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While I tend to like the use of trademark laws more than other forms of IP, it's long overdue that we all start admitting the realm of trademark has a problem. In a variety of industries, the use of trademarks is either not serving its original purpose or is doing vastly more harm than good. Craft beer is one of those industries, for instance. It's starting to seem like trademark use in certain advocacy realms is getting that way as well.

It's extremely difficult to win a defamation suit when the allegedly defamatory statements are THINGS THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Documents pertaining to the accidental killing of two men by US drone strikes in Yemen can continue to remain unacknowledged by the agencies guiding the strikes.

The Quicklock looks like a normal padlock but does not require an extra set of keys or a memorized combination to open it. The lock opens with a tap of an RF/NFC card (2 included in the purchase) or via Bluetooth and an app on your phone. The lock can be programmed to be used by up to 50 different NFC cards or unlimited phone users and will keep track of who used it and when, according to the Quicklock website FAQ. It's available through the Techdirt Deals store for 18% off of retail and includes a choice of blue or black, 2 NFC cards, a key fob and a micro USB charger. Additional NFC cards, key fobs and even a ring (really?) are available as additional purchases through Quicklock's site.

We recently wrote about a German film distributor that went on a DMCA takedown blitz and managed to send notices for sites that had nothing to do with infringing files (such as IMDB and, er, Techdirt). In a somewhat related story, we learn that representatives of Universal Pictures have likewise gone DMCA happy over infringing versions of movies like Furious 7and Jurassic World -- even to the point of issuing takedowns not only for the film's IMDB page (for Furious 7), but for "127.0.0.1" for Jurassic World.

The legislative sausage-making process is apparently so streamlined that many sausage-makers are barely involved in the process. It's not that they don't want to be. It's that other sausage-makers want their product to be pushed out the door with a minimum of inspection.

FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly will never be confused with a consumer advocate or champion of the people. He's voted down nearly every consumer-friendly FCC initiative that has come down the pike, whether that's net neutrality, raising the base definition of broadband to 25 Mbps, or fighting back against state protectionist broadband laws written by ISPs to protect their uncompetitive geographic fiefdoms. O'Rielly most recently made waves by proudly declaring, as an employee of an agency tasked with ensuring timely deployment of broadband to all Americans, that he really didn't think broadband was all that necessary.

Government paranoia about "critical infrastructure" will now be extended to drone photography, if New Jersey's proposed legislation is any indication. While law enforcement agencies are still weighing the Fourth Amendment implications of surveillance drones, some local governments are moving ahead with plans to shortchange the First Amendment.

A few years ago, if you asked cable and broadcast executives if cord cutting was real, most of them would proudly declare that it was a complete and total phantom (like Yeti). The few that could admit to the trend would usually try to argue that the only people engaged in this kind of behavior were losers not worthy of their consideration when contemplating their business models. Of course data has emerged since suggesting that not only is cord cutting very real (albeit slow), the people doing it are affluent, educated, and right in cable's key future target demographic.

We've argued for quite a long time that treating "pirates" like criminals instead of potential customers is a massive mistake for a whole host of reasons. There's the futility of the legal game, for instance, as well as the possible public relations nightmare that going after the public, even the infringing public, can create. But the best reason to not treat infringers like criminals is because they're often the best actual customers of content out there as well. In study after study, it's shown that a person who engages in some infringement spends more total money on movies, music, and video games than someone who gets everything legit. Pirates, scurvy-laden bastards as they may be, happen to be the creative industries' best customers.

As Techdirt has noted many times, one of the things that makes it hard to engage sensibly with so-called "trade negotiations" like TPP and TAFTA/TTIP is the secrecy surrounding them. Aside from the odd leak and any crumbs of information that drop from the negotiating table, one of the few things that are made public is the predicted benefit of participating in these agreements. To hear the politicians tell it, the models employed for this purpose prove that a country would be crazy not to sign up to whatever deal they are currently pushing. Given the central role played by these econometric models, you'd think more would be done to refine them and check whether they get it right. Here's what has happened on this front in Australia, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald:

Earlier this week, we noted that NY City mayor Bill de Blasio appeared to pick a fight with Uber that he couldn't possibly win. The plan was to create a taxi medallion-like system for car hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, but which would cap the number of such cars that could be on the road. The PR campaign against this effort was tremendous (obviously, some of it pushed by Uber and Lyft -- but much of it by the happy users and drivers on those platforms). De Blasio and his staff apparently believed that there really wasn't popular support for these platforms, which was just wrong. As the negative publicity continued to mount, including having various celebrities weigh in on how stupid the plan was, it appears that de Blasio has backed down and agreed to drop the plan, at least for the time being.

Computers are getting smarter all the time. Even though science fiction sometimes tends to paint artificial intelligence in an evil light, humans are building these intelligent machines -- and presumably, we'll have some control over how dangerous they'll ultimately become (but maybe not). People are building artificial brains without really knowing how brains work, but that's how we're learning. Maybe we should be breeding hyper-intelligent parrots, instead?

The CIA has been fighting to keep POW/MIA records out of Roger Hall's hands for over a decade. With that FOIA battle finally over, the CIA is now fighting to keep its moneyout of Roger Hall's hands. Judge Royce Lambert's order sounds a little exasperated with this vexatious defendant.

So, by now you've heard the story of how Wired reporter Andy Greenberg allowed two car hackers to hack into a car that he was driving, remotely, while he was on a highway. The story is getting plenty of well-deserved attention, with some people raising a variety of concerns. The most obvious concern is the "holy hell, that seems scary, we should improve car security." And that's true. A second level of concern is over whether or not that experiment on a real highway was appropriate, given the very real potential of danger (including the truck that almost hit Greenberg). A third concern is over the reality of the threat, given that Greenberg was driving a car owned by the hackers, that they had the ability to touch previously (i.e. the "remote" part of the hack sounds scary, but it's less scary if hackers have to get into your car first).

While Comcast's failed merger attempt with Time Warner Cable received a well-deserved media and public beating, AT&T's almost-as-bad $49 billion acquisition of DirecTV has been able to largely fly under the radar, despite the fact that only the latter eliminates a direct pay TV competitor. With less public pressure from consumer outrage, the FCC and DOJ appear poised to approve AT&T's deal, and the FCC is circulating an order approving the deal among the agency's Commissioners. Approval could occur as soon as this week.

Too busy to sit down and get through your book list? One company thinks they have your answer. Blinkist offers a way to read or listen to summaries of key points of books in about 15 minutes. It features over 1000 books with 40 new ones added each month. They cover a diverse range of topics and authors like Amanda Palmer's "The Art of Asking" and Paul Graham's "Hackers and Painters". You can sync with Evernote, and access your library across your Kindle, phones or computers. The Blinkist Premium edition is available in the Techdirt Deals Store for 62% off of a 1 year subscription. (Blinkist has a free 3 day trial available)

We've talked plenty about the value of body cameras and dashcams for police -- in acting as a deterrent to bad behavior by police while supposedly acting as public servants. Of course, that only works if people trust the video not to be edited and doctored. This week there are all sorts of questions being raised about the arrest and hanging death of activist Sandra Bland in Texas. There are plenty of questions about why she was even arrested in the first place, and then plenty more about why she died (the police called it a suicide, which many who knew Bland find highly questionable).

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On Twitter yesterday, Brian Fitzpatrick, a tech entrepreneur, noted that while trying to enjoy the in-flight entertainment on the United Airlines flight he was taking, the in-flight Wi-Fi system told him he need to install its special brand of DRM. They didn't even try to sugarcoat it with some fancy confusing name. It's literally called the DRM plugin:

Earlier this year, we covered a very troubling situation involving Kim Dotcom and the US government. As you almost certainly already know, Dotcom is fighting extradition from New Zealand to the US to face a bunch of charges concerning criminal copyright infringement. We've written about those charges as well as the extradition fight many times. However, while all of this was going on, the Justice Department filed a separate lawsuit, not against Dotcom himself, but against all of his stuff. We've talked for years about the problems of the "asset forfeiture" program in the US, and Dotcom's case drives all of those points home. And, even if you think that Kim Dotcom is absolutely guilty, a horrible person, responsible for billions of dollars in losses to the film and music industries, you should still be concerned about the asset forfeiture aspects here.

Comcast executive David Cohen is, by dictionary definition, a lobbyist. And not just any lobbyist; a gushing profile piece by the Washington Post in 2012 called him a "wonk rock star" and the company's "secret weapon," who uses "his vast network of high-powered contacts" to help craft Comcast-friendly regulations and apply pressure on DC policy makers. You know, a lobbyist. Unless you're Comcast, which has now e-mailed me repeatedly to demand I stop calling him that.

The availability of NFL games online has long been a bit of a joke when compared to the NBA or MLB, in large part thanks to the league's exclusive deal with DirecTV for out of market games. The televised bastard child of this unholy union is NFL Sunday Ticket, which charges consumers between $250 and $350 a season to watch their favorite games. And while DirecTV has eased up a little on the restriction that you need to subscribe to DirecTV's other services to get Sunday Ticket, trying to order the standalone broadband-only service over at the DirecTV website results in the user being accosted with a bevy of fine print:

Techdirt has been covering discussions to establish a harmonized pan-African legal framework for the protection of plant breeders' rights for a couple of years now, in particular the fears that this will benefit Western seed companies the most, at the expense of Africa's plant diversity and seed independence. As the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) website reports, what is now known as the "Arusha Protocol for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants" has been agreed:

Police misconduct and abuse allegations are always greeted with defensive department statements about "thorough investigations" and "taking allegations seriously." And yet, when it's all said and done, very little has been done to prevent future abuse.

The Apollo 11 Moon landing was a pretty big deal in 1969 (and it still is). It's been just 46 years since a human being first set foot on the moon, and it's a bit disappointing that we haven't been back more recently. Fortunately, there are some folks still working on manned space exploration (phew, SpaceX..), so people won't be limited to just visiting the ISS or Tiangong 1. If you're a space enthusiast, check out a few of these links on manned spaceflight stuff.

The NYPD doesn't care for transparency. Its relationship with open records requesters ranges from "frosty" to "antagonistic." It even employs its own in-house, completely arbitrary classification system in order to prevent even more of its documents from making their way into the hands of the public.

Muckrock has a story of Alex Richardson, seeking information on the IRS's Whistleblower Office, which has been receiving some scrutiny lately. Richardson filed a bunch of FOIA requests and discovered that the IRS apparently would like to make his life as difficult as possible. First he got an infamous GLOMAR "neither confirm nor deny" response -- which was supposed to be limited to national security issues. However, with at least one request, a package with a CD just arrived... and Richardson was dismayed to find the contents of the CD encrypted. That seems a bit strange for a response to a FOIA request, since whatever is being delivered is supposed to be public, but whatever. The letter accompanying the CD explains, for reasons unknown, that while the IRS was only returning 6 of the 23 pages that had been located, it was doing so with encryption, and it would send the key separately. Again, this seems like weird operational security for public documents. Now, also, in the response letter, it noted that the reason only 6 pages are included is because the rest were withheld under FOIA exemptions: So you had to imagine that in those 6 pages, there should at least be some relevant information. Nope. It appears that the IRS went through all that to give a final middle finger to Richardson, because when he finally decrypted the documents... they're all redacted too. Six pages, entirely blacked out. Which makes you wonder why the other 17 were "withheld" in the first place. What difference could it have made?

A few years ago, there was no reason to see Apple and Google as direct competitors — but thanks to the mobile space, all that has changed. Now the two tech giants are going head-to-head in a contest for the mobile device market share, but their approaches to this race remain very different. This week, we discuss the nuances of this competition and what these two different approaches can teach us about business models and innovation. Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to vet a DMCA takedown request for false positives, especially when the request only includes 28 URLs. You'd be wrong.

Charge up to 5 devices with the Speedy 50W USB Charger now available for $22 in the Techdirt Deals store. It is compatible with any USB-charging device and is lightweight and compact enough to slip into a bag and take with you so you can keep your phones and tablets topped up throughout the day. You can charge 5 phones or 4 tablets simultaneously.

As we've noted for years, the security on most "smart" or "connected" cars is aggressively atrocious. And in fact it's getting worse. As car infotainment systems get more elaborate, and wireless carriers increasingly push users to add their cellular-connected car to shared data plans, the security of these platforms has sometimes been an afterthought. Hackers this week once again made that perfectly clear after they demonstrated to a Wired reporter that they were able to manipulate and disable a new Jeep Cherokee running Fiat Chrysler's UConnect platform. While the reporter was driving it:

For quite some time now, the Snowden haters out there keep wanting to prove that Ed Snowden somehow caused damage with his leaks. It's been over two years now and they keep coming up empty. Former Senator and staunch surveillance state supporter Saxby Chambliss was out making claims yesterday about how when the US government "gets our hands on" Snowden, it should "hang him on the courthouse square." Because nothing says "freedom" like convicting someone without a trial and then killing them barbarically, right? But, Chambliss also claimed that "lives have been lost" because of Snowden, ridiculously comparing his leaks to the OPM leaks:

Self-driving cars are on the way, and in their wake, they'll leave a variety of entities slightly less better off. Insurance companies may be the first to feel the pinch, as less-than-risk-averse drivers are replaced with Electric Grandmothers more than willing to maintain safe speed limits and the proper distance between vehicles. And as goes the car accident, so go other areas of the private sector: personal injury/DUI lawyers, hospitals, body shops, red light camera manufacturers, towing companies, etc.

Hoping to have an errant charge resolved, O'Reilly Media author Jonathan Zdziarski recently reached out to Verizon Wireless on Twitter. While Twitter support can help put a friendly face to a massive, often-times unwieldy conglomerate, anyone that has actually interacted with one of these support agents has likely found the quality of these interactions to be decidedly hit or miss. In Zdziarski's case, the Verizon Wireless support agent in question thought it would be perfectly acceptable for him to prove his identity over Twitter, since the platform is such a "secure means of communication":

We had two separate stories late last week about copyright issues in the UK, and it occurred to me that a followup relating one to the other might be in order. The first one, from Thursday, was about the UK's plan to try, once again, to push a new "education campaign" to teach people that "copyright is good." We've seen these campaigns pop up over and over again for decades now, and they tend to lead to complete ridicule and outright mockery. And yet, if you talk to film studio and record label execs, they continually claim that one of the most important things they need to do is to teach people to "respect" copyright through education campaigns.

Techdirt has written a couple of times about European sensitivities regarding data protection, in particular when it comes to privacy rules requiring local storage of personal data. It turns out that Europe is not alone in its concern that agreements like TAFTA/TTIP and TISA could jeopardize this approach. An article in The Tyee points out that two of Canada's provinces -- British Columbia and Nova Scotia -- have requirements that sensitive personal data must be stored locally, and that they are likely to fall victim to TPP because the US insists the laws are "non-tariff barriers":

The digital era has redefined evidence "staleness." The evidence that law enforcement often claims needs to be grabbed quickly (and, often, violently) to save it from destruction is the same evidence that could conceivably live on forever if never subjected to a concerted destruction effort.

Volcanoes are not exactly predictable, so the best way to avoid getting killed by one is probably to just live far, far away. But Nature doesn't worry about death and destruction, so all kinds of life seems to thrive around active volcanoes, even where no one would expect life to be able to survive at all.

For years, Charlie Hebdo waged a brutal, often ugly war on good taste, restraint and self-righteousness. The satirical magazine took on every major religion, along with anything else it could satirize. It only had problems with one particular target: Islam. Rather, it only had problems with followers of Islam who believed brutal acts of violence were a perfectly acceptable way of resolving religious differences.

So we had just written about Newegg -- after waiting 20 months for a ruling in a patent case -- going to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) to ask for an order telling the district court in East Texas to actually do its job. The move worked, getting Judge Rodney Gilstrap to finally issue the order (overturning a jury award on a bogus patent), but still taking the time to scold Newegg for daring to go above his head. We quoted Newegg's top lawyer Lee Cheng pointing out that if, as Gilstrap stated, part of the issue was his overwhelming schedule, then Gilstrap and other East Texas judges should be much more willing to grant transfer requests to courts outside of East Texas. As has been known for the better part of a decade, patent trolls love to file in East Texas because the courts there are super friendly to trolls. There is no legitimate reason for them to be in Texas, though some of the trolls set up fake empty offices in Texas just to pretend.

As you my have heard by now, on Sunday, online security super reporter Brian Krebs revealed that the infamous "dating site for married people who want to cheat on their spouse," AshleyMadison had its systems hacked, with whoever is responsible claiming to have basically everything. Apparently the site (and a few other similar sites run by the company) had 37 million registered users, many of which are probably a bit more worried about their information leaking publicly than they were a couple days ago.

Soundcloud has been having some issues of late trying to "balance" (stupid word, but we'll get to that) the interests of copyright holders and people who use its platform for remixes. Soundcloud -- a site that is essentially a YouTube for audio, and which has long been a key place for DJs and remixers to upload their crafts -- has been going back and forth with an angry recording industry for a few years, trying to appease the industry, often by defaulting to the "take it down!" side of the ledger to avoid lawsuits. There was a big kerfuffle a year ago when Soundcloud gave more power to the labels to take content down from its service. However, in the last few months things have gotten much crazier, as Soundcloud clearly ratcheted up its takedown procedures leading to many vocal complaints from angry Soundcloud users. We've even seen the company tell someone that "fair use" is no defense, since fair use is only in the US and Soundcloud is available globally. That's beyond troubling for a variety of reasons, and as someone who pays Soundcloud to host our Techdirt podcasts, it has me concerned and looking for alternatives.

NY City Mayor Bill de Blasio has apparently decided to pick a fight with Uber -- a move that has already backfired and appears to be getting worse by the day. He's been pushing a proposal, obviously put together in support of legacy taxicab owners, that would limit the number of such car-hailing drivers allowed in the city. Basically, it would take the ridiculous taxi medallion system and apply it to these new services, limiting supply, keeping prices high and not serving the public very well at all. Uber responded forcefully last week by adding an amusing "de Blasio" feature to its service, showing riders how much longer they'd have to wait for a car if the plan moves forward.

We're featuring the pay what you want deal on the Web Hacker Bundle from Eudonix Learning Solutions. Pay what you want to get the first two courses which cover learning Docker and Apache Cassandra. If you beat the average price, you will unlock access to five more courses covering Django, Python, Ruby on Rails, PHP, MYSQL, JavaScript, JQuery and Bootstrap development. It's 73 hours of instruction with lifetime access. A great bonus is that 10% of the profits are given to Creative Commons.

So, we're engaged in a war of sorts. Against capital-T "Terror." It's a very ambiguous war that couples troop deployments with a dense mesh of surveillance programs. As is the case with all wars, there are those "up top" who see the only way to fight back -- or just "secure" the nation -- is to expand the government's powers.

Slightly over a month ago, a Canadian court (British Columbia) issued a ruling that basically stated it could order Google to block websites globally. This nonsensical, overreaching order was issued on behalf of plaintiff Equustek Solutions, Inc., which hadn't even originally named Google as a defendant. It wasn't until Google appealed the decision that it was actually roped into the lawsuit. The court defended all of its stupidity by pointing out the real problem here was Google's global reach, not the impossibilities and idiocy of its own decision.

This happens every few months -- whenever there's a flare up of "bad behavior" on the internet. Some genius thinks he can solve everything by just "getting rid of online anonymity." The latest to step into this well trodden, widely debunked, canyon of ridiculousness... is Lance Ulanoff over at Mashable. He seems to think that he's the first person to seriously consider the idea of doing away with online anonymity, and it only serves to show that he's barely thought through the issue at all. First off, it's simply wrong to associate anonymous comments with trollish comments. Yes, some anonymous comments are trollish, but most are not. And, in fact, many trollish, harassing comments come from people who have their real names attached to them. This has been studied widely, but Ulanoff doesn't even bother to look for evidence, he just goes with his gut. The largest single platform for harassment online... has been Facebook, which famously requires "real names." That hasn't stopped harassment, and nor would it do so on Reddit.

Last October -- following Apple and Google's announcements of encryption-by-default for iOS and Android devices -- was greeted with law enforcement panic, spearheaded by FBI director James Comey, who has yet to find the perfect dead child to force these companies' hands.

Back in May, we wrote about the European Commission's sharing "concerns" about corporate sovereignty chapters in trade agreements. The Commissioner responsible for trade, Cecilia Malmström, even went so far as to say that the present investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system was "not fit for purpose in the 21st century." But rather than removing something that is unnecessary between two economic blocs with highly-developed and fair legal systems, she instead proposed to "reform" it, and to start working towards an international investment court. That idea was dismissed almost immediately by the US Undersecretary for International Trade at the Commerce Department, Stefan Selig. Despite that, the EU seems set on replacing today's corporate sovereignty with some kind of court. In a non-binding but important set of recommendations to the European Commission regarding TTIP, the European Parliament called for the following: