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Last night Judge Pierre N. Leval, a renowned fair use scholar and judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, delivered the Fourth Annual Peter A. Jaszi Distinguished Lecture on Intellectual Property (you can watch the recording at that link) at the law school where I teach, the American University Washington College of Law (whew). "Lecture" doesn't really do it justice, though; Leval may have spoken in front of a lectern at a law school, but what he said was hardly dry or academic. Instead, it was a bravura exercise in storytelling, which is fitting, as storytelling and narrative are some of Peter Jaszi's favorite subjects, second only to fair use.

I've talked about the coming and evolving world of wider streaming in professional and major college sports for quite a while now. Even measuring only the past few years, streaming of sporting events has seen immense progress, from the leagues themselves getting on board and expanding options, to broadcast partners opening up their product online, to forward-looking team owners recognizing that the future is in streaming. Wide-spread streaming sports is going to happen, due to all of the above and the fact that cord-cutting is simply not going to go away.

Tipping is an acceptable custom in many restaurants across America, but the tradition isn't looked upon favorably in other parts of the world -- or even across the entire service sector in the US. Sure, there are arguments for it and against it -- and minor debates are held every day over how much of a tip to leave. Lately, there's been some shift towards eliminating tipping -- for a variety of reasons from restaurants trying to manage increasing minimum wages to general appeals to fairness.

The Supreme Court is taking a swing at the Sixth Amendment and it looks like it may be worse off by the time the court's finished with it.

Most of the nation's law enforcement agencies seem to accept body-worn cameras as inevitable. The DOJ supports their use of body cameras and has set aside $20 million in funding assistance for state and local agencies.

Appeals court rulings on the cell site location information are literally all over the place. (Also figuratively.)

Earlier this week, we noted that "website reputation management" dude, Patrick Zarrelli had sent us a large packet of papers claiming that he had "filed criminal charges and bar complaints in seven states" against a group of people, including our own Tim Cushing, because Tim had written a blog post making fun of Zarrelli for a spectacular failure in trying to get certain articles about the lawyer Gary Ostrow removed from the internet. You can read all the details at previous posts, but Zarrelli claimed that he was filing "criminal charges and bar complaints" against Cushing and a small group of lawyers -- Scott Greenfield, Mark Bennett, Brian Tannebaum and Sam Glover -- who had all made fun of Zarrelli's ridiculous claims.

Social media platforms are the best (unwitting) honeypots. The FBI continues to prowl public posts on Twitter, Facebook, etc. for "suspicious" material. Whatever triggers the FBI's counterterrorism spidey senses is followed shortly thereafter with subpoenas for user info. This is then followed up by DOJ press releases announcing the successful capture of another dangerous individual.

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Earlier this year, lots of copyright law watchers were taken by surprise when Alki David's video streaming service, FilmOn (though its name constantly has changed) actually won a case in California. If you don't recall, the service was a sort of fake knock-off of Aereo, enabling streaming broadcast TV service on the internet. Alki David, an eccentric, publicity-hound wealthy guy, had been sued earlier with a similar service, using a different technical infrastructure, and had responded with some ridiculous countersuits. When Aereo hit the scene, and had been carefully vetted by copyright lawyers who believed (strongly) that it was following the letter of the law, David suddenly declared that FilmOn was using the same micro-antenna infrastructure and got sued.

The Freedom of Information Act was put into place to give us a more accountable government. The theory was that more transparency would lead to better governing. Our public servants would know their activities were open to scrutiny and might start acting like their employers were watching over their shoulders.

Our Facebook, who art on the internet, mashup be thy name. My question's one, will Comcast come, to our church as connectivity has ended? Give us this day, at least one technician, and forgive us our addresses, as we forgive those whose customer service sucks. And leave us not without our Netflix, but deliver us from downtime, amen.

Late last month, FBI head James Comey contributed to the "Ferguson Effect" mythmaking, blaming unexplained spikes in violent crime on… citizens filming police officers. His argument? Officers fear for their power and no longer feel like exiting their vehicles to do their job.

Just when you think you've heard it all, along comes a story so ridiculous it's hard to write headlines for it that do it justice. We can still try, I guess. For pure hilarious complications, it's hard to outdo the state of Texas denying Rodeo Austin, which puts on a fair and rodeo down south, a registration for its name because its name is supposedly too similar to El Rodeo Inc., a Mexican restaurant that doesn't appear to exist.

The FAA hasn't exactly been quick to figure out how its going to regulate drones, and its current rules are a bit of an arbitrary mess of trying to determine what "commercial use" really means and how to register pilots and/or the UAVs they fly. Still, plenty of projects are moving forward with plans to use (semi-)autonomous robots to deliver packages more efficiently and quickly.

Nearly every week another website shutters its news comment section, breathlessly declaring that comments are an old-fashioned relic of a bygone era, long supplanted by the miracle that is social media. More annoying than the act of shuttering news comments sections perhaps is the disingenuous blather that accompanies these announcements; company after company proudly insisting that they're muzzling entire communities -- because they just really, really value conversation. As we've noted it doesn't actually take much work to fix comments, it just requires actually giving half a damn about the end user.

There's something a bit strange going on over at Rockstar Games. The makers of the Grand Theft Auto series have reportedly banned several players in the past week, all of them associated with a particular GTA5 game mod called "FiveM." Rockstar's reasoning for the ban will sound familiar to many observers of gaming in the online space.

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.

In the past, we've discussed the idea of "soft corruption" a few times -- which in some ways can be more nefarious than out and out corruption. In soft corruption, it's not what most people normally think of as corruption (i.e., cash for getting something from politicians), but merely something that presents the very strong appearance of influence buying. It involves situations where even if everything being done is legal and done for the right intentions, the mere appearance of the conflict reduces the public's trust in government. Earlier this week, we wrote about how the House Judiciary Committee, which claims to be working on a major copyright reform effort, held "listening tours" in both Silicon Valley and Los Angeles (unfortunately, reinforcing the idea that copyright is a "Hollywood v. Silicon Valley" concept). As we noted, however, we were pleasantly surprised at the Silicon Valley hearing, that the discussion seemed really positive. It was (a) focused on actual ideas that could be implemented and (b) the members of the Judiciary Committee really seemed open to lots of good ideas.

The DOJ has been instrumental in curbing abuse and misconduct by local law enforcement agencies around the nation. Its own backyard, however, remains a complete mess.

Most of us probably need to be more active in our daily lives and get ourselves out from behind our screens. Grab a refurbished Fitbit Flex Activity Tracker for $69.99 in the Deals store and start tracking your steps and activity minutes -- and get motivated to do more. This slim tracker is water-resistant, has a battery life of up to 5 days and can be worn on your wrist or carried discreetly in your pocket so you can always keep track of your activity. The data from the band will sync easily and wirelessly with your smartphone or computer, and the app will help you set personal goals to help keep you motivated. The tracker comes with one large wristband, wireless sync dongle and is available in black, slate or blue.

We've been here before a few times. Back in 2008, video game giant Blizzard initially won a very dangerous ruling against a World of Warcraft bot maker, saying that if (as most software companies do) the End User License Agreement (EULA) says that you've only licensed the product, rather than bought it, then any violation of the EULA can be a violation of copyright law. Copyright expert William Patry, at the time, pointed out how insane such a ruling was:

First, let's go back a year or so. A few weeks before the big Black Hat Conference in 2014, it was announced that a planned presentation from two Carnegie Mellon University researchers (Michael McCord and Alexander Volynkin), entitled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget" was pulled from the program, leading to lots and lots of speculation about what happened. Soon after this, the Tor Project announced it had discovered a group of relays that appeared to trying to deanonymize Tor users who were operating Tor hidden services.

So far the cable and broadcast industry has had a three pronged approach to the threat of cord cutting and the rise of Internet video. One, remain in stark denial about the changes in its sector, refusing anything more than the most superficial evolution (and if anybody notices, just use the word innovation a lot). Two, a relentless dedication to annoying its customers further at every turn, whether that's blocking ad skipping technology or inserting more ads than ever into every viewing hour. And three, a total refusal to ever, ever compete on price. Ingenious, right?

Good news for Canadians! Well…some of them. This good news only applies to a) Ontario residents who a.1) aren't vexatious litigants who use BS defamation lawsuits to silence critics.

We were just discussing the University of Kentucky's asshat-ish bullying attempts concerning Kentucky Mist Moonshine's gall in selling hats and t-shirts featuring the distillery's name and logo. The whole episode has been entirely silly from the outset, with the school essentially declaring itself the sole owner of the name of its home state for the purposes of its use on apparel. This attempt to throw aside even the question of actual customer confusion made the whole thing a strange power-play against a distillery, with some questioning how a trademark over a state's name could be granted in the first place. Kentucky Mist itself filed a lawsuit against the school, requesting that the trademark it has chosen to flaunt so brazenly be either declared invalid entirely or reformed to protect the school only against any attempts to actually be associated with the school as opposed to the state of Kentucky.

Pollution from energy generation is an enormous problem that will probably require an expensive solution -- which, thankfully, billionaires like Bill Gates are willing to fund. However, we're already spending billions on energy R&D, but progress seems slow when the doomsday clock appears to be "catastrophically" close to midnight. The option of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere might give us some additional time, though, even if global-scale geoengineering sounds like it might have its own unintended side effects.

This is hardly a surprise, but the DC Appeals Court has issued a stay on Judge Richard Leon's ruling from earlier this week that the NSA's bulk phone record collection program was unconstitutional. This is the same appeals court that overturned Leon's earlier ruling finding the program unconstitutional. This time, as we noted, Judge Leon refused to grant the government a stay, noting that the DC Circuit had taken its sweet time in actually issuing a ruling on the appeal -- and the program is set to end in a couple weeks anyway. Also, Leon didn't order the entire program shut down, but just that the NSA stop keeping the records of the plaintiffs who were customers of Verizon Business Network Services (J.J. Little and J.J. Little & Associates).

We've talked a lot in the past about how various state Attorneys General love to grandstand in ways where they get headlines that they can hold up to claim they're "protecting the public from evil corporations," even when there's no legal basis for it. Usually it's for the sake of the headlines, because most state Attorneys General use their office as a stepping stone for Governor or Senator. In the last few years, the "pick on high profile company x" plan has involved a lot of internet companies -- because they're in the news so much. And, now, New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has declared daily fantasy sports sites like FanDuel and Draft Kings to be illegal and ordered them to stop accepting users in NY.

The FBI's General Counsel is swimming in the wake of FBI Director James Comey's personal Crypto War. James Baker appears to be much more pragmatic about encryption than his boss. He's also conceded something Comey appears unwilling to: that the public's ultimately in charge here because that's the way our government is supposed to work.

A few months ago the FCC voted to crack down on the ripping off of inmates and their families by prison telecom companies, which for decades now have charged upwards of $14 per minute for services that cost little to nothing to provide. At the time, prison telecom companies like Securus complained hysterically about the FCC's decision, CEO Richard Smith declaring the new price caps would have a "devastating effect" on its business, potentially ending its participation in "services and continuing inmate related programs."

The NSA likes its software vulnerabilities. There are those it discovers on its own and others it purchases from "weaponized software" dealers. There are also certain tech companies that hand over exploits to the NSA first before working on a patch for the rest of us.

Managing your time and resources well is the key to getting any project done well and on time. The Lean Process Project Management Course, available for $49.99, will teach you valuable ways to save time, effort and money on your projects. The 20 hours course focuses on how to prioritize tasks, how to assign tasks to the right person and how to shorten your project's duration. At the end of the self-paced course, you will receive a certificate of completion.

Last summer I noted that Comcast's PR department pretty consistently now sends me snotty e-mail "corrections." Not about any of the thousands of articles Techdirt or I have written about the company's abysmal customer service, punitive usage caps, ridiculously high prices, or obnoxiously anti-competitive behavior mind you, but to scold me for one and only one thing: calling the company's top lobbyist a lobbyist.

Techdirt has reported on so many different aspects of China's online clampdown, that it's natural to wonder if there's anything left to censor. Surprisingly, the answer is "yes", according to this Tech in Asia post:

Here's something worth reading: the Burlington, Vermont Police Department has announced it will no longer be participating in the Dept. of Defense's 1033 Program. This program is the well-intentioned effort to somehow make use of excess/old military inventory. Unfortunately, along with desks, computers, file cabinets and other office staples, the government also allows police departments to pick up mine-resistant vehicles, assault rifles, grenade launchers and other military gear -- often at a steep discount that's made even more inexpensive by Homeland Security grants.

A year ago, we were writing a ton on the famed Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report. This report, which Committee staffers spent years on, cost $40 million, and clocked in at nearly 7,000 pages of detailed analysis of the US's hugely questionable (both morally and legally) torture program in the wake of 9/11. After much fighting, the Senate finally released a heavily redacted executive summary, but since then there have been some questions about what happens with the full report. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was (believe it or not!) the driving force behind the report, had copies of the full report delivered to the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department and the Justice Department. However, there has been a lot of confusion over whether or not anyone actually read it. The DOJ clearly announced that officials had read the whole thing... but later claimed that no one had even opened the report. Obviously, the DOJ lied with one of those statements.

Colorado is one of roughly twenty states where incumbent ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, and AT&T have quite literally purchased protectionist state telecom laws that prohibit towns and cities from building their own broadband networks, or in some cases even partnering with private industry to improve existing ones. Only after a fifteen year nap did the FCC recently announce it was going to pre-empt such laws in Tennessee and North Carolina, something that was immediately met with hand-wringing and lawsuits from the broadband industry and its allies.

Drugs are baaad, mmkay? And it is highly recommended that you NOT take micro-doses of LSD while you're at work. So just don't do drugs. Never. (So that when you do...) And check out all the other animals in the animal kingdom that like to get high -- cuz if everyone else wanted to jump off a bridge, would you do it, too?

As rumored, T-Mobile has unveiled its latest attempt to kick the nation's wireless duopoly in the shins: exempting video services from the company's wireless broadband usage caps. According to the company's latest press release, T-Mobile customers will soon be able to stream video from 24 participating partners without it counting against user usage allotments. The initial list of participating companies includes most of the usual suspects, with T-Mobile stating any notable omissions (like YouTube and Amazon Prime Streaming) will be added in time.

Yesterday afternoon, for about two and a half hours, members of the House Judiciary Committee took part in what they're calling they're "Copyright Review Listening Tour" for a roundtable in Silicon Valley. There were 20 participants in the roundtable, mostly made up of people who work in and around the technology industry. Today, the Representatives will host a similar roundtable down in LA, which will be mostly made up of entertainment industry folks. Unfortunately, this aspect of the tour seems to reinforce the silly idea that copyright law is a battle between "Silicon Valley" vs. "Hollywood" -- and that what's good for one is bad for the other.

Fifty episodes! Having skipped just two weeks in the past, this marks one whole year of the Techdirt Podcast! In honor of that, we're taking on a very relevant topic that we haven't yet discussed: the medium of podcasting itself. 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.

Last year, when the Sony emails leaked, and it was revealed that the MPAA was still totally focused on bringing SOPA back through alternative means, one of the strategies explored was getting the International Trade Commission (the ITC) to set up a sort of secret SOPA. The ITC is an already problematic government agency that is already widely abused by patent holders. Basically, you can ask the ITC to "block" some sort of "illegal foreign competition." And for patent holders, this has meant going to the ITC and claiming that a foreign firm (or a domestic firm that is importing products) is violating its patents, and thus the ITC should issue an injunction blocking any such products from entering the US at its borders. This is already troublesome in the patent context, because the ITC process is entirely separate from either the USPTO's review of patents or the federal courts -- and actually has different rules. So even if a court might decide that a patent is invalid under existing rules, the ITC may have already started blocking the import of products, claiming patent infringement. It basically allowed patent holders to get two bites at the apple (sometimes, quite literally at Apple).

So... a week and a half ago, we published an article, written by Tim Cushing, discussing the rather poor decisions of a self-proclaimed "reputation management" guy named Patrick Zarrelli. Zarrelli, it appeared, had been hired by Florida attorney Gary Ostrow, to improve his reputation, but instead, Zarrelli proceeded on a course that seemed more likely to destroy his own reputation, and potentially drag Ostrow further down with him.

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For many years the broadband industry relentlessly argued that broadband usage caps were necessary to protect networks from congestion. Unless ISPs were allowed to meter broadband usage, we were told, the rise in Internet video would clog the world's tubes, resulting in a mammoth network apocalypse known as the exaflood. Years later, with the exaflood debunked as fear mongering nonsense and most engineers pointing out that caps don't really fix congestion anyway, the broadband industry was forced to admit half of the obvious: that broadband usage caps weren't about congestion.

The last time we checked in with the long-running TVEyes case, the TV monitoring company had scored another partial victory for fair use. The company packages clips of news stories from TV broadcasts and makes them available to paying subscribers -- which include journalists and government officials.

Here on Techdirt we often write about pharmaceutical companies doing what they can to string out their drug monopolies as long as possible, sometimes resorting to quite extraordinary approaches. But whatever tricks they use to extend their monopolies, one day those end, and at that point generic manufacturers can make the drug in question without needing a license. You'd think governments would be delighted by the downward pressure this exerts on prices, since it means that they can provide life-changing and life-saving treatments much more cheaply. But last week, we had the bizarre spectacle of a UK government health minister filibustering a Bill that would have encouraged doctors to prescribe more off-patent medicines. As the Independent newspaper reports:

As you may recall, we had written about the University of North Dakota getting trolled by a jackass over attempts to give themselves a new school team name. Once called The Fighting Sioux, the school bent to local tribes' requests and agreed to abandon that name and come up with a new one. After soliciting suggestions from the public, a guy who wanted the school to keep its old team name went ahead and registered for trademark all of the new possible team names. It was a move as annoying as it is ineffective since, as we pointed out at the time, this man would have to prove he was using those marks in the same marketplace as the school in order to allege any kind of trademark violation. UND was the victim of trademark bullying.

There are plenty of examples of self-learning machines nowadays. Yamaha has a motorcycle-riding bot named Motobot that wants to ride faster than a professional human motorcycle racer (though it cheats a bit with some training wheels). Machine learning is rapidly becoming a capability that we'll all encounter in our daily lives (if we haven't already with algorithmically-generated news feeds or ads or recommendations). Here are just a few other artificial intelligence projects that could be worth keeping an eye on.