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As we've been covering here at Techdirt, French regulators have been pushing Google to censor the global internet whenever it receives "right to be forgotten" requests. If you don't recall, two years ago, there was a dangerous ruling in the EU that effectively said that people could demand Google remove certain links from showing up when people searched on their names. This "right to be forgotten" is now being abused by a ton of people trying to hide true information they just don't like being known. Google grudgingly has agreed to this, having little choice to do otherwise. But it initially did so only on Google's EU domain searches. Last year, a French regulator said that it needed to apply globally. Google said no, explaining why this was a "troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web."

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Mitch Stoltz, over at EFF, has been writing about a ridiculous situation in which Sony Music has been using ContentID to take down fair use videos -- and then to ask for money to put them back up. As Stoltz notes, the videos in question are clearly fair use. They're videos of lectures put on by the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, teaching people about bluegrass music. They're hourlong lectures in a classroom setting, that do include snippets of music here and there as part of a lecture, with the music usually less than 30 seconds long.

Last week, Twitter engaged in some dubious behavior on behalf of a few super-secret someones who'd rather the press didn't discuss their sexual activity. Twitter was apparently firing off "letters of warning" to users who had dared break an injunction issued by the UK Supreme Court forbidding anyone in the media from discussing a threesome involving a prominent British celebrity.There was very little legal force behind the "warning letters" (despite threats from local authorities) and Twitter users were under no obligation to comply with the company's request. The fact that Twitter even bothered to issue these highlights the utter futility of injunctions/super-injunctions of this variety, which are really just a way for British citizens of a certain level of importance to control local media. It doesn't really matter if the UK's highest court upholds a super-injunction if it has no way of enforcing it beyond its super-limited purview.That doesn't mean the lawyers who have obtained these injunctions on behalf of their clients aren't trying. While doing a bit of research for an unrelated story, I stumbled across Web Sheriff's utter failure to talk Google into delisting URLs by waving this injunction around in a threatening manner.The copyright owner is (apparently): APPELLANT (COMPLAINANT’S IDENTITY PROTECTED BY COURT OF APPEAL RULING / ORDER)Whatever these clients are paying Web Sheriff, it's far too much. Web Sheriff has issued 12 requests targeting 447 URLs. And so far, all 447 URLs are still live.Contained in these takedown notices is an awe-inspiring wall of text -- something that might impress the average DMCA notice recipient. But Google? Not so much. Here's just a very small portion of it:Then, of course, there are the URLs targeted for delisting, which -- thanks to Web Sheriff's failed injunction-quoting requests -- are all basically injunction spoilers.Included in the failed notices are some seriously dubious requests, like Web Sheriff demanding an entire post at the Onion's AV Club be taken down because of a single comment and what appears to be Web Sheriff's own attempted Zendesk request for removal of content from Reddit.Thanks to Web Sheriff's efforts to force the rest of the world to comply with UK law and its ridiculously unenforceable injunctions, more people are now aware of who's being "protected" by the ruling and where to find more details.

Here we go again: intellectual property laws being abused to silence critics. In this case -- which resembles the tactics exposed by Pissed Consumer recently -- bogus copyright claims contained in bogus DMCA notices are being used to remove negative reviews from websites.In this case, it's a British firm -- one that first tried to abuse that country's oft-abused defamation laws.

Facebook's Oculus Rift was originally expected to lead the virtual reality charge and become a shining example of "VR done right," but a bungled launch and a series of sloppy public relations missteps have ensured that won't be happening any time soon.

Back when I first wrote about the copyright lawsuit between a tattoo artist and Take-Two Software, makers of the highly successful NBA2K basketball series, over the faithful depiction of LeBron James' image including his ink, I had been hopeful that perhaps this case could be a step towards resolving whether fair use applies when presenting images of people with tattoos in creative works. And that might still happen, but the defense Take-Two has decided to start things off with won't do the trick. Rather than asserting the work's status as fair use, the video game maker has led with a challenge to whether the tattoo artist can claim statutory damages based on when he had registered the copyright for the tattoos in question. It's a play on a technicality, one which seems to strangely play on what counts as an independent work.Solid Oak Sketches had sued for damages nearing $1.2 million, claiming eight works had been infringed upon in the game NBA 2K16, including tattoo designs for LeBron James and two other players. According to Take-Two's most recent filing with the court, Solid Oak Sketches registered the copyright for those tattoos in 2015. The game company's argument is that it has been depicting those players and their tattoos since 2013, therefore there is precedent that statutory damages are not in play.

There are plenty of smart animals in the world. Dogs, cats and pet birds are the ones we're usually familiar with, but there are also dolphins, elephants... and octopuses. Generally, animals with 8 legs are fascinating because that's just a lot of legs. If you haven't been to an aquarium recently, check out some of these links on our friend the octopus.

For many, many years, we've complained about the fact that research reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) are kept secret. CRS is basically a really good, non-partisan research organization that tends to do very useful and credible research, when tasked to do so by members of Congress. The results, as works created by the federal government, are in the public domain. But the public never gets access to most of them. The reports are available to members of Congress, of course, but then it's up to the members who have access to them to actually release them to the public... or not. And most don't. Back in 2009, Wikileaks made news by releasing almost 7,000 CRS reports that had previously been secret. Since at least 2011, we've been writing about attempts to release these reports publicly, and nothing has happened.

At the recent Copyright Office roundtable on the DMCA, a representative from Fox was adamant about pushing for stronger punishment for sites that hosted infringing content. But she also made sure to respond to a point raised earlier about abusive takedowns. Someone had pointed out that in 2013, Fox had issued a bogus DMCA notice that took down a copy of Cory Doctorow's excellent book Homeland, because its robotic censors couldn't distinguish Cory's novel from its TV show of the same name. Before launching into her speech pushing for expanding copyright laws to provide more power for censorship, she wanted to "explain" what happened with Cory's book, and said that it happened because Doctorow's book "was on torrent sites" -- as if this made it okay. That leaves out the kind of important fact that Doctorow released the book under a Creative Commons license that allowed it to be shared anywhere, including torrent sites.

Another defamation lawsuit against a parody account has failed, brought on by a lawyer who should have known better but didn't. Todd Levitt -- self-proclaimed "Badass Lawyer" -- has a verifiable history of bad decisions that perhaps made this sort of bogus litigation a foregone conclusion, however.Levitt tried to fire up his own reality show, which would have presumably covered such lawyeriffic behavior as singing karaoke with college students, inviting comparisons to TV's sleaziest lawyer (Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad), creating a Top College Lawyers website solely for the purpose of awarding himself the title of "Top College Lawyer," and somehow mistaking alleged defamation for a criminal offense.Levitt sued the person behind the Todd Levitt 2.0 Twitter account, which parodied the original Levitt's more "badass" qualities, like partaking in excessive amounts of drinking/drug use, as well as the lawyer's Skill Crane-esque grasp on the nuances of the law. According to Levitt, the parody account, which clearly stated on more than one occasion that it was a parody account, was resulting in lost clients.A Michigan court dismissed his lawsuit last February. Levitt appealed the decision only to find the Michigan Appeals Court no more sympathetic to his weak claims. (via The Volokh Conspiracy)The court spends some time discussing Levitt's own behavior, as it's definitely relevant to the supposed "harassment" he "endured" at the hands of the short-lived, barely-followed parody account.

It wasn't supposed to go this way. The same tactics that are causing the FBI problems now -- running a child porn website, using local warrants to deploy its spyware to thousands of computers around the US (and the world!) -- slipped by almost unnoticed in 2012. In a post-Snowden 2016, the FBI can hardly catch a break.Just recently, a judge presiding over one of its child porn cases agreed the FBI should not be forced to hand over details on its Network Investigative Technique to the defendant. Simultaneously, the judge noted the defendant had several good reasons to have access to this information. While this conundrum spares the FBI the indignity of the indefinite confinement it's perfectly willing to see applied to others, it doesn't exactly salvage this case, which could be on the verge of dismissal.In related cases, judges have declared the warrant used to deploy the NIT is invalid, thanks to Rule 41's jurisdictional limits. If a warrant is issued in Virginia (as this one was), the search is supposed to be performed in Virginia, not in Kansas or Oklahoma or Massachusetts.While the larger issue of whether the evidence can be used against Jay Michaud continues to be discussed, the FBI is spending its time officially expressing its displeasure with its NIT being referred to disparagingly as "malware."

It's been almost three years since Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in jail for leaking a bunch of State Department cables to Wikileaks in what she claims was an act of whistleblowing (though, obviously, some disagree). As we noted in the past, even if you disagree with the whistleblowing claim, the leak did lead to some important discussions about what the US government was doing in certain areas and (contrary to some hyperbolic claims) did not lead to a single death. In addition, we've pointed out that people who were flat out selling secrets to the Russians, or simply full-on terrorists, have received lighter sentences. Something does not seem at all right with that.

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The NY Times has an op-ed piece by Jonathan Taplin, claiming that Silicon Valley hates music, that is so chock full of out and out factual errors that it's an embarrassment for the NY Times to have allowed it to be published. Is fact checking dead at the Gray Lady? It's perhaps not as embarrassing for Taplin, who's been spewing ridiculous falsehoods for years about how technology is out to destroy all creative culture. In the past we've had to correct his blatantly false statements, but it seems odd to us that the NY Times would let him publish a piece so devoid of facts. Let's dig in and do some editing and fact checking that the NY Times apparently failed to do.

There are no safe routes for intelligence community whistleblowers. The proper channels are pretty much guaranteed to end your career. The same goes for the unofficial channels, which route through countries uninterested in complying with extradition requests.The administration has prosecuted more than its share of whistleblowers over the last eight years. (In fact, its share of prosecutions outnumbers all those in previous presidential administrations combined.) Another whistleblower has come forward to provide details on… the government's treatment of whistleblowers.John Crane, a former senior Defense Department official, details his firsthand experience with the government's zealous pursuit of previous NSA whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and William Binney. He was part of the "official channels" and actively fought to protect these individuals from government retaliation. As Mark Hertsgaard of The Guardian notes, Crane carried with him at all times two essential documents: a copy of the Constitution and a copy of the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. These were often pulled out to settle disputes over treatment of whistleblowers.According to Crane, these whistleblowers followed all of the correct protocols when expressing their concerns about warrantless domestic surveillance and the NSA's failure to move forward on communications it had collected from the terrorists who would go on to perform the 9/11 attacks. While this did budge the Congressional needle on a couple of NSA programs, it did nothing to protect the whistleblowers from FBI raids, criminal charges, and the end of their careers with the US government.The person most instrumental in the prosecution of these whistleblowers was the DoD's general counsel, Henry Shelley. It was Shelley who stripped away the protections granted to whistleblowers in order to serve them up to a highly-irritated Bush White House.

Since December, we've been following the ridiculous Paramount/CBS lawsuit over a big crowdfunded Star Trek fan film called Axanar. While it is true that by raising over a million dollars on Kickstarter, and getting a professional team and actors behind it that Axanar started to blur the lines between a traditional fan film and a full-on professional production, it still seemed like a ridiculous and anti-fan move to sue. To some extent, it highlighted yet another problem with today's copyright laws, which are woefully unprepared for the fact that the equipment is cheap enough and available enough for "amateur" work to be really, really good.

As we covered recently, the judge presiding over Jay Michaud's case in Washington -- part of the FBI's Playpen child porn sting operation -- recently declared the FBI did not have to turn over information on its hacking tool to the defense. How Judge Robert Bryan arrived at this conclusion wasn't fully explained during his oral order, but it had something to do with the government's secret, judge's-eyes-only presentation that preceded the order.It also may have had something to do with the government's declaration that it wouldn't be turning over this information to Michaud under any circumstances. Either way, Bryan arrived at the contradictory conclusion that the FBI did not need to turn over this information despite conceding the defense had a right to see this information.A written ruling has been issued which offers a bit more in the way of explanation while simultaneously failing to deliver Judge Bryan from the conundrum he has created. (via Ars Technica)

This week, there was lots of discussion about the Oracle/Google fight over the Java API, and from there we get our first place winner for insightful. Phaedrus (whose underlying username, I notice, is an excellent Discworld reference) wondered about the details of the fallout from all this API copyright nonsense:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, we saw lots of critical digital issues being debated around the world. France was playing statistical games to claim that its HADOPI three strikes law was effective (it wasn't), even as it was having to temporarily suspend some operations following a data breach; Turkey was facing protests in response to a new plan for internet censorship; Pakistan was considering banning Facebook in the country; libraries in New Zealand were considering avoiding their own three strikes law by shutting off internet access; and in the UK, the courts were expanding superinjunction laws to cover social media and considering the Hargreaves report on the state of copyright.In the US, we were digging into the PROTECT IP act, which was really all about old media going to war with the internet. As Google pointed out, it would set a disastrous precedent for free speech (which, of course, the big media companies tried to claim meant Google thought it was above the law). The International Trade Commission was using some silly methodology to amp up the damages of "piracy" in China, the RIAA was pushing for warrantless searches of CD and DVD manufacturing plants and trying to dig through the cloud for infringement.Ten Years AgoFive years earlier in 2006, we were happy to see the New York Times recognizing the amazing power of a digital library of scanned books, and also pointing out how great it can be for bringing attention to commercially neglected works. The RIAA was freaking out about the ability to record songs from satellite radio in a re-hash of the old "home taping is killing music" debacle, despite having sworn it would never be opposed to private, non-commercial recording. At least Australia was smart enough to realize that people should be allowed to rip their own CDs to their own iPods. Meanwhile, some were realizing that TV downloads could be a huge commercial opportunity for Hollywood, though they'd been trying to offer movies for years and the offerings still sucked. After all, how else could they keep making $200-million movies, right?Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, the biggest source of prediction and speculation was the future of wireless. One report noted that the real key to unlocking the wireless revolution was a killer app that everyone wanted, while MIT was focusing on the need for devices to improve, especially in terms of their displays (though small screens were probably going to do just fine for porn) and really trying to figure out exactly where the wireless web was at, and where it was going. We also saw an extremely smart, subtle prediction that has proven largely true: that consumer choices for wireless devices would start significantly influencing their choices for more traditional PC hardware and software (hello, Apple!)Thirty-Six Years AgoSince the latest Star Wars movie is still fresh in many people's minds, and since we even talked about its remix qualities earlier today in our Awesome Stuff post, it seems worth noting that it was on this day in 1980 that The Empire Strikes Back was released in cinemas. It's now widely considered to be the best of the original trilogy, and one of the best films in movie history.

This week, we're taking a break from gadgets and tech products to look at something right inside Techdirt's main wheelhouse: a pair of crowdfunded projects related to copyright, art and remix culture.Right To Copy MagazineThere are a lot of different aspects to the discussion around copyright, but the most important and fundamental is the fact that it's completely incompatible with the reality of how art and culture functions. Right to Copy is a magazine dedicated to exploring exactly that, and it looks like it's going to be packed with interesting content. The first issue includes stuff from frequent Techdirt staple Cory Doctorow, and a new interview with author Jonathan Lethem (whose excellent essay, The Ecstasy of Influence, you may recall), as well as a bunch of other content that will be of interest to Techdirt readers. All in all, it looks like a magazine very much worth reading, and certainly worth supporting — it's currently a one-man project, and it'd be great to see it grow into something bigger.Everything Is A Remix: Star Wars EditionSurely all our readers are familiar with the Everything Is A Remix documentary videos by Kirby Ferguson. Recently, he released a new edition of the series focused on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, along with a new Kickstarter campaign to support the ongoing project. There's some fun merchandise available: new Star Wars-inspired EIAR t-shirts and stickers, plus a new book (in either PDF or printed form) about Kirby's own remixing process. There's also a very cool reward for serious fans: an hour-long exclusive video chat with Kirby himself, where he'll be discussing his process and philosophy and taking questions. EIAR has been fighting the good fight for quite some time, and has been critical in spreading a deeper understanding of how culture functions and how copyright gets in its way — and I encourage anyone who cares about those topics to show their support.

It wasn't enough that Creative Labs/Creative Technology spent March 24th suing almost every big name in the cell phone business for patent infringement. These lawsuits, all filed in the East Texas patent troll playground, asserted the same thing: that any smartphone containing a music app (which is every smartphone produced) violates the patent it was granted in 2005 to use in conjunction with its mp3 players. "Venue is proper" because smartphones are sold in Texas, even if the plaintiffs are located in California and Singapore, respectively.

Many of you likely know about Glassdoor.com, which is a website used by both employers and propsective employees for recruiting, job applications and reviews of companies by former employees as to what it's like to work at a given company. As with any source of crowdsourced reviews, it is not without its pitfalls and controversy, but most of that has to do with different methods by which companies and former employees try to promote or slam a partricularly workplace with anonymous reviews. Anyone who has done job placement research, however, knows how valuable the site is.

Many of you likely know about Glassdoor.com, which is a website used by both employers and propsective employees for recruiting, job applications and reviews of companies by former employees as to what it's like to work at a given company. As with any source of crowdsourced reviews, it is not without its pitfalls and controversy, but most of that has to do with different methods by which companies and former employees try to promote or slam a partricularly workplace with anonymous reviews. Anyone who has done job placement research, however, knows how valuable the site is.

Modern farming is evolving yet again as technology makes growing crops more efficient with increasingly clever tricks. Maybe it's not such a good idea to mess with plant DNA to insert interspecies genes, but maybe there's no reason for increasing crop yields or produce quality, anyway. Biologists are messing around with gene expression pathways instead, so they don't need to change the DNA present -- just when or how the genes are (or aren't) activated. And better fertilizers could be on the way, too. Check out a few of these farming developments.

Back in 2014, as the protests in Ferguson, Missouri were the main story everyone was following, we noted a troubling pattern of police in the area arresting journalists on no basis whatsoever. This happened even after a court told them to knock if off. And yet, the fallout from this is still happening. For reasons that still don't make any sense at all, prosecutors have charged two journalists -- Ryan Reilly and Wesley Lowery -- with trespassing, after they failed to leave a McDonald's fast enough (they were leaving, just apparently not fast enough).

The nominative use doctrine allows third party references to trademark owners using the trademarks they chose as their preferred descriptors. Without a robust and well-functioning nominative use doctrine, trademark owners can have too much control over their brands -- they can shut down the advertisement of complementary or competitive offerings and potentially even critical scrutiny of the brands. Unfortunately, Congress never adopted a statutory nominative use doctrine for trademark infringement, and the doctrine seemingly baffles the courts. As a result, the circuits have created a patchwork of nominative use doctrines. A ruling this week from the Second Circuit exacerbated this problem.The lawsuit itself is so ridiculous that it's hard to discuss with a straight face. The plaintiff owns the certification mark "CISSP" for certifying information security professionals. I've blogged about them before (1, 2). The defendant, Security University (SU), earned the CISSP designation and then ran ads self-referring to itself as "Master CISSP" or a "CISSP Master." When the certification mark owner challenged the "master" reference, the defendant responded "SU will continue to use the word Master. Master Clement Dupuis is a Male Teacher [and] thus he is a Master according to the dictionary." Oh come on, this is off the BS charts. Nevertheless, the district court dismissed the lawsuit because the defendant earned the CISSP certification and therefore could make a nominative use of it.Trademark law isn't well-equipped to deal with an issue like this. The defendant's "master" usage implies the defendant has a superior knowledge compared to other CISSP. That's more of a false advertising issue than a trademark issue, and courts struggle when pressing trademark law to regulate broader advertising law issues. Furthermore, the way certified parties advertise themselves is best addressed by the terms of the certification, i.e., the certification should include restrictions on making superlative claims, forming combination marks or otherwise creating the impression that there are new certification flavors. I think contract principles, incorporated through the certification part of a certification mark, would be more efficacious than primary trademark doctrine.Still, this case presented itself as a trademark case to the courts, so they address it using the tools of trademark. The Second Circuit reverses the district court's nominative use determination, remanding the case back to the district court to apply the legal principles it lays out in the opinion.Regarding the nominative use doctrine, the court makes two major moves. First, the court could have adopted the legal articulation used by other circuits, such as this venerable language from the Ninth Circuit's New Kids on the Block case from a quarter-century ago:

Techdirt has written many times about the way in which copyright only ever seems to get stronger, and how different jurisdictions point to other examples of excessive copyright to justify making their own just as bad. In Chile, there's an interesting example of that kind of copyright ratchet being applied in the same country but to different domains. It concerns audiovisual works, and aims to give directors, screenwriters and others new rights to "match" those that others enjoy. Techdirt has already written about this bad idea in the context of the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances. But it turns out that Chile's proposed copyright legislation adds an extra twist that makes it even worse, because these rights will be unwaivable -- an approach we've seen before in Portugal. Here's what that will mean in practice, as explained on infojustice.org by Luis Villarroel, from the Chilean organization Innovarte:

Anyone who has spent time with us here at Techdirt will be familiar with Voltage Pictures, the movie studio that perhaps is more famous now for being a copyright settlement troll than it is for having produced the movie Dallas Buyers Club. The studio has quite the reputation for sending settlement letters to those it accuses of having pirated the movie, typically with offers to settle for amounts in the thousands, and armed with the evidence of an IP address and nothing else. The frightened masses too often fork over the demanded settlement, not realizing that having an IP address is not evidence enough to prove guilt. It's a bullying business model that drips of sleaze.But, like with many others that use sleazy business models, the sleaze doesn't end there. Lying and making false promises appears to be part of the model as well. Take the case of Michael Amhari, a California man on the receiving end of one of Voltage's settlement offers. The studio made several promises to try to get Amhari to settle, none of which it appears to have been willing to keep. For instance, Voltage wanted Amhari to take a polygraph to back up his claim that he wasn't the one who downloaded the film.

For years we've written about the troubling practice in the UK of so-called super injunctions, which bar the press from discussing certain topics. It seems that these super injunctions are most frequently used to stop any discussion in the media of embarrassing situations involving the rich and famous. Of course, social media -- and Twitter in particular -- have become a real challenge to making those super injunctions have any meaning at all.

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You may recall that, back during the 2008 Presidential election, the Presidential campaign of John McCain sent YouTube a letter, complaining that the video site did not take fair use into account when deciding to pull down videos after receiving copyright complaints. Apparently, some people had been issuing copyright claims on videos related to his campaign that he believed were fair use, and he was quite upset about it. In particular, McCain was upset about videos his campaign had uploaded that included news clips that were taken down. He insisted this was not just fair use, but that YouTube was an important platform for political speech, and should be much more careful before pulling down political videos.If you can't read that, here are just a few choice quotes from the letter:

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About a decade ago, we wrote about a series of silly lawsuits against Google in which search engine optimizers sued Google because their search engine ranking sucked. All of these lawsuits went nowhere fast. The reason why seems fairly straightforward: it's Google's search engine, and it gets to decide how its algorithm works. Having the courts come in and start mucking with that gets problematic fast.

For years we've noted how the cable industry (and companies that feed off of it like Nielsen) have been in stark, often comic denial about the changes happening in the legacy cable sector. But every few months or so, a select rotation of news outlets also feel compelled to pooh pooh the entire notion of cord cutting, broadly declaring that the idea is a "myth" perpetuated by a select cadre of mean bloggers hellbent on confusing the public for some unfathomable reason. More often than not it's the editors trotting out the "myth" headline to gain hits, despite the story itself doing a piss poor job actually debunking the concept.

Typically, when we've talked about photojournalists in the past, it's been about how they will occasionally make demands for payment for the pictures or videos they've taken with little to no regard for the way fair use works. For the times we've instead focused on stories involving any kind of trouble for photojournalists, the stories are usually about how law enforcement harrasses anyone who tries to document it doing its job. That makes the story of Maya Vidon-White, a photographer in Paris, a new one for me. Maya is currently the subject of criminal charges in France. Her crime? Documenting the aftermath of the now-infamous Paris terror attacks.Vidon-White was in Paris at the time of the attacks and managed to snap photographs of the immediate aftermath just outside of the Bataclan concert hall, where gunmen murdered 89 people and wounded hundreds more. One photograph she took and later sold to a news outlet for publication showed an injured man, Cedric Gomet, on the ground receiving medical attention. Under an obscure French law, this is apparently a crime.

As Techdirt has reported, the public backlash against corporate sovereignty in TAFTA/TTIP was so strong in the EU that the European Commission was forced to come up with Plan B. It now wants to replace what has been called "the most toxic acronym in Europe" -- ISDS, which stands for "investor-state dispute settlement" -- with ICS: the investment court system. That was little more than a re-branding exercise, since most of the key flaws remained, but at least it suggested that the European Commission recognized that corporate sovereignty had become a serious problem that needed to be addressed. However, it seems that others didn't get that memo -- or, more likely, just don't care what the EU public thinks. A new leak reveals that a group of EU governments want to extend the use of ISDS, and to embed corporate sovereignty even more deeply in the fabric of the European economy.The plan by the five countries -- Austria, Finland, France, Germany and The Netherlands -- is to give corporate sovereignty rights for all cross-border investments made within the EU. That would allow EU companies to challenge EU governments over things like local health and safety laws, or environmental regulations, with the public paying for any losses in the ISDS tribunals. The original rationale for corporate sovereignty was to protect only foreign investors when they put money into a country; this has been turned on its head in a so-called "non-paper", now leaked, which calls for domestic investors to enjoy the same special extra-judicial rights (pdf). The background to this extraordinary idea is a move last year by the European Commission to terminate some old bilateral investment treaties (BITs) between European Union members:

There's no shortage of new man-made materials being developed, and they come in all different shapes, sizes and purposes. Sometimes it's about making something old in a new way, or giving something common an extremely uncommon property — or just producing something in previously unimaginable quantities. Here are some new developments from the world of synthetics.

Earlier this year, we wrote about how the entire Medium.com website was being blocked in Malaysia, after a publication it hosted, called the Sarawak Report, had been doing detailed, independent journalism on corruption in the Malaysian government, including a story about $700 million magically appearing in the Malaysian Prime Minister's personal bank account. The government first blocked access to the Sarawak Report's own website, and then to all of Medium after Sarawak started reposting all of its articles there. The government had first contacted Medium, via the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), asking the company to remove an article.

Last week, we wrote about a terrible idea from Minnesota politician Joe Hoppe, for the PRINCE Act (Personal Rights in Names Can Endure Act), which was a massively broad publicity rights law, clearly designed to capitalize on Prince's recent death. In fact, as we noted, the bill could be read to violate itself, since the whole point was to block people from exploiting the likeness or name of a famous person like Prince for various purposes, including commercial purposes and fundraising. Hoppe, apparently missing the irony entirely, had no problem saying that he was pushing the bill to exploit Prince's death.

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.

Legislators like pushing cyberbullying/cyberharassment bills, but seldom seem to consider how their badly/broadly-written laws will be abused. Like many legislators pushing cyber legislation, New Jersey politician David Norcross just wanted to help the children.

We've written a few times now about Rule 41, a proposal that was put forth by the Justice Department last year, in what they claimed was a mere "administrative" change to the rules covering their ability to hack into computers. But the reality is that the change would allow the DOJ/FBI to basically hack into millions of computers overseas based on a single warrant and basically no oversight. The whole concept was a disaster, as many civil liberties and tech companies explained at the time. But none of that mattered, apparently. The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee approved the request back in March, and the Supreme Court gave its blessing a few weeks ago.

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A couple weeks ago, we wrote about a phone call (and follow up emails) we received from Homeland Security indicating an interest in sending us a subpoena, asking for any identifying information we had on a commenter. That commenter had posted a (somewhat ridiculous) comment, in response to another story, about a guy who had nearly a quarter of a million dollars taken by him by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) under civil asset forfeiture rules. The commenter, somewhat weirdly, suggested that the guy who had this money stolen might "know people" who could murder the agents who took the money. It was clearly not a threat. It was random idle speculation.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) is supposed to be an independent body that makes sure that the intelligence community is not abusing its surveillance powers. It was created to go along with the PATRIOT Act, as a sort of counterbalance, except that it initially had basically no power. In 2007, Congress gave it more power and independence and... both the Bush and Obama administrations responded by... not appointing anyone to the PCLOB. Seriously. The Board sat entirely dormant for five whole years before President Obama finally appointed people in late 2012. Thankfully, that was just in time for the Snowden revelations less than a year later.

Given the fact that the FCC has recently bumped the standard definition of broadband to 25 Mbps to highlight competition gaps; reclassified ISPs as common carriers; passed real net neutrality rules for the first time ever; taken aim at the industry's use of protectionist state law to keep the duopoly intact; pushed for improved broadband privacy rules, and is now taking aim at the cable industry's monopoly over cable set top hardware, it's not really surprising that the cable industry isn't happy right now.

So over in the UK, they just had the annual Queen's Speech in which the Queen lays out a bunch of regulatory proposals, and (as per usual) it's a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to the internet. As plenty of the headlines have blared, one part calls for universal broadband access, with a minimum speed of 10 Mbps (I'm assuming they're only talking about downstream speeds, rather than symmetrical, but who knows...). It would also include "automatic compensation" if your internet connection goes down. That's a very good idea as a starting point (I'd argue the speed should be even higher, but it's a start).

It's a mantra I've been repeating for some time now, but the alcohol and brewing industry has a trademark problem on its hands. We've seen instance after instance of the explosion in the craft brewing industry being hampered and harassed over trademark concerns, both from within the industry and from the outside. Most of these disputes lay bare the fact that trademark law has moved well beyond its initial function of preventing consumer confusion into a new era of corporate bullying and protectionism. But at least in most of these instances, the victim of all this is a victim once. Larry Cary, on the other hand, must be starting to feel like a punching bag, having had to now twice change the name of his alcohol-making business over trademark concerns.

Geology is the ultimate riddle. All we have is a snapshot in time — the earth as it stands today — but within that snapshot are the remnant clues to untangling four and a half billion years of planetary development. Every turned stone might answer a question, or it might raise some new ones, as these latest steps towards a complete understanding of our planet's geology demonstrate.