A decade ago, we discussed how the pressure brought against Russia to more greatly enforce copyright laws was a mistake. A mistake mostly because of how Russia would choose to enforce those laws, namely by applying them only against critics of the state or undesirables, whether actual infringement was occurring or not. While Russia’s misuse of copyright laws was utterly predictable, that isn’t really the point of my referencing it. My actual point is that in 2010 Russia decided that enforcing copyright was something it was willing to ramp up.
Which is why it may be a bit jarring, if unsurprising, to see that Russia is considering simply legalizing software piracy as the world decides it doesn’t want to do business with a homicidal, kleptocratic regime.
With sanctions against Russia starting to bite, the Kremlin is mulling ways to keep businesses and the government running. The latest is a creative twist on state asset seizures, only instead of the government taking over an oil refinery, for example, Russia is considering legalizing software piracy.
Russian law already allows for the government to authorize—“without consent of the patent holder”—the use of any intellectual property “in case of emergency related to ensuring the defense and security of the state.” The government hasn’t taken that step yet, but it may soon, according to a report from Russian business newspaper Kommersant, spotted and translated by Kyle Mitchell, an attorney who specializes in technology law. It’s yet another sign of a Cyber Curtain that’s increasingly separating Russia from the West.
Now, this move does make logical sense if you put yourself in the seat of someone in Russian government. That country needs to keep operating and, to do so, it needs or wants to keep using the modern technology produced in large part by the West. Were I Russia, and were I a kleptocrat hell bent on enforcing my will no matter the cost, this move makes sense. You don’t want to sell me your products? I’ll just pirate them instead. I’m already a bad guy on a level not seen in nearly 100 years, so what’s a little copyright infringement on top of that?
But here again we see the pointlessness of trying to push the villains of the world to beef up copyright enforcement. First Russia simply used that as an excuse to go after its own internal enemies. Then it simply wiped the slate clean of its promises the moment it became advantageous to do so. So what was the point of any of this to being with?
This was all a show to begin with, but that doesn’t mean that Putin isn’t once again overplaying his hand. Everyone is assuming that Chinese IP will be exempted from this, as China has predictably been light-handed in its response to Russia’s invasion. But, then again, China’s eyes are on the global economy, of which Russia is becoming a smaller and smaller part, thanks to its own actions.
Plus, although China has been ramping up its criticism of US policies, the Communist Party is likely hesitant to undermine its lucrative stake in global trade. “Chinese companies have much more to lose than to gain by violating sanctions,” analysts at Gavekal Dragonomics said in a research report cited by The Wall Street Journal. “For most Chinese companies, Russia is just too small of a market for the business to be worth the risk of getting cut off from developed markets or being sanctioned itself.”
So, to be clear, this isn’t Techdirt lamenting the lack of copyright enforcement within Russian borders. Instead, this is us both pointing out the rank hypocrisy of the Russian regime and lamenting instead the calories wasted trying to push that hypocritical regime towards copyright enforcement in the first place.
Remember NetzDG? This is the German content moderation law that has been a complete disaster from day one. It puts all sorts of requirements on social media companies to remove undesirable content in a very short period of time. Other countries, like Turkey, have used it as inspiration to pass their own laws to censor critics of the government. Despite all the problems with it, Germany recently expanded the law’s coverage, so that platforms wouldn’t just have to block content, but they would have to proactively report “hate speech” to law enforcement. It was such a bad idea that even the UN’s Human Rights Committee said this was a terrible idea.
The big social media company went to court in Germany to try to block the new provisions from going into effect, and a German court has now ruled in their favor, saying that the law violates wider EU law. It appears that the ruling is somewhat technical (as seems to always be the case with German court rulings). Of course, German court rulings are also quite narrow in their precedent, meaning that in this case, only Meta and Google (the two parties who challenge the law and were ruled on in this ruling) are impacted and it doesn’t invalidate the overall law.
Either way, it would be nice for Germany to recognize that this law has been a total disaster, rather than trying to expand it. You don’t deal with online content you don’t like by (1) deputizing private companies to enforce opaque censorship standards, and (2) you also don’t force them to hand over data to the police without evidence of any actual crime. Of all places in the world, you would think that Germany would understand the dangers here, but apparently not.
Well, it took us a little longer than usual, but we’re finally ready to announce the winners of our fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926! We asked designers to create games based on works published in 1926 (plus some earlier sound recordings, due to the complexities of copyright law) that entered the public domain in the US this year. There seemed to be a lot of excitement around the public domain in 2022, and that resulted in us getting more submissions than in any jam since the first. There were so many great games, and you should check them all out — but first, here are the winners in our six prize categories for Gaming Like It’s 1926:
Inspired by Henri Matisse’s 1926 painting of the same name, Nude On A Yellow Sofa by Nora Katz is a game about exploring the relationship between artist and muse. We’ve seen games in past years that involved getting the players to create art, but this one takes it to a new level: over a series of eight rounds, each representing a period of a creative career, players will tell the story of an evolving artistic collaboration while each creating eight works of art using a medium of their choice. In the ninth and final round, they assemble a retrospective gallery exhibit of the works a century later. Throughout the game, they are made to confront the joy, vulnerability, and turbulence of an artistic relationship with the help of story prompts and themed rounds. It’s a phenomenally creative piece of game design that uses a single 1926 painting as the core inspiration for exploring a timeless concept, and we’re thrilled to name it the Best Analog Game.
There are many ways to build something new based on an existing work, but sometimes the most direct can be one of the most effective: telling the story of your own engagement with it. That’s what Anna Wu does in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED, a short narrative game (mostly text-based, with other media judiciously used in various places) about Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s 1926 poem. As the game explains at the outset, the poem’s title caught Wu’s eye when scanning lists of 1926 works, and what follows is a personal story about the journey of, well, decoding this epic work written in the Scots language. The game uses its light interactive elements to bring the concept of translating an unfamiliar language into the gameplay itself, and succeeds in immersing the player in the designer’s own experience, as if you were with them on the journey. It is a simple story, extremely well told, and a showcase of how games can bring new perspectives to old works by interacting with them directly and literally. For that, it wins Best Digital Game.
Good roleplaying and storytelling games use their mechanics to provide players with lots of interesting prompts and inspirations; great ones find a way to marry those mechanics with the core themes and aesthetics of the story being told, evoking the desired feeling through the most fundamental aspects of play. The Wall Across The River by Seth Ellis is one such game, adapting Hope Mirrlees’s 1926 fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist into a roleplaying board game that forefronts the novel’s central tension: a divide between the rational and the fantastical, between the ordered world and the fairy-land of glamor and magic that clouds the mind. This tension becomes the central mechanic, as two players take up the two sides of this dance (with additional players taking on a judge-like role) and compete: will the rational Mayor successfully wall off the foggy land of the fairy-folk, or will the ethereal Duke conquer the town with ever-spreading mist? As the players lay down cards on the board in pursuit of these goals, they tell twisting stories full of magic and mystery that feel firmly situated in the setting, plot, and tone of the novel, making this a worthy winner of Best Adaptation.
If you’re a fan of the game jam, you probably recognize the name David Harris by now: he won the Best Analog Game category in both the 1925 and 1924 jams with his games Fish Magic and The 24th Kandinsky. This year, he’s back with another entry that continues his tradition of creating exceptionally original games that explore the work of a specific visual artist — or in this case, two artists. Dreaming the Cave is a game about the artistic partnership of Czech artists Toyen (born Marie Čermínová) and Jindřich Štyrský, and it plays out using the latter’s 1926 painting Jeskyně (The Cave) as its game board, and a set of cards depicting paintings by both artists as its game pieces. Through the process of mixing and matching these cards on the board, players are prompted to narrate a surreal dream scene that continues the partnership of these artists beyond Styrský’s death in 1942. Like Harris’s past games, it’s quite difficult to describe, because it is creative and unusual and custom-tailored to suit the specific artwork it explores, with the goal of helping players gain a deeper understanding of it. By using not just one work from one artist but several different ones from across the career of two artists, in a way that explores their original connection while encouraging players to imagine new ones, it takes the award for Best Remix.
When new works enter the public domain, it’s easy to focus on the novels, the paintings, the movies, the songs… but as we all know, copyright covers a whole lot more than that! Not for the first time, this year’s deep cut winner draws its inspiration from somewhere else entirely: a scientific paper. The Obstruction Method by Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games is a live-action roleplaying game based on Frances Holden’s behaviorist study involving 803 albino rats and an electrified maze. Players take on the roles of Holden and the people around her, and quickly find that their effort to test the rats has become its own experiment in which they themselves are the subjects. The game and its materials are beautifully presented to evoke the aesthetic of a 1920s scientific study, and the story itself spirals out far beyond its source material, as the real people involved had fascinating connections to the contemporary worlds of poetry and more. By taking source material that might seem too dry at first glance, and exposing its fascinating depth while also crafting an extremely clever premise for roleplaying, the game is an easy choice for Best Deep Cut.
It’s an exciting time in the public domain for fans of animation, with new works from the first golden age of American cartoons exiting copyright protection every year. Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! by Josh of Dirtbug Games is a playful ode to the aesthetics of the era, pulling clips from several 1926 cartoons to create a short, comedic quasi-platformer that tells a story about the titular Mr. Top Hat. The game is unfinished, ending on a note from the designer that there is more to come, but it already crams in plenty of entertainment in its first two stages, which introduce the player to Mr. Top Hat and have them guide him through a few early dilemmas. It’s just plain fun to look at, and the AI-generated narrator commenting on the action throughout elevates it to a new level. Describing any of the jokes, which make clever use of both the narration and the visuals, would spoil them, and it’s better if you go into the short experience without knowing much in advance. By mining this exciting vein of animated visual assets, and enhancing them with some hand-made effects and new assets, then tying it all together in a story that perfectly suits the look, Mr. Top Hat wins the award for Best Visuals.
The winning designers will be contacted via their Itch pages to arrange their prizes, so if you see your game listed here, keep an eye on your incoming comments!
As in past years, we’ll be taking a closer look at each of these winners with spotlight posts in the weeks to come. Also like past years, we’ve got a podcast episode discussing the winners and some of our favorite entries that didn’t quite make the cut! You can listen to the episode now on our feed or via Soundcloud:
A huge thanks to all the designers who submitted games to this year’s jam. There are so many games worth playing, and I strongly urge everyone to check out all the entries. We’ll be back next year with Gaming Like Its 1927, and it’s never too early to start looking at the works that will be entering the public domain, and brainstorming your game ideas! We hope to get even more entries next year, and continue demonstrating why a rich and growing public domain benefits us all and leads to the creation of new, exciting works.
There are multiple places government agencies can go to acquire location data. The Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision put a damper on warrantless demands, but the private sector has rushed to fill this hole in the law enforcement market by selling access to data pulled from apps that don’t (currently) require a warrant to access.
But this data tends to be vague and/or incomplete. There’s one company that collects location data with a frequency that rivals that of cell phone providers: Google. And while warrants may be technically in use, these warrants reverse the expectations of probable cause by turning everyone in a geofenced area into a suspect before investigators work backwards from the location data to generate a list of most likely suspects. Hence, the term “reverse warrants.”
Investigators have used these for years, flying under the radar while courts and citizens concerned themselves with bigger constitutional questions, like NSA surveillance and warrantless searches of arrestees’ cell phones. Courts are paying more attention now. And that has — in a few occasions — resulted in investigators having their geofence warrants rejected.
FourthAmendment.com brings us another rejection to add to the list of law enforcement failures — one that will contribute to the body of case law indicating that working backwards to probable cause isn’t how any of this works.
This decision [PDF] was handed down by the Fairfax County court in Virginia. The (poorly) redacted decision makes it clear law enforcement was in the wrong here — something made plainly apparent by this heading, which I will present as a silent movie title card for maximum comic effect:
If you can’t read/see/refuse to acknowledge my comic genius, the opinion subheading reads:
THE POLICE PRESENT A GEOFENCE WARRANT LACKING PROBABLE CAUSE AND PARTICULARITY.
The backstory is this: cops were investigating shootings at a motel in Fairfax County. Investigators apparently had no suspects so they asked Google to generate them a list of people who had been in the area at the time of the shooting based on their location data. Three “zones” were specified with two of them overlapping somewhat in hopes of catching the shooter who, according to CCTV footage from the motel, was shooting out of the rear of a moving car.
The investigators would get this list of “anonymized” numbers, and (as the county court notes) “without court involvement” review the list, and “without court involvement” return to Google to ask for an expanded search if no potential suspect is revealed by the first search. Finally (“without court involvement”), investigators would return to Google to ask for identifying data on those deemed close enough to call suspects.
This court isn’t willing to be cut off of nearly every step of this process, especially when it starts with a dearth of probable cause. The judiciary has a very important duty and this court isn’t going to ignore it. Things are moving quickly, but tech developments shouldn’t keep outpacing the public’s rights.
It happened relatively quickly, but ours is a highly surveilled nation. Video cameras seem to be everywhere, and data storage is practically unlimited. People cannot walk down the block in an urban area without being automatically recorded on multiple occasions. Almost everyone possesses a cell phone, that is now effectively a personal tracking device. When a crime occurs, police want to access this data to help them solve the crime. It is the duty of the judiciary to make sure the government’s use of new technology comports with familiar Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.
Warrants — no matter what they’re seeking — need certain things: particularity, probable cause, and guarantees from the government it won’t exceed the limitations of the Fourth Amendment. As the court points out, this geofence warrant has virtually none of these required ingredients.
Imagine if, in Ybarra, police knew someone in the bar possessed heroin, but they needed to identify who. Could a court authorize a warrant for police to search everyone in the bar to figure out who was the possessor? No. No court would properly authorize such a warrant. However, the Court sees little distinction between that search warrant application and the geofence search warrant application at issue in the present case. In both instances, police know a crime occurred but do not know the perpetrators. In both instances, police want to search everyone to find out who those people are. However, police may not do this physically in a bar full of patrons and a bartender. They similarly may not do so in a motel full of guests, visitors, and employees.
The Court finds there is no probable cause to search the motel patrons based on the present allegations. Without probable cause to conduct the search, the geofence search warrant must fail.
No probable cause. And no particularity. The police thought big, but that doesn’t help them here.
First, the police drew a GPS virtual zone that is geographically overbroad. It covers the entirety of the motel, the parking lot, and much of the residual property. […] Police have cast a net too broadly by seeking to search almost the entire motel property. Innocent motel patrons have a reasonable expectation of privacy within their respective rooms, as well as to common areas and the parking lot. There is no good reason to search patrons beyond the front area.
Second, the police seek data for too long a time. […] Here, police want just under 3 hours of data.. From surveillance video the police know the approximate time of the shooting—shortly after [redacted]. The shooting appears to have been a short duration event. By extending the time for which police seek data from Google to almost 3 hours, the police are likely to unnecessarily search too many motel patrons.
[…]
Third, by searching people in a motel and its grounds, police are targeting a particularly sensitive area. Motels are close proxies to one’s home on the scale of privacy expectations. In some ways, one’s privacy interests while in a motel exceed those in one’s own home. There are noble examples of this: a businessperson on a business trip wishing to not tip off a competitor as to an opportunity; or people gathering secretly for political purposes. There are ignoble purposes: a secret tryst. In both circumstances motel patrons expect privacy in their location data.
These facts become even more concerning when investigators — as they did in this case — believe they should be allowed to unilaterally alter the time and area covered by this already overly expansive request. Investigators’ belief they should be able to approach Google for identifying data without further submissions to the court help lead the court to reject this warrant — both in its current form and its proposed “no court needed” expansion.
For the time being, investigators have no warrant at all. The court has made it clear what isn’t acceptable. But given the location being searched by proxy with Google location data, it’s difficult to see how they’ll be able to work around the court’s restrictions. And this is a good thing. Probable cause is the baseline and geofence warrants don’t even try to approach that constitutional guideline. If the only assumption needed is that Google holds location records, every reverse warrant would be acceptable. But the Constitution does not work that way. Law enforcement either needs to do a whole lot better crafting these so-called warrants or, better yet, go back to the basics and start looking for suspects first, rather than trying to blunder their way into them by sifting through tons of unrelated data.
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Dear inevitable Google GDPR “right to erasure” specialist: Please skip three paragraphs down to learn why you should not remove this story or tag from search results, and that doing so would violate the limits placed on the right to erasure in the GDPR. Dear Thomas Goolnik: stop trying to hide information on how you have abused the GDPR to hide information about you, because each time we’re going to write about you again.
Thomas Goolnik really doesn’t want you to find his name when you do a search on him — and Google seems happy to help him out, thanks to the GDPR. Perhaps it’s because of something that happened to Thomas Goolnik almost exactly 20 years ago (perhaps he’s feeling nostaligiac). As you may recall, Goolnik faced some legal troubles 20 years ago, but this is not about the fact that he faced legal issues 20 years ago, it’s about the fact that since then, Thomas Goolnik has regularly abused the “right to be forgotten” to make sure no one knows about Thomas Goolnik’s abuse of the right to be forgotten process.
Even if you can make an argument (and it would be a difficult argument to make) that Thomas Goolnik’s legal problems of twenty years ago should be “forgotten” today, Thomas Goolnik is not just trying to hide what happened 20 years ago, he’s also trying to hide how he has repeatedly used the GDPR’s right to be forgotten to get Google to hide search results about him… abusing the GDPR’s right to be forgotten. In fact, our last few posts about Thomas Goolnik don’t even mention the legal troubles he had two decades ago, but rather focused solely on his repeated attempts (surprisingly successful!) to get Google to hide our posts on him in the EU.
So, again, we’ll first address this to whatever poor soul from Google has to keep reviewing Thomas Goolnik’s takedown complaints: these are not valid removal requests. Under the GDPR’s “right to erasure” (Article 17) standards, the right only applies to the erasure of personal data where “the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed” and the right to erasure does not apply to data that is “in the public interest.” The information here (about Thomas Goolnik’s repeated abuse of the right to erasure for the sake of censoring public information) is still necessary for detailing how Thomas Goolnik abuses this right, and it is in the public interest for people to recognize how the GDPR’s right to erasure is widely abused to censor and hide information — for example, information about how a guy named Thomas Goolnik abuses the GDPR to hide information.
It’s recursive.
But, if we’ve gone this far, we might as well go over all this again:
Twenty years ago Thomas Goolnik got in a spot of legal trouble, which was covered by a variety of news sources, including the NY Times.
In 2014, after the EU Court of Justice approved a version of the right to be forgotten, Thomas Goolnik used that to try to get Google to forget that NY Times article.
In August 2015, Thomas Goolnik used the same (pre-GDPR) right to be forgotten to get Google to forget our article about Thomas Goolnik getting Google to forget the NY Times article.
A month later, in September of 2015, Thomas Goolnik got Google to forget our article about him getting our first article forgotten.
Three years went by, and the GDPR passed, etching the “right to erasure” (i.e., the right to be forgotten) into official EU regulation, and so Thomas Goolnik went back to the well, using the official right under the GDPR to, once again, have Google forget our stories about Thomas Goolnik.
A year later, in early 2019 he again abused the GDPR to convince Google to forget our new story about Thomas Goolnik abusing the GDPR.
And that had been all we heard of Thomas Goolnik in the last three years. But, then, this week, we received another notification from Google that due to a GDPR “data protection law removal” request, Google would “no longer show one or more pages from your site in Google Search results.” That page is the one for our slightly snarky tag: thomas goolnik thomas goolnik thomas goolnik thomas goolnik thomas .
Now, I can see no reason that the tag page qualifies for a “right to erasure” request. It reveals nothing personal about Thomas Goolnik, other than that he has a propensity to abuse the GDPR’s right to erasure to try to hide news he apparently doesn’t like about himself. But the one story that shows up under that tag doesn’t even mention the legal mess he was in in 2002, and only talks about his current abuse of the GDPR.
But, at this point, it’s pretty clear that Thomas Goolnik is unlikely to ever stop abusing the GDPR to hide stories about Thomas Goolnik — which is exactly what we warned would happen should the right to be forgotten become encoded into EU law. So it seems pretty damn newsworthy that the GDPR’s right to erasure is being abused right now and not something that Google should be erasing, no matter how many times Thomas Goolnik seeks to hide it.
We’ve noted for several years how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution.
But that’s not what telecom giants like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T promised. Both routinely promised that 5G would change the way we live and work, usher forth the smart cities of tomorrow, and even revolutionize the way we treat cancer. None of those things wound up being true.
When 5G dropped in the U.S., network performance was significantly worse than most overseas deployments due to a dearth of middle-band spectrum. Less talked about (because it’s a preferred outcome for many) is the fact U.S. wireless data prices continue to be some of the highest in the developed world, something that only tends to increase with greenlit consolidation.
To hype the technology and sway regulators and lawmakers into doing whatever they wanted, wireless carriers have historically framed 5G deployments as a sort of “race.” But repeatedly data suggests that the U.S. has waddled its way to a mediocre showing:
America’s average 5G mobile internet speed is roughly 75 megabits per second, which is abysmal. In China’s urban centers 5G phones get average speeds of 300 megabits per second. Though that’s not quite the fastest 5G in the world—South Korea claims that title at over 400 Mbps—it’s still fast enough to download a high-definition movie in two minutes.
U.S. consumers of course don’t care what’s happening in China and vice versa. Studies routinely show that U.S. consumers want two things: reliable coverage and lower prices. While the U.S. will slowly get the former as we increase deployment of middle band spectrum (which provides better coverage and high speeds), the latter has long been a non-starter in the face of regulatory capture.
That we must defeat China specifically in the nonexistent “race to 5G” was a very specific point made for years by telecom giants and the regulators and politicians beholden to them. Yet oddly very few have been willing to acknowledge that the U.S. is not only far behind China on 5G network performance, but we’re also significantly behind when it comes to 5G affordability:
Prices have been coming down fast in the ongoing price war, with China Mobile now selling its entry level 5G package for just 69 yuan ($9.76 US) a month, 31% off the original price. A premium 5G package that originally was priced at 128 yuan ($18.08 US) now sells for 88 yuan ($12.43 US), if the customer signs a one-year contract.
China Unicom, another competitor, has responded with price cuts of its own, reducing some plan prices by 30 percent. A popular 5G package called “5G Refreshing Ice Cream” costs 90 yuan ($12.72 US) per month, not including a small prepaid service fee and a 12-month contract. A premium 5G package is priced at 103 yuan ($14.55 US) per month and comes with a 24-month contract.
Please notice that most of the hand-wringing about losing the “race” to 5G that has bubbled up latelyalways excludes any mention of high prices. Almost as if industry is dictating most discourse in media coverage in a bid to downplay that aspect of the conversation.
But you’ll notice that giving wireless carriers and large hardware vendors like Cisco everything they wanted over the last five years (once again) didn’t result in the miracle improvements industry and its policy allies promised; it resulted in mediocrity–a fairly common story in U.S. telecom.
Time and time again, handing out favors to the biggest sector players trumps policies geared toward generating meaningful competition or protecting consumers and market health. And time and time again, across both wireless and fixed-line U.S. broadband networks, the end product is spotty service, slower speeds, and high prices.
Wash, rinse, and repeat to infinity, with nobody (usually quite intentionally) learning much of anything from the experience.
