We've covered the efforts by many people over a very, very long period of time to set up a special treaty to help the blind and people who have other reading disabilities have greater access to works that may be covered by copyright. While the US administration rushes through things like ACTA and TPP, it has slow rolled this particular treaty -- bouncing back and forth between supporting such a treaty and not supporting it. Part of this issue, it appears, is that some of the key people in the Obama administration who recognized the value of such an agreement left, and the people who took over are known for their extreme maximalist positions. And, the concern with creating this treaty is that (*gasp*) it might open the door to governments giving people back their rights to make use of products they own.

So it took some people by surprise that the US showed up at the latest WIPO meeting apparently ready to support an agreement. Of course, the devil is in the details and the details showed that the US still didn't want anyone to call the thing a treaty, even as everyone else wants it to be a treaty. The US is also acting very tentatively on this, making it clear that it wants "final review" of the text, and that it might walk away if big copyright holders protest they don't like what they see. After some pressure from just about everyone else, the US has agreed that it will at least show up for discussions on making the agreement an actual treaty -- and that's quite reasonably being seen as progress.

The actual conference to discuss all of this will be held in June, and between now and then, expect all sorts of posturing (mostly by the US) in which they try to limit what's in the agreement and water it down as much as possible. The end result is unlikely to be particularly interesting. It's likely to be very limited and carve out all sorts of things (for example, it will only apply to text, rather than "audio-visual" works -- because, apparently, the MPAA has no interest in making its products more accessible). Having seen all of the scheming and roadblocks US officials have put up over the years concerning what should be a fairly straightforward agreement to help people who are disabled access more content, I'm not particularly hopeful anything useful will come out of this process in the end. But, the big copyright industry can rest easy at night knowing that blind people won't be able to access their materials.

Watching robots learn how to move can be fascinating, as the machines wobble and tilt almost like infants/toddlers do. But no one really cares if a robot topples over and hurts itself (well, unless you're the owner of a very expensive prototype robot...). If you want to see a few robots moving around gracefully, though, check out these videos.

• The HyTAQ Robot can roll around on the ground and fly over obstacles whenever it needs to. This bot looks pretty crash resistant, and if it can survive kids playing with it, it'd probably be a great toy. [url]
• If you thought only hipsters rode fixies, then you should watch this cute little Japanese robot ride a small bike without brakes. This bot just needs a companion that can ride a recumbent bike.... [url]
• Here's a bipedal robot walking a tightrope, but it sorta cheats because it doesn't lift its feet off the wire once it gets on. (Warning: You might want to mute this video to avoid the dance music.) Maybe someday there will be a robot version of Cirque du Soleil. [url]

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

We've been covering in great detail the FISA Amendments Act, which is likely to be renewed before the end of the year. As you may recall, this was the "law" that expanded the ability of federal law enforcement to warrantlessly wiretap Americans -- and then, thanks to a secret interpretation appears to be used to scoop up tons of information on Americans, despite appearing to be limited to only foreign communications. As we noted recently, a former judge has made a pretty compelling case why the whole thing is completely unconstitutional. While Senator Wyden has put a hold on the renewal of the FAA, he's also said he'll lift the hold if the Senate will consider some important amendments and actually debate the law.

And yet... that might not happen. Senator Saxby Chambliss, apparently with no regard to the Constitution or the privacy of the public he's supposed to represent, has apparently complained that any debate is a waste of time after Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid tried to bring up the issue.

Reid wanted S. 3276 to be considered with a limited number of amendments, but Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) objected and said he didn’t understand why the Senate couldn’t just pass the House FISA bill. He referred to a letter stating that the Obama administration supports the House-version.

So, apparently, as long as the White House wants to trample on Americans' 4th Amendment Rights, and there's a House version that was passed because Representatives misrepresented or lied about what was in the bill, the Senate should just approve it? Yikes. We deserve better. We should absolutely demand that Congress debate this issue, and not rubber stamp it.

A Kickstarter project by Ryan North, called To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure, has become the most funded publishing project on Kickstarter ever, as it recently surpassed $400,000 (he was originally seeking $20,000). While we always love to see interesting and successful crowdfunding projects, this one is interesting for a few additional reasons concerning topics we talk about here: copyright and trademarks. The actual book is, as North explains, "an illustrated, chooseable-path book version of William Shakespeare's Hamlet." So, how does that hit on copyright and trademark issues?

• Copyright: Even if the head of the Author's Guild doesn't seem to know this, Shakespeare's works are in the public domain, meaning that anyone can use them however they want -- whether it's to make an exact copy (and, yes, there are plenty of those on the market) or to do a derivative work. There have been tons of remakes and updates on Shakespeare's work, and many of them are super creative, such as this one. Kinda demonstrates just how ridiculous it is for copyright maximalists to argue that without strong copyright protection, creativity gets killed off. Just the opposite, it seems. The ability to build on the works of the past quite frequently inspires amazing new creativity.
• Trademark: North refers to this as a "choosable path adventure" because:

  "Chooseable-path" you may recognize as a trademark-skirting version of a phrase and book series you remember from childhood. Remember? Books in which... an adventure is chosen??

  Yes, they're not using the widely known phrase "choose your own adventure," because it's trademarked, and the owner of the mark has sued before. Of course, the story of the mark is interesting in its own right. Apparently, Bantam Books who helped popularize the original choose your own adventure books let the trademark lapse, and it was bought up by Ray Montgomery, who had run the small press that published the original books, but had not held the original trademark on it.

So we have examples of how a lack of a common "intellectual property" law enabled greater creativity, and how a current "intellectual property" law stupidly limits the option of using the most reasonable description of the work.

Either way, the book looks absolutely awesome, and if you want in on the Kickstarter offering, there are just a few hours left.

The EFF has a post up about how Victoria's Secret sent a legal nastygram to an ISP taking down a parody campaign by an anti-rape organization, FORCE, called Pink Loves Consent. The campaign was a parody designed to raise awareness of these issues, by mocking Victoria's Secret's "PINK" line of clothing, that includes underwear that says things like "sure thing" and "unwrap me." The parody campaign replaced those with things like "ask first" and "respect." The page showed what Victoria's Secret could have done to put forth a more positive, more respectful message... and the company's response was to go straight to the hosting company and demand the site be taken down (which it was, though they found a new host who was willing to put it back up). Parody is a key element of free speech -- and issuing a takedown over this seems like a pretty clear attempt to stifle free speech. And, really, it just makes Victoria's Secret look really, really obnoxious. Were its lawyers really so offended by positive messages, rather than pure sexual objectification?

Well, well, well. With the NRA planning to blame violent video games and movies, and eager grandstanding politicians, pundits and some members of an angry public ready to do the same, it seems like it might be useful to look at some actual data.

Senator Jay Rockefeller -- one of the grandstandingest grandstanders on this particular issue -- has already introduced a bill demanding that the National Academy of Sciences "study the impact of violent video games and other content on children." The speed with which this was introduced suggests that it was already sitting in a desk drawer, just waiting for a tragedy to exploit.

But, the thing is, we've got a ton of evidence already. The moral panic crew always claims that there are studies that support their argument that violent video games are bad, but that's not true. Every single study they cite tends to either have serious methodological problems, or to show something other than claimed (such as the fact that immediately after playing a violent video game, gamers may feel slightly more aggressive -- but with no evidence this lasts or leads to violence). A few years ago, a very thorough review of all of the research trying to connect video games to violence showed that there was no real evidence of any real world impact. Instead, what they found was that some studies used "poorly standardized and unreliable measure of aggression" to make their arguments, but that no study had shown any real world impact. Furthermore, in going through all the research, they concluded that "Overall, effects were negligible, and we conclude that media violence generally has little demonstrable effect on aggressive behavior."

Even the American Psychological Association, who had, in the past, warned about violent video games, recently walked back that warning, after it, too, reviewed a whole bunch of studies and found nothing to support the claims that violent video games lead to increased violence. The one possible exception was that for "a small minority with pre-existing personality or mental health problems," video games might possibly exacerbate the condition. But, the problem there was more on the mental health side, rather than the video game side:

"Violent video games are like peanut butter," said Christopher J. Ferguson, of Texas A&M International University. "They are harmless for the vast majority of kids but are harmful to a small minority with pre-existing personality or mental health problems."

He added that studies have revealed that violent games have not created a generation of problem youngsters.

"Recent research has shown that as video games have become more popular, children in the United States and Europe are having fewer behavior problems, are less violent and score better on standardized tests," Ferguson, a guest editor for the journal, explained.

That same study also showed that much of the research shows that video games can actually be quite useful to children.

Finally, the Washington Post recently published a Ten-country comparison of video game spending to gun-related murders. Let me know if you can spot the outlier. This, of course, is correlation data, and while correlation does not equal causation, a lack of correlation certainly suggests that there is no causal impact here. If anything, the chart suggests, pretty clearly, that there's an entirely different variable impacting the US's proclivity towards gun-related murders, and that video games have absolutely nothing to do with any of it.

Whoo boy. Back in 2009, we were somewhat pleasantly surprised to hear the general counsel for the NY Times, Ken Richieri, speak out on Doug Lichtman's IP Colloqium podcast (which, sadly, appears to have gone away), going somewhat against the grain of other news publishers on the issue of fair use. Lots of news companies were up in arms about "aggregation" by other providers, but Richieri noted that he was a much stronger believer in fair use than some of his colleagues, in part because he realized that newspapers often have to rely on fair use themselves. However, either he wasn't paying that much attention to the latest kerfuffle, or he's changed his stance. Earlier this week, the NY Times sent a copyright complaint to Quartz (the horribly designed, nearly unreadable spinoff from The Atlantic). The issue? A story on Quartz that highlighted their favorite charts of 2012. It's a nice bit of aggregation, with a small version of the graphics, some praise for the original publisher and a link back to the full thing. Here's what Quartz had to say (and show) about the NY Times graphic:

Obama’s chances, deconstructed

What an awesome utility. I spent all evening on the day of US election glued to this thing, answering my own what-if questions, watching different branches disappear as different states were projected. I love how the graphic takes a problem that’s way too crazy for mental math—the combinatorics of electoral outcomes in swing states—and makes it tractable, not by simplifying it, but by providing a way to explore the complexity. —Ritchie King

High praise. But, according to a lawyer from the NYT's... infringement:

While we are delighted that Mr. King found the graphic so admirable, I must point out that The Times owns the copyright in the graphic and the current posting infringes The Times’s rights under U.S. Copyright law. Accordingly, we hereby demand that you immediately remove the graphic from qz.com and cease and desist from any further use of any New York Times content in any manner whatsoever.

In response, Quartz is sticking to their guns. They did add the phrase "from the NY Times" after the link to the blurb, but they're arguing that it's clearly fair use. The NYTimes position here is really, really stupid, for many reasons. Here are just a few:

1. The NYT's original graphic was interactive. That's what made it so special. It was useful for those trying to figure out the probabilities and what needed to happen for either major party presidential candidate to win on election night.
2. In no way, shape or form, does this use take away from, compete with or diminish the NYT's successful graphic. It was a single screenshot of the original interactive graphic, not the full interactive thing.
3. That graphic, as amazing as it was, was really only "useful" leading up to the election as people were trying to understand the route to the Presidency. It might also be useful after the fact as a historical look at the situation, but, again, it can only be used in that way on the NYT's site. The screenshot isn't useful in that manner at all.
4. Quartz's use could only serve to drive more attention and traffic to the NYT's by highlighting what an awesome job they did with the graphic (which they did). In fact, other publications had no trouble recognizing the valuable publicity. Bloomberg publicly thanked Quartz for including one of its graphics.
5. The use was almost certainly fair use from almost any angle you look at it. It didn't harm the market for the NYT's original graphic. It didn't use the whole graphic. It was used for the sake of news reporting.
6. As noted at the beginning, the NYT itself relies heavily on fair use at times, and arguing against it can only come back to bite the company at some point in the future.
7. But, most of all, this makes the lawyers at the NYT's look petty and vindictive for no good reason.

If the NYT were smart, it would issue an apology, saying that they got a little jumpy on the legal cease-and-desist trigger, and that it appreciates the publicity.

Oh, and in case they decide to go in the other direction, our use of the same image above is doubly a case of fair use, because the NYT's actions have now made that blurb and screenshot a specific news item itself, and it would be impossible to discuss the copyright/fair use/stupidity issue without including the graphic to explain what was going on.

A few months back, we wrote a post about how there was this idea gaining steam that somehow a fee-based service (such as a fee-based Twitter clone) would likely result in better service for users than a free one, in which revenue was paid by other third parties (advertisers and others). While I understand why the idea is compelling, it's hogwash. There are plenty of examples of companies who you pay who still treat you like crap (think: pay TV providers, mobile phone providers, airlines, etc.). The simplistic argument is that when users pay, the company's interests and the consumers' interests are "aligned." But that's not true. The company's interests remain to get more money out of you, and your interest (generally speaking) is to not have to pay that much more money (there's more to it than that, but...). Furthermore, the idea that a service that shoots for volume via free services, and then supports it with third party revenue still has tons of incentives to treat users right: because if they don't, those users go elsewhere, and the third parties no longer want to pay. Yes, there are some exceptions on both sides, but the idea that one automatically leads to better service than the other just doesn't seem supportable.

And yet... we're still seeing people arguing this. The latest is from Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic -- someone I tend to agree with more often than not. But, this time he falls into that same simplistic argument without thinking through what he's saying. The post complains about Instagram's overhyped plan to change its terms of service, meaning that your photos might be associated with advertisements (which they later backtracked), and then quotes someone's silly, misleading and inaccurate "chart" about why only companies that make money directly from users should survive, and then assumes that all of that is true:

Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It's amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold.

Instagram has, what, 100 million users? If they got $5 a month from 20 million of those users, they'd be looking at $300 million in quarterly revenue. That's a nice chunk of change when you have a baker's dozen employees. You think those guys could split more than a billion dollars a year and call it good.

Of course, this is silly, top down math that never works. Here's what would actually happen in the scenario described above. If Instagram started charging $5/month, within two months, the vast majority of those 100 million users would have moved on to another competing service that does essentially the same thing for free. While I'm sure that some percentage (way, way, way, way, way below the 20% that he posits) would pay, the value for them would actually decrease since so many fewer people would be using Instagram. And, before too long, they would stop paying, because all their friends were using some other free service that does the same basic thing. And getting much more value out of it.

Yes, there are some services worth paying for, but it's ridiculous for people (especially those as knowledgeable and thoughtful as Madrigal) to fall for this silly claim that somehow "paid" online services automatically function better and treat users better than unpaid services.

There's been a fair amount of discussion about "gun control" in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre -- and whether or not you believe that gun control is important or that it wouldn't have made a difference one way or the other (and I've seen both arguments over and over again in the past few days), one thing that a number of people have talked about is the gun lobby's silence in response to the tragedy. The NRA, one of the most powerful lobbying groups out there, has remained mostly quiet on the subject, even to the point of shutting down its Facebook feed (which was getting bombarded) and staying silent on Twitter. However, the organization started to speak up yesterday, putting out a message about how it, too, was horrified by the tragedy, and announcing an important press conference for Friday. According to Fox News, the point of the conference is to "push back" and apparently that means blaming videos games and movies:

Sources close to the issue had earlier alerted Fox News that the National Rifle Association -- which has remained silent since Newtown, chiefly to allow for a proper period for mourning -- would soon start to "push back" against the gun-control lobby.

"If we're going to have a conversation, then let's have a comprehensive conversation," said one industry source. "If we're going to talk about the Second Amendment, then let's also talk about the First Amendment, and Hollywood, and the video games that teach young kids how to shoot heads.

Of course, as we've been noting the past few days, this kind of thing may actually go over well with grandstanding politicians who have used the tragedy to push this line of action, despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that such things have had any impact at all.

This is basically the NRA's "hey, look over there!" strategy.

And, whatever you think of the gun control issue, I can't see that working out well for the NRA in the long run. It might get the attention of a few grandstanding politicians, but these days, a very large percentage of the population plays video games. It's not an issue that's confined to a small group of teenaged boys any more. And pissing off the large and growing group of gamers with bogus claims about how they're being brainwashed to murder people isn't going to win many fans.

There's sort of an odd back and forth that happens at Techdirt, where we spend a great deal of time highlighting all the success stories of artists and creators that managed quite well without operating under the stringent guidelines of intellectual property laws. Glyn Moody recently covered one such story in Psy, creator of the nearly unfathomably popular Gangam Style music video. As happens so often when we post these stories, some detractors consider Psy an "anomaly", despite how often we cover these stories, and as though mainstream label successes of Psy's size weren't also "anomalies". So perhaps it would be useful to have a post that wrapped up a non-exhaustive but multi-creator list of folks who have embraced piracy to further their own success.

That's exactly what Geek.com has put together, putting four other creators alongside Psy with brief descriptions of how they spurned copyright and were successful in spite of, or perhaps because of, that decision. The list includes names you should recognize by now, from Cory Doctrow to Louis CK and on to Peter Mountford. But one new name you'll see on this list is Shahrzad Rafati.

Where most content producers see pirated video as a negative for revenue, Shahrzad Rafati saw an opportunity. Rafati started Broadband TV in 2005 with the aim of monetizing and legitimizing pirated video. The Canadian company searches video sharing services, looking for copyrighted material. Instead of removing it, Broadband TV re-brands the content, includes relevant ads, and reposts. What once was infringing video has become a revenue source.

Rafati realized that people uploading videos aren’t doing it to be malicious. They just really enjoy the content and want to share it. A heavy handed approach to enforcement won’t work long-term. Broadband TV currently works with some big name partners like the NBA, Warner Brothers, Sony, and YouTube. The company also has a YouTube channel called VISO where users can watch sports, movie trailers, and news programs.

Like the others, where Rafati had success is utlimately in identifying what people wanted and figuring out an amicable way to intersect that desire with content producers to create yet another success story. But, what you'll notice in these stories, the first step is in identifying and satisfying a public's need or want. What they never start with is a knee-jerk or angry reaction to that need.

The list is growing, regardless of what critics might suggest. If major media wants to get on board with these kinds of stories even further, they can win. If they don't, then I guess we'll just keep collecting the names and stories of others who do it better.

Intellectual Ventures is at it again -- playing the "oh, little innocent us? we're not doing anything that should really concern anyone" card in the press. Wired is running an op-ed by Raymond Hegarty, IV's "VP Of Global Licensing in Europe." He's a long term patent maximalist... and it shows. The article is entitled: Intellectual Ventures: Why the Patent System Needs Aggregators Like Us, which should give you an idea of the fanciful rewriting of history you're about to read.

The U.S. patent system borrowed from mainland Europe a concept that had evolved over hundreds of years: the “moral right” for inventors to protect their ideas. But America's founders went even further – they also included the obligation for inventors to publish.

This extra part of the deal was ingenious: It has been key to America's history as a global leader in innovation.

Except, of course, that patents weren't actually based on "moral rights" at all. Hegarty is making that part up. It was an economic right designed solely for the purpose of "promoting the progress" of "the useful arts." And, yes, it had a disclosure component -- which would be brilliant if it worked. But it doesn't. Especially in the technology industry where IV holds most of its patents. Time and time again we've seen the same thing. No one in technology learns anything from looking over broadly written patents full of legal phrases that mean nothing to engineers. It's not uncommon to hear engineers say that they don't even understand what's in their own patents, once the lawyers get through reworking them. The whole idea that patents disclose things is a myth.

If Hegarty really wanted patents to disclose things, he'd support the idea that any software code covered by a patent had to have the original, working source code be submitted with the patent. Of course, that would make an awful lot of IV's patents not worth very much, since they could no longer be used to shake down companies which are actually innovating.

Because inventors were incentivized by protection, yet still obligated to publish, their ideas became available for everybody to see. Not only did this increase the global pool of knowledge, it also allowed follow-on developers to avoid the blind alleys experienced by the original inventor.

Again, this is part of the myth -- but it's bunk, as most engineers will tell you. It's much, much easier to learn from other products just by looking at those products or reverse engineering what they do, rather than reading over the patent. Hegarty is simply making up a world that does not exist.

The published patent also provides a roadmap to further innovation: the work-around. When developers become too enamored with popular features, they stop innovating. By preventing access to such successful features, patents conversely force competitors to come up with the new ideas or workarounds that lead to fresh innovation.

Another myth with no real support. The idea that developers become "too enamored with popular features" and only innovate because patents block them from staying enamored is laughable. It makes you feel like he's never spent any time with any living engineers or innovators. People innovate for a variety of reasons, and the idea that people don't try something new unless forced to by a patent limitation is simply ridiculous. Studies have shown that the driving causes of innovation are self-need first of all and to stay ahead of the competition second. Both of those give plenty of reasons for innovation without the artificial restriction of a patent.

Having started out his article by rewriting history and how and why people innovate, he then goes on to suggest that in such a purely mythical world, massive, obnoxious patent trolls like the one who pays his salary don't just have a place, but are somehow vital to the system.

But as technologies converge and the products we use become increasingly complex, the system needs intermediaries within the market – companies like Intellectual Ventures – to help sift through and navigate the published landscape. By developing focused expertise, these patent licensing entities and intermediaries can function as patent aggregators, assembling portfolios of relevant inventions and providing access through licensing.

Don't you see? Intellectual Ventures didn't just buy up 30,000 or so patents from a bunch of universities struggling to defend their overeager decisions to set up tech transfer offices just for the sake of shaking down actual innovators -- it did it to help companies "sift through and navigate" the patent "landscape." This is the point at which most normal, living, thinking people who are familiar with the patent system call this out for what it is: bullshit. 100% bullshit.

No company is going to Intellectual Ventures and paying them upwards of $100 million to have IV help them sift through the patents that are out there, to better understand the "disclosures" so they can further innovate. They're paying up to avoid getting sued and hit with a judgment that could be many hundreds of millions of dollars. In more colloquial language, this is generally known as a shakedown. But, thanks to our patent system, it's a "legal" form of a shakedown.

Yes, sometimes aggregators have to go to court to protect their patent rights – and get labeled with all kinds of nasty names for doing so.

Oh, Hegarty, be fair now: people were calling Intellectual Ventures a patent troll since long before it started suing companies. And no one is calling you nasty names for going to court. We're calling you nasty names for abusing the system massively to take money away from actual innovators to move it to those who have done nothing to move the market forward.

He then goes on to wax rhapsodic about the wonderful smartphone and how it's just so chock full of patent goodness. And, you see, what that really means is not that there are tons of companies abusing the system, but that the little guy -- the mythical sole inventor laboring away in his garage -- is somehow at risk of not getting his due, if it weren't for the kindly and benevolent likes of Intellectual Ventures... here to save the day.

Patent aggregators sift through the issued patents with an expert eye, and provide efficient access to the long tail of patents. When tens of thousands of patents touch a product, hundreds of inventors spread around the globe deserve to be paid. But in the race to market, product companies often ignore the long tail; small inventors have very little power to do anything about this unless they can enlist the help of patent aggregators.

In other words: please small-time patent holder, sell us your patent, so we can shakedown big companies for more money. The whole idea that anyone at Intellectual Ventures "sifts through" its patents with an "expert eye" for the sake of helping companies innovate is laughable. They look to bundle as many patents together as possible, so that they can go to companies and use the modern equivalent of the famous line from an IBM lawyer to Sun execs back in the day: "OK, maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

It's notable, by the way, that last year, when the reporters at This American Life did their episode all about patent trolls, mainly focusing on Intellectual Ventures, and they asked the company to give them any evidence of individual inventors helped along by IV, the company could only come up with one name, and when TAL tried to track that guy down, they discovered nothing to support the claims at all, but rather another troll case with a questionable patent being used to shake down actual innovators.

But aggregators, in order to maximize returns from the patents they've acquired, are incentivized to package and license patents as broadly as possible. If patents are available to all-comers, not just used to exclude, companies can focus on improving their products and competing through innovation.

You have to sit back and wonder if Hegarty actually believes this stuff or if he's really just getting a chance to exercise the more "creative" muscles in his writing skills. The company has done more to block competing through innovation than probably anyone else. It's done more to funnel money that could have gone towards actual innovation into the wallets of its own execs and investors. No one is running to IV because they think that it will help them "improve their products." In talking to lots of companies who have dealt with IV over the years I've never, not once, come across one who did a deal with the company eagerly or for the sake of helping them innovate. No, everyone does it for one reason only: to not get sued (or, possibly, to have access to patents to hit back against others who sue). IV isn't helping innovation, it's trying to monopolize the arms dealership business in the patent wars. And it's laughing all the way to the bank.

Despite this complexity, we must maintain the founding principle of the U.S. patent system – providing an incentive for inventors to create without fear of being ripped off. Only then can inventors continue to focus on doing what they do best: inventing. Society benefits when the value of ideas is recognized.

Society benefits when innovative products are brought to market and people who want them buy them in a free market. Society does not benefit when one company buys up a ton of useless, broad and vague patents that have nothing to do with the innovative products on the market, and then demands cash from companies if they don't want to get sued.

Aggregators also provide a signal to the market as the debate around patent quality continues. Every time Intellectual Ventures purchases a patent, we are making a bet that it is a quality patent. We purchase only 15 percent of the tens of thousands of patents we review, drawing on and continually building the expertise of our acquisitions team. Sometimes patents come as a package deal so we have to buy 10 to get the six or seven we really want, which is why only 40,000 of our 70,000 assets are in active licensing programs. But we continuously prune our portfolio to maximize quality – thus helping the market navigate the long tail of patents.

Translation: yes, some patents are so bad that even we can't figure out ways to misread what they were supposed to cover into pretending they cover something entirely different.

Ultimately, the users of those products – you – are the ones who benefit.

By paying a tax that increases the cost of the products you buy by a massive amount.

The whole thing is, once again, ridiculous. It's based on myths and an attempted rewriting of what's actually happening. It's sick and it's cynical to make such claims knowing full well that the only thing that Intellectual Ventures is doing for this market is sucking money out of actual research and development.

Despite its own worst efforts, the TSA doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Year after year, horror story after horror story surfaces, detailing abuse of American citizens at the hands (very often literally) of TSA agents. If they're not poking, prodding, fondling or carelessly tossing supposed explosives into a trash can five feet away, they're confiscating harmless plastic swords while allowing loaded handguns on board. If they're not digging around in someone's laptop searching for who knows what, they're "diverting" iPads into their personal collections.

A report by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) suggests that the TSA's main focus isn't safety, it's self-preservation. As yearly budget reviews loom, the TSA suddenly needs to "look busy" and justify its continued existence. Anything that might cut back its funding is briefly humored and then discarded. (via Reason 24/7)

Congress in 2002 set up a program giving airports the option of having private employees conduct screening operations. Unfortunately, TSA was put in charge of deciding which locations could participate. A total of 16 out of 440 commercial airports nationwide got into the program before TSA Administrator John S. Pistole slammed the door shut last year.

Keeping private companies out of government operations ensures a steady flow of tax dollars. While taxpayers might appreciate the relief, the TSA isn't interested in dividing the pie into more slices that it absolutely has to. While it maintains its (again, very often literal) stranglehold on airport security, the airports it "services" are losing business directly as a result of its frequent bad behavior. As the GAO states, "Passengers who have negative encounters with the screening process generally associate their experiences with the specific airport." 

Private companies would be forced to follow the hated TSA procedures, but even with these limitations, the Department of Homeland Security isn't interested in taking on new "partners."

[T]op Democrats want the TSA to continue rejecting applications to the program "until the costs and possible benefits can be accurately assessed," as Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, urged.

Kind of tough to assess costs and benefits if you're unwilling to actually let the program run. This lockout extends further than private companies looking to get into the airport security business. The deck is stacked against private screeners, whose performance is assessed by the one entity that is relying on their failure to stay in the money.

Right now, the performance of private screeners is assessed under a process directed by TSA. It's not particularly surprising that this government agency is going to do everything it can to limit potential competition. Congressional auditors found, "TSA has not conducted regular reviews comparing private and federal screener performance and does not have plans to do so." The agency isn't about to document its own relative failure.

In fact, the TSA does all it can to keep from being criticized. Here's how the traveler complaint process "works:"

At Ronald Reagan Airport, for example, angry flyers aren't given a form they can turn in on the spot to document their concerns. Instead, they're handed a tiny, easily lost sliver of paper containing TSA's website and mailing address.

Ah, technology... wait... what? A slip of paper that contains the TSA's website URL? If the TSA actually was interested in feedback, it could easily set up a kiosk where travelers could file a complaint electronically with reports that could be viewed and acted on daily. Instead, it justs hands out something of use to nobody and hopes that time and distance either takes the traveler out of the complaining mood or makes the details unreliably fuzzy. The TSA benefits from its neo-Luddite approach which keeps complaints to an absolute minimum, a quasi-fact it frequently references when defending itself against any complaints that somehow make it through.

All of these actions have allowed the TSA to rake in nearly $8 billion a year without having done a single thing to improve its policies, protect travelers or prevent terrorism.

The march towards drones becoming a common tool for domestic law enforcement agencies seems inevitable and some people aren't happy about it. We've already covered the backlash against one artist who satarized New York City's drone program. San Diego, for their part, valiantly refused to honor an FOIA request on their domestic UAV program because they determined on their own that there wouldn't be a public benefit to the disclosure. MuckRock thought that was a dodge not afforded San Diego under FOIA rules, but San Diego again declined to say anything at all about the program.

"Sorry, citizen, but Detective Iron Death-Spy is very, very shy."
Image source: CC BY 2.0

But one thing that has generally been accepted is that law enforcement agencies were required to operate these drones under very strict guidelines and within very strict geographic boundaries. It would appear, for Mesa County, Colorado at least, that may not be universally true. The EFF's Drone Census project has uncovered that Mesa County has two UAVs and can operate them without many of the restrictions in place elsewhere.

The MCSO must abide by standard FAA restrictions on domestic UAV flights, which cap flights to below 400 feet and preclude night flights or operating over "populated areas, heavily trafficked roads, or an open-air assembly of people." But MCSO's drone authorization includes no geographic restrictions: effectively, the agency can fly its UAVs anywhere in Mesa County. This freedom has allowed the agency to log dozens of operational missions since fall 2010. MCSO flight logs indicate that its UAV team has logged more than 160 flight hours on its drones since January 2011.

So, whereas other UAV programs are restricted to flying over areas where they could chiefly assist in locating missing people in difficult to surveil areas, Mesa County can fly them anywhere within their jurisdiction without any limitations beyond the somewhat vague-sounding "populated areas, heavily trafficked roads" or the open air above a large assembly of people. That can leave a great deal of sky to buzz around with less of the oversight I think is desperately needed in programs like this.

Now, just to be clear, these drones do not carry arms. They are used for imaging. Then again, as the creep continues, the rules keep shifting towards greater use and application, so it wouldn't be fair to slam anyone concerned that someday we may indeed see armed UAVs over our skies. Equally worrying is this:

MCSO has been using drones operationally for two years, but the department has no written drone policy outlining the uses for which its officers may deploy UAVs. Ms. Barnes writes that MCSO is "currently in the process of drafting a written policy for the use of our unmanned aircraft."

Well, that's just peaches. Military-style technology deployed domestically without any official policy for its use. I feel so warm and fuzzy inside.