A new presentation from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute combined with a data visualization from Engine (disclosure: I'm on the steering committee for Engine, though I had absolutely nothing to do with this project and only found out about it after it was done) looks at the nature of high tech jobs in the US today -- and it shows just how important innovation and tech jobs are to the economy. Even as we've gone through difficult economic times, high tech jobs have continually and significantly outpaced growth of the rest of the private sector: Perhaps more importantly, it shows that high tech jobs aren't just concentrated in a few key areas, like Silicon Valley, New York, Boston and Seattle -- but really are found pretty much all across the country: And, in fact, the presentation highlighted some unexpected areas of the country showing very large high tech growth in just the past few years: A lot of the places on that list above aren't areas that you'd consider to be "tech hubs." Now, of course, that last slide is just showing percentage growth, so if a place is starting from a small number, that growth percentage could be somewhat distorted. But when looking at the whole of the data, it certainly seems to suggest that high tech job growth is happening across the country -- and that's a good thing.

The problem, of course, is that it often seems like the high tech industry is ignored in Congress in favor of some other industries that have a much longer history of lobbying. But if the federal government is serious about claiming that job growth is the key to our economy, then it really needs to start paying attention to these facts, and recognize that the tech industry is not just limited to Silicon Valley, and is creating jobs across the country. That shouldn't be surprising of course, since we live in a digital age, and all sorts of jobs are quickly becoming tech jobs. But it does mean that we need policies in place that allow this kind of shift to continue happening, rather than stifling it with legacy policies that just protect old and obsolete businesses who fail to adapt.

If you'd like to play around with some of the data in an interactive format, the folks at Engine have set up a neat interactive map to dig into where the high tech jobs are located in the US today, even letting you look back at how it's changed over the past decade.

We've been a bit confused about the hubbub and complaints concerning Facebook's IPO. Yes, the stock has dropped tremendously since the IPO, which was bad for those who bought high (and for some employees whose options may now be under water), but from Facebook's perspective, the IPO was great. Think of it this way: if I have a painting, which I sell for $10 billion, and three months later, the next owner can only get $5 billion for it, it seems like I did a good job in negotiating the deal to get my $10 billion. I sold high, just like you're supposed to.

So it's a bit of a head-scratcher to see NY Times financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin suggesting Facebook's CFO, David Ebersman, deserves to be fired for getting a positively amazing deal for Facebook. In Sorkin's world, Ebersman was supposed to get less for Facebook to benefit Wall Street. That seems wrong.

And yet if there is one single individual more responsible than any other for the staggering mispricing of Facebook’s I.P.O., it is Mr. Ebersman. He signed off on the ever-increasing offer price, which ended up at $38 after the company had originally planned a price range of $29 to $34.

He — almost alone — pushed to flood the market with 25 percent more shares than originally planned in the final days before the offering. And since then, as the point person for investors, he has done little to articulate how or why the company’s strategy will lift the stock price any time soon.

At a time when investors are looking for some semblance of accountability on Wall Street and in corporate America, it is remarkable that nobody — no bankers, no one at Nasdaq, no one at Facebook — has been fired for botching the offering.

Sure. Perhaps someone on Wall Street should be fired, or Nasdaq for its technical problems, but Ebersman? He convinced Wall Street to fork over a ton of money to Facebook at an extremely high price. He should be seen as a financial wizard, not someone who should be fired. Mathew Ingram points out that it's silly to blame Ebersman when it takes a lot of people to make a market. But the best response may come from this Tumblr page that rewrites Sorkin's article in a more accurate way -- highlighting how Facebook got a hell of a deal for itself.

Now, yes, there's a longer term issue to think about as well: Facebook's relationship with investors is not a one-time thing (in theory), and you can question if the continued and rapid descent in share price makes it more difficult to go back to the public markets in the future. But this is Wall Street we're talking about, where money speaks above all, and it speaks loudest for those who get a lot of it. If there's an opportunity to make money from future Facebook offerings, they'll happen no problem. And, really, does anyone doubt that Wall Street take advantage of Facebook in the same way, if the shoe was on the other foot? I mean, look at the history of IPO "pops" that shot up 100% or more on opening day -- which is basically Wall Street doing the exact same thing that Ebersman did: mis-pricing the stock for their own financial benefit. But those are celebrated, not panned.

Basically, Sorkin's column seems like sour grapes from the Wall Streeters' perspective. Facebook made out very nicely in the IPO, got a ton of money at a much higher valuation than the market now thinks the company is worth. In other words it got a heckuva deal. A failure would have been pricing the stock at a point that people didn't want to buy it. But they did buy it, because Wall Street incorrectly thought that sucker retail investors would eat up the stock and drive up the price. They didn't. But that's not Facebook's fault.

Some have bemoaned that this shows how Facebook doesn't care about investors. But there's something to be said for that. Wall Street investors are notorious short-term thinkers, focused on this quarter or possibly (if they're looking "far out") the financial year. But that's not how you build long term strategic value. It seems Facebook was smart to take a ton of money when it was offered, and then to focus on trying to build a good product, and not really worry what Wall St. or its favorite journalists have to say.

The fountain of youth has been an elusive solution to the problem of aging. Sure, there are plenty of drawbacks to staying young forever, but living longer seems to be an ongoing trend, so if everyone is living longer anyway, we might as well try to stay young for as long as possible, right? Here are just a few interesting stories about getting really old.

• Stanford economists report that the decreases in death rates are improving more for people over 70 years old, rather than for kids or teenagers. So planning to retire early might not work out so well.... [url]
• Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov is trying to get other billionaires to pony up some research funds for a project that's aiming for cybernetic immortality for humans by 2045. This sounds like the plot of a bad summer action movie, so maybe they can finance part of the project by selling the movie rights to the story. [url]
• Calorie restricted diets were proposed as a possible way to living longer, but apparently it might not be such an effective regime. A 25-year study on rhesus monkeys shows that caloric restriction doesn't necessarily lead to longer lifespans. [url]

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

I'd meant to write about this back when it was first announced, but the story got lost in the sea of unwritten stories around here. But with On The Media providing an update, I can revisit it. There's been lots of talk this election season about the rise of SuperPACs and their ability to take unlimited funds and advertise for (or against) political candidates, so long as the candidates don't "coordinate" with the SuperPAC (with "coordination" defined rather loosely). Many of the really nasty attack ads often come from those SuperPACs. However, up in Massachusetts the two major party Senate candidates surprised a lot of people by calling a "truce" back in January against SuperPACs. The way the "pledge" works, is that each candidate agrees if a SuperPAC runs an ad attacking the other one, they'll donate half the ad's costs to a charity within a few days. While the suspicious among you might think that this would lead a SuperPAC to run counteradvertising against the candidate it likes to force the other side to pay up, in reality, it appears to have mostly worked, with very little SuperPAC money showing up in Massachusetts and the TV ads not being nearly as nasty, despite it being a close fight.

Of course, some SuperPACs can't resist. Last week, Brown's campaign admitted that it had donated over $35,000 after SuperPACs had put out ads supporting him, against his own wishes. But those were fairly minor from the sound of it. On the whole, compared to other similar races, the lack of SuperPAC funding has meant a (slightly) more reasonable campaign, with not quite as much smearing.

The obvious question, then, is will other candidates in other races agree to the same kind of pledge? Unfortunately, as the OTM segment notes, that's unlikely. In most cases, SuperPAC money really benefits one party over the other, and no one wants to give up such a major advantage, even if voters think they're really annoyed by negative advertising. Tragically (from a human nature perspective), it still seems like such ads have an impact. That's really too bad on multiple levels. It would be nice if we, as a country, actually moved to a more civilized electoral process. It just seems unlikely to actually happen.

Earlier today, we wrote about Antisec releasing some Apple UDIDs to show that it had apparently collected info on 12 million Apple users, which it claims to have found when it hacked into an FBI's laptop. As we noted at the time, the file was called "NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv," which implied that it came from the National Cyber-Forensics & Training Alliance, a vehicle set up to allow companies to share info with the government. However, the FBI is now flat out denying that any of its laptops had been hacked or that it had the info. Antisec is, to say the least, unimpressed: The FBI's denial comes after an earlier, weaker denial, in which they just said they had "no evidence" to support the story. Now they're saying it's "TOTALLY FALSE" (all caps for EMPHASIS). And, of course, Antisec folks are reminding the FBI (and the public) that they're still sitting on 3TB of additional data from this hack -- which suggests that they're planning to release more to prove that the hack really was of an FBI machine. Either way, now that the fight is happening on Twitter, it seems time to grab some virtual popcorn, sit back and watch the fireworks.

Hey, various musicians, celebrities and sponsors! How would you like a swift lesson in Crowdsourcing Your Ignominy? What's that? You'd rather not? Oh... I see...

OK. I'll pass that alo--

LESSON IN PROGRESS........
PLEASE STAND BY

Lessons (un)learned to date:

• Time Magazine says "Vote for Person of the Year" and opens the polls up to 4chan's robot army without so much as a captcha to slow them down.

• Cuban rapper Pitbull teams up with Big Retail (Wal-Mart) to push energizing breath strips in the store receiving the most "Likes." Boston Phoenix writer teams with army of goons to send Pitbull (and the writer himself) to Kodiak, Alaska.

• Edgy beverage company invites internet users to name new MTN Dew flavor and is somehow shocked the suggestions contain a mixture of grotesque sexual imagery and Hitler references. Local favorite "Methamphetagreen" fails to place in the top 10.

Enter corporate sponsors Chegg (textbooks) and Papa Johns Pizza (um... pizza), a marketing force deemed nigh invulnerable after drafting country music sweetheart Taylor Swift. The plan? Open up the polls to The Internet and allow It to choose which lucky school will be receiving $10,000 and a concert starring Ms. Swift.

Precautions were taken. Entrants could only vote once per day and had to log in through Facebook (and "Like" Taylor Swift) in order to select a school. Voters could gain extra votes by "Liking" other sponsors' pages and buying Taylor Swift's latest single. The polls were opened and, as is often the case, members of 4chan were the first several thousand people in line.

Shortly thereafter, a certain school shot out to an insurmountable lead. Pack your ASL interpreter, Taylor. You're headed to Horace Mann School for the Deaf!

Like most things 4chan reroutes, it makes you laugh before you realize how heartless you sound LOLing away at a potential bunch of deaf kids. ("Potential" meaning Swift has the option to turn down the winning school. But she wouldn't, would she?) Of course, there's some honest laughter to be had at the decidedly less cruel thought that Swift's music is best left unheard.

Horace Mann had cleared 50K votes as of last Friday night, so it's unlikely that (barring any sponsor interference) another school will suddenly outpace it. This isn't necessarily the most heartless thing 4chan has conjured up. If nothing else, Horace Mann will be receiving $10,000. There's also the good possibility that Swift will play a concert at the school. The effort won't be completely wasted, as this Redditor points out:

I get the humor but those deaf kids are going to fucking love it! Most deaf can hear a certain degree with residual hearing, hearing aids and CI's. Not to mention those deaf kids who are profoundly deaf and don't wear any assistive devices will enjoy the visual stimulation of the show.

So, there's that. The music will still be appreciated on some level by the attendees. Oddly enough, this looks like another PR win by the time all is said and done. Swift will play a well-received concert at Horace Mann. Five schools will receive $10,000. Visuals will be stimulated. And somehow, 4chan will have inadvertently trolled up a massively good deed, adding yet another incongruous layer to its mythology.

And, on the one-in-a-million chance that Swift turns this gig down, I humbly suggest these gentlemen fill in.

I'm no longer surprised that people fall for Nigerian advance fee "419" scams. It seems that every generation falls for something along those lines. In the past, I've talked about the bogus story of Drake's fortune, which was the "Nigerian scam" of nearly a century ago. But what certainly has surprised me is how little the story really seems to change. Given how closely so many people associate "Nigerian prince" with "scam," you'd think that it would make sense for scammers to move away from such things, and try to find a story that is slightly more realistic. However, On the Media points us to a fascinating research paper by Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley, and a Wall Street Journal article about the research, which reveal why it still makes sense for Nigerian scammers to say they're from Nigeria:

It weeds out all the non-suckers.

Think about it from the scammer's point of view. With advance fee scams, they need to string along someone for a while. A live sucker can be quite valuable, but also involves quite a bit of work. So, for it to be worthwhile, they actually need exceptionally gullible people and by flat out saying they're from Nigeria, given how closely associated that country is with such scams, they quickly weed out the people who are probably smart enough to realize they're getting conned. Since the cost to them of spamming everyone is close to nothing, you may be confused about why you keep getting "Nigerian prince" emails, but they don't care about you. In fact, in ignoring those emails, you're kind of doing them a favor by not bothering them with time-consuming efforts that won't pay off.

As the WSJ piece notes, this highlights a potentially better way to deal with such scammers: waste their time. Of course, we've written about such scambaiters before, with 419 Eater being the most well known community. But this research suggests that, not only are such efforts amusing, they can be genuinely effective in harming the economics of such advance-fee frauds.

Nathan Myhrvold is trying to rustle up a little positive PR for Intellectual Ventures (IV) by appointing a VP of Global Good (although it's hard to see how anyone lumbered with such a daft job title is going to be taken seriously anywhere.) You can gauge just how touchy Myhrvold is on this topic by his rather waspish response to some commentary on that move.

As Techdirt reported, Myhrvold came up with what he obviously thinks is a winning riposte whenever people criticize IV's business model based on industrial-scale patent trollery. He asks them: "How big is your malaria project?" His point being that IV does does have a malaria project, so this somehow makes up for all the bad stuff it does. There's only one slight problem: that project offers little more than fantasy solutions. For example, here are some details from Intellectual Ventures Lab's malaria page about a cool-sounding "photonic fence" designed to keep out mosquitoes:

The system would create a virtual fence made out of light -- we call it a "Photonic Fence". Light Emitting Diode (LED) lamps on each fence post would beam infrared light at adjacent fence posts up to 100 feet (30 meters) away; the light would then hit strips of retroreflective material (similar to that used on highway signs) and bounce straight back toward the illuminator. A camera on each fence post monitors the reflected light for shadows cast by a hapless insect flying through the vertical plane of light.

When an invading insect is detected, our software identifies it by training a nonlethal laser beam on the bug and using that illumination to estimate the insect's size and also to measure how fast its wings are beating. Using this method, the system can not only distinguish among mosquitoes, butterflies, and bumblebees, but it can even determine whether a mosquito is male or female! (Females are significantly larger than males and have slower wingbeats.) This is useful because only female mosquitoes bite humans.

However impressive all that technology might be, there's the obvious problem that mosquitoes could just fly over these "photonic fences". Perhaps conscious of this flaw, the page describes several other equally ingenious -- and equally impractical -- approaches to tackling malaria including the use of magnets to make mosquitoes explode and an "engineered blood substitute" to draw them away from humans (also useful for regions plagued by vampires, presumably.)

This impracticality rather undermines Myhrvold's taunting of lesser mortals that don't have their own malaria project, since his lab projects seem unlikely to make any significant contribution to combatting malaria in the short term, if ever. Clearly, to tackle malaria in real-life situations, what is needed is not some super high-tech approach that looks good in TED talks, but something rather more simple and effective -- something like this, perhaps:

The University of Cape Town’s Science Department believes that it has found a single dose cure for Malaria.

This was announced by researchers that have been working on this compound, from the aminopyridine class, for several years. Unlike conventional multidrug malaria treatments that the malaria parasite has become resistant to, Professor Kelly Chibale and his colleagues now believe that they have discovered a drug that over 18 months of trials "killed these resistant parasites instantly".

Unlike potentially blinding lasers, the new compound is claimed to be safe, with no adverse side effects. Of course, lots of clinical tests still need to be run to establish that and its efficacity. Then, a way to manufacture and distribute the drug to malaria victims will need to be found. The worry has to be that traditional drug companies won't be interested in helping here, since the drug must be sold cheaply if it is to reach the millions of people most affected by malaria, and that means few if any profits -- not something pharma companies are happy with.

So here's a suggestion. If Myhrvold really wants to burnish the image of Intellectual Ventures through philanthropic activities, he should forget about appointing his VP of Global Good, and drop his fun but useless malaria program. Instead, he and his company should offer to pay all the costs for carrying out the clinical tests of this new anti-malarial drug, and for setting up a large-scale manufacturing program sufficient to treat everyone in the world that has the disease, or is at risk from it. Helping to circumvent problems caused by drug companies' obsession with patents and exorbitant profits would be a truly fitting way to atone for the sins of Intellectual Ventures.

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

Whenever debates come up about disruptive innovation in the entertainment industry, the big record labels and big movie studios like to fall back on claiming that they (and often they alone) are the last vanguards protecting our culture. They talk about how, without greater copyright protections, their "art" may die off. But, of course, as most normal people recognize, the labels and the studios (and the RIAA and MPAA who represent them) are not representing art at all, but commerce -- and just a specific type of commerce. They represent the gatekeeper model, which makes less and less sense in a digital world where we need filters and enablers, not gatekeepers. But it's pretty rare for them to actually admit that, since their entire public persona and lobbying efforts are based on "we represent culture and art."

And then, finally, an exec speaks the truth. In a quite interesting New Yorker profile of Scooter Braun, the man who made Justin Bieber into Justin Bieber, Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal Music Group (the biggest of the record labels) explains why he named Braun the company's first technology "entrepreneur in residence" by admitting that "art" has nothing to do with Universal Music:

The company likes hits, the fans like hits, and that's what he's there to do--make hits. We're not in the art business.

It seems like people should remind him of this every time he or his lackeys claim they're defending art. Separately, the rest of the Braun profile is well worth reading. It highlights exactly what we've been saying for quite some time, that the real "business" these days is in finding other areas of the market you can build a business around -- areas that are made more valuable by digital content:

In the beleaguered music industry, few managers can afford to focus on just selling music anymore. When Braun met David Geffen, at a party a couple of years ago, he said that Geffen had one bit of advice for him: “Get out of the music business.” So Braun has been converting his twelve-person company, SB Projects, into a many-faceted organization: it now has film and TV arms (Braun recently sold a scripted show, and has reality shows in development), a publishing division, and a technology-investment unit, in addition to a label and a management company.

And how is he building up many of those other businesses? By leveraging the star power of Justin Bieber -- something that can't be "pirated" and which is a true scarcity that Braun can control:

His YouTube channel is approaching three billion views, and on Twitter, where he acquires a new follower every other second, a single tweet from him can mobilize his supporters to perform stunning feats: sell out Madison Square Garden in seconds, conjure a horde of three hundred thousand tweens in Mexico City, induce fans to buy a hundred and twenty million dollars worth of perfume (Bieber’s fragrance, Someday), or influence the conversation about world events—in March, Bieber’s tweets brought attention to the campaign to apprehend the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.

[....] Barry Lowenthal, the president of Media Kitchen, an ad agency that is promoting Bieber’s new fragrance, Girlfriend, told the Times that the reach of a Bieber dispatch across networks like Facebook and Twitter would cost ten million dollars to replicate through conventional advertising methods.

As the article really highlights, there are plenty of ways to make money in the business today -- but a lot of it isn't specifically about selling music. And while some people insist that's "selling out," Braun sees it differently:

"I don't think you're selling out by allowing the masses to love your art."

And the end result is what we've been saying all along. There's tons of opportunity in and around the music business if you're smart and you know how to build a good business around it. In fact, the market is growing, and Braun recognizes that:

"This isn't a dying business, this is a changing business," he told me. "CD sales have declined drastically, but the over-all business has grown: licensing, merchandising, digital sales."

It always seems that, in these discussions, there's often an implicit conflict between art and commerce, when there doesn't need to be. But if someone's defending commerce, it should be clear that's what they're defending, and they shouldn't try to confuse that by claiming that they're really defending art or culture. Art and culture will live on no matter what. Commerce will shift around to the markets most appropriate. Neither need defending on their own, as they seem to survive just fine. The only thing struggling is one particular sector of the entertainment industry which built a "hit driven" business based on being a gatekeeper. And now we live in a world where such gatekeepers aren't necessary, and businesses can be built in other ways.

We've written a few times about the unfortunate saga of 4-year-old Maya Nieder and her mother, Dana. Due to a ridiculous patent dispute, the one thing that allows Maya to speak -- an app called "Speak for Yourself" -- may get shut down. Back in June we were disappointed that, despite no request for an injunction, Apple decided to pull the app in question from its iOS store, citing the ongoing lawsuit. Maya can continue to use it for now, but it could go away and they wouldn't be able to get it back. Many people in our comments suggested that SfY should release an Android app. And they did... but a recent update from Dana notes that Google removed the app from its Play store as well, per the request of Prentke Romich Company & Semantic Compaction Systems (the patent holder and licensee suing SfY). While it's much easier to install 3rd party apps on Android devices without going through the Play Store, it's still surprising and disappointing that Google would join Apple in pulling this app before there's been any official ruling on the matter.

In the meantime, Dana also points out that PRC -- who didn't have an iOS app itself through all of this -- has finally released one in the iTunes store. Even though this seems ridiculous -- since they were able to shut down the competition and now have a clearer playing field -- Dana celebrates this entrance into the market because making more of these apps available can only help speech-challenged people speak. And, in the end, shouldn't that be the overriding concern?

She also mentions that the two sides met for court-ordered mediation, and asked the court to stay the case for 30 days to continue the process. So there's some hope for a settlement allowing the SfY app to live on. Either way, it's yet another example of companies using (often questionable) patents to cause real harm, rather than spreading innovation and helping people.

Last week, we were among the group of folks who wrote about some articles highlighting the fact that, when you die, your library of digital goods likely dies with you, thanks to ridiculous licensing terms and DRM (and ignoring unauthorized copies). Over the weekend, there was a silly -- and quickly proven bogus -- story claiming that Bruce Willis was so incensed by this that he was going to file a lawsuit on the legality of passing down his digital content to his children. While that story appears to have been a work of fiction by the UK's Daily Mail, it did lead to a great observation by Kevin Marks who compared the lifetime of copyright to the lifetime of the licenses you get:

How is it that copyright lasts 70 years after death, but licenses expire at death?

The simplest answer is that the big legacy entertainment industry players have lobbyists. And their customers do not. So we've created a system that massively favors one side over the public -- despite the fact that, if we believe the US Constitution, copyright is supposed to be for the benefit of the public.

Much of the debate over cybersecurity legislation like CISPA and the Cybersecurity Act focused on getting more private companies to "share data" with federal government agencies, including the FBI and the NSA. As we've pointed out time and time again, beyond the basic privacy rules that the bills tended to bulldoze through, any time you increase the sharing of private data, you're only making it that much easier for hackers to access that info because you're putting it in more places -- some of which will almost definitely be insecure. In other words, even though these bills were ostensibly about "protecting" from hack attacks, by increasing the sharing of data, they'd almost certainly open up new attack opportunities and make it easier for hackers to get info.

While neither bill passed (yet), the latest example of what happens when you have widespread data sharing comes from some Antisec hackers, who claim that -- in response to a presentation from the NSA's General Keith Alexander -- they wanted to probe the security of various government agencies, including the FBI. End result? They claim to have hacked into the laptop of FBI agent Christopher Stangl, who has appeared in recruitment videos for the FBI looking to hire "cyber security experts."

The hackers claim that on his laptop, they found a csv file with:

...a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc.

The hackers have released 1,000,001 UDIDs and APNS tokens to prove they had the data, stripping out the personal info. The file they found was called: "NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv" which folks at Hacker News have pointed out likely refers to the National Cyber-Forensics & Training Alliance. According to its website, the NCFTA...

functions as a conduit between private industry and law enforcement with a core mission to identify, mitigate and neutralize cyber crime. In an effort to streamline intelligence exchange, the NCFTA will often organize SME interaction into threat-specific initiatives. Once a significant online scheme is realized and a stakeholder consensus defined, an initiative is developed wherein the NCFTA manages the collection and sharing of intelligence with the affected parties, industry partners, appropriate law enforcement, and other SMEs.

In other words, it's almost exactly what we were told we needed CISPA to enable. In fact, during the CISPA debate, we specifically pointed to the NCFTA to ask why we needed CISPA, since something like that was already possible.

And now it seems to also be showing why CISPA or other similar legislation focused on increased "sharing" of info could actually put many more users at risk, rather than protect them. When the feds are careless with the info they receive from companies, it's going to get hacked. These kinds of things just put a giant target on their back, and now we're seeing the harmful results of such sharing without effective privacy protections.

And the feds want more of this?

HBO has been fighting cord-cutters in the US for the past several years, refusing to offer a standalone product in any form. Its mobile offering, HBO Go, requires purchasing a subscription to HBO, and even with all the cords still connected and money laid out on the table, you're still limited to certain devices. This insistence on keeping subscribers attached to cable companies they'd rather be living without has seen HBO consistently topping the "Most Pirated" charts. Obviously, HBO would prefer "Most Subscribed," but why buy the milk when you can get whole cow for free, minus the cableco remora?

In a move sure to please certain Europeans, HBO is now offering a completely cord-free option.

The service, named HBO Nordic AB, will allow customers in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark to stream subtitled versions of the same content available in the US. Original series like Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire, as well as movies that are featured by the channel, will be streamable at HBONordic.com.

The service is cheap ($6-12.50/month) and gives Nordic viewers a fairly good selection of the channel's offerings. As Ars Technica points out, this move may be a reaction to Netflix's announcement that it would be offering its services in the same region. No doubt HBO would be happier placing further down the "Most Pirated" charts and Netflix has been proven to be one of the better "pirate killers." Offering a reasonably priced streaming option with all normally-attached strings detached is a good start.

In addition to cordless service, HBO will also be shredding its usual timetable. Currently, weeks or months pass between original airdates and the programs' appearance in countries like Norway and Sweden. With HBO Nordic AB, programs will be available to stream within a few hours of the original airtime.

Providing a desirable service at a good price and with a minimum of windowed "scarcity" is one of the only ways to put a dent in filesharing. Hopefully, HBO recognizes this and considers expanding this service into other countries. Here in the US, unfortunately, the symbiotic relationship between the movie studios, cable companies and premium offerings like HBO is too far ingrown to imagine this has even the slimmest chance in hell of becoming a reality. But, if it knocks HBO off the "Sharing Is Caring" lists, who knows? Maybe everyone involved (or at least, two-thirds) will see the potential, rather than morosely counting the "potential" losses. I can't see an offering like this making US cable companies happy, but really, does anyone care if Time Warner, Comcast, Cox, etc. find themselves on the business end of "The Shaft" for a change? 

We have talked repeatedly of automated copyright enforcement, and how it often goes too far. Recently, we wrote about over enforcement-by-bot when Google's ContentID flagged coverage of the Curiosity landing on Mars. And then there was that time when a recording of some birds got flagged as the content of Rumblefish. These are just a few examples; these stories happen all the time.

One thing that sets these examples apart from the following story is that most if not all of those videos were taken down after they were recorded. What happened just recently is a whole new category of insane. These automated copyright enforcement bots are now flagging and taking down live content. Not surprisingly, you have the same folks as usual to blame for this: an over-aggressive US government, at the behest of the legacy entertainment industry. A few years ago, after various sports leagues complained to the feds, Congress held hearings designed to put the fear of Congress into live streaming startups like Ustream and Justin.tv. In response, despite having strong DMCA compliance records (and the associated safe harbors), those companies are going above and beyond what the law requires to try to keep copyright holders (and the government) happy.

But, as with the over-aggressive automated takedowns on recorded content, the live streaming takedowns can be similarly troublesome -- and that situation can be made even worse when people are relying on an official live stream via one of these sites. That is what happened to the Hugo Awards when it tried to live stream the awards ceremonies on Ustream. After airing footage of Neil Gaiman's award winning episode of Doctor Who, the show was flagged for infringement and pulled from the live stream -- right before Gaiman got to speak. Suddenly, everyone watching the official livestream online saw: This lit up Twitter, as tons of people were watching the show via the stream -- and suddenly you had folks like sci-fi author Tobias Buckwell, Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell and many other high profile people complaining about the over-aggressiveness of automated copyright enforcement. What made things even worse was the fact that all clips shown were cleared prior to airing.

This was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadn't, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management (DRM) robots on UStream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law.

io9 has it absolutely right. Even if the clips were not cleared, they still likely fell under fair use. This is one of the major weaknesses of automated enforcement which we have repeatedly warned about. Such tools are completely incapable of determining fair use and proper licensing, yet many sites continue to use and promote their use -- often because the government and the entertainment industry insist that they must. As io9 laments in the passing of the Hugo awards:

And with that, the broadcast was officially cut off. Dumb robots, programmed to kill any broadcast containing copyrighted material, had destroyed the only live broadcast of the Hugo Awards. Sure, we could read what was happening on Twitter, or get the official winner announcement on the Hugo website, but that is hardly the same. We wanted to see our heroes and friends on that stage, and share the event with them. In the world of science fiction writing, the Hugo Awards are kind of like the Academy Awards. Careers are made; people get dressed up and give speeches; and celebrities rub shoulders with (admittedly geeky) paparazzi. You want to see and hear it if you can.

But UStream's incorrectly programmed copyright enforcement squad had destroyed our only accesss. It was like a Cory Doctorow story crossed with RoboCop 2, with DRM robots going crazy and shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of perfectly innocent broadcasts.

By killing the broadcast of the show, Ustream's bots ruined a very special occasion for a number of creative individuals. It blocked access fans of science fiction had to see their favorite writers receive the awards their craft had made possible. Such award shows are something to celebrate, but because of over enforcement, this show has become nothing but another casualty in the war on copyright infringement. Another life snuffed out in the name of "the artists." Tell me, what artist wants her name used as the reason behind an award show being snuffed out? What artist wants to be known as the reason why thousands of fans didn't get to hear Neil Gaiman's speech or the speeches of other writers as they accepted their awards?

The point is, our ability to broadcast was entirely dependent on poorly-programmed bots. And once those bots had made their incorrect decision, there was absolutely nothing we could do to restart the signal, as it were. In case anyone still believes that copyright rules can't stop free speech or snuff out a community, the automated censorship of the Hugo Awards is a case in point.

Welcome your new robot overlords internet. The robots have spoken. Copyright is the almighty mainframe from which these robots take orders. They kill indiscriminately. They kill without feeling, without remorse. Even free speech and communities are not safe. This is the world asked for by the copyright maximalists. They have set up a world in which no speech is safe as long as it contains copyrighted content, authorized or not, fair use or not.

Yet, all this is ignoring the harm that Ustream has now done to its own reputation. After this incident, why would any show or event willingly use Ustream's services to live-stream? Knowing that your show could be taken down midstream at any moment will not breed confidence in the service.

Of course, Ustream has come out with an apology for this unfortunate event. However, this may be too little, too late for some people.

On Sunday night, The Hugo Awards were streaming live on Ustream (The Hugo’s are like the Academy Awards for science fiction). Very unfortunately at 7:43 p.m. Pacific time, the channel was automatically banned in the middle of an acceptance speech by author Neil Gaiman due to “copyright infringement.” This occurred because our 3rd party automated infringement system, Vobile, detected content in the stream that it deemed to be copyrighted. Vobile is a system that rights holders upload their content for review on many video sites around the web. The video clips shown prior to Neil’s speech automatically triggered the 3rd party system at the behest of the copyright holder.

It may be Vobile's fault, but it was Ustream's decision -- even if under pressure -- to use Vobile in the first place. It seems that they should have recognized the weaknesses of such an aggressive system.

Our editorial team and content monitors almost immediately noticed a flood of livid Twitter messages about the ban and attempted to restore the broadcast. Unfortunately, we were not able to lift the ban before the broadcast ended. We had many unhappy viewers as a result, and for that I am truly sorry.

This is what frustrates users the most. While it only takes moments, seconds maybe, to really screw up a user, it can takes days if not weeks to make things right. Again, it is great that Ustream took notice of the problem, but without proper plans in place to fix the problem right away, then what point is in even trying? At the time of this writing, there is still no indication that the account streaming the Hugo awards is back. If you're going to set up a system that can snuff out a stream in an instant, it seems only reasonable that you should be able to turn that stream back on.

Ustream has said that it has turned off Vobile for the time being, which is the right move. But perhaps it can use this as an explanation for why such solutions are overkill the next time the entertainment industry or the government come calling.

Hopefully, this serves as yet another example to lawmakers, policy makers, the entertainment industry and online service providers: as much as some of them think that automated copyright enforcement is a panacea, it can often create even more problems. Snuffing out a broadcast like this doesn't help make anyone respect copyright any more. It makes them think it's pointless and obsolete.

This year saw two huge victories for digital activism: against SOPA in the US, and against ACTA in the EU. The big question is now: what will be the next moves of those behind SOPA and ACTA as they seek to regain the initiative? For SOPA, we've had a clue in the call for a "Son of SOPA" from the US Chamber of Commerce. But what about the European Commission?

Although it is supposedly waiting for the European Court of Justice to rule on the compatibility or otherwise of ACTA with European law, that's more a matter of saving face -- even a positive result there is not going to bring ACTA back in its original form. But two public consultations from the Commission that are currently open for comments share a common theme that points to one possible approach to bringing in some of ACTA's ideas through other means: the increased use of extrajudicial punishments.

The first one, which closes soon -- on 5 September now extended to 12 September -- concerns Europe's e-commerce directive. But its title makes clear that the consultation is actually much more tightly focused on one particular aspect. As "A clean and open Internet: Public consultation on procedures for notifying and acting on illegal content hosted by online intermediaries" suggests, the consultation is really about trying to stop online sharing. Although the use of the word "clean" is clearly intended to suggest that this is about removing extreme material like child pornography, the detailed questions reveal that the central concern is taking down unauthorized copies of legal content.

The method for achieving that is what the European Commission calls "notice and action" -- broadly similar to the DCMA's "notice and takedown" approach. The Commission tries to suggests that such "notice and action" has always been part of the e-commerce directive, but as Monica Horten points out in a recent post, that's not true:

the Commisson appears to be trying to re-write history. It says that Article 14 [of the e-commerce directive] forms the basis for Notice and Action procedures. That was certainly not the intention of Article 14.

The E-commerce directive, with its provisions for mere conduit and exemptions on the liabiilty was the result of a political compromise thrashed out in 2000 between the ISP industry and others, such as the copyright industries, who wanted it to incorporate a notice and takedown regime. However, that notion of notice and takedown was explicitly rejected.

Some of the questions in the e-commerce consultation give the impression that what the European Commission would like to see are voluntary notice-and-action agreements between service providers and media companies that would make allegedly infringing material simply disappear without any judicial process or appeals. It's the perfect solution, since it doesn't require new legislation, and is based on the service providers' fear that if they don't go along with this approach they will find themselves liable for the infringing activities of their customers.

This move to "voluntary" extrajudicial punishments is confirmed by the other consultation, which closes at the end of the month, and goes by the innocent-sounding name of "Code for Effective Open Voluntarism: Good design principles for self- and co-regulation and other multistakeholder actions" (pdf). It is couched in the very vaguest terms, exemplified by this extraordinarily opaque question:

Please share your knowledge, ideas and opinions about how best to ensure that voluntarism receives its appropriate share of attention in the policy-making toolbox. How best can we address the grey area of self-regulation that are not quite as purely autonomous as the wording in the 2003 Inter-institutional Agreement on better lawmaking implies, and yet has none of the characteristics required in that Agreement for a system to qualify as co-regulation, and how best to give a new momentum to self- and co-regulation and open voluntarism to ensure that they are duly considered and practiced when they appear to be the most efficient route to the societal benefits in point. This does NOT mean voluntarism should substitute for lawmaking and regulation in any systematic manner, rather making the best possible use of voluntarism is critical to a highly effective policy approach. Please use the text box below or upload any additional relevant material.

Even though this comes across as harmless bureaucratic nonsense, it conceals a deadly serious intent: to shift from rules based strictly on those laid down by the relevant laws, to one "making the best possible use of voluntarism." Translated into English, it means that where the European Commission can't push through the legislation or treaties that it wants (as with ACTA), it will encourage ad-hoc "voluntary" agreements and self-regulation that achieve the same aim (as the e-commerce directive consultation seems to be pushing for).

It's a clever tack to take, because it is hard to motivate people to oppose something that is so ill-defined and therefore apparently unthreatening -- even the name "voluntarism" sounds rather appealing, especially compared to the more honest description of "extrajudicial punishment". But the danger lies in that very vagueness, which allows all kinds of rules and behavior that, if proposed in the normal way as traditional legislation, would be completely unacceptable and fiercely resisted.

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