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So when we last checked in with Comcast, the company was whining about a now deceased FCC plan to bring some much-needed openness and competition to your dusty old cable box. The FCC had proposed requiring that cable providers let users pick the cable box of their choice, later modifying the plan (after endless industry pearl-clutching) to simply requiring that cable providers bring their existing content in app form to existing streaming boxes. Granted, Comcast was at the heart of a massive, bizarre disinformation effort claiming the plan would end civilization as we know it.Of course, what it would have ended was not only $21 billion in cable box monopoly rental fees, but a cornerstone of the closed, locked down walled garden that helps prop up the cable industry's gatekeeper power. Comcast, for what it's worth, claimed that bringing its content to third-party devices would harm copyright, increase piracy, hinder cable industry "innovation," and was technically impossible anyway. Regardless, the FCC's plan is dead, and it's not coming back any time soon.But Comcast still has to drive the impression that it's listening to consumers and driving innovation, so the cable giant recently announced it would be bringing its Xfinity cable TV service to Roku streaming hardware. The app, currently in beta, lets users access their existing Comcast TV content without the need for a cable box, highlighting, Comcast insists, the company's innovation in the TV space:

Remember the good old days, when trade deals were so boring nobody even cared they were happening? That started to change with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, (ACTA), where the copyright industries rather foolishly tried to slip in some proposals that would have had big impacts on the online world. As Techdirt reported at the time, that led to an unprecedented awareness of, and resistance to, ACTA that ultimately caused its defeat in the European Parliament.After that, things were never the same again in the world of trade deals, because digital activists were now on the lookout for the bad stuff hidden in the stultifyingly dull language. They soon found it in TPP, which people realized was basically "Son of ACTA," but worse. Then came TAFTA/TTIP, which publicly dropped its ACTA-like elements in a desperate attempt to stave off criticisms and mass protests. That didn't work, of course; TTIP soon ground to a halt, and remains in limbo. Even though TPP was eventually concluded after years of delays, it was derailed by the election of Donald Trump as US President, who promptly withdrew from the deal. But if you thought things had finally quieted down for a while -- TISA too has dropped off the radar recently -- think again. There's a new twist in the global trade deal saga, as the Handelsblatt newspaper reports:

As Techdirt has noted, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act, better known as the Snooper's Charter, has been dubbed "the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy." It may be the worst, but it's not an isolated case. Governments around the world are bringing in laws that grant them powers to spy on innocent citizens using "bulk collection" of information -- mass surveillance, in other words. As the Dutch site Bits of Freedom reports, the latest country to join the super-snooper club is the Netherlands, where the lower house has just passed the bill for the new Intelligence and Security Services Act:

Here is something you, the dear Techdirt reader, may not have known about me: I had always thought that there was only one proper spelling for the name "Lindsey." I'm not sure why I thought that, but I was certain that name was only spelled with an "e" before the "y." But, it turns out, spelling it as "Lindsay" is a perfectly common and accepted alternate spelling for the name. And the only reason that I now know that is because Linsday, with an "a," Lohan will not let her lawsuit against Take-Two Interactive -- for appropriating her likeness for several characters, which didn't actually happen -- die its final death.First, a refresher. Lohan decided that a side quest character in Grand Theft Auto 5, which was actually an amalgam of several Hollywood starlet tropes, violated her publicity rights. She also claimed that an entirely different character that was used on some of the game's marketing and packaging was also her and also violated her publicity rights. The case wove its way through the past half-decade, largely with the court and Take-Two casting narrow eyes at the mountains of paperwork Lohan's legal team was able to produce while somehow maintaining an inability to come up with claims that were in any way credible, before the court finally tossed the lawsuit entirely. The court at the time made it clear that Take-Two's characters weren't direct appropriations of Lohan's likeness and that the parody amalgam starlet it had created was clearly protected by the First Amendment.But, for some reason, it appears that LiLo's legal team was, like, "nuh uh!"

For a while now, we've discussed how your children's toys are quickly becoming the latest and greatest privacy threat courtesy of cryptic or half-cooked privacy policies and the treatment of device security as an afterthought; rather part and parcel now for the privacy dumpster fire that is the internet of not-so-smart things era. Numerous privacy groups have complained that smart Barbies and other toys not only now hoover up and monetize childrens' prattle, but leave the door open to the devices' being used nefariously by third parties.The problems culminated in a lawsuit last December here in the States against Genesis Toys, maker of "smart" toys like 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. The privacy policy for the toys does warn users that companies like Nuance Communications, also a government defense contractor, will receive this data for analysis:

California's IMDb-targeting "ageism" law looks as though it won't be able to survive the website's Constitutional challenge -- an outcome that should have been foreseen while the bill was still in its crafting phase. The law was passed to address apparent age discrimination by movie studios. For whatever reason, the California legislature decided the best way to handle this was to force a web site to stop publishing actors' ages, rather than just, you know, enforcing the state's existing anti-discrimination laws. Sure, other similar sites would also (theoretically) be affected, but IMDb is the only one that's actually been sued by an aggrieved actress over its publication of facts.Politico's Josh Gerstein reports the presiding federal judge doesn't see much to like in the new law and has granted a temporary restraining order to IMDb while everything gets sorted out it rolls to its inevitable victory.

Perhaps no entity generates more fake news than the FBI's counterterrorism unit. Several times a year, a press release is issued announcing the bust of a so-called terrorist. Almost invariably, the "terrorist" has been handcrafted through the relentless intercession of undercover FBI agents.Here's how the DOJ website describes its latest self-crafted anti-terrorism coup:

Google, being the search giant that it is, has been banging the drum for some time about the silly way the DMCA has been abused by those that wield it like a cudgel. Here at Techdirt, we too have described the many ways that the well-intentioned DMCA and the way its implemented by service providers has deviated from its intended purpose. Still, the vast majority of our stories discuss deliberate attempts by human beings to silence critics and competition using the takedown process. Google, on the other hand, has been far more focused on statistics for DMCA takedown notices that show wanton disregard for what it was supposed to be used for entirely. That makes sense of course, as the abuse of the takedown process is a burden on the search company. In that first link, for instance, Google noted that more than half the takedown notices it was receiving in 2009 were mere attempts by one business targeting a competitor, while over a third of the notices contained nothing in the way of a valid copyright dispute.But if those numbers were striking in 2009, Google's latest comment to the Copyright Office (see our own comment here) on what's happening in the DMCA 512 notice-and-takedown world shows some stats for takedown notices received through its Trusted Copyright Removal Program... and makes the whole ordeal look completely silly.

Google, being the search giant that it is, has been banging the drum for some time about the silly way the DMCA has been abused by those that wield it like a cudgel. Here at Techdirt, we too have described the many ways that the well-intentioned DMCA and the way its implemented by service providers has deviated from its intended purpose. Still, the vast majority of our stories discuss deliberate attempts by human beings to silence critics and competition using the takedown process. Google, on the other hand, has been far more focused on statistics for DMCA takedown notices that show wanton disregard for what it was supposed to be used for entirely. That makes sense of course, as the abuse of the takedown process is a burden on the search company. In that first link, for instance, Google noted that more than half the takedown notices it was receiving in 2009 were mere attempts by one business targeting a competitor, while over a third of the notices contained nothing in the way of a valid copyright dispute.But if those numbers were striking in 2009, Google's latest comment to the Copyright Office (see our own comment here) on what's happening in the DMCA 512 notice-and-takedown world shows some stats for takedown notices received through its Trusted Copyright Removal Program... and makes the whole ordeal look completely silly.

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There aren't many rights extended to anyone in the "Constitution-free zones" we like to call "borders." You may have rights 100 miles inland, but the government's needs and wants outweigh citizens' and non-citizens' rights wherever immigration officers roam. According to the Supreme Court, warrants are required for cell phone searches. But neither the Constitution nor Supreme Court rulings apply within 100 miles of the border, where the government's needs and wants are considered more important than the protections they can avail themselves of everywhere else in the country.Senator Ron Wyden is looking to change that. Rather than cede more ground to the rights-swallowing concept of "national security," Wyden is looking to change the laws governing the "Constitution-free zones."

The Copyright Office's study concerning Section 512 of the DMCA (the notice-and-takedown/safe harbors part of the law) had its second comment period end this week -- which is why you're seeing stories about how the RIAA is suddenly talking about piracy filters and notice-and-staydown. Via our think tank arm, the Copia Institute we filed our own comments, pointing out the already problematic First Amendment issues with the way the current notice-and-takedown system works. Remember, there's a very high standard set by the Supreme Court before you can take down expressive content. But the notice-and-takedown system ignores all of that:

21 states have passed laws hamstringing the rights of local communities when it comes to improving broadband infrastructure. Usually dressed up as breathless concern about the taxpayer -- these bills have one purpose: protect the telecom mono/duopoly status quo -- and the campaign contributions it represents -- from the will of the people. Countless towns and cities have built their own next-generation networks, usually because nobody else would. But these bills, usually ghost written by ISPs for politicians with ALEC's help, either ban locals from making this decision for themselves, or saddle these operations with enough restrictions to make them untenable.Missouri's just the latest state to either pass a new protectionist bill, or update old laws so they're more restrictive. Like many of these bills SB 186 does its best to impose all manner of restrictions on towns and cities looking to bring better broadband to under-served state communities. SB 186 is actually the third time in as many years that incumbent ISPs have tried to pass expanded community broadband restrictions. Last year, a similar Missouri bill got "unwanted" attention when AT&T got a lawmaker to try and bury it in an unrelated traffic proposal.Like the last few iterations, SB 186 words itself in such a way to avoid the impression of an outright community broadband "ban," even if that's effectively what it is. Usually this is done by stating a community can't build and operate a broadband network if an existing provider already services the area, intentionally ignoring the fact that said "existing provider" is usually a fat and lazy telco trying to sell users 2002-era 3 Mbps DSL speeds at next-generation prices. SB 186 also saddles these operations with all manner of restrictions on how these networks can be funded, marketed, and expanded.Often, the bills require a protracted additional public comment period, during which deep-pocketed lobbyists use push polls and other disinformation to convince locals that community broadband is one step up from devil worship, even if it's really just an organic reaction to telecom market failure. The history of these disinformation efforts goes back decades, with ISPs resorting to push polls with questions implying that taxpayer funds would be used for pornography, and government would ration your TV usage.Should the networks actually get built, they'll then often face incumbent ISP lawsuits. When said lawsuits inevitably saddle these local efforts with delays and added costs, ISPs are quick to point to the problems they caused as proof positive that community broadband doesn't work. But community broadband is like any business plan: if the plan itself is sound, the network succeeds (as is the case in places like Chattanooga, Tennessee).Historically, most of the twenty-one protectionist state laws have been passed quietly with minimal controversy, in large part thanks to an either misinformed or apathetic public. But as companies like Google and Ting have more recently attempted to disrupt the telecom market, reporters have highlighted not only the lack of broadband competition -- but the protectionist laws responsible for keeping things that way. Last month, Google, Netflix and Ting fired off a letter to Missouri lawmakers (pdf) highlighting the absurdity of such laws:

As we've noted before, China's grip on the domestic Internet seems so complete that it's hard to think how the authorities there might tighten control yet further. But the Chinese government is nothing if not resourceful, and has managed to come up with a new group to target, as this report on the Sixth Tone site explains:

House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, along with his Senatorial counterpart Ron Wyden, is tackling something he promised to act on after he was finished excoriating the leaky Office of Personnel Management for ruining the lives of millions of Americans: Stingray devices.

Starting last summer, we noted that the Department of Homeland Security had quietly tested the waters to expand the information it requested of travelers entering the United States, to "optionally" include social media handles. By December it was officially in place. And then, just days into the new administration, the idea was floated to expand this program even further to demand passwords to social media accounts.In other words: that escalated quickly. We went from "hey, maybe we could ask people to volunteer what their social media profiles are" to "hey, let's demand all social media accounts, including passwords" in, like, six months.In response, a ton of human rights and civil liberties organizations have posted an open letter condemning this dangerous plan.

Unless the Supreme Court decides to weigh in on this long-running SLAPP lawsuit (highly unlikely -- and unlikely to be appealed to that level), it looks like it's finally the end of the line for Dr. Edward Tobinick and his quest to silence a critic of his questionable medical practices.Quick recap: Dr. Tobinick claimed he could treat Alzheimer's, strokes, and other neurological maladies by repurposing an immunosuppressant drug. Dr. Steven Novella disagreed with Tobinick's unsubstantiated claims and wrote a few blog posts detailing his problems with Tobinick's treatments.

[The following post was contributed by Fault Lines (a Scott Greenfield/Lee Pachia joint) columnist David Meyer Lindenberg, a self-described "wannabe 1-L" and actual German. The last fact explains his in-depth knowledge of German speech laws, which Mike Masnick has graciously allowed him to dump all over Techdirt's pages. Enjoy! {And possibly NSFW around the middle-ish.}]Remember Jan Böhmermann? The guy who caused a major diplomatic spat back in April when he read out a satirical poem about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the notoriously thin-skinned Turkish president, on a German comedy show?Usually, what happens on Central European state-run TV stays on Central European state-run TV. Not this time. “Erdogate” went massively viral: there were protests in the streets of Istanbul. Techdirt covered it at length. Even a guy named John Oliver did a segment on it.Now Erdogate’s back in the news, with a number of media outlets reporting that a German court just permanently enjoined Böhmermann from reciting his own poem. Sucks for him, right? Actually, no. Bad as it is, things are usually a hell of a lot worse for people in his position.First, a little historical context. Böhmermann’s poem came at an inopportune time for the German government, which relies on Turkey to help stem the flow of Syrian refugees into Europe. And Erdogan, the Turkish strongman who was himself imprisoned in 1997 for reading a political poem out loud, is exactly the kind of guy to endanger a bilateral agreement over his hurt feelz.These feelz of his are very sensitive, indeed. For example, he doesn’t like it when you compare him to Gollum. (There are some alleged similarities between the two.) If you’re a Turk and ask him to guess what you’ve got in your pocketses, he’ll have you convicted of a crime. On the other hand, if you’re fortunate enough to live somewhere with freedom of speech, the worst he can do is block you on Twitter.What if you live in a foreign country that nevertheless has archaic, repressive speech laws? As a lot of surprised Germans found out in mid-April, it may mean Erdogan and other delicately minded people can reach out to your government and get it to punish you for them.On or around April 15, German prosecutors indicted Böhmermann on a count of insulting a foreign head of state, a felony punishable by up to three years in prison under Article 103 of the federal criminal code. Erdogan also sued -- something he does a lot -- and in May, a Hamburg court issued a preliminary injunction blocking Böhmermann from saying the poem out loud.Of course, that just had the effect of Streisanding the comedian and his poem into the stratosphere. I wasn’t totally happy with the non-rhyming translation floating around the web, so I came up with one of my own.

Get your Copymouse t-shirts, hoodies, mugs and more »It's Fair Use Week — time to celebrate the all-important safety valve on copyright law and oppose those who want to see it clogged up or removed entirely! Of course, for us that's pretty much every week, but this still seemed like a good time to launch our newest t-shirt design: Copymouse (also available as a v-neck, hoodie, women's tee, mug or sticker). As most of our readers know, Mickey Mouse has a real talent for evading the public domain (even if he has to drag the rest of our culture down with him) and this t-shirt lets you remind everyone of that fact — and the fact that we likely haven't seen the last of that fight.Also, while all our gear artwork is available on request, for Fair Use Week we figured it was a good idea to make a vector SVG version of the artwork available from the get-go.(P.S. don't forget to check out the Techdirt store on Teespring for our logo gear (in two styles) and our still-available I Invented Email gear.)

Those who thought the domestic surveillance Ed Snowden exposed was perfectly acceptable and lawful are finding it much harder to stomach with Trump in charge. The Lawfare blog, which routinely hosts articles supportive of government surveillance activities, has taken on a new tone over the past few months. The lesson being learned: if a power can only be trusted in certain people's hands, then it really can't be trusted in anyone's. This belated realization is better than none, but one wonders if the drastic change in tone would have followed an election that put Hillary Clinton in the White House.That's not to say the first month of Trump's presidency has borne any resemblance to a "peaceful transition of power." The federal government isn't just leaking. It's hemorrhaging. Underneath the recent ouster of Mike Flynn, Trump's former National Security Advisor, is something disturbing.What's disturbing isn't the surveillance -- although in "normal" circumstances it might be. Flynn was dumped because recorded phone calls captured him discussing sanctions with Russian officials. This domestic surveillance isn't unheard of. The fact that this information -- including the content of the calls -- was leaked to the public is more notable.Calls to foreign officials are fair game for US surveillance efforts. The last-minute removal of restraints on sharing unminimized US persons data/communications by the Obama administration just served to ensure Flynn's calls would end up in the hands of multiple federal agencies. The timing of the loosened restrictions is worth noting though, as Marcy Wheeler does in this post about the Flynn ouster.

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The news site Mashable has apparently decided that you, the general public, are simply too dumb to actually own the stuff you thought you bought because you might just injure yourself. We've written about so-called "right to repair" laws and why they're so important. There are a variety of issues, but the most basic one here is about property rights. If you buy something, it's supposed to be yours. It doesn't remain the property of whoever first made it. And they shouldn't then be able to deny you the ability to tinker with, modify, or repair what you bought. However, Mashable's Lance Ulanoff (last seen here being completely clueless about the importance of anonymity online because he, personally, never could see a reason why someone might want to speak truth to power without revealing who they are), has decided that because you might be too dumb to properly repair stuff, the entire "right to repair" concept "is a dumb idea."The article can basically be summed up as "I have a friend, and her iPhone wasn't repaired properly, so no one should be able to repair your iPhone but Apple." Really.

Correction: As some of you have noticed, we made a silly mistake in this post. Neil Turkewitz is not with the MPAA, but rather a former RIAA executive who is now with the International Center for Law & Economics, a think tank that reliably advocates for the MPAA & RIAA's positions.This week has been dubbed fair use week by a whole bunch of organizations (mostly universities and libraries) as a chance to celebrate the usefulness and wonder that is fair use in protecting free speech, enabling creativity and inspiring innovation. As we've said many times in the past, fair use is an incredibly important concept -- if often misunderstood -- so it's good to see these organizations working together to better educate the public on why fair use is so key.However, not everyone is so enthralled with fair use. The MPAA and RIAA are apparently so frightened by fair use that they, and some of its friends, have been posting weirdly uninformed screeds against fair use over the past few days. Some are more silly than others (such as one that tries to claim that the MPAA has never been against fair use, ignoring that the MPAA's long-time boss Jack Valenti once declared -- totally incorrectly -- that fair use wasn't in the law), but let's focus on the one that comes straight from a former RIAA top exec.Neil Turkewitz, formerly of the RIAA and now the International Center for Law & Economics Senior Policy Counsel, has published a piece at Medium (a site that relies heavily on fair use to protect it from being sued into oblivion) pretending to honor fair use while actually criticizing it.

This week has been dubbed fair use week by a whole bunch of organizations (mostly universities and libraries) as a chance to celebrate the usefulness and wonder that is fair use in protecting free speech, enabling creativity and inspiring innovation. As we've said many times in the past, fair use is an incredibly important concept -- if often misunderstood -- so it's good to see these organizations working together to better educate the public on why fair use is so key.However, not everyone is so enthralled with fair use. The MPAA is apparently so frightened by fair use that it, and some of its friends, have been posting weirdly uninformed screeds against fair use over the past few days. Some are more silly than others (such as one that tries to claim that the MPAA has never been against fair use, ignoring that the MPAA's long-time boss Jack Valenti once declared -- totally incorrectly -- that fair use wasn't in the law), but let's focus on the one that comes straight from the horse's mouth: Neil Turkewitz, the MPAA's "Senior Policy Council" has published a piece at Medium (a site that relies heavily on fair use to protect it from being sued into oblivion) pretending to honor fair use while actually criticizing it.

On his first day new FCC Boss Ajit Pai repeatedly and breathlessly insisted that consumers and the digital divide would be his top priority. The problem: that dedication was directly contradicted by not only Pai's past voting record at the agency, but his first actions as agency head. Out of the gate Pai undermined an FCC legal case against prison phone telecom monopolies, scrapped an FCC plan to bring competition to the cable box, killed all ongoing zero rating inquiries and began laying the ground work for killing net neutrality, and prevented nine already-approved ISPs from helping the poor via the agency's Lifeline program.Unsurprisingly, it didn't take particularly long for some news outlets to realize that Pai's words weren't supported by his actions. Both The Washington Post and the New York Times penned editorials blasting Pai, most notably for his ongoing disdain for net neutrality, which has broad, bipartisan support.Driven to defend Pai's selection as FCC boss for obvious reasons, ISPs got right to work fighting back via their traditional weapon of choice: bullshitters for hire. Shortly after the Post and Times pieces surfaced, contrasting op-eds quickly popped up in newspapers and websites nationwide claiming Pai is actually an incredible boon to consumers, competition and innovation. Most of these op-eds failed to adequately disclose the authors' financial ties to large broadband providers, or the fact they take money while pretending to be objective analysts -- often including Congressional testimony.Fred Campbell, a long-standing ISP-funded "consultant," penned a piece over at Forbes blasting the Post and Times for "doublespeak," while insisting that Pai is secretly a hero of the people:

The European Commission is still (slowly) moving forward with its plan to dump a link tax on service providers like Google, Facebook, etc. in hopes of propping up local news outfits. The plan has been in the works for a couple of years now and it's looking like the longer the planning goes on, the less likely it is to result in something that makes its advocates happy.A long report from Politico details the current state of this doomed venture. And it is doomed. Even if implemented in a way that makes news outlets happiest, the end result will be less incoming traffic from some of the most-used sites in the world. Some news agencies aren't so sure this is the way forward.

Techdirt has written dozens of stories about US police forces deploying body cameras, with all sorts of interesting consequences. Their use for school police means that body cameras are also turning up in US schools, but the next logical step of putting body cameras on the actual teachers has been taken not in the US, but in the UK, as the Guardian reports:

In 2009, April Yvette Smith was arrested on drug dealing charges and spent 80 days in jail. The charges were ultimately dropped by the district attorney, but by the time it happened, Smith had already lost her job. The same can't be said for the officer who obtained her arrest warrant. His job was always secure. The only thing he's lost -- seven years after the fact -- is his immunity from Smith's civil rights lawsuit.The chain of events leading to Smith's wrongful arrest are as horrible as they are stupid. Somewhere between Barney Fife and the banal evil of law enforcement ineptitude lies Officer Jason Munday. It starts with a "wired" confidential informant and ends in an indifferent "investigation" that sounds as though Munday just got bored sitting around the office.Here's how it began, as detailed in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion [PDF]:

For years now, ESPN has been the perfect personification of the cable and broadcast industry's denial regarding cord cutting. Long propped up by a system that forces consumers to buy massive bundles of largely-unwatched channels, ESPN has struggled with the rise of streaming alternatives and sleeker, "skinny" channel bundles. The sports network, which has lost 7 million viewers in just a few years, has been trying to argue that these losses (which caused Disney stock to lose $22 billion in value in just two days at one point) are simply part of some kind of overblown, mass hallucination.Last year, ESPN exec John Skipper even went so far as to suggest that these departing customers weren't worth keeping anyway:

Innovation isn't easy, but success in Silicon Valley involves a bigger dose of luck than a lot of entrepreneurs seem prepared to admit. Chance gets left out of the economic equation all too often, and this week we're joined by Mike's own Econ 101 professor from Cornell, Robert Frank, to discuss the role of luck in the world of entrepreneurs and innovation.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.

In news that will surprise no one, police officers decided they must do something about someone filming the police department building from across the street. That's where this Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision begins: with a completely avoidable and completely unnecessary assertion of government power.Phillip Turner was filming the police department. He was accosted by two officers (Grinalds and Dyess). Both demanded he provide them with identification. He refused to do so. The officers arrested him for "failure to identify," took his camera, and tossed him in the back of a squad car. Given the circumstances of the initial interaction, it's surprising the words "contempt of cop" weren't used on the official police report. From the opinion [PDF]:

Last week, reports began to emerge that internet users were unable to access The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent-focused websites. Ultimately it was discovered that this was courtesy of transit provider Cogent, which was blackholing an undetermined number of IP addresses allegedly linked to copyright infringement. The IP addresses in question didn't belong to the websites -- but to popular CDN provider Cloudflare. All told, Cogent's blockade impacted around twenty different websites -- but the impact was global, with ISP users worldwide unable to access these IP addresses if they traveled the Cogent network.Initially, Cogent wouldn't comment whatsoever on why this was occurring, but later confirmed to Ars Technica that the company had received a Spanish court order (it's not clear if it's the same 2015 order demanding Cogent block access to music streaming website Goear.com). Cogent was vague about the order itself, but did confirm that The Pirate Bay was blocked -- despite it not being a target of the court order. Subsequent routing checks confirmed the impact was global across Cogent's footprint.As we've seen time and time again, actual pirates with just a modicum of technical knowledge utilize a variety of tools (VPNs most specifically) to tap dance around such restrictions, making these filtering efforts ham-fisted "solutions" that cause more problems for the internet and end users than they traditionally solve. In talking to Ars, Cogent acknowledged the potential "collateral impact" that such orders and filters can cause, especially when applied globally at scale to multihosting transit operators like Cloudfare, where one IP address may be home to multiple, unrelated websites:

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President Trump appears to have thrown his support behind asset forfeiture, even as the issue has begun reaching critical mass in the mainstream media. (It's been thoroughly covered by more libertarian publications like Reason for years.) In addition to not being able to "see anything wrong with it," Trump jokingly suggested he'd ruin the careers of politicians mounting reform efforts.His recent executive orders appear to back this "gloves off" approach to criminal justice. In addition to singling out immigrants as troublemakers, the orders ask law enforcement officials to take a look around and see if they're being constrained by any state or federal laws. Presumably, any recent forfeiture reform legislation would fall under this heading as it prevents law enforcement agencies from acting in the way they've become accustomed: seize first, convict later... if at all.With Jeff Sessions in place as attorney general, asset forfeiture appears to be headed for the wrong kind of renaissance. Sessions is a firm believer in the general rightness of taking aways citizens' property and due process simultaneously because, as he sees it, the process only affects people who've "done nothing but deal dope their whole lives."Now, there's this: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner is offering up another bill with a clumsily reverse-engineered acronym -- one that could further pervert the incentives of asset forfeiture. (via Watchdog.org)

It looks like Apple decided to drop in on flyover country in hopes of thwarting a "Right to Repair" bill pending in the Nebraska legislature. It did not go well.

After quite some time, a New Zealand court has said that Kim Dotcom is eligible for extradition to the US -- something he's been fighting for over five years. But there's a weird twist to the story. A key part of the argument that Dotcom's lawyers have been making is that for extradition to the US, there needs to be "dual criminality" (you can hear Dotcom's lawyer, Ira Rothken, discuss this on our podcast a few months back). And, the key "crime" that Dotcom is charged with involves secondary copyright infringement (i.e., creating a platform that others use to infringe). But, that's a problem, as there's no criminal secondary copyright infringement under New Zealand law (nor US law, but that's a separate issue). So, here's the twist. The court actually agreed that there's no such thing under New Zealand law -- and said that Dotcom can't be extradited for copyright infringement. However, the court said that he can be extradited for "fraud" because there's dual criminality there.As Dotcom's lawyers point out, that means this is no longer, as was claimed by the US, the "largest criminal copyright case" because copyright is officially no longer a part of it. But, if the copyright part is taken out... where's the "fraud"? The whole claim of "fraud" is based entirely on the fact that Megaupload users infringed on copyrights. So if that's not a crime, then, um... where's the fraud?I know that some will argue that it doesn't really matter, and they'll insist that what Dotcom and Megaupload did was "bad" -- end of story. But we're still supposed to live under the rule of law, and you don't just get to throw people in jail because they're "bad." You have to prove they actually broke the law. But that's a big problem here, because Megaupload didn't violate copyright law. And if it didn't do that... where's the "fraud"? Dotcom's lawyers will now try to appeal this part of the ruling, extending this legal fight even further. But it's a bigger issue than that. If courts can wipe away safe harbor protections by service providers by hiding behind a "fraud" claim, there are no longer safe harbor protections:

Last week, when we launched our Techdirt Survival Fund, we received a lot of support and encouragement — but of course we also recognize that there are plenty of good reasons some readers might not want or be able to donate. So it was largely unnecessary for one commenter to come by and explain that we "aren't important enough", but at least it yielded a response from Vaultnode that won most insightful comment of the week:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, mass anti-ACTA protests broke out across Europe as opposition to the bill continued to swell. Bulgaria joined the list of EU members halting ratification of the treaty and even the European Parliament's president spoke out against it. The EU official who resigned in protest of ACTA explained further what was wrong with it, the head of Mozilla called it a bad way to develop policy, Public Knowledge made a strong call for greater transparency in such agreements, and our own Glyn Moody offered a thorough debunking of the European Commission's list of supposed "myths" about ACTA as well as the idea that there's any meaningful transparency at all. Despite all this, the IFPI and other lobbyists stood by the agreement, even having the gall to claim that the public protests were silencing the democratic process.Ten Years AgoThings were pretty grim on the copyright front this week in 2007. The RIAA was making its first forays into voluntary enforcement deals with ISPs that would forward settlement letters, which would eventually morph into the now-dead six strikes program. The US entertainment industry was trying to get Canada condemned as a pirate haven while its Canadian counterpart was itself pushing for an iPod tax. Microsoft was introducing yet another DRM scheme even as one survey showed that even two-thirds of music industry executives thought ditching DRM would be a good idea. Hollywood was beginning a new crusade against Google, not over YouTube but over ads on P2P websites, and a jury sided with sample troll Bridgeport in yet another abuse of the George Clinton copyrights they own. There was, at least, one victory: an EFF-backed lawsuit forced a prolific DMCA abuser to rescind his baseless takedown notices.Fifteen Years AgoThere was one event this week in 2002 so much more significant than the others that it deserves the sole focus this week. Today, CC licenses are an integral part of the world of digital content, but (because copyright is a disaster) such open and flexible licenses were not always so easy to employ no matter how much a creator might want to. But it was this week fifteen years ago that we first learned that Lawrence Lessig and a team of other people were working on a new project called Creative Commons to provide an alternative to copyright.Two Days AgoWhat, two days ago? Yes: this week, I'm using this space to remind everyone about the Techdirt Survival Fund that we launched on Friday along with our filings in the lawsuit we face. We're very grateful to everyone who has donated so far, and hope you continue to give generously and spread the word so we can continue our fight for free speech.Techdirt is off tomorrow for President's Day. We'll be posting the weekly comment winners at noon, and back to our regular schedule on Tuesday!

New Gear From Techdirt: I Invented Email »As some of you might have noticed, recent upgrades over at Teespring have allowed us to change the way we offer Techdirt gear. Instead of running individual week-or-two long campaigns that only print and ship once the whole thing is completed, we've now got our logo gear (in two styles) and our I Invented Email gear running on a cycle with new orders printing and shipping every three days, so you don't have to wait nearly as long to get your hands on it. Those of you who already ordered should be getting your shirts, hoodies et al soon!Another batch closes tomorrow (Sunday) night — so order now to get in on the next shipment! The Email gear won't be around forever, so don't wait too long.

Donate to the Techdirt Survival Fund »As we mentioned last month, we are currently being sued for $15 million by Shiva Ayyadurai, represented by Charles Harder, the lawyer who helped bring down Gawker. We have written, at great length, about Ayyadurai's claims and our opinion — backed up by detailed and thorough evidence — that email existed long before Ayyadurai created any software. Once again, we believe the legal claims in the lawsuit are meritless and we intend to fight them and win. Earlier today, we filed a motion to dismiss (along with our memorandum in support) and a special motion to strike under California's anti-SLAPP law (along with a memorandum in support). You can see all of those below. I encourage you read through them.Unfortunately, the fight itself is incredibly distracting and burdensome. It has taken up a significant amount of my time (and the time of others who work here) over the last month and delayed multiple projects that we were working on, and even forced us to pass on writing about many stories we would have liked to cover. Even though we are confident in winning the legal fight, it has already taken a massive toll on us and our ability to function and report. We have now set up a Techdirt Survival Fund at ISupportJournalism.com, which will allow us to continue our reporting on issues related to free speech and the growing threats to free speech online, while continuing to fight this legal battle. We've put together an all-star steering committee to help us oversee how the funds will be spent, including representatives from both the Freedom of the Press Foundation and EFF.Many of you have already supported us in various ways -- by becoming Techdirt Insiders, supporting us on Patreon or by buying t-shirts. We are so grateful for all initial support we've received, but for us to survive, we unfortunately need to ask for more help. Please consider supporting us via this new fund and spreading the word as well.In this era, especially, strong independent voices in journalism are necessary. Allowing lawsuits to stifle freedom of expression online, silencing voices and creating chilling effects, is a huge threat to how a responsible society functions. Please support Techdirt and support journalism.Donate to the Techdirt Survival Fund »

As the world continues to get used to an America with a President Donald Trump at its head, the binary nature of the current political climate has reared its own head in unfortunate ways. One example of this is the stunning speed with which many of those previously ignorant of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, as the Title of Nobility Clause is commonly called, have feigned familiarity with it. As one of my colleagues here termed it, the "emoluments hunting" going on is transparently political in nature, rather than representing a serious effort at protecting the public interest from the shadow of undue influence and sanctioned bribery over our highest political office.Both sides of the American aisle are badly misusing this important constitutional text. Those whose skin might crawl at the mere words "President Trump" seem to find emoluments violations everywhere, even in the most trivial of cases. Trump himself, of course, hasn't helped in the matter, even when he easily could, as he has shirked the norms of disentangling the presidency from the previous life of he who holds that office. Trump, you will recall, has distanced himself from the decision-making aspects of the family business, but not the profits of it. It's an important distinction, which we'll get into in a moment.But first, for the sake of context, let's start with the text of the emolument clause, as well as the framers' reasons for its inclusion in the highest law of our land. The text itself is blessedly short and seemingly simple.

The saga of Facebook Live marches on, I suppose. The social media giant's bid to get everyone to live-stream content that mostly appears to be wholly uninteresting has nevertheless produced some interesting legal stories as a result. The latest of these is the conclusion of a string of lawsuits filed by a man who used Facebook Live to stream the birth of his child over copyright infringement against many, many news organizations that thought his act was newsworthy.It was in May of 2016 that Kali Kanongataa accidentally publcly streamed his wife birthing the couple's son. He had intended for the stream to only be viewable to friends and family, but had instead made the stream viewable by pretty much everyone. Even after realizing he'd done so, Kanongataa kept the stream public, leading over 100,000 people to view the video -- including some folks in several news organizations, who used snippets of the stream in news stories about the couple's decision to stream this most intimate of moments.And then came the lawsuits.

In what looks to be the FNG currying favor with the new boss, rookie Congressman Jim Banks is introducing a bill that would turn the DHS's social media prying from something it would like to do to something it has to do.

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President Trump's three new law-and-order Executive Orders are designed to combat a largely-nonexistent crime wave and increase protections for one of the most-heavily protected groups in America: law enforcement officers. The orders also mixed crime prevention and national security into a single bowl, making criminal activity inseparable from threats to the nation -- especially if foreigners are involved. In addition to his travel ban and his Two Minutes Hate reporting system, Trump also singled out illegal immigrants in these "law and order" orders, implying that they were to blame for much of the perceived crime problem.That's in addition to some off-the-cuff remarks Trump made during a meeting with several sheriffs, where he suggested there was no need to reform asset forfeiture and joked that those pushing reform efforts should have their careers ruined by the nation's top (proxy) cop: Donald Trump.The president may unequivocally have law enforcement's back for the next four years (at minimum), but the nation's top cops don't have his. Or, at the very least, they don't agree with Trump's hardline, anti-crime, pro-cop-always stance. In a report [PDF] filled with suggestions for the new president, a coalition of police chiefs, district attorneys (including Manhattan decrypto warrior Cyrus Vance), and other police officials agree that the ideas Trump is pushing so far are only going to make the nation's policing -- and the nation's relationship with police -- worse.While Trump has been calling for longer sentences, increased law enforcement presence, and projected a zero tolerance approach to everything until crime rates lower (or at least his perception of crime rates -- the stats don't back up his claims), this group says throwing the book at everyone is just going to perpetuate criminal activity.

While T-Mobile isn't without its faults (like its opposition to net neutrality, or the time its CEO mocked the EFF), there's little doubt that T-Mobile has been a good thing for the wireless industry. The company has managed to drag the industry kicking and screaming in an overall positive direction, including the elimination of the carrier-subsidized handset model, the elimination of annoying hidden fees, and the recent return to more popular unlimited data options. And its brash CEO John Legere, while sometimes teetering into absurd caricature, has at least managed to bring a sense of industry to a traditionally droll telecom sector.And while T-Mobile had been mocking AT&T and Verizon's forays into video as "distractions," the company this week strongly hinted that it may bring a little bit of disruption to a sector that needs it most. Both Legere and T-Mobile COO Mike Sievert made numerous comments during their earnings call this week making it pretty obvious they wanted to test the market's reaction to the idea of some kind of T-Mobile video service:

As Techdirt has just reported, even though encryption is becoming more widespread, it's not still not much of a problem for law enforcement agencies, despite some claims to the contrary. However, governments around the world are certainly not sitting back waiting for it to become an issue before acting. Many have already put in place legal frameworks that allow them to obtain information even when encryption is used, predominantly by hacking into a suspect's computer or mobile phone. In the US, this has been achieved with controversial changes to Rule 41; in the UK, the Snooper's Charter gives the government there almost unlimited powers to conduct what it coyly calls "equipment interference."One of the main tools for carrying out surveillance in this way is the trojan -- code that is placed surreptitiously on a suspect's system to allow it to be monitored and controlled by the authorities in real time over the Internet. There are clearly huge risks and problems with this approach, something that a legislative proposal from the Civic and Innovators parliamentary group in Italy tries to address, as explained by Fabio Pietrosanti and Stefano Aterno on Boing Boing. The draft law is the result of nearly two years' work by a group of experts from many fields:

We've seen stories in the past in which higher educational institutions attempt to slap down students' use of school iconography when it comes to advocating for marijuana legalization. Trademark law is the preferred bludgeoning tool in many of these cases, regardless of whether or not the uses in question actually pass the muster on the tests for Fair Use. Still, at least in most of these cases the schools are at least quick to act and staunch in their attempts to silence a completely valid political position by the student body.That's not so in the recent dust up between a pro-marijuana student group and Iowa State University. In this particular case, the student group got approval from ISU to use school trademarks, only to have that approval rescinded once a bunch of politicians got involved. The organization created by students is called the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML.

Another court has stepped up to inform law enforcement that just because criminals are known to use cell phones doesn't mean any cell phone possessed by a suspect is fair game -- warrant or no warrant.This time it's the Superior Court of Delaware making the point. In its suppression of evidence found on a seized cell phone, the Superior Court makes it clear that cell phones are used by everyone -- not just criminals. Not only that, but if an officer is going to seek a warrant that effectively allows them access to the owner's entire life, the warrant needs to contain more specifics and limitations than this one did.During a consensual search of an apartment where a homicide suspect (Qualeel Westcott) was staying, police came across heroin and three mobile phones. All three of the phones were seized. A warrant was obtained to search the content of the phones. But a warrant alone isn't good enough. While a warrant is better than nothing at all, the warrant here -- according to the court -- barely exceeded "nothing at all."While the court does recognize [PDF] there's a good likelihood that phones possessed by suspects will often contain useful evidence of criminal activity, it takes far more than the bare bones assertions made by the officer obtaining the warrant, which did almost nothing to establish a relationship between the phone and suspected criminal activity. (via FourthAmendment.com)

As you will hopefully recall, there is an ongoing case between Twitter and the government over exactly how specific or not the social media service can be regarding the number of government surveillance requests it receives. Most of the rest of the big internet companies reached a settlement with the DOJ, including rules how specific companies could be (not very) in revealing such requests. Those rules basically were an attempt by the government to get tech companies to play hide-the-ball on transparency issues, in which the more specific a service attempted to be about how many individuals would be impacted by government orders, the more additional orders had to be lumped into those specifics, rendering the information useless.Twitter, to its credit, was alone in saying that the proposed settlement wasn't good enough, and continued its fight with the DOJ. Essentially, the fight is over whether Twitter can be specific when it discloses how many orders it has received, or whether it must only disclose "bands" or ranges of orders. Recent arguments made by both sides do a nice job of highlighting the absurdity of the government's argument.