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It wouldn't be a month at Techdirt without one group or another engaging in a fit of moral hysteria over something they really don't need to spend precious calories worrying about. Whether it's the false claim that video games create deadly assassins, VR makes us slaves to Mark Zuckerberg, smartphones have demolished cultural civility or having Google at our fingertips makes us dumber, there's always something new to waste time having a hissy fit over.

So, it's come to this. After battling back against ad-blocking by guilting or forcing people into whitelisting sites -- rather than taking a good look at their terrible ad inventories, intrusive trackers, or reprehensible practices -- the press is turning to the FTC in hopes of having the government decide how you can surf the web. (h/t EFF)The crux of the complaint [PDF] is various practices deployed by ad blockers that the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) considers to be anti-competitive or dishonest. But in its run-up to the actual complaints, the NAA makes some seriously stupid assertions.

Fair use is apparently the last refuge of a scofflaw. Following on the heels of a Sony rep's assertion that people could avail themselves of fair use for the right price, here comes the New York Times implying fair use not only does not exist, but that it runs more than $6/word.

Just over four years ago, Canada Post filed a copyright infringement suit against GeoCoder.ca, which describes itself as follows:

The War on Shoplifters.This is what was left of Leo Lech's home after the Greenwood Village police were done with it. Lech had done nothing wrong. In fact, he wasn't even home. By the point the local PD had decided to turn a standoff with a suspect into a one-house reenactment of the Battle of Fallujah, the only person inside was Robert Jonathan Seacat -- originally wanted for nothing more than shoplifting.This was all fully justified, according to the police chief, because Seacat had opened fire on police officers during the standoff.According to Lech's lawsuit, those shots -- five of them, nine hours into the standoff -- by Seacat were met by tear gas, flash bangs, and "72 chemical bombs." Sure, it turns out Seacat had a backpack (and lower intestine) full of drugs, but the police didn't know that when they began their assault. Of course, the complete destruction of an unrelated family's house was considered copacetic because no one died.

Man's best friend, the dog, has a mysterious and complex relationship with people. Ancient humans presumably domesticated wolves or some other closely related species a long time ago -- perhaps multiple times on different continents. The story of dogs and wolves and people is far from over, getting ever more interesting as we learn more about ancient dog specimens and create more genetically-engineered dogs.

Yet another vehicle heavily advertised as being "smart" has proven to be notably less secure than its older, dumber counterparts. This week, researchers discovered that flaws in the Mitsubishi Outlander leave the vehicle's on-board network vulnerable to all manner of hacker attack, allowing an intruder to disable the alarm system, drain the car's battery, control multiple vehicle functions, and worse.

Nearly two years ago, we wrote about a bonkers lawsuit against the makers of the film American Hustle, brought by a journalist who used to make remarks about what microwaves do to the food we eat. The lawsuit was essentially over Jennifer Lawrence's character, who had been built up in the film as a complete know-nothing whack-job, misinterpreting a historical article by Paul Brodeur in the film. This kind of thing is not remotely actionable, and such portrayals are not only protected against the libel and defamation claims Brodeur made by that pesky First Amendment thing we have, but in the context of the film there was simply zero chance of Brodeur suffering any harm from an insane character's misunderstanding of his article's position. I took the time to write about it because the idea of someone suing over this is hilarious, but the court forced to listen to this insanity couldn't take the same snarky position I did.So instead, when a California appeals court tossed the lawsuit entirely, it had to keep a straight face to explain its reasoning.

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.

Not sure what's going on in California, but it's been suddenly issuing a bunch of really bad rulings concerning Section 230 of the CDA (the most important law on the internet). As we've explained many times, Section 230 says that online services cannot be held liable for actions of their users (and also, importantly, that if those platforms do decide to moderate content in any way, that doesn't impact their protections from liability). This is massively important for protecting free speech online, because it means that platforms don't have to proactively monitor user behavior out of fear of legal liability and they don't feel the need to over-aggressively take down content to avoid being sued.

General Petraeus, despite turning over "little black books" filled with classified info to his mistress/biographer (Paula Broadwell), is now serving out his mild non-sentence by suffering through high-paying speaking gigs. The government -- "punishing" one of its own -- ended up implying there was somehow a difference between Petraeus and others who turned over classified information to journalists.But there appears to be zero difference between Petraeus and whistleblowers who received much harsher treatment. Josh Gerstein of Politico reports:

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Following the jury verdict finding in favor of fair use for Google and its use of Oracle's Java APIs (if you haven't yet, you should listen to our podcast about the trial), Oracle asked Judge Alsup to basically ignore the jury ruling. Specifically, Oracle asked Judge Alsup to rule that "as a matter of law" that Google's use was not fair use, thus negating the need for the jury to settle any dispute. This is actually how the original Alsup ruling in this case came about. After the first trial had a jury find Google had infringed, Alsup said that, as a matter of law, APIs were not eligible for copyright protection and effectively dumped the jury ruling... until the appeals court overturned that ruling and sent the case back for a second trial focused solely on the fair use question.

A couple of years ago -- as the ugliness of asset forfeiture abuse was becoming a mainstream media topic -- the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's senior Washington correspondent published a cautionary article featuring a very blunt headline:

For all the idiotic things said about Ed Snowden, at least US bureaucrats appear to have come around to the idea that he helped kick off a necessary debate on surveillance powers and privacy. Just recently we had former Attorney General Eric Holder admit that Snowden "performed a public service by raising the debate." And regular surveillance apologist and former Defense Department lawyer Jack Goldsmith just said that "Snowden forced the intelligence community out of its suboptimal and unsustainable obsession with secrecy."

All around the world, people are pushing to get copyright updated to reflect the digital world we live in. And all around the world, copyright industries are fighting tooth and nail to stop them. Here's an example from Uruguay, where something good could be about to happen on the copyright front, as a post on the Creative Commons blog explains:

This isn't necessarily a huge surprise, but the UK's House of Commons overwhelmingly voted in support of the Snooper's Charter, officially known as the Investigatory Powers Bill. As we've discussed, this is a dangerous bill that will give the UK government significantly more surveillance powers (or, in many cases, will "authorize" things that the UK government has already been doing on dubious legal authority), with little to no real oversight. And despite people being upset about it, it still was approved by a vote of 444 to 69. And, yes, the current version of the bill still asks for backdoors to encryption, but leaves a vague exemption if a company claims that it would not be feasible or would be too expensive. That's better than the alternative, but it's still a step in the wrong direction. The bill still needs to be considered by the House of Lords, but it's disappointing that the House of Commons seemed so willing to cave to demands for more surveillance powers.

Disposable packaging adds up to a lot of trash. Sure, some of it gets recycled, but there's a significant amount that doesn't -- and ends up polluting the environment in mind-boggling ways. In the not-so-distant future, we might have more plastic in the ocean by weight than fish. But it doesn't have to be that way.

You may recall that a few months back we wrote about LARPing.org being sued by a company called Global Archery for trademark and patent infringement. At issue was LARPing.org, which is a hobby site for live action roleplayers, selling foam-tipped arrows acquired through a German manufacturer. Global Archery claims that those arrows infringed on a patent it owns and that LARPing.org's use of Google Ad-Words infringed on its trademarks. While both of those charges seemed destined for loserdom, as the German company would be the patent infringers and the Google Ad-Words thing almost never works, the fact that Global Archery was relatively big and LARPing.org is tiny meant that perhaps that would be enough to tip the scales. With that in mind, Newegg's Lee Cheng jumped into the fray, helping to back LARPing.org's legal efforts in defending itself.Today we're left to wonder exactly how necessary that even was, given that the court has tossed Global Archery's suit on grounds that it has no jurisdiction.

When Rep. Jason Chaffetz began asking the Secret Service about its string of high-profile failures, agents were quick to respond… with attempts to undermine the Congressman's credibility. Eighteen minutes after the hearings started, Secret Service agents -- dozens of them -- began poring through his 2003 Secret Service application in hopes of finding a few skeletons in his previously-vetted closet.Even Secret Service Assistant Director Ed Lowery got in on the illegal fun, suggesting via email that "some information [Chaffetz] finds embarrassing needs to get out." Information did get out, but it had no effect on Chaffetz's reputation. The only people embarassed were the Secret Service and DHS head Jeh Johnson, who was forced to apologize on its behalf.Johnson's press release, detailing the results of the DHS's investigation of the incident, shows dozens were questioned about this violation of the Privacy Act. Better yet, it shows dozens were punished for their misconduct.

I'll admit that very few things in this existence we all share give me as much pleasure at poking at the prudish censorship employed by Facebook. The overly broad puritanical guidelines, theoretically designed to save our sensitive eyes from anything as horrible as a breast or a penis, often instead results in the censorship of parody, renowned artwork, and bronze statues. That sincere but misguided attempt to keep things PG on its site is inherently funny, but nearly as inherently funny as is the fact that the following image was (rather innocently) included in one of a collection of children's books in France, entitled Images of Ponies and Horses.

Copyright as censorship is one thing. Copyright as blundering, drunken bull in the DMCA china shop is another. We've seen this before: sloppy algorithms generating DMCA notices targeting not only possibly infringing content, but also the rights holders' own websites, listings as IMDb, critics' reviews -- basically anything that might have the copyrighted content's name in the URL.Now, there's this, uncovered by TorrentFreak: some thing calling itself "Copyright UNIVERSAL" (but not apparently related at all to Universal Pictures) has issued a string of colossal failures in DMCA notice form.

We just wrote about the big social media companies agreeing to quickly take down content for "hate speech" in the EU, and warned about how problematic this was. The definition of "hate speech" matters quite a bit, and we've pointed out in the past how "hate speech" laws frequently morph into a tool for government censorship. So perhaps it should be no surprise at all that just around the same time that Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft agreed to start censoring "hate speech" in the EU, we get another story from the Associated Press about how Russia is using its own hate speech laws to imprison dozens of critics who mocked the government on social media.

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"Collect it all," they said. "You can't find needles without haystacks," they proclaimed. "The more you know," they rainbowed. All well and good, except the NSA, GCHQ, et al. appear to have far more in common with the protagonists of "Hoarding: Buried Alive" than with effective, finely-tuned terrorism-fighting machines.New documents from the Snowden stash show the UK's intelligence agencies love piling data on top of data, but seemingly have no idea how to utilize this massive haul.

Yesterday we wrote about an already troubling attempt by Senator John Cornyn to attach a dangerous amendment to the Senate's ECPA reform bill that would massively expand what kinds of electronic communications the FBI has access to (as we noted, the FBI already pretends it has access to this very info, so really this law would be papering over the FBI's illegal collection of this info). But there's another amendment, put forth by Senator Jeff Sessions, that is just as, if not more, troubling. It's basically creating a massive loophole in the 4th Amendment, saying that any and all basic oversight can be tossed out the second the FBI declares the situation to be an "emergency."

Back in February the FCC voted to open up the captive cable set top box market to competition, potentially opening the door to better, cheaper hardware, but also putting an end to the $21 billion the cable industry makes annually in set top box rental fees. Shortly thereafter the cable industry responded by pushing an absolute torrent of misleading editorials in newspapers and in websites nationwide. Some of these editorials claim set top box competition will result in privacy, security, or piracy Armageddon. Most try to claim set top box competition is some kind of nefarious plan by Google to freeload on cable's "amazing history of innovation."

Back in February the FCC voted to open up the captive cable set top box market to competition, potentially opening the door to better, cheaper hardware, but also putting an end to the $21 billion the cable industry makes annually in set top box rental fees. Shortly thereafter the cable industry responded by pushing an absolute torrent of misleading editorials in newspapers and in websites nationwide. Some of these editorials claim set top box competition will result in privacy, security, or piracy Armageddon. Most try to claim set top box competition is some kind of nefarious plan by Google to freeload on cable's "amazing history of innovation."

As we noted last October, Europe passed net neutrality rules that not only don't really protect net neutrality, but actually give ISPs across the EU's 28 member countries the green light to violate net neutrality consistently -- just as long as ISPs are relatively clever about it. Just like the original, overturned 2010 net neutrality rules in the States, Europe's new rules (which took effect April 30) are packed with all manner of loopholes giving exemption for "specialized services" and "class-based discrimination," as well as giving the green light for zero rating.

Techdirt has written plenty of stories about the Chinese government's attempts to stifle dissent online using a variety of heavy-handed approaches. But a story in the Washington Post shows China's State Council Information Office trying a refreshingly different approach:

With the news that a "superbug" resistant to an antibiotic of last resort was found in the US, there's a bit of concern that medicine could regress significantly in the face of uncontrollable bacteria. We've had antibiotic drugs for about 70 years now, and we've grown accustomed to the effectiveness of these drugs. Hopefully, we can stay ahead of drug-resistant microbes with new pharmaceuticals or phage therapy.

When the Nest smart thermostat was launched back in 2011, you may recall that it was met with an absolute torrent of gushing media adoration, most of it heralding the real arrival of the smart home. That was in part thanks to the fact the company was founded by Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, both ex-Apple engineers with some expertise in getting the media to fawn robotically over shiny kit. But a parade of high-profile PR failures have plagued the effort since, including several instances where botched firmware updates briefly bricked the device, leaving even the media's resident internet of things evangelists annoyed.

LifeLock has never been the brightest star in the identity fraud protection constellation. Its own CEO -- with his mouth writing checks others would soon be cashing with his credentials -- expressed his trust in LifeLock's service by publishing his Social Security number, leading directly to 13 separate cases of (successful) identity theft.Beyond that, LifeLock was barely a lock. It didn't encrypt stored credentials and had a bad habit of ambulance-chasing reported security breaches in hopes of pressuring corporate victims into picking up a year's worth of coverage for affected customers. This culminated in the FTC ordering it to pay a $12 million fine for its deceptive advertising, scare tactics, and inability to keep its customers' ID info safe.It's LifeLock's ambulance chasing that's getting it into trouble again. Rather than verify the details of a recent breach, it began sending notices to customers informing them about possibly exposed info at entirely the wrong service.

The conversation around tech policy has traditionally happened at the federal level, but more recently we've seen a change in that trend, and some of the most interesting experiments — both good and bad — have started happening in state and municipal arenas. This week, we're joined by Tech:NYC Executive Director Julie Samuels to discuss why this is happening and what it means.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Show of hands: who remembers Axl Rose? Last we here at Techdirt checked in on him, Rose was busy suing video games and hassling music bloggers over album leaks. The younger among you may chiefly be familiar with his Axl-ness via a somewhat popular string of internet memes centered on some rather unflattering pictures of the musician taken from a concert in 2010.

One of the more interesting things to sneak out around the edges of the FBI's redaction bars in Yahoo's document dump of National Security Letters was the sheer amount of information the agency was demanding. The FBI -- using letters it writes and approves with no outside oversight -- wants all of the following in exchange for a piece of paper backed by nothing but the FBI's "national security" claims.

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Remember Web Sheriff? That's the wacky firm that claims it will send DMCA takedowns on your behalf or protect your online reputation by taking down stuff you don't like. The company is somewhat infamous for being a joke and not doing its job particularly well. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about the company abusing the DMCA to try to get Google to delist stories relating to that "celebrity threesome" media injunction in the UK that has been making news for a few months. We highlighted just how ridiculous this was on many accounts, including using a copyright takedown notice on an issue that wasn't about copyright at all. And they even tried to take down the company's own Zendesk request to remove content from Reddit.

The FBI doesn't want to talk about its secret malware, but with over 100 child porn prosecutions tied to it, it's had to discuss at least a few aspects of its Network Investigative Technique (NIT).In yet another prosecution -- this one actually taking place in Virginia for a change -- the FBI is once again struggling to withhold details of its NIT from the defense. Suppression of the evidence likely isn't an option, as the warrant it obtained in Virginia was actually deployed in Virginia. I'm sure the FBI is as surprised as anybody by this fortuitous coincidence. But the defendant still wants access to more information, as he is looking to challenge the evidence the FBI collected with its Tor-defeating exploit.The defendant, Edward Matish, has questions about the chain of custody. FBI Special agent Daniel Alfin, who has testified in other Playpen/NIT cases inadvertently admits there could be problems here, considering the FBI does nothing to protect the information it collects from suspect's computers from being intercepted or altered. (h/t Chris Soghoian)

Time and time again, we've noted how the broadband industry's justifications for usage caps just don't hold water. And while the industry used to falsely claim that caps were necessary due to congestion or to save us all from the bullshit "exaflood," the industry has slowly but surely stopped using any justification at all for what's really just glorified rate hikes on uncompetitive markets. These days, big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast looking to impose usage caps either give no justification whatsoever, or pretend they're doing consumers a favor by providing more "choice and flexibility."

Every time the anniversary of the first Snowden leak rolls around, everyone reassesses the damage... or lack thereof. Did Snowden actually make a dent in the surveillance apparatus or did he do little more than hand out cheat sheets to terrorists?As more time passes, even Snowden's harshest critics are warming up to the idea that his leaks did more good than harm. Former attorney general Eric Holder, to name one such critic, believes Snowden "performed a public service" by leaking surveillance documents. Of course, this is the sort of thing one can safely say when no longer in the position of having to choose between prosecuting Snowden or dropping the bogus espionage charges.Over at Lawfare -- a site whose writers are almost universally critical of Snowden -- one contributor (a former DoD lawyer) sees Snowden's leaks as beneficial. Jack Goldsmith's take on the NSA leak fallout finds that Snowden's actions actually made the NSA a better agency -- not just in terms of transparency but in terms of capabilities.

Corporate sovereignty has become a big issue as a result of its inclusion in TPP and TAFTA/TTIP, but it's present in hundreds of other trade and investment treaties.The heated discussion of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) chapters in those negotiations has led some countries to realize that corporate sovereignty could prove very costly to them one day. As we've written, both South Africa and Bolivia have decided to dismantle the ISDS provisions by renegotiating treaties, and according to a new report in The Economic Times, India has decided to do the same on a large scale:

Making copies of physical goods is becoming easier and easier all the time. Some folks want to make sure that all these physical items are authentic, devising fingerprinting or watermark technology to identify objects uniquely. Dollar bills, documents and all kinds of valuable things could be tracked with this kind of anti-counterfeiting tagging. Here are just a few other examples of making a mark on stuff that could be useful.

Forty years ago, the general counsel for the CIA reached a conclusion that has since been ignored repeatedly -- most often by the current administration. CIA GC Anthony Lapham issued a memo on the effectiveness of using the Espionage Act to punish leakers/whistleblowers. In short, Lapham found its application in this manner to be not unlike approaching every leak as a nail because all you have is a Nerf bat. (via Boing Boing)

A case dealing with a warrant issued in 2003, a subsequent warrant issued in 2006, and a whole lot of judicial work in between finally concludes -- with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals coming down on the side of the government's apparent "right" to seize everything, hold it for an indefinite period of time, and pore through unrelated documents in hopes of finding evidence of additional criminal activity.The government, in the form of the US Army, first went after Stavros Ganias for billing improprieties and theft of copper wire. Over the next three years, this morphed into an IRS investigation for tax fraud, using the same hard drives the Army seized three years before the IRS showed any interest. The IRS obtained its own warrant and began looking for evidence related to its suspicions.In 2014, the Appeals Court decided Ganias' Fourth Amendment rights had been violated by the government's multi-agency fishing expedition.

Jason Leopold has secured another comprehensive set of Snowden-related documents from the NSA, dealing with the agency's search for evidence backing up his claim that he tried to take his complaints to intelligence community officials before heading to Hong Kong with a drive full of secret documents.The long, detailed post -- written with the help of Marcy Wheeler and Ky Henderson -- covers the 800+ pages of internal emails released to Vice in response to a FOIA request. The headline suggests there's a smoking gun, but a few thousand words later, the conclusion seems to be, "There's possibly a smoking gun... and the NSA, due to malice or just incompetence, is going to be of no help in locating it."What is undoubtedly true is that there was more to Snowden's concerns than the single email released to shore up the NSA's side of the story. There is evidence Snowden contacted other officials about his concerns, but the agency decided to present the single email as though that were the extent of Snowden's complaints.This posed problems later as Snowden repeated his assertion to other news outlets, including NBC and Vanity Fair. These resulted in further search efforts from the agency which had already claimed to have uncovered everything that could be considered evidence of Snowden's "proper channels" claims.

You may have heard recently that after switching many domains, a few weeks back ThePirateBay returned to its original thepiratebay.org domain. It's basically an ongoing game of wac-a-mole, where the entertainment industry freaks out and scares registrars into taking back whatever domain and TPB just moves on. It's unclear what good this does for anyone, but it keeps happening. And with the return to .org, it appears the entertainment industry has basically lots its mind. First, it had one of its lobbying front groups, the Copyright Alliance write a hellishly misleading post attacking Public Interest Registry (PIR), the organization that currently runs the .org top level domain.

What a week. Just a few days after we wrote about a dangerous ruling in a federal appeals court in California concerning a way to get around Section 230 of the CDA, now we have another problematic CDA 230 ruling from California in the form of a ruling from San Mateo Superior Court judge, Donald Ayoob, that has the potential to do a lot of damage to Section 230 as well as anti-SLAPP efforts in California. Paul Levy has a very detailed post about the case, but we'll try and do a summary here.

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