News of the Week; January 4, 2017

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

  1. Terence Corcoran: The CRTC needs to stop playing this game and let networks decide what ads run during the Super Bowl
  2. Canada Classifies Broadband as a Basic Telecommunications Service
  3. Tucker Carlson delivers sexism for Fox News
  4. Megyn Kelly Is Leaving Fox News for NBC
  5. Canada among the ‘most expensive mobile data countries,’ report says: People are worried about ‘crazy, huge overage fees,’ OpenMedia spokeswoman says
  6. FCC Approves Up to 49% Foreign Ownership of Univision – What Guidance is Provided to Potential Foreign Investors in US Broadcast Stations? 
  7. FCC Settles Largest Lifeline Enforcement Case for $30 million and Permanent Ban from the Program 
  8. FCC Denies Petition for Declaratory Ruling on Fax Advertisements 
  9. Dutch Regulators Demand T-Mobile Stop Zero Rating, Remind Users That Free Data Isn’t Really Free
  10. Cord-Cutting Forces Cable Networks to Make Hard Choices
  11. CASL — Year in Review

DIGITAL

  1. ‘Copyright Trolls’ Hit With Class Action Lawsuit For Theft by Deception
  2. Browsewraps, fair dealing and Blacklock’s Reporter v Canada: a critical commentary
  3. Failure to Introduce Source Code of Original Work Fatal to Claim Against Alleged Derivative Work
  4. Apple pulls New York Times apps from Chinese App Store by China’s request: Apps have been missing from the store since December 23.
  5. Honest Shanghai app gives citizens public credit score
  6. China has made obedience to the State a game: China has created a social tool which gives people a score for how good a citizen they are
  7. Web of tax breaks and subsidies keeps iPhone production in China: Foxconn’s clout as Apple’s manufacturing partner nets billions in incentives.
  8. Apple’s FaceTime blamed for girl’s highway crash death in new lawsuit: Family claims Apple should have deployed patented tech to “lock-out” motorists.
  9. Victims Of Car Crash Sue Apple For Not Preventing Distracted Driver From Hitting Their Vehicle
  10. Families of Orlando nightclub shooting victims sue Facebook, Google and Twitter
  11. Follow Buddies and Block Buddies: A Simple Proposal to Improve Civility, Control, and Privacy on Twitter (Danielle Citron & Benjamin Wittes)
  12. Google Apparently No Longer Humoring Court Orders To Delist Defamatory Content
  13. The Most Important Law in Tech Has a Problem: How “safe harbor” turned into a protector of privilege.
  14. Facebook scrubs — then restores — post that called Trump supporters ‘fascists’
  15. Now Italy Wants To Make ‘Fake News’ Illegal
  16. How Amazon, Google, and Facebook Will Bring Down Telcos
  17. Op-ed: Five unexpected lessons from the Ashley Madison breach – This is the first FTC complaint involving lying bots – there will be more.
  18. Pirates: You Can Click But You (Can’t) Can Hide
  19. LG threatens to put Wi-Fi in every appliance it introduces in 2017: Its new fridge includes Amazon’s Alexa and a bunch of cameras.
  20. Snapchat using machine learning to introduce greater targeting to its ad stack
  21. Ridiculous Congressional Proposal Would Fine Reps Who Live Stream From The Floor
  22. From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck (Spoilers)
  23. 2016 Was The Year Torrent Giants Fell
  24. Is an NSA contractor the next Snowden? In 2017, we hope to find out: These 5 cases touch on the near-future of drones, privacy and IP law.
  25. Glasses From eSight Help Legally Blind Indianapolis Colts Fan See First Game
  26. The Chatbot Will See You Now
  27. The Bot Politic: Silicon Valley’s usual solution to designing an inoffensive, eager-to-please technology has been to make it a woman. But why use gender at all?
  28. The most dramatic patent and copyright cases of 2016: Google v. Oracle; Prenda lawyers arrested; and much more.
  29. Our Unfortunate Annual Tradition: A Look At What Should Have Entered The Public Domain, But Didn’t
  30. Fighting for Fair Use and Safer Harbors: 2016 in Review (EFF)

CREATIVITY

  1. ‘Star Trek’ Fan Film Not Fair Use, Will Be Tried by Jury
  2. Aussie Productivity Commission Doubles Down On Fair Use And Serious Copyright & Patent Reform
  3. Surrender Dorothy: Court Upholds Damages, Injunction for Movie Content Infringement
  4. Welcome, Mr. Walt Disney, to the Canadian Public Domain (Howard Knopf)
  5. Milo Yiannopoulos’s Cynical Book Deal
  6. Milo Yiannopoulos Inks Book Deal With Simon & Schuster: The “alt-right” icon was banned from Twitter after launching a widespread attack on actress Leslie Jones.
  7. Simon & Schuster Threatened with Boycott for $250K Book Deal with Alt-Right Homocon Troll Milo Yiannopoulos
  8. Our Murrow Moment: The time for hand-wringing and hysteria is over. The Trump presidency promises a civic stress test. In a time of principled fights, citizens and journalists need to respond with fearlessness rooted in fairness.
  9. Librarians must resist trumpism
  10. Actors rush to protect their image from ‘digital resurrection’ after they have died following eerie Star Wars: Rogue One reanimation of Carrie Fisher
  11. Fox News Opinions Get Wide Berth Under Defamation Law
  12. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: ‘The Bachelor’ Is Killing Romance in America
  13. Creative solutions to cultural appropriation – fashion industry
  14. The most dramatic patent and copyright cases of 2016: Google v. Oracle; Prenda lawyers arrested; and much more.
  15. Tesla Gave Up Its Patents, But People Are Freaked Out That Faraday Future Put Its Own Into A Separate Company
  16. Ten Worst Section 230 Rulings Of 2016 (Plus The Five Best)
  17. 2016 Quick Links, Part 3: Trademarks And Domain Names (Eric Goldman)
  18. 2016 Quick Links, Part 4: Counterfeits And Olympics (Eric Goldman)
  19. 2016 Quick Links, Part 5: Patents, Other IP, Employment, CFAA (Eric Goldman)
  20. Functionality Screens (Christopher Buccafusco & Mark Lemley)

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

  1. A French court case against Google could threaten global speech rights
  2. Obama administration announces measures to punish Russia for 2016 election interference
  3. White House Kicks Russian Diplomats Out Of The Country, Releases Preliminary Report On Russian Hacking With More To Come
  4. Obama tosses 35 Russians out of US, sanctions others for election meddling: Intelligence dump from DHS and FBI bolsters claims of Russian election interference.
  5. Singapore Will Add Iris Scans As Identifier For Citizens And Permanent Residents Starting January 1
  6. UK Councils Used Massive Surveillance Powers To Spy On… Excessively Barking Dogs & Illegal Pigeon Feeding
  7. Surveillance in Latin America: 2016 in Review (EFF)
  8. Facebook buys data on users’ offline habits for better ads: And opting out is a lot more complicated than it should be.
  9. Man Has To Beg LG To Uncripple His ‘Smart’ TV After Ransomware Attack
  10. Malware Purveyor Serving Up Ransomware Via Bogus ICANN Blacklist Removal Emails
  11. Online and Mobile Tracking Company Settles FTC Charges It Deceptively Tracked Consumers
  12. Watch out hackers: Deploying ransomware is now a crime in California: Previously, prosecutors had to rely on the state’s extortion statute.
  13. Confirmed Horrible Person James Woods Continues Being Horrible In ‘Winning’ Awful Lawsuit To Unmask Deceased Online Critic
  14. EU Binding Corporate Rules For Transferring Data: A Comparison of US Law, EU Law, and Soon-To-Be EU Law
  15. The Real Name Fallacy
  16. When Do Data Breaches Cause Harm? (Daniel Solove)

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