If Net Neutrality Dies, Comcast Can Just Block A Protest Site Instead Of Sending A Bogus Cease-And-Desist
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It appears that a vendor working for Comcast sent a totally bullshit cease-and-desist letter regarding a pro-net neutrality site: Comcastroturf.com, created by our friends over at Fight for the Future. The Comcastroturf website was set up as a tool to see if someone filed bogus FCC comments in your name. As you probably recall, there is a bot that has been flooding the FCC comment site with bogus anti-net neutrality comments, filed in alphabetical order. Reporters contacted some of the individuals whose names appear on these comments, and they had no idea what it was about. People are still trying to track down who is actually responsible for the bogus comments, but Fight for the Future set up this neat site to let you check if your name was used by whoever is behind it.And, of course, the name "Comcastroturf" is pretty damn clever, given the topic. Kudos to Fight for the Future for coming up with that one. It is, of course, totally legal to use the domain name of a company that you're protesting in your own domain. There are numerous cases on this issue, normally discussed as the so-called "Sucks Sites." There's clearly no legal issue with Comcastroturf, and any reasonably informed human being would know that. Unfortunately, it would appear that Comcast hired a company that employs some non-reasonably informed humans.The cease-and-desist letter was sent by a company called "Looking Glass Cyber Solutions" (no, really), which used to be called "Cyveillance" (only marginally less bad). We've written about Cyveillance twice before -- and both times they were about totally bogus takedown requests from Cyveillance that caused serious problems. The most recent was the time that Cyveillance, working for Qualcomm, filed a bogus DMCA notice that took down Qualcomm's own Github repository. Nice move. The earlier story, however was in 2013, and involved Cyveillance -- again representing Comcast -- sending a threatening takedown demand to some more of our friends over at TorrentFreak, claiming (ridiculously) that public court filings were Comcast's copyright-covered material, and threatening serious legal consequences if it wasn't taken down. Eventually, Comcast stepped in and admitted the cease-and-desist was "sent in error." You'd think that maybe this would have caused Comcast to think twice about using Cyveillance for such things. But, nope.The rebranded Looking Glass Cyber Solutions has told Fight for the Future that "Comcastroturf" violates Comcast's "valuable intellectual property rights" and that failure to take down the site may lead to further legal action around cybersquatting and trademark violations.Of course, there's no way that Comcast would actually move forward with any legal action here. In fact, I'm pretty sure it already regrets the fact that the numbskulls at this vendor they hired to police their brand online just caused (yet another) massive headache for their brand online. Maybe, this time, Comcast will finally let Cyveillance/Looking Glass Cyber go, and find partners who don't fuck up so badly. Meanwhile, the fact that Looking Glass Cyber can't even figure out that Comcastroturf is a perfectly legal protest site makes the company's website -- which is chock full of idiotic buzzwords about "threat mitigation" and "threat intelligence" -- look that much more ridiculous. The only "threat" here is Looking Glass/Cyveillance and their silly cluelessness sending out censorious threats based on what appears to be little actual research.Of course, without true net neutrality, if Comcast really wanted to silence Comcastroturf, it would just block everyone from accessing the site...
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posted at: 12:00am on 24-May-2017
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Trademark Has Come To This: Tinder Opposes Dating App With Only One Lonely Dude On Its Dating Roster
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By now, Tinder is probably in the common lexicon. The dating app has been fairly successful, boasting something like 50 million people using it and managing to make something like 12 million matches per day. It's a household name, in other words, which is what makes it a bit strange to see the company bother to oppose a fairly silly trademark application by one guy who designed a dating app to get dating matches for exactly one person: himself.Shed Simove called the app Shinder and said he built it to find himself a partner. However, when he tried to trademark it, a Notice of Threatened Opposition was filed to the Intellectual Property Office by dating giant Tinder."I think it's a case of a big corporate giant looking at an entrepreneur who sees the world differently and being punitive," he said. "It's unlikely that the female population will stop using Tinder and start using Shinder." To be clear, the attempt to trademark "Shinder" itself is silly. The app was created by Shed Simove for the sole purpose of getting himself a date. He's the only dude on the roster. While the app attempts to recruit women to use it, he's the only option for them. It would be kind of funny, if it weren't so creepy. The attempt to trademark Shinder, according to Simove, was done because he's thought about white-labeling the app for any individual to use. And yes, this is every bit as dumb and probably not trademarkable as it sounds."If it was 'white label ' - that would mean if I chose to I could take the raw guts of the code and allow people to have their own versions. Jane could have Jinder, and so on." Jinder? Please. The whole point of trademark law is to keep customers from being confused between products and services. There is a roughly zero chance that anyone is going to mistake Tinder, megalith in the dating app world as it is, for Shinder, an app used by almost nobody created by one guy to get himself a date. Why Tinder is even bothering with this is beyond me.Although, because every funny story needs an even funnier punchline, Tinder was not the only one concerned.He also received a letter from lawyers representing the elevator firm Schindler. Schindler asked him to commit to refraining from entering the elevator or escalator market. If trademark law has gotten to this point, is it time we contemplate whether it's serving its purpose any longer?
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posted at: 12:00am on 24-May-2017
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