Congress Backs Down From Terrible Surveillance Bill; Running Out Of Time
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Just this morning we wrote about a last minute plan by surveillance hawks in Congress to rush through a really bad bill to extend Section 702, which enables widespread domestic surveillance by the NSA. We recommended letting your elected officials know what a bad bill it was (leading at least one of our commenters to mock us, saying contacting your elected officials is useless). Turns out: it worked (for now). The bill has been taken off the table and won't be voted on today. Senators Rand Paul and Ron Wyden had promised to filibuster such a bill on the Senate side to stop it, and it appears that widespread criticism caused the House to kill the bill for now.Of course, Congress is now running out of time if it wants to extend the program. It technically expires at the end of the year (though large parts of the program can continue beyond that for at least some period of time). Devin Nunes, who was the main sponsor of the bill, appears frustrated, as he should for pushing so hard on such a bad bill:But by midafternoon Wednesday, Nunes told reporters that the reauthorization effort was dead for now and that decisions about how to proceed were being made above my pay grade. The House Rules Committee also canceled plans to review the proposed legislation Wednesday afternoon. It's still possible that Congress may try to shove a 702 extension into the "must-pass" spending bill next week -- though a whole bunch of folks in Congress have warned leadership that they will not accept this. Of course, we've gone through things kind of like this before. If you don't recall, the other controversial program, Section 215, expired before Congress was able to agree on a reform package, and that helped get Congress to finally agree to significant reform to the program after a few weeks of it technically no longer existing. A more likely solution would be a short term (30 or 60 day?) renewal, forcing the debate into January.
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posted at: 12:00am on 21-Dec-2017
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Apple Bullies Pharmacy Over Trademark Because All The Apples Are Belong To Them
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For roughly as long as Apple went through business-puberty and grew up into a big-boy company, it has held the somewhat strange belief that only it is allowed to use anything resembling an image of an apple as part of any kind of corporate branding. This has resulted in all kinds of bullying episodes and disputes over the logos of other companies that have little to no resemblance to Apple's iconic logo and typically involve companies that don't remotely compete with it either.But if Apple was hoping for some kind of chilling effect to be the result of these bullying efforts, it's only logical that this chilling effect would need to be renewed now and again. Fortunately, some silly pharmacy called Red Apple Interactive Pharmacy had the audacity to file a trademark application for the following logo.
Does that look like Apple's iconic logo?
No, it does not. Does the pharmacy compete with Apple in any way related to anything in trademark law? No, it does not. Did any of that stop Apple from opposing the trademark application of Red Apple Interactive Pharmacy. No, it most certainly did not.Apple filed its opposition yesterday, December 18, claiming that the applied-for mark would cause a likelihood of confusion and dilution by blurring. The document filed by Apple cited the company’s apple logo, the mark ‘Apple’ and the mark ‘Apple Watch’ as some of the registrations used to oppose the applied-for mark. The Apple logo covers classes 9 (computer hardware and programs); 25 (analysis and consultation in the field of business information management); 29 (data storage services); and 41 (education and training services). This is bullying in its purest form. There is not a shred of potential or real customer confusion about which to worry in this case. The logos aren't similar enough to cause concern, the companies are not competing, and even the most moronic hurried person is not walking going to try to buy prescription drugs thinking its from the same company that made their iPhone.One would think there were better efforts on which to spend Apple's valuable time beyond these frivolous, bullying efforts.
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posted at: 12:00am on 21-Dec-2017
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