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February 2018
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Mozilla's Open Letter To Expert Committee Drafting India's First Data Protection Law Slams Aadhaar Biometric Identity System

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Techdirt has been covering India's monster biometric database, Aadhaar, since 2015. Media in India, naturally, have been on the story longer, and continue to provide detailed coverage of its roll-out and application. But wider knowledge of the trailblazing identity project remains limited. One international organization that has been working to raise awareness is Mozilla, home of the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client.Last May, an opinion piece entitled "Aadhaar isn't progress -- it's dystopian and dangerous", by Mozilla Executive Chairwoman and Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker and Mozilla community member Ankit Gadgil, appeared in India's Business Standard newspaper. In July 2017, Mozilla released a statement on the Indian Supreme Court hearings on Aadhaar. A blog post in November pointed out that the Aadhaar system is increasingly being used by private companies for their services, something Techdirt covered earlier. Similarly, after it was revealed that anybody's Aadhaar details could be bought for around $8 each, Mozilla issued a statement saying "this latest, egregious breach should be a giant red flag to all companies as well as to the UIDAI [Unique Identification Authority of India] and the [Indian] Government."Following the creation of a committee to draft India's first comprehensive data protection law, Mozilla has now paid for an open letter to appear in The Hindustan Times. It was written by Baker, and co-signed by 1,447 Mozilla India community members. Although the letter welcomes the work being carried out by the committee of experts, it criticizes Aadhaar for its many failings, and points out some serious omissions in the committee's report on data protection:

The current proposal exempts biometric info from the definition of sensitive personal information that must be especially protected. This is backwards, biometric info is some of the most personal info, and can't be "reset" like a password.The design of Aadhaar fails to provide meaningful consent to users. This is seen, for example, by the ever increasing number of public and private services that are linked to Aadhaar without users being given a meaningful choice in the matter. This can and should be remedied by stronger consent, data minimization, collection limitation, and purpose limitation obligations.Instead of crafting narrow exemptions for the legitimate needs of law enforcement, you propose to exempt entire agencies from accountability and legal restrictions on how user data may be accessed and processed.Your report also casts doubt on whether individuals should be allowed a right to object over how their data is processed; this is a core pillar of data protection, without a right to object, consent is not meaningful and individual liberty is curtailed.
On a Web page called "Key challenges and the way forward", Mozilla calls on the Indian government to "pause further roll out of Aadhaar until the major problems with Aadhaar have been addressed." It also has a further suggestion:
The Indian government must release Aadhaar as true open source software rather than use language of open source, and encourage the use, development, and adoption of open source as a pillar of the Aadhaar system
Of course, you might expect an open source foundation like Mozilla to say that, but nonetheless it's good to see what is at heart a software organization engaging with global problems that affect huge numbers of people in this way. Others should do the same.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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posted at: 12:00am on 16-Feb-2018
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US Piracy Lawsuits Shoot Out Of The 2018 Gates As The Malibu Media 'Coaching Tree' Spreads Its Seeds

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For those of you not interested in professional sports, allow me to educate you on the concept of the "coaching tree." This concept comes from the common decisions by losing teams to hire junior coaches out from under the head coaches of successful teams, hoping to siphon off some of the genius of more successful organizations. In football, for instance, you will often hear about the "Andy Reid coaching tree" as his assistants get head coaching jobs across the league after serving underneath him.Sadly, a much more sinister version of this appears to be occurring in the copyright trolling space, with Malibu Media serving as a launching point for legal minds joining other organizations and replicating what they've learned from their former employer. The result has been an explosion in copyright lawsuits for the early part of 2018, with most of them coming from the porn-trolling industry.

According to Lex Machina, there were 1,019 file-sharing cases filed in the United States last year, which is an average of 85 per month. More than half of these came from adult entertainment outfit Malibu Media (X-Art), which alone was good for 550 lawsuits.While those are decent numbers, they could easily be shattered this year. Data collected by TorrentFreak shows that during the first month of 2018, three copyright holders filed a total of 286 lawsuits against alleged pirates. That’s three times more than the monthly average for 2017.
As the TorrentFreak post goes on to note, while Malibu Media is still leading the way in these lawsuits, a company called Strike 3 Holdings is keeping pace with them, 138 lawsuits for the former and 133 for the latter. The rest of the companies that have filed suits against BitTorrent infringers are other porn-related organizations, save for Bodyguard Productions, which sues over the pirating of the Hitman: Bodyguard film. Interestingly, it seems that this significant uptick in the lawsuit rate has been driven by former Malibu Media employees finding new professional landing spots.
While Strike 3 Holdings is a relative newcomer, their cases follow a similar pattern. There are also clear links to Malibu Media, as one of the company’s former lawyers, Emilie Kennedy, now works as in-house counsel at Strike 3.
This comes at the same time that some courts are pushing back on these trolling efforts. Between some courts describing their tactics as harassing to questioning seriously the evidence that the trolls present to the court, this is the exact wrong time for the court system to suddenly be clogged with Malibu Media-trained legal minds hell bent on trolling for settlement dollars.The only good that might come out of this, should this lawsuit pace continue, is a public recognition that these trolling operations need to be stopped.

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