High School Teacher's Copyright Suit Against Netflix Gets Dismissed Because Coincidence Isn't Protectable

Copyright

from the class-dismissed dept

Of all the areas that result in copyright lawsuits that never should have been filed, it surely must be ignorance of the idea/expression dichotomy that is the most common. That link will take you to a litany of posts about copyright fights in which one party sues another over elements of a creative work that are themselves not protectable. The basic explainer goes like this: the specific expression of a work, or even the specific expression of unique thematic or character elements, can be protected by copyright, whereas mere general ideas cannot. This is why Batman is a copyrightable character, but that copyright cannot be used to sue the hell out of anyone that writes a story about an insane rich person who wears a cape and cowl while fighting bad guys. Idea versus expression.

It’s crazy just how many lawsuits get filed by full grown adult lawyers who don’t seem to understand this. One recent example is a lawsuit brought by a high school English teacher against Netflix over the latter’s series, Outer Banks. The suit was tossed at the motion to dismiss stage, with the court reasoning that the majority of the 40-plus claims of infringement amount to either non-protectable ideas, or allegations that amount to mere coincidence that has nothing to do with copying anything at all. On the first of those:

In a 25-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Timothy C. Batten Sr. said Kevin Wooten’s 2016 book “Pennywise: The Hunt for Blackbeard’s Treasure!” had a significantly different plot, characterization, mood, pace and settings than the Netflix original.

“To be sure, both works involve shipwrecks and treasure hunts,” Batten said. “But to analyze their plots at such a high level of abstraction would render every work involving a hunt for buried treasure susceptible to copyright infringement.”

It’s a useful high-level takeaway on the majority of issues with the lawsuit, but it’s worth noting that the court did in fact do a deep dive on each of the claims made. Not all of them amount to generic story ideas such as the above. While the actual plotlines and characters are very, very different — a different number of main characters, different treasures being hunted for by those characters, different outcomes, etc. — , some of the claims detailed out in the dismissal are downright absurd.

As a preliminary matter, many of Wooten’s purported similarities either do not exist or are “random similarities” that “could be found in very dissimilar works.” Beal, 20 F.3d at 460 (quoting Beal, 806 F. Supp. at 967 n.2). For instance, he argues that “both Works clearly sought to invoke an avian theme at the mausoleum.” [19] at 14. He points out that in his novel, Nathan and Ben find a clue hidden in the wing of a bird statue at a mausoleum. He argues that this plot device is substantially similar to the protagonists’ discovery in Outer Banks of a clue labeled “For Bird.” But the bird reference in Outer Banks is merely a callback to the nickname John B’s father gave him as a child. The fact that the word “bird” is present in both narratives is entirely innocuous and of no significance in an infringement analysis.

It goes on from there, including where the court looks at the actual main characters of each work, claimed by Wooten to be substantially similar, and concludes:

In sum, the characterization in the novel is in stark contrast to that of the series. The Outer Banks characters are complex, with narratives that cause the viewer to at times sympathize with even the most nefarious individuals. In the novel, on the other hand, the naïve Pennywise twins and their uncle serve as prototypical hero figures while Darwin acts as a classic villain.

Without trying to, the motion to dismiss doubles as something of a literary review, albeit one rather unkind to Wooten’s novel.

The real point of all of this is that what should be common sense ought also to be better understood among attorneys willing to file copyright lawsuits on behalf of clients: you cannot copyright general ideas, tropes, nor the obvious story elements that grow from either. Treasure hunts are as tropish as they come, frankly, and attempting to silence an entirely unrelated creative work simply because of “avian themes” and the like is nonsensical.

Filed Under: copyright, idea expression dichotomy, kevin wooten, outer banks
Companies: netflix

A Second Cambrian Explosion of Open Source Licenses Or Is it Time For Open Source Lawyers to Have Fun Again?

Legal Issues

from the fun-with-open-source-licensing dept

As the open source world has grown, so have concerns about the context in which openly licensed items are used. While these concerns have existed since the beginning of the open source movement, today?s larger and more diverse movement has brought new urgency to them. In light of this revived interest within the community, the time may be ripe to begin encouraging experimentation with open source licensing again.

How We Got Here

While the history of open source software is long and varied (and predates the term open source software), for the purposes of this blog post its early evolution was driven by a fairly small group of individuals motivated by a fairly homogeneous set of goals. As the approach became more popular, the community developed a wide range of licenses designed to address a wide range of concerns. This ?First Cambrian Explosion? of open source models and software licenses was a time of experimentation within the community. Licenses varied widely in structure, uptake, and legal enforceability.

Eventually, the sprawling nature of this experimentation began to cause problems. The Free Software Foundation?s Free Software Definition and the Open Source Initiative?s Open Source Definition were both attempts to bring some order to the open source software world.

In the specific context of licensing, the Open Source Initiative began approving licenses that met its criteria. Soon thereafter, it released a License Proliferation Report detailing the challenges created by this proliferation of licenses and proposing ways to combat them.

These activities helped to bring order and standardization to the world of open source licensing. While OSI continues to approve licenses, for well over a decade the conventional wisdom in the world of open source has been to avoid creating a new license if at all possible. As a result, for most of this century open source software license experimentation has been decidedly out of style.

Largely for the reasons described in the License Proliferation Report, this conventional wisdom has been beneficial to the community. License proliferation does create a number of problems. Standardization does help address them. However, in doing so standardization also greatly reduced the amount of license experimentation within the community.

Reduced experimentation means that concerns incorporated into approved licenses (access to modifications of openly licensed code) have been canonized, while concerns that had not been integrated into an approved license (restrictions on unethical uses of software) at the moment of formalization were largely excluded from consideration within the open source community.

What Changed

What has changed since the move towards codification of licenses? The open source software world has gotten a lot bigger. In fact, it has gotten so much bigger that it isn?t just the open source software world anymore. Creative Commons – today a towering figure in the world of openness – did not even exist when the Open Source Initiative started approving licenses. Now the open world is open source hardware, and Creative Commons-licensed photos, and open GLAM collections, and open data, and all sorts of other things (this is a whole other blog post). The open source world has moved beyond early debates that questioned the fundamental legitimacy of open source as a concept. Open source has won the argument.

An expansion of applications of open source has lead to an expansion of people within open source. Those people are more diverse than the early open source software proponents and are motivated by a wider range of interests. They also bring with them a wider range of concerns, and a wider range of relationships to those concerns, than early open source adopters.

What is Happening Now

This broader community does not necessarily share the consensus about how to approach licensing that was developed in an earlier period of open source. They bring a range of viewpoints that did not exist in the earlier days of open source software into the open source community itself. They are also applying open source concepts and licenses to a range of applications that were not front of mind – or in mind at all – during the drafting of today?s canonical licenses.

Unsatisfied with the consensus rules that have delivered us the existing suite of (incredibly successful) licenses, parts of the community have begun experimenting again. Veteran open source lawyers are rewriting licenses with public understandability in mind. Community members are transforming their interpretation of open source development into licences that invite collaboration without intending to adhere to the open source definition. Some of these licenses are designed to address concerns traditionally excluded from the scope of open source licenses. I am directly involved in the ml5.js attempt to do just that.

The creators of these experiments are responding to a standardized approach to licensing that does not fully accommodate their needs and concerns. In some cases the standardized approach does not accommodate these concerns because the community litigated including them in the past and decided it could or should not be done. However, even in those cases, that debate happened within a very different community in at least somewhat different contexts. The conclusions arrived at then are not necessarily valid for the broader world that open source finds itself inhabiting.

In light of that, it may be time to begin encouraging experimentation in open source licensing again. Encourage people to test out new approaches by applying them to real world problems. In some cases, the decisions made in the past will prove to be robust and sustainable. In others, a new debate will reveal the decisions? shortcomings. In both cases, the open source community will be stronger by being tested from within.

Coda: Is This Post Just a Lawyer Advocating for Lawyers to Have More Fun?

Throw out the old ways of doing things! Try something new! Experiment! Is this just a call for lawyers to have fun by screwing around with exotic licensing concepts at the expense of everyone else?s stability (and sanity)?

It could be. But I don?t really think so. The thing about lawyers (as a group – there are always exceptions) is that novelty and instability makes us nervous. Things that are tried and true will probably work. That means we do not have to worry about them. New things – who knows what will happen to them? That uncertainty makes lawyers nervous.

That is part of the reason why lawyers like today?s conventional wisdom. The canonical set of open source licenses have more or less worked for decades. It is unlikely that they will explode, and it is even less likely that they will explode in the face of the lawyer who uses them on any given project. In contrast, any lawyer who writes their own license is setting themselves up for a period of anxiety, waiting to discover what they missed or how things will go wrong.

Of course, some lawyers do think it is fun to cook up new open licenses. And maybe this post is a call for them to do more of it. But, on balance and as a whole, introducing new licenses into the world of open source will probably cause open source lawyers more anxiety than joy.

I think that anxiety is probably worth it. But that will be far from a universally held position.

Originally published on Michael Weinberg’s blog and repbulished under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.

Filed Under: licenses, open source, open source licenses, sharing

Private Security Company Thinks It Should Be Able To Take People To Jail Just Like Real Cops

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the Uber-but-for-vigilantes dept

A snitch app called Citizen is angling for the position of Local Law Enforcement®. Going a step further than hotbeds of bigotry like Ring’s Neighbors or Facebook-but-for-racism Nextdoor, Citizen is actually trying to create a private law enforcement agency that provides “security” and other services for app users.

A marauding cop-like patrol vehicle emblazoned with the Citizen logo (and some branding for another private security company) was spotted roaming Los Angeles last week. The desire to create a private cutout in public law enforcement space was confirmed by current and former Citizen employees, as well as documents shared with Motherboard and Joseph Cox.

It’s not just theoretical. It appears some employees of this private company really want to convert Citizen into a law enforcement agency. (Supporters of this move may also contain members of the Los Angeles Police Department, which called Citizen’s move towards patrolling the streets a “game changer.”) Then there’s this new twist, which indicates Citizen’s partner in patrolling — Los Angeles Professional Security Services — really would prefer to be an actual law enforcement agency, rather than the private security company it actually is.

In a self-described “documentary” on the Los Angeles Professional Security YouTube, the company’s CEO and founder James Caspari explains after detaining two tresspassers that the company wants the power to make arrests and take people to jail.

“We’re going to waste police resources because we can’t drive them to the police station,” he said. “The security guard manual says we have to wait and a peace officer has to take them. That’s just a waste. If we’ve already cleared it… why can’t we just take ‘em to jail?”

Flow my tears, the fake policeman said. Why? WHY?? Because you’re a goddamn rent-a-cop. You’re not the real thing. You don’t get to start depriving people of freedom just because you’re dressed in black cop-adjacent garb and employed by a private security firm. No one has granted you the right to arrest people because that’s limited to publicly-funded government agencies that are (in theory) more accountable to taxpayers than a private company that only answers to paying customers.

“Private security has zero authority on a public space,” he later laments.

Go be a cop then. If it’s killing you that you can’t violate rights as a private citizen, go get an actual cop job where you can violate rights on the taxpayers’ dime. Sure, this seems a bit backwards but that’s how it works. The government gets to do certain things with the implicit consent of the governed. Los Angeles citizens have not agreed to allowing private citizens to start throwing other private citizens into faux cop cars in order to take them to jail. What standard is LAPS applying to itself when it affects an arrest? There are rules in place, backed by the Constitution. And, while these rules may be violated with alarming frequency by government agencies, they’re still rules. Private companies don’t have to adhere to the Constitution. And that’s why they shouldn’t be getting into the business of violating the rights of others. (And, before certain commenters start trying to turn this statement into something about social media, no one’s rights are violated when a company refuses to provide you a platform for expressing yourself.)

Going from bad to arguably worse, the CEO of a private security firm actually believes it’s capable of responding to mental health calls with its staff of people who apparently couldn’t cut it as real cops or first responders.

Caspari explains in the video that LAPS believes it can remove trespassers and respond to mental health calls. “We are in a position to respond in force to effectively anywhere in the city to remove any negative element that a client of ours is threatened with,” Caspari said in the video.

And even in its own video, which it had the chance to edit before publishing it, the private security company’s employees are given the “what even the fuck” treatment by the partners Citizen and LAPS really want to have on board: the Los Angeles Police Department.

After searching an abandoned building, LAPS employees cuff the two people they find there and wait for the LAPD to arrive. Caspari explains this is all cool and legal: a “private person arrest” supported by California law. After lamenting the “waste of time” that is waiting for actual law enforcement to show up, he’s greeted with LAPD officers wondering why the private security firm is patrolling abandoned buildings that appear to be outside of its contractual obligations with its customers.

At one point, the LAPD does turn up. A seemingly surprised LAPD officer asks Caspari, “Is that your normal protocol, you guys just go search the building?”

“On your own, or? Just curious, I’ve never dealt with you guys before,” the LAPD officer continues.

It’s a legitimate question. If the private security company wasn’t asked by the owners (and “abandoned” suggests no real owner exits) to patrol the building, why the hell are they entering it? At that point, the security personnel are just as guilty of trespassing as the people they detained.

Since there are no good answers to that question, the CEO moves on to complain the LAPD doesn’t have enough resources to harass the homeless, leaving people “pushing two shopping carts down the road” free to annoy Caspari.

If nothing else, Caspari has the right mindset for law enforcement. The people who should be rounded up first are hanging out in abandoned buildings or irritating the locals with their homelessness. Nothing in the video suggests the security firm is stumbling across serious or violent criminal activity that’s not being handled by the LAPD. Instead, the CEO complains his company has its hands tied, unable to remove homeless people, trespassers, and the mentally ill from the street without having to bring the LAPD into it.

If the LAPD has to use its resources to handle more serious crime and leave this sort of “crime” unaddressed, good. But that’s not an invitation for private companies to fill this perceived void. Providing security for paying clients is fine, but wanting to be a cop just so you can round up a bunch of non-threatening, non-violent people makes you worse than the actual cops. This is just a bunch of people cosplaying and wishing their cardboard props were real. And it’s going to do serious damage to Los Angeles residents if companies like this continue to believe they should have the right to violate the rights of others.

Filed Under: arrests, law enforcement, private cops, snitching, vigilante
Companies: citizen, la professional security services

US Postal Service's Social Media Surveillance Program Uses Clearview's Facial Recognition Tech

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the bad-idea-with-even-worse-execution dept

Late last month, it was discovered the United States Postal Service was operating a social media surveillance program. The “why” of this was never explained. Apparently, the USPS has time and money to blow, so it has something called an “Internet Covert Operations Program” (iCOP) which it uses to investigate crimes that definitely are not of a postal nature.

According to the two-page bulletin first reported on by Yahoo News, iCOP was trawling social media looking for “threats.” And the “threats” observed in the report shared with the DHS and its many, many (mostly useless) “Fusion Centers” was that the threats weren’t credible.

Great, I guess, but why is the Postal Service surveilling communications that aren’t being sent through the mail? I’m sorry if it feels a bit left out by the move to email and other electronic communication methods, but wandering around Twitter and Facebook looking for crimes seems to be both a waste of its limited resources and something that really isn’t covered by the directives of the Post Office’s investigative wing.

Well, there’s even worse news to report. Again, Yahoo News is on top of it. It appears the iCOP program makes use of facial recognition tech. And not just any facial recognition tech. It uses the worst, most questionable offering out there at the moment.

Among the tools used by the analysts is Clearview AI, a facial recognition software that scrapes images off public websites, a practice that has raised the ire of privacy advocates. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service uses Clearview’s facial recognition database of over 3 billion images “to help identify unknown targets in an investigation or locate additional social media accounts for known individuals,” according to materials reviewed by Yahoo News.

What was first just confounding is now also stupidly dangerous. Clearview’s tech has never been independently tested. Multiple law enforcement agencies have tried out the product and most feel it’s mostly useless, prone to generating false positives or just a wealth of irrelevant information.

Adding a questionable tool to a questionable surveillance program sounds exactly like the sort of thing you’d get when you ask the people in charge of the snail mail to get online. Yahoo reports other tools are in the mix as well, including software that uses keyword searches to dip into the social media firehose. And there’s one that lets investigators pretend to be people they aren’t while extremely online.

It also uses Nfusion, another software program, to create and maintain anonymous, untraceable email and social media accounts.

For what? So far, all we’ve seen is a lot of time, money, and wtf-ness produce a determination that some threats weren’t actually threats. That doesn’t exactly build confidence in a surveillance program no one outside of the federal government believes the USPS should be engaged in.

Yahoo’s report notes the program dates back to 2018, when the USPS got more involved in tracking criminal activity on the dark web. It apparently expanded its purview to the regular web. According to a USPS statement, surveilling social media platforms and users is essential to protecting postal workers from dangerous situations and threats. But there’s no evidence this program has ever accomplished that goal. All it appears to have accomplished at this point is the surveillance.

And that surveillance is being used unwisely.

Beginning last spring, following the death of George Floyd, iCOP analysts began monitoring social media to track potential violence at racial justice protests. After the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters, the analysts turned their attention to right-wing accounts, according to documents, including an intelligence bulletin previously obtained and published by Yahoo News.

There’s your First Amendment concerns. I’m sure the USPS expected its covert surveillance operations to remain covert and it would never have to address this publicly. But the program is now public knowledge and the USPS needs a better explanation than “we’re just being careful.” Any number of federal and local law enforcement agencies engage in the same surveillance. We may not like that, but at least they’ve got some jurisdiction and justification for doing so. Erecting an NSA-lite in USPS data centers makes zero sense when you’re the entity in charge of handling physical mail.

Filed Under: facial recognition, icop, surveillance, usps
Companies: clearview

Daily Deal: The 2021 Complete Computer Science Training Bundle

Deals

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

The 2021 Complete Computer Science Training Bundle has 9 courses to help you build your IT and computer science skills. Courses cover Python, Linux, TensorFlow, Discrete Math, and more. It’s on sale for $20.

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

Senator Chris Coons Says No One Who Has Ever Criticized Intellectual Property Can Head The Patent Office

Patents

from the and-biden-agrees dept

There had been some talk that we might, once again, get someone to head the Patent Office who actually understood and appreciated the many trade-offs associated with monopoly rights around inventions. But apparently that’s not happening. There’s an article in The American Prospect saying that Senator Chris Coons — one of the more maximalist of the copyright and patent maximalists in Congress — has secured some sort of ridiculous deal with the Biden administration that no one who has ever criticized patents will be allowed to run the US Patent & Trademark Office.

Patents have not historically animated sustained intraparty fights that spill out into headlines. But Coons?s pro-IP, pro-patent stance, and his long friendship with the president, has elevated the issue, and turned the selection of the next director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) into a flashpoint. Coons has been aggressive in working with the White House to secure a director who shares his viewpoints, and his top candidates have represented patent owners as lawyers or trade group leaders. According to sources on Capitol Hill and from outside groups, Coons has claimed that he was granted the power to make the USPTO choice in exchange for staying in the Senate. Coons had been seen as a potential pick for secretary of state.

Other members of Congress, including Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, have stressed in their conversations with the White House the need to balance the patent system to prevent abuse. Advocates have also asked the White House to ?overrule efforts? by Coons and his allies to put forward a USPTO director nominee who is ?aligned with the pharmaceutical industry or other intellectual property maximalists.?

First, it’s not surprising that Biden would go along with this. While Biden doesn’t have much of a track record of interest on patent issues, he was reliably one of the most maximalist Senators on the copyright front — so it’s not surprising that he’d be amenable to such a deal, even as many others in his party recognize the problems with such an approach.

The title of the article is somewhat ridiculous: “Chris Coons Working to Install Business-Friendly Candidate for Key Patent Position.” Being “pro-patent” is not “pro-business.” Patents and patent trolls are quite frequently anti-business. They are anti-competitive, and frequently anti-innovation — being used to stop, block, and suppress the companies who actually make stuff (or make stuff better). It’s not pro-business to be pro-patent. It’s pro-monopoly, and pro-patent lawyer.

And here, it gets even more insane. The article notes that Coons, along with Senator Mazie Hirono, sent a truly ridiculous letter to President Biden and VP Harris, saying that no one who has criticized patents should be allowed to be the USPTO director.

… the USPTO Director serves as one of our leading ambassadors for intellectual property and innovation. A history of criticizing or weakening American intellectual property rights will undermine his or her ability to advocate for strong protections and enforcement mechanisms with our trade partners.

That’s just ridiculous. Only installing someone who has never criticized the patent system means installing a foolish, ignorant person who refuses to recognize the various trade-offs associated with the patent system. Hell, even Coons himself is a critic of the patent system. He’s introduced bills to change the patent system (notably, to change them for the worse, but still, to change them).

In the letter, Coons also makes a bunch of assertions that are simply laughable to anyone even remotely familiar with the problems of over patenting, patent abuse and patent trolls:

… the USPTO Director should understand that clear, predictable, and enforceable intellectual property protections drive economic growth, foster entrepreneurship, create jobs, and improve our quality of life. Our intellectual property systems have long enjoyed a reputation as the international gold standard, and this has allowed the United States to leverage the incredible talents of our people to lead the world in technology and creative enterprise. The USPTO Director must ensure that risk takers can access the research and development investments necessary to challenge incumbent players, bring disruptive technologies to market, and win the global race to develop the next generation of personalized medicine, clean energy technology, quantum computing, wireless communications protocols, and artificial intelligence.

Anyone who thinks that patents are what is necessary to drive any of those industries has no idea what they’re talking about. Patents and patent trolls threaten the innovation in those industries.

Of course, some of this may be in Coons’ background. His one private sector job was as in-house counsel for W.L. Gore, makers of GoreTex (I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that Coons’ stepfather founded the company). That company holds a bunch of patents and has been involved in a series of patent fights. And Coons apparently still owns millions of dollars in stock from the company.

Of course, many of those fights seems to involve accusations that W.L. Gore infringed on the patents of others — including one somewhat infamous case that literally was over four decades in the making and which did not end well for Gore. Given that experience alone, you might think that Coons would recognize that patents are a two-edged sword. And even if you support them in some circumstances, they clearly can be used as a blunt weapon against innovation and product development, and as a costly attack on innovative companies.

Separately, of course, there’s the issue that Coons represents Delaware — and while the Texas courts have become famous as patent troll breeding grounds, lots of folks know that Delaware courts also are favored by patent trolls.

The second most common venue for nonpracticing entity litigation is Delaware: It alone sees as many cases as the next six most popular venues combined ? over 20% of cases overall. And as we?ve computed using data from RPX, non-practicing entities? Delaware patent suits end with loss or dismissal only 8% of the time, a scant difference from the 4% rate in Marshall.

Either way, it’s unfortunate that his view on patents seems so skewed and so dangerous — and that he was apparently able to cut some sort of deal with the Biden administration on who should run the USPTO. An ideal leader should be one who recognizes the competing interests with patents, not someone who slavishly praises patents, even the parts that are so problematic.

The Prospect article also floats some names that Coons has been suggesting — and they include literal patent trolls and patent troll lobbyists. Which is… not a good look at all. And that he has apparently tried to shoot down two candidates who would be excellent: Colleen Chien of Santa Clara University Law School and Arti Rai of Duke University. Both have done lots of research and have written important papers on the patent system, while noting some of the problems with them. But, perhaps for those reasons, Coons is trying to block them from being appointed and make sure a patent troll or, at least, a patent troll friendly lawyer gets put in place instead.

That all of this is happening against the backdrop of a pandemic — let alone one where the overuse of patents to block vaccines and treatments has been a major concern — makes you wonder: is Coons truly interested in what’s best for American innovation… or what’s best for his W.L. Gore stock?

Filed Under: biden administration, chris coons, criticism, patent trolls, patents, uspto, uspto director
Companies: w.l. gore

Verizon Forces Users On To More Expensive Broadband Plans Just To Get $50 Covid Subsidy

Failures

from the not-helping dept

As part of a recent COVID bill, the government recently announced that folks struggling economically during COVID would be getting some temporary help. Under the EBB (Emergency broadband Benefit program), U.S. consumers can nab a $50 discount off their broadband bill, or $75 if you live in tribal areas. The program ends when its $3.2 billion in federal funding expires, or six months after the government has declared an end to the pandemic.

It’s a useful but temporary band aid, and doesn’t really do much to address the regional monopolization and lack of competition that makes US broadband so perennially mediocre in the first place. Nor does it address the fact the Trump FCC gutted its own consumer protection authority because a bunch of telecom monopolies asked them to, using completely bogus justifications.

Under the program, the money is first given to your broadband provider, which is then in charge of ensuring you get the discount. But given these companies’ track record of dodgy behavior, it obviously didn’t take long for US telecoms to misbehave. Enter Verizon, which is using the program as an opportunity to upsell customers to more expensive plans. Users contacting Verizon to sign up were told the program didn’t apply to their existing plans, and in order to get the discount they’d need to sign up for more expensive service. The Washington Post politely points out this is rather sleazy:

“Verizon elicited the most ire from readers. It requires customers to call a phone line to register for the EBB, rather than just signing up online. And when you do, Verizon told some customers the EBB can?t be used on ?old? data plans, so they?d have to switch. That might be allowed by the letter of the law but certainly isn?t the spirit of the program.”

Granted this is the same company that tried to upsell California firefighters to more costly plans when their data allotment ran out during an historic wildfire, so this shouldn’t be too surprising. In short, knowing the subsidy was temporary, Verizon nudged users to more expensive plans so they’d see a revenue boost when the plan ended. U.S. regulators at the FCC didn’t do a thing. Fortunately Verizon reversed course after the Post story began circulating online:

“On Wednesday, two days after I initially published this column, Verizon reversed course and said it would accept old plans. ?We heard from some customers that they prefer to stay on the legacy plans they have,? it wrote in a blog post. ?Moving forward, we will offer customers on legacy Fios plans (no longer in market today) the ability to enroll in EBB.”

A few other companies have taken to using misleading websites to trick users into thinking they’re enrolling in the government’s official program (the real website for which is here).

Needless to say the press shouldn’t always be the last line of defense against Americans getting ripped off, especially considering the increasingly tenuous financial situation the press finds itself in. You also wouldn’t need a COVID discount program in the first place if the U.S. hadn’t spent the last twenty years coddling regional monopolies, resulting in some of the most expensive prices in the developed world for broadband.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, covid, discounts, ebb, fcc, subsidy
Companies: verizon