Last week, in writing about the silly backlash to Zach Braff's successful Kickstarter project, we noted that he claimed he had the data that showed his success did not take away from other Kickstarter projects, but rather it appeared that Braff brought a lot of new people to Kickstarter, many of whom went on to fund other projects. But still, the ridiculous arguments persisted that somehow famous people using Kickstarter take away money from upstarts. It's as if these people don't understand what a non-zero sum game is. They assume, incorrectly, that if one (famous) person is succeeding, it means one (non-famous) person is not. Perhaps the worst example of this was a piece by Reginald Nelson at TheWrap which ridiculously attacks Kickstarter's founders, arguing that these moves harm "the creative class."

To (hopefully) put an end to such ridiculousness, Kickstarter itself has shared the analytics and data that Braff was talking about concerning the impact of his project (as well as the Veronica Mars project, which is the other big one that some people have complained about):

The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter. 63% of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects.

We’ve seen this happen before. Last year we wrote a post called Blockbuster Effects that detailed the same phenomenon in the Games and Comics categories. Two big projects brought tons of new people to Kickstarter who went on to back more than 1,000 other projects in the following weeks, pledging more than $1 million. Projects bring new backers to other projects. That supports our mission too.

I'd hope this puts to rest the ridiculous claims, but somehow, I doubt it will (and the comments on the Kickstarter blog post suggest people will still complain anyway).

A few months ago, we wrote about Steven Brill's amazing article in Time Magazine about hospital billing. As we noted at the time, the story confirmed what many people believed: that healthcare is a giant economic scam, and it's often the hospitals (not necessarily the insurance companies) who are driving the massive increases in costs. A big part of the scam is the fact that hospitals don't reveal their price list -- known as the "chargemaster." It's all a giant secret. There's no such thing as comparison shopping. There's simply no data anywhere.

Well, that may be changing. The US government just released data on what various hospitals charge for various things, along with how much Medicare actually pays in return. This has quickly resulted in people noticing massive differences in pricing for the same treatment in different hospitals (including, at times, hospitals very close to one another). This release definitely provides some significant data about just how massively hospitals are overcharging for things, even if most patients never pay the listed fees.

Still, it's not quite enough. Brill has responded to the release by noting that while this is a big deal and can be quite helpful in highlighting how broken the system really is (and hopefully will lead to a lot more reporting on the subject), it could go much further:

The feds need to publish chargemaster and Medicare pricing for the most frequent outpatient procedures and diagnostic tests at clinics—two huge profit venues in the medical world. But an even bigger step toward transparency would be collecting data that Medicare doesn’t have: exactly what insurance companies pay to the various hospitals, testing clinics and other providers for various treatments and services.

After all, as the hospitals themselves concede in downplaying their chargemasters, these insurance prices are the ones that affect most patients.

And that is one price list where there is close to zero transparency.

While hospitals and insurance providers clearly will not want to give up that information, Bill points out that patients do find out this information, so perhaps we should crowdsource the data:

So even if insurance companies don't want to participate, Brill writes, states could crowdsource price information from patients:

...state pricing centers could gather the information from patients who volunteer, in exchange for a promise that their names won't be used, to submit their Explanations of Benefits. After all, a hospital or insurance company can't claim a patient can be prohibited from talking about or making public his or her own bill.

For a market to work in any effective manner, pricing information must be clear. It's not that way at all in healthcare, and it needs to get that way fast if we're ever to get healthcare pricing under control.

One of the key things that has been a major concern to us for many, many years is how much of copyright policy tends to be driven by faith-based claims about what must be best (often this falls into the "more must be better" category), rather than any objective analytical look at actual data and evidence. We were encouraged when the UK's Hargreave's Report did start to look at some objective data when it sought to understand how best to reform copyright in the UK. And we've been hearing encouraging things out of Australia as well. With copyright reform back on the table in the US, and Congress seemingly open to the discussion, having reality-based policy discussions will be more important than ever.

That's why it's actually quite encouraging to see a new report from the US National Research Council that has begun the process of calling for more objective data to inform the upcoming copyright reform debate. You can get the full PDF via the National Academies Press for free. They have an embedding widget which we've placed below as well, though it uses Flash, which is a bit annoying. The effort was funded by a broad coalition of organizations with a variety of different views on the issue, so it's not limited to just one particular view. For example, you've got copyright maximalist organizations like the MPAA and the BSA, but also Google and Pam Samuelson, who tend to take a different view on the appropriate level of copyright protection. There is also support from a number of different government and private foundations, including the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

The committee who put together this particular work also has a wide range of viewpoints covered, including Mitch Singer from Sony Pictures, former federal judge Marilyn Hall Patel who presided over the case against Napster, Chris Sprigman (law professor who wrote The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation and who has been featured prominently on Techdirt in the past) among a number of other big names with various viewpoints.

While the paper itself doesn't have any answers yet, it does highlight the key questions that we should be trying to answer, and indicates the beginnings of some research being done in that direction, with the likelihood of more to follow. I am a little annoyed that they still refer to things like the public's rights to access and use content as "exceptions" to copyright, because that feels unfairly limiting, but overall the direction of the work is quite encouraging. Here's a list of some of the initial questions they note it would be good to answer, if possible, which gives you an idea of the research areas they're interested in supporting and encouraging:

With respect to changing incentives for creators, distributors, and users, research could help determine

• how the expenses involved in creative expression and distribution differ across sectors and the role of copyright in generating revenues to offset those expenses;
• under what circumstances sources of monetary and/or non-monetary motivation outside of that provided by copyright are effective in motivating creative activity;
• the motivations of various types of users and potential users of creative works, including both infringers and lawful users; the effects of enhanced enforcement remedies on promoting creativity, technological innovation, and freedom of expression; and
• how the costs of distributing creative content are affected by social media and other new technologies.

With respect to the enablers of and impediments to voluntary licensing transactions in copyrighted works, research would help determine

• the significance of transaction costs as barriers to utilization of copyrighted works;
• the extent of problems involving orphan works (whose owners cannot be identified), user-generated content, and collaborative and iterative works;
• what are successful arrangements for managing transaction costs;
• the roles of public and private institutions in facilitating licensing;
• the relationship of transaction costs to legal rules such as compulsory licenses; and
• changes in transaction costs with new technological and business developments.

With respect to the enforcement challenges, research could help determine

• how much is spent by governments and private parties on copyright enforcement;
• against whom enforcement efforts are targeted and what remedies are sought and granted;
• the results of enforcement efforts in terms of compensation, prevention, education, and deterrence;
• how the effectiveness of enforcement efforts is changing with the expansion of digital networks;
• the costs and benefits of current enforcement methods vis-a-vis those associated with proposed new enforcement methods;
• the relative vulnerability of different business models to infringement; and
• the costs and benefits of fair use exceptions and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbors.

In assessing the balance between copyright protection and the statutory exceptions and limitations to copyright research could help determine

• the costs and benefits of copyright exceptions and limitations in terms of the economic outputs and welfare effects of those individuals, businesses, educational institutions, and other entities that rely on them;
• how copyright and the various categories of limits and exceptions interact with innovative and/or disruptive technologies and platforms; and
• what adverse effects, if any, exceptions and limitations have on copyright holders and their potential to generate economic outputs and welfare effects.

Eventually, research will help inform decisions about key aspects of copyright policy, including

• the appropriate scope of copyright protection;
• the optimal duration of the copyright term;
• the best arrangements for correcting market imperfections that inhibit voluntary licensing;
• appropriate safe harbors and fair use exceptions to copyright;
• effective enforcement remedies for infringing use and the best arrangements for correcting deficiencies in enforcement mechanisms;
• the advisability of reintroducing a formal registration requirement; and
• the advantages and disadvantages of reshaping the copyright regime with different rules for different media.

The paper itself points to the concerns raised over things like SOPA and ACTA as reason to have a more empirical based approach to copyright reform, which is a good sign (and goes against those who insist that the SOPA protests had no real impact). The report goes into a lot more details, including a number of other important research topics as well.

One other point that they raise -- which is a key point we've brought up concerning our own Sky is Rising research -- is the need for those who have this data to be much more open about sharing it for the sake of making good overall policy. Since much of the data is considered "proprietary or subject to trade secrecy and privacy protections," the report outlines ways in which the data might be made available "on reasonable terms to qualified investigators." This, alone, would be a huge step forward in looking at many of the key policy questions above. The lack of real data is a huge impediment to being able to create effective policy.

All in all, it's a very good sign that this is underway, as it should really encourage a much more empirically-driven approach to the inevitable upcoming reform process. I hope that the results of future research driven by this particular effort do, in fact, play a role in any future debates on copyright reform. Moving from a faith-based look at copyright to an evidence-based one is a huge step forward, and long overdue.

Degban, the anti-piracy company that once took down comedian Dave Gorman's Flickr account because it thought photos of distinctive typography were actually its client's porn (and then blamed it on being hacked), has put together some very interesting (that's a colloquialism for "??!?") piracy numbers at its site.

Degban's "State of Piracy" page introduces itself with some rather ominous wording about piracy and the importance (and difficulty) of compiling accurate numbers.

When it comes to statistical data regarding content piracy, the complexity of the data and its abundance is utterly mind boggling. The data channels are scattered across geographical borders and scientific dimensions. The nature of the matter effects the data gathering process, resulting in datasets with chaotic orders and unclean results sets.

It is of grave importance, regardless of the challenge, to understand the trends and fashions behind content piracy as a thriving organism . Furthermore, appreciation of statical [sic] data regarding content piracy can be advantageous from a business intelligence point of view.

And some very fine "statical" data it is. The first chart posted is of the pie variety, breaking down the "market share" of several file storage lockers. Most of the contenders hover somewhere between 4-6% of the "market," possibly giving some credence to the MPAA's claims that Megaupload made the Internet go 'round by driving 99% of the traffic that wasn't Netflix (heavily paraphrased).

The data Degban has collected also shows the US firmly holding the lead in terms of "Origins of Pirate Peers." (USA! USA! USA!) How this number (185,290) is derived remains a mystery, but whatever it is, it's nearly nine times as much as Russia (28,001). So... who's doing all this piracy? Atlantans, apparently.


As can be seen by this chart, Atlanta is more than twice as piratey as Tacoma (?!?), the second place pirate haven, in terms of numbers lying along a Y-axis. Again, no further information is provided as to what these numbers represent, but we can certainly assume that Atlanta is the problem and Tacoma isn't helping. Once we venture beyond these two homegrown pirate bays, we see pirating is a major issue in such metropolises as Chalfont, PA and Iselin, NJ. Other cities/villages/unincorporated townships appear on the list as well, leading to questions of "Where is that, exactly?" and "Didn't that one guy used to live there... the serial killer/general store proprietor?" Cities with large populations -- New York and LA -- are pretty far down the list, which might make a lesser anti-piracy company question the quality of its data.

Degban really drives home the "Atlantans heart pirating" point with its next info-less graphic.


From this graphic portrayal of the United States battling a post-adolescent breakout of Venn diagram remnants, we can only draw one conclusion: if piracy is to be stopped, Atlanta has got to go. No more DMCA requests. No more lousy legislation. No more half-assed, self-serving infographics. You kill something by cutting off its head. The MPAA will be able to return millions of bag boys to their copyright-protected jobs just as soon as someone detaches Atlanta from the internet. And, from what I can tell of the map above, at that point, nearly all piracy will have gone away. If only Degban had made this clear earlier, we could have done away with all these lawsuits and focused in on the real piracy cancer: Atlanta.

Now, the numbers contributing to these SHOCKING bar graphs might possibly be found in this detailed, interactive (click over to Degban's site to experience this in all its glory) Google Map, which pinpoints where these "peers" are located, as well as the number of peers operating at each inverted teardrop.


Yes. There are some numbers in there, alright. Some low numbers. In fact, it's tough to find any location with more than 5 "peers." How these scattered points add up to over 10,000 pirating Atlantans is beyond me, especially considering Atlanta itself has no data point at all. None. Zip. Zero. Clearly, Degban processes data in a far advanced way, in which "0" peers means, "more than double the piracy impact of Tacoma, in which Tacoma is the number two piracy center."


You may also want to check out the dates on this map. It looks like the last data harvest was back in the spring of 2010. "OLD NEWS!!!" I hear you yell like a bunch of irate Digg members Redditors. But, how can that be? "Data is important," Degban tells us in the intro, along with this:

This section is regularly and automatically kept up to date.

From the looks of it, "regularly" means "once per decade." And "automatically" means "please delete this word from this sentence before publishing this page."

So, we have a bunch of numbers that don't add up, aren't current and do little more than randomly drop circles on maps and rub bars affectionately up against sky-high Y-axises. And yet, Degban is a well-known name in the piracy world, one that understands the "grave importance" of accurate and up-to-date statistics. To fight your enemy successfully, you must know them, and from what I'm seeing here, Degban is nearly 100% sure someone's pirating stuff somewhere.

Godspeed, number wranglers! Remind me to keep one hand on my content when passing through the muggy climes of Hotlanta or the suicidal murkiness of upstate Washington! And tell Vkontakte.ru that everyone's extremely disappointed in its lack of effort on the file sharing front.

Even though I was never a big Google Reader user, its death has got me thinking about online services quite a bit lately -- and really reminded me that we've done the cloud wrong. Rather than build true cloud computing, we've built a bunch of lockboxes.

The cloud was supposed to free us, not lock us in

"Cloud computing" went by a variety of other terms in the past before this marketing term stuck, but the key part of it was that it was supposed to free us of worrying about the location of our data. Rather than having to have things stored locally, the data could be anywhere, and we could access it via any machine or device. That sort of happened, and there definitely are benefits to data being stored in the cloud, rather than locally. But... what came with today's "cloud" was a totally different kind of lock: a lock to the service.

I can point many apps to data stored locally

I wrote something related to this a few years ago, concerning music in the cloud. If I have a bunch of MP3s stored locally, I can point any number of music apps at my music folder, and they can all play that music. As long as the data is not in a proprietary format, I can find the app that works best for me and the data is separate from the app. Even when you have proprietary formats like Microsoft's .doc, other apps can often make use of them as well -- so, for example, I can get by with Libre Office, and I don't lose access to all of my old Microsoft Word docs.

This is really useful, because it helps us avoid vendor lock-in in many cases. Even when, say, Microsoft or Apple dominates the market. It's still possible to come in and be compatible. The competition then focuses on building better services, rather than reinventing the data model. That's much more useful to consumers, because the innovation is focused on making their lives better, rather than reinventing the wheel.

Today's cloud brings us back to walled gardens

For the most part, today, however, "cloud" applications bundle the storage and the service as one, and the two are linked inseparably. You check your data into a new cloud service, but the application layer and the data are both held by the same company. Yes, you can often transfer data from one service to the other -- such as Google's "data liberation front" effort, which is fantastic (and goes beyond many other companies' efforts), but just the fact that data needs to be liberated suggests we're taking the wrong approach altogether. Rather than having to "export" all of your feeds from Google Reader and then waiting patiently for 50,000 other people who are trying to upload them to the few small Reader competitors out there, why shouldn't we have each had an OPML file stored somewhere that we control, and that we could easily point any reader application, whether its local or "in the cloud." And, yes, there are some services that attempt to do this, but it's not where the whole "cloud" space has gone.

Separate and liberate the data from the infrastructure

What the cloud should be about is both freeing us from being locked to local data, and also freeing us from having that data locked to a particular service. I should be able to keep my data in one spot and then access it via a variety of cloud clients -- and the clients and the data shouldn't necessarily be directly connected or held by the same party. If I don't want to listen to my music via one app, I can just connect a different app to my personal data cloud and off we go. If Google Reader shuts down, no problem, just point a different app at my RSS data. No extraction, no uploading. Just go.

There are, of course, plenty of players around which sort of do this. DropBox, Box, Amazon's S3 and even Google Drive are setting themselves up as personal data clouds, and there are a growing number of apps that run across them. Projects like the Locker Project are thinking about how we store personal data separated from apps as well. And I know there are a bunch of other projects either around today or quickly approaching release, that also seek to do something in this space.

But, for the most part, all of the stories that people talk about concerning "cloud" computing almost always involve services that tie together the app and the data and all you're really doing is trading the former limitations of local data for the limitations of a single service provider controlling your data. Many service providers want this, of course. It's a form of lock-in. Plus, having some sort of access to your data and your usage can enable them to do other things, such as more accurately data mine you and your usage.

But, as users, we really should be pushing more towards embracing the apps that separate the app from the data and that let you point their "cloud" app at any particular place you store your "cloud" data. Some of this may involve standardizing certain data formats, but that makes sense anyway, as, once again, that's an area where there are tremendous benefits to not reinventing the wheel, so that the innovation and competition can focus on the service level. While some vendors may fear losing lock-in, if they truly believe in their own ability to provide great services, it shouldn't be a problem. At the same time, they should also realize that embracing this kind of world means that it's easier for others to jump in and test their services as well.

The death of Google Reader raised a lot of issues around trust, and while you could "export" the data, that process is still messy and archaic when you think about it. The future of cloud computing should be much more focused on separating the data from the service. That would remove the fear that many are now talking about concerning adopting new cloud services that might not last very long. If the data is stored elsewhere, and entirely in the control of the user, then you don't need to trust the service provider nearly as much, but can dip in and test out different apps operating on the same data, and switch with ease.

If we're going to see the real promise of "the cloud" take place, that's where things need to head. We should be increasingly skeptical of "cloud" apps that also control the data.

One of the key complaints about CISPA is the fact that it does absolutely nothing to make sure any data of yours that is shared with the government by third parties is sent narrowly to folks working to protect us from cybersecurity threats. Instead, the information can be shared with any agency of the government, so long as they can claim, vaguely, that it's being used for "cybersecurity purposes." But, as the EFF points out, without any limitations on who in the government can see your data, every government agency can see your data. They've even put together a helpful "list."

One question we sometimes get is: Under CISPA, which government agencies can receive this data? For example, could the FBI, NSA, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement receive data if CISPA were to pass?

The answer is yes. Any government agency could receive data from companies if this were to pass, meaning identifiable data could be flowing to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the National Security Agency, or even the Food and Drug Administration.

We've reposted the list below as well, just so you can get an idea of which government agencies could get access to your data on CISPA (and which ones thought that, perhaps, that's not such a good idea).

In 2001, I published a history of free software, called "Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution." One of the people I interviewed for the book was Eben Moglen, for many years the General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and one of the main architects of the later versions of the GNU General Public License. He had the following interesting thoughts on the delivery of digital media:

Let's think about the Net for a change as a collection of pipes and switches, rather than thinking of it as a thing or a space.

There's lot of data moving through those pipes, and the switches determine who gets which data and how much they have to pay for it downstream. And of course those switches are by and large what we think of as digital computers.

The basic media company theory at the opening of the 21st century is to create a leak-proof pipe all the way from production studio to eyeball and eardrum.

Creating that "leak-proof pipe" has long been the dream not only of media companies, but also of computer companies like Apple that hope to collaborate with and ultimately supplant them. A recent patent application, found through the French title Numerama, seeks to make videos uncopiable during playback by locking down the last section of the pipe -- the part that connects the computer to the screen. Here's how Apple's patent describes it:

Securing protected content during video playback. The embodiments provide a system that drives a display from a computer system. During operation, the system writes graphical output, generated from a copyrighted video file, to protected memory and drives the display from the protected memory. If the graphical output lacks copy protection, the system discontinues the driving of the display from the protected memory. In particular, upon detecting a lack of copy protection in the graphical output, the system continues to drive the display from the protected memory during a grace period associated with the lack of protection in the graphical output. The system then discontinues driving of the display from the protected memory if protection of the graphical output does not resume during the grace period.

The rest of the patent describes the details of the process. What's striking -- and sad -- is the effort and ingenuity that has been put into making things less convenient for the end user. After all, introducing a system that automatically shuts down when it thinks security may be absent is a recipe for disaster -- as if current DRM screw-ups weren't enough of problem.

Moreover, Apple's system will fail, just as all the other approaches to "protecting content" have failed. Anything involving copy protection is regarded as a challenge by certain people; it's not a question of "if" the particular scheme employed by Apple will be broken, but "when". And there's another, deeper reason why such attempts won't ever work. As Moglen explained to me all those years ago:

The switch that most threatens that pipe is the one at the end. If the switch closest to your eyeball and your eardrum is under your complete technical control, the whole rest of the aqueduct can be as leak-proof as they like, and it won't do them any good. And the switch is under your control, of course, if the software is free software.

While there's free software, the data pipe will always be leaky.

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

My goodness. Yesterday we posted about Rep. Louis Gohmert's incredible, head-shakingly ignorant exchange with lawyer Orin Kerr during a Congressional hearing concerning "hacking" and the CFAA. In that discussion, Gohmert spoke out in favor of being able to "hack back" and destroy the computers of hackers -- and grew indignant at the mere suggestion that this might have unintended consequences or lead people to attack the wrong targets. Gohmert thought that such talk was just Kerr trying to protect hackers.

I thought perhaps Rep. Gohmert was just having a bad day. Maybe he's having a bad month. In a different hearing, held yesterday concerning ECPA reform, Gohmert opened his mouth again, and it was even worse. Much, much worse. Cringe-inducingly clueless. Yell at your screen clueless. Watch for yourself, but be prepared to want to yell. The short version of this is that he seems to think that when Google has advertisements on Gmail, that's the same thing as selling all of the information in your email to advertisers. And no matter how many times Google's lawyer politely tries to explain the difference, Gohmert doesn't get it. He thinks he's making a point -- smirking the whole time -- that what Google does is somehow the equivalent of government snooping, in that he keeps asking if Google can just "sell" access to everyone's email to the government. I'm going to post a transcript below, and because I simply cannot not interject how ridiculously uninformed Gohmert's line of questioning is, I'm going to interject in the transcript as appropriate.

Rep. Gohmert: I was curious. Doesn't Google sell information acquired from emails to different vendors so that they can target certain individuals with their promotions?

Google lawyer whose name I didn't catch: Uh, no, we don't sell email content. We do have a system -- similar to the system we have for scanning for spam and malware -- that can identify what type of ads are most relevant to serve on email messages. It's an automated process. There's no human interaction. Certainly, the email is not sold to anybody or disclosed.

Gohmert: So how do these other vendors get our emails and think that we may be interested in the products they're selling.

Okay, already we're off to a great start in monumental ignorance. The initial question was based on a complete falsehood -- that Google sells such information -- and after the lawyer told him that this is not true, Gohmert completely ignores that and still asks how they get the emails. It never seems to occur to him that they don't get the emails.

Google lawyer: They don't actually get your email. What they're able to do is through our advertising business be able to identify keywords that they would like to trigger the display of one of their ads, but they don't get information about who the user is or any...

Gohmert: Well that brings me back. So they get information about keywords in our emails that they use to decide who to send promotions to, albeit automatically done. Correct?

NO. Not correct. In fact, that's the exact opposite of what the lawyer just said. Gohmert can't seem to comprehend that Google placing targeted ads next to emails has NOTHING to do with sending any information back to the advertiser. I wonder, when Rep. Gohmert turns on his television to watch the evening news, does he think that the TV station is sending his name, address, channel watching info, etc. back to advertisers? That's not how it works. At all. The advertisers state where they want their ads to appear, and Google's system figures out where to place the ads. At no point does any information from email accounts go back to anyone. And yet Gohmert keeps asking.

And not understanding the rather basic answers. Unfortunately, the lawyer tries to actually explain reality to Gohmert in a professional and detailed manner, when it seems clear that the proper way to answer his questions is in shorter, simpler sentences such as: "No, that's 100% incorrect."

Lawyer: The email context is used to identify what ads are most relevant to the user...

Gohmert: And do they pay for the right or the contractual ability to target those individuals who use those keywords?

Lawyer: I might phrase that slightly differently, but the gist is correct, that advertisers are able to bid for the placement of advertisements to users, where our system has detected might be interested in the advertisement.

Gohmert: Okay, so what would prevent the federal government from making a deal with Google, so they could also "Scroogle" people, and say "I want to know everyone who has ever used the term 'Benghazi'" or "I want everyone who's ever used... a certain term." Would you discriminate against the government, or would you allow the government to know about all emails that included those words?

Okay, try not to hit your head on your desk after that exchange. First, he (perhaps accidentally) gets a statement more or less correct, that advertisers pay to have their ads show up, but immediately follows that up with something completely unrelated to that. First, he tosses in "Scroogled" -- a term that Microsoft uses in its advertising against Gmail and in favor of Outlook.com -- suggesting exactly where this "line" of questioning may have originated. Tip to Microsoft lobbyists, by the way: if you want to put Google on the hot seat, it might help to try a line of questioning that actually makes sense.

Then, the second part, you just have to say huh? The lawyer already explained, repeatedly, that Google doesn't send any information back to the advertiser, and yet he's trying to suggest that the government snooping through your email is the same thing... and Google somehow not giving the government that info is Google "discriminating" against the government? What? Really?

Lawyer [confounded look] Uh... sir, I think those are apples and oranges. I think the disclosure of the identity...

Gohmert: I'm not asking for a fruit comparison. I'm just asking would you be willing to make that deal with the government? The same one you do with private advertisers, so that the government would know which emails are using which words.

Seriously? I recognize that there are no requirements on intelligence to get elected to Congress, but is there anyone who honestly could not comprehend what he meant by saying it's "apples and oranges"? But, clearly he does not understand that because not only does he mock the analogy, he then repeats the same question in which he insists -- despite the multiple explanations that state the exact opposite -- that advertisers get access to emails and information about email users, and that the government should be able to do the same thing.

Lawyer: Thank you, sir. I meant by that, that it isn't the same deal that's being suggested there.

Gohmert: But I'm asking specifically if the same type of deal could be made by the federal government? [some pointless rant about US government videos aired overseas that is completely irrelevant and which it wasn't worth transcribing] But if that same government will spend tens of thousands to do a commercial, they might, under some hare-brained idea like to do a deal to get all the email addresses that use certain words. Couldn't they make that same kind of deal that private advertisers do?

Holy crap. Gohmert, for the fourth time already, nobody gets email addresses. No private business gets the email addresses. No private business gets to see inside of anyone's email. Seeing inside someone's email has nothing to do with buying ads in email. If the government wants to "do the same deal as private advertisers" then yes it can advertise on Gmail... and it still won't get the email addresses or any other information about emailers, because at no point does Google advertising work that way.

Lawyer: We would not honor a request from the government for such a...

Gohmert: So you would discriminate against the government if they tried to do what your private advertisers do?

No. No. No. No. No. The lawyer already told you half a dozen times, no. The government can do exactly what private advertisers do, which is buy ads. And, just like private advertisers, they would get back no email addresses or any such information.

Lawyer: I don't think that describes what private advertisers...

Gohmert: Okay, does anybody here have any -- obviously, you're doing a good job protecting your employer -- but does anybody have any proposed legislation that would assist us in what we're doing?

What are we doing, here? Because it certainly seems like you're making one of the most ignorant arguments ever to come out of an elected officials' mouth, and that's saying quite a bit. You keep saying "private advertisers get A" when the reality is that private advertisers get nothing of the sort -- and then you ignore that (over and over and over and over again) and then say "well if private advertisers get A, why can't the government get A." The answer is because neither of them get A and never have.

Gohmert: I would be very interested in any phrase, any clauses, any items that we might add to legislation, or take from existing legislation, to help us deal with this problem. Because I am very interested and very concerned about our privacy and our email.

If you were either interested or concerned then you would know that no such information goes back to advertisers before you stepped into the room (hell, before you got elected, really). But, even if you were ignorant of that fact before the hearing, the fact that the lawyer tried half a dozen times, in a half a dozen different ways to tell you that the information is not shared should have educated you on that fact. So I'm "very interested" in what sort of "language" Gohmert is going to try to add to legislation that deals with a non-existent problem that he insists is real.

Gohmert: And just so the simpletons that sometimes write for the Huffington Post understand, I don't want the government to have all that information.

Rep. Sensenbrenner: For the point of personal privilege, my son writes for the Huffington Post.

Gohmert: Well then maybe he's not one of the simpletons I was referring to.

Sensenbrenner: He does have a Phd.

Gohmert: Well, you can still be a PHUL.

Har, har, har... wait, what? So much insanity to unpack. First of all, Gohmert seems to think that people will be making fun of him for suggesting that the government should "buy" access to your email on Google. And, yes, we will make fun of that, but not for the reasons that he thinks they will. No one thinks that Gohmert seriously wants the government to buy access to information on Google. What everyone's laughing (or cringing) at is the idea that anyone could buy that info, because you can't. No private advertiser. No government. It's just not possible.

But, I guess we're all just "simpletons."

Seriously, however, we as citizens deserve better politicians. No one expects politicians to necessarily understand every aspect of technology, but there are some simple concepts that you should at least be able to grasp when explained to you repeatedly by experts. When a politician repeatedly demonstrates no ability to comprehend a rather basic concept -- and to then granstand on their own ignorance -- it's time to find better politicians. Quickly.

One of the initiatives gaining momentum around the world is open data -- the idea that, for example, non-personal data affecting the public should be made freely available. That's partly to improve transparency, so that citizens are more informed about what is happening, and partly to stimulate new kinds of business that build products and services based on that data.

An important category of open data that boosts transparency concerns basic drug safety information. Last month, Techdirt wrote about the AllTrials initiative that seeks to have key information about clinical trials placed in the public domain. As part of a wider move towards greater openness, the European Medicines Agency, the main body that licenses drugs in Europe, is starting to make available information that has hitherto been withheld.

Although doctors and patients are rejoicing at this greater transparency, not everyone is pleased by the move. AbbVie, the pharma company spun out of the Abbott Laboratories at the beginning of this year, for example, is taking legal action to stop it:

AbbVie, a pharmaceutical company has sought an injunction to block Europe's medicines regulator from releasing "confidential" and "commercially-sensitive" information on its blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis drug, a spokeswoman for the U.S. drugmaker confirmed on Sunday.

The Chicago-based company had taken legal action against the European Medicines Agency to stop it from releasing data on the effects in individual patients in clinical trials for its drug Humira, the Financial Times reported earlier on Sunday.

Except, of course, this isn't "confidential" and "commercially-sensitive" information: it's just basic data about its safety and efficacy. Doctors and patients surely have a right to know this before using products that could potentially have serious, even fatal, side-effects.

Another EU body, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), is also opening up:

The project is part of EFSA's continuing commitment to openness and addresses recommendations made by an independent evaluation report of the Authority's performance to further enhance transparency in its decision-making processes. EFSA's Science Strategy also highlights the importance of the Authority playing a leading role in making relevant scientific data more accessible to all interested parties.

Here's one particular set of data that it has now released:

Given the level of public interest, EFSA will make all data on genetically modified (GM) maize NK603 publicly available on its website today (14 January).

Once more, that seems reasonable, since the public ought to be able to find about what is going into the food chain whose end-products it will consume. But some disagree: according to a story on Bakeryandsnacks.com, Monsanto is threatening to sue the EFSA over the release of this data.

What makes this a little confusing is that the company is quoted in that article as saying that it "firmly supports transparency" -- and yet here it is fighting tooth and nail against precisely that. Apparently, Monsanto also wants the regulatory environment in Europe to be "science-based". Modern science requires experimental data to be made available so that anyone can check the validity of the conclusions that have been drawn from it. If it can't be scrutinized, the conclusions can't be confirmed, and it's not science. So, given its call for "science-based" regulation, why does the company want to keep that data hidden? A cynic might almost suspect that Monsanto and AbbVie have something to hide.

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There's an interesting event going on today and tomorrow at the Cato Institute, with a very practical focus: looking at ways to automate the process of getting legislative data into Wikipedia. That is, when new bills are introduced, and as they make their way through Congress and to the President, is there any reason that data doesn't automatically populate to Wikipedia?

Our project to produce enhanced XML markup of federal legislation is well under way, and we hope to use this data to make more information available to the public about how bills affect existing law, federal agencies, and spending, for example.

What better way to spread knowledge about federal public policy than by supporting the growth of Wikipedia content?

There are a bunch of services out there that present such legislative data, but having a straight XML feed from Congress to Wikipedia seems like an all around good idea.