In the dual golden ages of internet and snark, individuals and companies are offered many opportunities to decide how to deal with people using social media to have fun at their expense. In most cases, this goes exactly how you'd imagine: strong-arm tactics to shut down social media accounts, lawsuits to silence fake or parody accounts, and even entire government agencies getting upset over one of its own tweeting against the agency line. Missing in all of this, as you may have noticed, is any sense of humor or fun about this sort of thing.

But level heads do occasionally prevail. Such appears to be the case with the folks at Table Talk Pies, a century-old pie-slinging company that decided in the past few years to have a better online presence, but also recently discovered someone out there is impersonating the company on Twitter.

Take a quick glance at Table Talk Pies' Twitter account and at first, everything seems normal. The 95-year-old Worcester company often tweets out its “pie of the day” deals – three of a daily rotating flavor for the special price of $1 – posts photos from events around the city and gets mentioned by other local businesses like Wormtown Brewery.

But a closer look reveals some strange inconsistencies.

“the honorable, pumpkin is 3 for $1 today”

“as the sun shines regardless, may luck be ever on the side with you!! #StPatricksDay2018 #pies #lucky”

“have not only a lemon but i smile! #threeforonedollar”

So, someone appears to be having some rather nonsensical fun pretending to be Table Talk Pies online. It's all rather bizarre, with the impostor account mostly tweeting out entirely accurate information about Table Talk's daily promotions, or just pimping the company's pies as hard as possible. But often the tweets do take a turn towards the strange.

It goes on like that. But what makes this somewhat unique is that the folks behind Table Talk Pies are both absolutely obsessed with finding out who this person is and with making sure everyone knows they're totally cool with the impostor account.

"It's very strange," Table Talk Pies retail store manager Caitlin Enck said. "We don't even want them to stop at this point, honestly, because everybody loves them."

After they discovered the strange messages, Enck contacted Twitter hoping to get information that could lead to the owner’s identity, but the company said it was unable to share the user’s IP address or email. Unless the account was posting derogatory tweets or slandering Table Talk, Enck was told nothing could be done.

“We could be super jerks about it and do the whole cease and desist thing, but why? They’re not doing anything wrong, they’re not hurting anybody,” she said. “All the things that would make us, as a company, be like, ‘This isn’t cool, we don’t want our name attached to it,’ they’re not doing. So their tweets are a little weird and don’t always make sense? They’re not hurting anybody.”

Which is the exact right filter through which to view all of this. Rather than trying to strong-arm whoever is behind the account, instead there's something of a following because it's an impostor account, leading to more coverage and information getting out about Table Talk's pies. And with this approach, the company comes off in a way that is earning it some public good will. Now, it's certainly occurred to us that this might be a big marketing ploy to have the company go viral. But if it is, it's extremely well done, and Enck comes off as genuinely obsessed with finding out who this is without being threatening about it.

“It has this cool mystique to it, it’s this really funny thing,” Nelson said. “We’ve known a little over a year now. It’s been crazy. I’ve gone through and tried to figure it out, we cannot figure it out to save our lives. I’ve become obsessed with it.”

"It's supposed to be a quirky, funny thing, and all of a sudden I'm detective Olivia Benson and this is a crime and I'm so far deep into it I can't get out," Enck added.

This is all to say that there are other options beyond being a jerk when these types of rogue accounts pop up. In this case, the account wasn't doing anything particularly negative as far as the "victim" company was concerned. But that's often the case elsewhere as well, where big corporate interests can't find their own sense of humor in dealing with it. In other words, there is potentially much to be gained by not going full protectionist, a lesson far too many companies need to learn.

As we noted earlier this year, the California Supreme Court wisely sided with Yelp in a legal fight over whether or not the company could be forced to remove reviews based on another legal dispute of which Yelp was not a party. The crux of the case was about Section 230 of the CDA. As we detailed back in 2016, a lower court had initially ordered Yelp to take down a review that the court found to be defamatory (though, it was on default judgment as the defendant in the case decided to not show up in court). The case was brought by a lawyer, Dawn Hassell, who sued a former client, Ava Bird, claiming that Bird had posted a negative review of Hassell's legal work. Bird then ignored the lawsuit, leading to the default judgment -- all of which is fine. But then the court issued an injunction against Yelp, ordering it to take down the review, despite Yelp not even being a party to the lawsuit.

The California Supreme Court properly ruled that the injunction should be thrown out, based on CDA 230, which (as we've discussed over and over again) says that an internet service provider (such as Yelp) cannot be held liable due to the speech of a user (such as Ava Bird). This was a pretty standard and "easy" ruling on CDA 230, and the court had many cases to cite. And thus, it's good news that the US Supreme Court has denied Hassell's cert petition to hear the case -- meaning the California ruling stands. It shouldn't be a surprise that the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case, as there is widespread agreement that this is exactly how CDA 230 is meant to work and it's how basically every circuit that has ruled on this issue has found, sot here's no circuit split to deal with. Having the Supreme Court refuse to hear a case isn't always newsworthy, but it's at least a bit of a relief that the court apparently didn't think this one was an issue worth reconsidering. The internet and the services we all use, remain protected... for now.

Late last year, a Seattle newspaper petitioned the court to unseal dockets related to electronic surveillance by law enforcement. The position was clear: the First Amendment provides citizens with a right to information, hence the presumption of openness that's supposed to govern court proceedings. The government has long argued the need to protect law enforcement means and methods outweigh the public's right to know, and has secured a lot of compliance from judges at all levels of the court system.

In recent years -- no doubt at least partially as a result of the Snowden leaks -- courts have begun pushing back. Warrant affidavits are receiving more scrutiny from some judges and litigation has resulted in courts agreeing to unseal large numbers of proceedings involving law enforcement surveillance tech.

The Seattle case deals with the same concern: law enforcement is increasingly deploying secretive tech and locking the public out of the discussion by sealing documents and dockets. The good news is the federal court presiding over the case agrees with the EFF and The Stranger, the Seattle publication that put the litigation in motion.

In response to The Stranger’s petition, the United States Attorney’s Office for Western District of Washington and the Clerk of the Court have launched a new pilot program for tracking these surveillance tools. The court is now collecting data each time one of these surveillance tools is used and will publish that data in semi-annual reports. These reports will include the case numbers and the principle crime being investigated every time the government asks to use one of these surveillance methods, giving the public in Seattle an unprecedented understanding of how investigators spy on Americans.

This isn't as broad as the unsealing ordered by the court following a lawsuit by Jason Leopold, but it's a start. It appears filings will still remain under seal, but at least the public will have some idea how often surveillance tech is deployed by local law enforcement as well as what case numbers to target in future First Amendment-based litigation.

The first report won't be available until 2020 and, unfortunately, won't be retroactive. It will only affect cases brought from 2019 forward. It also will remain in operation at the US Attorney's discretion, which means it could be shut down anytime after its two-year trial run.

But we'll take what we can get for now and hope the US Attorney sees the value of partial transparency, rather than just the limited downsides law enforcement will likely complain about repeatedly. It's a big win for The Stranger, which has been instrumental in exposing legally-dubious surveillance programs rolled out by the Seattle Police Department.

In 2013, Brendan Kiley and Matt Fikse-Verkerk’s reported on a then-secret wireless spying network that the Seattle Police Department (SPD) had installed in downtown Seattle. Six days after the story was published the department deactivated the network. In 2016, Ansel Herz uncovered a secret, and illegal, SPD software program that lets them snoop on people’s social media feeds.

This is the sort of thing that happens when the public is locked out of the conversation, whether it's by city government officials failing to fulfill their oversight duties or judges obliging law enforcement every time they ask for public courtroom filings to be taken out of the public's hands. Less transparency equals less accountability, and the government has repeatedly shown it will exploit holes in public knowledge to engage in shady surveillance tactics.

As you might have heard, the famed pranksters The Yes Men were recently involved in something of a parody news story. They printed up and handed out a ton of parody Washington Posts, dated May 1, 2019 (note: a date a few months in the future) with a cover story claiming to be about President Trump being removed from office. People who got their hands on the printed edition said that they looked pretty similar to an actual Washington Post. The pranksters didn't just print out newspapers, they also set up a website at my-washingtonpost.com. The Washington Post itself was not amused and appears to have sent an incredibly stupid cease-and-desist letter from a publication that should know better.

Actually, let's be clear: the Washington Post does know better. As Public Citizen lawyer Paul Levy notes in a post we'll talk more about down below, the Washington Post's double standard shines through based on its reporting on other parodies in comparison:

By an amazing coincidence, on the same morning that the Post parody was distributed, the Post ran this story about a Facebook page spoofing the Maryland state government.  The story made clear that the reporter found the whole thing very amusing.  The Post's coverage of the parody aimed at itself showed no such sense of humor.  “We will not tolerate others misrepresenting themselves as The Washington Post, and we are deeply concerned about the confusion it causes among readers,” Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti said. “We are seeking to halt further improper use of our trademarks.”

While the Washington Post's cease-and-desist claims that it "recognizes there are important First Amendment protections for parody and satire," the rest of the letter appears to forget that. Thankfully, the Yes Men have EFF representing them, leading to quite a response letter written by EFF legal director, Corynne McSherry.

We are frankly disappointed that the Washington Post has chosen to take this approach. Given the content of the site and the physical paper, and the ample publicity the spoof has generated, it is difficult to imagine that any member of the public would be confused. Moreover, given the Washington Post's long history of defending free speech and fair use, we had hoped that your paper would recognize the spoof site is entirely legal critical speech.

But there's something else here that goes unmentioned by either the Washington Post or EFF in its response. And it's that (1) the very same URL that the Post is complaining about was once subject to a different trademark lawsuit (2) the Washington Post told a court that it was absolutely critical that said domain be handed over to it (3) which happened... and most importantly (4) the Washington Post did literally nothing with the domain and allowed it to expire, after which it sat unused for years.

This brings us back to the post that eagle-eyed internet lawyer Paul Levy wrote, highlighting that this domain was actually at the heart of a key trademark/domain name dispute from the early 2000s.

In the case of Coca-Cola Company, et al. v. William S. Purdy Sr., et al. in the 8th Circuit, there was a dispute between a few different companies -- including the Washington Post and Coca Cola among others -- who were angry at anti-abortion activist William Purdy, who had registered a bunch of domains that included the trademarked names of these companies, which he then used to push his activist message. One of the domains on the list? Yup: my-washingtonpost.com. As the 8th Circuit explains, at one point Purdy even set up a... parody Washington Post site at that domain:

For several days in early July 2002 Purdy linked the domain names my-washingtonpost.com and drinkcoke.org to a website displaying what appeared to be a front page originating from washingtonpost.com. The page with this format featured the headline “The Washington Post proclaims ‘Abortion is Murder’ ” and contained graphic images of aborted fetuses next to Coca-Cola's trademark and the words “Things Don't Always Go Better With Coke. Abortion is Murder-‘The Real Thing.’ ”  (“It's the Real Thing” is a registered trademark of the Coca-Cola Company.)   Sometime after this litigation began, Purdy also linked many of the domain names to his own websites which contained references to a claim that plaintiffs supported abortion, graphic photos of aborted fetuses, and links to abortionismurder.com.

Counsel for the Washington Post entities sent a cease and desist letter to Purdy on July 8, 2002, and it persuaded his Internet service provider (ISP) to stop hosting the website at my-washingtonpost.com. Counsel for McDonald's and Pepsi contacted Purdy and his domain name registrars with similar requests around this time.   During a telephone conversation with counsel for the Post entities on July 8, Purdy acknowledged that he had published a counterfeit front page at my-washingtonpost.com and claimed that his actions were protected by the First Amendment.   The record indicates that Purdy offered to comply with the request of the Post entities if they would publish something written by him on the Washington Post editorial page, but they declined.4  A few days later Purdy reactivated my-washingtonpost.com with a new ISP and published another counterfeit washingtonpost.com front page with antiabortion headlines and graphic content.   He also registered washingtonpost.cc and washingtonpost.ws, linked them to abortionismurder.com, and began using the email address dontkillyourbaby@ washingtonpost.cc.

The lower court had ruled against Purdy, saying that he was violating the law with his cybersquatting, and Purdy (somewhat gleefully, apparently) decided to thumb his nose at the court and kept on registering similar domains for similar purposes -- leading the court to issue an injunction barring him from even registering such domains. Levy and Public Citizen -- back in 2003 -- had sought to file an amicus brief in the case, saying that while the court was right to reject Purdy's use of these sites in these cases, the injunction barring him from registering similar domains went too far (since it was conceivable that he might set up sites that were legitimately about those companies, rather than designed to fool people). The court refused to accept that brief.

However, as Levy noted, during the course of the case, the Washington Post had argued that it was quite important that it gain control over Purdy's my-washingtonpost.com:

The Post (and the other companies), claiming that ownership of my-washingtonpost.com was vital to its business, obtained preliminary and later permanent injunctive relief, persuading the federal court in Minnesota, and then the Eighth Circuit, that Purdy’s having offered to trade the removal of his web site for free op-ed space in the Post to express his anti-choice messages made his a sort of commercial use that was, therefore, subject to Lanham Act and ACPA proscription.

Indeed, the district court ordered that Purdy turn over the domain name my-washingtonpost.com to the Washington Post -- though it looks like Purdy tried to ignore this. Looking over historical whois records, it appears that the domain, after originally being registered in 2002, changed hands on January 2, 2003. Based on the timeline laid out by the Appeals Court (and the fact that there was a contempt hearing a few weeks after this), it may be that the Washington Post used the initial court order to get the domain registrar to transfer it (rather than have Purdy willingly hand it over). From the appeals court ruling:

The plaintiffs also moved on October 1 for an order to show cause why Purdy should not be held in contempt for violating the earlier preliminary injunction.   The district court appointed a public defender to represent Purdy for purposes of the contempt motion, and a hearing was held on it in January 2003.   The court found that Purdy still had not brought himself into compliance with its injunction and issued an order on January 28, 2003 finding him in contempt.   The court listed more than 60 domain names that it found he had registered and/or used in violation of its original injunction.5  It again ordered Purdy immediately to cease using the listed domain names and to transfer the names to the rightful owners within three days.   Purdy was also ordered to pay plaintiffs $500 per day from the date of the order until he complied and to pay their fees, costs, and expenses.

The next week a status conference was held to assess Purdy's compliance with the January 28 contempt order.   At that time Purdy was still using many domain names that had been specifically found to violate the court's injunctions.   Although the plaintiffs had succeeded in forcing the transfer of many domain names registered in the United States, some registered in France had apparently not been transferred and were still linked to content of his choice.

So that suggests that the January 3, 2002 transfer of the domain was from Purdy to the Washington Post (though, not done willingly by Purdy, despite the court order). Looking at the Internet Archive, it is clear that the Washington Post did literally nothing with this domain once it had it in its possession. And, again, looking at the historical record, the Washington Post appears to have let the registration on this domain lapse on August 1, 2006, at which point its DNS pointed to "expireddomainservices.com" which is likely a service to scoop up expired domain names to see if someone wants to pay up to get them back. On January 1, 2007, all domain name servers were removed from the domain... until January 13 of this year, when the domain was registered once again and put to use for this particular parody.

So, perhaps the Washington Post's claims back in the day about how important it was that this domain be handed over to it for its own use were not entirely truthful at the time. Shocking.

It certainly would be interesting from the standpoint of an observer, if there were a second legal fight over a parody Washington Post news story using the exact same domain. Of course, this time around, the Washington Post would likely need to explain why (among other problems with its claims), after apparently owning that particular domain for nearly four years, it let it go.

You'll recall that one of the top reasons for killing popular net neutrality rules was that they had somehow supposedly crushed broadband industry network investment. Of course, a wide array of publicly-available data easily disproved this claim, but that didn't stop FCC boss Ajit Pai and ISPs from repeating it (and in some cases lying before Congress about it) anyway. We were told, more times that we could count, that with net neutrality dead, sector investment would explode since carriers would be "unchained" from "burdensome regulation."

You'll be shocked to learn this purported boon in investment isn't happening.

A few months ago, Verizon made it clear its CAPEX would be declining, and the company's deployment would see no impact despite billions in tax cuts and regulatory favors from the Trump FCC. Both AT&T and Verizon have similarly announced massive workforce reductions as well. Some investment growth is happening in wireless as carriers prepare for fifth-generation (5G) wireless service (which they would have deployed regardless of the attacks on net neutrality). But even that's a bit lower than Wall Street and sector analysis expected.

And according to the latest analysis from MoffettNathanson, both fixed-line telcos and cablecos are expected to see notable declines in CAPEX and investment:

"Telco-related wireline capex, meanwhile, is slated to fall from $20.3 billion in 2018 to $19.6 billion this year. That slight drop comes as AT&T completes the fiber buildout commitments originally promised when it acquired DirecTV by July, and as Verizon redirects capital to wireless, Moffett said. Capital spending among the four publicly traded cable operators covered by the MoffettNathanson -- Comcast, Charter, Altice USA and Cable One Inc. -- is expected to decline significantly this year -- some 5.8%.

My math may be shaky, but a 5.8% decline in cable industry CAPEX doesn't quite sound like the investment revolution Ajit Pai and his squad of industry allies promised.

To be clear, there's a lot of reasons that ISP CAPEX rises and falls. When Pai and friends were trying to claim that net neutrality killed network investment back in 2017, we noted extensively how they were cherry picking very narrow windows of CAPEX decline that had nothing to do with net neutrality. For example, one company's CAPEX had dipped under net neutrality because it had just finished a cable set top box upgrade project.

The same is true here. As MoffettNathanson notes, some of this dip is thanks to AT&T shifting its focus toward paying off debt for its megamergers. Another chunk of it is because streaming competition is reducing the desire for the clunky old cable box. And in the case of the biggest dip at Charter Communications (Spectrum), it was in large part thanks to the completion of an all-digital transition in the wake of its costly acquisition of Time Warner Cable.

None of that changes the fact that Ajit Pai and a chorus of telecom industry sycophants repeatedly misled the public and Congress about the net benefits of their historically-unpopular policies. Repeatedly. Now, we're left with the end result; a coalition of natural monopolies with even less competition or accountability than ever, eager to get to work not on investing back into the network, but extracting higher and higher consumer and competitor costs courtesy of limited competition. Limited competition Ajit Pai and friends can't even admit is real, much less have a plan to do anything about.

I know this is a crazy thought, but it's almost as if when you appoint industry sycophants to positions of oversight, their primary goal is to improve carrier revenues, leaving everything else (competition, consumer welfare, innovation) foundering in the rear view mirror.

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The evidence the feds use to lock people up continues to be laughable. Well, laughable under any other circumstances. Freedom is a high price to pay for bad science, but the FBI seems to believe the tradeoff between lost freedom and junk science is a net gain for society. Judges seem to agree. It's difficult to challenge the sufficiency of evidence against you, nevermind the underlying "science" backing dubious forensic evidence like hair or bite mark matching.

The gold standards in forensic evidence aren't even gold. DNA is a hitchhiker which can put people never involved with a crime at the scene just by hitching a ride on first responders. Fingerprints have been considered individual markers for years, but even that assessment appears to have been overstated.

But dig deep enough into the FBI's forensic toolkit and you'll find some truly surprising forms of "evidence." ProPublica has done exactly that, uncovering so-called science that far more resembles faith. Convictions have been obtained thanks to FBI forensic experts claiming mass produced products like shirts and jeans are just as distinct as fingerprints and DNA.

A bank robbery trial 16 years ago was a watershed for such testimony. Prosecutors charged an ex-convict with robbing a string of banks across South Florida over two years. Richard Vorder Bruegge, an FBI image examiner, told jurors that the button-down plaid shirt found in the defendant’s house was the exact shirt on the robber in black-and-white surveillance pictures. The examiner said he matched lines in the shirt patterns at eight points along the seams.

The prosecutor asked Vorder Bruegge what were “the odds in which two shirts would be randomly manufactured by the company, having all those eight points of identification lining up exactly the same?”

Only 1 in 650 billion shirts would randomly match so precisely, Vorder Bruegge said, “give or take a few billion.”

The following image -- used in court to send Wilbur McKreith to prison for 92 years -- was part of the FBI's collection of circumstantial evidence, which included seeing McKreith's vehicle near some banks that were robbed and McKreith spending around $10,000 in cash around the time of the robberies.

Where Vorder Bruegge got his "1-in-650-billion" estimate, no one knows. There's is no body of work -- at least, not outside of the FBI -- on clothing pattern matching. There's no data available detailing the number of identical shirts created during manufacturing runs or how many variations an examiner should expect to find in a lot of manufactured clothes. Nor is there any specific training required to turn an FBI examiner into an expert on clothing features. From what's been obtained by ProPublica, the only requirement appears to be a functioning pair of eyes.

After Congress passed a law in 1968 requiring banks to have security equipment, most banks installed surveillance cameras. Meanwhile, Eastman Kodak sold the public millions of pocket-size cameras and amateur photographers took billions of exposures of life and, occasionally, of crimes.

Pictures flooded the bureau as evidence. The lab formed a team called the Special Photographic Unit to find information in images and manage the bureau’s inventory of 35 mm cameras. No scientific background or advanced degrees were required.

Unlike other areas where examiners focused on one thing (fingerprints, bullet casings, hair), "image examiners" looked at everything: facial features, clothing, and anything else that might help them make a match. But how much of a match? The FBI was trying something new, using low-quality photos and some unscientific hunch that clothing, ears, freckles, etc. were unique. As of 2005, the FBI still wasn't offering any formal courses to train its "image examiners," despite claiming in court shirts and jeans were as unique as fingerprints.

Like anything else, this "science" is prone to confirmation bias. But in these cases, it's much worse. FBI image examiners aren't given control images or items to guard against this. They're only given images and the items investigators believe are evidence, so it guides examiners to inevitable conclusions. The "research" tends to be little more than finding ways images and items match, working backwards from the assumption the item being examined is evidence of a criminal act.

Since the FBI is considered to be staffed with the smartest and most technically-astute investigators and examiners, courts generally have granted deference to their testimony in court, even when they make claims of scientific certainty that can't possibly be true. The examiner/expert claiming mass produced shirts were unique also claimed mass produced denim jeans were unique, in direct opposition of what's known about mass production.

[Vonder Bruegge] wrote that manufacturing defects like dropped stitches, where a stitch is missing, are identifying features — the equivalent of a facial scar.

Not at all, said Alicia Carriquiry, director of the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence and an Iowa State University professor. Sewing machines can drop stitches in a consistent manner, embedding the same set of stitches in garment after garment.

“This could be that the same sewing machine in China is producing a drop stitch in the same position in every last pair of jeans until they change that needle,” Carriquiry said. Thousands of pairs of jeans would have the same feature.

The barcode pattern is unique because the stitching varies between pairs, Vorder Bruegge wrote.

But jean manufacturing has been standardized across the industry for a long time, said Charles Jebara, chief executive of Alpha Garment, which sells jeans under Nicole Miller and other labels. The number of stitches per inch along a seam is much the same from one factory floor to another. “They’re using the same kinds of machines, the same general processes to get that operation done,” Jebara said.

The supply chain for denim jeans is so standardized the FBI no longer does fiber comparisons for denim fibers recovered from crime scenes. And yet, the FBI's champion of image examining claims [PDF] wear marks and creasing in jeans is unique enough to act as supporting evidence in criminal trials.

This isn't science. This is jargon-laden hunchery masquerading as evidence. And despite the DOJ's vows to dial back statements of certainty from its experts, people are still going to jail because someone with no specialized training said a pair of jeans is more distinct than a DNA strand.

One of the key themes we've been hearing for years now concerning the EU's awful Article 13 section of the EU Copyright Directive, was that no one should pay any attention at all to the critics of Article 13, because it's all just "big tech lobbying" behind any of the criticism. In the past, we highlighted a few of these claims:

Here's Geoff Taylor from BPI:

The US tech lobby has been using its enormous reach and resources to try to whip up an alarmist campaign...

And here's Richard Ashcroft from PRS for Music:

the Internet giants... have whipped up a social media storm of misinformation about the proposed changes in order to preserve their current advantage.

And how about UK Music's Michael Dugher who really wants to blame Google for everything:

Some absolute rubbish has been written about the EU’s proposed changes on copyright rules.

Amongst the ludicrous suggestions from the likes of Google is the claim that the shake-up will mean the end of memes, remixes and other user-generated content. Some have said that it will mean ‘censorship’ and even wildly predicted it will result in the ‘death of the internet’.

This is desperate and dishonest. Whilst some of the myths are repeated by people who remain blissfully untroubled by the technical but crucially important details of the proposed EU changes, in the worst cases this propaganda is being cynically pedalled by big tech like Google’s YouTube with a huge vested and multi-million-pound interest in this battle.

However, as we wrote about back in December, an analysis that looked at the actual lobbying efforts around copyright in the EU found that it was done overwhelmingly by the legacy copyright industries, and only sparingly by the tech companies. In that post, I went through a spreadsheet looking at the lobbying of the EU Commission, and found that over 80% of the meetings were from the entertainment industry.

However, as is coming out now, there was definitely one "tech" company that was one of the most aggressive lobbyists on Article 13. However, it was lobbying in favor of it, and that's because it knew that Article 13 would lead to an artificial, but highly inflated demand for internet filters. And that's the company known for building the filtering technology behind nearly all of the non-ContentID copyright filters: Audible Magic.

Law professor Annemarie Bridy recently posted a detailed Twitter thread of Audible Magic's lobbying activities regarding Article 13. It's easy to see why the company did so, because the law, if put into effect, would be a huge, huge benefit for Audible Magic, more or less forcing nearly every internet platform of a decent size to have to purchase Audible Magic's technology. Indeed, in the run-up to Article 13, we heard directly from policymakers in the EU who would point to Audible Magic as "proof" that filtering technology was readily available for not much money and that it worked. Neither of these claims are accurate.

On the fees, Audible Magic has a public pricing page that has been frequently pointed out by supporters of Article 13, often with the claim "fees start as low as $1,000 per month." But... that's not accurate. The $1,000 only applies to "on device" databases. Hosted databases start at $2,000 per month, which is already double that... and the $2,000 per month only covers very low levels of usage. Indeed, the usage rates are so low that it's unlikely to think that any company that used Audible Magic at that rate would be making very much (if any) money at all -- meaning that relatively speaking, Audible Magic would be a huge margin killer. And the rates quickly go up from there. Indeed, on Audible Magic's pricing page, as soon as you get to a level that one might consider "sustainable" for a business, the prices become "contact us."

A few years back I spoke with one mid-sized streaming company, who told me Audible Magic was quoting them fees that were between $30,000 to $60,000 per month. An academic paper from 2017 found pricing to be slightly lower than what I had heard, but still quite expensive:

Commercial fingerprinting and filtering services, such as Audible Magic and Vobile, do not publicly release pricing. But we can guess at the ballpark: one medium-sized file hosting service reported that its license for Audible Magic filtering cost $10,000-12,000 per month in 2011 (though this provider was later able to negotiate a reduced rate based on the amount of content flagged through the system). Another estimated that Audible Magic cost its service roughly $25,000 per month. OSPs noted that the licensing fees are just the beginning. Filtering systems, several OSPs noted, are not turnkey services. They require integration with existing systems and upkeep as the OSP takes on new mediation roles between rightsholder and user (such as tracking and managing user appeals).

In other words, those things get really pricey quickly -- such that it becomes untenable for all but the largest of service providers.

And that leads us to the second part, about whether or not they work. As we've been detailing for years, the answer is clearly no. These fingerprinting technologies make both false positive and false negative errors all the time. We probably have a few examples sent our way every single day. Incredibly, the very lobbying video that Bridy points out Audible Magic created as part of its lobbying effort says that Audible Magic's technology is accurate to about 99%.

Last summer, we highlighted that Alec Muffett created a "simulator" that would look at the the error rates on such filtering technology -- and it noted that if you went with an accuracy level of 99.5% (higher than even Audible Magic claims) and ran it across 10 million pieces of content, you'd end up censoring approximately 50,000 pieces of content that were non-infringing. 50,000. And that's assuming the technology is even more accurate than even Audible Magic will claim.

And, of course, that's solely discussing the matching accuracy. It says absolutely nothing about understanding user rights -- like fair use, fair dealing, parody, etc -- none of which Audible Magic takes into account (meaning even more non-infringing works would get censored).

And, yet, as Bridy shows, Audible Magic has been lobbying hard for this:

It's not surprising that they'd lobby for such a thing. I mean, which company wouldn't lobby for a new law that would effectively require thousands of internet companies to buy your product for which there is little to no real competition (oh yeah, which almost certainly means Audible Magic would likely raise prices once the government required everyone to buy its filters).

Bridy highlights that their lobbying claims are complete bullshit as well:

Quite incredible that they highlight the "voluntary" nature of the filters while lobbying for making their technology required under law. And equally ridiculous that they claim that intermediary liability protections some how create "barriers" for online services. That, as Bridy points out, is exactly the opposite of reality. Safe harbors create clear rules that platforms understand so they know what they need to do to set up a legit platform. Removing those rules, as Article 13 does, and requiring expensive (and terrible) technology is a huge barrier, as the cost is prohibitive for most.

There's more in that thread, but as Bridy shows, Audible Magic's own presentation shows that it knows who the "winner" of Article 13 will be: Audible Magic inserting itself to become the de facto "copyright filter" layer of the internet:

So, yeah, there was some "tech" lobbying for Article 13 and its mandatory filters. It was just coming from the biggest supplier of those filters.

India's government is still seeking more direct control of the internet, using ill-defined buzzwords ("hate speech," "fake news") as justification for broken encryption and holding tech companies directly responsible for content created by users. The Indian government may have passed and killed a "fake news" law in the space of 24 hours, but the term lives on as a useful enabler for censorship.

New rules proposed by the Indian government to rein in tech giants and combat fake news could have a profoundly chilling effect on free speech and privacy online. The proposed changes involve Section 79 of the IT Act, a safe harbor protection for internet “intermediaries” that’s akin to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the US. Current law protects intermediaries such as internet service providers and social media platforms from liability for the actions of their users until they are made aware of a particular post; intermediaries also must only censor content when directed by a court.

The proposed amendments attempt to curb the spread of misinformation on platforms like Facebook and Twitter by effectively forcing internet companies to censor a broad swath of user content. They also require secure messaging services like WhatsApp to decrypt encrypted data for government use, which could affect the security of users around the globe. The rules also would require internet companies to notify users of their privacy policies monthly.

Just the threat of government intervention has been enough to turn a number of US companies into proactive censors. As Paris Martineau notes in this Wired article, Netflix and a number of other streaming services have already voluntarily agreed to engage in self-censorship, purging their Indian offerings of content that "disrespects the country's flag," "hurts religious sentiments," or promotes terrorism.

Netflix's justification for self-censorship is apparently that this is somehow better than direct government censorship. But this justification makes no sense, especially when proactive measures tend to remove more content than is actually illegal. Add in some automation and legal content is going to get flagged and removed faster than the Indian government can issue self-serving removal requests.

The government's timetable on content removal only adds to the problem. The Indian government wants content it finds illegal removed within 24 hours of notification. Short turn times -- seen elsewhere in the world -- have increased proactive takedowns by internet companies, resulting in far more content removals than are strictly necessary.

Not that these governments are complaining. Bogus takedowns aren't their problem, beyond the occasional courtroom dispute over mistakenly-removed content. At this point, governments need only threaten to put direct censorship in place to start seeing content these governments don't like removed.

India's plan introduces compromised encryption to the mix, which would set a dangerous precedent if companies like WhatsApp comply. If it can be done in India, it can be done anywhere, and a long list of government entities frustrated that they don't have access to every domestic online conversation will see this as an invitation to make similar demands. And once the floodgates are opened halfway around the world, it's going to be tough to argue you can't do the same thing in your home country.

Techdirt writes plenty about copyright in the US and EU, and any changes to the respective legislative landscapes. But it's important to remember that many other countries around the world are also trying to deal with the tension between copyright's basic aim to prevent copying, and the Internet's underlying technology that facilitates it. Recently, we covered the copyright reform process in South Africa, where some surprisingly good things have been happening. Now it seems that Singapore may bring in a number of positive changes to its copyright legislation. One of the reasons for that is the very thorough consultative process that was undertaken, explained here by Singapore's Ministry of Law:

The proposed changes are made, following an extensive three-year review and two rounds of public consultations conducted from August to November 2016 and May to June 2017 respectively. Three public Town Halls and ten engagement sessions with various stakeholder groups, including consumer, industry and trade associations, businesses, intellectual property practitioners and academics were held. Close to 100 formal submissions and more than 280 online feedback forms were received.

The full 70-page report (pdf) spells out the questions asked during that review, the answers received, and the government's proposals. The Ministry of Law's press release lists some of the main changes it wants to make. One of the most welcome is a new exception for text and data mining (TDM) for the purpose of analysis:

Today, people who use automated techniques to analyse text, data and other content to generate insights risk infringing copyright as they typically require large scale copying of works without permission. It is proposed that a new exception be established to allow copying of copyrighted materials for the purpose of data analysis, where the user has lawful access to the materials that are copied. This will promote applications of data analytics and big data across a gamut of industries, unlocking new business opportunities, speeding up processes, and reducing costs for all.

Importantly, Singapore's proposed new TDM exception applies to everyone -- including big businesses. That's unlike the corresponding Article 3 in the EU's awful Copyright Directive, currently working its way through the legislative process, which imposes an unnecessary restriction that more or less guarantees the European Union will be a backwater in this fast-growing area. An obvious but wise move by Singapore is the proposal for an enhanced copyright exception for educational purposes:

Non-profit schools and their students will be able to use online resources that are accessible without payment, for instruction purposes. This will be in addition to their existing exceptions which generally cover only copying of a portion of a work. The enhancement will facilitate instruction and make it easier for teachers and students to use online materials in classes. For example, teachers and students will be able to use various audio-visual materials (e.g. videos, pictures) found online for their classroom lessons and project presentations. They will also be able to share those materials, or lessons and project presentations which have included those materials, on student learning portals for other schools to view. Online resources that require payment will not be covered by this exception.

Another suggested exception is for non-profit galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) to make copies for exhibition purposes. Also useful for GLAMs is a new limit on the protection given to unpublished works. This will stand at life plus 70 years for literary and artistic works, just as for published versions. GLAMs will be protected from contract override, as is the text and data mining exception. That's important, because it means that copyright owners cannot nullify the new exceptions by insisting organizations sign contracts that waive them. Individual creators receive new rights too:

the report proposes that creators be given a new right to be attributed as the creator of their work, regardless of whether they still own or have sold the copyright. For example, anyone using a work publicly, such as posting it on the internet, will have to acknowledge the creator of the work. This will accord creators due recognition and allow them to build their reputation over time. Currently, they do not need to be attributed as the creator of their work when others use it.

This is essentially a moral right alongside the usual economic ones. As the Wikipedia page on the subject explains, the degree to which moral rights exist for creators of copyright works varies enormously around the world. In France, for example, moral rights are perpetual and inalienable, whereas in the US they are less to the fore. Singapore's Ministry of Law also proposes that where rights have not been explicitly signed away in a contract, they remain with the creator. Although that will prevent naive creators being tricked out of their rights, it won't apply to work created by employees: there, it's employers who will continue to retain rights. As for enforcing copyright, there is the following:

the report proposes that new enforcement measures be made available to copyright owners to deter retailers and service providers from profiting off providing access to content from unauthorised sources, such as through the sale of set-top boxes that enable access to content from unauthorised sources, also commonly known as grey boxes or illicit streaming devices. The measures, which are absent today, will make clear that acts such as the import and sale of such devices are prohibited.

This is clearly aimed at Kodi boxes, which are currently one of the main targets of the entertainment industry. To its credit, the Ministry of Law's proposal does include important additional requirements for the measures to apply:

the product can be used to access audio-visual content from an unauthorised source and additionally must be:

designed or made primarily for providing access to such content

advertised as providing access to such content, or

sold as providing access to such content, where the retailer sells a generic device with the understanding that "add-on" services such as the provision of website links, instructions or installation of subscription services will subsequently be provided

At least that makes a clear distinction between basic Kodi boxes, and those specifically built and sold with a view to providing unauthorized access to materials. That understanding of the difference is of a piece with the rest of the legislation, which is unusually intelligent. Other governments could learn from that, and from the overall thrust of the proposals to move Singapore's copyright law towards a fair use system similar to that of the US -- something that is fiercely resisted elsewhere.

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