The folks over at M-Lab have apparently updated their data on BitTorrent throttling to look at how much different ISPs throttle BitTorrent connections. TorrentFreak has an excellent summary of the data, showing that thanks to Comcast getting slapped down for its BitTorrent throttling years ago, there's very little happening in the US. Other countries, however, show a very different story (though it seems to vary wildly from ISP to ISP. For example, in the UK< 65% of BitTorrent traffic on BT gets throttled, but none gets throttled on O2. Similarly, up in Canada, 80% is throttled on Rogers, and none on Telus.

With all this data out, it will be interesting to see two things: (1) If people start switching providers based on this data -- and, no, not just for unauthorized access, but for all the many legitimate uses of BitTorrent these days. (2) If this leads to any additional research on the impact of throttling. This data points to some areas where researchers could do either cross-country comparisons between those that have high throttling and those that have low throttling, or intra-country comparisons between ISPs with exceptionally different policies.

The Olympic games publicize the physical achievements of athletes, but what about the notable achievements of scientists? It's somewhat hard to cheer for individuals working on fundamental research, but sometimes scientists get some well-deserved recognition. There are other prizes besides the Nobel, and here are just a few international awards for smart folks working on scientific endeavors.

• The first round of the Fundamental Physics Prize has been awarded to 9 physicists -- handpicked by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to receive $3 million each. The Milner Foundation prize is a little more than double the value of the Nobel prize in the same category (which is worth about $1.2 million), but is the prestige of the Nobel greater? [url]
• The Kavli Prizes started in 2008 to award million-dollar prizes in astrophysics, neuroscience and nanoscience. The Kavli Foundation was started by Norwegian businessman and philanthropist, Fred Kavli. These Kavli prizes are not as well-known as the Nobel, but the Swedes don't have a monopoly on awarding scientific medals. [url]
• The Crafoord Prize tries to complement the Nobel prizes by picking significant achievements in fields that the Nobel ignores: astronomy and mathematics, biosciences, geosciences or polyarthritis research. The very specific prize for rheumatoid arthritis research was instituted because Holger Crafoord suffered from the disease, but it's only awarded by a special committee that decides when such an honor is warranted. [url]

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

So this is a bit strange. Unglue.it is a cool crowdfunding platform that focuses on raising money for authors/rightsholders so that they'll release an edition of their books under a Creative Commons license. We've seen a few similar offerings, but Unglue.it seemed really interesting (and to be getting some attention/traction). Basically, they would work with rightsholders, to find out at what price they'd be willing to put their works out under a Creative Commons license, and then try to crowdfund that amount. Neat idea. However, as Jack Allnutt alerts us, despite having already been processing payments for Unglue.it, Amazon has cut the service off, with a bizarre claim about how they don't want to work with any new crowdfunding platforms:

Amazon Payments has informed us that they will no longer process pledge payments for Unglue.it, forcing us to suspend all active ungluing campaigns. According to a Senior Account Manager at Amazon, Amazon has decided against “boarding fresh crowdfunding accounts at this time”. Amazon has been providing payment services for Unglue.it, as it does for the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

Of course, that statement doesn't make much sense, given that it was already processing payments for Unglue.it. In fact, part of this news was that Amazon is requiring Unglue.it to void all payments for existing campaigns (i.e., those not yet funded). So the idea that this is about not "boarding fresh crowdfunding accounts" doesn't make much sense. Amazon has been the only choice for payments on Kickstarter since the beginning, and that seems to have gone well, so it's odd that they're now cutting off others (and, of course, opens up Amazon to wild conspiracy theories). I contacted Amazon to get their side of the story, and they provided the following comment:

We support a wide variety of businesses, but we have regulatory obligations as a licensed money services business for how we operate. Unfortunately, Unglue.it’s model is not the same as some other crowdfunding services and at this time does not allow us to meet those obligations.

That statement makes this all the more... confusing. They're clearly implying that there are regulatory issues preventing them from supporting Unglue.it, though I'm not sure I can think of what the concern here might be. There have been some regulatory issues around equity funding via crowdfunding, but that doesn't seem to be an issue here. If they're just working out deals for licensing books... I'm at a complete loss.

Nothing sells like scarcity. We've seen artists package their music in any number of new ways to make the infinite, well, less infinite. Collectors and afficionados of analog devices are picking up vinyl at a record (oh ha! and I didn't even mean that one!) pace. Even the cassette has made a resurgence.

But Beck, always the iconoclast, is going back even further. Past 78s and wax cylinders. Past player pianos and John Phillip Sousa's eerily prescient fear of new formats. Beck is going all the way back to the day when artists only had one way to publish music: via the staves and bars of sheet music.

Beck has announced that his newest album will arrive in the form of Beck Hansen's Song Reader, meaning you won't know what the songs sound like unless you put some work in. What is a song reader, you ask? It's an experimental collection of individual pieces of sheet music. In this case, none of the 20 songs have been recorded or released before. It'll be available through indie publishing house McSweeney's in December of this year.

While it remains to be seen if today's Beck fan has the washboard-and-harmonica skills to pull off a Beck tune, the novelty of the whole thing should certainly see a few dollars thrown its way. Of course, releasing an album of sheet music asks a lot of your audience, including "Did you like the thing the Flaming Lips did when you needed four stereos playing simultaneously to hear the album in its intended form?," "Regret dropping band after 6th grade?," and "Can you read ukelele notation?" McSweeney's has more details, but no solid answers to these rhetorical questions:

In the wake of Modern Guilt and The Information, Beck’s latest album comes in an almost-forgotten form—twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded. Complete with full-color, heyday-of- home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case (and, when necessary, ukelele notation), the Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012—an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together.

Man, that takes me back. The last time I had a dozen gatefold LPs put together, I was running a small-time weed dealership and pulling an all-night seeds-and-stem sorting operation. Good times... probably. But this package is more than just functional. In addition to its collection of ukelele explorations, the collectible package will include art from more than a dozen different artists (some of which you can eyeball here) and 20 individual full-color song booklets. 

This is definitely a case of giving people a Reason to Buy, even if many of them will still need outside assistance to hear the music they purchased. And I could imagine an entire cottage industry of Beck Hansen's Song Reader covers springing up all over YouTube, assuming Beck is cool with that. Packaging his new album this way also makes his post-release touring that much more of a draw. If all people have heard is their own renditions and other covers, I imagine they'd jump at the chance to hear the original performer actually perform them.

We've followed the Al-Haramain case against the US government for a while through all of its ridiculousness. This was the challenge to the government over warrantless wiretapping, which went through crazy twists and turns, because information on the wiretapping was deemed classified -- even though it was published by reporters. The only reason the case exists in the first place is that the government accidentally leaked a document that proved that such wiretapping happened. Earlier cases to challenge the warrantless wiretapping in general failed on the grounds that the people suing had no standing since they couldn't prove that they'd been spied upon without a warrant (and if this sounds like something Joseph Heller would write about, you've got the right idea).

Eventually, the court actually ruled that the feds violated wiretapping laws, but then there were questions of what the court could actually do about it. It turned into a wrist slap for the government, with it being ordered to pay $20,400 to each of the two lawyers who represented Al-Haramain.

However, earlier this week, that got overturned. The appeals court has basically said that even though Congress passed a law that said the feds could not eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant, it didn't waive sovereign immunity rights for the government, which lets the government basically wave away any lawsuits. And thus, the government can ignore wiretapping lawsuits -- even in the one and only case where there's clear evidence of it violating the law. Yeah.

Think about that one for a second.

And then... realize it gets worse. That's because in a different ruling, by the same court, a few months ago, the court said that someone couldn't sue the telcos for helping the government warrantlessly wiretap Americans, in part because they could still sue the government. Yet now they're saying that you can't actually sue the government either (once again, paging Joseph Heller).

The court tries to get around this by suggesting that you might be able to sue individuals within the government (though it then goes on to reject such an attempt in this case) or to recover actual monetary damages, if you can prove that such damage occurred. But "distress" apparently doesn't qualify since there's no monetary issue there. So, as long as the government spies on you illegally (and everyone seems to admit that it's illegal) without doing anything with that info that is causing you monetary damages, even if you find out about it, you probably can't do anything about it.

Yeah. That doesn't seem right.

The court itself admits that this result is "anomalous and even unfair," and says that's really Congress' problem because of the way it drafted the statute. Either way, the end result seems pretty crazy, and gives the federal government wide ability to spy on people at will, even as the law says they can't. This is a situation that Congress now needs to fix, though it almost certainly will not do so.

Piracy is one of those things that is pervasive throughout video gaming. It has become a force of nature, a fact of life. While many companies attempt to fight piracy of their works through DRM or complaining loudly, others are taking a very different approach. Last year we posted a story about a company called tinyBuild that decided to embrace piracy rather than fight it. It released a special pirate themed version of its game on the Pirate Bay and saw a positive response from it. When discussing the move, tinyBuild stated, "I mean, some people are going to torrent it either way, we might as well make something funny out of it." By having a positive sense of humor in the face of piracy, one indie game developer was able to cope with it and succeed despite it.

This sense of humor is catching on too. Gamasutra highlights another indie dev, Paul Greasley, that, when faced with the realities of piracy, decided to approach it with a bit of tongue in cheek. The developers of the game Under the Ocean released the game under three different options. The first was early, cheap access to the game for $7. The second was a more feature rich and personalized version for $25. The third was a hat tip to piracy.

The Cockroach edition was actually not an attempt to cut down on piracy. It was just one of the liberties of being an indie developer, with nobody to answer to. The elephant in the room is that 90 percent+ of people are going to pirate your game on the PC (and ours is no exception, based on the traffic logs). We just thought it would be fun, and frankly honest, to point that out!

To further seal the deal, Paul had originally included a link to the Pirate Bay. Unfortunately, some wet blankets in the indie scene overreacted to the inclusion of the link. Those developers had claimed that the inclusion of the link was Paul condoning piracy, something he denies. So, to put out the fires and save his cred with those developers, he removed the link while leaving the rest of the option on the site.

It is quite interesting that he even included the link to begin with. Most developers, especially those from large studios, try to do their best to pretend that such sites don't exist in the off chance they accidentally convert a potential customer into a pirate. Including the link was a massive show of openness with fans. By showing that he knows what the competition is, he was showing fans that he understands what it takes to build up a loyal following.

We're going to be releasing a whole bunch of frequent updates, with lots of feature additions. If you want to stay up to date, buying it is much easier than pirating it. The users win, because it's DRM free and they get a bunch of cool new updates for Under the Ocean, and we win, because the updates get us new ways to promote the game outside our game forums.

Make a product people want and will talk about, make that product as good as you possibly can, and treat your customer base with respect.

By recognizing the reality of piracy, Paul was able to identify features and services that will build loyal fans, things like avoiding DRM and providing frequent updates, not just for the game but from himself. What this means for Paul and his game is that players get a great experience from someone who is open, human and honest and in return they will spend more money on his game.

As mentioned earlier this week, at 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET today, we're hosting a live video chat with Rob Reid, the author of Year Zero, our Techdirt Book Club book of the month for July. Rob will be joining me at our offices, and we'll be broadcasting the conversation via Google Hangouts on Air. We'll be posting the embed beneath this text, so it should stream live if you're reading this while the conversation is ongoing. If you're here afterwards, the video should be replayable below.

If you have any questions that you'd like to ask Rob during this conversation, please tweet with the hashtag #yearzero. We will be monitoring that tweetstream and will try to take some questions from the audience. This is the first time that we're doing something like this via a video stream, rather than a text chat. Please bear with us in case there are technical difficulties. It is very much an experiment, but hopefully provides a worthwhile experience.

With guns and violence in the news lately, you would think that everyone involved in the chain of the firearms business would be a teensy-weensy bit more careful, from manufacturers, to retailers, all the way up to those handling the shipping and distribution. As with any other business, you have to expect to deal with some human error, but one would imagine that the firearms industry would have the tightest of controls in place right now.

As it turns out, such notions are exactly that: imagination. Or, at least that appears to be the case in the Wired story of a man from Washington D.C. who ordered a television on Amazon and was shipped a Sig Sauer 716 Patrol Rifle. For anyone keeping score at home, that's a military grade weapon. Seth Horvitz, the guy who is guilty of attempted TV-buying, is not a military grade citizen.

“When I saw some metal parts inside the box, I thought, ‘Maybe this is a TV stand or mount or something,’” Horvitz said in a phone interview with Wired. “When I realized it was an assault rifle, it was pure shock and disbelief.”

The Wired interviewer chooses not to ask Horvitz if he attempted to point the weapon at his wall and pull the trigger to see if flat-panel televisions shot out, which is disappointing. In any case, Horvitz did the responsible thing and immediately called the D.C. police, who informed him that the weapon is illegal to own in the District of Columbia. There is no word yet on whether flat-panel displays are also illegal, but I'm guessing not. 

The story then details how the mistake happened, which essentially appears to boil down to a lovely bit of insight into the shipping warehouses of UPS, in which the Label Fairy made a mistake and put two shipping labels (only one of which was correct) on the box-'o-death and allowed the box to be shipped anyway. Everyone from the guy who let it leave the warehouse to the guy who delivered the rifle to Horvitz's door apparently decided to play the new hit game "Shipping Address Coin Flip", resulting in Horvitz getting his new Rambo Halloween costume accessory. Amazon, predictably, disavowed any responsibility for the mistake, which it's looking like it has every right to do. On the other hand, when Horvitz tried to post a review of his purchase, Amazon blocked it. Admittedly, the review was hillarious, and guns and funny just don't mix:

I'm not sure what pretending all this didn't happen accomplishes from Amazon's end, other than to perhaps flip open the cover to the Streisand Effect alarm, press it, and wait for the derision to ensue.

We've written plenty about the ridiculous government case against whistleblower Thomas Drake, who exposed waste and fraud at the NSA, only to find himself charged under the Espionage Act as a spy, because he had kept a few documents on his computer that shouldn't have been there. While the government case completely fell apart (and ended with Drake agreeing to a plea that basically admitted the government had no case), it's nice to see that the vindictive nature of the feds using the Espionage Act against whistleblowers has been getting more mainstream attention.

The latest? The Daily Show, which did a hilarious interview with Drake, complete with Jason Jones' attempt to turn his story into a spy thriller movie, only to be disappointed by the lack of anything remotely spy-like happening (and, yes, I know, non-US viewers can't see this, blame Viacom):

Unfortunately, what the story does not cover, is that the feds have continued to go after whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. The Obama administration has now done that six times, including against the CIA agent who blew the whistle on waterboarding. Prior to this administration, the Espionage Act had been used only three times. In other words, he's doubled the use of the act of all previous Presidents. For a President who campaigned on civil liberties issues, and whose first day in the office included a memo in support of whistleblowing, this is beyond depressing. It's good to see more mainstream press coverage, but they need to know it didn't end with Thomas Drake.

We've covered a number of stories dealing with ebooks and their disruption of normal publishing. There have been a lot of growing pains in the industry as the ebook market continues to expand, replacing physical sales (and their associated margins and intentional bottlenecks) and knocking down a healthy number of barriers to entry.

Allegations of ebook price fixing are still in the air, pending the Department of Justice's investigation. No matter the final decision, publishers will still be free to set ebook prices as high or low as they want to. But if they insist on pricing themselves out of the market, they'll be seeing an increasing number of their authors decide to write their own tickets, as others have done with great success.

Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, breaks down exactly how traditional publishing houses are shooting their own authors in the foot with pricing "strategies" that run in direct opposition to how people purchase ebooks. With ebooks expected to compose nearly 30% of trade book sales (in total dollars) in 2012, authors may be doing serious damage to their careers by selling their ebooks through traditional publishers.

Coker quotes from his RT Booklovers convention presentation, showing that there are certain "sweet spots" in ebook pricing—ones that show marked sales increases and, sometimes counterintuitively, higher author earnings than others.

One surprise, however, was that we found $2.99 books, on average, netted the authors more earnings (profit per unit, multiplied by units sold) than books priced at $6.99 and above. When we look at the $2.99 price point compared to $9.99, $2.99 earns the author slightly more, yet gains the author about four times as many readers. $2.99 ebooks earned the authors six times as many readers than books priced over $10.

If an author can earn the same or greater income selling lower cost books, yet reach significantly more readers, then, drum roll please, it means the authors who are selling higher priced books through traditional publishers are at an extreme disadvantage to indie authors in terms of long term platform building. The lower-priced books are building author brand faster. Never mind that an indie author earns more per $2.99 unit sold ($1.80-$2.10) than a traditionally published author earns at $9.99 ($1.25-$1.75).

This isn't news to anyone following along here at Techdirt. For some reason, though, many traditional publishers still feel that higher prices equal higher profits and fail to see that lowering prices will increase their sales and profits over and above what they can expect at their normal price points.

Certain members of the traditional publishing crowd argue that lower prices are unsustainable given built-in costs and that pursuing these price points will somehow "devalue" the written word. First of all, selling your product for more than the public is willing to pay is what's actually "unsustainable." And any explanations involving fixed costs will fall on deaf ears because consumers don't make purchases based on what they think the product is worth to the company selling it. They purchase based on what they feel the product is worth to them.

Secondly, if people aren't buying at $9.99 but they are at $2.99, then the product isn't "devalued." If you're selling many more units at a lower price, then your price point is closer to "dead on" than "undervalued."

The picture painted augurs well for indie ebook authors, but indicates that authors who continue to publish with traditional publishers might actually be damaging their careers. Look no further than the bestseller lists at Apple, Amazon or Barnes & Noble to see that indie ebook authors are taking eyeballs from the authors of NY publishers. As I write this, seven of the top 30 bestsellers in the Apple iBookstore are distributed there by Smashwords.

In the short term, existing publishers would do well to follow Coker's advice and start maximizing sales by lowering prices. Most publishing houses have already had the term "price fixing" pointed at them, and thinking that you can somehow outlast the consumers in a price war is just going to shove you to non-existence that much faster. Exclusive deals with authors won't mean much when no one's buying, and those authors are going to swiftly tire of minimal sales and miniscule royalties, especially when they can plainly see better opportunities outside the gates.

As the news of 4chan hitting 1 billion posts has come out, it only seems appropriate that the Surprisingly Free podcast has a fascinating discussion with Stefan Krappitz, the author of the book Troll Culture: A Comprehensive Guide, in which Krappitz tries to suggest that the common view of trolling as being a negative thing is mostly inaccurate. Instead, he suggests, trolling is more a form of practical joking -- "disrupting people for personal amusement." He even suggests that Socrates may have been an original troll, baiting people with silly questions and then mocking them. The overall discussion is quite interesting, even if it seems to underestimate the collateral damage that trolling can cause at times. Still, it does raise some good points, that certainly counter the more common view of completely condemning trolling.

Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about RIM getting hit with yet another crazy patent infringement award, after a jury sided with Mformation and told RIM to pay $147.2 million. However, as often happens in these kinds of cases, RIM then sought a judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) -- effectively a finding from the judge that, even though a jury ruled one way, it did not have enough evidence to do so. Those aren't often granted, but in this case... the judge dumped the jury verdict.

After considering motions presented by both parties, as well as the jury verdict (which was announced by RIM on July 14, 2012), the Judge determined that RIM had not infringed on Mformation's patent. In granting RIM's motion, the Judge also vacated the $147.2 million jury award, which means that RIM is not required to make any payment to Mformation.

Mformation can (and almost certainly will) appeal, though a successful appeal would just take things back to square one, meaning a new district court trial.

Stories like this are why there have been some efforts made to get juries out of patent trials...

As the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations move forward, it appears that some more members are expressing concerns. In the past, we'd noted that politicians in Chile were questioning what benefit there was to being locked into the US's rules. And, now, another TPP negotiating member, Malaysia, seems to be questioning the agreement. The report claims that the government is now against TPP, though the actual article really only highlights the (significant) concerns from Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai, who claims that TPP "would be detrimental to the local medical industry."

"We are against the patent extension. According to the agreement, if a medicine is launched in the US, and then three years later it is launched in Malaysia, the patent would start from when it is launched here and not when it was launched earlier in the US," said Liow. "This is not fair."

The end result, he warns, is that the TPP would make healthcare less affordable to citizens of Malaysia. Hopefully he really does represent the views of the Malaysian government and they really are considering dropping out over this issue.