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The Daily, a short-lived, iPad-only "newspaper," may be in the process of setting a defamation land speed record: 64 characters.

When last we checked in with the internet's least-liked human being, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals was backpeddaling on his promise to lower the cost of the AIDS and cancer fighting drug Daraprim, and hiding it ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday in the hopes that fewer people would notice (it worked relatively well). CEO Martin Shkreli, you'll recall, increased the price for Daraprim from $13.50 per pill to $750 -- a 5000% or so mark up for a sixty-two-year-old medication. Shkrelli brought renewed attention to the skyrocketing prices of generics thanks to (ab)using restricted distribution to deny samples to generics manufacturers.

Get ready to take to the skies and capture some fun footage with the Micro Drone 2.0+ with HD-Camera for $99.99. This little drone weighs just over 1 ounce and comes with a 720p HD camera so you can film your flights, flips and tricks. Toss the drone into the air and start flying as it stabilizes itself with a self-righting algorithm and sensors. You can even fly this little one upside down -- it's one of the only micro drones able to do that. It comes with 4 spare blades, USB charger, a 400 ft. range and 8 minutes of flying time.

One of the craziest stories of outright censorship by the US government isn't getting any attention at all. Five years ago, ICE -- Immigrations and Customs Enforcement -- a part of the Department of Homeland Security, illegally seized a group of domain names, claiming that they were violating copyright law. As we noted soon after this, the affidavit that ICE used to get a court to sign off on the seizures was particularly ridiculous, showing a near total lack of understanding of both the law and how the internet worked.

While nobody expected much of former cable and wireless industry lobbyist turned FCC boss Tom Wheeler, he's actually been doing a relatively good job when it comes to standing up to entrenched broadband duopolists. From passing tougher net neutrality rules to taking aim at state level protectionist broadband law, he's often been on the side of the end user and actual competition. That has included an ocean of fines for fraud that, while wrist slaps for the bigger companies involved, have spearheaded a crack down on the kinds of behavior the FCC spent fifteen years pretending didn't exist.

For many years now we've discussed the unflagging belief on some fronts that WiFi is capable of making people sick, despite no scientific evidence supporting this belief. Getting some shouldn't be hard, yet the "electromagnetically sensitive" have yet to prove they're capable of even detecting the presence of WiFi signals during double blind studies. That hasn't stopped many of them from flinging lawsuits about, suing schools for making their kids sick, or even forcing school districts to eliminate WiFi entirely.

The government of Turkey has a really... weird relationship with the internet. The government seems quite quick to attack internet services and to shut them down if anyone says anything even mildly critical of the government. Starting about six years ago, we noted that Turkey would do things like banning all of YouTube or Blogger to try to block a single mocking or critical video or blog post. These bans seemed to come and go -- sometimes leading the actual citizens of Turkey to protest the outright censorship of useful services. In the last couple of years, things have ramped up a bit. An attempt to block a single blog post resulted in 60 million Wordpress sites being blocked. Turkey's President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan at one point ordered a ban on all of Twitter... even filing a lawsuit against his own government over this. There have also been attempts to ban Facebook. Oh, and Minecraft. In fact, just the other day the European Court of Human Rights said that Turkey's earlier YouTube ban violated freedom of expression in Turkey.

Congress is once again declaring its willingness to hold everyone in the nation accountable for their actions, present party excepted.

A few months back, Techdirt wrote about the European Commission's proposal to replace the traditional corporate sovereignty system -- generally known as "investor-state dispute settlement " (ISDS) -- with what it called the "Investment Court System" (ICS). That seemed to us little more than a re-branding exercise; now an international investment law scholar has weighed in on the issue with his own, rather more expert opinion. Gus Van Harten is Associate Professor at York University in Canada. According to his biography, he's written a book proposing:

The history of materials once correlated highly with the development of civilization: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, ... the Silicon Age.... However, we seem to have gotten away from huge advances depending on the discovery of new materials. Or maybe we just haven't discovered how to make the right materials yet (e.g., room temperature superconductors, nanotubes, etc). Here are just a few interesting materials that might change the world (if we can make them).

So this is interesting. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is dragging Google in front of the FTC, with a complaint alleging some potentially serious privacy violations concerning tracking of students in schools. The crux of the EFF's complaint:

Remember Patrick Zarrelli? Of course you do. He's the dude bro, who claimed to run a "reputation management" service, who was hired by an attorney named Gary Ostrow to "clean up" his Google mentions. At issue were a bunch of blog posts from blogging lawyers mocking Ostrow's ridiculous press release. Zarrelli seemed to think that the proper strategy to "manage" Ostrow's "reputation" was to call up a bunch of these lawyers -- many of whom have built their reputations on protecting free speech rights -- and threatening them, saying they should take down their blog posts. That went about as well as you'd expect if you've spent any amount of time online. Lots of people wrote about Zarrelli's fuck up, including us. As that mess was happening, Zarrelli lashed out a few times, threatening bar complaints against the lawyers mocking him.

Michael Geist has a long and detailed post on the Canadian Supreme Court's finding that broadcaster CBC doesowe royalties on incidental copies of content controlled by SODRAC, a Quebec-based copyright collective.

Pakistan is pushing forward its version of CISPA/CISA, the PECB (Prevention of Electronic Crime Bill). Much like here in the US, legislators have put this together without the input of legal or technical experts and, to make matters worse, this one is being pushed under a regime already notorious for censorious actions and intrusive surveillance.

Early last year, Tor suffered a massive attack that compromised the anonymity of its users over a period of at least six months. Soon after, the FBI launched Operation Onymous, which dismantled yet another round of darknet markets and left Tor developers and supporters desperately wondering what went wrong. Last month, Tor then dropped a bit of a bombshell: it claimed the FBI paid researchers at Carnegie Mellon $1 million to conduct a Sybil attack on the network. Running from January to July of 2014, CERT used just $3,000 in hardware to flood the Tor network with additional new relays that then modified Tor protocol headers to do traffic confirmation attacks.

Underdog Texas company takes on corporate giants!

The eternal search for where you parked your car. TV shows have had entire episodes based around this idea. The Zus Car Charger and Locator can help eliminate that mildly embarrassing tradition of wandering parking lots and looking completely lost. Plug it into your car's power supply and it uses Bluetooth to help guide your phone back to your car -- no data plan required. The $29.99 Zus even acts as a fast charger for your phone so you can stay fully charged while out and about. If you order very soon in the US, it could be here in time for Christmas.

As we noted a couple of weeks ago, Judge Liam O'Grady rejected Cox Communication's attempt to protect itself under the DMCA's safe harbor concerning a "repeat infringer policy." At the time, he only said he would explain his reasons later, and late yesterday he released his full opinion. It, unfortunately, brings to mind the phrase "hard cases make bad law."

Earlier this year, we noted that Barbie had received a face lift for the internet of things age. Hello Barbie is able to take commands from your kids, but also connects to your home Wi-Fi network to shovel your children's conversations to the cloud -- purportedly to improve Barbie's voice recognition technology. At the time, groups like the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood complained that monetizing the ramblings of toddlers was a line that shouldn't be crossed, given that kids would no longer be talking to a doll, they'd be "talking directly to a toy conglomerate whose only interest in them is financial."

A little history: In 2011, after quite a bit of study, the so-called Hargreaves Report was released in the UK, with some fairly mundane suggestions on how copyright law in the UK could be updated for the 21st century. One of the key suggestions? Admit that it was legal to rip your own CDs to MP3s, which everyone had simply assumed to be the case anyway. Of course, it took over three years for that to actually be implemented. However, back in August of 2014, the UK finally made it officially legal to rip CDs (of course, in the intervening three years, fewer and fewer people even bothered to buy CDs any more, but, details...). Then, less than a year after that happened, we noted that the UK's high court stripped away that right after the record labels protested. The court ruled that private ripping of CDs "harms" the recording industry and thus, couldn't be allowed. The court left open the possibility that perhaps the UK government might find a workaround, but the UK's Secretary of State told the court it was fine with killing the law anyway -- and thus, on July 17th, the private copying exception was dead.

Privacy International, which has been engaged in legal challenges over GCHQ spying for the past few years, has obtained an oversight document as a result of its litigation. What they show is the agency's broad hacking powers and the reluctance of its oversight to condone these actions.

The Boston Police Department has been fighting two FOIA requests -- one from Mike Katz-Lacabe and one from Shawn Musgrave -- for months. We covered Katz-Lacabe's battle back in June. In that one, the BPD denied the release of documents related to Stingray devices on the questionable grounds that they were covered under the "investigative materials" exemption.

If you haven't noticed, there's a climate change conference going on that could have an impact on global commerce and... possibly the global climate, if you believe we puny humans can actually change the climate. Even if you don't think climate change is a real problem, it shouldn't hurt to explore more energy technologies or environmental remediation techniques, right? (Well, unless we get ourselves into a Snowpiercer situation.)

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that certain legal memos justifying the government's drone strikes can remain secret. The long-running FOIA lawsuit involving the New York Times and the ACLU has been covered previously here. At the center of this FOIA lawsuit are more than 100 legal opinions from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that provide the legal argument for the extrajudicial killing of suspected terrorists.

As companies race to embrace the inanely-named "internet of things" (IOT), security and privacy are usually a very distant afterthought. That's been made painfully apparent by "smart" refrigerators that expose your Gmail credentials, "smart" TVs that transmit your living room conversations unencrypted, or "smart" tea kettles that compromise your Wi-Fi network security. In all these examples the story remains the same: everybody's so excited to connect everything and anything to the internet, few companies can be bothered to do so intelligently and correctly.

Privacy and free speech aren't fundamentally opposed, but they do have a tendency to come into conflict — and recent developments in Europe surrounding the right to be forgotten have brought this conflict into focus. This week, we're joined by Daphne Keller of Stanford's Center For Internet And Society to discuss the collision between these two important principles. 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.

As we've noted, we regularly get legal threats, some of which are more serious than others. Sometimes we ignore them entirely, and sometimes we feel the need to respond. Depending on the situation, sometimes we respond privately. Sometimes we respond publicly. The more ridiculous the threat, the more likely we are to respond publicly -- and I think the latest holds up as one of the most ridiculous legal threats we've seen. It comes from Milorad Trkulja, who is also known as Michael Trkulja, and who lives in Australia. Trkulja made some news a few years back when he (somewhat surprisingly) successfully sued both Yahoo and Google for hundreds of thousands of dollars, because when people did image searches on a variety of phrases related to things like "Australian criminal underworld mafia" sometimes a picture of Trkulja would show up. Apparently, Trkulja was actually shot in the back a decade ago by an unknown gunman. And somehow, for whatever reasons, certain websites included pictures of him along with enough keywords that the search algorithms at both Google and Yahoo would return his photo in such searches. We wrote about his victory over Google back in November of 2012, pointing out how ridiculous it was that an Australian court said you could sue search engines because image search happens to pop up your image along with actual gangsters.

We've already discussed how Nicholas Merrill can finally reveal the ridiculous and almost certainly unconstitutional National Security Letter (NSL) he received 11 years ago while operating a small ISP, Calyx Internet Access. However, with that revelation also came the unredacted version of the judge's ruling back in October. When we wrote about the October ruling we had mocked many of the obviously ridiculous redactions -- including this somewhat iconic redacted footnote: Thanks to the unredacted decision's release, we can now see what exactly was redacted and it was mostly judge Victor Marrero totally mocking the DOJ's ridiculous arguments. Here's that footnote, by the way: If you can't read it, it says:

Yes, yes, we realize that it's no longer Monday, let alone the ridiculously named Cybermonday, but our eLearning sale has been extended, because that's how things go. Don't complain, you get stuff for less. Today you can receive an additional 20% off of your eLearning purchase (excluding the Pay What You Want bundles) by using the CYBERMONDAY20 code (yes, you're allowed to snicker when you do). A few more of our best sellers are listed below.

Back in October, we followed up on a much older story concerning Nicholas Merrill, the owner of Calyx Internet Access, who back in 2004 had received one of the FBI's infamous National Security Letters (NSLs) complete with a total gag order on it. NSLs have long been widely abused by the FBI to (unconstitutionally) get around the 4th Amendment, demanding all sorts of information from private parties and then putting a perpetual gag order on the request, which also would seem to violate the 1st Amendment. Merrill fought back against the NSL -- at first anonymously because he wasn't even allowed to admit to anyone that he'd received one. In 2010, Merrill was finally granted the right to admit that he had received an NSL and that he was fighting it. But he still couldn't reveal much more than that.

We've written about Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart and his desire to censor the internet for a few years now. Back in 2009, he sued Craigslist because he claimed it was "the single largest source of prostitution in the nation." As we noted at the time, Craigslist was just a platform, and suing it made no sense at all -- especially given that the company was more than willing to cooperate closely with law enforcement and help them track down people who were breaking the law online. In other words, whereas a sheriff who was actually interested in stopping law breaking might embrace the site and work with it to track down law breakers, Dart, chose to sue the toolmaker. That lawsuit failed miserably, but Sheriff Dart never gave up his quixotic quest to blame internet companies for prostitution.

Historically, the cable and broadcast industry has made a full-time sport out of trying to ignore the changing TV landscape and the threat posed by internet video. There's a fairly significant number of cable and broadcast execs who still believe that internet video, cord cutting, cord trimmers (users who cut back on cable packages) and recent ratings declines are some kind of mass delusion akin to the yeti or the mysterious chupacabra. Others think this recent commotion is just a fad we're going through that will magically resolve once millennials start procreating.

The UK's "Snooper's Charter" was already terrible. The draft bill, finally released earlier this month, confirmed the UK government would be mandating encryption backdoors and requiring the retention of citizens' web browsing history. On top of that, the bill confirmed dragnet surveillance by UK agencies was alreadyin place (unbeknownst to its "oversight") and, in fact, is looking to legalize the snooping after the fact.

Before the Wright brothers and planes, people had actually flown in hot air balloons as early as 1783. Those early balloons didn't travel that far -- just a few miles or a couple dozen miles if the balloons were filled with hydrogen. Blimps (aka airships) were somewhat common in the early 1900s, but obviously that mode of transportation didn't really stick around after the spectacular demise of the Hindenburg. Perhaps we're due for a comeback for more advanced balloons now?

As body cameras become the new normal in policing, there's been a significant amount of pushback from the law enforcement community. There is some natural resistance from certain police officers -- the same ones that probably resisted being saddled with dash cams and audio mics.

The history of anti-piracy activities by the legacy entertainment and software industries always seems to focus on the mistaken idea that if only the public were "more educated" piracy would magically go away. That's never been true. In fact, nearly every attempt at an education campaign hasn't just failed to work, it's often actively backfired and been mocked and parodied. And yet, if you talk to politicians and industry folks, they still seem to think that "more education" will magically work next time. One can only wonder what the hell the geniuses at the Software Alliance (the BSA -- which used to be the "Business Software Alliance" but has dropped the "Business" part, but not the "B" in its name) were thinking when they decided to "settle" with a guy who apparently uploaded some Microsoft software in the Czech Republic. The terms of the settlement required him to take part in a "professionally produced" anti-piracy video and that the video needed to get 200,000 views on YouTube or he might face having to pay damages in court.

Just about a week ago, the NY Times had a giant article comparing Saudi Arabia to ISIS. It was a rather powerful article that highlights the similarities and connections between the two, while really highlighting the incredibly hypocritical attitude of many Western politicians who freely embrace the Saudi government while claiming that ISIS is barbaric.

There's just something absolutely nutty when politicians with no technical knowledge whatsoever try to make technology policy, and it often crosses over into out-and-out slapstick when that technology policy involves surveillance. It's why we see things like talk of "golden keys" for encryption that somehow wouldn't be "backdoors" (even though they are). Over in the UK, they're going through something similar with the current "debate" (if you can call it that) over the latest Snooper's Charter bill, officially known as the "Investigatory Powers Bill" or the "IPBill."

Nick Selby says an LA councilwoman has just proposed "the worst use of license plate data in history." He's not lying.

What better way to procrastinate doing work on a Monday than by shopping for some deals. We're hopping on that bandwagon this year with 25% off all of the eLearning deals (except the Pay What You Want ones) in our Deals Store. Just use the code CYBERMONDAY25 when you check out today only. Some of our favorite courses are listed below. And while you're shopping, take a look at our Techdirt Gear Clearance sale, which runs until December 13th.

The mission of museums and art galleries is generally to spread knowledge and appreciation of beautiful and interesting objects. So it's rather sad when they start taking legal action against others that want to help them by disseminating images of public domain works of art to a wider audience. This obsession with claiming "ownership" of something as immaterial as the copyright in a photograph of a work of art made centuries ago led the UK National Portrait Gallery (NPG) to threaten Derrick Coetzee, a software developer, when he downloaded images from the NPG and added them to Wikimedia Commons, the media repository for Wikipedia, of which he was an administrator. That was back in 2009, and yet incredibly the same thing is still happening today, as this Wikimedia blog post explains:

In response to the attacks in Paris earlier this month, the French government has enacted a state of emergency. Like the War on Terror itself, this "state of emergency" has no discernible end in sight. The government has given itself an incredible amount of power for an indefinite period of time. When this power shift happens, abuse follows.

The NSA's frontmouth, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is burying news again. Not that it could help it. Normally, the ODNI likes to do its document dumps (most often consisting of documents ordered out of its hands by federal judges presiding over FOIA lawsuits) on Friday afternoons or shortly before a holiday to buy itself some response time before dealing with journalists and Congressional committees.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal's Stacy Meichtry and Joshua Robinson published an in-depth bit of reporting on the planning and operational setup of the Paris attackers, revealing a bunch of previously unknown details. The key thing, however, isn't just the total lack of anything that looks like sophisticated encryption, but the opposite. The attackers basically did nothing to hide themselves, communicating out in the open, booking houses and cars in their real names, despite some of them being on various terrorist watch lists. It discusses how Brahim Abdeslam booked a house using an online website (Homelidays -- a French service that is similar to Airbnb, though it predates Airbnb by a lot), using his own name. So did his brother, Salah Abdeslam, who booked a hotel for a bunch of the attackers (using his real name) on Booking.com.

We've got a double-winner this week, with DannyB taking the first place spot for insightful and the second place spot for funny. The comment in question comes in response to Yahoo's sad and baffling decision to start blocking Yahoo Mail for Adblock users, and explains a better way of looking at it:

Five Years Ago The parade of horrors from the TSA continued this week, as the world continued reacting to the new enhanced security processes. One man stripped down in an attempt to avoid being groped and ended up under arrest for failing to complete the security process, while a botched pat-down left another passenger covered in urine from a broken urostomy bag. President Obama took a trip with the CEO of the company that makes the naked scanners and soon after defended the scans, while people trying to find out if the TSA had ever successfully stopped a terrorist were rebuffed in the name of national security. It was clear that the rollout of the new scanners was rushed, leaving the whole process limited in its effectiveness, but that didn't stop newspapers from snidely mocking objections to the TSA or the San Diego Airport from saying that recording the groping procedure is an arrestible offence. The TSA was even making people go through the process after their flights, but their demonstration of the groping in congress seemed to backfire, and they couldn't even keep a loaded gun magazine from being left on a plane and found by a child. The TSA's overall failure all stemmed from the same issue: the myth of perfect security. Ten Years Ago The fallout from the Sony rootkit fiasco was dying down this week in 2005, but it wasn't over. Texas' attorney general sued the company while the numbers showed that infected Sony CDs took a significant sales hit. One anti-virus firm came out to dispel notions that it might have colluded with Sony by explaining why it was unable to detect the rootkit sooner, and we asked a critical question: can any business based on copy protection survive? TiVo apparently thought so, as it was expanding its offerings of content on iPods and PSPs at the cost of more robust DRM and content controls. This was a precautionary measure that didn't seem to work, as TV executives almost immediately began threatening to sue. Another new company was simply begging to be sued (though it's a shame that's the case) by selling iPods with preloaded video ripped from simultaneously purchased DVDs. iTunes also hit an interesting milestone: it surpassed Tower Records in sales. Fifteen Years Ago I highlighted that last point because five years earlier, almost to the day, a study predicted that MP3s would replace CDs within five years. Of course there's lots to debate about what exactly iTunes' sales milestone meant, and what "replacing" CDs means, and so on — but it is still delightfully prophetic on the surface. The ASIMO robot is an ongoing project that is widely known today, but it was this week in 2000 that Honda first unveiled it. Around the same time, the first self-contained bionic hand was completed in the UK. Carmakers were experimenting with driver-assisting cameras and, less glamorously, hotels were using technology to automate and secure their minibars. Oh, and Amazon got knocked offline on Black Friday, which is some very unlucky timing. Twenty-Eight Years Ago Last week, we highlighted a famous authorized (but unfortunate) interruption of a broadcast signal. This week, we've got the anniversary of what is probably the most famous unauthorized intervention on the airwaves. It was on November 22nd, 1987 that a still-unidentified person dressed as Max Headroom hijacked two Chicago television stations for no immediately obvious reasons. To this day, it remains a minor mystery.

Google Cardboard is a wonderful way to make virtual reality more accessible (you can even grab one on sale in the Insider Shop) but it still has its limitations. Today we're looking at a new twist on smartphone-powered VR: the Figment phone case with built-in viewer. The Good The main limitation to Cardboard-style VR rigs is that they simply aren't as powerful, immersive or responsive as headgear like the Oculus Rift — but in exchange they are affordable and mobile, with the potential to make VR (and its cousin, augmented reality) a bigger part of everyday life. However, if there's one thing that holds them back from fulfilling that potential, it's that they are bulky and somewhat ugly — portable, but not convenient enough to carry with you everywhere, and not something you can leave permanently attached to your smartphone. The Figment offers a new approach: it foregoes the boxy enclosure and embeds the most critical part — the lenses — directly into an iPhone case. The eyepiece sits flush with the back of the phone until you flip it out, at which point an aluminum arm holds the lenses in place at VR viewing distance, immediately bringing a 360-degree 3D video or an augmented reality layer to life. Putting the lenses so close at hand unlocks the power of this type of lightweight VR as both a tool and a more common way to consume content. Setting up your Cardboard rig to check out a 3D YouTube video is a bit of a hassle that you'll only commit to on occasion; but flipping an eyepiece out of your phone hardly adds any barrier at all, and suddenly you might find yourself opening up such content on a whim. The Bad Obviously, the lack of a full enclosure means the Figment doesn't deliver a fully-immersive experience, and may be more suited to AR than VR on the whole. But that's a sensible sacrifice in service of the goal of portability and convenience — if and when it moves past the other key issue of only currently being available for iPhones, and as the price of full headset rigs comes down, Cardboard may start to look like an unnecessary middle ground: not as convenient as the Figment, not as immersive as the Rift. The Content Whether you've got a Rift or a Cardboard, or plan to get a Figment, you'll need content to enjoy. With VR becoming more widespread, a growing number of creators are working to harness its unique capabilities, and there's another Kickstarter project underway that's worth checking out: Blackout, "a virtual glimpse into the lives of strangers". It's an original virtual reality documentary based on the idea of reading the minds of fellow commuters on a stalled subway train, in which you can look around and hear thoughts based on actual interviews with real people from around the world. This sort of experimentation is what makes a new medium like VR truly exciting, so be sure to check it out.

We never planned to have a Black Friday event, but we have been getting ready to hold big sale for a while now, and it just so happens to have serendipitously coincided with the (in)famous shopping event — so here it is! Starting today, we're clearing out all our existing Techdirt merchandise to make room for new offerings in the future. Until December 13th in the Insider Shop, we're offering huge discounts on all our shirts, hoodies and more in the Techdirt Gear Clearance Sale. In addition to favorites like the DMCA t-shirt and the Seized t-shirt (both over 40% off), we've dug up some old Techdirt classics from before the Insider Shop: t-shirts featuring the original DMCA design and one of our many inside jokes for only $10 each. We've got extremely limited quantities and size availability in these designs, and some will likely never be offered again, so act quickly if you want to grab one! There's a bunch of Techdirt logo gear with huge discounts too. We've also got some gear from Techdirt's think-tank, The Copia Institute: a logo t-shirt and keychain, and a ready-to-assemble Copia Cardboard kit for diving into the world of smartphone-powered VR. The Techdirt Gear Clearance sale runs until December 13th, and all merchandise orders will be processed and shipped together on the 14th and 15th. Check out the sale today!

Plenty of businesses rely on third-party payers: parents often pay for college; insurance companies pay most health care bills. Reaching out to potential third-party payers is hardly a new or revolutionary business practice. But someone should tell the Patent Office. Earlier this year, it issued US Patent No. 9,026,468 to Securus Technologies, a company that provides telephone services to prisoners. The patent covers a method of "proactively establishing a third-party payment account." In other words, Securus patented the idea of finding someone to pay a bill. It's been an interesting few weeks for Securus. First, the FCC announced that in response to price gouging by the industry, it would impose per-minute price caps on prison calls. Then The Intercept reported on a massive hack of recorded Securus calls: 70 million recordings, including many calls made under attorney-privilege, were leaked through SecureDrop. We'd like to add November's Stupid Patent of the Month award. Securus' patent has a single independent claim with three steps. These steps are: 1) identifying a "prospective third-party payer"; 2) detecting a "campaign triggering event" (this can be something like an inmate being booked into a facility); and 3) "initiating a campaign to proactively contact" the prospective third-party payer using an "interactive voice response system." In other words, when an inmate gets booked into the local jail, Securus robocalls a family member to ask if they are willing to set up a pre-paid phone account. There are two serious problems with this patent. First, the claims are directed to a mind-numbingly mundane business practice and should have been rejected as obvious. Obvious uses or combinations of existing technology are not patentable. Second, the claims are ineligible for patent protection under the Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Alice v. CLS Bank—this is a recent Supreme Court decision that holds that an abstract idea (like contacting potential third-party payers) doesn't become eligible for a patent simply because it is implemented using generic technology. That the system failed to register either of these defects shows deep dysfunction. In a sane world, a patent examiner would apply common sense and reject Securus' application out of hand. It includes no technological innovation (it notes that all of the relevant phone technology already exists); instead, it simply describes a basic set of steps for contacting potential third-party payers. Unfortunately, the Federal Circuit has essentially beaten common sense out of the patent system. For example, it recently overruled an examiner who had relied on common sense for the basic fact that electrical plugs have prongs. This repudiation of common sense is how we get patents on filming a yoga class or white background photography. To the patent examiner's credit, he did originally reject all of Securus' claims as obvious based on a combination of earlier publications regarding third-party payment accounts. Securus appealed that rejection to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The PTAB overruled (PDF) the examiner. In a victory of hyper-formalism over rationality, the PTAB said that the examiner had not giving sufficiently explicit reasons for combining the teachings of prior publications. What about Alice v. CLS Bank? Securus' claims are just an abstract idea implemented on generic technology. They should therefore have been found ineligible under the Supreme Court's new standard. In fact, when it overruled the examiner on obviousness grounds, the PTAB explicitly noted (in a footnote) that the examiner "may wish to review the claims for compliance under 35 U.S.C. § 101" in light of the Alicedecision. Yet the Patent Office ignored this suggestion and rubber stamped the claims. We have repeatedly urged the Patent Office (here, here, and here) to do a better job applying Aliceto pending applications. It is very disappointing to see patents like this one being granted months after the Supreme Court's ruling. Even invalid patents are very expensive to defeat in court after they've issued. Securus already has a captive market for its services. It does not need the monopoly power of a stupid patent as well. Reposted from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Deeplinks blog

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is preparing for an en banc hearing on whether there is a privacy interest inherent in mugshots, or whether they are simply public records that can be obtained with an FOIA request.