Everyone's favorite privacy activist -- former revenge porn site runner Craig Brittain -- is at it again. As the operator of one of the most infamous revenge porn sites, "Is Anybody Down?" Brittain's view on privacy seemed to be that if you ever sent anything on the internet you no longer had any privacy. As he told On The Media's Bob Garfield:

Earlier this year, the entertainment and telecom industries' "six strikes" anti-piracy initiative died a quiet death after years of hype from the RIAA and MPAA about how it would revolutionize copyright enforcement (it didn't). The program involved ISPs using a rotating crop of "escalation measures" to temporarily block, throttle or otherwise harass accused pirates until they acknowledged receipt of laughably one-sided copyright educational materials. Offenders, accused entirely based on IP address as proof of guilt, were allowed to try and contest these accusations -- if they paid a $35 fee.Needless to say, data suggests the Copyright Alert System didn't do much if anything to stop piracy, since most would-be pirates simply obscured their internet behavior using proxies and VPNs. Meanwhile, the supposed "education" the program provided American consumers accomplished little more than driving up broadband costs as ISPs passed on the cost of participation in the farce to the end user.But while six strikes is technically dead, that's not apparently stopping participating ISPs like Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable (now Charter Spectrum) from continuing to threaten to disconnect users from the internet based on often-flimsy IP address evidence. Users of these ISPs say they continue to receive threats from their ISP that they'll be kicked off of the internet if they don't stop being naughty:

New FISA court documents have been handed over to the EFF as the result of its long-running FOIA lawsuit. The new pile of documents is, unfortunately, very heavily-redacted, forcing readers to extrapolate a lot from the missing data.One of the few released FISA court docs leaving anything legible concerns the NSA's use of pen register/trap-and-trace orders to collect content, rather than just dialed phone numbers. The NSA (along with the FBI) has been admonished for its abuse of these orders before, thanks to its insistence any numbers dialed are fair game, even if they could be construed as partial contents of calls -- i.e., communications.What the NSA liked to scoop up were "post cut through dialing digits" -- any numbers dialed after the phone number itself. These numbers could contain such things as credit card numbers, menu selections for automated services, and other information that could not be considered a dialed phone number.The FISA court put an end to this, noting (all the way back in 2006) the government's complaints it couldn't segregate phone numbers from post cut through digits were laughable. It cites a magistrate judge's denial of the government's PR/TT order for these very reasons and asks the government to explain what actions it had taken in response to this denial.

Jails and prisons continue to sacrifice what few physical interactions prisoners have with loved ones on the outside to phone service provider Securus. The New Orleans Advocate reports a local jail is the latest in a long line of correctional facilities to ban in-person visits, replacing them with Securus communication software and hardware.

The FBI loves its counterterrorism work. Loves it so much, it's pretty much abandoned all pretense of being a law enforcement agency. It acts as though it's somewhere between the NSA and the ATF: interested mostly in picking through surveillance dragnets and running sting operations that turn people who have trouble with basic skills like holding down jobs into national security threats.But it can't score anti-terrorism goals on unguarded nets without a crew of informants. It works with immigration authorities to coerce visiting foreigners into providing the agency with intel. It goes further than that, though. It also operates a witness protection program for informants/witnesses actually involved in actual terrorist activity.Considering the danger inherent to letting these informants run on a long leash, you'd think the FBI would keep close tabs on some of its more dangerous helpers. But that isn't the case. The DOJ's Inspector General has released a heavily-redacted report [PDF] on the government's use of known suspected terrorists (KSTs) as temporary allies in the greater War on Terrorism. These are handled by the US Marshals Service, with the FBI acting as an intermediary. More government agencies are involved as well -- or at least should be. But one of the many problems the OIG found was a lack of communication.

If you've seen current FCC Ajit Pai's name in print so far this year, it's probably for any number of his extremely anti-consumer, telecom industry friendly positions. Like his attempts to kill net neutrality, his support of gutting consumer broadband privacy protections, his efforts to protect the cable industry's cable box monopoly from competition, efforts to dramatically reduce media consolidation rules, his defense of prison phone monopoly price gouging, or the way he's making it harder for Americans to get affordable broadband.To obfuscate this arguably-lopsided agenda, Pai has been busy trying to portray himself as somebody notably other than the revolving door regulator he actually is.For example, Pai has repeatedly insisted that he's a heroic advocate for closing the digital divide, even while simultaneously weakening broadband deployment standards and eroding all oversight of historically-despised mono/duopolists like Comcast. Similarly, Pai spent many of his first months in office insisting he'd be breathlessly dedicated to transparency, yet the FCC boss has already been sued for refusing to document his communications with incumbent ISPs regarding net neutrality, or to provide hard data on why his agency appears to have hallucinated a DDoS attack.Last week, Pai trotted out yet another effort to try and portray himself as an unwavering ally to consumers. In a missive posted to the FCC website (pdf), Pai lambasted Apple for refusing to turn on the FM radio chipsets embedded in iPhones, something he was quick to proclaim was a major affront to the safety and security of the nation's wireless subscribers:

The ACLU is going to court to fight government warrants seeking info on thousands of Facebook users who interacted with a Facebook page related to Inauguration Day protests. The resulting arrests have generated several extremely broad search warrants seeking communications and other personal information from Facebook and the protest site's hosting provider.For awhile, the targets of these warrants could only be guessed at, thanks to the gag order attached to the Facebook warrants. The gag order was finally lifted by the DOJ less than a day before it was due in court for oral arguments. It wasn't Facebook securing a win so much as it was the government avoiding a loss -- a possibly-precedential ruling on gag orders in Washington, DC courts.The fight goes on, with the charged protesters -- and Facebook itself -- fighting the overbroad warrants.Thanks to the last-minute lifting of the gag order, the targeted protesters are fully aware of the government's efforts. More importantly, they're able to participate in challenging the warrants before the government takes possession of their personal data.Paul Levy of Public Citizen points to the latest filing by the ACLU, and makes it clear there's a lot of personal info at stake.

Careless handling of sensitive emails isn't just a problem for Trump's top advisor, Jared Kushner. Having rolled into office on the echoing cries of "Lock her up!" Trump's team nonetheless continued to use private email accounts for official correspondence. Kusher did this twice: using both a Republican National Committee account as well as another personal email address.It's a security issue as well as a transparency issue. Personal email accounts -- while convenient (and conveniently opaque) -- are little more than attack vectors for cybercriminals and state-sponsored hacking. Making this security problem worse are Trump team legal reps, who can't seem to stop communicating with staffer-spoofing accounts.A prankster known only by his Twitter handle (SINON_REBORN) has a few admin team trophies on his wall already. The prankster has already duped White House Special Counsel Ty Cobb with an impersonation of White House Media Director Dan Scavino. That followed successful pranking of Breitbart editors and White House Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossett.The latest victim is Jared Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell. He's been stung twice, as the Verge's Sarah Jeong reports.

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We've noted how large ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are covering all their bases in their endless quest to kill popular (some would say necessary) net neutrality protections. They've successfully lobbied FCC boss Ajit Pai to vote to kill the existing rules later this year, despite the massive public opposition to that plan. But they're also lobbying Congress to draft a new net neutrality law they publicly insist will solve everything, while privately hoping you're too stupid to realize will be entirely written by their lawyers and lobbyists -- ensuring it has so many loopholes as to be effectively useless.In case those first two options don't work, large ISPs are also -- for the third time in as many years -- looking for the Supreme Court's help. ISPs lost their first attempt to overturn the Title II net neutrality order last year when the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia shot down their complaints (which included insisting that net neutrality rules violated their First Amendment rights). ISPs lost again earlier this year when the courts shot down their en banc appeal.Hoping the third time's the charm, lobbyists for Comcast, AT&T and other ISPs have lobbied the Supreme Court to overturn the rules, hoping to kill net neutrality protections both today and for the foreseeable future. Like previous complaints, AT&T's petition to the court (pdf) trots out a parade of theoretical horribles, doubling down on numerous, previously debunked industry claims (like these modest net neutrality rules somehow utterly devastated sector investment, a claim repeatedly debunked by countless journalists and objective economists).AT&T's petition is a greatest hits of its previous, false claims, including the claim that zero rating (imposing usage caps then letting a company's own content bypass those caps while still penalizing competitors) is somehow "pro consumer":

While the "main event" in the never-ending case of the US Justice Department against Kim Dotcom continues to grind its way ever so slowly through the wheels of justice, one element has basically concluded. And this was the part that should concern you even if you think that Kim Dotcom was completely guilty of criminal copyright infringement. The issue here is that as part of the arrest of Dotcom and his colleagues, the US "seized" many of his assets. Now, when the government seizes assets, it's a temporary thing. They have a certain period of time to hold onto it. Afterwards, they either need to give those assets back or file a separate case to attempt to "forfeit" those items (i.e., keep them forever). Here's where things get a little bizarre. Because Dotcom was fighting extradition in New Zealand, the "deadline" for the US to continue holding the seized assets was approaching -- so they filed the separate case against his stuff. Because it's a civil asset forfeiture case, the case is literally against his stuff, and not against Kim Dotcom (and, yes, this is as weird and nonsensical as it sounds). But there was a twist: because Dotcom was still in New Zealand, the Justice Department said that he was a "fugitive" and thus couldn't even protest the forfeiture of his stuff. Unfortunately, both the district court and the appeals court agreed.Again, let's be totally clear here -- because sometimes people get so focused on their belief that because Megaupload enabled copyright infringement that this is somehow okay. But here we have a situation where before anyone has been found guilty of anything, the US government was given permission to take and keep all of Kim Dotcom's stuff. This should concern you even if you think Dotcom deserves to rot in prison, because there's a clear absence of due process here. If Dotcom is eventually found to be not guilty -- that won't have any impact on this. The US government still gets to keep his stuff (or, well, whatever it can get its hands on).So the issue here is not whether or not Kim Dotcom is guilty of copyright infringement. It's whether or not the US government can just take his stuff before that other process has played out. That's a problem.And, unfortunately, it's a problem that the Supreme Court will not be reviewing at this time. Even as some of the Justices have expressed concerns about civil asset forfeiture, apparently they didn't want to take on this particular case. And, maybe that's okay, because maybe, as with many people, they wouldn't have been able to separate out the copyright question from the civil asset forfeiture question from the fugitive disentitlement question -- all of which are separate but important.

Denuvo DRM has graced our pages many times in the past year or so. The DRM once thought to be unbreakable and heralded as the end of piracy has taken a precipitous downward path in reputation. Games using the DRM slowly began being cracked in months, then weeks. The ability to crack Denuvo then sped up, with cracking times dropping to a week, five days, a couple of days. Through it all, Denuvo worked furiously to patch its software, all while proclaiming that a week or so's protection is worth it to game developers as they protect their games during the all important initial release window.Well, it seems like that ability to make that argument has come to an end, as DRM-"protected" game Total War: Warhammer 2 was cracked in a matter of hours.

When the Department of Justice handed down remedies for the Seattle Police Department's excessive use of excessive force, it told officers they would need to dial back their penchant for deadliness. Just prior to the DOJ's civil rights investigation, the PD was responsible for 20% of the city's homicides. The DOJ recommended officers work on their de-escalation tactics, as well as partake in training meant to steer officers away from viewing anything strange (medical conditions, mental health issues, drug impairment, behavioral crises) as something to be shot at or beaten.Seattle PD officials adopted the DOJ recommendations and altered the department's use of force policies. Rather than comply or quit, several police officers decided to file a federal lawsuit against the DOJ. The officers asserted a nonexistent right (the "right" to make it home alive) and hammered an existing right (the 2nd Amendment) to it in hopes of persuading a federal court that using less force less often somehow violated their right to keep and bear arms.The crowdfunded lawsuit didn't get very far. The district court pointed out the 2nd Amendment does not create a "right" to defend yourself, much less attempt to guarantee officers' personal safety. Gun ownership is regulated, not a free pass for cops to violate PD use of force policies as they see fit. It also tossed a variety of other rights violations claims, noting these were even more tenuously connected to the officers' protest of the new use of force policy than the 2nd Amendment claims.The officers appealed this decision because of course they did. Despite raising less than $4,000 of their $100,000 legal defense fund goal, the officers apparently had enough funding to lose twice. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected [PDF] the officers' ridiculous rights violation assertions. (h/t Kevin Gosztola)As the court points out, the use of force policy these officers felt needed to be addressed with a civil rights lawsuit does zero damage to the officers' civil rights.

What is it about companies (or their contractors) leaving consumer data publicly exposed on an Amazon cloud server? Verizon recently made headlines after one of its customer service vendors left the personal data of around 6 million consumers just sitting on an Amazon server without adequate password protection. A GOP data analytics firm was also recently soundly ridiculed after it left the personal data of around 198 million citizens (read: most of you) similarly just sitting on an Amazon server without protection. Time Warner Cable also recently left 4 million user records sitting in an openly-accessible Amazon bucket.This sort of incompetence shows no sign of slowing down. Not to be outdone, The Kromtech Security Center recently found over half a million records belonging to SVR Tracking, a company that helps track your car's location for its “vehicle recovery" service, left sitting online without adequate security. You guessed it: the company apparently also thought it would be a good idea to leave this data sitting on an Amazon server openly accessible via the internet:

We cover many petty intellectual property lawsuits here at Techdirt. After a while, you kind of become somewhat numb to them and the only mildly ridiculous lawsuits seem sort of... meh. But every once in a while you run into a real doozy, the sort of lawsuit that really gets the anger juices flowing. The copyright infringement lawsuit brought by author Dr. Keith Bell against King's College and its football coach, Jeff Knar, is one of those lawsuits.A timeline is required here, for reasons that will become readily apparent. In 1982, the year I happen to have been born (skypoint for myself), Bell published a 72 page book called Winning Isn't Normal. The book is supposed to be of motivational nature, prodding the reader to win at sports, games and life, or something. Fast forward to 2015, when the Twitter account for Northeastern State University's baseball team tweeted out an image of a single page from the book. Also in 2015, King's College coach Knarr retweeted that tweet. Now fast forward to late 2017, when Knarr and the school are being sued by Bell for that retweet.

There are obviously a lot of mixed motivations behind the push for SESTA -- the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act -- with many of those motivations based on good intentions of actually stopping sex trafficking. Of course, we've explained in great detail how SESTA isn't likely to help at all, and is quite likely to make the problem worse. It also seems clear that many of those lining up in support of the bill see it as a wedge -- a way to slowly dismantle intermediary liability protections for platforms on the internet. And thus, some just see it as a way to attack Google and Facebook out of a general dislike for those companies -- without realizing (or without caring) just how much damage it will do to free speech online and the platforms that enable such speech. We've also been perplexed by SESTA supporters using completely bogus stats to insist the problem of sex trafficking is much larger than it truly is. As we noted, sex trafficking is both very real and an absolute tragedy for those caught up in it and their families. But we should be realistic about the actual scope of the problem -- and many SESTA supporters aren't actually able to do that.But perhaps the motivation behind some SESTA supporters is... even more absurd. An email popped up in my inbox recently with a bunch of really strong language supporting SESTA, coming from a group calling itself the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE). They run the website "End Sexual Exploitation" and are strong supporters of SESTA. But what caught my eye is that the end of the email noted the true mission of NCSE isn't to end sex trafficking... but to rid the world of the "public health crisis of pornography."You see, NCSE began its life in 1962 as Morality in Media, and was a reaction to a ridiculous moral panic over "pornographic material" being left outside of a school. NCSE appears to believe that all porn is pure evil and must be eradicated. The group has insisted that porn is a "public health crisis" and has worked to get states to declare it as such. It also posts a Dirty Dozen list of organizations that it needs to shame for "perpetuating sexual exploitation."Want to know how totally fucked up the list is? They include the American Library Association and Amnesty International on this year's list. Really. They completely misrepresent the ALA's opposition to mandatory internet filters to claim that libraries have been turned into "a XXX space that fosters child sexual abuse." It put Amnesty on the list because Amnesty dares to call sex workers "sex workers" rather than prostitutes. They also list the Justice Department as an honorable mention for failing to enforce obscenity laws, which NCOSE wants to use to basically criminalize pornography. In other words, NCSE supports pretty blatant censorship.Now people can certainly differ on their beliefs about prostitution and pornography, but having groups like this at the forefront of destructive, counterproductive bills like SESTA -- which will do nothing to stop actual sex trafficking, and plenty to harm free speech online -- raises some serious questions about what really are the goals of SESTA. NCSE certainly seems to think it's part of the plan to wipe out all pornography. Considering that other SESTA supporters insist (incorrectly) that SESTA won't have any impact on speech online, they might want to consider why one of their major coalition partners seems to be eagerly looking for ways to censor the internet.

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Blatant hypocrisy aside, the Trump Administration's use of personal email accounts isn't just a low-flying middle finger to public records laws. It's also a stupidly insecure method for handling sensitive communications.Senior adviser Jared Kushner continued to use his personal email account -- albeit in a limited fashion -- after taking his official position. He did this despite being warned by the nation's professional spooks that doing so was a really bad idea. Josh Meyer reports for Politico:

As you may be aware, the US, Canada and Mexico are "renegotiating NAFTA" for reasons that don't entirely make sense, but we'll leave that aside. Either way, opening up that process has created an opportunity for Hollywood to attack the internet, and they've rushed right in. And, despite promises to the contrary, it appears that Hollywood may have succeeded in getting the Trump administration's US Trade Representative to back its dangerous plans.To fully explain this requires a bit of a history lesson. A few decades back, Hollywood realized that what it couldn't get Congress to pass, it could force upon the US through "international trade agreements." Much of the history of what happened is detailed in the excellent 2002 book, Information Feudalism by Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite. The very short version is this: international trade agreements have mostly been negotiated without much fanfare or attention, often in secret, with handshake deals in backrooms. And since "trade agreements" are about industry and commerce, trade negotiators often spend most of their time listening to industry representatives to figure out what they want, rather than looking at what's best for everyone as a whole.The legacy entertainment middlemen (very cleverly!) realized this long before many others did, and realized that if they could make copyright a "trade" issue, they could continually ratchet up the protectionist parts of copyright law. The plan involves a few clever components. First, find a few countries where they can convince local legislatures to pass ever more draconian copyright laws. Second, put pressure on trade negotiators to put similar provisions into trade agreements. Third, whine about countries (including the US) "failing to live up to the obligations of our international trade agreements" and forcing everyone to ratchet up their copyright laws to "comply." Wash, rinse, repeat.This is actually how the DMCA itself became law in the US (which is ironic as you'll see in a moment). Hollywood tried to pass a DMCA-like law in the US in the mid-1990s and it failed. So, as the main architect of this plan publicly admitted a few years ago, they did "an end-run around Congress," ran to Geneva, and got a new trade agreement -- the WIPO Copyright Treaty -- passed. And then they scurried right back to Congress, and said to meet the obligations of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, we needed the DMCA.Since then, Hollywood has pushed for draconian copyright requirements in basically every trade agreement, and the USTR was only too happy to oblige. Ridiculously, the USTR, while pushing ever more draconian copyright law around the globe through trade agreements, has flatly refused to also include fair use or equivalent "safety valves" to keep the law from being abused. Of course, as we've discussed for years, these "safety valves" -- generally called "limitations and exceptions" -- are actually fundamental user rights. In short: the USTR has pushed for rights for big corporations, while refusing to include the necessary rights for the public. That's a dangerous combination.That brings us to the ongoing NAFTA renegotiation. Hollywood has been whining about the DMCA's safe harbors quite a bit in the past few years (yes, the same safe harbors that are from the DMCA that it forced the US to pass via international trade agreements). So far, however, heavy lobbying by the RIAA and MPAA to do away with the DMCA's safe harbors has failed to convince Congress (in part because Congress has seen through this game and, in part, because Congress still remembers what happened with its attempt to undermine the internet through copyright law with SOPA).But, hey, with the reopening of NAFTA, Hollywood saw an opportunity, and has pushed for language that will undermine the DMCA's safe harbors and fair use -- things they can't get through Congress alone. Unfortunately, the latest reports are that the USTR has agreed to support this move and, even though it's been shown that more balanced copyright promotes trade, the US is now officially putting more draconian copyright on the agenda -- a move that risks undermining the entire internet, not to mention a major backlash from internet users as well.Needless to say, this is bad. Some in Congress are speaking up on this, but it's falling along the traditional lines. Senator Ron Wyden has made it clear that he's "deeply concerned" that the Trump administration is willing "to undermine the internet as a platform for speech, innovation and US jobs" with the NAFTA renegotiation. On the flip side, you have Orrin Hatch -- a Senator so closely associated with giving the legacy entertainment industry everything it's ever wanted, that he's given the nickname "Senator Fido" (as in "lapdog") in Rob Reid's comic novel about the music industry. Hatch has spoken up in support of Hollywood, saying that while it's fine to reopen the DMCA's safe harbors, there should be no mention of fair use or any other user rights in these negotiations.At this point, it appears that Canada is left pushing back on the US's crazy Hollywood-inspired demands. Of course, Canada's suggestions aren't all wonderful either, but at least it's pushing for a more balanced approach -- one that actually recognizes the rights of the public and the importance of protecting free speech, while the USTR (pushed by Hollywood) seems to have decided to throw that right out the window.Obviously, there are so many other things going on these days, that it's easy to miss the background of "NAFTA 2.0" negotiations. But at this point, it appears that Trump's USTR -- at the urging of Hollywood -- is trying to use these negotiations to do real damage to free speech and innovation online. Taking away the DMCA's safe harbors and refusing to include important protections like fair use in any copyright language should be seen as a non-starter. As we've argued for years, copyright is best left out of trade agreements altogether, but if it does need to be in there, giving Hollywood it's wishlist plan to destroy the internet shouldn't be the USTR's top priority.

If you're a cop patrolling a demonstration and you get hit by a flying rock, you most likely shrug it off as the hazards of work and set out making an arrest. If you're one anonymous Baton Rouge cop, you sue ethereal non-entities and someone who did nothing more than speak at the protests where the officer was injured. (h/t Adam Steinbaugh)We don't know who this cop is but we do know his lawyer, who had this to say about the recently-tossed lawsuit.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side was... me! But I prefer to highlight reader comments, so I'll just link off to that and move on to featuring the second and third place winners. First up, it's an anonymous response to Larry Lessig's new campaign for electoral reform, suggesting a different take on the problem:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, the fallout from the farce that was the Megaupload raid — made worse by the revelation that the New Zealand government used illegal wiretaps in the case — the public was starting to realize more about the disasters of copyright overreach. There was no shortage of examples, from copyright trolls and aggressive rights collectives around the world, to terribly onerous laws on the verge of passing in countries like Panama, to insane statements like that of a former Register of Copyrights who thought new technologies should seek prior approval from the government, to absurdities like an author being punished for torrenting his own book.Ten Years AgoThey wouldn't have had any lack of examples this week in 2007, either — though at least there was some pushback from various corners, like the growing number of judges smacking down the RIAA's file sharing lawsuits (you know, the ones that almost certainly accomplished nothing, and one of which was for the first time on its way to be heard by a jury. You might remember it: the defendant was someone by the name of Jammie Thomas...)And just for fun: it was surprising and amusing to see a headline about "fake news" all the way back in 2007, though the context was, as you might imagine, very different from today.Fifteen Years AgoThe main flashpoint of the copyright fight this week in 2002 was still the insane Hollywood hacking bill, which was the subject of fierce debate. While the bill's sponsor defended it with empty statements that belied either ignorance or indifference, Congress was inviting only Hollywood representatives to come whine about piracy and support the bill. Dan Gillmor invited Jack Valenti to share his (unconvincing) side of the story regarding the MPAA's heavy-handed actions, while Gary Shapiro of the CEA was clearly and carefully making more nuanced arguments wherever possible — but of course, the opposition had the potent weapon of recruiting celebrities to the cause.

We have written many times about why the patent system is a bad fit for software. Too often, the Patent Office reviews applications without ever looking at real world software and hands out broad, vague, or obvious patents on software concepts. These patents fuel patent trolling and waste. As machine learning and artificial intelligence become more commonplace, it is worth considering how these flaws in the patent system might impact advances in AI.Some have worried about very broad patents being issued in the AI space. For example, Google has a patent on a common machine learning technique called dropout. This means that Google could insist that no one else use this technique until 2032. Meanwhile, Microsoft has a patent application with some very broad claims on active machine learning (the Patent Office recently issued a non-final rejection, though the application remains pending and Microsoft will have the opportunity to argue why it should still be granted a patent). Patents on fundamental machine learning techniques have the potential to fragment development and hold up advances in AI.As a subset of software development, AI patents are likely to raise many of the same problems as software patents generally. For example, we've noted that many software patents take the form: apply well-known technique X in domain Y. For example, our Stupid Patent of the Month from January 2015 applied the years-old practice of remotely updating software to sports video games (the patent was later found invalid). Other patents have computers do incredibly simple things like counting votes or counting calories. We can expect the Patent Office to hand out similar patents on using machine learning techniques in obvious and expected ways.Indeed, this has already happened. Take U.S. Patent No. 5,944,839, for a "system and method for automatically maintaining a computer system." This patent includes very broad claims applying AI to diagnosing problems with computer systems. Claim 6 of this patent states:

Elsevier is at it again. It has launched a new (free) service that is likely to undermine open access alternatives by providing Wikipedia-like definitions generated automatically from texts it publishes. As an article on the Times Higher Education site explains, the aim is to stop users of the publishing giant's ScienceDirect platform from leaving Elsevier's walled garden and visiting sites like Wikipedia in order to look up definitions of key terms:

You may have heard the story earlier this week that the video game company Atlus had issued a DMCA takedown over a Patreon page for the creators of RPCS3 -- an open source PlayStation 3 emulator, because people could use that emulator to play the Atlus game Persona 5. An awful lot of people immediately said that this was a crazy DMCA takedown, and it's clear that a Patreon page is not violating the copyright of Persona 5 itself. And it is messed up, but perhaps not for the reasons most people are thinking. A DMCA takedown here may actually be legitimate under the law. Rather than a bogus takedown, this may be yet another example of just how fucked up the DMCA is.The big clue: Atlus itself put up a weird blog post defending the action that is mostly nonsensical, stating lots of things that have nothing to do with copyright law, but see if you catch the one thing that is actually covered by copyright (okay, okay, I've put it in bold for you):

Earlier this week, the company Factba.se posted an archive with audio and transcripts of every interview that Donald Trump did on Howard Stern's show. As they noted, some of those interviews had turned into news stories with a fair bit of public interest. Factba.se pointed out that while those news stories quoted from the interviews, there was no publicly available archive of all those interviews for others to listen through.

Earlier this year we wrote about a truly awful Supreme Court ruling concerning whether or not the design of cheerleader costumes could be covered by copyright. As we had explained earlier, this ruling could have a major impact on a variety of industries. The key issue is that "useful articles" are not supposed to be subject to copyright. Historically, that's always meant that the actual design of clothing or costumes is not protected by copyright law. And that's been a really good thing. It's inspired much more competition and innovation over the years in the clothing world.As we noted when the ruling came out, allowing the copyright on cheerleader uniforms to stand, with a weird "new test" (basically whether you can "separate" the design from the useful article, and if the separated design is copyright-eligible), would lead to a lot of lawsuits pushing the boundaries of that test. And that's exactly what's happening. And it may ruin Halloween this year. Because suddenly, Halloween costume designers are starting to sue. Specifically, a costume maker named (no joke) "Rasta Imposta" is suing K-mart for having the audacity to sell someone else's banana costume. Really. This is straight out of the complaint:Incredibly, Rasta Imposta argues that basic features of a banana are its "distinct visual elements."

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Carl Crowell is a special kind of copyright troll who has graced our pages in the past. The lawyer who worked with Voltage Pictures and whose tactics were underhanded enough to warrant a lawsuit from his former business partner and for a federal judge to setup a pro bono legal team for the targets of his trolling threat letters, Crowell has always operated at the far end of the spectrum when it comes to copyright trolls. That said, a recent demand he made of someone he accused of pirating the film Mechanic: Resurrection takes things a step further by simply demanding the accused turn over his computer upon accusation.

Showtime's websites recently began covertly hijacking user browsers to mine cryptocurrency, and neither Showtime nor its parent company CBS appear interested in explaining how or why it happened. The code in question -- a bit of JavaScript dubbed Coinhive, was embedded in two different Showtime domains: Showtime.com and Showtimeanytime.com. When a visitor visited these domains, their browser was hijacked and their computer was forced to help mine Monero, a new privacy-centric alternative to bitcoin currently valued at around $92 each.The mining software was first noticed by a Twitter user who discovered the Coinhive miner buried early on in the source code:

The government has lost its claim to money lifted from two men by the DEA at the Cleveland airport. Despite agents being super-sure the money was either drug profits or intended for drug purchases, no charges were brought. But the DEA decided to keep the money -- $31,000 from one and $10,000 from the other -- for itself.The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals says not so fast. The decision [PDF] lets the government know it's jumping the gun on claiming sole ownership of this lifted cash. The opinion starts out with a brief description of how the cash-focused Drug Enforcement Agency starts each airport workday.

Techdirt has been pointing out for a while that the cliché about Chinese companies being little more than clever copycats, unable to come up with their own ideas, ceased to be true years ago. Anyone clinging to that belief is simply deluding themselves, and is likely to have a rude awakening as Chinese high-tech companies continue to advance in global influence. China's advances in basic research are pretty clear, but what about business innovation? That's an area that the US has traditionally prided itself on being the world leader. However, an interesting article in the South China Morning Post -- a Hong Kong-based newspaper owned by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has a market capitalization of $400 billion -- explores how it's Chinese ideas that are now being copied:

Of all the things that most people get wrong about copyright law, the idea/expression dichotomy has to rank near the top. The confusion over this is easily explained by the pervasive ownership culture that has emerged organically from an intellectual property ecosystem that only moves in the direction of more protectionism. Because of that culture, most people simply assume that the creation of the idea is itself a copyrightable thing, rather than the reality which is that copyright only applies to specific expression. The useful example at hand is that one cannot copyright a superhero named after an animal that wears a mask and a cape, but one can copyright Batman, particularly any books, comics, or movies in which Batman is depicted.As already stated, this reality evades many people. But it probably shouldn't evade those in industries dominated by copyright, such as the video game industry. Despite that, Bluehole, developers of the wildly popular PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds developer, appears to have its fur up over another studio, Epic Games, releasing a "battle royale" game mode for its Fortnite title.

Another warrant requirement for Stingray use has been established. Again, it's not a federal decision, so jurisdiction is limited, but there's now another case to cite when fighting warrantless Stingray use in federal courts.This decision comes from the DC Appeals Court (very much not the DC Circuit Court of Appeals). The case involves the Metro PD's use of a Stingray to track two phones: the suspect's and one he had stolen. The lower court handed the government a win. After pointing out there was plenty of time (around 10 hours between report of crime and Stingray deployment) to obtain a warrant (thus no exigent circumstances exception), the court decided the evidence derived from the tracking fell into the "inevitable discovery" exception since the tracking of the stolen phone would have led officers to the suspect.The problem is the officers testifying for the Metro PD could not say for sure which phone they were tracking: the suspect's or the phone he had allegedly stolen from the victim. The lower court cut the cops some slack, allowing for the possibility of they were tracking a phone (the victim's) the suspect had no privacy interest in.The appeals court, however, doesn't read it the same way. First, it goes further than the lower court, deciding the use of Stingray devices requires a warrant. As it points out in its opinion [PDF], the use of Stingray devices is far more invasive than other tracking methods. To begin with, it does something historic cell site location data and/or GPS trackers can't: locate a suspect no one's actively tracking.

The road to this story has been paved with absolutely dreadful decisions made in Europe over the past few years. As several courts and governments adopting the general idea that social media sites are somehow responsible for content posted by individual users, they likewise developed the stance that these sites must somehow review and remove "hate speech" — as vague and amorphous a term as there could possibly be. As such, the EU essentially demanded that sites like Twitter and Facebook act as content police for their platforms, with nary a care given to the insurmountable nature of the request, nor the actual moral viability of vicarious assignment of guilt. In what some describe as a no-choice situation, Google, Facebook and Twitter — among others — agreed to an equally vague notice and takedown regime for hate speech in the EU.Choice or not, it was never going to work. Monitoring and responding to hate speech designations, while affording those accused of hate speech anything resembling a fair and honest review, is laughably beyond these companies' ability. Likewise, whatever those sites were actually able to accomplish in removing truly vile speech from their platforms was never going to be enough for the EU. Now that this door has been opened, rather than these sites standing firm and making the argument for why opening that door was ridiculous, we're too far down the road. It was therefore perfectly predictable that the EU was going to come back at these very same sites with more demands, in this case that these companies fulfill the EU's request for the impossible even faster.

Despite the hype surrounding Google Fiber and gigabit connections, vast swaths of the U.S. broadband industry are actually becoming less competitive than ever. As large telcos like Windstream, Frontier, CenturyLink, and Verizon refuse to upgrade aging DSL lines at any scale, they're effectively giving cable providers a growing monopoly over broadband in countless markets. And these companies are quickly rushing to take advantage of this dwindling competition by imposing entirely arbitrary, confusing and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees in these captive markets.The benefits of these pricey limitations are two fold: they allow cable providers to not only jack up the price of service, but they're an incredible weapon against the looming threat of streaming video competition. Caps and overage fees make using streaming alternatives notably more expensive, helping to protect legacy TV revenues. But cable operators are also exempting their own streaming services from these caps (as Comcast did with the launch of its own, new streaming platform this week), while still penalizing competitors. This kind of behavior is just one of several reasons why net neutrality rules are kind of important.Oddly though, you'd be hard pressed to find politicians or regulators from either party that give much of a damn that this massive distortion of the level internet playing field is occurring. Which is why, unlike in other sectors, nobody anywhere is verifying whether ISP usage meters are accurate. As a result, there have been countless instances where users say they've been billed for bandwidth despite their modem being off or the power being out. And numerous studies have indicated ISPs routinely abuse this lack of oversight by overcharging for service.Comcast has, of course, been at the forefront of imposing these usage limitations and overage fees. And unsurprisingly, consumers pretty consistently state that the cable giant -- already world renowned for historically-abysmal customer service -- isn't tracking usage or billing these customers accurately. Users who were billed for usage while away on vacation have had no real ability to challenge Comcast's meter readings. And Ars Technica documented another user this week who says he battled with Comcast for months over errant meter readings before cancelling fixed-line broadband service entirely:

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Cops and the press can be best friends. In some cases, they are. Anytime an officer shoots or beats someone, at least one obliging outlet steps up to publish the department's statement as well as any criminal history they've been able to dig up on the shooting/beating victim. And if the police aren't willing to turn over criminal records, some outlets will do the heavy lifting for them.But they can also be antagonists. Generally speaking, law enforcement is a closed shop. It usually takes diligent efforts by journalists to pry loose documents pertaining to misconduct or misbehavior. State laws tend to make this more difficult than it should be by granting law enforcement agencies tons of public records exemptions.It's this strained relationship being highlighted in an incredibly ill-advised Facebook post by the Aurora (IL) Police Department, penned by police chief Kristen Ziman. As Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery pointed out on Twitter, it's not every day you witness a police department berate a journalist for practicing journalism.The department's Facebook post opens up with some speculation about the journalist's intentions:

On one hand, the growing number of streaming services has been a boon for users looking for a less expensive, more flexible alternative to the bloated cable bundle. On the flip side, as a growing number of streaming services emerge and broadcasters begin launching their own services to bypass the middleman (Amazon, Apple, Netflix), we're seeing a rush toward more and more exclusive content deals. Forcing the consumer to hunt and peck through an ocean of ever-shifting licensing windows is already confusing, but siloing content across numerous, cumulatively-pricey services also risks driving consumers back to piracy.Case in point: CBS recently launched its own streaming platform: CBS All Access. The service, which costs $6/month with ads and $10/month without, provides access to CBS' full roster of shows, but saw fairly tepid growth initially. But CBS recently announced that the new Trek series, "Star Trek: Discovery" will be exclusively available early to members of the service moving forward. This move did, rather unsurprisingly, result in a single day sign up record for the service, at least according to CBS:

I like to assume that everyone is as tired as I am of the term "fake news." The term, which once seemed to have a fairly coherent meaning, has since been co-opted by pretty much everyone to mean any number of things that mostly amount to "news I don't like." That's incredibly annoying, as is all of the partisan mold that has grown upon this now dead and useless term.That said, one does struggle to find different terminology to use when referring to a very strange thing the Republican Governors Association did when it set up a site that purported to be a "news site", but which only served as a GOP governors propaganda outfit, while forgetting to tell anyone who was behind it all.

We're not hearing much about corporate sovereignty -- also known as "investment state dispute settlement" (ISDS) -- these days. It's definitely still a problem, especially for smaller countries. But the big fights over the inclusion of corporate sovereignty chapters in the two global trade deals -- the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement -- have been put on hold for the moment. That's for the simple reason that both TPP and TTIP are in a kind of limbo following the election of Donald Trump as US President with his anti-free trade platform.TTIP seems completely moribund, whereas TPP -- re-branded as TPP11 to reflect the fact that there are only 11 countries now that the US has pulled out -- is showing the odd twitch of life. A recent article in the Canadian newspaper National Post points out that the departure of the US might even allow some of the worst bits of TPP to be jettisoned:

More good news on the forfeiture front: Nick Sibilla of forfeiture watchdogs Institute for Justice reports a federal judge has declared one of Indiana's civil asset forfeiture laws unconstitutional.

If you haven't heard, something slightly strange happened in the tech world a few days ago. Suddenly, and seemingly without warning, Google decided to break YouTube for the Amazon Echo Show product. The Show is the Echo product that comes with a small display screen where you can... you know... watch videos. YouTube used to work on the product, and was even showcased by Amazon when it demonstrated the product at tech shows, but now all you get is Alexa's monotone voice letting you know "Currently, Google is not supporting YouTube on Echo Show."Exactly why this is happening is something of an open question, since nobody at either company is offering up any details. Amazon's response to the press puts the onus for this flatly on Google, but doesn't detail why it happened.

If you haven't heard, something slightly strange happened in the tech world a few days ago. Suddenly, and seemingly without warning, Google decided to break YouTube for the Amazon Echo Show product. The Show is the Echo product that comes with a small display screen where you can... you know... watch videos. YouTube used to work on the product, and was even showcased by Amazon when it demonstrated the product at tech shows, but now all you get is Alexa's monotone voice letting you know "Currently, Google is not supporting YouTube on Echo Show."Exactly why this is happening is something of an open question, since nobody at either company is offering up any details. Amazon's response to the press puts the onus for this flatly on Google, but doesn't detail why it happened.

The FCC is required by law to offer an annual report on the state of competition in the broadband industry. Depending on who's in power, and how eager they are to downplay the lack of said competition to the benefit of industry, these reports often provide comical insight into how the regulator fiddles with data to justify policy apathy. Under George W. Bush's presidency, the FCC declared the wireless industry perfectly competitive. Under the Obama administration, the FCC refused to state one way or the other whether the sector is competitive. Neither party has what you'd call courage when it comes to calling a spade a spade.Fast forward to this year, and you likely won't be surprised to learn that the Ajit Pai led agency has declared the wireless sector perfectly competitive -- for the first time since 2009. In a press statement, Pai declared (pdf) that the re-introduction of unlimited data plans, prompted in turn by a resurgent T-Mobile, is proof positive that the sector is perfectly healthy and "fiercely competitive":

It looks like being the wrong kind of American will result in the mandatory collection of social media account handles and aliases. New rules on social media snooping have been floated several times with varying degrees of sincerity, but this time the DHS actually means it.

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The rationale behind the Section 230-upending SESTA bill is that sex trafficking is such a huge problem, some collateral damage is a small price to pay. The push begins with the targeted criminal behavior itself. No one wants to appear as though they're opposed to fighting trafficking, so that scores some quick wins with a few legislators. It continues with inflated numbers suggesting trafficking has become a multi-billion dollar industry here in the US.Two backers of an earlier human trafficking bill - Rep. Bob Goodlatte and Rep. Ann Wagner -- both cited unsupported numbers while discussing the criminal activity. Goodlatte claimed "child sex trafficking alone is a $9.8 billion industry." Wagner's money quote was about the same -- $9.5 billion -- but didn't narrow it down to just child sex trafficking.It doesn't matter whether the number included children or not. The numbers are false. The Washington Post dug into the stats and couldn't find anything independently verifiable that added up to the $9 billion price tag asserted here. What WaPo found was the $9 billion was a worldwide estimate based on some very questionable extrapolation from a few small data sets with large sampling errors. The paper tracked the numbers all the way back to figures provided by ICE in 2003, which was a worldwide estimate that also included human smuggling.Other reports have suggested an incredible amount of profit per exploited person:

In the wake of the Equifax breach, there has been some discussion about just how quickly companies should publicly disclose when they have been victims of security breaches that reveal client information. In the case of Equifax, the company had essentially been sitting on the knowledge that it was attacked since July before going public in early September. Something like two months, in other words. While most people agree that victim companies should have some time to get their houses in order before opening the window shades, two months seemed like a lot, given the severity of the attack and the number of potential victims among Equifax's clients.But two months is nearly lightning quick compared with Deloitte, the enormous accounting firm that discovered it was the victim of an attack in March and only bothered to tell the public, along with most of its clients, this week.

When last we checked in with Verizon Wireless, it was taking heat for kicking at least 8,500 wireless customers off of its network without much warning. The short version: Verizon created a program aimed at shoring up connectivity to rural areas, but after hyping the program and promising rural users access to unlimited data, Verizon realized the roaming costs were higher than initially projected, resulting in them quickly pulling the plug. In a notice to customers Verizon justifies the purging of these mostly-rural users by insisting they're using a "substantial" amount of data: