Orphan works (or maybe that should be "hostage works") have become a really hot area in the copyright debate. That's because increasing numbers of people have realized how insane the current situation is whereby millions of older works, that are out of print and have no obvious owners, remain locked away because of copyright. This has led to various proposals around the world to liberate them, while still protecting the copyright holders if they later appear and assert ownership.

Among these is the European Union's Orphan Works Directive. Given the size of the EU and the huge number of cultural artifacts that could be freed up by the right kind of legislation, this is potentially a big deal, particularly in terms of allowing works to be digitized and used in new contexts.

Recently, the European Parliament and the European Commission released a so-called "compromise text" (pdf); it hasn't been passed yet, but it's quite likely to. Here's how Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) summarizes its proposals:

The current text of the proposal will not solve problems with orphan works, but may aggravate them. The proposed Directive should encourage conservation and dissemination of orphan works with adequate safeguards for potential right holders, but it fails to do so. On the contrary, it sets unnecessary limitations on potential beneficiaries, does not solve for-profit use of orphan works and establishes an over-regulated mechanism that could suffocate non-profit initiatives. The purpose of the initiative is not to create additional bureaucratic barriers for a wide dissemination of works whose authors and right holders are neither known nor located... but the current proposed language if unchanged will.

Finally, the Proposal may produce unattended consequences by encouraging countries to limit the use of orphan works in their domestic law. If the proposed Directive is as it is today, it could compel country members of the European Union to comply with the standards of the proposal instead of more flexible solution available in their domestic law. In other words, the proposal not only threaten any future positive and more useful development but it may also threaten any current achievement on the matter. This creates an extremely bad precedent on copyright regulation.

Despite years of activities organised and coordinated by the Commission in this area, the proposed Orphan Works Directive is a missed opportunity.

KEI is being diplomatic: the proposed EU Orphan Works Directive is an utter disaster, which actually manages to make the situation worse than it is today. So how did this come about? A clue can be found in an earlier Techdirt story, which reported on a curious 113% turnout during crucial votes of the Legal Affairs (JURI) committee. The topic? Why, orphan works....

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For years, we've been pointing out the massive problems of e-voting, and governments' general blindness to the security risks. Of course, beyond the basic fear of fraud, there should have also been concerns about wasting taxpayer money. Apparently those concerns didn't amount to much in Ireland. As Slashdot highlights, Ireland spent €54 million on 7,500 e-voting machines. However, after realizing that there was no way to secure them from being hacked, the government has sold them off for scrap for a grand total of €70,000, or approximately €9 per machine. On the bright side, at least they weren't completely worthless...

Social networks are clearly a very fashionable field of study right now because they provide an unprecedented volume of records for human interactions that can be mined for trends and correlations... and marketing strategies. Figuring out how viral messages spread could teach us how to educate our peers or to notify people about emergencies or to advertise caffeinated beverages. Here are just a few studies on how people behave in online communities.

• If you're looking to create the next Facebook, it might help to know that it's not the absolute number of friends on a social network that encourages new users to join, but the types of friends who are already signed up. A user who gets an invitation to join Facebook is more than twice as likely to join if he/she sees more than 4 of separate groups of friends are already signed up. That's real peer pressure at work. [url]
• Twitter bots can influence the behavior of online communities and help speed up human-to-human communications. These bots don't have to pass a rigorous Turing test to fool people into following and tweeting more frequently. [url]
• [PDF link:] Another research abstract discusses work on identifying influential and susceptible people on Facebook by looking at how viral messages spread. Influentials are thought to be critical people in disseminating information, but where would they be without their susceptible audiences? [url]

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

We recently wrote about Louis CK's latest experiment in being open, human and awesome and connecting with his fans: selling his entire tour directly from his own site at a flat price (no service fees, nothing) of $45. One of the "features" of that offering was also an attempt to cut down on scalpers. There is at least some recognition that this means leaving money on the table and, potentially, making things a little more complicated than they might otherwise be. However, Louis seems to recognize that the benefit here is making most fans a lot happier with more reasonably priced shows.

And, so far, it all appears to be working. Louis sent an update on both ticket sales info and scalpers to Laughspin. You should go read the whole thing there, but there were a couple points worth addressing here. First off, in one week, it looks like he's grossed over $6 million.

I’m doing 67 shows on this tour and we’ve sold 135,600 tickets to those shows after one week on sale.

The math here is easy. Every ticket is $45. That's it. So, multiply and you get $6.1 million. Obviously, that's gross sales, not net, and there are significant overhead costs to factor in, but still -- that's not bad.

Perhaps more interesting is the impact on scalping. The Laughspin folks noted that there still does appear to be some availability of scalped tickets (some at high prices), and Louis and his team are working hard to track down and cancel many of those tickets. But he also provided some numbers that suggest the new plan is working quite well in minimizing scalping. He can tell this, in part, because prior to setting up this tour, he had two other shows booked in a more traditional way, and he can look at how many scalped tickets are available for those shows compared to the new ones. And the differences are striking:

There are 1100 tickets available on stubhub alone for those two traditionally ticketed shows out of 4,400 available ( Almost exactly 25%)....

There are less than 500 tickets available on all scalper sites (including stubhub) out of the entire 135,600 tickets that have already been sold, from the tour sold exclusively on my site, louisck.com (substantially less than 1%)

So it’s working. So far.

That's a pretty massive difference. Assuming this really does work, it sounds like Louis and Etix (who is handling the tickets) have a service that lots of other performers might want to start looking into.

One final interesting point: Louis talks a little about how the scalpers are reacting -- saying that they defend what they do...

Contact with these scalpers has been enlightening. They tend to respond with indignance and a defensive posture “Hey man! Scalping is NOT a crime!” We’re not treating it as a crime or even a wrong-doing. We are just competing with them, on behalf of my fans, to enforce the terms and conditions of our ticket sales and to keep the prices down. It’s worth the effort, it’s working and it’s even been kind of fun.

And that is part of what makes this so awesome. He doesn't feel the need to go legal or whine about it. He's innovating and adapting... and beating the scalpers at their own game. And that's how it should be done.

Most artists dream of seeing their new single debut near the top (if not the very top) of the singles charts. For some bands this dream has become one of those nightmares where you're in high school and you've arrived at class sans finished essay and most of your clothing, except replace "arrived in class" with "saw their single climb the charts" and "sans clothing" with "attached to someone else's name."

Pity the poor members of Maroon 5 (if you can), whose anticipated chart success with their latest single appears to alreay have been enjoyed by cover artists operating under the name Precision Tunes, weeks before the official release date:

Some of the world's biggest pop stars have fallen victim to the practice, which sees near perfect copies of their latest songs enter the charts before they have even released their own version. A fortnight ago, for the first time, one of these copies - a cover version of a song by the band Maroon 5 - made it into the top ten of the British charts before the real track was released.

On June 17, a track called "Payphone (Maroon 5 Feat Wiz Khalifa Tribute)" by an unknown group calling itself Precision Tunes made it to number nine in the official charts, purely on the basis of online downloads. This was a week before the US band Maroon 5 and the rapper Wiz Khalifa released the official version of their song Payphone. In the week it reached the top ten, the Precision Tunes version reportedly sold 34,492 downloads - a figure which music industry insiders said was surprisingly high.

A variety of pop tunes covers have made it onto the iTunes charts before, but only very recently have these covers beat their namesakes to sales success. While not technically illegal, these covers are definitely operating in a gray area. Mechanical royalties (in the US) allow for covers once the original artist has recorded the song (not "recorded and published" or "recorded and made available for purchase"). [This pertains to US mechanical royalties only. PRS, who collects the royalties in the UK, refers to allowing the original song to debut first as a "courtesy," as any song receiving radio airplay is being used "commercially" and is technically fair game.]

Precision Tunes' cover process involved "pulling" the track from radio airplay and swiftly cranking out a credible facsimile. If the song is on the radio, it can be assumed the track has been "recorded" and covers are now fair play. Basically, Precision Tunes is operating in violation of an unwritten "gentlemen's agreement," much to the chagrin of Maroon 5, among others:

In April 'Carly Rae Jepsen Tribute Team' got to number 49 with a cover of Call Me Maybe a week before the Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen released the original version of her song. Earlier this month the success of a cover group named Can You Blow My in reaching number 38 prompted the rush release of the US artist Flo Rida's song Whistle, two weeks earlier than planned.

But the larger issue at play is one that has a long history in the UK: ultra-extended windows:

It is possible because of the unique situation in the UK where, unlike in other countries, songs by big acts get weeks of radio airplay before the official single is released. Traditionally, this has allowed bands to build demand to ensure big first week sales. The internet, however, means cover bands can now get in first, quickly making an online copy of the song available for fans who cannot wait for the real thing, or who do not realise they are buying an imitation.

True, the internet does make this process much, much faster, but this problem that The Telegraph seems to believe is new was actually commonplace during the 50s and 60s. Many artists rushed out covers to capitalize on the hits of others and in Britain, where American music was rarely licensed, British artists covered tracks to fill in the gap. So, it's not really an issue of copycat artists taking advantage of the bandwagon as much as it is an availability issue. People want to purchase new music while it's still new, not days or weeks or months down the road, after it's been played to death by radio DJs.

As Helienne Lindvall pointed out back in 2009 while declaring that cover artists were "robbing" original artists of income, it does no one any good to discuss the morality of cover artists when the real problem is licensing and staggered windows:

Last year, I wrote about the problem of holding back the release date for songs in the digital age, as it drives people towards illegal filesharing sites. I mentioned the example of Leona Lewis's cover of Snow Patrol's Run. Someone called Ameritz managed to get into the charts with a similar sounding cover of the same song at the time. And last August Nicki Bliss was at No 50 with I Kissed a Girl the same week Katy Perry entered the charts at No 4.

When you've got even Helienne Lindvall pointing out a failure of the legacy system, you know you've got a real problem. Holding back tracks to generate demand via radio airplay just creates a market you're not serving. And that market will buy from whoever's selling, whether it's iTunes or something, um, more cost effective.

Steve Angello (one-third of the now disbanded Swedish House Mafia) learned this the hard way. In a vituperative rant delivered on his personal blog, Angello ripped into file sharers for pirating his tracks. Not incredibly unusual, but it did little to endear him to his fans, who pointed out that they'd gladly give him some money if he'd just make his tracks available for purchase earlier:

I totally agree the prices on iTunes / Beatport are very cheap - so I think most people are tempted to download off these blogs simply because they can't wait to get the tracks... sometimes you have to wait like 4 months after hearing something before it gets released!
I'm not defending it, but I think that is what motivates people.
-TNM

youre completely right! (btw i also buy records) i dont wanna say anything bad about your statement but please just keep this point in mind: in a record shop you cant steal a track that is gonna be released in a year!!! if the people hear your killer tracks like "bodycrash" or "be" or whatever in a radio station they want to buy it immediately or at least in an acceptable time. cus they go crazy for it! but they cant, they can only find it on illegal blogs and on p2p so thats the choice a lot of people are gonna take. am I wrong?:) peace
- Julian

Steve:
If record companies (and producers) didn't hold out so long on releasing tracks from the time of the first promo pressings/copies people wouldn't feel the need to "steal" your music.
People wait months and months for official releases and by the time they arrive people are sick of hearing the fucking track, no matter how good it is. Holding back the release has one purpose, to build up hype in order to sell units. However in this day an age when everyone has access to the internet on high speed lines this no longer holds true.
If you're trying to make it as a DJ you MUST to have upfront tracks, not tracks that have been cained by the likes of Pete Tong day in, day out for the last 3 months, and unless you're "connected" what chance do you stand. Sure, you may say create your own tracks, but where is the recognition factor there?!
- Go

If you don't want your fans helping themselves to your latest single, make it available for sale as soon as they start hearing it elsewhere. No one wants to wait for the "opportunity" to purchase lukewarm hits at some arbitrary point in the future. If their only options are "someone other than you," then that money will walk right on by. Your fans want to give you money now. Why keep them waiting?

 

Kim Dotcom is not a sympathetic individual. Anyone who's followed his career over the years (even from well before Megaupload) has known that. He's loud, obnoxious, ostentatious and seems to have little shame about his past efforts to be on the wrong side of the law. If there's anyone out there who could easily be framed as "Dr. Evil," it is Dotcom. So, it's really quite stunning to realize that the US government and Hollywood have taken perhaps the easiest person to demonize around... and turned him into a lovable "cult hero." Over the past six months, it appears that the US's massive overreaction to Megaupload, at the urging of a typically clueless Hollywood, has done the exact opposite of what they hoped. Whereas they figured the prosecution of Megaupload and Dotcom was a slam dunk, and that it would act as a clear "education campaign" for others, the truth seems to be the exact opposite. People are realizing that the government and Hollywood overreacted, and it's almost entirely rehabilitated Dotcom's image.

Gavin Ellis, a senior political studies lecturer at the University of Auckland, said that over time the public had become less supportive of the police operation.

“Initially there was a sort of a ‘gee, whiz’ reaction. ‘Wow, look what the police have done, they’ve got this alleged master criminal,”’ Mr. Ellis said. “But then, as the media perception of him and the media portrayal of him changed, looking backward those things started to look heavy-handed.”

While Mr. Dotcom’s lawyers were making steady progress in court, Mr. Dotcom was gaining the public’s favor. A headline on the news Web site Stuff.co.nz in May read, “Dotcom’s straight talk wins over Kiwis.”

“There’s been a clear shift in the characterization of him, from this assumed criminality or alleged criminality, to a cult hero,” Mr. Ellis said.

The amazing thing to me, is that Hollywood and the US government should have known this was going to happen. They more or less did the same thing with the Pirate Bay years ago. Having the US government completely overreact and bring the power of the government down on almost anyone can make them look sympathetic. But even I doubted it would happen when it came to Dotcom, who was so over-the-top that he's very, very easy to dislike. He must have seemed like a perfect target to US and Hollywood officials. To think that within just a few months he's become this "cult hero" is pretty stunning and shows just how clueless both Hollywood and the feds are about the public's reaction to their campaign.

Back in May, we wrote about a ridiculous lawsuit in France, where Google was being sued because when people searched on the names of certain famous people, sometimes Google's autocomplete feature would show the name with the word "jew" or "jewish." Of course, if you understand how Google works, you'd know that this is because a lot of people were searching for the names of those individuals along with the keyword jew or jewish. Those individuals doing the searching may or may not have been doing so for anti-semitic reasons, but it seems ridiculous to blame Google because of what its users were searching for. Also, I'm still at a loss as to why appending the suggestion of "jew" to someone's name is anti-semitic (and I say that as someone who is Jewish). The specific issue in France is that it's apparently "illegal to record someone's ethnicity in a database." But, of course, that wasn't what Google was doing either.

Either way, it appears that the lawsuit is being dropped after some sort of "agreement" was reached, though no one seems to want to explain what the agreement entails. The AFP article notes that searches on famous people still do seem to be returning suggestions that include "jew," so it doesn't sound like Google manually changed its results, which is a good thing. Instead, the only thing that's mentioned is that the parties "identified areas of useful cooperation in the fight against racism and anti-Semitism that put an end to the dispute." While the details may matter here, hopefully it just involves providing more information to people in an effort to fight ignorance, rather than trying to hide information. The fact that people are searching for names along with "jew" may be an indicator that those individuals are anti-semitic, but the way to do deal with that is by confronting ignorance, not hiding it.

I tend to be a pretty big supporter of free market capitalism and the importance of real property rights (not imaginary property rights). As such, I've always been intrigued by Ron Paul's libertarian stance against big government and excessive regulation. I think that position is pretty clearly staked out in my writing over the years. However, I'm perplexed by the new "internet freedom" manifesto from Ron Paul and Rand Paul, which seems like a hodgepodge of poorly thought out concepts -- some of which make sense, and some of which do not. While I agree about keeping the government out of internet regulations, the document seems to attack many of those who actually agree with the Pauls by setting up ridiculous strawmen. In particular, the Pauls come out vehemently against both net neutrality as a concept and any effort to expand the public domain -- even though both are really about limiting big government.

In fact, in a bizarre twist, the Pauls seem to be supporting massive government subsidies and handouts in this document, even as they insist they're not.

Now, I agree that the whole "net neutrality" debate has been muddled over the years, but it is entirely possible to be for the end-to-end principles of the internet (which is what most people mean by net neutrality) and against bad regulations trying to "force" neutrality on the internet. But not in the world of the Pauls. To them, any support of a neutral internet must be about "coercive state actions" and "collective rule" over "privately owned broadband high-speed infrastructure." This makes me curious if the Pauls spoke out against the billions and billions in subsidies and rights of way grants that the government provided the telcos and cable providers to build their networks. Once again, I am against regulating net neutrality -- because it's obvious that the telcos will control that process and the regulations will favor them against the public -- but pretending that broadband infrastructure is really "privately owned" when so much of it involved tax-payer-funded subsidies and rights of way is being in denial.

Then there's the following, where they claim that these evil "collectivists" want to limit "private property rights on the internet" and are saying that "what is considered to be in the public domain should be greatly expanded." Considering the Pauls were both instrumental in the fight against SOPA and PIPA, you would think that the two of them understood how copyright law is massively abused and how beneficial the public domain is. But apparently not. To them it's all part of this "collectivist" plot. Earth to the Pauls: copyright is a massive government-granted monopoly privilege. That's the kind of thing we thought you were against, not for. In this document, you seem to be arguing for one of the largest programs in the world of a centralized government handing out private monopoly privileges.

There are a few other whoppers in there, including the claim that the groups talking about a "right to privacy" rarely care about it when it comes to government snooping -- and, in fact, support government surveillance and collection of private citizens' internet data. That's funny, because the very groups that the Pauls appear to be slamming... happen to be the same ones who were central in the fight against CISPA, which was all about the government snooping on our internet activity.

Frankly, this document is a joke from two people who should know better. There are some good points in there about limiting government regulation of innovative companies, but when they're supportive of two of the biggest government handouts around -- telco subsidies and copyright -- it's hard to take them seriously when they claim they're for smaller government and about getting the government out of the internet.

Want a sense of just how screwed up the incentives of our patent system are today? Purdue Pharma, the makers of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin, is now running clinical tests to get the FDA to approve its use for kids as young as 6-years-old. Why? Because the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act section 505A includes a little "gift": if drugmakers conduct clinical studies for their drugs with kids, they can get six more months of patent protection. So even if they don't even sell OxyContin to six year olds, just securing the extended patent, thanks to the massive monopoly rents given to drugs still on patent, Purdue is likely to profit massively. Lots of people are reasonably troubled by this:

“They are doing (the pediatric trial) for patent exclusivity, there’s no doubt about it in my mind — not out of largesse,” said Dr. Elliot Krane, director of pain management at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. “That’s important for their bottom line.”

Of course, some will argue that if this provides better drug availability to kids, and those drugs really help the kids, then perhaps this isn't a bad thing. But, no matter what, the incentives here are highly questionable.

We've been impressed with Google's ongoing transparency report efforts, and it appears that the folks at Twitter agree. The company recently released its own Transparency Report (and gave a hat tip to Google in the process). Like Google's report, Twitter's looks at how many requests for information it has received, as well as how many copyright takedown requests. The first chart it showed highlights how nearly all of the government requests for user info it receives comes from the US: As you can see, the US had 679 requests for info, dwarfing second-place Japan, who had 98 requests. After that, the highest you got was the UK and Canada with 11 requests each. There may be a lot more American Twitter users, but still, that's quite a spread. Perhaps more interesting is that Twitter appears to have resisted an awful lot of the requests (especially coming from other countries). However, in the US it did end up abiding by 75% of requests. This isn't a huge surprise, as there have been a few court cases that have shown that Twitter can be compelled to cough up such info here. At the very least, Twitter has been very good about letting its users know that their information is being sought, whenever it can (though there may be cases where it's legally restricted from doing so).

Next up, Twitter showed how often it gets requests not to provide info, but to flat out remove Tweets (outside of copyright takedowns, apparently): Here you see that there aren't really that many requests -- and thankfully none from the US. What's most interesting here, of course, is the fact that Twitter has refused to remove such info each and every time. Considering how many companies just roll over when they receive an official government correspondence or court order, this is really nice to see (and, yes, a bit surprising). As the company notes, it will remove content for "rules violations" (and for copyright infringement, as we're about to see), but these requests fall into a different category -- likely just information that governments didn't want to exist.

And, finally, they discuss copyright takedowns. This is actually an area where we've felt that Twitter doesn't always do a very good job, as there have been multiple stories of questionable DMCA-based takedowns. Given our earlier stories, I'll admit that I'm a bit surprised to see that Twitter seems to actively resist questionable DMCA takedowns -- to the point that only 38% of requests resulted in material being removed. The company admits that it gets a ton of bogus complaints and is careful to review them:

We also receive a large number of misfiled, non-copyright complaints through our web form. We carefully review each report received, and follow-up with the reporter as appropriate.

There may be room for improvement here, but it does appear that (unlike many companies), Twitter doesn't just roll over on every DMCA request.

Either way, it's great to see these kinds of transparency reports that really reveal some detailed info on just how often companies like Google and Twitter are asked to remove content or reveal info on users.

While we are encouraged by the USTR's supposed recognition of the importance of limitations and exceptions in copyright law in their latest TPP draft proposal, there are still significant concerns about the TPP agreement, as a whole, including with the very specifics of the language around exceptions and limitations. Already, a few folks who have been burned before by the USTR are worried that the language being used is so narrow as to only allow fair use-like exceptions in a very narrow set of circumstances. Furthermore, as Sean Flynn lays out, there are many other key issues at stake in the specifics of the text around the IP provisions, way beyond just the limitations and exceptions. These include questions about the copyright status of "temporary copies" (think cached copies), parallel importation ("gray market"), copyright term extension, digital locks and a few other things as well.

You know what would make it so that people weren't so damned concerned about all of this? Opening up the proposed text so that the public can comment on it and give feedback. The fact that the USTR was willing to reveal that it's included a section on limitations and exceptions was nice... but, in part, helped to show the problem: that the USTR only gets to reveal little bits of info it wants to reveal, rather than presenting the document in an open fashion for public comment. That's not transparent at all. We're encouraged to hear that the USTR did share the "exceptions and limitations" language with some who weren't part of the formal "advisory committee" process, but we're still not talking about an open and transparent process -- and without that there are all sorts of opportunities for problems to arise.

While the main event in the Charles Carreon vs. Matthew Inman saga may officially be over, a few issues do remain, including (most importantly) the lawsuit for declaratory judgment against him -- which he can't just dismiss. That said, there's also something... bizarre going on. And we're not talking about the Jonathan Lee Riches' filing (Riches, if you're unaware, is famous for filing ridiculous lawsuits -- even to the point that he filed a lawsuit against Guinness for putting him in their record book as the winner in the "most lawsuits filed" category). At this point, Riches filing a lawsuit is just not newsworthy any more.

Instead, what's more bizarre is a lawsuit filing claiming to be from Matthew Inman against Charles Carreon and his wife -- but which is almost certainly fake. We learned about this from Ken at Popehat, who notes that this supposed "Inman" filing is in "the bizarre and farcical style of Riches," though he's not sure if Riches is actually behind it. That said, he also notes that whoever filed this may soon be in a world of trouble:

However, whoever did it, I submit they've crossed a line they may regret. Filing a frivolous and farcical lawsuit as performance art in your own name is one thing. Filing it falsely under someone else's name is a false statement to the courts. It is very arguably a federal felony under 18 U.S.C. section 1001. I often write here about abuse of 18 U.S.C. section 1001 by the government, but I'm going to have to chew over whether or not this ought to be charged as a crime or not.

The filing itself (embedded below) is truly bizarre. It claims that he (Inman) flew to Tucson to meet with Carreon, where Carreon demanded $1.1 million -- paid in weekly installments of $9,999.99 to a Swiss bank account. Seriously (well, no, not seriously, but that's what's in the filing):

Plaintiff received a telephone call on 6/28/2012 from defendant Charles Carreon, who asked me to fly down to meet him in Tucson Arizona to discuss settling a lawsuit that the defendant filed against me in Federal court in California, and he told me to meet him at the Denny's for breakfast on 6/29/2012 at 8am, so I went to Tucson, and the defendant was waiting in the Denny's booth for me, and The defendant demanded $1.1 million dollars in cash from me to be deposited in weekly installments of $9,999.99 to his offshore swiss bank account, to stay under the $ 10,000 dollars to avoid reporting it for tax purposes, and if i did that he will drop the lawsuit against me. Charles Carreon had his wife Tara lyn Carreon with him and she also told me that i must pay $ 50,000 dollars for her breast enlargements, her tummy tuck, and a years supply of anti aging cream. I told both defendants " no way" " this is complete blackmail" and I told Carreon that I'm reporting him to the Bar association for attorney ethic violations, and to the local police, and Charles Carreon went biserk and irate on me and took my bowl of oatmeal and threw it in m face, Tara lyn Carreon was originally using her feet under the table and secretly massaging my groin with her toes while mr. Carreon was trying to black mail me, so after oatmeal splattered my face, then Tara Carreon kicked me in the groin under the table, everything swelled. Mr. Carreon also poured hot mrs. butterworth maple syrup on my head to humiliate me, the defendants then got up , and Carreons left with a stern warning that they will see me in court, Mr. Carreon told me to enjoy my oat meal. I've suffered emotional distress since and the oatmeal caused stains to my men's wear house suit , and i seek damages including travel expenses to Tucson, Cleaning bills from Oatmeal stains, and medical treatment for hurt groin. I respectfully pray this honorable court will grant my motion for relief.

So, uh, yeah. I do love the creative "sentence" structure used. In particular, the sentence beginning "I told both defendants..." which technically runs on until "everything swelled." When it first mentioned that Inman was eating "oatmeal" I thought it was marginally clever, but it seems to have gone back to the Oatmeal joke three too many times. Either way, this is pretty obviously a bogus filing, but it really was filed in court, and whoever did so may end up regretting it. But, in the meantime, it's a bizarre coda to put at the end of an already bizarre story.

We recently wrote about a bizarre attack on Google from copyright propagandists The Copyright Alliance, claiming that Google wanted to turn all information into "pink slime" where "distinguishing value from muck" was not allowed. We pointed out how ridiculous that is, as the entire role of a search engine is to do exactly that -- to distinguish value from the muck. It's why your search rank is so important. I was thinking of this today, as I read about Jeff Jarvis' experience using "Doctor Google" to self-diagnose the fact that his appendix was bursting. He notes that all the talk from people about how searching Google for medical info led you down dangerous pathways had him nervous enough that he didn't want to believe what he was seeing -- but, in actuality, Google led him to credible (and correct) info:

I woke up with a new pain on my right side about an inch down and three inches over from the navel. Given who I am — chronic hypochondriac and a certified Google fan boy — I searched Google for appendicitis.

By reputation, Google — and the internet — should have returned bogus, dangerous, uninformed, unauthoritative advice from cults, and witch doctors, and Demand Media. But it didn’t. It gave me the NIH, WedMD, the Mayo Clinic, (yes) Wikipedia, and other good and trustworthy sources. It gave me more than enough good information to check and cross-check and then diagnose my new pain correctly.

Yes, rather than promoting "the muck," Google properly returned the valued sites. And, of course, that's exactly what Google wants to do. So I started thinking -- why is it that the folks at the Copyright Alliance are so confused about Google (other than the obvious answer that they've never used a search engine)? And I think I know what the problem is. They think that Google is supposed to serve up the links that are most valuable to the Copyright Alliance, not the links that are most valuable to the actual users of the service. That's a very different thing.

More specifically, when people using Google search for "free movies" or "free music," the folks at the Copyright Alliance get upset that Google actually sends them to what they want, believing that, instead, Google should send them not to free movies or free music -- but rather to a site to pay for those things. Of course, if the users were looking to pay for those things, then I'm sure Google would accommodate. But to assume that someone looking for free stuff is magically going to buy because Google doesn't send them to what they want sure sounds like wishful thinking.

The issue is not about "pink slime" or Google's inability to distinguish value from the muck. It's very much about actually responding to what users want. The problem is that the folks who generously fund the Copyright Alliance don't like giving users what they want. They prefer the old way that things were done, when they could control and limit the release of content and they could focus on being gatekeepers and artificially jacking up the price on things -- leading them to inflate (in their own minds) the true value of something, as well as the corresponding price (not the same thing, of course).

However, if they were to adapt, and recognize the opportunities the internet provides, they could embrace it by providing what consumers want. At that point, it seems clear that Google would also point many people in their direction... if only they served the users' best interests too.

Along with ridiculous libel cases, the UK is also infamous for laws that are designed to stop people hurting the feelings of others. Maybe that's a laudable aim, but the end-result is that they can cast a chill over freedom of speech. Here's a classic case from the English town of Boston in Lincolnshire:

A Boston OAP [Old Age Pensioner] who vowed to defy police advice and display an atheist poster has attracted national interest -- and an offer of support from the National Secular Society.

John Richards was advised that putting up a poster at his Vauxhall Road home denouncing religions as 'fairy stories' could be an offence under the Public Order Act.

Following the outcry that greeted this story, the Lincolnshire police naturally responded by issuing a press release:

LincolnshirePolice have not advised Mr Richards that he faces arrest for the specific posters he is displaying and he is not committing any offences by doing so.

The 1986 Public Order Act states that a person is guilty of an offence if they display a sign which is threatening or abusive or insulting with the intent to provoke violence or which may cause another person harassment, alarm or distress. This is balanced with a right to free speech and the key point is that the offence is committed if it is deemed that a reasonable person would find the content insulting.

If a complaint is received by the police in relation to a sign displayed in a person’s window, an officer would attend and make a reasoned judgement about whether an offence had been committed under the Act. In the majority of cases where it was considered that an offence had been committed, the action taken by the officer would be to issue words of advice and request that the sign be removed. Only if this request were refused might an arrest be necessary.

So the good news is that the police haven't told Mr Richards that he faces arrest for his atheist poster -- yet; the bad news is that if someone says they are offended by his poster, and the police decide that a reasonable person would agree with them, then he will indeed face arrest unless he takes it down.

Since the UK government claims that the current threat level from terrorism is "substantial", you can't help feeling that one way of tackling that would be to free up the police from having to worry about posters in a pensioner's window.

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