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Supporters of TPP generally insist it's absolutely worth doing, despite any infelicities it might contain, because of the huge overall economic benefit it will bring to participants. But when challenged, they are unable to cite any credible evidence for that claim. That's because there isn't any: despite the impact that TPP's measures will have on how the US and other countries do business, there are astonishingly few studies on whether it will indeed have a positive impact overall. Just over a year ago, we wrote about one of the rare attempts to model TPP, commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture, which came up with the following result for countries like the US and Australia:

We've had some fun with our North Korean friends around these parts in the past, mostly revolving around the Pyongyang regime's adorable attempts to bolster its already nefarious reputation through its propaganda efforts. While the nation's Orwellian policies are both stark and serious, and it certainly does have troubling weapons in its arsenal, so many of its threats have amounted to bad propaganda devised through the liberal use of video game footage, music and bad attempts at Photoshop. Well, the arms race doesn't end, of course, which is why North Korea is pleased to display its latest weapon: bad attempts at video editing!

One of the properties of life itself is that it changes its environment. All life does it, not just us humans. But we might be the only animals that might care about our legacy on the world. We haven't completely figured out what mark we've left on the Earth (or if it's permanent), but we've definitely changed some things, for better or worse.

We used to do cover a certain type of story around here, where we informed our readers about some truly dumb criminals doing truly dumb things with technology. We stopped doing those posts more recently, in part because they were starting to feel stale and in part because we didn't want to force our readers to confront the true levels of stupidity that exist on this planet. But, like a member of the Corleone family, they just keep pulling me back in.

There have been a number of copyright-related discussions spurred by the unfortunate passing of David Bowie, but here's one more that might make for an interesting law school exam. Matthew Braga, over at Vice's Motherboard, has a really wonderful story about how Bowie used a lyric writing word randomizer app called Verbasizer in writing his album Outside in the mid-1990s. He includes this clip from a documentary about it: In short, it's a digitized version of the famed "cut up technique" that has been used by creators for decades. Bowie had previously been known to use a more traditional method of literally cutting up pieces of words on paper. But in the 90s he teamed up with Ty Roberts, who later went on to found Gracenote, to create a software version that would randomize words to create possible lyrics.

Last week at CES, I had the honor of "moderating" a panel on what was next for patent reform, that kicked off with a short speech from US Patent and Trademark Office Director Michelle Lee, who notes that she's the first ever director of the Patent Office to attend CES (which is crazy). Before Director Lee was appointed to the full job, back when she was just the interim director, I noted that she was the first head of the patent office I'd ever seen who seemed to have a more accurately nuanced view of patents, and recognized how in some cases they could be harmful rather than helpful. She's continued to make that clear since taking over the top job full time, and you can see that in her speech. She, unlike so many in government jobs related to copyright or patents, actually pointed out the full Constitutional clause, and how patents need to be for the promotion of progress, and not just "to help inventors get paid."

In late 2014, we wrote about a class action lawsuit filed against copyright trolling operation Rightscorp, which argued two things: (1) that the company's robocalling people's mobile phones accusing them of copyright infringement violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), because you're not allowed to robocall mobile numbers, and that (2) the use of questionable DMCA 512(h) subpoenas to discover accounts associated with IP addresses was "abuse of process." Rightscorp and co-defendant Warner Bros. got that second claim tossed for violating California's anti-SLAPP law.

Kentucky legislator John "Bam" Carney thinks social media might be getting a bit out of hand. His response? Prior Restraint: The Legislation. (via Slashdot)

Keep track of your busy life in one handy app. Pagico 7 allows you to turn all of your tasks, notes and projects into easy to understand flowcharts to help you visualize your workload and track your deadlines and progress. You can organize your data with tags and keywords making it easier to find related pieces of information. It's on offer for $15 in the Techdirt Deals store.

It's time to panic about Craigslist again. If it's not a key player in the human trafficking scene, it's the unwitting accomplice in over 100 murders.

Mike just recently did a post on the horrible effects of piracy on Hollywood box office results from last year, which can be summarized as "holy shit, look at all the money!" That post took a macro look at the year Hollywood had at the box office, in which revenue and individual ticket sales were both up, despite the fact that piracy exists. Still, the post warned of one potential rebuttal some might make: yeah, but Star Wars.

As we've noted for some time, the broadband industry (and all the think tanks and politicians that work for it) have spent the last few years trying to vilify Netflix. That's primarily due to the company's support of net neutrality, but also its opposition to anti-innovative and anti-competitive broadband usage caps. These attacks usually start with the criticism that Netflix now dominates around 37% of peak downstream traffic (as if that's a bad thing), followed by some bizarre and unfounded claim that Netflix should be forced to "pay its fair share" (read: give us a cut of revenues despite us having no legitimate claim to it).

In the latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails -- forced out of the State Department's gnarled fists by an FOIA lawsuit and a recently-released Inspector General's report showing the agency flat out sucks at responding to FOIA requests -- there's a conversational thread suggesting the presidential candidate considers her access to classified information more important than the security of that information.

Criminal defendants face a tilted playing field all over the country. If it isn't the frequent withholding of exculpatory material by prosecutors, it's everything leading up to it -- beginning with questionable interrogation methods and continuing with the admission of dubious physical evidence.

As you probably heard, President Obama gave his final State of the Union Address a little while ago, and it was likely pretty much what you expected. A lot of vague pronouncements and not a whole ton of substance. I was surprised that the TPP got very little mention at all (it was basically mentioned in passing), but found it especially odd that the internet was mentioned just twice — and in ways that seemed to contradict each other. First, the President gave a brief mention of how his administration has "protected the open internet":

There are a lot of things about ourselves we just don't know. Why do we need sleep? How does general anesthesia work? A whole bunch of involuntary reactions are still mysterious. Partial explanations exist to describe what happens when these things occur, but that's not a fully satisfactory understanding. So what about sneezing? Think you know all about it?

At long last, it appears some prosecutors will no longer be putting BS gag orders on their subpoenas. Eastern District of New York judge Raymond J. Dearie has expressed his displeasure with the language found on nearly all subpoenas issued by the Brooklyn, New York US Attorney's Office.

Historically, the FCC has steered well clear of regulating broadband prices. Hell, for most of the last fifteen years the FCC hasn't even admitted that high prices due to limited competition are a problem, instead focusing on the politically sexier idea of ensuring uniform availability. The FCC certainly collects pricing data from broadband ISPs, but, at the industry's behest, never shares that data with the public. As a result, we get things like our $300 million national broadband map, which will happily show you (largely hallucinated) speed and competitive options in your neighborhood, but won't tell you how much they cost.

It appears someone'slistening to local crackpot New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance's demands that encryption be outlawed to make law enforcement easier. His "white paper" didn't have the guts to make this demand, instead couching it in language stating he would be completely unopposed to a legislative ban on encryption, but that he wasn't going to be the bad guy asking for it.

It appears someone'slistening to local crackpot New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance's demands that encryption be outlawed to make law enforcement easier. His "white paper" didn't have the guts to make this demand, instead couching it in language stating he would be completely unopposed to a legislative ban on encryption, but that he wasn't going to be the bad guy asking for it.

After a few weeks off for the holidays, we're back! And as anyone on the internet can't ignore, CES 2016 has just wrapped up. Our own Mike Masnick was there, and today he's joined by journalist and long-time CES veteran Rob Pegoraro for a post-mortem of the event and this year's crop of new products. 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.

Earlier today we wrote about the latest misleading claims from John Legere and T-Mobile about its BingeOn program. I've seen some confusion some of the discussions about this -- some of it thanks to Legere's misleading claims -- so I wanted to go through exactly what T-Mobile appears to be doing and why it's problematic. Also, with that, I wanted to highlight the key part of the FCC's net neutrality rules regarding throttling, and the one single paragraph that T-Mobile appears to be banking on to protect it from getting slapped around.

When I was very little, my father drove a 1972 Ford Pinto (yes, one of the exploding versions) that had a faded bumper sticker reading "My other car is a Porsche." I remember this very clearly because I remember, at a very young age, asking my father to explain the "joke" and still not really getting it. Of course, that "my other car is a..." joke has been around for a long time. It may not be a good joke, but it's a pretty well-known joke. Except, apparently, for the overly serious trademark lawyers at Louis Vuitton.

If you're looking to learn about IT security principles or want to brush up on your skills, the $59 IT Security and Management Bundle is a useful place to start. The four courses cover the subjects you need to know to take the ITIL, CISA, CompTIA, and CISSP certification exams, by focusing on the underlying principles and how to put them into everyday use. You have 2 years of access to the bundle so you can learn at your own pace about cryptography, system and infrastructure life cycle management, risk mitigation strategies and much more.

The big story of last week was T-Mobile CEO John Legere's meltdown over people calling out the bullshit claims about BingeOn "optimizing" mobile video when the truth is that it was simply throttling all video traffic (partners and non partners alike). Things got even worse when Legere decided to attack EFF and suggest that it was being paid to discredit BingeOn. The simple fact remains, however, that T-Mobile is throttling video streams (and downloads).

People are quite reasonably upset by the news of David Bowie's passing, with lots of reminiscing and certainly tons of listening to his music. I certainly re-listened to a bunch of his music on Sunday night after hearing about Bowie's death. And, some, such as comedian Eddie Izzard, suggested that "every radio station" should just play David Bowie music for the day as a tribute:

The FCC's recent broadband progress report (pdf) highlighted the telecom industry's continued failure with not only getting any broadband to rural areas, but with getting next-generation speeds to existing broadband customers. The FCC has noted that 34 million Americans still lack access to fixed broadband at the FCC’s benchmark speed of 25 Mbps for downloads, 3 Mbps for uploads. The agency also notes that two-thirds of homes lack access to more than one provider capable of delivering these speeds. If you recall, the FCC bumped its definition of broadband to 25 Mbps from a measly 4 Mbps about a year ago.

Software patents are contentious, and nowhere more so than in Europe. Patenting there is governed by the European Patent Convention (EPC). Article 52 of the EPC reads as follows:

We have talked quite a bit about Major League Baseball for a technology site, in no small part due to many of the forward-thinking things the league has done regarding operating its business in the digital age. In the realm of sports streaming, I've typically referred to MLB.TV and the league's Advanced Media products as the gold standard and I think I'm on pretty solid ground in saying so. Beyond that, the league seems poised to embrace expanded streaming options and the dropping of some of its more intrusive blackout rules, positioning the league well in the midst of the cord-cutting epidemic winding its way through the cable television industry.

The universe is just incredibly vast and full of stuff we're only scratching the surface of detecting. Every so often, though, there are some folks who think we've learned it all -- or that there's not much more left to figure out. But there's always more. The pace of technology might not advance fast enough for us to be able to continue to discover new things at the rate we've been doing so, but the "peak science" event probably hasn't happened yet (or may not happen at all).

Spend any reasonable amount of time looking through all the posts we've done here on DRM -- digital rights management -- and one theme becomes abundantly clear: the whole thing is an exercise in futility. Far from a blanket solution to video game piracy, DRM instead can be best explained as an arms race between game publishers and the hacking groups that best them at speeds nothing short of remarkable. All, mind you, while mostly annoying legitimate customers of the games the DRM is meant to protect from the pirates that crack them.

We're formally now bearing witness to the "synergistic" fruit of AT&T's $69 billion recent acquisition of DirecTV. When the deal was first proposed, even Wall Street wondered why AT&T would spend that kind of money on a satellite TV provider on the eve of the cord cutting revolution. But AT&T has a very clear plan of attack, and as we recently noted, its first move post merger was to raise the rates of DirecTV and AT&T U-Verse TV customers in perfect unison. Now AT&T has added a new wrinkle to its post-merger plans, bringing back unlimited wireless broadband data -- but only if you sign up for the company's television services.

We seem to end up posting stories like this every year, but it just keeps on happening. Hollywood whines and whines and whines about how piracy is killing the movie business... and then announces yet another record year at the box office.

As I'm sure you've heard by now, famed musician David Bowie passed away yesterday at age 69 due to cancer. As someone who influenced so many people in so many different ways, it's great to see basically everyone celebrating his life and his music. But, given that this is Techdirt, I also thought that Bowie deserved a shoutout on topics that we discuss around here as well: Bowie wasn't just an amazing music visionary, but he was similarly visionary about the music business and the internet as well.

Get your gaming on with the $37 NES30 Pro Bluetooth Game Controller. The controller's looks are inspired by the old school NES controllers, and it lets you play games on a variety of platforms (iOS, Android, PC, etc.). You can also add expansions as they become available with firmware upgrades. Slip this sleek controller in your pocket and be ready to play whenever the mood strikes you.

Hook a "smart" TV up to a "dumb" pipe and this is the inevitable result.

As you may have heard, on Friday, a group of top White House officials, including Homeland Security director Jeh Johnson, FBI Director James Comey and NSA boss Admiral Michael Rogers, all came out to Silicon Valley to meet with tech execs to talk about how to "disrupt" groups like ISIS. On the tech side, a bunch of top execs came, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince. The White House released a basic agenda publicly, though there was also apparently a more thorough briefing document that ran about 7 pages.

The FCC is required by Congress to annually "determine whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion," something the FCC's latest broadband status report (pdf) suggests we're still doing a relatively crappy job at.

The NYPD considers itself to be the finest police force in the nation, if not the world. But its track record says otherwise. It lost a lawsuit over its "stop and frisk" program, thanks to its unconstitutionality and appearance of racial bias. It is currently in the middle of a lawsuit related to illegal summons quotas -- one in which it destroyed documents it was ordered to preserve. And now, it has just lost anotherlawsuit related to its biased policing.

We've got a double winner this week, with our top comment taking the first place spots for both insightful and funny. It came in response to the news that cryptography pioneer David Chaum is working on creating backdoors for law enforcement. A Non-Mouse perceived a devil in the details:

Five Years Ago Recently, Homeland Security returned a domain it seized all the way back in 2010. This week in 2011, we were still examining the fallout from the original seizures, as well as some similar seizures that were finally moving into the forfeiture phase. Some were claiming the technical and legal errors in the affidavit didn't matter, but we pushed back against that idea while marveling at how Homeland Security had clammed up about the seizures. They also appeared to have invented a non-existent form of criminal contributory liability in their justification. In the world of Wikileaks, the new congressional leadership was prioritizing an investigation even while paying lip service to transparency. A Spanish newspaper explained its decision to publish the leaked cables, while a USAF Intelligence veteran explained why he supports Wikileaks and we debunked the idea that the leaks put lives in danger in Zimbabwe. Also notable: this week in 2011 we took our first look at the TPP, and the now-infamous "study" linking vaccines to autism, which had already been known to be mistaken, was beginning to be exposed as outright fraud. Ten Years Ago The RIAA was up to its antics this week in 2006, using scare tactics to implicitly threaten anyone visiting the Grokster site and subpoenaing a bunch of John Does over file sharing. The MPAA was celebrating a DVD bust that was basically fake as part of Hollywood's broader strategy of entirely missing the point. Some media companies were starting to experiment with device-independent content as though it was a shocking and difficult innovation (not an obvious and simple feature) while some TV networks were opening up a bit more to VOD. The New York Times was trying to get its head around the fact that bloggers were calling out inaccuracy in the press, while other major newspapers were failing to fact check stories they lifted from blogs. But the worst trend in online content by far was the separation of articles into multiple pages. Fifteen Years Ago After Y2K went off without a hitch, few expected that the real bugs would start coming a year later. This week in 2001, systems that had put in place hacky patches to avoid Y2K problems but not account for future years suddenly experienced the Y2K+1 bug, which brought down the trains in Norway and made 7-Eleven regret the $8 million it spent on a Y2K fix. Looking back on the year 2000, the total count was over 200 dot coms dead in the water. The still-profitable ones were those that didn't get venture capital and had to be scrappy from the start. The Blogger platform was begging for money and we saw an early call for getting rid of free content. Still, the overall effect of the internet appeared to be an increase in productivity. Sixty-Nine Years Ago Here's a historical tidbit from the intersection of two of our central topics: technology and government. It was on January 3rd, 1947 that the proceedings of the US House of Representatives were broadcast live on television for the first time. Three days later, Harry Truman would make the first televised State Of The Union address from the same chambers.

With CES wrapping up today, the internet is awash in rundowns of the greatest new gadgets, and these days it's barely newsworthy that this or that product was partially funded on Kickstarter or created by a team with a crowdfunding background. So instead of looking at the CES crop, most of which you've probably already seen, this week we're rounding up three simple and inexpensive geeky playthings. Luma Dice Usually, when it comes to things like dice and playing cards, I'm an advocate of keeping it simple. The fetishization of "lucky" dice is just superstition and magical thinking. But maybe I should lighten up, because some of the specialty dice showing up on Kickstarter are admittedly pretty cool, with the most noteworthy being the Luma. It's a solid aluminum die with powered LEDs embedded as pips, and contains an accelerometer to activate them automatically when it's picked up or rolled. You'd think that with the accelerometer already present, they'd have a mode to light up only the up-facing side when a roll is complete — but sadly they don't. Though, that may be part of why the price is surprisingly reasonable at only $21 (approximately, as the original prices are in Australian dollars) for a pair. The Sound Reactive Mask While we're on the subject of lighting up things that don't normally light up, this product might emerge from the Montreal electronic music scene but it's tech-geeky through and through. Sound-reactive clothing and costuming is nothing new, but this might be the first time I've seen anyone with a good design sense use it in a way that's actually fun to look at, unlike the terrible t-shirts marketed to "ravers". The stylized jaguar design on the foam mask appears to respond quickly and accurately to music by deconstructing and reconstructing itself piece by piece, to pretty impressive and mesmerizing effect. And once again, the price is lower than you might expect for this kind of Kickstarter project: again about $21, thanks this time in part to the exchange rate with Canadian dollars. The Key Armory Several years ago, for reasons I still don't fully understand, a friend bought me a gag birthday gift in the form of a giant sword — one of those ridiculous fantasy ones with all sorts of curlicues that I assume would render any real sword useless. It's neat, but it's weird, and I have no idea what to do with it — so it's lived in its box under my bed ever since. Somehow I doubt I'm the only person with a display sword in that situation. Well, the Key Armory offers a slightly more workable alternative: lovingly crafted key blanks with handles hilts inspired by various famous fictional swords. They are available in two common key types, though if you don't use one of those, you're out of luck for now. And in keeping with this week's low-price theme, they are only $10 a pop with discounts if you buy more than one.

Once again, it appears the only way to make our nation's intelligence oversight committees care about surveillance is to include them in the "fun."

Michael Morisy -- founder of FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock -- has been waiting since February of 2012 for the FBI to hand over information on its GPS tracking devices. Specifically, Morisy was looking for information on any devices it deactivated/recollected after the Supreme Court (US v. Jones) declared the warrantless, long-term tracking of individuals couldamount to a Fourth Amendment violation.

Maybe you've heard that the word 'salary' comes from Roman soldiers being paid in salt. That's seems like a fuzzy bit of history, and no one actually knows with certainty how early Roman soldiers were paid, but at some point, they were paid with coinage -- or perhaps with some other kind of allowance to purchase salt. Luckily, most people don't get paid in spices anymore, but there are a few food items that are expensive enough that they could be used as currency. (And if you want to really get off the grid, you might want to know about how much it'll cost to really make everything yourself from scratch.)

Just recently, we discussed the revelation that former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's emails were deleted right as he was exiting office -- despite being ordered by a federal court to preserve all communications relevant to a summons quota lawsuit.

There's plenty to complain about when discussing the federal court's document filing system known as PACER. Lots.

One of the stranger stories from last year was the demise of Politwoops, the wonderful project designed to not let public figures tweet out brain-vomit and then disappear it all once the backlash ensues. This useful service, designed to let the public see what politicians really thought after their two-martini breakfasts, was eighty-sixed by Twitter over a ham-fisted claim that it was protecting users' expression, which is how it referred to deleting users' previous expressions. If you can twist your brain into a pretzel enough that any of that makes sense to you, you're a better brain-gymnast than I.

Several weeks back, the FTC posted some guidelines on how it expects disclosures to be used in native advertising campaigns. The short of it is that advertising campaigns should come with some kind of prominent disclosure, one easily read and understood by the public. Specifically regarding online content, the FTC guide states:

One of the big stories coming out of CES this week is the bizarre situation in which US Marshals showed up here at the event yesterday and completely shut down the booth of a Chinese company, named Changzhou First International Trade Co. This happened after a judge granted a motion for a temporary restraining order, filed by US company Future Motion, following a seven minute hearing about the matter, in which Changzhou was not present and had no say.