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Our nation's federal law enforcement agencies may soon be gazing back wistfully at the Golden Age of Warrantless Surveillance and wondering where it all went so very wrong. (Hint: the "warrantless" part had a lot to do with it.)

Late last month, director Quentin Tarantino participated in a rally against police brutality, where he made the following comment:

Back in December of 2013, DC district court judge Richard Leon shocked many by declaring the NSA's bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to be unconstitutional. Just a few months ago, the DC circuit appeals court overturned that ruling and sent it back to the lower court, saying that the plaintiff, Larry Klayman, failed to prove he had standing to bring the lawsuit -- mainly because Snowden only had revealed that the NSA was scooping up all Verizon Business Network phone records, and Klayman was a Verizon Wireless customer. That it had since been revealed that the NSA also got Verizon Wireless records was basically ignored.

Tons of people seem (quite rightly) concerned about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. As we pointed out last week after the final text was finally, released, the agreement has a lot of really big problems. But if you want to understand just how bad the agreement is, perhaps you should just look at the industries that like it. Vox notes that Big Pharma and Hollywood love the agreement while The Intercept notes that Wall Street loves it.

A smallish town in Colorado is home to the teen sexting apocalypse. Something that first appeared to be limited to the football team now apparently involves almost half of Canon City High School's student body.

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The Call of Duty series is finally giving players the option to play through the campaign mode as a female soldier. The nod towards the existence of female game fans is every bit as obligatory as the game's campaign mode, but now the game's developers are being accused of pushing girls towards a future as emotionless, jaded killbots. You know, the way it has millions of young men over the past decade.

So at the end of September, we wrote about the absolutely insane lawsuit in which PETA -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- bizarrely claimed to be representing "Naruto" (whose name we only just learned with that lawsuit), as the "copyright holder" of the image below. Naruto, of course, is the macaque monkey who is famous for taking this photo: Now, we've been writing about this monkey selfie for years now, mostly focusing on why the photo is clearly in the public domain. This issue comes up periodically, with the photographer whose camera "Naruto" used, David Slater, often taking random potshots at Techdirt for explaining basic copyright law to the public. Slater, as you may recall, still likes to insist that he holds the copyright on the photo, and twice has had companies apparently representing himself make dubious legal threats in our general direction.

Back in January of this year, we wrote about a remarkable report proposing a number of major changes to EU copyright law. Part of an extremely long-drawn out process that aims to update the current 2001 copyright directive, the document was written by the sole Pirate Party MEP in the European Parliament, Julia Reda. In the short time she's been an MEP -- she was only elected in 2014 -- she's emerged as the European Parliament's leading expert on copyright, which means it's always worth taking her warnings in this area very seriously. Earlier this year, Techdirt noted that Reda was worried about moves to restrict outdoor photography in the EU. Now she's picked up something even more disturbing after studying a draft version of the European Commission's imminent communication on copyright reform, which was leaked to the IPKat blog. According to her interpretation of this document:

This week, when a law professor wrote a ridiculous attack on Section 230 of the CDA, it garnered a lot of backlash — and our most insightful comment of the week. First place goes to TasMot, who headed over to site where the piece was published and hoped to participate:

Five Years Ago First, one of the most notable events of this week in 2010: a proposal started making the rounds in the EU, calling for a newly conceived right to be forgotten. What ever happened with that? Meanwhile, we saw plenty of copyright clashes: a reality show was sued for copying its premise from another show (shocking!), a YouTube star was silenced because apparently parody isn't fair use, and online radio was being stymied across the board by the DMCA. At least it was nice to see the librarians of Brazil state that copyright is a fear-based reaction to open knowledge, while Lawrence Lessig was pointing out to the WIPO that copyright was not designed for an age when every use is a copy. In the world of patents, we were surprised to see the DOJ come out against isolated gene patents (which did not make the USPTO very happy at all). But there was still plenty of room for patent abuse, what with the chief CAFC judge ignoring the negative side of patents and Colgate trying to patent a traditional tooth-cleaning powder that was thousands of years old. Ten Years Ago This week in 2005 was when the tech world was rocked by the Sony rootkit scandal. First, the nefarious copy protection scheme on Sony CDs was discovered, sparking off a firestorm of reaction. Then it became clear that the rootkit opened up a huge security hole that others could piggyback on. Then some people noticed that other companies were doing similar things. Sony promised to "fix" the problem, but not by actually letting you uninstall the "copy protection", and then people noticed that the patch contained a bunch of other questionable stuff, and sometimes crashed Windows. Nobody was impressed, and the fallout plagues Sony to this day, deservedly so. You'd think this might put a damper on the entertainment industry's enthusiasm for DRM, but of course this was the same week Hollywood started seeking to plug the "analog hole" (though thankfully Congress didn't seem very interested). Fifteen Years Ago There was plenty of the usual 2000 stuff this week: dot-coms may or may not have been failing, tech incubators were struggling, spam was everywhere, much like tech conferences, and so on... But the most interesting tidbit is one that reminds us of something it's often easy to forget: copyright was not always a central topic of Techdirt, and the blog was not an ongoing participant in that debate. Thus, when the Copyright Office announced its support of a law to prevent the circumvention of copy protection, Mike noted that "I don't follow this stuff as closely as many people do" and made only a simple comment about how anti-circumvention seems nonsensical from a security point of view. Oh how things have changed! Forty-Seven Years Ago Around here, we mostly talk about the MPAA for its ongoing Sisyphean war against piracy — but to most people, it's best known for the voluntary rating system on movies (which has its own host of problems). Well, it was on November 1st, 1968 that the voluntary ratings came into effect, replacing the Hays Code (which also had its own host of other problems, but that's another story).

We've talked before about how the booming field of virtual reality may start with better VR headsets and displays, but requires additional pieces of tech to truly meet its full potential. This week, we're looking at one such piece of tech that tackles the most critical VR challenge of all: the VRGO chair for controlling movement in a virtual world. The Good There's one fundamental challenge that has plagued the world of VR from its inception: how do you move about the virtual world? Of course, you can just do so with a joystick or directional pad like any other game, but that's extremely immersion-breaking in most cases, reminding you at every turn of the one thing VR is supposed to make you forget — that you're playing a game. At the other end of the spectrum, some have built multi-directional treadmill rigs that allow you to walk and run in place, but these have their own list of problems, such as the fact that they are very big and very expensive. Plus, it's not always appealing to exert the same amount of physical energy to play a game as you would if you were actually the superhuman action hero you control. The VRGO offers a new solution. It's a sleek, compact chair that is carefully calibrated to detect your leaning and turning, and translate these movements into game controls. It offers the sort of direct, intuitive control that VR needs without requiring a dedicated room for all your gear or a budget of thousands (it clocks in at around $300 USD, which is hardly eyewatering) and while keeping your hands free. It's wireless and portable, and works not only with PC/Mac but with mobile devices (where a lot of VR experimentation is now happening). Plus, you get to sit down. All told, it may be the single best solution to the problem of movement in VR, especially if price is a factor in that determination. The Bad Videos of the VRGO in action tell us it looks good, appears to be responsive and makes users smile — but as with any such device, the ultimate test will be using it yourself to find out how it feels. Does your brain embrace the immersion and forget about the chair, or are you permanently aware that you're rocking back and forth on a plastic egg? And how quickly does this transition happen? Questions like these are why it might be tough to shell out money for the first model, unseen and untried, rather than waiting for some testimonials and hopefully a shot at trying it out somewhere. Still, if the VRGO lives up to its apparent potential, it (and the inevitable imitators, some of which may even improve the design) could become the go-to standard for VR gaming rigs. The Combinable While it might actually be fun to try the VRGO out all by itself for certain kinds of normal, non-VR games, obviously the real point of this device is to combine it with, at minimum, a VR display like the Oculus Rift or a smartphone in a Google Cardboard headset. Then there's a rapidly growing world of additional components: Wii-style handheld motion controllers, Kinect-style cameras, tactile feedback gloves, 3D audio systems... And this raises what might be the key challenge for VR as the technological kinks are ironed out, the price comes down, and it becomes mainstream: getting everything to work properly in concert and deliver an overall satisfying experience. In time there will surely be some companies selling comprehensive VR rigs with everything included, but for most gamers (PC gamers especially) their rig will be assembled from multiple different devices. Even assuming there are no strict hardware compatibility issues, there's an interesting question of calibration and optimization — will all these devices feel good together? Will the sensitivity and responsiveness of your VRGO harmonize with that of your motion control camera, or will it create a looming sense of physical dissonance? This isn't just a hardware challenge, but a software one too, and we'll see lots of action on this front as more developers build games with VR in mind as a (or the) primary use case. As the technology for VR comes into its own and the games proliferate, we'll have to move beyond answering each individual question of how to interact with the virtual world, and start focusing on marrying all these aspects into a harmonious, fully-immersive experience.

In the past few days there have been a flurry of stories about the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai peninsula, which investigators reportedly think may have been caused by a bomb. Notably, anonymous US officials have been leaking to journalists that they believe ISIS is involved, and it's actually a perfect illustration of the rank hypocrisy of the US government's position on the Edward Snowden disclosures. Why do US officials allegedly have a "feeling" that ISIS was involved? According to multiple reports, US intelligence agencies have been intercepting ISIS communications discussing "something big" in the region last week. CNN published a report on Tuesday based on anonymous sources that ISIS was likely responsible despite the fact that "no formal conclusion has been reached by the U.S. intelligence community and that U.S. officials haven't seen forensic evidence from the crash investigation":

As we were just talking about the recent consternation over daily fantasy football sites like FanDuel and DraftKings and whether they ought to be considered forms of gambling or games of skill, news recently broke about one player's personal war with FanDuel over likeness rights. NFL player Pierre Garcon of the Washington Redskins has filed a federal suit against the daily fantasy company, alleging it used his name and likeness for commercial value, as well as alleging that FanDuel included images of Garcon in advertisements, falsely implying endorsement. There are details to unpack here, but you can see the filing for yourself here.

Fungus is everywhere. One of the largest organisms in the world is actually a huge fungus over 2 miles across, growing in Oregon. Fungi might have even been the first organisms to live on land, and mushrooms covered the earth's surface after the world's worst mass extinction event -- feeding off all the dead plants and animals. So it might not be cockroaches that inherit the earth, but fungus. And if we ever find alien life, it could look more like mushrooms than humanoid life.

As you may recall, over the summer we wrote about the Marilyn Monroe Estate's second attempt to extract money from AVELA, a company that produces consumer products with images of nostalgia affixed to them. The first attempt the Estate made was way back in 2012, when it tried to apply publicity rights under California law to AVELA's products featuring the image of Marilyn Monroe. The problem in that case was that the California law only applied to celebrities living in the state at the time of their deaths and Monroe's Estate had previously affirmed she did not live in California at the time of her death, so as not to have to pay the relevant taxes on her estate. With that attempt dashed, Monroe's Estate has instead turned to trademark law in attempt to do exactly the same thing. The court allowed the suit to proceed after hearing form AVELA on matters of whether customers can be confused that a dead celebrity is endorsing, well, anything.

Facebook has brought out the ban-hammer on its competitors in the past. Most notably, the social media giant banned advertisements from users for links to Google+, when that was still a thing. That said, the most recent example of Facebook banning what can be seen as a competitive product has gone even further, preventing users from linking to Tsu.co in status updates or on its messaging service.

One of these days I'm finally going to get around to writing the piece I've been planning for the better part of a year on the importance of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies, but in the meantime, it's still fun to see the way traditional bankers try to wrap their heads around it. Apparently, for JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, it's to say he's not at all concerned about it because he's sure that the government will step in and kill Bitcoin should it ever really matter:

With the release of the new UK Snooper's Charter, UK Home Secretary Theresa May tried to justify the collection of phone and internet records as nothing more than being like an "itemised phone bill" and therefore nothing to worry about. Keith Vaz replied that there is plenty to be concerned about when the government can look at such records:

Techdirt has been following with a certain amusement the humiliating failure of German publishers to bring in a "snippet tax" that would force Google and other search engines to pay for displaying even short quotations from their publications. The most recent defeat for the copyright industry was the German competition authority announcing that it would not "punish" Google for refusing to take out a license for snippets because, well, Google had a perfect right not to do so. The Disruptive Competition (DisCo) Project Web site has an update on the continuing saga, and it's as crazy as the rest of the story:

Dive into the world of virtual reality with the Homido Virtual Reality Headset. The headset works with most phones (best with iPhones/Androids, good with Windows) with screens up to 6", comes with an app that has a library of games and 360-degree videos, and comes with various lenses so you can adjust for near/farsightedness. It is compatible with over 300+ Google Cardboard iOS/Android apps, has a locking clip for your phone's safety, and is wireless and battery-free so you aren't tethered to a console. It is available in the Deals store for $69.95 for a limited time.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the UK's release of its new Snooper's Charter bill, where we noted that the government spin on it was fairly dizzying. I noted at the time that while the government kept insisting that it wasn't adding a requirement to backdoor encryption, that was misleading because the text of the bill indicated the government believed such a mandate already existed. And that's only the least of it. The bill and the discussion around it simply confirmed that the UK government engaged in mass surveillance for many, many years, and until now only a "tiny handful" of government ministers even knew about it.

Yesterday, a month after it was announced that the TPP was "finalized," the official text was finally released. Immediately after that, USTR (somewhat oddly) reposted the whole thing to Medium -- apparently in an effort to appear transparent for an agreement that was negotiated for years in secret. The overall document has been broken out into many different sections, but if you add it all up it's over 6,000 pages long. The Washington Post did what none of the governments actually did and made the document searchable. I spent much of yesterday trying to read through the various sections, and it appears to be super problematic. Along with the text, the USTR posted a bunch of nonsense propaganda about what they want people to think the TPP is really about.

First the cable and broadcast industry argued that cord cutting didn't exist. It was, to hear execs tell it, simply a reflection of the sagging housing market, and the people who were cutting the TV cord were poor, 40 year old nobodies, living in their mom's basement who didn't matter. Of course data has since shown that cord cutting continued as housing markets recovered, with millions of new home owners not signing up for cable. Similarly, most data shows that cord cutters are young, educated, and just tired as hell of constant rate hikes for mammoth bundles of awful reality TV programming.

We've already established that the University of Kentucky is sort of insane when it comes to overly restrictive trademark practices. We've also established that many other educational institutions are equally asshat-ish when it comes to trademark issues, in particular, for some reason, on any matter that in any way has to do with alcohol brands. The beer and liquor industries are dealing with their own trademark issues resulting from the explosion in craft brewing, but this is the story of how the University of Kentucky has managed to convince itself and, apparently, the USPTO that it has sole ownership of the very name of the state in which it is located for use on apparel.

There could be a new Star Trek TV show ready in a couple years or so (trying to keep up with the Star Wars franchise, no doubt). But real space travel is also making some progress -- with a growing number of private companies trying out new approaches to making more cost effective launch systems. Check out a few of these propulsion concepts that could be powered by "di-lithium" crystals someday.

The NYPD is jerking around FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) requesters again. Usually, the NYPD just pretends it's the CIA (somewhat justified, considering its hiring of former government spooks) and claims everything is so very SECRET it couldn't possibly be edged out between the multiple exemptions it cites in its refusals.

While there's been no limit of hand wringing from the grumpy grandpa corners of the Internet about the mean old "over-reaching" FCC, the agency has actually been making some good decisions lately. Reclassifying ISPs under Title II and passing tough net neutrality rules (which, contrary to chicken littles has been a good thing so far), stopping ISPs from buying state protectionist broadband law, cracking down on cramming, thwarting convention centers from blocking personal Wi-Fi so you'll use their pricey services; there's a lot of pro-consumer, pro innovation, pro-competition issues the FCC has woken up to after a fifteen year slumber.

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.

Presidential candidate Ben Carson said last month that he wants to keep the United States Department of Education in business, rather than dismantling it as many conservatives would like, because he wants to use it to receive and then investigate reports of "extreme political bias" on college campuses. The example he has given of the need to which this proposal responds, most notably in an interview for Meet the Press, but also in a radio interview, is that a college student was supposedly threatened with discipline for refusing to comply with a professor's instruction to "stomp on Jesus." The notion of a federal inquisition into speech on college campuses trying to stomp out "political bias" is bad enough, but looking back at the facts of that incident, it appears to me as if Carson's excuse for the inquisition is based on an apocryphal account.

The South Korean government's strong suggestion parents should install spyware in their kids' phones resulted in the the official blessing of Smart Sheriff -- a program that hoovered up communications and data and sent it all back to the MOIBA mothership with a minimum of security. Citizen Lab security researchers found numerous flaws in the spy app, ranging from the unencrypted transmission (and storage) of data to the circumvention of HTTPS protections in order to check sites against blacklists.

Get big, full sound anywhere you go with the UE BOOM Bluetooth Speaker, which is available for $149.99. This speaker is small enough to pack away easily, lasts for 15 hours on each charge, and comes with a water-resistant coating so you can use it both indoors and outdoors. It's compatible with NFC (passive) enabled devices, Bluetooth-capable devices (with a 50 ft. range), and it has a 3.5 mm audio jack. BOOM features dual-performance drivers and dual passive radiators, and comes in either red or white.

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on what sounds like a boring topic: "International Data Flows: Promoting Digital Trade in the 21st Century." However, as we've discussed, this seemingly boring topic can have a profound impact on how the internet functions, and whether it remains a global platform for free expression -- or becomes a fragmented system used for widespread censorship, surveillance and control. In other words this is important.

Comcast has quietly announced that the company is expanding its usage caps into nearly a dozen new markets just in time for the holiday season. And by announced, I mean the company buried the freshly capped markets in a FAQ over at the Comcast website. As we've been noting, Comcast has slowly but surely been expanding a "trial" of usage caps whereby users face a 300 GB cap with $10 per 50 GB overages, or pay $30 to $35 if they want to bypass the usage cap entirely. Apparently, Comcast believes if it moves slowly toward capping all users, people won't notice they're the frog in the boiling frog metaphor.

The TSA's inability to live up to the "S" in its acronym is on display again. The agency's Inspector General recently testified before a Congressional oversight committee. Fortunately, no one stepped forward to shoot the messenger -- seeing as the message was more bad news about TSA incompetence. I imagine TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger would have jumped at the chance to be the triggerman, but was fortunately limited to delivering his own prepared remarks in response.

As HBO's streaming service popularity has taken off, the company has yet to crack down on the sharing of passwords, believing it's a great opportunity to have programming junkies market the brand for you. We all of course already knew that sharing HBO Go passwords was a violation of the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA and an unholy sin. But according to Charter CEO Tom Rutledge, the sharing of streaming service passwords is also a diabolical theft of content that needs to stop immediately.

It's really somewhat astounding just how absolutely hated journal publishing giant Elsevier has become in certain academic circles. The company seems to have perfected its role of being about as evil as possible in trying to lock up knowledge and making it expensive and difficult to access. A few years ago, we noted that a bunch of academics were banding together to boycott journals published by the company, as more and more people were looking at open access journals, allowing them to more freely share their research, rather than locking it up. Elsevier's response has been to basically crack down on efforts to share knowledge. The company has been known to charge for open access research -- sometimes even buying up journals and ignoring the open licenses on the works. The company has also been demanding professors takedown copies of their own research. Because how dare anyone actually benefit from knowledge without paying Elsevier its toll. And that's not even mentioning Elsevier's history of publishing fake journals as a way to help giant pharmaceutical companies pretend their treatments were effective.

Rockets fail all the time. There are just a lot of things that can go wrong, and if everything doesn't go right, the usual result is that the rocket and its payload self-destructs to prevent further damage (or just explodes all on its own). Fortunately, the hardware is getting cheaper with time, and more and more people are able to play with launch systems to get beyond Earth's gravity well. Here are just a few more examples of rocket projects that are trying to do more with less.

I've never really made it a secret how much I loathe the Washington Redskins organization. I dislike their tasteless, stupid, racist team name. I hate their dumb, overly-litigious owner. And I really have nothing but disdain for the team's attempt to control public perception by strong-arming the media. And, in past posts, I've come down on the side of the government when it cancelled the team's trademark for its name, declaring that the government shall not be in the business of granting trademarks for terms that are disparaging. I was slightly less comfortable when the DOJ made a weak argument that denying the trademark wasn't a First Amendment violation, but, still, no Redskins trademark was a good thing in my mind, partially because I hate the Redskins.

No criminal activity. No suspicion of wrongdoing. Just cops wandering around, opening car doors and seizing valuables. But they're doing it for YOU.

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced last Wednesday the "Chronicling America" contest to create projects out of historical newspaper data. The contest is supposed to showcase the history of the United States through the lens of a popular (and somewhat ephemeral) news format. But looking at the limits of the archival data, another story emerges: the dark cloud of copyright's legal uncertainty is threatening the ability of amateur and even professional historians to explore the last century as they might explore the ones before it. Consider that the National Digital Newspaper Program holds the history of American newspapers only up until 1922. (It originally focused on material from 1900-1910 and gradually expanded outwards to cover material from as early as 1836.) Those years may seem arbitrary—and it makes sense that there would be some cut-off date for a historical archive—but for copyright nerds 1922 rings some bells: it's the latest date from which people can confidently declare a published work is in the public domain. Thanks to the arcane and byzantine rules created by 11 copyright term extensions in the years between 1962 and 1998, determining whether a work from any later requires consulting a flow chart from hell—the simple version of which, published by the Samuelson Clinic last year, runs to 50 pages. The result is what's been dubbed "The Missing 20th Century," after it was brought to light by the striking research of Paul Heald, which shows copyright restrictions are tightly correlated with the lack of commercial availability of books. He analyzed the titles available in Amazon's warehouses to find a steep drop-off in titles first published after 1923, which carries through until just the last few years. As Heald's research shows, the number of books available from the 1850s is double the number available from 1950. Despite what advocates of copyright term extensions like to say, the data suggests that after the first few years of a book's publication, publishers as a group are much less willing to print a text that's under copyright than one in the public domain. The situation with newspapers is worse. After all, while books may tend to see their value to readers taper off after a few years after publication, for newspapers that same tapering happened in just days. Today's newspaper issue may be incredibly valuable in the right hands, but yesterday's is more likely to line bird cages or wrap fish than to end up preserved for posterity. The big players keep their own archives. The New York Times, for example, makes articles available dating back to 1851. But that's an incomplete solution for two major reasons. For one thing, it sets up a single point of failure that could allow catastrophic losses. Just last month, flooding threatened a priceless collection of photos in the New York Times archive; had those images been digitized and widely copied, no single flood or fire would pose a risk. But also, even a robust archive from a major publication like the Times can't provide the kinds of insights that come from looking at a diverse collection from multiple different sources. In the world of media journalism, we talk a lot about the future. But we can't have a coherent conversation about that without thinking about the past and the present. And those thoughts, in turn, rely on access to the history that we've allowed to be locked up under effectively unlimited copyright restrictions or as orphan works. Because this issue is bigger than the entries into a particular contest, or the way today's history students can explore the past. The Atlantic documented last month the near-total disappearance of a groundbreaking series of investigative journalism from just eight years back. If copyright continues to jeopardize the unrestricted ability of archivists and researchers to preserve and contextualize our history, how much will we lose?

Today, we've got something a little different: a crossover podcast with the folks from a16z. Last week, Mike joined Julie Samuels from Engine on the a16z Podcast hosted by Sonal Chokshi to discuss a long list of important policy issues related to technology and innovation, and for those of you who aren't already following that podcast, we're cross-posting the episode here as part of the Techdirt Podcast as well. Enjoy! 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.

Another day, another example of copyright being used to censor. A few weeks ago, we wrote about a sketchy crowdfunded "food scanning device" company called TellSpec, which had ridiculously threatened the online publication Pando Daily with laughably ridiculous defamation claims. The threats were ridiculous for any number of reasons, including the fact that the statute of limitations had expired and the commentary wasn't even remotely defamatory. There were also some weird (and stupid) threats about suing in the UK, despite TellSpec being based in Toronto and Pando in the US. At some point, TellSpec then denied having made the threats, but that appeared to be pure damage control.

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Earlier today we reported on a story in the Telegraph, claiming that the upcoming "Investigatory Powers Bill" in the UK would mandate encryption backdoors. The full draft of the bill has been released and the UK government is prattling on about how it doesn't "ban" encryption. But note the subtle difference in language here. No one expected a ban on encryption: they expected backdoors. The bill is actually stupidly vague on this point. Here's what the explanation says about "communication service providers in the UK and overseas."

The MPAA gleefully announced on Tuesday that it had shut down the main fork of Popcorn Time along with torrent site YTS (and its associated release group YIFY). Of course, if we go back through the history of file sharing, we can find plenty of times when the MPAA similarly declared victory over the shutdown of other file sharing sites -- and not a single one did a damn thing to slow down piracy rates. People just move on to something else. And yet, the MPAA thinks that it did something important here:

Remember earlier this week when we mocked the silly reports claiming that the UK government had "backed down" on its demands for a Snooper's Charter. As we noted at the time, it did not appear they were backing down at all, but pulling out a bogus publicity campaign where they decided to "ditch" some absolutely crazy ideas that never really would have been included in the first place, but still leaving in plenty of terrible ideas.

Grand juries: still just prosecutorial railroads, despite everything the word "jury" would imply. Seemingly the only time a grand jury fails to return an indictment is when the prosecutor doesn't want one. To ensure the jury pool is loaded with rubber stamps, prosecutors can seek to have meddlesome individuals barred from carrying out their civic duty.

One of Techdirt's earliest posts on corporate sovereignty was back in October 2013, when we wrote about the incredible case of Chevron. It used the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism to suspend the enforcement of a historic $18 billion judgment against the oil corporation made by Ecuador's courts because of the company's responsibility for mass contamination of the Amazonian rain forest. Given the huge sums involved, it's no surprise that things didn't end there. As the site Common Dreams reports, in 2013:

Pessimistic economists have predicted overpopulation problems based on exponential growth trends, but statistics point to lower birth rates as countries become more industrialized. So now, there's a different kind of problem -- aging populations and minimal population growth in certain countries. How will we deal with people living longer and having fewer and fewer kids?