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Five Years Ago This week in 2011, the New York Times had just launched its new paywall experiment. The newspaper expressed various mixtures of fantasy and denial, suggesting that people felt guilty about reading for free and that only college students and the unemployed would game the system. Of course, they were also trying to shut down those who took perfectly fair advantage of the holes they intentionally built in, and we even wondered if bypassing the paywall might have DMCA implications. Meanwhile, star columnist Paul Krugman was helping his readers figure out how to do it. Techdirt had its first encounter with Barry Eisler when he turned down a half-million dollar publishing contract to self-publish his book instead, and noticed an interesting path-crossing in Amanda Hocking, a self-published author being courted by big publishers with contracts worth millions. This was also the week that we got a very important ruling out of a big loss for Righthaven: a judge declared that even reposting an entire article can be fair use. Ten Years Ago This week in 2006, the RIAA got slapped down in its attempts to dig through people's computers for evidence of infringement. Meanwhile, one of its own studies was showing that file sharing was no big deal. Another study, from the Cato Institute, looked at how the DMCA has changed the nature of competition. Over in France, the parliament approved a law banning the sale of DRM'd content in stores like iTunes — garnering some serious kickback from Apple, which seemed rather contradictory in light of Steve Jobs' thoughts on DRM a few years earlier. This was also the week when the web scored one of its most pointless but iconic victories, convincing the producers of Snakes On A Plane to go back and shoot a new scene heavily requested by fans online. Fifteen Years Ago There seemed to be a lot of buzz about email this week in 2001. President Bush announced that he would no longer use it, thanks to fear of open records requests; one professor was amping up its importance, putting it alongside speaking and writing as the third revolutionary step in communications, while another was spinning a story about how email isolates us and is broadly terrible. I suspect both might have been going just a tad too far. Meanwhile, the real fight was in the world of instant messaging. One-Hundred And Thirty-Three Years Ago The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property was one of the first international treaties regarding intellectual property, and it still stands today as one of the widely-accepted treaties in the world. Mostly it has to do with allowing companies to get patents in other countries and be eligible for that country's local protections — and it was signed on March 20th, 1883.

Support our crowdfunding campaign today! Awesome Stuff is normally about highlighting interesting crowdfunding projects from others, but this week it's time for a little shameless self-promotion, because today is the last day of our campaign to fund Techdirt's encryption reporting! The campaign ends in a few hours, just before 1pm Pacific time. If you're a Techdirt regular, you know we've been working hard to cover the truth about a debate that is so often distorted by fear-mongering and empty rhetoric. Earlier this week, we released a new explainer video to summarize the subject and explain why it matters so much. Following the tragic attack in Brussels, the response to which is echoing what happened after the Paris attack, we've been keeping tabs on the politicians who are rushing to blame encryption even though the real issue was an intelligence community failure. And we're committed to covering each new legal development between the FBI and Apple, and (as is always Techdirt's policy) to include the full text of court filings and decisions whenever possible, so those who wish to go beyond our analysis can delve in themselves — something we're surprised still isn't the norm on most news websites. We've had a long list of people step up to express their support for Techdirt and explain why they think our campaign can make a difference, including EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, former CIA operative (and current novelist) Barry Eisler, Media Professor Dan Gillmor and former Senate staffer Jennifer Hoelzer — plus a whole lot of positive comments on the Beacon crowdfunding page. With your help, we'll be able to keep doing this kind of important reporting on the encryption debate and even expand our coverage. We're also dedicating some of the funding towards spreading the word — purchasing up some of the internet's cheap ad impressions that normally go to spammy banners and replacing them with public messages about encryption and links to our most important stories. We couldn't do any of this without your help, so if you haven't yet backed our project on Beacon, please consider doing so today before it closes. Thanks! Support our crowdfunding campaign today!

There's been a bit of a mess in the programming world, the past few days, that you may have missed if you don't pay close attention to certain circles of the internet, but it's fascinating on a number of different levels. The mess began when people at the messenger app Kik, realized that someone else, a guy named Azer Koculu, had a module on NPM named "kik." Some background: NPM stands for Node Package Manager -- and that's exactly what it is: a package manager/repository for programmers to share and reuse javascript code, useful for folks using node.js (a server side javascript environment). This is a good thing as it allows for fairly easy opportunities to share code and build on the work of others without having to reinvent the wheel.

You can almost set your watch that any company or group that comes out vehemently in favor of restrictive copyright protection under the guise of protecting artists will be found to be in violation of copyrights and acting in a manner demonstrating clearly that zero care is given to the well-being of artists. The most recent example of this is Time Warner. Recall in the past that the massive media company has regularly sued music startup groups, pimped the six-strikes agreement with Hollywood, worked with Rightscorp to milk money out of accused infringers, and back a ways waged a war unpopular with its signed musical artists against YouTube. This, all done by Time Warner in the name of advocating for artists and creators, was done even as we learned just to what lengths Warner Music has gone to make sure it paid artists as little as possible.

The accomplishments of artificial intelligence are making it a popular topic in the news again, both for its wins and its (apparent) failures. General artificial intelligence hasn't quite lived up to its full potential yet, but more open source AI projects could help speed up development. Here are just a few reminders that open source AI projects are making progress -- hopefully towards a more 'John Henry' type of AI and less of a scary Skynet program.

Matthew Doyle appears to be not just an ignorant bigot, but a proud ignorant bigot. But... it still should be concerning that he's been arrested for the crime of saying ignorant bigoted stuff on Twitter. Doyle is apparently a PR guy in the UK, who claimed on Twitter that he had "confronted" a Muslim woman on the street demanding that she "explain" the attacks in Brussels. She allegedly told him "nothing to do with me," which, frankly, is a much more polite response than he deserved: There is some question as to whether or not this actually happened or if it was just Doyle acting out his ignorant jackass fantasies online. But what is clear is that he was then arrested. Not -- mind you -- for the alleged confrontation with the woman, but for tweeting about it:

LAST DAY to support Techdirt's crowdfunding campaign! As we pointed out earlier this week, it's pretty obvious that the Justice Department lied to a federal magistrate judge in saying that it had exhausted all possible opportunities to get into the work iPhone of Syed Farook, given that it has now put the case about it on hold to test out a "new way" to get into the phone. The DOJ had made a filing claiming that Apple's help was the only way to get into the phone, yet now is saying that's probably not true. However, the FBI is insisting that the DOJ wasn't lying. In a letter to the Editor at the Wall Street Journal, FBI Director James Comey reacts angrily to a similar opinion piece at the WSJ suggesting the DOJ lied:

While there are 10 (known) cases covering 13 Apple devices that the DOJ is asking Apple to help unlock, there are two "big ones" that are receiving most of the focus. The big one in San Bernardino, which has been put on hold as the FBI claims it may have actually found a way into the phone -- and the one in NY where magistrate judge James Orenstein wrote a wonderful rejection letter for the DOJ's request. The Justice Department has appealed that decision, and the case has been handed over to Judge Margo Brodie.

Netflix this week admitted that the company has been throttling the video streams of most wireless customers around the world to 600 kbps, a practice the company claims is necessary to protect users from usage caps and wireless overage fees. It was the first time Netflix acknowledged the practice, which the company said it's been engaged in for five years. The more interesting part? The company admitted to the Wall Street Journal that it's apparently not throttling the video streams of companies whose consumer policies Netflix agrees with:

Earlier today we posted a story about Senator Ron Wyden's letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in which he asks (yet again) for the DOJ to disclose a secret 2003 legal opinion, and also notes that it appears the DOJ lied to the court in a FOIA lawsuit by the ACLU, as the DOJ seeks to block an attempt to force it to release that document. In our post, we pointed to an excellent post by Marcy Wheeler exploring some of the possible "misrepresentations" that the DOJ may have made in its filing -- however, her site, EmptyWheel.net is getting hit today with some sort of attack and the story is down. As we both agree that this is an important story that needs to be seen, at Marcy's request, we're reposting her story here. I've written a bunch of times about an OLC memo Ron Wyden keeps pointing to, suggesting it should be declassified so we all can know what outrageous claims DOJ made about common commercial service agreements. Here's my most complete summary from Caroline Krass' confirmation process:

Support our crowdfunding campaign to help us keep making content like this! After the Paris attacks late last year, we noted that it was clear that they were evidence of an intelligence community failure, rather than an "encryption" problem -- which kind of explained why the intelligence community quickly tried to blame encryption. But, as we noted, most of the attackers were already known to the intelligence community and law enforcement -- and there's still little evidence that they used any encryption.

The inCharge Keyring Cable is 3 inches of charging and data transfer power. The ends snap together around your key ring, purse, backpack, etc. and unclip to plug into any USB port to help charge your device. The inCharge Keyring Cable comes in a $19 2-pack, and you can choose from one Lightning and one Micro-USB cable -- or two of the same variety -- to cover all of your charging needs.

This isn't necessarily surprising, but it is incredibly stupid. As you hopefully recall, in the summer of 2014 the EU Court of Justice came out with a dangerous ruling saying that a "right to be forgotten" applied to search engines and that Google needed to "de-link" certain search results from the names of individuals. We've discussed at great length the problems with this ruling, but it continues to be a mess.

We've been noting for years: when Senator Ron Wyden says that (1) there's a secret interpretation of a law that is at odds with the public's understanding of it, or (2) that government officials are lying, you should pay attention. It may take a while, but it always comes out eventually that he's absolutely correct. For at least five years now, we've been posting semi-regular updates to Wyden calling out the government for its secret interpretations of the law, and some of that was proven entirely accurate thanks to the Snowden revelations concerning how the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act had been interpreted. However, since the Snowden revelations, Wyden has made it clear that that's not all. In particular, he's spoken about a Justice Department legal opinion, written by John Yoo, that Wyden insists is important and should be revealed.

Zero-rating -- the nifty trick companies use to edge around net neutrality rules -- is being offered to developing countries as a way to provide cheap internet access to their citizens. There's a bit of altruism in the offerings, but there's also a lot of walls surrounding gardens. Facebook's "Free Basics" is a zero-rated platform that functions like a twenty-first century AOL, funneling users into Facebook'sversion of the internet.

Despite the fact that copyright has been repeatedly extended and strengthened over the years, the thought never seems to cross publishers' minds that they could ever have too much of it, or that the public might have some countervailing rights here. As a consequence of this insatiable appetite, there have been a number of recent moves to create an ancillary copyright, also known as a "snippet tax," "link tax" and "Google tax," since it aims to make it obligatory to pay for making even short excerpts or linking to copyright material -- for example, in search results. Rather amazingly, publishers are still pushing for this new monopoly "right" despite abundant evidence from their own research that it harms their businesses. Undeterred by these facts, some politicians in France are pushing for the creation of yet another kind of ancillary copyright, covering thumbnail images. That idea was squashed a long time ago in the US, but as the public domain advocacy group Comunia explains, in France, the following is still a real possibility:

Here's a fun trademark tiff involving a "punk rock" flea market and the shambling, barely-reanimated corpse of a legendary band. [via Techdirt reader Cheyenne Hohman]

It's a no-brainer that math is a critically important subject. Okay, a lot of people probably don't remember much calculus from high school -- or how to do "long division" -- but the exposure to advanced math and encouraging everyone to appreciate math is still laudable. And making sure kids aren't turned off by math will hopefully lead to more people involved in STEM fields in the future.

The FBI announced (without going into verifiable detail) that it had implemented new minimization procedures for handling information tipped to it by the NSA's Prism dragnet. Oddly, this announcement arrived nearly simultaneously with the administration's announcement that it was expanding the FBI's intake of unminimized domestic communications collected by the NSA.

Late last year, USA Today's Brad Heath and Brett Kelman uncovered a massive DEA wiretap program -- one that was being run almost exclusively through a single California state court judge and being signed off on by a single DA's office. The wiretaps were likely illegal, seeing as the warrants weren't being run by federal judges. They also weren't being signed by the top prosecutor in the area, as is required federal law.

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.

You may have heard, recently, that the guy who was apparently behind the celebrity nudes hacking scandal (sometimes called "Celebgate" in certain circles, and the much more terrible "The Fappening" in other circles) recently pled guilty to the hacks, admitting that he used phishing techniques to get passwords to their iCloud accounts. But... that's not all that he apparently used. He also used "lawful access" technologies to help him grab everything he could once he got in.

Help Techdirt Cut Through The Confusion In The Crypto Fight So our big crowdfunding campaign around encryption is in its final couple of days. In the past few weeks, we've had guest posts from a number of knowledgeable people explaining why it was so important to support Techdirt -- including EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, former CIA operative (and current novelist) Barry Eisler, Media Professor Dan Gillmor and former Senate staffer Jennifer Hoelzer. Hopefully, those were enough to convince you to support us as well.

Keep tabs on your important objects with the Nut Mini Tracker. Attach the tiny tracker via an included strap or with the included 3M VHB tape and download the smartphone app. Whenever you stray too far from the Nut tracker, it will alert your phone. The Nut mini also notifies you when you leave your phone behind and the app even helps you track down lost items. It is less than 1.5 inches long and weighs in at a mere .35 ounces so you can attach it to anything and hardly notice it is even there. The tracker is available now for $15 for 1, or $25 for 2.

Is there anything more gloriously effed-up than IP law? I submit to you there is not. Here's the sub-headline for Eriq Gardner's Hollywood Reporter article, which deftly sums up the predicament facing a filmmaker looking to make a movie based on an old Buck Rogers novella.

The legacy recording industry just has a way with attacking any new technology service that helps it adapt, doesn't it? Whether it's ringtones or video games or YouTube or iTunes, the industry always takes the same basic approach: denounce the new offering as evil. Threaten and/or sue. Maybe take some equity as a way to "settle" the legal threats/suits. And then squeeze the companies for more and more money until they're dead. It's happened over and over again, and we're now witnessing the same thing again in streaming music -- even as it's turning into a major cash cow. For whatever reason, to make this work, the industry wants to turn this cash cow into an enemy.

For many, many years interstate inmate calling service (ICS) companies have charged inmates and their families upwards of $14 per minute for phone calls. Because these folks are in prison, and as we all know everybody in prison is guilty, drumming up sympathy to convert into political momentum had proven difficult. But after decades of activism the FCC intervened last year, voting to cap the amount companies can charge the incarcerated. According to the FCC's updated rules, ICS companies can no longer charge more than twenty-two cents per minute -- depending on the size of the prison. Caps were also placed on the fees companies could charge those trying to pay these already bloated bills.

Just recently, we were writing about the increasingly-desperate assault on Popcorn Time in Norway, where even linking to sites that offer the software is enough for the authorities to seize a domain name. Now the Russian anti-piracy group Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPO) wants to take its own fight up a notch in an equally vain attempt to stop people finding out how to circumvent blocklists using proxies, VPNs and Tor. As TorrentFreak reports:

When I wrote about the monumentally silly trademark dispute between the San Diego Comic-Con and the Salt Lake City Comic Con, I didn't appreciate the simple nature of that trademark dispute. Sure, the idea that the phrase comic-con, or comic con, could be trademarked seemed wrong. The phrase is arguably both generic and descriptive, after all. But at least the dispute was simple.

There are vast amounts of stuff that no one knows anything about. Everything in the universe that we can see -- that reflects light or glows on it own because it's hot -- only amounts to about 5% of the known mass of the universe. So... what's going on with the other 95% of "stuff" that's out there? Maybe there are exotic particles we haven't discovered yet that are everywhere, but we just don't know it. Physicists call this stuff "dark matter" and "dark energy" -- and there could be a whole "dark sector" of dark matter doing things that we just can't see. But we're getting some hints for some of the stuff we can't see by observing and measuring the outcomes of rare astronomical events -- and by creating simulations of what possible undiscovered particles might do to the formation of galaxies and other distant space objects. Here are just a few projects that might explain how the universe works someday.

More than a year after San Francisco police officers arrested public defender Jami Tillotson for doing her job, the city's Office of Citizen Complaints has issued its report. It clears Tillotson of any wrongdoing and lays the blame solely at the feet of the San Francisco PD.

We've covered in the past how Newegg and its Chief Legal Officer, Lee Cheng, have been both vocal and active in the fight against patent trolls. Far from a lightweight in this arena, Newegg has gone on the offensive against the trolls, with Cheng even going as far as to state that he would never settle a case with a patent troll. Settlements are often times what these patent trolls are primarily interested in, milking money from legitimate businesses that simply don't want to bother with a lawsuit. Like most bullies, a little pushback is all that's required to get them to turn tail and run.

Join us in telling EU regulators not to wreck the net.

We've noted a few times that Tennessee is one of numerous states that have literally let incumbent ISPs like AT&T and Comcast write state telecom law. Most notably, around 20 states have now blocked towns and cities from building their own broadband networks -- or striking public/private partnerships -- even in cases where the market has clearly failed. It's protectionism pure and simple, and when the FCC voted last year to try and gut these laws in Tennessee and North Carolina, ISP allies in Congress were quick to assail the FCC for "violating states rights" (to let incumbent ISPs dictate all telecom policy, apparently).

Cybersecurity is a crowded field. Not every competitor will make it. That's inevitable. Tiversa is one of the also-rans.

Wondering if coverage like ours can really make a difference? In 2014, former Senate staffer Jennifer Hoelzer sent us this unsolicited piece about Techdirt's influence on lawmakers in the SOPA fight. With today's encryption debate now shifting back to Congress, she's given us her support in republishing the story (with a few minor edits) to drive that point home. If you want quantitative data to go with her anecdotal experience, you can see this Harvard study that highlighted Techdirt's influence in that debate. Please help us do the same for the fight over encryption as well. Help Techdirt Make Sure Congress Doesn't Sell Out Our Privacy & Security Hi. My name is Jen... and I was once a Congressional staffer who knew so little about Internet policy that I had no idea how little I knew about Internet policy. (I think this is where you're supposed to supportively say, "Hi, Jen," and reassure me that this is a safe space for me to continue my embarrassing confession. Because it gets worse.)

We're highlighting some of the best Security and Ethical Hacking Resources available through the Techdirt Deals Store.

Another terrorist attack somewhere in the world* has provoked another round of punditry from former government officials on how to protect America from future attacks. Over the coming weeks, there will be no shortage of stupid ideas, useless ideas and pointless discussions about "heightened security" at any place people gather.

Support our crowdfunding campaign to help us keep making content like this! So now that there's been a little time to process the Justice Department's last minute decision to bail out on the hearing in the San Bernardino case, claiming it was because some mysterious third party had demonstrated a way to hack into Syed Farook's iPhone, it's becoming increasingly clear that (1) the DOJ almost certainly lied at some point in this case and (2) this move was almost entirely about running away from a public relations battle that it was almost certainly losing (while also recognizing that it had a half-decent chance of also losing the court case). Just replace "Sir Robin" with "the DOJ" in the following video. That said, there are still some things to clear up. First, did the DOJ lie? It seems pretty obvious that it must have. After all, it insisted earlier in the case, multiple times, that it had "exhausted" all other possibilities and "the only" way to get into the phone was with Apple's help. That's certainly raised some eyebrows:

Facing a future where competition is rampant, customers pay less money, and solar users actually get paid for driving power back to the grid gives any entrenched utility executive heartburn. Fortunately for them, we live in an era where buying state law and tricking consumers into rooting against their own best self interests is easier than ever before. Florida (where air conditioning drives the second highest energy consumption nationally) is quickly becoming the poster child for how utilities are using ethically incontinent lawmakers and a gullible populace to prevent solar power technology from reaching critical mass.

Recently, we wrote about how Sage Bionetworks was sharing data it collected during a clinical study. That was a laudable move, but made much easier by the non-profit nature of the research organization involved. Here's a sign that openness is spreading even to commercial research, as reported by The New York Times:

Part of the fun of covering the sort of silly trademark disputes that we do here at Techdirt is seeing just how far companies, most often large companies, will go in trying to apply protectionist habits where they don't belong. This typically manifests itself in the key marketplace aspect of trademark law, where the brands in question are to be competing for customers who might become confused for an infringement to have occurred. Too often this aspect of the law appears to go ignored in claims of infringement, or else the concept of competitive marketplaces is stretched to the point of absurdity. As I said, this is often times amusing to us, because we're strange.

Virtual reality or augmented reality goggles are getting a lot of hype, but some of us who need to wear glasses all the time just to see normally are probably not looking forward to wearing bulky electronics on top of regular eyeglasses. Unfortunately, VR/AR goggles tend to cater to people with 20/20 vision first, and then provide some footnote about how corrective lenses might be compatible in the future. Well, if we're all going to be wearing glasses someday, how about making them a bit more useful?

Everyone behind the failed clown school that was Prenda Law deserves what's happening to Paul Hansmeier. Unfortunately, it appears Hansmeier is taking the most damage from the fallout of Prenda's disastrous copyright trolling… or at least he's the one doing most of his suffering in public.

Following in the proud tradition of governments everywhere who believe a push for transparency is best performed under the cover of darkness, the Canadian legislators behind an attempt to update the Access to Information Act have decided to keep their transparency discussions secret.

If you want to send someone a message online today, you've got a hell of a lot of options. Far from the erstwhile IM dominance of ICQ, today there are messaging platforms of every shape and size, a blurring of the lines between messaging and social media, and messaging components incorporated into almost everything. This week, we ask a simple question: why so many, and what are they all for? 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.

Support our crowdfunding campaign to help us keep covering stories like these! You may remember that, right after the Paris attacks late last year, politicians rushed in to demonize encryption as the culprit, and to demand backdooring encryption before the blood was even dry. Of course, it later turned out that there was no evidence that they used encryption at all, but rather it appears that they communicated by unencrypted means. Just yesterday, we noted that the press was still insisting encryption was used, and using the lack of any evidence as evidence for the fact they must have used encryption (hint: that's not how encryption works...).

We've written about Donald Trump's announced plans to "open up libel laws" which was specifically directed at the Washington Post, which he argued was purposely writing bad articles about him. Despite the fact that, even as President, he can't really change such laws (there's a little First Amendment issue to deal with), we noted that he can create real problems for free expression. For example, by blocking a federal anti-SLAPP bill from becoming law. And Trump is no stranger to SLAPP suits that are used to threaten or filed solely to silence people. He's threatened or sued an awful lot of people over perceived slights, such as claiming it was defamation to post a picture of him next to a picture of South Carolina murderer Dylann Roof. And then, of course, there's the famous case where he sued reporter Tim O'Brien for writing a book about him (that was actually mostly positive), but which pointed out that he was probably "only" worth a few hundred million dollars, rather than $10 billion. Trump lost that suit big time, and was basically humiliated in the process, but still insists that he basically won the lawsuit:

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Support our crowdfunding campaign to help us keep making content like this! While the DOJ may be thinking about ways to weasel out of the San Bernardino fight with Apple, the underlying fight about backdooring encryption remains. The DOJ may focus on other cases, such as the one in NY, where the facts line up a bit more in its favor, or elsewhere. Or we may soon see legislation to backdoor encryption.