The Girl Scouts Sues The Boy Scouts Over Trademark

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As you may recall, the Boy Scouts of America decided late last year to -- finally -- allow girls to join their ranks. It was a widely praised decision that was long overdue, with the organization's mission statement not calling for any kind of gender exclusivity. You may also recall that the BSA has some history of being on the wrong side of intellectual property concerns and even has a special law created just for the BSA to allow it to be trademark bullies. These two seemingly unrelated worlds have now collided, with the BSA being sued by the Girl scouts of America over trademark concerns.

The Girl Scouts are suing the Boy Scouts, saying the organization’s inclusive rebranding effort has caused all sorts of consumer confusion from mistaken enrollment in the Boy Scouts to misinformation about a merge of the two groups.Tuesday’s trademark infringement lawsuit is an attempt to clear up the uncertainty, said the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.The Manhattan federal case noted the two separate youth organizations have long coexisted. But problems arose when “core gender distinction” was altered by the Boy Scouts of America, which announced in October 2017 it would open its doors to girls beginning in 2019. Earlier this year, the Boy Scouts unveiled new marketing campaign to back the effort. “Scout Me In,” the tagline proclaimed.

In court papers, the Girl Scouts said the Boy Scouts’ rebranding announcement has created all kinds of brand confusion across the country.For example, some Minnesota families looking to sign up their girls were erroneously told the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts have merged. Meanwhile, in Indiana and South Dakota, some parents mistakenly signed up their daughters to girls’ programs in the Boy Scouts.

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The US Refusing To Sign 'The Paris Call' Is Not As Big A Deal As Everyone Is Making It Out To Be

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On Monday, a bunch of countries and companies officially announced and signed "The Paris Call," or more officially, "the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace." It's getting a fair bit of press coverage, with a lot of that coverage playing up the decision of the US not to sign the agreement, even as all of the EU countries and most of the major tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco and many many more signed on.But, most of those news stories don't actually explain what's in the agreement, beyond vague hand-waving around "creating international norms" concerning "cyberspace." And the reports have been all over the place. Some talk about preventing election hacking while others talk about fighting both "online censorship and hate speech." Of course, that's fascinating, because most of the ways that countries (especially in the EU) have gone about fighting "hate speech" is through outright censorship. So I'm not quite sure how they propose to fight both of those at the same time...Indeed, if the Paris Call really did require such silly contradictory things it would be good not to sign it. But, the reality is that it's good not to sign it because it appears to be a mostly meaningless document of fluff. You can read the whole thing here, where it seems to just include a bunch of silly platitudes that most people already agree with and mean next to nothing. For example:

We reaffirm our support to an open, secure, stable, accessible and peaceful cyberspace, which has become an integral component of life in all its social, economic, cultural and political aspects.We also reaffirm that international law, including the United Nations Charter in its entirety, international humanitarian law and customary international law is applicable to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) by States.

• Prevent and recover from malicious cyber activities that threaten or cause significant, indiscriminate or systemic harm to individuals and critical infrastructure;
• Prevent activity that intentionally and substantially damages the general availability or integrity of the public core of the Internet;
• Strengthen our capacity to prevent malign interference by foreign actors aimed at undermining electoral processes through malicious cyber activities;
• Prevent ICT-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, with the intent of providing competitive advantages to companies or commercial sector;
• Develop ways to prevent the proliferation of malicious ICT tools and practices intended to cause harm;
• Strengthen the security of digital processes, products and services, throughout their lifecycle and supply chain;
• Support efforts to strengthen an advanced cyber hygiene for all actors;
• Take steps to prevent non-State actors, including the private sector, from hacking-back, for their own purposes or those of other non-State actors;
• Promote the widespread acceptance and implementation of international norms of responsible behavior as well as confidence-building measures in cyberspace.

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This Week In Techdirt History: November 4th - 10th

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Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, UK officials were going a bit nuts in response to the fallout from their detention of David Miranda, first arguing that he was, in fact, a terrorist, then that they didn't know he was a journalist, and then that the Snowden leaks would help pedophiles — leading us to wonder of the State Department would condemn their stifling of journalism (okay, not really wonder...)Stateside, Mike Rogers was claiming that more NSA transparency would hurt privacy, while also being opportunistically concerned about the privacy implications of the Affordable Care Act. The agency was positively comparing metadata searches to stop-and-frisk, and making a similar argument that curbing metadata protection would harm privacy. And of course the Inspector General was rejecting a request from Congress to investigate the agency, while the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced a bill to give the NSA more funding.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, while we were wondering why the MPAA gets to review and approve DVD players, the Copyright Alliance was fighting to outlaw remote DVRs. A UK ISP was threatening to disconnect anyone who has open wifi, the French Senate approved the three strikes law that would create the infamous Hadopi, and Italian authors were fighting for a piracy tax on DSL connections (while Italian officials were moving forward with criminal charges against Google executives over a user's video).Today, there's a lot of concern about issues with electronic voting machines and their poor security. Naturally, if people had known about this ten years ago, it would have been fixed by now. Oh, wait...Fifteen Years AgoBut certainly if we'd known about it all the way back in 2003, it'd definitely be fixed by now, right? It's not like we'd need advocacy groups and law clinics to fight to stop Diebold from C&D-ing people who talk about its security issues, right? Oh...Well anyway, also this week in 2003, we saw the first big record label merger of the 21st century, with Sony and BMG turning the Big Five into the Big Four. The RIAA was bragging about the success of its lawsuits based on dubious causality, while studies showed they were somewhat effective in making people delete MP3s and really, really hate the record industry.It was also around this time that the trend of making computers look cool started taking root beyond the world of Apple.

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Denuvo: Every Download Is A Lost Sale For This Anonymous AAA Title We're Referencing, So Buy Moar Dunuvo!

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The saga of antipiracy DRM company Denuvo is a long and tortured one, but the short version of it is that Denuvo was once a DRM thought to be unbeatable but which has since devolved into a DRM that cracking groups often beat on timelines measured in days if not hours. Denuvo pivoted at that point, moving on from boasting at the longevity of its protection to remarking that even this brief protection offered in the release windows of games made it worthwhile. Around the same time, security company Irdeto bought Denuvo and rolled its services into its offering.And Irdeto apparently wants to keep pushing the line about early release windows, but has managed to do so by simply citing some unnamed AAA sports game that it claims lost millions by being downloaded instead of using Denuvo to protect it for an unspecified amount of time.

In a statement issued by Denuvo owner Irdeto (the latter acquired the former earlier this year), the company states that it tracked pirate downloads of an unnamed ‘AAA’ (big budget, major studio) title during the first few days after its release. Without Denuvo protection it was quickly cracked and made available on P2P networks and from there, pirates did their thing.“Irdeto tracked the downloads of a major sports title on P2P networks after the title, which did not include anti-tamper protection, was cracked on the same day of its release,” the company says. “During the first two weeks, Irdeto detected 355,664 torrent downloads of the illegal copy of the title. Given the retail price of the game, this puts the total potential loss of revenue from P2P downloads at $21,336,283.”

It’s worth noting that while Denuvo games are often cracked very quickly, it’s definitely not uncommon for protection to stand up to the first two weeks of attacks. Denuvo can usually hold off crackers for the first four days, so these figures are obvious marketing tools for a technology that has been somewhat diminished after various cracking groups began taking its challenge personally.But just in case Denuvo only manages a single day of protection, owner Irdeto suggests that the effort is worth it – even dropping down to the importance of standing firm for an hour.

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