Hello Techdirt community! Mike invited me to share my favorite posts this week.

This is a double honor since it allows me to honor my own first-ever Techdirt post: Crime Inc. Inc.--a shocking expose of the conspiracy to hype criminal conspiracies about piracy. Is Crime Inc. Inc. the most interesting post of the week? No. Maybe not in the top ten.  But it is a contribution to the important Techdirt tradition of shaming bad journalism. And it is the longest post of the week.

More generally, this was a bonanza week for posts about international copyright politics, which are a big part of what I get from Techdirt.  Post-after-post, it's the best running account of the global politics of intellectual property, the Internet, and innovation.  It's incredibly important.  Among this week's bounty, there's:

• Tim's rundown of the maximalist copyright law recently passed in Panama, which has all the hallmarks of being written by US entertainment industry lobbyists and includes such perennially bad ideas as the protection of transient copies stored in computer memory. (Panamanian parliamentary staff Techdirt readers: call me)
  
  
• Glyn's accounts of the latest copyright heterodoxy to emerge from the European Parliament: a proposed break with the basic principle of automatic copyright embedded in the Berne agreement. 
  
  
• Mike's relentless hammering on issues of transparency and participation in international policy-making, from WIPO's refusal to provide the Pirate Party with observer status (in contrast to other NGOs); to the US's selective advocacy of transparency at the ITU (in contrast to its obsessive secrecy with regard to the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations); to, for good measure, the ITU's secretive, telco-backed efforts to assert a role in Internet governance. 
  
  
• Zach's account of the battle over the Guyanan government's decision to buy pirated textbooks from schools, as a cost saving measure.  (Guyanan cabinet staff Techdirt readers: call me).

Finally, I really enjoyed the piece about Mike's receipt, a couple weeks ago, of Public Knowledge's coveted IP3 award for contributions "in the three areas of "IP"—intellectual property, information policy and Internet protocol."  Oh wait. No one at Techdirt has written about that.  Well, I'll be the first.  Congratulations, Mike.  It is richly deserved.