One reason the European Commission decided to refer ACTA to the European Court of Justice may have been in the hope that people would simply get bored and move on. It's certainly true that the cities of Europe aren't full of protesters as they were a couple of months ago, but that doesn't mean that everything has died down completely. Here, for example, is one country whose population still has strong feelings on the matter:

A movement in Serbia against the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is gaining a groundswell of support, although the government denies that the treaty is being considered for adoption.

Well, that last part may be true, but only in the sense that Serbia will have no choice. The country is currently applying to become a member of the European Union, and if it is accepted, it will be forced to sign up to ACTA, whether it wants to or not:

Assuming the EU and its member states ultimately ratify the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement [], Serbia will have to follow suit as it will have become a full part of EU law, said Branka Totić, director of the Serbian Intellectual Property Office.

That might make protests against ACTA seem pointless -- after all, if Serbia is admitted to the EU, it won't even be asked on the matter. But it seems that ACTA has become a political issue in Serbia:

Online group Pirate Party founder Aleksandar Blagojevic said the mainstream media and politicians are manipulating the public.

"They want to put us in the position of the boy who cried wolf ... when there is no wolf. But once it arrives, it will be too late," he said.

The group leads the anti-ACTA charge in Serbia and is in the process of registering as a political party.

In many ways, Serbia may be the perfect country for the Pirates. The founder of the movement, Rick Falkvinge, visited the country last year, and wrote about what happened during the 1990-95 international embargo against Yugoslavia, of which Serbia was a part:

Yugoslavia was allowed to import food, medicine, all the basic necessities of life, but not luxury items. Copies of digitized works counted as luxury items that weren’t allowed. Importing copies of bitpatterns was not permitted, stupidly enough. It turns out, therefore, that this was not a problem. The people living there could make do themselves, copying themselves. It showed on a country-wide scale just how unnecessary the copyright monopoly is -- not just to academics studying the situation, but to the very people, too.

Against that historical background of large-scale sharing, ACTA's attempt to enforce copyright strictly could well be even more problematic for Serbia than for other EU countries. No wonder people are protesting.

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

It's been a pretty open secret for quite some time that Facebook is actively in the market to buy a bunch of patents, and now it's done its first big deal, scoring 750 patents from IBM to add to the 56 patents it currently has (some of which it purchased, and some of which it applied for). There's been plenty of talk about people who don't really know much about patents about how Facebook "needs" more patents, and the ridiculous Yahoo lawsuit only increased the attention the issue is getting. Plus, there are some investors who still -- for whatever reason -- think that the number of patents in a portfolio are a reasonable proxy for innovation or the ability to control a market. Of course, none of these patents will help Facebook against its most common legal foe: the patent troll. They're really only useful either against other operating companies (to ward off patent nuclear war cross-suits) or if Facebook decides to become obnoxious like Yahoo and start suing others offensively.

What this really shows is just how broken the patent system is. Facebook basically just had to waste a large chunk of money on a bunch of patents that have nothing to do with innovation, which won't help Facebook provide a better product for its users and which will only serve to create more money for lawyers somewhere down the road. That's not a healthy system. That's not an efficient system, and it's not one that's good for innovation or economic growth.

More and more crowdfunded projects are popping up all the time. We've mentioned a few recently, like the video game that collected over $3 million from tens of thousands of folks who essentially pre-ordered the game before it was even created. Here are just a few more cool Kickstarter projects that look interesting.

• Endangered is a short live action film project which tells a story about the world after it's been taken over by strange and dangerous creatures. At just the $20 level, your face will be included in the film on a "missing person" poster in a post-apocalyptic world. [url]
• You could probably buy steel wall hooks from some huge hardware store chain, but they wouldn't look like rabbits and come in a handful of colors. And why wouldn't you want wall hooks named Frank? [url]
• Long-form journalism isn't dying, and Matter wants to prove it by producing important and newsworthy stories. A team of reporters will be writing about science and technology stories each week, they'll be aiming to sell each article for 99 cents a piece. [url]
• To find more interesting stuff on entrepreneurship, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

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

Following up on this first experiment with the Techdirt Book Club -- where we're going to host a discussion around Rebecca MacKinnon's Consent of the Networked -- I've added some potential questions on the Step2 discussion page where people can add their own questions and vote existing questions up or down. We'll be passing along these questions to Rebecca shortly for a discussion next week. Head on over and ask your questions or vote on existing questions.

I frequently get asked why I spend so much time talking about the entertainment industry here on Techdirt, and one of the points I make is that I think what's happened to the entertainment industry over the last decade and a half is really a leading indicator of the type of disruptive change that has already started to impact, or will soon be impacting, nearly every industry imaginable. As such, by understanding what's happening and how not to respond, perhaps we can help lots of other industries move more smoothly into the future. So I'm always interested and intrigued by parallels in totally unexpected industries. Just recently, the good folks over at NPR's Planet Money put together a fascinating episode about modern farm economics (and host Adam Davidson also wrote a NY Times piece on the same subject). While it mainly focuses on Claudia, the high-tech cow, it also has some key economic points that will likely sound familiar to regular readers (unfortunately, these key economic points are only in the audio version of the podcast, and were left out of the transcript). Near the beginning, host Adam Davidson lays out his "four clear lessons about how to have a shot at thriving in the current global economy."

1. Stay on top of technological change.
2. Focus. Specialize on the things you can do best.
3. Find some way to buffer yourself against unexpected changes that are definitely coming.
4. Find something that you can sell that your customers are willing to pay a premium for because you've given them something they want which no one else can give them.

All of those sound familiar to one degree or another, but clearly number one and number four are ones that we hit on frequently. They then use the example of Fulper Farms to show how it can work. They talk about the technological change and innovation not just in process, but in the breeding of better cows, which leads to the "bleeding edge high tech cow." They then talk about specialization, where the Fulper's don't do everything that a farmer used to do, but instead focus on raising and milking cows, and rely on other experts to handle the breeding of cows (to get those high tech cows) and even cow nutrition (letting this other person stay up on the latest in cow nutrition science).

To some extent, it's like the differences we've talked about between gatekeepers and enablers. The gatekeepers wanted to be at the center of things and control all aspects of production, distribution, etc. But in a world of enablers there's much more specialization. So, for example, in the music world, musicians can pick and choose from best-of-breed solutions to help create, distribute, promote and monetize their work, rather than just relying on a single provider.

Not much time is spent on the third point, but there's a brief discussion about financial tools to help buffer the swings in the market -- things like grain futures and such, which are really just forms of insurance to protect in a volatile market. I'm a little less interested in this particular point. I think it can be important in some industries but is less of a key point long term.

But the fourth point was what I found the most interesting, and obviously fits most closely with some of the theories and business models I've espoused for years: sell something scarce which people want to buy. But, in a commoditized world such as farming, how is that even possible? Well, we hear the same thing in the music world all the time, where people insist that there's nothing to sell but the music, but then we see lots of folks get creative and do amazingly creative things. And the same thing is clearly happening on the Fulper Farm as well -- thanks in part to the youngest generation, who attended my own alma mater (Go Big Red!), and is applying some of what she learned about being more entrepreneurial back to the farm.

She's trying out a few things to take some special facets of what the farm has available, for which they can charge a premium:

Breanna realized they kept talking about this "problem" they had. They're really close to New York City. Land is really expensive in Northern New Jersey. There's not an agricultural world there, so they have to travel really far to buy ag equipment. There's all these problems being so close to New York City. And she realized, by using her farm as a case study in college, that being so close to the City might be the best way to make money. It might be their secret to being a successful farm. I looked and I couldn't find any farm closer to New York City. I think this is the closest one to Brooklyn... And people in Brooklyn are kind of obsessed with farming....

Breanna has figured out that there's money in that. She's working with a cheese maker who's going to help them make a premium Fulper-branded cheese. You and I, some time soon, can go to our local shop and buy really, really local... this is "the closest cheese to Brooklyn."...

Breanna had this other idea. Did you know that you could send your two daughters for a week to summer camp at Fulper Farms?.... Families pay a few hundred bucks, their kids have an awesome week experiencing agriculture.... You know what's amazing? A few weeks of summer camp that Breanna did as a college project? Brings in almost as much money as a whole year of milking cows.

Hello alternative revenue streams. I'm sure the purists will insist that just like a musician should only sell music, a dairy farmer should only sell dairy products. But a smart business person finds ways to capitalize on real scarcities, and that's exactly what Breanna appears to have done with the Fulper Farms.

The report concludes with another key point that we've definitely seen in the music business as well. Davidson notes that there's a lot more opportunity, and the average farm is now making more money than in the past, but it's a lot more volatile, and lots of the old guard simply don't make the transition well. Once again, this sounds mighty familiar.

It's kind of neat to see the parallels between such different industries when it comes down to the basic economics of progress and technological change.

Along those lines, perhaps there are even more parallels moving into the future. As I was working on this post, Leigh passed along a TED talk from about a year ago by Marcin Jakubowski, who is taking the concepts of the maker culture and the open source ethos and applying it to farming. It seems like an appropriate thing to end this post with, so check it out:

I'm kind of wondering if this one would have gone over better a few months ago, when SOPA and PIPA were still on the legislative agenda, but Andrew Couts at Digital Trends points us to a bit of a silly Kickstarter project to get the text of SOPA and PIPA custom printed on a roll of toilet paper (where they belonged in the first place). SOPA is pretty long, at over 70 pages (PIPA was a lot shorter), but there's still some extra space, where backers can leave their "own messages" for bathroom reading about SOPA or PIPA. So far, the project doesn't have many backers, and looks like it has a pretty good chance of failing, but it is notable just how ingrained the absolute badness of these bills has become in the culture today.

Wizz points us to a speech that French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently gave in response to the death of the suspect in the Toulouse murders after the police shot him as he tried to escape, when they raided his apartment after a 32-hour standoff. As part of the speech, Sarkozy decided to use it as an opportunity to push for more anti-internet legislation, including a plan to criminalize visiting certain websites too often. Here's the video in French, with his comments coming around 2:20. Translating the key line, he says:

Anyone who habitually visits Internet sites that advocate terrorism or carrying calls for hate or violence will be punished under criminal law.

It appears that there is already a law in France that similarly makes it a criminal offense to "habitually" visit child porn sites, and this is a push to expand that same law to terrorism, hate and violence sites (original French). Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this. Obviously, accessing child porn is a strict liability kind of thing, where it's clearly illegal. Merely reading about terrorism, hate or violence is not.

Also, there's a question of how do you know if someone "habitually" visits such sites, raising fears that Sarkozy wants to implement a pretty broad deep packet inspection spying system to make this work. This has, quite reasonably, raised significant concerns among human rights/free speech activists (original French) about just what Sarkozy is actually planning. Others point out that such a law almost certainly wouldn't pass French constitutional scrutiny.

Either way, just the idea is quite a dangerous leap. Criminalizing the visiting of websites because they contain information? If the content itself is illegal, go after those who create the website. Going after people for reading it reaches towards the level of establishing thought police. It also seems to greatly overestimate (as many politicians do) the power of a simple website to convince people of certain things. We see the same thing in the US with Senator Lieberman's grandstanding against terrorist content, which he wants banned and blocked in the US as well. It seems to assume that people are all complete suckers who, as soon as they read a terrorist pitch, automatically become terrorists. In reality, all they're really doing is legitimizing much of this ridiculous content, by suggesting that it really is "dangerous" and somehow must be criminalized.

The Guardian has up a short excerpt from William Patry's recent book, How to Fix Copyright, which is a really enjoyable read. I don't necessarily agree with everything in there, but almost all of it is thought provoking and relevant to the discussions we have around here. The excerpt is actually from the beginning of the book, it highlights how much of the confusion over today's copyright law might be because people have been confused over what definition of "copy" we're using. As he notes, "copy" can be both a verb and a noun -- and at first copyright appeared to be about the noun version, but relatively early on, people redefined it to cover both the verb and the noun, but people aren't always clear which one they really mean:

The word "copy" has two meanings. As a verb, "to copy" means reproducing content from one work into either another work (we say one song was "copied" from another song). It also means that copying into another form (you "copy" your CD onto your iPod). The verb of "copy" is what we mean by the exclusive right to reproduce a work. "Reproduce" is a synonym version of the verb to copy. The noun version of "copy" refers to a physical object, a CD or the mp3 file on your iPod that contains the intangible work (the song or the performance). When I say I own a CD "copy" of a work, I am referring to the noun.

The original use of "copy" was in the noun sense. In England, book publishers spoke of owning rights in their "copies," meaning the printed production. The 1710 Statute of Anne, in its title, also spoke of "vesting the copies of printed books in authors or purchasers of such copies...." The right granted - the verb - was the right to "print" those copies. The right to print later became the right to reproduce, with reproduce being regarded as a synonym for the verb to copy. The term "copyright," though ambiguous, referred to either the noun or the verb. Most copyright acts, including the US Copyright Act, combine both the verb and noun versions: the right granted in 17 USC 106(1) is the right to "reproduce the work in copies."

But these days, thanks to these misinterpretations, we get bizarre thinking from copyright maximalists:

Unfortunately, through mistaken interpretations of the noun "copy," the reproduction right has been wildly expanded in many countries, particularly the United States, to include transitory acts such as buffering, caching, or non-consumable versions that are necessitated by the automatic operation of computers or other digital technologies. None of these transitory acts has an independent economic value; that is, they do not harm copyright owners' markets. For example, in order to ensure that the streaming of a video is not interrupted by breaks in the transmissions, websites copy ("buffer") small parts of the video so that missing pieces can be filled during the interruption. Browsers make caches of websites that you just visited in case you hit the "back" button and want to revisit a site you just left. Other caches help with latency (response) time, and managing network traffic. Other times, a cache is made in case websites are inadvertently deleted. To consider buffering or caching to be infringing "copies" is using an eighteenth-century concept to defeat necessary twenty-first-century technologies, the only purpose of which is to increase performance. Where "copies" are made as a necessary adjunct for other legitimate purposes, no liability should exist. Amending the definition of "copy" in either the noun or verb version is an easy fix that would go far in assisting musical licensing and in removing the specter of mass, unintentional copying.

The piece goes on to note that this version of "copying" under copyright law makes all sorts of new services -- those based around access rather than ownership -- a huge minefield of potential copyright violations. And it's all made that much worse when you add in the ridiculous anti-circumvention clauses, because that effectively gives the entertainment industry a veto on technology, despite having nothing to do with violating copyright law.

The DMCA and other digital lock laws are prime examples of our march backwards, of how our laws are used to thwart innovation and creativity. The DMCA is the reason you can't load lawfully purchased copies of your DVDs into your iPod, why you can't transfer copies of many lawfully purchased works from one electronic device to another, why DVDs bought in one country may not work in another, something that greatly embarrassed (or should have) President Obama when he gave then–United Kingdom prime minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs of American movies, which couldn't be lawfully played on Brown's DVD player.

The DMCA will permit copyright owners to control how many times you can read or watch a copyrighted work. In the DMCA world, both consumers and technology are treated as the enemy.

And, as he notes, this is unfortunate not just for technology companies -- but for consumers and the artists and content creators they want to support:

This unfortunate approach ignores that consumer expectations are greatly influenced by technologies. It is new technologies, not new works, that lead to new consumer expectations and therefore new sources of profits for authors. The Sony Walkman led to an explosion of new sales of audio cassettes. The same was true of the introduction of the CD, where for most of its product life, more money was made from consumers re-buying existing albums than from buying new ones.

But for new technologies, the copyright industries and authors would have starved long ago, since they have played no role, creatively or financially, in the development and introduction of the technologies that enable them to make money. Not a single penny was contributed by the music industry to the creation, manufacture or marketing of iTunes, the iPod, or the iPad. Not a single penny was contributed by the copyright industries to the development of the internet or to any search engine even though the copyright industries could not exist without either. New technologies provide new ways to satisfy new consumer demand and to thereby make healthy profi ts. You would never know that from the medieval mentality of moat building represented by the DMCA and copyright industries' approach to most new technologies, an approach that has failed to grasp the simple point, proved over and over again, that new technologies create new opportunities.

There's a lot more in the article that's worth reading, and even more in the full book, which I recommend highly.

One aspect of fair use that often confuses people is the distinction between parody (which is well-established as fair use in many circumstances) and satire (which is not). The basic distinction is that a parody that makes use of a copyrighted work is doing so to comment on that work, while satire that makes use of a copyrighted work is doing so to comment on something else. The legal reasoning is that in the former situation, use of the work is necessary because it is intrinsic to the commentary, but in the latter situation it is unnecessary because the same commentary could be made in another way.

Unfortunately, the distinction is not always so clear. Illustrator Danny Hellman recently discovered this after completing a series of illustrations in the style of Dr. Seuss for a book about declining job prospects for recent graduates, itself written in the Seussian style (and presumably inspired by the tradition of reciting Seuss' Oh, The Places You'll Go! at graduation ceremonies).

A few months into the project, (after I’d turned in about half of the book’s 80 or so illos) the publisher sent promo materials for the book out to retailers. Apparently, some wicked, Grinch-like person felt compelled to pass these materials along to attorneys who work for the Ted Geisel [Dr. Seuss] estate, at which point this flock of legal carrion birds descended on my publisher much as the Onceler clan does on a newly-discovered forest of virgin Truffula trees.

Okay, enough of the Seuss metaphors. Suffice to say that my publisher was hit with a Cease & Desist letter, and the project was killed, in spite of our well-established First Amendment right to commit parody.

While I'm sure that the estate would have sent a C&D no matter what, in this case the parody defence is likely not as strong as Hellman assumes, because the book was not commenting on Seuss and his work, but rather on an unrelated topic, making it more satire than parody. There's also the possibility that trademarks are involved, which would be a different story, but without actually seeing the C&D it's hard to say. Assuming, as Hellman suggests, copyright is indeed the core issue, this situation is comes down to an even more fundamental question: can an artist's "style" be protected by copyright? Let's take a look at one of the images in question:

Yes, it is distinctly Seussian, but it does not replicate or make use of any of Seuss' actual work. This is an example of the failure of the idea/expression dichotomy that is supposed to be central to copyright law. In theory, ideas are not covered by copyright, only the fixed expression of those ideas, but while some argue that the distinction is clear and obvious, the fact is that's rarely the case. An artist's signature style is, in one sense, a part of the specific expression, but in another sense it is a collection of artistic ideas that dictate expression. If style can be protected, it creates a problematic double standard: could someone, for example, get away with reproducing a Seuss book in full using a different style of art and writing? Unlikely. But if they also can't tell a different story using the Seussian style then... suddenly there is no "idea" side of the dichotomy at all.

The real issue is that it's highly subjective, creating situations where judges must play art critic to determine if something is infringing. So a book like this can easily be killed by a C&D, since the publisher isn't going to risk a lawsuit when they have no clear standard telling them if the work is infringing. That creates a massive chilling effect on art, and gives rightsholders too much power to squash anything they don't like, with or without a firm legal basis.

Lack of clarity on key concepts like parody/satire and idea/expression is one of the biggest problems with copyright law today. When artists have no way of knowing whether something is infringing, it limits their creativity, and everyone is worse off. A firm, clear definition of the idea/expression dichotomy (and one that errs on the idea side, as was always the intent, since fair use is supposed to be what stops copyright from violating freedom of speech) would go a long way towards fixing a broken law.

It's often amazing how legacy industry organizations come up with the most far-fetched and ridiculous reasons to insist that giving the public more information isn't actually in the public interest. Rob Hyndman points us to an effort by real estate agents in Canada who are fighting back against a plan to put house listing information online by claiming that this will expose home sellers to crime, as suddenly criminals will break into their homes. This is based on... absolutely nothing. Well, actually, it's based on a false claim that realtors are getting attacked and killed already. The Globe and Mail report on this story could have done a better job calling the realtors on their crazy claims, but goes with a more understated approach:

“Easy access to information online is a huge safety issue,” said Von Palmer, the real estate board’s chief privacy officer. “There is a real possibility of break-ins and assaults; you only have to read the headlines to imagine what might happen. You hear stories about realtors getting attacked and killed. Can you imagine if we put that information out there about consumers? You can only imagine the headlines.”

A spokesman for the Toronto Police Service said he wasn’t aware violence against real estate agents was a problem in the city.

Also, they could just look south of the border. The information that the Canadians are now discussing putting online is, for the most part, already available online here in the US. And while I'm sure if they tried hard enough, somewhere, somehow, someone might be able to connect a real estate listing to crime, it's certainly not a common occurrence.

It's pretty clear that the real issue is just one of control. The real estate agents benefit from being the gatekeepers to that information, and they fear what happens when people can start to route around them. A few months back, I did a talk at a real estate conference, where I compared the music industry to the real estate industry, and it was amazing just how many similarities there were between the two. They were two big legacy industries trying to hold back the tide of what the internet allows, and they were able to come up with all sorts of ridiculous scenarios to explain how horrible the world would be if the information they used to control was allowed to go free online. But it's tough to stop the free flow of information, and real estate agents will learn soon enough that a strategy of spreading FUD isn't a way to future-proof your business. Learning to adapt, and to take advantage of the spread of information by becoming an enabler rather than a gatekeeper, really is the key.

Having recently lost its attempt to blame Justin.tv for the fact that some of its users stream Ultimate Fighting Championship matches, UFC's parent company Zuffa is moving ahead with its strategy of going after its fans directly. This isn't entirely new. A few years ago, the company announced plans to sue fans, even though it admitted at the time that the costs of such lawsuits would outweigh any benefits. Of course, that alone should make you wonder what Zuffa management is thinking, but it seems that their entire thought process is "piracy bad, must stop," and that's about it.

The latest move is that Zuffa was able to get user information from Greenfeedz.com, one of the websites that let people watch unauthorized feeds of UFC's pay-per-view (PPV) events. This plan is very reminiscent of when DirecTV ran one of the first of these extortion-like shakedown campaigns by getting the list of customers from a seller of smart cards (which had other legitimate purposes) and then demanding $3,500 from each of them. That action did not go well for DirecTV, leading to multiple lawsuits, including from former employees, and the company eventually dropped the program altogether. Stunningly, Zuffa's lawyer compares his situation to the DirecTV situation... but seems to ignore the massive backlash it created, the legal pushback and the eventual dropping of the program.

Of course, as we also noted in that post a couple years ago about Zuffa's plan to sue fans, huge numbers of people are perfectly willing to pay large sums for the PPV fights, and the numbers seem to keep growing. It seems to depend more on who's fighting rather than whether or not unauthorized streams are available. That said, in explaining why they're going to sue their fans, Zuffa's legal boss, Lawrence Epstein, said that he believes the company has an obligation to sue the fans.

But, even more ridiculous is the response when someone asks about suing fans. Epstein claims that UFC loves its fans, but anyone who infringes is simply not a fan at all. However, that's ridiculous. An article by Ben Fowlkes at MMAFighting.com provides a wonderful explanation for why this is a ridiculous claim:

For starters, the UFC seems to believe that there are two types of MMA fans: the type who buys the pay-per-views, and the type who watches them illegally. In reality, the line between those two groups is probably a lot blurrier than Zuffa realizes. Chances are very good that some of the people who have streamed events in the past have also bought them, and probably will buy them again at some point in the future. Maybe they only pony up the $55 for the pay-per-view when the card is good enough, or when they can get friends to split the cost with them. Maybe they stream it when they only care about one or two fights, or when they’re simply too strapped for cash to afford it.

My point is, not all piracy is created equal, at least on the receiving end, and attacking viewers as if they are distributors could do much more harm than good.

For instance, picture a 19-year-old college student just about anywhere in America. He wants to see a UFC event, but maybe he can’t even afford basic cable, let alone a pay-per-view. He can’t go to a bar to watch the fights (unless he has a convincing fake ID), so he stays home and finds an illegal stream on his laptop, because he can't stand to miss the big fight. Then, months later, he gets sued by the UFC.

What’s going to happen when that kid graduates, goes to work, and finds a job that will allow him to enjoy luxury expenses like pay-per-views? You think he’s going to become a loyal customer of the company that sued him back when he was struggling to buy books? You think he’s going to buy a ticket to see a UFC event when it comes to his city? You think he’s going to buy merchandise or watch free events or patronize the UFC in any way after that experience? Maybe. Or maybe he’ll hold a little bit of a grudge. You know, for the rest of his natural life.

That's the amazing thing about so many anti-piracy attempts. They simply don't take into account the actual situation, and what the real costs and benefits of their actions are. They just think "piracy bad, must stop." They refuse to accept that those who are infringing may have reasons for doing so beyond "I'll never give any money to these people ever." Not actually understanding that seems like a huge strategic blunder. For all the talk of having an "obligation" to sue fans, I would think that the company's officers actually have an obligation to the company's shareholders, which means not making braindead moves that actually hurt the bottom line. And yet that seems to be the ultimate plan here.

In 2009, we wrote about the city of Bozeman, Montana asking job applicants for all of their passwords to social networking sites, so that the city could look more closely to see if they had "high moral character." Public outrage over that plan resulted in the city dropping the requirement. Last year, we noted that some places in Maryland were doing the same, leading to a lawsuit. However, the Boston Globe is now reporting that more and more jobseekers are being asked for their social network logins, as a simplified "background check" by employers. It's a newspaper trend piece, so in typically maddening fashion it makes no effort to indicate how widespread this really is -- but the fact that it's not a big story any time an employer does this certainly suggests that it's becoming at least somewhat more standard.

Still, does that mean we should pass a law? Senator Richard Blumenthal -- who has long been in favor of laws against all kinds of internet companies -- is apparently working on exactly that kind of legislation. Somehow, I doubt it's an accident that the Boston Globe trend piece came out at about the same time as Blumenthal's plans were discussed. Frankly, I still think that it's pretty sketchy and questionable for companies to ask for logins, but is it so bad that we need a law? Is there at least some sort of data on how widespread this practice is?

In the meantime, for those interviewing for jobs who do get asked for such things, it seems only proper to respond as the first individual profiled in the original article does—by walking away:

Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn't want to work for a company that would seek such personal information.

I would still guess this isn't quite as common as the article tries to suggest, but either way I'm curious if people feel this practice is so egregious that it needs a new federal law?

There was a fair bit of discussion recently about the story of The Pirate Bay exploring using drones to build a flying file sharing system -- with many insisting that such a thing was a completely ridiculous-to-impossible notion. They might want to think again. It seems that a proof of concept had already been built by a different group, who had no idea that TPB was considering this idea. Liam Young from Tomorrow's Thoughts Today already built what's basically an implementation of the what the Pirate Bay described, which you can see below: Of course, the key here is that these are just setting up a drone-based local-area network, rather than one connected to the wider internet, but that's easy enough to add at some point (especially as wireless technology improves). There's still a long way to go towards a full-scale system such as what the Pirate Bay guys envision, but the technology itself isn't that far fetched.

Remember the Hobbit pub in the UK that was threatened with legal action from the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) for infringing on the supposed rights SZC held in the Hobbit movie? The bad publicity resulted in SZC offering up a cheapo license, and now two of the actors appearing in The Hobbit movie -- the hugely popular Stephen Fry and Ian McKellen -- have said that they'll pay the license fee for the pub. Both actors had spoken out pretty early on about their disgust over the moviemakers bullying the pub this way, with Fry going so far as to apologize for his industry's actions. Taking it even further by agreeing to pay the license is certainly a nice gesture and shows (yet again) the value of actually connecting (and being human and awesome). It still amazes me that so many companies don't recognize how badly these kinds of things will backfire.

Last month Techdirt wrote about yet more secret meetings between the copyright and internet industries, this time in Australia, where the federal government there was "encouraging" them to come up with ways of tackling online copyright infringement.

The public, as usual, was not invited to offer their views on plans that would obviously affect them more than anyone. And so people filed a freedom of information (FOI) request to find out belatedly what was going on. But the answers they received were unsatisfactory, to say the least:

the Attorney-General’s Department responded to that Freedom of Information request, providing a series of five documents. However, using a variety of justifications, the department has redacted almost all of the information previously contained in the documents -- including 14 pages of notes taken by a departmental staffer at the event and other four pages of notes taken by a senior staffer from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s department.

Some of the excuses for not providing the requested information are pretty far-fetched:

the Attorney-General’s Department stated in its response to Delimiter’s FoI request that it "does not hold" a list of the attendees who actually attended the meeting.

So the Australian government organized a secret meeting, but doesn't know who attended? If that's true, it suggests a stunning level of incompetence that ought to require heads to roll; and if it's not true, then heads should still roll, for being economical with the truth.

But perhaps the most outrageous aspect of the response to the FOI request is the underlying justification for providing a content-free non-reply:

"Disclosure of the documents while the negotiations are still in process, would, in my view, prejudice, hamper and impede those negotiations to an unacceptable degree," wrote [Attorney-General’s Department senior legal officer] Purcell. That would, in my view, be contrary to the interests of good government -- which would, in turn, be contrary to the public interest."

What this really means is: "All hell will break loose when the public finds out what is being discussed behind closed doors. So what we're going to do is to come up with an agreement in secret, and then present it as a fait accompli, without offering citizens any options to change anything substantive. By contrast, to release the documents, and allow the public to have a say in how they should be allowed to use a critical 21st-century technology, would be contrary to the interests of this very good government, which by definition is identical with the public interest."

It's really extraordinary that, in 2012, governments can still trot out this nonsense that what is good for the government is by definition good for the public interest. How about letting the public have a say on the matter, by inviting them to join the debate using the means devised by the open government movements around the world during the last few years?

Instead, once the back-room deal finally emerges into the light of day, and is predictably met by a barrage of anger, the Australian government will profess itself stunned by the ingratitude of the public that is rejecting all that hard work done by its faithful public servants. And then perhaps, following in the footsteps of their German colleagues, Australian politicians will use that anger over lack of transparency as an excuse to justify further lack of transparency.

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

We've noted in the past the similarities between mass IP infringement trolling lawsuits and shakedown scams -- and have even seen some out-and-out scammers mimic the techniques of copyright trolls. Torrentfreak now reports that some scammers are specifically targeting Megaupload users, pretending to be lawyers demanding payment for infringements on Megaupload. While these are pure scams, given the MPAA's own statements about possibly suing Megaupload users, combined with the success rate that copyright trolls often have in getting some people to just pay up, it seems likely that a fair number of recipients of such a scam letter are actually falling for it.