In the Wired story about Trulia's IPO (which oddly, again, suggests that a massive stock price bump on day one is "good," rather than a sign of a company leaving lots of money on the table), there is a somewhat random aside about how Zillow and Trulia are the two key competitors in the space, and noting that Zillow sued Trulia for patent infringement just recently.

The patent, 7,970,674, is for "Automatically determining a current value for a real estate property, such as a home, that is tailored to input from a human, such as its owner." Got that? Basically, it's for Zillow's "Zestimator" that seeks to take a guess at what any particular house might be worth (an estimate that -- from my view -- often seems completely inaccurate in my own neighborhood, but others may differ). It's a nice feature, no doubt, and it's one that Trulia apparently added to its site... hence the lawsuit.

Even if we assume that Trulia saw what Zillow was doing and flat out copied it -- is that really a problem? Looking specifically at this example (and my experience with Zillow's estimates) this is the kind of thing where it seems like a really good thing to have more competition, driving each company to make their offering even better and more accurate and useful. In other words, just compete in the market and let the best service win. In the past I've been a big fan of Zillow, so I'm disappointed to see them going after competitors with patents, rather than focusing on innovating. It did get me to go check out Trulia again, however, something I hadn't done in years. Though I doubt that was Zillow's intention.

In the quest for a longer life and eternal youth, people have come up with many different (and sometimes crazy) theories on how to get there. Add years to your life with vitamins, supplements, and hormones! Eat this, not that! Postpone death with suspended animation! Here are just a few examples of possible ways to increase our lifespan.

• As early as in 1935, studies have suggested that restricting caloric intake can extend the lifespan of rats, but does the same idea apply to humans? Researchers at Tufts University are conducting a study (CALERIE) to see if reducing caloric intake by 25% can help to slow aging and extend life. [url]
• Researchers at the University of Paris have found that feeding rats fullerene (C60) in olive oil can almost double their lifespan, with no long-term toxic effects. Apparently, an unaffiliated small startup is already selling research-ready C60 olive oil solution -- prepared the same way as in the study -- to people interested in studying it (in rats, not people!) [url]
• Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have figured out how to turn adult blood cells into embryonic stem cells. Aside from curing the incurable, perhaps the discovery could one day lead to eternal youth. [url]
• A study from Northwestern University suggests that children with older fathers are more likely to live longer. This is because they inherit longer telomeres from their fathers (and paternal grandfathers) that protect against aging processes. [url]
• The FDA has apparently approved "suspended animation" for human trials. The idea is that by injecting critically injured patients with a cold fluid to induce severe hypothermia, death can be postponed so that surgeons can work on them in suspended animation for 60-90 minutes. This extra time could mean the difference between life and death. [url]

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

Over the years, we've noted time and time again that people seem to think that if a book, movie or TV show comes out that has some basic similarities to a project they worked on, it simply must be copyright infringement. But, of course, copyright is supposed to apply to specific expression, rather than mere ideas. As we've noted, over the years, the line on this is unfortunately blurry, but for some cases, it's pretty clear that there's no infringement at all. Such is the case in a legal fight over a Disney movie (direct to video, of course) about a dog who helps Santa Claus. Three guys came up with a similar idea, which they wrote as a short story (it took three guys to come up with such an idea?) and then decided that the movie must have infringed on their copyright. It did not. I'll let THREsq's summary explain:

The court acknowledged that the short story and the Disney movies had some elements in common: they all feature a threat to Christmas and a talking dog; all feature a dog named Paws, Santa Paws or Puppy Paws; they all have magical icicles; etc. There also is some similar dialogue. However, "apart from these abstract similarities, the remaining elements of the plaintiffs' short story and defendants' movies are substantially dissimilar," the court notes. "Furthermore, most of the aforementioned similarities between plaintiffs' short story and defendants' works are not protected by copyright law."

While we can point to cases like this and say that the system is working, just the fact that such cases so often get filed shows a real problem. We've so built up this perception of copyright-over-all and "ownership society" that people really do think that anyone having the same idea as them must have infringed -- and are so sure of it that they're willing to go to court. That's a symptom of a much bigger problem with the system and the way people view it today.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren has recently announced two brand new, but important bills (pdf): there's HR 6529, which is an ECPA reform act and HR 6530, the Global Internet Freedom Act. The ECPA reform effort is one we've discussed a few times recently. It's much needed, but law enforcement officials are pushing back against it because it would require them to get warrants before spying on electronic communications -- which is something they don't want at all. Here's what the bill would do according to Lofgren's fact sheet:

1. The government should obtain a warrant before compelling a service provider to disclose an individual’s private online communications.
2. The government should obtain a warrant before it can track the location of an individual’s wireless communication device.
3. Before it can install a pen register or trap and trace device to capture real time transactional data about when and with whom an individual communicates using digital services (such as email or mobile phone calls), the government should demonstrate to a court that such data is relevant to a criminal investigation.
4. The government should not use an administrative subpoena to compel service providers to disclose transactional data about multiple unidentified users of digital services (such as a bulk request for the names and addresses of everyone that visited a particular website during a specified time frame). The government may compel this information through a warrant or court order, but subpoenas should specify the individuals about whom the government seeks information.

All of these seem perfectly reasonable -- but given how hard law enforcement has fought against earlier ECPA reforms, it seems unlikely it'll go anywhere.

The Free Internet effort is also important, obviously, if a bit more vague. Lofgren's summary:

The Global Free Internet Act would create a Task Force on the Global Internet that identifies, prioritizes, and develops a response to policies and practices of the U.S. government, foreign governments, or international bodies that deny fair market access to Internet-related goods and services, or that threaten the technical operation, security, and free flow of global Internet communications. Members of the Task Force include the heads of several executive branch agencies, four U.S. persons nominated by Congressional leadership, and four U.S. persons who are not government employees nominated by the Internet itself. The Task Force would hold public hearings, issue reports no less than annually, and coordinate the activity of the U.S. government to respond to threats to the Internet. When the next SOPA-like legislation, restrictive international trade agreement, or overbroad treaty from an international body becomes a threat, it is the job of this Task Force to sound the alarm and propose a course of action

This is basically something that the government probably should have done a while ago, if it truly believed in the importance of an open and free internet... which is exactly why it, too, seems unlikely. And, of course, bills introduced at this point are unlikely to go very far, seeing as Congress is out of session for election season, only to come back briefly for a lame duck session after the election. It would be great if these bills got some attention, but unfortunately they're unlikely to do much this time around. Hopefully Lofgren introduces similar bills next year too.

I recently talked about how the cynicism of the "internet generation" is only helping to keep broken systems in place. I recognize that many people feel that their vote is useless, and think that voting for "the lesser of two evils" is not worth it. I also have sympathy for those who argue that not voting may, in fact, be better than voting-while-uninformed. But none of that really means that votes don't matter. They absolutely do matter, in a big and important way -- especially when you can bring together a large group of people who really do understand the issues, and don't want to just get pushed around by lobbyists and crony capitalism.

The folks at Fight for the Future and Personal Democracy Media have teamed up to create a website called, The Internet Votes, hoping to get more people -- especially internet savvy people -- registered to vote. They've even set up this nice widget:

This kind of thing matters. As we noted in our "cynicism" post, when a large group of voters speak out, it really does make a difference. It's only when they don't speak out and don't make their views known that the special interests can take over. This latest effort is an outgrowth of the fight against SOPA and PIPA, and if we want to make sure that the RIAAs/MPAAs of the world can't try to push such things through again in the future, then the internet savvy crowd has to make it clear that their vote can and does matter. This isn't about who to vote for -- but being willing to speak up with an informed voice. If you don't like either of the major party choices, there are alternatives as well, and those can make an important statement.

Along those lines, there's an article over at HuffPo by Michael Beckerman, arguing that now is the time to make the "internet bloc" the next important voting bloc:

Campaign strategists and pundits are always trying to predict the newest or most important political demographic groups. For a long time, it was seniors. That was followed by the dawn of the "soccer mom" and lately there has been a lot of talk about "NASCAR dads." But the strongest untapped political factor these days is rarely mentioned, despite representing a force central to the lives of nearly every American -- the Internet.

Indeed. Beckerman, by the way, discusses the importance of such a voting bloc in his article describing the official launch of the Internet Association, a group that we discussed -- somewhat skeptically when it was announced a few months ago. Beckerman and the folks who make up the Internet Association seem to be taking the concerns raised to heart, and have made it quite clear that a key element of its platform is to be a voice for internet users.

The three planks of the association's advocacy platform are: protecting Internet freedom; fostering innovation and economic growth; and empowering users. The unique nature of the Internet, free from government control, has unleashed unprecedented entrepreneurialism, creativity and innovation, far beyond imagination. But what about tomorrow? No one can predict what innovations will happen next. But we do know that the Internet's decentralized and open model has been the catalyst that has powered this information revolution.

We've pointed out a few times that we worry when the future has no lobbyists, so as the internet itself rises up and makes itself heard, hopefully a group like the Internet Association can really help.

We've noted in the past that Brazil doesn't seem to have much of a concept of safe harbors for secondary liability, as it's blamed Google for actions of its users in the past, even once ordering that YouTube be shut down, or blocked due to a video that someone didn't want seen. Once more, the Brazilian courts are at it again. Last week, a judge apparently ordered Google to take down a YouTube video that attacked a mayoral candidate for the city of Campo Grande. Google refused, and the judge, Flavio Peren, has responded by ordering all Google services be shut down for 24 hours and that the head of Google's operations in Brazil, Fabio Jose Silva Coelho, be arrested.

To say that this is an extreme overreaction, would be an understatement. Because of one video, about one local mayoral candidate (which, thanks to this publicity many more people are likely to see), all of Google should be blocked for people in Brazil and the head of Google's operations in Brazil should be arrested? Talk about a disproportionate response. Not only is it extreme, it makes no sense. Google didn't create or upload the video. It's just hosting it. If the video is illegal, blame whoever created it and uploaded it.

Google is appealing the ruling, but it still seems extreme. Google's transparency report has noted in the past that Brazil is perhaps the most aggressive country when it comes to content removal requests -- but that only suggests that someone should be thinking more carefully about how fast the Brazilian courts are to issue these kinds of injunctions without seeming to understand Google's role.

A few folks sent over a great blog post by Sparkfun CEO Nathan Seidle about a recent TEDx presentation he did on the topic of "IP Obesity," in which he argues that companies that focus on patents tend to get fat and lazy while others out-innovate them. He provides the following example, showing this chart:

Here's an interesting example. Kodak is an amazing company that has been in operation for over 130 years. In 1978 Kodak filed for a patent for an electronic still camera, the precursor to the digital photography industry. They had a 25 year head start on the industry. What did Kodak do? They licensed their patent and filed suit against other companies that possibly infringed upon it. A graph showing the stock value changes of two companies over the past 25 years. I'll let you guess who is Canon and who is Kodak. What happened? Kodak relied too much on their patents. They rested on their laurels and become intellectually unfit. They were afflicted by IP Obesity.

Of course, that's just a single example, but we've noticed it in other cases as well. When we see bigger companies getting more aggressive with patents, it almost always seems to signal a decline in prospects for the company -- because they've become fat and happy resting on their laurels and government-granted monopoly privileges, rather than continuing to innovate in the market place. It's the exact opposite of what we're told patents are for.

You should check out the rest of the post, but Seidle goes on to talk about how ideas get copied all the time, and why that shouldn't concern you. He explains why it makes much more sense to focus on just building your business -- and he's got Sparkfun to prove it. If you don't know (and you should) it's an open source hardware company that has done over $75 million in business since its inception and is apparently on pace to do $25 million alone this year. Seems like you really can build a pretty good business while still being pretty open and not worrying about others copying you.

The Dutch Supreme Court (Hoge Raad) has posed some pre-judicial questions to the Court of Justice of the EU regarding the home-copying exception in European copyright legislation -- raising significant questions about what is legal under EU rules and how it meshes with how people actually consume music. Of course, all it really seems to demonstrate is just how messy the copyright system is today. When the top judges of a country cannot figure out the seemingly simple question of whether downloading music and films is legal or not -- mainly due to a huge patchwork of amendments to copyright law over the years -- something needs to change. Drastically. Let's see if we can make some sense of it:

In essence, the home-copying exception allows people to make copies for non-commercial home uses. Such an exception makes a lot of sense, because these private copies are largely impossible to enforce anyway. A levy is imposed on manufacturers of blank media to compensate rights holders for the supposed "losses" from foregone license fees.

The case in question concerns a group of these blank media manufacturers, who refuse to pay the full levies imposed by the collecting society in charge of the compensation for the home-copying exception. The collecting society considers it fair to charge for "losses" that stem from people downloading unauthorized uploads. You see, in the Dutch system, there is a chicken and the egg problem where you may download copyright protected content, but you may not upload (not unlike its policy for marijuana where buying and selling is tolerated, but growing is not). Any uploaded material is therefore often considered to stem from an illegal source. There is a huge political debate about the desirability of this construction in the Parliament.

The Netherlands is one of the few countries that has a system like this, where the end-user is partly taken out of the equation for copyright infringement. This is due to a particularity in European copyright, which is a headache to comprehend, but necessary to understand the confusion of the Court. Here’s a quick summary:

The EU legislator adopted the so called "Copyright in the Information Society" Directive in the year 2001, which was supposed to "adapt legislation on copyright and related rights to reflect technological developments" and make sure all 27 copyright systems in the EU would become more or less uniform. The hope was that this would knock out some of the problems of very different systems, and create a better "single market" for European content.

Of course, no copyright law is complete without the important exceptions and limitations, like the fair-use doctrine in the US. However, in the case of the copyright directive, the exceptions and limitations were optional for Member States, thereby effectively eliminating any chance for a uniform (or "harmonized") copyright legislation in the EU and thus missing the point completely. Information activist Smari McCarthy explains the resulting chaos well:

The directive outlines 21 different optional exceptions or limitations to the right of reproduction of copyrighted works. Each country implementing the directive can choose to either include or leave out the exception clause. This gives us 2,097,152 different ways to implement the directive.

Now repeat this for the 27 Member States, and you see where this fragmentation exercise is going. Since only a few countries have also implemented this home-copying exception and there has not yet been a legal conflict about it, no jurisprudence exists on which the Dutch court can rely. The exception reads as follows:

Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations to the reproduction right provided for in Article 2 in the following cases: [...]

[...] in respect of reproductions on any medium made by a natural person for private use and for ends that are neither directly nor indirectly commercial, on condition that the rightholders receive fair compensation which takes account of the application or non-application of technological measures referred to in Article 6 to the work or subject matter concerned;

As you see, this text does not include any information on whether the fair compensation should be based on only foregone license fees (implying only copies from legal sources), or whether all copying on blank media carriers should be included.

When the collecting society proposed to start charging for copies from illegal sources in 2008, the manufacturers of blank media went to court hoping for a ruling that levies should only be payable for copies which are allowed under the copyright directive, thus only from legal sources (as this would decrease the levy significantly).

If you read through the lines of the courts’ analysis (and if you understand Dutch), I think you can see quite clearly that the judges tried their utmost to find a way to reconcile this copyright exception with the way people share and use works online. The Court states it would like to give rights holders a fair compensation via a levy system for losses from piracy, but it is unsure if EU law allows this. In its questions, the Court proposes some ways of establishing the mechanism for fair compensation and asks the European court whether this would be permissible under law. The questions asked by the Court are rather technical in nature, but here’s a quick summary of the main points (my interpretation, not a literal translation!):

1. Can the home-copying exception be interpreted so that the exception applies to all copies, regardless of whether the original was an authorized source? Or does the exception only apply to copies, which are derived from an original, which does not infringe copyright itself?
2a. Can the three-step test be used to expand the scope of the exception to include all copies?
2b. Is the Dutch construct – where downloading from any source is legal – in conflict with EU law? Would it help to mention that feasible technical tools to counter the making of private copies is not yet available, which may influence your decision regarding the three-step test? [...]

Dutch internet lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm is confused about the Courts’ deliberations:

I find it remarkable that Court contemplates a compensation paid for downloading copyright protected works from an illegal source, but that this does entail that the act of copying of this content is permissible under law. In my opinion, there are simply just two options: either it is permissible to make private copies from an illegal source and we pay the levy, or it is illegal and we don’t pay the levy. I do not agree with the current system either, though, where downloading from illegal sources is permissible but no levies are charged over this.

The court misses some important points here, indeed. First, if people are paying levies for unauthorized downloads, society will perceive their actions to be justified. Second, people mainly use phones, computers and portable devices for music and films. Hardly anyone uses blank media any more. Therefore, levies on CD’s, for example, miss the objective. Third, if a levy is imposed, we get into the sticky situation where actual losses from downloading unauthorized content needs to be determined, which is a seemingly impossible task. Finally, the Court may not have been informed about this, but there’s been a fierce quarrel on the amount charged for levies at the EU level, which has raged on for the past 15 to 20 years. Recently a mediator had to be hired to find a way out of this mess.

Apart from total confusion about the copyright system and how it should be applied to the internet, the Court may have also chosen to sidestep the current and hostile politicized debate in the Netherlands, which was met with opposition from many sectors of society. The Court has not given a conclusive ruling in this debate, so now the European Court may rule on whether the Dutch construction is legal. Expect an update in a few years time!

We recently wrote about the band Uniform Motion's problems with SACEM, the French collection society that seemed to be taking a lot of money from the band and working against the band's own interests. We've noted this repeatedly with collection societies around the globe. While they are often held out as being good because they (unlike the labels) have more of a mandate to actually get money to artists, we've seen time and time again that their actions often do more to harm the market and harm artists than to help them. And yet... thanks to the complicated nature of the music industry today, it seems that a lot of people have been pushing the idea of some sort of "collective licensing" regime as a solution to many of the problems the industry faces. This would be a mistake. We already see that just in how such systems end up, often locking in a particular way of doing business at the expense of innovation and larger, healthier markets for musicians.

Jonathan Band has put together a fantastic white paper, detailing "cautionary tales" related to excess of and problems caused by these Collective Rights Organizations (CROs) around the globe. It's quite eye opening. As he notes:

The episodes collected below reveal a long history of corruption, mismanagement, confiscation of funds, and lack of transparency that has deprived artists of the revenues they earned. At the same time, CROs have often aggressively sought fees to which they were not legally entitled or in a manner that discredited the copyright system. While properly regulated CROs in some circumstances enhance efficiency and advance the interests of rights holders and users, policymakers must be aware of this history as they consider the appropriateness of CROs as a possible solution to a specific copyright issue

The paper categorizes these problems into two categories. First up is a collection of stories that show how these organizations are quite frequently "Bad For Artists," covering things like corruption, mismanagement of funds, bad distribution of funds, lack of transparency, lack of choice, diverting funds & attention from small artists to large, etc. The second group is "Bad for Users," covering things like monopolistic control (and pricing), trying to ignore fair use, price fixing, and aggressively trying to get licenses for things they have no rights over. What's amazing about the report is just how many examples there are. This is not a case of a few rogue CROs acting badly. It's difficult to look through the paper and not see evidence of how these CROs are almost systemically designed to actually be very bad for both artists and the public (though perhaps helpful in keeping the status quo for gatekeepers).

Just doing a quick count, I see over 90 examples of actions taken by these collection societies that have either been bad for artists or for users. This is a serious problem, not a "solution" to fixing whatever inefficiencies there may be in the music industry today.

A recent scandal in the UK concerned the country's worst sporting disaster, when 96 football/soccer fans were crushed to death at a stadium in Hillsborough in 1989. Prime Minister David Cameron issued an official apology to the families of the victims for the fact that the safety measures at the ground were known to be inadequate, and that police and emergency services had tried to deflect the blame for the disaster onto fans.

One way the police did this was by falsifying statements made to them after the disaster, to remove negative comments about how they had handled the situation. But another way involved trying to suggest the deaths were caused in part by the drunken behavior of fans. One attempt to bolster this view apparently involved the use of the UK's main Police National Computer system. Here's what the Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (pdf) wrote about new evidence that had come to light:

2.5.112 The document indicates that a Police National Computer (PNC) check was conducted on all who died at Hillsborough for whom a blood alcohol reading above zero was recorded. It includes a handwritten list of the names, dates of birth, blood alcohol readings and home addresses of 51 of the deceased and provides screen-prints apparently drawn from the PNC. A summary of the results appears on the front page, establishing the number 'with cons' (convictions).

The idea was clearly to point to previous convictions as evidence that many of those who died were in some way responsible for the deaths of themselves and others because of drunkenness. As TJ McIntyre emphasizes in a blog post on this revelation:

This illustrates an important point that privacy campaigners have been making for a long time: centralised databases of this type can and will be abused, and the power to trawl databases for information on individuals -- in effect, to manufacture a case against them -- is a dangerous one. It's not hard to imagine how data retention records might be abused in a similar way in future.

Although the UK government's proposed "Snooper's Charter" foresees the creation of distributed databases of information about every citizen's online activities, it will be possible to carry out "filters" -- searches -- across them, unifying them into a single, virtual centralized database. As McIntyre notes, it's easy to imagine these hugely-detailed records being trawled for information and then used by the police to cover up their own blunders in the future, or to support a flimsy case against someone, in exactly the same way that those involved in the Hillsborough disaster tried to do with the existing PNC database. The latest revelations of database misuse are another compelling reason not to bring in the intrusive and ineffective approach that lies at the heart of the UK government's plans.

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In discussing Canada's C-11 copyright reform, we noted that while we were troubled by the "digital locks" provision that mirrors the DMCA's ridiculous anti-circumvention rules, there was actually plenty of good things in the law, that other countries should take note of. Not surprisingly, the entertainment industry feels differently. With Canada joining the TPP negotiations, entertainment industry lobbyists are seeing it as an opportunity to roll back all of the good parts of Canada's copyright law. Michael Geist has the story on how the IIPA -- an organization made up of a bunch of other copyright maximalist organizations, like the RIAA and MPAA -- have put in a filing that argues TPP should wipe out many of the reasonable parts of Canada's new copyright law:

The IIPA, which recently submitted its position on Canada's entry to the TPP as part of a U.S. regulatory process, takes particular issue with the role of Internet providers in enforcing Canadian copyright law. The Canadian "notice-and-notice" approach, which requires providers to forward thousands of infringement allegation notices to their subscribers, strikes a balance between effective enforcement and free speech, while preserving users' privacy.

The model has begun to attract global attention with countries such as Chile adopting it within its own domestic law. The IIPA sharply criticizes the approach, however, calling for dramatic reforms. It argues that Canadian law "fails to provide meaningful incentives for network service providers to co-operate with copyright owners to deal with copyright infringements that take place in the digital network environment."

Instead, the copyright lobby wants Canada to implement measures that would require Internet providers "to take action to prevent recidivists from repeatedly using their services to commit copyright infringement." The plain language demand: a termination system that would cut off Internet access for subscribers accused of infringement.

The IIPA also wants Canada to undo statutory damages changes from Bill C-11 that created a liability cap of $5,000 for non-commercial infringement. It claims that the non-commercial cap renders statutory damages "ineffective in achieving its goals of full compensation and deterrence in the online environment."

Even with the change, Canada remains one of the only developed countries with statutory damages that create the prospect of multi-million dollar damage awards for commercial infringement. The government created the non-commercial cap because it was uncomfortable with rules that could spur thousands of lawsuits against individuals.

This isn't surprising, of course. These groups have always used international trade agreements to force through IP laws that they can't get otherwise. In fact, what's slightly ironic is that the whole reason that Canada was pressured to put in place C-11 in the first place, was because all of these same trade groups kept insisting that Canada was not living up to its "international obligations" with regards to earlier copyright-related agreements. So now that Canada has updated its law with some good ideas and some bad... the industry goes running right back to international agreement negotiations to try to delete the good parts, which it doesn't like.

And, really, this is a big part of the problem with all the secrecy around the TPP. While the process in Canada to approve C-11 certainly had its issues, at least the bill itself was public and was open to significant discussion for quite some time. And if you look back to previous attempts to reform copyright law in Canada, the proposals had gone through significant public scrutiny. None of that will happen with the TPP, which is still being negotiated in secret, and will only be revealed as a done deal: take it or leave it. And none of it will involve real input from the public, who can give talks around the edges of the negotiation, but are never invited to comment on the actual proposals at all. Of course, the entertainment industry, being on various "advisory committees," do have full access to TPP negotiating docs.

Large-scale surveillance of private communications is becoming depressingly routine, even in supposedly enlightened democracies. In less freedom-loving locations, Internet cafes are viewed with particular suspicion, and subject to tight controls. But it looks like Cambodia is taking surveillance of Internet cafes in particular, and communications in general, to new heights/depths:

All telecommunications operators, sales outlets and distributors are obliged to register their business at local authorities. Meanwhile, all locations serving telephone services and Internet shall be equipped with closed circuit television camera and shall store footage data of users for at least 03 months. Telephone service corporation owners along public roads shall record National Identity Cards of any subscriber.

Alarmingly, the Global Voices story quoted above suggests that there's more to come:

The circular could be a model for a more comprehensive cyber legislation which the government plans to enact this year.

In the good old days, the West might have criticized such moves as disproportionate and oppressive. But as has happened with censorship, it long ago lost what moral authority it had in the area of surveillance. Probably the most we can hope to do is to stop our own governments following suit.

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We've been discussing how bad metrics can lead not only to bad conclusions, but also to a tendency to optimize for those bad metrics. That seems to apply to some of the recent news concerning "lagging" by the US in the OECD's education metrics. However, as Greg Ferenstein highlights in a piece over at TechCrunch, these stats may be meaningless. Not only has the US pretty much always lagged since these stats were first calculated, there's little indication that the stats being measured are representative of anything actually important.

Ferenstein's article is well worth reading, but it highlights a few key points. First of all, what the OECD is measuring might not be particularly meaningful:

However, the report implies that education translates into gainful market skills, an assumption not found in the research. For instance, while Chinese students, on average, have twice the number of instructional hours as Americans, both countries have identical scores on tests of scientific reasoning.

Second, whenever you're talking about aggregate numbers, a lot of important nuance can be lost in the mess. For example, there is evidence to suggest that while the US may not be good at educating everyone, it does seem to do quite a good job with taking its best students and preparing them for the world.

Most importantly, the innovators at the helm of an economy come from the top quarter of students. While the United States has a dismal track-record of inequality, we treat our brightest minds quite well. The “average test scores are mostly irrelevant as a measure of economic potential,” write Hal Salzman & Lindsay Lowell in the prestigious journal, Nature, “To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.”

The United States, they find, has among the highest percentage of top-performing students in the world.

Now, there are reasonable policy arguments to be made about this, and about what it means for everyone who is not included in those "brightest minds." You can reasonably argue that we should be seeking ways to move more of the "non-brightest minds" students into the "brightest minds" category. But we shouldn't take the aggregate data of ill-performing education metrics and from it assume that the entire system is broken. When you look for an across-the-board solution to metrics like that, you very often end up wiping out the good stuff (such as how we handle top performers) in the process -- potentially making the whole thing worse.

Ferenstein also points out a second point on the "economic impact" of our education system: historically, we've tended to fix that economically by attracting the best and brightest from other countries to come to the US for higher education and for work as well. This is something that we're doing less and less of these days, due to ridiculous and reactionary laws on immigration and civil liberties.

None of this is to suggest that we shouldn't figure out ways to improve our education system. It does remain pretty clear that good education is important to other aspects of the economy. But we need to be quite careful in understanding what we're really measuring and what it's tied to, rather than just accepting that if one report says we're "lagging," it must really be an actual problem.