Disputin Bout Rasputin: Beer Trademark Woes

Brouwerij De Molen (Belgium) and North Coast Brewing (California) have reached an agreement regarding competing beer names.  North Coast, producer of Old Rasputin, contacted De Molen, producer of Rasputin, in hope of stopping them from using the name Rasputin for their beer.  North Coast’s Old Rasputin was already one of the most widely available Imperial Stouts in the US Market for a number of years when De Molen’s Rasputin appeared in US stores just last year.  The use of the name Rasputin by De Molen could likely dilute the trademark of North Coast when sold in the same stores.  The two came to an agreement in lieu of a long court battle.

The agreement caused De Molen to stop using the Rasputin name, but not without taking a shot at North Coast in the process.  After changing the name of their beer to Disputin, De Molen printed the following under the name, ”This stout used to be called Rasputin, but the people who make Old Rasputin in California thought you were too dumb to tell the two products apart, and threatened to sue us for trademark infringement.” [LABEL IMAGE]  While many breweries are teaming up to create collaborative brews, some continue to fiercely compete.

Full Story From Beernews.org

Germany’s Proposal to Protect Publishers

Publishers around the globe are suffering from consistent reductions in ad sales and revenue driven by decreased circulation.  The most common target of the publishers’ anger and frustration have been online aggregators.  In the U.S., aggregators have been party to a series of lawsuits, most of which have ended in undisclosed settlements.  The U.S. government has yet to take action to clarify how the copyright laws relate to the aggregation of content online.

A different story is unfolding in Germany where the government is proactively taking steps to create a new type of copyright designed to protect publishers against online news sites.  According to the The New York Times, the German government’s proposal would give publishers a “neighboring right,” similar to what music labels and movie houses already enjoy.  Details of the proposal have not been fully hashed out, but one suggestion is to require a license for any commercial use of published material online.  A new royalty collection agency would be created to gather and distribute the fees.  Private, noncommercial uses would remain unrestricted.

Opponents to the plan say extension of the copyright laws runs counter to the “spirit of openness” that characterizes the web.  They also argue that distinguishing between commercial and private noncommercial use would be extremely difficult.  Fair use is an additional concern, though fair use protection in Germany is nowhere near as strong as it is in the U.S.  It will be interesting to see whether the German proposal is adopted, and if it will have any influence on the extension of U.S. copyright laws in this area.

OiNK File-Sharing Community Shut-Down

Now, we can talk about it: OiNK, the invite-only, free file-sharing community was raided by the police, and the owner was taken into custody. OiNK (once available at oink.cd)was known on the street for distributing a lot of not-yet-released and pre-release versions of albums. But OiNK was supposed to be a secret. (Some facts and rumors about the OiNK takedown.)

It’s interesting that they shot for this below-the-radar service, while the big ones still exist (like The Pirate Bay or Mininova). Maybe OiNK was never penetrated by companies like MediaDefender, and therefore wasn’t controllable or compromisable. Or maybe because OiNK was so good at grabbing those pre-releases. The tough thing is that whomever was behind this action doesn’t have to ‘fess up as to why they targeted OiNK—just that OiNK aided in copyright violations. The other tough thing—for OiNK—is that while he wasn’t making money explicitly for the service, he *did* accept donations, and no matter how minor those funds may have been, they could probably be easily connected with his service to make it for-profit.

And already people are looking back at even tighter friend-to-peer networks (or other darknets) like Soulseek and WASTE. The bump in users to the big guys, again, like The Pirate Bay, will probably barely be noticeable. People don’t want to share their super-secret goodies with the whole world; they want to do it with friends. So files bouncing from WASTE mini-network to WASTE mini-network will be better at insulating the actual initial seeder from discovery.

Regardless, at the end of the day, OiNK was a service that violated copyright—even though as some users will claim, it wasn’t *all* copyrightable, there was some openly free stuff there. Whether it was the proper strategic move to make is another question.

The Pirate Bay Files Criminal Complaint Against MediaDefender Clients for Hacking

Update on The MediaDefender Debacle:

The Pirate Bay (“TPB”) announce on its blog that it filed a criminal complaint against MediaDefender’s clients, including Universal Music Group, Sony, Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox. The charges are “infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.”

TPB tracked back IPs from fake torrents to IPs in the Gmail account they hacked earlier. They also found MediaDefender’s software that creates fake accounts and seeds fake torrents on sites like TPB. Sounds like TPB might actually have some valid claims, at least against MediaDefender.

This could really turn into an extremely interesting case. More to come…

The MediaDefender Debacle

Hackers recently intercepted e-mails and phone conversations from MediaDefender, a company that monitors torrent tracking sites and seeds fake content to discourage illegal downloading. They purportedly did this by tracking down a MediaDefender plant in a torrent forum by the user’s IP, obtained his password for the forum, and then tried that password on his Gmail account… And voila! They had access to his Gmail, to which he had forwarded his work e-mail.

(I wonder if betraying his password would violate the torrent forum’s TOS—and whether the user might have a claim against them for that. For example, he accepted the TOS which formed a contract between him and the forum owners, and if they promise to keep his password secure, then they breached the contract… Then, damages?)

The leaked e-mails and phone conversation (the latter, a separate hack) revealed which sites MediaDefender “policed” and some conversations they had with the NY Attorney General’s Office about aiding the AGO with a child porn investigation. (Yes, more child porn on this blog.) Ironically, in the phone call with the AGO, MediaDefender stressed how secure their services were given the highly sensitive nature of the AGO investigation.

On top of it all, there’s evidence that MediaDefender created a fake torrent site, a “honeypot,” named MiiVi to lure and trap torrent users (from an ArsTechnica post):

A web site called MiiVi allegedly offered full-length motion pictures for download and offered to install special client software on the user’s computer to help speed up the downloads. However, the software did a little more than that: it also reportedly performed searches of the user’s computer for other illegal software and reported its findings back to MediaDefender. Acting on a tip from The Pirate Bay, the online publication ZeroPaid began an “investigation” (a followup to Torrent Freak’s article) and found that MediaDefender didn’t make much of an effort to hide who was behind MiiVi. The whois records for MiiVi were clearly registered to MediaDefender with the company’s address in California and administrative contact information within the company.

In reaction to this shit-storm, MediaDefender has sent cease and desists to at least MegaNova and isoHunt, to which they’ve responded derisively. From the ArsTechnica article:

[T]he isoHunt administrator says that the he will comply with the request if it is properly submitted. “Despite us being located in Canada, if you do actually figure out how to compose a valid DMCA notice, we will honor it,” he concedes, “just as soon as we’re done laughing at you.”  

“Dearest little asstunnels, Let me start off by thanking you for your pitiful attempt to have your e-mails removed from the entire internet,” Meganova’s response says. “In case you haven’t noticed, this site is located in Europe (I hope you can point it out on a map) where your stupid copyright claims have no base. But fair is fair you guys did suffer over the past week so here’s bit of advice to you guys: F*** you! F*** you again! F*** you again and again and again!”

Furthermore, MediaDefender has written to sites that have published the list of torrent sites they’ve been targeting, bullying them into removing the list.

Gotta love the drama. And asstunnels.

Wishing Well

I was just thinking that if there was a wishing well where everyone had one shot to get what they wished, then inflation would go out of control. Everyone who asked for $1 M would drive prices up; then people would ask for $100 M, then $1 B, and so on. Global economies would collapse. And if everyone asked for true love, then would true love lose its meaning? World peace? Teddy bears?

Openness and Sudoku

The New York Times is running an article on the man and the company behind sudoku. Interestingly, the brain power behind sudoku, Mr. Kaji, wasn’t able to make much money because he didn’t trademark the name “sudoku,” but because the IP wasn’t protected he feels that popularity of the game exploded:

While no one knows how much revenue is generated by the global sudoku business, most agree it has easily topped $250 million over the last two years from an estimated 80 million devotees. The New York Times syndicate provides a variety of logic puzzles, including sudoku, kakuro and others, for newspapers and Web sites around the world.

Nikoli received only a sliver of that money. Mr. Kaji says his private company, with just 20 employees, had annual sales of about $4 million.

Sudoku’s popularity in the United States caught Mr. Kaji by such surprise that he did not try to get the trademark there until it was too late. As a result, Nikoli receives no royalties from sudoku-related sales overseas by other publishers.

In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoku’s intellectual property rights let the game’s popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says. Nikoli does not plan to trademark other new games, either, in hopes this will also help them take off.

“This openness is more in keeping with Nikoli’s open culture,” said Mr. Kaji, who sat on a sofa in his Tokyo office among pillows adorned with printed faces of racehorses. “We’re prolific because we do it for the love of games, not for the money.”

While this might just be a good marketing face to show, it’s core aligns with the philosophy of open source, copyleft, GNU, etc. If you don’t control the IP, a product has a chance to explode. If you do it for the love of the product, then maybe your reward will be greater in the end.

Even Clipse Goes Global

For those who read the Times (do I even have to specify which rag I mean?) or pursue graduate studies, the globalizing world is one of those basic les chose de la vie. (Please attempt your best authentic French accent.) But there are segments of our culture that are, for one reason or another, blind to this phenomenon. (See my post on casual drug use and the globally deleterious effects.)

What’s more interesting is when facts and ideas of globalization reach into areas where those players aren’t forced to read books about it from professors or peers flaunting their intellects. Worker protests against the WTO in South America. African farmers using the Internet to track global crop prices. And Southern rappers removing themselves from their otherwise provincial “ghetto mentalities” as a hierarchical claim to their alpha status above their peers.*

From “Momma I’m So Sorry” by Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury (2006):

But it’s a bigger picture, homes, trust I done seen it
From Frankfurt to Cologne, Oslo to Sweden,
From Italy’s Milan to the shores of Napoli.
Now I consider Ferrari and Salvador Dalis.
I’m no longer local, my thoughts are global.
That’s why I seem distant, son, expand ya vision.

* Though Clipse constantly profess the heights of their status apart from the hoi polloi of players, they still allow for others to join them in their ranks. In “Hello New World,” they sing: “Can’t wait for the next n*** from my hood to say, ‘Look out world, I’m on my way!’”

Marijuana and Globalization

Here’s another post that has nothing to do with IP or technology…

When I was in college, I had the chance to talk with an assistant district attorney (Dan Rather’s son–unfortunately, I can’t remember his name, nor will Google give it up to me). During our conversation, he mentioned that one of his more compelling arguments against the use of marijuana is based upon fact that by using marijuana one supports a drug trade that kills people.

I, personally, have not found a compelling medical reason that marijuana deserves the level of censure that the law provides. Practically speaking, should a kid picked up with a dime bag of pot be thrown in jail? You can walk around most colleges and universities in the US on any day of the week and find otherwise-law-abiding citizens smoking dope.

Yet, it’s illegal. And, on a related note, it’s mostly those who aren’t in US colleges who are being prosecuted for possession of marijuana.

I would wager that a good percentage of kids out there don’t think that pot is that bad a drug. And they use it in the face of the law, just as the plethora of underage drinkers–I mean, watch MTV at any hour, and you’ll see underage drinking plastered across so many frames.

But the fact is that when you buy pot, you very likely at least fuel an industry, a drug trade, that ends up abusing and killing people in other countries. Perhaps if you buy organic pot, grown domestically, then you may feel less morally obligated. But I’m not sure if most pot is grown domestically. At some point, it comes from a Central or South American country where a vicious drug trade exists, where people are forced to grow, under a gun and the threat of starvation, drugs at an extorted price to fuel an industry that illegally traffics the drug across international borders. If not, then at least you fuel a demand, no matter how fictional, that drives producers and processors and traffickers to use their various methods to supply this plant.

The fact is that our globalized world allows pot grown by subsistence farmers in Mexico to end up in the hands of US college students. And by purchasing this substance you fuel a market that ends up in the prosecution of potentially otherwise-innocent folk in other countries, and in the process of extortion and murder that global organizations participate in to produce these black market goods.

So while there may be perfectly good apologetic arguments for the softening of punishments for marijuana, an otherwise-honest and innocent baseline middle-class kid in college may think that they’re just smoking up a good time, but in the end their $20 is putting $10 in the pocket of some person who’s holding a gun to the head of someone you’ll never meet.

Mercury Pollution from Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFLs)

NPR reports on the dangers of mercury in compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs):

Wal-Mart wants to sell 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs this year. The Environmental Protection Agency has almost the same goal. The bulbs save energy and reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

But there’s a hitch: Each bulb contains about 5 milligrams of mercury, a toxic heavy metal.

The bulbs last a long time, but eventually they burn out. The EPA says that people should recycle them, but most people don’t know they should.

This blog talked about this issue before, and back then I also remarked on my experience in Uganda and the  near ubiquity of CFLs.

If the US doesn’t have the capabilities to safely dispose of mercury in CFLs, and the US population isn’t informed about this or is able to do anything about it, what are the people in Uganda to do? I’m sure people are just throwing these into the trash, sending the mercury straight into the soil and ground water, and back into the people. Bad stuff.

One of the problems with mass recycling is that the bulbs inevitably break and leak, so you can’t just put out bins for people to drop them off or for services to come by and pick them up. Technology may be able to reduce the amount of mercury, but right now there’s no way to avoid it. Maybe in the scheme of things, this isn’t as bad as other solid waste problems–sewage treatment, electronics and circuit boards–and the energy savings are worth it. With rolling black-outs, more people have light more of the time because of the significant reduction in energy consumption. Maybe this is something the world will have to live with for now.