Junocam is attached to NASA's Juno probe in orbit around Jupiter, and has vastly outperformed its specification, sending home unexpectedly clear images of its moons as well as the swirling gas giant itself. The latest images, presented with enhanced color, show an incredible profusion of marbled detail. — Read the rest

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I won’t pretend like I’m not a huge fan of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF has done great work representing clients on matters of free speech and technology innovation. Whether it’s defending anonymous speech from being unmasked or fighting back against the use of intellectual property laws merely to hide content from daylight, this is a group that certainly doesn’t back down from a fight.

But those fights continue. The most recent of them is a cease and desist letter sent from several gas companies to an advocacy group called Modest Proposals over the latter’s use of those companies’ trademarked logos on its site. The problem, though, is that Modest Proposals is a non-profit and the site it constructed is pure parody.

Modest Proposals is an activist collective that uses parody and culture jamming to advance environmental justice and other social causes. As part of a campaign shining a spotlight on the environmental damage and human toll caused by the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, Modest Proposals invented a company called Repaer. The fake company’s website offers energy companies the opportunity to purchase “life offsets” that balance the human deaths their activities cause by extending the lives of individuals deemed economically valuable. The website also advertises a “Plasma Pals” program that encourages parents to donate their child’s plasma to wealthy recipients. Scroll down on the homepage a bit, and you’ll see the logos for three (real) LNG companies—Repaer’s “Featured Partners.” 

Believe it or not, the companies didn’t like this. (Shocking!) Two of them—TotalEnergies and Equinor—sent our client stern emails threatening legal action if their names and logos weren’t removed from the website. TotalEnergies also sent a demand to the website’s hosting service, Netlify, that got repaer.earth taken offline. That was our cue to get involved.

This is familiar ground for the EFF. It’s response to the two gas companies was in letter form, which was also posted to the EFF website. It is a point by point refutation of the claim that any of this is trademark infringement. I will post the entire letter below for your enjoyment, but here are some key points in the response letter.

Your trademark claim fails at the threshold because the Lanham Act regulates only commercial speech.2 Modest Proposals’ parody website is not selling any good or service; it is pure social commentary. It therefore falls beyond the Lanham Act’s reach.

Even if the Lanham Act did apply here, use of a trademark is not infringing unless it is
likely to confuse consumers. The content of the website is facially and intentionally absurd: It purports to offer companies in the energy industry the opportunity to purchase “life offsets” that balance the human deaths their activities cause by extending the lives of individuals deemed economically valuable. The website also advertises a fake “Plasma Pals” program that encourages parents to donate their child’s plasma to wealthy recipients. We find it extremely unlikely that any significant number of consumers would mistake the fake website for anything other than the spoof that it is or believe that TotalEnergies, one of the targets of the parody, approved it. Indeed, courts readily recognize that successful parodies carry little risk of consumer confusion.3 Without a likelihood of consumer confusion, there is no infringement.

The letter goes on to note the First Amendment protections afforded to expressive works of parody.

Now, these companies have large legal war lychests to utilize should they actually want to fight this out in court, but they certainly shouldn’t. This isn’t one of those marginal cases where there is a real question of the law.

Instead, it is an instance the EFF right calls out as an attempt to utilize trademark law to silence expressive speech these companies simply don’t like.

Current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has spent much of the last decade positioning himself to be Trump’s likely pick for the next boss of the FCC. He’s likely to get his wish; after spending a lot of time crying about TikTok to get on cable TV and kissing AT&T’s and Comcast’s asses, Carr’s widely considered the frontrunner to head the country’s top telecom and media regulator.

If you’ve tracked Carr’s policies, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that one of his top goals will be to dismantle the FCC’s already shaky consumer protection efforts.

That means the death of net neutrality, the end of the agency’s inquiry into shitty broadband usage caps, the end of broadband consumer privacy, the end of the FCC’s efforts to stop broadband “redlining” (read: racism in fiber deployment), the end of any good faith efforts to help the poor afford broadband, and an end to efforts to stop Comcast from ripping you off with shitty fees.

Carr’s policies are basically AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast’s policies, dressed up as original thought.

Carr is one of these guys who thinks that if you let giant, unpopular telecom behemoths do whatever they want; miracles and innovation start magically sprouting from the sidewalk. You’ve seen repeatedly how that turns out for the public (be they Republican or Democrat): higher prices, slower speeds, shitty customer service, and a variety of annoying problems like privacy abuses.

As a telecom beat reporter of 25 years now, I can say with absolute certainty that anybody claiming Carr has the slightest interest in a competitive broadband market and consumer welfare is lying to you. I’m writing this down now so that nobody acts surprised when this stuff comes to pass.

Consumer Protection Is Now Basically Illegal

Given the Trump Supreme Court and 5th Circuit have already primed the pump on letting companies basically declare all corporate oversight and consumer protection illegal (I’m really not exaggerating); I don’t suspect the initial assault on consumer rights will take up much of Carr’s time. He should have the agency’s consumer protection efforts fairly well lobotomized by next summer.

In telecom, I suspect no shortage of time will be spent rewarding Elon Musk with Starlink unearned subsidies where ever possible, even if taxpayer money is better spent on more reliable and affordable options not managed by a conspiratorial bigot.

I also expect Carr will follow through with his plan to impose a big new tax on tech services (read: you) to even further subsidize his friends at AT&T and Comcast (you can read more about that here). I also suspect Carr will find creative ways to undermine the exploding and hugely popular community broadband movement, and he’ll certainly rubber stamp shitty mergers (like the Verizon Frontier deal) resulting in more telecom consolidation and higher prices and worse service for everyone.

It’s after that where things should get truly interesting in terms of FCC policy under Carr.

Carr you might recall wrote an entire chapter of Project 2025. There he makes it clear that he’s hoping to leverage whatever authority the FCC has left to harass tech and media companies that try to rein in Trump’s authoritarianism, whether that’s broadcast journalists critical of Trump, or tech companies doing the absolute bare minimum to stop racists and fascists from being hateful assholes on the internet.

Carr isn’t quite as unhinged as many “thought leaders” in the Trump delusion extended infotainment universe, so I’m not entirely sure he’ll go along with Trump’s lust for pulling the broadcast licenses of critical media outlets. But Carr has proven to be such a sniveling sycophant, it would be hard to guarantee he’ll show any real backbone here — which is worrying in and of itself. Indeed, a week ago he did say he supported pulling NBC’s license for putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live, even though NBC absolutely followed the “equal time” rule, giving Donald Trump free ad space the next day (and even as, in other contexts, Carr has been critical of rules like the “equal time” rule).

Again Carr’s primary, most immediate goal will be in doing whatever AT&T and Comcast want: namely turning the FCC into the consumer protection and policy equivalent of a decorative seasonal gourd. That means making it easier for giant, shitty telecom monopolies to rip you and your family off. Despite all the rhetoric about “Trump populism,” none of what Carr has planned is at all popular.

Keep in mind that despite all of Carr’s bootheel licking it’s entirely possible Trump’s team picks somebody even worse as head of the FCC. In which case, all bets are off.

The question for me then becomes (in telecom and elsewhere), will any of the folks who “voted for this” ever tether their coming pain (higher prices, worse service, more privacy and net neutrality violations) to their own choices? Or are Americans so saturated with propaganda, and U.S. journalism so profoundly broken, that the blame for the suffering to come is just endlessly shifted elsewhere.

Japanese scientists blended traditional woodworking techniques with state-of-the-art electronics to fashion the world's first wooden satellite. On Monday, a SpaceX rocket carried the "CubeSat"—just four inches by four inches on each side—to the International Space Station for launch into orbit next month. — Read the rest

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NASA's annual budget is $25.4bn. It generated $76bn of the U.S. economy last year, it claims. Clearly we are not giving NASA enough money!

NASA's latest economic impact report reveals that its activities contributed $75.6 billion to the U.S. economy in fiscal year 2023 — about three times the agency's budget for that year, which was $25.4 billion.

— Read the rest

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