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When AT&T originally announced the company wanted to spend $69 billion on a satellite TV company on the eve of the cord cutting revolution, even M&A bullish Wall Street thought AT&T was a little nuts. After all, AT&T's refusal to seriously upgrade its aging DSL networks to full fiber have left it at a serious disadvantage to faster cable broadband. Given Verizon's FiOS fiber build clocked in somewhere around $24 billion, the $69 billion AT&T spent on DirecTV could have gone a long way toward bringing those customers into the modern fiber to the home era.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has just made it easier for the state's law enforcement officers to search residents' houses without a warrant. A 4-3 decision overturned an appeals court opinion finding the opposite. In doing so, the Supreme Court expanded the reach of the state's "community caretaker function" beyond simply allowing the retention of evidence discovered in "plain sight" to that found behind locked doors as well.

The dangers of corporate sovereignty chapters in so-called "free trade" agreements are increasingly well-known. That's especially the case for Techdirt readers, since we've been warning about this parallel legal system, which puts corporations above national laws, for well over three years. Now that the general issues of these investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are widely understood, people are starting to explore more specific problems. Here, for example, is a new report from the Transnational Institute (TNI) looking at how ISDS cases limit the ability of governments to collect and even set taxes in their own lands:

A renewed interest in space technology is growing with re-usable rockets and more private companies getting into the space business. Rocket science is generally a pretty expensive and risky venture because there are just so many things that could go wrong. Still, there are a few space agencies accomplishing significant space missions on relatively small budgets, and we should probably expect amateur space programs to get better and better as the costs to get to space come down.

FOIA reform is (yet) again working its way through the bowels of Congress. Unfortunatley, the FOIA process is resistant to fixing because there's very little in it for the government. Agencies are supposed to err on the side of openness and transparency, but a stack of broadly-written exemptions makes it's far too easy for them to operate in opacity.

A new documentary is coming out by famed documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney called Zero Day. Big reports in Buzzfeed and the NY Times (both with additional reporting) note how it reveals that the famed Stuxnet attack by the NSA (with an assist from Israeli intelligence) was just a drop in the bucket of a massive cyberattack capability, under the code name NITRO ZEUS, that the US has built up in Iran as an "alternative" to nuclear war should diplomacy fail in negotiating Iran away from making nuclear weapons. The NY Times article focuses more on the geopolitical issues involved in the effort:

Back in January, we wrote with some concern over the news that US Marshals had seized a bunch of one wheel scooters that everyone wants to call hoverboards, even though they don't hover. The case involved a US company, Future Motion, that had gotten a lot of attention (and a utility patent and a design patent) on such single-wheel balancing scooters. Future Motion then sued a Chinese firm, Changzhou First International Trade Co., that was making a product that certainly looked similar. Changzhou was demonstrating its product at CES in Las Vegas, only to have the US Marshals raid its booth and seize all its products based on a 7 minute hearing in front a judge where Changzhou didn't even get to present its side.

Having trouble keeping your secure website secure? Why not try a DMCA takedown request?

Lots of people are aware of the Constitutional underpinnings of our copyright system. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 famously says that Congress has the following power:

The ultimate travel coffee mug is here for those who prefer theirs freshly ground and brewed. The $99 Cafflano Coffeemaker And Cup is a grinder, filter, kettle and tumbler rolled into one portable package. Hand grind your beans, place in the stainless steel filter over the tumbler and pour in your hot water. It is easy to clean with no wasted filters or pods or cups to toss and with no DRM. At less than 8" tall, the Cafflano can slip into any bag and be ready to help you brew that perfect cup of joe anytime and anywhere.

Over the last five years GoGo has effectively cornered about 80% of the in-flight broadband market, allowing the company to lag a little bit when it comes to giving a damn about customer satisfaction. And while the 3 Mbps per plane is starting to grow a little long in the tooth, the company has been raising prices for the service slowly but dramatically (though filters, throttling, and fake SSL certs are still free of charge).

Last night, we wrote about a judge's order commanding Apple to help the FBI effectively decrypt the contents of Syed Farook's iPhone 5C. Farook, of course, along with his wife, was responsible for the San Bernardino attacks a few months ago. Many of the initial reports about the order suggested that it simply ordered Apple to break the encryption -- which made many people scoff. However, as we noted, that was not accurate. Instead, it was ordering something much more specific: that Apple create a special firmware that would disable two distinct security features within iOS -- one that would effectively wipe the encrypted contents following 10 failed attempts at entering the unlocking PIN (by throwing away the stored decryption key) and a second one that would progressively slow down the amount of time between repeated attempts at entering the PIN.

We already wrote about how CBS fucked up internet streaming of the Grammy's on Monday night, but a few folks have sent in the various stories about how Grammy's boss Neil Portnow did his now annual whine about how evil tech companies don't pay musicians enough, and how if we don't start giving musicians more money ISIS will win and the 12 year old who just performed on piano might starve or something. The crux of his talk was to whine that when people stream a song it might earn those associated with the music "a fraction of a penny" and somehow that's unfair:

Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that broadband services didn't need additional consumer privacy protections because "public shame" would keep the broadband industry honest. But in late 2014, Verizon found itself at the center of a privacy scandal after security researchers discovered the company was embedding stealth tracking technology in every packet sent by the company's wireless users. These "stealth cookies" were being used by Verizon for two years before they were even discovered, and it took another six months of public and press outrage for Verizon to let users opt out.

So... have you heard the story about how a magistrate judge in California has ordered Apple to help the FBI disable encryption on the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters? You may have because it's showing up everywhere. Here's NBC News reporting on it:

Human intelligence is about to be bested by computers playing the game of Go, and software already soundly defeats people at games like chess and specific variations of poker. If we're trying to keep our smug superiority, people are still better than AI at MMORPGs and a few other skills... but it might not be too long before we hand over the controls of monetary policy to algorithms.

Intellectual property: if you fail to block competition with one kind, apparently you can try, try again with another kind -- and eventually you'll end up in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who will mess everything up and kill off the competition. Printer company Lexmark has been at war with alternative suppliers of ink for well over a decade. As you may be aware, printer ink is sold at a ridiculously high markup, such that one estimate (from over a decade ago) noted that in order to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with printer ink, it would cost you $5.9 billion (yes, with a "b") at the checkout counter of your local office-supply retailer. The printer makers have notably taken a "give away cheap crappy printers at a low cost, and make it up in seriously overpricing the ink" strategy to their businesses. This kind of thing works great until someone tries to step in and sell competing ink.

This past Friday, we published our response to an Australian lawyer, Stuart Gibson, who apparently works for a real law firm called Mills Oakley. I know that Gibson is a real lawyer, because he's represented big famous clients in the press before, including this impressive TV appearance in which he is left "categorically denying" statements that his client appears to have made directly and then having to defend himself when the news anchor points out what his client has actually said. Anyway, Mr. Gibson did not appear to appreciate my blog post on Friday, and sent a series of short emails over the weekend, with increasing fervor, in which he insisted that I "get proper legal advice instead of publishing your utter dribble," that my "legal theories" were "nonsensical" and finally demanded to know if I had "the guts" to face him in court.

Last week, we shared the first half of Mike's interview with Barry Eisler at the Commonwealth Club of California. This week, we've got the second half of that discussion, which pivots from national security and the surveillance state to Barry's novels, his experiences with publishing, and the time he met Keanu Reeves. 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 New York ACLU has obtained documents from the NYPD -- a feat on par with prying paperwork away from the FBI, CIA or NSA -- showing the department has been deploying Stingrays without a warrant since 2008. This puts them on the same timeline (and with the same lack of legal paperwork) as the Baltimore Police Department, although the BPD was much more proactive with their deployments: over 4,300 since 2008, as compared to the NYPD's relatively restrained 1,016.

CBS had the perfect opportunity over the extended weekend to show that the company had evolved and was ready to embrace the modern streaming era. CBS had announced that users could watch the Grammy Awards live online on Monday Night -- but only if customers signed up for a trial of CBS' $6 per month "All Access" streaming service. And while not necessarily a bad promotional idea on its surface, it appears that CBS choked completely on the opportunity, with numerous customers reporting that they couldn't even get the stream to start:

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Oh, the irony. First pointed out by Mathias Schindler, it appears that a copyright lecture about music copyright done by famed copyright expert and Harvard Law professor William Fisher has been taken down due to a copyright claim by Sony Music. Fisher is well-known in copyright circles and has long advocated for a major reform to copyright to effectively spread a compulsive license to other uses, effectively legalizing file sharing, but with systems in place to still have artists paid. He's detailed versions of this proposal in his book, Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment. That said, this takedown appears to have nothing to do with that whatsoever.

CIA boss John Brennan -- perhaps still rattled from being put on the spot by Sen. Ron Wyden at a recent hearing -- is now just saying whatever the hell he wants with little regard for facts.

Copyright infringement kills creativity. It's killing artists and depriving future generations of a variety of works that -- if they could even be made in this era of lawlessness -- should rightfully be withheld from the public until long after the future generation is dead and next generation fully grown. So. They. Say.

We've talked a few times before about the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, a government office theoretically designed to keep money from flowing to and from scary people in scary countries or whatever. Its work typically amounts to keeping businesses from doing business-y things with people in places like North Korea and such. On the other hand, sometimes the folks at the OFAC get their knickers in a twist over a graphic novel about some of these scary people, so it's not like these folks have a spotless record when it comes to keeping the proper targets in its collective sights.

This week, we've got another first place winner for insightful from That One Guy, who also notably took seven out of the top ten insightful spots overall. The top comment was an excellent response to the many ludicrous claims about the public's broadband needs:

Five Years Ago This week in 2011, we saw some great stuff. David Guetta suggested "beating" piracy by embracing free music; Neil Gaiman explained how he went from fearing piracy to believing it's incredibly good; the Khan Academy was moving to leverage the power of BitTorrent; and a study from the Japanese government showed that anime piracy might be boosting sales. But, on the flipside, we saw even more awful stuff. One rapper sued multiple companies for giving him lots of free promotion; the MPAA was lobbing all sorts of threats at Google over file sharing and suing Hotfile; a report from the IP Czar sounded like it was largely written by pro-copyright lobbyists; and Sony was going nuts over the PS3 jailbreak video, demanding the identity of anyone who watched it even while being tricked into tweeting the critical jailbreak code itself. Ten Years Ago Five extra years doesn't seem to change much. This week in 2006, even while some artists were realizing you could make money giving away free music and the evidence was showing that movie piracy doesn't reduce sales, plenty of people were still trying to fight this imagined enemy with restrictive licensing terms that kill the value of the product and set-top movie boxes that cost a fortune despite not offering much. Newsweek, for some reason, was praising Rupert Murdoch as a digital visionary based largely on News Corp's acquisition of MySpace (which went wonderfully, right?) One look at MTV's efforts to compete was enough of a reminder that old media really struggles to "get" new media. Fifteen Years Ago This week in 2001, Napster was in limbo. It was unclear when its paid, licensed offerings would be arriving, while some were still arguing that it should remain free. Then the word came down that the final ruling on Napster from the 9th Circuit would be arriving the following Monday (so we'll check in on that next week, naturally). Wi-Fi was on the rise, but still had some security-related kinks to work out, and mobile innovation was orbiting the still-unborn iPhone with ersatz mashups of PDAs and phones. E-books were starting to make their mark, online shopping seemed due for its true rise, and home networks remained less common than anticipated. Also, in one of the first instances of a point we'd go on to make many times, we pointed out that content isn't necessarily king, and connectivity matters a lot. One-Hundred And Eighteen Years Ago The justice system, the government, the national security apparatus, the media, the public, espionage, free speech, libel — they are all intersecting topics of interest here at Techdirt, and perhaps no incident in history brings them all together in as sharp a focus as France's Dreyfus Affair. The details of this infamous miscarriage of justice are far too numerous and intricate to recount here, but one of the most important aspects of the whole thing was J'Accuse, an essay published by Émile Zola as a direct attack on the government, which landed him on trial for defamation starting on February 7th, 1898.

My criteria for the projects in these posts is simple: I look for things that make me say "hey, that's pretty awesome," whether or not I'm entirely sure if they need to exist. But once in a while something makes me say "hey, that's really awesome" even though it definitely doesn't "need" to exist, and the Ming Micro 8-bit video synthesizer is one of those cases. Chiptunes are fuelled by a kind of sonic nostalgia: the desire to take the infectious bleeps and bloops of old 8-bit game consoles and use them to create new compositions. Off in another part of the music world there's the video DJs, using high-end live editing equipment and advanced visualization algorithms to mix and modify images alongside the music. The Ming Micro brings the two together: it's a real-time chip graphics engine built on a compact Arduino board. What does a "chip graphics engine" do? Well, in short, it's a visual synthesizer: Awesome, right? The Ming Micro is entirely controlled by MIDI, the standard language used for music devices and synthesizers. It hijacks the channels normally used for bending notes and altering synth parameters and applies them to live-generated visuals which it outputs in NTSC video at 240p — the completely authentic look of retro consoles. MIDI is widespread and highly customizable, meaning the Ming can be controlled with knobs and sliders, "played" on a piano, and even integrated into a larger MIDI music workflow to interact with instruments. It even includes some basic chiptunes synthesis of its own, with a pair of square-wave generators and a noise generator. It's not just for producing abstract dances of garbled pixels (though it's entirely capable of that) — it can incorporate loadable graphics packs from an SD card. The graphics can be built from scratch, even in something as simple as Notepad, since they are stored in a special ASCII-art format, and then they can even be modified and re-written live via MIDI. The possibilities are pretty much endless. Now, in fact, the Ming Micro isn't the first device to do this — it's actually a successor to the Ming Mecca, which is even more powerful. But there's a critical difference: while the Mecca clocks in at close to a thousand bucks, the Micro is a mere $200. Essentially, it's the engine from the heart of the Mecca — rather than coming with a massive pre-designed control panel, it's just the synthesis unit, ready to be plugged in to just about any MIDI device and/or a PC. (The "or" is worth noting: the Micro can do lots of stuff all by itself without ever touching a USB port, but the associated control app unlocks a whole lot of more advanced functions and settings). The low price point makes it available to a whole world of creators who probably weren't in the market for a $900 Mecca, and I'm excited to see what they do with it.

This isn't a huge surprise, but the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal -- which is a sort of extremely weak "oversight" board, charged with making sure that the GCHQ isn't violating the law, but with no real powers over GCHQ and a history of supporting its spying, has now said that the GCHQ's hacking of computers, networks and phones is perfectly fine.

The government has made one last attempt to screw over a victim of an IRS bank account seizure. The screwing began in December of 2014, when the IRS -- despite stating it would notperform forfeitures if there was no clear evidence of wrongdoing -- lifted $107,000 from convenience store owner Lyndon McLellan. This was yet another one of the IRS's "structuring" cases, predicated solely on the fact that multiple deposits under $10,000 were made. ($10,000 triggers automatic reporting to the federal government.)

If you haven't planned a romantic Valentine's Day yet, you still have a bit of time left. But if you're not at all interested in this pink and red commercial holiday, then just think about the discounted chocolates you can snag on the 15th. Don't just sit home alone, though, check out these links and appreciate that, in the grand scheme of things, almost anything that's possible has a chance of happening -- and try to stay romantic somehow.

In 1998, Congress passed the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA), which placed a ban on taxing internet access. The bill was temporary, and every few years had to be extended by Congress to stop attempts to add taxes to the cost of your internet access. For a long time, there's been a push to make the ITFA permanent, and Congress finally did that yesterday, when the Senate approved such a bill (the House approved its version last summer). As Senator Ron Wyden noted in response to this passing, this inevitably saves the public a lot of money on a vital service. He notes that mobile phone service is taxable, and average consumers pay a 17% tax on such service. The President still needs to sign the bill, but it would be a surprise if he vetoed it.

It's still somewhat strange to me to see how badly some companies react to basic competition. Yes, sometimes that means companies lose, but it doesn't automatically make any and all competition unfair. An online map company, StreetMap.Eu sued Google a few years ago, claiming that Google's entrance into the online mapping world, and specifically including maps in search results, was unfair competition. However, the UK High Court has now, rightfully, rejected such a claim. The basis of the ruling seemed rather straightforward:

For years now, broadcasters have waged legal war on Dish network for giving consumers what they want: namely a DVR that automatically skips advertisements users weren't watching anyway. Fox, CBS and NBC Universal all sued Dish back in 2012, claiming that the ad-skipping technology embedded in its "Hopper" DVR violated copyright. Most of the lawsuits were packed with hilariously baseless claims, like Fox ignoring the Betamax case to breathlessly insist that merely recording the entire prime time lineup was making "bootleg" copies of Fox's broadcasts.

So... you may recall that, back in December, we received and responded to a ridiculous and bogus legal threat sent by one Milorad "Michael" Trkulja from Australia. Mr. Trkulja had sent the almost incomprehensible letter to us and to Google, making a bunch of claims, many of which made absolutely no sense at all. The crux of the issue, however, was that, back in November of 2012, we had an article about a legal victory by Mr. Trkulja against Google. The issue was that when you searched on things like "sydney underworld criminal mafia" in Google's Image search, sometimes a picture of Trkulja would show up. His argument was that this was Google defaming him, because its algorithms included him in the results of such a search and he was not, in fact, a part of the "underworld criminal mafia."

With the rapid growth of cameras in smartphones and social sharing apps, photography is a popular hobby again. But mastering Instagram filters and knowing your perfect selfie pose are just the tip of the creative iceberg with photography. The $69 Adobe KnowHow Photography Bundle aims to show you the tips and tricks that the pros know to develop the shots they want. The 65+ hours of instruction cover topics from the basics of DSLR cameras to how to use Photoshop and Lightroom to perfect your shots. The courses cover portrait work, black and white photography, travel photography, framing a shot and more. This bundle will take your photography skills to the next level.

Remember the Senate Intelligence Committee's massive CIA torture report, that details how the CIA conducted a vast program of torturing people, which had no actual benefit, and then lied to Congress (repeatedly) about it? The same report that, when the heavily redacted executive summary was released, ex-CIA officials insisted would result in attacks on America that never actually happened?

For a while now we've been highlighting the problems of Europe's "Right to be Forgotten" concept as it applies to search results. The idea is that, rather than a search engine, Europe thinks of companies like Google as creating something of a "dossier" on individuals, over which they should be able to delete old or irrelevant "data." This means that, in the EU, people can apply to Google to "de-link" certain stories that they consider to no longer be relevant, even if those stories are 100% accurate and true. Not surprisingly, given a chance to "delink" yourself from truthful information has resulted in lots and lots of people demanding Google "forget" links about them. Google now has a process to go through these, and certainly has rejected many requests, but it still appears to accept many requests that appear to be obviously bogus attempts to hide information someone just dislikes.

You can add CenturyLink to the growing number of ISPs charging more money for the same product thanks to limited broadband competition. The company told attendees of an earnings conference call this week that it would be following Comcast's lead and conducting a "trial" of broadband usage caps and overage fees sometime later this year. The company lost 22,000 DSL customers last quarter, and clearly believes that layering an already inferior product with new restrictions and higher prices will surely make its customers happy:

Despite a few daring experiments in the space, the dark net (or dark web, if you prefer) is generally seen as a dangerous, frightening place inhabited by terrorists, pornographers and general ne'er-do-wells. That makes a report in The Guardian about drug dealers moving online unusual, because it shows how the dark net can also be beneficial to society:

Alright, this one has me more than a bit puzzled. We've written here before about Urban Outfitters, which has previously been on the receiving end of intellectual property disputes in the form of the company's use of famous Obama iconography and for trying to inject a bit of humor into its coffee offerings. This time around, however, the clothing retailer is facing a lawsuit from the Navajo Nation for selling clothing and merchandise with patterns inspired by Native American designs and including the word "Navajo" or "Navaho" in the offerings.

Artificially intelligent assistants are everywhere in science fiction, and they're slowly creeping into reality. However, most of the time, these things are limited to answering simple questions like "what's the weather?" or "who won the Super Bowl?" And even then, simple questions don't always return the desired simple answer. Still, we must press on because technology will only get better. Here are just a few more digital assistants that are going to be fighting for your attention someday.

Apple has a long and annoying history of trying to keep the content within its app store as pure as the driven snow. To do this, Apple employs an arbitrary and downright stupid sense of morality. That's how you end up with Apple banning a VR representation of the Ferguson shooting, for instance, despite the fact that it was non-graphic. Or that time the company killed off a Civil War simulation because the game contained historically accurate representations of the Confederate flag. Or when it removed an image-searching app from the store because, hey, somebody somewhere might use it to see naughty-bits.

Back in 2014, we wrote about a crazy story, where the Harvard Law Review was claiming copyright over legal citation standards. It's true that the Harvard Law Review Association has published the famous "Bluebook" of legal citation standards for many years, but the idea that such citations are copyrightable is crazy. In response to this, law professor Chris Sprigman and open records guru Carl Malamud alerted the world of their intention to publish "Baby Blue" -- a competing legal citations publication. They noted that the 10th edition of the Bluebook, which as published in 1958, had clearly fallen into the public domain, and they were going to use that as the starting point for their competing product. Late in December, we pointed out that Harvard Law Review freaked out after its expensive Ropes & Gray lawyers saw a few tweets from Malamud suggesting Baby Blue was almost ready for publication. On Christmas Eve, a pricey lawyer sent off a nastygram, threatening a copyright infringement lawsuit if Baby Blue were published.

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.

It's not clear why it's taken this long, but late Wednesday, the White House sent two WIPO treaties over to the Senate for ratification: The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled -- usually just called "The Marrakesh Treaty" or "The Marrakesh Treaty for the Blind" -- and the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances, usually just called "The Beijing Treaty." The Beijing Treaty was completed in 2012. The Marrakesh Treaty in 2013. It's not clear why it took the White House until 2016 to move on them, but such is life.

Last summer, we noted a crazy case in which the famous Hollywood actor James Woods sued a random Twitter troll who had been making fun of Woods. The anonymous troll, who went by the name Abe List, mocked some of Woods' own nonsensical tweets about Caitlyn Jenner and Planned Parenthood by saying:

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In late 2014, the Obama Administration and the FCC shocked everybody by announcing that the government would be uncharacteristically ignoring telecom lobbyists and reclassifying broadband service under Title II -- ensuring it had adequate legal foundation for tougher net neutrality rules. As you might expect, the cable and phone companies immediately set to work with a blistering public relations barrage, with think tankers, editorials, industry consultants and thousands of industry mouthpieces all making one common refrain: Title II would utterly decimate broadband sector investment and crush innovation.