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Third-party copyright troll Rightscorp is fighting a couple of lawsuits related to its alleged telephonic harassment of alleged infringers. One wonders what the ROI is on funding robocalling in pursuit of $10-20 "settlements" from suspected infringers. Whatever it is, the ROI is definitely edging further into the red, what with the company now paying lawyers to safeguard its "right" to harass and threaten people who won't pay up (or haven't even performed any infringing activity).

Let me start out by saying that I think online harassment and bullying is a significant problem -- though also one that is often misrepresented and distorted. I worry about the very real consequences of those who are bullied, harassed and threatened online, in that it can often lead to silencing voices that need to be heard, or even causing some to not even bother to participate for fear of the resulting bullying. That said, way too frequently, it seems that those who are speaking out about online bullying assume that the best way to deal with this is to move to push for censorship as the solution. This rarely works. Too frequently we see "cyberbullying" being used as a catchall for attacking speech people simply do not like. Even here at Techdirt, people who dislike our viewpoint will frequently claim that we "bullied" someone, merely for pointing out and discussing statements or arguments that we find questionable.

Back in early April Comcast unveiled its response to Google Fiber: a new two gigabit service the company promised would be made available to eighteen million customers before the end of the year. For the next four months the company made a lot of PR references to this ultra fast tier, but despite an April promise the product was launching "soon," there's five months left in the year and nobody can actually sign up for it. Comcast, now facing Google Fiber, indie ISP and municipal broadband pressure in a growing number of markets, has also consistently refused to state how much this new service would cost.

A bad ruling has been handed down that will make it much more difficult for the Maryland citizens to find out the extent of misconduct performed by public employees. The court there is nodding to an expectation of privacy that really shouldn't exist in the public sphere and, in doing so, has provided that much more obscuring darkness for badly-behaving cops.

Zorro, the masked vigilante who wields justice in the form of a sword, was first brought to the world in 1919 by Johnston McCulley. As such, some portion of the Zorro existence is now in the public domain in many jurisdictions. That hasn't stopped Zorro Productions Inc. from claiming all kinds of intellectual property rights on all things Zorro, of course. A few years back, there was a lawsuit between Zorro Production and Mars over a depiction of the hero in a commercial for M&Ms. That was a trademark claim, the rights for which Zorro Productions claims for itself, and one of the interesting questions in the case was whether such a trademark claim could be made upon a character that had entered into the public domain. Put another way: can the expiration of copyright law on a fictional character be circumvented through a trademark claim. One of the keys to answering that question, as is discussed in the above post, is whether a specific use of the character would confuse the public as to the source of the original creation, or if it might be misconstrued as any kind of endorsement. Mickey Mouse, for instance, equals Disney. Does Zorro equal Zorro Productions? Of course not.

If artificial intelligence doesn't seem to be making as much progress as we'd like, there are some other ways to try to create more intelligent beings on demand. If we can't breed smarter animals, perhaps we can make some animal cyborgs to do our bidding. We'll need some better brain interfaces, and it looks like plenty of folks are already working on them.

DHS boss Jeh Johnson is still out trading fear for civil liberties. There's a cyberwar that needs fighting and his agency is looking for a position at the "information sharing" front lines. As the major systems went down left and right a couple of days ago, Johnson remained mostly unperturbed while delivering an address to CSIS.

There's a line between a legitimate copyright infringement lawsuit and a bunch of mostly-ineffective claims masquerading as a legal filing. Photographer Dennis Flaherty has crossed that line.

So far, legacy cable operators have crafted an ingenious, two-pronged response to the rising threat of internet video competition. One, mindlessly raise programming and equipment rental rates (since we all know that traditional cable TV is a cash cow that will live forever). Two, pretend to be innovative. This latter part doesn't have to consist of much; you have to do just enough to make it look like you give a shit about television's evolution, like offer a sloppy Hulu clone under your own brand, or launch a "me too" streaming service with so many caveats to make it largely useless.

At the end of last month, Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), better known as "fast track" for various trade agreements, was approved after a series of back and forth procedural moves by Congress. This means that Congress no longer has the (Constitutionally-provided) power to have a say in the trade deals the administration is creating, other than a single up-or-down vote when everything is set in stone. There was, however, one tiny poison pill that Senator Bob Menendez supposedly hid in the TPA concerning the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. And that was that it could not be used if the trade agreement included countries that were listed as a "tier 3 nation" by the State Department when it comes to human rights violations. Malaysia, one of the countries that is a part of the TPP, has been designated a "tier 3 nation" by the State Department for a while now, due to serious human trafficking problems.

Netzpolitik.org is arguably the most influential German blog in the realm of digital rights. It played a key role in marshalling protests against ACTA three years ago. You'd think the German government would be proud of it as an example of local digital innovation, but instead, it seems to regard it as some kind of traitor:

Free yourself from tangled wires and leave your music player in your pocket or purse with these REMXD On-Ear Bluetooth Headphones. Save 28% off of retail and get up to 15 hours of playtime on one charge. The headphones work up to 33 feet away with any Bluetooth device. Buttons on the headphones allow you to skip/rewind, adjust the volume and answer calls for hands-free talking.

One of the most hilarious claims that we hear from internet trolls and the like concerning copyright and infringement is something along the lines of "but, without strong copyright, there would be no music!" It's a silly argument that has been debunked so frequently that we'd thought that it had been relegated to living on only among uninformed internet commenters, rather than actual industry execs. Enter Neil Turkewitz, one of the RIAA's top execs, who has been with the organization since 1987, and apparently still has the "Home Taping is Killing Music" phrase permanently imprinted on his brain, no matter how laughably false it is.

The internet has been tripping up dumb criminals since its inception. Police used to have to raid residences for incriminating Polaroids. Now, the criminals are saving them that step. Hashtagged bragging combined with location-tagged photos of criminal behavior has Darwinned the stupidest criminals right into the hands of local law enforcement. Not resetting stolen devices to "factory settings" after stealing them also snags a few thieves, who can easily be tracked by their victims.

Decades later, the Nazis, or at least the estate of a long-dead Nazi, gets a win. In a case we had written about months ago, in which the estate of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels sued Random House Germany over the inclusion of quotes from Goebbels' diary, claiming copyright infringement, we raised the story up as an example of why fair use rights are necessary for the sake of scholarly work. The idea that the estate of an historical figure could censor, or even put up a toll booth, between history and those that would learn from it has to be about as good of an example of what the originators of copyright didn't want as any. The whole point was to proliferate knowledge and the arts. I'm not sure why a Nazi's diary should even be afforded such protections in any respects, nevermind the estate of the dead Nazi be allowed to control the dissemination of history in this way.

Thanks to yet another FOIA lawsuit, more evidence is being produced that suggests certain federal agencies employ labyrinthine systems that seem deliberately designed to keep requesters as far away as possible from responsive documents.

It's been a while since we've had a week with this much crossover between the insightful and funny categories. First, we've got our first place comment for insightful that also came in third on the funny side — an anonymous response to James Comey's ongoing insistence that "American ingenuity is great, so I don't really believe all these computer science experts who say that it's 'too hard' to give the government access. I think they haven't really tried":

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, the Joel Tenenbaum continued to echo the Jammie Thomas case as a judge declared the damages to be unconstitutionally excessive. Meanwhile, a heated online debate about file sharing broke out between a teenager and a composer, with at least one music/media professor taking the right side. The never-normal Prince was making bold proclamations about the death of music and the internet, and Kara Swisher was taking his side, while we wondered just how many 'significant blows' against file sharing it would take to make any kind of difference. We were also fresh out of one of the DHS' big domain seizure rounds, and discovering that they wanted to go after The Pirate Bay and Megaupload as well. Snoop Dogg was sued for sampling while the band Men At Work was ordered to pay 5% of all earnings on 'Down Under' to the publisher of an old folk tune — great examples of the sort of creative interference that doesn't happen in the copyright-free world of food. At least 'Hollywood Accounting' was starting to lose in the courts, while the Washington Post was recognizing how crazy Summit Entertainment can be about Twilight IP. A lawsuit was underway that explored the boundaries of Creative Commons, while we explored some nuances of using free as part of a business model — just don't tell that to the financial columnist who lectured a bunch of little kids for running a free lemonade stand. Ten Years Ago The iPhone was still two years out, but the rumors that Apple would be entering the phone business in some big, mysterious way had already been long-circulating, and resurfaced this week in 2005. SOPA was still six years out, but the German recording industry was already onto the idea of poisoning the DNS to block file sharing. The age of MMORPGS was already well underway, and we discovered the strange new industry of real sweatshops farming virtual goods. And people were beginning to realize just how little digital memories fade (even if you want them to). The EU Parliament faced the question of software patents this week in 2005, and threw out the whole idea with a landslide vote. Back home, supporters of the Broadcast Flag were taking a sneakier approach to dealing with legislators and the public, obfuscating the facts like crazy. That kind of constant obfuscation is how you end up with people who completely fail to understand the difference between trademark and copyright. A lot of people were focused on 'mobile music'... to a fault, in fact. Some were just worried about mobile phone etiquette in the office. Others were tracking the predicted blog bubble and debating the legality of open Wi-Fi. Amidst all this, though, one huge and sad story swept through the world: the London subway bombings, which served as a tragic coming-of-age event for the internet as news media. Fifteen Years Ago It was very quiet on Techdirt this week in 2000, but apparently we didn't stop posting entirely for the 4th of July holiday, especially since Techdirt was getting a bunch of new traffic from being voted 'Cool Stop on the Internet'. Meanwhile, this was still a time of great uncertainty in Silicon Valley, but it was starting to sort itself out: the IPO market clearly hadn't died entirely and a bunch of upcoming IPOs were from companies that were actually profitable, even as major dotcom failures were hurting partners like PR firms and law firms. Unfortunately some entrepreneurs were pulling deceptive tricks to catch the eyes of VCs — perhaps lending some credence to UK residents, who trusted old names more than flashy new dotcoms. Tech adoption in the world was rapid and only accelerating. Mobile phone penetration kept blasting through more and more key threshholds, while we heard some of the first rumblings of the now-ubiquitous "camera phone". On the flipside, a lot of companies were struggling to accept and respond to online customer inquiries, while students were proving nervous about online college applications which felt a little too much like dropping your future into the void. Seventy-Eight Years Ago Film buffs, historians and fans of American culture will all feel a pang of sadness at mention of the Fox vault fire, which happened on July 9th, 1937 when canisters of nitrate film spontaneously combusted and destroyed the only copies of virtually every silent film Fox had made up to that date. It was a staggering loss for the history of cinema, and today we have only snippets and low-quality copies of a handful of the lost films — just enough to give us a taste of everything we're missing. Today, of course, there's absolutely no good reason for something like this to ever happen again: new films, music, books, photographs and other forms of content can be stored digitally in thousands or millions of places, such that nothing short of the total breakdown of society could wipe them out. And yet the sad truth is that we haven't taken full advantage of this capability: all over the world, committed archivists are being blocked in their efforts by copyright laws, DRM and a general ownership mentality. Right now there are old films rotting in vaults — or getting ready to explode in their canisters — while historians line up outside only to be denied entry. So in truth there are only two things that can destroy our cultural heritage in the digital era: the total breakdown of society, and copyright law.

Plenty of people have tried to market various devices for keeping track of your keys or never losing your wallet, but they've tended towards the cumbersome and gimmicky, and have always been pretty limited in their function. This week, we're taking a look at a much cooler approach to the same problem: little computers called Trakkies that attach to your things and link them all up in a mesh network. The Good Trakkies are a great example of innovation at work. The problem — people losing their keys, forgetting their bags, etc. — has an obvious solution in a world of wireless technology, but implementing that solution in a functional and stylish way that makes people say "wow, I want that" is another challenge altogether. Trakkies go beyond a simple proximity or location system, and instead make all your stuff smart. The little node tags come in two sizes, each with a bunch of sensors and a big configurable button; they locate each other and form a mesh network with Bluetooth and NFC connectivity, and begin learning what you bring with you and when. Your wallet can warn you if you're leaving the house without your keys, and vice versa — or you can tap the button on any one tag to find out if all the others are with you. The associated mobile app is optional (a beautiful thing) and brings your phone into the mesh network without the need for an an attached node tag, plus provides additional tools like looking up the last known location of all your tags on a map. The network can communicate with lots of other smart devices and can be hooked into IFTTT for programmable behaviours based on a wide variety of factors. And the buttons on each node can be set up with context-sensitive functions — so the button on your coat could be set to tell you if your phone isn't with you, but serve as a music skip control if it is; it could check for your wallet and keys when you're getting off the bus, but turn on and off your smart lightbulbs when you're at home. Trakkies take a big leap beyond solving a simple problem, and actually spark excitement about the new things they could enable. The Bad Truthfully, at this stage, I don't have much bad to say about this project. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. The price isn't cheap, but it isn't prohibitive either, and the designers have made what I'd consider all the right choices. The "internet of things" has been looming on the horizon for some time now, and a device like this could represent a meaningful step in that direction. The Background There's an interesting bit of backstory to the Trakkies on the Kickstarter page: the whole thing actually started as a software pursuit. The original team was a research company at European Space Agency BIC, and was focused entirely on the data science and machine learning aspects of the project. The switch to a focus on hardware only came when the team realized that nobody was making hardware capable of doing what they wanted their software to do. That's the path innovation often takes, and beautifully illustrative of the fact that the simplest problems — people sometimes forget their keys — can yield the most interesting and groundbreaking solutions.

The DHS isn't the most responsive government agency when it comes to FOIA requests. In fact, this government in general isn't very responsive when it comes to FOIA requests. So, it's completely understandable why its brand new FOIA app is similarly unresponsive.

Earlier this week the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments in the appeal of Lenz v. Universal. This was the case where Stephanie Lenz sued Universal because Universal had sent YouTube a takedown notice demanding it delete the home movie she had posted of her toddler dancing, simply because music by Prince was audible in the background. It's a case whose resolution has been pending since 2007, despite the fact that it involves the interpretation of a fundamental part of the DMCA's operation.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are more common than many people think. Diabetics nowadays who rely on insulin shots aren't getting their medicine from pigs/cows or other mammals -- and haven't been for decades. Modern sources of insulin come from vats of genetically engineered bacteria. So what about GMOs and GMO-produced products in our food supply? Most Americans have definitely eaten some GMO food, but is there any end to GMO experimentation in the wild now?

If you pay any attention to Valve's Steam platform, you've probably already at least heard about the hot-selling game NotGTAV. The game, just to be clear, is not Grand Theft Auto 5. It's actually not even close. It's a parody game, built to play more like a clone of Snake or something similar. But it is most certainly not GTA5. And nothing in the game is GTA5 either. Here's how the developers of the game explain themselves:

After Grooveshark shut down a few months ago, some individuals set up a site that looked kind of like Grooveshark, but with a totally different backend, and used a variety of URLs that included Grooveshark on different top level domain systems. The RIAA, as it's been known to do, freaked out, and filed a lawsuit. As part of this, it sought a restraining order and injunction, which it got. The RIAA then insisted that the restraining order applied to CDN provider Cloudflare, despite not actually being a part of the case. Cloudflare, as a non-party worried about the impact of such a restraining order, stepped into the case to protest, but the judge still ruled against Cloudflare despite the fact that the ridiculously broad injunction went really far, basically saying that no site with the word "Grooveshark" in the domain could use Cloudflare, even if that was a domain like "GroovesharkSucks-GoBuyMusic.com."

The Supreme Court's punt on true threats vs. free speech in the Elonis case has managed to pay off for one convicted criminal. While the nation's top court waits for the system to generate a better test case (and for defense lawyers to add up billable hours), the country will have to make do with the with the answers/non-answers provided by the decision.

As part of the Digital Single Market (DSM) communication, the European Commission has discussed the possibility of imposing a "duty of care" on Internet intermediaries, which would require Internet platforms to take a more active role in policing user content. Forcing Internet intermediaries to monitor and remove their users' communications is ill-advised from both an economic and human rights standpoint. The rapid growth of the Internet was not merely the function of technological innovation. This fundamental restructuring of commerce and communications would not have been possible but for substantive legal reforms that adapted legacy legal concepts to comport with the realities of a hyper-connected Internet age. Arguably the most important legal and legislative development of the Internet era was the concept of intermediary liability limitations for Internet service providers. Or, stated in a less legalistic way, the policy choice that Internet services should not bear blame for bad people saying or doing bad things on the Internet. Given the size and scope of the Internet and the volume of online communications, it is safe to say that Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yelp, YouTube, Allegro, and Dailymotion would not exist today if the law evolved to hold websites and Internet services liable for the actions of their users. Further, imagine operating a telecommunications network with the sum of all this information passing through without being shielded from responsibility for the actions of all of your users. What venture capitalist in her right mind would invest in a platform that was exposed to liability for billions of websites beyond its control or trillions of posts composed by third parties? What would Internet business models look like if companies had to pre-screen all user communications before they went live? Recent developments in Europe, including the Delfi ruling and the DSM "duty of care" proposal, suggest that Internet services may soon be asked to take a more active role in filtering user content. Yet even with advanced filtering tools, unlawful speech is almost always context dependent. Libel and defamation would not be obvious to a filter. Even more complex is when lawful speech is used unlawfully, as in the case of copyright and trademark infringement. Given that rules about these various types of speech are often the product of complex legal cases, even human review of every online communication would not completely shield an Internet company from liability, given that different people can come to different conclusions about whether speech is "harmful." Not to mention that standards for what is permissible speech vary widely from country to country. Besides the commercial impact, the implications for free speech would also be disastrous. Protections from intermediary liability enable platforms to give people around the world a simple way to express themselves and to share what they love with the world, and to challenge the restrictions of oppressive governments. One study found that when online platforms are regulated on the basis of content submitted by their users, they remove large amounts of controversial but legal content for fear of facing penalties. The UN's Joint Declaration on Freedom of Expression on the Internet recognizes the success of laws such as the CDA, DMCA, and the E-Commerce Directive, stating that "intermediaries should not be required to monitor user-generated content and should not be subject to extrajudicial content takedown rules which fail to provide sufficient protection for freedom of expression." Even if pre-screening and filtering at scale were feasible, the value of each individual communication — whether it takes the form of a website, a tweet, a Facebook post or a YouTube video — is negligible, where the potential legal exposure is huge; the potential damages for copyright law can reach $150,000 per work infringed. So, in a world where Internet companies were liable for the communications of their users, a rational company would be incentivized to aggressively censor content, leading to significant blocking of ostensibly legal speech as the costs of under blocking are significantly more than the costs of over blocking. Historical Context on Intermediary Liability Initially, the legal status of Internet companies was uncertain. Problematic cases arose where the courts found Internet companies liable for user-generated content. However, both the United States and the European Union were relatively quick to act. In the United States, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996, which shielded Internet service providers from liability for a variety of actions that were committed by their users. Although §230 specifically did not include intellectual property infringement, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which shielded Internet platform providers from liability for their users' infringement provided they acted quickly to remove infringing content when notified. In the subsequent report that accompanied the bill, the Senate Judiciary Committee made clear that these intermediary liability provisions were necessary given that the size and scope of the Internet made it functionally impossible for Internet service providers to monitor all the material that they served or indexed. At the time, Yahoo!, the illustrious example used by the Committee, indexed 800,000 websites. Counting just websites, and not other forms of content on social media, the number of sites Yahoo! indexed in 1998 was less than 0.1% of the size of the current web. As new Internet entrepreneurs seek to join the Yahoos, Twitters, and Facebooks of the world, it is imperative that those companies are afforded the same legal protections that allowed the prior generation of Internet success stories to achieve scale. Europe was also quick to embrace the concept of liability limitations. In 2000, the European Union adopted the e-Commerce Directive, which endorsed a similar notice-and-takedown framework of Internet service providers for most Internet content. Since it was a directive that needed to be interpreted by individual European countries, it resulted in some inconsistency of application that provided somewhat less certainty to Internet companies than the U.S. versions of Intermediary liability. Nevertheless, it has provided the necessary legal foundations for the Internet to grow and expand in Europe. These laws do not create any general monitoring or filtering obligations for illegal or harmful content. US law states that a service provider need not monitor its service or seek out infringing activity in order to qualify for the DMCA safe harbor. (This provision is intended to protect user privacy. Without safe harbors in place, website administrators might be required to search through and peer into their users' otherwise hidden conversations.) Under the e-Commerce Directive, states may not impose general obligations on intermediaries to monitor information or to actively seek out unlawful activity. If any reform of the e-Commerce Directive is needed, it should be in the direction of giving EU startups and platforms greater assurance that they will not be found liable for the speech of their users. Adopting a liability regime closer to §230 would provide a critical boost to the growth and global competitiveness of EU communications platforms, review sites, social media platforms, dating apps, e-commerce sites, and the next generation of digital innovators. Intermediary Liability Enables Flexible Responses to Harmful Content The existing rules in place in the US and EU have led to strong respect for rights. Internet platforms already take down a significant amount of content that infringes copyright. In addition, platforms respond to court orders and cooperate with law enforcement on issues like child sexual abuse imagery. Finally, while there's no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of online abuse, many platforms have evolved highly effective community policing and report abuse systems that help stop the spread of harassment, hate speech, and other harmful content. For example, anyone on YouTube can flag a video for review, and Google employees review those flagged videos for abuse 24 hours per day. In 2014, 14 million videos were removed from YouTube for violation of the site's Community Guidelines. (Twitter and Facebook also have similar guidelines and flagging procedures that can lead to removal of content and the termination of accounts.) Unfortunately, as part of its DSM initiative, some are calling for a re-opening of the e-Commerce Directive and implementing a new "duty of care" on Internet service providers. This "duty of care" would be effectuated by either narrowing, or completely removing, the liability safe harbors available to Internet companies under the e-Commerce Directive. According to the Staff Working Document that accompanied the DSM communication, the European Commission noted that it was considering "whether to enhance the overall level of protection from harmful material through harmonised implementation and enforcement of conditions which allow online intermediaries to benefit from the liability exemption." Furthermore, as part of this examination, the Commission is also asking "whether to ask intermediaries to exercise greater responsibility and due diligence in the way they manage their networks and systems… so as to improve their resistance to the propagation of illegal content." The same document also acknowledges that the intermediary liability safe harbors included in the e-Commerce Directive "underpinned the development of the Internet in Europe." Let's hope this last statement is borne clearly in mind if any updating takes place, remembering that a consistent process across Europe could be useful, but that a weakening of the liability shield and an extension of proactive monitoring would be economically and socially disastrous. Economic Effects of a "Duty of Care" The ramifications for future competition and innovation are also dire if the European Union were to enact a broader duty of care provision for Internet intermediaries. Given the limitations of automatic filters, and the fact that harmful, illegal content is context dependent, new online companies that offer communications platforms will need to employ large teams of human filters to review user-generated content. What does that mean for competition and innovation? It likely means that startups and new business models will be disproportionately affected. From a venture capital perspective, the imposition of new regulatory costs on traditionally lean startups means that fewer new ideas get funded. Given that Internet platforms often spend years developing a user base before they devise ways of turning their popularity into revenue, the added costs will also mean that many of these ideas either don't get funded, run out of money before achieving the necessary scale, or simply prove unable to turn a profit. The companies best positioned to bear these new cost burdens are the current Internet incumbents who have large legal departments and significant revenue. And depending on how new regulation might be written, even a large number of human reviewers still cannot catch everything. The number of humans needed to review 500 million tweets a day or 1 trillion Facebook posts is mind-boggling. In the YouTube example alone, 300 hours of video uploaded per minute makes 18,000 hours per hour or 432,000 hours per day. That would require non-stop oversight from 18,000 people to vet everything–and that's assuming they never get a day off and never sleep. (Not to mention, this makes it harder to push back against laws from more authoritarian regimes demanding the censorship of "harmful information".) Higher regulatory and legal burdens threaten the robust competition and disruptive innovation that has characterized the Internet ecosystem over its short history. High regulatory costs entrench incumbents. This could disproportionately affect European companies, as none of the top 15 global Internet companies are European. However, Europe does have a high-share of the so-called "unicorns" — startups that are valued at more than $1 billion. (And, according to a recently released study, the unicorn population of Europe grew by 13 between 2014 and 2015.) Furthermore, nearly one quarter of the startups at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show were French! As higher regulatory burdens harm smaller companies more than large ones, such an imposition of regulatory costs hurts these plucky startups more than the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Increasing Liability Would Harm Startups, SMEs and the Broader European Economy Imposing a duty of care on Internet services wouldn't just harm new startups in the EU. As we have discussed before, the Internet has transformed the world's economy and spurred economic productivity. The majority of these benefits accrue to traditional industry, not "Internet companies," through streamlining logistics and reducing frictions in international commerce. In fact over the last 20 years, the U.S.'s greater economic productivity growth relative to Europe has been powered by its better integration of Internet and networked technology into the overall economy. Given the role Internet platforms have played in this economic transformation, creating legal frameworks that enable the creation and foster the growth of Internet platforms — such as social media, e-commerce, financial services, crowdfunding, cloud computing, advertising, etc. — is important not just for the Internet sector, but for the broader economy that relies on them to enable their day-to-day business operations. Not surprisingly, small and medium size businesses often benefit the most from these platforms, as Internet platforms enable them to immediately build infrastructure, conduct traditional back office operations, take payments, easily target advertising to prospective consumers, and reach consumers worldwide through e-commerce platforms in ways that were not possible before the rise of Internet commerce. With this in mind, it's not surprising that SMEs who heavily utilize that Internet are 10% more productive (and export two times as much products and services) as companies that do not. Also not surprisingly, SMEs were the key to the U.S. economic and jobs recovery, and are seen as key to powering the European economic recovery. As European policymakers sit poised to decide the nature and scope of Internet regulation as part of the Digital Single Market (DSM) initiative, creating a legal and regulatory environment for Internet platforms to thrive (and new ones to be created) should be a top priority. Ensuring that robust online intermediary liability protections extend across the European Union stands as arguably the most important policy imperative of the DSM if Europe wants its vibrant, connected digital economy to thrive in the 21st century. If anything, for the Internet to continue to grow and thrive, liability limitations for online companies should be expanded and strengthened. It is a worthwhile and important endeavor for the European Commission to clarify and harmonize liability safe harbors across Europe. However, harmonization with a weakening of these safe harbors will have negative effects for both freedom of expression and Internet commerce. Reposted from the Disruptive Competition Project

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have built an entire comedy empire on the back of free distribution. The pair first came to fame by circulating their animated short, The Spirit of Christmas, for free first as a popular bootleg VHS and later on the Internet. They also were among the first TV show creators to operate their own web portal to provide content for free, striking a (at the time) groundbreaking 50/50 ad revenue sharing deal with Viacom. They were the grandfathers of viral content, with free distribution leading them to the mammoth financial and critical success South Park saw at its peak, and continues to enjoy today.

Innovation in America, and Silicon Valley in particular, has never waited for permission. The ease of starting companies, the low barriers to accessing capital, and (of course) the existence of an open and free internet on which anyone can build anything have all been major contributors to the vitality of Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry, which permeates nearly everyone's daily life. The most successful companies of our time — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and more — didn't have to ask anyone for permission to innovate. They didn't have to explain their businesses and get special licenses. They just came up with an idea and built it.

So many things these days need batteries and seem to eat through them quickly as well. Instead of grabbing a bunch of disposable batteries again and again, grab the SunLabz Rechargeable AA Battery Bundle for 40% off in our store. The bundle includes the SunLabz charger which can charge NiMh and NiCD batteries, and has a convenient LCD display to help you see the charging status of each battery. It can handle AA and AAA batteries. The bundle includes 8 AA 2800mAh NiMH SunLabz rechargeable batteries as well. These batteries get 2-3 times the capacity of an equivalent NiCD cell and can be recharged about 1,000 times.

Techdirt has been reporting for a while on China's continuing clampdown on the internet, the latest step being the new national security law. You might think these stringent measures, combined with numerous previous moves to strengthen censorship, would be enough. But a fascinating report in The Australian Financial Review reveals that over the last few years the Chinese authorities have also used other techniques in order to ensure that their control of the online world is as complete as possible. As we reported last year, the number of posts on the Chinese microblog site Weibo plummeted by 70% as a result of new censorship rules that were brought in. The Australian Financial Review feature explains what happened next:

The TSA's Secure Flight system apparently isn't all that secure, according to the barely-readable portions of the recently-released Inspector General's report. The TSA has a Pre-Check program that requires a ton of personal information and $85 to participate in. It also has "Secure Flight," which grants Pre-Check privileges on a case-by-case basis, for which travelers pay nothing. This simply means they won't always find themselves in the short line, but it does call into question the need to provide a ton of information up front, much less $85 for an experience others are getting for free.

Weird TrueCrypt-related things keep happening. Over the past few years, TrueCrypt has gone from "recommended by Snowden!" to a service of questionable trustworthiness. To begin with, it was never clear who exactly was behind TrueCrypt and the lack of a recent security audit wasn't winning it many new converts.

Given the deeply-intertwined relationship of the CIA and the New York Police Department, it just makes sense that the CIA would need to periodically remind its personnel that the NYPD isn't the sort of intelligence agency they can share US persons information with.

Over three years ago, we wrote about a fast-growing boycott of the academic publisher Elsevier, organised in protest at that company's high prices, its "bundling" of journals into larger collections, and its support for SOPA. Even though over 15,000 people eventually pledged not to work with Elsevier, the company is still going strong, making huge profits from the work of academics, and putting paywalls between the public and knowledge. Perhaps we should have guessed it would end like that. As we noted then, this was not the first or biggest boycott in the history of open access. In 2000, 34,000 scientists from 180 nations signed up to the following:

In the past few weeks, we've discussed two particularly ridiculous proposals put forth by members of the European Parliament in the report that it is sending to the EU Commission for copyright reform across Europe. First was the proposal to remove freedom of panorama, which would allow countries to block the photography of certain buildings and structures, claiming that those photographs violated the rights of the architects. The second was a plan to support a link tax that would tax content aggregators like Google News for linking to content elsewhere.

Computers are such an important part of our daily lives now that it's difficult to imagine how we could get along without them sometimes. Obviously, people do. But growing accustom to supercomputer capabilities available at our fingertips all the time is much more than a luxury. We expect computers to get better and better at an astonishing (exponential) rate, but will we notice if/when that rate slows down? Here are just a few links on keeping up -- or possibly exceeding -- the performance expectations that Moore's Law has instilled in us.

Kevin Johnson: Three-time NBA All-Star. Former (embattled) president of the National Council of Black Mayors. Outgoing (non-embattled) president of the US Conference of Mayors. Frequent litigant. Destroyer of public records. Suer of his own city. Only a couple of these can be considered flattering.

The global war on selfies continues on. The first salvo was launched here in America, with many institutions banning selfie sticks for any number of reasons (mostly safety). But our inoculation has failed and the scourge of the selfie has spread to Mother Russia, infecting the youth there at what is apparently insane levels, considering some of the suggestions in this Russian pamphlet detailing how not to die for a sweet selfie.

The venture capitalists who are members of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) may want to reconsider why they support an organization that is actively working against the interests of venture capitalists and innovation. It has long been known that most venture investors in the tech world know damn well that patents get in the way of innovation, rather than help it. For years, we've written about some of the most high-profile venture capitalists -- the ones that entrepreneurs would die to have invest in them -- arguing about the need for patent reform and how patents often act as a tax on innovation, rather than an incentive for innovation.

One of the most bizarre points that became clear in yesterday's Senate hearings on encryption was that many Senators are so focused on the big bad threat of theoretical ISIS violence in the US, that they don't understand the very real (and not at all theoretical) threat of our personal data that is being hacked into and exposed on a regular basis, often due to a lack of encryption. The ACLU's Chris Soghoian summed it up nicely with the following tweet:

For quite some time now, we've been pointing out that the hatred directed at Spotify and other music streaming services in some circles is misplaced. Spotify is paying out a ton of money to the copyright holders (approximately 70% of its revenue). The problem is that much of that money is staying with the labels rather than being passed on to the artists. Earlier this year, in fact, we wrote about a detailed report by Ernst & Young, in cooperation with a European music label trade group, that revealed just how lopsided some of these deals end up being: That's the breakdown of how subscription fees are distributed. The vast majority goes to the labels and only a small portion goes to artists and songwriters directly. Now, some of that label money may make it to artists through other means -- eventual royalty payments should an artist ever recoup, but we all know how rare that is.

If you spend a lot of time in front of a computer, it is important to have a good mouse. Most of the ergonomic ones can be bulky and aren't easy to take with you. The Swiftpoint GT Gesture-Enabled Mouse looks to combine the traditional mouse with the natural touchscreen gestures we use with our mobile devices to give you the best of both worlds in a very portable device. The rechargeable mouse (a 30 second charge can give you an hour of working time) can connect to your devices through a USB dongle or Bluetooth and comes with a travel case, cleansing cloth and a palm-rest mat. The Swiftpoint GT Gesture-Enabled Mouse is available for 20% in the Techdirt Deals store. Check out the specs and product video there as well for more information.

We've already discussed the ridiculousness of yesterday's Senate hearings with Jim Comey on "going dark" and the desire to backdoor encryption. But one thing that came out in the discussions that deserves further scrutiny is the fact that Comey repeatedly admitted that he had no proposed solution to the question of how to do this. He admits that computer scientists say it's not possible, but he insists it's because they're "not trying hard enough" to figure it out. And whenever Senators suggested different possible legislative fixes, Comey would sort of throw up his hands and say "well, we're not making any proposals here, we just want a conversation."

We already wrote a bit about the two Senate hearings that FBI Director James Comey participated in yesterday, concerning his alleged desire to have a "discussion" about the appropriateness of backdooring encryption. The phrase tossed around at the hearings was about the FBI's fear of "going dark" in trying to track down all sorts of hypothetical bad guys (and it always was hypothetical, since no actual examples were given). However, not all of the crazy statements came from Comey. There was plenty of nuttiness from Senators as well. It is, of course, difficult to pick out the most ridiculous, so here are two that stood out to me, personally. And, to avoid any charges of bias, I'll include one from each hearing and one from a Democrat and one from a Republican.

Back in 2010 under the leadership of Julius Genachowski, the FCC released a "national broadband plan." While it did help subsidize some middle and last mile rural deployment and directed the FCC to actually start using real world data to make policy decisions (ingenious!), it somehow managed to float like a butterfly over the U.S. broadband industry's biggest and most glaring problem: the lack of broadband competition. Even the agency's $300 million broadband coverage map birthed by the plan couldn't be bothered to actually list broadband service pricing, lest site visitors conclude that they're paying too much for too little.

The Dutch government is looking to expand its surveillance powers, something which would seemingly be at odds with the current public antipathy towards mass surveillance, but of course isn't, because governments are expanding powers even while complaining about being spied on. This would be the first major update of its surveillance authorities since 2002, something likely viewed as essential due to changes in technology and "evolving threats."

As was widely expected, FBI Director James Comey appeared before two separate Senate Committees yesterday -- the Judiciary and the Intelligence Committees -- to talk about the "risks" of "going dark" if the government is not allowed to backdoor encryption. You can watch the Judiciary Committee hearing and the Intelligence Committee hearing at those two links. I'd embed the videos here on Techdirt as well, but I can't because (guess what?) neither offers an encrypted HTTPS version, so they wouldn't appear on our site, since we force HTTPS connections.

"Collect it all": for the NSA, it is communications data; for Kenya, it is information about every Wi-Fi user and device. For Kuwait, as Yahoo News reports, it's everyone's DNA:

This is apparently going to keep happening. A while back, we discussed the situation in which Donald Trump declared his candidacy for President (while making comments that torpedoed a bunch of his vaunted business interests) and used the music of Neil Young without the artist's permission. As I noted at the time, Trump was legally allowed to use the music, since the venue had paid the required ASCAP license, but failing to go the extra step and clearing it with Young allowed the musician to generate headlines all to do with his support of Democrat Bernie Sanders. Since candidacy announcements are generally not done to generate name recognition for one's opponents, I suggested that, hey, just go get the whiny artist's permission first, mmkay?