It's striking how drones have passed from a mysterious weapon used to wreak destruction in distant lands to something that could well become a familiar sight in the skies of the US and Europe. Meanwhile, the technology is progressing rapidly, allowing drones to fly in synchronized swarms and even to be printed out by the sheet. But what might some of the effects on our daily lives be -- for example in the sphere of privacy?

That's what an interesting post by David Eaves begins to explore. As he points out, some uses of drones seem so sensible that it would be almost irresponsible not to adopt them:

it is entirely conceivable that, in 5-7 years, there could be drones that would follow your child as he walks to school. You can of course, already choose to monitor your child by giving them a cell phone and tracking the GPS device within it, but a drone would have several advantages. It would be harder for someone to destroy or "disconnect" from your child. It could also record and save remotely everything that is going on - in order to prevent anyone from harassing or bullying them. It might even remind them to look both ways before crossing the street, in case they forget. Or, because of its high vantage point, it could pick out and warn your child of cyclists and cars they failed to observe. Once your kid is safely at school the drone could whiz home and recharge in time to walk them home at the end of the day. This may all seem creepy to you, but if such a drone cost $100 dollars, how many parents do you think would feel like it was "the responsible thing to do." I suspect a great deal.

Given the continuing success of Facebook despite the well-publicized issues around privacy, there's probably not much we can do to stop people adopting drones in these ways -- and why should we, when they obviously offer clear benefits in many situations? The best we can do is to encourage people to think through the consequences of taking this road before we set off down it, accompanied by our swarm of personal drones.

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• Greg Smith resigned from Goldman Sachs, and he had a lot to say about how the company changed on his way out. "People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm..." [url]
• Stephen Elop's "burning platform" memo was published a little over a year ago in 2011. Has Nokia hit the water yet? [url]
• Brad Garlinghouse wrote Yahoo's "Peanut Butter Manifesto" back in 2006. It looks like that peanut butter is being spread thick on patent trolling now. We should all hate peanut butter, indeed. [url]
• James Whittaker says there's a big difference between the Google culture and the newer Google+ culture. Guess which one he thinks is double plus ungood. [url]
• To discover more interesting business-related content, check out what the deal is on StumbleUpon. [url]  

Was it a spur of the moment decision on your part to post the letter?

No, no, no. My friends and my son, we've been working on this for the past eight or nine years. We have all the contracts, all the record labels, all of that information together. It's a good time because of Occupy. My wife is a paralegal, so she's been able to do a great job preparing all of the paperwork.

So you're going to sue them directly? This isn't just a press campaign?

We're gonna correct our situation.

Do you think you'll succeed?

I hope so. I'm gonna do it for every musician who's been treated the way I have.

We've often criticized the entertainment industry for their use of utterly bogus math to claim massive, completely unrealistic losses from piracy. As Mike once noted, "it would actually be kind of funny... if policy makers and the press didn't actually believe those numbers and pass bad legislation based on them."

That said, it can still be pretty damn funny, as this brilliant 5-minute TED talk by Rob Reid demonstrates:

If you didn't watch the video (you should), it's a sarcastic take on "©opyright Math™" in which Reid plays along with the industry's numbers in order to expose how ridiculous they are:

The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that back in '98 the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people. Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people. And so the job losses that came with the internet and all that content theft have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries. This is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day. And some people think that string theory is tough.

Reid doesn't do any actual debunking, because he doesn't need to—the numbers are so plainly false that just putting them in the spotlight is enough to get the audience laughing. It's a lot of fun, but it also underlines the bigger question: why do journalists and policy makers still blindly accept and repeat those same numbers? Hopefully, as more and more people recognize the industry's claims for the comedic fiction that they are, that will begin to change.

Sometime earlier this year, a provider of communication services in the United States "perhaps a phone company, perhaps Twitter" got a letter from the FBI demanding it turn over information on one, or possibly even hundreds, of its customers. The letter instructed the company to never disclose the existence of the demand to anyone "in particular, the target of the investigation..."

[....]

But this time, the company that received the request pushed back. It told the agency that it wanted to tell its customer that he or she was being targeted, which would give the customer a chance to fight the request in court, as a group of Twitter users did last year when the Justice Department sought their records under a different kind of request. The minor defiance in this latest case was enough to land the NSL request in a federal court docket last Friday, where the government filed a request for a court order to force the company to adhere to the gag order.

"Our industries do something that no one else can do," the Motion Picture Association of America's Fritz Attaway said at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting this morning. "We create content that people want to have."

"Right doesn't always prevail," Attaway said of SOPA and PIPA. "This time, it didn't, because our opponents were able to energize a grassroots response. In my view, and I think all of us would agree, [the protest against SOPA and PIPA was spread] primarily through disinformation and spinning their interest in a way that captured the attention of a number of consumers."

The RIAA's Sherman hopes further copyright discussions will be more "rational" than the debate over SOPA and PIPA. "The digital tsunami we encountered with SOPA and PIPA—we're not going to get the same kind of engagement when we talk about statutory damages or open works," he said. "We'll have the opportunity for a more rational discussion."

After we moved in, we were asked to file patents for anything and everything we’d invented while working on Upcoming.org. Every Yahoo employee was encouraged to participate in their “Patent Incentive Program,” with sizable bonuses issued to everyone who took the time to apply.

Now, I’ve always hated the idea of software patents. But Yahoo assured us that their patent portfolio was a precautionary measure, to defend against patent trolls and others who might try to attack Yahoo with their own holdings. It was a cold war, stockpiling patents instead of nuclear arms, and every company in the valley had a bunker full of them.

Against my better judgement, I sat in a conference room with my co-founders and a couple of patent attorneys and told them what we’d created. They took notes and created nonsensical documents that I still can’t make sense of. In all, I helped Yahoo file eight patent applications.

Years after I left I discovered to my dismay that four of them were granted by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office.

I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it.

The scary part is that even the most innocuous patent can be used to crush another’s creativity. One of the patents I co-invented is so abstract, it could not only cover Facebook’s News Feed, but virtually any activity feed. It puts into very sharp focus the trouble with software patents: Purposefully vague wording invites broad interpretation.

As Techdirt revealed a couple of days ago, one reason why the European Commission decided to refer ACTA to the European Court of Justice was a fear that another SOPA disaster was in the offing. It's a little too early to be sure, but we may be seeing the first signs that the equally problematic TPP agreement is also running into problems because of heightened sensitivity to key issues in the wake of the Net-based revolt against SOPA.

Here's a report by Sean Flynn, on the latest round of TPP negotiations, held recently in Australia:

Contrasting with apparent progress on some other chapters, which were declared “on track” by negotiators, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement’s intellectual property chapter appears to have stalled in Melbourne. According to some sources, the 10 day negotiation yielded no meaningful progress on the intellectual property chapter. This is as some of the most controversial aspects of the U.S. proposal, including internet service liability and the “May 2007” access to medicines issues, came to the table.

What's new, though, is the growing general concern about TPP's impact on access to medicines, particularly the low-cost generics that are important for many countries in the Pacific region. KEI's Krista Cox wrote about this in her summary of the Melbourne meeting:

The afternoon session [of the TPP Stakeholder Forum] began with eight representatives of the generic pharmaceutical industry giving strong statements in opposition to the US "access window" text, opposing in particular the provisions related to patent term extensions, patent linkage, and exclusive rights over test data. These representatives noted that the US proposal would hinder access to affordable generic medicines

The Australian chief negotiator may think it is "common practice not to release texts during negotiations of free trade agreements", but that was before SOPA. A decade ago, sharing drafts and soliciting feedback from the general public would have been difficult. Today, it's easy. After SOPA, it's unacceptable not to.

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In a victory for free speech, PayPal today announced plans to revise their content policies to allow Smashwords writers full freedom to publish and sell legal ebooks.

This is a victory for all writers and readers. It removes credit card companies, banks and payment processors from the business of censoring legal fiction. It creates a new precedent that should allow other payment processors who have previously discriminated against legal fiction to relax their policies.

It will make more fiction more available to more readers. It gives writers greater freedom to express themselves. It gives readers more freedom to decide what they want to experience in the privacy of their own imagination.

First and foremost, we are going to focus this policy only on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text. The policy will prohibit use of PayPal for the sale of e-books that contain child pornography, or e-books with text and obscene images of rape, bestiality or incest (as defined by the U.S. legal standard for obscenity: material that appeals to the prurient interest, depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value).

The music streaming service Spotify has adopted a rather unusual pattern of launches around the world. Founded in Sweden, it spread gradually to various parts of Europe, and only later arrived in the US. The main reason for this slow rollout seems to have been difficulty striking licensing deals with the major recording companies.

That's also why Spotify has only just launched in the important market of Germany. The main problem is the notoriously unhelpful German music collection society GEMA. Surprisingly, Spotify still doesn't have a license, but it turns out that's only one of its problems in the country. Via Twitter, Arjan points out that Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, Peter Schaar, and Berlin's Data Protection Commissioner, Alexander Dix, are both unhappy with Spotify, since it seems to be incompatible with Germany's data protection laws (German original.)

The problem arises from the fact that Spotify requires users to have a Facebook account to sign up. That means it is not possible to use the service anonymously or pseudonymously -- as required by German law. It's not yet clear what the data protection commissioners intend to do about this -- Dix, for example, is simply recommending that Spotify changes its business model to render it compatible with German laws.

It's rather appropriate that when Spotify launches in Germany, a country well-known for its concerns about privacy, it should encounter problems in this area -- just as it was probably inevitable that soon after its arrival in the US, Spotify was sued for alleged patent infringement.

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