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ESPN has been losing hand over fist as consumers shift to streaming alternatives and new "skinny" TV bundles of smaller channels. The company is estimated to have lost roughly 7 million subscribers in just a few years, and a recent survey found that 56% of consumers would drop ESPN in a heartbeat if it meant saving $8 a month on their cable bill (the estimate of how much ESPN costs each subscriber). The losses are largely thanks to ESPN executives failing to see the cord-cutting threat coming. Apparently it's difficult to identify shifting viewership trends with your head buried squarely in the sand.

In my talk last week at Wikimedia, one of the examples I gave of "copyright creep" where copyright law is being shoved into areas where it obviously doesn't belong was that time when John Deere and GM argued that you didn't really own parts of the vehicles you bought from them, because of copyright. The underlying issue was that these companies didn't want the Librarian of Congress to exempt hacking cars and tractors from section 1201 of the DMCA. 1201 is the anti-circumvention provision that says that getting around technological protection measures (even if not for the purpose of infringing on copyright) is still infringement. Ridiculously, even the EPA sided with these companies arguing that hacking cars could override environmental protections. However, as we pointed out at the time, there are other laws to handle that kind of thing. Don't abuse copyright for that purpose.

Congrats Peter Thiel: you've successfully censored true stories reported by the press. Just a little while ago, Nick Denton posted that the remaining three cases filed by lawyer Charles Harder against Gawker, Denton and some reporters had been settled, with the agreement to remove the stories. Harder, of course, is the lawyer that Peter Thiel set up with his own practice, with the stated mission of filing lawsuits that would kill Gawker. Thiel/Harder "won" back when this effort forced Gawker into bankruptcy and then a fire sale to Univision. But now the remaining stories have been officially killed off. This includes the famous Hulk Hogan story and case -- meaning that the appeal, which basically every lawyer admits would have resulted in overturning the lower court's jury verdict, is dead. I know the Gawker haters will cheer this outright censorship (or, worse, insist that this proves that the case was legitimate -- despite the fact it never was). But let's focus on one of the other stories that is getting censored here thanks to Peter Thiel's actions.

Deep Learning is a set of powerful algorithms that are the force behind self-driving cars, image searching, voice recognition, and many, many more applications. Learn more about it all with the $39 Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence Introductory Bundle. Over four courses, you will learn about building machines that, in effect, act like neurons in a neural network as they learn while they're fed more information. The first course covers the basics of building a linear regression module in Python, and progresses into practical machine learning issues that will provide the foundations for an exploration of Deep Learning. Next, you'll learn about logistic regression for making data-driven decisions. The third course focuses on artificial neural networks, which are the architecture that make Apple's Siri recognize your voice, Tesla's self-driving cars know where to turn, Google Translate learn new languages, and so much more. Finally, you'll learn about TensorFlow and Theano and how to use these tools to build your own artificial neural networks.

Last week, we wrote about the big news in the copyright realm, where the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, removed the Register of Copyrights (the head of the Copyright Office), Maria Pallante, from her job. Technically, Hayden reassigned Pallante to a new job in the Library of Congress, but Pallante rejected that offer and resigned. While we -- and some others -- pointed out that this was a good opportunity to reshape the Copyright Office away from being a taxpayer-funded lobbying organization for Hollywood, some folks who support ever more draconian copyright immediately jumped on all sorts of conspiracy theories about how this was really Google somehow firing Pallante, including one site that directly had that as a headline.

Last week, we wrote about the big news in the copyright realm, where the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, removed the Register of Copyrights (the head of the Copyright Office), Maria Pallante, from her job. Technically, Hayden reassigned Pallante to a new job in the Library of Congress, but Pallante rejected that offer and resigned. While we -- and some others -- pointed out that this was a good opportunity to reshape the Copyright Office away from being a taxpayer-funded lobbying organization for Hollywood, some folks who support ever more draconian copyright immediately jumped on all sorts of conspiracy theories about how this was really Google somehow firing Pallante, including one site that directly had that as a headline.

On Monday evening, you may have seen news of a "big scoop" at Slate by famed reporter Franklin Foer, about how Donald Trump had a server that was "communicating" with a Russian server. Foer, who famously got pushed out of The New Republic for not being very with it on technology on the internet (among other things), makes a really big deal out of some really weak tea. After reading the article (along with another one alleging Russian spies had been "cultivating" Trump) I tweeted out that the evidence on both was super weak. I kept expecting a smoking gun in the Foer piece, but instead got a lot of handwaving and confusion about DNS. Of course, Clinton supporters were quick to jump on the article as some sort of proof, despite the really weak claims.

As we've been discussing, the hot new broadband battleground is the boring old utility pole. In most existing markets, a new competitor needs the incumbent ISP to move their gear and "make ready" the pole before a competitor can attach their own fiber. With every incentive to slow new competition, incumbent ISPs have long (ab)used this bureaucracy to their advantage. As a result, this preparation can take the better part of a year, especially if gear from multiple incumbents needs moving.

Back in June, Western media picked up on a sordid tale involving the Chinese company Jiedaibao, a platform which facilitates loans between individual lenders and borrowers. Because of the private nature of the deals, loan sharks came up with a new twist on securing collateral for the money they lend out at exorbitant rates, described here by China.org.cn:

For those who don't follow the video game industry closely, you may not be aware that there is currently a worker's strike by voiceover actors belonging to SAG-AFTRA against some of the larger game publishers out there. The union and ten or so publishers have been attempting to negotiate a new labor agreement for something like two years, with the sticking point being additional compensation based on game sales. While this concept may sound foreign to those of us that grew up with the gaming industry in its infancy, the explosion in the market and its evolution as an artform certainly warrants the same consideration talents get from other entertainment industries, such as television and film. After all, why shouldn't game voiceover actors be just as frustrated with Hollywood-style accounting as their on-screen counterparts?And, yet, because this is a labor dispute, of course there had to be a petty wrong-turn along the way, which brings us to how SAG-AFTRA is now firing off demands that a PR firm hired by the game studios stop trying to influence the public because of a lame trademark claim. The key issue appears to be that this PR firm is using domain names and social media handles that include the SAG-AFTRA union name.

Almost four years after we noted that the fight between German collection society GEMA and YouTube had gone on way too long, it looks like it's finally been settled. If you don't know, way back when, GEMA, which is effectively a mandatory copyright royalty collector in Germany, demanded insane rates for any music streaming on YouTube. Apparently, it initially argued that a stream on YouTube was no different than a purchase on iTunes, and thus it should be paid the same rate. In 2009, it asked for 17 cents per video view (which was a decrease from the 37.5 cents per stream it had asked for earlier). 17 cents. Anyone who knows anything about how the internet works and how advertising works knows that's insane. YouTube was paying out a decent chunk of its advertising revenue to other collection societies at a fraction of a penny per view, which is inline with the potential ad revenue.

If you really want to believe the nation is unsafe and under threat from foreigners of all kinds, the government entities in charge of ensuring your safety are more than happy to oblige your dark fantasies.

Monopolies are one of the areas that even the most staunchly anti-regulation folks often agree there is a role for government intervention. In the world of tech, multiple big antitrust fights have broken out and continue to rage in both America and the EU — but how effective is this kind of regulation and how often should it really happen? This week, we discuss whether or not there is a role for antitrust in the world of technological innovation.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

While the United States finally passed net neutrality rules this year, the FCC's decision to not ban zero rating (exempting some content from usage caps) has proven to be highly problematic. ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have all begun exempting their own content from usage caps, putting competing services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu (or smaller startups) at a disadvantage. The loophole has also spawned new confusing options from Sprint that throttle games, music and video by default, unless a consumer is willing to pony up $20 or more extra to have those services actually work as intended.

Every so often, government entities are efficient despite themselves.

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Back in August, we noted how the FCC lost an incredibly important case regarding municipal broadband. In short, the FCC tried to dismantle state-level protectionist laws, written by incumbent ISPs, that hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks or striking public/private partnerships for broadband -- even in areas those same incumbent ISPs refused to upgrade. The FCC had tried to claim that its congressional mandate to ensure "even and timely" broadband deployment allowed it to strip away any part of these laws that hindered broadband expansion.

If you run any kind of website it's super important that you file with the Copyright Office to officially register a DMCA agent. This is a key part of the DMCA. If you want to make use of the DMCA's safe harbors -- which create a clear safe harbor for websites to avoid liability of infringing material posted by users -- then you have to first register with the Copyright Office. Larger corporate sites already know this, but many, many smaller sites do not. This is why for years we've posted messages reminding anyone who has a blog to just go and register with the Copyright Office to get basic DMCA protections (especially after a copyright troll went after some smaller blogs who had not done so).

Okay, look, let's face the fact that any time we write about anything having to do with either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, people in the comments go nuts accusing us of being "in the tank," or "shills." or even (really) "up the ass" of one candidate or the other (and, yes, this has happened with both of the major party candidates). I'm assuming it will happen again with this post, even though it's not true. As should be abundantly clear, we're not big fans of either choice (and don't get us started on the third parties...). So when we talk about one, the other (or even both together), it's not because we're "biased" or trying to help or hurt one or the other. We're just doing the same thing we always do, and which we never had a problem with before, which is reporting on policy related issues having to do with technology, free speech, the 4th amendment, law enforcement, etc. So, before you rush in to yell at us in the comments, please consider that maybe just because we're not toeing the party line on your preferred candidate, maybe it's not because we're in the tank for the other one.

The government often engages in very dubious CFAA prosecutions, but it takes a lawsuit to get it to talk about how it decides what cases are worth pursuing.

We've talked often about how common it is for legitimate customers to get caught up in attempts to thwart piracy and copyright infringement. From DRM keeping legit purchasers from using what they paid for to Fair Use uses of content getting taken down by automatic systems on sites like YouTube, it's worth noting whenever this happens. After all, there is an expression in the legal system that goes something like: I'd rather set 100 guilty people free than imprison a single innocent. The stakes when it comes to copyright aren't as high as jail time, typically, but it's interesting how little this mantra penetrates with those who would enforce copyright via carpet-bomb rather than a scalpel.Take the recent incident with Sega's Steam Workshop mod-space, for instance, where dozens and dozens of mods within the platform suddenly disappeared.

There's only a couple of months left until the DOJ's proposed Rule 41 changes become law. All Congress has to do is nothing. This is a level of effort Congress is mostly amenable to. If this becomes law, worldwide deployments of malware/spyware during investigations will be unable to be challenged in court. In addition, the DOJ wants to be part of the cyberwar. It's seeking permission to remotely access zombie computers/devices used in cyberattacks to "clean" them.The rule changes would also add a presumption of guilt to an activity performed by millions of computer users around the world:

Last week, I mentioned that I was giving a talk at the Wikimedia Foundation about copyright. It was a fun time, and the video from the talk is now online. Unfortunately, the audio and the video are... not entirely great. I'd complain about the terrible microphone, but that sounds like a certain presidential candidate. The video is okay, but the colors are off, so my presentation looks a little weird. Either way, you should still be able to get the basics. There's an introduction from Jan Gerlach at the Wikimedia Foundation, talking about all the important policy work they do, then my talk that runs about half an hour, followed by a Q&A with the audience that runs another half hour or so. It was a fun time, with a really great group of folks, and the conversation continued on after the official session ended for quite a while. Check it out:

Copyright trolling is somehow still a thing and it never seems to fail to provide ridiculous examples of miscarriages of justice. It has been long pointed out how rife with inaccuracy the process of threatening individuals with lawsuits and fines based on infringement as evidenced only by IP address is. Even courts have time and time again pointed out that an IP address is not sufficient to identify a person responsible for a given action. Yet the trolls still send out their threat letters, because bullying in this manner generally works.The latest example of this kind of trolling misfire comes from Canada, where 86-year-old Christine McMillan received a threat letter from CANIPRE over an alleged infringing download of Metro 2033, a game in which the player slaughters zombies in a post-nuclear world.

The copyright case involving Stephanie Lenz and her dancing baby is one that may finally be nearing a conclusion after many, many years -- but it's not over yet. As you may recall, Lenz posted a very brief clip of her then toddler, dancing along to a few seconds of a barely audible Prince song. This was almost a decade ago.Universal Music sent a DMCA takedown, and that kicked off a big fight over fair use, with the EFF representing Lenz and arguing that Universal Music needed to take fair use into account before issuing takedowns. The case then bounced around courts for nearly a decade with a variety of rulings, eventually getting a huge confusing mess of a ruling from the 9th Circuit last year, followed by an only marginally better mess earlier this year in an en banc decision replacing the original one.

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Over the years, we've noted how AT&T has a nasty habit of lying to sell the public, press and regulators on the company's neverending attempts to grow larger. Whether it's promising broadband expansions that never arrive, or using astroturf to try and argue anti-consumer mergers are good for toddlers, AT&T's lobbyists, lawyers, and policy tendrils work tirelessly to argue that up is down, black is white, and any skepticism of its claims are unfounded hysteria. As we saw with the blocked T-Mobile merger, this sort of behavior doesn't work quite as well as it used to.

A bunch of organizations concerned with privacy, free press, and human rights are gently reminding the outgoing president that he still hasn't fully responded to a We the People petition about encryption.

You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime, you just might fine... a company for being unable to deliver on the impossible.

So, months after clearing Hillary Clinton's slate by deciding she was stupid rather than malicious, James Comey has again gone rogue, declaring there's something worth investigating in emails recovered from a sleazy ex-politician's computer. (Thus subverting the norm of recovering emails from a sleazy, CURRENT politician's computer…)The timing is, of course, suspect. The FBI really isn't supposed to be announcing investigations of presidential candidates this close to Election Day. As Marcy Wheeler points out, there are guidelines Comey appears to be violating.

This week we have some parallelism between the insightful and funny sides, with both first place comments coming from one post and both second place comments coming from another. What's more, both first place winners came from the same commenter! First, we head to our look at the various insane claims about the massive DDoS attack, where one commenter insinuated that Hillary Clinton might have had something to do with it — and Michael won first place for insightful by highlighting just how unlikely that seems:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, we saw several examples of companies attacking consumers and/or making their products worse/harder to access. Universal Music started going after the Bad Lip Reading parodies on YouTube, Sony Ericsson shut down an Xperia fan blog that aggressively promotes their products, Hollywood's "kinder, gentler" DRM Ultraviolet was being widely hated upon, and Warner Bros. decided it wanted to embargo DVD sales to libraries for a month.We also featured our own little historical epic on the site this week: Tim Cushing walked through the many, many technologies that have "killed" the film industry in a trilogy of posts: part one, part two and part three.Ten Years AgoThe ripples of the YouTube acquisition were continuing to spread this week in 2006. Despite lots of concern about legal issues, it became clear that YouTube's compliance with DMCA takedown procedures were keeping it in the clear (this was long before the rollout of ContentID) and the service was perfectly legal. Meanwhile, Google was building a portfolio of legal wins against smaller claimants as ammunition for when bigger companies came calling. And despite all this supposedly hurting music sales, Weird Al was openly crediting YouTube and the internet with the success of his new album, while folks in Hollywood were realizing that online stars might just represent the next big talent pool.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, we saw prototypical versions of fights that would become commonplace in the digital world. Tech companies were opposing an onerous regulatory bill in congress, Microsoft was getting ready to sue a hacker for breaking DRM, and Homestead was ordered by a court to turn over identifying info about its users. Meanwhile, some big products were hitting the market: Windows XP was getting a lukewarm reception (not to mention pushback against its new activation procedure), and as we mentioned last week, Apple officially unveiled the iPod — though folks weren't sure if it was revolutionary enough (a funny notion in retrospect).Twenty-Four Years AgoComputer-aided dispatch systems are now the norm for emergency services, and have vastly improved their efficiency — but getting here wasn't an easy road, as one historical example this week demonstrates. The London Ambulance Service in the UK commissioned a computer dispatch system way back in the 1970s, but it sat unused for thirteen years because nobody wanted to switch. The system was replaced but the replacement failed tests. It was replaced again on October 26th, 1992 and the results were a complete disaster that caused huge ambulance delays. The debacle now serves as a popular item of study in the subject of poor engineering management.

Digital privacy and the control of personal data have emerged as two of the main online battlegrounds in recent years, as the flood of Techdirt posts on the subject attests. One of the central questions is how we can use global online services like Facebook and Google without surrendering control of the information we provide them. The US and the EU take contrasting approaches here, both of which have attracted plenty of supporters and detractors.But what about alternatives: might there be another way to tackle this crucial subject that is effective and reasonably fair to all? Jack M. Balkin and Jonathan Zittrain, respectively professors at the law schools of Yale and Harvard, believe there is. Together, they've written an article that appears in The Atlantic, entitled "A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies Trustworthy," while Balkin has published a more rigorous 52-page version for UC Davis Law Review (pdf). Their starting point is the fact that many of the problems encountered with digital privacy have already been solved in the analog world:

A few days ago we described how the Belgian region of Wallonia was holding up the official signing of the EU-Canada trade deal, CETA, in part because of the corporate sovereignty chapter it contains. Not surprisingly, given the high-profile embarrassment this caused -- Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was forced to cancel his planned trip to Europe at the last minute -- the Walloon politicians have been under intense pressure to change their minds in return for some concessions. This they have now done, and a document has been published spelling out the nature of the deal they have obtained (currently only available in French and Dutch). The Council of Canadians suggests that the EU has not solved the problem, just bought some time:

When I drop dead of a massive heart attack, it will be because some huge company has bullied some small company over a ridiculous trademark that never should have been granted in the first place. The examples for this sort of thing are legion around Techdirt, but it still gets me every single time. The Trademark Office has done such a poor job of turning even the barest of critical eyes towards trademark applications that all sorts of short and common words have been granted trademarks all over the place, including in industries where it was plainly insane to grant them at all.The latest of these concerns a small family-owned supper club in Maryland and the threat letter it received from an enormous casino company over the trademark it had somehow received on the word "live."

Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server (at times kept in her own basement...) has obviously been a big story during this campaign -- and for a variety of obvious, yet stupid, reasons, the discussion has become ridiculously partisan. What people should be able to admit on all sides of the debate is that Clinton's use of a private email server was incredibly stupid and, at the very least, calls into serious question the judgment of whoever told her this was okay. It also, almost certainly, put serious information at risk of being exposed through hacks. But, earlier this year, the FBI came out and said that it didn't actually break the law. There was a bit of the old "high court, low court" to this whole setup, because you could see how someone with much less fame or status would be nailed to the wall by the DOJ if they wanted to put that person away.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg had a fairly revealing article about the internal digital efforts of the Donald Trump campaign, in which Bloomberg reporters embedded for a few days. The whole article is quite interesting, but one of the most stunning parts, frankly, was the Trump campaign staffers directly admitting how they are actively trying to suppress voting by African Americans. It's no secret that a variety of new voter ID laws are designed to suppress voting -- especially among minorities. When North Carolina's voter ID law was struck down by the court, the judge pointed out how the legislators that had backed it had explicitly targeted rules that would suppress votes among African Americans. They had requested "racial data" concerning voter ID and then specifically targeted the types of ID more commonly used by African Americans.

Meet the new transparency/Same as the old transparency:

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Nearly a decade ago, just as YouTube was really getting popular, we questioned whether or not it would be considered infringement to merely embed a YouTube video if the content in that video were unauthorized. As we noted at the time, it seemed like a crazy idea that this should be considered infringing, given that embedding is just sticking a simple line of code on a website. No content ever actually is hosted or lives on that website. You're just telling a browser to go find content from the original YouTube source. For the most part, US courts have agreed that embedding is not infringing. And we'd thought that the EU had come to the same conclusion -- however that ruling was a bit vague, in that it focused on the embedding of authorized content, not unauthorized content.

Earlier this week we wrote about the revelation, via a FOIA request by the EFF, that the Copyright Office consulted heavily with Hollywood (the MPAA directly, and a variety of movie studios) before weighing in on the FCC's set top box competition proposal. As we noted, the Copyright Office's discussion on the issue involved completely misrepresenting copyright law to pretend that an agreement between to industries (content studios & TV companies) could contractually wipe out fair use for end users. That's... just wrong. The FCC's proposal had absolutely nothing to do with copyright. It was just about letting authorized (paying) customers access content that was already authorized through other devices. What the FOIA request revealed was that the Copyright Office not only had many, many, many meetings with Hollywood, but that it actually prioritized those meetings over ones with the FCC -- and lied to the FCC to say that key Copyright Office personnel were not available the very same week they were meeting with the MPAA, in order to push back the meeting with the FCC.

We already know how bizarre defamation rules in Australia can be, but apparently even they have some limits down under. A teenager named Ali Ziggi Mosslmani (who goes by "Ziggy") got a bit of internet fame last year when a photographer, Jeremy Nool, took a picture of him at a birthday party and posted it to his Facebook page. People noticed Ziggy's somewhat unique mullet haircut, and the picture started to go viral:As you can see, it has over 10,000 likes, almost 25,000 comments and over 1,500 shares. As these things tend to do, it also inspired people to create new meme images out of it. Here are just a few:

In an unpublished opinion, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has upheld awarded fees in an anti-SLAPP case.

Exactly how far can overly protective trademark owners go before the wider public wakes up to what a shitstorm trademark has become? It's a question I find myself asking often, given the type of stories we cover around here. It seems any progress made on that front is slow, however, and the ridiculous stories keep on rolling in. You may recall that the Premier League, the UK's famous soccer/football/whatever league, has already proven itself incapable of making any kind of sense while enforcing its intellectual property rights. Well, perhaps taking its cue from its parent league, the also-famous Arsenal soccer club is reaching across the pond to try to block a trademark application for a small bar in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.

If police culture is truly going to change, it needs to start at the bottom. Years of DOJ investigations and consent agreements have done almost nothing to root out the deep-seated problems found in many law enforcement agencies. The change has to come from within each department -- a much longer, slower process that requires those leading the reforms to put their careers on the line. They will be opposed by many of their fellow officers and villainized by police unions for any attempts to bring more accountability to policework.There are probably more law enforcement officials out there with the same mindset as Austin (TX) police chief Art Acevedo. Unfortunately, very little of what they've done or said makes its way into the public eye without being strained through several filters. Acevedo's private comments to Austin PD commanders, however, arrive in the form of a leaked recording.Acevedo was addressing the criticism he took for firing Geoffrey Freeman after the officer shot and killed a naked, unarmed, mentally-ill 19-year-old as he ran down a residential street. Acevedo addressed many issues during this talk and made it clear the APD isn't going to keep heading down the same limited-accountability road and end up just another law enforcement agency more known for its misdeeds than its law enforcement efforts. (h/t PINAC)

The big news earlier this week, of course, was AT&T's announced plans to purchase Time Warner. As we, and plenty of others, were careful to point out, Time Warner is a different and totally separate company from Time Warner Cable (which Comcast famously tried to takeover not that long ago). Yes, at one time they were the same company, but that was a long, long time ago. They've been separate since 2009. And yet, lots of people still get them confused. In fact, soon after the announcement of the deal, AT&T had to do a special filing with the SEC to clarify which Time Warner it was buying. Really.Apparently, the Senate didn't get the memo (literally). The Senate Judiciary Committee's top four members (from both parties) put out a press release from the antitrust subcomittee, saying that it was going to hold hearings on the merger, and that the CEOs of both companies would be testifying. But they named the CEO of Time Warner Cable, not Time Warner.

Earlier this year, we noted how traditional utilities were playing extremely dirty in Florida to try and derail efforts to ramp up solar competition and adoption in the state most likely to benefit from it. After all, the vision of a future where competition is rampant, customers pay less money, and solar users actually get paid for driving power back to the grid gives most of these executives heartburn. As a result, utilities have gotten creative in the state, launching fake solar advocacy groups that actually function to pollute public discourse and derail any amendments intended to help solar grab a larger foothold in the state.

Over the past week, we've been talking a lot about the need for more transparency and user control for privacy on the internet, so it's only fitting that the FCC has officially adopted its new privacy rules for ISPs that will require broadband providers to be much more explicit concerning what information it collects and shares with others, and provide (mostly) clear "opt-in" requirements on some of that data collection. This isn't a surprise. It was pretty clear that the FCC was going to approve these rules that it announced earlier this year. And, of course, the big broadband providers threw a giant hissy fit over these rules that just ask them to be more transparent and give users at least a little bit of control over what data is collected.

We've seen all manner of silly claims by copyright licensing groups as to what requires what kind of license in every kind of circumstance. These licensing groups have gone after children's charities. A UK collection society had the strategy of calling up local businesses and demanding payments should they hear music playing in the background. The Author's Guild once claimed that reading a book out loud constituted the need for a separate license, while ASCAP asserted with a straight face that the ring of a mobile phone was a public performance. This panoply of idiocy might be funny, except for the very real harm done through this kind of harassment.Even the good stories in this vein weigh heavily in that they are necessary at all. For instance, the advocate general for the EU's Court of Justice recently wrote an opinion advising that hotels didn't need a copyright license just to have televisions within guest rooms. It's a good ruling, but conjures the frustrating question as to why it was needed in the first place. The answer, of course, is because a collection group was attempting to collect from hotels for just that reason.

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