Last week Tim Cushing wrote about the hugely-worrying new "cybercrime" law passed in the Philippines that seemed likely to criminalize all kinds of everyday online activities. As an article on Radio Australia's site reports, the Philippines' highest court has now stepped in after being petitioned to block the legislation:

The Philippine Supreme Court on Tuesday suspended a controversial cybercrime law, amid huge online protests over fears it would impose enormous curbs on Internet freedoms.

Justice Secretary Leila de Lima said a "temporary restraining order" was issued by the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Such an order stops Philippine laws from taking effect until further orders from the court, while making no immediate judgement on their legality.

The same article reports on the widespread protests the new law has provoked:

Human rights groups, media organisations and netizens have voiced their outrage at the law, with some saying it echoes the curbs on freedoms imposed by dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s.

Philippine social media has been alight with protests, while hackers have attacked government websites and petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court calling for it to overturn the law.

It's great to see the Supreme Court recognizing that there might be a problem here, but it's too early to assume victory. The law might still go into operation -- with what looks like dire consequences for the Internet and civil rights in the Philippines.

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The whole Megaupload/Dotcom mess seems to have really woken up New Zealand to just how much damage an overzealous interpretation of copyright laws can do. New Zealand has already passed a ridiculous three strikes law that US diplomats offered to write for them -- but it seems that the whole Megaupload case has many in the country rethinking their government's support for Hollywood's interpretation of copyright.

And that actually represents a big problem for Hollywood, because New Zealand has been a key force in pushing back on Hollywood's plans for copyright expansionism in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. But Hollywood (and the USTR) need New Zealand to come on board, so they've moved into aggressive lobbying mode. Prime Minister John Key, fresh off of apologizing to Kim Dotcom, showed up in Hollywood recently to be wined and dined by studio execs:

The movie industry's main motives for wining, dining and flattering the Prime Minister were not about Dotcom or subsidies, although it has an obvious interest in both.

The end-goal is to get Key's Government to drop its opposition to aggressive United States demands in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) negotiations. New Zealand will host the next round of TPPA talks in Auckland in early December.

And... at the same time he was being catered to by studio bosses, counterparts in New Zealand were aggressively lobbying other officials there:

While John Key was in Los Angeles, top US intellectual property negotiators were in Wellington lobbying for their latest proposals.

The article linked above, published in the New Zealand Herald, properly points out that what Hollywood is asking for of New Zealand "is too high a price" to pay, just to keep Hollywood happy, and to bring big movie productions to New Zealand. It will impact too many other businesses and "stifle the growing local industry." Hopefully, politicians in New Zealand understand that keeping Hollywood happy seems to result in pretty damaging situations for people in New Zealand and continues to push back against such overreach.

Unusual cloud formations and strangely diffracted sunlight are fascinating phenomena, and more amateur photographers are capturing these ephemeral meteorological events all the time now. So instead of chasing chemtrail conspiracy theories, we can document weird-looking patterns in the sky and try to figure out how/why they happen. Here are just a few examples of some crowdsourced meteorology.

• The International Cloud Atlas is considering including pictures of wavy clouds, called undulatus asperatus and documented by the Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS). These wavy clouds could be the first new type of cloud added to the official cloud record since 1951. [url]
• Here's a gallery of a variety of rainbows and some other cool-looking artifacts of the sky (eg. fogbows and sundogs). If cute pictures can increase worker productivity, maybe rainbows can, too. [url]
• Pretty clouds make for great pictures, but they might also precede some pretty bad weather. Actinoform clouds can only be seen properly from space, as they spread over a hundred miles across the sky. [url]

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

The Humble Bundle folks continue to do cool new things based on their basic (awesome) business model of bundling up a bunch of cool indie content in a simple, user-friendly, pay what you want system (with a charitable component). They've gone through six video game bundles (it's hard to keep up!), and over the summer they did their first music package, with a bunch of cool albums from the likes of Jonathan Coulton, OK Go, They Might Be Giants and MC Frontalot. And... today they announced their very first ebook offering. Same basic deal: bundle of books, pay what you want. The basic package includes:

• Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow, an intense story of youthful techno-defiance
• Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, a hard-hitting collection of 11 impactful stories
• Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, an alternate Earth mystical science fiction tale
• Invasion: The Secret World Chronicle by Mercedes Lackey, Steve Libby, Dennis Lee, and Cody Martin, a modern military superhero saga packed with bonus content
• Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, a delightful fantasy collection of 11 stories
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, the cross-genre follow-up to Stranger Things Happen

As always with Humble Bundle, if you pay more than the ongoing average price paid by others, you also get some bonus content. In this case, it's

• Old Man's War by John Scalzi, a science fiction war epic
• Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, an ethereal graphic novel of a man’s last days

That's apparently the first time the Gaiman/McKean book is available in ebook form... There's also the charitable component. In most bundles, you can designate some of the money to go to EFF or Child's Play Charity -- and that's still true, but this time they've also added the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. It will be interesting to see how this goes. The music bundle did well, by any reasonable standard, but definitely didn't pop the way the video game ones did. It will be worth watching to see how this one goes as well, and if there are other ways that the Humble Bundle crew will continue to innovate.

We've covered one of the sideshow issues in the larger Megaupload case: whether or not the US DOJ could get away with charging Megaupload (the company) without it being located in the US. This wouldn't have impacted the individuals who were indicted separately, but the case against the company entity itself ran into a problem. Since Megaupload has no corporate presence in the US, and the letter of the law is pretty clear that you have to serve companies accused of criminal law violations in the US, there were concerns if Megaupload could even be charged. The DOJ argued that none of this mattered, because in spirit, it should be able to treat foreign companies as if they're in the US. Megaupload hit back, noting that the DOJ shouldn't get to just make up what it thinks the law should be when the law says otherwise.

Unfortunately -- but perhaps not too surprisingly -- the court has sided with the DOJ, saying that the case against Megaupload, the company, can move forward, even though the company was not served in the US.

Judge O'Grady echoes the government's belief that the rules weren't intended to be interpreted for the evasion of foreign defendants. He writes, "It is doubtful that Congress would stamp with approval a procedural rule permitting a corporate defendant to intentionally violate the laws of this country, yet evade the jurisdiction of United States' courts by purposefully failing to establish an address here."

The judge goes onto to make his own interpretation of Rule 4, saying that mailing a summons to the address of corporation's alter ego is the same as mailing the summons to the corporation itself. Often, that means mailing it to the domestic subsidiary of the foreign company; here, it could mean Kim Dotcom if he's ordered to be extradited at a later point.

"So long as the government could prove that an individual defendant is an alter ego of the corporate defendant, the government could satisfy Rule 4's mailing requirement by mailing a copy of the summons to one of the individual defendants once that defendant is extradited to this district," writes the judge.

I can see the judge's reasoning here, but it seems like a pretty slippery slope argument, basically allowing some pretty broad powers to the US to go after countries all around the world. Imagine how the US government would act if other governments around the globe claimed the same thing? It seems that if Congress really intended the DOJ to be able to go after foreign companies, then it should have made that clear in the law.

It sounds as though Megaupload is planning to appeal this ruling, to get a higher court to look into this issue.

In the end, though, this still remains a tangential issue, and one that doesn't impact the case against the individuals. But, for now, the government's argument has won the first round.

Just when you thought trademark law couldn't get any stranger, we have a new story that takes it to a whole new level. Most often, trademark law is applied to logos and names of goods and services, yet there is still some untested ground. This is where Sony comes in. Several years ago, in an effort to rebrand its floundering Playstation 3 brand, Sony created a fictional Vice President of the Playstation brand named Kevin Butler. This character and the ads he starred in became a gaming sensation and brought the Playstation 3 back into the limelight. Here is a sample of these advertisements.
Such success never lasts, and earlier this year, the contract Sony had with Kevin Butler actor, Jerry Lambert, expired and he has moved on to other contracts. One of these new advertisement contracts is with Bridgestone Tires. Unfortunately, Lambert has starred in one ad that now has Sony up in arms. This ad features Jerry Lambert starring as an unnamed Bridgestone engineer along side two other actors portrayed playing a Nintendo Wii. This ad has resulted in Sony going over the edge, so to speak. The entertainment and electronic giant is now suing Bridgestone and Wildcat Creek, the corporation set up to manage Lambert's advertising career, for a variety of reasons, one of which is trademark infringement. You can view the original Bridgestone commercial at GoNintendo.

Sony Computer Entertainment America filed a law suit against Bridgestone and Wildcat Creek, Inc. on September 11. The claims are based on violations of the Lanham Act, misappropriation, breach of contract and tortious interference with a contractual relationship. We invested significant resources in bringing the Kevin Butler character to life and he's become an iconic personality directly associated with PlayStation products over the years. Use of the Kevin Butler character to sell products other than those from PlayStation misappropriates Sony's intellectual property, creates confusion in the market and causes damage to Sony.

This statement is a tad confusing on first blush. It reads as if Sony is claiming trademark on the Kevin Butler likeness rather than the character itself. As such, it would seem that Sony is making the claim that Lambert starring in any commercial could cause likely confusion among consumers, resulting in them thinking that Kevin Butler is endorsing another product. This is rather absurd though. Primarily because the character Labert portrays has no name and actors portray many different characters throughout their careers.

Thankfully, the Hollywood Reporter has provided some further clarifications on the matter. Here we learn a bit more about the exclusivity clause in Lambert's contract.

According to a complaint filed in California federal court, the contract between Sony and Wild Creek was entered into on August 7, 2009 and contained an "exclusivity clause" that prevented Lambert from providing his services or his likeness to competing gaming system manufacturers like Nintendo.

This part at least makes some sense. A lot of contracts will contain language that prevents an employee or other contracted company or individual from working for a direct competitor for a specified time. However, to claim that the commercial with Bridgestone, a tire company, meets this definition is a stretch, even if the commercial features a Nintendo Wii. Sony then claims that Lambert's work with Bridgestone is a breach of contract, unfair competition and tortuous interference. These are quite harsh accusations and Sony will have its work cut out for it.

Next is the claim of trademark infringement.

According to the lawsuit, "With the intent of unfairly capitalizing on the consumer goodwill generated by 'Kevin Butler,' Bridgestone has used and is using the same or confusingly similar character, played by the same actor, to advertise its products or services in the commercial."

Having seen both a Kevin Butler commercial and the Bridgestone ad featuring Lambert, I find it hard to see the similarities beyond the superficial. The Kevin Butler character plays as an overly-serious and often hyperbolic character to its comedic levels. The Bridgestone ad features an excitable and fast talking character. Aside from that, Kevin Butler was built to be a VP while the Bridgestone guy is merely an engineer in an R&D department.

These differences are not going unnoticed by Bridgestone either. It has made the claim that not only are the characters different, but Sony has no actual claim on the Kevin Butler character at all.

"Mr. Lambert is one of the actors who appeared in the commercial as a Bridgestone engineer," say the defendant. "Bridgestone denies that 'Kevin Butler' appears in the Bridgestone commercial discussed herein and thus denies that he speaks or does anything whatsoever in the commercial."

Bridgestone indicates that it intends to fight the lawsuit by showing that Sony has failed to register any mark on "Kevin Butler," that the character has not acquired secondary meaning and that there is no likelihood of confusion among consumers.

This is certainly not the first time something like this has happened. Many years ago, Wendy's had a very successful advertising campaign starring Clara Peller as a little old lady asking a generic fast food chain the famous question, "Where's the beef?" She lost her job with Wendy's after she starred in a Prego commercial uttering the phrase: "I found it. I really found it."

What these accounts show is that the ownership mentality of many corporations goes beyond logos and phrases, to specific actions, characters and the actors behind them. This is certainly a dangerous line of thought for anyone to take up. While Sony most likely has a vested interest in the Kevin Butler character, claiming that its interest in the character extends as far as the actor himself is certainly going to make Lambert's career more difficult potentially to the point of halting it. If he cannot star in any commercial for fear of looking and acting too much like himself, then what point is there in continuing in an acting career?

Last year, we wrote about a crazy patent troll, named Innovatio, who had sued a ton of restaurants and hotels, claiming that anyone who used WiFi was violating its patents. It was even claiming that individuals who use WiFi at home infringed too -- but that it wouldn't go after them "at this time." Instead, it preferred to focus on shaking down tons of small businesses, offering to settle for $2,500 to $3,000 -- which is cheaper than hiring a lawyer to fight it, no matter how bogus. We noted at the time that Motorola and Cisco had gone to court to try to get a declaratory judgment to protect its customers.

Well, it seems that the effort to stop these lawsuits has been taken to the next level. Cisco, Motorola and Netgear have now filed an amended complaint which rips Innovatio apart, and doesn't just seek a declaratory judgment of non-infringement, but outlines a parade of lawbreaking by Innovatio, arguing that it's actually involved in racketeering and conspiracy among other things. The full filing, embedded below, is fascinating. The filing reveals some background about Innovatio, which apparently is connected to Noel Whitley, who had been VP of Intellectual Property at Broadcom... but then left to create Innovatio, which just so happens to have acquired most of its patents from... Broadcom. Among the parade of insanity charged against Innovatio:

• Motorola, Cisco and Netgear all have licensed the patents in question, meaning that users of that equipment are covered by those patents under the concept of patent exhaustion (basically, if you buy a licensed product, it's licensed). Innovatio conveniently doesn't mention this to the people it sends threat letters to.
• The patents in question are part of commitments to IEEE that they'll only be licensed on RAND terms, but the threat letters demand way more than would be considered "reasonable."
• Incredibly, Innovatio includes some expired patents in the list of patents it has threatened people over. That's a massive no-no. Once a patent is expired you can't demand a license for it. At all.
• Innovatio apparently tells the people it threatens that it'll be cheaper to just settle, rather than to even investigate the claims that it's making -- and has told people that the manufacturers in question aren't defending their customers, which is proven false by the lawsuit, which, again, was filed soon after Innovatio popped up on the scene.
• In an attempt to appear more legit, Innovatio claims that the patents in question have "generated in excess of $1 billion in settlements and license fees" to scare small businesses into complying. It leaves out that it appears to be basing this number on the famous broad patent fight settlement between Qualcomm and Broadcom, which was a wide-ranging cross licensing program, that has nothing to do with Innovatio or its specific patents.

There's a lot more in there, but if the allegations by the vendors are accurate, Innovatio's actions are really questionable. Even if people agree that the patents in question are legit, the fact that the vendors have already licensed them makes these actions quite incredible. The lawsuit claims that Innovatio has sent threat letters to an astounding 8,000+ businesses, mostly way too small to be able to understand the details of what's happening.

Defendants prey upon end users that are not involved in the development or supply of the accused technologies, demanding exorbitant licensing amounts that breach numerous obligations on the patents and greatly exceed any notion of reasonableness. In furtherance of their plan, Defendants threaten protracted negotiations with onerous burdens on end users, and offer supposed “discounts” for promptly paying Innovatio without engaging in such negotiations, while making it clear that Innovatio will initiate costly litigation with anyone that does not acquiesce (something it cannot realistically do given the 8000-plus letters sent throughout the U.S.). Under these circumstances, Innovatio circumvents its obligations and illegally obtains and seeks to obtain licensing fees to which it is not entitled, at great detriment to the Plaintiffs in this action, their customers, and the public generally.

Oh yeah, as for that whole "expired patent" thing? That seems especially egregious:

To date, at least ten of the Innovatio Patents have expired, yet those patents continue to be highlighted in Defendants’ threat letters in furtherance of their licensing campaign. Yet Innovatio states to its licensing targets that “Innovatio proposes granting [the licensing target] an upfront, paid-up license for its use under all of 31 of the issued Innovatio Patents,” when those targets have no liability on and therefore no need of such a license to expired patents. For example, on May 9, 2012, almost one year after the ‘771 patent expired and almost six months after the ‘311 patent expired, Innovatio sent a demand letter to [redacted] .... Innovatio did not provide notice of these or its other patents to [redacted] before expiration. Notwithstanding the expiration of these patents and other patents, Innovatio’s May 9, 2012 demand letter stated “[t]he operation and use of any [WLANs that use the IEEE 802.11 communication protocols] by [redacted] constitutes infringement of at least the following Innovatio Patents: . . . U.S. Patent No. 5,940,771 . . . [and] U.S. Patent No. 6,374,311.” .... Yet circumstances here including a failure to comply with 35 U.S.C. §287, confirms that Innovatio cannot assert infringement or recover damages on at least these expired patent claims. On information and belief, Innovatio never disclosed that these patents had expired, or that its remedies were limited, and the purpose behind inclusion of these patents is to inflate the size of Innovatio’s portfolio, instill fear, increase fees and costs to investigate, and force its targets to capitulate promptly to Innovatio’s unlawful demands.

The filing also includes standard claims of non-infringement and invalidity of the patents in question, but the highlighting of these other behaviors by Innovatio are really quite stunning. Even in cases of extreme patent trolling it's pretty rare to see such egregious behavior. Every so often we see RICO claims being used to counter trollish behavior, but they rarely work. However, the details in this case suggest that if a RICO charge is going to stick, this seems like a reasonable case for it to happen.

In the wake of the settlement concerning book scanning by Google and a variety of book publishers, the Copyright Clearance Center issued one of the more ridiculous statements concerning the situation, in which they basically read into the agreement something that was never there:

"Today's news not only further establishes the value of copyright, but also points to the importance of working with rightsholders when undertaking mass digitization. Collaboration is key when it comes to copyright."

First of all, nothing in the seven-year fight or the settlement helped to "establish the value of copyright." Quite the contrary. It seemed to show what a disaster copyright is today in that it could be used to delay the creation of an amazing resource for the world through highly questionable copyright claims. As for the argument that it's important to "work with" rightsholders when doing things like this, that too is misleading. All it showed is how those rightsholders can hold up the useful creation of such a resource -- and highlight why "permission society" is holding back innovation and better tools for learning and education.

Okay, it's official. I no longer believe that our Department of Homeland Security is an actual government agency with important work to do. No, I now believe that it is a series of highly subtle performance art pieces designed to make us laugh at the sheer audacity of dumb government. We already know about the agency's boss, who is in charge of cybersecurity, not bothering to use the internet. And then there is the DHS's highly touted fusion centers being both a waste of money and a detriment to the very freedoms they're supposedly protecting.

But Tim K writes in about a rather stunning admission by DHS officials of a bogus DHS report on a water pumping facility. It essentially amounts to: "sure the report is a complete lie, but it was a successful lie." Don't believe me?

Officials behind the false claims told Senate investigators that such reports weren’t meant to be “finished intelligence” and that despite their report’s inaccuracies and sloppy wording they considered it to be a “success.”

“[It did] exactly what it’s supposed to do – generate interest,” DHS officials told Senate investigators.

Now, let's do some quick background on this report, less because it informs you and more because it's hysterical. About a year ago, a water pump failed in an Illinois water facility. In response, almost immediately, an Illinois fusion center (part DHS, part Illinois State Police) circulated a report blaming a hacking attack from Russia. Not soon after that report was circulated, the greater DHS office rebuffed the fusion center's hacking allegation as absolute nonsense. It pointed out, as does the linked article, that the allegation was pure conjecture based on the fusion center's inability to do even the most basic investigation.

Someone did access the water district’s SCADA system from Russia, but it was a water district contractor who was asked to access the system by water district employees, as Wired first reported. They had called him to seek his opinion on something while he was on vacation in Russia, and he had logged into the system remotely to check on some data for them.

When the pump broke five months later and someone examined the network logs to determine the cause, they found an IP address from Russia listed in the logs next to the username and password of the contractor. No one ever bothered to call the contractor to see if he had logged in from Russia; they just assumed someone in Russia had stolen his credentials.

It's worth noting that the water pump busted 5 months after this Russian IP logged in. In other words, none of this makes a lick of sense, except if it's the case of someone looking for a convenient scapegoat. "Hackers! Russians!" is apparently what these people went with, for reasons unknown to this author.

But the DHS report circulated to Congress, which DHS says is a success even though it's bullshit, was written up after they called out their own fusion center for making stuff up. I think most reasonable people would suspect that such successful excriment is part of the fear mongering around so-called cyberwars and the trumped up need for Congress to pass some kind of cybersecurity bill. But even the least cynical person would at least expect the DHS to correct their report and alert Congress to the pure made-up-iness of it. DHS has thus far declined to do so, because, paraphrasing DHS itself, the lie is more effective than the truth. Yay, government!

Back in December of 2010, Aaron Swartz filed a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts to seize, without any notification or adversarial hearings, domain names which ICE claimed were facilitating copyright and/or trademark infringement. After nearly two years of back and forth (including ICE apparently losing an updated request and closing the request because of it), ICE has finally delivered 100 pages worth of heavily redacted material which are close to useless. They are also claiming that there are another 16,137 records out there, but they want him to pay over $1,000 to get the rest. They told him if he didn't cough up the money within a few days, they would consider the request closed. Aaron, with the help of the Muckrock site (which helps people file FOIAs), is appealing this decision.

In the meantime, however, we have 100 mostly useless documents that appear to just show the warrants that US Magistrate Judge Alan Kay approved on the morning of November 23rd, 2011. Of course, these are completely redacted, so you don't even know what domains they're referring to. In going through the documents, the only thing of interest that I spotted was that the judge time stamped each warrant signature, and many of them are mere minutes from one another -- at least raising some questions concerning how carefully the judge reviewed each individual case before granting the warrant that allowed the feds to then seize and shut down those sites. Considering that we already have two known cases -- Dajaz1 and Rojadirecta -- in which it later came out that the government did not have the necessary evidence, and where the feds were embarrassingly forced to hand back the domains and drop legal proceedings, it seems that a judge should be expected to at least spend some time understanding why it is he's signing off on an order to take down speech.

Either way, it really does seem like these documents being the first 100 released was, perhaps, done on purpose, to make sure the released documents don't actually get at what Swartz actually requested, which was:

• Any guidelines or protocols for ICE agents about the procedures for seizing domains
• Any communications between ICE and other government agencies with regard to the seized domains
• Any communications between ICE and intellectual property owners requesting domains be seized or discussing seized domains
• Any court filings requesting authorization to seize domains
• Any internal emails mentioning the seized sites
• Any legal memos mentioning the seized sites

Instead, he gets 100 pages of heavily redacted warrants? What a joke. And, is it that difficult to expect that a judge will take more than a minute or two to understand the issues at hand when signing off on a warrant to completely shut down a website with no adversarial hearing with the site owner?

Welcome back, viewers, to another segment in our "How To Look Like A Complete Legal Know Nothing While Also Making Sure You Keep Streisand-ing Yourself Into Oblivion" series of posts here at Techdirt (we're working hard on a new segment name; sorry). Remember when we urged YouTube to not censor the controversial hate-film, "Innocence Of Muslims"? And then do you remember how one of the film's actresses, Cindy Garcia, went bonkers in California state court, seemingly alleging everything she could think of against the film's producers in attempt to force YouTube to take the film down? Remember how everyone was surprised to hear a story involving censorship that didn't have a copyright element to it?

Well, to hell with your surprise, because Cindy Garcia is back in a federal way, and she just claimed copyright infringement (PDF) over her performance and filed DMCA notices to get the film taken down. As Marc Randazza hilariously notes, this is plainly stupid.

An actor’s performance in a film is not an independently copyrightable work. I am surprised that these two attorneys are unfamiliar with this rule of law. They might be well-served to review Aalmuhammed v. Lee, 202 F.3d 1227 (2000). You know, the case that is in pretty much every single copyright textbook published since before the Clinton administration ended. Jesus fucking christ, is it so much to ask that someone take a copyright course before filing a copyright infringement lawsuit?

And that really should be the end to the copyright claim, but certainly not to the liability Garcia may find herself under for attorney and legal fees should she have an anti-SLAPP suit filed against her. The claim here, copyright and otherwise, are obviously made in attempt to get the film, i.e. speech, taken down. No one with even a modicum of understanding of copyright law and precedent could possibly think that she owns the copyright on either the film or her performance. This is settled law. Only the director is recognized as having creative control and, thus, the original copyright on the work. The MPAA and WIPO may be touting new monopoly powers for actors to dictate how their performances are expanded upon, but that wouldn't apply here. And, lest you naively think that this is just Cindy Garcia, non-lawyer, almost-actress being all spurious and whatnot, she has an actual legal team working with her on this, and there is no evidence as of yet that this legal team is actually composed of drunk orangutans. These theoretically non-ape lawyers also have some curious notions about the laws and how this nation operates. The following is from their press release.

“We are seeking the legally appropriate mechanism and the least politically controversial one to allow Google and YouTube to do the right thing,” according to M. Cris Armenta, counsel to Ms. Garcia. “Again, this is not a First Amendment case. But, the First Amendment does protect American’s [sic] rights to freedom to express, and also the right to be free from expression.” In Ms. Garcia’s case, the words that were dubbed over her performance were not hers and she finds them personally and profoundly offensive. Ms. Garcia has publicly stated worldwide, including in live broadcasts to Middle Eastern television stations that she does not condone the message in the film and would never willingly participate in such a hateful venture.

If this does not amount to an immediate rescinding of Armenta's license to practice law, that's a major problem. This is not legally appropriate and it is politically controversial because you're looking to censor speech because your client didn't bother to understand what she was getting into. I'll note again, as I did in my last post concerning Ms. Garcia, that neither she, nor her fellow enraged actors and actresses, were equally enraged for the 4 months or so the trailer was on YouTube before the mainstream media had picked the story up and the protests had begun. Her legal team can dictate all they want that this is not a First Amendment case, but simply saying so doesn't make it so.

Though, I suppose I should not be shocked that Armenta doesn't understand that this is a First Amendment case when he apparently doesn't really know what the First Amendment is. That line up there? The one that includes him telling us how the First Amendment protects our "right to be free from expression"? In case you were wondering, that's made up. There is more reality in the Twilight series than there is in that statement.

So, while I too find the film to be offensive both in taste and in some truly awful production qualities, I hope the film's producer has a competent enough attorney to anti-SLAPP the crap out of Garcia's copyright suit. The fact of the matter is that the movie business wouldn't be able to survive if the court said individual actors owned the copyrights on their own performance.

Ah, Russia. Officials in the Federal Mass Media Inspection Service (?!?) are considering a plan to ban children from using WiFi -- and would enforce the ban by holding the hotspot owners liable if anyone under 18 got on their networks. Seriously.

The Communications and Press Ministry has proposed banning children from using Wi-Fi networks in public, potentially making cafes, restaurants and other locations providing the service responsible for enforcing the law.

Why? For the children, of course! They claim it's related to Russia's new internet censorship law, which they're afraid will be circumvented by kids at the local coffee shop or restaurant. Not surprisingly, various places that offer WiFi are not happy about this, pointing out that they have no way of making sure that teens don't get on their WiFi. That doesn't seem likely to stop moralizing bureaucrats (with a healthy appreciation for the ability to censor) from moving forward with this plan.

For years, there have been reports or whispers about how Chinese networking giant, Huawei, might not be trustworthy. Specifically, people talked about how China might hide trojan horses in the equipment for economic espionage or even cyberattack reasons. These rumors got so loud that Huawei last year flat out told the US government to investigate it and come to its own conclusion. Well, the House Intelligence Committee has done exactly that... and Huawei is not pleased (pdf). Despite the investigation coming at its own request, with its promises to be as open as it could be, the report slams Huawei and another company ZTE, and basically says "don't trust these companies."

Huawei has hit back hard, claiming that the report is "libel" and "utterly lacking in substance." They also note that it appears to just be political, calling it "an exercise in China-bashing and misguided protectionism." Indeed, some commentators are noting that this has all the indications of blatant protectionism, rather than a legitimate concern, with some pointing out that the Intelligence Committee seems to consistently ask Huawei to prove a negative and then bashes the company for failing.

But again and again, throughout the report, the pattern emerges: an allegation is made, Huawei denies it, without providing evidence deemed detailed enough to substantiate the denial, and the Committee is unimpressed.

As that writeup notes, Huawei has not been found guilty, but is repeatedly asked to prove its innocence, and being unable to prove conclusively that it hasn't done anything, the Intelligence Committee insists that the threat is just too great.

It is, of course, quite possible that something nefarious is going on with Huawei and ZTE. But there doesn't appear to be any detals in the report that actually proves anything. Instead, it's all just baseless allegations, followed by Huawei (and ZTE) not providing enough details to convince investigators that they're innocent. Given Congress' history of grandstanding, this certainly raises some questions.
But... an even bigger issue is that the whole focus on Huawei may be kind of silly. Yes, it's a Chinese company, but as others have noted, basically all of our electronics products are made in China, and if that country really wanted to do something questionable, why not sneak in trojan horses there as well?

One fundamental failure of all this official hand-wringing is that it neglects the fact that many if not most of the components, with the exception of certain higher-value chips like those from Intel, are manufactured in China. Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks in the U.S., Alcatel-Lucent in France and Ericsson in Sweden, all use Chinese-made parts and carry out at least some portion of the final assembly of their equipment in China.

Furthermore, that same report notes that, if this is just kicking off a trade war between the US and China over telco products, the US companies may get hurt a lot more than the Chinese:

Might China respond with its own restrictions against U.S. telecom firms like Cisco and Juniper? Is this the first shot of a telecom trade war? We’ll see.

If that happens, expect Cisco to be hurt more than Huawei. U.S. sales account for only 4 percent of its overall revenue, whereas Cisco’s operations in Asia, the Pacific Rim and China account for more than 16 percent, and China was its second fastest-growing market in that region after Japan.

Yes, it's entirely possible that Huawei and ZTE are doing something bad -- but you'd think any report claiming that would have a lot more evidence than what's in this report. Of course, considering it's by the same FUD-spewing folks responsible for CISPA, perhaps we should get used to the fact that FUD without evidence is their standard operating procedure.

Twitter has been trying to push all links through its t.co link shortener system, which is actually quite annoying. It's experienced some downtime in the past, including earlier this week when a bit of "human error" by the registrar who handles the .co domain made the entire t.co domain dead to the world, basically breaking all of those links. Apparently someone at the registrar responded to a phishing complaint by accidentally killing the entire domain... and with it countless URLs. As security researcher Mikko Hypponen pointed out in response to all of this:

t․co downtime illustrates how shortlinks make the web more fragile and harder to archive.

Indeed. While they're handy given Twitter's artificial limits, and can be useful as a poor man's tracking system for outbound links, on the whole, they seem to cause a lot of problems. Too many times I've had links go through multiple shorteners and fail along the way because one of them hiccups.