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When the Federal Circuit Appeals Court (CAFC) initially made its nutty ruling saying that APIs are copyright-eligible subject matter, many in the copyright and tech world were not only shocked, but were tremendously worried about how the ruling would impact innovation and software development going forward -- while supporters on the other side brushed off such concerns.

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As you may have heard, over the weekend, former Attorney General Eric Holder appeared on a podcast with his former administration colleague, David Axelrod, for a podcast. The ~1 hour discussion is pretty wide-ranging, but right towards the end Axelrod brings up questions about surveillance and how the adminstration handled the NSA, leading Holder to make an offhand comment that is now making headlines, noting that he believed Ed Snowden had done "a public service" in revealing various NSA files to journalists. Of course, he immediately then focuses on why Snowden should go to jail. The statement is interesting because it's been like pulling teeth to get anyone associated with the administration in any way to acknowledge that maybe what Snowden did was a good thing. That said, almost everything else that Holder says is either wrong, misleading or questionable regarding Snowden and surveillance. Here's a quick transcript of the relevant parts (it doesn't appear that CNN, which produces the show, or Axelrod, have released a full transcript, so I apologize for any typos), followed by some thoughts:

Late last week, the press had a bit of a frenzy with the news that indie musician Casey Dienel, who releases music as White Hinterland, had sued Justin Bieber and Skrillex (along with some others) for copyright infringement, claiming that the pair used a sample from her song "Ring the Bell" that was released in 2014. The accusation is that Bieber's 2015 hit "Sorry" uses the same sample of a female musical riff. You can read the lawsuit here, which might be useful since most of the rest of the media didn't link to it.

Last week, we covered a multinational corporation's attempt to force MuckRock to take down documents supplied by the city of Seattle to Phil Mocek. Landis+Gyr, which was awarded the contract to supply the city with "smart meters" in conjunction with the publicly-owned utility, claimed the documents released -- along with documents the city was planning to release -- would be a boon to competitors and terrorists, although it didn't specify which of these it was more worried about.The company also demanded MuckRock turn over information on site users who may have seen or downloaded the documents. It also (hilariously) demanded MuckRock assist it in the "retrieval" of disseminated documents.The company's request for an injunction against MuckRock and the city of Seattle went before a judge on Thursday. It has been (partially) granted. Ansel Herz of The Stranger says, after speaking to Landis+Gyr reps, that the judge granted its request -- not on its merits but because there just aren't enough hours in the day.

Some good news has arrived: the Feinstein-Burr anti-encryption bill is now little more than a cooling corpse in the legislative mortuary.

This week we had what I consider to be an all-time great comment win the insightful vote (it came close on the funny side too, actually, but ended up in the third slot, rather than the top two), in response to Sony claiming that it can charge an "administrative fee" for fair use. Commenter Zengief did a nice job playing off the "notice-and-takedown" and "notice-and-staydown" concepts and came up with something entirely new:

Five Years Ago

Search for stories about Apple's App Store in the Techdirt archives and you will quickly notice a theme. That theme is that Apple routinely appoints itself as the arbiter of artistic quality and morality when it comes to content within the app store, particularly gaming content, and that its application of these standards swings like some kind of absurd pendulum. Ban a game over here for telling a bible story that includes violence against children, but allow the actual bible to be sold as well. React to the South Carolina massacre by pulling down games about the Civil War because they include images of the Confederate flag. Reject a wargaming simulation, then approve it, and nobody knows how the company might decide to react tomorrow. You often hear that stability breeds a good ground for business, whereas Apple runs its App Store like some kind of experiment in chaos.And in order to apply its standards in a way that apparently makes the folks at Apple feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it occasionally has to truly lower its explanations to absurd levels of outright lying. For instance, Apple recently disallowed a game about surviving on the Gaza Strip in its store, claiming it wasn't a game at all, but a news publication, even though the briefest review of the app reveals that it's obviously a game.

Solar power is literally everywhere, just not at night. But it's free to capture, if you have the means. Plenty of folks have been trying to capture enough solar energy to power cities or cars or whatever gadget you can think of, but sunlight just isn't as convenient as we'd like it to be. Solar energy is still going to become a larger and larger contributor to the mix of energy resources, and even as oil prices remain low, it looks like some companies are still committed to investing in it. Go, solar power, go....

As India has been revamping its patent policy, there had been some serious concerns about broadening patent subject matter eligibility to include software and business methods. Earlier this year, however, the Indian Patent Office clarified that it would not allow patenting of just straight software patents. And that's good.

In February of last year, Frontier Communications announced it would be buying Verizon's unwanted fiber (FiOS), DSL, and phone customers in Florida, Texas, and California for $10.5 billion. The deal was yet another chapter in Verizon's effort to give up on fixed-line networks it no longer wanted to upgrade, as it focused on more profitable (read: usage capped) wireless service. The deal was, as Frontier's CEO stated at the time, a "natural evolution for our company and leverages our proven skills and established track record from previous integrations."

Remember not too long ago when some internet dude was saying that the best way to deal with harassment on the internet was to basically create a DMCA for harassment, where people could issue takedowns? And remember how we pointed out that this would make things worse, because just as the DMCA is regularly abused to silence people, this new tool would actually be used as a tool to harass more people and silence their speech? Here's just a little example of why a DMCA-like approach is a really, really, really bad idea as a way to deal with harassment or abuse online. Business Insider has a story about an unfortunate setup where a woman who is clearly being harassed was told by Twitter that she should file a DMCA notice, since some of the harassment involved using some of her photos. Following the sending of the DMCA notice, Twitter forwarded her notice to the folks harassing her, making them somewhat gleeful since it included her full contact info.

Over and over again, we're told that copyright is not about censorship, and yet time and time again we see how it is used to censor speech quite frequently. Back in March, we wrote about the somewhat horrifying bit of news that a news website that posted stories about the app Popcorn Time had been seized by Norwegian police. The "crime" according to the police was that the site -- which never hosted the app at all -- did link to some other sites where you could download Popcorn Time. This is so far removed from the actual infringement as to be crazy. Yes, some users of Popcorn Time use the software to infringe on copyright-covered works. No one doubts that. But the software itself -- like a VCR -- can also be used for legitimate purposes as well. If a user infringes, go after the user. But the software itself shouldn't be targeted (even though it is). But, then you go another step removed to sites that host the app. And then a further step removed to a news site that links to sites that link to the software that a user might use to infringe.

Over the weekend, the internet blew up over the story that Paramount and CBS were going to drop their silly lawsuit over a professional looking Star Trek fan film. The news was "broken" by the producer of the next official Star Trek film, JJ Abrams, sitting alongside the director of that film, Justin Lin, at a Star Trek fan event. Lin had previously expressed support for the fan film on Twitter, and Abrams claimed that Lin urged Paramount to settle, and that "within a few weeks" there would be an announcement that the case had been settled.

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The annual intelligence authorization is under way, with the Senate deciding how much money the nation's spy agencies will receive next year, along with anything else they can slip in while no one's looking. The entire discussion takes place behind closed doors, so there's very little stopping the Intelligence Committee's many surveillance fans from amending the bill to increase intelligence agencies' powers.Fortunately, there's still one person on the inside who continues to perform his oversight duties.

Last spring, in the wake of the Sony hack, President Obama threw a cyberwar. And no one showed up.

Copyright: for when you just don't feel like being criticized. (Currently available for periods up to, and including, seventy years past your death!)Matt Hosseinzadeh, a.k.a. "Matt Hoss," a.k.a. "Bold Guy," a.k.a. "Horny Tony," runs a moderately successful YouTube channel containing his moderately well-done videos of his "characters" performing feats of pickup artistry and parkour. It's all fairly ridiculous, but considering the depths pickup artists can plumb, the HossZone videos are actually fairly tame.However, they aren't immune to criticsm. The two people behind YouTube channel H3H3 Productions posted a reaction video containing parts of one of HossZone's pickup-and-parkour recordings. The video, which the Kleins made private shortly after the legal threats began, has been mirrored here. This made Hoss irritable and he sent a lawyer after Ethan and Hila Klein of H3H3 Productions.They've detailed the experience here: According to H3H3, it all began with a demand for the removal of the video and $3,750 in legal fees racked up so far by Hoss's lawyer. From there, it got stupider. After failing to secure instant capitulation, HossZone's lawyer altered the terms of the deal. ("Pray I don't alter it stupider...") H3H3 could avoid paying any money by apologizing via their channel for misappropriating Hoss's "art," say some nice stuff about him in their apology video, and throw additional compliments HossZone's way for a period of no less than 60 days. (I am not kidding. Watch the video above.)H3H3 refused to do so, so Hoss has now filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Ethan and Hila Klein. Hoss also hit H3H3 with a copyright strike, despite the fact that the video central to the complaint had been set to "private" shortly after his lawyer began issuing legal threats.Unlike others who have sought to abuse copyright to censor critics, Hoss appears to have his end of it pretty much nailed down. He has a valid, registered copyright that predates the H3H3 reaction video and his complaint isn't filled with vagues assertions about ethereal property and even vaguer assertions about how it's been violated.That being said, detailed allegations aren't always credible allegations. It appears that fair use is still misunderstood by a great deal of the population, including those representing plaintiffs in copyright infringement lawsuits. From the complaint:

Judge Robert Bryan -- having set his own house against itself by declaring the FBI could keep its NIT info secret while simultaneously declaring the defendant in the child porn case had every right to see it -- has managed to find a way out of his self-induced conundrum. And it's going to make the FBI very sad. (h/t Ars Technica)

The legalization of marijuana in a few states has led to some interesting law enforcement problems. To date, most of the "solution" appears to be camping out on the borders and seizing drugs from travelers headed out of the state. The lack of legalization on a federal level inflates drug bust stats but doesn't do much for visitors to pot-friendly states whose purchases are completely legal, but their possession -- once crossing the border into a neighboring state -- suddenly isn't.The legality of the transaction at the point of purchase also makes for some rather unusual court decisions, like the one highlighted by Noel Erinjeri of Fault Lines. Two Minnesota natives were traveling to Colorado to purchase some weed when they were stopped by Lancaster County (NE) Sheriff's deputies, resulting in their arrest and seizure of the cash they were carrying.

The obvious challenge with renewable energy sources like solar and wind is: what do you do when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing? Solar and wind generators don't tend to produce electricity in convenient amounts whenever we want, leading to wasted resources and further reliance on fossil fuel generators to keep up with electricity demand cycles. Storing lots of energy in an efficient way that can be readily recovered isn't easy, but there are some solutions that could work.

Fights over tech policy are going increasingly local. Most technology regulations have been federal issues. There have been a few attempts to regulate on the state level -- including Pennsylvania's ridiculous attempt to demand ISPs filter out porn in the early 2000s. But state legislators and Attorneys General eventually learned (the hard way) that federal law -- specifically CDA 230 -- prevents any laws that look to hold internet platforms liable for the actions of their users. This is why state Attorneys General hate Section 230, but they need to deal with it, because it's the law.

This is somewhat surprising, but good: after a few days of deliberation, the jury in the redo of the Oracle v. Google case concerning Google's use of Java's APIs in Android has resulted in a jury verdict finding that Google's use was allowed as fair use. There's not much to unpack here beyond what we've already written about the case. The jury form was a simple question of whether or not the use was covered by fair use, with a "Yes" check box meaning "finding for Google" and a "No" check box finding for Oracle The jury checked yes.

Limited time offer: Support Techdirt and get a "Nerd Harder." T-shirt!Normally at this time of the week, we post our "Techdirt Reading List" suggestion for a book worth reading, but this week we're suggesting something that's a little shorter to read: Our Nerd Harder T-shirt.The T-shirt has proved more popular than expected, and it's only available for a few more days, so we thought we'd remind folks that it's available before it disappears and you regret it. Because, trust me, you'll regret not getting this T-shirt. We also added an option for women's cut T-shirts, which we didn't have when we launched.

Earlier this year, FOIA enthusiast/privacy activist Phil Mocek requested documents from Seattle City Light, the city's public-owned utility. Mocek was seeking info on the utility's proposed "smart meter" system, which carried with it some obvious privacy implications.

If you've been following the Prenda Law saga around here for any length of time, you're aware that it's been going on for years, with sketchy copyright trolling practices that appeared to include Team Prenda uploading their own content to torrent sites, tracking who downloaded them, and then filing questionable lawsuits. That scheme fell apart after a series of judges, led by Judge Otis Wright, called out Team Prenda for committing fraud on the courts, and referred the issue to the feds, while also hitting them with a fine. That was three years ago. Other courts piled on more fines and attorneys' fees -- and more referrals to the feds. After the second such referral, Ken "Popehat" White noted that these things take time, but that something would probably happen eventually:

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We've noted a few times now that ever since the FCC passed net neutrality rules, loyal ISP politicians in the House and Senate have been engaged in a full-court press to punish the agency for daring to stand up to big broadband ISPs. That has involved an endless parade of taxpayer-funded hearings pretending to be about agency transparency and accountability -- but are really just about publicly shaming the agency. It has also involved a laundry list of bills that attempt to thoroughly gut FCC funding and authority under the pretense of saving the country from a power-mad FCC.

So I had thought that our post yesterday about Peter Thiel allegedly financing Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker would be the only time we posted about that story, but a few things have happened that seem to merit a further post. First, Thiel has admitted to it, and insisted that he views it as "philanthropy." There are a number of claims that Thiel makes that are quite troubling. First, he admits that he didn't just back Hogan, but rather gave lawyers money to go hunting for anyone who might want to sue Gawker, directly out of spite.

For years now Verizon has made it clear that it no longer wants to be in the fixed-line broadband business. Despite countless billions in taxpayer subsidies and numerous unfinished obligations, the company has all-but frozen serious fiber deployments. It has also been either selling off unwanted DSL customers to smaller, ill-equipped telcos (which which almost always ends poorly for everybody except Verizon accountants and lawyers) or has quite literally tried to drive unwanted users away with both rate hikes and apathy.

Well, this isn't a surprise. After all, we warned you that it was likely to happen, and we helped get together folks to warn the EU Commission that this was a bad idea, but the EU Commission has always seemed dead set on a plan that they believe will hold back big successful American internet firms, while fostering support for European ones. This week they made their first move by releasing details of some of their plans. This is all part of the "Digital Single Market" plan, which, in theory, makes a ton of sense. The idea is to knock down geographical regulatory barriers on the internet, such as geoblocking. And the first part of the EU's plan is right in line with that idea and makes perfect sense. It talks about getting rid of geoblocking and also making cross-border delivery of packages easier and less expensive -- basically making e-commerce work better. That's all good.

Earlier this year, we wrote about an ongoing trademark dispute between the Navajo Nation and Urban Outfitters. The clothier had released a line of clothing and accessories, most notably women's underwear, with traditional Native American prints and had advertised them as a "Navajo" line. The Nation, which has registered trademarks on the term "Navajo", had sued for profits and/or damages under trademark law and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which prohibits companies from passing off goods as being made by Native Americans when they were not. In that post, I had focused on whether or not the term "Navajo" was deserving of trademark protection at all, or whether it ought to be looked at in the same way we consider words like "American", "Canadian" or "Mexican", as generic terms to denote a group of people.Interestingly, the first ruling has come down in the case. It's in favor of Urban Outfitters, although admittedly not in the form that I would have expected. The court has granted partial summary judgment in favor of the company on the claims of blurring and tarnishment by use of the trademark, stating that the term "Navajo" is not famous by the dilution standards.

Are the eyes the windows to the soul? Probably not — but that doesn't mean they aren't darn good indicators of a whole lot of things. Scientists in a variety of fields are still uncovering new secrets within these little wet orbs, often with potentially important medical or psychological implications. Here are some of the latest discoveries made by watching the watchers:

Another day, another story of abusing trademark law to try to silence speech. Paul Levy has the story of how the city of Mesa, Arizona, has sent a ridiculous cease and desist letter to Jeremy Whittaker, who is running for city council. Apparently, his opponent in the election is the preferred choice of many current city officials, suggesting that they don't really appreciate Whittaker's candidacy. But the city took things a ridiculous step too far in sending that cease and desist, arguing that Whittaker's campaign signs violate the city's trademark on its logo. And yes, that is a version of the Mesa city logo that he's using:But to claim this is "trademark infringement"? That's crazy.

When we've talked in the past about government attempting to outright block pornography sites, those efforts have typically been aimed at sites hosting child pornography. Blocking child porn is a goal that's impossible to rebel against, though the methods for achieving it are another matter entirely. Too often, these attempts task ISPs and mobile operators with the job of keeping this material out of the public eye, which is equal parts burdensome, difficult to do, and rife with collateral damage. Other nations, on the other hand, have gone to some lengths to outright block pornography in general, such as in Pakistan for religious reasons, or in the UK for save-the-children reasons. If the attempts to block child porn resulted in some collateral damage, the attempts to outright censor porn from the internet resulted in a deluge of such collateral damage. For this reason, and because we have that pesky First Amendment in America, these kinds of efforts attempted by the states have run into the problem of being unconstitutional in the past.But, as they say, if at first you don't succeed, just try it in an even more conservatively prudish state again. Which brings us to Utah, where state Senator Todd Weiler is leading the effort to purge his state of any access to porn on mobile devices.

The Kansas City Royals' long-delayed return to competitive baseballing coincided with one of the most ridiculous raids ever conducted by the Department of Homeland Security. Birdies, a Kansas City lingerie shop, was "visited" by DHS agents -- working in conjunction with ICE -- who seized a number of panties emblazoned with a handcrafted take on the Royals' logo, along with the phrase "Take the Crown."The agents performing the raid didn't seem all too enthused about their participation in this panty raid, according to the shop's owner, Peregrine Honig.

We've been covering for a while the ridiculous ongoing fight about the FCC's plan to open up the set top box market to actual competition. Historically, we've always seen that when closed technologies are opened up, it generally leads to much more innovation that benefits everyone. But the big cable companies are freaking out, because locked set top boxes are a huge moneymaker for them: they get customers to "rent" those cable boxes for an average of $230 per year. The industry, as a whole, takes in approximately $20 billion from set top box rentals alone. And they can only do that because the market is locked down. And the cable companies don't want to give that up.

Soon after the original Snowden revelations, I went around talking to a bunch of startups and startup organizers, discussing whether they'd be more willing to speak out and complain about excessive government surveillance. Some certainly did, but many were cautious. A key thing that I heard over and over again was "well, our own data privacy protections... aren't that great, and we'd hate to call attention to that." Every single time I'd hear that I'd point out that this should now be their first priority: clean up your own act, now and fix your own handling of people's data, because it's an issue that's going to become increasingly important, and you're being foolish and shortsighted to ignore it.

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For a company that just spent $69 billion on DirecTV to unlock "amazing synergies" across the TV, wireless and broadband sectors, AT&T's latest quarterly earnings subscriber tallies landed with a bit of a thud. The company actually posted a net loss of 54,000 video subscribers, a net loss of 363,000 postpaid phone subscribers, and a net gain of just 5,000 broadband customers during the quarter -- suggesting that any "synergies" AT&T envisioned are going to be somewhat slow in coming, if they arrive at all.

Indie musician Will Toledo has a band (it's all him, actually) called Car Seat Headrest that just (sorta) put out its first album with a label (pretty famous indie record label) after a whole bunch of self-released albums, and lots of (well-deserved) internet buzz. The album was released this past Friday... sorta. Apparently one of the songs included an homage to a song by The Cars. I've read a bunch of articles on this and Toledo's own statement, and the homage is called a bunch of different things, from a "sample" to a "cover" and no one ever clarifies which it actually is. And that's important because the legal issues are potentially different with each. But, it also doesn't matter at all because Toledo and Matador have agreed to destroy all the physical copies of the album after The Cars' Ric Ocasek complained that he didn't like it. So the digital release came out, with a replacement version of the song that Toledo apparently rewrote a week before the album was released, and a new physical version will come out... sometime.

Back in 2012, Netflix and Disney struck a deal wherein Netflix would be the exclusive online provider of Disney content starting in 2016. And while we knew that the deal had been struck, it was only this week that Netflix announced on its blog that the exclusive arrangement would formally begin in September. As of September 1, if you want to stream the latest Disney (and by proxy Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar) films -- you need to do it via Netflix.

So here's a crazy and unfortunate story. On Monday evening, the NY Times posted a rather weird story suggesting that there was someone with a grudge against Gawker funding the various lawsuits against the site, including Hulk Hogan's multiple lawsuits (he recently filed another one, even more ridiculous than the first -- which resulted in a $115 million verdict against Gawker that hopefully will get tossed on appeal). The NYT piece was weird in that it was pure innuendo -- just saying that Gawker's Nick Denton was increasingly sure that someone who really disliked the site was funding the lawsuits. It was surprising that the NY Times ran it given the lack of anything beyond speculation and rumor. And then, about 24 hours later, Forbes publishes a story saying that it's well-known billionaire Peter Thiel funding the lawsuit (warning: Forbes' ridiculous anti-adblock policy means you may not be able to read that article):

The perennial FOIA Reform Masquerade Ball is again under way, with legislators attempting to dodge blustery requests to "cut in" by administration officials and similarly-motivated federal agencies. The dance usually ends with Congressional committee chairmen yanking needles from records and booting everyone out of the dancehall.Meanwhile, limited headway is being made in another branch of the government, far from the muffled protests of overwhelming majorities who have been shouted down by parties of one. The DC Appeals Court has just ruled that the government must extend its FOIA fee discounts to students at educational institutions, rather than just to instructors and administration.The Department of Defense has fought this the whole way. It wanted a clear-cut delineation between students and staff for reasons only it comprehends, as that would mean saddling those with fewer financial resources (students) with higher fees.The decision starts out by noting that FOIA fees -- if high enough -- are an effective deterrent to requesters. It then goes on to examine the government's assertion that the category of "educational institution" does not include these institutions' student bodies.

Re-usable spacecraft sound like a good idea -- if they actually saved any costs and refurbishing them was economical. There are only a few examples of re-usable space vehicles so far, and NASA retired its space shuttle program in 2011, narrowing the field a bit. SpaceX seems to be getting closer to demonstrating a re-usable rocket system, but it still needs to re-launch one of its rockets (and it currently only has one rocket for such an attempt).

In Russia, we've talked about how Vladimir Putin employs a massive army of Internet trolls to ridicule and shout down political opponents and critics. In China, the government's tactics are notably different. According to a new study out of Harvard (pdf), the Chinese government posts about 488 million fake social media comments -- or roughly one day of Twitter's total global volume -- each year. In China, these propagandists have historically been dubbed the "50 Cent Party," because it was generally believed they were paid 50 Chinese cents for every social media post.

Yet another court has found that the warrant used by the FBI in the Playpen child porn investigation is invalid, rendering its NIT-assisted "search" unconstitutional. As USA Today's Brad Heath points out, this is at least the sixth court to find that Rule 41's jurisdictional limitations do not permit warrants issued in Virginia to support searches performed all over the nation.While the court agrees that the warrant is invalid, it places the blame at the feet of the magistrate judge who issued it, rather than the agents who obtained it.

The DOJ likes to sling lawsuits and injunctions towards law enforcement agencies with histories of misconduct and deception, but it's apparently less interested in ensuring its own behavior is above reproach.A lawsuit filed by a handful of states in opposition to the administration's new (and controversial) immigration policies have made their way through a number of courts, with one headed to the top court in the land. Meanwhile, down in Texas, a federal judge has uncovered DOJ lawyers have been engaged in a pattern of deception since the inception of the litigation. While the Supreme Court will be tackling the question of whether the administration has to play by its own rules, Judge Andrew Hanen is spending his time reprimanding the government's lawyers for their misdeeds. (via Jonathan Turley)

We've noted how the FCC's latest net neutrality rules do a lot of things right, but they failed to seriously address zero rating or broadband usage caps, opening the door to ISPs violently abusing net neutrality -- just as long as they're relatively clever about it. And plenty of companies have been walking right through that open door. Both Verizon and Comcast for example now exempt their own streaming services from these caps, giving them an unfair leg up in the marketplace. AT&T meanwhile is now using usage caps to force customers to subscribe to TV services if they want to enjoy unlimited data.