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A handful of FOIA documents [PDF] obtained by EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) are shedding some new light on the FISA court and its relationship with the FBI. The good news is that the court is not quite the rubber stamp it's often been portrayed as. Even though a vast majority of requests are improved, there appears to be a significant amount of modification happening behind the scenes.

Pokémon Go is an undeniable phenomenon, and the first mass-appeal hit from the world of augmented reality — a technology people have been expecting would transform gaming for years. That leaves a big question, though: is its popularity a sign of the future for AR, or is the game an isolated phenomenon that owes more to the popularity of its brand? This week, we discuss what we can learn from Pokémon Go, and whether we can truly learn anything at all.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.

Pokémon Go is an undeniable phenomenon, and the first mass-appeal hit from the world of augmented reality — a technology people have been expecting would transform gaming for years. That leaves a big question, though: is its popularity a sign of the future for AR, or is the game an isolated phenomenon that owes more to the popularity of its brand? This week, we discuss what we can learn from Pokémon Go, and whether we can truly learn anything at all.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.

A Houston law firm has decided to make its mark on the world much in the same way a rogue house pet makes its mark on an expensive Oriental rug. The Tuan A. Khuu law firm has decided it has "no choice" but to sue a 20-year-old student suffering from two broken bones in her back following a collision with two vehicles -- one of them being the drunk driver who started the chain reaction.The student (Lan Cai) first met representatives from the Khuu law office in her own bedroom, while still in her underwear.

Washington State has sued Comcast for, well, being Comcast. A new lawsuit filed by the state this week (pdf) accuses the cable giant of 1.8 million violations of Washington state’s Consumer Protection Act (CPA), including misrepresenting the scope of the company's "Service Protection Plan," charging customers improper service call fees and improper credit screening practices. More specifically, the lawsuit states that Comcast misled more than 500,000 Washington State customers by charging them $5 per month for this protection plan, then intentionally hitting them with fees for services the monthly fee should have covered.

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An algorithm is deciding certain criminal defendants should spend more time in prison. And that determination can't be fully challenged because the code belongs to a private company which provides the software to the government.Eric Loomis was determined to be a "high risk" defendant, based on something called a "COMPAS score." COMPAS -- Criminal Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions -- cranks out Presentence Investigation Reports for use in the courtroom, utilizing a number of factors to generate a score that lets judges know how likely the defendant is to re-offend.The problems with this system are numerous. For one, the code is proprietary, so defendants aren't allowed to examine the factors that lead to this determination, unlike other sentencing guidelines created by the government, which are open to the public to examine.Another problem is that the algorithm engages in demographic profiling -- generally considered to be a bad thing when it comes to determining criminal behavior.

Every couple of years as the Olympics gears up again, we end up posting a series of stories about massive bullshit overclaims by the Olympics concerning trademark law. And none of it is actually about what trademark law allows. It's all about the Olympics' weird infatuation with making sure no company that doesn't give them a ton of money first can "associate" with the Olympics. Again, that's not how trademark law actually works, but few companies are willing to stand up to the International Olympic Committee or the US Olympic Committee. This year, the crackdown seems even more ridiculous than usual, with letters being sent to companies who are helping and sponsoring athletes stating that, unless they're official sponsors with the US Olympic Committee, they can't even tweet anything mentioning the Olympics. Companies that had sponsored athletes were being forced to blur out or delete social media posts about their own athletes because their racing bibs said "Olympics" on them.

If at first you don't succeed, try to waste everybody's time in perpetuity. That's apparently the plan of the broadband industry, which has formally unveiled its latest attempt to kill U.S. net neutrality rules and the FCC's reclassification of ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Telecom Act. As leaks had suggested, multiple broadband providers and trade organizations have requested an en banc review from the full 9-member DC Circuit Court of Appeals in the hopes of overturning last June's massive FCC legal win.

Over the weekend, TorrentFreak picked up on yet another weird case of some copyright extremists trying to "make a point" but really just coming across as jackasses instead. It involves one of a group of wacky companies that promise to help issue DMCA takedown notices for copyright holders. In this case, it's an outfit called "Remove Your Media" (creative!) which put up a Tumblr site and a tweet pretending that it was "turning the tables" on the famous and useful Lumen Database (formerly known as the Chilling Effects database): If you went to that website, for at least a little while, Remove Your Media was posting full details of people who filed counternotices to some of its DMCA takedowns. These postings made no effort whatsoever to redact personal information such as emails and phone numbers (TorrentFreak has an image where it redacted the info itself).

It's too rare that we see courts get trademark questions right on the merits of actual customer confusion, so it's nice to highlight some examples of when they do get it right. It's even more fun when the court takes the time to add just a dash of snark and narrow-eyed language into its opinion. Such appears to be the case in an appeals ruling between Florida International University, a public college, and Florida National University, a for-profit institution. FIU sued FNU for trademark infringement and, having lost its initial case, took it to appeal. The claim FIU made is that potential students were confused between the two schools based solely on the similarity of their names.The appeals court was not impressed.

Over the years, we've discussed various examples of tech companies taking a stand against patent abuse. That is, in lieu of actual patent reform to fix a broken system, some companies are doing things on their own (we even had a podcast discussing a bunch of examples). One of my personal favorites was Twitter's Innovator's Patent Agreement which effectively lets the named inventors on the patent issue their own licenses to undermine trolls should the patents ever fall into trollish hands. Think of it as something of a poison pill to make the patents worth a lot less to pure trolls. One of the tricks though has been convincing smaller startups to take some of these steps -- even the license on transfer network, which is sort of a no brainer for startups. So it's good to see, as pointed out by EFF, that Blockstream, a fascinating company in the blockchain space that employs a ton of super smart people, take a big commitment to be a good player in the patent realm..

We've dinged Blizzard quite a bit in these pages for acting overly protectionist of its intellectual property in the past. And that dinging has been well deserved, with Blizzard doing things like trying to twist copyright law as a way to combat cheat software within its multiplayer games, to use intellectual property as an excuse to shut down a World of Warcraft vanilla fan-server, and has otherwise not always acted in human or awesome ways towards its own fans.But sometimes, with much kicking and screaming and the insistence of making many a mistake along the way, even a company like Blizzard can manage to do what game companies like DoubleFine have already done: loosen the leash on its own IP and reap the rewards. StarCraft Universe is a fan-made mod that consists of a full new game in a genre that Blizzard had never taken the StarCraft universe into.

It's no secret that the US Copyright Office has been acting pretty nutty lately. For decades, the office has basically carried the water of the legacy copyright/entertainment industries, but at least they would sometimes try to appear marginally balanced. Now it appears that all caution has been thrown to the wind and the entire office is actively looking to suppress and attack user rights and innovation. In just the past few weeks and months, we've pointed out a series of really bad ideas on reforming the notice-and-takedown safe harbors of the DMCA, a separate plan that would effectively strip tons of websites of their DMCA safe harbors by requiring them to remember to keep re-registering, and a disturbing willingness to totally misrepresent the copyright issues at play with regards to the FCC's set-top box proposal.

It's no secret that the US Copyright Office has been acting pretty nutty lately. For decades, the office has basically carried the water of the legacy copyright/entertainment industries, but at least they would sometimes try to appear marginally balanced. Now it appears that all caution has been thrown to the wind and the entire office is actively looking to suppress and attack user rights and innovation. In just the past few weeks and months, we've pointed out a series of really bad ideas on reforming the notice-and-takedown safe harbors of the DMCA, a separate plan that would effectively strip tons of websites of their DMCA safe harbors by requiring them to remember to keep re-registering, and a disturbing willingness to totally misrepresent the copyright issues at play with regards to the FCC's set-top box proposal.

Politico has an article with a misleading title -- the return of the Luddite president -- which discusses how neither of the two major party Presidential candidates are even remotely tech savvy. The headline is an unfortunate oversell. Luddites aren't just people who don't know anything about technology. They're people who actively dislike certain technologies, in the belief that such advances will harm their own livelihoods. In a broader sense, the term is used to discuss people who generally dislike the march of technological progress. Again, that does not appear to be the case with either of the two candidates, who (at best) might just be described as agnostic to/indifferent to new technologies and somewhat ignorant on what that might mean from a policy perspective.

In accordance with the new instructions to wrap its arms gingerly around transparency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is following the letter of the law in its tepid celebration of National Whistleblower Day.The admission that this is something beyond the office's control doesn't appear until the fifth paragraph of the ODNI's "National Whistleblower Celebration Day" post -- which definitely gives it the appearance of being something it wouldn't have done if it had been given the choice.

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Ever since last year, Manhattan DA Cy Vance has been singing the same old tune: demanding backdoors to encryption while insisting that he's not demanding backdoors. The only way this makes sense is that he doesn't seem to have the slightest clue about what he's talking about. Either that or he's willfully misrepresenting things. Neither is a good look.

As you may recall, we just recently wrote about photographer Carol Highsmith's copyright lawsuit against Getty Images, for falsely claiming copyright in her images (and demanding she pay to use her own images...) which she had purposely donated to the Library of Congress to make them available for the public to use, royalty-free. A PR person from Getty has reached out to us and pointed us to Getty's completely nonsensical "statement" on the lawsuit (and, actually, the email pointed us to the wrong URL, but we found it anyway).

Daniel Meyer is the Executive Director of Intelligence Community's Whistleblowing and Source Protection. He's in the best position to fight for the protection of intelligence whistleblowers against retaliation for taking their complaints through the proper channels. Let's hope it works out better for those under him than it has for Meyer himself.

Daniel Meyer is the Executive Director of Intelligence Community's Whistleblowing and Source Protection. He's in the best position to fight for the protection of intelligence whistleblowers against retaliation for taking their complaints through the proper channels. Let's hope it works out better for those under him than it has for Meyer himself.

The FBI is already having problems here at home with the hacking tool it deployed during its dark web child porn investigation. A few judges have ruled that the warrant used to deploy the Network Investigative Technique (NIT) was invalid because the FBI's "search" of computers around the United States violated Rule 41(b)'s jurisdictional limits.Now, we'll get to see how this stacks up against international law. It's already common knowledge that the FBI obtained user information from computers around the world during its two weeks operating as the site administrator for the seized Playpen server. More information is now coming to light, thanks (inadvertently) to a foreign government's inquiries into domestic anti-child porn efforts. Joseph Cox of Motherboard has the details:

This week, Yahoo was facing accusations that it wasn't entirely honest about its ability to recover communications that it claimed were deleted. That Anonymous Coward won first place for insightful by expanding on the problems with the situation:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, we saw a variety of studies and other sources pushing back against the common "wisdom" on copyright and piracy. People were beginning to point to the signs that weaker copyright can encourage cultural output, that piracy can actually increase the quality of content, that pirates are the best consumers, and that file sharing is good for artists.Of course, on the flipside, we saw the idea/expression dichotomy gutted when a judge allowed a photographer to sue Rihanna. PayPal agreed to help cut sites off at the behest of the IFPI, a UK court ordered a telecom to block sites at Hollywood's behest, and the music industry was pushing for infringement red flags in Google search results.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2006, Kazaa began walking down the Napster road of going straight (and becoming irrelevant). Meanwhile Metallica, author of Napster's destruction, was finally accepting that fans want music online, and entering the iTunes store. TorrentSpy was trying to fend off Hollywood, the RIAA was dropping cases over the fact that an IP address is not a person, the industry was cracking down on karaoke bars, and amidst so much dastardly piracy, the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel was still thriving. YouTube was changing the way people interact with television, and gimmicky technology was changing the way people interact with a game of Monopoly.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, still fresh off the heels of Napster's destruction, it was bizarre to see Metallica's website boasting about their love of "sharing" music. Some people were predicting that all the Napster copycats cropping up in its wake would soon be dead thanks to more effective copyright schemes (and though many of the clones did die, music piracy lives on...) The folks in DC were apparently very happy with the DMCA despite its increasingly obvious problems, most notably last week's arrest of a hacker that went over so poorly Adobe started backing down. But perhaps the most noticeable way technology was changing the entertainment industry was naturally, from the inside out: a lot of cliche movie plots were rendered nonsensical by things like cellphones, and TV news and sports broadcasts were undergoing a drastic webification.Seventy-Six Years AgoThere's a lot of talk about Mickey Mouse in the copyright world, but this week we can celebrate a competing character who also evades the public domain thanks to copyright extension: Bugs Bunny, who was introduced in the short A Wild Hare on July 27, 1940. (The all-time classic Bugs short What's Opera, Doc? would have entered the public domain two years ago were it not for the 1976 Copyright Act.)

Last week, we launched our latest t-shirt (and hoodie!) on Teespring: the Takedown tee. Now the campaign is nearly at an end, so if you want one you've only got until Monday, August 1st at 8:00pm PT. Otherwise you'll have to wait for the campaign to restart, which could happen soon or it could take ages — so don't delay!Men's and women's t-shirts are $20, hoodies are only $35, and everything's available in a variety of colors. Hurry up and get yours today!

For the last few months we've poked fun at Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has ridiculously thin skin. As we noted, he had filed upwards of 100 lawsuits per month against people for "insulting" him -- and this included things as ridiculous as posting a meme on social media that compared Erdogan to Gollum.

Another month, another terrible patent being asserted in the Eastern District of Texas. Solocron Education LLC, a company whose entire "education" business is filing lawsuits, owns U.S. Patent No. 6,263,439, titled "Verification system for non-traditional learning operations." What kind of "verification system" does Solocron claim to have invented? Passwords.The patent describes a mundane process for providing education materials through video cassettes, DVDs, or online. Students are sent course materials, take tests, and, if they pass the tests, are allowed to continue on to the next part of the course. At various times, students confirm their identity by entering their biographical details and passwords.Solocron did not invent distance education, encryption, or passwords. The patent doesn't describe any new technology, it just applies existing technology in a routine way to education materials. That should not be enough to get a patent. Unfortunately, the Patent Office does not do enough to prevent obvious patents from issuing, which is how we get patents on white-background photography or on filming a Yoga class.The extraordinary breadth of Solocron's patent is clearest in its first claim. The claim, with added comments, is below:

The whole silliness around Hillary Clinton and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement just keeps getting sillier. She should admit what pretty much everyone already recognizes: she supports the deal. She could then explain why she supports it and perhaps the public could have an honest and open conversation about the nature of these agreements. As we've noted more than once, we tend to support free trade here at Techdirt, but the TPP agreement is barely about free trade. It's mostly about investment and creating other regulatory/protectionist barriers. But Clinton's constant flip flopping on the issue is silly. Back in 2012, she declared the TPP to be "the gold standard" in trade agreements. It was only last fall, after she started facing primary pressure from Bernie Sanders, who was against the agreement, that she flip flopped and said:

Law enforcement officers are pretty used to being able to stop nearly anyone and demand to know who they are and what they're doing. Sure, there are plenty of laws that say they can'tactually do that, but the public is generally underinformed about their rights, and this works in cops' favor. As a recent Appeals Court decision pointed out, citizens are "free to refuse to cooperate with police before a seizure."Obviously, this perfectly legal act of noncompliance just won't do, and it certainly won't be cops pointing out to citizens the rights they have available to them. New York City legislators thought they could force this transparency on the NYPD.

Eugene Volokh has a somewhat terrifying look at how very broad interpretations of California's identity fraud law, California Penal Code § 530.5(a) has been so broadly interpreted by the courts that it, in effect, creates a crime out of things that were normally considered, at best, civil offenses. This includes defamation, publicity rights infringements and disclosure of private facts. He discusses a few cases, but focuses on a key one that we've mentioned: the state of California's recent legal win over Kevin Bollaert, a revenge porn creep. In our writeup, we were mainly concerned with how the ruling seemed to run against Section 230's protections, but as Volokh makes clear, it's much, much worse than that.

For many years now, the MPAA and the various studios that make it up have filed various lawsuits against various internet platforms for not waving a magic wand and making piracy disappear. This also appears to be their big complaint against Google, which has bent over backwards trying to appease the industry and it's still not enough (of course, that may be because what the industry really wants from Google is money, not stopping piracy). But now the shoe is somewhat on the other foot as Sony Pictures is being sued for failing to stop piracy. Really.

We've long been supporters of the concept of Wikileaks around here, though we've had some concerns about some of the decisions it has made. Generally speaking, though, we find the accusations and conspiracy theories around Wikileaks to be somewhat ridiculous. The latest comes buried in a Politico article about the massive amount of dysfunction within the Democratic National Committee. Apparently since Wikileaks released a bunch of DNC emails, leading to chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepping down, it has freed up a bunch of people to bitch and whine about her (lack of) leadership and what a mess the whole DNC has been recently.

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As cable operators consolidate and AT&T and Verizon continue to hang up on millions of unwanted DSL customers they don't want to upgrade, cable's monopoly control over the U.S. broadband market is actually stronger than ever. In most markets, cable broadband's "competition" still consists of either a cash-strapped telco incapable of offering speeds greater than 6 Mbps, or no competition at all. That's why we've seen Comcast rush to impose usage caps on many of these captive markets; an effort to protect legacy TV revenues from Internet video -- a move only made possible by a lack of competition.

Welp. Here we go again. For many, many years, we've been tracking the insane legal situation of the selfie-taking monkey, whose name we were told only recently is "Naruto." Early on in this saga, back in 2011, our focus was on how the photographer whose camera was used, David Slater, had no legitimate claim to the copyright in the image, in large part because the copyright goes to whoever took the photo, and the copyright cannot go to a monkey, because copyright law is limited to "persons." Every so often Slater would pop up somewhere or somehow and yell about this -- twice representatives of his even threatened us with completely bogus legal action.

We've been writing about the lack of security (and accountability) in electronic voting machines almost since Techdirt began. Our very first post on the subject, way back in 2000, declared that e-voting is not safe. Of course, over the years, we've seen more and more examples of this, from the Diebold debacle to Sequoia's security disaster. Basically e-voting is a complete clusterfuck. The machines have long been easily hackable, and the companies behind them don't really seem to care much. They frequently don't do common security practices, such as allowing for outside testing of their machines (or, even better, open sourcing their code for security testing). Instead, it's a big "trust us" and any time security researchers have gotten their hands on these things, they've discovered that the trust is totally and completely misplaced. The machines are a disaster.

Nothing says "Please stop keep talking about the bad stuff we do" quite like a bogus defamation lawsuit. Citizen Lab, which has reported on a great number of tech companies that are less than discriminating in their selection of customers (think Hacking Team), has been served with a lawsuit by a purveyor of internet censorship software.

Roughly eight years after information about law enforcement use of Stingray devices began slowly making its way into the public sphere, positive changes are being made. While the government has often argued it can be the "Third Party" in "Third Party Doctrine" by inserting itself warrantlessly between people's cell phones and their carriers' towers, its assertions are being met with increased judicial skepticism.Two judges -- one state, one federal -- have reached the same conclusion in recent months: using a cell tower spoofer to locate suspects by dragging information out of their phones is a search under the Fourth Amendment. Warrants are required.A few state legislatures have gotten into the act as well, proposing laws that create a warrant requirement for Stingray deployment. Illinois is the latest to do so (and the law actually passed), creating a new set of guidelines for law enforcement Stingray device use, including limits on data retention. It doesn't go quite so far as to mandate warrant acquisition, but it does force law enforcement to specify the equipment used in their applications, which also serves to create a paper trail that can be examined by defendants and members of the public.This is the new quasi-warrant requirement recently signed off on by the governor.

After months of anticipation, last June the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the FCC's Open Internet Order, an indisputably-massive win for net neutrality advocates. Not too surprisingly, net neutrality opponents have been engaged in histrionics ever since, with ISP loyal allies in Congress doing their best to punish the FCC with a series of senseless, taxpayer funded "accountability hearings" designed specifically to shame the agency for daring to stand up to large, incumbent ISPs. That's when they're not busy trying to gut FCC funding and authority via a rotating crop of sneaky bill riders.

The Director of National Intelligence's office (ODNI) has just released three Section 702 compliance reports covering December 2012 - May 2014. Considering the six-month lag time between the period covered and the reports' release, this is very likely as up to date as it can be at this point.The ODNI is (almost) justifiably proud of its awkward embrace of government openness.

If you haven't yet, check out our latest t-shirt, the awesome Takedown T-shirt and hoodie -- offered in a variety of colors. These shirts (and hoodies) have been selling a lot more than we initially expected, so we wanted to make sure no one missed them.The T-shirts are only $20 and the hoodies are a steal at $35. Personally, I've found them to be great conversation starters, and they look pretty awesome in the different colors (I bought myself a green one, which, so far, is the least popular one for reasons I don't understand).

Yelp -- both a frequent target of misguided lawsuits and the host of many, many targets of similarly-misguided lawsuits -- has instituted a nifty new flag that lets readers and reviewers know which businesses are issuing legal threats or filing lawsuits over negative reviews. The warning -- pictured below -- first showed up in May after Prestigious Pets went legal over a review it didn't care for.The warning has surfaced again at the page for Dr. Nima Dayani, a New York Dentist. Apparently, Dayani's not a fan of criticism and has initiated legal proceedings against an unhappy customer, as Leticia Miranda of Buzzfeed reports.

For years, when Stephen Colbert was on Comedy Central, he actually would discuss intellectual property issues with surprising frequency, including taking on SOPA back when it was a thing. Perhaps this is because he has a brother who is an intellectual property lawyer (who apparently works for the Olympics, which is not very encouraging). So it's interesting to see that Colbert is now claiming that a lawyer from Comedy Central or Viacom (he's not entirely clear) has contacted CBS to say that it holds the rights to the "character" of Stephen Colbert.

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A few years ago, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) seriously clamped down on the internet, with new regulations designed to silence criticism on the internet. There have also been efforts there to ban the use of BlackBerries and other devices that offer encryption. So, perhaps it's of little surprise that the UAE has expanded a law that had originally been designed to block VoIP usage, to ban any use of a VPN or proxy that changes your IP address, and makes it all a crime that can get you jail time:

Getty Images has a bit of a well-deserved reputation as a giant copyright troll, sending all kinds of nasty threat letters to people who use the images that Getty licenses. And even though it's showed some signs of adapting to the modern internet world, it hasn't given up on its standard trolling practices. It's also famously bad at it, often sending absolutely ridiculous threat letters.

We've long discussed how Verizon has a bit of a pattern of getting billions in tax breaks and subsidies in exchange for fiber broadband it only half deploys. State after state, city after city, Verizon gets politicians to sign off on cozy deals that effectively give Verizon everything it wants -- in exchange for promises of "full" city or state fiber broadband deployment. Except time, and time, and time again, cities that signed these sweetheart, loophole filled deals then stand around with a dopey look on their face when they realize they've been had.

It's remarkable how TPP, a previously obscure trade deal known only to a few specialists -- and to enlightened Techdirt readers, of course -- has suddenly become one of the hottest issues in the US Presidential contest. But it's important to remember that TPP is still a live issue in many of the other participating countries too. Malaysia seems to be the furthest along in the ratification process, and Peru is also moving forward. But there are signs that resistance could be growing, rather than diminishing, in some key nations. For example, the Australian Government's Productivity Commission has just released its Trade & Assistance Review 2014-15 (pdf), in which it says:

Earlier this summer, the Body of European Regulators of ElectronicCommunications (BEREC) took in around a half million public comments on itsdraft guidelines for member states on implementing end user protections for fixedand mobile Internet connections. The largest telecoms in Europe are lobbyinghard for weakened interpretations of the so-called “net neutrality” Regulationpassed late last year, which also covers data roaming and the EU Digital SingleMarket.