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If you still watch traditional TV chances are you've increasingly been accosted with blacked out content and annoying ticker warnings as cable operators and broadcasters bicker over programming contracts. Whether it's Fox News's ugly fight with Dish, DirecTV's feud with The Weather Channel, or the Cablevision - News Corporation fight that blacked out the World Series a few years back, these obnoxious disputes have only gotten uglier over the last few years as programming costs have soared and the cable and broadcast industry works tirelessly to ensure its looming irrelevance.

Copyright expert and professor Pam Samuelson, one of the most respected scholars of copyright law, has published a short paper explaining what she calls the "three fundamental flaws in CAFC's Oracle v. Google decision." As you may recall, that ruling was a complete disaster, overturning a lower court decision that noted that application programming interfaces (APIs) are not copyrightable, because Section 102 of the Copyright Act pretty clearly says that:

We've already written a few articles about the confirmation that AT&T is going above and beyond what's required by the law to be a "valued partner" of the NSA in helping with its surveillance campaign. While it's long been known that AT&T was giving fairly direct access to its backbone (thank you Mark Klein!), the latest released documents provide much more detail -- including that AT&T often does the initial "sifting" before forwarding content it finds to the NSA. To some NSA apologists, this is proof that the NSA isn't so bad, because it doesn't have full unencumbered access to everything, but rather is relying on AT&T to do the searching and then handing over what it finds. Of course, as the documents showed, it's only in some cases that AT&T searches first, in others it appears that the NSA does, in fact, have full access.

We've already written a few articles about the confirmation that AT&T is going above and beyond what's required by the law to be a "valued partner" of the NSA in helping with its surveillance campaign. While it's long been known that AT&T was giving fairly direct access to its backbone (thank you Mark Klein!), the latest released documents provide much more detail -- including that AT&T often does the initial "sifting" before forwarding content it finds to the NSA. To some NSA apologists, this is proof that the NSA isn't so bad, because it doesn't have full unencumbered access to everything, but rather is relying on AT&T to do the searching and then handing over what it finds. Of course, as the documents showed, it's only in some cases that AT&T searches first, in others it appears that AT&T does, in fact, have full access.

Time and time again, we hear the claim that without copyright and/or patents there is no way for creators to make money, or even any reason for anyone to create anything at all. This is obviously absurd on many levels, but in today's episode we look at the most immediate and practical ones: the many business models that aren't based on intellectual property, and approaches to incentivizing creativity and innovation that don't involve locking things down. 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.

The FCC has fined yet another company for blocking user Wi-Fi access in order to drive customers to the company's own, ridiculously-expensive Wi-Fi options. According to an FCC announcement, regulators have fined Smart City Holdings, LLC $750,000 for blocking user access to Wi-Fi at a number of convention centers served by the company. More specifically, Smart City was caught using common technology that sends de-authorization packets to user devices, kicking them off of their own personal hotspots or tethered smartphones while in Smart City business locations.

The US government's desire to keep terrorists off airplanes has resulted in heavily-populated "watchlists" -- lists short on due process and long on hunches.

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Back in 2011, This American Life toured an office building in Marshall, Texas, and found eerie hallways of empty offices that serve as the 'headquarters' of patent trolls. For many, that was the first introduction to the strange world of the Eastern District of Texas, its outsized role in patent litigation and, especially, its effective support of the patent troll business model. Trolls love the Eastern District for its plaintiff-friendly rules, so they set up paper corporations in the district as an excuse to file suit there. Meanwhile, defendants find themselves dragged to a distant, inconvenient, and expensive forum that often has little or no connection to the dispute. The remote district's role has only increased since 2011. The latest data reveals that the Eastern District of Texas is headed to a record year. An astonishing 1,387 patent cases were filed there in the first half of 2015. This was 44.4% of all patent cases nationwide. And almost all of this growth is fueled by patent trolls. Happily, lawmakers have finally moved to restore some balance. The latest version of the Innovation Act in the House includes language that would make it much harder for trolls to file in the Eastern District of Texas. The proposal goes under the decidedly mundane name of "venue reform" but it could actually be crucial to the effort fix our broken patent system. The Luckiest Court in the Universe The Eastern District of Texas is a federal court district running along the Texas-Louisiana border. The district covers a largely rural area without much of a technology industry. It is just one of 94 federal district courts. (Some states, like Vermont, have a single federal district, while others, like Texas and California, have as many as four.) If patent cases were distributed evenly among the federal district courts, each one would have received about 33 cases so far this year – a far cry from the 1,387 filings in the Eastern District of Texas. Accident? We don't think so. In fact, we ran a calculation to see how likely it is that at least 1,387 of 3,122 patent cases might end up there by chance. This was the result: This probability is so vanishingly small that you'd be more likely to win the Powerball jackpot 200 times in a row. Obviously, something other than chance is attracting trolls to this remote district. Now that folks are taking notice, some Eastern District of Texas jurists are feeling a bit defensive. Former Judge Leonard Davis, for example, recently said: "To say the Eastern District is responsible [for the patent troll problem] is to say that the Southern District of Texas is responsible for immigration problems." This is nonsense. The Southern District of Texas gets immigration cases because it sits on the U.S.-Mexico border. There is no equivalent reason for the Eastern District of Texas to be a hotbed of patent litigation. To understand why the district sees so much patent trolling, we need to look deeper. How We Got Here The Eastern District of Texas was not always so popular. In 1999, only fourteen patent cases were filed there. By 2003, the number of filings had grown to fifty-five. Ten years later, in 2013, it was 1,495. This massive rise in litigation followed the appointment of Judge T. John Ward in 1999, and his drive to create local patent rules. Judge Ward's rules, while similar to patent rules in other federal districts, had some additional plaintiff-friendly features such as a compressed discovery schedule and a short timeline to trial. This so-called "rocket docket" attracted patent plaintiffs eager to use the compressed schedule to pressure defendants to settle. For those cases that went to trial, the district got a reputation for huge patent verdicts. As one commentator explained, the Eastern District's "speed, large damage awards, outstanding win-rates, likelihood of getting to trial, and plaintiff-friendly local rules suddenly made [it] the venue of choice for patent plaintiffs." The explosion in patent litigation promptly led to a burst of new economic activity in East Texas. As the BBC wrote, Marshall is a "sleepy town kept busy with patent cases." The patent litigation boom creates business for hotels, restaurants, trial graphics services, copying, expert witnesses, jury consultants, court-appointed technical advisers, and, of course, lawyers. In other words, patent litigation has become important to the economic health of the communities surrounding the courthouse. But the federal courts don't exist to generate business for a particular region. Tipping The Scales on Both Procedure and Substance So why are these plaintiff-friendly rules so important? First, the rules impose particular burdens on defendants. If a patent case proceeds to discovery—the process whereby parties hand over information potentially relevant to the case—it will usually be more expensive in the Eastern District of Texas. This is because the local discovery order in patent cases requires parties to automatically begin producing documents before the other side even requests them. In patent troll cases, this imposes a much higher burden on defendants. Operating companies might be forced to review and disclose millions of documents while shell-company patent trolls tend to have very few documents. Trolls can exploit this imbalance to pressure defendants to settle. Second, the rules make it harder to eliminate cases early. The Supreme Court's decision in Alice v CLS Bank invalidated many of the low-quality software patents favored by patent trolls. But this only helps defendants if they are able to get a ruling to that effect from the judge overseeing their case. Judges Rodney Gilstrap and Robert Schroeder recently indicated that they would require patent defendants to ask permission before they can file a motion to dismiss raising Alice. This means that defendants in the Eastern District of Texas will more often be forced to go through expensive discovery. When judges in the Eastern District do issue rulings onchallenges raising Alice, their decisions are very different from jurists in other parts of the country. Recent data from Docket Navigator analyzed all challenges under 35 USC § 101 so far this year:

As we've been exploring, whistleblowers have been exposing Putin and the Kremlin's use of "troll factories" to fill the internet with propaganda. The efforts run amazingly deep, with employees paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation 24 hours a day. One of these employees, Lyudmila Savchuk, spent two months employed by the operation and was so disgusted that she quit, launched an anti-propaganda social activist campaign, and decided to sue the Russian government.

The MPAA has been working on a number of tricks to find a SOPA through the backdoor in the last few months -- more on some of the many attempts coming soon -- but in one attempt, it's suddenly walking away. A few weeks ago, all of the major movie studios filed a lawsuit over the website MovieTube (actually a series of websites). While it may well be that MovieTube was involved in copyright infringement (and thus a lawsuit may be perfectly appropriate), the concerning part was that, as a part of the lawsuit, the studios were demanding a remedy that is not available by law: that anyone who provides any kind of service to MovieTube be forced to stop via a court injunction. This was the kind of tool that was a part of SOPA, which (you may recall) never became law. Among the requests in the lawsuit:

In July of 2011, Verizon announced it would no longer offer its wireless users unlimited data plans, and instead began pushing more expensive and capped shared data plans (complete with shiny $15 per gigabyte overage fees!). While Verizon did grandfather existing unlimited customers, like AT&T, it immediately began waging a quiet war on these users, throttling these purportedly "unlimited" connections to try and drive these users toward pricier metered options.

Hollywood is still 100% focused on trying to blame the internet for any of its woes, mostly with bogus attacks on internet companies it doesn't like. And yet... it seems to keep on setting box office records. The latest is that Universal Pictures has broken a new record in bringing in $2 billion in box office revenue faster than any other studio in history, pushed over the top by the successful opening weekend of "Straight Outta Compton" (a movie that seems to have some big fans in Silicon Valley).

One of the key realizations over the last few years, especially post-Snowden, is that there is no such thing as "just metadata". Collecting metadata is not only as bad as collecting content, it is arguably worse. Whereas content must be parsed and understood -- something that is still quite hard to do well in an automated fashion -- metadata by definition is already classified and tagged. That makes it very easy to combine with other information, and in a way that scales, to reveal extremely intimate details about the person it refers to. Techdirt has already run a couple of stories that demonstrate this. Back in 2011, the German politician Malte Spitz obtained his own phone location data, and cross-referenced it with his Twitter feeds, blog entries and other digital information to give a remarkably full picture of his daily life. More recently, Ton Siedsma went even further, allowing researchers to analyze all of the metadata generated by his phone -- with a predictably detailed picture of Siedsma emerging as a result. Now a brave reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Will Ockenden, has requested and made available a year's worth of his outgoing call and SMS records, and six months of his data sessions on a Web page:

There's going to be a point where Moore's law stops -- because the things we build can only get so small before quantum physics starts to really mess with how circuits behave. Still, researchers keep pushing technology to make smaller and smaller devices. Molecular electronics aren't practical just yet, but the development of nanoscale components isn't completely ridiculous. Here are just a few examples.

We've all heard it before: [industry X] can't compete in the marketplace because the public just wants everything for free. It's a mantra taken up by the film industry, the recording industry, the literary industry, and the video game industry. And, almost always, we've found that the mantra is complete nonsense. Instead, it's been clear that the public is more than willing to purchase that which is scarce and valued. It's just that those scarce and valued things are often times not the content itself.

More evidence has surfaced showing local law enforcement agencies are using high-powered surveillance equipment -- equipment originally designed for the military and highly-recommended by the NSA. Ali Winston and the Center for Investigative Reporting have obtained documents showing both Chicago and Los Angeles have used "dirt boxes" (DRT -- Digital Receiver Technology "boxes:" high-powered cell site simulators) since 2005.

The recent Snowden documents published by the New York Times and ProPublica confirm the close relationship between AT&T and the NSA, which would explain the deafening silence the company issued in response to the first few months of leaks. (Such "partnerships" likely exist with Verizon and other providers, although nothing has been directly confirmed by leaked documents, and such partnerships may have done a bit of "dissolving" shortly after the leaks began.)

As we recently covered, ProPublica (in conjunction with the New York Times) published another set of documents exposing AT&T's long-running position as Alfred to the NSA's bulk collection Batman. The documents contained glowing quotes from various NSA operatives and officials touting the telco's subservience.

Late in 2013, a few like-minded individuals decided Yelp owed them money for all the reviews they had voluntarily written over the years. The class action suit bascially alleged Yelp's machinery was lubricated with the blood of unpaid reviewers. The original filing threw off the shackles of normal, dry legal prose in favor of phrases like "thumbing its nose at workers… and taxing authorities," "dependent on a horde of non-wage-paid reviewers," "system of cult-like rewards and disciplines," and "a 21st-century galley slave ship with pirates banging the drums."

Over the years, Techdirt has had a couple of stories about misguided chefs who think that people taking photos of their food are "stealing" something -- their culinary soul, perhaps. According to an article in the newspaper Die Welt, it seems that this is not just a matter of opinion in Germany, but established law (original in German):

Give your IT skills a boost and grab the CompTIA IT Certification Bundle for 95% off in the Techdirt Deals store. The four courses include instructions on how to install & configure hardware, how to set up network connectivity and email for Android and iOS, and how to master security, safety and environmental issues. Once you've completed the courses, you'll be ready to take the CompTIA A+ certification exam and be well on your way to becoming an IT expert.

For years the broadband industry tried to claim that they were imposing usage caps because of network congestion. In reality they've long lusted after usage caps for two simple reasons: they allow ISPs to charge more money for the same product, and they help cushion traditional TV revenues from the ongoing assault from Internet video. Instead of admitting that, big ISPs have tried to argue that caps are about "fairness," or that they're essential lest the Internet collapse from uncontrolled congestion (remember the debunked Exaflood?).

Dianne Feinstein has this weird obsession with book burning and violating the First Amendment. Just a few months ago, we wrote about her ridiculous rant about how the First Amendment doesn't cover The Anarchist Cookbook and that it should be banned from the internet:

There's something... weird about American publications, which regularly rely on the First Amendment, to argue against those very freedoms. Obviously, part of the joys of free speech is that of course they're allowed to express opinions on why we should have less free speech... but it's still odd. The latest entrant is from the New Yorker, which has a long piece by Kelefa Sanneh, which supposedly takes a look at the "new battles over free speech" and raises some of the usual concerns these days about how there have been a number of high profile (and low profile) situations recently where people have used their free speech abilities to demand that others, with views they disagree with, be silenced.

We've written before about AT&T's snuggly relationship with intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Not satisfied with being super-responsive to their demands, the telco provider has made proactive efforts over the years to ensure these entities get what they want when they want it... if not sooner.

This week, the sad story of the US government's treatment of whistleblowers added another chapter when Chelsea Manning was threatened with indefinite solitary confinement over some minor violations of military prison rules. Both our top comments on the insightful side come in response to this news, with first place going to JustShutUpAndObey with a solid observation about any time you see a charge labelled "disrespect":

Five Years Ago And so the 2010 copyright shenanigans continue, with problems on several fronts. In the world of collection society shakedowns, we saw how the day-to-day legalized extortion by BMI works, while Canadian collection society Access Copyright was trying to bleed more money out of students for photocopying privileges; New Zealand authors were calling for a "you must be a pirate" internet licensing fee, and the settling of a payola case offered yet more evidence for why the RIAA's calls for a Performance Rights tax are ludicrous. At least all this meant that more and more people were realizing how problematic collection societies are. In the world of lawsuit-based shakedowns, US Copyright Group actually withdrew two lawsuits... in order to refile them against individuals while Righthaven continued to ramp up its "sue everyone" insanity. But we're not done yet: next stop is the world of bogus and over-aggressive takedowns. A German anti-piracy group knocked out a video for which it had no rights whatsoever, the Discovery Channel forced down a popular Deadliest Catch fan site by claiming that embedding the official videos is infringement, and EMI suddenly decided to single out one popular Empire State Of Mind parody (out of hundreds) for a takedown. As one history we pointed to this week neatly outlines, copyright started as a tool for censorship, was attempted as an incentive system, and is now back to its roots. Ten Years Ago We continue our tour by jumping back to 2005 and the world of copy protection nonsense. Even as we pointed out how DRM simply doesn't work, and only pisses off legitimate customers we found out Princeton was getting ready to use digital textbooks with heavy-handed protections and wondered if companies think buyers are complete idiots — leading to the bigger question of whether the industry understands the concept of legitimate uses of technology at all. It didn't seem likely, with record labels eyeing the concept of release windows for music, universities bailing out of label-promoted forced music subscription services and people striking back at Microsoft for its intellectual property propaganda. And now, the freakout list: FedEx freaked out about people making furniture with their boxes, politicians freaked out about Usenet, the Associated Press freaked out (or tried to stoke others to freak out) about Daylight Savings Time changes causing Y2K-esque computer problems, one writer freaked out about online anonymity, and an entire high school of students freaked out (presumably) when a computer glitch told them they all got failing grades. Fifteen Years Ago Finally we come to the wellspring of many of the copyright debates that still rage to this day: the Napster controversy, with Intel taking a pro-peer-to-peer stance this week while music retailers had mixed opinions and one new piece of software was attempting to blend Napster with instant messaging. Already we were starting to look at ways for artists to make money without relying on intellectual property laws. We also saw the internet effect with other fields. In the world of health, it turned out the web was a great place for people with Munchausen syndrome (the compulsion to feign illness and disease) while people were beginning to track the overall impact of the internet on healthcare and doctor-patient relationships — plus the huge potential for dangerous quackery. In the world of sex we saw a porn ban struck down as unconstitutional while libraries were struggling with how to handle porn (still called "cyberporn") and married couples were struggling with how to handle cyber-infidelity. Thirty-Five Years Ago This isn't something that actually happened this week in 1980, but a New Yorker article this Thursday pointed to the newly-minted 808 Day on August 8th to honor the (not actually exact) birthday of the Roland TR-808 — the most iconic drum machine in the world. The closer look at the history is fascinating, tracking the machine's unlikely adoption by emerging styles of music, and the way its sound was essentially "crowdsourced" as various producers tweaked settings over the years and built off each others' adjustments, eventually producing the familiar sounds that you almost certainly recognize even if you don't know the machine by name.

One of the oft-touted features of 3D printers, especially in the early days, was the ability to scan an object and reproduce it. But as the printers themselves have become cheaper and more accessible, the focus seems to have shifted to downloadable and shareable designs, with little attention being paid to the scanning devices that help complete the "replicator" vision of our 3D printing future. This week we're looking at Bevel, an low-cost device that brings 3D scanning to any smartphone. The Good The most immediately noticeable thing about Bevel is the price. Some personal 3D scanners exist in the range of thousands of dollars, and a growing number in the range of hundreds, but I've never seen one that clocks in at a mere $50 like the Bevel. And this isn't something that produces faux-3D images with some forced depth — it's a proper scanning laser that works in concert with a smartphone's existing camera to build a true 3D model of an object. The resultant models are 3D-printing compatible (though likely not without some care and tweaking, as is generally the case) and quite impressively detailed for such a small, low-cost device. Interestingly, the Bevel is not a USB/Lightning peripheral, but rather uses the headphone/microphone jack — which is great for compatibility, though it does mean it needs to be separately charged since it can't draw power from the phone. The Bad The Bevel does appear to be tied down to a proprietary app, though for such a smartphone-specific device requiring presumably quite complex software, that's not a huge shock. I'd love to see more interoperability in smartphone peripherals, and the separation of device drivers from specific apps, but it's hard to lay the blame for that solely at Bevel's feet. More curious and concerning is their insistence on trademarking the term "Genuine 3D" to describe Bevel's photos. While I understand the desire to differentiate Bevel from apps that create a fake 3D photo effect, trying to turn the concept of a proper 3D scan/photo combination into a trademarked brand name seems unnecessary and potentially problematic, given that it's a function and a type of media that is going to become increasingly commonplace. The Creepy Bevel's 3D photos are quite impressive. It can capture very complex objects, even people, with a high level of detail. But... the results when it comes to people, while technically appreciable, are creepy as hell. I totally understand the desire to show off the Bevel's capabilities, but using terrifying renderings of their team members as flagship examples is an odd choice. I can see lots of uses for the Bevel, but their marketing material seems to suggest the most popular will be capturing moments with friends, which I frankly doubt unless your friends are already wrinkly zombie creatures.

It's been quite clear over the past two years or so that the alcohol industry, and specifically the craft beer industry, has a massive trademark problem. The simultaneous and wholly related explosions of both the sheer number of craft brewers in existence and the unprecedented interest in craft brews has resulted in more threatened legal action than anyone could have anticipated. At the heart of the issue is the cultural practice of giving specific brews funky, funny, derivative and pop-culture-based names. Because of the number of brews being developed, these names often are met with concern by a secondary party who holds a trademark on something similar. Most often, these disputes come from other breweries.

The FCC's long history of ignoring the broadband duopoly's stranglehold over telecom markets has at times bordered on the comedic. This is, after all, the agency that required 36 public workshops, 9 field hearings, 31 public notices and 376 pages to craft a "National Broadband Plan" that went well out of its way to avoid doing anything substantive about the lack of broadband competition. And only the FCC could spend $300 million on a broadband mapping website that completely omits price, while routinely hallucinating both competitors and available speeds.

Water that's safe to drink is a necessity for civilization that most Americans take for granted. When drought or natural disasters cut off safe drinking supplies, that's when we suddenly realize how precious potable water really is. Water is almost everywhere on our little planet, but it's not always safe to drink -- and the supplies of safe drinking water may be at risk of contamination from a variety of industrial processes. Here are just a few more links on our drinking water supplies.

IMSI catchers: not just for law enforcement agencies anymore! (via Slashdot) The cellphone signal-slurping devices are normally found in the hands of cops and investigators and carefully hidden from public examination by a fine mesh of redactions, withheld documents, non-disclosure agreements and dismissed cases. But two South African men walked into a sting operation, leaving behind an intriguing bit of interception equipment.

Last year we wrote about News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson's weird anti-Google rant that seemed quite devoid of facts. It was a odd amalgamation of conspiracy theory and outright falsehoods that fit more in the realm of an angry internet troll, rather than the CEO of a media conglomerate. Apparently, Thomson has continued to let these beliefs fester and has once again gone off on Google and other companies much more successful on the internet in a confused and rambling speech in Australia. The talk, focused on the future of the media industry, starts off with a philosophical discussion about China before jumping into an attack on the internet, which begins mildly enough with some digs at internet companies:

Last month, we wrote about a judge in California issuing a temporary restraining order barring an anti-abortion group from releasing a video it had surreptitiously recorded of a conversation it held with a life sciences company named StemExpress, where the group pretended to be an organization interested in doing business with StemExpress. You can argue that the group, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), did something quite shady (it's the same group that similarly recorded conversations with a Planned Parenthood exec) in misrepresenting who they were, secretly recording conversations, and editing and releasing the videos -- but that doesn't change the fact that the court really can't bar the release of the video. Because that's called prior restraint.

A few months ago, we wrote that it looked like much needed patent reform had stalled out in Congress, despite expectations that it would fly through Congress easily this year, having the strong support of both the majority party in Congress and the President. And this year, unlike last year, the trial lawyer lobby wouldn't be able to intervene. Of course, the one big obstacle -- as with every time patent reform is proposed -- would be the pharmaceutical industry. But even that seemed like it shouldn't be a huge problem because nearly all of the (relatively mild and fairly weak) reforms proposed really targeted trollish behavior, using overly broad patents to shake down innovative companies. Whether or not you approve of the way drug companies use patents, the trolling issue is a bit outside of that industry's concern, and thus it was believed that while pharmaceutical companies might whine a little bit, they wouldn't really stand in the way.

Here's the sort of copyright infringement lawsuit you don't see every day: a holistic motivational speaker purveying an off-brand Scientology designed to get true believers laid better sales commissions being sued by an artist whose portfolio contains over 400 representations of "sacred geometries."

Having a disposable phone number is a great way to avoid undesireable contacts. For $49, Hushed Private Phone Number is offering a lifetime subscription to their service. You pick one private number (USA and Canada area codes) that you can use to send text and pictures, and make calls. Hushed gives you 1100 SMS or 500 phone minutes per year. Use your number once every 6 months to keep it activated. Every 12 months from activation, you need to renew your subscription at no cost to you. If you want more than one disposable number or more SMS/talk time, you will have to pay more. Hushed is compatible with Android and iOS devices.

Michael Corleone would understand. Just when music companies and their performance-rights organization (PROs) thought they were getting out from under supervision by the U.S. Department of Justice, the DOJ may be about to pull them back in. For some time now, the DOJ's Antitrust Division has been investigating whether to modify the special antitrust consent decrees that govern the two leading PROs: the American Society of Composers And Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI). These broad settlements, originally reached in 1941, were designed to prevent anti-competitive behavior by the music publishers and set the rules for how the PROs can operate. This includes licensing on non-discriminatory terms (preventing the PROs from blocking a radio station or music service from playing their songs). The consent decrees have been modified before; BMI's was amended in 1994 and ASCAP's in 2001. But some music publishers argue these agreements are showing their age. The publishers and the PROs are hoping (and expressly asking) the DOJ to agree with their view that, here in the Internet Era, digital music doesn't need so much government intervention. Some suggest the DOJ's antitrust lawyers have shown sympathy to arguments for a "partial withdrawal" of digital copyrights from the consent-decree framework. But new arrangements to replace that framework ultimately may pull the labels and PROs back in. Billboard reported recently that the DOJ may be considering revisions that impose an even tighter regulatory scheme. According to the report, the Justice Department circulated a letter letting ASCAP and BMI know it is considering allowing any single co-owner of a "split work" — also known as a "fractional, "co-authored" or "co-pub" composition — to issue a license for 100 percent of the work. This is in contrast to the current practice in the music industry, whereby everyone who has a piece of the copyright needs to agree to license the work. The music companies have let their resulting unhappiness be known, albeit only off-the-record. Not everyone has been so unhappy with the DOJ trial balloon on split works. Billboard quoted streaming service Pandora as saying: "We appreciate that the Department of Justice is taking steps to prevent further anti-competitive behavior in music licensing." Matt Schruers of the Disruptive Competition Project has framed the reported DOJ inquiry as actively pro-competition. Per Schruers, the music industry has created "artificial gridlock" among its rights-holders by allowing each co-author the power to unilaterally veto, but not unilaterally authorize, the license to use a copyrighted song. This means that a single rights-holder with only a small percentage of ownership in the work may pull the work when a licensing agreement ends, or deny a license to begin with. These sorts of unilateral decisions by fractional rights-holders have been costly to services like Pandora Radio. Two years ago, Universal Music Publishing Group, owners of at least fractional rights in 20 percent of the music in the BMI catalog, withdrew its digital rights from BMI, a move that was followed by doubling the rates it sought to charge Pandora. And in another example, a different publisher, BMG, also withdrew its rights, but in this instance the result was Pandora took down all of BMGs wholly owned works and Pandora's customers were cut off from a substantial trove of the BMG catalog. Is this what Congress intended with its last major revision of the Copyright Act, back in 1976? It doesn't appear so. Contemporary reports from the U.S. House summarizing the changes conclude:

As we've been discussing over the past few months, Voltage Pictures took its global copyright trolling efforts down under not too long ago, seeking to shakedown lots of Australians for allegedly downloading infringing copies of Dallas Buyers Club. Australian ISP iiNet (who has regularly fought back against over aggressive copyright claims) pushed back. Earlier this year, the court allowed the copyright trolling to move ahead, but with some caveats, including demanding that DBC share the letter and telephone script it would be using to try to shake down people. At the time, we hoped this would prevent the standard level of shakedown -- and that appears to have happened.

Two words, delivered in jest, are now the focus of a civil rights lawsuit filed by a suspended student against his former school and, incredibly, the local police chief. There were a million ways this debacle could have been avoided, but the school district has decided doubling-down on its stupidity was the only way out of the mess it chose to create. After all, it won't lose much more than a bit of its reputation. If the plaintiff wins, it's taxpayers who will be footing the bill for the school's self-destructive, massively stupid overreaction.

According to the FCC's most recent Broadband Deployment Report, 55 million Americans -- 17 percent of the population -- lack access to advanced broadband, and over half of all Americans lack access to broadband at speeds of 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. When these underserved communities try to do something about it, they usually run into state protectionist laws written by ISP lawyers to protect regional duopolies. And when these duopolies are willing to connect them, it's often at an absurdly steep premium.

Sometimes you try really hard at something and you still fail. Such is the case with Mad Dogg Athletics' attempt to keep its "spinning" trademarks from becoming generic. We wrote about the company's marks on stationary bike classes nearly five years ago, when it was busy suing several gyms in Denmark for offering spinning classes. In fact, both before and after those legal actions, MDA has been incredibly active in trying to enforce its trademarks. They tried really, really hard.

All the biology we study today is based on life that relies on DNA (and RNA) to propagate. The ability to control DNA sequences will have a profound effect on our environment and society. We can already create synthetic lifeforms, but are we responsible enough to play with biotechnological fire?

Before I started paying attention to trademark issues as a part-time living, I'm pretty sure I would have thought that it would take quite a bit to get a big company's lawyers firing off threat letters and legal actions. You know, like an actual threat, or a violation of trademark that had been brought to the company's attention by confused members of the public. Instead, it too often appears that the lawyers for large companies scour the world for any-might-be-possible trademark issue that can be acted upon, like a schizophrenic pouring over the newspapers in search of that secret code the government is using to control our minds.

As we've been discussing, some surveillance hawks in Congress have been trying very hard to push CISA through into law, often using the disastrous OPM hack as evidence for why it's needed. Yet, as we've pointed out multiple times, there's nothing in CISA that would have prevented OPM from being hacked. Instead, the Senators pushing CISA and using the OPM hack as the reason seem to be blindly flailing around assuming that because both are tangentially related to "cybersecurity," people will believe that it all "works."

Let's say you're a leader in an association for NYPD sergeants. Now let's say you're, like, super aware of some of the changes and backlash against the NYPD that has occurred recently, chiefly concerning policies for policing the public, charges of racist and violent practices, and the insistance that the city government find ways to keep officers accountable for their actions. You know the city is looking into NYPD officials deleting information on illegal summons quotas. You know of the concern over the fact that the NYPD has pissed off so many black men that black men kind of don't want to join their ranks. And you're especially aware of the trend of greater protections for the public filming police doing their jobs and the crackdown on the crackdown of the photographers. What do you do?

We already wrote about Jason Leopold "accidentally" receiving a letter the CIA never actually sent that was an apology for spying on Senate staffers, but there was a lot more that Leopold received in that FOIA dump as well. Beyond the document Leopold wasn't supposed to receive, the 300 pages handed over by the CIA (not by its voluntary desire to respect FOIA stipulations, but rather because a judge told it to) provide additional details about the alleged Senate breach and its "investigative" spying -- and the ensuing fight that set off something of a Constitutional crisis in the separation of powers between the executive branch and the legislative branch.

Jason Leopold -- terrorizer of FOIA staffers throughout the US government -- has again obtained documents many would have expected to remain out of reach for years to come. Certainly, the CIA thought oneof the documents would remain its little secret for the rest of whatever.

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