A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is the persistent lack of transparency during the drafting of new laws or the negotiation of new treaties. Most governments, it seems, retain the view that they know best, that the electorate shouldn't worry about all those tiresome details being discussed in secret backroom negotiations, and that since the public will be able to see the result once it's all finished, what's the problem?

However, the world of government is beginning to change, largely under the impact of movements promoting openness of various kinds. In particular, efforts to promote open data and open government have major implications for transparency. The latest manifestation of that push for openness is OpeningParliament.org, "a forum intended to help connect the world's civic organizations engaged in monitoring, supporting and opening up their countries' parliaments and legislative institutions."

Here's more about its aims:

Parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) are working to create strong, open and accountable parliaments, through enhancing citizen participation in the legislative process and bringing parliaments closer to the people they represent. OpeningParliament.org provides a forum for international collaboration on efforts to improve access to parliamentary information and share experiences and good practices among PMOs. It also serves as the home of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, a set of shared principles on the openness, transparency and accessibility of parliaments being developed by the international PMO community.

The Declaration is quite long and wide ranging. Here's its stated purpose:

The Declaration on Parliamentary Openness is a call to national parliaments, and sub-national and transnational legislative bodies, by civil society parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) for an increased commitment to openness and to citizen engagement in parliamentary work.

The Declaration includes a number of sections dealing explicitly with transparency and engagement:

2. Advancing a Culture of Openness through Legislation

Parliament has a duty to enact legislation, as well as internal rules of procedure and codes of conduct, that foster an enabling environment guaranteeing the public's right to government and parliamentary information, promoting a culture of open government, providing for transparency of political finance, safeguards freedoms of expression and assembly, and ensuring engagement by civil society and citizens in the legislative process.

5. Engaging Citizens and Civil Society

Parliament has a duty to actively engage citizens and civil society, without discrimination, in parliamentary processes and decision-making in order to effectively represent citizen interests and to give effect to the right of citizens to petition their government.

18. Engaging Citizens on Draft Legislation

Draft legislation shall be made public and published upon its introduction. Recognizing the need for citizens to be fully informed about and provide input into items under consideration, parliament shall seek to provide public access to preparatory analysis and background information to encourage broad understanding of policy discussions about the proposed legislation.

44. Facilitating Two-Way Communication

Parliament shall endeavor to use interactive technology tools to foster the ability of citizens to provide meaningful input on legislation and parliamentary activity and to facilitate communication with members or parliamentary staff.

These are obviously great aspirations that would go some way to addressing the problems around transparency and engagement that are only too common today, but a legitimate question must be: so what? It's not as if governments are lining up to endorse these principles of parliamentary openness.

That may be true, but openness in the form of open source, open data, open standards and open government are certainly making themselves felt to varying degrees in countries around the world. What the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness makes explicit is how these are part of a larger move towards transparency and citizen engagement. At the very least, it's yet another set of voices calling for much more of both. One day, governments might even listen.

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Fact: if you have a site with any amount of traffic and open comment threads, you're going to draw trolls. There's no method that's been proven to completely rid your site of trolls, though not for a lack of trying. (This one is particularly mischevious.) Various sites have tried anything from aggressive moderation to requiring Facebook logins... all to no avail. (Although the latter method has proven that certain people are more than willing to troll without the protection of anonymity.)

A new anti-troll tool from a rather unlikely source has just been unveiled, one that hopes to combine the "fun" of solving captchas with something akin to a "blush response:"

A human rights group is introducing a new take on CAPTCHAs, those little boxes that make you type in a word to prove you are human before you can comment or register for a site. Their version doesn’t just present a scrambled word to be deciphered, but instead forces a person to choose the right word to unscramble based on the proper emotional response to a human rights violation.

Civil Rights Defenders, the Swedish-based group that developed the tool, hopes the Civil Rights Captcha will help sites block spiders and bots, while letting humans in — and hopefully educating the humans at the same time...

But perhaps forcing a troll to repeatedly choose an empathetic response will, over time, soothe the ravages of comment sections around the net. Okay, that might also be asking too much, but at the very least spreading information about human rights abuses certainly can’t hurt, even if the jerks of the internet (see, for example, YouTube comments) remain beyond help.

That's right. It's Voight-Kampff for comment threads. Instead of trying to parse a set of badly scanned words and Street View cam house numbers, Civil Rights CAPTCHA instead asks you how you feel about certain horrific situations, hoping that you'll make the "right" decision before spewing your vitriol and ignorance into the now-unlocked comment box.

While its heart is certainly in the right place, the implementation still requires captchas, something most users would rather not encounter every time they make a comment. (Yes, I know. But sometimes, decent , non-trolling humans don't want to "create an account" or "enter an email address" in order to participate.) On top of that is the fact that each captcha has only one "right" answer, making the system more than a little heavy-handed in its moralizing. This assumes that your regular, non-troll commenters are going to be fine with being preached at while jumping through hoops. It also assumes that all dedicated trolls are morons incapable of deducing the (obviously) "right" reaction to each situation presented.

This particular captcha service might prove useful in limited situations, like being pre-loaded with questions related to a particular cause or event being discussed/promoted at the website deploying it. It also might prove popular with the sort of people who are willing to annoy a certain percentage of their community in order to "raise awareness." It will become a form of penance for those involved, much like forwarding "concerned" emails and switching Facebook statuses to show support. You know, the sort of thing that will morph into "I solved Captchas for world peace. What will YOU do?" t-shirts popping up on Cafepress.

I can't see this solving the troll problem, but I can see it annoying most of a user base, leaving the site deploying it with a smaller audience consisting of people who like being moralized at frequently. Like any other captcha, the spambots and trolls will find a way around it, with the only ones affected being decent human beings, which would seem to be the sort of "demographic" you'd want to annoy less. Pushing them through a "think our way or hit the road" filtering system doesn't make trolls any less prevalent or make non-decent human beings any more "decent."

Water is an amazing substance. It's sometimes called the universal solvent. It's a requirement for all known forms of life. It's one of the rare chemical compounds that is less dense when it's frozen at ambient conditions. Water is cool, and ice is even cooler. So here are just a few links related to visually stunning ice formations.

• Ice flowers are a delicate formation of ice crystals made under windless conditions when supersaturated water vapor above sea ice condenses into dendritic ice crystals. Ice flowers are a natural phenomenon -- typically seen early in the morning. [url]
• An art project called 'Pi in the Sky' printed the first thousand digits of pi using 5 'skytyping' planes at about 10,000 feet in the air -- probably not quite high enough to form a cloud of ice crystals, but it was still cool looking. Cirrus clouds which are mostly ice crystals form at slightly higher altitudes (around 18,000 feet or higher), but skywriting-skytyping planes actually spray paraffin oil to form their messages. [url]
• The "icicle of death" (also known as a "brinicle") is made of freezing water that occurs as cold, dense salt water sinks through less salty sea water. The frozen brine can kill sea urchins and starfish when it touches them on the sea floor. [url]

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

Tomorrow is the latest version of the absolutely awesome SF MusicTech Summit, which happens twice a year, and which I rarely miss. It's always a great place to meet lots of people involved in both music and technology and to have some really great conversations. If you've never been, it's absolutely worth checking out. I asked organizer Brian Zisk about the themes for the event, and he noted that it's really about "working together to move things forward productively." This is great to hear, because that's what's really needed at this point. We've gone through about a decade and a half of finger pointing, but have not nearly had enough effort put into actually focusing on helping each other.

Along those lines, I'll be doing a panel at 9:25am tomorrow morning, with one of my favorite musicians, Zoe Keating and Mike McGeary from Engine, to talk about how artists and entrepreneurs can, are and should be working together to help each other. This session will actually be a brief "preview" into a bigger effort that we're working on. The following day, Wednesday, we're hosting a whole bunch of artists (not just music, but film, books, graphic artists and more) and entrepreneurs, for a daylong productive "working group," to try to help everyone understand each other -- the challenges we all face and the opportunities we all see -- and to figure out if there are specific, actionable things that we can all do to help each other. We haven't set up this working group as a "conference." There are no talking heads. There won't be any panels. There's a very loose agenda. But the focus is on having an open discussion and finding common ground -- recognizing that entrepreneurs and artists are often more alike than different. In many ways, we're all running our own businesses -- and creating something new and wonderful.

At the same time, obviously, there are some very real differences between being an artist and an entrepreneur -- and one issue that both sides often run into is a failure to fully understand those differences. So part of the goal of the one day event will be to foster better understanding of those issues, but with a focus on figuring out how we can actually get something done to help each other, rather than just talking about it all. We'll give a glimpse into that discussion tomorrow, and then will spend most of Wednesday working through these issues with a wide range of artists and entrepreneurs. We'll then be taking what we learn from the working group and creating a paper out of it, that we'll (of course) release to the world. It should be an exciting week!

Oh... and don't forget, if you're in town, come by our Happy Hour on Wednesday evening!

A few weeks ago, we wrote about how the octogenarian woman in Spain, who tried (and... failed...) to "restore" a 19th-century fresco, and then tried to claim copyright on her work and demanded a cut of the church's collection box, since the fresco was suddenly drawing many new visitors. Perhaps this "but I improved it" defense of defacing artwork is becoming more common. Apparently, a prankster, who claims to be pushing his own art movement, defaced a multi-million dollar Mark Rothko painting hanging at the Tate Modern gallery... and when tracked down by a reporter from The Guardian, defended his actions by claiming he had improved the value of the painting:

"I believe that if someone restores the [Rothko] piece and removes my signature the value of the piece would be lower but after a few years the value will go higher because of what I did," he said, comparing himself to Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who shocked the art establishment when he signed a urinal and put it on display in 1917.

"I was expecting that the security at Tate Modern would take me straight away, because I was there and I signed the picture in front of a lot of people. There is video and cameras and everything, so I was shocked."

"I didn't destroy the picture. I did not steal anything. There was a lot of stuff like this before. Marcel Duchamp signed things that were not made by him, or even Damien Hirst."

He basically signed his name to the photo and added "a potential piece of yellowism" which appears to be some sort of inane attempt at creating an art movement that nobody knows about. We are, of course, big fans of remix culture and the ability to build on the works of others -- but part of the reason why we like such things is that it can be done without doing anything to the original. Flat out defacing another's work is not a remix or a mashup. It's just vandalism.

We've already written about the NY Times' big article on our disastrous patent system, but there was one line in the article that deserves to be called out with a separate post. As almost an aside, the article notes how much Google and Apple are spending on patent related issues these days:

Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.

That seems like a pretty big problem, and one we should all be concerned about. Now, both Apple and Google are cash rich companies, so they can spend a lot on patent issues, but all of that is money that isn't going into actual innovation or developing new products. And, for smaller companies, it's much worse -- since basically all of them don't have the kind of cash reserves we're talking about with Google and Apple. If even these big companies are spending more on patents than on R&D, can't we agree that the system is completely broken?

Hey, it's time for some bogus stat debunking, thanks to Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica, showing that, once again, "RIAA math" is something more closely aligned with stuff we made up that people might actually believe.

There have been a variety of similar stats being thrown around these days in debates around what's happening in the music industry from defenders of the old way of doing things, arguing that there's been a massive decline in the number of musicians out there. The stat pops up in different forms, but keeps coming back up. We first saw a version of it back in 2010 when the RIAA put up a blog post claiming that "illegal downloading = fewer musicians." While we appreciate them finally realizing that unauthorized downloading isn't "theft," the chart claims to have posted data from the Bureau of Labor statistics, showing a correlation between the number of "musicians and artists" and the decline in recorded music: Even leaving aside the "correlation =/= causation" argument that could be made, the chart itself plays with numbers a bit. Note that the scales are different, meaning that the data was "fitted" to make it look like a direct correlation when that's not actually the case. RIAA math, as per usual, tends to be all about lies.

But, that chart seems to have taken on a life of its own in bizarre and ridiculous ways. Back in April, class warrior Timberg, claimed that BLS data showed a 45% decline of people employed in "musical groups and artists" from 2002 to 2011. That number has become a key touchstone for the rabid defenders of the old way. Not a week goes by without someone claiming something like it in our comments -- usually even messing up what was said. For example, that comment says that the 45% represented a decline in wages -- which is not actually what any of the numbers have shown.

In June, the RIAA's Cary Sherman gave a talk at PDF, in which he cited BLS data claiming a decline in artists of 41% from 1999 to 2011. That number was then picked up by Paul Resnikoff who posted the RIAA's updated version of the graphic and, again, insisted that BLS data says there are 41% "fewer paid musicians" since 1999. Once again, that's not actually what the chart says. It's not about "paid musicians." It's about how many people claim to be "musicians or artists on a full time basis." There are plenty of "paid musicians" who aren't full time.

Either way... Matthew Lasar, over at Ars Technica digs into the numbers to find that the RIAA's and others' claims... are completely bogus. First off, it appears that they failed the "how to calculate percentage change" test. Lasar also finds that the actual change based on the source data appears to be maybe a decline of a little over 8%. As he notes "8.4 percent, I'm sure most readers will agree, is a long way from 41 percent."

When confronted about this, first the RIAA admitted to playing some games with the numbers, not by using more stable yearly data, like Lasar did, but rather by using monthly data... and by selectively choosing which months to use.

"As far as the 41%, from that data set," came Friedlander's reply, "if you look at any of a variety of months between late 1999 and 2011 and 2012 (such as July '99 vs Aug '11) you can see declines around the 41% level (different months yield different figures, but some are even higher than 41%)."

In other words, it fluctuates pretty drastically. Anyone who wanted to reasonably show a change, would at the very least choose the same month in different years -- since there is likely to be significant seasonal fluctuation in musician employment (for example, July is a big month for weddings, which might mean more musicians who play weddings are "full time" musicians for July). As Lasar notes, this calls into serious question why the RIAA and others are making categorical statements that just don't appear to be supported by the data. Furthermore, even if the RIAA's bogus claim of 41% is based on monthly data... that chart that it's been spreading around shows yearly data, but implies, incorrectly, that it shows a 41% decline:

The problem with this response was that Sherman's categorical statement that we've seen a 41 percent drop in the number of musicians and artists since 1999 wasn't based on a monthly chart. It was based on the yearly table that he showed the Personal Democracy conference.

Finally, Lasar notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is actually pretty optimistic for employment among musicians to grow at about 10% over the next decade:

The number of people attending musical performances, such as orchestra, opera, and rock concerts, is expected to increase from 2010 to 2020. As a result, more musicians and singers will be needed to play at these performances.

There will be additional demand for musicians to serve as session musicians and backup artists for recordings and to go on tour. Singers will be needed to sing backup and to make recordings for commercials, films, and television.

That said, I don't think a slight and temporary decline in full time musicians should be all that surprising. It's true that labels funded a bunch of musicians for many years -- but often for short periods of time and with very questionable accounting practices. The problem, of course, is that many musicians came to believe, incorrectly, that the major labels were the only way to make money in music, and so they did little to cultivate new business models. These days, however, that's happening more and more, but we don't have enough experience for people to know what really works and what doesn't. So it's an era of experimentation -- and that means that an awful lot more musicians are making some money, whereas before they made none. That's good for all of those musicians -- and might (in fact) mean that more money overall is going to musicians -- it's just more spread out. But we haven't yet reached the point where things have developed enough to match the number of full time musicians, though as people become more comfortable with these new models, that seems almost certain to happen.

Either way, it looks like RIAA math has once again been shown to be a complete fabrication, relied on by people who want to continue to support the ridiculous story that artists need labels to make money. It's sad that so many people cling to an obviously false tale, but it's good to see the numbers debunked. Hopefully we can now move on from that silly narrative and focus on new business models that do help artists get paid -- rather than ones that just help the RIAA divert money from artists.

Well, this is nice to see. Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr at the NY Times have a nice long piece highlighting just how broken the patent system is today. It kicks off with an anecdote of the type of story we hear about all the time: where a startup innovator gets threatened by a patent holder (in this case, not a troll, but a larger company), and the lawsuit effectively kills the startup. Even though it actually won in court, after spending an astounding $3 million fighting the lawsuit, the company was basically out of money... and was forced to sell itself to the company who had sued it, knowing that it still faced another five patent lawsuits. That's not a unique story. The company who sued, Nuance, defended its actions in the articles with this line of pure crap:

“Our responsibility is to follow the law,” said Lee Patch, a vice president at Nuance. “That’s what we do. It’s not our fault if some people don’t like the system.”

No. "Following the law" does not include shaking down competitors in your space, taking them to the brink of bankruptcy and then getting them to sell to you at firesale prices.

Perhaps more interesting in the article is the talk about Apple's awakening on how powerful patents could be used as a weapon against others, all stemming from its legal fight with Creative Technologies over a ridiculously broad patent for a digital music player. Rather than fight Creative, Apple just paid the company $100 million to go away. At the time, we wrote about how unfortunate it was that the company who succeeded in the market basically had to pay off the company who couldn't compete. But what we didn't realize was that it also turned Apple into a vociferous patent-hungry beast. The NY Times report notes that, right after this, Steve Jobs made it clear to his staff that Apple now needed to "patent everything."

Soon, Apple’s engineers were asked to participate in monthly “invention disclosure sessions.” One day, a group of software engineers met with three patent lawyers, according to a former Apple patent lawyer who was at the meeting.

The first engineer discussed a piece of software that studied users’ preferences as they browsed the Web.

“That’s a patent,” a lawyer said, scribbling notes.

Another engineer described a slight modification to a popular application.

“That’s a patent,” the lawyer said.

Another engineer mentioned that his team had streamlined some software.

“That’s another one,” the lawyer said.

[....] The disclosure session had yielded more than a dozen potential patents when an engineer, an Apple veteran, spoke up. “I would like to decline to participate,” he said, according to the lawyer who was at the meeting. The engineer explained that he didn’t believe companies should be allowed to own basic software concepts.

Unfortunately, very few companies seem willing to take a stand on this, even as many, many engineers feel the way that last engineer feels. I spend a lot of time with engineers in Silicon Valley, and I have trouble thinking of any who think the patent system is a good thing.

Apple's former General Counsel, Nancy Heinen, has a good quote in the article highlighting part of the problem:

"Think of the billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet... When patent lawyers become rock stars, it’s a bad sign for where an industry is heading,."

It's a very bad sign, but there seems to be little appetite by anyone to do anything to fix the wider problem. And despite Apple's foray into being a massive patent warrior, attacking tons of other companies, it still hasn't occurred to many people just how broken the system remains. The NY Times piece spends some time looking at Patent 8,086,604, an Apple patent issued last year, which many refer to as the Siri patent, as it covers a "universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system." Basically, a way to search multiple databases at once. As a separate companion piece to the full article highlights, that patent was rejected 8 times before the examiner was "worn down" and approved it, despite no meaningful changes in the language. See all those red dots? Those are times the patent got rejected. See the green dot? That's when it got approved. The black dot that follows right after the green dot? That's when Apple started suing with it. The NY Times even gets patent examiners to admit that their process is more or less random, quoting one admitting that he doesn't really have enough time to "get it right every time" as well as a former patent examiner who notes:

"If you give the same application to 10 different examiners, you'll get 10 different results..."

That's not a functioning system. It's the opposite. It's a lottery... where the "winners" get to take billions of dollars away from actual innovation. It's becoming a national disgrace.

Ah, bogus DMCA notices that you just can't make up. TorrentFreak has a good article highlighting a completely bogus DMCA notice from Microsoft (sent by one of its partners on its behalf) that tries to take a bunch of legitimate news sites out of Google's index, on the mistaken claim that they violated Windows 8 copyrights. But, even more ridiculous is an aside mentioned in the article, that some other DMCA notices appear to target Bing, Microsoft's own search engine. Indeed, they're not that hard to find. If you look up DMCA notices asking Google to remove links to Bing, Microsoft shows up quite a bit: If you dig down, you can find out the specifics, such as this DMCA notice sent on May 23 of this year, sent by Marketly on behalf of Microsoft, supposedly to stop the infringement of Office 2010. It lists out 997 URLs that it wants Google to take out of its search results, including a link to a Bing search. Given that Microsoft owns Bing... you'd think it would remove that search first. What's even more amusing is that if you go to the link in question on Bing... it's still there.

Yes, this is yet another silly move by an automated system, but it once again highlights some of the ridiculousness involved in DMCA takedowns for search results.

It's no secret that the Iranian government has a bit of an uncomfortable relationship with the internet. First of all, it's trying to build its own internet, at which point it supposedly would like to block out that "other" internet completely. It's also pretty aggressive in censoring various sites it doesn't like. Over the past few days, it's apparently gone a step further. While there were plenty of reports about it blocking YouTube, someone who prefers to remain anonymous sent over this story, saying that Iran's Filtering Committee (IFC) has started blocking all kinds of audio-visual files, based on filetype:

Then, on October 4, 2012, the IFC began preventing files hosted on servers outside Iran from entering the country by blocking specific file extensions. At the time of writing, this policy applies to all MP3, MP4, AVI and SWF files. This kind of filtering was used after the controversial presidential elections of 2009, amidst harsh crackdowns on freedom of information, and coincides with Iran's current economic crisis and the ensuing protests.

Apparently, those blocks do not apply to those files hosted within the country -- just those from foreign sites. Still, that's a pretty extreme move: blocking all of those files takes away a significant part of the audio-visual part of the web. The article highlights a number of Iranians complaining on Twitter about how these blocks are having a severe negative impact on what they do. Still, it's yet another warning for what happens when a government can aggressively filter the internet in extreme ways.

That didn't take long. Google's move into the fiber business has already irritated the incumbents (Time Warner Cable and AT&T). Faced with a faster, cheaper rival, the two companies (at this point, mainly Time Warner) are complaining that the incentives provided to Google are "unfair."

In order to create the infrastructure for the cable and gigabit internet service, Google was given everything from free fiber, government employees, buildings, and discounted services; an agreement that a Time Warner Cable spokesman feels puts them "at a competitive advantage compared with not just us but also the other competitors in the field."

Time Warner's spokesman seems to misunderstand what the word "incentive" means. When cities attempt to lure businesses they want, they offer concessions, grants, tax breaks, etc. It's assumed that the incumbent businesses have grabbed substantial marketshare and, therefore, don't need to be given incentives to do anything more than stay. If Time Warner is upset that its new competition was given this in exchange for selecting Kansas City, it can't blame anyone else for its failure to offer better services. It certainly was in the position to do so, but it never occurred to the incumbent(s) to make any great leaps in service and speed until it was "unfairly" forced to do so.

This complaining about being forced to offer a competitive service is nauseating enough. But this sentence tops it:

He continued by stating, "We're happy to compete with Google, but we'd just like an even playing field."

No, TWC. That is absolutely the last thing you want. TWC has never been interested in "level playing fields" or "competition." In fact, it loathes competition (and innovation) so much that it's currently the target of an anti-trust investigation for its attempts to neutralize Netflix and Hulu by obtaining programming at lower prices than online providers are charged (among other things).

Hell, TWC has a long and storied history of doing whatever possible to block a level playing field even to the point of writing legislation to keep out competitors.

Time Warner is only interested in a "level playing field" if it means that everyone else has to come down to its level, rather than improving or innovating. In fact, TWC is so worried about Google's offerings actually leveling the playing field and providing real competition that it's offering rewards to city employees for information on Google's fiber rollout.

Time Warner has set up a phone hotline and an email address that will award three gift cards a week for employees that "[share] tips, rumors, and rumblings about Google Construction or launch activity..."

Still, TWC wants its undeserved place on the "gravy train," and has reached a "parity agreement" with Kansas City, MO.

In exchange for the incentives, the cities are requesting that the companies improve their community services to be on par with Google's efforts, which have resulted in free internet connections in hundreds of locations chosen by the government... The WSJ cites an unnamed source that claims Time Warner Cable has improved its service's speed and performance in the area in return for discounts that mirror Google's, as well as a partial refund of city fees that the company paid earlier this year.

"Improved speed and performance," eh? One wonders (loudly and angrily) what the hell was keeping TWC from improving speed and performance over the last several years? Perhaps it was the lack of a serious competitor and one of those famous "level" playing fields that tilts at a 45-degree tilt toward the incumbent provider. As it stands now, Google's fastest offering (up to 1 Gbps) is 950 Mbps faster than TWC's fastest offering.

Google's entrance into the broadband market should be a wake-up call for providers all over the US. Once this service is available, they'll no longer be able to get away with minimal, incremental improvements and never ending price increases. As soon as consumers have a chance to switch, they will, especially when the old school clings to things like binding arbitration agreements (a bad company's best friend) and metered broadband, rather than meeting customer expectations or improving infrastructure. 

We just recently wrote about how the UN's ITU (International Telecommunications Union) has been seeking to massively expand its mandate to take over international governance issues related to the internet, based on no real mandate other than one of its own making. Because of this, there are reasonable fears that it will end up creating dangerous rules that favor the incumbent telcos (often closely associated with certain governments) over what's actually best for the internet. Part of that analysis suggested that this was about the ITU trying to remain relevant in any way it could. After all, the core reason for the ITU existing for more than a century and a half was to deal with how different telcos would do the kinds of things that people no longer rely on telcos for. Because of that, they've basically been pretending that they should be involved in all sorts of unrelated things.

For example, plenty of the recent discussions coming out of the ITU have been focused on internet security issues. And you could argue that there are some significant security concerns that need attention. But is the ITU the proper body for this? Almost certainly not. Anthony Rutkowski has written up a history of the ITU's relationship to security noting that, at best, the ITU has tended to completely ignore security issues, and at worst, "treated security as a kind of vague requirement." The conclusion is pretty clear. The ITU isn't the proper body to be dealing with security at all. It has neither the mandate nor the necessary expertise.

So why is this ITU security history relevant today? Because its Secretary-General's new draft of an unneeded and worthless treaty instrument called the International Telecommunication Regulations mentions the word "security" no less than 36 times. Although the term "security" is never defined, the draft leaves the impression that the ITU is competent to deal with the subject of network security.

The reality today is that almost all work relating to network security occurs in myriad other public-private global bodies where it is pursued on a significant scale among expert communities. It is that array of work in other venues that is used worldwide. What purports to occur in the ITU is basically irrelevant and involves a relative handful of people who appear at meetings or workshops in ITU-T, ITU-D, or the General Secretariat for the purposes of maintaining largely website-based fictions to appear responsive to some political mandate of its conferences or leadership. Although a few knowledgeable and dedicated individuals participate in its work, the ITU as an institution has not possessed in modern history, and today does not possess the competence to deal with the subject matter of network security; and treaty mandates will not alter that reality.

Any treaty-based reliance on the ITU's network security competency would be perilous for the global infrastructure and irresponsible for nation States to recognize. I should know — I was the designated leader of the ITU-T cybersecurity work for the past four years who had to deal with these realities.

In other words, yet another overreach by the ITU to take on something it is not qualified to handle, and which will almost certainly result in a bad situation, driven by political interests, rather than actual security issues.

I've been pretty excited about the fact that my alma mater, Cornell, won the competition last year to open a massive NYC-based tech campus -- with a key focus on actually spinning innovation out into the market. I'd been able to spend some time with the folks who put together Cornell's bid, and the plan is really, really ambitious in a good way for innovation in the region. However, I'm a bit troubled by the recent news -- announced with great fanfare -- that the Commerce Department is setting up its own "mini-patent office" directly on the campus. While various politicians celebrated the announcement, statements like the following one from Senator Chuck Schumer make me cringe:

“Creating a direct link between the patent office and inventors is a simple and virtually cost free way to reduce red tape, and help our best and brightest produce the next iPhone or microchip. When all is said and done, New York City will have the only college in the nation where you can get advice on patenting your latest invention between grabbing a sandwich at the dining hall and picking up your laundry, all without leaving campus.”

The problem, of course, is that this perpetuates the myth that patents correlate to actual innovation or bringing products to market. There is little to no evidence to support that -- but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that patents often get in the way of innovation. Embedding a patent office directly on the campus may skew the efforts there to focus on patents over alternatives. We've discussed how some businesses are focusing on open hardware and argue that avoiding patents is a better strategy. But somehow, I doubt the mini-Patent Office on the campus is going to talk about that when a student swings by.

The whole thing just reinforces the myth of how patents are a key part of innovation, when the research shows the exact opposite.

Cornell's President, David Skorton, claims that this will help "the dialogue":

“A key part of Cornell Tech's mission is to encourage innovation and economic development by helping to facilitate all aspects of university, industry, and government collaboration,” said Cornell President David J. Skorton. “This partnership with the Department of Commerce will not only bring a new resource to the campus and to New York's tech entrepreneurs, it will also help create a new dialogue about intellectual property in the information age to help improve the innovation process in the United States.”

But, how is that dialogue created when you have an embedded person with one viewpoint, but not competing viewpoints?

Even worse, the press release announcing all of this cites the silly study the Commerce Department put out that showed correlation between jobs and very loosely defined "IP-intensive industries" to support the argument that this mini-patent office will somehow create jobs. Of course, that report was laughable. Its definition of "IP intensive" was so broad, that the biggest impact IP had on jobs was... in grocery stores. Also, the key to its argument that patents are good was that Steve Jobs had patents and made some cool products, so patents are clearly a good thing. But even at its worst, the report made clear that it was taking no position on the policy questions and shouldn't be used for such purposes... Yet here it is, in this press release, as if it's gospel that more patents will mean more jobs:

According to a recent Commerce Department report, intellectual property-intensive industries supported 40 million jobs in 2010, and contributed $5.06 trillion to the U.S. economy. By providing IP protection and commercialization tools for entrepreneurs, this partnership will drive additional job growth and serve as a forum for exploring ways to balance the free flow of information with the protection of IP in a digital era.

It's a real shame that my own alma mater -- whose economics professors helped shape my understanding of why and how patents could be so dangerous -- seems to be perpetuating these kinds of myths.

If you think copyright is bad in regions like the US or Europe, this post from Intellectual Property Watch points out that things could be much worse:

In Argentina, there’s no such thing as a "fair use" judicial doctrine. Moreover, Argentina is one of those few countries in the world where Domaine Public Payant is still in force -- which means to use or reuse works that have already fallen into the public domain one has to pay a "tax" that goes to a black hole known as then National Art’s Fund (Fondo Nacional de las Artes).

Understandably, then, people are trying to fix this, with varying success. For example, Argentina's Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation (MINCYT) is hoping to move publicly-funded research centers and universities to an open access model:

The bill mandates publicly-funded research projects, papers, theses, etc. to be deposited in the to-be-created Digital Repositories within 6 months of creation or publication (in a private journal) and research data within 5 years of recollection. The Digital Repositories will be managed by the MINCYT and it will guarantee open, free and universal access to users from a single website.

That's almost certain to happen: the Chamber of Deputies has approved the bill, and only the Argentine Senate needs to do the same. But another bill has been less fortunate, even though its aims are extremely modest:

[to] allow public libraries, museums and archives to loan, copy and communicate to the public (within the premises) their lawfully acquired works freely and without requiring permission from the copyright owner, in accordance with and limited to their public interest goals.

Sadly, this looks less likely to come to fruition thanks to opposition from collecting societies, who seem to think they have a right to payments even from libraries trying to do their job by helping the public gain access to information. Argentina's archaic copyright system may be very different, but its collecting societies are clearly no different from those in other countries.

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