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The Law in GIFs: An Extremely Rude Appeal

This week's important legal news.

Every week there's a veritable plague of new lawsuits, hearings, appeals, and Congressional bills. How is anyone supposed to keep up with what's happening in cyberlaw? With a GIF summary of course.

Washington Redskins File an Extremely Rude Appeal

The Redskins are appealing their appeal from the Trademark Trial & Appeals Board decision to revoke their trademark for "Redskins" on the basis that it is a vicious racial slur (otherwise known as "disparaging" in the law). Their argument is basically that the USPTO trademark database is already full of vicious racial slurs. Read the brief here if you want your eyeballs to melt off in embarrassment.

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A Very Boring Constitutional Law Case Over Very Creepy Data Collection Practices

The Supreme Court heard Spokeo v. Robins on Monday, which is a super boring case about Article III of the US Constitution. Also it might determine the future of privacy litigation in the United States and plus it's about Congress's power to regulate creepy data broker sites that give up estimates of your credit score to anyone for profit.

EFF Asks Appeals Court to Shut Down Hellhole of Patent Trolls

Almost all the patent litigation in the United States goes through the patent-holder-friendly Eastern District of Texas, which is kind of weird? Anyways the EFF wants that to stop and lol nothing matters.

Obama is Gonna Sign the TPP

A massive (and very secretive) plurilateral trade agreement has been coming down the pipeline for years. It lengthens copyright terms for many of its signatory countries (and locks in the current length of US terms), it does weird things with circumvention of DRM (similar to 1201 in the US), and there's some nasty ISP site-blocking stuff? Obama's totally cool with it.

Tl;dr: Ugh.