The Failure Of Courts/Regulators To Understand The Difference Between Infrastructure Providers And Edge Providers Is Going To Be A Problem

from the the-impact-is-very,-very-different dept

To some extent we've had this discussion before, as parts of other discussions about the regulation of content online, but it's worth calling it out explicitly: regulating internet infrastructure services the same as internet edge service providers is a really bad idea. And yet, here we are. So few people seem to even care enough to make a distinction. So, let's start with the basics: "edge providers" are the companies who provide internet services that you, as a end user, interact with. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Reddit, Wikipedia, Amazon's e-commerce site. These are all edge providers as currently built. Infrastructure providers, however, sit a layer (or more) down from those edge providers. They're the services that make the edge services possible. This can include domain registrars and registers, CDNs, internet security companies and more. So, companies like Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Amazon's AWS, among others are examples there.

While tons of people interact with infrastructure players all the time, your average person will never even realize they're doing so -- as the interactions tend to be mediated entirely by the edge providers. For a few years now we've been seeing attempts to move the liability questions up (or, depending on your viewpoint, down) the stack from edge providers to infrastructure players. This raises a lot of significant concerns.

At the simplest level, a big part of the concern is that the only real "remedy" for an infrastructure provider is to cease providing service altogether to the edge provider. This is an incredibly blunt instrument -- as a single accusation of a legal violation could lead an entire service to come crashing down if the infrastructure provider is sufficiently spooked about the potential liability. In short: imagine what happens when a copyright holder sends a DMCA notice not to the site that had an allegedly infringing image uploaded, but rather to that site's domain registrar. If the registrar fears liability, it might revoke the domain entirely (removing service) pulling down an entire website (or, at least, the way in which most people access that website).

There may be good arguments for cases when infrastructure providers should be involved -- perhaps the edge provider cannot be found or is deliberately ignoring actual legal notices. Then you might understand moving to a different level in the stack. But it should be justified.

Instead, it seems like many are simply targeting infrastructure because either they don't understand the difference between infrastructure and edge... or just because they know that its remedy (complete removal of service) is so big that it'll have more impact. Case in point: an Italian court has ordered Cloudflare to terminate the accounts of a few sites that the court has determined to be pirate sites. Assuming that these sites truly are engaged in infringing activities, it seems fine to hold the sites themselves accountable. But that's not what's happening here. Instead, the legal liability is being placed on Cloudflare, a company that provides CDN services, but isn't the actual host of any of the content.

In a ruling handed down by the Commercial Court of Rome late last month, Cloudflare was ordered to immediately terminate the accounts of the contested pirate sites. These include filmpertutti.uno, italiaserie.tv, piratestreaming.watch, cinemalibero.red, and various others.

In addition, Cloudflare was ordered to share the personal details of the site owners and their hosting companies with RTI.

If Cloudflare fails to comply with any of the above, it must pay a fine of €1,000 for each day the infringements continue.

While Cloudflare doesn’t see itself as a hosting provider, the Court concluded that it can be seen as such, under European law. Among other things, its “Always Online” service hosts various website resources even when the site’s servers go offline.

It's that last paragraph that's most important. Basically, that's the court saying "we don't care that you're an infrastructure provider, we're going to treat you as an edge provider." That should worry everyone. Again, unlike an edge provider that might be able to more narrowly target and adjudicate activity that violates laws (or terms of service), Cloudflare's only real ability here is to cut off service entirely. That's a pretty extreme solution.

But it's not just Italian courts doing this. Gizmodo recently had an article with the provocative title, The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online. That article details various parts of the web in which truly vile people with pretty despicable views hang out. And, I can completely empathize with why people are both upset and troubled by such corners of the internet. I'm uncomfortable with them as well. But, is their answer to blame the lower level infrastructure providers? The Gizmodo article certainly seems to think so. The entire article reads like an attempt to shame those infrastructure providers into cutting ties.

Four years later, the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website is still online, pumping out stories about “black serial murderers.” Those pieces are now slotted between odes to nationalist politicians like Nigel Farage, advertisements for a white supremacist conference at a Tennessee state park, and a widget tracking the progress of a crowdfunding campaign to help build Donald Trump’s border wall.

All of that content is still out there, waiting to be found by the next Dylan Roof. But the people behind the site aren’t able to spread their message without some help: The group’s website is hosted by a Michigan-based company called Liquid Web and registered by web infrastructure giant GoDaddy, a publicly traded company currently valued at over $12 billion.

There's a lot more in the article, but almost all of it is targeted at infrastructure providers. Indeed, the story's title is a bit misleading, focusing on the "hosting" of content, which is much closer to an edge provider than most infrastructure providers. But do we actually want to live in a world in which registrars are in the business of determining what you're going to do with a domain before allowing you to register it? Imagine if Techdirt's registrar for our domain decided it didn't like our views on copyright? Would be okay with them just shutting us down and "taking" our domain?

There are big questions to be dealt with concerning how internet companies handle content online, from dealing with hate, harassment and abuse, to disinformation and other sketchy practices. And there are lots of important questions to be dealt with concerning what choices edge providers make concerning content moderation on their networks. But to conflate those questions with the questions related to infrastructure providers seems fraught with very bad scenarios of censorship or worse. It's completely reasonable to be concerned about ignorant racists putting up ignorant racist websites. But is the answer to block them from being able to do so entirely? Be careful what you wish for. And how far does that go? If we don't want racists to even be able to set up forums, does that mean we should also bar them from having internet access at all? Cut them off? No phone service either? Where exactly is the line drawn? And I'm sure some people will say that racists have no redeeming values and you have no problem with cutting them off entirely. But let's be upfront about that and think about the implications, because it's quite a long way to go from "this person is an ignorant racist" to "and therefore they shouldn't be able to use the internet at all."

Filed Under: copyright, edge, infrastructure, liability
Companies: cloudflare

Game Developer Takes 7-Year-Old Kid's Lego Design And Puts It Into The Game As A Birthday Present

from the being-awesome dept

And here we have yet another tale of content creators being awesome to connect with fans. It's a story involving a 7-year-old kid, Zias, who really loves the game Edge (I assume it's unrelated to the trademark troll who tried to sue everyone who used "Edge" in the title of a video game). Zias likes the game so much that, when he's not playing, he's been building his own levels for the game out of legos. Zias' father tweeted the developers of Edge, asking if they might send a promotional item (poster, business card, something) to give to Zias for his birthday. Instead, the developers decided to go much, much further:

Hi Martin,

I don’t have much marketing material except for some digital flyers. But I thought it would be nice if Zias could make a Lego level for us, which we would rebuild and put back in the actual game. The level will have his name and be put on Steam.

Not sure if this can be arranged, but would that be a nice present?

Cheers,

Collin

The company then created a cool invite for Zias to come visit them, and telling him they'd make his lego level into a real game level.

The whole story is yet another example of content creators going above and beyond what's "necessary" to be both awesome and human. The more you look, the more you find great stories like this, and it begins to make you wonder why so many companies simply go in the opposite direction.

Filed Under: awesom, connecting with fans, edge, video games

Tim Langdell, The Righthaven Of The Software World, Gets The 'Righthaven Treatment' From A UK Court

from the reorganizing-as-'chapeau-de-cul-software' dept

Nathan F sends us the great news that infamous one-man trademark troll Tim Langdell has finally "gotten his" at the hands of a UK court. Having spent the last few years threatening and suing anyone with the audacity to put the letters E, D, G and (um...) E in close proximity, Langdell has earned the contempt of, well, pretty much anyone who has ever used "Edge" in their products, from the lowliest app developers to the mighty EA itself.

And much like one of the most epic trolls of all time -- Righthaven -- Langdell has found himself on the receiving end of a full-blast dressing down via the legal system. Even better, Langdell's last-minute desperation plays produced an embarassment of riches, each one of them yet another embarassment. 

To kick off the beatdown, Mrs. Justice Proudman first addressed Langdell's fictional associate:

I am satisfied that EIM and Games Inc are controlled exclusively by Dr Langdell. A "Jack Phillips" has occasionally put his name to witness statements on behalf of EIM in the past but he is not mentioned at all by Dr Langdell in his evidence and I suspect (without making any findings in this respect) that the claimant is right in saying that he does not exist and is an invention of Dr Langdell.

Then there was the whole problem with his "imaginative" logo, which is the other 50% of Langdell's legal wranglings:

The good doctor seemed to take as many nonsensical approaches to defending his use of the EDGE logo as possible, also arguing that because he “copied” it on a letterhead to Future, that this was an “estoppel representation“, which even the judge can’t seem to be bothered to fathom. And then, despite having admitted to copying it, and claiming to have been given permission to use it, he brilliantly asserts that he also invented it in 1991! Future, it seemed, “consciously or unconsciously” copied it two years later when they launched the magazine. This was somewhat scuppered when Future produced the original designer of the logo, and Langdell had nothing useful to say to defend against that.

But wait, there's more! Langdell is apparently still carrying around outdated storage, just to store his outdated logo. The most remarkable thing about this magical disk and its enclosed catalogue is its ability to travel through time, much like the logo itself:

However, Langdell had produced some floppy discs which stored logo, as evidence that it pre-existed the magazine. He claimed that the logo had been published on a “single page catalogue” and a flysheet he used at trade shows, but when asked to show a physical copy said that there was, er, “scarcity of use” pre 1993. But those discs – he’d saved “catalogue” and flysheet onto 5.25″ disc in 1991. He was home free! But wow, it was about to get brilliant.

The disc was too delicate to be shipped to the UK, said Dr Tim. Despite it already having been sent across the Atlantic twice. The court ordered him to send it over. And thus Langdell sent the disc to an expert, Mr Steggles of Disklabs, who verified that the disc was indeed from 1991, and said that in his opinion it was “genuinely created at that time.” Surely Langdell was finally onto a winner? Except, well, Future’s expert, Mr Dearsley of Kroll Computers, pointed something out. The content had been created by Windows 95.

At this point, everyone (possibly even Righthaven) would have given up, but Langdell pressed on, according to Justice Proudman:

He then produced an involved and absurd story about how he had found two disks in a box in 2009, one of which was a mid-90s back up disk (“disk 2″) and the other of which, (disk 1) was used to clone the original. He said he took the two disks to a “repair man” and mixed them up by marking the wrong one. His oral evidence did not tally with his witness statement and his evidence about the boxes in which he allegedly found disk 1 and disk 2 was confused and unpersuasive.

So, unable to sort himself out with his own contradictory statements, Langdell grabbed his shovel and began digging furiously, trying to somehow show evidence that EDGE is actually a viable software business and not just a guy with a printer and some settlement letter templates:

In attempting to provide evidence that EIM and Edge Games were making money in the UK, Langdell (along with providing an incredibly recent invoice for a company called Creative Distribution Ltd. in Croydon, but unable to remember any pertinent details about the order) offered emails to and from one Randall Copland, of his UK licensee Velocity Micro Inc. (for whom I’m only able to find a US website). In these Copland appears to reply saying of the sales figures for Edge and Gamer’s Edge products from 2006 to 2009, "The figure is way over $1m for each year".

The trouble was, when Copland was asked about this in court he said that the emails bore little in common with those that were really sent. The undoctored emails reveal a slightly different sales figure for the time period: nothing whatsoever.

With the court finding completely in favor of Future Publishing (home of Edge Magazine), the letters that form the word "edge" are back in the public domain and Langdell is left holding the tattered remains of a "business" that has -- for the most part -- done absolutely nothing over the last 2+ years but send out legal threats. ChaosEdge, which has been following Langdell's every move since his lawsuit against Mobigames in 2009 (over their "infringing" app Edge), has this great rundown of everything Edge Interactive Media hasn't done (with two sad exceptions):

• EDGE Games have NEVER published or developed a game on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation, PSP, Xbox 360, Xbox, Wii, Gamecube, N64, Super Nintendo, DS, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Color, Gameboy, Megadrive (Genesis) or iPhone.
• EDGE Games operates from a mail box – The big three hardware manufacturers don’t grant the right for developers or publishers to work on their consoles without a registered office.
• EDGE Games have NOT produced comic books
• EDGE Games have NOT published over 750 Games (The number is actually around 74, nearly all of which were in the 1980′s)
• EDGE Games have NOTHING to do with the magazine Edge (Future publishing)
• EDGE Games have NO TV Crossover projects in the pipeline
• EDGE Games DO NOT produce PC Hardware or Wii Peripherals
• EDGE Games was NEVER SEGA of Europe (They converted and published Alien Syndrome in 1988 under licence from SEGA, that doesn’t make them anything more than a 1980′s developer/publisher)
• EDGE Game sDO Steal peoples work from places such as Deviantart

Good luck in the future, Mr. Dr. Langdell! The world being what it is, I'm sure there's another trolling entity out there looking for someone with your particular "skill" set. Just try to remember to keep your Windows software un-updated.

Filed Under: edge, tim langdell

Court Denies Injunction Against EA Over Tim Langdell's 'Edge' Trademark; Slams Langdell

from the trademark-trolls dept

We've covered a few different stories about a guy named Tim Langdell who held a trademark on the term "edge" in video games, which he had used many years ago, and still sorta kinda maybe uses as part of his operation, "Edge Games." And yet, he seemed to think that trademark law means he owns the word, as it relates to video games, forever. So he's been threatening iPhone developers and sued EA, claiming the company's Mirrors Edge series violates his trademarks. EA has fought back strongly against the claims, and Brian alerts us to the news that a court has denied Langdell's injunction request and slammed Langdell in the process, suggesting underhanded practices which could result in criminal penalties.

The court has denied Edge Games' motion for injunction, citing that it believes that Langdell made fraudulent statements to the US Patent and Trademark Office and strongly believes that Langdell is "suspect" and has been "trolling" the game industry for licensing opportunities. His actions could possibly warrant "criminal penalties."

When a judge calls you a troll and threatens you with criminal penalties in a lawsuit you initiated... you've got problems. Reading through the actual ruling is incredible, in what it describes about what Langdell has done. I would argue that the above paragraph significantly downplays Langdell's actions, which the court notes, at one point, that the evidence suggests Langdell "willfully committed fraud." You can see the full ruling here: After discussing the background of the case, it jumps right into the part where it accuses Langdell of faking evidence (the judge even italicizes: "It was faked." in the ruling). The judge was even kind enough to include an image comparing an apparently faked magazine cover that Langdell sent to the USPTO, which the USPTO relied on: The ruling goes through a series of other situations that appear to be blatant misrepresentations by Langdell in order to secure the trademark in question. For example, there's a comic book cover, which Langdell scanned and used to show the USPTO that he was still using the mark in commerce. Only problem? The comic book was published by another company. Oh, and it was published over a decade earlier, meaning it wasn't a very good example of how Langdell was using it in commerce at all. And, then there were some other similar situations:

For example, Dr. Langdell's declaration asserted that Edge Games has been selling the video game Mythora (supposedly bearing the "EDGE" mark) since 2004. Curiously, while the exterior packaging submitted by Dr. Langdell to the USPTO for the Mythora video game included a website address "www.mythora.com," this website wasn't even registered by Edge Games until October 2008 -- nearly four years after the game's purported release.... The USPTO relied upon this questionable video-game packaging when it renewed plaintiff's "EDGE" mark in 2009

The ruling goes on to note many more cases of images sent to the USPTO, where the images appear to be doctored, even mockingly saying after one such "real" and "submitted" comparison:

"Once again playing "spot the differences," the specimen submitted to the USPTO appears to have been doctored in three material ways."

This is a judge who is not happy.

The more you read, the more bizarre it gets. Since it's questionable as to whether or not Langdell had really been using these marks in commerce all along, EA's lawyers tried to see if he's really using them today. So it went and tried to buy some of the games he's claiming to sell... and they got error messages every time.

At this point, one would hope that Langdell realizes it's time to back off. He could, in theory, push for a full trial (this was just a move to get an injunction), but he must realize that his chances of winning this case are about as close to zero as you can imagine -- and the deeper he digs, the more trouble he may find himself in.

The story is yet another example of the dangers of trying to abuse the legal system sometimes. It can certainly come back to bite you.

Filed Under: edge, mirror's edge, tim langdell, trademark, video games
Companies: ea

Langdell Still Claims Control Over The Word Edge; Sues EA For Mirror's Edge

from the step-away-from-the-edge dept

We've covered Tim Langdell and his ridiculous trademark claims for years. He's the guy who got a trademark on the word "edge" for a video game fifteen or so years ago, and now seems to spend all of his time threatening and/or suing any game or app maker who puts the word "edge" in the title, even though there's no likelihood of confusion, and Langdell's own failure to actually release a game in many years raises questions about how valid the mark is. EA, who had been threatened by Langdell for its Mirror's Edge game asked the USPTO to dump the trademark last year, claiming not only have the marks been abandoned, but that they were obtained via fraudulent means. The PTO is still reviewing that request.

However, Langdell is not sitting still. His lawyers kindly spammed me today with the news that they're suing EA over this trademark. Not surprisingly, they play up Langdell's position, and leave out the abandonment of the trademark, the lack of any likelihood of confusion and other pertinent details along those lines. Trademark law, despite Langdell's apparent belief, does not give a company full control over a word, especially if they're not using it. No one is confusing Mirror's Edge with Langdell's ancient games.

Filed Under: edge, mirror's edge, tim langdell, trademark, video games
Companies: ea

iPhone App Makers Get Edgy Over Bogus Edge Trademark

from the edge-edge-edge-edge dept

In the past, we've discussed how some guy named Tim Langdell seems to think that because he once had a game that had the word "edge" in the title and got a trademark for it (even though he hasn't released a game in about fifteen years) that he can go after anyone who uses the word edge in a video game title. EA is even working on getting Langdell's trademark dumped. In the meantime, he just keeps going with it, threatening plenty of folks. It appears that some game developers are getting sick of this and have decided to fight back. William Jackson alerts us to the news that game developers are now purposely adding the word "edge" to their game titles in solidarity with those threatened by Langdell. I wonder if that will get the message across?

Filed Under: edge, iphone games, tim langdell, trademark

EA Asks Gov't To Dump Ridiculous Langdell 'Edge' Trademarks

from the about-time dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about Tim Langdell and his claim of owning a trademark on the word "edge" when used in any kind of video game. Of course, Langdell last came out with a game himself in 1994, which makes the whole trademark claim pretty iffy. You need to be using your mark in commerce for it to be valid. Instead, Langdell just seems to be trying to stop anyone else from using the word "edge." Thankfully (as a bunch of you sent in), EA has finally decided to stand up and ask the USPTO to dump Langdell's trademarks. Beyond claiming that the marks are abandoned, EA is also claiming that they were obtained through fraudulent means. Either way, it seems that the basic "moron in a hurry" test should knock out most of Langdell's claims. It's too bad how rarely that test is used...

Filed Under: edge, tim langdell, trademark, video games
Companies: ea

Do Morons In A Hurry Play Games On Their iPhones?

from the use-in-commerce? dept

A whole bunch of people have been sending in the story of a guy named Tim Langdell, who claims to own the trademark to the word "edge" when its used in the name of any video game, and has used that to force a popular iPhone game, called EDGE, out of the app store. As the article points out, Langdell's last game was released in 1994, which makes you wonder if the name is still being used in commerce (a requirement for a trademark claim). And, of course, there's the question of confusion. Considering how few people have heard of Langdell's company, was there really any chance that "a moron in a hurry" would confuse a fun block game with Langdell's title's like "Snoopy: The Case of the Missing Blanket." Kotaku points out that Langdell appears to spend a lot more time these days talking to people about how he owns the word "edge" in any video game than producing or selling video games...

Filed Under: app store, edge, iphone apps, tim langdell, trademark, video games