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Well, this has really turned into quite a week for T-Mobile CEO John Legere, huh? First, his lies about BingeOn throttling were exposed. Then he doubled down on the lie insisting that BingeOn wasn't throttling despite clear evidence that it is. Then, he attacked EFF for exposing his lie. All the meanwhile, T-Mobile spokespeople were confirming that the company is, absolutely, slowing down all video traffic.

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The T-Mobile throttling saga is getting worse. Their PR people have totally stopped responding to me after I pointed out how they were lying about their claims to be "optimizing" video when they were really throttling. And then the company's CEO, John Legere insisted that claims that T-Mobile was "throttling" were bullshit (and then, bizarrely attacked EFF).

So, you've sued a major studio for copyright infringement and lost. How bad could it be? Here are the possible outcomes, rated from least to most painful.

AT&T this week is running its Developer Summit alongside of CES, and the telco's biggest announcement is that it's working closely with Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas to be their preferred partner in their quest to become the "smart cities" of tomorrow. In pretty typical "Internet of Things" parlance there's more flourish than substance to the announcement, but AT&T claims they're working on solutions that will integrate nearly ever part of a city with AT&T's network -- from utility meters and city maintenance systems to transportation computers and even law-enforcement gunshot detection systems:

Baltimore law enforcement officers love their cell tower spoofers. They have deployed them over 4,300 times since 2007, in most cases without a warrant. Instead, the Baltimore PD uses pen register orders, which both hide the technology being used and allow the department to abuse a lower suspicion standard.

There's some wonderful news from the NY Public Library, which has released over 180,000 high resolution digital images of public domain works that it found in its collection. We've seen too many organizations, mainly museums, try to claim copyright over public domain works, or otherwise limit access. The NY Public Library, on the other hand, is going the other direction. Not only are they releasing these works and making it clear that the works are in the public domain, but they're releasing them as high resolution images and actively encouraging people to make use of them.

Toys have really become much more advanced than the yo-yos and etch-a-sketches of the past. Sure, kids will always like to play with the big cardboard boxes instead of the toys that came in them, but older kids have amazing remote-controlled drones and paper planes (that they might need to register with the FAA someday). If you've been looking for some cool RC cars that can climb walls and drive on the ceiling, there are a bunch of toys to choose from.

Over the last few years, there's been a big controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline project, a massive planned project to build an oil pipeline from Canada to the US that many folks had been protesting, and which (after years and years of debate), President Obama finally rejected a few months back. That's not a topic that we've really covered here, other than a single mention when we questioned why the FBI had spied on activists protesting the potential pipeline.

I kinda feel bad for the PR people at T-Mobile. This morning, CEO John Legere put out a completely bullshit statement pretending to respond to the accusations that its BingeOn program is throttling online video. It didn't address the actual issues, made statements that were clearly false, and then accused people questioning the program of being "jerks." That seemed weird, considering the widespread concerns about all of this combined with T-Mobile's attempt to brand itself as the only consumer friendly mobile service provider.

Oh boy. Remember VG Media? That's the consortium of German news publishers who were so damn angry that Google News sends them all sorts of traffic without also paying them. A year and a half ago, they demanded money from Google. That failed, so they went crying to German regulators who laughed off the request. After there were some concerns that a new "ancillary copyright" right regime in Germany might require payment for posting such snippets, Google properly responded by removing the snippets for those publishers, who totally freaked out and called it blackmail.

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. This week we have a brand new book, but one I'm disappointed needs to be a book. It's the collected writings of Aaron Swartz, called The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz. As I've noted in the past, I knew Aaron as we worked in similar circles and interacted on a bunch of occasions, though I didn't know him well. But, more importantly, I'd actually been following Aaron's writings on his personal blog and elsewhere from a very early age (I particularly remember following his writings about his experience as a freshman at Stanford). As you probably know by now, Aaron committed suicide almost three years ago, while dealing with a ridiculous federal prosecution for downloading too many academic papers from a computer system at MIT, where the license was clear anyone could download as much as they wanted.

With an apparent minimum of judicial oversight, the FBI is engaging in large-scale hacking campaigns, Vice's Joseph Cox reports.

On Monday we wrote about T-Mobile flat out lying about the nature of its BingeOn mobile video service -- and after a couple of days of silence, the company has come out swinging -- by lying some more and weirdly attacking the people who have accurately portrayed the problems of the service. As a quick reminder, the company launched this service a few months ago, where the company claimed two things (though didn't make it entirely clear how separate these two things were): (1) that the company would not count data for streaming video for certain "partner" companies and (2) that it would be "optimizing" video for all users (though through a convoluted process, you could opt-out).

If you're looking to stream your favorite shows while traveling, for $60, ibDNS SmartDNS offers you unrestricted streaming around the world. Use this to unblock geo-restricted websites so that you can watch content from anywhere in the world. You can connect unlimited ibDNS-compatible devices simultaneously under one IP address. Binge watch to your heart's content.

As you know, we've been covering PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)'s absolutely insane lawsuit claiming to represent the monkey who took this selfie: We'd been covering the story of that selfie for years, since first noting that it was almost certainly in the public domain, as copyright law only recognizes human authors. This discussion spurred not one, but two, separate legal threats made against us by representatives of David Slater, the guy whose camera the monkey used. It's also gotten Wikipedia involved (after Slater asked the site to not allow the image to be used, while Wikipedia agreed with us that the image is public domain).

Shortly after the first Snowden documents were leaked, Techdirt wrote about former NSA whistleblower Bill Binney providing some context and history to the newly-revealed information. The central point he made was that trying to collect "haystacks" of data -- mass surveillance -- doesn't work, because intelligence agencies have insufficient resources to search through vast digital stores for the "needles" hidden there. It's a theme Techdirt has returned to a number of times, as has Binney. This week, he was trying to convince a committee of MPs and peers who are scrutinizing the UK's Snooper's Charter Bill that too much data leads to "analysis paralysis," and that targeted surveillance was the way to go. The Guardian reported:

For a while Comcast tried to pretend that its slowly-expanding usage cap "trials" were about managing network congestion. At least until leaked Comcast documents, the company's top engineer, and the cable industry's top lobbyist all confirmed that justification was bullshit (caps don't really help manage congestion anyway). Since then, Comcast has veered away from any hard technical explanation for the glorified price hike, instead focusing on the ambiguous claim that these new "flexible" pricing models bring "fairness" to the broadband industry.

Another would-be terrorist is in the hands of law enforcement, thanks to a joint effort by the FBI and the St. Clair (Alabama) Sheriff's Department. (h/t The Free Thought Project)

Biometric scanners are hardly a novelty these days, but how the data they generate can be used is still controversial. Here's a good example from Venezuela of how function creep there has turned fingerprint readers into instruments of pervasive surveillance:

We'll know things are really going wrong when government authorities are trying to innovate their way around math. (And maybe we're already headed that way with backdoors to encryption.) Hopefully, though, we'll be able to trust in math for the foreseeable future, and nevermind about the Banach-Tarski paradox. Math is hard.

A ruling on fair use, the right of first sale and the limits of trademark protection has been handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel. Normally, I'd proceed the word "ruling" with an adjective like "important," or "terrible," or "wonderful." But this ruling is none of those. It's a ruling, and I suppose it does set some sort of precedent, but thanks mainly to Adobe's inept handling of the case, it does very little to clarify any of the above issues.

And so the war on ad blockers marches on. Lots of sites have recently made ad blocking software a target of their ire, complaining that such software ruins everything and is a form of puppy genocide or whatever. We, of course, know that to be bullshit, so we think it's just fine if you block ads (in fact, we make it easy to do so). Still, some of these attempts are getting more and more aggressive, such as what two recent sites, GQ and Forbes, have decided to do.

If there's an unreasonable, warrantless search happening, there's a good chance Deputy (literal) Dog is on the case. Cops love their K9 buddies, mainly because nearly any motion or noise a police dog makes can be construed as an "indication" or an "alert." It's a blank permission slip, signed with a paw print.

I first came across cryptography pioneer David Chaum about a decade ago, during the debates about online voting. Many in the technology world were insisting that such things were impossible to do safely, but Chaum insisted he had come up with a way to do online voting safely (he'd also tried to do electronic money, DigiCash... unsuccessfully). Many people disagreed with Chaum and it led to some fairly epic discussions. It appears that Chaum is again making moves that are making many of his colleagues angry: specifically creating a backdoored encryption system.

Remember Richard Prince? He's the well-known "appropriation artist" who was involved a few years ago in a key fair use case concerning his artwork. That case involved him taking photographs taken by another photographer, Patrick Cariou, of a bunch of Jamaican Rastafarians, and adding some minor modifications, blowing the images up and selling them as "art." Whether or not you appreciate Prince's art, the lawsuit raised some serious questions about whether or not it's appropriate for judges to determine what is art and what is not. A district court determined that the works were infringing, but, thankfully, the appeals court overturned most of that ruling, declaring that the majority of Prince's artowrk was fair use. Unfortunately, before the case could go any further, the case settled, so there was some murkiness over the precedent.

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Default mode at tech companies these days is to inform users of government surveillance. Unless explicitly forbidden to do so, multiple companies have stated they will inform users of requests for data or suspected state-sponsored hacking attempts.

In March of last year, Canadian regulators announced they were combating high TV prices by trying something new: forcing the country's cable companies to offer "a la carte" (pick your own individual channels) TV. The CRTC's full ruling declared that by March 2016, all Canadian TV providers must provide a $25, discounted base bundle, letting users pick and choose individual channels beyond that. A la carte has long been a popular idea in both Canada and the States, where in the latter users receive on average 189 channels -- but usually only watch about 18 of them.

As we pointed out last month, the UK government is hoping to hamstring the country's Freedom of Information laws to make it much harder to dig out facts and thus hold politicians to account. In the meantime, it is going to absurd lengths in order to avoid responding to even the most harmless of requests, as this story from the BBC's Social Affairs Correspondent, Michael Buchanan, makes plain. Here's the background:

So much for the Fourth Amendment. Even though a field test for marijuana returned false results twiceand a SWAT team raid of Robert and Addie Harte's house turned up no drugs or paraphernalia, the cops involved have been let off the hook by a federal judge. Radley Balko runs down the details of the decision in his post entitled "Federal judge: Drinking tea, shopping at a gardening store is probable cause for a SWAT raid on your home."

Back in the fall of 2014, we wrote about a highly questionable police raid on the home of Nicky Hager, a well-known journalist who had published powerful pieces criticizing the government (and who was working on some investigations concerning the Snowden documents and New Zealand's involvement in mass surveillance). The wonderful Freedom of the Press Foundation (who helped raise funds for Hager's legal defense) has now alerted us to the fact that the raid on Hager's home was deemed illegal by New Zealand's High Court:

Despite a few mishaps with rockets headed for the International Space Station (eg. SpaceX, Orbital Sciences and the Russian space agency all failed to deliver re-supply cargo ships), there have also been some interesting space-faring developments in the last year or so. Fortunately, none of the lost spacecraft were manned missions, and the ISS also has the Japanese HTV as another backup cargo ship. And with SpaceX's awesome recovery with a successful launch, it looks like re-supply missions are getting back on track -- so the ISS will probably keep going until at least 2020 (and maybe a few years more? 2024? 2028?).

On New Year's Eve, the US Copyright Office dropped a bit of a surprise, asking for public comment on the DMCA's Section 512 safe harbor provisions -- which are probably better known as the "notice and takedown" provisions:

Michael Geist is counting down the days to when the TPP can first be signed in the US (February 4th) by going through and highlighting problematic aspects of the agreement. He's started with the simple fact that the TPP's intellectual property section is explicitly designed to favor corporations over the public. We've obviously discussed some of this ourselves, such as the fact that the only reference to things like the public's rights (such as fair use) is to recommend that countries consider them, but when it comes to stronger copyright and patents, the TPP requires them.

Running somewhat against the grain of the current political climate, the Netherlands government has issued a statement strongly supporting encryption (for everyone, not just the government) and against the idea of intelligence/law enforcement backdoors. Patrick Howell O'Neill of the Daily Dot has the details:

Yes, lots of people whine about the fact that so many people out in public these days seem to have their heads down in their mobile phones, but as we've pointed out before, things aren't necessarily so different than in the past: However, Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the UK, has taken this form of anti-smartphone luddism to new and even more ridiculous levels, claiming that all these people looking at their mobile phones or listening to music/podcasts in public are a public nuisance, because they're not watching out for terrorists. Really.

If you've recently decided to jump on board the ultra-high-definition (UHD) and 4K TV craze and bought a shiny new UHD set, you've probably run into HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) 2.2 by now. It's the latest version of the entertainment industry's video copy protection standard designed to secure UHD content. Unfortunately for consumers who rushed out to buy a new 4KTV set, they soon realized that every device in your home theater chain needs to support HDCP 2.2 in order to enjoy UHD.

Add 32GB of storage to your iOS device with the iSafe Drive Lite. This MFi-Certified storage device is small enough to slip into your pocket to take with you anywhere. One end connects via a lightning connector and the other end uses USB to connect to your computer for easy two way swapping. Store your music and movies on it without eating up your device's internal storage or use it to transfer data back and forth between the two without relying on a cloud storage system.

We generally don't talk much about musician David Lowery around here any more. We covered a few stories about him a few years ago, and he seemed to take it ridiculously personally, and continues to attack me with false and misleading claims. Every so often someone sends me a link to a blog post he's written and it's almost always laughably wrong (for example, in one recent story he falsely claimed that "Google" is on Spotify's board -- because a former Google exec who is no longer at the company also happens to be on Spotify's board). So, take the following with that caveat in mind. I tried to be objective in the analysis, but some will likely suggest that's impossible given his years-long attacks on me.

A copyright infringement lawsuit has been filed against a long list of defendants -- all of it related to the hit sitcom "The Big Bang Theory." Supposedly, a poem written in 1933 is being used without permission of the putative rights holders (the author's daughters) and making everyone involved with the show a lot of money.

Every year the FCC is mandated by Congress to release a report detailing the status of the U.S. broadband industry. The good news? This year's edition of the creatively-named "Measuring Broadband America Fixed Broadband Report" (pdf) notes that speeds have by and large tripled since 2011. The bad news? That's really only for those who have cable broadband (where DOCSIS upgrades are relatively inexpensive) and the few people living in an area getting wired with fiber to the home. If you're a phone company customer with a DSL connection, unfortunately, many of you are still lucky to get 12 Mbps downstream:

The Wall Street Journal's recent revelation that the NSA swept up Congress members' communications in a dragnet, which had been assumed to have shut down, has provoked a variety of reactions from Capitol Hill. Some Congress members have angrily expressed their displeasure at being spied on like so many citizens of so many nations (including ours).

As we are constantly reminded by its supporters, the TAFTA/TTIP agreement currently being negotiated between the US and the EU is huge: together, the two regions account for around half of global GDP. Given that scale, and the impact that TTIP is likely to have on both the US and EU, you might expect there would be dozens of detailed studies looking at the likely effects -- and whether, on balance, it would be a good idea. And yet such studies are very thin on the ground. The main one (pdf), produced by the London-based CEPR for the European Commission, dates back to 2013. Initially, its figures were widely quoted to bolster the case for TTIP; and then, almost overnight, it was quietly dropped. It's not hard to see why. Once people started digging more deeply into its oft-cited figures -- an extra €119 billion for the EU's economy, and €95 billion for the US -- it turned out that these were from an "ambitious" deal, and referred to the cumulative effect of TTIP in 2027, after it had been in operation for ten years. Even that best-case scenario worked out at just 0.05% extra GDP per year -- little more than a rounding error. Since then, TTIP supporters have stopped making precise claims about the boost to growth that TAFTA/TTIP will provide, and simply claimed instead that it will be good for the US and EU economies without going into further details. The embarrassing lack of any compelling economic justification for the deal probably explains why there are so few studies: anything even half-way rigorous would show the same, thin gains, which would hardly bolster the case for TTIP. That dearth of high-quality research makes the recent appearance of a new report from the Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture entitled "Agriculture in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: Tariffs, Tariff-Rate Quotas, and Non-Tariff Measures" (pdf) all-the-more welcome. As you would expect given its provenance, it's a rigorous piece of work, and confirms that the GDP gains from TTIP are likely to be tiny: in the best case, around 0.1% for the US, and 0.29% for the EU. Both of those are cumulative gains, which means that the annual GDP boost for both sides is once more extremely small. What makes the new study particularly valuable is that it naturally concentrates on the agricultural sector, and provides us with the first detailed breakdown of how the proposed agreement is likely to affect what is a very important -- and highly influential -- industry for both sides. The first scenario the report examines is one where all the tariffs currently imposed by the US and EU on each other's agricultural goods are removed, which is what is typically found in "classical" trade agreements. Here's what the report says might happen:

Open source software (OSS) has been around for several decades now, and it serves as the foundation for many gadgets and online services that consumers use regularly. Google, Facebook, Twitter -- even some Apple devices -- use open source software. There may even be a growing trend to use open source, but proprietary software is never totally going away, folks.

Back in October, the 2nd Circuit appeals court issued a really wonderful fair use win on the long-running (and somewhat ridiculous) lawsuit that the Authors Guild had filed against Google Books. The decision -- written by Judge Pierre Leval, who has long been a key player on issues of fair use -- was decisive and clear. It capped a ridiculously long process, in which the Authors Guild lost at every stage, wasting the money of its members. The ruling was quite clear that Google Books was transformative and did not compete with the original works. It also highlighted how it benefited the public. A key part of the ruling:

Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler both died in 1945 -- with Frank's death being caused by Hitler. European law (for now) says that copyright lasts 70 years "after death" of an author, and that means that the published writings of each of those individuals are now in the public domain in Europe -- though there's serious controversy about both. Even though we won't see any new public domain works here in the US for quite some time, over in Europe, at least some works are able to enter the public domain each January 1st.

So, yes, it was just revealed that, of course, the NSA spied on Congress as it was intercepting phone calls of foreign leaders, leading to hypocritical bloviating from folks in Congress who regularly support the NSA. And, of course, now the House Intelligence Committee, which approved the surveillance authorities in the first place, says it's opening a probe into this:

No surprises here, although the contempt for government authorities that aren'tthe NYPD is a bit audacious.

Big companies often have a way of tap dancing around the truth. It's rarely lying, because they will choose their words carefully, in a manner that clearly misleads or distorts, but is not necessarily outright lying. T-Mobile, however, appears to be flat out lying. We recently wrote about the charges from YouTube that T-Mobile was throttling YouTube videos as part of its Binge On program that zero rates video on mobile phones so it doesn't count against data caps. We noted the problems with this program when it launched, but YouTube's claims take it even further.