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The public domain is supposed to be what we receive in return for, and after the expiry of, time-limited, government-backed intellectual monopolies that are granted to creators. As Mike noted recently, that neat equation does not reflect today's reality for copyright, where the situation is so complicated that it requires a 52-page handbook to determine whether or not something is in the public domain.

But the situation is actually far worse than that, because the public is being denied access to many works that are unambiguously in the public domain because of new restrictions being placed on them when they are digitized. That's something that Techdirt has discussed before, but such stories have been largely anecdotal. Research from New Zealand provides us with more detailed information of what's going on:

In order to establish the extent to which digitized public domain books are being restricted, a sample of 100 pre-1890 books was selected from the New Zealand National Bibliography (NZNB). This sample was chosen on the assumption that these works had entered the public domain under New Zealand copyright law. Each book in the sample was searched for within six online repositories: Google Books, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, Early New Zealand Books (ENZB), New Zealand Electronic Text Collection (NZETC) and Project Gutenberg. In addition, Google and Bing searches were conducted for all sample books that could not be located within these repositories.

Here's what the researchers discovered:

The findings of this research suggest that a high proportion of digitized public domain books are being restricted by online repositories. Out of a sample of 100 public domain books, only three are hosted by repositories that do not impose any form of usage restriction. Furthermore, 48 percent (24) of all digitized books [50 out of the 100 public domain sample] are hosted by a repository that restricts or blocks access, with the most restrictive repository limiting or blocking access to 91 percent (21) of sample books within its collection.

They also managed to pinpoint the key problem:

Almost all access restrictions applied to public domain books within the sample were the result of repositories using a process of estimation to assess copyright status. Within the sample, a one-minute search located accurate biographical information about authors two-thirds of the time. This task takes a fraction of the time required to digitize a book, which involves 30 minutes to scan 500 pages (Kelly, 2006).

A solution is the following:

Digitizers should incorporate the sourcing of copyright information within the overall process of digitization, and copyright estimation should only be used as an option of last resort. Furthermore, copyright estimation periods should better reflect statistical norms regarding the actual duration of copyright protection. The current estimation period of 140 years, used by Google Books and Hathi Trust, is far too conservative. If hosted under this policy, 47 percent of sample books would be restricted. This is despite the fact that all books with locatable biographical information were confirmed as being in the public domain for between 30 and 132 years.

This goes back to the problem of determining whether a work is in the public domain or not. Because that can be complex, those carrying out the digitization of works simply assume the worst, just to be on the safe side. That's something that needs to change, otherwise we risk losing not just the benefits of digitized public domain works, but also our undoubted rights to access them freely.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Anonymous Coward writes:

A new Skype for Linux update has been released by Microsoft ... the developers have explained that, starting with this version of Skype 4.3, the direct ALSA support has been dropped and users will need to use PulseAudio 4.0 for the best audio experience.

According to the changelog, the new cloud-based Group Chat experience has been implemented into the software, the file transfer support is now much better when using multiple devices at once, the accessibility for blind and visually impaired users has been improved, PulseAudio 3.0 and 4.0 support has been added, and numerous bug fixes have been implemented.

 
--
[Ed's Note: The AC also included the following - I decided to leave it in.]

The cynic inside me finds it hard to swallow the words "best audio experience" just because Microsoft said so. If I was to add a group of tags to my story submission, I would include:
Linux-Audio | Microsoft | Lennart-Poettering | RedHat | DoD | Skype | Backdoor | Walled-Garden | NSA | Cloud | Elitist-Development-Model | Faithful-Brownshirt-Of-The-Oligarchy | If-Infiltrated-EQ-1-Then-Manipulate

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

Only two weeks left to get a copy of Augie!

Nick Thune (x)

This one was last week’s Medium post, but I added some details and tweaked it into a poster design. It’ll be for sale at HilariAwesome.com soon.

Speaking of which, this week’s Medium post is pretty awesome. It’s called “What is the best gift to get someone?” and here’s an excerpt:

You can read the rest here »

Help Make Super Art Fight The Best

We’d like to be voted Best of Baltimore, and with your help, we can make it happen!

Every year, Baltimore Magazine does a Readers Poll for the Best of Baltimore.

We’d like your help getting voted in. Just vote for us under Arts & Fun, under the Play or Performance heading.

We realize, there’s a remarkable Baltimore arts scene, so you’ll probably be split – but it’d make our day to make this happen for us!

Click here to vote, through JUNE 30th!

 

This is a bizarre story of an almost-happened $10 million scam. It reads like an obviously phony Nigerian 419 scam, but it actually fooled what seem to be smart people. What's amazing to me is that there was no face-to-face interaction at all.

We've been following the case of Adel Daoud, an American citizen charged with terrorism. He's one of the many, many folks that was arrested following one of the FBI's infamous home grown plots (i.e. he was never actually involved in any terrorism, as all of his "co-conspirators" were actually FBI agents or informants, and there was never any actual threat or chance that he'd pull off an actual terrorist attack). Back during the (pre-Snowden) debates on renewing Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, Senator Dianne Feinstein used Daoud's case as a specific example of when the program had been useful in stopping terrorism.

That caught the attention of Daoud's lawyers, who noted that this was the first they'd heard of this, and it seemed pretty clear that the government had withheld the evidence that was used to bring Daoud to trial in the first place (which is, as you know, not really allowed). After asking for the evidence, the district court first said no, but then ordered that some of the documents being filed actually be shared with Daoud's attorneys (who have the necessary security clearances). The DOJ, of course, flipped out at this idea that the lawyers for someone they're trying to lock up forever should actually be able to see the evidence used against him and how it was collected.

This resulted in an appeals court hearing, which bizarrely had to happen twice after the FBI so scared court staff that they failed to record the public portion of the oral hearings. The hearings were also odd in that, at one point, everybody but DOJ folks and the judges were kicked out of the courtroom, raising serious questions about basic due process.

Unfortunately, Judge Richard Posner's ruling (right after coming out with his good ruling on the public domain) has found that the evidence does not need to be shared with Daoud's lawyers. He slams the district court judge for overreacting and over-valuing the concept of the "adversarial process" in the court room. Seriously.

The judge appears to have believed that adversary procedure is always essential to resolve contested issues of fact. That is an incomplete description of the American judicial system in general and the federal judicial system in particular. There are ex parte or in camera hearings in the federal courts as well as hearings that are neither or both. And there are federal judicial proceedings that though entirely public are nonadversarial, either partly or entirely.

Posner basically says that the district court judge herself should have looked over the materials first, to determine if it makes sense to pass them on, rather than defaulting to saying that they should be shared with the lawyers. As such, he basically reveals that the "secret hearing" that was held was to go over the material with the appeals court judges, and they're satisfied that nothing needs to be revealed to Daoud's attorneys.

...our study of the materials convinces us that the investigation did not violate FISA. We shall issue a classified opinion explaining (as we are forbidden to do in a public document) these conclusions, and why therefore a remand to the district court is neither necessary nor appropriate.

Posner also, not surprisingly, rejects the objection by Daoud's lawyers to that secret hearing, noting that it was necessary to determine if the DOJ lawyers were being fully honeset with the court:

Their objecting to the classified hearing was ironic. The purpose of the hearing was to explore, by questioning the government’s lawyer on the basis of the classified materials, the need for defense access to those materials (which the judges and their cleared staffs had read). In effect this was cross-examination of the government, and could only help the defendant.

Defense counsel’s written motion cites no authority for forbidding classified hearings, including classified oral arguments in courts of appeals, when classified materials are to be discussed. We don’t think there’s any authority it could cite.

And, voila, the secret law and secret courts and secret evidence continue unabated...

For a very good analysis of this ruling, I recommend Steve Vladeck's take, in which he notes that Posner seems to (somewhat bizarrely) confuse sharing details with Daoud's lawyers in secret, with "openness" to the public. As Vladeck notes, the district court judge recognized that not everything had to happen publicly, but was (reasonably) concerned that just having a judge look over the secret FISA court ruling would not be sufficient, since the judge would not have the same view as the defense attorneys. Posner seems to ignore or misinterpret all of that.

The problem, from Judge Coleman’s perspective, is that it may not always be possible for a district judge to determine whether disclosure is necessary (as opposed to whether it “may be necessary”) without the benefit of adversarial presentation. That is to say, § 1806(f) conditions the disclosure of classified FISA materials to a defendant (or, at least, his security-cleared counsel) upon a finding by the district judge that may, in some cases, only be possible with defense counsel’s participation. This is why, in her order mandating disclosure, Judge Coleman devoted so much of her energy to the importance of adversarial proceedings, especially in criminal cases—not because all proceedings in U.S. courts are adversarial (they’re not), but because, in this context specifically, adverse-ness makes it easier for a judge to have faith that she is comporting with her statutory and constitutional obligations.

But rather than accept—or at least sympathize with—Judge Coleman’s efforts to square a circle, Judge Posner derided them by suggesting that the government has a right to keep these materials secret, repeatedly criticizing calls (one is left to wonder from where) for “openness.” “Not only is federal judicial procedure not always adversarial,” Posner wrote; “it is not always fully public.” This is true, but entirely beside the point; Judge Coleman wasn’t seeking to open the proceedings; she was seeking to provide security-cleared defense counsel (who, just like everyone else, are subject to the Espionage Act) with access to classified information.

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Over the last few years, we've been covering the declaratory judgment lawsuit trying to establish that Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. As explained, nearly all of the stories about Holmes were published prior to 1923, making them public domain in the US. However, there was one book with ten stories published after 1923, and those works are still covered by copyright, thanks to our nutty system of copyright extensions. Some Sherlock Holmes scholars/authors, Leslie Klinger and Laurie King, filed for declaratory judgment after the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Estate threatened the publisher of their upcoming book (after successfully pressuring a previous publisher) that Sherlock Holmes is still covered by copyright and a license must be obtained. Klinger argued that he wasn't using anything from those works that were published post-1923.

While the Doyle Estate ignored the start of the case, after initially losing, it suddenly became interested arguing that the "character" of Holmes was not complete, and thus the new works somehow magically could extend backwards in time to keep the older versions out of copyright. Furthermore, it argued that in a world where Holmes is in the public domain, something horrible like others creating "multiple" versions of Holmes might happen (even though that's exactly what the public domain is supposed to enable). While there was some confusion, the judge didn't buy the Estate's argument, and found Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson to be in the public domain.

The Estate appealed, and got the unfortunate honor of having Judge Richard Posner handle the case, which he has done quite thoroughly, completely dismantling the Estate's arguments in affirming that Holmes and Watson belong to everyone, and not to the Estate. The key line:

We cannot find any basis in statute or case law for extending a copyright beyond its expiration. When a story falls into the public domain, story elements—including characters covered by the expired copyright—become fair game for follow-on authors...

Posner notes that while the ten stories published after 1923 (it's not fair to call them "new") are derivative works of the original, and the only thing protectable in those are the "original elements added" in those later stories. Everything done before that is public domain.

Posner has little time for the Estate's wacky theory of how much "harm" would come from people actually making use of a Sherlock Holmes in the public domain, by accurately recognizing that it is the public domain that often inspires tremendous new creativity.

The estate offers the hypothetical example of a mural that is first sketched and only later completed by being carefully painted. If the sketch is allowed to enter the public domain, there to be improved by creative copiers, the mural artist will have a diminished incentive to perfect his mural. True; but other artists will have a greater incentive to improve it, or to create other works inspired by it, because they won’t have to pay a license fee to do so provided that the copyright on the original work has expired.

Posner also destroys the rationale of the Doyle Estate in which they have a made up concept of "flat" and "round" characters, where "round" characters are continually added to through newer and newer works, and the characters are never fully complete because of all that adding. Posner notes that this whole thing has nothing to do with copyright law:

The estate defines “flat” characters oddly, as ones completely and finally described in the first works in which they appear. Flat characters thus don’t evolve. Round characters do; Holmes and Watson, the estate argues, were not fully rounded off until the last story written by Doyle. What this has to do with copyright law eludes us.

Posner further points out that, for all the talk that the Estate is worried about the harm of "new" versions of Holmes it doesn't like, in truth it seems clear that the Estate just wants to get paid. Finally, Posner notes that this appears to be an attempt to create a perpetual copyright, which violates the "limited times" aspect of the Constitution:

With the net effect on creativity of extending the copy-right protection of literary characters to the extraordinary lengths urged by the estate so uncertain, and no legal grounds suggested for extending copyright protection beyond the limits fixed by Congress, the estate’s appeal borders on the quixotic. The spectre of perpetual, or at least nearly perpetual, copyright (perpetual copyright would vio-late the copyright clause of the Constitution, Art. I, § 8, cl. 8, which authorizes copyright protection only for “limited Times”) looms, once one realizes that the Doyle estate is seeking 135 years (1887–2022) of copyright protection for the character of Sherlock Holmes as depicted in the first Sherlock Holmes story.

That seems like a rather useful line given the likelihood of a copyright term extension fight coming up in the next few years...

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Peoria mayor Jim Ardis has responded to the ACLU's announcement of its lawsuit against him (and several others) over the actions taken to shut down a parodic Twitter account. Ardis' "press conference" was really nothing more than him reading a prepared statement and refusing to answer any questions.

His statement shovels blame on the media, complains about having his "identity stolen" and goes long on pointing out that the Twitter account (or "site," as he prefers to call it) was not clearly marked as a parody at its inception. But the highlight by far is Mayor Ardis reading some of the tweets delivered by the account.

Ardis still seems to think he's completely right, but nearly everything he states is wrong.

First off, while the account wasn't marked as a parody when it first went live (March 9th), it had been by three days later (March 12th). Despite this, the mayor and the police continued their hunt of the account's owner. This hunt continued even after they managed to convince Twitter to suspend the account (March 20th).

Ardis repeats the claim that the account wasn't marked as a parody, as though that makes the entire month of police activity past the point of the account's shutdown (and six weeks past the point the account was marked as a parody by Jon Daniel, the account's owner) completely appropriate. Separately, while the lack of being marked as parody for three days may have violated Twitter's terms of service, it has no real bearing on the fact that it's protected speech. Mayor Ardis seems to think that unless something is marked as parody, it's not parody. But the point that many people were making, was that anyone reading the crazy statements on the Twitter feed would recognize it as obvious parody for being so extreme. In fact, having Mayor Ardis read out some of the tweets only seems to confirm the point. What he thinks is so conclusive as evidence that he's right, really only seems to prove the opposite: that the account was making statements so extreme and ridiculous that they were clearly parody, and not real.

Ardis also attacks the media for misrepresenting the facts. That's very hard to do when you're quoting police reports and police department/mayor's office emails directly. Since day one, the media has portrayed this event as Mayor Jim Ardis abusing his power to shut down a Twitter account he didn't like -- a portrayal that is borne out by the documents obtained from public records requests.

He also claims the media is being hypocritical by claiming the account was harmless while simultaneously refusing to print the "offensive" content of the tweets. This is his stupidest assertion. A Twitter account that did nothing but tweet out repeated profanities would be harmless while still being something most journalistic entities wouldn't print verbatim. Arbitrary standards for print are not legal standards for obscenity.

Either way, just because many people may find the account's tweets highly distasteful (and probably wouldn't retweet @grandma, etc.), it still doesn't make the speech less protected or Mayor Jim Ardis any more "right" about pursuing the person behind the account. Once the account was marked as parody, such that it complied with Twitter's terms of service, that should have been the end of it.

Justin Glawe, a Peoria native and friend of Jon Daniel who's been covering this case for Vice since the beginning, says that emails and comments made by an unnamed city official hint that Mayor Ardis may have believed the supposedly obscene account might be linked with the Peoria Journal Star.

[A]ccording to a source inside City Hall, the officials who aggressively pursued Daniel, the creator of the account, were also wrong in a much more mundane way: They thought I was behind @peoriamayor and assumed I worked for the local paper, the Journal Star...

In an email that was released because of a Freedom of Information Act request, Ardis asked his subordinates what “JS reporter” lived with Daniel, and a police official said he didn’t know. If the source in City Hall is correct, Ardis was convinced that reporter was me, and likely thought that by exposing me as the foul-mouthed fiend behind @peoriamayor he’d ruin my reputation as a journalist and that of the Journal Star in the process.

This adds a bit more background to the mayor's apparent disdain for the media. Glawe also points out that the braintrust behind the account shutdown not only seemed to have a poor grasp of the law (perhaps intentionally), but was also mystified by the technical aspects of dealing with an online social media platform.

At one point, some city officials and cops thought they could call Twitter to have @peoriamayor shut down, so it’s no surprise that they apparently couldn’t be bothered to google my name and find out who I was and whom I work for.

In related news, Peoria Police Chief Steve Stettingsgaard has stepped down to take a job with Caterpillar, Inc. While his entire tenure at the head of the PPD has been marked with controversy, there's no doubt this latest incident played a part in convincing him to exit the law enforcement business.

Bizarrely, Mayor Ardis hints he's looking at pursuing someone (Jon Daniel or possibly even Twitter itself) for "defamation," apparently forgetting the email conversation he had with Chief Stettingsgaard back on March 11th.

Mayor/Manager, I reviewed this matter with Detective Feehan. He is in the process of shutting down the account as you saw from my last email. This phony Twitter account does not constitute a criminal violation in that no threats are made. I'm not sure if it would support a civil suit for defamation of character. I'm not an expert in the civil arena but my recollection is that public officials have very limited protection from defamation.

If Ardis decides to pursue this, he'll just be adding to his list of highly-public debacles. His defensive press conference indicates he's unable and unwilling to learn from his mistakes. There's no case to be made here, especially if Ardis decides to go after Twitter itself for the actions of one of its users. But it appears Ardis has dignity to burn, even if most of it is riddled with self-inflicted wounds.

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Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes You're likely familiar with the theory of how the Moon formed: a stray body smashed into our young Earth, heating the planet and flinging debris into its orbit. That debris coalesced and formed the Moon. The impact theory still holds, but a team of geochemists from the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France has refined the date, finding that the Moon is about 60 million years older than we thought. As it turns out, that also means the Earth is 60 million years older than previously thought, which is a particularly cool finding considering just how hard it is to estimate the age of our planet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

azrael writes:

The BBC reports on an answer to what might be the last big question about the biological system that underpinned the lumbering success of the dinosaurs.

Scientists compared the growth rates of hundreds of living and extinct species, using growth rings and bone size to calculate the [metabolic] rates for dinosaurs.

A paper by John Grady, the study's first author and a PhD student at the University of New Mexico, suggests that dinosaurs were mesothermic: neither cold nor warm blooded, but somewhere in between. This research provides fresh evidence to add to the debate.

Professor Roger Seymour, a reptile physiologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, is not convinced.

"It would be disadvantageous to be in the middle," Prof Seymour told BBC News. He remains convinced that only powerful, genuinely endothermic dinosaurs would have wielded sufficient energy to remain dominant for 150 million years.

"You have to realise that this group of dinosaur physiologists, including me, are very hesitant to change our minds. Each one of us has the smoking gun, we think, that proves one thing or another."

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

It's a strange thing to me when a union, say, the American Federation of Musicians, turns on one of its own members or even non-member musicians. Now, I'm supportive of the concept of organized labor as a general idea, though I certainly recognize that unions quite frequently fall into all the same trappings of any unwieldy and large organization -- where the original intent and the eventual results are quite different. So when the AFM demanded an apology from a musical artist simply for speaking his mind against a Canadian bill that the union supported, I could only scratch my head. But when that same AFM union goes after one of it own members for the crime of making video game music, a thing that I love, that's when I start to get really angry.

What's most striking in that video to me is the clear and obvious passion with which composer Austin Wintory speaks about working on game music. Still, the back story here is what makes it so ridiculous. AFM management constructed a contract for video game composers without the input of the union's own membership, a contract that is so one-sided that not a single game developer even hesitated to reject it completely, and constructed an ecosystem in which no AFM member could be hired with union sanction to perform his or her craft. For two years, the music in games was either made by composers not in the AFM or by composers who just ignored the AFM's rules. The union failed to benefit in any way. Then, when it discovered that one of its members, who had been vocally critical of the contract, had the gumption to actually make a living, the union threatened to levy a $50,000 fine against him.

Unions have a terrible reputation in this country because of stories like this, which is a shame. This union is an example of how not to behave, in making demands that will never be accepted, refusing to consult its own membership, actually coming out and suggesting that it chiefly operates through fear and intimidation, and going after its own members for daring to make a living doing what they do best (the kind of thing a union should be supporting, not hindering).

"Unfortunately employers have not signed the current agreement," admits AFM Local 47 Vice President John Acosta who represent the recording musicians of Los Angeles, "and the limited work we were doing before has all but vanished into non-union land."

And the solution to that is to levy fines against one of your members instead of negotiating a contract that will actually get composers back to work under the union umbrella? Please.

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Maybe it’s Moobelene

This past Wednesday, the CIA held its first ever Conference on National Security at Georgetown University. It included plenty of the usual talking heads spouting nonsense, but I wanted to focus in on one particular talking head spouting particularly ridiculous nonsense. It's our old friend, Rep. Mike Rogers, who is retiring from Congress to try to become an even bigger blowhard on talk radio (as if that's possible). Apparently, Rogers is using this conference to practice the classical blowhard strategy of making a variety of absolutely ridiculous claims that directly contradict each other.

So, for example, he kicked it off by attacking Silicon Valley tech companies for fighting back against NSA surveillance, and for arguing (accurately) that the NSA's efforts have created a major business problem for them around the globe, as people outside the US no longer trust them. In Rogers' mind, that means these companies are putting "European profits above national security." This isn't even close to true, but that's what Rogers is claiming (at about 2 hours 10 minutes into the video, which is also embedded below):

While I'm on my soapbox, we should be really mad at Google and Facebook and Microsoft, because they're doing a very interesting, and I think, very dangerous thing. They've decided to come out and say "we oppose this new FISA bill, because it doesn't go far enough." And when you peel that onion back a bit and say "Why are you doing this? This is a good bill, it's safe, it's bi-partisan, it's rational. It meets all the requirements for 4th Amendment protections and privacy protection and allowing the system to work."

And they say, "Well, we have to do this because we're trying to make sure we don't lose our European business." I don't know about the rest of you but that offends me from the words "European business." Think about what they're doing. They're willing to, in their mind, justify the importance of their next quarter's earnings in Europe versus the national security of the United States. Everybody on those boards should be embarrassed and their CEOs should be embarrassed and their stockholders should be embarrassed. That one quarter cannot be worth the national security of the United States for the next ten generations."

This is wrong and ridiculous on so many levels, but let's just jump to the biggest one and then circle back later to the rest. Less than 15 minutes later (at about 2 hours 25 minutes into the video), Rogers was arguing how important the internet is to our economy, and how a cyberattack might destroy it. He's basically discussing his beloved CISPA and its "information sharing" components, which is really a backdoor way to "legalize" companies handing over all their data to the NSA without warrants.

One sixth of our economy now, is through the internet! One sixth! So this notion that we're all going to say "well the government should do nothing and just completely keep away" -- and I'm not for regulation, by the way, that's not what I mean, but I mean in some way to... to help defend these private networks or allow them to defend themselves -- if we don't get it right, one-sixth of our economy is going to go away. Like that (*snaps*). If every time you turn it on, you lose money, how many times are you going to turn it on and use the internet for commerce? You're not!

Right. Did you get that? If the NSA is violating all of your privacy, no big deal, and people will continue to use the internet and contributing to the economy -- and if it hurts the economy, well that's just the price we pay for national security. But, if those evil foreign governments violate your privacy, well, then all of you will stop using the internet and it will destroy our economy.

In short: if NSA hacking into Europeans eats into US companies' profits: that's patriotism. But if Europeans hack into US companies, then everyone will stop using the internet and it will destroy us all.

And then he goes even further:

If one financial institution -- we have one particular financial institution that clears somewhere about $7 trillion in global financial transactions every single day. Imagine if tomorrow that place gets in there, and through an attack of which we know does exist -- the potential does exist -- where the information is destroyed and manipulated. Now you don't know who owes what money. Some of that, they have lost transactions completely, forever. Imagine what that does to the economy? $7 trillion. Gone. Right? Gone! It's that serious!

So, profits of Wall Street banks are patriotic. But profits of Silicon Valley companies... well, they can be sacrificed for national security.

Except, of course, the underlying assumption in all of this -- which has been proven time and time again to be false, is that these efforts actually help with national security. Mike Rogers was one of the leading FUDspreaders, concerning the claim that the section 215 bulk phone records collection helped national security. Except that's been proven to be false time and time again. Both judges and the President's own task force have marvelled at the total lack of evidence that the bulk records provision was necessary.

The complaints from various tech companies (who Rogers himself admits makes up a huge part of our economy) is not about their "next quarter" of European profits, but about the very idea that he and his friends have more or less convinced the rest of the world that American internet companies are not trustworthy. That's not about next quarter's profits, it's about violating the privacy of everyone around the globe -- for no actual benefit.

So, in the end, we see what hypocritical views Rogers has. It's shameful and unpatriotic for Silicon Valley to be concerned about the privacy rights of their users, because that might lead to an attack on national security, and that attack on national security might harm the profits of Silicon Valley and (more importantly) Wall Street, and any attack on profits is unpatriotic (except, apparently, the profits he wanted them to give up first). Confused? Don't be. What Rogers is really saying is he doesn't give a shit, so long as the NSA gets to violate everyone's privacy, and he'll make any ridiculous argument to keep that happening. And, of course, to keep it secret, because if you don't know about it, he still thinks your privacy hasn't been violated.

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Sue 'em if they can't take a joke.

Well, sue 'em if they can't take a joke and go so far as to raid your house, seize your electronics and abuse a law that contains no provision for impersonating someone via electronic means, in order to show you how much they aren't laughing.

As was noted earlier, the ACLU is representing Jon Daniel, the Peoria native behind a Twitter account that parodied Mayor Jim "Trill As Fuck" Ardis. Ardis was sufficiently offended by the off-color nature of the account that he demanded the local police do something about it. And they were only too happy to comply, rooting around in the local statutes (and throwing in child porn accusations for good measure) until they found something they could use.

It didn't take. Charges were dropped by the District Attorney, and Mayor Ardis was forced to defend himself against angry citizens who had just witnessed the power of government being thoroughly (and pettily) abused. According to Ardis, he had to do this. Until the account was closed, he had no First Amendment rights… at least according to his bizarre rationale.

The ACLU has filed its complaint against the City of Peoria, the mayor, his staff and a handful of law enforcement officials. The lawsuit asks for no specific damages, but one imagines those named are now in the process of nailing down a settlement amount that's affordable without being insulting.

The filing also fills in some more details on the overreach and abuse by these public figures and public servants. One of the more surprising details is just how long the Peoria PD held onto Daniel's cell phone (presumably as evidence of a Twitter account).

Daniel was arrested (at work) on April 15th. Charges were dropped on April 23rd (something Daniel learned from the papers, rather than from the city itself). That day, he visited the police department to get his phone back. The police refused. Daniel's lawyer sent a letter the next day demanding the release of Daniel's phone. It took all the way until May 2nd for the PPD to return property it never should have had in the first place.

Equally as surprising was how many warrants were crafted and served over a parodic Twitter account. In addition to the warrant served Twitter, the PPD also served one to Comcast. It obtained warrants to search his residence and cell phone. (Presumably, warrants were in the works for the electronics seized during the four-officer raid of the Twitter parody account's "headquarters" -- i.e., Daniel's home.) According to the filing, the PPD was also working on a warrant to serve to Google to access Daniel's email account. All of this over a Twitter account that was shut down by Twitter on March 20th after verifying that Mayor Jim Ardis was not behind it.

There's nothing in here that wasn't done out of sheer vindictiveness. Once the account was closed, Ardis was free to create an official account for the mayor's office. But he didn't. Instead, he worked closely with Peoria Police for more than a month to ensure the account's creator was punished. Now, he and his office, along with every law enforcement member involved, are being sued for violating Daniel's rights. I'm sure this isn't playing out exactly how Ardis envisioned it. Instead of "protecting" his reputation, he's completely destroyed it, doing more damage than a profane parody account (or twelve...) could ever do.

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Funny.