Germany's New Government Promises To Support End-To-End Encryption And Reject Backdoors
Furnished content.
A bit of welcome news as the war on encryption continues around the globe. Germany's new government has said that it plans to come out more strongly in favor of end-to-end encryption and against backdoors. According to a report in Euractiv:According to Jens Zimmermann, the German coalition negotiations had made it quite clear that the incoming government of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the business-friendly liberal FDP would reject the weakening of encryption, which is being attempted under the guise of the fight against child abuse by the coalition partners.Such regulations, which are already enshrined in the interim solution of the ePrivacy Regulation, for example, diametrically contradict the character of the coalition agreement because secure end-to-end encryption is guaranteed there, Zimmermann said.Introducing backdoors would undermine this goal of the coalition agreement, he added.What is sometimes proposed in the ePrivacy Regulation goes far beyond what we envisage in terms of vulnerability management, Zimmermann told EURACTIV, adding that implementation would mean actively creating vulnerabilities. This is certainly good to see, but it's also important to have a country with as much clout as Germany standing up and saying this. Indeed, Zimmermann is also quoted as saying that the new German government plans to take a more vocal and proactive role on this issue.Unfortunately, not all of the new coalition government's views on the internet appear to be as good or as helpful. The same article also notes that while some parts of the new governing coalition had campaigned on getting rid of Germany's truly awful NetzDG internet censorship law, the new government does not plan to support such a position, and may, in fact, support a similar EU-wide plan within the Digital Services Act (DSA) which is currently up for debate in the EU.Germany's Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which has a similar scope to the EU's DSA and has served as its model, according to Zimmermann, is not without controversy in the country.The FDP campaigned for its abolition during the Bundestag election campaign because, according to the liberal party, it encroached too much on civil liberties.But Zimmermann does not believe the liberal party would drag its reservations on the NetzDG into discussions on the EU's DSA.It is no longer a question of winning any symbolic victories, but we simply have to see that we get a good regulation in the end, Zimmermann said. That's an odd statement that seems to suggest that protesting the disastrous and censorial NetzDG is "symbolic." It's not. It's a terrible law that has been abused repeatedly and should be ditched entirely, not spread to the EU.
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 18-Dec-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
Hershey Goes On A Threat Blitz Against A Bunch Of Independent Breweries
Furnished content.
As far as Techdirt's pages go, Hershey, the company behind all kinds of candy and sweets brands, doesn't come out of the wash clean. The company has been known to lean on IP laws quite aggressively, even absurdly. For instance, it sued a furniture company for having vehicle wraps that looked like a couch being unwrapped like a chocolate bar. Pretty dumb. It also sued Mars for having its own peanut butter chocolate candy, but for which the trade dress was totally different compared with Hershey's Reese's property. Also dumb.And now the dumb continues as Hershey is apparently going on a threat blitz against several independent beer breweries for trademark infringement. While some of the disputes make some sense from Hershey's perspective, some do not and the overall behavior of the company is one of the bully. We'll start with some of the problematic threats.Over the past year, the world’s fifth largest chocolate confectioner has sent cease and desist letters to at least eight breweries across the country accusing them of infringing on its trademarks and requesting compensation up to $20,000.In one case, Hershey is demanding that the owners of Parliament Brewing in Sonoma County, California, stop calling a beer a common catch-phrase that happens to share a name with one of its candy bars. “We named a beer Whatchamacallit because we had a plumber we loved who was kind of hokey. He would refer to everything as a ‘whatchamacallit.’ I’d never heard the term before,” says co-owner Justin Bosch, who brewed the Whatchamacallit imperial IPA twice, once when Parliament opened in 2019 and again in 2020. You may be wondering: where is this coming from, given that Hershey doesn't make beer and these seem to be different market categories? Well, the answer to that is likely because Hershey entered into a licensing agreement with Yuengling for its "Hershey's Chocolate Porter". This, perhaps, has led Hershey to believe that it is now tangentially in the beer-making business.Except that's not really how that works. Combined with the generic nature of the brand name, "Whatchamacallit", there is no public confusion here to worry about. Beer is not candy, in other words, so these two products are in fact playing in different markets, which means in most cases there is no valid trademark complaint to be made.But because trademark bullying by huge companies works, nearly all of the breweries in question have agreed to change their branding, including Parliament Brewing. That, it appears, wasn't enough for Hershey. The company wants its $20k no matter what.“I don’t agree there’s an issue here but in the interest of making everybody happy I’ll stop,” he says, paraphrasing his response. “And they came back with, ‘Give us $20,000.’”More precisely, even though they made no initial mention of money and expressed a wish to “resolve this matter quickly and amicably,” they came back with a letter from their law firm that stated relief could only come from paying a steep price. It read, “While we appreciate your willingness to cooperate and to cease infringing our client’s intellectual property rights, be advised that entering a formal agreement with Hershey will be necessary to resolve your past unauthorized use of the WHATCHAMACALLIT® trademark and to confirm your understanding going forward.” I would think the lesson here is that perhaps the math on whether to fight spurious trademark threats from Hershey wasn't so cut and dry. If you're going to have to shell out $20k anyway, well, maybe it would have been better to find a lawyer and fight. After all, again, in nearly all of these cases there is little reason to think the public is actually going to be confused over any of this.Or, as Bosch, who produces a mere 500 barrels (15,500 gallons) of beer per year, says, “Nobody’s going to mistake a double IPA for a candy bar.” Depends on how many double IPAs they've already had, I suppose, but it's "moron in a hurry" not "moron who is drunk."
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 18-Dec-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
|
|