My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. We’re still experiencing the last stages of the Southsun Cove content, and starting to get details on the next content update: The Dragon Bash, coming June 11th. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
June 7, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Who is Glenn Greenwald?
The New York Times profiles Glenn Greenwald:
After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.
Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs. The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers.
On Thursday night, he followed up with an article written with a Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, that exposed an N.S.A. program, Prism, that has gathered information from the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years.
“The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Greenwald said in a telephone interview. He said that he had been advised by lawyer friends that “he should be worried,” but he had decided that “what I am doing is exactly what the Constitution is about and I am not worried about it.”
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Taking the battle to the patent trolls
In The New Yorker, Tim Wu suggests some lines of counter-attack to use against patent trolls:
There are good laws in place that could fight trolls, but they sit largely unused. First are the consumer-protection laws, which bar “unfair or deceptive acts and practices.” Some patent trolls, to better coerce settlement, purposely misrepresent matters such as the strength of their patents, the extent of other settlements, and their actual willingness to litigate. Second, there are plenty of remedies available under the unfair-competition laws. Some trolls work by aggregating an enormous number of patents, and then present the threat that one of their thousands of patents might actually be valid. The creation of these portfolios for trolling may be “agreements in restraint of trade” under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, or they may “substantially lessen competition” under the Clayton Antitrust Act. More generally, the methods of the trolls are hardly what you would call ordinary methods of competition; they should be considered, rather, what the Federal Trade Commission calls “unfair methods of competition” under Section 5 of the F.T.C. Act. The Commission has the power to define and punish methods of business that are inherently harmful with few or no redeeming benefits, and that’s what trolling is. Finally, it is possible that the criminal laws barring larceny and schemes to defraud may cover the conduct of some trolls.
Unfortunately, other than in Vermont, these laws remain largely unenforced, for reasons that aren’t particularly good. Trolls, to switch metaphors, are like cancer cells: they mimic ordinary activity, namely the assertion of patent rights. A war on trolls could become a war on patent holders in general. Since the line between the two can be fuzzy, the argument is that war might deter some real invention. It might, for example, lump universities in with the extortion artists.
But that justifies caution, not inaction. All law enforcement involves this problem of sorting. There is a narrow line between the legitimate trader who knows the stock market well and the criminal inside trader, yet that doesn’t mean securities laws should be left unenforced.
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The world’s longest undefended “no touching zone”
H/T to John Farrier for the link.
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