The entertainment industry has a long and storied history of incumbents freaking out about every technological advancement that alters the market. From iPods and digital distribution, to VCRs and home taping, all the way back to player pianos, it seems like they've never met a device they didn't hate and fear. And they've yet to be right about any of them: whenever a group claims something is going to destroy the music or movie industry, that thing ends up expanding it instead. In the interval, they churn out scare campaigns and sob stories like "Home Taping Is Killing Music", or the laughably intense anti-piracy ads that run before feature films, or in the 1930s, depictions of a vicious battle between musicians and evil robots.

Yes, evil robots. Long-time reader Matt Novak points us to a blog post he wrote last month, showing off some vintage ads from a campaign by musicians against recorded music in movie theatres:

That must be a textbook symptom of technophobia. You should only be warning the public about robot tyrants if you are a) dangerously insane or b) John Connor. Of course, as we now know, synchronized sound massively expanded the film industry, which in turn created countless new opportunities for musicians—while at the same time, closely-related technology advancements were turning the recorded music industry into its own powerhouse. Today's entertainment incumbents have reined it in a little, preferring somewhat-believable lies over utterly fantastic ones, and focusing more on issues of "theft" than a supposed decline in the quality of the experience (they leave the latter up to technicians and weirdos like Prince). And yet there are still striking similarities between their message and the copy that appeared on those 1930s ads:

The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.

Note the consistent refrain—"we're not opposed to technology and innovation, except that we totally are"—and the characterization of what they do as the entirety of "art". The more things change, the more they stay the same.

(By the way, there are several other amusing ads in the original post, and I strongly recommend checking them out.)

We always hear stories about how copyright has to be protected to "protect the artists," and yet time and time again we learn that some of the biggest name artists will often copy directly from each other without credit or payment. It's the way music is made. In James Boyle's excellent book, The Public Domain, there's a really fantastic chapter giving plenty of examples of this in practice. However, Rob Hyndman recently pointed us to another such example, found via Wikipedia, but backed up via its sources of course. The discussion? It's about where Michael Jackson's famous song Billie Jean came from. Turns out, Jackson himself admitted to copying the bass line directly from a Hall and Oates song:

According to Daryl Hall, when Jackson was recording “We Are the World,” Jackson approached him and admitted to lifting the bass line for "Billie Jean" from a Hall and Oates song (apparently referring to Hall’s "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" from the 1981 album Private Eyes): "Michael Jackson once said directly to me that he hoped I didn't mind that he copped that groove."

Of course, the really amusing part? Hall responded to Jackson... by telling him he had done the same thing himself to get that bassline in the first place! "It's something we all do," Hall later explained.

Indeed. And yet, under today's laws, it's still considered infringement, and we still hear people looking down on "remixing" or people who create works in this manner, by building on the works of others. And yet, this is one of the most successful pop songs of all time. And the bass was a big part of that. Elsewhere in the Wikipedia article, there's a discussion of how the producer of the song, Quincy Jones, hated the song, and specifically the bass line. Yet Jackson insisted that the bass line was the key to the song, and the two of them fought over it until Jackson won. And the bassline was completely copied.

It's stories like this that make us wonder how people can say with a straight face that copying something can't help to create something new.

Well, this is interesting. Given the general condemnation of Wikileaks by governments, all the ongoing controversy and reputation problems faced by the organization, you wouldn't expect them to be approached with any official requests for leaked information. But it seems just that has happened in the UK, where the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics has requested and received a dossier from Wikileaks on corruption in the British press.

On the surface this is pretty hypocritical, and more than a little ironic: in the past, the UK government asked media outlets to brief them on government secrets they received from Wikileaks before publishing them. Now, a government-run inquiry is asking Wikileaks to hand over information on UK media outlets. Apparently they don't hate leaks as long as they flow in the right direction.

Hopefully this represents another step towards governments recognizing that Wikileaks isn't pure evil, even if there are questionable things about the operation. Though there are risks, bringing sensitive information to light is often in the public's best interest—indeed, that's the whole spirit behind public inquiries. The Leveson Inquiry was convened when the News of the World phone-hacking scandal pointed to a secret culture of corruption in the press, and now Wikileaks is helping to expose it further. If governments attempt to maintain secret cultures of their own, they too will be exposed.

The Earth is literally covered in water, but 97% of that water is in salty oceans and not useful for drinking. In fact, only about 1% of the world's water is really usable by humans (because a lot of fresh water is frozen in glaciers or otherwise inconveniently located). Here are just a few links on the lengths people could go to in order to get drinkable water.

• The United Nations held a design competition to create ads that help raise awareness of water conservation efforts. The winners will be picked in June. [url]
• A team of software engineers created a simulation that concludes it's possible to tow an iceberg from the waters around Newfoundland to the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. The expense of actually doing this, however, has not been shown to be worthwhile by anyone yet. [url]
• IBM's Almaden Research Center is developing new water filtration membranes for purification processes -- which could be useful for desalination and other water reclamation. The trick is getting water purified without using a lot of energy to do so.... [url]
• A guy from Chile was arrested for stealing a 5-ton piece of a glacier -- that he was going to sell on the black market for making designer ice cubes. Glacier ice just tastes way better than the ice that comes out of a plastic tray because it's been aged for millions of years. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

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

After three failed attempts over the past seven years, copyright changes are coming to Canada. Bill C-11 enters the final stage of committee review next week, and after that it's all-but-guaranteed to pass into law. As Michael Geist puts it, "while there will still be some additional opportunities for debate—third reading in the House of Commons, Senate review—the reality is that next week's discussion will largely determine the future of Canadian copyright law."

The bill as written is nowhere near as damaging as SOPA/PIPA or even the DMCA, and it has significant bright spots, such as extending Fair Dealing (our comparatively toothless version of Fair Use) to include parody, satire, education and non-commercial remixes and mash-ups. But it does include one big problem: an anti-circumvention clause that, like the DMCA in America, will make it illegal to break copy protection even for the purposes of legal copying. This makes no more sense under Canadian copyright law than it does anywhere else: if the act of copying is legal, why should the means to do so be illegal? The Canadian Library Association has proposed a common-sense amendment to the so-called "digital locks" provision, clarifying that circumvention is only infringing if it is "for the purpose of an act that is an infringement of the copyright". It makes no sense to exclude such a requirement.

The other major concern is the amendments requested by content industry representatives, which if accepted would turn C-11 from a relatively tame bill into a monstrous cousin of SOPA/PIPA. Proposals include notice-and-takedown systems, graduated response from ISPs, website blocking provisions, warrantless access to subscriber information, and many of the other worst parts of SOPA/PIPA and the DMCA. Additionally, the licensing agency Access Copyright is opposing the bill's expansion of Fair Dealing, and even trying to go in the opposite direction and scale it back.

All these proposals will be reviewed by the committee in a "clause-by-clause" review of the bill. For Canadians who value progressive copyright and a free and open internet, the good news is that most of the bad amendments will likely be rejected, both because the committee members are well aware of the massive public backlash against SOPA/PIPA, and because many of the proposals are not the mere "technical amendments" that are permitted at this stage. But there are no guarantees, and that means that now is an essential time to make your voice heard, and ensure that the right decisions are made about the future of Copyright in Canada. We must let our representatives know that we support common-sense changes to the digital locks provision, and oppose the SOPA-fication of the bill by industry groups, as well as the attack on Fair Dealing by Access Copyright.

Geist has provided a convenient list of e-mail addresses for all the committee members, and Open Media's Say No tool allows you to contact your Member of Parliament—though it does not allow you to enter a custom message, so I recommend finding and contacting your MP directly. I also hope that American and international readers will not see this as a purely Canadian issue: it is, in fact, a part of ongoing American efforts to introduce stronger copyright wherever possible. Canadian copyright legislation has been largely driven by U.S. interests and pressure tactics like the USTR's Special 301 report. You can be confident that if the American government gets its wish and Canada enacts harsher copyright laws, they will soon be pushing to "harmonize" the law and bring the same restrictions back to the U.S.

In many ways, Canada is benefitting from the fallout of the SOPA/PIPA protests, which is helping to shield us from the worst of the proposed changes—but that cannot be an excuse for complacency. If we make the effort to fix the problems with C-11, and push back against industry proposals that aim to inject it with new, bigger problems, we can emerge from this process as an example of the right way to approach evolving copyright law.

We recently wrote about how Paypal was pressuring Smashwords to drop any books that included sexual content that Paypal didn't like. This seemed ridiculously over-aggressive. You can be completely against rape without that meaning that no books shall exist that include a rape scene. But according to Paypal's rules, books that include themes around rape, incest and bestiality -- even if such books were there to raise awareness around those things, not to encourage them -- simply were not allowed. Smashwords claims that Paypal is passing the blame on to the credit card companies, but others have questioned how accurate that really is. And, even then, it seems that Paypal should stand up to the credit card companies if that is, indeed, the case.

In the meantime, the EFF has put together a letter writing campaign to tell Paypal to stop censoring books:

Recently, PayPal gave online publishers and booksellers, including BookStrand.com, Smashwords, and eXcessica, an ultimatum: it would close their accounts and refuse to process all payments unless they removed erotic books containing descriptions of rape, incest, and bestiality. The result would severely restrict the public's access to a wide range of legal material, could drive some companies out of business, and deprive some authors of their livelihood.

Financial services providers should be neutral when it comes to lawful online speech. PayPal’s policy underscores how vulnerable such speech can be and how important it is to stand up and protect it.

The topics PayPal would ban have been depicted in world literature since Sophocles’ Oedipus and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And while the books currently affected may not appear to be in the same league, many works ultimately recognized for their literary, historical, and artistic worth were reviled when first published. Books like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were banned as “obscene” in the United States because of their sexual content. The works of Marquis de Sade, which include descriptions of incest, torture, and rape, were considered scandalous when written, although his importance in the history of literature and political and social philosophy is now widely acknowledged.

You can go to the link above and add your name to the campaign and let Paypal know that this is not the role of a payment processor.

Of course, what this story is really highlighting is just how ridiculous it is that there are choke points like Paypal who can solely dictate morality based on their own views of what is and what is not art. What we need are a lot of alternatives, so that if Paypal makes decisions like this, people can simply route around them.

Almost exactly two years ago, when the big publishers, along with Apple, effectively forced Amazon to allow the publishers to jack up prices on ebooks, I noted that this looked like a classic case of price fixing. Apparently, the US government agrees -- and found enough evidence to go after the publishers and Apple for price fixing. There are settlement talks ongoing, but if they fall through, the government is likely to sue. This probably means that we'll start seeing some lower prices on ebooks. Of course, the stupid thing is that these super high ebook prices have probably hurt the market more than helped. Lots of indie authors have experimented with ebook pricing, and found that the sweet spot for maximizing revenue is often under $5. So while big publishers may have been getting more per sale, it seems likely they were leaving a ton of money on the table by limiting the size of their ebook market with prices that were just too high.

The public domain is meant to be a source of free culture for all the world to enjoy, mix and derive other works from. Unfortunately, there are many people and organizations in the world that wish to block the use of public domain material. Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (ERB) is one such organization. Founded in 1923, this corporation has been handling all the copyrights and other rights for the works created by the author Edgar Rice Burroughs. Amongst the rights held by the corporation are the rights to the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars characters. What makes this situation somewhat unique is the fact that only a portion of the Tarzan and John Carter books are still covered by copyright in the US. A number of the early works were published prior to 1923 when modern copyright terms of life plus 70 years went into effect. Even though the copyrights of the early works are long expired, ERB has shown that it will block the use of both characters in modern derivative works.

With that in mind, it should come as little surprise that ERB has set its legal sights on the comic book company Dynamite Entertainment. You see, Dynamite had the audacity to base a series of comic books on the public domain stories and settings found in the early Tarzan and John Carter books. However, ERB was not having it. So it decided to sue Dynamite, not for copyright infringement (at least not primarily) but for trademark infringement. Since it can't fight Dynamite's use of those public domain stories on copyright grounds, it is attempting to use trademark law to block it.

In this lawsuit, ERB claims that Dynamite's use of the Tarzan and John Carter marks dilutes and damages the associated brands ERB controls. ERB claims that the manner in which Dynamite uses the mark, and specifically some of the covers which feature partial nudity, are damaging to the reputation and good will of ERB and the business it has built up around Tarzan and John Carter.

What this really sounds like is a company coming to the realization of what will happen in less than a decade's time. If people could just make comics and other derivative works based on its characters, then licensing deals, like the ones it made with Disney and Dark Horse Comics, would not be necessary. That's the real rub here. It is making a lot of money from those deals. If it were to be ruled either in court or through inaction that there is no need for such licensing when the derivative works are using the characters, settings and stories of the public domain works, then ERB's whole business model would fall flat. On the other hand, if ERB can win this case based on trademark alone, it could extend its business model and profit potential to long after the copyrights on all of Burroughs' works expire in 2020. If that is the case, it could set a very damaging precedent.

After the US seized Bodog.com, we pointed to a writeup by EasyDNS that has created quite a stir, claiming that this was the first time that the US had seized a domain that was registered through a non-US registrar by going straight to the register (in this case VeriSign). But as we pointed out, that's simply untrue. Back in 2010 we wrote about how most of the federal government's domain seizures went directly to the register.

For whatever reason, more and more people keep picking up on the EasyDNS piece, including interesting questions about whether or not these seizures could be seen as declarations of war by seizing foreign property.

I'm glad that people are up in arms about this, but it's important to remember that this simply isn't new. In fact, the feds themselves seem bewildered by all these claims. In an interview with Wired, ICE spokesperson Nicole Navas admits that the government has seized approximately 750 domains this way, with the vast majority of them using foreign registrars:

Such seizures are becoming commonplace under the Obama administration. For example, the U.S. government program known as Operation in Our Sites acquires federal court orders to shutter sites it believes are hawking counterfeited goods, illegal sports streams and unauthorized movies and music. Navas said the U.S. government has seized 750 domain names, “most with foreign-based registrars.”

So, sure, speak up about this, but please, please recognize that this isn't new. It's been going on for at least three years. Hell, it's so common these days that PIR, who runs the .org register, has a dedicated page listing out all the domains they've handed over to the feds.

When the MPAA filed its initial lawsuit against Hotfile, we noted that we were surprised at just how weak the argument was. Honestly, we thought that for all the talk of how evil Hotfile was, they would have a stronger argument. As expected, the MPAA has now filed for summary judgment in the case (standard behavior at this stage in a case like this). What's interesting is how much the motion for summary judgement appears to match the US government's indictment against Megaupload, including the questionable interpretation of perfectly reasonable behavior. Basically, the MPAA seems to think that the only possible interpretation of certain facts is that Hotfile was heavily encouraging copyright infringement. While there are some points that may cause trouble for Hotfile (its failure to set up a DMCA agent is a big one), many of the claims are ridiculous and seem to exist in bizarro world.

The more you read, the more you shake your head. The MPAA's circular arguments can basically be summarized as "We shall prove that this tool is illegal. Exhibit A: People use this illegal tool." Very large segments of the motion are basically this tautology over and over again. "Oh my goodness, this is illegal, and our proof is that it's designed so people use it!"

For example, the motion focuses on Hotfile's affiliate program for uploaders, which is quite similar to Megaupload's. However, the MPAA interprets this in a bizarre way suggesting that it was designed to encourage infringement. Why? Because it was designed to encourage usage. Really. The affiliate program pays people more if more of their content is downloaded. According to the MPAA that alone is evidence of encouraging infringement. That seems crazy. As we pointed out, plenty of artists used such services themselves to distribute their own works free to consumers, while still getting paid for it at the same time. This is a business model that cuts out the legacy gatekeepers... but does that make it against the law? In the eyes of the MPAA, absolutely.

Hotfile’s Affiliate program affirmatively discourages users from uploading files that are not downloaded frequently, because those files consume Hotfile resources without generating premium subscriptions. SUF 16(a)(iv)-(vi); e.g., Yeh Ex. 61 at 13 (“some webmaster just . . . upload LOTS of gigabytes, but don’t promote their files. So these kind of webmasters use our server resources, upload resources, bandwidth, diskspace and at final they make our service to work slow”). Hotfile discourages unpopular files through a “ranking” system (Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Copper), which governs how much Affiliates are paid. SUF 16(a)(iv). Hotfile assigns “rank” based in part on an Affiliate’s ratio of uploaded files to downloaded files....

Hotfile also uses its Affiliate program to encourage Affiliates to upload large files – because “free” users frustrated with downloading large files at slow download speeds are more likely to upgrade to premium accounts to get faster download speeds

Notice the implicit assumption here: encouraging people to post content that people want and is large must mean it's infringing. But that's a logical leap that the MPAA makes without anything to back it up. There is nothing that says a large popular file must automatically be infringing. Why would the MPAA even make such an argument?

Also, just like the Megaupload indictment, they use the lack of a search engine to suggest something damning.

Because Hotfile avoids having a search function, Hotfile depends on link sites to host, organize and promote download links to content stored on Hotfile. Hotfile’s Affiliate program encourages the development of pirate link sites that do nothing other than promote download links.

This is especially ridiculous because in earlier cases the entertainment industry has argued exactly the opposite: that having a search feature means that these file sharing services were inducing and encouraging infringement by not just being neutral content hosts. The obvious thing to do to remain in compliance with the law, then, is not to have a search engine. Yet, now, they're claiming that not having a search engine is evidence of trying to encourage infringement. So which is it? Is having a search engine illegal or is not having a search engine illegal?

Basically, the MPAA doesn't care. To them, either is illegal because they just can't handle that they're losing their position as a gatekeeper.

Similar to the Megaupload indictment, this motion assumes that encouraging the uploading of popular files and the deletion of unpopular files is proof positive of infringement -- but there are perfectly legitimate reasons for those features. It's fairly amazing to watch the MPAA interpret perfectly reasonable things like deleting files no longer being downloaded -- which plenty of legitimate file transfer services do -- as evidence of lawbreaking.

The MPAA then keeps pretending that if Hotfile isn't used for "personal storage", it must be used for infringement. But that's ridiculous. It's a service for distributing files -- nothing says those files are automatically infringing. That's the logical leap that the MPAA makes multiple times throughout the document.

Hotfile’s chiding of users on public forums puts to rest any suggestion that Hotfile based its business on personal storage: “To pay you just to upload? Why should we pay you then? … Why should we upload files that nobody wants to download? You may think your files are interest[ing] and most probably they are, but we must convince downloaders and convert them to premium users.”

I read this and I don't see the nefariousness. Nowhere do they encourage infringement. They encourage popular files. I know the MPAA would rather not believe it, but there are lots of content creators who no longer go through the gatekeepers, and they produce all sorts of popular content -- some of whom use services like Hotfile and Megaupload to profit from doing so. Why does the MPAA assume that encouraging legitimate activity is proof of contributory infringement?

Similarly, the MPAA jumps a over a clear logic gap by insisting that Hotfile support staff simply "knew" of infringement, because some people asked them how to download files that, according to the MPAA, were infringing. But from the examples given, it certainly sounds like the questions had little to do with the content, but merely the functionality of how you download. There's no indication there that Hotfile's support staff could have or should have known the content is infringing. Amazingly, the MPAA's "we're the center of the universe" attitude seems to assume that naturally anyone would recognize the name of some of its bad movies and immediately, magically know that it's infringing. But, based on what? That's not explained.

The MPAA's "smoking gun" of sorts is the fact that a study suggested a large percentage of downloads on the site were infringing, but I don't see how that, alone, is illegal. When the MPAA sued to kill the VCR, a large percentage of VCR usage was considered "infringing." But the market evolved. A large percentage alone isn't proof of anything, but the MPAA has to throw it out there.

Later, the MPAA goes so far as to pretend a part of the law that doesn't exist. They point out that Hotfile "failed to consider" filtering technology. I can see how that's frustrating to the MPAA, but the law here is pretty clear that there is no proactive duty to filter. So why would the MPAA even bring this up as a point?

There are redactions in the motion and perhaps the MPAA has some magic evidence -- but it's troubling that so many of these claims seem to have little connection to reality.

Also troubling, the motion tries to pin liability on the site's main developer because he programmed the software. That seems pretty crazy. Just because you make a tool, it shouldn't make you liable for how others misuse it.

The entire point of the motion (and the lawsuit) seems to be to prove that (1) Hotfile encourages users to use the site and (2) many users use it to infringe. For them to have a case they need to prove that Hotfile actively encourages infringement, but they can't actually do that, so they just keep trying to prove that Hotfile encourages usage (what site doesn't?!?) and then, entirely separately, that many users infringe... and completely and totally leave out the part where part (1) is connected to part (2). They just keep repeating part (1) and part (2) and saying See?!?!? See?!?!? as if there's a connection there... but which they fail to actually make. It's amazingly lacking in any direct connection.

In the end, one other thing strikes me about all of this. If the MPAA believes that it has such a slam dunk case here... why did it never sue Megaupload in federal court? Yes, Megaupload is based outside the US... but it has been sued in the US before and took part in the case. So why did the MPAA never actually sue Megaupload? If it believes this filing against Hotfile is such a slam dunk, surely we'd have heard about a similar case against Megaupload... and some details of how that effort was stifled. But that's not what's happened at all.

It's no secret that various major labels and big music organizations have a history of not paying artists what they're owed under the law. We've covered plenty of examples of fancy "accounting" to avoid having to pay, such that even big stars claim they never see royalties. However, Jeff Price, over at Tunecore has uncovered what may be an even bigger scam on the publishing/songwriting side of the business, creating a giant shell game, wherein major labels are getting hundreds of millions in royalties that are owed to songwriters, but are never paid.

The details are quite complex. Jeff's post has all the details, but let's just focus in on one key part of it. Basically, outside the US, digital music services need to pay two separate licenses to US songwriters -- one for reproduction rights and one for public performance rights (we won't get into why there are two separate rights and how they collided back together in digital music, as that's a different rant for a different day). However, almost no one actually buys both licenses. Typically they just get one (the reproduction right, as provided as a compulsory rate via ASCAP/BMI/SESAC) which they then pay through a local collection society. Technically, that means digital music services outside the US need to directly negotiate deals with US songwriters for the public performance right. But they don't do that.

Instead, they just pretend that the reproduction license they have covers it. And then, the local collection society arbitrarily split the reproduction license into components, pretending some of it is for the ASCAP/BMI/SESAC and some of it is for the public performance license... even if no such license has been secured (as it rarely is). Then, to make it even crazier, the local collection society skims its own take off the top for administration (despite having no right to the money in the first place) and then passes the money on... to the major labels. Jeff lays out an example:

You are a member of ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. These three organizations are in a relationship with other performance rights organizations around the world to collect and pass back and forth Public Performance royalties.

Your song sells via download in Japan (the same scenario plays out in just about every country).

The digital store pays the songwriter’s money to the local collection agency in Japan (called JASRAC) for the right of Public Performance. JASRAC has the right to issue licenses and collect money for the songwriter’s Public Performance as the right of Public Performance was passed to it by ASCAP/BMI/SESAC.

Now here’s where it gets really screwed up:

JASRAC arbitrarily splits the money paid by the digital store between mechanical royalties and Public Performance. For example, JASRAC decides 70% of the money it got paid by the digital music service for Public Performance goes to mechanical royalties and 30% of the money goes to Public Performance royalties.

There is no basis in copyright law for how the split is determined. The split differs from country to country and from collection agency to collection agency. It is based on who sits on the board of directors at each collection agency. If there are more publishers on the board, the split goes more toward mechanicals; if there are more songwriters, the split favors Public Performance.

Important: JASRAC does not represent the songwriter for Reproduction and has no right to split the money paid to it by the digital store. Nevertheless, the collection agencies ignore this (and apparently so do many digital music services).

For the mechanical royalties, JASRAC takes around 15% of the songwriter’s money as an “administration” fee despite not administering it (not to mention it had no right to the money in the first place).

Then, as the songwriter never joined JASRAC to get the mechanical royalties that JASRAC had no right to collect, JASRAC gives the songwriter’s money to Warner Bros., EMI, Sony, Universal and others based on each company’s market share in that country.

In other words, they give some portion of the songwriter’s money from Public Performance away to other entities. Eerily close to stealing the songwriter’s money…

He goes on to point out that it's effectively impossible for a songwriter to actually get this money that is required by law to go back to the songwriter.

Jeff has been on the warpath about this, trying to get back the royalties songwriters signed to Tunecore are owed. If you heard the story last month of Amazon suddenly taking down all Tunecore music in Europe, you might reasonably put two and two together to recognize that someone wasn't getting all the licenses required...

This is unquestionably a complex legal issue, with a variety of different separate rights under copyright law, which collide in slightly awkward ways online, combined with different laws in different jurisdictions on a global internet. The root of the problem is how copyright law itself is setup -- which is that each time a new technology comes along, regulators duct tape on a different "right" to handle things, and assume that they've fixed the issue. But that leaves us in a bit of a mess today where the internet is sorta like a sale, sorta like a license, sorta like a performance, etc... and then there's a big mess.

A true solution would be to recognize that the way copyright law is set up today is a huge Frankenstein-beast, but that seems unlikely to happen. In the meantime, however, this level of complexity appears to have opened up a way for the major labels to effectively just steal (and yes, in this case it is stealing) a ton of money from songwriters by more or less laundering the money through the complex and nearly impossible to understand international collection society system. As Jeff summarizes, the whole thing is pretty crazy:

The digital store has not gotten the right to Reproduction and has never paid the songwriter the money he/she is owed.

• The collection agency has taken the songwriter’s Public Performance royalties, split them into two, taken a % of the royalty it does not represent and then has made it impossible for the songwriter to get what’s left over.
• Other entities that have no right to the songwriter’s royalties knowingly take the royalties from the collection agencies.

From the portion of the money JASRAC was legally allowed to collect and arbitrarily assign to the Public Performance royalty, it takes somewhere between 15% – 25% of it as an administrative fee (it is not clear how much as they will not reveal the exact % they take from a particular source) and then about 6 – 12 months later, JASRAC passes it back to ASCAP/BMI/SESAC.

ASCAP/BMI/SESAC then takes an international administrative fee of around 3.7% of what’s given to them and then splits the Public Performance royalty in half, assigning 50% of the money to the songwriter and 50% of the money to the “publisher” (side note: there is no basis in copyright law for this, but it was done to protect songwriters in publishing deals).

ASCAP/BMI/SESAC then pays the songwriter 50% of the leftover Public Performance royalty 6 – 12 months after having gotten it (almost two years after it was generated) and the other 50% gets sent to the publisher; if the songwriter is both the songwriter and publisher, the songwriter receives both payments. If the songwriter is in a publishing deal, the publisher payment goes to the other entity that takes another 10% – 50%. This entity then sits on it for another 3 – 6 months before finally sending the remaining royalty back to the songwriter close to over three years after it was generated.

No one can follow exactly what is going on due to the complexity, lack of transparency and audit trail, and time delays. In the process songwriters’ royalties are either being taken from them or not paid to them in the first place.

It’s one hell of a global copyright shell game that funnels songwriter money into the pockets of everyone but the songwriter.

Yeah, and all the folks profiting then talk up in the press about how they're doing so much to "protect" artists and musicians?

I've never understood the hype about QR codes. They appeared one day, and then suddenly every advertiser made them a priority, plastering them all over everything in print. It has always seemed like undue obsession with something that, ultimately, is not that useful to very many people -- and that's assuming most people even know what they are. I was pleased to discover that I'm not the only one: the Guardian has set up a Tumblr called WTF QR CODES to catalog the many bizarre and inappropriate uses of the technology:

Most people look at a QR code and see "robot barf", but marketers seem to think they are a must-have technology for their advertising campaigns. In their minds, eager consumers wander around with their smartphones, scanning square codes wherever they appear. As a result, the codes appear just about everywhere, and often in some really absurd places.

The examples range from the fairly mundane (QR codes in the subway, where there is no data reception and where they are often located on the inaccessible side of the tracks) to the completely outlandish and even dangerous (huge QR codes towed behind airplanes, or printed on highway-side billboards).

There's one thing the article doesn't mention that I think is an important point: even if QR codes were popular, they would be a doomed transitional technology no matter how you slice it. Image recognition technology has been progressing rapidly and is already being used in products like Google Goggles, which means visual machine languages are going to be unnecessary. The tech isn't perfect yet, but it's already at the point that smartphones are capable of recognizing ads based on color, configuration and other indicators. As visual search becomes more common, consumers are going to get used to the idea that they can snap a photo of anything and find related information online—and the QR code will be officially obsolete (at least as a marketing tool).

Until then, I guess advertisers will keep slapping them on everything from bananas to condoms.

In a court ruling that came out a little while ago (just catching up now), Judge Richard Posner took the lead in an appeals court ruling that effectively reaffirmed the idea that police don't need a warrant to search mobile phones as they're arresting someone. Of course, this general concept is not new and I've discussed my concerns about police being able to search phones without a warrant in the past -- but this particular ruling does seem pretty limited. While Posner notes some of the bigger questions, he basically compares the phone to a diary, and focuses on the mere searching of basic data, like the address book, to suggest this particular search was limited, and doesn't raise any significant 4th amendment issue.

It’s not even clear that we need a rule of law specific to cell phones or other computers. If police are entitled to open a pocket diary to copy the owner’s address, they should be entitled to turn on a cell phone to learn its number. If allowed to leaf through a pocket address book, as they are, United States v. Rodriguez, 995 F.2d 776, 778 (7th Cir. 1993), they should be entitled to read the address book in a cell phone. If forbidden to peruse love letters recognized as such found wedged between the pages of the address book, they should be forbidden to read love letters in the files of a cell phone.

Effectively, the court more or less says that circumstances matter, and that in situations where there's a chance that data will get deleted or modified, it's perfectly reasonable to do a simple search of the mobile phone, but it could get thornier if it moves more in the direction of voyeurism, rather than as evidence for crimes. I'd certainly prefer much stronger privacy protections -- especially as a phone really is a window into much, much more than just a phone, but the ruling isn't much of a surprise and seems to align with other rulings on similar issues.

The Register recently published an interesting piece looking at the other, less-discussed side of the online privacy debate: what are users getting in return? Writer Matt Asay doesn't have a huge problem with ad networks tracking his behavior—or at least he wouldn't, if he was seeing more of the useful, ultra-targeted ads he is supposed to get in return:

What grates on me is that for all the spying these companies do on my online behavior, they can't seem to serve me an ad for something I'd actually want to buy. Worse, they're terrible at delivering anything close to approximating a deal on the things I'd like to buy, even when I tell Google exactly what I want.

What gives?

For example, I ski a lot. And I spend a reasonable amount of time on Backcountry.com, Rossignol.com and other ski-related sites. Even the most rudimentary tracking technology should know that I'm interested in Rossignol skis (perhaps it would even know I bought two pairs of Rossignol skis this past year), yet when I type in "skis" into Google or even "Rossignol" into Google, the ads served up are for ... something completely different. Even the store that sold me my last pair of Rossignol skis – EVO – keeps trying to show me every kind of ski except Rossignol skis.

... Come on, people: if you're going to track my online behavior, at least use it to get me to buy something I want!

Asay feels that, based on his purchasing habits, advertisers should be able to figure out that he's loyal to Rossignol skis—but he could be encouraged to spend more money on them if he was targeted with ads for sale prices and other promotions. Instead, he's shown full-price retail listings for brands he's not interested in, pointing him to retailers he already knows about.

Now, in some ways this example is a little unfair, since it's only natural that companies are going to want to advertise to their competitors' customers, and not letting them do so would remove one of their biggest incentives for spending money on ads. But Asay still hits an important point: most targeted ads are not that effective. Online advertising as a whole already faces a public perception crisis in the form of privacy concerns, and they are never going to solve it if they don't put more emphasis on giving customers something in return for their privacy sacrifices.

Reactions to the White House's We the People initiative have been mixed, but it is certainly one small step in the right direction. In Finland, they're taking a giant leap: letting citizens pass complete bills directly to parliament. The Citizen's Initiative Act, which came into effect this month, requires Parliament to process any bill that collects 50,000 signatures from citizens of voting age. Alternatively, citizens can make a proposal for a bill, which will then be examined and potentially drafted by a ministry. To facilitate the process, a volunteer group in Helsinki has created the Avoin ministeriö (Open Ministry) website, an online tool for drafting bills and proposals and gathering signatures.

The Open Ministry is an idea that Joonas Pekkanen came up with last December. Pekkanen, who has been involved in launching Internet-based start-up companies, saw a newspaper article about the citizens’ initiative. He began to recruit volunteer workers for the project from his circle of friends, and the group was formed quickly. The entire operation has started from the grass-roots level. No money from the government or any interest group is involved. Openness and involving everybody in the operation of the ministry has been the central principle behind the activity.

They plan to start small and get people comfortable with the idea, by first targeting a much-maligned dog tax that is effectively un-enforced but still on the books and actually costing the government money. Pekkanen plans to focus on submitting completed bills rather than proposals, saying “the aim is that citizens’ initiatives would have the best possible chances of being passed as laws by Parliament.”

There are similar projects underway in the U.S., but none go quite as far as this. Apparently there is going to be a delay while the Ministry of Justice builds a system for accepting legal digital signatures, but once that is taken care of it will be fascinating to see how this develops, and how responsive the Finnish parliament is to citizen-drafted legislation.

It's well-known that movable-type printing started (at least in the Western world) with the Gutenberg Bible, which all-but-singlehandedly ushered in a new era of literature distribution. To this day, the Bible remains one of the most-printed books of all time, and it's interesting to learn that it still plays a role in pushing publishing technology forward. The Christian missionary initiative Every Tribe Every Nation (ETEN) is working to make ebook Bibles available in as many languages as possible, on as many platforms as possible—and in doing so, they're solving technical problems that few others are addressing:

Now, it turns out, the old missionary impulse is being turned towards some extremely difficult technical challenges: as Mark Howe [who works on the project] has said, "For all the issues that are still to be solved, ETEN is trying to do things that the world's biggest tech companies haven't cracked yet, such as rendering minority languages correctly on mobile devices. There's a unity among Bible translators and publishers that stands in stark contrast to the fractured, fratricidal smartphone industry." And of course, once these technical challenges are met, it won't be Bibles only that people can get on their mobile devices: whole textual worlds will open up for them.

Much of the innovation has to do with niche languages (they have translations in Potawatomie and Hawai'i Pidgin) and the developing world: ETEN is tackling translation challenges that are of low priority for many businesses since they aren't interested in entering those markets—at least not enough, or not yet. But if ETEN succeeds in making this kind of mass-internationalization easier, it will be sure to have a ripple effect as others make use of the technology. The Bible may once again be responsible for driving a communications revolution.