Sometimes, the anarchists lose. Even in leftist Sweden, The Pirate Bay’s founders lost their last appeal. It’s guys like these, who deliberately put up a system for infringing on US copyrights while playing word games to justify it, that motivated SOPA and that drive the desire for a treaty like ACTA.

Google considers its privacy changes a public policy issue as the firm is getting plenty of criticism. This suggests to me they believe the critics won’t actually stop using Google services like Gmail, but will rather try for government regulation.

Considering Google is implementing a censorship plan much like that Twitter recently announced, and yet you don’t really see the same angry protestors saying they’ll quit using Google services in protest, that did a “Twitter blackout,” I think Google’s right that nobody will quit them over any of this. Hey, people: If you don’t like Google, use somebody else. It’s not that hard.

A former Clinton and Obama administration official is angry that the House Republicans have the nerve to demand the FCC obey the Congress. AT&T seems to think the FCC needs put in its place, though. I still support efforts to put limits on the FCC’s ability to dictate arbitrary spectrum rules.

The FCC is feeling the heat. As Chuck Grassley demands transparency on LightSquared, the brand new Chief of Staff lashed out at the Senator, and had to apologize. Watch the name Zachary Katz. He may embarrass himself and his bosses again in the future, and let slip their controlling agenda in his rage.

Grassley’s now gotten pushback from the FCC and from LightSquared. What do they have to hide? Why not just go transparent on this, instead of criticizing the man simply asking for openness in government? It couldn’t be because LightSquared is now under pressure from Sprint to deliver the goods, eh?

After all, it was when FCC critics exposed abuse of the “Lifeline” program that the need for reform of the wireless phone subsidy became apparent.

Don’t you just love it when firms ask for favors from the FCC, openly asking for legal action that benefits them against others? When it’s out in the open, we see the corruption inherent the regulatory system. Help, help, America is being oppressed.

Oh boy, Herb Kohl wants to block more spectrum deals. This is out of control. It’s like DC Democrats want to keep high-speed wireless Internet prices sky high or something.

When Congress wants to grab power for government, one of the easiest ways to disarm opposition is to say it’s being done to fight child pornography. People’s brains shut down and they rush to join in that fight. So I’m not sure we’re fully thinking through the risks of this data retention bill. Once we create this database, we’re not only creating a huge new legal mandate on a fast-growing, innovative industry, but we’re creating risks that the data could get out, or be used for other purposes. Do you really want Eric Holder to have access to all you do online? Really? I think I oppose this bill, despite the misleading name it has: the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act. A more accurate name would be: Keeping Records Of All You Do Online act, because the real goal is data retention for government to check up on you.

Databases always find new uses. When they created the ‘deadbeat dad’ database, they couldn’t help from using it to track other things. Mark my words: If these database are protected, they will be used to track more than child pornographers. This I promise you. The warrants will be issued. The laws will be passed. This data will get out.

It’s not really a “snooping” bill. It’s a data retention bill. But just as we don’t like it when Google creates a massive database of all we do, so should we fear government demanding that such databases be made. It simply creates the risk of future snooping, and that’s bad enough.

Also, we’ve really got to primary Lamar Smith. He’s producing one stinker of a bill after another. He clearly has no concept of limited government in his mind.

Meanwhile, as we keep trying to regulate Americans, Wikileaks operates abroad, and none of the bills Lamar Smith is putting up would do one thing about it. Nor would the latest power grab of a “cybersecurity” bill by Jay Rockefeller and Susan Collins.

You don’t create security by regulating the victims; that just hinders innovation and distracts from retaliation and prosecution. You don’t stop criminals by creating massive schemes to track everyone online; that just hurts the innocent.

Fascinating issue to consider: How do we apply the concept of the search warrant to encrypted data? How do you compel the accused to admit to the knowledge of a cryptographic key, which if the encrypted data is illegal, amounts to a self-incriminating statement? As the world goes digital, the lines between information and ‘stuff’ get more and more blurry.

Again, what good is ACTA if China doesn’t join it and trashes Apple trademarks?

Sometimes, the anarchists lose. Even in leftist Sweden, The Pirate Bay’s founders lost their last appeal. It’s guys like these, who deliberately put up a system for infringing on US copyrights while playing word games to justify it, that motivated SOPA and that drive the desire for a treaty like ACTA.

Google considers its privacy changes a public policy issue as the firm is getting plenty of criticism. This suggests to me they believe the critics won’t actually stop using Google services like Gmail, but will rather try for government regulation.

Considering Google is implementing a censorship plan much like that Twitter recently announced, and yet you don’t really see the same angry protestors saying they’ll quit using Google services in protest, that did a “Twitter blackout,” I think Google’s right that nobody will quit them over any of this. Hey, people: If you don’t like Google, use somebody else. It’s not that hard.

A former Clinton and Obama administration official is angry that the House Republicans have the nerve to demand the FCC obey the Congress. AT&T seems to think the FCC needs put in its place, though. I still support efforts to put limits on the FCC’s ability to dictate arbitrary spectrum rules.

The FCC is feeling the heat. As Chuck Grassley demands transparency on LightSquared, the brand new Chief of Staff lashed out at the Senator, and had to apologize. Watch the name Zachary Katz. He may embarrass himself and his bosses again in the future, and let slip their controlling agenda in his rage.

Grassley’s now gotten pushback from the FCC and from LightSquared. What do they have to hide? Why not just go transparent on this, instead of criticizing the man simply asking for openness in government? It couldn’t be because LightSquared is now under pressure from Sprint to deliver the goods, eh?

After all, it was when FCC critics exposed abuse of the “Lifeline” program that the need for reform of the wireless phone subsidy became apparent.

Don’t you just love it when firms ask for favors from the FCC, openly asking for legal action that benefits them against others? When it’s out in the open, we see the corruption inherent the regulatory system. Help, help, America is being oppressed.

Oh boy, Herb Kohl wants to block more spectrum deals. This is out of control. It’s like DC Democrats want to keep high-speed wireless Internet prices sky high or something.

When Congress wants to grab power for government, one of the easiest ways to disarm opposition is to say it’s being done to fight child pornography. People’s brains shut down and they rush to join in that fight. So I’m not sure we’re fully thinking through the risks of this data retention bill. Once we create this database, we’re not only creating a huge new legal mandate on a fast-growing, innovative industry, but we’re creating risks that the data could get out, or be used for other purposes. Do you really want Eric Holder to have access to all you do online? Really? I think I oppose this bill, despite the misleading name it has: the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act. A more accurate name would be: Keeping Records Of All You Do Online act, because the real goal is data retention for government to check up on you.

Databases always find new uses. When they created the ‘deadbeat dad’ database, they couldn’t help from using it to track other things. Mark my words: If these database are protected, they will be used to track more than child pornographers. This I promise you. The warrants will be issued. The laws will be passed. This data will get out.

It’s not really a “snooping” bill. It’s a data retention bill. But just as we don’t like it when Google creates a massive database of all we do, so should we fear government demanding that such databases be made. It simply creates the risk of future snooping, and that’s bad enough.

Also, we’ve really got to primary Lamar Smith. He’s producing one stinker of a bill after another. He clearly has no concept of limited government in his mind.

Meanwhile, as we keep trying to regulate Americans, Wikileaks operates abroad, and none of the bills Lamar Smith is putting up would do one thing about it. Nor would the latest power grab of a “cybersecurity” bill by Jay Rockefeller and Susan Collins.

You don’t create security by regulating the victims; that just hinders innovation and distracts from retaliation and prosecution. You don’t stop criminals by creating massive schemes to track everyone online; that just hurts the innocent.

Fascinating issue to consider: How do we apply the concept of the search warrant to encrypted data? How do you compel the accused to admit to the knowledge of a cryptographic key, which if the encrypted data is illegal, amounts to a self-incriminating statement? As the world goes digital, the lines between information and ‘stuff’ get more and more blurry.

Again, what good is ACTA if China doesn’t join it and trashes Apple trademarks?

There’s a lot of fear going around about ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a plurilateral agreement under the WTO between the US, the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Morocco. Some of the fears look real, some don’t. For example, even though it was negotiated in secret, the text is easily available.

Another false complaint is that it’s another SOPA, when in fact such a claim misses the point. SOPA was a bad bill, as it turned out to be a censorship bill that defied due process, but the intent was to fight the problem of free riding on copyright and trademark. Crossing international boundaries has been a cheap and easy way to cash in on another country’s copyright and trademark laws without having to abide by them. SOPA tried to fix that in a crude, rude, and ineffective way. ACTA has more options, and doesn’t have to resort to censorship, necessarily.

I’ve just read the treaty. I don’t really see a problem. Even if infringement isn’t ruining the movies and music, trademark and copyright are Constitutional concepts worthy of protection. That’s why some of the anti-SOPA leaders are promoting their own bill.

The pro-liberty position is not one of anarchy. It’s time to get reasonable protections in place. Maybe I missed something, and ACTA is a problem. But the best argument I see against ACTA is that it only includes a few countries, and not those best known for infringement (such as China, either China in fact). ACTA may yet be harmless but ineffective, as opposed to SOPA being harmful and ineffective.

So no, don’t expect me to cry either that Megaupload’s data is dying. Businesses that profit from mass copyright infringement deserve to die. And besides, did people ever see that website? It was shady like crazy all along. Everyone knew this.

Now, on the other hand, what I do see and have seen a problem with are the various “cybersecurity” proposals we keep seeing. The worst of course was the infamous Internet Kill Switch, which actually was even more dangerous than it sounded: It proposed to give the President “emergency” dictatorial powers over broad ranges of private property related to the Internet.

A new bill has apparently eased up from that ridiculous degree, but there are still concerns that it gives too much of that power over certain companies, such as government contractors. Republicans Kay Bailey Hutchison, Chuck Grassley, and Saxby Chambliss along with Lisa Murkowski wrote in Politico that the current plan “is ultimately a costly and heavy-handed regulatory approach. It will not work and it won’t pass Congress.” If they’re right on the former, I hope they’re right on the latter. We don’t need to create yet more “broad new regulatory powers.”

I also maintain my opposition to the role of government in policing private sector ‘privacy violations.’ If you don’t like Google, use competitors or take sensible precautions like not staying logged in and using the same cookie across all their sites. There’s simply no place for Mary Bono Mack to act here. Also, as I analyzed in the past, Carrier IQ was a total nothingburger and it’s simply grandstanding for Edward Markey to push the issue, especially since the guy never did take a stand against SOPA. He’s trying to change the subject.

There’s a lot of fear going around about ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a plurilateral agreement under the WTO between the US, the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Morocco. Some of the fears look real, some don’t. For example, even though it was negotiated in secret, the text is easily available.

Another false complaint is that it’s another SOPA, when in fact such a claim misses the point. SOPA was a bad bill, as it turned out to be a censorship bill that defied due process, but the intent was to fight the problem of free riding on copyright and trademark. Crossing international boundaries has been a cheap and easy way to cash in on another country’s copyright and trademark laws without having to abide by them. SOPA tried to fix that in a crude, rude, and ineffective way. ACTA has more options, and doesn’t have to resort to censorship, necessarily.

I’ve just read the treaty. I don’t really see a problem. Even if infringement isn’t ruining the movies and music, trademark and copyright are Constitutional concepts worthy of protection. That’s why some of the anti-SOPA leaders are promoting their own bill.

The pro-liberty position is not one of anarchy. It’s time to get reasonable protections in place. Maybe I missed something, and ACTA is a problem. But the best argument I see against ACTA is that it only includes a few countries, and not those best known for infringement (such as China, either China in fact). ACTA may yet be harmless but ineffective, as opposed to SOPA being harmful and ineffective.

So no, don’t expect me to cry either that Megaupload’s data is dying. Businesses that profit from mass copyright infringement deserve to die. And besides, did people ever see that website? It was shady like crazy all along. Everyone knew this.

Now, on the other hand, what I do see and have seen a problem with are the various “cybersecurity” proposals we keep seeing. The worst of course was the infamous Internet Kill Switch, which actually was even more dangerous than it sounded: It proposed to give the President “emergency” dictatorial powers over broad ranges of private property related to the Internet.

A new bill has apparently eased up from that ridiculous degree, but there are still concerns that it gives too much of that power over certain companies, such as government contractors. Republicans Kay Bailey Hutchison, Chuck Grassley, and Saxby Chambliss along with Lisa Murkowski wrote in Politico that the current plan “is ultimately a costly and heavy-handed regulatory approach. It will not work and it won’t pass Congress.” If they’re right on the former, I hope they’re right on the latter. We don’t need to create yet more “broad new regulatory powers.”

I also maintain my opposition to the role of government in policing private sector ‘privacy violations.’ If you don’t like Google, use competitors or take sensible precautions like not staying logged in and using the same cookie across all their sites. There’s simply no place for Mary Bono Mack to act here. Also, as I analyzed in the past, Carrier IQ was a total nothingburger and it’s simply grandstanding for Edward Markey to push the issue, especially since the guy never did take a stand against SOPA. He’s trying to change the subject.

Ordinarily I use Tech at Night to cover a variety of topics that come my way, and I have them in my queue for tonight. But with over 30 items to consider and integrate, most of them on SOPA, I’m shelving the rest for Friday, and discussing just one topic tonight: We must defeat SOPA in the House. It is entirely unacceptable, and I believe worthy of primary challenges, for any Republican to back this bill. I’m going to make a list, and I’m going to make noise about this. I hope you do, too.

SOPA is the Stopping Online Piracy Act, the House’s counterpart to the Senate PROTECT IP act. SOPA contains a grab bag of provisions intended to stop copyright, trademark, and patent infringements abroad, but Title I of the bill is intolerable, fails to achieve its goals, and creates a massive power grab online for this man by applying unaccountable censorship and regulation to Americans on the Internet.

That’s right. Eric Holder has been dreaming of censoring the Internet since 1999, and House Republicans are thinking of giving him that power. At the time, the crisis that was the excuse for this censorship attempt was the murder plot at Columbine High School in Colorado. Now the excuse is that kiddies online are downloading Scary Movie 3, and buying fake hand bags. Give me a break.

Copyrights, trademarks, and patents matter. If we have a way to protect them from foreign attacks without overstepping our bounds, we should consider doing it. SOPA is not that way to do it. Watch any Republican who dares vote for this garbage, voting to put Hollywood over us, to give Eric Holder the power to bend over backward for Barack Obama’s Hollywood donors over the interests of everyone with a job created thanks to the Internet.

Disgraced former Senator Chris Dodd may say the MPAA is pro-Internet, but as the head of the MPAA it’s his job to say that. He’s lucky he head a fallback after he was forced to retire by the Countrywide scandal he was neck-deep in.

You know who’s more credible about Internet censorship than the MPAA? People who made their fortunes online. The founders of Google, Craig’s List, eBay, YouTube, the Internet Archive, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, another firms joined in a single letter opposing SOPA. They echo my warnings from way back when that SOPA creates the same problems for Americans online that Communist China creates for the Chinese online, denies due process, creates a permanent state of spying online, and undermines the fundamentals of the Internet in America.

The retort may be that four hundred companies came out for SOPA. No, they didn’t. The came out for a law to attack foreign infringers. They could have chosen to endorse SOPA and/or PROTECT IP. They chose not to. The same goes for the NGA who put out a similar call. I take them at their word.

Fortunately, there is another. SOPA gets a committee vote in the morning, but the OPEN Act is the way to go instead of SOPA. OPEN, the brainchild of California Republican Darrell Issa in the House, and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden in the Senate, turns SOPA on its head. Instead of having America play the ostrich, censoring our Internet to pretend foreign infringers will just go away, OPEN applies decades of experience to use the ITC to attack foreign “e-parasites” where they live.

When Al Qaeda attacked us, we didn’t respond by sealing the border and permanently ending air travel. No, we cut off American funding, and took the fight to them. OPEN Act takes the fight to the foreign infringers, the “pirates” themselves.

SOPA proponents will say that Issa’s criticisms have been addressed by a manager’s amendment to the bill. But Lamar Smith’s changes are not good enough. It still censors the Internet, threatening our jobs and our leadership worldwide online.

Rand Paul is on board. Darrell Issa. Eric Schmidt. Arianna Huffington. Left and right, libertarian and authoritarian, Democrat and Republican, nearly nobody actually likes this bill, except for a few on Capitol Hill and the lobbyists who have convinced them to back a few big businesses. But the bill is moving through the process despite this huge public outcry. That just means we have to get louder.

Kill SOPA. Pass the OPEN Act to keep the Internet open, and to keep our jobs and innovation flowing, if you want to protect Americans from foreign ‘pirates.’ This is an obvious call, not to give Eric Holder this censorship power. Keep notes, folks. Watch every Republican who votes for this. Remember their names, and check on their primary races. Make it count.

Ordinarily I use Tech at Night to cover a variety of topics that come my way, and I have them in my queue for tonight. But with over 30 items to consider and integrate, most of them on SOPA, I’m shelving the rest for Friday, and discussing just one topic tonight: We must defeat SOPA in the House. It is entirely unacceptable, and I believe worthy of primary challenges, for any Republican to back this bill. I’m going to make a list, and I’m going to make noise about this. I hope you do, too.

SOPA is the Stopping Online Piracy Act, the House’s counterpart to the Senate PROTECT IP act. SOPA contains a grab bag of provisions intended to stop copyright, trademark, and patent infringements abroad, but Title I of the bill is intolerable, fails to achieve its goals, and creates a massive power grab online for this man by applying unaccountable censorship and regulation to Americans on the Internet.

That’s right. Eric Holder has been dreaming of censoring the Internet since 1999, and House Republicans are thinking of giving him that power. At the time, the crisis that was the excuse for this censorship attempt was the murder plot at Columbine High School in Colorado. Now the excuse is that kiddies online are downloading Scary Movie 3, and buying fake hand bags. Give me a break.

Copyrights, trademarks, and patents matter. If we have a way to protect them from foreign attacks without overstepping our bounds, we should consider doing it. SOPA is not that way to do it. Watch any Republican who dares vote for this garbage, voting to put Hollywood over us, to give Eric Holder the power to bend over backward for Barack Obama’s Hollywood donors over the interests of everyone with a job created thanks to the Internet.

Disgraced former Senator Chris Dodd may say the MPAA is pro-Internet, but as the head of the MPAA it’s his job to say that. He’s lucky he head a fallback after he was forced to retire by the Countrywide scandal he was neck-deep in.

You know who’s more credible about Internet censorship than the MPAA? People who made their fortunes online. The founders of Google, Craig’s List, eBay, YouTube, the Internet Archive, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, another firms joined in a single letter opposing SOPA. They echo my warnings from way back when that SOPA creates the same problems for Americans online that Communist China creates for the Chinese online, denies due process, creates a permanent state of spying online, and undermines the fundamentals of the Internet in America.

The retort may be that four hundred companies came out for SOPA. No, they didn’t. The came out for a law to attack foreign infringers. They could have chosen to endorse SOPA and/or PROTECT IP. They chose not to. The same goes for the NGA who put out a similar call. I take them at their word.

Fortunately, there is another. SOPA gets a committee vote in the morning, but the OPEN Act is the way to go instead of SOPA. OPEN, the brainchild of California Republican Darrell Issa in the House, and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden in the Senate, turns SOPA on its head. Instead of having America play the ostrich, censoring our Internet to pretend foreign infringers will just go away, OPEN applies decades of experience to use the ITC to attack foreign “e-parasites” where they live.

When Al Qaeda attacked us, we didn’t respond by sealing the border and permanently ending air travel. No, we cut off American funding, and took the fight to them. OPEN Act takes the fight to the foreign infringers, the “pirates” themselves.

SOPA proponents will say that Issa’s criticisms have been addressed by a manager’s amendment to the bill. But Lamar Smith’s changes are not good enough. It still censors the Internet, threatening our jobs and our leadership worldwide online.

Rand Paul is on board. Darrell Issa. Eric Schmidt. Arianna Huffington. Left and right, libertarian and authoritarian, Democrat and Republican, nearly nobody actually likes this bill, except for a few on Capitol Hill and the lobbyists who have convinced them to back a few big businesses. But the bill is moving through the process despite this huge public outcry. That just means we have to get louder.

Kill SOPA. Pass the OPEN Act to keep the Internet open, and to keep our jobs and innovation flowing, if you want to protect Americans from foreign ‘pirates.’ This is an obvious call, not to give Eric Holder this censorship power. Keep notes, folks. Watch every Republican who votes for this. Remember their names, and check on their primary races. Make it count.

Here’s a term Apple will have no dominion over: “multi-touch”.

Apple originally applied for the trademark on Jan. 9, 2007, (the day when iPhone was announced), but the United States Patent and Trademark Office decided that the term was too broad.

After Apple’s appeal, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board upheld the original decision. From the decision:

“The examining attorney maintains that “multi-touch” is“highly descriptive” and identifies a type of touchscreen interface which “allows a user to manipulate and control the functions of an electronic device by using more than one finger simultaneously. … Again, simply because the applied-for term has been used in association with a highly successful product does not mean the term has acquired distinctiveness.”

This comes as no surprise as the term multi-touch was used in the pre-iPhone era. For example, 9to5Mac points to a paper by Jeff Han that uses the term in 2005.

[via MacRumors]

More About: apple, iphone, multi-touch, trademark

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No really, Governor Haslam, you do not want to bring California taxation to Tennessee. Have you seen our unemployment? That’s why we just might defeat it at referendum.

PETA people are hijacking phones, sending malicious messages without consent, and running up text message bills. People need to be careful about what they install, but this sort of thing needs to send people to jail, as well. We don’t need more laws and regulations, we need more enforcement against the bad guys.

How badly do we not need more laws and regulations? Even the Progressive Policy Institute’s Michael Mandel thinks so, calling on the President to lead in the direction of less regulation and pro-growth change.

I’ve come out strongly against the proposed PROTECT IP law, that would create a national Internet censorship blacklist, like they have in unfree countries. Tech Liberation Front has gone further in studying the bill and finding just what’s wrong with it, proposing a list of fixes:

1. Drop provisions that tamper with the DNS system in an effort to block U.S. access to banned sites.
2. Drop provisions that tamper with search engines, indices, and any other linkage to banned sites.
3. Remove a private right of action that would allow copyright and trademark holders to obtain court orders banning ad networks and financial transaction processors from doing business with banned sites.
4. Scale back current enforcement abuses by the Department of Homeland Security under the existing PRO-IP Act of 2008.
5. Focus the vague and overinclusive definition of the kind of websites that can be banned, limiting it to truly criminal enterprises.

Copyright and Trademark are, in theory, good things to have, but mass censorship of the Internet in the support of a good thing is not in itself good.

Though sometimes trademark expansions annoy me. See the US Olympic Committee picking on the “Redneck Olympics”. Of course, I don’t like the IOC and its affiliated bodies anyway, so maybe I’m biased.

Google has drawn some criticism for its restrictive Google+ policies, where they try to lock you down onto one and only one account, preventing you from juggling multiple identities for different communities, and blocking the use of aliases to that effect. Facebook may adopt the same policy. Me? I’ll never join Google+ and I might just delete my Facebook account one of these days. These firms are greedy for personal information, and control of it.

The chickens continue to come home to roost at Google, as the FTC might try to implement Phone Neutrality for Android in response to Google’s plans to acquire Motorola’s phone business. When will Google learn that they blew it on Net Neutrality?

It turns out Germany overstepped its bounds legally in the EU, and most injunctions against Samsung importing the Galaxy Tab have been lifted, due to German courts having no legal right to impose them. Samsung’s not out of hot water for copying Apple designs, though.

Big surprise: the President foolishly handed over total control of the Internet to international bodies, and now we run the risk of totalitarian nations trying to wreck it through the UN. Sigh.

Another shocker: The Obama FCC found a great, market-based way to get us more wireless spectrum, incentive auctions, so that we can have nigh universal access to multiple carriers of wireless, high speed Internet, and John Dingell is having a temper tantrum. Only a totalitarian socialist would be “disturbed” by free market allocation of resources. Freedom threatens dictators, not small-d democrats.

Oh, and be prepared for more surprise: Obama’s cybersecurity plans won’t actually improve security. They’re just power grabs. You could knock me over with a feather.

Democrats are just serving up failure after failure after failure on tech policy. A combination of incompetence and ideological socialism will do that, I guess.

Let’s just hope they stumble into the right idea and stay out of the way enough that AT&T can do its 4G rollout using T-Mobile spectrum.

No really, Governor Haslam, you do not want to bring California taxation to Tennessee. Have you seen our unemployment? That’s why we just might defeat it at referendum.

PETA people are hijacking phones, sending malicious messages without consent, and running up text message bills. People need to be careful about what they install, but this sort of thing needs to send people to jail, as well. We don’t need more laws and regulations, we need more enforcement against the bad guys.

How badly do we not need more laws and regulations? Even the Progressive Policy Institute’s Michael Mandel thinks so, calling on the President to lead in the direction of less regulation and pro-growth change.

I’ve come out strongly against the proposed PROTECT IP law, that would create a national Internet censorship blacklist, like they have in unfree countries. Tech Liberation Front has gone further in studying the bill and finding just what’s wrong with it, proposing a list of fixes:

1. Drop provisions that tamper with the DNS system in an effort to block U.S. access to banned sites.
2. Drop provisions that tamper with search engines, indices, and any other linkage to banned sites.
3. Remove a private right of action that would allow copyright and trademark holders to obtain court orders banning ad networks and financial transaction processors from doing business with banned sites.
4. Scale back current enforcement abuses by the Department of Homeland Security under the existing PRO-IP Act of 2008.
5. Focus the vague and overinclusive definition of the kind of websites that can be banned, limiting it to truly criminal enterprises.

Copyright and Trademark are, in theory, good things to have, but mass censorship of the Internet in the support of a good thing is not in itself good.

Though sometimes trademark expansions annoy me. See the US Olympic Committee picking on the “Redneck Olympics”. Of course, I don’t like the IOC and its affiliated bodies anyway, so maybe I’m biased.

Google has drawn some criticism for its restrictive Google+ policies, where they try to lock you down onto one and only one account, preventing you from juggling multiple identities for different communities, and blocking the use of aliases to that effect. Facebook may adopt the same policy. Me? I’ll never join Google+ and I might just delete my Facebook account one of these days. These firms are greedy for personal information, and control of it.

The chickens continue to come home to roost at Google, as the FTC might try to implement Phone Neutrality for Android in response to Google’s plans to acquire Motorola’s phone business. When will Google learn that they blew it on Net Neutrality?

It turns out Germany overstepped its bounds legally in the EU, and most injunctions against Samsung importing the Galaxy Tab have been lifted, due to German courts having no legal right to impose them. Samsung’s not out of hot water for copying Apple designs, though.

Big surprise: the President foolishly handed over total control of the Internet to international bodies, and now we run the risk of totalitarian nations trying to wreck it through the UN. Sigh.

Another shocker: The Obama FCC found a great, market-based way to get us more wireless spectrum, incentive auctions, so that we can have nigh universal access to multiple carriers of wireless, high speed Internet, and John Dingell is having a temper tantrum. Only a totalitarian socialist would be “disturbed” by free market allocation of resources. Freedom threatens dictators, not small-d democrats.

Oh, and be prepared for more surprise: Obama’s cybersecurity plans won’t actually improve security. They’re just power grabs. You could knock me over with a feather.

Democrats are just serving up failure after failure after failure on tech policy. A combination of incompetence and ideological socialism will do that, I guess.

Let’s just hope they stumble into the right idea and stay out of the way enough that AT&T can do its 4G rollout using T-Mobile spectrum.

In an eyebrow-raising trademark battle, Facebook filed suit against adult dating site Shagbook in May. Facebook’s contention: that the world’s largest social network would be “damaged by the issuance of a registration for the mark Shagbook.”

Shagbook has now filed its own opposition, along with counterclaims, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

As represented by SNRG Ventures, Shagbook, in the filing, “denies the allegation that Facebook is highly distinctive as it is a generic term.” It also challenges the validity of Facebook’s trademark, arguing that it should never have been granted.

Shagbook, in Facebook’s reasoning, is in violation of Facebook’s trademark because the site’s name is highly similar in “appearance, sound meaning, and commercial impression.” Its filing says the name was adopted with “the intent to call to mind and create a likelihood of confusion … and/or trade off the fame of Facebook.”

Not so, says Shagbook. When its American owner was living in the UK, he “referred to his little black book as his little ‘Shagbook’,” a representative for SNRG Ventures told Mashable. “He was amused with the word ‘shag,’ and picked up the name Shagbook.com, all perfectly innocently,”

Just how far will Shagbook go to fight Facebook’s trademark suit? “SNRG and Facebook’s attorneys have spoken but there have been no formal negotiations as of yet,” the representative tells us. “SNRG plans to vigorously defend the Shagbook mark.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first instance of Facebook attempting to protect its mark. The social network has made several prior trademark claims against web companies using “face” or “book” in their names.

The full text of Facebook’s original filing against Shagbook, and Shagbook’s counter are included below.

Facebook vs. Shagbook

Shagbook Notice of Opposition

Image courtesy of Flickr, Joe Gratz

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