Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, the White House incredibly put James Clapper in charge of independent NSA review, then tried to change its tune a bit when people rightly pointed out that this was insane. Meanwhile, Rep. Justin Amash discovered that the House Intelligence Committee had withheld important NSA documents from the rest of Congress, and that the White House knew it. Then, the latest leak revealed that the NSA abused the rules to spy on Americans thousands of times every year — since there was no real oversight, the FISC court just relied on the NSA's own statements to determine what was legal, and agents were told to withhold information from those in charge of oversight. Senators Wyden and Udall hinted that this was just the tip of the iceberg, while NSA defenders claimed the abuses were evidence of the system working well and that the numbers were impressive compared to the amount of spying the NSA does.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, Italy tried and failed to block all access to The Pirate Bay, with the predictable result of a spike in Italian traffic to the site. Universities were realizing that the RIAA was taking advantage of them in its crusade against file-sharing students, while one teenager targeted in a lawsuit managed to get damages reduced with an "innocent infringement" defense. Nintendo was freaking out about memory cards for the Nintendo DS, while Tiffany was continuing its futile efforts to hold eBay accountable for counterfeit products by appealing a court ruling that said they weren't (and this same week, a Belgian court was ruling the same thing).

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, eBay was only just starting to become the ecommerce platform of choice with folks setting up entire businesses on the site. ISPs were the ones fighting back against the RIAA, along with one accused file-sharer who was hitting the agency with a countersuit arguing that sharing does not equal distribution. There were early rumblings of "personalization" as the future of search engines, and the fairly new technology of MMS picture messages was being put to use for networked security cameras and medical emergencies. And nearly seven years before the iPad, there were lots of tablet computers hitting the market, but nobody wanted them.

The key idea behind open access is that everyone with an Internet connection should be able to read academic papers without needing to pay for them. Or rather without needing to pay again, since most research is funded using taxpayers' money. It's hard to argue against that proposition, or that making information available in this way is likely to increase the rate at which medical and scientific discoveries are made for the benefit of all. And yet, as Techdirt has reported, academic publishers that often enjoy profit margins of 30-40% have adopted a range of approaches to undermine open access and its aims -- and with considerable success. A recent opinion column in the Canadian journal University Affairs explains how traditional publishers have managed to subvert open access for their own benefit:

An ironic twist to the open-access movement is that it has actually made the publishers richer. They've jumped on the bandwagon by offering authors the option of paying article processing charges (APCs) in order to make their articles open access, while continuing to increase subscription charges to libraries at the institutions where those authors work. So, in many cases, the publishers are being paid twice for the same content -- often charging APCs higher than purely open access journals.

Another serious problem is the rise of so-called "predatory" open access publishers that have distorted the original ideas behind the movement even more. The Guardian reported recently:

More than 175,000 scientific articles have been produced by five of the largest "predatory open-access publishers", including India-based Omics publishing group and the Turkish World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, or Waset.

But the vast majority of those articles skip almost all of the traditional checks and balances of scientific publishing, from peer review to an editorial board. Instead, most journals run by those companies will publish anything submitted to them -- provided the required fee is paid.

These issues will be hard, if not impossible, to solve. As a result, many are now looking for a different solution to the problem of providing easy and cost-free access to academic knowledge, this time in the form of preprints. Techdirt reported earlier this year that there is evidence the published versions of papers add very little to the early, preprint version that is placed online directly by the authors. The negligible barriers to entry, the speed at which work can be published, and the extremely low costs involved have led many to see preprints as the best solution to providing open access to academic papers without needing to go through publishers at all.

Inevitably, perhaps, criticisms of the idea are starting to appear. Recently, Tom Sheldon, who is a senior press manager at the Science Media Centre in London, published a commentary in one of the leading academic journals, Nature, under the headline: "Preprints could promote confusion and distortion". As he noted, this grew out of an earlier discussion paper that he published on the Science Media Centre's blog. The Science Media Centre describes itself as "an independent press office helping to ensure that the public have access to the best scientific evidence and expertise through the news media when science hits the headlines." Its funding comes from "scientific institutions, science-based companies, charities, media organisations and government". Sheldon's concerns are not so much about preprints themselves, but their impact on how science is reported:

I am a big fan of bold and disruptive changes which can lead to fundamental culture change. My reading around work on reproducibility, open access and preprint make me proud to be part of a scientific community intent on finding ways to make science better. But I am concerned about how this change might affect the bit of science publication that we are involved with at the Science Media Centre. The bit which is all about the way scientific findings find their way to the wider public and policymakers via the mass media.

One of his concerns is the lack of embargoes for preprints. At the moment, when researchers have what they think is an important result or discovery appearing in a paper, they typically offer trusted journalists a chance to read it in advance on the understanding that they won't write about it until the paper is officially released. This has a number of advantages. It creates a level playing field for those journalists, who all get to see the paper at the same time. Crucially, it allows journalists to contact other experts to ask their opinion of the results, which helps to catch rogue papers, and also provides much-needed context. Sheldon writes:

Contrast this with preprints. As soon as research is in the public domain, there is nothing to stop a journalist writing about it, and rushing to be the first to do so. Imagine early findings that seem to show that climate change is natural or that a common vaccine is unsafe. Preprints on subjects such as those could, if they become a story that goes viral, end up misleading millions, whether or not that was the intention of the authors.

That's certainly true, but is easy to remedy. Academics who plan to publish a preprint could offer a copy of the paper to the group of trusted journalists under embargo -- just as they would with traditional papers. One sentence describing why it would be worth reading is all that is required by way of introduction. To the extent that the system works for today's published papers, it will also work for preprints. Some authors may publish without giving journalists time to check with other experts, but that's also true for current papers. Similarly, some journalists may hanker after full press releases that spoon-feed them the results, but if they can't be bothered working it out for themselves, or contacting the researchers and asking for an explanation, they probably wouldn't write a very good article anyway.

The other concern relates to the quality of preprints. One of the key differences between a preprint and a paper published in a journal is that the latter usually goes through the process of "peer review", whereby fellow academics read and critique it. But it is widely agreed that the peer review process has serious flaws, as many have pointed out for years -- and as Sheldon himself admits.

Indeed, as defenders note, preprints allow far more scrutiny to be applied than with traditional peer review, because they are open for all to read and spot mistakes. There are some new and interesting projects to formalize this kind of open review. Sheldon rightly has particular concerns about papers on public health matters, where lives might be put at risk by erroneous or misleading results. But major preprint sites like bioRxiv (for biology) and the upcoming medRxiv (for medicine and health sciences) are already trying to reduce that problem by actively screening preprints before they are posted.

Sheldon certainly raises some valid questions about the impact of preprints on the communication of science to a general audience. None of the issues is insurmountable, but it may require journalists as well as scientists to adapt to the changed landscape. However, changing how things are done is precisely the point about preprints. The present academic publishing system does not promote general access to knowledge that is largely funded by the taxpayer. The attempt by the open access movement to make that happen has arguably been neutered by shrewd moves on the part of traditional publishers, helped by complaisant politicians. Preprints are probably the best hope we have now for achieving a more equitable and efficient way of sharing knowledge and building on it more effectively.

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It's been a week or so since we last checked in on the Aloha Poke situation, so perhaps you were wondering how things were coming along with the Chicago chain that wasn't founded by Hawaiians attempting to bully native Hawaiian poke joints across the country out of using their own language and culture over trademark concerns. You will recall that Aloha Poke Co. had sent cease and desist notices to many poke restaurants that dared to use the ubiquitous Hawaiian term "Aloha" in their names, including to proprietors on the Hawaiian Islands themselves. That many operations throughout the country had been chugging along sharing this name and food culture without issue apparently didn't prevent Aloha Poke Co. from registering "Aloha Poke" as a trademark and then go the bullying route. The last touchstone in all of this was a hundreds-strong planned protest at the company's headquarters in Chicago, which indeed ended up happening.

So, how have things gone since? Well, Aloha Poke Co. appears to be simply digging in its heels and trying to ride this storm out rather than backing down, but it's a strategy that doesn't appear to be working all that well. Just this week, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, an organization that promotes and protects Hawaiian culture, has jumped into the fray, both voicing its displeasure at Aloha Poke Co.'s bullying and essentially filling up its homepage with news about the protests.

In a statement, OHA CEO Kamana’opono Crabbe described the attitude of OHA as “appalled” over the food chain’s trademarks, which uses culturally significant words from ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i, the traditional native Hawaiian language.

OHA also asserted that they were currently contacting prominent stakeholders to “discuss possible solutions” to the trademark controversy.

The organisation went on to highlight the continuous “commercialisation and exploitation” of traditional Hawaiian culture that hinders attempts to preserve customs and languages in an appropriate manner.

As we've said in past posts, the concerns about cultural appropriation, particularly in light of the subsequent bullying, are valid and very real, but the better route to victory against Aloha Poke Co. is almost certainly legal arguments over its trademark more generally. Whatever you might think of this sort of cultural appropriation, it seems obvious to me that the United States government and its USPTO wing are not sure-fire candidates for swaying on arguments that big business isn't treating natives all that well. Backing that statement up for citation purposes is: history.

Instead, we should be seeing as many or more arguments that the term "Aloha" is, as stated, ubiquitous and non-identifying, whereas the term "poke" simply refers to the goods sold at these establishments. Marrying a generic term with a name of a product you can't trademark obviously doesn't create a valid trademark.

But none of that is to suggest that efforts to gin up anger over the appropriation side of this doesn't have a place in getting Aloha Poke Co. to reverse course on its bullying. Public shaming does indeed work and it's good to see that the company's current strategy of waiting out the anger simply isn't working.

In other words: Dear Aloha Poke Co., it's probably time to cut your losses and issue a mea culpa.

You may have heard the general mantra that "puns are the lowest form of comedy." Heathens say that, because puns are great and, if I had my way, there would be a legal requirement to use at least one in every legal document this country produces. They can also be used to lighten up what would otherwise be heavy legal actions. Such is the case with In-N-Out Burger, which decided to respond to what is pretty likely trademark infringement with a pun-laden cease and desist.

We'll start with the product that was likely infringing on In-N-Out's trademarks, which itself involves some punnery.

The back and forth banter all started on July 12 when Seven Stills took to Instagram and posted a photo of its soon-to-be-released "barrel aged neopolitan milkshake stout." The beverage's logo featured In-N-Out's famous red palm tree lining, arrow logo and the phrase "In-N-Stout Beer."

In case you're wondering just how clearly Seven Stills' use of In-N-Out's trade dress was, here is the brewery's own Instagram post.

In case you're somehow unaware of In-N-Out's log and cup design, the In-N-Stout effort above is a very clear play on it:

So, yeah, despite the two companies being in different markets, this sort of use could still cause some kind of confusion and create an impression of affiliation between the two entities. If you really want to argue any of that, I suppose you can, but this is probably trademark infringement.

In-N-Out, which we have criticized in the past for some dodgy trademark behavior, deserves some credit here instead for firing off a cease and desist that certainly didn't take itself too seriously.

After In-N-Out caught wind of the idea, its legal team crafted a cease and desist letter jam-packed with puns related to beer making.

"Based on your use of our marks, we felt obligated to hop to action in order to prevent further issues from brewing," part of the letter read.

The C&D actually had way more puns than just those, however. Given the gentle and congenial nature of the C&D, in fact, Seven Stills made a point to post the entire thing to its Instagram account, as well as agreeing to alter its beer's trade dress to remove In-N-Out's branding from the can.

If you can't see that, it reads:

Dear Seven Sills Brewery & Distillery,

We at In-N-Out Burgers ("In-N-Out") received multiple reports of your "In-N-Stout Beer" featured on your social media pages. The In-N-Stout Beer label features In-N-Out's trademarks including our palm tree and arrow logos along with a substantial similarity to In-N-Out's brand name. Based on your use of our marks, we felt obligated to hop to action in order to prevent further issues from brewing.

In case you are not already aware, In-N-Out owns multiple trademark registrations in these marks. As you may expect, we tap into a lot of effort in protecting our marks, which includes limiting their use by others.

Please understand that use of our marks by third parties ales us to the extent that this could cause confusion in the marketplace or prevent us from protecting our marks in the future. We hope you can appreciate, however, that we are attempting to clearly distill our rights by crafting an amicable approach with you, rather than barrel through this.

Accordingly, we request that you refrain from further use of In-N-Out's marks by not selling or promoting items featuring our marks, and removing images of "In-N-Stout" and any other items featuring our marks from your website and social media pages. Please contact us as soon as possible, so this does not continue to ferment. Thank you for your time and consideration, and we look froward to resolving this in good spirits.

The lesson here isn't that there wasn't some other way to work this out beyond a cease and desist notice. No, the point here is that trademark issues can reach amicable ends if only companies are congenial with one another... and use as many puns as possible.

Earlier this week, the Associated Press did a story revealing that even for Google users (on both Android and iPhone) who turned off location tracking Google was still tracking their location in some cases.

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking. (It’s possible, although laborious, to delete it .)

For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude — accurate to the square foot — and save it to your Google account.

If you squint, you can kind of see why this might have happened. Apps like Maps and weather more or less need your location info to work well (though, the search part is a bit more baffling). But, even so, this seems like a huge blunder by Google, a company that should absolutely know better. The latest, of course, is that Google has quietly moved to update the language that users see to "clarify" that some location data may still be recorded:

But its help page for the Location History setting now states: “This setting does not affect other location services on your device.” It also acknowledges that “some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps.”

Previously, the page stated: “With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

It's entirely possible, if not likely, that the location history feature is completely disconnected from the location specific data within these other apps. But, still, the average consumer is not going to realize that. Indeed, the tech savvy consumer is mostly unlikely to understand that. And Google's new "clarification" isn't really going to do a very good job actually clarifying this for people either. Google certainly has done a better job than a lot of other companies both in providing transparency about what data it collects on you and giving you controls to see that data, and delete some of it. But this was still a boneheaded move, and it's simply ridiculous that someone at the company didn't spot this issue and do something about it sooner.

As I've been pointing out for a while, a big part of why so many people are concerned about privacy on digital services is because those services have done a piss poor job of both informing users what's happening, and giving them more control over the usage of their data. This kind of situation is even worse, in that under the guise of giving users control (a good thing), Google appears to have muddied the waters over what information it was actually collecting.

I also wonder if this will make the FTC's ears perk up. There is still an FTC consent decree that binds the company with regards to certain privacy practices, and that includes that the company "shall not misrepresent in any manner, expressly or by implication... the extent to which consumers may exercise control over the collection, use, or disclosure of covered information." And "covered information" includes "physical location."

Would these practices count as misrepresenting the extent to which consumers could stop Google from collecting location info? It certainly seems like a case could be made that it does. There are many areas where it feels like people attack the big internet companies just because they're big and easy targets. Sometimes those attacks are made without understanding the underlying issues. But sometimes, I'm amazed at how these companies fail to take a thorough look at their own practices. And this is one of those cases.

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As a New Jersey native I know how tempting it is for people to gratuitously bash my home state. But, you know, sometimes it really does have it coming.

In this case it's because of the recent announcement of a new password policy for all of the New Jersey courts' online systems – ranging from e-filing systems for the courts to the online attorney registration system – that will now require passwords to be changed every 90 days.

This notice is to advise that the New Jersey Judiciary is implementing an additional information security measure for those individuals who use Judiciary web-based applications, in particular, attorney registration, eCourts, eCDR, eTRO, eJOC, eVNF, EM, MACS, and DVCR. The new security requirement - password synchronization or p-:-synch - will require users to electronically reset their passwords every 90 days.

For reasons explained below, this new policy is a terrible idea. But what makes it particularly risible is that the New Jersey judiciary is claiming this change is being implemented in order to comply with NIST.

This requirement is being added to ensure that our systems and data are protected and secure consistent with industry security standards (National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF)).

The first problem here, of course, is that this general allusion to NIST is not helpful. If NIST has something specific to say that the courts are relying on, then the courts should specially say what it is. Courts would never accept these sorts of vague hand-wavy references to authority in matters before them. Assertions always require a citation to the support upon which they are predicated so that they can be reviewed for accuracy and reasonableness. Instead the New Jersey judiciary here expects us to presume this new policy is both, when in fact it is neither.

The reality is that the NIST Cybersecurity Framework does not even mention the word "password," let alone any sort of 90-day expiration requirement. Moreover, what NIST does actually say about passwords is that they should not be made to expire. In particular, the New Jersey judiciary should direct its attention to Special Publication 800-63B, which expressly says:

Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically).

That same section of the Special Publication also says that, "Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets" because, as a NIST study noted, it tends to reduce overall security hygiene. Guess what else the new New Jersey password policy does:

Users must select passwords that are no more than eight (8) characters long and contain at least one capital letter, one lower case letter, one numeral, and one of the enumerated special characters.

It also gets worse, because as part of this password protocol it will require security questions in order to recover lost passwords.

Additionally, this policy change will require that each user choose and answer three personal security questions that will later allow the user to reset their own password should their account become disabled, for example, because of an expired password. The answers to the three security questions should be kept confidential in order to reduce the risk of unauthorized access and allow for most password resets to be done electronically.

Security questions are themselves a questionable security practice because they are often built around information that, especially in a world of ubiquitous social media, may not be private.

From their dangerous guessability to the difficulty of changing them after a major breach like Yahoo's, security questions have proven to be deeply inadequate as contingency mechanisms for passwords. They're meant to be a reliable last-ditch recovery feature: Even if you forget a complicated password, the thinking goes, you won't forget your mother's maiden name or the city you were born in. But by relying on factual data that was never meant to be kept secret in the first place—web and social media searches can often reveal where someone grew up or what the make of their first car was—the approach puts accounts at risk. And since your first pet's name never changes, your answers to security questions can be instantly compromised across many digital services if they are revealed through digital snooping or a data breach.

The Wired article this passage came from is already two years old. Far from New Jersey imposing an "industry standard" password protocol, it is instead imposing one that is outdated and discredited, which stands to undermine its systems security, rather than enhance it.

And largely, it seems, because it does not seem to understand the unique needs of its users – who are not all the same. Some may log into these sites daily, while others (like me) only once a year when it's time to pay our bar dues. (What does this 90-day reset requirement mean for an annual-only user?) Furthermore, although things have been improving over the years, lawyers are notoriously non-technical. They are busy and stressed with little time to waste wrangling with the systems they need to use to do their job on behalf of their clients. And they are often dependent on vendors, secretaries, and other third parties to act on their behalf, which frequently results in credential sharing. In short, the New Jersey legal community has some particular (and varied) security needs, which all need to be understood and appropriately responded to, in order to improve systems security overall for everyone.

But that's not what the New Jersey courts have opted to do. Instead they've imposed a sub-market, ill-tailored, laborious, and needlessly demanding policy on their users, and then blamed it on NIST. But as yet another NIST study explains, security is only enhanced when users can respect the policy enforcing it. The more arbitrary and frustrating it is, the more risky the user behavior, and the weaker the security protocol becomes.

The key finding of this study is that employees’ attitudes toward the rationale be-hind cybersecurity policies are statistically significant with their password behaviors and experiences. Positive attitudes are related to more secure behaviors such as choosing stronger passwords and writing down passwords less often, less frustration with authentication procedures, and better understanding and respecting the significance to protect passwords and system security.

As NIST noted in a summary of the study, "'security fatigue' can cause computer users to feel hopeless and act recklessly." Yet here are the New Jersey courts, expressly implementing, for no good reason, a purposefully cumbersome and frustrating policy, one that could hardly be better calculated to overwhelm users, and which, despite its claims to the contrary, is far from a respected industry norm.

The Telecom Act of 1996 mandates that the FCC routinely assess whether broadband is "being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion," and do something about it if that's not the case. As part of that mission, the FCC also periodically takes a look at the way it defines broadband to ensure the current definition meets modern consumer expectations and technical advancements. That's why, much to the telecom industry's chagrin, the FCC in 2015 changed the definition of broadband from a fairly-pathetic 4 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream to the current standard of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream.

Telecom monopolies (and the lawmakers paid to love them) whined incessantly about the changes at the time. Why? Because the higher definition only highlights how there's virtually no competition at faster speeds in the U.S. It also highlights how because countless U.S. telcos have shifted their focus to more immediately-profitable ventures (like flinging video ads at Millennials), they've neglected network upgrades on a comical scale. As a result, most modern telcos fail to even technically sell "broadband" across vast swaths of America, giving cable giants like Comcast a bigger broadband monopoly than ever before.

As such, you can kind of understand why, if you're a lumbering broadband monopoly, why you'd prefer the definition of broadband remain at ankle height.

With the FCC preparing its latest assessment of the broadband broadband industry as required by law, the question over whether the broadband standard should again be lifted has again raised its ugly head. Especially given that in the age of symmetrical gigabit (1 Gbps) connections and cloud storage, that 3 Mbps upstream standard is looking a little lame. But in a Notice of Inquiry (pdf) published last week, Pai’s FCC proposed keeping the current 25/3 definition intact, something that apparently annoyed his fellow Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel.

In a statement (pdf), Rosenworcel suggests that symmetrical 100 Mbps would be a far more ambitious goal to aim for:

"...This inquiry fundamentally errs by proposing to keep our national broadband standard at 25 Megabits per second. I believe this goal is insufficiently audacious. It is time to be bold and move the national broadband standard from 25 Megabits to 100 Megabits per second. When you factor in price, at this speed the United States is not even close to leading the world. That is not where we should be and if in the future we want to change this we need both a more powerful goal and a plan to reach it. Our failure to commit to that course here is disappointing.

Disappointing but not surprising. Again, an even higher bar would only more clearly illustrate that a huge swath of the broadband industry has effectively given up on upgrading their broadband networks at any real scale, a reason why countless consumers can only get sub 3 Mbps DSL from their incumbent telco.

Pai's unwillingness to aim higher is also unsurprising given he was recently forced to retreat from a plan that would have technically lowered the broadband definition bar back down to 10 Mbps. Pai had attempted a policy change that would have declared any 10 Mbps wireless connection good enough to be considered broadband, a move that would have ignored the fact that wireless connections are subject to all manner of limits (caps, overage fees, weird restrictions on HD video, rural congestion) making them a less than suitable full replacement for fixed line broadband.

With Pai's net-neutrality-killin' majority controlling any meaningful vote on this subject, it's likely that if the definition of broadband changes at all, it will likely be lowered. After all, you certainly wouldn't want any data highlighting how broken the U.S. broadband market currently is, lest somebody get the crazy idea to actually do something about it.

Cops in California have literally unbelievable protections. To ensure the "privacy" of government employees sworn to serve the public, the Cali legislature has kowtowed to state police unions to make disciplinary records all but impossible to obtain… by anyone.

This has led to the expected results. Professional liars in cop uniforms offer unimpeached testimony filled with more lies as defense lawyers stand helplessly by, screwed out of offering effective counsel by state law. The law is so restrictive prosecutors are often unable to obtain these files. In the unlikely event a cop is being prosecuted, past misdeeds are hidden under a heavy layer of legislated opacity, hindering effectiveness on the other side.

Sure, if you're the victim of police violence, your past is an open book. The cops will dump everything they have on you, from the shoplifting citation two decades ago to every charge ever brought (but ultimately dropped or dismissed) against you in your lifetime to smear your reputation and burnish their own. But if the court would be better served knowing the witness on the stand is an inveterate liar with a history of misconduct, justice will not only go blind but underserved under state law.

This bill aims to change that.

There is currently a bill before the California Legislature that would ease the burden for the prosecutors and the public to know whether the officers in their communities are trustworthy. SB1421 would require police departments to release information about, inter alia, sustained findings of dishonesty in the course of criminal cases and other instances of police misconduct. This bill would also require police departments to release information about serious uses of force, including officer-involved shootings, to increase transparency.

As the article notes, cops -- especially the good ones -- should welcome this move towards transparency.

[C]urrent California law protects the worst officers by hiding their identities from the public and makes them indistinguishable from the bulk of the officers who do their jobs faithfully in accordance with the Constitution.

But they won't. Or, at the very least, their support will be overridden by all the other cops: the mediocre, the bad, the repugnant, and the morally and criminally corrupt. These are officers and former officers currently holding prominent positions in the state's unions, and police unions are universally opposed to transparency, accountability, or minor policy changes that might make policing better.

This bill could change things but it faces the same opposition that managed to talk the legislature into turning police officers into an extremely protected class. It's a welcome effort, but has little chance of survival. Maybe the tide has turned. Maybe this time police unions will be told to stop standing in the way of rebuilding California communities' trust in the officers and agencies policing their neighborhoods.

Between the explosion in the craft beer industry and our pernicious ownership culture, the beer industry has enough of a trademark problem to regularly appear in our posts. While many of the disputes in the industry are generated by once-small breweries that have grown up and shed their permissive attitudes towards branding, just as many trademark disputes result from entities outside the industry attempting to pretend that the alcohol industries, if not craft beer specifically, are not markets all to their own. This lack of nuance occasionally pervades even within the USPTO, unfortunately.

But sometimes the TTAB gets it right. Such is the case with Comrade Brewing, makers of its 'Superpower IPA' brew, for which the TTAB refused the opposition of The Wonderful Company, which makes fruit juices. At issue was the slogan for POM Wonderful juices: "Antioxidant Superpower."

In past cases, the board has held that wine and spirits are closely related to beer in the minds of consumers, but it said The Wonderful Co. had failed to show that a soft drink such as fruit juice had the same kind of connection. “Simply put, opposer has not submitted sufficient evidence that consumers are accustomed to encountering these goods under the same mark,” Judge Peter W. Cataldo wrote for a three-judge panel.

“Particularly in light of the differences between the goods but also because the two marks had key differences in appearance,” Cataldo wrote, “the board sided with Comrade Brewing.”

This opposition was a loser on several grounds. The markets being different for each product is certainly the easiest to conceptualize. Customers looking for fruit juices are unlikely to wander into a store's craft beer section and find themselves irrevocably confused. As someone who has seen what pomegranate juice looks like, and as someone who has consumed an unholy quantity of IPAs, this opposition would be hilarious if it weren't so frustrating in the first place. For a small brewer to have to entertain this kind of clear bullying from a much larger company at the trademark office is plainly absurd.

And, when you take into account the difference in the actual marks, it becomes all the more so. A beer named "Superpower IPA" and a slogan that says "Antioxidant Superpower" are simply unlikely to cause anything resembling confusion in the market. Everything else about the trade dress is also, of course, wildly different. David Lin, owner of Comrade Brewing, appears to be taking this all in stride.

“Operating this brewery has thrown us a lot of curveballs,” explains Lin. “If I’m being completely honest the potential confusion between antioxidant juice and craft beer was more surprising to me than the day someone crashed their truck through our front door. We’re going to laugh this one off over a couple of Superpowers.”

It's certainly an endearing attitude to have, but it should be obvious that the wasting of a non-competitor's time with this sort of thing ought to be worthy of punishment.