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Nothing pushes a negative review of your product out of the public eye faster than a lawsuit, am I right? That's the line of thinking Enigma Software has chosen to entertain. It recently filed a lawsuit against BleepingComputer, alleging that its 2014 "review" (actually a forum post detailing Enigma's SpyHunter history as "rogue" software and the deceptive business practices the company has deployed) is defamatory.

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Amid the steady stream of "hot takes" the past few weeks on the legacy of the late great David Bowie, The Washington Post's Robert Gebelhoff dug up some of the rock legend's contrarian views on copyright, if only to rebuke them thoroughly. Gebelhoff's piece cited a 2002 interview Bowie gave to The New York Times in which he prophesied: "I'm fully confident that copyright...will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing…It's terribly exciting." Exciting though it may have been, Bowie's prediction obviously has not come to pass, for which Gebelhoff says we should be thankful. In his piece, he notes that strong copyright laws "play an essential role in our creative economy – and have done so for centuries." He cites as evidence a recent Stanford University/NBER study on how differing laws in Italian city-states led to more operas being produced where copyright was protected. Bowie has long been an innovator and music visionary, experimenting with early ways to use the Internet to "cybercast" concerts and connect with fans. But it's important that Bowie wasn't necessarily seeking the death of copyright (after all, he used it to make a living). Instead, he was paying heed to what digital media already had done to revolutionize copyright-centered industries. What he got right was detecting traditional copyright industry's anxiety – the same anxiety that has led them to push successfully for copyright terms to be extended by nearly 580 percent over the last 200 years. Mickey Mouse famously has enjoyed several retroactive copyright term extensions since Walt Disney's death, though Walt has yet to take advantage of this added incentive. So why would Bowie, whose fortune and fame owed so much to the music industry, be excited about the end of copyright? The answer is straightforward: as a working, successful musician and producer, he knew as well as anyone that unlimited copyright protection could hinder creation, as well as remunerate it. If you're a fan of Bowie's "Young Americans," you know that part of its power as a song derives directly from its unembarrassed quotation of the Beatles song "A Day in the Life." While copyright didn't disappear in the decade since Bowie's interview, Bowie was in many ways right about the impending shakeup of the industry. More and more consumers, particularly millennials, are listening to their music on demand through a streaming subscription, rather than purchasing copies a la carte. Remix has become a central technique for new creativity. And heavy-handed copyright can get in its way. Look, for instance, at what future presidential candidate Kanye West did with Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman." Bowie's vision that "music itself is going to become like running water or electricity" turned out to be pretty accurate. This trend has led to sharply declining revenues from physical sales (except for vinyl, which is doing fine, thanks to hipsters) and a steadily increasing share for streaming. Digital downloads are still popular and continue to represent a major revenue source for now. As physical formats have fallen out of favor, as Bowie perhaps foresaw, the industry experienced a period of sharp disruption. The result has been not just depressed global revenues, but also a whole apparatus of production, distribution and retail falling away. As a 2015 study by Midia observed, the narrative of "music industry decline is a label phenomenon." Which echoes what Bowie saw coming in 2002: "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way." Of course, the role of our copyright system is not to protect established industries from disruption. Policymakers shouldn't protect the record store from Apple or the bookstore from Amazon. Our nation's founders gave Congress a mandate to use copyright to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." That is, to provide the carrot to spur artistic creation. If we take copyright "incentives" too far, they can undermine artistic freedom by imposing limits on other forms of creative expression and uses of tangible property. Even the opera study Gebelhoff cites in his piece acknowledges this, as its authors write that "there is no clear evidence" that copyright extension beyond the author's life span creates meaningful incentives. In fact, they suggest it has little effect "beyond the first five years." In an article about the study, New York University law professor Christopher Jon Sprigman notes that: "[this] conclusion is particularly important because our contemporary debate is usually not whether to have copyright at all, but rather whether to extend already very long copyright terms." Bowie was wrong that copyright would end, but he was right that copyright as we know it is under threat. Its foundation, built for an analog age, increasingly struggles to function in the digital one. And its market, warped by decades of heavy-handed government intervention and industry carve-outs, doesn't know how to operate freely anymore. That's why substantial reforms will be inevitable. As Congress slowly moves in that direction, it should be mindful of this lesson: stronger copyright laws don't automatically incentivize more creative freedom. In fact, they often come at its expense.

Earlier this week, we wrote about a legislative attempt in France to outlaw hyperlinking without a license (really), but would you believe that whether or not you can link without a license is still an unsettled matter of law in the EU? As is described in great detail over at the Disruptive Competition Project blog, just this week the Court of Justice of the EU heard a case concerning whether or not linking is legal. We wrote about this case last year, but the court has finally heard the case, with an Advocate General recommendation in early April, and a final ruling in the summer. There was a similar earlier case, the Svensson case, which the EU Court of Justice got right, but there's some concern about this new case.

According to a recently-filed lawsuit, the media is apparently every bit as "helpful" as law enforcement when it comes to the responsible, logical handling of teens and sexting. Confusing "hurting" with "helping," Colorado's KOAA allegedly exposed not only the name of a teen involved in a sexting incident, but also the part that puts the "sex" in "sexting."

Nothing does more damage more quickly to your community than deciding to place your fear of piracy over the the concerns of those who've already paid for your product. DRM is rarely, if ever, the answer. And yet, it remains an inexplicably popular "solution."

Techdirt has reported how many Western governments are playing on fears of vaguely-defined "terror" to push through laws limiting fundamental freedoms that would never otherwise have been discussed, much less approved. Amnesty International is warning that Hungary is aiming to join the club -- and go much, much further down this slippery slope:

We've mentioned some advances in fusion energy research not too long ago, and it looks like Germany is ready to take a few more baby steps towards figuring out how to control insanely hot plasma. Still, we're a long way from plentiful fusion-generated electricity (not counting solar), but if we want to stop burning fossil fuels, we're going to need to do some more research.

We've been talking about and asking for ECPA reform for many, many years, and it might finally be moving forward. ECPA is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which details how the government can get access to your electronic communications. The law was written in the early 1980s, and as you've probably noticed, we live in a very different world these days as it pertains to electronic communications. One key example: the law says that messages left on a server for more than 180 days are considered abandoned and can be searched without a warrant. That may have made some sense (though, not really) in a client-server era, where everyone downloaded their messages leading to them being deleted from a server, but it makes no sense at all in an era of cloud computing.

NBC has made its views on piracy quite well-known over the years. For instance, we all know that it thinks that piracy is the most horrible damned thing that exists on this planet, so much so that it would please like ISPs to act as its personal police force. Oh, and because NBC also just cares so much -- could we all just have our kids take a break from learning about stuff to listen to how awesome copyright is for a while? Also, however, piracy is pretty sweet when it's convenient for NBC, or when it doesn't want to bother coming up with its own images for its websites.

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 Russian block party continues. The government agency in charge of censoring the internet is still working its way backwards, hoping to erase the collective memories of the web… or at least, keep Russian citizens from seeing certain bits of the archived past.

We first wrote about this issue in 2014, but the only known video recording of the very first Super Bowl only exists because a fan taped the TV broadcast, back in 1967. Now, as we're about to have the 50th Super Bowl, the fight has not only continued, but according to a NY Times article, the fight has been getting nastier.

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A Techdirt reader has sent us a copy of former DHS head/current University of California President Janet Napolitano's official response to the outcry over the secret surveillance of UC staffers -- surveillance she personally approved.

Every year about this time, it's become a running joke what the NFL tries to do in controlling who says what about the Super Bowl. It's gotten to such absurd levels that I've taken to calling it "The Game That Must Not Be Named." Setting aside the insanity that is having ICE go piracy hunting just prior to the game to make sure that nobody can see the product outside of the official channels, the NFL also enjoys pretending like it can control how advertisers refer to the sporting contest. The key aspect of the NFL's demand is that nobody can use the term "Super Bowl" in advertisements unless the company is an official sponsor. That, of course, isn't even remotely true, but pretty much everyone buying ads bows at the NFL altar. This has also given birth to creative ways for advertisers to poke fun at the NFL for being such asshats, such as the Newcastle Brewing's lovely entry a few years back, when it produced an advertisement about an advertisement it didn'tmake, in part because the NFL wouldn't allow them to say "Super Bowl."

We've discussed for years that as an apparatus directly tied to the wallet of the cable and broadcast industry, TV viewing tracking company Nielsen has gladly helped reinforce the cable industry belief that cord cutting was "pure fiction." Once the trend became too obvious to ignore, Nielsen tried to bury cord cutting -- by simply calling it something else in reports. And while Nielsen was busy denying an obvious trend, it was simultaneously failing to track TV viewing on emerging platforms, something the company still hasn't fully incorporated.

One of the most problematic aspects of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations is their lack of transparency. Although the European Commission, to its credit, has made available many of its initial offers and background papers, the key consolidated documents that show what's really happening in the negotiations -- and what deals are being cut -- are reserved for the inner circle. Even national politicians within the EU have been denied access to these, and that has really rankled, particularly in Germany. In an effort to defuse the anger there over this manifestly anti-democratic approach, a special reading room has finally been set up in the German Ministry of Economy. As this report from the non-profit investigative newsroom Correctiv.org makes clear, it's very special:

We haven't made a secret of our appreciation for Wil Wheaton here at Techdirt, in particular for his forward-thinking approach to digital content and intellectual property. More specifically, I've mentioned in the past that I am hopelessly addicted to Wheaton's YouTube show, Table Top, on which he features a series of table top board games being played by himself and a rotating panel of guests. As I was poking around trying to figure out when the series would resume for its fourth season, after amassing tons of crowdfunded money for the previous season, I came across an interesting thread discussing what had been dubbed "The Wheaton Effect."

For a pretty good stretch, the price of a barrel of oil was about $90-$100, but now the price is around $35 or so. That's a good bargain for some consumers, but on the other hand, thousands of oil workers aren't working and plenty of companies that bet on oil prices staying high are going out of business. The simplified explanation is that the current oil supply exceeds the demand for it -- and it takes some time/politics for oil production to adapt. Oil prices might start to go back up significantly in 2017, but in the meantime, there are about 68 oil projects around the world worth about $380 billion that are on hold for a while.

About an hour ago, representatives from 12 different nations officially signed the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP) agreement in Auckland, New Zealand. The date, February 4th (New Zealand time) is noteworthy, because it's 90 days after the official text was released. There was a 90 day clock that was required between releasing the text and before the US could actually sign onto the agreement. The stated purpose of this 90 day clock was in order to allow "debate" about the agreement. Remember, the entire agreement was negotiated in secret, with US officials treating the text of the document as if it were a national security secret (unless you were an industry lobbyist, of course). So as a nod to pretend "transparency" there was a promise that nothing would be signed for 90 days after the text was actually released.

Are tattoos covered under copyright law? Yeah, probably. But also, hey, maybe not. But if yes, how much control does the artist get to exert over depictions of the copyrighted tattoo? After all, it's on somebody's skin. And, hey, that somebody might be famous, like an athlete, who might then be depicted in video games about that sport. If so, then we get to find out if depictions in artistic works, such as video games, would fall under fair use and/or First Amendment provisions. It seems nobody is actually sure how to answer these questions, because what few cases have been brought before the court all appear to have ended in settlements and low-level court rulings.

Despite 2015 being a banner year statistically for cord cutting, you're going to see a renewed surge in cord cutting denial over the next few weeks. Why? Cable companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast managed to eek out modest gains in pay TV subscribers in the fourth quarter.

Former DHS boss Janet Napolitano -- who once stated she "doesn't use email" (for many reasons, but mainly to dodge accountability) -- is now showing her underlings at the University of California why they, too, might not want to "use email": someone might be reading them over their shoulders.

We've written many, many words on the ridiculousness of publicity rights, and how they're frequently abused to stifle perfectly reasonable activities. But this latest example really takes it up a notch. The owner of a horse in the UK is apparently demanding some of the prize a man won in a "selfie" contest, because the horse made a key "photobombing" appearance in the background, that likely contributed to the victory: That photo was taken by the 3 year old kid in the picture, Jacob Bellis, and that's his father, David, holding him. Nice photo! The horse in the background is named Betty, and is owned by Nicola Mitchell, who sounds like a person who perhaps needs to calm down a bit. From The Guardian:

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We've written a few times now (including just recently) about the Spanish firm Ares Rights, whose sole purpose and job in this world appears to be to abuse any and all systems to take down content to try to hide content that either Ares Rights or its clients dislike. Mainly, the takedowns seem to focus on the interests of what appears to be its main client, the government of Ecuador, and its main tool is totally bogus DMCA notices, that too many companies follow without looking at the details.

Three of the Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse (*Revenge Porn not included) are being targeted by Utah legislator David Lifferth with a package of amendments to the state's cybercrime statutes.

While the public successfully forced the FCC to adopt net neutrality rules last year, one glaring omission may be coming back to haunt consumers and the commission alike. The FCC's open Internet rules contain three "bright-line" restrictions: no blocking, no throttling apps or traffic, and no "paid prioritization" of apps or content. Unlike neutrality rules in Japan, The Netherlands, Slovenia, and Chile however, the FCC refused to outright ban zero rating (exempting content from usage caps), instead opting to determine on a "case-by-case basis" if a carrier is violating the "general conduct" portion of the rules.

Score one for the American public. A federal judge has reached the same conclusion many FOIA requesters have: the FBI simply doesn't play well with public records laws.

Techdirt has been trying hard to follow the twists and turns of one of the longest-running corporate sovereignty cases -- that involving Chevron and Ecuador -- for many years. Public Citizen's "Eyes on Trade" blog has a good, one-paragraph explanation of the key legal disputes:

The reality of designer babies seems to be more and more likely -- especially now that gene editing tools like CRISPR are becoming more refined and widespread in labs around the world. Legitimate concerns over a modern form of eugenics are being raised, and the ethical debates are getting less theoretical as the science pushes the boundaries of what can be done. People might be able to activate or delete genes without fully understanding the results, and the advances that can eliminate genetic disorders could also eliminate certain minorities or traits that are not necessarily disabilities.

Live by the copyright, die by the copyright, as I've said before. See, copyright protectionism is sort of like taking a moral stand: when someone asserts the importance of their copyright, they assert it for all copyrights. For most of us, this is not a problem, because we don't spend a great deal of time bashing others over the head with the copyright cudgel. But when you're Hasbro? Especially considering all of the many various actions taken by the company to shut down anything having to do with its My Little Pony property? Well, then it would be nice if the company might at least make sure it wasn't committing copyright infringement in selling that property as well.

We've discussed for years now how Hulu is hamstrung by the fact that it's owned by the traditional cable and broadcast industry. Owners 21st Century Fox, Disney and Comcast/NBC have gone out of their way to ensure the service is never too disruptive -- lest it hurt the traditional cable cash cow. And that's been the cable industry's mantra for years now -- crow ceaselessly about how you're "innovating," while simultaneously trying not to innovate too much, lest your customers realize your legacy TV service is absurdly expensive, inflexible, and outdated.

The digital world is increasingly giving rise to "winner take all" industries, where a market is all but dominated by one company and, sometimes, a single smaller competitor. Since innovation is so often driven by competition and hindered by monopolies, this is a worrying trend — but its true extent, and its implications, are hardly clear. This week, we discuss various winner take all situations and what they mean for the future of innovation. 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.

Back in October, we noted that it was a really big deal that the European Court of Justice had said that the EU/US Safe Harbor framework violated data protection rules, because it had become clear that the NSA was scooping up lots of the data. The issue, if you're not aware of it, is that under the safe harbor framework, US internet companies could have European customers and users, with their information and data stored on US servers. Without the safe harbor framework, there are at least some cases where many companies would be forced to set up separate data centers in Europe, and make sure European information is kept there.

I kind of figured a lot of people would disagree with my post yesterday, in which I noted that the underlying idea behind what the Fine Brothers were trying to do in helping to support fans in making their own versions of the various "React" programs was actually a good idea. The point was that the idea behind it was actually pretty good. A big brand/entertainment property encouraging fans to make their own versions of their program, helping them with additional support, promoting those fan videos and helping them make money -- in exchange for a cut of the revenue -- remains a cool idea. Unfortunately, the idea came from a company that had a really bad history of overly aggressive behavior in taking down content, deleting negative comments and ridiculously and petulantly claiming that anything remotely similar to what they did was somehow unfair. The examples of them whining about Buzzfeed and Ellen having similar segments was particularly galling. On top of that, the trademarking of various terms, including the very generic "React" really pushed things in the wrong direction.

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The misuse of DMCA notices to remove unwanted information from the web has been well-documented here. The "right to be forgotten" has sort of codified this behavior, but only applies to citizens of certain countries.

You may have heard that, in early December, amid great fanfare, President Obama replaced the terrible No Child Left Behind law and replaced it with the "Every Student Succeeds Act" which, among other things, gave more power to the states when it came to educational standards, moving them away from the federal government. There's actually a lot of good things in ESSA (mainly getting away from the really horrible parts of NCLB), but there were plenty of little "gifts" to various lobbyists. And, apparently, that includes Hollywood's lobbyists.

Last week, we noted that the FCC has proposed new guidelines that would bring some much-needed competition to the cable TV set top box market. Data shows that 99% of consumers pay something on average to $230 a year in set top box rental fees, despite much of this dated hardware being worth little to nothing. Collectively, the cable industry pulls in around $20 billion annually in set top box rental fees, which are fairly consistently increased once or twice a year. Unsurprisingly, whenever the FCC has tried to do something about this proprietary, captive market, the industry becomes downright hysterical.

Back in November, Congresswoman Katherine Clark introduced an anti-swatting bill. As you probably already know, swatting is when someone calls in a fake report to police about an ongoing incident at someone's home -- usually something like an "active shooter" or hostage taking or something similar -- in the interest of having police departments overreact and send out a SWAT team to deal with the situation, such as by raiding the home. The bill looks to make it a felony to use the phone system to "transmit false information with the intent to cause an emergency law enforcement response." While I'm not aware of anyone (so far) getting killed by a swatting, it seems like it's only a matter of time.

Techdirt has been writing about open access and open data in the academic world for some years now. But beyond those important ways of sharing lies a more integrated approach, generally known as open science. Gabriella Coleman has passed on some interesting news from Canada in this field. McGill University's Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), under the leadership of its director, Guy Rouleau, wants to speed up the translation of research into treatments, and thinks that opening up completely is the way to do that, as Science reports:

There was a time when making your own alcohol wasn't a completely legit thing to do. Sure, now anyone can just go down to a corner store almost any time and pick up a chilled alcoholic beverage, but if you're a real do-it-yourself-er, you won't want to drink just anything that comes in a pretty bottle. Here are a few projects you might want to check out someday when you're not feeling like guzzling something made by Anheuser-Busch-Inbev-SABmiller.

I first signed up for Twitter in March of 2007, but I'll admit that I barely used it for about nine months. There were two events in early 2008, however, that convinced me of Twitter's power. The first was that I logged in and saw someone who I only knew online, but not in person, mention a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in NY that I really liked, and because of that, we actually arranged to meet up there for lunch a few weeks later when I was in NY. That ability to connect people was really powerful. The second, though, was much bigger, and it was the Iowa caucus in 2008. It was in January in 2008, but I'm thinking about it today, obviously because (in case you haven't heard), today is this year's Iowa caucus that officially kicks off the Presidential silly season, known as the Presidential nominating process.

Apparently the millions Facebook has been spending on advertisements, lobbying, marketing and spamming the Indian government will be for naught. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) appears poised to ban the practice of zero rating as part of its new net neutrality rules, effectively killing Facebook's controversial Free Basics zero rating program once and for all in the country. According to the Times of India, TRAI is expected to deliver the death blow to Facebook's world-domination ambitions within a week:

Isn't politics just great? Politicians aren't exactly known for their honesty on things, often saying things to voters just to get elected. But Hillary Clinton's views on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have received quite a lot of scrutiny. After all, while she was at the State Department, she was a strong supporter of the TPP, and so it was a bit of a surprise last October when she came out against it. Of course, the fact that the deal is fairly unpopular with the Democratic Party base probably contributed quite a lot to that decision -- and Clinton's weak attempt at revisionist history to pretend she never really supported it.

Since late last week, we've been getting lots of inbound requests and submissions to write about The Fine Brothers, and the claims that they're somehow trying to "control" or "claim ownership" on the concept of "react videos." Almost all of the inbound requests are expecting us to trash the Fine Brothers for this apparent attempt to "own" something that can't be owned, and we're going to disappoint them. Having gone through all of the details, it actually looks like the Fine Brothers were legitimately trying to do something that's actually... kind of cool. Now, before you rip off my head as well, please wait and hear me out. I will say that they could have been a bit more tactful about it, but I don't think they deserve the intense hatred they're getting.

Back in 2013, not long after Aaron Swartz's tragic suicide, reporter Kevin Poulsen (who had also worked with Swartz on what became SecureDrop, the system for whistleblowers to anonymously submit documents to journalists) submitted a Freedom of Information Act with the Department of Homeland Security about what info it had on Swartz. There were some legal fights about it, but eventually DHS was forced to release the documents, which now reside at a site set up by Poulsen called SwartzFiles.com. These documents revealed things like the government's weird infatuation with the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, that many believe was written (at least in part) by Swartz (there's at least some dispute over this).

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