Trademark Censoring: Hungary Considering Banning Heineken Red Star Trademark Because Communism
Furnished content.
When it comes to trademark law, it's worth repeating that its primary function is to prevent customer confusion and to act as a benefit for consumer trust. This mission has become skewed in many ways in many countries, but one of the lessons learned via the Washington Redskins fiasco is that even well-meaning attempts to have government play obscenity cop will result in confusing inconsistency at best and language-policing at worst. When government begins attempting to apply morality to trademark law in that way, it skews the purpose of trademark entirely.To see that on display elsewhere, we need only look to Hungary, where the government is considering stripping the trademark protection for some of the branding for Heineken beer because it resembles the ever-scary demon that is communism.The rightist government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which faces an election in April 2018, says it is a “moral obligation” to ban the commercial use of symbols such as the swastika, arrow cross, hammer and sickle, and the red star. Heineken has had a star logo on its beer for most of the years since it was first brewed in the second half of the 19th century, changing to a red one in the 1930s. The star is thought to represent a brewers symbol or the various stages of the brewing process. But the red star was also a major symbol of Soviet communism and used to appear on the crest of communist-era Hungary. Which, frankly, is entirely besides the point. It should be immediately clear how silly this sort of thing is. Stripping trademark rights for symbols tangentially related to causes a government doesn't like is bad enough, but outright banning their use in commerce is obviously a statist act by government. It does nothing to benefit the consuming public, one which will already be quite familiar with Heineken and its branding, and instead is a move designed to play on the strain of nationalism currently weaving its way through much of the West. But it accomplishes nothing concrete. Heineken isn't communism, no matter how many red stars it puts on its labels.But dumb ideas like this necessarily come with even more extreme consequences.Under the new law, businesses using these symbols could be fined up to 2 billion forints (€6.48 million) and jail sentence. The danger in allowing the government to play language police in this way should be clear. Fortunately for us, this particular case in Hungary eschews the slippery slope entirely and instead simply jumps off of the corruption cliff.Last week Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén, who jointly submitted the bill with Orbán’s chief of staff Janos Lazar, was quoted as saying that the red star in Heineken’s logo was “obvious political content”. At the same time, Semjén did not deny that the ban was linked to Heineken’s legal battle with a small, partly locally-owned beer maker in Romania’s Transylvania — home to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians — over the use of a popular brand name there. That's where this always will eventually lead, with government taking this sort of power and abusing it to favor one company over another. Hungary simply did us the favor of putting that on immediate display. If you're going to go full corruption, after all, why bother hiding it?
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 25-Mar-2017
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
Encryption Workarounds Paper Shows Why 'Going Dark' Is Not A Problem, And In Fact Is As Old As Humanity Itself
Furnished content.
It was October 2014 when FBI Director James Comey made his famous claim that things were "going dark" in the world of law enforcement because of the increasing use of encryption. Since then, Techdirt has had dozens of posts on the topic, many of them reporting on further dire warnings that the very fabric of civilization was under threat thanks to what was claimed to be a frightening new ability to keep things secret. Many others pointed out that the resulting calls for backdoors to encryption systems were a stunningly foolish idea that only people unable to understand the underlying technology could make.One Techdirt post on the topic mentioned a great paper with the title "Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications," which ran through all the problems with the backdoor idea. It was written by many of the top experts in this field, including Bruce Schneier. He's just published another paper, co-authored with Orin Kerr, who is a professor at George Washington University Law School, which looks at the other side of things -- how to circumvent encryption:The widespread use of encryption has triggered a new step in many criminal investigations: the encryption workaround. We define an encryption workaround as any lawful government effort to reveal an unencrypted version of a target's data that has been concealed by encryption. This essay provides an overview of encryption workaround. The various possibilities are largely self-explanatory:We classify six kinds of workarounds: find the key, guess the key, compel the key, exploit a flaw in the encryption software, access plaintext while the device is in use, and locate another plaintext copy. For each approach, we consider the practical, technological, and legal hurdles raised by its use. What's interesting is not so much what the workarounds are, as is the fact that there are a number of them, and that they can all work in the right circumstances. This gives the lie to the idea that we are entering a terrible new era where things are "going dark," and it is simply impossible to obtain important information. But as the authors point out:there is no magic way for the government to get around encryption. The nature of the problem is one of probabilities rather than certainty. Different approaches will work more or less often in different kinds of cases. Schneier and Kerr go on to draw an analogy:When the police have a suspect and want a confession, the law gives the police a set of tools they may use in an effort to persuade the suspect to confess. None of the interrogation methods work every time. In some cases, no matter what the government does, suspects will confess. In other cases, no matter what the government does, suspects will assert their rights and refuse to speak. The government must work with the inherently probabilistic nature of obtaining confessions. Similarly, the government must work with the inherently probabilistic nature of encryption workarounds. That analogy reveals something profound: that the supposedly new problem of "going dark" -- of not being able to find out information -- has existed as long as humans have been around. After all, there is no way -- yet, at least -- of accessing information held in a person's mind unless some kind of interrogation technique is used to extract it. And as the analogy shows us, that is exactly like needing to find some encryption workaround when information is held on a digital device. It may be possible, or it may not; but the only difference between the problems faced by those demanding answers thousands of years ago and today is that some of the required information may be held external to the mind in an encrypted digital form. Asking for guaranteed backdoors to that digital data is as unreasonable as demanding a foolproof method to extract information from any person's mind. We accept that it may not be possible to do the latter, so why not accept the former may not be feasible either?Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 25-Mar-2017
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
|
|