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Apparently two French Parliament Members are on a mission to ban linking to websites, unless you first have permission. In short, they're looking to undermine one of the key features of the internet itself.

Apparently, the only way to stop terrorists from hating us for our freedom is to strip away those offensive freedoms.

The way things are going, pretty soon FBI Director James Comey is going to be out there alone, flipping off light switches and blowing out candles, all the while cursing the going darkness.

For many, many years, the big German music performance rights organization GEMA has been at war with YouTube over what rates YouTube must pay for any streamed music. It started with GEMA more or less arguing that a stream on YouTube was effectively the same as a purchased download on iTunes, and that it should get $0.17 per stream (yes, per stream). For anyone who understands even basic economics you'd recognize that's not even remotely in the realm of reality. The battle has gone on ever since, and unlike basically every other country in the world GEMA has refused to budge. Because of this YouTube has blocked most major label music from its service in Germany, while GEMA has filed a variety of lawsuits against YouTube in the country arguing that YouTube is somehow responsible for what YouTube users upload.

This week, one of the stories that got the most response was the extreme claims by the IAB chief that using an adblocker means you hate free speech. One anonymous commenter took first place for insightful with a simple explanation of this common fallacy:

Five Years Ago There were two related incidents this week in 2011, to do with citizens in Illinois videotaping authorities. One woman was arrested and faced 15 years in prison for recording her attempt to file a report of being sexually assaulted by a police officer; meanwhile, an artist faced the same sentence for video taping his own arrest. On the flipside, in the same week, a man was acquitted of charges that came after he filmed the TSA and refused to show his ID. The George Hotz situation was still in its early stages and unfolding slowly, but was already troubling after the judge approved an aggressive temporary restraining order requested by Sony. UFC was going after Justin.tv for inducing infringement, a Japanese court deemed overseas place-shifting of television to be infringing, and mass copyright shakedowns appeared based on Paris Hilton's sex tape and, more generally, the wide world of porn. Amidst all this, the president nominated a former top RIAA lawyer to be Solicitor General. Ten Years Ago Speaking of the RIAA, this week in 2006 they were pushing the new line that merely making files available is infringing, while some were predicting that their next target might be ISPs (following other trailblazers). In Canada, one record label actually stepped up to help defend a teen against the RIAA's aggressive tactics. The MPAA, for its part, exposed a serious double standard when it defended its own right to internally copy and distribute movies, even as the industry continued to push a plug for the analog hole in the form of secretive technology that nobody's allowed to examine. Following the disastrous launch of its Video project, Google admitted its mistake (though perhaps didn't quite grasp its full scope). This came the same week that Google announced it would let the Chinese government censor results on a special version of its site — a disappointing move, though we weren't sure why congress was grandstanding about it. Fifteen Years Ago This week in 2001, IBM was claiming to have developed "Napster-proof" DRM-laden music, Sega was getting out of the console business, the digital holdouts at The New Yorker were finally getting ready to go online, and even the smartest among us often failed to recognize the potential of mobile internet. The Presidential turnover was marked by widespread failures on the new Whitehouse website, though perhaps they had something to do with the prank pulled by the outgoing Clinton administration: removing the "W" key from all the keyboards in the building (prompting one TV show to hold a drive to collect replacements. Also this week in 2001: Despair.com (in)famously managed to trademark the :-( emoticon. Thirty Years Ago As you've likely noted, this Thurdsay was the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Back in 2011, we wrote a little about it on the 25th anniversary.

This week, we're looking at a pair of crowdfunded projects for proud urbanites: artwork that celebrates our streets and cityscapes. Microscape Models There's no shortage of souvenirs in the name of New York City, but this project offers an incredible new way to celebrate Manhattan: 1:5000 scale 3D-printed replicas of the cityscape itself, made with unbelievable levels of accuracy from recent aerial scans. Eventually they plan to do a huge array of cities, but for now it's the big one, rendered in all its gridlocked glory. The designs are hand-tweaked to optionally include buildings under construction or still in planning. The models come as individual 6" squares which can (for a hefty total price tag of $25k) even be assembled into a complete replica city — but, just one or two are pretty damn impressive all by themselves. There are also special landmark tiles available to Kickstarter backers, focusing on spots like the Chrysler Building, One World Trade Center, and Washington Square Park. Every Road Custom Maps Late last year, you might have seen a map making the rounds that purported to show how every road does indeed lead to Rome. Of course, as most people noticed (including the creators), you could create the same kind of visual for any spot on the road network of any location — and that's exactly what Every Road offers. They are custom map posters generated with an address of your choice in any given city, showing all the thousands of street routes from every point of the city to your chosen spot. The results are wispy, fractal-esque versions of recognizable city maps, and no two will be identical (unless two people choose the same address). The pricing is a little odd, with high-res digital copies costing slightly more than the smallest available print size — but for those who want to save cash, there's also a $5 desktop wallpaper option.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about some details from the court hearing in the ridiculous monkey selfie case in which PETA (the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) claimed not only that it represented Naruto, an Indonesian macaque monkey, but that the monkey should hold the copyright on this selfie: However, as we've explained time and time again (much to the chagrin of David Slater, the photographer whose camera was used to take the photo), the photo is clearly in the public domain, as it's long been held that the Copyright Act only applies to human authors. In court a few weeks ago, the judge made it clear he didn't believe PETA had any case at all, but Judge William Orrick has now come out with his written opinion in the case explaining his reasoning why. Not surprisingly, it more or less tracks with what he said in court: there is no evidence that the Copyright Act applies to monkeys, and thus, case dismissed -- with leave to amend. The judge cites numerous cases in which the courts clearly say the Copyright Act means a "person" when it refers to author... and PETA cited a grand total of zero cases that argued otherwise:

Ashkan Soltani is a well known privacy expert who (among other things) worked with Barton Gellman at the Washington Post to analyze the Snowden documents for story worthy information -- an effort that won that series a Pulitzer Prize. Soltani has been hugely instrumental in reporting on other privacy-related issues as well, including being a part of the team that also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the Wall Street Journal's excellent What They Know series on digital privacy issues. Basically he has a long history of doing great journalism around privacy. For most of the last year, he was also the Chief Technology Officer at the FTC. Back in December, it was announced that he had moved over to work for the federal government CTO, Megan Smith, in the White House as a senior advisor. The CTO's office has been collecting some fairly amazing tech talent recently.

Not that long ago, we mentioned that progress towards an algorithm that could play the game of Go better than humans was on the horizon. It looks like our wetware shouldn't be too smug about being able to play Go now, but we can still have fun playing, right? And it'll still take a while before robots are any good at (non-contact) sports. Ping pong, FTW!

Back when you were a kid, you may (depending on your age) have checked books out of your library using a circulation card. The cards, like the one pictured below, would allow the librarian to keep track of the books, who had them, and when they were expected back at the library.

I really hate stories where there is no one to root for. Unfortunately, this is one of those stories. C'est la vie. If you were ambulatory enough to get to your computer these past few weeks, you likely came across a video from a Donald Trump rally, in which a group of five young girls, only three of which are seen in the video, called the USA Freedom Kids hip-bobbed a serenade to the Trumpster about how awesome America is. It was horrible. It was jingoistic and patronizing with just a dash of discomfort as these young girls were dressed in pleated red, white and blue skirts and tops. So that you don't think I'm exaggerating the level of horror here, see the video of the whole thing below, if you can stomach it.

EPIC is reporting that the DOJ has finally caved and is handing over a document it requested last fall. The document EPIC sought was the "Umbrella Agreement" between the US and Europe on the handling of each entities' citizens' data.

Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick, one of the leading scholars on net neutrality, has filed a report with the FCC detailing how T-Mobile's Binge On clearly violates net neutrality. As we've been highlighting, Binge On has numerous problems when it comes to net neutrality, and appears to clearly violate some of the FCC's rules. There's also the fact that T-Mobile flat out lied about it and claimed that it was "optimization" when it's really throttling.

Over in Japan, there's been a big political scandal brewing over the last few days, leading the country's economy minister Akira Amari to resign amid charges that he received significant bribes from a construction company. What makes that relevant to us here is that Amari was also Japan's leading negotiator on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, and his resignation and the bribery charges are raising additional (and fairly serious) questions about whether or not Japan really should support the TPP. So far, the bribery that's been discussed does not appear to directly impact that TPP, but it at least raises other questions about whether or not the TPP itself was compromised by similar corruption (of course, some may argue that the entire process, in which big companies basically helped write the thing, is itself corrupt). Amari had been expected to travel to New Zealand in the next few days for the TPP signing ceremony, but obviously someone else will now have to go.

Despite its terrible name, the $20 LithiumCard Wallet Battery seems like a really cool product. It is roughly the thickness of 5 credit cards stacked together and is designed to fit in almost any wallet. The charge cord (Lightning or microUSB -- select your preference from the drop down menu) can be easily tucked away in the battery. It comes with a Nanostik pad for attaching to your device if you'd rather not carry it in your wallet. The 1200mAh promises a quick charge wherever you go.

So we recently reported on a claim that ISIS had been spotted making use of their very own encrypted messaging app, and highlighting how totally useless US laws requiring tech companies to backdoor encryption would be in that situation. However, it turns out that we should have been a lot more skeptical of the original report, coming from a single sourced security company. Over the years, we've learned that single-sourced security company claims are often highly suspect, and designed much more to get attention or increase FUD, than based on any real issue. The good folks over at Daily Dot are now reporting that this encrypted messaging app doesn't really appear to exist, and their investigation is pretty thorough and fairly convincing. Just like the claims that ISIS had a "training manual for encryption," this claim appears to be false.

Not too surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has been a big booster of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement over the past year, repeatedly praising the deal and claiming it will save the world in all sorts of ways. Most of that is based on the faulty belief that the TPP is actually a "free trade" deal (it's actually the opposite), with some of it just being the standard WSJ faith-based belief that "if big businesses like it, it must be good."

I'm not certain why people think this will work, but there seems to be an idea floating around a few of our fellow citizens that they can simply force their favorite sports teams to do what they want by filing trademarks for things they never intend to use. You may recall the story about a jackass in North Dakota who wanted to prevent the University of North Dakota from changing its name from The Fighting Siouxto, well, anything else that had been suggested by filing for trademarks on all the other things that had been suggested. Such a strategy was doomed to fail from the beginning for any number of reasons, but mostly because you actually have to be using what you're trying to trademark in commerce in order to get it approved, and trolling isn't a commercial enterprise as far as I know.

So much for those "inalienable rights." The Sixth Amendment -- among other things -- guarantees representation for criminal defendants. This guarantee has been declared null and void in two states: Utah and Pennsylvania.

Biology does whatever it can do, and it's usually pretty messy about it. Just when people think they've figured out a nice hierarchical system for classifying plants and animals and microscopic organisms, we find out that there's more going on and some things aren't as clear cut as we thought. We could divide up life into several kingdoms and/or three domains, but taxonomy isn't getting simpler with time. Life is a continuous spectrum that can't be separated easily, and classifications could become even more complicated in the future. If you thought a platypus was weird, check out a few of these creatures.

Of course, by now you know about the "Five Eyes" coalition of the signals intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all sharing certain intelligence information between them. Some of the Snowden docs have made clear that this collaboration helps the various countries get around restrictions on "domestic" surveillance by effectively offshoring it to other "friendly" electronic spy agencies. Well, at least for now, it appears that that the Five Eyes effort has lost an Eye.

Remember Roca Labs? The somewhat shady manufacturer of some goop that the company claimed was an "alternative to gastric bypass surgery." This was the company that initially sued the site PissedConsumer.com because it was hosting negative reviews of Roca's product -- and Roca claimed that because it pressured buyers into a gag clause saying they wouldn't say anything bad about the product, that PissedConsumer was engaged in tortious interference. There was a lot more as well, including threatening to sue us at Techdirt (more than once!) for reporting on the case, suing Pissed Consumer's lawyer Marc Randazza for defamation and a variety of other shenanigans (even including some bizarre side stories on Nevada politics, despite it being a Florida company). Anyway, late last year the FTC smacked down Roca for its misleading marketing and its non-disparagement clauses. Roca is still fighting that fight, but soon after it also lost the case against PissedConsumer.

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.

What happens when you lower the barriers to entry? More participants join the market. It works everywhere, even when the market is "law enforcement" and the "customers" are everyone else.

It appears that efforts to censor the internet globally continues to spread, with the latest being a report out of Pakistan that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has told ISPs that they need to start blocking an astounding 429,343 websites at the domain level as quickly as possible, following a Supreme Court order to the PTA about the evils of porn online.

It is critical to backup your data today. It only takes one problem with your computer, and your photos, files and music could be gone. The $49 Genius Rescue Cloud Backup promises a convenient and easy solution. The Genius Rescue app runs in the background while you work and backs up your files automatically. You can access your files from any device anywhere in the world. It features 2TB of storage space and easy ways to restore old or lost files to your computers, so you can rest a little easier knowing they're backed up safely.

In an article that's actually a bit (but just a bit) more thoughtful than the headline applied to it ("How Corporations Profit From Black Teens' Viral Content"), Fader writer Doreen St. Felix tackles the cultural appropriation of creative works. Sort of.

A few years ago, we highlighted an absolutely ridiculous claim by a pro-copyright expansion think tank, arguing that it was a myth that copyright could ever be used for censorship. In that article, we listed out a number of examples of copyright being used absolutely for reasons of censorship, including a few by government actors. But, by far, one of the worst abusers of copyright law (and US copyright law specifically) to censor critical speech is the government of Ecuador. We've written a few times about Ares Rights, a Spanish company that was regularly sending DMCA notices in the US to try to suppress any kind of criticism of Ecuador's government (and also on criticism of Ares Rights).

Another whistleblower is facing charges brought by this administration -- one that has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined. Thomas Tamm, a DOJ lawyer during the Bush era, exposed the NSA's super-secret domestic surveillance program, whose authorization ran directly from the Attorney General to the Chief Judge of the FISA Court.

It's striking that from a situation where there were very few studies of the likely effects of the TPP agreement, we've moved to one where they are appearing almost every week. Recently Techdirt wrote about a World Bank study, and one from Tufts University; now we have one from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which calls itself "a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution devoted to the study of international economic policy." Here's its summary of the results:

The NYPD is once again in the middle of a transparency/accountability controversy. The law enforcement agency has achieved the dubious distinction of being more difficult to obtain public records from than federal three-letter agencies like the CIA and NSA. The latest news does nothing to improve its reputation.

Current robotic developments are impressive, but about 200 years ago, mechanical watches and clockwork mechanisms were at the height of miniaturized, complex technology. Watch complications (the functions other than the time in hours and minutes) have continued to grow in complexity with thousands of parts and dozens of time-related functions, but these features can't quite compare to the millions of "apps" that are available now. Check out a few of these clockwork examples and stop complaining about needing to recharge your battery every night.

You'll of course recall that Aereo founder Chaitanya Kanojia's attempt to disrupt the TV industry ran face-first into an army of broadcaster lawyers and a notably ugly ruling by the Supreme Court. Undaunted, Kanojia has returned with a new plan to try and disrupt the frequently pricey wireless broadband industry. Kanojia's trying to do this via a new startup named "Starry," unveiled at a launch event this week in New York. Starry is promising to offer users uncapped, gigabit speeds at prices less than most people pay their incumbent broadband provider.

The FCC has formally declared war on the outdated, over-priced traditional cable box. The agency has put forth a new proposal (pdf) for guidelines intended to bring much-needed competition to the cable set top box market. As recently noted, data collected from the top ten biggest cable companies found that 99% of cable customers still rent a cable box, paying $231 in fees annually for often-outdated hardware that's frequently worth very little. This cozy little captive market nets the cable industry roughly $20 billion in rental fees every year.

We've seen an increasing effort by governments around the globe to censor content they don't like. This takes many different forms, but one fairly typical one is for governments to send official looking documents to websites and webhosts demanding that certain content be taken down. Many smaller companies, often with no official policy in place on how to handle such requests, will cave and just take the content down to avoid the hassle. However, recently we've seen a growing number of sites reject such requests, unless they're accompanied by a valid court order. The latest is Medium, the increasingly popular content publishing platform.

The terrible tale of the missing comma and the damage done may soon come to an end. The EFF is calling on Congress to legislate this apparently missing punctuation back into its list of FOIA exemptions.

Law enforcement agencies commit criminal acts while conducting criminal investigations. It happens all the time. With the blessing of their handlers, confidential informants routinely engage in criminal activity. Investigators act as co-conspirators in the planning of terrorist attacks and the robbing of imaginary "stash houses."

Staying up to date with the latest IT security issues is important for any business or organization. With the $39 Cyber Security Hacker Training Bundle, you can learn how to safeguard against security threats. You'll need a basic knowledge of C and PHP to get started. The bundle includes 11 courses with over 13 hours of instruction on topics ranging from the Security Code Review Guidelines to Threat Modeling to SQL Injection and more. You'll receive a certificate of completion and new skills you can add to your resume.

A person can undo the damage of a particularly stupid assertion by acting quickly and contritely. Too bad far too many people opt for making the situation much, much worse.

Edwin Guzman is currently facing charges of "annoying and accosting" a person of the opposite sex, as well as disseminating harmful material to a minor. That would be OfficerGuzman -- and not just any officer -- but SergeantGuzman, who was promoted around the same time he was sending naked pictures of himself to a 16-year-old girl. (Warning: AUTOPLAY)

A growing number of articles on Techdirt attests to the fact that the use of DNA is becoming commonplace in many fields, thanks to the continuing drop in the costs of gathering and analyzing genetic material. As those costs fall, of course, so the temptation to roll out the use of DNA more widely increases. It looks like Kuwait has the dubious honor of being the first nation to require everyone's DNA -- including that of visitors to the country. The Kuwait Times has a frighteningly matter-of-fact article about the plan, which is currently being put into operation. Here's how the DNA will be gathered:

Back when the Nest thermostat was announced in 2011, it was met with waves of gushing adoration from an utterly uncritical technology press. Much of that gushing was certainly warranted; Nest was founded by Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, both former Apple engineers, who indisputably designed an absolutely gorgeous device after decades of treating the thermostat as an afterthought. But the company also leaned heavily on the same media acupressure techniques Apple historically relies on to generate a sound wall of hype potentially untethered from real life.

Matthew Braga at Motherboard reports the Canadian Supreme Court has laid down some guidelines for law enforcement's access to "tower dumps" -- call records containing every phone that accessed towers during a specified period of time. While it doesn't direct law enforcement to seek warrants, it does at least provide more restrictive guidance for collection of these data dumps, which the court originally found to be so broad as to be unconstitutional.

Maybe this past weekend was a bit snowy for you if you live on the East Coast. Shoveling your driveway, and then shoveling it again, and then digging through the big mound of snow where the street meets your driveway -- fun times, for sure. If you were wondering if anyone had a robot snowblower, wonder no more.

Back in June, we had a post about an absolutely ridiculous lawsuit filed by noted internet news troll Chuck C. Johnson against Gawker, basically because they said some mean things about him, and mocked Johnson's own style of publishing bullshit articles that attempt to imply something awful about someone by asking a question about them. In this case, Gawker, mockingly seized upon some joking claims about Johnson supposedly shitting on the floor of a dormroom, which no one believed, but which Gawker used to mock Johnson. Johnson, for months and months and months, used to threaten libel lawsuits against basically anyone who mocked him, so it was interesting to see one actually get filed. But that was about the extent of the interest. Because the lawsuit was nuts. Almost nothing in it made even the slightest bit of sense, starting with filing in Missouri. Johnson lives and works in California. Gawker is based in NY. The stories about Johnson had nothing to do with Missouri. About the only thing in Missouri was... the one lawyer, John C. Burns, who was willing to represent Johnson (Burns had also helped Johnson in an earlier case involving Ferguson, Missouri). When questioned why it was filed in Missouri, Burns would only reply: "I will say this: I’m not an idiot."

We've written many times about Malibu Media, a massive copyright trolling operation that creates porn under the name X-Art and then shakes down people it claims are downloading it. There are tremendous similarities between Prenda Law and Malibu Media, but while Prenda Law has been buried under a series of rulings that it needs to pay up for abusing the judicial system to shake down people, Malibu Media has mostly been able to avoid such situations -- mostly by rapidly trying to get out of any case at the first sign of potential trouble. But, before that, it's been known to pull some pretty sketchy moves -- and sometimes gets weirdly aggressive in going after people who have a tremendous amount of evidence that they're innocent. While we've covered a few cases here and there, FightCopyrighttrolls.com has basically turned into a site reporting all things Malibu Media.

There are lots of criticisms of free trade agreements, especially the fact that they go far beyond "free trade" — but the Trans-Pacific Partnership truly takes the cake. This week, we're joined by Maira Sutton, the EFF's Global Policy Analyst, to discuss the many problems with the TPP. Tellingly, this episode is nearly twice as long as usual. 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.

Mother of God. You may recall that we recently discussed the Interactive Advertising Bureau's (IAB) unfortunate decision to refuse Adblock Plus' registration for its annual conference. At a time when adblocking software is seeing its greatest use, it seemed to us that the IAB and its members might have a great deal to learn from Adblock Plus and that, rather than walling off its conference to them, the IAB could instead try to learn why so many people are using that software and software like it. That is because I had thought at the time that the IAB's refusal had mostly to do with it seeing such software as a threat to its members' business. Well, the conference has begun and in the keynote speech delivered by IAB chief, Randall Rothenberg, we learn that barring Adblock Plus from the conference wasn't about ad revenue at all. It was about freedom of speech, an appreciation of diversity, pushing back on racist Republican presidential candidates, and good old apple pie America.

So, Vice's Motherboard has an amusing article about how the misleadingly named GuitarHeroFailure (misleading, because the guy's actually good at the game) tried to get around YouTube ContentID takedowns on one of his Guitar Hero videos (of Ozzy Osbourne's "Bark at the Moon") by singing an acapella version of the song over it. The overall effect is really quite amazing. Watch the video (and don't miss his, um, "variation" at the very end) below: The guy claims, in a separate video that he wasn't really trying to comment on copyright law (he actually says "YouTube's copyright laws," which, you know, aren't actually a thing). But, no matter what it is commenting on it. He notes that he was really proud of how well he did in that particular game, and was disappointed that it got taken down by YouTube.