Techflaws alerts us to an announcement by ZPÜ, the organization responsible for setting the levy on storage media in Germany, that fees will rise rather significantly (German original). For a USB stick with a capacity greater than 4 Gbytes, the tax would increase from 8 eurocents (about 10 cents) to 1.56 euros (about $1.93), a rise of 1850%; for a memory card bigger than 4 Gbytes, the fee would go up from 8 eurocents to 1.95 euros (about $2.42), an increase of 2338%.

No justification for such a huge jump was offered, but since one of the constituent members of ZPÜ is the German music collection society GEMA, which seems to have an unlimited sense of entitlement when it comes to demanding money from the public, that's hardly a surprise.

In particular, no rationale is given for including memory cards, which are used almost exclusively in cameras to record content produced by end-users -- so the idea that the levy is somehow justified as a way of compensating creators for revenue supposedly "lost" by piracy is manifestly absurd.

Basically, this outdated and insulting approach treats all Germans using digital storage as if they were pirates. Of course, arbitrarily imposing 2000% tax hikes on storage is probably the quickest way to turn them into something much more dangerous to GEMA and its friends: ardent supporters of the German Pirate Party....

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• Underground chemists are making synthetic versions of recreational drugs that are technically legal to possess and sell. This has been going on for years, but recently, there have been increasing political efforts to make these "chemically-similar" drugs illegal. [url]
• Amateur scientists are working on all kinds of crazy biological experiments and ideas such as rewriting the DNA of an acorn so that it grows into the shape of oak furniture. The zombie apocalypse might not come from a megacorporation, but from biology experiment gone wrong in a garage... [url]
• Albert Hofmann discovered LSD had interesting effects in the 1940s, and he said that it spoke to him: "Don't give me to the pharmacologist, he won't find anything." And lots of people have tried LSD since, including Steve Jobs and Aldous Huxley. [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

Today’s copyright legislation is out of balance, and out of tune with the times. It has turned an entire generation of young people into criminals in the eyes of the law, in a futile attempt at stopping technological development. Yet file sharing has continued to grow exponentially. Neither propaganda, fear tactics, nor ever harsher laws have been able to stop the development.

It is impossible to enforce the ban against non-commercial file sharing without infringing on fundamental human rights. As long as there are ways for citizens to communicate in private, they will be used to share copyrighted materials. The only way to even try to limit file sharing is to remove the right to private communication. In the last decade, this is the direction that copyright enforcement legislation has moved in, under pressure from big business lobbyists who see their monopolies under threat. We need to reverse this trend to safeguard fundamental rights.

At the same time, we want a society where culture flourishes, and where artists and creative people have a chance to make a living as cultural workers. Fortunately, there is no contradiction between file sharing and culture. This is something we know from a decade’s experience of massive file sharing on the Internet.

In the economic statistics, we can see that household spending on culture and entertainment is slowly increasing year by year. If we spend less money on buying CDs, we spend more on something else, such as going to live concerts. This is great news for artists. An artist will typically get 5-7% of the revenues from a CD, but 50% of the revenues from a concert. The record companies lose out, but this is only because they are no longer adding any value.

It may well be that it will become more difficult to make money within some parts of the cultural sector, but if so, it will become easier in some others – including new ones, that we have not even imagined so far. But as long as the total household spending on culture continues to be on the same level or rising, nobody can claim that artists in general will have anything to lose from a reformed copyright.

Should this also have the side effect of loosening up some of the grip that the big distributors have over cultural life, then so much the better for both artists and consumers.

"Candidly, you have to realise that intellectual property only gets you so far," says Mr Post. "At the end of the day it's really about your relationship with the consumer."

Vibram offered vouchers to customers who had unwittingly bought fake Five Fingers, so that they could buy the real product at cost price.

The company also put up a page on its website alerting customers, enlisted the help of bloggers and asked fans of its Facebook page to get the word out.

Within a year, the deluge of complaints from customers who had bought fake products slowed to a trickle.

“As I am sure you can understand, this image is highly denigrating to our brand, and we are disturbed that this image remains on your site despite repeated requests and the many images available of this person,” Karyn Sullivan, Labatt’s associate general counsel, wrote in a letter to the Gazette.

What kind of harm? Massive layoffs, of course. But also less money to invest in artists. That means fewer artists on our rosters, fewer people who can make a living from music, fewer songs permeating through our culture that help form a piece of our national identity.

These voluntary programs are not a panacea. No program ever will be. And sometimes, the Congress must step in to assure that our property rights, and U.S. economic interests, are being protected. Especially against sites overseas whose business model is the theft of U.S. works.

We hope other intermediaries like search engines will follow suit in negotiating voluntary marketplace best practices to prevent directing users to sites that are dedicated to violating property rights.

The studio is now digitally removing Chinese flags and military symbols from the movie and are hard at work re-recording dialogue so that no one mistakes the brazen invaders for the Chinese.

My own approach was to identify potentially patentable innovations (i.e., those that were not clearly unpatentable) that had a well-defined strategic value proposition, and then proceeding to seek patent protection for a broad-based interpretation of the underlying concept of those innovations.

Since many innovations represent a solution to a technical problem, this approach often involved determining other industries (or other situations within the same industry) in which a similar problem arose, and then generalizing the description of the innovation so that it could be used in those other industries or situations. This typically required developing a description of the underlying concept of the innovation in generic functional terms instead of implementation specific terms (a process I termed “functional deconstruction.”)

And, because the strategic value propositions (or use cases) for a patent often changed as a company developed and competed with others, my approach was an iterative one that was re-visited regularly in case a decision that was appropriate at one time was no longer appropriate because of new information. This applied both to patent application filing decisions and to those made during negotiations with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as part of the process of obtaining a patent.

There's this expression that [a movie is] written three times: during the script, when you're filming it and when you're editing it. And I believe that's wrong. I think it's written once, in editing -- and everything is clay for that. And I wanted to learn about it -- I thought it would be neat. It's like learning to play the piano and I need a lot of clay. And I thought if I did one movie out of these three ...

I think, for people who like to edit, this is a cool way to do it. And it's just a great community thing. But they'll never be on YouTube, or any of that stuff.

The Copyright Board of Canada, which reviews copyright tariffs for various collection societies (like ASCAP and BMI in America, which collect performance licensing fees from venues) has just approved a new set of fees to cover recorded music at a bunch of different live events. Karaoke bars, conventions, parades, weddings and several other classes of event—which already pay fees to SOCAN, which represents songwriters—will now begin paying additional tariffs to collection society Re:Sound, which represents recording artists and labels.

We've talked a lot about the problems with the whole idea of the collection society structure in the past, especially the fact that most societies are constantly pushing for higher fees and trying to extract money for ridiculous things, even though they have a poor track record of actually redistributing the money they collect to the artists they supposedly represent. But of course, the people behind the tariff talk it up as a boon for small musicians:

"We are trying to establish tariffs for the remuneration of everybody involved in the music — everybody that has some rights to receive some remuneration," said Gilles McDougall of the Copyright Association of Canada, adding that the tarriff will likely result in a few million dollars a year for performers.

Re:Sound spokesman Matthew Fortier said the money collected will make a big difference to small operations.

"Sometimes you think of the larger artists or record labels, but most often it goes to small, struggling artists and record labels — we have thousands signed up with us," he said.

But as Howard Knopf points out, small artists are the last ones to get anything out of a scheme like this. Megastars and their labels can make money—but even that pales in comparison to the real beneficiaries of the tariff:

Sadly, very little of this money through gets to the artists that need it the most. This is because the copyright collective system tracks and rewards commercial success. Celine Dion, U2, Lady Gaga and their record and publishing companies do very well by the this system but emerging creators see very little of this money. The ones who really and consistently benefit the most are those who run the collectives, those who are consultants to the collectives, and the lawyers who punctually pursue new and higher Copyright Board tariffs using money raised from the previous tariffs and paid for ultimately by the Canadian public. Many if not most Copyright Board hearings generate millions of dollars in legal fees in order to generate average annual payments to creators that are typically much less than a junior lawyer’s hourly rate.

As with many such licensing schemes, the specifics of the fees seem almost completely arbitrary. Karaoke bars pay a rate based on nights-per-week, parades pay a different rate per-float, and weddings pay a third rate that for some insane reason gets doubled if the wedding involves dancing.

Some people will look at the fees themselves, which in any singular instance only generally add up to a few hundred dollars at most, and ask what the big deal is. But that's ignoring the big picture: Canada loves copyright tariffs, and each one serves to shift massive amounts of wealth around, often with little justification and no way of ensuring that the money is being properly distributed. And we just keep piling new tariffs on top of old ones, with no clear idea of how effective they are—except at funnelling money to the collection societies:

It’s true that most people do not tend to get married very often. And many weddings cost $25,000 or more. So, some may not be too concerned about the macro or even microeconomic aspects this particular tariff item. It won’t likely harm Canada’s economy overall or even the institution of marriage.

But these little tariffs add up. The little tariffs such as $0.29 for a blank CD or $5.16 per year for each K-12 student, or $253.45 for a wedding soon add up to about $500 million a year in Canada. One is tempted to say that "A half billion here, a half billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money." Copyright Board tariffs siphon huge sums out of the educational system, the broadcasting and telecom industries, businesses of all kinds that use blank media for ordinary data storage and transfer purposes, etc.

Now we can add this one to the bloated list. And you can guarantee it won't be long before Re:Sound is back before the Copyright Board, pushing to raise the fees and expand the tariff to new classes of events and venues. Copyright tariffs rarely decrease—even when they absolutely should.

Although the traditional image of a science laboratory typically consists of a room full of test tubes or microscopes, the reality is that computers now play a central role there, just as they do for business and life in general.

Computers need software, and some of that software will be specially written or adapted from existing code to meet the particular needs of the scientists' work. This makes computer software a vital component of the scientific process. It also means that being able to check that code for errors is as important as being able to check the rest of the experiment's methodology. And yet very rarely can other scientists do that, because the code employed is not made available.

A new paper in Science points out that this needs to change:

The publication and open exchange of knowledge and material form the backbone of scientific progress and reproducibility and are obligatory for publicly funded research. Despite increasing reliance on computing in every domain of scientific endeavor, the computer source code critical to understanding and evaluating computer programs is commonly withheld, effectively rendering these programs "black boxes" in the research work flow. Exempting from basic publication and disclosure standards such a ubiquitous category of research tool carries substantial negative consequences. Eliminating this disparity will require concerted policy action by funding agencies and journal publishers, as well as changes in the way research institutions receiving public funds manage their intellectual property (IP).

The paper makes an important point that deserves a wide audience, because it's about a public policy issue. So it's a huge pity that, ironically, it is not published under an open access licence, and can only be read by Science's subscribers.

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