As crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter continue to be a rising trend in content production, there's an important lesson that both successful and failed attempts can teach us all. That lesson is that the turnout for such a project tells the producer everything they need to know about the combination of the saleability of their project and their ability to properly market it. In fact, Mark Cuban recently came out in strong support of crowd funding, going so far as to suggest that every startup should be required to do a Kickstarter campaign.

"It's a way for you create demand and sell the product without giving up any equity. That is a compliment to what an investor might do. In terms of PE (price to equity), there are strategic investors and then there's just money. I'm not a big fan of money investors, which is what most angel investors turn out to be, because they just want their money back. I try to be very strategic, I try to add value, or I don't make the investment."

It's a great way to look at things, but I wonder if we can take it a step further. There is no reason that a Kickstarter project cannot also woo more traditional investors. This is all the moreso if the Kickstarter campaign takes off like a rocket. Why wouldn't an investor want to back a project that has shown it is both in-demand and managed by competent business folks? Serving as one example of the ability to do this, not to mention the leverage such an approach provides content creators, is Chris Roberts, developer of the Star Citizen game, which was wildly popular on Kickstarter.

“We’re still doing investment,” Roberts explained to RPS, “but I’m going to be a bit more picky in choosing it, and I’m getting to dictate the terms better. I’m saying, ‘You guys have to realize about making the game as good as possible. No forcing us to go public or to sell out.’”

Far from well-known conditions of corporate or investor interests forcing an early release of a game, or nixing important but difficult to create aspects of one (ahem, Mass Effect 3), this diversification of backing dollars protects the creator and his or her vision for their creation. There are still going to be stipulations under which an investor may hand over their cash, but the control over the creator is mitigated by the other sources of funds.

Beyond that, Chris explains how crowd funding can be a great proving ground to current or new investors.

"It’s actually funny. Everyone I lined up is basically over the moon. Your big risk as an investor is, “I’m backing this thing. Does anyone really want it?” At this point there’s no question that people want it, and maybe a lot more than anyone was expecting."

What does this mean in practical terms? Well, far from the the caution some issue that crowd-funded projects will naturally be lower-budget cousins to their corporate largers, being able to attract money from multiple sources, including a wider internet public, could make for huge budgets in games, films, and music. I would suggest creators heed Mark Cuban's words: crowdfund, both for the money you can generate for your product, but also to prove to traditional investors that you're going to be successful.

The US government has announced it's going to fund a massive amount of brain research. The brain has been studied for a long time, but there have been some false starts such as phrenology. With modern science and technology, we might be able to understand a bit more about how brains work. Here are just a few tidbits on our gray matter.

• The Brain Activity Map project could cost billions of dollars, and lots of people are looking back at the Human Genome Project as an example for how government funded science can work. Assigning accurate economic benefits from scientific projects can be debated, but funding science is usually a good investment... [url]
• Data from 182 Vietnam vets with brain injuries have helped to map intelligence in the brain. A significant amount of brain mapping has come from studying injured or abnormal brains, but hopefully, newer imaging techniques will allow researchers to look at normally-functioning brains to better understand how people actually think. [url]
• There are a bunch of TED talks about the brain. The human brain is incredibly complex, so there's a lot that can be said about it, but there's even more that we don't know yet. [url]

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

For years, we've talked about the importance of anti-SLAPP laws, and the shame that so far, they're on a state-by-state basis -- such that many states have no anti-SLAPP laws, and many others have incredibly weak anti-SLAPP laws. If you're unfamiliar with anti-SLAPP laws, they are laws that protect free speech in a very important way. In our overly litigious society, it's quite easy for someone to file a lawsuit against you just to bully you because they don't like something you said. It's so expensive to defend yourself that many people will often back down, and hide or take down things that they said, just to get the lawsuit dropped. These are considered Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation -- or SLAPPs. What a good anti-SLAPP law does is allow those hit with SLAPP suits to get them dismissed quickly, easily and cheaply -- and often allow them to recoup any legal fees as well. It's a very powerful tool in states like California and Texas to stop lawsuits that are more about censorship than any legitimate purpose.

This isn't just an issue that impacts bloggers/reporters either. We've seen people get hit with SLAPP suits for posting a negative review of their church or their dentist online. In an era where we can all speak out, we're all at risk of getting hit with a SLAPP suit.

We've supported the push for a strong federal anti-SLAPP law for years, and despite two attempts to introduce one, it hasn't gotten all that far. The Public Participation Project is an organization that has really led the fight for a federal anti-SLAPP law for years. Unfortunately, even as interest has grown in a federal anti-SLAPP law, the organization recently ran out of its private funding, so it's trying an IndieGoGo campaign to raise some funds, specifically for the purpose of hiring a DC-based legislative director to lead the charge. I will admit that I am not convinced that crowdfunding is the best way to build an advocacy organization, but it would be nice to be proven wrong on that, especially for an issue as important and pressing as this one. If you believe this is an important issue as well, please consider supporting the campaign.

For a few years now, the Swedish Pirate Party has provided some hosting services to The Pirate Bay, arguing that attempts to take it down would amount to political censorship. It appears that theory may finally get tested. According to TorrentFreak, the Swedish anti-piracy group "Rights Alliance" has sent a letter threatening to take legal action against the Pirate Party if it does not stop hosting the site.

In the letter, which also targets bandwidth provider Serious Tubes, the group cites last year’s Supreme Court rejection of The Pirate Bay case as a precedent that hosting providers can be held liable for providing Internet services to file-sharing sites.

“With that decision, it was finally determined that not only those who operate illegal file sharing services, but also the Internet providers to such illegal services are committing a criminal act,” the Rights Alliance writes.

The party is figuring out how to respond. They note that, given how the original TPB trial played out, even if they believe they're strongly in the right under the law, the courts seem to toss all logic out the window as soon as someone mentions "but, piracy!" So they are reasonably concerned that a fair trial on the merits of the case would not come from this. However, it would certainly be an interesting trial, and might certainly call more attention to the issues that go beyond just the initial TPB trial. This is clearly getting into significant questions about secondary liability, especially over products that have significant non-infringing uses, and where the site itself is not hosting any of the infringing content. The whole thing remains a witch hunt by people who don't seem to understand the technology. A lawsuit against a political party may serve to highlight just how crazy this witch hunt has become.

You really start to get the feeling that some of these less-friendly nations aren't even trying anymore. We recently covered how North Korea tried to scare the bejeezus (technical term) out of the States with an incredibly strange movie about a man dreaming of the nuclear annihilation of America, except they used video game footage to produce it. This wasn't the first of such instances, but you begin to get the feeling that the attempts, at best, are not getting any better and, at worst, are getting even more lame. As someone who grew up in the 80's, I have to pine for the days when a possible enemy nation really put in the effort required to scare the hell out of me. The USSR did this extremely well, causing more people to build almost-certain-to-fail bomb shelters than The Discovery Channel would know what to do with. Each silly attempt only makes me shake my head, mostly because I have to wonder who these guys think they're going to fool in the era of the internet and its global group of fact-checkers.

Which brings us to the new fighter jet, unveiled by Iran and named the Qaher-313, which could well actually be able to fly, but you can't know that from the photoshopped pictures released to state run media. Here's a comparison between a stock image of Mount Damavand, a well-known natural landmark in Iran, and a suspiciously similar image with the new jet flying over it.

Look, it's not that the jet doesn't look pretty sweet flying over Mount Damavand, it's just that if the majority world opinion is that your country is still using Russian war technology because you can't build working models on your own, an easily-discovered photoshop of your plane... you know... actually flying probably isn't going to impress anyone. Put some effort into it, guys. At least figure out a way to alter the cloud formations, so they aren't identical.

At the always wonderful SF Music Tech conference yesterday, I went to what should have been a fascinating panel discussion about "artist revenue streams." It had Kristin Thomson from the Future of Music Coalition, talking about their wonderful artist revenue streams project, as well as Steve Rennie, who manages the band Incubus, among others. And then there was the third panelist, East Bay Ray, of the band The Dead Kennedys. Despite that band once mocking the whole "home taping is killing music" argument, it appears that he's now turned into one of those grumpy old musicians who demands that everyone else figure out a way to pay him. So, rather than an interesting discussion about artist revenue streams, the panel basically turned into a big rant from East Bay Ray complaining about all these internet sites that don't pay him. His misunderstandings were legion. He held up a screenshot of a file sharing site in Russia, showing Dead Kennedys songs on them, and noted that he doesn't get paid for those. And, of course, those sites have ads. This is the thing that gets me. A group of music industry folks, led by Jon Taplin at USC, who don't seem to have the slightest clue about how online advertising actually works, keep insisting that when they see an ad from a big company on a site that has infringing materials, it means that "the pirates are getting rich and the artists are getting screwed."

What I find amusing is that professional musicians so often insist that others are simply not qualified to speak about the music business. And yet, they have absolutely no problem pretending they know how internet advertising works. Let's make this simple: internet display ads pay next to nothing -- especially on sites like the one that Ray was complaining about. Those kinds of sites can only get deals with complete bottom of the barrel remnant ad providers, whose payout numbers are so small that most people would laugh. Some -- like Google's AdSense -- only payout if people click, and these days no one clicks on banner ads. They don't even see them. These sites make next to nothing. I'd be amazed if they can clear $0.05 CPMs. That is, if they're lucky, they get five cents for every 1,000 views. If they're lucky.

Furthermore, folks like Ray are blaming the sites, which tend to be platforms or conduits for sharing, rather than the hosts or the actual people responsible for uploading the works. Either they don't understand this or they don't care, but they really seem to want to blame the middleman for the actions of end users.

Steve Rennie tried to talk Ray down a few times, with little luck. Rennie, rightly, pointed out that whining about the pennies some Russian site might get is a really fruitless activity, when there's so much opportunity to make revenue elsewhere. Why not focus on the actual revenue opportunities, instead of whining about the two and a half cents some Russian site got?

And, of course, Ray's anger isn't just at Russian file sharing sites, but basically every legitimate site as well. Even if they pay, they don't pay him enough. He, of course, singled out YouTube and further demonstrated his near total ignorance of the world by insisting that YouTube has "forced 12,000 musicians out of work." You might wonder how that's possible, and read the link for the full "math" and try to hold back the guffaws. The short version, as far as I can figure it out, is that he argues that YouTube only pays artists 35% of the revenue they get, but they should be paying 70% "like Apple." And then:

So, if they had done the same percentage as say iTunes, 30/70 instead of 65/35, that's a difference of about $600 million. Now if you take a middle class musician, say, $50,000 year, year in and year out, divide it into $600 million, that's 12,000 people that Google has siphoned the money off.

And that's 12,000 people that are now working in the salt mines of Walmart.

There are so many things wrong with this that I'm afraid to even try to list them all. First of all, YouTube revenue is incremental revenue on top of other revenue. This is revenue that did not exist at all prior to YouTube setting up ContentID and monetizing those views. This is not money that was somehow taken away from artists. Second, the revenue is not evenly distributed as his simple "division" implies. Bigger artists get more views, so even if his other nonsensical argument about how Google should fork over more of the money made sense, the "missing" money would still go disproportionately to bigger artists anyway.

And, of course, there are so many other factors at play here, including a whole bunch of musicians who only have careers because of YouTube. The fact that this "logic" is even considered seriously is so bizarre.

Rennie pushed back on some of Ray's claims, and Ray just went on something of a rampage, comparing internet sites to companies that exploited child labor in the past. When Rennie suggested that YouTube and other internet services were providing new and incremental revenue streams that simply didn't exist before, Ray referred to Rennie as "massa," which is incredibly obnoxious. He later insisted that "pirate sites are on the payroll of multinational companies," and then said that the internet companies were "pimps" and that "iTunes pays their 'girls' 70%, but Google only pays 30%." The fact that these companies created brand new revenue streams for him never seems to even enter his consciousness.

Finally, when people pointed out that there are a growing number of artists who are successful primarily because of the internet and new business models and services, he mocked those success stories, arguing that they got lucky -- saying that it's "just like a casino." Apparently, he's unfamiliar with the old recording industry which was much more of a pure lottery, where most people never were even allowed in the door, and ended up making nothing at all.

Oh, and poor Kristin barely got to speak at all, despite actually being the one with lots of actual data to share, rather than angry, ill-informed, misguided rantings. Later in the day I got to speak to Dave Allen, who we've written about before, and who was a founding member of Gang of Four -- a contemporary of the Dead Kennedys -- and he made a key point. Whenever the conversation focuses on "but what do we do about piracy," it becomes a complete waste of time. There are so many amazing new opportunities out there, with all sorts of fantastic ways to create, promote, connect, distribute, and monetize music. Whining about "losses" is just time spent not seizing opportunities.

The intangible fear that something might go wrong at an undefinable point in the future tends to paralyze bureaucratic entities, reducing them blurting out bizarre statements based on flawed logic and paranoiac "what if" theories. At times, this sort of thought process seems almost rational -- when it comes to public areas, sometimes you can't be too careful.

At other times, however, these arguments border on hysteria strained through myopia, like this recent dustup over the hallowed halls of the Montreal metro station.

Despite its age and popularity, there has apparently never been a Counter-Strike map specifically set in the Great White North. Diego Liatis and some friends thus decided to take the job on themselves, and came up with what appears to be a pretty decent rendition of Montreal's Berri-UQAM station. But the work has attracted the attention of the city's transit authority, and not in a good way.

Liatis requested permission to recreate the station in January, but the STM refused to grant it. He went ahead with the design anyway, because he doesn't believe he can be legally forbidden from recreating a public space.

Well, no matter what Liatis believes, the Société de transport de Montreal (STM) believes Liatis can't. Or, considering the fact that he's already completed his map, the STM strongly believes that he shouldn't. Why? Well, because bad stuff could conceivably happen.

"[The STM] told me that they feared the game could create panic among the city's public transit users," he said.

What a very strange fear to have. First off, this statement seems to indicate that a) many public transit users play Counter-Strike and b) they would be unduly panicked if they happened across a realistic map of the metro station. Now, I understand the half-baked rationale behind this fear, one that quickly hardens into a "first-person-shooter + map of real life area = TERROR" flavorless paté of Safety Above All Else. I really do. All it takes is one shooter in the Metro at any point in time after the release of this map into the wild to make STM forever rue the day it failed to halt this effort in its tracks. Preemptive action must be taken to ensure that this day never comes (even if it was never going to arrive anyway).

To show it means business, STM has threatened Liatis with a $50,000 fine (plus court costs) if the map is released. And to show it really means business, it has also played the always-available-but-rarely-required IP card.

Liatis said he received a letter from the Société de transport de Montreal saying its doesn't want its "copyrighted metro network" to appear the game and that it will consider legal action against him if the map, which is still in development for Counter-strike: Global Offensive, is released.

Good old copyright. When regular fines just aren't enough of a deterrent, there's always the vague threat of copyright infringement to shut down activity you don't approve of. True, there are a lot of design elements within the station (and its Counterstrike counterpart) that would fall under this protection. But it seems like STM's first concern is with "panic" and it's only wielding the Copyright Stick as backup in case it has trouble proving a banal subway map will result in "panicked" Metro riders. It's a remarkably efficient way to shut down something that is feared irrationally without having to entertain logical arguments to the contrary.

We've talked before about rich guy Alki David's "revenge" lawsuit against CBS for its lawsuit against his internet TV service. He and some musicians he's convinced to join the lawsuit are alleging, ridiculously, that CBS should be liable for infringement itself, based on a convoluted copyright liability theory (and by "convoluted" we mean "totally bogus") involving the fact that CNET, which is owned by CBS Interactive, offers downloads of file sharing software on its Download.com platform, while its News.com news and reviews site have published news stories and reviews about using file sharing software. Late last year, they took the case to another level seeking an injunction against all BitTorrent downloads from CBS Interactive sites.

CBS hit back, not surprisingly, arguing that it would interfere with CBS's editorial mission, and that it would be against the public interest. Of course, this seemed more than a bit ironic, given CBS's own interference with CNET's editorial concerning copyright lawsuits that CBS is involved in. Last week, the artists tried again for an injunction, claiming incredibly that:

Because CBSI distributed several torrent software programs and encouraged infringement on torrent networks, CBSI is liable for all infringement on the torrent network.

Say what now? That's not how the law works, and thankfully, the judge recognized that pretty quickly. Yesterday, the judge denied the injunction attempt with a fairly simple statement. The judge makes it pretty clear that merely knowing that BitTorrent software is used to infringe doesn't make you liable for those infringements by offering the software for download. That's just not how the law works. At all. The key bits are here (full thing embedded below):

Plaintiffs have not shown any likelihood that Defendants will be found liable for their continuing activities. There is ample evidence of BitTorrent’s – and other P2P software’s – ability to infringe copyrights and that a large number of individuals use the software to infringe. Defendants are clearly aware of both of these facts. However, inducement of infringement requires more than just knowledge of actual or potential infringement. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. 545 U.S. 913, 937 (2005). While there might be some evidence of past inducement of copyright infringement, there is no evidence of any ongoing distribution of any file sharing software “with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement.”

In other words, the court properly recognized that this was yet another attempt to expand the ruling in the Grokster case which, while a bad ruling overall, laid out the rules for what is considered "inducement." What CBS is doing is clearly not inducement. The court notes that even if an argument could be made that CBS "induced" infringement in the past (still unlikely) there needs to be at least some evidence that it might happen again if the court is going to issue an injunction.

The Court is well-aware that injunctions are often properly imposed where allegedly wrongful conduct has ceased. However, there must be at least some evidence that future infringement may occur. Here, Plaintiffs’ only solid evidence of possible inducement comes from reviews that were published a decade ago.... The other articles cited by Plaintiffs merely discuss P2P issues, including legitimate distribution through P2P, and the various technological and legal issues that have emerged with the technologies. (See id., Ex. M, O, T, U, V, X.) The Court has no reason to believe that Defendants will purposefully encourage copyright infringement now or in the foreseeable future.

Finally, the court notes that such an injunction is "not in the public interest" and calls out David and the other plaintiffs for trying to "silence public discussion of P2P technologies."

The nature of some of the supposedly problematic articles also demonstrates that an injunction is not in the public interest. Most of the articles cited by Plaintiffs are straightforward, legitimate news articles that do not in any way encourage or induce copyright infringement. This suggests that Plaintiffs’ goal goes far beyond stopping actual infringement by Defendants and extends instead to silencing public discussion of P2P technologies.

Of course, the case is far from over. This was just looking at whether or not the court should issue an injunction to stop CBS Interactive from offering BitTorrent clients for download. There's still plenty more to go before this ridiculous case hopefully ends up on the scrapheap.

While it's lost steam, you likely recall what is commonly referred to as the "poker boom" of the 2000s. Due in large part to the sudden interest in the game resulting from ESPN's coverage of the World Series of Poker, it seemed like everyone was playing. This took the form not only of a massive uptake in friendly neighborhood games, but also in the emergence of online poker as a serious force in the internet world. That is, of course, until the United States government, conversely beholden to a largely religious lobbying effort coupled with an inability to collect taxes on the gaming, decided to shut down most of the popular poker sites. The result of the efforts by these anti-freedom groups was the crafting of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which then led to the takedowns of all kinds of poker sites. Predictably, this simply caused those sites to relocate domains and move their money processing facilities offshore, further depriving the government of both oversight and any chance at revenue. Recently, Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, has sought to expand legalizing online gambling in his state, and is currently working through the legislative/vetoing process to do so as he sees fit.

Which brings us to today, where a company called the Rational Group, owners of the previously popular PokerStars and Full Tilt sites, is looking into buying a distressed Atlantic City casino, giving them a legitimate home-base of operations within America, allowing them to reopen their online poker doors, and providing a massive revenue opportunity to the state of New Jersey.

Rational is taking its own gamble (sorry) in trying to develop a US base within the Atlantic Club, which lost $13.6 million during the first three quarters of last year amid declining revenue. The problem for Rational, however, is that its crown jewels are still on shaky footing with US regulators. In July, PokerStars paid $547 million to the DoJ and $184 million to foreign players in a bid to settle charges. The question now is whether or not the slate has been wiped clean.

"Both companies had issues with U.S. law when, in 2011, the Department of Justice closed down [PokerStars's and Full Tilt's] websites after they continued accepting U.S. bets," attorney Jason Gross told Press of Atlantic City. "Here you have these two companies, both owned by Rational Group, that went farther than most companies, and it may create further issues."

Let's avoid mincing words here: the idea that legal complications stemming from a what was essentially a religious lobbying effort (with some help from the pro and college sports leagues) could prevent a now legitimate business from operating and generating state revenue would be a travesty. A tyranny of the minority serves nobody in this instance. The people want online gambling, the state wants online gambling. Holding Rational's feet to a fire sparked by bad legislation is wrong, particularly when that company wants to invest into a distressed NJ business and help turn it around.

With that said, the broader point appears to be that online gaming is going to come back, whether Rational succeeds in this endeavor or not. As the article notes:

By legally forcing online gaming to have a home casino in the States, it could both reopen the online market while also capitalizing on that sweet tax revenue. Rational and its all-powerful brands might not bring online poker back, but it does look increasingly likely that online gaming is coming back.

And, in my opinion, not a moment too soon. I'm all for religious freedom and belief, but those stop where my freedom begins. The sooner the government gets out of the business of enforcing morality on the internet, the better.

This will hardly comes as a surprise, but the RIAA and other "anti-piracy groups" are still complaining that Google "isn't doing enough" to prop up their old and obsolete business models. The latest complaint? That Google's system only accepts a mere 10,000 DMCA takedowns per day and somehow that's just not enough. It turns out that this isn't actually true, but we'll get to that in a moment. Much of the article focuses on Dutch extremist anti-piracy group BREIN saying that the limit needs to go away. But there is this bizarre statement from the RIAA as well:

“Google has the resources to allow take downs that would more meaningfully address the piracy problem it recognizes, given that it likely indexes hundreds of millions of links per day. Yet this limitation remains despite requests to remove it,” RIAA noted.

In addition to unthrottling the URL limits, RIAA also says it wants to lift the cap on the number of queries they can execute per day to find infringing content.

“Google places artificial limits on the number of queries that can be made by a copyright owner to identify infringements.”

This seems wrong on a variety of levels. As we noted last year when the RIAA raised some of these complaints, part of the problem appears to be that the RIAA doesn't understand how Google's tools work. There are some technical limitations in terms of how many URLs a "trusted partner" using automated means can submit at once, but no actual limit on the number of URLs that can be submitted total. There's a practical reason for the setup: in case an automated system goes haywire, Google wants to be able to catch it. But that's it. It does not limit the searches or the ability to submit DMCAs. We asked Google for specifics, and they confirmed:

While there is no limit on the number of DMCA notices that a copyright owner or reporting organization may send us, we put safety limits on the number of automated submissions that partners can make at one time using our tools in order to protect our systems from technical problems. We increase these limits for partners who have demonstrated a consistent track record of submission quality and volume.

On top of that, there's the issue that takedown notices go through a review process before the takedowns happen, to hopefully weed out abuse. For the RIAA to compare handling of takedown messages to the automated process of searching is really bizarre. It's basically them saying they want to be able to automatically takedown any content with no review whatsoever. That's a massive problem for a variety of obvious reasons. Indexing the web for search is an automated process. Taking sites down requires at least some level of review, even if only cursory. Apparently, the RIAA not only misunderstands the tools available, but also the DMCA process itself.

One of the reasons Techdirt rails against exaggerated responses to supposed terrorist threats is that it has caused police forces around the world to lose all sense of proportion -- literally, in the case of this UK story from the Daily Mail.

It began when Ian Driscoll decided to post a picture to his Facebook page. It was of an Action Man doll, accompanied by a toy Alsatian dog. Why? you might ask. Well, "as a laugh", he says, because the Action Man figure looked a lot like him, and he had a real Alsatian -- which sounds entirely reasonable. What Driscoll did not note at the time, though, was that lurking in the background of the picture was another toy: a model mortar.

Unfortunately, a few weeks later, someone else spotted that toy mortar and, mindful of the incessant UK government propaganda about terrorists being everywhere, duly over-reacted and reported the image. Even more unfortunately, the police also over-reacted -- to the extent of sending five officers, two armed with sub-machine guns (and you thought they didn't carry them in the UK), ready to smash down Driscoll's front door and go in with guns blazing against this supposed terrorist cell.

Luckily, Driscoll was there, and was able to defuse the situation by showing them the mortar in question. He was able to point out that it was in fact only slightly larger than the nearby Playstation that was clearly visible in the snap he had posted, and considerably smaller than the table that was also prominent in the Facebook picture. He might even have pointed out that the figure and dog in his upload were quite obviously toys to anyone who spent more than three seconds examining the picture. The police had presumably decided not to waste those precious three seconds before acting. Instead, as a spokesperson later said:

'We are sure that the community would rather we acted quickly on information given to us of this nature, in case it had turned out to be a weapon.'

Well, no, actually: what the community would really like is for the police to use some intelligence before reaching for the sub-machine guns. If they had just stopped and looked carefully at the picture, it would have been evident that there was no possible threat here. And that's likely to be the case for many other incidents around the world where the police have assumed the worst.

That not only represents a huge waste of their valuable time and resources, it also perpetuates the corrosive idea that we should be constantly afraid and ready to report anything and anyone odd or vaguely suspicious, no matter how absurd it would seem to anyone looking at things rationally. This then creates a self-sustaining loop of public fear and police over-reaction. It's time to scale the rhetoric back, and to make common-sense judgments common again.

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

A year ago, we wrote about Rep. Mike Doyle introducing an important bill to provide public access to publicly funded research. As we've been discussing for years, the academic journal business is a huge boondoggle. Unlike just about any other publication, the journals don't pay their writers (and in many subject areas, authors need to pay to submit), they don't pay the peer reviewers -- and then they charge positively insane amounts to university libraries, often knowing that those libraries feel obligated to pay. Oh yeah, and the journals keep the copyright on everything. I've heard of researchers having to redo basic experiments because they were worried they couldn't even reuse data from earlier experiments due to the copyright assignment agreement they had to sign.

Thankfully, for years, there's been a law on the books for any NIH-funded research to guarantee that 12-months after publication, those works also had to be published openly. While some publishers have tried to game this system (such as by demanding a mandatory fee to "deposit" the work in an open access database), on the whole this has been hugely important in making sure that taxpayer funded research is actually available and can be built upon. Over the years, there have been multiple bills introduced in both directions on this issue. There have been some bills that sought to take away this requirement under NIH funding and there have been bills that have tried to expand it to the rest of the federal government and any of the research they sponsor.

Last week, a new version of Doyle's bill was introduced and it's been improved. First off, it's got some nice bipartisan backing in both parts of Congress. On the Senate side, it was co-sponsored by Senators Cornyn and Wyden, while on the House side we've got Doyle along with Reps. Yoder and Lofgren. Also, it reduces the time to open publishing from one year down to six months (like a NY bill that came out last year). It doesn't spread the policy to all federal agencies, but the vast majority of federally funded resarch would qualify (all agencies that spend over $100 million on research are covered).

As the EFF notes in the link above, there are a few lingering concerns about the bill, including some broad language around exemptions for works that "generate revenue or royalties for authors." Also, it could go further in not just requiring open access, but open licensing to make sure such works can more easily be built on to create next generation research. However, those are small quibbles.

But, of course, the publishers are really not happy about all of this, calling it "different name, same boondoggle." This is quite incredible, really, since it's really the publishers who have been getting away with a giant boondoggle for ages. If that gives you an idea about just how ridiculous the publishers' claims are, read on. Nearly every claim they make in attacking the bill actually applies to the publishers themselves much more than to the bill:

It would add significant, unspecified, ongoing costs to those agencies’ budgets in the midst of ongoing federal deficit reduction efforts.

As opposed to keeping the works locked up, which adds significant, unspecified and ongoing costs to anyone trying to actually do research and be educated?

Finally, it would undermine publishers’ efforts to provide access to high-quality peer-review research publications in a sustainable way, while ignoring progress made by agencies collaborating with publishers to improve funding transparency.

No it wouldn't. We already have the NIH example. Nothing in that "undermined" the publishers' efforts. Again, all that "high quality peer review" stuff comes for free: both the content and the peer reviewing. Most other publications somehow, magically, get by paying their writers and editors and don't have to charge tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription.

“This bill would waste so much taxpayers’ money at a time of budgetary crisis, squander federal employees’ time with busywork and require the creation and maintenance of otherwise-unneeded technology,”

This is the funniest of all. The real "waste" of taxpayer money is in funding all this research that then gets locked up and is nearly useless to those taxpayers.

Basically, the publishers know that their current position with these journals is such a sweet deal that they don't want anything to mess with it at all. That's ridiculous. While they're fighting for ever bigger profits, we're talking about access to research that was funded with our own dollars. It's really sad that the publishers would fight such a thing, though it shows what they really think concerning education. To them, it's not about how best to disseminate information, but how to lock it up and charge insanely high prices for it.

Recently, Techdirt noted that the European "database right" could pose a threat to releasing public data there. But that assumes that central governments are at least trying to open things up. A splendid piece by Sebastian Haselbeck on the Open Gov Germany blog, with the self-explanatory title "German government screws up open data," underlines that things can fail because the government itself sabotages transparency moves.

As he recounts, things began so well. The German government commissioned a study on open data, which was published in August last year. It's a massive, 572-page document put together with commendable thoroughness. A key section is the introduction from the German Interior Minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, who made the following comments:

The [German] federal government has set itself the goal of a more open government and administration. The basis for this is freely available data and information that must be available for others and in standardized formats.

That all sounds great -- open data made freely available in standard formats to promote open government. But then things started to go downhill, culminating in the horribly symbolic decision to name a new site not "Open Government Portal Germany" as originally planned, but just "GovData -- the data portal for Germany". In other words, some data, but without the openness. As Haselbeck comments:

Following the development the last few weeks it seemed clear that the conservative elements in the higher echelons either just did not get what it means to finally go "open government" in the data dimension, or they were just too scared to follow through.

…

Experts can but shake their heads, and sigh at the squandered opportunities of this government, which would love to be very innovative in economic dimensions, but is actually a very backwards cabinet with lots of conservatives in key positions and a liberal coalition partner that is mostly occupied with its own ultra-low poll numbers.

What's worrying is that this high-profile retreat is part of a larger failure to improve transparency in Germany. Haselbeck explains:

All this adds to a series of disasters in open government in Germany. One is the stubborn denial to join the Open Government Partnership (OGP), along with the partners in crime Austria, Switzerland and Lichtenstein. As an act of spite, they formed the "DACHLi" (the acronym for the countries' licence plate IDs) initiative, a series of workshops and cooperation agreements to mostly push information exchange and open data cooperation in a way that they have nothing to fear from it, and provide ample platforms for lobbyists to talk CIOs into purchasing proprietary IT solutions for "open" government. All the while, you can count the actual attempts for more cultural and managerial change towards openness with one hand. Another of those disasters is the government’s battle against a community-built Freedom of Information platform (fragdenstaat.de) and its failure to make publicly accessible studies produced as part of the parliamentary research service (after all, paid by the taxpayer). A third thing comes to mind: the failure to ratify the UN Convention against Corruption, along with a handful of other rogue states, because it would require reform of the federal criminal code that would tighten rules for politicians' leeway to accept campaign donations and stricter transparency on their side-jobs. Look it up, Germany is in good company there, even Myanmar is ratifying the convention.

It's sad to see such a generally tech-savvy nation fall behind here, as other countries open up their government and its data ever-more deeply. That's a loss not just for German society, through diminished political transparency, but also for the burgeoning number of digital start-ups in cities like Berlin, which are deprived of a key 21st-century raw material: government data.

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