New York City Council Passes Police Reforms That Includes Ending Qualified Immunity For NYPD Officers
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Qualified immunity is pure judicial cancer. This fact cannot be ignored. What began as a limited defense for decisions made in the heat of the moment has become the de facto response to civil rights lawsuits. The Supreme Court -- which conjured this new Section 1983 ejection seat out of thin air -- has only made it worse over the past few decades.Qualified immunity is more bulletproof than the Kevlar vests worn by those who summon its protections most frequently. Efforts have been made to dial this back, but so far, we've yet to see them come to fruition.Attempts to remove qualified immunity have faced massive amounts of opposition from some of the most powerful entities in the United States: law enforcement agencies and their unions. Despite this, efforts continue to be made to rein in something that has pretty much become a permission slip for rights violations.The good news (via MagentaRocks) is that one ongoing effort to end immunity targets the largest law enforcement agency in the nation: the New York City Police Department. This package of reforms offers up some other useful changes, like requiring NYPD officers to live in the city and mandating quarterly reports on vehicle stops, broken down by ethnicity, race, and age. It also would strip the police commissioner of final say on cases recommended for discipline by the Civilian Complaint Review Board. This would prevent CCRB recommendations from being overturned by the NYPD, something that has happened with alarming frequency in the past.But here's the big news: the end of qualified immunity for NYPD officers.Sponsored by Brooklyn Councilman Stephen Levin, Intro. 2220-A ends qualified immunity for police officers, which gives officers an exemption for civil lawsuits unless proven by the plaintiff that the officer’s action directly violated civil rights.The council’s legislation gives “a local right of security against unreasonable search and seizure,” in addition to excessive force. Of course, this would be limited to cases handled solely by New York City courts. Federal civil rights lawsuits wouldn't be affected by this removal. Nor would cases handled by state courts. So, it will only affect a small number of lawsuits pursued entirely within the city's court system.Since city lawmakers are limited to crafting laws that affect the city, this is the best they can do. It's better than doing nothing and it will help, even if it's severely limited. And the bill still needs to be signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has offered his support for some police reforms, but hasn't exactly shown he's willing to take on the NYPD during his tenure in office.It's a very small (but positive) change. But as small as it is, it's not small enough to keep the city's law enforcement unions from complaining about it.The city’s police unions have vocally opposed the bill, saying ending qualified immunity could have a chilling effect on officer’s willingness to insert themselves into complex and dangerous situations to enforce the law. I don't think that's true. Good officers will still insert themselves into these situations. Officers who like to play fast and loose with rights and civil liberties may choose to sit some of these situations out. Qualified immunity hasn't given us better, smarter cops. It has encouraged abusive behavior by giving officers a litigation escape hatch -- one that's rarely denied by courts.
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posted at: 12:00am on 02-Apr-2021
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Sega DMCAs SteamDB Despite That Site Not Hosting Any Pirated Material
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Sega has something of a flip-floppy history when it comes to how restrictive the company chooses to be with intellectual property generally and DMCA takedowns more specifically. The company notably went DMCA happy back in 2012, for instance, over a bunch of fan videos on YouTube for Shining Force, all because it had a planned release for a PSP version of the title. In 2013, the company actually half-apologized for doing so, promising to be more lenient with what it allows, though there were caveats expressed as well. Fast forward to 2016 and Sega quite gleefully poked some fun at its rival, Nintendo, for its DMCA blitzes, instead encouraging fans to make and create cool and fun stuff with some of its IP.Well, here we are in 2021, and Sega once again is in the news, in this case for a DMCA takedown sent to the SteamDB site.As SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik shared on Twitter Monday, Sega's lawyers asked that the site and its host take down a page for Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The takedown request alleges that SteamDB is distributing or linking to pirated copies of the game, even though a quick glance at an archived version shows that's not true.That page, like every other on SteamDB, simply compiles historical data on pricing, concurrent players, and other statistics from Steam's own API and public store pages. While there is a link to install the game near the top, that link directs users to Steam itself, which will attempt to install a legitimate copy if the user owns it. Just so everyone is clear, SteamDB has literally nothing to do with piracy of games. Instead, SteamDB compiles a ton of interesting statistics about games on Valve's Steam platform. Oh, and SteamDB also pushes visitors looking at game statistics to the totally legit place to buy them on Steam. Unfortunately, due to the either automated way some publishers police piracy of their games, or due to an ill-informed legal team tasked with issuing DMCA notices, SteamDB gets the occasional DMCA takedown request. It's yet another example of how hard policing this sort of thing is, where the actual publishers of these games are doing a ready-fire-aim DMCA approach. In this case, the SteamDB page for Yakuza: Like a Dragon was taken down, though it appears that was rectified afterwards.Sega has provided the following statement to Ars Technica: "Earlier this week, one of our games was incorrectly flagged on SteamDB. We utilize anti-piracy software to protect our games at a large scale, but sometimes it makes mistakes. Sega will continue to fine-tune these systems to avoid this in the future and we appreciate SteamDB cooperating with us to resolve the issue quickly." It's not terrible as far as apologies go for this sort of thing, but there is something unfulfilling about a message of: "Hey, you were collateral damage, too bad, so sad." Mistakes like this aren't world-ending, certainly, but they are a nuisance for innocent parties to endure simply because policing copyright infringement at scale is apparently an impossible task.
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posted at: 12:00am on 02-Apr-2021
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