Though the specific process differs from country to country, international agreements are generally negotiated and signed at the highest levels of government, with input from everyone else filtering up (in theory) through the hierarchy—at least until you get something like ACTA, where the public rises up en masse and essentially overrides the whole system. One thing that you don't often see is municipal governments standing up to take a direct role in international negotiations—but that's exactly what's happening now in Canada, where cities are seeking to avoid an ACTA-like situation by asking to opt out of the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA) at the municipal level.

The effort is being led by The Council of Canadians, a social justice group which is working to persuade cities, towns, and municipal authorities all over Canada to request exemption from CETA. Their core concern is about the agreement's procurement chapter, which sets down rules about how governments and other public bodies can spend money on goods and services, and which they fear will unduly restrict municipalities:

For example, new rules in CETA on how public bodies spend money would:

• Prohibit municipalities from putting buy local or buy Canadian preferences on contracts, or requiring that bidders use some portion of local or Canadian goods, services or labour. This would end the ability of municipalities to use procurement as a local economic or social development tool.
• Prohibit municipalities from using public spending to create or support a market for innovative goods and services, including green technologies, if the effect would favour Canadian producers or attract investment to Canada.
• Prohibit municipalities from spending public money in ways that support sustainability, for example through buy local food policies like the one Toronto passed to reduce emissions from food miles.

As long as municipal governments are part of the CETA deal, these prohibitions will apply to local purchases. We need to make sure cities, towns, school boards and hospitals are not bound by these unnecessary rules.

So far, over 30 local governments representing over 5.5 million people have joined the exemption campaign and another 30 to 40 municipal councils, school boards or associations have asked for more information and more input in the negotiations. Unfortunately, as is common with these situations, such concerns have been largely brushed off in a weak damage control effort by the federal government. Assurances from the Candian Foreign Affairs and International Trade Ministry on the Myths and Realities page are reminiscent of the EU's ACTA Facts, and the Council of Canadians have a page that debunks them. International trade strategist Peter Clark laughs off the fears Canadians have of corporate control of their water services.

CETA is not about diverting Canada’s lakes and rivers – which would not do Europeans much good in any event because we have no common borders... There is no requirement to privatize services which do not compete with private entities and do not operate on a commercial basis.

There are good reasons for the municipalities' concern about the investors' clauses, but Clark just tells them not to worry their pretty little heads about it and run along. Stonewalling and secrecy are not the way to build confidence in the benefits of CETA.

One of the recurrent themes here on Techdirt is the increasing lack of balance in copyright, which is now heavily weighted in favor of creators and their proxies, and against the public. That bias has come about thanks to the rise of the Internet, which has turned the traditionally rather specialist area of copyright law and enforcement into a matter of everyday concern: it affects practically everything we do online, and can criminalize even the most trivial of activities there.

But there are signs that some judges are starting to recognize this imbalance and -- more importantly -- to do something about it in their rulings. Here's what Graham Smith, a UK lawyer and blogger, had to say on this trend recently:

These have been a hectic couple of weeks for copyright. Ten days ago the EU Court of Justice published the UsedSoft decision, which will have us thinking in a completely new way about exhaustion of rights online. On Thursday this week the Canadian Supreme Court delivered five separate copyright judgments on subjects ranging from fair dealing to communication to the public, each in its separate way reinforcing a more user-centric, less author-centric, approach to copyright.

The UsedSoft decision was discussed here on Techdirt a few weeks ago, and may allow software and other digital goods to be re-sold within the EU – it's not clear yet how much of an impact this ruling will have. Meanwhile, the judgments from the Canadian Supreme Court are almost certain to re-shape the copyright landscape in that country.

Smith points out that one thing the European and Canadian decisions have in common is a desire to assert "technological neutrality" -- the idea that the move from an analog to a digital world shouldn't see the balance of traditional copyright tipped towards one side or the other:

Both the ECJ and the SCC [Supreme Court of Canada] kicked back hard against what they perceived as imbalance between hard copy and digital copyright outcomes. The ECJ strove to achieve 'functional equivalence' between a fully paid permanent download and a sale on physical media. It said that what would otherwise be a communication to the public would be converted into a distribution to the public if a 'transfer of ownership' (defined in economic rather than legal terms) had taken place. The ability to rely on the first sale doctrine in order to acquire second-hand software applied in equivalent situations, regardless of whether the transactions took place on physical media or by download.

The SCC invoked a similar concept of 'technological neutrality' in several of its judgments, two of which together held that the right of communication to the public applied to streaming but not to downloads.

The key role of technological neutrality in driving the recent decisions is supported on the Canadian side by Michael Geist, who concluded a series of posts analyzing the implications of the five SCC rulings -- which he termed "the culmination of a ten year transformation of copyright at Canada's highest court" -- as follows:

the court frames technological neutrality as a matter of balance within the Copyright Act and as a means to avoid the double dipping that occurs when new fees or restrictions are layered onto new technologies.

The net effect is to firmly reject claims that users' rights is merely a metaphor. In the eyes of the Supreme Court of Canada, it is an essential component of Canadian copyright law that is integral to achieving the purpose of copyright it identified over a decade ago -- a balance that "lies not only in recognizing the creator's rights but in giving due weight to their limited nature."

Let's hope this new recognition of the essential nature of users' rights deepens and spreads to other countries where copyright in the digital age remains seriously out of kilter.

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

Everyone does something stupid from time to time, but there are some stories that are just amazingly bizarre and a little bit dumb -- and they should be shared. But the Darwin Awards are a bit too brutal because someone has to die (or be made sterile) as a result of his/her own stupidity. So here are just a few examples of stupiditry in action, where people might get injured but not too seriously.

• Tony Robbins, the motivational speaker, tried to convince a bunch of folks that "there is absolutely nothing you can't overcome" with an exercise of walking over hot coals. For 21 people, though, it was second or third degree burns that needed to be overcome. [url]
• Stubbs the cat has been the mayor of the Alaskan town of Talkeetna for 15 years. Stubbs doesn't raise taxes and has high approval ratings -- and he was named "Stubbs" because he has no tail. Mayor Stubbs also takes advantage of his political power: he will only drink water out of a wine glass laced with catnip. Ah, stupiditry strikes again, and we fell for this hoax. [url]
• Catherine Venusto faces six felony charges for altering her kids' grades with the unauthorized use of a computer. This mother could be looking at up to 42 years in prison or a $90,000 fine, which should definitely teach her kids a lesson about cheating. [url]

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

Quick quiz on crisis management, internet-style:

Exercise 1: The product you've just introduced is a buggy mess, short on content and backed with terrible customer service. What do you do?

a.) Bite the bullet and start handing out refunds
b.) Start patching like hell and fire your current Customer Service team
c.) Drain all bank accounts and reorganize under the name Net Sortie, LLC.
d.) Whistle nonchalantly while sweeping bad reviews under the rug

If you answered "d," then congratulations! You've lost the battle and the war!

No matter how many companies line up to play the "I'd Like to Lose at the Internet" game and walk away empty shells of their former selves, there's always another player ready to step up and take a swing at wishing its problems into the Google Cache cornfield.

This week's contender is Rakuten and its Kobo Touch Reader. Billed as sort of a preemptive strike against the expected arrival of Amazon's Kindle in Japan, the Kobo began shipping last week. That's the last of the good news.

Rakuten launched the Kobo Touch in Japan with the expectation that they would dominate their home market. They are native to the country, and Rakuten does have a sizable retail presence there. Given their technical and CS resources, you’d think they would have been able to pull this off.

Unfortunately, it now looks like Rakuten has paved the way for Amazon to dominate yet another ebook market.This launch is rapidly turning into a debacle and it’s going to damage Rakuten’s reputation. And according to some of the tweets I’ve seen (in Japanese) it already is.

So, what went wrong? Well, many, many things. First off, while the firmware was solid, the desktop software was a disaster. If installation failed on the PC, a rather common situation according to the reviews, it pretty much made the Kobo Reader useless. Secondly, Rakuten's promotional work pointed towards 30,000 titles being available at launch. Instead, there were 18,894 titles and, as is pointed out in the comments, many of those were public domain. Last, but not least, purchasers now holding a shiny brick were treated badly by Rakuten's customer service.

Rakuten was understandably perturbed by this failed launch and decided the best course of action would be to pretend it just wasn't happening.

It’s been just under a week since the Kobo Touch started shipping in Japan, and things are going so well that Rakuten has removed from their website all the reviews of the Kobo Touch.

No, seriously, all of the reviews are down – both good and bad. I suppose there were too many people writing things like “I’m going to buy a Kindle” and that upset someone at Rakuten.

For a tech company, you'd think Rakuten would be a bit more familiar with how this "The Internet" works. You can't just pull the electronic wool over everyone's eyes and hope to sneak away undetected. The Internet never forgets. And even if it could, there's always a helpful person or two willing to remind it where all that stuff is stashed.

Luckily one of Rakuten’s potential customers tipped me to the story, including giving me a link to a blog that had collected responses and a screenshot of the review page before Raskuten removed it. That’s why I can show you things like this:

If you can’t see the image above, it says that the Kobo Touch has a 3 star rating largely due to the vast number of 1 star reviews.

And more help arrives:

Update: My source found a Google Cache page of reviews. Thanks, Bibo!

This response is so wrong and yet so common. Donna Barstow, law schools, the freakin' medical community. Pretty much anyone who's ever heard the term Streisand Effect whispered in their general direction has attempted to delete damning content, either of their own or created by others, only to find it resurrected in Google's Cache or the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It's definitely a knee-jerk response, but it seems to have a steep learning curve attached to it. Kobo screwed up and then doubled down by hiding the reviews. What does that say about the company and its future relationship with its customers?

Folks, they took the reviews down from the website so new customers wouldn’t be warned about the many problems. I want you to look past the fact they did it and think about how customers will feel once they discover the deception. That is what will make this a major debacle and not merely an embarrassment for Rakuten.

A bad launch could be recovered from. This is closer to being a systematic effort to lie to their customers. Okay, eventually people will forgive Rakuten, but in the short run this debacle could drive readers to Amazon.

Rakuten, by botching its launch, hurt itself a little. By covering it up, it did a ton of self-inflicted damage. You can't just flip "trust" on and off like a light switch. It's earned. And if it wanted to take on Amazon, it couldn't afford a mistake of this magnitude.

Google officially announced the details of its fiber service in Kansas City today. If you don't remember, after doing a nationwide search, Google chose Kansas City (both the Kansas and the Missouri ones) as a sort of testbed. For years, we've pointed out that the real problem in broadband is the lack of competition. It's that lack of competition that leads companies like Verizon to stop investing in fiber networks, and companies like Comcast to only offer serious broadband where its competing with fiber. Competition is the key, and sadly, it's lacking in most places.

The Google setup was intriguing in that it was a true new entrant in the market, and one that seemed to acknowledge that what was most important wasn't appeasing the short term thinking on Wall Street that pushes against faster speeds and more innovation (too expensive!). Instead, it was going to see what it could do to increase speeds and decrease limits -- and now we've seen a glimpse of what that looks like with the official details -- many of which probably have the traditional broadband players quite annoyed.

First up, there's an oddity: to actually do the last bits of the buildout, Google is asking residents to sign up, and the neighborhoods with the greatest interest will get the finished buildout first (which makes sense). Then there are two bits that are somewhat disruptive: first, you can get broadband for free, if you take the package that gives you speeds up to 5 Mbps. That may not seem that high, but as Google points out, that's about the average speed out there (and, frankly, it's more than twice the speed of the broadband I get at my house, smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley). You do have to pay for the installation, which is $300 (either upfront or in twelve monthly installments at $25). Then it's free service for at least the next seven years.

The second disruptive bit is that the full 1 Gbps offering only costs $70 per month (or $120 per month if you include TV) -- way lower than most competing offerings -- and the 1 Gbps is symmetrical meaning upstream and downstream. Broadband providers have long assumed that people are content consumers more than they are content creators, and thus they stressed the downstream bandwidth, while limiting upstream. Google seems to be making the bet that people can make use of that bandwidth in the other direction as well, and that should be quite interesting to see.

In some ways, this reminds me (a bit) of when Google launched Gmail and offered everyone 1 gig of storage. At the time, most competing services were in the range of 10 megs of storage before you had to pay. Google basically changed that market overnight -- so much so that many people thought it was an April Fools joke (it was launched on April 1). That won't happen here, obviously, because the service is just limited to Kansas City, but it still is setting the bar for what's possible.

There is one serious disappointment here, however. When Google announced this project, it had promised that it would allow competing services on its network. As we wrote about at the time, a Google VP said:

"We (sic) definitely inviting the Comcasts, the AT&T service providers to work with us on our network, and to provide their service offering on top of our pipe -- we're definitely planning on doing that. Our general attitude has been that there's plenty of room for innovation right now in the broadband space, and it's great what the cable companies are doing, upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0, but no one company has a monopoly on innovation. We're looking for other service providers to be able to come in and offer their service on top of our network so that residents have a choice when they open up their accounts. They get the connection from us, and then they have a choice as to who they subscribe to."

A few months ago there were some rumors making the rounds that Google had moved away from this plan -- and there was no mention of it in today's announcement at all. That doesn't mean Google won't eventually go there -- and it's possible that no other service provider wanted to "legitimize" Google's service this way, but it definitely would be nicer if Google also used this testbed to prove that there's value in competition at the service level, rather than just at the infrastructure level.

Either way, people living in Kansas City should be pretty damn happy right now...

In what one can only assume was the result of a long weekend retreat at an exclusive resort, various British artists have banded together to post an open letter to, well, who knows? The open letter, signed by several beneficiaries* of the recording industry, calls for the British government to make with the three strikes and such already. Apparently, these artists feel that the badly drafted (and hastily approved) Digital Economy Act is taking far too long to implement. In the meantime, millions of pirating pirates are pirating millions of pounds right out of their pockets. 

*The full list of signatories includes Simon Cowell, Roger Daltrey, Professor Green, Sir Elton John, Lord Lloyd-Webber, Dr (?) Brian May, Robert Plant, Roger Taylor, Tinie Tempah and Pete Townshend. With a few exceptions, we're looking at artists that have re-sold albums on vinyl, eight-track, cassettes, CDs, SACDs and digital.

The letter touches all the right political nerve endings, starting with the British "creative sector:"

As the world's focus turns to Britain, there is an opportunity to stimulate growth in sectors where Britain has a competitive edge. Our creative industries represent one such sector, which creates jobs at twice the speed of the rest of the economy.

Considering the "creative sector" involves everyone from songwriters to bagboys, it can probably be safely stated that the "creative industries" create jobs faster than whatever few industries remain once the "creative sector" finally closes the tent door. 

Next there's a bit of talk addressing trade deficits... or something:

Britain's share of the global music market is higher than ever with British artists, led by Adele, breaking through to global stardom. As a digitally advanced nation whose language is spoken around the world, Britain is well-positioned to increase its exports in the digital age.

No sooner are we assailed with the news of an impending if-only British Invasion than the authors begin conflating piracy with consumer confusion:

We can only realise this potential if we have a strong domestic copyright framework, so that British creative industries can earn a fair return on their huge investments creating original content. Illegal activity online must be pushed to the margins. This will benefit consumers, giving confidence they are buying safely online from legal websites.

"Fair return," eh? Well, one man's "fair" is another man's "month's worth of income." If you start with phrasing that makes your musical exports sound more like a colonizing force than a gift to the world, you need to be careful about what you assume is a "fair" return on your investments. Even domestically, people got a tad touchy when asked to shell out several pounds for a couple of decent tracks and 45 minutes of filler. Didn't seem all that "fair" back then, but we never heard Roger Daltry, Brian May, Elton John et al. complaining.

And as for the "buying safely online..." Well, that's just like ICE saying it needs to shut down file lockers because consumers might purchase faulty counterfeit fire alarms. For the most part, people engaged in "not paying" for their music and movies have confidence in their safety. It's not that people aren't buying because the pay options aren't "safe." They're not buying for any number of reasons. The content is over-priced. The content is "not available" for purchase due to licensing and region restrictions. The content is crippled with DRM. Sometimes they're not buying simply because they don't want it, but in the eyes of many in the industry, a drop in sales is always due to copyright infringement.

After half-assedly coming to the "aid" of the beleaguered consumer, the collective classic rock hydra turns on the faces of the internet itself:

The simplest way to ensure this would be to implement the long-overdue measures in the Digital Economy Act 2010; and to ensure broadband providers, search engines and online advertisers play their part in protecting consumers and creators from illegal sites.

By "protecting" consumers, they of course mean "cut off service," "serve with threatening letters," "allow certain industries to alter search results" and "punish fiscally without showing evidence of damage." Yes, nothing would send the masses back, money in hand, to the welcoming arms of the recording industry than giving each accused pirate (based on nothing stronger than an IP address, of course) the opportunity to spend their own time and money attempting to prove a negative. I imagine historians and economists will discuss the sudden spike in music sales resulting from the implementation of the Digital Economy Act for years to come, holding it up as a triumph of enforcement over reality. The recording industry will party like it's 1999 (except, like, if Napster had never happened).

They wrap up the open letter with a heartfelt plea:

We are proud of our cultural heritage and believe that we, and our sector, can play a much bigger role in supporting British growth. To continue to create world beating creative content, we need a little bit of help from our friends.

Hmm. "Friends." Well, it can't be the consumers. And it certainly can't be the ISPs and search engines (which really just means Google). So, these "friends" must be politicians. And if you can't "get by" without a little help from those friends, should you really be in business anyway? 

So, yesterday, everyone was feeling warm and fuzzy about the very clear statement by Washington DC's police chief Cathy Lanier pushing out a very explicit policy to all DC police concerning mobile phone cameras. The policy was straightforward: police cannot interfere with someone recording them. They cannot demand to know why they're recording them. And they cannot seize the phone.

It appears that some police officers didn't read the memo.

As noted by Ars Technica, the day after the policy was announced, a police officer seized a guy's camera for recording police activities. They did eventually give the phone back but kept the memory card and the guy is pissed off because the card supposedly has hundreds of photos of his daughter on there.

The DC police say that they're "looking into" the report. It would be nice to see them follow up on their original policy statement with a clear rebuke of the officers involved.

We recently discussed a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by its former publishers, L. Gordon Crovitz, in which he made some fantastically false claims about the origins of the internet. What was noteworthy was that while the WSJ got the story so totally wrong, lots of others, including bloggers, leapt into the fray to explain why Crovitz was wrong. Almost everyone he sourced or credited to support his argument that the internet was invented entirely privately at Xerox PARC and when Vint Cerf helped create TCP/IP, has spoken out to say he's wrong. And that list includes both Vint Cerf, himself, and Xerox. Other sources, including Robert Taylor (who was there when the internet was invented) and Michael Hiltzik, have rejected Crovitz's spinning of their own stories.

Basically, anyone and everyone is telling the WSJ that it got this story totally and completely wrong. You might think the WSJ would start making some corrections. Instead, it's made one single correction: That was a pretty minor correction, involving Crovitz being confused about how to understand how blockquotes work in HTML. But what about all of the other factual errors, including whoppers like saying that Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks? Of course, considering the very premise of the article and nearly all of its supporting factoids were in error, it raises questions about how you do such a correction, other than crossing out the whole thing and posting a note admitting to the error (none of which has yet been done). Given the widespread discussion online about these errors -- both in blogs and in traditional media, it seems like the company's silence about the whole thing is just making the problem worse. Why won't the WSJ step up and issue a real correction on all of the errors?

Not too long ago, despite the protests of several sites, Russia passed its own little version of SOPA. It did so for the typical "for the children" reasoning. Even though this new censorship power is only a couple of weeks old, the Russia government wasted no time in taking advantage of it. In what could only conceivably be an act of celebration, perhaps after a vodka binge, the government decided to block all of LiveJournal.

It began by blocking the entirety of LiveJournal, the country’s largest blogging community, to the city of Yaroslavl and part of surrounding Moscow from July 18 to 20.

Wait. All of LiveJournal? Why? What could possibly go through the minds of these government officials that would cause them to block an entire network of blogs, most of which were not doing anything illegal?

On July 18, local law enforcement informed a Yaroslavl court about pat-index, a neo-Nazi blog it had found on LiveJournal during a sweep. The blog’s hateful message violates Russian federal laws against extremism. Because of Bill 89417-6, the court now has the power to stamp it out completely and immediately.

The court ordered Internet provider Netis Telekom to block, among other illegal sites, this blog’s IP. The court order shows the IP to be blocked as 208.93.0.128.

You see, the court order demanded the blockage based on the IP of the blog in question. What could possibly go wrong with such a simple open and shut use of such an easy to use identification source? Oh, right. All of LiveJournal uses the same IP address. So when the government officials got their court order to block those few illegal blogs, they took out just a few extra. Kind of reminds me of when Homeland Security, here in the US, took out over 84,000 websites in a similar action.

This reminds me of the debates around SOPA. You know, when we and other people, who actually understand the dangers of the legislation, warned repeatedly that such legislation would result in collateral damage of this nature. This collateral damage is also part of the reason why this Russian bill was protested. Legitimate speech was censored for several days. That is not acceptable. It should be a wake up call to the legislators that passed the bill. Unfortunately, too many people in power are unwilling to relinquish the ability to censor speech once they have it. Hopefully, the citizens of Russia will take note of this unacceptable abuse of power and demand the law be repealed.

We've written a few times about the rather awesome The Humble Indie Bundle folks who have built a business out of bundling up a few (independently produced) video games, and offering them in a simple to buy pay-what-you-want format, with certain incentives to get people to pay more. Each bundle has been more successful than the last. Today, the Humble Bundle folks are trying something new: music. Launching today, they're doing a similar offering, but rather than video games, it's music by They Might Be Giants, Jonathan Coulton, MC Frontalot, Hitoshi Sakimoto and Christopher Tin. And, if you pay more than the average price, you also get music from Ok Go. And, as always, there are options on how to allocate the funds you spend, including options to designate a portion to go to various charities. I'll be interested to see how well this does, but they sure chose an amazing group of musicians who are really well known to the geek/gaming crowd. We've written about or mentioned Jonathan Coulton, OK Go, MC Frontalot and TMBG before. Christopher Tin and Hitoshi Sakimoto are well known for their work in video games as well. It certainly seems like a really well-suited bundle.

The bigger point, though, is seeing how the Humble Bundle is expanding its model to see how it works in other fields. If I were running an "affinity label" of some sort, where you have a bunch of different groups that attract a similar audience, I'd be watching pretty closely to see how this works out, because there's no reason you couldn't do something similar with a select group of artists.

Karl Bode has an interesting story explaining how Verizon is willfully pushing its DSL customers over to cable broadband "competitors." It's worth reading the whole thing, but the short version is that Verizon wants desperately out of the DSL business. Now, some of that is to drive people to its popular FiOS fiber service. However, the company has basically stopped expanding FiOS entirely. The fact that most of the competition is gone couldn't possibly have anything to do with that, right? But the bigger vision appears to be to push people over to the company's wireless solution, LTE. Bode suggests a few reasons for this, with a big one being that LTE is much more expensive, and has relatively low caps and high overage rates. In other words, it makes a lot more money for Verizon, but is much more limiting for users (there's also the bit about how it switches from a "unionized" business to a non-unionized one).

In other words, Verizon will cut off copper in FiOS markets first (which makes sense given the lower maintenance costs of fiber). They'll then leave users in DSL-only markets un-upgraded, forcing them to buy a costly landline so that remaining on Verizon DSL becomes less attractive. Those customers will flee to the same cable companies Verizon just signed a massive new partnership with, with Verizon planning to sell those users more expensive LTE connection later. Verizon will continue to "compete" in FiOS areas for now, if you call winking and nodding when it's time to raise prices competition.

Rural areas could see the biggest impact from the shift, as Verizon pulls DSL and instead sells those users LTE services with at a high price point ($15 per gigabyte overages). Verizon then hopes to sell those users cap-gobbling video services via their upcoming Redbox streaming video joint venture. Expect there to be plenty of gaps where rural users suddenly lose landline and DSL connectivity but can't get LTE. With Verizon and AT&T having killed off regulatory oversight in most states -- you can expect nothing to be done about it, despite both companies having been given billions in subsidies over the years to get those users online.

The entire amazing transition becomes clearer still when looking at Verizon's quarterly earnings posted yesterday. The company added a whopping 3.2 million LTE users during the second quarter, a record for the telco. In contrast, thanks to a frozen FiOS expansion (with the exception of franchise obligations in urban markets) and their disdain for DSL, Verizon managed to add just a net 2,000 broadband users in the quarter, despite adding 134,000 FiOS users. Verizon CFO Fran Shammo gave several excuses during yesterday's conference call ranging from the economy to aardvarks -- but the reality is that DSL users are fleeing in droves, and Verizon wants them to.

Now, there is something reasonable about a company actually being willing to cannibalize its own older offerings with something more modern. But a key warning sign that something is wrong is that they're not moving customers to something that's better and cheaper -- which is what you normally see in a truly competitive, innovative market. Instead, they're moving them to a more limited, more expensive offering. That's what you tend to see when there's not nearly enough competition in the market, and a few established players whose customers have little choice.

We've noted the unfortunate fact that President Obama has used the espionage act to go after whistleblowers, rather than actual spies. Similarly, we've been quite concerned that people have tried to paint organizations like Wikileaks as being criminal operations or guilty of violating the Espionage Act as well. While there may be many reasons to not like Wikileaks or Julian Assange, that does not mean that they're guilty of criminal activities in publishing classified information they obtain. That's what lots of reporters do.

And, in fact, as the EFF is warning, some in Congress are now turning their sights on reporters at the NY Times for daring to publish newsworthy material, dug up through traditional reporting means. In other words, the gradual expansion of the definitions here is putting reporters at risk. Already we expanded the definition of espionage to cover whistleblowers... and now they're trying to expand it to the press who report on the information leaked by whistleblowers.

At a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on July 11th, some members of Congress made it clear they also want New York Times journalists charged under the Espionage Act for their recent stories on President Obama’s ‘Kill List’ and secret US cyberattacks against Iran. During the hearing, House Republicans “pressed legal experts Wednesday on whether it was possible to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

In addition, the Washingtonian’s Shane Harris reported a month ago that a “senior” Justice Department official “made it clear that reporters who talked to sources about classified information were putting themselves at risk of prosecution.”

Leaks big and small have been happening for decades—even centuries—and the most recent are comparable to several others. No journalist has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act and it has generally been accepted, even by Congress's own research arm, that the publication of government secrets by the press is protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet the government is actively investigating WikiLeaks and now threatening others for just that.

It's hard not to be offended by the disdain for the Constitution displayed by these politicians. Even if no one actually goes through with a prosecution against a journalist, the chilling effects have already made their mark. Reporters are likely to think twice now about publishing that big scoop, exposing questionable government behavior, because those within the government seem to think that actually revealing troubling facts about the government is akin to being a spy.

 It's been a little over a year since Anders Breivik committed the greatest act of terrorism in Norway's history. The response to the horrific violence was completely unexpected. In a world where most countries would consider drafting major legislation and beefing up security, Norway's response seemed almost out-of-touch with the "real world."

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg pledged to do everything to ensure the country's core values were not undermined. "The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation," he said.

It's a pretty much unprecedented statement. One needs to look no further than the US government's reaction to the 9/11 tragedy to see an example of the standard M.O. Starting with the PATRIOT Act, the US government quickly turned the country into an echo chamber that subscribes to a culture of fear. This has allowed various government entities to insinuate themselves into nearly every aspect of Americans' lives at the expense of civil liberties and privacy.

One year down the road in Norway is a completely different story. As was pledged by Stoltenberg, the Norwegians have pushed forward with more openness and democracy. (via)

There have been no changes to the law to increase the powers of the police and security services, terrorism legislation remains the same and there have been no special provisions made for the trial of suspected terrorists. On the streets of Oslo, CCTV cameras are still a comparatively rare sight and the police can only carry weapons after getting special permission. Even the gate leading to the parliament building in the heart of Oslo remains open and unguarded.

"It is still easy to get access to parliament and we hope it will stay that way, " said Lise Christoffersen, a Labour party MP.

No one's rights were eroded, including the man at the center of the tragedy, Anders Breivik. He was treated no differently than any other prisoner and was given five days in court to tell his side of the story and lay out his ideas and motivations. Many critics believe this sort of unchallenged testimony would allow Breivik to glorify his actions and push his agenda, which they feared would inspire copycat acts of violence. Instead of falling prey to this mindset, officials felt that Breivik would do more harm to his own ideology by speaking openly than by being forced to sit quietly as an appointed mouthpiece spoke for him.

Cato Shiotz, a senior criminal lawyer, says having an open trial has enabled the Norwegian people to make their own informed judgement about Breivik.

"I think Breivik has done more harm to the radical right than he has benefited them," said Mr Shiotz. "His ideas now have less support than ever before."

Norway wants to combat terrorism in a new way. Rather than reacting to a terrorist act with draconian laws and increased security and surveillance, the country has opted to take the high ground and simply be "better" than their enemies. Many countries make statements to this effect, but most make the mistake of confusing a hardline "we don't negotiate with terrorists" stance with "taking the high road." Norway makes no such error.

"The only way to really combat terror is to show that we are better than them," says Jan Egeland, a former official in the Norwegian foreign ministry and now deputy head of Human Rights Watch.

"Their (the terrorists') whole point is to create shock and fear and get us to leave our liberal values…and lure us over to their shadowy part of the playing field… we should not let them win."

Unsurprisingly, Norway is not impressed with the US government's response to terrorism.

Mr Egeland is highly critical of how other countries, particularly the United States, have dealt with the terrorist threats they face, arguing that methods such as extraordinary rendition, the creation of the special prison for terrorist suspects in Guantanamo and the sanctioning of what is generally viewed as torture, have all been counter-productive.

"The whole (US) struggle against terror lost the moral high ground, You could see how public opinion was lost in Turkey, in Jordan, in moderate countries all over the Middle East," he said.

As the article points out, Breivik acted alone, not as part of a larger network. While a large network does change the dynamic of the threat, it hardly seems to justify the assumption that an isolated incident is an "act of war." Even worse, this assumption has led the US into a state of perpetual war against unseen, unnamed enemies with only the barest of threads holding the factions together. While Egeland insists that Norway wouldn't fall into the same pattern the US did post-9/11, he admits that he can't be certain the country would have "stood the test" as well as it has the Breivik massacre, if it was instead faced with a murky enemy located outside the country.

But all in all, the Norwegian response is more likely to unite its citizens against abhorrent acts of terrorism than it is to drive a wedge between the government and the governed. Openness is something the US sorely lacks, and despite 11 years and a change of presidents, there seems to be very little improvement on the horizon. No government can guarantee the safety of its citizens against unforeseen attacks, but certainly a culture of openness, democracy and love is preferable to a culture of fear and reprisal, carried out in the name of protection.

Back in March, when the US State Department responded to Ron Wyden's questions about the feds' authority to negotiate and sign onto ACTA without Congressional approval (damn you, Constitution), it made an odd (and rather new) claim: that Congress had actually already approved the executive branch's ability to negotiate and approve international agreements on intellectual property issues. The claim was that the ProIP Act (of 2008) said the newly appointed IP Czar should create a joint strategic plan which, among other things, helps identify how the administration can deal with IP enforcement issues by "working with other countries to establish international standards and policies for the effective protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights."

Yes, because Congress said that the IP Czar should create a strategic plan in which the administration can work with other countries on IP enforcement, the administration now claims that Congress effectively abdicated its powers over international commerce on that issue, despite it never clearly stating that.

Given that strained interpretation, Wyden has noticed that the new cybersecurity bill that the Senate is considering could be broadly interpreted in the same manner to create all sorts of powers for the administration to ignore Congress in crafting international agreements concerning online security. He's now sent the State Department a letter asking for clarification. Here's the key part:

Do these provisions, or any others, in S. 3414 authorize the Executive Branch to enter into binding agreements with foreign governments for the purposes of establishing disciplines on cybersecurity? If so, under what circumstances would Congress need to consider such agreements and under what circumstances would you argue that Congress need not consider such agreements? If S. 3414 does not authorize the Executive Branch to enter into binding international agreements over cybersecurity without Congress' consideration of such an agreement, how do you square this view with your interpretation of the Pro IP Act of 2008?

In other words: Wyden is calling the State Department on its bullshit retroactive interpretation of Pro IP by noting that if they truly believe it, then the new cybersecurity bill would effectively mean Congress gives up its powers to have oversight on any international agreements about cybersecurity -- something the administration almost certainly does not want, since that would spark a debate that would likely hold up approval of the bill. The State Department, of course, wants it both ways. It wants to claim that the Pro IP gave the administration the power to ignore the Constitution with IP issues, but the same is not true of the cybersecurity bill. But that would involve ignoring that the same language is present in both bills.

I fully expect that the State Department will now seek to tapdance its way around this -- or (more likely) not answer until after the cybersecurity debate is over.

Ever since Blizzard created the massive hit that is World of Warcraft, it has decided that requiring gamers to be constantly connected to the internet while playing is a good thing. Unfortunately, things have not gone as smoothly as it had hoped. If you are familiar with recent events surrounding the release of Blizzard's latest game Diablo 3, you may recall the Error 37 issue in which users who tried to connect to Blizzard's servers on launch day were unable to due to the lack of infrastructure. Since then, it has had fewer issues, but still some users have difficulty staying connected to the servers while playing and thus risk losing progress that has not been saved. This has some people and groups upset.

Via Cinema Blend, we learn that one German consumer group has given Blizzard an ultimatum to change the Diablo 3 packaging to reflect the need for such a connection. The original report from the German site PC Games states:

Potential purchasers must know before purchase what are the requirements for the software to be used. Whether a permanent Internet connection, obligatory registration to an Internet platform including the related access to a game, or downloading additional software: all these things are essential information that the user much receive before purchase.

The primary complaint is that the requirement to create and log in to Blizzard's Battle.net service in order to play is not clearly disclosed prior to purchase. Because of this requirement to be tethered to a constant internet connection, some people are having a number of issues, even when trying to play single player modes of the game. This consumer group has given Blizzard until July 27th to respond to the complaint. If Blizzard fails to respond or respond adequately, the group is prepared to pursue legal options against the company.

Unfortunately for gamers, many game companies are moving toward the use of this kind of "always-on" DRM. To those companies, it is a necessary part of the war on piracy. However, these DRM schemes are more often a nuisance for paying customers who have to deal with unexpected and even planned server outages. What makes these types of DRM more infuriating to consumers is the fact that it not only applies to the multiplayer portions, where you can understand a potential need for an internet connection, but also to single player portions that are typically done locally. There is never a reason to require that a gamer be connected to a server at all times when playing by themselves.

Hopefully as more consumer groups and consumers in general voice their dissatisfaction with such DRM schemes, more game developers will listen. We have seen many developers already making the stand that DRM is not useful or wanted. Those developers have found that treating fans with respect is a far more effective means of maximizing profits than any DRM scheme could ever be.