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Let's start off with this: there's no legitimate way to defend Zane Alchin, a guy in Australia who appears to be an all around horrible person. He went on Facebook, and after seeing a friend of his post (and mock) a woman's Tinder profile, proceeded to post a whole bunch of pretty horrible and misogynistic posts on Facebook, including some pretty horrifying statements about "raping feminists." I won't post any of his other comments, though they're covered in some of the articles written about the case. Alchin, who now claims he was just drunk and trolling, and also insisted he wasn't breaking any laws, has since discovered that apparently he was breaking a weird Australian law, for which he's now pled guilty.

For a while now we've warned how "zero rating" (letting some content bypass usage caps) is a creative way for ISPs to tap dance around net neutrality --potentially to public applause. Comcast, for example, exempts its creatively-named "Stream" streaming video service from caps, but claims this doesn't violate net neutrality because the traffic never technically leaves Comcast's network. Verizon exempts its own Go90 video service from caps as well, and to date doesn't even bother justifying the move. Both AT&T and Verizon let companies pay for cap exemption.

Very rarely does anyone want to believe a defendant in a criminal prosecution. They have the most to lose, are often presumed guilty by all involved, and if they'd done nothing wrong, they wouldn't be here defending themselves, right? None of that is how the system is supposed to work. But that's how it often does.Law enforcement officers, on the other hand, are often treated as unimpeachably credible, even when their recollections of events are less than accurate. Sometimes they get called out for it. Most times they don't. About the only way their dishonesty is called out if if there's another set of eyes on the scene -- like dashcams or body-worn cameras. (This, too, is far from a sure thing.)That's what happened here. A bogus traffic stop that morphed into a drug bust began with zero traffic violations -- even though the officer performing the stop claimed at least two violations had occurred. (via FourthAmendment.com)Victor Dominguez-Fernand was pulled over for allegedly driving with his headlights off and following too close to the vehicle ahead. Unfortunately for Deputy Nicholas Ernestes, his dashcam showed both claimed violations were bogus.First off, the supposed violation of "driving with headlights off" was only a presumed violation. Deputy Ernestes testified that he "believed" headlights were required because of the weather conditions (overcast and raining) but couldn't actually assert that such a requirement exists.This, of course, is hardly a fatal error. The Supreme Court (along with dozens of lower courts) have made it clear law enforcement isn't required to know the laws it's enforcing. All they have to do is believe a violation has occurred to perform a traffic stop.Not that it mattered. When Ernestes turned on his lights to pull over Fernand, his dashcam kicked in, and it showed something completely different [PDF].

As you may or may not be aware, Sky TV is a European cable television network owned by Rupert Murdoch. Sky TV is also a company that has trademarked the word "sky" and enjoys bludgeoning anyone who uses the word "sky" in business into the ground. This has resulted in exceptionally silly disputes, such as Sky TV suing Skype, despite there being not a lick of competition between a messaging/calling system and television.This past week, gaming enthusiasts learned that the much anticipated open universe space exploration game No Man's Sky had been battling with Sky TV over the inclusion of the word "sky" in its title. This case of trademark bullying can act as a wonderful barometer, because if you don't think this is ridiculous, then you are ridiculous.

We're on the verge of a transportation revolution with autonomous cars and electric vehicles about to become mainstream means of mobility. Various concept cars make the future of transportation look more bubble-shaped or like spandex, so the roads are really going to look a bit crazy if we allow 40-year-old muscle cars to drive along with surviving K-cars and futuristic-looking Tron-like hypercars. Check out a few more crazy cars that aren't quite practical in the links below.

Last week, the Supreme Court made life a little easier for patent trolls, and this week it made life a little harder. At issue was just how the Patent Office could review patents after they were granted. The last round of patent reform, the America Invents Act in 2010, included something called Inter Partes Review (IPR) that allows anyone to basically challenge a bad patent, presenting specific evidence that it shouldn't have been granted due to prior art. A special board at the Patent Office, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), can then decide to review the patent if it decides that there's a "reasonable likelihood" that it will invalidate some of the patent claims due to the submitted evidence.

The Constitution-free buffer zone near our nation's borders ensures those who wander too far away from the center of our country will be robbed of their rights, thanks to ongoing wars vs. drugs and terrorism. They may also be robbed of their dignity.There's apparently very little law enforcement personnel won't do when in pursuit of drugs. The gloves come off, only to be replaced with other gloves, which are then forcefully inserted into every orifice on a "suspect's" body. We saw this happen to New Mexico native David Eckert back in 2013. The list of invasions and indignities perpetrated on him by the Deming police and a far-too-compliant "medical professional" is long, ugly and comprehensive.

Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Twitch — online video is still booming. But it also still struggles under the weight of exclusive deals and content silos, and it feels like there's still plenty of innovation to be done. But where will that innovation come from? This week, we discuss the future of online video.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.

Folks in the Bitcoin/blockchain world can be fairly opinionated -- that's no surprise. But just because you have an interview go sideways, it doesn't mean you get to threaten a lawsuit over it. That's not how it works. Perianne Boring founded and runs a lobbying organization focused on Bitcoin/blockchain issues called the Chamber of Digital Commerce. I have to admit to not being that familiar with the organization (I'm more familiar with another organization called Coin Center). However, late last week, Boring appeared on a podcast called Bitcoin Uncensored. To say the interview did not go well... would be an understatement.Again, there are lots of different opinions around Bitcoin and blockchains, and the hosts of the show are pretty clearly skeptical of both Boring's position and knowledge on the issues -- and they don't hide their skepticism at all. The interview is basically a long attempt to pick apart Boring's knowledge of Bitcoin/blockchain and the regulatory issues related to it. It doesn't really get very confrontational in terms of yelling. They just keep asking questions that lead to more buzzwordy answers than substance, and then ask followups that highlight that. It does come across as a bit of badgering by the hosts who are playing a game of gotcha. But, still...

Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about the FBI pushing strongly for an update to the law that covers National Security Letters (NSLs) to cover up the fact that the FBI has been using them to get electronic communications records. The current law on NSLs doesn't cover that information, though the FBI insists that it's just a "typo" in the law, and still frequently asks for them in its NSLs, because NSL recipients often don't know the law themselves and will still turn over the info. Of course, it helps that the NSLs often come with gag orders. Reports going back a decade have shown that the FBI has a serious problem with abusing its NSL powers to get lots of information it's not supposed to have. And rather than do something to stop such abuses, the FBI's friends in Congress have, instead, been trying to legalize such abusive practices to allow the FBI to do even more.

Pay what you want for the Complete Photography Bundle and get ready to upgrade your photo taking and editing skills. The bundle, if you beat the average price ($12.84 at the time of writing), includes 7 courses covering food photography, travel photography, black and white photography in the digital age and more. You also get access to 2 stock photography bundles to practice your editing techniques and experiment further without having to use your own photos.

After two years, the DOJ has decided to drop its bogus conspiracy/drug trafficking case against Federal Express. In July 2014, FedEx was hit with an indictment for allegedly knowingly delivering illegal/counterfeit drugs to a handful of sketchy recipients.The government insisted FedEx perform interdiction efforts for it by opening boxes and determining (without guidance) whether or not the contents were legit. FedEx pointed out that it was in the package delivery business, not the law enforcement business. The DEA shrugged and said, "Do better." FedEx said, "Why don't you give us a list of people/businesses you think are engaged in illegal activities?" The DOJ refused to do so and rewarded FedEx's good faith efforts with an indictment.An indictment is easy to obtain, as anyone familiar with the machinations of grand juries is aware. The DOJ's case, however, immediately fell apart after it dragged its purple and orange ham sandwich into a process that's actually adversarial. Judge Charles Breyer -- who we know from his hilariously-redacted denial of HP's heavily-redacted request to seal documents and his interest in the FBI's possibly-illegal courthouse step wiretaps -- presided over the opening arguments… and that was pretty much all he had to hear.Maria Dinzeo of Courthouse News Service reports:

The cable industry is aggressively fighting the FCC's attempt to bring competition to the cable box market. So far that's been via a two-pronged approach of buying a torrent of incredibly misleading editorials by people pretending to be objective observers (including Jesse Jackson), and throwing money at politicians who oppose the plan, but pretty clearly have no goddamned idea what they're actually talking about.

As you might have heard, New York City recently launched one of the biggest free Wi-Fi initiatives ever conceived. Under the program, some 7,500 Wi-Fi kiosks will provide gigabit Wi-Fi, free phone calls to anywhere in the country (via Vonage), as well as access to a device recharging station, 311, 911, 411 and city services (via an integrated Android tablet). The city is installing ten a day -- most at old payphone locations -- and hopes to have 500 of the kiosks in place by July. It's a pretty impressive effort, and by most measures providing fast, free connectivity to the city's five boroughs has been something to celebrate.

The excuse that worked so well for so long -- "because terrorism" -- seems to have lost its luster. Despite having a locked iPhone tied to a mass shooting with terrorist overtones, the FBI was unable to budge the needle on encryption backdoors or magical "lawful access" crypto keys.However, that doesn't mean any number of government entities aren't willing to use the ever present "threat" of terrorism as fuel for their various civil liberties-endangering bonfires. Or that they won't use it as a profoundly cheap excuse to withhold information from the American public -- like the Indiana State Police's refusal to turn over Stingray docs because doing so might allow terrorists to plan attacks on cherished annual state events like the Mule Day Parade.The Maryland Transit Authority has been ducking a Public Information Act (PIA) request from the Baltimore Sun for nearly a year at this point. The paper asked for surveillance footage from the Mondawin Metro station, captured in April of last year as police shut down mass transit in anticipation of protests following the death of Freddie Gray in the back of Baltimore PD van.The MTA's first refusal utilized another very popular law enforcement excuse.

Body-worn cameras as a tool of accountability is an idea whose time has come, but so far, the implementation has been less than ideal. Lawmakers -- pressured by law enforcement agencies and unions -- have frequently pushed legislation that makes it almost impossible for the public to get their hands on recorded footage.In other cases it's been shown that camera placement results in highly-subjective footage -- where the "first-person" perspective can obscure what's really happening. One notable case resulted in two sets of footage. The body-worn camera footage gave the impression that officers were dealing with a highly-combative arrestee. A nearby surveillance camera showed something completely different: several cops beating a non-resisting suspect.So, it's somewhat a surprise to hear that body camera footage has resulted in the firing of police officers. For one, officers generally don't get fired. They get suspended. Or, if the misconduct is egregious enough, they're allowed to resign.In this case, however, multiple officers were fired in connection with the same incident. (h/t Techdirt reader Nathan F)

The vast blackness of space might not look like much to the naked eye, but the origins of all life have come from distant stars. As Carl Sagan put it, we are all "star stuff" -- we're made of atoms that could have only been born in intense supernovas. It may appear futile to try to decipher what happened billions of years ago, but astronomers can literally look back in time and see the formation of the universe. Here are just a few cool things astronomers have discovered lately.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about how legislators in various cities (mainly SF, Chicago and LA) were trying to push through anti-Airbnb legislation that would require homeowners doing short term rentals to register with the city -- and which would hold the platform (Airbnb) liable if its users failed to do so. As we noted, that almost certainly violates Section 230 of the CDA, which bars any law that attempts to hold a platform liable for the actions of its users. At least in San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors ignored all of this with a city attorney claiming (incorrectly) that since it regulates "business activities of platforms," it's not regulating the content on those platforms. That's an... interesting dodge on the Section 230 issues. It seems unlikely to hold up in court, but California's been especially wacky on CDA 230 lately. The SF legislation has since passed, and it will be interesting to see if anyone (i.e., Airbnb) decides to challenge it in court.

The FBI's biometric database continues to grow. Its Next Generation Identification system (NGI) is grabbing everything it can from multiple sources, compiling millions of records containing faces, tattoos, fingerprints, etc. from a blend of criminal and non-criminal databases. It went live in 2014, but without being accompanied by the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) it promised to deliver back in 2012.Lawsuits and pressure from legislators finally forced the FBI to comply with government requirements. That doesn't mean the FBI has fully complied, not even two years past the rollout. And it has no interest in doing so in the future. It's currently fighting to have its massive database exempted from federal privacy laws.Much of the information we have about the FBI's NGI database has come from outside sources. The EFF and EPIC have forced documentation out of the agency's hands via FOIA lawsuits. And now, the Government Accountability Office (in an investigation prompted by Sen. Al Franken) is turning over more information to the public with its review of the system.What the GAO found is more bad news. The FBI is all about collecting data. It has little interest in ensuring the data is accurate or even usable.

Another court handling an FBI Playpen case has handed down its decision on a motion to suppress. Like other courts fielding prosecutions resulting from this massive investigation, it has found [PDF] that the FBI's NIT (Network Investigative Technique) is invasive enough to be called a "search." (via FourthAmendment.com)The FBI must have felt its NIT deployment would be considered a search. That's why it obtained a warrant in the first place. But it's been frantically peddling "not a search" theories as court after court has declared its warrant invalid because the searches were performed outside of the issuing magistrate's jurisdiction.In this case, the issue of whether or not the NIT deployment was a search has not been disputed by either party. The court addresses it anyway because it affects the reasoning that follows.

The Supreme Court hasn't necessarily been kind to the Fourth Amendment in recent years. While it did deliver the Riley decision, which instituted a warrant requirement for searches of cellphones, it has generally continued to expand the ability of police to stop and search anyone for almost any reason.Its Heien decision said it was perfectly fine for police officers to remain ignorant of the laws they're enforcing by allowing them to continue making bogus traffic stops predicated on nonexistent laws. The Rodriguez decision at least prohibits officers from artificially extending stops to bring out drug dogs or beg for consent to search a vehicle, but it doesn't do anything to prevent the bogus stops in the first place.With its just-released Strieff decision, the Supreme Court -- in a 5-3 ruling -- extends the reach of bogus stops/searches to pedestrians. To get to where we are now, you have to go back a decade:

The FBI/DOJ had no problem rushing out claims last week that Omar Mateen, the guy who killed 49 people in a rampage at a club in Orlando last weekend, had "pledged allegiance" to ISIS. James Comey delivered remarks that said as much last Monday:

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Apparently, last week there was some buzz in the press about a new "app" that was being offered for iPhone users, put together by the charity group Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) and Grey for Good, a group that's associated with the ad giant Grey Group (itself a part of WPP). The idea behind the app is that it feeds users real-time satellite imagery of the Mediterranean Sea, and if you happen to see a boat full of migrants, you alert MOAS and they'll go check it out. Many in the press ate it up because it hits all the buttons: it's an app (ding!) that lets people feel good (ding!) by pretending they're changing the world (ding!) on a topic of great public interest (ding!). And thus, we got a bunch of stories, though only Reuters went with the most obvious of headlines: Want to save migrants in the Mediterranean? There's an app for that. Other reports appeared at Wired, Mashable, Huffington Post, the Evening Standard and a variety of other, smaller publications.

I think most people agree that bots that drive up viewer/follower counts on various social media systems are certainly a nuisance, but are they illegal? Amazon-owned Twitch has decided to find out. On Friday, the company filed a lawsuit against seven individuals/organizations that are in the business of selling bots. There have been similar lawsuits in the past -- such as Blizzard frequently using copyright to go after cheater bots. Or even, potentially, Yelp suing people for posting fake reviews. When we wrote about the Yelp case, we noted that we were glad the company didn't decide to try a CFAA claim, and even were somewhat concerned about the claims that it did use: including breach of contract and unfair competition.

You would think that someone in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency would have some knowledge about what he's discussing while at a Senate Hearing on intelligence. Perhaps not so much. CIA Director John Brennan completely incorrectly said last week that non-US encryption was "theoretical" despite there actually being hundreds of such products on the market.

The lawsuit against Twitter for "providing material support" to ISIS (predicated on the fact that ISIS members use Twitter to communicate) -- filed in January by the widow of a man killed in an ISIS raid -- is in trouble.Twitter filed its motion to dismiss in March, stating logically enough that the plaintiff had offered nothing more than conclusory claims about its "support" of terrorism, not to mention the fact that there was no link between Twitter and the terrorist act that killed the plaintiff's husband. On top of that, it pointed out the obvious: that Section 230 does not allow service providers to be held responsible for the actions of their users.As reported by Nicholas Iovino of Courthouse News Service, the presiding judge doesn't seem too impressed by what he's seen so far from the plaintiff.

This week, we asked a critical question: will we ever really get flying cars? There are plenty of obstacles, and Ehud Gavron won most insightful comment of the week by deploying his expertise to explain them:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, things were heating up around ICE's recent domain name seizures. Several of the targeted sites were challenging the seizures to get their domains back, with one — Rojadirecta — going ahead and suing the US government, Homeland Security and ICE. Those trying to get more information via FOIA requests were met with stalling by the government (which was not out of character). Then, the government decided to up the ante and sought to extradite one of the site operators from the UK on copyright charges (despite the fact that this essentially amounted to enforcing US copyright law outside its jurisdiction, since the target violated no UK laws). Meanwhile, some people online were busy turning ICE's gaudy takedown notice pages into the new Rickroll, and China was using the copyright excuse to clamp down on freedom of speech.Ten Years AgoThere was a big fight over net neutrality happening in 2006, and this week we couldn't help but balk at all the propaganda, from terrible newspaper editorials to celebrity endorsements and good ol' propaganda music. The issue was muddied by nonsense, and only a few people had rational thoughts to share.The RIAA seemed to have moved into the denial phase of grief about piracy, declaring victory and saying it was "contained". Perhaps that's why it had to turn its sights on YouTube videos of people dancing to music they haven't licensed. At least they still had Canadian politicians in their pocket.Fifteen Years AgoThere were several technologies looming on the horizon this week in 2001. Digital cash was struggling to catch on long before the revolution of the blockchain; Ebooks were poised to change everything from the way people write to the role of libraries; and SMS text messaging was taking the world by storm, but the US was a major holdout.Also this week in 2001: we saw a prototypical net neutrality crisis, the homepage takeover ad started to appear, Apple sued the Church of Satan for its own "Think Different" campaign, and Homer Simpson's iconic "Doh!" was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary.One-Hundred And Ninety-Four Years AgoMost of you surely know that the world's "first computer" is generally considered to be Charles Babbage's mechanical difference engine. It was on June 4th, 1822 that Babbage first proposed the possibility of such a machine to the Royal Astronomical Society. The project wound on for 20 years and cost £17,000, but never came to fruition, as the government abandoned it and Babbage moved on to his new analytical engine.

This week, we've got three unique crowdfunded speakers that deliver sound with a hefty dose of creative design flare.A Touch Of BassAs our sound equipment gets smaller, sleeker and more convenient, it's hard not to take a moment to appreciate the aesthetics of old-school hi-fi — the hulking, elaborate boomboxes that weighed a ton, gobbled up batteries, and looked cool doing it. A Touch Of Bass is a project to memorialize that era of design in pieces of functional art: photographs of vintage boomboxes are printed and mounted on a shadowbox, and fitted with real speakers connected to a bluetooth sound system. The result is a detailed wall-hanging reproduction of a classic piece of technology that connects to modern devices and functions like a real boombox. There's a huge selection of classic boombox designs in a range of sizes to choose from, and the speakers themselves are a high-quality pair of woofers and single tweeter for authentic, top-notch sound.HazangHazang speakers are a unique sight: elegant spherical speakers that, at a glance, look like something built long before the age of recorded audio. Each speaker is hand-crafted in North Vietnam using traditional weaving techniques to create a speaker box that's striking and unique, with a bamboo body and a hemp fabric faceplate. The high-end, high-tech guts ensure each speaker delivers superior sound, while the low-tech exterior not only looks good but is designed to serve as an excellent acoustic casing in its own right — all with a price tag which, while not cheap, is competitive for a piece of quality audio gear with such stunning design.COSMOSCOSMOS isn't just a speaker: it's also a clock and an ambient lamp, and it's all based on the night sky. The face of the COSMOS is a full map of the constellations in the northern hemisphere, backlit in all their glittering glory. But it also includes a pair of special stars to indicate the hands of a clock, and it conceals a bluetooth speaker at the base. It doesn't strive to offer the high-end sound of the previous two entries, but serves more as an all-around art piece that would make an excellent bedside lamp, or just an eye-catching decoration.

Last fall, we noted how New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office had launched an investigation into awful broadband service quality. In and of itself that was nothing particularly interesting (especially given Schneiderman's history of grandstanding), though what made the inquiry of note is the office's hiring of Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who first coined the term "net neutrality" back in 2002. With Wu as the AG's "senior lawyer and special adviser," Schneiderman sent letters to NYC area broadband incumbents Verizon, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable -- questioning whether they actually deliver the speeds they advertise.

While we've covered plenty of supposed copyright stories centered around some folks' misunderstanding of the idea/expression dichotomy, it isn't every day you come across one of these cases that involves Christian on Christian litigation violence. But I guess if copyright is everywhere, virtually perpetual and attached to a creation simply by being created, it was only a matter a time before it butted up against godly works.Kelly Kullberg and Michael Landon Jr. are screenwriters who wrote an as-yet un-filmed screenplay called Rise. It was the story about a student and professor finding themselves debating the existence of god, with the student eventually winning out. And, then there's a film that was made, God's Not Dead, which is a creatively-named film about a student and professor who find themselves debating the existance of god, with the student eventually winning out. It somehow grossed about $100 million worldwide, despite starring Kevin Sorbo, best known for playing Hercules in a television show of the same name. There are obvious plot similarities between the two.But one must keep in mind the idea/expression dichotomy. General plots are not afforded copyright. Only the specific expression of a work, and in some cases characters, are afforded copyright. According to the complaint (which was filed by Irell & Manella -- the law firm last seen pretending a monkey gets copyright), the elements over which Kullberg and Landon Jr. are suing are examples of the former:

The American food chain can be fascinating, as well as disgusting. There are happy, free-range chickens. There are also apparently a lot of very unhappy, caged chickens. The treatment of farm animals seems to vary quite a bit, and the economics of the food industry doesn't always account for the well-being of animals. However, the situation may be slowly changing as more humane techniques are developed, but until science figures out how to grow tasty meat in a petri dish, we'll still have to kill animals if we're going to continue to eat them.

From the perspective of an American, it's perhaps too easy to assume that everyone around the world has the same amount of fatigue over surveillance and the terrorism scare that I do. After all, even a good percentage of Americans still consider the threat of international terrorism to be a major cause for concern within their own lives, regardless of how much or little it actually impacts them directly. But Europe is dealing with its own cases of terrorism and the associated concerns that arise from it. Still, it's disappointing to watch one European nation, Poland, expand surveillance powers and internet censorship in very big ways.From Freedom House, an independent organization pushing for freedom and human rights around the world, we learn that Poland has essentially passed new laws in which the only direction pursued is in more surveillance and less civil liberty.

Mahendra Trivedi is a hell of a guy. Just ask him.

We talk a lot around here about stories with people trying to determine what "real journalism" is. Those stories tend to veer towards the incredibly dumb, with most centering on a misunderstanding of what journalism actually means in the digital age. For a long time, journalism was an alchemy performed by a select few wizards, horded by a few outlets, which vetted and locked up their product. Today, of course, the barriers of entry to doing any kind of journalism are lower and the ability to distribute that kind of work is virtually unlimited. And, despite what you might hear from some grumpy folks who prefer the good ol' days, it turns out that smaller websites and independent citizens can journalism really well!But not everybody has gotten that memo, apparently. Take Eric Papenfuse, Mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He has recently, and apparently surprisingly, decided to ban anyone working for website PennLive to the weekly meetings and briefings the rest of the press is allowed to attend.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU's highest court, has a slightly unusual procedure for delivering its judgments. After a case has been referred to it by a national court, one of the CJEU's top advisors, known as an Advocate General, offers a preliminary opinion. This is meant to provide guidance to the judges considering the case, and generally indicates how the CJEU will rule. But it is by no means binding, and judges have been known to go completely against the advice offered to them. Let's hope that doesn't happen in a copyright case currently before the EU court.The library association of the Netherlands wants to lend out ebooks as well as the dead-tree kind, but is concerned that the relevant EU directive on the rental and lending rights of books does not cover the digital ones. So it decided to take pre-emptive legal action against the Dutch organization tasked with collecting payments for authors, seeking a declaratory judgment from the court that it could indeed lend out ebooks without any problems. Since deep questions of EU law were involved, the District Court of The Hague in the Netherlands referred the case to the CJEU. That, in its turn, triggered a preliminary response from Advocate General Szpunar (pdf) as follows:

You may recall the Kirtsaeng case that we covered a few years back, in which a student, Sudap Kirtsaeng, had been sued for copyright infringement by publishing giant John Wiley for buying English-language textbooks in Thailand (that were cheap) and then reselling them to students in the US. It was a classic arbitrage situation. Wiley insisted that this was infringing, while Kirtsaeng pointed to the First Sale doctrine, allowing people to resell physical products they've legally purchased, even if they include copyright-covered content. Wiley's argument against first sale is that it only applied to content that was "legally made under this title." Thus, since the textbooks were made in Thailand and not under US copyright law, First Sale didn't apply. The Supreme Court, thankfully, rejected that argument 6 to 3, and said that first sale does apply. That was good.

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This one was so easy to predict. For the past couple of decades, completely clueless US politicians and bureaucrats (and tech company execs) have been screaming about how China "doesn't respect" our intellectual property. They demanded that China "get more serious" about patents and respecting IP. And for nearly a decade we've been warning those people to be careful what you wish for. Because, now China has massively ramped up its patent system, often by using odd incentives, but rather than helping American companies that demanded it, pretty much every patent lawsuit in China has been about a Chinese company punishing or blocking foreign competition. This is because the Chinese aren't stupid. It's a country that has thrived on protectionism, despite global efforts to "open up trade," and here it realized that the West was handing them the perfect trade barrier: one that let them say they were doing what the West wanted, while giving it the perfect excuse to block out foreign competition.

Another day, another example of Facebook's attempt at applying automated morality going poorly. For a site designed for little else beyond expressive speech, I suppose some erroneous applications of any kind of puritanism would go awry. Perhaps then you might have forgiven Facebook's mistaking a children's illustration for man-horse-fucking, or the algorithm's inability to recognize satire.But you would think that, in the wake of the tragic shooting that occurred at a nightclub in Orlando, one member of the LGBT community's perfectly cogent and innocuous rant wouldn't be gobbled up the by censor algorithm as being offensive. Here is the author's tweet complaining about its removal (twice), including a screenshot of the text, so that you can get an idea of what was taken down.

The fact that Techdirt has been writing about e-voting problems for sixteen years, and that the very first post on the topic had the headline "E-voting is Not Safe," gives an indication of what a troubled area this is. Despite the evidence that stringent controls are still needed to avoid the risk of electoral fraud, some people seem naively to assume that e-voting is now a mature and safe technology that can be deployed without further thought.In Australia, for example, e-voting is being used for the elections to the country's Senate, but the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has refused to release the relevant software, despite a Senate motion and a freedom of information request. Being able to examine the code is a fundamental requirement, since there is no way of knowing what "black box" e-voting systems are doing with the votes that are entered. A story by the Australian Associated Press (AAP) explains why AEC is resisting:

Earlier this week, we wrote about a ridiculous misinformation campaign that was being sent around by House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes against an amendment (sponsored by Reps. Thomas Massie and Zoe Lofgren) to a Defense appropriations bill that would block spending on two different kinds of surveillance "backdoors." First, ending backdoor searches, whereby tons of information on Americans that was collected "incidentally" as part of other searches, and then kept, could be scanned without requiring the showing of probable cause. Second, blocking the NSA from requiring backdoors into encryption technologies. A basically identical amendment easily passed in each of the last two years, but was stripped out before a final bill was approved.

The fun thing about leaked documents is that they almost always reveal something more than just the focal point. The leaked reports that showed British intelligence agencies to be drowning in data also exposed a previously hidden part of the UK intelligence apparatus.

The promise of flying cars and a future like the Jetsons obviously hasn't come to pass, but people are still working on it. Yes, drivers haven't even mastered safely navigating roads, and adding another dimension and the risk of falling out of the sky isn't going to help. Still, we shouldn't let these challenges prevent us from trying to create an awesome and boundless future of flying safely to work or school or a grocery store. Maybe we'll have groceries delivered by drones, instead of needing to shop for them in person, but traveling everyday by flying shouldn't just be for the birds.

A while back, we wrote about the hilariously bullying cease and desist notice Vice Media, a billion dollar media company, sent to ViceVersa, an un-signed punk band. At issue, according to Vice Media, was the band's name and trademark application, both of which the media company declared would damage its own brand and confuse customers. Neither of those claims was remotely true, but they bullied in the way that only bullies can.Which brings us to the present, where we learn the good news that Vice Media has settled with the band over the dispute.

If you listen to some entrepreneurs and investors, the flying car – a longstanding staple of science fiction – is right around the corner. Working prototypes exist. At least two companies already take orders for the vehicles, with deliveries promised next year.

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.

The record labels basically will find no innovation that's not worth suing, and so back in 2013 they sued the online video hosting/streaming site Vimeo, in part because the site had created a popular genre of videos known as "lipdubs" where people would lip sync to a song in a video. In the fall of 2013, the district court rejected most, but not all, of the record labels' arguments about the DMCA. The labels had argued that Vimeo lost its DMCA safe harbors for a variety of reasons, including not having a reasonable repeat infringer policy (and by "reasonable" the labels claimed it had to be the same as YouTube's), red flag knowledge, and the fact that because Vimeo lets people download videos there's no safe harbor. The court rejected basically all of those arguments -- but did leave open the possibility that red flag knowledge might apply if Vimeo employees had watched some of the videos at play in the case. There was also one very problematic part of the ruling, which is that the court said that pre-1972 sound recordings do not qualify for the DMCA's safe harbors because of the weird quirk of copyright law history by which pre-1972 sound recordings are not actually covered by federal copyright law (but, instead, various state laws and common law).

While hardline free marketeers and incumbent ISPs often try to paint city-owned broadband networks as the pinnacle of government-sponsored disaster, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke this week credited the city utility's gigabit broadband service as a major contributing factor for the city's re-invention. The Chattanooga Electric Power Board (EPB) is a city-owned utility that offers broadband speeds up to 10 Gbps to locals; a recent Consumer Reports survey noting that outside of Google Fiber, EPB has the only truly positive consumer satisfaction ratings among the 30 national ISPs ranked by the magazine: