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Wonderful. It's another one of those anomalies that happens all the time: copyright as censor.This time, the person abusing copyright protection tools to shut someone up is a disgraced researcher (Kaushik Deb) who received a three-year federal funding ban for "intentionally, knowingly, and recklessly" fabricating data in a research paper created with tax dollars.

Just about every year, like clockwork, Comcast will breathlessly insist that it has finally turned the corner when it comes to the company's historically abysmal customer service. In 2014, Comcast even went so far as to make a big deal about the fact it had hired a new "customer experience VP" who, the company promised, would finally get to the bottom of why Comcast has been ranked among the worst companies in any industry in America in terms of customer service and support. The end result: Comcast is still among the worst companies in America in terms of customer service and support.

In the struggle to provide open access to academic research, one company name keeps cropping up as a problem: Elsevier. Techdirt has written numerous stories about efforts to rein in the considerable -- and vastly profitable -- power that Elsevier wields in the world of academic publishing. These include boycotts of various kinds, mass resignations of journal editors, as well as access to millions of publicly-funded papers in ways that bypass Elsevier altogether.Alongside these grassroots actions, some universities and research institutes have tried taking a different approach. They are making common cause by banding together in order to strengthen their negotiating hand with the global publishing giant. The aim is to get a better deal from Elsevier, particularly in terms of providing open access to papers. Last year, a group of universities in the Netherlands used this strategy with some success, as Science reports:

Just when you think you've seen it all in silly trademark filings, along comes a liquor company to block the trademark application for the logo of an NBA basketball team. Jagermeister, a liquor I haven't thought about since my college days because I'm a grownup that drinks grownup drinks, has decided that the logo for the Milwaukee Bucks is too similar to its own logo and must be stopped.

Law enforcement databases, while useful in investigations, are also severely problematic. Not only does the desire to "collect it all" result in databases full of information about innocent people, but very few agencies are serious about deterring database misuse. In most cases -- despite the constant threat of criminal prosecution -- most abusers are hit with nothing more than short suspensions for improper access.Then there's the problem with the humans running the systems. When mistakes are made (or information is entered for more malicious reasons) by government agencies, the consequences for those mistakenly targeted can be severe.

One or two instances can be outliers, but any more than that and it's a trend. And there is now indeed a trend among video game companies for removing Denuvo, the DRM once thought to be the industry's final solution to piracy. As the DRM software has indeed been proven crackable, some game makers have begun releasing patches to remove it from their games entirely. Somewhat strangely, Denuvo's removal tends to be absent from the patch notes. Such is the case in the latest example, in which id Software has stripped AAA title Doom of Denuvo.Theories abound as to what is going on here. There are some who believe these game makers are finally coming around to understanding that DRM is annoying their legitimate customers and no longer stopping piracy. The problem with that theory is that you would think companies like id Software would include the removal of Denuvo in the patch notes if that were the case. It would be a PR boon to be seen as consumer friendly if there were no plans to keep up this annoying DRM arms race any longer.At the NeoGAF link above, some are suggesting that the new strategy for publishers will be to utilize DRM in the first few months of a game's release and then strip it out once it's been on the market for a while. That way, the companies can combat piracy as best as they can during the critical initial release window and then, I guess, choose to stop annoying their customers months down the road. If this is indeed the strategy, it's a dumb one, as quite a lot of ill will in the public can be generated if/when the DRM breaks the gaming experience for real customers, especially if that happens in that same critical release window. Not to mention that Denuvo in particular cripples the modding community, which often serves as a boon to interest in any particular game.Still others think that this all has something to do with a money-back guarantee offered by the makers of Denuvo.

While holding a position as a government employee can somewhat narrow your protected speech options, it doesn't mean your Constitutional rights are far closer to null and void than the average citizen's. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, affirming a lower court's ruling, has found that a police department's social media policies have been treading too heavily on officers' First Amendment rights.In early 2013, Chief John Dixon of the City of Petersburg (VA) Police Department revised the department's social media policy, adding two provisions. The preamble to the new rules set the tone. From the decision [PDF]:

Earlier this year, we wrote about a crazy decision in the EU Court of Justice, that determined mere links could be direct infringement on commercial websites (with "commercial" being not well defined). Now as various courts in the EU try to put this ruling into practice, they're already making a mess of it. In particular, a German case has set an impossible standard for a site, finding a site to have infringed on the copyrights of a photographer for merely linking to a photograph. And the backstory here is even crazier.

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We've covered a lot of ridiculous defamation lawsuits here at Techdirt, but this one may have them beat. It's not even that the lawsuit is bullying in any form. It's that the lawsuit is at odds with itself, with the complaint more resembling someone thinking out loud than actually seeking to have a wrong righted. (h/t Ars Technica)Manhattan attorney Donald J. Tobias wants the court to force Google to hand over all kinds of identifying information on a commenter ("Mia Arce") who posted a three-word "review": "It was horrible."Tobias simultaneously claims in his lawsuit that the review is both "plainly defamatory" and possibly a mistake. Tobias (the attorney) thinks the review may not actually be a review, but rather a reaction to the tragic suicide of Cornell professor Donald J. Tobias, who jumped in front of a subway train in 2013.Tobias (the attorney) theorizes that "Mia Arce" may have witnessed the suicide and the "review" is simply a reaction to the suicide. Nevertheless, he sent a letter [PDF] to Google asking that this "review" be taken down or that it would pass on identifying information on the reviewer to him. Google, unsurprisingly, refused to do so. This didn't please Tobias, who had earlier presented Google with the same conflicting claims (libel per se/possible mistake) only to run head-on into Section 230 of the CDA. From the lawsuit [PDF]:

Oh boy. Ever since people started ridiculously blaming fake news on Facebook for the election outcome, we've pointed out that these calls will be used to justify censorship of opposing views -- and that's a very bad thing. We've already seen authoritarian countries with long histories of punishing and silencing dissent jump on the "fake news is a problem!" bandwagon to justify heavy handed censorship. Both China and Iran have pointed to "fake news" as a reason for new internet censorship plans.

So we've noted several times how the FCC's decision to avoid banning zero rating when crafting net neutrality rules was a bad idea, as it opened the door wide to all manner of net neutrality violations -- provided incumbent ISPs were just creative about it. And like clockwork, companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast quickly got to work exempting their own content from usage caps, while penalizing competitors (and non-profits or educational services). Meanwhile companies like Sprint and T-Mobile began charging users a steep premium unless they wanted games, video and music throttled by default.

Earlier this year, Twitter pulled the plug on some of Dataminr's customers, specifically the intelligence agencies it was selling its firehose access to. Twitter made it clear Dataminr's access to every public tweet wasn't to be repurposed into a government surveillance tool.That being said, everything swept up by Dataminr was public. There was no access to direct messages or tweets sent from private accounts. And Twitter seemingly is doing nothing to prevent Dataminr from selling this same access to the FBI, an agency that's far more an intelligence agency than a law enforcement agency these days -- one that thinks it should be allowed to do everything the CIA does, if not more.Presumably, the FBI pinned its law enforcement badge to its chest when hooking up with Dataminr because Twitter has had nothing to say about the partnership. And it's not as though Twitter is fine with just anyone selling analytic tools to law enforcement. It, along with Facebook, yanked Geofeedia's access to APIs simply because it didn't like how Geofeedia pitched its tweet-grabbing front end. In sales materials, the company strongly hinted that law enforcement agencies could use its software to stay "one step ahead" of citizens engaged in First Amendment-protected activity.Twitter's standards are malleable, to say the least. But it does seems to be serious about refusing to let its service become just another government surveillance tool. The ACLU is reporting that Twitter has just cut off Dataminr access to the dozens of DHS "fusion centers" scattered across the country.

This week, the recording industry called on Donald Trump to protect and enhance their beloved copyright, and in response came both of our winning comments on the insightful side. In first place, we've got Jeremy Lyman responding to their talk about "rights guaranteed in the Constitution to those who, with the genius of their mind, form the cultural identity of our great nation":

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, everyone from Rupert Murdoch and Chris Dodd to sixteen former Judiciary Committee staff who had become entertainment industry lobbyists (hello revolving door!) was pushing to get SOPA passed. At the same time, Wikipedia was explaining in great detail why SOPA hurts the internet, and we heard the first rumblings of the now-famous Wikipedia blackout in protest.Meanwhile, some creators were smartly focused on being creative and finding new business models: this was the week that Louis CK launched direct-to-fan sales of his latest special via his website, and set the comedy world on fire with its staggering success.Oh, and Mike published his 40,000th post on Techdirt!Ten Years AgoThis week in 2006, people were beginning to slowly understand the fact that the iTunes store was just a loss-leader to help boost iPod sales, though several analysts were not quite getting the point. Other stores like eMusic were showing the power of DRM-free music but the record labels weren't listening, and even though folks like Bill Gates seemed to understand the dangers of DRM, they weren't doing anything about it. Meanwhile, the sex.com debacle continued, the Netherlands blazed a trail in switching from analog to digital TV broadcasts, and laptops were beginning their ascent as desktops began their decline.Fifteen Years AgoFive years earlier in 2001, some were already calling for the death of the PC industry and its replacement by the next big thing (though that may have been somewhat overstated). NY Times Magazine took a great look at the year's most interesting ideas, though perhaps the most problematic post-9/11 trend was the obsession with finding silver-bullet technological solutions to big problems. Tech was getting smarter, with some of the first forays into music recognition technology and the military suddenly becoming interested in the role of robots in war. (And today we have ContentID and drone strikes...) In slightly more pleasant forms of progress, Apple was realizing that Macs need more games (a problem that is a lot closer to solved today).One-Hundred And Fifteen Years AgoJust a brief historical nod this week: it was on December 12th, 1901 that the first transatlantic wireless transmission was received by Guglielmo Marconi at Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Lately it's been John Oliver whose short segments have been related to Techdirt-focus areas, but now it's another Daily Show alum, Samantha Bee, whose show, Full Frontal, just had an excellent segment by Ashley Nicole Black that's a Mr. Robot parody explaining why everyone should learn about protecting their digital info, including putting a passcode on their phone, using different passwords and more. The ~7-minute clip includes brief cameos by Senators Ron Wyden and Pat Leahy talking about overly aggressive US surveillance -- and an extended bit with technologist Chris Soghoian, who just left the ACLU to go help Congress better understand technology (this is good!). And then, at the end, they get Talib Kweli to do an... updated version of his hit song "Get By" to make it relevant to protecting your personal data from government surveillance, and concluding that the surveillance "goes against the 4th Amendment." And, did we mention the whole thing is pretty funny?

For many, many, many years, we've been covering the saga of Prenda Law -- a legal operation set up to file tons of shakedown copyright infringement lawsuits in an effort to get as many people as possible to just pay up and settle. The scam got deeper and deeper the more you looked, including forged signatures, clear evidence that the main actors behind Prenda -- John Steele and Paul Hansmeier -- were uploading their own works as a honeypot, while pretending to represent clients that they themselves owned through various shell companies -- which they denied owning. It went on and on and on. And on and on and on. Things really went sideways almost four years ago when Judge Otis Wright in California was the first judge to put much of this together, and called all of them to court, where everyone pleaded the fifth (yes, lawyers were pleading the fifth in a case they themselves brought). In response, Judge Wright referrred the case to law enforcement, leading many people to ask over the past four years how it was these guys weren't in jail (and, in fact, they continued to file lawsuits, reprising the same scheme but with ADA shakedowns.

We've had our run-ins with Jonathan Taplin before. The quintessential OMYAC of the legacy entertainment industry, who is so obsessed with the nefarious things he insists Google and Facebook are doing (even though he's often flat out wrong), is back in the pages of the NY Times, arguing that regulators shouldn't be so concerned about AT&T, when they should be attacking Google and Facebook instead.

NSA oversight and whistleblowing through proper channels: both pretty much worthless.Members of the intelligence community and members of its supposed oversight have said the same thing repeatedly over the past few years: oh, we'd love to cut Edward Snowden a break, but he should have taken his complaints up the ladder, rather than outside the country.As if that would have resulted in anything other than Snowden being cut loose from his job and his security clearance stripped. The NSA's Inspector General -- supposedly part of the agency's oversight -- was even more harsh in his assessment of Snowden's actions.

The Intercept, a site that regularly publishes classified documents, reports that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, also publishes a classified internal blog -- called (serendipitously enough) the "Intercept."

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Things just got a little more weird in the case of the 13 year old British girl who had some art she created taken down from Redbubble's site because the artwork included the phrase "winter is coming." The girl's father responded to the takedown, questioning why HBO, owners of the trademark rights to the phrase in conjunction with the Game of Thrones franchise, would do this to an autistic teenager that wasn't even selling the art, only sharing it. As noted in our original post, the letter Redbubble sent the girl is a mess, lacking any firm reference to trademark or copyright and replacing it only with "IP/Publicity Rights." In addition, the whole letter is written like a forwarded DMCA notice, including offering the ability to counternotice through Redbubble's DMCA counternotice email address... but this would be a trademark issue, to which the DMCA doesn't apply. Lots of people, including the girl's father, assumed this takedown had been carried out at the request of HBO.It looks like that wasn't the case. What the girl's father missed -- along with many of those reporting on the issue, including myself -- is that Redbubble's letter states that they did this because of HBO's history of issuing DMCA notices, not because it had actually done so in this case.

While the Oracle/Google case tends to get most of the attention when people talk about the copyrighting of interfaces, there was another big "interfaces on trial" case that just completed between Cisco and Arista Networks. Cisco insisted that Arista was infringing on its Command Line Interface (CLI) by using some of the same commands that Cisco equipment used. Arista responded by pointing out that a command line interface is hardly unique, and Cisco itself had been pushing the command line interface as an industry standard, and also that this whole lawsuit was just silly (they didn't quite put it in those terms, but...). Like the Oracle/Google case, this one had a patent issue attached at the hip, which got tossed off early on. That matters, because it means that the inevitable appeal will go up through CAFC, the appeals court that specializes in mucking up patent law. CAFC infamously took its "mucking up patent" skills to copyright law a few years back, in the Oracle/Google case when it decided that APIs were copyright-eligible subject matter, upending years of common wisdom, legal precedent and the clear text of the Copyright Act about interfaces.

Back when AT&T, Verizon and Comcast were fighting tooth and nail against the FCC's net neutrality rules, you'll recall that most of them made all manner of breathless, hyperbolic claims about how net neutrality would demolish sector investment, rip the planet off its axis, and disrupt the time-space continuum. For example in 2014 Comcast was quick to try and claim that the passage of such consumer protections would hurt jobs, stifle investment, and otherwise forge a calamitous, unlivable hellscape:

Last month, the UK moved forward with the latest version of its ridiculous "Digital Economy Bill" which will put in place mandatory porn filtering at the ISP level -- requiring service providers to block access to sites that don't do an age verification check. But it was at least somewhat vague as to which "ISPs" this covered. The bill has moved from the House of Commons over to the House of Lords, and apparently we now have at least something of an answer -- and it's that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook will be covered by this regulation.

Last year, we wrote about an important patent case concerning the common practice of patent trolls going forum shopping. We've been writing about how patent trolls have been flocking to East Texas for ten years now, and little has changed. In fact, as we noted last year, there's one judge in East Texas, Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who famously handled 20% of all patent cases filed in the country in 2014. One judge. And that's not all the patent cases that come into that court. The towns of Marshall, Texas, and Tyler, Texas, have built a giant industry out of being super friendly to patent trolls. And it's ridiculous. But there's a case that could put an end to it and the Supreme Court has thankfully agreed to hear it. The case is called In Re: TC Heartland, and -- somewhat ironically -- it is not about a case filed in East Texas, but rather in the second favorite patent troll destination: Delaware (which has become more friendly to patent trolls over the last few years -- apparently trying to compete with East Texas for the "business.")

Earlier this year Verizon was understandably irritated when it learned (just two days before the public) that Yahoo had failed to disclose a massive hack of the company's systems during the companies' $4.8 billion merger negotiations. Reports suggested that Verizon, who is attempting to pivot from broadband to ads and content, wanted a $1 billion reduction in the asking price and another $1 billion set aside for the inevitable lawsuits. Given its NSA ties, Verizon was likely much less concerned about reports revealing that Yahoo also went out of its way to help the government sniff through subscriber e-mail accounts en masse.

In highly regulated private industries the law means what it says – right up until a regulator decides that it doesn't. For that reason Uber, a company with a reputation for aggressively challenging legal norms, must have been particularly frustrated when the California Department of Motor Vehicles decided to publicly rebuke it for complying with the law of the Golden State.

We've been discussing how FCC Boss Tom Wheeler was stuck between a rock and a hard place with a Trump Presidency looming. While Wheeler's tenure at the FCC doesn't officially end until 2018, under FCC rules he can only stay on as a vanilla Commissioner -- not the agency boss. With the incoming Trump administration and GOP making it very clear they want to gut net neutrality and defang and defund the FCC, Wheeler sticking around would have resulted in a 2-2 partisan deadlock keeping the FCC in a holding pattern -- at least until a new FCC boss is chosen and approved.

Do you have examples of communities or individuals coming up with unique, creative or innovative ways to respond to hateful, abusive or trollish speech? Please let us know in the comments as we're trying to help an important research project on this -- including getting people past the kneejerk reactions to seeing speech they dislike by assuming that the only thing one can do it about it is ban it. I'll explain more below -- but if you have good examples, please share them -- preferably with links so that they can be investigated further.

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Facebook is now taking clear steps to try to address what some are calling its "fake news" problem. As someone who has argued that the fuss over this is massively overhyped and misleading, I actually find Facebook's steps here to be fairly sensible, and not a cause for concern -- but let's dig into the details.

Congress -- in the name of oversight -- is going to end up neutering the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Already the victim of endless dicking around by two straight administrations, the PCLOB finally came together when surveillance issues could no longer be ignored. The PCLOB's long-delayed investigations into the NSA's collection programs is just one of many improvements Snowden will end up being prosecuted for.Things are looking to get worse in terms of the PCLOB being left alone to do its job. As Jenna McLaughlin of The Intercept reports, new stipulations in the annual intelligence budget could jeopardize the PCLOB's effectiveness.

Even if the White House won't declassify the full CIA Torture Report, at least we know one copy will be locked up in President Obama's archives for 12 years. That prevents Senator Burr and others from making the report disappear completely.The White House copy isn't the only copy of the report, but at least we know where that one is. Other agencies have copies. Or had them. But they haven't read them. The CIA destroyed its copy of the report -- the sort of "accident" that often befalls damning reports in the hands of the agency targeted by them.There's another copy sitting further up the hierarchy as well. Or is there? The Defense Department is supposed to have its own copy and as the department the CIA answers to, it should be doing what it can to ensure its copy doesn't disappear.The Defense Department, however, may or may not have one -- depending on who you ask and when you ask it. Katherine Hawkins of Just Security notes that the DoD's copy -- if it even still exists -- won't be made a part of any public record anytime soon if it can help it.

Comcast continues to perfect the art of raising rates in a variety of creative new ways. In addition to just straight rate hikes to TV and broadband service, the company has taken to using hidden fees to covertly jack up the cost of service even higher. These fees take some of the cost of doing business and bury it below the line, letting Comcast falsely advertise a lower rate. This is all before you even get to Comcast's slow and steady expansion of usage caps and overage fees, which are just glorified rate hikes being imposed on uncompetitive broadband markets.

Encryption has become one of the key issues in the digital world today, as the many posts here on Techdirt attest. And not just in the tech world, but far beyond, too, as governments grapple with the spread of devices and information that cannot easily be accessed just because they demand it. Techdirt readers probably take crypto for granted, as an increasing proportion of Web connections use HTTPS, mobile phones generally offer encryption options, and hugely-popular mainstream programs like WhatsApp deploy end-to-end encryption. But a recently-published open letter points out that there is one domain where this kind of protectively-scrambled data is almost unknown: photography. The letter, signed by over 150 filmmakers and photojournalists, calls on the camera manufacturers Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Olympus and Sony to build encryption features into their still photo and video camera products as a matter of course. Here's why the signatories feel it's necessary:

We've written a bit about how the IRS is trying to force Coinbase to hand over information on all its users, because it's discovered some evidence of at least one person using Bitcoin, via Coinbase, as a tax dodge. While the demand seems massively overbroad, so far the judge has allowed it to move forward. Coinbase has indicated that it will fight back on behalf of users, but nothing definitive has been done yet -- which has some Coinbase users feeling uncomfortable. At least one has now filed to intervene in the case, in order to seek to quash the summons.

If you hadn't been paying attention, Samsung hasn't been having a very good year. The company was forced to recall the original Galaxy Note 7 in early September after numerous reports of spontaneous combustion. That was followed by a formal recall by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Samsung then doubled down on its incompetence, releasing an "updated" version of the phone that suffered from the exact same problem. By October Samsung was engulfed in an honest-to-goodness PR disaster as it failed to explain how it could "fix" the initial problem by somehow making things worse.

Elton John is no stranger either to crazy suggestions for how the internet should be or to flip-flopping on those very same suggestions. For example, he once suggested that the whole internet should be shut down for half a decade in order to foster better musical acts (seriously), then years later he was on a list of artists seeking to keep music pirates from being kicked off of that same internet he wanted shut down, until shortly after that list came out when he was totally behind kicking people off of the internet again.Well, here we go again, it seems. Earlier this year, Elton John joined other artists in asking Congress to remove safe harbor protections, with a specific eye on YouTube. Shortly after, he also signed onto a letter sent to several ranking EU officials complaining about record label music appearing on YouTube and suggesting that artists weren't being paid enough by the video-sharing site for their content. Which brings us to the present, where we come across Elton John's YouTube video revealing a public music video contest on YouTube, sponsored by YouTube.

A potential class action lawsuit against Twitter and the creators of a short-lived app that allowed users to "buy" and "sell" celebrities' Twitter accounts has raised some questions about a federal judge's grasp on social media reality and the First Amendment.The background: Jason Parker -- fronting an Alabama-based class action suit [original filing here] -- sued Twitter and Hey, Inc. back in August, claiming Hey's "Famous" app violated the state's right of publicity law. (We won't get into how ridiculous many "right of publicity" laws are as this lawsuit may not even survive a motion to dismiss even after it's amended.) The app, called "Famous: The Celebrity Twitter" allowed users to collect, buy, and trade Twitter profiles of famous people using virtual currency.For some reason, this made a bunch of people angry. The app's gameplay -- buying and selling people -- was somewhat unsavory, but it was all based on publicly-available Twitter profile information. Twitter allowed the app to pull this data for use in the game. The game underwent some changes after Congresswoman Katherine Clark sent a letter to Twitter telling it to remove all "unconsenting" profiles, whatever that meant.Hey, Inc. pulled the app and retooled it, releasing it a month later as simply "Famous." Gone was the virtual currency (almost) and the buying and selling of Twitter profiles. Instead, players "invested" in celebrity Twitter accounts with "hearts," which could be purchased with real money.The class action suit persisted as Parker's right of publicity claims wasn't based on whether Twitter profiles were bought/sold/stolen, but rather that Twitter didn't have the right to make this information available to the app creators. Despite voluntarily using a service and providing Twitter with profile information, Parker (and users similarly situated) somehow believe they should be able to control how their Twitter profile information is used.Supposedly, Hey, Inc. -- with Twitter's "collusion" -- is "exploiting" thousands of profiles for profit without their "consent." This must be Parker's first experience with a social media platform if he thinks Twitter is the only one "exploiting" users and their data for profit. Sure, it looks a bit more unseemly when an app allows users to buy and sell other people's profiles for in-game currency/hearts, but all of this voluntarily-provided data can be accessed by anyone, with or without Twitter's strict approval. (Use of Twitter's API is subject to some restrictions, but public profile information can be seen by anyone, even without a Twitter account.)Twitter has been in court arguing that Parker's claims -- if upheld -- will violate it and its users' First Amendment right, as reported by Helen Christophi of Courthouse News.

I really have no idea what to make of this fairly odd story. The richest man in China, Wang Jianlin, has apparently deputized MPAA boss Chris Dodd as his messenger to Donald Trump on the issue of China. As you may have heard, China is currently "seriously concerned" about Donald Trump's decision to publicly question the "One China" policy held for decades by US officials, which accepts China's position that Taiwan is a "renegade province" rather than its own autonomous country. Whatever you think of this policy, the Trump administration seems to have approached it with something approximating a diplomatic sledgehammer.

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Google has managed to lift gag orders on eight of the National Security Letters it's received from the FBI over the last five years. In a blog post that thankfully provides more details than its last NSL "release," Google notes that last year's surveillance reform bill has a lot to do with it even being able to do this.

So we've talked a lot over the years about how few people expected much from FCC boss Tom Wheeler, given his history lobbying for the wireless and cable industries. But amazingly enough, Wheeler wound up being one of the most consumer, small business, and competition-friendly bosses in FCC history (not that this is saying much). He passed net neutrality rules, new broadband privacy protections, raised the definition of broadband to 25 Mbps (to highlight a lack of competition at higher speeds), and more. In short, he wasn't the dingo many thought him to be.

Last week, we wrote about the ridiculous suggestion from the former Newspaper Association of America (now called the News Media Alliance) that President Donald Trump should scale back fair use because newspapers still don't like Google. As we noted, at a time when Trump has been strongly endorsing censoring newspapers, for those very newspapers to tell Trump to undermine a key cog in protecting free speech was absolutely ridiculous.

Techdirt first wrote about ransomware back in 2010. Even then, we noted it was nothing new, but that a further twist on the idea had appeared. Well, here we are, nearly in 2017, and ransomware is still with us -- so much for tech progress -- and new twists are still appearing, as the Guardian reported recently:

Another state legislature has decided it's time to start scaling back civil asset forfeiture. Ohio's Senate is the latest to pass a bill targeting the worst excesses of property seizures, as Reason's CJ Ciaramella reports.

As you may have heard, the past few years have seen a significant uptick in concern over video game journalism and the ethics surrounding it. While much of the consternation expressed appears to have journalistic ethics playing only in the periphery, there have indeed been stories that should concern anyone that looks to game reviews as a method for deciding on purchases. Like in other industries, some in the gaming industry have chosen legal backlash to combat reviews they don't like, whereas companies like Nintendo have attempted to trade access to unreleased games to institutionalize positive coverage. Instances of game companies trading access for slanted reviews are certainly alarming, though they only represent the carrot part of that approach.The other side of it is the stick, of course. For an example of that, we can look to Square Enix reportedly cutting off access to unreleased games for review to a Spanish website purely because the company doesn't like its review scores.

Elon Musk got plenty of attention recently for announcing his plans to colonize Mars. But that's not exactly a new idea -- so we wondered if it was really a different, exciting and realistic plan, or just a reiteration of the standard far-flung dream. To answer that question, we brought in three experts: Amy Shira Teitel (a space and flight historian and creator of YouTube's Vintage Space videos), JPL's Fred Calef (a Mars geologist and "keeper of the maps" for Mars rovers), and the New Space Intiative's Tanya Harrison (who worked on Curiosity and several other Mars missions). The result was a fascinating discussion about Mars and whether or not we're actually headed there any time soon.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. If you're a fan, consider supporting us on Patreon to access special bonus episodes.

A couple of years ago, two victims of Iowa's Snatch and Grab drug interdiction team saw $100,000 in cash disappear into the pockets of state police following a dubious traffic stop. The state ultimately returned 90% of the seized cash to the California natives, but not before calling in a tip to California law enforcement to cause additional problems for them once they returned home.The Iowa State Police's Fishing Expedition Unit noted -- during its attempt to retain "ownership" of money it couldn't prove was connected to anything illegal -- that the two Californian poker players set off all sorts of "suspicious behavior" alarms when stopped, including indicators that contradicted other indicators. From the 2014 lawsuit: