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We've had a lot of talk lately about the idiocy of automated content blocking, whether done by Facebook or by big movie studios like Warner Bros. issuing automated DMCA takedowns on its own site. Paul Sieminski*, the General Counsel for Automattic, was asked by Corporate Counsel magazine for his opinions on the WB takedowns (warning: possible registration or paywall). In it, Sieminski notes:

We already know that the Washington Post editorial board has some cognitive dissonance when it comes to Ed Snowden. Three years ago, right after the Washington Post itself, via reporter Barton Gellman, broke a bunch of the initial stories around the Ed Snowden documents -- including the first public report on the Section 702 PRISM program -- the editorial board wrote a piece condemning Snowden's leaks. Now, it's true (as many point out) that the editorial board is separate from the reporters who work at the paper, but it still is really quite amazing that the editorial board would not only burn a source like that but basically complain about its own journalism.

German website Netzpolitik might be headed for another treason investigation. The German government went after the site once for publishing leaked documents detailing mass surveillance operations and it may do so again after its latest publication.The site has obtained a classified report from the country's intelligence oversight office that shows the BND (Germany's intelligence service) illegally collected and stored data and information obtained via its partnership with the NSA.

Today is "International Talk like a Pirate Day." While it's a lot of fun to act like a pirate, drink rum and catch up on Errol Flynn movies, piracy is also a serious issue with real economic and legal significance. As electronic devices become an increasingly ubiquitous part of our lives, the content we consume has moved from analog to digital. This has made copying – as well as pirating – increasingly easy and prevalent.Adding fuel to the flames of this rising "pirate generation" has been the content industry's recalcitrant and often combative attitude toward digital markets. Piracy, and the reactions to it, has had an immense impact on the daily lives of ordinary Americans, shaping their digital experience by determining how they can share, transfer and consume content.As soon as electronic storage and communication technology was sufficiently developed, digital piracy became accessible. Whether it's a song, movie, video game or other piece of software, you could suddenly reproduce it without having to steal it off a shelf or obtain any specialized machinery to counterfeit it. Additionally, if you wanted to listen to an mp3 of the latest Britney Spears album on your computer, there weren't many lawful options. This led to a surge in online piracy and helped foster a culture of online file-sharing.Out of this period came some ridiculous anti-piracy campaigns, but also major legislation both good and bad (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Communications Decency Act) as well as legal battles that would set key precedents for how we access the digital world.The music industry historically has a reputation for being hostile to, or at least slow to embrace, digital markets. Yet there were also some major artists who were early innovators in the space.Before Spotify or iTunes, there was BowieNet. This music-focused internet service provider launched in July 1998 and gave users 5MB of space to create and share their own websites, content and chat. On BowieNet, according to Ars Technica: "[f]ans could get access to unreleased music, artwork, live chats, first-in-line tickets, backstage access, tickets to private, fan club-only concerts." David Bowie saw the potential to help his fan base access his content and discuss it in a social way in the early days of the internet, before Facebook or Myspace. He remarked at the time: "If I was 19 again, I'd bypass music and go right to the internet."Bowie wasn't the only early music pioneer of the internet. Prince was also an early unsung hero. In the early 2000s, he created NPG Music Group, later Lotusflow3r. He even won a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Unlike BowieNet, NPG and later Lotusflow3r provided releases of full albums.As musicians and users were experimenting with new ways to share content on the internet, the United States was working with other World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) member countries to create the most comprehensive "digital" update to the Copyright Act. In 1998, President Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which implemented U.S. WIPO treaty obligations, as well as several other significant titles (including the Vessel Hull Design Protection Act – which pirates of the nautical variety might care about). Of particular importance were the sections providing for "safe harbor" (Sec. 512), which protected service providers from infringing content generated by their users, and "anti-circumvention" (Sec. 1201), which was meant to stop pirates from hacking digital rights management (DRM) and similar restriction technologies.Indeed, it has not been smooth sailing. The DMCA has subsequently generated great controversy from civil society groups, internet companies and the content industry itself. As Cary Sherman, chairman and CEO of Recording Industry Association of America, stated back in 2015:

So this is interesting. MuckRock, the really useful FOIA platform (that I regularly use for filing FOIA requests), has announced what it's calling MuckRock's Thiel Fellowship, in which it's offering to give free service to between one and three "Thiel Fellows" who decide to do FOIA projects involved in investigating some Peter Thiel-connected companies:

Just a few weeks ago, we had lawyer Ira Rothken on our podcast (it's a really great episode, so check it out if you haven't heard it yet). Rothken has been involved in lots of big copyright cases, but is probably most well-known these days as Kim Dotcom's US lawyer. In that episode we talked a lot about the Kim Dotcom situation, but also spent a fair amount of time on the case of Artem Vaulin, who was arrested in Poland for running the search engine KickassTorrents. The US is seeking to extradite him to stand trial in Illinois. On the podcast, Rothken expressed some concerns that he hadn't been able to speak directly to Vaulin and noted that he was working on it.

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about a victory in the courts for Creative Commons licenses, noting that such judgments were still rather few and far between. That's unfortunate, in the sense that some people still think CC licensing is weird, rarely-used or even invalid. The situation regarding Wikipedia is similar. Even though it has been around for 15 years -- just like Creative Commons -- it too suffers from continuing doubts about its aims and methods, and a relative dearth of legal cases helping to clarify the status of both.Here's one from Brazil, which has recently been settled in favour of Wikipedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. It concerns the Brazilian musician Rosanah Fienngo, who had brought a lawsuit objecting to information about her personal life being included on her Portuguese Wikipedia page. Wikimedia pointed out:

We've talked about online electronics retailer Newegg quite a few times here on Techdirt, usually in the context of its noble fight against patent trolls. I, personally, have a lot of respect for Newegg's Chief Legal Officer, Lee Cheng. So it surprised me a bit to see that Newegg is suing another lawyer for copyright infringement on one of its briefs. And, so far Newegg is winning, as the judge has ruled that using the brief is not fair use.

Back in February the FCC voted to use its Congressional mandate to ensure speedy broadband deployment to dismantle protectionist state laws intentionally designed to hinder broadband competition. But the FCC recently found itself swatted down by the courts, which argued the agency lacks the authority to pre-empt even the worst portions of these laws. As a result municipal broadband providers continue to run face first into protectionist provisions written by incumbent ISP lawyers and lobbyists solely concerned about protecting the current broken broadband market.

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If you're going to argue against YouTube, Spotify, etc. and the supposed wholesale screwing of artists, it helps if:A. You're not a former member of an entity with decades of experience in screwing artists, andB. You have some grasp of basic economic concepts.Paul Young, a former director of licensing for Universal Music Group, has an op-ed posted at The Hill decrying the unfairness of streaming services and the wrongness of the DMCA. But any point he's trying to make is buried under ignorance and the demand that some artists be treated more equally than others.

So, last week, I wrote up a long analysis of the House Intelligence Committee's ridiculous smear campaign against Ed Snowden, highlighting a bunch of misleading to false statements that the report made in trying to undermine Snowden's credibility as he seeks a pardon from President Obama. The Committee insisted that it had spent two years working on the report, but it seems like maybe they just needed all that time because they couldn't find any actual dirt on Snowden.

Last week there was a big copyright ruling in India, where a court ruled against some big academic publishers in ruling that a photocopying kiosk that sold photocopied chapters from textbooks was not infringing on the copyrights of those publishers. We wrote about this case over three years ago, when it was first filed. It's actually fairly similar to a set of cases in the US that found college copyshops to be infringing -- leading to a massive increase in educational material costs for college students.

The FBI's impersonation of an AP journalist during an investigation raised some serious questions about what the agency considered to be acceptable behavior when pursuing suspects. The outing of this tactic led to a lawsuit by the Associated Press, which was naturally unhappy its name was being used to deliver malware to a teenaged bomb threat suspect.The FBI performed its own investigation of the matter (but only after it had become public knowledge -- seven years after the incident actually occurred) and found that rules may have been broken by this impersonation of a news agency. Certain approval steps were skipped, making the investigatory tactic not exactly by the book. But in the end, the report congratulated the FBI on using the ends to justify the means.The DOJ's Inspector General [PDF] has now reviewed the incident as well and, uncharacteristically, is even more supportive and less critical of the FBI's actions.

This week, we noticed that despite Hollywood's constant insistence that it should be easy to use technology to block infringement, they couldn't even manage to secure their own screener copies of movies. Our first place winner for insightful was an anonymous commenter who summed it up pretty simply:

So, each week we usually look back at what happened on Techdirt five, ten and fifteen years ago. It's a fun little way to look back at things. But, of course, the "fifteen years ago" this week includes September 11th, 2001. We actually had published five short stories earlier in the morning, before the attacks happened. I know lots of people have their "where were you" on September 11th story -- but mine is pretty simple. I was home in California, asleep in bed. A good friend (who also grew up in NY, but also lived in California at the time) called me and woke me up in the morning to tell me that planes had flown into the towers. I turned on the old TV I had in my bedroom at the time and just lay in bed and watched it for a few hours in horror. I eventually decided I had to write something... but it was just a short post saying that we wouldn't be posting anything else that day. I included a few links on how to donate blood, a site tracking news and a site for people to report if they were okay. The rest of the day I was just numb, wondering what was going on and if everyone I knew back in NY was okay (two of my high school classmates -- one of whom I'd actually gone to school with since 1st grade, and whose early birthday parties I remember attending -- were killed in the attacks).

Last chance this year to get Nerd Harder, Takedown, and more Techdirt gear! »Want to get someone some Techdirt gear for Christmas? I know, I know — you probably don't want to think about that yet. But since Teespring fulfillment sometimes takes a few weeks, we wanted to give everyone a nice big window to get their holiday orders in — or to snag some gear for themselves this fall. So why not get some holiday shopping out of the way early? Four of our classic designs plus one new one are available from now until October 3rd. Among them is the popular Nerd Harder line, which is now available on hoodies, mugs and stickers as well as t-shirts.It's the last time this year we'll be offering any of these designs, and your last chance ever to get some Vote2016() gear! Order now and get it just in time for the election.Hurry up and get your gear before it's too late.

Lots of people have expected President Obama to push for a Congressional vote on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) ratification in the "lame duck" session after the election, but before the new administration takes over. Last week, the President made it pretty clear that he was planning to do exactly that, and magically a bunch of "business groups" that make up the "President's Export Council" are suddenly pushing for a lame duck TPP vote, and lots of old school business lobbying groups are out talking to the press about how totally amazing the TPP is. Meanwhile, on the flip side, TPP opponents are (not surprisingly) gearing up to oppose a lame duck vote.

I'm always super interested in new ideas for hacking the patent system to get around just how broken it is -- and the fact that Congress still seems to have no real desire to fix things -- mainly because some of the largest patent system exploiters are standing in the way of necessary reform. So it's always cool to hear of new ideas to try to fix things without having to bother with changing the law.

In all of our coverage of copyright trolls, those rent-seeking underdwellers that fire off threat letters to those they suspect of copyright infringement with demands designed to extract cash without having to actually take anyone to court, it's quite easy to become somewhat numb to the underhanded tactics they employ. Between specifically targeting folks over pornography in order to minimize the chance that anyone might want to actually go to trial, to the privacy invading tactics occasionally used when a court case actually commences, it becomes easy to simply shrug at the depravity of it all.But there is a special place in hell for copyright trolls who falsely inform students that failure to pay on receipt of threat letters, or who falsely inform foreign students that deportation could result from a failure to pay. According to at least one university in Canada, this is apparently a new favored tactic among some copyright trolls.

John McCain -- fighting for the government's right to get all up in your everything -- has decided to embrace the "grumpy" part of his "grumpy old legislator" personality.Back in July, McCain expressed his displeasure with Apple declining his invitation to show up and get yelled at/field false accusations at his hearing on encryption. He dourly noted that he was "seeking the widest variety of input," but his invited guests included Manhattan DA Cy Vance, a former Bush-era Homeland Security advisor and former NSA deputy director Chris Inglis. Not having Apple to kick around peeved McCain, who finished off the "discussion" with subpoena threats.Another encryption hearing hosted by McCain devolved into the senator ranting about something no one cares about but him: a tech company not immediately prostrating itself in front of an intelligence agency. Here's Marcy Wheeler's summation of McCain's "contribution" to the discussion.

USA Today, the Associated Press, and Vice News have joined forces to sue the FBI over its refusal to release even the most minimal amount of information on the hack it purchased to crack open the iPhone seized during its San Bernardino shooting investigation.The DOJ certainly seemed adamant that Apple disclose all sorts of inside info to the government during the heated litigation. It turned down offers of assistance from hackers and security researchers before finally shelling out an unknown amount of money to an Israeli firm to gain access to the phone's contents. It also ensured it would never have to discuss the technical details of the hacking by not demanding this information be included in the purchase price.Now, it refuses to even discuss the purchase price. Educated guesses that put it north of $1 million are based on a James Comey comment in which he said it was several times his annual salary. Somehow, the actual amount paid -- if revealed -- would somehow prevent the FBI's investigation from reaching its conclusion.This FOIA lawsuit [PDF] targets other innocuous information the FBI refuses to release: contractor info on the party used to open up the seized iPhone (and discover nothing of investigative use on it).

For quite some time now, we've been following an odd case through the German and then EU court system, concerning whether or not the operator of an open WiFi system should be liable for copyright infringement that occurs over that access point. Back in 2010, a German court first said that if you don't secure your WiFi, you can get fined. This was very problematic -- especially for those of us who believe in open WiFi. The EU Court of Justice agreed to hear the case and the Advocate General recommended a good ruling: that WiFi operators are not liable and also that they shouldn't be forced to password protect their access points.

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Lauri Love, the British hacker the DOJ has been dying to get its hands on, has just been handed over to the US by his own government. The decision issued today [PDF] basically states that honoring extradition agreements is more important than any concerns issued about Love's health and well-being once handed over to US federal agents.

Earlier this year, New York City undertook one of the biggest free city WiFi efforts ever conceived. Under the plan, an outfit by the name of LinkNYC is slated to install some 7,500 WiFi kiosks scattered around the five boroughs that will provide free gigabit WiFi (well, closer to 300 Mbps or so), free phone calls to anywhere in the country (via Vonage), as well as access to a device recharging station, 311, 911, 411 and city services (via an integrated Android tablet). The connectivity and services are supported by a rotating crop of ads displayed on the kiosks themselves.

As you probably heard, the ACLU and other have launched a massive campaign asking President Obama to pardon Ed Snowden. You can check it out here and sign the petition. There have also been a bunch of high profile op-eds and endorsements from a wide variety of people -- from former intelligence officials to human rights groups and more. The campaign was obviously timed to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone's new movie, Snowden.

Mishandling classified material can result in a variety of punishments, depending on who you are. If you're a presidential candidate, the routing of hundreds of sensitive documents through an unsecured, private email server might result in a few conversations with the FBI, but not in any criminal charges. If you're a retired general, routing classified material to your biographer/mistress might result in criminal charges, but not any time served. If you're a whistleblower taking your complaints to the press, you'll likely see some jail time to go along with your destroyed career.And if you're a Marine Corps officer trying to warn others of trouble headed their way, you're more likely to be treated like Jason Brezler than Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, or even former CIA Director Leon Panetta.Brezler is facing dismissal from the Marine Corps for mishandling a classified document -- one containing information about an allegedly corrupt Afghan police chief who had already been kicked off a US base by Brezler himself.

Representative Jason Chaffetz, fresh off his bombshell report on the OPM hacking, is promising to drop another explosive report in the future. This one will deal with law enforcement's dirty little secret -- one that's not that much of a secret anymore.

It's football season again, which means some significant portion of America is routinely spending some significant chunk of its weekends watching some significant portion of male college students give some significant portion of each other irreparable brain damage. It's an American thing, I suppose. Also, an American thing is the acquisition of overly broad trademarks that border on the laughable. Intersecting these two bastions of American pride is Boise State, with a recent NY Times article discussing how the school managed to trademark athletic fields that include grass that is blue, with attorneys working with the school suggesting that any non-green colored field might result in trademark action.For those not inclined towards watching college football, a quick piece of background. Several decades ago, the folks that run Boise State University didn't want to pay to resod their football field. So, instead, the school laid down blue turf in its stadium. Now real-life football players play on this:

We've written quite a lot for years about the massive problems with "corporate sovereignty" provisions in trade agreements -- so-called "investor state dispute settlement" (ISDS) provisions -- that allow companies to "sue" countries for regulations they feel are unfair. These aren't heard by courts, but rather by "tribunals" chosen by the companies and the countries. Some supporters of these provisions claim that there's really nothing wrong with them because they help encourage both investment in different countries and more stable and fair regulations.

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As Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr mount another attempt to legislate holes in encryption, national security officials are offering testimony suggesting this is no way to solve the perceived problem. Another encryption hearing, again hosted by a visibly irritated John McCain (this time the villain is Twitter), featured testimony from NSA Director Michael Rogers [PDF] and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre [PDF] -- neither of whom offered support for mandated backdoors.As nice as that sounds, the testimony wasn't so much "We support strong encryption," as it was "We support strong encryption*."Lettre's testimony follows statements of support for encryption -- and opposition to legislated backdoors or "golden keys" -- with the veiled suggestion that the government will be leaning heavily on tech companies to solve this problem for it.

We've noted for years that one way incumbent broadband providers protect their duopoly kingdoms is by quite literally buying state laws that protect the status quo. These laws, passed in roughly twenty different states, prevent towns and cities from building their own broadband networks or in some instances from partnering with a private company like Google Fiber. Usually misleadingly presented by incumbent lobbyists and lawmakers as grounded in altruistic concern for taxpayer welfare, the laws are little more than pure protectionism designed to maintain the current level of broadband dysfunction -- for financial gain.

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As Techdirt noted in 2014, by agreeing to the "fast track" procedure for trade deals, Congress has essentially given up its power to change them. That's a two-edged sword. Although it makes the ratification process simpler, because things like TPP and TTIP must be accepted or rejected in their entirety, it also means that political bosses have no ability to tweak the text to make it more likely the deals will be ratified. That's coming back to bite one of the people who introduced the fast track bill, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch.He has been trying for a while to get TPP to require the same 12 years' monopoly of drug safety data that the US provides for so-called "biologic drugs," in addition to the normal patent protection they enjoy. The final TPP text specifies eight years, and because of the fast track authority that he worked so hard to put in place, there is no way for Hatch to get the text changed now that it has been finalized. According to a report from Bloomberg, Hatch is apparently hoping that "binding side agreements" with the other TPP nations might do the trick, but there's a problem with that or any similar approach:

There's been a lot of buzz over respected computer security expert Bruce Schneier recently talking about how someone, or some organization, or (most likely) some state actor, is running a series of tests that appear to be probing for ways to take down the entire internet. Basically, a bunch of critical infrastructure providers have noticed some interesting attacks on their systems that look like they're probing to determine defenses.

We've noted for years now how Verizon's modus operandi is to promise uniform fiber deployment to a city or state in exchange for all manner of subsidies and tax breaks, then walk away giggling to itself with the job only partially complete. This story has played out time and time again thanks to city and state contracts struck behind closed doors without public transparency, allowing Verizon to bury numerous loopholes in the contract language. Other times, Verizon can lobby to weaken oversight so that there's simply nobody left to hold Verizon accountable when it decides to laugh off the contract requirements.

Generally speaking, taking cues from China on things like best ways to censor the internet... probably isn't the best idea. Yet, it appears that's exactly what the UK's big surveillance agency, GCHQ is doing. The "Director-General of Cyber" (that's a thing? yikes!) at GCHQ, Ciaran Martin, gave a speech at a cybersecurity summit in DC recently and announced exciting plans to censor the UK internet at a DNS level. No, really.

When it comes to the digital distribtion of video games, there are many animals in the ecosystem but only one real eight-hundred-pound gorilla. That, of course, is Steam, Valve's platform for a digital games marketplace. The fact that some insane percentage of online game purchases go through Steam is great news for Valve, of course, but it comes with challenges as well. There's a balancing act Steam must do, as it must ingratiate itself to both buyers of games and those who develop the games.One recent attempt to, according to Valve, make Steam game reviews more useful to the gaming community has developers concerned, however. And, even if we take Steam's claims to its reasoning for the change, the concern by game developers is entirely understandable and warranted. This whole thing has to do with how Steam is prioritizing game reviews that come from reviewers who bought the game directly from Steam, as opposed to applying download keys acquired elsewhere.

While Nintendo has been making waves for some time with its overly aggressive DMCA takedowns of any fan-work that includes its intellectual property, the company has really ramped things up lately. Recent actions include the takedown of a Mario fan game, a remake of a 25-year-old Metroid title, and engaging in all kinds of craziness over its Pokemon Go title. It was enough that one of Nintendo's biggest rivals couldn't help but take a subtle potshot at it, while simultaneously treating Sega fans like human beings.Daniel Coyle, on Twitter as SuperSonic68, headed up a team of Sonic the Hedgehog fans in the development of a fan-made 3D Sonic game. Their work has been received rather well as of late, including on gaming blogs and YouTube channels. When one YouTube channel, GameGrumps, did a "let's play" of the fan game, it appears that Sega noticed and reached out in the comments section with a poke at Nintendo's aggressive nature and some encouragement.

The Fourth Amendment contains an exception for "plain view:" evidence of criminal activity seen by law enforcement, whether it's through a cracked-open doorway, on a vehicle's seat, etc., can be seized and used without seeking a warrant. The government would also like to avail itself of a "plain hearing" exception, which it can use to salvage evidence of criminal activity in overheard conversations intercepted with a wiretap.The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agrees with the government's "plain hearing" theory, though not with its assertions on how far the exception should stretch.The FBI obtained a wiretap warrant for a number it believed belonged to the target of its drug investigation, Ignacio Escamilla. After listening to several conversations about drug dealing, the agents came to the conclusion that Escamilla wasn't actually using the phone number targeted by the wiretap. However, they felt the conversations they were overhearing were related to the Escamilla drug conspiracy they were investigating. So, they kept listening.These conversations -- which didn't include the target of the wiretap -- led to the arrest of Michael Carey, who pled guilty to drug charges while reserving the option to move to suppress the evidence. The lower court concluded that the government could use wiretap warrants to gather evidence against other individuals, even if they weren't actually targeted by the wiretap. This was the "plain hearing" holding.The Appeals Court agrees [PDF] to a certain extent. While the government is welcome to make use of some unrelated evidence it comes across while eavesdropping, it cannot simply continue to intercept conversations once it's established the target of the warrant is not actually using that phone number.

This is not a surprise given the earlier leaks of what the EU Commission was cooking up for a copyright reform package, but the end result is here and it's a complete disaster for everyone. And I do mean everyone. Some will argue that it's a gift to Hollywood and legacy copyright interests -- and there's an argument that that's the case. But the reality is that this proposal is so bad that it will end up doing massive harm to everyone. It will clearly harm independent creators and the innovative platforms that they rely on. And, because those platforms have become so important to even the legacy entertainment industry, it will harm them too. And, worst of all, it will harm the public greatly. It's difficult to see how this proposal will benefit anyone, other than maybe some lawyers.

Prenda Law's Paul Hansmeier, infamous for constantly scheming about ways to use the judicial process to shakedown people for money, and pompously overstating his own position (e.g., "welcome to the big leagues") has now lost his license to practice law. The order from the Minnesota Supreme Court rather matter-of-factly lays out the claims against Hansmeier (amazingly, he seems to get off lightly given how much other stuff he did):

Right, so remember how over the weekend the spineless execs at Univision decided to delete six articles from various Gawker properties? The reasoning made very little sense. The company claimed that since it had only agreed to acquire the assets of Gawker, but none of the liabilities, it felt that it needed to delete the six articles that were part of existing lawsuits (they also changed an image in one that was the subject of a copyright dispute). As we (and basically everyone else) pointed out, this was ridiculous on multiple levels. First, due to the single publication rule, any liability likely would be only for that initial publication. But, more importantly, the lawsuits in question were all pretty obviously bogus.

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While it's certainly possible Russia has been busy using hackers to meddle in (or at least stoke the idiot pyres burning beneath) the U.S. elections, we've noted how actual evidence of this is hard to come by. At the moment, most of this evidence consists of either comments by anonymous government officials, or murky proclamations from security firms that have everything to gain financially from stoking cybersecurity tensions. Of course, transparent evidence is hard to come by when talking about hackers capable of false flag operations while obfuscating their footprints completely.

Last week, we wrote about a terrible copyright ruling from the Court of Justice of the EU, which basically says that any for-profit entity that links to infringing material can be held liable for direct infringement, as the "for-profit" nature of the work is seen as evidence that they knew or should have known the work was infringing. We discussed the problems with this standard in our post, and there's been a lot of commentary on what this will mean for Europe -- with a variety of viewpoints being expressed. One really interesting set of concerns comes from Egon Willighagen, from Maastricht University, noting what a total and complete mess this is going to be for scientists, who rarely consider the copyright status of various data as databases they rely on are built up:

Roughly every month or so I'll see a story proclaiming that cord cutting is a bad idea because you need to subscribe to multiple services to mirror the same overall volume of content you receive from pay TV. There are a few problems with that logic, first being that cord cutters aren't looking to precisely duplicate cable TV. They're looking to get away from paying a small fortune for hundreds of unwatched channels, including an ocean of religious programming, infomercials, whatever the Weather Channel is up to these days, and C-grade channels focused on inherently inane prattle.

The Guardian has published a long report detailing Senate staffer Daniel Jones' experience with the CIA while acting as the Senate Committee's chief investigator during the compilation of the "Torture Report." While much has already been written about the CIA's actions during this time, the Guardian's multi-part piece gives the public an insider's look at the effort the agency went through to disrupt the preparation of the report.The process started off on the wrong foot. It was the New York Times, not the agency itself, that initiated the Senate's examination of the CIA's counterterrorism efforts.