MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY
- Inconsistent Arguments and Questionable Claims: Bell Launches Yet Another Action Over CRTC’s Super Bowl Simsub Ruling (Michael Geist)
- TVAddons Returns, But in Ugly War With Canadian Telcos Over Kodi Addons
- Millennials Unearth an Amazing Hack to Get Free TV: the Antenna – Cord-cutters accustomed to watching shows online are often shocked that $20 ‘rabbit ears’ pluck signals from the air; is this legal?
- Republicans try to take cheap phones and broadband away from poor people: $9.25 monthly subsidy for mobile service would be eliminated by Republican bill.
- Sprint seeks merger with Charter to create wireless and cable giant: Comcast could have veto power over deal because of agreement with Charter.
- Sprint still seeks merger partner after being rejected by Charter: Sprint wanted to merge with Charter—or T-Mobile.
- Comcast fails to get hidden fee class-action suit thrown out of court: Comcast claims it can tack on Broadcast and Sports fees after order is submitted.
- FCC Extends TCPA Liability to Technology Platform Provider
- FCC says its specific plan to stop DDoS attacks must remain secret: Revealing technical details would “undermine our system security,” FCC says.
- Over 190 Engineers & Tech Experts Tell The FCC It’s Dead Wrong On Net Neutrality
- The Worst Internet In America
- Fox v. Aereokiller: Another Nail in the Internet “Cable” Coffin
- West Virginia Tries To Improve Broadband Competition, Incumbent ISPs Immediately Sue
- Cable lobby claims US is totally overflowing in broadband competition: NCTA touts data based on outdated broadband speed benchmark of 3Mbps.
- What Does Net Neutrality Mean for the Future of Cryptocurrency?
DIGITAL
- Online newspaper articles and libel do not toll notice and limitation periods
- Courts Keep Shredding Online Contract Formation Processes–McGhee v. NAB; Applebaum v. Lyft (Eric Goldman)
- Federal Court: Public Officials Cannot Block Social Media Users Because of Their Criticism
- Politicians’ social media pages can be 1st Amendment forums, judge says: Officials retain right to moderate comments to combat online trolls, judge says.
- Court Rules Temporary Ban Of Facebook Commenter By Gov’t Official Violates The First Amendment
- Politician Can’t Ban Constituent From Her Official Facebook Page–Davison v. Loudoun County Supervisors (Eric Goldman)
- Judge Tosses Vexatious Litigant Brett Kimberlin’s Lawsuit Against Conservative Blogger
- How an Ontario mom fended off a $120K libel lawsuit over her Facebook posts
- Stouffville woman awarded damages in SLAPP case
- Internet Censorship Bill Would Spell Disaster for Speech and Innovation
- Going to California—Google Asks U.S. Court to Declare Supreme Court of Canada’s Global Injunction Unenforceable
- Google’s US Challenge To The Canadian Global Delisting Order
- Google Asks US Court To Block Terrible Canadian Supreme Court Ruling On Global Censorship
- What Google’s New Autoplay Experiment Means For The Future Of Search
- U.S. Court Declares GPL Is A Contract (Andres Guadamuz)
- France: 13 million in damages awarded for linking to downloadable copyright works
- LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission – A legal scholar calls LinkedIn’s position “hugely problematic.”
- New Web tool tracks Russian “influence ops” on Twitter: Hamilton 68 tracks Russian state news and Twitter trolls, shows propaganda trends.
- What They’ve Said About Russian Election Interference
- Russia Has Banned VPNs
- Putin bans VPNs to stop Russians accessing prohibited websites
- Unstoppable Force, Immovable Object: Iranian Resilience in a Censored Society
- How May 35th Freedoms Have Blossomed With China’s Martian Language
- Meet Mia Ash, The Fake Woman Iranian Hackers Used To Lure Victims
- Maybe the A.I. dystopia is already here
- Artificial Intelligence Develops Its Own Language
- The Internet Will Not Break: Denying Bad Samaritans Section 230 Immunity (Danielle Citron, Benjamin Wittes)
- Pointing at the Wrong Villain: Cass Sunstein and Echo Chambers
- Senate’s “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017”–and Section 230’s Imminent Evisceration (Eric Goldman)
- A ‘potentially deadly’ mushroom-identifying app highlights the dangers of bad AI: The app’s creator says it’s just a guide, but experts aren’t happy
- State attorneys general team up to scare you from “content theft sites”: PSA is titled “Be safe on the Internet to Protect Your Family.”
- Apple Removes Apps From China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
- Apple Removes All VPN Apps From Its Chinese App Store
- Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent
- Apple Caved To China, Just Like Almost Every Other Tech Giant
- Apple paid Nokia $2 billion to escape fight over old patents: It’s on the hook for more payments down the line, too
- Apple must pay $506M for infringing university’s patent: University of Wisconsin may collect $4.35 apiece for millions of iPads and iPhones.
- Apple can’t end lawsuit over “breaking” FaceTime on iPhone 4, judge rules: “FaceTime is a ‘feature’ of the iPhone and thus a component of the iPhone’s cost.”
- Company: Apple TV’s “what did she say” feature infringes our patent – Patent claims the concept of skipping back and enabling subtitles.
- Apple Sales Exceed Expectations as Buyers Wait for New iPhones
- A Super-Expensive iPhone Is Good News, Even If You Can’t Afford It
- After three years, iPad sales are up again for Apple
- Apple discontinues iPod Nano and Shuffle, updates iPod Touch models: Say goodbye to the tiny music makers of 2005.
- Goodbye iPod, And Thanks For All The Tunes
- Apple Glasses Are Inevitable
- Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors
- How An IOS Developer Just Uncovered The Next iPhone
- UK WiFi Company Uses Overlong TOS To Trick Hotspot Users Into Cleaning Toilets, Hugging Stray Cats
- Kim Dotcom set to receive seized funds, “4 containers full of seized property”: Megupload founder adds he plans to move his family to Queenstown, New Zealand.
- AG Wahl says that, at certain conditions, suppliers of luxury goods may prohibit retailers from selling on third-party online platforms
- How Threats Against Domain Names Are Used to Censor Content (EFF)
- Fact Checking Snopes On Its Own Claims Of Being ‘Held Hostage’ By ‘A Vendor’: Well, It’s Complicated
- Uber drivers gang up to cause surge pricing, research says
- How Arby’s Dealt With Their Greatest Twitter Troll By Being Awesome; Also Sandwiches And Puppies
- Frank Ocean T-Shirt at Center of Debate Over Tweet Copyright: After singer’s Panorama Fest tee goes viral, creator of shirt and teen who first tweeted the quote wrestle over compensation and credit
- This U.S. Company Is Offering to Put Microchips in Their Employees
- A New Way for Therapists to Get Inside Heads: Virtual Reality
- Models of Consciousness Transformation & Unlocking Latent Human Potentials with VR
- No, Facebook Did Not Panic and Shut Down an AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart
- Science Says 13 Reasons Why may Be The Public Health Scare People Thought
- Sex History Educational Site Wants To Know If It’s Going To Be Bricked Up Behind UK’s Porn Wall
- We need to take a vacation from social media: Various platforms – and Facebook especially – are, weirdly, both a kind of diary and a public performance.
- Facebook’s Complicity in the Silencing of Black Women
- ‘It’s digital colonialism’: how Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users – Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say
- Lionsgate Launches Spanish-Language Streaming Service ‘Pantaya’ For U.S. Viewers
- Reddit Has $1.8 Billion Valuation After Chat-Room Site Banks $200 Million in Funding
- Reddit Raised $200 Million And Is Redesigning to Look More Like Facebook
- Spotify Surpasses 60 Million Subscribers
- Twitter Finds Meaning (and Madness) Under Donald Trump: The social platform was in bad shape last year, but it found an unlikely support system in an antihero
- Trump’s Radical Immigration Crackdown Won’t Help Tech
- A Gop Staffer Crowdsourced A Resolution From A Conspiracy Subreddit
- Bitcoin Exchange and Operator Charged With Money Laundering
- Feds say they caught a key figure in the massive Mt. Gox Bitcoin hack: Feds say a Russian man laundered criminal proceeds through the BTC-e exchange.
- Why the Bitcoin network just split in half and why it matters
- Bitcoin Is Splitting In Two. Now What?
- Here’s What CEOs Around the World Are Saying About the Bitcoin Fork
- Is the Party Over? SEC Concludes Cryptocurrency Offering Required Registration
- PewDiePie, YouTube’s biggest star, is leaning into his new, far-right following
- Here’s Why It Looks Like PewDiePie Has Lost 90% Of His Income: An annual report from his company suggests Pewdiepie’s income has dropped dramatically.
- NCAA Rules Football-Playing YouTuber Ineligible Due To Ad Revenue
- NCAA Strips UCF Kicker Of Eligibility After He Refuses To Stop Being An Athlete That Posts YouTube Videos
- UCF kicker ruled ineligible, loses scholarship after monetizing YouTube videos: Athletes can make YouTube videos, but they can’t make money off sports videos.
- Singing With Saquon? Current Stars Should Take NCAA at Its Word and Cash in Now on YouTube
- Amazon To Self-Distribute First Film In Theaters, Woody Allen’s ‘Wonder Wheel’
- Move Over, Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos Gets a Turn as World’s Richest Person.
- Streisand Effect Helps Sci-Hub To Acquire Almost All Scholarly Literature, Dooms Traditional Academic Publishing
- Jewish woman sues Andrew Anglin over ‘troll storm’: Suit against Daily Stormer’s neo-Nazi blogger raises questions about free speech and online harassment.
- YouTube Will Place Flagged “Supremacist” Videos That Don’t Violate Its Guidelines In A “Limited State”
- Following 10-Market Expansion, YouTube TV App Clocks 2 Million Downloads
- ‘Offline-First’ YouTube Go App To Launch In Nigeria
- YouTube Kids Lands “Eight-Figure” Upfront Commitment From Toy Brand Mattel
- Ars picks the top YouTube video of all time: We top off our look at the 10th anniversary of YouTube with the best video ever.
- YouTube Unveils First Country-Specific ‘Spotlight’ Channel In Canada
- YouTube throws more support behind Canadian creators with spotlight channel
- ViaSport, Microsoft Canada Team Up On Tech For More Inclusive Sports
- Redfin set out to disrupt real estate—it was harder than it looked: CEO once called real estate “by far the most screwed up industry in America.”
- America’s Competitors Angle for Silicon Valley’s Business
- Deceptive Online Marketing Practices: Intermediaries, what is your legal exposure?
- The complete history of the IBM PC, part one: The deal of the century: Bill Gates, mysterious deaths, and the business machine that sparked a home revolution.
- The complete history of the IBM PC, part two: The DOS empire strikes: The real victor was Microsoft, which built an empire on the back of a shadily acquired MS-DOS.
CREATIVITY
- York University to appeal recent copyright decision
- Why Fair Dealing is Not Destroying Canadian Publishing (Michael Geist)
- When life gives you Lemonade: court preserves copyright complaint against Beyoncé (Rebecca Tushnet)
- Photographer’s Copyright Suit Gets Mixed Results: A New York federal court judge handed a photographer a mixed result when it dismissed her copyright infringement claim but allowed her Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) allegations to move forward in a dispute that began on Instagram.
- Premier League scores second ‘live’ blocking injunction
- Cabin Fever: Is Reconstructing a Work to Preserve It Copyright Infringement?
- When can publishing newspaper articles amount to harassment?: The High Court has struck out part of a harassment claim against the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail Online. Unless the Judge’s order is successfully appealed, the remaining harassment claim will proceed to trial.
- Cigar City Brewing Sues Cigar City Salsa Over Trademark Despite Being In Different Marketplaces
- E And J Gallo Sends Cease And Desist Trademark Notice To E And B Beer
- Would You Confuse ‘Pierogi Fest’ With ‘Edwardsville Pierogi Festival’? Neither Would We
- Titleist Tees Up Lawsuit Against Parody Clothier Because Golf Doesn’t Have A Sense Of Humor
- Michelin Bursts Continental’s Trade Mark Application
- Seen around town(s), TM and right of publicity issues (Rebecca Tushnet)
- Copyright. Act of State Doctrine. Fifth Circuit holds that the act of state doctrine does not forbid U.S. courts from considering the applicability of copyright’s first sale doctrine to foreign-made copies when the foreign copier was a government agency
- EU’s draconian new copyright law puts an expiration date on startups
- NAFTA and a made-in-Canada IP framework
- Regulating the Internet of Toys
- Copyright Licences for Television and Film Content in Hotels
- Sony Pictures TV Networks to Acquire Funimation, Valuing Anime Distributor at $150 Million
- The ACLU filed a comical brief in defense of free speech and John Oliver’s satire
- Marshall County Coal Company v. John Oliver (Amicus Curiae Brief of ACLU to U.S. Dist. Ct., Northern District of West Virginia)
- 1H 2017 Quick Links, Part 5 – Advertising, Contracts (Eric Goldman)
- 1H 2017 Quick Links, Part 6 – Defamation, Section 230, Consumer Reviews (Eric Goldman)
- 1H 2017 Quick Links Part 7 – Fake News, RTBF, Censorship, Extremist Content (Eric Goldman)
- Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Development: A Better Set of Approaches For The 21st Century. (Dean Baker, Arjun Jayadev and Joseph Stiglitz)
SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY
- Privacy rights on the NAFTA agenda: Will the new NAFTA allow Canadian governments to ensure that private data collected from Canadians will not be stored outside this country?
- First Playpen FBI Spyware Warrant Hits The Appeals Court Level; Is Upheld On ‘Good Faith’
- Second body cam video of Baltimore cops manufacturing evidence discovered: Second video prompts another dropped case—bringing it to nearly three dozen so far.
- Police body cam footage of man tased in back prompts $110K settlement: However, police board said tasing was “reasonable, appropriate, and within policy.”
- Baltimore police commissioner orders cops not to stage body cam footage: Prosecutors dropping 41 cases, and more on the way, because of body cam scandal.
- Another Federal Court Says No Warrants Needed To Obtain Historic Cell Site Location Info
- Georgia To Roll Out Tens Of Thousands Of CCTV Cameras With Real-Time Facial Recognition Capabilities
- Viacom Faces Children’s Privacy Class Claims Over Gaming App
- Federal Court Holds Noodles & Co. Has No Independent Duty of Care to Card Issuers For Data Breach
- New Nevada Law Requires Notice for Online Collection and Disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information
- Google’s new scheme to connect online to offline shopping scrutinized: “Consumers cannot easily avoid Google’s tracking of their in-store purchase behavior.”
- Australian Prosecutors Want To Make It Illegal To Refuse To Turn Over Passwords To Law Enforcement
- UK Home Secretary Doesn’t Want Backdoors; She Just Wants Companies To Stop Offering Encryption Because No One Wants It
- Privacy Isn’t Dead. It’s More Popular Than Ever
- How A Bug In An Obscure Chip Exposed A Billion Smartphones To Hackers
- Broadcom chip bug opened 1 billion phones to a Wi-Fi-hopping worm attack: Wi-Fi chips used in iPhones and Android may revive worm attacks of old.
- Your Own Pacemaker Can Now Testify Against You In Court
- Stealthy Google Play apps recorded calls and stole e-mails and texts: Company expels 20 advanced surveillance apps installed on ~100 devices.
- When sextortion suspect refused to unlock her iPhone, the FBI stepped in
- Released Documents Show More Section 702 Violations By The NSA
- Someone Hacked Into HBO and Is Now Releasing Game of Thrones Info
- Hackers Threaten ‘Game of Thrones,’ as HBO Confirms Cyberattack
- Hack Brief: HBO Shows And A Game Of Thrones Script Land Online
- HBO confirms hack that reportedly included script to upcoming GoT episode: Video for episodes of Ballers and Room 104 also reportedly stolen.
- How Netflix DDOS’d Itself To Help Protect The Entire Internet
- Hackers descend on Las Vegas to expose voting machine flaws
- Every Voting Machine at This Hacking Conference Got Totally Pwned
- “E-mail prankster” phishes White House officials; hilarity ensues: Tom Bossert gave up personal e-mail in response to fake Kushner dinner invite.
- Privacy warnings spell trouble for millions of low-cost Android phone owners: Blu says the data its phones collect is standard. Experts disagree.
- Using a fitness app taught me the scary truth about why privacy settings are a feminist issue
- How a hacked Amazon Echo could secretly capture your most intimate moments: Hack isn’t simple and doesn’t work on all devices, but it’s definitely doable.
- How a podcaster managed to confront his tech support scammer, in person: “Alex, we have seen that your IP address has been compromised.”
Jon