Are Etsy Lawyers Bullying Jayne Hat Makers?

(If you're familiar with the Jayne hat controversy, skip the introduction and get right to the good stuff.)

The Jayne hat. Oh, the Jayne hat.

If you're a fan of the short-lived show Firefly, you already know what I'm talking about. If not, the shortest coherent explanation I can give is this: In one episode, Jayne Cobb, the big thug character (who secretly has a good heart) receives a hand-knitted laplander-style hat from his mother. It is brightly colored, with a pom-pom, and is fairly silly-looking and entirely inappropriate to his general demeanor -- which is what makes it perfect. Jayne loves the hat, and wears it in a climactic scene involving guns and threats of violence.

In the intervening years, the Jayne hat has become iconic for Firefly fans. "Browncoats" (Firefly fans) have been knitting the tricolor hats for about a decade. I actually own one, made for me personally as a birthday gift. You see them all over conventions; they're an instant symbol for the fanbase.

You can see where this is going. Recently, Fox, which owns the rights to Firefly, licensed a manufacturer to start selling official Jayne hats. I actually applaud that move -- why should only fans who know knitters get to show off the accessory? But, of course, it didn't stop there, and Fox (not having learned from, oh, any other decision they ever made involving the Firefly franchise) started sending cease & desist letters to online sellers of handmade Jayne hats.

Unlike most people commenting on the situation (and even most Jayne hat knitters talking about it), I actually think Fox is on pretty shaky legal ground. Despite what they would have people think, it's not at all clear that Fox has any legal right to stop people from knitting red, orange, and yellow laplanders and calling them "Jayne hats" -- and, if they can, that should give us pause. (That may be the subject of a future post, but it would take a fair bit of research to cover the topic adequately.) But let's, for the moment, suppose that they do.

There's someone in this controversy who is cutting a path even closer to the line, and even more dangerous, than Fox. It's Etsy. And it all relies on something we were never supposed to see.

Red Equal Signs: A Study in Sorting?

(Now that the bar exam is over and I have had time to sort out a number of personal and professional items, this blog is being revived. Sorry for the suspense.)

Odds are, you have a Facebook account. No, really. Over 50% of Americans have Facebook accounts. So, odds are, you have a Facebook account. (25 other countries are also over the 50% threshold, including the United Kingdom and Canada.) So, odds are, you've seen a red equal sign in the last few days.

In the extremely unlikely event you don't know what I'm talking about, here's what happened. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court, highest court in the country, heard challenges to the laws known as Proposition 8 (the California law prohibiting the performance of same-sex marriages in that state) and the Defense of Marriage Act (the U.S. federal law restricting federal marriage benefits from same-sex marriages*). Among the many memes and other trends on the Internet relating to the cases, Facebook was awash in red. The Human Rights Campaign urged followers to change their profile pictures in support of marriage equality, and it caught on. I haven't seen any estimates of how many people changed their pictures, but it was a lot. It also spawned a number of spoofs, from Ernie & Bert to corgis to bacon.

This is not a post about marriage equality. Sorry to disappoint. But I am going to talk about Facebook and social sorting, so click on!

Take This DRM. It's Dangerous to Distribute Games Alone.

(I am back after a couple of weeks of intense thesis immersion.  So let's talk about The Legend of Zelda.)

Let's be honest: If you never wanted to erase Navi, link's fairy companion in The Ocarina of Time, then you never played The Ocarina of Time.  If I had to make a list of the top modifications I wanted to otherwise great games, deleting Navi would top the list, and it wouldn't even be close.  If I had the time, energy, and technical skill, I would go back and erase Navi from the game myself, just to be able to go back and play the game without her.

Entrepreneur, gamer, and candidate for Dad of the Year Mike Hoye recently modded his own copy of The Wind Waker, Link's first adventure on the GameCube in the Legend of Zelda series.  He didn't remove the fairy companion; to the best of my knowledge (I don't own a GameCube), there is no fairy companion in The Wind Waker.  Instead, he painstakingly changed the dialogue to change protagonist Link's gender from male to female.

Hoye enjoys playing video games with his daughter, but was frustrated by the lack of positive female role models in games.  So he did the sensible thing, and built one.  He didn't change the plot or the function of the game, just a few words here and there to make the game more accessible to his daughter.  He also made his modifications available to the public for other concerned parents.

But this isn't a post about gender in video games.  Everyone knows that video games have done a terrible job of handling gender in any sensible way, with very few and limited exceptions.  No, I want to talk about copyright.  Mike Hoye's labor of love is demonstrative of why our copyright system isn't just broken; it's insanely broken.

Why?  Hoye's brilliant Zelda hack is probably illegal.

FTC Gets Crowdsourcing Right, Sets Example for Rest of US Government

When I interned in the federal government in 2010 and 2011, the government was experimenting with crowdsourcing to its employees. Every once in a while I would receive an e-mail soliciting ideas for what the department could do to save money and eliminate waste. The best idea each round would receive some recognition, and the department would implement it. (I can't remember if there was a cash bounty attached.) Submissions usually involved saving on electricity by turning off electronics or reducing paper waste by changing printing policies. I appreciated the idea, but it wasn't generating any landscape-changing policies.

Around the same time, the Government Services Administration (with input from the Office of Management and Budget) rolled out Challenge.gov, an online platform for soliciting ideas from the public. Much broader in scope, Challenge.gov is available for any government department to post challenges to the entire public. Challenges on the site range from video essays on responsible saving to launching nano-satellites to orbit. Again, this idea is an intriguing step, but limited exposure and lack of focus have limited its appeal.

This week the Federal Trade Commission has changed the game, I believe. The just-announced FTC Robocall Challenge has all the elements to get the viral attention a crowdsourcing initiative really needs.

The FTC wants you to "Be a hero." I think people will answer the call.

Who Says Internet Surfing Harms Attention Spans?

Not Congress, apparently.

The Senate voted unanimously this week to recommend that the President oppose any regulation by the International Telecommunications Union of the Internet. The resolution states that the government should "promote a global Internet free from government control." In his statement explaining the vote, Senator Marco Rubio noted that "I just want to be clear that America is on record as being in favor of Internet freedom and that we don't want to see any internationally recognized right for government interference on the Internet and the free flow of information on the Internet."

Senator Rubio authored an opinion piece in advance of the vote in Politico, discussing how important "Internet freedom" is:

"A top-down, international regulatory model goes against the very nature of the Internet. An international regulatory regime, and the politics and red tape that go with it, directly conflict with the Internet’s purpose of sharing ideas and connecting people. Governments and international bodies cannot keep pace with the Internet, and they should not try to do so." (emphasis mine)

There is a lot of room for debate about what "Internet freedom" means, and how we should react to that politically. Senator Rubio knows that as well as anyone: He co-sponsored PIPA.

Yep. That happened.

"Hello World! It's Me, the Internet!"

Big news today for the Internet -- and for the lobbying world. A group of organizations from the "Internet infrastructure industry" announced a new policy advocacy organization, the Internet Infrastructure Coalition.  i2, as they are calling themselves, claim to "support[] those who build the nuts and bolts of the Internet". They don't define exactly what those "nuts and bolts" are, but their members list includes software-as-service, remote hosting, and spectrum organizations.

An informal browsing of their members seems to indicate that most are related to cloud computing or other remote services. I question whether this is really representative of the "Internet infrastructure" without network owners and ISPs. Regardless of what they call themselves, though, i2 has stated that they believe in a robust and growing Internet environment to encourage innovation.

The most interesting part of i2's site is the explanation of their policy positions. Most of their positions are not particularly surprising for businesses relying on the Internet for their business models. I'd like to highlight a few interesting implications of their positions, though.