Author: Joe Mullin

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Stupid Patent of the Month" for December isn't owned by a sketchy shell company, but rather the Microsoft Corporation. The selection, published yesterday, is the first time the EFF has picked a design patent as the SPOTM. The blog post seeks to highlight some of the problems with those lesser-known cousins to standard "utility" patents, especially the damages that can result.

The chosen patent (PDF), numbered D554,140, would seem to be one of those things that's so simple it raises some basic philosophical questions about the patent system. That's because it's just a slider, in the bottom-right corner of a window, with a plus sign at one end and a minus sign at the other. That's it.

The patent was highlighted earlier on the blog of Sarah Burstein, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma who studies design patents and uses her blog to highlight some... interesting... examples. Many companies are getting design patents for things that are clearly functional in nature, like a Socket Wrench Tooth, or a rock dust blower, or even—really—a Quaker Oats granola bar.

Game of Thrones was illegally downloaded more than 14 million times in 2015, according to TorrentFreak's annual compilation of the most-pirated television shows.

It's the fourth year in a row that the HBO show has sat atop the most-pirated chart. TorrentFreak estimates that episodes of the show were downloaded 14.4 million times during the year, more than twice as many as the number two contender, AMC's zombie thriller The Walking Dead, which had 6.9 million downloads. In third place is CBS' Big Bang Theory, downloaded 4.4 million times.

The numbers suggest the GoT audience watching via piracy may be substantially larger than the show's US television audience, which is estimated at 8.1 million.

The citizens of several US states may soon find that they can't use their drivers' licenses to get into federal facilities or even board planes.

Enforcement of a 2005 federal law that sets identification standards, known as "Real ID," has been long-delayed. But now Department of Homeland Security officials say enforcement is imminent. The "Real ID" law requires states to implement certain security features before they issue IDs and verify the legal residency of anyone to whom they issue an ID card. The statute is in part a response to the suggestion of the 9/11 Commission, which noted that four of the 19 hijackers used state-issued ID cards to board planes.

Real ID also requires states to share their databases of driver information with other states. The information-sharing provisions are a big reason why some privacy groups opposed the law, saying it would effectively be the equivalent of a national identification card.

An Asian-American rock band called The Slants has taken a legal fight over its name all the way to an appeals court, resulting in a major decision over trademark rights.

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) denied The Slants a trademark registration under an old section of trademark law that denies trademark registration to marks that the US Patent and Trademark Office considers disparaging. Now, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, sitting en banc, has struck down not just the USPTO decision about The Slants, but the entire section of the Lanham Act that bars "disparaging" trademarks.

The decision is sure to have repercussions for other owners of controversial trademarks—most notably, the Washington Redskins, a team that was stripped of its trademark rights but is continuing its fight at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

Federal prosecutors announced charges today against 23-year-old Alonzo Knowles, a Bahamas resident who stands accused of hacking into the e-mail accounts of celebrities and entertainment studios, then trying to sell off unreleased scripts, audio tracks, and personal information that he obtained.

Investigators lured Knowles to the US, where he had been hoping to sell purloined movie scripts along with scripts for six episodes of a TV series. Instead, once Knowles asked an undercover officer for $80,000, he was arrested.

Prosecutors say Knowles had other information from celebrity hacks as well, including the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of "at least 130" entertainment, sports, and media figures. In one exchange, Knowles sent the undercover agent the passport, Social Security number (SSN), and other personal identification "of a particular film actor." Another time, Knowles offered to sell sexually explicit photos and videos from a celebrity account. At one point the complaint says he tried to sell "a very popular A-list celebrity SSN along with 30 unreleased tracks towards their upcoming album."

The founding editor of Business Insider UK, Jim Edwards, had a bank delete two of his tweets today. In an e-mail, Bank of America told Edwards that his tweets violated the bank's copyright and that if he kept it up, they'd see to it that his Twitter account was deleted.

"Investment banks apparently have the power to censor journalists on Twitter, simply by asking," Edwards wrote in a short post on Business Insider describing the situation. "That is depressing."

Edwards had quoted a research document produced by analysts. He says the tweets were "probably trivial," but can't really be more specific—in part because the frequent Twitter user can't even remember exactly what they were about.

A San Francisco Superior Court judge has ruled that police officers who sent racist and homophobic text messages can't be fired because the city missed a deadline.

Judge Ernest Goldsmith said that California's Peace Officer Bill of Rights bars San Francisco from taking action against the officers after a one-year statute of limitations. "It is not in the public interest to let police misconduct charges languish," he said, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The public has a right to have accusations against police officers be promptly adjudicated.”

The messages came out in court documents as part of a federal corruption investigation in February 2014. However, lawyers for the accused police officers say the San Francisco Police Department first learned about the texts in December 2012. But it wasn't until April 2015 that Police Chief Greg Suhr moved to fire eight of the officers and discipline the other six.

Apple and Swedish telecom Ericsson have ended a year-long patent dispute that spanned US federal courts, the International Trade Commission, and included lawsuits in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Exact financial terms weren't disclosed, but Apple will both make a one-time payment to Ericsson and pay ongoing patent royalties. Ericsson said in a press release that its patent-related income will rise between 4 and 5 billion Swedish krona this year, which equates to $470 to $590 million. The Swedish company's stock is up about 4 percent on the news.

"We are pleased with this new agreement with Apple, which clears the way for both companies to continue to focus on bringing new technology to the global market, and opens up for more joint business opportunities in the future," said Kasim Alfalahi, Ericsson's chief IP officer.

The most litigious "patent troll" of 2014 has been effectively shut down, and will have to pay attorneys' fees to several defendants.

US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who hears more patent cases that any other federal judge, issued an order (PDF) on Thursday saying that the behavior of eDekka LLC qualified as "exceptional," and that the company should pay the legal fees of various companies it sued.

Gilstrap's courtroom is perhaps the surprising spot in the nation from which a patent troll slap-down might originate. The judge has been criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for making life unnecessarily difficult for patent defendants. He's also invalidated relatively few patents under Supreme Court precedent set in last year's Alice Corp. case, even as other federal judges have been tossing out software patents at a steady clip.

A Virginia federal jury watching a high-profile copyright case reached a verdict (PDF) today, ordering Cox Communications to pay $25 million to BMG Rights Management for turning a blind eye to music piracy. The company's behavior amounted to a willfully infringed copyright in the eyes of the jury.

The verdict comes at the close of a two-week trial, which took place after US District Judge Liam O'Grady issued an opinion (PDF) slamming Cox's behavior, saying that the ISP isn't protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act "safe harbor" because the company did not "reasonably implement" a policy to terminate repeat infringers.

Today's verdict is a huge victory for BMG and its copyright enforcer, Rightscorp. The Rightscorp business model is based on sending massive numbers of copyright notices via email and asking for $20 or $30 per song "settlements" from users believed to have pirated songs. While Rightscorp wasn't a named plaintiff in the suit, BMG's case was based on evidence produced by Rightscorp, which says it found the IP addresses of the worst Cox infringers.