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  • Record 40-Tonne Cannabis Haul Found in North Macedonia

    Authorities in North Macedonia have seized a record 40 tonnes of cannabis after inspections at licensed medicinal plant companies revealed that the method of production, storage, and handling indicated the drug was actually meant for illegal activities.

    Officials suspect the cannabis is connected to a recent record seizure in Serbia of about five tonnes of marijuana and weapons, which may have originated in North Macedonia.

    The Interior Ministry said inspections at a Skopje-based company uncovered about nine tonnes of marijuana and more than 1,300 bottles of cannabis oil. Investigators also found over 31 tonnes of marijuana and plant biomass at several companies in the eastern part of the country.

    The scrutiny intensified after one of the suspects detained in Serbia less than two weeks ago was linked to the Skopje company’s ownership. Health inspectors found major discrepancies between recorded and actual quantities, prompting prosecutors to seize all cannabis on the premises.

    The seizures are under investigation by a joint team of police, prosecutors from the Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime and Corruption, customs officials, and the Health Ministry’s supervisory commission.

    On January 29, Serbian police reported seizing about five tonnes of marijuana near Kruševac, along with automatic rifles and a rocket launcher. Interior Minister Ivica Dačić said the haul, valued at 7 to 10 million euros ($8.3–11.9 million), involved two suspects arrested for illegal drug production and weapons violations.

    North Macedonia’s Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski called the uncovered irregularities “catastrophic” and said authorities are continuing the investigation. He noted that the Serbia seizure was part of the same network and that the drugs seized in Serbia probably originated from North Macedonia.

  • Op-ed: Weakening Section 230 Would Chill Online Speech

    (This appeared as an op-ed published Friday, Feb. 6 in the Daily Journal, a California legal newspaper.)

    Section 230, “the 26 words that created the internet,” was enacted 30 years ago this week. It was no rush-job—rather, it was the result of wise legislative deliberation and foresight, and it remains the best bulwark to protect free expression online.

    The internet lets people everywhere connect, share ideas and advocate for change without needing immense resources or technical expertise. Our unprecedented ability to communicate online—on blogs, social media platforms, and educational and cultural platforms like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive—is not an accident. In writing Section 230, Congress recognized that for free expression to thrive on the internet, it had to protect the services that power users’ speech. Section 230 does this by preventing most civil suits against online services that are based on what users say. The law also protects users who act like intermediaries when they, for example, forward an email, retweet another user or host a comment section on their blog.

    The merits of immunity, both for internet users who rely on intermediaries—from ISPs to email providers to social media platforms, and for internet users who are intermediaries—are readily apparent when compared with the alternatives.

    One alternative would be to provide no protection at all for intermediaries, leaving them liable for anything and everything anyone says using their service. This legal risk would essentially require every intermediary to review and legally assess every word, sound or image before it’s published—an impossibility at scale, and a death knell for real-time user-generated content.

    Another option: giving protection to intermediaries only if they exercise a specified duty of care, such as where an intermediary would be liable if they fail to act reasonably in publishing a user’s post. But negligence and other objective standards are almost always insufficient to protect freedom of expression because they introduce significant uncertainty into the process and create real chilling effects for intermediaries. That is, intermediaries will choose not to publish anything remotely provocative—even if it’s clearly protected speech—for fear of having to defend themselves in court, even if they are likely to ultimately prevail. Many Section 230 critics bemoan the fact that it prevented courts from developing a common law duty of care for online intermediaries. But the criticism rarely acknowledges the experience of common law courts around the world, few of which adopted an objective standard, and many of which adopted immunity or something very close to it.

    Congress’ purposeful choice of Section 230’s immunity is the best way to preserve the ability of millions of people in the U.S. to publish their thoughts, photos and jokes online, to blog and vlog, post, and send emails and messages.

    Another alternative is a knowledge-based system in which an intermediary is liable only after being notified of the presence of harmful content and failing to remove it within a certain amount of time. This notice-and-takedown system invites tremendous abuse, as seen under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s approach: It’s too easy for someone to notify an intermediary that content is illegal or tortious simply to get something they dislike depublished. Rather than spending the time and money required to adequately review such claims, intermediaries would simply take the content down.

    All these alternatives would lead to massive depublication in many, if not most, cases, not because the content deserves to be taken down, nor because the intermediaries want to do so, but because it’s not worth assessing the risk of liability or defending the user’s speech. No intermediary can be expected to champion someone else’s free speech at its own considerable expense.Nor is the United States the only government to eschew “upload filtering,” the requirement that someone must review content before publication. European Union rules avoid this also, recognizing how costly and burdensome it is. Free societies recognize that this kind of pre-publication review will lead risk-averse platforms to nix anything that anyone anywhere could deem controversial, leading us to the most vanilla, anodyne internet imaginable.

    The advent of artificial intelligence doesn’t change this. Perhaps there’s a tool that can detect a specific word or image, but no AI can make legal determinations or be prompted to identify all defamation or harassment. Human expression is simply too contextual for AI to vet; even if a mechanism could flag things for human review, the scale is so massive that such human review would still be overwhelmingly burdensome.

    Congress’ purposeful choice of Section 230’s immunity is the best way to preserve the ability of millions of people in the U.S. to publish their thoughts, photos and jokes online, to blog and vlog, post, and send emails and messages. Each of those acts requires numerous layers of online services, all of which face potential liability without immunity.

    This law isn’t a shield for “big tech.” Its ultimate beneficiaries are all of us who want to post things online without having to code it ourselves, and so that we can read and watch content that others create. If Congress eliminated Section 230 immunity, for example, we would be asking email providers and messaging platforms to read and legally assess everything a user writes before agreeing to send it. 

    For many critics of Section 230, the chilling effect is the point: They want a system that will discourage online services to publish protected speech that some find undesirable. They want platforms to publish less than what they would otherwise choose to publish, even when that speech is protected and nonactionable.

    When Section 230 was passed in 1996, about 40 million people used the internet worldwide; by 2025, estimates ranged from five billion to north of six billion. In 1996, there were fewer than 300,000 websites; by last year, estimates ranged up to 1.3 billion. There is no workforce and no technology that can police the enormity of everything that everyone says.

    Internet intermediaries—whether social media platforms, email providers or users themselves—are protected by Section 230 so that speech can flourish online.

  • Hong Kong Jails Jimmy Lai for 20 Years Under National Security Law

    A Hong Kong court on Monday sentenced Jimmy Lai, a prominent critic of Beijing whose pro-democracy newspaper closed in 2021 following police raids and arrests, to 20 years in prison under the city’s national security law.

    Lai, the former publisher of Apple Daily, was found guilty in December of conspiring to publish seditious material and conspiring to “collude with a foreign country or external elements.” The verdict is widely seen as a landmark ruling and a major blow to press freedom in the special administrative region.

    Judges deemed the foreign-collusion charges “grave” and identified Lai as the “mastermind” behind the offenses, while granting limited mitigation for his age, health, and time spent in solitary confinement.

    He is already serving a separate 5-year, 9-month sentence for an unrelated fraud case, and the court ordered 18 years of the new term to run consecutively to that previous sentence.

  • Sudan: UN rights chief says worse is to come without international action

    As the brutal Sudan war shows no signs of ending, UN human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday called on the international community to intervene immediately to stop more mass killings and other flagrant war crimes against civilians.

  • Proposed amnesty law offers political prisoners in Venezuela an ‘opportunity’

    A draft amnesty law in Venezuela aimed at granting immediate clemency to people jailed for participating in political protests or criticizing public figures, has been welcomed by a UN commission of experts – although they have emphasised the Venezuelan people need to be at the centre of the process.

  • UN calls for release of Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai following 20-year sentence

    The UN human rights chief on Monday called for the immediate release of Hong Kong media magnate Jimmy Lai after a Chinese court handed him a 20-year prison sentence under the city’s national security legislation, warning the verdict violates international human rights law.

  • Martin Shkreli Had a Point

    It’s been a decade since Martin Shkreli became the most hated man in America. In August 2015, Shkreli raised the price of Daraprim – an antiparasitic essential for immunocompromised patients – from $17.50 to $750 per pill. Hillary Clinton tweeted about price gouging; Congress hauled him before committees; journalists dubbed him “Pharma Bro.” He was eventually sentenced to seven years in prison.

    Source

  • Pluralistic: The Epstein class and collapse porn (09 Feb 2026)

    Today’s links


    A detail of a US $100 bill. Jeffrey Epstein's mugshot has been overlaid over Benjamin Franklin's portrait. Peter Thiel's portrait has been swapped for the US Dept of Treasury seal. Trump's signature has been swapped for the US Treasurer's signature. The line of zeroes after the 100, top and bottom, has been extended to the edge of the image. The image has been roughed up and recolored in a hellish mix of reds and yellows.

    The Epstein class and collapse porn (permalink)

    It’s hard to talk about the Epstein class without thinking about “The Economy” – “The Economy” in the sense of a kind of mystical, free-floating entity whose health or sickness determines the outcomes for all the rest of us, whom we must make sacrifices to if we are to prosper.

    As nebulous as “The Economy” is as an entity, there’s an economic priesthood that claims it can measure and even alter the course of the economy using complex mathematics. We probably won’t ever understand their methods, but we can at least follow an indicator or two, such as changes to GDP, an aggregated statistic that is deceptively precise, given that it subsumes any number of estimates, qualitative judgments and wild-ass guesses, which are all disguised behind an official statistic that is often published to three decimal places.

    There’s plenty to criticize about GDP: a healthy GDP doesn’t necessarily mean that the average worker is better off. When your rent goes up, so does GDP. Same with your salary going down (provided this results in more spending by your boss). GDP isn’t really a measure of the health of “The Economy” – it’s a measure of the parts of “The Economy” that make rich people (that is, the Epstein class) better off.

    But what if there was a way to make money from calamitous collapses in GDP? What if the wealthy didn’t just win when “number go up,” but also when “number eat shit?”

    The latest batch of Epstein emails includes a particularly ghoulish exchange between Epstein and his business partner, the anti-democracy activist and billionaire Peter Thiel:

    https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00824843.pdf

    The email is dated 26 Jun 2016, right after Brexit, and in it, Epstein writes:

    return to tribalism . counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain

    This is a perfect example of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” It’s been the norm since the crash of 2008, when bankers were made whole through public bailouts and mortgage holders were evicted by the millions to “foam the runway” for the banks:

    https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/

    The crash of 2008 turned a lot of people’s homes – their only substantial possessions – into “distressed assets” that were purchased at fire-sale prices by Wall Street investors, who turned around and rented those homes out to people who were now priced out of the housing market at rents that kept them too poor to ever afford a home, under slum conditions that crawled with insects and black mold:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/

    Note here that economic collapse helps the Epstein class only if society has no social safety net. If Obama had supported homeowners instead of banks, there wouldn’t have been a foreclosure crisis and thus there wouldn’t have been any “distressed assets” flooding the market.

    So it’s no surprise that the Epstein class are also obsessed with austerity. Peter Mandelson (British Labour’s “Prince of Darkness”) is a close ally of Epstein’s, and also a key figure in the crushing austerity agenda of Blair, Brown and Starmer. He’s a machine for turning Parliamentary majorities into distressed assets at scale.

    Same for Steve Bannon, another close Epstein ally, who boasts about his alliances with far-right figures who exalt the capital class and call for deregulation and the elimination of public services: Le Pen, Salvini, Farage. Combine that with Epstein and Thiel’s gloating about “finding things on their way to collapse…much easier than finding the next bargain,” and it starts to feel like these guys are even happier with “number eat shit” than they are with “number go up.”

    Trump is the undisputed king of the Epstein class, and he seems determined to drive “The Economy” over a cliff. Take his tariff program, modeled on the McKinley tariffs of 1890, which led to the Panic of 1893, a financial crisis that saw one in four American workers forced into unemployment and 15,000 businesses into bankruptcy (that’s a lot of distressed assets!):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893

    Then there’s Trump’s mass deportation program, which will force lots of businesses (farms, restaurants, etc) into bankruptcy, creating another massive pool of distressed assets. Trump’s given ICE $75b, while the DoJ Antitrust Division and FTC (which protect Americans from corporate scams) have seen their budgets take a real-terms cut. The majority of DoJ lawyers and FBI agents are working on immigration cases (against workers, not employers, mind!). The Antitrust Division has $275m to fight all of America’s corporate crime:

    https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/white-collar-crime-enforcement-in

    I’m not saying that Trump is trying to induce another massive economic crash. I’m saying, rather, that within his coalition there is a substantial bloc of powerful, wealthy people who are on the hunt for “things on their way to collapse,” and who are doubtless maneuvering to frustrate other Trump coalition members who are solely committed to “number go up.”

    Even the collapse of crypto creates lots of opportunities to “buy the dip.” Not the dip in crypto (crypto’s going to zero), but the dip in all the real things people bought with real money they got by borrowing against their shitcoins.

    The thousand-plus children that Epstein lured to his island rape-camp were often “distressed assets” in their own right: Julie K Brown’s groundbreaking reporting on Epstein for the Miami Herald described how he sought out children whose parents were poor, or neglectful, or both, on the grounds that those children would be “on their way to collapse,” too.

    The Epstein class’s commitment to destroying “The Economy” makes sense when you understand that trashing civilization is “much easier than finding the next bargain.” They want to buy the dip, so they’re creating the dip.

    They don’t need the whole number to go up, just theirs. They know that inclusive economies are more prosperous for society as a whole, but it makes criminals and predators worse off. The New Deal kicked off a period of American economic growth never seen before or since, but the rich despised it, because a prosperous economy is one in which it gets harder and harder to find “things on their way to collapse,” and thus nearly impossible to “find[] the next bargain.”

    (Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0)

    Hey look at this (permalink)


    A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #25yrsago Yours is a very bad hotel https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/yours-is-a-very-bad-hotel/34583

    #20yrsago Kids refuse to sell candy after completing health unit https://web.archive.org/web/20060223010123/http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5600588,00.html

    #20yrsago Disneyland model recreates Yippie invasion of 1970 https://web.archive.org/web/20051228122604/http://dannysland.blogspot.com/2005/12/great-moments-in-disneyland-history.html

    #20yrsago Canadian Red Cross wastes its money harassing video game makers https://web.archive.org/web/20060221020835/https://www.igniq.com/2006/02/canadian-red-cross-wants-its-logo-out.html

    #20yrsago How Yahoo/AOL’s email tax will hurt free speech https://web.archive.org/web/20060213175705/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004398.php#004398

    #20yrsago Adbusters and the Economist have the same covers https://pieratt.com/odds/adbusters_vs_theeconomist.jpg

    #20yrsago Head of British Vid Assoc: Piracy doesn’t hurt DVD sales http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4691228.stm#6

    #20yrsago Countries around the world rebelling against extreme copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20060629232414/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1095

    #20yrsago Web 1.0 logo-mosaic https://web.archive.org/web/20060506074530/https://www.complexify.com/buttons/

    #15yrsago Is it legal to print Settlers of Catan tiles on a 3D printer? https://web.archive.org/web/20110131102845/https://publicknowledge.org/blog/3d-printing-settlers-catan-probably-not-illeg

    #15yrsago UK Tories get majority of funding from bankers https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/feb/08/tory-funds-half-city-banks-financial-sector

    #15yrsago Colorado Springs school bans kid who takes THC lozenges for neuro condition from attending because of “internal possession” https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2011/02/07/teens-medical-marijuana-fight-escalates-as-school-says-he-cannot-come-back-to-class-after-going-home-for-medicine/

    #15yrsago Hamster-powered strandbeest walker https://crabfuartworks.blogspot.com/2011/02/hamster-powered-walker.html

    #15yrsago Daytripper: wrenching existential graphic novel https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/08/daytripper-wrenching-existential-graphic-novel/

    #15yrsago Pactuator: a mechanical, hand-cranked Pac-Man https://upnotnorth.net/projects/pac-machina/pactuator/

    #15yrsago Floppy drive organ plays toccata www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmoDLyiQYKw

    #15yrsago Mike Mignola talks setting and architecture https://www.bldgblog.com/2011/02/ruin-space-and-shadow-an-interview-with-mike-mignola/

    #15yrsago BBC to delete 172 unarchived sites, geek saves them for $3.99 https://web.archive.org/web/20110210152012/https://bengoldacre.posterous.com/nerd-saves-entire-bbc-archive-for-399-you-can

    #10yrsago Australia, the driest country on Earth, eliminates basic climate science research https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/australia-cuts-110-climate-scientist-jobs/

    #10yrsago Copyright trolls who claimed to own “Happy Birthday” will pay $14M to their “customers” https://web.archive.org/web/20160210091717/http://consumerist.com/2016/02/09/happy-birthday-song-settlement-to-pay-out-14-million-to-people-who-paid-to-use-song/

    #10yrsago Eviction epidemic: the racialized, weaponized homes of America’s cities https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

    #10yrsago Association of German judges slams US-EU trade deal for its special corporate courts https://www.techdirt.com/2016/02/09/top-german-judges-tear-to-shreds-eus-proposed-tafta-ttip-investment-court-system/

    #10yrsago A digital, 3D printed sundial whose precise holes cast a shadow displaying the current time https://www.mojoptix.com/fr/2015/10/12/ep-001-cadran-solaire-numerique/

    #10yrsago Jughead is asexual https://www.themarysue.com/jughead-asexuality/

    #10yrsago Vtech, having leaked 6.3m kids’ data, has a new EULA disclaiming responsibility for the next leak https://web.archive.org/web/20160210092704/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacked-toy-company-vtech-tos-now-says-its-not-liable-for-hacks

    #10yrsago How America’s presidents started cashing out https://web.archive.org/web/20160208210036/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/08/taxpayers-give-big-pensions-to-ex-presidents-precisely-so-they-dont-have-to-sell-out/

    #10yrsago Bill criminalizing anal and oral sex passes Michigan Senate https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2016/02/michigan_senate_passes_bill_saying_sodomy_is_a_felony/

    #10yrsago Hacker promises dump of data from 20K FBI and 9K DHS employees https://web.archive.org/web/20160208214013/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-plans-to-dump-alleged-details-of-20000-fbi-9000-dhs-employees

    #10yrsago Blooks: functional objects disguised as books https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/30/blook-madness-inside-the-world-of-bogus-books

    #10yrsago Indian regulator stands up for net neutrality, bans Facebook’s walled garden https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/facebooks-free-internet-app-banned-by-indias-new-net-neutrality-rule/

    #10yrsago British spies want to be able to suck data out of US Internet giants https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-british-want-to-come-to-america–with-wiretap-orders-and-search-warrants/2016/02/04/b351ce9e-ca86-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html

    #5yrsago Fleet Street calls out schtum Tories https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/permanent-record/#foia-uk

    #5yrsago The ECB should forgive the debt it owes itself https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/permanent-record/#ecb

    #5yrsago Favicons as undeletable tracking beacons https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/permanent-record/#supercookies

    #5yrsago Snowden’s young adult memoir https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/permanent-record/#ya-snowden

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

    A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


    A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

    • “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

    • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

    • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

    • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

    Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America ( words today, total)

    • “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

    This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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    Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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    “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla

    READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

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  • The peptide craze sweeping America has a fan in RFK Jr

    This could lead to less FDA oversight just when more is needed

    The post The peptide craze sweeping America has a fan in RFK Jr first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • DMCA Subpoenas Can’t Be Used for Foreign Piracy Lawsuits, Court Rules

    DMCA Subpoenas Can’t Be Used for Foreign Piracy Lawsuits, Court Rules

    With an impressive 185 million visitors per month early last year, Mangajikan was one of the largest piracy sites on the Internet.

    The site’s popularity did not go unnoticed by manga publisher Shueisha, which took legal action at a California federal court last summer to uncover the operator’s identity.

    Shueisha filed a request for a DMCA subpoena, directed at Cloudflare, hoping to expose the operator. This appeared to yield results right away, as mangajikan.com and the related domain alammanga.com were voluntarily taken down soon after.

    The DMCA subpoena was granted last October, despite fierce objections from Mangajikan’s former operator. However, Cloudflare could not hand anything over yet, as both sides disagreed on the scope of the associated protective order. This disagreement was finally resolved this week.

    U.S. Enforcement Only

    At the heart of the dispute was whether Shueisha could use the pirate site operator’s identity for copyright lawsuits in Japan or other foreign jurisdictions. The manga publisher argued it should have that flexibility, as it couldn’t know the operator’s location when requesting the subpoena.

    Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson disagreed.

    In a discovery order issued this week, the court stated that the DMCA subpoena’s purpose and scope is clearly defined by the sworn declaration Shueisha made to obtain it. This legally required statement says that the subpoena “will only be used for the purpose of protecting rights under this title.”

    “‘[T]his title’ means title 17 of the United States Code, so only U.S.-based copyright claims are within the purpose of the subpoena,” Judge Hixson wrote, adding that “foreign litigation is outside of that scope.”

    Out of Scope

    out of scope

    The ruling effectively means Shueisha can identify the operator to its team in Japan, as long as this is to aid U.S. copyright enforcement. However, it cannot use the data obtained through the Cloudflare subpoena to file copyright infringement actions in foreign courts.

    U.S. Lawsuit Can’t Be Used as Bypass

    The court also rejected Shueisha’s argument that filing a U.S. copyright lawsuit would effectively end the protective order’s restrictions, allowing the publisher to then use the publicly filed information however it wished, including in foreign proceedings.

    Judge Hixson characterized this as an impermissible bait-and-switch.

    “Filing a U.S.-based copyright claim does not cause the protections of the protective order to evaporate. They remain in place; otherwise, Shueisha’s attestation was false. It is not acceptable for Shueisha to make an attestation that it will use the requested information ‘only’ for one purpose and then later change its mind,” the order states.

    Mangajikan’s attorneys previously warned the court that Shueisha’s position would create a “roadmap” for rightsholders to circumvent DMCA limitations. They could simply obtain identity information through a DMCA subpoena, file a token U.S. lawsuit to make the info public, and then use it for foreign lawsuits.

    No Privacy Fortress for Pirate Site Operator

    While the pirate site operator won on the foreign litigation issue, the court rejected most of the operator’s proposed privacy protections as excessive. Judge Hixson called the operator’s 19-page protective order proposal “excessive,” noting it would have micromanaged Shueisha’s internal operations.

    Excessive

    excessive

    The final protective order clarifies that, while Shueisha can publicly identify the operator by name in U.S. court filings, other personal information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and financial data, remains protected.

    The order allows Shueisha to share the operator’s identity with its employees in Japan, coordinate with U.S. law enforcement, and use the information for settlement negotiations or U.S.-based copyright claims.

    What’s Next

    With the protective order now in place, Cloudflare must hand over the identity information to Shueisha’s lawyers. The publisher must then decide if it wants to use that information to file a U.S. copyright lawsuit, or pursue alternative enforcement options.

    Permitted Uses

    permitted

    If Shueisha fails to file a U.S. action before the statute of limitations expires, the company must destroy all identity information.

    Needless to say, the case continues to be closely watched by other rightsholders and pirate site operators. DMCA subpoenas are a widely used intelligence gathering tool, and the present order confirms they are not without boundaries.

    —

    A copy of Magistrate Judge Hixson’s Discovery Order is available here (pdf). The final protective order as modified by the court is available here (pdf).

    From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.