There are about 100 AT&T lobbyists currently making the rounds in Washington, trying to convince regulators and the press that the deal will provide an incredible boon to consumers. The folks who actually try to protect consumers aren't so sure, arguing that a larger combined company could make it harder than ever for streaming competitors to license the content they need to compete with AT&T (and its own streaming service, DirecTV Now). And that's before you even get to the fact that AT&T's using usage caps to give its own services an unfair leg up in the market (aka zero rating).But AT&T's path toward deal approval just got notably easier. While the deal will be reviewed by the DOJ, AT&T and Time Warner are configuring the deal so that it doesn't trigger any of the requirements for FCC review. As it stands, the FCC's jurisdiction would only extend to the deal with the transfer of certain spectrum licenses, or one of Time Warner's TV stations in Atlanta. But Time Warner just got done stating they'd be selling that station ahead of the merger. And new FCC boss Ajit Pai says he doesn't see the need for FCC involvement in the review process:

We've just written about the use of body cameras in UK schools. One reason these trials are taking place is probably because the technology is now relatively cheap, which lowers previous barriers to deploying it. So it should perhaps come as no surprise to learn from a new report from Big Brother Watch that body cameras are also widely used by UK local government departments (pdf). Here are some of the figures Big Brother Watch gathered using Freedom of Information requests to over 400 UK councils:

Update: The original story incorrectly suggested that the USPTO had allowed a trademark on "the Kitchen" when that's not the case. We've edited the article to correct that impression, and apologize for the error.Generic terms that are allowed trademark protection are the bane of those that still believe trademark law serves a useful function. For the law to work as intended, to protect the public's ability to know what they're buying and from whom they are buying it, trademarks need to be both unique and identifying.Take one current trademark dispute, for instance, which happily includes such big names as Wolfgang Puck and the brother of Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk. Those two are currently battling over whether or not the term "the kitchen" ought to be trademarked for the restaurant industry. Puck is opening new digs in Chicago with the name "The Kitchen by Wolfgang Puck." Musk is one of the founders of The Kitchen Cafe out of Colorado. Musk filed a lawsuit against Puck in Colorado over the trademark issue, with Puck's lawyers filing a motion to dismiss while also filing suit in Illinois to have the Chicago area be the venue for the litigation.The Colorado complaint filed by Musk's company makes the following claim.

It's been more than a bit perplexing to watch ESPN, sports television giant though it may be, shrug its shoulders at the cord-cutting trend that has refused to bend to the network's pleasure. With streaming being a thing, and that super-charging the cord-cutting revolution, we've made the point for some time that the sports broadcast industry was eventually going to feel the grip of fewer subscribers, as has been the case with much of the rest of the television medium. Yet ESPN barely reacted at all to cord-cutting, other than to insist that established ratings systems are crap and that its loss of millions of subscribers over the past few years was of no concern, mostly because those subscribers were poor. ESPN President John Skipper said just last year:

From its humble origins as an online bookseller that many people worried might not survive, Amazon has grown into a critical piece of the web's backbone via its Amazon Web Services platform. Last week's S3 outage made this painfully clear, and understandably raised lots of concerns — especially after it was revealed that the whole thing was caused by a typo. So this week we're discussing whether something needs to be done, and what that might be.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 first major ruling [PDF] by a Canadian court applying the country's anti-circumvention laws has been handed down and it's not good news. The law provides for a few exceptions to its broad restrictions on bypassing technological protection mechanisms (TPMs), but as the court sees it, any anti-circumvention process that might lead to infringement violates the statute.Not that the courts have done a great job interpreting the law to this point. In 2015, a Canadian judge ruled that simply asking for a copy of a paywalled article was illegal circumvention. The lawsuit at hand -- reported by Michael Geist -- isn't a great test case for exploring the outer limits of the anti-circumvention law. But the conclusions reached have severely negative implications for others not quite so entangled in facilitating infringement.Go Cyber Shopping made mod chips for Nintendo products that allowed users to bypass built-in protections to play "homebrew" games and, of course, pirated carts. Go Cyber defended its products by attempting to highlight the "homebrew" aspect, rather than the chip's ability to defeat Nintendo's copyright protection schemes. As is to be expected, Nintendo's lawyers did a far better job presenting their case than Go Cyber's did.

As you've probably heard by now, this morning Wikileaks started releasing a new cache of information regarding CIA hacking tools. This is interesting on a variety of levels, but many of the reports focus on the claims that encrypted chat apps like Signal, Whatsapp and Telegram may be compromised. See the top two links in this screenshot:Wikileaks itself may have contributed to this view with the following paragraph in its release:

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We've been writing about the sheer insanity of asset forfeiture for many, many years. If you happen to have missed it, civil asset forfeiture is the process by which the government can just take your stuff by arguing that it must have been the proceeds of criminal activity. They literally file a lawsuit against your stuff, not you. And, here's the real kicker: in most places, they never have to file any lawsuits about the actual crime, let alone get a conviction. They just get to take your stuff, say that it must have been the proceeds of a crime, and unless you go through the insanely expensive and burdensome process of demanding it back, they effectively get to walk off with your stuff. Law enforcement has literally referred to the process as going shopping. Most people who understand what's going on recognize that it's just state-sponsored theft.I'm constantly amazed to find people who simply don't believe civil asset forfeiture could possibly work the way it does. The whole process is so crazy and so lacking in basic due process, that many people literally find it unbelievable. And while some states have moved towards requiring a criminal conviction to keep the stuff, many don't have that, and our President and Attorney General are huge fans of civil asset forfeiture -- so it's unlikely to change any time soon.That is, unless the courts get involved. While the Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal on yet another egregious case of civil asset forfeiture, Justice Clarence Thomas issued an accompanying statement suggesting that he's having trouble understanding how civil asset forfeiture could possibly be legal in its current form. The case in question is egregious, but not all that unlike many other cases we've written about. People travelling with a large sum of cash (for a perfectly legit reason) are stripped of the cash by law enforcement who doesn't believe their reasons -- and then never files any criminal charges or anything, but just takes off with the cash:

While Trump, the GOP and new FCC boss Ajit Pai really want to kill net neutrality protections for AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, it likely won't happen at the FCC. As it stands, rolling back the rules via the same FCC process that birthed them would require showing the courts that things have dramatically changed since the FCC's major court win last year. Such a process would also involve another lengthy public comment period, during which the record-setting four million public comments filed during the rule creation could appear diminutive.So if you're an ISP lobbyist looking to kill net neutrality rules, how do you accomplish this without causing a massive public shitstorm? Why you table ghost write (corrected, thanks commenters) a bill that pretends to save and protect net neutrality, while wording it to do the exact opposite, of course!It's widely believed that the GOP intends to table a net neutrality bill sometime this year, either as a standalone bill or part of a Communications Act rewrite (with a heavy emphasis on killing the FCC's consumer-protection authority). The man likely to lead that effort is Senator John Thune, who last week took to the op-ed pages of Ars Technica to begin making his public case for such a proposal. Thune begins his sales pitch with, unfortunately, a lie:

Time for German parents to have "The Talk" with their kids. Unprotected sexual activity is probably fine. But casual seeding? That's a problem.TorrentFreak reports that a German court has decided to hold a parent responsible for his child's infringing activity. This doesn't have much to do with the rightsholder being unable to extract fines from a minor, but rather a perceived parenting failure.

Remember all the bravado behind John Steele and his copyright porn trolling? I've noted in the past that Steele reminded me of some guys I knew in college who believed that they were so smart that they could do whatever they wanted, and talk their way out later if they got into trouble. And, for many years, it seemed that Steele was fairly successful in doing exactly that. Remember all his big talk right after Judge Otis Wright referred Steele and his partners to law enforcement over his copyright trolling efforts? At the time, he yelled and screamed about how it was unfair and unprecedented, and insisted loudly that he would prevail.

So if you hadn't been paying attention, most of the "smart" products you buy are anything but intelligent when it comes to your privacy and security. Whether it's your refrigerator leaking your gmail credentials or your new webcam being hacked in minutes for use in massive new DDoS attacks, the so-called "smart" home is actually quite idiotic. So-called smart-televisions have been particularly problematic, whether that has involved companies failing to encrypt sensitive data, to removing features if you refuse to have your daily viewing habits measured and monetized.Last month Vizio joined this not-so-distinguished club when it was discovered that the company's TVs had been spying on users for the last several years. Vizio's $2.2 million settlement with the FTC indicates that the company at no time thought it might be a good idea to inform customers this was happening. The snooping was part of a supposed "Smart Interactivity" feature deployed in 2014 that claimed to provide users with programming recommendations, but never actually did so. In short, it wasn't so much what Vizio was doing, it was the fact the company tried to bullshit its way around it.And while Vizio may have settled the FTC investigation into its snooping televisions, the company now faces an additional class action after a California federal judge late last week denied the company's motion to dismiss. The court ruled that Vizio customers' claimed injuries were "sufficiently concrete" to bring suit under the Video Privacy Protection and Wiretap Acts:

For reasons unknown, a federal judge has said the hell with free speech and steered the court into the First Amendment-troubling waters of prior restraint.It's another defamation lawsuit that doesn't spend too much time dealing with defamation, preferring to focus on Lanham Act violations and tortious interference. Purple Innovations, maker of a (purple) bed-in-a-box mattress, is suing the Honest Mattress Reviews website, along with Ryan Monahan, former "Chief Brand Officer" for Purple Innovations competitor, Ghostbed, and creator of the site.Unlike other defamation suits we've covered here -- especially those attempting to dodge anti-SLAPP motions by presenting themselves as trademark suits -- Purple's complaint is long and detailed. Purple feels multiple posts at Honest Mattress Reviews have falsely disparaged the company and its products. All of the posts center on the white "powder" Purple uses to coat its mattresses during packaging to prevent it from sticking to itself.Purple's Lanham Act claims rest on Monahan's alleged conflicted interests, even as it admits in its filing that Monahan is no longer associated with GhostBed. It points to several statements posted at Honest Mattress Reviews which infer the powder used by Purple might be dangerous or unhealthy. HMR offers no proof of these assertions, but very few of them are actual assertions. In most cases, they're merely implications, surrounded by phrasing and pull quotes that help make the patent-pending substance appear more dangerous than Purple claims it is. Purple hasn't offered too many specifics in defense of its white powder, citing its pending patent as the reason it can't be more specific about the powder's composition.At this point, we don't know much about the merits of Purple's arguments, and nothing at all about the merits of Honest Mattress Review's defense. The defendants haven't been allowed to respond yet. The path to Purple's granted restraining order has been completely non-adversarial. Not a single document has been filed or motion entered by the defendants. [click through to enlarge]In less than a week, Purple has:(a) accidentally sued itself(b) had the case transferred from a magistrate to district court judge(c) asked for a restraining order(d) received a restraining order(e) asked for contempt charges to be brought against the defendantsPurple has filed a 102-page complaint [PDF] and a 174-page restraining order request [PDF], the latter of which is basically the 102-page complaint with 70 pages of website screenshots. Without seeing anything more than Purple's allegations, Judge Dee Benson has granted the request [PDF]. Not only does it require Honest Mattress Reviews to take down existing posts about Purple Innovations and its packing powder, it forbids the defendants from discussing the lawsuit in any way the court disapproves of.

There's been something of a trend recently in which the digital realm of video games have begun penetrating reality. This has taken several forms, from many countries attempting to dress up their real world military capabilities using video game footage, to infractions within the gaming realm resulting in real world criminal charges. This has come to be in part because gaming has become a dominant form of entertainment for so much of the population and in part because of how realistic games have become.But neither seems to be much of a factor in what I think is a first: Bolivia has filed a dipolomatic complaint with France in response to the country's fictionalized portrayal in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands.

For years we've pointed out the sheer insanity of the TSA's security theater, which is intrusive, insulting and does little to actually make us any safer. One aspect (of many) that has been particularly troubling is the way that the TSA has basically enabled sexual assault of travelers. If you felt that wasn't too bad, have no fear, the TSA is apparently increasing the sexual assaulty nature of these searches:

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You'd think city lawyers would talk to other lawyers before sending cease-and-desist letters to citizens. Or, at the very least, page through a few pamphlets on intellectual property law before threatening people with legal actions completely unmoored from statutory authority. But if they all did this, what would we write about?The city of Tamarac, Florida, is the latest participant in the long-running MMO we call "The Streisand Effect." Apparently, the city doesn't like its logo being used by someone who has little respect for the city's governance. It would presumably approve of its logo being adjacent to more respectful writing, but the lack of legal threats directed at home-teamers makes it difficult to gather test cases.As the Miami New Times reports, the city of Tamarac is unamused by a blogger's disrespectful parodying of its logo/leader.

Uber, but for private jets. That's JetSmarter's pitch. But just as Uber has engaged in some questionable behavior in its quest for marketshare, so has JetSmarter. You won't be able to find many negative reviews of the service because any journalist taking a test flight without delivering a puff piece is going to see their bank account take a hit.The Verge received this highly-questionable offer to "review" JetSmarter.

Considering the new administration has stepped up its ousting of immigrants, expressed its disinterest in pursuing civil rights investigations of the nation's law enforcement agencies, applauded asset forfeiture, and declared war on leakers, it comes as no surprise the White House supports a clean reauthorization of Section 702 surveillance.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes in response to Sean Spicer's about face on the Confide app, which prompted one anonymous commenter to point out a second layer of hypocrisy:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, we saw a somewhat parallel pair of bogus takedowns followed by apologies. First, there was the infamous Rumblefish incident in which a YouTube copyright claim was issued over birds singing in the background of a video, leading the CEO to explain the series of errors that lead to the mistake while missing most of the core point. The other incident targeted us here at Techdirt: one of our key posts about SOPA/PIPA was stripped from Google after a bogus DMCA takedown notice, garnering multiple apologies.Also this week in 2012, the Aereo lawsuit finally began, and two pieces of memorable viral content were introduced: The Oatmeal's comic about the difficulty of legally obtaining Game Of Thrones and the fantastic Polish essay We, The Web Kids about the anti-ACTA generation (if you haven't read it in a while, read it again).Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, Mike was at the Tech Policy Summit, where Howard Berman was blaming the pharmaceutical industry for holding back patent reform and the patent panel couldn't come up with any real solutions for the system. Overall, the event seemed to suffer from a lack of tech in the tech/policy balance. Meanwhile, following the Oscars, the Motion Picture Academy made the inexplicable decision to pull all videos of the ceremony off the web with the bizarre reasoning of wanting to whet the appetite for the next year's awards.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, the W3C was engaged in a critical fight over how to handle patented technologies in web standards, mirroring today's fight over EME in the nature of the problem (but not, so far, in the nature of the solution). CNN was musing about the future of charging for news online while the New York Times was deeming blogs a fad. Jack Valenti was arguing with Lawrence Lessig over copy protection schemes, a Senator was bashing Intel over the same thing, and the music industry was predictably blaming its problems on downloaders.Perhaps most notably, it was this week in 2002 that the EFF and various law schools launched ChillingEffects, the irreplaceable resource now known as Lumen.Two-Hundred And Twenty-Six Years AgoLong ago in the history of communication technology, there was a revolution that often goes under-discussed: the semaphore line. Though some designs exist from as early as the 17th century, it was on March 2nd, 1791 that one of the first practical experiments happened: at the height of the French Revolution, the Chappe brothers used a system based on colored panels, clocks and telescopes to transmit a message nearly 10 miles from Brulon to Parce.

Crisis management must be a full-time job at Uber. I've argued in the past that some of the attacks on the company are greatly exaggerated, but it keeps running into crisis after crisis -- many of them avoidable. The latest is a big scoop in the NY Times about how Uber has a special program called Greyball (a play on "blackball," get it?) that helped it determine if regulators were trying to get rides and then avoid sending a car. Here are the basics from the article by Mike Isaac:

The latest arena for deployment of cell tower spoofers is prisons. Along with the diminished rights and lowered expectation of privacy afforded to prisoners, those incarcerated can now expect their cell phone calls to be blocked or intercepted.The Register reports a new bill being introduced in the UK would give prisons legal authority to install IMSI catchers to monitor prisoners' communications and track/locate contraband devices. The use of Stingray devices in prisons isn't exactly new, although it hasn't really received much attention. Last year, Motherboard reported the Scottish prison system had been deploying cell tower spoofers for one specific reasons: to make prisoners' cell phone communications impossible. The devices blocked 2G and 3G signals, according to FOI'ed documents. (The documents also noted prisoners had already defeated the repurposed cell tower spoofers, so whatever was included in those documents is already outdated.)In the US, prisons are using similar devices, although no one has copped to deploying a name-brand Stingray within the walls of a prison. ACLU tech head Chris Soghoian's 2014 report on Stingray devices cites a Commerce Department paper on the use of cell tower spoofers to thwart communications and locate contraband devices.There's a twist in the UK legislation, though, that takes it past previous prison surveillance efforts. This bill would compel the cooperation of telcos, rather than make use of existing cell tower spoofer technology.

Public servants discussing public business. Should be public records, right? California politicians don't think so. The city of San Jose has spent eight years litigating the issue, hoping for the state's courts to find it permissible for public officials to hide official communications in personal email accounts and personal devices.In 2009, activist Ted Smith requested records from the city of San Jose, triggering a long-running lawsuit which has only now reached its conclusion. A state appeals court previously ruled for the city, finding records stored in personal accounts/devices to be beyond the reach of the state's public records laws.Fortunately, as the EFF reports, the state's supreme court has overturned that decision, making it much more difficult for public officials to stay out of the public eye. The decision [PDF] deals with the many arguments the city made -- several of which attempted to rewrite public records laws on the fly by taking certain phrases out of their context -- but the bottom line is this: public records still belong to the public, no matter where they're stored.

Techdirt has always been a place where we have discussed new emerging business models for the entertainment industry, including the music business. For far too long, there has been a battle about how musicians should monetize their art, with one side claiming that infinitely reproducable music files should be costly out of respect for the musicians and the labels that produce them, and the other side pointing out that this doesn't make any economic sense and that there are plenty of ways for artists to monetize their work without pretending the internet doesn't exist. Free music has always been at the forefront of this discussion, as some artists have given away music files as a way to make money elsewhere: live concerts, merchandise, etc. Yet, no matter how much money the new models can and do make for those musicians that embrace them, there is a stigma about what is essentially art enjoyed for free. And that stigma is often dressed up as a concern for artists.Yet that concern must wane as examples of artists making the internet work for them have proliferated. And those examples are no longer relegated to smaller artists with short music lifespans. Recently, Killer Mike and El-P from the exploding hiphop group Run The Jewels were guests on The Daily Show (we can't embed the video because Comedy Central, stupidly and inexplicably, doesn't use HTTPS — but you can view it at that link, or this one for our Canadian readers). While most of that conversation didn't revolve around the music industry, the first few minutes of the interview certainly did and both artists' explanation for why they chose to give away their music should sound quite familiar to Techdirt readers. Here's El-P:

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I can only assume Mike Pence is so self-absorbed he's literally incapable of recognizing his own hypocrisy. Either that or he's completely shameless.After engaging in a presidential campaign where much was made of Hillary Clinton's private email address/server, Pence went to court to prevent his AOL emails from being released to public records requesters.I can only assume Pence is now welcoming an FBI investigation into his use of an AOL account.Clinton routed sensitive documents through an insecure personal server. Pence is doing the same. While Clinton was advised against setting up her own personal email server, it's likely Pence has had an AOL account for a long, long, long time. Sure, there's a difference between taking matters into your own hands and leaving your email security up to a third party, but the end result is no different: both were using private accounts to handle government business -- business that included the classified and sensitive information.The main difference here is we know Pence's email account has been hacked. There were attempts made on Clinton's email server, but nothing out there suggests any of those attacks were successful. Considering Pence's earlier adamance about Clinton's careless email habits, it's probably time to invite the FBI to take a look at his careless handling of sensitive documents.

You may have heard, recently, about a series of reports about sexual harassment (and general sexism and other similarly awful behavior) in Silicon Valley. It's not a new thing, but it's getting a lot of necessary attention right now and it's seriously messed up. It's unacceptable. It needs to stop -- and people need to speak up about it, and to come down hard on anyone who's engaging in it or letting it slide. If you're doing the kind of crap being discussed, stop it now (and go apologize). If someone tells you you're acting inappropriately, listen to them. And if you see someone else doing something awful, tell them to knock it off and then follow through.It's no secret that, in general, I'm a fan of Silicon Valley and the innovations that are created here. Indeed, it's been argued by some that I'm too supportive of Silicon Valley at times. But, to me, it's the innovation that's important, and the way that it can make our lives better. When companies are doing bad things that can negatively impact that innovation, they should be called out on it. For example, a few years ago, we thought it was a good thing that many companies in Silicon Valley got into serious trouble for colluding to prevent poaching of workers from one another. That was bad news, anti-competitive and anti-innovation. As we've discussed for years, widespread job mobility is a key component to innovation in the tech sector.Another thing that's a key component to innovation? Diversity and a range of perspectives and ideas. That's one of the (many) reasons we've advocated for more immigration for high tech workers and also against this administration's effort to restrict immigration of all kinds. The basic human issues behind it are most important, but the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives is in there as well. To create better innovations that help the world, we need it to be driven by more than just a subset of the population who come from similar backgrounds.That's another reason why it sucks to see more and more evidence of massive, and widespread, sexism and sexual harassment in Silicon Valley. Again, this isn't something new. It's been going on for a while. But it's finally getting some necessary sunlight. It kicked off with a somewhat horrifying post by Susan Fowler about her experiences at Uber, in which the HR department appeared to bend over backwards to not do anything in response to repeated reports of seriously inappropriate behavior at the company. The Guardian has now published a similar account from an engineer at Tesla.The Guardian also has another article detailing even more horrific stories of totally inappropriate behavior towards women. I've seen some arguing that at least some of these claims are exaggerated, but that doesn't matter and it's a bullshit excuse. Just the fact that anything even remotely like this happened is disgusting and unacceptable.

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The Catholic Church has made some noises in recent years about attempts to modernize itself for the digital age. This modernization has taken different forms, from the Vatican attempting to create a special copyright over all things Pope some years back to selling indulgences in exchange for Pope-level Twitter followers. Somewhat strangely, the Church's last Pope actually spoke out against overreaching intellectual property, which appears to be at odds with the current Vatican administration.That's because the Vatican recently came out and suggested that it will soon begin strictly policing the way the images of Pope Francis and certain Vatican iconography are used by third parties.

For years, electric utilities have increasingly embraced smart meters. Roughly 65 million of the devices have been installed in the United States over the last few years, with 57 million of them in consumer homes. The meters provide innumerable benefits to utility companies, often delivering an ocean of new remote access and monitoring tools to better manage the network and reduce meter reading truck rolls. The benefits to consumers (outside of accuracy) have been less notable, including interference with some home routers, as well as the fact that a number of models have been shown to be relatively easily hacked.In addition to hackability, the sheer volume of data being gobbed up by utility companies tells an awful lot about you (when you wake, when you sleep, when you're home or away). This has, at times, sparked outrage from locals in places like Naperville, Illinois, where, since 2011, meter opponents have been fighting the intrusive nature of the devices:

Techdirt has been following India's construction of the world's largest biometric database, called Aadhaar, since July 2015. Concerns include the fact that what was billed as a voluntary system has been morphing into a compulsory one, and evidence that Aadhaar simply can't cope with real-life biometrics. Undeterred, the Indian government wants to expand the system even further by opening it up for use by companies, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

Update: We've made some corrections to this piece to clarify that, while this is a victory for Jim Sterling, it's a result of Digital Homicide agreeing to a settlement, rather than the court tossing the lawsuit, as the original suggested.The saga of game developer Digital Homicide whipped through our pages like an idiotic windstorm. This gust of blustery nonsense started with the company's lawsuit against a game critic, Jim Sterling, then moved on to it suing Steam users over reviews they wrote, before twirling into the stage where Valve banned Digital Homicide games from Steam entirely and the company stated it planned to shut down operations. All of that happened in the span of six months, which would be impressive if it weren't so sad.Still, the resolution of the threats against Steam users wasn't the end of the story. The lawsuit against Sterling was still out there, a $10 million dollar anvil hanging over the game critic's head. Until this week, that is, when the court in which the suit had been filed dismissed it with prejudice as part of a settlement agreement between the two parties.

The saga of game developer Digital Homicide whipped through our pages like an idiotic windstorm. This gust of blustery nonsense started with the company's lawsuit against a game critic, Jim Sterling, then moved on to it suing Steam users over reviews they wrote, before twirling into the stage where Valve banned Digital Homicide games from Steam entirely and the company stated it planned to shut down operations. All of that happened in the span of six months, which would be impressive if it weren't so sad.Still, the resolution of the threats against Steam users wasn't the end of the story. The lawsuit against Sterling was still out there, a $10 million dollar anvil hanging over the game critic's head. Until this week, that is, when the court in which the suit had been filed dismissed it with prejudice.

When copyright is deployed as a censor, it usually means the removal of content. In the case of Freddy Martinez of Lucy Parsons Lab (instrumental in peeling back the opacity covering the Chicago PD's "black budget"), copyright is the excuse being given to prevent the release of information.Martinez was hoping to obtain a copy of an instructional film the Chicago PD shows to incoming officers. This video -- made more than 30 years ago -- was highlighted in the DOJ's damning civil rights report. The DOJ noted that the video was outdated and the instructors presenting the film did absolutely nothing to ensure engagement or, you know, provide actual instruction.From the report:

The phone calls are coming from inside the house, it seems. The newly minted Trump government has suffered under one of the most porous climates in recent Presidential memory, with leaks leaking to the press from seemingly everywhere. This is happening for several reasons, which include enabling technology for such leaks to occur, the controversial nature of our current President and some of his actions, and the fact that, whatever else one might want to say about President Trump, his administration is certainly active, meaning there is much more about which to leak. This has led to Trump, along with members of his team, making strange noises about a crackdown of these leaks. The threats incorporated in this crackdown have included FBI investigations (where many of the leaks have come from), random phone checks by the communications staff with Sean Spicer playing Angry Dad, and the promise of the purging of any longstanding government staffers suspected of leaking information to the press.And, yet, the leaks persist. And they often persist in laughable ways. We already had Spicer's phone-check and leak-plugging emergency meeting with his staff leak to the press. Now the Washington Post has an article all about the State Department's memo that warned State staff against leaking anything to the press.

FCC boss Ajit Pai made it clear that overturning net neutrality would be the new FCC's top priority (apparently right behind paying lip service to the poor), and his behavior is making it very clear that wasn't an empty promise. Pai recently killed the FCC's inquiry into Verizon and AT&T's zero rating, which lets both companies use arbitrary usage caps to give their own content an unfair market advantage. The previous FCC argued both ISPs were violating net neutrality and engaged in anti-competitive behavior. The new FCC, in contrast, now says zero rating "enhances competition in the wireless marketplace."Now Pai's chipping away at the transparency portion of the FCC's net neutrality rules as well, insisting they're little more than "excessive reporting obligations." The transparency requirements, originally passed in 2010, required that ISPs make the following items perfectly clear when selling service to consumers:

Copyright trolls still labor under the (deliberate) misconception that an IP address is a person. Sometimes judges allow it. Sometimes judges remind them not to conflate the two. And sometimes -- well, maybe just this once -- the IP address being sued is actually a Tor exit node, evidence of nothing. (h/t Raul)In an opinion handed down by Judge Michael Simon, the person Dallas Buyers Club is suing for infringement will be subject to adverse jury instructions thanks to the Tor exit node DBC sued. The order refers to alleged evidence spoliation by the defendant, who shut down his exit node after being sued. The defendant has (correctly) pointed out "Evidence of what?" because it's highly unlikely his node would cough up any usable identifying information about infringers utilizing the node.All DBC had was an IP address, and it wasn't linked to the defendant -- at least not in terms of it being his personal computer.

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If your city has red light cameras installed, the length of time that yellow lights stay yellow largely depends on how much revenue the cameras are generating, rather than how much safer the intersection is.The Newspaper reports Fremont, California officials are mucking about with yellow light timing, supposedly to adhere to local regulations. But one can't help but notice the dramatic drop in citations that follows any lengthening of yellow lights.

So for several years now, the broadband industry (and the politicians, think tankers, and policy folk paid to love them) has desperately tried to claim that the FCC's net neutrality rules killed investment in broadband networks, clouding the entire telecom market in a dark shroud of "regulatory uncertainty." And it doesn't matter how many times we (and others) debunk this claim, it just keeps popping up like an undead groundhog. The reality is this: net neutrality had zero negative impact on the CAPEX, growth, or financials of major broadband providers. It simply isn't true.And yet this narrative was front and center in a speech given this week by FCC boss Ajit Pai at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. At the event, Pai reiterated his disdain for net neutrality, claiming the rules were a "mistake" that caused, you guessed it, a massive network investment decline:

Netzpolitik -- once on the receiving end of treason charges for reporting on leaked documents -- is marking the end of the so-called "inquiry" into the BND-NSA partnership with a post discussing the inquiry's multiple failures. The German government's investigation into Five Eyes spy efforts was a direct result of leaked Snowden documents, which showed the NSA had spied on the German chancellor.It failed to uncover much about that particular allegation. By the time this part of the investigation had been dropped, President Obama had already apologized for the NSA doing perfectly normal NSA-type stuff: spying on foreign officials. The committee turned to a broader discussion of surveillance best practices, including the propriety of spying on friends and neighbors. In doing so, it uncovered plenty of illicit and ill-advised spying by its NSA equivalent, BND.Netzpolitik has a full list of BND's questionable surveillance targets, including friendly foreign officials, journalists, EU officials, the UN, human aid organizations, banks, rating agencies, and a number of American companies. (Do unto others, etc.)But when it came to actually examining BND's tactics and programs, the committee opted to dwell on legal minutia.

A report released by the San Diego Police Department shows its body-worn camera program is actually doing some good.

The finding and booking of flights is a massive and elaborate global mechanism that contains both fascinating technology and useful secrets. This week, we're joined by Adam Fletcher, co-founder of Gyroscope Software and an architect of Google's airline reservation system, to talk about all the technology behind commercial air travel today.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.

I've known Bas Grasmayer for many years, and he's a super insightful digital/music strategist and has written a bunch of posts for us over the years. He tends to be on the cutting edge of any digital music startup -- so it's little surprise that he first got a Soundcloud account way back in 2008 or 2009, soon after Soundcloud started. His account is at soundcloud.com/bas/ because, well, that's his name. So it was a bit of a shock for Bas to get this notice from Soundcloud yesterday:If you can't read that, it says:

For the last four years, the Web has had to live with a festering wound: the threat of DRM being added to the HTML 5 standard in the form of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). Here on Techdirt, we've written numerous posts explaining why this is a really stupid idea, as have many, many other people. Despite the clear evidence that EME will be harmful to just about everyone -- except the copyright companies, of course -- the inventor of the Web, and director of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has just given his blessing to the idea:

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We recently submitted our comments to the Copyright Office's ongoing study on DMCA safe harbors, but perhaps we should have been a bit more creative. At least that seems to be the plan of the Content Creators Coalition, which has made its submission in the form of a video starring producer T Bone Burnett doing his best Werner-Herzog-without-the-accent impression. It's... quite something. (Amusingly it's also hosted on Vimeo, a site which — like all sites hosting user content — relies heavily on DMCA safe harbors for its existence, and indeed prevailed in a major legal battle over that very thing last year.)Probably the word most prominent in my mind after watching that is dramatic, with optional prefixes such as melo- and over-. It starts out like this:

Last week we watched as Verizon, a company that spent years telling users they didn't want or need unlimited data, was forced to bring back unlimited data. AT&T quickly followed suit with similar plans of its own, despite having spent years waging a not so subtle war on grandfathered unlimited connection customers. The reason for this sudden collective about-face? The continued rise of T-Mobile, which has increasingly brought something vaguely resembling competition to the wireless sector (even if non-price, often superficial competition remains the predominant law of the land).While this was happening, we've been noting how new FCC boss Ajit Pai has been taking an axe to consumer protections, moving to gut broadband privacy rules, making it easier for prison telco monopolies to rip off inmate families, and killing efforts to bring competition to the cable box. Pai also recently killed off the FCC's inquiry into zero rating, after the former FCC stated Verizon and AT&T were using usage caps to give their own content an unfair market advantage.If you ask industry lobbyists, this behavior makes Pai an incredible consumer champion. Apparently that narrative is very much alive in Pai's head as well. In a speech this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Pai was quick to proclaim that he's simply returning to an era of "light-touch" regulation of telecom, one that will result in massive, unspecified benefits to all: