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For the last two and half years or so, my Congressional Representative, Jackie Speier, has insisted that she was just about to introduce a federal law outlawing revenge porn. And then it wouldn't come. There would be an article saying it was almost ready... and then nothing. Months would go by, another article would appear... and then nothing. Finally, on Thursday, Speier introduced the bill, insisting that the delay was in convincing Silicon Valley companies to sign on to it. Of course, that leaves out the fact that the reason many refused to sign on was because previous iterations of the bill were incredibly problematic and almost certainly unconstitutional. With two and half years to work on it, however, the finally introduced bill, called the Intimate Privacy Protection Act of 2016, or IPPA, is not nearly as bad as it could have been, nor as bad as some of the suggestions passed around by those who "consulted" on drafting the bill.

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Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is making some news today for some silly remarks he made on Fox News last night in response to the attack last night in Nice, France. It comes right at the beginning of this video:All of the press -- for good reason -- is focusing on the first part of what he said, about deporting anyone "of Muslim background" (whatever that means) who "believes in Sharia." We'll skip over why this is totally clueless and unconstitutional, because plenty of other news sites are handling that.

The other day I saw the following tweet and was very confused:That's a tweet from the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) asking how does the UK's National Portrait Gallery in London "manage the copyright of national treasures like Shakespeare?" My initial response, of course, was "Wait, Shakespeare is in the bloody public domain, you don't have any copyright to manage!" It seems rather easy to manage "the copyright" of Shakespeare when there is none. But it turns out the link is... even worse. It's to a blog post on the IPO website eagerly praising the National Portrait Gallery for engaging in out-and-out copyright fraud. You'd think that the Intellectual Property Office would recognize this, but it does not.

In a move that's sure to only increase the nation's respect for law enforcement, police departments have been arresting people for "threatening" social media posts. This activity follows the tragedy in Dallas, where five police officers were killed by a man armed with a rifle. Naomi LaChance of The Intercept has more details.

For many, many, many, many years, we've followed the rather crazy trials and tribulations of trying to get an international treaty signed to make it easier for the blind to access copyright-covered works (basically requiring countries to allow visually-impaired accessible versions to be reproduced and distributed). This is a treaty that people have tried to get in place for years and years and years, and it was blocked again and again -- often by legacy copyright industries who flat out refuse to support any kind of agreement that could be seen as strengthening user rights, which they see (ridiculously, and incorrectly) as chipping away at copyright. Amazingly, despite a last minute push by the MPAA and the Association of American Publishers, an agreement was reached and signed in 2013, called the Marrakesh Agreement. As we noted at the time, we fully expected the legacy copyright industries to refocus their efforts on blocking ratification in the US, and that's exactly what's happened.

At the heart of copyright and patents there is -- theoretically -- an implicit social contract. People are granted a time-limited, government-backed monopoly in return for allowing copyright material or patented techniques to enter the public domain once that period has expired. And yet copyright and patent holders often seem unwilling to respect the terms of that contract, as they seek to hang on to their monopolies beyond the agreed time in various ways.In the case of copyright, this has been through repeated extensions of copyright's term, even though there is no economic justification for doing so. In the realm of pharma patents, a number of techniques have been employed. One is "pay for delay." Another is the granting of "data exclusivity." And a third is the use of "evergreening." Techdirt wrote about the last of these a while back, so it's no surprise that companies have continued to "innovate" in this field since then. For example, AstraZeneca is trying to use a variant of evergreening for its anti-cholesterol pill Crestor. As a New York Times article explains:

In any Presidential campaign, there are always going to be partisan folks who side with one candidate or another. And they may campaign for the candidate they like. But, obviously, the Donald Trump phenomenon is a bit different this year. Even so, it's still pretty surprising to see a ton of big names in the tech space send an open letter to Trump insisting that he would be an absolute disaster for innovation and the tech industry. They're not arguing on the usual partisan issues here, but rather the fact that Trump's general zero-sum outlook on the world doesn't recognize how innovation works:

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.

Evidence acquired using Stingray devices has rarely been suppressed. This is due to the fact that it's almost impossible to challenge. The reason it's almost impossible to challenge is because the FBI -- and the law enforcement agencies it "partners" with (via severely restrictive nondisclosure agreements) -- will throw out evidence and let suspects walk rather than expose the use of IMSI catchers.Earlier this year, a Baltimore city circuit judge threw out evidence obtained with the Baltimore PD's cell tower spoofing equipment. And this was no run-of-the-mill drug bust. An actual murder suspect had evidence suppressed because of the BPD's warrantless deployment of a Stingray device. Without the use of the Stingray, the BPD would not have been able to locate the suspect's phone. And without this location, there would have been no probable cause to search the apartment he was in. You can't build a search warrant on illegally-obtained probable cause, reasoned the judge. Goodbye evidence.

We've been following an important case for the past few years about whether or not the US can issue a warrant to an American company for data stored overseas. In this case, Microsoft refused to comply with the warrant for some information hosted in Ireland -- and two years ago a district court ruled against Microsoft and in favor of the US government. Thankfully, the 2nd Circuit appeals court today reversed that ruling and properly noted that US government warrants do not apply to overseas data. This is a hugely important case concerning the privacy and security of our data.

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I've been seeing a few anti-encryption supporters pointing to a new ProPublica report on terrorists using encrypted communications as sort of proof of their position that we need to backdoor encryption and weaken security for everyone. The article is very detailed and thorough and does show that some ISIS folks make use of encrypted chat apps like Telegram and WhatsApp. But that's hardly a surprise. It was well known that those apps were being used, just like it's been well known that groups like Al Qaida were well aware of the usefulness of encryption going back many years, even predating 9/11. It's not like they've suddenly learned something new.So, the fact that they're now using tools like WhatsApp and Telegram is hardly a surprise. It also kinda highlights the idiocy of trying to backdoor American encryption. Telegram is not a US company and WhatsApp's encryption is based on the open source Signal protocol, meaning that any American backdoor encryption law isn't going to be very effective.

Well known anti-Muslim troll Pamela Geller has teamed up with a group called the American Freedom Law Center to file one of the dumbest lawsuits we've ever seen. There's so much wrong here it's difficult to know where to start. Here's the lawsuit itself, which is filed against US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, even though Geller's own story about the lawsuit falsely claims she's suing Facebook. She's not. She's suing the US government because Facebook relies on Section 230 of the CDA in taking down some of her pages, and she claims, ridiculously, that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act violates the First Amendment. The lawsuit is wrong on so many levels it's not even funny. Let's start with this, though -- Geller has long positioned herself as an extreme supporter of the First Amendment. And yet, she's now suing the government over CDA 230, a law which has probably done more than any other to guarantee that the First Amendment works on the internet.

As we've noted for some time, Comcast continues to expand the company's usage cap "trial" into more and more markets. As a clever, lumbering monopoly, Comcast executives believe if they move slowly enough -- consumers won't realize they're the frog in the boiling pot metaphor. But as we've noted time and time again, Comcast usage caps are utterly indefensible price hikes on uncompetitive markets, with the potential for anti-competitive abuse (since Comcast's exempting its own services from the cap).

The treatment of all things "cyber" by the government is incredibly inconsistent. Give someone a password so they can deface a website for 40 minutes and it's two years in jail. Doxx, SWAT, and cyberstalk multiple people and the best the court can do is two years minus time served. The end result is one year in prison for Mir Islam, who doxxed multiple celebrities and politicians, as well as called in fake threats that resulted in the swatting of at least nineteen people, including security researcher Brian Krebs, who uncovered Islam's doxxing tactics.Krebs' investigation of Islam and his abuse of free credit report services to obtain personal information on a variety of public figures led to the following:

Techdirt has run many articles about China's direct assault on Internet freedom. Indeed, its attempts to muzzle online dissent are so all-encompassing you might think it has run out of things to censor. But you'd be wrong: China is now reining in games for mobile phones, as a post on Tech in Asia explains:

A few years ago, I got to travel to Moscow to present some of our research at an event. Having heard more than a few stories about internet access issues in Russia, before going I made sure that I had three separate VPNs lined up in case any of them were blocked. I ended up using Private Internet Access -- which was already quite well-known and reliable. That's my regular VPN, but I had been worried that maybe it wouldn't work in Moscow. I was wrong. It worked flawlessly. But apparently that's no longer the case. Just after Russia's new surveillance bill passed, complete with mandates for encryption backdoors and data retention (along with a demand that all encryption be openly accessible for the government within two weeks), apparently Russian officials seized Private Internet Access's servers in Russia, causing the company to send an email to all its subscribers, announcing what happened, what it was doing to fix things... and also that it was no longer doing business in Russia.

Here's some good news. After decades of ridiculously bad management, it appears that the Library of Congress has a real leader. Dr. Carla Hayden has been approved by the Senate as our new Librarian of Congress by a wide margin, 74 to 18. And that's despite a last minute push by the ridiculous Heritage Foundation to argue that the Librarian of Congress should not be a librarian (and one with tremendous administrative experience). Heritage Foundation's alerts can often sway Republican Senators, so the fact that only 18 still voted against her is quite something. Hayden was also able to get past ridiculous claims that she was pro-obscenity or pro-piracy based on people who just didn't like the idea of an actually qualified person in the position.

Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski has been picking apart the FBI's oral testimony on the NIT it deployed in the Matish/Playpen case. The judge presiding over that case denied Matish's suppression request for a number of reasons -- including the fact that Matish's residence in Virginia meant that Rule 41 jurisdiction rules weren't violated by the FBI's NIT warrant. Judge Morgan Jr. then went off script and suggested the FBI didn't even need to obtain a warrant to deploy a hacking tool that exposed end user computer info because computers get hacked all the time.He equated this to police peering through broken blinds and seeing something illegal inside a house, while failing to recognize that his analogy meant the FBI could let themselves inside the house first to break the blinds, then peer in from the outside and claim "plain sight."The oral arguments [PDF] -- using FBI Special Agent Daniel Alfin's testimony -- were submitted in yet another case tied to the seizure of a child porn website, this one also taking place in Virginia and where the presiding judge has similarly denied the defendant's motion to suppress. The DOJ has added the transcript of the agent's oral testimony in the Matish prosecution as an exhibit to this case, presumably to help thwart the defendant's motion to compel the FBI to turn over the NIT's source code.Many assertions are made by Agent Alfin in support of the FBI's claim that its hacking tool -- which strips away any anonymity-protecting efforts put into place by the end user and sends this information to a remote computer -- is not malware. And many of them verge on laughable. Or would be laughable, if Alfin wasn't in the position of collecting and submitting forensic evidence.There's so much wrong in here, it's probably best to just start at the top.1. A MAC address is a unique identifier that can never be altered.

Another week, another CFAA (Computer Fraud & Abuse Act) ruling out of the 9th Circuit Appeals Court. This time it's the infamous Facebook v. Power.com case that's been going on since 2008. When we first came across the case, in early 2009, we insisted that it made no sense. Power.com was trying to set itself up as a sort of "meta" social network, or perhaps a social network management system, where users could have a dashboard for all their different social networks. Facebook didn't like this and sued over a long list of things, including copyright and trademark infringement, unlawful competition, violation of anti-spam laws... and the CFAA. Most of the claims went nowhere, but the CFAA and anti-spam ones lived on (because Power.com had systems for sending emails to users). The copyright claims were troubling, but the CFAA claims were the ones that concerned us the most.

The only way to make "bad optics" surrounding a questionable recruiting video vanish is to make the bad video vanish first, right? That's obviously what the Minneapolis Police Department believes. It has nuked its controversial recruiting video from DMCA orbit, netting citizen journalist Wedge Live a copyright strike for preserving something the MPD would rather just went away.Twitter user Tony Webster pointed out the end result of the MPD's efforts, which removed the video formerly located here (Update: as this story started to get press attention, it appears that the Minneapolis PD has rescinded its takedown).Fortunately for us -- and less fortunately for the MPD -- the video has been uploaded to Vimeo by Wedge Live, where it presumably awaits another questionable DMCA takedown notice from the police department.The MPD used to be quite proud of its video, until it generated some complaints about its aggressive imagery. The video opens with two poorly thought out shots. In one, a man in military gear pointing an assault rifle morphs into an MPD officer… carrying an assault rifle.The other shows a female beginning to throw a softball, which then morphs into a female police officer… pointing a gun at the camera.Neither of these opening shots do much to set the stage for the rest of the video, which is the usual assortment of talking heads and officers-in-action shots after that point. Nonetheless, the MPD does not host the video at its own YouTube channel, and on July 13 removed its link to the video from its own recruitment page.The archived version contains a link to the video. (And the link still works, but it's not hosted at YouTube.)The updated version does not.If it wasn't for the MPD's efforts to remove all traces of the video, this might have been chalked up to just a misguided effort to flex copyright muscle over something that was created with public funds and should, generally speaking, belong to the public, rather than the police department.But, considering the MPD has removed the link from its own webpage, it looks a whole lot more like an agency abusing the DMCA takedown system to remove something it considers to be less-than-flattering, especially in light of the Philando Castile shooting -- in which an officer killed Castile for attempting to produce the ID the officer had just asked for. Castile was carrying a gun, but had a concealed carry permit and had informed the officer of the fact. When he reached for his ID, the officer shot him four times. The aftermath of the shooting -- as Castile died in his car next to his girlfriend and her daughter -- was streamed live to Facebook.So, it's not surprising the MPD would want its recruiting video to vanish, seeing as it opens up in an aggressive and militarized manner. Unfortunately, the web doesn't forget just because the DMCA process has been abused. The MPD will have to live with its poor decisions for much longer than it planned to.

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Google is big and successful. Some legacy entertainment companies have been struggling. For whatever reason, many of those companies have decided that Google's success must be the reason for their downfall, and they've been blaming Google ever since. It's pervasive and it's deeply ingrained. A few years ago, I ended up at a dinner with a recording industry exec (and RIAA board member) who was so absolutely positive that Google was deliberately trying to destroy his business that it was reaching delusional levels. Of course, these legacy players have been banging on this drum for so long that they've convinced some others that it must be true, including some content creators and politicians. They all believe that the correlation of Google's success and their own struggles must be about Google, and not their own failures to innovate. And their number one argument seems to be (ridiculously) that Google "profits" from piracy and therefore Google encourages piracy.

You may have heard that earlier this week President Obama published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) entitled: United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps. It follows typical medical journal format and has lots of charts and figures. A number of people remarked that this must be a first for how the "Author Affiliations" were listed:Whatever you might think of the President's health care policy, you should absolutely appreciate the willingness to publish data and details like this -- and to make it freely available online. But there's something that's still problematic here. And it has a lot more to do with the American Medical Association than the President. And it's that -- in typically idiotic closed access medical journal fashion -- JAMA is claiming the copyright on the article. There's a copyright permissions link in the righthand column, and if you click on it, you get taken to a page on Copyright.com, a site run by the Copyright Clearance Center, claiming that the copyright for this document is held by the American Medical Association:And if you click to download the PDF version of the article, which I've embedded below on the bottom of every page, it claims that the document is covered by a copyright held by the American Medical Association.To put it simply: this is bullshit. Section 105 of US copyright law makes it quite explicit that "any work of the United States Government" cannot be covered by copyright. When the President writes a journal article (and he's listed as the sole author), the document is automatically in the public domain and not subject to copyright. I recognize that, since the AMA obnoxiously wants to claim and take every copyright from every one of its authors, it might not be set up to handle publishing a document in the public domain, but it should figure out how to make an exception, because what it's doing right now is outright copyfraud, claiming copyright on something it does not have the rights to.

Last week, we noted how Verizon had unveiled some new wireless data plans intended to be a competitive response to T-Mobile. In very Verizon-esque fashion, the new plans involved first and foremost raising already-industry high data prices another 17%, then scolding media outlets that called it a rate hike. The new plans also involved taking a number of ideas T-Mobile and other carriers had implemented years ago, then somehow making them worse.

When Techdirt has written about seeds in the past, it tended to be in the context of patents, and how Big Agribusiness is trying to use multiple layers of intellectual monopolies to prevent patented seeds from entering the public domain. By contrast, seeds that are already in the public domain -- that is, owned by no one and thus everyone -- ought to be unproblematic. But an interesting story in Intellectual Property Watch indicates that's not the case in France:

Fake news and hoax news stories are annoying, to be sure. I've been fooled a few times by hoax stories, as I imagine most other folks who do what we do have been. And, while the strategies taken by folks like Facebook haven't resulted in ending the scourge of fake news, I can understand the intent. There are probably better strategies out there, though they are harder to achieve. Strategies like educating the public on how to verify internet stories they see. Or instilling in people a healthy amount of skepticism starting at a young age so that they don't fall victim to every hoax out there. Or just sending around Snopes.com to all of our family members and demanding that they run any outrage through that filter first before bringing it to the dinner table.The point is that there are good ways to combat fake news. Here with an example of a terrible way to do so is China, which is happily riding the annoyance at hoax news to the happy conclusion of further centralizing control of the internet through its government.

Maybe this is part of UPS's large settlement with the DOJ. Maybe this is what FedEx won't do, which is why the DOJ tried to prosecute it for aiding and abetting illicit drug sales, right up until a federal judge called its prosecution "novel" and ushered it out of the court.Whatever the case, there's at least one "inside man" (in this case a woman) at the UPS. A San Bernardino UPS store owner acted as a "citizen informant" for the county sheriff. In exchange for unspecified "compensation," the store owner would flag suspicious packages and call in the Sheriff's Department to come in and have a look/sniff at said shipments.All well and good, if that's the sort of service you expect from a private company, rather than, say, the US Postal Service, which presumably does this sort of thing all the time. The Sheriff's Department, however, did instruct the store owner that she was not to open any suspicious packages.So much for that. From the suppression order [PDF] (via Brad Heath):

All I have to do is say that this is a story that involves the Olympics and you probably already know exactly what kind of story this is going to be. That's because we here at Techdirt have posts going back years that detail how the IOC and the USOC go about bullying, threatening, berating and downright pestering anyone it can over even the slightest of intellectual property concerns. The fact that these international games come around every two years now, instead of four, only means this bullying occurs now in near perpetuity instead of at a pace of a half-a-decade staccato.So, with the Rio Olympics right around the zika-infested, super-bacteria-in-the-water corner, it's time to start relaying the most predictable news possible: the USOC are still bullying people over laughably slight trademark concerns. Though I will credit the USOC this much: they're finding new and inventive ways to come off as petty and money-grubbing as possible. The link above details the USOC's demands that Oiselle, an athletic apparel company that sponsors Olympic athlete Kate Grace, take down the following Instagram posts.

It should surprise nobody that the FBI is seeking even broader digital surveillance powers by changing the warrant requirements and expanding the power of national security letters. If you're a regular Techdirt reader, it also won't surprise you to learn that Senator Ron Wyden is working hard to hold the line against this kind of expansion. This week, we're joined by Senator Wyden to discuss what the FBI is up to and what the public needs to know about it.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.

I don't get to use the phrase "with alacrity" that often, but Baton Rouge store owner Abdullah Muflahi's filing of a lawsuit against the Baton Rouge police can only be described as that.Following the shooting of Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge police officers, Muflahi's store was raided by law enforcement officers who took the hard drive containing the store's surveillance camera footage of the altercation. So far, everyone involved has refused to discuss the illegal seizure of Muflahi's recording equipment, deferring to the FBI and its investigation of the shooting -- which would be something if the FBI would answer questions about the seizure and current location of the hard drive.. but it won't talk about it either.Hence the speedily-filed lawsuit by Muflahi, as reported by Mike Hayes of Buzzfeed:

If you spend any time online, you've by now noticed that the internet this week belched forth a tidal wave of incessant chatter over Pokemon Go, Nintendo's new augmented reality game involving scrambling around real-world locations to "catch" collectible, virtual beasts with your phone. The game is by any standard a smashing success, boosting Nintendo's market cap by an estimated $9 billion in two days with the app rocketing to the top of both major app stores. The phenomenon is, frankly, pretty amazing:

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We've been writing for a while now how the FBI has been trying to rewrite a key part of the PATRIOT Act to massively expand its ability to use National Security Letters (NSLs) to get email and browser information with no warrant and no oversight. Despite the fact that the FBI was asking for this just days before the Orlando shooting, right after it, a bunch of Senators, led by John McCain, used the opportunity to fast track that legislative change, cynically pointing to the Orlando shooting as a reason why it's needed (despite it having nothing whatsoever to do with that). That effort failed, but just barely -- and it's expected to be brought up again shortly for another vote.

This is becoming quite the stupid trend: people who are true victims of terrorist attacks suing internet platforms because terror-associated groups are using those platforms generally. It began back in January, when a woman sued Twitter after her husband was apparently killed in an ISIS attack. The lawsuit made no connection between the use of Twitter and the attack. It's just "husband died in ISIS attack" and "ISIS people use Twitter." The judge in that case is not at all impressed and it seems likely to dismiss the case shortly. In the meantime, another similar case was filed against Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Tell me if you've heard this one before: broadband carriers are once again claiming that if regulators pass net neutrality rules, their ability to invest in next-generation networks will somehow be severely hindered, causing no limit of damage to consumers, puppies, and the time-space continuum. That's basically the line U.S. broadband providers tried to feed the FCC in the States. But no matter how many industry-tried, cherry picking think tank studies have tried to claim that net neutrality hurts broadband investment, real world data and ongoing deployment show that just isn't true.

For some reason, gamemaker Blizzard has been totally smitten with the idea of twisting copyright law into an ugly pretzel to sue anyone who makes a hack or cheat for one of its games for some time now. They did this concerning Starcraft, then World of Warcraft, and then Starcraft 2. This lawsuit tactic is starting to become something of a right of passage for Blizzard's games, but the tactic in question makes little sense. Blizzard's argument can be roughly translated as: cheats and hacks break the EULA for the game, the game is licensed by the EULA instead of being owned by anyone paying for it, the game does regular copying of code and files while in use, therefore a hack or cheat that breaks the EULA renders all of that routine copying as copyright infringement. While this wrenching of copyright into these kinds of lawsuits has nothing to do with the actual purpose or general application of copyright law, many cheer these moves on, because cheaters within the communal games we play are annoying.But the ends don't justify the means, and this kind of twisting of copyright law is dangerous, as we've pointed out in the past. Not that that's stopped Blizzard from utilizing this tactic, of course. In fact, recent Blizzard success Overwatch has become the latest to achieve this right of passage.

When it comes to biometrics, you really can't beat DNA. You can always erase your fingerprints, or wear contact lenses to fool iris scanners, but there's no way of changing all your DNA enough to make it unrecognizable (even with the new CRISPR technique). Couple that with the fact that we are shedding DNA everywhere we go -- leaving tell-tale markers on everything we touch -- and you have the perfect surveillance mechanism. That's why earlier UK plans to give police access to medical databases are problematic, to say nothing of Kuwait's mandatory DNA database for all citizens, residents and visitors. Now Rick Falkvinge has written a post about troubling moves in Sweden:

One of the stranger stories from the past year or so in the social media space was the saga of Politwoops, the service that archives politicians' and public officials' tweets that have since been deleted. Politwoops had operated for a time before Twitter killed it off, claiming it violated its ToS. Twitter also claimed that the reason it had ended Politwoops' ability to operate was to protect the privacy of its users, including the public officials that were the target of Politwoops. Then Twitter suddenly allowed Politwoops to make its return, saying:

For some time now, the opinion du jour in "enlightened" media circles has been to treat the news comment section (aka the customers who visit your website daily and directly) as some kind of irredeemable leper colony. One that should be nuked from orbit before the infection spreads. As such, we've seen website after website proudly crow about how they've given up on allowing site comments because a handful of posters are obnoxious, hateful little shits and the social media age means more direct community interaction is passe.

Today's the day for bogus DMCA takedowns by clueless lawyers trying to hide embarrassing information, I guess. Earlier today we had a story about a legal exec at Sony Pictures issuing a completely bogus DMCA takedown over his salary info being included in the Sony Hacks email dump. And now we turn to Carl David Ceder, a young criminal defense lawyer in Texas. If you recognize that name, it might be because a much more well-known and established criminal defense lawyer, Scott Greenfield, wrote a few blog posts about young Carl a few years ago, when he discovered that Carl had been beefing up the content on his professional website by simply plagiarizing the content of other, more established legal bloggers, and posting it as if it were his own thoughts. To put it mildly, Carl did not respond well to this and sent a few barely comprehensible rants blaming everyone but himself, and never actually apologizing for copying someone else's content wholesale.

What is it with South American historical figures suddenly thinking they can control everything to do with their family names? You'll hopefully recall the brief existence of a case of publicity rights violation brought against Activision by Manuel Noriega over the depiction of him in the gamemaker's Call of Duty series. That case was quickly tossed out by the court because the First Amendment has just an tiny bit more weight when it comes to artistic expression than does any publicity rights for public historical figures from other countries that might, maybe, kinda-sorta exist, possibly. We might have struggled at the time to find a complainant less likely than Noriega to win this sort of long-shot in the American court system, but we need struggle no longer.Roberto Escobar, brother and former accountant to drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, has sent a letter to Netflix demanding a billion dollars (not a joke) and the right to review all future episodes of the streaming company's hit show Narcos, to make sure that he and his family are portrayed accurately. The letter, first published by TMZ (which explains the massive TMZ watermark on it) is quite a read.

As numerous posts on Techdirt attest, the authorities really don't like Tor, even though the Onion routing system was developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, not some terrorist hacker group. The latest jurisdiction to misunderstand how Tor works is Poland, as this report on Motherboard explains:

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Last fall, our think tank, the Copia Institute, released a paper, The Carrot or the Stick? which detailed how innovation in the form of convenient, appealing and reasonably priced legal content streaming services appeared to be the most powerful tool in reducing piracy. The report looked at a number of different data sources and situations in multiple different countries. And what we found, over and over again, was pretty straightforward: ratcheting up enforcement or punishment did not work -- or, if it did work, it only worked exceptionally briefly. However, by introducing good, convenient authorized services, piracy rates fell, like off a cliff. We saw this pattern repeated over and over again.

A lot of the problem with access is the access itself. Give enough people a way to look up compromising information on nearly anyone and abuse is guaranteed. Human nature ensures this outcome.Sure, abuse could be curbed with actual, substantial punishments for abusing this access, but as we've seen time and time again, the threat of firings and jail time doesn't mean much if law enforcement officers are rarely, if ever, fired/jailed for abusing their access privileges.The larger problem with access is the lack of strong deterrents. Access is essential to law enforcement work, but far too often, this access is used for anything but law enforcement reasons.Big Brother Watch has released a report [PDF] detailing numerous abuses of law enforcement databases by UK police staff over the past several years.

The DEA will no longer be able to waltz into Riverside County (CA) judge Helios Hernandez's chambers and walk out with signed wiretap warrants. I mean, they'll still be able to get Judge Hernandez to sign warrants. After all, no one does it better:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous commenter who had some thoughts on the notion of allowing a court case to disappear entirely because the plaintiff regrets it:

Five Years AgoThe fight over PROTECT IP was heating up this week in 2011, with law professors joining the ranks of those opposed to the bill while Hollywood ramped up its smear campaign against Senator Ron Wyden, and Senator Jerry Moran removed himself as a co-sponsor of the bill. Of course, this wasn't the only bad bill being considered — there was also the anti-streaming bill, which caught the attention of video game streamers and was met with a mass of YouTube video protests. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry was busy moving ahead of the law by signing the major US ISPs onto a "five strikes" plan for copyright infringement. Those who received strikes would have to pay to contest them, and it looked like the industry had backdoored in the disconnection powers it so desired.But the most memorable thing to happen this week in 2011 was, of course, the unveiling of the famous (and fascinating/contentious from a copyright perspective) monkey selfie.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2006, the RIAA was busy suing sites around the globe, with the latest target being Allofmp3.com in the UK. We were skeptical of this approach, but the Associated Press certainly seemed to have bought the scare stories about global piracy in full. The RIAA was also failing on the home front, with university students seeing right through its terrible "free" music service. Hollywood was busy taking down the free promotion it got from its fans, and after a German magazine noted that you can technically pirate a movie by simply screencapping every frame, we wondered how long it would take for the MPAA to try to ban the Print Screen button.There was a big, memorable moment this week in 2006 too: Senator Ted Stevens offered his infamous "series of tubes" explanation for the nature of the internet.Fifteen Years AgoLast week, we noted that Amazon introduced a free shipping program for the first time. This week in 2001, Barnes & Noble followed suit, and managed to do so without raising any prices on Monday. But then, on Friday... Amazon ended its free shipping program, calling it an experiment. Such was the dance of the early online retailers.We saw the early rumblings of a legal response to the problems of cyber-bullying, and early takes on how to deal with (or possibly flat-out ban) the use of cellphones while driving. We even saw the earliest of baby steps down the long road to Uber with Ireland experimenting with the ability to get cabs by texting. And in a move that may not have seemed revolutionary at the time, but was actually a first step towards opening up lots of enlightening data, Google unveiled its "Zeitgeist" product for exploring the most popular searches and trends.Twenty-Six Years AgoTechdirt has been around for a long time, but the folks at the EFF still have a few years on us: it was on July 6th, 1990 that the EFF was founded by John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor after both faced inquiries by law enforcement agents who were clueless about technology. Happy birthday, EFF!