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At this point, we probably don't need any more evidence that the emergence of publicity rights and its conflation with other forms of intellectual property, such as copyright, is a festering cancer in our culture that we'd do well to excise post-haste. Still, necessity isn't the mother of these stories that keep on a-coming anyway. The most recent example of how stupid this all has become is a small Connecticut town taking down a donated painting that includes an image of Mother Teresa over intellectual property concerns. More frustrating is how neutered the press covering the issue is in competently discussing the validity of the issues being raised.

Trumbull officials have temporarily removed artwork displayed at the public library over concerns that the use of Mother Teresa's image in the painting infringes on copyright. The painting, which Dr. Richard Resnick donated to the library, shows Mother Teresa and other women marching, holding signs that say messages including "Planned Parenthood," "Mission of Charity," "Feed the Poor," "Remember The Ladies," "Hospital Reform" and "Right to Vote," among others.

Let's get the easy stuff out of the way. Resnick had ownership of the painting when he donated it. There wouldn't be a valid copyright claim here even if the original artist was among those raising the issue, which doesn't appear to be the case. The library has every right to display the image. There aren't any copyright questions at all. All the reports this author has seen identify only "independent organizations" as claiming there is a copyright issue here at all. Should the actual claims center instead on publicity rights instead of copyright, that claim, too, would fail. First, there is no commercial use here. It is a painting rightfully owned and then donated to a municipality. Mother Teresa is a public and historical figure. And, again, there has been no indication that the estate of Anjeze Bojaxhiu, commonly known as Mother Teresa of Calcutta, is among those raising the issue. There is simply no applicable intellectual property concern here.

However, it seems that everyone involved (perhaps including the reporter) has no clue about any of this:

"Our initial research has shown that there is a doctorate of ‘Fair Use’ which allows a party to depict even someone of a public nature when it’s not designed for any commercial purpose," he explained.

It would be nice to be able to get a "doctorate" in "fair use" but it's likely the guy means (or even said) "doctrine." And while "commercial purpose" may have an impact on a fair use analysis it's not the only factor. But, more importantly, fair use isn't even an issue here because there's no copyright issue at all.

Which, of course, hasn't precluded Trumbull from pulling the painting proactively.

The town opted to remove the painting because the library lacks a written agreement with Resnick to protect the town against "any potential liability" from the copyright violation allegation, Herbst said.

“After learning that the Trumbull Library Board did not have the proper written indemnification for the display of privately-owned artwork in the Town’s library, and also being alerted to allegations of copyright infringement and unlawful use of Mother Teresa’s image, upon the advice of legal counsel, I can see no other respectful and responsible alternative than to temporarily suspend the display until the proper agreements and legal assurances are in place,” Herbst said in a written statement.

And, so, until such a time as the town and the donor can formalize a written agreement protecting themselves against all of this stupidity, stupidity prevails. It's hard to fault Trumbull officials too much for getting their protective documentation in place, I suppose. This is America, after all, the land of the lawsuit. Still, it's a tough pill to swallow to see a public entity bow even temporarily to the pressure of outside parties that have no standing, or apparent familiarity with the actual legal statutes they're pushing. Because, while none of the reports are naming the "independent organizations", everyone pretty much knows what's going on here. Resnick's attorney explains it nicely.

Elstein speculates that the controversy may have more to do with Catholic leaders' recent objections to Mother Teresa being depicted alongside a woman holding a "Planned Parenthood" sign.

Ah, so again intellectual property gets used to silence speech. Anyone still want to pretend that copyright and publicity rights aren't the favored tools of censors everywhere?

As you may have heard, the latest political "scandal" involving a major Presidential contender comes via the NY Times reporting that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she refused to have a government email address, and conducted all her work via a personal email account.

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

This is dumb on many, many levels and there appears to be no excuse for it happening. First off, using a personal email as Secretary of State seems like a massive privacy and security risk. While one hopes that there was at least some attempt to better secure her personal account by government security experts, it's still almost certainly less secure. Given how much sensitive information the Secretary of State has to deal with, it seems inexcusable that she was allowed to conduct official business via her personal account. That to me seems like an even bigger deal than the part that everyone else is focused on: the failure to preserve her emails as required by law.

Of course, the failure to preserve the emails is a big deal as well. But here's the really stunning thing: there is simply no way that Clinton and others in the administration didn't know that she was supposed to be using a government email address and preserving those emails. That's because both the previous administration and others in her own administration got in trouble for using personal email addresses. As Vox notes, towards the end of the Bush administration there was a similar scandal involving a variety of high level administration members using personal email to conduct government business and to avoid transparency requirements.

That scandal unfolded well into the final year of Bush's presidency, then overlapped with another email secrecy scandal, over official emails that got improperly logged and then deleted, which itself dragged well into Obama's first year in office. There is simply no way that, when Clinton decided to use her personal email address as Secretary of State, she was unaware of the national scandal that Bush officials had created by doing the same.

That she decided to use her personal address anyway showed a stunning disregard for governmental transparency requirements. Indeed, Clinton did not even bother with the empty gesture of using her official address for more formal business, as Bush officials did.

But that's not all. What the Vox report doesn't note is that the scandal actually carried over to the Obama administration also, as the White House's first Deputy CTO was reprimanded for using his personal email address as well, early in 2010. So there was both a scandal about the similar use of private email accounts in the previous administration and in the Obama administration. It's impossible to believe that Clinton or the other key people who worked for her in the State Department were unaware of one or both of these issues while she was using her personal email address.

While the White House's email system may be clunky and annoying to use (as I've heard repeatedly), there's simply no excuse for Clinton not to have used it at all -- and for the emails she did send not to be preserved as required under the law. A few years ago, we mocked Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano for refusing to use email entirely -- though at least she was upfront about the reason. She didn't want to be held accountable for what she said -- though, the reality was she would still have staff members send emails for her. Clinton appears to have wanted to be free of that accountability as well, but to still have the benefits of direct electronic communication herself. In short, she purposely ignored the law for her own benefit.

A small crack in the FBI's Stingray secrecy has appeared. A 2012 pen register application obtained by the ACLU was previously sealed, but a motion to dismiss the evidence obtained by the device forced it out into the open. Kim Zetter at Wired notes that the application contains a rare admission that Stingray use disrupts cellphone service.

[I]n the newly uncovered document (.pdf)—a warrant application requesting approval to use a stingray—FBI Special Agent Michael A. Scimeca disclosed the disruptive capability to a judge.

“Because of the way, the Mobile Equipment sometimes operates,” Scimeca wrote in his application, “its use has the potential to intermittently disrupt cellular service to a small fraction of Sprint’s wireless customers within its immediate vicinity. Any potential service disruption will be brief and minimized by reasonably limiting the scope and duration of the use of the Mobile Equipment.”

Notably, the application (and the magistrate's approval) do not refer to the device by any of the common names (Stingray, IMSI catcher, cell tower spoofer, etc.), but rather as "mobile pen register/trap and trace equipment." While it does admit the device will "mimic Sprint's cell towers," it downplays the potential impact of the device's use.

The fact that Stingray devices disrupt cell service isn't new, but an on-the-record admission by law enforcement is. The warrant application claims that numbers unrelated to the ones being sought will be "released" to other cell towers. The unanswered question is how long it takes before this release occurs.

“As each phone tries to connect, [the stingray] will say, ‘I’m really busy right now so go use a different tower. So rather than catching the phone, it will release it,” says Chris Soghoian, chief technologist for the ACLU. “The moment it tries to connect, [the stingray] can reject every single phone” that is not the target phone.

But the stingray may or may not release phones immediately, Soghoian notes, and during this period disruption can occur.

The problem with the so-called "release" is related to the amount of disruption that occurs when the device is used. Advances in cell technology have surpassed the ability of Stingray devices to capture calling info and location data. Upgrades are available and law enforcement agencies are scrambling to get their cell tower spoofers up-to-date, but the general process still involves "dumbing down" everyone's connection to the least secure and most easily-intercepted connection: 2G.

In order for the kind of stingray used by law enforcement to work, it exploits a vulnerability in the 2G protocol. Phones using 2G don’t authenticate cell towers, which means that a rogue tower can pass itself off as a legitimate cell tower. But because 3G and 4G networks have fixed this vulnerability, the stingray will jam these networks to force nearby phones to downgrade to the vulnerable 2G network to communicate.

If a device is in operation nearby, all calls that can't find a better connection will be routed to the cell tower spoofer. This means calls won't be connected, texts won't be sent/received and internet service will be knocked offline. While Stingrays are supposed to allow 911 calls to pass through without interruption, these are far from the only type of "emergency" communications. If the device is deployed for any considerable length of time, citizens completely unrelated to the criminal activity being investigated may find themselves unable to communicate.

And while the targeted number apparently belonged to Sprint, the warrant application notes that all service providers in the area will be asked to turn over a large amount of subscriber information.

[D]irecting AT&T, T-Mobile U.S.A., Inc., Verizon Wireless, Metro PCS, Sprint-Nextel and any and all other providers of electronic communication service (hereinafter the "Service Providers") to furnish expeditiously real-time location information concerning the Target Facility (including all cell site location information but not including GPS, E-911, or other precise location information) and, not later than five business days after receipt of a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, all information about subscriber identity, including the name, address, local and long distance telephone connection records, length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized, telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, and means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number), for all subscribers to all telephone numbers, published and nonpublished, derived from the pen register and trap and trace device during the 60-day period in which the court order is in effect…

This request seems to run contrary to what's asserted earlier in the warrant application, in reference to the Stingray device itself.

In order to achieve the investigative objective (i.e., determining the general location of the Target Facility) in a manner that is the least intrusive, data incidentally acquired from phones other than the Target Facility shall not be recorded and/or retained beyond its use to identify or locate the Target Facility.

It appears there is a "catch-and-release" policy when it comes to Stingray devices, but the FBI's data request to every cell phone service provider in the area contains no such assurances about minimization. Additionally, the request for data on "all subscribers to all telephone numbers" covers a 60-day period, while the use of the tower spoofer is limited to two weeks.

So, not only did the FBI potentially disrupt cell service while searching for the robbery suspects, it also collected a massive amount of data on every subscriber whose phone happened to connect with its fake tower. It's not really "catch-and-release" if additional call/location data on unrelated subscribers is obtained from from other providers. This broad request was granted without question or additional stipulations by the magistrate judge -- the only limitation applied (in a handwritten addition, no less) being that the FBI would not be able to use the device "in any private place or when they have reason to believe the Target Facility is in a private place." (This falls in line with the FBI's "warrant requirement," which is written in a way that ensures the FBI will never have to seek a warrant for Stingray use.)

The FBI, along with other law enforcement agencies, has refused to answer questions about the disruptive side effects of Stingray device usage. With the unsealing of this document, their silence no longer matters. These agencies are well aware of these devices' capabilities -- something they're clearly not comfortable discussing. The excuses deployed routinely involve "law enforcement means and methods" and claims about "compromising current and future investigations," but with more heat being applied by the nation's legislators, this code of silence may finally be broken. The use of these devices -- despite being fully aware that critical communications may be at least temporarily prevented -- sends a continual implicit message to the public: your safety and well-being is subject to law enforcement's needs and wants.

If you were the Secretary of Defense of a large country, you might think you'd be slightly concerned that foreign agents would want to spy on you. Not so down in Australia apparently, where the current Secretary of Defense, insists that he'd be "surprised" if anyone wanted to find out what was on his phone. Seriously.

We've written about the recent story, revealed in documents leaked by Ed Snowden, that the NSA and GCHQ were able to hack into the systems of Gemalto, the world's largest maker of SIM cards for mobile phones, and obtain the encryption keys used in those cards. While Gemalto insists that the hack didn't actually get those encryption keys, not everyone feels so comfortable with Gemalto's own analysis of what happened.

Senator Scott Ludlam (who we've written about a few times before) reasonably found the story of the Gemalto hack to be concerning, and went about asking some questions of the government to find out what they knew about it. The results are rather astounding. First he had asked ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, and they said it wasn't their area, but it might be ASD (the Australian Signals Directorate). The video below shows Ludlam asking the ASD folks for more information about the hack and being flabbergasted that they basically say they haven't even heard about the hack at all: Right at the beginning, the first person says he's not aware of the situation, and Ludlam asks "are you aware of the broad outlines?" and gets a "no I am not" response, leading to a rather dry "Really?!? Okay, this is going to be interesting" reply from Ludlam. It goes on in this nature for a while, with the various people on the panel playing dumb, and Ludlam repeatedly (and rightly) appearing shocked that they appear to have no idea about the story.

But the really incredible part comes in the last minute of the video, in which Ludlam asks the Australian Secretary of Defense, Dennis Richardson, about his own concerns about his phone being spied on:

Ludlam: Do you use an encrypted phone, Mr. Richardson?

Richardson: No, I don't.

Ludlam: Right. Okay. Do you use a commercial -- I'm not asking you to name names -- but do you use a commercial telecommunications provider?

Richardson: Yeah, yeah, yes.

Ludlam: So there might be a SIM card in your phone or mind. Does this alarm you at all?

Richardson: No.

Ludlam: No?

Richardson: No.

Ludlam: Why is that?

Richardson: Well, because I don't particularly deal with people who... if anyone wants to listen to my telephone calls they can. I'd be surprised if they do, but I don't particularly have conversations which I'm particularly worried about.

[Laughter all around the room]

Ludlam: So it's okay if foreign spooks have hacked every mobile handset in the country because you don't have anything in particular...

Richardson: It's possible some might try to.

Ludlam: It's possible some just have.

Richardson: [shrugs] Well, it's possible.

So there you have it, folks. The Australian Secretary of Defense says that anyone is allowed to listen in to his calls, because there's nothing secret about any of them. I'm not quite familiar with public records/freedom of information laws in Australia, but is it possible for someone to put in a request for recording all of the Secretary of Defense's phone calls?

It would be an understatement to say that net neutrality has been in the news quite a lot recently. One of the supposed arguments against it is that requiring all data packets to be treated equally within a connection will prevent companies from offering us a cornucopia of "specialized services." The main example cited is for medical applications -- the implication being that if net neutrality is required, people are going to die. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress that is currently underway, Nokia's CEO Rajeev Suri has come up with a novel variation on that theme, as reported by CNET (via @AdV007):

Suri emphasises that self-driving cars need to talk over wireless networks fast enough to make decisions with the split-second timing required on the roads. "You cannot prevent collisions if the data that can prevent them is still making its way through the network", said Suri, discussing Nokia's drive toward instantaneous low-latency communication across the network.

Yes, according to Suri, there are going to be terrible pile-ups on the roads unless we get rid of net neutrality. Leaving aside the fact that low-latency communications across the internet will come anyway -- if there's one thing that's certain in the world of digital technology, it's that everything gets faster and cheaper -- there's another problem with this argument.

Self-driving cars that are so reliant on such guaranteed, high-performance networks are hardly going to be very resilient in real-life situations -- and certainly not the kind of system that the public will want to entrust with the lives of themselves and their families. If self-driving cars are to be widely accepted, one of their key features must be the ability to work safely even with the flakiest of internet connections. Suri's attempt to use this emerging technology as a weapon against net neutrality instead undermines the argument for self-driving cars themselves.

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Capcom's never really had much of a consumer-friendly reputation. Between being all about SOPA and utilizing innovative DRM measures such as "You only get one save file per game cartridge ever at all," it would be tough for the company to claim some kind of goodwill dividend should it screw up and find the need for one. And, boy, could Capcom ever use such a dividend amongst PC gamers right now.

The screw up was advertising on Steam that the RE-reboot, Resident Evil Revelations 2, would include a local, split-screen co-operative mode, selling the game under the umbrella of that promise, and then revealing only after sales had begun that local co-op had never been planned for the PC version of the game.

Owners of the PC version of Capcom's action horror game Resident Evil Revelations 2 have discovered that, unlike the console versions, it does not include local co-op - despite advertisements claiming it would.

The game's Steam page had promised offline co-op as part of a bullet point list of features. However, the Steam page was recently amended to state the PC version does not support offline co-op play in the Campaign or Raid mode. (Raid mode, it should be noted, will support online co-op shortly after launch via a patch.) Confusingly, the "assistive co-op play" bullet point that mentions offline co-op remains on the Steam page.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm fairly certain that advertising a game to a passionate fan-base as having a much-wanted feature and then yanking the rug out from under those fans only after sales had begun is not only a PR nightmare, it's a legal no-no as well. And, of all people to pull this on, passionate PC gamers may be the worst targets. This is a group that expects to be treated as much like desired customers as console-owners and, because the PC gaming landscape is littered with differences between its games and those that appear on consoles, it's a group that tends to pay very close attention to the specifics about the features of the games they buy. Not the kind of group, in other words, that you could pull this kind of false advertisement on and actually get away with it.

Perhaps worse, the tone-deaf defiant and non-apologetic nature of Capcom's response isn't going to help matters.

Here's Capcom's statement in full:

"The PC version of Resident Evil Revelations 2 supports a variety of customisable visual settings and resolutions. The decision to prioritise a single local screen was made to ensure a stable user experience across a variety of different PC settings and devices. Raid mode will support online co-op shortly after launch when a free patch is available for players to download which adds this feature, but the main campaign on PC will only be available to play in single local screen."

Great, except none of that was the point or cause of the outrage. You told consumers there was a feature in the game at the time of purchase, then revealed that feature was not now or ever planned to be included post-purchase. That's shitty. Come out with refunds and an actual apology next time.

Readers of Techdirt have been hearing about corporate sovereignty -- the ability of foreign investors to sue governments directly in special courts over alleged losses, also known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) -- for a while now. For others who have yet to discover this particular feature of so-called trade agreements, Senator Elizabeth Warren has a good, approachable summary of the key issues in a Washington Post opinion piece. In fact, it was clearly so good that the White House Blog felt obliged to try to rebut its main arguments (there's also a great point-by-point response to that response by the Cato Institute's Simon Lester.). The White House Blogt post, written by Jeff Zients, Director of the National Economic Council, pretty much concedes that the criticisms of ISDS are valid, but would have us believe that everything has been fixed now:

ISDS has come under criticism because of some legitimate complaints about poorly written agreements. The U.S. shares some of those concerns, and agrees with the need for new, higher standards, stronger safeguards and better transparency provisions. Through TPP and other agreements, that is exactly what we are putting in place.

There are two massive problems with that assurance. First, the extreme secrecy of the TPP negotiations means that we have no idea just how strong those "safeguards" are. And secondly, in some sense it doesn't even matter: companies can use the mere threat of an ISDS action to cast a chill over future regulatory action. That's why the following comment is true but misses the point:

The reality is that ISDS does not and cannot require countries to change any law or regulation.

The ability to use ISDS to discourage governments from introducing inconvenient laws or regulations is no mere theoretical fear. As this important 2001 article in The Nation explains:

Carla Hills, the US Trade Representative who oversaw the NAFTA negotiations for Bush I and now heads her own trade-consulting firm, was among the very first to play this game of bump-and-run intimidation. Her corporate clients include big tobacco -- R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris. Sixteen months after leaving office, Hills dispatched Julius Katz, her former chief deputy at USTR, to warn Ottawa to back off its proposed law to require plain packaging for cigarettes. If it didn't, Katz said, Canada would have to compensate his clients under NAFTA and the new legal doctrine he and Hills had helped create [ISDS]. "No US multinational tobacco manufacturer or its lobbyists are going to dictate health policy in this country," the Canadian health minister vowed. Canada backed off, nevertheless.

Nor was that an isolated incident:

A former government official in Ottawa told me: "I've seen the letters from the New York and DC law firms coming up to the Canadian government on virtually every new environmental regulation and proposition in the last five years. They involved dry-cleaning chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, patent law.Virtually all of the new initiatives were targeted and most of them never saw the light of day."

Zients goes on to say that corporate sovereignty chapters are needed because foreign courts can't be trusted to provide justice:

U.S. investors often face a heightened risk of bias or discrimination when abroad.

But Warren already answered that with several extremely powerful points:

Countries in the TPP are hardly emerging economies with weak legal systems. Australia and Japan have well-developed, well-respected legal systems, and multinational corporations navigate those systems every day, but ISDS would preempt their courts too. And to the extent there are countries that are riskier politically, market competition can solve the problem. Countries that respect property rights and the rule of law — such as the United States — should be more competitive, and if a company wants to invest in a country with a weak legal system, then it should buy political-risk insurance.

Zients also tries to argue that since the US hasn't suffered as a result of ISDS cases in the past, it'll be fine in the future:

There have only been 13 cases brought to judgment against the United States in the three decades since we’ve been party to these agreements. By contrast, during the same period of time in our domestic system, individual and companies have brought hundreds of thousands of challenges against Federal, state, and local governments in U.S. courts under U.S. law.

We have never lost an ISDS case because of the strong safeguards in the U.S. approach. And because we have continued to raise standards through each agreement, in recent years we have seen a drop in ISDS claims, despite increased levels of investment.

But that line of reasoning ignores why there have been so few cases in the past: because corporate sovereignty provisions were mainly included to protect US investments in developing countries with weaker legal systems. By definition, such nations are unlikely to have the resources to make many or significant investments in the US, and therefore have few opportunities to use the ISDS system. That is what will change dramatically with TAFTA/TTIP, as this analysis by Public Citizen explains:

TAFTA would vastly expand the investor-state threat, given the thousands of corporations doing business in both the United States and EU that would be newly empowered to attack public interest policies. More than 3,400 EU parent corporations own more than 24,200 subsidiaries in the United States, any one of which could provide the basis for an investor-state claim. This exposure to investor-state attacks far exceeds that associated with all other U.S. "free trade" agreement partners.

In fact, the US may be about to find out about the modern reality of billion-dollar corporate sovereignty lawsuits, thanks to the 21-year-old NAFTA agreement, and the controversial Keystone XL project, which President Obama recently vetoed. Here's Politico's explanation of how corporate sovereignty could enter the equation:

President Barack Obama may decide to kill Keystone XL for good, but that could be no easy task -- thanks in part to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The 21-year-old free-trade pact allows foreign companies or governments to haul the U.S. in front of an international tribunal to face accusations of putting their investments at risk through regulations or other decisions. The CEO of Keystone developer TransCanada has raised the prospect as a potential last resort if Obama rejects the $8 billion project, although for now the company is focused on getting him to say yes.

Administration officials involved in reviewing the proposed Canada-to-Texas pipeline are aware of the potential for a NAFTA challenge and the importance of minimizing that risk in the event the president rejects Keystone.

So even though the President retains full powers to reject Keystone, it’s easy to see how the threat of a billion-dollar ISDS lawsuit might encourage him to approve it anyway. That would offer the perfect demonstration of how corporate sovereignty chapters can interfere with democratic decision-making -- at even the highest levels.

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Trademarks on generic terms and phrases make for the silliest, and often the strangest, battles. In particular, I find it detestable when companies that are serving small, niche groups of people who have every reason to band together in solidarity, instead bicker unnecessarily over even the most common kinds of language. This was the case when comic conventions went to battle over the now generic term "comic-con." It's been the case when game-makers have gone after other game makers over a phrase as generic as "would you rather."

And now, for reasons I can't particularly fathom, a company out of Florida called Gay Days Inc. has forced a gay pride festival in Southern California to change its name from "Gay Days" because apparently the LGBT community doesn't have bigger fish to fry besides bickering over insanely generic trademarked terms.

Organizers for the festival over Easter weekend changed the name from Cathedral City Gay Days to Cathedral City LGBT Days after a Florida company notified the city about a trademark it owns on the phrase "gay days."

Gay Days Inc., the company behind gay parties in Orlando, Las Vegas and Orlando, said in a Jan. 12 email from company President Chris Alexander-Manley it would take all necessary steps to protect the trademark "including, but not limited to, the institution of formal legal proceedings."

On the one hand, I suppose it's kind of a nice symbolic moment in the progression this country has undergone in how we look at the civil rights of the LGBT community that rather than focusing on solidarity, there are court fights over "gay days." On the other hand: what the shit? How does the USPTO even grant a mark on such a generic term, one that, by the way, has been in use long before Gay Days Inc. used it or was granted the trademark? Cathedral City, a wonderfully progressive city, appears to be asking the same questions.

The switch happened well before a major marketing push for the April 3-5 event got underway, said Chris Parman, spokesman and events manager for Cathedral City, a city that neighbors gay-friendly Palm Springs in California's Coachella Valley. The festival is set to include a bar hop, film screenings in downtown Cathedral City, a Saturday night disco party and Easter egg hunt on Sunday morning. It's taking place at the same time as the Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs.

"To me the name ('gay days') is so generic. I don't see how on Earth anyone could have that be a trademarked phrase," Parman said. "It's no different than 'pride parade,' or 'pride' or 'gay pride.' I think if you look, all of them have tried to be trademarked at some point."

But, hey, this is America, after all. The land of the free to lock up language and use it against the very people who share your own interests unnecessarily. Progress of a kind, I suppose.

Carbon gets a lot of negative publicity because it's associated with carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, but the element itself is critical to life and has numerous fascinating properties. Carbon comes in a variety of allotropes, and we're discovering other carbon-based structures all the time. Here are just a few more examples.

• Volleyballene is a combination of carbon and scandium atoms that forms a volleyball shape -- analogous to how carbon can form a classic soccer ball shape (aka the 60-carbon atom buckyball). Okay, so this molecule hasn't been synthesized or observed, but computer simulations say it should be remarkably stable. [url]
• Penta-graphene is a sheet of pure carbon (yet another allotrope!) that hasn't been synthesized yet, but if it can be made, it might be useful as a semiconductor to complement electrically-conducting graphene. Simulations predict penta-graphene is stable, assuming anyone can actually make it. [url]
• Aerographite is a lighter-than-air material made of a carbon foam. It is extremely compressible, electrically conductive and is one of the least dense materials ever made. [url]

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