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from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Random Jackass Attempts To Trademark 'Mayor Of Mar-A-Lago' In The Most Hilarious Way
from the not-how-it-works dept
For years now, I have railed on the USPTO for its overly permissive posture when it comes to granting trademarks. The whole thing is far too easy, with far too little concern shown by examiners as to how distinct or useful proposed marks actually are. All of that being said, there are still some hoops you have to jump through to get a trademark. And there are some rules governing how to get through those hoops.
It appears someone needs to give Natale Passaro some lessons in how trademarks work, then. See, Passaro recently filed for a trademark on the term "Mayor of Mar-A-Lago." The proposed classes for the mark are to be for "shirts" and "consulting services". Part of the application requirements, however, is documentation on "specimen of use." This is basically the USPTO asking the applicant to show evidence of the mark's current or proposed use.
A specimen of use is a real-world example of how the mark is being used on goods and/or services. A real-world example means that it is an actual object that bears the mark, not just a photo or drawing of the mark. For goods, a person can submit tags, instruction manuals, containers, labels, or packaging materials.
What the Passaro submitted for his specimen, um, doesn't cut it.
Mar a Lago Club, Inc. (Florida)
applies to registerMAYOR OF MAR A LAGO
as a trademark for
consulting services in the field of hospitalityhttps://t.co/v1aVTdbSvI#trademarks pic.twitter.com/SeYjfWvxNb
— Trademarks Are Magic (@TimberlakeLaw) February 16, 2021
Now, I truly wish that it was Donald Trump's hand that scrawled the phrase over a picture of a building at the club and a cartoon depiction of himself, because that makes all of this funnier. Unfortunately, it appears that this application came instead from someone just trying to cash in on the club and former President. That this initially confused a bunch of people, including me, is also a pretty good argument against any approval for this trademark. . .
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Conservative News Outlet Ordered To Pay More Than $250,000 In Legal Fees To Rachel Maddow, MSNBC
from the careful-with-those-baseless-claims,-OAN dept
Last summer, California's anti-SLAPP law gave MSNBC host Rachel Maddow an early exit from a bogus defamation lawsuit brought by one of the few "news" outlets that's farther to the right than Fox News, One America News.
OAN claimed it had been defamed when Maddow referred to one of its hosts as a "Kremlin-paid journalist." This comment referred to OAN "reporter" Kristian Rouz's concurrent employment as a Sputnik "journalist." Sputnik is owned by the Russian government and tends to produce exactly the sort of reporting you'd expect from such an arrangement.
As the court noted during its dismissal of the suit, Maddow's position at MSNBC is one of a commentator -- someone expected to give their opinion on world events. Thus, the stuff OAN was arguing (badly) was defamatory was actually protected opinion. And it was informed opinion that had basis in fact: Rouz did work for Sputnik and did produce propaganda on the Russian government's behalf.
Now, OAN owes MSNBC and Maddow some money. Losing a defamation suit via an anti-SLAPP motion means the victorious party can ask for legal fees. As Mary Papenfuss reports for Huffington Post, OAN's parent company (Herring Networks) has been ordered to write a very big check . . .
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Content Moderation Case Study: Google 'Removes' German Residences From Street View By Request (2010)
from the privacy-or-not? dept
Summary: Google's Street View is a powerful mapping tool that allows users to visit places they'll possibly never be able to visit and allows local users to see homes and businesses they're trying to locate.
But Google's Street View hasn't been warmly welcomed everywhere. In Germany -- a country with a long history of pervasive surveillance by government agencies -- Google’s mapping project hit a roadblock. In an effort to comply with German privacy laws, Google worked with data protection authorities to ensure all requirements were met before its cars and cameras hit the road.
Restrictions on data collection have resulted in Germany being one of the least-mapped countries in Europe.
After meeting with considerable public opposition to Google's street mapping, Google allowed residents to opt out. This resulted in opted-out locations being blurred in Street View, providing owners with more privacy inside Street View than they enjoyed outside it.
Decisions to be made by Google:
Questions and policy implications to consider:
Resolution: Given the chance to opt out, most Germans chose not to. According to Google, less than 3% of affected households asked Google to blur their residences, resulting in a little more than 244,000 blurred houses in Street View.
The opt-out program also led to an unfortunate, unforeseen, and completely unintended consequence. . .READ MORE
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Why We Filed A Comment With Facebook's Oversight Board
from the less-is-more dept
Back when Facebook's Oversight Board was just getting organized, a colleague suggested I represent people before it as part of my legal practice. As a solo lawyer, my entrepreneurial ears perked up at the possibility of future business opportunities. But the rest of me felt extremely uncomfortable with the proposition. I defend free speech, but I am a lawyer and I defend it using law. If Facebook removes you or your content that is an entirely lawful choice for it to make. It may or may not be a good decision, but there is nothing for law to defend you from. So it didn't seem a good use of my legal training to spend my time taking issue with how a private entity made the moderation decisions it was entirely within its legal rights to make.
It also worried me that people were regarding Facebook's Oversight Board as some sort of lawmaking body, and I was hesitant to use my lawyering skills to somehow validate and perpetuate that myth. No matter how successful the Board turns out to be, it is still limited in its authority and reach, and that's a good thing. What is not good is when people expect that this review system should (a) have the weight of actual law or (b) be the system that gets to evaluate all moderation decisions on the Internet. . .
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CBP Facial Recognition Program Has Gathered 50 Million Face Photos, Identified Fewer Than 300 Imposters
from the more-buck-than-bang-at-this-point dept
The CBP and DHS have released their annual report [PDF] covering trade and travel. It touts the agencies' successes in these areas but raises some questions about the use of facial recognition tech to make the nation safer.
Dave Gershgorn, writing for One Zero, points out the system the DHS and CBP claim is essential to national security isn't doing much to secure the nation. And it's not for a lack of input data.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection scanned more than 23 million people with facial recognition technology at airports, seaports, and pedestrian crossings in 2020, the agency recently revealed in its annual report on trade and travel.
The agency scanned four million more people than in 2019. The report indicates that the system caught no imposters traveling through airports last year and fewer than 100 new pedestrian imposters.
There are two ways of looking at this -- neither of which justify the DHS's aggressive expansion of biometric collection at airports, border crossings, and any other place travelers might be found.
This low number of imposters recognized could indicate the system is flawed -- incapable of accurately doing the job it's supposed to do: recognize faces. This is a problem inherent to every facial recognition algorithm being used anywhere . .
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Minneapolis, Minnesota Becomes The Latest Major City To Pass A Facial Recognition Ban
from the facial-recognition-lobby-still-incredibly-weak dept
Facial recognition bans are slowly becoming the status quo around the nation. Good.
The tech is faulty. And that's understating things. There's plenty of evidence showing the tech does little but generate false positives. Bogus arrests are starting to pile up.
Just as concerning are the false negatives -- something no one can actually tabulate. But you can't ignore the fact that AI prone to misidentifying people (especially minorities) is capable of letting as many guilty people go free as it's capable of subjecting innocent people to wrongful detainments and arrests.
Pockets of facial recognition resistance have cropped up. They've been mainly relegated to the coasts so far. Following multiple municipal bans, the state of California blocked use of this technology until 2022. The same thing happened on the other side of the country when Massachusetts lawmakers passed a moratorium on the tech -- one that will prevent law enforcement agencies from acquiring or using this tech until at least the end of 2021. This move followed several citywide bans passed by local governments in the state.
But what about the rest of the country? There's a lot of flyover country between the two coasts. And there's been very little activity in America's so-called "heartland
More > LAST BUT NOT LEAST
A 90 Year Old Shouldn't Have To Buy A $10,000 Ad Just To Get AT&T To Upgrade His Shitty DSL Line
from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept
Last week I wrote over at Motherboard about 90 years old North Hollywood resident Aaron Epstein, whose family has been an AT&T subscriber since the 1930s. Epstein himself has been a loyal AT&T subscriber since around 1960, and has had the company's DSL service since it was first introduced in the late 90s. Unfortunately for Epstein, much like countless millions of other Americans, his DSL line only delivered speeds of 1.5 to 3 Mbps, and he's been waiting for decades for faster speeds to no avail.
To try and nudge AT&T to action, Epstein recently took out a $10,000 ad in the Wall Street Journal just to yell at AT&T CEO John Stankey:
I mean how upset one must be, over slow home internet speeds, to pay for a personal quarter-page national ad in print @WSJ pic.twitter.com/Zk9umKD0t1
— Raju Narisetti (@raju) February 3, 2021
When I spoke to him on the phone, he told me that AT&T had advertised faster speeds in his area for five years, but when he called to see if upgrades were actually available, they never were. But after a full week of national press coverage (the story quickly bounced around the country) about the lengths Epstein had to go to, AT&T finally scrambled to upgrade his line to fiber to help manage the PR crisis. AT&T, for its part, issued a statement that tried to pretend these upgrades were "planned" all along (there's no real indication that's true):
READ MORE
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