Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure

from the gaming-like-it's-1923 dept

Yesterday, we announced the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923. We had a lot of great entries that deserve to be played, so for the next few Saturdays we're going to highlight some of the winning in the various categories.

This week, it's our winner for Best Digital Game: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure by Alex Blechman.

Most of you are probably familiar with the Robert Frost poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, which was published in 1923 and as of this year is officially in the public domain. Well, here's what the introduction of this tongue-in-cheek game adaptation has to say about that:

Robert Frost's classic poem about stopping in the woods for no reason is very well written, but it's also pretty boring.

Not much happens. A dumb guy stops to look at some snow, and his horse gets weirded out by him. Dull. Yawn. Snoozeville.

Maybe that was considered an action-packed poem back in 1923, when Frost wrote it, but it's overdue for an update.

That's where you, the player, comes in. In this simple browser game, you are tasked with updating Frost's poem to sate a modern audience's craving for action, adventure, and... treasure! Verse by verse, you are presented with the poem and given the ability to swap out various nouns, verbs and adjectives for more exciting alternatives. So this:

...becomes something like this:

With some prompting and encouragement, you'll edit the entire poem in this fashion, until finally gazing upon your finished creation. Yeah: it's a very simple game, but one that made lots of us crack a smile and give it a second playthrough to see if we could do an even better editing job. It's funny, well-written and succinct, and we're thrilled to call it our winner for Best Digital Game. Check it out now on Itch, and share your best poem in the comments!

Next week, we'll take a look at another one of the winners, though you can always explore them all right now as well as all the other entries that didn't quite make the cut.

Filed Under: game jam, public domain, video games

Legislators Take Another Stab At Eliminating Fees For PACER Access

from the aligning-the-price-tag-with-the-value-of-PACER's-UI dept

An new annual tradition in the halls of Congress is being celebrated with the introduction of legislation targeting PACER fees.

Representative Doug Collins (R-GA) reintroduced the Electronic Court Records Reform Act as HR 1164 Wednesday with cosponsors Mike Quigley (D-IL), David Roe (R-TN), and Henry “Hank” C. Johnson, Jr. (D-GA).

The full title of the bill is “To direct the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to consolidate the Case Management/Electronic Case Files system, and for other purposes.” The full text of the bill is not currently available, but it is expected to be substantially similar to HR 6714 from the second session of the 115th Congress last year.

Last year's bill died after being referred to the House Judiciary Committee, most likely trampled underfoot by Congressional hearings and wall-related legislation. Either that or it's tough to get Congress members excited about eliminating fees they already don't have to pay.

There have been no successful attempts to curb PACER fees, much less turn it into a free service. We know this because PACER still charges $0.10/page for documents and dockets as if it were an aged librarian keeping close tabs on the Xerox machine.

It has been nearly 20 years since PACER opened its doors to the public. Since its inception, prices have increased, fee collections have steadily ticked upward, and almost none of that money is being spent trying to lower access costs or update the archaic system that punishes the public for expressing an interest in court proceedings.

The only thing PACER has really done over the last twenty years is attract legislation and lawsuits. While it did create an online portal for court documents that can be accessed from anywhere in the world, that's about all it's done with the time and money the US court system has had at its disposal. It's not that this step wasn't important. It was a huge step forward. Since then, the PACER system has been characterized by its inertia.

Maybe this will be the year Congress finally decides to take this issue seriously. At least one federal court has suggested PACER is misusing fees. Another judge has decided to allow a class action suit against the US Courts system to proceed, stating that these litigants suffer directly from the costs imposed by the government's walled garden.

At the heart of all this is the First Amendment and the presumption of openness the US court system is supposed to adhere to. Instituting a paywall allows only some people to exercise their right to access public court documents. Whatever arguments might be made about having to offset the (very minimal) costs of maintaining this portal ignore the obvious side effects of limiting access only to those who can afford it.

Filed Under: court system, doug collins, ecrra, electronic court records, fees, pacer

YouTube Filters At It Again: Pokemon YouTubers Have Accounts Nuked Over Child Porn Discussions That Weren't Occurring

from the filter-fail dept

It's clear at this point that the automated filtering and flagging done by YouTube is simply not good. Whatever legitimacy the platform might want to have by touting its successes must certainly be diminished by the repeated cases of YouTube flagging videos for infringing content that isn't infringing and the fact that the whole setup has been successfully repurposed by blackmailers that hold accounts hostage through strikes.

While most of these failures center around ContentID's inability to discern actual intellectual property infringement and its avenues for abuse, YouTube's algorithms can't even suss out more grave occurrences, such as child exploitation. This became apparent recently when multiple Pokemon streamers had their accounts nuked due to discussions about child pornography that never occurred.

A trio of popular Pokemon YouTubers were among the accounts wrongly banned by Google over the weekend for being involved in “activity that sexualises minors”.

As the BBC report, Mystic7, Trainer Tips and Marksman all found their accounts removed not long after uploading footage of themselves playing Pokemon GO.

It’s believed the error occurred thanks to their video’s continued use of the term “CP”, which in Pokemon GO refers to “Combat Points”, but which YouTube’s algorithm assumed was “Child Pornography”.

That's pretty stupid and it certainly seems like the reliance for a ban of an entire Google account based on the use of an acronym ought to have come with a review from an actual human being. That human would have immediately understood the context of the use of "CP" in a way the automated system apparently could not. And, to be clear, this wasn't a YouTube ban. It was the elimination of each streamers entire Google account, email and all.

Now, once the backlash ensued, Google got them their accounts back, but that simply isn't good enough. As there is more and more pressure to ramp up automated policing of the internet, at some point, everyone pushing for those solutions needs to realize that the technology just isn't any good.

Filed Under: automatic filters, automation, child porn, cp, false positives, pokemon, youtube filters
Companies: youtube

AI Writes Article About AI: Does The Newspaper Hold The Copyright?

from the the-monkey-gets-it dept

For many years, we wrote about the infamous monkey selfie copyright situation (and lawsuit) not just because it was hellishly entertaining, but also because the legal questions underlying the issue were likely to become a lot more important. Specifically, while I don't think anyone is expecting a rush of monkey-authored works to enter the market any time soon, we certainly do expect that works created by computers will be all over the damn place in the very, very near future (and, uh, even the immediate past). Just recently, IBM displayed its "Project Debater" offering, doing an AI-powered realtime debate against a human on the "Intelligence Squared" debates program. A few days after that, the Guardian used OpenAI to write an article about itself, which the Guardian then published (it's embedded about halfway down the fuller article which is written by a real life human, Alex Hern).

In both cases, the output is mostly coherent, with a few quirks. Here's a snippet that shows... both:

This new, artificial intelligence approach could revolutionize machine learning by making it a far more effective tool to teach machines about the workings of the language. Deep-learning systems currently only have the ability to learn something specific; a particular sentence, set of words or even a word or phrase; or what certain types of input (for example, how words are written on a paper) cause certain behaviors on computer screens.

GPT2 learns by absorbing words and sentences like food does at a restaurant, said DeepFakes’ lead researcher Chris Nicholson, and then the system has to take the text and analyze it to find more meaning and meaning by the next layer of training. Instead of learning about words by themselves, the system learns by understanding word combinations, a technique researchers can then apply to the system’s work to teach its own language.

Almost... but not quite.

Anyway, in the ensuing discussion about all this on Twitter, James Green asked the "simple" question of who is the "author" of the piece in question. The answer, summed up by Parker Higgins is:

This is why I think the monkey selfie case was so important. In determining, quite clearly, that creative works need a human author, it suggests that works created by a computer are squarely in the public domain. And while this seems to lead some (mainly lawyers) to freak out. There's this unfortunate assumption that many people (especially lawyers) seem to make: that every creative work must be "owned" under copyright. There is no legal or rational basis for such an argument. We lived for many years in which it was fine that many works entered life and went straight into the public domain, and we shouldn't fear going back to such a world.

This certainly isn't a new question. Pam Samuelson wrote a seminal paper on allocating ownership rights in computer-generated works all the way back in 1985 (go Pam!), but it's an issue that is going to be at the forefront of a number of copyright discussions over the next few years. If you think that various companies, publishers and the like are going to just let those works go into the public domain without a fight, you haven't been paying attention to the copyright wars of the past few decades.

I fully expect that there will be a number of other legal fights, not unlike the monkey selfie case but around AI-generated works, coming in the very near future. Having the successful monkey case in the books is good to start with, as it establishes the (correct) baseline of requiring a human. However, I imagine that we'll see ever more creative attempts to get around that in the courts, and if that fails, a strong push to get Congress to amend the law to magically create copyrights for AI-generated works.

Filed Under: ai, articles, copyright, monkey selfie, ownership, public domain
Companies: guardian, openai

Investigating the Higbee & Associates Copyright Trolling Operation

from the exposing-the-trolling dept

Yesterday, we wrote about web developer Daniel Quinn's harrowing experience receiving a $20,000 payment demand from copyright troll Higbee & Associaties. That post ended with Quinn explaining how he found lawyer Carolyn Homer to represent him. Today, we have a companion post by Homer to talk about her experience investigating and dealing with Higbee, and calling out some of his questionable legal practices.

The moment I saw Higbee’s demand letter to Daniel Quinn I knew I was dealing with a troll. Although I’ve recently joined the #resistance, I spent the first five years of my career defending Silicon Valley companies against mass copyright trolls. Higbee is new to me, but I know this game.

I immediately scanned his demand letter for problems. There were many — Michael Grecco’s power of attorney authorization isn’t even signed! — but I’ll focus on three major ones.

Major Defect # 1: Pricing Unmoored From Market Reality

As Daniel quoted yesterday, Higbee’s November letter threatens litigation, statutory damages up to $150,000 and attorney fees. Supposedly to avoid this terror of litigation, Higbee demands payment of $20,000 within seven days, accompanied by a non-disclosure agreement.

Daniel Quinn did not pay the $20K. So Higbee sent a December follow-up letter which escalates the demand: “[P]lease do not make the mistake of ignoring this. If this matter is litigated, the demand amount will likely quadruple or more, and then you will also likely have to pay attorneys fees.”

Higbee’s message is clear: pay $20,000 now or risk litigation and $80,000—maybe even $150,000—later.

None of those numbers make sense. The market rate for a license to publish most individual photos on the internet ranges between $0-$1000. Similarly in my experience, typical litigation damages for adjudged infringement of individual photos on the internet range between $200-$2000. At this exact moment in time, a photograph from Michael Grecco’s same X-Files photoset is available to license for $1800. And that is itself insanely high—there’s a multitude of other professional X-Files stills available from stock photo agencies Alamy and Getty for $49-$499.

Higbee’s settlement demand price for a single Grecco photo is facially absurd.

Major Defect # 2: Ineligibility for Statutory Damages

Higbee’s utter divorce from market reality aside, the firm might have an arguable basis for demanding $20,000 if Grecco was eligible to recover statutory damages. Due to the insanity of copyright law, $150,000 is the maximum statutory recovery for willful infringement. See 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(2). Numerous commentators and courts have rejected that top-line figure as insanely out of proportion to the actual damages caused from publication of a single photograph on the internet. Most thoughtful people consider the $200-$750 minimum statutory damages numbers to be more fair. Nevertheless, the max-$150,000 provision exists.

But it was immediately apparent to me that Higbee and Grecco have no claim to either statutory damages or attorneys’ fees. Daniel Quinn posted his X-Files review on May 24, 2016. Higbee’s demand letter includes a Michael Grecco copyright application (not an issued registration) dated January 22, 2017. Absent an issued registration, Grecco is not eligible to even file a lawsuit. See 17 U.S.C. § 411(a).

Moreover, the Grecco application discloses the X-Files image’s first publication date as October 25, 1993. The X-Files image was published 23 years prior to Quinn’s use on his personal blog—which itself occurred 8 months prior to Grecco even bothering to apply to register it. The Copyright Act does not permit recovery of statutory damages or attorneys’ fees for “any infringement of copyright commenced after first publication of the work and before the effective date of its registration.” 17 U.S.C. § 412.

Higbee / Grecco is threatening a lawsuit seeking $80,000 dollars in statutory damages plus attorneys fees for dquinn.net’s use of an unregistered thumbnail image Quinn found on Flickr. It took me two minutes to line up the dates and realize statutory damages did not apply. Higbee couldn’t bother to expend the same two minutes of effort before his firm spent two months chasing Quinn with threatening emails, letters, and phone calls demanding tens of thousands of dollars?

I wrote a letter to Higbee & Associates on January 18, 2019, detailing this and other problems with their demand. I called them out for demanding statutory damages and attorneys fees for which Michael Grecco is plainly ineligible. A couple days later I received a response from one of their copyright associates, Theodore Sell. His email read like he had rush-typed it with his thumbs on his iPhone while stuck in L.A. rush-hour traffic.

Regarding statutory damages, Sell wrote:

Contrary to your claims, our client may still claim both Statutory Damages and Attorneys Fees. The infringement continued past the registration of the copyright of the image, for at least eight months following the registration. Thus, as the courts employ the Discovery Rule in matters of Copyright Law, there was an infringement of the copyright following the registration for at least eight months and both Statutory Damages and Attorney’s Fees are applicable.

I responded:

I note you cited no authority for your off-the-cuff argument about the discovery rule and statutory damages. That is probably because it has been rejected by every circuit to consider it. See generally Derek Andrew, Inc. v. Poof Apparel Corp., 528 F.3d 696, 701 (9th Cir. 2008) (collecting cases). Mr. Grecco is categorically not eligible for either statutory damages or attorneys' fees, and federal courts regularly dismiss claims legally identical to yours on that basis. See, e.g., McGucken v. Chive Media Grp., LLC, No. 18-CV-01612, 2018 WL 5880751, at *5 (C.D. Cal. Nov. 8, 2018).

Theodore Sell wrote back with a paragraph that doesn’t make any grammatical or logical sense.

As for my citation to Andrews, since the Supreme Court acknowledged that most circuits have applied the Discovery Rule, I find it hard to believe that it was "rejected by every circuit to consider it.” Nevertheless, I admit that I may have misapplied it in this matter; I apologize and will speak of Statutory Damages or Attorneys Fees no further. Our client’s offer to settle remains $20,000[.]

The gall of those sentences irked me. Higbee & Associates just flat-out admitted they are entitled to neither statutory damages nor attorneys fees—and then demanded $20,000 anyway. Once again, for dquinn.net’s non-commercial, innocent use on a personal review blog of a thumbnail image which is the sibling of an image available to license right now for $1800.

Major Defect # 3: Does Michael Grecco Even Own The X-Files Image Rights?

The X-Files launched in 1993. Michael Grecco’s photos are from a 1993 promotional photo shoot. The X-Files series and trademarks are Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation properties. By default, any “work made for hire” should be Fox property. 17 U.S.C. § 201(b). I would be shocked if Fox commissioned Michael Grecco to take promotional X-Files photos in 1993, but their lawyers failed to ensure that Fox owned the copyrights or exclusive rights.

My suspicions have deepened through research. In poking around the Copyright Office’s public catalog, I discovered multiple Grecco / X-Files copyright registrations of photographs from the same publication day.

This looks and feels odd. Grecco has registered seven separate sets of photographs from the same 1993 X-Files promotional photoshoot. Yet Grecco filed no registrations until 10 years later. The first four registrations expressly name “Fox.” The last two, both in 2017, omit the “Fox” name, but their Copyright Office records note “Transfer: by assignment.”

Meanwhile, Fox itself registered oodles of X-Files publicity photos during the 1990s. For one 1998 piece of merchandise, an X-Files postcard book (Registration # VA0000937875), Fox identified itself as the “employer for hire” of Michael Grecco alongside other X-Files photographers. To this day, other online publications credit Fox for the same set of 1993 Grecco photos.

Adding to my suspicions, in 2008 a federal court in New York indicated that Fox may own the rights. In that case, Michael Grecco sued the Everett Collection, an archive of historical publicity stills for Hollywood productions. Some of the images at issue were publicity stills from the “X-Files/Fox 4” collection listed above. The Court expressed skepticism that Grecco owned the rights at all: it noted that Grecco’s standard arrangement appeared to give all rights to Fox, except for a limited sublicense back to Grecco for his own personal portfolio and marketing. In short: “If Grecco had to ask Fox for consent [before Grecco used Grecco’s own photos], it implies that he granted Fox an exclusive license.” Michael Grecco Photography, Inc. v. Everett Collection, Inc., 589 F. Supp. 2d 375, 384 (S.D.N.Y. 2008).

Even more suspicious? A reverse-Google-image-search revealed that Google has delisted links to the 1993 Michael Grecco X-Files photoset. Google did so in response to a DMCA takedown notice sent by Fox Group Legal on May 30, 2016. That’s one week after Quinn published his review. If Fox owned the exclusive rights as of that week, they should be the ones contesting Quinn’s potential infringement. See 17 U.S.C. § 501(b).

I have so many questions. What does Fox’s contractual paperwork with Michael Grecco say? Did Fox own the rights to Higbee’s challenged X-Files image in May 2016? If so, then Fox should have been the one complaining both about the X-Files image’s presence on both Flickr, where Daniel Quinn found the image designated as “creative commons,” and on dquinn.net.

Maybe Fox doesn’t care? 1993 promotional stills are likely near-worthless. I can imagine a corporation making the business decision to let the images percolate as free internet marketing and meme material more than 20 years after the X-Files series premier.

What led Grecco to submit two belated registrations in 2017? Is it possible Grecco submitted registrations for near-identical photos to ones Fox still owns, in order to confuse the public, send threats, and generate revenue? Or at some point, did Grecco buy the copyrights back from Fox? Is it possible the images were in the creative commons, and Grecco / Higbee clawed them back just to flood the internet with exorbitant demands?

I’ve ordered the complete “Grecco / X-Files 5” electronic file from the U.S. Copyright Office to try and unpack this mystery. I’ve also reached out to copyright counsel for Fox, but so far I haven’t heard back.

As for Higbee & Associates? I’ve now asked them, four separate times, for the following information:

• A copy of the final, issued copyright registration for the X-Files Image, and not just the application.

• A copy of the deposit materials for that registration, in order to confirm the X-Files Image is encompassed within it.

• A chain-of-title history of any transfer or licensing agreements surrounding the X-Files Image, particularly with respect to who held any exclusive rights throughout 2016.

• A copy of any DMCA notice(s) sent on behalf of Mr. Grecco to Flickr regarding the X-Files Image, between 2016-2018.

They’ve refused to answer my questions, responding only that “[we] will not be conducting the pre-litigation discovery you want.”

There’s only so much our ongoing investigation can accomplish short of litigation, discovery, and the power to issue third-party subpoenas to Fox and Yahoo/Flickr. But at the moment, based only on the information I have, I’m severely concerned that Higbee & Associates is failing to exercise due diligence and conduct reasonable investigations before issuing its boilerplate demand letters.

Theodore Sell’s belated admission that they cannot seek statutory damages and attorneys fees supports their lack of diligence; so does Mathew Higbee’s contention last Thursday that “We never intentionally pursue private non-commercial infringements.” Daniel Quinn runs a private, non-commercial, hobbyist scifi review blog; Higbee & Associates has been chasing him with threats of litigation and demands for $20,000 - $80,000 in damages and attorneys fees for months.

I thus echo Paul Levy’s warning: Higbee & Associates appears to be threatening claims unwarranted by either the facts or the law. This is copyright trolling.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright troll, mathew higbee, michael grecco, registration, shakedown, works made for hire
Companies: fox, higbee and associates

Supreme Court Says Civil Asset Forfeiture Violates Constitutional Protections Against Excessive Fines

from the time-to-start-breaking-up-the-blue-line-cartel dept

Great news on the asset forfeiture front, courtesy of the highest court in the land. The Supreme Court has ruled that forfeitures can violate the Eighth Amendment's protections against excessive fines.

The case the Supreme Court ruled on deals with Indiana native Tyson Timbs. Timbs sold $260 worth of heroin to undercover officers. He pled guilty to criminal charges. The state decided to forfeit his $42,000 Land Rover via civil asset forfeiture, routing around the criminal system to make it easier for cops to make off with his vehicle. Timbs challenged this forfeiture as an excessive fine, given that the max fine for his criminal charges was $10,000.

This case made its way to the state's Supreme Court, which overturned the lower court's decision finding in favor of Timbs and the US Constitution, which Indiana had incorporated. The state's highest court stated that this clause of the Eighth Amendment did not apply to civil asset forfeiture. This was a bizarre position to take, as the Supreme Court pointed out during oral arguments.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, whatever the Excessive Fine Clause guarantees, we can argue, again, about its scope and in rem and in personam, but whatever it, in fact, is, it applies against the states, right?

MR. FISHER: Well, again, that depends.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: I mean, most -- most of the incorporation cases took place in like the 1940s.

MR. FISHER: Right.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: And here we are in 2018 -­

MR. FISHER: Right.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- still litigating incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Really? Come on, General.

The Supreme Court's decision [PDF] makes it clear the US Constitution protects citizens from excessive fines, even if those fines are meted out at the state level. If the Constitution has been incorporated by the states (and it has!), the protections apply.

Held: The Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause is an incorporated protection applicable to the States under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Pp. 2–9. (a) The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause incorporates and renders applicable to the States Bill of Rights protections “fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty,” or “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 767 (alterations omitted). If a Bill of Rights protection is incorporated, there is no daylight between the federal and state conduct it prohibits or requires.

The state tried to argue the protections only covered in personam (vs. a person) forfeiture -- the kind normally seen in criminal cases where property is seized as compensation for fines or as direct, provable ill-gotten goods obtained as the result of criminal activity.

In rem forfeiture -- the civil route -- lowers the evidentiary bar law enforcement must meet to take property away from citizens. In most cases, there are no criminal charges involved -- only accusations of criminal origin that force citizens to prove a negative to reclaim their seized property.

Here's where this decision has the chance to disrupt a majority of states' civil asset forfeiture programs: the Supreme Court says these incorporated protections also apply to in rem seizures.

As a fallback, Indiana argues that the Excessive Fines Clause cannot be incorporated if it applies to civil in rem forfeitures. We disagree. In considering whether the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates a protection contained in the Bill of Rights, we ask whether the right guaranteed—not each and every particular application of that right—is fundamental or deeply rooted.

Indiana’s suggestion to the contrary is inconsistent with the approach we have taken in cases concerning novel applications of rights already deemed incorporated. For example, in Packingham v. North Carolina, 582 U. S. ___ (2017), we held that a North Carolina statute prohibiting registered sex offenders from accessing certain commonplace social media websites violated the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. In reaching this conclusion, we noted that the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause was “applicable to the States under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 1). We did not, however, inquire whether the Free Speech Clause’s application specifically to social media websites was fundamental or deeply rooted. See also, e.g., Riley v. California, 573 U. S. 373 (2014) (holding, without separately considering incorporation, that States’ warrantless search of digital information stored on cell phones ordinarily violates the Fourth Amendment). Similarly here, regardless of whether application of the Excessive Fines Clause to civil in rem forfeitures is itself fundamental or deeply rooted, our conclusion that the Clause is incorporated remains unchanged.

So, the rhetorical question posed by this decision is one that's going to be asked of hundreds of state-level civil asset forfeiture programs: if there are no criminal charges, wouldn't ANY seizure of property be "excessive?" It certainly appears a lack of criminal charges would be fatal to in rem seizures, which almost always happen without accompanying charges. This case may not have been specifically about civil asset forfeiture, given Tyson Timbs' guilty plea, but the state made it about it by refusing to acknowledge its incorporation of the Bill of Rights.

This may start a scramble by law enforcement to suss out just how much of the Bill of Rights their particular state has incorporated. Given the Supreme Court's disdain for arguments to the contrary, pushing legal challenges to forfeiture programs uphill is a non-starter. This case was a 9-0 rout in favor of protecting Americans from excessive fines and fees -- in this case taking the form of civil asset forfeiture. This hopefully will be the starting point for nationwide reform of these abusive programs.

Filed Under: 8th amendment, asset forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, excessive fines, excessive punishment, incorporation, indiana, scotus, states rights, supreme court, trevor timbs

Daily Deal: SCOUT Wireless Portable Charger

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Between our smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and the like, we tote around a wide variety of gadgets on the daily. And, keeping them all energized is next to impossible, unless you're willing to lug a tangled mass of chargers wherever you go. Enter SCOUT Portable Charger. Sporting a built-in wall charger, built-in cables, quick-charging USB port, and intelligent charging technology, SCOUT is hands-down a good way to juice up your entire tech collection. It even supports Qi-compatible devices. Choose either the 5,000mAH or the 10,000mAh, and both are only $40.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Announcing The Winners Of The Public Domain Game Jam!

from the like-it's-1923 dept

The votes are in, and it's time to announce the winners of the Gaming Like It's 1923 game jam!

At the beginning of January, we decided to celebrate the long-awaited entry of new works into the public domain with a game jam, inviting designers to submit games of all kinds based on newly-copyright-free works from 1923. We got way more entries than we expected, and handed them off to our huge judging panel of game designers and copyright experts, who left comments and nominated them in our six prize categories. Now we've tallied up the votes and reviews, so without further delay, here are the winners of Gaming Like It's 1923:

Best Analog Game — Permanence by Jackson Tegu

This award goes to the best overall non-computer game, with a clear consensus emerging from the judge's review scores. Permanence is perplexing at first glance, and requires some serious prep work, but sometimes that's the cost of a game this unique and creative. Using the format of a book that can be read in two directions, it weaves the painting Metempsychosis by Yokoyama Taikan and poetry from the book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran into an artistic gaming experience that isn't quite like anything you've seen before.

Best Digital Game — Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure by Alex Blechman

The award for best digital game goes to this short, sweet, simple, and above all entertaining take on Robert Frost's famous poem. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure tasks you with jazzing up the verse by subbing in some new material to entertain a modern gaming audience. Give it a try, or two or three...

Best Adaptation — God of Vengeance by jrgoldb

This award goes to the game that most faithfully and meaningfully adapted its source material, carrying its original intent forth into a new medium. God of Vengeance, based on the 1923 Yiddish language play of the same name, is an analog storytelling game that puts players in the main roles from the play and provides an interesting mechanical framework for improvising scenes and exploring the themes of a work they might otherwise have never encountered.

Best Remix — Will You Do The Fandango? by Lari Assmuth

This award goes to the game that made the best combined use of multiple public domain works. Will You Do The Fandango? starts with the 1923 film Scaramouche, but then draws on the whole world of Commedia dell'Arte and the mechanics from games like Apocalypse World and Lady Blackbird. The result is a high-energy tabletop roleplaying game, complete with dice and stats, in which a troupe of traveling players tour revolutionary France engaging in bombastic drama and romance — with printable masquerade masks to boot!

Best Deep Cut — Not a Fish by J. Walton

This award is for the best use of an obscure or unexpected source that doesn't appear on the typical roundup lists of works entering the public domain, and the cuts don't get much deeper than Not a Fish: a game based on a pair of 1923 science journal articles about Amphioxus fisheries in China. Like the jigsaw puzzles that inspired the mechanics, the game starts out seeming jumbled, but it quickly starts to resolve into an exploration of social and political themes you might not be expecting from the subject matter.

Best Visuals (Tie!) — Chimneys and Tulips by litrouke, and The Garden of God by DreadRoach

There wasn't a single stand-out winner for the best visuals category, and understandably so — one month is scarcely enough time to create or assemble a game's worth of stunning graphics. Instead, the award for best visuals goes to two browser-based submissions which, while they have their limitations, certainly caught our eye.

Chimneys and Tulips is a creative arrangement of four poems by E. E. Cummings, with a focus on beautiful minimalist design. Though the gameplay is somewhat lacking, a lot of work and vision went into the colorful style in which the works are presented, and while the interactive elements may be simple, they aren't arbitrary. Fans of poetry, and of typography, will find plenty to explore.

The Garden of God is a short narrative experience based on the novel of the same name by H. De Vere Stacpoole. It's built in RPG Maker MV, and most of the visuals are stock sprites and graphics from that tool — but a lot of thought and effort went into how they were used. The game has multiple unique settings and maps, and well-choreographed scripted scenes with attention to background detail.

All the winners in all categories will receive their choice of a copy of our public domain card game CIA: Collect It All, or one of our copyright-themed t-shirts from Teespring. We'll be reaching out to all the winners on their games' Itch pages, so if you see your game listed here, keep an eye on your incoming comments!

Thanks again to everyone who submitted a game — there are lots of entries worth checking out in addition to the winners. And thanks again to our panel of judges:

• Whitney “Strix” Beltrán
• Nicky Case
• Eric Goldman
• Charlie Hall
• Carolyn Homer
• Daphne Keller
• Albert Kong
• J Li
• Mark Lemley
• Randy Lubin
• Mike Masnick
• Jason Morningstar
• Rebecca Tushnet
• April Kit Walsh

We'll likely be back with another game next year when, if all goes according to plan, the public domain will continue to grow!

Filed Under: 1923, board games, copyright, games, public domain, public domain game jam, rpg, video games

Does Twitter Have An Anti-Conservative Bias, Or Just An Anti-Nazi Bias?

from the springtime-for-jack-dorsey dept

In an article for Quillette titled, “It Isn’t Your Imagination: Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals,” Columbia University research fellow Richard Hanania offers us proof–once and for all–that social media companies are biased against conservatives. Either that, or it’s the latest in a growing list of bogus, exaggerated or otherwise dubious anti-conservative bias claims (I’ll let you judge for yourself).

“Until now, conservatives have had to rely on anecdotes to make their case,“ Hanania writes. Adding that, “[m]y results make it difficult to take [social media platforms’] claims of political neutrality seriously.” The data he collected (with the help two research assistants, no less) looks at “prominent, politically active” people suspended from Twitter since the company’s launch in 2006.

Accounts included in the data set were selected from individuals and organizations whose suspension was covered in a “mainstream” news outlet, and who expressed a preference for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

Out of 22 (!!!) accounts in the data set that met these criteria, 21 (or 95%) were Trump supporters. Despite the small sample size, the author argues this is compelling evidence for Twitter’s anti-conservative bias. Even if conservatives are more likely to break Twitter’s rules, he argues, it “doesn’t seem credible” the disparity would be so wide.

But let’s look a little more closely at this. These are the 22 accounts make up the data set:

1. Rose McGowan (the list’s lone Clinton supporter)
2. Azealia Banks
3. Tila Tequila
4. James O'Keefe
5. Richard Spencer
6. Baked Alaska
7. Roger Stone
8. Gavin McInnes
9. Candace Owens
10. Alex Jones
11. Chuck Johnson
12. Robert Stacy McCain
13. Milo Yiannopoulos
14. Radix Journal
15. National Policy Institute
16. Craig R. Brittain
17. David Duke
18. American Nazi Party
19. James Allsup
20. American Renaissance
21. Jared Taylor
22. Laura Loomer

Scanning the list, you probably noticed the “American Nazi Party.” This is not an anomaly. The bulk of the list is a who’s who of outspoken or accused white nationalists, neo-Confederates, holocaust deniers, conspiracy peddlers, professional trolls, and other alt-right or fringe personalities (go ahead, pick a couple and Google them). It does not include any mainstream conservatives, unless, I suppose, you count recently-indicted Trump campaign advisor and “dirty trickster” Roger Stone.

Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended.

Kicking off a bunch of Nazis and trolls isn’t very compelling evidence that your average conservative is getting unfair treatment on Twitter. The majority of the “victims” here seem to have been engaged in abuse, and it’s reasonable for a private company like Twitter to kick off people who are undermining the quality of their platform by harassing or threatening other users.

Considering the alt-right’s propensity to scream and yell about getting “deplatformed,” these 22 accounts probably aren’t that representative of Twitter’s 67 million U.S. monthly active users. Nor does their small number (despite the author having two research assistants) indicate a broad, systemic problem.

Of course, social media companies may be not be perfectly neutral when it comes to politics. The Bay Area, where many of these companies are based, is a very liberal place. In 2016, only 9.4% of San Francisco County voted for Donald Trump. It’s entirely plausible that this disposition affects their products and policies in subtle ways. Yet, to date there has not been compelling evidence of systemic bias or a grand conspiracy to silence conservatives (despite this becoming a standard trope in congressional hearings and conservative conferences).

But social media platforms aren’t bastions of free speech, either. Their evolving norms and policies around content moderation raise a host of concerns and issues. At minimum, platforms could do a lot better at being transparent in their enforcement and governance decisions.

For conservatives, as I’ve argued before, crying wolf about censorship is a self-defeating strategy that will only make people not listen when it actually happens. Nazis, while sometimes useful in edge cases around free speech or references to Godwin’s law, are not stand ins for the median conservative American. Targeted abuse or incitements to violence are also not the same thing as free speech. Let’s not get these things mixed up.

Filed Under: bias, conservatives, content moderation, nazis, richard hanania, trolls
Companies: twitter

Investigators, Reporters Close In On The Origins Of Those Fake Net Neutrality Comments

from the fake-plastic-support dept

As several Attorneys General and the FBI investigate who was behind the fake net neutrality comments that plagued the FCC website during the late 2017 repeal, reporters like Jason Prechtel and Gizmodo's Dell Cameron continue to slowly and methodically connect the dots. Last month, Cameron obtained leaked investigation data linking many of the bogus comments to several Trumpland-linked astroturfing and policy operations like "Free Our Internet," a bogus consumer-rights group specifically built by ex-Trump campaign staffer Christie-Lee McNally.

And this week, both Prechtel and Cameron leaned on FOIA data to discover that another sizeable chunk of the bogus comments were allegedly driven by both CQ Roll Call, a DC-based news and policy organization, and Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF), a "dark money" influence group with historical ties to defending tobacco companies:

"Founded in 1998, CFIF is a reportedly a dark-money group whose early roots lie in defending Big Tobacco, but which supported the repeal of net neutrality more recently and has campaigned aggressively against state laws requiring political groups like itself to disclose the sources of its funding. Along with CQ, the group is among the 14 entities subpoenaed by the New York attorney general last fall, as first reported by former BuzzFeed reporter Kevin Collier in October.

As late as last February, CFIF President Jeffrey Mazzella praised the FCC’s rollback of the Title II classification of broadband service underlying net neutrality in the Daily Caller, labeling the policy an “unprecedented power grab by the Obama administration,” which, he claimed, upended “two decades of bipartisan consensus for light-touch regulation of the internet sector."

You might recall that many of these efforts during the net neutrality repeal involved hijacking the names of both dead and living people (like myself), and using them to post comments supporting the repeal during the FCC open comment period. Most of these folks (obviously in the case of deceased) had never even visited the FCC website, much less heard about net neutrality. In one instance, a bot was used to pluck names from a hacked database of some kind, posting bogus, supportive-but-fake comments, name by name, in perfect alphabetical order.

In short, several groups were created by DC policy shops to generate the illusion of public support for a net neutrality repeal poll after poll shows was strongly opposed by a bipartisan majority of Americans. Especially since repealing those rules opened the door to ISPs using their network power to erect additional anti-competitive barriers for video competitors, driving up costs for everybody in the internet ecosystem.

None of this stuff is new. Telecom and other industries have spent decades creating entirely bogus consumer groups to prop up bad policy. And when companies aren't busy having DC policy shops create fake groups, they can often be found co-opting existing groups; promising cash infusions in exchange for quid-pro-quo support for company policy positions. Countless government agency proceedings have been plagued by similar fake comment issues, suggesting this sort of stuff is a pretty common option on the menu of many K Street lobbying and policy shops.

The goal is always the same: create the illusion of broad support for tech policy that consumers and actual experts strongly oppose, usually with very good reason. While that itself isn't illegal (whether it should be is a good conversation to have if we ever want to fix the country's garbage lobbying rules), identity fraud clearly is.

Of course identifying the dubious constructs acting as intermediaries is one thing. Connecting those constructs to entrenched broadband providers like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast is something else entirely. Telecom operators historically leave layers upon layers of deniability between themselves and such groups, and aren't usually dumb enough to put much of this work in writing. As such, whether the NY AG, FBI, and other investigators are able to document a real money trail to the obvious beneficiaries of these shenanigans will be interesting to watch.

Regardless of the outcome, there are more than a few DC policy outfits that aren't sleeping quite as well as they were this time two years ago. They've been engaging in this sort of behavior for years, but the extreme unpopularity of Ajit Pai's assault on net neutrality likely brought significantly more light and attention to the sleazy practice than they've historically grown accustomed to.

Filed Under: dark money, fake comments, fcc, foia, lobbying, net neutrality, transparency
Companies: center for individual freedom, cfif, cq roll call