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For years we've explained that broadband usage caps are a horrible idea. Not only do they hinder innovation and confuse the hell out of customers -- but they simply aren't necessary on modern, intelligently-managed networks. Caps are an inelegant and impractical way to handle congestion, and U.S. broadband consumers already pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world (2015 OECD data), more than covering the cost of running a network (as any incumbent ISP earnings report can attest).

Here on Techdirt we've written numerous posts about China's progressive clampdown on social media, as it tries to control what is said, when, and by whom. That makes the following story in the Wall Street Journal unusual, since it tells of a move by China's Ministry of Culture to open things up by joining the popular social media platform Weibo. Here's the Ministry's first post there:

We've discussed at length that companies rushing to embrace the "Internet of Things" (read: networked devices for those of us not in marketing) tend to have completely forgotten a little something called device security. As a result we're now bombarded week after week with stories about cars that can be controlled remotely, televisions that share your unencrypted living room conversations with anybody on the Internet, and refrigerators that leave the door wide open to having your e-mail password stolen. Some of these are kind of cute exploits, but many of them could be potentially fatal.

Streaming and video games are becoming quite a thing, as you likely know. Once met with rebukes such as "Why would anyone want to watch other people play video games?", game-streaming has gotten very large, very fast, such that there are now several outlets one can go to to see live streams and on-demand streams of games. But because, to bastardize a Christopher Hitchens book title, permission culture poisons everything, game streaming is finding itself having to leap over a copyright hurdle in the form of music within games. One solution, employed by the popular Twitch, was to simply silence any video in which a game's music could be heard. This method is patently ridiculous, of course, as a majority of games do indeed have music and silent streams are largely worthless in terms of entertainment value. But at least Twitch's move had the unintended consequence of highlighting just how burdensome our permission culture has become, in knee-capping game-streams, which are ultimately useful to game-makers, in favor of copyright protection. It's easy to see how everyone loses and why everyone loses when Twitch streams are silenced, in other words.

The search for aliens has been pretty fruitless so far, but that doesn't mean we should give up on it. Sure, there's little evidence that points to us ever finding aliens beyond our solar system -- and no way that we'll ever interact with distant aliens given the vastness of space and that darn speed of light limitation. However, if we can find some sign that we're not alone, that would be quite a remarkable discovery that could inspire us to greater goals, knowing that someone else is out there to impress or something? Or it would just be cool to be able to build a Dyson sphere of our own.

Another US city has stepped up to shelter some of its most privileged citizens from "hate crimes."

Review manipulation in the crowdsourced data era is of course nothing new. Amazon just filed a new lawsuit against more than 1,000 people who were selling reviews for as little as $5 a pop. Elsewhere, companies with a vested interest in making their streaming video catalog as attractive as possible will magically skew aggregated review data higher. Head over to any number of services like Walmart's Vudu and you'll notice that it's almost impossible for a crap film to drop below three stars, not matter how foul of an unholy abomination it is.

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 help support Techdirt.

So people living in San Francisco went sort of ballistic on the internet yesterday expressing outrage at a bunch of truly tone deaf ads from Airbnb, which were clearly an attempt to push against an upcoming proposition vote in San Francisco (Prop F) that would limit the ability of homeowners to rent out their homes via Airbnb. To start off, let's be clear: these ads are terrible. They're basically all premised on the fact that under existing law, taxes paid by Airbnb users (not Airbnb...) to the city from their rentals equals about $12 million. It's a valid point that Airbnb contributes to the city tax revenue, but the way in which Airbnb decided to demonstrate it simply reeks of entitlement, with each one basically asking for "more" for their $12 million, including from libraries. If you can't read that, it says:

Well, it's not a huge surprise that it moved forward, but the faux "cybersecurity" bill, which is actually a surveillance bill in disguise, CISA, has moved forward in the Senate via an overwhelming 83 to 14 vote. As we've discussed at length, while CISA is positioned as just a "voluntary" cybersecurity information sharing bill, it's really none of those things. It's not voluntary and it's not really about cybersecurity. Instead, it's a surveillance bill, that effectively gives the NSA greater access to information from companies in order to do deeper snooping through its upstream collection points. Even the attempts to supposedly "clarify" the language to protect data from being used for surveillance shows that the language is deliberately written to look like it does one thing, while really opening up the ability of the NSA and FBI to get much more information.

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For a while now, Jay-Z has been engaged in one of the more bizarre copyright(ish) cases around, concerning his classic song "Big Pimpin'". The musical hook to that tune -- everyone agrees -- was from the song "Khosara, Khosara." But this isn't a typical copyright case because the song was licensed to Jay-Z back in 1995. So, there shouldn't be any issue, right? Except that the nephew of the composer of the song claims that the song still violates his uncle's moral rights. Moral rights, as we've discussed for years, are a fairly common concept outside the US, but mostly not valid inside the US (there is a small exception for certain kinds of "visual" arts, which the US put in place solely to pretend it respects the moral rights requirements of the Berne Convention). Nonetheless, Osama Ahmed Fahmy was surprisingly successful in moving forward with a US-based lawsuit against Jay-Z, on behalf of his uncle, the composer Baligh Hamdy.

With a few exceptions (hearing aids, collectibles) as technology evolves, prices for these services drop. Unless you're the cable and broadband industries, cozily ensconced in a bubble of regulatory capture. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks prices for broad categories of goods and services over time, and as Business Insider notes, a quick look at the eighteen year trend of technology goods and service pricing shows cable relatively alone when it comes to product pricing rising steadily over time:The problem is that chart doesn't really work, since comparing cable TV to the cost of, say, audio gear isn't really an apples to apples comparison. Unfortunately for cable, things don't look much better even if you're comparing cable TV prices to other, marginally-similar services (streaming TV, satellite radio) or, say, inflation. Last year, the FCC released a study (pdf) that showed that cable rates have risen at around four times the rate of inflation. Over an 18-year period from 1995 to 2013, cable rates increased 6.1%, while the Consumer Price Index’s compound average annual rate of growth during the same period was just 2.4%.

Roca Labs has not been having a good fall. Just a few weeks after the FTC came down hard on Roca Labs, for its ridiculous gag clause, as well as for its misleading marketing, it appears that Roca Labs has now lost its lawsuit against Pissed Consumer. As you may recall, we first wrote about Roca Labs a little over a year ago when it sued PissedConsumer, ridiculously arguing "tortious interference" because Pissed Consumer effectively encouraged people to write negative reviews which would, in turn, violate the gag clause in Roca Labs sales' contract. This seemed like a ridiculous stretch and... the court agreed. The judge has little trouble pointing out that CDA 230 clearly protects Pissed Consumer from liability for any reviews written by users, noting that CDA 230 protects against tortious interference claims.

Using DNA found at the scene of a crime to identify the guilty party is pretty routine these days, but, as Mike discussed many years ago, police have been getting more aggressive in going much further: carrying out "familial" DNA searches on privately-held genetic databases. That link is to a recent Wired article that concerns the case of Michael Usry, who became a suspect in a 1966 1996 murder case because of his father's DNA:

So often when we exam the really silly trademark disputes here, they're typically between a large corporation and a much smaller entity. The reason for this should be self-evident: trademark bullies are like every other kind of bully in that they prey on those they think can be pushed around. But it isn't always that way. In fact, some of the really stupid stuff can, in fact, happen between two massive corporations. Witness the final resolution of the fight between ExxonMobil and Fox Network, which stemmed entirely from the grand issue of interlocking "x"s.

The Concorde jet flew for nearly 30 years before it went out of service. And now, the time airline passengers spend in security lines wastes far more time than a supersonic jet could make up in the air (depending on the journey, of course). Still, traveling fast is cool, regardless if it's done by air or in an evacuated tube -- as long as it's fast. Perhaps there's some analogy to the Skyscraper Index where supersonic transportation designs arise right before an economic recession... so maybe hold off on buying a high-speed ticket to London.

As we mentioned yesterday, one of the (many) bad things involved in the new Senate attempt to push the CISA "cybersecurity" bill forward was that they were including a bad amendment added by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that would expand the terrible Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that should actually be significantly cut back. Senator Ron Wyden protested this amendment specifically in his speech against CISA. And, for whatever reason, Whitehouse's amendment has been pulled from consideration and Whitehouse is seriously pissed off about it.

Just a few months back we had written about an odd case occurring in California between Multi-Time Machines, which makes watches, and Amazon, which sells watches, but not MTM watches. This trademark case over search results on watches took an odd turn after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals attempted to turn back the time-piece, applying a discarded doctrine called "initial interest confusion." This doctrine made it trademark infringement for retailers to point customers looking for product X to product Y instead, particularly by using certain product placement practices. The Ninth Circuit essentially dropped the doctrine in 2011, after a series of inconsistent rulings bred all kinds of confusion. In this particular case, Amazon customers entering "MTM watches" into the search field were presented with watches made by competitors, because Amazon doesn't carry MTM watches. In other words: "We don't carry that product, but we do carry these similar products that you might be interested in." The 9th Circuit initially ruled in favor of Amazon, but the appeals court reversed that ruling and set the trial to go before a jury using, again, the initial interest confusion doctrine.

Another day, another ridiculous legal threat. This time it's from a company called "TellSpec" against the news site Pando Daily. Last year, it appears that Pando had a couple of articles about Tellspec, a crowdfunded food scanning project that raised $386,392 on IndieGoGo. Pando was reasonably skeptical of the product, which claimed it could tell you the "allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories and ingredients" of your food just by "scanning" the food with a handheld device. Pando called it a "giant medical scam."

You probably recall that during the recent and ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, Petra Laszlo, a camera woman for Hungarian news outlet N1, was recorded tripping refugees and kicking their children as they ran for their lives across the Hungarian border. Laszlo was ultimately fired by her employer, and initially "apologized" for her behavior by trying to claim that she wasn't an unnecessarily angry racist, she simply tripped and kicked refugees because she thought she was being attacked:

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is pushing an absolutely terrible draft bill that is supposedly about improving "car safety." This morning there were hearings on the bill, and the thing looks like a complete dud. In an era when we're already concerned about the ridiculousness of how copyright law is blocking security research on automobiles (just as we're learning about automakers hiding secret software in their cars to avoid emissions testing), as well as questions about automobile vulnerabilities and the ability to criminalize security research under the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), this bill makes basically all of it worse. From Harley Geiger at CDT:

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For much of the year, Facebook has been at the center of a global net neutrality controversy regarding its Internet.org initiative. Internet.org provides developing nations free, limited access to certain services, provided they're Facebook approved and not encrypted. Facebook is hungry to get in at the ground floor of an absolute explosion in developing nation ad revenue, but net neutrality critics have worried that giving so much control to one company sets a horrible precedent. It would, they argue, be far more helpful to simply deliver a subsidized version of the real Internet, encrypted warts and all.

Ronald Satish Emrit -- like my two preteen sons -- is convinced YouTube is going to make him rich. However, Emrit's sole contribution to this effort so far has been eight music videos… and a $325,000,000 lawsuit.

If there are two edicts I try to follow whenever I'm writing, they are, first, write what is true and, second, avoid cliche at all costs. I bring that up only as a preface before saying the following: the UK is walking down an Orwellian path. It's nearly the cliche of cliches to say something like this, and yet it happens that the cliche is true. While there is most certainly a real thing known as a threat from Islamic terrorism, there is also such a thing as overreaction. What started as the British government's attempt to ban extremist thought from social media and television (under the notion that some thoughts are too dangerous to enjoy the freedom that other thoughts deserve) then devolved into the conscripting of teachers that were to be on the lookout for children that might become radicalized. To assist them with this, the government helpfully provided spy-software to use against students. Spy-software which itself was found to be exploitable in the most laughably easy of ways. This employed two of the most horrifying aspects of Orwell's Oceania: the concept of thought-crime and the employ of citizens to fearfully surveil one another.

Maybe the DOJ has grown accustomed to the FBI handing over fully-groomed terrorists for it to prosecute. Its recent attempts to go outside of the realm of young, impressionable men when seeking spy-related prosecutions have gone disastrously.

It shouldn't be news to anyone who reads Techdirt that HBO is rather well known for being overly protective of its intellectual property. Still, there are times when even those we know to be prickly on these matters pick a fight that has me scratching my head. One such example is the recent news that HBO decided to challenge the trademark registration of an itty bitty regional online television streaming group in Australia.

As technology advances, it's increasingly obvious that almost any piece of hardware can be used as a weapon, if put in the wrong hands. We can't exactly ban people from brewing their own beer at home because it's possible that they could also incubate a bioweapon with the same equipment. But how about re-purposing weapons for peaceful missions? NASA has inherited a couple pretty nice spy telescopes, and there could be plenty of other scientific uses for certain military hardware.

All over the nation, police departments are deploying body cameras. But there's no guarantee the public will have any access to the footage. As Kimberly Kindy and Julie Tate of the Washington Post report, the ultimate goals of greater accountability and transparency are routinely being thwarted by law enforcement agencies.

Despite the fact that most of the internet industry has recently come out against the ridiculous faux-cybersecurity bill CISA, the Senate today began the process of moving the bill forward with a debate. The arguments were pretty much what you'd expect. The supporters of the bill, such as Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr, went on and on about how the bill is "voluntary" and about various online hacks (none of which would have been stopped by CISA -- but apparently those details don't matter). Senator Ron Wyden responded by pointing to all the internet companies coming out against the bill, and saying (accurately) that they're doing so because they know the public no longer trusts many of those companies, and they don't want a bill that will almost certainly be used for further surveillance efforts.

Apple has entered its response to federal magistrate judge James Orenstein's request that the company explain whether or not unlocking an encrypted iPhone would be "burdensome." It was the judge calling the bluffs of everyone involved in the new Crypto War, but mainly the FBI's.

Trademark law often gets lumped in with patents and copyright under the "intellectual property" banner, but in fact it's a different kind of law with an entirely different heritage. That said, it's not without its dangers, so this week we're discussing the intent and extent of trademark law and its impacts both positive and negative. 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.

Lots of people talk about internet companies "selling" user data, and in many cases it's massively exaggerated. Often, what people think is selling data is something else entirely, such as targeted advertising, where no information goes back to the advertiser. For example: just try to go to Facebook or Google and "buy" someone's data. It can't be done. You can place ads against certain profiles or keywords, but you don't get back any data about the people who are being advertised to. That's not "selling" their data. However, that doesn't mean that some companies aren't selling people's data, and doing so in sketchy ways. And it appears that the UK's largest online pharmacy, Pharmacy2U, has now been been fined £130,000 not just for selling patient data, but for selling it to scammers.

If you haven't noticed, we tend to do things a bit differently around here sometimes. While other sites are looking at ways to ban you from reading their site if you use an ad blocker, we've made it easy for people to block ads on Techdirt if they feel that the ads are a problem. And while more and more sites are turning off comments, we've always believed that the comments on Techdirt are integral to the site and a huge part of the experience here. Over the years, we've added a few things here and there to keep the comment section vibrant -- including the "insightful" and "funny" buttons, which let you vote and help to highlight the most insightful and funniest comments (and we highlight the best ones every week in a separate post).

This is the last chance to grab a 2-year subscription for Private Internet Access VPN service for just $59.95 (that's 24% off the regular price) before time runs out. Private Internet Access has some good reviews and has publicly answered TorrentFreak's serious questions about its privacy policies and logging practices. PIA says, "We do not log, period. This includes, but is not limited to, any traffic data, DNS data or meta (session) data. Privacy IS our policy."

LOL. Cybersecurity.

In Canada, historically there hasn't been a worse offender of net neutrality than Rogers Communications. The ISP has been at the forefront of throttling, blocking, or otherwise impeding Canadian broadband traffic for years, its ham-fisted network management practices very often having a very real and very negative impact on perfectly legitimate Internet services ranging from encrypted traffic to World of Warcraft. For a while there, Rogers was responsible for half of all neutrality complaints to Canadian regulators.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires that federal agencies respond to FOIA requests within 20 days. If it needs more information, the government agency is allowed to wait for you to respond and not count that against the 20 days. The law does provide for a situation where, "in unusual circumstances" the 20 day period can be extended with a specific notice explaining the "unusual circumstances," but "no such notice shall specify a date that would result in an extension for more than ten working days."

Attention news agencies of Planet Earth. This is an all points bulletin for your benefit: stop passing off video game footage as real-life-happenings. Yes, what seems like a thing that shouldn't be able to happen has actually happened several times in the past, from video game footage passed off as a terrorist attack to state news agencies passing off video game footage as a potential threat to a nation's enemies. Some nations appear to even be trying to take advantage of it all, such as when Russia tried to sucker world news groups into thinking that it had found proof that America is arming Ukrainians with video game footage of a weapons cache. And, yet, it keeps happening.

Deus Ex is a video game series built around the theme of human-augmentation and its effects on people's underlying humanity. It is published by Square Enix, a company built around the theme of trying to piss off fans at every possible turn. Whether it was the nuking of a fan-translation that had already been three years in the works, the company's loving embrace of stupid DRM, or cease-and-desist-ing an entirely harmless Final Fantasy fan-film out of existence, it's always appeared that Square Enix might just be some kind of corporate monster that can only sustain itself on the tears of its biggest fans.

The goal of living on Mars is getting some media attention (because everyone continues to want to save Matt Damon apparently). It's seriously difficult to live on Mars unless we make some major changes to its atmosphere and climate, and somehow turn the clock back to make Mars warmer and more water-friendly. People are thinking about ways to terraform Mars, but it's an enormous project that isn't quite environmentally friendly to our alien neighbors (if they exist).

Last summer, automatic license plate reader manufacturer Vigilant Systems took the state of Arkansas to court over its legislative ban on the private collection of license plate data. It argued -- along with Digital Recognition Networks -- that the new law encroached on its First Amendment rights.

We've written a few times about Larry Lessig's somewhat wacky campaign for President, which was premised on the idea that it was a "referendum" campaign, where his entire focus would be to push Congress into putting in place serious campaign finance reform and then resigning from the Presidency. As we noted, the whole thing was a bit of a gimmick. And apparently that gimmick hasn't been working too well. Earlier this month, Lessig noted that he was being shut out from the Democratic debates, despite being a Democrat running for President and polling roughly on par with a few of the other nobodies in the campaign. The problem is that the Democratic National Committee apparently chose to ignore the campaign and because it refused to officially "welcome" him to the campaign, pollsters aren't including him and thus he didn't have enough polling data to be invited to the debate.

Are lawyers the driving force behind artistic freedom? Astonishingly, that's the impression you get when you read the Copyright Alliance's account of a recent panel on music copyright hosted at George Mason University. To be clear, they note the importance of creators, in the sense that:

The BBC is a rather odd organization. Unlike commercial broadcasters, or those given money directly by national governments, it is mainly funded by a public licensing fee that must be paid by anyone in the UK who watches or records TV programs in real time, using:

We've been covering how Verizon has swindled a long line of states and cities into giving the company all manner of subsidies and tax breaks in exchange for uniform fiber deployment that never happens (or only partially happens). While fourteen Mayors recently wrote Verizon to complain about its dubious behavior, New York City has been the most vocal critic of late, after a June audit showed that Verizon completely failed to live up to a 2008 franchise agreement with the city promising 100% FiOS coverage to all five city boroughs by 2014. Verizon accomplished about half of that.

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Hypothetical: someone has posted photos of a person on a website, attached to text suggesting the individual had done something that, if true, the person probably wouldn't want made public. The person in the photos would like these photos removed (and presumably the posts themselves). Who should they approach sue about this?

One narrative that broadcast and cable industry execs use to comfort themselves late at night while sipping bourbon is that cord cutting is the realm of the foolish youngster, and that as these folks age they'll suddenly see the wisdom in paying an arm and a leg for traditional cable. Nielsen, the TV ratings company that goes out of its way to tell the cable industry what it wants to hear, has been pushing this narrative hard lately; arguing that as the 18-to-34 demographic begins having children, the idea of giving Comcast $150 a month for huge bundles of awful channels is going to suddenly, somehow become appealing: