As I mentioned Friday night, I had so much to cover I was breaking up Tech at Night into two parts. This is part two.
Remember when I called out Wikileaks for abandoning their ally Edward Snowden in Russia? They claimed he had settled there and their job was done, but I knew better. Well, here’s the proof that they’ve used him up and thrown him away: he’s still trying to get out of Russia, this time to Brazil. Spying for Wikileaks doesn’t even pay.
Remember when Snowden was supposed to be all about defending American civil liberties? Now he’s sticking up for Russia against Norway. Huh. Almost like we’d expect a traitor that fled ultimately to Russia to do, eh?
He should have gone to Ecuador, where the government is abusing US copyright law and Google’s slanted, internal copyright process to attack Chevron. I’ve begun to say that Google’s processes at Youtube are giving the DMCA a bad name. Here’s more proof, when dictators are using them to silence Americans.
In Sweden, a mass copyright infringer gets fined $652,000, the amount it would have cost him to distribute legally the movie it distributed illegally.
This is interesting: the US government is actively enforcing trademark law on Google services.
Fun fact, it’s really annoying left-anarchist Bitcoiners when you ask them about Bitcoin’s “carbon footprint”.
Speaking of anarchists, Anonymous anarchists have been caught in the Paypal case. Heh.
Tor has been used yet again to commit crime, this time in a terroristic threat against Harvard.
Here at RedState, Fred Campbell gives his views on Retransmission Consent reform. I’m of the view that the system, by design, is terribly skewed in favor of local broadcasters against cable companies, picking winners and losers in the marketplace. And I think some sort of effort, such as the DeMint-Scalise reform idea, should be taken to address that. Campbell doesn’t seem to think the bill goes far enough though, which I think is reasonable to say. However I won’t oppose the bill because of that.
The Heritage Foundation constantly warns us about how many “professional licenses” the government mandates these days. Sound like a silly thing to worry about? Well, what if writing online required a license, as it now does in Singapore?
I’m beginning to wonder if I should oppose multilateral trade agreements the way I oppose omnibus bills of other kinds. Members of Congress want special considerations for specific industries in future agreements, and those are harder to stop in big ones like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Finally, we talk about patents. Senate Democrats are mad at efforts to curb the litigiousness of patents, after they passed the America Invents Act a while back. Big surprise. It’s weird that Patrick Leahy is on the side of Mike Lee and not Dick Durbin on this though.
Jimmy Carter is at fault in the real patent problem though. Carter started us down the road of getting too many patents issued, which is what I’ve seen saying is the real problem for a while now, when it comes to patent trolls. Jimmy Carter: history’s greatest monster.