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For this week's podcast -- our 100th episode -- we have both a special guest and an announcement. On the podcast, we have Jack Conte, the founder and CEO of Patreon, a fascinating company that we've written about a few times, for providing a really compelling platform for connecting content creators and fans, and giving those fans a way to support the creators. And with that conversation, we're also launching a Techdirt Patreon page and asking for folks to support our continued efforts to make great content. The Patreon campaign is focused on the podcast, but you can use it to support Techdirt as a whole if you'd like. If you don't actually listen to the podcast, there's still a good reason to support it: if we get enough support via Patreon, we'll use it to fund transcripts of the podcasts, so those of you who would prefer to read it can do so.

While it seems pretty darn clear that President Obama has no interest in issuing a pardon for Ed Snowden -- despite the well-organized campaign in support of such a pardon -- more and more people are stepping up to argue why Obama should change his mind on this. The latest is a big one: fifteen members of the Church Committee have sent President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch a memo outlining the reasons why Snowden deserves a pardon.

While we knew it was impossible for President Obama to truly rein in the massive executive powers that he helped expand (following on the massive expansions from previous administrations) concerning national surveillance and war -- we had still hoped that maybe his concern about a President Trump would let him do a few small things to limit some of the most egregious powers. Instead, it appears that President Obama is doing the opposite, and expanding his war powers, just as he's about to hand them to someone that he, himself, has loudly criticized as being unfit for the Presidency.

There seems to be some kind of unspoken competition between Russia and China to see who can clamp down on the Internet the most. Techdirt readers might like to offer their own views in the comments as to who is winning that unlovely race. But the days of repressive rivalry are drawing to a close; according to this article in the Guardian, Russia has decided that it would be much simpler to borrow some of China's ideas:

Hyperconnectivity has many positive aspects for many of us, though there are negatives as well. One of the negatives that come along with connectivity is the idea that everything we love can be used to spy on us. Back when prevalent criminal hacking was in the arena of science fiction and broad government surveillance was limited to thematic elements in Orwell novels, the public fear over security exploits like this was limited. Given that the alphabet agencies continue to be shown to use our devices to spy on us, however, Americans likely look more warily at their favorite technology than they did a decade ago. Everything, it seems, is a vector for an invasion of your privacy.Including, potentially, your headphones. Israeli researchers have shown how, with the aid of some malware, your headphones can be converted into microphones in order to listen in on whatever you happen to be doing.

A public records request is seemingly behind the Mississippi state legislature's speed decision to make even more legislative documents exempt from public records laws.Mississippi Today asked for copies of the state's already-signed contract with EdBuild. The nonprofit company was handed $250,000 to begin working on an overhaul of the state's "Adequate Education Program" [how inspiring!], which determines school funding. Seems like the sort of thing that would be of interest to the public.The state legislature doesn't agree its constituents should have any background information on something affecting the schools they send their children to.

As Techdirt readers know, there's a bit of a debate going on currently about the influence that social media exerts on politics and society. If you are still a little undecided as to where you stand on this vexed subject, Cavaye Djibril, Speaker of the National Assembly in Cameroon, has a few thoughts on the subject (pdf):

Trademark protection is use-it-or-lose-it. A company with a possibly-legitimate claim to the trademarked term "Dropbox" thought it could just sit idly by while another company put the term to use, hoping to capitalize on that company's success later. In the end, the lack of enforcement efforts cost it its infringement claims. Here's the backstory, from Tucker Chambers of DuetBlog. (h/t Rebecca Tushnet)

For some time now we've warned how the FCC's decision to not ban zero rating (exempting some content from usage caps) was going to come back and bite net neutrality on the posterior. Unlike India, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Chile, and other countries, the FCC crafted net neutrality rules that completely avoided tackling the issue of usage caps and zero rating. Then, despite ongoing promises that the agency was looking into the issue, the FCC did nothing as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all began exempting their own content from usage caps while still penalizing competitors.

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On the other hand, who needs to wait for the Rule 41 changes to kick in?

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance is still riding James Comey's anti-encryption coattails. Another year passes and Vance still comes to the same conclusions about phone encryption: it's bad for law enforcement and something (legislative) needs to be done to keep the criminal apocalypse at bay.His opening remarks at a recent cybercrime symposium set the tone:

Since around 2013 or so, Comcast has been injecting warning messages into user traffic streams. Sometimes these warnings are used to notify a customer that their computer may have been hacked and is part of a botnet. Other times, the warning messages inform users that they've (purportedly) downloaded copyrighted material as per Comcast's cooperation in the entertainment industry's "six strikes" Copyright Alert System (CAS), a program that pesters accused pirates until they acknowledge their villainy and receipt of "educational" materials on copyright.

Brazil's Superior Court of Justice (STJ), the highest court for non-constitutional questions of federal law, has ruled that the "right to be forgotten" -- strictly speaking, the right to be delisted from search results -- cannot be imposed upon Google or other search engines. As a post on Global Voices explains:

When Jay-Z's music streaming service launched nearly two years ago, it put forth two key selling points. One was exclusive releases that would only be available on Tidal. The other was a promise as to how artist-friendly it would be. In the wake of the froth-filled mouths of many other streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, Tidal would be a shining example of how a streaming music platform could be built that would be successful while being fair to the musical artists whose work it streamed. This has failed on both levels. On the question of being successful, Tidal's launch was a fizzle, and the news into this year isn't particularly encouraging, with subscriber accounts reportedly being a fraction of that of other streaming services. And, of course, because Tidal is a music streaming service, lawsuits and claims by artists that they were not being fairly compensated began rolling in almost immediately.And they haven't ended. According to reports, the estate of Prince is suing Tidal for copyright infringement, claiming that Tidal is streaming Prince's catalog without authorization.

The most famous recording of Albuquerque police in action shows them shooting and killing a homeless man -- a shooting that began as a normal rousting for the crime of "illegal camping." From there, the police turned it into a "standoff" with a cooperative person unsure of which direction to move next out of the very justifiable fear of being shot.This was just another in a long line of killings by APD officers, not many of which were captured on video. The DOJ issued a report stating that a "majority" of shootings by the city's police officers were "unreasonable and violated the Fourth Amendment."The police department does have a variety of cameras in its possession, which should have generated a wealth of footage for examination by public records requesters, attorneys, and police supervisors -- just in case they wanted to get a handle on the PD's problematic deadly force usage. The Albuquerque Police Department has shot more citizens than the NYPD since 2010, despite policing a city sixteen times smaller.The footage of use of force incidents is the PD's best-kept secret. A lawyer representing a family suing the city over the killing of Armand Martin by APD officers was given a copy of footage captured by the police. He was given password-protected files but not the password, despite repeated requests. In addition to representing the widow of Armand Martin, the law firm is now also engaged in an open records lawsuit against the city.Apparently, the Albuquerque police department doesn't feel the city's doing enough to shield them from accountability. Sure, forcing records requesters to file lawsuits just to see public records is a good deterrent, but the only sure way to prevent incriminating recordings from ending up in the public's hands is to make sure said footage doesn't exist.This goes far beyond simply tampering with devices or "forgetting" to activate them in crucial situations. According to an affidavit filed by a former police department employee, Albuquerque officers are tampering with the recordings that actually make their way back to the PD's cloud storage.

It was somewhat breathtaking back in 2011 to see the multiple accusations of copyright infringement brought against Dreamworks' movie Kung Fu Panda. While none of the suits appear to have stuck, the case brought by Jayme Gordon stood out, first because it certainly looked, based on his evidence, that he had a somewhat strong case, and then later it became clear that his evidence against Dreamworks was actually a bullshit con he'd trumped up after likely infringing on previous works by Disney. The quick version of the story is that Gordon altered some drawings he'd done previously to look more like artwork in a trailer he saw for Kung Fu Panda, where those original drawings were essentially recreations of art from a Disney coloring book. He also tried to hide all of this by deleting files off of his computer so that they wouldn't be found during discovery, an endeavor that worked about as well as a flotation device made entirely out of stone. Jesus, this world is a strange place in which to live.Regardless, as Tim Cushing noted in his post above, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston filed wire fraud charges against Gordon because his attorneys emailed requests for discovery and settlement offers across state lines as part of his scheme. These charges, which come from the same office that prosecuted Aaron Swartz, looked for all the world like charges stacking. Except this particular U.S. Attorney's Office tends to follow through on the charges.Which brings us to the present, in which Gordon has been found guilty on all four wire fraud charges and is in serious trouble.

We've noted consistently how the medical industry has become a hotbed of ransomware attacks thanks to too many incompetent IT administrators, and too many hardware vendors for which security is a fleeting afterthought. In fact, hospitals are now seeing more than 20 ransomware attacks a day; attacks that in many instances have forced the cancellation of scheduled surgeries and wreaked havoc on the day-to-day operations of many in the healthcare sector.

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As a result of a federal judge in Rhode Island taking a second look at an order he hastily granted earlier, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen has been able to confirm Richart Ruddie -- the head of an extremely-sketchy reputation management company -- signed off on the forged and fraudulent documents delivered to the court. The documents -- a bogus lawsuit featuring the forged signatures of both the plaintiff and the defendant -- are apparently just part of Profile Defenders' reputation management work.Nice work if you can get [away with] it. File a bogus lawsuit. "Locate" a bogus defendant. Produce a signed admission of guilt and ask the judge to order search engines to delist the offending content. Cash checks. Repeat until caught.Richart Ruddie has been caught.

Media critic Michael Wolff has a fairly long history of being hilariously wrong about just about everything. It's sort of his thing. He also has a history of being a ridiculously bad journalist in those rare moments when he tries to do journalism. We normally ignore him, but last week he said something so ridiculous and so crazy, that it deserved calling out. He called on journalists to be stenographers to those in power. Literally.

I didn't quite think it was possible, but it seems that the fight over some potential election recounts has served to basically make everyone look petty and awful. American politics continues to be a dumpster fire. Here is the latest, in three acts.

We just got done noting how despite all the hype surrounding Google Fiber and similar initiatives, the cable industry's monopoly over broadband service is growing larger than ever. Incumbent telcos don't want to upgrade their DSL customers across huge portions of their networks, effectively giving cable broadband less competition than ever. At the same time, we've noted how Trump's telecom transition team is thus far comprised of telecom sector cronies that not only can't admit the broadband market isn't competitive, but are eager to demolish all regulatory oversight of these anti-competitive carriers.

The DOJ has finally responded to questions posed by several senators about its interpretation of the proposed Rule 41 changes, due to go into effect on December 1st. Arriving shortly before the deadline -- and during the Thanksgiving holiday Black Friday news rush -- the DOJ's letter [PDF] contains a few explanations of its jurisdiction limitation-stripping and roving botnet warrants.Unfortunately, not much is clarified other than that the DOJ still feels its proposal is nothing more than Rule 41 64-bit -- an update of existing law more in line with today's connected reality. (The DOJ offers no insight on its reluctance to update other outdated laws like the CFAA…) It also appears to believe the Fourth Amendment impact of its "one warrant, thousands of searches" proposal will be minimal and that it will maintain the same level of respect it has shown for privacy protections (also minimal) under the updated rule.Needless to say, Sen. Wyden and co. aren't impressed by the DOJ's response.

This week, when a State Senator made some chilling statements about banning first amendment activity in the name of protecting companies, there was plenty of backlash. Our most insightful comment of the week was a response from Roger Strong pointing out that bigger fish have made similar overtures:

Five Years AgoThe SOPA battle rolled on this week in 2011. We took a look at how other parts of the world viewed the bill, as more people began to realize that it was about regulating the internet, not copyright. We gave kudos to the Senators who were standing up against PROTECT-IP, its partner bill and especially to Ron Wyden for promising to read out the names of all the people who opposed it. Even the BSA was changing its tune on SOPA — apparently prompted by the concerns of Microsoft. Meanwhile, the numbers were in: the previous week's anti-SOPA protest was huge (but wouldn't be the biggest).Ten Years AgoRecord labels were at war with parody songs this week in 2006, with Universal Music threatening Bank of America over a viral video with a U2 parody and EMI targeting some sports fans who wrote parody lyrics to various famous songs — because apparently they think making unreasonable legal demands is a business model. On the flipside, CBS seemed to be realizing that TV show piracy increases viewership and that you can and must compete with free online video. Microsoft was in the middle of its failed attempt to offer the Zune as an iPod competitor, while iPods were embracing video but users mostly weren't — though not because Stephen Spielberg was crotchety about it.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, SMS in America took a big leap forward when AT&T finally launched inter-carrier messaging. Nokia, meanwhile, was making early forays into camera phones and MMS on its first phone with a color screen. An early encryption battle was underway, mirroring today's, with Bruce Schneier explaining why backdoors are a bad idea. We took a look at the entertainment industry's ongoing attempts to kill fair use, Amazon was making its transition from store to platform for stores, and the Sega Dreamcast was in its death throes and selling for only fifty bucks.Twenty-One Years AgoThese days, 3D-animated movies are a dime a dozen and vary wildly in quality. But the first feature-length fully-3D-animated film is almost universally beloved, and it was on November 22nd, 1995 that Toy Story saw general release.

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Well, I guess it's time to complete the circle. Last week, we were warning that the rush to demonize Facebook for allowing "fake news" to be distributed and shared via its platform would lead to calls to suppress and censor certain view points. And then, this week came the news that China is strategically and opportunistically using the hubbub over "fake news" to push for greater censorship of the internet -- claiming it's necessary to stop fake news and keep people "better" informed (rather than the opposite).

For much of the last year, we've noted how the rush to connect everything from toasters to refrigerators to the internet -- without adequate (ok, any) security safeguards -- has resulted in a security, privacy and public safety crisis. At first, the fact that everything from Barbies to tea kettles were now hackable was kind of funny. But in the wake of the realization that these hacked devices are contributing to massive new DDoS botnet attacks (on top of just leaking your data or exposing you to hacks) the conversation has quickly turned serious.

While the past few years have seen a torrent of criticism heaped on the video game journalism world, far too little of it has been focused on the cozy contractual deals being worked out between publishers and YouTube personalities that review games. With some of these arrangements having come to light, most notably concerning Nintendo and Warner Bros. games coverage, it's fairly safe to assume that many other publishers do something of this sort. These arrangements work something like this: the game publisher will offer access to the games for review by the YouTuber, so long as the YouTuber agrees to offer generally positive reviews to the product. The YouTuber benefits by being first to market with reviews, the publisher benefits from positive coverage, and the public gets spit in the eye while losing their trust in the personalities they have followed. Add to it all that some of these arrangements fail to follow FTC guidelines on marking paid-for material and you're left with the inevitable understanding that this is an arrangement that can only last for a short period of time, as the public trust in the reviewers will torpedo to the point of losing the audience completely.It's devolved to the point where even companies from which we've come to expect the worst are trying to get out ahead of all this. Electronic Arts, for instance, best known for its annual rivalry with Comcast over the "Worst Company" award, has developed a new policy for marking YouTube videos produced under this arrangement that is actually quite good.

Unless someone steps up to push this off course, the DOJ's proposed changes to Rule 41 will become law December 1. That's the key part: doing something. All that has to happen is nothing for the changes to become law. The December 1st date plays right into the DOJ's hands, arriving between two major holidays when legislators have other things on their minds, including the annual Congressional fisticuffs over the federal budget.The DOJ says the changes are no big deal. Just an "update" on outdated laws. Oddly, it's never shown any interest in updating any other outdated laws (like the CFAA) or pushed for a reconsideration of the Third Party Doctrine, which traces back nearly four decades. When it comes to expansions of power, though, it's apparently time for some "updating."The proposed changes would allow the FBI to hack thousands of computers around the world with a single warrant, much like it already did during two child porn investigations. Unfortunately for the FBI, its warrant is being met with successful challenges because the agency clearly violated Rule 41 jurisdictional limitations.In addition, the DOJ wants permission to break into "compromised" computers and poke around inside them without the permission or knowledge of the owners of these computers. It also wants to treat anything that anonymizes internet users or hides their locations to be presumed acts of a guilty mind. The stripping of jurisdictional limits not only grants the FBI worldwide access for digital seizures and searches, but also encourages it to go venue shopping for judicial rubber stamps.Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden introduced a bill aimed at stopping the DOJ's Rule 41 push. Not much has been heard about this bill since, so Wyden (along with Sens. Coons, Lee, Franken, and Daines) has introduced another bill seeking to prevent a "do nothing" approval of expanding hacking/search powers. The "Review the Rule Act" [PDF] is about as succinct as legislation gets. Here's the complete summary of the proposed legislation (via Naked Security):

So lots of people have been discussing the story claiming that some e-voting experts believe the Clinton campaign should be asking for a recount in certain battleground states, where it's possible there were some e-voting irregularities. As we noted in our post, the story would barely be worth mentioning if one of the people involved wasn't Alex Halderman, a computer science professor we've been talking about for nearly a decade and a half, going back to when he was a student. Halderman is basically the expert on e-voting security -- so when he says something, it's worth paying attention.

The death of TPP has now been confirmed by Donald Trump himself in a short video posted to YouTube. As Mike wrote recently, the other huge trade deal, TTIP, is now in limbo, probably dying, and there are rumors that even the low-profile Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) has been put on ice pending instructions from the new President. Doubtless attempts will be made to revivify them, and if those fail, there will certainly be further so-called "trade" deals -- which actually go way beyond trade -- that seek to bring in all the bad things that Techdirt has been warning about for years.But alongside TPP, TTIP and TISA, there is one deal that is teetering on the brink of success. CETA is a smaller-scale agreement between the EU and Canada, but it's more important than it looks. It allows US companies with subsidiaries in Canada to use the agreement's corporate sovereignty provisions to sue the EU -- and there are 42,000 such companies according to one analysis (pdf). As a result, CETA has been called "TTIP by the backdoor," since it would provide a handy way for US companies to put pressure on EU nations even if TTIP suffers the same fate as TPP.Perhaps because CETA looks increasingly like the last hope for the establishment to push through an old-style trade deal, there is now an unseemly haste on both sides of the Atlantic to ram it through the ratification process as quickly as possible, with as little scrutiny as possible. That's most clearly seen in the EU, where the normal procedures for approval have been thrown out of the window, as this post explains:

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At the beginning of this year, Tamara Fields -- whose husband was killed by ISIS terrorists -- sued Twitter for "providing material support" to the terrorist group. The actions underlying Fields' lawsuit were undeniably horrific and tragic, but by no means provided any sort of legal basis for holding Twitter responsible for actions or speech undertaken by users of its service.The lawsuit was dismissed in August, with the court pointing to Twitter's Section 230 immunity and the lawsuit's general lack of argumentative coherence. Perhaps recognizing that Section 230 (and common sense) would prevent Twitter from being held responsible for ISIS's terrorist activities, Fields chose to approach the lawsuit from some novel angles. At some points, Twitter "provided material support" by allowing ISIS members to obtain accounts. At other points, it was Twitter's inability to stop the spread of ISIS propaganda that was the issue.The court invited Fields to file an amended complaint, hoping to obtain a coherent argument it could address with equal clarity. It didn't get it. The amended complaint may be a bit more structured, but the court has again dismissed the lawsuit [PDF] on Section 230 grounds while also addressing the deficiencies of other arguments raised by Fields. (h/t Eric Goldman)Fields tries to drill down the "provision of accounts" theory: that the ability of ISIS terrorists to obtain accounts somehow amounts to "material support" -- or, in any case, should result in the removal of Twitter's Section 230 immunity. The court says this argument makes no sense and, in fact, invites the court to engage in restriction of First Amendment-protected activity.

We've noted a few times that the whole net neutrality debate truly started back in 2005, when then AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proudly proclaimed that he wasn't going to let Google "ride his pipes for free." While AT&T's rhetoric has mutated slightly over the years, its core objective has remained the same: use its monopoly over broadband to extract unnecessary "troll tolls" from competitors, giving its own services an unfair advantage. It's precisely this kind of behavior that triggered the creation of net neutrality rules in the first place; an effort that took more than a decade of fighting tooth and nail to come to fruition.

All this talk of fake news and the public's apparent inability to be trusted with the task of sorting the real from the bogus has now led to China introducing even more censorship. #MakeSuppressionGreatAgainAlso.

In this topsy-turvy world where nothing makes any sense at all any more, Donald Trump spent months and months spinning stories about how the election was "rigged" and e-voting machines were going to be hacked in favor of Hillary Clinton. While we've spent nearly two decades pointing out problems with e-voting machines, and urged governments to do away with them, it still seemed unlikely that a hack would be sustainable on a large scale -- in part because our election system is such a mess and is handled differently from state to state. And, as Ed Snowden himself pointed out, hiding such a hack would be quite difficult. But with Trump refusing to say if he would concede, and talking up how the vote would be rigged, combined with false stories that made the rounds incorrectly claiming that George Soros owned a company that was making millions of e-voting machines, it seemed like a recipe for disaster if Trump lost and his supporters started insisting that the voting machines were hacked.

Just when you think you've seen it all in trademark disputes, a story comes along and slaps you across the face with its silliness. Quite often, I find myself writing in support of small groups staving off trademark bullying by big corporate entities. This has far less to do with any hostility to big business than it does with the fact that trademark bullying is a tactic more commonly employed by big business than small business or individuals. But that isn't always the case and I am certainly not above galloping to the rescue of a huge corporation with so much cash in its coffers that it would make Scrooge McDuck would blush.For more than half a decade, sports apparel giant Adidas has been trying to trademark "Adizero" as a brand in the United States. It has been unable to do so solely because a small church based in Chicago has a trademark on the phrase "Add a zero" for clothing, and it appears that enough people think this is enough of a problem to hold up the trademark application.

Dataminr, the company whose Twitter firehose access has become somewhat of cause celebre on both sides of the privacy fence, is back in the news. After being told it couldn't sell this access to government agencies for surveillance purposes, Dataminr had to disconnect the CIA from its 500 million tweets-per-day faucet.Twitter was pretty specific about what this buffed-up API could and could not be used for. The CIA's surveillance efforts were on the "Don't" list. This rejection of the CIA's access was linked to existing Twitter policies -- policies often enforced inconsistently or belatedly. What the CIA had access to was public tweets from public accounts -- something accessible to anyone on the web, albeit with a better front-end for managing the flow and an API roughly 100x more robust than those made available to the general public.The question now is how Twitter defines surveillance.

We're taking Thanksgiving week off from the podcast, which means our 100th episode is coming next Tuesday — and it includes a special guest and an important announcement, so you won't want to miss it! But in the mean time, we thought it might be fun to revisit some of our post popular episodes from the past year.Please listen, subscribe, and share with your friends — and if you enjoy the podcast, please leave a rating and/or a review! You can 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.First up in our greatest hits tour, we head all the way back to last December for one of our most popular episodes, in which we posed and discussed a simple-but-not-so-simple question: how much surveillance is acceptable? Though many people have a knee-jerk response of "none", even staunch surveillance critics like us recognize that the issue is a little bit more nuanced than that.After a few weeks off for the holidays, we came back with another extra-popular episode looking at the tech world's biggest industry show: The CES Post-Mortem. If you want to relive those innocent halcyon days of last January and its fresh crop of new gadgets, give it a listen.Jump ahead to March, and we've got a hit episode with guest Marvin Ammori, a lawyer and civil liberties advocate, and good friend of the Techdirt community. The discussion was focused on net neutrality and, more specifically, the games like "zero rating" that providers play to get around it.Next, in April, lots of listeners tuned in for an important and excellent two-part discussion with Justin Peters, author of a book all about the life of Aaron Swartz and his fight for internet freedom. The first part of the discussion focused on the free culture movement and the values that Aaron dedicated his life to:Then, in part two, the discussion turned to focus on Aaron himself and what he meant to the people that knew him (and plenty that didn't):Finally, in August, we featured a long discussion full of the sort of insights and details that we are proud to offer but that you won't find too often when other media outlets discuss the story: an interview with Ira Rothkin, the lawyer defending Kim Dotcom and Artem Vaulin. Whatever you may think of Dotcom, the discussion sheds critical light on the many injustices that have been perpetrated in the government's obsessive quest to bring him down at the behest of the entertainment industry.And that about wraps it up. There are lots of other great episodes to revisit if you need more — otherwise, we hope this tides you over until our special 100th episode announcement next week!

For a while now the trend du jour in online media is to not only block your readers from making news story comments, but to insult their intelligence by claiming this muzzling is driven by a deep-rooted love of community and conversation. NPR, for example, muted its entire readership because, it claimed, it "adored reader relationships." Reuters and Recode, in contrast, prevented their own users from speaking on site thanks to a never-ending dedication to "conversation." Motherboard similarly banned all on-site reader feedback because it greatly "values discussion."

You don't often see the FBI's website targeted by a DMCA takedown notice, but when you do, you can be sure there's someone with a criminal record behind it. The last time we saw this happening, it was convicted fraudster Sean Gjerde, who thought he could perform his own reputation management by copy-pasting the FBI's press release onto his own website as part of a "book" he was "writing," and then begin issuing bogus takedown notices targeting content he didn't create. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for all the reasons he was NEVER GOING TO GET AWAY WITH IT.Enter Anthony Lewis Jerdine, someone with a bit of reputation to clean up. Over the past decade, Jerdine has been imprisoned for bank fraud, made the US Marshals fugitive list, been sanctioned for unauthorized practice of law, been called a vexatious litigant by the Ohio court system, and, lest we forget, formed a trust in his own name.There are many reasons to form a trust. Jerdine's reason -- an apparent SEO gambit -- is none of them. Jerdine, like many people who don't understand search engines, the internet, intellectual property law, or the Streisand effect, seems to believe if he shouts "TRADEMARK and/or COPYRIGHT" loudly enough, magical things will happen.Here's the text of his DMCA takedown request, which compares favorably to the word salad periodically passed around Facebook as a supposed way for users to "reclaim" their copyrights from Big Blue.

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Trump this week formally selected two staunch opponents of net neutrality to oversee the incoming President's FCC transition team. Economist Jeff Eisenach and former Sprint Corp lobbyist Mark Jamison both have deep-rooted ties to the broadband sector, and both played major roles in helping the industry fight passage of the U.S.'s net neutrality rules last year. We had already noted that incumbent ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have been getting excited by the possibility of a hamstrung FCC and the roll back of numerous consumer-friendly policies made under the tenure of outgoing FCC boss Tom Wheeler.

A few years back, we had a few stories about ridiculous situations in which the Bulgarian Chess Federation was trying to claim copyright on chess moves and had even sued a website for copyright infringement for broadcasting the moves. Of course, chess moves are not just factual information, but they're historically written down and shared widely, because that's part of how people learn to play chess (and get better at it). Studying the moves in various games is part of how people practice chess, and no one is expected to claim "ownership" over the chess moves, because they can't.

Despite ample lip service to the subject of broadband, huge swaths of United States' broadband markets are becoming less competitive than ever before. Companies like AT&T and Verizon have proven completely disinterested in upgrading huge swaths of their networks, instead pivoting toward content and advertising, as evident by AT&T's $155 billion acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, and Verizon's acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo. CenturyLink and Windstream are following suit, shifting their focus from residential broadband to enterprise service with their respective acquisitions of Level 3 and Earthlink.

Another court has handed down a decision that upholds the standard set by the Supreme Court in the Rodriguez decision. That standard is pretty cut and dry: any Constitutional violation is still a Constitutional violation -- whether it lasts 30 seconds or ten minutes. In the context of a traffic stop, any actions taken not supported by reasonable suspicion -- like running a drug dog around the vehicle or spending time begging for consent for a search -- are not allowed under the Fourth Amendment.It was assumed law enforcement would just search for ways to speed up these unrelated activities so that traffic stops wouldn't be "unreasonably prolonged." The Supreme Court gave no guidance on what constituted an unreasonably lengthy traffic stop. Scott Greenfield theorized officers would read this decision to mean they could still do all the things they wanted to do, just so long as the stop ended whenever the "objective" -- usually the delivery of a citation -- was complete.