I'm obviously a big fan of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, but I've always argued that it's just one of many models that content creators can use to succeed today. In fact, for a long time, I've felt that the biggest thing that was missing from Kickstarter was any sort of ongoing payment system. It's entirely project based, and thus it's not the best tool for ongoing revenue. For many years I've been interested in ideas for more ongoing revenue streams, and even proposed the idea of "subscribing" to a band's output nearly a decade ago. So it's good to see that some folks are exploring some of these ideas in much more detail.

I met Jack Conte a few years ago, after having written about him and his band Pomplamoose a few times. I'd always been impressed by Pomplamoose's ability to really connect with their fans and to build a way to support themselves via that strong connection. But in my brief interactions with Jack, it quickly became clear that he thinks deeply about different ideas for revenue models, and so it's little surprise that he's now built what seems like a pretty cool platform for ongoing support for content creators. It's basically a platform, like Kickstarter, but rather than backing a project, you back the production of certain types of regular content. So, for example, you could promise that you'll pay $5 every time Jack releases a new video (and you can put limits on how much you pay, so he doesn't get away with suddenly releasing 1,000 videos at once). It's called Patreon, and it's got a nice, simple video explaining how it works: I'm sure some will argue that this is just a "paywall," but it's actually the opposite of that. People aren't paying you to get access to the content. The content will be available elsewhere (often for free). They're paying to support your continued production (i.e., supporting future production, rather than paying to access past productions) and they can get extra benefits (added value) as supporters, such as Google Hangouts with the creators. Some of this is quite like a few of the popular subscription options in our Techdirt Insider Shop, though rather than monthly, the amounts are triggered per creation (I'm not sure that would work for a blog like ours that produces a bunch of content every day, but I could see how it would be quite cool for less frequent types of creative endeavors).

Either way, I'm glad to see some new platforms popping up like this. For a little while, it had been getting kind of annoying to see just how many Kickstarter clones were popping up (including a new one from Donald Trump?!?). You never know, of course, if Patreon will catch on, but conceptually the model makes a lot of sense for many types of content creators. In some ways, it seems like a better model for connecting with "true fans" than something like a Kickstarter. While Kickstarter has the appeal of "this is a big event, join us!" it would be nice to see some more ongoing, sustainable model platforms become popular as well.

Here's an amusing one out of the UK. Nick Henderson has created something of a Swiftian "modest proposal" for people who feel guilty about infringement. Modeled after the idea of carbon offsets to become "carbon neutral," he suggests a process for becoming "piracy neutral," which is that if you happen to infringe by downloading an unauthorized song, you should freely release a track of your own composition into the world without restrictions. Henderson truly is trying to give back to the world, because he recorded some basic stems that he's put together and is offering up as the "piracy neutral fun pack", such that you can remix them yourself to create your own new music in an effort to become "piracy neutral."

And, because people who angrily write comments on this site rarely read to the end of the post, I'll just point out that this is a joke, not anything even remotely serious. Laughter is good.

Maybe you remember your graduation. Maybe you don't. If you were lucky, you graduated college and knew exactly what you wanted to do. You had a job all lined up, and when asked about your plans, you could avoid saying anything along the lines of:

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.

Here are just a few more pithy words for recent graduates. (PS. Congratulations!)

• Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, spoke publicly at his alma mater for graduation. "The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few." [url]
• Everyone should pursue their passion, right? But what if you don't know what your passion is? Economist Tyler Cowen tried to respond to this question, but Cowen admitted he was stumped on how to pick a particular career path. [url]
• The world's first commencement speech via Twitter was just 20 tweets long. If you thought that a 140 character limit might deliver more profound or sage advice, tweet #12 is "Never tweet pictures of yourself in underwear..." nuff said? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

We've talked in the past about how patent trolling operations love to use shell companies to hide who actually owns the patents. Intellectual Ventures has thousands of shells, but it's even worse in many cases when it's smaller trolls, where no one has any idea who's actually behind the trolling. You may remember a few years back, when Reddit, Digg, Fark, Slashdot and others were sued over a bogus patent held by a shell company called "Gooseberry Natural Resources LLC," and we wondered if the collective communities behind those sites might be able to figure out who actually owned the patent in question. But even those hive minds failed to turn up much of use.

Thankfully, Rep. Ted Deutch has introduced a bill that would require a true disclosure of the owners of patents that are being used in litigation. Specifically, the bill would require a much clearer accounting of who "any real party in interest" would be concerning any patent. Failure to do so would mean that it would limit the ability of those patent owners to collect on any damages. Specifically, patent owners can only collect on damages that occur after the true owners of the patent are disclosed. This would help a tremendous amount, since so much in the patent troll world today is done in incredibly shady ways. It is believed that a very large number of patent trolling operations are actually run by patent lawyers themselves, who saw how lucrative it was, but who don't want to be publicly identified with their trolling. Forcing the actual owners to identify themselves would be a big help in making sure that people actually understand what's happening with patent trolling.

It's interesting to see Congress suddenly interested in patent reform again, even if in a piecemeal fashion. After spending nearly a decade fighting over a "comprehensive" patent reform bill that became the America Invents Act (a watered-down, mostly useless, bill) we kept hearing people say that patent reform was "done" in Congress. But in the past few months, three key bills have been introduced, each targeting the patent trolling problem. There was Rep. DeFazio's SHIELD Act, which would make it easier to shift fees and make trolls responsible for the costs of bogus lawsuits. Then, a few weeks ago, there was Senator Schumer's bill to make it easier to get tech patents reviewed relatively quickly by the USPTO to see if we can throw out more bad patents. And now this bill, called the End Anonymous Patents Act, from Rep. Deutch.

So far, none of the bills has received much momentum, but it's good to see that more and more people in Congress are realizing that the patent system is incredibly broken, and that trolls are a big part of that.

Back in 2010, we wrote about Google's Eric Schmidt suggesting that in the future kids might change their names as they reach adulthood in order to disconnect their present-selves from their youthful indiscretions that were recorded permanently online. That seemed a bit silly to us at the time, but Schmidt is still focused on this basic concept apparently. His latest is the desire for some sort of delete button for the internet, again as a way to cover up some youthful indiscretions:

"In America, there's a sense of fairness that's culturally true for all of us," Schmidt said. "The lack of a delete button on the Internet is a significant issue. There is a time when erasure is a right thing."

Of course, this makes me wonder, what the hell did Eric Schmidt do as a kid that was so bad?

Yes, yes, we erase the criminal records of youthful offenders when they come of age, but I think this is something different. Trying to delete factual information from the internet is a quixotic task, unlikely to yield much that's beneficial.

Perhaps instead of trying to delete the past, society as a whole will become a lot more accepting of the fact that kids do stupid things when they're young. And many of them learn valuable lessons from those stupid things and they grow up to be better people. Plenty of folks have funny tales of their youthful indiscretions and, while these stories may be more difficult to embellish for effect if the details are all sitting on YouTube, does it really make more sense to try to delete that history or just to recognize that kids grow up and things they did as teenagers do not reflect how they're likely to act as adults?

We've argued for quite some time that law enforcement's desire to require backdoors for wiretapping in all electronic communications is really dumb, because it won't just be law enforcement using it (and, when they use it, it won't just be for legitimate purposes). As soon as you have that backdoor in place, you've pretty much guaranteed that it becomes something of a target. And the news that broke earlier this week about how Chinese hackers who broke into Google servers a few years ago were targeting their database of which accounts had been flagged for national security surveillance makes this point that much clearer. The people doing this kind of hacking aren't dumb: they know that there are weaknesses where they can probe. A few weeks back, a Microsoft exec had actually revealed that their own analysis of similar attacks on Microsoft's servers from China showed the same basic target and discussed the serious implications.

"What we found was the attackers were actually looking for the accounts that we had lawful wiretap orders on," Aucsmith says. "So if you think about this, this is brilliant counter-intelligence. You have two choices: If you want to find out if your agents, if you will, have been discovered, you can try to break into the FBI to find out that way. Presumably that's difficult. Or you can break into the people that the courts have served paper on and see if you can find it that way. That's essentially what we think they were trolling for, at least in our case."

The more openings and the more data that is shared, the more openings and opportunities there are for people who you don't want to see that data to have access to it. That should be a major concern. Just before all of this was revealed, we had written about a new report how such backdoors basically destroy any competent attempt at cybersecurity. Julian Sanchez highlights how those who think this isn't a problem are almost certainly confused about how computer security works.

Defenders of the FBI proposal tend to pooh-pooh security concerns raised about requirisng such backdoors: Our brilliant American programmers, they assert, will find ways to enable wiretapping without creating new vulnerabilities. But if a company like Google, with its massive financial resources and a stable of some of the smartest coders anywhere, can be victimized in this way, how realistic is it to expect thousands of Internet startups to achieve better security?

Creating more access to information that should be secret might help law enforcement, at the expense of our civil liberties, but it's also going to help those with nefarious intent quite a bit. And that should be a serious concern.

A pair of the cell phone recordings of the David Silva beating have been released by attorney Daniel Rodriguez. 23ABC News received the videos first, both of which capture the final moments of Silva's life. Unfortunately for those seeking more clarity as to the actions of the nine responding officers, these videos fail to provide much insight into the officers' actions during the previous 30-40 minutes.

Both videos were shot after the batons had stopped (allegedly) swinging. [The videos won't embed so you'll have to click through to view them.] In the first, Silva is surrounded by several members of law enforcement who are obviously still restraining him. You can hear faint orders to "get down" being yelled by the officers, but the most noticeable sounds come from Silva himself, who spends most of the runtime screaming.

The second video shows the efforts of law enforcement and the responding EMS unit to revive Silva. One of the offscreen voices makes a couple of interesting statements. First, he points out that officers "stood around for five minutes" by Silva's unmoving body before attempting resuscitation. The second, echoed by a female voice, lends some credence to the story put forth by several witnesses: "Now, it's a murder scene."

Also of note, at 5:19 a second cell phone, presumably recording, shows up in frame. This would appear to be the other cell phone that was seized by the Sheriff's Department, the one on which the footage is no longer available.

The witnesses claim that both phones had footage of officers striking and kicking Silva, but with both phones now returned to their owners, none of the footage has survived. Both phones made their way from the deputies who seized the phones to the Kern County Sheriff's Office, which then shared the phones with the Bakersfield PD and the FBI. The FBI has apparently analyzed both phones but has yet to release its findings.

Here's where we stand right now, according to Rodriguez:

Rodriguez told ABC23 that "the more incriminating video was one on the other cellphone." He said that video was shot "while the batons were swinging." Rodriguez added the second phone was returned to his client with no video. If a video was erased from that phone, he said, it could not be recovered because of the type of the device.

David Cohn, the attorney for David Silva's family, has his own concerns:

[Cohn] said his clients are concerned that the videos might be erased or destroyed, either accidentally or on purpose. He has not seen them.

"If I'd heard that they'd given them to the FBI, ok," he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "But the Bakersfield Police Department, whom they work with on a daily basis? It certainly doesn't have the look of impartiality."

Cohn also (obviously) has his concerns about the phone seizures themselves.

Cohn said the Sheriff's Department went "well beyond a reasonable search" in obtaining the videos, making no effort to ask for copies or voluntary cooperation from the witnesses.

"They held these people hostage for several hours pending the serving of a search warrant. I've never heard of that before," he said.

Beyond the deputies' abuse of these witnesses' rights, there's another aspect that may have made these seizures illegal, as posited by ExCop-LawStudent.

The Privacy Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. 2000aa(a) (hereafter PPA), states:

Notwithstanding any other law, it shall be unlawful for a government officer or employee, in connection with the investigation or prosecution of a criminal offense, to search for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication….

This law provides that if a person takes a video of police action and intends to disseminate it to the public, the police can only obtain the video by subpoena, not by a search warrant. In this case neither of the individuals who had their property seized were suspects in the crime being investigated, the death of David Silva at the hands of Kern County Sheriff’s deputies, nor were they being arrested.

The sheriff’s office was aware of the video because the individual that taped the beating called 911.

Further, that individual informed the 911 personnel that she intended to disseminate the video to the public (at 0:46 of the call), saying “I’m sending it to the news.” At this point, the Sheriff’s office was on notice that this was “work product” protected by the Privacy Protection Act, and should have been obtained by subpoena, not by a search warrant. Indeed, the law specifically provides that a warrant can only be used after a subpoena has failed to obtain the material.

In support of this argument, the author cites the infamous case brought against the US by Steve Jackson Games, which had several work products seized by US Secret Service agents via a warrant, despite not being a suspect in the investigation at hand. The end result was $50,000 in damages plus attorney's fees being awarded to the game maker for these illegal seizures.

The video supposedly containing the most damning footage is missing. What we do have available only shows the aftermath of the beating. We're still waiting for much more information to be released. There's been no word back from the FBI on its analysis of the phones. The coroner has yet to release an official cause of death and the sheriff's office has stated this process could take up to four months. Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood continues to make concerned noises, but the lack of conclusive video has also prompted a bit more hedging, along with some unfortunate statements.

"I have seen the video," Youngblood said last week. "I cannot speculate whether they acted appropriately or not just by looking at the video."

The sheriff, however, acknowledged that there is a great deal of public concern about the incident and subsequent investigation. "It is not just troubling to the public, it is not just troubling to news media, it is troubling to me," he said. In an interview with The Times, he said the credibility of the department is at stake.

"Baton strikes were used, but what I don't know is how many and where they were on the body and if they caused significant injury that caused death," he said.

Youngblood said the baton is a less lethal weapon, and because of that its use doesn’t usually lead to deputies being placed on leave. But he said the head is not an appropriate place for a baton strike.

"Sometimes in the heat of battle, the baton doesn't go where you want it to go.... If someone has 20 baton strikes to the head, OK, that is easy for us. But when there is a fight or scuffle and a baton strike goes where it should not ... then you have to evaluate,” he said.

The passive voice in this context is bordering on reprehensible. There's a person controlling the baton and that person presumably should have the training to ensure proper "placement" of the weapon. The two deputies seen on the surveillance tape seem to be controlling their batons very well, using both hands to swing and connect with Silva. Nine officers swinging batons at one man are going to run out of "appropriate" real estate on a human body very quickly.

Youngblood seems to be drawing a line between proper baton use and a savage beating, but he's drawing the line in his office's favor. If all officers aimed exclusively and repeatedly for Silva's head, it's an open-and-shut case. But, if Silva struggled, or if blows rained down on other parts of his body as well, it's probably just good (if a bit too aggressive) police work (pending "evaluation").

Youngblood's statement serves two purposes: to define how far officers under his control actually have to go in terms of violence in order to warrant further review or disciplinary action, and to justify the fact that his deputies are still on active duty, despite earlier reporting that they had been placed on paid administrative leave until the investigation was complete.

It is common to place law enforcement officers on paid leave during investigations of arrest-related deaths, but the Californian reported the deputies involved remain on duty.

Youngblood's deputies who allegedly beat a man to death are still on patrol. One hopes that they won't find themselves in any situations in which a baton strike might be used, or go where the deputies "don't want it to go."

AT&T isn't going to let something like "net neutrality" slow it down from shaking every spare cent out of its customer base. (Source: I'm a customer. Also: see these.) Beginning last year with its blocking of Apple's Facetime app (exempting customers who were paying for higher service tiers) and continuing on through its recent lockout of Google Hangouts, AT&T has skirted neutrality by using one term: pre-loaded.

In its mind, as long as an app is "pre-loaded" by phone manufacturers (and competing options are available), AT&T can block app functionality if it feels it's somehow leaving money on the table. Of course, this irritates many of its customers and brings with it an uncomfortable amount of heat as the word travels around the web.

AT&T has now issued another statement to critics of its Hangout-blocking, one which sends the clear message that the company will gladly welcome streaming video apps with open arms (even pre-loaded apps), just as soon as it's able to simultaneously welcome a fat stream of income.

AT&T has issued a second, follow up statement that doesn't make a whole lot more sense than the first one did, and again tries to place the blame at the feet of OS and device makers. AT&T does, however, promise that they'll stop blocking video chat apps from running over their network by the end of this year:

"For video chat apps that come pre-loaded on devices, we currently give all OS and device makers the ability for those apps to work over cellular for our customers who are on Mobile Share or Tiered plans. Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry have chosen to enable this for their pre-loaded video chat apps. And by mid-June, we’ll have enabled those apps over cellular for our unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices from those three manufacturers.

Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end.

Today, all of our customers can use any mobile video chat app that they download from the Internet, such as Skype."

AT&T's buying time while trying to appear to be working towards a "solution" for all of its customers. The longer it can hold out, the more likely the chance that someone upgrades or switches devices, thus pulling them off their grandfathered unlimited data plans and onto tiered/metered plans that earn AT&T a bit more money.

It tries to present this as a network issue, but Karl Bode translates AT&T's corporatespeak into the miserable truth:

In other words this isn't really technical (AT&T's LTE network is currently ranked the fastest available in the States), it's a way to bully unlimited users on to costlier plans. It's also a network neutrality violation, regardless of AT&T's choice of language.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a business attempting to earn more money. But the key word here is "earn." AT&T's just trying to grab more income while offering nothing in return but a bunch of laughable statements -- both in regards to the current issues, as well as the non-stop "congestion" posturing it uses to justify limited, expensive data plans. It's obviously most interested in tying users to high-margin "services." The least it could do is drop the obviously ridiculous statements and tell its customers they can have what they want just as soon as it gets what it wants.

In a story that sounds mighty similar to the Andrew "weev" Aurenheimer situation, two reporters from the Scripps News service have been told that they may be hit with Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) charges after a Google search they did turned up personal data on 170,000 customers that two telcos left exposed. At issue are low-income customers of YourTel and TerraCom, who provide service for the FCC's Lifeline, a phone service for people who are enrolled in state or federal assistance programs. Apparently, the real issue was a company called Vcare, which the two telcos outsourced certain services to. The Scripps reporters noted that they did nothing more than a Google search:

The unprotected TerraCom and YourTel records came to light through the simplest of tools: a reporter’s Google search of TerraCom.

The records include 44,000 application or certification forms and 127,000 supporting documents or “proof” files, such as scans or photos of food-stamp cards, driver’s licenses, tax records, U.S. and foreign passports, pay stubs and parole letters. Taken together, the records expose residents of at least 26 states.

The application records, drawn from 18 of those states and generally dated from last September through November, list potential customers’ names, signatures, birth dates, home addresses and partial or full Social Security numbers. The proof files, from last September through April, include residents of at least eight remaining states.

Of course, rather than be thankful to the reporters for letting them know about a huge security lapse, or be apologetic for revealing all sorts of key data on their customers, they decided to sue.

However, Vcare and the two telecom companies assert that the reporters "hacked" their way into the data using "automated" methods to access the data. And what was this malicious hacking tool that penetrated the security of Vcare's servers? In a letter sent to Scripps News by Jonathan D. Lee, counsel for both of the cell carriers, Lee said that Vcare's research had shown that the reporters were "using the 'Wget' program to search for and download the Companies' confidential data." GNU Wget is a free and open source tool used for batch downloads over HTTP and FTP. Lee claimed Vcare's investigation found the files were bulk-downloaded via two Scripps IP addresses.

I'm not sure how anyone could claim that the mere use of Wget constitutes a form of hacking, even under the extremely loose interpretations of the CFAA. However, as mentioned, the story does have similarities to the weev case -- except this time we're talking about reporters for a well known news service, rather than someone with a reputation as an internet troll. Hopefully, if the telcos do decide to actually file a lawsuit, it gets laughed out of court.

Another day, another story of a ridiculously overaggressive legal move by a big company. This time it's the NY Times, which turned its bogus nastygramming skills on a startup called Scroll Kit. Scroll Kit is a three person startup that tries to make a system to create more compelling publishing of stories easier. There's been a big push to make digital media more digitally native, and there have been a few cool examples of it in action, but it still tends to take a lot of development time -- something that Scroll Kit is looking to make easier. Neat. Of course, if you follow the media space, you'd know that last year, the NY Times put out a story called Snow Fall that was very well designed. I didn't think it was miraculous, but definitely a step up, and showed a better way to tell a story online. The old media guard has been spazzing out over Snow Fall as if it was the greatest thing ever, which is silly -- and even the NYT itself is taking that one example way too seriously in turning "snow fall" into a verb inside its newsroom -- as in, "we need to 'snow fall' that story."

Okay. Whatever. The guys at Scroll Kit agreed that Snow Fall is a nice example, and they knew that it took the NY Times many months to design it. So, in a compelling example of their own product, they showed how Scroll Kit could be used to recreate Snow Fall's design elements in about an hour, and put up a video showing that. This is called "good marketing." But, to the NY Times, they claimed it was copyright infringement, sending the following email to Scroll Kit founder Cody Brown: First of all, there's a tremendously strong fair use argument here. Nothing in what Scroll Kit did with the video competed with the Snow Fall story in any way shape or form. The video was just a demonstration of its product and how you could use it to create a Snow Fall like experience. Still, the folks at Scroll Kit decided that fighting the NY Times wasn't worth the trouble, so they took down the video and sent off an email to the lawyer saying they had complied. But, apparently that wasn't enough for Deborah Beshaw-Farrell of the NY Times' legal department, as she sent off another letter, still complaining: The first letter was bad, but this one is downright ridiculous. Switching the video to private should certainly be enough. But, the claim that they need to remove any reference to the NY Times from the website, including a factual description of reality is completely bogus. It's just the NY Times acting as a legal bully. Brown publicly asked the NY Times to reconsider, noting that if it believes so strongly that things like Snow Fall are the future of news, it's pretty ridiculous for them to try to intimidate and shut down a startup looking to make that process easier.

In response to Brown's request for more info, he received a third email, from a different lawyer at the NY Times, Richard Samson, with a statement that is even more ridiculous:

Dear Mr. Brown: We are offended by the fact that you are promoting your tool, as a way to quickly replicate copyright-protected content owned by The New York Times Company. It also seems strange to me that you would defend your right to boast about how quickly you were able to commit copyright infringement:

The NYT spent hundreds of hours hand-coding “Snow Fall” We made a replica in an hour.

If you wouldn’t mind using another publication to advertise your infringement tool, we’d appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Richard Samson

Again, this is completely bogus on many levels. The tool is not "an infringement tool," it's a creative tool for creating this type of thing. Anyone with any even rudimentary knowledge of design and development know that it's fairly standard for people to create tools based on creating things that others have created in the past. In fact, lots of websites copy elements and style from other websites. Even the NY Times tends to be a fairly derivative site design-wise. Second: being "offended" is no legal basis for making a threat. Brown was not boasting about "committing copyright infringement," but about using a tool to be able to do a similar design. It had nothing to do with infringement, and everything to do with making the design process easier.

The NY Times is being absolutely ridiculous here.

Once again, however, we see what happens when companies focus on legal strategies rather than supporting innovation. Sure, Scroll Kit could make it easier for competitors to the NY Times to create compelling stories, but it also might help the NY Times drive its own efforts forward. Perhaps, rather than spend many months of its own designers' time, it could use something like Scroll Kit to make it easier for their staff to design such compelling stories. Instead, they focus on stifling it with highly questionable legal threats. You know how you can tell when a company is really in trouble? When it focuses on legal attacks on others, rather than driving its own innovation.