Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the topics-of-conversation dept

This week, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Texas’s content moderation law, responding to the claim on Twitter that Wikipedia could easily comply with it by being more open and transparent:

Tell me you don’t understand how Wikipedia works without telling me you don’t understand how Wikipedia works.

I mean, Wikipedia is so open it airs its own dirty laundry in the talk pages. How much more open does it need to be?

In second place, it’s another anonymous comment on the same subject, this time responding to the claim that social media platforms just need to post their rules and admit their bias:

They do post their rules, its just that people like you cannot distinguish harassment from political discourse.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with yet another anonymous comment, this time responding to someone describing the EU’s big tech tax proposal as a “sender pays” system:

I’m sorry, but the proposal isn’t “sender pays”.

It’s “sender pays”, “receiver pays”, and “third party middlemen pay” all at once.

And to keep it all anonymous on the insightful side, we wrap up with a comment about the notion that Twitter is a carrier that “transmits communications between parties”:

Utterly wrong, Twitter allows people to post to its site for other people to read. ISP’s transmit packets between users and Twitter, but Twitter no more transmits or offers public carriage that any user of the mail, phone or other common carriage services.

Over on the funny side, we head back to the post about Texas’s law and the discussion around Wikipedia, where first place goes to Toom1275 for responding to the idea that it would “allow truth to flourish over propaganda there”:

Must have gotten Wikipedia confused for Conservapedia.

In second place, it’s That One Guy commenting on the subreddit that enacted a new rule in defiance of the law:

Be careful what you wish/throw a tantrum demanding…

Greg Abbot is a little piss baby.

With the mandatory text out of the way this seems reasonable enough, I mean there’s been so much whining about how platforms just need to be more exact and clear in their rules by people who are definitely not bad actors looking for loopholes to exploit that having clear rules about what your commentary must include can only be an improvement.

On top of that with all the furor about ‘viewpoints discrimination’ since there are people who don’t think that Greg Abbot is a little piss baby the platform’s hands are tied on this rule as it legally cannot tell the mod of that subreddit that they aren’t allowed to do that since that would be viewpoint discrimination against them, and I’m sure the law’s supporters would never be so grossly hypocritical as to demand viewpoint discrimination in their favor.

And last but most certainly not least since it’s a rule that all comments must include the ‘Greg Abbott is a little piss baby’ line there’s no possible concern about confusion over whether the text represents the position of the poster, and since it’s not forced speech so long as that confusion isn’t there there’s really no grounds at all for the first-amendment hating supporters of the bill to object to this new rule.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ll start by throwing in one more comment from That One Guy on that post, this time about the Wikipedia angle again:

You can tell a lot about a person/group by who/what they consider their enemies and when [Citation Needed] is on that list it’s probably not a good sign.

Finally, it’s glenn with another comment about the EU tech tax:

I’m waiting for grocery stores to pay me to take food off their hands, you know… because.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: September 25th – October 1st

Techdirt

from the old-stories dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, the SESTA fight continued, and we took a look at how Google would survive the law, but startups might not, and how much of the supposed sex trafficking epidemic driving the bill simply didn’t exist. Ajit Pai’s FCC amusingly declared victory over wireless competition issues, the streaming exclusivity wars were heating up and driving people back to piracy, and we looked at how the Supreme Court’s misunderstanding of copyright law was impacting halloween costumes. The Trump administration was continuing to panic about leaks, the global security community lost its trust in NSA-developed crypto technology, and a man in the UK got a 12-month sentence for refusing to turn passwords over to police.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, the USTR was pretending that it was an exercise in transparency to make people testify about the TPP text that they weren’t allowed to see, while Rep. Lofgren put forth a simple three-point plan for actual TPP transparency (the same week she introduced the Global Internet Freedom Act). Kickstarter was being overaggressive in dealing with DMCA notices, Google’s copyright crackdown punished an author for torrenting his own book, and there was a parade of horror stories from copyright collection organizations. While the US copyright office was seeking comments on the worrying idea of resale royalties for visual artists, Portugal made the great move of declaring file sharing for personal use to be legal.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, we got a look at how political astroturf “coalitions” are formed, while the NLPC was continuing a bogus campaign against Google Video. We also saw a very early appearance of the term “fake news” on Techdirt after Comcast was fined for airing some undisclosed nonsense. The RIAA got another judicial smackdown in one of its file sharing lawsuits, which according to a new report were not working out very well at all. But this was also the week that we noted the first of such lawsuits to head to a jury, and our post didn’t mention the name that would soon be extremely prominent in the annals of file sharing history: Jammie Thomas.

In The Beginning…

Two editions of the Up To Date newsletter that would become Techdirt went out this week in 1997: one on September 27th and another two days later on September 29th.

Filed Under: history, look back

Appeals Court Tells Cops Their Inability To Read A Temporary Plate Cannot Justify A Traffic Stop

Legal Issues

from the not-just-any-pretext-will-do dept

Pretextual stops are an unfortunate side effect of American law enforcement. When cops want to question people or root around in their cars, they’ll find another reason to make the stop and hope the eventual searches make it all worthwhile.

This law enforcement activity has been repeatedly blessed by courts, which tend to view it as an essential component of crime-fighting. The collateral damage to constitutional rights is often viewed as an acceptable sacrifice for law enforcement gains. But, every so often, cops mishandle the pretext so badly courts can’t grant them immunity for their rights violations. It’s rare, but it’s always good to see it happen.

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down one of these rarities [PDF]. Cops, who admitted in their own testimony they couldn’t clearly see the plate they decided to view as potentially illegal, will have to continue to face this lawsuit, having had their immunity stripped by two consecutive courts.

Pretext stops are cool and legal. But the pretense has to hold up long enough to justify the initial stop. This one didn’t. From the opening of the decision:

[T]he officers noted that [Jared] Clinton’s car did not have permanent license plates. Instead, the plates on Clinton’s car advertised the dealership “Dewey Auto Outlet.” Clinton had a valid temporary tag in the appropriate place in his vehicle’s rear window. However, the officers were unable to “make out any writing” on it from their position behind Clinton’s vehicle. The officers “observed that the vehicle had . . . dealer plates and a white piece of paper taped in the back window. [They] followed the vehicle for several blocks and could not make out any writing on it.” According to Officer Minnehan, “mostly it [was] the angle of the back windshield and then the glare from the sun” that made the tag unreadable. Officer Garrett similarly testified that he “could not have said” whether the tag “was blank or not blank” because “there was no way to tell” from where they were following Clinton’s vehicle. He further testified to having previously encountered forged tags because of the fact that paper tags are “easily altered.” Officer Steinkamp testified about his previous experiences with drivers placing counterfeit or blank documents in the windows of unregistered vehicles to mimic temporary registration tags.

The only conclusion these officers had reached was that they wanted to stop this car. They didn’t have anything else. So, they pulled the car over and one officer upped the ante by claiming to detect the “strong odor of marijuana.” A search soon commenced with officers discovering a vape pen and vape cartridge both “alleged to contain THC.” Jared Clinton was charged with possession and spent four hours in jail. He filed a motion to suppress, which apparently was enough to convince the county prosecutor to dismiss the case.

Clinton sued. The officers claimed they not only had reasonable suspicion to perform the stop, but qualified immunity if they were wrong about the reasonable suspicion part. The lower court disagreed with the officers.

It is undisputed that Clinton’s temporary tag complied with Iowa law. Clinton v. Garrett, 551 F. Supp. 3d 929, 938 (S.D. Iowa 2021) (“A properly completed temporary registration tag was taped in Clinton’s rear window.”). The issue is whether the officers had a reasonable and articulable suspicion that Clinton was violating the law. The district court found that they did not, reasoning that the inability to make out the tag did not constitute “a particularized basis for believing a motor vehicle was unregistered or a temporary registration tag was falsified.” The court based its conclusion on the distinction between an absence of information about the tag, i.e., the officers’ inability to see what was on the tag, and the presence of some information that pointed to the tag being fake.

The Appeals Court says the lower court was right. A cop can’t use their failure to do their job competently as the basis for a traffic stop.

We focused on the fact that Officer Del Valle relied on her inability to read the tag—rather than on her observation of a possible legal defect on the tag—in deciding to stop the vehicle…

The decision concludes with the court pointing out the ridiculousness of the officers’ arguments simply by repeating them back to them.

The officers argue that there is no clearly established right to drive with a nervous passenger through a high crime neighborhood with a temporary tag that is unable to be read by officers following the vehicle. We have already dismissed this argument to the extent that it relies upon Clinton’s nervous passenger and the area where he was driving. These facts, in isolation, do not support a conclusion that Clinton’s vehicle was connected to unlawful activity in general, much less to the specific kind of unlawful activity for which the officers pulled him over—a possible temporary tag violation. Nor can a driver rightly be held responsible for ambient conditions that render a tag illegible. […] The authority is clear: officers must have particularized facts that give rise to reasonable suspicion in order for a stop to be constitutionally valid.

Immunity denied. And the officers who converted their inability to read a paper plate into an unconstitutional stop and search can continue to be sued by their victim. Not all pretexts are created equal and this pretext turned out to be almost as useless as no pretext at all.

Filed Under: 8th circuit, pretextual stops

After Trying To Deny The Obvious, Google Announces It’s Shutting Down Stadia

Failures

from the we-hardly-knew-ya dept

While Google’s Stadia game streaming service arrived with a lot of promise, it generally landed with a disappointing thud.

A limited catalog, deployment issues, and a quality that couldn’t match current gen game consoles meant the service just never saw the kind of traction Google (or a lot of other people) originally envisioned. Developers have been consistently abandoning the platform, and Google has consistently sidelined the service, even shutting down its own development efforts as a parade of executives headed for the exits.

Back in July, rumors began to emerge that Google would soon kill the effort. Google tried to deny those rumors at the time, insisting that the project was very much alive:

As it turns out, the leaks were right. In a blog post, Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison announced that Google would soon be shutting down the platform:

…while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.

The service will remain live until January 18th, 2023. Google is refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made via the Google store, and all game purchases made through the Google Play store (I have a Premiere edition Stadia bundle I never bothered to even open). Employees will be shifted to other parts of Alphabet, and the promising underlying tech will likely be used on other Google platforms.

Game streaming does probably have a future, but it was simply too difficult to disrupt an industry dominated by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, whose products (including some of their own streaming efforts) still generally provided a superior gaming experience with a far larger catalog of actual titles.

Filed Under: 4k, console wars, game streaming, gaming, stadia, video games
Companies: google

No One Has Any Clue How Texas’ Social Media Law Can Actually Work (Because It Can’t Work)

Content Moderation

from the this-is-all-so-so-dumb dept

Lots of people are still trying to mentally process the bizarrely confused 5th Circuit ruling that has reinstated Texas’ social media content moderation law. I wrote an initial analysis of the ruling here, and then a further analysis of just some of the most egregious problems with it over at The Daily Beast. This week I’ve been at the TrustCon conference, where multiple people who actually have to implement the law have been repeatedly telling me that they have no idea how anyone even thinks it’s possible to follow the law. Because it is, quite clearly, impossible.

The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel released an article asking if this ruling “is the beginning of the end of the internet?” which may feel hyperbolic, but at the very least, if the ruling stands, it’s certainly the end of the internet as we know it. What comes after that is going to be something quite different. Warzel interviewed me for the piece, among some others, but the key part of the article comes from Stanford’s Daphne Keller, noting that it seems unlikely that even Texas legislators who wrote and passed the law have any idea what the law will do:

Keller, of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, has tried to game out future scenarios, such as social networks having a default non-moderated version that might quickly become unusable, and a separate opt-in version with all the normal checks and balances (terms-of-service agreements and spam filters) that sites have now. But how would a company go about building and running two simultaneous versions of the same platform at once? Would the Chaos Version run only in Texas? Or would companies try to exclude Texas residents from their platforms?

“You have potential situations where companies would have to say, ‘Okay, we’re kicking off this neo-Nazi, but he’s allowed to stay on in Texas,” Masnick said. “But what if the neo-Nazi doesn’t live in Texas?” The same goes for more famous banned users, such as Trump. Do you ban Trump’s tweets in every state except Texas? It seems almost impossible for companies to comply with this law in a way that makes sense. The more likely reality, Masnick suggests, is that companies will be unable to comply and will end up ignoring it, and the Texas attorney general will keep filing suit against them, causing more simmering resentment among conservatives against Big Tech.

What is the endgame of a law that is both onerous to enforce and seemingly impossible to comply with? Keller offered two theories: “I think passing this law was so much fun for these legislators, and I think they might have expected it would get struck down, so the theater was the point.” But she also believes that there is likely some lack of understanding among those responsible for the law about just how extreme the First Amendment is in practice. “Most people don’t realize how much horrible speech is legal,” she said, arguing that historically, the constitutional right has confounded logic on both the political left and right. “These legislators think that they’re opening the door to some stuff that might offend liberals. But I don’t know if they realize they are also opening the door to barely legal child porn or pro-anorexia content and beheading videos. I don’t think they’ve understood how bad the bad is.”

This is almost certainly true. Remember, the bill’s own author once got so angry at me on Twitter that he seemed to imply that he knows that Section 230 pre-empts his entire bill.

So… as it stands we have a bill where the social media companies have no clue how to comply with the bill, and the lawmakers who wrote the bill have no idea how to comply with the bill (and don’t seem to much care). The whole thing is just pure nonsense — legislating out of pure spite.

Texas lawmakers don’t actually understand any of this. What they wanted was to make “big tech” feel bad. But they didn’t actually do that either. They just made everyone confused, because no one in their right mind would pass a law that effectively requires all horrible content to remain online in perpetuity.

But that’s what Texas lawmakers did.

So, now they’re the dog that caught the car, and while they almost certainly don’t realize it yet (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t step in and fix things), they’re going to find out that they don’t actually like their jaws clamped to a car zipping down the highway…

Filed Under: 5th circuit, content moderation, hb 20, social media, texas

Daily Deal: Apple 13.3-inch MacBook Air 128GB – Silver (Refurbished)

Deals

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

With a gorgeous, ultra-thin design, the Apple MacBook Air 13.3-inch notebook is designed to take on today’s most demanding tasks without compromising on portability and usability. This refurbished Apple MacBook Air has an integrated 720p FaceTime HD webcam for video chats and communication. The combination of the stunningly beautiful Retina display, high-performance Core i5 processor, and low-power processor makes this device perfect for browsing and working at home or in the office. It’s on sale for $250.

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

Defense Department Latest To Be Caught Hoovering Up Internet Data Via Private Contractors

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the haystacks-at-wholesale-prices dept

Everyone’s got a hunger for data. Constitutional rights sometimes prevent those with a hunger from serving themselves. But when they’ve got third parties on top of third parties, all Fourth Amendment bets are off. Data brokers are getting rich selling government agencies the data they want at low, low prices, repackaging information gathered from other third parties into tasty packages that give US government agencies the data they want with the plausible deniability they need.

Relying on the third-party doctrine that mostly ignores the Fourth Amendment and the public claims of data brokers that the massive amount of data being hawked to willing buyers cannot, in and of itself, positively ID anyone, federal agencies are amassing haystacks without having to worry too much about upsetting the probable cause cart.

Who’s grabbing all this data from data brokers? Well, it’s DC’s heaviest hitters, including ICE, CBP, the FBI, IRS, Secret Service, and — according to this report from Joseph Cox for Motherboard — the Department of Defense.

Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world’s internet traffic, and which in some cases provides access to people’s email data, browsing history, and other information such as their sensitive internet cookies, according to contracting data and other documents reviewed by Motherboard. 

The report is drawn from the information revealed by Senator Ron Wyden in his letter [PDF] to the Inspectors General of the FBI and DHS, as well as (most relevantly here) the Defense Department’s oversight.

The material reveals the sale and use of a previously little known monitoring capability that is powered by data purchases from the private sector. The tool, called Augury, is developed by cybersecurity firm Team Cymru and bundles a massive amount of data together and makes it available to government and corporate customers as a paid service.

As Cox points out, there are non-privacy violating uses for this data. Analysts and security researchers use this treasure trove to track malicious hackers and/or do due diligence for cyberattack attribution.

How the US military utilizes this data is unknown. Much of it appears to be foreign-facing, which means most collections won’t raise constitutional eyebrows. The procurement record shows the Defense Department is particularly interested in accessing data from collection points around the world, including those found in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. But the procurement request also notes the data accessed might originate in North America, which is where plenty of US citizens reside.

Even if the Defense Department makes an effort to steer clear of US persons’ data, there’s no way Team Cymru can guarantee the military won’t end up with plenty of local data in its possession. Its (defensive) statements in response to questions from Motherboard suggests that by the time the data is packaged for sale, the company doing the harvesting (either directly or indirectly) doesn’t have much insight into its country of origin.

“Our platform does not provide user or subscriber information, and it doesn’t provide results that show any pattern of life, preventing its ability to be used to target individuals. Our platform only captures a limited sampling of the available data, and is further restricted by only allowing queries against restricted sampled and limited data, which all originates from malware, malicious activity, honeypots, scans, and third parties who provide feeds of the same. Results are then further limited in the scope and volume of what’s returned,” Team Cymru said in another email. 

If the platform truly laundered data into near-obscurity, it would be useless to those seeking it. So, either Team Cymru is relying on things unsaid to imply it isn’t helping federal agencies bypass constitutional protections, or it’s providing a service that asks end users to do all the analytic heavy lifting. It seems unlikely federal agencies (which include the FBI and DHS) would pay good money for access to a bunch of data that can’t be used to observe “patterns of life” or otherwise assist in pulling needles from Augury’s haystacks.

And a *lot* of money has been spent. Wyden’s letter notes the DoD has been evasive when asked direct questions by the senator.

While I have been able to make public important details about government agencies’ purchase of location data, my efforts to probe and shed light on the government’s purchase of internet browsing records have been frustrated by the Pentagon.

[…]

After DOD refused to release this information without restrictions, my staff learned that public contract information had been posted online, showing that multiple DoD agencies purchased data from data brokers that reveal internet browsing history: The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency spent more than $2 million purchasing access to netflow data, and the Defense Intelligence Agency purchased Domain Name System data. My office asked DOD to re-review their decision to maintain the CUI restrictions on the written answers DOD had previously provided, in light of these public contracts. DOD yet again refused, on May 25, 2022.

The Defense Department appears very reluctant to discuss its $2 million contract that allows it to hook itself up to Team Cmyru’s firehose. Rest assured, these government dollars are not being misspent. The DoD is definitely getting what it paid for.

Public contracting records confirm that the Augury tool provides access to “petabytes” of network data “from over 550 collection points worldwide” and “is updated with at least 100 billion new records each day.” The contracting records also confirm that Augury provides access to email data (“IMAP/POP/SMTP pcap data”) and data about web browser activity (“cookie usage,” “UserAgent data” and “URLs accessed”).

For those not familiar with the term used by Wyden, “pcap” is all-encompassing when it comes to internet traffic data.

PCAP data is “everything,” Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who has closely followed the data trade, told Motherboard in an online chat. “It’s everything. There’s nothing else to capture except the smell of electricity.”

Massive amounts of data, only limited by the government’s desire and Team Cmyru’s internal controls, whatever they actually are. That’s a lot of info on internet users’ habits, all of which can be had for a few million dollars a year, unrestrained by constitutional restrictions. As far as the government is concerned, a bunch of data that can be used to identify people and track their internet habits, if not their actual location (thanks to the wealth of location data generated by devices, apps, and on-the-go software) isn’t a Fourth Amendment issue because there are a few degrees of separation (and, possibly, meaningless “anonymization”) separating data generators from the government agencies buying access to this data.

That the Defense Department is unwilling to speak honestly to Wyden about this data haul signals there’s something questionable about its actions. Hopefully, this pressure will persuade the DoD to terminate its contract with Augury/Team Cmyru and find more constitutionally-sound ways to gather data.

Filed Under: cbp, defense department, dhs, fbi, ice, irs, secret service, third party doctrine

Hundreds Of Authors Ask Publishers To Stop Attacking Libraries

Culture

from the save-the-libraries dept

We keep pointing out that publishers hate libraries. Oh, they’ll pretend otherwise, and make broad platitudes about libraries and the good of society. But, it’s clear in how they act that they think of libraries as dens of piracy. They’re now using the ebook revolution as a chance to harm, or even wipe out, libraries. The biggest battle on this front is the big publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive.

Now, hundreds of authors have signed onto a letter put together by Fight for the Future in support of libraries and asking the publishers to back off.

Libraries are a fundamental collective good. We, the undersigned authors, are disheartened by the recent attacks against libraries being made in our name by trade associations such as the Association of American Publishers and the Publishers Association: undermining the traditional rights of libraries to own and preserve books, intimidating libraries with lawsuits, and smearing librarians. 

We urge all who are engaged in the work of getting books into the hands of readers to act in the interests of all authors, including the long-marginalized, midlist, and emerging authors whom librarians have championed for decades. 

This is important, because like with the RIAA claiming to represent musicians (rather than the labels they actually represent), the publishers always frame their attacks on libraries as if it’s about protecting authors’ interests. And here are tons of authors, including some very big names like Neil Gaiman, saying that the publishers need to not just stop going after libraries, but especially that they need to stop doing so in the name of authors.

The letter has three asks, all of which I think are important and which I’ll quote fully here:

1. Enshrine the right of libraries to permanently own and preserve books, and to purchase these permanent copies on reasonable terms, regardless of format.  Many libraries would prefer to own and preserve digital editions, as they have always done with print books, but these days publishers rarely offer them the option. Instead, when libraries have access to ebooks at all, the prices libraries pay to rent ebooks are often likened to extortion.

   Digital editions are more affordable to produce and often more accessible, but libraries are already relying on emergency funds and may only be able to license a small selection of mainstream works in the future. In turn, readers will have fewer opportunities to discover the more diverse potential bestsellers of tomorrow. 

   It is past time to determine a path forward that is fair to both libraries and authors—including a perpetual model for digital ownership based on the cost to maintain a print edition.

2. End lawsuits aimed at intimidating libraries and diminishing their role in society. The interests of libraries are the interests of the public, and of any author concerned with equity and longevity for themselves and their fellow writers. We are all on the same side. Yet a unanimously passed Maryland state law ensuring libraries pay “reasonable fees” for digital editions died after the AAP sued. And after a previous suit failed, several publishers are currently suing the Internet Archive Library in an attempt to prohibit all libraries from lending out scanned copies of books they own. While undermining libraries may financially benefit the wealthiest and most privileged authors and corporations in the short term, this behavior is utterly opposed to the interests of authors as a whole.
   
3. End smear campaigns against librarians. Recent comments likening library advocates to “mouthpieces” for Big Tech are as tasteless as they are inaccurate. Also concerning are the awards recently given to legislators who have advocated in favor of the dangerous surveillance of library patrons, and of laws that criminalize librarians. As a last bastion of truth, privacy, and access to diverse voices, libraries’ digital operations grow ever more essential to our society—and their work should be celebrated, not censured.

Many of the authors were so vocal about this issue, that they didn’t just sign the letter, but provided further quotes of support as well.

The real question then, is why the publishers are continuing this never ending attack on libraries. One hopes that journalists will be asking the heads of the big publishers, as well as the boss of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), (former Copyright Office boss) Maria Pallante, why they continue to drive forward with these anti-author, anti-library attacks.

Filed Under: authors, ebooks, lawsuits, libraries
Companies: aap

Netflix Expands Its Stupid Password Sharing Crackdown Cash Grab

Overhype

from the meet-the-new-boss dept

We’ve noted how, as Netflix gets bigger and more powerful, it has increasingly behaved more like the cable giants (Comcast) it used to disrupt. For example, once it was big enough to pay telecom giants their pound of flesh, it stopped caring about stuff like net neutrality.

But there’s no better example of Netflix’s pivot than the company’s dumb password sharing crackdown, which will require users to pay an extra fee if they’re caught sharing their password with people who live outside of the home of the original account holder.

It’s dumb for several reasons. One, predictions of how much money Netflix will make from the crackdown (Adobe claims $9 billion annually, for example) aren’t based in reality. Two, Netflix already limits the number of simultaneous streams per account, forcing you to pay more if you want more. In other words, the “problem” Netflix is trying to monetize has already been monetized.

Three, users just faced major price hikes. Four, Netflix is losing subscribers due to increased competition, and providing users with new, annoying reasons to leave your service isn’t particularly bright. Five, Netflix is on record repeatedly saying password sharing was no big deal and it loved the practice, which it saw as little more than free advertising not that long ago:

The crackdown hasn’t yet come to the U.S., but probably will next year. In the interim, Netflix has been using cash-strapped South American Netflix users as messaging guinea pigs, as it tries to figure out messaging that justifies the cash grab. It’s… not working particularly well:

The announcement of this latest pricing experiment triggered a wave of criticism, most notably among users in Argentina — the fourth-largest household penetration rate for Netflix globally, according to Comparitech, a consumer tech research platform, behind only the U.S., Canada, and Australia, with more than 4.5 million subscribers as of 2020. Argentine users took to the internet more vociferously than any other country, as anti-Netflix memes, hashtags, and posts went viral across social media. Many threatened to leave Netflix en masse by popularizing the hashtag #ChauNetflix (#ByeNetflix), a riff on the platform’s local #CheNetflix promotional campaign on Twitter.

Wall Street, as it does, demands quarter over quarter growth at any cost. Netflix clearly doesn’t feel like it can achieve that growth through improved service or innovation, so it’s taking a page from the cable industry playbook and attempting to do it by firing people and nickel-and-diming existing subscribers. It also joined the MPA, and embraced the dumb cable industry belief that password sharing is “piracy.”

But unlike Comcast in its heyday, Netflix actually sees meaningful, unconstrained competition. Disney, Amazon, Starz, Apple, Hulu, Paramount, HBO and the countless other streaming competitors that have been nibbling away at Netflix subscriber counts all surely appreciate Netflix’s dedication to making its service more expensive, cumbersome, and annoying.

Filed Under: competition, nickel and diming, password sharing, streaming, video
Companies: netflix

Third Culture Bakery Celebrates Loss Of ‘Mochi Muffin’ Trademark With Giveaway

Trademark

from the nuffin-muffin dept

This will be a short one, but the reputation rehab project for Third Culture Bakery has begun. If you don’t recall that name, it’s a baker business in California that somehow convinced the USPTO to issue it a trademark for “mochi muffin“. Mochi is a rice paste popular in Japan for making small baked goods and other foods. A mochi muffin is just that: a muffin made of mochi. It is, therefore, purely descriptive to call your product a mochi muffin. The sort of thing, in other words, that you’re not supposed to be able to trademark.

But the USPTO approved the mark and Third Culture began issuing legal threats and lawsuits against others that dared to use the descriptive term for their own products. The public backlash got so bad that eventually Third Culture relented and said it would relinquish the trademark and stop the bullying.

And now it has, or will at the end of the month. And, in a bit of an attempt at reputation rebuilding, Third Culture will be celebrating its own loss of the trademark with a mochi muffin giveaway.

On Monday the company took to Instagram to hype “Un-Trademark Day” celebrating the surrender of the mochi muffin trademark. On September 30, fans can visit any of the shops for a no-purchase necessary mochi muffin. The company’s announcement, the post reads, comes as the owners learned of the completion of a Surrender of Registration for Cancelation on the morning of September 26. Legally speaking, the trademark will phase out in the coming weeks.

Frankly, as annoying as the bakery was about all of this at the onset, this reverse-heel-turn isn’t a bad way to go about it. Instead of hiding from the whole issue, the company literally announced an “Un-Trademark Day.” That’s a bit of self-deprecation that can frankly go a long way to rebuilding public goodwill. Free muffins don’t hurt, either.

The post notes that they got some bad advice, and are trying to make up for it:

The post, signed by owners Sam Butarbutar and Wenter Shyu, goes on to explain a bit more of the reasoning behind trademarking in the first place. “We originally were advised to try and obtain the trademark in 2017 to protect our teeny-tiny company from our very own wholesale accounts,” the post reads. “And have since taken and followed some bad advice that ultimately did more harm than good…We take full responsibility for this.”

While blaming the “bad advice” may feel a little like a cop-out, it’s a bakery, not a bunch of trademark experts, and they certainly seem to be doing everything to make things right now.

The saga of the mochi muffin trademark is, at long last, over. And… if you happen to be near one of their California Bay Area stores tomorrow, go get a muffin.

Filed Under: mochi muffin, muffin, trademark
Companies: third culture bakery