“I hate Illinois Nazis.” – Jake Blues, The Blues Brothers (1980) I think my first introduction to the complexities of living in a nation with a constitutional right like the First Amendment was in the 7th Grade. Our teacher had the class watch and discuss the film Skokie (1981), a dramatization of the circumstances surrounding the 1977 legal case National ...
In 2010, the Oregon-based, Asian-American band had its application for a trademark in the name The Slants rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The denial was based on a statute in the 1946 Lanham Act prohibiting registration of marks “which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or ...
Photo by photocreo. Time for a hard look in the mirror? We’ve been on a social media bender for years, and I’m thinking January 1, 2017 might be the day we begin to sober up and come to grips with its more negative effects. When I began writing about all this stuff in 2011, it was partly in response to the fact that people ...
On October 6, the CEO of Backpage.com Carl Ferrer, along with former executives Michael Lacy and James Larkin, were arrested in California on charges alleging involvement in prostitution, including conspiracy to commit pimping of a minor. The classified ad site had been under investigation by the California DOJ for three years and on the radar of anti-human-trafficking advocates for at ...
Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit against the federal government, naming the DOJ and the Copyright Office as defendants. The EFF filed on behalf of plaintiffs Dr. Mitchell Green, a computer scientist and researcher at Johns Hopkins; Andrew Huang, an engineer and inventor; and Huang’s company Alphamax LLC. The crux of the suit argues that Section 1201 of ...
