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from the maybe-just-drop-it dept on Tuesday, May 21st, 2013 @ 12:10AM

As negotiators are seeking to finish up the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement as soon as possible (they had originally promised a done deal by October), it appears that the controversial "intellectual property" chapter is causing the most problems, according to Sean Flynn, who is at the current negotiating round in Lima.

Officially, the Chief Negotiators have backed off the prior commitment to end the TPP negotiation by October, but are still clinging to a goal to end the negotiation by the “end of the year.” But privately, none of the negotiators or stakeholders at this round would express any confidence that the intellectual property issues could be resolved by then. The issues still under contention are massive.

The intellectual property chapter has grown to over 80 pages of text – including all the bracketed suggestions and alternatives. Some negotiators describe it as the longest text currently under negotiation.

Many of the issues are completely blocked. There has not been any new negotiation text offered on the most controversial pharmaceutical provisions since the Melbourne round over a year ago. There is currently no mandate from many countries to negotiate (they only “consult” and “discuss”) the pharmaceutical reimbursement chapter. Barbara Weisel described the pharmaceutical issues as being in a “period of reflection,” and had no comment on when that period might end.

Furthermore, it appears that some of the negotiators are realizing that it's a bad idea to lock in certain concepts, as would be set under the TPP, especially as various court rulings are changing the way copyright laws are viewed, and while a new copyright reform process is ongoing. People seem to be recognizing that agreeing to specific norms that may quickly be undermined by national laws would be a waste of time.

The recent spate of proposals for policy changes for US copyright law have caused a stir. The US is being asked how it can hold on to demands for parallel importation restrictions after the Kirtsaeng ruling, 70 year copyright terms after the Copyright Office proposed shifting them back to 50 years with formalities required for extensions, and strict restrictions on anti-circumvention liability exceptions when the Obama Administration and the Library of Congress have endorsed reforms that would violate the US proposal. Barbara Weisel stated that USTR is “doing what we can to work with Congress” to make sure that the TPP will not restrict policy options. But negotiators have said that there has been no visible movement on the USTR’s positions on Copyright issues, which will be negotiated this week.

And, of course, once again, the USTR appears to have no plans to be transparent in the slightest.

And there is no plan to release any text to the public. This is stark contrast to the last to plurilateral agreements including countries in the region. The Free Trade Area for the Americas and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement both released full texts of the negotiating document with brackets indicating text under consideration before the finalization of the texts. For ACTA, there were four publicly released texts between April 2010 and May 2011. For the TPP – none yet, despite the Chief Negotiators’ pronouncement of end of year finalization plans.

Considering how much controversy there is over these items, it seems ridiculous that we still can't actually see what's being negotiated in our name -- especially when there's quite reasonable fears that it could mess with the democratic process of potentially rewriting copyright law.

from the steak-in-the-game dept on Monday, May 20th, 2013 @ 8:04PM

We've covered the trespasses of stupid criminals here before. Bank robbers who brag about their actions on YouTube, for instance. Or thieves on the lam uploading pictures containing their whereabouts to social media sites. It seems at times that these guys and gals are just trying to get caught. But that's certainly not always the case. Take the following story, which I have to believe is the internet-y-ist dumb criminal story yet.

It begins with Troy Maye, who is accused of grabbing identifying info on people and then attempting to sell the identities off to bidders. The IRS was tracking Maye and his girlfriend, but they didn't have either of their real names, since they were at least smart enough to give aliases. So the IRS engaged a confidential informant, who sat down to eat with them at a restaurant in Florida.

They came up on the IRS radar after the couple met an informant at — no joke — YOLO Restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. Maye told the informant his name was Troy and that he had stolen 700,000 identities, but the IRS could not yet crack the thief of identities' identity.

I have no idea what kind of food is served at YOLO Restaurant, but you kind of have to assume everything on the menu has a 50/50 shot of killing you, right? Maybe it's nothing but puffer fish and uncooked chicken with a side of ebola? Regardless, the IRS still wasn't able to get names on the two, so the informant was sent to have another meal with the two criminals, this time upping the classiness of the operation by going to a Morton's Steakhouse. While there, Maye provided the informant with a thumb drive that contained a bunch of identities, which were promptly turned over to the IRS. Investigators were then able to pull Maye's name from metadata on the drive. From there, the IRS did what any federal agency would do:

IRS Agent Louis Babino then headed to Google and located Maye’s Instagram page, which contained a profile photo of Maye. When shown the profile photo, the CW confirmed that Maye (seen at right) was the man with whom he dined at Morton’s.

Well, sure, Agent Babino, but how can you be really sure this was your guy?

A further review of Maye’s Instagram page, Babino noted, revealed “a photo of a steak and macaroni and cheese meal containing the caption ‘Morton’s.’” The image--uploaded on January 7 at 11:24 PM--“appears to coincide” with the CW’s meeting at Morton’s, added Babino.

Yup, this guy food-porned his way into being arrested. The Instagram photo is reportedly being entered into evidence in the case, so one hopes the juicy steak and the creamy mac and cheese was really, really worth all the trouble Maye is now in. Once again, if you're a criminal, online narcicism is probably something you'd do best to avoid.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept on Monday, May 20th, 2013 @ 5:00PM

Nuclear energy has been around for decades, but its safety and the safety of its radioactive waste have always been a political nightmare. Still, some researchers have been redesigning nuclear reactors to make them safer in many ways, but these newer designs have yet to be scaled up and used commercially. Maybe someday nuclear technology will be ubiquitous, but it'll likely take a long time before anyone is willing to embrace fission/fusion energy that doesn't come from the Sun.

• A European research reactor called Guinevere demonstrates the safety and benefits of a hybrid reactor-accelerator design. This nuclear reactor design is an accelerator-driven system (ADS) and uses a particle accelerator so that its nuclear reactor can run without enough fissile material to generate a nuclear chain reaction (so all the nuclear reactions stop when the external particle accelerator stops). An bonus feature is that its radioactive waste material can be transmuted via the particle accelerator into elements with lower half-lives that may be more convenient to handle and store. [url]
• Teenager Taylor Wilson has been building nuclear reactors for a few years already, and his current project is to build small, modular nuclear reactors capable of generating just 50-100 megawatts of electricity. Wilson's reactors would create a more decentralized network of electricity generation, but that's a lot of NIMBY to overcome.... [url]
• Italian scientists have halted research on piezonuclear fission. Low Energy Nuclear Reactions have been associated with Cold Fusion, so if there's any kind of non-classical fission/fusion going on, it may take extraordinary evidence to convince anyone of it. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

from the oops dept on Monday, May 20th, 2013 @ 3:30PM

When we typically discuss companies coming to blows with content control (aka censorship), the stories tend to be about what would otherwise be obscure wrong-doings going viral on a national or international level. Major automakers concocting horrible advertising around suicide, for instance. Or multi-state bus companies learning that bathroom-ing on their customers isn't the best practice and catching the resulting backlash. But the practice of shining the light on yourself by being overly protective of your brand doesn't only happen at the macro level, it can have a local effect as well.

That's the lesson the Chicago Blackhawks are learning right this very minute. If you're not in Chicago, you probably haven't heard of Susannah Collins, who reports for Comcast Sports Net on the Blackhawks. In fact, if you know who she is at all, it's probably from this line of low-brow comedy videos that she produced on YouTube. While some of those videos are likely NSFW, there is nothing more racy in them than a bit of colorful language and suggestive talk. It's about as harmless as it gets. That is, of course, unless you're the Chicago Blackhawks who, for reasons that make absolutely zero sense, decided that those videos surfacing were cause to five-hole Collins' career and have her fired.

In a letter to the Vice President/General Manager of Comcast Sports Net Chicago, team chairman Rocky Wirtz demanded that reporter Susannah Collins be removed immediately, citing his awareness of comedy videos made years earlier that he found “incredibly offensive to a number of audiences, going well beyond professional athletes.”

He only learned of them after her innocent, unfortunate slip of the tongue last week brought them back to the fore, but it didn’t matter to Wirtz. Although they had been a fully disclosed non-issue upon her hiring, they became instant, retroactive reason for a swift dismissal.

The locals in Chicago were immediately upset over the firing. Certainly part of the reason for the animosity is the silliness of firing a reporter over sketch comedy videos she did on YouTube years ago. But, in true bad PR fashion, the real anger comes over the team's almost epic level of hypocrisy. You see, Wirtz cited the video's offensiveness as the reason for asking CSN (which is owned by several local Chicago teams, including the Blackhawks) to fire Collins. This, from the same team that has young women in tiny outfits shoveling up ice shavings between periods during games. This from a team that plays a sport in which fans will cheer on two grown men committing assault upon one another and then have the nerve to call it "part of the game."

But the real fun comes with the magnifying glass now being placed squarely on the team's official "ambassador," Bobby Hull. The article linked above is one of several that makes the point nicely.

Hull’s second wife, Joanne, whom he wed in 1960 and divorced in 1980, told an ESPN documentary in 2002 that she “took a real beating” at his hands. She described an incident during which Hull “threw me in the room, and just proceeded to knock the heck out of me. He took my shoe – with a steel heel – and proceeded to hit me in the head. I was covered with blood. And I can remember him holding me over the balcony, and I thought this is the end, I’m going.” She filed to end the marriage in 1970 after several more incidents, but they reconciled until Hull threatened her with a loaded shotgun in 1978. Their daughter, Michelle, also described his pattern of behavior to “Sports Century,” and she now works as an attorney specializing in domestic violence.

Should you think this was a one-time minor indiscretion of old-fashioned domestic abuse, Hull's second wife complained of similar treatment, Hull was later convicted for trying to punch a police officer, oh, and there was that one time he was all warm and fuzzy about freaking Hitler.

But, hey, I guess if there aren't any YouTube videos, it never happened, amirite? That is, until your unreasonableness turns the magnifying glass back on you and now you have an entire city calling for the head of your so-called "ambassador."

from the another-failure dept on Monday, May 20th, 2013 @ 2:15PM

Well, well. Some Prenda supporters (shockingly, they exist) in our comments have been arguing that Judge Otis Wright's order against Team Prenda is the sign of a rogue judge who will get overturned. Of course, similar actions underway in other district courts suggest otherwise. On top of that, it would appear that the 9th Circuit appeals court doesn't seem too concerned about Judge Wright's order on a first pass either. Late last week, Paul Hansmeier, one of the key Prenda players, asked the appeals court to delay the requirement to pay sanctions so that he could get a proper appeal together. Of course, perhaps rather than putting together 30 pages protesting about the sanctions, Hansmeier should have been putting together a real appeal (or, as it turns out, reading how to file a stay pending appeal). The filing is certainly amusing. He whines about the lack of due process and the possible "reputational injury" this might cause.

Morgan Pietz, the lawyer who has been opposing Prenda in this matter (and, obviously, who would receive the bulk of the attorney's fees ordered), filed a very short and to the point brief saying he was actually fine with a stay on the payment, pending appeal, of course, but he wanted Hansmeier to first post a bond to show that the payment could be made. He also noted that he would have been happy to make this concession to Hansmeier if Hansmeier had just contacted him to let him know he was filing the brief requesting the stay. That's actually kind of a key point. Judges generally want the various lawyers to talk to each other about what's happening before surprise briefs are filed like this -- and so pointing out that Hansmeier filed a 30 page brief asking for the stay without even letting Pietz know about it probably won't be looked at too kindly by the court. As Pietz points out, there is very real concern about whether or not Prenda will ever actually pay up if they don't put up a bond.

The need for a substantial bond to secure payment of costs and fees from Prenda is not an idle request. Prenda Law, Inc. and its associated lawyers are an organization that is rapidly falling apart. They have dismissed the vast majority of their pending court cases across the country—cases which are their sole source of revenue. Meanwhile, as the days go by, they are increasingly being hit with new motions and orders to show cause for sanctions in various courts where they have tried, with mixed success, to escape from the consequences of their actions. Further, the lawyers and the entities involved here are likely the subject of potential criminal investigations, including an IRS investigation, flowing from the court’s formal referrals in the sanctions order below. In short, there may not be any solvent persons around to collect from for much longer. Further, as will be detailed in briefing on the merits, the lawyers’ interests in these cases (as well as their assets, one presumes) are hidden behind a web of Nevis LLC’s and mysterious offshore trusts. These are all complicated factual issues, with which the district court is already familiar, which is why the district court should set the amount and terms of the bond

Pietz also points out that the "reputational harm" argument is silly, because everyone already knows about it.

Either way, the Appeals Court wasted little time in saying "no," mainly because Paul Hansmeier, who presents himself as an accomplished lawyer, appears not to know the first thing about filing a stay pending appeal.

Appellant's emergency motion for a stay of the district court’s May 6, 2013 sanctions order is denied without prejudice to renewal, if necessary, upon the filing and disposition of such request in the district court. See Fed. R. App. P. 8(a)(1).

The rule in question says that if you're going to ask for such a stay, you have to first ask in the district court, rather than going straight to the appeals court. I would imagine that if Hansmeier had talked to Pietz, Pietz might have made that point as well. The deadline to pay up is tomorrow, though now it seems like Hansmeier may need to go ask Judge Wright for a stay in the matter if he wants to avoid having to pay up.

Of course, that's not the only trouble Hansmeier is facing from the 9th Circuit, who now appears rather aware of Hansmeier's reputation. You may recall that Hansmeier has also been involved in the sketchy practice of protesting class action settlements in the hopes of getting paid off to go away (in one letter he directly asked for $30,000 to go away). The appeal of one of those class action settlement battles is happening in this very same 9th Circuit, and Hansmeier had applied to be admitted in the 9th Circuit, where he cannot currently practice. As pointed out by Popehat, the court has taken notice of Judge Wright's order and told Hansmeier that he needs to clear up that before it will admit him. As Ken White noted:

In other words: no, Paul, you can't have admission to the Ninth Circuit until this is cleared up, and we won't let you represent a client before us in the interim.

Actions have consequences.

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