This guy wants $78,942 to make a documentary defending this guy
The New York City police detective caught in a viral video berating an Uber driver in a profane, xenophobic rant has been stripped of his gun and badge, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton told reporters Wednesday.
I assume the documentary would be an exact clone of Officer Maggot
Month: April 2015
East Texas judge who oversaw 1,700 patent cases joins biggest IP law firm
US District Judge Leonard Davis said this week he’s going to leave the bench to join Fish & Richardson, a large law firm focused on intellectual property.
Davis, who has presided in the Eastern District of Texas since 2002, has one of the most active patent dockets in the nation and has presided over some of the biggest technology lawsuits of the past decade. Corporate Counsel magazine reported this week that he has handled more than 1,700 individual IP cases as a judge. Before becoming a judge, he worked for 23 years in private practice.Statistics for 2013 showed 263 new patent cases being assigned to Davis, about one-sixth of the 1,700 patent cases that were filed in the district, the busiest in the nation. Only four other judges, three in Delaware and one in East Texas, had more patent cases assigned to them.
Light the torches! NSA’s BFF Senator Feinstein calls for e-book burning
Senator Dianne Feinstein is calling for a pair of controversial instructionals to be banned from the internet.
Feinstein (D-CA) did not say exactly how she plans to scrub The Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire magazine from every server, desktop and notebook on the planet, but none the less she wants both titles pulled from circulation.
The comments come after two women were arrested in New York City on charges of plotting terrorist attacks.
The duo reportedly had ties to the late former editor of the Al-Qaeda backed English-language Inspire, and were accused of seeking out other bomb-making guides in preparation for an attack.
Now Feinstein, a big fan of America’s surveillance apparatus, wants to make both Inspire and the 1969 Anarchist Cookbook illegal to make available online.
“We must remain vigilant against these types of attacks and place a high priority on tracking and interdicting such plots,” the fifth-term Senator said.
“I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bomb-making guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire magazine. These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the internet.”
Difficult as it may be to have a book permanently “removed” from the internet, Feinstein shares the opinion of at least one prominent figure: the author of the Anarchist Cookbook. William Powell now says that the book should be taken out of circulation, calling its underlying premise “profoundly flawed.”
“Shopping cart” patent troll shamelessly keeps litigating, and losing
Soverain Software, a “patent troll” with no significant revenue aside from patent lawsuits, made millions suing dozens of online retailers over a group of e-commerce patents, including one that essentially claimed an online shopping cart. Soverain’s money train got stopped cold when Newegg destroyed its patents on appeal in 2013.
Soverain, its lawyers, and its anonymous owners have had an extremely hard time realizing they lost. First, the company litigated for another seven months over, essentially, a typo in the Newegg ruling. The company asked for the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to reconsider its case en banc, but to no avail. Then it hired expensive Supreme Court specialists to write its petition to be heard by the high court, but that went nowhere, as well.
Even then, Soverain didn’t seem to understand that it wouldn’t be able to collect its nearly $18 million jury verdict against Avon and Victoria’s Secret, even though that case was based on the exact same patent claims as the Newegg case. Soverain went ahead and fought the appeal, despite really having nothing new to say.
“Soverain has not identified any significant new arguments that were not in fact raised in the earlier appeal,” a panel of appeals judges wrote in February, handing Soverain yet another loss.
One last try, in a familiar court
Soverain had a long list of retailers it intended to get royalty payments from after Newegg and filed one last wave of lawsuits in March 2012. However, those cases were put on “hold” once Newegg beat the patents on appeal, while Soverain pulled out all the stops trying to revive them.
This week’s ruling marks the end of the cases that were filed in March 2012. Of the many defendants, only Macy’s and eBay “fought” to the end.
Its appetite for courtroom losses apparently still not satiated, Soverain decided to press ahead against those last two. It told US District Judge Leonard Davis that it “no longer asserts” 27 out of the 33 patent claims it had initially brought, but insisted that those last six patent claims were “not affected by the Newegg decision.”
Perhaps Soverain thought it stood a chance, since Davis’ court is where it won its initial jury victories years ago. Davis, whose East Texas court has been one of the most popular in the country for patent owners, was the judge who allowed the “shopping cart” patent to go to a jury in the first place.
However, if Soverain wanted to indulge the fantasy that its last six claims held some kind of magical hidden breakthrough, Davis declined to participate. The judge invalidated the claims in an order issued earlier this week.
All six claims were “dependent” claims, relying on either claim 34 or claim 39 of patent number 5,715,314—both of which had been found obvious by the Federal Circuit.
The last six claims add tiny limitations to the already-invalidated patent claims. Two claims, for instance, talked about a system in which the “shopping cart computer” would send a “payment message” after the “buyer computer” told it to do so.
“[T]his Court must accept, and the parties do not dispute, the Federal Circuit’s determination that Soverain’s previously asserted claims are invalid,” Davis wrote.
Soverain wanted the case to at least go through a claim construction proceeding, but Davis found there was no reason for that to happen, and such a proceeding would “waste party and judicial resources.”
No matter how the last six claims are looked at, “it is clear that they do not add meaningful limitations that distinguish them from claims previously held invalid as a matter of law,” he wrote.
A Soverain spokesperson didn’t respond to Ars’ request for comment.
“We are pleased to have vindicated another innocent retailer targeted by Soverain and its invalid patents,” said Macy’s lawyer Kent Baldauf, who also represented Newegg at trial. “It took courage for Macy’s to stand up to a baseless case and defend itself to the end.”
Comcast: Merger to bring “$8 billion in price reductions” to businesses
I think DoomHamster sums it up nicely:
So is merging with TWC the only way they can enter that market? And if TWC is already in that market, how would Comcast merging with them increase the competition?
Seems to me that the better option for increasing competition would be for Comcast to enter the market along side TWC and all the other that are there.
What am I missing?
From Ars Technica:
When Comcast announced its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable, Executive VP David Cohen bluntly said that Comcast is “not promising that customer bills are going to go down or even increase less rapidly.”
But while residential customers shouldn’t expect any financial relief from the nation’s largest cable company, Comcast now says the merger will create new competition in the business market, lowering prices, especially for large, multi-city businesses. In areas including San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Boston, and Philadelphia, “we expect to generate almost $8 billion in price reductions due to our competitive entry in the enterprise business segment through the TWC transaction,” Comcast Business President Bill Stemper wrote in a blog post yesterday.
Comcast provided some details on how it calculated the expected price reductions in a filing last month with the Federal Communications Commission, though the numbers in that document are redacted. Comcast calculated cost savings over a 10-year period for enterprise customers, meaning multi-location businesses with at least 500 employees, the filing said. There will be “various cost savings and other benefits” for small businesses too, the filing said.
John Deere Thinks People Will Pirate Music With In-Car Computers
Did you know that it’s illegal to tinker with the code in your in-car computer? Thanks to the nuances of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you’re not even supposed to inspect the inner workings of your vehicle’s circuitry. This is absurd, which is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is fighting for a better policy.
The EFF is currently entrenched in a legal battle to challenge DMCA overreach. In a new blog post—colorfully titled “Automakers Say You Don’t Really Own Your Car”—the digital rights advocates share some of the absurdity that many vehicle manufacturers are slinging to justify the DMCA’s applications to in-car computers. This is the best:
John Deere even argued that letting people modify car computer systems will result in them pirating music through the on-board entertainment system, which would be one of the more convoluted ways to copy media (and the exemption process doesn’t authorize copyright infringement, anyway).
Yes, that John Deere. How about this: If you manage to pirate music in a tractor, you deserve a much better prize than a DMCA letter. You deserve to own the tractor you paid for. Repair it when it breaks down, even! And yes, you should be able to do whatever you want with your car’s computer—within reason.
Britain Used Spy Team to Shape Latin American Public Opinion on Falklands
Faced with mounting international pressure over the Falkland Islands territorial dispute, the British government enlisted its spy service, including a highly secretive unit known for using “dirty tricks,” to covertly launch offensive cyberoperations to prevent Argentina from taking the islands.
A shadowy unit of the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had been preparing a bold, covert plan called “Operation QUITO” since at least 2009. Documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, published in partnership with Argentine news site Todo Notícias, refer to the mission as a “long-running, large scale, pioneering effects operation.”
At the heart of this operation was the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group, known by the acronym JTRIG, a secretive unit that has been involved in spreading misinformation.
The British government, which has continuously administered the Falkland Islands — also known as the Malvinas — since 1833, has rejected Argentine and international calls to open negotiations on territorial sovereignty. Worried that Argentina, emboldened by international opinion, may attempt to retake the islands diplomatically or militarily, JTRIG and other GCHQ divisions were tasked “to support FCO’s [Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s] goals relating to Argentina and the Falkland Islands.” A subsequent document suggests the main FCO goal was to “[prevent] Argentina from taking over the Falkland Islands” and that new offensive cyberoperations were underway in 2011 to further that end.
Tensions between the two nations, which fought a war over the small archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean in 1982, reached a boil in 2010 with the British discovery of large, offshore oil and gas reserves potentially worth billions of dollars.
The British government frames the issue as one of residents’ self-determination. Prime Minister David Cameron maintains that the islands will remain British as long as that was the will of their inhabitants, “full stop, end of story.”
Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, known for her provocative, left-leaning foreign policy since taking office in 2007, rallied regional and international leaders to pass resolutions in international bodies supportive of Argentina’s claim to the islands and stand against what she called the U.K.’s “downright colonialism.”
Even the United States, Britain’s closest ally, declined to support the U.K. position, instead offering to mediate a resolution between the two sides in 2010. Prime Minister Cameron rejected the proposal, calling it “disappointing.”
GCHQ’s efforts on Argentina and the Falklands between 2008 and 2011, the time period the documents cover, were broad and not limited solely to JTRIG. Surveillance of Argentine “military and Leadership” communications on various platforms was a “high priority” task. Despite the Obama administration’s unwillingness to publicly back their ally, NSA assistance was ongoing as of 2010. According to an NSA “Extended Enterprise Report” dated June 2008, based on NSA officials’ meetings with GCHQ representatives, Argentina was “GCHQ’s primary interest in the region.”
State Legislators Pushing Bills To Shield Police Officers From Their Own Body Camera Recordings
Police accountability remains a major concern. Lawsuits alleging improper police conduct are filed seemingly nonstop. The Department of Justice continues to investigate police department afterpolice department for a variety of civil rights violations. More and more police departments are equipping body cameras on their officers in hopes of trimming down the number of complaints and lawsuits filed against them.
Meanwhile, the public has taken police accountability into its own hands, thanks to the steady march of technology — which has put a portable phone in almost every person’s hands, and put a camera inside most of those phones.
So, we have two entities viewing accountability from seemingly opposite directions. Over the years, many officers have made it clear through their actions that being filmed isn’t something they’re comfortable with. This has resulted in additional misconduct and abuse of existing laws to shut down recordings. But what are these officers going to do when a city council — or worse, a Memorandum of Understanding with the Justice Department — directs them to start generating their own recordings?
One answer has already been presented by the Denver Police Department. They simply won’t activate the cameras.
During a six-month trial run for body cameras in the Denver Police Department, only about one out of every four use-of-force incidents involving officers was recorded.
Cases where officers punched people, used pepper spray or Tasers, or struck people with batons were not recorded because officers failed to turn on cameras, technical malfunctions occurred or because the cameras were not distributed to enough people, according to a report released Tuesday by Denver’s independent monitor Nick Mitchell.
This is a case-by-case “solution,” self-applied as needed by certain officers. For other departments, it appears the imposition of recording devices will be greeted by legislation. Legislators cite “privacy concerns” but their bills do little more than hand law enforcement agencies full control over body camera recordings.
Lawmakers in at least 15 states have introduced bills to exempt video recordings of police encounters with citizens from state public records laws, or to limit what can be made public.
Their stated motive: preserving the privacy of people being videotaped, and saving considerable time and money that would need to be spent on public information requests as the technology quickly becomes widely used.
A small amount of redaction (face-blurring, etc.) would address the privacy concerns. After all, reality TV pioneer COPS has run for years with minimal privacy complaints and that’s all it’s ever used. As for the latter concern — expenses related to open records requests — there are ways to address this that won’t cede complete control to law enforcement agencies. Seattle’s Police Department worked with a local activist to find a solution that would provide footage, protect privacy and stay ahead of voluminous public records requests. Unfortunately, the result of these efforts has produced nothing more than extremely blurry footage in which everything is “redacted” by default.
Justifications offered by legislators try desperately to skew law enforcement’s total control of body camera footage as some sort of win for the general public.
“Public safety trumps transparency,” said Kansas state Sen. Greg Smith, a Republican. “It’s not trying to hide something. It’s making sure we’re not releasing information that’s going to get other people hurt.”
The problem is that if it’s the public being abused in these videos, there are very few options available to obtain recordings of misconduct.
The Kansas Senate voted 40-0 last month to exempt the recordings from the state’s open records act. Police would only have to release them to people who are the subject of the recordings and their representatives, and could charge them a viewing fee. Kansas police also would be able to release videos at their own discretion.
The “fix” for possibly overbroad public records requests includes a) making acquiring a recording unaffordable, even for the person on the receiving end of alleged abuse and b) allowing the Kansas police to push out a steady stream of exculpatory video. The latter of the two is perfectly acceptable, but only if it’s balanced by the public’s ability to obtain less-than-flattering video of interactions with police officers. Nothing about this bill makes the public any “safer,” no matter what Sen. Greg Smith says.
The potential for abuse of laws like these is so obvious even the cops can see it.
“I think it’s a fair concern and a fair criticism that people might cherry pick and release only the ones that show them in a favorable light,” said former Charlotte, North Carolina, police chief Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association.
Arizona’s legislation goes even further than its Midwestern counterpart.
The bill declares that body camera recordings are not public records, and as such can be released only if the public interest “outweighs the interests of privacy or confidentiality or the best interests of the state.”
Not even the subject of the footage can demand a copy of the recording without somehow talking a judge into issuing an order for its release. Washington’s proposed legislation similarly exempts all body camera video from public examination and routes footage requests through the courts. In both cases, bill sponsors claim publicly-released video could be used for “criminal purposes,” but have yet to explain how a properly-redacted video would become a tool for “extortion” by “unscrupulous website owners.”
The attendant irony hypocrisy, of course, is that law enforcement agencies and local governments have declared arrest mugshots to be public records and have allowed “unscrupulous website owners” to post the shots and demand payment for their removal. But mugshots only involve members of the public, making them of lesser concern than footage that will also contain police officers. This sort of legislation is nothing more than the codification of a double standard, if that’s the motivation behind it.
On the other hand, some states are at least moving to ensure the general public can continue their unpaid police accountability efforts.
The Colorado bill, which you can read here, states that if a cop seizes a camera from a citizen without permission or a warrant or deliberately interferes with a citizen’s right to record by intimidation or destruction of the camera, the citizen is entitled to $15,000 in civil fees in addition to attorney fees.
This bill will help ensure at least one recording of an officer-involved incident remains intact, seeing as Denver police officers aren’t all that into capturing their end of these interactions.
Another bill in Texas which has not gotten nearly as much publicity comes from democratic representative Eric Johnson, which seeks to protect citizens from bullying officers as well as criminalize cops who confiscate cameras, only to destroy footage.
This pushes back against Texas Congressman Jason Villalba’s recently-introduced bill, which hopes to add a 25-foot no-recording “halo” around police officers at all times — stretching to 100 feet if the camera operator happens to be armed. Villalba has openly stated that “officer safety” is a greater concern than violated First Amendment rights, which would actually be criminalized if his bill passes.
California has also introduced a bill involving citizen recordings — one that will make an incredibly obvious statement into law… presumably because that’s the only way the state will get law enforcement to respect it.
In California, Senate Bill 411 would amend the state’s penal code to say that simply filming or taking a photograph of an officer performing his duty in a public place does not automatically amount to interference.
“Filming isn’t interference” would seem to be something that shouldn’t need to be inserted as an amendment to criminal statutes. As would the following, which is perhaps even moreinfuriatingly obvious than the sentence above:
Supporters say it protects the First Amendment and clarifies that filming alone does not give police officers probable cause to search or confiscate an individual’s property.
Undoubtedly, there will be law enforcement pushback against the proposed legislation, which should be referenced in the future as the “We Shouldn’t Even Need to Be Telling You This” Act, with “SMDH” as the short title.
Both sets of cameras will help increase law enforcement accountability, but one set is receiving the majority of proposed legislative protections. Shielding body camera recordings from the public eye limits their effectiveness as misconduct deterrents — the very reason they’ve been instituted.
‘Mob’ Detains, Threatens Photographers Because Single Adults Are Probably All Pedophiles
To live in the US is to live in a nation of fears — most of them, irrational. The Department of Homeland Security — the eerily nationalistic-sounding phoenix that rose from the ashes of the World Trade Center — has done all it can to turn Americans into government informants, where they’re encouraged to turn in complete strangers for suspicious activities like not packing enough clothes orpurchasing cookware.
The DHS fears nothing more than a person armed with a camera. If any citizen aims a lens at public transportation, infrastructure, certain manufacturing plants or government buildings, they’re assumed to be practicing the dark art of terrorism.
Terrorism is only one of the nation’s collective fears: one so seldom realized that the amount of attention paid to it by a vast number of government bodies is almost laughable.
Another fear that is almost inversely proportional to the amount of attention paid to it is child victimization, especially kidnapping and pedophilia. From a young age, parents and educators drill into kids’ heads that all strangers are inherently dangerous. This is somehow supposed to protect children from abusers despite the fact that nearly 90% of abuse is committed by someone the child knows and trusts — family members, child care providers, neighbors, close relatives, family friends, etc.
This hysteria over child sexual abuse has reached the point that being an unaccompanied adult (especially male) in an area frequented by children is considered inherently suspicious. Toronto’s Legoland exhibit turned away a 63-year-old Lego fan simply because he wasn’t accompanied by a child. The stated reason for this bizarre policy? To “protect the children.” Likewise UK’s Puxton Park, which turned away a 53-year-old man for the same reason. The explanation given by the park’s director for its stupid policy is equally stupid:
He added: ‘There is a lot in the headlines about paedophiles and things that are going on with children.’
Perfect. The media says child molestation is happening pretty much nonstop and so it must be. Therefore, no single adults allowed. The perception is the reality. But as Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip pointed out in “Thou Shalt Always Kill:”
Thou shalt not think any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a paedophile/Some people are just nice.
Combine cameras, overwrought pedophile fears, insular communities and former homeless MTV VJ Jesse Camp, stir vigorously and you end up with the sort of mob “justice” rarely seen outside of horror movies set in remote, backwoodsy locations.
“I received a call that there was a suspicious vehicle, a light brown Volvo station wagon, Massachusetts plate, and there was a male and female in the Raysal area taking pictures of some children,” says Chief Deputy, Roger Deel.
Jennifer Adkins, the mother of three kids, and a resident of Raysal, is the one who contacted Chief Deputy Deel. She also confronted the photographers, with a group of others.
Audio recording captured the encounter. You hear a McDowell resident say, “And there are no pictures of any children on there?”
“No. And you can check it, not of your kids. I can show you. Jesus Christ. We didn’t stop and approach like, yeah; you guys are making us out to be like crazy pedophiles. You guys are making us out to be people that we are not,” says Marisha and Jesse Camp.
“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? You all don’t look like upstanding citizens,” says Jennifer Adkins.
The audio recording of the confrontation can be heard at WVVA’s website. According to Marisha, another person threatened to “beat them and their cameras into the ground.” Whatever violence might have resulted from this confrontation was prevented when a state trooper arrived and escorted the couple out of town. But the angry crowd already had all the justification it needed for harassing, threatening and detaining the couple — and it’s every bit as eloquent as the Puxton Park director’s defense of his “no single adults allowed” policy.
A man says, “There’s just too much going on with kids getting hurt and Y’all might be cool, I’m not saying you’re not.”
That’s what irrational fear gets us: irrational behavior. Not every adult with a camera is a security threat or a pedophile. Strangers may be unknown quantities, but they are not inherently dangerous simply because they’re unknown. No combination of these factors should be considered untrustworthy by default.
But that’s where we’re at. And these irrational fears are stoked by some of the most trusted members of the community: law enforcement officials, educators and the media. Two of those three directly profit from permanently-heightened fears. The other — educators — parrot the skewed information delivered by the other two. The perception becomes the reality. And that “reality” manifests itself as the ugliness detailed above.
European Commission Discovers The Hard Way That Corporate Sovereignty Provisions And EU Laws Are Incompatible
The US government and European Commission insist that the inclusion of a corporate sovereignty chapter in the TAFTA/TTIP treaty will not in any way diminish the ability of nations to pass laws as they wish. A fascinating case involving an investment in Romania shows why that’s just not true. It concerns a state aid scheme instituted by Romania to attract investments in the country, which offered tax breaks or refunds of customs duties on raw materials. The scheme was supposed to remain in place for 10 years. But as part of Romania’s accession to the EU, it was required to cancel this scheme, which was regarded by the European Commission as providing unfair state aid. So, obediently, Romania abolished the scheme in 2005, some years earlier than it had promised.
That didn’t go down too well with investors. Two of them were able to use the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clauses of a bilateral treaty between Sweden and Romania to sue the latter. Here’s what happened next, as described in the European Commission’s press release:
An arbitral award of December 2013 found that by revoking an investment incentive scheme in 2005, four years prior to its scheduled expiry in 2009, Romania had infringed a bilateral investment treaty between Romania and Sweden. The arbitral tribunal ordered Romania to compensate the claimants, two investors with Swedish citizenship, for not having benefitted in full from the scheme.
Just part of the price of joining the European Union, you might think. But the European Commission is unhappy that compensation has been paid:
By paying the compensation awarded to the claimants, Romania actually grants them advantages equivalent to those provided for by the abolished aid scheme. The Commission has therefore concluded that this compensation amounts to incompatible state aid and has to be paid back by the beneficiaries.
That is, both the original state aid and the subsequent compensation for not providing that aid for the full term of the agreement are regarded as forbidden under EU law. So the European Commission is ordering Romania somehow to pull back from the Swedish investors the compensation awarded by the ISDS tribunal. Leaving aside the difficulty of doing so, even if Romania manages that, it will then be in breach of the corporate sovereignty tribunal ruling, which could leave it open to further legal action, and further awards against it. On the other hand, if it doesn’t rescind the compensation, it will be fined by the European Commission.
This provides a perfect demonstration of how corporate sovereignty provisions in treaties take away the ability of national governments to act freely. Moreover, in this particular case, whatever Romania chooses to do, its people will suffer financially.