Domain Name Rights Coalition

Supreme Court Reverses Dangerous Injunction Rule in eBay Patent Case:

Four Justices Question Patent Trolls and Business Methods Patents in Concurring Opinion

San Francisco - The United States Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision in the controversial eBay v. MercExchange patent case Monday, invalidating a dangerous precedent that threatened free speech and consumers' rights. Four justices also joined in a concurring opinion questioning so-called "patent trolls" and business methods patents, which could foreshadow future intellectual property showdowns in the nation's highest court.

In Monday's decision, the court unanimously held that issuing automatic injunctions in patent cases improperly removed discretion from trial judges to weigh competing factors, including the effect that enforcing the patent would have on the public interest. This follows the reasoning outlined in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which urged the justices to overrule the lower court and protect the public interest in free speech, innovation, and education.

"More and more people are using the Internet to exercise free speech and other individual rights," said Staff Attorney Jason Schultz, one of the authors of the EFF brief. "The court's ruling will allow judges to protect those rights in patent cases."

The lower court's ruling stemmed in part from a misperception that patents are just like other forms of property, with the same rights and remedies. However, Supreme Court rulings have repeatedly emphasized that patents are a unique form of property, designed to achieve a specific public purpose: the promotion of scientific and industrial progress. Additionally, the concurrence written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Justices David Souter, John Paul Stevens, and Stephen Breyer noted that the current patent system may be suffering ill effects from business method patents and so-called "patent troll" companies.

"An industry has developed in which firms use patents not as a basis for producing and selling goods but, instead, primarily for obtaining licensing fees," Justice Kennedy wrote. "In addition injunctive relief may have different consequences for the burgeoning number of patents over business methods … the potential vagueness and suspect validity of some of these patents may affect the calculus under the four-factor test."

As a result of the Supreme Court's opinion, the case will now return to the trial court to reconsider its decision on the injunction.

For the full Supreme Court opinion:
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/05_2D130o.pdf

For Justice Kennedy's concurring opinion:
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/05_2D130c1.pdf

For EFF's amicus brief:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/ebay_v_mercexchange/eff_amicus_brief.pdf

For EFF's patent-busting project:
http://www.eff.org/patent/

Contact:

Jason Schultz
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
jason@eff.org

Posted by mikki at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

AOL Starts Pay-to-Send Email Shakedown:

"Certified Mail" Allows Mass Mailers to Bypass Spam Filters

San Francisco - AOL has quietly flipped the switch on its "certified mail" service, delivering pay-to-send email to some of its millions of customers.

The Goodmail CertifiedEmail service allows large mass-emailers to pay a fee to bypass AOL's spam filters and get guaranteed delivery directly into AOL customers' inboxes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believes the pay-to-send model could leave nonprofits, small businesses, and other groups with increasingly unreliable service.

"Many groups suffer from what the Wall Street Journal called 'spam filters gone wild,' and their email never reaches many on their mailing lists," said EFF Activism Coordinator Danny O'Brien. "With AOL's system in place, AOL will be taking money from big companies to skip those filters entirely. If ISPs can make money for a premium service that evades their malfunctioning filters, we worry that they won't fix those filters for groups who do not pay."

While the creators of "certified mail" claim that their programs help customers recognize legitimate worthy causes and vital banking mail in their inbox, the first pay-to-send mailing spotted by EFF was a promotion for Overstock.com. Overstock has every right to reach customers who signed up for their mailing list, but just because corporations have the money to pay for email delivery doesn't make that mail more important than any other non-commercial mail.

"We already know what commercial, paid-for mass mail is, but we don't call it certified mail. We call it junk mail," said O'Brien. "Why should paying ISPs for delivery let some companies gain special access to your inbox?"

EFF and hundreds of other groups have joined together in the DearAOL.com coalition, which formed to urge AOL and other ISPs to reject pay-to-send schemes. However, in a pointed example of how ISP control of your inbox can go wrong, last month AOL silently started dropping email that even mentioned DearAOL.com. After EFF publicized the problem, AOL quickly rectified the situation.

For more on the DearAOL.com Coalition:
http://www.dearaol.com

For more on AOL's CertifiedEmail launch:
http://www.dearaol.com/blog

Contact:

Danny O'Brien
Activism Coordinator
Electronic Frontier Foundation
danny@eff.org

Posted by mikki at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN Board Votes Against .XXX Sponsored Top Level Domain Agreement:


Today, ICANN's Board of Directors voted against a proposed agreement for a .XXX. Sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLD). The application was proposed by the ICM Registry. more...

Posted by mikki at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tom Cruise sues for TomCruise.com | The Register:

Scientologist Tom Cruise has taken the owner of TomCruise.com to domain name arbitrator WIPO to win it back.

The Hollywood star, and lead of recently released Mission Impossible III, is a bit slow off the mark - the domain was registered in November 1996, and other super-celebs have been going to WIPO for years trying to win back their namesake domains.



The domain owner is none other than the world's biggest cybersquatter, Jeff Burgar, registered under his Alberta Hot Rods company name.

Burgar has been referred to WIPO's headquarters so many times he could take up a permanent residence there. And he knows exactly how to pick holes in WIPO's case law.

He has won against Bruce Springsteen (for, surprise surprise, BruceSpringsteen.com), and Kevin Spacey (for KevinSpacey.com, having lost kevinspacy.com only a few months earlier in another arbitration forum, the NAF), but has, however, lost against many others, including Michael Crichton, Pierce Brosnan and Celine Dion.

Posted by mikki at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LawPundit :: Law : Information Technology : Intellectual Property : Current Events:


Absurd US Patent Law Saga Continues 

Dear Readers,

This is our last post on the US patent law situation and perhaps our last post on LawPundit period. We are so fed up with the idiocy of the US patent law system and the apparent lack of any sense in the US legal community on this issue, that we think it is time we retire from this field and leave it to those who truly have no clue.

OUT.Law.com haw a posting titled Another patent owner, another BlackBerry lawsuit where they write:

"A small company is threatening to darken the screens of BlackBerry devices in a case of deja vu for the manufacturer Research In Motion. Just two months after settling with NTP, another patent owner, Visto, is suing RIM over wireless email patents.
Buoyed with confidence from recent jury and US Patent Office endorsements for its intellectual property, Visto announced on Monday that RIM should pay damages, destroy all BlackBerry devices in the US and ban future sales because it has infringed four Visto patents."

Brilliant. Only a totally flawed patent system could lead to this kind of ludicrousy.

You idiots. And by idiots, I mean specifically the US legal community.

: Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 5/06/2006 11:47:00 PM

Posted by mikki at 07:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good news on WIPO Xcaster | A2K:


From James Love at cptech: "Today WIPO finally took a step back from forcing a restrictive Rome Convention intellectual property right on Internetpublishing... This is a victory for everyone who has opposed linking webcasting to the broadcasting treaty. There is still a lot of work to. There is a strong likihood the traditional broadcasting treaty will move forward, and the EU will clearly push to expand this to cases where broadcasters use the Internet.... and there are considerable problems with many of the proposals for the broadcasting treaty, including some very strong rights, TPMs, and other problems. However, there is now also a growing movement away from granting IP rights in the content of transmissions, in favor of theft of services protections, which is a very positive development, and a new project to examine the impact of TPMs on limitations and exceptions, which is quite important. The Internet is far safer now than before, because the threat of a new treaty for Internet middleman is now much less likely."

Posted by mikki at 07:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

why network neutrality matters, and is worth fighting for:

For weeks, I've been trying to write about why Network Neutrality is so important, and why everyone who spends even three minutes a day online should be writing, calling, and faxing their representatives in Congress relentlessly until the so-called First Amendment of the Internet is guaranteed and becomes law. But whenever I start, I end up angry and depressed and frustrated, and the words just won't come.

Today, Adam Green has a brilliant post at HuffPo that puts into simple language exactly why Network Neutrality is so important:

As the New York Times editorialized today:

 

"Net neutrality" is a concept that is still unfamiliar to most Americans, but it keeps the Internet democratic. ... One of the Internet's great strengths is that a single blogger or a small political group can inexpensively create a Web page that is just as accessible to the world as Microsoft's home page. But this democratic Internet would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access and slower to navigate. Providers could also block access to sites they do not like.

If Net Neutrality is gutted, Google, eBay, and YouTube either pay protection money to companies like AT&T or risk that their sites process slowly on your computer. Comcast could intentionally slow access to iTunes, steering Internet customers its own music service. And the little guy with the next big idea would be muscled out of the marketplace, relegated to the "slow lane" of the information superhighway.

This isn't just speculation -- it's already happened in places without Net Neutrality. Heck, AT&T's CEO blatantly announced, "The Internet can't be free."

That's why an Internet revolt has begun--a revolt that [Telecom spokesman Mike] McCurry belittles. Folks as diverse as Craig from Craigslist, MoveOn, Gun Owners of America,  Google, eBay, and Amazon are all fighting back. 350,000 people signed a petition demanding Congress preserve Internet freedom, over 2,000 blogs have rallied the public, and even some celebrities are chiming in.

Craig Fields from Gun Owners of America hit the target right-on when he said

"Whenever you see people on the far left and far right joining together about something Congress is getting ready to do, it's been my experience that what Congress is getting ready to do is basically un-American."

(Emphasis mine)

There's much more to his post, including a smackdown of Mike McCurry, who has become and outright lying shill for powerful telecom interests like AT&T who want to force a fundamental change to the way the Internet operates. Please read it. I think it's the most important thing you'll read today, and should help everyone who's heard about this issue (but doesn't know exactly what it is -- which includes a lot of people, including myself until about last week) understand why it's so important.

On a personal note: without the Internet, I'd be just another failed actor struggling to make ends meet. Because I had the same ability to put together a website and reach an audience as anyone else, I was able to put my words on your screens, and eventually into a book that got into many of your hands. If AT&T or some other big telecom decided that regular guys like me had to pay some sort of protection money to have the same ability to reach you as Google or MSN does, I never would have been able to get WWdN off the ground, much less found Monolith Press, publish Dancing Barefoot, and start an entirely new career as a writer.

We've all taken for granted that we'll have equal access to the Internet, both as consumers and as creators of content. Right now, very powerful, very greedy, and very un-democratic businesses are trying very hard to take that away from us. They must be stopped.

Again, Adam Green:

The only way to protect Net Neutrality is for Congress to take action now, as it re-writes our nation's telecom laws. Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) have introduced legislation to do this. Mike McCurry and his clients like AT&T are fighting it tooth and nail.

If you are outraged, don't just sit there . . .  take these steps:

1. SIGN a Net Neutrality petition to Congress:

2. CALL Congress now:

3. BLOG about this issue, or put our "Save the Internet" logo on your Web site:

4. MYSPACE: Add "Save the Internet" as a friend:

5. WRITE A LETTER to Congress:

6. VISIT our coalition Web site for more information, SavetheInternet.com

Posted by mikki at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sen Stevens tries to sneak the Broadcast Flag into law:


Cory Doctorow:

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has snuck the Broadcast Flag into a bill on Net Neutrality. The stealth clause authorizes "the FCC to establish a broadcast flag to allow TV stations to protect digital content from Internet piracy."

What this means is that Senator Stevens is trying to pass a law that will allow broadcasters -- who enjoy free use of billions of dollars' worth of public airwaves -- to veto any features of digital televisions and downstream devices. Ultimately, that means that the FCC would, on behalf of broadcasters, get control over the design of video recorders, optical drives, network interfaces, hard disks, computers and operating systems. A brief far more sweeping than the FCC has ever had before, making them into America's "device czars," charged with ensuring that the business models of the broadcasters and Hollywood studios won't be disrupted by technology.

One element of the broadcast flag proposal is that is prohibits the use of free and open source software in digital TV applications (including PC operating systems, video drivers, etc). That's because the Broadcast Flag requires that devices be built to be "robust" -- that is, to resist the attempts of their owners to modify or improve on them. It's as if Senator Stevens is trying to pass a law requiring the hood of every car to be welded shut when it leaves the factory, to make sure that no driver ever gets to change his own oil.

Link

(Thanks, Tony!)

Posted by mikki at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DNS Perils Popularized:

Interesting paper here:

The primary contribution of this paper is to expose
the inherent risks involved in a basic Internet service.

Perils of Transitive Trust in the Domain Name System, Venugopalan Ramasubramanian and Emin Gun Sirer, In Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Berkeley, California, October, 2005.

Well, no, not really. All the risks mentioned in the paper are common knowledge among people who deal with these things.

These risks create an artificial dilemma between failure resilience, which argues for more geographically distributed nameservers, and security, which argues for fewer centralized trusted nodes.

Well, no, not really. Fewer centralized trusted nodes wouldn't necessarily increase security; they'd just reduce the number of targets that would be worth attacking. While a smaller trusted computing base may be better for security within a single organization, it's not clear it is better for security of a distributed service such as DNS across the distributed Internet.

The paper further expresses surprise to find that many DNS servers are run by gasp academic institutions! The paper says such institutions do not have a financial relationship with the domains they serve and thus no fiduciary incentives to do it right. That's true, but fiduciary incentives are not the only incentives, and the more diverse the administrators of DNS servers the less likely they are all to be simultaneously compromised by commercial or political pressures.

The paper goes on to document specific numbers of vulnerable nameservers. This information could be used to help fix the problem.

Of the 166771 nameservers we surveyed, 27141 have known vulnerabilities.

This is a step in the direction of a reputation system. Why not take the next two steps?

Here's a rough sketch of a DNS reputation system:

1. Find out which DNS servers are running old buggy versions of software. OK, the authors of the paper claim to have done this.
2. 
   Inform the administrators of those DNS servers,
   and give them a fixed time in which to fix them.
   
3. 
   Then publish the names and addresses of those that don't.
   

If that step (3) seems too draconian, use the dependency graph to determine what other nameservers depend on the buggy servers, and tell the administrators of the dependant nameservers. Might as well recommend DNSSEC while you're at it. And of course iterate so as to check back later on all the surveyed nameservers.

In other words, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater by centralizing nameserver. Instead, leverage the open decentralized nature of the Internet to fix the problem.

-jsq

PS: This paper seen on Dave Farber's Interesting People list. It has also been noted in a BBC story.

Posted by mikki at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)