The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN is one of the most aggressive of the anti-piracy groups out there. So there's some amusement in watching as it gets caught up in a scandal that started when it pirated music for an anti-piracy campaign. BREIN had asked musician Melchoir Rietveldt to compose a song for a video that was only to be used at a local film festival. The terms of the deal were strict: the song was only for that one anti-piracy video at that one film festival. However, Rietveldt later discovered that the anti-piracy ad was being used all over the place -- a fact he discovered when he bought a Harry Potter DVD and noticed the video... with his music.

After determining that the music had been used tens of millions of times in such an unauthorized manner, he contacted the local music collection agency, Buma/Stemra, asking them to seek somewhere around $1.3 million owed from BREIN. Buma/Stemra ignored him. Eventually, however, apparently a Buma/Stemra board member, Jochem Gerrits, reached out, and said he could help Rietveldt get paid... but with some questionable conditions. According to TorrentFreak:

In order for the deal to work out the composer had to assign the track in question to the music publishing catalogue of the Gerrits, who owns High Fashion Music. In addition to this, the music boss demanded 33% of all the money set to be recouped as a result of his efforts.

The conversation between Gerrits and the composer’s financial advisor was recorded by Pownews, and during the conversation the financial advisor confronts Gerrits with his unconventional proposal.

“Why do you have to earn money?” he asks, as usually all of the money goes directly to the artists.

“It could be because a lot of people in the industry know that they are in trouble when I get involved,” Gerrits responds, adding that he can bring up the topic immediately in a board meeting next week.

Once again trying to find confirmation for the proposal, the composer’s advisor later asks if the music boss indeed wants one-third of the money.

“Yes, that’s the case, but then [the composer] would make 660,000 euros and now he has nothing,” Gerrits responds calmly.

This is apparently making news across the Netherlands, and Gerrits has resigned. As for BREIN, it's insisting that the whole thing is "a contractual issue" and that it is "not involved."

There's been plenty of talk about AT&T's deep lobbying connections around government, and its ability to put the name of various front groups on letters and op-eds penned by AT&T lobbyists. Most of those are probably legal, if icky and manipulative. But, in some cases, it appears that things may have crossed the line. BroadbandReports has the details on how the Mayor of Tallahassee, John Marks, apparently has been on the AT&T payroll since 1990 as a "lawyer and consultant."

And it's paying off. Marks is now being accused of taking $1.6 million in federal funds, and diverting it to a group called "the Alliance for Digital Equality" (ADE), which claims that it's trying to help get internet access to poor people. Except.... the group is entirely funded by AT&T and: "uses its funds simply to lobby for AT&T, and did little to nothing to actually help the disadvantaged." Mayor Marks, beyond being paid by AT&T, is also a paid member of ADE's board of advisors -- something he apparently didn't think was necessary to disclose when he brought ADE to the City Commission in an effort to have that $1.6 million granted to the group. He also failed to disclose his relationship when he voted in favor of giving the money to ADE.

Both the Florida Commission on Ethics (who knew such a thing existed?!?) and the FBI are now investigating...

Two of Canada's big three telcos have recently appointed former cabinet ministers of the ruling party's government to their respective boards. A few weeks ago, Bell appointed Jim Prentice, who was responsible for telecom policy and regulating companies like Bell while serving as Minister of Industry in 2007-2008. Then, while former cabinet minister Stockwell Day's new "government relations" not-a-lobbying-firm has raised concerns about loopholes in lobbying laws, this past weekend Telus named Day to its board. (How long until Rogers aligns with industry standards and finds an ex-minister of their own?) OpenMedia.ca decried both appointments as examples of big telecom "cozying up to the government," but journalist Peter Nowak argues it's the system's fault: "Lobbying is so pervasive and deeply integrated" into the system that the only way to deal with it seems to be to "fight fire with fire," as even new wireless carriers have quickly learned -- i.e. don't hate the players, hate the game.

Neither Prentice nor Day will be lobbyists, but it seems obvious that their knowledge of government is being sought for the purposes of lobbying. In the broadband space, Bell has been butting heads with the government and regulators over issues like wholesale usage-based billing. In the wireless space, the next spectrum auction is approaching and incumbents want to avoid a repeat of the last auction, where 40% of the spectrum was reserved for new entrants and the government forced incumbents to offer roaming agreements -- rules ironically set by Bell's new board member, Jim Prentice.

Are these appointments examples of regulatory capture? It might appear that way. It's certainly a case of telcos gearing up for a heavy round of lobbying that's unlikely to favor consumers, but it's hardly a case of blatant revolving doors. Day was not actually responsible for telecom policy, and Prentice was behind rules that angered incumbents. If the government favors incumbents in the next spectrum auction or backs down on wholesale usage-based billing, that would be a different story, but Canadian incumbents are scrambling because they've lost some big battles. This isn't so much a cause for deep concern as it is a challenge to those who favor more competition in Canada to keep pressing the government to follow through on what it's started.

We've noted how there's suddenly been a lot of mainstream interest in the massive problems of the patent system, thanks in part to mainstream media operations like This American Life doing stories that expose just how damaging the patent system is today. And yet, despite all of this, we've been pointing out for a while that the patent reform bill making its way through Congress is useless. It does nothing to address the problems of the system and has a few things that will make matters worse. And it bizarrely includes clear favors to Wall St., protecting them from a few bad patents, while leaving everyone else -- including Silicon Valley -- to fend for themselves.

So why isn't Congress actually fixing the patent system?

Zach Carter over at the Huffington Post has an absolutely fantastic detailed look at the politics and corruption behind the patent reform bill. It's long, but worth reading. However, the tl;dr version is: patent reform is entirely about lobbyists and special interests. No one -- and I do mean no one -- appears to have any concern whatsoever for the actual impact of the patent system or patent reform on actual innovation. The story is about as depressing as you would imagine, but is a great primer on the nature of regulatory capture and how certain industries influence regulations, while the actual public and the people most impacted by the legislation is left out. Here's just a snippet:

DataTreasury's lawsuits are handled by Texas trial-law kingpins Nix, Patterson & Roach. In the 2010 elections, the firm was the third-largest contributor to the Democratic National Committee, pouring in $179,000, behind only Google and the Law Offices of Peter G. Angelos, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. When Republican lawmakers bemoan "Democrats and trial lawyers," they're talking about Nix Patterson and a handful of other big law firms.

Nix Patterson brought in an even bigger fundraising champion to lobby Democrats for DataTreasury: Ben Barnes. He and his wife Melanie have dumped $379,000 of their own money into politics over the years, according to Center for Responsive Politics data, with every penny going to Democrats. Barnes is also one of the most influential fundraising bundlers in politics. In the first half of 2009 alone, he pulled together $630,450 for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee -- more than anyone else, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

Barnes is not a man congressional Democrats keep waiting. And he's previously worked directly with Pelosi, who attended a fundraiser at Barnes' Austin home in 2009. Pelosi's office did not respond to inquiries on her meetings with the fundraising giant, but when asked by HuffPost whether he had won over Pelosi on Section 18, Barnes said that he had.

"Oh, yeah," Barnes told HuffPost. "For some time I've worked with DataTreasury that has the patent all the banks are worked up about."

By revolting on the patent bill, Pelosi was throwing in her lot with Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Dan Boren (D-Okla.), Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who circulated a letter on June 15 urging their colleagues to oppose Section 18, saying the language "carves out a special niche" for Wall Street that would "stifle innovation."

This odd bipartisan coalition was going up against the entire New York delegation, led by Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), chairman of the corporate-friendly New Democrat caucus, who declined to comment for this story. As the behind-the-scenes struggle intensified, DataTreasury promoted the idea that Section 18 was a covert bailout for the banks. If courts ruled that the new law amounted to an unconstitutional taking of property -- a very big 'if' -- then taxpayers would ultimately have to pay back the bank winnings resulting from the bill.

Nobody comes out of this story looking good. Everyone comes out of it looking corrupt. And all of us suffer. Though a few lawyers are making out like bandits.

Late last week, we wrote about the corruption-driven raids on the Spanish music collection society SGAE, and the arrest of its boss, Teddy Bautista. Over the weekend, more details have come out. Jose Luis Campanello points us to the news that officials believe that SGAE execs may have diverted approximately $550 million (US) to their own (or others) profits, at the expense of the actual musicians who should have received that money (Google translation of the original Spanish).

TorrentFreak has additional details as well, about the scheme that seems extremely questionable. Basically, the accusations are that SGAE hired some "consultants" to set up a supposedly independent subsidiary. The thing is, some of those consultants were relatives of SGAE execs:

The complaint alleges that SGAE operatives set up companies and used revenue destined for artists to generate profit for themselves and their families, and that money bound for artists living abroad was diverted to personal Swiss bank accounts.

At the center of the storm is SDAE, the digital rights arm of SGAE. Although a notionally separate entity, SDAE is fully operated by SGAE. It appears that when SDAE was being set up, SGAE hired a for-profit company called Microgenesis as consultants.

Microgenesis describe themselves as “a team of specialists in engineering, consultancy and development, managed by individuals with established experience in the fields of intellectual property, as well as the culture and entertainment industries.”

Microgenesis operated a number of companies which provided various services for SGAE and SDAE, some of them suspiciously registered at SGAE/SDAE’s own office address. The problems only deepen when one learns who is behind Microgenesis.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Neri is Director General of SDAE and ex-director of SGAE. His wife, Maria Antonia Garcia Pombo, is the ex-president of Microgenesis. Partner-Chief Legal Officer of Microgenesis is Eva Garcia Pombo. She is Neri’s sister-in-law.

This all sheds additional light on SGAE's rather fanatical approach to increasing who it could collect the digital levy from. It sounds like they weren't necessarily looking for more money from artists, but potentially for themselves...

Spain is one of a few countries that actually has had pretty sane copyright laws lately. Unlike other places, it has generally felt that private, non-commercial copying of content is legal, and has also rejected the idea of placing liability on third parties. And, despite claims to the contrary from the legacy entertainment industry, there's still great content coming out of Spain (I keep getting great, new music from Spanish bands which, yes, I do pay for). However, it's been interesting to watch the big Spanish music collection agency SGAE, flail around in this environment. In its effort to go after some file sharing sites, it actually pretended two of its employees worked for the courts, and "raided" the homes of people who worked on file sharing programs. As you can imagine, that's a big no-no, and SGAE was fined. It also tried to take legal action against a competing upstart group, that was pushing for more open/copyleft/Creative Commons licensing of music.

And now comes the news that the head of SGAE, Teddy Bautista, is being sought on corruption charges (Google translation from the original Spanish), as a part of a massive investigation into corruption (original Spanish) in the very setup of SGAE.

Maybe, instead of trying to use questionable legal means to attack everyone else, SGAE should have been focusing on getting its own house in order.

It's always nice when either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report touch on stories that we regularly cover, so it was cool on Monday that TDS did a single segment, beautifully named "Well, That Was Fast" to cover both the story of Disney trademarking "Seal Team 6," just two days after Osama bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team 6, and the story of FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker joining Comcast as a lobbyist just a few months after helping to get their deal with NBC Universal approved. While these may just seem like fun little stories, they're important in showing the problems with the existing system, and it's good to see them getting mainstream attention:

A lot of folks are shaking their heads after learning that FCC commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker is leaving her post to take a lobbying job at Comcast just a few months after she voted to approve Comcast's massive purchase of NBC Universal. Now, let's be clear: there's nothing illegal in her taking this job. While she can't lobby the FCC for two years, she can lobby Congress or other parts of the government. And, it doesn't mean that she's corrupt at all. But it's this kind of move that makes people trust our government less and highlights why so many people believe that our government is corrupt.

When you have a massive revolving door, in which the people voting on important deals for companies are likely to get massive salary increases in jobs from those same companies a few months later, it's certainly going to make plenty of people assume corruption, even if there isn't any. So even if it's not corruption in the classical sense, it's hard not to see this as a form of regulatory capture. Baker's term is up in June, but it had been expected she would be re-nominated and would stay. But, making this decision so soon after voting on such a huge deal for the FCC certainly raises some questions about when she started talking to Comcast about a job and when she even decided she was looking for a different job.

Larry Lessig recently directed our attention to a new project, called Congressional Closeup, that seeks to uncover political narratives in "strange" voting patterns by our elected officials through automated means. For example, in a demo (covering a story from the last Congress), it looks at lobbying dollars and how that may have influenced a particular vote:

There was some strange behavior in Congress today as several Democrats went against their own party and voted with Republicans to table the Democrat sponsored Dorgan amendment to the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 (S.3217). The official purpose of Byron Dorgan [D-ND]'s amendment (according to the Library of Congress) is To ban naked credit default swaps.

At first glance, it seems like many of the rogue voters were influenced by lobbies.

For instance, a group of 3 Senators Sen. Dodd [D-CT], Sen. Carper [D-DE], and Sen. Johnson [D-SD], who voted with Republicans to table the amendment, have individually received more campaign contributions than other Senators (see Table 1 below).

Who knows how effective the tool will be, but it's nice to see more people trying to dig into the story (or stories) behind the story when it comes to voting -- especially when it comes to things like lobbying dollars. The project is being put together by a CS PhD student and it would be nice if it actually was effective at both uncovering important stories and also in making those stories known.

While plenty of attention late last week was focused (reasonably) on the goings on in Libya and Japan, there was a Wikileaks story that also was important. As Slashdot notes, a recent Wikileaks cable leak reveals claims of rampant bribery in the Indian parliament, specifically with regards to a controversial nuclear deal with the US. The report, from a State Department official, involves him reporting that he was shown "chests of cash" potentially representing $25 million, which was going to be used to pay off members of Parliament to vote for the deal. Of course, the response has been a whole lot of denial, so it should be interesting to watch what comes next. However, given how often we hear that the Wikileaks documents weren't any kind of whistleblowing or hadn't revealed anything major, I'm curious how people can still claim that, given this latest leak.