Techdirt

If your social media "presence" has been submitted as evidence, you'd better leave everything about it unaltered. That's the conclusion reached by the judge presiding over a Fair Housing Act lawsuit. The plaintiff didn't go so far as to delete Facebook posts relevant to the case at hand, but did enough that the defense counsel (representing the landlord) noticed everything wasn't quite the way it was when the plaintiff was ordered to preserve the evidence.

Those of us who dwell on the internet already know the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" is a useful source of evidence. For one, it showed that the bogus non-disparagement clause KlearGear used to go after an unhappy customer wasn't even in place when the customer ordered the product that never arrived.

Recently, we covered the ongoing jailing of a former Philadelphia police officer for his refusal to unlock encrypted devices for investigators. "John Doe" is suspected of receiving child porn but the government apparently can't prove its case without access to hard drives and Doe's personal computer. So far, it's claiming the evidence it's still seeking is a "foregone conclusion" -- an argument the presiding judge found persuasive.

Stories about copying turn up a lot on Techdirt. That's largely as a consequence of two factors. First, because the Internet is a copying machine -- it works by repeatedly copying bits as they move around the globe -- and the more it permeates today's world, the more it places copying at the heart of modern life. Secondly, it's because the copyright industries hate unauthorized copies of material -- which explains why they have come to hate the Internet. It also explains why they spend so much of their time lobbying for ever-more punitive laws to stop that copying. And even though they have been successful in bringing in highly-damaging laws -- of which the DMCA is probably the most pernicious -- they have failed to stop the unauthorized copies.But if you can't stop people copying files, how about stopping them from doing anything useful with them? That seems to be the idea behind an IBM patent application spotted by TorrentFreak, which it summarizes as follows:

The weird saga of the insanely thin-skinned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues. As you'll recall, he's on a legal crusade against a German comedian who recited a purposely ridiculous insulting poem about Erdogan on TV (as a response to the stories about Erdogan's thin skin). Erdogan's lawyers found a little used (and little known) "lese majeste" law on the German legal books that makes it a crime to insult representatives of foreign nations. The comedian, Jan Bohmermann, admits that the poem in question was over the top, but that was the point. When you hear about a foreign leader spending so much effort on trying to sue anyone who insulted him, no matter how slight, it's actually pretty tempting to add to the pile of insults.

Dive into the world of microcomputers with the Complete Raspberry Pi 3 Starter Kit. For $120 (55% off), you will receive a Raspberry Pi 3 and a quick start kit which includes an 8 GB SD card with Raspbian OS pre-installed, power cord and various cables to get your Raspberry Pi 3 up and running in no time. You also gain access to 6 courses covering everything from how to automate your home to building robots to parallel programming and more to help you take full advantage of what the Raspberry Pi 3 is capable of. If you already have a Raspberry Pi 2, most of your accessories will work with the 3.

The Copyright Office has been holding a series of "roundtable discussions" on copyright reform that it's going to use to produce a paper supporting certain changes to copyright law. We already know that some sort of copyright reform bill is expected in the near future, and what comes out of this whole process is going to be fairly important. Unfortunately, the roundtables are not encouraging. There was one held in NY a few weeks ago, which Rebecca Tushnet blogged about in great detail, and I attended the ones last week in San Francisco and I've gathered up my tweeted commentary, if you feel like reading through it.

While larger cable companies have the scale and leverage necessary to negotiate better programming, smaller cable companies are finding themselves facing tighter and tighter margins as broadcasters push for relentless programming increases. As such, many have begun candidly talking about exiting the pay TV sector entirely and focusing on broadband service only. When approached by broadcasters like Viacom about major hikes, some cable operators have simply culled the channels from their lineup permanently and refused to look back.

Beyond James Comey, there are still a few law enforcement officials beating the anti-encryption drum. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance is one of those. He's been joined in this fight by some like-minded district attorneys from the other coast, seeing as New York and California both have anti-encryption bills currently working their way through local legislatures. Vance, along with Los Angeles County DA Jackie Lacey and San Diego County DA Bonnie Dumanis, penned an op-ed against encryption for the LA Times. In it, they argue that tech companies have set them up as "gatekeepers" of communications and data, which they believe law enforcement should always have access to, no matter what.

We've talked about cheating in academia in the past, usually revolving around whether or not what used to be called cheating might be better thought of as collaboration. Beyond that, we've also talked about some of the strategies used to combat the modernity of "cheating", which has included the monitoring of students online activities to make sure they weren't engaged in cheating behavior.

The vast, vast majority of time when we point to new academic research, we end up linking to the research hosted on SSRN, which stands for the Social Science Research Network. SSRN has been around for a long, long time, and it's basically the go-to place to post research in the legal and economics worlds -- the two research areas we most frequently write about. At this moment, I have about 10 SSRN tabs open on interesting papers that I hope to write about at some point. Technically SSRN is what's known as a "preprint server," where academics can share papers before peer review is completed and the final papers end up in a locked up, paywalled journal. The kind of paywall run by a giant company like Elsevier.

People have been looking up into the sky for centuries, wondering what's out there and if we're alone on this world. Astronomers, more recently, have been looking into deep space with some relatively high-tech equipment -- finding some strangely inexplicable phenomena (that could be alien megastructures?!) and still wondering if we're alone in the universe. We may never know for sure if intelligent life exists anywhere else, but it doesn't hurt to look, does it?

There's no greater sin than being wrong on the internet. But can you build a federal case out of it? Thomas Robins tried to do exactly that by filing a potential class action lawsuit against Spokeo ("the people search engine") for posting incorrect information about him to its website.

We all know the internet is for porn, right? But the implication in that age-old internet commandment is that it's for porn and nothing else. But that's not true! The internet is also for cats, for business-ing, for Techdirt, and for political messages. But what you really shouldn't do is mix any of those formers with the latter, which it appears is what congressional candidate Mike Webb did on his Facebook page.

Consumers looking for an electric car have several options to consider, but the buzz and excitement around Tesla continues to dwarf everything else. It's hardly unfounded, but the scale of the company's success is staggering, and there's no single reason for it. This week, we discuss that simple question: just why is Tesla so successful?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.

As hardware and software advance, so facial recognition becomes more accurate and more attractive as a potential solution to various problems. Techdirt first wrote about this area back in 2012, when Facebook had just started experimenting with facial recognition (now we're at the inevitable lawsuit stage). Since then, we've reported on an increasing number of organizations exploring the use of facial recognition, including the FBI, the NSA, Boston police and even the church. But all of those pale in comparison to what is happening in Russia, reported here by the Guardian:

Back in February, the judge presiding over the FBI's case against Jay Michaud ordered the agency to turn over information on the hacking tool it used to unmask Tor users who visited a seized child porn site. The FBI further solidified its status as a law unto itself by responding that it would notcomply with the court's order, no matter what.

Product Management is a growing field. Get a hands-on introduction to it with the Complete Product Management Bundle on sale for $45. You'll learn how to think like a product manager and take something from ideation to market research to wireframing to prototyping to user stories, and how to use popular tools like Popplet, Axure, and Pivotal Tracker. The 7 courses even cover how to get into the Product Management field and how to prepare for a job interview. With over 60 hours of instruction, you'll be way on your way towards discovering a new career path.

Verizon's modus operandi has been fairly well established by now: convince state or local leaders to dole out millions in tax breaks and subsidies -- in exchange for fiber that's either only partially delivered, or not delivered at all. Given this story has repeated itself in New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York City and countless other locations, there's now a parade of communities asking somebody, anybody, to actually hold Verizon's feet to the fire. Given Verizon's political power (especially on the state level) those calls go unheeded, with Verizon lawyers consistently able to wiggle around attempts to hold the telco to account.

Three years ago, we wrote about a crazy story in which the Union of Jewish French Students (UEJF) was suing Twitter for $50 million, claiming that the fact that an anti-semitic hashtag started trendng violated some sort of anti-hate speech law in France. Twitter, somewhat ridiculously, actually agreed to remove the tweets in question, saying they were offensive. Even after that, UEJF demanded that Twitter also reveal the identities of everyone who tweeted the hashtag... and won (not the money, but Twitter was told to hand over the user info)! Yeah, France is not a big supporter of free speech, we get it, but this is still ridiculous.

The FCC recently voted 4-1 to approve Charter's $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. The agency just released its full order (pdf) pertaining to the deal, outlining the various conditions the FCC hopes to enforce to keep Charter from simply becoming another Comcast. Among them are a seven-year ban on usage caps, a seven-year ban on charging for direct interconnection (the heart of the telecom industry's battle with Netflix last year), and a ban on any attempt to pressure broadcasters into refusing deals with streaming video providers.

Techdirt has been writing for some years about the illogical mess that is the European copyright levy system -- effectively a tax on blank media that is supposed to compensate copyright holders for an alleged "loss" from copies made for personal use. Last November, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), Europe's highest court, issued an important judgment in this area. It said that Belgium's levies on multifunctional printer sales were incompatible with EU law because they failed to distinguish between private use and commercial use, and between legal and illegal copying. Along the way, the CJEU said that copyright levies must be paid to authors only, and not go to publishers.As Boing Boing points out, the effects of that decision are now being felt in Germany. An organization set up in 1958, called Wort (literally "word" in German), receives a portion of the German copyright levies that are collected, which it has been sharing between both authors and publishers in roughly equal amounts. The CJEU's decision last November ruled that was illegal, and Germany's top court, the Bundesgerichtshof, has confirmed that position in a recent judgment (original in German). As a result, German publishers now find themselves obliged to pay their authors the copyright levies the industry received over the last few years -- more than €100 million according to the German site Übermedien.That same article notes the cries of despair in the wake of this decision, as German publishers claim that they are doomed, and that the end is nigh for books in Germany, etc. etc. What's extraordinary is that there is no sense of regret that for years they have been depriving authors of considerable sums of money. That omission is made worse by the fact that publishers have been happy to use the difficulties that authors face in scraping together enough to live on as an excuse for demanding longer and stronger copyright. But as in the music and film industries, the problem is not that copyright is too weak or too short, but that many publishers -- like many recording companies and film studios -- have been only too happy to rip off authors while simultaneously claiming to have their best interests at heart.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

You may not be aware of this, but apparently Teresa Earnhardt, widow of Dale Earnhardt Sr., the NASCAR driver who died mid-race in 2001, is a staunch protector of her deceased husband's name. I was one of those not aware of this, primarily because NASCAR is every bit as foreign to me as curling (hi, Canadians!). Her latest attempt to block the use of the Earnardt name is particularly interesting, since those she is opposing are her dead husband's son and his son's wife.

Perhaps the most striking thing about archaeological finds is just how fragile and unlikely they are. When you realize the circumstances that had to align to give us each tiny glimpse into our prehistoric past, you can't help but think about all the artifacts we'll never get to see, lost as they are to decay or destruction or inaccessibility. Each find is precious and can teach us something new (except when it turns out to be fake).

The apocalypse for those who like to tinker with their router firmware may be postponed.

It may be that Hillary Clinton was the only State Department employee proactive enough to set up her own email server, but she's hardly the only one to use insecure channels to route classified information. Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times reports classified communications routinely traveled through the State Department's unclassified system.

The saga of the CIA torture report continues to get stranger and stranger. As we noted, last week, the appeals court shot down a FOIA lawsuit from the ACLU to get the full report released. If you remember, only the heavily redacted ~500 page executive summary of the report had been released, with another ~6,500 pages or so still locked away. And we do mean locked away. The Justice Department has basically told the entire executive branch not to open the report, and Senate Intelligence Committee boss Richard Burr has been demanding the report be sent back to the Senate so it can be destroyed. Senator Feinstein had actually distributed copies fairly widely throughout the administration, with the goal being that the full report would get read and, you know, the US government wouldn't torture people again.

The latest round of the Oracle/Google API copyright lawsuit has been an attention grabber to say the least. There's plenty of absurdity to go around, but in reading through the coverage and commentary, it became clear that part of the problem is actually in the nature of Java as a statically typed, verbose language. To me, the crux of the case has been in the fact that non-technical people don't seem to get that software and APIs are different things. They don't get that an API is more like a map or a menu, rather than the actual stuff itself. The API is basically just explaining how to get information, not what the information itself actually is.

Take your phone's camera to the next level with the $10 Acesori Smartphone Camera Lens Kit. The kit includes three lenses -- fish eye, wide angle and macro -- which attach to your phone's lens with magnets to increase the range of photos you can take. It also comes with a cleansing cloth and carrying pouch with lanyards and lens covers, so you can take these scratch-resistant lenses with you anywhere.

You would think that a large university like New York University -- better known as NYU -- would have decently competent lawyers. Especially since NYU has its very own law school that is frequently one of the top ranked law schools in the country. So it's a bit surprising to see NYU file a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube that seems to, pretty clearly, go against the DMCA's rules (found via Eric Goldman).

We've been covering the saga of Sci-Hub for a while now. It's the search engine for academic papers that includes a few tricks to access more paywalled academic papers for free, using the academic logins that have been shared with the site for the sake of retrieving more research. Academic journal publishing giant Elsevier has been waging a war with the site, first getting an injunction against its original domain back in December, only to have it quickly pop up elsewhere. Just a little while ago, we noted that the site had lost another domain, though it was still available in a few more places -- as well as directly at its IP address and at a Tor hidden site.

We've talked a lot about how the FCC is trying to open up the set top box market to additional competition, breaking open cable's monopoly control of the hardware, while driving down set top prices and improving gear quality. Given this would kill $21 billion in annual set top rental fee revenue and expose customers to more streaming options than ever before, the cable industry has been engaged in raging histrionics to try and shut down the effort and protect the status quo.

A law enacted "for the children" in Louisiana has been blocked by a federal judge for being -- like almost anything enacted "for the children" -- overbroad, badly written, and generally inconsiderate of protected expression.

This week, it was hard to miss the irony in David Petraeus saying that Edward Snowden should be prosecuted. We listed five reasons his statements were nonsense, and That One Guy won most insightful comment of the week with an addendum to that list:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, the copyright maximalists were out in force. We saw complaints about new TLDs on the basis that they create "more space" for infringement while lobbyists sought to include special censorship capabilities in .net domains. A judge let US Copyright Group move forward with its huge shakedown operation over The Expendables, BMI tried to claim that a person listening to their own music via the cloud counts as a public performance, and the creators of some origami patterns sued a painter whose work was inspired by them. In Portugal, politicians were seeking to make Creative Commons illegal, while in Ireland there was a push for fair use laws that was somehow branded as "radical". But of course the biggest news was the son of COICA: the hugely problematic PROTECT IP act that had a few good ideas undermined by all the bad ones and had the potential to gut the DMCA safe harbors. Senator Ron Wyden and Rep. Zoe Lofgren were not impressed.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2006, the trademark battle between Apple Computers and the Beatles' record label came to an end with the judge siding with the former's definition of iTunes as a data transmission service, not a music store. We saw an early push to make sure taxpayer-funded research is freely available, the dawning realization that video games are a really big deal, and a very silly squabble over the .xxx TLD. The big copyright topic was DRM, with one analyst presenting unconvincing multi-billion-dollar figures for the loss due to a lack of good DRM, even while Hollywood was being held back by its DRM obsession (and its apparent inability to understand BitTorrent). We debunked the idea that copy protection is somehow "necessary" and one of the few people who seemed to understand the problem was the CEO of RealNetworks.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, things were settling into a new post-bubble groove in Silicon Valley, with people realizing that overhyped areas like B2B weren't dead, they just weren't exciting and had to be approached like any other business — an attitude that was emerging throughout the world of internet startups. There was even more grappling over new TLDs, an interesting glimpse into the FBI's tactics against Russian hackers, and of course an ongoing glut of dot com documentaries. We also got some early bumps on the road to things that are much more common now: Microsoft killed off its subscription-based Office offerings with the apparent awareness that they would come back later, inflight WiFi was possible, but not coming to the US anytime soon, and we were clearly a bit too critical of Apple's plan to start opening retail stores. Also, all the way back in 2001, people were already discussing the still-far-from-complete switch to IPv6.Fifty-Five Years AgoBack in 1961, the recently-appointed head of the FCC was Newton N. Minow, and on May 9th of that year he gave a famous speech entitled Television and the Public Interest, but better known as the "vast wasteland" speech. It was a call for creating more television content in the public interest, and contained some hard-to-argue assertions:

This week, we're taking a look at some crowdfunded projects for new home accoutrements both frivolous and functional.IlyYears ago, someone bought me a cordless home phone that was also capable of instant messaging. All you needed to do was install the companion software on your computer, always keep it running, and then presto! You could use MSN Messenger from anywhere in the house on a tiny, terrible keyboard! Yeah, it was pretty useless. The Ily takes the same idea and makes it functional: it's a home phone that works on a landline but also serves as a communication hub for the house, providing video and text messaging and easily communicating with phones and tablets. The core goal of the design is to be extremely easy to use and family friendly, especially for kids — it only places calls to contacts that have been pre-added to the list, and does so at a single tap of the screen, so even very young children can use it unsupervised and unaided. In addition to being a phone of its own, it can also serve as a Bluetooth extension for multiple smartphones, so all calls in a home can be made and received from one central hub.AcanvasThe Acanvas is a digital art and picture frame that you hang on your wall, and there's nothing too exceptional about that. But it's worth a glance thanks to one fun, innovative feature: its motorized power cord that sneaks out to recharge the frame when nobody's looking. Yup: with the help of a special connector plugged in to the nearest outlet, the Acanvas takes care of its own charging needs as discretely as possible, hiding its power cord away most of the time then extending it to the outlet as needed. Game changer? Not really. Neat feature that's fun to watch? Definitely.PortalA home full of connected devices also needs to be a home full of robust WiFi access, and the Portal router might be on its way to becoming the new standard for just that. The key to Portal is simple: it can operate on a protected portion of the radio spectrum that was formerly reserved for radar, opening up about three times as much spectrum as typical WiFi. The main advantage to this is a way around congestion: in densely populated areas like large apartment buildings, there are a whole lot of routers competing for the same spectrum, invisibly slowing down everyone's WiFi in a way they probably aren't even aware of. Portal uses FCC-approved switching technology to move onto those other spectrum bands when the usual ones are bogged down. Of course, this is ultimately just a first step — in the long run we'll need all routers to be accessing more spectrum and smartly deciding how to share it.

The FBI has entered its explanation for its declaration that it won't discuss the NIT (Network Investigative Technique) in open court or with the defense -- no matter what. Its decision to run a child porn website for two weeks while it deployed the NIT has backfired immensely, resulting in successful challenges of the warrant and the evidence obtained. For the most part, the NIT warrant used by the FBI has been declared invalid because it violates Rule 41's limitations on deployment: a warrant obtained in Virginia can't be used to search computers located in other jurisdictions.

The following story -- sent in by an anonymous Techdirt reader -- shows the power of opening up government data for examination by citizens... as well as the reason many government agencies may be reluctant to do so.

Eating meat has been a part of the human diet for quite some time, and there's evidence that cooking meat allowed our ancient ancestors to spend less time chewing and more time doing other productive tasks. But now, we're eating a lot more calories and hardly chewing at all -- and soon we'll have robots doing all the hard work for us. With all our new free time, maybe we can spend it making sure we're eating the right things (without necessarily eating a trendy paleo diet).

There tends to be a great deal of talk these days about how the media influences public discourse. Most of these conversations tend towards the inane, with the dichotomy of our political affiliations directly deciding how we see the media's influence. One political side will complain that the media leans one way, while the other complains likewise. Everyone is working from a different set of "facts," causing the whole conversation to devolve into a sporting event, with each side rooting for its own team and proclaiming an underdog type of branding for their team against the horde of media others.

Earlier this year, the FBI was catching heat for some undersupervised and overly-broad surveillance it deployed around the San Mateo courthouse in California. Hoping to catch conversations related to suspected bid-rigging during real estate auctions, the FBI scattered hidden microphones around the courthouse steps where the auctions took place.

Unless the Supreme Court chooses to get involved, it looks like we'll never get to see the full "Torture Report." We'll just have to make do with the Executive Summary, which was released at the end of 2014. The summary is just 500 pages out of ~7,000 total. The rest of these pages remain in the hands of the Senate and the CIA, and neither is willing to part with them.

If you've ever had the pleasure of simply asking one medical outfit to transfer your records to another company or organization, you've probably become aware of the sorry state of medical IT. Billions are spent on medical hardware and software, yet this is a sector for which the fax machine remains the pinnacle of innovation and a cornerstone of daily business life. Meanwhile, getting systems to actually communicate with each other appears to be a bridge too far. And this hodge podge of discordant and often incompatible systems can very often have very real and troubling implications for patients.

We've talked in the past about how claims of dangerous silence from certain law enforcement and intelligence groups within the American government are so much the crying of "wolf!" As some will decry the use of security tools like encryption, or other privacy tools, the fact is that the so-called "internet of things" industry has created what is essentially an invited-in army of confidential informants. Domestic surveillance, once a time-consuming, laborious, and difficult task for those doing the spying has since become laughably easy by relative standards. One can imagine J. Edgar Hoover having to change his trousers if he learned exactly to what degree Americans today have accepted hackable or easily-compromised cameras and microphones into our homes, so excited would he be.

Snap up the $59 Complete 2016 Learn to Code Bundle and dive into over 100 hours of training and tutorials. The 8 courses included in the bundle cover Python, AngularJS, HTML5, PHP, Ruby and much more. You will learn web development by completing projects, building your own apps and setting up your own social network.

FBI Director James Comey says we're "going dark" as more platforms move towards encryption. Nobody's buying it. Not Congress. Not NSA officials. Definitely not those who have actually researched the subject.

Here's the sort of fun stuff law enforcement gets up to when it thinks no one's paying attention. It all started with Matt Blaze tweeting out a photo of a rather suspicious-looking Google Maps vehicle.

We've noted time and time again how broadband usage caps on fixed-line networks are arbitrary, unnecessary, and harm innovation. They're also a useful weapon against streaming video competitors, and the natural evolution of TV competition. Caps can be used to either punish users who try and cut the cord with higher prices, but they also allow ISPs to exempt their own streaming services from said caps (something currently being done by both Verizon and Comcast), thereby giving these services a distinct and unfair advantage in the market.

As Techdirt readers well know, Big Pharma really hates compulsory licensing of its patented drugs, where a country steps in and allows an expensive drug to be made more cheaply in order to provide wider access for its people. Such massive pressure is applied to nations contemplating this move, that even global giants like India quail. A new story is unfolding that reveals just how far companies are prepared to go in order to prevent it from happening. It concerns Colombia's possible use of a compulsory license for the drug imatinib, sold under the name Glivec, and used to treat leukemia. Despite the fact that the company holding patents on the drug, Novartis, is Swiss, the US has started to lean heavily on Colombia in order to persuade it not to go ahead with the move.KEI has obtained a copy of a letter from Andrés Floréz at the Embassy of Colombia in Washington, DC, to the Minister of Health in Colombia, reporting on a meeting between embassy officials and Everett Eissenstat. He's the Chief International Trade Counsel for the US Senate Committee on Finance, under Senator Orrin Hatch. Apparently, Eissenstat conveyed quite forcefully his views on the negative consequences for Colombia if it decided to issue a compulsory license on the cancer drug Glivec:

Lieutenant Timothy Filbeck of the Butts County Sheriff's Department found himself in a not-at-all unusual situation: his home was being foreclosed upon. Like many others who have undergone this process, Filbeck was served with a variety of notices explaining the steps of the process and warning him of the consequences of not complying.