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The University of Michigan has succumbed to a heckler's veto, mistaking an alternate point of view for the only point of view, and shutting down legitimate speech in response.

Nova Scotia's supremely awful cyberbullying law is finally receiving a much-needed tweak, but it took a trip to the Supreme Court to do it. (As noted by a commenter below, the Supreme Court is just Nova Scotia's first level of trial court, rather than the province's highest court.) The law's original wording was so broad it had the potential to "make bullies of us all," as MacLean's Jessie Brown put it when the law went into effect.

Nova Scotia's supremely awful cyberbullying law is finally receiving a much-needed tweak, but it took a trip to the Supreme Court to do it. The law's original wording was so broad it had the potential to "make bullies of us all," as MacLean's Jessie Brown put it when the law went into effect.

Police accountability remains a major concern. Lawsuits alleging improper police conduct are filed seemingly nonstop. The Department of Justice continues to investigate police department after police department for a variety of civil rights violations. More and more police departments are equipping body cameras on their officers in hopes of trimming down the number of complaints and lawsuits filed against them.

As Techdirt has reported, in the US, software patents are getting harder to obtain as the US Patent Office applies the important Alice v. CLS Bank ruling from the Supreme Court. In Europe, "programs for computers" are explicitly excluded from patentability according to Article 52 of the European Patent Convention -- but "only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such." That cunningly opaque distinction between "programs for computers" and "programs for computers as such" has allowed thousands of patents for the former to be granted, even though they differ very little from the latter. That trick worked so well, it seems that the European Patent Office (EPO) has decided to apply it to another area: plants. Once more, the European Patent Convention states quite clearly:

To live in the US is to live in a nation of fears -- most of them, irrational. The Department of Homeland Security -- the eerily nationalistic-sounding phoenix that rose from the ashes of the World Trade Center -- has done all it can to turn Americans into government informants, where they're encouraged to turn in complete strangers for suspicious activities like not packing enough clothes or purchasing cookware.

At this point you should know that surfing the web on a shared access point is not particularly safe. You're basically broadcasting out many of the details of your surfing habits. You read Techdirt, right? You know this. So you need a VPN -- and you don't have to pay a crazy amount either. Get the VPN Unlimited Lifetime Subscription for 70% off and surf more securely anywhere in the world on most of your devices (Windows phone owners are out of luck -- because, hey, you've already made that choice). For $39, you get a lifetime of secured and encrypted high-speed connections with unlimited traffic bandwidth. There's only one day left to take advantage of this deal and to help secure your data from prying eyes.

This, apparently, is not an April Fool's joke. This morning, President Obama signed an executive order [pdf] allowing the White House to issue sanctions on those "engaging in significant malicious cyber-enabled activities." I'm sure the Chinese state hackers behind the Github DDoS are shaking in their boots.

During the first round of the FCC's net neutrality comment period, the agency was absolutely swamped by public input (including ours), the vast majority of it supporting net neutrality. After the agency released a database of the comments, analysis of the comments showed that while around half were generated via "outrage-o-matic" forms from various consumer advocacy groups, once you got into the other half of the comments -- almost all were in support of net neutrality. After the volume of pro-neutrality comments received ample media coverage, anti-neutrality organizations -- like the Phil Kerpen's Koch-Funded "American Commitment" -- dramatically ramped up their automated form comment efforts to try and balance the comment scales.

A few years ago, we wrote about a terrible Georgia state court ruling against Matt Chan, the operator of Extortion Letter Info (ELI), a website/forum that has tracked copyright trolling for many years. There had been a number of discussions on the site about Linda Ellis, who is somewhat notorious for her trolling effort. Ellis wrote a poem called "The Dash" that gets reposted a lot online. Ellis and her lawyers then send threat letters, emphasizing the possible $150,000 in statutory damages (yet another example of how statutory damages aid in copyright trolling), before suggesting much lower (but still crazy high) dollar amounts to "settle." While some of the discussions on ELI were overly aggressive towards Ellis, it still seemed ridiculous that the court ordered Chan to remove all content relating to Ellis and to block any future mentions of her.

There's been no shortage of Comcast horror stories in the media of late, the company promising time and time again that it has made customer service a top priority under the careful watch of a new "Customer Experience" VP. Except despite ten years of these promises and what seems like an endless parade of horrible PR, the customer satisfaction rankings for companies like Comcast are actually getting worse. That's because with no serious competition forcing their hand and regulatory capture ensuring nobody tries to fix things, there's simply no organic penalty for being historically awful at what they do.

We've been writing a lot about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement over the past few years. There are many, many problems with it, but the two key ones are the intellectual property chapter and the investment chapter. Unlike some who are protesting TPP, we actually think that free trade is generally a good thing and important for the economy -- but neither the intellectual property section nor the investment chapter are really about free trade. In many ways, they're about the opposite: trying to put in place protectionist/mercantilist policies that benefit the interests of a few large legacy industries over the public and actual competition and trade. We've already discussed many of the problems of the intellectual property chapter -- which is still being fought over -- including that it would block the US from reforming copyright to lower copyright term lengths (as even the head of the Copyright Office, Maria Pallante has argued for).

There just seems to be something about the way that some people's brains function (or not) when the word "piracy" is introduced. Over in Ireland, there's been an incredibly long running battle over whether or not internet access providers need to kick people off the internet if they've been accused (not convicted) of file sharing three times. Such "three strikes" rules have been put in place in a few countries, and the evidence shows that they don't work at all. Not even in the slightest. They don't slow down the rates of piracy for any extended period of time (sometimes they show a very brief drop before people figure out other ways). They certainly don't lead more people to buy content. France, famously, led the way with the very first three strikes law, which the country has already dropped.

With the arrival of services like Dish's SlingTV, Sony's Playstation Vue, and looming standalone offerings from HBO and Showtime, 2015 is finally the year that Internet video finally starts gaining some serious traction. As such, we're now seeing oodles of breathless analysis focused on what this means for you and whether now is the time to cut the cord. Usually in these fluffy pieces, there's a heavy emphasis on the fact that once you've subscribed to all of these streaming services, you're probably paying the same as you already paid for traditional cable. Gosh -- it's almost as if the same people responsible for setting absurd cable TV rates are setting streaming video rates!

About a month ago, we noted that a federal court had granted a temporary injunction blocking a subpoena issued by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, demanding all sorts of information from Google. At the time, the judge only said that Google's argument was "stronger" than Hood's, but said a full ruling would come out in time. That full ruling [pdf] is now out, and boy, does it make Jim Hood's anti-Google vendetta look questionable -- specifically saying that there is "significant evidence of bad faith" on the part of Hood to try to use his government position to unconstitutionally coerce Google into making changes to its service that it has no legal obligation to make.

For years, the United States has had an on again off again love affair with the idea of a la carte television -- or the ability to purchase only the channels you want to watch. After a ten-year debate, "common wisdom" appears to have largely decided against the idea, the public buying into the cable industry's argument that selling channels individually would: a) kill niche television channels and b) drive up the cost of cable. Of course, the cost of cable TV is climbing skyward anyway, and the Internet has become the perfect place for those niche channels to flee to. Frankly, I've always wondered why there's any hesitation when it comes to blowing up a sector in such dire need of meaningful disruption.

It's no secret that many companies monitor their employees' computer use. But things are going much further than simply ensuring the normal "don'ts" -- file sharing, porn viewing, etc. -- are tracked for disciplinary reasons. Companies are now on the lookout for the next "insider threat." Some companies are viewing the Snowden saga as the ultimate cautionary tale, albeit one that results in moresurveillance rather than less. (via Dealbreaker)

It's hard to decide which is more infuriating: culture being stymied by copyright abuse, or simply by intricacies, stupidities and failures at the systemic level (with a dash of apathy and negligence thrown in). The latter is what led to the death of a classic game re-release this week, prompting Yes, I know I'm commenting anonymously to win most insightful comment of the week with a simple suggestion to fix the issue of orphaned and ambiguously-owned works:

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, as is so often the case, there were lots of stupid and/or troublesome moves in the entertainment world. Hollywood was still making up statistics about piracy for the AP to parrot, Warner Bros. was working on a confusing release strategy that favored Blockbuster Video, Universal Music was funding another propaganda campaign against file sharing, and Sony Music somehow managed to take down Beyonce's official videos for piracy. Viacom's true intent in its YouTube lawsuit became clear — pretending that the DMCA requires filtering — and the band MGMT, following a leak of its album, was blocked by its label from releasing the official version for free. Additionally, FIFA was attacking an airline over an ad that didn't even mention FIFA, and the Olympics was trying to block ICANN from offering a .sports TLD. Amidst all this, we also wondered why the government can use the term "music piracy" in court. This week also saw the full ACTA draft leaked to the public, raising serious constitutional questions. The UK was still grappling with the Digital Economy Bill, making extremely weak concessions to due process while some noted that it sets up a China-like censorship system. And while pushing for this bill that would enable kicking people offline, the government was also looking at moving all public services online. Ten Years Ago 2005 was when Hollywood really started getting the FBI on board as its private police force. The movie business was even more confused then than it is now, with bizarre aims like trying to become more like the IRS, and muddled strategies like advertising on Grokster while also suing it. The Chinese film industry was realizing that movies are a social experience, while the US television industry was trying to figure out if TV really is. (Broadcast TV still wasn't digital, by the way). People were acknowledging the deaths of plastic discs and newsprint and trying to figure out what would come next, Clear Channel was hopping on the podcast bandwagon, and the world was starting to notice the unexpected impact of Skype. Fifteen Years Ago This week in 2000, we were looking to the future. Some were discussing the new input devices heading towards the market, others were making better fiber-optics; Intel was showcasing VR, speech recognition and more while scientists were making unexpectedly fast progress on quantum computing; the convergence of phones and PDAs was on the horizon, as was the ascendance of ebooks. And China began taking its first baby steps towards the great firewall with a slew of new internet regulations. Despite all this, one global survey found that 40% of people just didn't really care about the internet or have any interest in using it. Twenty-Two Years Ago My first family computer, when I was very young, had an Intel 286 processor. Eventually we upgraded to a 386, then a 486, and then we waited for the next iteration. The pattern was so well-established that I continued to casually call my first Pentium a "586" for quite some time. Why am I telling you all this? Because it was on March 22nd, 1993, that Intel released the very first Pentium processor, choosing that name because they were unable to secure a trademark on the numerical names and didn't like the fact that competitors were using them too, as with the AMD Am486. The name itself was coined by the same branding company that came up with BlackBerry, PowerBook, Zune, Swiffer, Febreze, DeskJet, Dasani, OnStar and many other brand names.

For this week's awesome stuff, we've got some technology focused on improving your mobile music listening experience in a variety of ways. MAGZET For people with Apple laptops, the days of destroying your power cable by tripping on it are over thanks to the MagSafe connector. Unfortunately, the days of destroying your audio jacks and headphone connectors persist, and everyone knows the pain of having to jostle a broken plug around to get its weak connection to kick in. MAGZET aims to fix that by letting you turn any audio jack into a magnetic connector by connecting the small, two-piece device. As they point out, the standard audio jack hasn't been updated in a long time, and this could be just the smart revolution it needs. UAMP There have been many attempts to create products that will stymie the ascendance of lower-quality audio in the mobile device era, but most are overwrought and place too high a bet on the assumption that people truly care. The UAMP, however, is a nice and simple solution that can be easily adopted by those who want better sound without needing to go buy whole new specialty players: a small inline amplifier that lets you get more amplification at higher fidelity than those built into most consumer devices. It's USB-chargeable and about the size of an iPod Shuffle, and aims to retail for around $100. Aivvy Q The Aivvy Q is an interesting idea. Not only is it a pair of headphones with a built-in music player, controlled by touch gestures on the side — it actually aims to be a whole music solution for busy people. It grabs songs automatically from its own service while charging, then builds custom playlists and rotations based on your decisions to skip, listen, replay, etc. Of course, the big question is: where exactly is it pulling these songs from, will it require a subscription, and how confident are the makers that they can keep it licensed and robust? Though some of these things remain to be seen, the tech itself looks very cool. They do lose some points for the nonsensical claim that they are about "streaming music without internet", though (that appears to be their odd way of saying it downloads tracks while connected, then automatically plays or "streams" Pandora-style generated playlists from its internal storage later).

It doesn't happen often, but a judge has called out police officers for using a non-existent offense -- "contempt of cop" -- to justify the use of force against a detained person. Multnomah County (OR) Judge Diana Stewart cleared 16-year-old Portland resident Thai Gurule of several charges brought against him after he was pummeled and tased by police officers for… well, basically for responding angrily to a somewhat derogatory gesture.

Bear witness to the genesis of a new era, fellow sports fans. I've begged and pleaded in the past for the major professional sports leagues to take the harness off of the ability to stream games. Even as the trend of cord-cutting has progressed along nicely, I have always argued that the only dam keeping a flood of cord-cutters at bay has been professional sports broadcast deals. Those deals have almost universally been saddled with local blackout restrictions, making streaming games all but useless for the majority of fans. The past few years, however, have seen inched progress towards wider availabitily for streamed offerings. The NBA's most recent contract went out of its way to make sure streaming is expanded, for instance, not to mention the deal Dish and ESPN made to make the cable channel's broadcasts more accessible for streaming. But those were baby steps, too often leashed by a cable subscription requirement.

People eat all kinds of different things in different parts of the world. Some countries have well-known traditional meals and menu items, and foodies all over the internet are posting pictures of what they're eating all the time. Food-obsessed folks seem to like to capture snapshots of food -- both good and bad -- for fun and commentary. Here are some global food snapshots for you to look over that might not be all that appetizing.

I can't honestly claim to know a whole lot about e-cigarettes. That's because when I was still smoking, I smoked the old fashioned kind of cigarettes. You know, the ones made from tobacco, that cured acne, and that made my breath smell as cool and fabulous as a pub toilet. Plus, everyone was doing it and my lungs weren't going to give themselves cancer, so you know. But, even knowing little about e-cigarettes, I know enough to know that they aren't ale houses located in Riverdale, New Jersey. This is a conclusion that the lawyers over at Lorillard, makers of "blu" e-cigarettes, think is likely to escape the larger population, as they have decided to file a trademark dispute against Blu Alehouse over its name and logo.

The world of online privacy was changed forever by Edward Snowden's revelations of massive, global spying by the US, UK and others. And the repercussions of his actions continue to make themselves felt. Two countries particularly affected by the surveillance conducted against them, Germany and Brazil, have led efforts to appoint a new rapporteur (special expert) for privacy at the United Nations Human Rights Council, and with surprising success. Despite fears that the US or UK might try to block the move, or neuter the role, they both accepted the following resolution, which was adopted by consensus, without a vote:

Origin, Electronic Arts' online store and license-check-in system is a hilarious study in how to build a platform to serve legitimate customers and identify infringing copies of the game that both inhibits legitimate customers and misidentifies what is an infringing copy of a game. Add to this the fact that the Origin platform has in the past been found to be in and of itself a massive security exploit and one wonders how the service is still around today. But around it most certainly is, and still screwing with legitimate customers, too, as a group attempting to run benchmark tests on EA's Battlefield Hardline found out.

After Portland police arrested a homeless woman for charging her phone at a public outlet, we wondered what purpose that could possibly serve. Of course, the sad truth is it's not about purpose at all, as one anonymous commenter spelled out in this week's most insightful comment:

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit started in earnest with the motions for summary judgement from both sides, most of which appeared to be a lot of he-said-she-said. As the week wore on, though, the cracks started to show: Viacom couldn't figure out which clips were actually infringing (despite insisting that Google should be able to do so), and people realized that a lot of YouTube quotes in Viacom's filing were taken completely out of context. YouTube's motions, on the other hand, highlighted how industry lawsuits may have slowed innovation, and we wondered if the whole case might lead to an FTC investigation. Over in the UK, Simon Singh stopped writing his Guardian column to fight the British Chiropractic Association's libel lawsuit against him for calling them out on their many pseudoscientific claims. A commission was calling for a tax on Google to prop up newspapers (while Google was telling newspapers to experiment), and the Times Online was blocking aggregators after a ruling that the latter didn't have to pay a license fee. But perhaps the biggest news was the passage of the Digital Economy Bill through the House of Lords, which had only one positive outcome: it garnered another hilarious message song from Dan Bull. Ten Years Ago This week in 2005, Kevin Martin took over as FCC chair following Michael Powell; INDUCE Act author Orrin Hatch was put in charge of the Senate's copyright panel; bad stats were misleading people about reactions to copy protection; and we were wondering about the balance between privacy and anti-piracy efforts (while AOL was actively sacrificing the privacy of AIM users). Internet jurisdiction questions were still heated and unsettled, and strange legal ideas were popping up all over the world such as an attempt by an Indian newspaper to claim that ongoing criticism was a criminal conspiracy. Meanwhile, the MPAA was searching for the legal theory that would make BitTorrent trackers illegal. France was beating up Google on trademark issues while embarking on its own book scanning project; Apple managed to wrestle itunes.co.uk away from its previous owner; the NY Times was toying with the idea of charging for content; eBay was embroiled in a business model patent mess; and Yahoo was backtracking on claims that it would fully support Firefox. Fifteen Years Ago Would it blow your mind to know that, unlike today, in 2000 the entertainment industry was still struggling with the internet? Oh, they still are? Never mind then. Those struggles included, but where not limited to: the question of used CDs online, a cancelled merger between CDNow and Columbia House, and the creation of and subsequent freakout over Gnutella, the P2P file-sharing network. Meanwhile, some people were already cluing in to the idea that live performance is where it's at. Also in 2000 this week: rumours flew (as they would again in later years) that eBay and Yahoo were merging; Microsoft tried revitalizing MSN for the umpteenth time; Network Solutions got hit with a big class-action lawsuit; Stephen King tried releasing an online-only novel; and WashingtonPost.com seemed to be in trouble. Oh, and it appears that we may have accidentally coined the name "iPad" ten years early. Thirty Years Ago Techdirt was still a decade away (and I myself was still five months away), but on March 15th, 1985, the first commercial internet domain name — symbolics.com — was registered. The site that lives there now purports to offer "unique and interesting facts pertaining to business and Internet history", but seems to be a little light on content.

For this week's awesome stuff, we've got an assortment of technological tidbits for folks who like the customizable, the utilitarian, and the scientific. Trickey: Any Key, Anwhere For all the huge variety of input devices on the market, there is a surprising dearth of truly customizable ones. Some gamer's keyboards have settings and configurations and maybe a few modular pieces, but Trickey takes things to new level with a very simple idea: building the function for each key into the key itself, rather than into the board it connects to. This way, rearranging your input is as simple as popping out keys and plugging them in where you want them. It's a great idea that definitely has applications for gaming and a wide variety of design and creative tasks that use special software, but its one big drawback is the expense: unless the relatively small modular units can be brought down in price, building anything more than a simple four- or five-key custom interface is probably more than most people will want to shell out for. The PocketLab Smartphones have put a wide variety of advanced sensors into everyone's pocket, but as useful as this is, there are limits based on the fact that you usually want to keep your phone close and not put it in a great deal of danger. The PocketLab offloads these sensors — a barometer, accelerometer, thermometer, magnetometer and gyroscope — into a rugged standalone unit that communicates with your phone and the cloud. Now the readings-curious can strap it to a rocket, toss it off a cliff or subject it to whatever other abuse seems likely to produce some interesting data. VIS: Useful Power USB power banks are everywhere these days, with little to distinguish them other than price and capacity. But the creators of VIS realized that a portable battery can have all sorts of additional uses beyond charging your devices, and built them into a slick-looking unit. The VIS serves as a flashlight, and emergency lantern and — in an inspired bit of design that suddenly feels obvious — a jumpstarter for your car with the included jumper-cable attachment.

Recently, Techdirt noted that the FBI may soon have permission to break into computers anywhere on the planet. It will come as no surprise to learn that the US's partner in crime, the UK, granted similar powers to its own intelligence services some time back. What's more unexpected is that it has now publicly said as much, as Privacy International explains:

Freedom of information requests have become one of the most useful weapons in the armory of those seeking to bring more transparency and oversight to governments. Indeed, so powerful are they that the person responsible for introducing them in the UK, Tony Blair, later came to regret doing so:

Most folks like chocolate, but there are a few weirdos out there who don't. Sometimes, chocolate is used to mask the flavor of stuff that's good for you (like vitamins or minerals), but for the most part, chocolate lovers want to keep their chocolate free of adulterants. The supply of chocolate might have a hard time keeping up with the growing demand for it, so it could be difficult to preserve the exact same recipes for chocolate that we have now -- and there could be "vintage chocolates" on the market, sold like fine wines, someday. Here are just a few chocolate tidbits for the choco-philes/chocoholics out there.

As TPP allegedly draws near to completion -- although the participants have been saying this for a long time now -- a new sense of urgency is beginning to spread among those worried by the adverse impact it is likely to have on many aspects of everyday life. This has led to an important declaration in Japan by a group of organizations particularly concerned about TPP's copyright provisions, notably plans to raise the term of copyright to life plus 70 years. As Maira Sutton reports for the EFF:

Selfies: they're a thing now. Seriously, imagine yourself going back ten years in time and attempting to explain to a thirty-year-old professional that within a decade there would be a term in common usage for snapping off mini-monuments to narcissism with something called a smart-phone. Once that person was done trying to decipher what the hell you just said, he or she would likely dismiss it all completely and get to the business of asking how all the flying cars were working out for everyone. And that, dear friends, is exactly when you'd hit him with your selfie stick and really blow his mind.

Open records laws are in place to force governments into public accountability. The word "force" isn't hyperbolic. There's plenty of evidence strongly suggesting most government entities are still very resistant to the idea. Lawsuits, public figures using personal email addresses, excessive fees, abuse of FOIA exemptions… all of these run contrary to the spirit of open records laws. Some run contrary to the letter.

Algorithms for image recognition are getting better all the time, but computer vision is still very different from how humans look at images. Computers aren't capable of describing an image as well as a typical 5-year-old, but they can sift through millions of images before a kid can blink. Here are just a few examples of algorithms getting better at seeing the same things that we see.

Back in 2012 (pre-Snowden!), we wrote about why Google should encrypt everyone's emails using end-to-end encryption (inspired by a post by Julian Sanchez saying the same thing). Since then, securing private communications has become increasingly important. That's why we were happy to see Google announce that it was, in fact, working on a project to enable end-to-end encryption on Gmail, though it was still in the early stages. In December of last year, Google moved that project to Github, showing that it was advancing nicely. As we noted at the time, one interesting sidenote on this was that Yahoo's Chief Security Officer, Alex Stamos, was contributing to the project as well.

The FBI's preference for easily-investigated terrorism is well-documented. We're routinely assured that all sorts of domestic surveillance tech and agency opacity is necessary to protect us from a whole host of threats, but for the most part, the terrorists "apprehended" by the FBI seem to be people who've had the misfortune of being "befriended" by undercover agents and/or confidential informants.

We've talked a lot about massive copyright trolling operation, Malibu Media (which is also known for providing porn under the name xArt). In some other cases, it's been revealed that Malibu Media is one of many operations that appear to be little more than a copyright delivery system for a series of German companies that are behind the scenes of almost every major copyright trolling operation these days. The company is also somewhat infamous for its shady practices and the way in which it files many questionable lawsuits -- including the use of "Exhibit C" -- totally unrelated films that it claims the accused also downloaded illegally, but over which Malibu Media has no copyright claims. That exhibit clearly served only to try to pressure individuals into settling, so there wouldn't be a public court document insinuating a list of embarrassing films had been downloaded.

The FBI and DOJ are one step closer to having one of their "keeping up with the digital Joneses" requests granted. While the default phone encryption offered by Apple (and at some point in the future by Google) still remains free of law enforcement/intelligence "Golden Backdoors," the agencies are one step closer to being legally permitted to hack nearly any computer in the world.

For years now, we've been trying to understand why the US Trade Rep (USTR) is so anti-transparency with its trade negotiations. It insists that everything it's negotiating be kept in near total secrecy until everything is settled, and the public can no longer give input to fix the problems in the agreement. It's a highly questionable stance. Whenever this criticism is put to the USTR directly, it responds by saying that it will listen to anyone who wants to come and talk to the USTR. But, as we've explained multiple times, "listening" is about information going into the USTR. "Transparency" is about information coming out of the USTR. They're not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.

The legacy recording industry continues to seek any possible way to force people to pay, now that many people see no reason to continue to fork over money to the old gatekeepers. After years of seeking increasing "you must be a criminal" levies on hard drives, blank CDs and other media, there has been a more recent focus on just trying to get broadband access providers to add a "piracy tax" to all internet connections. Over in Belgium, the collection society SABAM has been leading this charge. Back in 2011, it suddenly started demanding 3.4% of all internet connection fees from ISPs in Belgium. When the broadband providers refused to just pay up, SABAM sued in 2013. And it's not going particularly well. The court has now rejected SABAM's claims, noting (correctly) that internet access providers are mere conduits and shouldn't have to pay for the actions of their users.

Walmart. Just saying the company's name is usually enough to evoke unbidden brain-sounds of terrifying organ music and images of pitchfork-wielding devil-imps. But, hey, it's a large business that's been around for quite a while, so I guess it's doing alright. It seems to me that somebody might want to call a meeting with the Walmart legal brain trust, because the company's campaign against a silly and simple parody website isn't achieving much of anything at all, and is in fact Streisanding the parody site into national views.

There was a time when it was possible to keep track of popular internet memes, but there's a countless number (maybe some neural net behind youtube has a tally while it's not trying to recognize cat videos) being created all the time now. Some marketing folks are trying to mimic viral videos and engineer their own, and it'll probably get harder and harder to spot the fake memes. ICYMI, here are a few links on viral videos of varying seriousness.

Canada's new copyright notice system is swiftly become a playground for copyright trolls. As Michael Geist reports, Canadian legislators could have baked in a few limitations to curb abuse, but chose instead to ensure the Rightscorps of the world could twist the legislation to their advantage.

There has been an increasing push by the legacy entertainment industry to get "full site blocking," in which companies can declare sites they don't like as "rogue" and order ISPs to block all access to them. This was the whole point of SOPA. And while that law failed in the US, the entertainment industry is still interested in figuring out other paths to making it happen. Courts in many other countries have been much more receptive to this form of censorship -- and have regularly ordered ISPs to block sites. This is true in Sweden as well, but it appears that one ISP, Bredbandsbolaget, is going to fight back for as long as it can, according to Torrentfreak:

This blog post is reprinted from Public Knowledge, and is quite timely. On Thursday of this week, we'll be discussing this very topic at our Copia Inaugural Summit, with Natalia Krasnodebska from Shapeways. We'll also be distributing copies of this new report at the event. If you haven't signed up to attend or to join Copia, please check it out.

The US legal system took a step towards criminalizing thought when a New York court convicted a former NYPD officer of conspiring to kidnap, rape, kill and eat 100 women. The evidence against Gilberto Valle included chat logs and internet searches.

If you wanted more bad reviews than you could shake a legally-unenforceable clause at, you'd do this:

Before there was Edward Snowden, there was of course the notably less celebrated Mark Klein. As most of you probably recall, Klein, a 22-year AT&T employee, became a whistleblower after he highlighted (pdf) how AT&T was effectively using fiber splits to give the NSA duplicate access to every shred of data that touched AT&T's network. Of course, once it was discovered that AT&T was breaking the law, the government decided to just change the law, ignore Klein's testimony, and give all phone companies retroactive immunity. It really wasn't until Snowden that the majority of the tech press took Klein's warnings seriously.