers. Here's El-P:

Takedown and Math Is Not A Crime are back in the Techdirt Gear store »As promised, over the next few weeks we're going to be bringing back most of last year's designs in the Techdirt Gear store on Teespring, and today we've got our first returning champions: the long-time favorite Takedown tee and the surprisingly controversial Math Is Not A Crime gear.We've also got some brand new designs coming soon, but for now this is your chance to get one of these designs if you missed them last year! You can also help us out by sharing the store with friends — and we love seeing photos of Techdirt gear in the wild when you tag us in them on Twitter.Check out the Techdirt Gear store for these returning designs, and more »

I can only assume Mike Pence is so self-absorbed he's literally incapable of recognizing his own hypocrisy. Either that or he's completely shameless.After engaging in a presidential campaign where much was made of Hillary Clinton's private email address/server, Pence went to court to prevent his AOL emails from being released to public records requesters.I can only assume Pence is now welcoming an FBI investigation into his use of an AOL account.Clinton routed sensitive documents through an insecure personal server. Pence is doing the same. While Clinton was advised against setting up her own personal email server, it's likely Pence has had an AOL account for a long, long, long time. Sure, there's a difference between taking matters into your own hands and leaving your email security up to a third party, but the end result is no different: both were using private accounts to handle government business -- business that included the classified and sensitive information.The main difference here is we know Pence's email account has been hacked. There were attempts made on Clinton's email server, but nothing out there suggests any of those attacks were successful. Considering Pence's earlier adamance about Clinton's careless email habits, it's probably time to invite the FBI to take a look at his careless handling of sensitive documents.

You may have heard, recently, about a series of reports about sexual harassment (and general sexism and other similarly awful behavior) in Silicon Valley. It's not a new thing, but it's getting a lot of necessary attention right now and it's seriously messed up. It's unacceptable. It needs to stop -- and people need to speak up about it, and to come down hard on anyone who's engaging in it or letting it slide. If you're doing the kind of crap being discussed, stop it now (and go apologize). If someone tells you you're acting inappropriately, listen to them. And if you see someone else doing something awful, tell them to knock it off and then follow through.It's no secret that, in general, I'm a fan of Silicon Valley and the innovations that are created here. Indeed, it's been argued by some that I'm too supportive of Silicon Valley at times. But, to me, it's the innovation that's important, and the way that it can make our lives better. When companies are doing bad things that can negatively impact that innovation, they should be called out on it. For example, a few years ago, we thought it was a good thing that many companies in Silicon Valley got into serious trouble for colluding to prevent poaching of workers from one another. That was bad news, anti-competitive and anti-innovation. As we've discussed for years, widespread job mobility is a key component to innovation in the tech sector.Another thing that's a key component to innovation? Diversity and a range of perspectives and ideas. That's one of the (many) reasons we've advocated for more immigration for high tech workers and also against this administration's effort to restrict immigration of all kinds. The basic human issues behind it are most important, but the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives is in there as well. To create better innovations that help the world, we need it to be driven by more than just a subset of the population who come from similar backgrounds.That's another reason why it sucks to see more and more evidence of massive, and widespread, sexism and sexual harassment in Silicon Valley. Again, this isn't something new. It's been going on for a while. But it's finally getting some necessary sunlight. It kicked off with a somewhat horrifying post by Susan Fowler about her experiences at Uber, in which the HR department appeared to bend over backwards to not do anything in response to repeated reports of seriously inappropriate behavior at the company. The Guardian has now published a similar account from an engineer at Tesla.The Guardian also has another article detailing even more horrific stories of totally inappropriate behavior towards women. I've seen some arguing that at least some of these claims are exaggerated, but that doesn't matter and it's a bullshit excuse. Just the fact that anything even remotely like this happened is disgusting and unacceptable.