News of the Week; February 15, 2017

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

1. Fuss over American Super Bowl ads ignores reality of Internet TV
2. CRTC wireless code review generates regulatory risk: Desjardins analyst
3. Why the Wireless Industry Fears Bill Transparency and Bans on Unlocking Fees (Michael Geist)
4. Comcast, AT&T Are Paying Minority Groups To Support Killing Net Neutrality
5. Wyden, Other Senators Warn That Net Neutrality Repeal Will Make SOPA Backlash Look Like A Fireside Snuggle
6. Tom Wheeler: Trump, GOP Plan To ‘Modernize’ The FCC A ‘Fraud’
7. The Trump administration’s other war on the media
8. FCC Commissioner Thinks Ultra-Fast Broadband Just a ‘Novelty’
9. ISPs ask lawmakers to kill privacy rules, and they’re happily obliging: Wheeler-era FCC rules that protect Web browsing data could be overturned.
10. “Broadband death star bill” blown up by municipal Internet advocates: Virginia anti-municipal broadband bill replaced by minor record-keeping change.
11. Yahoo reveals more breachiness to users victimized by forged cookies: Some accounts may have been accessed with forged cookies as recently as 2016.
12. Verizon Finally Gets Around To Telling Yahoo That It Ain’t All That
13. A Little Something Called Competition Forces Verizon To Bring Back Unlimited Data
14. Verizon offers unlimited data and won’t throttle video (unlike T-Mobile): Verizon’s $80 plan has unlimited phone data and 10GB of 4G LTE tethering.
15. Charter wrongly charged customers $10 “Wi-Fi Activation” fee, gets sued: Charter admits billing mistake in former Bright House area but faces a lawsuit.
16. Sewer broadband fraudsters handed lengthy prison terms: Bogus $200 million fiber network racket leads to collective 44 years in the slammer.
17. Lawyer’s claim: Feds issued a subpoena regarding Fox News sexual harassment scandal
18. A century and a half of Northern telecom innovations: Tracing 150 years of Canadian technological contributions to communication, from Bell to BlackBerry
19. The global media landscape: in eight charts
20. What does The Queen Mary International Dispute Resolution 2016 Survey tell us about the future direction of TMT disputes?
21. 2016 International Dispute Resolution Survey: An insight into resolving Technology, Media and Telecoms Disputes

DIGITAL

1. A battle rages for the future of the Web: Should the WWW be locked down with DRM? Tim Berners-Lee needs to decide, and soon.
2. Maker Studios Braces for More Layoffs as Disney Plans to Shrink Creator Network
3. Maker Studios Reportedly Slashing Its Creator Network Of “Thousands” To Just 300
4. PewDiePie dropped by Maker & YouTube ad platform over antisemitic content: PewDiePie calls out “old school media” for attempt to “decrease my influence and my economic worth”
5. YouTube Cancels PewDiePie Show After Disney Cuts Ties With Star Over Anti-Semitic Posts
6. When did fascism become so cool? PewDiePie’s antics are the thin end of the wedge: A white guy with a net worth of $124m making poor brown people hold up a sign calling for genocide is pure banter, isn’t it?
7. Pewdiepie Dropped By Disney Following Offensive Video Content
8. Disney drops YouTube star PewDiePie over anti-Semitic content
9. PewDiePie Incident Means More Scrutiny for Influencers: But ad buyers doubt marketers will pull budgets from all YouTube influencers
10. How Wikipedia Is Cultivating an Army of Fact Checkers to Battle Fake News: The online encyclopedia has been fact checking the Internet for more than 15 years. Now it wants to bring its skeptical eye to the masses.
11. Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle: Oracle insinuates Google was “a plagiarist” that committed “classic unfair use.”
12. Oracle Files Its Opening Brief As It Tries (Again) To Overturn Google’s Fair Use Win On Java APIs
13. Authors Alliance Amicus Brief Supports Fair Use Defense In Georgia State Case
14. Wikipedia bans Daily Mail for “poor fact checking, sensationalism, flat-out fabrication”: Daily Mail is too unreliable and can’t be used as a source, Wikipedia editors rule.
15. Handful of “highly toxic” Wikipedia editors cause 9% of abuse on the site: New study of Wikipedia comments reveals most attackers aren’t anonymous.
16. PayPal Kills Canadian Paper’s Submission To Media Awards Because Article Had Word ‘Syrian’ In The Title
17. Shopify’s Breitbart Fight Proves It: These Days, Tech Has to Take a Side
18. Lawsuit alleges Magic Leap workplace is ‘misogynistic,’ ‘dysfunctional’
19. Hedge funds reportedly want to buy Mt. Gox bankruptcy claims: A US lawyer has even set up a website to make this process easier.
20. Women filmed by Ottawa ‘pick-up artist’ may have no legal remedy
21. Maniac Killers of the Bangalore IT Department: Why is India obsessed with crimes committed by software engineers?
22. First Amendment Protects Google’s De-Indexing of “Pure Spam” Websites–e-ventures v. Google (Eric Goldman)
23. Internet firms’ legal immunity is under threat: Platforms have benefited greatly from special legal and regulatory treatment
24. UK Search Engines Will Sign Up To A ‘Voluntary’ Code On Piracy — Or Face The Consequences
25. Is the Internet a wilderness of commodity news?
26. Can Snapchat really save news? More than half of users don’t follow outlets on the platform
27. Don’t fear artificial intelligence: experts
28. Artificial Intelligence forges ahead of the law
29. It’s not as simple as man versus machine. (Sara Watson)
30. Netflix Cheating Is Common, But Is It Really All That Bad?: Almost half of couples that binge-watch together have been disloyal
31. Patent Troll Sues Netflix, Soundcloud, Vimeo And More For Allowing Offline Viewing
32. I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook. You Should Stop Playing Right Into It.
33. NHL’s First Games In Live VR To Be Seen By Canadians With Headsets Found In Cases Of Beer
34. Manchester United set to launch worldwide premium streaming app costing up to £4.99 per month with services in over 160 countries
35. 200 Coders and Hackers United to Save NASA’s Climate Data From Deletion

CREATIVITY

1. Kesha releases emails allegedly sent by Dr. Luke
2. The Moral Rights in a Banksy?
3. The Met Goes Public Domain With CC0, But It Shouldn’t Have To
4. How the copyright industry works methodically to erode your civil liberties and human rights
5. The Need Right Now for Subversive Photography: What does it mean for a photograph to challenge what we know about the world and reveal new aspects of it?
6. Maasai people of East Africa fighting against cultural appropriation by luxury fashion labels: Their name and image is estimated to be worth billions of dollars 
7. Beyoncé to Get Lawyers in “Formation”
8. Paul McCartney chants ‘Get Back’ again – The Future of Copyright Termination 
9. Is There Copyright Infringement in Whoville?
10. Prince’s music will be on Spotify and other services starting Sunday: When you’re facing a $100M tax bill, it’s time to make a deal.
11. University Rejection of Students’ Marijuana – Themed T-Shirt Violates First Amendment – Gerlich v. Leath (Eric Goldman)
12. Use of P’s photos to advertise D’s goods must be challenged via copyright, not Lanham Act, under Dastar (Rebecca Tushnet)
13. Back To Basics: Acting Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen Presents Near-Term FTC Reforms
14. Not Everyone Is Geeking Out Over Saudi Arabia’s First Comic Con: The cosplay fest is headed to the religious kingdom, but certain restrictions apply — especially for women
15. How Ancient Legends Gave Birth to Modern Superheroes
16. Can AI Make Musicians More Creative?: Google And Sony Want To Change The Way Artists Think About Artificial Intelligence
17. 2016 Copyright Year in Review
18. Robots As Legal Metaphors (Ryan Calo)
19. What Intellectual Property Can Learn From Informational Privacy, And Vice Versa (Diana Liebenau)

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. Canada’s Federal Court awards damages against a foreign website for breach of privacy laws
2. Oh, Sure, Suddenly Now The House Intelligence Boss Is Concerned About Surveillance… Of Mike Flynn
3. Judge sides with Microsoft, allows “gag order” challenge to advance – Court: “First Amendment rights may outweigh the Government interest in secrecy.”
4. Court Says Microsoft Can Sue Government Over First Amendment-Violating Gag Orders
5. What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?: DHS says agents are in the right to ask for passwords, decryption help.
6. Twitter to judge: Let us tell everyone exactly how many secret orders we get: Government fights Twitter’s attempts at transparency with generic filing.
7. Canada will soon force companies to disclose hacking attempts, data breaches
8. Amnesty International uncovers phishing campaign against human rights activists: Attacker targeted groups in Qatar, Nepal using extensive fake social media profile.
9. Russia Considers Returning Snowden to U.S. to ‘Curry Favor’ With Trump: Official
10. Landmark Court Decision Means Canada Has Now Joined The ‘Right To Be Forgotten Globally’ Club
11. Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives: He’s not charged with a crime. Judge demands he help prosecutors build their case.
12. After Passing Worst Surveillance Law In A Democracy, UK Now Proposes Worst Anti-Whistleblowing Law
13. UK government’s huge citizen data grab is go – where are the legal safeguards? – Analysis: Whitehall’s digital strategy lands a day after peers debate Digital Economy Bill.
14. UK Police Spy On Journalists At Small Town Paper, Gather One Million Minutes Worth Of Call Data
15. UK Train Operators Plan To Charge Passengers Using Their Biometrics
16. UK gov’t hit by 188 serious cyberattacks in the past three months: NCSC claims that Russia and China have stepped up the game.
17. DHS Secretary Says Agency Is Planning On Demanding Foreigners’ Social Media Account Passwords
18. Ohio Arsonist Gets Busted By His Own Pacemaker
19. Now sites can fingerprint you online even when you use multiple browsers: Online tracking gets more accurate and harder to evade.
20. Does Facebook Have the Right to Challenge Search Warrants Seeking Facebook Users’ Data? New York’s Highest Court Hears Argument 
21. Republican senators concerned about Yahoo’s “candor” concerning data breaches: In new letter, two GOP senators say company has been “unable to provide answers.”
22. Digital star chamber: Algorithms are producing profiles of you. What do they say? You probably don’t have the right to know (Frank Pasquale)
23. Get To Know Me: Protecting Privacy And Autonomy Under Big Data’s Penetrating Gaze (Sheri B. Pan)
24. Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy (Emily B. Laidlaw)

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