Author: Joe Mullin

Ross Ulbricht, convicted last February of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road darknet marketplace, has filed his appeal brief. It’s a 170-page whopper that revisits several of the evidentiary arguments that Ulbricht's lawyer made at trial. It also focuses on allegations of government corruption that didn’t come out until afterward.

The brief reprises the central elements of Ulbricht’s defense: namely, that he didn't do it. Ulbricht still says he wasn’t “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or DPR, and that “there were multiple DPRs over the course of Silk Road’s existence.”

As to the digital mountain of evidence that the feds found on his computer—including Silk Road logs and thousands of pages of chats with Silk Road admins—Ulbricht answers with a kind of vague “the Internet is scary” story. His attorney, Joshua Dratel, writes that “vulnerabilities inherent to the Internet and digital data,” like hacking and fabrication of files, made “much of the evidence against Ulbricht inauthentic, unattributable to him, and/or untimely unreliable.”

In late 2013, Yahoo was hit with six lawsuits over their practice of using automated scans of e-mail to produce targeted ads. The cases, which were consolidated in federal court, all argued that the privacy rights of non-Yahoo users, who "did not consent to Yahoo's interception and scanning of their emails," were having their rights violated by a multi-billion dollar company.

Now, lawyers representing the plaintiffs are singing a different tune. Last week, they asked US District Judge Lucy Koh to accept a proposed settlement (PDF). Under the proposal, the massive class of non-Yahoo users won't get any payment, but the class lawyers at Girard Gibbs and Kaplan Fox intend to ask for up to $4 million in fees. (The ultimate amount of fees will be up to the judge, but Yahoo has agreed not to oppose any fee request up to $4 million.)

While users won't get any payment, Yahoo will change how it handles user e-mails—but it isn't the change that the plaintiffs attorneys were originally asking for. Yahoo won't stop scanning e-mails, which is what the plaintiffs originally called for. Instead, the company has agreed to make a technical fix about when it scans e-mails. In the settlement (PDF), Yahoo has agreed that e-mail content will be "only sent to servers for analysis for advertising purposes after a Yahoo Mail user can access the email in his or her inbox."

Starting next week, certain state ID cards will no longer be accepted at federal facilities. Five states, along with the territory of American Samoa, aren't compliant with the 2005 "Real ID" law and haven't received an extension from the Department of Homeland Security. On Sunday, January 10, a "grace period" will end and enforcement of the Real ID rules will begin, DHS officials told reporters on a press call today.

The bigger concern for many citizens is whether ID cards from non-compliant states will be accepted for air travel. On that point, there's some breathing room. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement today that the law will be enforced with regard to air travel beginning on January 18, 2018. At that time, travelers with ID cards from states that don't meet the law's requirements "must present an alternative form of identification acceptable to the Transportation Security Administration in order to board a commercial domestic flight."

Johnson's statement also says that on October 1, 2020, every air traveler will need a Real ID-compliant license or another acceptable form of ID, such as a passport. (That's essentially the same rule as the 2018 deadline, but there's no talk of states still having "extensions" in 2020.)

On Tuesday, a federal judge rejected a proposed class-action lawsuit targeting Apple's extended service plan. US District Judge William Orrick shot down (PDF) all five of the plaintiff's legal theories and also had scathing words for the Texas lawyer who filed the suit.

English v. Apple was originally filed in 2013 in Galveston, Texas, and the case was later transferred to California. The three named plaintiffs, Patricia Adkins, Jennifer Galindo, and Fabrienne English, all said that Apple's AppleCare extended service plans amounted to a "fraudulent and unlawful scheme" because the company sometimes uses refurbished iPhones as replacement units.

But none of the plaintiffs were disgruntled consumers who went looking for a lawyer after getting bad service. Galindo was a paralegal for Renee Kennedy, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit, and Adkins had also worked for Kennedy in the past. Kennedy gave them both "monetary gifts to thank them for their excellent work," and both women used those "gifts" to buy AppleCare Plus, referred to as "AC+" in court papers.

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the law that allows content owners to remove copyrighted material from the Internet, and it's made just about no one happy. Content owners are bitter that their material tends to keep popping up, even when they've asked for it to be removed hundreds or even thousands of times. Internet platforms that host large amounts of user-generated content must cope with millions of infringement allegations, mass-produced by software. When those algorithms make mistakes, it's often users who pay the price—told they're copyright scofflaws because there was background music in their home video or they shared a photo of a toy they bought.

If you're feeling down about the DMCA this winter—or feeling just skippy about it—there's a government agency that wants to hear from you. On December 31, the US Copyright Office said it intends to take public comments about the effectiveness of the DMCA and its "safe harbor" provisions.

The comments will be part of a "public study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the safe harbor provisions" of the DMCA. Questions that the office wants to consider include:

Wearable technology company Valencell has sued both Apple and Fitbit, saying the two companies' devices infringe on various Valencell patents.

In the Apple complaint (PDF), Valencell says that the Apple Watch infringes its patents, and the company also adds some unusual breach of contract claims. Valencell lawyers say that Apple employees downloaded white papers from the Valencell website. The white papers are publicly available, but they require a user to enter contact information before receiving the papers. Valencell says that "Apple breached this contract by not providing the organization, name, and email address of the recipient."

Valencell was able to capture several IP addresses from visitors who got the white papers and link them to Apple. The breach of contract claims say that white papers were downloaded to Apple IP addresses in March 2013, March 2014, and April of 2015. The paper allegedly downloaded in 2013 was called “PerformTek Precision Biometrics: Engaging the Burgeoning Mobile Health and Fitness Market."

Statistics released today show that 2015 saw more patent lawsuits filed than any other year save one. Buried beneath heaps of high-tech lawsuits—led as usual by "patent trolls," shell companies with no real assets other than patents—are strong trends pushing power away from patent-holders and toward the defendant companies they sue.

If one adds together district court cases with patent disputes that are resolved through the process of "inter partes review," or IPR, a proceeding involving the Patent Trademark and Appeals Board (PTAB) at the US Patent Office, then 2015 saw the most patent disputes in history. If only district court cases are measured, 2013 was the year with the most filings.

"This would indicate that activity has not decreased since the America Invents Act became law," said Kevin Jakel, CEO of United Patents.

The device shown above is a $199 video peripheral that Warner Brothers doesn't think should have been in anyone's Christmas stocking. Until just hours ago, it was available for online purchase.

The devices, sold by an organization called HD Fury, allowed HD video to be moved around and displayed on devices that wouldn't normally be equipped to handle the content. To do that, the devices stripped out the entertainment industry's copy protection, called HDCP. The "HD Fury Integral," pictured above, was able to strip out even the newest version, HDCP 2.2, which protects Ultra HD or "4K" video content.

Stripping out that copy protection is a brazen violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, according to lawyers for Warner Brothers and Digital Content Protection (DCP), the company that licenses HDCP. Warner and DCP filed a lawsuit (PDF) on December 31 against LegendSky, the owner of HD Fury. The plaintiffs' lawyers say LegendSky is "a business or an individual located in China."

Cisco has finally quashed a long-running lawsuit brought by an Israeli patent-holding company called Commil USA. The case took a surprising number of detours, including a trip to the Supreme Court last year that looks almost unnecessary in hindsight.

In an opinion (PDF) published Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said that Cisco's non-infringement argument should have won the day at trial, and there was no justification for a jury's $64 million verdict against the networking giant. The opinion overturns the verdict, leaving Commil with nothing to show for a case it has pursued since 2007.

Monday's decision puts the Federal Circuit in an awkward position, because they had already considered the case before in 2013. At that time, the three-judge panel chose to punt on the non-infringement argument, simply not ruling on it—yet now the same panel views it as a decisive point in Cisco's favor.

In an interview on 60 Minutes earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the idea that his company dodges taxes is "political crap," with no truth behind it. "Apple pays every tax dollar we owe," Cook said.

Outside the US, Apple has faced more than just tough questions in front of the camera. In Italy, tax authorities began an investigation in 2013 to determine whether Apple was moving its Italian revenue through an Irish subsidiary in order to take advantage of Ireland's low corporate tax rate.

That investigation has now concluded, according to reports in The Guardian and The New York Times. Italian tax authorities say Apple skipped out on paying €880 million, or about $960 million. Tax officials won't say what Apple has agreed to pay, but citing local reports, the Times reports it may be around $350 million.