Author: Joe Mullin

By a vote of 285 to 281, the European Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution today calling on member states to “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection, and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties.” The move is a “recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender.”

Whatever disputes arch-rivals Google and Microsoft have, today they’ve agreed that patent litigation isn’t the right way to settle them.

The two companies have released a joint statement announcing that they’ve reached “an agreement on patent issues,” which includes dismissing all patent lawsuits between the two companies, including Motorola cases. Financial terms are confidential. The full statement says very little:

Microsoft and Google are pleased to announce an agreement on patent issues. As part of the agreement, the companies will dismiss all pending patent infringement litigation between them, including cases related to Motorola Mobility. Separately, Google and Microsoft have agreed to collaborate on certain patent matters and anticipate working together in other areas in the future to benefit our customers.

Microsoft sued Motorola in 2010 for patent infringement, and Motorola counter-sued later that year. Both lawsuits were inherited by Google when it bought Motorola the following year.

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whose leaked documents opened a worldwide discussion about government surveillance, joined Twitter this morning. So far, he’s amassed more than 400,000 followers, but he follows only one account: @NSAGov.

Can you hear me now?

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 29, 2015

Twitter created a GIF showing how his account acquired followers around the world in just a few hours.

Today @Snowden joined Twitter, and here’s the world’s response. pic.twitter.com/d6HgVvdRsf

— Twitter (@twitter) September 29, 2015

The @Snowden account carries a blue check mark, indicating that his identity has been verified by Twitter. His only substantive conversation so far has been with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and all-around science-communicator-guy, who recently interviewed Snowden on his show Star Talk Radio.

The investigation is over comments on Reason.com targeting US District Judge Katherine Forrest, who sentenced Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht to life in prison without parole. “Its [sic] judges like these that should be taken out back and shot,” reads one of the comments.

It has been about two weeks since those events became public, and now Popehat author Ken White has written a followup laying out reasons why he suspects the DOJ also sent Reason.com a gag order preventing it from speaking about the case.

One of those two agents has now reached a plea deal with prosecutors. Shaun Bridges, a computer expert for the US Secret Service, is accused of stealing $820,000 in bitcoins from various drug dealers on the site.

“Mr. Bridges has regretted his actions from the very beginning,” Bridges’ lawyer told Bloomberg News. “His decision to plead guilty reflects his complete acceptance of responsibility and is another step towards rehabilitation.”

For companies that get hit with lawsuits over obvious patents, the best chance they’ve got to fight back is last year’s Supreme Court decision in Alice v. CLS Bank. Now patent defendants are often able to get a judge’s opinion at an early stage of the case about whether the patent was too obvious to grant in the first place.

Patent cases still aren’t cheap, but for those willing to fight, Alice is turning the tide in defendants’ favor—just not in East Texas.

US District Court Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who presides in Marshall (pop. 25,000), hears more patent cases than any other judge in the country. He has gone out of his way to place additional barriers in the way of defendants seeking to knock out bad patents under Section 101 of the patent laws. That’s the section that Alice relates to, which the Supreme Court said should be used to knock out “do it on a computer”-style patents.

RayNiro, one of the lawyers who pioneered the wave of contingent-fee patent litigation, says he’s ready to exit the business.

“The stand-alone patent case is dead on arrival, and I don’t think we’re unique,” Niro told Crain’s Chicago Business.

Patent litigation dropped by roughly 20 percent in 2014, and patent lawsuits by “non-practicing entities,” also known as patent trolls, dropped by nearly 25 percent. Those trolls filed about 3,700 lawsuits in 2013, and 2,800 in 2014, according to data from RPX’s annual report (PDF).

Earlier this week, news reports came out revealing that it isn’t just the National Security Agency that engages in bulk surveillance. From 1992 until 2013, the US Drug Enforcement Administration kept records of “virtually all telephone calls” from the US to as many as 116 different countries.

News reports about DEA surveillance came out earlier this week and have now led to a new front in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s long-running but not yet fruitful legal battle against bulk surveillance. Today, the EFF filed a new lawsuit on behalf of Human Rights Watch, challenging the DEA program. The DEA says the program was “suspended” in 2013, but the EFF’s lawsuit seeks to ensure that the program doesn’t get restarted and that all records collected related to Human Rights Watch are purged from government databases.

“Human Rights Watch often works with people in dire circumstances around the world. Our sources are sometimes in life or death situations, and speaking out can make them a target,” said Human Rights Watch general counsel Dinah PoKempner. “Who we communicate with and when we communicate with them is often extraordinarily sensitive—and it’s information that we would never turn over to the government lightly.”

A Florida apartment complex is taking heat on review sites after its overreaching “Social Media Addendum” was published yesterday by Ars Technica.

Until yesterday, the Windermere Cay Apartments near Orlando, Florida, had only two Yelp reviews, one of which had been shunted by Yelp’s filter into the “not recommended” area.

Now the complex has more than 140 reviews, with 77 recommended reviews and 67 reviews that aren’t recommended. (The numbers keep changing, of course.) On Yelp, filtered reviews aren’t visible unless users specifically click to see them. Nearly all, if not all, of the reviews are from non-residents complaining about, or simply mocking, the building’s Social Media Addendum.

The RIAA-lite strategy to getting piracy off the Internet isn’t working out.

Los Angeles-based Rightscorp launched in 2011, with the goal of helping big content companies reduce piracy on peer-to-peer networks. The basic idea is that rather than using costly lawsuits, if ISPs forward Rightscorp’s sternly-worded emails, piratical users could be brought to a site where they could settle for the sum of $20 per infringed work.

Newly released earnings numbers show that Rightscorp is contacting more people than ever before, fining more people for infringement than ever before, working with more ISPs than ever before—and yet is reporting record losses. Its stock is near all-time lows at about $0.11 per share.