In the spring of 2011, Amazon launched its cloud music streaming player to much fanfare, along with questions about its legal status. Amazon chose not to get licenses from the labels, saying (accurately) that since the service was just to allow individuals to upload and stream their own MP3s, there was no need to get licenses. While the labels indicated they disagreed with this assessment, none seemed willing to take on the legal fight against Amazon (or Google who initially made a similar choice). After both Amazon and Google launched their cloud offerings, Apple got attention for not doing a cloud player, but rather a matching and syncing system.

Now, Amazon has apparently decided that a similar matching system makes more sense... and has done licensing deals with the four major labels and a bunch of indies. The end result is that the streaming player is changing significantly. The free service is greatly limited, and they now want $25/year for more. If you pay, then it'll now match as many songs as it can on your hard drive with its own database, and automatically populate your account (similar to Apple's system). Thus, users no longer need to upload all their tracks.

Basically, Amazon bought a license to allow the matching, and then switched its whole service around to enable that (and to charge people). It'll be interesting to see how well this works. $25 isn't much at all, but in the year+ since Amazon's streaming player launched, I honestly can't remember ever hearing anyone mention using it. I'm sure there are some out there, but it never seemed that successful, so it may be a challenge to get people to pay the $25. Personally, I played around with Amazon's player a few times, but the storage limit as compared to Google's similar offering meant that I used Google instead. These days I tend to bounce back and forth between Spotify and Google Music, and can't think of a reason to use Amazon's service instead -- even with the matching.

You may recall that Verizon Wireless bought the famed C-block of 700 MHz spectrum at auction back in 2008, which had an openness requirement. At the time, people wondered if Verizon Wireless would actually live up to the openness requirements, with some worrying that there were significant loopholes. In fact, ever since then, people have raised questions about whether Verizon Wireless was even paying the most basic lip service to those open requirements.

The FCC has now given Verizon Wireless a slap on the wrist, for blocking various tethering apps from the Android Market for Android-based Verizon Wireless phones. The company has agreed to pay $1.25 million and to no longer block those apps. Of course, as Karl Bode has noted, this probably isn't that big a deal to Verizon Wireless, since it had already been moving away from blocking such apps as it moved to its new "shared data plans." Bode wonders if this settlement may have been more for show as it gears up to approve an anti-competitive plan that Verizon is seeking to drive its DSL users to competing cable platforms:

In other words, the FCC took action and finally enforced 2008 rules when they knew Verizon was already changing their ways -- without FCC involvement. Meanwhile, the FCC is rumored to be ready to sign off on Verizon's marketing relationship with the cable industry, despite the serious anti-competitive and coverage issues that deal raises. This tethering ruling could be a way to pretend to appear "pro consumery" before approving the Verizon cable deal.

I'm not sure the FCC is going that far, but perhaps that's part of the problem. The FCC never seems to want to go very far at all, always seeking to not offend anyone, with the end result being that the telcos almost always get their way in the long run.

Just in case you haven't gotten enough information on the Olympics, there are a ton of stories digging up random trivia about the games. (Or maybe you think everyone should be more interested in a robot on Mars.) But if you're looking for some bits of Olympic trivia, here are just a few examples.

• The oldest athlete at the 2012 Olympics is Hiroshi Hoketsu at age 71. He competes as an equestrian rider, but isn't the oldest Olympian ever. Oscar Swahn from Sweden won a medal in shooting at the 1920 games at the age of 72. [url]
• The shuttlecocks in Badminton can reach speeds of over 300 miles per hour. Strangely, the best shuttlecocks are made from goose feathers -- plucked only from the left wing of the bird, for no particular good reason. [url]
• Guor Marial competes in the Olympics ... as an independent (representing no country). Wouldn't it be interesting if all the athletes were given the option to compete without representing a nation? Marial's unique status comes from being a South Sudan native, but not wanting to represent the nation that killed his family. [url]

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

If my time at Techdirt has taught me anything, it's that anti-piracy groups will pull more numbers out of their collective behinds than The Count from Sesame Street. It's a strange tactic, if only because once they are caught cow-pooping their own figures it seems to indicate that the problem is not nearly what they're claiming and therefore their response and policy recommendations no longer worth considering. Unfortunately, many members of the esteemed 4th Branch are inclined to simply parrot these fudged stats and report them as news.

Fortunately, The Economist is willing to call out the BS the BSA put out about the scary uber-dangers of cloud piracy (ooooooooh!).

Let's start with the BSA claims, shall we? Did you realize that 30% of people in wealthy nations and 45% of people in less-wealthy nations "have a liklihood of sharing log-in credentials for paid [cloud] services?" That's the conclusion drawn by the BSA's latest study. And if that seems like a lofty number to you, it may be because it's utter bullshit.

The Economist begins by correcting the BSA's pretend numbers:

"The percentages come from a question in which people were asked if they had ever shared their log-in details for paid services. Some 15% of people in rich countries and 34% in poor countries said they had for personal use. For business use, it was 30% and 45% respectively...Moreover the respondents were only those who had paid for cloud services, which was a fraction of users. Cloud services are generally based on a “freemium” model, whereby basic use costs nothing and a premium version is paid for. According to the BSA's own data, only half of computer users tap cloud services, of which only one-third use it for business, of which two-thirds pay. Of the small subset that remain, the minority share log-ins. This changes things considerably. If the BSA figures were adjusted for all this, the potential piracy figures could be as low as between 2% and 6% of users—as much as 20 times less than the group claims. (The BSA's data is online here.)"

In other words, through the magic of pretending like only a small subset of data is the entire data, the BSA has magically turned the number two into the number thirty. This would be laudable if those numbers were fish, the readers were hungry, and the BSA was trying to claim it had perfected what I lovingly refer to as "Jesus' Fish Fry Miracle", but they aren't, dear readers. No, they're going to policy makers with this nonsense.

And that isn't even the end of the story. The piece also points out that the BSA's survey failed to ask what might just be an important question: does sharing log-in credentials with a friend violate that service's TOS? If it doesn't, that isn't piracy. But the BSA doesn't bother to ask that question because they don't care, they're just looking for numbers that support their conclusions, here.

The article then points out a couple of other ommissions on the BSA's part:

"There are other anomalies. The BSA only considered PC use, when many people use cloud services over tablets and mobile phones, especially in poor places. And the survey, of 14,702 people in 33 countries, presumes to speak with confidence about the “developing” world but not a single African country is represented—an odd omission, since it is a fast growing market."

In short, these BSA claims are a "study" in the same way that snake-handling is a "religion": it isn't.

We've talked plenty about the Streisand Effect for years, but every so often something happens that actually demonstrates the impact graphically with data. We saw this a couple years ago when Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder tried to censor a satirical article about himself. Add to that this week's controversy over Twitter suspending the account of journalist Guy Adams, at the request of NBC Universal (after Twitter alerted NBC to some of Adams' tweets). Twitter has reinstated the account, but in the interim, there was an awful lot of discussion about Adams and what he had to say. Megan Garber, over at The Atlantic, has highlighted graphically how much more attention Adams got (via Topsy). Once again: seeking to stifle speech online is only likely to give that speech much, much, much more attention.

We've discussed the "America Invents Act," a patent reform bill that passed last year after years of Congressional fighting. As we (and plenty of others) noted at the time, for all the hyperbole around the bill, it completely ignored nearly every problem with the patent system today, and seemed almost entirely useless. Our worry, then, was that this would kill off any appetite for Congress to take on the real problems of patents today. So it's good to see that a new patent bill has been introduced -- by Reps. Peter DeFazio and Jason Chaffetz, with a very, very minor change to patent law: it would allow those sued for hardware or software patents the ability to recover litigation costs if it's determined that the suing patent holder "did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding."

In other words, this is a bill targeted very directly at the pure trolls: the patent holders who sue companies with no real intention of taking a case to court, but rather just to get them to pay a settlement fee to avoid the (expensive) court costs in defending a patent infringement claim (which is quite frequently much more expensive than the settlement options):

Notwithstanding section 285, in an action disputing the validity or alleging the infringement of a computer hardware or software patent, upon making a determination that the party alleging the infringement of the patent did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding, the court may award the recovery of full costs to the prevailing party, including reasonable attorney's fees, other than the United States.

But what's much more interesting about this is that it seeks to carve out a specific definition for software patents. I know that in software circles there's been plenty of talk over the years about the problems of software patents, and many don't believe that software should be patentable at all. However, as defenders of the patent system like to point out, there's no such "thing" as a "software patent" defined in the law, so it would be difficult to say software isn't subject to patents. Well... this bill defines software patents:

SOFTWARE PATENT.--The term 'software patent' means a patent that covers--

"(A) any process that could be implemented in a computer regardless of whether a computer is specifically mentioned in the patent; or
"(B) any computer system that is programmed to perform a process described in subparagraph (A).".

Given the massive fight in previous years over patent reform, I fully expect to see patent system supporters throw a massive hissy fit over this very, very minor change to patent law, but it's so minor that I'm at a loss as to how they'll have any compelling argument. The only reason I can think to be against the changes here is if you're in the business of abusing the patent system to shake down innovators. I actually think that supporters of the patent system, such as pharma companies, should support this kind of change too. If the patent system can successfully slice off the problems associated with software patents, it means that there will be less pressure for massive patent system changes.

Of course, if you want real patent reform that takes on the larger issues that impact all sorts of areas (beyond just software), we've made clear our suggestions -- though there doesn't seem to be any appetite in Congress to make such major changes in the near future.

As Universal Music Group (UMG) continues dealing with antitrust questions as it tries to close its purchase of EMI, there's a lot of focus on "divestment," or which parts of the combined entity that would have to be sold off. There's even talk of having to sell off the famed Parlophone Records label (home of Coldplay and Radiohead). That would be a big deal, of course, but an even more interesting proposal has been brought up by the Featured Artists Coalition, a UK-based coalition of musicians, who are saying that if the company has to divest, why not let the artists themselves have the opportunity to buy back their copyrights at "fair market value."

Divestments in the wake of mergers should first offer copyrights, at market rates, to the artists who created them. To sell them to other corporations, whether large or small, is just a perpetuation of an old business model, which has seen the recorded music business halve in value over 10 years. During that time, the technological revolution has displaced the old music business players. We do not need to repeat the mistakes of the past.

It would be good to have music business people rather than financiers owning and running music companies again. It would be even better to have artists owning their work and entering into partner relationships with service-providing major and independent record companies with all the finance and expertise an artist needs to develop their own business.

That letter is signed by Ed O'Brien of Radiohead and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd. Of course, I imagine that the labels and the artists might disagree about what "market rates" are. Also, given how focused the labels are on fighting copyright termination in the US (allowing artists to take back their copyrights after 35 years), you have to imagine that they'd fight any such plan equally hard. It's no surprise why, though: if the artists who could afford to buy back their rights did so, that would take away many of the "big name" acts, which are pretty much the remaining money makers under the old system. There's no way the labels would agree to this, even if it certainly puts the artists' interests first. Yet another example of how labels' and artists' interests are not aligned at all.

It's been said that Hollywood is completely out of ideas, and all it does these days is the same thing over and over again. That seems to be the case both on the policy front and with its movies. So how perfect is it that the MPAA's gift-of-the-month to Congress is a showing of the remake of the movie Total Recall? As we noted in our post about the MPAA's special showing of the latest Batman flick, to get around breaking gift giving guidelines, the MPAA includes a special "educational component," before its movies, which somehow makes it okay. We heard from attendees of the Batman showing that (amazingly) no mention of copyright or piracy issues was made in the "educational" component. Rather it was a presentation about the Natural History Museum and how it was doing things with IMAX, as well as a Time Warner presentation about its online offerings like HBO GO, TV Everywhere and Ultra Violet.

However, this month, the MPAA will more directly address the copyright issue, as you can see in the invite below, where they note the "educational" component will be about "the impact of film in the global economy and the benefit of IP protection to global trade." As the tagline of the movie says, "Is it real? Is it recall?" One has to imagine that the "educational" content will be particularly one sided, and I'd question how "real" the lesson will be. The stats that the MPAA is fond of throwing out are rarely anywhere close to reality. The presentation almost certainly won't "recall" the fact that due to the MPAA's own ridiculously extreme position on "IP protection" in "global trade," the ACTA agreement has more or less killed the agreement (at least for the majority of Europe).

If Congress wants an educational lesson on the role of IP and international trade, they might want to "recall" that the MPAA is just about the last place to go to get any sense of "reality."

We've been talking about the Senate debate over cybersecurity all week, and it appears that it's moving into the endgame process. Last night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called for cloture -- basically the process to end the debate and move to a vote. In doing so, he also set it up such that he's basically blocking most amendments from being discussed. However, the important Franken/Paul amendment that increases privacy protections will be voted on. In fact, it will be the first amendment to be considered. Whether or not the overall bill passes (and there's some skepticism about whether the votes exist), it is important that the Franken/Paul amendment pass, and Congress get the message that protecting the public from government snooping is an issue the public cares about. Senate staffers have been saying that they've been getting calls on this issue, but more would certainly help.

The folks at Fight for the Future have set up the excellent Do you have a secret? site to highlight why government snooping is a serious problem. Similarly, the EFF has set up a useful site with an embedded Tweet tool (and, yes, tweeting about this also helps -- staffers are paying attention to this, though calling is always best).

The Franken/Paul amendment does have some support, including from Senator Chuck Schumer who made an impassioned speech last night for protecting our privacy rights within this bill, and how important such privacy protections were to the future of the internet. Either way, today and tomorrow are important days for letting your Senators know that stopping the government from snooping on your private info online is important to you, so speak up.

We recently wrote about the fight over copyright/fair use in political videos. In the comments, someone anonymous pointed us to a YouTube page including a typical takedown notice.. Here's a screenshot. This is actually the first time I can recall that I've seen a takedown that had "multiple" takedown notices. So it's interesting that YouTube even has such an error message. But what really caught my attention was the second claimant listed. United States Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security? Issuing copyright takedowns? For what it's worth, the commenter who submitted this pointed us to another video, which they claim is the same as what was taken down. I have no idea if it's the same video or not, but it is some idiotic conspiracy mongering, taking one comment from a reporter completely out of context, and pretending President Obama said it, when he did not. I never understand conspiracy theories like that, but that's really neither here nor there.

The real question is why is Homeland Security issuing takedowns? Works produced by the federal government, of course, can't have copyright. However, it is possible for the government to hold copyrights -- mainly if someone else gets it and assigns it to the government. So it's possible that happened here, though it still seems like a strange move. If the video is the same as the other one pointed to, it's just conspiracy theory claptrap, and I don't see why DHS would even bother issuing a takedown.

But, even if we assume that the copyright itself and the takedown were legit, does this seem reasonable at all? Having a government agency directly using a copyright claim to take down a video? Especially when that group is DHS -- in which national internet censor ICE exists. Giving it the power to censor videos too just seems like it's going way too far. It's not as if Homeland Security is going to bring the work "to market" to make money, so it's not like there's an "impact on the market" for the work. The only reason to issue the takedown -- no matter how accurate the claim is -- is to silence speech. A government organization using a government-granted monopoly to stifle speech may be all too common, but that doesn't mean it should pass by unremarked upon.

I reached out to people at YouTube to see if they could explain why DHS appears to be issuing DMCA takedowns, and got back the equivalent of a "no comment." I also reached out to Homeland Security, who at first seemed interested in looking into the details and then completely stopped responding to emails. Having not received further communication from them in over a week at this point, I'm just going with the post as is, in the hopes that maybe someone out there can explain why the federal government is using copyright to censor speech?

We recently wrote about a bunch of super successful UK musicians complaining that the UK government needed to force ISPs and startups to make their old business model viable again. We, quite naturally, thought that was a pretty crazy suggestion. In reaction to this post on Twitter, reader botaday rephrased Tim's closing line in a way that so perfectly summed up a key sentiment that many of us had for years in dealing with the copyright fight, that it was worth repeating here:

If the government needs to "step in" to help your business model, maybe you shouldn't be in business.

Just keep repeating this. Because it's the crux of so many of the fights that we keep seeing all the time. It's the history of protectionism and mercantilism. It's the basis of regulatory capture and anti-competitive laws. And it's always couched in phrases to try to hide the fact that it's about having the government prop up a business model, by trying to make it a "moral" issue. But it's not a moral issue when your business model fails. So, every time you see one of these fights going on, repeat that line: If the government needs to "step in" to help your business model, maybe you shouldn't be in business."

We talk a whole lot about the security theater in airports these days. While most of what we write revolves around the TSA and its crazy policies that never seem to do anything to actually protect the people, there is still plenty to talk about in other nations. Take this recent story as an example of how little it takes to bypass modern security using nothing more than a little social engineering.

An eleven year old Manchester boy decided that shopping with his mother was just a little on the boring side and decided to run away. Not content with running away to join the circus, as most little boys are wont to do, he decided that running away on flight to Rome was the better option. Despite not having a passport or a boarding pass, the boy was able to make it through airport security and board the flight. How?

It's then understood Liam ‘tail-gated’ a family with other children even though he had no passport or boarding card tricking security staff into thinking he was part of the group. By the time he passed through the scanner at security, it was 1.15pm.

It is understood Liam headed almost immediately to the first departing flight, the 2pm service to Rome where passengers were already queuing to board the flight.

Airline staff at the gate again appear to have thought he was with a family and failed to check for a passport or a boarding card and allowed him to walk to the plane.

Since the boy was only eleven, he was able to pass for a member of a family traveling through the security checks without any questions. He was then able to pull the same maneuver when boarding the flight. While it might be easier for a kid to pull off something of this nature, it does show that there is still a major weakness in security, something that no amount of post 9/11 security policy can fix.

One of these weaknesses is that we are training our security to look for the wrong things.

Aviation security expert Chris Yates said: “This was a lapse but I don't believe this was a serious security breach. Anybody who passes through Manchester Airport must be screened whether that is through a full body scanner or a metal detector. That did happen in this instance.

You see, the people running security were so caught up in looking for potentially dangerous objects such as liquids over 3 ounces or nail clippers that they completely neglected to check if the people entering the gates or boarding the flights were supposed to be there. Even with this kid being eleven years old, that is a pretty big slip up. One that resulted in a lot of people being suspended while an investigation is under way.

I know what some of you are going to say. "The kid was eleven, how much of a threat could he be?" Sure this kid was eleven. He couldn't have been too much of a threat. However, it shows a major weakness in our security: the human element. Humans are naturally fallible. We make mistakes. As long as there is a human element, no amount of security is foolproof. Even though this kid was eleven, social engineering knows no age boundaries. Even the strongest security systems in the world can fall by a single lapse in judgment by a human being. As we become more and more dependent on machines to scan and screen passengers, we will be opening up larger and larger holes via the human element.

When the UK Hargreaves Review of intellectual monopolies in the digital age came out last year, Techdirt noted that one of its innovations was an emphasis on basing policy on evidence. The fact that this was even notable shows how parlous the state of policy-making has become. One important way to gather evidence is through public consultations, and in the wake of the Hargreaves Review, the UK government conducted a major exercise in gathering views and information in this field.

The responses to that consultation have now been published -- all 471 of them. That's a surprisingly high number for what was once an arcane area of interest only to a few lawyers, and a measure of just how important the subject has become. On that Web page there's the following slightly unusual statement:

in the course of reviewing the responses received, it became clear that a small number of respondents had advanced criticisms or inappropriately criticised the activities of others in the sector. The Government has now carefully reviewed the submissions to establish any potentially defamatory material and has redacted any inappropriate or defamatory comments.

One of the people whose submissions were redacted is Andrew Norton. He's written a fascinating blog post detailing what exactly was taken out. The first and biggest redaction occurs in his answer to the following question:

What aspects of the current collective licensing system work well for users and rights holders and what are the areas for improvement? Please give reasons for your answers

Here's what the UK government published of Norton's response:

Almost no aspects work well for users or rights holders. The standard operating system for collecting societies is to demand all, demand often. There have been many cases in the recent past where agencies have gone above and beyond their mandate, and targeted people in shakedowns.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

In short, what aspects work well? None. What needs to be done? First of all, an audit needs doing, to ensure compliance with the law. Then, shut them down. At the very least start a new, independent one with significant oversight, because this one just DOES NOT WORK.

So what exactly did the UK government think was "inappropriate or defamatory"? This, apparently:

… and targeted people in shakedowns.

In the past few years, there have been reports of UK Collection societies calling up small businesses, and threatening them if they hear music in the background (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090202/0128383597.shtml), carollers, charities (http://torrentfreak.com/charity-forced-to-pay-copyright-police-so-kids-can-sing-071209/) have been targeted for fees, as have schools (http://torrentfreak.com/uk-copyright-cops-target-kids-schools-community-centers-081015/). Even people who sing to themselves have been targeted because they're doing so at work (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/8317952.stm) and let's not forget their targeting of employers like Kwik Fit (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7029892.stm) and even the police (http://torrentfreak.com/police-chief-faces-high-court-anti-piracy-action-120608/). Incidentally, The EU Court of Justice just ruled that in cases like these, there are no fees to pay (http://euobserver.com/871/115621#.T2cCyGfYteQ.twitter)

That's just one of three such paragraphs, all linking to external sites. As you may have noticed, the first link above is to Techdirt, and the others are to sites like the BBC, El Pais, Die Welt and TorrentFreak. None of them is defamatory, since they are all reporting on established facts. This means that the UK government must think that these facts are somehow "inappropriate". That's a pretty extraordinary state of affairs. The UK government has taken it upon itself to hide what UK collection societies get up to, in an absolutely key consultation, one of whose purposes is surely to get the facts about what's happening in this sector.

What makes this censorship of linked information even more striking is that alongside the main consultation document itself (pdf) the UK government also published guidance on providing "open and transparent evidence" (pdf), where we read:

When you draw on other work, a reference, and link to the original work should be included. References to other people’s work should have the relevant web link

That is, the guidelines specifically ask for precisely the kind of scrupulous linking to sources that Norton provided, and yet the UK government censored them all because it didn't like the unequivocally dire situation they delineated.

This does not augur well for the results of the consultation. It suggests that the UK government is happy to gloss over one of the key failings of the present copyright system -- the UK collection societies -- and is seeking to present a very partial view of the real situation. It also undermines confidence in the whole consultation process: if the UK government has arbitrarily redacted true information that it finds inconvenient once, what's to say it hasn't done so multiple times elsewhere? If people aren't allowed to provide all the evidence what's the point of conducting a consultation in the first place?

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

It's pretty clear that when two big tech companies go into patent nuclear war, it's often just as much about egos as it is about anything legal. We've been covering the worldwide patent fight between Apple and Samsung for a while now, mostly siding with Samsung over Apple's silly claims which seem to demonstrate an unwillingness to actually compete against other viable products in the marketplace. But, Samsung is no stranger to petty actions either. According to reporter Ina Fried, from AllthingsD (who is apparently covering the latest round of the trial in San Francisco), on the first day, the sign outside the court just showed "Apple vs. Samsung", but Samsung objected, and so the sign has now been updated: Yes, this is the kind of petty squabbling that comes out during patent fights.

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by law professor David Levine for his radio show/podcast, Hearsay Culture. The episode has aired on the radio, and I believe it will go up as a podcast soon as well. However, he's also written a fantastic article summarizing the absurdity of the secrecy around the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement:

Imagine being invited to formally offer input on a huge piece of legislation, a proposed international agreement that could cover everything from intellectual property rights on the Internet to access to medicine to investment rights in the agreement’s signatory countries. For 10 minutes, you’d be able to say whatever you’d like about the proposed law—good, bad, or indifferent—to everyone involved in the negotiations. But there’s a caveat: All of your questions, all of your input, on what may be the most controversial part of the package, would have to be based on a version of the proposed international agreement that was 16 months old. And in that 16-month period, there were eight rounds of negotiations that could have changed any and all of the text to which you had access, but no one could tell you if that version was still accurate.

Would you still take the deal? This is not a hypothetical question; rather, this is the take-it-or-leave-it offer made to the public in May by the United States Trade Representative regarding the intellectual property rights chapter of the massively important but little-known Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP).

Levine is learning, first-hand, about "transparency" -- USTR style, where everything is kept secret, but you're cheerful about telling people who actually would like to help and could provide valuable feedback to come along... but then they're never allowed to actually see the document in question.

This is a travesty. It's certainly not democracy. It's a joke carried out by a government department that appears to be out of control -- focused mainly on helping a few industry groups with little concern about the public, despite how widely they'll be impacted by such laws and rules.