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February 2017
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Patent Troll Sues Netflix, Soundcloud, Vimeo And More For Allowing Offline Viewing

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Joe Mullin over at Ars Technica has the story of a patent troll, Blackbird Technologies, which was founded by (of course) two patent attorneys to buy up patents and shakedown companies with legal threats. Blackbird Technologies has now sued Netflix, Soundcloud, Vimeo and a variety of other companies over US Patent 7,174,362, issued in 2007 (filed for in 2000) on a "method and system for supplying products from pre-stored digital data in response to demands transmitted via computer network."Specifically, the lawsuits are targeting various "download to consume offline" features on various content websites. Netflix, of course, just famously launched that long-requested feature, which is useful in cases where people have slow or no internet access (e.g., taking your laptop on an airplane without internet access). If anyone thinks that this kind of feature was developed because of this patent, they're being delusional. And that's especially true because the patent itself isn't even about downloading content from the network for offline viewing. Instead, it's actually about someone ordering some content over the internet, having that content automatically burned to a CD-ROM and having that CD-R shipped off to the person. As Mullin notes, the true irony here, is that the guy who got the patent in the first place, Sungil Lee, may have been inspired by Netflix, which already had a very popular business shipping DVD's ordered online to customers:

Context is important when looking at Lee's patent. It's extremely unlikely an inventor writing up the idea of a web-based system for creating and shipping CD-Rs, in the year 2000, was not acutely aware of Netflixwhose DVDs-in-the-mail business had begun blowing up. If there was any copying at all, it was Lee copying Netflix's idea. But in the upside-down world of patent trolls, it's Blackbird who gets to claim the mantle of defending innovation, while it accuses Netflix of being the copycat.
And the thing is, even the idea of having content written automatically to CD-Rs was hardly new in 2000. This patent never should have been granted. I remember back in 1998, when I was working for a company that did electronic distribution of software being pitched by multiple companies that were working on similar solutions, and even seeing a demonstration of one such company at COMDEX in the fall of 1998 (if I remember correctly, to demonstrate how it worked they burned me a copy of Internet Explorer 5) which had just been released. So this patent never should have been granted in the first place. On top of that, to sue companies for doing the obvious thing of offering downloads for offline viewing is a clear abuse of the patent system.The lawsuits were filed in Delaware, which has become the "new East Texas" in recent years due to a series of patent troll friendly rulings. Every time we hear stories about how patent trolling is on the decline, we see stories like this, suggesting patent trolling is still a huge problem and still a huge cost on innovation, rather than a boon to innovation.

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UK Police Spy On Journalists At Small Town Paper, Gather One Million Minutes Worth Of Call Data

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The UK's top spy agencies have been known to place journalists under surveillance. Leaked Snowden documents showed GCHQ collected emails from news organizations such as the New York Times, BBC, and Washington Post. More accusations of spying were raised by UK journalists, detailing what appeared to be a clear abuse of the country's anti-terror laws -- laws particularly prone to exploitation thanks to generous loopholes and a minimum of oversight.

It wasn't just spy agencies doing the spying. In the case of the UK journalists, it was also local law enforcement digging through their emails and phone calls in hopes of identifying sources and leakers. More evidence of police surveillance of journalists has come to light, as reported by the Associated Press. Once again, it's law enforcement looking to uncover sources and whistleblowers, rather than terrorists or criminals.

British journalist Julia Breen's scoop about racism at her local police force didn't just get her on the front page, it got her put under surveillance.

In the months that followed Breen's exclusive, investigators logged her calls, those of her colleague Graeme Hetherington and even their modest-sized newspaper's busy switchboard in an effort to unmask their sources. The two were stunned when they eventually discovered the scale of the spying.

"It just never even crossed our minds," Breen said in a recent interview in the newsroom of The Northern Echo, in the English market town of Darlington. "I don't know if I was quite naive, but on a regional newspaper you don't expect your local police force to do this."

Mark Dias, a Cleveland Police officer, came forward and admitted he was the source for Breen's story, but that didn't stop the department from obtaining three days worth of calls to the paper's switchboard, along with logs of calls to and from three of the journalists who worked for the paper.

Once the police were tapped in, they just kept collecting call records.

Although none of the seized records included the content of the individuals' conversations, collectively the length, timing and nature of hundreds of phone calls can be extraordinarily revealing. It was later calculated that the surveillance covered over 1 million minutes of calling time.

And for what? The whistleblower the police were interested in had already outed himself. (And placed under investigation by his department.) Anything beyond that point was purely a fishing expedition for new sources/whistleblowers -- presumably in hopes of heading off more negative press. In addition to the journalists and Dias, Cleveland Police gathered information on communications with a police union official, and a lawyer that Dias and the union official were working with.

Since this came to light, the department has apologized to all of its snooping targets. It has also promised to perform an internal review of its last six years of policework to see if other surveillance abuses have taken place. This was more likely prompted by a court decision calling the surveillance unlawful than the department's innate desire to do the right thing. It will be doing it now, but only after being caught doing things it shouldn't have been doing.

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