Last week we reported that videos were currently being uploaded to YouTube at the rate of 72 hours every minute, and asked how anybody could expect Google to pre-screen such a deluge. Techdirt Insider xenomancer has gone a little further by working out how much it would cost to screen that material for potential copyright infringement, doubtless something the media industries would love to see imposed.

Most of the calculation is straightforward, but there's one key variable: the kind of person who will do the screening. You can't just use random people off the street, or starving artists, or bored software engineers, because the crucial question they must answer is: does too much of this video infringe on somebody's copyright? Only one class of person is qualified to answer that, and hence to take on this job: judges. Or, more specifically:

horribly underpaid judges who happen to be extremely efficient at determining the copyright status of each video they watch and choose, of the little free will they have, to consider all video uploaded.

Using the fact that the average pay for a judge in Silicon Valley is apparently $177,454, and that based on the volume of uploads and number of hours in a working day, a mere 199,584 judges would be required as screeners, this gives us the final figure for the cost of checking properly those 72 hours per minute:

$36,829,468,840 per year.

Interestingly, Google's revenue for 2011 was $37,905,000,000.

Absurd as this calculation may be, it does reveal the key problem with unthinking calls for YouTube videos to be pre-screened for possible infringement: only suitably-qualified individuals can do that, and eventually you run out of them. In other words, attempts to police rigorously online materials are doomed to fail by the nature of the copyright system itself. Basically, copyright does not scale.

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

Last month, we reported on some silly research that suggested the economy would grow massively if we could just convince women to get more patents. The whole thing was based on some fundamentally silly assumptions related to thinking that patents are a proxy for either innovation or economic growth. They are not. Plenty of studies have shown no link between patents and actual innovation -- and lots of other studies have shown that patents seem to be costing the economy a lot more than helping it.

Unfortunately, however, it appears this idea that women need more patents has somehow made its way to Congress in a new bill -- and (just for fun) it also says the same about copyrights and trademarks. Senator Olympia Snowe (with Senator Mary Landrieu) have introduced S.3196 to create a "National Women's High-Growth Business Bipartisan Task Force." By itself, that seems like a good idea. It's no secret that the tech industry has a much higher percentage of men than women, and there's been quite a reasonable concern about why that is and if it's healthy for innovation and the economy. And most of the proposal seems reasonable, if somewhat unlikely to accomplish anything meaningful.

But, then there's this part, which says that among the duties of the task force will be to:

examine the link between women who own small business concerns and intellectual property, including—

(A) the number of patents, trademarks, and copyrights granted to women; and

(B) the challenges faced by high-growth small business concerns owned and controlled by women in obtaining and enforcing intellectual property rights.

Once again, this is merely making the assumption that women need to get more patents, trademarks and copyright -- and that they need help "enforcing" them. Why make such an assumption? Why not start with a more neutral question that explores whether or not such government granted monopoly privileges actually help innovation or the economy? It seems weird to immediately jump to the conclusion that women need more IP.

The uncanny valley refers to the creepy-looking appearance that many computer-generated people have when their virtual features don't quite seem as natural as the real thing. But as technology improves, virtual people are starting to look more natural and less like zombies. Here are just a few examples of some artificial humans that are bound to become more widespread and acceptable.

• The NY Port Authority is renting some avatars for a few months to serve as customer service agents for travelers to New York city. Does Siri really need a face? Let's just hope there's no "blue screen of death" for these automated agents... [url]
• Tupac Shakur is on tour again as a hologram -- prompting some folks to question some aspects of the intellectual property rights of dead artists. Forget using real artists, there are already completely fabricated singers/actors. [url]
• Using just a PS3, game developer Quantic Dream demoed a virtual android named Kara to promote its technological skills in creating real-looking fake people. With better hardware/software, it looks like developers could jump over the uncanny valley entirely. [url]
• To discover more interesting tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

We've been arguing about the long-term problems with paywalls for quite some time now, but more and more newspapers insist that they're "the answer." Of course, they seem to be asking the wrong question. They may be "the answer" to "doing something" in a desperate attempt to slow down people dropping their paper subscriptions, but they're not a long term solution by any means. Beyond the fact that limiting the ability to share or link people to your content takes away significant value, we've also mentioned that it merely opens up a huge opportunity for others to step into the market and replace you. Newspapers don't seem to think this is a real problem, but they are vastly underestimating the threat.

I haven't seen it explained quite as clearly or in such perfect terms as longterm newspaper man John L. Robinson in explaining why paywalls are like "using band aids on a bullet wound (found via Jeff Nolan). Robinson points out that young people today -- such as students -- admit that they're addicted to Facebook, and spend a ridiculous amount of time on the site. But if Facebook put up a paywall of about $10/month (not out of the ordinary for newspapers), they'd find alternatives:

I asked my class of 20-year-old Elon University students how many were on Facebook. All 33 raised their hands. Many of them suggested they were addicted to the social network. (It was all I could do to keep them off Facebook during class.) I asked how many would pay $1 a month for Facebook membership. All raised their hands.

“Five dollars?” I asked. A few dropped out.

“Ten dollars a month?” I asked. Nearly every hand stayed down.

“No one?” I said. “I thought you guys were addicted?”

A student piped up with an explanation: “Someone will invent something else to take its place that is free.”

I shared this anecdote with a newspaper executive when we were talking about newspaper paywalls. I said that if people wouldn’t pay for Facebook, they wouldn’t pay to get through a newspaper paywall.

Robinson then notes that the exec he told this to was dismissive because his students "aren't our readers anyway". But they are the next generation, and any publication that plans to have a future might want to think about what gets them interested... not what sends them running to find alternatives.

The folks at EDRI and Access were able to get their hands on four "meeting notes" from the European Commission ACTA negotiators, concerning what happened at various meetings. This is especially important as the EU gets closer to an actual vote on ACTA. There are a number of issues raised by these documents, and the folks at TorrentFreak have covered many of the issues from an EU perspective. However, one thing that struck me about the documents was how much input US companies got in the process, compared to stakeholders elsewhere. We already know that the USTR spends an inordinate amount of time listening to Hollywood and taking its word as gospel, but as these documents reveal, the EU and other negotiating partners were unable to balance that by sharing the documents with other stakeholders.

Specifically, the US repeatedly told negotiators that it was sharing ACTA documents with industry representatives using non-disclosure agreements -- while the EU negotiators repeatedly complained that there was no legal way for it to share the documents with anyone. In the end, the EU meekly appears to have given up on this point. What this means, of course, is that the US -- and its close connections with entertainment industry special interests -- were able to have significantly more say in matters concerning ACTA. While there was no guarantee that the EU would have briefed public interest stakeholders, there definitely appeared to be at least some concern that such folks were not heard from -- but no real effort to fight for such.

Also, while it's not a surprise that the US wrote "the internet chapter" of ACTA, it is rather enlightening to have it confirmed that it was also the US who pushed so strong for a three strikes disconnection policy (something that negotiators had, at one point, denied was being discussed -- only to be revealed they were lying when various texts were leaked). This, despite the fact that the US requires no such three strikes regime. So all the talk of how there was no intention to use ACTA to change US law? Yeah, that's a lie.

Separately, there's a discussion about how the US's initial text for the internet/digital section was so "confusing" that "several ACTA parties off-the-record said that they would wait for a EU text to "balance" the US one." This is not a surprise again. Entertainment industry lobbyists -- who, again, had full access to the texts and the ready ear of USTR negotiators (go ahead, connect the dots) -- know quite well how to write completely confounding legislation, where the real purposes are hidden in the complex and confusing language. That initial "confusing and complex" draft from the USTR wasn't because they don't know how to be clear. It's a way to hide little time bombs that the entertainment industry plans to explode at later dates -- just as they did with the ProIP bill, and the bizarrely ridiculous interpretation that the clause on seizing CD and DVD burners really meant seizing websites as well...

A guy named Steve Cooksey developed Type II diabetes a few years back, and in response ended up embracing a paleolithic diet and exercise regime (something that's increasingly popular these days). It seemed to work quite well for him, and he ended up setting up a website called Diabetes-Warrior.net in which he wrote about that and related issues. As more people got interested in the site and what he was saying, he also started answering questions and providing advice on the site (a la Dear Abby) as well as setting up a (fee-based) "coaching" service to help those interested in a similar diet/exercise regime.

The State of North Carolina decided all of this was illegal. Apparently providing any advice to others about dieting, without a license, puts you in some hot water.

It turns out that, like nearly every other state, North Carolina has a law that regulates the practice of "dietics/nutrition." There are a set of rules, which require getting a license before you can provide any sort of dietary advice. Like many such operations it appears the regulatory regime here is much more about limiting the supply of professionals to keep pricing artificially high, rather than any real health or safety mission.

Now, it's good to stop people from outright lying about their credentials, and there may even be some gray areas where someone is actively implying professional expertise that they don't have. But can you actually ban amateurs from sharing their opinions on diets at all?

It appears that Cooksey, along with the Institute for Justice are about to test that question, filing a lawsuit claiming that the attempt to prevent him from providing advice was a violation of his First Amendment rights.

But the First Amendment does not allow the government to ban people from sharing ordinary advice about diet, or scrub the Internet—from blogs to Facebook to Twitter—of speech the government does not like. North Carolina can no more force Steve to become a licensed dietitian than it could require Dear Abby to become a licensed psychologist.

IJ also made a short animated video about the case:

This seems like an important question that could impact a number of different "regulated" industries as well. I recognize the idea that protecting the public from fraudulent or scammy advisers is what may appear to be a laudable goal, but it's wide open to abuse in which ideas that the government doesn't like are censored for not coming from a "licensed" practitioner.

We've spent plenty of time over the years highlighting the ridiculousness surrounding the Olympics and their over-aggressive enforcement of IP laws (and even getting host nations to pass special trademark laws that only apply to the Olympics in some cases). But it's really reaching positively ludicrous excesses in the UK. First up, a story of a flower shop being threatened for making a version of the Olympic logo out of tissue paper and hanging it in the shop window. You see, that kind of Olympic pride is only allowed if you've paid for the permission.

That story led us to an even crazier one. Apparently an 81-year old woman tried to sell a £1 doll at a church sale... but had it shut down because she'd dared to clothe the doll in a home made knit sweater that had a mini-Olympic logo on it.
It appears that they've turned this 81-year-old into someone who has realized the absurdity of over aggressive intellectual property protection:

The 81-year-old grandmother of six from King’s Lynn said the last thing she wanted to do was cause a crisis but attacked the rules as 'absolutely ridiculous.

'I thought that the hoops symbol was universal and I think it is disgusting that they can make rules about such little things, she said.

It seems that the Olympics would prefer that no one actually show any sort of pride or support for the Olympics unless it's an official sponsor who paid for the privilege.

Author Joe Konrath has written a fantastic letter to the Justice Department to counter letters sent by the Association of Authors' Representatives and the Authors Guild (and some others), complaining about the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against certain publishers and Apple to collude to keep ebook prices high. As Konrath notes, these groups don't appear to actually represent authors, but do seem to be representing the best interests of the legacy gatekeepers.

I’m writing to tell you that these organizations did not solicit the views of their members, that they in no way speak on behalf of all or even most of their members, and that (as I imagine is obvious) they are motivated not by what’s best for consumers, but by what they see as best for themselves.

I recognize that the heart of the DOJ’s suit is collusion, not high prices. But it’s clear that the legacy publishing industry’s strategy is to keep the prices of ebooks high so as not to cannibalize high-margin hardback sales. If the prices of legacy published books are kept artificially high it could be argued that my lower-priced self-published books are made more attractive by comparison, but I believe that a regime of higher-priced books is bad for the industry overall because it slows the growth of the global book market, which indeed hurts all sales. I also believe it’s obviously bad for consumers, especially lower-income consumers, who could buy more of the books they loved if those books weren’t priced so high.

The whole thing is a worthwhile read, and certainly raises questions about who gets to represent whom when such issues come up. For years, we've seen bogus claims that the RIAA represents "musicians" or that the MPAA represents "filmmakers," when nothing could be further from the truth. In this case, though, it's even more egregious, in that these organizations directly claim to represent authors. But, for the most part, they seem to be only be representing the interests of authors already successful under the old system -- and going against every other author (and potential author) out there. In other words, their focus is on protectionism for established players, not what's best for authors as a whole or the consumers they serve with their writing. That's unfortunate.

See update at the bottom.

A few folks have been sending over a recent article from Hillicon Valley, in which Senator Chris Coons, a co-sponsor of PIPA admits that SOPA "really did pose some risk to the internet."

Coons said it was "truly memorable" when one of his sons shook him awake and asked "why I wanted to break the Internet and why Justin Bieber thought I should go to jail."

The pop star had suggested that supporters of the Protect IP Act should be arrested after a campaign against the bill had claimed it could result in Bieber going to jail for singing songs that belonged to other artists.

"That was my first warning that we were not communicating effectively," Coons said. He added that he believes some elements of SOPA "overreached" and "really did pose some risk to the Internet."

Of course, I think that some folks are a little confused by this. The issue with Bieber wasn't actually about PIPA at all. Instead, Coons had directly sponsored (along with Senator Amy Klobuchar) a different bill, S.978, which would have made a felony out of certain forms of online streaming. This was at the center of the FreeBieber campaign, which was actually separate from PIPA (which was S.968). While the House version of SOPA pulled in similar language, PIPA was always separate from S.978. Coons, though, was a co-sponsor of PIPA as well. It's a little unclear from the context if Coons was really talking about S.968 or S.978 in what was quoted above.

Either way, it seems worth pointing out that, if it takes your kid to clue you in to the fact that you were pushing for legislation that "really did pose some risk to the internet," perhaps you shouldn't be putting forth that legislation in the first place. It certainly makes it clear that he didn't understand what he was supporting.

One hopes that Coons (and, really, all our elected officials) will use this as an opportunity to realize that jumping into regulating the internet without realizing what the hell they're doing is a mistake that should not be repeated. In the meantime, it looks like Coons may be trying to make amends to the tech community, and is now co-sponsoring the new Startup Act, which would provide a significant boost to entrepreneurs and startups by easing immigration laws for both entrepreneurs and highly skilled engineering students, allowing them to stay in the US where they can build companies that create jobs, rather than going back to their home countries to compete against Americans.

Update: Posted a slight clarification, as some insist that he was only speaking about SOPA -- the House bill, rather than PIPA, the Senate bill he co-sponsored. While the two bills were distinct, there were significant similarities -- especially on the key points that would have "posed some risk to the internet." If Senator Coons is making a material distinction between the two bills, that suggests he still doesn't understand the two bills he supported in the Senate and how they, too, had significant problems.

We all know that "Google" has become a verb (i.e., "just Google it") but has it reached the point that it refers generically to all search? One... er... enterprising guy is trying to make the legal case that this is so. David Elliott has filed a lawsuit to have Google's trademarks in its own name declared cancelled because the term has become generic. As you may or may not know, if a trademarked term is judged "generic," then trademarks on those terms can be cancelled -- which is why many trademark holders on near-generic words often fight hard against them becoming so generic. It's why terms like Xerox, Kleenex, White-Out, Band-Aid and the like -- which defined a category and often led people to assume that all such products were called that -- are often seen as dangerous failures in trademark circles, rather than massive successes for so dominating a category.

In this case, Elliott is pissed that Google won a ruling against him after he registered over 750 domain names that used Google's marks in some manner. He's got a pretty big uphill battle here. While "google" may be a verb, it seems like it's a verb in the context of using Google's search engine, not using another alternative search engine. Elliott's claims seem to focus on the fact that google is used as a verb, rather than that it's generic. For example, he quotes CEO Larry Page telling people to "have fun and keep googling!" and then seems to think this supports is case. It does not. It's not hard to see how it actually suggests the exact opposite. You would assume that someone in Larry Page's position would say something like that because he wanted people to keep using Google's products, not because he wanted them to generically search the internet with anyone's search engine.

I'd be quite surprised if this actually got anywhere.

Rob Hyndman points us to the bizarre story of director William Friedkin, perhaps most well known for directing both The French Connection and The Exorcist in the early 1970s. However, right now he's in a bit of a legal dispute with both Paramount and Universal studios, who co-produced the film that came after both of those films, called Sorcerer. While not a box office success, apparently there's a fair bit of interest in the film these days, and there have been requests for Friedkin to screen it, and for him to appear and talk about it. However, Paramount and Universal both seem confused about who holds what rights -- and while both seem to claim some rights to the film, neither seems to know what those are (and at least Paramount claims it no longer can find a print of the film, though Friedkin says he has his own). Friedkin finally decided to sue to force the companies to clarify who holds what rights. There's also the separate issue that, despite a profit participation deal with the film, neither studio has actually provided him with an accounting statement in 20 years. From the filing, which is embedded below:

Friedkin is the director and producer of the 1977 motion picture Sorcerer.... Friedkin is also a profit participant in the Picture, and owns a print. Although Defendants Paramount... and Universal... have previously had certain rights to exploit the Picture in the United States, each has recently disclaimed rights to exploit the Picture in the United States, and admitted ignorance as to who, if anyone, currently has such rights. Bafflingly, however, defendants persist in denying that Friedkin has any rights to exploit the Picture. Friedkin has filed this action to obtain a declaration as to the parties' respective rights in the Picture.

It does seem fairly crazy that such an issue should end up in court, and it appears the court thinks so too. While the original was filed in California State Court, recently it was removed to federal court by the defendants, and the court immediately directed them to its alternative dispute resolution (ADR) program in the hopes that this gets settled outside of litigation. Either way, it seems like a pretty crazy situation where the studios deny the filmmaker the right to show the film, while at the same time refusing to explain what rights they do have in the film.

Last week, we wrote about a proposal in Congress to give ICE (part of Homeland Security) at least another $10 million for the next year to continue its program of censoring websites in the name of "stopping piracy." Of course, when Congress and Hollywood get together, they never put all their eggs in just one basket. So, it should come as no surprise that in another appropriations bill, this time for the State Department, and put forth by Senator Patrick Leahy -- who also introduced PIPA -- there's another chunk of "anti-piracy" cash. The bill sets forth $899,600,000 for "civil judicial and security programs." But, amazingly, the only program that is specifically called out with a specific amount is to "combat piracy."

CIVILIAN JUDICIAL AND SECURITY PROGRAMS.—$899,600,000 for assistance for rule of law, justice, corrections, anti-crime, cyber crime, civilian police, and security sector reform programs, of which not less than $5,000,000 shall be made available to combat piracy of United States copyright materials, consistent with the requirements of section 688 (a) and (b) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2008

If you're curious about sections 688 (a) and (b) as mentioned in this bill, you can see them here. They just authorize the State Department to "provide training" to foreign judges and prosecutors on intellectual property law. That is, it's part of the US's official IP propaganda program to convince foreign judges and prosecutors that strict interpretations of IP laws are the only way to go.

A couple years ago, we wrote in more detail about how the State Department spends these funds, and it's not pretty. Basically, we send copyright maximalist lawyers to other countries -- countries that have their own copyright laws -- and tell judges and federal prosecutors there that they need to enforce US-style copyright maximalist laws.

I'm really not sure how that's an appropriate use of taxpayer money.

So, Google just revealed its copyright takedown transparency report and it's turning into the gift that keeps on giving. We've already discussed how it shows Microsoft DMCAing links that remain in Microsoft's own search engine... and now reader David Sanger points us to another amusing one. On March 14th, apparently BayTSP (one of the more well-known "anti-piracy" firms), working for Twentieth Century Fox (a News Corp. company), demanded the removal of a link to SFGate.com.
SFGate? That's the website for the San Francisco Chronicle -- the main newspaper in San Francisco. So what was infringing? According to the DMCA notice (which says the filing came from Irdeto, the company that acquired BayTSP last year), insisted that what was actually at that link was:

"The copyrighted work at issue is the film "Chronicle", which is owned by "Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation"

Now, wouldn't that be something if the SF Chronicle was distributing the movie Chronicle illegally? But, of course, that's hogwash. The truth is that BayTSP and Fox screwed up. The SFGate article is now back online and you can see it's just an editorial about how SF Muni (the local public transit authority) should let students ride for free. That has nothing, whatsoever, to do with the movie Chronicle. What's amazing is the word "Chronicle" doesn't even show up in the article. It obviously shows up elsewhere on the page. After all, it is the website for the SF Chronicle.

Of course, in filing this DMCA takedown, BayTSP -- who is a "trusted user" of the takedown system -- swears upon the following statements:

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described in all notifications submitted through the Program as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

The information in all notifications submitted through the Program will be accurate, and I swear, under penalty of perjury, that with respect to those notifications, I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

That's clearly bunk, however, since nothing on that page is even remotely related to the movie Chronicle. How do you have a "good faith belief" that there's infringement when you clearly didn't even take the briefest second to look.

At the end of last year we wrote about the case of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, former Federal Minister of Defense in Germany, who lost both his post and his doctorate when it turned out that he had plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis. Now the journal Science is reporting another possible case:

German Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan is facing allegations that she plagiarized parts of her dissertation, published in 1980. A Web site, called schavanplag (in German) has listed 56 incidents in which the anonymous accuser says Schavan copied phrasing from improperly cited sources.

That on its own might not be so remarkable, were it not for the fact that there have been at least two other recent cases of plagiarism by German politicians -- Silvana Koch-Mehrin in June last year, and Jorgo Chatzimarkakis a month later.

Now, I don't know what exactly the positions of all those German politicians were on unauthorised sharing of files online, but I somehow doubt that any of them approved of it. And yet they seem not to have had any qualms about copying other people's work and passing it off as their own.

Beyond the double standards involved, there's another important point to be made here, I think. Plagiarism is about denying creators attribution that is rightly theirs. When people share files online, by contrast, there is no attempt to pass them off as their own work -- the attribution is always preserved, because otherwise people wouldn't know what they were downloading.

That's probably why online sharing can sometimes increase the sales of the works involved: it's a way of signalling that you enjoy something -- and a personal recommendation is perhaps the most powerful form of marketing around. Plagiarism, on the other hand, is a conscious attempt to boost your own reputation by depriving others of the recognition they are due, with all that this implies for lost rewards.

So which is worse? And which one should German politicians be most concerned about?

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