This is just bizarre. Apparently, an Iranian-born American citizen who was speaking Farsi was denied the ability to buy an iPad and an iPhone because store employees cited an Apple policy barring the export of Apple products to Iran.

Jafarzadeh, who is from Virginia, said no one asked him where the phone was going. The employee only questioned his ethnicity.

"I feel like this is a bit of racial profiling against Iranians and I'm appalled," Jafarzadeh said.

It certainly sounds like Apple might want to train some of its employees a bit better in understanding what "export" means. And maybe Apple employees should also be made aware of the fact that American citizens can speak Farsi.

Until recently there has been an unchallenged assumption that the more copyright, the better. Although people have begun to realize that's not the case – and that extending copyright diminishes the public domain because we must all wait longer for works to enter it -- governments around the world continue to make copyright longer, stronger and broader.

Francis Davey has written a blog post about an amendment to what he calls a "fairly obscure corner of the [UK] Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988" that offers us yet another example. Here's the background:

Section 52 [of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988] deals with the situation where an artistic work has been exploited in the making of articles by an industrial process and marketing them in the UK. At the end of 25 years after the articles are first marketed, it ceases to be an infringement of copyright to copy the work by making articles (of any kind)

Davey gives an example of what this rule means in practice:

Suppose an artist drew a picture of an iconic vehicle - let's say a car - in a comic strip. After 25 years of marketing models of the car as merchandising, the artist could no longer use copyright protection from preventing others making rival versions of the car, but the artist could still stop the making of stamps, greeting cards and, most importantly, comic books based on the original drawings.

The exceptions mentioned there are thanks to a later modification to the 1988 Act, which excluded a list of objects from it, for reasons best known to itself.

The proposed amendment to the law would remove that limit of 25 years, and enable artists to prevent others from making rival versions (of the car, in the example above) for the full term of copyright -- life plus seventy years. The UK government's press release on the move speaks of:

Deterring the importation and sale of unauthorised replicas of classic designs which qualify for copyright protection and extending copyright protection for mass-produced artistic works to life of the creator plus 70 years. These measures will promote innovation in the design industry and encourage investment in new products, while discouraging unauthorised copies.

Of course, no evidence is offered that this will be the case -- this is classic faith-based policy making. And it's hard to see manufacturers investing anything extra just because their monopoly has been extended -- they are more likely to sit back and enjoy the windfall profits, assuming there are any. Similarly, surely nobody is suddenly going to decide to produce replicas because of possible sales half a century from now. All in all, it's really hard to see why the UK government is wasting the limited time of politicians pushing through such marginal and unnecessary extensions to a copyright system that already reaches too far for too long.

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As people study animals in more depth, we're finding out that animals may be smarter than previously thought. There might be some confirmation bias in some of these studies, since no one really looks for animals that are dumber. But it's still fascinating to see complex animal behavior that suggests their cognitive abilities aren't so different from humans. Here are a few examples of some interesting animal observations.

• Chimpanzees have been found with cultural differences, in that some groups of chimps have different nut cracking techniques than others. Chimps growing up using stones to crack open nuts know how to use other tools, but they just prefer using stones. And female chimps that join new chimp tribes adopt the social etiquette of their new peers. [url]
• Brain Storm is the name of a mouse that has been trained to go through fairly complex obstacle courses. Brain Storm wasn't harmed or abused during his extensive training in mouse agility, but other pet mice have not been so lucky. [url]
• The numerical abilities of three American black bears have been studied -- and it looks like bears know how to estimate small quantities. Bears could have similar mathematical skills as some primates, or maybe these researchers were working with relatives of Yogi the Bear who is, by all accounts, smarter than the average bear. [url]

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

We've been busy and haven't had a chance to do a Step2 Startups post in a while. If you don't recall, this is where startup execs ask you for feedback on something they're trying to figure out. This time around, a new Twitter image search engine called ThudIT is seeking your feedback on the overall concept. I actually find this to be pretty interesting. We're all used to things like Google's image search, but Twitter has become a more and more important platform for realtime images these days. We all know the stories, of course, about breaking news first appearing via mobile phone snapshots on Twitter -- things like the airplane that landed in the Hudson River, for example. Having a real-time search for images could be quite useful in a very different context than something like Google image search. ThudIT's Freddie Wynne provides two examples, one involving a sporting event and another about a conference to demonstrate the basic power of the tool. I could definitely see it coming in handy. But he wants more feedback/advice/suggestions, etc. Feel free to head on over to the thread on Step2 and provide some thoughts.

We're planning to get back to doing more Step2 Startups posts in the near future, so if you'd like to get feedback on whatever you're working on, let us know!

The folks over at EFF have launched a new site called DefendInnovation.org that seeks to get people to speak up about fixing the patent system, specifically around software patents. It puts forth a series of key suggestions:

1. A patent covering software should be shorter: no more than five years from the application date.
2. If the patent is invalid or there's no infringement, the trolls should have to pay the legal fees.
3. Patent applicants should be required to provide an example of running software code for each claim in the patent.
4. Infringers should avoid liability if they independently arrive at the patented invention.
5. Patents and licenses should be public right away. Patent owners should be required to keep their public records up-to-date.
6. The law should limit damages so that a patent owner can't collect millions if the patent represented only a tiny fraction of a defendant's product.
7. Congress should commission a study and hold hearings to examine whether software patents actually benefit our economy at all.

To me, number four is the key one and would fix a large number of issues with the patent system. I've been arguing for an independent invention defense for years. In fact, I'd take it slightly further. Since patents are only supposed to be granted on ideas that are non-obvious to those who are skilled in the art, the fact that there is independent invention suggests evidence that it is obvious to those skilled in the art, because multiple "skilled in the art" practitioners are arriving at the same obvious conclusion. Thus, such patents should be invalid, beyond just allowing the independent inventor a defense.

Some don't think the EFF is going far enough. Tim Lee put together a petition, asking the EFF to go even further and oppose software patents altogether. You could argue that point number seven gets towards that. In fact, you could argue that point number seven should be the whole ballgame here. The fact that we don't have any evidence that software patents benefit the economy should make the whole system a mockery. Either way, the EFF's response to the whole "abolish software patents" issue, is that there needs to be a first step:

Regardless of whether you think software patents should be abolished altogether or just reformed, the first step is recognizing that a one-size-fits-all patents system doesn’t make sense and that we need to treat software patents differently from other types of patents. Without that, no effort – whether reform or abolition – can be successful.

To be honest, as bad as software patents can be, I still do worry about hardware patents as well. So I don't think we should lose sight of the independent invention defense (or independent invention as evidence of obviousness) as a useful tool to fix many of the larger problems with the system. There are some other potential fixes out there as well, including something akin to an anti-SLAPP law for patents -- where it's clear that the lawsuit is an abuse of the patent system, just to try to get a company actually producing a product to pay. A big part of the problem today is how expensive a patent lawsuit is, and how difficult it is to get one dismissed without first having to spend upwards of a million dollars (no joke). That leads many companies to settle. This is, obviously, what point number 2 in the Defend Innovation campaign is about, but getting faster, anti-SLAPP-like dismissals would be a big help as well, as no company wants a big expensive lawsuit hanging over them.

Either way, it's good to see renewed emphasis on the problems of the patent system, especially after Congress and President Obama pretended that they'd "fixed" everything last summer with the patent reform bill that did very little (and probably made some things worse).

Today, Danish Minister of Culture Uffe Elbæk announced the death of Scandinavian-flavored 3 strikes plans that would force ISPs to issue warning letters to users suspected of copyright infringement. Instead he introduces eight new initiatives aiming at "strengthening the development of legal services" and "motivating users to go for legal solutions".

While disconnection was never part of the letter model, its passage looked like a foregone conclusion thanks to heavy lobbying efforts by IFPI and friends, the so-called RightsAlliance. (Yes, the bogus numbers folks we've covered before.)

Then, governments changed, and the new Minister of Culture (who's in charge of copyright, but, curiously, has no influence over ACTA) started listening to common sense. Elbæk's eight initiatives signal a sea change and, seemingly, an end to a symbiotic relationship with the entertainment industry lobby. As an example, former Head of Copyright Office Peter Schönning left the ministry after, conveniently, implementing an EU directive in a way that made DNS blocking of The Pirate Bay possible shortly before joining IFPI as chief prosecutor - and winning the precedence-setting case. Recently, Danish ISPs were ordered to block Grooveshark.

Instead of warning letters, a "positive" information campaign will teach the Danes about "the many good possibilities to legally access music, films and books". A task force will "proactively" inform users of illegal services about alternatives in comment fields and on social networks. An informal innovation forum for new, legal business models is also planned.

"I believe this is the right way to go," says Elbæk.

Interestingly, Elbæk, in an interview earlier today, gave credit to the demonstrations against ACTA earlier this year, which, "created a polical context which made the letter model nearly impossible".

Co-founder of the Danish internet think-tank Bitbureauet and ACTA-critic Henrik Chulu says, "We're pleased about the news, but there are still problems. First of all, this cements the problematic DNS-blocking scheme already in place. Secondly, it opens up for DMCA-style notice-and-takedown procedures. As we've seen in the US this inevitably leads to abuse because it sidesteps courts and privatizes enforcement."

Here's the original press release (in Danish) and a translation

Nina Paley (filmmaker, activist, occasional Techdirt contributor, and many other things) has given an interesting interview with O'Reilly's Mac Slocum, in which she talks about the concept of "intellectual disobedience" -- merging "intellectual property" with "civil disobedience." Nina argues that if you believe in creating and sharing culture these days, copyright infringement is almost necessary, and people shouldn't apologize for it, but should stand up for what they're doing:

"A lot of people infringe copyright and they're apologetic ... If you know as much about the law as, unfortunately, I do, I cannot claim ignorance and I cannot claim fair use ... I know that I'm infringing copyright and I don't apologize for it."

The phrase "intellectual disobedience" has a call-to-arms ring to it, but Paley characterized it as an introspective personal choice driven by a need to create. "It's important for me as an artist to make art, and the degree of self-censorship that is required by the law is too great," Paley said. "In order to have integrity as a human being and as an artist, I guess I'm going to be conscientiously violating the law because there's no way to comply with the law and remain a free human being."

There's much more in the full interview:
I have to admit that I'm a little bit torn by this concept. I certainly think that each individual needs to make their own decisions about what they do when creating, but my general approach has been to avoid infringement wherever possible, and focus on convincing creators that being open and encouraging others to build on their works has tremendous benefits in both the short- and long-terms. At the same time, however, I can see where Nina is coming from as an artist who feels restricted. And that's a major concern. When the laws are holding back what artists can do to express themselves, that seems incredibly troubling. So many people have this unfortunate view that if someone builds on someone else's work (even though that's the very basis for pretty much all of human culture), something has been taken away from culture or society. The truth is the opposite: building on someone else's work expands culture, and does so in fascinating ways. It both creates something new, but also often generates new interest in those original pieces (as Paley herself did with her movie Sita Sings the Blues). Old culture doesn't disappear because someone does something new with it -- it gets revitalized.

Holding that back, for some mistaken understanding of "preserving" culture, does seem like a tremendous shame. And so in those situations I think Nina's point is a good one. Creating new artwork should never be something that people apologize for. Historically, building on the works of others is how culture has been expanded. Some of our greatest forms of culture were created exactly that way. Great plays and novels of the past were really re-imaginings of older stories. Musical forms of folk music, rock music, jazz and soul all are versions of building on the works that came before (often very soon before). Hip hop, of course, is even more directly rooted in building on top of the work of others and making something new out of it. Why should people be apologetic for doing what we've always done?

We've talked many times about how legacy industries and organizations seek to protect against competition they don't like. One example we've mentioned a few times involves taxi companies and bus companies trying to shut down upstarts such as ride-sharing/carpooling services as being "unlicensed" transportation offerings. What they really mean, of course, is that they're competition in a market with artificial barriers to entry, which artificially keep prices high -- sometimes astronomically high. But, of course, as with any attempt to defeat real competition, those in support of cracking down have some sort of sob story, and governments and law enforcement often fall for it with no evidence.

Aaron DeOlivera points us to a sort of twist on the situation described above, where the real issue is people paying less money to the Port Authority of NY. You see, if you are in a carpool (of at least 3 people) and cross the George Washington Bridge (between the Bronx and New Jersey) you save $6 on the toll. That's a decent-sized savings, so people have set up an informal sort of ride share, in that those who want to get across will wait at a nearby bus station, and drivers will swing by and pick them up for the ride. The riders get a free trip across the bridge... and the driver gets a lower toll. Win-win.

Except for the Port Authority. And apparently the police are helping out the PA by giving tickets to people picking up hitchhikers based on absolutely no violation of any law.

... the crackdown on carpools smacks of a revenue-grab by the Port Authority, which has been criticized for lavish pay and benefits. With extensive overtime, some toll collectors make more than $100,000, while salaries for several officers working at the bridge topped $200,000 last year.

Curious to see what would happen, Mr. Topyan [an economist who's been observing the practice] recently picked up two passengers in plain sight of a police officer—and was promptly ticketed. Having researched the law, he spent six hours in traffic court and won his case. “The prosecutor was jumping up and down in disbelief,” he says. He didn’t have to pay.

Even so, the report notes that the police still show up. Even if there's nothing illegal happening, just having the police show up -- and having people think that there might be something wrong -- causes people to worry about taking part.

We've talked a few times about how attacks on new innovations in the name of protecting copyright can create massive chilling effects. For example, the increasingly questionable arguments against Megaupload have created a real chill for online cloud storage providers. That was likely manifest last week in the news that Dropbox was killing off its "public folders" feature in deference to its link feature, basically making the product less useful.

Matt Schruers, from CCIA has an interesting blog post up which ties actions like those done by Dropbox here with a new study showing how the chilling effects of bad copyright law can impact innovation. The full study (pdf) is actually something of a follow up to an earlier study we wrote about, which showed how good judicial rulings on copyright which allowed for greater innovation (such as the Cablevision ruling, which allowed cloud-based DVRs to exist) contributed directly to greater funding of innovation.

This new study, also by Harvard professor Josh Lerner, highlights the unfortunate opposite impact: the chilling effects on investment in innovation that comes as a result of anti-innovation judicial rulings. In this case, Lerner looked at specific rulings in the EU:

We analyze the effects of a court ruling in France and several court rulings in Germany on VC investment in cloud computing firms in these countries. These court rulings were seen as negatively affecting the development of cloud computing, and our findings confirm this view by showing that these rulings regarding the scope of copyrights had significant, negative impacts on investment. Specifically, we find that VC investment in cloud computing firms declined in Germany and France, relative to the rest of the EU, after the French and German rulings. Our results suggest that these rulings led to an average reduction in VC investment in French and German cloud computing firms of $4.6 and $2.8 million per quarter, respectively. This implies a total decrease in French and German VC investment of $87 million over an approximately three year period. When paired with the findings of the enhanced effects of VC investment relative to corporate investment, this may be the equivalent of $269.7 million in traditional R&D investment.

Combine these two studies and you can see how these chilling effects can be quite massive in terms of investment in innovation. Of course, investment alone is not the sole determinant of the pace or success of innovation, but it is a key factor. And scaring investors away from innovations can have a major impact on the public and the economy.

It's really quite amazing how frequently those targeted by parody freak out and reach for intellectual property law in an attempt to silence the speech directed at them. The latest is the group "Invisible Children", which became quite famous (or infamous) earlier this year for the viral success of the "Kony 2012" video, which sought to build support for arresting Joseph Kony. Apparently a group of NYU grad students created a website called Kickstriker, which is a parody of Kickstarter, but to pretend that it's a crowdsourcing campaign to hire people to go get Kony.

However, as Wired's Danger Room blog discovered, Inivisible Children doesn't like being parodied. So they sent a cease-and-desist arguing that it violated both their copyrights and trademarks.

“It has come to our attention that you are causing public confusion through your use of Invisible Children’s copyrighted and trademarked property on www.kickstriker.com. This impermissible use is a blatant and egregious infringement of Invisible Children’s valuable copyright and trademark rights,” reads a letter Invisible Children sent last week and acquired by Danger Room. “[F]ailure to cease and desist your unlawful use of Invisible Children’s intellectual property will result in legal action.”

Among Invisible Children’s demands: “Confirm in writing that you have permanently deleted all electronic copies of the unauthorized and infringing materials from any computers, servers, or other distribution media”; take down any links to Invisible Children’s material; and declare “in a prominent location” that Kickstriker is “in no way associated with Invisible Children, Inc. or the Kony 2012 campaign.”

Thankfully, the students behind Kickstriker appear to know that these demands are ridiculous and have replied, with an explanation of fair use. You would think, in this day and age, that someone might have explained all that to the Invisible Children folks before they sent the takedown.

Once again, we are left stunned by the sheer ridiculousness of Congress. In a House Judiciary Committee markup concerning the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), a proposed amendment to require the NSA to reveal how many times it had spied on Americans was voted down 20 - 11, led by chair Lamar Smith who just kept talking about how "important" it was get past the markup phase and pass the bill. Meanwhile, Rep. Dan Lungren lashed out at those who wanted the NSA to explain how often it had spied on Americans without warrants under this bill by saying (and I kid you not): "What evidence is there that it is being used to spy on Americans?"

You see, that's the problem. The NSA doesn't have to tell anyone -- and whenever officials ask, they're given ridiculous answers, like the claim that it would violate the privacy of Americans to tell Congress how many Americans' privacy the NSA violated. It's stunning that our elected officials -- many of whom don't know themselves what the NSA is doing -- seem to have no qualms passing this update to the bill without even being willing to ask a simple question: how many Americans have been spied on using this regulation?

On the Senate side, as we've noted, Senators Wyden and Udall have been indicating (within the limitations they have, due to security clearances) that the NSA is quite clearly using this law incredibly broadly -- perhaps to the level of scooping up all phone data, which goes way, way, way beyond the text of the law. If some in Congress are so sure that there's no evidence that it's being used to spy on Americans, then have the NSA answer the damn question. But, no, instead, they insist that we just have to push it through, or, as Lamar Smith says, "We have a duty to ensure the intelligence community can gather the intelligence they need to protect our country."

You know who you have an even bigger duty to? The American public. That's who you represent. Not the intelligence community. The failure of our elected officials to give even the most basic oversight to the NSA is astonishing. It's shameful. We all deserve better.

Helene Lindvall is back, bringing with her one of the worst anti-piracy arguments ever crafted. You might remember her from such Techdirt posts as "You Can't Trust Anyone Who Gives Stuff Away But Still Makes Money" and "Not Wanting To Spend All Your Time Playing Pirate Whack-A-Mole Is Defeatist." She's topped herself this time, though, making the claim that piracy has started a "self-perpetuating conveyer belt of cookie-cutter pop stars."

Her post at the Guardian carries this provoking title: "Why piracy is perpetuating plastic pop," and it theorizes that piracy's ravaging of the music industry has resulted in a non-stop stream of ready-made pop stars, the likes of which has never been seen, except for pretty much the last 50 years of the recording industry. In her hurry to blame piracy for American Idol, Miley Cyrus and other artists who carry a hint of "assembly line" about their person, Lindvall blows right past the obvious fact that pre-made pop far precedes file sharing, and arrives at this bizarre conclusion:

Could it be that instead of creating a more level playing field and opportunities for, say, a new Nirvana or Smashing Pumpkins to break through, piracy and the unwillingness to pay for music is creating a self-perpetuating conveyer belt of cookie-cutter pop stars?

Could it be? Could piracy have gutted the market so much that labels are forced to play it safe and only invest in pop stars? Really? Is it only NOW that the recording industry is shifting its gears towards "safer" music and "plastic pop" and that it has spent the last half-century-plus cultivating only the finest, deepest talent and rewarding listeners with act after virtuoso act?

Never mind the fact that pop music has existed (to some extent) since the 1940's (60 years BN*). Never mind the fact that Top 40 radio has been around since the early 1950s, a format based on teenage girls' interaction with jukeboxes (play the same handful of songs, over and over). Never mind the fact that bubblegum pop and the rise of pre-fab bands began in the mid-1960s. All of this predates the repeated killing of music by anything stronger than a cassette tape. Never mind the fact that one of the most hated of all pop entities, the Eurovision Song Contest, has been tormenting the ears of listeners since 1952.

*Before Napster.

Never mind the fact that for every Nevermind, there are a million other weightless albums released into the Top 40 ether by major labels. Never mind the fact that Nirvana's success swept in a long string of much less talented grunge purveyors. Why? Because Nirvana sold albums. The Smashing Pumpkins were also beneficiaries of Nirvana's financial success. The major labels pick up acts if they think they'll sell, not because they have a burning desire to only offer the best music to the world. Hell, even Bob Dylan got dropped from his original label for failing to push enough vinyl, and people consider him to be one of the finest songwriters of all time.

Basically, her whole argument boils down to good, old-fashioned elitism. Lindvall automatically assumes pop is a universally "bad" thing, presumably because it's popular, and points the finger at piracy. It's only slightly less insulting than saying that if the barriers to entry are removed then everything will suck. Instead, it lays the blame on the broad shoulders of John Q. Pirate, whose illegal efforts have "cheapened" quality, non-pop music .

Compare Lindvall's theory to Gavin Castleton, whose post for The Trichordist gets expounded on by David Newhoff. Here's Newhoff's opening line:

Imagine your diet will henceforth be determined by the tastes of a majority of American ten-year-olds.

Sounds like "plastic pop," doesn't it? Newhoff's post deals mainly with the film industry, but he first takes a moment to bash all these new artists operating outside the established systems:

One assumption behind DIY culture seems to be that the best work is being systematically squashed by big media conglomerates, and that the level playing field of the Web will allow great art to emerge through the ultimate, democratic means - popularity supported by algorithms. This theory has proven generally untrue for journalism, music, and publishing; and we're now on the leading edge of its proving untrue for filmed entertainment.

Newhoff off-handedly insults DIYers here, tying them in with spam bots and other SEO gamers, while simultaneously making the implication that the industries value art over commerce. He quotes Castleton, who goes even further, hilariously suggesting that the labels and studios are actually well-designed filters, rather than commercial ventures:

"When you release the valve without well-tuned filters in place, you get what we have now: muddy waters (not the artist, the metaphor). You have tracks from seasoned artists like Radiohead distributed side by side with garbage (not the band, the metaphor), and you have transferred the burden and blessing of filtering from more official gatekeepers to the consumer..."

God forbid the consumer (you know, the one expected to reward every artist monetarily) have any control over the incoming stream of content. We simply can't have people deciding who or what they want to throw money at. After all, they're only the public, an unwashed group of freeloaders who don't know what they want or how to show their appreciation when a label or studio hands it to them. Over in Lindvall's post, Noel Gallagher (the slightly less loutish half of Oasis) spells out exactly how the public should be treated by artists and their preferred gatekeepers:

[A]s I understand it the consumer didn't want Jimi Hendrix, but they got him - and it changed the world ... Fuck the customer. He doesn't know what he wants. You fucking give it to him and he likes it.

The consumer [says] 'Where's my free music on the internet? Is this a free download?' Fuck off! It cost me a quarter of a million pounds to make it, you're not getting it for nothing. I want my quarter of a million back, thank you very much. That's why we're rock stars.

Quarter of a million pounds to make a record. $250 million to make a movie. You'd think at some point someone would start dialing back the costs if they thought they had a very slim chance of recouping. But, no. These dollar figures are tossed around as some sort of anecdotal evidence that everything must return to the heyday of previous formats (CDs, DVDs, etc.). Here's the story, morning glory: Mr./Mrs. Consumer give not one single fook how much you sunk into your last album or how long you had to tour to pay it off.

Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins) also weighs in on Lindvall's post, decrying the fact that, as a musician, he's required to earn and cultivate his own audience:

"People like me used to be auteurs, saying 'I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do, you like it or you don't like it' and if you're really good they'll come," said Corgan. "Now I'm supposed to beg for attention. It's completely counterintuitive to why I became a musician in the first place and the personality of someone like me.

"I'm supposed to have enough of an ego to make my own world, my own music, my own artwork - everything - but then say, 'Please, please will you just fork out that $10, I know that's a really big decision'. What? When did that become such a big decision? Even if we could find the right price point the general person doesn't believe in making that purchase."

Billy, I hate to point this out, but musicians have always had to ask customers to fork out money for their albums. The aspect you don't seem to like is the fact that there's not a gatekeeper between you and the audience, doing the dirty work like asking for money or shoving your CD into the New Releases rack. You had to beg for attention when you first started. Now, you're stuck with everyone else, Connecting With Fans. Attention is scarce. More scarce than money these days.

The processes have been democratized and that does nothing but ire those who used be safe inside the clubhouse, occasionally flinging art in the direction of the general public with one hand out and the other flipping them the bird. Now that anyone can get in the game and make their own fortune without yoking themselves to gatekeepers, the club members have begun resorting to insulting everyone without a membership card. Back on Newhoff's blog:

No one can argue that the consumer isn't "getting what he wants, and for free," but the democratization of journalism has broadened the concept to include literally anyone with a computer. As with Caselton's Radiohead example, the best journalists in the world now swim in murky waters amid every crackpot, amateur netizen who considers himself a reporter.

That's the internet for you. Freeloaders. Crackpots. And saddest of all, the Club Members are now forced to share space with the General Population.

The digital-age conceit (because the Web is an egomaniac's paradise) is that the consumer always knows best; but this apparently fair and reasonable-sounding attitude may well be a greater culture killer than all the suits in Hollywood have ever been. Why? Because, just like solid news reporting, great art is not created by popular consent; to the contrary, it is often created in spite of it. When we shift the "burden and blessing" of gatekeeping from a finite number of professionals involved in the process to an infinite number of amateurs detached from the process, we are simultaneously creating work by committee in real-time while undermining the principle of investment in that work in the first place.

Between Newhoff and Lindvall (and Castleton), the general public is nothing more than a freeloading collective hellbent on destroying culture and rebuilding it via pre-fab pop stars and personal blogs. They decry the level playing field as harmful to the efforts of truly creative and talented artists, the likes of which will be buried by either (Lindvall) "assembly line artists" or (Newhoff) "crackpot bloggers."

All this faux concern for the outer limits of artistic expression completely ignores the fact that the fringe artists, the avant garde, the groundbreakers have as little use for these very same gatekeepers (that Lindvall and Newhoff hold in such high regard) as these gatekeepers had for them. It's been the independent artists, like Amanda Palmer and Ok Go that have ditched the label system and struck out on their own, and with great success. Many, many artists over the years have divorced themselves from major labels and studios simply because of the limitations. Others have been cast off by these same labels and studios for a lack of commercial success.

Artists like Amanda Palmer and Ok Go aren't held back by the public, they're enabled by the public. Lindvall and Newhoff act as if these artists have to only produce content that will appeal to the widest possible audience -- those ugly "masses." But what the successful artists have shown is exactly the opposite. Under the old system they were expected to do what Lindvall and Newhoff decry about the new system: dumb stuff down and produce something with a broad appeal. But under the new system, these artists have been able to find their niche and create the art they want to create. It's an upside-down world from the one that Lindvall and Newhoff see.

Yet somehow, Lindvall and Newhoff believe that scaling back the role of gatekeepers will somehow prevent artists like Billy Corgan or Noel Gallagher from ever succeeding again. And rather than distance themselves from the so-called "pop manufacturers," they attack the public, their own potential fanbase. There's always been a market for lowest-common-denominator pop culture, but lowered entry barriers are making it easier for even the most niche of artists to find an audience. This should be celebrated rather than mourned, but Lindvall and Newhoff seem to feel anything produced outside the "old" system is nothing but mediocrity.

We've certainly written an awful lot about the ridiculousness of the concept of "cyber war." Even with things like Stuxnet and Flame, it seems silly to compare what amounts to either electronic espionage or a little hacking as "war." But perhaps we were looking at it the wrong way. In a Foreign Policy article by John Arquilla, he argues that perhaps we should be embracing this kind of "cool war" as it can be effective at stopping threats (even distributed ones like terrorist operations, rather than just centralized ones like governments), while causing minimal bloodshed:

On balance, it seems that cyberwar capabilities have real potential to deal with some of the world's more pernicious problems, from crime and terrorism to nuclear proliferation. In stark contrast to pitched battles that would regularly claim thousands of young soldiers' lives during Robert E. Lee's time, the very nature of conflict may come to be reshaped along more humane lines of operations. War, in this sense, might be "made better" -- think disruption rather than destruction. More decisive, but at the same time less lethal.

And, indeed, if we believe that reports of "cyber attacks" being used to make planes fall from the sky are greatly exaggerated, perhaps we should welcome a "war" that mainly involves hackers vs. hackers trying to disrupt each others "real" warfare capabilities. But, of course, there are plenty of other issues that come up here as well -- such as how secret hacking programs can be abused. If it gets governments to stop physical battles that lead to real lives lost, that does seem like an improvement, though I'm not sure anyone should think that continuing to attack each other through computers is ever a "good" situation overall.

We've argued for years that many professions that require certain forms of "licensing" are often more about restricting supply. That's not to say those who set up the licensing effort didn't have the best of intentions, but the end effect often doesn't actually do much to benefit the public. I'm reminded of this after reading economist Charles Wheelen explaining why Albert Einstein technically wouldn't have been "qualified" to teach high school physics after retiring from a distinguished career at Princeton. And, for Wheelen, it's not just hypothetical:

When my wife tried to make a mid-career switch to teaching math in the Chicago Public Schools, I no longer needed a hypothetical example. I realized that licensing had the potential to be every bit as harmful in practice as I'd been saying it was in theory.

My wife Leah graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth. She was a computer science major with an emphasis on math. She worked in the software industry, built a company, and then sold it. She seemed, in every respect, perfectly qualified to teach middle-school math.

She found a job at a school adjacent to a public housing project on Chicago's South Side. On about day three of that job—after she had met the students, decorated the classroom, and started teaching—the principal informed Leah that she did not have a "middle-school math endorsement," which the State of Illinois requires.

Amazingly, this happened a second time as well. She did get the "math endorsement," but then lost a job teaching algebra because she didn't have a special "algebra endorsement." And yet, she's clearly qualified to teach those subjects. And, even more importantly, Wheelen points to research showing that students with "certified" teachers don't do any better than those with "uncertified" teachers -- suggesting the whole process has little to do with making sure students get the best education.