Yesterday, Techdirt reported on the UK government's plans to make publicly-funded scientific research freely available as open access. One concern was that its approach required funds to be diverted from research to pay for the article processing charges levied by so-called "gold" open access titles. One figure being bandied around was about $80 million per year, but a new report in the Guardian suggests this is a huge over-estimate, and that the true cost will be more like a fifth of that figure.

The same article notes that the government was not the only one making strong open access moves in the UK:

Research Councils UK, a coalition of the UK's biggest research funders, released its own updated open access policy, which is even more forthright than the broader government policy in requiring true open access that allows free commercial re-use. And maybe most important of all in the long term, flying in under the radar, the Higher Education Funding Council for England announced plans to require open access in all publications evaluated for the Research Evaluation Framework. This will remove the main reason that traditionalists have shied away from open access: fear that publications in newer OA journals will not be perceived as prestigious as those in long-established subscription journals.

As that points out, the requirements of these two research funders are even more stringent than the UK government's plans, and should accelerate the move to open access well in advance of the latter's introduction, by placing open access at the heart of academic evaluation in the UK.

Hard on the heels of those UK announcements, the European Commission has now released details of its own proposed open access policy:

the Commission will make open access to scientific publications a general principle of Horizon 2020, the EU's Research & Innovation funding programme for 2014-2020. As of 2014, all articles produced with funding from Horizon 2020 will have to be accessible:

articles will either immediately be made accessible online by the publisher ('Gold' open access) -- up-front publication costs can be eligible for reimbursement by the European Commission; or

researchers will make their articles available through an open access repository no later than six months (12 months for articles in the fields of social sciences and humanities) after publication ('Green' open access).

Researchers can therefore opt either for immediate "gold" open access, where fees are covered by the EU, or to publish in traditional titles with delayed "green" open access afterwards. In addition, the Commission is hopping on the open data bandwagon:

The Commission will also start experimenting with open access to the data collected during publicly funded research (e.g. the numerical results of experiments), taking into account legitimate concerns related to the fundee's commercial interests or to privacy.

That may seem a little timid, but it's worth bearing in mind that the EU tends to move cautiously: it first started flirting with the idea of open access back in 2006, as this background page listing related initiatives make plain. Another aspect of open access that the European Commission has only begun to explore is providing the software used to produce scientific results (pdf), an idea discussed on Techdirt last month:

The Commission will also encourage, where appropriate, the publication of software codes used to produce or process the data.

It's worth emphasizing that these are just proposals, and subject to revision. But currently they include a call for individual EU countries to adopt similar policies with a goal of making 60% of European publicly-funded research articles available under open access by 2016. Together with all the other national moves around the world, the EU's far-reaching plans would seem to signal that open access has reached a tipping point, and could soon be the norm.

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We've seen it over and over again: some people seem to think that if anyone says something you don't like about you online, it's illegal, and you can go after them for it. Of course, in most places that's not even close to true, but it doesn't stop some people from trying. Slashdot alerts us to the news that police in Tasmania are so fed up with people coming to them about things they don't like online that they've put out a statement telling the public to stop contacting them whenever they find something they think is "abusive or harassing" on Facebook or other social media sites. They specifically state that they have no interest in censoring the internet:

"If the conduct complained of would not amount to an offence if it occurred off-line, then it is not an offence simply because in a particular instance it was undertaken with the aid of digital technology," the department noted.

"For example, complaints have been received about comments posted on Facebook which are abusive or harassing. If this behavior occurred in a public place it would not be a reportable offence.

"It is not the role of Tasmania Police to censor internet content."

My first thought was "good for them" for putting out such a statement. But, my second thought was to be surprised that so many people go to the police about such things. Perhaps it's a cultural difference, but here in the US, they'd just threaten to sue (or actually sue) in the courts directly, rather than seeking criminal charges that would involve law enforcement.

Human perception can be pretty strange sometimes. People with synesthesia experience some mixing of their senses, so that they can hear colors or taste colors. But the English language even contains some interesting phrases to describe various feelings, such as "green with envy". Here are just a few more interesting examples of sensory perception.

• The vast majority of people are trichromats who can perceive about a million shades of color, but there are also dichromats who see fewer colors -- as well as tetrachromats who can see a hundred million colors. But even if you can see those extra millions of colors, it's a bit difficult to describe them to others in words. [url]
• Movie posters from 1914 to 2012 are mostly blue and orange. The distribution of colors isn't too even, and the spread of the use of blue appears to be growing over time. [url]
• The color of food can really affect how it tastes. Red-colored drinks seem to taste sweeter for some people, and people are pretty bad at tasting flavors when the color of a drink doesn't match its flavor. [url]
• Adults and infants may perceive colors very differently -- with babies seeing colors directly, but adults seeing colors based on language interpretations. Interestingly, some Russian speakers may be able to see more shades of blue than English speakers. [url]

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

Last year we noted just how odd it was that a Novell antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft over Windows 95 was still going on, but it really was. However, it may finally be over. After the jury deadlocked in December, the court has dismissed the lawsuit, claiming that Novell failed to show sufficient evidence of antitrust violations by Microsoft. But have no fear, fans of 20 years ago: Novell has promised to appeal. All I can say to that is, wait, Novell still exists?

Wow. So earlier today, we wrote about how BMG issued a takedown on the new web-based ad put out by the Romney campaign, which included a brief clip of President Obama singing Al Green's "Let's Stay Together." As we argued, this use seemed to be pretty clearly "fair use." And, of course, it was noteworthy that BMG only seemed to go after the Romney ad, making it pretty clear that this was politically motivated. The original clips of Obama singing Al Green were all over YouTube... and BMG only chose to go after the one used in a Romney commercial. It appears that someone pointed out to BMG's lawyers that this looks really bad, so rather than backing down, BMG has doubled down and issued takedowns to a bunch of the original videos of Obama singing that one line from Al Green. Here's one that shows BMG issued the takedown. The original one that we linked to was actually from the Associated Press, who -- as a news organization -- has an even stronger fair use claim. But that video is missing as well, though it has a slightly different message on the site now: That's... weird, because the video was absolutely available just this morning. Has the Associated Press really decided to block that video in the US? Seems... strange. Why would the AP allow itself to be bullied like that? Because I'm curious about these things, I hopped on my handy dandy VPN system and magically transported my connection to Canada... where the video came back. Magic. So, it's not entirely clear what's going on here, but if you're in the US (and not using a VPN) it appears that these clips of Obama singing Al Green are quickly disappearing from the web, despite clear fair use claims. The entire thing is 9 seconds and there's no way that anyone could make a reasonable claim that this use takes away from the original work or somehow acts as a substitute.

And, of course, in true Streisand Effect manner, all this is doing is calling a lot more attention to the video... and BMG's ridiculous censorious response to the situation.

Update: And... as Michael Weinberg points out, BMG appears to only be targeting President Obama singing Al Green. There are tons of other clips of Al Green singing the song himself or others singing the song. All left up. Hmm...

Last week, we were among the first to call attention to the fact that Lamar Smith and the House Judiciary Committee were seeking to rush through an IP-related bill which was similar to a small part of SOPA. We noted at the time that this was a much smaller issue than the key points in SOPA that everyone objected to, but our main concern was the failure in process. The fight over SOPA was as much a complaint about the process by which IP bills get passed as it was about the substance -- and this is a point that Lamar Smith and the House Judiciary Committee clearly still have not realized.

In the wake of this, BNA's Tamlin Bason correctly noted a few factual errors in what a few of us had originally published about the bill. For example, I flipped the setup of the bill, saying that the attaches would be moving from USPTO to Commerce, rather than the other way around, as is the actual case (though, confusingly, the bill also elevates a role from the USPTO into Commerce). I admit that this was a mistake in the writeup, though one that had little bearing on the actual issues raised by the bill and the process by which it was being rushed through. In fact, the process itself was partly to blame. We were told about the existence of this bill and the fact that there would be a markup with less than 24 hours notice last Monday, giving us little time process all the fine print.

While supporters of the Judiciary Committee are now using these minor mistakes to claim that there's nothing at all wrong with the IPAA, that's simply incorrect. Gigi Sohn's careful analysis of the bill shows where there are serious concerns in the substance, mainly in the fact that the role of the IP attache continues to be to only push one side of the equation (enforcement) and completely ignore important limitations and exceptions. On top of that, it leaves the door open to massive expansion of the program. This is exactly how we described it in our original post: a way to expand this program, and a questionable way to get US diplomats doing what's in Hollywood's best interest, not the public's:

Remember when everyone thought the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) only had authority to act with regard to “enforcement” as opposed to other IP policy matters? That limitation is nowhere to be found in the 2008 legislation that created the position or in its legislative history, and there is nothing in this bill that limits the Assistant Secretary's powers either.

In addition, the Secretary of Commerce is given carte blanche to hire as many Deputy Assistant Secretaries to help as the USPTO can afford. This means that overnight, the USPTO would become the home of yet another office dedicated wholly to the protection of intellectual property.

Have we told you that the USPTO already has personnel dedicated to Intellectual Property Enforcement? It should come as no shock to anyone that these new positions, as well as the attache positions, are likely to be filled by those who believe that more IP enforcement is always better.

In fact, as Gigi points out, the role that will be elevated is the Administrator for Policy and External Affairs, which will become the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Policy and External Affairs -- a much more high profile position. It's worth noting that the job is currently held by Shira Perlmutter, an infamous copyright maximalist, former executive VP of the IFPI as well as IP Policy boss at Time Warner. Think she's going to push for more exceptions and limitations? Yeah, right.

But, honestly, the bigger complaint here is still the process itself. People complained about SOPA being negotiated in back rooms without a chance for real public input. Just because Smith and the HJC chose a seemingly "boring" piece of SOPA to try to rush through without people noticing, don't think this wasn't a deliberate decision. Of course they chose a boring piece of SOPA. It was a test to see if people were really that concerned about the process, and to see if they could sneak through this bit of SOPA without anyone noticing. The fact that people spoke up stopped that temporarily, but these attacks on minor errors in the initial rushed writeups shows that the HJC is now trying to minimize the criticism -- though it still hasn't actually released the draft of the bill for public review. While Reddit has been saying that there's a vote on the IPAA on Wednesday, it doesn't appear to be on the schedule yet, though we have heard rumors of Friday or early next week from different people.

Smith and the HJC could have avoided this whole mess by doing something simple: being open and releasing the bill and letting the public react to it before rushing it through markup. Nancy Scola, over at ReadWriteWeb has a really good writeup on Lamar Smith's failings with this bill, which focus on the process failures, and the fact that Smith clearly tried to rush this through:

Fifty days.

That's the median time it took for eight legislative bills - on economic espionage, identity theft, abortion in the District of Columbia - to circulate in the House of Representatives before they were put on the agenda for Tuesday's markup session by the House Judiciary Committee.

Zero days.

That's how long the ninth bill on the agenda, a measure submitted by Judiciary chair Lamar Smith, existed before it was submitted for Tuesday's markup. Unlike the other eight (H.R. 6029, H.R. 4362, H.R. 3803... ), Smith's Intellectual Property Attaché Act didn't even have a number. It had yet to be introduced into the House legislative system.

That's legislating the future of copyright, the Internet and creative content, Lamar Smith-style.

As Scola points out, it's clear that IPAA was a "trial balloon" to see if they could sneak IP stuff through in a post-SOPA era: pick something that is good for his Hollywood backers, but which is "maybe just dry enough" that it can fly below the radar and get passed.

We apologize for making a small error in our initial post -- though, we likely wouldn't have done so if Smith had done as he supposedly promised other members of Congress and released the draft long before it went through the markup process. Instead, by trying to sneak stuff through and see if anyone was paying attention, we missed one minor detail in the bill, but not the larger concern nor the serious process issues. If the HJC and Lamar Smith don't want to see these kinds of reactions, they should be a hell of a lot more open about what they are trying to do. But, of course, that might make it more difficult to get Hollywood's agenda to move forward. I guess that's the dilemma they face.

* The initial report also stated that Darrell Issa was a co-sponsor of the bill. Scola's report quotes his office saying that it's simply untrue and that Issa is not a co-sponsor. We've heard similar things as well, and a few others named in the original report have since said they, too, were not co-sponsors.

Last week, we wrote about Viacom's really short-sighted decision to use its fans as hostages in a silly dispute with DirecTV over fees. To prevent any DirecTV customer from seeing any of its key shows, Viacom stopped streaming them online... for all customers, meaning that even those who had nothing to do with any of this couldn't legally watch the shows they liked. As we noted, this would likely only serve to drive more people to find unauthorized versions. Late in the week, we saw AMC smartly take the opposite approach and provide more online access to customers disrupted by a similar fight it was having with Dish Network.

Of course, one of Viacom's most popular shows -- and one of the key ones turned off from streaming -- is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which had been on break last week anyway. However, it returned last night with a vengeance, and target number one: his corporate masters at Viacom for acting as if they were China in blocking the internet, and likely driving more fans to unauthorized streams. You can watch it here (if you're in the US) complete with Viacom appending a commercial bitching about DirecTV beforehand: When we wrote about this last week, one of our usual critics told us, in some of the most angry language imaginable, how objectionable it was that we dared to mention the obvious fact that if you don't make things available legally, people might find unauthorized versions. However, Stewart made the exact same point in his discussion of the situation.

"You're pulling the shows from the internet?!? What are you, China?!? And by the way, you don't think the kids already have a workaround? This morning, when I woke up, my 8-year-old son was watching Dark Knight Rises in 3D. They're already figuring it out. So basically you're blocking old people from watching the show, and just giving people a chance to discover that there's other entertaining s**t in the world...."

In response, Viacom has somewhat sheepishly backed down and put the Daily Show & Colbert back online (though it seems some others may be blocked). It tried to make a joke of this a bit by pointing to Stewart's mocking and noting that "The Daily Show continues to exercise the creative and editorial freedom that makes it consistently great." In other words, someone at Viacom realized they totally screwed up and even their own high profile employees were calling them on it publicly. It really makes you wonder if they have anyone at Viacom who thinks how the world will react to its crazy moves.

One of the great divides in the digital world is between those who believe that people who share files online are selfish, thieving pirates who just want something for nothing, and those who see them simply as ordinary people who want to swap cool stuff with the world. The first group views them as a canker eating at the heart of the music industry, while the second sees them as providing free marketing to the artists concerned. What evidence we have supports the latter view -- not least because the music industry is thriving, not dying as you might expect if piracy were a problem.

Of course, the first group continues to ignore such indications, preferring to hang on to their dogmatic belief that people in general are evil. Wouldn't it be nice if there were some other kind of evidence that those who share are motivated by good, not bad, intentions? Something like this work from the academic Paul Zak, reported in the Guardian recently?

Being treated decently, it turns out, causes people's oxytocin levels to go up, which in turn prompts them to behave more decently, while experimental subjects given an artificial oxytocin boost -- by means of an inhaler -- behave more generously and trustingly.

Here's how that plays out in the world of money:

in experiments, people behave more generously than traditional economic models predict that they should. A classic demonstration of this is known as the Trust Game, in which pairs of participants communicate with each other via computer terminals: they never meet, and have no idea who the other person is. Person A is given £10 [$16], then invited to send a portion of it, electronically, to person B. Person A has a motive for doing so: according to the rules, which both players know about, any money that A sends to B will triple in value, whereupon B will have the option of sending some of it back as a thank-you. According to conventional notions of rational behaviour, the game should break down before it has begun. Person B, acting selfishly, has no reason to give any money back -- and, knowing this, person A shouldn't send any over in the first place.

But that's not what happens. Instead, 90% of A-people send money anyway, while 95% of B-people send some back. That is, people want to give, they want to spread a little happiness. And those who get something, do feel an almost irresistible urge to give back, which might help to explain why so many people support artists whose music they share: they want to give back to the people that have effectively given to them by making music in the first place.

To which the skeptics would probably respond that even if this were true, not everybody acts this way. And the same research quoted above confirms that view:

"that's except for the 5% of people who are 'unconditional non-reciprocators'," says Zak, referring to the consistent minority of people who seem immune to this cycle. "What we call them in my lab is 'bastards'."

These are the leeches, the freeloaders, who take without giving. Nobody denies that they exist, but the key issue is whether you focus on them obsessively, and want politicians to frame ever-harsher laws to punish them (and everyone else as collateral damage), or whether you ignore them, and concentrate on selling to the 95% of file sharers who are "reciprocators" and are only too happy to give back by buying music from the artists they enjoy. If Zak's results about the power and near-universality of oxytocin's feedback loop are anything to go by, it's pretty clear which one is likely to succeed.

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A few years ago, California outlawed texting while driving. On the whole, this is one of those things that certainly seems like a good idea. I'm still amazed that anyone -- law or no law -- thinks that texting while driving is a reasonable thing to do. It's a clear death wish. That said, like many laws, there appear to be unintended consequences. A few studies have suggested that states that put in place anti-texting while driving laws actually saw an increase in accidents compared to nearby states that had no such ban. How does that make sense? Well, it's because the law doesn't seem to actually get everyone to stop texting while driving. Instead, what it does is make them hide what they're doing, which generally means putting it down in their lap. Before that, they could hold it up and still see the road, even if they weren't paying close enough attention to it.

None of this is defending the ridiculously dangerous practice of texting while driving, but merely acknowledging that the law intended to make the roads safer could actually do the opposite.

With all that said, it's interesting to see that California quietly legalized some forms of texting while driving last week with very little fanfare. Basically, it allows totally hands-free texting -- such as dictating messages via a bluetooth headset or a car service like OnStar. Of course, unsurprisingly when dealing with lawmakers and lawmaking, there's a lot of confusion over the new rules -- with some wondering if it meant that something like Siri was now legal while driving. That resulted in the following amusing passage in the SJ Merc article about this, in which the staff of the sponsor of the bill is left to admit that no one there has an iPhone, so they didn't even really think about Siri:

On Friday, after much head-scratching and acknowledging nobody in Miller's office owns a Siri-equipped iPhone 4S, the assemblyman's aides concluded it will still be illegal to use your actual phone to text behind the wheel -- even by speaking the message directly into Siri.

The California Highway Patrol confirms that just the act of turning on the phone or selecting the phone's hands-free text app, like pushing the Siri button or Google apps on Android phones, is enough to warrant flashing lights in your rearview mirror and a $100-plus ticket. The same thing goes for using your phone to read texts.

"The phone can't be in your hands," said CHP spokeswoman Jaime Coffee. "Hands-free is the key."

Either way, this seems to suggest, once again, the difficulty in regulating any particular technology in a rapidly changing technology market. I still don't understand why we don't just do the simple thing: make dangerous and distracted driving illegal, and just teach people the human consequences of doing something moronic like texting while driving.

Here's an odd one. Yesterday, I saw that a top story in the technology subreddit was a claim that Facebook was blocking Imgur, the popular image hosting service (especially popular with Redditors, but which we use here as well). This screenshot was shown (hosted on Imgur, natch): A few hours later, however, an interesting comment popped up on the Reddit thread, from a user "fisherrider," who claimed to be a Facebook engineer taking responsibility for the situation. What's somewhat stunning is that when companies screw up something, you almost never get this level of honesty about the nature of what happened (especially directly from the person who screwed up):

Hey folks - so this is actually my fault. Literally, I'm the guy who accidentally blocked imgur for a brief period of time today. I'm really sorry. Some background: I'm an engineer who works on the system we use for catching malicious URLs. In the process of dealing with a bad URL that our automated defenses didn't catch, I ran into a rare bug that caused us to incorrectly block some legitimate URLs for a brief time. Right after I figured that out and removed the bad data, I reworked the UI so no one will get bit by the same issue in the future. As a form of apology that I'm sure is insufficient, here is a picture of my dog dressed up for the 4th of July: http://imgur.com/pR4mR

As some have noted, this really is a fantastic apology. It's not filtered through PR and actually seems to come from someone who sounds human -- which is pretty important in the midst of the Reddit faithful. But it should spread beyond just Reddit. When companies screw up, this is a pretty good lesson in how to respond. Admit to the screwup, be clear and honest about it, and explain what happened and what's been done to prevent it from happening again. And... don't let it near a PR person.

YouTube campaign videos get pulled over bogus copyright claims with alarming regularity. And now, as we're entering silly season for the US Presidential campaign, it means we'll be seeing more high profile takedowns. Back during the 2008 campaign, the McCain campaign even sent YouTube a letter trying to explain fair use to the company (seriously), and suggesting that Presidential campaigns should get special treatment to prevent videos from being pulled down. Of course, what might be better is if the Presidential candidates spoke up about how they'd fix the "shoot first, ask question later" aspect of the DMCA takedown procedures, but no one seems willing to do that yet. Back in the 2008 primaries, Mitt Romney also had to explain fair use to Fox News, so he should be ready for this issue again.

In fact, he appears to be the first "fair use victim" this time around. Romney's campaign had posted a web video ad on YouTube that included some of the well-known footage of President Obama singing a single line of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together." Apparently, that triggered BMG to issue a takedown on the Romney ad. This confuses me. If you look at the original footage of Obama singing, it's a grand total of 9 seconds long. If there ever were a clear-cut case of fair use -- a very brief snippet, used in a political ad -- this would be it.

One hopes that Romney, who spoke out against SOPA during the primaries, will start to realize that perhaps he should take a stronger stand in favor of digital free speech rights and against copyright excessiveness, now that he's (yet again) a victim of such things. But perhaps that's just wishful thinking.

A bunch of news reports are highlighting a story in which New Zealand District Court Judge David Harvey supposedly called the US "the enemy," and are pointing out that he's the judge overseeing the extradition case for Kim Dotcom. Upon seeing the headline, I was pretty amazed as well, figuring that might cause problems with the case, but the details show that his comments were not about the US in general, or about the Dotcom case. Rather, they were in response to the TPP negotiations that we've been following closely -- and how the TPP will take away certain rights from New Zealanders, like the ability to get around region-specific DVD players:

It is legal in New Zealand to use methods to get around these regional codes and make the DVDs watchable but Judge Harvey said the TPP would change this.

"Under TPP and the American Digital Millennium copyright provisions you will not be able to do that, that will be prohibited... if you do you will be a criminal - that's what will happen. Even before the 2008 amendments it wasn't criminalised. There are all sorts of ways this whole thing is being ramped up and if I could use Russell [Brown's] tweet from earlier on: we have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S."

His point is that the US is trying to expand copyright protectionism and curtail current rights of New Zealanders, blocking them from doing something that is currently legal and seems perfectly reasonable (getting around regional restrictions to watch legally purchased DVDs from other regions). It's a good thing that more people are seeing the problems of American extremism on copyright law, but I wonder if this will be used (as it appears to be in the press) to hit back on him for his role in the Dotcom case.

A few years back, Megapuload and Rapidshare were often discussed in the same breath as the "big" cyberlockers for sharing content. However, over the last couple years or so, Rapidshare has made a concerted effort to make it clear that its service is not designed for sharing infringing works, and to make it more and more like a Dropbox-type offering. If you look at the cyberlockers that the MPAA complains about these days, Rapidshare is no longer on the list and is rarely discussed. The company has bent over backwards to show that it's a "good guy" in the space, and shouldn't be accused of being a "rogue site." Of course, that hasn't stopped some of the lawsuits. Following a confusing, mixed ruling in one, there's now been another confusing and mixed ruling at the federal Supreme Court in Germany.

The ruling basically found that RapidShare is not liable for uploads directly, but if it's told of an infringing file, it should have a system in place to prevent that file from being uploaded back into the service. It sounds like the courts are magically deciding that if you host any kind of user-generated content, you have to have a filter in place that consistently blocks content once it's been indicated as infringing. That seems problematic for a few reasons. First, the context of a file being uploaded matters a great deal. As we've seen with Viacom, one person's infringing upload may be the same company's attempt at viral marketing. Doing a full-on block may block legitimate content. Furthermore, the context of the usage seems to matter quite a bit. A short clip with commentary could be fair use, but also could be blocked under such a system. Requiring a filter could also be quite expensive.

On top of that, Rapidshare is focusing more on personal backup, and there are lots of cases where a personal backup isn't infringing, but the system the court is requiring could block such uses. While the judge apparently dismissed this concern because of Rapidshare's name ("The service is called RapidShare and not RapidStore... and that says it all.") that's really troubling. Just because the company is called "RapidShare" it does not mean that's all the company can do. Lots of companies change over time, and it's a little crazy for a judge to hold them to exactly what their original name says.

Either way, the court has sent the case back down to the lower court to determine if Rapidshare had successfully blocked repeat infringement, so this case is far from over...

We've had plenty of posts in the past about the insane broadness of UK defamation law, which often effectively puts the burden on the accused to prove they didn't defame the accuser. However, sometimes, at least, they seem to get things right. A lawyer, Robin Tilbrook, who is also the chair of a political party, took offense and sued a blogger for defamation over a blog post that called the political party "racist." The blogger, Stuart Parr, asked for summary judgment and got it, as the court found that since Parr never even referred to Tilbrook directly, the defamation claim couldn't stand.

Mr Justice Tugendhat said: "The main issue before the court in this application is whether the words complained of are capable of being understood as referring to the claimant.

"The claimant is not named. Nor do the Particulars of Claim set out any facts relied on which might be known to any particular publishees, and no publishees are identified."

What strikes me as amusing about all of this is that, by suing and complaining that this was defamatory, it seems that Tilbrook has done much more to connect himself to that comment and to draw attention to it. I'm still amazed that, in this day and age, anyone in politics gets so offended by the things people say about them online. But, even worse than worrying about it, is calling attention to yourself when you're not even named in a post. If you can't do those kinds of things right, it certainly raises questions about your skills for actually being in government.

Last summer, we were pleasantly surprised to see Scott Adams use Dilbert to highlight some of the absurdity of the patent system. It looks like Scott Adams has decided to tackle the subject again, with a specific focus on the rise of patent troll firms. Considering how frequently we see information and data showing just how much patent trolling costs the economy, it would be nice to make more people aware of the issues. Getting the issue covered on the Dilbert site seems like a good first step.

By the way -- I had intended to embed the Dilbert comic with this story, but it appears that Universal Uclick has decided to go ahead and maximalist up the joint -- removing the previously available embedding feature. This is pretty surprising for a web property -- especailly one with Scott Adams involved... Its not like embedding it is more likely to lead to people infringing on that particular patent...