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Last year, the FCC unveiled a new plan that would require cable operators make their content available via app for third-party cable boxes and other streaming hardware. The goal was to bring a little added competition and openness to the clunky old cable box. But because the FCC's plan would have not only eroded the cable industry's walled-garden control over content -- but $20 billion in annual cable box rental fees -- the cable industry, broadcasters, Congressional allies and even the US Copyright Office got right to work lying about the plan -- repeatedly.Via an absolute sound wall of disinformation, these collective allies claimed that the FCC's plan would violate copyright (false), confuse consumers (nope), harm minorties (not true), result in skyrocketing piracy (well, no), hurt puppies, and tear a giant hole in the time-space continuum. With these claims popping up in hundreds of newspaper op-ed sections and websites nationwide, the FCC's plan soon ran into some stiff headwinds, with even some of the initial FCC supporters of the plan backing away from it. It was, frankly, one of the most effective lobbying and disinformation campaigns the cable industry has ever fielded.With the plan on life support, cable industry Congressional allies are now demanding the plan be formally put out of its misery. In a letter sent to new, ultra-industry friendly FCC boss Ajit Pai (pdf), Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn, and Energy and Commerce Committee Vice Chairman Joe Barton urged Pai to close the docket on the set-top box proceeding.The letter unsurprisingly mirrors most of the falsehoods used by the cable industry to derail the plan, including the idea that bringing competition to the cable box would somehow hamper the cable industry's incredible knack for innovation:

Last June, the FBI engaged in a public records lawsuit on its own behalf, seeking to prevent the city of Seattle from disclosing the locations of cameras the agency had mounted on city-owned utility poles. At the center of the case (for a short while) was privacy activist Phil Mocek, whose public records request for this information had spurred the FBI into action.In its arguments against the city's disclosure of this information, the government posited the novel theory that revealing the cameras' locations would violate the privacy of those the FBI was actively surveilling.

It sometimes takes a little while, but sooner or later most governments engaged in ham-fisted internet censorship get around to taking aim at VPNs. While VPNs certainly have numerous, legitimate uses (including an additional layer of security when on public WiFi), they're also great tools when it comes to preventing your government, ISP, or anybody else from nosily tracking your online behavior. As such, you'll see broadcasters or even Netflix quick to villify their use to enforce increasingly pointless geographical viewing restrictions.But such crackdowns are also a favorite tool of more restrictive governments, whether it's to protect VoIP revenue for state-run telecom monopolies, or to prevent users from tap-dancing around state-mandated filters or other restrictions.In China, home of the largest internet filter ever constructed, the Chinese government has ramped up its own long-standing war on VPNs by announcing a mass shutdown of VPN providers that have been helping citizens get around the great firewall.According to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, all VPN providers now need prior government approval to operate, a move toward effectively making VPN use illegal entirely. Moving forward, all basic telecom providers and ISPs are barred from setting up or renting special lines (including VPNs) to carry out cross-border operations unless previously arranged. The new effort, which lasts till March 31, 2018, appears to focus more specifically on companies providing VPN services to individuals.This banning of a fundamental encryption tool is necessary, the Ministry said in a notice published to its website, to "strengthen cyberspace" and cure some ambiguous "disordered development" in the nation's telecom market:

As was hinted heavily three years ago, you might be better off securing your phone with a passcode than your fingerprint. While a fingerprint is definitely unique and (theoretically...) a better way to keep thieves and snoopers from breaking into your phone, it's not much help when it comes to your Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.The Minnesota Appeals Court has ruled [PDF] that unlocking a phone with a fingerprint is no more "testimonial" than a blood draw, police lineup appearance, or even matching the description of a suspected criminal. (h/t Orin Kerr)

District Attorney Kari Brandenburg is done with Albuquerque. More to the point, she's decided not to seek re-election because she's especially done with the city's police force. On her way out the door, Brandenburg -- who found herself locked out by the PD after bringing murder charges against two officers for shooting a homeless man -- is letting the Department of Justice knows its work with the PD isn't done yet.In early 2014, the DOJ released its report on the Albuquerque Police Department. In it were descriptions of the department's indiscriminate, unchecked uses of force.

After being handed a loss in its judicial quest to force Microsoft to hand over data held in Ireland, the DOJ asked the Second Circuit for a rehearing of its July decision. At the center of the case is the DOJ's belief that it should be able to force US companies to turn over data/communications contained in overseas servers.The government wants to have it both ways with its warrants for electronic data. On one hand, it analogizes data demands as being no different than digging through a filing cabinet found in a house it's searching. It argues that data held in servers/devices should be treated no differently than the personal papers the founding fathers tried to protect with the Fourth Amendment.Then it argues that even if the "filing cabinet" isn't located on the premises it has a warrant to search, it should be able to access the contents of that cabinet. This, from Microsoft's motion to dismiss, explains what the government is truly asking for, using the sort of physical world comparisons the DOJ understands.

We're in something of an era of firsts here in America. We have our first billionaire President, for instance. Add to that that, on his first day as President Elect, Donald Trump saw fit to take to Twitter to take aim at the First Amendment. Fears for what a Trump presidency means for the rights of the press and for free speech rights have compounded since then, supercharged by Trump himself, who has constructed a narrative in which the press is his foil, either because he truly believes that's the case or out of pure political expediency. Whichever the case, we had another first as on the very day of Trump's inauguration, his first day officially as President of the United States, police managed to arrest and charge six journalists for the crime of covering the protests coinciding with the ceremony.There had already been reports of two such arrests, but we now learn of four more.

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It appears that Donald Trump -- or, more specifically, whatever remains of the organization that was his Presidential campaign -- has asked the US Patent and Trademark Office (US PTO, which Donald Trump now controls, as President) to give the campaign a trademark on the phrase "Keep America Great!" for use on bumper stickers, signs, placards, pamphlets, clothing, campaign buttons and more. One imagines that they are already gearing up for the expected campaign slogan of the 2020 re-election campaign. Of course, as Paul Levy at Public Citizen points out, someone else had already tried to trademark that phrase last year, and had it rejected by the PTO on the (correct) grounds that a "slogan" can't be taken out of the public domain and trademarked. Indeed, the rejection letter notes many examples of the slogan already in widespread use, recognizing that giving one guy the trademark on it wouldn't make any sense.And therein lies the big question: now that the PTO is technically controlled by Trump, will it suddenly now allow the Trump campaign to register that very same trademark that it rejected from someone else two months ago? Or will it (properly) reject it on the same grounds that the phrase is already in widespread use and a political campaign can't just snatch it from public use and claim it as its own? One hopes that the PTO will do the right thing and reject this trademark application as well. Many of us will be watching.

In 2012, it was discovered that Annie Dookhan, a Massachusetts state drug lab technician, had falsified thousands of drug test results. Perhaps this would have been discovered before it became catastrophic, but supervisors seemed impressed with her productivity and dumped even more of the testing workload on her.The end result of Dookhan's fakery was a caseload of well over 40,000 convictions that needed to be reexamined. It also resulted in Dookhan being sent to jail for three years. Dookhan is out now, but more than 20,000 of the possibly-tainted convictions still haven't been addressed. This makes it likely there are people still falsely incarcerated while the person who helped put them there is back on the streets.Presiding over what's left of Dookhan's mess is Massachusetts' highest court. It has been weighing various solutions to expedite the processing of more than 20,000 possibly wrongful convictions. One suggestion is that all remaining convictions be immediately vacated, with the option left to state prosecutors to reopen any they feel are still legitimate.State prosecutors, however, aren't nearly as willing to see 20,000 convictions overturned. Their suggestion is the complete opposite: that they be allowed to continue doing not much about it while people continue to do time for crimes they didn't commit, or live a less-full life thanks to a bogus felony conviction on their record. In fact, as Fault Lines' Josh Kendrick points out, the DA's office seems to feel wrongful convictions aren't really a big deal.

For years now, we've noted how state legislatures are so corrupt, they quite literally let giant ISPs like AT&T and Comcast write state telecom law. These laws, as you might expect, do everything in their power to keep the pricey, abysmal customer service broadband status quo in place by hamstringing any and every attempt to bring competition to bear on these complacent duopolists. That's particularly true of the anti-community broadband bills passed in more than 20 states that prevent towns and cities from upgrading their own local telecom infrastructure -- even in instances where incumbent providers refuse to.This kind of protectionism is precisely what's going on right now in Virginia, where incumbent broadband providers have convinced (read: thrown a lot of money at) state Delegate Kathy Byron to propose HB 2108, aka the "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act." The act does nothing to improve broadband deployment; in fact it does the exact opposite, preventing ad-hoc community broadband solutions in light of market failure. It also saddles towns and cities with all manner of restrictions, forcing them to get approval by committees stocked with incumbent ISP lobbyists if they want to even strike public/private broadband partnerships.Byron has been under notable fire the last few weeks by folks who believe, crazily, that perhaps you shouldn't let giant ISPs with decades of documented anti-competitive behavior write state telecom policy. While Byron has tried to claim that hamstringing towns and cities will somehow improve broadband expansion and pricing, other locals have been busy calling a spade a spade:

As we've noted before, the UK is infamous for the number of surveillance cameras that dot the land. They've become so much a part of British life that there is an official Surveillance Camera Commissioner, whose job is to encourage compliance with an official surveillance camera code of practice. The basic principle of the code is the following:

The New Mexico legislature, which passed the most restrictive asset forfeiture reform bill in the nation, is once again targeting easily-abusable tools of the law enforcement trade. The Tenth Amendment Center reports that the proposed bill targets police use of Stingray devices, as well as other electronic data demands.

Reports started coming out this morning that the new Trump Administration had told the EPA that it needed to stop doing anything publicly without first getting approval from the White House (in addition to freezing grants and contracts). According to a memo that was sent around to EPA staff:If you can't read that, the key parts say:

After years of working on the go, Mike has the mobile office down to a science — and wherever he sets it up, nearby gadget geeks have plenty of questions and comments (here's a rundown of his set-up). So this week we're joined by Espree Devora, host of the podcasts Women In Tech and We Are L.A. Tech, for a fun discussion about today's high-tech offices-in-bags.Also: we're getting ready to record our first exclusive patron-only episode for our supporters on Patreon, which means it's time for those who backed us at a level of $5/month or more to submit questions for the Q&A portion. If you're one of those patrons, you can now find a post calling for questions in our Patreon feed and submit yours in the comments. If you're not, but you want to submit a question or just get access to the episode once it's released, now's the time to support the Techdirt Podcast on Patreon. We've only gotten a couple questions so far, but at least one is rich enough for us to do an entire episode in response — still, we want to give others a chance, so we're likely delaying the release of the episode until early next month. If you want to ask a question, don't wait around!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.

The British have a number of traditions. Some, such as drinking tea, are famous around the world. Less well-known is a habit of revealing highly-confidential information by carrying pieces of paper in public that photographers using long-focus lenses are able to snap and then magnify to read. The Guardian wrote an entire article on the subject, detailing how numerous embarrassing leaks occurred in the UK because people forgot to put the documents they were holding in some kind of opaque folder. On one occasion, an anti-terror operation had to be brought forward when Britain's most senior counterterrorism officer walked around with top secret documents on display -- a blunder that cost him his job.This mistake is so common that there are notices by the door of the UK Prime Minister's residence at Number 10 Downing Street reminding people not to walk out with confidential material that is exposed. The fact that there is a photographer with a long-focus lens who hangs around outside No 10 in the hope that they do precisely that shows how often they ignore this warning.Although the Brits have practically turned this activity into another weird sport alongside cricket, it's not unknown in the US. For example, the following happened at the end of November last year:

The CIA has millions of declassified records stashed away in Maryland -- something it claimed was accessible to the public. Actual access, however, resembles something out of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," rather than what any reasonable person would call "accessible."This so-called "publicly accessible" database -- known as CREST -- has been the target of MuckRock contributor Mike Best, who kickstarted an effort to liberate records from the vault through the use of manual labor. The records can be accessed by computer, but only certain computers, and only if you know exactly where to find them.This is the CIA's "publicly available" records system front-end.And here's how you locate it.

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For years now we've noted how incumbent ISPs have written and purchased protectionist state laws in roughly twenty states. These laws were quietly passed by AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other large ISPs as a response to communities that began considering building their own broadband networks. Granted these efforts only emerged because these communities were frustrated by the lack of competition, poor service, and high prices (aka market failure). Instead of shoring up service and competing, these ISPs found it more economical to simply buy legislation overriding local community rights.Virginia is just the latest state to happily do the bidding of incumbent telecom giants with a new proposal that would hamstring towns and cities with all manner of restrictions should they decide to build their own networks, or strike a public/private partnership to that same end.House lawmaker Kathy Byron has crafted the "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act" after receiving healthy campaign contributions from ISPs like Verizon and AT&T. But her proposal actually restricts broadband deployment -- or public/private partnerships like Google Fiber -- by preventing towns and cities from building networks if incumbent ISPs offer speeds of just 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up across 90% of their footprints:

As we've noted, sorta-porn company Perfect 10 really is the gift that keeps on giving. The company claims that it's in the porn business, but in one of the many, many lawsuits it has filed, it was suggested that the company is little more than a pure copyright troll, just looking for companies to sue. This was in a filing made by one of the companies Perfect 10 sued back in 2010:

We've repeatedly noted how the idea of a healthy and open internet, free from the meddling of incumbent giants like Comcast, is a good thing. We've also noted that until we bring some real competition to bear on the broadband sector, the FCC's inconsistent protection is about the only thing separating you from a hearty "servicing" from Comcast corporation (whether that's usage caps or abysmal service). As such, the nation's net neutrality rules (which are really quite basic and if anything didn't go far enough) have broad, bipartisan support, and holding Comcast accountable is a bipartisan, very popular idea.And while Trump's Presidential campaign endlessly promised Trump would focus on bringing power back to the people, Trump's new FCC boss Ajit Pai -- a former Verizon lawyer -- effectively represents the complete opposite of that. He's yet to seriously stand up to Comcast or any other ISP, adores media consolidation, wants to kill net neutrality, is incapable of admitting the broadband market lacks competition, and has promised to dismantle the FCC's consumer watchdog functions solely at AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Charter's behest.On his way out of office, former FCC boss Tom Wheeler had a message for Trump supporters: you need net neutrality protections and healthy broadband competition too.

The FBI has reams of documents of interest to the public. And it knows it. That's why it plays keepaway with so much of them. Sometimes it releases tons of fully-redacted pages to requesters -- a middle finger to government transparency that also serves as a "response" on the FOIA balance sheets, ensuring the agency fulfills the letter of law while spitting on its spirit.Other times it just drags it feet. Requesters are often moved to sue the agency, thanks to its tendency to spend a year or four responding to FOIA requests. And that's only if it hasn't attempted to short-circuit the FOIA process by asking requesters for a small fortune in advance of its search for documents.The FBI's internal search mechanisms are deliberately broken, forcing FOIA requesters to become intimately familiar with the FBI's multiple databases and search methods, none of which seem to overlap. And when documents are finally delivered, a vast array of exceptions are deployed to ensure the public is given only the murkiest version of transparency.So, it comes as no surprise that the FBI has quietly decided to make it even more difficult for requesters to get their hands on documents. Michael Best of MuckRock explains.

Last summer, we brought to you the story of how Bryton Mellott, a young man in Urbana, IL, was arrested for posting a picture of himself burning the American flag on his social media accounts. The story was strange on a variety of levels. First, the law utilized to arrest him, one of many flag-burning prohibitions that exist in laws at the state level, had been declared unconstitutional decades prior to it having ever been enacted. Burning the flag has been codified as a form of protected free speech, no matter how stomach-turning any individual might find it. It was for that reason that the local State's Attorney's office requested that the police let Mellott go and didn't even attempt to bring any kind of charges against him, because they couldn't. The police report also noted that Mellott had been taken in for disorderly conduct, referencing the backlash his actions caused, which is insane. Blaming a victim of threats for receiving those threats as a reaction to protected speech ought to be beneath the common citizen, nevermind those we actually entrust to enforce the law.But perhaps the strangest part of the story, previously un-noted by us in our original post, the impetus for Mellott's arrest was one officer's apparent desperate search to find something for which to arrest him.

This seems to be something of a regular occurrence now. In the recent past, several foreign countries have celebrated how stunningly real video game graphics have become by using them to pretend they are really great at war. The Egyptians did it to pretend that Russia was fighting ISIS, the Iranians did it to pretend that their forces could shoot people from a really long way away, and the North Koreans did it to pretend that they could deliver a nuclear ICBM to our soil.Well, perhaps there is some synergy to be found over Korea's DMZ, because the South Koreans recently released footage detailing how super-awesome their new fighter jet program is, and that footage included several clips from both Battlefield 3 and Ace Combat.

Last Friday, the first three of Donald Trump's appointments were up for vote -- with his DOD and DHS nominees sailing through with an easy vote. However, the Senate blocked Mike Pompeo, Trump's nominee for CIA. As we've discussed in the past, Pompeo is not concerned with violating civil liberties. In the past, we've noted that Pompeo put forth a sneaky fake amendment that pretended to defund NSA metadata collection, but which really reinforced it. He's further defended spying on Americans' metadata as the way government is supposed to operate. Oh, and did we mention that he angrily denounced SXSW for daring to have Ed Snowden speak there.That's all quite concerning. But in opposing Pompeo for the CIA slot, Senator Ron Wyden has raised even more concerns -- including about Pompeo's willingness (or even eagerness) to use information hacked by the Russians to spy on Americans (and not just the Russians, but anyone else as well). That... should be concerning. As Marcy Wheeler explains, there were a long series of questions all leading up to the basic idea that Pompeo has no problem using whatever info is given to him to spy on people domestically, even if it comes from foreign hacking.

We've been quite vocal for more than six years about the problems of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, and why it would do really bad things for intellectual property laws and expand the concept of corporate sovereignty over national laws. Throughout the campaign, both major candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, campaigned against the agreement, though many people (quite reasonably) doubted Clinton's sincerity over that position.On the flip side, no one doubted Trump's sincerity -- but many of us disagreed with his reasons. Still, it's at least marginally good news to have Trump officially get us out of the TPP negotiations, effectively killing the agreement.

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Perhaps sensing the wave of civil asset forfeiture reform might eventually come crashing against the seized beach houses of the federal government, the FBI has decided to post a defense of the oft-abused process at its website.The post speaks in warm terms about federal partnerships with state law enforcement agencies -- partnerships often abused by local authorities to route around restrictive state laws governing forfeiture. Of course, there's no mention of this particular facet of federal partnerships in the FBI's post. Instead, the post does all it can to portray it as a legitimate tool of law enforcement, rather than the analogue for legalized theft it's become.The FBI tries to spin this as a limited-use tool that only affects convicted criminals. But even in its defense of the process, it can't help but enthuse about the near lack of limitations it enjoys.

There's lots of "me too" litigation flying right now. Multiple plaintiffs have advanced the theory that because terrorists kill people and terrorists use social media platforms to communicate, it somehow follows that social media platforms are at least partially responsible for terrorists killing people.Bed legislation tends to follow tragedies. So does bad litigation. In the aftermath of a car accident that killed a five-year-old girl, a lawsuit was brought against Apple for supposed negligence -- solely because it has yet to implement a patented lockout mechanism that might have prevented the driver who killed the plaintiff's daughter from using Facetime while driving.The key is "might have." The key is also a little understood aspect of intellectual property like patents. Just because a patent is acquired does not mean the company obtaining it has the means to put it to use. Nor does it indicate it ever plans to put the patent to use. It's an exclusionary process meant to keep others locked out for a certain period of time more than a leading indicator of any company's immediate plans for the future.Partly due to a fundamental misunderstanding of patent filings, a "me too" class action lawsuit has lobbed into a California court, piggybacking off the negligence lawsuit filed late last year.

For a long time, the narrative du jour in cable and broadcast circles was that sports would save cable TV from the unholy threat of cord cutting and the associated ratings drop. Live sports and sports analysis was, the argument usually went, the one true piece of bedrock in the cable and broadcast empire that could protect the industry from sagging ratings and defecting customers. But as we've see by the NFL's 2016 ratings dip and ESPN's stumbling face-plant, sports simply isn't the panacea industry executives pretended it was. Of course, the industry likes to attack any messenger that points this out, but it doesn't make the underlying reality any less true.With sports ratings in decline, the obvious question then becomes what to do about it. Most of the proposals being circulated by the industry have been relatively comical, like the NFL's decision earlier this year to simply shuffle the Titanic deck chairs a little and consider the subject closed:

Ahead of Trump's inauguration, the CIA announced changes to its rules on gathering/using (inadvertently or otherwise) data and communications from American citizens. Other than this being the timeframe in which it happened, this process was likely in the works for months, rather than a panicked, last-minute attempt to keep an incoming president from redirecting the agency's foreign-based focus. (h/t Julian Sanchez)But still, it's tempting to equate the two: Trump's swearing in and a slight scaling back of the CIA's domestic reach. The outgoing head of the agency was none too happy with Trump's tweets criticizing the intelligence community for not doing whatever it is Trump imagines it should have done about Buzzfeed publishing an opposition-funded dossier about his alleged ties to Russia. Trump compared life under this supposedly-incapable intelligence community to that of Nazi Germany, while also making statements about buddying up with Russia. Exiting CIA Director John Brennan seemed a little irked.

We've got a double winner on the insightful side this week, with Roger Strong taking first and second place with a pair of responses to then-still-President Obama's surprise commutation of Chelsea Manning's sentence. First, it was a response to the assertion that Edward Snowden's case was different because he "fled into the arms of an adversary":

Five Years AgoIt's time for one more focused retrospective on the events of this week in 2012: the week of the SOPA blackout and a huge victory for the internet. First, we dip briefly into the previous week, where we put out a special Saturday post to report the surprise news that the White House had come out against the approach in SOPA/PIPA. The MPAA responded to this with a bizarro-world statement interpreting it as a sign they could rush the bills through and Rupert Murdoch lashed out at the president on Twitter, while NBCUniversal's Rick Cotton was lying about the bill on MSNBC and Harry Reid was admitting concerns but insisting they must push forward. But the looming Wednesday blackout was gaining steam: Wikipedia officially announced its participation with a tweet from Jimmy Wales, then Google announced that it would join the fray, but not with a full blackout (later revealing a blacked-out logo that drew a lot of attention to its petition page). The Internet Archive (recently declared a rogue site by the entertainment industry) threw its hat into the ring as well, as did gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun and some artists like Peter Gabriel. Even Microsoft, while not joining the blackout, finally made it clear that it opposed the bills in their current form. For our part, we decided that blacking out to raise awareness wouldn't be so helpful on Techdirt where almost all of our readers were well aware of SOPA, and instead spent the day reporting on what was happening.With all this going on, even before the protest there was talk of the bills being dead — but Lamar Smith quickly made it clear that wasn't the case. He and the MPAA both brushed off the planned blackout as a publicity stunt, and Smith put out a press release announcing the next phase of markup for the bills. On blackout day (Wednesday, January 18th) the denial continued, with the MPAA making the astonishing claim that no "big sites" had joined the protests (Wikipedia, Google and Reddit, anyone?) and Chris Dodd spouting sanctimonious bluster about tech companies turning users into their pawns. A whole bunch of creators signed a letter saying they don't want SOPA/PIPA passed in their names, and soon the blackout began to take effect...The first one to go was Rep. Lee Terry, who removed his name as a co-sponsor. On the senate site, Marco Rubio followed suit. Then Senators Boozman, Hatch and Blunt and Rep. Quayle, with more and more joining them as the day progressed. The most entertaining response came from Rep. Bruce Braley of Iowa. At the end of the day, we noted that 8-million people had looked up their Representatives' information with Wikipedia's tool, and posted a gallery of all the blackout screens. Senator Ron Wyden, long-time opponent of the bills, thanked the internet but noted that the work was not yet done.The reaction continued strong into the next day, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell calling for the bill to be dropped all four GOP candidates for the 2012 election said no to SOPA and PIPA. But the most telling responses came from the industries that pushed the bills to begin with: Hollywood studio execs expressed pretty blatant anger at the fact that the government wouldn't stay bought, and the MPAA straight-up threatened politicians who wouldn't stick to its agenda. The RIAA, meanwhile, just condescended to the internet.On Friday, staunch supporter Marsha Blackburn conceded that it was time to scrap SOPA, and by the end of the day the internet had won: the bills were both listed as "delayed" and both Harry Reid and Lamar Smith announced that they would no longer move forward with them. We analyzed a long interview with Chris Dodd to explain why the industry's approach failed, and then began focusing on what comes next.But there was no need to look far, because for all the significance of the victory, SOPA/PIPA were also a prime example of winning the battle not being the same as winning the war. Not only did the Supreme Court choose the blackout day to issue the Golan ruling that allowed works to be yanked back out of the public domain — on Thursday, in the midst of SOPA/PIPA chaos, the DOJ went ahead and unilaterally seized and shut down Megaupload and arrested many of the principles, including Kim Dotcom.They didn't need SOPA to do it. They didn't need anything to do it. Much like the seizures of Dajaz1 and Rojadirecta, they didn't even appear to need especially solid legal footing: at least, they took a whole lot of questionable things as evidence of criminal activity. Some artists like Busta Rhymes spoke out in defence of the site (it being an extremely useful distribution tool) — and then Anonymous struck back with widespread DDoS attacks on entertainment industry websites, prompting some nonsensical free speech complaints from the MPAA and suspicions that the DoJ might have provoked Anonymous on purpose.As we now know, the arrest of Kim Dotcom was just the beginning of another long fight about the overreach of the US government and the influence of the entertainment industry thereon — and we know that's not the only example of a continued war against the supporters of free culture and an open internet. The internet should still take time to remember and celebrate the defeat of SOPA though, if only because we're almost certainly going to have to do the same thing again, and again, and again...

A little over a year ago, we first wrote about the unfortunate situation in which CBS & Paramount had sued a group of people trying to make a fan film in the Star Trek universe, called Axanar. Beyond the basic legal questions, there was a bigger issue here. Paramount has actually been pretty good about allowing fan films. The difference with Axanar was that it was shaping up to be a really good fan film, with professional level actors, sets and staff. And that was what set off Paramount and CBS, who jointly hold the copyrights on Star Trek. The big question then is what's the line between a fan film... and an unauthorized derivative work? This wasn't necessarily a question in the past, but today with the ease of making films (and funding them through platforms like Kickstarter), it becomes a much bigger question.

Apologies to everyone in America. The Department of Justice can't fix what's wrong with the nation's police departments. It's up to those departments to make the changes and stick to them. There has to be a desire to change, otherwise all we'll end up with is better documentation of police misconduct and excessive force.A police department has to fall pretty far before the DOJ is willing to step in. Consent agreements follow reports -- all of which can be described as "scathing". These follow DOJ investigations in which it's routinely discovered the officers employed by the police department either don't know the first thing about constitutionally-compliant policing… or just don't care.Reason's Scott Shackford has read through the DOJ's consent agreement [PDF] with the Baltimore PD -- one that follows its extensive investigation/scathing report. In amongst all the new reporting requirements are passages that indicate Baltimore might be better off firing its entire force and hiring new recruits. The rot growing from within the department has destroyed everything, starting with the Constitution and working its way down to basic communications skills.It's completely depressing that all of this is included in the consent decree.

This story is a rather fast-moving, so let's dig in. Ark: Survival is a survival game in which you hunt dinosaurs. Being a PC game, there is a fairly healthy modding community working with the game to expand it, make slight alterations to it, and even inject other instances of pop culture into it. Case in point is the Pokemon Evolved mod, which replaces the dinos that are to be hunted with, you guessed it, pokemon. As you probably also have already guessed, the mod was hit with a DMCA notice and was briefly taken out of the Steam Workshop.You would be forgiven at this point if you immediately assumed that it was the folks at either Nintendo or The Pokemon Company, both of which have been noticed policing the Pokemon IP aggressively. It was therefore head scratching that much of the reporting was peppered with caution over assigning blame for the DMCA, such as was the case in the original PC Gamer post linked above.

Let's start this off by stipulating that the Red Cross is an organization well known for doing very real humanitarian work. While some have raised questions as to exactly how ethically it spends donor money, the organization is still on the front lines in helping those suffering from natural and man-made disasters. All that being said, the Red Cross has also shown itself to wander over the line of sense when it comes to both video games and policing some of its iconography. Recall that the Red Cross insisted, for instance, that games that allowed players to commit what would constitute war crimes also be required to include virtual punishments for those actions. On policing the use of its icons, the organization has suggested in the past that the use of its red cross symbol on theatre costumes constitutes a violation of The Geneva Conventions.These two realms in which the Red Cross likes to play crazy have now converged, with Mark Morris and Chris Delay, makers of the notorious video game Prison Architects, having received notice that the game's inclusion of an ambulance emblazoned with a red cross constituted a violation of The Geneva Conventions.

As many expected, Donald Trump has chosen former Verizon lawyer and current FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai to head the FCC, according to a report by Politico. According to two anonymous insiders "familiar with the decision," Pai, who met with Trump on Monday, should be formally announced as FCC boss in short order. Pai recently proclaimed that net neutrality's "days are numbered" under Trump, while stating that the reformed FCC would be taking a "weed whacker" to "unnecessary regulations" like the FCC's net neutrality rules and its new consumer broadband privacy protections.Politico rather soft sells the controversy that Pai will represent to those who don't think technology policy should be dictated by Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Charter Communications:

Alongside his general dislike for existing trade deals, Donald Trump singled out the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for particular scorn, calling it "the worst trade deal maybe ever." It looks like he not only plans to renegotiate NAFTA, but he also wants to make that one of his priorities, judging by this story in The Globe and Mail:

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This week has been Copyright Week, put together each year by the EFF and others, giving lots of people and organizations a chance to weigh in on a variety of copyright issues. Each day has its own theme, and in the past, I've tried to participate each day -- as (not surprisingly) I have thoughts about each of the topics. This year, unfortunately, I've been a bit busier than usual, meaning I haven't had as much time to write. But, still, if you check out the Copyright Week site, you can see lots of great articles by others on various topics. This being the last day of Copyright Week, it hits on a topic that I think is the most important of all: copyright and free speech. Last fall, I gave a talk at Wikimedia in which I noted that copyright has a serious free speech problem, and we're never going to fix what ails copyright until we address that simple fact.What's most striking to me is how many people try to completely deny that copyright could ever be used to stifle free expression. It seems intellectually dishonest to make such a claim. There are tons and tons of examples of copyright being used to stifle different forms of expression -- from blocking derivative works to sending bogus takedowns and more. Copyright can be and is frequently used to stifle expression. That should be a concern.On the flip side, many (including, at times, the Supreme Court) have argued that copyright itself is also an engine of free expression. This may also be true. Copyright can both be an engine of expression and stifle expression at the same time. The challenge, then, is to figure out how we can increase the engines of expression while minimizing the ability to stifle expression. And to do that, we need to break down a few different components to explore the competing factors. The first is to look at the question of whether or not copyright is necessary to accomplish the goals of promoting this kind of new speech. In many cases, it very well may be. But I find it difficult to believe that it is the only, or even the most important, tool for doing so. Yet, that is how it is mostly structured today. With copyright automatically applying to any new work created by a person, it doesn't make much sense. Copyright should only make sense when it is the copyright itself that is the incentive for creation. If the work would be created no matter what, even absent the copyright, why is the copyright needed? Why, for example, do I need to get a copyright in every email I write? I can tell you that I have never been incentivized by the copyright system to write an email (other than, perhaps, to email with others about problems of the copyright system).On top of that, what we've seen over the last few years, is that copyright is often not the best incentive for creating new creative content. In an age where we're seeing lots of new business models develop, very few of them are actually dependent on copyright. It raises a serious question of why, by law, we naturally assume that copyright must be the grounding of every content business model, when time has shown it is quite frequently not the best nor the most efficient business model -- and one that is often saddled with downsides and limitations.Given that, it seems quite reasonable to ask why we don't scale back the copyright system to cases where it clearly (or at least likely) is a key part of the incentive for that creation. Doing that wouldn't (by definition!) harm any new creations, but it would take away the ability to abuse the excessive copyrights to stifle freedom of expression in other areas.Similarly, we should look at the situations in which copyright is regularly abused to stifle free expression, and see how to minimize that. A major area for abuse (though hardly the only one) is in bogus DMCA takedowns. That is not to suggest all (or even most) DMCA takedowns are bogus. Many are perfectly legit and do exactly what they're supposed to do. But an unfortunately large number of DMCA notices are used to try to take down content that someone just doesn't like, but which is not in any way infringing. Here, there are a number of possible answers. I probably lean towards moving to a notice-and-notice system, rather than a notice-and-takedown, because that keeps the content up while the receiving party has a chance to counterclaim. Thus, you avoid even the temporary suppression of free speech. Others prefer a solution that puts real meat on punishing those who file bogus DMCA takedowns, which isn't necessarily a bad idea, but could lead to other problems as well.In short, we've designed our copyright system in a dangerous way: it's one that actively encourages the use of copyright to stifle free expression, rather than to encourage it. And that's not just unfortunate for free expression and the free exchange of ideas, it's unfortunate for copyright as well. It's that structure, so open to abuse, that leads people to not respect copyright at all, and to naturally assume it must be all bad, rather than just partially rotten. If the copyright system supporters were serious about bringing respect back to copyright, one area where they should start, and where we could all agree, would be to make these kinds of fixes to copyright law, that would align copyright's incentives properly with encouraging new works, and to move away from the elements of copyright that make it such an easy tool for censorship and stifling freedom of expression.

It never fails (although the proposed solution often does): when faced with the struggles of operating news organizations in the internet era, far too many industry leaders suggest someone else should pay for their failing business models.The favorite target is Google. Google has somehow destroyed the profitability of news media companies by creating an incredibly successful search engine. Even though its search engine directs users to news agencies' websites, there are those in the industry that believe incoming traffic isn't enough to offset their perception that the search engine somehow piggybacks off their success, rather than the other way around.So-called "Google taxes" have been passed into law in countries around the world. In every case, they've been a disaster. In Spain, new agencies begged to have the law rolled back after losing traffic from Google searches. Having seen what didn't work in Spain, Austrian lawmakers floated the same idea, proposing a tax on SINGLE WORDS in search results. The latest bad idea is an EU-wide "snippet tax," because it worked so well in Spain, Spanish newspapers begged the EU to step in and block Google from killing its news article search results in Spain in response to the proposed tax.With all of this data to go on, you'd think the idea would be dead. But it isn't. The EU wants to spread its stupidity across several countries. Meanwhile in Canada, a meeting of minds over the fate of Canadian media companies has culminated in the same exact aneurysm.

Back in 2011 AT&T and Verizon killed off their unlimited wireless data plans, instead replacing them with usage caps and steep (up to $15 per gigabyte) over fees. And while these companies grandfathered the existing unlimited data users at the time, they've spent the lion's share of the last six years waging a not-so-subtle war on these users in an attempt to get them to switch to metered plans. This ranged from AT&T's decision to block Facetime completely for users on unlimited plans, to covertly throttling these users only after a few gigabytes of usage, then lying about it. Repeatedly.

Next month, a rather unusual court case involving copyright will get underway in Argentina:

Questions about how we approach our new robotic friends once the artificial intelligence revolution really kicks off are not new, nor are calls for developing some sort of legal framework that will govern how humanity and robots ought to interact with one another. For the better part of this decade, in fact, there have been some advocating that robots and AI be granted certain rights along the lines of what humanity, or at least animals, enjoy. And, while some of its ideas haven't been stellar, such as a call for robots to be afforded copyright for anything they might create, the EU has been talking for some time about developing policy around the rights and obligations of artificial intelligence and its creators.With AI being something of a hot topic, as predictions of its eventual widespread emergence mount, it seems EU MEPs are attempting to get out ahead of the revolution.

Five years ago this week, Americans opened their internet browsers and saw darkness.Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and other major websites had banded together and gone dark to make a then-obscure piece of legislation infamous. Wikipedia shut down completely for 24 hours and a black band masked the Google logo.These internet giants and other online sites joined millions of Americans in protesting the 2012 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) legislation in a historic grassroots movement. More than four million people signed Google's online petition linked to the blacked-out homepage. Eight million people looked up how to contact their representative when prompted to by Wikipedia. Tumblr alone produced 87,000 calls to representatives. The vast numbers led most congressional sponsors to rescind their support of the bill.SOPA and PIPA were well intended but ill-advised attempts on the part of Congress to protect the American copyright industry. But the legislation was so broad that it had the potential to harm or eradicate entire websites or online services, instead of specifically targeting individuals who uploaded illegal content.The New York Times called the SOPA/PIPA protests a "coming of age for the tech industry," and at CTA, we were proud to help lead this vital growth. It was a bipartisan and cross industry effort: venture capitalists and law professors, computer scientists and human rights advocates, progressives and tea partiers teamed together to fight the bills. Still, the bills progressed through Congress and appeared to have the momentum necessary to become law.The 2012 CES proved to be one of the turning points. We invited two legislators — Republican Congressman Darrell Issa and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden — to Las Vegas to explain how the bill would jeopardize the freedom of the digital world. Both policymakers made strong, smart and passionate cases, and the press and attendees listened. Within days, the tide had reversed, and members of Congress ceased their support of the harmful bills. Weeks later, SOPA and PIPA were history.We did this because we believe innovation, not an overbroad law, is the best way to grow the economy and fight piracy. History has proved us right. In five years since SOPA/PIPA failed, we've seen many instances of market disruptions and many more cases of technological innovation. Spotify, the now-ubiquitous Swedish streaming service, intentionally developed free streaming as a legal competitor to illegal piracy. It worked: piracy has dropped significantly. In 2013, less than 10 percent of daily web traffic in North America came from peer-to-peer file sharing compared to 31 percent in 2008.Even more exciting, streaming services also led to significant revenue growth for the music industry. The Recording Industry Association of America, one of the major supporters of the SOPA/PIPA legislation, reported an 8.1 percent increase in overall revenues from the first half of 2015 to the first half of 2016. This was due in large part to paid subscriptions to streaming services.Other content industries have experienced massive growth as well. Video streaming programs such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu continue to thrive. U.S. consumers spent 22 percent more on subscription video streaming services in 2016 than in 2015.The combination of audio and video streaming takes up a whopping 71 percent of evening home entertainment in North America, and this number should only grow in the coming years. Once at odds on the floor of Congress, the innovation of the tech industry and the creativity of the media industries now mutually support and sustain one another's growth.New technologies will lead to the same market disruptions that the internet prompted for the media industry. Will Congress support new technologies or stifle them? And how will legacy industries evolve to thrive in this changing technological landscape?This year at CES 2017 in Las Vegas, innovators from around the globe came to exhibit technology that will change our world as we know it. Augmented and virtual reality technology will profoundly affect the media landscape, creating a more immersive and personalized experience. Drones have already changed the face of the retail industry, with Amazon making its first drone delivery in time for the holiday season. Self-driving cars will revolutionize the auto industry, decrease traffic deaths and bring increased mobility to the elderly and those with disabilities. In dealing with the challenges that will inevitably arise, will Congress choose to preserve old models and technologies, or will it embrace the new and allow American ingenuity to lead?Five years ago, members of Congress sided with progress over fear. The resulting explosion of innovation proved them right. As other new disruptive technologies emerge, we urge policymakers to heed the lessons of SOPA and PIPA and allow new innovations to prosper, thrive and move our society forward.Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,200 consumer technology companies, and author of the New York Times best-selling books, Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses and The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream. His views are his own. Connect with him on Twitter: @GaryShapiro

Not only is the use of private email accounts to route around public records requests a common practice, it's also an accepted practice. Politicians aren't going to sell out their own in the name of transparency, so there's likely as many private email accounts handling official business as there are government employees. Everyone from former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to Gen. Colin Powell has used private email accounts to handle government communications they'd rather not be made public.The same goes for Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. For years, journalists and government transparency groups have been trying (and suing) to get the mayor to turn over city-related emails contained in his personal accounts. To date, the city of Chicago hasn't budged.But we're living in a "new" era of Chicago-brand transparency -- the aftermath of the city's concerted cover-up of police recordings of the Laquan McDonald shooting. The mayor pledged the city would be more open and forthcoming in the future -- not a difficult promise to make considering there was nowhere to go but up.Roughly a year after that announcement, one layer of opacity has been peeled back by the mayor's office. Given that it was prompted by multiple lawsuits and unsympathetic court rulings, it's probably best to hold any applause until something more proactive is witnessed.

A little over a year ago, we wrote about an appeals court ruling saying that the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) could not reject a trademark based on the fact that it was "disparaging" towards an individual or group. The case focused around whether or not a Portland band named "The Slants" could trademark its name. The band, which is fronted by an Asian American named Simon Tam, had its trademark rejected by the PTO on the claim that it was disparaging to Asians.As I noted at the time, I had struggled with my own opinion on this question as well -- initially arguing that this shouldn't be a First Amendment issue, because refusing to grant a trademark registration in no way interfered with anyone's freedom of expression. Instead, it did the opposite, and made it clear that anyone could make use of the content without restriction or fear of infringing on someone's registered mark (though, a common law trademark may still be an issue). Over time, and after lots of discussions with lots of people on all sides of this issue, I eventually came down on the other side. The key issue was not whether or not speech was blocked, but rather that there's a law that determines something based on the content of speech, and it's that point that makes it a First Amendment issue.The PTO appealed the appeals court ruling, and it's been pretty fascinating to follow the case over the past year. For some fun, I encourage folks to read some of the amicus briefs filed in the case. Public Citizen's brief (in support of neither party) most closely matches my own views. The brief from the think tank Cato is also a fun read in that it tries to make its point about the vagueness of what's disparaging and what's not in somewhat amusing ways:

Alfred de Zayas, who is the UN's "Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and international order" has put out quite a statement in support of President Obama's decision to commute Chelsea Manning's sentence. But de Zayas didn't stop there. He went on to point out that the US government and other governments have been persecuting many other whistleblowers around the world, including Ed Snowden and Julian Assange, and that should stop:

With Trump's telecom advisors and the remaining FCC Commissioners making it abundantly clear that they intend to gut net neutrality rules and dismantle pretty much all of the FCC's consumer watchdog functions, there are more than a few worried companies, startups and consumers concerned that the net neutrality fight is about to get downright stupid. One of Trump's telecom advisors doesn't even think telecom monopolies are real, which should speak volumes about our looming vacation to dysfunction junction.One company that's busy pretending it's not worried is Netflix, which penned a letter to the company's shareholders this week (pdf) insisting that it doesn't expect the death of net neutrality rules to materially impact the company's revenues: