News of the Week; January 18, 2017

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

  1. Not Exactly a Netflix Tax: Where Canada Stands on a Digital Sales Tax (Michael Geist)
  2. Careful: a digital tax isn’t the same as a Netflix tax
  3. Killing net neutrality at FCC is “not a slam dunk,” departing chair says: While Republicans could end net neutrality, Wheeler explains why they shouldn’t.
  4. Outgoing FCC Boss Warns New FCC About The Perils Of Killing Net Neutrality
  5. FCC Report Clearly Says AT&T & Verizon Are Violating Net Neutrality — And Nobody Is Going To Do A Damn Thing About It
  6. Report: Verizon Considering Comcast Merger In Supernova Of Dysfunction
  7. Trump team reportedly wants to strip FCC of consumer protection powers
  8. Trump’s Plan Is To Gut All FCC Consumer Protection Powers
  9. Don’t Touch That Dial: Why attempts to improve AM and FM radio technologies tend to land with a thud—a thud no harder felt than with the FMX standard, circa 1989. 

DIGITAL

  1. Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier
  2. Brexit leads to iOS App Store price jump: Apple raising prices by just under 25% to account for pound’s depreciation since vote to leave the EU
  3. Labor Department sues Oracle for racial discrimination: Regulators say white male workers paid more than non-white counterparts.
  4. Feds sue Qualcomm for anti-competitive patent licensing: Regulators say “no license, no chip” policy amounts to an illegal monopoly.
  5. BuzzFeed’s Bombshell: Why the site published the explosive memos about Trump and Russia—and why no one beat them to it.
  6. Was BuzzFeed wrong to publish the Trump dossier? This media ethicist says yes.: “They were serving themselves and their own clicks.” –Kelly McBride, vice president of Poynter
  7. Here’s Why BuzzFeed Was Right to Publish Those Trump Documents
  8. Exclusive interview with BuzzFeed editor: BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief talks to Brian Stelter about the decision to publish the unsubstantiated dossier on President-elect Donald Trump
  9. Trump Is Making Journalism Great Again: In his own way, Trump has set us free.
  10. Techdirt’s First Amendment Fight For Its Life
  11. How To Use Facebook And Fake News To Get People To Murder Each Other: In South Sudan, a country where the vast majority of people lack internet access, fake news and hateful speech leap from Facebook to the real world — with possibly deadly consequences.
  12. Yet Another Lawsuit Hopes A Court Will Hold Twitter Responsible For Terrorists’ Actions
  13. Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier
  14. Land Court Finds that Texting Can Bind Parties 
  15. Online Price Advertising: Amazon to Pay $1.1 Million to Settle Canadian Competition Bureau Investigation 
  16. New York Times report: ‘The Internet is brutal to mediocrity’
  17. The Great Unbundling
  18. Software Copyright Litigation After Oracle v. Google
  19. No, you do not have to pay a ‘settlement fee’ if you get an illegal download notice
  20. San Francisco sues local drone maker, drone maker then shuts down: Lily Robotics never shipped a single drone.
  21. YouTube livestreams now have their own tip jar
  22. The Inside Story of BitTorrent’s Bizarre Collapse: How a group of valley outsiders blew through the company’s cash and nearly left it for dead.
  23. How Netflix Lost Big to Amazon in India: The streaming company botched its chance to own India’s huge new video market.
  24. The next best thing to teleportation: Living in one country and working in another will soon be common, thanks to remote-control robots. Future Now spoke with economist Richard Baldwin about how this trend could change the world.
  25. Student Disciplined for Posting Threatening Mashup Video to Instagram–AN v. Upper Perkiomen School District (Eric Goldman)
  26. Drone maker Lily Robotics sued by San Francisco district attorney
  27. Why Blockchain Will Trump Populism
  28. The entire modern copyright was built on one fundamental assumption that the Internet has reversed
  29. Treat robots as “electronic persons” but with kill switches, argue MEPs: Committee approves proposal that mulls “electronic personality” for robots.
  30. Using Tinder in Your Hometown Is Like Visiting an Alternate Reality: Surfing the app on a trip back home can be a way of regressing, or imagining what life would be like if you never left.
  31. Siri-ously 2.0: What Artificial Intelligence Reveals About the First Amendment (Toni M. Massaro, Helen Norton, Margot E. Kaminski)

CREATIVITY

  1. Fake News, Fake Art?  Richard Prince Disavows Work Depicting Ivanka Trump
  2. Ceci n’est pas une Prince*: Richard Prince Appropriates and Repurposes Himself 
  3. How the Killers & a fortune cookie turned philanthropic
  4. Star Trek fan-fiction copyright suit tests ‘fair use’ defence
  5. Louis Vuitton’s appeal fails in parody case
  6. LA Chargers Already Face Trademark Opposition To Their Name Over The Term ‘L.A.’
  7. Artist creates “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” memes to stop people from whitewashing MLK
  8. How Reality TV Builds Narrative Is Crucial to Understanding Trump
  9. For Hollywood, The Best Way To Win Against Disney Is To Not Be Disney
  10. New Study Essentially Suggests That Publishers Should Do CwF + RtB Instead Of Going Legal To Combat Piracy
  11. What If China’s Money Stream Stops Flowing to Hollywood?
  12. Austria: Tattoos and Copyright
  13. Billions of Bilious Barbecued Blue Blistering Barnacles: Tintin Gets Color Makeover!
  14. Lucasfilm: Carrie Fisher will not return to Star Wars in CGI form: Still leaves major questions about Leia’s role in Episode IX unanswered.
  15. Beware! Academics are getting reeled in by scam journals: The number of predatory publishers is skyrocketing – and they’re eager to pounce on unsuspecting scholars.
  16. Copyright Reform in Canada – the 2017 Section 92 Review (Howard Knopf)
  17. Quick Links, Part 10: Marketing, Uber, Airbnb, Taxes & More (Eric Goldman)
  18. 2016 Quick Links, Part 11: Social Media, Harassment, E-Discovery & More (Eric Goldman)
  19. Free speech debates are more than ‘radicals’ vs ‘liberals’ (Eric Heinze)

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

  1. Assange weasels out of pledge to surrender if Manning received clemency: WikiLeaks founder now says it’s not good enough Manning will be released in May.
  2. Chinese Officials With Government Access To Every Kind Of Personal Data Are Selling It Online
  3. Court rules against man who was forced to fingerprint-unlock his phone: Unlocking a phone like this “is no more testimonial than furnishing a blood sample.”
  4. Mississippi AG Jim Hood sues Google—again
  5. Syrian Migrant Says He’s Tired Of Being The Subject Of ‘Fake News,’ Sues Facebook For Posts Linking Him To Terrorism
  6. US court says PSN data doesn’t get Fourth Amendment protection: Sony could hand info to the police without a warrant.
  7. It’s shockingly easy to hijack a Samsung SmartCam camera
  8. Empirical Data on the Privacy Paradox
  9. Cell Phone Hacking Company Hacked; 900 GB Of Logins, Log Files, And Forensic Evidence Taken
  10. Did The FISA Court Finally Reject The FBI’s Advances?
  11. Top UK Cop Says Hackers Should Be Punished Not With Prison, But With Jammed WiFi Connections
  12. VR as the Most Powerful Surveillance Technology or Last Bastion of Privacy? It’s up to Us.
  13. Law Enforcement Has Been Using OnStar, SiriusXM, To Eavesdrop, Track Car Locations For More Than 15 Years
  14. NSA to share data with other agencies without “minimizing” American information: Rules opposed by civil liberties and privacy advocates.
  15. It’s Official: Sixteen Government Agencies Now Have Access To Unminimized Domestic NSA Collections
  16. After Lawsuits And Denial, Pacemaker Vendor Finally Admits Its Product Is Hackable
  17. Cloudflare Finally Able To Reveal FBI Gag Order That Congress Told Cloudflare Couldn’t Possibly Exist
  18. Our Apathy Toward Privacy Will Destroy Us. Designers Can Help: The loss of security and privacy online may seem inevitable, but designers can help the public help themselves.
  19. Privacy’s Trust Gap (Neil Richards & Woodrow Hartzog)

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