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The push to reform ECPA -- the Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- have been going on basically as long as this site has been in existence (i.e. nearly 20 years). There are lots of problems with ECPA, but the big one that everyone points to is that it considers any communication that's on a server more than 180 days to be "abandoned" and accessible without a warrant. That perhaps made some amount of sense back in 1986 when the law was written, because everything was client-server and you downloaded your email off the server. But in an age of cloud computing and webmail it makes no sense at all. Still, the IRS and the SEC really, really liked the ability to use ECPA to snoop on people's emails.

As we've been discussing, the FCC is cooking up a plan to open up the closed cable set top box to third party competition. As we've also been pointing out, the cable industry has been throwing an absolutely epic hissy fit about this plan, given it would destroy the $21 billion in annual revenues cable operators make off of cable box rental fees. Since it can't just admit this is all about protecting set top rental fees, the cable industry has been pushing an endless wave of editorials in newspapers and websites nationwide, claiming more set top box competition will hurt consumer privacy, increase piracy, harm diversity, and rip the very planet from its orbital axis.

We recently wrote about the Rhode Island attorney general's "cybercrime" bill -- a legislative proposal that seeks to address cyberbullying, revenge porn, etc. with a bunch of broadly -- and poorly -- written clauses. Two negative comments written months apart could be viewed as "cyber-harassment" under the law, separating it from the sustained pattern of abuse that one normally considers "harassment."

With the EU making the first big antitrust move against Google in the EU over Android bundling practices (and more still expected over search), it seems that lots of other companies that have had trouble adapting to the internet are coming out of the woodwork to file complaints of their own (well, everyone except Microsoft, which has agreed to drop its complaints -- despite kicking off much of the EU antitrust focus on Google). Last week, we wrote about News Corp. confusingly arguing that Google News was an antitrust violation, because it both linked to its content and because it wouldn't link to its content (don't ask me, I don't understand it either).

As we've explained over and over again, copyright and censorship go hand in hand. People who want to censor seem to love the power that copyright conveys on them. Take, for example, the Brazilian media giant Globo. As you may have heard, there's a big political fight down in Brazil, as the Congress there looks to impeach the President, Dilma Rousseff. It's a big political mess, made even more ridiculous by the fact that many of the leading voices looking to impeach Rousseff have themselves been indicted for corruption or are being investigated for corruption. Last week, David Miranda wrote an article for the Guardian, arguing that the whole thing is political, and that the corruption claim against Rousseff is just a pretext for an opposing party to gain power. In that article, he blames the major media properties in Brazil for supporting the fiction in pushing an anti-Rousseff story.

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Just last week, we wrote about another ruling in one of the many cases kicked off when the FBI took control over a Tor-based child porn site, called Playpen, and ran it for two weeks. While the courts have said that it was okay for the FBI to run a child porn service for two weeks as part of a sting operation, they've been having a lot more trouble with the fact that the FBI then used its control over the service to infect any visitor with malware in order to figure out who they were. In the ruling last week, in the case against Alex Levin, in the Massachusetts District Court, the court said that the malware/hacking tool represented an illegal search under the 4th Amendment and suppressed the evidence. The key issue was that the warrant was issued for searches in the Eastern District of Virginia, but Levin clearly was not there.

For several years now, broadband providers have been taking full advantage of the lack of competition in the broadband market by expanding usage caps and overage fees. More recently, companies like AT&T, Comcast and Suddenlink have taken this practice one step further by charging users a $10 to $35 per month surcharge if consumers want to avoid usage caps. In other words, consumers are paying more money than ever for a service that costs less and less to provide, thanks again to limited competition in the broader broadband market.

Congress has mostly stayed away from any attempt at copyright reform since the great SOPA blackout of 2012, afraid that anything will set off the public again. However, in 2013, Copyright Register Maria Pallante called on Congress to create the "next great copyright act" designed to update copyright for the 21st century. The House Judiciary Committee has been holding hearings and roundtables every few months since then, some of which have been more encouraging than others.

By now, the theoretical risks of including corporate sovereignty chapters in TPP and TAFTA/TPP are becoming more widely known. But as Techdirt wrote back in 2014, there's already a good example of just how bad the reality can be, in the form of the monster-sized case involving Russia. An investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunal ruled that Vladimir Putin really ought to pay $50 billion to people who were majority shareholders in the Yukos Oil Company. The Russian government didn't agree, and so naturally took further legal action to get the ruling overturned. As The New York Times reports, it seems to have succeeded:

It's a source of wonder and excitement for some, panic and concern for others, and a whole lot of cutting edge work for the people actually making it happen: artificial intelligence, the end-game for computing (and, as some would have you believe, humanity). But when you set aside the sci-fi predictions, doomsday warnings and hypothetical extremes, AI is a real thing happening all around us right now — and achieving some pretty impressive feats:

We've talked quite a bit around here about the saga of the Washington Redskins trademark cancellation. The long-held mark by the football team was cancelled after a group of Native Americans petitioned against it, claiming that the team's name was disparaging of their people. After I, dare I say, flip-flopped from cheering on the cancellation to having the team itself change my mind with a delightfully vulgar ruling, which demonstrated that the USPTO grants all kinds of marks on "offensive" terms, the current status of the trademark remains cancelled. Well, the team has now appealed to the US Supreme Court, not only seeking to have its own case reviewed, but also seeking to tie their case to another that we've talked a bit about, that of the Asian music group, The Slants.

The EFF and ACLU -- along with the assistance of a very fortuitous public records request by Stingray-tracker extraordinaire Mike Katz-Lacabe -- have uncovered more hidden use of IMSI catchers by law enforcement. A criminal prosecution relying on real-time tracking of a suspect's cell phone has finally led to the admission by Wisconsin police that they used a Stingray to locate defendant Damian Patrick.

Recently, some Facebook staffers raised an interesting question: should the social media giant employ its significant power to stem the rise of Donald Trump? This week, we discuss that notion and the broader question: should the internet companies that influence so many aspects of our communication and information gathering use their position to pursue political goals?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.

Let's take a trip in the wayback machine a bit.

The insanity around Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his insanely thin skin is getting worse. As we've discussed, Erdogan has been going crazy suing anyone in Turkey who he claims insults him (over 1800 cases in just 18 months). And he's tried to take things internationally as well. Even when visiting the US, his team tried to silence the press. And then he whined about a song on a German TV station mocking him. That resulted in a German comic writing some more direct insults, and Erdogan somehow discovering a nearly forgotten German law that allows for criminal cases against anyone who insults a foreign leader.

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We've written many times about how copyright is frequently used for censorship, and just recently we wrote about law professor John Tehranian's excellent article detailing how copyright has a free speech problem, in that people using copyright to censor has become more common and more brazen. Whenever we write this kind of thing, however, I get pushback from copyright maximalist lobbyists and lawyers, who insist that no one really wants to use copyright for censorship purposes, but merely to "protect" their works.

There are a bunch of different cases going on right now concerning the FBI secretly running a hidden Tor-based child porn site called Playpen for two weeks, and then hacking the users of the site with malware in order to identify them. The courts, so far, have been fine with the FBI's overall actions of running the site, but there are increasing questions about how it hacked the users. In FBI lingo, they used a "network investigative technique" or a NIT to hack into those computers, but the FBI really doesn't want to talk about the details.

For several years now we've noted how instead of adapting to the cord cutting age, many in the cable and broadcast industry have responded with the not-so-ingenious approach of aggressive denial, raising rates as fast as humanly possible, and stuffing even more ads into every television hour. And when broadcasters can't get the ads to fit, they'll just resort to speeding up or editing programs to ensure that they're hammering paying customers with more ads than ever. Given the rise in alternative viewing options, this obviously isn't the most ingenious form of market adaptation.

Techdirt has naturally been following closely the battles over government attempts to bring in ever-more intrusive surveillance laws, particularly in the US, UK, and China, which are some of the worst culprits in this regard. But it's important to remember that this is a struggle that is taking place all around the world, even in the smaller countries that often get overlooked by mainstream media. For example, Georgia -- the country, not the state -- is witnessing exactly the same tussle between the politicians and the courts that we find elsewhere, as reported here on the civil.ge site:

We don't see nearly enough good trademark rulings, especially concerning Fair Use, that it's worthwhile in highlighting those that do occur. A nice recent example of this is a court tossing a trademark action started by several horse racing tracks against a gambling gaming company over the latter's use of track names. To get just a bit of background on this, Encore Racing Based Games makes electronic gambling games, including video slots and video poker. You see these types of machines in bars and restaurants wherever this type of gaming has become legal. But they also make a more innovative type of game in which players are presented with historical races and given the option to bet on them in a parimutuel fashion. The results, as best as I can tell, are based on the real-world outcomes of what I assume are obscure enough races that people aren't able to simply look up the results on their smartphones in whatever the allotted time is that they're given. Those results and races, naturally, include the names of the venues in which they were run.

Genetically modifying animals and plants is a growing concern -- with some people totally against the idea. And there are now a variety of biotech tools that make defining GMOs a bit less clear-cut for the general public. Taking a gene from a sea animal and putting into a pig sounds extremely unnatural, but does simply removing a gene sound as bad? Or what if farmers used traditional breeding techniques to get to a particular genetic end goal that was discovered by less "natural" genetic experimentation?

If you recall, the FCC and DOJ blocked Comcast's acquisition of Time Warner Cable, in large part because of the sheer volume of nonsensical benefits Comcast tried to claim the deal would bring consumers. When Charter Communications subsequently announced its own acquisition of the company, it decided to take a different tack; most notably by taking a more congenial tone with regulators, dialing back the tone-deaf rhetoric and astroturf, and even hiring long-time net neutrality and consumer advocate Marvin Ammori to help seal the deal.

Police body cameras aren't the cure-all for bad policing. However, they are an important addition to any force, providing not only a means for accountability (albeit an imperfect one) but also documentation of day-to-day police work. They can help weed out those who shouldn't be cops as well as protect officers from bogus complaints.

A couple of years ago, Techdirt wrote about Brazil's Marco Civil -- variously called a "constitution for the Internet," and a "Magna Carta for the Web." Whatever you want to call it, the Marco Civil was a heartening example of the rights of Internet users being strengthened for a change. In June 2015, one year after it passed, an article on the Council on Foreign Relations site noted its wide-ranging impact:

Lower courts appear to be taking the Supreme Court's Rileydecision seriously -- give or take the occasional "there's no Constitution at the border" decision. If the Supreme Court says there's a warrant requirement for cell phone searches, there's a warrant requirement for cell phone searches.

If you want to get a feel for the gobsmacking amount of information being collected by UK surveillance agencies (MI5, M16, GCHQ), all you have to do is see how it's being misused. Privacy International, which has been steadily suing the UK government over domestic surveillance, has received another set of documents that show the banality of dragnet surveillance evil. The banality is not so much the dragnet itself (although that's not to say it isn'tits own form of evil) as it is the uses it's put to.

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We know the FBI isn't willing to share its investigative techniques with judges. Or defendants. Or the general public. Or Congress. The severely restrictive NDAs it forced law enforcement agencies to sign before allowing them to obtain IMSI catchers is evidence of the FBI's secrecy. Stingray devices were being used for at least a half-decade before information starting leaking into the public domain.

Way back before Ed Snowden became a household name, Senator Ron Wyden kept pushing James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to reveal more details on how the NSA was interpreting certain provisions in the PATRIOT Act to spy on Americans. You probably recall the infamous exchange in a 2013 Senate hearing in which Wyden asked Clapper "does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" and Clapper said "No sir... not wittingly." Snowden himself later noted that this particular exchange was part of what inspired him to leak documents to reporters just a couple months later.

Last year, we noted that Comcast was refusing to let the company's customers access HBO's streaming video service on certain platforms. In order to watch a service like HBO Go on your Roku or, say, gaming console, you need to log in using your cable credentials, as with most "TV Everywhere" type services. Most cable operators had no problem quickly enabling this authentication, but when it came to say -- HBO Go on Roku or the Playstation 3 or 4, Comcast refused to let the services work. Why? If users can't access this content via a third-party app, they're more likely to watch the content on Comcast's own apps, devices, and services.

While so much of the attention had been focused on the case in San Bernardino, where the DOJ was looking to get into Syed Farook's iPhone, we've pointed out that perhaps the more interesting case was the parallel one in NY (which actually started last October), where the magistrate judge James Orenstein rejected the DOJ's use of the All Writs Act to try to force Apple to help unlock the iPhone of Jun Feng, a guy who had already pled guilty on drug charges, but who insisted he did not recall his passcode.

This week, after a lab tech was caught faking drug test results, calling over 7,800 prosecutions into question, That Anonymous Coward delivered our first place winner for most insightful comment of the week, in the form of a rightfully outraged tirade:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, the cracks in Righthaven's facade were starting to widen. One judge explained that their demands were silly then slammed their tactics and unsealed a damning document, which revealed that Righthaven's copyright assignments from Stephens Media were a sham, only assigning the "right to sue". Meanwhile, the company was defending itself before another highly skeptical judge.YouTube was facing a lot of criticism over its problematic copyright school (though it wasn't as bad as some "educational" offeringsthe associated quizzes, to the point that Public Knowledge was offering $1,000 to anyone who'd create a better one. The RIAA lawyer fighting the Limewire lawsuit was recommended as a federal judge while Grooveshark was defending its own legality and the MPAA was contradicting itself on the subject of protecting culture. This was also the week that we saw the birth of Kopimism.Ten Years AgoIn the world of copyright lawsuits this week in 2006, we took a closer look at why MP3.com never appealed the ruling against it, while one federal judge was considering possible defences against RIAA filesharing lawsuits. The FCC commissioner was pushing for DRM for no real reason, one economist was trying to blame piracy for the high price of concerts, and Mike was heading to Washington to discuss copyright at the CATO Institute.Laws against driving while using a cellphone were still proving popular, even if that required misrepresenting studies that actually said all distractions are bad. And in the world of completely unsurprising studies, we also learned that people use the internet, especially internet users and kids can find their way around web filters.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, people were grappling with predictions about emerging technologies, from the mostly-doomed (interactive TV) to the partially-successful (RFID tags are everywhere even if they never fully replaced barcodes) to the still-emerging (augmented reality) to the we-really-should-have-this-all-sorted-by-now (fiber to the home). A not-particularly-funny New York Times was calling for relationship counselling for the music industry and its customers while an always-funny Douglas Adams was delivering the keynote at the Embedded Systems Conference. Those who looked ahead with a bit more concern were noting that mass online victimization via data theft and hacking were just around the corner (and UK intelligence agencies couldn't even stop losing laptops).Eighty-Six Years AgoWe've all seen the absurd lengths cable news networks will go to in order to keep something on screen 24 hours a day, even when they have nothing interesting to talk about. On April 18th, 1930, BBC Radio took a slightly different approach that's almost unimaginable today: they simply announced that there was no news, and played some piano music instead. Of course, there actually was news, just as there's plenty the cable networks should be turning their attention to today, but at least then they had the reasonable excuse that said news couldn't possibly have reached them in time.

High-quality precision engineering enables the creation of remarkable tools and machines, but once in a while it gets applied to something more frivolous, with extremely appealing results. This week, we're looking at a pair of ultimately not-that-useful toys which are nevertheless very cool, thanks to unmatched detail and precision.MOONThis one is sure to make space geeks salivate, though only the hardcore among them will actually part with £300+ to get their hands on one. What makes MOON special? Well, while the non-detail-oriented might think a volleyball makes a sufficient lunar globe, the MOON is there for those who demand more: it's a completely accurate and faithful 3D reproduction of the moon, not based on 2D photos of the surface but on actual topographical data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can see — and even touch — every single perfectly-rendered ridge and crater, or just watch as they are cast into shifting relief by the ring of white LEDs that orbits the globe to create stark shadows and highlights and accurately simulate lunar phases. The rotocasted polyurethane resin globe comes in a couple of different sizes but, as mentioned, none of them are cheap.SpinSpinning tops are one of those funny pieces of simple engineering that most people can't help but find pleasing and intriguing for no immediately obvious reason, and this one might be the top to end all tops. It's huge — 3 inches tall by 2 inches in diameter — and hefty, made from high-quality aluminum with a precisely machined 2mm tip. After hitting full speed with the help of a kevlar pull-string, it's capable of some nifty feats for a spinning top: it can spin upside-down or on your fingertip almost as confidently as the normal way on a flat surface, and its high weight and speed make it function like a gyroscope and do tricks like spinning on its side (seemingly defying gravity) while hanging from the launching string. Essentially, it's an age-old toy made impressive by being engineered like an important machine — and while it's a slightly more accessible purchase than the lunar globe above, it still carries a $65 price tag (and that's just for Kickstarter backers — the intended retail price is over $100).

The Supreme Court declared in 2014 that law enforcement could no longer perform searches of cellphones incident to arrest without a warrant. The exceptions to this ruling are making themselves apparent already.

For many years we've pointed out that the fees charged by PACER were clearly outside what the law allows. If you don't know, PACER is the electronic filing system for the federal court system. It is great that all filings in federal cases are available online, but the interface looks like it was designed in 1998, the search is ridiculous, and (worst of all) the system charges you 10 cents per page of download -- excluding judicial opinions, but including HTML pages including search results and docket reports. There is a cap of $3 per document, but that means that every time I call up PACER on a big case -- say the Apple/DOJ encryption battle, there are so many filings that just to look at the docket is basically $3. That adds up.

Sometimes, the key to kicking off a whole new world of technology is a brand new material. The discovery and/or creation of new materials with useful properties is pursued in engineering, chemistry and physics — sometimes with world-changing results, and other times producing only curiosities. Lately, it seems like a lot of the most interesting material advances have to do with flexibility in one way or another, like these four creations that might end up enabling the devices of the future:

The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court has done something few courts do: told law enforcement it can't have that sweet, sweet "drug" money it lifted from two brothers for no other reason than that it feltthere was something shady about its very existence.

Back in 2011, Microsoft officially filed an antitrust complaint against Google in the EU. At the time, we noted how silly this was, given that the company itself had spent years battling EU antitrust regulations. It almost felt like a "well, if we had to go through that hellish process, let's put it on Google too..." kind of thing. Within less than a year, Google filed its own antitrust complaint back against Microsoft. As we noted at the time, both claims seemed kind of ridiculous and overblown -- and it bothered us greatly that these companies were resorting to stupid political games, rather than just competing in the market.

We've seen a lot of silliness this political season, most of which I happily lay the blame for at the feet of what has to be the lamest group of candidates for President this esteemed country has ever seen. What these good-for-nothings have bred is a deeper level of hateful rhetoric and toxic partisanship than what was present already, which I didn't even think was possible. Yet they achieved it anyway, meaning that my social media feeds are overflowing with the kind of know-nothing memes and claims about all of the candidates that have me thinking about downing a bottle of rat poison just to make my brain stop hurting. Add to all of it the involvement of SuperPACs for all of these candidates, with their un-subtle messages and self-serving advertising, and it's enough to wonder if we should scrap this whole America thing and try to start something new from scratch.

We've written quite a lot about National Security Letters (NSLs) over the years. This widely abused tool allowed the Justice Department/FBI to issue simple letters (technically administrative subpoenas) demanding information from companies with no prior judicial review -- and frequently with a perpetual gag order, so that a company can't even say that it had received an NSL. The FBI hands these out by the dozens. Back in 2013, there was a somewhat surprising, but important, district court ruling in California saying that national security letters were unconstitutional, and that legislation was needed to fix them.

I already wrote a post about how the FISA Court rejected the arguments of the public advocate that it appointed to review the legality and constitutionality of the infamous backdoor searches. However, I wanted to put up a second post as well, digging a little deeper into what the ruling itself means, rather than just focusing on the public advocate part of it. Because it's pretty scary. We already knew that, once that data was collected under the Section 702 PRISM program, the NSA opened it up to both the CIA and FBI to search on for other purposes.

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On Tuesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released some redacted versions of three previously secret FISA Court rulings. There are a few interesting things in them, but one notable point, found in a ruling from last November regarding the NSA's 702 PRISM program, is that the FISC took advantage of the provision in the USA Freedom Act to appoint a public advocate to argue on behalf of the public. One of the big complaints in the past, is that the FISA Court is no court at all. Only one side -- the government -- gets to present its case, and then the judges decide.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are a popular topic here on Techdirt. We've discussed how important FOIA rules are... and how the government seems to go out of its way to try to ignore both the letter and spirit of the law. Because that's just how secretive governments act. However, it's certainly true that some FOIA requests are a little more ridiculous than others. Take, for example, Refinery29 reporter Vanessa Golembewski's amusing decision to file a FOIA request for Game of Thrones Screeners after finding out that the producers have been sending advance screeners to President Obama. Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss admitted in an interview that they sent the screeners:

On Thursday, FBI Director James Comey suggested that the FBI paid over a million dollars to a group of hackers who helped it get into Syed Farook's encrypted work iPhone. Of course, just as pretty much everyone predicted, the FBI found nothing of value on the iPhone. This was hardly a surprise. It was a case where we already know who did it, and that they were already dead. We also know that they destroyed their two personal iPhones, leaving open the question why anyone would think there was anything valuable on the work iPhone.

Back in February, we noted that the TPP has been officially signed, and that the focus now moves on to ratification by each of the 12 participating countries. On this score, there's been plenty of sound and fury in the US, including bizarre demands to re-negotiate TPP, but less coverage of what is happening elsewhere. As we noted, Canada's ratification has ground to a halt as the new government there launches "widespread consultations." Japan, too, won't be ratifying TPP for a while, for reasons explained by The Mainichi site: