Top EU Court Says There’s No Right To Online Anonymity, Because Copyright Is More Important

Copyright

from the copyright-exceptionalism dept

A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was whether the judges considered that copyright was more important than privacy. The bad news is that the CJEU has just decided that it is:

The Court, sitting as the Full Court, holds that the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses does not necessarily constitute a serious interference with fundamental rights.

IP addresses refer to the identifying Internet number assigned to a user’s system when it is online. That may change each time someone uses the Internet, but if Internet Service Providers are required by law to retain information about who was assigned a particular address at a given time, then it is possible to carry out routine surveillance of people’s online activities. The CJEU has decided this is acceptable:

EU law does not preclude national legislation authorising the competent public authority, for the sole purpose of identifying the person suspected of having committed a criminal offence, to access the civil identity data associated with an IP address

The key problem is that copyright infringement by a private individual is regarded by the court as something so serious that it negates the right to privacy. It’s a sign of the twisted values that copyright has succeeded on imposing on many legal systems. It equates the mere copying of a digital file with serious crimes that merit a prison sentence, an evident absurdity.

As one of the groups that brought the original case, La Quadrature du Net, writes, this latest decision also has serious negative consequences for human rights in the EU:

Whereas in 2020, the CJEU considered that the retention of IP addresses constituted a serious interference with fundamental rights and that they could only be accessed, together with the civil identity of the Internet user, for the purpose of fighting serious crime or safeguarding national security, this is no longer true. The CJEU has reversed its reasoning: it now considers that the retention of IP addresses is, by default, no longer a serious interference with fundamental rights, and that it is only in certain cases that such access constitutes a serious interference that must be safeguarded with appropriate protection measures.

As a result, La Quadrature du Net says:

While in 2020 [the CJEU] stated that there was a right to online anonymity enshrined in the ePrivacy Directive, it is now abandoning it. Unfortunately, by giving the police broad access to the civil identity associated with an IP address and to the content of a communication, it puts a de facto end to online anonymity.

This is a good example of how copyright’s continuing obsession with ownership and control of digital material is warping the entire legal system in the EU. What was supposed to be simply a fair way of rewarding creators has resulted in a monstrous system of routine government surveillance carried out on hundreds of millions of innocent people just in case they copy a digital file.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: cjeu, copyright, data retention, eprivacy directive, eu, ip addresses, privacy

Second Circuit: Yeah, You Can’t Arrest Someone For Asserting Their Fourth Amendment Rights

Legal Issues

from the they're-rights,-not-privileges dept

As the country most famous for enshrining civil rights, it sure seems like we spend a lot of time and money reminding the government of this fact. And it shouldn’t need to be reminded! These rights were defined by the government and considered inherent to American life. They weren’t granted. They were recognized as natural rights and it was the government that was required to respect them.

And yet there are still tons of civil rights litigation, most of it aimed at law enforcement officers who, for some reason, have far more trouble respecting rights than other government entities and employees.

Worse, cops tend to feel anyone invoking their rights must be doing something wrong. Invoking rights tends to increase shows of force, rather than negate them. Rarely does an invocation of rights stop law enforcement from doing what it wanted to do, requiring the victim of rights violations to spend their own money to file a lawsuit. In other cases, it means being subjected to the full force of a criminal trial (a place where juries and even some judges consider the accused to be guilty long before any evidence has been presented) and hoping an evidence suppression attempt is successful.

That’s why rights are violated regularly. The victims of rights violations carry the entire cost of the violation. Prosecutors may lose some evidence. Cops may occasionally see civil cases reach the jury trial stage. But in both cases, the public pays the literal price with their tax dollars for the government’s unwillingness to recognize, much less respect, their civil rights.

This case [PDF] being handled on appeal by the Second Circuit doesn’t exactly end the lawsuit. It does allow it to continue. Most importantly, despite all the procedural maneuvering, it overturns the lower court’s inexplicable conclusion that it’s ok to arrest someone just because they asserted their rights.

This one started with a concerning call placed to law enforcement, in which a person claimed the defendant had been sexually abusing his newborn daughter. (The footnote points out that the defendant’s sister-in-law made the call after seeing diaper rash on the child. The footnote says the sister-in-law “apparently suffered from a mental illness.” In any event, it was determined the defendant had never abused the child.)

Officer Pagiel Clark (along with other officers) responded to the 911 call. They were met by Larry Thompson who refused to allow them to search the home. At this point, the officers had nothing more than the 911 call to work with. They definitely did not have a warrant.

Rather than seek a warrant to search the residence for evidence of sexual abuse, Officer Clark decided to do this:

[Thompson] was arrested for obstructing governmental administration (“OGA”), in violation of New York Penal Law §195.05, and resisting arrest, in violation of New York Penal Law §205.30. The next day, Clark swore out a criminal complaint making factual allegations about the events that occurred on January 15, 2014, and formally charging Thompson with OGA and resisting arrest. As a result, Thompson was detained for two days until his arraignment, at which time he was released on his own recognizance. After arraignment, Thompson made two additional court appearances before his criminal case was dismissed.

Demanding to see a warrant is not a crime. It definitely isn’t “obstruction,” because if it was, it would render the Fourth Amendment irrelevant. Unfortunately, things didn’t go all that well for Thompson at the district court level. The court found in favor of the government (and officer Pagiel Clark, who was named as the sole law enforcement officer defendant) on certain claims. Others went to trial. The jury sided with the government and the remaining malicious prosecution claim was decided in favor of Officer Clark by the court instead of being handed to the jury.

That single claim was appealed by Thompson. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the nation’s top court found that Thompson had sufficiently demonstrated a “favorable termination” of his criminal case — a requirement needed to pursue malicious prosecution charges.

It went down to the district court again. This time the court sided with Thompson. And this time, the government appealed, bringing back to the Second Circuit for a second time. The government should have taken notice of the chain of judicial events. If it had, it possibly wouldn’t have wasted everyone’s time.

The nation’s top court revived the malicious prosecution claim and the lower court upheld it. The Second Circuit follows the Supreme Court’s lead. You simply cannot arrest someone for asserting their rights. That’s pretty malicious when it comes to prosecution. Or as close as is needed to put this allegation in front of a jury.

A reasonable jury could find that Clark lacked probable cause to charge Thompson with OGA because Thompson’s actions – opening his door, standing in his doorway, speaking peacefully with officers, and verbally invoking his Fourth Amendment rights – did not constitute interference. The interference “element of the statute is satisfied when an individual intrudes himself into, or gets in the way of, an ongoing police activity.”

Conversing with cops but refusing to consent to a search is not “interference” or “obstruction.” If the officers had a warrant in hand, things would have been quite different. But they didn’t, so this allegation is revived (again) and sustained.

Nor does the allegation that Thompson got a bit shout-y during this unwanted interaction change anything about the correct application of New York’s obstruction statute.

A reasonable jury could also conclude that Thompson did not exhibit “inappropriate and disruptive conduct at the scene.” The parties dispute whether Thompson yelled or raised his voice during the conversation, and who initiated the physical contact between Thompson and the officers. And Thompson testified that as soon as the officers grabbed him, he submitted, telling them “[y]ou have it” to indicate that he was not attempting to resist. Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Thompson, as we are required to do, we conclude that a reasonable jury could have found that Thompson did not interfere with the officers.

Finally, the court says Officer Clark is not entitled to qualified immunity on the malicious prosecution charge. He might have been, had he chosen to raise it at any time prior to this second visit to the Appeals Court. But since he didn’t, the argument is forfeited and the officer will join the plaintiff in facing a jury for a second time.

It’s a good decision but it should never have gotten to this point. The lower court blew the call in the first instance. Because it did, the man whose rights were clearly violated by this arrest has had to take his case all the way up to the top court in the land. And now he’s going to take a third trip to the district court to get this final charge sorted out.

Invoking rights isn’t a criminal act. It certainly isn’t obstruction, at least not in this case. If the cops really wanted to search Thompson’s place, they could have sought a warrant to do that. That they didn’t makes it clear they really had nothing more on their side than a show of force they hoped would coerce Thompson into complying. When he didn’t, Officer Clark decided to go the most vindictive route and have him arrested for “contempt of cop.” Hopefully, someone in law enforcement learns something from this experience, starting with Officer Pagiel Clark.

Filed Under: 2nd circuit, 4th amendment, civil rights, lawsuit, new york, pagiel clark, warrantless search

Daily Deal: Babbel Language Learning (All Languages)

Deals

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

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let’s focus on the app. Right off the bat, let’s be clear about one thing: When we say “app” we don’t mean that you’re limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across devices. Want to practice where you won’t have Wi-Fi? Download lessons before you head out, and you’ll be good to go. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you’ll be able to choose from 14 languages. Want to try your hand at all of them? Knock yourself out — you’ll have a lifetime to get it done. And you can tackle one or all in 10-to-15-minute bite-sized lessons, so there’s no need to clear hours of your weekend to gain real-life conversation skills. It’s on sale for $150 6/7/24 only.

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

Schools’ Social Media Ban Backfires, Jeopardizing Student Privacy

Privacy

from the think-this-through dept

What if banning social media from schools actually put kids at even greater risk?

One of the more annoying things in talking about tech policy is how many people refuse to think one step ahead about how the world reacts to their policy proposals. We’ve talked about this in many contexts, but one that keeps coming up as illustrative is eating disorder content, where getting big social media companies to ban such content backfired.

That’s because the issue with eating disorder content online wasn’t a “supply side” problem (kids getting eating disorders because they stumbled upon such content online), but rather a “demand side” problem (kids with eating disorders seeking out such content). When social media sites banned that content, the kids still went looking for it, but often found it in less reputable places, and (even worse!) often in places that didn’t also try to provide resources or other community members to guide people towards recovery.

For every effort to “ban” something, we need to think about what impact it will actually have.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about “banning social media in schools.” And you can see why this feels like it makes sense intuitively. There are concerns about how much time kids spend on social media, what content they see, and certainly whether or not it’s relevant in schools. I mean, we already have school districts across the country filing ridiculous lawsuits against social media companies claiming that they’re melting kids’ brains.

So shouldn’t banning social media in schools be a no-brainer?

Turns out it’s a lot more complex than that. The always excellent reporter Emily Baker-White has a piece at Forbes that, among other things, is looking at what happens in schools that have banned social media. And it’s not making kids any more safe. If anything, the reverse is happening.

As with the eating disorder issue discussed above, it appears that the kids these days want their social media. And if schools try to ban social media, the kids are finding ways around those bans, often using questionable free VPNs to route around network level blocks. And those free VPNs are… pretty bad about the privacy of people using them:

It’s common practice among most school districts to restrict the internet access of their students to prevent them from browsing porn and “inappropriate” websites — from social media platforms to educational sites about racial identity, mental and reproductive health. And, increasingly, it’s common practice among many kids to use apps that bypass those restrictions so they can view those sites anyway.

Today, 1 in 4 high American school students now use workarounds to avoid schools’ internet restrictions, which, in addition to blocking websites, can also monitor their personal online lives, including their social media posts, emails, and browsing history. The most common of these workarounds is a VPN, or virtual private network, which obscures a user’s IP address from the websites they navigate to and the apps they use. But VPNs — especially the free types that teens are most likely to use — often collect sensitive personal information like location and browsing history.

Many unscrupulous free VPN companies then sell that information to data brokers. Some of them have ties to China, where the Chinese Communist Party has the authority to force any company to hand over such data. And others may contain malware that allows hackers to take control of devices on which they are installed.

Yeah. So, for all the hyped up fear about TikTok supposedly shipping all our kids’ data to China, it appears a more effective way for China to get data on American kids is to… have more American schools ban social media at school, leading them to use sketchy VPNs that suck up data and keep that data in China.

And yes, this can lead to very real risks:

Just last week, the U.S. Justice Department indicted a Chinese national for allegedly using free VPNs to gain access to 19 million IP addresses, more than 600,000 of which were in the United States, and renting them out to criminals who used them to stalk and defraud people and engage in child exploitation.

Of course, rather than recognizing that maybe banning stuff outright might lead to worse results, I’m pretty sure all this is going to lead to is the next mole to whack in this never-ending game of whac-a-mole, and politicians and schools will be looking to figure out ways to… ban free VPNs.

The article has lots of concerned quotes from policymakers… focused on the problem of VPNs. But not so much on how their own moral panics drove up the usage of these VPNs.

Still, this is yet another example where when folks like Jonathan Haidt insist there are really no downsides to his policy proposals — which include banning social media for many kids — they may not understand at all what they’re talking about.

Filed Under: china, privacy, social media, social media bans, teens, vpns

‘Max’ Again Hikes Streaming Prices As Customers Head For The Exits

Failures

from the higher-prices-for-a-shittier-product dept

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.

That has involved chasing pointless “growth of growth’s sake” megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions — all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.

Warner Brothers Discovery ‘Max’ Streaming service has been the poster child for this dysfunction. Born from the disastrous abomination that was the AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery series of pointless mergers, the service has continually gutted what made some of HBO’s original programming great, instead chasing the bottomless well of low-quality, cheaply produced, lowest common denominator, mass engagement porn.

This week Max raised prices on all of its service plans a buck or two, whether we’re talking about ad-based and or ad free versions. The company’s annual ad-free plan at $170 per year is now $20 more, and its Ultimate ad-free annual plan jumped $10 to $210 per year. At the same time, customers on Max’s cheaper plans lost access to several features, including 4K and HDR streaming.

This kind of stuff, where you consistently charge more money for fewer features and less quality, is what ultimately happened in both U.S. telecom and cable TV. Both sectors have perfected this approach of consistently shoving you into a pricing funnel where, if you want all the perks and features you originally enjoyed, you can expect to steadily pay more and more for them — even as overall quality declines.

But unlike traditional cable or broadband, which locks you into service either through forced bundling or (in telecom’s case) regional monopoly, customers fortunately still have the ability to cancel streaming services — assuming they don’t mind missing out on some of their favorite shows. So customers are increasingly signing up for a service, binge watching, then cancelling again.

This is, as Ars Technica observes, bad news for an industry that’s trying to give Wall Street consistent, improved quarterly returns:

“This week, Andrew Georgiou, head of WBD’s UK and Ireland business, discussed the challenge this poses for streaming companies: “Netflix is a mainstay but we are starting to see real SVoD churn, people cycling in and out at an increasing rate,” he said, per Deadline. “That phenomenon is a huge cost to business and reducing that churn, increasing engagement and reducing the cost of ‘winbacks’ is something we all need to focus on.” WBD CEO David Zaslav has called high churn rates a streaming business “killer.”

Having covered telecom and media for decades I know that this is where the industry will start making it difficult to cancel service. That will likely mean everything from simply making it steadily more difficult to find the cancel button (a la AOL or the Wall Street Journal), to finding “creative” ways to bundle services together in increasingly complicated ways (perhaps with broadband or wireless access) to minimize churn.

This will involve, like in telecom and cable, making it more and more difficult to understand what you’re paying for (was I paying for Netflix already via my promotional deal with Verizon FiOS, or was I subscribing to a Hulu plus Netflix bundle via my Disney and Charter cable cross promotion?), inevitably resulting in you paying for some services you’d forgotten completely about.

This shift will, I expect, involve more telecom and media cross mergers like the AT&T Time Warner disaster. It will also, again just like in cable TV and telecom, involve making it more difficult than ever to actually know how much you’re paying (likely via strange new hidden fees).

Ideally you’d handle customer “churn” (defection rate) by lowering prices, improving customer service, expanding innovative features, and ramping up product quality. But given that nibbles away at Wall Street’s improved quarterly earnings, the alternative is consolidation (tax breaks, huge debt loads, short-lived stock bumps) and anti-consumer creative pricing and feature set fuckery.

That opens the door to disruption by alternative tech (or piracy), starting the cycle all over again.

To be clear, I still think streaming TV holds a lot of value. Streaming customer satisfaction remains far higher than cable TV ever was. These more annoying trajectories, which you’re only starting to see emerge, will take several years to play out. But the path is pretty clearly set, thanks to executives who are utterly financially disincentivized to learn absolutely anything from cable TV’s rocky history.

Filed Under: competition, consolidation, max, mergers, streaming, tv, video
Companies: warner bros. discovery

City Sued For $1 Million After Cop Murders A Tiny Dog For The Crime Of Being Lost

Legal Issues

from the public-so-much-safer-now-thanks-to-hero-cop dept

You know what kind of person kills animals on the regular? Psychopaths, at least according to a casual survey of pop culture references. You know who else? Cops. But I repeat myself.

Laurel Matthews, a supervisory program specialist with the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (DOJ COPS) office, says it’s an awful lot. She calls fatal police vs. dogs encounters an “epidemic” and estimates that 25 to 30 pet dogs are killed each day by law enforcement officers.

30 dogs a day. Only a handful of court cases where courts have found officers violated the Constitution by killing innocent pets. Judges often hold that killing an animal amounts to a “seizure” under the Fourth Amendment, but in most cases, qualified immunity carries the day.

Occasionally, it goes the other way. A court stripped immunity from a cop who killed a dog 13 seconds after arriving to a call about people cleaning out their cars in a vacant parking lot. In another case, immunity was denied when the court determined the officer acted unreasonably by killing a family’s dog while other officers on the scene were shouting at him to back off and all the family to bring their dog back inside.

Then there’s this incident, which could easily serve as a metaphor for policing as it’s practiced here in the United States:

Lawsuit: Deputy Tried To Shoot ‘Charging’ Pomeranian, Shot Woman On Porch Instead

This case is more of the same. Hopefully, it will end like the ones listed above: with a denial of qualified immunity. A family whose deaf and blind 13-pound Shih Tzu was shot and killed by Sturgeon, Missouri police officer Myron Woods earlier this month has sued the city and the officer for $1 million, as Nina Golgowski reports for the Huffington Post:

[Officer] Woodson had been called in to help find the owner of the dog, a 13-pound Shih Tzu named Teddy. The officer shot him twice at point-blank range, as seen in body camera footage. Minutes after the shooting, Hunter, who’d gotten a call from a friend about Teddy escaping his backyard kennel, confronted the officer.

“At no time during the encounter between Teddy and Defendant Woodson did Teddy show any aggression towards Defendant Woodson,” states the complaint. “Teddy never barked, growled, or even moved towards Defendant Woodson. Instead, the small, blind and deaf dog simply kept trying to walk away, oblivious to the danger that Defendant Woodson posed to him.”

The body camera footage backs up the lawsuit’s claims. I must warn you this is a tough watch, even if you’re fairly accustomed to footage of inexplicable acts of violence committed by police officers.

It’s a hideous chain of events. The officer starts looking for the dog while armed with the restraint device animal control officers use on animals: the extended pole with a loop at the end of it. While the officer had no way of knowing the dog was deaf and blind, he had nothing to worry about. He had a restraint device and was dealing with a small Shih Tzu that not only ignored the officer’s presence, but was in obvious distress.

But like many living things in obvious distress (people undergoing mental health crises, people undergoing physical health crises, potential suicides, and… um… lost dogs), the officer chose to end the crisis by killing the living thing in obvious need of assistance.

Roughly five minutes into the recording (and less than two minutes after encountering the dog), officer Myron Woods ditches the restraint device, pulls out his gun, and kills the dog.

Any normal person would try to help someone or something in distress. Pretty much any officer that considers themselves “reasonable” thinks the problem can be solved with bullets and, if need be, even more bullets.

It only took one to kill this dog. And, of course, the officer felt he had done the right thing. He was so confident in this conclusion he felt comfortable sharing his rationale with the owner of the dog he had just killed.

When Hunter confronted Woodson about what he had done, Hunter said the officer told him he thought Teddy looked injured or abandoned and wanted “to put him down.”

The town could have (and should have!) left this officer to fend for himself after he committed this truly senseless act of violence. But it didn’t. Instead, it spun this as nothing more than good police work from an officer acting in the interest of public safety.

In a statement Thursday, the city said it is standing by the officer’s actions. Officials have reviewed the dispatch report and body camera footage and believe “the officer acted within his authority” to protect citizens from the dog causing injury to others.

“The dog’s strange behavior appeared consistent with the dispatch report of an injured or possibly sick dog,” the city said, after initially claiming in a separate post that the officer feared it had rabies. It added that it would send its officers to a local county animal control facility for training and education “in hopes that this unfortunate situation does not occur again.”

Even the person who reported the lost dog called for the officer’s resignation. She also expressed her displeasure of the city’s support for the officer to the mayor. Mayor Kevin Abahamson refused to respond to this (and complaints from other city residents), choosing instead to resign after the city’s board of Aldermen took issue with the statement released by the mayor about the shooting.

And just to drive the point home that this was a truly senseless killing by an officer who could have done literally anything else to handle this completely non-threatening situation, here’s a bit from the lawsuit (filed with the assistance of the Animal Legal Defense Fund) that details officer Woodson’s actions and statements as captured by his own body camera:

Teddy’s attempt to simply walk away from Defendant Woodson indicated a total lack of aggression on Teddy’s part as well as his desire for avoidance rather than confrontation.

As he walked after Teddy, Defendant Woodson audibly remarked “Maybe I’ll get a blanket and just wrap you up,” indicating that he perceived no threat or danger and believed that he could possibly get close enough to just reach down and safely pick Teddy up by covering him with a blanket.

Despite contemplating simply using a blanket to safely capture Teddy, Defendant Woodson did not return to his vehicle to obtain a blanket but rather transferred his catch-pole from his right hand to his left hand and followed after Teddy.

[…]

In walking after Teddy, Defendant Woodson did so in a calm manner, even whistling and calling out to Teddy.

Even with Defendant Woodson following after him, Teddy showed no signs of aggression, did not turn around to face his pursuer, and did not bark or growl.

Upon reaching within feet of Teddy, Defendant Woodson made no further attempts to use his catch-pole (which he had facing the wrong way rendering the device effectively useless and abandoned anyway) and instead unholstered his firearm.

On May 19, 2024, at 5:43:27 p.m. (five-forty-three p.m. and 27 seconds or 17:43:27 in military time), Defendant Myron Woodson – while in the employ of Defendant City of Sturgeon, while on duty and attired in the uniform of his department, and while acting under color of state law – calmly and deliberately removed his firearm from his holster and fired a single shot into Teddy from near point-blank range.

At the time Defendant Woodson fired his fatal shot into Teddy, Teddy was seemingly unaware of the mortal danger presented by Defendant Woodson and was angled away from Defendant Woodson and again simply attempting to walk away.

Defendant Woodson’s shot caused the little dog’s body to jerk backwards and fall to the ground.

At the moment he shot Teddy, Defendant Woodson was not in fear for his safety or the safety of anyone else.

Approximately five (5) to seven (7) seconds later, Defendant Woodson fired a second point blank shot into Teddy’s body.

That’s what you’ll see in the video embedded above, if you’ve got the stomach for it. If not, I’m sorry. The dry text version contained in the lawsuit isn’t that much easier to take.

Now, it’s up to the federal court to decide whether this was a “reasonable” act by a police officer. I sincerely hope it does not decide it is. Given what’s alleged in the lawsuit and captured on Woodson’s body cam, this was the act of an officer who just got tired of playing dog-catcher and opted to play dog-killer instead.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, civil rights, cops killing dogs, lawsuit, missouri, police violence

Louisiana Becomes The Third State To Pass A Law Creating A No-Go Zone Around Cops

Legal Issues

from the special-rights-just-for-cops dept

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” I’m sure you’ll recall specifically which type of animal on George Orwell’s Animal Farm made that proclamation.

In other words, we’re back to Orwellian lawmaking in this country. And not the usual kind. The 9/11 attacks in 2001 led to one sort of Orwellian lawmaking. That was dialed back a bit following the Snowden leaks, but as we’re now more than a decade out from that watershed, there’s been a bit of a return to business as usual. You need look no further than the latest Section 702 surveillance renewal for evidence of that.

This form of Orwellian lawmaking is a bit more novel. As phones became something everyone carried and those phones started containing cameras, efforts were made to prevent people from filming cops. But as pretty much every appellate circuit has held, filming cops is protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has yet to weigh in, but it really doesn’t need to as long as the circuits remained unified in this view.

Cop accountability became a hot button topic (again!) following the murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin. With protests sweeping the nation, some efforts were made to reform or rebuild law enforcement entities. But while the outrage remains, there’s been no unified front across the nation for a few years now, and legislators are getting back to passing laws constituents (as least those not employed by cop shops) aren’t really asking for.

Arizona did it first. Legislators dropped the pro-police halo down to eight feet before the bill was finally signed into law. But it didn’t matter. It has already been permanently enjoined by a federal court because it’s (you guessed it) unconstitutional.

Florida was the next to pass a law preventing people from coming within 25 feet of police officers. Governor Ron DeSantis pretended it was about giving “first responders” space to do their jobs. But only certain “first responders” are asking for laws like these. EMTs and firefighters haven’t been begging for more space to do their work. It’s only cops who seem concerned when people (and their cameras) get too close. That law takes effect at the beginning of next year, at which point it will be met with multiple lawsuits asking courts to prevent it from being enforced.

Now, it’s Louisiana’s turn, as Politico (via the Associated Press) reports:

A new Louisiana law will make it a crime to knowingly approach within 25 feet of a police officer while they are “engaged in law enforcement duties” and after the officer has ordered the person to stay back.

[…]

“This is part of our continued pledge to address public safety in this state,” [Governor Jeff] Landry, who has a law enforcement background, said during the bill signing.

Whatever. This has nothing to do with “public safety” and everything to do with limiting accountability. Louisiana has plenty of problematic law enforcement agencies that need a lot more oversight, but instead of that, state residents are getting hit with further restrictions on their rights. And it’s also worth noting (as the AP does) that legislators tried to pass this under the former governor (a Democrat), but were met with a veto.

At least this law is a bit more intellectually honest about its intentions. There’s no wording in there to help pretend this about protecting all first responders. Instead, this pro-cop, anti-citizen halo is limited to “peace officers.”

Anyone approaching closer than 25 feet after being “ordered […] to stop approaching or retreat” can be arrested and hit with a $500 fine or up to 60 days in jail. Nothing in the law makes it any less likely to be found as unconstitutional as the one passed in Arizona but at least this provides for an affirmative defense if the accused person can demonstrate no order was given to stop or retreat.

Given that other crimes like obstruction and assault are still on the books, the only reason this law exists is to make it more difficult to film police activity. That is made exceedingly clear by the supporters and writers of the bill, who are now saying stupid things in public to defend this bit of legislative bootlicking.

“This is a bill that’s enacting all across America that gives our police officers a peace of mind and a safe distance to do their job,” Republican state Rep. Bryan Fontenot, who crafted the legislation, said at a signing ceremony Tuesday.

I’m not sure how three states out of 50 is “all across America,” but a man’s gotta dream, I guess. This “bill that’s enacting” only applies to Louisiana. And even in the cop-friendly Fifth Circuit, it’s unlikely to remain in “enacted” status for very long. And it’s actually just two states: Arizona’s law (at only 8 feet!) has already been permanently enjoined.

This isn’t the only stupid stuff said by Rep. Fontenot in defense of his unconstitutional bill:

“At 25 feet, that person can’t spit in my face when I’m making an arrest,” Fontenot said while presenting his bill in a committee earlier this year. “The chances of him hitting me in the back of the head with a beer bottle at 25 feet — it sure is a lot more difficult than if he’s sitting right here.”

LOL. This isn’t about any of these things. It’s about making it more difficult to film cops — the sort of thing that often undercuts cop narratives about how things went down. Going back to the murder of George Floyd, the official narrative — until undone by a bystander’s recording — was that officers arrested someone who just happened to die. And, as the original Minneapolis PD press release took care to point out, the officers turned out OK following this murder.

Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction

May 25, 2020 (MINNEAPOLIS) On Monday evening, shortly after 8:00 pm, officers from the Minneapolis Police Department responded to the 3700 block of Chicago Avenue South on a report of a forgery in progress. Officers were advised that the suspect was sitting on top of a blue car and appeared to be under the influence.

Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.

[…]

No officers were injured in the incident.

That’s why bills like these are being written. A citizen’s recording undermined the official narrative. The only thing it verified is that the MPD officers escaped the murder scene without injury.

Fortunately, most of these stupid bills aren’t being signed into law. And one-third of those enacted have already been permanently blocked by a federal court. This is just more police protectionism, which cops don’t need because they already have more “rights” than the people they serve. Hopefully, this law will meet the same fate Arizona’s law did : an enactment, a lawsuit, and a permanent injunction.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, accountability, free speech, louisiana, police

The NY Times Challenges ‘Worldle’s’ Trademark

Failures

from the mine-mine-mine dept

Correction & Retraction: The original BBC article implied that the NY Times was threatening Worldle and demanding it change its name. That now appears to be incorrect, and it simply opposed letting Worldle register its own trademark, noting that it was too close to its own Wordle. Which… is not a crazy interpretation. While the NY Times has, in the past, been too aggressive on some things, in retrospect, what it did here appears appropriate, given the circumstances.

Indeed, one wonders why Worldle sought a trademark at all in these circumstasnces.

At Techdirt we normally try not to report on things without looking at (and posting) the underlying documents, and in this case we failed to do that. We deeply regret the error and will seek to be more careful going forward.

Whenever we talk about Wordle, the simple Mastermind-like vocabulary game, it’s important to remember that it wasn’t always owned and operated by the New York Times. Before the Times, the game was operated by its creator, Josh Wardle, who flatly insisted that the game not be monetized nor protected or enforced over any kind of intellectual property rights. But after the Times bought the rights to the game, all of that changed. The paper began going after all kinds of Wordle spinoffs over IP concerns, including the Wordle Archive and alternative language versions of the games for those who wanted to play it, but not in English.

And now we learn that the NY Times is still at it, with news that the paper is also going after Worldle, a spinoff of Wordle that has nothing to do with words or vocabulary, but where you instead have to guess a location based on Google Streetview images.

The New York Times is fighting to take down a game called Worldle, according to a legal filing viewed by the BBC, in which The Times apparently argued that the geography-based game is “creating confusion” by using a name that’s way too similar to Wordle.

Worldle is “nearly identical in appearance, sound, meaning, and imparts the same commercial impression” to Wordle, The Times claimed.

What’s impressive about all of this is the speed and determination by which the Times has chosen to act as the antithesis to Wardle’s handling of the game and situations like this. The company applied to trademark Wordle the day after it closed on the purchase of the rights to the game, something Wardle never pursued. And then the threats and takedowns began. It’s as though Robin Hood handed his bow and arrow to another person only to have that person declare that it was time to rob from the poor to give to the rich.

Not to mention that it’s not like the NY Times, for all of its aggressive enforcement activity, has been fulsome in doing so. There are still a zillion Wordle clones and otherwise inspired games out there that use similar names that are living without threat, as of yet. And while the Times claims that Worldle’s existence is confusing the public and taking away from its own game, the similarity in their names actually seems to be working for the Times, rather than against it.

Today, millions visit the Times site daily to play Wordle, but the Times is seemingly concerned that some gamers might be diverted to play Worldle instead, somehow mistaking the daily geography puzzle—where players have six chances to find a Google Street View location on a map—with the popular word game.

This fear seems somewhat overstated, since a Google search for “Worldle” includes Wordle in the top two results and suggests that searchers might be looking for Wordle, but a search for Wordle does not bring up Worldle in the top results.

The NY Times doesn’t have to do any of this. It didn’t even have to trademark the name of its purchased game at all, actually. Wardle had no problem attracting players to his game even after the so-called clones came to be. In fact, the public did a wonderful job of policing that sort of things itself, all without the help of any intellectual property or lawyers. But the moment it became a corporate property, all of that changed.

The creator of Worldle is vowing to fight this attempted takedown, but he also seems resigned to the idea that he might have to change the name of the game.

McDonald told the BBC that he was disappointed in the Times targeting Worldle. He runs the game all by himself, attracting approximately 100,000 players monthly, and said that “most of the money he makes from the game goes to Google because he uses Google Street View images, which players have to try to identify.” The game can only be played through a web browser and is supported by ads and annual subscriptions that cost less than $12.

“I’m just a one-man operation here, so I was kinda surprised,” McDonald told the BBC, while vowing to defend his game against the Times’ attempt to take it down. “There’s a whole industry of [dot]LE games,” McDonald told the BBC. “Wordle is about words, Worldle is about the world, Flaggle is about flags…Worst-case scenario, we’ll change the name, but I think we’ll be OK.”

While true, that would be entirely too bad. There’s no reason any of that has to happen. Millions still play Wordle these days, and the six-figure user count playing Worldle is obviously not some kind of threat to the NY Times’ property.

But because the NY Times couldn’t be bothered to act human and awesome, even just this once, or even honor the wishes of the actual creator of the game, well, here we are.

Filed Under: trademark, wordle, worldle
Companies: ny times

A Parent Explains Why They Oppose NY’s ‘SAFE For Kids Act’

Policy

from the not-very-safe-for-kids dept

Editor’s note: We’ve written a few times about NY’s “SAFE for Kids Act” and it’s many problems. There’s a decent chance that bill gets voted into law this week. Samuel Johnson posted a wonderfully detailed letter about why he, as a parent, opposes the law, and sent it to his elected officials. He also posted it on his own blog about Upstate NY, and kindly agreed to let us repost it here.

For a number of months now, the New York State Legislature has been kicking around its own internet regulation law. Like similar laws in many other states, the bill is deeply flawed, relying on animosity towards Big Tech and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet and computer technology in general works.

Unfortunately, the bill is likely to pass in the next few days. As a parent with many other demands on my time, I was unable to put together a letter outlining my opposition to it until now. Below is the current draft of a letter I intend to send to my state assemblyman, with similar versions to be sent to my senator, the Governor, and others in a position to oppose the bill.

If you are a New Yorker, please reach out to your legislators and the governor. Time is desperately short.

Dear Mr. Steck:

I write to you today to express my concerns about the SAFE for Kids Act currently being considered by the New York State Legislature (and heavily pushed by the Governor). As you know, I am the father of four children, ages six through sixteen, and the increasing difficulty of protecting them as they grow and learn to use the internet has occupied a fair amount of my time and attention over the last decade and a half.

I have been employed full time as a software engineer for sixteen years, the last ten of which have been positions in the “infosec” (Information Security) field, including positions with national security clearance and at international companies like GE. I hold two degrees from RPI, one in Computer Science, the other in Information Technology, and I was on faculty there as an adjunct professor for eight semesters, bringing my professional experience into the classroom to help educate the next generation of engineers and scientists.

While I support the general intent, the SAFE for Kids Act as it is currently drafted will do little to protect children from being exploited by Big Tech. Often, when faced with taking action on a complex issue, people will seize on a partial, or even counterproductive idea, and say “we must do something…this is something, therefore we must do this.” Unfortunately, in this case, this will do little to address the underlying problem, and it will simultaneously expose already marginalized kids (and adults) to greater danger online, and make it more difficult for smaller, independent organizations and businesses to develop alternative, ethical websites and apps.

To understand the problems with the bill we need to consider:

• The value of the internet as a means of distributing high-quality content and information, and building community
• The need to support the ability of people to have autonomy over their online identity and experience
• The need to allow pseudonymous and anonymous use of the internet by both minors and adults
• The business model of “Big Tech” platforms like Facebook/Instagram and TikTok
• The distinction between “recommended content” and addictive features

Once we evaluate the bill’s impact with these things in mind, we begin start to understand why the SAFE for Kids Act will make the internet less usable for New Yorkers, no more safe for our children and teens, and more dangerous for members of marginalized communities, while further entrenching the dominance of existing Big Tech and Big Advertising companies.

The Value of the Internet

It would be hard to overstate the value of the internet with respect to its potential for bringing people together and making the world’s knowledge available at low cost to all, at the touch of a button. While misinformation (and even disinformation) have become more widespread in recent years, it’s undeniable that much of the information that used to be available only in print (or radio or TV) is now online. From news, schedules, and weather, to reference material, catalogs of products, and published research, the internet is our go-to medium for finding information.

Most of us have colleagues and friends we’ve met online. We follow the ongoing work of journalists and writers. We enjoy the community created by sharing clips of our favorite sports teams and athletes. We love sharing our hobbies and seeing the work others have created. The internet is especially enjoyable in this respect for people with more niche interests. Someone with a one-in-a-million hobby may only have a handful of similar people in their city, but they can connect online with hundreds or thousands of people with similar passions.

Even more crucially, the ability to organize on the internet allows members of traditionally marginalized populations—from racial minorities to LGBTQ people to those with disabilities or longterm illnesses—to function in a world that all too often wants to shut them out (or worse). The internet allows people to make connections with others who understand their struggles, and possibly more importantly, allows them find life-saving resources. That’s especially true for teenagers in those groups.

Autonomy over Identity and Experience

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to switch to a new cellphone carrier, you had to surrender your number. We recognized that this was not in the interests of anyone but the cellphone companies and created laws guaranteeing our rights to our phone number, regardless of whom we chose as a carrier. We should expect the same kind of autonomy over the identities we assume online, and for the same reason. Our phone numbers form part of our public identity. It’s easy to see why we don’t want a private corporation to exercise veto power over our ability to choose a different carrier (or phone).

We experienced similar frustrations when carriers demanded to decide what brands of cellphones we should be allowed to have. Some people prefer iPhones; others Android (and others neither). A variety of devices are now available across carriers. Typically, if you switch carriers, you can take your phone with you as well as your number. We don’t allow the carrier to dictate the whole phone experience.

We would rightfully object if corporate America attempted to dictate that we could only watch Disney content (including ESPN) on Disney TVs and Netflix content only on a TV sold by Netflix. Why then do we accept that we can only view the content created by our favorite sports teams, celebrities, authors, musicians, and artists using only those apps dictated by Big Tech?

It’s important that we as individuals be able to maintain autonomy over our online identities, making sure that people can follow us to other social media platforms when we leave, just as easily as our friends could reach us on our existing cell phone number when we left AT&T for Verizon. Similarly, it’s important that we be able to control our experience interacting with online content. Why should we accept having to use Meta’s app to view content created and published on Instagram, any more than we would accept having to use Paramount’s TV to watch Syracuse play basketball in March (Paramount owns CBS)?

Anonymous and Pseudonymous Access

We all assume different identities in ordinary life. We often dress differently for work or church or school functions than we do for the gym or a weekend BBQ at the lake. We commonly use titles and last names in formal public settings, while first names are more common among friends and colleagues. We may even be stuck with childhood nicknames with our parents or old friends. Online life shouldn’t have to be different. Potential employers don’t need to see the goofy pictures of my cats that I share with my siblings; my mother shouldn’t expect to scroll through the highly technical work I share with colleagues. Additionally, the ability to exist online under a pseudonym allows members of marginalized populations to ask the more difficult or fraught questions that are nonetheless important, without worry about repercussions from employers or family.

Unfortunately, there are also many cases of ordinary, or even ethical, behavior being punished by families, communities, employers, and the government. Whistle-blowers are often prosecuted (or worse). Union organizers and community organizers are frequent targets of retributive actions by the powerful. Women are threatened and even jailed for seeking basic reproductive healthcare. Victims of domestic violence—both adults and children—are systematically isolated by abusive partners or parents. And teenagers struggling with their sense of identity or sexuality all too often find themselves ostracized, or even cast out, by families whose beliefs don’t include compassion for those unlike themselves.

Every person described in the preceding paragraph has a compelling need to be able to reach out online, whether just for information, or to make contact with organizations in a position to help. But they can’t do that if making the request, or even just running the search, requires use of their legal identity. Anonymous and pseudonymous access to the internet can be (and certainly is) abused. But it’s a literal lifeline for many who are otherwise very alone in a hostile world.

“Big Tech” Business Model

“Senator, we sell ads.” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered that line in his testimony to the U.S. Senate in April of 2018. It certainly remains true today. Both Meta (Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp) and Alphabet (Google) derive a huge portion of their revenue by selling ads. They can make billions of dollars selling ads because billions of us spend hours every day using their apps and websites. The more time we spend on their apps and websites, the more ads they can sell.

The fact that we might want to spend our time online on other apps or websites, or that we might want to spend our time not looking at a screen at all, is a threat to their ability to sell ads. Their apps are very carefully and deliberately engineered to maximize our time using them, whether it’s constantly checking for new “likes,” endlessly scrolling for new content, or angrily commenting on someone else’s hateful post. Big Tech and Big Ad don’t care that it might be bad for us: they want our engagement and attention.

An app that might allow us to view content shared by our favorite celebrity, sports team, musical group, artist, author, or even just a local business encouraging us to try their new taco special this Tuesday, without us seeing an advertisement, is a threat to their business.

Recommended content vs. addictive features

One of the great promises of computers is that they would relieve us of some monotonous tasks and drudgery. To that end, websites and apps that offload some of the more mundane tasks to an algorithm can be extremely helpful. That can include basics like spam filtering or sorting emails into folders based on sender and subject line. It can include using geographical context: when you search for Paesan’s Pizza, you want the one in Colonie or Latham, not the similarly named businesses in Pennsylvania or Indiana. It can include things like recommending the next book in a series when you’ve just checked out the previous book, or finding reviews for products you’ve looked at, or even similar alternative products others have purchased.

Like so many things, websites and apps can deploy such algorithms to exploit their users. Some websites or apps are explicitly constructed to trigger the same cognitive impulses as a casino slot machine or carnival barker. But would we honestly want to use an app or website that is prohibited from serving us helpful content? There is a distinct difference between a recommendation and a sales pitch.

SAFE for Kids Act

With all that in mind, we can begin to consider the SAFE for Kids Act. At its core, it purports to address that last issue: addictive features. Unfortunately, its fundamental definition begs the question. The act defines “addictive feed” in such a way that it captures much of what we expect a modern website or app to do. Just about every useful thing described in the previous section qualifies as an “addictive feed” under the bill’s definition. After the definition’s first word, the bill makes no mention of any addictive feature or property.

Even if the definition were productive, the bill doesn’t actually require platforms to provide an environment free of addictive features (or even access to the content by other apps that might not have the same addictive features). It simply allows access with parental permission. We’ve all clicked “agree” countless times for countless apps and websites. Why would parents behave any differently here? The bill does require that apps provide parents with the means to restrict an app’s ability to send notifications in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, it doesn’t require that option to be available for everyone, only “covered minors.” Parents who might be in need of sleep are left out. If we want to maintain some semblance of control over our own online experience, this bill will not help us.

The bill requires that anyone providing an “addictive feed” (which, remember, includes just about any modern website or app) must use “commercially reasonable methods to determine” if a user is a minor. Unfortunately, there is no technically feasible way to apply that test only to minors: every New Yorker will be required to verify their age.

Age verification requires identify verification. While the bill requires that “information collected for the purpose of determining a covered user’s age…shall not be used for any purpose other than age determination,” there isn’t existing technology to support the requirement. Any age verification service will need to send information to any website requesting the information. The verification service will then have a record of what website or app the person is using. The age verification service might not be covered by New York Law. Indeed, one of the leading “commercially reasonable methods” for verifying a user’s age is provided by MindGeek, the Canadian company best known as the owner and operator of PornHub. I don’t particularly want to give them my information, let alone that of my children, in order to sign up for services and apps online.

The bill effectively removes the ability of New Yorkers of any age to sign up for websites and apps anonymously or pseudonymously. As we noted earlier, it’s vital—in some cases a matter of life and death—that this ability be preserved to protect already marginalized people.

These requirements: the need to verify a user’s age, the need to provide the functionality to opt-out, and the need to provide parents with the ability to change notification settings based on a user’s age and the time of day, will be relatively trivial for multi-billion dollar companies like Meta and ByteDance (the owner of TikTok). But in order for the internet to continue to be a source of high-quality information, and a tool to build communities among real people, we need smaller entities to build and operate websites and apps. These requirements will likely be prohibitively expensive for any number of community groups, non-profits, political campaigns, local churches, and small businesses who want to provide an alternative to the ad-driven, attention-seeking commercial products provided by Big Tech. Rather than protecting our kids (and all New Yorkers), the SAFE for Kids Act will only serve to further entrench the very companies we need to keep in check.

While the goal of liberating our children and teenagers from websites and apps that have been meticulously engineered to capture their attention is a noble one, this bill falls short. It attempts to solve a very real problem. Clearly, we must do something. This is something. But very clearly, we must not do this. Please oppose the SAFE for Kids Act in its current form.

Sincerely,

Samuel B. Johnson

Filed Under: addictive design, ny, protect the children, safe for kids act

Daily Deal: The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training Bundle

Deals

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

The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training Bundle has 4 beginner-friendly courses to help you become more comfortable with the capabilities of OpenAI and ChatGPT. You’ll learn how to write effective prompts to get the best results, how to create blog posts and sales copy, and how to create your own chatbots. It’s on sale for $30.

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