As an intellectual property company itself, Microsoft encourages respect for intellectual property, including copyrights. We also are committed to freedom of expression and the rights of users to engage in uses that may be permissible under applicable copyright laws. Links to webpages containing material that infringes on the rights of copyright owners may be removed from our search results provided we receive a legally sufficient notice of infringement from an owner or an authorized agent acting on that owner’s behalf. The following numbers relate to requests to remove links to webpages from our Bing search engine results.

Copyright removal requests, July to December 2020

 

Requests	URLs requested	URLs accepted	URLs rejected	Percentage of URLs accepted
17,006,978	59,222,175	58,965,071	257,104	99.57%

Note: The data above details compliant removal requests received by Bing for removal of algorithmic search results. The report does not include: (1) copyright removal requests from the Bing image or video index, (2) from Bing Ads, or (3) removal requests for other online services, such as Outlook and Skype requests, or (4) requests initially deemed non-compliant during preliminary reviews conducted prior to entry of the request into our standard tracking tools. The data includes more than 95% of the copyright removal requests for Bing for the six-month reporting period. Removal requests for Bing represent about 99% of all copyright removal requests received.

Source: Content Removal Request Report | Microsoft CSR

Does this show that people have no recourse to invalid removal requests unless they are willing to spend big money on lawyers?

n most cases, allegedly infringing content is removed at the request of rights holders following the normal DMCA takedown process. A DMCA notice is issued and the site responds by removing the content and — in some cases — allowing the uploader to challenge the takedown.

SoundCloud has positioned itself as a host of user-created audio content, relying on content creators to upload original works. But, like any content hosting site, it often found itself hosting infringing content not created by the uploader.

Realizing the potential for SoundCloud to be overrun with infringing content, the platform became far more proactive as it gained users and funding.

Rather than allow the normal DMCA process to work, SoundCloud allowed one major label to set the terms of engagement. This partnership resulted in Universal being able to unilaterally remove content it believed was infringing without any input from SoundCloud or use of the normal DMCA process.

One user reported his account was closed due to alleged infringement contained in his uploaded radio shows. When he attempted to dispute the removals and the threatened shuttering of his account, he was informed by the platform it was completely out of SoundCloud’s hands.

Your uploads were removed directly by Universal. This means that SoundCloud had no control over it, and they don’t tell us which part of your upload was infringing.

The control of removing content is completely with Universal. This means I can’t tell you why they removed your uploads and not others, and you would really need to ask them that question.

Unfortunately, there was no clear appeal process for disputing the takedown, leaving the user without his account or his uploads.

[…]

SoundCloud continues to allow labels like Universal to perform content removals without utilizing the DMCA process or engaging with the platform directly. Users are still on their own when it comes to content declared infringing by labels. This appears to flow directly from SoundCloud’s long-running efforts to secure licensing agreements with major labels. And that appears to flow directly from multiple threats of copyright litigation from some of the same labels SoundCloud is now partnered with

Source: Content Moderation Case Study: SoundCloud Combats Piracy By Giving Universal Music The Power To Remove Uploads (2014) | Techdirt

And having said that, DMCA is a process that is very very far from perfect and is used to bully smaller players in the market by the big boys with big lawyer pockets.

We cover a great many ridiculous and infuriating trademark disputes here, but it’s always the disputes around overly broad terms that never should have been trademarked to begin with that are the most frustrating. And that most irritating of those is when we get into geographic terms that never should be locked up by any single company or entity. Examples in the past have included companies fighting over who gets to use the name of their home city of “Detroit“, or when grocer Iceland Foods got so aggressive in its own trademark enforcement that the — checks notes — nation of Iceland had to seek to revoke the company’s EU trademark registration.

While it should be self-evident how antithetical to the purpose of trademark laws are to even approve of these kinds of marks, I will say that I didn’t see it coming that a company at some point would attempt to play trademark bully over the “planet.”

Powerful French entertainment company Canal Plus trademarked the term in France, but environmental groups are pushing back, saying they should be allowed to use the word “planet” to promote their projects to save it. Multiple cases are under examination by France’s intellectual property regulator INPI, including one coming to a head this week.

Canal Plus argues that the groups’ use of the terms “planete” in French, or “planet” in English, for marketing purposes violates its trademarks, registered to protect its Planete TV channels that showcase nature documentaries.

That this dispute is even a thing raises questions. Why in the world (heh) would any trademark office approve a mark solely on the word “planet”. Such a registration violates all kinds of rules and norms, explicit and otherwise. Geographic terms are supposed to have a high bar for trademark approval. Single word marks not inherently creative typically do as well. And, when trademarks for either are approved, they are typically done so in very narrow terms. That EUIPO somehow managed to approve a trademark that caused a film company to think it can sue or bully NGOs focused on environmental issues for using the word for the rock we all live on together should ring as absurd to anyone who finds out about it.

Certainly it did to those on the other end of Canal Plus’ bullying, as they seemed to think the whole thing was either a joke or attempt at fraud.

The head of environmental group Planete Amazone, Gert-Peter Bruch, thought it was a hoax when he first received a mail from Canal Plus claiming ownership of the planet brand.

[…]

But, as we often note, trademark bullying tends to work. Bruch’s organization is hammering out a deal with Canal Plus in an effort to keep using the word “planet.” That shouldn’t have to occur, but it is. Other groups are waiting on a ruling from the French National Intellectual Property Institute in the hopes that someone somewhere will be sane about all of this.

Source: French Film Company Somehow Trademarks ‘Planet’, Goes After Environmental NGOs For Using The Word | Techdirt

Long-time Slashdot reader zoobab shares this update about the long-standing Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a Munich-based non-profit opposing ratification of a “Unified Patent Court” by Germany: The FFII is crowdfunding a constitutional complaint in Germany against the third attempt to impose software patents in Europe, calling on all software companies, independent software developers and FLOSS authors to donate.

The Unitary Patent and its Court will promote patent trolls, without any appeal possible to the European Court of Justice, which won’t be able to rule on patent law, and software patents in particular. The FFII also says that the proposed court system will be more expensive for small companies then the current national court system.
The stakes are high — so the FFII writes that they’re anticipating some tricky counter-maneuvering: Stopping the UPC in Germany will be enough to kill the UPC for the whole Europe… German government believe that they can ratify before the end of the year, as they consider the UK still a member of the EU till 31st December. The agenda of next votes have been designed on purpose to ratify the UPC before the end of the year. FFII expects dirty agenda and political hacks to declare the treaty “into force”, dismiss “constitutional complaints”, while the presence of UK is still problematic.

Source: ‘Save Europe from Software Patents’, Urges Nonprofit FFII – Slashdot

These have been batted off the table before and for very good reason.

According to Politico offshoot Protocol, the felony streaming proposal is the work of Republican senator Thom Tillis, who has backed similar proposals previously. It is more or less exactly what it sounds like: A proposal to turn unauthorized commercial streaming of copyrighted material—progressive policy publication The American Prospect specifically points to examples like “an album on YouTube, a video clip on Twitch, or a song in an Instagram story”—into a felony offense with a possible prison sentence. Currently, such violations, no matter how severe, are considered misdemeanors rather than felonies, because the law regards streaming as a public performance. With Twitch currently in the crosshairs of the music industry, such a change would turn up the heat on streamers and Twitch even higher—perhaps to an untenable degree. Other platforms, like YouTube, would almost certainly suffer as well.

“A felony streaming bill would likely be a chill on expression,” Katharine Trendacosta, associate director of policy and activism with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The American Prospect. “We already see that it’s hard enough in just civil copyright and the DMCA for people to feel comfortable asserting their rights. The chance of a felony would impact both expression and innovation.”

According to Protocol, House and Senate Judiciary Committees have agreed to package the streaming felony proposal with other controversial provisions that include the CASE act, which would establish a new court-like entity within the U.S. Copyright Office to resolve copyright disputes, and the Trademark Modernization Act, which would give the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office more flexibility to crack down on illegitimate claims from foreign countries.

Alongside the felony streaming proposal, these provisions have drawn ire from civil rights groups, digital rights nonprofits, and companies including the aforementioned Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, the American Library Association, and the Center for Democracy & Technology. Collectively, these groups and others penned a letter to the U.S. Senate last week.

[…]

Source: Proposed U.S. Law Could Slap Twitch Streamers With Felonies For Broadcasting Copyrighted Material

It’s incredible that not only does copyright stifle competition, but it allows a creator to create something once, get lucky and then sit on his / her arse for the rest of their lives – and  their childrens’ doing sweet fuck all and raking in dosh. And that these laws get stronger and stronger for the people who do pretty much nothing.

one of the biggest defeats for users of the Internet — and for online freedom of expression — was the passage of the EU Copyright Directive last year. The law was passed using a fundamentally dishonest argument that it did not require upload filters, because they weren’t explicitly mentioned in the text. As a result, supporters of the legislation claimed, platforms would be free to use other technologies that did not threaten freedom of speech in the way that automated upload filters would do. However, as soon as the law was passed, countries like France said that the only way to implement Article 17 (originally Article 13) was through upload filters, and copyright companies started pushing for legal memes to be blocked because they now admitted that upload filters were “practically unworkable“.

This dishonesty may come back to bite supporters of the law. Techdirt reported last August that Poland submitted a formal request for upload filters to be removed from the final text. The EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has just held a public hearing on this case, and as the detailed report by Paul Keller makes abundantly clear, there are lots of reason to be hopeful that Article 17’s upload filters are in trouble from a legal point of view.

The hearing was structured around four questions. Principally, the CJEU wanted to know whether Article 17 meant that upload filters were mandatory. This is a crucial question because the court has found in the past that a general obligation to monitor all user uploads for illegal activities violates the fundamental rights of Internet users and platform operators. This is why proponents of the law insisted that upload filters were not mandatory, but simply one technology that could be applied

[…]

Poland also correctly pointed out that the alternatives presented by the European institutions, such as fingerprinting, hashing, watermarking, Artificial Intelligence or keyword search, all constitute alternative methods of filtering, but not alternatives to filtering.

This is the point that every expert has been making for years: there are no viable alternatives to upload filters, which means that Article 17 necessarily imposes a general monitoring requirement, something that is not permitted under current EU law. The fact that the Advocate General Øe, who will release his own recommendations on the case early next year, made his comment about the lack of any practical alternative to upload filters is highly significant. During the hearing, representatives of the French and Spanish governments claimed that this doesn’t matter, for the following remarkable reason:

The right to intellectual property should be prioritized over freedom of expression in cases of uncertainty over the legality of user uploads, because the economic damage to copyright-holders from leaving infringements online even for a short period of time would outweigh the damage to freedom of expression of users whose legal uploads may get blocked.

The argument here seems to be that as soon as even a single illegal copy is placed online, it will be copied rapidly and spread around the Internet. But this line of reasoning undermines itself. If placing a single illegal copy online for even a short time really is enough for it to be shared widely, then it only requires a copy to be placed on a site outside the EU’s reach for copies to spread around the entire Internet anyway — because copying is so easy — which makes the speed of the takedown within the EU irrelevant.

[…]

In other words, what seemed at the time like a desperate last attempt by Poland to stop the awful upload filters, with little hope of succeeding, now looks to have a decent chance because of the important general issues it raises — something explored at greater length in a new study written by Reda and others (pdf). That’s not to say that Article 17’s upload filters are dead, but it seems like the underhand methods used to force this legislation through could turn out to be their downfall.

Source: Poland’s Bid To Get Upload Filters Taken Out Of The EU Copyright Directive Suddenly Looks Much More Hopeful | Techdirt

Disney, of course, has quite the reputation as a copyright maximalist. It has been accused of being the leading company in always pushing for more draconian copyright laws. And then, of course, there’s the infamous Mickey Mouse curve, first designated a decade ago by Tom Bell, highlighting how copyright term extensions seemed to always happen just as Mickey Mouse was set to go into the public domain (though, hopefully that’s about to end):

Whether accurate or not, Disney is synonymous with maximizing copyright law, which the company and its lobbyists always justify with bullshit claims of how they do it “for the artist.”

Except that it appears that Disney is not paying artists. While the details are a bit fuzzy, yesterday the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and famed author Alan Dean Foster announced that Disney was no longer paying him royalties for the various Star Wars books he wrote (including the novelization of the very first film back in 1976), along with his novelizations of the Aliens movies. He claims he’d always received royalties before, but they suddenly disappeared.

Foster wrote a letter (amusingly addressed to “Mickey”) in which he lays out his side of the argument, more or less saying that as Disney has gobbled up various other companies and rights, it just stopped paying royalties:

When you purchased Lucasfilm you acquired the rights to some books I wrote. STAR WARS, the novelization of the very first film. SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE, the first sequel novel. You owe me royalties on these books. You stopped paying them.

When you purchased 20th Century Fox, you eventually acquired the rights to other books I had written. The novelizations of ALIEN, ALIENS, and ALIEN 3. You’ve never paid royalties on any of these, or even issued royalty statements for them.

All these books are all still very much in print. They still earn money. For you. When one company buys another, they acquire its liabilities as well as its assets. You’re certainly reaping the benefits of the assets. I’d very much like my miniscule (though it’s not small to me) share.

[…]

In a video press conference, Foster and SFWA […] said that Disney is claiming that it purchased “the rights but not the obligations” to these works.

Source: Disney (Disney!) Accused Of Trying To Lawyer Its Way Out Of Paying Royalties To Alan Dean Foster | Techdirt

Last month, GitHub removed a popular tool that is used to download videos from websites like YouTube after it received a DMCA takedown notice from the Recording Industry Association of America. For a moment, it seemed that GitHub might throw developers under the bus in the same fashion that Twitch has recently treated its streamers. But on Monday, GitHub went on the offense by reinstating the offending tool and saying it would take a more aggressive line on protecting developers’ projects.

Youtube-dl is a command-line program that could, hypothetically, be used to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material. This potential for abuse prompted the RIAA to send GitHub a scary takedown notice because that’s what the RIAA does all day. The software development platform complied with the notice and unleashed a user outcry over the loss of one of the most popular repositories on the site. Many developers started re-uploading the code to GitHub in protest. After taking some time to review the case, GitHub now says that youtube-dl is all good.

In a statement, GitHub’s Director of Platform Policy Abby Vollmer wrote that there are two reasons that it was able to reverse the decision. The first reason is that the RIAA cited one repo that used the youtube-dl source code and contained references to a few copyrighted songs on YouTube. This was only part of a unit test that the code performs. It listens to a few seconds of the song to verify that everything is working properly but it doesn’t download or distribute any material. Regardless, GitHub worked with the developer to patch out the references and stay on the safe side.

As for the primary youtube-dl source code, lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation decided to represent the developers and presented an argument that satisfied GitHub’s concerns that the code circumvents technical measures to protect copyrighted material in violation of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The EFF explained that youtube-dl doesn’t decrypt anything or breakthrough any anti-copying measures. From a technical standpoint, it isn’t much different than a web browser receiving information as intended, and there are plenty of fair use applications for making a copy of materials.

Among the “many legitimate purposes” for using youtube-dl, GitHub listed: “changing playback speeds for accessibility, preserving evidence in the fight for human rights, aiding journalists in fact-checking, and downloading Creative Commons-licensed or public domain videos.” The EFF cited some of the same practical uses and had a few unique additions to its list of benefits, saying that it could be used by “educators to save videos for classroom use, by YouTubers to save backup copies of their own uploaded videos, and by users worldwide to watch videos on hardware that can’t run a standard web browser, or to watch videos in their full resolution over slow or unreliable Internet connections.”

It’s nice to see GitHub evaluating the argument and moving forward without waiting for a legal process to play out, but the company went further in announcing a new eight-step process for evaluating claims related to Section 1201 that will err on the side of developers. GitHub is also establishing a million-dollar legal fund to provide assistance to open source developers fighting off unwarranted takedown notices. Mea culpa, mea culpa!

Finally, the company said that it would work to improve the law around DMCA notices and it will be “advocating specifically on the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA to promote developers’ freedom to build socially beneficial tools like youtube-dl.”

Along with today’s announcement, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman tweeted, “Section 1201 of the DMCA is broken and needs to be fixed. Developers should have the freedom to tinker.”

Source: GitHub Restores YouTube Downloader Following DMCA Takedown

It’s nice to see a large company come down on the right side of copyright for a change.

After many years of fierce resistance to open access, academic publishers have largely embraced — and extended — the idea, ensuring that their 35-40% profit margins live on. In the light of this subversion of the original hopes for open access, people have come up with other ways to provide free and frictionless access to knowledge — most of which is paid for by taxpayers around the world. One is preprints, which are increasingly used by researchers to disseminate their results widely, without needing to worry about payment or gatekeepers. The other is through sites that have taken it upon themselves to offer immediate access to large numbers of academic papers — so-called “shadow libraries”. The most famous of these sites is Sci-Hub, created by Alexandra Elbakyan. At the time of writing, Sci-Hub claims to hold 79 million papers.

Even academics with access to publications through their institutional subscriptions often prefer to use Sci-Hub, because it is so much simpler and quicker. In this respect, Sci-Hub stands as a constant reproach to academic publishers, emphasizing that their products aren’t very good in terms of serving libraries, which are paying expensive subscriptions for access. Not surprisingly, then, Sci-Hub has become Enemy No. 1 for academic publishers in general, and the leading company Elsevier in particular. The German site Netzpolitik has spotted the latest approach being taken by publishers to tackle this inconvenient and hugely successful rival, and other shadow libraries. At its heart lies the Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI), which was founded by Elsevier and other large publishers earlier this year. Netzpolitik explains that the idea is to track and analyze every access to libraries, because “security”

[…]

Since academic publishers can’t compete against Sci-Hub on ease of use or convenience, they are trying the old “security risk” angle — also used by traditional software companies against open source in the early days. Yes, they say, Sci-Hub/open source may seem free and better, but think of the terrible security risks… An FAQ on the main SNSI site provides an “explanation” of why Sci-Hub is supposedly a security risk

[…]

As Techdirt pointed out when that Washington Post article came out, there is no evidence of any connections between Elbakyan and Russian Intelligence. Indeed, it’s hard not to see the investigation as simply the result of whining academic publishers making the same baseless accusation, and demanding that something be “done“. An article in Research Information provides more details about what those “wider ramifications than just getting access to content that sits behind a paywall” might be:

In the specific case of Sci-Hub, academic content (journal articles and books) is illegally harvested using a variety of methods, such as abusing legitimate log in credentials to access the secure computer networks of major universities and by hijacking “proxy” credentials of legitimate users that facilitate off campus remote access to university computer systems and databases. These actions result in a front door being opened up into universities’ networks through which Sci-Hub, and potentially others, can gain access to other valuable institutional databases such as personnel and medical records, patent information, and grant details.

But that’s not how things work in this context. The credentials of legitimate users that Sci-Hub draws on — often gladly “lent” by academics who believe papers should be made widely available — are purely to access articles held on the system. They do not provide access to “other valuable institutional databases” — and certainly not sensitive information such as “personnel and medical records” — unless they are designed by complete idiots. That is pure scaremongering, while this further claim is just ridiculous:

Such activities threaten the scholarly communications ecosystem and the integrity of the academic record. Sci-Hub has no incentive to ensure the accuracy of the research articles being accessed, no incentive to ensure research meets ethical standards, and no incentive to retract or correct if issues arise.

Sci-Hub simply provides free, frictionless access for everyone to existing articles from academic publishers. The articles are still as accurate and ethical as they were when they first appeared. To accuse Sci-Hub of “threatening” the scholarly communications ecosystem by providing universal access is absurd. It’s also revealing of the traditional publishers’ attitude to the uncontrolled dissemination of publicly-funded human knowledge, which is what they really fear and are attacking with the new SNSI campaign.

Source: To Prevent Free, Frictionless Access To Human Knowledge, Publishers Want Librarians To Be Afraid, Very Afraid | Techdirt

“It’s finally happening: Twitch is taking action against copyrighted music — long a norm among streamers — in response to music industry pressure,” reports Kotaku.

But the Verge reports “there’s some funny stuff going on here.” First, Twitch is telling streamers that some of their content has been identified as violating copyright and that instead of letting streamers file counterclaims, it’s deleting the content; second, the company is telling streamers it’s giving them warnings, as opposed to outright copyright strikes…

Weirdly Twitch decided to bulk delete infringing material instead of allowing streamers to archive their content or submit counterclaims. To me, that suggests that there are tons of infringements, and that Twitch needed to act very quickly and/or face a lawsuit it wouldn’t be able to win over its adherence to the safe harbor provision of the DMCA.
The email Twitch sent to their users “encourages them to delete additional content — up to and including using a new tool to unilaterally delete all previous clips,” reports Kotaku. One business streamer complains that it’s “insane” that Twitch basically informs them “that there is more content in violation despite having no identification system to find out what it is. Their solution to DMCA is for creators to delete their life’s work. This is pure, gross negligence.”

Or, as esports consultant Rod “Slasher” Breslau puts it, “It is absolutely insane that record labels have put Twitch in a position to force streamers to delete their entire life’s work, for some 10+ years of memories, and that Twitch has been incapable of preventing or aiding streamers for this situation. a total failure all around.”

Twitch’s response? It is crucial that we protect the rights of songwriters, artists and other music industry partners. We continue to develop tools and resources to further educate our creators and empower them with more control over their content while partnering with industry-recognized vendors in the copyright space to help us achieve these goals.

Source: Twitch Suddenly Mass-Deletes Thousands of Videos, Citing Music Copyright Claims – Slashdot

Of course, the money raised by these music companies doesn’t really go to the artists much – it’s basically swallowed up by the music companies themselves.

For years, you may recall that we would write about the insane nature of forum shopping for patent trolls, in which the trolls would flock to the federal courts in East Texas. Going back nearly 15 years, we wrote about how East Texas courts became grand central for patent troll cases, leading to all sorts of sketchy behavior. There are a bunch of empty office buildings setup in small Texas cities (mainly Marshall and Tyler) just to “pretend” to have offices there. Companies engaged in many patent cases started to try to suck up to residents of those small cities, in case they might be on a jury. TiVo literally bought a “Grand Champion Steer” just weeks before a jury was set to rule on a massive TiVo trolling case. Samsung threw so much money at the local “Stagecoach Days” event that it was renamed “Samsung Stagecoach Days,” and built a Samsung ice rink right next to the courthouse in Marshall.

For years, people pressured Congress to fix this mess, but instead, the Supreme Court finally stepped in, with the TC Heartland ruling, and said that the proper jurisdiction should be where defendants actually are incorporated. Of course, this seemed to have the reverse effect — as companies no longer want to be in East Texas. Apple shut down its stores there to avoid the jurisdiction.

Of course, if you thought that the judges would go quietly, you’d be wrong. It’s always felt like a few judges in East Texas loved the reputation they’d built up as being super friendly to patent trolls. For a while it was Judge T. John Ward. And when he left the bench (to become a patent lawyer, natch), Judge Rodney Gilstrap stepped into the gap he left. He even tried to ignore the Supreme Court’s TC Heartland decision (though the Federal Circuit appeals court was not impressed).

However, as Patent Progress notes, there’s a new judge vying to be at the top of the patent troll’s Christmas list, and he’s in West Texas. Judge Alan Albright, a former patent litigator, was appointed to the bench in 2018 — and he literally went on a tour to convince companies to bring patent cases in his court:

U.S. District Judge Alan Albright and attorneys who predicted last year that Waco’s federal court would become a hotbed of patent and intellectual property litigation missed their prediction just a bit.

With Albright traveling the country drumming up business and patent attorneys spreading the word that Waco’s new federal judge, a longtime patent litigator, will provide the expertise to create an efficient and welcoming environment in Waco, the response in the past year actually exceeded those predictions.

Since Albright took office in September 2018, more than 250 patent cases have been filed in the federal Western District of Texas, which includes Waco. That total eclipses the number for the previous four years combined and has made the Western District among the busiest in the country for patent cases.

[…]

Source: Former Patent Litigator Becomes Federal Judge And Begins Advertising For Patent Trolls To Come To His Court (And They Have In Droves) | Techdirt

The US government’s Department of Justice has won its multi-million-dollar claim to Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record book royalties as well as any future related earnings.

A federal district court in eastern Virginia this week ruled that Uncle Sam was entitled to the proceeds of Snowden’s bestseller, an estimated $5.2m, and “any further monies, royalties, or other financial advantages derived by Snowden from Permanent Record.” It can also grab Snowden’s appearance fees from 56 speeches, thought to exceed $1m.

The court came to this conclusion after deciding Snowden broke his non-disclosure agreements with the NSA and CIA. It noted the super-leaker did not offer up his book for a review by official censors nor did he clear speeches on intelligence matters with the US government as required by his employment contract from the time he worked for Uncle Sam.

“The United States’ lawsuit did not seek to stop or restrict the publication or distribution of Permanent Record,” the Dept of Justice’s spokespeople said on Thursday of the decision.

“Rather, under well-established Supreme Court precedent, Snepp v. United States, the government sought to recover all proceeds earned by Snowden because of his failure to submit his publication for pre-publication review in violation of his alleged contractual and fiduciary obligations.”

That the US government would crack down on Snowden is hardly unexpected. Officials filed suit in September 2019 to claim a cut of Snowden’s public persona on the grounds he broke his agreement with the No Such Agency by going public.

“Edward Snowden violated his legal obligations to the United States, and therefore, his unlawful financial gains must be relinquished to the government,” said Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.

“As this case demonstrates, the Department of Justice will not overlook the wrongful actions of those who seek to betray the trust reposed in them and to personally profit from their access to classified national security information.”

Source: US govt wins right to snaffle Edward Snowden’s $5m+ book royalties, speech fees – and all future related earnings • The Register

Wow, apparently these employment contracts are more like permanent indenture – last I looked, Snowden wasn’t exactly in the employ of the NSA any more… in as much as he was ever as a contractor…

The passage of the EU Copyright Directive last year represented one of the most disgraceful examples of successful lobbying and lying by the publishing, music, and film industries. In order to convince MEPs to vote for the highly controversial legislation, copyright companies and their political allies insisted repeatedly that the upload filters needed to implement Article 17 (originally Article 13) were optional, and that user rights would of course be respected online. But as Techdirt and many others warned at the time, this was untrue, as even the law’s supporters admitted once it had been passed. Now that the EU member states are starting to implement the Directive, it is clear that there is no alternative to upload filters, and that freedom of speech will therefore be massively harmed by the new law. France has even gone so far as ignore the requirement for the few user protections that the Copyright Directive graciously provides.

The EU Copyright Directive represents an almost total victory for copyright maximalists, and a huge defeat for ordinary users of the Internet in the EU. But if there is one thing that we can be sure of, it’s that the copyright industries are never satisfied. Despite the massive gains already enshrined in the Directive, a group of industry organizations from the world of publishing, music, cinema and broadcasting have written to the EU Commissioner responsible for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, expressing their “serious concerns regarding the European Commission’s consultation on its proposed guidance on the application of Article 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (“the Directive”).” The industry groups are worried that implementation of the EU Copyright Directive will provide them with too little protection (pdf):

We are very concerned that, in its Consultation Paper, the Commission is going against its original objective of providing a high level of protection for rightsholders and creators and to create a level playing field in the online Digital Single Market. It interprets essential aspects of Article 17 of the Directive in a manner that is incompatible with the wording and the objective of the Article, thus jeopardising the balance of interests achieved by the EU legislature in Article 17.

In an Annex to the letter, the copyright industries raise four “concerns” with the proposed guidance on the implementation of Article 17. The former MEP Julia Reda, who valiantly led the resistance against the worst aspects of the Copyright Directive during its passage through the EU’s legislative system, has answered in detail all of the points in a thread on Twitter. It’s extremely clearly explained, and I urge you to read it to appreciate the full horror of what the copyright companies are claiming and demanding. But there is one “concern” of the copyright maximalists that is so outrageous that it deserves to be singled out here. Reda writes:

#Article17 clearly says that legal content must not be blocked. #Uploadfilters can’t guarantee that, so rightholders claim that this is fulfilled as long as users have the right to complain about wrongful blocking *after* it has already happened.

This completely goes against what users fought for in the negotiations and what #Article17 says, that it “shall in no way affect legitimate uses”. Of course, if all legal parodies, quotes etc. get automatically blocked by #uploadfilters, legitimate uses are affected pretty badly.

The copyright companies and their political friends tricked the European Parliament into voting through Article 17 by claiming repeatedly that it did not require upload filters, which were rightly regarded as unacceptable. Now, the companies are happy to admit that the law’s requirement to assess whether uploads are infringing before they are posted — which can only be done using algorithms to filter out infringing material — is “practically unworkable”. Instead, they want blocking to be the default when there is any doubt, forcing users to go through a process of complaining afterwards if they wish their uploads to appear. Since most people will not know how to do this, or won’t have the time or energy to do so, this will inevitably lead to vast amounts of legal material being blocked by filters.

As Reda rightly summarizes:

The entertainment industry is joining forces to push for the worst possible implementation of #Article17, which would not only require out-of-control #uploadfilters without any safeguards, but also violate fundamental rights AND the very text of Article 17 itself.

The EU Copyright Directive’s Article 17 already promises to be disastrous for user creativity and freedom of speech in the EU; unfortunately, the proposed EU guidance has some additional aspects that are problematic for end users (pdf), as a group of civil society organizations point out in their own letter to the EU Commissioner. What the industry’s demands show once again is that no matter how strong copyright is made, no matter how wide its reach, and no matter how disproportionate the enforcement powers are, publishing, music, film and broadcasting companies always want more. Their motto is clearly: “too much is never enough”.

Source: Copyright Companies Want Memes That Are Legal In The EU Blocked Because They Now Admit Upload Filters Are ‘Practically Unworkable’ | Techdirt

Monster Beverage tried to stop Ubisoft from trademarking the name “Gods & Monsters” earlier this year to prevent confusion between its brand of highly caffeinated sodas and the upcoming action adventure game. It turns out this is the sort of thing Monster does a lot.

Monster routinely challenges “monster”-related trademarks, including, tactical gear, ice cream, and dog treats.

The news about Gods & Monsters, which Ubisoft announced earlier this month had been renamed Immortals: Fenyx Rising, was first reported by TechRaptor based on publicly available filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In a 186-page filing dated April 3, Monster argued in part that the Gods & Monsters name would conflict with its own because of the drink company’s involvement in sponsoring esports teams, tournaments, as well as actual video games. Surely you’ve heard of Monster Energy Supercross: The Official Videogame?

“[Monster] has built up, at great expense and effort, valuable goodwill in its MONSTER Marks and has developed strong common law rights in its MONSTER Marks,” the company wrote. Ubisoft responded a month later with a much briefer eight-page filing denying Monster’s claims.

The publisher has also claimed that the name change from Gods & Monsters to the inscrutable Immortals: Fenyx Rising was entirely its own idea. “The change of name was entirely because of the vision of the game,” game director Julien Galloudec told VGC in an interview last week. He went on:

The game changed a lot, to the point where we felt we needed a new name to be better aligned with that updated vision, so that’s where we decided to change to Immortals Fenyx Rising, a name that combines the notion of the timeless aspect of the Greek mythology with the immortals. And also I like the new era, Fenyx, and adjoining that epic adventure.

Ubisoft did not respond to a request for comment.

A quick search on the Trademark Office website reveals 25 current pending notices of opposition to other companies using the name “Monster.” The cases range from disputes with other food and beverage companies to seemingly completely unrelated businesses like toy manufacturers.

For example, Monster took issue with Nikko Toys’ line of remote control Mega Monster trucks because it, too, has at one time or another plastered its logo on the sides of toy cars. The company even went after someone trying to sell dog treats called “Monster Bully Sticks,” to which the maker of those dog treats basically responded that it is unlikely anyone would confuse a giant beef tendon for dogs to chew on with a can of Monster Energy.

The brand’s tagline is “Unleash the Beast.” A more appropriate one might be, “Unleash the lawyers.”

Source: Gods & Monsters Isn’t The First Time Monster Energy Has Been Annoying About Naming Rights

A computer scientist who created an artificial intelligence system capable of generating original inventions is suing the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over its decision earlier this year to reject two patent applications which list the algorithmic system, known as DABUS, as the inventor.

The lawsuit is the latest step in an effort by Stephen Thaler and an international group of lawyers and academics to win inventorship rights for non-human AI systems, a prospect that raises fundamental questions about what it means to be creative and also carries potentially paradigm-shifting implications for certain industries.

In July 2019, Thaler filed two patent applications in the US—one for an adjustable food container, the other for an emergency beacon—and listed the inventor as DABUS. He describes DABUS as a “creativity engine” composed of neural networks trained on a broad swath of data, and not designed to solve any particular problem. The USPTO rejected the applications, citing court decisions ruling that corporations, as opposed to individuals within corporations, cannot be legal inventors, and asserting that “conception—the touchstone of inventorship—must be performed by a natural person.”

British, German, and European Union patent regulators have also rejected Thaler’s applications, decisions he has appealed. Petitions for DABUS-invented patents are still pending in China, Japan, India, and several other countries.

“What we want is to have innovation. AI has been used to help generate innovation for decades and AI is getting better and better at doing these things, and people aren’t.” Ryan Abbott, a professor at the University of Surrey School of Law, who is representing Thaler in the suit, told Motherboard. “The law is not clear on whether you can have a patent if the AI does that sort of work, but if you can’t protect inventions coming out of AI, you’re going to under-produce them.”

[…]

Source: This Guy is Suing the Patent Office for Deciding an AI Can’t Invent Things

Yesterday, the Internet Archive filed our response to the lawsuit brought by four commercial publishers to end the practice of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), the digital equivalent of traditional library lending. CDL is a respectful and secure way to bring the breadth of our library collections to digital learners. Commercial ebooks, while useful, only cover a small fraction of the books in our libraries. As we launch into a fall semester that is largely remote, we must offer our students the best information to learn from—collections that were purchased over centuries and are now being digitized. What is at stake with this lawsuit? Every digital learner’s access to library books. That is why the Internet Archive is standing up to defend the rights of  hundreds of libraries that are using Controlled Digital Lending.

The publishers’ lawsuit aims to stop the longstanding and widespread library practice of Controlled Digital Lending, and stop the hundreds of libraries using this system from providing their patrons with digital books. Through CDL, libraries lend a digitized version of the physical books they have acquired as long as the physical copy doesn’t circulate and the digital files are protected from redistribution. This is how Internet Archive’s lending library works, and has for more than nine years. Publishers are seeking to shut this library down, claiming copyright law does not allow it. Our response is simple: Copyright law does not stand in the way of libraries’ rights to own books, to digitize their books, and to lend those books to patrons in a controlled way.

“The Authors Alliance has several thousand members around the world and we have endorsed the Controlled Digital Lending as a fair use,” stated Pamela Samuelson, Authors Alliance founder and Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. “It’s really tragic that at this time of pandemic that the publishers would try to basically cut off even access to a digital public library like the Internet Archive…I think that the idea that lending a book is illegal is just wrong.”

These publishers clearly intend this lawsuit to have a chilling effect on Controlled Digital Lending at a moment in time when it can benefit digital learners the most. For students and educators, the 2020 fall semester will be unlike any other in recent history. From K-12 schools to universities, many institutions have already announced they will keep campuses closed or severely limit access to communal spaces and materials such as books because of public health concerns. The conversation we must be having is: how will those students, instructors and researchers access information — from textbooks to primary sources? Unfortunately, four of the world’s largest book publishers seem intent on undermining both libraries’ missions and our attempts to keep educational systems operational during a global health crisis.

The publishers’ lawsuit does not stop at seeking to end the practice of Controlled Digital Lending. These publishers call for the destruction of the 1.5 million digital books that Internet Archive makes available to our patrons. This form of digital book burning is unprecedented and unfairly disadvantages people with print disabilities. For the blind, ebooks are a lifeline, yet less than one in ten exists in accessible formats. Since 2010, Internet Archive has made our lending library available to the blind and print disabled community, in addition to sighted users. If the publishers are successful with their lawsuit, more than a million of those books would be deleted from the Internet’s digital shelves forever.

I call on the executives at Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House to come together with us to help solve the pressing challenges to access to knowledge during this pandemic. Please drop this needless lawsuit.

Source: Libraries lend books, and must continue to lend books: Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit – Internet Archive Blogs

Georgia Tech researcher Mark Riedl didn’t expect that his machine learning model “Weird A.I. Yankovic,” which generates new rhyming lyrics for existing songs would cause any trouble. But it did.

On May 15, Reidl posted an AI-generated lyric video featuring the instrumental to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” It was taken down on July 14, Reidl tweeted, after Twitter received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice for copyright infringement from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents major and independent record companies.

“I am fairly convinced that my videos fall under fair use,” Riedl told Motherboard of his AI creation, which is obviously inspired by Weird Al’s parodies. Riedl said his other AI-generated lyric videos posted to Twitter have not been taken down.

Riedl has contested the takedown with Twitter but has not received a response. Twitter also did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

The incident raises the question of what role machine learning plays when it comes to the already nuanced and complicated rules of fair use, which allows for the use of a copyrighted work in certain circumstances, including educational uses and as part of a “transformative” work. Fair use also protects parody in some circumstances.

Riedl, whose research focuses on the study of artificial intelligence and storytelling for entertainment, says the model was created as a personal project and outside his role at Georgia Tech. “Weird A.I. Yankovic generates alternative lyrics that match the rhyme and syllables schemes of existing songs. These alternative lyrics can then be sung to the original tune,” Riedl said. “Rhymes are chosen, and two neural networks, GPT-2 and XLNET, are then used to generate each line, word by word.”

Source: The Record Industry Is Going After Parody Songs Written By an Algorithm

Oddly enough, game publishers seem to be able to contest DMCA on YouTube in 20 minutes when they are at a convention. It’s like it’s not being applied fairly at all…

It wouldn’t be a virtual event without a few technical difficulties. Though I can’t imagine the media giants showcasing at San Diego Comic-Con’s online event were worried about copyright violations affecting their panels. Considering, you know, they’re the ones that own the copyright.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened.

On Thursday, ViacomCBS livestreamed an hour-long panel for this year’s virtual SDCC to showcase properties in its ever-expansive Star Trek universe such as Picard, Discovery, and the upcoming Star Trek: Lower Decks. The stream briefly went dark, however, after YouTube’s copyright bots flagged the stream and replaced it with a warning that read: “Video unavailable: This video contains content from CBS CID, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”

The hiccup occurred as the cast and producers of Discovery performed an “enhanced” read-through of the show’s season 2 finale accompanied by sound effects and on-screen storyboards. Evidently, the video sounded enough like the real deal to trigger YouTube’s software, even if it was obvious from looking at the stream that it wasn’t pirated content.

It only took about 20 minutes for the feed to be restored, but the irony of CBS’s own panel running afoul of its copyright (even accidentally) was too good for audiences to gloss over. As noted by io9’s Beth Elderkin, a later Cartoon Network panel livestream was similarly pulled offline over a copyright claim from its parent company, Turner Broadcasting.

Source: Copyright Claims Block Star Trek, Cartoon Network Comic-Con Panels

I’ve seen a lot of people — including those who are supporting the publishers’ legal attack on the Internet Archive — insist that they “support libraries,” but that the Internet Archive’s Open Library and National Emergency Library are “not libraries.” First off, they’re wrong. But, more importantly, it’s good to see actual librarians now coming out in support of the Internet Archive as well. The Association of Research Libraries has put out a statement asking publishers to drop this counter productive lawsuit, especially since the Internet Archive has shut down the National Emergency Library.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) urges an end to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive filed early this month by four major publishers in the United States District Court Southern District of New York, especially now that the National Emergency Library (NEL) has closed two weeks earlier than originally planned.

As the ARL points out, the Internet Archive has been an astounding “force for good” for the dissemination of knowledge and culture — and that includes introducing people to more books.

For nearly 25 years, the Internet Archive (IA) has been a force for good by capturing the world’s knowledge and providing barrier-free access for everyone, contributing services to higher education and the public, including the Wayback Machine that archives the World Wide Web, as well as a host of other services preserving software, audio files, special collections, and more. Over the past four weeks, IA’s Open Library has circulated more than 400,000 digital books without any user cost—including out-of-copyright works, university press titles, and recent works of academic interest—using controlled digital lending (CDL). CDL is a practice whereby libraries lend temporary digital copies of print books they own in a one-to-one ratio of “loaned to owned,” and where the print copy is removed from circulation while the digital copy is in use. CDL is a practice rooted in the fair use right of the US Copyright Act and recent judicial interpretations of that right. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many academic and research libraries have relied on CDL (including IA’s Open Library) to ensure academic and research continuity at a time when many physical collections have been inaccessible.

As ARL and our partner library associations acknowledge, many publishers (including some involved in the lawsuit) are contributing to academic continuity by opening more content during this crisis. As universities and libraries work to ensure scholars and students have the information they need, ARL looks forward to working with publishers to ensure open and equitable access to information. Continuing the litigation against IA for the purpose of recovering statutory damages and shuttering the Open Library would interfere with this shared mutual objective.

It would be nice if the publishers recognized this, but as we’ve said over and over again, these publishers would sue any library if libraries didn’t already exist. The fact that the Open Library looks just marginally different from a traditional library, means they’re unlikely to let go of this stupid, counterproductive lawsuit.

Source: Research Libraries Tell Publishers To Drop Their Awful Lawsuit Against The Internet Archive | Techdirt

The internet’s domain names have become potentially trademarkable following a decision by the US Supreme Court today that Booking.com can in fact be registered with America’s Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) – against officials’ objections.

The near-unanimous decision [PDF] – Justice Stephen Breyer was the sole rebel – went against the PTO’s legal arguments that adding “.com” to a generic term was like adding “company” to a word and so “conveys no additional meaning that would distinguish [one provider’s] services from those of other providers.”

The Supreme Court disagreed; at some length. It agreed with both the district court and the appeals court that “consumers do not in fact perceive the term ‘Booking.com’ that way.” It cited as a key piece of evidence a survey that showed 75 per cent of respondents thought ‘Booking.com’ was a brand name, whereas just 24 per cent believed it was a generic name.

It didn’t help that the PTO hasn’t followed its own argument in the past, with the court noting trademark registration #3,601,346 for Art.com and #2,580,467 for Dating.com. If the decision went against Booking.com, the Supreme Court reasoned, then existing approved trademarks would “be at risk of cancellation.” But it was also scathing in its assessment that “we discern no support for the PTO’s current view in trademark law or policy.”

The same survey that showed 75 per cent of people felt Booking.com was a brand however also revealed that only 33 per cent felt “Washingmachine.com” was a brand whereas 61 per cent though it was generic. And that subjective measurement is likely to prove to be a major headache for the PTO in deciding on what presumably will now be a rush of .com trademark applications.

Source: The internet becomes trademarkable, sort of, with near-unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Booking.com • The Register

A popular website with a comprehensive database of repair manuals for ventilators and other medical devices has received a letter from a medical equipment company saying that its copyrights are being infringed.

Kyle Wiens, CEO of the repair website iFixit—which posts guides on how to repair anything from sewing machines to video game consoles—shared the letter on Twitter Thursday, sent to him by counsel for Steris Corporation, which makes sterilization and other medical equipment.

“It has come to my attention that you have been reproducing certain installation and maintenance manuals relating to our products, documentation which is protected by copyright law,” the letter said. The letter then went on to tell Wiens to remove all Steris copyrighted material from the iFixit website within 10 days of the letter.

As Motherboard reported in March, major manufacturers of medical devices have long made it difficult for their devices to be repaired through third party repair professionals. Manufacturers have often lobbied against right to repair legislation and many medical devices are controlled by artificial “software locks” that allow only those with authorization to make modifications.

As reported by VICE News last week, a repair technician contracted to repair ventilators for hospitals preparing for COVID-19 said he has struggled to get repair parts or manuals from manufacturers when he has made requests to them.

“I’m disappointed that Steris is resorting to legal threats to stop hospitals from having access to information about how to maintain critical sterilization equipment during a pandemic,” Wiens told Motherboard in an email.

Wiens said he got the idea to post service manuals for medical equipment on iFixit when he began seeing stories about ventilator shortages in Italy. When he saw how some people were using 3-D printers to create ventilator replacement valves, he said he was inspired to create the database of medical equipment guides as a way to help.

“No manufacturer should be stopping hospitals from repairing their equipment,” Wiens said. “The best way to ensure patient safety is to make sure that equipment is being maintained regularly using the manufacturer’s recommended procedures. The only way to do that is if hospitals have up to date manuals.”

With regards to the letter sent by Steris, Wiens said iFixit has not removed any material from its website.

“We explained to Steris that what we did is a lawful and protected fair use under the U.S. Copyright act,” Wiens said.

“iFixit is protected by Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows online platforms to host content contributed by users provided they comply with the Act’s requirements, which iFixit does,” a letter to Steris from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of iFixit said.

Source: A Medical Device Maker Threatens iFixit Over Ventilator Repair Project – VICE

Back in March, the Internet Archive launched its National Emergency Library, a program that made roughly 1.4 million books available to the public without the usual waitlists. But on Wednesday, the organization announced it was ending the program two weeks early after four major publishers decided to sue Internet Archive for copyright infringement.

Internet Archive explained in a blog post that after June 16, it would revert to a controlled digital lending model, in which libraries lend patrons digitized copies of a physical book one at a time. “We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic,” the non-profit said. “However, this lawsuit is not just about the temporary National Emergency Library. The complaint attacks the concept of any library owning and lending digital books, challenging the very idea of what a library is in the digital world.”

By eliminating waitlists, the National Emergency Library program effectively upended how publishers have thus far controlled how libraries distribute ebooks. Under the usual system, publishers sell two-year licenses that cost several times more than what you’d pay if you just bought the book outright. Internet Archive’s program basically made it so any number of people could temporarily download a single ebook an infinite number of times between March 24 and June 30, the original end date for the program.

In their complaint, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and John Wiley & Sons allege that in addition to violating copyrights, Internet Archive’s free ebook program “grossly exceed legitimate library services” and “constitute willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.”

Before blasting Internet Archive for capitulating, this lawsuit has the ability to tank the organization—probably best known for its Wayback Machine web archiving tool—for good. Publishers could claim up to $150,000 in damages per title. When you multiply that by the 1.4 million works Internet Archive put up for free, the final number could be astronomical, and well beyond the nonprofit’s ability to pay. A win for publishers would put Internet Archive’s other projects at risk.

It appears that publishers aren’t just after Internet Archive’s temporary free ebook initiative. The complaint also contends that controlled digital lending is an “invented theory” and that its rules “have been concocted from whole cloth and continue to get worse.” It also contends that Internet Archive’s “one-to-one conflation of print and ebooks is fundamentally flawed.” Controlled digital lending, however, isn’t unique to Internet Archive. It’s a framework that’s been supported by several libraries over the years, including many university libraries like UC Berkeley Library. Publishers winning this lawsuit may potentially also put the kibosh on the entire controlled digital lending model.

It’s clear that Internet Archive’s decision was intended to appease publishers into dropping the suit. According to Internet Archive, some academic publishers who were initially displeased with the National Emergency Library eventually came around. That said, it’s unclear whether commercial publishers would do the same, as they have everything to gain by strengthening their hold over ebook copyrights.

Source: Internet Archive Ends Free Ebook Program Early

Fed up with the DRM in a General Electric refrigerator that pushed the owner to buy expensive manufacturer-approved replacement water filters, an anonymous hacker went to the trouble of buying a domain name and setting up a website at gefiltergate.com to pen a screed about appliance digital rights restriction management (DRM) and how to bypass it.

The fridge in question required a GE RPWFE refrigerator water filter. It has an RFID chip, which the fridge uses to verify the authenticity of the part. The RPWFE filter costs much more than unapproved filters: about $50 compared to $13.

“Some ******* at GE thought it would be a good idea to include a ******* RFID DRM module in select refrigerators,” the unidentified individual wrote, without using the asterisks we’ve included because online profanity filters are awful.

The Register contacted GE to ask about this, and the American giant’s corporate communications director promptly replied that GE sold its appliance unit to China-based Haier in 2016, which continues to use its brand. Haier did not immediately respond to our inquiry.

The gefiltergate.com website, borrowing from a similar post on another website back in May, explains how to hack your Haier GE-brand fridge by affixing an RFID tag – stripped from a component for bypassing the water filter system – to the RFID sensor.

The GE website suggests that a water filter is a good idea to avoid exposure to unfiltered water and sediment, inadvertently offering a sad commentary on public water infrastructure and government funding priorities. It recommends its RFID water filter because the chip chats with the fridge to report leaks, and will shut off the water supply if a leak is detected.

But the appliance doesn’t require the RFID filter; fridge owners can use the bypass plug, and still get unfiltered water.

“Non-GE filters and counterfeit filters without this technology will not perform the same way in the event of a water leak,” the company’s website explains. “The refrigerator has the option to use a bypass plug should you not want to use a genuine GE Appliances water filter.”

That makes it sound as if fridge owners can use water filters from another vendor but that’s not the case – the bypass plug is just to silence the fridge display screen warnings coming from the filtration system’s RFID sensor. “The ID chip on the filter detects when a wrong or non-genuine GE Appliance part is used,” the GE Appliances website states. “If this happens, the dispenser will not work and the display may read ‘Leak Detected.'”

Hence the need to hack the fridge, which is something product owners evidently have been doing for years. The Amazon.com webpage for the bypass plug contains a string of user reviews indicating that customers only purchased the thing for its RFID chip. And complaints abound on discussion site Reddit.

In a phone interview with The Register, Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, said product hacking of this sort is entirely legal, in America at least. The US Copyright Office, she said, included software-enabled appliance repair in its 2018 rulemaking [PDF], and patents are not an issue in this case. And the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act guarantees that consumers can use parts not from the original manufacturer.

Asked whether such practices generate enough ill-will to make them unprofitable, Gordon-Byrne said they can, pointing to Keurig’s problems selling coffee makers with digital locks, but added that people have to be aware of the problem.

“It generates some ill will but not enough to offset the value of controlling the whole parts market,” she said. “But it’s a stupid, stupid thing to do. There’s no reason to do this.”

Right-to-repair legislation, which aims to ensure consumers have a legal right to repair products where product makers or laws deny that possibility, was being considered in about 20 US states last year. However, Gordon-Byrne said that progress has stalled due to the coronavirus outbreak. She expects repair bills will have to be reintroduced in January next year.

Current US Copyright Office exemptions, she said, should be renewed for 2021 and she expects to lobby for new exemptions for product categories where repairs that require breaking digital locks are still not allowed, like boats, medical equipment, and game consoles.

Source: Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it • The Register

The real Space Force may be going down in flames against the fictional Space Force: According to the Hollywood Reporter, the newly founded military branch appears to be losing a trademark battle with the Netflix comedy show of the same name.

Netflix “has outmaneuvered the U.S. government to secure trademark rights to ‘Space Force’ in Europe, Australia, Mexico and elsewhere,” according to the Reporter, while the Air Force—under which the Space Force is organized—simply has a pending application stateside. This mostly has ramifications for merch. Consumers won’t have trouble discerning between the military branch and Space Force when it comes to which one stars Steve Carrell, but they might not be able who is selling a line of Space Force shirts.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office relies on a “first-to-use” system when assigning rights, and Netflix has been submitting trademark applications for the Space Force across the globe since the start of 2019. On the other hand, the Air Force filed a trademark application on the basis of intent to use in March 2019, per Law & Crime, and the Space Force didn’t become an actual organization until December 2019. If it comes down to a legal battle, that means Netflix may be able to easily demonstrate it was actually using the Space Force branding first. (Even if Netflix lost the case, it would have a First Amendment right to continue selling Space Force merch on the grounds of satire and parody.)

Source: Space Force Losing Trademark Battle With Netflix’s Space Force

OK, so not only is this silly but the fact that you can apparently actually trademark two words in a row seems absolutely bonkers to me.