We've talked a lot about Louis CK's success with being open, human and awesome in going direct to his fans with a DRM-free offering. It's not surprising now to see a few other forward-looking comics follow suit. Last month a few folks passed along Jim Gaffigan's plans to do something really similar to Louis (with a hat tip to Louis for inspiring him). The latest is that Aziz Ansari has decided to do the same thing (worth noting for our crowd: Ansari was also a vocal opponent of SOPA -- and he's been known to occasionally tweet Techdirt stories, not to mention the fact that he's really, really funny).

In all three cases, while the "deal" is the same -- $5 paid direct off the website -- they're also are done in a very personable and human way. They weren't announced with press releases, but direct appeals to true fans. As I've been saying, that's a big part of the reason why Louis's offering was such a success. It also helps, of course, that all three of these guys are well-established comics who are known for being at the top of the game, and are widely considered some of the best comics out there.

The one thing that concerns me a little about this is the fact that the deal terms are identical. I can understand why they're doing this. It's basically "don't mess with what worked for Louis." But I worry that the message people are getting is "$5 direct offering off a website is the secret." I don't think that's it. Lots of people have offered up a product for download off their website for a variety of prices. The key to making it work is not just the pricing. It's the way the offering is presented. I think it would be even cooler if some of these comedians experimented a bit more with branching out creatively around this business model. It wouldn't be hard, for example, to build on what various musicians have done, and offer up different tiers of support. Or something else. The real opportunity here is in how it's presented -- in a way that treats fans as fans, rather than assuming they're criminals or that there needs to be a big impersonal gatekeeper in-between the fans and the artist. But, unfortunately, some are going to look at these experiments and say "the lesson" is "$5 off your website is the secret." And when that doesn't work for some content creators, they're not going to understand why.

Overall, however, I'm really excited to see more content creators going direct, cutting out gatekeepers, and recognizing that treating fans well is a good start to any smart business model.

Spiders are just fascinating creatures -- not only because they have a crazy number of appendages, but also because they create intricate webs and seem to have incredibly complex behaviors for such small animals. To top it off, we're learning something new about the properties of spider silk all the time. Here are just a few examples.

• Japanese researchers have used spider silk as violin strings. This is what it sounds like when doves flies cry.... [url]
• Surprisingly, certain spider silk is an excellent conductor of heat -- better than silicon, aluminum or iron -- and becomes more conductive as it stretches. Silk threads from "golden silk orbweavers" could teach us more about thermal conductivity and have applications in heat sinks or textile fiber technology. [url]
• It took a million spiders to produce enough silk to make an 11'x4' rug. It also took 70 people four years to collect all that silk. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

There was some controversy a month or so ago, when it came out that app maker Path was secretly uploading your entire address book to its servers. The company apologized and deleted all the data. Of course, pretty quickly, people realized that lots of apps do this, if you allow the app to search your address book to see who else you know is already using the service. The way they do this is to upload your address book. I would have thought this was, well, obvious, but not everyone seemed to think so (it's also why I never use that feature). Either way, lots of apps quickly changed either how they work or how they explain what happens with that feature.

But, of course, in our litigious society, that's not going to stop the class action lawsuits from being filed. In a 152 page document, a class action lawsuit has been filed against pretty much every big name company in the space:

Path, Inc., Twitter, Inc., Apple, Inc., Facebook, Inc., Beluga, Inc. ., Yelp! Inc., Burbn, Inc., Instagram, Inc., Foursquare Labs, Inc., Gowalla Incorporated, Foodspotting, Inc., Hipster, Inc., LinkedIn Corporation, Rovio Mobile Oy, ZeptoLab UK Limited aka ZeptoLab, Chillingo Ltd., Electronic Arts Inc., and Kik Interactive, Inc.,

The lawsuit kicks off by quoting Robert Fulghum's "All I really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten," saying, "Don't take things that aren't yours." Of course, as with many such class actions, this one is all about getting the lawyers paid. This isn't to say that I think the actions in uploading the address books were ok, but worth a lawsuit? Seems a bit extreme. It seems that the public pressure about all of this has caused pretty much all of these companies to change how they work, and it's unlikely any real significant "harm" came from this.

This one's from a few week's back, but a few people have called it to my attention. Nilay Patel over at The Verge argued that because various companies offering Android phones have been able to design around a couple of Apple patents that have made their way into lawsuits -- #7,469,381 which covers the "scrollback" bounce when you scroll to the end of a page, and #7,657,849, which covers the "slide-to-unlock" concept -- that there's "really no day-to-day impact on the consumer" from the big patent fights going on over smartphones.

That seems like a rather simplistic analysis. Patel is right that many companies are "designing around" these overly broad and somewhat silly patents, and so it doesn't mean that Android phones aren't available. But that doesn't mean that there's no real impact on consumers. While it can't be quantified directly, there are numerous ways in which these patents are likely impacting the results. First, there's a matter of cost. The legal fights over patents are quite expensive, and that's almost certainly keeping prices on these devices somewhat higher than they might otherwise be. Second, the money and time it takes to do that "designing around" potentially slows the development of these phones. Third, those same resources could have been put elsewhere, working on additional innovations that would make the phones better and more valuable. Instead, they're forced to reinvent the wheel without doing the same scrollback or slide to unlock. Finally, while some will claim that forcing these companies to invent around the patents can lead to new innovations, there's little evidence to support this claim. Certainly it might happen accidentally, but letting developers come up with new innovations based on their own experiments and what the market tells them is always going to be more efficient than stumbling on some innovation because you're trying to avoid the artificial monopoly of a patent.

Of course, this is one of the difficult things in discussing the problems of the patent system. People insist they can't be that bad because these devices are still on the market. It's difficult to see or even explain the innovations that we don't have because of this, or even to show how the pace of innovation is almost certainly slower because of this, but that's exactly what plenty of research has shown for years. No one says that innovation stops completely because of patents, but we have significant concerns about how they impact the overall pace of innovation, as well as the specific direction of innovation. While it might not seem to have a "day-to-day impact on the consumer," chances are it's having quite a large one. We just can't see how big.

While Eminem's producers got a ton of attention and a big ruling noting that the labels had incorrectly accounted for iTunes sales -- leading to some back of the envelope calculations that artists might be owed around $2 billion in unpaid royalties from the major labels -- the very first of these cases (which actually predates the Eminem case) has reached the "settlement" stage, with Sony Music offering all qualified artists a relatively tiny pool of money to split.

The case was originally brought back in 2006 by the Allman Brothers and Cheap Trick -- which we wrote about at the time. Both of those bands eventually settled, but by then the case had turned into a class action lawsuit for other Sony Music artists, with the Youngbloods and Elmo Shropshire (who has been involved in some other bizarre copyright lawsuits) taking the place as the named artists in the case. At issue, of course, is whether or not an iTunes transaction is a sale (tiny royalty payment) or a license (much bigger royalty payment). However, the settlement seems pretty paltry. Sony pays out $7.95 million, but as is so often the case in class action lawsuits, the lawyers get $2.65 million of that, leaving $5.3 million for all of the remaining qualified artists. As Digital Music News explains:

Of that $5.3 million, $5 million is reserved for artists who sold at least 28,500 total downloads on iTunes between the inception of iTunes on January 9, 2001 and December 31, 2010 including current class members Youngbloods and Shropshire. Qualifying members would split that $5.3 million pro rata to the number of downloads of their records. However, these two artists may ultimately receive a lot less than splitting the $5 million between themselves because any artist who was signed to Epic, Columbia or Arista Records who sold more than 28,500 is eligible to join the class if they entered into agreements dated between January 1, 1976 and December 31, 2001.

According to a trusted source there may well be over 100 artists would qualify for membership. The balance of the money, only $300,000, is reserved for all Sony artists with fewer than 28,500 total downloads on iTunes.

The proposed settlement also provides for a prospective 3 percent bump in artists' royalty rates with respect to permanent digital downloads and ringtones sold in the US after January 1, 2011. The 3 percent is against Sony Music Entertainment's gross receipts. This amounts to 3 percent of 70 cents (the amount Sony received for 99 cent downloads) and that is only 2.1 cents.

It's... something. But considering how much was being dangled in previous estimates, it sure sounds like Sony may end up getting off on the cheap end if this settlement is completed. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Sony probably won't even have to pay out a chunk of this money because if any of the artists haven't recouped yet, this money will merely be "credited" towards their accounts. And considering how the labels aren't exactly known for keeping the best records as to who's actually recouped, there's plenty of room for Sony to keep the money and just claim it's crediting an account that will never surpass the red line.

Last year, we wrote about how Zuffa, the parent company of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) was suing Justin.tv because some of its users streamed UFC matches. As we noted at the time, we couldn't see how Zuffa would get past the DMCA's safe harbors. Apparently, Zuffa tried to get around that by being way too creative for its own good and the court has now shut down those efforts. Basically, Zuffa focused on two areas not covered (or not clearly covered) by safe harbors. The first is trademark, which is neither covered by the DMCA's safe harbors nor Section 230's safe harbors -- though, many courts have accepted similar rules that limit liability to third party service providers anyway. In this case, the court is extremely skeptical of the trademark claims, in part because it seemed clear that Zuffa was merely trying to use trademark law as if it were a "mutant copyright law," which courts have rejected in the past.

The other attempt to get around safe harbors was to use the Communications Act, which has rules against "intercepting cable." Justin.tv actually suggested that Section 230's safe harbors should protect it from that claim -- which makes sense -- but the court doesn't want to touch that argument. Instead, it just says that the basic idea that Justin.tv is illegally intercepting cable doesn't make any sense -- and notes, again, that it appears to be Zuffa seeking to do an end-run around copyright law:

In essence, Zuffa alleges that Justin.tv’s users copied Zuffa’s UFC event and then rebroadcast the UFC event over the internet. This is not the type of conduct properly addressed by the Communications Act, but by copyright law (and, potentially, trademark law) because Justin.tv had no relationship with the original cable or satellite signal: by the allegations, Justin.tv did not receive or intercept any actual cable or satellite signal or broadcast. The Court finds no evidence in the statutory language, other cases, or legislative history that the Communications Act addresses this type of conduct or was meant to bolster or act as a separate type of copyright claim.

Furthermore, as Eric Goldman highlights in the link above, there's a further footnote discussion in which the court notes that if Zuffa's "stealing cable" argument made sense, it would open up a whole host of legal issues against pretty much all cloud computing:

if the Court were to allow claims such as these, it would have to allow similar Communications Act claims against scores of “cloud computing” service providers such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon.com, Dropbox, Box.net, and others because Jusint.tv’s [sic] particular streaming service would be irrelevant. As an example, say a person took a snippet (or longer) of video of a UFC match being broadcast on their television with their iPhone, Windows Phone, etc. The iPhone then automatically uploads that video to one of dozens of cloud storage systems such as Apple’s iCloud. The Court refuses to find that Apple (or Microsoft, etc.) would be liable under the Communications Act for merely receiving and storing this data under the Communications Act. Yet, Zuffa arguesfor exactly this result when it argues that Justin.tv’s mere receipt of this video stream makes Justin.tv liable. In passing the Communications Act, Congress did not intend such a result, and this Court will not broaden the effect of the statute in this manner.

Nice to see a court recognize the troubling implications of such a crazy argument.

Reader vegetaman points us to some comments made by Maynard James Keenan (best known as the singer for the band Tool) in an Oregon radio interview that suggest he's reached the "get off my lawn" phase of his career. When asked about music piracy and its effect on the industry, he responded:

I think it's a much bigger conversation. I think part of the problem with most of that is just the foundation of respect or entitlement. I think 'entitlement' is probably the better word. I think, just in general, our society has gotten to the point where just you click a button, you get what you want when you want it. So until we get to a point where we realize you don't necessarily always get what you want when you want it, we're gonna have a problem. So it stems from there. And then things like file-sharing and the Internet kind of lend themselves to that mindset. So, some day, hopefully, we'll adjust that perspective ... And until somebody has actually written a check to record their own record and see everything that goes into it, they don't really understand that if you just take it... The current state of music, I'm sure there's a lot of creative stuff going on out there, but there certainly isn't—of course, I'm being nostalgic—but it doesn't seem like there's as much, creatively, going on, 'cause most people can't afford to do it."

Perhaps he chose "entitlement" over "respect" because he realized that "kids these days don't have any respect" is a bit of a cliché, and not a positive one. But I've heard this "entitlement" complaint before too, and it still doesn't make any sense. People aren't so much entitled as they are accustomed, and that's a natural result of progress. Sure, people (especially digital natives) get frustrated when they can't find what they are looking for online, but how is that different from getting frustrated when you can't find a gas station? It's not some grand sense of technological entitlement, but rather the fact that we structure our lives around the tools that are available to us, and thus come to rely on them. On the internet, the simple fact is that you can get what you want at the click of a button, and people aren't going to pretend that's not true out of respect for those who predate the privilege. The real sense of entitlement is believing that you don't have to grow and adapt to changing technology, and that you can refuse to give your customers what they have grown accustomed to (and can get elsewhere) and expect them to stick around.

Then there's his perception that there is less creativity today, and at least he acknowledges that he's being nostalgic, because he's certainly not being accurate. The cost of creating, distributing and promoting music have all fallen drastically, allowing musicians to bypass gatekeepers and resulting in more music being made, and more financial opportunities for artists, than ever before. To claim that the cost of making music is limiting creativity is just weird (and not the good kind of weird like Tool's album art). Keenan does have an affinity for expensive productions, but it's a shame that he seems to think creative value is directly linked to budget.

Increasingly I feel like someone needs to sit all these aging musicians down and explain to them that the internet is pretty awesome, and it isn't going away.

In an interesting blog post, James Firth discusses a comment from music industry analyst Mark Mulligan, quoted in a BBC story about the digital locker site Hotfile:

"If the service providers are serious about wanting to heed the industry's concerns then instead of assuming that all of the content is legitimate until found otherwise, they should actually assume that most of the content is illegal and take action.

"Much of the content on these service is very high quality video files -- how many consumers genuinely create large high definition videos of their own and upload them?"

Mulligan clarified his views in an update to Firth's post:

Just to be clear I at no stage questioned anyone's right to create digital content (I myself have a recording studio and create lots of my own music). My point was simply that the vast majority of us do not create feature length high definition videos and that the vast majority of the content on Hotfile is not UGC [user-generated content], rather unlicensed professional content. Just run a google advanced search on the hotfile domain and enter the name of any movie and you'll find it there -- normally multiple different versions.

The comment that "the vast majority of us do not create feature length high definition videos" may be true for the moment, but underestimates the power of Moore's Law. The improved quality of cameras built into smartphones, combined with ever-increasing storage capacities, means that producing such videos won't be the preserve of film studios for long.

Once the technology is available, many people will start creating and uploading such things, just as many already create blogs, or post high-quality pictures to Flickr. Nobody predicted any of these things would happen, because it seemed unlikely that "ordinary" people would write hundreds of articles a year, or share thousands of photos.

As the same thing happens with high-quality video, Mulligan's assumptions about what is and what is not "legal" are likely to become more and more dubious. Meanwhile, switching from that quaint "innocent until proven guilty" thing to the contrary is an incredibly dangerous step to take, since it will add to the presumption of online guilt that is already popular in some circles.

Not only is that likely to chill innovation, since fewer people will be willing to take the risk of creating the next YouTube or Facebook if ISPs just assume people are guilty until proven innocent and "take action", it also plays into the hands of governments looking to repress dissent. Attacking the fundamental principle of "innocent until proven guilty", even in this apparently "minor" way, makes it much easier to start branding people who protest as terrorists, for example, because it forces them to prove a negative.

What's particularly disappointing about Mulligan's view is that he is normally a much more thoughtful commentator in this area, as Techdirt has noted before. His "Music Format Bill Of Rights", for example, is closely aligned with many of things that Techdirt has been advocating for years. And a recent post entitled "When the Media Industries Really Need to Start Worrying About Piracy (and it's not yet)" has the following original and provocative idea:

The nightmare scenario for media companies is that the pirates turn their attentions to developing great user experiences rather than just secure means of acquiring content. What if, for example, a series of open source APIs were built on top of some of the more popular file sharing protocols so that developers can create highly interactive, massively social, rich media apps which transform the purely utilitarian practice of file sharing into something fun and engaging? If you though the paid content market was struggling now imagine how it would fare in the face of that sort of competition.

That's a much more insightful and nuanced comment than unhelpful calls to reverse a crucial legal tradition that has been around for centuries.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

You'd think that an industry so concerned about piracy would at least get its own house in order before carelessly chucking stones at people who make unavailable music more readily available, usually, without a price tag. This screenshot came across my Facebook feed recently, the frustrated result of Daniel Barassi's (a.k.a. BRAT Productions) attempt to purchase music.

In case you can't see the text the arrow's pointing to, it reads: "Due to copyright restrictions you cannot buy this product in your country."

This rant was attached:

I am so fucking sick of this shit! I am a music lover! I love to buy, and own, music. If I can not buy an actual CD, I buy WAV format, so I can have the best possible quality (fuck mp3/aac). More often than not, when I want to buy something legally, I get this shit. You want illegal downloads to stop? STOP FUCKING PUTTING REGION RESTRICTIONS! Figure out a way to talk to your labels in other regions, make a FUCKING DEAL, AND GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER! There is a globe full of people who want the opportunity to hear new music. Stop selling to only one region! Fix this, and watch. You will you see less piracy. GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR COLLECTIVE ASSES!

Yes. Seriously. W.T.F.

Tell me (and Barassi) why this sort of thing happens. If your answer includes words like "licensing," "rights" or any other explanation of the convoluted system that the labels themselves set up to prevent people from purchasing their music, your answer, while "technically correct," is completely wrong.

What I want you to explain is why, in this day and age, with the internet handling a large quantity of the sales, are labels still attempting to pretend that the purchaser's country makes any difference. Because it just doesn't. The only people who would find this sort of thing acceptable are the legal teams, administrators and royalty-collecting intermediaries who need this sort of relentlessly stupid convolution to maintain their positions.

Let's use a physical analogy because that's just the sort of thing everyone likes to do when dealing with a digital product: If you're a German citizen visiting or living in the US and you stop in at Best Buy to pick up a CD or movie, no one checks your passport to see if you're legally entitled to make this purchase. Or, for that matter, anyone can order a physical CD from anywhere in the world and get it shipped to them. Obviously, it's more expensive but no one stops them from doing it. If it already makes no sense in the physical world, how in all hell do you expect it to work in a world where anyone from anywhere at any time can at least attempt to purchase music or movies?

(If your answer contains anything like "they're purchasing licenses, not songs," go ahead and give yourself an F-.)

You've got so many entities vying over every last digital nickel that they've conspired to keep BRAT from shelling out $6.99 for an EP. That works out to zeroes across the board, much like piracy does, except in this case, you've got someone throwing money at the screen and receiving asinine statements in response. Do you seriously think that telling people "no" repeatedly is a great way to build a business? And what if these people are so determined to purchase your music that they jump through a few hoops in order to appear to be purchasing this album from an "approved" region? How does that play into your tangled web of royalty payouts? Or does it even matter? Is this just some obtuse attempt at control?

Explain. I'm all ears.

(Oh, BTW: before you critics start writing off BRAT as just some "nobody" from the internet who *gasp* occasionally cranks out mashups when not espousing freedtardist views, check out his FAQ. BRAT is also the official webmaster for Depeche Mode, a position he's held since 1998. He also manages their Youtube presence, which includes issuing takedowns on infringing content. So, he's not some Google shill or whatever it is that you imagine those of us that refer to piracy as a "customer service issue" are. And by all means, go and listen to his stuff, which includes official remixes for Depeche Mode, some "mixtapes" and a fine selection of quality mashups. I recommend the Echo & the Bunnymen vs. UNKLE track "Follow Me Down to the Killing Moon," which I hold is actually superior to the originals.)

 

Building on the solid work of the Hargreaves Report on copyright, the UK government took a surprisingly sensible attitude in its proposed implementation of most of Hargreaves' suggestions. The consultation period for those proposals ends shortly, and the panic among the copyright industries that the UK government might actually make copyright slightly less biased in their favor is evident. Here's a Daily Telegraph piece where they try to undermine the economic rationale behind the moves, professing scepticism about UK government claims that modernizing copyright will add billions to the UK economy:

UK Music, the music industry body, said the growth projection was “based upon underlying assumptions and extrapolations that are facile and deeply flawed”.

Its chief executive, Jo Dipple, called on the Government to “re-examine the evidence”.

"Re-examine the evidence" is precisely what the Hargreaves team did when it explored to what extent digital piracy was causing harm to the copyright industries. Here's what it found:

The Review team has examined numerous studies, including those in the table above, and a supporting paper looks at the methodological strengths and weaknesses of this work. With the exception of the Industry Canada study, we have either not been able to examine the methodology of the studies or, where we have, we have discovered problems with the methodology. Consequently, we have not found either a figure for the prevalence and impact of piracy worldwide or for the UK in which we can place our confidence.

In other words, bar one report, there was no reliable evidence, despite the fact that the copyright industries have been claiming the contrary for years, and using those claims to push for harsher laws against online copyright infringement.

A typical case is the TERA report that came out in March 2010. As I have shown elsewhere, its headline result that piracy in the EU was likely to cause losses of 1.2 million jobs and 240 billion euros ($325 billion) by 2015 was based almost entirely on figures supplied by the recording industry -- in other words, of no value as independent evidence. And yet its "assumptions and extrapolations" were widely used in the debate running up to the vote in April 2010 that saw the passing of the UK's Digital Economy Act.

Also quoted in The Telegraph piece is Pete Wishart, an MP and a musician chiefly associated with the folk-rock band Runrig. Commenting on the UK government's projections, he said:

“How the Government has got away with such bonkers figures is beyond me.”

The real issue is how the copyright industries got away with its bonkers figures, and for so long. Let's hope their new-found love for evidence-based policy making doesn't vanish when the facts turn out to be very different.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

I've been hearing about this project for a few months now, and I'm excited to see that it's finally been released. F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab have officially released their Free Universal Construction Kit, a set of 3D printer instructions for creating nearly 80 awesome "adapter" bricks that let you connect ten (sort of) popular children's construction playsets:

Included are connectors between the following sets: Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob. There's also a giant universal adapter block. I'll admit I'm a bit disappointed that Megabloks didn't make the cut, as my son tends to go back and forth between those and Duplos. If you want them, they're available at Thingverse, though you'll obviously need a 3D printer to actually do anything with them. Here are some of the photos they've put up of the kit in action:





The general idea is really cool. Kids don't care if Lego and Tinkertoys come from the same company. They want them to work together nicely. That's part of the fun of tinkering. But, of course, the toy companies want to "control" the market and pretend that only their toys exist. Acknowledging anyone else's toys is seen as a mistake -- even though it actually adds value to the toys by letting you do more with them. In the past we've seen Lego, in particular, be particularly aggressive in trying to lock out competitors.

Of course, that raises the big question: what about intellectual property law with this offering? The non-commercial nature of it likely protects them against trademark issues, though it does seem silly that actually offering such useful connector blocks for sale might put you in legal hot water. Either way, I know the guys who put this together spent a ridiculous amount of time exploring the different legal issues involved here, and have put up a detailed discussion on them -- with a clear recognition that even after being as careful as possible to not infringe on anyone's rights, they still have to note:

Some may express concern that the Free Universal Construction Kit infringes such corporate prerogatives as copyright, design right, trade dress, trademarks or patents of the supported toy systems. We encourage those eager to enforce these rights to please think of the children — and we assert that the home printing of the Free Universal Construction Kit constitutes protected fair use.

Furthermore, they have a pretty full discussion on how the use of IP here is not about protecting rights at all, but about attempting to gain market dominance:

Today’s manufacturers have little or no intrinsic motivation to make their products compatible with anyone else’s. Indeed—despite obvious benefits to users everywhere—the implementation of cross-brand interoperability can be nearly impossible, given the tangled restrictions of patents, design rights, and trademarks involved in doing so. So we stepped up. The Free Universal Construction Kit is the VLC of children’s playsets.

As we can see from the example above, interoperability is a question of power and market dominance. Most market leaders regard interoperability as an anti-competitive nuisance, a regulatory check on their ambition, or a concession to the whining of lesser players. Quite simply, interoperability is the request of the disenfranchised. And which end-user, in so many ways, is less enfranchised than a preliterate child?

The simple fact is that no toy company would ever make the Free Universal Construction Kit. Instead, each construction toy wants (and indeed, pretends) to be your only playset. Within this worldview, the other manufacturers’ construction sets are just so many elephants in the room, competing for your attention on the shelves of Toys-R-Us. No longer. The Free Universal Construction Kit presents what no manufacturer could: a remedy providing extensible, post-facto syntactic interoperability for construction toys. Let the fun begin!

Of course, there's still the issue of patents... and there the folks behind this project also did something interesting. In that list of supported toys are two -- Zoob and Zome -- that are technically still under patent protection. To deal with those two, the kit actually does not include connectors to either of those toys. Instead, both have a pending date, to be released on the day those patents expire. In other words, progress and the ability to interoperate with those toys must wait until the monopolies expire. Progress is being hindered, not promoted here.

We've discussed in the past how 3D printing is an upcoming legal battle, as many of the issues that previously arose solely the digital realm will be crossing over into the physical. We've also noted how The Pirate Bay has already stepped up with plans to offer a place to share 3D printable plans -- and, indeed, the folks behind this project note that it will soon be up on that site, when it's ready.

The more you look at this, the more it makes you wonder what else simply isn't being done today due to over-aggressive desire for control via IP laws, rather than recognition that making a product more valuable and useful is actually a good thing.

Face Britain, a national collaborative art project in the UK, is collecting children's self-portraits to build an online gallery and a composite portrait of the Queen, among other things. It's all pretty harmless school-activity stuff, until you notice that the release form includes the extreme requirement that parents transfer "all intellectual property rights, including copyright" to the foundation that runs the program. Such a requirement is not unheard of, but is rarely necessary and should be justified—but when The Register reached out to boss Jeremy Newton to ask about it, his response demonstrated that he just doesn't know the first thing about copyright:

"We weren't sure how we'd change the images for this big projection. We need a legal power to use the image which is flexible enough for us to blend it into an image of the Queen, that the whole image revolves around," said Newton.

The chief executive believes that the intellectual property acquisition only applies to the photographic reproduction of the artwork. He said: "The ownership of the creative artwork remains with the child and the school - they can keep it and use it however they wish. We don't take ownership of the creative artwork."

He did, however, appear to be unclear on just how extensive those rights are in reality, and added: "The issue on licensing is not as simple as saying that children are the creators. They use brushes and paints other people have given them. They create the image in school or at home."

Um, what? Let's look at this piece by piece.

Firstly, the "legal power" they need can easily be obtained with a blanket license—the kind that countless websites obtain on user-generated content. From Newton's phrasing, it sounds like they didn't want to bother looking into it, so they just required the most extreme transfer of rights they could think of in order to cover all their bases. Shame.

Secondly, I'm baffled by the distinction Newton tries to make between the copyright and the "creative artwork" itself. Presumably by "creative artwork" he means the original physical portrait, which remains in the hands of the student. But to say they can "use it however they wish" is misleading at best—if the copyright has been transferred in its entirety to someone else, then there are all sorts of limitations on what they can do with it.

Finally, it doesn't matter who gives an artist their "brushes and paints" nor whether they created it "in school or at home". There may genuinely be some authorship questions when it comes to younger kids who are directly assisted by parents and teachers, but if that's the case, nobody can hand over the copyrights until those questions are resolved anyway.

What this really points to is one of the biggest overall problems with copyright law: it's so complicated that a lot of people go way overboard with their restrictions and requirements rather than figuring out what rights they actually need. But that doesn't let Face Britain off the hook, either: when you're running a fun project involving thousands of kids, there's no excuse for being sloppy about this stuff. Newton says he is going to add an explanation for the rights transfer to the website, but that's not a solution at all. No rights transfer is necessary, and what he should really be doing is replacing that draconian clause with a more reasonable license agreement, which is all they ever needed in the first place.

There's a lot of talk about how the Senate is likely to approve the JOBS Act today with a procedural plan put in place by Harry Reid that limits the ability for any real amendments to be debated or discussed. Unfortunately, the JOBS Act has been more controversial than it should be, based on some misinformation being spread about how it's somehow dismantling all investor protections from Sarbanes Oxley.

The fact is, this is a situation where the original rules clearly went too far in requiring onerous regulations on businesses that didn't actually do much to stop fraud and abuse, but did make it prohibitively expensive for many good companies to go (or stay) public. There should be a middle ground that is not the "anyone can go public based on hype" days of the late 90s, and the much more limited public markets we have today. The JOBS Act may go a bit too far in raising the ceiling for the IPO "on ramp" to $1 billion in sales, but it's not the free for all that some have made it out to be. It gives companies more time to meet full (expensive) Sarbanes Oxley compliance, but opponents make it out like in these five years, companies will just completely make up their financial documents (even knowing that they'll face a reckoning when the on-ramp is over). Making the on-ramp slightly smaller probably would have made sense (and there was an attempt to do that, which appears to be dead in the water), but this is a case where you have a basic trade-off. Yes, you can add regulations to public companies, but it means you'll have fewer public companies, and less money to spend on creating jobs. That's a real trade-off, and one where those advocating specific plans do need to recognize the costs and the benefits.

Separately, there are many other features of the JOBS Act that make plenty of sense -- such as allowing small businesses to make use of crowdfunding. Currently, crowdfunding is possible for pre-sales or donations, but not in exchange for equity. Yes, there is risk involved, but there are some limits here, and to some extent, people should learn to understand the basic risks of what they're investing in before they do so anyway. These crowdfunded operations aren't going to be giant companies dealing with Wall Street for the most part, so the talk of how this helps Wall Street is mostly bogus.

That said, because of the political process that will get this through quickly, it appears that Senator Wyden won't get to introduce two amendments he proposed, one of which would have made it clear that the US can't agree to ACTA without Congressional approval, and a second that would have required the USTR to make its proposals public on international trade agreements. Hopefully, we'll see those proposals turn up elsewhere.