Court Rules That EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month Post Is Protected Speech | Hacker News Reader

Court Rules That EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month Post Is Protected Speech

eff.org

163 pointsDiabloD339 comments

The company in question GEMSA Pty Ltd of Australia got a patent on "Storage cabinets" on a computer. Pretty much a patent on folders or directories. Now they are suing everyone.

According to the EFF: "As far as we can tell, GEMSA seems to think that anyone with a website that links to hosted content infringes its patent"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/stupid-patent-month-st...

How does this not get immediately dismissed by prior art?

In order for it to be dismissed as prior art, it has to make it all the way to court. The business model of patent trolls like GEMSA is that they get a bunch of obviously overbroad and spurious patents, and then they sue a lot of companies for them, offering to settle for less than the cost of defense. If a company actually puts up a legal defense, they drop the lawsuit.

I'm a little surprised that the courts don't get cranky at the firm that files hundreds of cases and then retracts pretty much all of them. It seems like red flag behavior that should be investigated. Is there just a lack of oversight on legal firms? It seems to take exceptionally egregious behavior before anybody steps in.

In some states for some actions there is a rule that disallows retracting a suit after an answer is filed. Might be useful for patents in federal law. That's for Congress to take up.

> any foreign order censoring EFF would be unenforceable in the United States under the First Amendment and the Securing the Protection of Our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act (SPEECH Act).

This way of naming laws is incredibly childish.

on its face it's pretty stupid: acronyms that are so contrived (or worse, misleading) that you have to shake your head when you hear them.

but there is at least a little bit of value to having a brief, specific name to use when referring to it that somehow relates to the topic at hand.

Speak for yourself, I like it. I mean, the whole reason the SPEECH Act exists is to be a “fuck you” to countries like the UK with plaintiff-friendly libel laws trying to get those judgements enforced in the US, so the immature name is kind of fitting.

This is good for the EFF in the short term, but what if the Australian court finds that the EFF is ignoring its order and so must pay fines?

Perhaps in response to US court saying "the Australian court lacked jurisdiction over EFF", the Australian court will say that the US court has no jurisdiction in Australia. The Australian court could conceivably force the EFF to change how its site is shown to people in Australia. Then after realizing that people in Australia can still access the US version of the EFF's site, force the EFF to change its site in all countries.

This sort of problem could become more common, such as the case that Google lost where the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Google had to remove results in violation of Canadian law from all Google results worldwide.

Unless the EFF site is hosted in Australia, such a ruling cannot have any effect. A court could force Australian ISPs to block eff.org though. Interesting things could also happen if the EFF used an Australian DNS provider, but that is quite unlikely.

It gets blocked at the ISP level. Nothing to do with DNS providers.

> the Australian court will say that the US court has no jurisdiction in Australia

One would hope that'd be a given and go without saying.

> The Australian court could conceivably force the EFF to change how its site is shown to people in Australia

Not without jurisdiction over the EFF they can't.

> Then after realizing that people in Australia can still access the US version of the EFF's site, force the EFF to change its site in all countries.

Not without jurisdiction over the EFF they can't.

It just seems like the US court decided that the Australian court had no jurisdiction over the EFF. But does the Australian court agree with the US court's ruling? It may or it may not. Evidently the Australian court at one point believed it had jurisdiction because it took up the case in the first place and issued a ruling. To me just as an observer it seems that the Australian court gets to decide what is under its jurisdiction.

> it seems that the Australian court gets to decide what is under its jurisdiction.

Nope

To have jurisdiction over something, you need to have enforcement power there. The Australian court can make any claims they like, fine EFF, even charge its officers with contempt of court - but I don't see how this could possibly be enforced.

Couldn’t they just tell Australien ISP to block their IPs?

Sure. But that's enforcement against the ISPs, not EFF itself.

EFF officers won't be able to vacation in Australia.

countries' laws only apply within its borders. An Australian court cannot fine the EFF or force them to modify their website because it does not operate within Australia, they have no ability to "force" the EEF to do anything. Google only had to obey the Canadian Court because it has operates in Canada [0]

[0]: https://www.google.ca/about/locations/?region=north-america

Could they obtain an injunction forcing Australian ISPs to block the EFF website?

Possibly, although that depends on Australian law, may be impractical, and will be of limited effectiveness.

They can censor EFF's website against Australians. There's a Internet censorship scheme available to courts.

Countries laws apply wherever they say they do. Whether they are able to enforce them is a secondary issue.

Some countries do claim jurisdiction outside their own borders for certain types of cases.

Generally only for their own citizens. This covers, for instance, cases of sex tourism.

The German criminal law explicitly covers e.g. all cases of money counterfeiting, human trafficking, and war crimes worldwide regardless of nationality. They have given themselves some binding restrictions on what cases should be prosecuted. Of course enforcement is usually hard to impossible so it does not get used often. But just as an example, a German court has sentenced an Rwandan FDLR president for assisting war crimes even though there is absolutely no connection to Germany.

Germany is not alone in claiming universal jurisdiction for certain crimes.

The EU GDPR regulation applies to people interacting with citizens of the EU, not only EU citizens.

Law can certainly apply to foreign legal entities as defined by the local legislation if the legal code permits such.

EFF Australia should just repost the EFF US post and see what happens. :)

The post didn’t make clear if EFF US contested the case in South Australia at all. In which case it was probably a default judgement and unlikely based on merit?

After its thorough analysis, the court declared “(1) that the Australian Injunction is repugnant to the United States Constitution and the laws of California and the Unites States..

Wow, now that's a judicial smack down.

This is a term of art, defined in the relevant statute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/4104

> Any United States person against whom a foreign judgment is entered on the basis of the content of any writing, utterance, or other speech by that person that has been published, may bring an action in district court, under section 2201(a), for a declaration that the foreign judgment is repugnant to the Constitution or laws of the United States.

I suspect that the court in fact found the patent to be stupid (not merely "protected opinion"), but stopped short of writing that into the verdict. The EFF substantiate their "stupid" accusation with reason; it's not just schoolyard name-calling.

But can EFF officials still travel to Australia now?

It’s a civil case and it’s against the organization, so yes?

If they are fined or in contempt of court ... I would recommend consulting with an Australian lawyer and then the Australian embassy before boarding a plane to Australia.

It's hard to even call that a legal system, when a court can find "stupid" to be a statement of fact.

I’m certainly not familiar with Australian politics or law, but is it not surprising that the Australian court would grant the injunction in the first place?

Australia has some of the most draconian anti-libel laws in the English-speaking world.

A judge recently sent a blogger to jail for 4 months for "libel" even though the truth of the matter was not disputed.

A book on Chinese bribing of Australian politicians has been withdrawn after defamation threats from these politicians.

This was largely unreported in the Australian press, only in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/australia/china-aus...

Could you point me to a source about the defamation threats that hampered this story from being published in Australia.

Was on the front page of abc's news site... not sure how unreported that was : http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-13/academic-claims-hes-be...

Good but unsuprising. A much more newsworthy story would be if a US Court ruled otherwise.

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