I found out today (via TechDirt via Asher_Wolf) that a French company called Early Flicker has applied to trademark the Anonymous logo.

Besides the fact that this is probably a really bad idea, it goes to show how immoral people can be. Indeed trying to protect a logo from being used by others is one thing if you are the creator/owner of that logo, doing so for a logo created by others is probably as low as it gets when it comes to trademarking.

The Anonymous emblem is already in the public domain, so anyone is allowed to use it for any purpose without any conditions.

Early Flicker sells via Ebay but apparently operates pickapop.fr. I never heard of them before today and would of course avoid them, it's quite low to try to privatise public property.

Update: There are 2 brands that have been registered. You can view them in the INPI website by going to bases-marques.inpi.fr and searching for "Anonymous" or by numbers, 3897980 and 3897981. If you feel the courage you can click on "Signalez une erreur sur cette notice" to report the issue to the INPI (thanks Rike for the update).

Update 2: The owner of pickapop.fr has replied by replacing the content of their website with this message (copied to Pastebin because..). The short version is that Auffret claims that he had no bad intentions and proof is that he has not sued anyone. He also goes on to saying that he could have used CC or some other license etc etc.

I think it's just a lame attempt to recover from all the negative attention he's been getting over the past few days. The fact that he hasn't bothered/sued/etc anyone looks more like an attempt to try to keep the fact that he did register the brand secret.

Update 3: I just called the INPI, they told me that trademarking something in the public domain is legal as long as it contains an extra element. In this case, the logo itself is not protected by this trolling trademark, however the Anonymous logo and the text Anonymous
We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us. together is proteced by French trademark law.

Update 4: After a discussion on IRC between Anonymous and Apollinaire Auffret from Early Flicker, Auffret agreed to let go of both trademarks 3897980 and 3897981 registered at the INPI (Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle).

Lately everything has been somewhat serious so to lighten up the mood, some fun from the 80's.

The other day my friend was singing this 80's song in German, I recognised it and it reminded me of an American song. We set out to find out WTF is the deal.. It turns out I was thinking of MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This and she thought she was singing Der Kommissar (she had all the words wrong).

None of those pages mention each other yet the base of the songs are the same. However it is mentioned that MC Hammer did get sued by Rick James for having copied Super Freak. This must have been the best moment in time ever to be a music copyright lawyer.

The weirdest thing is that there is almost nothing to be found on the Internet except this old Usenet thread that brings Falco's Der Kommissar and Rick James' Super Freak in the same conversation ! And then it gets even stranger as both songs were released in 1981. So who copied who ? Or who highly inspired who ? And why is nobody talking about this ?

To try to figure this out I did a sloppy montage of with images from both clips Der Kommissar and Super Freak (and bonus semi subliminal stuff) using the soundtrack from Falco's version. You might notice that Rick James is almost in sync with Der Kommissar's lyrics. It's not arranged, I superposed both clips, aligned them to the right as Der Kommissar is longer due to the intro and simply flipped from one song to the other.

Anyway, here goes:

Update: I must note that if MC Hammer had not "stolen" music from Super Freak, Rick James would have never won a Grammy in his life. Indeed, the only Grammy he got was as a result for having co-written U Can't Touch This.

Update 2: I just found this remix done a few years ago, the soundtrack mixes both Der Kommissar and Super Freak.

FunnyJunk, a website whose main "about us" link is a Copyright Infringement Notification page, has hired an "Internet lawyer" to put pressure on TheOatmeal to remove any content that speaks of them.

FunnyJunk just realised their SEO is really bad, when you search for them TheOatmeal comes up in the results, since the story broke it's even worse. Instead of re-thinking their SEO they decided to threaten TheOatmel and get them to remove any content referring to them. One of the things FunnyJunk doesn't find funny is:

Here's how FunnyJunk.com's business operates:

1. Gather funny pictures from around the internet
2. Host them on FunnyJunk.com
3. Slather them in advertising
4. If someone claims copyright infringement, throw your hands up in the air and exclaim "It was our users who uploaded your photos! We had nothing to do with it! We're innocent!"
5. Cash six figure advertising checks from other artist's stolen material

Source theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk

When non US citizens face US charges and extradition how can people who operate sites like FunnyJunk feel so legitimate that they start to attack the websites from which they steal content from ? Just saying, it's messed up.

In any case, Matthew Inman has raised $93,272 of the 20,000he needed to tease the morons from FunnyJunk with photos of cash that will be sent to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

Since last night I noticed that The Pirate Bay's website appeared down. I checked in this morning, checked via multiple locations (from different countries) and same result. I asked a few friends to help figure this one out because this is not a DNS issue and it seemed to be more than just a server down.

The results is that the Pirate Bay's netblock is no longer advertised, this means there is no known route to 194.71.107.0/24.

MBS (the friend who figured it out) showed me this tool I could use to see for myself:

I found a list of Public Route Servers to query, those I tested say the same.

It appears that The Pirate Bay has been getting DDOSed since last night, however they have only mentioned it recently on their facebook page, and I read that after having investigated this... So is the solution to the DDOS to disappear from the Internet ? Is this a reaction from Anonymous beause of this ?

A new book to be released in a few hours (I think this is on USA time): No Safe Harbor. This book is released by the United States Pirate Party, it features many interesting people and ideas.... .. and yes, it's licensed under the Creative Commons license. You can buy it or download it. Etc. You can even read it.

Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) speaks about the anti SOPA/PIPA blackout, noticeably about Wikipedia.

It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.

Indeed, nobody should be allowed to take down their own website, only MPAA and friends should have that kind of power.

A friend pointed out this article on how Richard Stallman was right all along and of course, I agree and actually was not part of those who think/thought that RMS is too paranoid/crazy. I don't have a mobile phone and don't have a googlebookspace account, etc etc.. Like you too right ?

Anyway, lately pieces are being put together, SOPA (crap), ProtectIP (also crap), HADOPI (merde), Spain blocking websites, Belarus bans anything foreign, etc etc. . . Oh, and Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act which in short allows the U.S. (of North America) to detain anyone they suspect/want indefinitely..

It's all crap, and then you realise that half of the "cool Internet" has been using Godaddy as their registrar !!

When visiting youhavedownloaded.com it will show you what you may have downloaded via torrent recently.

You may also enter an IP address to see what others may be downloading. The goal of this site seems to make it clear to users what information about them is actually publicly available.

People at torrentfreak have found that Sony, Universal and Fox like torrents.

Guess who else likes torrents ? Check out Nicolas Sarkozy's home IP and another Elysee IP (The French presidential home has 62.160.71.0/24, so you can check for others).

Over the past 10 years or so the entertainment industry has been whining about losing money because of the Internet. Of course it is (most probably) false. The crazy thing isn't the bitching, it's the desire to have full control of human communication, over the Internet at least.

I am so tired of them that it is unbelievable, the only reason these people have any power is because people actually buy their products and hence provide them with a neat fortune.

From here on I am going to go out of my way to not purchase anything that provides them with income. I am already not a big client of theirs, however it can happen that I legally watch a movie or buy a movie merchandise, that's done.

I do not support the "Entertainment Industry" (anymore at least), I would like to see them disappear for good. I am not afraid of not being entertained.

A victory for the creative industry, finally. A British court has ruled that BT (British Telecom) must block access to Newzbin2 (if you can't access it check via Herdict).

Some say this is good news for the audiovisual entertainment industry as they will finally be able to pay their bills and such. Indeed it is well known that the industry behind the MPA (Motion Picture Association) have been in complete financial decline since the popularisation of the Internet.. check the numbers. They have been selling approximately the same amount of tickets every year for the past 15 years yet the revenue has doubled, that means they are doing bad right ?

Others say this is an attack on our Freedom of w4r3z.. .. People need w4r3z, that's why the Internet was invented.

And others, more seriously, point out the issues between having ISPs enforce content filtering, websites being blocked more and more easily, innocent bystanders... and websites getting blocked for "copyright" reasons when it will in reality be for other reasons, like political for example.

Worse comes to worse, they block all of this stuff from the Internets and people will have no choice but to do other things with their lives. I think that because I doubt people will spend more on music and movies than they already do. Because people already spend a lot of money as it is..

Read more at Guardian/filesharing.

I don't even know how to go about writing about this.. So the Internet used to be a place where physical location did not matter.. Then websites started to deny access depending on your IP's declared physical location... .

Innovation being a part of the Internet, it seems that we may soon have a system to mimic real world borders, at least in Europe that is. It would work just like regular borders, most people can come in, some will need a visa others just a load of cash or something.

Of course internal movement will be free, except from time to time, like in case of revolutions in countries bordering Europe, France and Italy will try to close the borders down to national levels.

Anyway, the good news is that this might just slide as it is probably just a some kind of tantrum from Hungary's tenure of European presidency.

A while ago I ranted about Turnitin pirating copyrighted content, meaning (IMHO) they copy content of peoples websites or student's work and store it in a database for an unlimited time. They then use that content as a means of earning money, there whole business is based on other peoples work, and not just by referencing them like a search engine.

So I emailed them and it turned out that after years and years of doing this never has anyone complained. I asked nicely for them to remove my content from there database and after being asked if I was really really sure they said they would have to write some scripts to automate the task.

The guy I was in contact with was actually very nice so no complaining there of course, I think he was simply surprised but he did get back to me with this:

So now they have a script to automate this task, if you would like to get your content removed from their database you just need to ask. If you run into anything weird let me know.

I just read a sad piece of technical journalism from Charles Arthur for the Guardian. I'll resume his rant; he blames p2p (file-sharing) usage for the new "no more unlimited mobile networking" policy that apparently O2 is moving into. He cites an O2 blog post which actually makes no mention of this.

According to the very imprecise graphic 97% of the users consume less than 500MB a month, the average would be 200 and 0.1% use more than 690MB. In short, very very few people tend to exaggerate IP (data) usage. If that caused any real nuisance to the network that would mean that either the operator's network is insufficient and/or they do not have the knowledge to implement simple QoS regulations (example: slow down the speed when network usage goes up so that all traffic can be on the move). So what is the real deal here ? Why are operators no longer happy to offer unlimited data for a fixed price ?

My conspiration theory is as follows: Now that you can access the Internet via your mobile device you can trade limited "text messages" (SMS) for unlimited text via realtime chat (irc/msn/aim/icq/etc) or email, you can trade phone calls for VOIP (skype, etc). And all this being on The Network (Internet) means that there is no difference between local and long distance communications. This is precisely, in my opinion, the real part where the operators may feel cheated. Users can escape the overcharges of calls and text messages not included in their plans, and why not even get a minimal call/text deal and just go for the unlimited mobile internet.

In reality the very few who actually do use p2p networks (illegal or legal btw) are not a real nuisance for the network, they are instead, AS USUAL, an excuse to change policies, pricing and laws. In this case, it's actually a "technology journalist" ranting about this, as if 0.1% of the data/phone users stole directly from his pocket.

Oh, and one more thing, I'm pretty sure those statistics include users who bought the mobile Internet dongle thing, you know the 3G usb device intended to connect computers to the Internet, in that case it's more than normal to go over 690MB in one month..

Today I notice a new bot called "turnitinbot" crawling my site and not for a new search engine.. this one is different. There is a new site called turnitin.com which sells a service to students and schools to prevent plagiarism, the idea is that students submit their work to Turnitin who then verifies it against their databases. According to the Wikipedia/Turnitin page the databases are composed of:

• content from, books, newspapers etc
• already submitted work to Turnitin
• anything submitted to "other" sites like GradeGuru
• etc etc
• Result's from spider crawling

For me this whole things seems very dirty, the only small part I can do is add this to robots.txt User-agent: turnitinbot Disallow: / I don't want people to take credit for my work but I even less want a company to push the education system into their control and make big money out of it. Is Turnitin paying you or me for our work ? No. Are they making money out of it ? Yes.

For those who submitted their work to GradeGuru and are regretting it, please understand that when you submit content to a third party you should always read and agree with their terms of service, I'm sure they mentioned that one day the free service will benefit themselves alot more than yourself.

Actually, here goes Article 14 from the Terms of Service http://www.gradeguru.com/sps/communitystandardmessagenlu.htm?tandc=tandc : Proprietary Rights in GradeGuru Content. GradeGuru does not claim ownership of the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you may post to the GradeGuru Services. By posting any Content on or through the GradeGuru Services, you hereby grant to GradeGuru a non-exclusive worldwide perpetual license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute all or part of such Content on and through the GradeGuru Services and through GradeGuru and its affiliated entities, other off-line services and products and to charge for access to and/or use of Your Content. This license granted by You to GradeGuru to use Your Content (including that supplied prior to the version date of these Terms) includes (without limitation) the right for GradeGuru supply Your Content to providers of anti-plagiarism tools at our discretion, so that such providers may, amongst other things, check the integrity of Your Content. I was going to put the important/shocking part in bold, but then I figured the whole article should be bold, emphasized and blinking...