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Someone's worst fears just became a reality. A lot of "someones," actually.

Pissed Consumer has uncovered an apparent abuse of the court system by reputation management firms. Getting allegedly defamatory links delisted by Google requires a court order, which is something very few people can actually obtain. But the plaintiffs featured in this Pissed Consumer post seem to have no trouble acquiring these -- often within a few days of filing their lawsuits.

Yesterday, at the excellent RightsCon event in San Francisco, Senator Ron Wyden gave a barn burner of a speech, in which he detailed why it was so important to protect our privacy and security in a digital age, at a time when law enforcement and the intelligence communities are digging deeper and deeper into all of our personal information. He started out with a clear and emphatic statement on how he will block any attempt by Congress to undermine encryption:

The rise in public awareness of the dangers of corporate sovereignty provisions in agreements like TPP and TAFTA/TTIP has brought with it a collateral benefit: academics are starting to explore its effects in greater depth. An example is a new paper from Krzysztof J. Pelc, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, at McGill University in Canada. Called "Does the Investment Regime Induce Frivolous Litigation?" (pdf), it looks at how the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism has evolved in recent years, and in a very troubling direction. Along the way, the paper explores one of the central arguments made by those supporting the inclusion of corporate sovereignty chapters in major agreements: investors lose most of the claims that they bring against governments, so ISDS is really nothing to worry about. But Pelc identifies a key question posed by this line of thinking:

Last year, we wrote about a lawsuit Lionsgate Studios had initiated against TD Ameritrade over a throwaway line at the end of one of the latter's advertising spots. That commercial included the line, "Nobody puts your old 401(k) in the corner," an imperfect parody of a famous line from Dirty Dancing, the rights for which are owned by Lionsgate. The fact that the ad was no longer running at the time of the lawsuit, nor the fact that Lionsgate was in no way involved in the investment business, failed to keep the studio from claiming this was trademark infringement. The studio even went so far as to hilariously claim that consumers would be confused into thinking that TD Ameritrade either had rights to the movie or was in some way affiliated with Lionsgate Studios.

Organ transplant procedures are becoming amazingly complex and reliable. Still, it's a good idea to try to keep your original equipment in good working order. But if you do start having an organ fail on you, it's nice to know there are some options -- and the options are getting better. Here are just a few advances in getting donor organs that don't necessarily involve other people dying.

This is refreshing. A very stupidly-written law is the basis for evidence suppression in a drug arrest. Not only does the conviction vanish, but so does the law (more or less), thanks to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel ushered in a new age of law enforcement/city transparency recently by opening his mouth and saying words to that effect. This followed the city/law enforcement sitting on the recordings of a highly-controversial shooting by police officers for more than a year.

A few years back, we wrote a few stories about the unfortunate move by the W3C to embrace DRM as a part of the official HTML5 standard. It was doubly disappointing to then see Tim Berners-Lee defending this decision as well. All along this was nothing more than a focus by the legacy content providers to try to hinder perfectly legal uses and competition on the web by baking in damaging DRM systems. Even Mozilla, which held out the longest, eventually admitted that it had no choice but to support DRM, even if it felt bad about doing so.

Both Congress and the Copyright Office continue to explore possible ways to reform copyright laws, and one area of interest to a lot of people is reforming the whole "notice and takedown" process in the DMCA. The legacy players have been pushing for a ridiculously stupid concept they're calling "notice and staydown" in which they argue that once there's a notice for a particular piece of content, a platform needs to proactively block any copies of that content from ever being uploaded again. This is dumb and dangerous for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that it would place tremendous burdens on smaller players, while locking in the more dominant large platforms that can build or buy systems to handle this. But, even more importantly, copyright infringement is extremely context dependent. The same content may be infringing in one context, while protected fair use in another. But a notice and staydown process would completely wipe out the fair use possibilities, and potentially violate the First Amendment (remember, the Supreme Court itself has declared fair use to be the "safety valve" that allows copyright law to fit with the First Amendment).

On Monday, President Obama gave a speech about journalism in Washington DC, in which he bemoaned the state of investigative journalism today, suggesting that the lack of good investigative journalism is partly to blame for the mess that is this year's Presidential election season:

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As we just got done noting, Netflix recently admitted that it has been throttling the streams it sends to AT&T and Verizon wireless customers in order to lessen the impact of usage caps. While most everybody agrees that Netflix should have been transparent about the practice, most also agree that Netflix -- an outspoken opponent of usage caps and supporter of net neutrality -- was actually trying to improve the customer experience with the move. As such, no real harm was done, and nobody even noticed that Netflix had been doing it -- for five years. Really not much of a story in and of itself.

The operating theory of incumbent industries is that piracy kills creativity. Try telling that to Nigeria.

Last fall, Comcast added a new wrinkle to its plan to impose arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps on the company's broadband customers. It began charging users a $30-$35 premium if users wanted to avoid caps, effectively turning the idea of unlimited data into a luxury option many could no longer afford. Caps continue to be a great way to impose price hikes on uncompetitive broadband markets, charge more money for the same service, with the added bonus of both curtailing -- and cashing in on -- the growing use of Internet video.

We've seen this sort of thing proposed at the state level on more than one occasion. But Rep. Ken Buck, a former DOJ prosecutor, wants to take it national, as Chris Seaton reports for Fault Lines.

Somehow and for some reason, the head-scratching lawsuit between actress Lindsay Lohan and Take-Two Interactive continues to move forward. If you'll recall, in 2013 Lohan began asking her lawyers about suing Take-Two over what she claimed wrongly was a direct depiction of herself in the game Grand Theft Auto 5. The character in question is clearly a composite parody of all kinds of Hollywood starlets, in part composed of references to Lohan's antics, and in part composed of references to other starlets' antics. Which is ultimately entirely besides the point, because the depiction is parody in nature and that really should have been the end of all of this. Except Lohan's legal team moved forward with the suit, and even amended it to include as much paperwork as possible, all while asserting that her legal claims could get around the statute of limitations on bringing the suit because Take-Two had manipulated the cover image for the game, which featured a bikini-clad girl Lohan alsoclaims is a depiction of herself, in order to fit it on the DVD the game was shipped with.

Maybe you've been to a store with the self-check-out lanes where you have to scan and bag your own groceries. Some stores have had success with this kind of self-serve technology, but others haven't. Still, brick and mortar stores need to try out different ways to be more convenient for shoppers in order to compete with same-day shipping from various online retailers.

For many years now we've seen a dramatic spike in programming contract disputes between broadcasters and cable operators, usually resulting in consumers losing access to TV content they're paying for. These feuds usually begin simply enough; with a broadcaster asking for a programming rate hike cable operators don't want to pay for. But instead of sitting down and hashing out a new deal that satisfies both parties like grown ups often do, the companies take their feud into the public sphere, punishing paying customers in the process.

We've written a few times about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who appears to have one of the thinnest skins of any national leader anywhere. He's been filing an average of over 100 lawsuits a month over "insults" to himself. And the latest is that the Turkish Foreign Ministry summoned the German Ambassador Martin Erdmann to explain why a German television station, NDR, broadcast a silly satirical video (gently) mocking Erdogan. You can see that video here (with English subtitles): It's kind of catchy, honestly. But would anyone really be talking about it if Erdogan and the Turkish government hadn't freaked out about it? This is The Streisand Effect in action. A total nothing of a mocking video that very few people would have cared about if Erdogan hadn't turned it into an international incident, which in turn makes the video news. As of this writing the video is quickly approaching a million views, and I imagine it'll end up with quite a bit more than that before long.

Anyone who reads Techdirt knows our opinion on encryption: stronger is better, and giving the government (or anyone else) a back door is a dangerous idea. We've decried a lot of the stupid arguments that we've heard in favor of back doors — usually coming from technologically clueless politicians and law enforcement officers — but that doesn't mean we aren't open to considering some smart ones. This week, we've invited Albert Wenger (who you may recall from a discussion about basic income way back in Episode 16) to share his pro-backdoor position and engage in some friendly debate. 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.

The questions raised by the DOJ announcing that it was, in fact, able to get in to Syed Farook's work iPhone continue to grow. The latest is that, if it could get into that phone, running the fairly secure iOS 9, why is it still fighting the case in NY where it's trying to get into a drug dealer's phone running iOS 7? As you may recall, the case in NY has been going on for longer than the San Bernardino one. It started back in October when the DOJ demanded Apple's help in getting into the iPhone of Jun Feng (a drug dealer who admitted guilt, but who claims he forgot the passcode) and magistrate judge James Orenstein stepped in to ask Apple if this was a reasonable request.

Netflix's criticism of usage caps and vocal support of net neutrality (not to mention its threat as a pay TV competitor) has helped it replace Google as public enemy number one for the telecom industry. As such, every PR, lobbying, and political asset at the telecom industry's disposal has taken aim at the streaming giant over the last few years, accusing the company of being a dirty freeloader and horrible hypocrite that's unfairly lobbying the government to attack poor, honest, hardworking companies like AT&T and Comcast.

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The Washington Post has a big story delving deep into how the Hillary Clinton email scandal happened, noting that Clinton just didn't want to give up her BlackBerry, even as the NSA told her repeatedly that it wasn't secure and there were serious risks involved. What's amazing, from the story, is how much everyone was focused on the BlackBerry side of things, and sort of skipped over the fact that she was using a private email account with the server set up in her basement. The WaPo article notes that for the first few months in her job as Secretary of State, the email server didn't even have basic encryption tools enabled. All of that is a travesty, and you should read the whole article to understand the issue more, but I wanted to focus in on a related issue: the high court/low court treatment of Hillary Clinton as compared to others. In particular, the situation with Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower.

By now, usage caps on both fixed and wireless networks have grown increasingly common. And while broadband carriers are endlessly looking toward caps and zero rating for a competitive and financial advantage, overlooked is the fact that a huge amount of a user's monthly bandwidth allotment is now being eroded by good old advertising. How much? According to a new study by Enders Analysis, anywhere from 18% to 79% of your monthly data bucket can go toward delivering advertising. Previous studies had pegged this between 10% and 50%.

Update: We've now added to the story that the DOJ is saying that CNN got the quote wrong, and the vulnerability applies to any iPhone 5C, which is more believable, but still raises questions. Original story, with a note appended is below.

So late yesterday the Justice Department told magistrate judge Sheri Pym that it had successfully broken into Syed Farook's work iPhone and therefore no longer needed to continue with the court's order compelling Apple to write a new version of its iOS with security features removed. And then, in talking to the press, the DOJ apparently claimed the method only works for Farook's iPhone:

The knee-jerk response of politicians to terrorist attacks -- calling for more surveillance, more crackdowns, more displays of purposeless force -- is by now so routine that we don't even remark on it. We tend to go along with their plans because we are very poor at estimating risks, and thus often end up making bad decisions about trade-offs -- specifically, trading off liberty in the (misguided) hope that it will deliver security. That's not a new insight -- Bruce Schneier wrote two fascinating posts on what he called "The Psychology of Security" as far back as 2008. But maybe it's time to start challenging a strategy that hasn't worked, doesn't work and will never work. Maybe we should start pushing for an alternative response to terrorist attacks -- one based on logic and the facts, not rhetoric and fear. That's exactly what Björn Brembs, Professor of Neurogenetics at Regensburg University in Germany, has done in a short blog post about a more rational approach that avoids bad trade-offs. As he writes:

Another day, another trademark dispute with one side weaponizing a trademark for a commonly used phrase and stretching the definition of common marketplaces. The latest foray into making my head hurt with this sort of thing is between MRC, producers of the Netflix drama House of Cards, and D2 Holdings, which claims to have trademarked the phrase and licenses for a radio program that covers gambling. At issue is a soon-to-be-released series of House of Cardsthemed slot machines in casinos across the nation.

A bunch of food companies are pledging to remove artificial colors and flavors from their products. We mentioned before that Starbucks tried a different color for its drinks and had a slight problem. While the FDA says there's no link between artificial colors and any health issues, ultimately consumers are pushing for more natural ingredients and voting with their spending trends.

So it appears that the mainstage event over the DOJ's ability to force Apple to help it get around the security features of an iPhone is ending with a whimper, rather than a bang. The DOJ has just filed an early status report saying basically that it got into Syed Farook's work iPhone and it no longer needs the court to order Apple to help it comply by writing a modified version of iOS that disables security features.

As noted recently, PETA isn't giving up in its quixotic quest to argue that it can represent the interests of an Indonesian selfie-taking monkey, and further that the photos in question have a copyright and that copyright belongs to the monkey (and, by extension, PETA). UK IP professor Andrés Guadamuz recently wrote an interesting paper arguing that there is a copyright in the photograph and it belongs to the guy who owned the camera, David Slater, based on UK copyright law. It's an interesting read, though others have convincingly argued the opposite, noting that UK law requires a "person" to have created the work.

Comcast for years has offered what most find to be utterly abysmal customer service and support, resulting in story after story of nightmare experiences for consumers and businesses alike. This is, by and large, thanks to limited competition in most of Comcast's footprint, and despite Silicon Valley being arguably the tech epicenter of the country, the region apparently isn't immune to Comcast's particular... charms or the nation's obvious lack of broadband competition.

WhatsApp: a tool for evil.

There's no need to fumble with which way to plug in your micro USB devices. The $14 MicFlip Fully-Reversible Micro USB Cable is the world’s first reversible micro USB cable. It features a tangle-free, nylon braided 6' long cable with corrosion resistant plugs. It is compatible with all micro USB devices.

First, the legislators came for encrypted phones, because terrorists were apparently using encryption. (Except they weren't.) Now, they're coming for prepaid phones. Sure, customers will still be able to buyprepaid phones. They'll just have to "register" with their local retailer in order to do so.

Last week, we wrote about Donald Trump's fairly astounding interview transcript with the Washington Post editorial board. In that post, we focused on his bizarre and nonsensical comments on defamation law, though there was lots of other nuttiness in the interview. Over the weekend, the NY Times published its own transcript of an interview between Donald Trump and two reporters, Maggie Haberman and David Sanger, focusing on foreign policy questions. Once again, reading it presents an incredible picture of a man running for President who doesn't know the most basic things about foreign policy (he literally seemed shocked and confused when the reporters pointed out that the US has sanctions against Iran, barring it from buying Boeing airplanes).

When the DOJ announced that the FBI may have miraculously found a way in to Syed Farook's work iPhone after swearing to a court that such a thing was impossible, many people zeroed in on the possibility of "NAND Mirroring" as the technique in question. After all, during a Congressional hearing, Rep. Darrell Issa had gone fairly deep technically (for a Congressperson, at least) in asking FBI Director James Comey if the FBI had tested such a method. Well-known iPhone forensics guru Jonathan Zdziarski wrote up a good blog post explaining why such a technique was the most likely. While recognizing that there are other possibilities, he does a good job breaking down why none of the other possibilities are all that likely, given a variety of facts related to the case (I won't go through all of that -- just go read his post). It's worth a read. It also has a nice quick explanation of NAND mirroring:

When the DOJ announced that the FBI may have miraculously found a way in to Syed Farook's work iPhone after swearing to a court that such a thing was impossible, many people zeroed in on the possibility of "NAND Mirroring" as the technique in question. After all, during a Congressional hearing, Rep. Darrell Issa had gone fairly deep technically (for a Congressperson, at least) in asking FBI Director James Comey if the FBI had tested such a method. Well known iPhone forensics guru Jonathan Zdziarski wrote up a good blog post explaining why such a technique was the most likely. While recognizing that there are other possibilities, he does a good job breaking down why none of the other possibilities are all that likely, given a variety of facts related to the case (I won't go through all of that -- just go read his post). It's worth a read. It also has a nice quite explanation of NAND mirroring:

The same Alabama school district that claimed God the NSA told it to monitor its students' social media activities is back in the news again. The tune has changed but the lyrics remain the same. This new social media monitoring program proceeds withoutthe NSA's blessing or the use of a snappy acronym, but it's pretty much the same thing -- only expanded to cover all students (potentially), rather than the former's programs 600 or so "targets." (via the Free Thought Project)

The leaderboards this week are dominated by comments about France — and not from just one story. On the insightful side, both of our top comments come in response to France's ambitious belief that it can regulate the entire internet, and its attempts to fine Google for not globally enforcing the right to be forgotten. GrooveNeedle won first place on the insightful side with a straightforward question:

Five Years Ago This week in 2011, the New York Times had just launched its new paywall experiment. The newspaper expressed various mixtures of fantasy and denial, suggesting that people felt guilty about reading for free and that only college students and the unemployed would game the system. Of course, they were also trying to shut down those who took perfectly fair advantage of the holes they intentionally built in, and we even wondered if bypassing the paywall might have DMCA implications. Meanwhile, star columnist Paul Krugman was helping his readers figure out how to do it. Techdirt had its first encounter with Barry Eisler when he turned down a half-million dollar publishing contract to self-publish his book instead, and noticed an interesting path-crossing in Amanda Hocking, a self-published author being courted by big publishers with contracts worth millions. This was also the week that we got a very important ruling out of a big loss for Righthaven: a judge declared that even reposting an entire article can be fair use. Ten Years Ago This week in 2006, the RIAA got slapped down in its attempts to dig through people's computers for evidence of infringement. Meanwhile, one of its own studies was showing that file sharing was no big deal. Another study, from the Cato Institute, looked at how the DMCA has changed the nature of competition. Over in France, the parliament approved a law banning the sale of DRM'd content in stores like iTunes — garnering some serious kickback from Apple, which seemed rather contradictory in light of Steve Jobs' thoughts on DRM a few years earlier. This was also the week when the web scored one of its most pointless but iconic victories, convincing the producers of Snakes On A Plane to go back and shoot a new scene heavily requested by fans online. Fifteen Years Ago There seemed to be a lot of buzz about email this week in 2001. President Bush announced that he would no longer use it, thanks to fear of open records requests; one professor was amping up its importance, putting it alongside speaking and writing as the third revolutionary step in communications, while another was spinning a story about how email isolates us and is broadly terrible. I suspect both might have been going just a tad too far. Meanwhile, the real fight was in the world of instant messaging. One-Hundred And Thirty-Three Years Ago The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property was one of the first international treaties regarding intellectual property, and it still stands today as one of the widely-accepted treaties in the world. Mostly it has to do with allowing companies to get patents in other countries and be eligible for that country's local protections — and it was signed on March 20th, 1883.

Support our crowdfunding campaign today! Awesome Stuff is normally about highlighting interesting crowdfunding projects from others, but this week it's time for a little shameless self-promotion, because today is the last day of our campaign to fund Techdirt's encryption reporting! The campaign ends in a few hours, just before 1pm Pacific time. If you're a Techdirt regular, you know we've been working hard to cover the truth about a debate that is so often distorted by fear-mongering and empty rhetoric. Earlier this week, we released a new explainer video to summarize the subject and explain why it matters so much. Following the tragic attack in Brussels, the response to which is echoing what happened after the Paris attack, we've been keeping tabs on the politicians who are rushing to blame encryption even though the real issue was an intelligence community failure. And we're committed to covering each new legal development between the FBI and Apple, and (as is always Techdirt's policy) to include the full text of court filings and decisions whenever possible, so those who wish to go beyond our analysis can delve in themselves — something we're surprised still isn't the norm on most news websites. We've had a long list of people step up to express their support for Techdirt and explain why they think our campaign can make a difference, including EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, former CIA operative (and current novelist) Barry Eisler, Media Professor Dan Gillmor and former Senate staffer Jennifer Hoelzer — plus a whole lot of positive comments on the Beacon crowdfunding page. With your help, we'll be able to keep doing this kind of important reporting on the encryption debate and even expand our coverage. We're also dedicating some of the funding towards spreading the word — purchasing up some of the internet's cheap ad impressions that normally go to spammy banners and replacing them with public messages about encryption and links to our most important stories. We couldn't do any of this without your help, so if you haven't yet backed our project on Beacon, please consider doing so today before it closes. Thanks! Support our crowdfunding campaign today!

There's been a bit of a mess in the programming world, the past few days, that you may have missed if you don't pay close attention to certain circles of the internet, but it's fascinating on a number of different levels. The mess began when people at the messenger app Kik, realized that someone else, a guy named Azer Koculu, had a module on NPM named "kik." Some background: NPM stands for Node Package Manager -- and that's exactly what it is: a package manager/repository for programmers to share and reuse javascript code, useful for folks using node.js (a server side javascript environment). This is a good thing as it allows for fairly easy opportunities to share code and build on the work of others without having to reinvent the wheel.

You can almost set your watch that any company or group that comes out vehemently in favor of restrictive copyright protection under the guise of protecting artists will be found to be in violation of copyrights and acting in a manner demonstrating clearly that zero care is given to the well-being of artists. The most recent example of this is Time Warner. Recall in the past that the massive media company has regularly sued music startup groups, pimped the six-strikes agreement with Hollywood, worked with Rightscorp to milk money out of accused infringers, and back a ways waged a war unpopular with its signed musical artists against YouTube. This, all done by Time Warner in the name of advocating for artists and creators, was done even as we learned just to what lengths Warner Music has gone to make sure it paid artists as little as possible.

The accomplishments of artificial intelligence are making it a popular topic in the news again, both for its wins and its (apparent) failures. General artificial intelligence hasn't quite lived up to its full potential yet, but more open source AI projects could help speed up development. Here are just a few reminders that open source AI projects are making progress -- hopefully towards a more 'John Henry' type of AI and less of a scary Skynet program.

Matthew Doyle appears to be not just an ignorant bigot, but a proud ignorant bigot. But... it still should be concerning that he's been arrested for the crime of saying ignorant bigoted stuff on Twitter. Doyle is apparently a PR guy in the UK, who claimed on Twitter that he had "confronted" a Muslim woman on the street demanding that she "explain" the attacks in Brussels. She allegedly told him "nothing to do with me," which, frankly, is a much more polite response than he deserved: There is some question as to whether or not this actually happened or if it was just Doyle acting out his ignorant jackass fantasies online. But what is clear is that he was then arrested. Not -- mind you -- for the alleged confrontation with the woman, but for tweeting about it:

LAST DAY to support Techdirt's crowdfunding campaign! As we pointed out earlier this week, it's pretty obvious that the Justice Department lied to a federal magistrate judge in saying that it had exhausted all possible opportunities to get into the work iPhone of Syed Farook, given that it has now put the case about it on hold to test out a "new way" to get into the phone. The DOJ had made a filing claiming that Apple's help was the only way to get into the phone, yet now is saying that's probably not true. However, the FBI is insisting that the DOJ wasn't lying. In a letter to the Editor at the Wall Street Journal, FBI Director James Comey reacts angrily to a similar opinion piece at the WSJ suggesting the DOJ lied:

While there are 10 (known) cases covering 13 Apple devices that the DOJ is asking Apple to help unlock, there are two "big ones" that are receiving most of the focus. The big one in San Bernardino, which has been put on hold as the FBI claims it may have actually found a way into the phone -- and the one in NY where magistrate judge James Orenstein wrote a wonderful rejection letter for the DOJ's request. The Justice Department has appealed that decision, and the case has been handed over to Judge Margo Brodie.