Patent Troll Sues Electronic Frontier Foundation

Posted on 2017-05-15 by arjaybe

Electronic Frontier Foundation – CC-BY

Almost a year and a half ago, Green Comet had a post on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) series called Stupid Patent of the Month, where they call out the bad practises of patent trolls and other miscreants. The stupid patent in our post had Microsoft suing Corel.

A little less than a year ago, the EFF featured another stupid patent held by the Australian patent troll, Global Equity Management (SA,) or GEMSA. This company’s only apparent activity seems to be suing people over patents. It seems GEMSA didn’t like that and is now suing the EFF for defamation. Even though the EFF is based in the United States, where freedom of expression laws protect it, GEMSA wants Australia’s more repressive laws to apply. They are accustomed to abusing people with stupid patents, and now they think they can use national laws to invoke an international chill on freedom.

The EFF is not so easily cowed, and they have a few lawyers of their own. After GEMSA demanded that they take down the article, and every other reference to it on the internet, they launched a countersuit in California seeking a ruling that the Australian injunction should not apply in the US. They should be successful because the US already has a law that makes foreign laws invalid in the US unless they respect freedom of expression.

Here’s the story at ars technica and the Courthouse News Service. Here’s Motherboard’s list of the eleven stupidest patents of 2016.

In its complaints, GEMSA said that the EFF’s article made it harder for them to bring their patent suits in the US. Well, good. Now it seems their injunction has raised the profile of patent trolls, which are coming under closer scrutiny. Also good.

rjb

UPDATE

The ruling has come down in this case and, as I predicted, it is in favor of the plaintiff, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They have every right, in the US anyway, to call GEMSA’s patent stupid.

Kurt Opsahl, EFF’s deputy executive director and general counsel, hailed the ruling as a victory for free speech.

“We knew all along the speech was protected by the First Amendment,” Opsahl said in a phone interview Friday. “We were pleased to see the court agree.”

You can find the Courthouse News article here.

rjb

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Edvard Munch and Nacreous Clouds

Posted on 2017-05-07 by arjaybe

Painting by Edvard Munch – Public Domain

Did Edvard Munch paint nacreous clouds? The hypothesis was put forward by Norwegian scientists at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna this spring (2017.) The long-held assumption is that the vividly colored sky in The Scream (1893) is a reflection of the artist’s troubled mind. A facile analysis and attractive mostly for the reason that we like to attribute romantic madness to our artists. More careful research is showing that some paintings that have been thought to contain fanciful imagery are really representing unusual meteorological phenomena, such as the lurid sunsets that happened after the volcano Krakatoa (1883) put huge quantities of aerosols into the atmosphere.

Munch himself said in his diary about the incident that inspired The Scream:

I went along the road with two friends — the sun set

I felt like a breath of sadness —

— The sky suddenly became bloodish red

I stopped, leant against the fence, tired to death — watched over the

Flaming clouds as blood and sword

The city — the blue-black fjord and the city

— My friends went away — I stood there shivering from dread — and

I felt this big, infinite scream through nature

Photo credit – Deven Stross

Check out the links and get the rest of the story. Go have a look at the Green Comet Cloud of the Day post on nacreous clouds and see if they look anything like the sky in Munch’s The Scream. This could be speculation, somewhat like my suggestion that Vincent van Gogh might have been inspired by asperatus clouds to paint some of his skies. It is also quite possible that this hypothesis is accurate and that Edvard Munch really did see nacreaous clouds. Personally, I prefer it to the analyses of pop psychologists.

Photo credit – NASA – PD

rjb

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Green Comet Has Gone SSL

Posted on 2017-05-01 by arjaybe

credit Alvesgaspar – CC-BY-SA

We’re joining the big leagues. No longer will the big guys look down their noses at our unsecured website. Now you’ll see that reassuring lock up there by the location bar along with that fully modern “https.” Don’t you feel safe now?

I was just waiting until it was free and easy to do. Let’s Encrypt went a long way toward that by creating a “free, automated, and open certificate authority.” Now you can get a certificate for your website without paying a for-profit certificate authority. That makes it easy for your web host to provide encryption for your site without having to charge you for it. Then it was a simple matter of calling up my host and asking them to install Let’s Encrypt on my site.

Well, not quite. The server I was on wouldn’t support it so they had to move Green Comet to another server. That meant it had a new address and the internet name servers had to propagate it, so we were in limbo for a while. You might have noticed we were hard to reach, but now we’re in business.

Almost. Now all the calls for http://greencomet.org have to be changed to https://greencomet.org. My head reeled! But this is computers and what are computers for if not to automate things? I found out I could edit a file on the site called htaccess that gives visiting computers special instructions when they arrive. Now if someone comes in looking for the old URL, it’s automatically changed to the new one. So now we’re good. I think.

Free but not so easy.

rjb

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