Back in 2010, we wrote about how some ancient patents from OpenMarket (now held by a company called Soverain) for an "online shopping cart" were suddenly being used against a ton of online retailers, including NewEgg, QVC, HSN, Amway, JC Penny, Victoria's Secret and more. So when we saw the news that a case concerning the use of an ecommerce patent against a bunch of online retailers, including NewEgg, Amazon, eBay, Dell, Office Depot, Costco and Target had been dismissed and the patent declared invalid, at first I thought it must be the same case. Silly me. Of course there are lots of patent lawsuits against ecommerce providers. And this one was different, involving a company called Kelora Systems, who holds a patent (6,275,821) on "executing a guided parametric search."

The judge, however, found that the retailers didn't infringe, that the claims weren't valid and said that the defendants can recover their legal fees. What's incredible about this case is that when it was originally filed it was against 16 defendants and then more were added a few months later, but as you look down the docket, you also see plenty of orders granting stipulations for dismissal, which are really indications that many of the defendants chose not to fight, but rather to pay up. I bet those companies, including 1-800-Flowers, Briggs & Stratton, PC Connection, CircuitCity, Officemax and others are kind of regretting that decision right now. Kelora, of course, has been hyping up the fact that it's also signed other "licensing" deals with companies like K-Swiss, Footlocker and Sur La Table without having to first sue them.

Of course, I wonder how many such companies will be willing to take out a license after seeing this ruling...

Back in March, we wrote about an important development in India, where a compulsory license for Bayer's Nexavar anti-cancer drug was granted. Bayer, of course, is fighting back:

in its 37-page appeal to the Intellectual Property Appellate Board, Bayer has "demanded the withdrawal of the country’s first compulsory license given to Natco Pharma, arguing that a three-fourths reduction in the price of the anti-cancer drug by another Indian firm has made the permit redundant and its patent itself is vulnerable to being revoked," the Economic Times, India’s leading business newspaper, reported on 19 May. Bayer says CIPLA’s new price "will render Natco’s price unreasonable and defeat the purpose of compulsory licensing," according to the newspaper.

As that shows, there's been an interesting twist in this story. Cipla, another Indian manufacturer of generics, has announced that it too is coming out with a version of Nexavar, pricing it at $125 for 120 tablets. That's even cheaper than Natco's price of $163, to say nothing of Bayer's $5,128 for the same course. A key difference is that India's Patent Controller has granted a compulsory licence to Natco, but not to Cipla. In fact, Bayer has said that it is taking Cipla to court over its production of a cheap version of Nexavar.

Bayer is employing some very strange logic here. On the one hand, it is saying that Cipla's cheaper version of Nexavar means that Natco's licence is no longer needed, and should be revoked. On the other, Bayer is suing Cipla because it has produced Nexavar without the compulsory license that Natco has. Clearly, Bayer hopes to get the best of both worlds -- the revocation of Natco's compulsory licence, and a court ruling against Cipla, which would leave Bayer once more as the only supplier of Nexavar.

Bayer seems to be trying to make that outcome more palatable by emphasizing that it has already reduced the price of Nexavar for some people:

Bayer stresses that to facilitate access for patients to innovative treatments, it has had a Patient Access Programme in place since the launch of Nexavar in India in 2008. Bayer says that this programme, last expanded in April 2012, reduces the price for the monthly treatment with Nexavar for qualified persons to about a tenth of the regular pharmacy price (Rs 280,000 or $5,128) for the complete duration of treatment.

But it's not clear how many patients have actually benefited from this program. And in any case, the reduced price of $512 per 120 tablets is still three times higher than Natco's pricing, which would put it out of the reach of many poorer patients. Compulsory licensing, by contrast, has driven down the price to $163, and maybe even to $125 if Cipla is allowed to offer it too. In other words, the availability of indigenous alternatives has caused the price to drop from completely unaffordable levels to ones that are more realistic for the India market -- exactly as generics are supposed to do:

Health advocates and cancer patients are happy that the fight between the big brand-name pharmaceutical producers and local generic drug makers is making cancer drugs cheaper. The vast majority of Indians don’t have any form of health insurance and out of pocket payments continue to be among the highest in the world. Cancer has also become one of the ten leading causes of death in India today. It is estimated that there are nearly 2 – 2.5 million cancer cases at any given point in time in the country.

Against that background, provisions in TPP that will make it much harder for local manufacturers to produce low-cost generics legally are troubling. They represent a clear attempt by the US to prevent the kind of access to vital patented drugs that India's compulsory licensing has permitted. Western pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders may rejoice if that happens, but many of those in emerging economies who are unable to afford life-saving medicines will die as a result.

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City planning in the future might have to take into account some technologies that sound like science fiction from the 1960s. Probably no flying cars, but there could be autonomous vehicles and less sprawl. Owning a car might not even be practical. In any case, parking lots will likely be long gone, and here are just a few links on some interesting parking situations.

• What goes well with a liveried chauffeur? Perhaps a parking spot that costs a million bucks. The first parking spot in NYC listed for $1 million is in a private garage at 66 E. 11th St. [url]
• One of the first automated parking garages opened in NYC in 2002 -- and it dropped a few cars before working out its bugs. But now, car owners don't have to worry about parking attendants (like Richard Edson) taking cars out for joyrides... [url]
• When cars can drive themselves, they'll just drop us off, circle the block and/or park themselves somewhere (hopefully in a good neighborhood). They could also meet up with their other robot-car friends at the automated parking garage and waste time chatting about power converters.... [url]
• To find some more bizarre/crazy stuff, check out some things that other StumbleUpon users have found. [url]  

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

While we know that at least Senator Ron Wyden understands why CISPA (and related cybersecurity bills) are bad, there are still 99 other Senators who don't seem quite so clear on the matter. And they're about to vote on such bills very, very soon. A bunch of groups have set up a site called Privacy is Awesome to help you contact your Senator today to let them know that you do think that privacy is awesome, and you won't accept them voting to take away your privacy via overly expansive cybersecurity bills like CISPA or the other bills the Senate is considering.

Senator Wyden has been at the forefront of raising concerns about the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (as with many other issues we follow), specifically over the total lack of transparency from the USTR on the issue. While USTR Ron Kirk has pretended that "listening" to a few people is transparency, it's not. Actually sharing what you're doing is transparency.

Now, it's one thing for the USTR to refuse to share with the public what it's supposedly negotiating on their behalf -- but what if it is refusing to share with the very people in charge of overseeing its actions? As you hopefully know it's Congress, not the Executive branch, that has the authority to regulate foreign commerce. While the USTR is often granted the power to handle negotiations, it is only to be done with oversight from Congress.

So, you would think that the staff director on the Senate Finance Committee's Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Global Competitiveness, would be able to "oversee" what the USTR is doing by getting a copy of the USTR's positions. That staffer, who works for Senator Wyden, got all the proper security clearances... and the USTR basically gave him the finger. According to Wyden:

As the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, my office is responsible for conducting oversight over the USTR and trade negotiations. To do that, I asked that my staff obtain the proper security credentials to view the information that USTR keeps confidential and secret. This is material that fully describes what the USTR is seeking in the TPP talks on behalf of the American people and on behalf of Congress. More than two months after receiving the proper security credentials, my staff is still barred from viewing the details of the proposals that USTR is advancing.

But you know who's not having any trouble seeing the details? The MPAA, Comcast, PHRMA and others. Again, from Senator Wyden:

The majority of Congress is being kept in the dark as to the substance of the TPP negotiations, while representatives of U.S. corporations – like Halliburton, Chevron, PHRMA, Comcast, and the Motion Picture Association of America – are being consulted and made privy to details of the agreement.

Wyden is introducing some new legislation in response to this, called the Congressional Oversight Over Trade Negotiations Act, which is actually just a clarification of legislation passed in 2002 that created the Congressional Oversight Group in an attempt to increase coordination between Congress and USTR on such matters. Again, Senator Wyden:

Congress passed legislation in 2002 to form the Congressional Oversight Group, or COG, to foster more USTR consultation with Congress. I was a senator in 2002. I voted for that law and I can tell you the intention of that law was to ensure that USTR consulted with more Members of Congress not less.

In trying to get to the bottom of why my staff is being denied information, it seems that some in the Executive Branch may be interpreting the law that established the COG to mean that only the few Members of Congress who belong to the COG can be given access to trade negotiation information, while every other Member of Congress, and their staff, must be denied such access. So, this is not just a question of whether or not cleared staff should have access to information about the TPP talks, this is a question of whether or not the administration believes that most Members of Congress can or should have a say in trade negotiations.

Again, having voted for that law, I strongly disagree with such an interpretation and find it offensive that some would suggest that a law meant to foster more consultation with Congress is intended to limit it. But given that the TPP negotiations are currently underway and I – and the vast majority of my colleagues and their staff – continue to be denied a full understanding of what the USTR is seeking in the agreement, we do not have time to waste on a protracted legal battle over this issue. Therefore, I am introducing legislation to clarify the intent of the COG statute.

The legislation, I propose, is straightforward. It gives all Members of Congress and staff with appropriate clearance access to the substance of trade negotiations. Finally, Members of Congress who are responsible for conducting oversight over the enforcement of trade agreements will be provided information by the Executive Branch indicating whether our trading partners are living up to their trade obligations. Put simply, this legislation would ensure that the representatives elected by the American people are afforded the same level of influence over our nation’s policies as the paid representatives of PHRMA, Halliburton and the Motion Picture Association.

How ridiculous is it that a Senator in charge of oversight of the USTR has to introduce special legislation just to find out what's being negotiated by the USTR, supposedly on the public's behalf? The ridiculous levels of secrecy from the USTR are shameful. It's sad that it hasn't received more attention.

Summary of Part One: Consumers, trained by content providers to think most entertainment can be enjoyed freely, no longer take copyright seriously as a legal or moral imperative. It's like a parking meter that's rarely checked. When we do get a (large) ticket, we're outraged. After all, no one else got one for doing exactly the same thing. Our cognitive dissonance has left copyright a law in name only.

Media industries have made things worse for themselves by training customers to think of ads and other indirect sources of revenue-generation as an inconvenience, a feature of programming best not talked about. Ads are woven into the flow of the programming, and increasingly hidden in product placements and other inline forms of sponsorship. My favorite brand of frozen pizza is now co-marketed with the new "Avengers" movie. The psychology of advertising is subtle and complex—or maybe not.

In either case, the result is that at the most basic level—at the reptilian cortex of the brain—consumers are encouraged to ignore the reality that advertisers pay for or highly subsidize most forms of content. Because the economics of content are kept mysterious, we have no reason to believe that if we enjoy movies, music, books or television shows at the wrong time, or with the wrong people, or without the ads, we're undermining the basic rules of the industry. How can we be expected to understand that doing so is not only dangerous to the continuation of that longstanding model but also a crime, punishable by enormous fines and even possible jail time?

What consumers do see, however, is that as content has been translated, often kicking and screaming, into digital form, the unit cost of production, distribution, and marketing has plummeted. Yet for most media, the price has not decreased proportionally, largely because rightsholders want to protect increasingly uneconomical physical media formats such as hardcover books, newspapers, and movie DVDs.

Worse, even as the unit cost of media declines, the rules against unauthorized copying have become stricter. It's as if there were suddenly millions of new parking spaces available across Manhattan, but parking lots keep charging more than $10 an hour. And all the meters are suspiciously broken.

How did this happen? Since well before the invention of the photocopier, media industries have pursued a consistent if counter-productive legal strategy of responding to disruptive technologies that decrease costs and open new markets by lobbying for extensions to copyright terms, increased penalties, and criminalizing more behaviors.

Their theory—if there is one—is that technologies that make it cheaper to create and distribute content also make it cheaper to violate copyright (see Napster, et. al.). Cheaper production is ignored, while increased potential for violations requires enhanced penalties that can't, in any case, be enforced. It's a lose-lose-lose strategy for producers, creators, and consumers. And it's a loop we've been stuck in for decades.

One result of that fatal loop is that under current law the concept of fair use—long understood as a safety valve to an otherwise economically-dangerous copyright monopoly—exists in name only. And with copyright terms continually and retroactively extended, almost nothing enters the unrestricted "public domain" anymore, even though the continued expansion of the public domain was the whole point of granting the "limited" copyright monopoly in the first place.

Copyright was designed as a low-cost and largely self-enforcing mechanism for achieving two important goals: incentivizing creators to build the intellectual capital of a new nation and making sure that their efforts could be used and built upon as quickly and as freely as possible. Copyright gives authors a monopoly, which necessarily reduces potential social value. (Economists call it "dead weight loss.")

But there's an essential caveat. Once the limited period of the monopoly expires, all rights are unreserved. The public can do as it pleases with the work—copy it, adapt it, reframe it, anthologize it, mock it. (Some amount of mocking is allowed even before the term expires.) As the Constitution puts it, Congress shall have the power—and not the obligation—"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

But copyright law no longer promotes the progress of anything. It just secures more rights. And patent law, in its own state of disarray, is even worse. It's actually counter-productive, as if to make it a crime just to think about parking.

This dangerous imbalance in the system is the result of misguided efforts to preemptively rescue American content industries from wave after wave of disruptive copying technologies, each seen as the certain destroyer of the content enterprise. Jack Valenti's infamous testimony that the VCR was "to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" is still chilling in both its rhetorical excess and its misreading of the future. (And how was the "American public" threatened at all?)

The imbalance of copyright today is the result of Hollywood's irrational fear of the unknown. As Prof. Tom Bell made visually clear with his 2009 "Mickey Mouse Curve," the regular extension of copyright terms and penalties, especially in the last hundred years, has not been based on the reasoned deliberation of Congress so much as the unrelenting lobbying of the Disney Corporation, determined to spend whatever it must to keep every iota of its creative work out of the public domain. Worse, Disney's obsession is about control, not maximizing profits.

As Bell's curve demonstrates, whenever the earliest works of Disney are about to lose copyright protection, Congress steps in to extend it retroactively. This is no coincidence. But it is ironic coming from a company whose oeuvre includes so many films based on content (the Hunchback, Hercules, Mulan, Tarzan) that had only recently entered the public domain. Or maybe not ironic at all.
Source: Tom W. Bell
(It is a persistent myth, by the way, that allowing "Steamboat Willie"—itself a parody of a Buster Keaton film—to enter the public domain would mean the end of protection for Mickey Mouse. While freely copying those early cartoons would no longer violate Disney's rights, all the later works would still enjoy their full run of exclusive rights. And Disney's trademarks in its characters and character designs would greatly limit what others could do with Mickey beyond copying the public domain cartoons themselves. Trademarks are valid so long as consumers continue to associate them with a particular source—potentially forever.)

Irrational policy decisions produce unintended consequences. The successful campaign to continually and dramatically extend copyright is increasingly a pyrrhic victory for the content industry. By removing all of the safety valves against abuse of the "limited" monopoly, copyright, as Supreme Court Justice Breyer has argued in dissent, has effectively become permanent. The law is now rewritten solely to protect the interests of a few large rightsholders.

Yet traditional forms of legal enforcement have become nearly impossible. Consumers use a constant supply of disruptive technologies (the cloud, P2P protocols, encryption) to rebel against a dictatorial copyright regime. And the speed of innovation has long-since outstripped the speed of Congress and the courts. Most consumers now see themselves and each other not as lawbreakers but as freedom fighters. Copyright, in its current mutant form, is now firmly on the wrong side of history.

Next: How to Reset the Balance and Save Copyright from Itself

Two years ago, we wrote about how YouTube took down the original "Rickroll" video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up" -- perhaps the most well known internet meme ever. It seems that that video was taken down yet again, this time due to a "copyright claim from AVG Technologies." Not surprisingly, soon after the news of this came out the video was put back up.

TorrentFreak claims that this AVG is the same as the maker of the popular anti-virus software, who almost certainly has no legitimate copyright claim to the video. And while there are other options out there, as well, it once again raises some questions about bogus takedowns, and the "silence first, ask questions later" process that is almost mandatory under the DMCA. Sure, the world isn't suffering much from a bogus Rickroll takedown (and some may argue they benefit), but just the fact that random third parties seem to be able to take down super popular videos raises serious questions about why we've set things up to work this way.

Remember back when Oracle was claiming that Google owed it billions of dollars for infringing on Oracle patents and copyrights? Yeah. Forget that. The jury just said that there's no patent infringement at all and the judge has dismissed the jury. All that's left in this phase of the case is for the judge to make a determination over the copyright issue -- and if he decides APIs cannot be covered by copyright, Oracle will have a complete and total loss. Of course, Oracle will almost certainly appeal, but this case has turned into something of a complete disaster for the company.

Groklaw has the details with "no" answers across the board:

Clerk:

Question 1: has Oracle proved by preponderance of evidence that Google infringed?

Claim 11: not proven
27: no
29: no
39: no
40: no
41: no

Question 2: not proven

1: no
20: no

Question 3: no answer, no response, not applicable.

YouTube has announced that 72 hours of video is now being uploaded to its service every minute. Earlier this year, the statistic was that 60 hours of video was uploaded to its service every minute:

In 2007 we started at six hours [of uploads per minute], then in 2010 we were at 24 hours, then 35, then 48, and now...60 hours of video every minute, an increase of more than 25 percent in the last eight months.

This year, a 25% increase will probably take around around six months. In other words, the rate at which uploads occur is accelerating. Presumably at some point things will level off, but there's no sign of that yet, and it's not hard to see YouTube video uploads hitting 120 hours a minute or more.

Now consider the calls from some governments that Google and others pre-screen user-generated material. Just how do they think anyone can do that when every second there's one or more hours of new material flooding in? The challenge is particularly acute for video, which does not lend itself to automatic screening, unlike text, say. Such machine-based approaches are still extremely rough, and will either let through material governments want censored, or else err massively in the other direction, blocking all kinds of harmless footage.

As Google's latest figures for YouTube demonstrate, the mismatch between what governments want and what is possible is only going to get worse, thanks to Moore's Law and its analogs for storage and bandwidth. It's not clear how this is going to be resolved, but with more and more politicians calling for "something to be done", the chances of a good outcome based on rational policy making don't look good.

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Senator Ron Wyden took to the floor of the Senate earlier this week to speak out against pretty much all of the current cybersecurity proposals out there arguing that "privacy should be the default, not the exception." While noting that narrowly targeted cybersecurity rules could be helpful in protecting consumers, he stated that it seems clear that these bills are much more focused on opening up the internet for government to spy and monitor activities online: The full speech is chock full of good points, such as the importance of trust in creating a functioning internet, and how these bills can ruin that by cutting away at our privacy:

Congress’ effort to develop a comprehensive approach to cyber security must not erode that trust. When Americans go online to consume digital services and goods, they must believe and know with some certainty that their privacy is adequately protected. The content Americans consume must be at least as private as their library records, video rentals, and book purchases in the brick and mortar world. Our law enforcement and Intelligence agencies should not be free to monitor and catalog the speech of Americans just because it’s online.

But the bill passed by the other body, known as CISPA, would erode that trust. As an attempt to protect our networks from real cyber-threats CISPA is an example of what not to do. CISPA repeals important provisions of existing electronic surveillance law that have been on the books for years without instituting corresponding privacy, confidentiality, and civil liberties safeguards. It creates uncertainty in place of trust, it erodes statutory and constitutional civil rights protections, and it creates a surveillance regime in place of the targeted, nimble, cyber-security program that is needed to truly protect this nation.

Unfortunately, S. 2105, the bill before the Senate shares some of these defects. Currently Internet services and service providers have agreements with their customers that allow them to police and protect their networks and users. Rather than simply allowing these internet companies to share information on users who violate their contracts and pose a security threat, the House and Senate proposals authorize a broad based information sharing regime that can operate with impunity. This would allow the personal data of individual Americans to be shared across a multitude of bureaucratic, military, and law enforcement agencies. This takes place regardless of the privacy agreements individual Americans have with their service providers.

In fact, both the House and Senate bills subordinate all existing privacy rules and constitutional principles to the poorly defined interest of “cyber-security.”

Wyden goes even further later in the speech noting -- as many of us have been arguing all along -- that these bills are a massive overreaction to the possibility of an issue, which are much more about ways for government contractors to profit from fear:

As they stand, these bills are an overreaction to a legitimate fear. The American people will respond by limiting their online activities. That’s a recipe to stifle speech, innovation, job creation, and social progress.

I believe these bills will encourage the development of a cyber security industry that profits from fear and whose currency is Americans private data. These bills create a Cyber Industrial Complex that has an interest in preserving the problem to which it is the solution.

There's a lot more in the speech that's worth hearing, so check it out.

You may recall last summer that Apple, Microsoft, EMC, RIM, Ericsson and Sony all teamed up to buy Nortel's patents for $4.5 billion. They beat out a team of Google and Intel who bid a bit less. While there was some antitrust scrutiny over the deal, it was dropped and the purchase went through. Apparently, the new owners picked off a bunch of patents to transfer to themselves... and then all (minus EMC, who, one hopes, was horrified by the plans) decided to support a massive new patent troll armed with the remaining 4,000 patents. The company is called Rockstar Consortium, and it's run by the folks who used to run Nortel's patent licensing program anyway -- but now employs people whose job it is to just find other companies to threaten:

But Widdowson is a specialist. He's one of 10 reverse-engineers working full time for a stealthy company funded by some of the biggest names in technology: Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion, Sony, and Ericsson. Called the Rockstar Consortium, the 32-person outfit has a single-minded mission: It examines successful products, like routers and smartphones, and it tries to find proof that these products infringe on a portfolio of over 4,000 technology patents once owned by one of the world's largest telecommunications companies.

When a Rockstar engineer uncovers evidence of infringement, the company documents it, contacts the manufacturer, and demands licensing fees for the patents in question. The demand is backed by the implicit threat of a patent lawsuit in federal court. Eight of the company's staff are lawyers. In the last two months, Rockstar has started negotiations with as many as 100 potential licensees. And with control of a patent portfolio covering core wireless communications technologies such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) and 3G, there is literally no end in sight.

The article admits that Nortel got most of these patents because it wanted them for "defensive" reasons. And now look at how they're being used. Remember that the next time you hear a company promise to only use its patents defensively. There's also a ridiculous quote from Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi:

“A lot of people are still surprised to see the quality and the diversity of the IP that was in Nortel,” he says. “And the fundamental question comes back: ‘How the hell did you guys go bankrupt? Why weren’t you Google? Why weren’t you Facebook? Why weren’t you all these things, because you guys actually had the ideas for these business models before they did?’"

The real answer, of course, is because patents are meaningless. Ideas are worth nothing by themselves. Ideas only matter if you execute, and anyone who's ever actually executed on an idea will tell you that the original idea almost is never reflected in the final product. The process of going from idea to actual product is a process by which you learn that what matters is not what you thought mattered. And yet, for reasons that make no sense to anyone who has ever actually built a product, creating monopolies around the ideas only serves to create a massive tollbooth towards actual innovation. And that's what we have here -- and it's funded by Apple and Microsoft.

Once again, we see that these two large companies are using the patent system not to innovate, but to stop up and coming competitors from innovating. The patent system isn't being used to encourage innovation but to protect incumbents from an open market.

Oh, and worst of all, the reason that the antitrust effort was dropped was because Apple and Microsoft promised to license the key patents under "reasonable terms." But... Rockstar is not subject to that agreement.

But the new company — Rockstar Consortium — isn’t bound by the promises that its member companies made, according to Veschi. “We are separate,” he says. “That does not apply to us.”

That seems quite problematic, and perhaps worthwhile for the government to reopen its investigation...

Last fall, we were absolutely amazed at a paper written by some NY state politicians arguing that we have too much free speech, and that we need a "more refined" interpretation of the First Amendment, that outlaws things like "leaving improper messages on online message boards." Well... as covered by Dave Kravets at Wired, some NY state politicians have introduced the same bill, in both houses of the legislature, that would outlaw anonymous speech online. The actual bill is not particularly subtle.

It lays out the purpose front and center:

AN ACT to amend the civil rights law, in relation to protecting a person's right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting

Most of the "bill" is definitions, but the key part is as follows -- written in all caps like a true internet troll:

A WEB SITE ADMINISTRATOR UPON REQUEST SHALL REMOVE ANY COMMENTS POSTED ON HIS OR HER WEB SITE BY AN ANONYMOUS POSTER UNLESS SUCH ANONYMOUS POSTER AGREES TO ATTACH HIS OR HER NAME TO THE POST AND CONFIRMS THAT HIS OR HER IP ADDRESS, LEGAL NAME, AND HOME ADDRESS ARE ACCURATE. ALL WEB SITE ADMINISTRATORS SHALL HAVE A CONTACT NUMBER OR E-MAIL ADDRESS POSTED FOR SUCH REMOVAL REQUESTS, CLEARLY VISIBLE IN ANY SECTIONS WHERE COMMENTS ARE POSTED.

This will, of course, never become law (or if it does, would never survive a Constitutional First Amendment challenge). The Supreme Court has been pretty clear:

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.

You would think that lawmakers would know this, but apparently their fragile egos can't take people making fun of them online.

What's amazing is that the lawmakers behind this seem oblivious to the concerns about the bill, insisting that anonymous posting can only be used for negative reasons."

Too often, online bullies hide behind their anonymity as they inflict pain. My legislation turns the spotlight on cyber-bullies by forcing them to reveal their identity or have their post removed. Once a bully is identified, steps can be taken to end the harassment. Bullying is no laughing matter. The more we can do to combat this abuse, the better off we will all be as a society.

That's from Assemblyman Jim Conte, a sponsor of the bill, who should be forced to not only read the details of the McIntyre case, but also to produce a report about the importance of anonymous speech throughout US history, starting with the Federalist Papers and moving forward from there. It's scary that these people who govern us who don't seem to understand what they're talking about.

Oh, and separately, I kicked this post off by mentioning the paper from last year. It's worth noting that these bills are not actually being brought forth by the same politicians. We have a general policy here at Techdirt where we don't mention political parties unless the party itself is key to the story. When we wrote that original comment, someone in the comments accused us of "hiding" the fact that the paper was written by Democrats. As we noted, we would have written it exactly the same way if it were written by Republicans. So, I will point out that the politicians who introduced bill in both houses in NY are... Republicans this time, which I'm only bringing up because of the contrast from last time. This isn't about parties. It's about clueless politicians, and neither mainstream party has a monopoly on (or, even, a shortage of) them.

You may recall that, back in March, on a whim based on a discussion at SXSW, Alexis Ohanian and Erik Martin (from Reddit) teamed up with Holmes Wilson (from Fight for the Future) to crowdfund a billboard to go up in Lamar Smith's district in Austin. It turns out that you internet people don't mind paying after all, and helped fund two billboards which have now gone up in Smith's district, including one across the street from his office in San Antonio, and a second one on "Lamar Blvd" in Austin Oh, and Ohanian's BreadPig is selling a "Don't Mess with the Internet" t-shirt, where each sale will help fund Fight for the Future and its new Internet Defense League -- which you should join, in part because if you do cool things to help defend the internet, they hand out totally awesome medals.

For years we've discussed the issue of open access for federally funded research. Currently, NIH has a program that requires any of the research that receives its funds to be available via public open access databases a year after its published elsewhere. While this still allows federally funded research to be locked up under a questionable copyright for a year, it's certainly better than locking it up for eternity. And while there have been some unfortunate efforts to ban NIH and other government agencies from requiring such conditions, many in academia favor such information sharing.

There is currently a White House petition asking the government to require such free access to scientific journal articles coming out of taxpayer-funded research. The Obama administration has indicated interest in doing this in the past, but has not done so. Forcing the administration to respond to the petition may help nudge them in the right direction. The petition still needs a lot more signatures, though, so get signing.

A few weeks ago, we noted the UK government was considering plans to bring in an opt-out form of censorship, in what would amount to a kind of porn license, and that such an approach runs the risk of blocking a far wider range of materials. Now the Open Rights Group (ORG) has released a report that shows the "child protection filters" on UK mobile Internet networks are already overblocking sites:

It shows how systems designed to help parents manage their childrens' access to the Internet can actually affect many more users than intended and block many more sites than they should. It reveals widespread overblocking, problems with transparency and difficulties correcting mistakes.

The report and an update show that sites affected are found in the realms of digital rights (La Quadrature du Net and the Tor Project), technology (GigaOM, London Ruby User Group and the start-up organization Coadec), lifestyle, community and politics.

As the ORG report highlights, this kind of overblocking does not augur well for any UK government attempts to widen filtering to include fixed-line access:

If they follow a similar blueprint of ISP level filtering as mobile operators, all the problems we have highlighted would be reproduced at a larger scale. For example, most fixed-line connections are shared by a number of people using a variety of devices. Implementing filtering in that situation would require a range of approaches from whitelisting for young children to censorship-free connections for adults.

What's rather depressing is that news that overblocking is already taking place is no surprise: it's simply inevitable when this kind of network-level approach is taken. It underlines again why filtering has to be implemented locally:

we hope that if the government does pursue such a policy it will be flexible, concentrate on users and devices rather than networks, allow the tools to be properly described as "parental controls" and above all avoid turning on blocking by default.

Despite the mounting evidence of overblocking on mobile networks, it's not clear if any of those sensible suggestions will be implemented when it comes to fixed-line access -- details of the proposed UK legislation have yet to be announced.

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