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If you're still looking for a goal for yourself for 2016, maybe you could pick up coding or continue to improve your skills at it. Coding is a great job skill to have and can help you bring your ideas for websites, digital devices, apps and more to life. We have some helpful learn to code bundles available in the Deals store now.

Last month, we were actually the first publication to report that Homeland Security had very quietly "returned" two domains that it had "seized" five years ago based entirely on totally bullshit claims from the RIAA. We focused our story on the search engine torrent-finder, but also mentioned that it appeared that DHS had returned OnSmash.com as well. As we had noted, back when the domain was first seized, OnSmash was a popular hip hop blog that many in the industry purposely sent their music to, because it was great for marketing and publicity. In fact, Kanye West had been known to promote OnSmash himself. That doesn't sound like a site "dedicated to infringement" as Homeland Security's ICE division claimed in the affidavit used to seize the website.

In late spring of last year, more than 100,000 taxpayers had their personally-identifiable information accessed by criminals. It wasn't a security breach, nor was it accomplished by "hacking." Instead, it was the result of the IRS using common static identifiers to verify accounts -- information that could easily be found elsewhere. These were deployed to access transcripts of taxpayers' filing histories. The transcripts gave criminals the information they were actually seeking: Social Security numbers, birth dates and current addresses.

The FBI has managed to get one more terrorist bust on the books for FYE 2015.

Each year, for the past few years, the wonderful Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University publishes a blog post highlighting key works that should have entered the public domain on January first, but did not. And each year, we write about it again. Here is the list for 2016. These are mostly works that were published in 1959. Under the law at the time they were created, the maximum copyright term was 56 years, and that apparently was more than enough of a bargain for the work to be created. That we retroactively extended those works, taking away the public domain for no actual benefit, remains a travesty. The list includes books like Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch, Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate, and Strunk and White's famed The Elements of Style. Films that should be in the public domain today include Ben-Hur, North by Northwest, and Some Like It Hot. The original season of the seminal Rocky and Bullwinkle show would also be in the public domain.

It's that time again! This week, we're looking back at all of 2015 and rounding up the top three comments in both the insightful and funny categories. For those who are still interested in the winners for this week only, here's first and second for insightful, and first and second for funny. The Most Insightful Comments Of 2015 You've all seen him — y'know, what's-his-name, That One Guy. According to our roundup of yearly numbers he was the second most frequent commenter on Techdirt, and the most insightful according to the number of times he got an Insightful badge on his comments. Now, he's backing that title up with the most insightful comment of 2015. In October, our think tank The Copia Institute released its The Carrot Or The Stick report, which compared enforcement and innovation as strategies for reducing piracy. That One Guy ran through his own thoughts on the matter, and the insightful votes came pouring in:

It's become something of a yearly tradition around here, soon after the new year, to tally up some of the stats from the just completed year. If you'd like to look back at them all, you can see "the numbers" from 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 when we started this little tradition.

Thanks to the way the days align and the fact that we don't publish on New Year's, there aren't any posts from 2011/2006/2001 to highlight just yet — so this slightly-truncated history post represents the very last of the 2010/2005/2000 batch! Five Years Ago Lots of back-and-forth on the copyright and piracy front was happening this week in 2010, and most of the news was international. In India, the film industry was threatening a strike over the possibility that filmmakers would have to pay composers for music, while we looked out how 'piracy' helped establish the Nigerian film industry, which is often compared to the famous Bollywood; in Canada, a music collection society was trying to get payouts for 30 second song previews, while Germany's infamous GEMA collection society was cracking down on free sheet music for kindergarten students; in Sweden, the leaked State Dept. cables revealed that copyright enforcement was happening at the behest of the US, while officials complained that the Hollywood-backed IPRED law was doing more harm than good; and, following a similar situation in Spain, politicians were already planning the return of a rejected US-written copyright bill. There was at least one bit of sanity too, thankfully. A Dutch court dismissed criminal charges against a P2P index site while noting how heavily law enforcement relied on information (and prompting) from an anti-piracy group. Ten Years Ago This week in 2005, a huge discussion broke out about blog plagiarism, and we wondered just how big a deal it really is. At the same time, blogs were supposedly the booming new thing in China, but that bubble appeared to be rapidly bursting. The shiny new MMS multimedia messaging was struggling to get off the ground, but it turned out early adopters included high school drug dealers — while in South Korea, SMS was already so common it was normal to serve legal notices via text. Telecommuting as a whole, on the other hand, appeared to have an uncertain future. Also this week in 2005: we saw an early net neutrality battle around the idea of a two-tiered internet, the RIAA was accused of coaching a teenage witness in a file-sharing case, Australia was considering expanding fair use, and Sony agreed to settle a class action suit filed over its rootkit. Fifteen Years Ago Bluetooth was still a big new thing this week in 2000, but its applications were still uncertain. Some complained that venture capitalists were funding too many Bluetooth chipmakers and not enough application builders, while others were going as far as to call the whole technology vaporware. As usual for the time, some were predicting the end of the dot-com downturn and pointing out the sectors that were surviving, while some were looking at the bigger picture and examining the consequences of an economic recession in the US. The video game world was rocked by rumors that Nintendo was buying Sega, but they were quickly put to rest. Meanwhile, a more traditional gaming world was re-emerging, as people realized that board games were a comeback hit. We had our first (I think) run-in with a website trying to charge people to link to it, and Techdirt got mentioned (weakly) in the news. Fifty-Six Years Ago You may have heard the conception of nanotechnology attributed to Richard Feynman. In fact, this is only partly true — while he did indeed propose the idea in a lecture over half a century ago, it went largely unnoticed, and appears to have been dug up much later by scientists pursuing nanotechnology, in order to absorb some prestige from the famous physicist. In any case, like all Feynman lectures and writings, There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom is full of intriguing ideas explained brilliantly, and it was on December 29th, 1959 that it was delivered to an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech.

Happy New Year, everyone! This week we're kicking off 2016's Awesome Stuff posts with another round-up of three crowdfunding projects for interesting new gadgets and gear. The TESLA Electronic Lighter Over the years, there have been lots of pie-in-the-sky dreams of a future where induction charging lets us power our smartphones and laptops by simply walking around with chargers in our shoes, but that's not going to be happening anytime soon. But, the technology still has the potential to take on all sorts of smaller tasks and make life a little bit easier, and that's exactly what the TESLA self-recharging lighter does: it's a metal-and-rubber-clad electric arc lighter that can be charged up with just a few shakes. Refilling or replacing lighters may be only a small annoyance for those that use them, but it could be handily solved by the first lighter to actually have a shot at the "last lighter you'll ever buy" title. The Ekster Wallet Wallets are one of the most ubiquitous items on Kickstarter. The deluge has slowed slightly, but at one point it seemed like every week there was another "reinvented wallet" that promised to change your life forever — yet, virtually all the options seemed to follow one of a few basic design approaches. With that in mind, the Ekster is the first crowdfunded wallet in a while that is worth a look. Though others have tried the "spit our your cards at the press of a button" idea in the past, none have looked quite as smooth or convenient as the Ekster's pop-up cascade does in the video (though as always it may be less pleasing in operation). Additionally, the wallets include a BLE-based tracking device with a six-month battery life, so the wallet can pair with your phone and offer several convenient functions: an alert if your wallet gets out of range of your phone, the ability to ping your wallet from your phone, and the reverse ability to trigger your phone's ringer from a button on the wallet. If all this operates smoothly and doesn't require a bunch of clunky apps and configurations, it could be a godsend for all those who frequently find themselves saying "where did I put that?" The Tulip Recording Device Have you ever tried to record a phone call? It's considerably more frustrating than you'd expect it to be. What should be a simple push-button function on all our devices is instead a hassle requiring specialty apps and obscure settings — and even then, the results are mixed and unreliable. One could argue that this is partially because of the legal issues with non-consensual recording, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to record phone calls in the professional sphere — reporters do it all the time for phone interviews, businesses need records of conference calls and meetings and presentations — and it's a powerful tool for the public too, for recording interactions with companies and the government when the need arises. So: why is it such a pain? That brings us to the Tulip: a small dongle that plugs into any 3.5mm audio jack and records directly from the audio line. Recording calls is just one of its functions — it's also not a bad tool for quickly capturing music, either from a DJ setup or an electric guitar (or bass or fiddle or...) — but it's the one I suspect will get the most use.

Since 2008, I've always concluded the year with a post in which I take a step back and reflect on (1) how I continue to remain optimistic despite lots of negative news (2) the overall forward progress of innovation, even while so many stories play up the negative and (3) the power to keep that forward progress moving. It started after I had a few people question how I remained so optimistic and happy, despite writing so many stories that seemed somewhat infuriating. But, as I noted at the time, the infuriating parts were mostly about attempts by people (often those in power) to hold back the pace of innovation. The forward progress of innovation marches on, however. And thus, we can and should be happy about that, even if we're angry about the pace and the efforts to hinder that pace. It's about understanding the difference between relative and absolute change. We should be happy with where things are headed, even if we're upset about the pace at which things are moving.

For a few weeks now, we've been telling you about a worrisome EU consultation on regulating the internet. That consultation was supposed to end today -- but it's been extended a week. As we noted recently, the survey technology built by the EU Commission had a major bug in it, meaning that many people had their submissions rejected. Based on this, we requested that they extend the survey. We got back two separate responses, the first telling us that they were very sorry, but it would be "impossible" to extend the survey. The second response was that they had agreed to extend the survey one week... but only for people who had run into problems. Given the two conflicting responses, I asked for more information on this (including how they would keep it open only for those people). I also asked if they were planning to announce this anywhere. I was told that it would likely be impossible to make an announcement, and I never heard anything else, as I believe many left for the holidays.

In 2015, an estimated 1.6 million patients were diagnosed with cancer and over half a million died from it. We've previously pointed out some cancer research that could lead to promising new treatments, and it looks like we're making significant progress in the fight against the many forms of this deadly disease. Using the body's own immune system to fight cancer is a growing strategy that seems to be working. Check out a few of these minor successes.

The recent Techdirt article about Microsoft's design patent on a slider understandably focused on the absurdity of companies being forced to hand over all of the profits that derive from a product if it is found to have infringed on someone else's design patent even in just a tiny portion of that product. But there's another angle worth mentioning here that picks up on something Techdirt has written about several times before: the rise and threat of patent thickets. Back in 2012, it was estimated that 250,000 active patents impacted smartphones. That makes it impossible to build devices without licensing large numbers of patents, and even then, it's likely that claims of infringement will still be brought. The underlying problem is that patents were originally devised for a complete, self-standing process or invention. For example, some of the earliest patents were those granted in fifteenth-century Venice for glass making. Over the centuries, invention has become atomized, with smaller and smaller elements being granted patents. These are not, in general, useful on their own, but must be combined with other components to make something useful. That process of atomization has reached its peak in the world of software, which is typically made up of thousands of smaller software parts. That's in part why computing has emerged as the field most plagued by patent litigation: if you own a patent on a key element that is required for the other software parts in a product to work properly, you are in a very strong position to force manufacturers to pay you for a license. The situation described in the Techdirt article about Microsoft's slider shows that there is a risk that the consequences of atomization in the field of design patents, where even tiny, obvious elements are awarded a patent, could be worse than for "ordinary" utility patents. That's because of the high level of damages based on the total profits derived from an infringing product, irrespective of the importance of the design element in question. Let's hope the Supreme Court decides to take this case, and comes out with a sensible ruling that heads off the danger of disproportionate damages. If it doesn't, we can probably expect trolls to move into the design patent world in a big way -- and for real innovation to face even more hurdles than it does at present. Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

I have to say, it can certainly be quite frustrating to watch dispassionately how terrorism is discussed in the United States. After the fervor in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when terrorism was used either as a reason or excuse to enact all kinds of liberty-diffusing policies and to launch an insane surveillance state that we still haven't recovered from, I had thought we were quietly entering an era of eye-rolling at the way some in government throw around the word "terrorism." But, because the home of the brave is so easily whipped into a frenzy of fear, an admittedly horrible terrorist attack half a world away and a shooting spree in California that would have been shrugged off as "Hey, that's just America" except that the perpetrators had scary sounding last names, has once again meant that our political debates and twenty-four hour news programs are focused on the threat of Islamic extremist terrorism and not all of the other zillions of ways that you might die in the next twenty-four hours.

We've talked a lot about the ethical and programming problems currently facing those designing self driving cars. Some are less complicated, such as how to program cars to bend the rules slightly and be more more human like. Others get more complex, including whether or not cars should be programmed to kill the occupant -- if it means saving a school bus full of children (aka the trolley problem). And once automated cars are commonplace, can law enforcement have access to the car's code to automatically pull a driver over? There's an ocean of questions we're not really ready to answer.

Remember how Dianne Feinstein -- a huge supporter of the intelligence community -- absolutely freaked out about surveillance when it happened to her staffers (when the CIA snooped on their network)? It would almost be funny how the defenders of surveillance react when they're being surveilled... if it weren't so tragic.

The countdowns are on and the top moments of 2015 listicles (#6 will shock you) are plentiful. We couldn't resist and have compiled a list of our own.

It hasn't been a particularly good year for ESPN, once considered evidence of cable's infallibility in the face of Internet video. The sports network spooked Wall Street several times this year; once when analysts realized ESPN's viewership totals had dropped 7.2% since 2011, and again when SEC filings showed the cable network had lost 7 million subscribers in the last two years alone. That's of course thanks to two major trends: cord cutting (and cord trimming) users tired of the high cost of TV, and the rise in so-called "skinny bundles" that ditch ESPN from the core channel lineup in a desperate attempt to retain TV customers.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the NSA is in the middle of another "incidental collection" mess, this time involving Congress.

2015 was the year cord cutting stopped being written off as fringe behavior and truly went mainstream. 23% of consumers engaged in "cord trimming" in 2014 (reducing their overall package where they could), while 16% said they had unsubscribed from pay-TV services in the past year. Billions in stock value evaporated in a flash as Wall Street realized cord cutting wasn't a fad. in 2015, 4.9 million consumers called themselves former cable customers, a tally that's expected to jump 12.5% in 2016. Consumers are finally tired of paying an arm and a leg for bloated channel bundles, when they only watch, on average, about 17 of them.

Police unions are working tirelessly towards destroying any remaining shreds of respectability. Presumably, they once served a purpose roughly aligned with the public good. Now, they serve the singular purpose of ensuring our nation's law enforcement agencies will always be forced to keep the abusive, incompetent officers on their payroll.

Since the release of the TPP text back in November, commentators have naturally tended to concentrate on the bigger, more obvious problems -- things like the corporate sovereignty chapter, the extension of Big Pharma's monopolies to scientific data, and copyright provisions -- that Techdirt has been exploring for years. But there's one area that has received relatively little attention, perhaps because for most people it's an obscure topic that seems rather unimportant. It concerns the issue of trade secrets, which Techdirt wrote about in the context of TPP in October 2014. There, we concentrated on the risk that it would chill investigative reporting and corporate whistleblowing, but a new column in The Globe and Mail by Dan Breznitz, professor of Innovation Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, looks at the economic impact of TPP's trade secrets measures. First, he notes that copyright and patents are based on a social bargain:

Battery technology just hasn't improved as much as other electronic gadgets. We have computers that are more powerful than room-sized mainframes on our wrists, but we still can't go more than a day without recharging a modern smartphone. We've seen suggestions of various kinds of portable fuel cells, but none seem ready for consumer gadgets just yet -- even several years after promising announcements. There are a bunch of ways of generating relatively small amounts of energy from everyday activities, so maybe we can generate electricity as we need it as we walk around. But probably not.

For the first time ever, this month's Stupid Patent of the Month is being awarded to a design patent. Microsoft recently sued Corel for, among other things, infringing its patent on a slider, D554,140, claiming that Corel Home Office has infringed Microsoft's design. The design patent, as detailed by Microsoft in its complaint, is titled "User Interface for a Portion of a Display Screen" and entitles Microsoft to own this: More specifically, Microsoft claims to own this design of a slider. Design patents aren't like the utility patents that most people think of when they think of patents. Unlike utility patents, which are meant for new and useful inventions, design patents are meant for new, non-functional, ornamental aspects of articles. They have only one claim, little to no written description, and usually a series of images detailing what exactly is being claimed. (A note about design patents: solid lines are used to show what is claimed; broken or dotted lines show the unclaimed "environment related to the design" or define the boundary of the design.) As Professor Sarah Burstein points out on her fantastic Tumblr, design patents are often issued on a small part of a product, and often for things that seem unoriginal, not ornamental, or just ridiculous. Microsoft's patent claims against Corel are unsurprising in light of how much money is potentially at stake. If Corel is found to infringe even one of Microsoft's design patents through even the smallest part of Corel Home Office, current Federal Circuit law entitles Microsoft to all of Corel's profits for the entire product. Not the profits that can be attributed to the design. Not the value that the design adds to a product. Allof the profit from Corel Home Office. The well-known Apple v. Samsungdispute addressed the issue of whether an infringer should be required to pay all of its profits for infringing a design patent that applies only to a portion of a product. Samsung had asked the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to reject this reading, but the court disagreed in a May, 2015 opinion. Samsung has now asked the Supreme Court to weigh in. In its petition for certiorari, Samsung points out the absurd results of this rule. For example, Samsung explains that under the Federal Circuit's ruling, "profits on an entire car—or even an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer—must be awarded based on an undetachable infringing cup-holder." In addition, given that many products will include multiple ornamental features that could be covered by design patents, this raises the possibility that a company could get hit for multiple judgments for all its profits. That sounds pretty crazy to us. But that's exactly what might happen if Microsoft prevails against Corel. Putting aside whether Microsoft's design was actually new and not obvious in 2006 (when Microsoft filed its application), whether Microsoft needed the patent incentive in order to come up with this design, and whether it is even desirable to grant a company a government-backed monopoly on a graphical slider (we don't think so, that's why this is a stupid patent), the scope of damages for design patent infringement has the potential to become a powerful tool to shut down legitimate competition based on the mere threat of a lawsuit. Reposted from the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The phrase "Internet of Things" suggests connection. The problem is there's nothing financially motivating about interconnectedness. Manufacturers of connected devices would prefer homogeneity, which leads to actions like Philips' which recently pushed a firmware update that locked competitors' bulbs out of its Hue "smart" lighting fixtures. Sure, it rolled back the update and (mostly) allowed owners to use bulbs they had already purchased, but it was also suggested in the same quasi-apology that the company would rather limit the options available to its purchasers in the future, funneling them through its "friends of Hue" program.

Another National Security Letter issued by the government has made its way into the public domain. While it's still likely years away from the full exposure finally granted to Nicholas Merrill of Calyx Internet Access (after 11 years!), this one may not stay covered up for the next decade.

We've talked a lot about Comcast here at Techdirt, mostly because between the company's broadband cash-grab caps, its great big middle finger to the concept of net neutrality, and its (haha) customer service, there's just a never ending wealth of stories to write up and Mike only lets us out of the dungeon for porridge after we write enough posts. And, as we bring 2015 to a close, it's kind of fun to remember that Comcast wanted to be an even bigger corporate thing with its intended merger with Time Warner Cable.

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Great news for people who think there's just too damn much freedom in this country: the government's "no-fly" list is about to get much, much longer.

Here's the stupidest thing on piracy you're going to read today. Or this month. Maybe even this whole holiday season. Rudy Shur, of Square One Publishers, has a problem with piracy, which he thinks is actually a problem with Google.

Theresa May, the UK Home Secretary who seems like a comic book version of a government authoritarian, is leading the charge in the UK for its new Snooper's Charter, officially called the "Investigatory Powers Bill," that is filled with all kinds of nasty stuff for making it easier for the government to spy on everyone. Among the many problematic elements is the demand for basically everyone's metadata. May dismissed the concerns about this by saying it's nothing more than "an itemised phone bill." Given that, Member of Parliament Keith Vaz noted to May that people might be interested to see May's itemized phone bill.

Like many broadband black holes, Western Massachusetts has spent years asking regional duopolies for broadband. Towns like Leverett, Mass. literally took to hanging signs around town begging Verizon to install even the slowest DSL. Of course Verizon not only refused to install Western Massachusetts, they froze deployment of effectively all FiOS fiber upgrades, leaving a large number of towns and cities (including Boston, Baltimore, Alexandria, Buffalo) without next-gen broadband -- or in some cases broadband at all.

We talk a lot about first sale rights and resale rights at Techdirt, but of particular frustration to me is the strange capitulation to companies that sell digital copies of software. This isn't a strictly American problem, though here in the States there has been a near total abandonment of the consumer's rights when it comes to electronically delivered entertainment, be it eBooks, music, movies or games. The "you're licensing the game you paid for, not buying it" line is, on its face, ridiculous, amounting to a situation where Game "X" bought on a disc can be resold, but Game "X" bought and delivered on the internet cannot. Why a delivery method would alter the right to resale a bought product because a EULA says so is a concept that simply escapes me.

All the DHS wanted was a warrantless "peek" at the contents of a seized iPhone. The phone, one of three seized from a person suspected of drug trafficking, was examined by the DHS, with the warrant arriving a month later. Now, allof the evidence obtained from the phone is being tossed out.

Artificial intelligence projects have gotten more attention over the past few years as some major milestones have been achieved and point to a promising future for AI (or cognitive computing or whatever we want to call it now). Software is getting better and better at recognizing what we're writing and saying... and now it's getting better at seeing what we're up to. Check out a few of these projects where computers are identifying visual images and correctly identifying a wide variety of things.

In our recent discussion about the delightfully vulgar filing by the Washington Redskins in an effort to point out the arbitrary application of morality by the government to trademark law, the point in the filing was driven home by just how many similarly vulgar and offensive terms the USPTO has been happy to sanctify with a valid trademark. Perhaps some of you out there thought that this was a uniquely American problem, something resulting from our overabundance of political correctness. It's not. A case in Canada over the trademark application for "Lucky Bastard Vodka" shows this quite well. It also shows the inherent problem in trying to have a government institution apply morality to business in this way.

This is an important step forward for (forced) government transparency. A Colorado legislator is introducing a bill that would require government agencies to stop paying lip service to transparency with their purposefully-hobbled FOIA responses. Arthur Kane at Watchdog.org has the details.

Good news (of sorts) on the asset forfeiture front: the same budget bill that delivered us into the hands of CISA also helped "rob" the nation's highwaymen of $1.2 billion in equitable sharing funds.

50 Cent's (Curtis Jackson) questionable decisions over the last several years have put him in a deep financial hole. Many of these questionable decisions have led to litigation, either byhim or against him. Now, it appears he's trying to get ahead of the litigation/bad decision curve.

Senator Richard Burr, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee and long time friend to the intelligence community, has now penned a ridiculous, misleading, fear-mongering opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, entitled: Stopping Terrorists From "Going Dark." It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect if you've paid any attention to the ridiculous "going dark" debate in the US. But, let's dig in and show just how bad this one is:

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Last week we noted that India had shut down Facebook's Free Basics program, arguing the company's plan for zero rating Facebook-approved content and services is effectively glorified collusion; an attempt to eventually corner global ad markets under the banner of altruism. The country has been trying to craft net neutrality rules, and has slowly realized that whatever neutrality looks like, Facebook deciding what content Indians get access to isn't it.

For years now we've noted that while broadband ISPs rush toward broadband caps and usage overage fees, nobody is checking to confirm that ISP meters are accurate. The result has been user network hardware that reports usage dramatically different from an ISPs' meters, or users who are billed for bandwidth usage even when the power is out or the modem is off. Not only have regulators historically failed to see the anti-innovation, anti-competitive impact of usage caps, you'd be hard pressed to find a single official that has even commented on the problem of inaccurate broadband usage meters.

In the fall of 2014, we wrote about a plan by public documents guru Carl Malamud and law professor Chris Sprigman, to create a public domain book for legal citations (stay with me, this isn't as boring as it sounds!). For decades, the "standard" for legal citations has been "the Bluebook" put out by Harvard Law Review, and technically owned by four top law schools. Harvard Law Review insists that this standard of how people can cite stuff in legal documents is covered by copyright. This seems nuts for a variety of reasons. A citation standard is just an method for how to cite stuff. That shouldn't be copyrightable. But the issue has created ridiculous flare-ups over the years, with the fight between the Bluebook and the open source citation tool Zotero representing just one ridiculous example.

In the fall of 2014, we wrote about a plan by public documents guru Carl Malamud and law professor Chris Sprigman, to create a public domain book for legal citations (stay with me, this isn't as boring as it sounds!). For decades, the "standard" for legal citations has been "the Bluebook" put out by Harvard Law Review, and technically owned by four top law schools. Harvard Law Review insists that this standard of how people can cite stuff in legal documents is covered by copyright. This seems nuts for a variety of reasons. A citation standard is just an method for how to cite stuff. That shouldn't be copyrightable. But the issue has created ridiculous flare-ups over the years, with the fight between the Bluebook and the open source citation tool Zotero representing just one ridiculous example.

It's not like this wasn't easy to predict (because we did exactly that), but as China is pushing forward with its new "anti-terrorism" law, it's using the US's fight over encryption as a reason for why the law shouldn't be a problem. Part of the law would require that companies backdoor any encryption for the Chinese government:

With our week truncated by the holidays, voting was a little slow this time around. Nevertheless, we have a runaway winner taking the first place spots on both the insightful and funny sides. It came from an anonymous commenter in response to the Manhattan District Attorney's latest attacks on encryption:

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, we continued to track Homeland Security's recent mass seizures of domains. We discovered that their "evidence" of piracy included songs sent to the targeted blogs by the record labels themselves, and a close reading of the affidavit revealed plenty of technical and legal errors that kept getting worse. Despite all this, the Indie Music Association came out in support of the seizures. While Homeland Security was playing copyright cops at home, the US was busy trying to export stronger copyright around the globe, too. The ambassador to the UN made it clear that copyright and patents were more important than progress in developing nations, and the State Department was spending millions to train foreign judges on intellectual property issues. The Spanish legislature, at least, rejected new copyright laws that Wikileaks had revealed to be heavily influenced by US diplomats and, by extension, Hollywood. We also took some time this week to debunk common myths, like the idea that it can't be fair use to quote an entire article, the accusation that ISPs are profiting from piracy, and the fear that people just want stuff for free. Ten Years Ago Security and spam were big topics this week in 2005. Rootkits were spreading via instant messaging and even the Sony rootkit was still on some shelves (while Texas was extending its lawsuit to cover Sony's other copy protection technology), and one mysterious virus was surreptitiously downloading Mr. Bean to people's computers, possibly as part of some sort of shakedown scheme. Amidst this, we took a look at a three part series on overhauling the internet from MIT'S Tech Review, though sadly the original articles appear to have been taken down or moved. On the spam front, we noted that Bill Gates would almost certainly not be able to keep his 2004 promise that the spam problem would be "solved" within two years, though the FTC was cautiously optimistic about the future of spam, and some people were simply content to enjoy all the creative names spammers come up with. Fifteen Years Ago This week in 2000, there was lots of overhype about the sold-out gift of the season: the Playstation 2. This had interesting and varied consequences, ranging from one man's long and rambling article about trying to decide what to do with the one he got his hands on, to the news that Iraq was buying them up in bulk (presumably for the purposes of building a supercomputer). Next door in Iran, meanwhile, we saw a big collision of tradition and technology: a flame war among clerics, complete with cybersquatting. This year's other popular gift, despite it's $1,300 price tag, was Sony's Aibo robotic dog (which may or may not have come with a rootkit, who knows?), which sold 40,000 units. That's one way to use robots to make money from people with too much of it — another is what Honda announced: that it would start renting out the Asimo robot to parties and events. One-Hundred And Thirty-Three Years Ago Here's a slice of Christmas technology history from long before Playstations and robots: it was on December 22, 1882 that an associate of Thomas Edison unveiled the first Christmas tree decorated with electric lights. The lights became popular among businesses within 20 years, but wouldn't truly replace the mainstream choice of candles until the 1930s when the price had dropped sufficiently.

This week, instead of a closer look at one product, we're rounding up a bunch of interesting Kickstarter campaigns that aim to ship in 2016. So, if you didn't get everything you wanted this Christmas — or if you are planning really far ahead for the next — take a look. From The Simple-But-Cool Department: The Arcade Switch Light switches are boring, and that's... probably fine, actually. But just in case it's not, the Arcade Switch is a pretty great way to give them some flare. These classic-arcade-button light switch covers have a customizable color selection (with new glow-in-the-dark options coming if they hit some stretch goals) and start at only $4. Unfortunately, they only work with flat "rocker" switches, but if you've already got those then installation looks pretty easy. This campaign is nearly over! If you're reading this after the weekend, you're too late. From The Science-Is-Beautiful Department: μPeek The μPeek is an impressive little microscope the size of a credit card. It performs great for something so portable — it even crams motorized auto-focus into the tiny package, and achieves up to 350x magnification. Of course, it needs to be controlled by Bluetooth from an Android or iOS phone, and while this makes some sense considering it's all about portability, I'd really like to see more such products include simple desktop software as well, or at least an API that allows others to build apps on any platform. From The Slow-And-Steady Department: Enlaps While the μPeek is enabling microscopic photography, Enlaps is enabling time-lapse photography. The Enlaps Tikee is a self-contained, ultra-efficient time-lapse photography device that is designed to shoot practically forever with no memory or power limitations. It has a big battery and is self-charged by a solar panel, and ample internal storage that is regularly offloaded to the cloud via a wireless connection. All of this is managed by software that maximizes efficiency to get the longest standalone shoot possible, adjusting the schedule of uploads according to the recharge rate from the solar panel. Even without any solar charging whatsoever, it can take photos at ten-minute intervals for a week on one full charge. Of course, as you might expect, all this doesn't come cheap.