Author: Joe Mullin

On Friday, a group of members of Congress who are central to the surveillance debate demanded some kind of answer, even a vague one, about how many Americans are having their data harvested by surveillance programs.

In a sharply worded letter (PDF) to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, 14 members of the House Judiciary Committee insisted he provide some type of "public estimate" of the number of US communications that are being caught up in surveillance programs authorized by Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. That's the law that spy agencies like the NSA use to justify "upstream collection" of bulk data from Internet infrastructure.

"We note that we are not the first to ask you for this basic information," states the group of representatives. They mentioned that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D-N.M.) have asked for such information since 2011.

When I watched the first season of HBO's Silicon Valley in 2014, I thought it was OK, but not amazing. Yet I kept thinking about the show and talking to friends about it. That's when I realized—Silicon Valley isn't a perfect satire, but that doesn't matter. It's the satire we need in our tech-obsessed world. Hunger is the best seasoning, and when it came to tech satire, I was a starving man.

The tech corporations that run the machines in our pockets and the skies have more money, power, and influence than ever before. Even when they're good, but especially when they're bad, we've got to take them down a notch sometimes—just to stay sane. And nothing does that like satire.

So where's The Daily Show for the tech world? Comedies about computers tend to be insipid, miss the target, or worse, culminating with The Internship. That vapid and formulaic 2013 film used the considerable talents of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn to produce what amounted to a Hollywood press release for Google.

In December, a court case brought by Portland-based Asian American rock band "The Slants" led to what could be a major change in US trademark law. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overruled the US Patent and Trademark Office, which had refused to give the band a trademark, citing a law barring "disparaging" marks.

The battle isn't quite over, though. Patent Office lawyers have appealed to the Supreme Court, asking them to consider the case. If the Supreme Court takes up the case and reverses the Federal Circuit—something the high court has not hesitated to do in recent patent cases—the USPTO will retain its ability to quash disparaging trademarks.

Either way, the results of the case will have repercussions for other owners of controversial trademarks—most notably, the Washington Redskins. The football team was stripped of its trademark rights after years of litigation but is continuing its fight at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

Apple has agreed to pay $24.9 million to a "patent troll" to end a lawsuit over its Siri voice system, according to documents filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Publicly traded Marathon Patent Group, whose business is focused on patent licensing and lawsuits, will split the settlement cash with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), the New York technical university that provided the patents.

It's a big payment. Patent trolls, also called non-practicing entities or patent assertion entities, have lost power in recent years, due to changes in case law and new ways to challenge patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office. This recent settlement is a reminder that the era of that patent troll is far from over. And it's a reminder that the lure of big money from patent lawsuits continues to be a tempting draw for universities.

The two asserted claims of US Patent No. 7,177,798 describe a "method for processing natural language input," and was invented by Drs. Cheng Hsu and Veera Boonjing. At the time of invention, in 2000, Hsu was a Professor of Decision Sciences and Engineering at RPI, while Boonjing was a doctoral candidate at the institution. The patent's first claim describes processing language queries by using databases filled with "case information, keywords, information models, and database values." The inventors assigned it to the university, which is common, since many universities have rules requiring that faculty assign patents and dictate splits of any licensing revenues.

Just one day after Ars and other outlets published comments by the CEO of AMC Entertainment saying he's interested in allowing some texting in theaters, the movie chain is backing away from the idea.

"We have heard loud and clear that this is a concept our audience does not want," the company said in a statement published on Twitter. "In this age of social media, we get feedback from you almost instantaneously and as such, we are constantly listening. Accordingly, just as instantaneously, this is an idea that we have relegated to the cutting room floor. With your advice in hand, there will be NO TEXTING ALLOWED in any of the auditoriums at AMC Theatres. Not today, not tomorrow and not in the foreseeable future."

AMC CEO Adam Aron mentioned that he was considering allowing phone use during an interview with Hollywood trade magazine Variety, published Wednesday. In Aron's view, changes are needed to ensure that millennials attend theaters "with the same degree of intensity" as baby boomers.

A New Jersey man named Michael Garofalo had a patent he claimed covered online contests, and used it to demand money from other small businesses. But when the Electronic Frontier Foundation came to the defense of a photographer targeted by Garofalo last year, Garofalo quickly dropped his case. Last month, he and his lawyers were ordered to pay $29,000 in legal fees.

Now Garofalo, who owns the website Garfum.com, is asking for the fee smackdown to be reconsidered. His reasoning: since the US Patent and Trademark Office recently agreed to grant him another patent, nearly identical to the first, his case couldn't possibly be considered "exceptional."

"This new evidence shows that this case does not lack substantive strength," writes Garfum.com's lawyers, from the Texas-based Austin Hansley law firm. "Simply put, how could Plaintiff’s position lack substantive strength when the USPTO performed the same § 101 analysis as this Court and found nearly identical claims to recite patentable subject matter?"

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. One of the last cultural holdouts of text-messaging, the movie theater, may be set for an invasion.

AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron has said he’s open to relaxing the ban on cell phone use in an effort to get more millennials into movie theaters. He wants this generation of movie-goers to attend “with the same degree of intensity” that the baby boomers did.

"When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear 'please cut off your left arm above the elbow,'" said Aron in an interview with Variety. "You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life."

"We Shall Overcome," a song that was the "unofficial anthem to the civil rights movement," was wrongly placed under copyright and should be put in the public domain, according to a lawsuit filed today in federal court. The complaint (PDF) was filed by the same group of lawyers who succeeded at putting the world's most famous song, Happy Birthday, into the public domain after years of litigation. It's a proposed class action that seeks the return of copyright licensing fees they say were wrongfully collected by Ludlow Music Inc. and The Richmond Organization, which claim to have copyrighted "We Shall Overcome" in 1960.

According to the lawsuit, the song is much older than that. The plaintiffs say the song is based on "an African-American spiritual with exactly the same melody and nearly identical lyrics from the late 19th or early 20th century."

At most, they say, the defendant companies own specific arrangements of the song, or additional verses that were added in 1960 when the song was copyrighted and again in 1963.

An appeals court has ruled that Google will have to deal with an investigation into its business practices by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. The court also noted the search company can still challenge the investigation at a later time.

It's a reversal of a big win by Google last year when a federal judge halted the Mississippi investigation, which sought information about how Google deals with links related to counterfeit goods, illegal drug sales, copyright violations, and other matters. Google sued to stop the investigation while litigation was underway, saying that Hood's goal was to "punish" Google while he pursued his goal of a "pre-filtered Internet"—a power denied him by both Congress and the Constitution, Google lawyers argued.

Hood's investigation had been egged on by lobbyists from the Motion Picture Association of America, and in some cases demand letters that came from Hood's office were actually written by MPAA lawyers.

A deal between Lyft and lawyers representing some drivers, in which the ride-hailing app would pay $12.25 million to end a lawsuit, has been thrown out by the federal judge overseeing the case.

In a 21-page order (PDF), US District Judge Vince Chhabria says that the $12.25 million payment seriously shortchanges the proposed class of drivers—and the state of California. Plaintiffs' lawyers said the $12.25 million was a reasonable cut for the $64 million that drivers deserved for mileage reimbursements they would have received as employees. But Chhabria's calculation of that reimbursement, using the drivers' own methodology, was that it's worth more than $126 million.

"The drivers were therefore shortchanged by half on their reimbursement claim alone," he concludes.