Mike Doughty, a frequently awesome musician who may mostly be known for his work in the band Soul Coughing (though his solo work after that is even better), has always been known for creative attempts at navigating the new music world. He's frequently said that the original Napster saved his career and he's been willing to embrace new media and new models in the same somewhat experimental way that he crafts music. The latest offering is somewhere between a business model experiment and performance art (and, honestly, when the two blend together, that's often a good thing). He's written a song called "Dogs/Demons" which is not being released on any album or online in any manner. The only way to get it is to pay $543.09 and he'll record you an entirely personalized performance directly into a voice recorder and send it to you. You can pick which of 3 different keys he'll record it in, there's an optional bridge for an additional $267.18 (you know you want it), and at the beginning of the song, he'll state the date, time, location, the recording number and "the full first, middle, and last name of the person who orders it." The voice recorder itself will also be signed and numbered.

In the FAQ, he makes it clear that the full name is absolutely required:

Q: I’m going to put a weird fake name in there, like Hoobop Skibbyskabby Lorbowl–will you say it?

A: No. Essential to this piece is the actual, full name of the person who purchases it. If your name is indeed along the lines of “Hoobop Skibbyskabby Lorbowl,” you may be asked to provide documentation proving this is indeed your name.

Q: I hate my middle name! Will you omit it from my recording of “Dogs/Demons”?

A: Again, essential to this piece is the real, three-part name. If you have no middle name you may be asked to provide documentation; the same goes for multiple-middle-name possessors.

Q: I’d like the name of my friend, colleague, or partner said on my version of “Dogs/Demons,” as well as my own name, can you do that?

A: Alas, no: only one name can be in each recording.

As for buyers, he notes that they can "sell it to somebody else for more than you paid for it–you can auction it off, you can exhibit it. All that stuff." Though, he makes it clear that he still retains the copyright, he also notes "there will doubtless be some sold person-to-person, or bootlegged, and I accept this as the nature of the world."

He admits that he's more or less copying the idea of artist Ray Johnson as shown in the documentary How to Draw a Bunny.

While it's certainly not the best way to get that particular song heard widely, as part of a continuing strategy to draw attention for doing some unique things (and, who knows, maybe make some money in the process), it seems like an amusing experiment.

Elite schools aren't getting any cheaper, and college tuition seems to be rising faster than a lot of other goods (though the net price may not be). So what are aspiring university students to do? Here are just a few interesting links on the future of education.

• One proposal for college students to try to pay for rising tuition fees is for schools to take a cut of their students' future earnings in lieu of upfront tuition. Indentured servitude 2.0 might kill the classical liberal arts education, but oh well. [url]
• Baby boomers might be able to take college-level classes via iPads and chatrooms, but do they really want to? Mobile classes sound useful for students of any age, so why target just the baby boomers? (This exercise left to the reader.) [url]
• Sal Khan discusses the future of credentialing -- and how schools might be separated from the role of providing proof of proficiency. The future of microcredentials could offer a way for anyone to obtain proof of expertise in a narrowly-defined domain. [url]

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

The latest research by law professor Colleen Chien is getting lots of much-needed press coverage, in that it reveals we've passed the tipping point with patent trolls, as more than half of all patent lawsuits were brought by trolls. In fact, her new report reveals that 61% of all patent lawsuits filed in the first 11 months of 2012... were from patent trolls. That's an astoundingly large number -- and one that is growing fast. The same report notes that just last year the number was 45% and five years ago it was just 23%. When does the government wake up and realize we have a serious problem on our hands?

We've been writing about mobile phone subsidies for quite some time. As you probably know, most of the time (especially in the US) when you buy a mobile phone, it's heavily subsidized by the mobile operator, which is part of the reason why they require a long-term contract with expensive penalties if you break the contract early. Of course, they really make up that "subsidy" by charging higher prices on the service, and they do so over such an extended period of time that the higher service fees almost certainly outweigh the amount of the original subsidy. So, despite it appearing "cheaper" up front to consumers, subsidies are frequently against the consumer's best interest, and somewhat silly. We all buy computers without subsidies from our ISPs. Why shouldn't we do the same with mobile phones?

Even though these subsidy programs really benefit the mobile operators the most, they've been complaining about them for years. It really was almost exactly a decade ago, that we wrote that operators in the US were exploring the idea of ditching subsidies, even as we also discussed how mobile operators didn't seem to realize that those subsidies probably helped the operators more. However, it took until now for one of the major operators to finally make the break. T-Mobile has officially announced the end of phone subsidies. The T-Mobile plan is actually pretty smart and consumer friendly. You'll pay $99 upfront, and then effectively "finance" the rest of the phone purchase with $15 or $20 payments added to each monthly phone bill -- but those payments go away once the phone is paid off. And, yes, the fees for ongoing service are cheaper. So, as long as you keep your phone past the time when you pay it off, you're likely to save money.

As some are pointing out, this actually could save consumers are fair bit of money and allow them to avoid a lot of hassle later. That's because without subsidies, the reasons for super long term contracts become less important. That also means operators have less reason to focus on "locked" phones, and can be much more open to allowing unlocked phones on their network.

And... at the same time, the massive growth of the smartphone market worldwide, might even mean that you don't even need to pay more for your smartphone. Jimmy Wales recently noted that his smartphone of choice was a cheap Android-powered smartphone, made by Huawei in China and sold in Kenya for $50. As we're now reaching massive economies of scale for smartphones, and as Moore's law churns along, the phones themselves can get cheaper and cheaper -- as we've seen with lots of other technology, including computers.

As such, it's not hard to see this working out spectacularly for consumers, where both the phones and the service can end up being cheaper, without the annoying lock-in and lock-down with subsidized phones. Hopefully other US operators will start to follow suit as well. They've only talked about it for a decade. And with T-Mobile leading the way, perhaps others will finally take the plunge.

Ah, Representative Marsha Blackburn. This is the self-styled "limited government" Member of the House of Representatives who famously posted a nearly 100% factually misleading attack on "net neutrality" just shortly before sponsoring SOPA, despite the fact that almost everything she complained about in her mythical version of net neutrality was true of SOPA. For example, she talked about the wonders of the internet (yay!) and sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and talked about how they've been built up entirely without government intervention (ignoring, of course, the government's rather large role in the creation of the internet, but let's leave that aside). And then she states: "There has never been a time that a consumer has needed a federal bureaucrat to intervene (in the world wide web)." And she worries how under the net neutrality she fears "the next Facebook innovator" may "have to go apply with the government to get approval to develop a new application."

Yet, of course, when it comes to SOPA and copyright, she ignores these very same arguments. SOPA itself was very much about federal bureaucrats, including Rep. Marsha Blackburn, intervening in how the internet was to work. And, of course, the very nature of copyright these days is that it means that innovators often do have to effectively get "approval" from the government to develop a new product. In fact, the former director of the US Copyright Office, Ralph Oman, recently stated specifically, in the Aereo case, that he believed the intention of copyright law was that new technologies must first get Congressional approval before they can be considered legal -- and this appears to be Blackburn's position as well.

Of course, this blatant contradiction is explained away easily enough, since her district is up against Nashville, Tennessee, a major outpost of the recording industry. Given that, it was no surprise to see it confirmed that she was one of the leading voices among Republican members who led the Republican Study Committee to first retract Derek Khanna's "copyright myths" policy brief, and then to push to make sure that he was not retained as an RSC staffer.

The latest, is that when asked about Blackburn's role in Khanna's employment situation, a Blackburn staffer, Mike Reynard, went off on an ill-informed rant against the policy brief:

"She does not believe the radical positions espoused in a recent so-called policy paper regarding copyright," Reynard said. "Conservatives aren't going to tolerate the ideology that copyright violates nearly every tenant of laissez-faire capitalism, that copyright is a government monopoly, and that property rights don't matter anymore."

"We were concerned that the RSC's Executive Director, Paul Teller, and Congressman Jim Jordan associated themselves with these bizarre ideas and were happy to see them denounce the process and the ideas in the paper after it was published," he added.

So much lies and distortions in two short paragraphs. First of all, the ideas in the paper were hardly "radical." They've been widely discussed for quite some time outside the halls of Congress, but they rarely make it inside, because Blackburns' close friends at the RIAA and MPAA do a bang up job keeping them out. Second, the idea that "conservatives aren't going to tolerate the ideology that copyright violates nearly every tenant of laisez-faire capitalism" is kinda laughable, since an awful lot of conservatives not only "tolerate" the idea, they believe it to be true. In fact, as we've noted, there's an entire new book making the "conservative" case for massive copyright reform (even going beyond Khanna's so-called "radical" suggestions). Furthermore, an awful lot of prominent conservative thinkers have come out in favor of the report. So whether or not Blackburn "tolerates" it, doesn't have much bearing on whether or not "conservatives" tolerate it. It just seems to show that Blackburn may be completely out of touch and out of step with those she claims to represent.

As for the idea that copyright is not a government monopoly -- well, that's just wrong. I mean, there's nothing to argue here. It's a simple fact: a copyright is a monopoly. In the earlier days of the US, the founders even directly referred to them as monopolies. So I'm not even sure how this point is debatable, unless you're entirely ignorant.

Then there's the idea that "property rights don't matter anymore." That's just weird, because no one suggested that at all. In fact, if you actually read Khanna's paper, he argues quite the opposite. Property rights matter a great deal. The problem with copyright is that it's a restriction on people's private property rights.

Finally, while the RSC did retract the report, after heavy pressure from various lobbyists, at no time did they "denounce the process and the ideas in the paper." They simply argued that it did not properly represent the views of all of their members. One assumes this includes Marsha Blackburn, but judging from the comments from her staffer, I would think that the RSC would not wish to associate itself with the pure and blatant ignorance coming out of her office. We can argue the merits of the paper (and, in fact, we've been trying to do that in a series of posts). But to pretend the paper says stuff that it doesn't... and to argue things that are clearly factually 100% false is no way to go about making policy.

Earlier this year, a picture posted online by musician Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers -- a successful act from the 1960s -- went viral, telling the story of how the recording industry never paid him money he was owed. Now, with help from Reddit & Breadpig founder Alexis Ohanian, Chambers is raising money for a new album on Kickstarter, called Lester's Time Has Come Today. This is being done in association with Breadpig, which has helped a number of content creators sell their goods, while also doing social good as well.

The music industry may have screwed Lester Chambers for decades, but we the internet public can right their wrong.

Thanks to the open internet (things we fought for against SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, etc.), sites like Kickstarter and other innovations that are being worked on by entrepreneurs right now, we have the opportunity to do right by artists and cut out those who'd mistreat them. We have the opportunity to create solutions that will support artists in the digital world.

The money will actually go to Lester via Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, an organization that provides financial help to career musicians who are struggling financially, due to age, illness or disability.

In looking over this, I'm reminded that earlier this year, during a debate with Jonathan Taplin, Alexis similarly offered to help struggling career musicians launch Kickstarter campaigns, and was mocked for his offer. It raises questions, yet again, as to who is actually helping musicians out these days? The people whining about how copyright laws must be enforced... or the people actually setting up and creating new services to help musicians make money?

Via Julian Sanchez we learn that Senator Ron Wyden has released some updated responses from our national intelligence bosses concerning the questions that Wyden (and a few other Senators) have been asking for years. It's been pretty clear that a "secret" interpretation under the FISA Amendments Act (related to the Patriot Act) has meant that the NSA is scooping up tons of American communications, even as its mandate is that it only cover foreign intelligence—and Wyden has been pushing for more information.

It appears that there are some pretty significant loopholes that have allowed the NSA to go a lot further. For example, it isn't allowed to collect information on Americans if "it's known at the time of acquisition" that the communications are domestic. So as long as it doesn't look when it's acquiring (but does look later) there's no problem. Similarly, it appears that the secret interpretation also means as long as the target of the investigation being conducted -- and not necessarily the person whose communication is being intercepted -- is a foreign terrorist, the communication is fair game. That is, so long as the NSA can claim that they're collecting the information to go after Al Qaeda, they can claim that it's valid to intercept almost anything, as it "targets" foreign communications, even if it's collecting purely domestic communications. The key to all of this is reports that the NSA is likely collecting a massive chunk of information, possibly including pretty much all mobile phone records. Senator Wyden keeps asking about how many Americans have had their data collected, and what interpretation the NSA is using. These seem like completely valid questions, but the NSA and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, keep refusing to answer.

After the NSA responded to yet another request from Wyden for answers to these questions, Wyden once again demanded answers from James Clapper, the Director of National Security. Wyden, along with Senators Jeff Merkeley, Tom Udall and Mark Udall, sent a letter simply asking Clapper to respond to four simple questions -- many of which could be answered with a simple yes or no:

First, we asked if any entities have made any estimates -- even imprecise estimates -- about how many US cmmunications have been collected under section 702 of the FISA statute (which is the central provision of the FISA Amendments Act). You did not answer this question. Please provide an answer. We would expect this answer to be unclassified, but if you disagree please provide your reasons for keeping this answer secret.

Second, we asked if it was possible to estimate the order of magnitude of this number. (For example, is the number of US communications collected under section 702 closer to 100. or 100.000. or 100 million?) You did not answer this question directly, however the Director of the NSA has made public statements that appear to estimate this order of magnitude. Specifically, the NSA Director has said that "the story that [the NSA] has millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is absolutely false." Please explain whether this statement should be understood to mean that the number of US communications collected under section 702 is less than "millions or hundreds of millions." Since the NSA Director made this statement publicly, we would expect this answer to be unclassified as well.

Third, we asked if any wholly domestic American communications had been collected under section 702 authorities. Your response was classified. We do not understand how simply stating whether any wholly domestic communications have been collected under section 702 authorities would have any impact at all on US national security interests. if you believe that it would, please explain why. And if you agree that it would not, please provide an unclassified answer to this question.

Fourth, we noted that the FISA Amendments Act does not prohibit searching through communications collected under section 702 to find the communications of particular Americans, and asked if the US government has ever attempted to search for the communications of a specific American in this way without a warrant or emergency authorization. Your response was classified. We do not understand how providing a 'yes' or 'no' answer to this question would impact US national security interests in any way, and we ask that you provide an unclassified response.

They further note, via a footnote, that the idea that it's reasonable to answer these questions in a classified manner because Senators can read the classified answers makes little sense concerning the important debate on renewing the FISA Amendments Act, since the key staffers who Senators hire to understand this stuff probably can't read those classified responses.

We note that classifying these answers does not just keep them secret from the public. Most members of Congress including eleven of the thirteen senators that signed our letter - do not have any staff who are cleared to read your attachment, which will make it extremely difficult for most members to review and understand these" answers.

The whole thing is ridiculous... and making it even more ridiculous is the response sent by Clapper which basically ignores the questions and says that he's happy to meet directly with any Senator in a classified setting to answer questions:

We cannot provide additional answers to your questions in an unclassified format. Rather than provide you with imprecise, unclassified information, I reiterate our offer to meet with you -- and any other Members of Congress -- in a classified setting to discuss these authorities and answer any questions you might have.

Of course, that defeats the point of letting the public know about how these laws are being interpreted and how much of their communications are being collected by the NSA. Furthermore, it fails to take into account the footnoted point that the key staffers who help elected officials understand this stuff may not be allowed to learn about these answers. Clapper's letter is even more ridiculous when he explains the justifications for not answering the questions. Basically, he gives a blanket "national security" answer, claiming that he's "balancing" the issues of security and public debate:

I also share your interest in an informed public debate on the government's use of its intelligence collection authorities. As you know, it is my responsibility under the law to protect critical intelligence activities from public disclosure in order to safeguard sensitive sources and methods, including the government's acquisition of vital foreign intelligence information through FAA authorities. Our earlier publicly available letters, including my August 24, 2012 unclassified letter (with classified annex) responding to your July 26, 2012 inquiry, and General Alexander's November 13, 2012 letter, properly balance protecting classified information and informing the public of the manner in which FAA is implemented.

That is, to put it simply: hogwash. As the original letter makes clear, there is no reason that national security is threatened by answering the basic questions being asked. Saying whether or not an estimate has been made on how many Americans have had their communications intercepted (not even saying what that number is) is not going to violate national security. As for the NSA letter from General Alexander that Clapper mentions, Wyden has released that too and it's equally ridiculous -- again, insisting that the answers to such basic questions need to be classified.

In the end, it looks like the NSA and the National Intelligence Director aren't so interested in protecting national security with these non-answers, but their own job security. Claiming that such information needs to be kept secret may allow them to keep quiet how they've been using unique interpretations of the law to collect American citizens' communications, even as Congress pretends that the bill is being interpreted as written, whereby domestic communications are off limits. The whole thing has become a joke, and shows what intelligence officials will do when there's no real oversight, and they can spy on citizens at will under a flimsy secret interpretation of the law that they never have to reveal.

The government spying on Americans using "secret interpretations" of laws, where intelligence officials get to play word games, rather than answer straight questions from Congress? That's not the way these things are supposed to work.

A bunch of folks, including James Allworth himself, sent over James Allworth's excellent post at HBR entitled How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation. If you're a frequent Techdirt reader, there is little new here, though much you'll likely agree with. It details how many legacy companies use questionable regulations to hinder disruptive upstarts who are challenging their businesses via unique and innovative means. It covers a bunch of different fields or situations where this is seen: autodealers going after Tesla for daring to sell cars direct, perpetual copyright term extension that appears to be much more a function of the age of Mickey Mouse than promoting the progress, how companies like Uber and Airbnb have had to deal with a bundle of local regulations on taxis and hotels, and how Comcast doesn't count its own video content towards your download cap, but Netflix's traffic does count.

It's a great article, but the thing that struck me about it is how it would be possible for people to explain away the corruption in each case as having a legitimate basis. That's what's really pernicious here. Allworth calls out Larry Lessig's book, Republic, Lost which often tries to drive this point home by calling it "soft corruption." That is, we're generally not talking about overt corruption, the kind where someone is handing briefcases full of cash over to politicians. It's much more subtle. What you get are legacy companies who fear disruption -- and they are able to make the case that the "disruption" should be illegal because it's scary to the incumbent. That is, "we must shut down this new innovation x, because it will destroy industry y, and industry y is important to America because of all the jobs it creates!" Or, it's "we need to carefully regulate industry z, because if we don't they'll take advantage of customers!"

And, thus, there are legitimate-sounding reasons for these kinds of regulations, and supporters of them always hit back on the corruption charges, claiming that "of course, it's not corruption -- politicians are just protecting jobs / children / etc."

There's a myth out there that businesses hate regulations. That's only partially true, and it's only true in limited cases. In many industries -- especially highly regulated ones -- the incumbents often love regulations because (a) they have enough power to control the regulations, (b) they know their way around those regulations better than anyone else, (c) those regulations quite frequently limit competition and (d) those regulations quite frequently effectively block out any form of disruptive innovation by stopping it entirely.

Perhaps what this is all about isn't properly conveyed by just calling it "corruption," or even "soft corruption." I think it's better described as corruption laundering. It is corruption, but it's done through this regulatory framework to make it look, sound and (in some cases) feel perfectly legit to many people, making it much easier to keep those regulations in place. The corruption is "cleaned" of its dirty connotations because it can be wrapped in a cloth (though bogus) of "protecting jobs" or "protecting your safety." It is corruption, but the truly nefarious part is that the corruption is done in such a way that there is plausible deniability over whether or not it is truly corrupt. And that's what makes it so difficult to root out this form of corruption. It's all been white-washed in a way to have a plausible explanation, even as the pace of important innovation suffers drastically.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is something of an institution in the UK, famous for his blond mop of hair and outrageous opinions. He's also been a journalist on and off for two decades, and is close to Rupert Murdoch, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that he's penned a characteristically witty defense of British newspapers. They're currently under threat of having governmental regulation imposed upon them in the wake of the UK's Leveson Inquiry, written in response to years of journalists breaking the law in search of hot stories, as Johnson acknowledges:

They have shoved their slavering snouts into the parlours of weeping widows, and by their outrageous lies they have driven the relatives of their victims to suicide. When you read Leveson in full, you are left to ponder the mystery of how people can behave like this. Are these journalists that much nastier and more cynical than the rest of the human race? Why do they seem to have got out of control? The answer is simple. The press are no nastier than anyone else; quite the reverse. On the whole, journalists are highly intelligent, amusing and frequently idealistic.

But if that is the case, how is it possible they have been shoving their slavering snouts all over the place? Johnson has a simple explanation:

for some papers the costs are becoming prohibitive. Every year, every month, they are losing ground to blogs and Twitter and Google News; every year the internet eats more destructively into the business case for old-fashioned journalism. That is at least one of the reasons why some journalists have been driven to behave so disgracefully, squawking ever louder, no matter how erroneously, in the hope of being noticed.

Yes, it's all the Internet's fault. Those poor journalists lost their otherwise robust moral compass because Big Bad Google and friends have been progressively stealing their daily bread. Of course, we've heard this narrative about Google destroying newspapers many times before. It's what publishers around the world are saying, while asking for a cut of Google's revenues. It's what Rupert Murdoch has been saying, although he still wants to be included in Google's search results.

But this whole idea is "an inverted pyramid of piffle", to use a famous phrase of Johnson's. It wasn't Google and the Internet that destroyed traditional journalism, it was the newspapers themselves by refusing to evolve as new technologies have come along that changed the relationship with the reader in significant ways. Johnson's attempt to deflect blame away from the guilty parties onto the agents of technological change is simply shabby.

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Recently, we noted that copyright levies in Europe are looking more and more anachronistic for the high-tech world. It seems that Nigeria has not noticed this, since Afro-IP points out to us that the Copyright (Levy of Materials) Order 2012 has been approved there, which will bring them in for a very wide range of goods:

The Director-General who disclosed this in Abuja, indicated that the materials regulated by the levy imposed by the new Copyright Order include storage media like Audio Cassettes, Mini Discs, CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, SD Memory Cards, Video Cassettes, USB Flash drives, I-Pods and Photocopying Paper. Others are equipment and devices like Photocopying Machines, MP3 Players, Digital Juke box, Mobile Phones, CD recorders, DVD Recorders, Blu Ray Recorders, Computer External Hard Drives, Analogue Audio Recorders, Analogue Video Recorders, Personal Computers, Printing Plates, Printers/Printing Machines, Radio/TV Sets enabling recording, Camcorders and Decoders/Signal Receivers.

The money is going to the usual places:

"The Commission is expected to disburse the funds to beneficiaries who are essentially approved collective management organisations (CMOs) subject to retaining 10 per cent of the collected levy for administrative purposes of agencies that would be involved in the implementation of the scheme", he stated, adding, "The Order also permits the Commission to retain 20 per cent of the fund for anti-piracy purposes; and 10 per cent for promotion of creativity", he stated.

It's particularly sad to see that exactly double the amount will be spent on "anti-piracy purposes" compared to the "promotion of creativity." That not only seems precisely the wrong way round but is regrettable in a country where it was piracy that helped build the hugely-successful local film industry.

It's obviously great to see African countries like Nigeria develop as an increasingly important player in the world of technology, but it's depressing to see its politicians repeating the mistakes of the West in this area. Imposing retrogressive levies do little to help local artists, but are likely to hinder the development of local hardware industries because of the extra costs they impose on purchasers.

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Here at Techdirt, we're used to seeing national security agencies make overly broad requests for personal data, often under the premise that the crime (or crimes) committed justifies these fishing expeditions that are as "targeted" as dropping a nuke into the ocean and keeping everything that floats to the surface. Vague assurances are usually given that any data not considered "relevant" will be discarded or ignored and, as such, couldn't possibly be considered a violation of privacy.

The Lebanese Internal Security Force looks like it might take the prize for Most Overreaching Data Request. The ISF is still looking for those responsible for the assassination of intelligence chief Wissam al-Hassan in 2010 and figures that getting access to a little data might be helpful. All it's asking for is... everything.

[Telecommunications Minister Nicolas Sehnaoui] also revealed that his ministry received a request to hand over the contents of “text messages and passwords of Facebook and other internet accounts of all Lebanese across the country.”

There's nothing like an investigation whose list of suspects includes EVERY CITIZEN IN THE COUNTRY. The requested data doesn't include "political leaders and dignitaries," so at least there will be someone to pick the suspect out of the cross-Lebanon lineup.

Fortunately, this request was recommended for rejection, but at this point still remains in the "OPEN" file. The ISF has also issued two scaled down requests -- one for just everyone's SMS data -- and finally, one for just the SMS data from two provinces, covering only the two months prior to the attack of October 2010.

Even more fortunately, these slightly less inclusive requests also seem to be on their way to being rejected. The issue of the legality of these requests is still being debated, but early statements from the Interior Minister seem to indicate that nothing but the latest, most targeted request will even be considered, and even that may be deemed too broad. The Interior Minister did, however, make a brief argument for the final SMS data request, which features the sort of "promise" no citizen in their right mind should trust. 

The interior minister said that providing the SMS data to the security forces did not necessarily entail that all their contents will be revealed “and that the privacy of the Lebanese people will be violated.”

He added that it only the content of messages sent and received by those who came under the security forces’ suspicion will be accessed.

This would be a lot more convincing if the ISF hadn't already cast the entirety of Lebanon under suspicion with its first request. Handing over a bunch of private data to a national security force and trusting them to "just look at the bad guys' stuff" is just paving the infamous slippery slope for faster downhill travel.

One of the concerns we have about the US Copyright Office is that the staff there often seem entirely out of touch with the world we live in today. Witness, for example, its description of the Authors Guild in a recent announcement about an event they're hosting celebrating the Authors Guild 100th anniversary:

The Copyright Office is pleased to host a Copyright Matters discussion about the history and future of the professional author on December 11 at 3 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress. The event, occurring on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of The Authors Guild, the nation's leading advocate for writers' interests, will feature Guild president, author Scott Turow, as the keynote speaker. Other speakers include author and past Guild president Robert K. Massie; John Y. Cole of the Library's Center for the Book; and book market analyst Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group. Also present will be guest authors Roy Blount, Jr., Katherine Neville, Mary Pope Osbourne, Nick Taylor, and others. The event is free and open to the public. See www.copyright.gov/copyrightmatters.html.

Except, of course, that's not even close to true. The Authors Guild represents a very tiny sliver of "writers." It currently has about 9,000 members, and famously only realized that self-published authors count as authors... a few months ago. Look, if copyright only covered works that were officially registered with the Copyright Office, perhaps they'd have a point in claiming that the AG represents writers. But that's silly. Due to ridiculous expansion of copyright laws in the US and around the globe (much of which the Copyright Office gleefully supported), everything that people write that has even a tiny modicum of new/creative elements is automatically covered by copyright. That includes the email you just sent and the scribble your toddler just drew on a piece of paper.

Somehow, I don't see the Authors Guild watching out for those "writers" interests.

What about me? I make my living writing -- but I see the Authors Guild as an out of touch organization run by luddites working hard to limit and hinder innovation because they're confused and scared of technology -- mainly how it creates more competition for their special club which doesn't want too many members. This is the same organization that argued that having a legally purchased ebooks read aloud violated their copyrights. The same organization that has sued libraries for scanning books to make them available for people to read in digital form. The same Authors Guild who has argued that the future of books is... brick and mortar stores. The same Authors Guild who (seriously) argued that Shakespeare wouldn't survive in the modern era since no one respects copyright any more (ignoring that there was no copyright in Shakespeare's time, and he did okay).

The Authors Guild isn't representing 99.999% of all "writers." And it certainly doesn't seem to be advocating for writers' interests, considering that it's fought against some of the best new technologies for creating, distributing, promoting and monetizing writers' works today.

Of course, we know what this is really about. The Copyright Office is still living in a time in the past, where it gets to fetishize a small cadre and closed off "club" of top professionals, ignoring that the rules and laws they seek to pass to protect that club against innovation and competition, also have massive negative impacts on the vast majority of content creators who aren't members of that tiny club. The Authors Guild may do wonderful things for a small group of authors who don't want to change with the times, but I don't see how that's a particularly beneficial service. It seems like a mistake. And the Copyright Office celebrates this?

Mike wrote how both Vint Cerf and Sir Tim Berners-Lee were concerned about the outcome of the WCIT talks currently taking place in Dubai. Those aren't the only important voices being raised. Here, for example, is the Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox browser and many other free software projects:

The Web lets us speak out, share, and connect around the things that matter. It creates new opportunities, holds governments to account, breaks through barriers, and makes cats famous. This isn't a coincidence. It's because the Web belongs to all of us: We all get a say in how it's built.

Mozilla has made it our mission to keep the power of the web in people's hands. But all this could change on December 3.

Our governments are going to meet in Dubai to decide whether an old treaty, the International Telecommunication Union, can be expanded to regulate -- to control -- the Internet.

The issue isn't whether our governments, the UN, or even the ITU should play a role in shaping the Web. The problem is that they are trying to do it behind closed doors, in secret, without us.

We believe everyone should have a voice. And this site is to help you be heard in Dubai.

As you can see, the Mozilla Foundation isn't just moaning about WCIT, it's giving people tools to help them engage with it -- despite the best efforts of the ITU to shut out the public. As a blog post about Mozilla's position on WCIT explains:

The resources we are making available today will give you everything you need to learn about the upcoming meeting and why it matters, craft an effective message to get your government to listen, and engage in the global conversation about how decisions about the future of the Web should be made.

Aside from this very practical help, Mozilla's move is important for another reason. In the past, Mozilla has tended to avoid getting involved with issues that are as much political as technical. The big exception was SOPA, when it took part in the January 18 Blackout, with impressive results:

Approximately 30 million people in the US who use the default start page in Firefox received the blacked out page with our call to action

We sent messages out to almost 9 million people via Facebook, Twitter and our Firefox + You newsletter

Our messages were retweeted, shared and liked by over 20,000 people (not counting MC Hammer’s tweet to his 2.4 million followers!)

1.8 million people came to mozilla.org/sopa to learn more and take action on the issue

600,000 went on to visit the Strike Against Censorship page, hosted by the EFF

Ultimately, 360,000 emails were sent by Mozillians to members of Congress, contributing a third of all the emails generated by EFF’s campaign site.

The action that it is taking over WCIT isn't quite so drastic, and so is unlikely to have such a big impact. But the fact that Mozilla has once again cast aside it usual apolitical position to voice its concerns shows how great they are.

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As Techdirt has reported over the last year, the Indian government is becoming increasingly keen on using cheaper, generic versions of important drugs to treat diseases, rather than paying Western-level prices its people can ill afford. Intellectual Property Watch reports on another instance of the Indian authorities easing the way for low-cost versions by striking down a patent granted to Roche for the treatment of Hepatitis C. As the article explains, it's notable for at least two reasons:

the patent granted to Roche in 2006 was the first product patent on a medicine in India after the country switched to a product patent regime for medicines as mandated by the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). It is also India's first successful post-grant opposition case.

Getting rid of the first modern drug patent in this way neatly symbolizes the country's aggressive new attitude to Western-held monopolies on medicines. It's interesting that in this case the opposition came not from the Indian government, but from Sankalp Rehabilitation Trust, a non-governmental organization, which hopes to source the drug from a manufacturer of generics cheaply enough to be able to give it away for free. This may well inspire post-grant opposition from other organizations seeking to provide cheaper drugs to the sick in India through the use of generic versions.

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